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“So here you stand. Too foreign for home, too foreign for here. Never enough for both.”
— Ljeom Umebinyuo, Diaspora Blues
Kaeya runs, blood splattering upon the wet ground from his shoulder, with desperate pants of breath leaving his lungs. He clutches at his wounded shoulder, the whisps of smoke lingering on his torn jacket, seared and ruined with blood. Rain tumbles down, the heavens pelting him with watery bullets as he makes his way to the grassy hills of Windrise. He stumbles and lets out a broken noise, half-sob half-whimper, as his foot gets caught on a rock.
Nonetheless, he rights himself and pushes through the pain seizing his leg, slipping as the mud becomes increasingly wet, and claws at his feet and ankles, begging him to stop. He lets out an enraged noise and pushed forward once more, with more vigour and desperation as he clambers up to the Archon’s Statue, his newly bestowed vision knocking against his thigh with every step, cold seeping into his muscles at every tap.
He gazes up at the statue, breath caught in his chest, as something seizes him. A desperation he’s felt only once before when he barely came up to his father’s knees and was being sent on a mission to restore glory of a once-great nation as a round-faced eight-year-old. The same rhythm hammers in his chest as he stares up at Barbatos’ outstretched hands and divine wings, captured in stone older than the trees that swayed with the winds or the waters that flowed in the river.
He’s felt this familiar rhythm in his chest once before, when he was silently begging for his father not to abandon him in a foreign land, hefted with the weight of a purpose he barely understood. The words never made it out of his throat back then, too afraid of disappointing his then-father with cries that he just wanted to go home.
He collapses on his knees, hitting the stone painfully but he pays no mind to the sensation and instead keeps his one eye focused on the statue. He didn’t believe in the Archons. He knew they were real, but he never really believed in them. The Geo Archon may descend every so often to accept offerings from his people, and the Electro Archon may reside in her chambers, overlooking the entirety of Inazuma, but to him, a Khaenri’ahn who was brought up godless the moment he took his first breath, they were nothing but distant figures. Figures of destruction, war, wealth and power but not of belief.
When a Khaenri’ahn child is brought into the world, the first words uttered are not a thanks to the archons but a soft greeting to the newborn, soothing it’s cries and promising protection and love. Kaeya barely remembers Khaenri’ah as it is, but the promise made to him as he was barely able to even lift his own neck, screaming and bathed in his mother’s blood, is proof enough that Khaenri’ahn’s do not rely on godhood, but the hearts thumping under their chests.
They had no need for the Gods when they were able to do just as much with their own mortal abilities. They had no need to sing prayers to the Archons or offer sweet fruits and delicacies to them when they were able to bring about their own blessings with the ingenuity and labour the Archons had never known.
Khaenri’ah was glory itself, and it's advances and progress came solely from the calloused hands and unbreakable pride of millions. He carries that faithlessness with him even to this day; he owes no thanks or words of adoration for the archons that tore his homeland apart. He is not favoured by the divine beings of power and glory. He is cursed by a wrath that felled an entire nation to dust.
And yet Kaeya sits, prostrating to a statue of an Archon as if the blood of non-believers doesn’t flow through him - isn’t leaking out of his arm right now and staining the divinity of the stone beneath him. It’s blasphemous for him to even dare kneel here, stare up at the statue the way thousands have before, but only through him does the remnants of godless souls remain.
Kaeya’s used to leaving things behind, giving them up as easy as severing limbs from a body. He’s given up his life in Khaenri’ah, given up his heritage, forsaken every connection to them, all for his duty, pressed upon him with his father’s shaky hands upon his naïve eight-year-old shoulders, heavy with a burden that held the dream of millions. He kneels here, and once again he’s leaving something behind, giving up his faithlessness with a bow of his head that would make his ancestors scream in horror and disgust. He’s letting them down, he knows, but the weight upon his heart holds him down far stronger than the one upon his shoulders ever has.
“Lord Barbatos,” he starts out, but the words are stolen away by howling winds and fall of rain.
He clears his throat and tries again, "Lord Barbatos, I’m not a worshipper, not a follower and I barely get by without sneering at the praises they sing you most days,” he confesses quietly, tracing the lines of the Archon’s face with his eye, feeling his hands involuntarily shake as he presses on.
“You and the other Archons despise my people on the principle that we don’t bow our heads to revere you. The blood of non-believers flows through me, and my people have scorned you and the Archons for centuries. In turn you have punished us by wiping all traces of Khaenri’ah from this world.”
“I don’t have any mora to offer or sunsettia’s. But I’m here and I’m bowing my head for you and I’m asking—“ he cuts himself off and screws his eye shut, as his hand that had been clutching at his bleeding shoulder drops down and grasps at the slick stone steps of the statue to hold himself up, as if gravity itself were trying to force him to press his forehead to the cold stone and beg for the mercy of the divine.
“I am begging for you to let me keep my brother,” he says and the words are whispered and hoarse, carried away by the violent winds.
“Please— He’s all I’ve got left,” he scrambles to say, tears mingling in with the raindrops that cascade down his cheeks. He discards the pride that’s been thrust upon him since he was born, and sits there, broken and barren as Khaenri’ah was on the day of the cataclysm, begging for a mercy he knows he doesn’t deserve.
“I know it was wrong. It was wrong to keep it from him - from both of them - for so long, but I didn’t want— I couldn’t do it.” When they break open his ribs one day, they will only ever find his devotion to Diluc left behind, burned into him and stark against the ivory cast of his body. They may question his loyalty to Mondstadt, but his love for his brother is something they will never be able to tear from his hands; it’ll remain in his grip even as his body decays and the bones fall away.
“Not when they were— are everything to me. I couldn’t hurt them like that,” and he feels his hand ball up into a fist at his slip up. Crepus is dead, that much was true but that didn’t mean Kaeya’s entire being didn’t ache for another hug of his adoptive father, for the touch of his hand upon his head, or for the comfort of knowing he still had a father who loved him more than to promise him to martyrdom.
“But now— Now he knows and he’s going to leave. I know it. He’ll chase after the Fatui and he’ll leave me alone,” Kaeya clutches at his chest, and it's like his own heart is threatening to rip its way out and lay at the statue’s feet, a worthless offering if any. He knows nothing of absolution or penance, but if Barbatos descended at this moment and demand Kaeya cut his own heart out as offering, he knows the taste of metal would grace his skin before the Archon could finish his words.
“And— I’m just so tired of people leaving me,” he confesses lowly, sucking in a deep breath as his other hand comes up from clutching at the stone to his vision. It’s cold to touch with a chill that reaches his bones and sits there as he unclasps it from his belt where he’d haphazardly placed it.
Kaeya brings it to his face and its gleaming blue is divine in a way that can’t be recreated, not even by delusions. He holds an object, forged by Celestia herself, and its holiness sears into his palms, branding him a traitor to his people as he holds a God’s blessings in his delicate hands.
There’s a splatter of blood across it, and he wipes a wet sleeve over the glassy surface and watches as it leaves red streaks behind; the blood of a Khaenri’ahn that’s been blessed by the Archons. His eye is reflected back at him as he gazes at the vision. The eye of a traitor stares back at him, deep indigo with the tell-tale diamond of an iris — a curse from his ancestors. He used to love his eyes when he was younger, fascinated by them.
(“I’ve got your eyes mama,” he whispers to his mother behind him, braiding his hair with gentle hands.
“A gift from your ancestors,” she says fondly, meeting his eyes in the reflection of the mirror.
“A gift,” he repeats, proudly beaming up at her.)
Now the eye just reminds him of everything he’s lost. Gone is the pride of being Khaenri’ahn when he sees it. All that’s left is the suffocating duty tying him to his homeland, the betrayal he breathes out with every exhale in Mondstadt, and the desperate tug of his past and current homelands vying for his loyalty.
“You gave me this to protect me, right?” He murmurs as he stares at the vision, fingers curled around it and he’s not sure if he wants to hold it close to his chest or hurl it out into the river. It’s a promise of acceptance. It brands him a traitor to Khaenri’ah.
“To show him that you know where my allegiance lies. The trust you have in me to gift me power that I could use to fell the nations and Gods that ruined my homeland,” he spits out. He’s angry and vengeful, but he knows even as the words spill out into the empty fields, he would never hurt Mondstadt. He may despise the Archons for their hand in bringing down Khaenri’ah, but Mondstadt was still his home, the Manor was still his home, Diluc was still his home.
He wants to hate the Archon, for giving him a vision that seemed to widen the gap between him and his brother even further. He wants to despise Barbatos for mocking him with that bright blue shimmer that promises the protection and acceptance of one of the Seven. The archon should have let Diluc kill him if it meant he wouldn’t have had to betray his only brother and his dead ancestors all at once. He wants to scream and cry and curse Barbatos but in the end he sits there, still as the statue before him.
“Please, just don’t let him hate me,” his hands clutching the cold vision as if it were a lifeline, “it’s all I’ll ever ask from you,” Kaeya promises, but all he gets in return is wind and rain.
There is no change — no sudden light, nor divinity of any kind. There is no sign that the Archon had even deigned to listen to the cursed non-believer that lays begging at his statue, nor heeded the worthless promises of a boy with nothing to offer but inherited devastation.
He’s desperate and it feels like his world is ending so he stays there, hunched over and crying, begging over and over again with thousands of promises to just have a brother who still loves him. Dying men have gone to their graves quieter than the way he begs to the statue, godless blood spilling all over the platform beneath him, and along with it the pleads of thousands before him screaming at him to stop his lunacy.
His bones creak under the weight of his ancestors that live within him, that stare back at him every time he looks in the mirror, and that haunt his dreams. “You’ve forgotten your duty,” they hiss at him, and he pleads with them that they don’t know what he’s found here — a home, a family. He has a body of thousands begging not to be forgotten and yet he stays there, eye shut in supplication despite the ghosts grappling at his back.
He thinks of Diluc, 10 years old, barely any taller than him with wild red hair fanning out of a much too loose ponytail, offering him a warm hand and an even warmer smile.
He thinks of Diluc, barely 12 and throwing open the sheets of his bed for Kaeya to crawl into after he’d had yet another nightmare.
He thinks of Diluc, 14 and rebellious, as he convinces Kaeya to sneak out with him in the dead of the night to go see the crystalflies by the river – they’d been met with a month-long grounding from Crepus and a disappointed look from Adelinde that almost had Kaeya bursting out in tears.
He thinks of Diluc, 17 and all broad shoulders, with all his baby fat and chubby cheeks replaced with a refined jaw, staring up at Varka from where he’s kneeling on the floor of the Cathedral as he’s sworn in as Cavalry Captain.
He thinks of Diluc just yesterday, refusing to let him have the last grilled fish tiger, holding it out of his reach and over his head with a taunting smile that soon changed into surprise as Kaeya tackled him to the ground .
He would forsake it all; his duty to Khaenri’ah, his vision, his own life, for Diluc. He may not have faith in the Archons, but he believes in Diluc like he’s his religion. Diluc was the first person to accept him, who gifted him a smile just because, to hold his hand when he was afraid of the storms.
He thinks of a future where his older brother is no longer his older brother and they’re once again strangers, as if he weren’t privy to all of Diluc’s whims and secrets once upon a time. He thinks and he thinks, and he thinks as he sits there whispering broken promises and desperate pleads to an Archon that spilt blood so old that the world no longer remembers it.
Dawn is breaking, and the rain is finally letting up. The first rays of sunlight are brushing against his skin, as if trying to comfort him and wipe his tear-stained cheeks. He’s been sat there for hours and his legs have gone numb, his back aching from how he’s still hunched over his vision.
He shakily unclenches his fingers from where they’re tightly bound around his vision, and he can feel them creak in protest. He cups the vision instead in his palms, as if locked in prayer and he finally lifts his head to stare up at the statue.
It still has its outstretched hands and divine wings, and Kaeya defeatedly thinks that his prayers have gone unanswered, when a soft caress of wind ruffles his hair. A calmness envelopes him like a gentle hug with the memory of a mother years ago and his heart finally stops beating that drum of desperation.
A whisper reaches his ears melodious and almost familiar in a way he can’t pinpoint before it’s gone just as quickly.
“Go home, Kaeya,” it says.
And so, he does, that familiar curse to hold the weight he can’t bear dragging along with him. But he does, because he has to.