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Angel's Share has a warm and homely atmosphere tonight. It's a weekday, too early for any workers or regulars to have come in yet, but late enough that the lights inside serve as a nice counter to the rapidly setting sun. Mona's sitting in the corner, by the door, watching the occasional customer drift in and out as she slowly nurses a glass of dandelion wine.
She wouldn't normally come here, would rather spend her mora on other things, but something about tonight is going to be different. Fate will inevitably have its way with her, of course, but she's learned enough from the tragedies to never try and avoid it. If something different is going to happen tonight, the way she's foreseen, then she will be different too.
Time drags on, her glass grows empty, and someone new walks in the door. It's not any local, an Inazuman by looks, and he's got the kind of mix of intention and uncertainty you only find in someone who's new to a city. There is something else about him, something that sends feather-light shivers up her spine, that she cannot fully blame on his pretty face.
Not seeing her, tucked in the corner as she is, he walks up to Charles at the bar.
"What'll it be?"
"Oh, I'm not here for a drink. I'm looking for someone, actually."
"Are you? You know, even in Mondstadt, information doesn't come free."
"It's nothing big, I promise– I was just wondering if you knew where Mona Megistus lived."
Charles looks over at her, a question in his eye. Perhaps a more sensible girl would make a better choice, but she is no such girl. She nods.
"Well, I can't tell you that, but I can tell you she's right behind you."
The stranger spins around, his eyes widening, the rosy tint of embarrassment coloring his face as if he hadn't been asking after her a second earlier. He pulls his hat down over his face a beat too late, failing to hide his surprise from her.
"Well? You wanted to see me, didn't you?"
She gestures to the empty seat next to her, and after just a stretch just long enough to qualify as atypical he takes her offer. He doesn't quite settle, even after he sits, instead folding into himself with his hands tucked nervously into his lap.
He's comfortable enough to steal a few glances over at her, though, far more anxious, more afraid of what he'll find, than the average adventurer seeking their fortune. It's like there's something in particular he's looking for, like he's got an image of her in stained glass that he's holding up in comparison to the real thing. If he's satisfied with what he sees, though, she can't quite tell.
"... Yes," he starts.
"You don't just want your fortune told, do you?"
"It's kind of a long story," he says, shooting a glance back at the bartender. "Do you mind if we go somewhere more private?"
She can see the headline now– Mona Megistus dead after going out into the woods alone with a pretty stranger who knows more than he's willing to let on.
"Sure," she says. "I know just the place."
~
She takes him outside the city gates, just across the bridge, far enough away so the guards can see but not hear them. If worst comes to worst, she can teleport over to them and get backup. Something tells her it won't come to that, though.
He walks over to the water, staring down at his own dark reflection as if the answers he's come to her for can be found there. If they could, she's sure he wouldn't have approached her. He does not seem the type to talk to anyone if he doesn't have to.
"Why did you come here?" She asks.
"I've had some… problems, with my memory recently."
"Problems."
"I lost them. I was able to get most of them back, but not all."
He turns back towards her, but does not meet her eyes. There is something he fears more than anything, she can tell, and that is something is shaped like her.
"Do you need my help with finding the rest, or–"
"I knew you, once."
She looks him over, more intently this time. He is a complete stranger. She has never met him before. And yet–
And yet she knows him well. It's like when you don't realize something was a dream, and it starts to bleed into reality, coloring everything you see even as you first forget that it wasn't real, and then that it was at all. This is someone she's familiar with, someone she has an impression of, a text she's read that's been scraped off the page and overwritten with something new. He is a stranger in the sense that her childhood home is a stranger; the trappings may be different but she still remembers the foundation.
Perhaps she's the same thing to him; perhaps there is some history, unknown to her, that he sees instead of her current shape.
There is nothing to be said for it, either way. Reality is as it is.
"I don't remember you."
"You wouldn't."
He looks back over the water. The night has dyed it black.
"My memory problems– it was Irminsul. I erased myself from everything. There's ways of storing memory, though, even beyond that, and so I could recover almost all of mine. Everyone else forgot about me, though."
"So I don't remember you."
"No."
"And you don't remember me."
"That's the one thing I'm missing, yes."
"So then why aren't we strangers?"
He laughs, in something closer to relief than mirth. If all the world has forgotten him, then she figures that this must be the only real connection he's got left– the girl he too can't remember.
Memories are funny things, flighty things, with a tendency to vanish when you aren't looking and then reappear, misshapen, when you next look for them. You forget the pain, but remember the scar. They do not remember each other, and they are not strangers.
He doesn't reply, not verbally, because he doesn't need to. The point is made, the playing ground equal.
"One more thing," she says. "Do you have a place to stay?"
~
The morning light streams in through her window, rousing her out of sleep far earlier than she usually likes. But things are not usual, today, and she makes her way into the main room to check up on the guest she'd left on the couch.
He's already awake, poking through her things with the analytical precision of a coroner performing an autopsy. She hopes he isn't trying to find any one item in particular, because she thinks they both know at this point that it won't be there. No traces of them exist outside their own memories, and those memories have long slipped away from them like sand through one's fingers.
"My name is Kunikuzushi," he says, trying very hard to seem as if he has not been looking at her since she entered.
It feels right. It feels like that is his name, like that is the name she called him.
"I know," she replies.
"You remember?"
"It sounds right."
He turns towards her, no longer trying to disguise the object of his interest. She likes the way he looks at her, like she's an unsolved puzzle. Sometimes about it stokes– not her ego, but something else, something she's not quite willing to define.
"... Very well," he says.
~
"Going back to the tavern?"
"What do you think I am, some kind of drunkard? No, I'm going stargazing."
"What, was it a special occasion?"
"If you really must know, I was waiting for you."
That shuts him up, but does not stop him from following her out the door. She normally doesn't like other people to come with her when she stargazes, but whatever he is, he's an exception.
He trails after her like Eurydice all the way to Starsnatch cliff. She lays out the few books she'd brought, and pulls out her mirror, and he sits just far enough behind her to not be in her way. All things considered, he's an inoffensive companion, which surprises some part of herself she'd hadn't known existed.
She hums, sometimes, when she's out like this, and she doesn't know she's started until he cuts her off with a mournful sigh.
She turns, stealing a glance at him. His face is a strange mix of pain and pleasure, comedy and tragedy, his mouth curved in a soft smile but his eyes resigned to the cruelty of fate.
~
That night, she dreams of endless blue, of the sky blending into the horizon so completely she cannot tell where the world ends and it begins. When she looks down, it is not water beneath her, but the ground, lousy with little blue flowers.
She leans down, tries to inspect them, but the second she reaches out they wither. Helpless, she watches as death overtakes the whole field, what once was blue turning cracked and brown.
When she wakes up the next morning, Kunikuzushi is gone.
~
Mona begins to wonder if she'd dreamt him up, if he'd been some far echo in the corner of her mind brought to life on a mix of sleep deprivation and alcohol. He'd certainly felt unreal, like he'd walked out of some fantasy story, some fairytale, and been unable to blend in with the mundane world. He'd been a doll, she thinks, a mermaid, who'd wished to be human but could not manage that burden for more than a short span of days.
But she didn't. He was real. She looks for his stars, and finds them. He has gone to Sumeru. He is going to come back.
She continues to go about her life, to copy the motions of her typical routine, and nobody else knows that she is waiting for him. Ultimately, the object of her studies is the human heart, and his is probably one of the most intriguing she's seen.
That's all.
~
She comes back from getting groceries and finds the door unlocked. He is sitting at her kitchen table, flipping through her research.
"It's polite to knock," she says.
"I have never cared to be polite."
"Well, I do. How was your trip?"
"Annoying. Thank you for asking."
They both go silent, and the room fills with the quiet clatter of her putting her purchases away. She can feel him watching her, using his eyes like hands to measure the quality of her character. His gaze is not so unwelcome.
"Why Sumeru?" She decides to ask, to let him know she's been watching him too.
"I am in debt to the dendro archon."
"She does not seem the type to keep track of such things."
"She isn't, but I am. One day, I will pay her back, and not be beholden to her any more."
"And when you are free, where will you go?"
He doesn't reply.
~
"You know, it's funny. You came looking for me, but you haven't asked me a single question about myself."
He pauses, considering, idly running his finger along the rim of his teacup. She'd ousted him from his spot to do her work, and he'd relocated to the furthest corner of the table. She doesn't know why he doesn't leave entirely if he's insistent on being so far away.
“I wanted to know what sort of person you were. You can’t pick that up by asking questions.”
“Well, I have some questions for you. Who are you?”
“Kunikuzushi. I’m a wanderer.”
“And how does a wanderer end up erasing himself from Irminsul?”
“How does the best astrologist of this century end up destitute in Mondsadt, forced to write for a foreign newspaper just to pay her rent?”
“You– I could make a fortune reading fate, you know, if I wasn’t so principled.”
He smirks, his teasing eyes still visible even as he takes a sip of his tea.
“Don’t look at me like that. It’s true. If I charged people for readings, if I lied to them and told them they always had happy fortunes, I could be rich. But I don’t, and that’s what makes me such a great astrologist.”
He doesn’t reply to that, not immediately, instead looking down into his tea. Even if he could read tea leaves, which she doubts given his temperament, there’s still too much liquid in the cup to get an accurate impression.
“I think you and I could do great things together,” he says.
~
He stays this time, sticking to her like a bug to fly-paper. The people in the city begin to pick up on him, on the strange and handsome stranger she’s never seen without, and they both ignore the whispers that follow them in the streets. Yet more time passes, and even he becomes normal, the rumor mill turning to some newer, shinier, gossip.
She takes him to Musk Reef. She does not know why. She does not usually stargaze here. He stares at the sand, transfixed.
"Mona?"
"Yes?"
"Do you ever–"
He does not continue, looking at the sun set over the water, and then at her. He takes a deep breath, as if staving off something.
"I feel like we've been here before," she finishes for him.
"... Yes," he says. "We have, haven't we?"
~
"Why the heart?"
She glares up at him, and covers the article draft he'd been reading over her shoulder. It’s closer to the main point of her research than she usually writes about, and therefore has quite a lot to do with the intricacies of the human heart. She’s not really satisfied with it, finding her draft consists of far more questions than answers.
"Human hearts are behind everything. If you understand the heart, then you understand humanity, and if you understand humanity, you understand their fates."
"And what about gods?"
He crosses over to the other side of the room, and picks up a bishop from a chess set she'd forgotten she'd stuffed in the corner. He twirls it between his fingers, a mournful expression on his face.
"I'm only mortal. I can hardly begin to understand the logic of the archons."
"You undersell yourself. Their hearts are filled with just as much malice and deceit as anyone's."
"... In your experience, maybe. But I believe in the goodness of people."
He pauses, sets the chess piece back down.
"And where has that gotten you?" He asks, softly, speaking more to himself than to her.
"Here," she replies.
~
“You know,” she muses one evening, exiled from the kitchen as he makes a filling, although not frugal meal, “If you really intend to live here you don’t have to stay on the couch.”
He coughs, and does not say anything, does not even move, for one long moment that seems almost to last forever. She wonders what she thinks she means by that, or if maybe she’d made some sort of presumptuous assumption.
“It’s fine,” he answers, and nothing more.
~
The next morning, he gathers his scant few possessions and meets her at her door. He staunchly refuses to look her in the eye.
“I have to go back to Sumeru. The dendro archon has some business for me.”
It’s not a lie, but it's not the truth either. He is saying what he is saying without any regard for the truth at all.
“You can’t delay?”
“No.”
“Well, alright. But– do come back, will you?”
He looks up, finally meeting her gaze, and nods just a fraction too hesitantly for her to be completely satisfied.
But he is not hers to keep, and so she lets him go. She can only hope that he’s the type to keep his promises.
~
The next evening, the next awful, lonely evening, she finds a single crushed stem of forget-me-nots underneath her couch.
~
“Say, that friend of yours– where has he gone off to?”
She sits at the bar of Angel’s Share, on an otherwise familiar evening, and sighs into her wine. She cannot even muster the care to complain about the liberal amount of sarcasm Charles had laced into the word friend.
“Sumeru. Business.”
“Must be important business, if he’d be willing to leave for it. He seemed to really like y- the city.”
“... Yes. I suppose he did.”
~
Days turn into weeks, and she remembers what it is like to live on her own. It’s not unpleasant, far from it, and she enjoys having time to herself, but she’d gotten used to his company and now there is a part of her that feels incomplete. Perhaps it’d be more accurate to say, she considers, that she has always been this way and only now that he’s come and gone can she see it.
Either way, it’s unfortunate.
She’d tried to grow the forget-me-nots, had become enamored with their blue color, but the cutting she’d found had possessed neither root nor seed. She’d had to settle for pressing one of the flowers, although they were misshapen, and now every so often she opens her grandest astrology tome just to look at its preserved face.
~
The morning sun pours in like bitter lemonade, dying her room shades of pale yellow. She does not normally wake up this early. She consults the stars, and finds that she is to receive a guest. Accordingly, she gets herself up, and prepares for whoever it is might appear.
A few hours later, there is a soft knock at her door. She hadn’t allowed herself to wonder about who might be coming, but so close to the moment itself she can no longer help herself and allows her imagination to run free like a stampede of wild horses. She should have just checked the stars to see who was coming, but she wants to wonder. Just in case.
She opens the door.
It’s Kunikuzushi. It was always going to be Kunikuzushi. Such is the logic of fate. He is holding a scant few sheets of paper, closer to a signature than a book, to his chest, and seems far paler than she remembers him.
“I’ve brought something for you.”
“Yourself, I hope.”
“It’s just–”
“Come in.”
“I-”
“Please.”
He comes in, coughing slightly into his hand as passes her in the entryway. She spots a flash of blue in his palm, but he quickly spirits it away into the folds of his outfit.
He sits on the couch, and she pulls out a chair to sit across from him.
“... I wasn’t being completely honest,” he admits. “There was a reason why I couldn’t remember you.”
He holds out the booklet. She takes it.
“The reason why I’m in debt to Kusanali is because she spared me after I became a false god and usurped her. And the reason I can’t remember you–”
He doubles over coughing. Strangely helpless, she begins to read.
Date: XX/XX/XX Entry: XX
The experiment is progressing. Construction of the body is underway. The subject’s physical condition is less fit than expected. Will continue to monitor.
Date: XX/XX/XX Entry: XX
Issue with subject has been identified. Hanahaki. Preliminary memory scans indicate cause is a Mona Megistus of Mondstadt.
Diagnosis conveyed to subject. Plans made for surgical removal. Subject responded negatively upon communication of these plans to him. It was then communicated to the subject that the cause would be eliminated if he did not comply. Subject then stopped engaging, and appeared distressed.
No such plans for elimination exist. Emotion will make the subject unfit for godhood. This includes harm inflicted on the cause.
Surgery will be performed as soon as possible.
Date: XX/XX/XX Entry: XX
Subject’s diagnosis has worsened. Further suggestions of surgical removal have been rejected. The subject’s mental state appears fractured, potentially making him unfit to develop further.
All other plans are progressing according to schedule.
Date: XX/XX/XX Entry: XX
The physical body is ready. Subject will be sedated for insertion and connection. Subject has assented to sedation.
Plans have been made for removal surgery at this time.
Date: XX/XX/XX Entry: XX
Subject has been connected to the god-body. Tests are returning positive results. Synchronization has been achieved.
Scans indicate that the hanahaki removal was successful. All memories of the cause have been removed. Preparations are underway for the creation of a memory backup, to use against the subject in case of further resistance.
… It is not very scientific of me to record this here, but I cannot imagine a better outcome. The complete loss of Scaramouche’s memories will keep him pliable.
“That’s all Kusanali could recover,” he says faintly. His lap is covered in blood and bright blue petals. “Everything else was lost when I rewrote Irminsul.”
“... This is why you came looking for me.”
“ I wanted to know what you were like. I am… not a romantic person, so I figured that you had to be remarkable."
She looks him over, carefully. He’s leaning back, exhausted, his face frighteningly pallid, and he seems to lack even the energy to brush the flowers off his lap.
He smiles at her.
"I was curious, and willing to give up everything."
“And now you’ve caught it again.”
“And now I’ve caught it again,” he repeats. “It doesn’t look like I expected anything of you last time, and I want you to know that’s still the case now.”
“Why’d you tell me?”
“You asked me to come back.”
Yes, she supposes. She did.
“I’m terribly fond of you, Mona, and I’m also terribly selfish. I will not give this up.”
She looks back down at the records in her hands, stares helplessly at the impossible past and the impossibility of changing it. He is in front of her, again, alive, and neither of them can remember what happened before.
“I’m not letting you stay on the couch.”
“... I’m sorry to have to ask, but I won’t make it back to Sumeru if I don’t-”
“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re welcome to move in with me, if you’d like.”
He stares at her, something undefinable spread across his face. She fears he has not understood her, and the only thing for the failure of words is action.
She rises, holds out her hand, the curve of the jaw is cold to the touch. The best way to rectify such a situation is, or so she’s heard, physical touch.
"Mona?"
His voice is rough, damaged by coughing fits, and she can feel the shape of it moving beneath her fingers.
Hanahaki, though so often interwound with the souls of its victims with the kind of intimacy only dying can bring, is not incurable; and of the available cures, some are far kinder than others.
Mona does not claim to have a complete understanding of the heart. She does not think she ever will, because the nature of the heart is to evade understanding. Still, though, she has– and this is how she has surpassed her master– knowledge of herself, and of how to be kind.
She moves in closer, and kisses him softly.