Chapter Text
The Dawn Winery gets scant warning of the oncoming storm. Mondstadt grows chill in the winter, the winds turning harsh, but it rarely gets more than a sprinkling of snow. No one expected a blizzard to come screaming down out of the northwest like this. The only reason they have warning at all is a Springvale hunter up the old northern road who sees the first flakes, and the heavy clouds beyond them, and decides he doesn't have time to make it back to the village.
Crepus sends out his best rider on one of the Winery's fastest horses to warn the village in the hunter's stead, with orders for her to take shelter there and not try to return until the blizzard ends. Then he and his employees start preparing for the incoming snow.
Anyone from the outlying houses is invited to come up to the manor to wait out the storm; Crepus hates the thought of any of his people shivering in their homes, or worse yet, being caught under a roof that collapses under an unexpected load. The grapevines have to be covered, as many as possible in the short time they have, and the barns and stables secured so the beasts will stay warm. There hasn't been such a storm since Crepus was a small child, but the previous Ragnvindrs have made note of what precautions they took, and which others they should have and didn't. He religiously follows their guidance.
In all the bustle, Crepus assumes that the boys have been pressed into service. It's not an excuse. He'd never excuse himself for neglecting them, even for an hour, no matter how urgent the affair. But that is why he doesn't realize they're missing, not until he and the workers are all tromping into the manor to drink the warm mulled wine the maids have been brewing and he realizes that he sees neither a shock of red hair nor the long tail of blue that's recently become its constant companion.
"Were Diluc and Kaeya with you?" He asks one of the men he'd directed to take charge of some section of the efforts, and then another, but every time, the answer is a solemn head-shake and a worried "No." He even goes so far as to ask the cooks and maids--it's not like Diluc to try and skive out of the heavy work, so eager is he at this age to prove himself a man, but maybe Kaeya persuaded him that in this case it was better to be inside and warm. But even they haven't seen hide nor hair of the boys.
"Master Crepus?" The voice is soft and young and uncertain.
Crepus turns to look at the pale-haired boy, hardly more than a few years older than Diluc. Leah's son, he thinks, the boy who shows such a talent with numbers that Crepus has him sharing Diluc's tutors. What was his name? Ah, yes.
"Elzer," he says, smiling at the lad and trying to keep his worry from his face. "What is it?"
"You're looking for Master Diluc and Kaeya, aren't you?" Elzer asks. "They went out hours ago. We finished up lessons early today, and Master Diluc said he was taking Kaeya around the lake a bit, towards the cliff on the north end, to show him, um, a place he liked there."
Elzer goes evasive at the end, his gaze darting to one side. But Crepus knows immediately what he's talking about. There's a sheltered little cave up there where Diluc has been hiding forbidden treasures since he was very small. Half the trinkets are ones he found in that spot--an old rusted bell, a tiny jeweled dagger, a small wood chest with one hinge broken. Crepus knows because they were his own treasures, when he was a child. Generations of young Ragnvindrs have squirreled away their secrets there.
But it's the only really sheltered place in that whole area, and it's not all that large. Two small children might fit inside, to stay safe from the snow, but Diluc and Kaeya are far from small.
He looks over the workers gathered in the front hall, talking quietly as they drink their wine, and picks a few of the most sober-looking out of the crowd. "Tunner, Josef, Miriam. The boys are still out in the storm. Will you come help me bring them home before it gets any worse?"
All three he'd chosen set their drinks aside and pick their jackets back up without hesitation. Other people look up and call out offers to come along, but Crepus waves them down. He doesn't need the whole winery trooping out into the snow with him, halfway to drunk and likely to stumble off into the storm. All he wants is enough people to help get the boys home if either of them are unwell.
"Do you need me to show you?" Elzer asks, fidgeting nervously.
As if Crepus is going to take another boy out into the storm and maybe lose him too. Besides, he's hardly ready to hire a new head housemaid just yet, and that's what he'd have to do if he so much as ran the risk. "No, Elzer, I know where they are. You stay here and help your mother get ready for them. They may need hot drinks and warm blankets by the time we get them back."
Elzer looks disappointed, and Crepus claps him on the shoulder. He's never been the close friend to Diluc that Crepus may have hoped he'd become when they started lessons together, a few years' difference in age being a vast gulf to the young, but he proximity alone must have made him fond of Diluc and his new shadow. At Crepus' gesture, he draws himself up with more confidence. He looks almost his age that way.
"We'll be ready, Master Crepus."
"I'm sure you will be," Crepus tells him as one last reassurance. Then he gathers up his chosen crew and heads out into the snow.
The wind has gotten much worse in the forty or so minutes they were inside. They'd headed in when the first snowflakes started blowing, but already the snow is steady, the wind whipping it into their faces like a driving rain. The snowclouds block out the afternoon sun, casting the Winery into shadow, and the darker, thick-bottomed clouds racing down from the north promise even deeper dimness on the way.
Tunner's brought markers with him, the brightly-painted tall stakes used to lay out the boundaries of new fields or mark vines for special attention. Crepus quickly realizes how valuable that foresight was. At the moment, he can still see the familiar landscape around him, but visibility is dropping fast, and it will be worse yet coming back. They plant stakes every ten feet as they head north along the lakeshore.
Soon Crepus is navigating mostly by his own familiarity with this trail. He would have expected to have forgotten the way--he'd forgotten the little cave himself, until Elzer reminded him of it--but it seems some childhood memory remains. They leave the path alongside the lake to forge eastward up the slope.
He does hope he really is remembering the way, and not imagining it. Even in his heavy coat, he's bitterly cold, the slashing winds finding every space they can to drive snow between his clothes and his bare skin. The snow is piling quickly, too, halfway up his calves already. Tunner and Miriam, both much shorter than him, are starting to struggle as they head up the hill in his tracks. It can't be later than early evening, but the gloom that's fallen under the weight of the storm is as dark as twilight. Josef lights a lantern and holds it high for them all.
Then bushes loom up in front of him, one bent and twisted by some long-ago lightning-strike, and Crepus knows he's almost there. He turns right here, climbs a few feet more to where the bluff starts, and scans along the tangled, snow-covered rocks along the wall. The cave is here, sheltered by them, but he can't remember exactly where.
"Master Diluc?" Miriam shouts, coming up next to him.
"Diluc? Kaeya?" He takes up the call, and so do the other four.
Listening closely in the spaces between their own shouts, Crepus hears a familiar cry from among the rocks. "Father?"
Tunner scrambles over the rocks and begins scraping at the snow, and Crepus hurries to join him, Miriam and Josef right behind. Heavy drifts have blown up over the outcroppings already, but they scrape them away easily, revealing dirt piled behind them. And then Diluc pokes his head out from among the rocks--dirt-streaked and unnervingly pale, but moving and alive.
"Diluc!"
Crepus crushes him into a hug. He can feel Diluc trembling in his arms--no, shivering, and as Diluc, embarrassed by the attention, wriggles away, Crepus feels dampness seeping through his coat in the gaps in the weather-proofing. When he looks Diluc up and down, he sees his son is soaking wet.
Kaeya, peering out of the cave behind him, is also dirt-streaked and shivering, but he's not nearly as wet. Both boys' gloves are ruined, and Crepus looks at the piles of dirt at the entrance of the cave and realizes that they must have been digging it out. Of course, they wouldn't have both fit otherwise.
"What happened to you two?"
"Diluc fell in the lake," Kaeya says. "We were trying to stay warm and out of the wind."
"We were digging here, to make more space, and then it started getting dark early, so we went down to the lake to clean off before we came home," Diluc says. "There was a Cryo slime, and I fell in fighting it. But by then the snow was coming down. I couldn't get myself dry with just my Pyro Vision, so we were trying to start a fire in the cave, but there wasn't really space and the only wood we could find was wet.... Kaeya said I couldn't walk home wet in this weather, though."
Crepus thinks of his son struggling through the cold winds, soaked to the skin, and is deeply grateful that they had the good sense to shelter in the cave. Diluc is hugging himself now, and Kaeya comes up to curl against him, like he must have been doing before rescue arrived.
"Here you are. Wrap yourselves up in these, and we'll walk you back," Tunner says, pulling blankets from his pack. "Master Diluc, you take that coat off and wear just the blanket. Better one dry layer than two wet."
Both boys wrap themselves up as best they can, and everyone starts back, two adults to a child. Crepus and Josef guide Diluc along, Crepus with his arm around Diluc's shoulder for a little extra warmth, while Miriam and Tunner walk with Kaeya. It's full dark now, and Josef's lantern creates a tiny pocket of light in the whirling blizzard. They go from one marker to another, all the way back to the manor house.
As soon as they get inside, half the maids descend upon the boys with Elzer in tow, dragging them off to strip down and get into warm baths. Crepus doesn't embarrass them by following them to their rooms. Instead, he waits in the kitchen where Leah and the cooks are keeping soup and hot cocoa warm.
Diluc emerges first, wrapped in his fluffiest robe with his hair still damp. He has a bandage around his left hand. Crepus frowns at the sight of it.
"Was that from the slime?"
"What?" Diluc pauses in the midst of sitting down and touches the bandage, then, unexpectedly, flushes. "No, it's... that's why we were out there. I read about something in my lessons the other day. An old ritual for, um, becoming blood brothers."
Crepus, who read the same old books during his education, nods. "You cut your left hands, because they're close to your heart, and mix the blood. And that's what the two of you were doing?"
"We were." Diluc draws himself up, the way he does when he's trying to make himself look more adult. "If Kaeya's my brother, that makes him a Ragnvindr. And that means no one can come and take him away from us."
Like his father, Diluc doesn't say. Maybe that's not even who he's thinking of. But it's what's been on Crepus' mind for a while. Two months isn't enough time for the Knights of Favonius to adjudge a child abandoned, not when it's not unclear whether the parent meant to do so, so Crepus sits on the urge to tell Diluc about the notion that he's begun fostering. He won't get his son's hopes up just to have them dashed if the man does return.
"Unfortunately, the law doesn't recognize that ritual anymore," he says instead. When Diluc's jaw goes stubborn with defiance, he smiles and adds, "But I won't ever make him leave here unless he wants to go."
"Good," Diluc says, and drops into the chair he'd been aiming for with a full-body slump of relief.
A few moments later, Kaeya comes padding in, light-footed and almost drowning in Diluc's second-fluffiest robe. He gives Crepus a polite smile. "Thank you for coming to get us, Master Crepus."
"I'll always come for you boys," Crepus says.
"That's what family does," Diluc puts in, almost fierce. "And since you're my brother now, Father will come even if I'm not there."
"I will." Crepus sees Kaeya looks dubious, almost amused at Diluc's certainty, and tries to put all his sincerity into that assurance.
He can't tell how well he does, or how much of that the boy believes. But then Kaeya sits down next to Diluc, and his smile goes from polite and amused to bright and genuine. Leah sets hot soup in front of the two of them. They murmur to each other, their voices rising and falling in conversation in between greedy mouthfuls of broth. Their heads bow together as they talk, bright red and dark blue, and they seem heedless of the way their shoulders brush together.
Watching them, safe and warm and happy, Crepus leans back with his own mug of hot cocoa and smiles. Blood-brothers or not, adoption is still months away--but he doesn't need paperwork, and the boys don't need old rituals, to make it clear that Diluc's found himself a brother. They fit together like two halves of a whole. Crepus can tell, just watching them, that those boys will always be at each others' side.