#i spent my entire life being told the t in tsunami is silent because it is in the english loan word version

[bmpmp3]

I NEEEEED TO MAKE A SHITTY UTAU VOICEBANK. grabs you by the throat. and you must too

[sword-dad-fukuzawa]

black glass in the desert, an au about teyvat after the fall

Summary: In the wasteland of what had been Teyvat, Diluc picks through the wreckage. Part of a post-apocalyptic Genshin AU that I may or may not finish, and the product of my obsession with the Mare Jivari. Diluc-centric.

Rating: G/T

Warnings: Canon-typical violence, death

Ships: None explicitly, though you could read into this what you like. Jeanluc and Kaeluc are both kind of implied.

--

Diluc has always been the sort of person who hates anything that inconveniences him, mild as it often is, and the dangerous hot sun is no different. He can feel it lancing hot pain over the unprotected skin of his neck and he knows, with the burden of prior experience, that he’s going to be scorched bright red in the morning. But he keeps walking. At the rate he’s going, he won’t reach the Mare Jivari before sundown. And with the endless desert stretching as far as the eye could see, that just might kill him.

But he survived the Night of the Burning Citadel and he survived the earthquakes that followed. He adamantly refuses to die in the middle of an empty desert, not when he’s so close he can taste it.

It’s the ash on the wind, Diluc thinks, a little deliriously. It’s a familiar taste in his mouth.

There’s also sand in his mouth, sharp and gritty. There’s sand in his collar, sand in his boots, sand worked so far into his hair that he’ll spend weeks washing it out if he survives this. Even having chopped most of it off just before venturing into Sumeru’s desert sea hadn’t stopped it from collecting particles. He’s not used to it being so short, either. Every so often, Diluc catches himself rubbing at the back of his head, expecting a ponytail where there isn’t one.

He stumbles and nearly falls to his knees in the dunes, but he stops at the last moment. The sudden movement makes him woozy.

Diluc doesn’t remember the last time he’s gotten a proper night’s rest. It can’t have been since the fall of Mondstadt, or even before, not when he’d had his hands full dealing with all the minor crises leading up to it. Those days remain a wash of black ash in his memories, the sort that Abyss Mages became once whatever kept them from dying ran out.

Lots of ash. Diluc’s sick of ash.

He walks until the sun stops bothering him, though he only realizes that it’s stopped being a problem because it’s setting. And that, more than the evening breeze, sends a thrill of fear through him. He could face a hilichurl band or an Abyss Mage any day, but the small outpost of Sumerian refugees—scholars, mainly, who had rode out the earthquakes by holing up in the Academia and fled the subsequent fires—had warned him against the plunging temperatures of desert nights. Even his Pyro Vision might not be able to save him, they’d said, and eyed the gemstone dangling at his waist with barely repressed curiosity.

Diluc hadn’t had the heart to tell them that he couldn’t conjure flames if he tried, and that he mostly wore his Vision out of habit and because it reminded him of home. He’d tried once after the earthquakes, still standing in the smoking ruins of Mondstadt, and he hadn’t been able to conjure up so much as a spark. It hangs from his hip like a dead weight and sometimes he smacks into it while he runs.

He grits his teeth and keeps walking, slogging over the sand like one of those Ruin Guards that always haunted Brightcrown Canyon. Though Brightcrown Canyon is markedly less of a canyon, now, and more a shallow divot in the earth. He assumes the Ruin Guard meandering through it on a patrol route nobody understood, least of all him, had been buried by landslides.

The breeze blows past him, still warm from the heat of the day. Diluc is from Mondstadt, born and bred—even with the Anemo Archon gone and any Anemo Visions long since gone dead, it carries a familiar pang of comfort.

He’s never been all that religious. Not like Jean—and he thinks of her with some regret—or his father had been. Too many terrible things happen on a daily basis for him to accept that there was really some benevolent god watching over him. And that belief was only solidified when he met that god, because it’s hard to worship a bard wearing bright green and standing a good two or three heads shorter than him. Especially one that drank his weight in alcohol at least once a week.

Nevertheless, the wind against Diluc’s cheek feels like a promise. An encouragement.

And so he keeps walking.

He thinks that there might be some truth in the old clan sayings about the wind when he sees what must be the border of the Mare Jivari, illuminated in broad strokes by moonlight. Since he’d made up his mind to travel there, he’d heard it called many things.

The silent sea of ash. The edge of the world. A windless land.

He knows it by the way the breeze abruptly stops, as if controlled by some unseen hand, as soon as he steps over the last few sand dunes. In front of him is what looks like a flat plane of grey and black dust—the ashes of the lava that had, once upon a time, made up the bulk of the Mare Jivari. Now, only ash and charcoal stretches before him, seeming to go all the way until the horizon. Inexplicably, the air is warm—much warmer than the air before the border, which had begun to cool as the moon climbed higher in the sky.

And there, standing ankle-deep in the ashes, stands a tall, familiar figure.

“Fucking finally,” Diluc spits, hauling himself fully outright.

The figure turns at his outburst. He’s missing his elaborate cloak and he’s put his hair into a bun, but it is still, unmistakably, Kaeya. He still wears his old clothes and his Cryo vision dangles over his left hip, and his eyepatch is the same gold-trimmed black it’s always been.

“Fancy seeing you here,” he says, and Archons, he even sounds the same. It doesn’t look like a single day has passed since the last time Diluc had seen him—perched atop the statue of Barbatos, silhouetted against the burning cathedral—and yet it’s been over a year. The time spent wandering is engraved in Diluc’s bones, but some days, he wonders if this aching feeling is what the Traveler had felt in those halcyon days before. Before Celestia fell from the sky and broke the world into pieces.

“Cut the shit,” Diluc snaps. “You know what I’m here for.”

Kaeya has the gall to look vaguely amused, his visible eye crinkling into a mockery of a smile. “What, to kill me? You’re welcome to try, Master Diluc.”

The old title grates on his ears, insincere in a way that he’s long since learned to tolerate but not to enjoy.

“I’m not you,” he says through gritted teeth, because as much as he desperately wants to see Kaeya bleed for what he knows he’s done—because cathedrals don’t set fire to themselves, and he had gone missing for weeks before the night Mondstadt burned to the ground—there are things he wants more. He’s travelled this far, and for so long, that to lose sight of what he wants in a fit of passion is unthinkable to him.

“You wound me,” says Kaeya. He shifts his weight from one leg to the other, as casually as if he were standing across the counter the Angel’s Share. Diluc feels the pull of home more viscerally than ever before, looking at Kaeya. If he fixes his eyes on his face and not on the Mare Jivari, he can almost imagine he’s behind the counter, wiping down glasses and putting bottles in the correct order. He can hear the ever-present music on the breeze and the low chatter of bar patrons, smell the scent of cecelias on the wind—

Diluc cuts off the thought. He can’t afford to think of Mondstadt now.

“Answers,” he says, the words low in his throat. “Answers, Kaeya, you owe me that much.”

The wind doesn’t blow here. He’s utterly alone, now—and if he’s being honest with himself, he’s been alone since Mondstadt burned, and maybe even before that. He’s spent this last year searching for answers. Looking, desperately, for a clear description of what had happened the night of the earthquakes. Wandering around and talking to the survivors had told him three things that he could hold as fact.

First, that the earthquakes had happened simultaneously. Each one had been centered on a region with a major quake for each city. Mondstadt, just barely recovering from the fires in the previous day, hadn’t stood a chance. As it was, most of the larger population centers had been decimated. Liyue’s ports had crumbled and the rest of the buildings flooded or destroyed after a massive tsunami. Snezhnaya’s Zapolyarny Palace had apparently tumbled down around the Harbingers’ ears. Similar stories could be heard all across what was left of the seven nations, though there hadn’t been a single word from Inazuma. As far as Diluc knew, the islands may as well have been drowned by the sea.

Second, that none of the survivors from Mondstadt had seen Kaeya that night. He’d been the only one to see him standing atop Barbatos’s open hands, and when he’d looked again, he was gone.

Third, that something had happened to Celestia, and so everything that drew upon a connection to it ceased working as soon as the aftershocks had ended. Visions turned blank and dull, like masterless Visions, and nothing could bring them back to life. Most damningly, not a single person could see Celestia hovering in the sky anymore—though no one had seen it fall, either. But the Abyss seemed to have gone quiet, too—as if the hilichurls, Abyss Mages, Abyss Heralds, and other monsters had all quietly vanished from the face of Teyvat. Even the pulsing blue leyline trees and flowers were gone.

Diluc looks at Kaeya and he sees Mondstadt burning, but he doesn’t pull out his sword. Not yet. “Explain,” he says roughly.

Kaeya considers him with a blank expression, inscrutable to the last. Finally, he sighs. “Wouldn’t you prefer not to know?” he asks, patronizing. “You might not like what you hear.”

Diluc has never, in his entire life, wanted to kill someone as much as he wants to kill Kaeya in that moment.

“Jean is dead!” he roars, feeling something inside him, something held tight for so long, snaps. “She died of injuries sustained hauling civilians out of the cathedral, the cathedral you burned down! I had to watch as her little sister tried to heal third-degree burns and couldn’t, because they’d gone down right to the bone, and I had to carry her body back to Lisa. You owe me! This is the least of your debt!”

Kaeya takes a step back, his face contorting into surprise. Good, Diluc thinks viciously. He doesn’t know how Kaeya has the audacity to look surprised at the destruction he’d clearly wrought with his own two hands, but he hopes the knowledge that he’d killed Jean—Jean, the best of them, the one who had deserved to live—hurts. He hopes it rips open a wound and he’ll get to watch Kaeya bleed.

Diluc takes a step forward, pressing his advantage. “And worst of all,” he hisses, seeing Kaeya’s jaw tense, “is that I had to leave. I had to leave, Kaeya, had to leave the last survivors of Mondstadt’s collapse behind because there was one person in this place who could possibly answer for everything we’d lost. The last Knights remaining are Klee and Albedo, did you know? Did you even care that they survived? I left Mondstadt with two knights and a librarian, one of whom is a child.”

“Had to leave?” Kaeya shoots back, as if regaining his footing somehow. “Or did you run away, like you always do?”

“Lisa told me to go!” Diluc shouts. He finally gives into the urge to pull his sword out, the familiar heft of it in his hand both a comfort and an assurance.

Kaeya's hand comes to rest on the hilt of his own sword, still hanging at his hip. But he smiles, sharp and slow. "I'm getting deja vu," he says. "Isn't this familiar?"

Diluc bites down on the instinctive, frustrated snarl. "If I have to beat the answers out of you, I will," he promises.

"Bring it," Kaeya snaps, unsheathing his blade in one smooth motion.

And then Diluc is lunging forward.