Chapter Text
Jean wasn’t sure how to feel about the Ragnvindr brothers. True, they had been enough fun at Diluc’s promotion party, just in vastly different ways. Diluc was...quiet. Focused, even. The single-minded dedication to his knight training had scored him his graduation from knight-in-training to proper knight even faster than her, and she’d been training since she could pick up a sword. Kaeya, on the other hand—he’d been fun in a sharp, edged sort of way. He struck her as the sort of person to smile at you while he planned something embarrassing.
Which he had tried to do to her, to be fair.
The two brothers had a strange magnetism between the two of them, like they existed in an orbit around each other and each other alone. She almost felt like she’d been intruding at the party. But they’d been nice enough after, and Diluc had even indulged her in her request for a spar. Maybe the outcome hadn't been what she wanted, and maybe she’d regretted the choice a little when she went home, but it had been fun while it lasted.
She was even more inclined to like them, considering her mother had nothing to say about either brother. Of Diluc, she turned up her nose and dismissed as “Just another one of those gaudy Ragnvindrs, all power and no finesse.”
She disagreed. Diluc had plenty of finesse. Fixing the outcome of the spar like that, with barely any preparation? Sure, she’d been angry when she put two and two together—Kaeya’s amused laughter, Diluc’s low murmur about fair play and appearances—but damn. That was the sort of endeavor that required knowledge of his opponent and a solid grasp on his own abilities. And really, she could admire that, and appreciate his overblown sense of whatever “good form” was.
Of Kaeya, her mother’s judgement had been worse. She’d bristled at the very mention of Jean speaking to him, muttered something caustic about outlander security risks and bleeding-heart fools. Then she promptly forbid Jean from seeing him on the basis that he was “trouble”.
Naturally, Jean sought him out.
But the younger Ragnvindr was surprisingly difficult to get a hold of. Their training schedules didn’t overlap, so she’d taken to lingering after class and meandering the training grounds to try and catch him. Somehow, she hadn’t run into him. Not even once. It was like he knew exactly where she was at all times and gave that area a wide berth.
By the time Kaeya’s elusiveness had started to grate on her, she’d decided to camp out in front of his squad’s training grounds to just speak to him already. In the end, though, it was Kaeya who found her outside of the library, about to enter and look for a treatise on Anemo-enhanced sword forms.
“Lady Gunnhildr,” said his familiar voice from behind her.
Kaeya had a nice voice. It said a lot about him, the way he always sounded like he was grinning.
“I thought I told you to call me Jean,” she said, turning around. Kaeya was wearing his training uniform, a sheathed sword at his hip and a look in his eyes that spelled mischief.
“Jean,” he said easily. “My apologies. I was wondering if you would help me with a project of mine.”
Jean looked him up and down. His uniform was dirty, like he’d just gotten out of training, and his medium-length blue hair was determined to escape his ponytail. She raised an eyebrow, and Kaeya’s polite smile widened. “It’ll be fun,” he promised. He put his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels, looking like an excitable schoolboy.
“What’s the project, Kaeya?” she asked warily, crossing her arms and leaning against the library door. “And we’ve only spoken once, so why seek me out?” The question of why he’d been avoiding her—because he must have been—hung in the air.
Kaeya tilted his head back and forth, as if searching for the right thing to say. “It’s a project like spilling the punch was a project,” he said finally, “and I thought you might appreciate it more if you were on the other end, so to speak.” He fell silent, then, watching her. She made a show of letting the silence sit uncomfortably, letting him sweat. It was what he deserved for avoiding her, really.
“Is the target your brother?” she asked then. She figured it probably was, since he was coming to her for help. Though, really, she wasn’t sure what kind of help she would be. Jean didn’t have much experience pranking. Training, yes. Sparring, yes. Reciting founding documents, history, and the rulebook, yes. But pranking? She couldn’t remember if she’d ever played a proper one.
To her surprise, Kaeya scowled. “No,” he huffed, rocking back on his heels again. “My esteemed and knightly brother is busy doing knightly things and conducting knightly business. You know. Because he is a knight.”
Jean tried not to choke on a laugh and only partly succeeded. “Sir Kaeya,” she said, teasing and amused, “you wouldn’t happen to be jealous of said ‘knightly’ business, would you?”
Kaeya raised an eyebrow at her, mimicking her previous expression with an air of condescension. “Me? Jealous of more work?” he asked, a hand flying to his chest. “Never. I’m only upset that he’s too busy conducting a mass genocide of slimes in Springvale to help me out. Alas—” and here he grinned, as if to say he didn’t mean it, “He very much is busy murdering slimes, and so I need a different partner in crime.”
“I’m sure there are plenty of others who could help you. Besides, I don’t think I’ll be very useful,” Jean admitted. “I’ve never really played a prank on anybody before.”
Kaeya stopped rocking and straightened, looking at her with a strange expression. “In the most respectful way possible,” he drawled, “what are you talking about? You pranked Diluc and I at his party with the whole ‘So I actually hated that dress’ debacle. You had me worried for a moment. Even if you’ve no experience, you’ve got the talent.”
She opened her mouth to reply, then closed it. What could she say to that?
Noticing her floundering, Kaeya’s grin widened. She could practically see him decide to mess with her.
“In fact,” he said, leaning forward with a conspiratorial gleam in his eyes, “I think you have the talent and the motive, Jean Gunnhildr.”
“What are you implying?” Jean shot back, tensing as he perched just on the edge of her personal space.
“You strike me as the sort of person who’s had a role picked out for her since she could walk. And you’ve fulfilled it well, right? Done the training, memorized the documents, been prim and proper and the perfect heiress. With me so far?”
Jean nodded slowly, spellbound.
“Right,” repeated Kaeya. “That sort of thing chafes a person, you know. Don’t you want to do something...surprising?”
“Surprising?” Jean echoed, a little bit breathless for reasons she didn’t understand.
“Would anyone expect you, the Gunnhildr heiress, to be helping Master Crepus’s outlander charity case with a prank? You, of all people?” Kaeya asked.
“Outlander—”
“Not important,” he said, waving a hand. “Either way. Are you in or not?”
Jean took one long look at him. At the way Kaeya stood, smirking and confident and utterly sure of himself, self-possessed in the way she wished she was. And she thought about the strange sincerity in his voice when he spoke about a role she’d been made to fit, the intensity in his single blue eye.
About the way he could have gone to anyone, and yet he went to her.
“I’m in,” she said, and Kaeya’s beaming grin brightened up his entire expression.
“I was hoping you’d say that!” he chirped, and slung an arm around her shoulders to drag her away from the library. He set off at a brisk trot, his arm light but firm, and Jean wondered what on earth she was getting into. Nothing good, probably.
She refused to examine how the very thought of terrible consequences made her feel like smiling.
“Now, I haven’t been entirely honest, but there’s another reason I approached you besides the aforementioned pranking instinct and the fact that my brother is probably getting eaten by a slime,” Kaeya was saying, and Jean snapped herself to attention. He was leading her...somewhere. Away from the Knights’ headquarters, through the streets of Mondstadt—to the gate, perhaps? She focused again on Kaeya’s voice. Barbatos, this boy always had so much to say.
“It’s also because you have ties to the target,” said Kaeya, and Jean stopped walking.
“My mother?” she asked, because she couldn’t think of anyone else.
“Was it that obvious?” Kaeya asked, eyebrows drawing together. “Damn. I’ll need to work on that.”
“You,” said Jean incredulously, “want me to help you prank my own mother.”
“Yes,” said Kaeya, utterly shameless. “Besides. You can’t back out now. You agreed, and a knight always follows through on their promises, no? I’m fairly sure that’s a rule in the handbook.”
“My mother,” Jean replied, still stuck on the idea. How would that even work? Her mother had the situational awareness of a flighty butterfly and the skill to put them both on the ground before they could try anything. Her mother was the worst possible target that Kaeya could have picked, save maybe the Grand Master.
“Yes,” repeated Kaeya. “We’ve established this. Do keep up, Jean.”
Jean glared at him. “You should’ve told me this beforehand,” she insisted, and tapped her foot nervously on the cobblestones. “I agreed on false pretenses.”
“The blame is yours for not asking,” said Kaeya, with an elegant and infuriating shrug.
Jean sputtered, and before she could get her thoughts together, Kaeya was by her side again and leading her forward. “Trust me,” he said, his tone cajoling. “I know what I’m doing. We won’t be caught.”
Jean let herself be led, frowning at him. “She would have dodged the punch spill,” she pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Kaeya. “But the difference is that I’ve planned this out accordingly.”
He slid his gaze over to her, side-eyeing her with a knowing smile. “I find it hilarious that you’re not objecting to it being your mother on principle, but, rather, that the risk is higher.”
Jean turned her nose up at him, pointedly refusing to answer. So maybe Frederica Gunnhildr wasn’t her favorite person in the world, but did he really have to point it out? Damn him and his stupidly perceptive eyes. He’d seen them interact, what, once? Twice? And he’d already stripped her down and aired her dirty laundry in a single conversation.
She really didn't understand why it was less annoying and more amusing, and why it honestly made her like him more, but that was a dilemma to ponder later. When Kaeya Ragnvindr wasn’t dragging her through the streets of Mondstadt to a small, out of the way store in one of the back alleys.
“Where are we going?” she finally thought to ask.
Kaeya opened the shop door and a bell chimed somewhere in the dark, dimly lit store. He didn’t answer her and instead tugged her over the threshold, shutting it behind them both. Jean looked around, absorbing the environment of the shop with a cautious feeling. It was small, and there was only one window to let in the muted sun. The shelves were stocked with packets and boxes of all kinds with labels she couldn't quite make out. The whole place smelled faintly of cecelias.
“Alfry,” Kaeya called softly.
A young girl popped up from behind the counter. Her hair was a dull shade of pinkish brown, and she wore them in pigtails—a cute but impractical hairstyle that her own mother would have never let her wear.
“Kaeya!” chirped the girl, leaning on the counter with a grin. “You almost never visit me anymore. What brings you here?”
Kaeya grinned back at her, his posture loose and relaxed. “Ah, just knight things,” he demurred, “and I’ve got a bit of business.”
She giggled. “The usual trade then?”
“Obviously,” he said. Alfry made a “wait one moment” sort of gesture and ducked underneath a curtain behind a counter. Jean could hear the sound of her rummaging around back there, looking for something. She popped back out a moment later with a medium-sized box hefted in her small arms. “Your usual,” she said.
Kaeya walked forward and murmured something into her ear. Whatever he had said—and even with her sharp ears, Jean hadn’t heard—made Alfry’s grin widen. “Ooh, I’m using that,” she said appreciatively, and dropped the box into his arms.
Kaeya laughed, adjusting the box. “What on earth for?” he asked.
She winked at him. ‘That would be telling, Sir Kaeya,” she said. “Now, shoo. I’ve work to do and you’re not strictly a paying customer.”
“You wound me, Alfry!” Kaeya yelled, dragging Jean back out of the shop. Once they were outside, back in the Mondstadt sunlight proper, Jean turned to him. “Explain,” she said, raising an eyebrow.
“All in good time,” he said.
“Now is a great time,” Jean insisted, and Kaeya sighed, put upon and resigned all at once. His single blue eye slid to her, suddenly serious. Not for the first time, Jean wondered what had happened to his other eye. Maybe, if she didn’t mess up his prank and they became friends, she would ask someday.
“Not here,” said Kaeya. She ended up following him outside the gates of Mondstadt, nodding an acknowledgement to the two gate guards and stepping out onto the well-worn path. Kaeya didn’t lead her far, speaking little and walking with purpose. He only stopped at a small copse of trees a little ways past the bridge and set down the box. He plopped onto the grass, folding his long legs beneath him, and gestured for her to sit too.
She did so, mindful of the fact that her uniform would probably get grass stains she’d need to explain to the maids.
“Well?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at him. He didn’t look at her, instead, starting to pry open the box.
“Do you know Alfry?” he asked, in lieu of an actual answer.
“No,” said Jean, taken aback by the non-sequitur.
Kaeya made a noncommittal noise. “I didn’t expect you to,” he replied. “She’s twelve, just starting to wonder what more is out there. Born and raised inside Mondstadt, of course. A merchant’s daughter. Her parents manage the store, but they travel more often than not. She gets lonely.”
Jean hummed an acknowledgement and watched him. One of the few good pieces of advice her mother had given her was that she should listen when people tell stories. This was the city of Mondstadt, after all. The city of wind and song.
Stories told in this place had more power than she knew, her mother had told her, and while she didn’t fully understand it—because weren’t stories just words?—she could respect it.
“I met her when running from one of the instructors,” recalled Kaeya. “It was my first and last foray into making my own explosives. It turns out I don’t have a knack for it, and the resulting fallout had me slightly injured and needing a bolt hole. Alfry helped me out, hid me in the back room of her shop and lectured me on the proper handling of firecrackers. As it turns out, she’s a dab hand at making them.” Kaeya had finally opened the box and pulled out a couple of brightly colored sticks, fuses dangling out of one end.
Jean let out a startled laugh. “You’re joking,” she said, watching him unpack bundles of firecrackers.
“Not this time,” he disagreed, smiling at her a little. “Anyway, Alfry has big ambitions to have a spy network of a sort. I pointed her toward the intelligence division of the Adventurer’s Guild. She’s planning to join up when she’s old enough, but she’s also trying to get a head start.”
“Ah,” said Jean, understanding. “Information for competently made explosives.”
“Precisely,” said Kaeya. “I hear a lot of things, you know. I dragged you out here because I know, better than anyone, that the walls have ears. Wouldn’t want this getting back to your mother.”
Jean conceded the point with a nod. “Exactly how explosive are these?” she asked suspiciously, prodding at one with her boot.
Kaeya looked at her concerned expression and laughed. “No worries,” he said easily. “They make loud noises. Very little smoke or fire. Definitely a hazard, because they wouldn’t be any fun otherwise, but not enough to kill a person. I hear murder is frowned upon.”
“Quite,” Jean agreed, feeling a little dizzy. She picked up one of the bundles, turning it over in her hand. Each bundle contained three cylinders of different colors with a fuse coming out of one end. Kaeya had about nine bundles laid onto the grass, each a different combination of colors.
“So what are we doing with these?” she asked, and Kaeya’s grin sharpened.
“Well, I might have a few ideas.”
—
Jean, lying on her stomach on the mezzanine of some minor lord’s house, had started to wonder if this had been a good idea after all. She was playing lookout for Kaeya, who had promised her that nobody would be near the explosion as long as she kept an eye on the guests below. She’d be giving the signal for him to set them off at exactly the right moment—no sooner and no later.
Her back hurt and the floor was unforgiving against her elbows. “This is shit,” she muttered to herself. Nobody was around to scold her for it, and Kaeya had somehow kept all the guests and servants from the mezzanine with a whispered rumor that the stairs were creaking dangerously at this minor lord’s house. How he did it on such short notice, Jean didn’t know. It was vastly more likely that this plan had been in the works for far longer than she’d been involved.
She eyed the guests below, praying none of them looked up. “People rarely do,” Kaeya had told her, waving away her concerns in that annoyingly insouciant way of his. More and more, he seemed like one of those people who remained unflappable even when things went horribly wrong.
She hoped to Barbatos that he had a contingency plan if this went horribly wrong, anyhow.
The guests below milled about in their formal wear, talking and laughing and nibbling on delicate appetizers. It was a much more low-key gathering that Diluc’s promotional party, just a socializing event thrown by whoever owned this house. Jean had needed to scale the outside of the manor to get onto the mezzanine, where there had been a conveniently open window.
...Now that she thought about it. Kaeya probably had an inside man.
The thought failed to alarm her, and she refused to be concerned about the amused feeling blooming in her chest. The younger Ragnvindr was, as her mother would say, absolutely incorrigible. Jean somehow found it endearing.
She only caught wisps and snatches of conversation from her position on the mezzanine. Some useless gossip about someone’s son failing to woo his sweetheart, a burst of raucous laughter in reply to a joke she hadn’t heard. Really, it reminded her about being on the floor of functions like these. The Gunnhildr heiress, untouchable and prim and alone, because nobody spoke to her at such things unless they wanted to curry favor with her mother or were related by blood.
She found that she didn’t regret ruining their party one bit. A darkly satisfied part of her was muttering something about justice and she wasn’t at all interested in getting it to pipe down.
Jean noticed that her mother, resplendent in a gown of ivory brocade, had finally set her sword down at a table in order to sit properly. Finally.
She wormed backwards from the edge of the mezzanine and hopped to her foot, knocking sharply three times on the wall. Barbatos, she hoped Kaeya heard the signal.
She counted the seconds as they slowly ticked by. He’d told her to wait a minute and a half from when she knocked before going for the stairs. Since Kaeya was outside setting up the firecrackers, he couldn’t be the one on the floor, and Jean was conveniently closer.
“This is really a three-man job,” he’d told her, mouth pursed slightly.
Jean remembered startling at that, nearly dropping the bundle of firecrackers she was helping him repack. “Three-man?” she repeated. “So even if Diluc hadn’t been called off—”
Kaeya slid that bright blue eye to her, his frown turning into a grin. “Well, usually Diluc is who I put on the floor in order to do any extraction bits. He may be a brute with his greatsword, but he has fast hands. But this plan can’t really work without a lookout, and if I had Diluc on the floor or setting up the explosives, the timing might be slightly off. With plans like these, timing is everything.”
Jean hadn’t replied, packing in more firecrackers and trying to ignore the warm feeling spreading through her. She hadn’t even been just a second choice for a pranking partner, like he’d implied earlier. He’d planned this with her in mind from the start.
At a minute, the firecrackers started going off. Loud popping noises exploded from the front of the house, making all the guests rush to their feet and out the doors to see what was going on. She waited thirty seconds before making for the stairs.
She kept counting the seconds as she skidded down the polished wood, trying not to make too much noise. Keya had said he could only guarantee her sixty seconds for the stairs and the actual snatching of the sword, and she wasn’t about to waste any of them. She was at the bottom of the stairwell in nineteen seconds, reached the table where her mother had been sitting in twenty-five, and she had the sword in her hand to leave at twenty-six. The scabbard was cool and dry, but the sword was oddly heavy. She hadn’t even been allowed to touch it before, as her mother either wore it or kept it in her bedroom.
The Aquila Favonia, a sword feared by Mondstadt’s enemies and allies alike because of its power. It hummed underneath the scabbard with a strange, densely coiled power, like a flattened spring. She nearly dropped it when she first picked it up from the table.
“Don’t do anything stupid,” she muttered to it, feeling a bit stupid but deciding not to take any chances as long as she had it in her hands.
Jean sprinted through the halls, making for the back entrance and reciting the directions in her head. Take a left. Third door on the right. Go through the servant’s hallway and—
There. The door, a dark, weathered brown, capped the end of the hallway. She burst through it and saw Kaeya, waving his arms wildly at her. Her stomach dropped—he wasn’t supposed to be waiting for her. They were to take separate exit routes and meet up at Alfy’s shop.
She darted over, the sword still humming quietly against her palms. “What happened?” she asked, out of breath.
“Someone with a Hydro Vision happened,” Kaeya said grimly, and gestured for her to run. They two of them took off for the city, as they’d been a little outside of the walls on the shore of the lake. As they fled the manor, trying to stick to the trees, Kaeya explained between breaths.
Apparently, one of the nobles had a Hydro Vision they’d used to put out the minor fire and sent the guests back inside quickly, and Kaeya had needed to improvise a hiding spot. When he’d been half-spotted by another guest, he’d high-tailed it to the door where he’d known Jean would come out of.
“We just need to make it to Alfry,” Kaeya said, panting a little, “on the off chance I was recognized.”
“Understood,” said Jean, clutching the sword in one hand tightly. Her heart was beating a mile a minute and her hands were sweaty enough that she didn’t trust her ability to hold it properly. If they got caught...she didn’t even want to think about it. Why had she even agreed to this?
She knew the answer as soon as she asked the question.
She hadn’t ever had this much fun.
Jean felt a grin spread across her face and Kaeya turned to her, looking a little worried. “Jean?” he asked, and she couldn’t help but laugh.
“We’re going to be in so much trouble,” she informed him, uninterested in keeping the glee from her voice. Kaeya smiled back at her. “Only if we’re caught.”
It was then, of course, that they got caught—about fifteen minutes after leaving the manor and the scene of the crime.
Diluc Ragnvindr, in his knight uniform and looking entirely harried, burst through the trees. Diluc skidded to a stop in front of them, eyes immediately fixing on the sword in Kaeya’s hand. “You bastard,” he growled. “So you’re why Frederica Gunnhilr is on a rampage, yelling about hooligans stealing her sword and someone setting off firecrackers at Lord Hurston’s estate so loudly that my patrol had to go investigate?”
Kaeya opened his mouth to reply but Diluc had lunged for him, trapping him in a headlock. “You idiot!” he was roaring, hauling Kaeya bodily out of their little hiding place to dig his knuckles into Kaeya’s skull.
“I can’t breathe, you stupid brute,” Kaeya wailed, flailing wildly. Jean only barely managed to catch her mother’s sword when Kaeya dropped it.
“Breathing obviously isn’t an issue if you can still talk,” Diluc snapped.
Jean let out a startled laugh and Diluc’s gaze flicked to her, wide and surprised as if he had just noticed her presence. He dropped Kaeya like a stone and he crumpled to the ground, moaning and rubbing at his head. “Oww,” Kaeya complained, and was thoroughly ignored.
“Lady Jean,” Diluc said, sounding a little hoarse.
“Just Jean,” she corrected. “And yes, it is almost certainly our fault that my mother is on a rampage.”
“This wouldn’t have been an issue if I had been more important than the slimes,” Kaeya said snidely from his position on the ground. “And why do you sound like you were the one getting choked out? Drama queen.”
Diluc and Jean both looked at him, eyebrows raised, and Kaeya stuck out his tongue.
Diluc turned back to look at her, expression slack. “‘Our’...?” he asked.
Jean shrugged. “Apparently you left him high and dry on this one, and he needed someone to actually do the thievery.”
Diluc glanced between the both of them, his face progressively more resigned. “I should report you,” he said weakly.
“But you won’t,” Kaeya sing-songed, “because you’ll be a good brother and bail us both out. Won’t you, Diluc?” He batted his eyelashes at him and patted his foot.
“Yes,” agreed Jean, keeping a straight face. “Be our knight in shining armor, won’t you, Sir Ragnvindr?”
Diluc’s face somehow became even more pained. It looked a bit like he had eaten something sour in front of polite company and couldn’t, in good conscience, spit it out. He tipped his chin up and faced the sky. “Lord Barbatos forgive me,” he said mournfully, and dragged Kaeya to his feet by his collar. He gestured to Jean as he started walking, hauling his brother behind him. “You can hide out in the manor until this all blows over,” he said over his shoulder.
“Great,” said Kaeya, grinning again. “You want to be the one to return the sword, Diluc? Acquire points with the Lady Gunnhildr, and all?”
Diluc punched him in the shoulder. “Stop talking,” he muttered. “I blame you for this.”
“It was Jean’s idea!” Kaeya protested.
“It was not,” she said placidly, and couldn’t hold back her laughter when Diluc got Kaeya in another headlock and started yelling about “not telling lies” and “being polite to women” and “taking responsibility for his own shitty decisions, damn it!”
They ended up taking a circuitous route to the Ragnvindr house. It was a fairly long walk, but Jean didn’t talk very much. She just listened to Diluc and Kaeya bicker, feeling warm despite the sharp breeze.
“Why on earth did you drag Jean into your idiocy?” Diluc was grumbling, and Kaeya’s relaxed shrug probably didn’t do much to appease him.
“Who else would I have dragged into my idiocy, as you put it?” he shot back. “You were too busy setting slimes on fire to help out much.”
“I am literally, at this very second, bailing you out,” Diluc informed him, and Kaeya flapped a dismissive hand. “Details,” he said, and narrowly dodged another attempt at a punch to the arm. He edged away, a hand flying to his chest.
“So violent,” said Kaeya, sounding utterly scandalized. “What would Master Crepus say if he saw his son picking fights like this?”
Diluc raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms, clearing his throat noisily. “‘Splendid dodge, Kaeya!’” he said, affecting a higher pitch.
Kaeya outright beamed, clapping his brother on the shoulder. “‘A brilliant exhibition of synergy on the battlefield!’” he added, and Jean watched with fascination as Diluc cracked a grin.
“Master Crepus sounds like he’s very…” she searched for a word.
Kaeya turned a little to face her. “Enthusiastic?” he offered.
“Overbearing,” Diluc muttered, but the complaint was undercut by his smile.
“Perhaps bombastic,” Kaeya mused.
“You mean easily overwrought,” Diluc put in.
“Spoilsport,” said Kaeya, sniffing haughtily. Diluc’s smile widened. “That he is,” he agreed, and Kaeya sputtered a little. “Not what I meant, and you know it!”
Jean’s face hurt, she was smiling so hard. She didn’t even know what to say, or why there was such a warm feeling in her chest. It took her several long minutes of walking to the Ragnvindr estate before she had anything strung together into a coherent sentence, and the brothers had devolved into more bickering by then. She opened her mouth, half-scared she wouldn’t be able to get a word in edgewise.
But to her surprise, Kaeya noticed and turned to her again, cutting Diluc off mid-word. He tilted his head, as if waiting.
She almost felt like crying a little.
“What are we going to do with the sword?” she asked, lifting it a little for emphasis. It hadn’t stopped humming in her hand with that strange, tightly controlled power. The handle gleamed faintly in the low light.
Kaeya’s grin widened slowly, and Jean almost felt bad for her mother.
“Here it comes,” Diluc grumbled. “Are you sure you should say this while I’m in earshot?”
Kaeya shrugged. “You wouldn’t report me,” he said gaily. “Master Crepus would cry. You hate it when he cries.”
To her amusement, this argument actually made Diluc stop protesting. Jean filed that information away for further examination, because she had never, in her fifteen years of life, seen an adult cry. Apparently it was traumatizing enough that it could stop even Diluc in his tracks.
“Anyway,” Kaeya continued, “we give the sword back.”
“Back?” Jean exclaimed. “When it was so much effort to get in the first place?”
Kaeya nodded, still with that manic smile. “But! We put it exactly where we found it—on the table at Lord Hurston’s house. One of the servants finds it and tells your mother that it was where she left it. And she realizes that she threw a fit over nothing.”
Jean stared at him for a long second before starting to laugh again.
Frederica Gunnhilr could be an incredibly dramatic woman. She’d bore witness to many of her mother’s fits of temper over the years, though they were almost never directed at her. No, her mother had other weapons when it came to her. But what Kaeya was suggesting…
“That’s evil,” she breathed, admiring and in awe all at once. She hadn’t been expecting a poorly-concealed flinch from Kaeya or a strange shuttering of his expression, wiped away quickly by another smile.
“Isn’t it just?” he asked, somehow sounding utterly satisfied with himself.
“Messing with people,” Diluc muttered. “It’s his specialty.”
Jean laughed, trying to break the tension. “Can’t say she doesn’t deserve it,” she admitted freely, and Kaeya snorted.
“I figured,” he said, dry as the desert.
The three of them continued on in companionable silence, and ten minutes of walking later, they’d reached the Ragnvindr mansion. Diluc let them in through a side gate, either to keep up the pretense of secrecy or because he felt like it. Jean wasn’t sure which.
Or maybe he felt like making them walk slightly farther.
...It was probably that.
As she stepped past the gate, she glanced around. At the party, she’d been mostly confined to the ballroom and the nearby hallways. But the side gate led into a garden, blooming with flowers in the late spring. She spotted windwheel asters on a raised dais and lamp grass in a corner, and the white petals of cecelias. Trees with winding trunks lined the walls of the garden and cast dappled shade on the grass. It felt...safe. Like Jean had stepped past the gate and into a different world entirely, where the things she worried about couldn’t follow her.
“Wow,” she murmured, glancing around. Diluc smiled at her, and it was so strangely open and honest that she felt a little taken aback.
“It’s my father’s garden,” he told her, a little wry. “He spends his off days maintaining it. Doesn’t let any of the servants near the place either unless he’s away on a business trip, and gives them lengthy instructions on their care.”
Jean nodded, feeling struck dumb.
Kaeya bounded over the grass and peered around a corner. He bent down, like he was picking something up from the ground. “Diluc,” he said slowly, “will he notice if I pick a dandelion?”
“Yes,” said Diluc, rolling his eyes.
“Damn,” Kaeya said, turned around. He was holding a Mondstadt dandelion delicately in his hand, carefully keeping the stem from bending. “I suppose I’ll have to be the one to put up with him crying this time.”
Diluc rolled his eyes and watched, with a bemused expression, as Kaeya walked over.
“One moment, Jean,” he said, taking his brother by the arm and forcibly dragging him around the corner. She watched, amused and a little curious, as the two of them conferred over the blue flower. She couldn’t hear exactly what they were saying, but she gathered that the conversation was getting slightly heated when Diluc started to poke Kaeya in the shoulder.
“Turn around, if you would!” Kaeya called over, rubbing his forehead. Jean, trying not to laugh, did so. As they continued to exchange heated whispers, she tipped her head back to watch the leaves of Master Crepus’s trees move in the faint breeze. The sunlight shining through was a pale, buttery yellow, and all the better for being half-concealed by foliage. A bird trilled out a ditty from a tree a few feet over, and all Jean felt was pleasantly warm.
She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned, surprised. Diluc stood in front of her, shifting his weight nervously. He held the dandelion that Kaeya had picked in his hand, and he was pointedly not looking her in the eye. He held it out for her to take. “Matches your eyes,” he muttered, a flush creeping over his collar.
Jean took the dandelion from him and raised an eyebrow at it. “You might be right,” she said, examining the flower. She turned her face up a little to face him and grinned, still feeling warm. “Thank you.”
Diluc grew impossibly redder, and Jean felt a little off-balance. He was normally so calm and collected. She didn’t quite understand why he was so embarrassed. In the end, it was just a flower.
She looked down at it again, searching for some hidden message. She found none, and so she looked back at him. “Diluc,” she said hesitantly.
“Yes?” he asked.
“Does this mean we’re friends?”
Diluc stared at her, bright crimson eyes wide. The moment was interrupted when Kaeya burst into raucous laughter from behind them, stumbling back and leaning against the house with a thunk. He was positively cackling, chest heaving as he bent over. “Friends!” he said gleefully, and erupted into another fit.
Diluc’s blush was creeping over his fair skin to his face, and Jean looked between them both. Had she said something wrong?
“Are we?” she asked, a little tentative, and Diluc cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said, very seriously, and turned around. He strode over to Kaeya and grabbed him by the collar, hauling him up. “Go on, answer the lady’s question,” he said to his brother, who was still shaking with laughter.
It took him a long moment and several deep breaths, but then Kaeya opened his mouth. “Of course we’re friends!” he cried, and started laughing anew.
“I’m going to drown you,” Diluc said conversationally, and Kaeya batted at him with a hand.
Jean glanced between them both—Diluc with his placid expression and Kaeya well into the hyperventilation stage of hysteria—and shook her head. “I’m glad,” she told them.
Even Diluc cracked a grin at that, and the sight of it made Jean smile.
It was at that moment that Master Crepus decided to come out of a back door. Jean didn’t know him very well at all—only been privy to a few of her mother’s decidedly unkind thoughts about the man. Apparently he was fairly good with a polearm, but had never quite made it to knighthood in his youth. Her mother’s exact words had been somewhere along the lines of “jumped-up rich boy who never grew up”.
Jean eyed him and found that the image her mother had and the man in front of her didn’t quite add up. Master Crepus was tall, thin, and gangly, but moved with a strange fluidity. His bright red hair, the same shade as his son’s, was pulled up into a high ponytail. He wore a comfortable-looking shirt and pants, and he seemed to be dressed for gardening.
He gasped upon seeing her and Jean tensed, apologies ready on her tongue. But he didn’t say anything to her. Instead, he rounded on Kaeya and Diluc. “Why didn’t you tell me you were bringing a friend over?” he demanded, hands on his hips.
Jean opened her mouth to explain that it hadn’t been their fault, and that she would leave immediately because he was clearly not ready for guests, but he barrelled on. “I would have made cookies,” he told them, with a narrow expression. “Honestly, I taught you better than this.”
Ignoring Kaeya’s half-strangled protest, he rounded on her. “Lovely to meet you,” he said to her, his annoyed frown immediately morphing into an open smile. “Jean Gunnhildr, is it not? I’m Crepus Ragnvindr, but you already knew that. What’s your favorite cookie?”
“Er,” Jean managed, and Diluc groaned.
“Father,” he said tiredly. “Play nice, won’t you?”
Master Crepus gasped again, sounding horrified. “I am playing nice,” he argued. “I’m being perfectly nice. Aren’t I, Jean? I can call you that, can’t I?”
Jean swallowed. “Jean is fine,” she agreed, feeling a little faint.
“Marvelous,” said Master Crepus, and put a gentle hand on her shoulder. “Don’t tell the boys, but I made valberry tarts,” he confided, his voice conspiratorial but loud enough to carry regardless. “You can have the first pick.”
He practically frog marched her into the house, ignoring Kaeya’s outraged yell of “That’s the opposite of fair!”
Jean’s head was spinning a little, but really, tarts didn’t sound all that bad.
