Chapter Text
At first, it’s the little things.
Kaeya can only ignore them until he’s back at Angel’s Share. The location is not a surprise. He isn’t sure what number this is in the sequence of nights he’s ended up here after work, skin waterlogged and bloated with how he’s been letting it drown him. The slow drip of it lingers on his shape stuttering through the doorframe. Feet heavy, boots heavier, staining the wooden panelling blotchy sunsets that bleed into the cracks like a growing bruise.
There’s something literal in that metaphor. The clouds have wept non-stop recently. Under any other circumstance, he’d probably be able to find something in it to laugh at. It’s appropriate, after all. Kaeya usually finds nothing funnier.
He has laughed since, of course. The sensation is a hollow one. Sunken cheeks and sympathetic eyes pressed down like ironed fabric in his direction. The pull of his skin seems to thicken like leather at the corners of cracked lips when he speaks, even despite the flawless performance he’s been wearing like a second face. Nothing is really that funny anymore, is all. He doesn’t know why now is different.
Except yes, he does. Of course he does. He was just better at it before. Finding things funny, like that. He was better at a lot of things before.
Nothing feels natural, these days. His mouth stings, thin as stripped ore, as it shapes around threadbare words picked to string at the vowels. Expressions curving around his cheeks a pantomime so ceramic he can’t take his own theatre seriously, gestures wooden and static like a mannequin rusted at the joints. His clothes cling both too tight and loose across his bones, fluttering like ripped skin over his fraying chest as his heart pummels its ribs. The collar is constricting, tighter today, a feathered and scaled boa drinking his breaths through its teeth.
He wants to stop wearing it. He knows he won’t.
The thing that meets him in the mirror when he dresses it, pulls on the clothes, fixes that collar, revolts him in a way he cannot name. He wants to tear into the silhouette until wisp becomes flesh, miasmic and wet at the corners. Reflection caved in to hundreds of angles like a disturbed lake, knuckles red, portrait blue and weeping as split veins. But again, he can’t, and he knows that, too.
The only option is to tolerate its grotesqueness. Its absent expression and careless lines. Brush its hair and its teeth and resist the urge to wring its neck like putty or shatter its skull against the glass. It’s preservation, that. For why, he hasn’t decided. None of this is a considerate gesture. It’s just what he’s always done. All he has now is to carry on doing it.
Its eyes are ashy and sunken, a thick scar risen to a pale mass bulbous with friction. Its cheekbones protrude as though the enamel is trying to claw out from under their shadows. The lips are rocky and dry and bitten raw, like soft nails. It is the complete opposite of the silhouette he knows, knew, but he can’t find it in him to care whether that’s better or worse.
Has it always looked like this? It must have. It isn’t possible that it could look so different, not so soon. He would’ve noticed a change so drastic. He’s not stupid.
He hasn’t always looked like this. He knows that. He’s not stupid. But he hadn’t noticed.
Kaeya glances up towards the bar. Angel’s Share is almost empty. Chairs pulled neatly beneath their tables, menus propped upright, glasses polished and sparkling under the solitary lamplight that shudders and beckons him from its place at the wall. A rope is limply slung across the entrance to stairs that spiral like a conch to the first floor. One of the rooms up there is a tip. That’s probably why.
Up there, the bed is unmade, and there is a long coat slung haphazardly over the duvet with a few burn marks on the trim. The days had been hot before the rain. It hadn’t been needed, so it hadn’t been moved. There are several snapped hair ties slumped in a lopsided stack on the bedside table, tangled with a combination of loose curls and frayed fibres. There is a mostly full glass of water on a coaster with watercolour grapes on it, collecting dust around the rim.
There is a half-written letter in neat, elegant handwriting. It is banal and addressed to Kaeya, talking of intelligence to be exchanged squarely under-the-table. The latter half of the page is bare, blotted with spots of ink where a mottled quill must’ve dripped and eroded at the plush off-white of needlessly expensive paper.
Kaeya does not know what to do with any of this information. He’s distantly aware that he should. He would, usually. He should follow up that lead it mentions, but the idea curdles, spoilt, every time it swirls at the base of his stomach.
There’ll be nothing more for him once he does, he realises. Its presence will stop lingering in its every acrid increment between his tastebuds, in how it stings and sweats and stabs at his nerves with this vile exhilaration. And that’d be it. It’d be gone as quickly as it’d come.
He can’t have that. Else he’d spend the rest of his life tasting nothing at all, chords ghostly and blistered from tune in his throat. He’d sooner cut that tongue from his mouth and swallow it.
He needs it. To stay just a bit while longer. His little secret. He can’t let them take that from him, yet.
Behind the counter, there’s Charles. He looks the same as always. Ordinary. His hair is tied back, and he is polishing a glass that is already spotless, and he is not humming anything as his eyes flit ever so briefly to the clock on the wall. He has been waiting for him, though he is pretending he hasn’t. As though he’s pretending, more specifically, that Kaeya’s being here is a surprise and he isn’t sure what to do with himself.
But he does, and one more time he conceals the traitorous blip of pity that tugs at his brow and turns to reach for a wine glass stashed beneath the waxy counter. There is nothing else he can do, either. Angel’s Share is closed. It has been closed for two weeks. The clinical poster tacked to the door is riddled with scribbles that end with the phrase ‘until further notice’. It is the only part Kaeya has read.
He doesn’t need to read the rest of it. It’s nothing he doesn’t know. Reading it will not give anything more worth, be it the thinly sheeted moonlight waning over his bony face or how the indent of his shape in bed grows ever shallower as the days lap against night. Everything is just a continuation of the same emptiness. There is nothing a word could do to give it any more value than nil.
Angel’s Share is closed until further notice. That is it. That is all.
Kaeya doesn’t know when it’ll reopen, if at all (It will. It shouldn’t). It doesn’t matter. He will keep coming here. He will sit at the same barstool and he will drink the same wine from the same glass and he will rattle through the same lines that are nothing more than a series of disconnected syllables jumbled together.
If he shows up enough, perhaps the cycle will shatter like bottles burst on the thick slabs of cobblestone outside. Or maybe he’ll wake up and finally blink back into a body that feels like his, and his clothes and expressions will slot seamlessly into place like warm, interlocking hands, and the morning air won’t heave grey with dirt and evaporated spit.
In an impossible someday, the stone glimmers like violet starlight with prismed specks of glass that crunch beneath the soles of his boots, swept back in a gust as he yanks open the door to a tavern full of swaying patrons and music plucked back a thousand years in time. The bell will chime like a chorus of pitchy laughter. The door will slam shut behind him, pushed in by the vaulting breeze from outside, and he’ll grin in total non-apology towards the counter where Charles will not be.
He’ll fix the man behind it instead with a knowing glance, which will be returned with the dry comfort of spite folded in on itself and warped round into familiarity. He’ll order a drink, which will be pointedly different than what he is actually served, and it will be exactly what he wanted but didn’t ask for. And then he’ll smarmily point that out, tone so seedy it coats the conversation like a spoon of freshly cooked jam, and the man behind the counter will falsely remark that he has no idea what he’s talking about.
It’s stupid, really. There is nothing particularly special about this series of events. Not remotely, but still. He thinks he’d do anything for that someday, now. For just a moment or line or sip or two. Kaeya hasn’t felt that before.
It doesn’t matter what he wants, though. That someday is not today. He knows that like nothing else.
It will not be tomorrow, nor the day after that, nor any day after that spun on the looms that stretch into the ends of the world. It will never come, not while he’s alive, but Kaeya will chase that someday forever if he has to. Along the beaten track of it, his legs ache with a pressure that cloys the more they thud towards its impossibility. They’ll give out, eventually, and he’ll clatter to the dirt like a bundle of twigs regardless of how far he still has to go. But again, that someday is not today.
At least the burn is somewhat familiar, recently bastardised to fables and myths that sicken him in their smallness. He wishes they were large enough to melt his skin from muscle from bones. A slicking, thin dew that slips down into the lake and melds in a marble of algae and seaweed. Chars his hair and eyelashes to cinders that whirl upwards to spend eternity thundering around the mountain’s lonely precipice, his clothes scattered and forgotten on an unmade bed upstairs with a mostly full glass of water and a half-written letter he knows he will read again.
There’d be no heaven greater than that, he thinks, though he doesn’t feel as though there’s much left of him to be burnt. If he got cut, it’d do nothing but expose the cavernous trench concealed beneath his surface, a hollowed porcelain doll puppeteered by cobwebs and spiders. Bleeding feels too human. He doesn’t feel human these days. But near anything will burn with enough grit. That is, if nothing else, a finalising blessing.
Kaeya’s body folds itself onto the stool shifted to the counter’s centre, hair lank and stringy where it falls over his fingers. Dust seems to linger between the knuckles, as if he’s some ancient mechanisation newly unearthed from the intermittent scorch of the desert. There’s sand in his lungs, it feels like, dust and faded scripture wrapping his teeth. His uncovered eye has fallen onto the counter.
He stumbles through some strange urge to pick it up. Toss it between his fingers, though he’s logically aware of its place still wedged in its socket. The diamond pupil is blunted, foggy around the edges. With any luck, it’ll grow hazier as the evening progresses. He already has a headache. He’s had a headache for a few days. A few more, and he’ll be able to notice himself a little less, in the whining tug of his lungs or involuntary flickers of awareness or the float of himself through unchanging hours into weeks into months.
A few more than that, and he can ignore that the sun still possesses the gall to keep rising. It shouldn’t be able to do that. It doesn’t deserve to.
A glass slides itself under Kaeya’s nose, fingers tapping once, twice at the base before slipping from view. In their wake, a softened thudding of footsteps drifts towards the furthest corner of the room, chair legs lamely scraping against wood, a sigh too distinct to place in its ambiguity. There are bubbles foaming around the glass’ curved wall, spitting little by little up his jaw. They’re too chipper for this hour, but they’re a welcome sight. They’re one of the few he can stomach these days.
He pours the drink down his throat in thoughtless, shoddy increments. It’s good. Of course it is. Dandelion wine. What he usually orders. Not what he is usually served. He knows he ought to get used to the difference, that jarring lack of change. He can’t. He’s not sure he ever will.
It’s only in the second before the final sip that he allows himself a glimmer of clarity. Dampened beneath the sky’s onslaught of rain, desecrated so deeply the words warble into vomit at the back of his mouth, but there. It’s hardly recognisable as clarity at all. Clarity is not one he comes by often, these days.
In truth, ‘allow’ is the wrong word for it, too. Its presence comes more like an unshakeable intrusion, teasing and acidic as it revolves around his head in off-key staccato, twisting his thoughts into spirals. It is new, yet always the same. It is never comforting, and he doubts it ever will be. It goes like so.
Kaeya takes his glass by its neck. Lightly, with his fingertips. Considers dropping it or smashing it against his forehead and revelling in the bloodied sting of shards sticking from his face. He doesn’t do either of those things. He doesn’t have the energy.
He lifts it to his lips, transparency cold and lucid as candlelight as it presses against the cracking skin. The bubbles race over its edge, raw flesh pricked in jittering shocks he can barely feel, liquid pins on his tongue as they thrash against the bitten insides of his cheeks. It tastes perfect, as always. It tastes like the impossible someday.
He closes his eyes. Tries to picture it like it’s less wishful, more real. It’s so beautiful, somewhere. He’ll find it this time. Surely.
Instead, he falls into the mimicry of a dirt road stained under a blackened, swollen sky. Long grass, fog crowded at the edges of his periphery and leaking across the tufted earth. A metallic clattering engulphed by the shrill ring of a cosmic tear, blinking to nothing in static jolts of fading ember and starlight.
He feels his boots stumble forwards, cluttering his feet in a dead sprint that cuts halfway short, choked. His legs are numb where they’re carelessly tacked to his torso. The air thickens, pungent with iron and smoke, and Kaeya cannot breathe. There is blood on the ground, sloughing up his boots as they sink into the wet dirt, his knees as they buckle like corroded springs. Hands as they grasp at a caved chest from which jut ribs scorched at the edges.
Diluc’s eyes are open. Dull and filthy as a breeze trembles the lids like they’re propped open with string. Mouth parted, mid-gasp. His hair and face have been chopped at myriad angles and it is impossible to tell what is natural and what is not, where familiarity begins and ends. His clothes are a mess, charred and discoloured and torn. His arms are bare. He is not wearing his coat.
He is not breathing. A piece of his heart has speared itself on his clavicle. It’s fleshy and pink. His Vision is white.
Kaeya throws up. If in the thought or reality, he’s never quite sure. He smashes the glass. Sometimes, it’s in his palm, another collection of cuts that will not heal from the nagging rub of gloves and thoughtless abuse. Sometimes, he’ll launch it at the wall, and it’ll explode like a plasmic supernova against the spacy wooden panels and stay there. Sometimes, he will simply smash half of the bulb against the counter and stare at the sharp edges that remain. It isn’t worth mentioning what he does after that. It means nothing, anyway.
Regardless, the ending is always the same.
Kaeya rises, stumbling around the bar, purple denting his hips’ protruding shadows. He does not know if Charles is watching this and he does not care to. He finds a bottle of dandelion wine, collects another glass from the overhead rack. Their number has been diminishing over the past couple of weeks, he suspects, but nobody has told him that directly.
Then, he sits and pours a glass of wine.
He takes a sip, then another, and another. It’s crisp. Delicious. He’s always had a sweet tooth, though it’d never seemed that way in comparison.
He isn’t sure what to call himself without that, he realises. The comparison. He has no reference for anything. It is impossible now to calculate what matters, on the scale of it all. Without reference, everything’s value equates to nil.
What is he doing, then? If everything is nil, then nothing is worth anything, and anything is just that. Equal value, and equal redundancy. He could do anything he wanted, and all it would mean is naught.
A thought scuttles over his mind, teasing like spiced rum, a millipede with its endless, pointed feet itching and detached between the wrinkles, and in spite of it, he smiles. He hadn’t meant to do that. He wouldn’t have before.
Somewhere amongst the weeks, perhaps, instinct has merged itself into reflex. There’s an automatic relief at the idea, now, preservation stuffed and sedated with cotton and dandelions. The writing is on the wall, and he can focus just barely long enough to read it. His mouth is dry with iron and bubbles. He cannot tell which is which.
Again, then, he drinks. He doesn’t need to figure that out until tomorrow.