Chapter Text
It's the season for rain.
The river floods by the Winery in the light fall that blows sideways in the wind. The slimes have crawled into the crevices of the nearby waterfall's cliffs and tucked themselves into the darkened nooks for safety.
Diluc spends the day out of his study; out of his jacket, sleeves rolled, helping to cart supplies from the vineyards sinking soil, into the stone and wood warehouses that surround the property.
The humidity brings sweat.
He ties his hair up and off his neck and resolves to spending the next few hours from morning to noon getting muddy from elbows, to knees, to boots.
There are vines that need tending.
Weeds that need pulling.
Fertilizer on the lower hill needs investigation near the cottages, where their most dedicated harvesters have chosen to make a home and stay.
A foul stench had been keeping animals away well enough. But that same stench had been seeping through the woodwork and windows of those living around it.
“It’s not unbearable, Master Diluc. It just… keeps us awake at night. And makes the baby cry.”
“Isn’t that the definition of ‘unbearable’?”
“Er- yes. I suppose it is. Actually, if you could maybe try and figure out what’s wrong… It’s coming from over here-”
He's in the middle of rubbing questionable red dirt between his gloved forefinger and thumb in inspection when the gray skies finally crack open above the heads of him and the workers gathered, and true downpour descends.
Some shrieking, some mutters, some sighs.
Elzer, who should have been indoors but had spent much of the same time as Diluc out helping with manual labor, smiles and brushes back his hair, commenting lightly on its benefits for the vineyard.
He shoos Diluc away from the lower hills, against Diluc’s protests, back towards the mansion.
“It wouldn’t do to have you sick.”
The rest of the workers and scattered members from the families who had gathered around to resolve the oddity with the fertilizer, usher him away too.
They give reassuring words, they'll tough-out the pour and continue looking into the matter themselves.
"If we're lucky, the storm will drown out the smell."
"Or make it worse."
"What's worse than the smell of your feet?"
"Yours."
"Oye, rude! Don't embarrass me in front of Master Diluc!"
“Ha! You insulted me first.”
”Precautionary action.”
“For what?”
Connor and Matthew.
The two cousins in their dirt-stained shirts and boots and slacks laugh, elbowing one another before crouching at each other's side to poke at the earth.
Rain drowns out the rest of their teasing conversation as Diluc reluctantly takes his leave, but their second round of laughter carries under the torrential storm and into his ears nonetheless.
They were older than Diluc by five years, yet the same age as each other; inseparable, doting guardians for Connor's youngest sister - a baby Diluc often heard was tossed into the sky and taken on 'adventures' swathed in blankets - much to the stressed grief of both their parents.
They were good workers.
They hung around the vineyard often even when off-duty, sweeping leave, pulling wagons; occassionally getting mischievous with the other harvesters and maids.
Diluc watched them sometimes in passing.
They reminded him of a past; carefree and simple. But he never lingered on it for more than a glancing minute before his steps carried him forward.
Elsewhere.
He spends the rest of the early afternoon ‘banned’ from the outdoors by his own staff, handling paperwork in the chair behind his late father's desk.
His pen meticulously marks away signatures and corrections, with eyes and a mind that occasionally wander to a notebook placed alongside the desk's corner lamp.
'Suspicious parties'.
Numerous spottings of bandits with unclear affiliations sighted around the area in the last few weeks, too near for his liking.
His hair, still damp, stays up.
He gets up briefly to request a simple cup of black coffee.
Maids bring it, and he spends time spinning a spoon in its small porcelain, before setting both drink and silverware aside and getting back to work.
He's not a fan of bitter drinks.
For the mood at times, he only tells himself he is.
"-dirt piles by the shed. The straw will stick to the brooms and spread it worse."
"Where's an Anemo Vision when you need it..."
"Pray to Lord Barbatos that his winds might blow the filth away after the storm, or we'll be facing Adelinde's wrath..."
The murmurs of the maids disappear with their light footsteps in the hall.
Diluc settles further in his chair, and let's the sound of the rain drumming on the window pane take over their gone company.
Cloud-casted shadows spill onto the floor over a sense of folding, comforting quiet.
He's in a near meditative work-trance, in the middle of reading a lengthy proposal from a partner in Sumeru, when a knock comes at the door.
"Come in," he murmurs, not looking up.
He recognizes Elzer's foot-fall all the same, and feels the polite bow from his childhood friend come before the familiar words.
"Master Diluc. I apologize for the intrusion."
"It's fine."
He drags his eyes from the proposal and withholds a sigh, leaning back in his chair to give himself something of a short rest.
He lifts his eyebrows.
“Were you still outdoors?”
Elzer, looking exactly as if he had indeed spent the afternoon walking about the vineyards inspecting the area and directing the workers under breaking thunder and wet, doesn’t deny it.
“Yes. The storm seems as if it’ll prolong throughout the night. I thought some precautionary measures should be taken to avoid flooding in the soil.”
"What needs looking at?"
"Nothing, really," says Elzer, a small smile on his face. His green eyes hold a spark of brightness, stand-out, in the overcast shroud of the room. "I came to deliver different news. You could say intelligence from an outside source.”
”Intelligence.”
”By the gorge, on its high cliffs, scouts encountered Master Kaeya. He advised us to bolster lock and guard by the south cellar. Reasons weren't given... but it might be safe to assume he's noticed the same bandit-activity near the property as us. Truthfully, he’s been crossing back and forth the area outside Winery grounds for a week now. Unaccompanied; no party of knights. He’s only just approached us today to speak about it.”
Diluc's arms cross.
"Of course he’s been lurking around. He can't seem to stay away from this place no matter how many times he's turned away."
He sits for a moment longer as Elzer continues to wait with patience. Then he asks.
"...How far away is he?"
"I would say two hours out. Last spotted around the abandoned trade routes and the tunnels beneath Windwail. The bandits are that ‘particular’ party of twenty we’ve been eyeing. Leader: Hennings. Second-in-command, Borsch. They’ve regathered. Moderately-armed. Standard weaponry; no Delusions."
Diluc pushes aside documents of trade for the scribbled notepad detailing the same information.
"Yes. No collusion with the Fatui. They're operating independently. What they're after, aside from petty revenge for an unknown grievance, I'm unsure of. Sir Kaeya seems to think it's our wine, yet these ‘bandits’ haven't shown around the property prior to this month.”
Diluc’s mouth thins, unimpressed.
“You say scouts spotted them further in Windwail by abandoned routes and tunnels. Those woods wind into the Wolvendom. They're nowhere near to here. Protect the cellars when the threat is leagues away? What clumsy information is that knight giving on purpose?”
”Would you like us to investigate the area around the cellars regardless?”
“No,” Diluc responds, curt. “Suffice to say, Sir Kaeya probably thought I'd go against his advice like this, and say that I'd stick around the cellars tonight myself - rather than move others to guard them. Which means he wants me to stay away from whatever in Windwail he's poking his nose into. But what he’s really expecting is for me to follow his trail."
"You know each other well."
"…Hardly. He's just embarrassingly predictable."
Diluc taps his fingers on the notepad, gazing down at his own written words for several moments.
He rises shortly after, adjusts his cuffs and straightens out his shirt. It's while he's shrugging on his jacket that Elzer speaks again.
"I trust we won't be seeing you for evening meal tonight. Or will Master Kaeya be coming back with you?"
"He most certainly won't be." Diluc ties his boot lace slightly aggressively, scowling at the crimson and gold carpet of the study. “I’ll be here for evening dining.”
There's amusement in Elzer's chuckle, followed by an apologetic clearing of his throat, and lighter words.
"My apologies."
Diluc's halfway out the door, disgruntled, when Elzer says as if struck by a sudden thought -
"Master Diluc, that's right. Master Kaeya made no mention of it, but the scouts have told me personally of Abyss Order appearances on the very same cliffs as they were descending. I believe they were mages. Cryo. Hydro, perhaps?"
Diluc pauses in the hall.
Imperceptibly.
"In this weather, the elements don't seem to be in his favor,” Elzer continues. “Or yours, for that matter. If he’s pursuing the bandits on his own… it could be that this matter is one the Knights shouldn't be involved in. I imagine the only scenario he would do so is if it's the Abyss Order these bandits are for some reason working with. But that alludes to a matter of a more serious nature…”
He trails off.
"...Please be careful. I hope you'll be able to catch up to them, regardless. It would be poor news if this mess of a storm washed away their tracks."
Diluc, listening to the words, finally looks over his shoulder at his close confidant, business partner and butler with lowered brows.
"I'm not going to meet with him."
Elzer meets his gaze. "No?”
"No. If Mondstadt's Cavalry Captain wants to handle it himself, he can," Diluc responds. "It's not my concern what the Knights of the city get up to."
He adds words quieter under his breath.
"Much less him."
"Ah."
Elzer takes a moment of silence, eyes wandering idly to the walls before they drift back to Diluc.
A thoughtful smile ghosts his lips.
"May I ask where you're taking leave to then? In the event I need to find you.”
“The vineyard three fields over."
"Where the southern cellars are."
"Where they happen to be. It has nothing to do with what he said."
Elzer inclines his head, slightly, hiding his ever-growing smile behind a white-gloved hand as he coughs delicately into a fist.
"Of course. Do take care not to slip."
The storm has brokered into slanting sheets of wind-blown rain on a green-hilled landscape, bleak and gray.
He has extra eyes and ears stationed in the demure, unassuming cottage-homes around the southern vineyards that grow above the hidden cellars where their finer barrels of century-old wines are stored.
If he takes extra time afterwards, at a brisk pace, to hike into the nearby winding forest to the west afterwards, it's purely for speculative reasons - not because it would be the most likely path for any 'unwanted wanderers' such as bandits to try and pass through undetected.
The northern forests of Windwail on the cusps of the Winery are deep, bending into the shadowed boughs, wrought with dense thickets and thorns.
He stations a number of 'servants' there as well - and after an hour - makes the drenched journey back to the main estate grounds.
It’s not long at all before he finds his way right behind his father's desk again, out of the rain, but just as damp as he was the first time he sat down in the noon.
His eyes wander towards the notebook and its warning of the Abyss Order and motley crew of bandits.
His eyes wander away.
He goes back to reviewing basic accords between Mondstadt and Inazuma.
With travel and trade restrictions heavily lifted in the settling resolution of its civil war, an exchange of goods could possibly - tentatively - begin again.
He needed to be wise about how he chose to go about it.
Focused.
His gaze drifts away a second time from the translated Inazuman documents - onto the notebook.
Windwail.
What was Kaeya doing out there on his own?
Diluc glares at the notebook as if it’ll give him any sort of answer, before he clicks his tongue, pinches his brow, and twists his mouth, displeased.
He grabs the journal, opens a drawer of the desk, and stows it away inside.
He turns a key in its lock after, leaves the key, and returns to business.
Not his problem.
He’s sure he’ll hear about it somehow down the road.
It's an uneventful rest of the eve.
The rainstorm carries well into the onsetting night.
The wind grows stronger.
Branches of nearby trees tap against the windows of the mansion as water bursts in a rhythmic onslaught on glass.
He pushes and pokes at a dinner of heaping green and marinated meat.
Bored.
If he drinks, he doesn't remember what it was, aside from it being something oddly sour and abnormally sweet.
It’s while departing from the dining hall, he overhears conversation from the kitchen.
”Did we make that?” he overhears one of the cooks asking, confused.
“I don’t recognize the bottle. It’s not ours. It’s… cheap glass.”
“Who brought it in here?”
“…I don’t want to say it. But all signs point to Master Kaeya. Look - there’s five more of the stuff, stowed back here behind the flour. And… what is this?”
“Throw that away-“
“Is it a pastry- oh- euck! What did he bake it with?”
”The real question is how does he keep getting into here?”
”What a headache. Never mind. Search the rest of the cabinets - Reece stop smelling it, throw it away - and don’t speak a word of it to the Young Master.”
Diluc pretends the conversation was never heard.
When he falls into bed sideways and rests an arm beneath his head, he spends a great long time looking at the moving shadows on the wall across from him where the bedroom window lies.
It's the leaves in the thunderstorm's gales.
It's the memory of a storm in another time; in another place.
It's the hours spent before he shuts his eyes in search of rest.
Before he’s able to do so without seeing the body of a dead father in the rain.
The dream he has is unwanted.
Of a brother he idly walks alongside on an open road from the city to the Winery and estate, several days before his eighteenth.
…Not a dream. A memory.
The sun sets before them, golden, orange, weeping beyond the darkened hills in the distance.
"Something's bothering you?" Diluc asks.
Kaeya's eye is on the ground, face pensive; distracted.
He’d gotten smacked around while running knight drills with Jean. She hadn’t shown mercy, but had apologized profusely after when she had noticed the swelling to his cheek and way he gripped his rib.
Diluc had been watching from the other side of the field and had come over only when Kaeya had starting feigning mortal injury - to the exasperation of them all.
"...Kaeya?"
"...You don't feel something strange?" Kaeya questions at last.
"Strange how?"
"In the air. Evil. Foreboding."
"Evil?" Diluc laughs kindly. "Not at all."
He looks at his brother's injured face carefully as they continue to travel side-by-side at a leisurely pace.
"You feeling alright? You were training for a long time today. Perhaps you need rest."
"Perhaps," Kaeya agrees.
He stops scrutinizing the ground and lifts his head, an easy smile coming to his lips.
"It's not easy living up to the high expectations the Order has, thanks to a certain Captained Knight. You must know how hard it is for us ordinary, Vision-less, grunts to keep up with might such as yours."
"You keep up with me just fine," Diluc muses, amused by the same old argument his brother brings up when it comes to responsibilities among the Knights.
It's a side-long, equally amused look Kaeya gives him in return. "Just fine?" he repeats. "That's what you call beating me into the ground every time we spar?"
"You say 'not to go easy'."
"Well you're supposed to anyway. That's common sibling protocol."
"You have it backwards."
Diluc says it in the darkened thunderstorm three days later as rain and blood and blade keep them apart.
"The fight's not over. Get up."
Kaeya stays down, beaten into the mud, sword sprawled out of reach.
He doesn't move from where he lies, defeated, but there's a look in his eye from where his head is turned, distant, and blank.
"Diluc," he mumbles.
"Get up," says Diluc again. "We're not done."
But they were.
For years after, the both of them had been -
It's the moving of footsteps in the bedroom, soft across the carpet - unrecognizable - light as an assassin's, that wakes him from his sleep.
Rain hits his face at an angle, harsh and cold, and he stares at the bowing thick trees poking branches into the room and against the wall, before realizing the window's been jimmied and pushed open - and the shadow of the culprit - is stealthing his way.
He's out of his sheets and on the threat in an instant.
His wrist is grabbed by one much smaller.
An elbow drives under his ribs.
For as tiny as it is, it feels like it's gone one-inch-short of breaking in a lung.
A very strange moment comes to Diluc after as he wheezes in air - as to whether or not he's still caught in the throes of a very vivid dream - before he's flipped and thrown into the dresser on the other side of his wall, with astounding speed and force.
It’s his own grapple-and-throw he’d only ever used on one other person while roughhousing playfully in childhood.
Footsteps unsteadily steady.
A voice speaks, high-pitched, out-of-breath, uneven and tight.
On the possible verge of tears.
"Will you cut it out? I didn’t come here so you could try and strangle me too.”
Flame ignites in Diluc's palm, instinctively, immediately at the sound of distress.
Upside-down from where he lays, half sprawled up against his dresser, his bewildered thoughts come to a halting stop.
He stares.
The blue eye that glares back at him in the swath of palm-fire and dark is one he knows too well.
"Kaeya?"
He's convinced he's still asleep.
It's the only explanation.
So Diluc lies back in his sheets, pulls his blanket back over his shoulders, and goes back to gazing at his window, still wide open and letting in a torrent of filth and mud and rain on the carpet, floors and wall.
“…Diluc?”
He closes his eyes.
The bottom of the sheets are tugged.
"Diluc, quit ignoring me."
Diluc doesn't.
A small body hauls itself up onto the mattress, sits halfway on him, and tries to rip the blanket off.
"Diluc, there’s a problem so help me!”
Diluc sits up abruptly.
The tiny figure on him topples - off the bed - on to the floor.
The window has been closed.
The lights of the bedroom have been turned on.
There's no room for denial; he can see all too clearly.
It’s not a dream.
If anything, it’s a nightmare.
In the thunderstorm, in the dead of night, it's without a doubt Kaeya, standing on the carpet of his bedroom, dripping wet and bruised, years younger with a sword on his back and eye ablaze.
The sword looks like it’s seen a battle of a hundred years. It’s not Favonius. It was like it’d been scrounged from a pile of discarded weapons among scrap and trash in the caverns of a forgotten tunnel.
Miraculously, his Knight uniform was still on him, shrunken to his exact size.
Which looked like the size of a seven year-old.
Yet it's his face that makes Diluc unable to tear his eyes away.
A swollen cheek, half-heartedly bandaged with square gauze and tape. A split brow; cuts by his mouth and chin, like he'd fallen into splintered wood or shattered glass. Like he'd been beaten, dragged and struck by lightning thrice.
It’s when Kaeya turns his much shorter head to glance from the window to the bedroom door with a frown that Diluc sees the bruising on his neck.
An angry, black mottle of fingerprints that look as if they've attempted to near strangle him to death.
Kaeya’s earlier, upset, words come back to him.
Diluc’s on a knee, grabbing Kaeya’s arm and holding it in place before he even knows he’s done it.
Kaeya jumps, startled, and swings his head back around with a scowl and glower, like he’s about to butt Diluc in the forehead with his own and make it hurt.
“You’re holding too tight. Get off.”
Diluc doesn’t. Not just yet.
“Is this you?”
“Are you really asking me that?”
“You’re Kaeya.”
“No, I’m a flying goblin.”
Diluc lets go of him, slowly, incredibly annoyed - by the smart words - by the suddenly difficult attitude - after Kaeya had been the one to scale the vines outside his window, bust into his room, toss him into furniture, and destroy his floors with mud.
But he searches Kaeya's face intently with narrowed, narrowed eyes anyway, trying to figure out what’s going on.
Kaeya looks nothing like Diluc remembers - eye bigger, clearer, the star pupil in it more prominent, hair messy to chin without the growth of any hair-tail.
They had met when Diluc was twelve and when Kaeya was eleven.
But now Kaeya was obviously younger.
"...Why are you like this?"
Kaeya shuffles where he stands.
His gaze wanders to nowhere in particular, mouth petulant, hair plastered, curled and dark and wet across his injured brow.
"It's a long story. I don’t want to explain.”
"Well you scaled three floors in the middle of a storm and broke into the mansion to come into my room. So tell it. I thought you were investigating tunnels and chasing bandits.”
“I was.”
Kaeya shuffles again, this time distinctly uncomfortable, and for some reason it makes Diluc give him a second glance over.
Not just injured - he's paler; exhausted.
And -
"Where's your Vision?"
Kaeya gazes at an indiscriminant part of the carpet his boots have ruined with grass and muck and rainwater.
He doesn't make eye-contact.
"They took it."
Diluc stares. "Who."
"...Mages. From the Order. The Abyss."
Kaeya keeps staring at the carpet.
"I wasn't trying to come here. My feet took me on their own. I'd go after them and fight them myself to get it if I could. If I was grown.”
He goes silent.
His eye narrows, perplexed.
Diluc hasn’t seen the look on him in a long while.
“But there was something else there I didn't see? Another mage? It wasn’t like the rest. They hit me with an incantation from behind while I was fighting from the front, and suddenly I was like this. As soon as it happened, the rest of the standing bandits lunged and grabbed me and ripped it off my belt.”
Kaeya brings a small hand to a smaller chin, frowning, vexed.
“I did try to snatch it back, but there were too many bigger men. They passed the Vision over to the mages after, carried me out and threw me off the cliff. It… must have been a trap. But I don’t know why for me. I thought they were trying to get some sort of revenge on you for one of your Darknight stunts.”
Clearly not.
Diluc's eyes are back on the strangulation bruises on Kaeya's neck.
What exactly had been done in those tunnels?
Bandits couldn’t take what they were looking for without kicking around a kid?
Not that Kaeya was a kid, per say.
Technically.
His memory and thoughts were his own as an adult.
But Diluc supposed if he had gone off to the tunnels and caves like Kaeya had indirectly been trying to get him to do in the first place, he would’ve been there to see for himself.
The longer he looks at the injuries on Kaeya, the more irritated he becomes.
Not because it bothers him, but because the situation and sudden predicament holds too much of the unknown his brain is having trouble trying to wrap itself around.
Why did they take his Vision?
...Had Kaeya really walked himself the entire trip through flooding gorges, sinking hills and crumbling ridges in a body like this just to get to the Winery?
It was a miracle he hadn't been mauled by something else.
A miracle he wasn't dead.
"Diluc."
Diluc's drags his eyes up.
Kaeya is still not looking at him, and his shoulders suddenly seem hunched and small.
It’s a juxtapose from the frigid look in his eye and coldness on his face.
"They took my Vision ... so I need it back, I think. And they took - "
He stops.
His forehead pinches, and he winces at a pain that must shoot through his head after because a hand of his snaps out to hold the cuff of Diluc's sleeve for balance.
He either doesn't know or process the gesture, because he keeps clinging onto Diluc’s sleeve even after the pain has left his scrunched features.
Diluc looks at the hand.
He looks up at Kaeya, and finds Kaeya looking at him directly for the first time since Diluc had grabbed him by the arm.
His young expression is impossible to read.
"…They took something else from me I'd like to get back. Or maybe it fell in the fight. It’s more important than the Vision, but I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it on my own. ...So help me. Please."
His fingers squeeze Diluc’s sleeve, tiny.
“We don’t have to talk again after.”