Work Text:
Kaeya hates the library and books. There’s different ways to hate libraries and books just like there’s different ways to evade them. He’s been mulling it over for some time, the ways to hate best. It’s a difficult craft of his own. He goes precise about it. The everyman is unlikely to be seen reading; it is something for the bourgeoisie class even in Mondstadt.
Where Kaeya was born, reading was a matter of parentage and Leif, his friend from next door with the knocked-out teeth, wasn’t the sort to learn to read. His mother was a stiff woman with a hunchback who reared another’s horses throughout the day and returned home muddy. Such a day has no cracks for books or poetry.
As a child, books were the thing placed on his night stand by his father who read to him in the raw, coarse voice of the destitute. And in the fashion of little boys, he calls him Ba all his life and never asked for his name. To children, fathers aren’t people who can be stranded in foreign countries; mothers aren’t people who emigrate to the edge of the world. Though Kaeya reckons there’s a particular kind of loneliness when stranded in another country without knowing your father’s name that not even Ba or Ma had to shoulder.
When he is older, Kaeya understands that there’s less worth in books than he assumed. In his new home, the strange country he has settled for, the children all learn to read and write. There are no toothless illiterates for his father to sneer at. It’s the children like Jean and Diluc who stick to reading however, born blue-blooded if they are to be believed though they grow red-faced when he points it out. They are permitted empty afternoons and need not worry about the weather pouring over the rotting fields.
Kaeya isn’t one to join them even though he grew up in a household of literature and class, whatever class means at the edge of the world. It is a thing of names and history, but here’s the crux about history: no one cares more for it than the people who read and no one cares more for it than the people who think they are written between the pages. The name Alberich is littered around.
The other sort, the part Kaeya would like to belong to, they tell tales whose truth is neither here nor there. They tell them at night instead of reading out of someone else’s mouth. They aren’t presumptive enough to think Ajax the Hero is of their own trunk. Even if he is, then it doesn’t mean anything. Kaeya admires this.
His father – or the man who should have been his father – is an academic, the sort who spends his evenings spilling over yellowed caricatures and speeches; gentry, socialist, soldier, and labourer, they’re all the same kind of martyr. Somewhere between there must have been the propaganda that leads him to abandon his child in a storm. His mother had been from the Akademiya in Sumeru. The social sciences which is, really, the science of all things. This he has never told anyone.
He speaks Sumerian, broken and dryly. He doesn’t speak it at all for eighteen years, in fact, and startles when he hears it at the port asking for directions to the Citadel. He wrings with himself, watching Jean struggle through Common Pidgin. Neither she nor the merchant can stop their hands from flinging in futility. So he takes up his heart and chimes in, broken.
The merchant’s eyes light up and he launches into an elaborate plan to whisk his shipment over the cliffs but worries for the rain he’s heard so much of – Kaeya can’t blame him, he knows a thing or two about storms.
There’s a dialect to the man’s speech but Kaeya can’t speak well enough to place it. At an early, green-as-buds-in-spring stage of language, dialects are but another hurdle to understanding and not something that enriches. Though if his father is to be believed then dialects never enrich; it muddles, it taints. The common folk cut things here and there and draw the sound wrong and dirty. They use the word freest of them all.
Language belongs to the people but it’s the literature that makes civilisation, everyone knows that. Does a shepherd speak the same language as a merchant? Only on paper is all, everyone knows that. His father can smell the wretchedness of poor language like a bloodhound. Who’s goin’ to ask for an ol’ wisdom from up the mountain folk? A sailor smokin’ by the port? There’s endless wisdom in the sea and finite words to relay it. Precise, concise, zip it up for the print; who cares for the word of mouth?
Those loanwords too – sky, sun, and moon – that a cursed kingdom can’t lay eyes on and had to borrow from the surface are loanwords best uprooted. Kaeya concedes but merely because the loan of these words has long since expired. He grows up with the sun – the real sun as far as the faux firmament and Kaeya are concerned in their stalemate loathing – even at the edge of the world, and he needs a word for the sun.
He’ll pry it out of anyone’s hands, dead or not, if necessary. He doesn’t care for where it comes from. He doesn’t care for where most things come from; he doesn’t want to know of house glory, Ragnvindr or otherwise, and he doesn’t want to know how Mondstadt sprouted under a deity’s will from the dandelion patches. Kaeya swallows the present, clear cut. The social sciences and all that – they’re best left to people stuck in their own heads. The past has never done him any good.
He flashes smiles at the merchant but doesn’t say much. There’s a burning shame to speaking a language inadequately. His father was the eye of his generation in one language and a mere help fumbling through hacked vowels at the market in another, trying to scrap together coin for himself, his son, and his wayward ways.
Kaeya huddled around the feet of grander footsteps during those days, soaking up the sun and world. He said them all without shame, sullied by his mother tongue, he tacks them on upside down where they don’t belong; Xiansheng, Monsieur, Fräulein and Herr, Âghâ and Khânom, my good Effendi, Ọ̀gbẹ́ni, dearest Sayyid, o Señor, would you like some tea? Fresh, fresh! Yes, so fresh! From mountain range!
And then the couture-wearing pass-bys broke into amusement. Sometimes into slurs and sneers; it was a wildcard more than anything but usually it’s the locals who take offence. By the third help-out, his Liyuean was more impeccable than any other. He knows twenty words for sir and fourteen for mountain and tea; he knows which languages don’t have a word for sir and which conflate mountain and hill to one; he knows how to stress the yu in Mondstadtian and the chen in Southwest-Sumerian. It’s handy when selling Chenyu tea.
He couldn’t argue his way out of a paper bag in any of them, can’t read any of them, can’t say he knows quite what grammatical inflection means though the term has passed his father’s lips. Sure, there’s Common Pidgin, but who wouldn’t prefer buying chai instead of tee? Or tee instead of chai? D’la tisane des montagnes de Chenyu, tenez, tenez! Kaeya likes the way he can bounce off from one side of the world to the other so he doesn’t have to think of how ugly his native tongue sounds here.
However there’s little use for tea now; the merchant keeps telling and telling and Kaeya grabs for straws and ashes. The words tumble out of him all jumbled; he carts them the wrong way, inflects the opposite and stalls, stops, hesitates; he’s forgotten a word here and a word there and he’s forced to describe what he means; how do you forgo the term checkpoint?
“Knights will look at your things,” he says in Sumerian; it’s the closest he has crawled to fluency throughout the conversation. “Before the town.”
There is nothing graceful about searching for your words in the sand. It is a humiliation ritual more than anything. The biggest shame of them all is to speak your own language inadequately. Never mind the foreign tongue wringing it’s way through the throat; what good is it if he can’t remember how to ask for rice and bread in his mother’s hometown?
He does remember rice and have and please but the grammar is beyond him. He remembers his mother’s sweet melody, a raspy tone from the pipe smoke she frequented, and the way her warm lips stuck to his forehead and tuft of hair. He remembers, soft-spoken, the lullabies of the night but feeling the memory for sturdiness beyond it’s wisp is akin to capturing smoke with his hands. He realises he couldn’t ask for beans; he hasn’t the appropriate word.
The merchant grins for a goodbye and clasps him on the shoulder.
“I won’t forget this, brother,” he tells Kaeya. “Been a while since I’ve met someone from Vissudha. May you live well.”
Kaeya nods. A “same for you” is all he can stammer. The merchant strolls back to his sails.
There’s a sort of wonder in watching faces take to light when spoken to in their mother’s tongue in a foreign land. Sparkling eyes, tilting heads, boyish enthusiasm for the oral fruits of their home out of another’s mouth no matter how chopped and hacked and twisted in the dirt. That’s all Kaeya’s ever done to other languages; drag them through the mud.
He knows if anyone tried to speak to him in his native language – his father's tongue -, his first feeling would be horror.
-
Here’s Kaeya’s secret: his favourite pastime as a child was reading. You could ask Jean or Diluc or even Barbara and they would tell you that little, hare-in-the-fields Kaeya who tripped over his own two feet was an avid reader second-to-none in their classes. And here’s what they don’t know: they think he felt great shame for his illiteracy in their country and had greedily sucked their libraries dry to compensate for this inadequacy.
A wild child – though there was nothing wild about him to anyone who spoke to him for more than five minutes – from nowhere must have found enlightenment in their nation’s great and ancient gospels, never mind that Kaeya never touched a prayer book and skid past the mass and cathedral as though in a hurry. He loathed that statue – does so still.
As a trainee he swapped shifts with anyone willing to help him evade his patrols of it; it had become a notoriety at one point, when he was sixteen; Kaeya’s up for a shift-swap, any kind, really; he’ll swap for any time at any day as long as you take his cathedral shift; just ask Kaeya to swap, he’ll do it. Tough luck if you want to swap your cathedral shift though.
But Kaeya had been neither unread nor illiterate when their storm clouds first soaked him to the bone. He had read the epics of his homeland and the epics of theirs which is more than can be said of them because they can’t even place his accent; the most accurate guess is Crepus’; some isolated village in the Sumerian borderlands. He would have hit the nail right on the head had Kaeya spoken his mother’s Sumerian. But that’s not what leaves his mouth at all.
He’s written his own poetry in the margins of worn prints; he’s hunched over manuscripts about knights and dragons and cursed kingdoms with Leif who had only just begun putting sounds to the letter scrawl and set his heart on authorship, one day. If he ever does write a book, it won’t make it to the country under the sun where Kaeya is.
And even if Kaeya had been unread and illiterate when he came here it would not mean anything or make him more or less likely to read – his mother’s tongue, his father’s tongue, the way Leif shortened his name, his mother’s endearment, and the ways his cousins cursed so foul Kaeya’s aunt threatened to wash out their mouths with soap and vinegar are a precious thing of their own that can’t be measured by how many tomes one can stack onto marble walls. It’s a ridiculous presumption, this literacy, and yet it is a fickle, wonderful thing all the same. It is an iron fist with roses.
But Kaeya gives him up, that poet-boy in the dusty streets where the houses straggled for fresh air and sunlight just a hair’s width out of obscurity. He writes in this new, foreign tongue of storms; there’s things to like about any language. There’s endless stories to tell and endless ways to tell that tale and the most sacrilegious act is to believe in the objective superiority of one of them.
Cut here, add there, draw and flick the tongue against your teeth and clip it together; even in the periphery of the gods the dialects sprout like weeds between the mandated written word – Kaeya can’t quite understand Jean and Barbara’s aunt from up north or the sister sewing his arm together from down south. Sometimes, they can’t understand him – he rolls his r too long, his ch is too harsh it should be nicking his teeth, not the throat; those consonant clusters are a headache and what’s with that perked vowel at the end? You need to pronounce the eh, stop swallowing it.
He drops the accent one year in and, two years beyond the day the carriage took him with, no one could guess he wasn’t a native born and raised in the barren stone on Cider Lake. It’s people and their assumptions that have them all trip up together but they don’t feel as embarrassed about it as he; he’s Sumerian; he’s Natlanese, he’s Southern Inazuman; he’s from remote Nod-Krai. Kaeya couldn’t translate for half the people he’s presented with if he tried. He can sell them tea, though.
Diluc and he are forced to attend Liyuean classes. It is the language of commerce, of trade, mercantilism; any merchant worth their salt knows a phrase or two and is literate enough to sniff if any deceptive contract is astray. Diluc loathes it; he hasn’t much respect for them, though that goes for his native tongue as well. The tonal aspect, so different to Mondstadt, is of no help.
Diluc speaks high-strung like the aristocrat he is but picks up the word of the street quickly much to their father’s dismay. Kaeya can’t pick up on those distinctions yet even with fluency; it will take a few more years. But unlike Diluc, he takes like kindling to the new language and soaks it up like a sponge – he throws himself into grammar, tones, vocabulary and honorifics and all those layered sweet accents to decorate himself with, veil himself competent and intelligent. He’ll read all their books, too, and find out all their secrets. Because that’s the recipe to be taken for a respectable man.
Diluc drops out after two years. Perhaps that is why Kaeya is so shocked to hear the harsh Snezhnayan Diluc has picked up, unlike that of the casual manner of the soldiers; there’s a loathing to the way he spits the words that Kaeya has never heard anyone use for a tongue; no respect, no love for what he has learned. Not even Kaeya’s ambivalent war with Mondstadtian can compare.
There’s ways to hate libraries and books and then there’s ways to hate the tongue itself. Kaeya could never hate any of them; he’s much too fond of their ways to say tea but he comes close, on some days. Whichever language he is quarrelling with could be anyone’s guess – sometimes it is all of them.
There’s much he knows, but only in one language, that he has never told anyone. There’s much to be said about the industrial pride of a time he never saw. It's all there; totalitarian doctrine, democracy, revolutionary, anarchist and monarchist, the middle in their chipped, picket-fence line-houses, and the soot-soaked children in the factories. Politics for another era, medicine for another people. Electricity, film, algorithm, and penicillin, words no stranger to him but all those around. Hoarders, thieves, heathens of the world’s dregs, war mongering on a scale unseen! What is he going to do with all these untranslatable words?
He’s quite glad to not have laid eyes on the factories and sewers in Fontaine. He’s never seen the factories of his homeland buried under centuries of time. Is it even a homeland if his people have been in exile for five centuries? Kaeya’s the last person one should ask to define home; not for lack of trying – he’s likely one of the only people who’s read dictionaries front to back.
There are no words for many of these things in Mondstadt and he won’t be the one to introduce them. He won’t be the one to lend them out for loan. This is his secret to keep. There are tomes he knows Lisa wants translated, written so long ago deciphering it would give him a headache, though he could do it in due time.
But this is his secret to take to the grave. He won’t speak it out of fear but he cannot shed it either. He counts his coins under his breath in it, does his multiplications, his fractures, his subtractions and if the aggravation is too much, the curse escapes his lips before he can help it. On one summer day, a word will slip out; or he can’t find the correct word for sheathe; or the word in one language is too inadequate; or he, for once in his life, remembers a word in his mother’s Sumerian and feels his head rush hot when he stammers in front of the cadets, unable to think of any other equal to it – in this moment it is absolute.
He’ll take the secret to his grave, to the best of his abilities. Maybe, after another twelve years here, he will finally do additions the proper, local way.
-
“Since when do you speak Sumerian?” asks Jean.
The merchant has disappeared down the pier. Seagulls cry up ahead and Kaeya’s temples throb with a migraine. He’s exhausted, sweaty, clammy in his tight-laced wardrobe and wishes to stumble to the nearest tavern and gobble some greasy fried fish and wash it down with the strongest liquor available.
“I can’t,” he says. “Not really.”
Jean purses her lips, unperturbed. “Enough for that man apparently.”
“I can’t speak it properly. It’s nothing.”
“Kaeya,” she says. “Come on, what’s going on?”
“Nothing,” he says. “It’s nothing. Nothing at all.”
Worry clouds Jean’s eyes but she would never understand. She could try, perhaps, to put herself into his shoes and think of that afternoon, six years ago when he had opened a book in the library of his mother’s people and watched the letters skit of the page in fear of him. How the one poetry collection of his uncle’s he managed to save from his father’s purge of heathen-work and traitor-art before definite abandonment in fear of muddling his grandiose plan took double the time to read and thrice the time to understand now.
He wants to cry on that pier for the way it has all run through his fingers like sand. He has long since accepted the physical displacement; father and son, exiled travellers for longer than Kaeya had ever dared call anything home. But he hadn’t been ready to lose that boy he was, in those words, the choice vocabulary he had, the nicknames for his cat, the special way to call for his grandmother and auntie, and the tongue twisters he giggled at, now a dim memory. He’s lost even the boy with the brittle gift of language of his mother’s that he never did learn to read properly despite her lessons but could, once, speak for more than one sentence in.
He hasn’t any children and he likely won’t have any; he has his hands full with Klee. But if he did, he wouldn’t be able to gift them either language of his parents’. That day, six years ago, when he had snapped the tome together and thrown it against the shelves with a wail is his greatest shame, more so than the one that’s left the burn scars on his fingers.
“Kaeya?”
Hands grab for his, warm and small with wide knuckles. Jean’s eyes have darkened.
“It’s nothing,” he tells her. There's no use mourning what's lost already.
-
There isn’t much that can be said for the end. There is no fix to his predicament and he dives head-first back into the monotony of his home for that is what it is even if his heart is cut into places, scattered across the continent and beyond its edge.
But for the end, he’ll divulge another secret: language is a living, breathing thing and it’ll run you out, always. You can never surpass it. It evolves more than evolution itself, it is potent like that, the most fertile of grounds is the oral; the most constricting the page but even that cannot hope to contain it.
The most well-versed of scholars is no master no matter how much he insists, begs, squeals to be taken for one. His betrayal is likely that of the periphery. Who writes their novel in obscure dialect? Snuff it out, quickly, before anyone sees; what a shameful conduct. Who translates for the edge of the world? Those books they hoard are only a fraction of the beating centre and if their poor, silent cries are ever heard through the wringer of translation then it can only be a novelty.
You must dictate who reads and what they are to read. In school the only thing you will learn is the proper way, so you must cut away the destitute, wilting branches. Language is power and all that – the social science, Kaeya’s been saying it; it’s the science of all.
In those early days, when his mother had spent afternoons in the kitchen stuffing samosas, she had had him hunch and pour over her people’s word for hours to an end. She surveilled every scratch of ink. There was resentment in it – no other child on the street spoke like he, double the effort, and it cut him apart into his own little, lonely box. The gift is difficult to understand at that age.
“You must practice,” his mother would say, sternly. “Or you’ll lose it one day. It’d be shameful to take such a child home.”
"Look at me, Ma," he wants to say now, almost two decades older - an adult she could never have imagined. "I'm the most shameful child of them all."
That’s her secret and his, and maybe everyone else’s; drop the ball for too long and it will have rolled down the hill and into murky water and wedging through those swamps is a cruel, raw humiliation that he isn’t willing to undertake. He’s taken most of the things in life for granted, mother, samosas, and language and all.
A knock echoes on his door the next morning and he manages a brusque “come in” before returning to bureaucratic malady.
Jean pokes her blonde head through the entrance way. She perks up when she sees the stacks on his desk. “Are you catching up on paperwork?”
“Needs to be done, I fear,” he says succinctly before breaking into a slight smirk. “Though if you’ve got something else for me to do, I’ll gladly do that first–”
“Not necessary,” says Jean, holding up a hand.
On any other day she would have chuckled at his poor attempt of humour; that’s another art form of its own, wiggling your way into another tongue to be able to bend the words and sentences for your benefit. It’s the first art Kaeya mastered, beyond the tea, of course.
“Did something happen?” he asks instead.
She shakes her head and pulls out something from behind her back.
“Here,” she says, almost shyly, handing him a book. “It’s from the back library section if you want more. I just thought – with yesterday – you might want to practice?”
Kaeya grabs for it, inspecting the swinging ends of a writing he can’t read any more. A gesture of goodwill, misguided as it is. A native language that is not quite native to him and if it was, then it would be second to another. His gaze flicks up to his dearest friend who shifts her weight from one foot to the other, gnawing on her lip, and he flashes a smile.
There’s a way to hate libraries and books properly and he practices it like a piteous man. But for now, he cracks the spine open and inspects his own sort of misery, the one that means home to a people he should know much of for the simple fact that he’s technically of them. There’s always something to tie him to it. His mother’s murmured words of love can’t be spoken in any other language but this one and that alone is enough to make it his to claim.
“Thanks,” he says. “I’ll make sure to read it.”