Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Kaeya finally managed to wheedle you into visiting him the first time (You should bring Miss Klee along, we’ll have a lovely lunch date), your initial impression of the Cavalry Captain’s home was taken in a brief-slice glance from what you could see from the doorway: a composition of soft golds and ivories held in place by warm wooden beams, a scant minutiae of turquoise and indigo scattered about. Airy curtains. Plush cushions and rugs. Shoe polish and leather softened the still-new scent of construction, along with the door lintels and beams with their fresh coats of Brightwood oil. You could hear the muffled sounds of the town square through the closed casement windows.

He'd only just moved in, but it felt...strangely familiar.

Klee’s first impression was familiar for a different reason. Two steps into his apartment was all it took before she gasped in utter shock.

“ARE YOU IN SOLITARY CONFINEMENT??“

Kaeya only laughed, waving you both further inside as he wove his way around a small desk, squeezing between a book shelf and a basket of laundry freshly folded off the line. “It’s not very solitary if you’re here, is it?” he countered.

You gave the living room and attached kitchenette another cursory glance, trying to direct your thoughts away from the collective familiarity you still couldn’t put your finger on. If it was solitary confinement, it was one finely furnished. But to Klee’s point, you found the Captain’s quarters to be modest in terms of living space. (And in terms of what you thought you understood to be ‘Kaeya Alberich’, perhaps even impoverished.) 

His apartment was one of several suites in the newest building in Mond– a Favonius housing annex commissioned by the Acting Grandmaster during the repairs made to the city proceeding the ‘Stormterror Incident’, which held a dozen such apartments, and half of these were gifted to those who'd made notable contributions to the resolution of said incident. 

In the end however, it was only Kaeya who’d accepted anything. Aether hadn’t stayed, naturally. Diluc had the winery, Lisa lived with Jean and had no desire to move all her books and scrolls again, Amber had her grandfather's estate to handle, and the enigmatic bard never bothered to answer Jean’s summons to begin with.

Which only left Kaeya, spoiled for choice. 

Klee let out a long, unsure hum, which pitched upward with delight as she reached out and touched a cream colored blanket thrown over the arm of his couch. “No, wait. But it’s small!” she said, even while grabbing your hand and struggling to yank your glove off so you could touch the blanket too. 

It was very nice.

“You’re right,” Kaeya easily agreed, shrugging off his uniform jacket. Without it and its fur mantle and cape, he looked almost...inappropriately bare despite being fully clothed, and for a moment you wrestled with the bewildering urge to avert your eyes. Patting dust off the jacket's fur with a wide grin, he asked you both, “What do you think of it?” which caused your thoughts to trip over themselves a second time. 

Klee immediately pointed an accusatory finger up at you and said, “Even Brother’s cave is bigger’n this!”

The Captain hung his jacket on a peg on the wall with care. “That’s true,” he said, all pleasantries.

“Are the other ‘partments Master Jean gave like this?”

“There’s one thrice this size, if I recall,” Kaeya replied over his shoulder, his grin growing ever larger at Klee’s compounding horror. 

You put a gentle hand on her hat before she could could accuse the captain of being very stupid, and she allowed herself a moment to dramatically inhale and exhale. She then silently implored you for help with an exasperated pull of her mouth. 

Keeping your face schooled into blank apathy is simple for you, but the same couldn't be said for Kaeya, who looked ready to burst with his own amusement. You settled with, “I...think Klee would like to know why you did not choose the more spacious quarters for yourself, as you had your choice of any of them,” and Kaeya was already nodding before you’d finished speaking. 

“And you?” he’d asked with a barely-there, sultry dip in his voice, turning to one of the casement windows and pulling it open wide, “Is the Chief Alchemist also curious about my answer?”

You remember very vividly the moment he’d said this. Daylight hit one of the panes just right, filtering through what you were surprised to discover was intricate, Sumerian stained glass. The result painted half the room in striking shards of gold and ultramarine, the colors mingling on Kaeya like a night sky, delicately gilded. 

Watching him there in that light gave you his answer in an instant. But you weren’t lying when you responded with, “I'm always interested in what you have to say.”

Which you’d expected him to wave off as empty words, as that was how this game had always been. So you were surprised when he instead stumbled over his own mouth a moment, looking away with rapidly blinking lashes before quietly saying, “Well now you've put me on the spot. Erm.” His right hand idly traced the bottom edge of one of the window panes. “You could say I’ve had enough of sprawling mansions,” he said, glancing back at you.

Klee, whose interest was waning quickly without concrete answers to her questions, said, “Klee bets it's ‘coz of this blanket.”

“That one? You like it?” asked Kaeya.

“Klee can unnerstand choosing a place ‘coz of this, really. It's sooooo soft. Like Dodoco.”

“Wow, then I seemed to have chosen the perfect place after all.” A fondness seeped into his expression then, at home in those blues and golds. “Honestly, it’s still a lot of room for little ole me. Though-” he looked back at you with an impish smile “–I’d be a fool to pass up a personal bathtub, you see.”

And then he’d invited you to take a bath with him, to which Klee said, “What are you, four?”

You feel awful.

“This can’t be a sound idea,” you mutter, cutting a furtive glance through his doorway, the late afternoon light enchanting. Inviting. His quarters are a siren song to your weary and agitated mind, casting a spell you only just resist by the skin of your teeth.  It’s distracting enough that a sneeze sneaks up on you, and you nearly miss covering it. 

“Is that so,” Kaeya says, imitating you perfectly.

You narrow your eyes at him, wiping your glove on your jacket. You can’t be afflicted with anything other than a mild chill and some type of respiratory irritation, but having never been ill in your life makes it worrisome in a different way – one that you cannot seek counsel for.

And being invited into the Captain’s home forces your hesitation. The living space is comfortable, human, and presently drives home the point that you are an alien pebble in the world’s shoe.

Gauging your silence, Kaeya does not suggest an intimate romp in the bed being a better idea. He only says, “I won’t force you,” before leaving you at the threshold and bee-lining to the little kitchenette in full uniform, making the briefest pause to set your bag on a table before filling up a kettle at the basin.

To say the man is ‘subdued’ after Rosaria’s departure would probably be an overstatement, but...you can grasp that things have deviated between you. You’re not sure what that means, or how to address it. Sticking your head in the doorway, you say, “I see you’ll keep my bag hostage, though."

“Naturally,” he calls back.

After a few moments of deliberation, in which your headache bullies you into submission, you resolutely step inside and shut the door behind you. Kaeya busies himself with a well-used tea brazier, quickly scanning over the written brewing instructions the apothecary had supplied with the herbs. You slowly drift through the living room to linger at the windows, newspaper still awkwardly in your hands.

Settled amongst everything is Klee: Dodoco drawings, pressed clovers, framed Kamera photographs depicting her with various other knights, with you, with Kaeya. There’s even one of her on Rosaria’s hip, having passed out after too much Ludi Harpastum excitement. 

This is the first time you’ve been here without her. Without her having to plead for you to come along, without Kaeya providing a convenient pretext for you to visit by inviting her and Dodoco for tea and cake.

Ah– Klee. That’s what doesn’t add up. Considering all the arrangements that had been made for Klee’s care this evening, you realize you don’t know how that occurred, as it had taken place completely outside your awareness. When was any of that discussed? And hadn’t Kaeya been at your side since he picked you up from the lab? 

...Why had he sought you out at the lab in the first place?

You trace the folds of the paper in your hands, overlooking the town as it slowly closes up for the evening. Parents rush their children home, storefronts place signs and close awnings, a pair of stray dogs have one last chase around the overgrown courtyard. You wonder.

Well. It's not all endless wondering - you can make a few educated guesses. But the answers are ones that you find difficult to accept. Because there are reasons why you’ve never been here without Klee, why you spend most of your time alone on the mountain, why you don’t defend yourself from Rosaria’s ongoing observation.

You’re an unknown. A risk. You shouldn’t be here, yet here you are anyway, being helped and cared for by people who don't know what you are. By people you can't ask ‘what does it mean when a heretofore impervious homunculus catches the common cold’, because even you know that’s a subject too unacceptable to spring on just anyone.

Sometimes you wish you could ask your master any of the endless questions you’ve thought up in her absence. Sometimes you wonder why such important things were never taught by her in the first place.

(Sometimes you suspect you were set up to fail, and she’s never coming back.)

(Sometimes you fear she’ll return and give you the most frightening answer of all.)

“Whatever it is you’re thinking, set it aside for a moment,” Kaeya says, cutting through the things you can’t speak aloud. When you look away from the window, you’re struck by stained light tracing up his form as he approaches, your gaze following gold and ultramarine up to his face, to the muddy starburst in his left eye and it’s dark, dark blue. The deep of Beneath.

Kaeya eases the newspaper from your hands and offers you a fine porcelain teacup full of herbal tea.  The curling, thorny vines painted around its rim are another echo of your master, like fading ripples stretching across a pond.

You sigh, weary to the marrow. Your mind wandering is a fact of life, but where it travels today isn’t your favorite. 

He leans a little and presses the cup into your lifeless hand when you make no move for it. “Please apologize to all of Teyvat for your sour attitude,” says Kaeya. “...And drink this, please.”

“Two pleases,” you murmur, wearing a scowl that is entirely meant for yourself. The warmth of the cup can be felt even through your gloves. The aroma of clove and ground harra stones have already begun to soothe the ache in your throat. Sumerian spices, the chemist had said, though you’d already known that, from your time with Rhine. “My apologies,” you say to the tea, and take a sip.

It isn’t an objectionable taste, but it burns down your chest like any ghastly drink from Angel’s Share. (Seems fitting, maybe, the sting coming from a teacup such as this. Care administered by the embrace of thorns.)

“When did it start?” asks Kaeya, bringing you out of your thoughts again.

His lips compress into a troubled line. “Your symptoms. When did they begin,” he asks more quietly, moving close while pulling the glove off his right hand, then bending lower and reaching out to you with it. You can't pull your eyes away, fixated by the movement, the dusky rose of the nailbeds. The net of scars across his knuckles, a verse of countless fights and training sessions penned there.

He swings a sword like Rhine, too. The flourish. The tease and taunt. Khaenri'ah. Khaenri'ah. The place you're from but have neither been nor seen. Your home you can never know.  

If he touched you now, would he know what you are? Would his palm recognize the earth of you and make him homesick? You imagine his fingertips, warm, dusky rose on your skin.

You yelp and nearly drop your tea when he reaches beneath your fringe, pure winter resting on your forehead. “You’re freezing,“ you splutter. “Does...does cryo actually alter one’s temperature-"

“You’re a man of science, you know better than that," he says, unimpressed. He pulls his hand away, a frown marring his angular, lovely face. “You’re running rather warm,” he mutters. With a light press to your fingers around the cup, he reminds you the tea is still waiting. You sip it again. It burns again. Your mind nearly drifts into treacherous territories again, but his worried gaze prompts you to recall the question you’re meant to answer.

“Oh. The symptoms. Hm.” Your brain feels tangled and it’s quickly becoming cumbersome to think in a straight line, much less remember when you first started feeling ill. “I suppose they surfaced the night before last. The end of Windblume.”

Kaeya straightens and walks to the table where he’d left your bag, musing aloud: “Two nights, and usually another two or three for a sickness to brew beforehand...” He deposits his glove on the table, peeling off the second to join it and exposing more of the brace on his left wrist in the process. “So. Five days ago was what, then?”

Closing your eyes to stop thinking about his damned hands, you reply with a withered groan, now having the presence of mind to do the math yourself. “Miracle of Misfortune,” you say, opening your eyes and giving the teacup a look of utter defeat.

Kaeya sounds genuinely surprised. “Mister Bennett?” he says with a half-laugh. “So even Sir Albedo can succumb to the Conqueror of Fortunes, eh? The Harbinger of Flukes. The Deliverer of-”

“So it seems.”

If he silently laughs with his back turned, it is thankfully hidden as he sheds his one-winged jacket. Unfortunately, this also reveals the lines of his trim waist to you, tight riding leather lit in all those captivating blues and golds from the window, now going warmer with the sunset. Kaeya asks, “What happened with him?”

Deigning to stop analyzing the color composition of someone else’s ass and how it might be recreated on canvas, you rivet your eyes back to the teacup. “I was on-site with an apprentice and we chanced upon him trapped in a pit of...I still don’t know. Nothing of the Seven can make that color as far as I’m aware. Or stench.” Frowning, you take another sip of the tea just to raze the memory of that smell out of your mind. “It took some engineering to haul him out of the muck. We got him back to the base camp, where he was thoroughly fussed over, but after an examination we determined he was at worst, simply filthy.”

Thinking back on it now, turning the cup about in your hands, you go over the incident in your mind a few times. “But apart from that, nothing out of the ordinary occurred...” Certainly nothing that would obviously make you ill for the first time in your life. You pull off your own glove to touch your forehead, but as you’d expected, it feels normal to you.

What isn’t expected is the unnatural quiet from Kaeya. Looking up at his silence, you find him still as glass, standing by the table of your combined belongings as he carefully watches you. 

“Muck,” he says. Even the star in his eye has lost its characteristic dance, its mischief. “Where did you chance upon our Mister Bennett, exactly?”

It is in this moment that you become reacquainted with the actual Calvary Captain, a man notorious in the quieter halls of HQ as the cunning interrogator, the saccharine songbird in the alley shedding its feathers to reveal something far keener. You sit up a little straighter.

“I was...called in to oversee another alchemist in training, in Liyue. His camp was in the recently reopened mine-” 

Kaeya swiftly crosses the room, his hand wrapping firm around your left shoulder. Nothing is still about him now, his gaze searching, darting all over your face, your body. You don’t even have the will to lean away, his expression holding you captive. “Small wonder you’ve fallen ill,” he says, an anxiousness bringing forward the lower registers of his voice, sharpening them. “Any other symptoms? Any injuries?”

“I-” you clear your throat again. “Unless confusion can be counted, no, I don’t think so.” You glance meaningfully at his hand at your shoulder, but he ignores it and your silent questions, his jaw set tight. 

Eventually, he says, “You aren’t wrong. That muck is certainly not of the Seven.” You’re released as quickly as you’d been caught, Kaeya turning around to stalk back to the table and rifle through a stack of scrolls and notes there. He finds what he wants, returning to you with a report bearing his signature in the bottom corner. Takes the teacup from you and shoves this into your hand instead. 

“Read it. Rest. Don’t...don’t wander off. Please.”

“Is something-”

The tea sloshes precariously within the cup when the Captain leaves it on the windowsill, saying, “I must check on Bennett.” His hand briefly lights on your arm once more, much gentler than before, and then he’s gone and out the door. His footsteps echo down the annex hallway, leaving you to sit in bewildered silence.

“...Three pleases,” you mutter aloud.