Chapter 1
The storm reached Dawn Winery an hour after midnight, and Kaeya reached it ten minutes later, which Diluc did not think was a coincidence.
He heard the horse first, a wet clatter on the cobbles of the courtyard, then nothing, then the side door that only family had ever used. Nobody had used it in years. Adelinde kept the hinges oiled anyway, the way she kept dusting the room at the end of the east hall that nobody slept in, and Diluc had never once asked her to stop.
He was in the study with the ledgers and a single lamp. He did not get up. He listened to the boots in the corridor, the drag of a sodden cape, a pause outside the kitchen. A cupboard opened. A glass clinked.
"The wine is in the cellar," Diluc said, not loudly. "Which is locked."
The footsteps came to the study door. Kaeya leaned in the frame, dripping on the rug. His hair was plastered dark to his skull and rain ran off the end of his nose, off the edge of his eyepatch, down the open neck of his shirt where the Cavalry Captain's fur collar should have been and wasn't. He was holding a glass of water like it was a joke he'd decided to commit to.
"Master Diluc," he said. "You're up late."
"It's my house."
"So it is." Kaeya smiled. It was the smile he wore at Angel's Share, the one that charmed bards and unnerved Knights and told no one anything. "I was passing."
"You were passing Dawn Winery. At one in the morning. In a thunderstorm."
"The road back to the city floods. You'd know that if you ever went anywhere except the tavern and the rooftops of Mondstadt at night." He took a sip of water and made a face. "Don't look at me like that. I'm not here to drink your stock. I'm not even here to annoy you, although I admit it's a happy side effect."
Diluc set down his pen. Lightning flared outside the tall windows and turned the vineyard rows white for an instant, a field of bones, then dark again. In the pause before the thunder, Kaeya's smile slipped, just at one corner, and Diluc saw it go.
"Sit down," Diluc said. "You're ruining the rug."
Kaeya sat. Not on the chair across the desk, where a guest would sit, but on the low bench beneath the window, where he had sat at twelve with his boots up on the cushions and been told off for it. He seemed to realize it a second too late. He didn't move.
Diluc got up, went to the cabinet, and took out two glasses and the bottle of grape juice he kept there for reasons he did not examine. He poured. He brought one to the bench and held it out until Kaeya took it.
"Ah," Kaeya said, looking into it. "The house special."
"You came here for something."
"Maybe I came for the conversation."
"Then you'll be disappointed."
That earned a real laugh, short and surprised. Kaeya turned the glass in his fingers. His hands were shaking, very slightly, and it wasn't the cold. Kaeya had a Cryo Vision; cold hadn't touched him since the night he got it.
Diluc looked at the calendar on the desk without meaning to, and then he understood, and something in his chest pulled tight.
The date. Of course. He had written it on three invoices today and not once let himself read it.
"It's tonight," he said.
Kaeya didn't answer. Rain threw itself against the glass behind his head.
Diluc remembered a different storm. Not this kind, full of wind and noise, but the silent kind that comes after, when the rain has stopped and you can hear water dripping off everything. He remembered his father's body on the road, still warm, and then not. He remembered the cellar of this house later that same night, the smell of oak and spilled wine, and Kaeya standing in it with his face very white, saying words that took apart eight years of brotherhood in under a minute. I was sent here. I was supposed to report back. Khaenri'ah. I'm sorry. I never. I'm sorry.
He remembered his own Vision burning, his own hand on his claymore, and Kaeya's hand coming up, and the cold that broke out of it, sudden and blue and enormous, the moment the gods decided to answer a boy who was begging not to have to fight his brother.
They had both carried that night out of the cellar in different shapes. Diluc had carried it to the edges of Teyvat and back, through three years of blood and smoke. Kaeya had carried it, as far as Diluc could tell, nowhere at all. He had simply stayed. Joined the Knights. Smiled. Never once spoken of it, except in jokes so sideways you'd need a map.
"You don't usually come," Diluc said.
"I usually go to the cemetery," Kaeya said to the glass. "I bring a cecilia, because he liked them, and because they're a pain to climb for. Then I go drink at the Cat's Tail, because you don't let me drink at yours on this date. Or, well, Charles doesn't. I've always assumed it was on orders."
Diluc said nothing. It was on orders.
"Tonight I got to the cemetery and the rain started, and I thought, it's ridiculous, standing out here getting soaked to talk to a stone. And then I got on the horse, and I don't entirely remember deciding where to point it." Kaeya finally looked up. Without the smile his face was younger, and very tired. "So. Here I am. Ruining your rug."
The lamp hissed. Diluc thought about all the things he could say. He had rehearsed some of them, over the years, alone on rooftops with the city asleep below him. Accusations, mostly, at first. Later, things that were harder to name. None of them had survived contact with Kaeya's face across a crowded tavern, where everything Diluc meant came out as a clipped remark about Mondstadt's alcohol laws.
"He knew," Diluc said.
Kaeya went very still.
"Father. I found his journals, after I came back. He'd guessed years before. Not all of it, maybe. But enough." Diluc looked at the dark window rather than at the man under it. "There's an entry from when you were fourteen. You'd broken your arm falling off the barn roof and you wouldn't cry in front of anyone, and he wrote: Whatever that boy was brought here to be, he's ours now. I'll have to make sure he knows it."
Thunder rolled down over the valley, long and slow, and faded into the hills.
Kaeya set the glass on the floor. He did it carefully, as though it might break if he didn't. Then he put his face in his hands.
He made no sound. That was the worst part. Diluc had seen grown men weep on battlefields, howling for their mothers; he had seen the kind of grief that shook the walls. Kaeya's was silent and contained, the way he did everything, his shoulders curling forward in a tight hunched line, as if even now he did not believe he had the right to take up room in this house.
Diluc crossed the study. He did not know what to do with his hands. In the end he sat down on the bench beside his brother, close enough that their shoulders touched, and stayed there. Kaeya's shirt was soaked and freezing. Diluc let the warmth of his own Vision rise, slowly, the way you'd banked a hearth on a winter night, until the wet cloth between them began very faintly to steam.
They sat that way for a long time. The storm wore itself out against the windows. Somewhere in the house a clock struck two, and Adelinde's door opened and closed down the hall, and her footsteps came to the corner, paused, and went quietly away again.
"I don't forgive you," Diluc said eventually. His voice sounded rough in the quiet. "I want you to know that. I'm not there."
"I know," Kaeya said into his hands.
"But I'm not where I was, either."
Kaeya lowered his hands. His eye was red. He looked at Diluc sidelong, warily, the way you'd look at a dog that had bitten you once and was now wagging its tail.
"That," he said, "is the nicest thing you've said to me in years."
"Don't get used to it."
"Wouldn't dream of it." But the corner of his mouth had moved. It wasn't the tavern smile. It was smaller, and less sure of its welcome.
Diluc stood up. He collected the empty glass from the floor and the full one from the windowsill and set them both on the desk. He picked up his pen. He did not look at the bench.
"The road to the city will be flooded until morning," he said. "Your old room is made up. It's always made up. Adelinde's stubborn."
There was a long pause behind him.
"Is that an invitation, Master Diluc?"
"It's a weather report."
He heard Kaeya get up. He heard him cross the study, stop at the door, the wet boots shifting on the stones. For a moment he thought Kaeya would make a joke, and he braced for it, and found he would almost have been glad.
"Diluc," Kaeya said instead, no title, no edge.
Diluc kept his eyes on the ledger. The numbers swam.
"Goodnight," Kaeya said, and went down the east hall, and Diluc listened to the door at the end of it open and close for the first time in years, and sat there for a long while afterward, not writing anything at all.