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Kaeya’s fingers scramble to grip onto Diluc’s as they’re pried away from one another. He doesn’t want to let go, he can’t let go, not even with the chilled numbness spreading throughout his naturally cold body; not even with the weakness that’s been wrapping around him and squeezing tight over the days that he’s been locked up and away from freedom; not even with the hands pulling, and gripping, and wrenching him away like he’s nothing more than a sack of calla lilies to be tossed to the back of a cart.
“Luc!” He calls, and his voice is scratchy—broken, almost, with the way that the syllables shatter and tumble away on the bitten tip of his tongue. “Diluc, Luc,” he tries again, and again, and again, just to get his brother’s attention, to have the red-head focus on something that’s not their perilous situation, to have Diluc, at the very least, meet his eyes.
“Please,” Kaeya calls—he shouts, stretching his vocal chords to their very limits lest his voice fails to reach its target. “Diluc!”
There’s distress in his voice—there’s distress, and there’s anguish, and it takes a moment more of shouted desperation for Diluc to finally look up.
He lifts his head, uses whatever strength he has left in his broken, bruised body to meet Kaeya’s pleas directly on. His face is scratched up pretty badly—battered and burnt right across the middle, which would almost be laughably ironic if they weren’t in this situation at all. His lip is split right open, there’s blood running down his temple, and his eyes—oh, his eyes.
For as long as Kaeya has known Diluc, he’s always been full of fire.
Even before he’d gotten his vision, even before he’d been able to scorch the earth with his bare hands, to set his weapons alight with a single flicker of determination, to stand within infernos and embrace the flames instead of arching away from them, he has been full of a raw blaze of orange, and red, and then a roaring orange once again.
For as long as Kaeya has known him, Diluc has been alive in the most blinding of ways. His passions have burned brighter than the stars in the sky, his soul has glowed fiercer than Morax’s glistening geo, and he has never once backed down from all that’s been presented to him. He’s fought off abyss mages, and hilichurls, and he’s thrown himself into fatui hideouts in search of even the slightest whiff of revenge.
Diluc has never been weak, not in a single moment, not even when he was bent over his father’s body and screaming, and his eyes have always reflected that—he’s always looked at Kaeya as if the sparkling red perfectly mirrors all of his blistering defiance and then some.
He has stared at Kaeya and Kaeya has stared right back into a bonfire of bravado.
But now—but now Diluc’s flaring scarlet has dulled into an expiring blush. It’s losing its colour, dying, almost, as the red bleeds into streaks that stain Diluc’s pale skin. He’s the fading embers at the centre of a camp; he’s the dissipating wisp of smoke after a hearty bake; he’s the discarded ashes and the pile of cinders, and all Kaeya can think is no.
“You can’t give up,” Kaeya tries to beg, though his voice comes out scratchy, and broken, and not at all fit for begging. “You can’t give up, Diluc, you can’t.”
“Shut him up,” somebody says from his left as Kaeya cries, and he pleads, and his frost-tipped fingers dig into the ground and his heart yearns for his icy vision to come back to life so that he can do something. “Now.”
A cloth is forced over Kaeya’s mouth before he can even think about a rebuttal. It covers his lips, presses just underneath his nose - allowing only the smallest huffs of air out - and the knot tied at the back of his head catches some of his blue hairs in such a way that has him hissing from the pinching pain.
It doesn’t distract him completely, though, it doesn’t make him stop trying to lunge forwards towards where his brother is being dragged backwards; it doesn’t make him stop trying to scream behind the restraint even if only a muffled cry gets through; it doesn’t make him stop thrashing, and squirming, and begging the Cryo Archon to lend him even an inch of her power for just this moment.
He wants to get to Diluc. He wants to get to his brother. He wants to go back to last week—or however long ago it was that they were just existing outside of this disaster and they were existing well. It doesn’t even matter that they hadn’t been talking to one another, that the only time they really saw each other was when Kaeya would sit himself down in Angel’s Share and drink until Diluc was practically dragging him out.
It doesn’t matter, because at least they’d been together without the threat of kidnappers, or mouth gags, or a knife at Diluc’s throat—Kaeya is screaming again, screaming at the top of his lungs, kicking his legs, and scratching at anything he can reach, anything he can possibly get his hands on.
This can’t be happening. This can’t be happening. Kaeya refuses to watch his brother being slaughtered. Kaeya refuses to sit back and do nothing as his brother's throat is slit and he dies right in front of him. He can’t let that happen. He can’t witness that. He can’t be forced to witness that.
Kaeya needs to be stronger. He needs to be—better. He needs to throw himself upwards, rip the gag away, find his vision and call upon the power of cryo to freeze out anyone who dared hurt them. He needs to do something other than crying, and screaming, and pleading for somebody else to find strength where he cannot.
Kaeya needs to be a stronger man. A better man. A better brother.
Except he’s not.
He’s not, and he can’t be, and Kaeya is thrown onto his side, hitting hard stone with an unforgiving crack.
That has to be his cheekbone shattering, is what Kaeya deduces with a pained groan. It has to be his cheekbone splintering into tiny, unfixable fragments as pain bursts along the side of his face and his vision swims, and swims, and swims some more, but he can’t focus on it. He can’t focus on it, not with the way that Diluc is staring at him just as he’d wanted earlier.
Kaeya can only barely see out of one eye at this point, the other being forced closed by swelling bruising, but he sees Diluc—sees the way his red curls are slicked against the side of his head by leaking blood; sees the way his chest rises and falls in erratic, unstable movements; sees the dullness to his eyes, the uncharacteristic wobble to his lip, the unnatural twist to his right hand.
Kaeya sees Diluc, and he sees the way that his swollen lips tremble, and tremble, and tremble as he mouths i'm sorry.
Diluc’s head is forced backwards, his bobbing throat bared outwards, and then it’s sliced across. Just like that.
As easy as splitting open a bag of flour, Diluc’s life is taken away from him.
Kaeya is allowed to do nothing but sob as Diluc is let go of—his body dropped as if he’s worth nothing more than a handful of mora. He’s dead the minute that he hits the ground, throat split open far too wide for even Barbara’s gifted hands to heal. Blood spills all over him, over his beloved clothes, his shattered vision, his hands, and his pale skin, and—it’s almost poetic.
Diluc has always loved red. The red to his hair, to his father’s hair, the red to pyro, and the red imbued within his claymore. The red that has always signified warmth, and love, and family. Diluc has treasured the colour like he’s treasured no other, and Kaeya knows that all too well as his brother is tugged away into death’s embrace while he is soaked in hissing crimson.
The notion hurts. It hurts deep within Kaeya’s chest, and the pain spreads throughout his body, clawing its way through his veins, and distracting him from the sharp kick to his side, the pull on his hair, the crunch to his wrist as it’s stood on. He can’t focus on anything but Diluc’s still body, and all he wants to do is hold him.
Kaeya wants to reach over, to pull Diluc against him, to hold him close to his chest, run his fingers through his brother’s hair like he used to do when they were younger. He wants to intertwine his fingers with Diluc’s, he wants to laugh with him, smile with him—Kaeya wants to bite back a grin as Diluc scolds him for drinking too much, and he wants to pretend to be too drunk to walk properly so that Diluc will carry him back home, and he wants Diluc to say something.
A harsh sob crawls out of Kaeya’s throat, only vaguely muffled by the cloth forced over his lips.
He wants to be twelve again, running through grape vines with Diluc as they laugh together; to be twelve again, laying under the stars next to Diluc on the peak of Starsnatch cliff as they talk about their dreams of becoming knights together; to be twelve again, young, and free, and content in knowing that his brother is always going to be by his side, no matter what happens.
There are tears streaming down his cheeks, a wet hiccup lodged behind his teeth, a pain deep within his heart, and Kaeya just wants his brother back.
But Diluc is gone. He’s dead, and he’s gone, and his body is still, and there’s blood everywhere, and Kaeya can’t breathe. He can’t breathe, he can’t think, he can’t—
It’s only moments later when somebody is thrown out of Kaeya’s blurry vision by a directed gust of anemo. There’s the pounding of feet against stone, and there’s shouting that only barely manages to penetrate Kaeya’s burst eardrums, and there’s electro zapping in the air and making his skin tingle. He hears dampened sounds, and he distantly hears screaming people, and there are hands gently pushing against his body to lay him flat on his back.
He blinks open his one good eye, a thick sob bubbling past his lips as Jean’s face comes into blurry view.
“Diluc,” he thinks he might try to say, his fingers shaking, his body trembling, his mind spinning in this direction and that. “Diluc.”
Jean’s face crumples, and Kaeya feels as if he’s going to throw up. She gently brushes her fingers through his blood-streaked hair, and her lips part. “I’ve got you,” is what she says. “I’m so sorry,” is what he doesn’t hear.
——
Kaeya still has a slight limp as he makes his way across the grassy slope of Starsnatch cliff. Cecilia’s brush against his ankles, and grass tickles at his skin. His limp hinders him considerably, making each step both a handicap and a burst of pain, but he’d refused Jean’s offer to accompany him this morning, so it’s his own fault really—nothing worth complaining about, nothing that he can exactly complain about.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t a large surge of relief that fills him, though, as he finally reaches his destination and sinks down beside the carved stone at the very peak of the cliff. His chest stops heaving and his mind settles, if only by an inch.
Kaeya sits with his back against the slab, a heavy sigh pushing past his lips. “I can’t keep up with this, Luc,” he mutters, “it’s gonna kill me one day—well.” The joke falls a little flat even to himself, and he gives a tiny shake as if to rid himself of those thoughts. “I brought you some flowers this time.”
“I know you’d probably prefer to have them at the manor in one of your fancy vases, but.” Kaeya shrugs, placing the small bouquet down beside himself. It’s full of calla lilies and windwheel asters, and it’s wrapped in a light brown paper. It’s nothing special, but Kaeya knows that Diluc would appreciate it either way. He’s always had a more covert interest in flowers that not many were privy to.
“I miss you,” Kaeya adds after a few beats of silence. Wind brushes against his cheeks, nips at the tip of his nose. It almost feels like a stony embrace, and Kaeya desperately wishes that he could lean into it. “I miss you a lot, I—I hope you’re doing okay, wherever you are. I hope you’re happy. I hope,” and he swallows tightly, then, “I hope you’re with father, and I hope that you’re both happy.”
Kaeya never stays long at Diluc’s grave.
But he’s still there every week, and every week he brings something with him, be it flowers or a bottle of grape juice, and every week as he’s leaving he’ll hear a chorus of children’s laughter, and every week he’ll see flashes of bright red and dark blue dancing together in the corner of his eye.
”I miss you too, Kaeya.”