[ and how might he sneak like this? for all that diluc rebuffed him, there is little to do for what has stricken him this night. induced to the misery of his own cycles, forced through the escalation and the slivering pain that comes with it, it is all that he might do to lie here and be silent. it is all that diluc might do to lie here and pull in each shuddering lungful of what he remembers. what he could not forget. and so, muddled and murky as the bottom of each lakebed, diluc is awash. he loses, to the sound of the tap turning on and turning off. loses, as he turns his head against the sheets and the sees the world about kaeya's silhouette distort. tilt.
drink, he hears kaeya tell him. if you need anything— ]
Shut up, [ a reedy little thing, pressed through the teeth and coiled about the neck. he is eleven again. he is fourteen, sixteen, eighteen — bleeding out in the cold, bleeding out on his back. he is every single liquid night between. foolhardy and sanctimonious, his bitterness like the ice that webbed between his fingertips. that burned diluc hotter than any fire he'd ever wielded. his skin had mottled as bruised, tender lamp grass. it'd blackened as soot. it took fissures of his milk-washed skin, grooved it as though silty shores. warm in the springtime, he'd thought of kaeya's hand cut through the blackness of the fertile filament. pain became a pinhole, little bursts of stars each time he'd touched it. then, since — now, as his arm climbs upward. it flings its heft along the bridge of kaeya's shoulder, yokes him tight around the neck.
there is no recognition. how could there be, for all that his body burns and seethes for what he sees as lost? reduced to the smoldering edge of primal instinct, hair matted and skin damp, what little of diluc is left buries itself against the dark crescent of his throat. pulled down to the nest of kaeya's bed, pulled into the vice of diluc's arms, he noses against the thrumming pulse. and with each shallowed, labored breath he tastes the scent of pine. he tastes himself in the mingling of what he knows is right. and for what ugliness he is in his own right, it bears itself to kaeya's judgement, blind and pitiless.
diluc had long since told himself that he'd hated himself for trying to hate him at all. he'd long since told himself there was nothing left to forfeit, nothing left to lose. he'd told himself, but the body is mindless. it throbs as though an opened wound, fingers pushed against the worst of it. and diluc throbs too with it, ceaseless in the way he rubs his wrists along the linen. comforts himself amid the visceral anxiety that seizes him in the aftermath, knowing there is something amiss and yet — he turns the scarred skin to kaeya's back. strokes, trembling and uneven. ]
[ the gritted order to shut up is expected - the arm around his neck is not, and for a wild moment kaeya thinks this is it, diluc's finally had enough and decided to strangle him. an extremely understandable desire, all things considered, which is why he's taken by surprise when instead he's dragged down into the bed, landing face first into a fluffy mass of fiery hair. it's the shock, clearly, that saps all the strength from his limbs, leaving him loose and pliant; it has nothing to do with the warmth suddenly surrounding him, sinking into the marrow of his bones. it has nothing to do with how with every breath, he inhales the scent of aged oak and smoked wood and something deeper, something his noseblind self can't identify but wraps around the corroded strings of his heart to tug him home. it has nothing to do with the way his skin lights up like fireworks, every nerve ending screaming with scalding oversensitivity, forcibly reminding him it's been who knows how long since the last time he's allowed anyone to really, truly touch him.
no, he knows exactly how long it's been. down to the month, the day, the second.
it's the sensation of hands stroking up and down his back, lightning shuddering through his spine, that shocks his brain back into gear. a really slow, stupid, rusty gear, because the only thought that echoes in his head is - what the fuck? what the fuck? since when is clinginess a side effect of fever - okay, sure, they'd cuddled like this whenever they'd gotten sick as children, but there's been an unspoken agreement that it was more for kaeya's sake what with him coming down with far more severe cases than diluc's minor colds, and anyway that had been years and a lifetime ago. it doesn't explain diluc's behavior now, when he's more likely to want a porcupine in his bed than his estranged sworn brother.
for a moment, as diluc's nose presses into the hollow of his neck and nearly gives him a heart attack, he's struck with a sudden memory from a much younger time - rifling through pages of tawdry romance novels under the covers, trying to learn how to imitate the behavior of these strange secondary genders, wondering what it would feel like to truly....
...but no, that can't be it. diluc's biological clock is as strict as the man himself, and a quick check of his internal schedule confirms he's not due for a rut any time soon. that, and there haven't been any of the usual signs of pre-rut recently - no frequent wrinkling of his nose, no subtle leaning back from anyone in scent range, no irritated snap in his voice, none of the little tics that tell kaeya he can skip going to angel's share for the next few nights. (and if anyone asks, not that anyone ever will, he only keeps close track of these details because it's part of his duties as mondstadt's unofficial spymaster, thanks so much. he would know every alpha's rut schedule down to the day if it mattered, it just so happens that none of them aside from the infamous darknight hero are important. )
and anyway, diluc being in rut still wouldn't explain all of...all of this. even reduced down to a base bundle of instincts searching for a warm source of pheromones to embrace, he still wouldn't reach out to kaeya - not to this uncanny creature from a godless land, who produces no scent save for the dead decay of the darkness that lurks underground. without the mask of his artificial pheromones, any alpha in rut should be treating such an aberrant twist of nature with revulsion, not drawing them close enough that every breath they take shares the same inhale and exhale of air.
no, there's only one logical reason for this. clearly, the fever has boiled diluc's brain to the point where it's clouded his memories and caused him to hallucinate. ]
Diluc. [ for once, kaeya's voice is devoid of humor in his worry, as he pushes himself up on his arms to give the other some space, patting his cheeks lightly to try to draw his attention. ] Do you know where you are? Do I need to call Barbara?
[ how funny that he should think that, that each little sign and symbol of his cyclical ruts would never show up outside of bounds of expectation. was it not already obvious that the fatui had no issue sinking to exciting new lows? was it not obvious already that kaeya was the only one that he could stand? in all the time he spent back in mond, kaeya was the only one who could bring him back to the fold. he knew better than anyone who it was that sent kaeya stringing along in the days up to his ruts. he'd known better than anyone, that no one else would dare (could dare) to come close when he found himself in the highlands - covered to the wrists in oil and ichor, singed and sunburnt.
it'd been miserable, with or without him. no matter how far he would roam, the knifepoint of his accursed hormones would wedge into the marrow. it would seize him by the throat, make nuisance of itself in the days and weeks up to. nothing could soothe him. nothing could quiet him. nothing. no herbs or salves or tinctures. no potions, made with the newest ingredients or the newest ideas behind them. and so: what fools would those self-named fools be, if not wield the known against him? what a fool kaeya must be too, to think he doesn't already know. ]
'm in bed, [ diluc tells him. slurs, more so. affront cuts through the fever bright of his expression, the dark of his eyes narrowed against the separation kaeya has stupidly carved. like this, he looks every bit an animal. matted lashes and matted curls, the flush on his skin is high and fresh as blood. beneath kaeya's hand, there is no thought of whether it burns. instead, it is instinct that drives the want to press into his palm. to turn his head and nuzzle up against it, only stoppered by the threads of something more coherent underneath it all. barely, that is. he still blinks and leans in, the process both noticeable and unbearably slow. ] Told you to shut up.
[ he did, didn't he? he tries for it again, but his tongue feels weighted in his mouth. he feels as though a bruise, the darkened skins of stone fruits punctured through. he breathes, lips parted. he hooks the rough crescent of his nails against kaeya's shoulder, bites their edges all along the linen that barely covers it. in his head, he thinks he makes a compelling argument to lie back down and stop asking him pointless questions. he thinks maybe he is seventeen years old, a handful of weeks before everything was upended. he thinks maybe they are in the barracks. he thinks maybe that kaeya's hair is warm and rain-damp. he thinks, without thinking at all. all the little ruinous pieces of himself, shaken out across their makeshift bedclothes. what a bother. ]
Well, at least the fever hasn't robbed you of your sense of humor. That would be a real tragedy, considering how little of it you have left.
[ even so, between the glaze in his eyes and the syrup slur of his voice, it's clear that diluc's nowhere near his right mind, the fever likely fogging his reality until he no longer remembers that what he holds in his arms is no treasured companion but a viper poised to strike. only the cruelest of monsters would let this joke play out any further; what kaeya needs to do now is to get him out. out of his bed, out of his apartment, out into the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing and won't lead to any further regrets come morning.
it should be easy. he's always both prided and loathed himself for his ability to detach from any given situation, to shield himself with a smile and let his words carry away whatever semblance of sentiment he might have. it should be easy to simply pull away from the circle of diluc's arms, to laugh it off as another embarrassing story he'll tell in the future, to escape this pretense at intimacy that threatens to choke him with all the weight of memories long aged to dust. it should be easy...and yet when diluc turns the flush of his cheek into his hand, all the steel of kaeya's prized self-control melts away like so much frost beneath the sun. when diluc presses down on his shoulders, he can only helplessly follow, a star dropping in free-fall to the inescapable gravity of the sun.
ah. of course it wouldn't be easy. somehow he's forgotten who he really is, that he's selfish, selfish, selfish to the core. ]
If you want someone quiet, you should let me take you to Barbara.
[ 'let' - as if diluc in this state could possibly stop anything kaeya wanted to do, as if he's ever needed permission to interfere in his life. it's just another excuse, another way to deflect the blame, another way to manipulate the narrative so that this - taking advantage of a sick man to play out a pale mockery of the only thing he's ever truly wanted - can somehow not be entirely his fault when reality sets back in. ]
Don't recall you ever being funny, [ diluc mumbles, eyelids heavy. he turns his face against the bare of kaeya's palm, in all ways sluggish and unthinking. when he was young, kaeya used to stroke his hair until he fell asleep. he used to stroke through kaeya's too, the color of it so deep and so blue that it seemed the sheen off a bird's wing. diluc thought of him as a raven back then, a fiercely intelligent and curious thing. shadowed against the sun, brighter than anything — it'd took so long to earn his trust. but, as with all that diluc had ever thought he'd come to know, it'd been only that he was naive. that he was foolish. that he was an idealistic, ignorant thing that circled a peacock of a man in his cloak of new stars.
but, for now, the diluc who should care about distance and time and the inevitable agony of what has already come to be — he curls deep in the dark, instinctive parts of himself. he nests down in the cool of kaeya's body. he breathes, slow and deep. ]
Throw your back out then, [ he continues, more for the sake of something he no longer can hold the shape of in his hands. all that ache in his body finds a singular point of pressure and releases, a slow and trickling valve. the scent of kaeya numbs it down, makes it so that he is able to speak. ] See if I care.
[ and it is only when kaeya lies back down, when he allows diluc the grace to shove himself back up against him as though they are again seventeen and reckless in all of their youth and wonder, does diluc find some glimmering edge of relief. cool as the backs of dragonspine, open as the maw of caverns so deep that they know no end or boundary. ] Dumbass.
Strange, because I seem to recall a certain someone laughing so hard at my jokes that grape juice came out of his nose. More than once, I might add.
[ it's always a risk bringing up what they had been once upon a time, always a good chance he'll drive the wedge between them further by tainting what had once been pure sunlight with all the exposed shadows surrounding him now. usually he does so with a vicious vindictiveness, wielding their shared memories like jagged knives, hooking them under diluc's skin so he can't brush them away no matter how much pain it may cause them both. tonight, curled together as if they're still children yet untouched by the world's cruelties, the words come out with a rueful fondness instead, a trickle of vunlerability leaking out of his chest in this twilight moment that seems separated from time.
they say old habits die hard, but kaeya's never understood the phrase. he's broken himself of his old habits time and time again, ground them into the dust of fossils and forgotten bones; first all the little things that made him other, the tics and traits he carried with him from the land of the dead, and then again with all that made him ragnvindr until only a handful in the city ever remembered he had once hailed from the same home as the famed dawn winery's young master. now, as his hands start automatically stroking through diluc's hair without any input from his brain, he thinks he finally gets just what they mean. it's as if he's stepped back in time...
...but not, he realizes, to the halcyon days of their teenage youth when they'd been less two indivduals and more one soul split across halves. he's too aware for that - the rough silk of hair snagging against his calluses, the heat of his breath against his neck - too conscious of what had once been pure instinct. no, this reminds him of a time much further back than that, to the early months when they'd first met: him, tense and terrified of this strange creature in his bed, reaching out to hide the way his hands trembled, ready to leap back at the slightest sign of rejection. he remembers thinking diluc's hair had been the softest thing he'd ever touched - that diluc had been the softest thing he'd ever seen, round cheeks and huge eyes and bright smile, holding his heart out on a platter as if the world wasn't filled with monsters ready to gobble it up. he remembers thinking how his homeland would have eaten this boy alive, how easy it would be to crush this tender spring flower between the hard ice of his grasp, simultaneously repulsed and intrigued by the thought - caught between the awe of a crystalfly landing gently on his palm and the urge to rip off its wings so it could never leave. he remembers thinking: i will destroy you.
in some ways, he thinks now, he never really did grow up from that feral and frozen child of his past. diluc's hair is still the softest thing he's ever touched. he still wants to both crush their bones together until every part of them intersects, and to run as fast and far as he can and never come back. and look, he was right, wasn't he? it turns out they destroyed each other, in the end. ]
Call me what you want, but I'm still smart enough to stay home when I'm too sick to walk straight. [ a lie, and both of them know it. a lie twice over, because if he were anywhere near smart, he'd have put an end to this long ago. ]
[ old stories, old memories, old habits - diluc does not melt into the snagging of his fingers, the passive taming of his hair. but, there is a moment. there is a quiet, that settles in the ember of his body. it splutters for a moment, stings all along the rawness of his boundary, each edge that diluc wrenched free for his own. ]
I'm surprised you remember at all.
[ fever soft and sleep warmed, his words piece themselves apart against the dark curve of kaeya's throat. smooth as river rock, down soft as the birds who live amongst the snows - diluc thinks of the frost that'd held him through nights far from the remnants of what was once home. picked over, speared upon the thorn of his own ignorance, diluc had thought very little at all of survival or what that had meant. consumed by what he called hatred, brittle down the black of his bones, he'd hoped. he had hoped, in all of the rage that came from realization, that he might bury the body of his youth under the same rooms he had found it. pieced apart and forgotten, rotted down to the root - he thought it better to destroy himself before anything left was destroyed. it had been a momentary death that steadied him. it had been learning what kaeya too must have learned. it was knowing that no matter how he might find himself beyond kaeya's orbit - kaeya would always find his way back to his door.
a cosmic joke, diluc once told himself. a fate bound up in cruelty. no matter how much kaeya held the light to the darkness diluc had made himself apart, there was no halting inevitability. there was no slowing eventuality, the persistent gravity that kept them together. that would one day, too, send them both tearing each other apart. where kaeya went, so too did diluc. again and again, no matter what it was they could do - here they were. tumbled over into kaeya's bed, diluc's breaths a tangible shape against the cool of kaeya's skin, the ugliest parts of himself submit. they quiet in the fever that breaks within his ribs, that settles against the surface in place of any sense that could exist. why now, he would think. why now, would he find him?
why now, would he be led to the days that they would while the afternoons away, tucked against each other as though separation was never something to behold? pressed end-to-end, diluc once thought them a singular soul. he'd thought them once a body, cloven neat in two. he had thought, if he might press himself close enough, he might become him too. and what a fool he had been, still is - what a fool, his father had raised.
what a fool, who still lays in the cradle of kaeya's arms and thinks himself deserving to be held. to hold. to mark him as his own, in the way of his wrists against the broad of his back. against the smooth of his hair, corn silk and soft linen. he is still the most beautiful thing that diluc has ever seen. the glow of a northern star, a sacred wind beneath the blanket of the earth - kaeya had always seized him without pity. he seizes him now, no matter the verbal roll of his eyes and the flutter of his lashes against the mirrored wingbeat of kaeya's thrumming pulse.
diluc had once known kaeya as well as he'd known himself. and in here, in the drifting hours before the clawing light of dawn, he knows kaeya. briefly. ]
[ everything is warm, warm, warm, the scent of summer in his nose, the heat of sunlight leaking through his arms - and then diluc speaks, words rumbling against the hollow of his throat, and the world freezes over again.
ah. how stupid of him, to be swept away by childhood nostalgia, to lose himself in the memory of a bed where their breaths had risen and fallen in sync, their dreams shared as one in their sleep, their hearts thudding to the same beat. how stupid, to forget for a moment what he's become in diluc's eyes - a snake in the grass, a cuckoo in the nest, a wolf who had thrown aside its sheepskin without hesitation to devour its prey. it's an old familiar hurt, every time he's hit with how little the man thinks of him now, yet he's still never prepared for just how much it burns.
and of course he deserves it. and of course it's no surprise...but even so, he wonders, how can diluc accuse him of not remembering their past when every brick that builds the foundation of the crumbling shell of his sense of self is baked in those sunlit memories, when the mortar that barely holds the mess together is scraped from the ashes of the cremation of their relationship? how can he not know that it's the memory of that firebright child whose love blazed like an inferno, of the only time he'd ever been happy, that steadies his blade as he wields it against his own people and keeps him rooted in a city that has no place for him? cavalry captain, wine aficionado, mondstadtian dog - isn't it obvious that even four years gone, what's left of him that doesn't belong to khaenri'ah is wholly, solely, entirely his so much so that cutting him open would find a glass replica of diluc's heart instead of his own?
you're the one who left, he wants to spit out, the words rising up like jagged knives in his throat. you're the one who doesn't want to remember. his hands stiffen with the urge to strike back, to retaliate until they're both left bleeding from reopened scars, until he marks diluc so deeply that he'll never be able to forget him again without breathing for the pain of it; it's only the fact that even he isn't low enough to attack a sick man that keeps him still rather than shoving what now feels like a live coal in his arms away. ]
Ah, Master Diluc, I remember everything about you. [ he regrets his words immediately; even layered in superficial charm, even dripping with saccharine honey, there's still too much sincerity in the sentence for comfort. scrambling to recover himself, he huffs a laugh, forcing a cheeky smile to his face. ] At least all the embarrassing parts, anyway.
soft in the way of his heart, soft in the heat of his lungs – soft, when the world itself fixed upon a solid axis and never deigned to spin. diluc had once been an ignorant thing, blessed by the ironies of the gods that knew not his name or his prospects. he had once been naïve, had once been young and full of dreams, never to be listened to. it was that foolishness, that harboring of sin without meaning, that had allowed him the illusion of sweetness to begin with. spun as though hay into each golden thread, it was the specter of love that filled him with hubris. it was the concept that each fantasy, so bright and unconditional and saccharine, was possible as they were everlasting. held tight in the fist of his heart, tucked firm beneath the tongue, he’d have given kaeya anything. he’d have given him the eggshell of the moon, would have carved from his body the strength of his limbs. but now, he dreams only of the evenings that kaeya would listen. tucked to his chest, hollowed to house him as the chamber of seashells, diluc used to think that kaeya would always fit against him just like this: two stars pinned and binary, balanced as they were fixed. where diluc went, so too did kaeya. and where kaeya went, so too did diluc.
it was no use. no matter how he tried to run, how he tried to forget – how might he have? how might diluc have ground his nails into the flesh of himself, pulled free the boundary that was his before kaeya? even without the heat of his vision, the dawning turn of kaeya’s lone eye, there was nothing in him that he could find. no matter how deeply he dug, no matter how far he’d turned from the sun, the darkness reflected only the truth. no matter how far he might go, he would always be there. in the rain dampened parts of himself, in the death of his father, in the fragmentations of his mother held in the moments before he’d awoken to what diluc could call you - it would always be him. ]
Better I didn't accept your drink, then. [ it is a grumble of a thing, tossed across the sheets. for all that diluc knows not at all the clear lines between sincerity and fabrication, he knows there is no mask in the way kaeya’s hands tighten. instinctive, in the basest parts of himself, he scents the tension that holds no fruit. he thinks how blessed he might have been, to be loved. he thinks he’d never deserved the concept. diluc thinks, as all that is selfish and asleep in him inches up against him stubbornly, that he’d always been a perilous thing – forever pushing his luck, thinking he’d never snuffed out the light that was turned over to his sun-bleached palms.
he huffs out once against kaeya’s shoulder, against the cool curve of his throat. the crown of his head rubs once against the dark underside of his chin, potent for all that it is display. he knows – will know – kaeya cannot discern the meaning in it. blind in this way, a fortune – was there ever any wonder that diluc came to be this because of him? ]
[ there's a niggling itch in the back of his mind as diluc's hair brushes against his chin, a faint alarm that he's missing some vital piece of a puzzle he isn't even aware he's trying to put together. it's not a feeling he's particularly accustomed to or enjoys, he who pries secrets out of most everyone he meets as easily as breathing. but then again, he's always been a little bit stupid when it comes to diluc, since the moment they'd met - clumsy in spite of his grace, foolish in spite of his wits, bewildered and blinded in face of someone who burned too bright beyond his comprehension.
beneath his palms and between his fingers and below his head, the softness of diluc's hair reminds him of fur, some wild creature huddling for warmth against the night. rabbit fur, he remembers suddenly, a memory of far younger days - there'd been a family of them once, nibbling on the vine-ripened grapes of the winery. he'd stared at their twitching noses stain purple as they gorged themselves on the winery's lifeblood, thought about the tenderness of their flesh, the fragility of their bones, about proving his worth to this strange foreign family so they'd keep him around a little longer. it'd taken but a moment to stun the rabbits with his slingshot and then slit their throats with a dagger - mother and child, the kits no bigger than the palm of his hand. the fur had been soft then too, blood pumping out to drench his fingers dark copper; he'd watched the light leave their eyes without any emotion save a vague curiosity on how easily a life could be exstinguished - at least not until he'd looked up and saw the expression on diluc's face, felt that same sick swooping sensation of having missed some crucial step somewhere.
his father had taught him survival at any cost, how to freeze his heart into unwavering ice. the courts had taught him how to lie with a smile, to navigate the seas of conversation without compass or map. diluc had taught him, step by fumbling step, how to be human.
it's the only lesson he's never been able to master. little wonder then, that when diluc left, he'd taken some vital part of kaeya's soul with him - the part that borrowed his flame to burn away the darkness, the part that desperately believed if he pretended hard enough he could do better, be better. and now the rabbit has grown into a wolf, snarling and snapping at the world around him - and yet here he still is, lain in bed with the bloodsoaked hunter he knows far better than to trust, so really who's the stupid one here?
(it's him. it's always been him.) ]
Since when have you accepted anything from me at all? [ too sharp, too personal, and he nearly bites his tongue off, hoping against hope diluc won't remember any of this once his fever's broken. he tightens his grip against diluc's hair and back, curls towards him in some mocking imitation of an attempt at a protective embrace - as if there's anything out there diluc needs protecting from more than the one in his bed. ] Go to sleep, Diluc.
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drink, he hears kaeya tell him. if you need anything— ]
Shut up, [ a reedy little thing, pressed through the teeth and coiled about the neck. he is eleven again. he is fourteen, sixteen, eighteen — bleeding out in the cold, bleeding out on his back. he is every single liquid night between. foolhardy and sanctimonious, his bitterness like the ice that webbed between his fingertips. that burned diluc hotter than any fire he'd ever wielded. his skin had mottled as bruised, tender lamp grass. it'd blackened as soot. it took fissures of his milk-washed skin, grooved it as though silty shores. warm in the springtime, he'd thought of kaeya's hand cut through the blackness of the fertile filament. pain became a pinhole, little bursts of stars each time he'd touched it. then, since — now, as his arm climbs upward. it flings its heft along the bridge of kaeya's shoulder, yokes him tight around the neck.
there is no recognition. how could there be, for all that his body burns and seethes for what he sees as lost? reduced to the smoldering edge of primal instinct, hair matted and skin damp, what little of diluc is left buries itself against the dark crescent of his throat. pulled down to the nest of kaeya's bed, pulled into the vice of diluc's arms, he noses against the thrumming pulse. and with each shallowed, labored breath he tastes the scent of pine. he tastes himself in the mingling of what he knows is right. and for what ugliness he is in his own right, it bears itself to kaeya's judgement, blind and pitiless.
diluc had long since told himself that he'd hated himself for trying to hate him at all. he'd long since told himself there was nothing left to forfeit, nothing left to lose. he'd told himself, but the body is mindless. it throbs as though an opened wound, fingers pushed against the worst of it. and diluc throbs too with it, ceaseless in the way he rubs his wrists along the linen. comforts himself amid the visceral anxiety that seizes him in the aftermath, knowing there is something amiss and yet — he turns the scarred skin to kaeya's back. strokes, trembling and uneven. ]
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no, he knows exactly how long it's been. down to the month, the day, the second.
it's the sensation of hands stroking up and down his back, lightning shuddering through his spine, that shocks his brain back into gear. a really slow, stupid, rusty gear, because the only thought that echoes in his head is - what the fuck? what the fuck? since when is clinginess a side effect of fever - okay, sure, they'd cuddled like this whenever they'd gotten sick as children, but there's been an unspoken agreement that it was more for kaeya's sake what with him coming down with far more severe cases than diluc's minor colds, and anyway that had been years and a lifetime ago. it doesn't explain diluc's behavior now, when he's more likely to want a porcupine in his bed than his estranged sworn brother.
for a moment, as diluc's nose presses into the hollow of his neck and nearly gives him a heart attack, he's struck with a sudden memory from a much younger time - rifling through pages of tawdry romance novels under the covers, trying to learn how to imitate the behavior of these strange secondary genders, wondering what it would feel like to truly....
...but no, that can't be it. diluc's biological clock is as strict as the man himself, and a quick check of his internal schedule confirms he's not due for a rut any time soon. that, and there haven't been any of the usual signs of pre-rut recently - no frequent wrinkling of his nose, no subtle leaning back from anyone in scent range, no irritated snap in his voice, none of the little tics that tell kaeya he can skip going to angel's share for the next few nights. (and if anyone asks, not that anyone ever will, he only keeps close track of these details because it's part of his duties as mondstadt's unofficial spymaster, thanks so much. he would know every alpha's rut schedule down to the day if it mattered, it just so happens that none of them aside from the infamous darknight hero are important. )
and anyway, diluc being in rut still wouldn't explain all of...all of this. even reduced down to a base bundle of instincts searching for a warm source of pheromones to embrace, he still wouldn't reach out to kaeya - not to this uncanny creature from a godless land, who produces no scent save for the dead decay of the darkness that lurks underground. without the mask of his artificial pheromones, any alpha in rut should be treating such an aberrant twist of nature with revulsion, not drawing them close enough that every breath they take shares the same inhale and exhale of air.
no, there's only one logical reason for this. clearly, the fever has boiled diluc's brain to the point where it's clouded his memories and caused him to hallucinate. ]
Diluc. [ for once, kaeya's voice is devoid of humor in his worry, as he pushes himself up on his arms to give the other some space, patting his cheeks lightly to try to draw his attention. ] Do you know where you are? Do I need to call Barbara?
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it'd been miserable, with or without him. no matter how far he would roam, the knifepoint of his accursed hormones would wedge into the marrow. it would seize him by the throat, make nuisance of itself in the days and weeks up to. nothing could soothe him. nothing could quiet him. nothing. no herbs or salves or tinctures. no potions, made with the newest ingredients or the newest ideas behind them. and so: what fools would those self-named fools be, if not wield the known against him? what a fool kaeya must be too, to think he doesn't already know. ]
'm in bed, [ diluc tells him. slurs, more so. affront cuts through the fever bright of his expression, the dark of his eyes narrowed against the separation kaeya has stupidly carved. like this, he looks every bit an animal. matted lashes and matted curls, the flush on his skin is high and fresh as blood. beneath kaeya's hand, there is no thought of whether it burns. instead, it is instinct that drives the want to press into his palm. to turn his head and nuzzle up against it, only stoppered by the threads of something more coherent underneath it all. barely, that is. he still blinks and leans in, the process both noticeable and unbearably slow. ] Told you to shut up.
[ he did, didn't he? he tries for it again, but his tongue feels weighted in his mouth. he feels as though a bruise, the darkened skins of stone fruits punctured through. he breathes, lips parted. he hooks the rough crescent of his nails against kaeya's shoulder, bites their edges all along the linen that barely covers it. in his head, he thinks he makes a compelling argument to lie back down and stop asking him pointless questions. he thinks maybe he is seventeen years old, a handful of weeks before everything was upended. he thinks maybe they are in the barracks. he thinks maybe that kaeya's hair is warm and rain-damp. he thinks, without thinking at all. all the little ruinous pieces of himself, shaken out across their makeshift bedclothes. what a bother. ]
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[ even so, between the glaze in his eyes and the syrup slur of his voice, it's clear that diluc's nowhere near his right mind, the fever likely fogging his reality until he no longer remembers that what he holds in his arms is no treasured companion but a viper poised to strike. only the cruelest of monsters would let this joke play out any further; what kaeya needs to do now is to get him out. out of his bed, out of his apartment, out into the hands of someone who actually knows what they're doing and won't lead to any further regrets come morning.
it should be easy. he's always both prided and loathed himself for his ability to detach from any given situation, to shield himself with a smile and let his words carry away whatever semblance of sentiment he might have. it should be easy to simply pull away from the circle of diluc's arms, to laugh it off as another embarrassing story he'll tell in the future, to escape this pretense at intimacy that threatens to choke him with all the weight of memories long aged to dust. it should be easy...and yet when diluc turns the flush of his cheek into his hand, all the steel of kaeya's prized self-control melts away like so much frost beneath the sun. when diluc presses down on his shoulders, he can only helplessly follow, a star dropping in free-fall to the inescapable gravity of the sun.
ah. of course it wouldn't be easy. somehow he's forgotten who he really is, that he's selfish, selfish, selfish to the core. ]
If you want someone quiet, you should let me take you to Barbara.
[ 'let' - as if diluc in this state could possibly stop anything kaeya wanted to do, as if he's ever needed permission to interfere in his life. it's just another excuse, another way to deflect the blame, another way to manipulate the narrative so that this - taking advantage of a sick man to play out a pale mockery of the only thing he's ever truly wanted - can somehow not be entirely his fault when reality sets back in. ]
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but, for now, the diluc who should care about distance and time and the inevitable agony of what has already come to be — he curls deep in the dark, instinctive parts of himself. he nests down in the cool of kaeya's body. he breathes, slow and deep. ]
Throw your back out then, [ he continues, more for the sake of something he no longer can hold the shape of in his hands. all that ache in his body finds a singular point of pressure and releases, a slow and trickling valve. the scent of kaeya numbs it down, makes it so that he is able to speak. ] See if I care.
[ and it is only when kaeya lies back down, when he allows diluc the grace to shove himself back up against him as though they are again seventeen and reckless in all of their youth and wonder, does diluc find some glimmering edge of relief. cool as the backs of dragonspine, open as the maw of caverns so deep that they know no end or boundary. ] Dumbass.
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[ it's always a risk bringing up what they had been once upon a time, always a good chance he'll drive the wedge between them further by tainting what had once been pure sunlight with all the exposed shadows surrounding him now. usually he does so with a vicious vindictiveness, wielding their shared memories like jagged knives, hooking them under diluc's skin so he can't brush them away no matter how much pain it may cause them both. tonight, curled together as if they're still children yet untouched by the world's cruelties, the words come out with a rueful fondness instead, a trickle of vunlerability leaking out of his chest in this twilight moment that seems separated from time.
they say old habits die hard, but kaeya's never understood the phrase. he's broken himself of his old habits time and time again, ground them into the dust of fossils and forgotten bones; first all the little things that made him other, the tics and traits he carried with him from the land of the dead, and then again with all that made him ragnvindr until only a handful in the city ever remembered he had once hailed from the same home as the famed dawn winery's young master. now, as his hands start automatically stroking through diluc's hair without any input from his brain, he thinks he finally gets just what they mean. it's as if he's stepped back in time...
...but not, he realizes, to the halcyon days of their teenage youth when they'd been less two indivduals and more one soul split across halves. he's too aware for that - the rough silk of hair snagging against his calluses, the heat of his breath against his neck - too conscious of what had once been pure instinct. no, this reminds him of a time much further back than that, to the early months when they'd first met: him, tense and terrified of this strange creature in his bed, reaching out to hide the way his hands trembled, ready to leap back at the slightest sign of rejection. he remembers thinking diluc's hair had been the softest thing he'd ever touched - that diluc had been the softest thing he'd ever seen, round cheeks and huge eyes and bright smile, holding his heart out on a platter as if the world wasn't filled with monsters ready to gobble it up. he remembers thinking how his homeland would have eaten this boy alive, how easy it would be to crush this tender spring flower between the hard ice of his grasp, simultaneously repulsed and intrigued by the thought - caught between the awe of a crystalfly landing gently on his palm and the urge to rip off its wings so it could never leave. he remembers thinking: i will destroy you.
in some ways, he thinks now, he never really did grow up from that feral and frozen child of his past. diluc's hair is still the softest thing he's ever touched. he still wants to both crush their bones together until every part of them intersects, and to run as fast and far as he can and never come back. and look, he was right, wasn't he? it turns out they destroyed each other, in the end. ]
Call me what you want, but I'm still smart enough to stay home when I'm too sick to walk straight. [ a lie, and both of them know it. a lie twice over, because if he were anywhere near smart, he'd have put an end to this long ago. ]
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I'm surprised you remember at all.
[ fever soft and sleep warmed, his words piece themselves apart against the dark curve of kaeya's throat. smooth as river rock, down soft as the birds who live amongst the snows - diluc thinks of the frost that'd held him through nights far from the remnants of what was once home. picked over, speared upon the thorn of his own ignorance, diluc had thought very little at all of survival or what that had meant. consumed by what he called hatred, brittle down the black of his bones, he'd hoped. he had hoped, in all of the rage that came from realization, that he might bury the body of his youth under the same rooms he had found it. pieced apart and forgotten, rotted down to the root - he thought it better to destroy himself before anything left was destroyed. it had been a momentary death that steadied him. it had been learning what kaeya too must have learned. it was knowing that no matter how he might find himself beyond kaeya's orbit - kaeya would always find his way back to his door.
a cosmic joke, diluc once told himself. a fate bound up in cruelty. no matter how much kaeya held the light to the darkness diluc had made himself apart, there was no halting inevitability. there was no slowing eventuality, the persistent gravity that kept them together. that would one day, too, send them both tearing each other apart. where kaeya went, so too did diluc. again and again, no matter what it was they could do - here they were. tumbled over into kaeya's bed, diluc's breaths a tangible shape against the cool of kaeya's skin, the ugliest parts of himself submit. they quiet in the fever that breaks within his ribs, that settles against the surface in place of any sense that could exist. why now, he would think. why now, would he find him?
why now, would he be led to the days that they would while the afternoons away, tucked against each other as though separation was never something to behold? pressed end-to-end, diluc once thought them a singular soul. he'd thought them once a body, cloven neat in two. he had thought, if he might press himself close enough, he might become him too. and what a fool he had been, still is - what a fool, his father had raised.
what a fool, who still lays in the cradle of kaeya's arms and thinks himself deserving to be held. to hold. to mark him as his own, in the way of his wrists against the broad of his back. against the smooth of his hair, corn silk and soft linen. he is still the most beautiful thing that diluc has ever seen. the glow of a northern star, a sacred wind beneath the blanket of the earth - kaeya had always seized him without pity. he seizes him now, no matter the verbal roll of his eyes and the flutter of his lashes against the mirrored wingbeat of kaeya's thrumming pulse.
diluc had once known kaeya as well as he'd known himself. and in here, in the drifting hours before the clawing light of dawn, he knows kaeya. briefly. ]
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ah. how stupid of him, to be swept away by childhood nostalgia, to lose himself in the memory of a bed where their breaths had risen and fallen in sync, their dreams shared as one in their sleep, their hearts thudding to the same beat. how stupid, to forget for a moment what he's become in diluc's eyes - a snake in the grass, a cuckoo in the nest, a wolf who had thrown aside its sheepskin without hesitation to devour its prey. it's an old familiar hurt, every time he's hit with how little the man thinks of him now, yet he's still never prepared for just how much it burns.
and of course he deserves it. and of course it's no surprise...but even so, he wonders, how can diluc accuse him of not remembering their past when every brick that builds the foundation of the crumbling shell of his sense of self is baked in those sunlit memories, when the mortar that barely holds the mess together is scraped from the ashes of the cremation of their relationship? how can he not know that it's the memory of that firebright child whose love blazed like an inferno, of the only time he'd ever been happy, that steadies his blade as he wields it against his own people and keeps him rooted in a city that has no place for him? cavalry captain, wine aficionado, mondstadtian dog - isn't it obvious that even four years gone, what's left of him that doesn't belong to khaenri'ah is wholly, solely, entirely his so much so that cutting him open would find a glass replica of diluc's heart instead of his own?
you're the one who left, he wants to spit out, the words rising up like jagged knives in his throat. you're the one who doesn't want to remember. his hands stiffen with the urge to strike back, to retaliate until they're both left bleeding from reopened scars, until he marks diluc so deeply that he'll never be able to forget him again without breathing for the pain of it; it's only the fact that even he isn't low enough to attack a sick man that keeps him still rather than shoving what now feels like a live coal in his arms away. ]
Ah, Master Diluc, I remember everything about you. [ he regrets his words immediately; even layered in superficial charm, even dripping with saccharine honey, there's still too much sincerity in the sentence for comfort. scrambling to recover himself, he huffs a laugh, forcing a cheeky smile to his face. ] At least all the embarrassing parts, anyway.
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soft in the way of his heart, soft in the heat of his lungs – soft, when the world itself fixed upon a solid axis and never deigned to spin. diluc had once been an ignorant thing, blessed by the ironies of the gods that knew not his name or his prospects. he had once been naïve, had once been young and full of dreams, never to be listened to. it was that foolishness, that harboring of sin without meaning, that had allowed him the illusion of sweetness to begin with. spun as though hay into each golden thread, it was the specter of love that filled him with hubris. it was the concept that each fantasy, so bright and unconditional and saccharine, was possible as they were everlasting. held tight in the fist of his heart, tucked firm beneath the tongue, he’d have given kaeya anything. he’d have given him the eggshell of the moon, would have carved from his body the strength of his limbs. but now, he dreams only of the evenings that kaeya would listen. tucked to his chest, hollowed to house him as the chamber of seashells, diluc used to think that kaeya would always fit against him just like this: two stars pinned and binary, balanced as they were fixed. where diluc went, so too did kaeya. and where kaeya went, so too did diluc.
it was no use. no matter how he tried to run, how he tried to forget – how might he have? how might diluc have ground his nails into the flesh of himself, pulled free the boundary that was his before kaeya? even without the heat of his vision, the dawning turn of kaeya’s lone eye, there was nothing in him that he could find. no matter how deeply he dug, no matter how far he’d turned from the sun, the darkness reflected only the truth. no matter how far he might go, he would always be there. in the rain dampened parts of himself, in the death of his father, in the fragmentations of his mother held in the moments before he’d awoken to what diluc could call you - it would always be him. ]
Better I didn't accept your drink, then. [ it is a grumble of a thing, tossed across the sheets. for all that diluc knows not at all the clear lines between sincerity and fabrication, he knows there is no mask in the way kaeya’s hands tighten. instinctive, in the basest parts of himself, he scents the tension that holds no fruit. he thinks how blessed he might have been, to be loved. he thinks he’d never deserved the concept. diluc thinks, as all that is selfish and asleep in him inches up against him stubbornly, that he’d always been a perilous thing – forever pushing his luck, thinking he’d never snuffed out the light that was turned over to his sun-bleached palms.
he huffs out once against kaeya’s shoulder, against the cool curve of his throat. the crown of his head rubs once against the dark underside of his chin, potent for all that it is display. he knows – will know – kaeya cannot discern the meaning in it. blind in this way, a fortune – was there ever any wonder that diluc came to be this because of him? ]
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beneath his palms and between his fingers and below his head, the softness of diluc's hair reminds him of fur, some wild creature huddling for warmth against the night. rabbit fur, he remembers suddenly, a memory of far younger days - there'd been a family of them once, nibbling on the vine-ripened grapes of the winery. he'd stared at their twitching noses stain purple as they gorged themselves on the winery's lifeblood, thought about the tenderness of their flesh, the fragility of their bones, about proving his worth to this strange foreign family so they'd keep him around a little longer. it'd taken but a moment to stun the rabbits with his slingshot and then slit their throats with a dagger - mother and child, the kits no bigger than the palm of his hand. the fur had been soft then too, blood pumping out to drench his fingers dark copper; he'd watched the light leave their eyes without any emotion save a vague curiosity on how easily a life could be exstinguished - at least not until he'd looked up and saw the expression on diluc's face, felt that same sick swooping sensation of having missed some crucial step somewhere.
his father had taught him survival at any cost, how to freeze his heart into unwavering ice. the courts had taught him how to lie with a smile, to navigate the seas of conversation without compass or map. diluc had taught him, step by fumbling step, how to be human.
it's the only lesson he's never been able to master. little wonder then, that when diluc left, he'd taken some vital part of kaeya's soul with him - the part that borrowed his flame to burn away the darkness, the part that desperately believed if he pretended hard enough he could do better, be better. and now the rabbit has grown into a wolf, snarling and snapping at the world around him - and yet here he still is, lain in bed with the bloodsoaked hunter he knows far better than to trust, so really who's the stupid one here?
(it's him. it's always been him.) ]
Since when have you accepted anything from me at all? [ too sharp, too personal, and he nearly bites his tongue off, hoping against hope diluc won't remember any of this once his fever's broken. he tightens his grip against diluc's hair and back, curls towards him in some mocking imitation of an attempt at a protective embrace - as if there's anything out there diluc needs protecting from more than the one in his bed. ] Go to sleep, Diluc.