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Separately, they're decent groupmates.
Sure, Diluc leaves messages on read 99% of the time, tries to pay off all of his groupmates to turn it into an individual project, and seemingly cannot interact in anything close to a normal way, and Kaeya tends to slack off unless under extreme pressure, doesn’t do any work half the time without anyone noticing, and always tries to spin the project into something inappropriate, but they're fine.
Individually, that is.
When they're in a group together, it only ensures that absolutely no work gets done. Not that it’ll be any of Jean’s fault.
No, it’s the fact that the two brothers (even though half the time Kaeya uses it as an insult and Diluc doesn’t use it at all) physically cannot be in the same space without getting into the pettiest arguments about the smallest things while Jean tries to get them from committing major offenses that will go on their permanent records, come on, guys, please calm down.
By some twist of fate, she’s usually the one who ends up having to mediate their arguments, which is a fate she doesn’t wish on anybody else, but also one that she really wants to push on someone other than herself for once.
Once, she asked the teachers why it’s always her, because anyone can tell at a glance that the two brothers are only close in the sense that they’re close to killing each other, and they simply shrugged and attributed it to their parents having been friends. Very old, very good friends, by virtue of them both being very old and very rich.
In unrelated news, sometimes she wishes that her father had gotten her in the divorce. Barbara definitely never had to deal with this.
So when the teacher announces their groups for the first major project of the year, and it’s a cooking project, and they’re in the same group yet again, she feels all remnants of her already crumbling sanity leave her. Sleepless days and nights, endless homework, and now having to deal with these two clowns?
No, she cannot deal with this.
She turns to Lisa, who’s thankfully her seatmate.
“No,” Lisa says apologetically.
Then she tries Eula.
“Are you trying to ruin my grade in this class? I’ll have my vengeance for this—”
She moves on to Venti.
He’s asleep.
Okay. This is fine. So what if no one wants to switch with her? This can’t be too bad, right? Right?
She looks over at Kaeya. He throws a paper airplane at Diluc’s head, who catches it in mid-air and rips it into shreds. Glitter falls all over his uniform and desk, and the pure rage that fills his expression has Kaeya cackling like a Disney villain.
“Lisa,” Jean tries again, “are you sure you aren’t willing to switch with me? I... I’m sure Diluc can reimburse you for any harm. And Kaeya isn’t... that bad at cooking. I think.”
She looks over at her, shaking her head sympathetically. She’d gotten an equally bad group in terms of skill, but miles ahead in terms of cooperativeness and general atmosphere. “Sorry,” she says, “but honestly, it would be easier to do it on my own rather than deal with those two. At least Barbara can serve as moral support and Amber can... try.”
“Okay,” she says, and resists the urge to slam her head into her desk.
The teacher gives them the rest of the class to discuss their plans. Jean sort of wishes he hadn’t.
Their chairs are arranged into a triangle to form a makeshift discussion group, and Jean finds herself having to mediate between one angrily glaring Diluc, one smugly grinning Kaeya, and one extreme headache.
“—I’m just saying, it wasn’t exactly my fault that your dumb bird got into my—”
“You left it unlocked and near his litterbox—”
“—maybe you shouldn’t have let your mangy ball of fur near my—”
“Guys,” Jean says, loudly. Then she repeats it even louder, waving a hand in-between their stare-off. When they finally stop acting like they’re about to engage in a wrestling match with their small triangle serving as the boxing ring, she forces a smile and says, as calmly as she can, “So, can we get back to discussing the project? Please?”
“Sorry,” Diluc says flatly, still glaring at Kaeya. He doesn’t sound too sorry, but then again, he never sounds like any emotion aside from mild general distaste. “Anyways, I can cover most of the ingredients, I’ll just get Elzer to pick them up on his next grocery run. What do we need?”
Before Jean can answer, Kaeya interrupts again.
“Your mom,” he says.
Diluc’s expression immediately twists into disgust at hearing his voice, and Jean resigns herself to getting nothing done for the rest of the class. “Oh yeah?” he asks, and he has the sort of expression that says that he’s practiced this in his head before. “Well, at least I know who my mom is, you’re adopted.”
“Ouch, low blow.” He clasps a hand over his heart, dramatically pouting as he slides down his chair. The screeching of metal on ceramic doesn’t even faze him, though everyone nearby has to clap their hands over their ears. “I cannot believe that Diluc Ragnvindr would say something so— something so absolutely cruel and heartwrenching to his favorite brother. What did I do to deserve such callousness—”
“You just made fun of my dead cat.”
“You just made fun of my probably dead mom.”
“Well, you started it.”
“Where’s your proof?”
“Wha— proof? Jean—” he gestures towards her, turning to her with an incredulous look. She hurriedly pretends to still be copying down the ingredients onto her notebook. No way is she’s getting involved in this again, not after what happened last time. “Jean, you heard him say that. See, she can serve as witness to you being an utter piece of shit.”
“Your mom can serve as witness.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
Jean nudges her chair until she’s closer to Lisa’s group than her own. Neither of them notice.
Barbara waves at her with a bright smile which she tries and fails to return, and Amber, who’s also on the student council and had to break up another fight last week, gives her a pitying look. Lisa just pats her on the back and passes her a store-bought, plastic wrapped cookie, even though eating in class is strictly prohibited.
She takes one anyways. She needs the sugar if she wants to make it through the day.
"How do those two even live with each other," Jean says. In the background, Kaeya has moved to throwing erasers at Diluc’s head and making faces at him.
"Well," Lisa says, "I assume that if they continue on like this, eventually one of them won't have to deal with the other being alive. Perhaps you can just wait until then."
She lets out a pained sigh through a mouthful of chocolate chip cookie, "Honestly, that might be for the best."
The week comes and goes like bad gas. Jean finds herself punching her current grades into a calculator and checking just how much a zero in this class will tank her GPA, and also stares into the distance a lot, wondering if she can call in sick, fake debilitating mental illness, or bribe the teacher (though her mother and her strict conscience would never allow it).
None of it prepares her for the actual day.
The kitchen of their academy is a large, spacious room by the ground floor hallway, funded by an anonymous donor and frequently in use by the few of their year who can actually cook, which is to say, Jean rarely sets foot into it. It hardly matters, since the shiny chrome and clean counters last for about five minutes once their class is unleashed inside.
They're assigned their theme. Breakfast.
For a moment, Jean is relieved. She eats breakfast. She's sure they've eaten breakfast. How bad can it be?
...those words haunt her to her dying day.
"It's an omelet," Diluc says, frowning.
She raises an eyebrow. "Scrambled eggs, you mean?" she asks, gesturing to the contents of the pan.
It definitely doesn't look very solid or omelet-like. Or edible, for that matter, but they can get to that later, after she’s dealt with the egg’s identity crisis and his defensiveness.
"It's an omelet," he repeats, frowning even harder.
Kaeya groans, somehow making it sound extremely passive aggressive for being in a conversation about omelets. "Just let him keep being delusional, he can't even tell the difference between wine and grape juice even if they're labeled clearly—"
"It’s not my fault that they were the same color."
"Oh yeah? Maybe next time I'll put apple juice and pee in the fridge, see if that teaches you a lesson about not drinking my—"
“Neither of us are even old enough to drink yet! You’re lucky that there wasn’t school the next day, or I would have killed you with or without my hangover—”
In the midst of their rapid gesturing, Diluc’s elbow snags on the handle of the pan, and the ‘omelet’ goes crashing onto the tiled floor. There’s a distinct crunching sound as it does, likely because Diluc had dropped no end of eggshells into the mixture beforehand. No amount of education could teach a sheltered child to crack an egg properly, it seems.
He stares at the mess silently for a while, and then moves to get another egg. When he cracks it open, even more shell gets in than last time.
Kaeya scoffs. “Rich kids,” he mutters to Jean.
“We live in the same house.”
“And yet only one of us knows how to crack an egg without dropping the entirety of Warring States China into it, hmm?”
Jean tunes them out as she gets a broom and dustpan from the supply closet. On the way there, she pauses by the teacher’s desk near the entrance and decides to try her luck, even though she doubts she’ll ever be lucky enough to get out of this.
"Sir," Jean says, "may I please be reassigned to another group?"
The teacher doesn't even look up from where he's grading papers, only making a placating gesture with his free hand. "Don't worry, I'm sure it'll be fine. Anyways, the three of you are friends, right? If anything, you should consider yourself lucky that the randomizer picked you three."
Behind her, she can hear Diluc start to shout as Kaeya cracks an egg over his head and calls him a combination of words that she didn't even know existed. That was their last egg. They have ten minutes left, and their plate is empty and cracked from when Kaeya had tried to use it as a frisbee to decapitate his brother.
She doesn't feel very lucky.
Later, after having 'borrowed' more eggs from the neighboring group (well, Lisa said they weren't using them, and Jean chose to believe her when she slid the new carton over), things are not much better. They're down half their new eggs, and their old eggs are... curiously colored and odored. Hopefully they aren't graded on cleanliness.
Jean turns back from commiserating - briefly, so quick it hasn't even been 5 minutes - with Lisa to find a sight that makes her heart drop. Diluc, by the stove. Stirring eggs. Completely engulfed by his focus on the pan, so much so that he hasn't turned around to see... Well.
"Err, Diluc," she tries to warn him, "maybe you should—"
Diluc turns to frown at her. "I don't see the problem," he says, furiously stirring the eggs in the pan. The sheer velocity of the spatula might be enough to cook them on its own, she thinks. "The higher the heat, the faster the eggs cook, and the more time we have to deal with everything else. Thanks to someone, we don't exactly have time to waste."
He seems to be completely unaware of Kaeya standing beside him, holding the tip of his ponytail to the fire with a wide grin.
Jean decides that it's a lost cause and moves to get water from the sink to deal with the inevitable fallout; she doubts anything she could do could help with the impending disaster.
"Oh, shit," Kaeya says, as embers begin to spark at the ends of his hair, though it's more gleeful than worried. He whistles sharply to catch his attention, waving his hand in the air and not even trying to hide the magnitude of his grin as the fire continues to trail up his brother’s hair. "Hey, Diluc, is it hot in here, or is it just me?"
"Will you shut up, Kaeya," Diluc says, not even bothering to look up. "I'm trying to fry this goddamn egg."
He sighs dramatically, draping himself over the countertop, only a short distance away from the stovetop. "Oh, woe is me! Not even my own flesh and blood will pay me any mind, what reason is there left to live in this painful world—"
"First off, I’m too busy to deal with your bullshit, I’m trying to save our grade." A particularly harsh turn of the pan, the screeching of metal on metal making her wince. Or maybe it’s just that the fire is spreading through his ponytail at a rapid rate. "Secondly, it'll be your flesh and blood in this omelet if you don't shut— what the fuck—"
Diluc notices the fire in his hair and hurriedly throws the pan out of his hands, moving to pat down the growing flames while Kaeya stands at the side, howling in laughter. The burnt eggs splatter onto the tiled floor, the pan falling with a clang.
"Sheesh, overreact much, hothead?" he calls out.
People are turning to look at the utter catastrophe that is their grade. Lisa pats her on the back, murmuring that ‘it’s fine, I’m sure that you can pull the grade up later on’, and Albedo gives her a sympathetic look— they share babysitting duties for Klee, so she’s sure he understands the dangers of loose pyromaniacs.
Jean sighs, pushing the water towards Diluc, who’s getting increasingly panicked as the fire refuses to go out. "Here, water," she says.
Her eyes widen as Kaeya, grinning like a madman, is the one who picks up the water instead of Diluc, still trying to put out the fire with his bare hands. Oh no.
Before she can stop him, he’s already making his way towards his brother with an expression that cannot be described in its sheer chaos.
"Hey," he starts.
Diluc swivels around to glare at him, scowling darkly. His face whitens as he notices what’s in his hands. "Don't you fucking dare—"
He’s interrupted by a faceful of water. As he lifts his head to shake off the water like a disgruntled cat, Kaeya then dumps the remainder still in the pot over his head, cackling wildly.
"Why don't you cool off?" Kaeya finishes. “Ha, you should see the look on your face–”
In a split second, he’s tackled to the ground.
Onto the plate. Which proceeds to shatter into pieces on the floor, a fitting representation of how she thinks her grade is going to be after this class.
Thankfully, both of them get out of it without much injury; at the same time, unfortunately, both of them get out of it without much injury.
Kaeya’s jacket, for some reason, was bulletproof, and so he was not pierced through the heart by a shard of glass or disemboweled by the spatula Diluc had tried to stab him with, both of which Jean definitely did not encourage or hope for. Neither was he set on fire by miraculous divine intervention or tossed out of the window by a work of magic.
(When she asks him why it’s bulletproof, he shrugs and says, “You know how it is.”)
Diluc, on the other hand, had to get an impromptu haircut from the school nurse, and was still staring blankly into a provided mirror at his new hairstyle. There are still bits and ends of charred red hair lining the floor, because no one has moved to clean it up. Jean refuses on principle to help him with that particular mess, Barbatos knows Kaeya won’t be of any use, and Diluc himself is still in a state of catatonia.
(”My hair,” he says, head in his hands, then even more mournfully, “my hair. What the fuck. Why couldn’t he have gone for my face instead.”)
And now, they're sitting in the corner of the kitchen, mournfully staring at their scorched, ruined counter. No eggs remain.
Jean sighs. Goodbye, honor roll.
"You know what," Diluc says, then pulls out his phone, typing furiously.
Jean does not know what. She does not think she wants to know what.
"What are you doing, calling a hitman on me?" Kaeya leans forward to peek at what he's doing, only to get a middle finger shoved in his face. She’s slightly impressed that Diluc can type that fast with one hand, but then she remembers the summer where he’d broken an arm trying to climb a tree to ambush Kaeya from above. "Uh, is that McDonald's? Sorry to break the news, but no amount of greasy fast food can help us now—"
"The driver can be here in five minutes," he interrupts. He lifts the screen to show her, pointedly facing it away from Kaeya.
She raises an eyebrow. He had ordered McDonald's.
More specifically, a breakfast meal that included two eggs, a burger, and a liter of soda. And a limited-time cartoon cat toy with wide blue eyes, but she doubts that’s what he’s trying to show her.
“Dibs on the FluffyTime Cat toy,” Kaeya says.
Diluc scowls, slapping his hand away from where he’s zooming in on the toy. “That is not the point. This order comes with two eggs.”
“I noticed,” Jean says patiently. She’s not sure where he’s going with this.
He gives her an impatient look, as if she's the slow one. It kind of makes her want to go insane. Is it her fault the two of them can't put their fraught sibling relationship aside for one hour to keep them from disappointing all of their parents (well, in their case, parent singular, but who's keeping score?) by failing what is widely considered a free class?
"Two eggs," he says slowly, then points at a few more items on the frankly, concerningly long receipt; he'd paid with card and gotten over 500 points on this order alone. "Hash browns. Bacon. Maybe some apple juice."
"Ha, remember when you drank the 'apple juice' I left in the fridge-"
"Shut it, you adopted piece of shit, I had actual apple juice there that you replaced with your-"
While they devolve into arguing (yet again, do they not get bored of their own voices?), Jean processes what she assumes is Diluc's train of thought when ordering McDonald's apropos of nothing.
Ah.
Well. She supposes a Ragnvindr has never seen a problem they haven't been able to buy their way out of.
To cut a very long story short, the McDonald's arrives in time.
They hurriedly arrange the delivery on a plate and try to make it not entirely obvious that their submission is... overpriced, greasy fast food. Kaeya pockets the toy that comes with the meal. Diluc calls him a list of words that shouldn't be repeated. Jean decides to stop thinking about this before she starts losing hair.
In the end, they get a B+. It's the second highest grade in the class.
"Wow, Jean," Barbara chirps when she sees her grade, eyes bright and shiny. She's never seen what can happen to an egg put directly on a stove. Jean envies that innocence. "How did you do so well?"
Jean pauses. Hm.
"Teamwork," she says serenely.
(The next time they have a groupwork, she rigs the ballots.)