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The sun’s fingers crept like thieves across the warped wooden floor, gilding the dust motes that swirled in their path. They climbed the bedposts in liquid gold ribbons, spilling over the mountain of disheveled sheets—once white as a Khaenri’ahn winter, now twisted into valleys and peaks by the restless bodies that had sought refuge there. The fabric pooled like fresh snowfall after an avalanche, its deceptive softness swallowing two figures whole, preserving them in the fragile amber of dawn.
Outside, the world woke in increments.
First, the birds—tiny heralds with throats full of light—who sang as if the day were a thing to be sculpted from sound alone. Then the wind, carrying the scent of qingxin blooms and damp earth through the unshuttered window. And finally, the sky itself: an endless blue eye, indifferent to the ruin festering at its edges. Far beyond the glass, where the clouds dared not gather, Celestia hung like a guillotine blade, its shadow stitched to the horizon with threads of damned starlight.
No one spoke of it.
(Some wounds fester louder when named.)
Perhaps that was why Rex Lapis had peeled divinity from his skin like a sodden cloak, leaving his Gnosis to gather dust in the hands of other gods.
Perhaps that was why Barbatos curled around bottles of dandelion wine at Angel’s Share, his laughter a hair’s breadth from a sob, his ballads omitting every third verse where the truth festered.
Perhaps that was why ordinary hearts shattered under the weight of ordinary days—because some griefs were too vast to hold in mortal hands.
The questions coiled like smoke above the bed where the last Prince of a dead nation slept, loyal guard by his side, their limbs entangled in silent defiance.
Does the curse taste different on lovers’ tongues?
When the sky finally falls, will it matter who faced it bravely?
Or perhaps—
Perhaps the only rebellion left was this: to map the living warmth of another body with trembling hands, to whisper names like incantations against the dark, to mistake teeth on skin for permanence.
Maybe that was all they had left to do?
The sun climbed higher.
It painted the sweat-slicked hollow of Kaeya’s throat in molten light, gilded the scar that split Dainsleif’s eyebrow like a crack in porcelain. Their hair lay mingled on the pillow—one the blue of deep glacier ice, the other the pale gold of wheat fields that would never grow in Khaenri’ah’s ashen soil. The marks they’d left on each other bloomed in the morning: violet fingerprints on hips, the half-moon crescents of nails dug into shoulder blades, a lovebite at the juncture of neck and collarbone that pulsed like a second heartbeat.
Somewhere, a dove struck the windowpane.
Neither stirred.
The scent of last night’s passion still clung to the sheets—salt and iron and the faint ozone crackle of Delusions pushed too far. But beneath it, something sweeter lingered: the crushed-petal musk of Calla Lilies from Kaeya’s hair, the pine resin and old parchment smell that clung to Dainsleif’s skin.
For now, the world let them pretend.
The birds sang. The wind turned the pages of an abandoned book on the nightstand. The sun, relentless in its kindness, kissed their closed eyelids as if it could bless what even the gods had cursed.
The sun’s ascent was a sacrilege.
It poured through the window like liquid heresy, gilding the scars that mapped Dainsleif’s back—each one a constellation Kaeya had learned to navigate by tongue. Last night, he’d traced them with his teeth: the jagged line above his hip (a falling star caught mid-plummet), the branching burn along his ribs (a lightning bolt frozen in divine wrath). Now, in the cruel clarity of morning, they shimmered like tarnished silver, as if the gods had tried to brand their ownership into his flesh and failed.
Kaeya’s own body was a scripture of touch.
The crescent marks on his thighs still throbbed where Dainsleif had anchored him. The bruise blooming over his pulse point on his wrist ached sweetly—a temporary eclipse, dark enough to hide the Abyss that flickered behind his pupils when nightmares woke him screaming. He pressed his lips to it now, eyes still closed, tasting salt and the metallic whisper of his own blood.
(He wondered if Dain could hear the hollow places inside him, the voids where stolen memories should be. If his fingers, tangled in blue hair, could feel the absence where a crown had once sat.)
Outside, the sky deepened from pale ambrosia to a wound-red horizon. The birds had gone quiet, as though sensing the weight of celestial eyes upon them. Only the wind dared speak, slipping through the cracks in the window frame to tug at the sheets tangled around their ankles like discarded burial shrouds.
Somewhere beyond the roof, beyond the stratosphere, the eyes of the Divine narrowed.
The lovers didn’t flinch.
But the sun was a slow and patient conqueror.
It crept over their tangled limbs like a golden tide, dissolving the last remnants of night with its inexorable glow. The light caught on the curve of Dainsleif's shoulder, the hollow of his throat, the delicate flutter of his lashes—gilding him in a way that made Kaeya's breath catch. For a suspended moment, he looked like something holy. Something that belonged to the heavens rather than this ruined earth.
For now, in this fragile moment, there was no past, no future—only the quiet harmony of shared breath, the unspoken promise that whatever doom awaited them, they would not face it alone.
The nearest doom was the damned sun.
The sun that had reached its destination—yet in truth, it never truly finished its journey. The first golden rays brushed against the eyelashes of the two men, slipping beneath them like thieves, coaxing sleep-weary eyes to flutter open. A new day had begun, one that they would likely spend tangled in each other’s arms once more, as if the world beyond these sheets held no meaning.
The quilt was a lost cause, anyways—half-draped over the foot of the bed, half-spilled onto the floor in a tangle of fabric and wayward feathers from the overstuffed pillows. One such feather had escaped the fray, drifting lazily onto Kaeya’s forehead before catching in the waves of his blue hair.
“Nhh…” A sleepy sigh escaped Kaeya’s lips as he tightened his arms around the body he had clung to all night. Dainsleif, nestled against his chest, remained still, his breathing slow and steady. His short, pale bangs fell over his eyes, barely disturbed despite the fervor of the night before—a night evidenced by the constellation of red and purple marks scattered across his neck. He showed no signs of waking, content to linger in the warmth of Kaeya’s embrace for hours more. And Kaeya? He couldn’t have been happier.
Dainsleif stirred. His hand—calloused from centuries of holding swords like penitent prayers—found Kaeya’s wrist, thumb pressing into the delicate bones as if to say: You are here. You are real.
Kaeya turned his palm upward, exposing the star-shaped scar that marred his lifeline. A child’s wound from a fall, or so he claimed. Dainsleif kissed it anyway, lips moving against his skin like a man reciting vespers at the altar of a ruined church.
The Prince exhaled, slow and satisfied, his fingers tracing idle circles over Dainsleif’s hip. The memories of last night played behind his eyelids like a forbidden film reel—every gasp, every shudder, every broken plea seared into his bones.
He remembered the way Dainsleif had arched off the sheets, his spine a perfect curve of desperation, fingers clawing at the headboard hard enough to splinter the wood. How his voice—usually so controlled, so infuriatingly composed—had cracked around Kaeya’s name like a prayer.
“Again—please—”
And Kaeya, ever the devoted prince, had obliged.
He’d mapped every inch of Dainsleif’s body with his mouth, his hands, his cock—claiming, conquering, worshiping. The way the blonde’s muscles had twitched under his touch, the way his thighs trembled when Kaeya bit down on that pale, unmarked throat, branding him in the only way that mattered.
Mine.
Kaeya’s eyes fluttered open.
Even now, in the daylight, the evidence was everywhere. The red-purple constellations blooming across Dainsleif’s collarbones. The way he winced slightly when he shifted, his body still thrumming with the aftershocks of their coupling. The raw, bitten swell of his lower lip—a casualty of his own restraint finally snapping.
Kaeya smirked, dragging a fingertip down the length of Dainsleif’s sternum, savoring the way his breath hitched. “Regrets, mein Schatz?”
Dainsleif’s golden eyes flicked open, hazy with exhaustion and something darker. “Only that you’re already half-dressed,” he muttered, voice rough as gravel.
Kaeya laughed, low and wicked, rolling atop him in a tangle of limbs and scattered feathers. “Eager, aren’t we?”
The movement sent a flurry of down swirling around them, catching the sunlight like flecks of stardust. One landed on Dainsleif's lower lip, and before he could brush it away, Kaeya leaned down and blowed it off with his own breath, before stealing Dain’s lips for himself.
The sound Dainsleif made—half growl, half plea—sent heat curling low in Kaeya's belly.
Outside, the world continued its indifferent turn. The wind carried the scent of blooming silk flowers through the open window, mingling with the musk of their spent bodies. Somewhere in the distance, a church bell tolled, its sonorous voice marking the hour.
Kaeya didn't care.
Here, in this sun-drenched bed, time had lost all meaning. There was only the slide of skin on skin, the catch of breath, the way Dainsleif's hands—those warrior's hands, capable of such violence—cradled his face with unbearable tenderness.
When their lips met, it tasted like salvation.
And if the gods were watching, let them see. Let them bear witness to this act of defiance, this refusal to bow beneath the weight of destiny.
Kaeya would worship at this altar until the sun itself burned out.
But the sun—that merciless voyeur, that golden-handed thief—chose that moment to pour through the fractured curtains like a verdict. It speared through the haze of spent passion, gilding Dainsleif’s sweat-slick skin until he glowed like some fallen seraph pinned to earth. The light caught in the fine scars along his ribs, turning each one into a silver thread in the tapestry of his ruin.
For a heartbeat, Kaeya faltered.
He had a god before him now.
But last night…
Last night, Dainsleif had been human beneath him—all gasping breaths and bitten-off pleas, his voice fraying around Kaeya’s name like a prayer unraveling at the edges. Now, in this pitiless dawn, he looked like what he truly was: a relic of a dead world, something carved from moonlight and memory, too beautiful to last.
Then Dainsleif’s nails scored down Kaeya’s spine—five points of exquisite pain—and dragged him close until their bruises aligned.
"Distracted, Your Highness?"
Kaeya’s grin returned, sharp as a drawn blade, as fatal. "Never."
Their kisses were the only scripture left to them. They traded them like vows, like battle cries, like the last two men alive building a religion from spit and teeth. Kaeya licked into Dainsleif’s mouth as if he could devour time itself, as if he could swallow the centuries that stretched between them and the home they’d lost.
And yet, after just a few moments of mind numbing pleasure there was an end of it.
Reluctantly, Kaeya broke away, lungs burning. His head spun—whether from oxygen deprivation or the way Dainsleif’s fingers still clutched his hips like a drowning man grips driftwood, he couldn’t say. When his vision cleared, his gaze caught on the pale strands of Dainsleif’s hair fanned across the pillow, each one trembling with the ghost of his exhale.
They carried a scent— Wind through the birch forests of a homeland turned to dust, through which threated the ghost-smoke of a thousand pyres never lit.
It was home. Not the home of stone and hearth, but the home of blood and bone, the kind that lingers under fingernails long after the burial.
"Ngh—" Kaeya squeezed his eyes shut as the room tilted. Fatigue coiled around him like a second skin, but he resisted. Sleep meant dreams, and dreams meant—
(The sky cracking open like an egg. The sound of a child’s laughter cut mid-breath. The way Dainsleif’s sword had trembled in his hand when he realized he could neither save them nor join them.)
It was just a moment, and yet to the Prince it felt as if the whole day had passed.
He opened his eyes, a blink away, the morning had crept over them both, painting their tangled limbs in watercolor light. Kaeya’s palm lay splayed over Dainsleif’s chest as if to cage the heartbeat beneath. The Twilight Sword laid there, by his side, his lashes casting shadows that softened the usual sharpness of his face. For once, he looked young.
For once he didn’t look like a man escaping his past.
The Prince could watch him like that for the whole eternity.
As he, however, turned his eyes, taking in the sight of their bedroom, the pride has stirred inside his chest at the view. Sunlight gilded the wreckage of the bed—the clothes, tore down hungry bodies and laid to rest on the floor, the quilt pooled on the floor like a discarded shroud.
And then—
The feathers.
Not the light, not the birdsong beyond the window, but the damn feathers. One clung to Dainsleif’s throat, lodged in the hollow where Kaeya’s teeth had marked him. Another had wedged itself in Kaeya’s eyelashes, fluttering like a soul trying to escape its skin each time he blinked.
Dainsleif slowly moved up the bed, brushing through his hair with his hand. The Prince’s eyes fixated on that hand.
Dain had gorgeous hands, Kayea thought; hands calloused from centuries of holding weapons that could not save what mattered, scarred with years of the training and clashes of swords. These hands were taught to kill. And now these hands rose with sleep-heavy grace to pluck the feather from Kaeya’s face.
"Molting, Prince?" he rasped, his voice ruined in the best of ways.
Kaeya grinned. "You’d know. I recall you bit the pillow hard enough to murder it." He flicked a stray plume from Dainsleif’s shoulder. "Twice."
Outside, the wind carried the scent of burning leaves from some distant pyre. Neither man remarked on it.
The Twilight Sword’s answering groan vibrated against Kaeya’s throat as he buried his face into the crook of his neck, lips lingering over the bruise he’d left there hours earlier—a violet constellation only they could read. The touch was both apology and promise, written in a language older than the ruins of Khaenri’ah.
Outside, the wind shifted like a restless sleeper. It carried the fractured crystal chimes of the Cathedral’s bells. Beneath it all, the iron whisper of the city waking to another day of borrowed time
Kaeya closed his eyes. Let the scents and sounds paint pictures behind his lids—Dainsleif kneeling in dawn-lit fields before the Cataclysm, braiding qingxin stems into coronets for children who would never grow old.
Kaeya’s mind began to wander, but it was brought back by the scarred and calloused, warm hand plucking the feathers out of his hair.
"You’re truly shedding," Dainsleif murmured again, his voice thick with sleep and something darker. He held the feather between his fingers, its downy edges glowing like starlight caught in cobwebs. "Like a molting crow."
Kaeya grinned, rolling onto his back in a sinuous stretch that made the bedframe protest. "Mmm. And whose fault is that, oh noble Twilight Sword?" His gesture encompassed the battlefield of sheets—the pillows gutted like fallen warriors, the quilt banished to the floor like a deposed monarch.
The flush that crept up Dainsleif’s neck was a victory sweeter than any battle.
For a suspended moment, they existed in the sacred geometry of after; Kaeya’s fingers tracing the pale topography of his lover’s shoulder—here a scar from a duel lost, there a freckle like a drop of liquid sunlight; all while Dainsleif’s hand was moving through Kaeya’s hair with the reverence of an archivist handling sacred texts, each blue strand a sentence in their private scripture. And between them a feather drifting down to crown Kaeya’s forehead, its filaments trembling like the last leaves of autumn.
The qixing flowers sighed their perfume through the window. Kaeya committed it all to memory with the precision of a man building a shrine: the warmth-worn weight of Dainsleif’s thigh against his, with the way dawn gilded the old scars along his collarbone—each one a rune Kaeya had learned to decipher with his tongue. And the last thing…
The absurd, endearing tilt of the feathers sliding over one eyebrow of his.
This, he thought as the church bells rang again—sharp as a blade drawn across the morning’s throat—is how gods should have made eternity.
Not in fire. Not in gold.
But here.
Now.
Alive.
Dainsleif’s hand froze mid-caress. The feather—
—the feather was a revelation.
He noticed it. Didn’t speak. Just reached with fingers that had toppled kingdoms and gentled sparrows, brushing Kaeya’s temple with a touch lighter than a wish. The feather came away clinging to his fingertips like a fragment of a dream.
Then—
—a decision.
With the ceremonial care of a knight draping a coronation cloak, Dainsleif returned it. Added another. Arranged the down until it formed a lopsided diadem in blue-black waves.
"There," he rasped, the words rough as unpolished marble. "A crown fit for a prince."
Kaeya’s star-pupiled eye cracked open—a comet flashing through twilight. "Mm. I prefer tiaras, actually." A deliberate stretch sent feathers swirling like a blizzard of moth wings. "More sparkle. Though I suppose this will do… for now."
Dainsleif’s exhale was half exasperation, half something too tender to name. His thumb traced Kaeya’s cheekbone, brushing away an imaginary speck of dust—an excuse to touch, always an excuse. "Insufferable."
"Yet you adore me." Kaeya caught his wrist, pressed his lips to the time-worn pulse beneath the skin. "Admit it."
The silence that followed was softer than the feathers, warmer than the sunlight.
Outside, the last bell faded into the hungry sky.
And then the voice, tore the silence open:
"Do you think... we will get more days like this?"
The question hung between them like a suspended blade, glinting in the honeyed light. For a heartbeat, the room seemed to hold its breath—the dust motes frozen mid-dance, the feather tiara caught in its slow descent like a star refusing to fall.
Kaeya felt the moment fracture.
(He had spent a lifetime patching cracks with clever words and sharper smiles.)
With a slow, deliberate arch of his back—the sinuous motion of a cat claiming sunlight—he rolled atop Dainsleif, pinning him to the wreckage of their sheets. The feather crown tumbled free, spinning through a beam of light like Icarus mid-plummet.
"You're thinking too loudly," Kaeya purred, trailing a fingertip down the sacred geography of Dainsleif's throat. He lingered over the pulse, savoring the staccato rhythm beneath his touch—alive, alive, alive. "Let me remind you of better uses for that tongue."
Dainsleif's breath hitched as Kaeya leaned down, stopping just shy of a kiss—close enough to share breath, close enough to taste the unspoken 'what if' clinging to his lips.
"Unless," Kaeya whispered, "you'd rather argue about my molting again?"
A growl. A hand fisting in blue hair—not gentle now, not when the ghosts pressed close. Then—
—the world upended.
Dainsleif flipped them with the effortless brutality of a man who had spent centuries turning the tide of battles. His knee slotted between Kaeya's thighs like a sword returned to its scabbard; his mouth hovered over the shell of Kaeya's ear, teeth grazing the sensitive skin below his jaw in a mockery of a coronation.
"You talk too much," he murmured, the words vibrating against Kaeya's skin like thunder before the storm.
Kaeya's laugh dissolved into a gasp.
(Their moments always felt stolen—pilfered from the clenched fists of fate, smuggled past the watchful eyes of dead gods.)
Sometimes the prince allowed himself to ponder over it. Sometimes he avoided the thoughts altogether. That day, he let himself linger for a moment.
Lost in thought, Kaeya loosened his grip, letting one hand drift along Dainsleif's side—a scholar tracing the margins of a ruined manuscript. His fingers hesitated over the curse's handiwork: jagged, darkened veins branching beneath alabaster skin like roots of a poisoned tree.
A sharp pang twisted in his chest. He curled inward instinctively, his body forming a living shield against phantoms only he could see. For a breath, he lingered there—fingertips whispering apologies to the marred flesh—before burying his nose in Dainsleif's hair, breathing in the scent of birch and battlefield.
Sleep eluded him. The morning had stolen his drowsiness, leaving only hyperawareness—of the rise and fall of Dainsleif's chest, of the way his lashes cast fragile shadows on cheeks usually carved from marble, of the blue-black inkblot of a bruise he'd left just above his collarbone.
His touch grew bolder, charting a path along the battlefield of Dainsleif's shoulder—each scar a monument to a war Kaeya had been too young to fight. His fingers slid within seconds towards the precipice of his collarbone—where sweat pooled like liquid starlight, only then, finally landing in the plains of his chest—interrupted only by the archipelago of bruises Kaeya had planted there like flags of conquest
Then—
—a sigh.
Soft as snowmelt, warm as stolen wine. Followed by a low, throaty hum that vibrated against Kaeya's palm.
And then—
Eyes like forget-me-nots pressed between the pages of a holy book flickered open, meeting Kaeya's gaze with a drowsy intensity that unmade him.
For a long moment, neither spoke. Words had always been Kaeya's weapon, but here—in this cathedral of tangled sheets—silence was the truest liturgy.
Then, slowly, a ghost of a smile tugged at Dainsleif's lips.
Kaeya answered with a smirk—all edges, no apologies.
(The feather, forgotten on the pillow, finally settled.)
The sun poured through the cracked window like molten gold, painting the two figures entangled in the wreckage of sheets. Feathers drifted lazily through the beams of light—remnants of last night's passion, when teeth and desperation had torn holes in the pillows. One such feather caught in Kaeya's blue-black hair, resting there like a lopsided crown as he stirred awake.
Dainsleif's breath was warm against his neck, his arms locked around Kaeya with the desperation of a drowning man clinging to driftwood. Kaeya smiled, tracing idle patterns along the scars that mapped Dain's back—each one a story, a battle, a memory he'd been too young to share.
The man was humming, each breath of his loud hum that brought to mind a tiger ready to pounce. He was battling his thoughts and the Prince knew it. He saw it in his eyes and heard it in his hum. Every little sound of his was a reminder of pain through which the Twilight Sword had suffered.
"You're back at it again," Kaeya murmured, pressing a kiss to the pulse point at Dainsleif's throat. He tasted salt and sleep and something bittersweet—like the last dregs of wine at the bottom of a glass. “You know that I’d pay to know your thoughts,” he joked but it didn’t get rid of the seriousness of their moment.
Dainsleif's grip tightened. "How long do we have left?"
The question hung between them, fragile as the feather trembling in Kaeya's hair. He could feel the tension coiling in Dainsleif's muscles, the way his breath hitched—waiting, always waiting for the other shoe to drop..
The Prince hated these moments of awareness, when the impending doom crawled over them, causing the panic and fear to set in their bones. And so, just like many other times, he just laughed, pushing away the thoughts. He got on top of his lover’s chest, hands pushed against the muscular shoulders, noses almost pressed together, blue eyes against blue eyes.
Theirs.
"Let me remind you," Kaeya purred, tracing the line of Dainsleif's jaw, "what we promised to do with that time we have left."
Their lips met in a kiss that started soft, almost reverent—until Dainsleif's fingers tangled in blue hair, pulling just hard enough to make Kaeya gasp. When they broke apart, breathless, Dainsleif's eyes burned with unspoken fears.
"Do you regret it? The time?" The Twilight Sword’s words were rough, raw. "Or do you just regret that it won't last?"
Kaeya's answer was to seize him by the hair and crush their mouths together again, pouring every unsaid thing into that kiss—the years of loneliness, the weight of crowns they never asked for, the terror of losing this, losing him.
Hands became explorers, rediscovering familiar terrain: the dip of a collarbone, the ridge of a scar, the hammering pulse at the base of a throat. The blanket pooled at their feet, forgotten, as morning light gilded sweat-slick skin.
The urgency softened gradually, fierce kisses melting into something slower, sweeter. They broke apart only to breathe, foreheads pressed together as if trying to fuse their thoughts into one.
Dainsleif's arms locked around Kaeya like iron bands. "I've been looking for you for so long," he whispered against Kaeya's lips, voice cracking. "I don't want to lose you like I've lost everyone else."
Outside, the wind carried the scent of qingxin blooms through the open window. Somewhere in the city, church bells began to toll. Kaeya caught Dainsleif's face between his hands, thumbs brushing away invisible tears.
"You won't," he lied smoothly, smiling the way he'd learned to smile through pain. "I'm rather hard to get rid of, you know."
The feather, forgotten on the pillow between them, trembled as another gust of wind swept through the room. For now, in this suspended moment between dawn and whatever came next, they pretended not to hear the distant thunder—or see the way the light caught Dainsleif's scars, making them gleam like cracks in gilded porcelain.
The man looked at him with the pain, raw and aching clearly tearing at his chest.
“And yet, still, I am scared…”
Kaeya's chest ached—not the sharp sting of battle wounds, but the deeper, more dangerous ache of something precious held too tightly. Without hesitation, he pulled Dainsleif against him, pressing the blonde's ear to the steady drumbeat beneath his ribs. Listen, he willed silently, fingers tangling in sun-bleached strands. This is real. I am here.
"You won't lose me, Dain," he murmured, lips brushing the crown of his head. The promise tasted like summer wine on his tongue—sweet and fleeting. "I'll always be with you."
But promises were fragile things in a world where gods broke nations like children shattered toys.
Dainsleif exhaled sharply, breath scalding against Kaeya's collarbone. "Don't," he warned, voice rough as gravel. "Don't make promises you can't keep, Prince. Death doesn't wait for pretty words." His fingers dug into Kaeya's back, blunt nails leaving crescent moons in their wake. "If it takes you—if I'm left with nothing but ghosts and this curse—"
Kaeya silenced him with a finger to his lips, pressing gently until the tension bled from Dainsleif's jaw.
"Then let's not waste this time speaking of endings," he whispered, replacing his finger with a kiss—soft as dawn light, bittersweet as last rites. "Let's spend it like this. Holding each other. Telling each other—" His breath hitched, the words sticking like honey in his throat before he forced them out, "—that we love each other. Again and again, until the words wear grooves in our tongues."
He felt the exact moment Dainsleif surrendered—the slow unraveling of coiled muscle, the quiet sigh that fogged against his skin. Kaeya chased it with his thumb, tracing the arch of a cheekbone sharp enough to draw blood.
"After," he continued, painting pictures with his words, "we'll go to Good Hunter. You'll scowl at Sara's new Snezhnayan dishes. I'll steal the spiciest bite from your plate when you're not looking—"
"—and pretend you don't see my knee between your thighs under the table," Dainsleif finished dryly, though the edge had dulled to something dangerously close to fond.
Kaeya's grin was all teeth. "You're learning."
Dainsleif huffed, but his arms tightened possessively, fingers splaying across the small of Kaeya's back like a brand.
For a long moment, they simply breathed—Kaeya counting each rise and fall of his lover's chest, Dainsleif's fingers moving through blue strands and over the sun-kissed skin with the reverence of a man touching something holy. Outside, the wind carried the scent of baking bread and distant rain, the ordinary sounds of a city that didn't yet know it was doomed.
There was silence again. A silence that had Dain thinking again.
“Thinking about it won’t stop it from happening, you know?” The prince mused and fell silent, noticing his lover’s tension.
Kaeya watched the war play out behind Dainsleif's eyes—the way his pupils dilated then constricted, how his teeth worried at his lower lip until it bloomed red. Words had never been Dain's strong suit; he spoke in sword strokes and silences, in the language of a man who'd lost too much to trust in pretty lies.
But when he finally nodded—a small, reluctant thing—Kaeya claimed it as victory.
He reached for the discarded quilt, pulling it over them in a cocoon of warmth before settling his head against Dainsleif's chest. The blonde stiffened momentarily—centuries of vigilance hard to shake—before melting into the touch with a quiet sigh.
Kaeya hummed, tracing idle patterns across the battlefield of the man’s torso: here a scar from a fight he'd never witnessed, there a bruise he'd left last night like a claim. His fingers hesitated over the cursed veins creeping along Dainsleif's ribs—those dark, twisting things that pulsed like living shadows—before deliberately skirting away.
He didn't have to wait long. Calloused fingers—hands that had wielded swords and wiped blood from a prince's face with equal care—threaded through his hair, nails scraping gently against his scalp. Kaeya arched into the touch like a cat sunning itself, a contented rumble building in his chest.
For now, there was only this: the steady rhythm of Dainsleif's heart beneath his ear, the slow dance of sunlight across rumpled sheets, the feather still caught in their hair—gilded by dawn, fragile as their peace.
Kaeya exhaled against Dainsleif's collarbone, tracing idle patterns where sweat still glistened in the morning light. The silence between them stretched—comfortable, for once, not the taut wire of things unsaid. But Kaeya had never been one for quiet when words could paint escape.
"Let's disappear," he murmured, lips brushing skin as he spoke. "Just for a while. We'll sample every vintage from Liyue to Fontaine, see if any compare to that swill you call wine." His grin was all sharp edges as he nudged Dainsleif's ribs. "Might even find a tavern where the barmaids don't recognize your wanted posters."
Dainsleif's fingers never paused in their journey through blue strands, though something flickered behind his eyes—something Kaeya recognized as the phantom weight of crowns they'd both stopped wearing.
Kaeya rolled onto his elbow, studying the way dawn gilded Dainsleif's lashes. "Daaain," he drawled, fingertip skating down the marble plane of his chest, "don't make me beg. Just say yes."
The smile that curved Dainsleif's lips was a rare, unguarded thing. He caught Kaeya's wandering hand, pressing a kiss to the star-shaped scar on his knuckle—the one that matched the pupil of his eye. "If my prince commands it," he murmured, and the title sounded different here, in this nest of stolen sheets, stripped of its history.
Kaeya's breath caught. For once, he had no retort, just the sudden, terrifying fullness in his chest as he tucked himself against Dainsleif's heartbeat. The morning wrapped around them—golden and thick as honey, the scattered feathers from their ravaged pillows drifting lazily in sunbeams.
It was exactly as Kaeya imagined the happiness to feel.
Then Dainsleif's hands stilled.
Kaeya knew before looking up. The hitch in Dainsleif's breathing, the way his pupils swallowed the blue of his irises—memories had claws, and they were dragging him back to yesterday's horror.
***
The sundial had been broken diagonally, grinning like a skull. Kaeya had seen the bones first—small enough that his throat closed around the thought of who they might have been. The little ring still clinging to a fingerbone had gleamed mockingly in the afternoon light.
Dainsleif had knelt as if struck, forehead pressed to fractured stone while the wind carried the scent of salt and old iron. Kaeya had pocketed the ring without speaking, the metal burning through his glove.
***
Now, in their fragile present, Kaeya pressed closer, lips finding the frantic pulse at Dainsleif's throat. He tasted salt again—whether from sweat or the memory of yesterday's wind, he couldn't say. Outside, rain began to patter against the glass, the sound like a hundred tiny bones falling.
Dainsleif's arms locked around him, tight enough to bruise. Kaeya let him. They'd always held each other like men bracing against a storm—as if their bodies could be shelter, as if love was armor thick enough to stop time.
The feather still caught in Kaeya’s hair trembled as the church bells began to toll.
The air tasted of ozone—sharp and electric, clinging to the back of his tongue like a premonition.
Just like back then.
Dainsleif remembered the silence first. That terrible, breathless moment when all of Khaenri'ah had looked up as one—scholars mid-lecture, children with sticky hands full of honey cakes, blacksmiths with hammers poised over glowing steel—and seen the sky peel back like gilded parchment, revealing the hollow bones of things that should never have been called angels.
The fracture came without sound. One heartbeat, the familiar tapestry of stars; the next, a jagged wound of light splitting the heavens diagonally—a grotesque mirror of the sundial that would crack centuries later beneath his kneeling form.
Then—
—light.
Not daylight. Not starlight. Something older, something that hurt to witness. It poured through the tear in the firmament like liquid judgment, scalding the retinas of those foolish enough to look. The ground shuddered. The air itself wailed.
And they descended.
The figures had wings of blades, voices that resonated in the marrow. Their words weren't speech but collapse—the sound of towers folding inward, of bridges snapping midspan. When they spoke, it was with the finality of tombs sealing:
"You were never meant to be."
Khaenri'ah came apart like wet parchment.
The people – women, men, children – disappeared; never to be seen again. The great archives themselves burned white, centuries of knowledge turning to ash in breaths.
And the curse—
—oh the curse—
It moved through the crowd like a perverse baptism. Dainsleif watched as the woman who'd sold him flowers every Monday clawed at her own throat, her veins blackening beneath skin like ink
spreading in water. A knight's armor fused to his flesh, the metal weeping as it became one with screaming muscle. Eyes that had sparkled with wit and pride clouded over—not with death, but with something infinitely worse: awareness trapped in ruined flesh.
Only monsters remained. Hiding their faces behind masks, so that they won’t lose their minds.
Somewhere to his left, a child wailed for her mother.
The gods did not pause.
And Dainsleif?
He watched.
(He remembered.)
Helpless.
Hollow.
Alive.
The feather still caught in Kaeya's hair trembled as Dainsleif surfaced from the memory, his fingers spasming against the prince's back. Outside, thunder rolled—the modern sky's pale imitation of divine wrath. Kaeya said nothing, just pressed closer until their scars aligned, until Dainsleif could feel the living beat of his heart against his own.
No words would ever be enough.
So they didn't speak.
They breathed.
And waited for the storm to pass.
Alive.
The word shuddered through Dainsleif like a dying man's first gasp of air.
Present.
"Dain." Kaeya's voice cut through the memory-fog, sharp as a dagger between ribs. His grip on Dainsleif's wrist bordered on painful—an anchor point, a lifeline. "Look at me."
The Twilight Sword gasped, reality crashing back in waves—the quilt tangled around their legs, the honeyed sunlight pooling on Kaeya's collarbone, the feather still caught in his blue-black hair. His hands rose of their own accord, framing Kaeya's face with trembling fingers. Thumbs brushed the scar beneath that star-pupiled eye—the one that mirrored the constellations of their dead nation.
"You're here," he rasped, voice raw as an open wound.
Kaeya answered by surging forward, crushing their mouths together in a kiss that tasted like desperation and defiance. It wasn't gentle—this was teeth and tongue and shared breath, a violent reaffirmation of existence. When they broke apart, Kaeya's lips were swollen, his pupils blown wide.
"And so are you," he panted.
Outside, the birds resumed their oblivious songs. The sky hung intact above Mondstadt's rooftops—for now.
The church bells faded, but the tension coiled in Dainsleif's muscles didn't. Kaeya felt it in the punishing grip on his hips, in the way Dain’s fingers pressed into his flesh like he wanted to leave permanent marks.
"Dain," Kaeya murmured, lips grazing the tight line of his jaw. "Still with me?"
A beat of silence. Then—
—movement.
Dainsleif flipped them with the controlled violence of a warrior, pinning Kaeya's wrists to the mattress. His eyes burned with something feral—not just desire, but the primal need to confirm, to possess, to etch this moment into reality.
"Prove it," he demanded, voice cracking like dry parchment.
Kaeya arched an eyebrow. "Prove what?"
"That you're here." Dainsleif's hips ground down in a slow, filthy roll that drew a gasp from them both. "That this isn't another fucking dream."
Kaeya understood. Words had always failed them—their language was written in bruises and bitten-off moans. He surged up to reclaim Dainsleif's mouth, all heat and hunger, his fingers tangling in golden strands to drag him closer. The makeshift feather crown tumbled forgotten to the floor.
"Feel that?" Kaeya gasped, guiding Dainsleif's hand to his throat where his pulse rabbited against the skin. "Real enough for you?"
Dainsleif answered by sinking his teeth into the juncture of Kaeya's neck and shoulder—hard—the pain blooming sweet and bright. Kaeya's resulting moan dissolved into breathless laughter.
"Fuck—yes, just like that—"
They came together like opposing storms, all thunderclap kisses and lightning-bright touches. No finesse, no artifice—just the desperate slide of skin on skin, the shared certainty that each gasp might be their last. The world beyond these sweat-slick sheets ceased to exist. Celestia's judgment, the weight of dead crowns, the child's bones in the ruins—none of it mattered.
There was only this: Dainsleif's mouth mapping every scar, every shudder, as if committing them to eternal memory. Kaeya's nails scoring down his back, drawing half-moon promises in flesh. The headboard knocking a frantic rhythm against the wall—a counterpoint to their ragged breaths.
When the crescendo hit, it was with the force of a collapsing star. Dainsleif's groan vibrated against Kaeya's throat, his fingers interlacing with Kaeya's above their heads as if trying to fuse their very bones together.
Afterward, foreheads pressed together in the wreckage, Dainsleif's whisper was barely audible:
"If the sky falls tomorrow—"
"Then we'll burn together," Kaeya finished, licking the salt from his lips. His leg hooked possessively around Dainsleif's waist, drawing another growl from the blonde. "But today?" His grin was all sharp edges and dangerous promises. "Today you're mine."
Outside, the sun climbed higher—brighter than natural, brighter than right.
Neither man looked up to notice.