Chapter Text
Diluc creeps downstairs; the bottoms of his pajama pants are bunching around the bottoms of his ankles but he's too angry to cuff them. "Where's he gone off to this time?"
Adelinde is sitting on the parlor couch, reading. "Master Crepus? Oh, just on a walk."
"A walk!" He gestures to the rattling window beside them. Angry, loving, sick, cold, half–asleep: Diluc doesn't have articulate enough words to describe how stupid it would be to take a walk now. Every window rattles. Outside, the snowfall is so thick he wouldn't be able to see past the freezing billow of his breath.
Adelinde puts a hand to her mouth and chuckles behind it. "He said he had a good feeling about tonight."
It's no secret that Diluc's father is trying to earn himself a vision. He goes out, sometimes randomly, to try and save the day. Every so often a battle is pitched against treasure-horders or a lone fatui agent. He's lost a tooth, broken an arm, and taken uncountable stitches in this trivial pursuit.
"You've got to stop him. He's losing it. Really."
"Well," She pats the couch beside her. "You wait for his return. He'll get cold eventually. And hungry. I'll go make him something warm to eat."
Diluc rubs his eyes and picks up the book she'd been reading. There are no pictures which, for an eight-year-old, even a reasonably sharp one, makes it boring. He yawns. A long time passes, at least that's how it feels. His mind wanders through miles of snow, trying to find his father. The world is big; he wonders how many footprints have been stamped into the snow tonight.
The door opens and so do Diluc's eyes. He tries to look awake. He tries to look stern and responsible.
It is his father, or... it's more than his father. He's carrying something big in his arms. Furry and white, the size of a mountain dog but much too loose.
Diluc stands up and follows him back to the couch he'd been sitting on. He watches his father set the creature down. It's still and lifeless save for the rise and fall of its breath.
“What is it?” He murmurs.
His father gives him a sharp look and returns his hand to the small shivering mass. “Luc, it’s a boy.”
A single laugh of surprise bursts from his mouth. Then he sees his father isn’t joking. It turns to a gasp. “It…” He shuffles closer and finds the wild white friz isn't the fur of a living animal, but a billowing jacket made from the skin of an abyss mage. “Oh!”
The boy shakily pulls himself upright and lifts the hood away from his face. One eye. The other is covered by an eyepatch lined in silver. His dark skin is shining with melted snow, the color between brewed tea and molasses. Diluc didn’t know people came looking like that.
He steps back, blinks, and then shuffles forward again. “You came from the storm? What happened to you?” He reaches out hesitantly to touch the boy's cheek, but when one flinches away, they both do. “I heard when you get frostbite your skin turns blue–black and peels away.”
“Manners, Luc.” His father warns.
“Sorry.” He says, not really sorry. “Where did you come from?”
The boy looks down as if he’s ashamed. It takes him a long time to start talking. “N—nowhere.” His voice fades to a cold clatter of teeth. Two hands emerge from the abyss–mage jacket, shaking, and he blows into them. “I need to find Mondstat.”
“What you need is a break,” Crepus says firmly. He holds the foreign boy’s shoulders and uses them to tilt him forward so he and Diluc make eye contact. “Why don’t you give him something nice to wear? The snow is melting now, I’ll bet that jacket is as heavy as a ton of bricks.”
Diluc furrows his eyebrows. “He’s staying? Why? The city isn’t far, I’m sure one of the servants would escort him.”
His father is not one to think of danger or consequence when he’s helping people. That trait is annoyingly apparent now. “You would do it for any local child, why should this one be different?”
“I need to find Mondstat.” The boy repeats absently as if the city is nothing more to him than a line in a script.
“Please, my child. You can trust us. When you are back to full health you can leave but for now, you belong here.”
“I don’t belong anywhere… ” His voice is hazy. “Not anymore.”
Diluc and his father exchange a look of confusion.
“Well, let's see if we can change that.” He says, rubbing the boy’s back in a gentle, fatherly way. “For as long as you need— ah, what should we call you?”
“Kaeya.” He says, barely audibly.
“Well then, it’s settled. Diluc? Get Kaeya something warm to sleep in.”
Diluc crinkles his nose in concern, though he’s too tired to argue. He grabs this strange new housemate by the wrist and drags him up the stairs.
The boy stumbles after him, knees shaking with cold and exhaustion.
“What do you mean anymore?” Diluc interrogates him once they reach his bedroom. “You belong wherever you came from, even if you’re a refugee or runaway. I’m sure your parents are worried sick.”
“My parents are gone.”
Gone.
Diluc winces. He doesn’t know what type of gone he’s talking about, and he doesn’t have the guts to ask. He turns away and digs through his drawers to find a pair of pajamas. “Well, you still came from somewhere. Parents… disappear, but nations don’t.” He tosses a pair of button–up bedclothes to the boy’s side.
Kaeya stares blankly, hands folded against his chest like the limbs of a small fragile animal. “You…” Slowly he undoes the leather and bone button loops of his jacket. “You’d be surprised.”
Diluc doesn’t know what he was expecting to be underneath. Rags maybe, nothing.
But he’s dressed in silk and gems, peacock feathers falling like tassels at his sleeves. Royalty. But royalty within a storybook, too magical and foreign and dripping with mystery to be real.
He peels himself from the cold, wet clothing.
Diluc notes his bony knees, bruises, and scars. There’s a frost–burn at the back of his neck in the shape of a four-pointed star — too perfect to be accidental. Somehow this adds to the mystical allure.
Kaeya changes into the pajamas, shakily climbs into bed, and kicks under the covers.
“Hey,” Diluc mutters, clambering up after him, making sure to stake his claim on at least half the blankets. “This is my bed. Go lay with the maids.”
“Can’t. I’m already asleep.”
“No you aren’t. I can see you looking at me.”
“I must’ve forgotten how to sleep comfortably; in a snowstorm, you have to keep one eye open to make sure no cryo slimes come up behind you.” He grins at his own weird sense of humor. “It could take hundreds of years to break the habit.”
Diluc doesn’t understand this boy. “Where’d you say you were from again?”
“I didn’t,” Kaeya replies quietly. “I can’t.”
“Why?”
His voice is hushed and impatient. “My memories are gone.”
That word again; sends a shiver down his spine.
“How is that possible?”
“I guess they just melted away,” Kaeya says with a freezing air of calmness. His eye seems to glow, like sea ice, or maybe a lit stove ring in the dark. It’s searing, but the type so intense that it’s impossible to tell if the feeling is hot or cold.
Kaeya reaches out to take his hands, seeking heat.
Diluc pulls away, refusing the comfort he knows he's obliged to give. For the first time, a shock of guilt runs through him that his heart is too scared to cure despite his rational mind's coercion. Of course he can take this boy's freezing hands. He should. It's the right thing to do.
But there's an aura of danger seeping from him... a hurt that lingers long after the original violence. And Diluc doesn't want that staining his fingers.