Work Text:
Diluc’s interrupted from his studying by the sound of rocks hitting glass. More specifically, the glass of his window, which has already been replaced who knows how many times, and would probably have to again after this. One tap, then two, and then a whole barrage of them, loud enough to be heard over the music playing in his headphones.
Eventually, he storms over to the window and yanks it open. A stone flies over his shoulder, one that he only barely dodges.
“What the fuck do you want?” He glares down at Kaeya, who looks like this is a perfectly normal thing to be doing on a school day. It’s two in the morning, he’s only halfway through reading the module they’d been assigned in class, he has an incomplete book report, and he’s trying to focus, so if his brother isn’t dying, he will be after he’s done with him.
“Took you long enough!” Kaeya calls up, waving at him with a wide grin. “I’m going to the 7-Eleven a few blocks away, need anything?”
“What,” he says, then shakes his head. “Why would I need anything from 7-Eleven? I got everything I needed on our last trip to the bookstore. Didn’t you?”
“Oh, good for you then.” He picks up another rock, tossing it idly in the air. “Well, not all of us can be as prepared as you are, I suppose. I need to get ten liters of soda and a grape Slurpee by tomorrow, or Rosaria’s going to kill me. The keys to the car are with you, right? Toss them down, will you?”
“What?” he repeats.
He rolls his eyes. “Need to go to 7-Eleven. Keys to Honda Civic. Throw to me. Now, preferably, before Dad realizes that my door’s locked for reasons other than privacy.”
Diluc stares down at him for a while, before moving to close his window. Whatever Kaeya has planned is none of his business, and he does not want to be implicated as an accomplice to whatever stupid thing he has planned. Also, he really wants his car to get back in one piece, he’d just gotten it for god’s sake.
“Wha– hey!” A rock hits on the wooden window frame. “Don’t just leave me hanging like that, didn’t Dad teach you any manners? Sharing is caring, dear brother, hand over the keys!”
“Fuck off,” he replies, turning the latch and going back to his desk.
That should be the end of it for tonight, at least, until the next morning until he’s faced with the misfortune of having to see Kaeya’s face again. Maybe if he leaves early enough and just gets breakfast at McDonald’s, he can be out of the house before he wakes up.
That’s what he thinks. Then he’s reminded of how utterly unhinged his brother is.
“Open up!” He hears, just as he’s getting back into his work. When he jerks his head to the side in surprise, Kaeya’s perched on the ledge outside, banging furiously on the glass. “I know you can hear me, I didn’t drop your headphones in the sink this morning for nothing!”
Damn it, he’d known something was off with the sound quality. Scowling, he flips him off and turns the volume even higher, drowning him out with slightly grainy audio and desperately trying to ignore him.
“I’m willing to stay here all night,” Kaeya says, unreasonably smug for someone stuck outside in the freezing cold. “7-Eleven is open 24-7, and I can get what I need on any of those 24 hours, so it’s on you if I spend any more of them bothering you for the keys to the Honda Civic. Your move, dear brother.”
He continues to talk at an unbearably loud volume for the next ten minutes as Diluc’s grip gets increasingly tighter around his pen. At the exact ten-minute mark, he gives in and opens the window, glaring at him with a level of rage he hasn’t felt since he was six and Kaeya had killed off his Tamagotchis while he was away.
“You have legs,” he hisses out. “Maybe use them to get to your goddamned 7-Eleven.”
“Come on.” He leans against the inside of the window, looking like he was martyring himself. “Would it kill you to lend your favorite sibling the car? Especially since Dad never cared enough to get me one, that’s blatantly obvious parental favoritism right there.”
“Dad didn’t get you one because you had your license revoked,” Diluc shoots back.
And that was after he’d had to bail Kaeya out of prison for doing things that– really should not be repeated in any sort of company, polite or otherwise. Regardless, it had left him as the only sibling with a legal driver’s license, and thus the only one with a car.
He shrugs nonchalantly. “Don’t nitpick.”
“Look,” he starts, scowling darkly, “if I thought you were capable of getting my car to and from a location without it coming back as a heap of scrap metal, then maybe I would. Unfortunately for you, I would rather entrust it to a group of monkeys rather than letting you even touch the steering wheel.”
“That’s not fair,” he complains. “Look, I’m not in the mood to carry ten bottles of Pepsi and a Slurpee back home, so just hand over the keys–”
“Maybe when a meteor hits me, you can take it from my cold corpse,” he says, “because you aren’t getting them any other way.”
That gets a groan in response. “Please?” Kaeya tries.
“No.”
“Please?”
“Over my dead body.”
“I’ll owe you big time,” Kaeya promises, shooting him a pleading look.
Diluc narrows his eyes. “You already do.”
He checks the clock on his wall. This has wasted thirty whole minutes of his time, thirty minutes longer than his ideal interaction with his brother. At this point, he just wants to get this over with so he can get back to studying, so he sighs and mentally prepares himself for what he’s about to say next.
“You know what,” Diluc says, “you can take the car.”
Dark blue eyes widen, and then he pumps a fist in the air, whooping. “Yes! Finally, thought you’d never–”
“But,” he stresses the word, “I’ll be driving.”
There’s silence. Diluc tries not to smile at the shock, then abject despair that fills his brother’s expression at his words, even though it’s the only thing in their conversation that’s given him any semblance of joy. Honestly, he very much doesn’t want to spend his night making sure his car doesn’t get set on fire, but this way he can at least have some peace of mind.
“What,” Kaeya says. He stares at him blankly, mouth agape. “What? You’re joking, you have to be.”
“I don’t joke,” Diluc says.
Kaeya groans. “Right, forgot you have no sense of humor,” he says, “but are you kidding me? I know how to drive, I don’t need you to be my chauffeur to fucking 7-Eleven.”
He idly fiddles with the keys in his pocket. After several incidents where they’d been outright stolen from him, he’d taken to just keeping them on his person at all times. “That’s too bad, because that’s the only way you’re getting there in my car, unless, as I said, you take them off of my dead body.”
“That’s looking like a viable option right now,” he mutters.
Diluc scoffs. “Do you want to have to walk there or not?” he asks. “Because I’m perfectly fine with that.”
“Ugh, fine,” Kaeya concedes. “But I get to pick the music, your taste is shit.”
“You drive like you were born in the 1800s.”
“At least I can drive,” Diluc fires back, glaring at him through the rearview mirror. He’d stubbornly refused to let him sit shotgun, mostly because he knows that he’ll end up trying to mess him up while driving. “Or are you forgetting why I have to be here in the first place?”
“I can drive, technically,” Kaeya corrects. “Legally, no, but that’s only because that police officer was a stick in the mud.”
He rolls his eyes as he rounds the corner to the 7-Eleven. “I’m making at most three rounds around the block,” he warns. “Take any longer and I’ll leave you here and go back home.”
“As thoughtful as always,” Kaeya says, opening the door and stepping out into the cold night air, sending him a peace sign that he steadfastly ignores. “Sure you don’t want anything while I’m there? Maybe a hot meal to warm your cold, cold, heart? I hear they have good burgers.”
“Get me a better brother,” he says.
Kaeya tsks. “7-Eleven can’t get any better than the best model,” he replies.
With that, he steps away from the car and into the neon-lit doors of the convenience store. Diluc waits until he’s inside before shifting gears back into drive, turning the radio station to something that wasn’t the weird stuff that Kaeya liked and resolving to at least enjoy getting to joyride around Mondstadt for a while.
It’s rare that he gets to relax, so he does his best to not think about the things he has to do as he settles into the rhythm of looping around the street.
And then his peace is interrupted by an unholy screeching coming from outside.
He hits the breaks, raising startled eyes to meet Kaeya’s from where he’s stood on the sidewalk, hands on a grocery cart filled to the brim with plastic bags.
The door is yanked open, the contents of the cart spilled onto his carpeting and seats, and Kaeya leaps into the car, slamming the door shut behind him with an audible bang. He doesn’t waste a second before yelling, insanely loudly for being in an enclosed space, “Drive!”
Too shocked to process why, Diluc does. He shoots Kaeya an incredulous look as he does so, ears still ringing.
“What was that,” he says, once they’re a safe distance. “Did you– oh god, don’t tell me you stole from 7-Eleven. This is the only convenience store in town.”
“I did not steal,” Kaeya says.
Diluc’s eyes narrow. “That’s oddly specific. Did you perhaps borrow their merchandise?”
“I did not steal from 7-Eleven,” Kaeya amends, “just… from the cart of that old woman who lives a few streets away, the one with the worst temper known to man, you know her. The one who has lungs of steel?”
He nearly slams his head into the steering wheel. Of course he knows her, the whole town knows her, he’s pretty sure that on her loudest tirades the whole universe knows her. She’d made their childhoods living hell whenever they saw her around.
“Why would you even consider doing that.”
“She had the last bottle of Pepsi!” he defends. “What, like she’s going to need that sugar high when she dies of old age in ten minutes? I was doing her health a favor! You’ve seen her, she looks like drinking water with too much salt in it will make her keel over!”
“So you stole her Pepsi,” he says tiredly, staring at the road ahead with an unbelievable amount of hate for his life coursing through his veins. “Was that what the screaming was?“
He hums in thought. “Not all of it,” he says, as if that isn’t extremely ominous. “Some of it was– well, there’s a playground nearby, so there were some children around, and I may have framed them for it. But,” he hastily adds, “if you think about it, this will probably teach them the very important lesson of not staying out late at night. Something they should learn early on.”
Diluc opens his mouth to speak, then decides against it. “You know what,” he says, “every time I ask for details, this gets worse. I’m not going to even bother.”
“It wasn’t that bad.” Kaeya looks up from where he’s sorting through the jumbled mess of items on the car floor, smirking at him through the mirror. “It could have been worse, at least.”
He sighs. “I don’t think I want to see what your definition of worse is.”
When they arrive back at their house, Diluc is ready to forget that this night ever happened and get back to his work, where he doesn’t have to deal with his brother’s remarkably bad decision-making. Unfortunately, before he can, he’s faced with yet another instance of said horrible decision-making.
“You didn’t think to maybe, I don’t know, bring the keys to the house with you when we left?” he asks flatly.
“I thought you had them!” Kaeya frowns, shooting him a dirty look from where he’s currently trying to pick the lock to their front door. They can’t go back in through his bedroom window, either, since he’d locked it on his way out. “You had the keys to the car, the keys to the garage, but not the keys to the house?”
They’re stranded out on the lawn at three in the morning, the air of early dawn is bitingly cold, and he just wanted to get his homework done tonight, goddamnit. This is why he hated spending time with his brother.
“Why do you even know how to pick locks?” he asks. “Actually– forget I asked, I don’t want to know.”
“From Youtube, mostly,” Kaeya provides, then he hisses loudly. “Oh, shit.”
His eyebrows jump. “What? What happened?”
“I want you to remember,” he says solemnly, standing and brushing off his pants as he backs away, “that I am your beloved younger brother who you love and care for deeply, and also that murder is illegal in every country.”
“What did you–”
He’s interrupted by the obnoxiously loud blaring of an alarm echoing throughout the neighborhood. The burglar alarm.
Their neighbors are beginning to wake, curtains being pulled aside and doors opening as everyone they know stares at the two of them, on the front lawn of their house at an ungodly hour of the morning, with several bright yellow bags from 7-Eleven filled with bottles of Pepsi scattered around them, and the Honda Civic’s engine still running. All the while, the screeching of the burglar alarm serves as a backdrop to the scene they've set.
“I hate you,” Diluc tells him, “so, so much.”