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It’s never bothered her to have Albedo in her space while she’s working on her column for The Steambird. He’s a quiet young man—minds his own business and focuses on his own work, so he doesn’t needlessly distract her when she’s trying to hunker down and meet a strict deadline. He’s pleasant company, too, with the occasional jest should a particular thought cross his mind, or a contented hum when he’s pleased with his own progress.
The silence that she shares with Albedo when they work—separately, but together—is far from being anxiety-riddled and suffocating. It’s comfortable; one might even consider it to be intimate.
When Albedo first speaks after having been quietly engrossed in his painting for quite some time, he begins with a thoughtful hum and a breathy little laugh that pulls Mona’s attention away from her own penmanship. She only tilts her head to the side to indicate that she’s listening.
“You know,” Albedo starts, and his gaze lifts from the canvas for a moment to check for her response. He’s facing her little table in the corner, and she’s almost entirely blocked from his view by the sheer size of the stretched canvas before him. “Klee said something quite interesting to me the other day.”
“Oh?” The astrologist takes another few seconds to finish putting her thoughts to the paper before she adds, without so much as sparing a glance in his direction, “What might that be?”
There’s a little glass resting on the easel’s tray, and he dips the end of his brush into it and stirs absentmindedly, until the paint thins into baby blue wisps in murky water. “To put it simply, she was inquiring about the nature of our relationship.”
Mona, with a stutter in her heartbeat and a prickle of embarrassed heat crawling up her neck and burning in her ears, tenses up for a fleeting moment before she forces herself to relax. It takes effort to keep her gaze pinned on the papers under her hand. She doesn’t want to risk a flustered glance over at the alchemist, lest they make eye-contact—he could read her like an open book.
She can tell he’s expecting some kind of response, though he’s turned most of his attention back to his painting. Even the sound of his brush being skillfully swept across the coarse canvas feels loud in the otherwise silent room.
“Well,” Mona says when she realizes that he isn’t going to explain any further unless he’s prompted. “Aren’t you going to tell me what you told her when she asked?”
“I told her the truth, of course,” he tells her, and his voice is so delicate that she feels as though she could melt. “We’re friends—colleagues, perhaps.”
A shred of disappointment that he hadn’t thought of them as more might have settled itself into her heart if he were being honest with his answer. Although Mona isn’t certain of the exact details, she knows he isn’t telling the whole truth.
He’s hiding something from me, she thinks, pursing her lips and tapping a finger on the table a few times in consideration. And he knows that I know.
“What did Klee really ask you?”
She isn’t entirely sure why she says it. It’s a lingering thought in the back of her mind, something she can’t explain that’s nudging her in the direction she needs to find the truth behind his words.
But Albedo knows, and he chuckles when she catches him in his dishonesty.
Mona is certain that he hadn’t teetered on the truth for the sake of lying to her; rather, the shift in his energy now seems to be something bordering on amusement and pride, as though he had been testing her ability to realize when someone is trying to hide the important details.
The alchemist hums thoughtfully, another soft bubble of laughter dancing its way past his lips as he sets his brush down. It’s his way of indicating that she now has his full, undivided attention. “She asked me if I had kissed you yet.”
Mona chokes on a breath, cheeks flushing to an embarrassed shade of red. Unable to force herself to focus on something else, her gaze snaps in his direction now; she feels almost like she’s been cornered.
She doesn’t realize how high her voice rises in indignation—instead of keeping the conversation on the status of their relationship, as it seems Albedo wants to do, she turns it around on the young girl who has apparently put them in this situation in the first place.
“Why is she thinking about things like that?”
Albedo chuckles, though he doesn’t seem nearly as bothered; Mona almost wishes she could be just as good at being relatively unreadable.
“A consequence of allowing her to hang around Kaeya too often, I presume,” he suggests with a shrug. “It could even be her little fairytales—a prince and a princess share true love’s first kiss. I believe it goes something like that.”
There’s more to this than what he’s said so far, and Mona knows it. Against her better judgment, she decides to pry a little further.
“So, when you told her that we haven’t, ah—” Mona clears her throat and hesitates for a moment, as though she can’t find it in herself to speak that word aloud. “—kissed, I’m assuming that wasn’t the end of the conversation?”
“Of course not,” he says. “It’s Klee.”
“Mm, that’s true.” Mona has finally set her own pen down, allowing her hands to rest gently on the table, and she’s careful not to let her skin smear the wet ink across her papers. “Then please, continue.”
“Well, once I told her that we haven’t, she asked me when we would.”
“I see.”
Mona can’t help but wonder why he’s decided to bring this all up now. It almost feels like a confession, in its own backwards way, to use Klee’s curious, unfiltered questions to venture closer to admitting his own feelings.
In hindsight, Mona feels like she should have seen this coming. Her ability to read into the future is certainly useful in many situations—of all the things she had been able to prepare for in advance, why couldn’t she have steeled herself for this incredibly embarrassing conversation?
“And what did you say to that?” she urges, and it’s hard to pretend like she isn’t itching with curiosity.
“The truth,” he says again, and Mona narrows her eyes because this conversation is going in circles. There’s a ghost of a smile on his lips as he covers his mouth with his hand and adds, “I’m unsure if you’d want me to. After all, it would be quite rude of me to kiss you if you aren’t interested.”
There is so much she could say now. She could complain that she thought she had been obvious, and she could question him, asking him how dense he had to be, if he hadn’t noticed that she had been interested for weeks. She could even, perhaps, wave off their conversation and turn back to her work to spare herself any further embarrassment.
But she doesn’t do any of those things.
Mona, with intuition on her side, drums her fingers impatiently on the surface of her table while dropping her gaze to her lap, and she murmurs, “I wouldn’t mind if you did.”
Silence follows.
And then she hears shuffling as Albedo adjusts his things and then crosses the room with a slow and steady gait. The astrologist remains seated in her chair, following each movement with her own eyes wide and eager.
“May I?” he asks as he reaches her side. He’s already bending forward to meet her height, and he carefully takes her chin in his fingers.
“Yes,” Mona breathes.
Albedo meets her gaze as she answers, and his eyes are full of curiosity and wonder and raw, unspoken passion. Their noses bump together, a little clumsily, and he uses his grip on her chin to tilt her into a better angle. Mona’s eyes flutter shut only a heartbeat before he claims her mouth in a tender kiss.
It seems the proverbial fireworks do exist, Mona realizes—she feels dizzy with the thrill of his lips moving gingerly against her own. He’s unpracticed, and so is she, but the butterfly wings beating frantically in her stomach are more than enough to make up for their shared inexperience.
The urge to drag him forward by the collar begins to surface when she realizes that she should be doing something with her hands. She lifts them in thought, but with trembling fingers, she awkwardly clutches at his coat instead, only to hold him in place.
Mona finds herself leaning forward to chase his lips when he finally begins to pull away. He doesn’t meet her again; instead, he lets go of her chin and straightens up. When he clears his throat, Mona peeks up at him shyly.
“Was that alright?” he asks, voice a little tight. His cheeks are dusted rose, and Mona thinks this must be the first time she’s ever seen him even slightly flustered.
“More than,” she tells him quickly, and she’s nodding—perhaps a little too furiously, she notices when her hat begins to slip from its place atop her head. Mona readjusts it as she shifts her gaze elsewhere.
Albedo turns away as if to give her space, straightening out his coat as he begins to pad softly back to where he had abandoned his painting across the room. “I apologize for interrupting your work for such a trivial matter.”
“It’s not trivial,” she says in earnest, and though she has more she would like to add, Mona falls quiet, taking her pen back into her hand and looking for the place on her paper where she had left off.
It’s an awkward silence now—he steps back in front of his easel, gently picking up his brush and regarding the canvas thoughtfully as if to determine where he should continue his work.
Then, as he dips the brush into a violet as deep and as rich as Mona’s hair, he says, “I have been thinking about this since Klee mentioned it the other day.”
With a warm feeling swelling in her heart, Mona says, “Don’t tell me that you’re going to tell Klee we just did that.”
“I might, if she asks,” he muses, and he pauses for a moment to focus on his brushwork. “I fear her next question might be a little more intrusive, if she thinks these things happen the same way as her fairytales.”
“What do you mean by that?”
Albedo peeks around the side of the canvas to meet Mona’s gaze, and for a heartbeat, she thinks she sees a spark of mischief flicker across his own. “She might ask when we plan to get married.”