Mutually Assured

by Azzandra

Summary:

The missing person posters, odd as they were, had become part of Mondstadt's overall tapestry.

Until one day, they were all pulled down.

(In which Kaeya tries to figure out what's got the Traveler acting strange and gets more than he bargained for)

Chapter 1

The day was shaping up to be quite ordinary for Mondstadt. The city had its own rhythms, to the point that Kaeya could tell the time of day by whoever's footsteps he hear on the cobblestones. Ah, but of course, it was at times like these that it paid not to be complacent.

He'd coaxed Diluc into an early lunch that day--in truth, most of Diluc's lunches were early, because he liked being on-hand for the lunch rush at the tavern--but that was why they were both sitting at an outdoor table just before the tavern opened at noon, enjoying the warm breeze and a Sweet Madame. Diluc was drinking his insufferable grape juice, while Kaeya, in deference to the early hour, had a glass of apple cider instead of his preferred wine. 

"It wouldn't do for a Knight of Favonius to be seen drinking so early in the day," Kaeya had told Diluc with an air of professionalism that was carefully constructed, if not completely feigned.

Diluc, who despised drinking as much as he did the Knights, ground his jaw tight to stop his cheek from twitching in that way it did when he was annoyed. This amused Kaeya so much, he didn't even mind foregoing the wine.

But yes, that was why they were sitting outside having lunch together that day. Kaeya had a clear view over Diluc's shoulder of the tavern entrance, and so he was the first to see the Traveler and Paimon round a corner.

They stopped by the door, obviously unsure if it was open yet (it was not) and whether, knowing the tavern was not open, they might hazard to go in anyway, but then Lumine looked over and spotted them, so the point was moot.

In truth, this too was part of Mondstadt's routine nowadays. The Traveler and Paimon were a commonplace sight, even when they popped up where you least expected them. Errands and commissions had them going to and fro all of the time, and so Kaeya was not terribly concerned to see them, though he was curious to know who had them making the rounds this time and for what purpose. Their daily activities were an impressive grab-bag of completely mundane chores and heroic feats that could go down in legend, and Kaeya found this kind of unpredictability both amusing and something he might find useful.

But thoughts of what brought them to Angel's Share turned from amused to sobering as Kaeya watched them approach. There was a tension there; ill-concealed. Portending something dire.

"Why, look who it is," Kaeya remarked loudly as the two approached. "Already at it this early in the morning?"

This was when he expected Paimon to start berating him for being a hungover drunk, and telling him off because it was late in the morning when people were already awake for hours, but Paimon was hovering in tight at Lumine's side, small hands touching her shoulder in what might have been fretfulness, but Kaeya suspected was merely a show of support. Lumine's own hands were quivering tense, worrying at the hem of her skirt and wrinkling the fabric.

"Master Diluc," Lumine said, her voice as clear and calm as ever, "have you seen Venti lately?"

Diluc turned to look at her, missed the worry in her hands and looked into the tidy lines of her face. No, it wasn't calm, Kaeya thought. It was a blankness, if anything. Kaeya knew that type of mask well.

"He doesn't spend all his time at Angel's Share, despite what rumor would have you believe," Diluc replied. "But if I see him, I can tell him you're looking for him."

"Okay, thank you, Master Diluc!" Paimon piped up, while Lumine nodded; resigned.

"Thank you," she repeated more quietly, and turned to leave.

Kaeya continued watching the subdued departure, still trying to pinpoint what about the Traveler's demeanor struck him as out of place, but she had scarcely taken two steps when she stopped in her tracks, shoulders stiff. She turned towards the tavern entrance, then back in the direction she'd been walking towards, then back towards the entrance, like a poppet getting pulled in two different directions by the whims of indecision, until finally, she stomped up to the bulletin board by the tavern's door. She ripped one of the pinned notices, rolling it up, before she finally departed. Paimon did not remark at all on this behavior.

Cold prickles ran down the back of Kaeya's neck. Maybe it was nothing, maybe it was another of her odd little errands, except he was certain if he went up to the bulletin board, the paper taken would be the missing person poster Amber had helped her pin up.

 

---

 

The missing person posters were something of a curious detail, stirring some amount of gossip when they first went up. In content, they were vague; a blond young man in exotic clothing? How baffling, the Mondstadtians thought at first. There were any number of young blond men running around, and what even qualified as exotic, anyway?

As the Traveler's story got passed around, the posters felt less vague. Even if they contained no picture of the missing boy, the blanks could be filled in by the imagination just by knowing Lumine: that shade of blond, that kind of exotic clothing; and the eyes? That shade of gold gone unmentioned by the description in the poster? That, they could recognize by sight.

Everyone could keep an eye out for some outlander who resembled the Traveler, now that they knew what to look for. And if visitors to the city or strangers thought the posters were odd, well, there were plenty who were glad to explain, and draft them into the quest to find the Traveler's brother.

Which was all to say that the posters had become part of Mondstadt's milieu over the months. And now, as Kaeya walked the city after the lunch he'd pretended not to rush to finish, he was noticing the gaps where the posters were supposed to be. Bare wall met him instead, sometimes only with scraps of paper where a pin or two had been left behind.

This would ordinarily be something far below his pay grade, but as Honorary Knight, Lumine occupied a strange position in the Ordo Favonius. She had no captain she answered to, no salary she drew on, no standing orders or fixed duties. She did have a room at the Ordo Favonius headquarters, but she could have just as easily have taken lodgings at the Adventurers' Guild. The Knights of Favonius simply had an excess of available rooms with so many gone from Mondstadt, and having so few ways to reward her in proportion to her service to the city, the room she was granted was one of the small ways they showed their appreciation.

Which was to say that, whatever was happening with Lumine, there technically wasn't anyone obligated to check on her. And as Captain, Kaeya did have all the authority he required to make his own calls in this matter. He could check on her at his discretion, and it would not reveal any excessive sentiment on his part, now would it?

He went through these convolutions of thought as he attended his more typical duties around Mondstadt: checking in with informants, passing on messages, collecting information and leaving behind orders. Making his usual appearances, revealing nothing. Keeping an eye out for every missing person poster, as well as the one taking them down.

It was late afternoon when he finally made his way back to the Knights' headquarters, and crossed paths with Amber.

"Who would do this?" Amber asked--though the knight she's been speaking with shrugged and slipped away as Amber's attention turned to Kaeya instead. "Kaeya, did you see? The posters are missing! What kind of person would steal missing person posters?"

Kaeya, who'd spotted Lumine scaling up a windmill just earlier in her surprisingly meticulous cleaning spree, made only a non-committal sound in his throat.

"Say, have you seen our little Traveler today?" Kaeya asked.

Amber's eyes widened. "No! We shouldn't let her know someone is going around taking down her brother's posters! She's going to be really hurt if she hears about this!"

"How curious, you think she hasn't found out about it yet?" Kaeya asked, not quite able to stop himself from tweaking Amber a bit, even with how worrying the situation was.

"You think so?" Amber muttered. "No, but maybe if I get a new batch printed quickly enough, she won't kn--eep!"

Kaeya was slightly less conspicuous as he turned to look in the direction of Amber's gaze. At the other end of the bare, echoing corridor, Lumine and Paimon were standing, looking right at them. To close to not have heard every word as it bounced off the walls in Amber's high pitch.

Amber shouldered past Kaeya, always quicker to act than to think twice, but in this case, perhaps her blunt, earnest care was what Lumine needed. Kaeya kept back, and kept quiet.

"Lumine, are you okay?" Amber said, and caught Lumine by an arm like she was ready to pull her into a hug.

But then Amber's gaze fell to the papers in Lumine's hands, and there was a long pause. 

Lumine did not react in the sticky tension of that pause, her face still blank, and Paimon, who was floating besides her, gave only a quick glance between Lumine and Amber, before looking to Kaeya helplessly.

"Um, yeah, we're both fine," Paimon answered when the pause extended just a beat too long.

"Did you... take these down yourself?" Amber asked slowly.

Lumine nodded; just a single incline of the head.

"Wh... so... you didn't... give up, did you?" Amber rallied, "I promised to help you find him, and I know we will!"

"I found him," Lumine replied.

"Oh..." Amber swallowed nervously. "Did something... happen to him?"

"He's fine," Lumine said. "He just didn't want to come home."

She pulled free of Amber's grasp, and turned to walk away. Her heels snapped against the marble floors in a steady tap as the distance grew.

Paimon cast a look backwards, but then her expression was nothing but sympathetic as she caught Amber's eye.

"We'll talk later, okay? She's not mad at you or anything," the pixie whispered apologetically, and zipped to catch up with Lumine, leaving nothing but a glimmer of stardust and confusion behind.

 

---

 

Kaeya didn't know when he was relegated to the task of managing the feelings of young knights. Except perhaps he'd relegated himself to the job when Amber turned to him with that kicked puppy look on her face.

Well, he was going to do this anyway, so he knocked.

He didn't expect an answer. If anything, his planned contingency for a lack of answer was preferable, because at least he could retreat to his office and scheme. He wasn't sure what scheme he could possibly come up with that would be better than simply knocking on the Traveler's door and offering to talk, but he was sure one could never go wrong with an information-gathering campaign.

Instead, the door cracked open, and Paimon's large eye peeked out through the crack.

"Oh, it's Captain Kaeya!" Paimon declared, trying to sound cheerful. "Hello! Do you have a commission for us?"

"Actually, I just dropped in for a chat," Kaeya said, and pushed the door open. Paimon tumbled back through the air in surprise, before righting herself.

"Hey!" she snapped, indignant. 

"Sorry, but I assume you wouldn't want to be here anyway," Kaeya said, grinning. "Seeing as there's a three course meal waiting for you in my office?"

Paimon's eyes went wide, and she cast a look at the shadows of the apartment, torn between her loyalties to the Traveler and her own stomach. In the end, her first master won out.

"Well, alright," she said, blatantly accepting bribery. "But..."

She reached out and grabbed the edge of Kaeya's cape, looking far more serious than Kaeya had ever seen of her.

"Um, I think you should ask her about her brother," Paimon instructed, her voice low and her gaze darting nervously.

No, not nervous. Concerned. Typical of Paimon to always say the obvious, but he couldn't say it didn't come from a place of caring.

Kaeya nodded wordlessly, and Paimon released his cape, disappearing down the hall. He closed the door behind her, feeling oddly furtive about this entire situation.

Emotional support was not part of his job description, he kept telling himself. Knowing people's emotional levers, how to manipulate them, what made them tick, that was one thing. But he had never had a knack for comforting people in times of emotional turmoil. Diluc could vouch for that.

Nonetheless, he persisted. 

The sun had slipped past the horizon, and left the world in that anemic state of twilight that was not quite proper night yet. Outside, the lamps were just being lit, but it was much darker inside, the shadows already pooling in corners. Kaeya did not mind the darkness so much. He could see a fair bit better in the dark than most people. 

He had never been inside the Traveler's quarters, but the contents did not surprise him overly much. It was cluttered; books occupied most surfaces, some from the library, others clearly acquired in Liyue. Other miscellany included dusty relics, little trinkets and the odd crumpled paper. It was an accumulation of items, the accretion of days mostly spent adventuring, but not the kinds of items that made up a life. If she were to pick up and go home one day, were any of the items here things she'd take?

He spotted the Traveler by her silhouette. She sat on the padded window sill nook at the far end of the sitting room, looking out over the view. It was mostly cobblestones and hedges, nothing truly interesting, but Kaeya supposed the only thing that recommended the spot was that as long as she was looking out the window, she didn't have to see the room.

He bypassed the missing person posters abandoned in a loose stack next to a low table, and made certain the floorboards squeaked to announce his presence as he approached. She still did not turn around, but as he stopped behind her, he could see the reflection of her face in the glass. Again, that blank mask.

He cleared his throat.

"I'm fine," she said.

"We're lying to each other now?" he retorted, feigning shock.

There was a long moment of silence before she twisted around, just enough that she sat parallel to the window, with her back against the wall. The nook itself was not very wide, and her knees were bent to fit, but it was quite deep, and Lumine was a slim girl, so Kaeya eased himself down onto the edge of the seat, back against the opposite wall of the nook. She crossed her arms, probably trying to look stern, but mostly she just seemed to be hugging herself.

"Do you want," Kaeya asked very seriously, "for me to go beat up your brother?" 

Lumine's jaw fell open, and she looked at Kaeya with a decided lack of blankness on her face, frozen in that posture for several seconds, until finally she burst into laughter. Kaeya found himself grinning as her shoulders shook with each heaving guffaw, her entire body snapping from the tension that had it tightly wound all day and erupting into the first emotional outlet it was allowed. When the wheezing heaves started sounding more like sobs, Kaeya fully expected it, and took Lumine by the shoulders, drawing her close. It was not quite a hug, but he leaned her against his chest, and she curled her legs into his lap, and they stayed like that until her body stopped convulsing with laughter, or sobs, or any combination of both.

Though, even after Lumine stilled, she did not pull back, instead turning her face into the fur of his cape. She didn't say anything, and Kaeya would have been fine assuming she simply didn't want to talk about it, but he also knew some people merely awaited to be prompted. He knew some people actually did want to talk about the terrible things that happened to them.

Kaeya still didn't feel adequate to the task, but what was he, if not good at pretending? His fingers played with the ends of her blond hair at the back of her head, not quite brushing against the nape of her neck. He thought about rubbing her back, the way Adelinde or Master Crepus would do for him on the few occasions he'd been sick as a child, but felt too awkward to go through with it. He leaned his cheek against the top of her head instead, breathing in the smell of flowers and the clinging scent of old dust. She'd been in a ruin somewhere recently, and he filed away this fact out of habit.

"I'm sorry," Kaeya said. "Whatever he did, whatever he said to you, I'm sorry."

Was this what he would have wanted to hear after his fallout with Diluc? He wasn't sure. Lumine didn't stir.

"He just... wouldn't come home," she whispered.

Kaeya didn't understand, so he remained quiet. He took this tactic often, during interrogations, when he was simply fishing for information. People had the tendency to fill the silence. This was the same thing for the most part, wasn't it?

"I thought," Lumine continued after a while, "that whatever happened, we'd always feel the same about each other. That we'd always be the most important people to one another. We always have been. But he..."

Kaeya's fingers moved up from Lumine's nape to card through her hair, the motion even and gentle, like petting a wary cat.

"He has other things that matter more to him, I guess," she concluded pathetically.

Kaeya huffed.

"His loss and not ours, then," he said.

Lumine pulled back to look at him. Somewhere outside the window, a lamp had been lit. Night was fully upon Mondstadt, but the steady glow of lamplight came instead, gilding orange highlights onto her cheekbones, her forehead; the side of her nose. Just enough of her face that the anguish was easy to read.

He shouldn't have let himself grow soft over it, but Kaeya couldn't help it. His fondness was hard to earn, but even more difficult to shed once earned. Somewhere along the line, he had shuffled the Traveler into the list of people who had earned his loyalty, though naturally he would never say so to any of their faces.

"I have a feeling you didn't mean for him to come back to Mondstadt when you said 'home'," Kaeya remarked.

Remorse was just as easy to read on her face, especially when she looked away fully, and turned her entire face towards the lamplight.

"It could have been Mondstadt," she said, defensive yet subdued. "It could have been anywhere. I didn't think about where at the time--"

"But you would have left us all without a word for your brother's sake, hm?" Kaeya asked, though without much accusation. "If it came to that. If that was what he asked of you."

She lapsed into silence again. Did not deny it. Kaeya sighed, because he hadn't come to make her feel worse.

"In the moment, it must have felt like the only thing you wanted," he hazarded a guess. "The only thing that mattered."

Lumine nodded slowly. "But it wouldn't have solved anything." Then she gave a bark of laughter, devoid of any humor. "I don't even know what could possibly have solved any of it."

"Now what do you think there is to solve here?" Kaeya asked.

"I think whatever is at the heart of it, it happened when Khaenri'ah burned," Lumine said, and the words made a rushing sound rise to Kaeya's ears, like that of crashing waves superimposed over the entirety of his perception. Blood was rushing to his head. His heart was beating too fast. He simply hadn't been expecting it, that was all.

"...Oh?" he managed, his body continuing automatically along its track even as inside it felt as though his mind peeled off to have its own separate experiences of that moment. He felt the smile spread on his face, unnatural and forced. "And what has it to do with Khaenri'ah?"

She backtracked then, began the story with a man named Dainsleif. Kaeya knew the name, he even knew the face attached, but he had never connected the stranger who'd passed through Mondstadt with the figure of borderline myth from Khaenri'ah's past. Why would he? What was more likely, that some zealous parents had picked a name from a book, or that the Twilight Blade himself had betrayed the last royal family of Khaenri'ah, and now wandered Teyvat like a deathless ghoul? 

As the story progressed, Kaeya found any number of alarming details to become concerned about. It was scattered, like Lumine was relaying a bullet point list of most to least important details instead of events in chronological order, but it was not a terribly long or complicated story when taken as a whole. It merely contained a distressing mix of facts.

He stayed quiet long after Lumine finished speaking, digesting everything with a sluggishness that was not typical of him. But how might one react to such news?

The current situation, then. He needed to take stock.

"So, your brother and Dainsleif have departed through a portal, and you do not know where they are," Kaeya said.

Lumine nodded.

"But you expect to see your brother again."

"Of course."

"And Dainsleif?"

Lumine pulled a face.

"You and Aether both," she muttered, more to herself. "Why does Dainsleif even matter?"

"That... is hard to explain," Kaeya admitted. "He's from Khaenri'ah."

"And? So? What does it matter to you personally?" she persisted. Tired and frustrated, and now her sadness was turning into anger. He didn't hold it against her that she was lashing out.

Kaeya smothered a rueful laugh, reached instead for his eyepatch. This was something he couldn't reveal with words. A juncture in the road, and he was making the same choice that had lost him his brother. Except now he did it with past experience already demonstrating what a terrible idea it was.

He pulled off the eyepatch. The right side of his face was away from the window, drenched in shadows, but she would still be able to see it: the touch of Khaenri'ah's corruption around his eye; the cancerous blue glow etched unto his body, waiting in his veins to claim him for the Abyss one day. Years or decades down the line, but still a surety.

She was quiet and motionless, so devoid of reaction that Kaeya thought perhaps she didn't see it or didn't understand it at first. But when she finally moved, it was nothing dramatic, only her hand rising slowly to cup the side of his face.

"Does it hurt?" she asked in a hushed voice.

"Of the two of us, I suspect you are the one in the greater pain at the moment." Which was not a no, but also not untrue. It was less a pain, and more a transitory ache. Maybe, half the time, he was even imagining the sensation of that vein of evil digging deeper in his skull, its roots spreading.

He looked into her face, trying to identify the moment when it would shift into realization and hostility, trying to superimpose his memory of the same on Diluc's face when Kaeya confessed.

But there was nothing but a softness in Lumine's face. A softness in her touch. When Kaeya swallowed, it was past the burning knot in his throat that he hadn't even noticed. Kindness always cut him deeper than hatred.

"So what now?" he asked, covering her hand with his own, holding it to his cheek like a lifeline.

"Now?" she repeated faintly. "Now... I suppose we are in this together."

He didn't quite understand what that entailed yet, but he nodded. Together. Yes, once they had pooled their secrets together, how could it be otherwise?

"Together, then," he agreed.

Chapter 2

Notes:

I got some extra inspiration after the Serenitea Pot came out, and also found some good excuse to slip in some extra headcanons, so here is the continuation, with Kaeya realizing his new partner in crime is actually pretty weird.

 

 

 

 

 

One of Kaeya's earliest memories, that he still retained solely because he recalled it every morning when he put his eyepatch on, was of his own pudgy hand pressing up against the socket of his eye. 

He must have, at some point, seen a reflection of himself, because the impression he had in this memory was that this was a new habit he had just developed: tracing the ridge of his eyebrow all the way down along the side of his eye, where a vein of blue curled near the corner of his eye.

"Don't scratch it," some adult would tell him, exasperated, and Kaeya would snatch away his hand and pretend he hadn't been doing anything.

And he wasn't scratching it, he really wasn't. But he knew the vein of blue was there because he had seen it in a reflection of himself--a reflection in something smoky and a bit wavy, not a mirror, but something flat and glassy nonetheless--and he thought he might find it by touch, even though his fingers could detect no difference in the skin where it was marked or not. In furtive moments, when the adults were not paying attention, he would try to find that strange blue mark at the corner of his eyelid.

He perhaps didn't hide it as well as he might have liked, because his next memory was of scratching at an eyepatch, in truth miserable and itchy, but in that memory he knew it was his punishment for not leaving well enough alone.

It would be some time, though not very long, before he understood that this was the corruption of the Abyss, the punishment that all the sinners of Khaenri'ah had to endure. That this was the slow curse which would turn them all into monsters eventually. On that day when Kaeya had been left at the winery, it was assumed his loyalty could hang on this thread alone: that he would most likely die a monster, but could live just long enough for revenge to be within his grasp. Why would anyone assume otherwise, when they themselves had never had anything else but that to keep them going?

He supposed there was little else the beaten down survivors of Khaenri'ah could imagine living for. They sustained themselves on resentment the way most people drank fresh spring water. In the dark corners where they still hid their faces, talk of revenge was the last thing that brought a glimmer of hope to their eyes, but it was a fever-shine if anything. A heat that could keep the body moving for a while before it consumed entirely.

In Mondstadt, Kaeya had grown like a withering vine transplanted to more fertile soil. He had found things to live for, rather than just reasons to survive. Even were his life cut short--and no one could ever know how fast the corruption would spread, or how long until that song of the Abyss would lure them away--Kaeya still considered his remaining years worth living, if it meant he could repay his debt of life towards Mondstadt.

If people remarked on his eyepatch, it was fewer and fewer people over the years. People assumed a bad eye, or some injury garnered while performing his duties as knight, and Kaeya let them think what they had to. The privilege of knowing the truth had always been given to family: Master Crepus had known, though perhaps not fully understood. After Master Crepus died, Diluc had been next to be given this secret, on that night when Kaeya revealed everything.

And now it was Lumine, whose delicate fingers traced the knot of glowing blue that Kaeya hid from every other person, the way nobody but him had ever touched it: with uncomplicated curiosity, trying to find if the skin felt different, the way it would at the edges of a scar.

It didn't hurt where she touched, but it hurt somewhere deep in Kaeya's chest, in some desperate place that continued to exist no matter how much he talked himself out of hoping for acceptance.

 

---

 

 

Paimon returned from gorging herself on Kaeya's prepared feast, rubbing an eye as she floated lethargically, and all too ready to turn in and digest her ample bribery. 

But she clearly intended to check on Lumine first, and she blinked in surprise upon finding her and Kaeya sitting on the sofa together, the lamp turned on, a tea kettle set between them. Kaeya's tea cup was at least two parts wine to one part tea thanks to the flask he hid under his coat, but still, he did think they struck quite the domestic image.

"Hey, just what's going on here?" Paimon asked. She put her hands on her hips and peered at them both suspiciously, because the low table in front of the sofa had, in addition to the tea set, a small stack of books, open at various marked pages.

"We're in cahoots now," Lumine replied as she leafed through a volume.

Paimon was baffled. "...You're what?"

"Kaeya and I," Lumine said slowly, "are in cahoots."

"...Right." Paimon nodded like she was dealing with a couple of crazy people, and then bobbed along towards the bedroom. "I'm going to sleep."

Paimon disappeared into the next room, and with an almost comical promptness, tiny snores could be heard. Kaeya leafed the pages of the book before him.

"In cahoots, huh," he repeated.

One of Lumine's shoulders rolled up in a shrug, too emphatic to come across as casual.

As good a word for it as any other, Kaeya supposed.

"I'll gather up some of my own study materials for you," he said. "Though it might take a bit of doing, sneaking them out of the restricted section without Lisa noticing."

"We could just ask her," Lumine said.

"I could just ask her," Kaeya replied. "You need to practice some subtlety. You've just been asking about Khaenri'ah willy-nilly, haven't you?"

"No," Lumine protested. "I only asked you because you seemed like you'd know a lot of strange things."

Kaeya chose to be flattered, no matter that she didn't phrase that as a compliment, and preened a little.

"At any rate," he said, "it simply wouldn't do for anyone to see me sneak stacks of suspicious books into your room. We will need to meet in a more discreet location, if we're to do this regularly."

Lumine made a thoughtful noise, and tapped her chin, though by the way her eyebrows stitched together in thought, Kaeya assumed she must have had something in mind.

 

---

 

 

The next order of business was the statue.

Picking their way through the half-collapsed domain took some doing: carefully navigating collapsed masonry, doubling back a few times. The path Lumine had originally taken was partially collapsed, but the warren of tunnels offered other paths of ingress.

They emerged into the open chamber where the statue must have been, though Kaeya could tell only by Paimon shocked gasped.

"Where did it go?" Paimon asked, zipping through the room towards the raised dais at the far side.

"It used to be just here," Lumine said, raising her hand to gesture towards the shape of what was now missing.

Kaeya hummed thoughtfully as he advanced into the room. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility that they might have gotten turned around or lost, and if one room looked much like the other, he could see them becoming confused.

But he felt otherwise. There was a lingering uneasiness in the chamber, some remnant of the evil energy Paimon and Lumine had described. To Kaeya, it felt like a taste from his childhood: a knot of resentment nestled in the pit of his chest, and the closer he got to the dais, the more he felt like something was tugging at that knot through a string pulling out through his eye socket. It was a profoundly unnerving feeling.

"Looks like your friend Dainsleif came back to clean up after all," Kaeya remarked. Because who else might it have been? Unless the Abyss decided to come back and pick up their toys, which Kaeya would not put past them. Relocating the statue elsewhere and trying again might have been easier than starting over from scratch. But he wasn't going to voice his more pessimistic speculations.

"At least we know he's still alive, right?" Paimon said, though she sounded unsure.

Lumine kept silent. Maybe she wasn't sure how she felt about Dainsleif surviving either.

Kaeya stepped closer to the dais, looked up towards the ceiling and the chains hanging bare now. The sensation in his eye ratcheted up in intensity, like a painless burning. He wasn't sure if this was what could be described as an evil sensation, though it felt like something that was always latent in his blood, now igniting like a catalytic reaction.

"Kaeya, are you feeling okay?" Lumine asked, her voice muffled and far away. 

That was when he noticed he was swaying.

Ah, good question, then. Was he okay? It seemed like the kind of question he should have the answer to. He raised a hand to his eye, his entire body feeling immaterial but for that pinpoint of sensation.

The last this he heard was a high-pitched yelp. It might have been Paimon. More embarrassing if it was Lumine. 

 

---

 

 

Kaeya didn't remember hitting the ground, but he must have, because when he woke up next, he was staring up at the perfectly normal wooden slats of a bedroom ceiling, and his arm was feeling bruised as though it had taken the brunt of a fall. He could put two and two together; he had fainted. 

With a twinge of unease, he raised a hand to his eye. The eyepatch was in place, and nothing hurt, but there was a lingering prickling sensation, like the back of his eyeball itched. 

His impulse was to find a mirror, and he sat up accordingly, but once he was up, everything else caught up with him: first a bout of dizziness that made his head swim. Next, the realization that he had no idea where he was.

It was a bedroom, that was at least easy to identify. The bed was comfortable, perfectly ordinary, and built in Mondstadt fashion. The sofa across the room, similarly, might have belonged in any Mondstadt household, and there was an air of domesticity to the blanket draped over one arm of it, and a book left open upside down on the cushions. The nightstand, the wardrobe, the silk screen next to the bed were distinctly Liyuen, however. A strange mix, now that Kaeya thought about it.

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed, to find his boots had been neatly set next to the wall. He pulled them on.

Further inspection of the room revealed his coat and cape had been draped over the back of a chair, and his sword had been laid on top of a desk. He took a closer look at the books on the desk, discovering them to be less illuminating than he expected; a mix of popular novels and history treatises. There was an inkwell and fresh paper, but nothing written for Kaeya to nose around in. He opened an envelope he found in a drawer, and discovered it new and unused. 

The drawers themselves were also curiously empty. The thing about drawers that Kaeya always liked was how easily they accumulated things. Whether neatly and purposefully arranged, or merely some space to relegate any tidbit that needed storage, drawers could tell a lot about their owners. Judging by the contents of this desk's drawers, however, all they told Kaeya was that the desk was new.

In fact, the entire room had the air of being newly moved into. The more Kaeya looked, the more he noticed the lack of wear and tear; no scuffs on the floor, no threadbare spots on the carpet. The bedroom smelled like fresh carpentry, instead of that typical smell of long habitation that all bedrooms seemed to gain after a while: of sleep sweat and its owner's scent.

Kaeya pondered on this as he shrugged on his coat, hung the sword on his belt. He couldn't hear the sounds of anyone moving outside, and when he tried the door, it was unlocked. 

Well, whoever had brought him here couldn't have wanted him to stay in that room so badly, if they didn't even lock it. So he emerged out into a corridor, and from there further on, into a large open room. His footsteps sounded unnaturally loud in the cavernous entryway, though he tried to step lightly. The floors were polished to a shine, as new as anything else. 

Where had he been brought, Kaeya wondered? It had to have been Lumine and Paimon who brought him here, but where was this place? How far could they have possibly dragged him, considering how convoluted the path out of the domain was? And how long could he have possibly been unconscious? It hadn't felt very long when he woke up--he was thirsty, but not hungry. Not a full day, he didn't think. But where could he have possibly been dragged off to in just those few hours?

He tried to recall any information about some new mansion being built, but judging by the architecture, this would have been in Liyue, and somewhat outside his sphere of information. 

Two options, then. The doors to the right seemed to lead outside. He could go out and try to glean a location from the surroundings. But there was a corridor opposite, and stairs leading to a second floor, and he wondered if there would be something interesting left to discover inside.

Irrepressible as his curiosity was, Kaeya decided it was worth checking a few more doors.

The one other door near the bedroom led to an empty room, reinforcing the impression of this house newly moved into. The other corridor he had spotted had only one room, and this proved to be a kitchen. Fire crackled softly inside a stove, and cooking ingredients lined the nearby shelves. Kaeya picked off a bottle of cider to quench his thirst, quietly bemoaning the lack of wine. At most he found some cooking sherry, but he decided to retain some amount of dignity, if not a clear head.

He was still holding the bottle of apple cider as he doubled back. He passed bookshelves, still bare of any books, and took the stairs up next. Two doors presented themselves on the second floor, and he expected them to be empty. He tried the handle of one, finding it locked. No matter how he pulled or pushed, the door would not budge.

This only served to intrigue Kaeya further. Could it be there was something valuable was inside the room? 

He would be respectful, of course, though he was sure with a bit of Cryo and some clever application of force he could probably make his way in. With enough time and some wax, in fact, he might not even need force. He had a very fine control of his Cryo, and over time he'd discovered that a key made of ice could work as well as one of metal, if one had a mold of the correct shape and a delicate touch when turning it in the lock.

But those were drastic measures, to say the least, and very rude to his hypothetical host. So to sate his curiosity, Kaeya knelt down instead, and peered through the keyhole.

What he saw was...

Probably nothing.

The room was probably just dark. The endless starlit void had to be his overactive imagination. 

Kaeya took another long gulp of the bottle of cider, and when the other door on this floor proved similarly stuck, he practiced some discretion and didn't try to peer through that keyhole.

Heading back down, it seemed there was little left but to go outside. He couldn't see much through the wax paper of the windows, but the light coming through was the red gold of sunset.

He opened the door and stepped out into the sunlit exterior.

Kaeya squinted up into the sky, and the sun seemed like a smear of gold against the glass roof of the world. He blinked a few times, thinking his eyesight was deceiving him, but the strange impression of its unnatural appearance did not leave him. Now that he had noticed, other small details about the scene began seeming distinctly off. Maybe the wind didn't quite smell like Mondstadt. Maybe the angle of the sun was not quite the same as it had appeared to be through the window.

He walked out into the rolling green grass, just far enough that he could look back the the house and be struck by how ostentatious it really appeared. And yet so sparse inside. Curious.

He walked away from the house, figuring he could find a hill for a better vantage point, but that was when he realized the geography of this place had no intention of adhering to the norms of the natural world.

The ground simply stopped, into a sheer drop that could have been completely bottomless for the fog that obscured the ground below. The only way off this little island was a shimmering golden bridge, but as that one led to another floating chunk of rock, Kaeya didn't feel it was worth his time to go all the way there just to discover it was all floating rocks and bridges to nowhere. He roamed around the house a bit more, finding only a quiet, unmanned forge, a well, a table set ready for tea next to it; but nobody else around.

He took another swig of the cider and decided to go back and search more thoroughly for alcohol.

When he stepped into the house and closed the door behind him, he had to stop in his tracks. The house was darker than expected--it was not just his eyes having to adjust to the lack of sun. A nighttime darkness had fallen over the house, interrupted only by lamps set at the intervals. The lamps had not been on when he stepped out, he didn't think, but now they glowed weakly in the darkness.

But the sun had still been up outside. He cracked the door open again, and a shaft of sunlight slipped through, drawing a straight yellow line across the floor.

Now Kaeya was well and truly spooked. Remote geography could account for a lot of things, but not the fact that the inside of a house had a cycle of day and night completely broken apart from the outdoors.

Kaeya retreated outside, finding the daylight more reassuring, but as he sat down on the front steps of the house, he calculated that perhaps it was the inside that had the right of it; the lambent orb that hung in the sky had not moved at all this entire time, and so could not possibly be the sun.

He finished off the bottle of cider and sorely wished it had been wine instead.

 

---

 

 

By the time Lumine and Paimon appeared, Kaeya was close to admitting his nerves were frazzled, but the sight of them at least reassured him that nobody else had kidnapped him and stowed him away in some strange magical prison where he might live out the rest of his life alone. He hadn't spotted where they came from, so they might as well have appeared from thin air, but under the circumstances, and for his own ease of mind, he would conclude he'd simply been inattentive.

"Just in time," he said, shaking the empty bottle of cider. "I was worried nobody would come along to tell me where the wine is."

Lumine winced. "Sorry," she said. "Getting out of there took longer than expected, and I told Tubby to not engage."

"Tubby," Kaeya mouthed.

"Tubby," Lumine repeated, and gestured behind Kaeya.

He turned around, only to see what he could only describe as a giant bird poking its head out of a floating tea pot. Because that was what it was. That was the precise description of what he was seeing.

"That's the tea pot spirit who takes care of this place," Paimon explained.

"I welcome you to the Realm Within," the tea pot spirit said, the voice high-pitched and modulated more like something produced by a musical instrument than a human throat. 

Kaeya pressed fingers against his forehead, trying to ground himself, very slowly, he turned back around towards Lumine, who was looking at him like all of this was perfectly ordinary.

"Oh, you mean to say Tubby would have known this entire time where the alcohol is?" Kaeya asked, a smile slicing its way across his face.

Paimon huffed and put her hands on her hips. "Is that all you care about?"

Kaeya shrugged. 

"There's no wine," Lumine said.

"What a waste. Such a vast estate and no wine cellar?" He shook the empty cider bottle, the dregs swishing inside. "Your move really is incomplete, hm?" Then, tilting his head, he asked, "Where are we, anyway?"

"Inside a tea pot," she replied.

That answered absolutely nothing, but by the perfectly neutral face Lumine was putting on, Kaeya guessed it wasn't supposed to--she was obviously having a bit of fun at his expense. He wagered it was technically true in some way, so instead of launching into more questions or any declarations of disbelief, Kaeya nodded along.

"We should make dinner," Lumine said abruptly, and so Kaeya followed her inside.

The kitchen, at least, was a haven of domesticity in the otherwise unsettling setting, so Kaeya found himself not minding it terribly as he helped chop vegetables. 

Lumine dug out a bottle of wine from somewhere, and though she insisted it was for cooking, she didn't protest much at all when Kaeya poured himself a glass. It was not a very good vintage, and in all honesty it would probably indeed be better used for cooking, but the familiarity of the gesture helped settle his nerves. He took small sips of his glass instead, keeping a clear head.

An explanation was at least provided, as Lumine diced onions. After Kaeya had so inconveniently fainted in the domain, Lumine and Paimon found it too awkward to drag him out, so she had taken him into the tea pot--a subspace domain, as she explained it. Kaeya had read about such places some time ago, so the principle was not wholly unfamiliar to him, but he made a mental note to refresh his knowledge as soon as he returned to Mondstadt.

"To think you were hiding something like this," Kaeya tutted.

"I wasn't hiding, it's just something I only recently received," Lumine explained, as she slid the diced onion into the pan. She was silent for a few seconds as the sizzling came to a pitch. "I think you've noticed, I'm not even fully settled in yet. I wasn't ready for guests."

"Hmm, yes, you do seem to have some interior decorating to do," Kaeya agreed. He cast a look around the kitchen, but out of all the rooms in the house, this one seemed the most frequently used. With Paimon's appetite, small wonder. "So which adeptus decided to give you this little gift?"

He could have made a guessing game out of it. He did not have as much information coming in from Liyue as he did in Mondstadt, but he did retain any scrap that related to the Traveler. She was most frequently in the company of that demon slayer who hung around Wangshu Inn, but Kaeya suspected she knew a lot more of the adepti than even his information bore out.

"All of them, I suppose," Lumine shrugged. "They were thankful I helped with the Jade Chamber incident, so they wanted to give me a gift, and they thought I might not want to camp out in the wild at night. It's true, it has been nice to sleep in a bed every night."

She said it so lightly, too, the same way she'd relay that Sara from Good Hunter had given her a free meal after she helped with a delivery to Springvale. 

Maybe to Lumine, there really was no difference between running petty errands for a food vendor and helping in a pitch battle between godlike beings who could tread on regular humans like ants. In some part of Kaeya's soul where he was still profoundly Khaenri'ahn and thus reflexively distrustful of gods, he was gloating. That there was a single person who didn't think divinity correlated to the worth of one's life felt like a victory in a world where such beings garnered worship so easily.

It was the first time Kaeya acknowledged in a visceral fashion how alien the Traveler truly was. How far away and how different might the place she came from be, that to her, one thing in Teyvat was much like the other, even when they were nothing alike?

Kaeya glanced at her, with her mild golden eyes, and her hands that moved in perfectly human fashion, and her air of youth that he couldn't quite put a precise age to, and he began to wonder if he truly understood what she was.

Just then, Paimon poked her head through the door.

"Something is starting to smell good!" she piped in.

Lumine gave a startled laugh. "It's just the onion caramelizing," she replied. "Come back later."

"Ugh, how is Paimon supposed to ignore the smell on an empty stomach," Paimon grumbled, but floated away.

And just like that, like a trick of the light changing what one saw between one moment and the next, Lumine seemed like something familiar again, and the kitchen somewhere safe and domestic.

"Should I peel the potatoes next?" Kaeya offered, and Lumine gave a distracted nod.

 

---

 

 

They had dinner together at the kitchen table, but the conversation ended up mostly monopolized by Paimon gushing over the food served. Lumine had made enough to soothe even Paimon's expansive appetite, so by the end of it they were all full and exhausted by satiation.

Since no guest room was set up yet, Kaeya ended up on the sofa in Lumine's bedroom; he had very firmly refused the bed, under the excuse that he had already benefited from it once that day, while he'd been unconscious. Lumine argued that unconsciousness was not really the same as a good night's sleep, but Kaeya had merely smiled and repeated himself until he managed to exhaust her into acquiescence.

She did provide him with the better blanket, fluffy and soft and an unexpected comfort against the chill that settled over the house.

It was just large and drafty, Kaeya thought. Most of the house was bare--still unlived in. His fingers kneaded at the fabric thoughtfully, as he listened to Lumine's breathing and Paimon's cute little kitten snores next to her.

He must have drifted off at some point. He was certain there was some interruption in his perception, because next that his gaze drifted towards the bed, Lumine was sitting up, her face turned towards the window. Through the wax paper, something akin to moonlight poured in, tracing a delicate silver halo against Lumine's profile. 

The moonlight was fake, an illusion even as outside that fake sun continued its even glow. But its effect was very real, and in the silver touch of the cold light, Lumine seemed more melancholy than he had ever seen her. Had she woken up from a bad dream?

Kaeya sat up, and this startled Lumine out of her reverie. She turned to look at him, though she couldn't have been able to see much, since the moonlight didn't extend as far as where Kaeya was sitting, and she had just spoiled her night vision by staring directly into the moonlight. That was just as well; with her back to the light, Kaeya couldn't see anything but her outline, as her face was cast in shadow. Two people staring at each other through the darkness, knowing where the other was but still unseeing. There had to be someone who would find poetry in this.

"Go back to sleep," Kaeya said, loud enough for his words to carry, soft enough not to wake Paimon. 

She didn't reply. She sat unmoving, quiet, almost unresponsive. Kaeya got the sense she didn't want to go to sleep, and maybe he was imagining some slight tremor to her shoulders.

He pushed aside his blanket, got up to his feet. His steps were soundless against the new floor, not a single floorboard making a single noise. In his own house where he lived in Mondstadt, he had taken some carpentry tools to his own floor, loosened some boards, tightened others--only he knew which boards squeaked and which didn't. He never told anyone about this, of course. The sensible reason was that it would have defeated the purpose of the precaution; the real reason was that he suspected he would be dismissed as paranoid more than anything. That anyone he told this to would look at him like he was unhinged and laying awake at night, listening intently for some intruder to step on the wrong board and reveal himself.

He hadn't even told this to Diluc, but Diluc would have understood regardless. When Kaeya had finally accepted the Ragnvindr household's kindness towards him was also around the time he began suffering a spate of recurring nightmares, of a man slowly approaching his bedside, the weight of his steps making the wood beneath groan. In his dreams, Kaeya had always known that was his father, returning to hold Kaeya to his duty as a spy. That the moment his father was next to his bed, sitting down on the edge and peering down at him through the darkness, Kaeya would have to let go of the comforts of this warm household, and the kindly man who took him in, and the bright boy who was always holding his hand and pulling him along. Kaeya had never told Diluc the entirely of his fears, but he had let slip enough in moments of weakness that Diluc might not have found it strange.

This was a different house. Not the old winery manse, and not his house in Mondstadt. The floorboards here did not creak, because they were not old, and Lumine was not paranoid and broken as he was. He stepped softly, insidious like the encroaching frost, and sat down on the edge of Lumine's bed.

"Do you want a bedtime story?" he asked, turning his face into the moonlight so that she might see his smile. "You should sleep after the day you've had."

He raised a hand to her shoulder, and at the lightest contact, she leaned back and laid down. She turned on her side, away from Kaeya, and he in turn pulled the blanket up to her shoulders, tucking her in. He got no response about the bedtime story, so instead he gently stroked her hair, the motion light and even.

After a while, bit by bit, the tension seeped out of her. Maybe she was awake for a while longer, or maybe she was already asleep, but Kaeya sat there for a time. Her hair was soft, and the motion proved soothing even to him.

 

---

 

 

The next morning, she slipped a little wooden token into his hand.

"I asked Tubby to prepare this for you," Lumine explained. "It will allow you to come here whenever you want."

Kaeya looked at it, turning it over in his palm.

"That's a lot of trust to put in someone," he said somberly. Then, quirking and eyebrow and giving his most roguish smile, "Are you that sure I won't throw a party here behind your back?"

"If you do, I'll send a bill to the Knight of Favonius," she retorted immediately.

He laughed. 

But he pocketed the token regardless. When he was alone, he would take it from his pocket, and worry at it with his fingers, learning every groove and texture until it was wholly familiar to him.