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There’s blood in the water. A man in the bush, twitching remains of a treasure hunter’s hideout, a shattered goblet on the floor. Iron, from the spilt open stomachs, from the twisted handle of what was once a sword. Overhead, the wind blows.
“Crows. Always so menacing.”
Mondstadt never sees a moment of peace from the cawing of birds soaring across the skies and leaving patches of blue in their wake. Such lovely songs and poems written about them, lovers meeting above the clouds, the winds echoing their shrieks.
It’s less romantic when they spend their evening circling overhead, predators preparing to sink their claws into their prey.
Kaeya sighs, washing the last remnants of the bloody gash along his left calf. He’d known something was off about this particular tip-off when they’d given him coordinates and nothing else, not even a code word; still, he hadn’t expected to be ambushed by treasure hoarders of all people. They shouldn’t have gotten this far into the information network, at least not enough to be able to bite the tongue of one of his closer informants.
Pity. He’d have to dispose of that connection, now that it betrayed him too.
“Hahhh.” His leg stings as he washes it, hopefully getting rid of the last of the sparks sent his way by the hoarders. They’d been armed with new equipment, new weapons. He’d have to report that.
But reporting meant walking back into Mondstadt with torn up pants, just hours after Jean had scolded him for being too much of a lone wolf. She’d planned for him leaving alone, had asked Amber to wait for him by the gates, so he’d just… scaled around. Jean wouldn’t be happy.
The Grandmaster is never happy with him these days.
A difference in professional opinion, that’s all. She wanted him with two bodyguards and a healer, and he wanted alone time.
Jean got hurt. Tore herself up in that hidden away office, buried in paperwork higher than her head and thinking of a little sister she didn’t know how to speak to anymore. That was why she doted on him—some misplaced sentiment for himself and Diluc. Some way to assuage her guilt.
“Kaeya, you don’t need to work alone. We’re here for you, you know that, right?”
“Ah,” he groans, falling back under Windrise’s largest tree’s shadow. Jean’s favorite spot—even without her standing by his side, he sought out her comfort implicitly. But it wasn’t hers to give, wasn’t his to take.
Kaeya didn’t need to carry her guilt with him. He had a nation weighing on him already.
Of course he’d taken on the informants alone. If the rumors of abyssal cracks running through the grounds meant what he’d suspected, only he’d be able to tackle the problem.
He’d tried to share his burden once. He didn’t need to learn the lesson again.
Besides, what’s wrong with him working alone?
Kaeya sighs, lazily flicking droplets of water that freeze in his grasp, fingers that are always just a tad too cold to be normal. Cryo users were known for enjoying their solitude—there’s an unmistakable peace in being alone in the snow, surrounded by nothing but a blanket of tinted white. It’s a trademark part of him , ice that trails up his fingers and throat and eyes, frost glazing over every part. Diona and Rosaria, he knows, are the same.
There was a reason Varka left him as cavalry captain of no one at all. Kaeya could fight, could shield, could heal.
He’s better this way. Alone.
“? reallyllaer?”
Especially for enemies like this.
Fire licks at his heels just as Kaeya pulls himself from the water. The heat of the midday sun, the torn flesh at his leg, the familiar scent of burning—it throws him off kilter. The abyss mage coos as it disappears in a flicker of magic, only to pop back into existence with nothing more than the singe of burning hair.
Pyro. Just his luck.
“heartoftheabyssssybaehtfotraeh… wearewaitinggnitaweraew!”
“How sweet.” The words are sugary even as Kaeya takes the moment to draw to his proper height. One boot is off, resulting in some unbalance, but he’d swung from a horse and beheaded a man before. This, drawing forward ice by the curve of a river, would not be so hard. “Sorry, but I have no plans of returning.”
“sillychilddlihcyllis, yourbloodleavesyounochoiceeciohconuoysevaeldoolbruoy!”
It’s a bad matchup, but not impossible. Not unfamiliar, at least, even if Kaeya bites back the urge to flinch when the fire takes on a shape almost that of a bird.
(“Kaeya!” It should have sounded like tinkering laughter, like warmth and family and all that Kaeya ever dared to dream of before his eye began to sting and his lungs started to curl up, before his mother held him close with a painful little sob as his father pushed him away. It should have sounded like love.
“ Kaeya!”
It sounded like hate.
Kaeya sees those red eyes in his dreams.)
This creature—red, puffed up, burning —it’s not him. It could never be him. The thought doesn’t stop Kaeya from stumbling when the shield shatters right by his face, eye burning.
“That’s enough!” Cryo bursts from his draw as he thrusts the sword into the mage, plunging it against the ground. It cackles, heat swirling by his feet the only warning Kaeya gets before he’s darting to the left to avoid an explosion of fire from the ground.
“runninggninnur… comebackkcabemoc!”
The fire does more than lick. It claws at him now, greedy, and he hisses when it sweeps up that bloody gash, lapping at the incision. Fury, grief, something unhinged unfurls in Kaeya’s chest as he steps into that flame, letting himself burn for that moment he can drive down the hilt of his sword into that mask. Past it.
The mage has no face underneath. None of them do.
Celestia ripped that right away from them so long ago.
“hearttraeh!”
The fire finally peters out as the body dissolves into a black dust, undeserving of a proper death. His palms burn. The leather of his gloves sticks to his flesh as he peels them off, dunking his hands back into the water and watching it freeze on contact. “Archons,” Kaeya hisses and laughs at himself for the choice.
More blood in the water. Overhead, the sound of the crows grows. If they’ve been sent by Celestia to monitor this godless man, they’d come too late.
He’d done the worst of his betrayals already.
The leather gloves are useless now, a pity. Kaeya sighs as he finishes cleaning himself up again, straightening his fur and running slow fingers over his eyepatch. In the wilderness far from Mondstadt, the temptation to remove it, to gaze at his swirling reflection in the water, is great. No one else would know, not this far from the city, and his hand hesitates.
(Kaeya had always been a runt. Too small, too skinny, stumbling over his own two feet. It was something that, unexpectedly, that boy had loved.
“It means I need to protect you!” he swore, pressing their hands together. Those hands were bigger, warmer, free from the dirt that Kaeya never seemed to be able to scrub from his skin. They closed around him protectively. “I’ll protect you forever and ever, okay, Kaeya?”
“Hmm… okay!”
Where was that compassion, he laughed in the heat of flames, now?)
No. He doesn’t want to see it, not now.
“Ah, a long walk back… if only I had my horse!” Kaeya bemoans to himself, groaning exaggeratedly as he stretches in place. Truthfully, he hadn’t seen Sugarplum in years, not since Varka needed to storm off with literally every horse the knights had to offer. The cavalry team was never very big to begin with, but with no horses left Kaeya was left quite literally with no people nor any option to recruit more.
How could he recruit them with no horses?
Snorting to himself, he sets off for the long walk back. At least the sky is clear today, cloudless, and he clicks his tongue as he searches for any wisps of rain. The last time it rained here, Lumine had dragged him out to help her freeze enemies in place.
“Is that all I’m useful for?” he’d teased, then, tossing his wet hair back and barely missing her face. She stuck out her tongue and he laughed. “Freezing your enemies up to no good?” She’d smiled at him, batting away his arm with just as much playfulness.
“Hush, you’re plenty useful. And just as much up to no good yourself.”
“You think I’m up to no good?”
“Well.” She smiled. “aren’t you?”
He’d swallowed, then, freezing at her gaze. There was something knowing in it that a girl that young shouldn’t have had, a maturity and an age that betrayed her appearance, but that seeking look disappeared as quickly as it appeared in another chug of her cider.
“You’d be a good Harbinger.” Conversationally. As though being compared to the Fatui was anything so simple. “Hot and up to no good.”
Dangerous, she didn’t say, a storm simmering in the clouds. Guilty, her eyes read, and furious for how much it weighed on him. Loving and cold, just like the archon who granted him his Vision. She smiled and he smiled back.
“I wouldn’t kick Venti in the stomach.” Venti, not Barbatos, not anymore, and was it so bad, really, that Kaeya liked him better that way?
“Maybe not. You’re more like Childe.”
“Childe?”
“Tartaglia,” Lumine clarified, “he smiles too much too.”
“You wound me,” Kaeya laughed, and chugged the last of his drink in hopes it’d cloud up his ringing mind. What Lumine didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that Kaeya had known Tartaglia. Had met the man in an investigation into the Balladeer lingering near Mondstadt, had spoken to him in an exchange, and had known, then, that they weren’t the same at all.
Kaeya smiled to hide the fact that he’s mourning. Childe smiled to hide the fact that he didn’t remember how to mourn anymore.
But bringer of war? Mayhem? Perhaps that was right.
If anything, he felt closest to Dottore. Dangerous, still smiling, but a different form. Raw, dangerous, and a certain pride that threw away the last dregs of human morality. They were better off alone, those hidden faces. Who knew who they’d hurt otherwise?
(He lived.
It was a surprise, something undeserving. Death would have been the cleaner end for them all—no more betrayals, no more plotting, no more secrets. Just the truth, the consequences of the truth, and the guilty burden that Kaeya wouldn’t have to carry anymore. The phoenix should have killed him.
It didn’t.)
“Aah,” Kaeya sighs, blinking up at the noontime sun. They’d drank well into the night that day before Lumine had to depart for Liyue once more, citing something about new commissions and protecting balloons. He’d laughed at her woes then, ignoring her warning huff before she shoved him off the bar stool. Then Diluc had emerged from the cellar, he had frozen, and she dragged him out.
He hadn’t been smiling then. She didn’t take back her words.
But she also didn’t mention the icy edge of his hands.
Really, how long would he drone on like this? Kaeya chuckles to himself as he turns the bend nearing Mondstadt, shoving his hands in his pockets to whistle a tune. No doubt Jean had advised Swan to keep an eye out for him, a lecture already prepped on her tongue; he didn’t need to provide her any more proof that she was right. What a shame to have his ale cut off for the next two weeks.
Though he supposes it wouldn’t be more than a day or two. Jean was always too lenient with her punishments, especially with—
“Kaeya!”
“Klee!” Their spark knight crashes into him at the gate, eyes sparkling as he tugs her upwards in his arms, twirling her with glee. “Look at you, big girl! Soon you’re going to get too heavy for this.”
“Never!” She admonishes with a gasp, and he adores her, truly, twinkling smiles that he’d turn the world over for. She wiggles in his hands and he winces at a sharp twinge shooting up his arm. She notices, clever despite her age, wriggling loose of his hands to grab hold of them.
His burns stare up at her, ugly. It’s too late to avoid Swan’s lingering gaze and he grimaces.
“Ah, boo-boo! Klee will help!”
Off comes the backpack, spilling out notebooks and crayons and two ticking bombs he politely puts out. Klee grasps at a roll of bandages; her hands clumsily wrap them around him, tongue sticking out in concentration, when Kaeya realizes. Her fingers press against his palm, and the pressure hurts, sharp, gloveless. His bare palm against hers.
“Ah, careful. My hand, it’s—”
(“Cold.”
It rattled from Diluc’s lips like a curse, tense with worry, and for a moment it was as though they were fine. Like Kaeya was still his clingy little brother with the too-big doe eye and the droopy smile, and Diluc was still his protective guardian angel who cried a little too often, clutching Kaeya in those warm hands.
Hand. The one that flinched away from Kaeya’s own.
“You’re freezing.”
Hah. Of course.
His heart had frozen up long ago.)
“Hurt, right? Klee can do it!” Kaeya blinks at her, wordless, as she laughs, light, the way children do. Klee pulls the wrappings tight and beams.
“All good!” she declares, proud of her own messy handiwork; her hand, tiny, still so young, so innocent, cradles against his own. Her fingers curl against him and he realizes, then, that just as his blood runs a little too cold, hers runs a little too warm.
The red of her Vision sparkles, proud where it dangles.
But instead of a phoenix, a shield, a stench of burning flesh and horror, instead of those wide-eyed red eyes that betray their owner when they turn to his mangled form, instead of all that, Kaeya blinks down to the red of Klee’s hat expanding in his vision. Wide eyes peek up at him and he remembers that Klee is a child but she is also a knight, long-lived, and she chooses to live her life here.
Here in Mondstadt two blocks down from his house, barreling into his house on weekday mornings when Albedo isn’t here to keep watch. Calling him big brother when he is neither and laughing while she does it.
Here, Klee stands at the edge of the city, still looking up at him. Still holding his hand. “All good?”
Her Vision shines, but it is Klee, Klee , and Kaeya does not fear.
Cryo. Pyro. How could he do anything but melt?
“Yeah,” Kaeya smiles, closing his hand fully around hers as he pulls her into his arms. Her hand radiates heat and he squeezes it just the slightest, just to feel the ebbing of pain from the burn. Klee squeezes back, the cold tips of his fingers slotted against her own. “All good.”