Chapter Text
“For the sake of my sanity, I’m going to assume that this is some elaborate joke I’m too old to understand.”
“Oh? Have you already gone senile at the tender age of 24?” Diluc sighed into his palm in faux pity. “What a pity. I suppose I should begin funding your retirement plans. The knights don’t pay well.”
Kaeya dragged his hand down his face, eyeing the assortment of creatures crowding Diluc’s personal space in his office. If he didn’t know any better, he’d assume Diluc left Mondstadt a broken shell of a man and returned a fairy tale princess.
That, or he’s senile. The former option seemed more believable.
Diluc flicked a stray feather away from his face. “No response? No witty comeback?” He returned his gaze to the half-finished novel in his hands. “I should really start finding you a nice cottage in the countryside.”
“Only because you asked nicely. I think this—” Kaeya spread his arms, gesturing at the alarming amount of creatures infesting Diluc’s study, “is getting out of hand.” He narrowed his eye at the tuft of blue hair sticking out of a pile of books. Is that human hair?
“Hmm,” Diluc hummed, flipping pages. “I still think you’re senile.”
“And I think you’re an impostor and the real Diluc’s rotting away in a ditch,” Kaeya deadpanned. “But nooo. No one ever listens to Kaeya Alberich. They only care about the one and only Diluc Ragnvindr, who has a literal rodent chewing on his hair.”
Diluc paused and turned to the pair of reptiles using him as a body heater. One was curled around his shoulder like an oversized neck pillow, purring as it nestled into his hair. The other was sleeping on his lap, belly side up.
“This?” Diluc poked the obese snake on his shoulder. “Morax isn’t hurting anyone.”
“You named it after the Geo Archon?”
“Well, I wouldn’t say that.” Diluc then shifted his attention to the feathery ball on his lap. “This is Dvalin. He’s a bit heavy, but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”
“Dvalin—Diluc, please tell me those aren’t—”
“Don’t question it, Kaeya. I gave up trying to make sense of this months ago.”
Kaeya shoved a finger at the tuft of hair. “What about that, then?” The tuft of hair perked up like a pair of ears. “Is that the Cryo Archon stowing away in your literature? You have horrible taste, by the way.”
Diluc craned his neck to see where Kaeya was pointing at. “Oh, no. That’s just Chongyun.” A hand popped up from the pile to wave at Kaeya. “He’s shy, don’t mind him. But if he ascends to Celestia and take the Tsaritsa’s place, you wouldn’t be far off.”
“Diluc, Diluc. Why are you hoarding a literal kid?”
“I don’t hoard him. He’s not some antique glass I got down in Marjorie’s store.” Diluc flipped more pages. It was either he’d developed super-speed overnight, or the book was the only intermediary between his head exploding and resigned calmness. “He said something about the abundance of my ‘Yang energy’ attracting equally ferocious ‘Yin energy.’”
“Uh huh.” With how fast Diluc was going through the book now, Kaeya decided it was the latter. Diluc wasn’t even looking at the pages now.
“And said ‘Yin energy’”—Diluc made quotation marks with a free hand—“comes from them. The freeloader on my shoulder and the oversized lizard on my lap.”
“Uh huh.” Kaeya’s read about the myth in passing. About how every creature in Liyue had some spectrum of chi in their bodies. Outdated tales would tell him that only women possessed Yin and men Yang, but the one story that withstood time was the one about Phoenixes and Dragons.
And if those things crowding Diluc’s person were what Kaeya really thought they were, he might have to start calling Diluc an oversized chicken.
“However, I’m only one of me, and there’s two of them.” Diluc shut his book with a fatalistic sigh. “So this creates a scenario where there’s too much Yin energy, which mellows out the kid’s overflowing Yang energy. It basically suppresses it to some extent so he can go apeshit. Understand?”
“Yep.”
“No, you don’t. I can see your wrinkles from here. Maybe some steam from your brain short-circuiting.”
The lizard, who’d been resting its head on Diluc’s shoulder, abruptly jerked its head up towards the window. Even from a distance, Kaeya could see the creature’s nostril constrict, as if it were sniffing something in the air. It promptly leapt off Diluc’s shoulder, body-slamming the lizard on Diluc’s lap, and landed on the floor with its nonexistent feet.
In a flash of gold light, a ravishing man in Liyue attire stood where the lizard once did. He stretched his limbs and turned to leave, but not before glaring daggers at the blue lizard that had climbed onto the table to hiss at the man.
“I have business to attend to,” he told Diluc, but his glower never left the blue chameleon. “Do inform me if you wish for anything. I will do everything in my power to fulfill your needs.”
Initially Diluc didn’t even bat an eyelid, but tilted his head to contemplate an idea in his head.
“Do you know the owner of the Third-Round Knockout?” The man nodded intently. “Help me pass a message to him. If he wants Dandelion wine in his menu, I’m willing to work out a deal. Tell him to stop replicating my product, water it down, then direct all complaints and lawsuits to me.”
The man nodded again. “I will be sure to inform him.”
“No meteors.”
This time the Liyuen had frustration etched all over his face, as if restricting him from mass genocide was a massive blockade to his personal fulfilment. “No meteors,” he promised begrudgingly. “I will not harm anyone… physically.”
“Zhongli.”
“Zhongli” sighed heavily, but his face returned to an impasse. “You ask too much of me at times, Phoenix.”
“I ask of you to do the bare minimum. They were your people once, weren’t they?”
“They still are, by technicality. This presents a scenario where their fates are to be changed as I see fit.”
Diluc leaned back into his chair, crossing his arms like a disappointed mother. The blue lizard on the desk tapped its feathery tail on the surface disbelievingly, hissing at the man like they meant something. Apparently, it did, from the way the man immediately whipped towards the lizard, scowling back.
Behind Kaeya, Chongyun poked his full head out, blinking wide. “Oh,” he muttered, slitted eyes fixed on the pair. “Is it happening again?” He dove back under the pile. (How can such a small hill of books hide an entire teenager? Does the dusty corners of Diluc Ragnvindr’s room hide a domain?)
“Xingqiu, get up. They’re fighting,” he heard the boy call. There was another one of them?
“You jest! What stage have they progressed to?” another voice called, appalled rather than perplexed.
This time, both heads emerged from the pile of literature, but only revealing half their heads. Xingqiu, the boy with turquoise hair, narrowed his eyes at the growling pair.
“Is it the juice stage?” Chongyun whispered.
“No!” Xingqiu gasped when Zhongli was on a full rant now, jabbing the desk with his finger as the odd pair tried to talk (hiss?) over the other. “I fear it has already gone to the gift stage!”
Chongyun shirked into his pile a little more, bringing his hands up to his eyes. “Archons, I can’t watch.”
“The what stage?” Kaeya blurted, taken aback by the absurdity of it all.
Xingqiu and Chongyun spun to him. They exchanged glances and quick catchups—“Who’s the circus?” “Master Diluc’s brother; he’s new.” “Ah, I see. The worst kind.”—before gathering the wits to explain the shitshow.
Xingqiu stuck his hands out the pile to make quotation marks. “‘The Gift Stage,’” he quoted seriously, “is when those two reach an impasse in judgement. Our Dear Master Diluc, as you can see, is in a state of what we would call ‘The Believer.’ Which essentially means he’s utterly done with those two and is praying to all the deities he can think of.
“This renders him unable to reign those lizards back in, which in turn will catalyze their disagreements. In approximately five minutes from now, they will rush out the Winery and begin searching for the shiniest rock to come in their possession to present to their Phoenix.”
“Then Master Diluc will lock them out,” Chongyun added helpfully. “And they’ll be sleeping on the couch.”
As if to prove their point, Zhongli and the blue lizard were already reaching for the window, still cussing each other out in a mixture of languages and hisses. When the last of them slipped out of the window frame, a flood of light surged into the room, forcing Kaeya to shield his eye.
From what limited vision he was left with, he swore he could’ve seen Diluc’s silhouette bend into himself, fingers clasped together as he muttered every type of prayer known to Teyvat in all their respective languages.
Before the light even died down, a whirlwind burst through the open windows, sending all the loose documents and everything that wasn’t bolted down flying. Xingqiu and Chongyun made the wise decision to retreat into their papery hideout, but Kaeya was left to fend for himself.
The winds swept him off his feet unromantically, promptly throwing him into the wall. His back crashed into the walls by the books, and if there was anything that came out of it, he could now swore up and down that there was definitely some secret basement under the guise of those books, because there was no way in Teyvat that two whole teenagers could nestle their way in a pile shorter than his knees.
Kaeya groaned, gathering himself as he blinked the white spots from his eye. From a distance, he could see two massive dragons soaring through the skies from the windows, going in the opposite direction of one another.
“I’m looking up reptile recipes,” was all Diluc had to say for the admittedly terrifying show, groaning into his palm as his curly hair stuck up in every awkward angle imaginable.
Xingqiu shot up from the pile, and so did the books surrounding him. One leather-bound book titled “How to Train your Dragon(s)” smacked Kaeya directly in the face.
“I may be of assistance!” he declared. “I have every book that dabbled in Reptilian Culinary Arts cataloged and ready to be shipped to this exact location at any moment’s notice!”
Kaeya spat a mouthful of dust as the book sild off his face.
If there’s anything he took away from the situation, it was that he really should leave Diluc to his own hell. He didn’t know how much more of transforming lizards he could take.