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It starts with a cliche: a raid on a Treasure Hoarder camp after weeks of meticulous planning. It becomes a two-person job when the Darknight Hero joins the fray, having scraped together enough intel to follow the same steps that had led Kaeya here tonight — more frequent the longer it’s been since Diluc’s return to Mondstadt, and less annoying these days than Kaeya would like to admit.
Less cliche: one of the Treasure Hoarders nicks Kaeya across the thigh with a strange-looking knife. There’s a flare of searing pain — far more than such a shallow wound has any right to bear — and then a creeping numbness that starts to spread over his entire leg.
He knows the poison that’s been used on him, can put a name and a face to it without having to think too far back into his notes; a man at the tavern the other day had talked about it at length, once Kaeya had plied him with enough drinks to erode the filter between his brain and his mouth. The numbness will be temporary, but it will spread. With a proper antidote, it will be localized to just his leg, and even that should wear off within half a day at most; left untreated, it’s likely he’ll be bedridden until the end of the week.
Either way, Kaeya’s going to be worse than useless for the remainder of this fight — so he hobbles over to the nearest tree while there’s still some feeling in his injured leg, and carefully lowers himself to the ground.
The fight rages on without him, and Diluc doesn’t cast a single glance his way. It’s the best possible outcome, for the turn tonight has taken — Kaeya’s injured, yes, but not so badly that it warrants immediate attention or concern; he’s managed to extract himself from the fight so that he doesn’t become a liability, and even if the Treasure Hoarders do break free from Diluc’s onslaught and come after him, he’s far from defenseless.
Technically, Diluc does not need Kaeya’s assistance with such fights — and so the fight ends seamlessly, even if it takes a bit longer than it would have had Kaeya fought at his side the entire time. Diluc makes his way over to the tree, lowers himself to his knees — and there’s no anger or irritation in his eyes, as he examines Kaeya’s injured leg.
“Poison?” he asks.
“Seems like it,” Kaeya replies, sighing.
In another lifetime, this would be where Diluc practically trips over himself with worry; in another, different lifetime, this would be where Diluc scoffs at Kaeya’s carelessness, deriding his sloppiness for falling prey to something he should have been able to avoid in his sleep.
But what Diluc does instead is: he takes Kaeya’s hand, pulls him to his feet — and does not complain when the numbness has spread to the extent that Kaeya cannot stand on his injured leg. He maneuvers Kaeya onto his back, waits until Kaeya’s grip on him is strong enough that he won’t slip off, and then starts walking towards Dawn Winery.
“This really isn’t worth the trouble, you know,” Kaeya whines, a bit exaggeratedly.
“You can’t even walk,” Diluc points out. “You live alone, right? Just how do you expect to treat this by yourself?”
“I have a room to myself,” says Kaeya, “in a building where lots of other people also live.”
“Right,” says Diluc. “And you expect me believe you’re going to head straight home and ask one of them for aid? Don’t make me laugh.” His expression is perfectly flat, unamused and nowhere close to laughter.
“So rude!” says Kaeya, lightly smacking him upside the head — which is all the confirmation Diluc should need, that he’s correct in his assessment.
The Winery’s lights are off, by the time they arrive, but when Diluc unlocks the front door, Adelinde is there, waiting — and when her gaze drifts to Kaeya, her expression melts into a warm, relieved smile that never fails to make something itch under his skin.
“I’m going to need that antidote I prepared last week,” says Diluc, brisk and perfunctory. “Not for me — for Kaeya.”
Like clockwork, her expression morphs into one of worry; Kaeya smacks Diluc once more for good measure.
“It—It’s really not as bad as it looks,” says Kaeya, sheepishly. “Occupational hazard, you see?”
Predictably, it’s not enough to convince Adelinde — and she wastes no time in instructing Diluc to carry him up to one of the spare rooms that the winery staff has refused to convert into a proper guest room for some reason, where he’ll no doubt be held captive until well after the poison leaves his system. He at least gets enough privacy to change into a pair of his old pajamas that someone had oh so conveniently forgotten to throw out or give away, even though he remains acutely aware that Diluc is just outside the door, listening for the slightest bit of difficulty.
The antidote that Adelinde brings him is disgustingly sour, as expected — but what comes after is a pair of steaming mugs with hot milk and honey, which she hands to him and Diluc with a smile that stretches far too wide across her face.
As she leaves them, shutting the door behind her, Diluc sinks into the chair at his bedside with a weary sigh. Tomorrow — or whenever he and Adelinde are satisfied that Kaeya is well enough to handle it — they’ll talk about tonight’s events. They’ll compare notes, discuss long-term strategy, maybe bring Rosaria into the conversation in hopes that she’ll have enough relevant information to fill in the gaps.
—but for now, they sit quietly in one of Kaeya’s childhood bedrooms, sipping on a drink that Diluc’s father used to make for them late at night, after a long day of grueling work. It’s comfortable, in all the ways it slides into a routine that, for all intents and purposes, should not exist.
It’s not like they’ve ever talked about it. It’s not like Kaeya had ever sat him down and explained why he’d kept his heritage a secret for so long or apologized for revealing it at such a terrible time; it’s not like Diluc had ever apologized for the burn scars running up and down Kaeya’s arms, and emblazoned across the eye that he’d always kept covered before. And yet, it’s normal in all the ways it shouldn’t be, after a fight so horrific that the gods themselves had to intervene before the damage could become irreparable.
“Do you ever get the feeling,” says Kaeya, “that we might be doing this wrong?”
“’Wrong’ how?” asks Diluc, without missing a beat.
In all of those little dramas that he and Lisa sometimes like to read during slow periods at the knights’ headquarters, there’s a certain way things are done. The lines between people are clear, unmistakable; the heroes’ goodness is unquestionable, and the villains’ wrongdoings are uncomplicated in their simplicity. Every insult can be explained; every hurt inflicted, apologized for; every wound, healed.
Someone like Kaeya’s father, in those stories, would be every bit the monster that Diluc had always believed him to be, for abandoning his young son in a foreign land, in the rain; someone like Master Crepus, in those stories, would be every bit the saint that Kaeya was told he would be, for oh so generously welcoming a poor, drenched urchin into his home and calling him family.
If this were one of those stories, perhaps Diluc would be angrier for the secrets that Kaeya had kept from him and then revealed at the worst possible moment; perhaps Kaeya would be more bitter, for all that Diluc had taken from him in a prolonged moment of anger and pettiness.
“Do you ever think it should be…” says Kaeya. “… I don’t know — harder than this?”
If this were one of those stories, all it would take is a simple, yet difficult conversation — an admission of wrongdoing, an apology, all of those years-old hurts evaporating into dust as the two of them march ahead, whatever notions of love or friendship or brotherhood that had once existed between them reforged into something stronger — something unbreakable.
—but the truth is: this isn’t one of those stories. What exists between them has never been quite so simple.
In this world, Kaeya’s father had held onto him, fiercely, until there was no other option but to let him go; in this world, Master Crepus had smiled just as gently, talked just as nicely to his manor staff as he did to his business contacts in the Fatui.
In this world, it’s not just that one day, four years ago, that’s colored by conflict. It’s all of those little fights over the years, so frequent and unremarkable that they’ve been smoothed over in Kaeya’s memory as an indistinct blur — snide comments for which Diluc retaliated with a punch; cruel, barbed words from Kaeya aimed to burrow under Diluc’s skin; brawls in the mud, amidst the trellises, started over nothing but the most pathetic of insults hurled in moments of pettiness and irritation.
It’s all of the times that Diluc had yelled at him, hurt that no matter how kind the Ragnvindrs had been to him, no matter how much they’d given him, Kaeya could never bring himself to call Diluc’s father anything but Master Crepus. It’s all of the times that Kaeya had had to bite his tongue because Diluc had said something so casually careless, so casually insulting to people he would have never considered worth his notice, and explaining to him why it was wrong promised to be a far more grueling ordeal than simply ignoring it altogether.
Diluc hums, staring at the contents of his mug. “I don’t know,” he says, quietly. “Do you want it to be harder?”
“Do you?” Kaeya retorts.
For a long moment, Diluc is silent. He sits with his shoulders hunched forward, his hands cupped so gently around the mug that it’s as if nothing had gone wrong in the first place. “I think,” he says, “when a bone breaks and nobody sets it, one of two things can happen: it does not heal at all, remaining broken forever...” His gaze drifts upward, softening as it settles on Kaeya. “… or it does heal eventually, even though it takes longer than it ought to.”
Kaeya smiles, wryly. “And what do you suppose happened here, then?”
Diluc sighs, and takes a long sip from his mug. “You and I,” he says, “willingly fought together to bring down a Treasure Hoarder camp. It’s not the first time we’ve done so, and I reckon it won’t be the last. You were injured, so I brought you here so that you’d have a quiet place to rest while you heal; I’d like to think you’d do the same for me. Does that sound broken to you?”
… no, not particularly. It’s different than how it used to be, sure — but they themselves are not the same. That, in itself, isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Diluc smiles, and it’s far gentler than anything Kaeya has seen from him in a long, long time. “I rest my case.”