Chapter Text
May 25th.
The explosion came first.
White-hot and violent, it swallowed the cliffside in a single blink and turned the world into shattered afterimages. Heat punched across Diluc’s face hard enough to sting. Something cracked beneath his boots.
Then nothing.
For one disorienting second, the ground simply… ceased to exist.
“Dammit—”
The curse tore out of him as his footing vanished. He twisted on instinct, body trying to recover midair, but the angle was wrong. He’d miscalculated the dodge. The blast. The distance. Everything.
The world lurched sideways.
For the first time in a very long time, Diluc felt truly off-balance. No wall to push from. No foothold. No controlled landing. Just gravity dragging him downward while the dark cliffside spun around him in jagged streaks.
Then came the Impact.
His body hit the ground with a brutal, solid crack that rattled through bone and teeth alike. The air burst from his lungs for a horrifying moment he genuinely wondered if he'd forgotten how breathing functioned.
Something warm trickled down the side of his temple.
His vision narrowed into fractured smears of black and silver. The high-pitched ringing started immediately, swallowing the night whole. He pushed against the ground, arm trembling but nothing obeyed correctly. The sound felt distant. Everything felt distant.
Then...
“Jesus Christ!”
The voice cut through the ringing so suddenly Diluc almost thought he imagined it, panicked male voice completely unfamiliar.
What in the actual hell is a Jesus?
The darkness around him shifted strangely; footsteps pounded toward him, moving shapes bleeding together at the edges like living shadows.
“Oh my God, he fell all the way down—holy shit—”
The same voice came again, frantic, closer now. Something fast and small darted across the rocks to his left. Diluc tried to focus on where it was coming from.
“Oh my God—sir? Sir, can you hear me?!”
Branches swaying overhead.
The stranger made a strangled noise.
“Ohhh no. Nope. Don’t do that. Don’t move. Jesus— okay stop saying Jesus, Ethan, you’re freaking him out—”
Diluc stared upward blankly.
Whoever Ethan was, he sounded hysterical.
His falcon circled above him wildly, wings cutting through the moonlight as it cried out in sharp, piercing screeches.
“Mama! Hold on! I will get help”
Diluc’s eyes narrowed weakly.
Who was Mama?
Why was Mama involved?
Why did this person keep summoning random entities instead of helping?
Diluc attempted to speak, but all that emerged was a rough, half-formed sound.
Another voice shrieked somewhere near his boots.
“I THINK THAT’S A GUY—”
“SHUT UP!”
“WHY IS HE ON FIRE?!”
What. The. Hell.
Diluc’s head throbbed violently.
Multiple shadows moved again. Tiny silhouettes scrambling across the rocks and brush. One darted near his arm before vanishing back into darkness too quickly for his eyes to track properly.
The voices overlapped.
“He’s dying!”
“I don’t know first aid!”
“Why does he smell like smoke?!”
“USE YOUR EYES, YOU IDIOT!”
“I CAN’T SEE, MY EYES ARE SMALL!”
His brain stalled trying to process any of it.
There were no people. Only darkness and those distorted little shapes skittering around him while unfamiliar voices echoed from impossible directions.
The ringing in his ears worsened.
“Stay with us, weird fire man!”
“We are NOT qualified for this!”
“Do something!”
“I’m a squirrel, not a doctor!”
Diluc blinked slowly, trying very hard to remember how consciousness worked. The effort lasted approximately three seconds. Then his body made the executive decision that consciousness was no longer a priority.
Everything inside him shut down at once while the strange creatures kept shouting absolute nonsense into his ears.
Then darkness swallowed everything whole. And the last thing Diluc heard before darkness swallowed him whole was a horrified voice yelling.
“OH MY GOD HE POWERED OFF—”
************
Morning arrived like a personal attack.
Diluc became aware of consciousness slowly and against his will, dragged upward through layers of exhaustion and the lingering suspicion that his brain had been shaken inside his skull like dice in a cup. The first thing he registered was the merciless brightness.
Light poured through the windows directly into his eyes with all the subtlety of divine punishment. He made a faint sound of disgust and attempted to turn away from it.
The air smelled unnaturally clean. Somewhere nearby, glass clinked softly against glass while muffled voices drifted in and out of focus like they were traveling through water.
His vision refused to cooperate.
Shapes moved overhead in blurry smears of white and gold. Someone was talking. He couldn’t understand a single word at first. The sounds tangled together uselessly inside his aching skull.
“…hey?”
Static.
“…many fingers…”
Static again.
Diluc blinked heavily toward the shape leaning far too close to his face and saw several blurry fingers waving in front of his eyes with deeply unnecessary enthusiasm.
“Hey, hey,” came a familiar voice far too close to his face “How many fingers am I holding up?”
Then another voice cut in sharply.
“He just woke up, Sir Kaeya. Please stop shoving your fingers into his vision and back away from the patient.”
A pair of hands immediately grabbed Kaeya by the shoulders and physically hauled him backward.
Barbara came into focus first, standing beside the bed with practiced concern written across her face. Kaeya stood a few steps behind her looking deeply offended at being removed from what he probably considered a perfectly reasonable medical procedure.
“I was conducting a medical evaluation.”
“You were poking his forehead.”
The moment Barbara noticed Diluc properly focusing on her, her expression softened with visible relief.
“Oh, thank Barbatos,” she breathed. “I’m sorry, but I need to ask you something. Do you know your name?”
He stared at her for a long second as though the question itself required advanced calculations “…Diluc.”
Barbara nodded immediately, visibly encouraged.
“Good. Very good.” She hesitated before continuing carefully. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
Diluc’s expression flattened.
That question felt unfair because the last thing he remembered sounded less like reality and more like the dying hallucinations of a man whose skull had bounced off a cliff. His brow furrowed harder. A screaming stranger invoking some entity named Jesus every three seconds.
Across the room, Kaeya and Albedo exchanged a look so quick most people would’ve missed it entirely.
Diluc did not.
And somehow that made everything worse. Kaeya cleared his throat and stepped forward with the air of someone volunteering information before suspicion could naturally form.
“Your falcon,” he began dramatically, “literally hunted me down in the middle of the night. I was minding my own business when it descended from the heavens, ripped off my eyepatch, smacked me directly in the face with it, and then kept screaming until I followed it.”
Diluc stared at him blankly.
Kaeya pointed accusingly toward the window as though the bird might still be lurking nearby “Do you understand what it feels like to be assaulted by a bird while peacefully existing?”
Albedo, meanwhile, stood near the wall with his usual calm posture, hands folded neatly behind his back like a scholar observing a particularly unstable experiment.
“You fell off a cliff,” Albedo continued smoothly “The terrain beneath you collapsed after some sort of explosion. No wildlife appears to have been harmed, fortunately.”
That felt like an oddly specific reassurance.
Still, neither of them questioned why he had been outside after midnight half-dead near a cliff in the first place. But then again, nobody in Mondstadt asked those kinds of questions anymore. The Darknight Hero operated on a strange unspoken agreement with the city at this point. If Diluc appeared bloodied at three in the morning, people simply accepted that the Knights of Favonius had probably failed at something again.
Diluc sat in silence for a moment before finally speaking. “Did either of you,” he began carefully, “see people there?”
Kaeya and Albedo exchanged another glance.
They shifted slightly farther away afterward under the extremely fake excuse of ‘giving Barbara space’ only to immediately lower their voices into whispers the second they thought he couldn’t hear them.
Diluc’s eyes narrowed harder.
What the hell were they doing?
Kaeya leaned closer to Albedo who whispered something back. Kaeya looked briefly horrified. Then both of them turned toward Diluc at the exact same time.
“No,” Kaeya answered smoothly. “Only you.”
Albedo tilted his head thoughtfully “Hallucinations caused by the concussion are the most likely explanation.”
That answer came suspiciously fast.
Barbara, thankfully unaware of whatever strange conspiracy energy had suddenly infected the room, continued her examination while soft hydro shimmered around her hands.
“Well,” she said after a moment, sounding relieved, “everything seems stable now. No lasting damage. You should rest, avoid unnecessary stress, and please try not to fall off any more cliffs.”
*********
A short while later, the three of them stepped outside the cathedral into the cool morning air.
Sunlight spilled across the cobblestone streets. The breeze carried the smell of bread and flowers. Citizens moved casually through the city completely unaware that Diluc currently felt like his brain had been removed, shaken violently, and reinserted incorrectly.
The silence between the three men stretched strangely as they crossed toward the main bridge. A glance here, a quiet murmur exchanged the second they thought Diluc wasn’t paying attention.
Conspiring.
Definitely conspiring.
Diluc’s suspicion deepened with every step.
Every few minutes they drifted slightly ahead of him, lowering their voices into quiet conversations that immediately stopped whenever Diluc got too close. It was beginning to feel deeply personal, he was seconds away from demanding an explanation when—
“There he is.”
The voice came from nowhere filled with ancient hatred.
“The bastard who keeps ruining our day.”
“Kaeya,” he said flatly, “shut up.”
Kaeya blinked. “Excuse me?” he continued, looked genuinely offended “Maybe you’re irritated by my very existence, but that doesn’t mean you can just—”
Another voice cut directly across his sentence “This time we retaliate instead of retreating..."
Diluc stopped walking so abruptly, the voice hadn’t come from Kaeya. It hadn’t come from Albedo either.
"Everyone to your positions.”
It came from… everywhere.
His eyes scanned the bridge sharply, the pigeons scattered upward from the bridge all at once in a violent explosion of feathers. Tiny black eyes locked onto Kaeya with terrifying synchronization.
“Kaeya,” Diluc hissed, holding up a hand sharply “just shut the fuck up.”
Kaeya blinked in outrage “I told you to stop using that language with me—”
“SHUT UP!” Diluc and Albedo said simultaneously.
Kaeya finally fell silent out of pure confusion.
One pigeon landed atop the bridge lantern like a commander overseeing troops. Its tiny chest puffed outward “Phase two commencing.”
Another voice answered immediately from overhead “All aerial bombardment units loaded and ready.”
Diluc stared upward in horror …What
Albedo, meanwhile, had gone very still, studying Diluc now with the expression of a scientist realizing his experiment may have spontaneously developed new problems. Because whatever he had expected from a concussion patient, it clearly had not included this.
“Permission to unleash divine judgment” one pigeon declared with frightening conviction.
“Denied,” another answered coldly “Wait for countdown.”
The pigeons were circling overhead now in coordinated spirals like some kind of airborne death cult.
“Five”
“Four.”
Diluc’s pulse spiked instantly.
Why were they counting?
Where were they?
“Diluc,” Albedo said slowly “what is happening?”
“Three.”
Diluc looked upward sharply.
One pigeon missed formation and flapped sideways into another “WAIT!,” it yelled furiously “I don’t know how to do it midair—!”
“Skill issue,” another barked back immediately.
“Two.”
Diluc’s survival instincts activated instantly.
“Jump!” he ordered sharply then vaulted upward onto the bridge railing in one smooth motion, eyes locked onto the sky. Albedo immediately followed with no questions.
Kaeya remained standing there, completely unaware “…Wait,” he said slowly. “Why are you tw—”
Something wet hit his shoulder, unfortunately, looked up one second too late.
“One!”
The heavens opened.
A horrifying rainstorm of pigeon shit descended from above with military precision. Every single projectile locked exclusively onto Kaeya like a planned assassination. He barely had time to process the incoming biological warfare before the first impact hit his shoulder.
“FOR TIMMIE!” it screamed with genocidal enthusiasm.
For one stunned moment, absolute silence consumed the bridge. Even the wind seemed too shocked to continue. Kaeya stood there frozen in place beneath the aftermath of aerial vengeance, blue eye wide with genuine spiritual devastation.
Above them, one particularly smug pigeon performed a graceful turn through the air before landing triumphantly atop the city wall.
“THIS!” the tiny furious voice declared proudly, “is what you GET for scaring Timmie again, bastard.”
Then the pigeon puffed out its chest and admired the destruction like an artist observing a masterpiece.
Somewhere nearby, Timmie witnessed the entire event unfolding before his eyes with his mouth hanging open in absolute awe. The pigeons circled triumphantly overhead like war heroes returning from battle.
Nobody would ever believe him.