Chapter Text
"Albedo, how hard do I have to slap a chicken to cook it?"
Kaeya watches the way Albedo's eyebrows raise at Klee's question. It's almost funny, seeing Mondstadt's beloved yet aloof Chief Alchemist look absolutely baffled at his ward's question. The three of them stand outside of Albedo's workshop, with the alchemist directly under the doorway. As if to make up for looking confused for half a second, Albedo leans against the doorway and crosses his arms cooly, redirecting his gaze from Klee to Kaeya.
"Context?" is all Albedo says, and Kaeya shrugs.
"Klee said she saw Amber and the traveler hunt birds the other day," he answers. "I believe she saw the Outrider use her Vision to shoot the birds down." Then he puts an affectionate hand atop Klee's head.
Kaeya is only supposed to drop her off with her guardian. The night is young, but little kids must go to bed early, especially after such a long day of bombing a bunch of slimes off the main road from Springvale to Mondstadt. Still, Klee doesn't show any signs of fatigue; the girl in question is looking at the two men expectantly as she rocks back and forth on her heels. She nods vigorously at Albedo with Kaeya's every word, as if confirming to him that Kaeya is, indeed, telling the truth.
"She asked if she can cook the birds by bombing them," Kaeya continues. "I said no, so here we are." And Klee nods at Albedo again.
"If I can't use my bombs, then maybe I can slap it," she reasons, raising a tiny fist and hitting it against her open palm with a determined look. Schlap. "I have a Pyro Vision, too! I know it'll work!"
It’s a silly idea that a silly little girl came up with, but Kaeya can respect Klee’s enthusiasm. Albedo doesn't say anything, and when the alchemist and Klee just stare at each other for a second too long, Kaeya realises it's up to him to not break Klee's heart this week. After all, being told no twice in a day would be crushing for a kid like her, so he gives Klee a pat on the head, prompting the girl to look up at him. Albedo, too, looks at him.
"Well," he starts, "maybe if you slap it really hard, you can?" He chuckles. "I can't say for sure, though, sweetie. Perhaps Albedo can help you figure it out?"
Albedo narrows his eyes at Kaeya as Klee whips her attention to him. He pushes himself off the doorframe and puts a hand under his chin, making a dramatic show of mulling over it.
But it's not like Kaeya expects Albedo to figure it out for real; he could just say some bullshit to humour Klee. You can't cook a chicken with a slap, Pyro Vision or no.
Right?
"...Maybe," Albedo eventually mutters under his breath, but both Kaeya and Klee hear him, nonetheless, and Kaeya blinks. Klee beams at Albedo with a you're the best! before throwing Kaeya's hand off her head and bouncing into Albedo's workshop. She disappears behind a row of bookshelves that separates the workshop proper from the receiving area of the room, with the two men watching her until she's out of sight, then Kaeya turns his attention to the alchemist.
"That's just to humour her, right?" Kaeya asks, and Albedo blinks at him.
"No," Albedo answers, and this time, it's Kaeya who raises his brows at him, baffled. "It's actually a unique point to consider. See, when a hand hits against a surface, the kinetic energy turns to thermal energy. In short, heat. Do it enough times, and there’s a possibility to generate enough heat to cook chicken."
What.
Albedo, once again, puts a hand under his chin, his eyes looking somewhere Kaeya can only hope to see. "Considering this, hmm, I wonder... how far can we push human limits?"
It really isn't that deep, Kaeya wants to say, but Klee pops out from behind the bookshelves to say good night to Kaeya, and he takes it as his cue to leave. As Kaeya leaves, he can feel Albedo staring at his back, perhaps even wearing a troubled expression on his face to rival Jean's whenever she can't find her plume to sign her documents, but whatever it is that's going through his mind, Kaeya doesn't want any part of it.
This is not any of his business, after all.
--
Albedo makes it Kaeya's business. At three in the morning.
The cavalry captain wakes up to rhythmic knocking on his front door. Knock knock, knock knock knock, knock knock—rinse and repeat for an entire minute straight when Kaeya decides to ignore it at first. The sounds echo throughout his house, quite literally, almost as if he's in a cave and someone's knocking on the entrance to piss him off. He gets sick of it, eventually, and Kaeya begrudgingly throws his blanket off him, grabs his eyepatch, and makes his way to the front door to open it.
Albedo stands outside his house still fully dressed, and Kaeya blearily blinks at him before squinting at the sky. It’s dark; there’s barely any hint of light in the sky save for the moon and the twinkling stars. Kaeya looks back at Albedo.
"It's come to my realisation that it's humanly impossible to cook a chicken with one slap," is the first thing Albedo tells him.
"I...," Kaeya starts. He blinks again, then raises a hand to rub the rest of his drowsiness from his eye altogether. He squints at Albedo again. A part of him thinks he should send the blond home for the night, but another part of him—the crazy one, yes—is curious about what Albedo has yet to say about slapping things and its impossibility to cook raw chicken, because who the hell wakes up someone in the middle of the night to say that?
Kaeya lets that crazy part win out, steps aside, and motions for Albedo to come in.
"Even with a Pyro Vision?" Kaeya finds himself asking as he closes the door. He looks at the clock hanging above his fireplace. It says 3:09. His eye flickers back to Albedo as the alchemist shakes his head.
"The question is whether or not you can cook a chicken with a slap," Albedo says, "a Pyro Vision may be used to boost the slap, but the average person isn't a Vision wielder."
"But this is in the context of Klee slapping it. She's the one who asked, after all," Kaeya somehow feels the need to argue back. It does a great job of making himself feel insane, arguing with Mondstadt's greatest alchemist about slapping chicken to perfection at 3 am. "So, if you take into consideration that it's Klee doing it, surely that changes the variables a bit."
Albedo doesn't seem to appreciate Kaeya's efforts, though. "The velocity of Klee's slap must be 3,725.5 miles per hour to cook a chicken in one slap," he flatly says. Kaeya clamps his mouth shut at that. "Perhaps even faster," the blond continues, "she's tiny and, therefore, has a tiny hand."
A beat of silence, then Kaeya slowly says, "that's going to obliterate her hand."
"And the chicken," Albedo agrees.
Another silence. Unadulterated, disappointing silence.
"...So," Kaeya slowly says again, "what brings you here, then?"
What Albedo says next is the one that completely seals Kaeya's fate, dragging him down into this rabbit hole, and he doesn’t even get to kick and scream. Albedo looks troubled when he replies, "I... don't want to tell Klee she has to break her hand slapping a chicken."
Gods, of course that's the problem. Everything suddenly makes sense. Kaeya is hit by a deep understanding and sympathy for Albedo's dilemma. Kaeya himself wouldn't want to tell Klee it's impossible, either, wouldn't want to disappoint the girl more than he already has this week.
Lying to her would encourage her to try it, and that's out of the picture. There must be some other way to figure this out. Perhaps a way to make it humanly possible, for one.
So Kaeya tells Albedo to make himself comfortable in the living room, and as the alchemist sits on the sofa, looking confused, Kaeya goes off to the kitchen and opens one of the cupboards. He grabs the jar of coffee beans he has stocked there, only to be opened in circumstances that require his full, undivided attention.
This is going to be a long night.
--
Kaeya hears Albedo speak more in the next few hours that they're discussing chicken slapping than he has throughout Albedo's entire stay in Mondstadt as the Knights of Favonius' Chief Alchemist.
Which surprises Kaeya more than it should have. It's ironic coming from the cavalry captain himself, but Albedo is mysterious, maybe even more so than Kaeya himself. No one knows anything about him, and making small talk is not the way to get to know him. Albedo seems to dislike wasting time to begin with, shutting down any attempts of conversation he thinks are unnecessary, and, unfortunately, wasting people's time with small talk is what Kaeya is good at when he wants something from them.
Before this, Kaeya's interactions with Albedo is limited to anything involving Klee and their weekly captain meetings, and he doesn't say much to begin with unless he's addressed. Now, though, Albedo hasn't stopped talking for the past hour or so. Kaeya tried to keep up at first, asking questions about every single word that came out of Albedo's pretty mouth—
Kaeya's mind reels over that, and he internally cringes at himself as Albedo continues to explain that the average slap on chicken generates about, well, less than one degree celsius.
"Sorry, you lost me," Kaeya says, perhaps for the tenth time that hour, and he delightfully watches the way Albedo doesn't even bother hiding his disappointment; Albedo wrinkles his nose, lips curving slightly into a pout before he sighs, and Kaeya tries not to smile at that. He’s amusing to watch, that’s for sure.
"Which part?" Albedo asks.
"Everything." And he beams at the way Albedo narrows his eyes at him. Albedo's eyes are a delightful shade of sea green, always looking as if they shine under the sun the same way the sea does. Even in the low light of the lantern sitting on top of the table in Kaeya's living room, Albedo's eyes still look as if they're outside, watching the sea when the sun is high above the sky.
"We can start all over if you want," Albedo offers, and Kaeya blinks and straightens in his side of their shared sofa.
"... No," Kaeya carefully says, and before Albedo can say anything to that, he immediately adds, "what I mean to say is, I think I get it, for the most part, anyway. It's the terms that fly over my head." He gives Albedo the most pitiful smile he can give, maybe to try and get Albedo to cut the explanations short. "I'm not quite as bright as you, you know."
Whatever effect Kaeya's hoping for, it clearly doesn't work on Albedo. He just looks unimpressed. "I suppose so," he says, "but if you're understanding the logic behind it even with the jargon, then you're clearly downplaying your own brilliance, Captain Kaeya."
Kaeya did not expect a compliment with that look on Albedo's face, so he blinks, smile slipping slightly. "That's... a compliment, right?"
A ghost of a smile plays on the other's lips—the slightest hint of amusement at Kaeya's question. "Well, I'm clearly not insulting you," Albedo replies.
Cheeky little man.
Still, Kaeya smirks lightly at that. "Well, thank you," he says, "how long until the conclusion, though?"
Albedo blinks, looks down at his sketchpad (apparently, his alchemy mumbo jumbo's all crammed in there? Kaeya always thought he likes to draw; he carries it everywhere), then looks up at Kaeya again. "A bit more."
Kaeya considers that, looking at Albedo for an absurdly long time. Albedo, to his credit, doesn't seem bothered by Kaeya's staring, simply tilting his head slightly to the side before sighing and looking down on his sketchpad, pen scratching against paper. To be frank, Kaeya truly has no idea what the hell Albedo is talking about; he would rather Albedo gets to the point, but it's clear to the knight that Albedo's put a lot of thought into the whole science behind how impossible it is to cook a chicken by slapping it, and they're trying to figure out how to make it work, anyway.
Besides, Kaeya likes the timbre of Albedo's voice.
Albedo’s always been a likeable man, but Kaeya has realised there’s much more to him than co-worker I kinda get along with.
So, Kaeya resigns himself to Albedo's mercy, if only to satisfy his own curiosity. "Go on, then," he says, and Albedo looks up at him. "You said the chicken needs to be at 205 degrees celsius to be considered cooked, right?"
Albedo doesn't exactly beam at him, but the small smile doesn't escape Kaeya's notice.
--
It's 6:13 am when Albedo says something that catches Kaeya's attention. The sun is slowly rising by the time Kaeya gets an epiphany to their problem; there's light chirping of birds outside, and sounds of human activity have started to pick up. When Albedo eventually says that it will take about 23,034 average slaps to cook raw chicken, Kaeya suddenly straightens in his seat, after another half hour of smushing his cheek against his sofa's backrest while Albedo babbled on.
"That's it," Kaeya says, and Albedo replying with what? with a confused look on his face should not be that nice and satisfying, but it is. "The answer to our problems," he clarifies.
Albedo just stares at him, and Kaeya shakes his head. "It's been there all along!" Kaeya tells him. "Waiting for you to take notice of it. The question you tackled was can we cook it with one slap? and clearly it's a no, but what if we don't have to do it in one slap?"
Finally, Kaeya watches the way Albedo latch onto what he is trying to say. Albedo blinks once, then sparkling sea green eyes widen at the realisation, and he puts a hand over his mouth. Cute.
But the expression falls as quickly as it appears. "Are you capable of slapping a chicken 23,034 times?"
Albedo didn’t have to shoot it down as quickly as he did, damn. "Well, no," Kaeya answers, "but I think it's a lot more plausible than slapping it at a velocity that would rival a dragon's." He crosses his arms, leaning against the sofa as he thinks.
How would one achieve 23,000 slaps on a chicken? Kaeya can imagine that one person doing it continuously for hours would be too much for them, too exhausting and perhaps disgusting. Maybe multiple people can have a go at slapping the chicken, dividing the work among them?
Meanwhile, Albedo looks down at his sketchpad again, eyes flitting to Kaeya now and then as he writes. It distracts Kaeya enough to stop thinking too hard about how to efficiently slap raw chicken.
"What are you writing?" he eventually asks.
Albedo pauses. He doesn't look up at Kaeya. "Thoughts and ideas I've had while we're conversing," he replies, though conversing doesn't feel like the right word here; he almost talked the entire time on his own. He returns to scribbling. "It's a good point, actually, what you just said. It's a better way to push human limits than what I've had in mind."
Then he pauses, as if realising something, then he looks at Kaeya. Albedo's eyes narrow slightly at him, though his gaze is far from the disappointed one he's given Kaeya several times throughout the night. Albedo's lips curl into a wry, knowing smile as he lifts his sketchpad and rests the top end of it against his chin.
"Would you be willing to be the subject of my research, then?" Albedo asks, his voice almost a purr.
The question and the manner Albedo decided to deliver it throws Kaeya so far off his game, completely taken off guard, that he widens his eye at the blond. He opens his mouth, closes it, and there’s a tiny, little man inside his head that suspiciously sounds like his brother that’s started mocking him because wow, a guy a head shorter than you is definitely shooting his shots at you right now.
What in the Seven Archons is happening.
There’s a knock on his front door, and Kaeya's head snaps to the front door. The knocks are light and airy before banging immediately follows, and he immediately recognises the knocking. He turns to Albedo, whose expression returns to disinterest as he looks down at his sketchpad once again, leaning back into his corner of the sofa.
Kaeya blinks, and he tries for a smile. "Not interested to know who it is?" he asks.
"No." Albedo turns his sketchpad to a blank page. "It's your business to attend to, not mine."
Kaeya’s mind is still reeling from what just happened literally five seconds ago, but he almost laughs at how quickly the alchemist loses interest. The whiplash in Albedo's demeanour is enough to make him abandon all prior thoughts about what just happened, and he decides to inform Albedo who exactly is banging his front door.
"It's Klee," Kaeya says as he stands up from the sofa, and as expected, Albedo pauses and looks up. At this point, the sun's rays filter through the curtains, and Kaeya extinguishes the lantern and slides the curtains aside, letting the warmth of the sun light up his humble home.
Albedo, on the other hand, has closed his sketchpad and put it on the sofa beside him. There's a troubled look on his face, and Kaeya realises that Albedo left his ward on her own last night to pester Kaeya instead. The fact they both forgot about Klee when she's the reason they stayed up the entire night talking non-stop about slapping raw chickens to begin with is pretty damn astounding. And terrible, actually. Don't leave kids alone, even if said kid is Klee. Especially if said kid is Klee.
Klee's already beaming when Kaeya opens the door. For a child her age, she's very capable of getting dressed on her own. Even from where Kaeya is standing, he can smell the strawberries and milk from the bunny soap she begged him to buy for her the week before. Her jacket is well pressed and buttoned up well, and her shoelaces are tied correctly. A part of Kaeya feels absurdly proud by how well Klee's done for herself.
However, despite all that, Klee's hair isn't tied, her blond locks cascading behind her back. She's holding two hair ties, and Kaeya thinks he knows why her hair is left undone.
"Good morning, Kaeya!" Klee happily greets, and she raises her hair ties towards him. "Um, I can't find Albedo...can you tie my hair for me before breakfast?"
To be asked by Klee to handle her hair is an honour Kaeya wants to accept, but before he can reply a hearty yes, Albedo steps into Klee's view from behind him and greets her. Needless to say, the girl is pleasantly surprised, throwing herself at Albedo for a hug, and the man responds by lifting her up in his arms as Klee wraps her arms around his neck.
“Were you here the entire night?!” Klee accuses, and Kaeya watches the way Albedo’s smile softens at her as he nods. Huh.
“We were discussing the problem you proposed yesterday, you see,” Albedo tells her, and Klee gasps. Kaeya can tell with the way she looks at him and Albedo—all wide eyes and barely contained smiles; not to mention the way she’s vibrating in the blond’s arms—that she’s very pleased with that. “We can discuss it later over breakfast, if you wish,” Albedo continues, “but let me tie your hair first.”
With his chance to play hairdresser snatched right under his nose, Kaeya sighs. He supposes he’s relegated to his usual role in this house—making breakfast.
Still, Klee is very happy that Albedo is here to have breakfast with them. They haven’t figured out how to break the news to Klee that what she wants to do is impossible, nor have they figured out a way to make it possible, but one problem at a time.
For now, Kaeya’s problem is to figure out what to make for the, as it turns out, eccentric alchemist in his house.