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Albedo dies surrounded by people who love him.
Jean is there, her arms outstretched and Anemo pushing out from her gathered fingers, locking him in place against the heart of Dragonspine. She’s crying – big, unapologetic tears - and so is Sucrose. Collapsed in the corner in a trembling mound of fabric and hair. No blood. Good. So he hadn’t hurt her.
Diluc has come too. A rare sight to see the brothers together, collaborating. Albedo feels a bit of pride – or something like it – to know that some growth has come out of all of this.
Pain rips through him and pools in his chest. His soul blisters, and so too does his skin. Externalized. His body – his borrowed heart - has betrayed him. When Albedo strains his neck to look down at the length of person, he doesn’t recognize any of it. Nothing but a mass of crimson limbs.
Albedo closes his eyes. He wonders where Klee is – hopes she’s far, far away.
His final belongings are his senses, and those too are failing. His ears ring, pound, blare, but even through that unflinching noise, there are words. Albedo can’t make them out. Maybe he’s also lost language. In a way, their cries of agony don’t sound much different than the cheers he knows well from celebrations, from warm afternoons, from birthdays.
Albedo inhales slowly, deeply. Anemo delivers him his breath.
It’s cold, he thinks, colder than he’s ever known.
Albedo opens his bleary eyes like he’s still waking from a dreamless sleep, and when vision returns, Kaeya is all he sees. He’d always been a difficult one to read – the eyepatch hadn’t helped with deconstructing those sly facial expressions – and even now his features are all twisted up and trembling and on the precipice of plummeting into total and irreparable despair.
When the sword passes through the god heart in Albedo’s chest - the one that had never belonged to him - the world shivers. Time ruptures and its splinters radiate outward into space.
Albedo goes in every direction.
-
“I brought you coffee.”
Albedo looks up from his ledger.
Jean is in the doorway, a paper cup in each hand. Steam spirals outward and upward, disappears into the sterile false sky of white tiles and fluorescent tubes. Humming, buzzing, imparting light and irritation. Albedo allows her into his office with a simple nod. She goes to the seat opposite him, but doesn’t sit - just sets one cup down and uses that hand to prop herself up against the chair’s back.
He sets his pencil down, the numbers forgotten. Somewhere in another hallway a phone rings.
“Congratulations on the promotion,” Albedo says, slipping a finger under his black suspender strap, feeling the difference between its elastic and the bleached cotton of his button-up shirt.
She takes that as her proper invitation to sit down. The chair makes only the slightest sound when its legs pull across the tightly coiled, gray carpet.
“I don’t feel very qualified,” she says, breathy.
Albedo pushes his glasses up high on the bridge of his nose. Now that she’s nearer to him, he can see Jean's collar is caught between her jacket’s lapel and her collarbone. Rushed morning commute, maybe.
He takes the coffee cup and sips tentatively from it. There’s oil on the surface and when he tips it back far enough, grit brushes up against his lips. Huffman must have made the pot this morning. He only uses a single paper filter in the machine. It’s the economical choice, and the subsequent annoyances are minor. Albedo, unconcerned, sets the cup on the cork coaster beside his ledger.
“Varka was delegating over half his responsibilities to you even before he stepped down,” says Albedo. “If anything, you’re finally getting paid what you ought to be.”
Jean’s head dips forward and her bangs hang accordingly. Stagnant air sits between them for a few beats of silence. Then she’s upright once more, straightening herself out. She fixes her collar - renders herself symmetrical.
“Maybe it’s more that the position itself is unsustainable.”
Her hand goes to the wooden plaque at the corner of his desk - the one that says his name and title. She straightens that too.
Albedo spins to the left in his chair - restores the asymmetry of their setting. “Something to discuss with the board, maybe?”
She smiles politely like it’s an impossibility.
“You weren’t here when Diluc quit, were you?”
Albedo’s eyes go between her and the windows - floor to ceiling, wall to wall. It’s an improvement from the basement office he’d been crunching numbers in for the last few years. Now he has sun, floor neighbors, and the never-ending music of the row of fax machines in the center hallway.
“No,” he eventually says. “Clearly it’s stuck with you."
Jean releases a sigh, crosses her legs, and leans back in the chair.
“He dared to criticize the board’s terms. Said they were unjust to our clients.” A pause. "I just think it’s suspicious that since he’s left, there’s been a series of promotions in quick succession. Growth this steep is going to plummet.”
Albedo rotates his chair so he’s facing her once more. Steam pours upward from their cups.
“And you think I have the numbers?”
Jean cocks a weary eyebrow. She brings her hand up to her face to hold her jaw, and the light catches her silver wedding band.
“I don’t know,” she says. “Do you? Has accounting come up with anything?”
The both of them look briefly to the ledger he’d been revising. It’s a mess of quantitative data - ultimately meaningless. Projections, estimates. He pushes it into the center of the desk. It’s a gesture of good intent and honesty more than anything.
“Private sector is flourishing. The pendulum will swing back in a few years - maybe at the end of the decade - and we’ll lose some staff.” Albedo flips through a few pages as if the columns could indicate anything concrete. “I’m not thrilled either.”
Jean is the one to turn away then. Her face falls and a sliver of indoor shadow leaps across it.
“But our contract with the city is due to be renewed spring of 1990. You really think we can last another four years before financial catastrophe? Varka handed out raises like candy before he stepped down.”
Albedo leans forward by a microscopic measurement - only enough for the subconscious to pick up on.
“That compassion is going to kill you, Jean. Maybe in another world it would do you well, but here?” Albedo motions upward as if to indicate the whole of the company - distributed across five floors in a precarious skyscraper.
He sees between her elegant fingers the start of a smile.
“What if I said I had a business proposition?”
A cloud passes outside, broadcasting cool shade into the office.
Albedo hums to break the quiet. “I’m listening."
-
The first time Albedo meets Klee, she takes him by the thumb. Never before has he seen a hand so small - not even his own when he was a child. Size is relative. So too is love, and when he looks into her glassy eyes, he witnesses an affection so great that everything he has ever known - snow and research and jutting stone and his master’s cold disposition and pine needle tea - shifts to accommodate it.
Her little hand squeezes, squeezes, squeezes his finger bone.
-
Albedo draws his feet along the bones in the top of his flexing foot - rising and falling like oars in the sea’s surface. His calf itches underneath the cast. Caustic and humid and out of sight.
The doctors had told him he wouldn’t dance again - not for years, and even then, there’d still be the chance of another fracture. It’s strange to see that logically - in hospital papers and figures and the mirage of his mind - and to feel the opposite in his adolescent muscles. He stretches again and waits for some jolt of pain - some clear sign that he should rest a little longer. It doesn’t come.
His phone, nestled amongst Sucrose’s comforter, flashes with a text from his aunt.
please text me next time you go out ok? just because I’m putting Klee to nap doesn’t mean you can slip out of the house without saying anything
While he’s looking at the date - considering the implications of time’s unrelenting passing - another text arrives, and his phone vibrates impatiently.
sorry to be so worried but we both know what happened last time you left and didn’t tell me. one car accident per week maximum ok?
“The deadline already passed, right?” Albedo knows the answer, but he wants to hear Sucrose say it.
“Forms are due tonight,” she starts, and her voice hitches high in her chest. “But Jean and Eula are in the program and their parents know the Favonius board. That has to count for something, right? Maybe they could arrange a late admission for you?”
“I doubt it,” he says. He can’t help the way it comes out of him cold. He doesn’t speak with cruelty. Both he and Sucrose know this; she’s fluent in his flatness. When it’s just the two of them, he doesn’t ever feel like he’s chasing after forgiveness.
When they dance together, it’s another thing entirely. No words necessary. Just air and flying arms and legs in long lines.
Sucrose puts her fingers at the base of his palm like he’s checking his pulse. Albedo doesn’t know what to do with touch, so he lets his hand lay limp at his side while she rubs reassuring circles into the skin there.
“I can wait a few years to apply to the program,” she says quietly.
Sucrose is impossibly light on her feet - the foil to Albedo’s steady steps. It’d be a great loss if she delayed enrollment.
“Don’t wait on my account,” he says. “Too competitive. We both know that."
Sucrose looks away and her narrow hand departs from his like a restless breeze.
He’s not sure if it’s placidity or euthymia that tempers the pain.
“I wish I had been there,” she says, the words shaking out of her. “If I could go back in time— I don’t know."
Maybe it’s neither of those things, Albedo thinks. Maybe it’s something else entirely.
-
There are crystalflies all around, interrupting the dusk colors of the air, and when Albedo pulls his gloves off to stow them in his breech pockets, his hands light up like lamps in the dark simply by virtue of their pale color. Diluc’s too, perhaps more so, but upon him there are freckles brushed across knuckles in artistic sections - dappled by the sun’s choice.
Albedo learns that selecting grape samples requires enough attention to not be monotonous, for the winery’s grounds are hilly and irregular. He does not need his sight to know that the soil beneath contains rock from the nearby gorge - eroded over time - and substrate brought in from the nearby stream’s sandbar. All of these things are fully felt through the tough sole of his riding boots.
“These should be ripe soon,” Diluc says off-handedly, his head nodding in the direction of a particular trellis.
Albedo walks under it and for a moment a nebula of ghostly green fruit and thick, dark vines surround him. Stars in earth tones. He re-emerges into the meager moonlight.
“It’s beautiful here,” he says. So follows the immediate epiphany of the word’s inadequacy.
Diluc watches him for a moment, and time passes between them without deliberation - tumbling forward and carrying the both of them by the ears like a stern mother.
“In another life,” he says, quiet and low. “Perhaps you live on these rural grounds instead of in the city."
Albedo falters. His breath too. Diluc looks away with no visible indication of embarrassment. The world is too dark for such a sight. With the capillaries of his spirit thoroughly crushed under existential grip, Albedo continues forward between the rows of grape vines.
While Albedo takes a few paces forward, Diluc does not move, and once they’ve made station in the same square foot, Diluc turns with an offering in his cupped palms.
“For you.” is all he says.
Albedo might require a set of auxiliary lungs when Diluc gives him a cluster of grapes - incidentally dusted with mist flower pollen - and their ungloved hands brush up against each other.
-
Albedo goes to Dragonspine’s core and watches its crimson heart pulsate. He wonders how it can glow with the same color as Klee’s eyes - bright and wide when she wakes up and realizes Kaeya had carried her to the lab sometime in the night. Morning surprises.
There are phenomena in the natural world that simply don't make sense. Hyperobjects that cannot be examined through any known method of research. The measurements of good things and bad things - whether they outweigh each other, whether they can co-habitate - is meaningless. It requires a formula that’s missing too many variables, and yet Albedo goes to the chalkboard again and again, seeking some answer for it.
Klee blinks, blinks, blinks the sleep away. Whatever is left in the corners of her eyes, Albedo is there to wipe it away with his thumb.
-
“You’re my neighbor—”
In. Out. In. Out. The needle goes in its diving pattern, directed by Albedo’s careful movements.
“—you do me favors—”
The simpler the shape, the more difficult it is to produce in the skin with a hollow-point needle and a stolen jar of black ink.
“—'cause I’m your neighbor—”
“Ouch,” Kaeya says. He doesn’t flinch. “Are you almost done?”
“—I’m not your neighbor—”
Albedo looks up slowly. His hand skitters across the carpet, searching for the crumpled paper towel damp with rubbing alcohol.
“Not even halfway.”
Kaeya wipes his brow in a show of exasperation. With the threat of the needle at least temporarily removed from his ankle, he’s free to throw himself backward onto a bean bag chair. It’s filled with Styrofoam, Albedo thinks, and when Kaeya’s gangly person sinks into it, the grating sound produced proves it couldn’t be anything else in that yellow vinyl casing.
“You Bakersfield trash!”
“Jeez, this shit hurts,” Kaeya says. “Are you sure this is a good spot for it? If I get in trouble at school for it then Crepus will totally find out.”
Albedo cocks his head in half-hearted curiosity as he dips the needle back into the jar of ink. Rosaria had stolen it for them from With Wind Comes Glory, and in return for her life ban and loyal service, Albedo had covered her thigh in roses and thorns as best he could with the tools available. What had previously been awkward teenage tension and unmitigated anxiety between them was easily transformed with the singular tool of a finely honed point.
"Traaaaaash! Traaaaaash!”
There’s a beat of fuzzy silence as the record progresses to the next song. Albedo pulls himself toward Kaeya’s leg to resume the tattoo.
“Go back to those gold sounds—”
In. Out. Scoot closer. In. Out. Wipe. Ink. Deep breath. Steady hands. In. Out.
“—and keep my advent to yourself—”
“Does it look okay?” Kaeya asks, voice tight like he’s restraining his breath. “It’s going to look just like yours, right?"
Albedo doesn’t pause, doesn’t falter. Just keeps on task.
“—because it’s nothing I don’t like—”
“Yeah,” he says, pulling back to refill the ink once more. “Mostly.”
“—is it a crisis or a boring change—”
When Albedo lifts his head back up, Kaeya is looking directly at the base of his throat - to the star shape that rests just above his collarbone. He’d tattooed it a week before in Alice's bathroom mirror, Kaeya excitedly pacing behind him the entire time. When they’d finally exited she was more frustrated that they’d come between her and her straightening iron than the fact that Albedo had permanently altered his body.
“Looks pretty cool, kiddo,” she’d said before wedging herself past the two of them - a beautiful catastrophe of rhinestones and body spray as she always was before her nighttime excursions. “Just keep that stuff away from Klee, okay?”
Albedo shakes the thought away. Kaeya’s gaze relocates to his ankle.
“—when it’s central, so essential?"
“Hey, wait,” Kaeya says and leans forward. “Can you turn it up? I like this song.”
“It has a nice ring when you laugh—”
When Kaeya sings along, he does it with his whole body - shoulders and hands trembling with the sheer volume of his pitchy voice - and despite his best attempts, Albedo’s needle still skips over a few patches of skin, depositing errant bits of ink in unwanted areas - like a kid trying to jump across a crack in the sidewalk and instead falling into the un-mowed grass, like a patch of shadow in the sun’s path.
“—at the low-life opinions—”
Like a record skipping.
-
“Wake up!”
Albedo’s first proper birthday celebration is organized by Klee.
“How did you get in here?” Albedo stretches, yawns, rolls into lucidity.
Up until that point, it had been a quiet affair, often spent alone in the Dragonspine campsite gathering samples or under the tree at Windrise with a fresh sketchbook laid out in his lap. He does not know the proper method by which to accept thoughtfully wrapped gifts, nor does he have a good technique for which to blow out candles.
“Klee.” She tugs him out from his bed with such force that it dislodges his voice from his throat. “Where are we going?”
He stands, the blankets settle, and for a brief moment she allows him to regain his posture and straighten up to his full height. Albedo starts toward his dresser to change out of his cotton pajamas, but when he casts a cautious glance at Klee, she’s looking up at him with such joyful ferocity that he knows instantaneously any attempt at stalling will earn him a thorough scolding.
“We’re going home, Albedo!” She cries out, incomparable glee coloring every note. “Everybody is waiting for us.”
“Everybody?” He wipes the sleep from the corner of his eyes as he’d done for Klee a dozen times. How odd to have their roles switched. “The Knights?”
She takes him by the wrist and jostles him like a plucked dandelion.
“Not just the Knights. Klee invited everybody,” she says, her little hands pulling him through the threshold with a power that can only be produced by childlike delight. “They’re all waiting for us, so let’s hurry, okay?”
It turns out Albedo doesn’t have to worry about the blowing out the candles part; Klee - emboldened by her successful party planning - is so eager to show him how that she extinguishes every little wax pillar in a single, excited breath.
-
There are a thousand other worlds scattered in spacetime, through Celestia and heaven and enlightenment and the infinitesimal distance between two sets of hands – reaching for each other. Albedo occupies every inch.
Even after the sword has been pulled from his heart, after the Knights have cremated him into ash and scattered him at the base of Dragonspine and in the gentle froth of Cider Lake, he goes on living in the corner office under midday purview, before the mirrored wall of a ballet studio, in a shag-carpeted bedroom with stolen goods, under banners of grape vines, at a birthday party with Klee’s hand in his.
When the witnesses to this particular death grow old and the event becomes distanced from its pain through age and myth, there will always be that single detail that sends melancholy and joy and despair and euphoria through every part of the storyteller’s body—
As Albedo died – though his skin was mottled with sick vermilion and tar pooled at his waterlines – he erupted in golden light, and for a brief moment all anybody knew was that brilliant color.