Chapter Text
Many years ago, as the story goes, when the God of Storms fell, the new Anemo Archon gathered unto himself his followers who yet lived, and offered to each a boon. And the knight Gunnhildr asked for the honor to crown the young god with laurels with her own hands, and dying Amos asked for a song to ease her pain. But the flame-haired warrior stood apart, and when it came time to ask for his boon, he spoke thusly:
“I ask a gift for my line still to come. If any child is born who bears my blood, I beseech you that on their third day of life, their father may seek audience with you, and entreat you to bless the child in my memory.”
And the young god granted his request, and gave the flame-haired warrior an aster that would never wither, in token of his vow. And the warrior departed, then, for he knew not how to live at peace, and there were still shadows in Mondstadt for him to battle.
===
“Diluc,” said Diluc’s father, on a breezy summer evening when Diluc was eleven, “Kaeya is going to live with us now. Say hello.”
“Hello,” Diluc said. He couldn’t see very much of Kaeya, hidden as he was behind his father. He was very small, and when he ducked his head out from behind Diluc’s father’s trouser leg to peek, his blue-grey eye glimmered bright, flickering like steel.
Kaeya didn’t say anything at all. He ducked back behind Diluc’s father after a while, scuffing his feet minutely against the carpet. There was a hole in Kaeya’s boot, with his big toe sticking out of it. The toe had a blister on it.
“Kaeya, say hello to Diluc,” said Diluc’s father.
There was no answer. Finally, his father reached behind him and took Kaeya by the arm, and pulled him forward so that he couldn’t hide anymore. “Shake hands,” his father suggested, and Diluc reached forward, even though the order hadn't necessarily been meant for him. But Kaeya shook his head and glared mutely. There were tear-tracks on his cheeks, paler brown places where the grime had been washed away when he cried. A white handkerchief, folded up and only somewhat dirty around the edges, was held over his eye by a fraying cord of rope.
“Don’t gawk, Diluc,” said his father, and Diluc’s gaze snapped to the patterns on the carpet. “Kaeya, shake hands with Diluc,” his father continued, but nothing happened. Kaeya’s boots kept moving on the carpet, scuffing forward and back. The soles were almost worn through, like he’d been running in them for hours a day for a year.
“Well, then. You’ll just have to keep setting a good example for Kaeya, Diluc,” said Diluc’s father. “Be a good influence on him.”
“Of course I will,” said Diluc.
“Go wash up and change now, boys,” said Diluc’s father. “Dinner in ten minutes.”
Diluc went upstairs to the bathroom and splashed cold water on his face and hands, without waiting for it to warm. He yanked his everyday shirt over his head and buttoned himself into his dinner jacket, running a comb through his hair until it lay flat enough for him to tie it back with a ribbon.
“Where’s Kaeya?” said Diluc’s father, squinting at Diluc as he sat down at the table. “Tell me when you last saw him, Diluc.”
“In the foyer,” Diluc said. Why would his father have brought Kaeya home, if he couldn’t be trusted to behave? “Then I went to wash up and change,” he added.
“Go bring him,” said Diluc’s father. “Don’t waste any time.” Diluc nodded, once, and rose up out of the chair. There were too many places to hide at the Dawn Winery. The Rebel always won Windtrace at the Winery, when Lady Gunnhildr visited and Diluc was sent to play with Miss Gunnhildr.
He eyed the coats on their rack longingly as he shoved open the heavy Winery doors. But even the mere second it would have taken to put one on would have been time wasted, time that could have been spent finding Kaeya. His feet moved without him, carrying him through the doors into the wet summer evening.
“Kaeya,” Diluc called, peering under the neat rows of vines, already growing miniature grapes. “Kaeya, come out!” There was no response. Kaeya didn’t have to follow anyone’s orders, of course.
“Please,” Diluc began adding to each call, hours later, as the moon brightened in the night sky. “Please come out, Kaeya, and then we can have dinner.”
With the advantage of the new light, he tried to find boot prints. But if Kaeya had left any, Diluc had since trampled them over in his search. He shivered, longing for a fire. It would have wasted time, so he couldn’t have made one if he tried.
The crystalflies buzzed and hummed around Diluc’s head, just out of reach. If he could have gotten up as high as they were, he would have found Kaeya easily by now. But he was too young to have a glider of his own, his father had decided last year, and that had been that. Except—
Diluc turned, sending the crystalflies scattering, and hopped up off the ground, finding purchase on the side of the Winery’s wall. He avoided the windows—if his father saw him and told him to get down at once, he wasn’t sure whether he’d be able to climb down, or whether he would have to let go.
Finally, with cold, aching fingers and trembling arms, Diluc heaved himself onto the roof and lay there, panting up at the stars.
There was a clicking sound, and then the telltale press of cold steel at his throat. Diluc forced himself not to swallow as he tried to angle his head to get a look at it. It wasn’t very big—a pen knife or a letter opener, perhaps. But it was wickedly sharp, and the small, brown hand that held it was steady and sure.
“Kaeya,” said Diluc, carefully, “Father sent me to get you. Do you want dinner?”
“No,” said Kaeya. From the sound of his voice, he was crouching just above Diluc, in the protective shadow of a chimney. He would have been invisible from below, and near-invisible even on the roof. “I don’t want to live with you. No one asked me.”
“I have to bring you inside,” said Diluc, breathing in carefully to avoid the steel. “Father told me to.”
“I’m not going inside,” said Kaeya. “I’m joining the Treasure Hoarders. Sit up and give me everything valuable you’ve got.”
It was clearly a childish fantasy, and even Kaeya didn’t seem as if he believed it. But even so, Diluc sat up, and his fingers moved automatically. The ribbon in his hair, his boots, his belt with its ornate buckle. The jewel on the knot of his cravat, passed down from his mother’s side of the family. And finally, with a throbbing ache in his chest, his Vision, pulsing faintly in its golden setting. As it slipped from his fingers, Diluc felt the warmth and the strength drain from his body.
“Stop,” said Diluc, as seriously as he could. He was older than Kaeya, which meant that he was supposed to set a good example. “This isn’t a game. Get down, and we’ll go inside.”
But the knife didn’t leave his throat. “You’re afraid of a little knife like this?” said Kaeya’s voice, with a sort of awed fascination. “You’re trying to be some sort of knight, the old geezer says. Does he know you’re afraid of a little blood?”
“I’m not scared of the knife, or blood,” said Diluc truthfully, forcing his breathing steady. He wondered how cold it was, and how long he had been outside. If he rolled his eyes back in his head, Diluc could see the bright flash of Kaeya’s too-white teeth, bared in a snarl.
“Yeah, sure. You gave me everything without even trying to fight,” said Kaeya, punctuating it by digging the knife in, just a little. “What sort of warrior does that?” When Diluc didn’t answer, he continued, an edge of childish bravado creeping into his high, thin voice. “I’ve killed, by the way. Real people. Not the knight way, either. Guts and all. This one guy—I kicked him in the balls and then sliced his ankle tendons, and when he fell over, I gutted him like a fish. One slash from throat to groin.” Kaeya paused for effect, as if he was telling a ghost story. “You scared?” he whispered, his breath warm, his lips pressed close to Diluc’s ear.
“No,” Diluc snarled, suddenly indignant. “You’re so thin, I could break your wrist right now.”
Kaeya laughed, an odd, boyish sound of utter delight. “Do it, then,” he goaded. “Do it. Maybe you can tell Daddy how chivalrous you are—”
Diluc’s elbow rammed backwards into Kaeya’s ribs. His left hand reached past the knife, and grabbed Kaeya’s right wrist before he could jerk it away. It didn’t even take all of his strength, to wrench the wrist out at an odd angle until he dropped the knife—then past that, until they both heard the splintering crack of Kaeya’s bones. Diluc’s stomach wrenched painfully, and he breathed through his nose, trying not to gag.
Throughout it all, Kaeya stayed silent, even as his arm twisted and jerked in Diluc’s grasp. There was a jagged edge to his breathing, when it was over, that might have been panic, or fascination, or the beginnings of a sob.
“What’s wrong with you?” Kaeya spat as soon as Diluc let him go, jumping away and grabbing the knife with his good hand. His eye was terribly wide in his bony, jagged face. The blood had drained from him, leaving him wan and waxen-looking. His grip on the knife trembled. Rain was beginning to fall around them in a fine mist. They’d have to get off the roof before the lightning began.
“Give me back my Vision,” said Diluc, his voice shaking slightly from the cold or the adrenaline. “And then I’m going to bring you inside.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Kaeya said scornfully, his face twisting up. He kicked the Vision at Diluc, sending it skittering and clattering across the shingles. Diluc stooped and caught it, barely, between two fingers.
“Father’s looking for you,” Diluc said, holding his hands up to show he didn’t mean harm. “If you come inside, we can sit by the fire and get dry. You’ll have all the blankets you want at bedtime, and tomorrow you’ll have new clothes.”
“Shut up,” said Kaeya, and Diluc’s mouth closed mid-word. Kaeya’s hand on the knife was shaking violently. “I don’t want to live here,” he said, his eye darting around the rooftop like a spider trapped in a glass. “I don’t want new clothes and blankets. I want my father back. I hate this place, and I hate your father, and I hate you most of all!” he said.
Diluc barely heard him: he was focusing on the way Kaeya’s weight shifted forward and back on his toes, like he was nervous or about to throw a punch. The rain was getting thicker, falling in steady, fat, cold droplets.
“That’s fine,” said Diluc, keeping his voice low and steady, the way he had to talk to Father and his teachers and Miss Gunnhildr if he didn’t want to get in trouble. “But you need to sleep somewhere tonight, right? Are you hungry?”
“I’ll steal from your kitchens,” Kaeya boasted. “I’ll eat a whole pheasant, all by myself, and take as many pies as I can carry, and wineskins—”
Three things happened, one after the other. Kaeya’s foot slipped a few inches on the tile—barely a stumble, but his grip on the knife loosened. Diluc lunged forward to get the knife while Kaeya was off-balance. And Kaeya shrieked, high and loud, with the half-feral terror of a child, “Get back!”
Diluc’s legs moved before he even comprehended the words—stumbling back, one step, two steps, three, and then his foot slipped too, on a shingle that had moss growing on it, and he kept stepping backwards with his other leg as he flung out his arms frantically to grab something—anything. For a moment, he found purchase with his back foot. Everything slowed down and dulled: the terrified thudding of his pulse, the wheeling of his arms, the hissing throb of his Vision in his hand. Kaeya’s mouth was frozen in a tiny, horrified o . He looked as if he might be about to cry.
Then Diluc’s back foot slipped, and he skidded off the roof altogether. The drop was just long enough for him to remember the correct way to fall (bent elbows and knees, chin tucked, face turned to the side, aim for the meatier parts of the body and roll with the impact), but not long enough to do any of the things before he hit the ground.
There was a loud crunch, and Diluc’s right leg burned, all over, like someone had lit his bones with a match and left them to char his flesh from the inside out. Someone was making a high, whining, whimpering noise, like a dog. The world went hazy and cloudy around the edges. Diluc bit his lip until it bled. He was going to have to stand up, soon.
“Help,” Kaeya screamed, high and piercing. “Someone, do something—help!”
“Go inside, Kaeya,” Diluc managed to yell, panting through the waves of dizzying pain. “Go get Father.”
Kaeya hesitated, at the top of the roof. On the horizon, a bolt of lightning crashed. Kaeya stood, framed against the sky, counting the seconds just as Diluc was. When the thunder came, it felt like it shook the ground beneath Diluc. Five seconds. Too close.
Kaeya seemed to think so too. He shimmied nimbly down the drainpipe and hopped to the ground. Diluc knew he’d gone inside when he felt his own head fall back into the mud, freed of the urgent need to get up, to get Kaeya and bring him inside without wasting any time.
The last thing Diluc remembered from that night was his father’s arms, bundling him in a coat and lifting him up. “Good work, Diluc,” Crepus said, pulling his wet hair back from his face. “Now, stop thinking about the pain, alright? Just go to sleep, and you’ll feel better tomorrow.”
===
When Diluc woke up, he was lying on the couch by the fire, with his leg wrapped up and splinted, elevated on a pile of pillows. He felt drowsy and dizzy, and he was sure his leg hurt. Every time he tried to think about it or feel just how bad it was, he forgot why he was wondering at all. Whenever he thought about other things, it hurt a great deal.
“Hello,” said a voice from the armchair. Diluc turned his head a few inches—the most he could manage, as it turned out. Kaeya was sitting on the armchair, tucked back into the upholstery. He was wearing one of Diluc’s old shirts, which was too big for him, with pants that ended before his bony ankles. Someone (Adelinde, presumably) had given him a bath, and splinted his wrist, and combed his hair back behind his ears. His dirty eyepatch had been replaced with a wad of clean bandages, held on with Crepus’s sixth-best cravat. He still had the knife: it was the third-best letter opener, as it turned out. Kaeya was twirling it between his fingers, staring down at the ground.
“Hello,” said Diluc. “Where’s Father?”
“Out,” said Kaeya, jerking his chin at the entrance. Then he looked at Diluc and held his gaze like a challenge. “He told me about you. About why what I did was wrong.”
Diluc sucked in a breath and held it, to see if his ribs were hurt too, or just his leg. He wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. Even Miss Gunnhildr, the only person his age who he saw regularly, just thought Diluc let her win at Windtrace all the time.
“Pax?” said Kaeya after a long time, sticking out his uninjured hand. There was a scar on the palm of it, just barely healed, still pink and puckered.
“Pax,” Diluc agreed, sticking out his own. Kaeya had to come down off the armchair to take it. Kaeya spit in his hand, a big wet glob.
“That’s disgusting,” said Diluc, spitting into his own before Kaeya could order him to.
“So how’d it happen?” said Kaeya, once Diluc had finished wiping his hand off against the sheets. He flopped down half on top of Diluc, with his elbows digging into Diluc’s stomach.
“My leg?” said Diluc.
“The curse,” said Kaeya, wiggling his toes as he squirmed to get comfortable. “Did you touch a cursed treasure? Was it Whopperflower venom? Did it hurt like a barbed arrow, or was it more burn-y like the shards from those big pillars?”
“What big pillars?” said Diluc, squinting at the ceiling as if it had answers. “Anyway, it isn’t a curse, and I was a baby, so I don’t know.”
“How does that happen to a baby?” said Kaeya thoughtfully.
Diluc had heard the story a thousand times, growing up. “Lord Barbatos,” he said loftily, “was a guest at my christening. He blessed me with the virtue of obedience.”
Kaeya tensed up, all at once. “Wait, who?” he said hoarsely.
“Lord Barbatos, God of Freedom. He’s Mondstadt’s Archon,” said Diluc with importance. Kaeya would have to know these things, soon, which meant it was Diluc’s duty as a loyal child of Mondstadt to tell him.
“I know who he is,” said Kaeya, even though he had just asked. “Hold on—he cursed you to be like this?”
“Blessed me,” Diluc clarified, “technically speaking.”
“Fucking Archons,” Kaeya muttered. Diluc debated whether or not to call Adelinde to wash Kaeya’s mouth out with soap for blasphemy, but decided not to in the end. Kaeya was new to Mondstadt. He didn’t know much about the Archons yet. He didn’t really know what he was saying.
===
Things didn’t change much, after that. Kaeya got the room next to Diluc’s, and took pride in turning it into a bizarrely chaotic mishmash of discarded clothes and carelessly arranged knickknacks. Adelinde tried ordering Diluc to clean it once, in the hope that Kaeya would feel guilty and decide to help, but Kaeya just ordered Diluc to fetch a glass of grape juice before he started cleaning. When Diluc came back with the glass of grape juice, Adelinde had taken back the order and gone to make dinner.
That was one of the things Kaeya was good for—giving competing orders. Diluc started being able to win at Windtrace some of the time, because if Miss Gunnhildr yelled out something like, “Show yourself,” Kaeya could just as quickly yell, “Don’t move,” or something like that, and the competing orders would paralyze Diluc for long enough that Miss Gunnhildr gave up on looking for him to chase Kaeya across the roof. When his opponent snarled “Yield!” during his midterm sparring exam, Kaeya screamed, “Kick his ass, Diluc!” from the stands. Diluc did—it was a banned move in formal dueling, but Grandmaster Varka was of the opinion that his students should be trained to survive at all costs, even if it meant fighting dishonorably. He gave Diluc extra credit on the midterm, “for showing the first sign of real fighting spirit I’ve seen in you since the day you were born”.
Of course, Kaeya benefited too. Kaeya never did anything that didn’t benefit him.
“Don’t tell Master Crepus,” Kaeya said, when Diluc caught him selling the answers to a tactical operations exam, six months into his first year with the Knights. “Or Grandmaster Varka,” he hastily added before Diluc could so much as open his mouth. “Or Adelinde, or Sister Victoria—you know what? Don’t tell anyone...unless it’s someone you think might want to buy from me.”
“Cover for me?” Kaeya said, again and again, slipping out of classes, dinner parties, etiquette lessons, church, training exercises, and once, memorably, his own squiring ceremony.
“I don’t know any good lies,” Diluc responded, once, staring warily at Lady Frederica Gunnhildr as she demonstrated appropriate small-talk patterns. His fingers twitched with the urge to take notes, but Adelinde had told him to stop wasting so much parchment.
Kaeya just patted his shoulder. “Make something up,” he said, “the more outlandish the better. The crazier it sounds, the less inclined they’ll be to press for the truth. They’ll just assume whatever they wanted to assume in the first place.”
“Where’s Master Kaeya?”
“…he was paralyzed by a Whopperflower an hour ago?”
“…he’s run away to join a Theater Mechanicus troupe?”
“…he’s been kidnapped by the Fatui for asking the Sixth Harbinger if he was compensating for something?”
===
“I wonder,” said Diluc, a week before he turned fifteen, “whether you could order me to stop following orders. Even if it was just for a little while, like for a fight or something.”
Kaeya pursed his lips. They were lying side by side under the pergolas. The vines were about a month away from flowering, Diluc judged. “I could try,” Kaeya said.
Diluc swallowed and propped himself up on his elbow so he faced Kaeya. “Do it,” he said.
Kaeya propped himself up too, licking his lips to wet them. “Okay,” he said. “How do I word it? If I order you not to listen, you’ll just go deaf if someone says an order. If I order you not to follow orders, you might just always get paralyzed.”
“Order me not to feel compelled to follow any order I hear,” Diluc suggested.
“You’ll still follow it anyway,” Kaeya pointed out. “How you feel doesn’t have anything to do with this. What if I ordered you to be disobedient?”
Diluc shook his head. “Too vague. Just try one of the others. What harm will it do?”
“Potentially a lot, idiot,” said Kaeya, scowling. “This isn’t the sort of thing I can just try!”
“Fine,” said Diluc, and pushed himself stiffly to his feet. “I’ll find someone who will, then.”
“Stop!” said Kaeya behind him. Diluc’s legs locked up. He froze mid-stride. “I order you,” said Kaeya, “not to follow the next order you receive.”
Diluc let out a breath, slowly and carefully. He didn’t feel any different. “Okay. Good. Now jump up and down,” Kaeya said, barely breathing. For a moment, Diluc felt both orders at once, felt his legs lock up as they tried to both jump and not jump.
Then, with a sinking feeling, he hopped an inch off the ground.
“Stop,” said Kaeya, immediately. “Let’s try again—”
Diluc shook his head. “It won’t work,” he said. “I felt them both, like last week when Miss Minci told me to chug that bottle of Dandelion Wine and you told me not to. New orders override old ones. It won't work, ever,” said Diluc. It felt as if something inside of him had been snuffed out, all at once. He dashed the back of his hand against his eyes and tried to ignore the feeling.
===
Diluc told Kaeya about his plan to save Mondstadt on the day Kaeya turned sixteen, at the house in the City where they lived in the winter. Their father had spent most of the day in his study, with a box he’d had shipped all the way from Snezhnaya. Adelinde had made the boys a cake to eat after dinner, and then they had snuck up to the attic with all the blankets from their beds and huddled together in a corner to celebrate in secret (under pretense of finishing their homework in the attic, where they wouldn’t disturb Father).
It was a cold and rainy night, and some of the blankets had to be allocated to block the drafts that swept through the room now and again. Diluc lit a candle for them to take turns warming their hands by. Kaeya had a bottle of Dandelion Wine that he’d sweet-talked out of Tunner before they left the Winery, and a bottle of real wine he’d stolen from the cellar once they arrived in Mondstadt. He’d given up trying to convince Diluc to drink with him, and had one bottle in each hand, sipping from them slowly one after the other.
“Kaeya,” said Diluc, staring at the flickering candle, “I want to talk to you.”
“You have my permission to talk,” said Kaeya magnanimously.
“Do you ever feel like things in Mondstadt are wrong, and they’re not getting better?” Diluc said.
Kaeya blinked at him and set the bottles down on the floor with a clink. “You couldn’t have discussed this an hour ago when I was sober?”
“You came up here, brought out the wine, and immediately told me that you intended to get drunk as quickly as possible,” Diluc pointed out.
“Past me was an idiot,” said Kaeya with feeling. “I’m,” he squinted at his hands, doing a quick tally, “old. Old people know better. Remind me next time not to get drunk, Luc.”
“No need,” said Diluc, taking a deep drag of grape juice. “At the rate you’re going, you’ll have Father’s tolerance by year’s end.”
“Go fuck yourself,” said Kaeya good-naturedly, then froze in horror. “Shit, wait! Don’t do—that. ”
Diluc’s hand dropped from his pants as if the buckle had scalded him. He hadn’t even noticed it moving there. He locked eyes with Kaeya in mute horror, the blood rushing to his face. His stomach churned with embarrassment.
“What was the question?” said Kaeya at last, picking the wine bottle back up and taking a long sip.
Diluc gratefully seized on the change of subject. “Every year, just after tax season, there’s a steep increase in Treasure Hoarder attacks,” he said. “The Rifthounds still haven’t been cleared from Wolvendom. The people don’t seem interested in holding the Knights of Favonius accountable for any of this, but our taxes are nearly as steep as Liyue’s at this point, and nothing the Knights do works. Something has to change, Kaeya. And the Knights won’t listen to anyone except other Knights.”
“So we’ll be Knights,” said Kaeya. “Easy. People listen to you. You have an angry face. Easy-peasy sunsettia-squeezy.” He took another swig from the bottle of Dandelion Wine and made a face.
“That’s what I used to think, too,” said Diluc. “But every year, Varka drives the Treasure Hoarders back underground, and they’re still back by next tax season. What the Knights do isn’t working.”
“So what’s your solution?” said Kaeya, leaning forward. “Run away and join the Treasure Hoarders, then turn on them and slaughter our way through their ranks?”
Diluc frowned. “Yes and no,” he said. “We need to go where the Knights can’t go, and do things they never would. But we need the legitimacy that membership in the Knights offers us.”
“So what, we join the Knights, and disappear every weekend to hop underground and pursue vigilante justice?” said Kaeya. One of the wine bottles was empty, now, and he twirled it between his fingers. “Not exactly honorable, is it?”
“We’ll be called the Dawnlight Heroes,” said Diluc, ignoring him, “after the Dawnlight Swordswoman who gave her life to dismantle the aristocracy.”
“We live half the year in a manor that controls half of Mondstadt’s economy,” Kaeya pointed out, “so I’m not sure her death was worth it.”
“Can you just shut up, and try taking something seriously for once in your life?” said Diluc, and covered his mouth immediately. His chest felt tight with how much he needed Kaeya to listen to this—and more than that, to understand.
“Crap,” said Kaeya. He blinked, his eye liquid. “You actually mean this shit, don’t you?”
“I shouldn’t have yelled,” Diluc mumbled. “Just—please.”
“Okay,” said Kaeya. “Let me get this straight. You feel like the Knights of Favonius are limited in their approach, so you want us to join the Knights to work to reform them from the inside, but also operate outside their boundaries to perform preemptive attacks on Mondstadt’s enemies.”
“Bringing light to every shadow,” said Diluc quietly. He could picture it: they’d wear the colors of the rising sun (red and orange for him, purple for Kaeya, with black cloaks for stealth). They’d burst down onto their foes like a flaming judgment from the heavens, striking true and swift in the name of justice.
“And you really don’t have any concerns about the amount of murder this entails?” said Kaeya.
“Murder?” said Diluc, perplexed. “Who said anything about murder? We’ll tie them up and leave them at the city gates to face justice.”
Kaeya guffawed merrily, throwing his head back against the wall. “You always have to make everything so complicated,” he said.
“Mercy,” said Diluc, parroting their ethics textbook, “is the only true way.” After a moment, he added, “Anyway, we can’t just go around mindlessly killing people. Everyone would think we were criminals.” His fingers were getting cold. He shoved them over the candle, almost close enough to burn.
“You’re right,” said Kaeya darkly. He finished the other wine bottle in one long, slow gulp. “That’s the Knights’ job.”
“Will you do it?” said Diluc. “I could do it myself, probably,” he added after a moment. “But I want—I mean, the plan works better, with two people. We’ll each have someone guarding our backs that way.”
“Have you considered,” said Kaeya thoughtfully, “that your plan is wasteful and—hic—inefficient in the extreme?”
“I beg your pardon?” said Diluc, stiffening his posture the way Father did when he had a point to make. He’d tried it on the Grandmaster, just the week before, but Varka had merely laughed and patted his head.
Kaeya straightened up too, though he wobbled a little. “It’s like this”—he held up an admonishing finger and stared at it blearily—“Two halves don’t make a whole.”
“Yes, they do,” said Diluc, staring at him. He reached for his glass of grape juice. “I thought arithmetic was one of the classes you weren’t failing.”
“You shouldn’t try to fight me with words,” Kaeya reminded him. “You always lose. What was I—? It’s like this, Luc. When you divide two in half, you don’t get two halves.”
“Two divided by two is one,” said Diluc. “And you’ve had far too much to drink. You’re not thinking clearly anymore.”
“Objection—you’re the one not thinking clearly,” Kaeya crowed, his eye glinting dangerously. “Your plan is two halves—we each spend half our lives as Knights of Favonius and half as—what was it?”
“The Dawnlight Heroes,” Diluc supplied. “Guardians of noble character, who drive away the shadows and bring the light of justice back to Mondstadt.”
“—That,” Kaeya said, gesturing grandly at thin air. “But when are we going to sleep?”
“I don’t need much sleep,” said Diluc immediately. “A few hours here or there will suffice—”
“There’s also Dawn Winery to think of,” Kaeya pointed out. “Meetings, trade deals, taxes, hiring and firing—”
“Father will handle that,” said Diluc.
But Kaeya shook his head grimly. “Fathers aren’t around forever,” he said. “But think about it this way. It’s a formation, you know the one?” He clicked his thumb and first finger together helpfully, like a beetle.
“Pincer formation,” Diluc provided.
“Exactly. You don’t cut people up and stick them in two places at once to do that. They’d get all jumbled up. You stick one person in one place and one in the other, and they work together,” said Kaeya.
“One for the light, and one for the shadows,” said Diluc slowly.
Kaeya’s left hand tapped out an imaginary melody on the floorboards. It looked like a sad song, the sort sung by drunks in the limbo hours between the tavern’s busy hours and the rush of musical exuberance that came with the easy drinking songs just before closing. “You’ll lead the Knights to become an effective and honorable force of good little Dawn Knights. And I’ll be your right-hand man—the sort of amoral, dissolute fellow who’s conveniently on a tavern bender right before new intel comes in to link five or ten honest Knights to the Treasure Hoarders,” Kaeya said at last. He smiled lazily like he had a good hand of cards.
“You cannot destroy your reputation for this,” said Diluc severely.
Kaeya grinned wolfishly. “Who says I have a reputation to destroy? I was born in the shadows, and I’ll die in them too. Might as well get some use out of them in the time between.”
“I hate it when you talk like that,” said Diluc.
“Yeah? Well I hate your face,” said Kaeya with feeling.
They lapsed into a comfortable silence. Diluc tried to picture it—Kaeya, laughing and drunk, sometimes there to guard his back but more often away, smiling from the shadows with a knife up his sleeve.
“So it’s agreed?” said Kaeya eventually. “We’ll use my plan?”
“You can’t appear to sink low enough that they expel you from the Knights,” Diluc said warily. “There’s still the matter of my obedience. You leaving the Ordo Favonius would make me far more vulnerable than I’d like.”
“Right,” said Kaeya. “That.”
“That,” Diluc agreed.
“We’ll just break it,” said Kaeya. “Curses can be broken—”
“—it’s not a curse, it’s a bl—”
“A blessing passed down through your family for generations, I know,” said Kaeya, rolling his eye. “But why would the Archon of Freedom bless you with obedience?”
“Just because you’re an atheist doesn’t mean—” Diluc began hotly.
“Gods follow the wishes of their true believers, right?” said Kaeya. “I miss church services a lot, but even I remember that gem of wisdom. If we find Barbatos, and he realizes how much you hate it—surely he’ll take the gift back.” He waited a while, like Diluc was supposed to say something. “You do hate it, right?” Kaeya said quietly—prompting him.
When Diluc was seven, he’d seen a wild fox in a trap chew its own leg off to escape. “Yes,” he said. “It’s like—it’s like if somebody could cut off your hand, at any time, and then put it back on without anybody else knowing.” He took a sip of his grape juice, still struggling to express the feeling in a way that Kaeya would understand. “It’s like always being pulled in two directions, and—and you don’t even want to go in one of them but you just have to.”
“Fuck,” said Kaeya loudly. He stared into the empty wine bottles as if one of them would suddenly reveal a secret compartment filled with alcohol. Then he picked up the bottle of regular wine and dropped it against the wooden floor, so hard that it shattered.
“Are you insane?” Diluc hissed, as Kaeya hunted through the shards bare-handed, testing the edges of the biggest chunks against his thumb. “You’ll wake Adelinde.”
“My father taught me that this is how you swear an oath when you really mean it,” said Kaeya. He hissed when the shard he tested pierced his skin. Then he gripped the dullest end in his right hand and slashed the skin of his other palm open. The cut was jagged and messy. “You’re supposed to do it with a ceremonial knife, though. Knives, wine, and blood, that’s the old way. Left hand?”
Diluc stuck it out warily, squeezing his eyes shut when Kaeya slashed through it. It didn’t hurt quite as much as he had expected it to—it was a dull, numb, pulsing sort of pain. He could feel his heart rate spike when he opened his eyes and saw the cut bleeding. “Why left?” he said, to distract himself and slow down his heart rate.
“So it doesn’t mess up your fighting hand,” said Kaeya, grabbing Diluc’s bleeding hand with his own and holding tight. He brought the other wine bottle underneath, and Diluc watched the blood trickle in, slowly. “Now we swear,” said Kaeya, staring at their hands and gripping even tighter. “I’ll go first, so you see how it’s done. I, Kaeya Alberich, name Diluc Ragnvindr to be my sworn brother. His enemies will be my own, and my triumphs his. His kin are my kin, and my hearth his hearth. Before men and against the gods, I swear this oath, with glass and blood and”—he looked around the room—“grape juice,” he finished. He took a deep breath and wetted his lips with his tongue. When he spoke again, he looked into Diluc’s eyes. “And I swear also that I won’t order him to do things anymore, except for counter-orders.” Something in Diluc’s chest squeezed then, sharp and painful in a good way. He blinked back tears—his cut was hurting much more now, with the pressure Kaeya was putting on it. “At least not until he breaks his curse and we’ve both gotten to punch Lord Barbatos in the face a bit for giving such a stupid blessing to a baby,” he continued. Diluc laughed, despite himself. Then Kaeya’s face went serious and still, all at once. “And if I should break this vow, let me die by my brother’s hand before the Abyss takes me,” he said, the lines and edges of his face lit up by the flickering firelight.
“My turn?” he said, and Kaeya nodded. “I, Diluc Ragnvindr, name Kaeya Alberich to be my sworn brother. His enemies will be my own, and my triumphs his. His kin are my kin, and my heart his—”
“You mean hearth,” Kaeya corrected.
“And my hearth his hearth,” Diluc said carefully. “Before men and gods, I swear this oath, with glass and blood and grape juice.” He looked at Kaeya. “What comes next?”
“The free space for anything else you want to add,” said Kaeya.
Diluc nodded and thought for a moment. “I swear also,” he said, “that if I die without an heir, all I inherit will pass to him and his line, to serve as its custodian and rightful lord. And I swear to be by his side when he takes back his homeland and avenges his father, and be among the first to hail him as the true and rightful king of his nation. As soon as he tells me where it is.” He looked at Kaeya. “Good enough?” he said.
Kaeya looked like he had been stabbed. His hand must have been hurting, too. “Yeah,” said Kaeya. “It’s fine.”
“What’s the last bit?” said Diluc. “Something about dying, right?”
“And if I should break this vow, let Celestia strike me down before I die at my brother’s hand,” Kaeya said, staring into the candle flame.
It didn’t sound exactly right, but Diluc repeated it carefully. Then Kaeya let his hand go, and they helped each other bind their hands up with Diluc’s spare handkerchiefs. They poured the rest of the grape juice in with the blood, and passed it back and forth between them, as the candle burnt lower and lower until only the wick remained.
“Brother,” Kaeya said, testing the word out, on his tongue and in the air.
“Brother,” Diluc confirmed, low and quiet.