Work Text:
“I don’t understand,” Diluc says, running a shaking hand through his rain-soaked hair before extending that same hand towards Kaeya. “Kae, please– you’re not making any sense, let’s just go home – Addie’s waiting–”
“You’re a learned man,” Kaeya says smoothly, stepping out of his brother’s reach. “What part of this could possibly be too difficult for you to understand?”
“You’re not making any sense,” Diluc says again, as if that ignorant declaration can strike through everything Kaeya’s said and erase it from both of their memories just like that. As if it’s that simple. “You– how can you possibly be from some ancient civilisation? Don’t be stupid. You’re just– you’re just Kaeya. You’re Kaeya Ragnvindr, and–”
“I wasn’t always a Ragnvindr.”
“You’ve been one for long enough.” There’s a weight behind his words that rivals his own blade. “Just stop this, Kae. I don’t know what you’re playing at – have you forgotten that Father’s dead? I don’t care about ancient kingdoms or the gods or whatever it is you think they’ve done–”
“Careful, Diluc. That’s the kind of talk that got my people killed.”
“Your people?” Diluc chokes out a disbelieving laugh. “Your people are here.” He points at the muddy ground between them, at their footprints being washed away under the pelting rain. “Mondstadt’s people are your people.” He places his hand over his heart, grappling for stability he won’t find in the drenched fabric of his Favonius uniform. “Our people.”
“You can’t proclaim to know my loyalties so well–”
“I know you.” Diluc’s voice is harsh, a fire roaring to life. “I know you’ve always been as loyal to Mondstadt as I have. How could you possibly care more about some fallen kingdom than the country that took you in? Than me?”
“How could I, indeed.” Kaeya chuckles to himself, then throws his hand out to the empty clearing in the manner of a king addressing his court. “Well, perhaps it is too much for a man of your privilege to understand, so I won’t ask for that. But this is the truth, Diluc, it always has been, and it’s about time you accept it.” He lets his smile sharpen and tilt until it’s barely recognisable. “I’m telling you all this because I know you love me, brother,” he says, imbuing that final word with all the sarcasm he can muster. “Aren’t you grateful I’ve chosen not to lie to you any longer?”
“You’re lying to my face.” Diluc’s breathing is heavy, now, as if they’re sparring with weapons besides their words. “I would never love a traitor.”
At that, Kaeya has to bite his tongue to kill the maniacal laugh in his throat, lest he show his hand too soon – but he can’t stop his smile from splitting his face in two at the all-too-inviting opening, or his voice from pitching up wildly when he says, gleefully, “You loved your father.”
Diluc’s reaction is slow but delightfully intense. Kaeya revels in the blooming distress, savouring every frame, every millisecond of the twisting and darkening of that once-unshakeable expression. His blood pulses with renewed vigour as the lines of Diluc’s face take on more shadows, as his mouth falls open and he gasps like a man strangled, as his eyebrows cross like opposing blades, as his blood-red eyes narrow with murderous intent – and Kaeya’s heart blooms too, opening up to accept every last drop of his brother’s righteous fury, readying itself for the killing strike.
Soon. He has to wait for the right moment, but it’s soon. He can taste it. He’ll get this one thing right, if nothing else.
This is the most alive he’s ever felt.
Soon, soon, soon, the mantra echoes in his veins when Diluc finally finds his voice again and says – hisses, more like – “Father was no traitor.”
“Oh, please. We both saw that weapon, didn’t we?” His hand doesn’t shake in the slightest as he gestures towards Diluc’s chest – towards the breast pocket of his jacket, where he stashed the cursed glove that brought about his father’s demise before fleeing from the scene with blood still dripping from his once-pristine gloves. “It carried the mark of the Fatui. How do you suppose your father got his hands on such a thing?”
Diluc looks around, lost, then grits his teeth and steps closer. “He was not a traitor. And he was your father too.” He laughs again, still choked, still disbelieving, with a new and distinct note of bitterness that tastes blissful on Kaeya’s tongue. “You might be an idiot, Kae, but you’re not a traitor.”
“Even when the evidence is right in front of you, you choose to blind yourself to the truth.” Kaeya sighs. It doesn’t feel so forced. “How pitiful. How… naive.”
The time for blindness is almost up. His right eye pulses beneath the soaked-through eyepatch. His blood pounds mercilessly behind his eyes, stampeding like an army with nothing left to lose.
Soon.
“Diluc,” he says, pressing his right hand against his eye, quelling the lust for control until the right moment arrives, “you can’t let a traitor live, can you?” He looks up at Diluc through the hair falling over his other eye, and grins. This doesn’t feel forced either. “You’ve already disposed of one. What’s one more?”
“Kae, please, you’re not–” Diluc’s voice breaks. He cries out, a broken, animalistic yell, and stumbles forward to reach for Kaeya once more – and once more, one last time, Kaeya steps out of his reach. “Stop saying that. Stop lying. Fuck – alright, maybe you’re a liar, but I know you’re not a traitor even if you–”
He tears away the eyepatch before Diluc can finish that nonsensical sentence. The knot in the string comes undone from the sheer force of it, but whatever pain he might have felt fades under the skull-crushing rush of blood to his head.
Diluc stands frozen before him. Stunned into silence.
Into submission.
“You’ve always wondered what it was that I was hiding under here.” Kaeya tosses the eyepatch aside like it’s nothing but a scrap of old cloth and not the shield he’d been cowering behind for more than a decade. “Well, now you have your answer.”
What will the hero do, now that the villain has unmasked himself at last?
Kaeya knows very well what his right eye looks like – he’s stared into mirrors more times than he can count, trying to use its power on himself, to make himself do the one thing his body is too cowardly to do on its own. The one thing he needs to be redeemed for his never-ending sin.
He’s always seen it with perfect clarity, because it’s incapable of shedding a single tear. That was never its purpose. He knows how unnatural, how corrupted, how sinful it looks, the endlessly swirling moon-bright silver around a star-shaped void of a pupil–
So how is it that Diluc’s eyes, now meeting both of Kaeya’s own for the very first time, are filled not with revulsion and horror, but… pity?
He was supposed to be angry. None of this will work if he’s not angry, if he continues to harbour anything close to sympathy in that too-noble heart of his. The reveal of his eye was supposed to elevate their conflict to a fever pitch, to serve as the beginning of a crescendo to a climactic end – but here Diluc is, worrying about him.
Is he insane?
Never mind – he’s always known how foolish his brother’s kindness makes him. He should’ve known it would take more than this to drive him to the edge.
If Diluc won’t be angry, then Kaeya will just have to be angry on his behalf, and maybe… maybe this can still work.
“This is the mark of Khaenri’ah – of the Alberichs,” Kaeya spits, stepping closer as he gestures harshly towards his eye. “The last link I have to my real family. Doesn’t it disgust you?”
Diluc’s expression is still too damn soft. Too forgiving. He shakes his head slightly, stretches one hand out towards him but stops himself halfway, and then, in a voice that trembles so much it hurts just to listen to, he asks the worst question he could ever possibly ask: “Does it hurt?”
“What hurts,” Kaeya says with a low snarl, “is how long I’ve had to keep this power – my birthright – hidden, just to appease you all.”
“Power?” Diluc says, heartbreakingly small. “What kind of– what are you talking about now, Kae?”
“The power to control people. To bend their will as I see fit.” The snarl shifts into a sneer. “Why, how else would the Alberichs have gained the right to rule when the old king fell?”
Maybe Diluc really isn’t as intelligent as Kaeya had led himself to believe, because his idiot of a brother only stares back at him dumbly, jaw hanging open, caught between disbelief and a sheer lack of understanding.
“Ah, you don’t believe me.” Kaeya chuckles with not-quite-false pity. “Then allow me to demonstrate.”
He looks at his brother one final time and discards every last fragment of love still embedded in his sinner’s heart. There won’t be a use for any of it from now on, when all is said and done.
After tonight, nothing will ever matter to him ever again.
There are limits to this power, of course: if he tries to issue an order they would never choose to follow in their lifetime, it won’t work – but people are more easily manipulated than they want to believe. And what has Kaeya done all these years if not lie and manipulate all these innocent people into caring for him? Some might argue they’re not so innocent anymore, simply by association.
When all their love has been built on a false premise, it will be so easily overturned. A little anger, a little hatred is all it should take. A little betrayal – and was he not born to be a traitor?
This conversation didn’t go quite as he’d hoped it would, but it’s shaken the foundations a little. It should be enough.
(It has to be.)
He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath, then opens them again and locks onto his brother’s helpless, pleading gaze.
Here it is. The moment he’s been waiting for all his life.
“Diluc Ragnvindr, you know what needs to be done.”
The power thrumming behind his eye threatens to overflow. Kaeya smiles his brightest ever smile, fitting for the grand finale of his life, and spreads his hands in invitation.
“Kill me.”
He knows what his own eye looks like when he tries to use its power – the way the silver roars to life and flares like the nexus of a dying star, a blinding flash of raw, world-altering power that forces him to step back from the mirror before it cracks. He knows how it flickers when the power fails him, when he has to try again with increasingly more specific instructions – from kill yourself to tie the end of the noose to the ceiling beam and then pull the loop around your neck and tighten it until you can hardly breathe and then climb up onto the chair and kick it out from underneath yourself–
He’s never seen what it looks like on another person when it actually works, though.
Diluc’s blood-red eyes go impossibly wide as they’re overtaken by that same blinding silver, the colour of Irminsul’s infinite roots, his pupils shrinking to pinpricks of Abyssal darkness.
He can’t suppress a gleeful laugh, dizzy with elation.
It worked.
The unfiltered knowledge of his own sin has never been enough to make this one order work on himself. But, evidently, for Diluc – for the purity of his spirit, for someone who’s always been better than Kaeya could ever dream of being – it’s more than enough.
I should’ve thought of this sooner.
Diluc is listening. He was ready to do this all along, despite his own words.
Who’s the liar now?
Well, that’s for the best, really. Lying is an invaluable skill in this world. Diluc will need it from now on, now that Father isn’t around, now that Kaeya won’t be able to cover for him either. It’ll serve him well.
I should’ve believed in you from the start.
Diluc is breathing hard as he summons his claymore without looking away and raises it high over his shoulder. Flames begin to dance along the sharpened, gleaming edge until the whole thing is alight with an unstoppable inferno – somehow Kaeya wasn’t expecting that, but it’s more than welcome. A trial by fire from which only the pure of heart can emerge unscathed. He couldn’t ask for more.
Come, Diluc – burn me away and cleanse the world of my sins, once and for all.
The only part of him that isn’t made of sin is the part that has always wished for death.
Because death is a weightless thing. Of course a boy who since birth has known nothing but the weight of a doomed nation would crave it. Is that really so wrong? Is that really such a sin, compared to everything else in his life?
No, it can’t be. If it were, Diluc wouldn’t be rushing forward as he is right now to fulfil this final wish.
The searing warmth of the advancing flames is more comforting than any of Diluc’s hugs have ever been. It’s so much more than Kaeya deserves. He’s never felt so relieved. So content. So peaceful. Maybe this is his final sin – taking such unbridled pleasure from the world he never deserved to be a part of in the first place.
But then–
But then, but then, but then–
No, you can’t–
Not you too–
Kaeya can only watch in horror as the Irminsul silver flickers and fades from Diluc’s eyes.
Before Kaeya knows what he’s doing, before he can process how catastrophically wrong this all is, he’s unsheathing his own sword and throwing it up in front of him with a choked cry. Time slows to a glacial pace, and Kaeya stays frozen within it.
Diluc’s eyes narrow for a second, then go wide again – he gasps like a drowning man resurfacing at last, and the flames on his blade vanish one by one, starting at the hilt–
But the blade’s killing arc was too far gone for anyone to stop.
Diluc’s sword clashes with a raucous clang against Kaeya’s.
And before he can even think of turning away, the last, stuttering flame at the very tip of the claymore leaps forth, straight towards Kaeya’s right eye – his wrong eye–
Oh, gods–
The scream that’s torn from his throat cleaves the last of his hope and the air between them in two halves that will never be rejoined, deafening him as the searing onslaught on his eye carries on, his skin crackling and sizzling and peeling and burning, burning, oh gods, make it stop, please please please, not like this–
Kaeya stumbles back several steps, gasping, shaking, heaving with nausea at the rising stench of cooked flesh. He nearly trips as his heel bumps against something small and looks down to see, through his blurred vision, the unmistakable light of–
A Cryo Vision at his feet, half-submerged in the mud.
He lowers his wavering sword and shakes his head.
This can’t be happening.
It can’t have not worked.
Diluc can’t have failed me too.
His free hand reaches up to his eye, covering it–
Covering it with ice.
A soft, healing cold emanates from his fingers, a steady flow to counter the throbbing pulse of the baying, burning skin around his eye.
Then the ice isn’t just at his fingers – it’s all around him. A paper-thin shield, tessellated, crystalline, sparkling like the first snowfall of winter–
And through it he sees, unobscured, his brother looking back at him with horror to mirror Kaeya’s own.
His own body – his own will – betraying him at the last second. As it always has. A traitor on every level, down to his worthless, rotten soul–
“How– what– Kae– what was that–” Diluc chokes on his feeble gasps, his gaze darting wildly between Kaeya and the now snuffed-out blade in his white-knuckled grip. He looks down at his own Pyro Vision, securely attached to his belt, glowing dully as Visions do after they’ve just been used for great power. “What did you try– what did you make me do–?!”
Kaeya lets out an animalistic yell and lunges blade-first at his brother, lances of ice flying from the tip of his sword at the speed of light.
Diluc holds firm against the chaotic assault and pushes him back with little effort, his own sword positioned defensively across his chest, the ice vaporising into hissing steam as soon as it gets close. His face is still consumed by pure dread. He’s barely breathing. His eyes are still wide. Still desperate.
But for what?
You did that to him.
What does he think there is to salvage here?
He’ll never forgive you for this.
How stupid can he be?
Your own brother–
Kaeya swings down again, steel ringing stridently against steel, ice blooming out from his palms, his feet, the point where their blades cross–
But it all melts away into nothingness.
How enviable.
Diluc knocks Kaeya’s sword away like it’s a stray leaf in the wind. It falls in the mud right beside the Vision. The abrupt change in momentum unbalances him and he, too, falls to his knees, crashing with a muffled yelp against the hardening ice around his feet.
He looks up at Diluc and throws one hand out towards him – and the ice evaporates right there on his fingertips. He’s too numb to be scalded by it.
Even through the steam, the vaporised vestiges of his final stand, the fire in Diluc’s eyes is clearer and brighter than ever.
Clearer, brighter – but undeniably broken. There’s something missing. Something Kaeya robbed him of.
Something he’ll never be able to give back.
Diluc stares down at him with wordless judgement, too sympathetic to be scornful, too heartbroken to be sympathetic – then turns on his heel quick as lightning and runs. His racing steps retreat into the deathly silence and his once-vibrant crimson form dissolves into the endless shadows of their surroundings like it was never there at all.
Kaeya’s all alone again. As he always has been. As he always will be.
But this isn’t the loneliness he was supposed to find.
The Vision is glowing beside his fallen sword. He pulls it closer, his breath misting the air around him and obscuring his sight.
Maybe I can still–
He spreads his fingers and manifests a circle of ice, thin and perfectly smooth, shining like polished glass under the moonlight – a mirror. He holds it with both hands, stares down at it like he would into a lake before drowning himself, and whispers with all the strength he has left: “Die.”
His eye is as unchanging as the corpse of a moon hanging over him. The mirror splinters and shatters into a thousand shards before he can try again.
He grits his teeth and fashions a frozen blade the length of his hand – but that shatters too before he can even wrap his fingers around the hilt.
Damn the Vision then.
He scrambles for his sword, presses the muddy, rain-soaked tip right against his chest, his stampeding heart – but the once-flawless steel falls apart in an instant, as if it were made of nothing more than fine snow.
It’s hopeless.
If even Diluc couldn’t kill him, then he’s never going to die.
So much for being spared from Khaenri’ah’s curse. For being its last hope.
If even Diluc couldn’t kill him, he’ll never be free.
So much for the City of Freedom.
Kaeya collapses against the ground, amidst the remains of his attempted self-destruction, against the last bit of ice left intact. A frozen bed of sin, the death of redemption itself.
The eye that was never supposed to cry sheds its first ever tear. It freezes halfway down his numbed cheek.
He collapses, and waits for the world to exact revenge against him on Diluc’s behalf.
As his shaking hand gives in and closes around the faintly pulsing Cryo Vision, he can’t help the sinking feeling that he’ll end up destroying this world before that happens.