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“Ah, Dawn Winery in the snow,” Venti sighs, tipping his head towards the sky. “Truly a vision worthy of a ballad!”
“You must have seen it before,” Diluc points out. Venti, after all, has lived more winters than Diluc can imagine. “If you were going to write a ballad, surely you would’ve already done it.”
Venti huffs, shoving his hands in his coat’s pockets. Or, rather, Diluc’s coat’s pockets. The borrowed black wool has practically swallowed Venti entirely, but he doesn’t seem to mind. If anything, he relishes it. “ Luc ,” he whines. “You’re too pedantic. Art is ephemeral.”
“I don’t think you’re using that word properly.”
“I think otherwise.”
Diluc sighs, shaking his head. Venti, he’s discovered, is impossibly stubborn. Truly, he’s impossible overall. The Anemo Archon is walking the perimeter of the winery, tongue out to catch snowflakes, slim form enveloped by one of Diluc’s coats. The Anemo Archon is flesh and blood and addicted to alcohol. The Anemo Archon loves him. It’s like a fairy tale, and if there’s one role Diluc never imagined himself cast in, it’s Prince Charming.
“Coin for your thoughts?” Venti asks, giving Diluc a hard nudge.
Diluc startles. “What?”
Venti gives him a knowing look. Archons, he is beautiful in the snow. “You’re brooding again,” he accuses. “Go back to giving me attention.”
“I give you enough attention as things are,” Diluc says mildly, and Venti, predictably, stomps on his foot. It doesn’t hurt in the slightest; while Venti has an archer’s strength, he weighs about as much as one of the apples he holds so dear.
Venti is already skipping away. He falls into a snowbank and sprawls out like a starfish, moving his arms up and down, giggling with delight. Despite the cold, something in Diluc warms. Thousands of years, he realizes— Venti’s been alive for thousands of years, and he’s still capable of laughing like that. Diluc’s hardly lived more than twenty, but he doesn’t think he could do the same.
He used to think Venti was the same as any other Mondstadt drunkard, weak-willed and lethargic, as foolish as he was prodigal. And he is, to some degree, but now Diluc understands that it’s earned. Diluc has been to church before; he knows every even slightly charitable thing Barbatos has done for Mondstadt. Venti deserves to be a little foolish sometimes; and yet, he also deserves so much better than a life spent wasting in a tavern.
Venti deserves a thousand snowy days, one for each year he’s survived with a smile. Venti deserves the world, and while Diluc can’t give him that, he can still give him his bed and his coat and his aching, battered heart, useless as it is.
Impossible as it is, Diluc is in love. The kind of love he scoffed at Kaeya for believing in. But he believes in it now, as Venti pulls Diluc down into the snowbanks, smushing slush against his face. “You’re brooding again,” Venti whines his earlier complaint, then goes in for a kiss.
The snow is frightfully cold, and Diluc has work to do, not to mention a night of patrolling ahead of him. And yet none of it matters, because Venti smells like cecilias and tastes like sweet summer wine. Because Diluc is in unrealistic, impossible love.
The kiss ends, but then they kiss again, and again, until snowflakes are clinging to their eyelashes and Diluc has to warm them while Venti wraps them in a breeze, swirling the flurry around them without letting it connect.
It’s all magic, Diluc thinks wildly. Their pocket of warmth in a snowstorm, Venti’s reddened lips, the whole timeless moment. It’s naught but a dream, a fantasy. Ephemeral, and he is using that word right.
But that’s what Venti is. He’s glib and foolish, brave and clever, lost and aching and loud. He’s battle scars and beauty and brilliance. He’s alive like no one Diluc’s ever met, and not even millennia of change could take it away from him. He is a dream, a fantasy, a reverie. He’s impossible.
He’s also drawing Diluc to his feet, giggling in his way. “Come on, Master Diluc, let’s go inside,” Venti purrs, hat askew and braids woven with snow. Diluc nods, and then they’re running through the snowstorm. It’s cold and awful and beautiful, and Venti is cackling with delight, and he feels so alive .
Maybe Diluc needs more impossible in his life.