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There’s something so fragile about first love—especially, Diluc thinks, when you find it when you’re young. It’s easy to break something that you hadn’t even known you had (and live, Diluc knows, to regret it in the years that pass).
Indeed, for the past half-decade, Diluc has believed that he’d done exactly that: broken something precious that he’d never be able to replace. He still isn’t sure that he hadn’t done that—no matter what Adelinde or his quickly beating heart might find it within themselves to say—and yet, his father had always said: With a careful combination of hard work, dedication, and a little bit of help... even broken things can eventually be fixed.
Diluc is certain that those words were never meant to describe the love that he has long since held for Kaeya (yet he finds himself hoping that they might, all the same).
- -
“Gods,” Kaeya laughs, his voice dripping with exhaustion.
Diluc grunts in an affirmative reply, pushing his way into Dawn Winery and letting the doors swing inwards as he does so. Kaeya steps in afterward, and he shuts the doors with a bit more regard than Diluc had cared to give.
The two of them make their way through the foyer and out into the candlelit hall, and Diluc makes a beeline to the small cupboard in the back, from which he pulls bandages and a small bottle of antiseptic. This isn’t the first time that Kaeya has returned to Dawn Winery, yet his presence still sets Diluc on edge as much as it always has, and he grips the bottle tightly as he turns back to the center of the room and lets the medical supplies fall gracelessly atop his lacquered dining room table.
“Bandages,” he calls out, only to look up and find that Kaeya has wandered away. Diluc frowns—stepping up to him with a question on his lips—yet he finds himself faltering as he reaches Kaeya’s side, and sees what Kaeya is looking at: a vase full of various local flowers, resting softly upon a speckled bed of white.
Diluc sucks in a breath.
Beneath the other flowers sit wide swaths of baby’s breath—small splashes of white that spill brilliantly out from atop the mouth of the vase. They paint a stark contrast to the dark wood of Dawn Winery’s wall, their shadows flickering beneath the quiet candlelight, and Diluc finds that he can hardly look away. By the way that Kaeya remains rooted in place, uncharacteristically silent, Diluc expects he feels the same.
“Adelinde hasn’t put these out in years,” Diluc says, and his voice feels oddly rough. “Not since I’d left Mondstadt... right after my father’s death.” He pauses. “I’d almost forgotten what they looked like.”
Kaeya breathes out at the words, then turns to Diluc a second later—a forced sort of smile on his face.
“It’s a common flower, you know,” he teases, as though Adelinde putting out baby’s breath again hasn’t just shaken the both of them to their core. “Haven’t you ever seen it at Flora’s?”
“I don’t go to Flora’s,” Diluc replies quietly, and he can’t quite seem to meet Kaeya’s eyes.
Kaeya laughs anyway, and his hand brushes Diluc’s as he reaches out towards the flowers in the vase. His fingers linger beneath the small buds of baby’s breath—a tentative sort of caress—and he turns to Diluc a second later, his gaze clouded yet curious.
“She really hasn’t put these out since you left?” Kaeya asks, and Diluc shakes his head, unsure what more to say.
Not since I left, not since you left—his mind easily supplies—not since my father left, and... not since either of us has come back here, together.
“They’re as pretty as I remember,” Kaeya tells him, his voice yet low. “Simple. Supportive. Did you know that’s how I once wished to be?”
He glances down at Diluc with a look that feels distressingly genuine, and Diluc can hear the unspoken “for you,” that sits in the dark of Kaeya’s gaze.
“You used to let me thread it through your hair,” Kaeya continues quietly, and Diluc blinks at the statement, then quickly looks away. It’s true, yet for whatever reason, he hadn’t thought Kaeya would remember.
When the two of them were young, he had let Kaeya thread baby’s breath through the thick of his braided hair, and the memory leaves something suffocating and tight pulling at Diluc’s chest. In those days, Kaeya had stared up at him with such open devotion that Diluc had barely been able to handle it—and the feelings had only gotten worse as the two of them had grown older.
Diluc breathes out a sigh. “I suppose I did,” he replies, unwilling to give either of them more than that, and the two of them stand in silence—caught up in that strange sort of reverie that only two adults who had grown up together seem to have. Diluc remembers his laughter as Kaeya had adorned his hair with the snow-like flower, hands soft as he’d made loops in Diluc’s waist-length hair, and he remembers his flush as he’d stared in his father’s mirror—once he’d gone off to look at Kaeya’s handiwork, after.
It’s no wonder that Diluc had fallen in love with him, back then.
“Well—” Kaeya says suddenly, breaking Diluc from his thoughts, “all of Adelinde’s creative flower choices aside... I do believe I was promised wine, in addition to that medical care?”
Diluc ducks his head, blinking away from the flowers, then forces himself to nod. He steps backward—away from the baby breath, away from the memories, and away from Kaeya—before waving a hand in the general direction of the bandages and antiseptic.
“You know where the cellar is,” he says, throwing his coat over one of the dining room chairs, “and I know for a fact that you can bandage yourself. Just... don’t take anything too expensive, alright?”
He adds the last bit on as an afterthought, and though Kaeya laughs and says something about Diluc being a bad host for making him clean out his own wounds, Diluc still can’t stop the smile that spreads across his face once he finally makes his way upstairs.
- -
Adelinde continues to put out baby's breath with the rest of the flowers she buys in the weeks that follow afterward.
Innocuous as they are, Diluc still finds himself staring at them each time he passes a newly refreshed vase in the hall, and the flowers never fail to make him remember all of those things that he’d at one point tried to forget.
Kaeya’s fingers, tangled with his as they'd walked down the briny beaches of the Falcon Coast.
Kaeya’s smile, as they'd sung together atop Starsnatch Cliff during the lazy afternoons of Windblume.
Kaeya’s laugher, as they'd tumbled down the hills of Cape Oath, their bodies going faster than their feet had been able to keep up.
The pride in Kaeya’s eyes, when Diluc had been made the youngest Cavalry Captain to date...
And the despair that had moved to replace it, on the day that Diluc had torn himself away.
Diluc remembers them all anew, and Kaeya’s newfound presence in his life makes the feelings that accompany them all the more difficult to ignore. Indeed, as Kaeya continues to worm his way into Diluc’s life—and as Diluc continues to let him—those feelings of young love that he’d felt for the other man inevitably begin to return. Kaeya continues to return to Dawn Winery after each successful undercover mission that they embark upon around Mondstadt, and Diluc starts to take dinner with him on the odd night that they both know they’ll be out. Kaeya comes to help Diluc with grape tastings whenever a new crop is ready for fermentation, and he falls over himself to try all of the new mixed drinks that Diluc comes up with—even the ones made explicitly to spite him.
Alone, Diluc finds out that Kaeya isn’t the same sort of drinking partner as he is at the bar, and he finds himself drinking with the other man far more than he originally expected he would. Long nights in front of Dawn Winery’s fireplace go from therapeutic to almost nostalgic, and they fall into a strange sort of comfortable, after that.
“I loved you, you know,” Kaeya tells him quietly one night, and there's the smell of alcohol on his breath as he smiles and leans in—“back when we were younger.”
“Did you?” Diluc replies, his own drink in hand, and he can feel his heart beat faster as he swallows nothing but saliva.
“Mm,” Kaeya replies, and his gaze is soft and singular as he continues smiling Diluc’s way. “I think you might have been my first love.”
Diluc's breath catches in his throat, yet he dares not tear his gaze away. The moment is slow and warm, and Diluc wets his lips, his voice hoarse as he finally gets out his reply.
“I think,” Diluc says, the words quiet, “that you might have been my first love, too.”
Kaeya’s eyes are bright as he turns back to the fire, a flush dusting his cheeks.
“I thought so,” Kaeya says, and Diluc looks back to the fire as well, one half-second later. “I'm happy to know I was right.”
Their fingers brush from where they sit next to each other on the couch, yet Diluc doesn’t pull his hand away, and—when he wakes up the next morning with a pounding headache and a glass of water on the table next to him—he realizes that neither did Kaeya.
- -
The weeks continue to pass, and Kaeya continues to come over as often as he can, ingredients for dinner and boxed sweets for dessert both in hand. Adelinde continues to put out baby’s breath alongside the rest of her flowers, and—after so many months coming to terms with their presence—Diluc finds himself used to them, now.
Kaeya’s presence, however, still feels as new and wonderful as it had been the first time Diluc had allowed him back at the Winery, and Diluc steps down the stairs one morning to find Kaeya standing below—a new vase of flowers before him. Small sprigs of baby’s breath are held lightly in his hands, and Diluc finds himself grinning wryly as he comes to stand next to the other man.
“Busy reminiscing again?” Diluc asks him, and Kaeya looks down at him for a moment, before laughing and shaking his head.
“Nothing so maudlin,” he replies, and Diluc raises an eyebrow, watching Kaeya twirl some of the flowers around between his fingertips. When Kaeya doesn’t continue, Diluc looks back to the vase, which is filled with Cecilias and Qingxin alongside the pure white of the ever-present baby’s breath.
It’s a bouquet made entirely of white petals and thin stems of green, and it makes the entire arrangement feel young... almost innocent.
Diluc takes a breath.
“You know,” Kaeya cuts in, and Diluc bites his tongue, looking up to see a thin smile spread carefully across Kaeya’s face. “I think you’d look pretty with baby’s breath in your hair—even now. Your face is still fairly youthful, and I bet your hair would still look good in braids.”
Kaeya continues to twirl the small sprig of baby’s breath in his hand, and Diluc stares up at him mutely—any thoughts of saying something heartfelt dying quickly after that.
“Aren’t you a little old for this?” Diluc asks him finally, feeling heat start to rise to his cheeks. However, he doesn’t stop Kaeya’s hand as he moves to brush hair from Diluc’s face, and Kaeya presses baby’s breath behind the shell of Diluc’s ear with a reverent sort of care.
Diluc blinks back at him afterward, watching Kaeya’s face shutter through a handful of expressions, and then Kaeya is moving to put another sprig behind his other ear, too.
His hands shake slightly, inches away from Diluc’s face, and Diluc watches him carefully, feeling something in his stomach flutter delicately at Kaeya’s strange, uncharacteristic hesitation.
Finally, Kaeya brushes his thumb against Diluc’s cheek—the rest of his hand curling into a small, loose fist—and Diluc digs his nails into the palm of his hands, willing himself not to ruin such a moment as fragile as this.
“It seems I was right again,” Kaeya tells him, his voice a low murmur, and there’s something so endless in the words as he says them. Diluc looks away. “You do look pretty.”
“And you flatter me,” Diluc replies, his voice quiet, “even more than you did, back then.”
“Things have changed since then,” Kaeya replies easily, with his hand still soft against the curve of Diluc’s cheek, “and so have we.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Diluc agrees, and Kaeya runs his fingers down Diluc’s jaw. Diluc stands—feels Kaeya’s fingers rest carefully around the small of his chin—and finds himself unable to do anything more than let him.
“May I kiss you, Diluc?” Kaeya finally asks, and Diluc nods small, one hand coming up to rest against Kaeya’s shoulder as Kaeya starts to lean in. The brush of lips is slow and chaste—everything like Diluc had imagined it would be as a child... yet different, all the same. Kaeya’s hands are sure as he tips Diluc’s face up to meet his, and Diluc breathes out against Kaeya’s lips, their breath intermingling as Kaeya slowly lets him go.
“I’ve wanted to do that for years,” Kaeya whispers then—like it’s a secret he’s held so close to his heart that he’d never imagined it would ever be released. “Gods, Diluc; gods—”
And Diluc stares back—his heart beating fast because he knows that Kaeya has, and he knows that he’s wanted to since the two of them were children, too—and slowly, with incessant, reverent care...
Diluc pulls Kaeya in, again.
- -
There’s something so fragile about first love. Especially, Diluc thinks, when it happens to be reciprocated in another. It’s strange to think that your affections might be so generously returned; yet so it is with Kaeya—strange, easy, and endlessly sincere.
“It’s a flower that stands for rebirth and reconnection,” Adelinde tells him later, when he asks after the meaning of baby’s breath and its relevance in their lives. “And,” she continues quietly, “for the innocence of young love.”
Diluc does not ask her how she knows—because of course, Adelinde knows—yet he smiles small and careful, and Adelinde beams back at him in a way that only a woman who has known them both since they were children ever could.
“All broken things can eventually be fixed,” she quotes to him then, and Diluc can feel his vision going blurry as she folds him into her embrace. “And I’m glad that the two of you finally managed to make things work.”
Diluc can do nothing more than nod—yet he thinks to himself, me too—for he knows there were many years when he wasn’t sure they would.
