featuring. kamisato ayato, kaeya alberich, alhaitham, kaedehara kazuha, wanderer
notes. angst if you squint?? generally the genshin men being shitty.
He cares about the pristinity of your relationship far too much. How the two of you look, what you wear, how you appear in public, the pet names he calls you, what you say to him, all that jazz. He has a reputation to uphold—a firm one—and he will not let you be the crack in that image.
In private, he's as sweet as honey. You get to see the other side of him. The softer, less cunning one—the one that teases you gently, pulls you by the waist, looks at you, really looks at you. That version of him feels like a reward almost. As though you've earned something other people haven't.
It’s kind of like a trap.
Because in public, he has you at a distance. Your relationship is controlled, measured down to the last detail before it's ever shown to the world. His gaze rarely wanders to you unless it's for a performance he's rehearsed far too many times in his head. That flower he twirls between his fingers, that slow smile before he hands it to you—you think it's romantic. But, in actuality, his political opponents are standing to the side, and he knows exactly where they are. And more importantly, what to do to keep up the image everyone has of him.
After a while, the line between private and public stops existing. You can't tell anymore. Were those words for you, or for a chorus of blurred faces that you can’t be bothered to memorise? Was that touch yours, or staged?
It's hard enough to be part of the Kamisato clan. Harder still when you can't tell if your husband loves you, or if he's simply very, very good at making you believe he does.
He probably does love you, for what it's worth.
Kaeya thinks you're a good fuck. But that seems to be all he thinks of you.
He's an attentive guy, don’t get me wrong. You know he listens to you. Knows exactly what you like, exactly when to pull back and when to push, exactly how to make you feel like the only person in the room. His fingers trace over your body, your jaw, tips your chin up to face him. He kisses you, soft and languid, breath heating over you.
The conversations are good too, when you have them. He’s charming and quick and interested in the things you say. He makes you blush, makes you trip over your words on purpose. You can tell he loves it, the way his eye lingers just a half second too long on the colour climbing up your cheeks.
He files away the little things you tell him and brings them back up later at the exact moment you'd least expect, some offhand thing you said three weeks ago dropped so casually into conversation that it almost doesn't register. Almost. You feel known when he does that, warm in a way that makes you stop questioning what, exactly, he sees when he looks at you.
The thing is, Kaeya moves through his life like it's a solo endeavour with a rotating company, and you are the company. A welcome one, clearly—he wouldn't keep coming back if you weren't—but company nonetheless. There's no real sense that he factors you into anything, no weight of another person present in the way he makes decisions or fills his days. You don't come up with his plans because you're not really part of them. You exist in the spaces he allows, the ones he opens up just enough to let you feel like you belong there, and then closes again without ceremony when he's done.
And another annoying thing is that he doesn’t seem to care when other guys flirt with you. At Angel’s Share, when men talk you up, you know that Kaeya sees them. But it’s always just a flicker of his eyes and he’s back to laughing along with someone else. Like the moment wasn't worth the energy it would've taken to hold onto.
He only ever reaches for you in the dark, fingertips at the small of your back, his voice dropped low enough that it feels like it only belongs to the two of you—and in those moments you think, you really think, that this means something to him. That you mean something to him.
But the mornings roll around all too casually. Either you’re greeted with a dip in the bed, or an eager-to-leave Kaeya pulling up his pants. “I’ll see you around,” He says with a small smirk, and he kisses you. But it’s firm and empty, like plastic pressing against your skin. And then he’s gone.
He has this talent for making you feel wanted without ever once making you feel chosen.
The problem with Al-Haitham is that he's usually right, and he knows it, and those two things combined make him genuinely insufferable to have a relationship with.
He's not unkind about it. That's what you'd tell someone if they asked, that's the first thing you'd reach for— he's not unkind—because he isn't, and it feels important to say that before anything else, like you owe him the caveat. He doesn't talk over you or wave you off. He lets you speak.
He just also happens to have already formed his conclusion by the time you're halfway through your second sentence, and everything after that is him being polite enough to let you finish.
He is, unfortunately, not listening to understand you, but to solve you. And god does it get annoying when you have to listen to him rattle off like this is a debate he ought to win. You bring him something that's been sitting with you and he takes it apart with the kind of efficiency that would be impressive if it didn't make you want to scream. Offer you the solution before you've even asked for one. Clean, logical, correct, and completely beside the point.
You look at him and you think, that's not what I meant, and when you try to explain what you did mean he listens again, with that same careful attention, and then explains, dryly, why his interpretation is the more reasonable one.
And the worst part is you can't even argue with his reasoning. You just know, somewhere he doesn't have access to, that he's wrong anyway.
It gets exhausting. You're not talking to him anymore so much as presenting a case, and you are so, so tired of losing arguments you never wanted to have in the first place.
Kazuha loves you. He also loves the road, the sea, the particular way light hits water at a certain hour, the feeling of wind that doesn't belong to any one place, and the freedom to go wherever that wind takes him. In no particular order.
He doesn't see this as a problem, which is sort of the whole issue.
You know he can be a good lover. The type of boyfriend to make every conversation precious. I mean, the guy basically looks and speaks of you like you’re poetry, what’s not to love? But then somewhere between that and actually being your partner, something doesn't quite connect.
He’s with you the way he is with everything else in his life. Kazuha loves you one moment and then forgets about you. He is so comfortable with the idea of impermanence that he has assumed that you must be too. Sure, it was romantic at first. This untethered soul that flitted from one place to the next. But that also meant that Kazuha was untethered to you as well.
He doesn't ask, he tells, and he does it with such complete calm that there's no real foothold for an argument. It's just a fact he's delivering. He's going. He'll be back. He says it like that covers it, like the shape of what he's describing is perfectly reasonable, and the worst part is that by his own logic it is. He's not abandoning you, per se, he'd hate that word for it. He just needs to move, and you are, unfortunately, a fixed point.
So you're alone for a while, and it's not dramatic, it's just your life with a person-shaped gap in it. You manage fine. And then he comes back, easy and unbothered, like he stepped out for an hour, sets something down on the table that he picked up somewhere along the way, starts talking, and the time just folds back into itself like it was never there. He doesn't address it. Doesn't seem to think there's anything to address. You watch him settle back in with no friction whatsoever and you think, not for the first time, that it must be genuinely nice to move through the world like that.
It would just be nicer if he occasionally remembered that you don't.
He takes everything personally. You could mention something completely unrelated to him and watch it land anyway, watch him decide what it means about how you feel about him specifically. You mention you didn't sleep well and somehow by the end of the conversation he's asking "Do you not want to be here?" like those two things exist on the same plane.
"What? That's not what I meant at all."
"Right. So you just didn't sleep because you were thinking about something else then."
You're not even sure how you got here. You were just tired. Now you're defending yourself against an accusation you never made, and the worst part is watching him sit there completely calm about it, like he's already decided what you actually meant and he's just waiting for you to catch up.
You learn to be careful with your words around him, which is its own kind of exhausting because you shouldn't have to manage someone else's insecurities, but here you are, pre-editing sentences before they leave your mouth. Sometimes you just don't mention things at all. It's easier.
When it does blow over, he doesn't circle back. Doesn't apologise, doesn't acknowledge the mess he made. He just resumes normally like nothing happened, and if you try to address it later—
"Can we talk about earlier?"
"I thought we were past this."
The look he gives you is almost pitying, like you're the one being unreasonable by still having feelings about it. It’s the type of face you’d like to sucker punch.
You learn the shape of his silences, the ones with teeth in them, and you learn to wait them out without trying to fix it because trying to fix it only makes it worse.
It's not even that he's cruel about it, really. That's what makes it stick with you. He's just so thoroughly convinced that everything circles back to him that you eventually stop trying to convince him otherwise.
You start accepting that certain conversations are just not going to happen, that you're going to have to carry some things alone because the moment you mention them they become about whatever he's decided about himself that day. And some nights you think about just not bothering anymore, about keeping everything close and small so there's nothing to accidentally weaponise against you.
dividers by: @cafekitsune
