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Venti is the only bard who is allowed to play in the Angel’s Share.
Other bards do play there, of course, and even more drink there- the Angel’s Share is still the best tavern in Mondstadt, much to Margaret’s dismay. Six-Fingered Jose in particular is a near-permanent installation by the door.
But none are strictly allowed to play there. Not while Master Ragnvindr is manning the bar. Charles will let performance and some coin slide, but as soon as the bards spot a flash of fiery hair behind the bar, they pack up their lyres and lutes with a sigh.
There is some talk about why Venti is the only one allowed to play, and no one can give you an answer, not really, anyway.
“He can at least carry a tune,” Diluc says when asked about it, icy cold and one eyebrow high on his face. The bard who asked, six sheets to the wind, goes white and stumbles off.
“I think he’s known Diluc for a while,” Charles says thoughtfully, pours more wine. “Old friends get special privileges.”
“Why wouldn’t I be?” Venti says, looking up in surprise, eyes huge and innocent. There’s not a lot to say to such vehement and practiced guilelessness.
Something strange about the little green bard, something not quite-
Diluc hears the whispers, rolls his eyes. “He’s got a vision,” he points out. “Touched by the wind himself. Maybe he just hears better than the rest of you tone-deaf frauds.”
Venti is just that- Venti, a bard of Mondstadt, more talented than the rest, blessed by the Anemo Archon himself, but just as drunk if not drunker.
That is what Diluc has always seen, anyway.
It’s quiet tonight, in the tavern, and Diluc sends Charles home early and polishes glasses slowly to the sound of muted, picked at notes, nothing he recognizes. There’s a strange look on Venti’s face, eyes cast down at the floor, and the tune meanders strangely.
Twists in on itself, repeats again and again, different this time with a false note, now a half octave higher, and Diluc realizes he’s writing a ballad right as Venti lets his hand drift over the strings a final time, let’s the final chord echo out gently.
It’s a very sad song, Diluc thinks.
He gives a sigh, slides himself onto a bar stool, sets the lyre on the clean bar. It’s silent as it lands, no discordant jangle of its strings.
“A glass of dandelion wine, please,” he says, polite and lilting up at the end- Venti has the soft edge of an accent long faded, one that Diluc can never seem to place- but maybe not as cheerful and brightly grating as he normally is.
“On whose tab?” Diluc asks, raises an eyebrow. Venti doesn’t pay for drinks sort of as a general rule- Diluc’s never actually seen him handle mora.
Someone is usually around to buy the little bard a round or a shot or a bottle for his music, but the tavern is empty now.
“Yours?” Venti says hopefully, one corner of his mouth twisting up. It’s still subdued, however, and Diluc sighs. Rolls his eyes half-heartedly. Pours him a drink.
“Stop acting like someone kicked your cat,” Diluc says, slides him the glass.
“Don’t like cats,” Venti says, distracted, breaking into a small grin as the drink reaches him. “Ah, you truly are a prince among men, Master Diluc- the uncrowned King of Mond- a generous-”
“I’ll take it back.”
“Fair enough,” Venti shrugs, and doesn’t down the glass like expected. He turns it in his hands instead, watches thick golden wine coat the sides. “How are your vines this year, Master Diluc?”
“Fine enough,” Diluc says. “A little rainier than normal, and we’ll have some trouble if the storms keep up.”
“Ah, I’ll do something about that,” Venti murmurs nonsensically. “More rain than usual, then.”
“You have a sudden interest in viticulture?”
“I wouldn’t call it sudden,” Venti says, smile playing at the corners of his mouth, still turning the glass in his hands. He looks older, all of a sudden, the false innocence he swathes himself in gone, round eyes heavy lidded and tired. When Venti looks up at him, it is strange and makes him swallow. The gaze is- too knowing, too much. “I’ve had wines that you’ve never heard of, never will. But the Dawn Winery’s is best, never fear.”
“Yes, well.” Diluc says, on his back foot now.
There’s something strange and lyrical about Venti’s words, something that makes Diluc’s well honed, hard fought instincts perk up and take notice.
“Dawn Winery has always been successful, even in your absence,” Venti says absently, and Diluc’s knuckles go white on the rag that he’s still clutching.
“Yes, thank Barbatos,” Diluc says tightly, eyeing the bard. “I’m very lucky to have an excellent team of retainers. And the wind is kind.”
“Thank Barbatos,” Venti echoes, something strange in the twist of his mouth. “Yes. I suppose you are- blessed.”
“What wines?” Diluc asks. He doesn’t really know why he does it. He’s not interested in the ramblings of a drunkard- if he were, he would tend bar more often. He doesn't care.
Except for the strange far-away look in the bard’s face, and the way he said-
Diluc doesn’t like not knowing things.
Venti looks up at him from under his eyelashes, elbows propped up on the varnished wood of the bar. “I thought you didn’t care for alcohol, Master Diluc?”
“It’s good form to be innovative in your business,” Diluc says stiffly.
“It’s an old story,” Venti says thoughtfully, stretches his arms across the bar. For professing to hate cats, he rather acts like one. The delicate frilled cuffs of his sleeves fall over his hands. The fingertips that stick out are rather more calloused than even a bard’s should be, and nearly make it over the counter. “And a rather long one. But maybe we will stick to the high points, hm?”
Diluc sighs, falsely put upon. “You’re the bard, Master-”
Pauses.
“Just Venti will do, Master Diluc,” Venti says lightly. “All the other names are too long for friends.”
“What other names?”
“And here I thought you wanted to hear about wine!” Venti says, pushing back with those calloused hands and sitting upright, finally. “You must choose, Master Diluc, as I only have one tale in me tonight, and I cannot imagine you would pick an old drunk bard versus the wonderful vintages I have stored up here.” he taps his temple, flashes Diluc a grin.
There is something that he is missing, and for a long moment Diluc is tempted- tempted to ask about Venti’s names, and why a traveling bard would need more than the usual two.
There is also the problem that he’s not entirely sure Venti would tell him the truth- bards being the way they are. Storytellers. Fable weavers. Liars, all.
“Is it a true story?” Diluc says, wary and sounding childish even to his own ears.
Venti pauses, looks very nearly stricken. “I wouldn’t tell you falsehoods, Master Diluc,” he says, quietly. “I promise.”
“Alright,” Diluc says. Fights the urge to tug at his gloves, hunch his shoulders like a person much younger, with much cleaner hands. “Tell me about the wine.”
“I have a friend in Liyue,” Venti begins after a moment. His voice is a little clearer when he’s orating, like something akin to a stream- rollicking and burbling and easy to follow. “I have a friend in Liyue, an old friend, one with extensive and eccentric tastes.
“This friend of mine is older than I am- not by much, mind you, not that it matters these days, but he is still the elder- and has finer tastes than anyone I’ve ever known. A bard can be happy with an apple off the tree and a pretty girl’s song,” a wink for Diluc here, who scoffs and folds his arms but listens anyway, “but my friend has always gone in for fine stones, rare teas, and opera. Though,” Venti says thoughtfully, “that’s just a more expensive version of the pretty girl’s song.”
“Liyue opera is an art form,” Diluc says, interrupting despite himself.
“And so are the women,” Venti says, grinning a little now. “Now this friend of mine, with his very fine tastes and his correct opinions has one fatal flaw: he is sentimental. Nostaliga rules his world, which at this age one cannot blame him for, not really, but it can occasionally blind him to the wonders that a new, modern age can bring.
“Now this friend and I used to drink wine, together, on the borders of our countries, to exchange gossip and tales and whatever else. Osmanthus wine,” Venti says, and his voice tips wistful here, slides into something that wouldn’t sound out of place on his nostalgic friend. “The materials are lost now, and so are the people who know how to make it. There are very few bottles left in the world, and half of them are buried under Vanessa’s tree at Windrise.”
He looks up then, arches an eyebrow. “So I better not find any of them missing, because now I will know it was you, Master Diluc.”
“Vanessa’s tree?”
Venti shrugs a shoulder. “It’s an old name. And so, out of the many people who are in this world, my friend and I are the only ones who really remember the taste of Osmanthus wine, and are probably the only ones who know about it. And you now, of course. The kicker, of course,” and he leans in, intimate and smiling around the edges, and Diluc cannot help himself- he leans in too.
“The kicker, is that Osmanthus wine is just that now- a memory. The rest of it has turned to vinegar!”
Venti rocks back on his chair, grins. “Now tell me, Master Diluc- do you think that counts as wine you will have never had?”
Diluc shakes his head, but there’s something tugging at the corner of his mouth despite his best efforts. “It seems like a sad story to me- good wine turned to vinegar.”
Venti shrugs. “Life- it’s destruction, you know. And creation. Vinegar is useful too, to clean the windows and the mirrors.”
“More useful than wine,” Diluc grouses, and is rewarded with Venti’s crystal clear laugh. “Why do you call it Venessa’s tree?”
“Because it’s hers,” Venti says, shrugs. “And anyway, isn’t it a prettier name for the stories? Rather than ‘that big old tree with all the crystalflies’?”
Diluc shrugs. “I suppose.”
“Do you still love the crystalflies?” Venti asks, runs a finger around edge of his wine.
Diluc goes very still. “What?”
“They haunt your vines,” Venti says, smiles into his glass, soft and a little melancholic. “I thought you liked them?”
The anemo crystalflies do haunt his vines. There’s nowhere else in Mondstadt that they live in such profusion- not Windrise, not Starsnatch, not the church.
Diluc occasionally comes outside in the pink of the evening or the bright gold of mid day to find the traveler sprinting among them, getting thick black mud on his boots, his hands full of crystals, grinning.
They trail anemo through the air and Diluc has watched them over the years with the same wonder he can’t seem to get rid of, even after all that he has lived, shimmering and otherworldly. They turn his vineyard into something ethereal, and he goes out on early mornings when the fog lays thick and low, watches them drift amongst the dark black grapes and feels quiet, for a moment. Feels at peace.
It is a feeling that is all too rare, one that he treasures.
“Yes,” Diluc says, feeling strangely young. It’s very quiet in the tavern. “I like them.”
Venti looks up then, and his eyes are the same color as anemo, the same color at that which lights Jean’s sword or gathers round Aether’s fist, the same ethereal blue-green brightness.
They’re also very sad, and very sober. “I’m glad.” he says simply. “You should have as many as you like.”
Quiet, silence, and Diluc’s hand wanting to shake. Here, in the warm light of the tavern, Diluc feels his throat close up with something like tears.
Venti downs the glass then, waves a hand, his lyre dissipates. “Thank you for the drink, Master Diluc!” he says, faux cheerfully. “You do an old bard’s heart good.”
He starts toward the door, and confused and still off kilter, Diluc says, voice still horribly thick despite himself- “Do you- do you know where they come from?”
Venti stops. “The crystal flies?”
“Yes.”
Venti is quiet for a long moment, his back still facing Diluc. “Well, they’re from Barbatos, aren’t they?”
Venti tilts a smile over his shoulder, and it hits Diluc like a bolt of lightning, like a rain shower on a hot day. Like a crystalfly in early morning fog.
“Given to those who are-” Venti stops, swallows, his eyes even brighter, somehow, still fixed on Diluc- “beloved of the anemo archon.”
It sounds like something precious, handed to him on silver, on gold, on platinum, on the wings of crystal flies.
“They’re for you, after all.”
When the door shuts behind him, the whole tavern seems to exhale, settle into its foundations. Diluc sets down the glass he stopped polishing ten minutes ago very carefully. Unwraps his white knuckled fingers from the rag.
He lets out a long, controlled exhale.
It’s a funny feeling, to know you are on the precipice of something. To know that there is something that you’re not quite getting, that’s just out of reach.
“Beloved,” Diluc says out loud, questioning and reaching for disparaging, but can’t quite- he flushes. “Beloved,” he says, quieter, and it’s intimate enough that-
He throws himself into motion, puts chairs on tables and finishes closing.
He’s on the road to the winery not half an hour later, and as he rounds the cobblestone road home, soft lights glow in his vines.
Just for him.
He sighs, very quietly, alone on the road.
The crystal flies don’t fly away when he approaches them like they do with everyone else. When he reaches out at thick-gloved hand, one lands on it, blurring the air around it.
Diluc turns his hand over, closes his fist. When he opens it, the perfect diamond crystal lays in his palm, bright and beautiful.
It isn’t warm- they never are, strange beings of elemental energy and not strictly alive- but there’s a strange electricity to them, Diluc has always thought.
The winery is very silent, very quiet in the witching hours. Diluc makes the final steps home on cat soft feet and the weight of a crystal heart in his pocket.