Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

You don’t happen to remember.

Rex Lapis is a god, after all. Gods like him exist everywhere and nowhere, in whatever is between and beyond; in the memories of the old souls hiding in our bones; in the pollen that the winds sweeps from lands beyond your own. There might’ve been a small chance of arguing the finer details of it—if only your memory was sharper—a small possibility that suggest gods have not been diligent, have not been as omniscient or as powerful as they say they are—but otherwise, it is a foolish, foolish thing to assume that your earliest memory of him is the first circumstance of your meeting.

But still—the first time you ever recall meeting Rex Lapis is inside a dream. Inside that dream, you remember being nothing—your name meaning nothing but a footnote to the nobles; nothing to anybody until your father passed it over.  You remember knowing that you were young; and as children were—innocent and naive. So very easy to please.

When the corners of your vision fade and color like rose-tinted shades melted into your retinas, the garden stretches before you, like a landscape brought to life.

The hedges tower over you, shading the garden path from sunlight. It’s a blissful, mindless maze; twisting and turning, like in spite of all your attempts at getting out—never ending.

A head rises from the hedges, only a faint illuminated silhouette against the greenery. The child in you almost breaks in relief, running towards the bushes and bracing for rough scratches against your face—until the branches peel back, and you tumble through the sudden opening.

There are three problems here, you decide. One is that the silhouette is a man. The other is that you’re sure you’ve never ever seen him in your life before.

Also, the world remains upside down.

He helps set you upright, hands on his hands as he gently pulls you up. You are young enough to not know that he is a god, but you are old enough to recognize respect, taken in the same way it is given; old enough to recognize the aura of a long forgotten battle cry in the smears of red lining his eyes.

Still, you stand your ground. You were never one to back down, even then.

He kneels down to meet you at eye level. Try as you might, you squirm in discomfort at the full attention of those gilded eyes on  you.

"What is your name?" He asks you, voice impossibly deep, and when the sun catches on the strands of his hair—almost reverent, almost impossibly gentle—you remember your father’s warning, and at eight, you already know he isn’t just a man.

"You’re not like me." You bluntly tell him, avoiding the question. Nothing more. "You’re—"

Something tugs at the corner of the stranger’s lips. "Different?"

"No," you say, scrunching up your nose. You know there’s a word for it, and it’s on the tip of your tongue, but you can’t exactly remember what.

You settle on the closest word you know, regarding him with a critical eye. "Special."

You’re eight inside of this beautiful autumn daydream, and you’re frowning at him with an unspoken challenge. He only smiles at you, close-lipped, like he’s biting back a laugh, and you hastily say you won’t elaborate further.

"Maybe I am," the stranger allows, the tips of his hair softly glowing in the waning light. "Maybe I am not. At the very least, not so more than you."

Even at a young age, you can recognize beauty in all the ways it is for a child: simple and strange. Strange enough that he makes you wary, but simple enough that you think you’re safe around him.

"I don’t understand," you furrow your eyebrows. He’s a confusing man; an enigma out of place in this airy, picturesque memory of the old Ragnvindr Estate. "Do I know you?"

His broad shoulders almost crumple with something that looks like pure, unspoken relief. Distantly, you think; in this memory, you are a child. How do you know this?

You remember asking—because you think there’s no explanation else for a man who speaks to a child like a familiar, like an equal, and for the child to feel safe with someone he barely knows; because somehow, you remember knowing, in the very crevices of your bones, that this man is familiar, but not overwhelmingly so.

He says, unconvincingly: "No."

At the raise of your eyebrows, he elaborates, before standing up. "I do not think you do."

What an unusual way to phrase that. "You’re lying," you decide, easy as anything else. In here, you are a child after all, and the world is your oyster. What would you have to hide in the land of dreams? "What’s your name, then?"

"I’m… sorry?" The man’s eyebrows furrow.

"If you tell me your name, then we won’t be strangers," you impatiently explain with all the authority the heavens have given to children. Maybe you haven’t quite grown out of that yet. "You have to have known mine if you’re here, so what’s your name?"

The next smile he gifts you is bittersweet, and that confuses you, even now. "One day," he says instead. He doesn’t answer your question either. "Maybe you will know, maybe you will not, but that will be years from now."

You frown at him. "But that’s... a really, really long time."

"Until then," the man solemnly swears, and something about it makes you believe in that promise—a promise set in stone. "I’ll see you then, and I will tell you my name."

Maybe it's fate: when you stumble across an old statue on a new morning, framed by the muffled light of the curtained windows. It’s spring cleaning season—you're not to disturb the maids while they clean, but you do your best to try and help anyway. 

When you pull off the curtains, sunlight streams through the windows. It filters through the floating dust that you sneeze at until you feel like every single dust bunny has been crammed into the back of your throat, but you squeeze your eyes open and—

The statue sits there, abandoned. There’s a thick sheen of dust all over it, but the lighting makes it seem like nothing, dust melting from memory like it was never there at all.

Your breath catches. Chiseled and strong, the carved marble serenely stares back at you—almost reverent, almost gentle—and you startle. You remember the man, his strangeness and his beauty, and he resembles this statue close enough. The lines of his face are hauntingly familiar, like you've ran your fingers over them in some distant past life: the bridge of his nose, the curve of his neck, the arc of his cheekbones, and the curl of his lips in a faint smile. 

There are still questions that linger—why is this statue hidden in the attic? How long has it been sitting in the dark?

These are things Adelinde will later answer: oh, that statue? It was a gift from a previous benefactor of Dawn Winery that hailed from Liyue. They say she was favored by the Geo Archon, and when the Winery partnered with her, she gave your ancestors the statue as a sign of goodwill—whose likeness this statue was inspired by? Why, Master Diluc, it's Rex Lapis! Though I understand -- he looks different from those statues of the seven in the wide open, doesn't he?

You press your fingers to the marble, to the hollow of his cheeks, and though your fingers come away with too much dust, something about the way the head is carved, leaning against your palm, makes you smile.

In this moment, only one word comes to mind -- that word you had forgotten, in that distant dream of so long ago.

Ethereal. He's ethereal.

You are somewhere between nineteen and twenty in this next memory—you had been out on a business trip with your father somewhere to Sumeru on one of the countless dealings you've been made to attend when your father’s carriage rests near the statue of Rex Lapis at Lumberpick Valley.

You think of that spring morning. Adelinde had been right: where the statue in the attic had been gentle and lovely, this one is indifferent. This Rex Lapis looms, towering above them as if to remind people of their mortality. He looks arrogant: chin held high, muscled torso bared, sprawling across a throne of stone, looking as cold as the steel cube he wields in his open palm.

"Diluc?" Crepus pauses. When you turn your eyes back to him, your father looks—concerned. eyebrows creasing, lips downturned. “Are you okay?”

Diluc Ragnvindr: you are nineteen or maybe twenty—why does it matter—on this sweltering summer day, and you’re thinking, I know him, repeating it like a mantra with a frustrating clarity. I know him. I know him.

And to the statue: you're not him.

“It's nothing,” you lie. The lie sticks to your throat, like a sin unuttered, a sin you can’t bring yourself to confess. “Nothing at all."

You are older this time around.

Not by that much, though you beg to differ. Your shoulders feel heavier, burdened by the weight of the truth. You feel older, and you think it shows in your face: in the rough, unshaved stubble of your chin, in the haunted circles underneath your eyes. You look like the living dead.

Seasons have already gone by, and the stranger should be nothing more than a forgotten memory at the back of your mind. But today – this strange man takes a delicate sip of his cup of tea. If he notices the tension in your shoulders, he does not mention it.

No matter. With your back to the open, you drop a heavy bag of coins on the table. You've heard of Wangsheng Funeral Parlor's more discretionary services from a brother of the cause hailing from Yaoguang Shoal, whose hair was grey at the temples and whose right arm was cut from the shoulder down. He had pointed in the vague direction of Liyue Harbor with his prosthetic arm, the varnish lining on the wood worn with time. Though time had faded his scars, he had looked at you – you, with the same weathered eyes, a heart hungry with hatred for the same people in the name of the same cause – and told you where to go. He never offered you a farewell as you went; he had only turned away on his foot with such finality, so precisely you had wondered if he'd done it a thousand times, had sent many a soldier away with the expectation they'd never return from where he'd send them from. 

You wonder if this man — a man dressed in fine clothes, a handsome face unlined and untouched by the worries of past, present and future — can smell the stench of death on you in the same way that brother had. If he already knew that you were a lost cause, a soldier with a death wish. Another face to bury. 

The man does not blink at you. He continues to sip his tea, savoring the taste of it. Eventually, he withdraws his cup from his lips, and you are hit by the intensity of his honeyed gaze but not just that. There is another word, barely out of reach and dancing away from the tip of your tongue. You think, and you think, and you keep thinking, but it never comes to mind. You can't help but impatiently tap your fingers on the table as he gingerly empties his cup — some childish habit your tutors never managed to beat out from your busy fingers a lifetime ago. Over the rim of the cup, an eyebrow slightly lifts. The movement is minuscule, barely noticeable to anybody less vigilant, but it is surprisingly friendly. Familiar.

“Will you not drink this tea?” He mildly inquires, tea still cupped in his hands. 

You meant to say no. Instead, you pick up the lukewarm cup of tea in your hands out of respect. You barely remember the Liyuean way of drinking tea as taught in your etiquette classes: first, you sip a small amount before you take the main sip. Then, there is the last sip, which empties the cup, leaving you with the strong, overpowering taste of black tea in your mouth. A pity—you've left it steeping for longer than it should've been.

The tea had been a courtesy: you've known that he'd like it. Something you'd overheard someone say about the consultant. Some meaningless gesture to offer before the consultant gave you directions to the nearest Fatui hideout in Liyue in a neat, straightforward business transaction that was never meant to take this long. But when he sets down his teacup at the same time you do, there is a finality to the clink of porcelain against the table. You straighten in your seat, hands in your lap, a soldier being fed his orders. This is it, you think. Finally. 

Still, you can't help but furrow your eyebrow at the oddity of that action. Something about the certainty strikes you as familiar, and it is this thought that startles you—somehow, you know this is how he's always been: always certain, always measured in his actions. 

But you've never met this man before in your life. You're sure of it—as sure as an arrow sailing true, as certain as the wind finding its way home. Certainly, you'd remember if you had met a man as striking as this one, but you don't.

So where did that thought come from? 

The word comes in slow trickles. You've read about the concept before, in a plundered library of an abandoned fortress on an aquamarine island in the nation of Fontaine. Written in a book by some fabled Fontainian philosopher were his final, fragmented thoughts on his experience with rediscovering long-forgotten perceptions, and what would follow when they—violent and sporadic—came in contact with the current world. Every newborn idea should carry with it the charms of novelty, in the same way Mondstadt's winds carrying everything you cast away to oblivion felt like freedom; in the same way Fontaine's waters would eventually wash all old things anew. 

But to him, it never had. Instead, every place visited had felt cloying—the air stale and dry and clawing at his throat; that sense of wrongness ever-present, a slight tilt to the world that made it seem like the present had already been a life well-lived. Déjà vu, he'd called it. He'd claimed: I did not know, yet I did. Before this moment of knowing would come to pass, I found that I already missed the moment the boundary of separation faded: the ways of new had already been as old as time. 

You wouldn't know then, dismissing it as the rambling of a madman. But you know now: in the turning cogs of old memory, you think, and you remember: you do know him. Before the ghost of vengeance came and took you away from home, you remember the fading wisps of winding hedge corridors, dust bunnies in the spring morning, the searing heat of the midday sun bearing down on you, and that damned stone statue. There is more, before that. Things you will never remember, but still find familiar as it sits dormant in the hollow of your throat, in the longing at your fingertips.

You know him. You've never met him before.

There are matters more pressing than this paradox: half-formed remembrance; of having forgotten the loss of something and only having the vague shape of its imprint to remind you of it. You can hear your master, another brother from the same cause behind your ear, and your final orders: Diluc Ragnvindr—you are on a mission. This is your only reason for living, the only cause you have pledged your death for. Remember that are only in Liyue because of this.

This is it, you think. Your throat is dry. You ask: “Do I know you?”

It's the wrong question to ask. The corner of his mouth ticks up, and he looks you in the eye—like no one in the last two years has managed to do. Your breath does not catch, but it's a close thing.

He looks at you as though you are not marked by death. 

“No,” he tells you, like a secret. Though his amusement is evident, the same bittersweet smile is ever softer — better than that dream, better than the attic. “No, you don't.”

When he points west towards Lisha and marks the location of the ruin guard lab on your map, he does not warn you nor attempt to talk you out of your death wish. Instead, you follow him to the border of Liyue Harbor that very same night, stopping right before the point where the bridge starts. The dogs that linger around the bridge during the day are gone now, left only with the steady rush of water punctuating the silence. It's not important anyway — you will remain silent as you part ways, just as you have every time you have seen his face since that old, storied dream.

You will not meet him for another year, nor the year after that, nor the year after that year. If there is a chance you leave that place alive, you will be shipped to Natlan, where another mission on this never-ending cause awaits you. 

You indulge yourself just this once—one small indulgence for the boy in that dream, in the attic, at the statue of the seven, the boy you left behind to chase the ghosts of vengeance—and look back once. You swear to remember this moment: this stranger, who once promised you his name, with the sun at his back, face limned in the blessed golds of his own land. 

He does not bid you goodbye. He does not wish you luck. Instead, he meets your eyes with something unknowable in the split second you look back. 

It is unspoken - the certainty that you will survive, and live another day. A confidence you do not have, and cannot be assured of.

You face the open sky as sunlight spills over the cliffs lining the path to Lisha, your shadow cast long before you. You do not look back.