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“You’re still here,” Diluc says without looking up as he replaces the last of the bottles beneath the Angel Share’s long bar.
“That I am,” Kaeya agrees and takes another sip of his wine. It’s late, the bar empty, Kaeya’s cape thrown limp as a skin over the barstool beside him. He’s not looking at Diluc as he drinks, instead propping his elbow on the bar and arranging himself parallel to the wood, staring onto the empty cavern of the barroom like he’s surveying for ghosts. Well, Diluc presumes he’s staring. In profile, facing Diluc’s right, Diluc can only see the eyepatch. Maybe Kaeya’s just falling asleep.
“No work for the Acting Grand Master tonight?” Diluc asks, though he feels resentful doing so. Kaeya’s funks aren’t his responsibility. Diluc just wants to wipe down that last damn glass (in Kayea’s hand) and go.
“No,” Kaeya murmurs, barely paying attention. “Nothing tonight. Mondstadt sleeps soundly.” He turns his head, enough to catch Diluc’s eye. “And no work for you?”
“Not once the last drunk in my bar finally clears out.”
Kaeya smiles sweetly. “No other work?”
“No,” Diluc says, short, and grabs a rag with which to polish the bar. It’s already polished. Kaeya should know better than to ask him about his other work.
“Smart planning, I think,” Kaeya muses. “Wet autumn night like this, anyone up on the roofs is liable to fall and break their neck before Barbatos even knows they’ve gone climbing.”
Diluc polishes the bar harder.
“Perhaps the Darknight Hero will invest in some cleats. Or crampons.”
Kaeya is in a mood tonight, to keep prodding. Good thing Diluc’s in a mood, too. He’s drowning in a mood, actually, been trying and failing all day to get above the surface of a mood. Rootless frustration weighs him down like marsh weed. “Drop it,” he says.
His sleeves are rolled up to the elbow, as they usually are when he tends bar. Kaeya’s eye is half-lidded, his smile as perfunctory as Diluc’s ever known it. His finger along the muscle of Diluc’s bare forearm has all the enthusiasm of a dry fuck. “Of course, our Hero has all the strength he needs—“
“At least put some effort into it,” Diluc snaps. “This is hardly worthy of your reputation.”
Kaeya’s hand withdraws. “My reputation.”
His tone crackles. It’s impersonal, disdainful, like Diluc is a stranger wasting his time, like Diluc is an idiot who doesn’t know his foot from his ass. He’s trying to warn Diluc off, as ably as they’ve ever been able to warn each other off anything.
Not Diluc, but Diluc’s day-long broil of bubbling anger, responds, “You think I don’t hear? Mondstadt’s famous cavalry captain. See how he rides.”
He’d been fishing for information on smuggled grave goods. The three Adventurer’s Guild drop-outs and all-around drunks had leered and leaned conspiratorially across the bar and provided him otherwise. Kaeya rears sharply back, eye as wide and open as a child’s.
“Excuse me?” he says.
Diluc doesn’t reply, snatching up his rag again and turning his back to Kaeya. He threw the ex-adventurers out as soon as they’d said their piece. He doesn’t trust the next thing that will come out of his mouth.
“What would, why would you listen to that—“ Kaeya fumbles behind him, “I put up with that dogshit because it’s useful for work, it’s not real. Diluc. Diluc.”
The rag twists in Diluc’s grip, unwilling to fake even the pretense of polishing. He makes the mistake of looking up and Kaeya stares back at him from the bar’s back mirror, his hands on the wood and half-rising from his stool.
“I told you,” Kaeya says, the desperation in his voice unfeigned. “I haven’t slept with anyone else in months.”
Diluc can’t keep looking in the mirror. He ducks his head, hunching his shoulders.
“Diluc, hey!”
“I heard you,” he grunts.
“And do you believe me?”
“I—” Diluc begins and then, brutally, cuts himself off. It doesn’t matter. Kaeya hears the rest anyways.
He stands, shoving the stool away, cracking it against its brothers. Frozen air billows off his hands. He gasps audibly for breath, struggling for each inhale. “Sometimes I can’t, I just can’t stand you,” Kaeya snarls. “You think nothing of me. You think,” another teetering breath, “you think I’m worse than shit. Every apology I’ve ever made you is sand, right? Everything I’ve ever,” another, “told you. I meant it, I meant it.” Diluc needs to do something, but he doesn’t. “I haven’t slept with anyone but you since the new year. It’s just you. And as you keep lowering yourself to dragging me home—”
He ran his finger down Diluc’s arm not five minutes ago. “Dragging you?” Diluc snaps, though there is no fraction of his conscious mind that considers this a good time for snapping. “You’re the one who keeps—”
“This entire thing has been on your terms,” Kaeya yells. He slams his hands to the bar and ice pops off the half-damp surface of the walnut like fizzling stars. A few more seconds of power and he’s going to crack the wood right down to the floor. “You started this. You dragged me into an alley and got your hands—” His breath is coming faster, uneven and staggering, a pony that’s not going to survive the last lap. “You started this and you keep starting this, you find me at the Knights or at the table in the corner and you drag me home whenever you’re angry, when you want to vent your frustrations, when you’re lonely and you miss me, you dumb bastard.”
“Kaeya,” Diluc says, stepping forward, trying to find a way through. It hasn’t been like this. Has it been like this?
“And as soon as all’s done and dusted you kick me out and pretend it never happened,” Kaeya sobs, not with tears just the heaving breath, neck hunching as his hair drops across his face and his fingers dig grooves in the frosted bar. “And then a week later you just start it all over again.”
He thought that was how Kaeya wanted it. He thought this was what Kaeya expected.
“Kaeya,” he says again, “Kaeya—”
“And all I have ever done in my life is sit here at this fucking bar and wait for you to come back!”
Diuc lunges forward. “Don’t fucking touch me,” Kaeya hisses. Diluc grabs his arm. Kaeya writhes like a snake, gets his hand around Diluc’s thumb and nearly breaks it in an incredibly dirty street hold before Diluc staggers back. Kaeya’s glass hits the floor and shatters. Shards of it wedge under Diluc’s boots.
“I’m sorry,” Diluc says, and then again, like a chant, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”