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It takes Diluc a while, once he returns to Mondstadt, to notice the state of Kaeya's wings.
They aren't in notable disarray, but neither are they at all well-kept. He keeps them tightly closed against his back, the cape of his new uniform half-falling over them, eclipsing them with its ornate cut and dramatic tones. There's no gleam of oil, and his feathers are dry and brittle from the lack, more always broken when Diluc sees him than can be accounted for by battle alone. They're brushed back with a ruthlessness that no doubt is only breaking them further.
And Diluc has never once seen them decorated. Kaeya doesn't wear any wing-clasps, even though Diluc can easily imagine several designs that would match his outfit, and whoever he commissioned it from would surely have offered to add them in. Not once has Diluc seen even the ends of the primaries painted. Father used to love painting their wings. Diluc never had the patience for more than a hawk's bars, but Kaeya would hold still for an hour or more, wings stretched out behind him, while Father painted each primary with a peacock's eye in full and natural detail.
Perhaps Diluc can understand why he doesn't paint them anymore.
The rest, though, makes no sense. If this were the Kaeya he thought he'd known as a youth, shy and soft-spoken, always a step behind Diluc so that Diluc could attract all the attention, he could wave it away. But not for this new Kaeya, with his flamboyant clothing and his cheerful, talkative guise. A Mondstadter's wings should be one of the anchors of their style, not a disregarded afterthought.
He mentions it to Jean, once, during one of the quiet moments in the midst of Dvalin's unexpected violence. Diluc is careful not to bring up Kaeya with her most of the time, afraid of prying into the friendly trust he can tell exists between them. But in that encounter in the Temple of the Wolf Kaeya had spread his wings, mantling at him over the Abyss Mage, and the feather-breakage had been unexpectedly brutal on the underside. It niggles at him more than the mantling itself.
"I know," Jean says. "He maintains them well enough to glide, though, and their condition doesn't break the Knights' uniform regulations. I have no grounds to reprimand him for it."
Her expression is carefully composed in the way that means she's holding back some emotion or extra comment. Diluc bites back a more demanding question. He's not her superior anymore, and he can't insist she not treat him as such if he interrogates her like a subordinate. Though even if she can't discuss the subject with Kaeya as Acting Grand Master, he doesn't see why she wouldn't speak up as a friend.
Or perhaps that's gone as poorly for her as disapproving of Kaeya's new drinking habit tends to go for him. If Kaeya has set a boundary around the topic, Jean would be better-mannered than Diluc about crossing it. He only wishes that she could tell him why.
Could, or would. She changes the subject swiftly back to Dvalin, and as soon as she does that closed-up composure falls away. Diluc swallows his frustration and turns his attention, too, back to the task at hand.
***
It eats at him still every time he sees Kaeya, whether it's in his bar applauding his deception of Huffman, or roaming the islands of the Golden Apple Archipelago, or at his dining table one evening during the Weinlesefest, making terrible jokes and gesturing to emphasize them with his hands only, not a twitch of wing or feather even when he laughs at his own jibes. Adelinde looks as pained as Diluc feels when Kaeya pins them against the back of the chair at the table instead of slotting them through the notch down its center and draping them comfortably over its curves.
He's not comfortable at the Dawn Winery, that seems to say. Diluc knows that's his own fault. Adelinde and the other staff have never done anything that would make him think he shouldn't feel at home.
The day Kaeya comes by with the Honorary Knight and a variety of gifts from Sumeru is the day Diluc loses his patience at last.
Kaeya is still there when he returns from his meeting--which he'd rather have left to Elzer after all, ill or not, if he hadn't known that Kaeya would be more comfortable if he wasn't there. He expected Kaeya to have left already. But instead, while the Honorary Knight went back to Mondstadt with Klee after she made an unexpected appearance, Kaeya has apparently lingered to help Adelinde clean up after lunch. Just as he's apparently helped Tunner pick grapes, and Connor check on the fermenting wine, and Elzer handle an unexpected merchant.
He's taken his jacket and cape off by this point in the afternoon, sitting on a bench outside and sharing a bottle of wine with Connor and Elzer, chatting idly about the current projects at the Winery. Finally, unlike that dinner, his wings are spread a bit, low and drooping behind his back. There's grape leaves stuck to the broken feathers, a bit of soot streaked across them, and even a piece of vine tangled around two primaries. He looks up at Diluc, and the ease of his smile makes it clear he's drunk.
"You aren't staying for dinner in that state," Diluc tells him in a flash of utterly unjustified irritation.
That easy smile goes wry and pained in an instant, and the loosened wings draw tight. Kaeya sets his glass down and starts to rise, one hand on the table to keep himself steady. Connor and Elzer both look dismayed, Connor holding out a hand as if to stop Kaeya and Elzer giving Diluc a frowning look.
"I've enjoyed this visit," Kaeya says to the men, waving off Connor's hand, "but it seems it's time for me to take my leave. Thank you for your hospitality."
"I didn't say that." He regrets his tone already, though it still grates at him to see how quickly Kaeya takes that as a dismissal, and not--not jealousy, Diluc admits reluctantly, chagrined by his own reaction. It's not Kaeya he's frustrated with.
"Oh?"
"I said 'in that state.' You ought to clean up first. So should you two. Adelinde won't serve any of you still in work clothes."
The other two hasten to stand, Connor collecting up the glasses while Elzer picks up the bottle. Connor smiles knowingly at Diluc, while Elzer simply looks relieved. Kaeya, though, scoops up his jacket and cape and shrugs.
"I'm afraid these are the only clothes I have on me."
"You can at least straighten up your wings. Come on. I'll brush them for you."
Diluc gestures for Kaeya to follow as he strides through the door and deliberately doesn't look back. He's aware all the same of Kaeya's hesitation, and then the sound of his footsteps as he does, indeed, follow.
Upstairs Kaeya hesitates again on the landing, and Diluc opens the door to his suite wide and beckons him impatiently in.
"I'm sure Adelinde could give me a hand, if it matters that much," Kaeya says, still standing there. He looks oddly lost.
"Adelinde will be down in the kitchen insisting the cooks make all your favorites. All the ones she trusts them with, that is. She'll make as much as she can by hand."
Kaeya winces and mutters, "She's already made me lunch," but the distraction is at least enough for him to finally accede to Diluc's impatience and step into his suite.
The front room is half study, but it's also where Diluc does what toilette he requires. He pulls the stool out from under the dressing table and waits until Kaeya has sat down, somewhat awkwardly, upon it before dragging the chair from his desk across the room and sitting down behind him. He can see Kaeya's face in the mirror, and it's clear Kaeya is watching him through it as well.
After a long, silent, wary moment, Kaeya loosens his wings from where they're clamped tight against his back, leaving them half-unfolded and relaxed enough that when Diluc reaches for the left one, the one with the vine, he can tug it into a good position to preen.
He untangles the vine carefully, slowly, taking his time. Kaeya's unoiled feathers are just as fragile as he'd presumed, and despite all his care a few barbs still do snap under the slight pressure of tugging it free. Diluc grimaces and pinches the barbs around them to gently draw them straight before collecting up the grape leaves scattered all across Kaeya's coverts.
The soot he has to pat off with a damp towel. If it were his own wings, he'd brush it vigorously off, but whether Kaeya cares or not he doesn't want to break any more barbs than he has to. Then, with the same concern in mind, he ignores the stiff preening brush and picks up a bottle of oil, sitting back down to hand-preen Kaeya's feathers.
Kaeya shifts on the stool when he sees Diluc pour the oil over his hands, but he doesn't say anything in protest. Doesn't say anything at all, in fact, neither light commentary nor teasing jokes nor even any complaints about the tugging as Diluc maneuvers his wing this way and that, oiling his hands over and over again as he runs his fingers delicately over and beneath and between feathers.
The primaries are in the best shape, kept straight and clean for gliding even if too many of the barbs are broken, and the secondaries are close enough to his back to stay more intact, though they're still brittle. The coverts, though, range from in disarray to very nearly matted. He pulls them apart with hands that only force of will keeps from trembling, biting his tongue on sharp comments about their neglected state.
Kaeya is tense in front of him, his shoulders stiff. He watches Diluc in the mirror like he's waiting for the moment when Diluc grasps the delicate bones under his hands and snaps them. Diluc doesn't know how to say what he wants to say without sounding angry, and he knows how Kaeya will take that.
At last, though, the left wing is in good order, every feather fluffed and preened and oiled. Diluc shifts the chair a little and starts on the right.
Kaeya goes even more tense when he takes the leading edge to pull it out. For a moment he resists--Diluc almost lets go, afraid he will snap it if Kaeya keeps pulling back--and then he sighs, his face in the mirror resigned, and his wing relaxes as he hunches his shoulders forward. He's no less tense, still sitting like he's waiting for the blow, but he drops his gaze from the mirror and stares down at the dressing table instead.
Two of these primaries are folded oddly inward, their barbs tangled, pinning them together in a way that leaves gaps in the bottom line of the wing. Diluc frowns at that and separates them as carefully as he can, though that doesn't keep one barb from snapping as he tries to free it from the one it's tangled with. They're bound so close he'd almost think someone had interlaced them on purpose. When they part, it doesn't reveal the third primary that should be hidden between them. The feather just isn't there.
Diluc traces the gap upwards, pushing back the coverts to find the root. He expects the shaft to be broken somewhere high. Maybe this was from a recent blow, because more of the coverts are tangled around the root. He parts them carefully, too, and realizes that two of them are missing, as are some of the feathers around and above. Where they should be, the bare skin of the wing is- scarred. An old, rough, patch of skin, pulled tight and knotted where fire had burnt first feathers and then flesh away.
He rests his fingers against the burn scar for a long moment. Kaeya is rigid as a board, his left wing clamped in tight again, looking down at his hands in his lap like he has the secrets of the universe folded between them. But he doesn't twitch his wing away from Diluc's hand.
It feels like something is trying to gnaw its way out from Diluc's chest. He takes a deep, slow breath, then pours more oil onto his hands and carries on with straightening the feathers. It's clear now why they were so deliberately matted together, but he doesn't fold them in again. Everyone in the Dawn Winery knows what he's done. There's no point in Kaeya hiding it here except to salve Diluc's guilty conscience. As much as it burns, Diluc wants to see.
There's more on the underside, a whole burnt streak from top to bottom that isn't nearly as easily hidden. Kaeya has made what efforts he can, enough that Diluc hadn't spotted it in any of their previous encounters. At rest, though, he'd have to keep his wings tightly closed to hide that scar. Which is exactly what he's been doing.
Diluc takes a moment to breathe after that, too, and then goes back to straightening and oiling feathers, the guilty ache gnawing ever stronger beneath his ribs. He still doesn't have anything to say that wouldn't come out angry--he is angry, and he can't let that spill out onto Kaeya when the anger is at himself. Once the feathers are straight, he stands, touching Kaeya's shoulder when Kaeya shifts to do the same, and picks up his softest brush and a different oil to pour over it before he sits back down.
As a child, he'd rarely had the patience for this part. But Kaeya had loved it, the same way he'd loved Father's feather-paintings. Diluc regrets, now, how rarely he let Father administer this final gloss, unnecessary as it might have been. If he had known when he wriggled free of Father's ministrations on his eighteenth birthday that he'd never get the chance again....
Maybe no one's done this for Kaeya, either, since that day. He hunches further under it at first, visibly uncomfortable, though he doesn't protest. Diluc stays silent too, focusing on his work, brushing the oil into Kaeya's feathers in long, slow sweeps. At the burn, he hesitates a moment, then runs the brush down over the scars as well, the rough dark skin taking on the same gleam as Kaeya's feathers, though not as iridescent as this particular oil teases out of that dark blue. Slowly, gradually, Kaeya unhunches, relaxing under the brush, his wings falling into the same comfortable droop that Diluc had seen at that table outside.
When he's finished, he caps both bottles and rises, setting them and the brush back on the dressing table. Kaeya hasn't tried to rise this time, which leaves him room to circle around and double-check his handiwork from multiple angles. A few final touches, pushing feathers that the brush had disturbed back into perfect alignment, and then Diluc can't resist touching the worst of the burns one more time.
He swallows all the anger and guilt and regret that threatens to claw its way up and says, his voice as soft as he's ever been able to make it, "I'm sorry."
Kaeya looks up at him with his eye wide. Then a faintly ironic smile eclipses the astonishment. "Why? They aren't real, remember?"
That feels like a knife twisted in his stomach, and Diluc closes his teeth on an angry retort. Kaeya's shirt is buttoned close around the base of his wings, but he knows that older scars still lie beneath that, the long thin lines of a knife in a wedge-like cut. The gouges, he knows now, not of the crude attempt at removal he'd assumed as a child, but of their original installation.
Had it hurt? Diluc doesn't think he's ever asked. He certainly doesn't have the right to ask such a question now. But he can't imagine that it didn't.
When he presses a little harder against the burn, he sees Kaeya flinch. "This is."
"Ah." Kaeya swallows hard, the smile vanishing. "That's true."
"And if it is, then they are, too."
Diluc can't quite read the expression on Kaeya's face before he looks away. He resists the urge to check it in the mirror. Instead he lowers his hand and steps back, giving Kaeya space.
"I have to change. I'll meet you downstairs for dinner."
And then he flees, putting the door of his bedroom between them. Kaeya will probably go through his desk behind his back--Diluc would, in his place--but there's nothing there that Kaeya doesn't already know. His brother has always been adept at digging out his most mortifying secrets.
He'd rather Kaeya dig through his desk before going downstairs. The other option is that he decides Diluc has been too overbearing and leaves.
When he comes down to dinner, though, Kaeya is there, waiting in the chair beside Diluc's and chatting companionably with Adelinde. He looks up at Diluc and smiles, the friendly mask right back in place. Diluc frowns at him and braces for another evening of bad jokes and teasing. He can live with those. What matters more is that Kaeya has his wings draped over his chair, neat and oiled, arranged loosely and comfortably behind him.