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Not for the first time, Jean wonders why bureaucrats can’t just say what they mean. The report she’s wading through, from some Snezhnayan diplomat, is full of big words like confluence and hereinbefore and in pari delicto that, as far as Jean can tell, mean absolutely nothing. She knows what these words mean on their own, but they all start sounding a little bit muddled when they’re strung together like sausages in a chain. Usually Kaeya helps her decipher reports like these, his puzzle-loving mind easily parsing the meaning behind these hieroglyphs. When they’re alone late at night, he teases her about being too honest to understand crooks—but he always helps anyway.
Today, though, Kaeya is off on some… mission, or something. Jean thinks it’s something to do with the recent spate of Treasure Hoarder activity around Mondstadt, but he never actually tells her anything about his excursions until they’re over. “I’ll only be gone a few days, Jean,” he’d said a few mornings ago, pulling on his jacket and kissing her goodbye. “Just a routine check-up. Nothing to worry about.” Jean, who’s loved him for long enough to tell when he’s lying, had tugged him back by his collar and ordered him to come home in one piece, or else, Kaeya Alberich. He’d smiled, the twist of his mouth betraying his affection, and asked, “Do you trust me?” And Jean does trust him, gods help her. So she’d let him go. (And if she’s dropped by the Cathedral every day since then to say an extra prayer for his safety, that’s between her and Barbatos.)
The text of the report is starting to swim before her eyes, so Jean puts her head down on her desk and thinks about screaming. She dismisses the idea a bit sadly when she realizes that Wyratt would probably assume the worst and sound the alarm, and then she’d have to explain to the whole Knight corps that the legendary Lionfang Knight had been bested by a bit of legalese.
Still. Surely they can’t begrudge her a little break. It’s late afternoon. She’s been trudging through the drifts of paperwork on her desk since morning, and her brain is mushy. Lisa is always telling her to take more breaks—maybe Jean should start listening.
She stands up from her desk, stretching and hearing her back pop. Gods, she must be getting old. Walking over to the bookshelf, she finds Vera’s Melancholy in its familiar place on the shelf. It leaves a trail in the thin layer of dust as she pulls it off the shelf, as if to proclaim to the world that a specific high-profile Knight prefers romance novels to the more literary or politically useful tomes on the shelf. It’s not that Jean is ashamed of her reading habits, necessarily—she loves love, no matter what anyone else thinks about it, and she deserves to unwind. But she still wipes the rest of the dust off the shelf with her sleeve to obscure the incriminating trail. And then she wipes the shelves to either side, just for good measure.
Jean sinks onto the couch, tugging her boots off with some effort and pulling her legs up in front of her. She lies back, head on the cushion next to the arm of the couch, opens her book and sighs contentedly. Her eyes skim the first, ever-so-familiar lines: “There are times when I think to myself... There's nothing to do in this tiny village. What a dull place to live.” For a few blissful minutes, Jean loses herself in the story.
Then a loud knock sounds at the door. “Jean?” Kaeya’s voice is muffled by the door, but Jean would recognize it anywhere. “Are you free?”
“Kaeya!” she exclaims, shutting her book and sitting up. “You’re back! Come in!”
The door swings open and Kaeya strides in, letting the door thud closed behind him. His gaze goes to her desk first, then sweeps the room from left to right when he doesn’t find her in her usual seat. It only takes him a split second, but he’s not the only experienced fighter in the room—Jean takes one look at him and unease spikes in her stomach. Something is wrong about the way he’s carrying himself. The set of his jaw is too tense, his shoulders too stiff.
His eye lands on Jean at last, and some of the tension goes out of his posture. He tips his head to one side and gives her a fond, tired smile.
Jean doesn’t say anything, only holds her arms out to him in invitation. She knows her concern is written on her face, the same way his exhaustion is written on his. They don’t try to hide anything from each other anymore. It would be a futile effort; they know each other too well. So she doesn’t need to say he looks like hell, and he doesn’t need to say he knows. He just walks over to her, bends over and buries his face in the crook of her neck. She wraps her arms around him and rubs circles into his back, and feels his arms snake around her waist in return. It’s not the most comfortable hug—he’s bent over weirdly and Jean is reaching up way too high, curse his long legs—but they stay like that for the space of a few breaths.
Eventually Kaeya pulls away, dropping onto the couch. He slumps into Jean as she lies back again, slotting his body between her outstretched legs and pressing his cheek to her collarbone, arms coming to wrap around her waist. The couch is too short and narrow for him to spread out properly, so he’s sort of splayed out on his stomach on top of her with his shins resting on the couch’s other arm. But he looks comfortable, which is good enough for Jean.
Jean wants to ask what went wrong, whether he’s okay. But she knows he’d have told her if he needed anything urgently. So she holds her tongue.
Ever so carefully, she reaches out to stroke his head. They’ve been together for a while now, but Kaeya can still get jumpy sometimes when she touches him without warning—and then he feels guilty about getting jumpy, and then he beats himself up for feeling guilty, and then he disappears for a few days and reappears pretending nothing is wrong. He’s gotten better in the last year or so, but he’s still working through it. Jean doesn’t mind. She’ll never ask him for more than he can give.
She raises her left hand slowly so he can see it from where his face is turned. He doesn’t move, so she places it gently on the top of his head. Kaeya draws in a deep inhale and then releases it as a sigh. The stiff set of his shoulders eases a little, which Jean takes as a good sign. She cards her fingers through his hair, tugging gently when she encounters tangles. Undoing the ribbon that keeps his ponytail in place, she watches as his hair spills out over his back. She runs both her hands through it again, feeling the weight of the deep blue strands as she combs it with her fingers. Her nails scratch his scalp gently and Kaeya hums with pleasure, so she does it again, massaging in rhythmic circles. His constellation is a peacock, flashy and proud, but most days Kaeya reminds her of nothing so much as a cat. The way he arches his back when he stretches, the way he tips his face up to the sun when he walks out of a dark building. The way he groans, low in his throat, when she scratches his scalp like she’s doing now. Sometimes he even shoves papers off her desk if she’s not paying enough attention to him, feigning innocence when she scolds him, although he always helps her clean up afterwards.
She slides her right hand over his scalp and down to the nape of his neck, resting it there, not squeezing, only letting the pressure sink into his skin—as if by doing so she can keep him inside his body, stop his mind from wandering off to wherever it goes when he gets that faraway look in his eye. Stay with me. With her other hand, she sweeps his hair to her right to keep it off his face. It catches the late-afternoon light filtering through the windows, turns into a mass of blue and gold ripples, like the blazing waves that spread out beneath Cape Oath at sunset.
Kaeya takes a long breath, body rising and falling in time with it. Jean can’t see his face, but she leans down to press a close-mouthed kiss to the crown of his head. He smells like sweat and dirt and a hint of rust. Jean is pretty sure he’s not injured—he’d have told her if it was serious enough to leave him smelling like blood. But she sends her healing energy over his body anyway, just to be sure. It stretches over his skin like an extension of Jean herself, leaving a Kaeya-shaped imprint in her mind’s eye. He feels it blanket his body like sunshine on a chilly day—of course he does, he’s almost as familiar with her powers as he is with his own, seeing as she’s always patching him up after some escapade or other. Jean feels more than hears him huff out a laugh, breath ghosting over her chest. “I’m not hurt, Jean,” he says quietly, achingly fond. “It’s not my blood.”
Jean hums in acknowledgement, having come to much the same conclusion herself. She’ll ask him later whose blood it actually is. Her left hand returns to his head, scratching gently, the light from the window glinting off her ring. They stay like that for a long time, breaths syncing up so that their chests rise and fall together. They’re pressed so closely together that Jean thinks she can feel his heart beat—or maybe that’s just the echo of her own heart, keeping time in her chest. She closes her eyes. She hears the thud of boots on cobblestones; the guard outside the Knights Headquarters must be changing. Athos and Porthos exchange greetings, their voices recognizable but too muffled to hear clearly. The Cathedral bells toll deep, almost mournful. Jean thinks she could stay in this moment forever.
Finally, Kaeya stirs. He turns his face up towards hers, propping his chin up on Jean’s sternum as she opens her eyes and lets her left hand fall to the couch. Up close, she can see the fatigue etched into his face, the dark circle under his left eye, the smear of mud on his cheekbone. But he looks at her like she’s the only person in the world.
“Hi,” he murmurs.
“Hi,” she returns, just as quietly. Her right hand comes up to cup his face, rubbing ineffectually at the mud there. “You’ve got a little… something…”
Kaeya chuckles and turns his head to brush a kiss over her palm. “Leave it, Jean.”
She pouts, but lets her hand drop. Then she tips her head to the side and watches him watching her, his gaze roaming her face like he’s trying to commit its shape to memory, sear the line of her nose and the bow of her lips into his consciousness. He does this sometimes when he thinks she’s not looking, propping himself up on one elbow as she drifts off to sleep or sneaking glances at her during a boring meeting. But he’s never done it quite so openly, so brazenly, like stolen glimpses aren’t enough to satisfy him any longer. Jean lets him do it; she’s in no hurry to force this moment to its close.
Eventually he turns his gaze back out to the room and returns his head to its original position, cheek on her collarbone. He’s a lot less tense than he was earlier, so Jean takes the opportunity to ask him, “What happened out there, Kaeya?”
He sighs like he’s been expecting the question. Jean almost regrets it, but she knows from long experience that he won’t tell her if she doesn’t ask, and she needs to know if he’s okay.
“One of the Treasure Hoarders has been making trouble lately,” he starts, slowly, gaze still fixed on the bookshelves across the room. “They’re always making trouble, but this guy… more than the rest.” Jean makes a little “mm” noise to let him know she’s listening. “Vile and I had figured out a way to neutralize the threat and scare the others into line. But I hadn’t…”
He slows, sighs. “It was my fault, really. I should have asked Eula if Recon already had someone on it. But you know I don’t play well with others.”
Jean does know this, but she’s not about to let him beat himself up. Instead she puts a hand on his back and rubs circles with her thumb. Kaeya’s arms tighten around her waist.
He continues, “Anyway, I get there and camp out, put the plan into motion, start a couple rumours, scare a couple scouts. And I’m about to finish up with the pièce de résistance and take the troublemaker hostage when some of the Hoarders drag Mika in—you know, that kid from Recon.”
Jean nods, realizes he can’t see her, and makes a “hmm” noise again.
“Looking back, I’m pretty sure he could have handled it himself. Mika’s a decent fighter and the Treasure Hoarders are petty thieves, not a militia. But… I was worried,” Kaeya admits quietly, almost reluctantly, like he thinks Jean will judge him for it. “So I say screw the plan, run in, eliminate a bunch of them. But the guy I was aiming for got away. And in the chaos, Mika… got hurt. Pretty bad. He took it like a champ, but. You don’t walk away from an injury like that without a scar.”
Kaeya’s voice is tight, guilty. Jean wants so badly to lift the weight of the world off his shoulders, wrap him up, keep him from blaming himself for everything. But she can’t. So she just presses her hand hard into the space between his shoulder blades and lets him keep talking.
“I would have gone after the troublemaker if I’d been alone, but I couldn’t leave Mika. So I dragged him back to Mondstadt with me and dropped him off at the Cathedral. And then I came to find you.” Kaeya takes a deep breath, lets it out slowly. “I couldn’t neutralize the problem, Jean. And I got Mika injured to boot. I didn’t– He wasn’t– This isn’t how it was supposed to go.”
“You did the right thing,” Jean says, emphatically, rubbing his back like she can make his body absorb her words. “You did your best.”
Kaeya laughs bitterly. “And it wasn’t enough.”
This isn’t a side of Kaeya that everyone gets to see. Most see him as charming and laid-back, even irresponsible. Difficult as it is to see him blame himself like this, Jean considers herself privileged to be the person who sees all of him, frustrations included. “I’m sorry, Kaeya,” she says. “But I trust you made the right choices. It’s just how the job goes, sometimes—not every mission can be a success. I don’t blame you for any of it. Okay?”
Kaeya heaves a long sigh, but his back relaxes just the tiniest bit. “Okay,” he whispers. For now, that’s enough for Jean.
(She’ll reiterate her affirmation before they go to bed tonight, and again in the morning. She will hug him tight like her touch can keep the nightmares away. She will tell him he is worthy of love and make him repeat after her, over and over and over again. As many times as he needs it. He’d do the same for her.)
The street lamps turn on outside the window, throwing flickering firelight into the room. It must be later than Jean realized. Kaeya shifts, turns his face towards hers. She smiles at him. “Wanna get dinner?” she asks. “We could grab something from Good Hunter.”
He hums. “Sure,” he says quietly, and she’s relieved to hear some of his usual lightness come back into his voice. “But… can we stay like this for now? Just a little longer.”
Jean cups his face in her hands. “We can stay for as long as you want.”