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A sickening part of Kaeya that he’d love to bury in the depths of his mind and forget about will always miss the vacant skies of his homeland. As beautiful as the constellations are as they glitter in the night sky, staring at the emptiness beyond his homeland had always given him an odd sort of hope that everything would be fine. They didn’t need an archon, didn’t need anyone but themselves to ensure that they’d make it til tomorrow.
He remembers staring at the sky stained in the colors of nights filled with love and days stretched til they snapped in a time long before his people stopped having tomorrows. Being held in his mother’s arms, a gentle kiss pressed to his forehead and a soft voice whispering that he was her star.
It’s as he looks up at the vibrant constellations glimmering above Vennessa’s tree that Kaeya thinks she would’ve loved to see what the stars looked like. His commissions had gone late into the night as he’d spent the entire morning dealing with minor explosions around the Goth Grand Hotel and what could’ve possibly become an international accident. By the time he had even thought of making a stop by Angel’s Share to see Diluc on his evening shift, the tall buildings of Mondstadt had been shrouded in the glow of the moonlight.
His last commission just completed, it was all he could do to merely lie against the base of Vennessa’s tree and dream into the beyond. The luxury of dreaming is something he’d never once thought he would have as a child of Khaenri’ah. Hoping for what you don’t have and praying for dreams to come true had always been deemed a cry of those hopeless enough to not sculpt those dreams for themselves. He wonders now, if in their last moments, the people of Khaenri’ah hoped.
The stars sparkle at him almost mocking his monologuing when he feels a gust of wind spreading throughout the area, the grass nervously flitting around his feet. Soon after, he hears the familiar sound of light footsteps - almost suspiciously so.
There’s no question about it when Kaeya hears the soft humming of a lullaby he hasn’t heard since he and Diluc were too small to climb up the branches of Vennessa’s tree (not that it ever stopped them from trying), and Diluc would insist on a lullaby every night. Venti’s eyes are filled with something far from the usual light and dreamy expression Kaeya is familiar with. No, it’s something far more painful, Kaeya realizes, as Venti’s steps are laced with the after effects of a night spent far too long in the tavern.
Venti smiles upon noticing Kaeya, but it doesn’t meet his eyes. Gently, he takes a seat next to Kaeya, offering him a bottle of wine likely just purchased - or knowing Venti, stolen - from Master Diluc’s stash. Kaeya’s smile is genuine as he takes it; he’ll definitely need it for whatever conversation drunk Venti is capable of keeping.
Kaeya’s voice is deceptively light as he speaks into the stars, “What brings you here at this hour, bard?”
“Who says it’s not just the company?”
“As much as I’d love to believe that it’d my winning personality, something tells me it’s not quite that.”
Venti sighs as he moves his gaze onto Kaeya, almost hesitant to shatter the silence the two have lived in possibly from the day Kaeya came to Mondstadt as a child, “You’ve known.”
Kaeya can’t help but scoff at that, “You haven’t exactly made any secret of it, Barbatos. I had my suspicions beforehand, but the Stormterror crisis that all but confirmed it.”
“And yet, I’d wonder why you kept it to yourself so long knowing the stars in your eyes speak a different story.”
At that, Kaeya freezes. He’d been aware that it was unlikely he’d ever be able to hide his true identity from an Archon, let alone the very Archon sent to destroy Khaenri’ah as it was five hundred years ago. Still, it didn’t make the recognition any less of putting. Very few in this day and age even knew to associate the stars glittering around him as that of the Abyss, “What, did you wish for me to curse you of slaughtering my people in the middle of a tavern, where I would have been the one to be thrown at the stake instead?”
At Barbatos’ silence, Kaeya lets out a bitter laugh. To think that this is one of the Seven who tore his homeland to the ground, “No. I thought better to take my chances on the whim you hadn’t found me out yet.”
When Barbatos turns his gaze on Kaeya again, all pretenses are shattered and all that is left is a chilling and hollow regret, “When you came here as a child, stars in your eyes and ghosts of a land long gone in your dreams, all I had felt was joy that some part of the nation we had crushed remained. I’d be a fool to not have my suspicions at first, but time and time again you proved yourself a child of Mondstadt above all else.”
Kaeya feels his vision go red, “I suppose it should’ve been of no surprise to me that you’d use me, a pitiful remnant of a home you crumbled to dust, to assuage your own guilt. You Archons do nothing but lie in your own hypocrisy and nourish false hopes to hide the red staining your hands.”
It seems as if Barbatos can no longer bare to make eye contact with Kaeya. Good, “It was never my intent to make up for what I have done, I merely wished for you to find a home here where you may be loved.”
The fight leaves Kaeya’s bones as he can only find it within himself to sigh. Wars of hundreds of years ago and battles long past... there had been years when he had dreamed of watching the Archons bleed out under the weight of his sword. But there’s something pitiful in the way Barbatos has no wish to fight. Kaeya is a lot of things, but above all else it sickens him to see the people lost by Barbatos’ flurry of arrows in Barbatos himself, “As much as Mondstadt may be my home, I would never once swear my life to you.”
Barbatos almost seems to laugh at that, “And yet, many would argue you are one of the most loyal to Mondstadt itself. What is freedom if demanded of you by a god? I have never wanted the people of Mondstadt’s loyalty - only for them to find a place where they may love and be loved in peace.”
There are many things Kaeya resents. The feeling of being mocked is one, “My role as a Knight of Favonius is a result of no love lost for you.”
“Then... what have you found that here that makes you stay?” The searching gaze turns back onto him, having had found a new approach.
The question leaves Kaeya at pause, “For a time, I had all I wanted here,” the constellation of Noctua seems to laugh at him as it passes overhead, glittering with a fiery glow that Kaeya wishes didn’t make him shrink into himself.
Kaeya used to think that losing Crepus, losing Diluc had meant the loss of everything he’d ever loved. To lose everything and to try to start again, only for it to burn to the ground once more... there eventually came a point where one began to contemplate what the common denominator was. Kaeya doesn’t know if he ever truly let go of that pain and gave himself the ability to love in the way he used to.
He thinks of long nights spent drinking with Jean and Lisa in the Grandmaster’s office that they all swear to never tell anyone about, days spent training with Bennett in the practice ranges, picnics by Starsnatch Cliff with Albedo and Klee, patrols where the only thing achieved is messing with Amber’s hair until he can get her to smile at him. For as empty as he feels, he thinks he got pretty close to love.
“I’d like to think I’m slowly finding that again.”
“In your childhood, I often contemplated giving you a gift form Celestia. I had always feared you’d grow to resent a vision though, if I had sent it with my touch. That you’d view it as an obligation rather than a chance to take flight,” Barbatos’ smile is genuine when he speaks, “I only hope I made the right choice in holding off, and yet all the same I do hope you know that you will always have the protection of a Child of Mond.”
Barbatos’ final whisper is of the wind as he leaves with a faint whisper of hope. Kaeya laughs at that - of course its hope.