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“I simply thought collecting seashells might be fun. It was last time,” Kaeya says, then looks pointedly out at the horizon. The sun is still hours from setting, a shimmering coin above the endless waves, bright and unrelentingly warm. He places his hands on his hips and lets out a short, sighing sort of laugh. “Although, we were much younger back then.”
Diluc is quiet for a long moment. He shifts at Kaeya’s back, like a lifeboat in a calming sea, sand crunching softly under those bloodstained boots, and says, finally, “I didn’t think you still remembered anything from back then.” He shifts again. The leather of his gloves squeaks gently – a closing fist.
The tide creeps in and crests over the tips of Kaeya’s toes. A small orange seashell bumps against them, cracked on the left but still glittering exquisitely under the waves. He holds it down with his bare foot as the water struggles to pull it in again, the shell’s ridges digging into his sole – then he nudges it back out to sea like nothing happened. It drifts along with enviable ease.
Kaeya prepares his most winsome smile – only because Diluc will be able to see it – and turns around swiftly, water and sand splashing around his heels, hair whipping the salty breeze away from his face. The warmth of it all could damn well sear his other eye shut too.
“Well, come on then, Master Diluc.” He gestures to the shoreline stretching out to infinity before them. “You used to lead the way back then, too, didn’t you?”
“…We have to return to the others sooner rather than later.” Diluc huffs as he sets off. “You’d better not hold us back.”
“When have I ever?” Kaeya says, laughing under his breath, laughing harder when Diluc doesn’t respond except by stomping away even faster.
So childish. Just like he used to be.
(He… did used to be that way, didn’t he?)
The truth is that Diluc was right. He always is when it’s least convenient for Kaeya.
All that’s left of the trip to the archipelago is the scent of the sea breeze clinging to his clothes and tan lines that are already fading. And a handful of seashells, and a crumpled fake treasure map, shoved into his pocket just as hastily as it was drawn – and nothing else.
No memories.
His reflection in the bathroom mirror stares back at him, a soulless smudge in the shadows.
He remembers saying he would do things – but what did he actually do? What did he feel? Did he feel anything? Or was he as empty as these conch shells, plucked out of the only place they belonged, now good for nothing but taking up precious space?
One minute Diluc was telling him to pull himself together and make a proper ice bridge – the next, they were sitting by a campfire, a dozen shells in his pocket, and he couldn’t remember how they’d gotten there.
He knows how it must have happened, of course, logically – but he can’t remember. Not the feeling of shells in his hands, not the warmth of the sun on his face, not the sea and sand swirling beneath his feet – nothing.
The seashells now sit in a little clay bowl, intended as a simple bathroom decoration. Klee’s idea.
He knocks them all into the sink with a faint cry.
What good is keeping them when he can’t remember what it is they represent?
His face goes numb. His breathing quickens. He looks back up at the mirror, and the face he finds there looks even emptier than he feels.
One shaking hand reaches into the sink and fishes out the largest seashell – a bright red one, almost purple in this dull moonlight – and throws it straight at the mirror, at himself, cracking them both, cracking them all.
(They’re all broken here.)
Watching the fragments of glass and silver float down into the sink, settling between the grooves of the shells like dust upon forgotten graves, he can’t even bring himself to feel sorry. When he’d left the winery, he’d put all his useless little trinkets in a box and hidden them away so he wouldn’t have to be reminded of everything he couldn’t remember. He’ll just have to put these things away too. Lock them all up, throw out the key, and hope his heart erases those memories for him, too.
But it’s not fair.
It’s not fair that when something good happens – arguably the best thing that’s happened to him in fucking years – that all he gets to hold on to is the hollow echoes of it.
“Make it stop,” he begs his unfeeling reflection, before thinking–
Maybe it is fair.
Maybe it’s exactly what he deserves. Why should a sinner be allowed to remember something so blessed?
He fails to stop a tear rolling down his cheek. Acknowledging the truth never seems to make anything easier.
This emptiness in his chest that keeps expanding to keep anything good from filling the gaps, this incurable ache from forgetting his best memories that somehow hurts more than remembering the worst–
When will it all just stop?
Diluc and Rosaria have been strangely talkative tonight. For some reason the news of the church’s charity concert has sparked his brother’s interest. Kaeya’s interest, on the other hand, is reserved for his drink and his drink alone, because it’s rare for Diluc to let him consume this much without cutting him off – but really, what could possibly be so important about this concert that Diluc is so distracted–
“Oh, I remember now,” Rosaria says, handing her empty tankard to Diluc for him to refill. She casts a sidelong glance at Kaeya. “You two played some violin duet in one of those concerts when you were kids, didn’t you?”
There are so many of these things, now – things that Kaeya doesn’t remember, couldn’t remember if someone held a knife to his throat, things that must have belonged to some other husk of a human that called itself ‘Kaeya’, once upon a time – that he doesn’t even blink. He sips at his drink wordlessly without looking up.
“Violin and viola,” Diluc corrects her with too little hesitation and too much indignation, before his expression settles into one of almost nostalgic reflection. “I’m surprised you remember, given how long ago it was.”
“I remember because I had to sing with the damn choir right afterwards,” she says with a groan, massaging her temple. “It was bad enough to make me never agree to be in one of those charity concerts ever again. But you probably don’t remember that,” she continues, casting a much more pointed look at Kaeya this time, “because your old man had already pulled you aside by the time we started and was going on and on about how proud he was.”
Diluc’s cheeks turn as red as his hair, and in any other circumstances Kaeya would revel in that detail and tease his brother until he was inevitably kicked out–
But how can he do that, when he’s too busy falling deeper and deeper still into the never-ending chasm of his own missing memories?
Father… was proud of us. Of me.
Even in his own mind, it sounds so impossible.
What did Father look like, when he was proud of him? Did he smile? What was his smile like? Did his eyes crinkle around the corners, did he laugh? Did he pat them on the shoulders? Hug them? Neither? Both?
Rosaria taps her claw rings on the counter and pulls him out of the downwards spiral, holds him in place with a too-attentive stare. “Do you still play?”
Diluc’s also looking at him too expectantly. A coordinated attack from opposite sides. It leaves Kaeya with little choice but to say, quietly, without meeting either of their gazes, “I still have my viola, if that’s what you’re asking.” It was one of the few things he’d taken with him from the winery when he left. Not that he’s done much with it since then. There hasn’t been time, or a reason.
Maybe if he’d remembered that Father liked it when he played–
But he hadn’t.
“If you two played in another concert like that now you’d probably double their earnings,” Rosaria says, smirking slightly – or perhaps it’s meant to be a genuine smile, but she’s never been very good at those. “You could even play the same thing you did back then, for old time’s sake.”
Diluc sets down the glass he’d been cleaning, and now all his attention and expectations are on Kaeya, an unforgiving weight upon his shoulders. “If Kaeya still remembers the piece, I wouldn’t be opposed.”
“Of course I remember,” Kaeya says, before the shock of Diluc agreeing to give up his valuable time for such a thing can paralyse him. “We spent all those hours practising it, how could I ever forget?” He laughs, feigning self-consciousness, and makes himself look at Rosaria because that’s easier than looking at Diluc right now and he needs to look at someone so that they don’t get suspicious. “It took me ages to get that solo right. I don’t think I’d ever forgive myself for forgetting.”
Rosaria hums, sounding almost pleased. “Well, you can think about it.” She tosses back the rest of her drink, dumps her payment unceremoniously on the counter, and leaves without so much as a goodbye, only muttering something to herself about how if she tells the other Sisters that she convinced a Ragnvindr or two to participate in the concert, they might stop pestering her to join the choir again.
It’s almost absurd enough to make him forget that he’s supposed to be spiralling–
But Diluc, as always, sets him back on the right track.
“It’s interesting,” Diluc says.
Kaeya straightens up a little, like he’s squaring up for a fight. “What is?”
“It’s interesting how two people can remember the same thing so differently.” Diluc looks away, but his gaze is bright enough to cut right through the glass in his hand, if he so willed it. “It’s interesting, because I seem to recall you playing that solo near flawlessly on the first try.” He looks back at Kaeya. His gaze is still smouldering. “I was the one who took ages to perfect my solo. The only thing you spent hours doing was reassuring me that it would all be okay in time for the concert.”
That’s what he gets for talking too much. Damn his wine-drunk tongue.
“Oh, is that how it was?” Kaeya tries for that self-conscious laugh again. “I just remember being so nervous when we were playing – I thought I must have been worried about the solo. Perhaps I was more nervous than I let you believe.”
Diluc prolongs the silence for several painful seconds, burning up all the air around them – but in the end, all he says is, “Perhaps,” and then he disappears off into some other corner of the tavern to pick up more empty glasses.
Father used to do the same thing. When he knew Kaeya was lying, he’d never explicitly call him out on the lie – he’d let him stew in his own guilt, in the knowledge that he’d already been seen right through like glass, until Kaeya cracked and tried to make amends on his own, though that rarely included confessing to lying in the first place.
…Father couldn’t have ever been proud of me.
Surely, in spite of everything else he’s lost – surely that one image, that one event, that one memory – surely that, of all things, would’ve been worth holding onto at the cost of everything else.
And if it wasn’t – if Kaeya couldn’t make himself care enough for the only father who ever really cared about him, couldn’t care enough to remember–
Then Father certainly wouldn’t be proud of me now.
“You’re coming round for dinner next Saturday,” Diluc declares on an otherwise ordinary night at the tavern not even a week later, just as Kaeya’s about to head home (before he can be cut off and all but forced to go home, that is). “You’ll be staying the night, too.”
His brother having the audacity to order him around even after giving up his knighthood is hardly a new or noteworthy development, but for such a personal request… “Is this an invitation or a summons?” Kaeya asks, semi-rhetorical. Diluc’s tone hadn’t left much room for speculation in that regard.
“Adelinde wants you there,” Diluc says stiffly. And you know Adelinde’s words hold more weight than any legal summons goes unspoken.
“What’s the occasion?”
Diluc stares right through him. “Adelinde wants you there.”
Can’t imagine why, Kaeya thinks bitterly to himself, but he schools his expression before any of that bitterness can reveal itself, and turns on his heel with a shrug and a half-hearted wave over his shoulder. “Tell her I’m looking forward to it.”
Dinner was a mostly silent – some would say sorry – affair, and yet Adelinde had looked so thoroughly pleased throughout it all, beaming at the two of them like a damn lighthouse. But it’s like all that light is bouncing off the wall he’s put up around himself to stop them from seeing through to the emptiness within, and so all he’s left with is a bright and untouchable sort of cold.
He owes it to her to leave things on a more pleasant note than that, though. “Thank you for the food, Adelinde. It was delicious as always.”
“Oh, Master Kaeya,” she says, smiling even wider, somehow, “you’re far too kind.” Her smile takes on a note of wistfulness, and her eyes shine serenely in the candlelight. “You hardly ever stop by these days, so I had to make your favourites. I’m very glad you enjoyed it. But here,” she says, pushing forward a plate with a slice of lemon and lime cheesecake. “No meal is complete without a good dessert, now is it?”
“Say, Kaeya,” Diluc says, “do you remember the name of that dessert you used to love when you were a child?”
Kaeya pauses halfway through lifting his fork. He looks up and finds that familiar fire in Diluc’s eyes, threatening to burn right through him, through whatever he might dare to say next – and so, with just a touch of defiance, Kaeya smiles back. “You’ll have to be more specific – I’m sure I loved lots of desserts as a child.” He cuts off a tiny triangle of cheesecake with perhaps a touch too much pressure, not stopping the silver from clattering against the spotless porcelain. “You know, as children do.”
Diluc narrows his eyes. “There was one in particular. You can’t have forgotten. It used to take Adelinde a long time to make, but you would ask for it every time regardless.”
He tries to rebuild the memory from scratch – of asking Adelinde to make him a particular dessert. But the blurred and flickering images, the faded and echoing words, all of them slip away before he can so much as extend his hand to them.
It can’t have happened. He wouldn’t have dared. What he remembers is being frightened that Adelinde, with her too-keen powers of observation, would one day look at him at just the wrong angle and all his years of pretending to be something worthy of her love would be for naught. And he made a lot of mistakes as a child, he remembers all that well enough, but he never would’ve tempted such a fate by being so wilful and spoiled and plainly selfish–
“Mille-feuille,” Adelinde says with a quiet gasp that breaks off into soft laughter. “Oh, you did used to love that, didn’t you, Master Kaeya? It was the texture, I think, you couldn’t get enough of it – and you were always so happy to help me put it together.” She sighs, then shakes her head and reaches out to hold his hand. “I can’t believe I completely forgot about that until now. I’ll have to remember to make it next time you visit.” She turns to look at Diluc. “Master, you’ll remind me if I forget, won’t you?”
Diluc doesn’t even acknowledge her. The fire in his eyes would eviscerate them all on the spot if he willed it. Maybe it already has and Kaeya’s just too stupid to realise it.
“Master Diluc?”
“Sure,” Diluc says. “Next time.”
Kaeya opens his mouth to try and salvage what’s left of his facade–
But Diluc’s already noticed his loss for words, and drops the subject like one drops a corpse off a cliff into a darkened sea.
So Kaeya picks at the rest of his cheesecake in silence, and doesn’t lift his head until the meal’s end.
He should’ve known that the blatant attack at dinner wouldn’t be the end of it – but that doesn’t stop him from being startled when Diluc, who’d made himself scarce the instant Adelinde had started clearing away the dinner table, barges into Kaeya’s room just as he’s getting ready for bed.
And of course, in a manner completely becoming of the gentleman who owns the nation’s foremost winery, the first words out of his mouth are, “What’s wrong with you?”
“What’s wrong with you?” Kaeya says, his hands painfully devoid of anything to throw at his most unwelcome intruder. “Ever heard of knocking?”
Diluc all but slams the door behind him, all but pins Kaeya to the wall as he stalks forward. “You’re not leaving until you explain yourself.” He hasn’t raised his voice a decibel above his usual unfeeling tone, but the invisible fire emanating from every inch of him speaks loud enough on his behalf, and Kaeya flinches.
“I don’t know what you’re–”
“The last time you lied so openly to my face, you were deliberately trying to anger me,” Diluc says, somehow towering over him despite being the shorter one between them now. “Well, now you’ve gotten what you wanted.” All the shadows of the night upon his face can’t seem to dim the white-hot glare of his eyes. “Time to return the favour.”
The heat is dizzying – but not so much that Kaeya doesn’t know exactly what he means by ‘the last time’, not so much that the guilt from that moment, forever frozen in some hidden chamber of his heart, doesn’t rush back towards him, a flurry of long-faded flames. His Cryo Vision flares bright on the bedside table, where he’d set it aside in anticipation of sleep, but it does nothing to slow down the rapid rise in temperature between them.
“You always think I’m lying,” Kaeya says weakly, unable to muster up any of his own righteous anger, barely able to push Diluc a millimetre back. “I don’t know what I’ve done to set you off this time, but–”
“Don’t play dumb with me,” Diluc growls. “Save that shit for other people. Not me.”
“I’m not–”
“What kind of fool do you take me for?”
Kaeya, for once, keeps his idiot mouth shut, because Diluc’s caught himself on the edge of his own tumultuous anger now, prey in his own beak, so all that’s left to do is wait for the inevitable verdict to spill from his lips.
“What did you think would happen if you started pretending you didn’t remember a damn thing about our past? What was your endgame here? Did you think I’d take the hint and let you push me away? ‘I don’t even care enough to remember our childhood together, so leave me alone’ – is that what you’ve been trying to tell me?” Diluc barrels on, breathing heavily now. “Did you really think I’d believe it for a single second?”
It’s one thing to think it shrouded in the privacy of his own shame, but to hear it straight from Diluc himself–
“Yeah,” Kaeya whispers, slumping back against the wall, looking to the side, at his dimming Vision. “Yeah, I don’t care. Never did, never will. You’re right.” He lets go of the strangled laugh dying in his throat. “Aren’t you always?”
Diluc’s fire is snuffed out so quickly, the ensuing cold burns more than any real fire could. He steps back, giving Kaeya room to breathe – not like it helps much now, though.
“What?” Diluc says, unnervingly quiet.
“You heard me,” Kaeya says, laughing again, letting the sharpness of it cut his tongue until he can nearly taste blood. “What did you think would happen when you stormed in here? Did you think you’d get me to break down and admit that it was all a lie?” He pushes Diluc back with one finger and it’s almost enough to send him crumpling to the floor. “What’s the use of all that fire if you’re not prepared to endure a truth that can burn you?”
It feels horrifically good to put Diluc on the back foot for a change. His brother looks so small now. “I don’t– what are you saying?”
“You said it yourself, Diluc – I don’t even care enough to remember our childhood–”
“So – you’ve been… pretending to remember?”
The gloating words he’d been waiting to throw in his brother’s face fizzle out like candles in the rain when he catches sight of Diluc’s too-bright eyes shining with something too delicate to acknowledge out loud:
Grief.
It’s a real talent of Diluc’s, getting to the truth behind the truth.
“Kae, I’m not wrong, am I?”
Why does his brother have to say his name like that? Like it means something?
How is it that he’s gone all the way from a furious inferno to a feeble flame, and yet the amount that he cares hasn’t fluctuated in the least? And how are those quietly desperate, pleading words more disarming than any amount of vitriol could ever be?
Diluc’s too-warm fingers wrap around Kaeya’s wrist and stay there. “How much have you forgotten?”
To Kaeya’s own surprise, the answer was waiting on his tongue. “Enough that it doesn’t matter anymore.”
Diluc’s grip tightens. His lips are pressed tightly together, like he’s afraid a single breath will shatter whatever illusions he still has left.
“That can’t be true,” he says, his voice like newly-forged steel. Then he starts to tug Kaeya out of the room without waiting for an answer. “You can’t have forgotten that much. I’ll prove it.”
For all Kaeya’s strength, he’s only really been able to push back at his brother one time when it mattered. Now, he trails in Diluc’s shadow like a wayward ghost until they’re in Diluc’s room, and stands unmoving in that same shadow while Diluc pulls a dusty box from the top of his wardrobe and sets it on the floor. When he’s silently instructed to sit, he does.
“You started this,” Diluc says, almost angrily, gesturing frantically at the box. “You were the one who started keeping random souvenirs from all the things we did together, and I copied you. After doing all of that, you can’t start claiming you don’t remember any of it now.”
He watches listlessly as Diluc pulls out the first item – a little red envelope embossed with gold lettering.
Diluc presses it a bit too eagerly into his hand. “You recognise this, don’t you?”
Kaeya looks between him and the envelope, bemused. “It’s for when adults give money to children during the Lantern Rite. Liyuean tradition.”
Diluc makes a frustrated little noise in the back of his throat. “Father did the same for us. The first time we went. You remember? But I was an idiot and lost mine somehow, but then you gave me yours, and we split the money and never told Father what happened.” He smiles a little. “We ended up spending it all on dumplings or something, and you said they were good but you liked Adelinde’s desserts better.”
Kaeya turns the envelope over, peeks into it as if the memory might be waiting for him inside – but it’s empty. Because they’d spent all the money, just like Diluc had said, and he can’t even remember what seeing all those lanterns for the first time must have looked like, what those dumplings might have tasted like. He can imagine the awe, the wonderment, the childish glee – but it’s all fake. He’ll never know what it felt like again.
“What about this,” Diluc says, plucking the envelope out from between his fingers and shoving a few pages of yellowed sheet music at him instead. “The first thing we ever learned to play together – the thing that made Father suggest we perform in that concert, the one Rosaria was talking about.” He taps insistently at a handful of heavily annotated measures at the start – the introductory, wandering melody of a viola, waiting to be pulled up by the soaring high notes of the violin a few bars later. “This is the solo you took forever to get right – you were always so afraid to start without me.”
Kaeya drags his gaze across the page at a languid pace. The imagined notes fall like rain on damp earth, dull, soundless, devoid of any and all impact.
“You worked so hard on it,” Diluc says, pulling the pages down just enough to get Kaeya to look up at him again. “You– when you finally managed it, you were so pleased with yourself. Father was, too.”
Kaeya shakes his head and laughs that familiarly bitter laugh. “Diluc, this isn’t–”
“Forget that, then – look at this instead,” Diluc says, brandishing a large, coral-red seashell too close to Kaeya’s face, forcing him to sit back further on his heels to save his eye from being taken out. “You remember us collecting seashells, right?”
I just know that we must have – I don’t exactly remember doing it.
When Diluc tells his stories, it sends up a flash of colour in Kaeya’s mind – a crystalfly’s light, bright and pure – but he can never seize it in time before it flickers out of existence forever, leaving nothing but the afterimage of a dying, diffuse glow on the backs of his eyelids.
“This was one of your favourite ones that we ever picked up. We thought we’d lost it, and you dragged me all the way up and down the beach at least twice to try and find it again, before we realised it’d slipped under your towel, somehow, and–” Diluc’s hand tightens around the shell so much that Kaeya’s afraid he’ll cut himself somehow, but Diluc doesn’t seem to care about that – he’s looking at Kaeya with growing helplessness in his eyes, oblivious to how much it hurts to see that look on his face. “Okay – okay, never mind – you’ll definitely remember this next thing. There’s no way you won’t.”
“Diluc–”
“It’s literally impossible,” Diluc asserts, digging through the box and fishing out a thick, worn book bound in blue hardcover. “Open it.”
There’s not much point in arguing with his brother when he sets his mind on something so doggedly like this – the best way to shut him up is to let everything unravel as it should and leave him standing there in a mess of his own making.
Kaeya opens the book with a sigh; it falls open naturally in the middle, on a double spread of pressed flowers.
One calla lily, one lamp grass.
He’d have to be brain-dead to not realise what these are supposed to be.
“Windblumes,” Kaeya says, fidgeting with the stem of the calla lily, listening for the rustle of the tape holding it down.
Diluc – for the first time in forever – laughs. “I knew it,” he says, his words suffused with pure relief, “I knew you–”
“You don’t get it, do you? I don’t actually remember; I just made an educated guess. You’re only wasting your time here.” He tries to close the book–
But Diluc slams his hand down in the centre of the pages and holds it open. “No, you do remember. You must – look at the date, Kaeya. You can’t tell me you don’t remember what’s important about that date.”
He fights the instinct to snap at his brother again, to tell him off for being an obstinate fool once again, and looks down at the lightly smudged ink on the corner of one of the pages. It’s a date from a March nearly fifteen years ago, scrawled in childish handwriting – his own, probably, given how it’s barely legible.
He breathes out slowly. His shoulders slump. It’s another one of those things he knows without remembering. A legal fact with none of the emotional context that made it matter in the first place. “The day I was adopted.”
“Father took us into the city for your first ever Windblume Festival,” Diluc says, leaning forward with renewed fire in his eyes, not stopping to breathe, “and at the end of the day, when we all gave each other our Windblumes, Father handed you the adoption papers as well, and then we went home and Adelinde showed us how to press flowers so that we could keep them forever and we promised that we would keep them forever because” – and then Diluc chokes on his own words, and those fiery eyes dart uselessly between the book, the flowers, their hands on the pages, Kaeya himself, searching for something to hold onto that Kaeya can’t provide – “we never wanted to forget what a perfect day it was, didn’t we?”
Kaeya blinks and ducks his head. The pressed calla lily petals are starting to blend into the off-white page beneath them.
“Kae, do you– you really don’t remember?”
He squeezes his eyes shut.
“Kae, that was the best Windblume Festival of my damn life – it must’ve been up there for you, too – how can you not–”
Kaeya snaps the book shut. “I’m sorry.”
A spot of darkness appears on the previously spotless cover. Then another. Kaeya shoves it aside and buries his face in his hands.
“Kaeya,” Diluc says, though it’s barely audible over the ringing in Kaeya’s ears. “Kae, don’t…”
And then a familiar warmth surrounds him in the form of a strong pair of arms holding him tight, and it’s enough to melt whatever dam Kaeya had tried in vain to put up and the tears begin to flow freely at last.
“It’s okay, Kae–”
“It’s not,” he snaps back, his voice already broken beyond repair, “and you don’t have to pretend it is, and I’m sorry–”
“You don’t have to apologise,” Diluc says, holding him tighter. “But, Kae, I don’t– how is it that you can remember who I am – no, I mean – how is it that you can remember everything about your past except the good times?”
Because it was all too good to be true.
“I don’t deserve to remember,” he mumbles into his brother’s shoulder.
Diluc freezes. Diluc pulls back. Diluc grabs him by the shoulders, with more force than he’s probably ever used to hold Kaeya in his life, and says, in a voice that’s almost as broken as Kaeya’s, “That’s not true and you know it.”
Kaeya tries to wriggle out of Diluc’s increasingly firm hold, but it’s futile.
“Kae, all those good memories are still a part of you, even if you don’t remember them. They still made you who you are today. You deserved to remember them then, and you still deserve them now, but– but they’re not really gone,” Diluc says. He lets go of one of Kaeya’s shoulders and moves to brush the hair out of Kaeya’s uncovered eye, wiping away a tear or two as he goes. “They’ll always be a part of you.”
How can that be true? Don’t you see the person I’ve become, Diluc? Does this really seem like the same person you shared all those good memories with?
“And– it doesn’t matter if you don’t remember them, because we’ll just make better memories in the future,” Diluc says. “And if you forget one of those, we’ll make two more.”
You can pour light into a bottomless well, but that won’t leave you with anything other than darkness in the end.
And no one, not even Diluc, is capable of producing infinite light forever. Not when all Kaeya will do is drain it from him like the parasite he’s always been.
“What about when you get tired of that?”
“I won’t. I never will.” Diluc wipes away another tear, then leans in and presses his lips tenderly against Kaeya’s forehead. “I can promise you that much.”
“You’re wasting your time.”
“I’m not.”
“It won’t change anything.”
“It will.”
Kaeya clutches at the hem of Diluc’s shirt. “It won’t fix the problem.”
“I know.” Diluc pulls Kaeya close again, nestling his head against his shoulder. “But until we figure that out, it’s better than nothing. Right?”
Kaeya closes his eyes again.
“Kae, do you trust me?”
There is one thing he remembers – one good thing, one instinct that no amount of sin has been able to erase: I can always count on my big brother.
He wraps his arms around his brother at last. “I’ll try.”
The Angel’s Share’s roof makes a good viewing point for the fireworks that mark the end of the Windblume Festival. So here they are, leaning back against the newly installed tiles, side by side, matching Windblumes in hand.
(He’d tried to surprise his brother by picking a different flower than he thinks he used to – he hadn’t expected Diluc to do the same.)
(He thinks he remembers Father liking cecilias the best, so perhaps they can excuse it as trying to honour his memory.)
The last firework outshines the stars, but Kaeya hardly notices the end of the show – how could he, when Diluc’s sun-bright eyes are right here in front of him?
“So.” Diluc twirls the cecilia between his thumb and forefinger, studying the fluttering of its petals in the nighttime zephyrs, before lifting those sun-bright eyes to Kaeya. “Do you think you’ll remember this?”
He has no idea how badly Kaeya wishes he could answer in the affirmative, but…
“I don’t know,” Kaeya says, quietly, because it’s hard to be honest out loud.
Diluc draws in a sharp breath–
“But either way,” Kaeya continues, taking his brother’s hand in his, lacing their fingers together and squeezing tight until he can’t tell where one of them ends and the other begins, “I’m glad it happened.”