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Jean did not remember deciding to take the horse.
She remembered someone saying Diluc's name. She remembered turning away from the correspondence on her desk and asking the question twice because the first answer could not possibly have been right.
Gone?
Then the stable doors flew open, and everything after that became wind.
The road beneath her blurred as the horse thundered south. Dust rose behind them. Jean leaned low over its neck, one hand wound tightly around the reins while the other steadied her whenever the ground dipped. She had ridden this road dozens of times, but never as though speed could change something that had already happened.
The vineyards appeared first, their green rows peaceful beneath the morning sun. Beyond them stood the manor. Someone waited near the front steps.
Adelinde.
Even from a distance, there was something wrong in the way she held herself. Her hands were clasped too tightly before her, and grief had hollowed the composure from her face. Jean pulled the reins. The horse sidestepped at the sudden command, but she brought it under control and dismounted in one swift movement.
"Miss Jean."
"Where is he?"
Adelinde did not ask whom she meant. "Young Master Diluc left before sunrise."
Jean glanced toward the manor. For one desperate instant, she expected him to appear in the doorway, exhausted and irritated because everyone had misunderstood. Perhaps he had gone into the vineyards. Perhaps he had ridden into the city, and they had passed each other somewhere along the road.
"Where did he go?"
"I don't know."
"When will he return?"
Adelinde's eyes lowered. "He didn't say."
Something cold settled beneath Jean's ribs. Only days had passed since Crepus Ragnvindr's funeral.
Jean had come to the winery the first day, but Diluc had refused to see anyone. She returned the next morning and was turned away again. On the third, she waited outside for nearly an hour before deciding that perhaps the kindest thing she could do was leave him alone.
He had just buried his father.
He needed time.
Tomorrow, she had promised herself. She would try once more tomorrow.
Tomorrow had become today, and Diluc was gone. "Did he leave any instructions?" Jean asked. Her voice sounded painfully formal. "Any messages?"
Adelinde understood what she could not make herself ask. "No."
The answer struck more deeply than Jean was prepared for. She lowered her gaze before that hurt could show. Behind her, the horse shifted, its reins hanging loose against its neck. "I see."
"Miss Jean, I'm sure the young master..."
"Thank you, Adelinde."
She turned away.
"He was not himself when he left."
Jean closed her eyes. That was precisely what frightened her.
She mounted again. This time, she let the horse choose its pace.
There was nowhere left to hurry to.
One year earlier, Diluc Ragnvindr had nearly ruined Barbara's birthday cake. At least, that was how Jean remembered it.
Diluc insisted Kaeya was responsible. Kaeya claimed he had merely been an innocent witness to an unfortunate chain of events involving a bowl of frosting, Jean's hair, and Diluc's inability to stand still when something was thrown at him. The truth was probably somewhere between the three accounts.
"Hold still," Diluc said.
Jean sat rigidly on the edge of a chair. "I am holding still."
"You keep turning around."
"Because you have not told me what Kaeya put in my hair."
Across the room, Kaeya made a suspicious choking sound. Diluc glanced at him. Kaeya immediately devoted himself to arranging strawberries along the edge of the cake.
"It is frosting," Diluc admitted.
"How much frosting?"
He hesitated. "More than would be convenient."
Jean started to rise.
His hand settled lightly against her shoulder. "If you move now, it will spread."
She sat again. "This wouldn’t have happened if you didn’t flick the spoon at Diluc!" She pointed at Kaeya
"And he very heroically stepped aside."
Diluc worked the sticky streak from a lock near Jean's temple. "I was protecting the cake."
"From frosting?"
"From Kaeya."
"A much more credible threat," Kaeya agreed.
Jean tried to glare at him, but Diluc gently turned her face forward with two fingers beneath her chin.
"Almost finished." His voice had softened.
Jean became aware of how close he stood behind her. One hand held the rescued strand away from the rest of her hair; the other wiped away the last trace of sugar. His fingertips grazed the shell of her ear.
"There," he murmured.
Jean looked up.
Diluc was already looking at her.
Kaeya cleared his throat with theatrical delicacy. "Should I give you both a moment to recover from the ordeal?"
Diluc tossed the cloth at him. Kaeya ducked. It struck the wall with a wet slap. All three stared at it.
Kaeya slowly turned back. "I fear your aim has suffered under emotional strain."
Diluc picked up a crumpled piece of wrapping paper.
Jean saw what he intended too late.
"Diluc, don't."
He threw it. Kaeya caught it against his chest and gasped as though struck by an arrow. "Jean, you witnessed that."
"I witnessed you start it."
"There is a troubling lack of impartiality in this room." Kaeya threw the paper back. Diluc moved aside, and it sailed toward the vase of cecilias.
Jean caught the vase before it tipped.
"Both of you, stop."
They did.
For perhaps five seconds.
Then something soft struck Jean's shoulder. A paper flower dropped into her lap.
Silence fell. Diluc turned slowly toward Kaeya.
Kaeya raised both hands. "That one was not mine."
Jean picked up the flower.
"Jean," Diluc said carefully.
She threw it directly at his face. Kaeya doubled over laughing. Diluc plucked the flower from his hair and regarded Jean with exaggerated betrayal.
Diluc threw the flower at him. Kaeya ducked behind the table and returned fire with a ball of discarded paper. It missed Diluc, bounced from the wall and landed in the bowl of strawberries. "My strawberries," Kaeya said.
"They were never yours," Jean reminded him.
Kaeya seized a handful of loose petals and sent them flying over Diluc's head. Several skimmed the cake before landing in the frosting.
Diluc shielded the plate with his body.
Jean shielded her schedule. "You are both behaving like children!"
Kaeya scooped up the frosting-coated petals.
"Don't you dare!"
He dared. The petals struck the page in Jean's hands, leaving white smears across her carefully ordered list.
Jean lowered it. Kaeya was already retreating. Diluc was failing not to smile. She folded the ruined page around the sticky petals and launched the entire bundle.
It struck Kaeya in the chest and burst apart.For the next several minutes, very little work was accomplished.
Kaeya used the back of a chair as a barricade. Diluc defended the cake with one arm while throwing paper balls with the other. Jean attempted to restore order twice before abandoning the effort and joining whichever side seemed most likely to win. That side changed frequently.
"You cannot ally with him after he put frosting in your hair," Diluc protested.
"Kaeya apologized."
"I expressed regret that you were standing there," Kaeya corrected.
Jean threw a napkin at him. Diluc laughed hard enough that Kaeya landed a paper flower in his hair. Jean moved closer and reached to remove it, but Diluc caught her wrist. For one suspended second, the battle stopped around them. His hand was warm. His smile remained, softer now that it was meant only for her.
Kaeya hit them both with a shower of frosting-dotted petals. Diluc released Jean and lunged for him.
"So much for brotherly loyalty!" Kaeya cried, retreating around the table. "Jean, control your knight in shining armor!"
"He…is not my knight."
Both brothers stopped. Jean heard the words one moment too late, causing her cheeks to redden. Diluc cleared his throat. The tips of his ears had turned red. Kaeya's delighted expression was intolerable.
Jean snatched up a roll of blue streamers and threw it at him. Diluc launched another from the opposite side.
Both struck Kaeya at once. He collapsed dramatically onto a chair, blue paper draped over his shoulders. "Defeated by the combined forces of Mondstadt. Tell Father I fought bravely."
"I will tell him you ate half the strawberries," Diluc said.
Kaeya sat upright. "There is no need to involve him.
"Jean?"
All three froze. Barbara stood in the doorway. No one had heard her enter.
Jean still held a paper flower like ammunition. Diluc stood halfway around the table with frosting across one glove. Blue streamers hung from Kaeya's shoulders, and cecilia petals covered the floor.
Barbara looked from one of them to the next. "I thought you were doing Knights work."
Jean lowered the paper flower. "This became more complicated than anticipated."
Barbara's gaze found the cake, then the cecilias, then the crooked blue decorations and the wrapped gifts waiting near the window.
Her hands rose to her mouth. "Is this for me?"
The battle was forgotten. "Happy birthday," Jean said.
Barbara crossed the room and flung her arms around her. The force pushed Jean back against Diluc, who caught them both while keeping the cake out of danger.
"You remembered the cecilias," Barbara whispered.
"Of course I remembered."
Barbara pulled Diluc into the embrace before he could prepare himself, then reached for Kaeya as well. Kaeya protested that his dignity was being compromised, but one arm settled around Barbara while the other hooked around Diluc's shoulders. For a little while, all four stood together amid fallen petals, crooked decorations and the remains of a battle no one would confess to starting. The rest of the decorations were finished with Barbara's enthusiastic assistance. The surprise had failed, but the party had not
Later, after the candles had burned low and Kaeya had somehow eaten enough cake for three people, Jean found Diluc near the window collecting abandoned paper flowers.
She bent to help him.
Their hands reached for the same one.
This time, neither pulled away immediately.
Across the room, Barbara was laughing at something Kaeya had said, one cecilia tucked above her ear.
"She liked it," Jean said.
"I told you she would. You remembered everything she loves."
Jean's fingers closed around the paper flower between their hands. "You remembered too."
He had brought Barbara's favorite apple pastries from the winery. He had found the blue candles Jean could not. He had spent an hour tying cecilias into the garland because Jean wanted the room to look as though spring had wandered inside. Diluc looked down at their joined hands and slowly released the flower to her. "Only because your schedule was terrifyingly specific."
Jean smiled. "Thank you."
The teasing answer she expected did not come.
Instead, he met her eyes and said, "Anytime."
For the first few weeks after Diluc left Mondstadt, Jean expected news. Not necessarily for her. She would have accepted anything: a note to Adelinde, word from another branch of the Knights, a merchant who had seen him on the road.
Nothing came.
Weeks became months, and Mondstadt carried on with an indifference Jean found almost offensive. Children still scattered Timmie's pigeons, merchants opened their shops each morning. The bells rang, patrols changed, and people gathered beneath the great tree at Windrise.
Diluc did not return.
Jean wrote her first letter a few months after he disappeared.
Diluc,
I hope this letter finds you safely.
She studied the blank space beneath the sentence. There was no address, but she folded the paper anyway and placed it in the bottom drawer of her desk.
Another letter followed several weeks later, then another. She told him that Mondstadt was well, the western patrol routes had been reorganized, and Barbara had begun singing in public.
She did not mention that Kaeya had not spoken Diluc's name once nor did she write that she missed him.
Both truths felt too large to place on a page that would never find him.
The escort mission near Wolvendom should have been unremarkable.
Instead, a second group of hilichurls emerged from a narrow trail that did not appear on the Knights' map. Two members of Jean's unit sustained minor injuries while protecting the merchants, though everyone returned to Mondstadt alive. Her superior called the operation a success.
Jean spent the night studying how close it had come to becoming something else.
Maps and witness statements covered her desk. One merchant insisted the attackers had come from the north. Another swore they had crossed the road from the west. Jean retraced the formation until the inked route swam before her eyes.
The office had emptied hours ago. She pressed two fingers to her temple, and memory carried her to another late night, when the chair opposite her had not been empty.
"The cart was beside the road when we arrived," Jean said.
Diluc did not lift his head from his report. "It was in the middle of the road."
"Mr. Schuster stated that it had not moved." The distinction mattered. If the hilichurls had dragged the cart across the road, the ambush had been planned. If Mr. Schuster had left it there himself, he had obstructed the route against their instructions. The report had to say which.
"Mr. Schuster spent most of the attack beneath it."
"Which gave him an excellent view of its position."
Diluc finally looked up. Between them sat enough paperwork to make both new recruits reconsider every choice that had led them to the Knights of Favonius. They had returned from their assignment near sunset. Someone, in an astonishing display of cruelty, informed them that the incident reports were required by morning.
It was well past midnight.
Jean tapped the witness statement. "If the cart began beside the road, something moved it."
"Perhaps the hilichurls did."
"During the attack?"
"They may have objected to the obstruction."
Jean stared at him.
Diluc maintained a perfectly sober expression. "Very civic-minded hilichurls."
"This is an official report."
"I am aware."
"You cannot write that."
"I wasn't planning to. I was planning to watch you consider it."
She tried not to smile and miserably failed.
Diluc's face brightened in triumph. "There. I was beginning to think you had forgotten how to look like a person rather than an extension of the report."
Jean kicked him beneath the table. He laughed, and the work somehow became lighter. Not shorter. Not less tedious. Only easier to carry. Diluc began keeping count of who completed each report first. Jean objected that speed was not the purpose of administrative documentation. He informed her that people who said such things were generally losing. Jean finished the next one almost four minutes before him. He accused her of omitting a statement. She made him inspect every line.
At some point, Diluc disappeared. Jean assumed he had gone in search of another bottle of ink until he returned carrying a plate of bread, cheese and sliced apples. He placed it beside her hand.
"I'm not hungry. Plus, we still have six reports."
"They will remain six reports whether you eat or not."
"I can eat when we finish."
Diluc drew one of her pages toward himself. "Eat."
"That is mine."
"Not anymore."
"You already have one."
"Then I had better work quickly while you eat."
Jean glanced at the food, then at him.
He had noticed.
She had not complained or slowed her work. She had not even realized how hungry she was until the plate appeared beside her. The care in the gesture made her chest feel unexpectedly tight. Jean picked up a slice of apple. "Only because arguing with you will take longer."
Diluc's mouth curved. "Naturally."
After that, they invented a game. Whoever completed a report first earned the right to ask the other one question. It began badly.
"Favorite food?" Jean asked.
"Pile 'Em Up."
"Hmmm, yes, delicious. Your turn."
"Worst patrol partner?"
"You know exactly whom I am going to name."
"Kaeya?"
"Kaeya."
Diluc laughed. The stack dwindled. Five reports became four, then three. The candles burned lower.
Jean won the next round. "Which Knight snores even during briefings?"
Diluc answered without hesitation. "Huffman."
She covered her mouth. "You cannot say that."
"You asked."
"He is very dedicated."
"He can be dedicated and loud."
Two reports remained.
Then one.
Diluc set down his quill first.
Jean groaned. "Go on."
He considered her for a moment. "What do you want to be someday?"
"I want to serve Mondstadt."
"That is what you want to do." He folded his arms. "What do you want to be?"
Jean opened her mouth, but every answer that came to her meant the same thing. A knight, a protector, someone worthy of the Gunnhildr name. Someone Mondstadt could rely upon. Diluc waited without rescuing her from the question.
"What about you?" she asked.
"That is cheating."
"Answer me first."
"Captain."
Jean stared at him. "Isn't it kind of the same as what you want to do?"
Silence passed between them. Diluc leaned back. "We are terrible at this game."
Jean laughed so loudly that she immediately covered her mouth. He joined her, and for a little while neither of them remembered how tired they were.
When the final report was finished, Jean flexed her aching fingers. Without comment, Diluc gathered the pages, tapped their edges into alignment and tied the stack.
"I can do that," Jean said.
"I know."
"Then why are you doing it?"
"Because I want to."
The simple answer left her strangely still. Diluc did not mention her hand, but his eyes dipped briefly to the wrist she had been rubbing before he offered her half of the last apple slice.
Jean accepted it.
She was accustomed to people noticing what she accomplished. Diluc noticed what it cost her.
The realization warmed something in her that had nothing to do with the approaching dawn.
Dawn had begun to turn the windows gold when they stepped outside. Mondstadt was waking below them. A shopkeeper raised his shutters, birds gathered along the rooftops, and the first breeze of morning cooled Jean's face.
"We have training in two hours," she said.
Diluc stopped walking.
Jean smiled. "You forgot."
"I hate the Knights."
"Yesterday, you said becoming a Knight was the proudest achievement of your life."
"People change."
She laughed.
He watched her for a second longer than the joke required, then bumped his shoulder lightly against hers."Come on."
"Where?"
"Breakfast."
"We should sleep."
"We will sleep after training."
"That is a terrible plan."
"It is the only plan we have."
Jean followed him anyway.
The memory loosened its hold.
Jean sat alone beneath the low office lamp. Across from her, the other chair waited in shadow. A laugh escaped her, quiet enough that the empty room seemed to swallow it. "Very civic-minded hilichurls." She returned to the conflicting statements with clearer eyes. By comparing the merchants' positions rather than their directions, she found the hidden trail and marked it for inspection at dawn. Then she revised the patrol plan.
The mission could not be undone, but the mistake would not be repeated. Only after the reports were stacked did Jean open the bottom drawer.
Eleven letters rested inside.
She took out a fresh sheet of paper.
Diluc,
I am working late again. You would be pleased to know that no carts have relocated themselves tonight.
Her mouth curved despite herself.
I think you would be less pleased to know that I forgot dinner.
Jean's quill hovered. For one aching moment, she wanted to add the simplest truth.
Can't you just come back and be here?
Jean stared at the question until the ink dried.
Then she folded the letter and placed it with the others.
Far beyond Mondstadt, Diluc learned how many kinds of cold existed in the world. There was the cold of rain soaking through a cloak, stone beneath his back when the road offered nowhere safe to sleep, and a Delusion lying heavy against his palm. There was also the chill of understanding that no place he entered expected him to stay. He followed rumors of the Fatui across borders. He learned to listen in languages he barely understood and fight without the Vision he had left behind. His father's death became first a question, then a trail, then something sharp enough to build his days around.
In the moments before sleep, Mondstadt sometimes returned to him.
Jean beneath a window full of morning light, her hair loosened after a night bent over reports.
Jean cutting the final apple slice precisely in half, though she had been hungry enough to forget dinner.
Jean at Barbara's party, laughing while a smear of frosting clung near her temple.
He remembered the way she gave everything away in equal portions except herself. That, she spent without measure.
More than once, he imagined telling her to stop.
More than once, the imagined answer came in her voice.
You first.He never allowed the memories to remain long enough to become wishes.
The letters became less frequent as Jean learned to carry his absence without allowing it to shape every day. When the drawer would no longer close, she moved them into a wooden box and bound them with a cord.
Then, Diluc returned on an ordinary morning.
There was no procession, no announcement, no great disturbance in the city. Only a murmur passing from the winery to the merchants, from the merchants to the gates, and from the gates through the halls of the Knights of Favonius.
Master Diluc had returned.
A young knight carried the news into Jean's office with the breathless excitement of someone who did not know he was reopening a three-year-old wound.
For one moment, her fingers lost their feeling.
"Captain Gunnhildr?"
Jean lowered her quill to the report. "Thank you for informing me."
The knight lingered, perhaps expecting questions.
Jean had hundreds.
She asked none. When the door closed, she remained at her desk.
Three years earlier, she had heard that Diluc was gone and abandoned everything to race after him. Now he had returned, and she finished the sentence beneath her hand, then the paragraph, then the report.
Jean did not go to Dawn Winery that day.
Before, she had chased him all the way to its doors and found only his absence. She would not chase him again. If Diluc wanted to see her, he knew where the Knights' headquarters stood.
That was the sensible reason. The truth was that she did not know what she would do if he looked at her and felt only distance between them, when she still held what they had shared so dear.
The following morning, a routine request arrived bearing the winery's seal. Her attention caught on it longer than the matter required. By evening, restraint had begun to resemble cowardice.
Jean asked for a horse.
Dawn Winery glowed softly against the darkening fields.
Jean approached at a measured pace. She had no intention of repeating the desperate arrival Adelinde might still remember, though each step toward the manor tightened something in her chest.
Adelinde opened the door before she could knock. For a heartbeat, surprise crossed her face. Then it softened into a smile. "Miss Jean."
"Good evening. I hope I am not intruding."
"Not at all."
Jean waited for her to call Diluc.
Adelinde did not. "He is in the office," she said instead. "Or he was the last time I checked."
"I can come another day."
"You could." The gentle answer left Jean with the uncomfortable suspicion that Adelinde could still read her as easily as she had three years ago. "But he has barely stopped since returning," Adelinde continued. "There were accounts to review, meetings with Elzer, problems in the vineyards he insists should have been handled differently..." Fond exasperation passed over her face. "He missed dinner."
Jean nearly laughed.Some things, apparently, survived even three years and half the world.
Adelinde turned toward the corridor. "Perhaps someone should remind him that returning home generally requires remaining alive."
The invitation was unmistakable. Jean followed her through the familiar halls. Nothing in the manor had changed enough to justify how strange it felt. The same paintings hung on the walls. The same clock marked the hour. Yet she moved through the house as if entering a memory that had continued without her. Adelinde stopped outside the office and knocked.
No answer came.
She tried again. "Master Diluc?"
Silence. Adelinde opened the door and looked inside. Her shoulders lowered with a quiet sigh.
"Is something wrong?" Jean asked.
"No. Only overdue."
She stepped aside, leaving the door open.
Diluc was asleep at the desk.
Jean forgot every sentence she had prepared. Reports lay beneath one arm. His other hand rested near an uncapped pen, fingers still curved as though sleep had overtaken him between one line and the next. A lamp burned beside him, gilding the loose strands of red hair fallen across his face.
He looked older than the boy she remembered.
He looked exhausted.
He looked alive.
The last truth struck with such force that Jean had to grip the doorframe. When she glanced back, Adelinde was already walking away.
Jean could have called after her. Instead, she entered the office. She closed the door only partway, careful not to make a sound.
Diluc's face in sleep was not peaceful. A faint line remained between his brows. New scars crossed the hand resting on the desk, pale against his skin. The years had broadened his shoulders and taught his body to hold tension even in exhaustion. But with his guard lowered, traces of the boy she had known returned. The curve of his cheek against his sleeve, the stubborn crease between his brows whenever a report displeased him, the lock of hair that always escaped first.
Jean stepped closer.
The thought broke through every careful layer she had built over it.
I missed you.
Her eyes burned.
I missed you
She wanted to wake him.
She wanted to tell him that she had ridden after him, that she had written until the drawer would no longer close, that she had learned to lead without the person who once made the heaviest nights bearable. She wanted to be young again, with frosting in her hair and his laughter filling the room. She wanted dawn at the Knights' headquarters, half an apple in her hand, and his shoulder brushing hers on the way to breakfast.
She wanted three years returned to them.
Jean pressed her lips together until the ache in her throat eased.
None of those wants belonged to the man asleep before her. Not tonight. He had returned carrying wounds she could not yet name. Whatever explanations waited between them would still be there when he woke. So would her resentment. So would the questions, the letters and everything they had become without each other.
Tonight, he was home.
For now, that was enough.
Jean unfastened the short mantle from her shoulders. She shook out the dark fabric and laid it carefully across his back.
Diluc stirred.
Her breath caught.
His fingers shifted against the page, but his eyes remained closed. The tension between his brows eased by the smallest degree.
Jean allowed herself one selfish thing. She reached toward the loose strand of hair near his face and brushed it back.
Silk slid over her fingertips.
Real.
He was real.
Her hand lingered for less than a heartbeat before she drew it away. On the desk, beside the lamp, lay a plate holding a piece of untouched bread and several apple slices. Adelinde's work, undoubtedly. Jean looked at them and almost smiled. Then she lowered the lamp's flame. Darkness gathered gently around the office, leaving only a thin amber glow over Diluc's sleeping form.
At the door, Jean turned back.
There were a hundred things she had once wanted to say if this moment ever came. Some belonged to the girl who had chased him down the road. Others belonged to the woman who had stopped waiting and found him here anyway.
She chose the only words that asked nothing of him.
"Master Diluc," she whispered. The sleeping man did not move.
"I'm glad you're back."