@namiyto sent: the tide rolls in, and he returns home, if home could be made of anything so substantial as flesh and blood and the ache beneath. half a life between them, but the hand in his feels the same. a cataloguing: the exhaustion beneath the eyes, the way the bones feel beneath his touch -- a little too noticeable, frayed. he hums and smiles a moment too late, a cold front from his sister's most tender touch. flounders for a moment, beneath unexpected waves. he'd known, of course, that coming to mondstadt would be a reckoning, but he'd thought his lungs a little better than this.
" master diluc. " voice remains steady as ever, and if he aches, he is only ever the calmer for it. divested of himself, a dinghy lone on the ocean. stupidly, he wishes ayaka were here, like when she would hold his hand to comfort paltry injuries when they were children. there isn't so far a difference between bruises and heart aches. " you look well. "
he's made no effort to disguise the lie as anything but what it is. he means: you look different, because time hasn't removed every little tell. knowing someone isn't a wound that goes away. he hums and it crackles with winter fog, faint and distant, and he should find something clever and charming to fill the spaces, but for once he can't. the silence lands like a thud; ripples out from the center as he turns his cheek away, as if that will lessen the blow.
. . . Ayato. The name comes so innately to the tongue as breathing to lungs, and it’s... insulting in a way. To occupy someone’s mind so viciously despite being but a phantom memory during the wistful day.
The sight of him is the catalyst to something rotten, a taste so sulphuric and pungent that he almost forgets to take a breath or to shade the acrimony in cardinal eyes. It is to both of their fortunes that he manages to reign it all in ( he had enough forewarning to prepare himself after all, and he appreciates Jean for that ).
'Don’t comment on my appearance’ is the petty thought, the bark that desires to be spat, but he’s matured enough not to act on impulsive emotion, especially one so irrational. ❝ Welcome to Mondstadt. ❞ Polite and civil pleasantries were a skill he was acquainted with, for while he might have shed the nature of a virtuous knight, the hand would always know the technique.
I lost three people that day.
Perhaps it was unfair to be this aggrieved by him, maybe he ought to be usurped with a feeling of longing - want, but all he’s capable of seeing is the a symbol of a past now long discarded. Whatever yearning his ex-lover manages to draw out of him is recycled into wrathful emotion.