Chapter Text
The first month in Mondstadt makes him patient. It is a skill his father tried to cultivate in him that never quite took, a comfort with idleness tempered by an eager mind, racing and bracing itself for a promised someday that, when it arrives, is much more lethargic than he expects. The days pass slowly, a dozen new things to learn each one, more than the countless hours of lessons his father gave could ever prepare him for.
They structure their days different here: Mondstadters value freedom of every kind, and freedom of time is no exception. Meeting times come and pass before they begin, meals are eaten at different hours every day, the lessons that Crepus put him in occur in sporadic bursts of inspiration between his instructors’ bouts of isolation and travel. But time does not work the same for Kaeya, who must bring the space between someday and today together, who must be as from here as anyone else.
He makes it a week in near silence, observing, sitting with words in his throat that sound strange amidst the melodic syllables of their voices, before he breaks down and starts to ask. It is an inundation of questions that he forces upon the little family who take him in: What does that mean? What is this? How do I say that word? How do I eat this?
They are gentle with the answers, eager to give them, to explain the little things about their lives they never noticed before that will someday be his little things, too. It is a thought that sends his stomach sinking, that everything about him will need to be rewritten, stitches pulled out and resewn something new, something someone else’s. His favorite foods, the cut of his clothes; the sound of his voice should blend into theirs someday, soon. He comes here not of want but of need, and there is little room for error in this endeavor.
It is easy enough to learn Mondstadt fast, to get a picture of their people and their ways, but less so to become it. Kaeya is smart about the becoming. He figures out quickly where to pretend and where to adopt, how to replicate the sounds they make and the expressions they have, how to fit into their clothing without pulling at the strings and enjoy their food without pinching his face. It is new at first, to pretend like this, but he slots into this pantomiming way much more easily than he expects.
Years pass like this and then, when he thinks he cannot go on, that he has no reason to, more years pass like this. Time becomes muddled in his mind, how long he has been like this and how long he has left to go don’t seem very much at all. He is grateful for those early days, for the ones that taught him how to be like this and forgave and forgot him from before. He is grateful for his patience, for teaching himself becoming as if it were any other skill. It is a simple thing to learn to wait, but he finds it the most useful of all when his little life has settled some.
. . .
He thinks, some nights, when the rest of the household has fallen asleep, in the eternal watch of night, when stars blink down at him and he watches back with tired eyes, slipping closer toward slumber but not yet reaching it, about what it is to be here.
On the worst of these nights, he can feel wispy tears in his eyes, the full weight of his homesickness barreling forward to the front of his head, at the shape of their silverware: the sheer number of tines they have on each fork, the way they hold them differently and set them down between bites. It makes his head spin and his heart ache.
So too does the way they say his name, cutting off syllables that should not be, mostly right but the accent wrong, the best attempt they can make, and at night he whispers it to himself so that he might remember, whispers all the names and words he knows in the way he remembers, so they might be preserved a day longer.
It is difficult to describe it to even himself, this vastness within him, how it pushes at the sides of him, widens the inside until he is space within himself, emptied out. It is difficult to quell it, to shrink it down into something manageable; the days are easy, with people by his side to keep him company, but when they disperse, the world is again upended below him.
He finds himself laying on elaborate rugs on wooden floors, grounding, hidden behind locked doors, pressing parchment against his chest, feeling the fraying edges of this paper, clutching it to himself because he cannot lose it. He finds himself tracing the letters on the page with his first finger, desperate to remember the shape of their pens and their flints alike, petrified of forgetting what they feel like to hold.
. . .
A day comes, far too early into his time here, when Mondstadt stops being strange, when he realizes he thinks of it as familiar before anything else, when the light stops making him sick, when the people embrace him as warmly as anyone, when the final cluttered syllables don’t stop his speaking anymore.
It is a simple thing to respond in kind when Diluc says, “Let’s go home,” after a long day of playing, simpler to echo his words than try to find another way to say it that will not hurt the Ragnvindrs in their kind openness.
Idle days like these, like theirs, free and melodious and full of rebellion, feel like maybe they can become something to love, and the thought leaves a space so empty within him he is sure it will never be filled.
It is a different question, to call it home and to think of it as such, at the same time it is not very different at all.
Home is still home, of course, and always will be, but maybe here is something important, too. Different in every way, because home leaves him alone and somewhere strange, beckons him back but never pulls, fills his childhood with a million ways to leave it and none to return, and here accepts him with warm, open arms, fills his belly and makes his bed, and demands he call it something else. And the same, too: a place to rest his head, a place to miss when he goes.
. . .
Kaeya runs. Eighteen months into his life in Mondstadt and again he becomes something new: a coward, a craven someone who flees.
It is easy enough to leave the Ragnvindr’s manor, and easier still to slip onto one of the shipping vessels they have contracted. Much of Kaeya’s childhood was dedicated to light steps and slinking through shadows; this is no trouble at all.
The journey is harder. Staying unseen, that comes easy as breathing, and the waiting endurance as he sits alone amidst barrels. But the being between—he is always between, but this makes it feel real—he can barely manage.
I’m going home, he tells himself as he watches the stars from the top deck once the sailors have gone to bed for the night. But home calls from two directions, and neither feels like they belong under the starry expanse above him, tucked away in caverns and mansions always with someone at his side. I will go, he thinks, and then I will be home.
The leaving is easy, but the staying gone is not. He remembers with wood on all sides, scratching at his skin, the thick scent of wine filling his nose, his first month with the Ragnvindrs, malleable and alone, and he thinks he can do it again in search of his first home but the thought of it sends his hands shaking, his lip quivering.
Land comes into view in the early hours of the morning, when he wakes with tears staining his face and rubs them away, cheeks warming even in his loneliness. Bridges and boats dot the edges of the water, but the ground is what steals the show: giant, twisting roots make up the world here, ruins of once-great forests now falling in broken pieces and tied together with green-topped buildings shaped like petals.
Kaeya’s destination is here somewhere, deep in the deserts if the stories are true, but suddenly the world feels too grand to traverse alone, the promise of learning somewhere new, again, in his search is too great to bear on his own. He doesn’t remember the land like this; his journey with his father was on quiet backroads, relics of another time, not this bustling city that makes him feel dizzy just looking at it.
But his musings are cut short in one swift moment: the sharp eye of a bored sailor out for a morning stroll around the deck, blinking in shocked stupor at the child before him.
“Well,” he says. “Where’d you come from?”
He will never live this down. When he finally returns, the Ragnvindrs will not let him forget, poking fun over evening meals and family trips, a feigned lightness to conceal a true anxiety, one that runs deep, that he will go back as quickly as he appeared, as cleanly, a tear in the space of a place they know well, dropped into their worlds without anything to tie him to anywhere else. It makes it easier for them, he thinks, that the place he was before does not seem to exist, at least not to them, not to anyone who walks in Teyvat’s sunshine and stars, that he comes to call their things his but there is nothing before to replace. This is not as simple, the knowledge that there is somewhere out there that might want him back.
In the end, it is Crepus alone who comes to fetch him. The captain of the ship puts him in a hotel and for two more days he sits alone in wait, until he finds himself face-to-face with the concerned expression of the person who has taken him in and from whom he runs. Who chases him down when he leaves.
“Do you want to come home with me?” he asks, a man practical before anything else, even in the face of uncertainty over their little life together.
There are few ways to answer this question honestly, because it’s not like he has much choice; Crepus will not leave him to his own devices in this new country even if he asks. Still, it is not a lie when he answers, “Yes.”