Chapter Text
A Cavalry Captain walks into a bar and immediately slams a few thousand mora on the counter.
“Give me however much this’ll buy,” he says, and quite frankly, he looks like shit. So much so it’s a bit strange, actually, Diluc thinks as he bends to pick up the coins that’ve toppled onto his feet and ignoring how loudly his back clicks in response.
“Not a lot.” Comes his voice from under the bar as he stashes it away in the pseudo cash register. It’s a pretty awkward amount of money to be carrying around, but Diluc doesn’t feel like it’s worth messing around with the change, rummaging for a larger glass than usual and the nearest dandelion wine.
Even when they’d been children, Kaeya had always enjoyed taking care to present himself well. He’d started styling his hair at seven, no longer letting Adelinde lay his clothes out for him by nine, and once he hit the double digits, he’d taken it upon himself to start collecting perfumes that very quickly took up the vast majority of the shelving unit until their father finally put his foot down. Kaeya had always insisted that he ‘enjoyed the undertones’, like he was some kind of tiny scent sommelier. Diluc reckoned he probably just liked the looks of the bottles.
Somewhere along the line since then, it seems he’d decided to forgo the lot of that. For one, he smells something between a ditch and a river, potentially both. Probably both, on second thought, given the streaks of mud highlighting his hair with increasing severity the further down they go, lit under a kind tavern lamplight doing next to nothing for his appearance. In some ironic way, the muffled, weirdly purplish colour of it is a perfect complement to the fun arrangement of bruises and mosquito bites all but coating his chest, cut off halfway by the fluffy boa slung over one shoulder.
On the counter, it sounds much like Kaeya has just slumped himself over the length of it and smacked his forehead, “Ugh, I don’t care, just make it strong.”
Diluc returns the dandelion wine and reaches for a different bottle, “Fire-water mixer?”
“Perfect.”
Despite knowing it perfectly well, Kaeya doesn’t seem to dwell on the fact that the fire-water in question has been proclaimed on numerous occasions to be ‘strictly for display purposes’. It’s effectively still full, having been sold for roughly a week total proceeding that one time Diluc got absolutely hammered and subsequently left to collect dust on the back shelf ever since. There’s a slight layer of miscellaneous fluff circling the base of the bottle where the grooves curl into the underside. Some of it skims the edges of Diluc’s sleeve as he grabs it.
The silence that stretches between them as he pours a scoopful of ice into a glass isn’t as thickly awkward as it might usually be, which somehow makes it even more awkward. There are only a few patrons hanging around right now, and most of them have been incoherent since mid-afternoon, contributing to the soundscape in hushed babbling and the occasional chortle that threatens to evolve into projectile vomit. Kaeya looks slightly more composed than he had when he’d initially sauntered in, the crease in his brow smoothed a touch and general demeanour more befitting his outwardly lax attitude.
Of course, it isn’t like he’d been on the brink of his sanity before. It was more that Kaeya being outwardly stressed at all is usually a pretty good signifier that something's incredibly wrong, but knowing his issues seem more the result of various simultaneous inconveniences rather than a single world-ending calamity allow Diluc to backtrack on his plans of spending all night playing vigilante.
The glass practically floats into Kaeya’s waiting palm with a reverberating thunk. “There.”
“What, no change?”
Diluc folds his arms, “You’re getting your money’s worth. If you wanted change, pick a better opening line.”
Kaeya hums nothing that sounds like words, drowned out through the liquid he proceeds to down a good half of in the next heartbeat, tipping himself back as a lopsided sigh drips from his lips. He swipes his cup to the side in a needlessly extravagant swish, and Diluc wouldn’t be all too shocked if the fat sploshes of alcohol that jump down onto the floor because of it are deliberate.
“Don’t do that."
“Oh, come off it. I’ve had a hard day,” The cup swirls again, and this time the extra few droplets that are sent cascading onto the planks are absolutely deliberate, though at least Kaeya himself seems vaguely remorseful about wasting precious alcohol, “I’m at least allowed to relax.”
Diluc spends a couple of seconds contemplating whether or not to swat at him with the rag he’s just picked up to mop the counter, “You can do that without making a mess of my tavern. I’ll have you clean it up yourself if you’re not careful.”
Mid-sip, Kaeya’s slender eyebrows hike slightly up his forehead. Or rather, they probably do, but that’s a guess given Diluc can only see one of them, “Well, I never! That’s not very charitable of you now, is it?”
“The day you need charity is the day the church goes out of business.”
“Ooh, I don’t know. That day might be coming sooner than we think.” The way Kaeya says it almost makes it sound like a question. An incredibly annoying feature, as if the others weren’t enough, because it tends to leave people a little stuck on the kind of response it’s supposed to warrant.
Luckily, Diluc doesn’t actually care what he’s expected to respond with anyway, which is nothing at all as Kaeya necks the rest of his drink as though not tasting any of the alcohol and instantly resumes fumbling around in one of his pockets, “Have you not seen all the ad campaigns recently? Apparently, the sisters’ numbers are dwindling, and this year’s recruitment has been low.”
A snort nearly fights its way out of Diluc’s nose before he has the presence of mind to stop it, and he instead channels that energy into snatching the mora out of Kaeya’s palm the second he’s stopped fiddling with his wallet. He mixes the drink within seconds, the same thing he’d ordered before, and slips it onto the counter, “If you’re that concerned, why don’t you sign up? I’m sure the sisters would be delighted.”
“You think so?” Kaeya says, the words warbled through a mouthful of bubbles. It must be adequately strong because he makes a face and immediately attempts to neutralise it, “I’m more than charming enough to pull it off, no? I’ll have Rosaria put in a good word for me.”
“It just might work if the recommendation came from anybody else.”
“A guy can dream.”
Out of habit, Diluc briskly checks for any wayward eyes pointing in his direction before reaching under the bar and taking a sip from the water that’s been sat there since noon. Kaeya quickly clinks their glasses together before he goes in for a second swig, and the water is hued a strangely glittery cream in the alcohol’s ludicrous reflection and statically rippled with fizz. A droplet of the fire water mixer falls into his cup, sparkling red blooming to a feather of faint pink splayed down from the ripple at the surface. Once again, it is impossible to tell if he did that on purpose.
Replacing his cup, Diluc takes the rag back into his palm and flicks it about for lack of anything better to do with himself. He considers scrubbing at Kaeya’s comically massive glass and saying it’s because he’s got his elbows on the counter.
“So,” he says instead, resting one hand at his side as the other hovers by the cash register, still open. The fresh mora in there glints like cor lapis under the clement tavern bulbs, glassy waves of light bending white around the engraved trefoil, “any reason you decided to grace us with your presence looking like that?”
Kaeya’s expression widens as though he’s about to retort something unbearably snotty, but his face is midway in his drink, so he holds an arm up and makes a franticly elegant rotating motion with his wrist as he swallows, “I’d watch it if I were you. It’s no secret that I’m one of your most faithful customers, isn’t that right?”
“Sure, but you also don’t usually look like something the hilichurls dragged in.”
“Tell me, is that meant to be a compliment or an insult?”
“Neither. It’s an observation.”
“Oh, I’m sure.” Kaeya takes another sip, and Diluc almost catches himself telling him to slow down, unless he’s planning on only leaving the building once he’s too drunk to remember that he’s covered in at least three different kinds of mud. But Kaeya is also a fully grown man, and Diluc will continue attempting to repress his thoughts on his drinking habits until they’re dragged into the open by force, “Don’t you remember what Father always said? If you don’t have anything nice to say, you ought to not say anything at all.”
Diluc feels a brow quirk up his forehead. He takes another cursory glance around the room and reaches for his water, knocking it back in a motion so fast a good amount of it splashes down his chin. A plastic laugh, low and bevelled, much more like a chuckle, drifts across the air directly in front of him, and Diluc is abruptly not too concerned about the fact Kaeya not only referred to Father as… well, Father, rather than an excessively formal ‘Master Crepus’, but didn’t even take it back.
It was yet another one of those weird idiosyncrasies he must’ve developed over the years Diluc was busy being a moderate inconvenience to the Fatui. He wasn’t sure what to think of it. To call Crepus ‘Father’ was far from an inaccurate title even now. That’s exactly what he both was and still is, alive to hear it or no.
Maybe it was another result of their legendary falling out on his eighteenth birthday, where Diluc had been so thoroughly consumed by anger the more precise memories of whatever poison he’d spat only lingered like noxious mist in his head, clogging his thoughts and filing down the nerves until they swayed rounded and numb under his skin. It was a bitter, guilty ache, the only thing he knows true to his core that he avoids the scent of. In and amongst the barbs and rain and slick screech of metal through air, he may have abandoned the last family he had left then, but Crepus certainly hadn’t.
It was almost like he felt ashamed of it, for being treated like a son. Except Kaeya was not the type of person who felt much shame, especially under the shared weight of a history never spoken aloud but clinging so tightly to their persons it indurated the air. Diluc had never found the right time to tell him to stop correcting himself, but that was hardly a reminder he needed. They were both plenty smart enough to know that.
Rather than saying anything, he merely takes another sip of his glass, refilling it and sliding it back under the bar.
“I heard that the water’s supposed to go in your mouth.” Kaeya says.
Diluc liberally gestures to the sporadically placed droplets lining the wood he’s still got his elbows on, as well as the fact he’s clearly gone out of his way to not put his glass back onto the coaster, “Words are valuable resources. It’d do you well not to waste them.”
Shrugging, Kaeya swishes his drink from side to side, watching the remnants of liquid cling to the walls of the cup and the curved mirror of a small but surgically sharp smirk in the light, “Follow your own instructions, perhaps?”
A pitchy jingle floats from the doorway as Diluc opens his mouth to throw out a retort he’s not come up with yet, a couple of men sauntering in and the latter of the two lightly kicking it shut behind him. He sends a blank glance to Kaeya, who shrugs something wonderfully indistinct and returns to studying his alcohol as though there’s any sense to be found there.
Two cups of dandelion wine are passed over the counter for an emptied pouch of mora, fallen from a leather purse that looks as though it’s been around longer than Diluc himself has. He quickly counts the sum of it in his palm as the men then amble off to the furthest corner of the tavern, rolling the coins between his fingers and hearing their metallic trill clutter the cash register, “What are you staring at them for?”
It's almost unnoticeable, but Kaeya startles a touch, eye flickering to Diluc’s back as he drains the soapy basin and refills it. The collar lying around his neck ruffles and makes him look abstractly like a puffed-up cat pawing at a pile of snow, and it probably would’ve fallen off entirely if it hadn’t managed to get caught on those stupid, absolutely not standard-issue shoulder guard things he wears, “No reason.”
“Liar.” Kaeya’s face broadens with something akin to amusement, shrugging his shoulders. He fiddles somewhat lazily with his collar, fingers sinking into the chalky white and its faint indentations of blue, “What is it this time?”
“Hardly anything particularly exciting. Just some people I’ve got to…” He makes a vague gesture with his free hand, just like he does when he’s already decided on the correct term but knows it wouldn’t do to mutter aloud. Not that Diluc would’ve had any trouble guessing what it was, which was half of why it worked so well, “have a chat with tomorrow night, that’s all.”
“Night? Hate to break it to you, but we’re closing early tomorrow. Maintenance visit.”
“I’m on a twenty-four, so we’ll be starting here and heading elsewhere afterwards. Who knows, you might get lucky and run into me.” Kaeya sips at his drink, pinkie sticking out a little in a very ordinary display of teasing hyperbole.
It does nothing to negate the fact he still very much looks terrible, not to mention tired, now that he’s leered forwards enough for Diluc to get an accidental second look. It’d be rather concerning if it were anyone but Kaeya.
However, it is Kaeya, so it’s only an ordinary amount of concerning, “Should you really be drinking tonight, then?”
Kaeya waves a hand flippantly besides his face, “I don’t start ‘til one. Besides, you know I can put back a few before you need to start worrying your pretty little head about me.”
“I’m not worried about you. I just think that it’s incredible how someone who apparently possesses so much intelligence can make such ill-advised choices.”
“Right, sure.” His mouth twitches, and Diluc can’t quite tell if he’s genuinely ticked or just playing it up for his own entertainment. He’s fairly certain it’s something Kaeya does almost exclusively for the purpose of winding him up, making it nigh-on-impossible to tell what exactly he’s thinking, “It isn’t as though I’ll be doing anything before I need to, anyway. It’s all about patience, you see. Trying to start right here and now would be far too suspicious.”
“Not helped by the fact you look like that.” Diluc dunks one of the glasses in the basin, polishing off the water and pointedly raking his eyes up and down over the counter, “You never answered my question.”
Tipping his jaw onto bony knuckles, Kaeya keeps his mouth wedged in his cup, though it doesn’t look like he’s actually drinking anything, “What’s it to you? Does the Darknight Hero want to stick his nose where it doesn’t belong again?”
Diluc involuntarily grimaces at the name, and the corner of Kaeya’s eye crinkles like tissue paper as he talks, “It’s all said and done, anyway. You know, if you really do care that much, there’s no shame in telling me.”
“I never said that.”
To add insult to injury, Kaeya’s smirk takes on a flatter quality to it, a pencil drawing of a crescent moon silhouetting a tackily curtained sky, “You don’t have to.”
“If you insist.” Diluc rolls his eyes and pretends there isn’t anything weirdly un-irritating about the fact Kaeya’s unmistakable huff of amusement doesn’t make him want to gnaw his own ear off, “Tell me why you look like that, or I’m kicking you out.”
The smoothly bouncy huff mutates some which way into a chuckle, breathy against the inside of his glass, “I wouldn’t put it past you.” He says, though a small, soft gleam slithers between the corners of his pupil that betrays his knowing the threat to be an entirely empty one, “Abusing your power, like that. My, my, what would people think?”
“I think they’d understand perfectly well that you’re the exception that proves the rule.”
“Aww, well isn’t that sweet?” Finishing off the remainder of his drink, Kaeya sets the glass down onto the counter and stares at its swanlike neck for a moment or two, as if he doesn’t understand where all the liquid’s gone. Which is certainly not what he’s likely thinking right about now, because he can very easily order another one and also absolutely has the pocket money to do so, “Careful being all vintage like that. People will start thinking something’s wrong.”
Against Diluc’s better judgement, he scoffs, “It’s called having tact and not letting random knights desecrate my temper. Shockingly enough, that’s usually you.”
“Flattered, truly.”
Diluc sighs, the feel of it alone making his chest heave like pulled fabric as he tries not to accidentally stare directly into the lamps softly swaying above his head, “Well? I don’t have all night.”
He rolls his neck around for a moment in his palm, the muscles stiff as bark and corrugating the fabric of his gloves. Charles took the day off for his anniversary, so he’s been here since morning, the amount of hours spent lost between the payments and measures and lines etched up the smooth insides of shot glasses. Really, it’s not like Diluc minds covering when needed, but he also feels a little like a ragdoll by now, senses stuffed full with cotton, which is far from ideal.
Across from him, Kaeya sighs back, the sound of it light and infinitely more performance than it is genuine, “If you must know, I was out today with some recruits we’re thinking about promoting.”
Wordlessly, he slides his cup back over the counter, knocking his head to one side with a particular pinch in his chin. Diluc obliges. “Mhm?”
“We were off near Windrise. All very rudimentary stuff, given they’re still in basic, and, uh,” Kaeya pauses for a moment, a glass of Death After Noon slipping into his hand. It’s out of season, and he clearly knows it judging by the slight tilt in one corner of his mouth, but Diluc isn’t about to explain himself.
Kaeya’s typical order is whatever he first asked for, that again, and then a Death After Noon. Occasionally, the third is substituted with either a cider or some abomination of mixology that’s even stronger than everything else combined, depending on how blasted he intends on getting.
With mixed results, might he add, because Kaeya’s life has a petrifying lack of routine. Which means he hasn’t always eaten anything decent by the time he ends up at Angel’s Share, meaning that Diluc is sometimes forced to disrupt the general order of things by pretending berry juice is actually hard liquor. It’s barely his responsibility, and Kaeya knows that too, but he’s fairly confident that he just likes making himself Diluc’s problem because he quite legitimately has nothing better to do.
In the meantime, Kaeya takes a sip of his drink and hums in satisfaction, and it feels more like a victory than makes any sense, “Well, to cut a long story short, one of the recruits at the back of the pack got snuck up on by hilichurls, and so I went back to help. He must’ve caught it with his sword or something like that, but a barrel exploded.” He swirls the glass in a small arc from one shoulder to the other to demonstrate, sending a new plethora of alcoholic droplets onto the counter, “We ended up being sent flying right into the lake. And the mud.”
Diluc has the grace to outwardly wince at that, which must communicate whatever reaction Kaeya had been hoping for if the thick little huff he lets float in his glass is any indication, “As it turns out, it’s a little difficult to save face when you’re soaking wet and covered in reeds and such. Wasn’t fun to detail in the report, either. I would’ve ad-libbed it more if Jean hadn’t all but perched herself over my shoulder.”
“I can imagine.” Diluc says over giving into the urge to mention that Kaeya doesn’t have a lot of face in need of saving to begin with, partially because that’s fundamentally untrue to his overwhelmingly positive reputation and partially because he doesn’t care to be grilled about his own, “And you didn’t break anything?”
As if subconsciously, Kaeya’s fingers drift to ghost over the notably purple bruise crawling between his collarbones, haphazardly splashed across his skin like a spill of paint, “Nope.”
“No concussion?”
“Do I really look concussed to you?”
“And the mosquito bites?”
“Oh, probably because I’ve been sleeping with the window open recently.”
“That’d do it.” Diluc pauses for a second to watch two of the patrons who’d been in since midday stumble through the door, nodding in acknowledgement as one of them yells something that might be a thanks in his general direction, “And now you’re here. Getting mud all over my floor.”
Whatever residual glee was still sparking on Kaeya’s face drops like a sack of bricks in the ocean, and he takes a long, slow sip of his drink while glaring over the rim of the glass, crystalline and splintering bright fractals into his eye, “Well, I’m deeply sorry for having a job, your majesty.” He tuts as though he hasn’t just paid Diluc for three separate drinks he both made and served him in the tavern that he owns, “The showers at headquarters are broken, and if I went home, you would’ve long been shut by the time I got here. I’m here to relax, aren’t I? Interrogating your customers is probably bad for business.”
“If you have an issue with my management, you could always go to the Cat’s Tail.”
“I’ll pass.” The way Kaeya says it almost sounds like he’s gloating, “I prefer it here, you’ll find.”
“I do. Regularly. As evidenced by the fact you’re caught there barely once in a blue moon.”
“Exactly! As talented as little Diona is, she’s not too fond of me.”
“What a surprise.” If it were physically possible, Diluc flattens his stare even more, leaning a shoulder against the wooden pillar stretching to the ceiling at the counter’s end with a short glance to the room. The oaky veins of wood press engravings into his coat like millions of tiny, misted footsteps, tangled within the tassels, “It’s hardly as though the alcohol’s your primary reason for coming here, anyway.”
“Who’s to say?” Kaeya concedes with a shrug. Neither of them comment on the fact he immediately made a beeline for the counter the second he struggled through the door, his stride so strangely rehearsed it was as though he’d ran through the motions beforehand in front of the bathroom mirror. Nor the way this happens to be the exact same seat he takes every time Diluc is working the bar and he’s not being paid to drink and ply information out of people. Even for Kaeya’s tried and true technique of phrasing very obvious things in this smarmy kind of manner that make them sound more like jabs, it would’ve been far too easy.
Really, one would think that criminals would catch on to the whole charade by now and just avoid him all together. Clearly, that isn’t the case, given Kaeya seems to still have enough variety in his work it makes the generous insanity of his paycheque somewhat justified.
Diluc nibbles absently at his bottom lip, eyes shuffling to the wall in thought, then back to the glass in his hands he’s pretending not to have finished polishing at least two minutes ago. He mumbles and privately hopes it comes out as an afterthought, “There’s an en-suite attached to the room upstairs. You can shower there if you need.”
He spins around to the sink so he doesn’t have to see Kaeya’s face. Something about saying it tugs weirdly at his nerves, and it would’ve pissed Diluc off if he wasn’t trying so hard to play it off as just another meaningless sentence.
At the bar, there comes a small intake of breath, muddled in the sloshing of wine that sounds like Kaeya once again pausing halfway through another sip. Once again, largely unreadable, though hued ever so distantly with something that might’ve been a welcomed bewilderment.
“Oh, that’s not necessary.” He says after a little while, and a smile sits curled in the dipping of his voice, the kind of undertone that only exists if the words are ones he’s spent a moment mulling and spicing with the intricacies of his inflection. It’s something he’d done a lot as a child, when Diluc would enthusiastically prod him for his thoughts on the latest book they’d read, “I’ll be heading home soon anyway. Twenty-four, remember?”
Diluc stuffs another glass in the sink as though he’s trying to drown it, mouth pinched, feeling oddly stupid, “Right.”
Across the counter, Kaeya hums again, and Diluc can feel the near repressive weight of that single-eyed stare at the back of his neck as though the points on his pupil’s diamond are piercing the flesh. There’s another rustle, followed by a thump, an attempt at subtlety as he turns to stack the dried glasses on the overhead beams, hanging them like plosives on the lines of a notepad. Kaeya is slumped more onto his elbows now, still swirling the wine in his hand, and he doesn’t break eye contact even as he notices Diluc looking.
“No need to sound so offended.” Kaeya says. The alcohol he’s successfully managed to pour down his throat in the while he’s hung around seems to be just on the verge of taking effect, and there’s an angular set to his face as if remoulded by the unexpected, “I’ll need clean uniform to change into tomorrow and a good night’s sleep. Not that I doubt the quality of your bedding, of course. It’s hardly personal.”
“I know. I wouldn’t be renting it out to people if it was poor quality. There’s at least some kind of reputation I intend to uphold.” The words come out automatically, and Diluc’s already schooled his face back to a comfortable plainness and resolutely ignores the strange, unwarranted sense of disappointment tapping at his throat, “You should probably start making your way home. I’m doing last calls in, what…” He glances to the clock on the wall, “five minutes.”
Lifting his head, Kaeya takes a sip, and the casual tease in his voice is pulled like knotted ribbon, “Is this your polite way of cutting me off?”
“Sure.” He pauses, watching Kaeya lean backwards on the barstool and gulp down another mouthful of alcohol. Turns around and grabs one of the clean glasses from below the counter, flicking on the tap, “You’re not tipsy, are you?”
Kaeya snorts as if to purposefully be irritating, “Tipsy? After three drinks?”
“Three strong drinks.”
“Just what do you take me for? Give it half an hour. Maybe it’ll have hit me by then.” His voice comes out as if he doesn’t believe his own words, a moonish curve of unknown nature still loitering on his lips. Diluc rolls his eyes, watching him down the remainder of his drink and grabbing the glass the moment he’s let go of it, “For someone who supposedly despises the Knights, you sure do like to fret about us a lot.”
The bait in it is strong as anything, but it’s nothing Kaeya hasn’t launched his way without warning before. In some abstraction, it’s an olive branch, one of the many the both of them have been indistinctly waving in the others’ direction at ill-fated moments before retracting like withered leaves. Diluc feels spun on vertigo when he recognises it and bats it away with a proverbial arm.
So far, they’ve both been resolutely ignoring said olive branches, at least in their most obvious forms. Efforts of deeper conversation, anything relating too deeply to the Winery, memories of Father wilted six feet up. Kaeya’s eyepatch, or anything surrounding his eyes, generally, despite the fact they both know the right one works just fine. Those years where Diluc voluntarily stepped off the face of the planet. The fact he still has all those old letters they’d exchanged, strewn about his living room like the spotted recollections of an amnesiac. That gaudy vase he can’t seem to get rid of. The delusion shards littering his old clothes. Favonius uniform, new. Unworn.
And yet, the olive trees seem to grow. A few years back, reunited once again and marred with years and scars and the absence of camaraderie seething in the subtext, they wouldn’t be having this conversation. Kaeya wouldn’t have sauntered into the tavern looking like a royal mess with as much confidence as he had, and Diluc wouldn’t have dipped into the fire-water that’d sat there purely as unneeded prestige decoration for eons and considered lightly swatting at his arms with a cleaning rag. Branches terracing the sky laced between the planks of the tavern, the dark eyes of wooden beams green and black and sprouting long, teal leaves in the bubbling gold.
Diluc snatches a new coaster from the pile at the counter’s edge and places it in front of Kaeya. On top of that, a tall glass of water, a bead of moisture snaking down the side. He’s put ice in it. It’s an unnecessary gesture, “Whatever the Knights are up to is of no concern to me. I just think it would be dreadfully embarrassing for the Cavalry Captain to be found passed out on the street after having one too many.”
Dutifully, Kaeya grabs the water and takes a long swig, not checking to see if Diluc’s watching, “That’s rich, but fair enough, I suppose. Though there are very few who can drink me under the table.”
“Rosaria. That bard?” Lord Barbatos, Diluc doesn’t say, because no matter how long ago he’d become aware of it, the knowledge that he is regularly serving copious amounts of wine to the deity he grew up and still somewhat worships is unfathomably strange.
“I said few, not none.” Kaeya taps his fingers around the glass’s surface in a slew of flickering rotations. It’s a habit he’d never kicked that was picked up from Father way back when, who appropriately insisted on having a glass of wine at any given opportunity. “Say, is Venti even old enough to be drinking?”
“You’d be surprised.”
His eye flickers upwards, and there’s something sharp in it, though not whetted by malice, “Would I now? Howso?”
Not keen on getting in trouble with a god today, Diluc rolls his shoulders back, huffs through his nose, and feels a phantom of Anemo breeze trickle like thread around his ears, cold and silken and watchful, “Ask him yourself.”
“Good idea.” Kaeya winks at nothing, which is only certain because of the overdone tilt of his head it’s accompanied with. A backhandedly meaningless thing, he understood by now, something he tends to do when he’s run out of other gestures to fall back on, “Rosaria I couldn’t explain even if I tried. She drinks like a madwoman.”
Diluc hums, and he’s fairly sure his face morphs into a peculiar sort of scrunch because Kaeya grins into his water, eye flashing hazy in an apparent recollection of something he probably wasn’t entirely mentally present for. It’s not often that he goes out of his way to get ridiculously drunk. Most nights, he’ll allow himself tipsy at the very most, and usually only reaches that point when Diluc’s preoccupied with gently kicking everyone out to fumble their way home.
Even within the tavern, Rosaria is an elusive figure. She likes to order drinks and then take off with them, returning the glass on her way back to the cathedral as though the other sisters won’t know where she’s been. Diluc’s seen her as many times as he can count on one hand. One of which being a Friday where she’d strolled in with Kaeya at early evening, the fading yellow sunlight a molten syrup sinking in between the floorboards and momentarily bathing her shape in an oxymoronic halo.
Anyway, being a Friday, it’d been busy, and Diluc had enough other customers to deal with to not even consider paying them any particular attention. It was only when things were beginning to slow down that he finally remembered where they were sat, only to find Kaeya unconscious as anything and sprawled across the table, snoring much louder than anyone who didn’t know him so well may expect.
And then Rosaria, a faint daze in her eyes, granted, and surrounded by beer steins somewhere in the double digits. Heels propped up on the table, holding a cigarette, the smoke curling between the banisters of the stairs above her like the feathered plume of a quill pen.
So yes. Rosaria was an enigma, even to the opportunistic bartender. And she also needed to stop smoking indoors, because Diluc had had to leave the windows open overnight to let the musky smell of it air out and ended up concerned enough about the possibility of theft he’d slept upstairs. “Makes you seem perfectly adjusted.”
“When did your manners die out, exactly?” Kaeya makes a motion with his hand as if to suggest he’s toying with the possibility of dropping his cup on purpose, “Care to discuss glass houses?”
“Not particularly. Speaking of which, finish your water. I need to wash that.”
Kaeya mutters something unclear under his breath, melodic as Diluc steps aside for a moment to announce last calls to a now slightly quieter tavern and bundles a few empty glasses into his arms to dump into the sink. An empty glass of water comes sliding to the edge of the counter the very second he loops back around to gather a few more, the backwards scrape of wooden legs scratchily blending into the toneless humbuzz of the bar’s dreamlike atmosphere like pollen.
There are a few more seconds of rustling, during which Kaeya somewhat awkwardly returns to fishing about in his pockets on an uncomfortable looking angle, as though his muscles are refusing to function as they should. Then a pause, and between the pitched clatter of fragile things teetering on edges and boot steps beating into the floor, a fistful of coins is sprinkled unceremoniously over the cash register.
Diluc sighs, “Just leave it on the counter next time.”
“I was only trying to help.” Says Kaeya, in a way that makes it very obvious he wasn’t.
Keeping his stare down to the slowly filling basin, Diluc tries very hard to resist spraying a flick of soap at him, “Will you be needing any fire-water for tomorrow?”
“Huh?”
“That ‘chat’ you mentioned.” By some otherworldly mercy, a few more patrons (specifically, the conscious ones) gradually peel out of the tavern. It’s a few less things to worry about, though truthfully, they would never have been too steep a trouble, “I’m here from five.”
“Oh, are you really?”
It’s only partially a lie. Diluc doesn’t feel bad about it. There’s no need to- he was going to be in for the closing shift to direct the engineers afterwards, anyway, then that’d be him until Sunday. Simply put, it’s a lot harder to keep track of Kaeya’s comings and goings if he arrives while the party is already in full swing, not to mention monitoring whoever it is he’s trying to get information out of and how much everyone had to drink.
Again, by no means is it that Kaeya’s incapable of managing his affairs. Diluc is just… not paranoid, but undeniably somewhere along that pipeline. For instance, if someone slips something in his glass, swordsman or not, he wouldn’t be able to properly defend himself. Or if there’s an ambush, and every patron that night turns out to be in cahoots with an unknown gang set on dealing a massive blow to both the Knights and city in one fell swoop. Or if someone strolls in with plans for some gruesome train of events already lodged in their back pocket, intent on setting themselves alight to keep some rotten evil warm in the celestial fractures heat rises to, burning the entire nation to the ground with them.
He simply likes to be there, just in case, to keep an eye. That, and the extra information he can gather in the process is always handy. “Just spit out what you have planned.”
“Hmm, it’s nothing out of the ordinary, I suppose.” Kaeya says, and one of his fingers taps at his chin. Much less like he’s thinking about anything than he is giving himself something to do for doing’s sake, “I can tell you if something changes. If that’d make you feel better.”
His tone is slick with snark. Diluc huffs, “Well, whatever the case, I’ll be in. That’s all.”
“Good to know. I think it's time I head off.” Kaeya’s arms stretch high over his head, and as if on cue, a yawn encroaches at his mouth that he visibly attempts to stifle. He manages to dislodge some of the dirt gluing his hair into thick and unwieldly strands around his face, off coloured and dusting its remains onto his clothes. Diluc only now notices there’s grass trapped between his shoulder guard and thin fabric of his arm band, braided between the strands, “Hope I didn’t wreck your tavern too badly.”
“You wish. Go shower before the city will have to be fumigated.”
Lazily, Kaeya waves a hand over his shoulder, and there’s a slight stumble in his step as he tugs open the door that’s more likely from exhaustion than alcohol. The warm, sheltered blaze of the lamplights are damp against his skin as moonlight quickly creeps through, pearl flecks dappling the floor that waver like starlit phantoms in Kaeya’s stretched shadow, dipping into his cape and stroking the glossy stitching. Crosshatches sketch themselves small to every edge of his silhouette, cutting around the backs of his ears and neck to conceal his presence in dried puddles of ink, and dusty pencil shavings mutter at his heels, clustered in the glossy watercolour.
Then, the door swings shut once more, the thud muted like grey against the translucent whispers of cool air. Thinly heeled boots tap along the uneven cobblestones outside, their marble rhythm drifting quieter into the rustling night’s breeze as distance swallows its sound, a step or two occasionally drooping off-kilter in the gentle beat.
And again, Diluc is left alone, and there’s a patron or two still dozing over the tables in the corner, and the golden brightness weakly pulsing at the wall doesn’t quite cloy like honey at his cheeks.
He should be able to lock up soon. The few stragglers still present are categorically not being served any more alcohol, not that he’s sure they could pay for it. Strangely, it’s a relief. Makes his job a hell of a lot easier, that’s for sure. This sort of patron tends to be woken up, apologise profusely for a few seconds, then clear out in the next heartbeat.
That’s a problem for a little later, though. Because if they can leave on their own before then, Diluc can knock a good few minutes off the closing to-do list. The lonely walk home never grows shorter, no matter how fluently his legs can recite it. He’s not been sleeping well, a combination of late nights and no nights that’d have Adelinde judgementally shaking her head if she knew.
There are still chores in the manor that need handling before bed, too, and the prospect of them is hardly thrilling. In truth, it should be far too much for a single person to stomach, even when accompanied by the ever-reliable staff populating the bright mausoleum of home, but he’d forgotten all about it until the door’s bronzing latch clicked shut. The thoughts muddle as though trodden and discarded, burnt black by the lungs of a wick waxed to disuse. It’s enough to grow overwhelmed by in the silence.
Instead, in the tavern, door closed and quiet, he breathes. Erases all other obligations except those required now, reaching across the bar to dip Kaeya’s glass in the sink.