For all the years Jean had known him, Kaeya Alberich simply did not cry. Not when a group of vicious kids bullied him at school when he was ten years old, or when he emerged from a fight with twenty or so treasure hoarders with a stab wound so deep he still occasionally felt its effects decades later when he was thirteen, not when his entire world collapsed at seventeen years old, nor when he bore his heart to Jean when she asked him to marry her at twenty-three. Kaeya did not cry the day his past came back to haunt him when he was just shy of twenty-five years old.
Instead of crying when in pain, he always laughed, cackled and giggled in delighted glee to cover up the bleeding of his heart. With a tongue made of silver, Kaeya Alberich was the master of language, able to twist everything into anything he wanted it to be, the intention behind every word hidden with such ease it lying was almost instinctive at times. Jean eventually learned to treat his silence as confessions and his laughter as tears streaming down his face. And how she wished to see him shed a tear.
They were twenty-five when her wish was granted, when the burden on his shoulders finally was lifted and he went down on one knee. They were already at the cathedral for Kaeya had brushed too closely with death when he made Celestia his enemy and destroyed her. With nothing but his birth mother's ring in hand, dressed in the clothes meant for patients of the infirmary, unable to even stand without the efforts of Diluc and Rosaria's aid, she told him she wanted nothing else and Barbara wed them right then and there.
"You're going to be a father," Jean told him when they were twenty-seven, and Kaeya took her into his arms and sobbed for what he thought was impossible for a sinner like him for twenty years.
