Old Scars

There was a box sitting in the middle of his bed.

Erion stared at it for a long moment after he had closed the bedroom door behind him. Why was there a box on his bed? He hadn’t expected there to be a box. There shouldn’t be a box there.

No…. wait, he should know this right? It was there for a reason.

His brain felt sluggish as he tried to remember. Was he drunk? He felt a little drunk. Funny, he hadn’t thought he’d had that much to drink. But then again, maybe he hadn’t really been paying that much attention to what he’d been drinking, not when there was so much else to be thinking about. Or to try avoiding thinking about was a better way to put it.

...Box, right the box. He ran a hand down his face as he forced himself to think. He knew this. Box..box…

“Right,” he said as his mind finally decided to dredge up the answer he had been looking for, “Dad.”

His father had been cleaning out a corner of his workshop and found a box. Erion remembered he’d brought it in as he was leaving for a performance saying that it had things belonging to him in it, and because he'd been in a hurry he’d just told his dad to dump the box in his room.

“He didn’t have to leave it on the bed,” Erion grumbled as he crossed the room and sat down heavily next to it. He wasn’t sure why he would have left a box in his dad’s workshop. Didn’t make any sense. If it was his stuff wouldn’t he have just shoved it into a closet?

Again though, It felt like he should know this. Something was nibbling at the back of his mind every time he looked at it, but it kept stubbornly sliding away every time he tried to focus on what that emotion was. It was almost a strange feeling of..unease. But it was just a box, and one that his father had brought up. There couldn’t really be anything bad in here, could there? His father must have looked through it already if he thought it was just some old junk his son had shoved in a corner of the workshop and now needed to deal with.

Besides, if nothing else, he would never have put something he thought was dangerously incriminating in his father’s workshop.

Well, there was an easy way to figure out what was really going on. He peered into the box, then frowned and reached inside. As he sifted through the items it bore, he could tell that his father had been right - this was some of his old stuff. It was just a weird collection of things - a few old scarves, some bits of jewelry and clothing. A book or two.

That weird anxiety hadn’t gone away though, and his fogged mind still wasn’t giving him a clear answer. At least he didn’t until his fingers touched something thin and smooth. He froze then, his stomach starting to drop, mind clearing even as he pulled a beautifully-carved wooden flute from inside.

What….it’s beautiful! Look at it! Where did you even find this? I just remembered that you were saying you wanted to practice with other instruments more, so I found one I thought you would like. Happy Windblum, Eri.

He yanked his hand away from the wooden thing like it was a viper, his mind feeling all to clear as he stared at the innocuous looking flute now laying on a rumpled scarf in the bottom of the box. Suddenly all those weird feelings and the trepidation about looking inside made all to much sense.

The first couple of days after his….dramatic final meeting with Diluc were a blur. All he remembered clearly was grief and sadness and confusion and anger all mixing together as he tried to figure out what had happened. Eventually the anger had won out, and he’d stormed up to the Winery, determined to confront Diluc and do….something. Demand answers, maybe? Apologize? Make Diluc apologize to him? Whatever his plan had been, it came to a screeching halt when he’d found out that ‘Master Diluc’ was gone. Left without telling him, and no one would tell him where he had gone or when he would be back.

So he’d gone back home - and promptly threw every gift he could remember Diluc giving him into a box, swearing he would get rid of it all. He’d made such plans for that box - he was going to burn it (it would be symbolic!). Throw it in Cider Lake. Leave it inside a hilichurl camp somehow.

Yet despite all the plotting the only thing he’d managed to do was lug the thing down to his father’s workshop, and shove it into a dark, dusty corner where it hopefully would never see the light of day again, and he would be able to forget. Something he had actually started to do, before today, had brought the past crashing straight back into his life.

As he pulled back away from the box, he wondered if he had somehow managed to anger one of the Seven. Maybe Lord Barbatos wasn’t happy with him for some reason. Because the box was hardly the only thing that had crept back into his life today, and he found it hard to believe it was a coincidence that it showed up the same day he’d had the misfortune of meeting Diluc-fucking-Ragnvindr face-to-face for the first time since their break-up.

Oh, he’d known that Diluc was back in town for a while now. It was part of his job to find out information like that after all. Granted he hadn’t known how to feel about that information - still didn’t really. His ex had just...shown back up in town after he’d dropped off the face of the earth, and hadn’t even bothered to tell anyone he was still alive for so many years. It was a lot to unpack.

Still he’d thought that he would be able to ignore it. It had been years since Diluc had made it clear they were done after all. He was an adult. The past was something he could deal with.

Then two days ago he had been speaking to Marjorie when suddenly she’d gasped and looked past him.

“So he is back,” she said excitedly, and when he’d turned to see who she was talking about, he’d froze. Red hair, of a far to familiar shade. Diluc, in black, with a weight in his eyes that Erion hadn’t remembered being there before. For a moment, all he could do was stare. His heart had jumped up to beat widely somewhere around his throat when his had mind could come to a screeching halt. He had heard that Diluc was back. There shouldn’t have been this feeling of relief that he was okay. Yet there had been, mixed in with so many other emotions that he couldn’t have moved even if he had wanted too. Marjorie had been saying something about ‘Master Diluc’ but he hadn’t been paying attention to what she had been rambling about. For a panicked moment he had thought that Diluc was going to glance over at him, and suffered a shameful moment of almost wanting to bolt before he’d been seen looking so confused. Thankfully Diluc had kept walking across the top of the stairs without even glancing over at them. It had taken him a second to realize that Marjorire was talking to him then, but he had managed to drag himself back to the conversation somehow without her noticing anything was off.

You would think two days would be more than enough to deal with those emotions, he thought angrily at himself as he stared at the box as if his current state was its fault, before grabbing it by the side and setting it heavily on the floor. Then he kicked it halfway across the room before collapsing backwards onto his bed.

He would let tomorrow Erion deal with it. When he wasn’t tired or drunk. Or still in a knot over everything.

At first he had been sure that since the initial shock was over, it would be fine. He’d just been caught off-guard about the whole Diluc thing.. Wouldn’t happen again.

Until he’d walked into the Angel’s Share with some fellow bards today only to find Diluc already there. Standing behind the counter, serving drinks like he belonged there.

(A small distant part of his brain tried to remind him Diluc owned the place but he ignored it)

Seeing him standing there so casually had made him feel like someone had smacked him over the head for a moment. It hadn’t hit him as hard as it had the first time, but it had more than enough to make him pause. And this time the fates hadn’t been kind enough to have Diluc miss him. Not when he’d come straight into the tavern door, and Diluc had called out a vague greeting to the group he was with before realizing who was part of it.

And not when, for a brief moment, their eyes had actually met. He could have sworn that in that breath Diluc had actually frozen as well, but then the other bards he was with had gotten excited over ‘Master Diluc’ and the moment had broken. He’d made an excuse about grabbing a table and slipped off while Diluc had still been acting the perfect gentleman over their questions about how long he had been back.

He threw an arm over his eyes, wondering if he would have actually left if had been alone, instead of with other people. No, he quickly decided as his stomach twisted itself into a knot at that thought. Not with him standing there. He had too much pride to just...run away like that, which is what it would be if he tried to disappear each time Diluc was in the area..

Though apparently not enough pride. Why was this even throwing him off? He’d dealt with far, far worse than this since Diluc had left. Time hadn’t stood still. He’d grown up. More skilled. After all that he should have been able to at least face Diluc, no matter how things had ended between them.

“You never forget your firsts,” he muttered dully to himself. Apparently that included your first heartbreak. The whole thing had blindsided him, and he supposed that was what made it different. He had replayed how things had ended in his head over and over after it had happened, trying to figure out what had really happened. He’d gotten some answers over time, started to understand, and thought that he had managed to move on.

At least until Diluc had shown up right in front of him, and reopened all those old wounds. He let out a shaky breath, his stomach in knots. Was it the alcohol in the system that was still making him feel nauseous? Had to be.

Whatever it was...he couldn’t go on like this. He wasn’t an inexperienced teeanger anyomore, and he was not an idiot. With a certain dread he realized that if he really wanted to move on, he would have to at least talk with Diluc.

Oh, he really didn’t want to do it. Really,really didn’t want too. After everything that had happened between him and Diluc he wasn’t sure he wanted to talk to him at all. Ever. At the same time, he knew that this was the quickest way to just...get used to it. He was not going to be able to avoid the master of the Angel’s Share, not when he performed there regularly. He was also not going to allow the fact that his ex was to run him out of one of his most lucrative locations.

His own ego also wouldn’t stand for Diluc being the one to approach him either. Besides, he realized fuzzily, if I go up to him and act like nothing wrong it will probably at least confuse him,. Somehow that thought was comforting. Let him be the one to control when the scars got reopened this time. See how Diluc liked it.

Somehow with that decision made, he felt a strange sense of distant calm. Suddenly his eyelids felt heavy. A part of him knew that he should probably at least get his shoes off, but that suddenly didn’t seem as important anymore.

Yet, as he finally drifted off, one of his final thoughts was wondering if Diluc would be surprised…….or if he wouldn’t care what if he did at all. Somehow the latter option seemed like it would hurt that much more.