Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 20]

Kaeya Alberich, in your esteemed opinion, is little more than a glutton for punishment sometimes.

It’s not as though you particularly dislike his presence. He’s a fine customer, if you could call him one—he takes his time weaving through the shelves of the Thousand Lives bookshop, his gallantry with the elderly customers knows no bounds, and at least he has the sense to put the books back where they belong when he’s done examining them. He’s cordial enough, too, which you’re sure is just par for the course with any Knight of Favonius. Especially the Cavalry Captain.

(What cavalry? All these years in Mondstadt, and you’ve never once seen a horse. The best you’ve got in town are dogs, cats, and those pigeons Timmie is inexplicably fond of.)

It’s just that his cordiality with you is a bit… particular. Sure, he doesn’t cross any boundaries when he speaks with you, but he certainly doesn’t make it easy to forget any interaction with him—right down to the knowing smiles he leaves you with before he turns on his heel. Right down to the first words he spoke to you before he requested, in his words, “the honor of knowing your name.”

“Well, now. I had no idea Lisa had hired a courier.”

Honestly. The nerve of him to call you something like that. It wasn’t your fault someone had accidentally left one of the library books in your reading area. You just had the decency to return it to its rightful home. Of course, that came with requesting an audience in the Knights’ Headquarters, and requesting an audience required an abundance of free time and patience. And apparently, Kaeya Alberich had a way of finding lonely people who had both of those in spades.

Apparently, he also had a way of happening upon where those lonely people worked. And complimenting them at every turn. And, for some mind-boggling reason, returning despite being shot down, and despite already having an abundance of the facilities you offer within the Headquarters itself.

Like you said. He’s a glutton for punishment. He has to be.

Today, for reasons that continue to be beyond you, is no different. He patrols throughout Mondstadt—just so happening to pass by the storefront every so often and just so happening to peek inside and just so happening to catch your eye every. single. time—and close to closing time he lets himself in, smiling faintly at the tinkle of the bell above the door and greeting you with a smile and a hand to his heart. As if that alone is supposed to sway you. But he’s still a customer, and you’re still the proprietor, so your courtesy is more than expected. You eyeball your inventory while he weaves through the shelves, and while you don’t proactively ask if he’s looking for anything in particular—because over time you’ve come to learn that he’s hardly ever looking for anything in particular—you do try to steal a glance every so often.

Because he’s a customer. And even if he doesn’t buy anything, you’ve never really believed in the concept of loitering anyway. If anyone’s looking for a place to post up and read for a while, your door is open.

(Maybe that’s why your finances take a dip every so often, but… ah, well.)

He’s been leafing through a novel—a classic epistolary one by the looks of it, but you have to squint at the title to get a better look—and after another moment or two he snaps the books shut and shelves it. It isn’t long after before he sidles up to your counter and congratulates you on “another hard day’s work,” even if by all accounts it hardly holds a candle to what he must have to put up with.

You sigh, blowing a lock of hair out of your face—maybe you shouldn’t use the ribbon from an old bookmark to tie your hair up, but it works most of the time, and it’s sentimental to boot—and you try to keep clipped but amiable. “Couldn’t find what you were looking for today, either, Sir Kaeya?”

Mischief sparks in his eye, and he leans forward, still mindful enough to give you your space but certainly teetering on the boundaries of it. It’s his way of doing things, you’re sure, to exude respect and somehow still make you deeply aware of his presence and intentions. “Must you be so formal with me?” he asks. “I’ve been stopping by for weeks now, haven’t I? Months, even?”

“Yes,” you deadpan. “I’m aware.”

He cocks his brow as if to say you’re welcome, though you’re not exactly sure what you ought to be thanking him for. It could be his company, but you wouldn’t be caught dead admitting to that—even if it is comforting, vindicating, to watch him pore over pages the way you’ve done on late nights. “You can drop the title,” he says. “I think we’ve moved past that point.”

“Maybe I’ll consider it if you put your mora where your mouth is.”

Kaeya chuckles and curls his hand under his chin, which you’re sure based on the frequency he does so around you is his way of saying, Touché. “You know, you never did tell me where the name of this place came from.”

“You never asked.”

He’s still smiling. Knowing. If you could wipe it off his face somehow, you would. “I’m asking now.”

You shrug with one shoulder, turning your attention to one of your regulars and their haul for the day. (You’re pretty sure they either devour books at breakneck speed, or they’ve developed a habit of collecting books without necessarily reading them all in between purchases, but you know how it goes.) “It’s from a novel,” you tell him once you bid the regular good night and start making the rounds to close up. “‘A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.’”

Remarkably—or perhaps unremarkably by this point—Kaeya follows a few paces behind, as if he feels the need to keep watch. Or keep close. “Pretty honest man, living only one life. Unusual, if you ask me.”

“Yes, well.” You toss a glance behind you. “Not all of us go around keeping secrets.”

To your chagrin, you linger long enough to catch the incline of Kaeya’s head, the glint in his eye that says he at once doubts you and knows more than he should. He hums, soft but curt, and every footfall behind you is purposeful yet deafening. “You run an awfully tight shop around here,” he comments to change the subject.

“I think the phrase is ‘to run a tight ship.’”

“Do you see any oceans around here?”

A grin tugs at the corner of your mouth; half of you is thankful he can’t see it. “In some of these pages, I do.”

Kaeya laughs again. You think he has half a mind to call you clever; you hate that you might not mind it. “And which life is that?”

You feign consideration, tapping your chin. “Five hundred seventy-six.”

“Have you made it to a thousand already?”

“Would you be surprised?”

“Not surprised.” Out of the corner of your eye, Kaeya runs reverent fingers along the shelves, over fresh spines. “Impressed.”

Flatterer. He must have a line like this for everyone. There’s a reason half the town thinks he’s so personable, and the other half thinks he’d be the perfect grandson, and it’s not just because he’s one of the Knights’ Captains. (Again—of what?) You’re not sure if they’re foolish for letting him be the keeper of their life stories, but you won’t lend him yours so easily.

To his credit, he has the courtesy to wait by the door while you finish up. He does this sometimes, waits for you to lock up as though it’s part of his duty. It certainly isn’t; no other captain has ever stopped by—not that you know any other captains by name except Lady Eula—and while other Knights and Miss Lisa have occasionally visited on an errand or for some respite from the bustle outside, none of them have visited quite so… consistently.

“You work awfully hard, you know,” he says after you’ve counted the till and put on the final touches for tomorrow. “You ought to take a break every now and again.” He doesn’t bother to look at you, instead opting to study his nails; you’d consider it a blessing if not for that mischievous twitch in his brow. “I know a tavern nearby.”

Your expression sours—of course that’s what he wants—and you give your satchel a pointed tug from its hook. If he’s really been paying attention during his visits, he’d know you don’t care for alcohol, have never even touched the stuff. “What are you getting at, Sir Kaeya?” you ask with a sigh. If it’s truth he wants, he only has to ask. Not that you’ll tell him most things, but at least you can tell him if something is classified.

You get the feeling hearing that would amuse him. Make him come back.

You haven’t quite decided if that’s a good thing. But then, you haven’t quite decided if it’s a bad thing, either.

The corner of his mouth quirks, like he wants to challenge the formal title again but judges that it’s better not to. “Can’t a customer extend his gratitude?” he says; it sounds a lot more like, Can’t a man indicate his interest?

“Of course,” you say to both, slipping out the door, completely unsurprised by how he follows a few paces back. “But someone of your status ought to consider his position, shouldn’t he? What do you think the townspeople might say if they saw a Knights’ Captain in the dark corner of a tavern, talking hushed with the bookkeeper? What do you think the other knights might say?”

“Well,” Kaeya shoots back, thoughtfulness and honey holding equal footing in his tone. “I imagine they’d say, ‘Yes, sir.’ You know. As they’re meant to?”

You roll your eyes. If he were a friend, you might have playfully pushed him. But he’s not a friend, he’s… actually, you’re not sure what he is. He’s just… Kaeya.

No. Sir Kaeya.

The distance is necessary.

He’s laughing to himself, closed mouth, through the nose, as the two of you pause outside of Angel’s Share. Of course he “knows a tavern”—it’s one of only two in Mondstadt, and the one you’ve seen him frequent the most. (Not that you’ve been watching him. Certainly not.) “That bookish side of you is showing again,” he says. “Dark corners, hushed tones… quite the imagination you’ve got there.” His head tips to the side. “Unless, of course… it’s something you’ve considered on more than one occasion?”

You squint. He doesn’t need to know that. “Shouldn’t you be heading to your post?”

Kaeya’s eye flickers toward the heavy wooden door, then back to you. It shouldn’t keep you so rooted to the spot. It shouldn’t, but it does. “Shouldn’t you be living your thousand first life?”

To its credit, Angel’s Share isn’t rife with noise or the stench of alcohol. You have to hand it to Charles and Master Diluc (though he scowls whenever you call him that despite your insistence): most evenings things run pretty smoothly, and with its connections to the Dawn Winery, the mora flows in like water here. Or wine. Whichever.

You’ve been here a few times, partly because it happens to be so close to the bookshop, partly because the monotony of the cycle between home and work and errands gets to be a bit much on occasion. You haven’t done much—merely ordered something without alcohol, taken refuge in the corner, sunk into the live music that some bard or even Miss Barbara herself has in store. But it’s better than the deafening silence that always awaits you when you turn the key. At least there’s living around you this way.

You’ve never come accompanied, and for all his questions and the quality time he maintains during his patrols and other duties, Kaeya doesn’t know much about what you do when the bookstore is closed. Kaeya lets you in first and holds his place beside you, and from one of the tables, Charles raises a brow at you. You shrug and try to pass it off like it was pure coincidence. As far as you or he or anyone else is concerned, you two just happened to make it to the door at the same time, and he was merely being polite.

But, apparently, Kaeya is the master of your inconveniences this evening.

Maybe you ought to start frequenting Cat’s Tail instead. You may not be familiar with the menu, but nobody knows you there. It’s a dream sometimes, to never have to be perceived.

You’re about to duck into the first corner you can find—at least attempt to unwind and sink into some sort of daydream to the tune of whatever’s on Six-Fingered José’s setlist—but all it takes is Kaeya clearing his throat to remind you of his presence. He nods toward the bar, and with a sigh, you slide onto the high stool next to him. Part of you wants to tell him this isn’t your thousand first life, just to spite him, but you’re not quite used to being so prominently among the other customers, and there’s a sparkle in his eye that shuts you up besides.

(Regrettably, you remind yourself.)

Diluc is working the bar tonight, and he fixes you with an odd look in greeting; it seems he’s as unsettled by this as you are. The two of you don’t talk very much—actually, Diluc doesn’t talk much in general—but you’ve always gotten the sense that there lived a quiet understanding between you, and perhaps even a mutual feeling of having had enough with… well, most things. Sometimes you think you might get along well with him, but he makes more of a point to distance himself beyond transactions, and you don’t see the point in giving chase to someone who could well outrun you.

You offer him your usual cordial smile and a nod, leftovers from your shift. He returns the latter of these, at least; then his gaze flickers over to Kaeya, and a cloud passes over his face. It’s probably in your best interest not to ask.

Not that you would ask.

Diluc looks between the two of you expectantly, likely wondering what the two of you could possibly have to do with each other—a question you honestly still ask yourself from time to time. “What will it be?” he asks in the curt customer service voice you know too well.

Kaeya, to no one’s surprise, orders a single glass of Death After Noon. Drinks aren’t meant to be downed and ordered so mechanically, as though that means anything to you. They ought to be savored in conversation, laughed over between sips while they take their time to intoxicate, like curls of smoke or frost gathering on a windowpane.

(Oh, brother.)

“And for you?” Diluc asks, strangely refreshing among the buzz of the tavern.

You spare one regrettable glance next to you, then rest your chin in your hand. “Just grape juice for me.”

Diluc nods again—“Good choice”—and you swear his eyes sparkle. It almost makes you swell with pride.

Kaeya, for his own part, sighs in mild disgust and says something about how “impatient” it is, but you’ll take what little victories you can get.

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 40]

Sour is an interesting look on Kaeya, because he doesn’t particularly show it. You’ve seen it on customers countless times before, even on shopkeeps when their composure slips for a split second. A furrowed brow, a scowl, the deepest sigh of all. A strain in the voice, even, making itself known at the most inconvenient of times.

For him, it is none of these things. You catch, instead, a smile that attempts to charm yet still fades at the edges. A spark of what might be mischief leaving the eyes as soon as his meet yours. He’s not displeased to see you—for all his dealings in half-truths, you’re sure he’d make that much clear—but the little signs tell you that he’s become the victim to someone’s upper hand.

Your upper hand.

Not that it’s the first time this has happened. By now you sort of pride yourself on leaving Kaeya speechless with comebacks you barely have to think about—on being, as far as you’ve witnessed, the only person to do so consistently, without so much as a stammer. And by now you’re pretty sure it’s exactly why he keeps coming back.

“Just browsing again, Sir Kaeya?” you say by way of greeting, barely gracing him with a glance. There’s something airy in your tone, half-playful in how it questions what could possibly be the matter. “I hope these books aren’t distracting you from your duties too much. I imagine Master Jean would have a few choice words about that.”

You must have stolen all the spark from him. Maybe you’ll give it back sometime. Maybe.

When you look his way for longer than that greeting moment, you catch the traces of the sour in his expression again. Try not to revel in it, and fail. You suppose that maybe he likes the failing, in secret. That in some way, you come into an element you’ve rarely allowed yourself, and in some way, he is the only one who has the privilege of seeing it.

He finds himself among the fiction, tracing his Knuckles over the spines of novels as though they are the creeks and dips in spines of past lovers. “At Angel’s Share,” he says, in the sort of tone that gives away that he’s been sitting on the topic far longer than feigned nonchalance might have you believe. “You ordered my least favorite.”

“Yes, you made that obvious enough.” Even poring over accounts and receipt records, you find the space to laugh to yourself. “Going on and on about how it was… what was the word you used again? ’Unromantic?’” The corner of your eyebrow quirks; you’re sure he doesn’t need to catch it when your tone is derisive enough. “Funny how people can have different tastes.”

He isn’t smiling when you look his way again, but his eye is. You’ve only ever seen the one—he keeps that patch over the other all the time, and he’s devilishly good at skirting around any questions about it—but one is all he needs to get his point across. He raises a brow to match yours, and even as he crosses his arms his slim form seems to fill the whole aisle. “You’ve been paying attention to me.”

You fix him with a stone stare, letting out just enough incredulity for him to go looking for. “Do you leave me any choice, with how often you visit?”

“You haven’t said I’m wrong.”

Perhaps he’ll take that as a little victory, too. “Your point, Sir Kaeya?”

“Ah, my point,” he echoes, doing absolutely nothing to mask the glee in his voice, the control he’s wrenched back. “It just occurred to me, you know. That I ought to pay a little more attention to you, too.”

“Sometimes I think that’s all you do when you darken my doorway.”

He could say something about gracing you with his presence, you’re certain, but apparently he elects not to. “Are you complaining?”

“I’m sure half of Mondstadt is by now.” You roll your eyes. “Word can get around fast about the Cavalry Captain shirking his duties, tarnishing the reputation of the Knights of Favonius…” You’ve heard Diluc scorn them before, but you suppose it’s better not to mention him. “Not to mention your myriad admirers. What do you think they’d do to my business if they saw we were up to something?”

Kaeya inclines his head, looks you up and down. You’ve slipped. “Are we up to something?”

You squint—a warning—and return to your work. He might take that as a victory, too, but he should know this better than anyone else. You’re not up to something. You had better not be up to something. You have too much self-preservation to busy yourself with—to get involved with—someone like him. Someone so integral to the city’s well-being, so charmingly popular.

It’s for everyone’s good to keep him at bay. It doesn’t hurt.

You steal another glance.

It had better not hurt.

Slow, heavy footfalls make their way around the shelves, grow louder, come to a halt in front of your post. “You know,” Kaeya says, drawing you from your accounts. “I’ve been meaning to buy a book today.”

You swear your eyes are sparkling, and sure, there’s a smile threatening to spread, but who are you to stop it this time? “Now you’re talking.”

He smiles back, warm and genuine, no mischief or coquetry to be found. Like he’s known all this time how to turn your lock, and he’s been flipping and twirling the key in his fingers, just the way he does with his coins when he gets bored on patrol. You really shouldn’t be surprised. “You wouldn’t happen to have any recommendations, would you?”

Now, this could get interesting.

You round the till, beckoning him along with two fingers, and there’s a sort of power you delight in as he trails after you. It’s only back to the fiction section, just where he was before, but the way he puts his trust in your hands, defers to your judgment, isn’t entirely lost on you. It’s a feeling you may call on later, but not now. Not where he can see it.

You don’t need to run your fingers over the books the way he does. Even if you have studied them so closely you could probably name them from texture alone, you know them better by the patterns on their spines, by the gold leaf names of the people who brought them to life. And for the book you have in mind, you need little more than a glimpse of gold stars connecting over charcoal black. Nimbly, and with just one finger, you coax a thick novel from its place wedged between two others, and lay it sacred in his hands.

If it’s a recommendation he wants, it’s a recommendation he’ll get.

“This one,” you tell him with a pointed look, “is my favorite.”

His eye sparks, and a grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “All the more reason for me to read it,” he says. “Tell me about it.”

“And ruin it for you? It’s a life, Sir Kaeya. What if it were yours? Would you want to know what’s going to happen in your future?”

“That depends,” Kaeya says. “Are you in it?”

The comment hardly amuses you, and the twitch in his brow tells you he knows it. Was betting on it. Grape juice, all over again. “I will end you where you stand.”

“Please,” he insists, and presses a few coins into your palm. “It would be my esteemed honor.”

You shoo Kaeya out of the shop and he lets you, still playful, cracking the book open and skimming the title page with next to no sense of urgency. He casts one last look at you through the storefront glass, and there’s that genuine smile again, just before he takes off in his usual casual stride. His nose is already between the pages. Like he can’t wait to read it.

Like, perhaps, he can’t wait to read you.

(No, no, that’s not it. That can’t be it.)

You tell yourself so, over and over, all through inventory and counting and closing and tying and retying your hair with that blasted ribbon. There is nothing for him to read except the words. Nothing for him to cling to except the arc of the story. Nothing for him to study except the author’s craft.

Nothing, nothing, nothing.

He must see it, too. Or he will. One day. You can count on that.

What you don’t count on is the leather portfolio left in the reading area, leaning against the armrest of one of the couches waiting to be found. Another abandonment. An errand. Or, knowing Kaeya’s schemes, a trap. You can already hear him teasing with that stupid nickname about how you care about him after all, too lost in his own triumph to let you insist that it’s little more than common decency. Because of course you’d be decent to him. You’d—

You’d…

With a sigh, more exhausted than annoyed, you take up the portfolio and bring it down to the till, peeking inside for a name, a sign of who it might belong to. But where you thought you might find the loops of Kaeya’s penmanship, there are instead sheets of textured paper, splashed with blushes of color. Curious, and hoping it isn’t too intrusive, you coax one of the sheets out, careful not to tear it.

It is not writing.

It is a painting. Intimate. Detailed. As breathtaking as the mountain it depicts.

Gorgeous.

You’re so caught up in the composition and the search for a signature to really notice the ring of the bell above the shop door. It makes itself known on the closing, loud and harsh, and this time you’re sure of how exasperated you sound as you set the painting down, because there’s only ever one person who visits just before the shop closes.

“Sir Kaeya,” you start to say. “How many times must I tell you— “

But it isn’t Kaeya standing in the doorway; in fact, his height and his smirk are nowhere to be found.

Instead, it is someone else. A man, you think—you know, as he steps in from the evening. Flaxen hair, half-braided back. Ocean eyes, now blue, now green, now blue again. A face near unreadable, with a hint of an emotion that creeps in at the edges yet balances so precariously on the tip of your tongue that you cannot name it. It could be uncertainty; it could be anything but.

“My apologies,” he says, careful and even; there is nothing sweet in his tone, necessarily, but the cadence of his voice endears you to him. If he said more, you wouldn’t complain. And he does say more, and you don’t complain. “I believe I may have left something here…?”

His gaze drifts from you to the painting, and your stomach drops.

His name is Albedo, and his hands and his mind are always busy with something, and apparently both his art skills and his reputation in Mondstadt precede him. And after that evening, you pray to Barbatos that his first impression of you was half as good as your second impression of him.

It must have been, because he returns the next morning on two pretenses: that he didn’t properly thank you for keeping his portfolio safe, and that he has the feeling he’ll need another sketchbook soon.

“I was just looking for a signature,” you try to explain one last time, stumbling over your words in the process. You could attribute it to the early morning, or your residual guilt, or the fact that he watches you so intensely that it seems he could pinpoint every little thing that makes you tick.

But in spite of his store, he seems unaffected by your stammering—seems unaffected by most everything—and he gets as lost in your sketchbooks and paper stocks as you did in his painting. So perhaps it’s no longer worth pushing the issue.

You total his purchases after a while, remind yourself this is the second time you’ve done so, try to recall his first visit. Try to recall whether you’ve ever seen him in the city before. Timaeus seemed all too thrilled about his appearance when you passed by the alchemy stand last night, and he did mention that Albedo’s visits to the city were few and far between, if they ever happened at all. That it was noteworthy when such a genius as the Chief Alchemist and Captain of the Knights of Favonius’s Investigation Team showed up in town.

(Well. Now you know three of them by name.)

But this time, you think little of reputations and captains, because to you he has only ever been a customer, a creator, a kindred spirit. And as you exchange Albedo’s purchases for a pouch full of coins, you manage to say, “My grandfather is a painter, too.”

The way his eyes spark in response, in connection, almost makes you forget that Kaeya does not visit you that day.

Or for the next several days.

Almost.

Maybe it’s some strange truth that absence does make the heart grow fonder. Either way, you certainly notice a pronounced emptiness in the spaces of the shop as the mornings drag on, as the evenings come to their quiet close. No darkened doorways. No sickly sweet comments. No glint in the eye that makes you question your comebacks, stay on your toes. No delicate fingers surveying spines or parting pages. It’s a touch colder without him. Or warmer.

Perhaps your recommendation did exactly what you thought it might do: come off so bold, so ornate in its language and so dense with what some might call “romantic drivel,” that it scared him off. What you haven’t quite figured out is if that was your intention in the first place. If you wanted to push him away altogether, or simply test him to see if he’d come back.

The pit in your stomach is barely there at first, but it is there, and it grows with the hairs, and it answers the question of whether you want him to come back at all.

(You don’t need the pit. You don’t need the spaces in the shop. You already know.)

Kaeya does not come to the Thousand Lives in days, but Albedo does. Once he stops in to peruse more of your paper stock, weighing each in his hands as though he can assess its worth from touch alone. Another time he finds himself caught in the glossy pages of a parlor book balanced precariously in his lap, studying the brushstrokes of what looks like Cider Lake.

“Each of us has our own way of capturing the world,” he explains when you catch him surveying the finer details of the painting—the pigeons gathered on the cobblestone bridge, the clusters of dandelions that sway in an invisible breeze. “That which we value more highly captures more of our attention and manifests in what we do… and for artists, what we create. There’s worth in examining what may at first seem insignificant.”

He has a point. You’ve looked at the painting a hundred times over, and you love the parlor book so much you have a copy that is never to leave the shop, and yet you’ve never seen what he sees. Never dug into that deeper thought. “You’re fascinated by fascination,” you murmurs and in days you will know, in that moment, you were looking too long. That you looked at him with the yearning of a friend.

Albedo’s gaze flickers over to you, alive, knowing, connecting again. “I suppose you could say that,” he says, and though his tone is even there is the passion of understanding tracing the edges of his voice. As though, for once, someone has made heads and tails of him.

He purchases the parlor book for reference’s sake, and you offer it on the house, and he insists on the pouch of mora he slides across the counter. If not for the business, he says, then for your service. He almost leaves you to parse out what that service is before you catch him with a question.

“What else fascinates you, Albedo?”

(In days, you will also remember that you never distanced him with a title.)

At first he doesn’t speak, merely watches you from his place by the door like you should already know the answer. Eventually, he breathes out a sentence.

“Everything, for a time. And then nothing at all.”

It is as the door closes behind him, the bell delicately wishing him good night, that you fish your notepad out of your satchel and scribble his words in the corner of the inside cover. Defiant. Refusing to be forgotten. Eternally fascinating.

You learn more about Albedo than you intend to during those visits, and when your paths cross in the streets of the city, and most of it lives in what he leaves unspoken. His curiosity is near-insatiable, and he finds himself particularly caught up in the stars. He prides himself, somewhat, on his patience, if his experiments and the child he occasionally looks after are any indication. He is so absorbed in his work that from time to time he forgets to eat—and, when you mention that that worries you, he begins to follow up his greetings with a brief report of his last meal. He holds and touches everything with the utmost delicacy, as though they are tools of a precise trade, tainted if handled too roughly. As though he might destroy them. As though he is capable of destruction instead of creation.

(Well. You suppose all artists and all scientists are. Must be. And what is art if not an exact science? What is science if not an art?)

He says he stays near Dragonspine, makes camp in the very depths of the mountain, and when he tells you stories of it, it feels like he’s taken you there himself. Chilled you to the bone with its weather, caught the snowflakes on his clothes and showed you the patterns of each one. He tells you, in his tone, that he usually prefers the company of pipettes over people, that visiting Mondstadt is a rarity best sampled instead of indulged, and perhaps that is for the best.

Here is what you learn most keenly about Albedo, in so little time together. It’s that he talks the way he creates: searching for something grander than himself yet abysmally unaware of the beauty he leaves in his wake. maybe that is for the best, too; it’s the lack of intention that makes him more whimsical, worth listening to, worth observing.

He doesn’t ask you much about yourself, but he hints at questions about your grandfather and his craft. And while you admire how he respects your privacy, it is easy for you to share these small pieces of your life with him, cradled in careful metaphorical hands. You tell him, as he studies the countryside landscape behind the till, that your grandfather used to work in textiles, that you grew up in private galleries of his own making. He never once sold a painting; he did it simply for the love of it. To capture the world around him, and the one in his memories. You tried to copy him once, as a teenager, but it never came out quite right. You probably didn’t have the technical skills or the imagination for it, you admit with a sheepish laugh, so you gave up on drawing and painting years ago.

Albedo looks at you with something lost, and yet like he knows something about you that you should already know about yourself. “You still have now what you had then.”

You tilt your head. “What’s that?”

Amusement sparks green at the edges of his gaze. “Passion,” he says, matter-of-fact with connection creeping in, and he leaves the rest unspoken yet again.

To create. To feel something. To share it with someone and ask, Do you feel this, too?

“You... “You clear your throat. “See that?”

“Nuances,” he says, weighing the words. “Traces. It’s the sort of thing that is difficult to hide when you have so much of it.” He doesn’t fumble—he never does—but there’s an uncharacteristic haste in how he reaches for his sketchbook, fishes charcoal from his pocket. “Would you mind? If I captured it?”

You could say a million things in the moment. Ask him about the nuances, ask him what else he sees, tell him about your other attempts at creation, allow him—insist that he take down the parts of you you’re barely aware of. You could even reach up to undo the ribbon in your hair, because perhaps passion is best captured at its most natural. But the front door flies open, the bell ringing all too harshly, before you can open your mouth. And there is Kaeya, gripping the knob for dear life, looking like he’s barely slept.

There are nuances in him, too. Scandal. Shock. Guilt, perhaps. It’s the first time you’ve ever seen him so... off-kilter. You’d delight in it, probably, if your stomach weren’t turning so much.

(Why? It’s hardly the first time he’s seen you in the company of another man.)

Kaeya’s gaze flits between you and Albedo, perhaps sussing out your interaction, or the dress of your expression. Eventually he composes himself, smooths out the wrinkles in his uniform and clears his throat behind his fist. “Afternoon,” he says; greeting you both by name and then turning his attention to you. “Might I speak with you alone, if you don’t mind?”

In the time that you weigh your options between asking him why he could possibly need to speak to you alone and snapping that he has some nerve demanding your time after disappearing without reason or notice, Albedo gives your answer for you. With a hand to his heart, he nods, conceding, and he shares a look with you that requests your company, your likeness, some other time. The interruption probably sucked all the passion dry, anyway.

You wave after him with a friendly smile, and when the shop door closes behind him, you fix Kaeya with a raised brow and a stoic expression. “I see the prodigal captain has finally returned.”

You half-expect him to shoot back with some dolled-up comment about how he could never stay away from you for too long. Instead, he strides up to the counter, slow, almost predatory, and your weight shifts to the balls of your feet as you brace yourself for whatever comes next.

Kaeya’s gaze never leaves yours, dares you to keep staring back. There’s a hint of a knowing smile in his eye, piercing your heart and chilling you under your skin—and sure, it may be pleasant, but you’re probably better off denying it if he asks.

Just barely in your periphery, Kaeya places a book on the counter, sliding it forward until the pages bump against your fingertips. His eye darts down, then up again, allowing you to do the same; it takes little more than a few seconds for you to recognize the cover. To notice the bookmark wedged halfway through the pages.

“You know,” he hums, bending to your height, well aware of his own victory. “You never did tell me this book contained a scene like that.”

With Kaeya, you’ve learned how to stand your ground. Your eyes narrow, you mimic the smile, and you nudge the book back. “You never asked.”

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 50]

Kaeya finishes the book days later. He doesn’t let you live down that scene when he catches your attention in the streets, and you suppose, for all the time you’ll ever know each other, that he never will.

The next time he shows up to the Thousand Lives, it is closing time again, and the book is tucked under his arm, visibly well-loved. He posts up in the leather armchair by the window, one leg lazily crossed over the other, the book settled comfortably in his lap; when you finally ask him why his visits have been so few and far between lately, he grins and says, “Why? Did you miss me?”

You scoff. “In your dreams.”

His smile widens. “Better there than nowhere.”

You’re not quite sure you missed this—the gotcha moments, the smirk you can feel drilling into your back, the smile tugging insistent and spiteful at the corner of your mouth. But maybe you did. Maybe you did.

“You should know why I haven’t been around,” he says with an airy wave of his hand, a delicate brush of his fingers along the embossed letters. “You didn’t want to ruin it for me.”

“You can’t possibly have read it just to talk to me about it.”

“Can’t I have?” he asks with all his usual daring. “Perhaps it was one of a handful of reasons.”

“Let me guess.” You fold your arms. “All of them to do with me.”

“Such conceit,” he says with a chuckle, though he doesn’t deny it. Instead, he sits back, the leather creaking under his weight. “Tell me about this book. Tell me about this life.”

His words give you pause, but only for a moment, and certainly not where he can see it. “You read it, didn’t you?”

“And thoroughly enjoyed it, cover to cover.” You don’t have to look at him to know his eyes are following you as you go through the motions of closing up shop. He’d probably offer to help; you’d probably turn him down. “But I’m sure the life I lived and the life you lived are vastly different. So, tell me about yours.”

“Weren’t you the one going on about how you ought to pay more attention to me?” He didn’t need to; you could fill two coin purses with his attention, you’re certain. “Shouldn’t you be telling me what you learned about my life?”

You can practically hear the way Kaeya rests his chin in his hand. “You want to be remembered,” he says. “You want to be loved. You want the comfort, the foundation of a partner, and in the City of Freedom itself, freedom is still exactly what you crave. You’re intrigued by history and horror, you’re tempted by the supernatural and some great, wide somewhere, and…” He laughs under his breath. “You’re far more of a sucker for romance than you’d have your customers believe.”

When you turn on your heel to glare at him, he doesn’t even flinch. His leg bounces lazily, and his brow twitches, and there is that idle, piercing, knowing smile, flashing in his eye and pulling up the corner of his mouth.

“Did I get it?” he asks, and he sounds so damn self-assured that you’re already plotting how to wipe that look off his face. This time, you are sour, and you feel it showing. But as sure as you are that he’d like to revel in your mood, he pays it no mind. He only sits back again, ever the picture of learned elegance. “Now,” he says. “Why don’t you tell me why you like it so much. I’d prefer hearing it from the source.”

As much as Kaeya prides himself on knowing more about people than he lets on, you pride yourself on your ability to multitask. It’s par for the course with running a business, after all. You collect books strewn on tables and misplaced in shelves, and you recall the mastery of the novel’s structure and language. You consult your accounts and your daily earnings, and you dig too deep into the characters all over again, get yourself tangled in dialogue and thoughts and foreshadowing. You fall into a trance of your own design, and you tell him about the vaguest sense of adventure, of prayers, of having too much time and never enough, of wanting. Of wanting.

You speak too much.

When you come back to your senses, back to the shop, Kaeya is still staring at you. But where there was mischief, now there is awe. Where there was an abundance of confidence, now admiration takes up space. He looks between you and the book in your hands, gets to his feet, takes those careful strides toward you all over again. “You know,” he says, “had you asked me before, what my favorite parts of this book were, I might have said some of the same things you did. But now…”

Effortlessly, he coaxes the book out of your grip, cages you in as he slots it onto the shelf above your head. “Now,” he murmurs, not even looking at you, “my favorite thing is, without a doubt, watching you talk about it.”

He doesn’t need to flaunt his height like this, doesn’t need to try and charm you like this, but you aren’t exactly pushing him away. You ought to give him a piece of your mind, you know better than to be swayed by sweet, empty words, and yet you come up speechless. And you stare. And you feel none of the sour, even when he smiles. Especially when he smiles.

“So,” he says, returning to his book and weighing it in a careful hand. “Albedo, huh? I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. He’s the type everybody likes.” He tosses you a glance over his shoulder. “Are you one of his myriad admirers, too?”

There’s no way that’s jealousy you detect in his tone, in the flash of his eye. Kaeya Alberich never gets jealous. Sassy, perhaps. certainly never lacking for wit. You’d even go so far as to say he must be a little ruthless in some of his dealings. But jealous?

It takes you an extra moment to gather yourself, to shake his presence where it lingers under your skin. Maybe the pause makes him sweat. Maybe you like it. “Why?” you ask, crossing your arms. “Are you?”

Kaeya turns dark-cheeked instead of green-eyed, and goes quiet.

He is back the next day. And the day after that. He returns until time seems at once to blur together and to be marked only by his presence. The shop isn’t quite open unless you’ve caught him slipping out of the Knights’ Headquarters on your way to the town square; you break for a meal once you’ve caught him on his midday patrol—or, rather, once he’s caught you, and winked through the window; and the evenings are never truly evenings until he slides through the doorway and watches you close up with a careful eye.

(You’d call it admiring, again, if you weren’t so sure he gave that look to everyone.)

Perhaps it is strange that you count your life away in shifts when there ought to be so much more to it. Perhaps it is even stranger that you let someone else keep your time for you. But isn’t that the nature of running a business, even of time itself—for it to never really be yours?

What is a life, or all one thousand of them, if not borrowed in the first place?

It is evening, though not quite given the emptiness of the store, and you suppose you ought to get to tidying up for the next morning. It’s when you turn your back—it is always when you turn your back—that the shop door opens. Not with the urgency of someone scandalized, not with the casual smolder of someone looking to conquer through charm. There is something solemn in the jingle of the bell, and Kaeya is standing in the doorway with his hands on his hips and a wrinkle in his brow.

“I swear,” he says with a sigh, “some men don’t know how to hold their temper or their liquor.”

This time, he does not browse the shelves or add his usual flair to his speech, and when he sinks into one of the armchairs by the window, it is with such exhaustion that you almost pity him. He regales you with the latest happenings at Angel’s Share—certainly not the least of which was a fight, no, an explosion, in one of the darker, drunker corners—and every time you catch a glimpse of him he is staring at you. As though you might disappear if he ever looks away. As though, perhaps, he is trying to count every life you’ve lived, afraid he will never find the thousandth one. Or even the hundredth.

“You don’t need to worry about me, if that’s why you’re here,” you tell him. “I’m hardly noticeable by drunkards.”

You’re hardly noticeable by anyone. You do not say so out loud.

Something approaching a smile flits across his face, does not linger the way it usually does. “Fools,” he murmurs, only half-serious. He gets to his feet. “Well. Would you humor a genius anyway?”

You narrow your eyes. “What are you talking about?”

This time, the smile stays, and Kaeya draws the blinds.

When he offers his elbow to you, you take it, and maybe that is your first mistake.

He says he is walking you home to keep you out of harm’s way, because what kind of knight would he be if he didn’t look out for Mondstadt’s citizens? He says he keeps looking at you, keeps briefly covering your hand with his, to make sure you don’t lose your way, as if you’ve never walked home alone before. As if you’ve even set foot outside the city to know what it is like to get lost.

Except he doesn’t take you there at first. He knows which way it is—he easily cut through your riddle about edges of the world and six-armed giants who never sleep— but he doesn’t lead you toward the windmills. And in fact, he doesn’t move toward the walls of the city at all. Instead, he makes for the center of town, guides you up the stairs with a casual hand at the small of your back, and you curse yourself for barely flinching because you know he will use that against you somehow.

He doesn’t. Not right away. But he does laugh to himself, something more felt than heard. And he does press his palm more firmly to your back. And he takes you to the Church plaza, where the statue of Barbatos stands regal, proud without being arrogant. Hopeful.

“Are you much of a believer?” Kaeya asks, curious, or maybe cynical. “Or do you put all your faith in the gods of your stories instead?”

“Gods in stories are awfully particular.” You cautiously walk the circumference of the statue. “They have their own rules to follow, or play on. They find ways to chain you to them. In the real world, it’s…” You hold your breath. “It’s people who find ways to chain you to gods.”

“Maybe it’s both,” Kaeya muses, with a distant smile. Like you must remind him of someone.

You breathe out. Thoughtful. Relieved. “Maybe it’s both.”

Perhaps it is the stories themselves that are little gods. Perhaps Kaeya thinks so, too.

You’ve never exactly pegged him as the faithful type.

“Come with me,” he says, and when you ask where, he only grins and points up. He brushes your confusion aside, shows you the notches where time and rebellion have worn away the stone. “Just don’t look down,” he adds. “Or do. I’ll be there to catch you either way.”

You decide to let Kaeya go first.

It’s easier to follow than to lead, anyway. To make note of where he leaves his mark, so you know better than to misstep. Don’t look down, he told you, so you look ahead instead. You mind the curves and wrinkles of the sculpture, and when you reach the top you are too uncertain to look up and too scared to look down. This time, though, it is Kaeya who decides for you; he lends you half his strength, and you give him half of yours, and he pulls you up onto the statue’s outstretched arms. He catches you when you teeter, his grip iron around your wrist, and when you finally take a seat you see it.

You see everything.

Six-armed giants. Rooftops. The edges of your world, and guards like ants. Sprays of trees like green cotton, and Cider Lake like a splash of ink. The mountains. A cliff. The horizon. The moon. The stars.

The stars.

Oh, if you could capture this somehow. If only the parlor book did this justice. And in fact, the only thing that surprises you more than the view is how Kaeya looks at you like he’s thinking the same thing.

“You craved freedom, didn’t you?” he says. “What better place for freedom than in the Anemo god’s hands?”

The first thing you ask—the first thing you’re always cursed to ask—is, “Why?”

“Is that a theological question,” Kaeya says, “or am I meant to take that another way?”

It’s easier to look at Mondstadt, at the stars, when you answer him. “Why me? Why all of this?”

“For all your wit, I have to say, that’s not your sharpest question.” He takes a seat beside you, lets his legs dangle over the edges of Barbatos’s fingers, has the courage to look down. “Altogether vague, and something I thought you’d know the answer to by now.”

You squint at ants. People. Pinpricks of streetlight. It is easier, too, to focus on the echoes. “How could I possibly? Aren’t you the one always talking about how we all wear masks around each other? How we’re rarely true to ourselves and never to each other?” Your arms fold, naturally. “What reason do I have to believe any of this”—you gesture between the two of you—”is real, when you flatter me and treat me just the same as everyone else? Next thing I know, you’ll be trying to swindle me out of something, or asking all these roundabout questions where I’m meant to slip up and tell you something I’ll regret later.”

Perhaps you’ve said too much again. There is silence between you, the twinge of pain almost palpable. A glance to the right tells you that Kaeya is still watching the city, his eyes hooded with thought. (How often does he come up here? How often does he get to look at the world like this?) “If that’s how you feel,” he says, “then why did you come?”

You’ve already parted your lips to counter whatever he has to say, sure you’ll say something to catch him off-guard. But the moment he speaks, you falter; the words get caught in your throat, your face grows unbearably hot, and you shut your eyes tight to keep from following his gaze, toying with the ends of your hair ribbon for security.

Why did you come? Why, all this time, did you simply allow Kaeya past your doors when you knew well exactly what he’d do? Why did you let yourself fall into conversation with him every time when it always devolved into a back-and-forth, sharp words, sparks of the tongue? Why did you give him so much attention in spite of yourself? And—and maybe this is the most boggling thing—why did you feel his absence from the shop so profoundly? It wasn’t like you looked forward to him coming…

…Did you…?

“You know?” Kaeya is almost unfairly good at drawing you out of your thoughts. At coaxing instead of jerking away. He leans back on his hands, tucks one knee in. Takes comfort like this is his home as much as anywhere else in town. “You just looked at the world the same way you looked when I asked you about that book.” He laughs; it’s probably more to himself, but you still catch it. “You think you do a phenomenal job keeping your guard up around people. Sometimes a smile, sometimes a witty comeback. And most of the time you do. You wear a mask just as much as the rest of us.” There goes his gaze, fluttering again. “But you have these… pockets, where who you truly are comes through whether you want them to or not. I want to see more of that person. I want to know more about them. They fascinate me.” His eye lands on you, and he smiles. Genuine. “You fascinate me.”

It’s the most Kaeya has said to you at once. It’s the longest you’ve stayed quiet around him.

“Did you never wonder why I kept coming back after that first day?” he goes on, idly toying with his hair. It sounds like he’s asking whether you remember that first time at all. (Of course you do. He came in days after your run-in at the Knights’ Headquarters, batting his eyes and speaking the same sweet words he used on everyone, and you’d been so fed up with men like him that you’d told him none too kindly that if he wasn’t here for a book, you didn’t want to hear it.)

He laughs, mostly to himself. “You really can’t figure it out?”

“Well, of course not,” you tell him. “I sort of figured you’d want to keep the company of people who’d fawn over you, and hang onto your every word.”

Kaeya looks at you with the sort of spark that asks if you don’t do that already, in some bizarre way. “And yet, it’s precisely because you didn’t that I came back. It was… refreshing, let’s say, to have the opposite effect on someone.”

“What?” You roll your eyes. “You mean some thrill-of-the-chase thing?”

“Archons, no. I’d hope you’d give me a little more credit than that. If you’re that hung up on turns of phrase, let’s call it the opportunity for… a marriage of true minds, perhaps.”

“You know, I’m pretty sure that has to do more with the faithfulness of lovers and less with meeting your intellectual match.”

Kaeya raises a brow, only half-playful. “Am I not faithful to you?”

“Do I look like your lover?”

“You do when you read,” he says. “You do when you talk about books.”

You fold your arms. Hide the heat in your face with the dark. “How unlucky for you. I didn’t bring any with me.”

“That’s all right,” Kaeya says, pointing up again. “I’m sure these will suffice.”

You’re not sure how long the two of you stay up there, watching and talking and dreaming in turns. Certainly long enough for the tavern to be cleared of most of its patrons, or at least the ones who caused the most trouble. The night is temperate enough that you don’t catch a chill, but you can feel him shifting toward you on occasion all the same. Most of the time he is courteous enough to sit back, even if to watch you instead—even when you have nothing to say at all. It seems like he likes it better that way. And if you strain your ear enough, you might be able to hear the whisper of a number.

One thousand two.

When all is said and done, Kaeya gets to his feet, holds out his hand to help you up, and suggests he ought to take you the rest of the way home. It is, he says, the knightly thing to do, after all. When you ask how he plans to get you down, he simply points to the ground and grins, and as the world seems to tilt on its side you’re sure, now more than ever, that Kaeya Alberich has lost his entire archon-damned mind.

“What do you say?” Kaeya asks. “Do you trust me?”

You swallow and sway on the spot, and perhaps it’s the way he instinctually grips your wrist to steady you that answers your question. “Sometimes I get the feeling I shouldn’t,” you tell him, “but right now I do.”

He hums to himself, and it sounds more like a laugh as his fingers briefly wind with yours. “Excellent choice,” he murmurs, and he lifts you into his arms and leaps.

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 60]

You could kill Kaeya for not telling you about the wind glider. Even if you’re certain he just “conveniently forgot” to make mention of it in the moment.

That night, he treated you to a little more freedom. Let you feel the thrill of your bones nearly jumping out of your skin and your life flashing before your eyes before jerking you into free-floating. His glider burst open at the last possible second, and he landed on both feet with a catlike certainty, and it took you an eternity to will yourself to open your eyes again.

It took you even longer to realize you were still holding onto him for dear life.

You wobbled on your legs once he finally set you down, nearly stumbling as the city blurred and swayed in your vision, and as Kaeya grabbed your elbow to steady you, he laughed and said he had all the more reason to escort you back.

But despite his jokes and good nature, and despite the death stare you gave him once you were capable of it, he kept a gallant air about him the rest of the walk to your place. Your arm stayed firmly looped around his, and he kept you on his left side where he could see you, and all the while he kept his eye on the street for any signs of danger. You’d never think, in retrospect, that he was the same person who came sauntering into your bookshop on the daily to drive you up the wall with his niceties.

No... not that, exactly...

You were still silently questioning him by the time you made it to your doors and when you slipped your arm out of his grip he let you. (You could always give him credit for that; he always let you go.) He looked at you like he didn’t want to, like he’d regret turning his back on you, and then he bent forward in a bow and said, “On behalf of the Knights of Favonius, it is my duty and my great honor to ensure your safety tonight.”

The formality—the distance—almost made you laugh. Almost.

And then he lifted his head and winked at you—or, at least, you thought he did. And this time you really did laugh in sheer disbelief, and as you moved to cover your mouth, he caught your hand and pressed his lips to the back of it. Closed the distance. Just for a second.

“Sleep well,” he said, with that same old spark in his eye, and when he finally turned away he seemed to regret it more than you thought he would. More than you hoped he would. And you found yourself smiling softly in his wake, long after he disappeared into the dark.

And then you blinked, and your stomach dropped again.

Oh, Barbatos, no.

Kaeya Alberich is not. Your. Friend. And if he’s Not Your Friend, then he can’t be anything else, either.

Even after he bids you good night.

Even after the feeling of his lips lingers on the back of your hand, and fades within the hour.

Even the next morning, when he “just so happens” to pass by your home during his early patrol, when he insists on walking you to town because “you know as well as anyone else that one can never be too cautious, even in broad daylight.” Even when he asks if you’ve ever been outside the city, if you’d ever like to taste a freedom free of deities, and promises offhand to show you sometime. And yes, even after he leaves you at the door to the Thousand Lives, catching your hair ribbon between his fingers with another wink—you think—and the promise that he’ll be back to peruse your shelves just before closing, the way he always does.

He is not your friend, not your anything else. And yet he seems to think he’s made something special of himself, judging from the glance he tosses over his shoulder, the too-sweet curl of the corner of his mouth. The fleeting kiss farewell in every echoing foot fell.

He’s finding the cracks, and he’s toying with you now more than ever, and you both know it.

And sure, he may have done something special, but you won’t go letting him lord something like sentiment over you. You won’t let him in.

You won’t let anyone in.

Not again.

“You seem particularly distracted today… Are you alright?”

When you snap to attention again, Albedo is watching you cautiously from the corner of the shop, sketchbook and charcoal. It’s his first time back to the Thousand Lives in a while—since he happened to be in the neighborhood for a “rather particular supply run,” he said. And you’re not quite sure when he arrived, or how long he’s staying, or even if he’s come back to town before now, but you may have mentioned that the offer to let him draw you still stood, and he may have accepted, and you both may have been a little more pleased about it than you anticipated. He’s been here ever since—for hours, you’re certain—to make good on his word. To mark down humanity in motion. To immortalize each individual life. All one thousand.

(All one thousand two.)

He’s never unwelcome here. Could never be. Not when he waxes poetic about snowfall and mountainsides between strokes of the pencil. Not when he moves so effortlessly about the shop or subtly changes his own expression, just to match what he wants to capture on paper.

(You’ve never been drawn before—in fact, it’s one of the few times outside of Kaeya’s daily occurrences that anyone has paid such extended attention to you—but given your own skirting with the creative process, you’ve decided not to question his habits.)

Albedo calls your name, as delicate and precise as he might stretch canvas to frame, as full of questions as he might be every time a new piece of the world catches his eye. “It’s been a while. Are you uncomfortable?” he asks, poised to snap his sketchbook shut.

“Huh? Oh—!” You shake your head quickly. “No, no, sorry. Just… lost in thought. That’s all.”

There’s a glint in his eyes that almost makes you think he’s smiling. “I hope you’ve found your way back, then…?”

“Yeah.” You laugh, more breath than mirth, and nod toward his sketch. “Yeah, I’m okay. How’s it coming along?”

He shrugs with one shoulder. “The way art does.”

You turn back to your work. “Say no more.”

The way art comes along is that it is forever a process, doomed never to be finished even when it is finished. Agonized over for never quite matching the vision in the head. Lifted as the heart of one’s pride, crumpled and tossed as the depths of one’s failure, or quietly placed aside with the resignation that it is simply “good enough.” Revisited later, sometimes to cringe, sometimes to marvel, always to mark improvement unseen in the moment. It comes along the way time passes—sometimes dragging, sometimes racing, but always, always doing so.

It comes along as a record of the world. And of oneself.

You rarely revisit your art. Albedo revisits his all the time.

What you revisit instead is the way Albedo’s gaze flickers so easily between you and his sketch, how it sometimes lingers on you and you know, despite the feeling of flattery, that he’s simply trying to get the shading right. What you revisit instead are the scattered conversations about your grandfather, and the world outside the walls, and the precision of art and science and the fickle, fleeting decisions of gods. The stories he tells you as if he’d like for you to hold on to them in his absence. The pieces of yourself that aren’t terrifying to share, but still surprise you to say out loud.

(You could call Albedo a friend. If friends can grow so close, so soon, over so little.)

Perhaps your friendship is art, too. Forever in process, never quite done, returned to in stages, but quietly put away for another time when he walks out the door. Perhaps that is good enough, too.

After a time that is at once too short and long enough, Albedo moves from his place and meets you at the register. “Thank you,” he says, “for allowing me to observe you. It was a truly enjoyable experience.”

“Enjoyable?” You laugh, the same way he does. “Albedo, I didn’t even do anything.”

“You’ve done more than you perceive,” he says with another shrug. “I’m around humans often enough as aides or volunteers for experiments; these days, it’s rare that I depict them in a sketch, or a painting.”

“Because you keep to yourself?” you ask. “Or because you feel like if you’ve seen one human, you’ve seen them all?”

There it is again. The lingering look. The almost-smile. “Perhaps a little of both. People tend to… blur together sometimes, you could say.” He cocks his head. “Do you ever feel that way about customers?”

You decide to mimic his gestures, idly running your fingers along the edge of the counter. “Not always. Occasionally there are people who… distinguish themselves. You could say. But even then, even when people blur together, there’s always some feature I remember about them, I think. The color of their eyes, the pattern of their clothes, the way they walk, how their face lights up when they find exactly what they’re looking for, the curiosity when I present them with something they haven’t considered. There’s always… something worth remembering. Something worth capturing.”

This time, Albedo’s smile is there. Real. “Is that how you feel about yourself? That there’s something within you worth capturing, too?”

You pause, and stammer, caught in your own logic, too rooted to admit anything one way or the other. Eventually, you clear your throat and point to the books. “Not really,” you say. “I guess... that’s why I go looking for other lives instead.”

Albedo doesn’t respond for a while, simply studies you, and it’s different when he’s up close. When you’re watching him watch you, unable to look away, instead of catching his eye every so often while you busy yourself with other affairs. He barely moves—is he blinking? breathing?—and only follows your contours and shadows with his eyes. Perhaps he’s questioning whether he’s done you justice. Perhaps he’s looking for something to remember.

The ribbon, perhaps. For all your deliberation, you decided to keep your hair tied up, because the ribbon is as natural as the rest of you.

And then he lays the open sketchbook on the counter, encouraging you to look. And when you do, you think you see what he’s found in the way you run the shop, in the way you reach for your books. Care for your surroundings. Hints of curiosity. Comfort with the things you’re so familiar with. The weight of the everyday. A yearning for something extraordinary.

Caution. A lot of it. Perhaps too much of it.

(Maybe this is why Albedo avoids drawing humans. Because there is so much of someone to capture all at once.)

“That’s… wow.” Half-anxiously, you rub the back of your neck. “Consider me impressed.”

There’s a flicker of pride in Albedo’s eyes as he takes the sketchbook back. “Well, consider me grateful.”

Your brow furrows. “For… what?”

“Oh,” he says airily. “The experience. The comfort of the shop. Your company, as always.” He slots his pencil away. “The reminder.”

“What reminder?”

“That we’re not the blurs we think we are.”

This time, you don’t smile in almosts. It’s too painfully wide for you to control. “Say,” you tell him. “The Windblume Festival’s coming up soon. Will you be here for it? I’m sure they’ll have some flowers you could study or take back with you, or even some favors you could tinker with.”

(Hey, it’s worth a shot.)

Albedo’s face dims, slight but still perceptible. “I’m afraid I have some other affairs to attend to.” And then, maybe to assuage the disappointment you swear you masked, “Perhaps you can put something aside for the next time I’m in town?”

Which implies there is a next time.

At least there is that.

You glance down at his sketchbook one more time, then over to the empty space on the wall next to one of your grandfather’s paintings.

“Well… perhaps, on one condition, I could.”

Albedo agrees to paint the sketch. And he agrees to let you pay for it.

Kaeya catches him in the doorway on their mutual ways in and out. One nods; the other puts a hand to the heart. They take each other in stride as the door closes between them. And then Kaeya takes his usual seat, casually crosses one leg over the other, and smiles at you. There’s all the usual teasing, but it seems… softer, somehow.

Affectionate, almost.

Has he… always been like this? Has he been dealing in almosts, too?

“Whenever you’re ready,” he hums, shooing you off to your work with a distant gesture, and your stomach lurches at the prospect of Kaeya Alberich walking you home again. Asking you about another book. Regaling you on just how boring his patrols are without a good story. Walking you right up to the door, and catching your hand as you turn, and—

You clear your throat, a little too loudly, and turn on your heel. “Ready for what, Sir Kaeya?”

(That’s the ticket... you think.)

“To go, of course.” He cocks his head. “Can’t have you at risk of getting hurt after hours, can we?”

“Since when am I your responsibility after my hours?”

Kaeya breaks into a grin this time, and he rests his chin in his hand. “Would you like to be mine?”

You want to shoot back—Not on your life, or something like that. But the words lock up in your throat, and you’re plunged into those thoughts of your doorstep, right where you left off. So you glare instead, bracing himself for the inevitable, “That’s not a no.”

Except Kaeya doesn’t say that it isn’t a no. In fact, he doesn’t say anything at all. He merely settles back with a chuckle, and he lets his eyes follow you through the motions of closing, and when you finish he rises and offers you his arm.

You balk, clutching your satchel, and you do not take it. “You can’t be serious.”

“Can’t I be?” he says. In earnest. “Shouldn’t I be?”

There is no smugness about him when you finally accept, or even during the walk back. He seems a bit more lenient in his vigilance, but he makes his presence more than clear with your arm secure around his. Perhaps he knows the way by now—someone so learned in the way of Mondstadt’s streets and with such a sharp eye should have no problem memorizing a simple route—and yet he lets you lead the way at the same, even if subtly.

(Were there... always such good intentions behind him?)

“It’s going to get awfully busy next week,” Kaeya says just as your house comes into view. “Windblume Festival and all. Peace to keep, merry to make... it ought to be quite lively here.”

You roll your eyes in mock sympathy, but a smile insists on tugging at the corner of your mouth even as you slip out of his grip. “Sounds like you’ll be up to your ears in work.”

“Most likely.” He lets out a disappointed sigh, but soon enough that twitch in his brow and spark in his eye make their grand reappearance. “Promise you won’t miss me too much?”

Even though you scoff, you decide to play along; either the budding familiarity is getting to you, or the festival spirit is. “I suppose I’ll just have to do my best.”

Kaeya grins, and he taps your nose with his fingertip before you even realize he’s moved. “That’s my darling.”

It takes a great deal of willpower not to remember all the little ways Kaeya has touched you. The brush of your hands, the link of your arms, that playful tap of his finger.

It takes an even greater deal of willpower not to remember how you felt cradled against the warmth of his chest, and—more importantly—that infernal pet name.

Darling.

He calls you that once more, in close quarters in a dream whose details you’ll never speak out loud. The memory hits you not upon waking the next morning, but as he is walking you to town, and you have to scramble to explain just why you choked on your own breath and tripped over the cobblestone. It isn’t until after he leaves you at the door and goes about his morning patrol that you slump against the counter and curse your existence. And his.

Because where did he get off teasing you and calling you sweet names and entering your thoughts like that? And where did you get off letting him?

A week comes and goes, at times so dull that you’re plagued with those memories, at times so busy that you blissfully forget them. Albedo stops in once more, just long enough to hand you a folder from his portfolio. He tells you as you’re paying him that he felt particularly inspired, that he forever appreciates the similarities he draws between the shop and his campsite, and when you bid him safe travels, he puts a hand to his heart and smiles. No questions about it.

(It is almost enough to make you forget.)

You have a couple more dreams in that week , are so domestic that drift awake far too easily, the other simply unspeakable, and left at that. On both mornings, Kaeya asks what’s got you so flustered, and both times, you fold your arms tight and keep your mouth shut.

He’d never let you live it down if he found out. And you’d never forgive yourself if you ever told him.

At least Kaeya is right about one thing: Mondstadt, even in the days leading up to the Windblume Festival, is so busy that you can barely hear yourself think. And perhaps that is a good thing. You can’t agonize over touches or dreams or terms of endearment when every few moments there’s a call for more dandelion wine, or hushed anguish over consulting with the legendary bard himself. Not when you have such an influx of customers perusing your poetry collections and nearly cleaning out your shelves each day, as though merely reading poetry will make them masters of it for their loved ones.

(Well. At least you had the sense to keep well-stocked.)

Kaeya doesn’t come for three days, either because he actually is up to his ears in work, or because he’s found himself caught up in the festivities. But by the end of the fourth day, just as you’re bidding your last customer good night, he slips in through the front door, sinks into his usual armchair, and fishes a small notebook out of the inside pocket of his coat.

“It would appear,” he murmurs, his voice sounding heavy, “that I am in need of your help.”

You raise a brow, taking your time as you round the counter. “Don’t sound so upset about it, Sir Kaeya.”

As usual, he tries to cover it up with a laugh, a trace of charm. “How could I be upset when you’re here?”

You decide to humor him, and not to. “Title, author, or description?”

He waves off your request, and begins thumbing through his notebook. “I imagine,” he says, pulling out a folded piece of parchment, “that you must know your way around love poetry?”

You freeze. “Excuse me?” you start to say, but then he’s holding the parchment out to you, and you find yourself reading it over without a word. It is a notice for some sort of class, headed by the bard Venti himself—and it’s something Kaeya seems awfully interested in, if the solidity of his expression is anything to go by.

His gaze drifts from you to the flyer, and back to you again. He’s still clutching that little notebook, its open pages at times empty, at times riddled with scribbles and scratched-out words. “Given the kind of business you run and your… hidden penchant for romance, let’s say… I figured you’d be able to help broaden my horizons beyond what the bard has to offer.” He taps a few of the scribbles. “I’ve had awful luck on my own, you know. I thought maybe you’d have a few examples.”

Well… you’re nothing if not keen on giving recommendations. With a sigh, you flip the sign on the door to CLOSED and rummage in your satchel for a notebook of your own, small and leather bound and clearly well-loved. “I collect them,” you explain, though your face grows hot and your fingers twitch. “Writing I like. Stuff that inspires me, things like that…”

Kaeya tilts his head, but if any gears click together, he makes no indication of it. “All right,” he says, settling back with his eye closed and his hands folded over his chest. “I trust your judgment.”

He looks so peaceful there, open-minded, waiting. You can’t help it; you read to him, in between the motions of closing up shop. Sometimes you dole out a stanza or two; sometimes you pause to read from start to finish. The whole time, he sits there, unmoving, listening, breathing it in line by line. Eventually, you come to the end of the poems you’ve copied, and you watch him all too cautiously, waiting for the inevitable jab.

He says nothing. Doesn’t even open his eye.

So you take a deep breath, and you read him one of your own.

It’s not the greatest—but then, you don’t exactly think any of your writing is the greatest. They are words slapped together haphazardly, sometimes barely comprehensible or cohesive, but all the poetry you’ve ever read sort of sounds like that, so by those standards it must not be so bad. They are lines you’ve threaded together while staring at the stars or the flowers on display across the road, or hastily scrawled out in the middle of the night for fear of forgetting them. They are an attempt at immortality—at, perhaps, an alchemy of your own.

But they are yours. And they are shaky. And they are seeping into the grooves of the door and the walls. Spoken. Done.

For a while, it is silent in the shop, save for the shuffle of books as you heft them onto the shelves, of papers as you check your daily accounts. Eventually, you speak first. “That’s all I have,” you tell him. “If you want more, I’ll have some collections in stock in the morning. You’ll have to come back then.”

Kaeya sits up then, as slowly as he approaches you when he knows he’s won a round of back-and-forth. There is no cockiness in any of his features; there is only a muted wonder. You imagine it’s what you might have looked like the night on Barbatos.

“The last one,” he breathes, beckoning you closer. “Come here. Read it again.”

You blink, and your stomach turns, and you take one step forward, barely realizing it yourself. “Why…?”

“I want to remember how it feels. I want to remember how you sound when you read your favorite parts.” His fingers curl around the binding of his notebook, and he smiles, more to himself than at you. “I suppose you could say I wish… I could bottle up the way you sound reading it, so I can hear it whenever I want, and this is the best I can get.” He rests his chin in his free hand. “Do you think that’s greedy of me?”

Your chest goes tight because, for once—just this once—you think he might mean it.

Anxiously, you cross the shop to sit near him, and your fingers brush the front of his notebook, catching his knuckles along the way. “I think,” you murmur, “you should maybe write that down.”

Kaeya pauses, then chuckles to himself, and for another brief moment in the waning daylight his fingers tangle with yours.

“Read it again.”

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 70]

You never tell Kaeya the poem is yours. Even when you have multiple chances to. Because, apparently, this “broadening horizons” endeavor of his is more than a one-time thing.

Apparently, this is a next-few-days thing.

In the mornings, he walks you to town and sets off on patrol as per usual; in the afternoons, he tosses you a grin while helping an elderly woman with her walking stick, or while studying Flora’s wares. And in the evenings, he slips into the Thousand Lives instead of the Angel’s Share, and he opens his notebook, and he starts to write. Sometimes he scratches out lines. Sometimes he flips the page to start afresh. Sometimes—more often than not—you catch him studying you, as though you might have the unspoken answer to whatever block he’s facing. But no matter what, he is creating. He finds safety here to do so. And perhaps this alone makes running the shop worth it.

The first day, he pauses his work to say, “You never did tell me what you used to do before the bookshop.”

To be fair, he never asked. But it’s not as though you can go around handing off your life story to anyone you meet, especially him. There are layers to knowing people, especially you, and he hasn’t quite dug all the way in.

But… maybe he’s dug just enough.

“Would you believe me,” you ask him, “if I told you I used to be a private tutor?”

It’s rare for Kaeya to look surprised, but he does now. And intrigued, to boot. “Go on…“

He would want you to go on. “It was just the thing to do for me,” you tell him. “Teaching came as easy to me as reading. I figured I ought to put it to good use while I was still figuring out what I wanted to do with myself. It seemed right, helping the people of tomorrow and all. It’s just… well, children don’t stay young forever, and neither do I. So I decided I might as well chase the things that make me happy, instead of just settling with the things I’m good at.”

“Do you think you’d ever want to return to it? Say…” He leans forward in his seat, enthralled. Scheming, perhaps. “Brushing up on your history and literature to train a handful of knights?”

You give him a muted grin. “Sorry, Sir Kaeya. History was my worst subject. Besides, between you and Master Jean, I’m certain you’ve got things covered, don’t you?”

Playfully, Kaeya snaps his fingers, then looks you up and down. He seems too thoughtful to be ravenous. “Maybe that’s for the best after all.”

“Because you’d take issue with my instruction?”

“Because I’d take issue,” he says with a dip in his voice, “with those other men trying anything funny with you in such close quarters.”

That… shouldn’t make you shiver. “Oh, of course,” you try to shoot back despite the waver in your voice. “Because you’re the only one allowed to fawn over me, that's right.” You pass it off with a weak laugh. That can’t be jealousy you detect—again. Especially with regards to you. “Besides, what about Albedo?”

“What about him?”

“He’s a man, isn’t he? He’s been in and out of the shop plenty, and you’ve never once taken issue with him spending time with me.”

“He’s your friend,” Kaeya says. “And my colleague. I have no reason to take issue with him. Besides—and pardon my bluntness—for all his wisdom, Albedo wouldn’t know ‘trying something funny’ if it asked him to experiment on it.”

“You know, you sound awfully possessive of something that isn’t yours, Sir Kaeya.”

“Does that mean it doesn’t warrant protection?” He folds his arms. “Does that mean I shouldn’t look out for it when I know better?”

Swallowing hard, you relent, pressing your lips together in a firm line and uncertainly stroking up the spine of the parlor book. “Well,” you finally say, skirting the question, “rest assured that you, Master Jean, or any other knight can find me right here for the rest of my days.”

You can feel his gaze boring into your spine, but by the time you turn around again he’s already focused on his words, tapping his notebook with his pen as though that might inspire something. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he says without looking up, “if I don’t willingly relay that to the others. “And if you look closely, there is his usual smile, hiding at the corner of his lips and in the wrinkle of his brow. “You’ll allow me to be your only student for a while longer, won’t you?”

It’s a miracle you don’t shoo him out right then and there, but his tone of voice shoots heat to your face and all but sews your mouth shut.

The second day, in the broken silence where creation makes an attempt at happening, he asks you for a synonym. He’s already used the word “thoughtful “in this stanza, he says, and it doesn’t seem in good taste to use it again. He could easily get up and poke around for a thesaurus—you’re sure that if anyone knows the ins and outs of the store by now, it’s Kaeya—but he looks up at you as if to say this is where you, specifically, come in.

Before you know it, you’re rattling off suggestions. “Considerate, kind, concerned, well-intentioned… I guess it depends on what you’re going for, and how it helps the poem flow.” You pause tapping your heel against the floor in thought. “There’s nothing wrong with repetition, though. It just has to be crafted to mean something, instead of just being redundant. I like when things like that come in threes, for instance, and it also works well with shorter words and phrases in succession, so—”

You freeze. Sure, getting to talk about reading and writing is part of why you opened the shop in the first place. But there’s a difference between talking about it and getting carried away with it, especially in front of Kaeya. Hasn’t he seen enough of you already? Hasn’t he seen too much? “Sorry,” you say, clearing your throat and lifting the back of your hand to your mouth to quiet yourself.

Within seconds, Kaeya’s caught your wrist and pulled your hand away. He’s gotten good at these little touches, no matter how much you don’t want to admit how often they happen. Or how delicate his fingers are, despite all their calluses, as they trace over your palm before they curl in. “Don’t,” he murmurs with that usual faint smile; it’s hard to tell how much he knows. “I came here to learn from the best, didn’t I?”

You’re too stunned by the touch to ask, even half-jokingly, who in the world he’s talking about. Instead, you sit on your hands while he writes down your suggestions on a fresh page, watches you with a careful eye for any other suggestions. And you try not to recreate the feeling in your head, over and over. Try not to wish he’d hold them again.

And you fail.

“Cold,” you say, your gaze dropping to his fingers. “Your hands are always so cold.”

Kaeya laughs to himself, flicks the ice-blue charm at his hip. A Cryo Vision. “Comes with the package, I’m afraid. Makes it easier to control the elements. Though I do recall having poor circulation even as a child…” Without looking up from his notes, he lifts his dominant hand, tugging his glove off with his teeth and letting it drop into his lap. “It’s part of why I wear these, after all,” he says, clenching and loosening his fist in turns before removing the other glove properly.

Briefly, you grit your teeth. He did that on purpose. He totally did that on purpose. “But they’re fingerless,” you point out. “Do they even work?”

“Sometimes.” His gaze drifts toward the wrinkles in the spare armchair where your hands hide away. “But I can think of something that might work better.”

Well… you suppose he deserves a break for his work. And if you’re doing it for his sake…

You wiggle one hand free and he takes it easily, eager without seeming desperate. You couldn’t say you could pull off something like that just as well. His fingers tangle with yours, and he presses into the warmth of your palm, urging you without words to break from your work just a little longer. Convincing you, for just a moment, that no one would peek through the blinds.

Kaeya makes it a point to squeeze, gently, and to thumb your knuckles before pulling his hand away and cradling the leftover warmth close to his chest. As though your touch is something to be cherished in the first place. “I’d bet mora,” he says as he tugs his gloves back on, “that you’d make a fine Pyro wielder. Your touch is indicator enough, to say nothing of your personality.”

Every move is so meticulous that you can’t help being drawn to them, even as you make your way back to the counter. “Not at all. To be honest, I don’t think any element would suit me. I’m pretty content not to have a Vision. I think… I think the more you insist on getting to know me, the more you’ll find I’m actually pretty… boring.”

(The distance is necessary. The distance is necessary.)

“Oh, on the contrary.”

Kaeya’s got his back turned to you, but you catch his expression—thoughtful—in the window. He taps his lips with his pen, keeping his gaze low. “You don’t need the power of the elements to control things like knowledge, or kindness, or curiosity, or love. Those are powers all their own. In fact, I’d argue that those are qualities that take a lifetime to master. And that you wield them just as well.” He studies, admires, his notes. “You are yourself,” he says, “and I find that plenty fascinating.”

He says it with such finality, such emphasis, that you nearly kick yourself for arguing further. “Anyone could spend their whole life honing those skills, and in the end, it’s the progress that counts more than the mastery, right? I don’t think that makes me particularly exceptional when everyone I know is capable of it.”

Slowly, Kaeya turns in his seat. “Everyone…?”

Your breath catches, but you find yourself nodding all the same. “Yeah… everyone.”

“Awfully naïve of you,” he says, “but I’m flattered nonetheless. And what about the infinite ways that people can love one another, or be kind to one another? Surely your former students don’t show it the same way you do. Surely some future lover wouldn’t necessarily express it the same way you do. Doesn’t that make you unique? Doesn’t that open up new avenues to explore? To learn?”

“It sounds,” you say, returning to your work because that is the easy thing to do, “like it opens up new avenues for miscommunication. Like all it does is cause pain. From the disconnect between your own love and someone else’s, or the realization that you can’t see the way others love you because it doesn’t match the way you love them… makes you wonder how much of it you’ve missed out on over the years because you didn’t see it the way you were meant to. How much lost time you have to make up for, to know that perhaps you were loved all along,”

Kaeya goes quiet for longer than you’re used to. Longer than you’re comfortable with. Maybe he’s just figuring out how you tick. Or maybe he’s looking on you with pity. Either way, a sigh and the creak of leather announces his return to his writing. “Fire and ice,” he muses aloud. “Opposite sides of the same passionate coin. Two lovers, perhaps, that fate never intended to unite, but who dare to defy the odds anyway.” He chuckles; it almost sounds sad, if you thought he was capable of it. “Quite the inspiration, I must say.”

Secretly, you hope he’s writing it all down as you duck behind the counter for a stepladder, as you adjust the painting next to your grandfather’s. “Maybe they have the same problem,” you murmur amid the scratches of his pen. “Maybe they don’t love the same, either.”

“You never did ask why I’m writing a poem, you know.”

True to form, Kaeya’s come back to the shop every day of the Festival, sometimes blocked, sometimes already inspired, always with his notebook and pen in hand. scene now, you’ve decided it’s best not to question it anymore. You’ve also decided, just as surprisingly, to get most of your end-of-day tasks done before he arrives.

It is nice, you think, to have nothing to do for a while, except to lend him some of your time.

“It’s for the bard’s class,” you say, peeking over the edge of an anthology. “Isn’t that enough of an answer?”

“And why,” he goes on, “do you think I’m enrolled in the class? Aren’t you the least bit curious?”

You give him a pointed look, snap your book shut, and sit up straight, counting logic on your fingers. “Either for the love of trying something new, to practice a craft you have and refused to divulge until now, or…” You can practically feel your eyes spark. “To give to some poor soul, perhaps in secret, for the sheer delight of watching them descend into pure love sickness. So? Which is it?”

Kaeya weighs the options in the quiet. “All logical,” he concedes, “and mostly correct. But that last one… “ He clicks his tongue and leans forward in his chair, dares to share your space. Challenges you. “To think I would intentionally torment someone with love sickness… I thought you would have held me in higher esteem by now. Maybe even softened up to me.”

“Who’s to say I don’t?” You fold your arms. “Who’s to say I’m not simply cautious when other people were cruel enough to spoil the experience?”

You pause, and your chest goes tight. You’ve said too much. Again.

His expression goes soft at the edges. In pity, maybe, or understanding. As though now everything truly makes sense. Why you’re so guarded all this time. Why you find such solace in your work, in being alone. In being left alone. “I see,” he says, holding out a hand palm-up in solidarity.

He hesitated before he spoke.

He never hesitates.

You watch his hand, the twitch in his fingers, but don’t take it. “It seems like a risk,” you say, making for the shelves. It’s easier to have your back to him. It’s easier to, for a while, stop entertaining the thought that you’re the reason he keeps coming back. That you’re the secret subject of this assignment of his. “You... seem like a risk.”

“Because people were cruel to you?”

You shut your eyes. Grip the shelves until your knuckles tighten. It wards off the memories, at least, along with all the possibilities that come with fraternizing with someone like him. The spotlighting, the cruelty from other citizens in a town where word travels fast. The vulnerability that affects him as much as it affects you. “Yeah,” you say. “That’s… part of it.”

He hums. There’s a hurt in his voice. He doesn’t make it obvious, but you know it’s there all the same. “I suppose that makes two of us, then.”

To his credit, Kaeya keeps his distance, but despite it something awful and needy tugs at the pit of your heart, demands to be known. To be met with the comfort of a touch, or a few words. A few of his words. Because you don’t mind talking with him. You don’t mind how he insists on walking you to and from the shop, or how he routinely pokes around your interests. Pokes arand you. makes the effort to know you. Sees himself in you, maybe. Hopes you’ll do the same, maybe.

It’s company. Some of the first real, consistent company you’ve had in a long time.

And … you like it.

“I won’t claim to know your feelings,” he says, haltingly, as you use the last of the daylight to thumb through the books around you in a sudden frenzy. “But it doesn’t change a thing between us. It doesn’t change that I still intend to look out for you—for more than just my duty. That I intend to gain your trust as a confidant—”

“Here,” you tell him, all but thrusting a book at his chest and looking down before he can go on about trust and feelings and... “us.” Whatever that means.

Out of the corner of your eye, Kaeya studies the cover, then looks up at you. “What’s this?”

“My favorite book,” you mumble through the crack in your voice. “That’s the sequel.”

There are two possibilities, if you want to keep up the logic loop. Either this is all still part of some elaborate, deep-seated act of his, or… he really means it. At least part of it. And maybe you should know better by now, to chase after his coattails, to be so conceited as to think yourself so deserving of his special treatment. But maybe it is worth the risk to find out.

When you finally chance looking back at him, he’s got a muted smile on his face as he reads the first few paragraphs. But it is a smile all the same. “Well, well,” he murmurs. “Another favorite?”

“Not… exactly.” You wring your hands. Untie and tie your hair again. “But it’s not bad for a sequel. It’s honest… It’s realistic, but not overly dramatic. It’s human.” You shift your weight, then take your seat again. “I like reading things that feel human. Do you know what I mean?”

Kaeya laughs to himself, tucks the book between the armrest and his thigh for safekeeping. “I think so.” He searches your face, perhaps watching for cracks where he might let himself in. where you might let him in. “To tell you the truth—and perhaps I don’t do that as often as I should—I could do with a little more humanity.”

It surprises you that there are any cracks at all, and you think that Kaeya Alberich might let on more truth than he knows. Subtly, you nod toward his notebook, which he’s barely touched. “Can I read it?” you ask. “When it’s done?”

“Maybe.” He sighs.”If I finish it.”

This is the second risk: you lean forward, dare to share your space, and tap his notebook twice. You’re thankful for how low the lights are, how they must fail to cover up the burning in your cheeks.

“When,” you say with a quiet emphasis, “you finish it.”

Kaeya’s gaze settles on yours, as if merely looking at you is enough to ease his spirit, and he nods and picks up his pen. “When I finish it,” he echoes—like a true scholar—and the shop respects his work and falls quiet.

The end of the Windblume Festival comes and goes, with gaudy blossoms and delicate dandelion seeds and bursts of the bard’s lyre, and Kaeya does not show you his poem. You don’t ask about it, because you know that the creative process is fickle and vulnerable and raw as it is without someone breathing down your neck about the final result. It is patient and impatient at the same time, and you’d argue that so are you, and you’re sure he’d argue that, logically speaking, that makes you art, too. But you opt for quiet, and he opts for routine, and neither of you asks for the things you suppose you ought to.

There is a beauty and a discomfort in that, in not having to say much. Silent understanding is an intimacy all its own; admitting that it is an intimacy in the first place, however, is near-terrifying.

So perhaps it is best that you do not talk about it.

Instead, over the weeks that pass, you make idle chat about anything and everything else. Dull paperwork and inventory records. Master Jean hitting her self-imposed monthly caffeine quota within a couple of days and overworking herself for the fourth time in as many weeks. Outrider Amber’s intermittent cravings for sticky honey roast, which you honestly can’t blame her for, after a long day. Some ruckus in Liyue whose story you can’t get straight between the two of you—and then some passing joke about how, really, neither of you could even be straight. Some other affair about Lady Eula being… well, Lady Eula.

Occasionally, Kaeya brings up the book—where he is so far, the human things he sees in it, how he can see why you gravitate toward stories like this. But he never brings up the poem, and you start to think that maybe he never wrote one at all. That maybe it really was just the elaborate ruse you’d suspected. It’s just that you can’t figure out the end to the means. What he could possibly want out of it beyond… you. Your time. Your company.

You decide that it isn’t worth the trouble of asking. Or even thinking about it.

It’s one evening after closing, as the weather is starting to warm up, that Kaeya leads you away from the city instead of toward home. He takes you, with your arm hooked around his, past the flower shop, past the Adventurer’s Guild hub, just beyond the walls that keep everyone safe. On fearful instinct, your grip on his arm goes tense (was he always so defined?) and he reassures you with a brush of his fingers over the back of your hand as you settle on the bank of Cider Lake, just near the glow of the dandelions.

“It’s nice to be somewhere quiet,” he says as he lets you go.

He has a point—there is some relief in leaving the bustle of town behind, even just a few meters away—but you’re no less confused. “What are we doing here?”

“Cautious as always…” He leans back on his hands and stretches out on the bank, the gold embellishments of his eyepatch glinting in the moonlight. “A fine quality to have, but a little more trust in me would take you a longer way.”

“You haven’t answered my question.”

“Have I ever told you about my grandfather? He was a pirate. A fine explorer.” Kaeya chuckles and points to his eyepatch. “I even inherited this from him. Perhaps it’s in my blood. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to follow the path of your family?”

“What are you getting at, Sir Kaeya?”

He sobers then, slowly, and fiddles with a coin he fishes out of his pocket before examining it. “I received a letter,” he says, “about a treasure that would be of great value to me. I’ve heard of others receiving them, too.” He pauses, flips the coin, catches and pockets it again. “It would be best if I went out to investigate their origins. Who knows? Maybe there really will be some treasure along the way.”

Oh.

Oh.

Briefly, your teeth sink into your lip. “So you’ll be gone for a while.”

That shouldn’t make you feel… empty. It’s just a fact. You have your life. Kaeya has his own, and duties to boot. Of course those duties would take him away from time to time.

Perhaps you got a bit too… comfortable over time. Perhaps you’re still too comfortable that if anyone ought to know about his absence, he should think it would be you.

Kaeya watches you out of the corner of his eye, a faint, knowing smile playing on his lips. “Will you miss me?” he asks.

You hug your knees to your chest. “Do you want me to miss you?”

He thinks for a moment, lets his gaze drag up to the stars, as though you never needed a statue to know real freedom. “It would be nice,” he finally admits, “if you thought of me every once in a while.”

It is easier to do so than he thinks. His presence lingers over you at the counter where every purchase is made; in your head he always has something to say about your favorite titles; he practically lives in the armchairs by the front window. Sometimes the echoes of his voice coo in encouragement as you hop up onto the stepladder; sometimes the ghost of his hand brushes over yours when it starts to ache from keeping accounts. And more often than not, shadows by the doorway catch your eye just before closing, and your stomach always clenches in the anticipation that he might have come by a little early.

You gather the grass in a fist just out of his view. “I suppose I could manage that.”

You’ve never seen such light in his face. You’ve never seen his expression so warm. Where you expected triumph, there is only surprise. Where you expected a smugness from your giving even a centimeter, you find only affection.

(How much of it is true? How much of it is real?)

“Well,” he says. “Allow me to make it a little easier on you.”

Before you can ask what he means, he pulls out a small spray of orange flowers, tied together with a ribbon and a finger-sized scroll of paper, from the inside of his coat. You’re too stunned to say anything at first, so he fills in the blanks as he frees one of the flowers and delicately tucks it in your hair. “Calla lilies. A particular favorite of mine.” He brushes a few flyaway hairs behind your ear. “I would have taken you to Springvale myself, but the stars never quite aligned… not to mention it would have ruined the surprise.” Carefully, he nudges the other two lilies into your grip, his smile only growing when your fingers briefly close over his.

Eventually, you find your words as you reach up to touch the flower yourself. Or, well, one word. The same as always. “Why?”

Kaeya watches the flowers in your hand, then looks up at you as though the answer should have been obvious all along. “You said you like it when things come in threes, didn’t you?”

Your stomach lurches, and you try to tell him he knows that’s not what you meant, but you end up stammering and falling silent for a spell, and your face goes hot. Again. “You… were paying attention.”

“Naturally.” His hand nudges yours. “I pay attention to important things.”

Your fingers curl around the scroll of paper. “All right,” you say. “What’s my least favorite drink?”

Kaeya leans back into his laugh, and you almost forget, in the realization that he means it all, that he’s leaving.

Chapter Text

[Ascension: 80]

Kaeya walks you to the Thousand Lives one last time.

It is especially somber this time around, more than it should be—it’s merely a temporary parting, not the steps to his doom—but he treats it like farewell instead of see you soon. He doesn’t insist on your arm in his, or break the silence with any grandiose words. Or even break the silence much at all. He only guides you along the streets with his hands behind his back, and every time you pass an alley or descend a walled staircase you think he might stop and do something unfathomably intimate while you still have some modicum of privacy.

(Think? Or hope? It is hard to tell the difference, so early in the morning or at all.)

The most he does is steal glances at you every so often, and rest a hand at your back to guide you, and you try not to show how the touch makes your skin prickle. And when you reach the shop, he briefly catches your fingers in his where Flora and Donna can’t see, or the guards at the gate. It feels like he should say something, anything. Jokingly make you promise to protect the city in his absence, or remind you under his breath to think of him every once in a while. Say your name. Call you “darling.”

He doesn’t. He only lets his gaze settle on yours, lets your hand slip out of his as he reaches up to finger the ribbon in your hair, the line of your jaw. It takes every fiber in you not to chase after the touch when he pulls away, and he smiles. Makes sure it’s the last thing you see.

Maybe it takes every fiber in him to turn his back, too.

(There you go, being conceited again.)

You watch him go, your grip on the shop door far too tight, and when he is gone you slip inside before the city guards can catch you staring, before Donna can ask you what that was all about—and inevitably launch into her usual longing for Diluc. (It’s actually kind of concerning.) There’s still some time before the shops open for the day, and in the dim quiet of the morning you settle at the counter and pull out your notebook, opening it carefully to the three calla lilies you pressed between its pages the night before.

Every once in a while.

A small scroll of parchment drops to the countertop, and you take a deep breath, and with shaky hands you unroll it and begin to read.

You learn to count time differently in Kaeya’s absence. Or perhaps you remind yourself of how you used to do it before. You count time in books sold and recommended, in courteous smiles exchanged. You count it in protesting creaks of the stepladder for those hard-to-reach selections, in glimmers of sun as it sets to mark closing, in the cautiously purposeful steps between work and home and back again. In lines of poetry.

In lines of Kaeya’s poetry.

The wonderful, harrowing thing about poetry is that every reading uncovers something new. A pause that was never there before. A word that wants, begs, to be spun two ways. A crack where the feelings spill through. It is wonderful because the reading of it never gets boring. Harrowing, because there is a pain in peeling back such vulnerable layers to someone, inch by inch, until you find the cure of what compelled them, tortured them, to write. Even when there is love in the writing. Especially when there is love in the writing.

You only let yourself read the scroll of paper twice a day. Once, just before you open the shop, when the morning is full of possibility and apprehension, when all you need is the sound of the words, the push to unlock the door and seize the day. Once, after the shop is closed, when the windows muffle the ruckus of the Angel’s Share regulars and Diluc’s strange, days-long absence. When all you need is a little bit of meaning, the reminder that you have done well.

It is better not to discover too much of him at once. It is better not to miss him so much.

It is better, too—has to be better—not to believe there is love in the writing.

But is it easy or difficult to miss him when so much of him lives in the shelves, or in the wrinkles of the armchair, or in the cracks of the cobblestones you pass over on your walk home? Is it easy or difficult to miss him when his words are so secure at your side? Or when his absence at the tavern is so pronounced by the dullness in conversation? Or when, if you linger at the statue of Barbatos and close your eyes for just a second, you can feel the buzz of his touch in the spaces between your fingers?

Both, you decide. It is in Kaeya Alberich’s nature to be easy and difficult, after all. And perhaps yours too.

You will never admit out loud that you learn to count time in dreams, too. In hazy looks and ghosts of touch, dimmed lights and dark corners, dismissed questions of whether you’re meant to feel your heartbeat in your sleep. In goodnight kisses left at doorsteps, hesitation, invitations inside. Fingers in fabric, tangled tongues, the security of false weight. Hushed confessions, as though he is possessed. As though he possesses you.

He tells you once that he loves you, whispers into your hair that he is yours for as long as you will allow it, and you wake before you can respond. You scrub the words from your teeth so that you never speak them. Run the water so loudly you cannot even think them.

Perhaps your choice in books has had a bit too much influence on you lately.

If Albedo were around, he would probably chuckle and fold his arms and ask, under the careful watch of his own painting, if you’re distracted again. He hasn’t been around in a while, most likely because of some experiment or other up in the depths of Dragonspine, but you can’t help wondering if he and Kaeya must have crossed paths at some point. If he must have gotten some letter about treasure, too, and gone hunting for it. Or if those letters took Kaeya up the mountain instead.

You laugh to yourself, glancing up at the painting, and put the thought and the distraction away. It is easy to simply miss Albedo and be done with it.

It is just as easy to study people from the windows, and in the corner of the tavern, and from the tucked-away corners in town—to take notes on them, sketch them with words for later reference. It is easy to sit on the steps of the church, to stand at the base of the statue, and think you might feel something divine, or to linger by the fountain and wonder if it’s worth wishing on mora—and what you would even wish for if it were. To fall back into old whimsies. To live on the edges of other people’s lives. To live the way you used to. A thousand lives, yours and not. A thousand two.

It is easy to be alone.

It isn’t easy to be lonely.

And it isn’t easy to admit, even to yourself, that you miss Kaeya Alberich.

You don’t have the right to. Even after all the banter, the walks, the touches—both accidental and not. There’s always the chance that behind all that sweet talking, there’s still something he wants. That he could hurt you at any time—get exactly what he’s looking for from you, and leave you in the dust. Maybe even be so cruel as to pretend not to know you anymore. And even if he didn’t get the best of you, someone else could. Word still gets around in Mondstadt, and all it takes is one jealous, vindictive soul to put a glaring target on your business. To send you under for daring to share space, and words, and…

And feelings.

To hell with conceit and caution for now. You miss him. You kneel at Barbatos’s feet in quiet reverence, and you miss him. You toss a spare coin into the fountain, and listen to José’s old songs, and you miss him. You read his poem, and dare to touch the now-dried calla lilies, and think about fashioning them into a bookmark, and you miss him. And at closing, you rest your head in your hands and start to count time in thick swallows, in exhausted shudders, in tears. In words you cannot say. The kind that only make themselves known when the people who ought to hear them aren’t around to.

You only allow yourself a few vulnerable moments—otherwise, you’ll spend too long wallowing, and you’d rather get home before the drunks spill out onto the streets. You take one last breath, tell yourself you’ll worry about bargaining and fear and acceptance when you have the time for it, and gather your things. And you are about to lock up and head home for the night when you catch another shadow of movement in the window. One that stops and lingers, makes itself known. One that is real this time.

Your blood warms and chills in seconds.

It’s Kaeya. Standing at the doorway.

No. Leaning on the doorway. Doubled over. Heaving.

His gaze meets yours, just as exhausted, and you bolt for the door without thinking. You haven’t locked it yet, thank goodness, and when you open it, silence falls between you. There are only the sounds of town at night and his shallow, stuttering breaths, unspoken questions about the scuffs on his cheek and the stains on his blouse.

“A Frostarm Lawachurl, on a tropical island,” he says weakly, half-delirious, by way of greeting. “Imagine that.”

It is all he says before his legs give out.

Thank Barbatos he didn’t lose consciousness. And that your reflexes were quicker than you remembered.

You managed to help him to the armchair, where he promptly collapsed and heaved a sigh. You had half a mind to take him to Miss Barbara yourself, but you weren’t so sure he could make the journey even with help, and he probably would have insisted on staying here anyway. So you told him to wait—just wait—while you quite literally ran to the first shop that was still open and had first aid in stock, all the while fighting the insidious instinct to go after whoever, whatever, hurt him.

He was still conscious by the time you got back, and you’ve been silent ever since. Even despite the scrapes and cuts on his hands, even despite all the effort it takes to loosen his cape and the laces at his waist, to help him out of his coat and his blouse. You‘re relieved the blinds are drawn, and that the lights are dim, and that your heart beat hasn’t given you away. You’re just as relieved that he’s chosen not to say anything either. At least about the clothes.

Eventually Kaeya does speak, just after you’ve wrapped his hand and set it to rest and told him he still ought to see Miss Barbara in the morning.

“There you are…”

His voice sounds cracked and dry, even after he clears his throat and laughs it off—and then goes tense from the pain. You try to focus on his words, and the next wound, instead of the faint warmth of his skin or the build of his torso. Those will torment you plenty later. “What are you talking about?” you ask, clipped in the way that still allows for an answer. “Of course I’m here.“

“No, no.” He catches your wrist with his good hand, and he must be hallucinating because he lets it slide up your arm, lets it cradle your face. His fingers are still cold. “The parts you try to hide all the time. They’re back.”

You don’t stop him, or pull his hand away; you must be losing your mind, too. “Should I ask what you mean? Or would you rather finally regale me with how you ended up like this?”

“You always love a good story, don’t you…” His hand slips away; briefly, you close your eyes and wish it hadn’t. Allow yourself to wish. “What is there to say? I went off in search of treasure, and… perhaps got more than I bargained for.” He shakes his head, lets it fall back with a sigh. “You know, that’s the funny thing about going up against an ice-based threat with a Cryo Vision. Doesn’t really work as well as you want it to. As a matter of fact, it doesn’t work much at all.”

“How…” Your brow furrows. “How did you even get back? Not on your own…”

A ghost of a smile flits over Kaeya’s face as he looks past you; you follow his gaze to the painting over the counter. “I had some help. Rocks, you see… well, they’re a little more effective against ice.”

He laughs again, then breathes in sharp through his teeth and clutches his abdomen. Without thinking, you hush him and rummage around for squares of gauze to clean the gash in his chest. For now, tending to the pain takes priority over smirks and the usual banter.

“Your hand is remarkably steady,” he comments, keeping his marveling to a murmur.

“That’s what happens when you work with children. You learn patience quickly. That, and first aid.” You press the gauze firmly with your thumbs, and he hisses, and you hush him more gently this time. “You learn to be ready for anything, I guess. Children are good teachers.”

“You must have been, too,” Kaeya says, “to speak so highly of them.”

“There you go, trying to flatter me again.”

He shakes his head— “No, never”—and you suppose neither of you has it in you for the back-and-forth.

You dress the rest of his wounds in silence, and Kaeya seems content to watch you work, just as always. He doesn’t mind or make comment when you have to move closer to him, or when you have to turn him around or put your hands on him in places you’d barely admit to dreaming of. The only time you say anything is when you finger the darkened, wrinkled splotch of skin at his waist. A scar that seems to wind around him.

“You were burned?” you ask.

Instead of saying something cheap and silly about burning only for you, he slips his hand under yours and nudges your touch away. “Years ago,” he says—hollow, remembering, as though he didn’t want to be reminded. “Don’t mind it.”

You nod, with a quiet apology, and wonder for a heartbeat moment if his eyepatch has anything to do with it. But the thing about heartbeats is that they continue, one after another after another, until something else stops them, and so the questions are the same. How did it happen? What was he thinking? How many times has this happened before? Does he fight the wounds, or just accept them for some past sin?

What if this happens again? Or something worse?

And what if he doesn’t make it that time?

And what if—

And then there is a hand cradling your face, a thumb pressing into your cheekbone. Cold fingers curl and lift your chin, and this time when Kaeya looks at you, there is nothing too light or too heavy in his expression. There is only himself.

“Hey,” he murmurs, soothing despite his own pain. “Why are you crying?”

You blink, confused, and only then do you feel the tears running down your cheeks. Hastily, you try to rub them away, but more replace them in seconds. And you think Kaeya is saying something, maybe some joke about how you didn’t need to miss him that much, or some half-hearted comment about how he isn’t worth crying over, but the words blur together before they can even reach your ears. Tender hands brush your hair back and coax you closer by your waist, and you don’t have it in you to question the impropriety of being pulled into his lap, of his palms resting so carefully at the small of your back.

He asks you again. “Why are you crying, hm?”

You shake your head; you don’t know how to put words to powerlessness, and fear, and the courage of being vulnerable.

His fingers trail up your back. “Are you worried I might get hurt again?”

You shiver, and nod before you can stop yourself, and you rub at your eyes with your sleeve despite the subtle appeal of watching his bare shoulder glisten.

“Afraid…?” His finger twists around a lock of your hair. “That you wouldn’t be able to do anything about it if I did?”

Another nod.

His hand cups the back of your neck, secure instead of teasing. “Are you afraid of losing me?”

He whispered the words, but they thunder and echo throughout the shop. This time, you hold your breath, and you don’t say anything, because he really is as good at pulling the truth out of people as rumor says. And he wasn’t supposed to, but he did. He wasn’t supposed to know, but now he does.

You are grateful for the blinds. You are grateful the sun has gone down.

His knuckles brush your cheek and you let them, and he calls you “darling” again and you let him, and when he runs those callused fingers down your back again it is as though he is unzipping you from every layer of caution you’ve kept between the two of you. As though he is freeing you to feel and think the things you wouldn’t before, because it is safe here, because he will zip them back up with the rest of you, because he will allow no one else to know them.

Don’t hurt me. Don’t leave. I don’t want to be alone anymore.

Because, perhaps, he will allow no one else to know this side of him, either.

He loosens his hold on you, and his nose bumps the shell of your ear. “Check my coat,” he breathes, the words prickling down the nape of your neck. “I brought something back for you.”

You lean back, at once curious and confused, and at his encouragement you slip out of his lap and feel around his discarded clothes. Eventually your fingers skim over something smooth, flared at the middle and tapered at the ends.

A seashell.

Kaeya is grinning, half-returned to his usual self, when you pull it out and hand him his blouse. “Go on,” he says, gesturing toward your ear. “They say you can hear the ocean inside.”

Carefully, you lift the shell to your ear, and your stomach lurches.

There is the ocean, just as he promised, wearing down rocks and washing over the shore. And then there is the echo of his sigh. And your name. His footsteps against sand and gravel. The hiss of the wind. The cry of a gull or two. A child’s laugh.

It is his voice inside the shell.

He laughs, as he always does, and weaves words with the sound of the ocean; he must be describing everything as far as the eye can see, everything he can sense. Clear skies and sea, golden sand, wild grass that grows up to his knees. Smooth pebbles just perfect for skipping, a breeze that cuts across his cheeks and ensures it can be tasted. Fireflies that gather in threes at sunset. It seems like the sort of thing people could write poetry about, he says. It seems this is the second best treasure he could ever find, he says.

He wishes you were there with him, he says, wishes he’d known what would be here, because you would have made lovely company. But this is close enough. A story is close enough.

In the shop, Kaeya waits for you to open your eyes—when did you close them?—before he smiles warmly, his fingers curling around the armrests of his chair. “Five hundred seventy-six, was it?” he says. “Or, maybe, one thousand three?”

You pause, scrambling for words as you lower the shell; you hardly part your lips before he cuts you off with your own question.

“’Why?’” he asks, a knowing spark in his eye as he looks you up and down, appraising you. He sighs, clearly satisfied with himself. “Because it is nice to have someone to come back to, when the fighting is done.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” you tell him. “There are better reasons to fight.”

“Well, not everything has to make sense. Truth is stranger than fiction sometimes.”

“You were fighting long before you met me.”

He rests his chin in his good hand. “People were a means to an end before I met you, too.”

You narrow your eyes, more bewildered than suspicious. “And what are people now?”

“People are people.” He readjusts in his seat and winces, perhaps trying to hide it. Perhaps sitting on some urge to pull you back to him, to remind himself what it feels like when you shiver. “You are something else entirely, what with you sauntering your way into my life, keeping me on my toes, one thing leading to another…”

You swallow hard. “And… what am I?”

Kaeya tilts his head, as though you should already know, and holds out his hand to you. “A friend,” he says, and you take it. “A confidant,” and he tugs you close. “Caution, and imagination, so much more than you would have others believe. So much more than you would have yourself believe.” His touch hovers at your waist, and you bite your lip and press his palm there, and he wraps his arm around you, and you let him, again. “You are kindness,” he says, “and whimsy, and wit. You keep stories, you guard them with your life, you are a story in your own right. You are worth knowing, and—”

His fingers curl tight into the back of your top, and you swear you can feel the chill of them through the wrinkles as he whispers against your jaw.

“Knowing you,” he says. He seems to know what to say, but there are bumps in his speech all the same. His breath hitches. His tongue stumbles. “Really knowing you. That is my esteemed honor.”

His grip on you loosens, allows you to lean back and watch every centimeter of him. The shine in his eye is genuine. The twitch at the corner of his mouth is reserved. His chest gathers deep breath, pushes it out slow, as though he is awaiting judgment. Scars and bandages shift where they peek out from under his open shirt. And his hands… his hands rest on you so carefully you barely sense they are there.

He waits. Despite everything, he always has.

He gives you that. Despite everything, he gives you so much.

You have nothing of your own to give him in return, so you reach up and slowly unfasten the ribbon in your hair, shaking it out as you reach for his hand. “Then,” you tell him, fumbling to tie a bow around his wrist. “I suppose you ought to have a reminder. Since you insist on coming back to me. Since you insist on…” You hesitate. “Knowing me.”

The knot does not come undone this time.

“I… “ For once, words fail him. His gaze drops to his wrist as he turns it this way and that, admiring the bow from all angles. “I do,” he finally says, far too hushed, “I do insist.”

“Then… “ Your fingers trail over his wrist, only briefly tangling with his. “Then, I have to insist on knowing you, too.”

There’s the spark you’re used to. “Deal.”

You hesitate again, curl shaky fingers under his chin, bend to press your lips to his eyepatch because it feels delicate and right and safe, it feels like a promise—and then to the ribbon, on the inside of his wrist, because it feels a little more brave. And then he is holding your face in his hands again. Leaning up. Pulling you in. He kisses you and it is practiced on his part, clumsy on yours, and it is better than anything you would admit to dreaming about, and it tastes like everything he’s ever wanted to tell you. Like months of craving. It is warm, and dizzying, and you learn to stop counting time because it does not warrant counting. You whisper his name against his lips when he lets you breathe, a test, a question, Kaeya, and apparently he’s also decided the distance isn’t necessary, because he growls under his breath and catches your lip between his teeth and buries his mouth in the hollow of your throat.

It is possibly the most unknightly thing he’s ever done.

It is definitely the most un-bookish thing you’ve ever done.

He hums, a pleasant buzz against your skin, and nuzzles his mouth against yours, one, two, three times. Leaves his smile on your lips, and gives your waist a squeeze, and rests your foreheads together while you catch your breath. He rakes his fingers over your scalp, doesn’t let you overthink the consequences or how embarrassingly easily you were undone.

How gluttony finds company.

You’re not sure what either of you is supposed to do or say, so you let him take the lead again because it is nice, admittedly, to give him the upper hand every once in a while. He doesn’t quite take it; he only strokes your hair, and tucks your head under his chin, and zips you back up with his fingertips. “I ought to get you home,” he says.

“I should be telling you that,” you say.

“How chivalrous of you.” He laughs softly when you stutter, digs residual pain into your sides with his nails. “I suppose I have no choice but to accept. But on one condition, of course.”

Trust him to still give you pause. “Okay.” You chew your lip. “Name it.”

Kaeya holds you tighter in spite of his wounds, or maybe to spite them. To revel in the warmth of permission, of crumbling walls. “You’ve got a thousand lives under your belt.”

“One thousand three.”

He hums, standing corrected, and presses his mouth to your neck one last reverent time. You trust he won’t sink his teeth there. (You wonder if he might, one day.) “Share one with me.”

You hold your breath. Close your eyes. Hear the echoes of the ocean again, turning in time with the anticipation in your stomach. “I suppose I could manage that.”

He grins, plays roulette with the numbers in your head, and you don’t have to wonder anymore as he goes against judgment, and claims you under the collar, and your mind screeches to a halt. “That’s my darling.”

You hope the lilies are not looking.