Of masks and dances - Chapter 19: Hearts, fire and dangerous games

[threading_in_dreams]

Of masks and dances
Chapter 19: Hearts, fire and dangerous games

In which Diluc is very much not ok. At least he makes an unexpected new friend rival sparring partner.

Sooooo... I did use the Tartaglia scenes I mentioned before. Not because they were too good to ditch, I said I was about to just spin an another fic out of it, but because those scenes became the key to what I was trying to do with Diluc's character.

You see, I needed him to be violently shaken out of his dissociative state. I needed him to feel his own heartbreak. Childe was very useful for that, because he is his contrast character from the very start. The romantic undertones were just me having some fun. Fuck, there aren't enough Diluc/Tartaglia fics in the world.

And I really just can't write duel scenes without serious erotic undertones for some reason*.

Of course, the whooping 17.8k words managed not to be enough for me to also show what change, exactly, was enacted by the whole ordeal. That'll come in chapter 21, since chapter 20 goes back to Lumine. I also avoided saying what else he was doing besides playing fight club with a Fatui. That was on purpose.

But I had time to flesh out Kaeya's newest team member! Lol, yeah. I know. I just like writing these kind of layered stories and braiding a small side-character in and out of the story is catnip for me. Also, Evelyn is a very reckless, foolhardy person and I love those.



* I usually blame Chris Claremont's run on the X-Men, which was formative reading for me, but it's probably some psychoanalytic bullshit. I mean, I know my kinks and only some of those can be traced back to reading X-Men comics while young.