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.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
[ 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. ]
no subject
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. ]
no subject
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.
no subject
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? ]
no subject
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.