Chapter Text
Winter. White and cold and cruel. It comes slowly, setting itself on roofs and in the air. Silently, in the night when everyone sleeps, it arrives. An opaque veil covers the sun in the sky. Everything turns brittle and muted.
Winter means having to adapt to the weather. Warmer coats, numerous blankets, beanies. For Klee at least, because winter doesn’t really bother Albedo.
He is a homunculus, made of water and clay, and some brilliant alchemy. Days for him are like seconds. Soon enough it’ll be spring, soon enough the cold will fade. (Never changing even in that ever-changing world. A chalk man.)
Days, uncountable, are filled with paperwork and research, and more paperwork. Scarce expeditions, nothing very interesting. Spending time with Klee is the highlight of his routine, like the lighthouse to a lost sailor. She comes to his office when she has the time, between her schooling and playtime with her friends. Sometimes they have lunch, sometimes Albedo reads to her, sometimes she draws and Albedo writes in silence. It’s simple, it’s good, it’s happy.
Klee has grown a lot in the short while that Albedo wasn’t there. Three years are nothing to a homunculus, but apparently they are that much significant to a child. She knows how to read now, and how to write her name. She goes out on her own, and apparently she became a knight of Favonius. (The Spark Knight, because of the pyro vision she was blessed with. Another moment that Albedo missed.)
He ties the scarf around her neck like a bow, the way she likes it. Then he helps her put on her gloves. Children get sick easily if they don’t cover up properly, one is never too careful. It has snowed this morning and Klee wants to play outside. She’s allowed to, of course, but prevention is better than cure.
“Did you put Dodoco in my bag?”
“Of course.”
It’s still hard getting used to it; how much he missed, how much she grew. Klee used to fit in the cups of his arms. Now she’s grown and even lovelier. She has new interests, new talents, new friends. It’s a lot to catch up on for Albedo. He still doesn’t understand what Dodoco is supposed to be, if he has to be honest. (A bunny? A snow fox?)
“Are you gonna hang out with Madam Wilma again?” Klee asks.
“Not hang out,” he says, “research.”
“Is she your friend?”
“Hmm,” he takes time to ponder his answer. Wilma isn’t any different from all the other people working in the Knights’ headquarters. There’s Jean and Lisa, and many more whose names he doesn’t know, but none of them are really his friends. Colleagues is a better word for it. “I don’t think,” he settles on answering.
“Hmm,” she repeats. It’s always cute when she tried to mimic his manners. “And Kaeya, he’s not your friend too?”
Of course she would end up noticing something was wrong. Selfishly, Albedo doesn’t want her to worry about it.
“Everything is fine,” he securely closes her jacket before letting her go from his hold.
“Off you go Klee. Have fun.”
When he is not wasting away in his office filling up boring paperworks all day, Albedo makes his way across the courtyard to the laboratory of Madam Wilma. She’s the chief alchemist – and the only alchemist – of the Knights of Favonius. Her interest seems to lie in plants. Her workplace is more akin to a greenhouse than a proper lab. Even her gloves are green, and her apron that she always wears has flowers embroidered into it.
“I want to make a flower that does not die,” she told Albedo on the day they met. That day he had followed the smell of sulphur and the melody of a solution bubbling over a flame. She didn’t throw him out nor ask him what he wanted when he entered through the door. She listened to his questions and answered them, and then she invited him to come more often. An offer that he eagerly accepted.
It’s been at least a decade since Albedo last had to share a lab with someone else. The last, and only, person was his Master. Strict and cold, she was the best alchemist he ever had the honour to behold.
Wilma is nothing like her at all. She’s an old woman, grey and kind. She makes potions for the weary knights and marmalades when she has the time. The kids love her, the council of knights ignores her. Albedo thinks he admires her. Her genuine passion for her craft and extended knowledge make her a most competent scientist. He thinks that together, they can achieve her dream of making an eternal flower. WIth her expertise and his khemia, it should be feasible.
And so, they spend their days researching for the sake of it. For the passion of it, something Albedo had forgotten was so thrilling. The laboratory is quiet (except when Klee visits, she brings with her a tumult of life and of laughter. She loves eating Wilma’s marmalade on toast with some tea). It’s peaceful, a better way to spend his days than in his office which he mostly tries to avoid if he can.
It’s winter, and time is slow. The number of commissions from adventurers is scarce, and so Wilma dedicates her time to making fertilisers. For a flower to never die, it first has to survive winter. Studying specimens of flowers that grow even in the cold, she tries to understand what differentiate them from other species.
Her interest for plants is infectious, because Albedo finds himself studying them too. After his workload for the day is duly completed, he rushes through the courtyard to get to the lab. He’s been trying to use flaming flowers to make a heating apparatus that would keep Klee warm during those harsh winter nights.
While he waits for his solution to heat, he makes Wilma a cup of medicinal tea. She’s an old woman weakened even more by the bad weather. He doesn’t miss the way her hands tremble when she holds her vials and how she coughs into a handkerchief when she speaks for too long.
“I’ve been thinking, if we don’t apply cryo to flaming flowers before collecting them, we might be able to make a more efficient usage of their heat.”
“You mean picking them while they’re still on fire and using them as such? That would defy all of our current modus operandi when it comes to those stamens, and all of our safety protocols too.”
“It cannot hurt to try,” he remarks.
She nods, taking a sip from her tea. “We Mondstadians do love a revolution.”
Albedo makes the mistake of looking away from his experiment for once, where the window gives into the courtyard, and that second is enough to lead to disaster. Glass shatters and flies everywhere with a loud BAM.
“Albedo! You have to pay more attention, my friend.”
But Albedo has his mind elsewhere.
From the window, he sees (watches) Kaeya. His hair is in a braid (it looks good), he’s smiling as he guides the new knights through their training (not a bad expression on him). Fiercely, he swings his sword (as talented as always), he helps the guys replicate his moves.
It’s only through windows that Albedo gets to see Kaeya nowadays. Only from afar. (They’re not friends, he thinks. They weren’t exactly friends in the past, but at least they were close. And now they are nothing at all. Two men, forever estranged.)
**
Sometimes, the council of knights, those old men with their white beards and self-important attitudes, call upon Albedo to assign him the randomest of missions. The truth is that now that they have made him a captain, they don’t really know what to do with him. The water issue has been solved and they have a group of knights on watching duty, should any issue arise. All in all, Albedo has become obsolete. They still haven’t bothered to give him a proper title.
So for now, he is Albedo, captain of nothing at all.
Of course, he is not mad at having a job, a well-paying one at that. He’s not mad that they also called Kaeya to their office today, either. Albedo watches him from the corner of his eyes, not quite able to focus on what any of the members of the council are saying. Something about an adventurer stuck on the mountain Dragonspine. A lack of resources, the outrider being too busy to take care of it as she usually would. Kaeya looks bored. He stares at the wall in front of him, Albedo knows he’s not listening either.
“A rescue mission?” Albedo asks for the sake of stopping their blather. “I’m not sure how this falls under my authority.”
“You’re well aware that the captain of the Investigation Team retired not long ago, and we’ve yet to find him a suitable replacement. Achieve this mission and the title is yours. Finding our missing adventurer, Ebert Krause, can pass as an investigation. Treat it as an exam of a sort. If you succeed, we’ll deem you competent enough to take over the Investigation Team.”
“Do I have to…”
One of the council members clears his throat pointedly. “By the end of the month we’ll be submitting the Knights’ yearly budget for reviewing. We can’t afford to keep spending resources on a captaincy with no purpose, as you can imagine. Your current office will have to be reconsidered to correspond to our financial goals.”
“In other words, I’ll be losing my job.” It’s not a question. How fitting of them to give him an ultimatum, over something that they offered to him in the first place. Them and their beards, they care little about the well-being of the common man. Politics, games of power, profits, more profits, that’s what matters to them. They’re too old to understand how society has continued to move on without them, and too rich to fathom what an ordinary life looks like.
They want Albedo to replace the Investigation Team captain now. It almost sounds like a bad joke from these capricious old men. Albedo will not miss his office, but at the very least he would like to have a job that interests him. He’s never wanted to be a detective, he doubts he even has the skill for it.
“Captain Kaeya can be your chaperone. He did commit to assisting you after all,” the one with the longest beard continues. “If he deems you capable, the position is yours. Don’t make us regret our decision.”
Albedo thinks he catches Kaeya rolling his eye, but the next moment he looks all proper and dignified. He inclines his head. “Let’s not waste any time, then.”
They don’t talk – as Kaeya walks in front of him and as he leads them through hallways and through doors, a place behind the knights’ headquarters, in the opposite direction of Wilma’s laboratory. A stable, it turns out. Mostly empty except for a couple of horses. Kaeya caresses each one of them behind their ears.
“You still know how to ride, right?” Kaeya asks, levelling Albedo with his gaze as if he wasn’t the one to teach him, not that long ago either.
“Of course.”
Kaeya raises an eyebrow. “Alright, let’s go then.” He hands Albedo the reins of a sturdy brown mare, and chooses a black steed for himself.
(On the way, Albedo almost falls from the horse twice and nearly runs head first into a tree.)
They reach the foot of the mountain by early afternoon. The sun is getting lower and the air even colder. It would have bothered Albedo if he were human. He guesses Kaeya is mostly immune to it thanks to his vision.
Kaeya gets off his mount and hands both his and Albedo’s reins to the adventurers of the camp. “Bring them back down, please. I don’t want them to be out in the cold.” He doesn’t forget to say goodbye to his horses before letting them go.
By foot, they make it up the mountain, not talking much either.
Albedo has never gone to Dragonspine before. Neither now nor in the past did he have a reason or an interest to climb up a freezing mountain. It just never appealed to him before. That snow that does not melt, that eternal lonely winter.
But as they climb up, Albedo gets to see more things, way more interesting than boring white snow. Ancient constructs, glowing steles, red seelies that emit heat. And bones. Enormous bones, like a thoracic cavity coming out of the ground. Around the area where the gigantic bones emerge from the earth, they find a proliferation of rocks that glow red under the winter’s sun.
Upon breaking, the rock emits a strange sort of warmth. Encompassing, without burning. He takes another piece and breaks it in his hand the same way, producing the same reaction once again. This time he notes the residue of red light around his fingers. Kaeya watches him from above his shoulder.
“Fascinating.” The rocks, the heavy atmosphere, the ruins all around them, everything. There’s a thrum of something – not energy, not exactly life. Something that calls to Albedo, something telling to return home. The bones, the stones… Why do they feel like khemia?
“Perhaps you’ve found something worth staying for this time,” Kaeya tells him genuinely, without a hint of malice or hurt. “We can come back to take samples on the way back, if you want.”
They continue into the mountain, following the beaten path in search of clues. (Perhaps this does qualify as an investigation mission after all.) There are more rocks on the way, more bones. Through trial and error, he discovers the red rocks’ ability to melt even the coldest of ices. How would it work if he tried incorporating them into his warming bottle? Although the warmth doesn’t last long once the rock has been broken, he’ll have to dig around it and bring it whole to the lab to study in more detail.
“I’ve been thinking,” Kaeya says suddenly, running a hand through his hair to put it back into place. “Being a captain doesn’t suit you at all. You’ve always loved experimenting. Your place is in a lab, not in whatever office they stuffed you in.”
“I, well, it’s not like I have a choice.” He used to think being a knight didn’t fit Kaeya either but now he can see he was wrong. He’d love to ask him what made him become a captain, but he doesn't dare in the end. He wonders if Kaeya would bother telling him.
Despite the silence and the uneasy tension, they work well together. They always have. Like a rehearsed dance, there is no word needed. Albedo proposes looking for obvious signs of battle first, to see if Ebert had a run in with one of the monsters inhabiting the mountains. If they find nothing, then the logical conclusion is that he found shelter from the cold somewhere and either got stuck or died on the way. In that case, they should focus on investigating caves and nooks in the mountain’s walls instead of hilichurls’ camps.
It’s tedious but it's all they can do. Had Ebert a vision it would have been easy to follow the metaphorical thread of elemental energy.
Kaeya nods and immediately goes to work. Ebert doesn’t have a vision but a fight with monsters would have left elemental residue. Finding nothing of the sort, they focus on the second hypothesis.
The sun sets on their first day of search and they come out of it empty handed. It’s useless to be defeatist, Albedo knows, but their mission is of the time-sensitive sort. It’d be better for them to find Ebert still breathing. And the frown on Kaeya’s face makes something unpleasant stir in Albedo’s stomach.
The sun finishes its descent in the faraway horizon, and the mountain becomes even colder. For the night, they take shelter in one of the grottos, sleeping in turns. They keep a distance, they stay silent.
(That invisible distance, unmelting between them, how easy would it be to shatter it?)
The second day is more lucky. Thankfully.
They keep on searching and looking, careful. Until, until, Kaeya stops in his tracks.
“Is that our guy?”
In a tight hallway between the rocks, through an opening blocked by a thick wall of ice, a lone silhouette lays on the ground. Albedo recalls the council of knights’ description: dark hair with a matching beard, a green uniform, medium height. It must be him.
Kaeya lets out a long sigh.
Crushing another of the red rocks between his fingers, Albedo melts the wall of ice trapping the man inside. He’s passed out, but other than that he doesn’t seem hurt in any way.
“Shit,” Kaeya rushes inside as soon as he’s able. “We have to heat him up quick. He’ll die of cold at this rate.”
Albedo throws one of his prototype heating bottles to Kayea, who catches it without missing a beat.
“It’s hot,” he says with surprise. “Amazing, did you make that?”
“It’ll keep him warm while I gather wood to make a fire. Do keep an eye on him, I’ll be right back.”
Ebert is awake, although very much weakened, by the time Albedo makes it back to the cave with a bundle of dry sticks in his arm. He’s covered by Kaeya’s jacket, who busies himself unpacking the contents of his bag while Albedo makes the fire. He holds the heating bottle in trembling fingers that have started to turn blue.
Once the fire burns high enough, Albedo fills one of the pots they packed with water. Kaeya understands immediately, and starts helping him with the soup he’s started. Kaeya peels the potatoes, Albedo cuts them, same for the carrots, the turnips. Salt from Albedo, pepper from Kaeya. Albedo stirs the pot, Kaeya pours tomato purée. Albedo gets the spoons, Kaeya gets the bowls. (All of this, without a word. Like a dance, like a melody known by heart.)
Kaeya offers one of the bowls to a dozing Ebert. “Eat, and rest more,” he tells him. “We’ll bring you home tomorrow.”
“I can’t wait that long, I have to go back today!” Ebert suddenly jerks up. “My family is waiting for me.”
“We’ll bring you to them soon, once you have recovered enough strength.” Kaeya reassures him, in vain.
“You don’t understand, my beloved is alone, waiting for me. Wouldn’t you run to her no matter what, were you in my shoes? I can’t leave her alone. She’s sick you know, she’s alone with our kid. I wasn’t supposed to leave for so long.” He turns his pleading eyes to Albedo, seeing as Kaeya will not relent. “She needs me, you would do the same as me wouldn’t you?”
It’s at that moment that Albedo’s eyes meet Kaeya’s. (Would he, it seems to ask.)
After that burst of energy, Ebert rapidly falls asleep. Kaeya forces him to at least eat half of his bowl of soup before he lets him rest for good. And then it’s just him and Albedo around the fire. Kaeya knows how to read Albedo, just like Albedo knows how to read him. His restlessness doesn’t go unnoticed. Once they’re done staring at their respective empty bowls, he speaks.
“I know you’re sorry Albedo,” is all he says.
“Kaeya–”
“I know that. But it’s not enough for me.” He sounds defeated, like he’s tired of fighting. But Albedo doesn’t want to let go, he cannot.
“Can’t I be your friend, Kaeya? Can’t we be something?”
He lets out a short laugh at th at, a dry thing with no humour. “We were raising a kid together, Albedo. You can’t ask me to pretend to be your friend.”
The fire crackles, its red dance is reflected in Kaeya’s eye.
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.”
**
It was hand in hand that they made it out of Khaenri’ah, panting and afraid. They held on tight, as to not lose each other in this storm of dust and rubbles. The fog of dirt made it impossible to see farther than Kaeya’s face and it wasn’t all that bad. It was enough for Albedo back then, and it would be enough again today.
He’s always liked looking at Kaeya after all. Back then his hair was a bit longer than now, no eyepatch to hide his golden eye either. He was more quiet also, but less shy. More open to the world, more pensive. Robes and baggy pants, now replaced by his knight uniform. He’s changed, from back then, yet still remained fundamentally the same.
Hand in hand, they traversed the storm. Hand in hand, they found Mondstadt.
Only them, a hand and a hand.
And then Klee arrived. A lovely bundle in Alice’s arms. She has to leave, she told them. She cannot bring the child with her on her quest anymore. But they’ll take care of her, won’t they? They’ll protect her? Promise? They’ll never abandon her?
We promise, Kaeya said. Just like that, their family grew from two to three.
(But then, after what must have been a year or two, Alice came back. It was night. Everything dark and quiet, except for the sound of Klee and Kaeya sleeping. I have a lead, she said. I know how to find your Master.)
**
They bring Ebert back to Mondstatd the following morning. They’re lucky enough to catch one of the adventurers’ guild carts as it goes down to restock in the city. They sit in the back, the trip is mostly quiet. Ebert sleeps for the biggest part of it. Kaeya doesn’t speak for he has already said all that he wanted to say, Albedo doesn’t either, for he cannot find anything useful to add.
They arrive to a city all dressed in white. Snow has yet to fade, warmth has yet to return. It’s winter after all, and winter does last long.
They come back right on time to attend Wilma’s funeral.
Albedo is starting to understand, humans and time and cycles of life. The importance of three years, the meaning of one second, of one moment. Why Ebert rushes home as soon as the cart reaches Mondstadt’s bridge. Why Klee ran to them when she saw Kaeya and Albedo from afar.
This moment is precious. Each moment is precious. And each moment reaches an end.
Wilma was here and now she isn’t. Albedo didn’t even think to say goodbye. (Who is going to take care of her lab? How about her dream of eternal flowers? Does it amount to nothing at all now?)
People gather on a sunday morning in the living room of one of Wilma’s relatives. Scattered hushes float in the air. Condoleance exchanged and returned. There are less than a dozen people in the room. Wilma was an eccentric person, not everyone knew how to appreciate her. Yet Kaeya is there, an anchor amongst this sea of unknown faces.
He gives a sad smile when he notices Albedo.
“She was your friend, wasn’t she? Klee told me.”
Gently, suddenly, his hand snakes up to take hold of his. “I’m sorry, Albedo.”
Albedo responds in kind, squeezing his fingers in his like a lifeline. Because it’s always Kaeya. It’s always been, and it’ll always be him. In the storms of a dying Khaenri’ah, all the way to Mondstadt. Here, right now.
“Yes, she was my friend,” he says, realising just now the veracity of that statement. But he thinks he’s starting to understand, because surely there is something to understand there.
(Kaeya and his warm hand, a cold winter morning. People saying goodbye, handkerchiefs, flowers. Klee in a black dress. Albedo in his white coat because no one warned him it was inappropriate to wear for a funeral. It’s his first one, after all.)
No one told Albedo – maybe he should have figured it out himself – that time is such a precious and fragile thing. A year (three), a week, a second. Everything changes so fast. Autumn to winter to spring again. Flowers blooming and dying. People, doing the same.
Three years are enough for Kaeya to gather all his broken pieces and build himself a new life out of it. (A life without Albedo.)
(Would three more years be enough to forgive? Albedo is very good at waiting.)
Albedo thinks about that night, when he got out from under the bedsheets and escaped through the window. He thinks back to when they left Khaenri’ah, he thinks about when they got Klee.
He thinks, yet cannot find one time he told them he loved them. (He never thought it was something he had to do).
He tightens his grip on Kaeya’s hand.