Goodness, how did the uploading process get more complicated since the last time I was here. Anyway, I'm sorry for not updating my other fics. Please enjoy this one.
I do not own Genshin Impact.
"Sir, I've been running the numbers and noticed something peculiar…" The young knight fidgeted as he stood before Kaeya, a stack of papers clasped tightly in his hands.
"And?" asked Kaeya, not bothering to look up from his own stack of papers currently strewn across his oft abandoned desk.
"Uh, well..." The knight's voice cracked a little as he spoke. "I've discovered that when the drink Death After Noon is out of season, that we have far fewer crime incident reports."
Kaeya suppressed a smirk. "And?"
"I-I-I, well see, I was wondering if you had any insight into that."
If he had to guess, Kaeya imagined that the other man's hands were probably sweating. Afterall, the Cavalry Captain of the Knights of Favonius was an unpredictable man. There was no telling what he might do. He briefly considered messing with the poor lad, but it had been a long day of catching up on paperwork (under strict orders from Jean) and there was a stool at Angel's Share with his name on it. Instead, he stood, reaching across the wide desk to snatch the damp papers from his subordinate's hands. Kaeya feigned a cursory glance over them before letting them fall on top of all the other reports that he would get around to…not today.
"Interesting," said Kaeya, this time unable to hide his wry smirk, "I'll look into it."
Look into it, indeed, Kaeya thought to himself as he cut down yet another hilichurl. Several months had passed since that conversation. Death After Noon was out of season. With nothing better to do, the errant cavalry captain was burning off steam by doing his own self-assigned side missions. In the last week, he had cleared out nearly every hilichurl camp in Mond. Still unable to sit still, he had set off for Dragonspine.
His breath crystalized into small clouds before him as he swung at another enemy. It seemed that he had arrived at the perfect moment. There were far more hilichurls around the base of the mountain than he had ever seen before. Even the intrepid Adventurer's Guild had had to move their camp back to a lower valley. Kaeya huffed as he released a blast of chilled air at a group of hilichurls. The poor creatures, foolish enough to cross a small creek to get to him, froze solid in an instant. With a powerful slash of his sword, he rent the wretches in two, their iced over bodies crumbling into piles of gory rubble.
Satisfied that he had removed any threats from the immediate area, Kaeya turned onto the trail to climb higher into the mountain. The groups he had encountered so far had been weak. He knew that the one organizing them had to be farther up, hiding out at an altitude where few would dare tread.
Kaeya hiked for at least an hour without incident. The occasional slime hopped into his path but was no match for him.
"Maybe my hunch was wrong," he muttered to himself as he mounted a set of crumbling stairs, noting how the temperature dropped several degrees as he climbed higher. With the enemies he had encountered earlier in the day, Kaeya had expected to have at least worked up a sweat by now…regardless of how cold it was. But instead of the howls of angry hilichurls, he only heard the frigid wind whistling past the rocks. Unless the brutes were coordinating some sort of ambush—which seemed highly unlikely—he had wasted his time coming here.
Kaeya sighed, his breath coming out in a billowing cloud.
"Whatever."
The sun was starting to get low, and the weather felt like it might shift at any moment. He would continue around the next bend and then, if nothing interesting presented itself, he would go back down the mountain to sleep in a place where he wouldn't have to worry about losing some fingers to frostbite. Maybe if he was lucky, the kind people at the Adventurer's Guild camp would have a certain out-of-season beverage. Kaeya's mouth watered at the thought.
"Okay, just a little further," he told himself, quickening his pace. A warm bed roll and a drink with good company were sounding better and better. "If there's nothing ahead, you can—"
A sheer rock face jutted out over the path, obscuring what was on the other side of it from view until Kaeya fully rounded the corner. What he found was nothing short of a bloodbath.
Had there been any snow to speak of, Kaeya was certain it would have been stained red; however, he was faced with mostly bare rock but for several patches of slick ice. He stood still for a moment, surveying the area. The piles of hilichurl bodies confirmed his earlier suspicions. There were at least twenty of them strewn about. Closer inspection also found three mitachurls and a couple of Abyss Mages. Kaeya knelt by one of them, brushing his fingers over their broken magical staff.
"Who the hell did all this?" he asked himself quietly.
Rising, he went to look for where the conflict had begun. His tracking skills weren't quite as sharp as Amber's, but he could make do in a pinch. Within a few minutes, he found a patch of snow that had survived the scuffle. It was near a gently sloping rock wall that was a shortcut to a frequently used camping spot. Looking closely, he found boot prints in the snow, along with a spatter of blood drops. A quick check on the other side of the path found a dead hilichurl with a charred crossbow in its hands. The monster was burnt so badly that it was barely recognizable, but the electro arrows still sparked and buzzed in their quiver a foot away. Kaeya grimaced. Those arrows packed a punch, regardless of how strong one was. The group's intended victim must have been stunned and fallen as they had tried to climb away.
He continued up the path, pausing every now and then as he encountered more carnage and more clues as to how the fight had gone. The mystery traveler had held their own, from what he could tell. There wasn't much human blood to be found, though the footprints in the surviving patches of snow revealed that whoever the boot prints belonged to had been limping.
Maybe an injury from the fall while climbing? Kaeya thought as he passed another handful of smoldering monster corpses.
Kaeya paused for a moment before climbing higher to turn and look back. Whoever had been ambushed by this group had made it much farther than he would have expected. This person was strong, though the bodies of their enemies indicated that they were running out of energy. He needed to hurry if he was going to help.
The knight moved faster, each inhale stinging a little as he pushed himself into a higher, colder elevation. Eventually, the hilichurl, samachurl, mitachurl, and mage bodies stopped appearing. Were it not for the footprints and blood trail in the snow, Kaeya might have thought that he had imagined the carnage below. But whoever had fought all of these enemies alone had soldiered on; for what reason, Kaeya couldn't imagine.
When the last of the monster bodies had disappeared behind him, Kaeya paused for a breather. The wind was picking up, it had begun to snow heavily, and his limbs were beginning to tremble from the cold. He teeth chattered as he lifted his hands to blow on his fingers.
Damn, I wish I had worn better gloves.
Doubt began to creep into his mind. Maybe, the mystery warrior had escaped. Maybe, they were fine. Maybe, he was risking his life in the bitter cold for nothing.
Then he saw it.
The howling wind died, allowing the snow to drift gently toward the ground. In that moment, Kaeya caught sight of a small drift stained red with blood. Without a second thought, he rushed forward, dropping to his knees beside the small mound.
"Don't be dead. Don't be dead," he chanted to himself as he cleared away the snow. "I need to know how you did all this alone. Don't be de—"
His hand brushed away a patch of snow to reveal fiery red hair and his breath caught in his throat.
No.
Suddenly, his movements became more frantic. Kaeya hastily shoveled aside one handful of snow after another, his gloves growing cold and sticky from the combination of moisture and blood. Time somehow seemed to slow as he dug. What he knew to be a matter to seconds felt like hours until his fears were confirmed.
Shit. Kaeya clenched his jaw until his teeth hurt. You fool. Diluc, you damn fool.
With numb, shaking hands, Kaeya grabbed the shoulders of the man he had once called his brother and lifted him from the snow.
Diluc's head lolled lifelessly as he was pulled upward. His skin was the kind of pale that one only typically found at a funeral parlor, its lack of color offset by the bluish-purple of his lips and the bruise that was beginning to form around a deep gash on his forehead. As the snow crumbled away around him, Kaeya could see the broken ends of no less than three electro arrows buried in his torso, one near his collarbone and two in his back just below his left shoulder blade. His clothes and hair were frozen almost solid, bringing to mind the small waterfall and stream Kaeya had passed as he tracked Diluc's footprints in the snow.
Swearing under his breath, Kaeya forced himself to stop checking for more injuries. There was nothing he could do on a mountain path with the weather growing worse by the second. He needed to find shelter, then he could take stock of Diluc's injuries.
With a small grunt, he pulled Diluc from the snow and hefted him onto his shoulders in a weird, limp piggy-back ride. It took all of his concentration to not notice how cold the other man's cheek was against his neck or how the broken ends of the arrow sticking out of his chest dug into his back. Kaeya paused for a moment to consider which direction he would go. The increasingly heavier falling snow swirled around him, obstructing his view. The path downward was likely still clear of enemies, but he doubted that Diluc would survive the hours of hiking required to find any sort of shelter. With a small shake of his head, Kaeya turned to look up the path. He wasn't well-versed in this part of the mountain. It was a lot of work to climb this high and he rarely had reason to venture here.
He ground his teeth together. Neither option looked good.
Shifting Diluc higher onto his back, Kaeya turned and began to climb higher. He knew that the climb down definitely would result in the former knight freezing to death, but maybe there was shelter higher up.
The dead weight of Diluc's body pressed down on him as he climbed. The cold seemed to radiate from him, soaking through Kaeya's fur lined cape and into his bones. If he didn't find shelter soon, Kaeya was certain that they would both die.
It was at that moment that he saw it. A warming seelie. Its orange glow reflected off the snow swirling around it, making it appear as a fiery orb floating back and forth across the path. Kaeya hiked Diluc up higher onto his back and rushed toward it. He felt the briefest blast of warmth before it chirped and glided away, leading him farther up the mountain pass.
"Okay then, little guy. You better not get us killed," he muttered, following close behind.
The spirit continued for several meters, leading Kaeya up a small slope, before finally disappearing through a gap in a wall of ice. The cavalry captain didn't hesitate to follow. Whatever might be waiting for him behind the ice couldn't be worse than the weather around him. He ducked through the cramped hole just in time to see the little spirit settle into its court. The seelie pulsed for a moment and then adopted a bright steady glow, illuminating the space.
Kaeya breathed a sigh of relief. The spirit had led him to a cave. And not just any cave, one that had apparently once been a pit stop for adventurers but currently had no other lifeforms inside. Beside the seelie court was a chest with no lock, which Kaeya hoped might contain some supplies. Further back in the small cavern were the remnants of a campsite complete with firewood, a pot, and a makeshift lean-to made from a branch and some tattered fabric.
Shuffling to the back of the cave, Kaeya knelt and settled Diluc as gently as he could under the lean-to. He paused before checking out more of the cave to press his fingers against the redhead's neck. He held his breath as he waited to feel the pulse, finally breathing a sigh of relief when he felt a faint flutter under his fingertips. Diluc wasn't out of the woods, but at least he was alive. For now.
Standing, Kaeya moved over to the chest beside the seelie. Even in the short amount of time they had been there, the little spirit had already warmed the cave by several degrees. If he could get a fire going, he might be able to thaw the layer of ice that coated Diluc's body. The chest was old, the brittle metal that remained of its hinges cracking and crumbling as Kaeya pulled the lid open. Inside, he found a small stack of Mora, a few scrolls, a blanket, and some frozen meat.
"Better than nothing," Kaeya mumbled to himself as he pulled out the contents.
He set the blanket beside Diluc, and the meat and scrolls beside the old fire pit. He pocketed the Mora. Then, he drew his sword and went about breaking down the chest into pieces, eventually finding himself with a decently sized pile of wood. Without pausing in the least, Kaeya built a small fire, tucking a couple of the scrolls amongst the old wood to serve as kindling. Luckily, he still carried his flint in his pocket and the wood was decently dry. In a matter of no time, a small fire crackled to life in the cave, lighting up the walls and raising the temperature to a comfortable level. Kaeya eyed the seelie for a moment. If it stayed in place, he could burn the fire low and still keep both he and Diluc alive.
"You stay put, okay?" he asked.
The seelie chirped happily and flared for a moment.
Kaeya nodded. "Good."
Then he turned to face Diluc. Had he not felt the other man's pulse with his own fingers mere moments before, he would have thought he was dead. Clenching his jaw in determination, he knelt beside him. Diluc's frozen clothing crackled and creaked as Kaeya pulled it away from his skin, revealing more pale flesh muddled with bruises and raw from the cold. His injuries were extensive. Sword and knife gashes slashed through his torso, and the arrows that had been visible outside Diluc's clothing penetrated even deeper than appearances had initially indicated. The angle of his arm betrayed a dislocated left shoulder, while a nasty cut to the thigh and a swollen ankle explained the limping tracks Kaeya had found in the snow. Treating these injuries in a cave on Dragonspine would mean some serious scars and a lot of pain.
"Don't get mad at me," Kaeya muttered. "You brought this on yourself."
The first thing Diluc noticed was the pain. Everything hurt. His head throbbed in time with each beat of his heart and his ribs ached in a way that betrayed some deeper injuries. He considered trying to sit up to take better stock of his own condition, but everything felt too difficult, and he was too tired. Wherever he was, he had been kept alive. Whoever had found him had even dressed his wounds. He wasn't in any immediate danger. Instead, Diluc laid still, thinking back on how he had gotten himself into his current predicament.
He couldn't believe he had let a group of hilichurls get the better of him, even if they had been led by someone with higher intelligence. Through his various connections, he had received information that the Fatui were up to something on Dragonspine. Without a second thought, Diluc had packed some provisions and set out to track them down. He was tired of dealing with only the Abyss Mages. It was time that he got his hands on someone with real power to interrogate.
The wind and the weather on the inhospitable mountain had been worse than he had predicted. Diluc was caught by surprise when the first electro arrow buried itself in his back as he climbed up a shortcut to shelter. It had stunned him long enough for another to find its mark beside the first, causing him to lose his grip on the rock and fall to the path below.
He had felt his ankle roll and crumble from the impact of the landing, giving the crossbow-wielding hilichurl the chance to land one more shot before it was dispatched with a wall of fire. He would have still managed against the rabble of monsters, even with the injuries from his fall, had it not been for the mysterious figure that aided them. Diluc had made out just enough to know that the ringleader was a tall man and likely Fatui. He had seemed to flit in and out of existence in the swirling snow, landing one precise hit after another with his blades. Diluc was certain that he had managed to injure the other man as well, remembering how a mitachurl had used his fight with the nearly invisible Fatui as an opening to grab him by the arm and throw him. He remembered the sickening pop with which his arm was removed from its socket, but what was worse was the sight of his real prey retreating farther up the mountain as the remaining monsters converged on him. He had dispatched them as quickly as he could before giving chase. Unfortunately, the weather had grown worse as he climbed and more of the Fatui's minions were sent down to meet him. Even injured as he was, he had managed to knock one large recruit over the sheer edge of the path, his scream echoing as he tumbled down the side of the mountain.
Diluc had followed the path for as long as he could. He recalled slipping on the wet rocks in a mountain stream and how much more impossible it felt to breathe as his wet clothes froze to his flesh. He wasn't sure how far he had made it after that. His lungs had burned with each breath until he finally could go no further. The last thing he remembered was the feeling of cold stone beneath his cheek as the snow piled up around him.
Which brought him back to his current predicament. Wherever he was, it was significantly warmer than where he had fallen. That aside, his limbs felt stiff and numb, making it difficult to move. Diluc shifted slightly where he lay and realized that his clothes were gone. Instead, he was covered by a rough wool blanket and…something else. Whatever it was had fur on it. It tickled his chin and nose every time he breathed in. He groaned softly in annoyance.
Something moved not far from him in response to the sound. Diluc heard the soft rustle of fabric and light footsteps as someone walked over to him. Leather creaked as the person crouched beside him, then Diluc felt cool fingers brush aside his hair to feel his forehead. He slowly opened his eyes, hoping to subtly catch a glimpse at who had found him.
His vision was blurry as his eyes adjusted to the dim light around him, but he still managed to make out a few details. Namely, the tanned skin, teal hair, and ridiculous eye patch. Diluc frowned.
"Kaeya?" His voice came out in a pathetic rasp.
The smirk on Kaeya's face made him look entirely too satisfied for Diluc's taste. "You're awake. Good."
"What are you doing here?" asked Diluc.
"You have a bit of a fever," answered the knight, pulling his hand away, "but it's better than the ice block you were before."
"That doesn't answer my question."
"I thought you were a goner for awhile there," said Kaeya as he stood and walked back over to a small fire. Next to it, Diluc could see his clothes draped over some rocks to dry. Kaeya bent to retrieve a water skin from the ground. "I should have known that you were harder to kill than that."
Diluc frowned. Kaeya was being as evasive as ever. He supposed that he should count himself lucky that they were both fighting for the same side...probably.
"You know, if you actually had friends, you wouldn't find yourself in these situations," Kaeya teased as he returned to Diluc's side. He knelt beside him, threading an arm around his shoulders to help him sit up.
Diluc grunted as broken ribs and bandaged injuries were forced to move. The woolen blanket bunched up in his lap, but the fur stayed put. It was then that he realized that Kaeya had tied his ridiculous cape around him as a makeshift sling.
Kaeya lifted the waterskin to his former comrade's lips. "Drink."
Diluc considered resisting simply for the sake of being petty, but he was too thirsty. He gave Kaeya a small nod and allowed him to pour some of the liquid into his mouth, only to immediately cough as the bitter taste of a dark, dry wine flooded his tongue.
"Why do you have wine in your waterskin?" sputtered Diluc after just barely managing to swallow.
"What else would I have?" Kaeya raised his eyebrows.
"Don't mock me," Diluc bit back.
"Oh, I'm sorry," said Kaeya with a derisive smirk. He put down the wineskin and picked up one with water inside. He uncorked it and poured some into his patient's mouth. "I didn't realize that His Highness disliked his own product so much."
"You're intolerable."
"The feeling's mutual."
Diluc scowled. "You didn't answer my question before. What are you doing here?"
"Oh, you know." Kaeya shrugged and laid Diluc back down on what he now realized to be a Knights of Favonius-issued bed roll. "I had nothing better to do, so I thought I'd go for a relaxing hike. Lucky for you that I did, otherwise you'd be frozen solid by now."
Diluc rolled his eyes. He should have known better than to ask. "Where are we, anyway?"
"A cave."
"Gods, you're difficult." Diluc turned his head to glare at Kaeya as he poked at something in the fire. "A cave where?"
"I'd say about three-quarters of the way up Dragonspine. It's hard to tell, given the weather. Who knows; we may even be on the Liyue side. You seemed like you might croak at any second, so I followed that little guy here," explained Kaeya, lifting the stick he had been using to poke the fire to point at a little warming seelie perched nearby. The spirit chirped happily at the attention. "I'd say that between the two of us, we have enough provisions to last a couple of days, though the firewood will run out by tomorrow. I'll know more about our location when the storm outside clears."
With that, Kaeya focused back on the fire. From the smell that was beginning to fill the small space, he was cooking boar meat.
Diluc sighed, silently cursing his rotten luck. Kaeya was right to plan for them to stay put for at least a couple of days. As much as he wished for things to be different, he wouldn't be fit to travel down the mountain until then, even if the cavalry captain carried him the whole way. Why did it have to be him, of all people?
"You should try to get some sleep," said Kaeya, pulling Diluc from his thoughts. "You need the rest and lying there glaring at me won't make you heal any faster. I'll wake you up when the food's ready."
Diluc swallowed his retort. Kaeya was right. He could already feel sleep making his eyelids heavy. "Just...don't…"
"Yeah, yeah. I know."
Kaeya felt himself relax as Diluc drifted off to sleep. Knowing that the other man was stable enough to wake up and talk to him was a relief. He continued to glance over at him every now and then as he cooked, noting how the blanket that covered him rose and fell more steadily than before. As long as the storm let up before they ran out of food, both of them would make it back down the mountain alive.
Once the boar steaks were cooked through, Kaeya moved them to the edge of the fire to stay warm and then turned toward Diluc's things. There had been a time when they had once trusted each other completely. They had been foster brothers as children, growing into two halves of one whole as they matured. Kaeya had even loved the other man once, though judging by how his heart had lept when he'd found Diluc in the snow, it was hard to tell how much had changed.
Diluc's words as he drifted off to sleep could have been the beginning of any number of commands. Kaeya couldn't be sure what he had meant to say, but he was sure that there was likely valuable intel hidden away in his bag. He glanced over his shoulder at Diluc. He was still sleeping. Good.
"This stays between you and me, okay?" Kaeya whispered to the seelie as he carefully lifted the flap on the bag.
The ice on the bag had melted in the warmth of the cave, leaving the supple leather damp to the touch. Likewise, water dripped from the clothing Kaeya had stretched over the nearby rocks. Small puddles had formed around all of Diluc's things, the water reflecting the cave ceiling above.
"I should get everything out of here before it gets ruined, anyway," he rationalized.
The seelie remained silent, its warm glow only pulsing slightly. Kaeya had never felt so judged.
"You know, you're better at making me feel guilty than all the nuns in the Mondstadt Cathedral combined." Kaeya chuckled softly at the thought as he pulled one item after another from Diluc's bag.
All told, he found a map, a compass, a whet stone, and some letters. The rest was standard traveler fare: a bed roll (also dripping wet), some dried meat and fruit, and spare socks. Kaeya laid out the bed roll and socks to dry along with the rest of Diluc's clothes, maybe as penance for his snooping. Then he picked up one of the letters, bringing it closer to the fire.
Unfortunately, the ink had begun to bleed from the excessive moisture, though even if it hadn't, the knight doubted that he would have been able to read it. It was in some sort of code that he had never seen before. Kaeya cursed under his breath. If only he had brought some paper and a quill with him, he could have copied this down to decipher later. Had this bag belonged to anyone else, he would have easily been able to steal one, but Diluc's attention to detail was too great. He would notice right away.
"You win this round, Darknight Hero," he muttered, putting down the letter and unfolding Diluc's map. His eyebrows rose as he looked it over. "Now, what do we have here?"
There were several secluded locations circled on the map, including a spot on Dragonspine. Kaeya knew that Diluc had it out for the Fatui. Could these be strongholds of some kind? He quickly committed the Mondstadt locations to memory-ignoring the Liyue ones-and dropped the map as he heard Diluc begin to stir. He moved back to the fire, picking up one of the steaks and wrapping it in a cabbage leaf from his own provisions.
"What are you doing?" Diluc asked, his voice low and dangerous.
Kaeya turned and smiled at him. "What do you mean? I told you, I'm cooking dinner."
Diluc deadpanned at him. "You went through my things."
"Only so they could dry. Otherwise, they'd be ruined."
Kaeya moved to his side and helped him sit up again, pressing the wrapped steak into his free hand.
"Don't treat me like one of your dimwitted recruits," growled Diluc, his voice tight from the strain required to sit up. "We know each other too well for that act to work on me."
"Fine, you caught me," said Kaeya with a light laugh. "Can you really blame me? You always know all the best gossip."
He reached to the side to pull his own, significantly drier, bag over, putting it behind Diluc to help him sit up.
"Besides," he continued, "I couldn't read any of it, anyway."
"That's generally the point of writing in code," muttered Diluc, taking a small bite of his food. He chewed slowly, his sullen gaze never leaving Kaeya. "Glad to know that it worked."
Kaeya moved back to the fire, sitting next to it and picking up his own meal. "Care to teach me?"
"No."
The cavalry captain shrugged. It was worth a shot.
The two of them ate in awkward silence for several minutes, the sound of their chewing only interrupted by the water dripping from Diluc's clothing to the ground and the occasional gust of wind outside the cave entrance. Kaeya couldn't help but to remember the adventures they had gone on when they were younger. The two of them had once been capable of getting into and out of a lot of trouble. This wasn't the first time one of them had nearly died, nor their first time camping together, though it had been years since their last joint excursion.
"Hey, remember the time you were almost killed by that huge cryo slime?" asked Kaeya, unable to bear the silence for any longer.
"That was you," answered Diluc without looking at him.
"You sure?"
"Obviously." Diluc took a bite of the boar steak. "It was before you had your Vision."
Kaeya turned to him with a shocked expression. "Did the suave Master Diluc just speak with his mouth full?"
"Shut up. Don't change the subject."
"Okay, okay." Kaeya laughed. "How did we get into that mess? You got us lost, right?"
"You decided to try to glide from Starsnatch Cliff to Stormbearer Point and dropped out of the sky right into a nest of them," growled Diluc. "You were always doing such reckless things on a whim and dragging me into it, getting injured, risking your life and others', creating problems for Father…"
He trailed off and Kaeya could have sworn that he saw his jaw clench.
"How much trouble could I have really caused? It's not like he ever kicked me out or un-adopted me or-"
"Don't do that," Diluc snapped.
"Do what?"
"Talk about him."
"Why not?" asked Kaeya. "You aren't the authority on who gets to talk about him. He raised me too."
Diluc shot Kaeya a glare that would have preempted death, had he been strong enough to stand. The grip he had on his dinner looked more similar to how one would hold a sword than food. Kaeya decided to press his luck a little further.
"Have you ever considered that it would be good for you to talk about what happened? Get everything off your chest?"
"Shut up."
"Why? Am I making you uncomfortable? You're so busy running from his memory that you're going to get yourself killed."
"SHUT UP." Diluc's voice echoed around the cave. The seelie's light flickered for a moment.
"Fine." Kaeya shrugged and casually leaned back against the cave wall. "I just think talking about it would be better for you than walking around angry all the time."
"It's better than being a drunk."
"Oh? You've got an opinion on my drinking, do you, wine mogul of Mondstadt?" Kaeya picked up his skin and took a swig of wine. "I'll tell you what, when you decide that you're going to stop being an insufferable grump and talk about things, I'll give up drinking."
Diluc didn't answer.
"It's lucky for me that you're so godsforsaken stubborn," laughed Kaeya, taking another drink. "I really like your product. It would be a pain to give it up."
More silence.
Kaeya sighed. "Fine, fine. I'll change the subject. What do you want to talk about?"
Diluc shrugged, seemingly intent to examine the veins on the cabbage leaf.
"Aw, come on. You can't make me keep the conversation going all by myself."
"Never stopped you before." Diluc's voice was flat.
"Whoa, whoa, whoa. That's unfair." Kaeya sat up a little straighter. "I seem to recall a certain someone that used to talk the ears off of any winery guest that would listen."
"Yeah, well…"
"You've done the somber act for too long. All of your conversational skills have gone right out the window."
"Untrue. I just don't want to talk to you, is all."
"Well, sorry," said Kaeya. "I'm all you've got, right now."
The awkward silence returned. Refusing to back down, Kaeya finished his boar steak and put another piece of wood on the fire. Several painful minutes passed before Diluc finally spoke.
"...you've gotten better at cooking boar…"
"Yeah?" Kaeya couldn't help but smile a little. "I'm glad you like it."
"I didn't say I liked it. I'm just saying you're better at cooking it." The traces of a smirk pulled at the corners of Diluc's mouth. "It's barely even burned this time. You could almost call it edible."
Kaeya feigned a wince. "Ouch. Thanks, I guess."
"Don't mention it."
Diluc was still staring down at the steak in his hand, but something about his expression had softened. He looked almost wistful. Kaeya sighed and leaned back against the cave wall once again, looking up at the firelight playing across the stone ceiling.
Maybe his excursion up Dragonspine wouldn't be a waste of time, after all.
To be continued...
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