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A disaster, born of loose tongues and inebriated egos, was brewing on the tavern's second floor; it had started early in the night when a troupe of local adventurers sat at a table behind a Fontainian troupe, wearing the same green uniform, swapping tales, voices growing loud and slurred and arrogant. Diluc had cut them off an hour ago. Refused service was not the deterrent it should have been.
"Adventurers," he grumbled low with disdain usually reserved for the Knights.
He looked up at a clatter of stools, knuckles squeezing white around a dish towel, squeezed so hard he'd have shattered a glass in hand. Jose's fingers stilled on his harp strings and he looked up too, going pale, looking back at Diluc. One of the young Mond cads backed up against the banister, his Fontainian rival on him in his face finger under his chin. Diluc threw down the towel; it landed with a loud wet splat, drawing the attention of the only two patrons on the ground floor, hunched over their cups and tired around the eyes, one weathered a single second of Diluc's sharp glare and started reaching for his mora pouch.
The door creaked open, a gust of early spring's cold wind slipping in ahead of Kaeya, shoulders slumped, gait unsteady, another trouble for Diluc's pile. The door swung shut behind him, closing out the chill. He stopped, swaying, frowning at Diluc's expression, at his hand on the swing gate, at the tension thick in the air.
"Closing early?" Kaeya spoke slow, careful, but the sounds stumbled together, soaked in whatever he'd drunk before arriving.
A glass shattered overhead.
Diluc pointed to an empty stool at the bar. Growled, "Sit." Left Kaeya to follow his instructions, or leave, stomping up the stairs, vision flaring at his hip, fire warming his palms. It was bad business to turn his pyro on patrons, but so was it to close the bar an hour early, and once he had the adventurer's fleeing, tails tucked between their green legs, he kicked out the stragglers and clicked the lock shut behind Jose. Kaeya remained.
His assessing gaze swept over him, sun-kissed skin gone pale and fingers shaking against the bar-top, as Kaeya turned the same scrutiny on him. Diluc poured a glass of water and set it in front of him. His fingers stilled, wrapped around the glass, blue fringe and eye-patch not quite covering the track of blood dried to his cheek.
Silence sat in the space between them as Kaeya sipped his water. He took up his towel again and a cup and wiped away the water marks, inspecting its surface for chips or cracks between unsubtle glances searching for some, any sign of what occurred before he'd darkened Diluc's doorstep. Kaeya abandoned the glass once half-empty, resting his chin on his palm his elbow on the table, his single visible eye sliding shut and accompanied by a pale suspiration. Diluc hesitated but when Kaeya didn't stir he went around the bar and back up the stairs to collect the adventurer's abandum; he left the disarray as it was, the stools turned over and the tables knocked askew, swore to himself he'd have words later with Cyrus, and went back down with soiled cups and plates which went promptly into the dish pit.
The stool creaked as Kaeya stirred, stretched, shoulder joints popping. "Suppose I should be going too," he said to Diluc's back.
He caught the counter as he stood, gripped it hard like it was the only barrier between him and the floor; Diluc didn't know how drunk he was, thought maybe it was.
"And go where? If you came for wine, no other tavern is open this late."
Diluc saw the edge of a crooked grin from over Kaeya's shoulder. "You say, as if this tavern is still open. I understand the meaning of last call, Master Diluc, and would rather you not be any more cross with me for overstaying my welcome."
"I'm not cross with you."
"It's hard to tell." Kaeya gestured to him, his face, blood dried under his nails. "Must suck, looking like that. Always mad. How did Rosario describe it that once?"
"Never seemed to bother you before," Diluc said, chancing his luck, coming from around the bar. Kaeya leaned deeper into the counter as he approached, wound tight, wearing all the nervous tells of one of his cavalry horses; but he didn't spook when Diluc's hand fell to his hip, steadying, and the other swept the hair from his face.
"Diluc." There wasn't a word for his tone, some itchy mixture of scold, warning, and whine.
"Hold still." He tugged off his glove with his teeth before touching Kaeya's face again, slipping a naked finger under the eye-patch, feeling the dried blood under his callouses. A sound, wordless and high, bubbled up in his throat. "Shut up and—"
"Brother."
"—don't call me that. Let me look." Diluc thumbed his lower lip, inviting, caught under the prick of his canines. "Don't bite your lip, either."
Kaeya released his lip, sighed softly, his only protest as Diluc flipped back his eyepatch.
A gold star twinkled back at him. Diluc hummed and said, laced with mild surprise, "You still have two eyes."
He slipped the eye-patch off Kaeya's head, dropping it on the bar top. The cut, starting at the inside corner of his eye, curling under it, was too clean not to have been self-inflicted. Kaeya winced when index and middle fingers probed the wound. He pulled free of Diluc's grip, dropped his head, hid face and wound and eye. Diluc rubbed flakes of dried blood from his fingertips and said, again, "Sit."
Kaeya sank onto the stool as Diluc fetched the first aid kit from beneath the counter. "I should have something witty to say about your bossiness, Master Diluc," he said airily. "Alas, my wit escapes me. Maybe if you got me a drink while you were back there..."
Kit in hand, Diluc reemerged from behind the bar, gaze penetrating the affected dignity of Kaeya's pose, leaned back against the bar, arms stretched out at his sides.
"Would that not inspire another act of self-mutilation?"
He began to ramble. "I was entirely sober for that spark of brilliance." Diluc let him, face gone blank, wordlessly tapping his knee; when they parted, he slotted himself between them, like coming home. "Not that you'd believe me, you think me an unrepentant lush even though I drink less than half the clergy, but the drinking came later, after I failed, and then I came here when the liquid courage gave me none."
Kit balanced on Kaeya's thigh, Diluc shoved three fingers against the underside of his chin, tilted his head back, brought his face into full light. The candles in the chandelier above burned warm, orange. Blood had clotted in his lashes, crimson in his waterline, but the eye was truly unharmed, star-shaped pupil and golden iris and black sclera, clear and bright and whole. Such couldn't be said for the surrounding skin, puckered from that old burn scar, blood caught in its grooves. Diluc pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth, wetted a clean cloth, and dabbed it against the cut, suspecting it took more than liquid courage to harm whatever magic called that eye home. More, maybe, he morbidly wondered, than Kaeya could withstand.
Kaeya, reading his mind, said, "You could give it a shot."
The eye didn't give him that power, telepathy. He'd explained it only once, late at night, sharing the single bed on the Angel Share's top floor wine on his breath that lingered in Diluc's mouth after spit-swapping kisses; but Diluc was no witch, no scholar, just a washed-up wonder boy with too much rage burning, burning inside him, who couldn't make heads or tails of the explanation. The abyss, fate, choices made, not made, seeing all possibilities at once. A headache, Diluc had muttered, and Kaeya had snort-laughed, agreed, sucked a mark onto his collarbone.
"Have I forgotten who gave you this scar, or did you?" he asked, folding the cloth over to its clean side.
He smirked. "You weren't trying to blind me. Kill me, maybe, you were so, so mad. Then you went and shaped your anger into a remarkable kind of violence if all my reports from Snezhnaya are to be believed."
"You want me to blind you."
"I want it gone! I don't care how or by who, but if it were you then I'd be in good hands, hands—" Kaeya grabbed his hands and squeezed; smiled sweetly, sugar to feed Diluc's nausea, "—which would care for me, and tend my wounds, and keep me safe from worse trouble."
"Hands that will hurt you." Diluc swallowed back bile. "Have hurt you."
Kaeya brought the back of his hand to his mouth, pressing plush lips to his knuckles, stars framed by spidery lashes peering up at him. "Please."
There was a scalpel in his kit, but his mind went elsewhere, to the fire in his fingertips, holy and hellish, certain as he was certain of how he would do this, that he would do this. "I'm not a surgeon," he said, sounding out the words tasting of ash on his tongue. "This will hurt, a lot, and then I'll take you up to the cathedral and I don't know if Barbara's healing magic will be strong enough to undo what I've done. It might be. If it is—you don't get to go out looking for another way to get this done, and you don't get to try again."
"Do you want me to sign a contract?" Kaeya asked. "Swear a blood oath? Suck you off?"
Diluc thought he knew what desperation looked like on his features, yet this was a new one, a new twist of his mouth and wrinkle between his brows; it didn't give him as much satisfaction as the look he wore when begging for his wine or his cock. He shook his head. "Just keep your word."
Kaeya eyed him as he put the first-aid kit aside, as he grabbed a bottle of dandelion wine, top shelf, and a single glass. He offered a shaky grin.
"I swear to be a good boy for the healers and not complain if they manage to save my eye, and I swear not to seek out Fatui or Treasure Hoarders or any manner of miscellaneous monster to finish the job, if I don't try again with my shaving razor. Swear it—on my command, my lucky coin, whatever you'll have."
Diluc brought the wine to him. "You talk too much."
He reached for it with greedy hands; Diluc knocked them away and pressed the rim to his mouth, fitted the edge between his lips, and tipped it back. He looked, perhaps for the last time, into a matched pair of stars. He set the glass aside when it was empty, stole his taste of the wine from a kiss.
"Commencing enucleation?" Kaeya asked breathily.
Diluc shoved the dirtied rag from earlier between his teeth. "Bite."
His fire came easily, licking at his skin from the inside, flaring hot in anticipation. Kaeya winked his good eye, the eye he'd still have after, and must have felt the burn in even his gentle farewell touch.
Despite the gag, the pleading and bargaining and swearing, the want so deep and desperate he'd turned a razor blade on himself, he screamed when Diluc pressed his burning thumb to his eye. Diluc slapped a hand over his mouth to further muffle his agony. The scent of burning flesh was immediate, but a smell he was long inured to; the feeling was different though, nothing like when skin and fat and muscle sizzled under his fire and rage, this was soft, too soft and too easy, yet a magic pushed against his fire. Kaeya clawed at his wrists, at once trying to stop him and trying to stop him from stopping. He burned hotter, brighter. The magic burned away.
Kaeya choked on his scream and fell silent, limp. Diluc's fire died; and he ignored the burned-out socket where his golden eye had once been, the bubbling, sizzling skin around it, to tear the gag free from his teeth. He shoved a finger under his nose and waited, frozen, until Kaeya's exhale whispered against his skin.
Kaeya lived.
Diluc breathed, gathered him in his arms, and made for the church.