Archive of Our Own

Diluc is eight when he experiences his first loss, sixteen when he experiences his second. He’s starting to think that every eighth year of his life is a sign for the start of a new tragedy.

There are a few differences between each one, though, the most marked being: he didn’t cry the first time it happened, and he didn’t have to move across the country to a small town filled with faces he couldn’t recognise, either.

(Although, in retrospect, living in the city was no different. A mass of faces, all the same shade of blurry and unfamiliar.)

The first time was when his parents had gotten a divorce, and his father had chased the corporate ladder upwards and away from them. He had always been a bright kid growing up, so he’d been able to grasp the situation they’d ended up in pretty quickly, but he had been a little too young to actually make any sense of it. He thinks that’s why he didn’t feel much over the days that his father’s presence in the house became less and less, until it dwindled away into nothing at all.

It did leave him with a lot of questions, though, that he fears may never be answered, and an unexplainable spark of anger burning in him that he doesn’t know how to extinguish. Between that and the death of his mother—the second loss of his life, at the tender but tumultuous age of sixteen—he isn’t sure which is worse.

At least with the passing of his mother the tears had come naturally, and at least they’d held a funeral and properly mourned her and the life she’d lived till then. But there was no funeral for his father, for the life they were never able to live; there was no place for him to grieve and come to terms with his loss and standing here eight years on there’s a part of him that feels uncomfortably like he’s lost something he never truly had.

Although, he supposes, that would be a fair assessment, if not a little tragic to admit. Both of his parents had always been busy with their work as he grew up—living in a big city was a time-consuming and expensive task, he’s come to learn—and he’s almost entirely certain he saw more of the nanny they’d hired to watch over him than either of them. Physical presence aside, his parents’ divorce didn’t actually feel like a major shift to him. His father just kind of faded away. Out of sight, out of mind.

Or so he wishes, at least. The older he gets, the more questions he has that he wants to ask his father. It’s funny, because they say absence makes the heart grow fonder, but in the place of affection his is bubbling with only bitterness and cold and it’s gone all thorny from the time they’ve spent apart. 

He also hates the fact that despite barely spending any of his life with his father (both his parents, really, but he doesn’t harbour that much ill intent towards his mother. She’d passed away in an accident—it wasn’t her choice to leave him behind. The least he could do was respect the dead.), he still finds himself living his life like it’s a script with his father as the writer every now and then.

Like now. He’s on his way to his aunt’s house—there had been no one to take him in after his mother passed away, with her relatives having had settled in a different country years back and the rest of his father’s side equally as busy as him in their little corporate worlds—and staring out of the car window, but instead of actually focusing on the scenery he’s only thinking about what the new school term will be like.

Growing up, he’d excelled at his studies. It was one of the few things his father had actually praised him for, and over the years, he’d ended up obsessing over his grades in copious attempts to please his parents (after his father’s leaving, his mother ended up taking on the role in an attempt to encourage him to continue excelling, and he hadn’t had the heart to fight her on that). Now that he’s older, he knows it’s all just conditional love, but old habits die hard, and he doesn’t want to attend another funeral just yet, anyway.

The car brakes screech along the asphalt and jerk him out of his thoughts. The sound reminds him of the day he’d crashed his bike so bad he had to be taken to the hospital. His parents had taken off the training wheels for the first time, something about him learning to pedal on his own, but he’d ended up accidentally letting go of the brakes too, and he’d left the hospital the following day with a knee full of stitches, a handful of humiliation, and a fear of bicycles.

He hasn’t ridden one since that day.

“We’re nearly there,” the driver he doesn’t know the name of says from the front seat, providing a much-appreciated distraction from his old memories. He nods his head, not bothering to give a verbal response. The school term must have started by now; they’re already halfway through the school year, after all.

He’s moving in the fall, when the sun glows a little warmer and the leaves rustle across the grey pavements with that crinkly sound he used to love as a kid. If circumstances had been different, he thinks he would’ve enjoyed it. Fall always used to be his favourite season, after all, but now he’s gotten sick of picking favourites. It’s just an illusion of choice, some way or the other, and he’s tired of all his choices leading to the wrong ends.

The car grinds to a halt, and he grabs hold of the phone that’s sitting on his lap. He hadn’t bothered to check it during the entire journey; it’s not like anyone would bother to contact him. Anyone who mattered, at least.

“We’re here,” the driver announces. 

Diluc thinks the driver sounds more excited than him, and they don’t even know each other. “Okay. Thanks.”

He slips his phone into his pocket and gets out of the car. His limbs feel like rusted puppet joints as they move him round to the back, where the driver helps him unload his luggage. It’s only a relatively small suitcase, enough clothes to last him to his next shopping trip, the barest of necessities, maybe a few polaroids here and there for nostalgia’s sake. 

“Is that all?” the driver asks, and he nods, mumbling out a half-hearted ‘thanks’ before he wheels his luggage along with him towards his place of residence.

His new neighbourhood is a far cry from the bustling city streets and towering apartment buildings that he’s used to, with the monotonous grey shades replaced instead by smaller, quainter houses that dapple tiled pavements, curved streetlights casting faint hues into the apricot-coloured leaves of the trees which signpost each individual house.

He stops outside the house that apparently belongs to his aunt and her family, double-checking the number at the front door with the one on his phone. It’s much smaller than the landed property they’d lived in when his father had still lived with them, and from what he can surmise, more homely in nature than the apartment block he’d lived in with his mother.

The door opens after three and a half knocks. “Diluc! It’s so good to see you again!” The face of his aunt stares back at him. He hasn’t seen her in years, not since he was a kid too young to remember all the features, and looking at her now like this he sees foggy parts of his father written in her eyes, the curve of her lips—an unpleasant feeling curls in his stomach and he fights the urge to drop his gaze away.

“Yeah,” he echoes instead, hoping he doesn’t come off sounding half as unenthusiastic as he feels. “It’s good to be here.”

It’s not, but it’s not like he had much of a choice. He doesn’t particularly mind, though; at least he got to step away from the city. He’s sick and tired of that place and more so tired of the things it’s made people become.

His aunt steps to the side and he makes his way into the house. It’s cluttered and a little messy, decorated with photo frames and pictures. He’d never had that in his house before. Family portraits, he means, not pictures. He grew up surrounded by framed paintings, all the fancy kinds by foreign artists with names he never learned how to pronounce, all meant for showing off. He supposes his family never really saw it fit to show themselves off. There hadn’t been much to show off.

“My husband’s not here at the moment, but he’ll be home from work by dinnertime,” his aunt speaks, and he nods. “In the meantime, maybe you should acquaint yourself with my son?”

He nods again. He’d heard about his cousin on occasion—he’s two years younger than Diluc, from what he can remember, but they’ve never met before. His cousin was adopted, he’d been told, and by the time he became an official member of the family his father had decided to leave them behind.

His aunt shows him to his room and he leaves his things on the bed, debating whether to actually acquaint himself with his cousin or just hide out in here for as long as he can before he’s summoned out to the dining room. He doesn’t have to make the decision, though, because there’s a series of knocks on the door before it swings open.

He takes in his cousin appraisingly. There’s a wide smile on his face and his eyes flicker and glow like stars even under the dim bedroom lights. He looks nothing like his father, or anyone remotely related to him, and distantly somewhere Diluc registers it as a plus point. He’d left the city behind, and he doesn’t want to take any reminders with him.

(Or at least, the less the better. It’s not like he can erase the features of his father out of his aunt’s face without either forking an exorbitant fee for the surgery costs or going to jail for criminal activity.)

“Hi, I’m Kaeya!” His tone, while young and in that awkward-pitched stage of mid-puberty, is confident and unfaltering as he sticks a hand out. “I’m fourteen this year.”

Diluc eyes the extended hand a little sceptically, but accepts it in the end. “Diluc,” he utters by way of introduction, “I’m sixteen.”

If Kaeya is put off by his curt tone, he doesn’t show it, instead seeing it fit to invite himself into Diluc’s room. Diluc supposes it technically is more Kaeya’s house than his own, so he steps aside and watches as the younger of the two plops himself onto the bed. “You’re going to the same school as me, right?”

“Yeah,” Diluc says. There are only a few schools in this small town, fewer good ones. The one he’s set to go to has the highest school fees, but he supposes that if his (barely-there) relationship with his father has any plus points, it would be his lack of need to worry about money.

He’ll earn his own money someday, though, he swears. He doesn’t like the feeling of owing anyone anything, especially not the same person who left him eight years ago. He thinks his father tries to use it as a way to bribe his way into forgiveness, but it’s not forgiveness that he’s ready to give. 

Regardless, the thought of graduating and finding a job hurts his head. He’s been mulling over the courses he wants to take, but eventually all of them had started tracing back to stuffy office jobs in too-tall buildings, complete with stuffy suits and blank smiles that accompany the arduous climb up the corporate ladder. He doesn’t want to end up like his parents, so he dismisses the thought to the back of his mind. It’s not like him to be like this, but at this point he doesn’t know what it means anymore to be like him.

“... meet up.” Kaeya’s expectant gaze burning into his face causes him to realise that he’s been zoning out the entire time that Kaeya has been speaking, and his eyebrows furrow.

“Repeat that?”

Kaeya sighs, but a smile flickers at the corners of his lips. “You’ll get along with him just fine, from the look of things,” he mutters, more to himself than anything, and then louder, “I said I’ll introduce you to a friend of mine if you’d like. He’s a year older than you, but we get along fine, since we’ve known each other ever since I came here.”

“Oh.” Diluc doesn’t know what to think about the prospect of making friends. He hadn’t made many plans beyond getting good grades, graduating, figuring life out from there. The concept of friendships had somehow managed to skirt its way around his life in question, but he’s not too surprised—it’s not like he had many to start with anyway, not even back in the city. But he supposes it’d be too rude to refuse, so he settles on, “okay.”

“Alright, I’ll see when he’s free, and then we can meet up,” Kaeya enthuses, and at the back of his mind Diluc wonders why he seems so eager to have someone new to hang around with. From how things are looking, though, Kaeya seems to be far more of a social butterfly than himself, so he supposes it makes sense. “He can get a bit annoying at times, but he has his mature moments too. You look like you’re in need of some lightening up, anyway.”

Diluc fights the urge to bristle at the words. What’s that supposed to mean? he’s tempted to retort, but he manages to dutifully keep it from spilling out of his mouth. Kaeya’s young, and words have a habit of falling out without much brain work involved at ages like that.

The door sounds from one floor below, and Kaeya straightens. “Dad’s home,” he says, standing from his seat on the bed, and Diluc trails after him as he pads down the stairs. Kaeya shouts out a noise that’s half a yell and half a greeting as his father walks past, and Diluc raises his hand in a stiff wave.

His uncle looks like what he can remember—or at the very least, resembles the blurry, barely-there image of him in the fog of Diluc’s memory—if not a little older, hair a little more grey, but with the same wide smile and boisterous laughter. Diluc recalls, distantly, that he had once felt envious of their family. It hadn’t occurred to him then—back when he was only so young—that people could be so friendly, like it was an automatic response, bubbling with sunshine and spilling golden light as if they were a house crafted of windows and no walls. 

He finds out, just a little bit later at the dining table, that the art of being overly-friendly has its moments of being the startling antithesis of a magnum opus. And maybe his uncle had achieved his abundance of enthusiasm and warmth for a lack of tact, for they’re only halfway through the meal before he asks, cheerfully, like nothing’s wrong, “You know, you look just like your dad!”

Diluc makes a visible attempt to swallow down the food that’s suddenly gotten stuck to the back of his throat. Steamed fish isn’t supposed to be hard-to-digest by any means, but a part of him wonders if a bone had managed to sneak its way in along with the meat, somehow. Kaeya shoots him a nervous glance from across the table.

It’s not the first time people have said that to him, but it doesn’t make it any easier to hear. He doesn’t like the reminder; he doesn’t need to be told what he already sees every time he looks into a mirror (which had, in his earlier days, led to a furtive attempt to avoid reflective surfaces—an incident that had caused his mother to worry he was suffering from self-esteem issues at a young age. Which was not the case, but it had been easier to let her believe that than to try to explain whatever he was attempting to run from). 

But then again, he supposes it’s better than he inherited his father’s looks over his mind. I won’t be like him, he vows, fingers curling into fists against his cutlery and fork prodding into the fish on his plate a little harsher than necessary. That’s why he’s here, in this small town with barely anything to offer on the table, but he’d rather a table than the precariously-balanced ladders of the corporate world.

“You should go and visit him sometime, you know! I can drive you,” his uncle continues, and Diluc fights to maintain an expression of neutrality. “I know you may not be on the best of terms, but still, it’s good for kids to see their parents—”

“Dad,” Kaeya warns, quietly, and his father falls silent.

Diluc shovels the remainder of the fish in his mouth and swallows hard. It feels like a bunch of rocks with how dry his mouth had gotten over the course of the conversation, but he’d rather have stones shoved down his throat than lectures on how he should be as a son. 

He’s tired of others lecturing him on his forgiveness. It’s his to give, not theirs.

“Are you okay?” Kaeya asks him later, once the plates have been cleared and the sound of the running tap water in the kitchen has faded to quiet, leaning against his door with his arms crossed as if he owns the place.

(Which he technically does, Diluc is forced to realise again. There’s a part of him that wonders if he’ll feel like a half-stranger in this home for as long as he remains here, but it’s not like he’s not accustomed to it, anyway.)

Diluc glances out at the corridor. A few right turns and it’d lead to the master bedroom. “Come in,” he says, “and close the door behind you.”

Kaeya is happy to oblige, shutting the door and flopping belly-first against the bed. Diluc’s eyebrows furrow as he watches Kaeya roll over, limbs splayed out enough to take up two-thirds of the space. If this is what having a sibling is like, he’s kind of glad his parents didn’t love each other enough to have another kid.

“So,” Kaeya probes again, sitting up and leaning in (uncomfortably close) to Diluc. He supposes the younger of them must’ve inherited some form of lack of social cues from his father. “Are you okay?”

Am I? Diluc wonders for a moment, but he comes to the conclusion that he’s not about to spill his guts out to some fourteen-year-old he’d only just met on this same day. He doesn’t even know how to verbalise what he’s feeling to himself, let alone to his younger cousin. “Yeah.”

“I used to get kind of mad when they brought up my parents, you know,” Kaeya says, turning his gaze away from Diluc and up to the dim bedroom lights, and Diluc straightens a fraction, half-intrigued. “My birth parents, I mean. They kept asking me things about them, although I don’t remember a thing. I was just—trying to erase their existence, you know? They abandoned me. I didn’t want to keep being reminded of them, or the fact that they didn’t love me enough to keep me around.”

Diluc turns his attention to the younger, watching the way the light falls into his eyes and traces the pattern of the stars in its melancholic grey. He supposes Kaeya isn’t all just overstepped boundaries and cheer and annoying tendencies. He’s got a heart built out of scars and a mind full of ghosts too.

Maybe they’re more similar than he’d first thought, Diluc reflects.

“But nevermind that,” Kaeya dismisses breezily, and Diluc takes a moment to wrap his mind around how easily the fourteen-year-old can slip the mask right back on, like the layers buried underneath his cheery exterior were never there in the first place. “Are you ready for school?”

Diluc shrugs. He hadn’t given it much thought. “I suppose.”

“Alright, I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Mom told me not to bother you too much.” Kaeya wrinkles his nose, and then adds in on afterthought, “for the first few days, at least.”

Diluc shoots the younger of the two a somewhat-withering glance, grateful when Kaeya decides to move away and roll back to the other edge of the bed to get to the door. “Night, Diluc!”

“... Goodnight, Kaeya.”

It’s an easy thing to say, but oddly unfamiliar rolling off his tongue.

He supposes he’ll get used to it someday.

The first day of his new school rolls around with burnt toast, Kaeya tripping over his half-tied shoelaces running along the pavement behind him, and barely just boarding the bus in time. He also discovers that the bus, at this time, is crammed full of students hurrying their way to school, and there are usually no seats left.

(This time, there is one. He lets Kaeya have it, though, because as much as he’s unused to public transportation, he’s not terrible enough to force someone two years his junior to stand. He’ll get used to it someday, anyway.)

They’re in different levels and classes, so they split up after Kaeya sends him to the general direction of the classroom, and the walk is surprisingly peaceful as he crosses the courtyard to the flight of the stairs leading him up to where he supposes he’ll soon be spending majority of his waking time. 

His classmates are respectful for the most part, and they don’t probe much, a few nods and waves and maybe some not-so-discreet glances from the girls as he finishes his obligatory self-introduction (he just tells them his name, leaving out his last name on purpose) and takes his seat near the window. Class is a little different from what he’s used to—the teacher calls people to answer more often, and the environment is just warmer somehow, more laughter and more rowdiness and at times a little too rowdy—but it’s nice. It cements the idea that he’s away from the city now.

Speaking of the city, he comes to learn through overheard conversations and the corner in class where some of his classmate’s wishes have been written on paper and strung up against the walls that many of them have dreams of moving to the city and hitting it big. Some have dreams of becoming the next great entrepreneur. Others want to become a celebrity. Few want to stay in this small town and take over their family’s small restaurant business or work in the offices that are barely five stories high, but he finds himself gravitating towards them a little more.

He doesn’t tell anyone that he’s from the city, although he thinks it might be obvious. If his sudden entry into the school midway through the semester isn’t a big enough indication, his somewhat reserved personality and little-to-no knowledge about the town around him might be. The lack of conversation topics between them fall out as unsaid words and stack themselves into an invisible wall, and for the most part of his beginning weeks at school, he’s alone (Kaeya doesn’t join him since they have different timetables, and it would be weird for him to eat with a junior two years younger, anyway).

It’s not something that he minds, though. If anything, he’s used to it; there’s something peaceful about eating lunch in the quietest part of the school he can find, and he’s come to find that strolling around in the gardens where people rarely go—save the gardener, who leaves him alone—is a good way to clear his mind. 

“Are you doing okay at school?” his aunt asks him two weeks in, putting down a plate of toast—unburnt this time—and bacon in front of him. He’s learnt that Kaeya wakes up easier with music blasting jarringly loud next to his eardrums, and he’s been taking advantage of it to avoid having to chase the bus in a rush out of the house every morning.

He blinks. “I guess,” he answers around a mouthful of breadcrumbs. He hadn’t given it much thought, but considering that school hasn’t crossed his mind much, he supposes that it’s an indication that he’s doing okay. Probably. “The classes are a little slower than what I’m used to, but it’s alright.”

“Really?” His aunt places Kaeya’s plate down too. “That’s good.”

“Yeah,” he echoes. There’s the signature loud yelp as Kaeya trips and misses a step on his way down, but Diluc notes with a glance at the clock that Kaeya’s merciful enough today to drag himself down the stairs in time for the bus. 

This time, they are early enough that they manage to find two seats.

“Remember the friend I told you about?” Kaeya asks.

Diluc tears his gaze away from the blurring greenery and grey roads for a moment. “No.”

He chooses to ignore the younger’s eye-roll. “The first day you came. I said I was going to introduce the two of you.”

“Oh.” 

“Meet me after school?” Kaeya huffs out a breath against the bus windows and draws a sloppy smiley face against the condensation, and this time it’s Diluc’s turn to fight an eye-roll at the cartoonish image that grins up at him.

“We meet after school every day, Kaeya. We live in the same house.”

Kaeya shoves him, and Diluc sinks further into his seat so that he doesn’t budge. “I meant to meet my friend, dumbass.”

There’s a chuckle to his tone. “I know.”

Kaeya lets out a noise that’s a mix between exasperation and frustration, and Diluc holds back a laugh.

He thinks they’re doing okay.

Kaeya sends him directions to the place they’re meeting once he’s done with school, and he manages to navigate the public transport system—with moderate difficulty, but he gets it done—to get where he’s supposed to be. It’s a small restaurant located by the side of the park, and it’s not a name that’s come up in his classmates’ list of recommendations once they found out he’s new to town, but he’s learned pretty early on that it’s not great to judge a book by its cover (his father, for one, had a convincing cover belying the chapters within).

The bell chimes overhead as he enters. The restaurant is swathed in dim light, painting it in a cosy atmosphere for before-evening, and he squints a little as his eyes adjust to the environment. To the corner he spots Kaeya and his friend, the latter with his back facing the door, but Diluc can make out the fact that his hair is long enough to be tied into twin braids. A unique hairstyle, but he’s not one to comment.

There’s no one else but them, and he’s not sure whether to feel relieved or sceptical as to the quality of the restaurant’s food, but it would be impolite to change his mind now that he’s already in the restaurant, so he ends up making his way over.

Kaeya’s friend notices him before Kaeya does, turning his head at the sound of footsteps against the ground. “Your cousin’s here,” he says to Kaeya once Diluc is in earshot, and Diluc swallows as he bows his head in greeting, taking the person in front of him in.

He’s relatively small in frame, but his presence itself is large enough to drown out that fact—his eyes are bright even in the dim of the restaurant lights, piercing into Diluc’s with a near-playful glimmer, and as he leans forward, hand outstretched and voice dancing, the faintest scent of dandelions and citrus washes over Diluc. “My name is Venti. It’s good to meet you at last—Kaeya’s been telling me about you.”

Diluc takes it. Venti’s palm is cool against his, and he notes that Venti’s voice is light, but written with mature undertones that make his one-year-older status more believable amidst the teasing look on his face and his relatively youthful features. “I’m Diluc.”

“I know,” Venti replies, and Diluc falls silent, only for it to be broken by the sound of the older’s laughter. “Take a seat, why don’t you, and we can order some food. They serve pretty good dessert here.”

“You’re the only one who actually likes it,” Kaeya grumbles, shifting his chair to make room for Diluc, who shuffles through the space between Kaeya’s chair and the wall to his own seat across from Venti.

Venti slides the menu towards Diluc with one hand and makes a dismissive wave towards Kaeya with the other. “Shut up, you brat, I’m paying anyway. And you like the vanilla ice cream, so stop exaggerating.”

“And you would, too, if you gave it a try,” Kaeya shoots back.

“But it’s so boring,” Venti whines, a snort following his words. “At least try something with some flavour.”

Kaeya opens his mouth to respond, but Venti waves him away, instead turning his attention to Diluc. This entire time, Diluc had been watching the exchange between his cousin and his friend with some sort of curious fascination, and he starts a little when he finds Venti’s eyes on him. “So what do you say, Diluc?”

“What?”

“Your dessert of choice.” If Venti notices Diluc’s inattention and general lack of ability to socialise with strangers, he doesn’t seem to pay it any mind. “Anything that looks appetising to you?”

From his peripheral vision, he can see Kaeya staring wide-eyed at him. He’s not the biggest fan of sweet treats, though, and he clears his throat as he gets out, “I’ll… try the lemon one.”

Kaeya lets out a noise that’s part-indignation and part-disbelief, and across the table from them, Venti cheers. “I just met you, but I already like you way better than your cousin over there. I’ll order, then, just give me a moment.”

It doesn’t take long for the food to come, and as Diluc lowers his head to take a bite of the dessert, he feels Venti’s expectant gaze on him; lifting his head, he mumbles around half a mouthful of cake, “what?”

Venti shoots him a wide grin. “Is it good?”

The taste on his tongue is strong, but not overwhelmingly so. Appearance-wise, it lacks the perfectly-crafted, blog-post-worthy aesthetic of dessert shop cakes back in the city, but it makes up for it with its endearingly uneven corners and tellingly handcrafted taste. He thinks he prefers it over the ones in the city. “Yeah.”

Next to him, Kaeya huffs as he pokes his spoon into his ice cream. Venti flashes him a victory sign. “Told ya. This restaurant has pretty good meals outside of desserts, too. We can come here for dinner sometime. And what’s even better is that barely anyone from school knows this place except for us.”

Venti says it like it’s an achievement he’s proud of, but that’s not the only thing that Diluc is focused on. “... You go to the same school as us?” His eyes trail to Venti’s outfit—a jacket thrown haphazardly over his shoulders, a simple dark green tee under the outer layer.

“Yup. I’m seventeen, so I graduate end of next year.” Venti pops a spoonful of lime ice cream in his mouth. “I skipped today, though.”

He says that like it’s something to be proud of, too. “Why?”

Venti laughs. “I felt like it.”

“Oh.” Some part of him is concerned that Venti will be a bad influence on Kaeya, but considering their years of history and the fact that Kaeya is still dutifully attending class, he dismisses that particular strand of thought for the time being. “Where do you plan on going after school? To the city, too?”

He doesn’t know what possessed him to ask the question, but he thought it might be fitting, anyway, considering most of the students he’s come across seem to have that aspiration, dreams half-crafted of ambition and polished fully with the gleam of financial success. Strike it rich, they’d sworn, but he can’t blame them. He’s no stranger to the comforts that money can offer. 

To his surprise, Venti’s laughter only gets louder. “The city? Me? No way.” He licks the ice cream off his spoon, the remnant green on the metal matching the dark emerald of his eyes. Diluc thinks it might be artificial food colouring, but it’s pretty nevertheless. “I’m just going to settle here in this small town. I used to have a summer job at this music school, so I’m thinking of going back there. Or I could work as a freelancer, you know, going around places like this one to play music. Maybe my first stage will be right here in this restaurant.”

His words are laid-back, but there’s the faintest hint of decisiveness within, like Venti’s already made his mind up a long time ago. A part of Diluc envies him for that—they’re only one year apart, but he seems to know where he’s going with his life, a startlingly large contrast to Diluc. “Make sure to call us when that happens, then. I’ll come and watch.”

Venti’s beam widens. “Will do!”

From there, things change again, bit by bit. Kaeya still doesn’t hang around him at lunchtime, because it’s embarrassing to spend all your time around your older relative and vice versa, but Venti manages to find him from time to time—how he does it Diluc doesn’t know, but he won’t ask, and most days still comprise of him going right home after school, but every now and then he heads over to the restaurant with Kaeya and Venti, the park later in the evening if they’re free and the weather’s good.

(And morning bus rides still sometimes consist of choking down burnt toast and struggling to keep themselves from falling on days they miss out on the seats, but Diluc thinks he’s starting to learn to keep his balance, bit by bit.)

Autumn passes like that, and then the beginnings of winter. By the time their school break comes round, Diluc is more used to the noise-induced headache that is Venti and Kaeya combined than the silence of being alone, and at some point he’s even grown accustomed to the rowdiness of his classroom, too.

There are quieter moments too, though, moments which he finds himself relishing for how rare they are. Rare but precious. It’s in the middle of winter when he next experiences a moment like that, following Venti to the park by the restaurant in the afternoon. There’s no one else there, because it’s negative degrees and no one else would be insane enough to spend their time outdoors, but Venti had insisted there’s no time like the dead of winter to sit out in the park and eat popsicles.

“Cold?” Venti asks as he unwraps the plastic around his popsicle. Diluc shoots him a withering glance, deciding not to bother answering the question as he takes a seat on the bench. It’s covered with snow, but thankfully his coat is thick enough for him to remain unaffected by it for the most part.

“You couldn’t have picked a better time?” Not having his popsicle melt all over his hands is a plus point, but not enough to necessitate having to come here in temperatures colder than his refrigerator. 

Venti grins. “It’s pretty.” He says it like it explains everything, which it doesn’t, but Diluc lets it slide because he’s right. It is pretty. There’s something about the way the snow clings to the thin of the trees and lies in sheets of white across what had previously been yellow-green that’s different from what he’s used to. Different in a good way. It never snowed like this in the city. “Where’s Kaeya, by the way?”

“Stuck at home because he broke curfew a few days back and his parents are mad.” Diluc relishes the flavour on his lips. Lime, Venti’s recommendation. “Miss him?”

That elicits a giggle from the older of the two. “Me, miss him? No way, I see him enough.” A smile curls at the corners of Diluc’s lips—Kaeya’s a bit of a handful, but they’ve never taken any of the bickering to heart. “A curfew, though? That’s so lame.”

“He’s only fourteen, you know.” Diluc can barely remember himself at fourteen, even though it was only two and a bit years ago. Time passes by quick, and his memories quicker.

“Already?” Venti sighs, tilting his head to look up at the sky. The sun peeks out in watery rays behind the winter clouds, tracing faint gold lines across his face. “He was only so young when I first met him. Come to think of it, it was here too, in this park.”

Diluc lowers his popsicle. They’ve known each other for a few months now, but neither Kaeya nor Venti had ever brought up how they had met. “Kaeya said you’ve known each other since he came.”

“Yeah.” Venti finishes off the rest of his popsicle and covers the stick with the plastic wrapper. “His parents brought him here while showing him around. I just so happened to be skipping school that day, and I played tag with him for a bit. He sucked at it, by the way, but don’t tell him I said that.”

Diluc stifles a laugh. The image of a young Kaeya and Venti chasing each other around the park is amusing, to say the least, but in all honesty, he thinks he could imagine them doing it even now. 

“And then we just kind of got closer from there, I guess,” Venti continues. “His parents thought it’d be nice for him to have a friend, since he didn’t know anyone else, and they didn’t mind the age gap between us, so I ended up hanging out with him every now and then.”

He’s not normally one to tease others, but he thinks his days of hanging out with the two of them must be rubbing off on him. “You don’t have any other friends?”

Venti shoots him a mock-offended look, a huff rising to his throat. “I have many friends, I’ll let you know! Who else is going to keep me company when Kaeya graduates and leaves me behind?”

Diluc blinks. “What?”

“He… didn’t tell you?” The smile slips a little from Venti’s face. “He wants to work in the city when he grows up.”

For some reason, it’s not something that Diluc had ever considered, and now that he’s being forced to consider it, he doesn’t know what to feel. “Oh,” he says, because he doesn’t know what else to say.

“Yeah,” Venti replies, and they lapse into silence from thereon, Diluc finishing off the rest of his popsicle, too. But it’s not an uncomfortable silence, and watching the sun melt across the clouds and the snow on the ground, Diluc burns the image of the pre-evening park into his mind, classified as one of those rare but precious moments.

The rest of the day passes uneventfully, with Diluc coming to learn that Venti can be quiet and almost introspective when he chooses to be, and this time he manages to convince Venti to let him split the bill for dinner before they split ways to head home. He catches all the right buses without having to look the public transportation systems up online, and it’s a small achievement, but an achievement nonetheless.

He’s getting used to this place.

He comes home to the sound of his aunt scolding him for staying late when it’s so cold out, but he doesn’t mind. Some things are give and take, and he’ll gladly lend his ears to a series of scoldings if he gets to take these little moments with him as he goes along. 

“Had fun without me?” Kaeya asks from his spot sprawled across Diluc’s bed—Diluc is starting to think he’s made it into a bad habit—once Diluc steps into his room, hair still wet from his shower. “You stayed out late.”

He’s heard it enough from his aunt, so he ignores what Kaeya has to say on it. If anything, the younger is just bitter that he doesn’t have a curfew to adhere to. “Venti says you plan on going to the city after you graduate.”

There’s the sound of the bedframe creaking. Kaeya straightens, sitting cross-legged as he meets Diluc’s gaze through the mirror. Diluc shrugs as he picks up the hairdryer, waiting for Kaeya to speak.

“He… told you.”

It’s a statement, not a question, but Diluc answers anyway. “Yeah.”

“I don’t know much outside of this small town, but I know that there’s a lot more out there than just this,” Kaeya says, and Diluc supposes he’s right. Whether or not the things out there are good or bad are a subjective matter, though. “My parents call me too adventurous for my own good, but I want to see with my own two eyes what the world out there is like, and the city’s a good place to start as any.”

Diluc can see it in him. While young, Kaeya already possesses the confidence and, on occasion, hardheadedness probably needed to thrive in the competitive world out there; if he worked just a little harder and reigned in his playful temperament just a little more he’d probably do well. Whether or not that’s supposed to be a comforting fact goes missed by Diluc—mentions of the city only reminds him of the life he’d left behind.

“Well,” he finds himself replying, “it might not be all as grand as you’re expecting it to be.”

Kaeya stands, ruffling a hand through his hair and breaking his eye contact with Diluc against the glass. “Yeah, whatever,” he says with a hint of that trademark Kaeya stubbornness, lying below a light-hearted tone, “I’ll find that out for myself.”

He walks out the door, leaving only the sound of the hairdryer to fill the room, drowning out the silence and the cacophony of Diluc’s thoughts.

After that day, they don’t make any mention of the city to each other.

It’s part and parcel of navigating relationships, though, learning what words to watch and which topics are a little too sensitive to be probed. Through discovering Venti’s love for citrus and Kaeya’s penchant for hanging out with friends past curfew they figure out how to focus on the present, not the future, and for Diluc’s sake they don’t bring up his father. Kaeya doesn’t like it when they talk about his birth parents, so they skirt around that topic too, and Venti doesn’t want to make mention of old friendships and burnt bridges, so they don’t, because some things are better off unsaid and learning to respect that is just a part of growing up.

Things take time, Diluc knows, and it takes more than a few months to build a home, but he thinks he’s getting used to it.

But there’s always a limit to the amount of silence the air between three can hold, and Kaeya decides to be the one to break it, when winter’s beginning to spill into spring and the start of the school term acts as a sharp reminder for the relentless turning of time’s wheels.

“What’s the city like?” he asks, sitting on the floor of Diluc’s room like it’s his own. Diluc sits up from where he’s been leaning against the headboard of his bed, kicking the blankets off his feet as he peers down at Kaeya.

“I thought we weren’t bringing that up.” His tone is neutral enough to avoid betraying any of the things he’s feeling, and he’s grateful for that.

Kaeya shrugs, flipping a page of the book he’d taken off the shelf. It’s one of Diluc’s physics textbooks from school. Kaeya doesn’t even take physics. “We never actually agreed on it.”

Diluc swings his legs over the edge of the bed, his gaze falling on the contents of the page that Kaeya’s currently at. Newton’s first law states that if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed unless it is acted upon by a force. “There’s nothing special about the city.”

“To you, maybe,” Kaeya answers. “It’s the same as how I feel about this place. It’s nice, but it’s just the same old. I want to go out there, you know? Maybe I’m meant to be more than just… this.”

He flips the page again. Newton’s third law is important in analysing problems of static equilibrium. “It’s not the same,” Diluc denies, reaching down to grab hold of the book. Kaeya refuses to let go, and Diluc gives in for a moment. “I never felt that the city was nice. It’s just—”

Fake? Filled with bad memories and capitalistic smiles and the life he’s been running from all this while? Nothing more than a haunting reminder of his father and the masquerade of success he’d chased in a bid to save face until the mask he wore became his own face? 

“It’s a bad place,” Diluc says eventually. “Don’t go there. I’m not going back there.” 

“I’m not asking about you,” Kaeya shoots back. They’re not related by blood, but at times it feels as though they’d inherited each other’s stubbornness, somehow. “That’s for me to find out and decide, anyway.”

Diluc can’t tell what he hates more—the fact that Kaeya is set on going to the city he’d run from, or the fact that Kaeya, at fourteen (fifteen in the fall), knows more than he does about where he’ll be going after graduation. It makes him feel like he’s losing, somehow, in this invisible race of living life.

There’s no formula to success, he knows, and there isn’t a fixed plan when it comes to living, either, but he’s lived most of his life up to now constrained by a narrow definition of merit and he supposes old habits die hard.

“Whatever.” It’s getting late and he wants to finish up with his revision before the new school term rolls around, so he drops a hint for Kaeya to leave. The younger of the two doesn’t take it. Or, Diluc assumes, he gives it a cursory glance before ignoring it on purpose. 

“Besides,” Kaeya says casually, like he’s bringing up a conversation about the weather, flipping to another page titled Equilibrium, “I don’t understand your obsession with hating the city, anyway. I get that a lot of bad things happened there, but with your grades, you could go anywhere. Make it big. The opportunities are right there. Why not take it?”

Diluc can feel the corners of his lips forcing their way downwards. “You wouldn’t get it.” His voice, while curt, maintains its final remnants of impassiveness (he tries his best, at least). “Go to bed, Kaeya.”

“You’re just rebelling.” Kaeya’s voice takes on an accusatory tone, and Diluc stiffens, his jaw hardening. “You just want to go against whatever your parents told you to become. But if you don’t allow yourself to think about what you want for yourself just because you’re so blinded by what they told you, aren’t you still allowing them to rule over your life?”

Diluc hates that Kaeya is here lecturing him in his own room, and he hates it more that he makes sense. Somewhat. He’s young, and he tends to run his mouth without thinking it through, but this time his words come out sounding purposeful, and Diluc doesn’t think he can sit through any more of this.

“Go to sleep, Kaeya.” This time, his tone brooks no argument as he reaches out, ripping the physics book from Kaeya’s hands. Kaeya’s hold around it tightens, and Diluc frowns.

“Careful,” he warns, finally tugging the book free, “it’s from a few years back, so the pages are loose.” One tears free from its already-precarious position within the book and flutters to the ground. Frictional force is the opposing force that is created between two surfaces that try to move in the same direction or that try to move in opposite directions. Both of them stare at the loose page before Kaeya speaks.

“I know.”

Diluc slams the book shut, watching as Kaeya gets to his feet. “Then why did you do it?”

The only answer he receives is the sound of the door closing as Kaeya exits the room.

He doesn’t speak to Kaeya anymore after that. In a way, he’s glad for the resumption of the school semester, because it means he can excuse his less-than-talkative behaviour for being tired, and he can use study sessions as a way to stay back in school for longer than necessary.

“What’s going on between the two of you?” Venti asks him one day, tossing him a can of his favourite drink midway along a garden path. He catches it before it can fall onto and crush the plants by his feet, lest he earn the ire of the gardener. 

“Nothing,” he lies, taking a long sip. Venti raises an eyebrow.

“You haven’t been coming to the restaurant for a week, and he’s been in a bad mood for a week.”

Diluc shrugs, kicking at a stray pebble on the ground. It rolls away and lodges itself in the soil, stained a messy shade of brown. “I’ve been busy.”

“I’m in my final year, and even I’m not that busy,” Venti comments. Diluc ignores him. “But seriously, did the two of you fight or something?”

He doesn’t think it can be considered a fight. There hadn’t been much conflict, just a lot of unresolved tension and a general unwillingness to speak to each other hanging between them over the past seven days. “We’ll figure it out by ourselves.”

“Whatever,” Venti sighs, taking a sip of his own drink, “you’re both too stubborn for your own good. But come and grab a meal with me at the restaurant sometime, yeah? It’s been long enough.”

“It’s just been a week. You’ve lived for long enough without me in your life.” 

Venti shoots him a dirty look. “You’ve already walked into my life. You can’t just walk out now.”

Diluc doesn’t speak until he’s done with his drink, walking towards the end of the garden path that leads back to the corridor by the classroom block. Venti follows.

And then, tiredly, just before he turns the corner to head back towards his class, “yeah, whatever. I’ll think about it.”

He does decide to pay the restaurant a visit eventually. It’s not Venti’s fault that he and Kaeya are currently on a cold shoulder agreement, and it would be unfair to involve him in this mess. He goes late enough to avoid seeing Kaeya (he’s been getting an earlier curfew nowadays as punishment for breaking his, again, if the scoldings he’s heard through the walls have been any indication) but Venti isn’t at the restaurant by the time he gets there.

He doesn’t have to look far, though; there’s a tap on his shoulder two steps into the park, and he turns, seeing Venti holding out an ice cream. He takes it. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

Venti shrugs, plopping himself down on the nearby bench. Diluc follows suit. “I didn’t, but you can have it. I ate too much for dinner and I don’t feel like eating anymore.”

He takes a bite of the ice cream. “We didn’t fight,” he says. Venti didn’t ask, but they’ve known each other for long enough now for him to hear all the questions anyway. “He brought up the city, and we… had a disagreement.”

“About what?”

It’s a good question. One he doesn’t know the answer to.

“I don’t know,” he replies honestly, taking another bite. The citrus flavour spreads over his tongue, sharp and rousing enough for him to continue talking. “I just didn’t feel like talking about it, I guess. He knew that, but he continued talking about it anyway.”

Kaeya’s young, but he’s not a kid—he’s old enough to differentiate between which conversations should be kept going and which should be dropped, and he’s old enough to call his own shots as to which decision to make, too. Diluc thinks he made the wrong one.

“Why not?” Venti’s squinting up at the starless sky like there are answers to be had there (there aren’t). “Because of your father?”

“Yeah,” he says. They haven’t brought up his past much, but Venti knows enough about him to know he’s moved over from the city, that he has a mother in the stars and a father in the metaphorical grave. He’s usually one to skirt around the topic, but sitting here alone with Venti, he figures there’s no time like the present to start with some honesty. If he’s going to be staying in this little town, Venti will know his story someday, anyway, so he might as well start with today.

“My parents didn’t really spend much time with me growing up,” he begins, the citrus tang on his tongue growing bitter at the thought. “They pushed me a lot, though. To get good grades, to get into a good school, and all that. I don’t blame them, because that’s just the way the city works.”

Venti turns to him. There’s a faint sense of wonder and horror both in his eyes, like he’s hearing about a world he’s never seen before. “That’s the only way it works?”

Diluc shrugs. “Not the only way. But the easiest way. All the big firms care about is your degree and how you did in your studies, anyway, and the city’s too expensive to chase your dreams over money.” 

“Oh,” Venti says with a faint hum. Diluc wonders if he’s wondering how his life would be in the city. He doesn’t think Venti would suit the skyscrapers and stuffy businessmen in too-proper suits.

“My father left when I was eight. It didn’t hurt, though.” A part of him thinks he was just too young to know any better, but a bigger part of him reasons that that’s just an excuse to cover up the reality he already knows. “He’d been so occupied with his work he was barely at home. It felt like saying goodbye to a stranger.”

Venti hums again. It’s nice to have someone listening, Diluc realises. It’s not something he’s used to, although in retrospect, he’s not used to telling anyone anything about how he’s feeling, either.

“I ended up hating him, though,” he confesses, “especially when I saw the rest of my friends in school with their dads. It felt like he abandoned me, in a way. Left me behind. For a long time I thought I wasn’t good enough, or something.”

“Don’t say that,” Venti interjects, and Diluc laughs. He knows better than to let someone else determine his worth by now, but old habits die hard, still. 

“I ended up studying hard because of that. Topped the cohort in everything, went to top schools and all.” A wry smile plays on his lips. In retrospect, he doesn’t entirely regret it, because getting good grades was never a bad thing, but he does wonder how differently he would have turned out if he’d abandoned studying for arcade games and if he’d spent his childhood chasing dreams instead of validation. “And then I came to hate it as I grew up. You know? It felt like everything I was doing was ruled by him. The city just became this jail where I couldn’t—I had no freedom.”

Venti sits up a little straighter. Diluc remembers one of the days they’d spoken until the sun set over the restaurant seats, with Venti talking about this small town with a light in his eyes Diluc never had in the city and smiling over the future lying in wait for him. Freedom. He’d said that word, then. The thing he’d never give up, not for the money and not for the prestige of making it big in the city skyscrapers.

“Coming to this place felt like a weight off my chest, or so I thought,” Diluc continues, squinting up at the sky. There are no stars to be found, still. “He wanted me to work in the city, and coming here felt like rebelling, somehow.”

Venti’s gaze traces his features. From the corner of his eye, he sees the older’s lips twitch downwards and then straighten again, fighting to maintain an expression of neutrality. “But?”

“... That’s what I’m trying to figure out.” It doesn’t feel right, he wants to say, but he can’t. A part of him thinks he doesn’t want to admit it, not even to himself.

“Do you want to go back? To the city.” Venti pulls his knees to his chest, the bottom of his shoes resting lightly against the park bench. Diluc thinks back to the city, to the cold windows and the colder stares, and then to this town, streets bustling with chatter and the quiet of no rush hour. Neither feel like home. 

No, he wants to insist, but he finds that the words don’t come out as they should. 

“This isn’t the place for you,” Venti says softly, “is it?”

He’s never told the people in his class that he’s a city boy, but he thinks they know. And he’s never told the cafe staff that he’s not from around here, but they still give him recommendations like it’s his first time in this town. He’s not in a place where he belongs, and he doesn’t know if he ever will.

Skyscrapers, office buildings, the city that feels as familiar as it is jarring. He’d dreamt of working there once, of living in an apartment right in central, of making a name for himself in the same place he’d ended up losing himself, and then somewhere along the way his dream had aligned with his parents’ expectations of him and crumbled to dust.

He wonders if he still has that dream, somewhere in the corner of his heart where it’s been folded away for safekeeping. He wonders if he’s brave enough to find out.

Venti takes his lack of an answer as one. “You’re here because you hated the idea of growing up to be the kind of person he wanted you to become,” he murmurs. “But you can be the person you want to be without doing it for him. It’s not letting him be involved in your life if you’re the one to call the shots.”

Diluc presses his lips together, and Venti continues talking. “Besides, if you stay here just for the sake of staying because you’re too stubborn to go back, aren’t you technically letting him take control of your life even more? Being unable to do what you want because of how his actions have influenced you.”

It’s not like Venti to be this direct, but in hindsight, he is grateful for it. “You know,” he chuckles, although there’s no mirth to it, “I’m starting to see why you and Kaeya get on so well.”

Venti smiles. “You’ll figure it out. It’s a hard mountain to climb, but we can’t stay frozen in the past forever. And things aren’t static; your future’s yours to decide, nevermind what others say.”

Diluc nods, and Venti stands, wiping leaves from his clothes. The park bench creaks and Diluc tilts his head to the side, inquisitive gaze falling against Venti’s. “I should get going,” Venti says by way of explanation, casting a quick glance up at the sky. It’s dark out, barely illuminated by the soft orange of after-dark streetlamps. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He says it like a promise, and Diluc doesn’t bother telling him where he plans on going during break, or what time his class is dismissed. Venti always manages to find him, anyway, somehow. 

“Diluc.” He jerks his head up, eyes flickering from Venti’s to the ground and then back up to Venti. “... Your ice cream’s melting.”

It’s cold as it runs down the side of his palm, smelling of citrus and liquid-wet like the first touch of tears.

That night, he’s so lost in thought he stumbles on the bus twice and nearly misses his stop on the way home.

Things tip out of balance again a little more later, when he steps into the restaurant a week later to see not one but two silhouettes. Venti sees him before Kaeya does, raising his hand in greeting above a half-finished bowl of spaghetti. 

“You’re here,” Kaeya says loud enough for him to hear, looking up briefly before dropping his gaze back to his plate of food. It’s too late for Diluc to turn and leave and pretend he’d never come in the first place, so he clears his throat and sidles in next to Venti.

“Won’t you get scolded?” he asks. Venti offers him the fork, but he waves it away. From what he’s heard, Kaeya isn’t allowed to eat dinner out with his friends yet, especially not now that it’s approaching exam season. Not when the dinner in question is at nine in the evening, at least—Diluc had come today specifically because he thought Kaeya wouldn’t show up. They’ve been keeping their three-week streak going strong with Kaeya’s curfew (which he followed, albeit very unwillingly) and Diluc’s sudden tendency to return home late at night (which his relatives questioned, but never probed too far about).

Kaeya shrugs. “How else am I supposed to talk to you? You go straight to your room and lock the door when you’re home, and it’s not like I want to confront you in front of our parents either.”

He’s right, Diluc knows. He hadn’t left room for Kaeya to speak to him on purpose, and he knows Kaeya well enough to know that he wouldn’t want to make mention of their conflict in front of his parents.

“Well,” he says, leaning back against the chair, “you’re here now.”

Neither of them apologise, but there’s no need to. Diluc orders a drink, and Kaeya finishes the rest of his meal. Venti finally convinces Diluc to take a bite of his spaghetti, and they stay like that until the constant lighting up of Kaeya’s phone screen from his parents calling gets annoying enough for him to finally pick up.

This time, though, they go home together, sitting one seat apart—but close enough to speak over the screech of the bus wheels on asphalt—and the night in spring is cool, but not enough for Diluc to miss the warmth.

“You were out late,” Kaeya’s mother says when they get home, her tone unreadable, but she doesn’t scold Kaeya like he expected her to.

“Sorry,” he replies in place of Kaeya, ignoring the surprised look the younger shoots him, “I ate dinner with him and we lost track of the time.”

She reaches over, wiping the faint condensation off the window panes with a cloth. “I’m glad the two of you are home safe.”

Kaeya and Diluc exchange a long look, and Diluc offers a half-smile as he runs a hand through his hair.

“Yeah.” Diluc heads towards the stairs. His bag doesn’t feel quite so heavy on his shoulders today. “I’m glad, too.”

Today, he doesn’t lock the bedroom door shut. Kaeya doesn’t come in and make himself comfortable on his bed, but across the walls, he hears soft music filtering through, the lullaby light and lilting.

From there on they regain the balance they’d lost, bit by bit, through breaking curfews and after-dark park strolls through the spring and bus rides across the summer. By the time semester break rolls around, they’re back to how they were before, if not closer. 

“You know,” Venti comments out of the blue one day, on a holiday weekday where they’ve all gathered at the restaurant after finally breaking free of the shackles of long-overdue assignments, “I’m going to miss you after I graduate.”

Kaeya shoves a scoop of vanilla ice cream into his mouth. “We’re not going anywhere, and neither are you.”

“That’s true,” Venti concedes, eyeing Diluc’s snack of choice (he decided to go for strawberry this time, after finally caving to Kaeya’s continuous insistence for him to try something sweet for once) as if it were a can of worms instead of a frozen dessert. “But it’ll still be different.”

Somewhere along the way, Diluc thinks he’d ended up getting used to Venti’s presence during break times. How their timetables constantly aligned and how the oldest of the three managed to find him no matter which corner of the school he retreated to would always remain a mystery to Diluc, but nevertheless, it hadn’t been a bad thing. A little annoying at times, sure, but never enough for him to actually dislike it.

Venti’s looming graduation does make him feel uneasy, because not only is it going to cause an inevitable change in his life—he’s come to detest things happening out of his control—but it also reminds him of the inexorability of his own graduation in a little over a year’s time, encroaching and unavoidable, and with it the need to make his own decision for the future.

It’s a thought that makes the dessert sitting in his stomach turn into a weight of stones, and he’s half-tempted to leave the rest of the ice cream unfinished to the open air, but he ends up shoving the rest in his mouth, if not a little forcefully.

He’ll figure it out later, he decides, eyes flickering up to Venti’s. He’ll figure it out later.

(They all will.)

And he would’ve thought that Venti would start attending class more often now that his final exams are approaching, but if anything, Venti chooses to do the complete opposite. He can’t say he’s too surprised, though, and Kaeya takes it into stride like he’s been expecting it all along.

Through the remnants of their break they turn into the human embodiment of live while you’re young—he barely has time to finish his meal before Venti’s dragging him through the park and into the malls; nights of hearing soft music through the walls have been replaced by the mind-numbingly loud din of arcade games and running along the streets to catch the last bus home.

But, he thinks as the seasons shift across the sky and spills summer into autumn, marking a year since his arrival in this small town, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

They treasure the moments, even as they dwindle when they’re dragged by the figurative leash by forceful parents and even more forceful teachers to the kennel of their academics, and somewhere between the stubbornness that Diluc and Kaeya share and the odd, miraculous ability of Venti to make things work in his favour, they live life together—clumsily, a little chaotically, and contentedly—the way they want it, all the way up to the very end.

“You look different,” Kaeya laughs. They’re standing in the school hall against the backdrop of the stage lights, side-by-side as they watch Venti come down the stairs dressed in his graduation gown. 

He shoots them a grin. “Don’t worry. I’m the same old me underneath all of this.” 

And he does prove his point only moments later, taking both of them by the hand and dragging them over to the gardens, not caring when the plants, half-damp from the rain earlier in the morning, drag across his graduation gown and leave droplets in their wake.

“Don’t you have to take photos or something?” Kaeya asks, laughter in his tone. “Or celebrate? Or—something more grand than this.”

Venti shrugs, walking over to the vending machine located over at the corridor by the garden path. He buys Kaeya’s favourite drink first, Diluc’s next, tossing it in a clean arc through the air. Diluc catches it perfectly this time. “I like it this way, though,” he says, and there’s no refuting it. It is a very Venti thing to do, and Diluc takes a small but significant comfort in that fact.

Their celebration comes by way of them hopping onto the bus and heading over to the same old restaurant, with Venti swapping out his graduation gown for a hoodie and some sweatpants. It’s smack in the middle of the afternoon, an odd enough time for there to be no one else but them by the window seats, and Diluc takes comfort in that, too.

Things are changing, he knows, but like this it’s almost too easy to pretend nothing is.

“Cheers,” Venti shouts, raising his glass into the air. They’ve ordered the closest thing to alcohol—grape juice, which Diluc has found he actually enjoys to a decent extent, although Kaeya begs to differ—and it doesn’t make for the best celebration, not by a long shot, but it’s theirs and that’s what matters.

Diluc is proud to be part of Venti’s unique, if not rebellious, way of doing things until the very last moment. 

“I’m still going to be here in this town, even though I won’t be in school anymore.” The way Venti speaks sounds like a reminder, and it’s one Diluc is grateful for. Maybe his break times will get a lot lonelier now, and maybe he’ll have to get used to the lack of the senior with the braided hair popping up in every corner unannounced like unlearning a bad habit. But the restaurant’s still here, and the park with the popsicle stall nearby, and many more sunsets waiting to be watched together.

“Time flies, doesn’t it?” Kaeya’s sitting on the furthest edge of the park bench, nearest the horizon, and he stretches his hand out to the golden-fire shades of the sun like he’s trying to stop the sunset. “A part of me wants to break its wings if only I could.”

The smile on his face is light, but helpless, and Diluc can read him well enough to know it’s not just about Venti’s graduation. And goodbyes are inevitable, he understands that well enough by now, but it doesn’t get any easier just because you can see them coming.

There’s some things you just don’t get used to, he’s come to learn in his seventeen-or-so years of stumbling through the universe and all her challenges, and goodbyes are a mountain he’s climbed more than just a few times over, but experience doesn’t lower the peak any more than the promise of reunion would.

“You’re going to have to decide where you’re going after this,” Diluc’s uncle tells him one day at the end of the year. They’re sitting at the dining room table, eating Kaeya’s mother’s cooking, and while his uncle and him still aren’t entirely always on the same wavelength, they’ve figured out how to make things work. 

“I know,” he replies, looking down at the rice in his bowl. It’s the brand that they buy from the mart down the street, produced here in this small town—his aunt says the owner of the business is her classmate back from highschool, a lady of the same age who had been so excited at the newfound possibility of making it big within the constraints of their hometown. “I’m still figuring it out.”

He’s been thinking about it a lot, between study sessions and arcade games with Venti and bus rides with Kaeya. He’s been considering all the possibilities carefully, and he’s looked so long and hard into the future that he’s no longer sure if his lens is skewed by now, but he thinks he has a more concrete idea—somewhat—of where he’s going to go.

He just doesn’t know if he dares to let that idea manifest into anything more than an idea.

It’s a daunting thing to do, thinking of returning to a place you swore you’d run away from. Even now, the city he spent the majority of his life growing up in feels foreign and cold to the imagination, but there is something unmistakable about it that feels—not like home, but he doesn’t know what that feels like—right. There is something that tells him he should be there, not here, but he doesn’t know if he’s brave enough to chase the train of thought into the subway stations of the city and the skyscraper-ladders of the corporate world.

His teachers have told him the same thing. “You’re a smart boy, and well-spoken,” they’d appraised over career-counselling sessions, coupled with approving nods and that look they give favourite students with the highest chances of getting scholarships to universities in the city. “You should give it a shot. I’m sure you’d do well.”

A new vision has taken place, forming over the cracks of the one his parents had left behind, shaped more of ambition than expectations and stretching towards the sky. He knows there’s a lot more waiting for him out there, the world his father had wanted him to explore—but he won’t do it because his father asked him to, he won’t, he’ll do it for himself this time—and the world he’s started to wonder about.

He just doesn’t know if he’ll find the courage to do it in time.

It’s not a bad thing to stay here either, he reasons. Venti’s here, and Kaeya’s parents are, too. He’s gotten used to this small town, the bus routes memorised like the back of his hand, and the coffee shop workers treat him like a regular now. There are fragments of him in each possibility of the future, but he doesn’t know which one to grasp hold of.

It’s a task not short of being terrifying, after all, picking up the pieces he thought he’d left behind in a forgotten city and rebuilding himself anew. Anew, and alone, in the same place he’d lost his parents and then himself. He doesn’t know if he trusts himself enough to be able to find himself.

December melts away into snow on bared branches, the January sun spilling across the canvas of white in flecks of gold like sand in an hourglass. The seasons don’t change, and nothing changes, really, except for the year on the calendar and his classroom that’s one floor lower now that he’s got final year privileges, but the change is jarring enough still for him to finally start seeing the invisible countdown before him.

He thinks back to how Venti had handled his graduation. Calmly, with his trademark lack of care and unfazed behaviour, plunging headfirst into his post-graduation plans without much second thought. He hadn’t sorted out a plan prior to leaving the school, instead spending most of the later months of the year hopping from music school to cafe, seeking out places that would want him.

In a way, he envies Venti and the ease with which he’d tackled life, and a part of him wants to do the same—throw caution to the wind and leave it until later. But figuring out a job and figuring out which place in the country to live in are different matters entirely, and he knows the decision lies in his hands this time.

(Which is a shame, considering he’s only been using his legs to run from his past with his legs this entire while. He doesn’t quite know what to do this time round.)

“You’re still not sleeping?” Kaeya’s sitting up from where he’s been making himself at home on Diluc’s bed, tucking the physics books and half-written papers away from the edge of the bed before they can fall. “Thinking again?”

“Yeah,” Diluc responds. He doesn’t need to tell Kaeya what he’s thinking about for the him to know; he’s seen the younger of the two do a considerable amount of growing—both physically and mentally, but Diluc supposes he’ll accept the amount of space Kaeya now occupies on his bed if it’s in exchange for some more maturity of thought—over the past year and a bit, and at the back of his mind somewhere he wonders if it’s time for himself to do the growing now.

Kaeya hops off the bed, footsteps quiet against the floor. “I’ll leave you to it, then. Don’t stay up too late, Mom will get mad.”

Diluc offers him a half-hearted smile. He says it like it’s a bad thing, but it’s not the worst to have someone who cares about you, albeit at times not in a way they understand. “Goodnight, Kaeya.”

The corners of Kaeya’s eyes crinkle as he shuts the door behind him. “Goodnight, Diluc.”

They’ve gotten better at figuring each other out in the past year and a bit, so they skirt carefully around the topic of university like it’s a half-forbidden topic, because it’s easier to pretend nothing’s wrong than acknowledge that something is, and he’s never been one for last minute decisions, but there’s no time like the present to change as a person.

He likes it like this, Diluc decides, between sleepless nights thinking of the greyscale city and autumn-warm town, and of the far-stretching corporate ladders and the invisible ceiling above his head in this place. They still chase the bus down on bad mornings with burnt toast between their teeth and they still avoid each other during breaks like familiar strangers, and now that Venti’s got a job at the music school he used to teach at in the summer, they go there too. 

It’s enough to feel almost like home.

It’s not quite the same, he knows, but for now it’s enough.

The sand in the hourglass doesn’t stop flowing just because he turns his sight away from it, though, and the countdown he’s shoved to the back of his mind becomes increasingly hard to ignore with each passing term. By the time the second semester rolls around, it’s pressing enough that it’s impossible to ignore, from posters stuck up in hallways promoting university options and career counsellors approaching final year classes at seemingly every spare minute.

Venti’s been there once before, and he knows how it feels, and while Kaeya still has some time to spare before he’s the one swamped with the uncomfortably large weight of decision-making, he’s not blind to all the posters and the talks of graduation and the university plans being flung around all over school, either.

They’re by him through the frustrated mistake-reviewing of past tests and the caffeine highs of mid-afternoon in attempts to get through a block of revision material. Kaeya’s got his own exams to tackle, but he picks the floor of Diluc’s bedroom as his new study desk, and Venti’s whimsical nature translates to him showing up at the door of their house unannounced to crash their study sessions. For all his skipping school and apparent lack of studying, though, he’s surprisingly adept at helping Diluc work through certain subjects.

“You don’t have to stay, you know,” Diluc comments one night, long after the sun has sunken beyond the horizon. Kaeya’s stretched out on his bed, holding a book of his chemistry textbook above his head, but Diluc thinks he’s been reading the same page for the past twenty minutes. Venti is peering over his shoulder at the equations he’s writing, and he laughs after hearing what Diluc says.

“All I have is time right now.” He reaches out to tap his finger against a sum at the bottom corner of the page, and Diluc realises he’d gotten the formula wrong. No wonder he hadn’t been able to solve the question. “Besides, what better time to hang out than now?”

He phrases it innocently, but the euphemism is clear. Diluc crosses his working out with more force than necessary, leaving a dark blotch of ink against the paper as he rewrites the answer. 

“You’re right,” he replies, and he hates the way the words leave his tongue with such inevitability, like there’s no option other than goodbye. It was bound to happen someday, but now that he’s the one leaving, it feels odd. Something he’s never felt before.

His graduation rolls around when the weather’s cold, frost unthawed and the skies grey enough to match his sombre mood. All around him the air’s sparking with anticipation like they’re trying to melt the snow off the bare-boned trees, and the stage lights illuminating his gown shimmering gold and a little too bright. They remind him of the stars in this small town, skies cleared of pollution and the ever-hanging haze of city smoke.

He had gotten through finals smoothly enough, after countless nights of poring over assessment books and frustration barely-stemmed by Venti coaxing him out to the park or Kaeya chatting to him way past his bedtime. It’s only after the end of finals, though, that he realises the exams themselves hadn’t been what he had been afraid of at all.

“Smile,” Venti says, a little scoldingly, as he hugs the graduation certificate to his chest and comes down the stairs of the school hall. “You’re all grown up now, Diluc. Be proud of it.”

That’s the problem, Diluc thinks, although he doesn’t vocalise it. He doesn’t want to grow up, not just yet. Decision-making is a difficult thing, and he doesn’t know if he can live with himself if he’s the one to mess it up. Who’s he to blame if he ends up with regrets? There’s no one to make the decisions for him this time.

Kaeya squints at him, scrutinising his expression. “You’re thinking too hard again.”

“Shut up,” Diluc retorts, but he doesn’t mean it. “Wait here. I’ll be back.”

He does the usual—pictures with his classmates out of courtesy, going round the hall to thank the teachers for his two years here in school, navigating questions flung at him about his future prospects with as much grace as he can manage. He doesn’t take long, though, because the two of them are waiting for him, and that’s where he wants to be.

“So,” Venti brings up conversationally, like he’s talking about the weather, “have you decided on where you’re going?”

“Yeah,” Diluc replies. They’re on their way to the restaurant now, with his graduation gown replaced by more comfortable clothes. Venti asks him the exact same question as half of his teachers did, but it feels different, somehow, and the answer on his tongue gets tangled and then dies in a way it hadn’t prior. “... I’ll tell you later.”

The corners of Venti’s eyes crinkle like he already knows the answer. Diluc has a feeling he does. “Alright.”

Venti slips into the seat by the window, Kaeya in his usual spot. Diluc takes a seat next to Kaeya, opposite from Venti. The winter sun overhead is dimmed away by the blinds of the restaurants, peeking through in faint wisps of gold. It reminds him a little of the city’s stars.

“We’ll go to the park after this,” Kaeya blurts around a mouthful of vanilla ice cream. Diluc nods, the citrus against his tongue bittersweet. Kaeya doesn’t have to say it aloud for him to know why. 

Everything had started here, in this restaurant tucked away from the rest of the town. He wouldn’t want it to be the place he said his goodbyes in, either.

“You’re planning on leaving, aren’t you?” Venti brings up an hour and a half later, when they’re seated along the park bench, Diluc sandwiched between the two. He says it like it’s a fact, not a question, and Diluc swallows, the taste of citrus in his mouth fading to dry. 

“Yes,” he says.

And now that he’s said it aloud, there’s no taking it back.

It’s a decision he’s been ruminating over for as long as he can remember, and he can’t pinpoint the exact moment he had finally come to his conclusion, but earlier in the day his answer had felt so natural coming out of his mouth to his teachers’ questions.

Yes, I’m moving back to the city.

The same place he’d left behind two years back, dreams unrealised and scars festering in the spaces he never dared to revisit. But two years on, and he’s got new ambitions and expectations (his own this time), and maybe this time when he returns to the city it won’t be coming home, but building a new one.

Briefly, he considers what it would be like if he ran into his father again. Heaven likes playing a cruel joke sometimes, he thinks, and if he climbs too far up the ladder he might find himself face-to-face with the demons of his past. But that’s okay, he thinks. In the two years of them and the past two tragedies of his life, he’s come to learn that sometimes people just grow up and grow apart, and he can’t blame anyone for the scars left behind by the inevitability of goodbye. 

He’s made peace with the past now, and there’s no running to be had anymore.

“You’re going to do well there,” Venti responds, and then, like he’s reading Diluc’s mind, he adds, “and don’t worry. There’s a difference between leaving and leaving behind. No matter where you go from here, you won’t be leaving us behind.”

Something soft and warm blossoms inside of Diluc’s heart, like flowers in the spring. “Yeah,” he agrees quietly, and there’s a smile on his face, tugging the corners of his lips up, “I won’t be leaving you behind.”

Leaving things behind is what he’d done to his past, after all, for a new beginning crafted by his own script and polished with his own two hands. But there are no more new beginnings to be had, not in this small town, no more stories to be rewritten.

This one is good enough, he thinks, more than good enough.

“Promise you’ll come back to visit?” Kaeya asks, nudging him with an elbow. There’s a vulnerable, almost sulky undertone to the younger’s voice amidst the wide grin on his face, and Diluc’s expression softens. He never thought he’d think like this, but maybe—just maybe—he’ll miss having someone barge into his room every other night to take up the entirety of his bed. “I won’t change a thing in your room. It’s yours every time you come back.”

This time, there’s no hesitation to be had. “Of course,” he promises, the glow of the afternoon sun dappling gold like a million shining stars across the snow-flecked ground. “I’ll come back whenever I can.”

Burnt toast, steamed fish, lemon ice cream. They’re all easy to digest now, and he doesn’t have to hold onto the handrails to keep his balance on the morning bus anymore. 

He thinks he’ll miss this place.

“Soon,” Venti declares, raising his chin to look at the sun, his emerald eyes bright and defiant like he’ll touch the world even if it burns, “we’ll become the people we were dreaming of.”

By his rules this time, Diluc thinks, gazing up at the sky and the stars hidden behind the layer of daylight. 

He’s his own person now.

“You’re not afraid anymore?” Kaeya asks, and Diluc shrugs.

“I am.” His newfound ability to speak whatever’s on his mind is refreshing, and he takes comfort in that fact as he draws his gaze down from the sky to the two of them flanking him, a twin warmth by his side. “I’m still afraid of what waits for me out there, but I guess sometimes you need to take the leap to be able to fly.”

Venti beams at him. “You’re going to do just fine,” he reassures, and Diluc knows he can’t control the future, but for all of Venti’s playfulness and tendency to crack jokes, he’ll believe him this time round. “Sometimes, you have to take off the training wheels to realise you know how to pedal.”

It reminds him of the time he’d crashed his bicycle, all the way back then. He used to be afraid of the failure, of the potential crash and burn, of the scars it’d leave behind.

But this time, he thinks, maybe this time he’ll finally be able to cycle on his own.

“Just wait,” he responds with an uncharacteristic confidence, and the light-heartedness in his own tone surprises even himself. Maybe Kaeya’s really starting to rub off on him, after all. “I’m going to be more than fine.”

It’s not about the money, or the prestige, or the weight of his parents’ expectations on him, or anything that the city once reminded him of. This time, it’s about the person he wants to become, and the ambition burning in his own soul, and the city that’s calling to him, rich with promises of a life yet lived and a sky beyond the ceilings of a small town waiting to be explored.

Maybe the city is where he’s meant to be, and maybe that’s alright.

“I’m going to move back in a month’s time,” he says. He could leave earlier if he wanted to prevent the rush of having to sort out his residence and university and everything in between, but he wants to stay here just a little longer. And then he asks, although he already knows the answer, “will you be there to see me off?”

Venti reaches over to ruffle his hair, and normally he would’ve shoved the older away, but this time he settles with a huff and a shake of his head.

“Of course,” Kaeya replies, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

And they do. They’re there for every moment until the very end, just like before, only that this time he’s the one saying goodbye. His sneakers scrape the gravel on the ground and it’s an odd feeling standing across from them, one hand raised in a wave and the other on the handle of his suitcase. It’s fuller now, with arcade plushies and expired restaurant coupons for memory’s sake and far more polaroids than before.

Venti’s grinning at him like a proud dad, and the ebbing of the coldest part of winter makes the warmth that spreads in Diluc’s chest all the easier to notice. “You’ve grown so much,” he says, a little theatrically, hushing Kaeya when the younger reminds him that they’re only a year apart. “You’re not going to forget us?”

Diluc fights the urge to roll his eyes, but his lips twitch upwards against his will and develop into a laugh. “I won’t, I promise.”

The driver gets out of the car and offers to take Diluc’s suitcase. He lets go, hand grasping at empty air, and the driver steps away only to be replaced by Venti, centimetres away from Diluc with bright green melting into burning crimson. “I’m going to miss you,” he tells Diluc, a rare layer of sincerity laced in every word, but he refuses to let go of the smile on his face. Diluc fights to keep the one on his, too. 

“I’m going to miss you, too,” Diluc admits, and then Venti’s hugging him, smelling faintly of dandelions and citrus. He feels a weight lifting off his shoulders in the leaning of Venti’s head against his, and the smile on his face softens and then settles, brimming in the corners with promises he swears he’ll fulfil and words he’ll say to them the next time around.

Venti steps back after what feels like a short-lived eternity, and Kaeya sidles up to the two of them. He’s nearly at Diluc’s eye level now, and Diluc comes to a belated realisation that he’d grown a lot over the past two years. There’s a maturity to him that hadn’t been there before, amidst the joking laughter and the heart hiding the ghosts of the past. 

“I know it’s cheesy,” he starts, his gaze flickering to at least five different places before finally landing on Diluc, “but I’m glad to have met you. You know? You’re… just like a brother. I think.”

A brother. Diluc laughs a little. Having one isn’t as bad as he first imagined, after all.

“You’re gonna do well, okay?” Kaeya insists with so much certainty it almost feels as though Diluc has no choice but to agree. “You’re going to go out there, to where everything’s waiting for you, and you’re going to make yourself proud.”

“Us too,” Venti chips in, “you’re going to make us proud, too, wherever you go from here. But as your own person.”

As my own person. There’s something about the love peeking through the corners of Kaeya’s grin and Venti’s words that feels unconditional, and Diluc feels what can only be described as his heart swelling in his chest as he nods his head.

Old habits die hard, but this time, he’ll gladly lower the casket.

“Hey, Diluc,” Kaeya says as the driver opens the passenger door, where the car waits against the gravel to take him away. Two years later, and he’ll be the one standing in this spot, bidding farewell to the town he’d grown up in. “Wait for me there, in the city.”

Diluc smiles. “I will.”

They say their goodbyes, and then he steps into the car, sinking against the soft of the seat and staring out the window until the waving figures of Venti, Kaeya and his parents fade into blurs, and then disappear. Kaeya and Venti text him throughout the journey from start to finish.

The city looks just like he’d left behind, monochromatic skyscrapers towering overhead and passerbys too busy to spare glances as they walk past him on the crowded streets. But this time, he sees the splashes of colour between the grey—the billboards, the coffee shop advertisements, the posters advertising the hottest boy bands in the country—and this time he knows there’ll be familiar faces to be had and to be waited for, two years from now, in this place that he’ll learn to call home.

There is no more running to be had, he decides, keying in the passcode to his new apartment and wheeling his suitcase to his bedroom. He strings the polaroids up above his bed—the smiling faces of three—and arranges the books neatly on his shelf. He’s kept the physics textbook just for the sake of it, with the page that had come loose taped back safely within. 

It’s a new start for him, here in this city, but not the start of a new tragedy. He’ll face this place with his head held high, dreams half-crafted of desire and polished fully with ambition.

(As his own person, now.)

And this time, for the first time, it feels right.