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“A entire realm encapsulated in a bottle? That’s quite the tall tale, Master Kaeya.”
“I’m being entirely serious,” he says, the pout entirely audible in his tone. “Does this really sound like the sort of thing I would lie about?”
Adelinde folds the cape of his new ensemble over one arm as she looks back at him. He’s turned away from the mirror, hands on his hips, chest still bare because for some reason he hasn’t yet made a move to put the vest on. There are scars across it, along his back, too – some faded, some less so. Some old, some that she can recall the stories of with perfect clarity, and some she doesn’t recognise, some whose stories she’s too cowardly to inquire into.
All proof that he’s survived.
“I suppose not,” she says with a sigh that slips into a smile, walking over to join him at his side. “Your lies are usually more believable than that.”
“I thought as much,” he says, and the pout fades, as quickly as it had appeared, into a mirroring smile.
She sets the cape down on the nearby table and picks up the vest, since it seems Kaeya isn’t interested in putting it on himself any time soon, too busy fussing with the elastic waistband of his trousers. “Arms up, young master,” she says with another sigh, and holds the vest over his head.
“I’m not a young master anymore,” he shoots back without missing a beat – or tries to, at least, but it’s muffled by black cotton sliding over his mouth and down to his torso. It’s a distressingly tight fit.
“Only young masters need help putting their undergarments on.” She pulls up and smooths out the high collar, running the pads of her fingers over the thin bands of gold now encircling his neck, down to the bright sapphire resting upon his sternum. Cold to the touch. “Though somehow I recall you being much more independent as a child.”
In the time it used to take to get Diluc changed, Kaeya would have slipped into his own clothes like a knife into its sheath. He would stay as far away as possible, in the shadows of their once-shared bedroom, so that she would not see if his buttons were done out of order, if the hems and cuffs and collars were in disarray, if his hair was tangled or if his eyepatch’s string was on the verge of coming undone. And when she would inevitably move closer, kneel before him, and fix his outfit piece by piece, he would stay frozen in place like the ice flowers that line the river south of the winery. He would not breathe until she’d let him go. Even after she learned her lesson and began keeping her hands to herself in favour of instructing him step by whispered step, it was only when she looked away in the end that his breathing would even out.
Now she can stand close enough for her breaths alone to rearrange his hair. She can place her warm hands on his ever-cool skin, and he will not flinch.
Independence was a virtue Crepus always extolled. What would he say if he could see this now?
She breathes out once more, and decides – perhaps too quickly – that it doesn’t matter.
Kaeya’s own fingers reach up to the sapphire, dancing around hers across its elegantly cut and polished facets while he smirks down at her. “Somehow I recall you lamenting that I don’t grant you enough opportunities to spoil me. Does this not suffice?”
She turns away to find the jacket, laid out in all its brocaded glory on the table. “Tell me more about this bottle, then. It sounds like quite the adventure.”
“Did Klee not already regale you with the whole tale? She hasn’t been able to stop talking about it since we returned. And poor Noelle’s been stuck with more laundry than usual, having to take care of her little mage costume every single day, seeing as she refuses to go anywhere without it.”
“I’d like to hear it from you, Master Kaeya.”
He blinks, but indulges her without further ado. He’s had years of practice telling stories – it was one of the first talents he’d given up on suppressing, and now he’s a far cry from the silent child he once tried to be. A skilled weaver, dressing his loom with the threads of fates yet unseen, pulling them together into showstopping, breathtaking tapestries to hide behind when the curtain falls.
Who did he learn all that from?
Adelinde’s skills begin and end at basic stitches. Darning those tapestries when a fire burns through them. Patching up the holes before anyone can notice they were there in the first place.
So as she picks up that jacket and drapes it over his shoulders, she lets the words pouring out from his lips like spun silk drape over her consciousness and carry her along. He paints for her the desert cliffs and rainforest valleys that he had traversed with the aid of friends old and new, the dreamland sustained by wishes and whimsy – and he tells her the story within the story, of the lone bandit searching for a singular light, the last hope of his people.
It’s here that his weaving stutters, the threads splitting and fraying beneath his fingers, though he attempts to push on regardless without rest – so she pulls him back from the loom with a light hand on his shoulder, and lifts one of his arms to thread it through the jacket’s sleeve.
“Such a lonely character,” she says, pinching at the chiffon to gather it into artful pleats along his forearm, tousling the ruffled silk around his wrist.
“The bandit?” A choked sort of laugh escapes him. He flexes his hand, the sunlight cast on his painted nails turning them half-white, half-black. Waning moons against a night sky. “He had his mission to focus on. He didn’t have time to feel lonely.”
“Even if he refused to accept that he was lonely, it wouldn’t change the fact that he was.” She takes his hand and feels out the faint divots left on his fingers by the opulent rings that accompany this costume. “Going to such extremes to save his people, all while they thought of him as some dishonourable bandit. No one should have to go through that alone.”
“He’s just a fictional character, Addie.”
“Of course.” Her hand reluctantly falls away from his, and then she moves to pull the other half of his jacket on, holding that ever-growing lovelock up and out of the way as he shrugs into it before reluctantly letting that fall too. “But after hearing his story, I can’t help but be reminded of a certain someone.”
A heartbeat of anticipatory silence. “And who might that be?”
“I think you already know.”
“Not sure how well Diluc will take being compared to a bandit,” Kaeya answers before the next heartbeat can pass. “But I suppose I can see it. Scion of the Ragnvindrs, bearer of the old man’s legacy – a lonely place indeed, that pedestal. Going to such extremes to protect his beloved city under the guise of some unruly vigilante. Yes, I see it.” One of Kaeya’s hands clenches into a fist. “But Diluc himself is the light – he wouldn’t need to go searching for one.”
There he goes, weaving again. Restless hands, fidgeting fingers, always searching for a new thread to pull at. But his mistake is assuming that his art alone is enough to capture her attention after all this time. She has long since trained herself to ignore the hypnotising dance of the threads as he draws them into the warps and wefts of increasingly elaborate patterns. Her eyes know better now than to stray from the man behind the loom.
“Can you imagine if he really was like the bandit, and he brought a girl back to live with him, happily ever after?” Kaeya goes on, for if the loom goes still, what will be left to mask his trembling hands? “But that’s impossible, of course. His utter dullness would outshine any roguish bandit charm. He wouldn’t even be able to convince a stray cat to come home with him, let alone a girl.”
Every pattern, these days, no matter how it begins – the same blood-red, red-hot threads always work their way into it by the end. The tapestry reflects its creator, and this creator lived in the shadow of that firelight for too long to reflect any other kind of light, not even his own. He is learning, these days. But the seams of formative years in the fabric of a lifetime are not so easily unpicked. And the creator and his light are so intimately intertwined that they form a tapestry all of their own – Diluc the warp, Kaeya the weft–
And the weaver, these days, of those precious, priceless threads: grief.
There’s still plenty of pieces of the outfit left on the table: three curved and gem-encrusted daggers, the jewellery and accessories for his hair, the eyepatch and the Vision, the cape with its lush feathery collar, and the sash belt with its golden frame.
There’s still time.
The belt is lighter than it looks, sapphire satin shimmering in the sunlight as she picks it up, sparkling like the sea as she wraps it around his waist while he smooths out the jacket and holds it in place.
“That’s the purpose of this costume, is it?” She clasps it in the front, listening for the soft click of gold into gold, then circles round to the back to arrange the folds in a manner befitting of such an luxurious garment. Her fingers graze along the small of his back, inexplicably left exposed, and pause there. “To catch a woman’s eye?”
“I hardly need a costume for that. And what would be the point? As if any woman could compare to you.” He grins toothily at her in the mirror, his lone eye squinting until it’s nearly shut. “Maybe Diluc’s onto something for once, acting the way he does. Charmless bastard.”
“Language, Master Kaeya.”
“Oh, come on. That wasn’t even that bad.”
“If you think flattering me will give you free rein to insult your brother behind his back, you are sorely mistaken.”
“Who said it was flattery? And alright then, I’ll insult him to his face instead. Would that please you?”
She presses her lips tightly together. Looks at the man behind the loom. Hidden behind such a flamboyant facade that would fool anyone into thinking he had nothing to hide, that he’d already put all of himself on display – hidden to all but those sacred few who know him too well to fall for the same trick twice.
“You needn’t try so hard,” she says, running her fingers through his long navy lovelock as she moves back around to his front, to look him in the eye instead of in the reflection, “to paint yourself as the polar opposite of your brother. It only calls all the more attention to your similarities, of which there are many.” She keeps his hair entwined in her fingers. “You needn’t force more distance between yourselves than there already is.”
Kaeya looks away, the star of his eye flickering in the diffuse light, and murmurs under his breath, “It’s not like being close is any better for us.”
There’s still plenty of pieces of the outfit left on the table: two curved and gem-encrusted daggers, the jewellery and accessories for his hair, the eyepatch and the Vision, and the cape with its lush feathery collar.
“If you really believed that,” she says, gathering the cape into her arms, “you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“Maybe I don’t want what’s best for him.”
The webs he weaves around himself are so thick and dense, the threads themselves so mired in myths of his own making that he can’t see through to the other side – can’t see what the rest of them see whenever they look back at him.
The cape is heavier than it looks, golden tassels swaying like church bells from the ends of the two-toned silk, the strikingly-coloured feathers over the fur collar trapped by their own weight, a bird kept from flying.
“Your lies,” she says, lifting his hair out of the way once more as she arranges the fur and feathers around his neck, “are usually more believable than that.”
Kaeya holds his hair out of the way for her, holds his breath when her hand brushes over his exposed neck, breathes out again when she pins the cape in place upon his shoulder and lets go. He steps away with a flourish, twirling enough to send his cape flying out behind him, whipping back and forth in a momentary breeze. A second later he’s tossing his hair over his shoulder and whipping up another breeze, lifting his chin to grin down at her all the more impishly, silently burying whatever unease had arisen between them just now – begging her to let it stay buried.
“For a prototype costume designed for such a hastily-written play, it really is quite dramatic, isn’t it?” Kaeya says, shifting his weight from one leg to the other as he turns this way and that, keeping the cape fluttering behind him. The elegantly-arranged folds of silk dance perfectly in time with each other, mesmerising.
“Indeed,” she concurs, nudging him away from the table and back towards the mirror. “I suppose something this elaborate could only have been conjured up so quickly in a dreamland like the one you described.”
“You still didn’t believe me?”
“Believing you does nothing to make the story any less incredulous,” she says, chuckling to herself. “I certainly wouldn’t believe a story like this if anyone else had told it.”
She’d thought the lightness of her tone would be enough to dispel that unease for good, but Kaeya goes eerily still for a millisecond before the illusion shatters. “You shouldn’t tell people things like that. They could so easily decide to wield that trust against you.”
She holds him by the shoulders, then lets her hands slip down to his upper arms instead, using that gentle pressure to guide him to stand a little straighter. “You have always known how much I trust you.” To do the right thing, to protect your family, to be good. “If you wanted to use that against me, I daresay you would’ve done it by now.”
“Perhaps I already have, and you simply haven’t realised it yet–”
“Master Kaeya.” Her voice takes on the sharpness of a blade. “That’s quite enough of that.”
He winces in her hold, as if she’d pressed that blade right against the nape of his neck. She steadies her breathing, but holds him tighter.
Even when he’s standing right in front of her, letting her see him at his most vulnerable – even now, after all this time, he’s still so desperate to be pushed away. Even now, he doesn’t see that she could never in a million lifetimes even think of doing such a thing, let alone follow through on it.
Whatever it is he uses to blind himself to these simple truths, she would tear it to shreds in an instant if she could only see it herself. But even now, after all this time, she’s fumbling about in the tangled mess of their relationship as blindly as he is.
The pleated fabric of his sleeves is wrinkling in her crushing grip. She breathes out slowly, and lets him go.
“Master Kaeya,” she starts, softer, sheathing the blade, “is something the matter?”
Not quite a wince, this time, but it’s enough for her to notice, and surely he must realise that as well. “No,” he says regardless, adamantly clinging to some hollow, fragmented pride (just like his father, so much like his father).
There’s still plenty of pieces of the outfit left on the table: the curved and gem-encrusted dagger, the jewellery and accessories for his hair, the eyepatch and the Vision.
There’s still time to make this lovely, foolish boy of hers see sense.
“Then, pray tell, what is the meaning” – and now she drops her own pretence, and slips one hand into the side of his jacket right by his waist, the other hand under the belt right by his hip, to pull out the two missing daggers – “of this?”
He at least has the sense to look surprised for a moment, eyebrows rising and eye widening just a fraction, before smoothing out the shock into a charming smile. “When did you notice?”
She spins both daggers around her fingers in quick succession – they’re heavier than the little knife currently hidden under her sleeve, a cold kiss against her forearm, but she manages. A bud of satisfaction blooms in her chest as Kaeya’s eye follows the movements with hawk-like precision. Then she tucks one of them under her belt against the small of her back, and the other under her empty sleeve in even quicker succession.
“From the start, of course. Did you really think I wouldn’t notice what was happening right in front of me? With daggers as ostentatious as these, no less?”
“Hiding in plain sight works more often than you might think.”
She divests herself of the daggers with a huff, setting them back on the table where they belong. “Your misdirections are wasted on me, young master. I thought you would’ve realised that by now.”
“I guess you’re right. You’re the master of misdirection, aren’t you?”
Her eyes sharpen just like her voice had moments ago, against her will.
“I was only practising what you taught me,” he says with a shrug, the cape fluttering behind him once more. He tilts his head and his smile tilts with it, like it isn’t sure where to go, where it belongs. “Aren’t you proud?”
Back then, I didn’t have a choice.
When faced with a boy who would sooner cut into his own palms than relinquish the knife, who would simply sneak out two more when one was taken until he had a whole hoard of them stashed beneath his pillow in the once-shared bedroom–
When faced with that, what else should she have done, if not teach him how to use them safely?
He was a quick learner. Desperately quick. So she’d taught him, in the silence of a sleeping manor, how best to handle those too-important knives and how to hide them on his person, so that he might always feel some modicum of safety and security – so that he might feel what any seven-year-old boy should feel in the company of his brother and father, under an unshakeable roof, in front of an inextinguishable hearth–
How could she have denied him that?
The look in his eye when she’d found him the first time, trying to bandage his self-inflicted wounds after a careless slip of a blade, when she’d tried to take the knife and tell him how dangerous it was – that look haunts her to this day.
The spectre of it is there now, looming over his reflection, washing out the bright star of his eye until it’s dark as the moon on a clouded night.
She hadn’t wanted to set him on the same path as her. But when the alternative was him withdrawing from her, from all of them, hiding knives upon knives and scars upon scars, hiding behind shadowy curtains woven from fears she would never fathom–
There hadn’t been any other choice.
“You have a sword.” She gestures to the table, with all the accessories still scattered across it. “A Vision.” She picks it up, cradling its coldness for a heartbeat before clipping it to his back. Her hand settles on his shoulder for the umpteenth time that morning, and she fixes him with as stern a look as she can muster without forgoing the necessary gentleness. “The authority of a captain, and fighting prowess matched only by your brother.” A smile only a few can discern from your masks, and a mind none of us can keep up with. “What need have you of more hidden weapons?”
“Well, the bandit in the story” – he grabs one of the daggers without looking at it – “should take these out from their hiding places at the climactic moment, I think. To catch everyone off guard.” He unsheathes it, traces his finger along the curved, glittering edge – surprisingly sharp, for an alleged prop – then smiles with the same curve on his lips. “In that moment, no one will know whether to trust him or not. It’s his next action that will decide everything. Audiences are suckers for that kind of suspense, aren’t they?”
“He was the hero of the story, was he not? Would the audience really have any doubts?”
“That’s what makes the twist all the more intense.” He spins the dagger in a perfect circle, mirroring her movement from earlier. “The story could use a bit of revising beyond the first draft. You know, to really maximise the dramatic impact. Making the audience question where their loyalties lie – that’s what keeps them coming back for more.”
She prises the dagger from his hands and presses it back into the sheath, then affixes it to his back, just below the waist. “Master Kaeya, you do not need to test my loyalty.”
“…I know.” There’s that choked laugh again. “You’ve been too loyal to me from the start.”
And there it is – that deceptive lightness in his words, counterbalancing the weight he’s dragging out from the depths of their pasts into the sun after all these years–
“I’ve never understood why.”
They’ve never talked about it in all that time – an eternally unspoken understanding–
But that’s the problem, isn’t it? That they never speak about these things, that they see each other only through the infinitesimal spaces between stitches in an ever-thickening tapestry. That neglect is why he’s here, still weaving those old lies around himself until they suffocate him–
“I mean, didn’t it feel wrong, harbouring a cold-blooded murderer right under your master’s nose?”
Everything about that night was wrong.
The corpse on the floor of the once-shared bedroom. Masked, fur-clad, bleeding out all over the floor she’d polished just that morning. One gloved hand bearing a blood-red gem and a pitch-black, four-pointed insignia. Bleeding, bleeding, bleeding.
Diluc, fast asleep. Kaeya, wide awake, bloodied knife in shaking hand, shivering. A pale, moonlit face and a solitary, starlit eye, silver like steel and devoid of tears.
The night she’d finally learned why he clung so fiercely to those knives.
He’d been on the same path as her long before they met, and all she’d done was rein him in, pull him back by a single thread, keep him from drifting too far into the dark and out of her reach.
She pulls on that thread now, steeling her voice and clenching one fist as she looks up into his eye, forever in flux between light and shadow. “It wasn’t murder. It was protection.”
Kaeya hums, the dagger-like smile still dancing on his lips. “It has to be one or the other, doesn’t it? Like a bandit can never be a knight, a murderer can never be a protector.”
It’s too cold, even in the sunlight. Kaeya’s Vision glows serenely as ever. This particular cold has a different, unnameable source.
“You didn’t hesitate for a single moment back then,” he says. “You took care of everything, no questions asked.”
Patching up the holes before anyone can notice they were there in the first place.
She looks down and unclenches her fist, busies her hands with smoothing out her apron. “A maid who can’t clean up her master’s messes can hardly be called a maid at all, now can she?”
“Like Moco or Hillie would’ve done the same in your shoes,” he says, and laughs, bitter. “At least, not with the same efficiency. Not without letting rumours spread – but no one’s ever said a word about it since. You never did tell me how you managed that.”
She looks him up and down, all dressed in sapphire and gold finery, and clears her throat. “Step one: have the hand that conducts the nation’s economy at your back.”
Kaeya hums again, but it’s lighter this time. Reassuring rather than deceptive. “Ah, so you did tell Father. I always wondered. Never worked up the courage to ask him myself.”
“No secrets can be kept from the master in the master’s house,” she says quietly.
“I’m sure that’s what he liked to tell himself, yes.” Kaeya looks away. “Here I was, thinking he would’ve thrown me straight back out in the rain again if he knew. What a surprise.”
Anyone who knows Kaeya well enough knows that his sarcasm is never to be taken lightly. “You did what you had to, Master Kaeya. You are no less honourable for it. We were grateful for it.”
“Then why did we all keep it a secret?” The points of the star in his eye drill into her. “Diluc still doesn’t know, does he?”
“Because we were grateful for what you did,” she says, hesitating over each syllable, “but you shouldn’t have had to do it. You were a child. Both of you were just children.”
“Would you tell him now?”
“It’s your story to tell.” She hesitates again, but takes his hand, closing her fingers lightly around his. “But you must know he would never think badly of you for it.”
Kaeya chuckles. “Diluc’s lucky to have you on his side. What with all the trouble he gets himself into these days, all the messes he leaves behind – he needs allies like you more than he realises.”
He needs you more than me – more than you realise–
But the odds of Kaeya accepting that just yet, even if she swore it on her life, are slim to none.
There’s not many pieces of the outfit left.
She picks up the eyepatch like it’s made of glass and holds it out to him. “You should probably hurry,” she says. “Klee must be getting impatient by now.”
“I’m sure Diluc can handle entertaining her a little longer. Goodness knows he could use the company. If there’s anyone who can get him to give up the grumpy facade, it’s her.”
“Master Kaeya,” she says, too soft to be properly chiding, as she presses the eyepatch into his hand and turns away–
But a cool hand on her shoulder stops her mid-motion.
“Adelinde,” he says, almost inaudible, “you… it’s okay. You don’t have to look away.”
She takes a moment to turn back towards him, but she can’t bring herself to look him in the eye. She stares at the eyepatch in his hand instead, at the way his hand shakes and curls around it, at the glint of the burnished bronze edge between the shadows of his fingers.
It’s been four years. But he’s hidden that eye for even longer. A secret even Crepus hadn’t pried into.
Why now?
“Master Kaeya,” she says, shaking her head, “you don’t have to–”
“Please. I–” He draws in a short, sharp breath. “I want you to see this.”
“…As you wish, Master Kaeya.”
Her fingers are trembling as they creep up to Kaeya’s face, as they hover over the worn leather and fraying string of the eyepatch, but if this is truly what he wants then there’s no sense in delaying it. She focuses all her attention on the little cracks and creases in the leather so that she doesn’t have time to track the shift in Kaeya’s breathing, the way the muscles on his face tighten up as she draws closer, how he purses his lips and squeezes his other eye tightly shut when she brushes aside his hair to reveal the carefully-tied knot in the string holding it all together.
Her fingers go still.
She already knows what to expect.
Diluc had confessed to it himself, drunkenly (just like his father, so much like his father), mere days after the end of his endless sojourn, when she’d finally dared to ask if he’d spoken to his brother yet. Mere days before he vowed to never drink another drop of alcohol in his lifetime.
A smouldering tapestry, crumbling to ashes before her eyes.
But Kaeya’s next words send those ashes scattering to the four winds and pitch her over a precipice she didn’t know she was standing on–
“I was counting on it, you know. On you. After Father died.”
–until she’s suspended in the emptiness, waiting to fall–
“I knew you’d be there for Diluc. That’s why I did it.”
–unable to do anything but look down in horror.
“I wouldn’t have otherwise,” Kaeya finishes, smiling.
Smiling.
“Master Kaeya, I can’t believe– you can’t mean–”
“If it’s so unbelievable, that means it’s not a lie. Right?”
Something must be wrong. Something about this trip, this costume, the story within the story and the wishes only fulfilled in a land of dreams – something about it all has shaken him, that’s why he’s saying all these dreadful things–
“I guess it’s better this way, since Father wasn’t around to help – but I’m sure you would’ve managed to work something out for Diluc’s sake–”
“Master Kaeya, please,” she begs, “don’t speak of such terrible things so lightly–”
“Addie,” he says, and presses her hand against his hair, where it was still hovering above the knot. “Klee’s waiting.”
She takes a deep breath. She wants to shake her head, but she doesn’t, and lets out a shuddering exhale instead.
The knot comes undone easily despite the uncooperative shaking of her hands. The eyepatch slips down, then falls away like the last leaf on a tree before winter sets in.
She catches it by the fluttering string, and takes another deep breath before looking up.
No amount of drunken confessions could have prepared her for this.
“Kaeya,” is all she can say, before her voice frays into a mournful gasp.
Her hand moves unbidden to cup his cheek, to brush a shaking thumb over skin rippled like fire in a roaring wind – like a flag of surrender frozen in motion – and stays there, unmoving.
Stubbornly, like a child who has never been taught how to grieve, Kaeya does not cry.
He blinks, too quickly for it to be natural, the right pair of eyelids lagging a beat behind the left, encumbered by scar tissue, the weight of the world leaning upon an iris of sunken gold and a collapsing star of a pupil – but not a single tear breaches the defences fortified by years of self-imposed solitude. The threads of the tapestry stay taut.
Adelinde doesn’t blink, too still for it to be natural, tears welling up in both eyes simultaneously, cresting at last over the apex of anguish like the first notes of a funeral dirge. The threads of the tapestry start to unwind–
And Kaeya catches them, again. Winds them around his slender fingers, tighter until they slice into his skin like blades, and pulls.
“It doesn’t hurt anymore,” he says, passing the threads over one another at the speed of light, lips fluttering, breath misting in the air between them. “It didn’t hurt back then either. It healed quickly. It’s magic. Can’t you tell?”
She closes her eyes, pushing more tears out past the breaking dam to rush down her cheeks. A caustic warmth. “Is this another one of your stories?” Your lies?
Kaeya doesn’t answer, and that’s answer enough.
But the threads won’t stop moving. “Addie, it wasn’t his fault. Please don’t cry. It’s really not as bad as it looks.”
No, it’s not.
It’s worse, isn’t it?
The story is woven into his skin. It tells her more than any drunk or sober words could. It tells her too much, but this is the story her children have woven together, and they have carried it alone for far too long now.
Someone else must share this burden before it crushes them both. She cannot avert her eyes any longer.
“I told him to draw his blade. I didn’t wait before drawing mine. I tried to kill him, Adelinde, and I left him burnt and bleeding in the mud when I failed.”
“He thought he was doing the right thing. I thought I was letting him do the right thing.”
Her thumb traces the peaks and troughs of the scar, the deep diagonal ridge in the middle bisecting it into halves that will never meet again. They blur together in the fog of her tears. “How could this ever have been the right thing to do?”
“Can you still love a cold-blooded murderer like that?”
“I came clean. I told him he was a fool for ever trusting me. I told him how much of a danger I was–”
“You have never been a danger to any of us.” She holds his face with both hands. Warm. Not warm enough. “You have always been worthy of our trust.”
She traces the scar again. If only she could patch it up and make it good as new. If only it were that simple.
“Does someone like that still deserve a brother?”
“You didn’t want this,” she whispers. “You can’t have.”
“No,” he says. He stares back, unblinking. “I didn’t want this.”
I wanted something worse.
That’s what truly undoes it. That one thought, too tragic to be spoken aloud, rips right through the seams of her threadbare composure, and she buckles under the weight she’s been spared from carrying all this time. Her hand jolts away from the scar like it’s still burning. She covers her mouth, shakes her head, staggers a single step backwards–
And Kaeya catches her, again. Her child holds her closer than he should, and in spite of the shame coursing through her veins, she crumples against his too-steady form with a broken gasp.
Silently, like a mother who has never been taught to forgive herself, Adelinde cries for him.
The cape is heavy enough without her tears to drench it, but alas. His arms, that would weave a thousand tales to wipe away her tears, loop around her shoulders and hold her in place – at first tentative, and then with a wavering, desperate strength. His heartbeat thunders between them.
Something shifts. Some final thread she didn’t know was there unravels, and her heart gives out.
“I should have stopped you,” she says between gasps, clutching tighter at silk and satin, cursing the softness she doesn’t deserve.
He clutches tighter in return. “I wouldn’t have let you.”
She shakes her head. “I should’ve done more.” Her voice is so pathetically small – the price for not speaking up sooner. “It was my duty to keep you safe – you were children–”
“Addie, it wasn’t your fault–”
“Neither was it yours.” And then she says what she should have said long ago, in the shadows of the once-shared bedroom, next to the corpse, next to the hoard of knives, next to the bandages around a bleeding palm: “I’m sorry, Kaeya. I’m so sorry.”
Kaeya doesn’t answer.
He only pulls her closer.
They stand there, silent and shaking, long enough for the angle of the shadows in that sunlit room to shift. She doesn’t care to quantify it – whatever length of time it is, it’s nothing relative to the time they spent apart. Time squandered on patching up holes in the tapestry instead of addressing the man behind the loom, the boy at the centre of it all.
Only when a heavy set of footsteps thunders up the stairs and the door swings open do they pull apart.
Whatever words Diluc had come prepared with die on his lips like a snuffed candle. His gaze snaps to the eyepatch still in her hand like a needle to a magnet, and he freezes, then steps back. The floorboards don’t dare to creak.
Kaeya laughs – weary, but not bitterly so. “I was going to come down in a minute, I swear,” he says, his voice clearer than ever in the deafening silence. “Where’s Klee?”
“Eating the last of the cookies,” he answers automatically, before blinking rapidly and taking another step back. “I didn’t mean to– I should–”
“Come in, Luc. You might as well help while you’re here. Leaving poor Adelinde to do all the work is hardly fair.”
She’s too out of it to protest – and so, it seems, is Diluc, as he wordlessly crosses the threshold of the room and comes to a stop just a foot away from them. A puppet on a string, hypnotised by Kaeya’s perpetual weaving.
Diluc’s gaze is now fixed on Kaeya’s scarred, golden eye with such an incredible intensity that not even the manor burning down could pull it away.
When was the last time they saw each other like this?
Kaeya holds that gaze for an impossibly long moment, then clicks his tongue and takes Diluc’s hand. “You still remember how to make a braid, don’t you?” he says, tugging his brother closer.
Diluc flinches at the sudden contact, jerks his hand out of Kaeya’s grip while his lips begin to curl into a snarl – but it never gets very far, and he doesn’t make a move to retreat. Wordlessly, just as he’d entered, he reaches over Kaeya’s shoulder and brings that lovelock forward, caressing it as if it were the finest silk in Teyvat, guiding it like an older brother guides the younger one home.
“What kind of braid,” Diluc says, his voice raw and rough, lacking the proper inflection of a question.
“Up to you,” Kaeya says with a lilting laugh that Diluc doesn’t echo.
Nonetheless, he doesn’t hesitate for another moment, the set of his jaw and the unyielding line of his mouth as decisive as ever (just like his father, so much like his father). His hands move with near-mechanical precision, with care and caution beyond his years – care and caution beaten into him by unbearable loss. He weaves the strands of midnight blue together in a rhythm he hasn’t rehearsed in years. With each pass of his hands over one another, with each barely-disguised glance up at the unmasked eye, the hardness in his own eyes is chipped away, and all she can do is watch.
In spite of the circumstances leading up to this moment, she can’t help but feel proud.
Look how they depend on each other, she would tell Crepus if he were here. Aren’t you proud, too, of the men your sons have become?
That after everything they’ve endured, they’re still here, together?
If Crepus wouldn’t extol the virtue of this moment, then perhaps his opinions never mattered at all.
On Kaeya’s face: the softest of smiles. He glances at her out of the side of a golden eye, and the gentle radiance emanating from it melts away the last of her doubts.
This is a story she’ll allow herself to believe without question. She’ll allow that warm cloak of brotherly promise to wrap itself around her – how could she deny it, when the evidence of its existence is right in front of her, on the stage belonging only to the three of them? When Diluc finishes the braid, seals that promise with a peacock feather and beads as bright as his brother’s eyes, and doesn’t think to step away when all is said and done?
“Now it’s your turn,” Kaeya says.
Diluc frowns. “What?”
It’s Kaeya’s turn to reach over his brother’s shoulder, now, and he gives Diluc’s ponytail a sharp enough tug to elicit a yelp. “Do something with your hair too. For Klee’s sake. You’re already the most boring out of the three of us, you’ve got nothing to lose by making an effort.”
“What difference will it make? And it’s not my fault I wasn’t there to get a stupid costume like you–”
“Just do it already, won’t you?”
Diluc huffs, but obliges, because he’s never been truly able to deny his brother when it matters. While Kaeya puts on the last pieces of his outfit, slipping on the rings and the earring with remarkable deftness, Diluc pulls his hair up into a high ponytail and ties the black ribbon around it into a tidy little bow. “Better?”
Kaeya snorts. “You are a master of falling short of expectations, Master Diluc.”
“And you, Sir Kaeya, are–”
Adelinde clears her throat. That snaps them out of their bickering quick as lightning and they turn to stare at her, wide-eyed. Like they’d forgotten she was there entirely. She doesn’t mind – this moment is for them. They deserve as many of these easy, light moments as they can get, these days. All she’s here for is making sure they don’t tear each other apart.
But it seems, in that regard, she has nothing to fear. Not truly. Not anymore.
Kaeya snaps out of his daze first, and holds the new eyepatch out to her. “Care to do the honours?”
She’s still holding the old one. She doesn’t let it go as she steps forward and takes the new one in a hand that she refuses to let shake. Kaeya’s breathing more evenly this time as she ties the eyepatch in place, when she brushes her thumb one last time over the scar. Covering up the truth once more, for only Barbatos knows how many more years – but there’s nothing left to hide. The worst of it has been told, woven and unraveled and woven again, and so–
And so, they can start anew.
Kaeya casts a sidelong glance at Diluc out of the corner of his blue eye. They exchange a subtle nod, perhaps thinking that she won’t notice. Still such children, sometimes.
The sunlight pales in comparison to Kaeya when she steps back to admire their handiwork.
It’s quite a fetching costume indeed. She can’t imagine anyone would mistake who the star of the show was as long as he was on the stage.
Something in her heart twists at the thought of him ever leaving that stage, but she fights that feeling back with the brightest smile she can manage.
“Well. Time to find Klee, then. It’s a terrible idea to leave her to her own devices. Let’s hope she hasn’t burnt down part of the manor while we weren’t looking.”
And just like that, without a single glance backwards, he’s gone. The curtain falls, fluttering. The threads of it sparkle in the lights of the stage, unbroken.
Diluc stares after him, then turns to her, and his face is wrought with the same helplessness as his voice when he says, “Adelinde, are you–”
“You should go catch up with your brother,” she says. “He hardly ever has the time to visit these days. Go and make the most of it.”
The master of the house shouldn’t need permission from his maid. But he’s still a child. They both are.
He searches her face for answers he won’t find, then nods unsteadily and turns on his heel, his ponytail whipping behind him as he leaves, fire-like warmth in his wake. She follows him to the door and no further.
When she hears his voice interweaving with his brother’s at last, she shuts her eyes.
The threads of your stories are slipping through my fingers.
She clutches at Kaeya’s old eyepatch, worn leather and thinning string creasing within her calloused palm.
I’m not sure how much longer I’ll be able to hold on.
A chorus of childish laughter rings all the way up the stairs, sunny and sharp and sweet, and in the echoes of that fading sound, she wipes at her still-damp cheek and smiles.
Kaeya, if it’s not too much trouble–
This grand story of yours, the one you’ve been weaving all your life–
I hope you’ll let me be a part of it until the end.