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Ever since we were young, my brother has always hated the cold.
I noticed during our first winter together. As my friends and I played in the snow, I caught him out of the corner of my eye, sitting inside the house with a blank expression.
I knew my father wanted me to make him feel more included, so I asked him to make a snowman with us.
He didn’t respond, simply walking away to his room and shutting the door.
Only a year and a half later, I had received my vision. Both a gift of power and a reminder of the responsibility I shouldered as I crossed into adulthood, my days of playing in the snow were over.
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That winter, we both sat inside while the other children played.
“…you can go without me.”
“No.”
“Your hands won’t melt the snow like mine. Go.”
“…I can’t.”
“Why. Don’t pity me.”
“I’m not. I’m just…afraid…”
“Of what? Snow?”
“…yeah. It’s too cold.”
His words revealed little more than a distaste for it, yet his unobscured eye reflected years of pain; I could tell he had kept this kind of expression bottled away from me since the day he arrived at the winery’s front door. Despite my usual lack of social tact—especially at that young age—I had the mind to avoid pressing the matter any further.
“Here,” I placed my arm over his shoulders, deciding to make at least some use of my pyro vision’s side effects.
The act came naturally; perhaps I sympathized with his discomfort, or maybe it was out of a sense of duty as an older brother and vision-bearer.
It was the first time Kaeya smiled since he had arrived.
From that day on, life moved much faster. I joined the Knights and quickly moved up the ranks with Kaeya not far behind. Our synergy was unmatched, carving a new sense of pride for the Ragnvindr name.
But as easy as it comes, the easier it goes. The stormy night of my 18th birthday was when everything fell apart at once.
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I barely registered what had happened that night. As if possessed by a ruin machine, my body moved on its own, packing bags for my brother and myself. My hands were numb after hours spent clutching the ground where my father met his cruel demise. I heard a single knock on the front door, almost as if they hadn't intended for me to notice.
Kaeya stood on the other side, refusing to enter what was as much his home as it was mine for the past six years. Words poured from his mouth with a growing urgency as his entire body began to shake, wracked with a sense of vulnerability I hadn’t seen from him since the day I learned of his fear of the snow.
I paid his words little heed—he seemed to have convinced himself that he was a traitor of some sort—but two of the last things he said had stuck with me.
“I can’t leave the Knights”
and;
“…I hate who I am”
I watched him slowly kneel to the ground, head hung in defeat. He didn’t reach out towards me, instead gripping his own arms as pitiful sobs overtook his body.
“Get up.”
“I can’t—I—”
“GET UP AND FIGHT ME.”
Kaeya rose slowly. His eye, rubbed raw, eventually met my own.
“I don’t want to fight you, Diluc.”
“No. You want me to kill you.”
Kaeya gulped, looking away. He didn’t deny the claim.
“…And I don’t kill unarmed men.”
He was reluctant, but finally took the sword I had thrown at his feet.
My heartbeat slowed. My vision dimmed around the edges. This was quite possibly the last thing I had wanted to end that day with. But I knew it was beyond my abilities to convince Kaeya that he hadn’t done anything wrong. He was the one who handled the talking in this operation, damn it!
I swung straight down, as I usually started with during spars. Even a complete stranger could have blocked the blow, but Kaeya knew better than anyone; his sword was above his head in less than a second, his eye still trained on the ground as it had been before.
Two more strikes continued in this fashion; Kaeya blocking effortlessly without sparing me a glance. If I wasn’t so tired and angry, I might have felt offended, honestly.
Finally, I summoned flames into the blade, despite each fiber in my body pleading not to. I would never use my vision against a weaker opponent, but Kaeya was equally matched even without one. As expected, he blocked me, though the effort it took was slightly more apparent than before.
I held my blade in place, taking the momentary stalemate to look at Kaeya’s face, though I wish I hadn’t.
A single, silent tear rolled from his eye. Somehow—though he was sobbing at my feet mere moments before—this expression was infinitely more painful, weak, and utterly defeated.
A white flash knocked the both of us back. Kaeya landed on the rain-soaked cobblestone; I hit the front door, the iron handle knocking the wind from my lungs for a moment.
Forgetting my greatsword, now lodged into a nearby thicket of boxwood, I crawled to my brother. He lay motionless on his back, a cruel juxtaposition to my father’s slumped form when he took his final breaths. Panic shot through my body.
“Kaeya.”
My voice was hoarse with dread, barely able to articulate the name.
To my relief, he rolled over, fairly unscathed. His eyepatch had flown off in the chaos, string cut neatly.
I started tying the loose ends together again, only to have Kaeya stop my shaking hands.
He shook his head once. My shoulders fell in defeat. I followed his line of sight to the glowing object in his palm.
The gods were cruel, indeed.
A cryo emblem stared back at the two of us, icy light pulsating with numbing tendrils of energy.
Kaeya shivered, but his expression remained blank. Whatever emotions he may have been experiencing remained indiscernible. I tentatively reached my hand out; it had become habit at that point.
In an instant, Kaeya shifted away, gradually pushing himself to his feet. I let my hand fall.
“What about father? Everything he’s done for you?”
I regretted speaking immediately. It was a cheap attempt to guilt-trip him, but ultimately I knew Kaeya’s decision had been made.
“…I hold the utmost respect for Master Crepus. But he should have left me back then. His sense of duty was both his strength and his vice, even to the very end.”
Anger reignited, I felt too nauseous to respond to Kaeya’s sudden decision to stop calling him “Father”. If this is how he wanted things to be, so be it.
“Go. We tied this fight. I don’t want to see your fucking face another second.”
Oddly, Kaeya smiled softly, as if what I said had even remotely resembled words of comfort. He turned towards the dirt path leaving the winery and limped away. Clutching his sword in one hand and his new vision in the other, his retreating silhouette bore a broken sense of pride.
I shivered as my anger immediately died out, quick as it had started. The searing warmth at my hip seemed to mock me, laughing at my ability to lose both family members in the span of 12 hours. I ripped the disgusting thing off my belt and slammed it into the ground. It continued to glisten, pristine in its indestructible glory. I resigned to gathering it inside my Favonius-issued overcoat and dislodging my greatsword from the wet soil. Back inside the winery, I shoved the bundle into my pack, avoiding the second bag sitting next to it and retreating to the office to write out my official resignation letter.
The sound of the rain as it grew ever more turbulent drew me from the task at hand, and I suddenly recalled the night my father brought Kaeya to the winery, drenched from the unrelenting downpour. The rain had sounded the same back then.
I cursed the gods for what must’ve been the millionth time that day. Knowing he would be the only staff left on the premises at this hour, I called for Elzer, instructing him to ensure Kaeya’s safe return to the Knight’s headquarters and to remain unnoticed at all costs.
The front door slammed shut with Elzer’s departure, leaving me truly alone in the mansion. Half-written resignation forgotten, I dropped my head into my arms, folded over the desk. My hands gripped onto shaking shoulders as I cried, letting my voice drown in the raging storm outside.
In a tear-drunk haze, I mourned the loss of warmth I once felt from my father’s steady guidance, the loss of faces aglow by the fireplace on rainy nights like this, the loss of balmy summer days spent at the beach.
Those bright, comfortable days felt like they happened in a different lifetime, to a different person, yet I missed them all the same. Even as I slowly came to terms with the fact that we would never return to how things were, I took an odd comfort knowing there may always be at least one similarity connecting my brother and I.
It was on that night I discovered that I, too, couldn’t stand the cold.