Stardust

D I L U C

Some Years Prior, Snezhnaya, Amidst the Mountains

Diluc knew cold.

He knew its nips and its bites. He knew its sleepy song and numbing pinpricks. Mostly he knew its cruelty.

Here, bleeding out in the Schneznayan snow, Diluc wondered. Diluc thought about a lot of things, but mostly if Kaeya would ever forgive him. Dying here certainly wouldn't help his case. 

"Kae," he coughed, trying to clear the wet feeling from his lungs. Diluc had not uttered the name in two years. Now, in the freezing cold, he wished he had said it every day. More than anything, Diluc wished he stayed.

He wondered how bad the burns were on Kaeya's body, feeling that freezing cold digging into the scars on his back. He didn't even remember getting them.

"I don't know how it's going to heal with the scar tissue already there..." Diluc jerked up, he knew where every blade that kissed his skin had been and there was nothing there. There shouldn't be.

He winced as the man brought a mirror, holding the bandages. Diluc felt his lungs freeze, as his eyes found the chains of ice woven into his skin. Of course he didn't remember this one. He carved it himself the night he lost his mind. When he shattered so much more than just his back.

Whenever he thought about Kaeya, it felt like frostbite. Now, it was just a whisper against all the swimming around in his head. Thoughts. Feelings. Pain.

Mostly pain.

Over a hundred dead by his hands and he still could not erase the feeling of cutting into his brother. Over a hundred dead by his hands and he was no closer to avenging his father. A father who, as he discovered more and more, dug his own grave by seeking the powers of the gods.

Diluc did not like to think about Crepus. That would mean confronting the facts. Facts he did not want to accept.

Crepus Raginvindr was a good man.

Crepus Raginvindr was jealous of his son's vision.

Crepus Raginvindr was naive enough to invest in Fatui research.

Crepus Raginvindr was fool enough to buy a delusion.

Crepus Raginvindr died as he lived and breathed–for his sons.

Crepus Raginvinr was a liar. He taught his sons well.

Diluc now knew how bottomless truth was. A well but he could never find its bottom.

Only fall deeper and deeper into it.

It was funny that Diluc would understand Kaeya only at the end. How they mirrored each other in more ways than he would ever get the chance to count.

Childhood is built on the lies of adults. That's the anguish of becoming an adult. Kaeya arrived on the Raginvindr doorstep as an adult. He was young, small, and weak.

Kaeya did not lie because he hated Diluc. He lied because he was a child forced to be an adult. He lied because doing so was the only way to protect Diluc's ability to stay one.

Diluc said thank you by trying to kill him.

Because he never asked for that. He never asked for his brother to leave him behind. 'I do hate him, just a bit,'  Diluc laughed into the frost. Even now he could not deny it. 'Maybe if I had managed to grow up sooner, I could have purged the darkness. I could have seen the signs.'

That's what haunts Diluc—did Kaeya know their dad had the delusion? Could he have stopped it? Why didn't he? 

Diluc doesn't want to know. 

Diluc wanted to know.

Diluc was never the decisive type. 

More than anything, Diluc could admit to himself that he wanted to believe Kaeya did not know about Crepus's plans. That there was no way he would be able to sense archon residue so steeped in their house Diluc could still feel it after three years.

Diluc remembered turning to see Kaeya there, laughing, as their father's eyes turned cold. Back then, it fueled his rage. Now, he wondered--why did Kaeya laugh?

"To think even a man like father would fall to a delusion, how interesting." Kaeya giggled, the words tumbling out and crashing into a blood-stained Diluc. Did he even know what he was saying? Diluc took it for shock, than hatred, but only now could he see it for the heartbreak it was.

Kaeya only called things interesting when he could not handle them. Like the bright sun that he could not bear to stay underneath his first few months in Mondstadt. Like the rich foods Adelinde begged him to eat and Kaeya could barely keep down even when he did.

Diluc remembered picking it up. Their secret code. Whenever one of them couldn't handle something, could not admit how bad it was, they would say that.

"Alright, Diluc?" Kaeya would ask.

"It's interesting, to say the least." Diluc would smirk. Then they would spar until something made sense. But since that day, nothing had.

Not killing the Fatui. Not keeping them alive. Not the information slipping through his hands nor the regrets pilling up on his back.

'Is this what it was like for Kaeya? To live crushed by the weight of it all?'

"Kae, m' sorry," Diluc muttered again, trying to shift his hands over the pouring blood only to realize a pair of hands were already there. 'What?'

He squirmed, struggling to fight them off, until he realized something about these hands felt familiar. Not quite the same, but definitely belonging to him. He would recognize that presence anywhere. "Kaeya?"

The hands jerked, and there was mumbling, but Diluc could not focus. Death was making him awfully sentimental.

"I didn't mean it," Diluc grunted. "I didn't mean it." He wished he heard what Kaeya said back, but the cold took everything. His senses and his reason. 'There is no excuse...'

Diluc thought death was empty.

Then a shock brought his eyes open and he was writhing on a table.

"Ahh, you're awake," a calm voice said, and Diluc could hear the scratch of a quill as a blonde man took notes. "Experiment successful."

"Who?" Diluc muttered, trying to blink away the pain of overloads shivering up his spine. He turned only to see a head of gold and eyes so blue, Diluc did not know how he mistook them. They were nothing like the ones he conjured on the mountain.

"Who are you?"

The man sat his pen down, eyes not matching the soft smile on his face, as he approached the table.

"Nevermind that," Albedo said. His face was calm, but Diluc's hairs stood up on the back of his neck as the doctor looked at him. He was just another experiment. "Tell me more about this brother of yours. Tell me about Kaeya."