Chapter Text
There are two options when you hit rock bottom. The first is to think that there’s nowhere to go but up. The second is to check behind you to make sure the trench doesn’t run any deeper .
On the whole, Diluc enjoyed his work as a wine tycoon. Even though he didn’t particularly enjoy the end product, that wasn't what he was in the business for. It was to carry on the reputation and memory of his father, and to honor every other Ragnvindr that came before him. Each bottle of wine they sold was a testament to their hard work, to their diligence, and to their character. The work was as intensive as it was rewarding. From maintaining the vineyards to balancing the bank books down to serving drinks personally at Angel’s Share, there was no job that had higher priority than another, no part of the process could be removed.
However, if there was any part of the process that he could remove, it would be the sort of thing he found himself doing that night— rubbing elbows with the Mondstadt elites and investors, playing petty games of fraternization. As shallow as they felt, he knew they would pay back dividends in the long run. Keeping his name and face fresh in the minds of rich people in high places paid back both monetarily and socially, especially since he understood the way those two values intertwined.
Which was why he currently found himself here, at the countryside home of the owner of the Mondstadt general store. Dawn Winery had provided drinks for the night, of course, and Diluc kept a glass in his hand throughout the night as he hobnobbed with the best of them. Even though this sort of work was the least physically intensive, it drained him the most. Constantly appearing “on”, navigating through group conversations, remembering how each person liked to be charmed and appealed to, then acting accordingly. Subtle tasks like this chipped away at him throughout the night as the drinks continued to pour and the wealthy merriment continued.
Eventually Diluc was able to pull himself away from the larger crowd he had been conversing with, feigning that he had to use the bathroom. While idly walking around to the other side of the grand dining room, he overheard two subordinates discussing something that piqued his interest more than any other casual business humdrum he’d been offered so far that evening.
“—I’d heard from a stevedore in Sumeru that they’d had a lot of weird activity at their ports.”
Diluc immediately cut into the conversation of the two men. “What sort of activity?”
The man who just spoke, a tall young man with a cropped haircut. “Ah, Master Diluc. It’s my pleasure. While I was travelling on business I spoke with the stevedore, as I said. We were discussing some of the details of our work, and they mentioned that they had ships coming in and out at irregular hours. Their harbormaster had reported unregistered and unnamed ships carrying what they thought to be suspicious amounts of ore. The ships came from their southeastern end, which would be more to the north east from Mondstadt. According to them, they were a particularly odd bunch, which you know means something when a dock unloader is saying that.”
“That’s very interesting. And potentially concerning for those dockworkers if they see anything more explicitly criminal coming to their shores. Did they have any idea what the ore was being used for?” Diluc tried to sound detached. Involved in the polite conversational sense, but not personally so.
The tall man responded “If I had to guess—”
The other man, a head shorter than his friend, piped in. “They could be smuggling in something within the ore.”
His friend was skeptical. “No way, how would that even work? Break open the chunks, stuff your drugs or what have you in them, and glue the rocks back together?”
“If you had something you wanted to smuggle around that badly, I imagine you do everything in your capacity to find a workaround,” Diluc said.
“As expected from such a fastidious man such as yourself, Master Diluc” the shorter one said, clapping his hand on Diluc’s shoulder. Diluc smiled and took it gracefully even though the unexpected physical contact took him off guard. He quickly regained control of his visage and pivoted back to the rumors. “Who do you think is running it?”
“It’s gotta be some sort of crime ring, right?” the taller one pondered.
Yes .
“I suppose it could be,” Diluc responded.
“Yeah no matter who it is, I can’t imagine they’re doing anything good with it, or we would have heard about it. Someone would be bragging from Snezhnaya to Liyue, trying to take all the credit for taking raw ore to make horseshoes for orphaned foals or something.”
The two of them laughed at the man’s joke, but Diluc caught onto that sentiment in earnest. The man was correct. This surely had to be some flavor of criminal activity. And if there was one thing Diluc knew for sure it was the feeling of excitement when pursuing the criminal.
Diluc pushed once more, “And where do you think the boats are coming from?”
“Hell if I know. My understanding is that no one has accurate maps of what’s out there that far away from the major land mass of Teyvat. I feel bad for the poor underlings who probably had to sacrifice themselves to find this secret hiding lair in the first place.”
It was only a rumor, but it would have to be enough.
The rest of the dinner party wrapped itself up quickly once Diluc had something far better to focus on.
Diluc usually loved his rides home from the Winery after meetings like this, with his energy truly drained and Gloriosa, his dappled gray Morgan horse, as his best form of company after being in the presence of so many other people.
However, the need to sleep was a hindrance to what he’d rather be doing— checking over his notes, his business documents, old newspapers— seeing if there was anything to corroborate what he had just heard. The rumors stank of the Fatui and their Delusions. The raw materials to make such a treacherous item had to come from somewhere off-the-books. Any quarry of notable size would have already been privatized by this point. And suspicious acting crew members with no clearly stated allegiances? It had to be Fatui, right? Right.
The feeling that began to pulse in his chest was both familiar and unwelcome. It was the acrid flavor of grief-led bargaining that carried him throughout most of Teyvat when he had travelled over the past three years. The thing that always had him thinking: There was something he could fix. An unjust death was a problem that he could find the solution for. Vengeance has to be the salve to his wounds, because it was the last thing Diluc had yet to obtain.
In the early days of his travelling, he waded through the countryside in what he had thought of then as the deepest valleys of his mind. The shock of death had clenched his jaw shut and his mind was only able to loop the same moments in his mind. Replaying the same moments where his heart would freeze in his chest, before sinking down into the pit of his stomach and resting six feet underground. Memories that would fight for attention at the forefront of his mind, a tableaux of his best and worst moments with his father. Moments when they were kind to one another, moments when they had both been cross, moments where one lashed out. He would often remember times where he had been a particularly juvenile type of cruel, needlessly talking back with sarcastic comments or refusing to do tasks simply because his father had told him to do them. He would then immediately see his father’s final moments, holding Crepus in his arms in a way no son that young should ever have to. He was always left thinking You had such little time with him left, and look at how you spent it. Ungrateful brat .
He was so young he had never even considered his father’s morality, so green himself that he had no concept that he too would age and would have probably taken care of Crepus as he became an elder of Mondstadt. There was no way for him to conceive the end when he hadn’t even conceptualized his place in his own beginning.
Diluc had thought he had been doing a lot better at handling his downswings in the past few weeks . It had been especially rough when he had finally returned to Mondstadt and had to face physical reminders of his father’s absence. Clothes, lovingly packed away by Adelinde as a part of her own healing, had to be unpacked and gone through. What would he keep, what would be handed off to gain new life from someone else. He had suppressed his urges to squirrel everything away for himself. To remind himself that if someone received a garment they wouldn’t be taking Crepus away from him.
His father had become a finite resource, inventory in the form of socks and riding gloves and trousers and colognes.
Most things he could genuinely justify keeping for himself. In his three years travelling he had filled out more both in height and in muscle, so he could reasonably have some of Crepus’s wardrobe staples become his own. At the time he himself had only two shirts that fit him that he had purchased while on the road.
The one thing he had let himself be truly selfish about was Crepus’s collection of ties. Diluc was used to wearing the cravat as part of the Knights of Favonius’s standard uniform, but Crepus had accrued an impressive collection of neckwear over the years that he stored in a wooden box atop his dresser. He couldn’t bring himself to wear them in public, though. To display his love for a father now-gone on his body so brazenly in his day-to-day life. It still felt so shameful to show his grief to anyone but himself. And even that was a challenge some days.
Diluc continued to mull over these thoughts as Gloriosa brought him home. Now that the emotions had been opened up, once he stabled Gloriosa for the night, he was more on edge in his own environment than he had been in a while. Each corner he turned he anticipated something jumping out at him. What that ‘something’ was was fluid, a thought that was unable to grasp with how fleetingly it took over his better judgement. A faceless enemy. A giant boar. Every Knight he left behind. He even stood in front of the doorknob to his bedroom believing, just for an instant, that perhaps Crepus was going to be behind the door, having never died at all, and everyone else who had ever known Diluc Ragnvindr was going to be standing around his father laughing at what a joke of a son he had grown up to be after all.
But of course that wasn’t the case. Adelinde had already gone to sleep, at Diluc’s own request earlier in the day not to fret staying up for his return, and the winery was otherwise empty. The only other thing in Diluc’s company was the broad hazy shadow cast by the cloudy twilight that came through the windows.
For how eager to stay up all night and conduct research on what the two men had told him, once he started undressing and preparing for bed his body quickly caught up with him and begged for rest. He tucked himself in, turned onto his right side, and gazed at the large shelf that faced him. There was the familiar skyline of books, another prestigious collection he owed to Crepus, that he was slowly working his way through reading. Many of them were reference books, some of them were his old workbooks from tutoring, and many more were collections of fairy tales that he was sure he could recite from memory with how many times he insisted on being read them in his young age.
And along that shelf there was something else, too. Several other things, actually, that Diluc tried to not focus his attention on.
But he knew they were there.
Different sets, different families, of carved wooden animals. They varied in quality, some very crude— shoddy lumpy shapes that could only charitably be called a bear— and many with increasing levels of detail. Whittling had been an activity that Crepus had happily set Kaeya onto in the early days of Kaeya’s transition to living with them. Kaeya had been brought to them so wound up. Constantly on edge, constantly in fear. He would jump out of his seat if a plate clanged against a table too loudly. Diluc and Crepus’s concerns for the boy, and their desire to make him comfortable in their home would often melt into exasperation at the end of the day. Mostly this due to the fact that Kaeya barely spoke to them, and neither Ragnvidnr could tell if it was because Kaeya’s mental response to the situation was to go mute or that he simply didn’t know how to speak common Teyvat language. Even when Diluc was 10, and still saw his father as an infallible god, he saw how the situation was wearing Crepus down. That desire to do right by the child he saved but not always knowing how to.
One day during Kaeya’s first week with them, a business partner had come by the winery. Diluc knew his son, the two of them had taken over their respective father’s enterprises, but the man himself was a hazy memory. He was old enough to have been Crepus’s father— a man that dealt with metallurgy and whose business created metal hoops for the wine barrels. He had noticed Diluc and Kaeya sitting tensely on a table outside the Winery entrance and procured what Diluc first thought was a shoehorn and a carving tool with a soft hooked end from his bag.
“This is basswood, a very soft wood. Perfect for beginners like you two. I’m making a new serving spoon. Do you want to try scooping out this part? Here, I’ll show you.” He knelt in front of the two boys, shifting so that they could both peer over his shoulder. “See how I hold the spoon in my left hand? I keep my fingers out of the way. This tool won’t cut your fingers, but there are some that could. Watch here, I hold the carving hook here, and make shallow little scoops. See?” He did the action, practiced and smooth, and held the pale wood chip up for the two of them to see. Kaeya, in a new-to-them show of engagement, reached out and took the chip in his hands, running his fingers over the grain and bending it to test its flexibility.
“Do you want to give it a try? Make sure to scoop along the grain top to bottom. Otherwise the spoon will split. Do that for as long as you like, until it seems like a good spoon. I looked over and saw you boys just sitting there and thought how much I’d hated that when I was a boy. I always need something to do with my hands,” he explained with a theatrical waggle of his fingers which earned a then-rare smile from Kaeya. Diluc shifted back in his seat, silently offering Kaeya the first turn.
In the end, Diluc never got a turn to use the tool himself. He was just as happy watching over his new acquaintance’s shoulder, enjoying both watching the process itself and the pleasure it seemed to bring him.
Kaeya took to it immediately. Not in the way that he was particularly good at the start, but it was clear that the task calmed him during the day more than any other thing Diluc had tried thus far.
He knew not to take that personally, but it was more difficult when he was a child.
From then on, if Kaeya knew there was a chance that at some point in the day he’d have idle hands and spare time, he brought a whittling kit and a block of wood with him. It started with simple shapes— mushrooms, crescent moons, stars. From Diluc’s perspective, he improved rapidly. Soon he made his own spoon, which he presented to Adelinde and was received in great delight. The overwhelmingly positive reaction quickly proved to be a good motivator for Kaeya. From then on almost every member of the Dawn Winery could expect a hand whittled or, later on, hand carved wooden gift for their birthdays. Crepus’s first birthday gift from Kaeya was a long smoke pipe. Elzer received an ornate letter opener. Diluc was the one exception to Kaeya’s birthday gifts. But that was more because he was the recipient of every other thing Kaeya whittled in the meantime. Cats, owls, snakes, horses, rabbits. Soon Kaeya had made them a whole zoo of wooden figurines to play and decorate the house with.
It took a few more pulses of bittersweet reflection, but he eventually lost out to his fatigue and fell asleep.