Chapter Text
Venti has always liked the bar.
It feels almost crude to say it like such – to put words to what is merely a fact of life that everyone accepts. The wind always blows in Mondstadt, the Ragnvindrs always have crimson hair, and the dark-haired bard can always be found where the alcohol is.
Still, it’s not quite as meaningless as that; when Venti lets the feeling take shape, it’s a soft thought.
He has always liked the bar.
He likes the drinks, certainly, and the blurriness that he gets from drinking alcohol, though rarely does it ever get any stronger. He likes the atmosphere, the lighting, the warm lanterns and carved wood that has stayed the same after hundreds of years. He likes the chance to sing, to tell stories, to listen to others’ and hear of everything that takes place in a human mind, whether through imagination or memory.
But of course, most of all, he likes the people.
The wine industry is essential to their nation. Drinking culture is Mondstadt culture. And as such, when he slips through the door to the seat by the countertop that Diluc always keeps open for him while pretending it to be unintentional, the bar is already packed with Mondstadters, conversation buzzing through the room just as wine buzzes through their bodies.
It’s a lovely place to watch people. There’s quite a lot a person will show on their face when they don’t think about it, and Venti loves to see it.
They are his people, after all. He loves every part of them.
He really does like the bar, he thinks, and sighs deeply as if exhaling the force of all the emotions swirling in his chest.
A glass is set down next to him with a harsh thunk, effectively cutting him off from his musings. He blinks, shifting slightly to look up, and meets Diluc’s eyes with a grin. “Is this a free drink, just for me?”
He scoffs, blowing a strand of red hair away from his eyes as he turns back towards the sink. “No, your fellow bard paid for it.”
Venti blinks again, and looks over to Six-Fingered José, who spots the drink and the question in his eyes and responds with a salute. “Huh,” he says, and then shouts back a thanks, already bringing the glass to his lips. “I really like the bar,” he mumbles.
“That’s what got you so contemplative earlier?” Diluc’s voice is gruff, not even turning to face him, but he can hear the undercurrent of concern regardless.
“Kind of,” he says, smiling. “Isn’t it nice? There’s a lot you can see in a bar with all these people.”
Then again, Venti supposes that Diluc of all people is not the person who would need to be reminded of such a thing. Even ignoring the simple fact that he can be found bartending more frequently than not – and therefore would know everything about the bar – it would be ridiculous to pretend that Venti isn’t aware of what, exactly, Diluc likes to use the bar for so frequently.
Rosaria and Kaeya, as well. Venti does not require a tavern atmosphere when the wind picks up everything he needs to know, but he’s not blind to the exchanges that happen under the table at Angel’s Share rather frequently.
It’s part of what he likes to watch. It’s a little amusing, in a way. He’d never needed to do anything of the sort to pass along information – or to take it.
“A lot you can hear, too,” Diluc adds, and the water cuts off. When he looks back at Venti, he looks, somehow, more serious than normal. The bard would make a joke about it, but there’s something in his eyes that stills his tongue. “Be careful, Venti.”
“Well, of course, but might I ask why? I’m just a simple bard, after all.”
“After that stunt you pulled,” there’s no need to ask which one it is, seeing as it would not be difficult for Diluc to make the connection between Venti’s identity and the wind-powered voice channels that had appeared all over Mondstadt, “there have been more people asking questions.” There’s no one around them, too distracted by whatever story Pallad is regaling them with, which is likely the only reason Diluc feels safe enough to step closer. “You should pay more attention to your being a simple bard.”
There’s a pause. “I see,” Venti says slowly. He hadn’t exactly put too much effort into being subtle, it was true. Nobody who didn’t already know his secret had seen him, but the wind channels hadn’t been discreet.
“There’s been talk about a certain Anemo god having perhaps awoken,” Diluc says mildly, though his eyes are as sharp as ever. “Like I said – be careful.”
Venti sighs again, but this time, there’s no levity to it, only a resignation. “I will. Thank you, Diluc.”
He grunts in acknowledgement, already returning to his duties once more. Venti watches him turn away to where Pallad is stumbling over, half-drunk already, with a faint smile. He’s really too kind, honestly.
It’s nice to see that despite the centuries, the Ragnvindr honor stands strong. No matter what Diluc or Kaeya might think of themselves or their actions, Venti knows he will always be able to trust in the two of them.
It’s not like Venti’s identity is a dangerous secret, though perhaps his over-anxious friends might think of it as one. Still, Diluc has gone out of his way to warn him, and it leaves a warmth in his chest that he knows is not merely from the wine.
Pallad staggers back towards his rapt audience with a collection of pints in his arms, placing them on the table to a series of cheers, and Venti smiles. Beside him, Diluc groans.
“It’s not the time to be getting so drunk,” he says dispassionately, drying a cup with a towel.
“It’s Mondstadt,” Venti returns brightly. “It’s always the time.”
He huffs, shaking out the towel to dry it a bit before moving on to the next glass. “We still haven’t fully rebuilt from what happened over Windblume. And on top of that, the few Abyssal monsters that have still managed to sneak into the city…”
Venti straightens, almost knocking his own glass of wine over. “What?”
Diluc blinks in surprise. “You weren’t aware?” When he shakes his head, the bartender continues, brow furrowed, “it hasn’t been anything major, just frustrating. Just a couple of mages that got past some of the new holes in Mondstadt’s security. They’ve already been taken care of.”
By either the Knights, or the underground networks spearheaded by himself, his brother, or the nun, Venti assumes. Still, it’s not a good sign.
He hadn’t truly been worried, trusting in Mondstadt’s reliability and adaptfulness, but Diluc makes a good point; the city is weakened. What had happened during Windblume hadn’t been directly caused by the Abyss Order, but he wouldn’t put it past them to take advantage of their current distraction.
Varka is still in Nod-Krai, Jean and Kaeya are overwhelmed with the Knights’ new workload, Albedo is focusing on Durin, and for once, Diluc is far too busy helping rebuild to dedicate his time to vigilantism quite as frequently. Even now, the fact that he’s working at the bar at all is rare.
Venti sighs. He had thought he’d already gotten all of his responsibility over with now that the entire fiasco with Albedo and Durin is over, but it seems like he’ll just have to fill in those new holes Diluc had mentioned.
Temporarily, of course.
For all his dramatics, Venti hadn’t actually been expecting to be forced to make good on his word a mere couple of days after his and Diluc’s conversation. Honestly, this isn’t fair to him at all. He hasn’t even been awake that long, and he’s already been dragged into so many different situations!
And yet, the Abyss Order doesn’t seem to quite understand that. When he feels the sharp jolt of someone invading one of his places of worship, Venti groans, almost falling out of his tree from the force of it.
It takes mere seconds to vanish in a glimmer of teal light and reappear behind the Mondstadt Cathedral. There’s enough prayer suffusing the cemetery there to make the trip effortless, which would be good if it isn’t for the fact that it means that Venti can’t get away with pretending he’s too weak to deal with it.
Then again, once he gains a proper look at who’s actually trying to sneak into Mondstadt via the back of the church, he likely would have to be the one to do it anyway.
No matter how talented people like Barbara and Dahlia have become with their visions, neither of them are particularly combat-oriented. Were Rosaria here, she might be able to handle it, but even then it would be a difficult battle for her, as well. It doesn’t matter, regardless, because she’s not here, and there’s no one else who’d be able to get here on time and take on several Abyss Heralds. And Lectors. He keeps forgetting that they’re technically different – what does it matter when their strengths are equally insignificant to him?
“This is kind of a step up from a couple of mages,” Venti says, cocking his head. Anemo energy begins concentrating in his palm, his bow already forming in his hand.
It’s always been an eager thing. It’s hard enough to tamp down the reflex to summon the Skyward Atlas.
“Barbatos,” one of them hisses, voice crackling in unison with the Electro sparking off of its arms.
Venti winces. “None of that, please.”
“Barbatos,” it repeats, and he sighs, already tuning out whatever else it might be trying to say. It’s not that he doesn’t feel any guilt or pity, because he really does, but after so many years of the same monologues it does get repetitive.
When the Cryo Abyss Herald gets bored of its counterpart’s dramatics, it steps forward, launching a series of spikes at him that he dodges, drawing his bow up instinctively.
There are already three arrows nocked and aimed before he even straightens back up, bowstring pulled taut to his ear. “Fighting isn’t the only option, you know,” he tries, infusing his voice with as much cheer as possible.
It growls at him in response and lunges again, which he supposes is answer enough.
The first arrow slices through its chest at the same time that other two embed themselves into its hands, and it collapses to the ground in a flurry of Abyssal power and snowflakes. Rather theatric, though Venti supposes he isn’t one to talk.
The Electro Lector mutters something else, finally raising its own energy up in preparation for the fight. Venti nocks another arrow.
It steps back into an Abyssal portal. Its pyro counterpart steps forward instead, arching fire reaching hungrily for him and leaving the ground charred and smoking.
“Oh, come on,” he whines, slipping out of the way of the flames. “That’s just cheating. You can’t just disappear on people whenever you want.”
Paimon’s voice comes to mind, unbidden, shouting something about him teleporting off on them when they’d first arrived in Mondstadt all those months ago. Venti pauses, frowning, and huffs in offense at the memory as he sends up a swirl of wind to block another attack.
It’s different when he does it. He’s allowed to.
The swell of Abyssal energy at his back is enough to warn him, and he twists, aiming another two arrows into each eye socket. He watches them fly through the gaps in its mask, embedding themselves into their targets, and the Lector trips backwards into its portal before it evaporates them both.
“Barbatos,” the Pyro Lector calls out, sounding exactly as raspy and angry as its now-dead friend. Venti makes a face. The voice resemblance is honestly uncanny, and he’s saying that as someone copying another person’s voice himself. “You will not hide forever.”
He squints at it, letting the wind extinguish the flames for him, and says, “I am literally in front of you right now.”
As is typical of people who wish Mondstadt ill, it does not respond, attempting one last valiant charge despite seeing him take down its comrades in a couple of seconds. Venti can respect that sort of loyalty, at least, even if he despises the Order’s actions.
He doesn’t bother wasting an arrow for this one. It’d been nice to take his bow out for a stretch, but he’d forgotten how large and dramatic weapons could be, and it’s still more efficient to simply compress the wind around it tightly enough that it stops moving.
The air snakes around him once the body disintegrates, mimicking a playful caress, and Venti lets the tips of his hair and cape blend into it in thanks. He yawns.
“That took too much time,” he says, vanishing his bow once more where he hopefully won’t have to pick it up again for a long, long time. He’d been using it far too often as of recently. “Well. There are a couple of scorch marks, but nobody will really pay attention to those, right?”
Something in the wind giggles, high-pitched and knowing.
“Okay, okay, but I’m not the one who started throwing fire around, so it’s not my fault, what are you all laughing for?” Venti says, unable to stop the smile on his face. His siblings’ laughter has always been contagious. Being among the wind like this – that’s contagious, too, and he needs to stop it before he gets tempted to dissolve his human form for a couple of weeks.
People would get concerned, and Angel’s Share is offering discounts right now due to the Windblume fiasco. He wouldn’t want to miss out on that.
The wind laughs again pointedly, but Venti maintains that just because using Anemo to block Pyro sometimes results in a little bit of extra fire doesn’t mean that he’s the one who decided to fight in such a flammable place like the Mondstadt gardens in the first place.
And if his siblings don’t want to tell him what has them so excited, then that’s on them, and he’s not going to worry about it.
Venti yawns again, stretching his arms out and feeling his cape settle properly against his back. His nap got interrupted by this drama, and there’s a branch on Windrise Tree with his name on it. Now that everything’s fine, he intends to collect.
When he vanishes once more in a flash of Anemo energy, he doesn’t think anything of it.
When the bard disappears again with the same light that had brought him, Nimrod finally allows himself to exhale again. He supposes he could count himself lucky that, outside of that first, instinctive inhale, he’d kept his presence of mind enough to remember that disturbing the air around the Anemo god is a surefire way of revealing his presence.
He still can’t quite wrap his head around that, actually, slumping against the elegant arch of the Cathedral stone. He doesn’t know what powers had kept Venti – Barbatos – from spotting him, but the man tucked behind an alcove had gone unnoticed by god and Abyss alike.
Nimrod realizes, faintly, that his hands are trembling.
To think that the bard that all of the city loved so ardently is truly their god, taken human form and walking among them – if he wasn’t a Mondstadter, and if he weren’t an informant, Nimrod suspects that he’d be far more incoherent than he is now.
Mondstadt accepts people from all walks of life. There’s a reason why people like Kaeya and Rosaria and Eula and Jean are all so important to the city when half of them weren’t even born here. For someone to be revealed as something other than human – that sort of prejudice does not exist here.
It would concern him a lot more if it was revealed that the bard secretly hates wine.
And yet, though concern is certainly the furthest thing from his mind after seeing Barbatos’ nimble mastery of his bow, there’s still something incomprehensible about having just witnessed his very own god.
Nimrod has never claimed to be anyone great. There’s a reason why he’s just one of Kaeya’s many informants and nothing more – if he can help the young man in helping their nation, that’s enough for him, and he’ll spend the rest of his time drinking in revelry. In all honesty, he’s a rather average Mondstadter, and he’s never minded it.
He’s always been surrounded, however, by people who are great, like Kaeya himself, or Rosaria, the very reason he’s at the Cathedral at all. He’s merely a messenger for whatever letter Kaeya wishes to pass to her, for some reason unwilling or incapable of giving it to her himself, and the sound of fighting had drawn his attention once he’d exited the building as discreetly as he could.
He doesn’t pretend to know everything that the two of them are up to, and he doesn’t wish to, but he’d be truly foolish to miss how much they do for Mondstadt. Even with all they drink, it’s obvious. People like the Acting Grandmaster, and even Master Diluc, or their resident Dragonspine Alchemist as well – Mondstadt seems to be in no shortage of great, powerful protectors.
It’s always been comforting, no matter how worrying their young ages are to him.
But now, to add an Archon to that? Like all Mondstadters, Nimrod has never truly believed Barbatos to have left them, raised with stories of the winds’ care and attention. It’s entirely different to see him in person and to know that he’s been among them for so long.
He cannot remember a time when Venti couldn’t be found somewhere in the city, but he knows, logically, that the bard had not always been here.
How had no one noticed sooner? What is Nimrod supposed to do?
The wind brushes against his ear, and for a moment he flinches, afraid that perhaps Barbatos had noticed him after all. Then he flinches, because he is a Mondstadter and the concept of being afraid of their god is abhorrent.
But there is no bard appearing out of thin air to question him. Rather, the wind merely ruffles his hair, and the clasp of his bag opens and smacks him.
Oh, Nimrod thinks. That’s a perfect answer to his question. Nimrod doesn’t need to do anything. He likes a good pay and he likes a good drink – people who do things are people like Kaeya, who would want this information and be able to make decisions about it.
Mind made up, he shuts his bag once more and sets off for where he knows Kaeya will be, never hearing the wind’s excited titters behind him. He’s not anyone great, after all. He can’t understand the wind.
(He’s a Mondstadter. He’ll never understand the wind, but he’ll always be a part of it.)
Kaeya is exactly where Nimrod expected him to be: at the Knights of Favonius headquarters, gazing upon the stacks of paperwork left on his desk with an expression that can be only described as abject terror.
When he turns, catching sight of him, the relief that immediately blossoms over his face is slightly worrying. Nimrod steals another glance at the papers, but they haven’t morphed into any terrifying creatures. They haven’t moved at all, yet Kaeya acts like his appearance is saving him from death itself.
“Nimrod, my dear friend,” Kaeya says, sounding like an attempt at smoothness and sliding into deranged. If even Nimrod is hearing it, then the captain must be truly exhausted. “Have you spoken to our beloved nun?”
Rosaria would gut him if she heard him refer to her like that. Nimrod says, “Yes, and–”
“Wonderful!” Kaeya claps him on the shoulder, hard enough that he stumbles under the weight of it. He spends his days drinking, not working out or going on expeditions. He’s not meant to bear the strength of a young adult maniacally trying to avoid work. “So there’s something she wants me to do, right, and I should go do that immediately, Nimrod?”
Nimrod hesitates for just a second too long. Kaeya’s face immediately falls, filling with desperation, and he slumps back into his chair while studiously avoiding making eye contact with the papers, throwing one hand dramatically over his face. “Sorry, Captain.”
“It’s fine.” It does not sound fine. “What’d she say, then?”
“I don’t know, just handed me this paper,” Nimrod says, digging it out of his bag and leaving it on the desk, ignoring the man’s flinching at the last word.
Kaeya sighs. “Thanks.”
“Also,” here, he pauses. How is he meant to say this? He knows Kaeya has never been particularly religious, but he’s still a Mondstadter. Barbatos may be – have been – absent, but his metaphorical presence in their lives has always held strong. Sometimes, the travelers at the bar tell them that the worship in Mondstadt is heavier than from where they’re from, which Nimrod has always found strange. Half of them are more likely to be found in a bar than in church.
Kaeya shifts his hand slightly to look at him. “Are you alright?”
Nimrod shifts. “At the Cathedral, I saw Venti the bard,” he starts. Kaeya nods encouragingly. “He – I thought it was impossible, but – there were these huge Abyssal monsters.”
The captain bolts upright. “Abyss mages?”
“No, they were bigger,” Nimrod says. He doesn’t understand it himself. “I thought they were using catalysts – but how could that be? I’ve never heard of that before.”
Kaeya frowns, contemplation settling over his features, and there’s something in his eye that makes Nimrod think that perhaps he has heard of it. He doesn’t understand how that could be, when Mondstadt has not faced situations like these in centuries, but he isn’t going to question it. It’s likely another one of those things for great people, one of those things Nimrod doesn’t get to know about and doesn’t want to.
“Is Venti okay?” Kaeya asks, making it as if he were to get up and go to the Cathedral himself. Nimrod blinks, straightens, and nods quickly.
Of course, he almost says. What could harm a god? “He’s fine,” he says instead. “He – he killed them all in a couple of seconds.” Kaeya freezes, something flashing through his eye that he doesn’t bother to decipher. “He – Captain, they called him Barbatos.”
Neither of them say anything for a long time. Nimrod is frozen, watching for Kaeya’s reaction, wanting desperately to go to the tavern for a long drink to process this himself.
Kaeya – Kaeya is frozen, too, but he cannot even begin to guess at what might be going through his mind. There are too many emotions on his face, fear and shock and awe and something that looks a lot like triumph, until they all settle into blankness, that poker face he’s so well known for that banned him from the local Mondstadt gambling circles.
(With foreigners, though, is a different story. Mondstadt is the land of the free, and that includes the freedom to trick some mora out of strangers looking down on their ways.)
“I see,” Kaeya says finally, and his voice is so neutral it sounds empty. “Thank you for letting me know, Nimrod.”
“Of course,” he says, grateful for the reprieve from that tense silence. “I’ll be at the tavern, if you need me for anything.”
Not that Kaeya will call on him, though. Nimrod is at least self-aware enough to know that asking someone drunk to do any work isn’t going to be very helpful. There’s a reason why Kaeya doesn’t generally ask for his help for anything more significant than passing messages along.
Then again, this seems like something pretty significant, accidental as it may be.
“Yeah,” Kaeya says absently, not even seeming to process anything going on. Nimrod slowly edges out of the room. “Yeah, go ahead, I’ll – I’ll see you later.”
The door clicks shut to the sight of their beloved Captain, standing in the middle of the room, still somewhere in his own mind.
The tavern greets Nimrod with the same warm lights and busy people as always, drunken cheers already reaching his ears despite the relatively early hour. Nimrod grins as he enters, Jack already calling him over with a shout and raised pint of ale.
The scent of alcohol hangs heavy in the air and he lets himself sink into it, ignoring Charles’ sigh when he stops by the counter to order a second round for them all.
It may be the third round he’s ordered. Or perhaps the fourth. Enough so that there’s blurriness in front of his eyes and mind alike. When he leans over to steal a Death After Noon from someone on the table – he isn’t quite sure who asked for it at this point – he accidentally falls into Quinn instead, who’s standing next to the table and moping about Beatrice instead of succumbing to the Mondstadt cheer like the rest of them.
Odd guy. He hopes he figures things out soon enough, Nimrod thinks, doing his best to straighten them both up from where they’d been knocked onto the ground with a slurred apology.
“Barbatos didn’t bless you with much agility, did he,” Jack laughs, falling back against the back of his chair and draining what looks like half of his pint.
“Or much else,” José calls out to a series of good-natured jeers, people already pitching in with their own stories of getting a little too drunk. “Must’ve gotten distracted and didn’t notice you!”
Nimrod blinks. There’s something scratching in his mind, beyond the haze of alcohol, that tells him that he knows something about that – Barbatos, and agility?
No, that isn’t quite right.
They’ve already moved on in conversation, topic switching easily to one of the latest Springvale hunts with the fluidity of drunk men not completely aware of what they’re saying. Still, Nimrod stays fixated on that one sentence, standing blankly next to Quinn, albeit for a very different reason.
It had been something important. He remembers that, at least.
Distraction, blessings, agility, not getting noticed –!
“I remember now!” Nimrod shouts, whipping around to the table and almost falling over as a consequence.
Somebody cheers, before another voice shouts out, “Remember what? Remember what? Your wife looking for you again?”
The cheers rise up again. Nimrod shakes his head – Eury, much as he loves her, has nothing to do with the odd jobs he takes on for Kaeya and that’s how he prefers it. “No, no, it’s about Venti!”
There’s a hush that overtakes the crowd, then, because their bard is as deeply mysterious as he is deeply loved. Something like pride wells up in his chest, because he’s the one who will solve that mystery first. “I saw him,” he starts, with a dramatic whisper, “outside the Cathedral.”
“C’mon, what were you doing outside the church? The sisters aren’t gonna give you the communion wine,” Jack says from behind another pint of ale. Nimrod isn’t really sure when he got it, but that isn’t the point.
“Jack, you’ve barely stepped foot in the Cathedral for years,” José responds without missing a beat. “If a man wants to pray to Barbatos for good wine, he has that right. You pray to Barbatos for the tolerance to drink it.” He doesn’t sing quite as often now that Venti is around, though he’ll still do it on the days that Venti either doesn’t show up or doesn’t perform, but his profession as bard likes to make its appearance through his insults more often than not.
There’s another round of drunken laughter before Cyrus shushes them all, a hand gesturing carelessly towards Nimrod, who takes the opportunity with gratitude. “No, there were Abyss monsters there. And Venti took care of them! Instantly! I saw him, with a bow, and three arrows nocked.”
“Three?” Someone in the crowd repeats. Nimrod nods emphatically.
“There’s no way,” Jack says doubtfully. “He isn’t even an adventurer or a knight!”
“Master Diluc isn’t either of those, but he’s a good fighter,” Quinn pitches in, apparently done with his romantic troubles for the night. Jack twists around in his chair to squint at him in offense.
“Master Diluc was Cavalry Captain at fourteen, of course he can fight,” he says. “Making the rest of us look bad.”
“What, you saying that Venti the bard's a secret prodigy?”
“No, that’s not what I’m saying, that’s what you’re saying.”
“Both of you are wrong! There’s no way at all–”
“Well to be good with a lyre you’ve got to be good at strings, right? Same principle.”
“Oh, fuck you, you think José can shoot as well as me?”
“I probably could, seeing as I’m not as drunk as you! Celestia knows why Venti couldn’t!”
“The Abyss monsters called him–!” Nimrod’s voice cuts off. He’d been shouting. That seems foolish, probably, and if he’s thinking that through the glasses of wine he’d already had, then it must be extraordinarily foolish. Then again, there’s no other way to cut through the rising clamor of Mondstadters with nothing better to talk about.
Thankfully, with Cyrus leaning forward to listen, the rest follow quickly enough, and Nimrod makes sure to drop his voice down low enough. Angel’s Share is indoors, and the windows are always closed to keep the tavern a little warmer than outside, even with the coming spring.
The wind shouldn’t be able to get in, right? So the bard won’t hear of this.
(If Nimrod were any more sober, he’d remember Charles, working at the bar and always keeping an ear out for everything happening to report back to Diluc. He likely wouldn’t make the connection between Diluc and Venti, but everyone knows that Diluc and Kaeya were brothers, once upon a time, and Kaeya knows about Venti being Barbatos now.)
(Unfortunately, Nimrod is not any more sober. Being any more sober would likely solve a lot of problems for them all, but it’s an impossible thing to ask of a Mondstadt local.)
“The Abyss monsters called him Barbatos,” Nimrod whispers.
There’s a pause. One moment of beautiful, taut silence, before a glass shatters somewhere and the entire tavern explodes in noise.
There really hadn’t been any point in trying to lower his voice in a bar filled with people just drunk enough to believe him.
Diluc finds him by the Cathedral, ironically enough, when he tells him. Venti had only been talking with Dahlia, a conversation light enough that he’d nearly forgotten about the whole thing with the Abyss Heralds a couple of days later.
In his defense, a fight that lasts several minutes doesn’t generally register in his mind as relevant. He’d figured the entire situation to be wrapped up and over with. If any more appeared, he would either take care of it or ask someone else to, but it hadn’t been a pressing concern.
Which is why, when he feels someone approaching and Dahlia’s face drops, immediately beelining back to the church, he’s surprised to find Diluc walking towards him with an expression best described as furious worry.
“Ah, hello my dearly beloved wine-maker Master Diluc!” Venti chirps, and is blessed to see the disgruntled face he makes in response.
“Venti,” Diluc says, ignoring his greeting entirely, “when I told you about the Abyssal monsters, I didn’t mean you needed to take care of it.”
Venti blinks. “Oh, is this about that? Seriously, it wasn’t important. Nobody was available, anyway, and it’s not like I want my church to get wrecked.”
He wouldn’t really care, honestly, because the whole thing is far too large to be just for worshipping him, but Mondstadt has long fallen out of the habit of praying to Istaroth and he thinks if he suggested anything to Andrius, the wolf might actually kill him.
The Cathedral is less about Barbatos these days, no matter what the more devout sisters might say. The people pray to him, certainly, but they don’t go to church for worship but rather the familiarity – the safety – it offers. That’s all that’s important, in the end, so Venti supposes he has to make sure it doesn’t collapse.
“I – okay,” Diluc says, pinching the bridge of his nose, and for one second he looks so utterly exhausted that Venti starts getting seriously concerned. Had he missed one? That seems impossible, and even if he had he would’ve expected the wind to warn him, but everyone makes mistakes. “Venti, someone saw you.”
There’s a pause. “Someone saw me,” Venti repeats.
“Nimrod,” Diluc nods. “Got drunk in Angel’s Share afterwards. Charles told me, which means that everyone in the bar must know by now, and probably half the city.” Then he mutters something about Kaeya, which Venti would address if he felt anything like normal. It’ll be fine, probably.
How, in the name of Istaroth, did he miss Nimrod? He knows about the man’s occasional jobs for Kaeya, which is likely why he’d been around the Cathedral in the first place, but he’s still never been particularly subtle.
Venti groans suddenly enough that Diluc startles. That’s – that’s what his siblings had been so smug about, giggling the entire day. And they’d never bothered to warn him, which sounds exactly like the wind.
Fickle, unreliable bastards, Venti thinks in frustration, knowing exactly how much it applies to him as well. He sounds like Morax.
“...Venti?” The sharpness has dropped from Diluc’s voice, and he sounds more worried than anything else. He’s always had such a hard time at showing it, but he cares so freely. So much. Venti should respond. Not only as Diluc’s god, but as his friend. “Are you alright?”
How did he miss Nimrod? How did he miss the man getting drunk and shouting it in Angel’s Share? He’d never cared for all the responsibility of an Archon, but this isn’t even about being responsible for his people, it’s the negligence that Morax always yelled at him about.
Even the memory of the Geo Archon’s fury that day does little to break past the blankness growing in his mind. The idea of Nimrod knowing, of half of the city knowing –
Anemo rises up between Venti’s limbs before he can even put the idea into words. He doesn’t think about it, barely processing what he’s doing, before he blinks out in a flurry of teal.