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I. The First Time
There were many things Diluc did not ask for in life.
He had not asked for the Death After Dinner Commission, which involved the Knight’s Cavalry Captain, a bottle of ancient dandelion wine, and a suspiciously chewed map of Mondstadt’s sewer system.
He had not asked for Kaeya to start loitering in the lab at Dragonspine like a frostbite-happy stray with no sense of boundaries.
He certainly had not asked to be flipping through Albedo’s sketchbook because the Chief Alchemist left it on the Angel’s Share bar again — he had just been trying to put it in the back with the other “Kaeya Lost and Found” items (which now had their own damn drawer).
And yet, here he was.
Holding a sketchbook.
Reading it.
And regretting every single life decision that led him here.
At first, it was normal. Too normal.
Delicate botanical studies. Precise anatomical diagrams. A philosophical note or two on the alchemical process of life’s transience.
You know. Typical genius stuff.
And then.
Page forty-three.
A sketch of Kaeya.
No—many Kaeyas.
Kaeya laughing, lounging, leaping. Kaeya in a lazy half-sprawl across the lab bench with a sly smile. Kaeya with a popsicle—was that two popsicles? One in each hand?
Diluc paused. Then flipped the page.
Kaeya again.
Shirtless this time.
Gods.
Was that sparkles? Had Albedo added actual shading to his pecs?
Diluc blinked. Once. Twice.
Page after page was lovingly detailed with the obsessive brush of someone who had not only memorized Kaeya’s stupid, smug bone structure but had romanticized it. Albedo had drawn Kaeya so many times he could have published a Kaeya Kama Sutra. Which, judging by the next page’s angle—was not entirely out of the realm of possibility.
“Oh for Archons’ sake,” Diluc muttered, flipping faster in the vain hope it got better. It didn’t.
Kaeya in repose. Kaeya with stars in his eyes. Kaeya with his collarbone peeking out of an open shirt and—was that glitter paint?
The kicker, though? Each sketch had a little note. Not analysis. Not research. No, this was pure indulgence.
“The curve of his smile seems almost cruel until he laughs. Then it’s all light.”
“Blue, yes, but there’s warmth beneath it. A slow burn.”
“If he were a formula, I would have spent my whole life trying to solve him.”
Diluc had to sit down. For his health.
“Kaeya,” he muttered under his breath, eyes wide in exhausted horror, “what in Celestia’s frosty ass did you do to Albedo?”
And just then, as if summoned by some unholy synchronicity, the door to the tavern creaked open. It was late. Too late for business. But not, apparently, for this.
Kaeya strolled in, hair tousled, half-cape fluttering behind him like he lived in a perfume ad.
“Oh my, Diluc, working late?” he purred.
Behind him, trailing a step behind with quiet precision and a conspicuously glowing blush, was Albedo.
Albedo who noticed his sketchbook immediately.
Albedo who paused like he’d been caught naked in church.
Albedo who very calmly said, “You weren’t supposed to see that.”
Diluc stood. Wordless. Waving the sketchbook in a slow, furious arc.
Kaeya peered at the open page.
Then grinned.
“Ah,” he said lightly. “You got to the good part.”
Albedo looked like he wanted to die.
Diluc looked like he wanted to kill.
There was a beat of total silence.
Then Kaeya leaned just slightly into Albedo’s space, eyes half-lidded.
“Well, since the cat’s out of the bag—what do you think, ‘Bedo? Should we just tell him we’ve been dating in metaphor for six months?”
“We’re not dating,” Albedo said flatly, ears a traitorous shade of red. “We’re observing emotional hypothesis through structured proximity.”
Kaeya chuckled. “Sure. You sketch me shirtless in ten different tragic lighting scenarios because it’s for science.”
Albedo blinked. “You were shirtless.”
“You kept asking me to hold that pose.”
“It was for studying the subclavicular shadow.”
“Oh, is that what you call it now?”
“Would you two shut up!” Diluc barked, slamming the sketchbook shut like it was cursed. “By Barbatos, just fuck already.”
A horrified silence.
Then—
Kaeya grinned, too wide.
Albedo blinked, lips parted in almost genuine confusion.
Diluc groaned and stormed off behind the bar.
They were in love. Obviously. Hopelessly. Hornily. In that quietly unbearable way where both parties denied it, overcompensated with casual brush touches and too-long eye contact, and used a sketchbook like it was an emotional confessional.
It wasn’t just a crush.
It was a goddamn art installation.
And Diluc?
He was in hell.
II. The Second Time
Diluc did not like visiting Dragonspine.
It was cold. It was quiet. It was full of frostarm lawachurls and emotionally stunted geniuses.
Also, it reminded him of Kaeya’s horrible tolerance for sub-zero flirtation and even worse wardrobe decisions.
A fur-lined cape was not adequate protection from hypothermia, but try telling him that.
Still. Diluc was not without reason.
Albedo had asked him—specifically him—to bring a small crate of reagent vials from the Angel’s Share cellar that Kaeya had stashed there “for emergencies” (read: Kaeya had been drunk and forgot they weren’t his).
He had gone up the mountain out of courtesy.
That was his first mistake.
His second was not knocking on the damn lab door.
The third was entering.
Because inside—
Kaeya.
Sitting in Albedo’s lap.
Like it was his natural habitat.
Worse—Albedo had his arms around Kaeya’s waist, holding him steady as if this was a normal ergonomic seating arrangement. Kaeya was draped in smugness and Albedo’s coat like a spoiled cat nesting in laundry.
And Kaeya was reading.
Aloud.
From Albedo’s field notes.
In a voice that sounded like honey trying to seduce a thunderstorm.
“‘Subject K. appears once again in the late afternoon, haloed in snowlight. He is laughing—no, smiling, which is rarer, and there is a glint in his eye I do not yet have a formula for…’”
Albedo, to his credit, looked only vaguely resigned to the situation, pencil still in hand, mid-edit.
Kaeya glanced up from the notebook in his hands and grinned. “Oh, Diluc. What a surprise. We were just engaging in a bit of literary… feedback.”
Albedo blinked at him. “I’m testing a theory.”
“About what?” Diluc said tightly, setting the crate down like it was a hostage.
“About whether reading back my own observations with Kaeya’s inflection changes their perceived emotional tone,” Albedo said.
“Translation,” Kaeya added, smirking: “he wants to know if I can make his science diary sound like a love poem.”
“And can you?” Diluc said. Immediately regretting it.
Kaeya did not blink. “You tell me.”
Then he cleared his throat and flipped to another page.
“‘Subject K.’s voice is pitched lower when he’s thinking. His fingertips hover above the snow, just shy of contact. I wonder if he knows he leaves behind heat even when he doesn't touch anything. I wonder if he knows I measure that, too.’”
Albedo didn’t flinch. But his pencil slipped. Just a little.
Kaeya turned his head, and this close, even Diluc could see how slow the look was—how lingering.
“‘He smiled today. At me. I felt it for an hour after.’”
Diluc made a noise like a teakettle trying to explode.
Albedo, as if noticing him for the first time, said mildly: “You brought the vials?”
“They’re on the floor,” Diluc managed, backing away slowly like someone who had found a bear in a tent. “Please never speak to me again.”
“Oh, come now,” Kaeya purred. “We’re not doing anything indecent.”
“You are sitting on his lap, reading his feelings about you aloud, while he’s blushing like he doesn’t know how to install a window.”
“I’m not blushing,” Albedo said, completely unconvincingly.
Kaeya leaned his head back, resting it on Albedo’s shoulder. “He says that, but he won’t stop writing about my stupid eyes. My eyes, Diluc.”
“Stop saying my eyes like that!”
“They’re very narrative, aren’t they?”
“I hate you both.”
“No you don’t,” Kaeya said, practically humming. “You’re just upset we’re not officially official yet. It’s messing with your sense of narrative structure.”
Albedo tilted his head. “Should we be?”
Kaeya blinked. “Be what?”
“Official.”
“Are you asking?”
“I’m testing a theory.”
“About what?”
“Whether I want to be.”
Diluc fled the lab.
Ran, actually.
Ran from the words.
From the unspeakable tension.
From the way Kaeya had stopped smiling like a bastard and started smiling like he meant it.
From the way Albedo looked at Kaeya like he wanted to turn his very bones into an art installation.
Diluc tripped on a frost flower. Cursed.
Vowed to take a vow of silence.
Vowed never again to open a book.
Vowed to never go outside.
Vowed to burn the Angel’s Share to the ground if either of them ever tried to bring a date there.
They weren’t even dating, apparently.
But if that wasn’t romance, if that wasn’t sweet, messy, sensual, shy-brained, poetry-stained love, then Diluc would eat Kaeya’s eyepatch.
With a side of field notes.
III. The Third Time
To be clear: Diluc was not eavesdropping.
He was simply walking the vineyard at night like he always did when insomnia curled like smoke around the edges of his mind, and the moonlight made the grapes look like scattered jewels. His gloves were off, the soil cool beneath his palms, and the scent of summer twilight was heavy in the air—dew and roses and wine.
It was peaceful.
Until it wasn’t.
Because as he passed the far side of the estate, the old stone wall near the edge of the fields—there were voices.
He paused.
One was Kaeya. Easy. Smooth, low, infuriating. Like whiskey poured over a flame.
The other?
Albedo.
Diluc exhaled. He should’ve guessed. Where Kaeya went lately, Albedo followed. Like a comet chasing gravity. Or maybe the other way around.
But they weren’t talking.
Not really.
He crept closer—reluctantly—and saw them: stretched out together on a blanket in the tall grass just beyond the vineyard fence. Kaeya had a bottle in one hand, arm behind his head, one leg crossed over the other like he owned the damn stars.
And Albedo.
Albedo had a notebook in his lap. His face turned upward. And—shockingly, heartbreakingly—smiling.
Gently.
Softly.
Like the kind of smile you wear only when you’ve forgotten to be careful with your heart.
“…there,” Albedo murmured, lifting a finger toward the night sky. “See that one? The falling star. Right above the edge of the Scorpion’s tail.”
Kaeya turned his head. “I’m watching you, not the stars.”
“Don’t,” Albedo said.
“Don’t what?”
“Say things like that when you don’t mean them.”
Kaeya was quiet.
Then—softly, low, like the admission cost him something—
“But I do.”
Silence.
Diluc’s fingers tightened around the old stone wall.
“You’re not the kind of person who says things just to say them,” Albedo added. “I know that. But still. You joke. You perform.”
“And you dissect every word I say like it’s a puzzle,” Kaeya replied. “Do you ever just feel something without breaking it into equations?”
Albedo turned his head. Their faces, in profile, framed in moonlight.
“I feel things about you,” he said, simply. “And I don’t write those down.”
Kaeya stared at him.
Diluc felt the shift. The drop. The tilt of gravity. The exact moment one of them fell off the edge.
“…do you want me to stop?” Kaeya said.
“Stop what?”
“Coming here. Calling you. Making excuses to see you. Leaving you terrible drawings on your lab table.”
Albedo laughed.
Gods, he laughed.
And Kaeya stared like he’d discovered a new star.
“No,” Albedo said. “Don’t stop.”
Diluc turned. Immediately. Fled back toward the house with the urgent, sinking horror of a man who had just accidentally witnessed two emotionally stunted idiots fall in love in real time.
He poured himself a full glass of grape juice. Drank it too fast. Poured another.
Because it wasn’t just the sweetness that ruined him.
It was the quiet sweetness. The vulnerable, reverent kind.
Kaeya had always been a storm, a smirk, a disaster dressed in silk and secrets.
And Albedo—he’d been quiet, sharp, untouchable.
But together?
Together they looked like home.
Kaeya, unguarded.
Albedo, undone.
Their words slow and careful, like the first time you say I love you without saying it at all.
Diluc downed the second glass. Contemplated exile.
Because that?
That was not flirting. That was not field notes.
That was poetry with breath and bruised knuckles and no exit strategy.
That was real.
And he didn’t know if he could handle it.
IV. The Fourth Time
There are many kinds of silences.
Diluc had learned that young: the silence of a house after the fire had died, the silence of a man with nothing left to say, the silence of grief clawing through your ribs like it wants to escape your body.
But the silence that followed Kaeya’s return from the reconnaissance mission was new.
It wasn’t quiet like grief.
It was quiet like pressure. Like the air before a lightning strike.
And at the center of it—Kaeya, bleeding. And Albedo, shaking.
It had been a simple mission. A border skirmish. Bandits from the outer edge of Snezhnaya territory testing the Knights’ presence with steel and snow.
Kaeya had taken a squad out.
Diluc hadn’t gone.
He regretted that now.
Because when the doors of the Favonius infirmary opened, and Kaeya limped in—grinning, as always, because he couldn’t not be a bastard even while actively hemorrhaging—Albedo was already there.
And what happened next was not subtle.
Kaeya barely made it four steps in before Albedo crossed the floor like a storm wearing gloves. His coat flared behind him, and he had his sleeves rolled up to the elbows—Diluc noticed, because it meant he’d been preparing to work. Not fret. Not feel. Albedo was good at dissociating when it was time to patch up the people he called colleagues.
But this wasn’t that.
This was Albedo grabbing Kaeya’s arm—not gently—and saying, in a voice low and fraying at the edges:
“You said it was low-risk.”
Kaeya blinked at him. “Good to see you too, sunshine.”
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Deflect. Make a joke. Try to change the subject when your ribs are broken and you’re still bleeding.”
Albedo’s fingers tightened, eyes locked on Kaeya’s collarbone—on the way the coat hung unevenly, the bruising beneath. “You said you’d be careful.”
“I was. This is me being careful.”
“You have three arrows in your side.”
“Not anymore. Took them out.”
“That’s worse, Kaeya.”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Kaeya said, softly now. “I came back.”
Albedo didn’t answer.
He just—exhaled. Like something in him had been clenched since Kaeya left. Like all the air in his lungs was suddenly too much and not enough.
And then—very carefully—he reached up. Touched Kaeya’s face. Just under the eye patch. Not a gesture of checking for damage.
Not clinical.
Not practiced.
Something else.
Kaeya, for once, didn’t say anything.
Didn’t smirk. Didn’t deflect.
He leaned into the touch. Closed his eyes like he was bracing for impact. Or maybe praying.
Diluc, who had been standing outside the door holding a godsdamn medical report, turned and walked the other way.
He’d already seen too much.
But it was too late.
Because now the image was in his mind: Albedo, whose hands never shook, reaching out like he was afraid of what he’d find, and Kaeya letting himself be held like that was the only thing keeping him upright.
And then—
And then.
“I don’t know what I would’ve done,” Albedo whispered, and Diluc wasn’t supposed to hear it, but he did. “If you hadn’t come back.”
Kaeya didn’t answer.
But he lifted one hand, slow and clumsy with blood loss, and wrapped it around Albedo’s wrist.
“Then I’ll keep coming back,” he said. “Until you tell me to stop.”
“You know I won’t.”
“I’m counting on it.”
That’s when Diluc pressed his forehead to the cool wood of the hallway wall and whispered, “This is emotional terrorism.”
Because what else could he call it?
It wasn’t just sweet. It was devastating.
Kaeya, vulnerable. Albedo, desperate.
Their affection was so tightly wound around their fear of losing each other that it ached to look at.
They weren’t flirting.
They weren’t even really talking.
They were confessing, in code, in silence, in touches and glances and broken ribs and trembling breath.
It wasn’t a kiss.
It wasn’t a bed.
It wasn’t sex.
But it was more than all of that.
It was love in the most terrifying sense.
It was real.
And it was breaking Diluc’s brain.
Because if Kaeya—Kaeya—could love someone like that, and be loved in return by a man like Albedo, a man who looked at him like he deserved to be kept alive—
Then maybe everything Diluc thought he understood about love was too small.
Too cruel.
Too afraid.
He left them alone.
He wouldn’t tell anyone what he’d seen.
But later, when Kaeya finally limped out of the infirmary with half his shirt off and Albedo hovering behind him like a lovesick stormcloud in a lab coat, Diluc just handed him a bottle of wine and said, without meeting his eyes:
“Don’t die. It would break someone.”
Kaeya blinked.
Then smiled—not like a bastard. Not like a flirt.
Soft. Quiet.
“Noted.”
V. The Fifth Time
There are a lot of things Diluc can tolerate.
He can tolerate Kaeya’s terrible wine-related puns.
He can tolerate Albedo using highly flammable reagents within ten meters of historical manuscripts.
He can even tolerate their increasingly suspicious habit of appearing in each other’s offices at ungodly hours of the morning like they both lived in the library now.
What he cannot tolerate, however—what he shouldn’t have to tolerate—is the sound of Kaeya calling Albedo "beloved" in a voice so natural, so practiced, so devastatingly casual that it makes the ground seem embarrassed to exist beneath them.
But let’s back up.
The day started normal enough. Or at least as normal as a day can start when you're the co-owner of a vineyard, occasional vigilante, and reluctant older brother to a man who thinks “subtlety” is a kind of seasoning.
Diluc had agreed to deliver a crate of specialized wine samples to the Knights’ headquarters—strictly for alchemical study, not for drinking, though that distinction tended to blur when Kaeya got involved.
So he headed to Albedo’s lab, expecting the usual: flasks, charts, perhaps an emotionally distant lecture about fermentation in cryo environments.
He did not expect to walk in on a domestic scene so offensively married that it made his molars ache.
Kaeya was—get this—sitting on Albedo’s desk.
Not beside it.
Not across the room.
On it.
Feet swinging. Smiling lazily. One hand braced against a stack of ancient, probably important texts like they were props in a romantic play.
Albedo, meanwhile, was mixing some kind of powder into a glowing vial, completely unbothered, as if this happened every Tuesday. Which, Diluc now realized with increasing horror, it probably did.
Neither of them noticed him at first.
Which is why Diluc got the full, unedited version of the following exchange:
“Albedo,” Kaeya drawled, twirling a glass stirring rod like it was a wine flute. “What happens if you accidentally knock this vial over and I catch it with my teeth like a gallant hero?”
“You’d burn your tongue and lose consciousness within twenty seconds,” Albedo said without looking up. “And I’d be forced to resuscitate you, which I’d rather not do in front of my assistants again.”
“Oh, again, he says. You wound me, beloved.”
Albedo’s hand twitched.
Diluc’s soul twitched.
Because—beloved?
Beloved?
Beloved?!
Was Kaeya reading poetry out loud in the alchemy lab? Was Albedo blushing slightly or was that just the light from the flame underneath the beaker?
And why—why in the name of Barbatos—did it all sound so normal?
Diluc cleared his throat.
Loudly.
Violently.
It was the sound of a man spiritually ejecting himself from a room.
Kaeya looked over his shoulder, bright and breezy. “Ah, dear brother. Just in time. Albedo’s on the brink of a brilliant discovery. Or a small explosion. We’re not sure yet.”
Albedo, for his part, turned calmly and said, “I told you not to touch anything that glows.”
Kaeya smiled. “You never told me not to touch you when you glow.”
There was a beat.
A beat in which the gods themselves held their breath.
And then Albedo, in the most deadpan voice imaginable, said:
“That was unspeakably inappropriate.”
Kaeya winked. “So you’re saying I should write it down instead.”
Diluc backed out of the room like a man escaping an active hostage situation.
He didn’t deliver the wine.
He didn’t want to know what “glow” meant in this context.
He considered calling Jean over and filing an HR report, just to cleanse the air.
Back at the winery, Adelinde asked if everything had gone smoothly. Diluc said nothing. Just poured himself a glass of the good stuff and stared out the window like a soldier freshly returned from war.
He would never, ever, be the same.
Later, he heard from Lisa—Lisa—that Kaeya had used the word “beloved” three more times in conversation with Albedo that week, including once in front of a visiting diplomat, who promptly assumed they were engaged.
Lisa had been delighted.
Jean had said nothing.
Diluc had written exactly five words in his journal that night:
"They’re doing this on purpose."
+1. The One Time They Actually Were Together (and Stopped Lying)
It began with a rumor.
As most disasters in Mondstadt did.
A city guard spotted Kaeya sneaking into Albedo’s personal laboratory. Not unusual. But this was well past midnight, and he’d entered from the rooftop. In a storm.
No coat.
No armor.
No explanation.
Just wind and silence and Kaeya slipping inside like a whisper, soaked to the bone and smiling like something wild.
And then?
Nothing.
No one saw either of them for three days.
Not Amber. Not Sucrose. Not Jean, who tried to send messages and got no response. Not even Lisa, who once claimed she could locate Kaeya’s pheromones like a bloodhound in heat.
They vanished.
Which is how Diluc—against his better judgment and every self-preserving instinct in his body—ended up at the edge of Albedo’s private greenhouse, shoving open the heavy door with a clatter that said this is your last warning.
And what he saw—
What he saw was not meant for him.
Let’s begin again.
The air was thick with the scent of rain-soaked earth and strange flowers, luminescent blossoms breathing slow pulses of light. Moss grew along the stone walls, soft and clinging, and a skylight above bled in moonlight like milk poured across velvet.
In the center of the room was a stone worktable.
Kaeya sat on it. Barefoot.
Shirtless.
Damp hair falling into his eyes.
Legs spread lazily, one foot braced on the ground. A cut across his collarbone glowed faintly gold, the residue of some alchemical salve not yet rubbed in.
And kneeling before him—
Albedo.
Kneeling.
Coat discarded. Hands cupping Kaeya’s hips like he owned them, like they were a canvas he’d been studying for years and only just now dared to touch. His head was bowed. Lips brushing just under Kaeya’s ribs.
Kaeya’s eyes were closed.
Not in pain. Not in smug satisfaction.
But peace.
Pure, devastating, staggering peace.
A kind of calm Diluc had never seen on him before. Not even when drunk. Not even when laughing. Not even asleep.
Kaeya looked like he had come home to something he’d never believed existed.
Albedo’s voice—soft, steady—rose through the hush.
“You’re always so warm,” he murmured, fingertips tracing down Kaeya’s thigh. “You come in like a storm and melt the snow off my bones.”
Kaeya exhaled. A shaky, wrecked sound.
“I don’t know how to say it,” he whispered.
“Then don’t.” Albedo pressed his mouth to the side of Kaeya’s knee. “Just… stay.”
Kaeya reached down, found Albedo’s face, and tilted it up.
Their eyes met.
No shields. No jokes. No performance.
Just… longing.
And relief.
And wonder.
Kaeya smiled, quiet and slow. “This is dangerous,” he said.
“I know.”
“You could destroy me.”
Albedo’s hand slid up, over Kaeya’s heart. “Not destroy. Transform.”
And then—
Then he stood.
And kissed him.
Properly.
No interruptions.
No spectators.
No almosts.
Just yes.
And Kaeya, who had kissed countless people and meant none of it, let out a noise so soft, so small, that Diluc nearly dropped the wine bottle in his hands.
Because in that instant, he realized:
This wasn’t new.
This was old. This was ancient. This was something earned over years of proximity and patience and aching and glances and notebooks filled with sketches no one else ever saw.
They hadn’t fallen in love.
They had built it.
Quietly. Painfully. With the care of two men who didn’t believe they deserved it.
And now?
Now they were finally claiming it.
Kaeya's fingers curled in Albedo’s hair. Albedo’s lips traveled across his jaw, temple, the shell of his ear. Each touch reverent. Clinical and carnal at once.
And when Kaeya whispered, “I want you,” it didn’t sound like lust.
It sounded like devotion.
It sounded like home.
That was the moment Diluc quietly shut the greenhouse door and left the continent in spirit.
He walked the streets of Mondstadt in a daze, holding the wine bottle like a sacred relic.
He did not tell anyone.
He could not bear to.
Because what he had seen wasn't something you shared.
It was a secret too beautiful for casual air.
It was not gossip.
It was a poem.
And in the privacy of his journal, that night, he wrote only this:
Kaeya loves like he bleeds—violently, smiling, and without asking permission.
And Albedo—gods help us—loves him back like a scientist faced with a miracle he’s afraid to name.
They are together now.
And the world is better for it.