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“How old are you?”
The red-haired boy was met with silence. In response, he narrowed his eyes and jabbed Kaeya with his bony finger, resulting in Kaeya shooting up with an indignant yell. Talk about annoyances, the Ragnvindr heir couldn’t even let someone pretend to sleep in peace.
“How old are you?” Diluc repeated.
“What’s it to you?” grumbled Kaeya, lying back down and tugging his blanket over his head. Not that it was chilly in the slightest; he just wanted Diluc out of the guest room—in fact, back at home, he was used to much colder climates.
Well… it wasn’t quite home anymore.
Diluc seemed to pay no heed to his irritation as he promptly pulled the blanket off Kaeya—and off the bed—tossing it to the other side of the room. It landed soundlessly, crumpled on the floor, and Kaeya could only dismay at the fact that he’d cleaned his shoes in that corner yesterday. He’d have to give it up to one of the maids for laundry or attempt to clean it himself (because excuse me, he wasn’t about to let a dusty blanket onto the place where he slept.).
“I’m just curious.”
“And you couldn’t tamp down that curiosity until morning? It’s past your bedtime.” Diluc scowled; that was enough to make Kaeya’s heart hitch and curse his snark. He was still relatively new to Mondstadt, He still had a mission to fulfil. He couldn’t risk the Ragnvindrs deciding they hated him and kicking him out of the house. Though Crepus Ragnvindr was apparently known for his generosity, he was known more for his pride and joy in his son. If Diluc said anything bad—
His fears were sated—be it temporarily or not—as the lines on Diluc’s face shallowed. “It’s past yours too,” he scoffed, but his tone was far from hostile. Instead… was that a glimmer in the Ragnvindr’s eye?
“And I was sleeping,” said Kaeya.
“Pfft. Sleeping. Right.” Diluc snorted. “That totally explains why the light on your desk is still warm.”
Kaeya’s heart leapt into his throat once again. Yes, okay, fine, he hadn’t been sleeping. He’d been jotting down notes—what he’d seen in Mondstadt, how the people behaved, what the Ragnvindrs were like, the history of the old city. That’s what his father had told him to do, hadn’t he? He hadn’t been very clear, but when he’d return, Kaeya wanted to have everything he might need ready. After all, this was his chance. He was Khaenri’ah’s last hope.
When he’d heard footsteps outside his door, he had hastily stuffed those notes into the drawers and turned off the light. His eye flitted to the barebones desk unwittingly; the drawer top was ajar. He hadn’t closed it all the way in his hurry. Had Diluc seen them?
“God, that’s creepy. Next thing you’ll be telling me is you went through my drawers too.”
Diluc turned up his nose at the very prospect. “No, thank you. I respect boundaries.”
Kaeya could only let out his relieved sigh inside his mind. “Says the person who came in here way past my bedtime to poke me awake simply to ask me how old I am.”
“I thought we established you were already wide awake?”
“Whatever.” He pushed himself up, sitting cross-legged on the bed. His hand went instinctively to his eyepatch, pushing the cool scratched leather with two fingers, to make sure it was still in place. Once he was satisfied with it, he spoke. “Eleven. Or twelve. Give or take. That’s how old I am.”
“Eleven then.”
“Excuse me?”
“Give or take. So, I’m taking. See, I’m twelve, and I can’t have you be older than me—I want to boss you about, not the other way round.”
“Is that how it works?” asked Kaeya, his voice lilting upwards.
Diluc scrunched up his face and shrugged. He paused, and then raised his eyebrows. “You’re clearly not going to sleep anytime soon. Come on. Let’s go downstairs, I’m hungry.”
“Okay, and…? I can’t cook.” A lie. He could cook, albeit nothing too fancy. Chicken, mushroom, whatever vegetables he could find, all pierced onto a stick and roasted—burnt—over a fire. Not the greatest, and definitely nothing that could compare to what the chefs concocted in the Ragnvindr Estate.
“Neither can I. Does it matter?”
Huh. Fair enough. “I guess it doesn’t.” He dangled his legs off the edge—his toes almost reached the wooden floor (why in the world was the bed so high?)—and jumped down. The hard floorboards creaked like an old person’s joints, the sound echoing through the silent halls; unsurprising, the house was probably ancient.
Kaeya and Diluc snuck out with relative ease—the servants lived in the other wing of the house, Master Crepus was the heaviest sleeper to ever sleep, so none of them would be roused, no matter how loudly the stairs groaned or doors squeaked. They really should get someone to fix those though—though they did have their uses when Kaeya was listening out for people. No one seemed to be out and about either.
Darkness shrouded the kitchen, but it was expelled by a single flip of the light switch. Kaeya blinked, the sudden change in brightness bringing spots in his vision. A couple more times to adjust himself to the light, and he looked at Diluc. The bright—garish even—red of his hair was even more prominent now.
“So, what do we make?” Diluc mused. “Preferably without burning the house down, I don’t think Father would appreciate that much.”
“A house this big and there’s nothing to eat without having to cook?”
Diluc clicked his tongue. “There is. Making stuff from scratch is more fun though. Or at least, that’s what I’m told.” With that, he pulled open the cupboard above one of the counters, standing on tippy toes with his head thrown back to be able to see inside. “Oh, look, is that sugar? I love sugar.” He reached up and took a jar filled halfway with white powder down.
Kaeya stepped up as Diluc opened the lid a crack. He took a whiff of it, but unsurprisingly, he couldn’t tell if it was sugar or not.
“You won’t be able to smell it, idiot,” sighed Diluc, shaking his head. He then promptly stuck a finger into it and tasted it gingerly. “Yep. Sugar.”
“Well, isn’t that hygienic,” said Kaeya dryly.
“Shut up. It’s my house anyway.”
“Spoilt.”
“Prick.”
Kaeya chuckled, liking this easy camaraderie they fell into. There weren’t a lot of children back at home, not a lot of kids his age he was really allowed to be a kid with. It was nice to find someone he could laugh with, however short-lived this tentative friendship may be. He’d expected Diluc to be a lot more uptight, what with being the heir to the esteemed Ragnvindr clan. Though, he supposed, Master Crepus, the jovial and merry man, played a huge role in Diluc’s informal side.
Speaking of which, Diluc had taken to rummaging through the cupboards under the counter. He soon brandished a sack of flour, some of it trickling through a hole in the corner, dusting the floor. Diluc didn’t care, dropping the sack at Kaeya’s feet. “Cake!”
“What?”
“Cake. We’ve got flour, we’ve got sugar. What else do we need? Eggs and butter. And…?”
“Chocolate?” suggested Kaeya. “Do we have chocolate?”
“This is Mondstadt,” replied Diluc with a huff, almost offended at Kaeya’s so-called implication. “Of course we have chocolate. We need bowls.”
“And a recipe,” Kaeya muttered, but started rummaging through the cupboards for the right utensils too. Diluc took off, presumably to get eggs and butter (and hopefully chocolate; he’d heard, from random conversations he’d eavesdropped on, of Mondstadt’s famed chocolate while he travelled there with his father).
He’d brought out a jar of salt, because why not, by the time Diluc was back, lugging a crate at least half his size behind him.
“What is that?”
“The mist-flower-box,” said Diluc matter-of-factly. “You put eggs and butter and all that stuff that either melts or goes bad in these. See,” he bent down and unclasped the lid, reaching inside to flourish a mist flower corolla with a self-satisfied grin, “these keep the food cool.”
Kaeya peered into the crate. “Are those…” he counted quickly in his mind, “thirty-nine eggs? How many do you think we’ll need for one cake?”
“Please, what do you take me for?” Diluc took off a false bottom. “There’s seventy-eight!” Indeed there was. Another well-arranged layer of eggs identical to what Kaeya had just seen, except this time, chocolate was smushed into the wall as opposed to the sad little stick of butter beside the first layer of eggs. “Jokes aside, I just brought the egg box and put the butter and chocolate in. I mean, how much of those would we even need?”
“Eggs? Less than seventy-eight, that’s for sure.”
“I meant the butter and you know it.”
Kaeya snickered. “I don’t know. I’ve never tried baking a cake before.”
“Fine.” Diluc pushed the crate closer to the counter. His countenance lit up at the sight of the multiple bowls and spoons Kaeya had laid out. “Oh, you were useful!”
Kaeya merely grinned “And you brought back seventy-eight eggs. We all have our strengths.”
“Oh, come on, get a new joke already.” Diluc beckoned with one hand at Kaeya. “Now be a good assistant and pass the flour.”
“Who said I’d be your assistant?” But he passed the flour to Diluc anyway, watching the redhead intently measure out multiple cups and pour it into the bowl, eyes narrowed in concentration. “You have no idea what you’re doing, do you?”
Diluc ignored him. “Butter.”
“This can’t be enough.” Kaeya passed the butter, the stick of which was barely the size of his palm. Compared to the bowl practically overflowing with flour (Diluc’s arbitrary measurements did not look accurate), the butter stood insignificant in the grand scheme of things.
Diluc frowned, scrutinising the mixture in front of him with a critical eye. “Hmm. Less flour then,” he said, and poured half the bowl out into another. And by poured, Kaeya meant ‘dumped unceremoniously’, because there was more flour now spread across the counter than there was in either of the bowls. At least Diluc had the self-awareness to grimace.
“Miss Adelinde won’t be happy.”
“No kidding,” Diluc sighed. “We better clean this up once we’re done. Till then, start cracking the eggs. I’ll mix the flour and butter.”
Kaeya grabbed five eggs from the crate (how many did one even need for a cake? Maybe he shouldn’t have been so hasty to laugh at Diluc) and set up another bowl. Crack went an egg, the yellow of the yolk slipping in, a couple of tiny eggshell white specks floating in it. Crack went another, and another and…
Oh, dear.
He watched, almost in slow-motion, the egg slipping out of his fingers, and in an unegg-like fashion, bounce off the counter. And in an egg-like fashion, it fell straight onto Diluc’s bare foot and burst open with a loud splat.
Diluc screeched in shock, an unholy sound akin to a strangled owl. His face turned a drastic shade of red—quite like his hair, actually—his eyes popping out comically like a pufferfish’s. “You… you…” Clearly not finding a suitable word that could encompass his feelings, he took to sputtering, “why would you do that?”
“I’m… sorry…” choked out Kaeya between laughs. “Not on… purpose! But… your face…” He doubled down again in a fit of laughter, tears streaking down his cheek.
Diluc didn’t respond. Kaeya took it to mean that he was fuming, which made the whole situation even funnier to him, resulting in a fresh bout of laughter. A couple of moments later though, the silence became pointed and he had to look up to make sure Diluc was alright.
Bad idea.
He was just in time to see the egg hurtling towards his face, and he only had a split second to whip around so that he got eggshell in his hair and not under his eyepatch. It was his turn to yell now. “Diluc! You animal!”
“Tit for tat,” said Diluc, a smug grin adorning his face.
“Oh, I’ll show you tit for tat,” hissed Kaeya, hurling his remaining egg at Diluc. It landed on his red hair, yolk drip following the shattered shell.
Thus ensued a battle of egg throwing, both of the boys arming themselves with a portion of the seventy-eight eggs and tossing them back and forth. Kaeya would throw an egg, it would be retaliated by a giggling Diluc who’d throw two. Shrieks and cracks pierced the night; it took all but a few seconds for them to be slipping and sliding on eggs.
Diluc threw one with too much force, which narrowly missed Kaeya’s ear as he ducked behind a cupboard door. It sailed past him towards the kitchen door, cracking open a hair’s breadth short of a pair of fluffy slippers.
Wait. They hadn’t been there before.
In unison, Kaeya and Diluc shot each other a horrified glance, before turning slowly towards the owner of the slippers, a red-haired man clothed in a black woollen nightrobe. Crepus Ragnvindr stared at them with pursed lips, surveying the scene in front of him. It was a quite absurd one, Kaeya would admit, what with Diluc sitting in a sticky mess of yellow, one hand raised and clutching another egg, Kaeya crouching on top of strewn eggshell dust, their hair plastered to their faces in now-drying egg residue.
“Boys.” And then Master Crepus paused, like he wasn’t quite sure of what to say. A minute of deafening silence passed. And finally, Master Crepus sighed ruefully. “If you wanted to have an eggball fight, you could have at least taken it outside.”
Diluc winced, lowering his arm. “I—sorry. Dad. It was my fault. I woke Kaeya up because I was hungry. And, erm… started the egg fight.”
Kaeya’s head would have snapped towards Diluc if he hadn’t learnt how to control outward displays of emotion since he was a little kid. What he was really surprised about was the way Diluc shouldered the blame. It would have been easy to throw Kaeya under the bus, or even say that both of them did it (which would have been true).
Diluc continued. “We were… trying to make cake… but, well… we didn’t really know how to.” He shrugged at everything. “Sorry for waking you up.”
“That’s alright, I was already awake. I came downstairs to nick one of those Fontaine macaroons your Auntie Hilda sent,” said Master Crepus placidly, with not a touch of anger, much to Kaeya’s surprise. In fact, he recognised the tinge of a laugh. “Diluc, my boy, why would you not use your mother’s old recipe book which I showed you on your birthday last year? Then maybe you could have avoided,” he gestured towards them, “so many eggs.”
“Seventy-eight,” Kaeya piped up, and Diluc poked him with his toe (that brute hadn’t had his toenails cut so it hurt).
“Seventy-eight—Oh, Lord Barbatos, what will I do with you two geniuses? Come on, come on, get up!” He waved his hand in rapid succession as Kaeya and Diluc scrambled to stand.
“Ew, the egg seeped through my clothes,” Diluc complained, squinting at his backside. “And I’m still hungry.”
“All your fault, my dear,” came Master Crepus’s singsong words. “How about this? Both of you—yes, both of you—clean up this mess so that Adelinde doesn’t try to take our heads off, and then clean yourselves up. I’ll bake the cake, following the recipe,” he picked up a book from the top shelf of an open cupboard above the counter and held it towards them, “then we eat. And you two will go straight to bed after. Do we have a deal?”
“Yes, Father!”
“Yes, Sir!”
Master Crepus gave Kaeya a good long look, as if he was some puzzle he was yet to figure out. A slight stiffness appeared in Kaeya. He rolled his lips (not a good idea, raw egg was now inside his mouth), and took a deep breath, not sure of what was going to come. But then, Master Crepus smiled, a warm one, a genuine one, and Kaeya’s haunches relaxed.
He left them to their devices, only coming back with two mops, a huge bucket of water about three-fourths the size of the mist-flower box, and a squirt bottle of lemon-scented soap. “Chop, chop!” He clapped his hands with a manic sparkle in his eyes, clearly having fun at their expense.
Once he was out of earshot, Diluc groaned, resting his chin against his mop handle. “Can you believe he’s making us do this? We have, like, I don’t know, thirty servants? Any of them could do it.”
“Preeetty sure your dad’s terrified of Miss Adelinde,” Kaeya joked, wiping out one of the corners where eggshell had firmly encrusted itself. “Besides, you don’t have to be such a snob. Get your hands dirty sometimes.”
A predictable spark of competition flared in Diluc. “Oh, please. Just watch. I can get this done way better than you.”
“You’re on.”
Diluc’s pathological need to be the best was, all in all, incredibly beneficial because they were done in no time. Diluc spent his sweat and blood, and Kaeya egged him on (pun absolutely intended) from the side-lines. Sometimes, he just made it way too easy to manipulate him.
By the time the kitchen shone spick and span once more, Kaeya’s discomfort had intensified tenfold. He was all grimy and slimy and crusty, and he knew his hair would be hell to wash. Diluc looked no better as he attempted to peel dried strands of red off his forehead. They’d be stinking up the house for days—despite the copious amounts of lemon soap they had splashed everywhere.
“Hmm. Not bad.” Master Crepus nodded in approval. “Can hardly tell that something happened here. Now off you go. Leave the kitchen to me. And make sure to clean yourselves properly in the shower! Clothes go in the laundry, unfortunately. We can’t get out of that little do-do.”
They needed no prompting. Without even saying a word to each other, Kaeya and Diluc sprinted up the stairs—Diluc tried to elbow him to slow him down, but Kaeya was quick enough to duck, leading to Diluc hitting it on the banister and yelping in pain. Somewhere far below, Master Crepus’s faint chuckles caught their ears.
To his chagrin—and to Diluc’s pure delight—Kaeya took a little more time to scrub away the icky feeling and change his clothes. It was unfair, alright? He’d gotten a lot more in his hair, Diluc had been lucky to get most of the egg on his clothes.
Once he was ready (he made sure to fold up notes in the guest room where he slept and close the drawer properly), he ran down the stairs, skipping two steps at a time. As he neared the kitchen, a chocolaty aroma wafted up, the smell of baking cake. A million times better than the eggy monstrosity he’d managed to create with Diluc.
“Smells good,” he remarked, strolling inside.
“Tastes good,” said Diluc, through a mouthful of cake.
“Don’t worry,” said Master Crepus, pointing towards a plate set aside, “I made sure to keep some for you before this heathen could devour it all.”
“Hey!”
“Thanks, sir.” Kaeya grinned, grabbing the plate, and looking around for a spoon.
Master Crepus handed him one without missing a beat, fixing him again with that strange quizzical look. It melted as fast as it came, and if Kaeya didn’t know any better, he’d say he had imagined it.
The three took their little gathering to the living room after. Sometime before Kaeya had come downstairs, Master Crepus had had the time to light the fireplace, and now the flames gently fluttered, casting dancing shadows on the wall. The orange glow it emanated enveloped them in its warmth. Kaeya hadn’t felt the nip so pronounced to the Ragnvindrs, but it was nice all the same.
Diluc took the rug right in front of the fire, patting the area beside him. Kaeya sat there too, cross-legged, and Diluc shifted a little to make place. Master Crepus took the big armchair near them, the one Diluc would sometimes curl up on when the nights got too cold.
As he bit into his cake, bits of chocolate melting in his mouth (ahhh, so good), a vague image of his homeland ran through his thoughts like an undercurrent. The old stone ruins and the luminescent flora and the darkness that persisted in spite of it. As to what jogged his memory—oh. Every year, today—it was technically past midnight now—his mother would get a cake from somewhere, somehow. A rite of passage in Khaenri’ah, the commemoration of another year the nation’s people survived.
“Kaeya?” called Master Crepus, breaking him out of his reverie. “Something on your mind?
“Back at home,” he said, mostly to himself, “every year today, I’d get cake.”
His words were soft, but Diluc, sitting beside him, heard them anyway. “What do you mean? Every year, as in… your birthday?”
Not exactly. But it was too difficult to explain, not without letting the cat out of the bag. Too difficult to explain how they didn’t really keep track of birthdays at home. So, he simply smiled, though not a very happy one. A far more contemplative expression. “You could say that, yeah.”
Diluc, the tactless moron, had to open his mouth. “How do you remember your birthday but not your age?”
Master Crepus shushed him. “Happy birthday, Kaeya.” He ruffled Kaeya’s hair, much like a loving father would pat his son on the head. It was a foreign yet familiar touch.
Kaeya leaned back against the foot of the armchair, closing his eyes. A weird lump appeared in the back of his throat. “See, Diluc,” he quipped, trying to deflect the attention, “that’s how you reply when someone tells you it’s their birthday.”
“Oh, right, yeah, happy birthday. But why would you not tell us?” Diluc made a face.
Kaeya shrugged. “Dunno. Wasn’t that important.”
“But how are we supposed to organise a special day for you? That’s what we’re supposed to do for birthdays. It’s too late—”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Kaeya interrupted Diluc’s spiralling tirade hastily, alarm washing over him. “Please don’t. I… I don’t need anything. You’ve all done enough for me, please, I could never pay you back for your kindness.”
“What rubbish, you don’t have to—”
Master Crepus cut across this time. “Diluc, stop hounding the poor boy. And Kaeya," he raised an eyebrow, "you don’t have to worry about paying us back. What put this silly idea into your head? We are just happy to have you here with us, for however long it may be. Now just finish up your cake and go back to bed, you have lessons in the morning.”
“Yes, Father—” “Yes, sir,” chorused Diluc and Kaeya.
The sky lightened and the flames dimmed. Under the calming influence of the crackling fire, despite Master Crepus having told them to go back to their rooms, Diluc dozed off then and there, his head drooping onto Kaeya’s shoulder. Kaeya was no better, and his eyelids were too heavy for him to pry open. Right before he fell asleep though, he heard a whisper, “good night, Diluc. Good night, Kaeya. Rest well.”
(Crepus carried the sleeping boys up to their rooms and tucked them in. The next day, he took them to the city, on the pretext of work. Somehow, however, ‘work’ got cancelled and they had already come all the way to the city. Might as well make the most of it—and oh, look, the Good Hunter had Mondstadt’s famous chocolate cake on display. Might as well buy it for no particular reason and give Kaeya a generous helping.
Kaeya appreciated that. That Master Crepus didn’t make a huge deal of it, but still went out of his way to make Kaeya feel included.
Months passed, and then years. Kaeya’s father never came back. Crepus, however, was always there, and at some point, Kaeya started calling him ‘Dad’. Then, Kaeya was adopted, Diluc was now officially his brother, and things could never be better. He stopped looking back at the festering past.
That is, until that fateful night of Diluc’s eighteenth birthday, when the whole world came crashing down.)
Seven years later, 30th November…
The tombstone was still clean. The flowers—bouquets of cecelias, asters, dandelions—were refreshed every week by the citizens of Mondstadt. Crepus Ragnvindr was loved by everyone, in life and in death, and the condition of his final resting place reflected that. A few rotting ones lay on the ground, and Kaeya dutifully picked them off and pocketed them. He’d dispose of them later.
This was the first time he was visiting Crepus’s gravesite. Diluc refused to let him attend the funeral—and for the record, he wouldn’t have gone either. Wounds had been ripped open between them, too many too soon.
He laid a calloused hand, scarred with pink tissue, on the stone. It was still wrapped in bandages; the burns he’d suffered a few months ago hadn’t healed fully. He was a woebegone sight indeed, clad in a simple beige shirt with drawstrings, his shoulders hunched. His eyepatch was the same one from so many years ago, he’d only had the frayed string changed. His hair, still a dark blue, just a lot longer now.
In the other hand, he carried one flower. A fresh calla lily.
“Hi, Dad.” His smooth voice rasped over the words, shaking uncontrollably. “Diluc told me not to call you that. Dad, I mean. I don’t really know what else to call you, though.”
He swallowed, placing the single lily on the stone, on top of the engraved words.
Crepus Ragnvindr.
Father of Diluc Ragnvindr.
Shining true, always.
“I’m eighteen today. Well,” he amended quickly, “you would have celebrated my eighteenth birthday today. Today was never my birthday, you know? I don’t really know when I was born. But I never told you that. I never told you a lot of things. You never pried though.
“I’m living with Jean now. Training with her in the Knights too. Jean Gunnhildr, by the way, I’m sure you remember her. Her mother wasn’t very happy about it, but it wouldn’t look good if she turned an orphan away, especially when the orphan was Sir Ragnvindr’s ward. Not that I’m a Ragnvindr in name any longer, Diluc made sure of that before he left. It’s Kaeya Alberich now."
He stopped, inhaling deeply. The scent of freshly turned mud mingled with the floral smell hit him. “Don’t know if you know,” he muttered, his hand falling to his side where the icy vision glowed, “I got a vision. You would have been proud, I remember how happy you were when Diluc got his. If it wasn’t for how I got mine.”
The memories of that day, Diluc’s rage, Kaeya’s own readiness to give up, their grief manifesting in different ways. And now the tears he’d been trying desperately to hold back started to roll. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry. I let you down, I let everyone down, and—” A sob escaped him, one he couldn’t internalise in time. “I wish you were here. You’d have known exactly what to say.”
For a moment, just a moment, he thought he saw a flash of red. Blinking through his tears, however, it was just a trick of the light. The setting sun glinting on the cathedral windows.
“I just miss you, Dad,” he choked out softly. “I love you.”