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The first thing Lumine tells him when they’ve got a chance to strike out on their own before her eventual voyage across the sea to Inazuma is, “You look like my brother.”
He doesn’t know what to say, which is about right. “Is that so?” he defaults to, as he struggles to think of something poetic and sympathetic enough to pass the checkbox of socially acceptable.
“He wasn’t so eloquent like you,” continues Lumine, brilliant gold eyes turning away from him as she seems to ponder the clouds in the sky. “Talked a lot. But he was sweet.”
“Do you miss him?” he asks, because he at least knows what everyone else in Teyvat is starting to learn about this Outlander; her brother’s gone and she’s on a quest to see him, starting with interrogating all seven archons. It is commendable, especially since she’s already talked to two of the seven.
“Of course,” Lumine says. “That’s why I’m going to Inazuma.” She has an enthralling gaze, he comes to realize, when she meets his eyes once more. She doesn’t have much in the way of spoken eloquence, but she doesn’t need it. When she looks at him he feels the same way he did under the eyes of his friend, whose gaze remained true even as he stared down the Raiden Shogun.
Not for the first time, he feels a little envious of their courage. It’s not enough to overtake him, nor is it enough to become an ugly, blackened part of his heart, but it’s enough to make his heart weigh heavy. Lumine and his friend, they share the same weightiness in themselves. He always thought his friend was sturdy enough to withstand the world trembling and shaking. But Lumine, he comes to find, is compelling enough to sway the world.
---
He sees his friend in his dreams, arms folded, cat clinging into the inside of his robe. He’s sitting in the shade of a tree, back against the bark. “Kazuha,” calls his friend, eyes not meeting his. He—Kazuha—has this moment, this gripping of his heart, ice in his chest as he realizes he can’t quite recall the color of his friend’s eyes. Brown? Green? Purple, same as the vision taken from him? Grey, same as the vision extinguished in his hands?
“Yes?” he replies back, because in the end he has nothing more to say. This is not his friend, not really, and nothing he says now will mean anything to a dead person.
“Hm. I forgot.” His friend smiles as he always does, and when Kazuha blinks his friend is at the shoreside, fingers dipping into the water as he cradles his cat with the other. “What’s the matter with you? Normally you’ve got a few things to say to me, at least.”
“Just thinking,” Kazuha tells his friend.
He hears laughter, then the rain as it patters against the rain-thatched roof of a small hut he once sought shelter in. “How’s that new friend of yours? You haven’t mentioned her in a while.”
The truth is he hasn’t spoken of her at all. His dreams of his friend are few and far between—a little moment here or there which renders him immovable with melancholy for a moment or two after awakening, but then nothing. His heart is a stone gate which will not move again, it seems.
“She’s doing fine,” Kazuha tells his dream. “I’m accompanying her for now before she sets off to Inazuma. And I suppose we’ll have to part ways temporarily, considering I’m still a wanted man.”
“But not dead,” his friend replies, and he’s wandering the bamboo groves of Liyue now, stooping down to pluck a few shoots from the ground to toss back at Kazuha. “And how is that treating you? The traveling, the life outside of Inazuma.”
He reflects. He thinks. He is, not for the first time, at a sudden loss for words. It is a little unbecoming as a poet, but not all poets have the right words for the right situation. “I don’t regret it,” he says, “but it’s a shame you can’t be here too.”
“Ah, but I can see through your dreams, can I not?” replies his friend in that fair tone of his. He smiles—Kazuha tries to look at his eyes—and then he wakes up with no recollection of the color.
---
“Kazuha,” calls the Traveler, and she tilts her head down as she stares at him blankly, still clinging onto the side of the house she was making a valiant attempt to climb. She has this way of speaking, peculiar in its sharpness. Ka-zu-ha. Kazuha.
My friend used to call me that, he does not say. Because it is my name, and it seems I cannot fathom hearing it from someone else, with the solitude which I had believed would be there my entire life.
“Kazuha,” repeats Lumine, and he realizes she’s been calling for him all this time. “Are you going to help me?” He finally notices the chest which she’s preoccupied her time towards getting and uses a gust of wind to help carry her up onto the rooftop.
“My apologies. I was thinking.” She jumps down as soon as she’s done rifling around through its contents, feet landing firmly on the ground.
She tilts her head a little, eyes squinting. Gold, he tells himself, golden eyes. “About what?” she asks, which he understands to be quite the question from her. She is stoic most times, quiet in her demeanor, and Paimon tends to do most of the speaking. For her to ask about his thoughts is akin to the Raiden Shogun cracking a smile.
In his pocket he feels the cold, extinguished surface of his friend’s vision. “My friend,” he admits, and Lumine nods. “He would’ve enjoyed traveling outside of Inazuma.”
“So you’ll just have to travel for him,” Lumine tells him, matter of fact. “You can’t save him now, so you can only live for him.” Behind her, Paimon yanks at her clothing while hissing about how it’s a bit insensitive to go straight out saying that.
Instead of feeling angered, bitter, mournful, Kazuha feels a low laugh rumbling in the base of his throat, partly amused, partly as a knee-jerk reaction. “It’s funny you say that,” he tells her, and never elaborates.
---
They’re sitting at Liyue Harbor at night watching the waves roll in and out. His friend skips stones across the waters as Kazuha looks around. There is not a single person around, which he supposes is on par for a dream such as this one. “Beautiful weather,” says his friend. “Is it always like this here?”
“Mostly,” Kazuha tells him. “It rains once in a while, but I can’t recall the last time it did.”
“Delightful.” His friend skips another stone, and when it hits the water they’re climbing the statue of Barbatos right in front of the church. “And is the archon really this big?”
“I’m not sure.” Kazuha thinks for a moment. “I haven’t met him.”
“I would hope not. Archons can be fickle creatures.” His friend crawls into the open palms of the statue and smiles back at Kazuha. His eyes are closed, and when his friend turns back to the sky Kazuha realizes he’s lost his chance to check for the color. “And that friend of yours?”
“Quiet,” Kazuha says. “Doesn’t talk as much as you do.”
“Hm. I talk a normal amount,” he complains. But his voice is light and he turns to Kazuha, only now the sun shines behind his head as they stand in the grassy plains of Windrise. His eyes are obscured by the brilliance of the sun and the shadows left behind, but Kazuha can’t bring himself to ask his friend to turn and show his eyes. “What else? You can’t just be thinking that little of her.”
It is embarrassing, telling this to his dream of his friend, but Kazuha thinks for a moment. He unravels his thoughts of Lumine until they’re all unwoven and sit around in his head. “She is...extraordinary,” he begins at first, until even that little phrase flusters him. “Most people don’t think of meeting one archon. She wants to see all seven.”
“And do you think she can do it?” They walk along Yaoguang Shoal. His friend digs a starconch out of the sand and washes it clean in the saltwater.
“She’s already seen two of them. What’s unbelievable about five more?”
His friend laughs, warm and hearty, and Kazuha thinks of their long, languid chats in the past. He thinks of drinking warm sake under the moon, and not for once wonders of his home country. “Well said, Kazuha!” his friend roars, but can he even call it that? His friend talks so subdued in his dreams, with the calmness of one that remains only in memories. “She sounds fun.”
Kazuha doesn’t doubt they’d get along, if not only because his friend is the chatty sort and Lumine is the listening type. His friend would prattle on all day and Lumine would only nod and enable him to continue talking. “It’s a shame you can’t meet her,” he responds.
“A great shame,” his friend laments. “You talk to her for me, then.” And before Kazuha can reply, his friend is gone and he wakes to the morning sun shining on his face.
---
Lumine makes a game out of fighting not long after. Who kills a slime the fastest, who swings their sword the hardest, who can make Paimon worried for their physical health the most. It is surprising, seeing her so competitive when she is normally someone who favors pragmatism over normal human emotions. Mostly, he comes to find he needs to train a little more with his sword considering Lumine’s rapid learning speed.
When she’s not looking he allows himself to drift away into his memories. His friend was similarly competitive, to the same degree as her. He connects the two, looks to Lumine, and feels inexplicably guilty right after. He knows he’s not committing a crime by superimposing one upon the other, but the moral expense of such is near unbearable to him.
“Your friend again?” Lumine asks when she sees his eyes a little too distant, and he feels like a shameful child caught in the act of disobedience. He doesn’t mean to have his thoughts drift to his friend so often. He has long since made peace with his actions then, but his dreams only seem to bring the inevitable regret back to the forefront of his mind.
“You remind me of him,” he admits, and bites his tongue right after. But Lumine doesn’t seem offended. She shrugs her shoulders so slightly he nearly misses the action.
“We’re both seeing someone else in each other, then,” she says. With a jerk of his hand, Kazuha remembers Lumine’s twin brother.
“I’m not replacing him with you,” he quickly insists, as if an apology for bringing it up. “I just see some parts of you that resemble him, in some way.”
She seems unaffected. Her eyes gleam in the sunlight and when she looks at him, he realizes she sees right to who he is without any hint of her brother. “I know,” she simply states, and moves right on.
---
“The moon is beautiful, isn’t it?” says his friend, legs dangling off the cliffside at the Great Narukami Shrine. He snatches flower petals out of the air, releasing his grip to let them flutter away after only a moment’s glance.
Kazuha looks up. The moon is round, looking close enough to touch. From the highest vantage point in Inazuma it almost feels possible. “And when have you been so touched by the natural sights?” he questions, with just a touch of bite in his voice.
“You don’t realize how beautiful home is until you’re out of it,” his friend insists. “Don’t get me wrong, Liyue and Mondstadt are wonderful, but where else can you see the sakura blooms and such a clear view of the moon?”
“On one of those peaks in Liyue,” Kazuha dryly replies. “Not the sakura blooms, but the moon is certainly just the same.”
His friend shakes his head, and when he stands they are ankle deep in the waters by Amakane Island. The eyes of his friend are drowned out by the moonlight this time, and Kazuha can do little but look up at him. “No, no,” his friend is indignantly replying, hands on his hips. “It’s about the emotion. You’re a poet, aren’t you? Surely you know it’s about sentimentality and such. Nostalgia, even.”
Oh, his friend isn’t wrong. Kazuha feels nostalgia in his quiet remembrance of Inazuma, but he feels more than just sentimentality. There is the stifling rule of their archon, the strict codes they were made to follow, the heartache of losing his friend and his comrades to the Vision Hunt Decree. He can’t push all his feelings into one neat box of sentimentality.
“It’s more complicated than you make it sound,” comes Kazuha’s quiet voice. “I miss my home. I miss you too, at times.”
“Aww. I miss you too.” His friend grins. They sit at a stone table, and his friend is pouring him sake as if nothing’s changed. “Here, Kazuha. Drink.”
The moon hangs above his head, and all is illuminated but his friend. The moonlight cuts off halfway across the table, leaving his friend shrouded in darkness. He reaches for the cup, only for his gaze to be caught by the bandages on his hand.
“Drink,” his friend says again, pushing the cup towards him. “We don’t have all night, you know? This is my parting gift to you.”
Kazuha opens his mouth to ask, one hand picking up the cup, but then the scene shifts once more and he stands at the steps of where he once ran to find his friend and his duel against the Raiden Shogun. He stands at the very top, watching as the Raiden Shogun drives her blade through his friend’s chest and his vision flies backwards.
He repeats to himself the truth: I wasn’t here for this. This isn’t a memory, but a dream. “Drink, Kazuha,” his friend says, even as he’s impaled by the Raiden Shogun, but this is a dream and Kazuha knows it is. His friend knows it is. The Raiden Shogun is only as real as his friend is.
He raises the cup in his hand and tilts his head back, downing its entirety. When he looks back to his friend he’s smiling, sword through his chest, smiling even as he dies. “Good job,” his friend says, and Kazuha steps closer. “Go on, Kazuha. You’ve got places to be.”
Kazuha meets his friend’s eyes and he wakes up, but even when he sits up in bed and opens his eyes all he can see is a deep, rich violet.
---
They part ways at Ritou. Lumine climbs off the ship with the grace of someone used to climbing all over the place and Paimon floats alongside her serenely. Kazuha follows her off the ship just to be polite, even if he’s not staying. He’ll have to run back on the ship before someone more familiar with his face decides to come capture him, but before then he can at least say goodbye.
“It was enjoyable, traveling with you,” he tells Lumine. “Once this is all over I would not be opposed to traveling more.” If he were not a wanted man, if this were not the country which doomed his friend and sealed his fate, he’d have followed alongside her. As it is, he is only able to part with her now.
“I would like that,” Lumine replies, still stern. But now he knows her better, he can see past her stoicism and into the person she is. He has never known her to tell a lie, and even now she holds his gaze steady before Paimon reminds her there’s someone else waiting for them.
“Go on, Kazuha,” says Lumine. “You’re a busy man. You’ve got other things to do.” So he does. So he will.
“I’ll see you,” he tells her, and follows Beidou back onto the ship. There’s much to do, but he knows he’ll see Lumine once more as her journey draws to a close. Those bound by fate such as they were not so easily parted, and he’s still got her memory to carry with him.