Work Text:
The Chief Alchemist of the Knights of Favonius was a mysterious figure in many ways - he vanished as quickly as he appeared to his lofty Dragonspine laboratory to conduct experiments almost entirely unknown to the people of Mondstadt. It would be so easy to misconstrue the man for a mad scientist if it weren’t for that clean, cool and seamless manner he conducted. Instead of a strange and fleeting oddity, Albedo was revered and a topic of curious rumour and conversation.
Sucrose was inevitably of those many who looked up to the man. She was pained on a daily basis watching him effortlessly drift around the lab and wholeheartedly devote himself to his experiments then so easily shift into being amicable and sociable at anyone’s beg and call. While their research fields were vastly different, the girl knew that if she ever decided to journey on the path her superior did, she’d spend the rest of her life in an unending game of catchup to his near incalculable genius.
She worked tirelessly and constantly in an unending world of variables, each possibility mapping its way in front of her regardless of the situation. The anxiety of missing a potential from an unseen catalyst or sequence that was unconsidered plagued her and formed the apparent deficits surrounding her character like a protective yet entirely reclusive bubble. Her research was the only instance where discovering a variable not yet discovered was welcome, allowing refinement past what would be otherwise impossible with mere natural evolution. On the other hand, Albedo relished in those everyday unseen variables Sucrose avoided like the plague. She could sometimes see it in his otherwise unreadable eyes, a calculating glint when something was atypical. It wasn’t fear that gripped him, but an electrifying interest and intrigue.
Sucrose was strange. Albedo was also strange… but so much more streamlined. She could see so much of herself within the blonde yet also nothing at all. So much on the same level as her, but so above him. In the same way her experiments enhanced things above what was above the natural order, Albedo was the Tetratanic sweet flower to her regular home grown variant.
These thoughts gripped her in the early hours of the morning as she was testing her newest experiment for her personal wonderland. In her head, it had been laid out as such:
Berry Sweetness Extraction: Enhancement and Test Version 4. Plant dissection and Analysis.
It was an easy task. She’d take a Berry plant she’d dug up in the wild and analyse its root, stem and leaf system to identify what factors within made the berries grown on its branches so sweet, and how to further optimise it to yield more fruit. The end goal of this relatively simple task was to create a berry approximately two and a half times sweeter and larger than those in the wild. The crafting table, bottles and set of scalpels were laid out in their perfect order as she checked over the forty-seven variables she’d identified over the course of the day, currently working through the layers of its stump and testing each to gage both its age and the soil quality each year had provided it. This was her element, a perfectly controlled space where her otherwise permanent flush dissipated to form an absolute focus. There were no outside independent variables she needed to worry about.
However, that changed as a thud sounded against the door, forcing itself open as the instantly recognisable blonde visage of the Chief Alchemist came into view.
But something was terribly, horribly wrong.
“M-mister Albedo!?” Sucrose cried upon seeing the state of him, the girl dropping the flask holding her precious indicator fluid to the floor, freezing up.
Disregarding the hour (two forty-seven in the morning) the utter disrepair Albedo displayed…
Half of his face was missing, ligaments, bone and skin torn, shattered and visible, his arm utterly destroyed to the point where it was a barely recognisable mess of skin and bone. Even his torso had been ripped apart, shirt half hanging off him as his internal organs were exposed, ribcage cracked and painfully visible.
Yet there was no blood. A fine powder trailed after the man instead. Sucrose was too panicked to register what it was.
“Please… keep your voice down.” Albedo managed to get out, oesophagus somehow still intact enough to form words
“We need to wake sister Barbara! M-mister Albedo, h-how are you still standing!? You need to sit down! A-and I need to find Barbara and-”
“ No. ” He said forcefully, tone so hard that the girl felt her mouth instantly snap shut. “Only you can fix this. Conventional healing has no effect on me.”
In her time working with the man, Sucrose had never seen Albedo injured, or even hurt to any degree. But in the state he was in now, it was a miracle he wasn’t dead.
“Whua!?” She clamped her hands to her head, ears pinned to the back of her neck as she shook her head violently “No… noo no. Mister Albedo, I can’t use my vision for healing! You- You’ll die without attention soon!” She couldn’t help her breath speeding up, fear gripping her entirely as Albedo limped further into the lab, one arm entirely lame as he unlocked his ingredients cupboard
“Please, sit down!” She girl begged
“Sucrose. I won’t die.” Albedo said evenly, coughing into his viable hand. More of the white dust fell to the floor. “You won’t be using your vision. Please, just listen.”
She calmed herself as much as she was humanly capable of, looking away with her heart still fluttering so quickly in her chest it made her feel positively ill. “M-my apologies.”
“Would a human theoretically be able to survive an injury of this magnitude?” He bought out a large jar of chalk from the cupboard, struggling to handle it with only one functional arm. Sucrose squeezed her eyes shut to prepare for the disgustingly gruesome sight. To hope with how hideous it was, she pretended it was just like the dissection she had been completing only minutes earlier and listed the sequence of scientific observations to be made.
- Shattered arm bone (four)
- Compound fractured ribs (three (visible))
- Missing fingers (two)
- Severe thoracic arterial damage on right side
- Internal organ exposure (3: Lungs, small intestine, large intestine)
- Severe burns (approx. 35% bodily coverage)
- Severe muscular damage on left side of body (approx. 100+)
She stopped counting when she realised Albedo wasn’t breathing. He had no pulse, there was no bleeding and no pumping heart. Yet, he was alive.
“No.” She assessed. The blue eyes flickered to her amber, fully attent and present when they shouldn’t be.
“Correct. I have lost the use of my dominant hand, so you will need to perform the transformative alchemy necessary to reform what of my arm is currently absent… At least to a state where it is functional.”
“B-but I don’t know the process.”
“That’s alright. I will walk you-” He coughed again, “- through the process.”
“Why me?” Sucrose squeaked. She could feel herself wilt under the pressure.
“You are the only individual with these skills in Mondstadt, along with the only person competent enough to handle this task.”
Sucrose gulped. In any other situation she’d stand slightly taller and feel herself swell a little with pride, but in that moment all she felt was a cold sense of dread at the monumental scale of the task she was being presented with. She didn’t have the space in her mind to fully evaluate as to why and how her overseeing alchemist and colleague was so evidently not human and how he was quite literally crumbling apart in front of her very eyes.
“Sucrose. Attention.” Albedo said firmly, seating himself in the chair they used occasionally for conducting tests on willing participants, wincing slightly as he tried to adjust himself into something resembling a comfortable position.
“Y-yes! Sorry.” the girl floundered.
“It’s quite alright. Please bring the alchemy bench next to me.” Albedo instructed, Sucrose doing as she was asked, struggling as she dragged it but driven by such a rush of adrenaline and urgency she barely felt the strain of her sub-optimal muscles. “Good. Now sprinkle that chalk onto the centre and lay my arm inside. Then, pour chalk over the most severe damage.”
She did what she was told, Albedo very kindly not questioning her shaking as she placed the utterly brutalised limb onto the bench. She repeated the mantra that this was an experiment over and over again as the blonde calmly delivered the steps in which to repair his broken body. She tried her best not to meet his gaze or even look at his face as the damage just avoided the blue eyes, exposing the nose cavity, upper and lower teeth and fragments of his lower jaw. Ligaments were torn and hung limply around areas scuffed and burnt away down his body.
“Now you will need a lizard’s tail. Please remove your vision and place the tail where my palm would be.” The instructions had all been strange, vague and unnerving. Crimson agate had been ground up onto the table and joined the chalk as a fine pinkish powder, with a series of short, complicated bursts of alchemy added to the strange concoction at odd, seemingly sporadic intervals.
During the process, through a momentary break from the laser-focused concentration, Sucrose mustered up the courage to ask
“Mister Albedo… What happened?” The woman watched as the vibrating dust slowly came to settle. The senior alchemist blinked before meeting her gaze.
“I was caught off guard by a particularly strong burst of Abyssal energy. A severe miscalculation on my behalf. He admitted. “I’ll answer your no doubt pressing questions once my face is intact. I’m afraid it’s quite painful to speak as of right now.”
“Ach! My apologies, sorry! What’s the next step?”
“This is the final step. Recite the incantation I tell you to the table and never repeat it again.” Albedo’s voice became cold and full of warning. Sucrose had no need to be told twice.
She repeated the short words he fed to her-
“Pulvis et umbra sumus, tamen
Ex favilla nos resurgemus.
Moriendo renascor”
The saying made no sense. It certainly wasn’t in the Teyvat common tongue, and Sucrose mentally shredded the sentence. It felt ugly on her tongue; worse now she didn’t have the usual lifeline of her vision.
In the seconds after her stilted reciting, the mark on Albedo’s throat grew to a bright light and the contents of the table began to slowly form together. First; bone, second; blood vessels; next; ligaments and the fourth being the skin. The light subsided and the lizard’s tail was nowhere to be seen, reduced to a fine dust in the palm of the alchemist’s hand.
The green haired girl felt her eyes widen to an impossible width as Albedo flexed the fingers on his newly formed hand, touching the destroyed parts of his face and sighing.
“Very well done Sucrose. The rest I will do on my own. I trust you will never speak of this?”
“No! Of course not! I-I don’t even know what I’d say.” She admitted
“Good. Allow me some time now.” Albedo dismissed, nodding fractionally.
Sucrose didn’t dare leave or speak, pretending to continue on her own notes on her previous experiment that had been the topic of interest until approximately thirty two minutes ago.
Now she rapidly wrote notes on the process of how to physically mend her coworker, including a list of hypotheses and potential causes behind Albedo’s existence. There had always been something odd about him, subjected to much rumour and hearsay in his initial few months of being in Mondstadt. But Sucrose wasn’t one to believe rumours, and people had eventually played Albedo’s near inhuman perfection to simple good self care and his so clearly high intellect. Sucrose had secretly hoped he was obsessive in the same way she was, chasing some far off ideal that was as impossible as her little paradise; a paradise that now felt further away than ever, after the events of the past half-hour.
Her ideas were listed messily on the page as such:
- Albedo was a clone and he worked out how to transfer his consciousness into an alchemy created puppet with a second human Albedo elsewhere
- Albedo had been injured terribly in the past and engineered himself like this to prevent death by conventional means
- Albedo was simply ‘born’ in such a manner and was physically made of chalk.
- Albedo had been born human but at some point was transformed into chalk, by either an outside party or himself.
None felt entirely correct yet all equally plausible. Nothing felt right at all in this situation, Sucrose’s gaze flickering to both of their visions still lying discarded off to the side on one of the tables, their weak glow disconcerting. Why had Albedo asked for them to be removed? Was this line of work offending Celestia in some way? Sucrose knew Albedo was radical in some of his pursuits but she didn’t think he’d be so bold as to challenge whatever rules and laws created by the airbourne city. The idea made the woman’s head hurt, not used to entertaining ideas so outside of her specific research field, and never anything so contested and controversial.
She watched with an intense morbid curiosity as the Chief Alchemist’s face knitted itself back together, forming his once more perfect portrait, his sides patching themselves back up. While his clothes hadn’t recovered from the damage, he showed no signs of scarring. The frayed and burnt lab coat and shirt had been removed once he’d regained use of both of his arms, only wearing the largely undamaged pants. Unlike how many of the gossip had suggested, Albedo certainly did not possess an impressive build, soft and not that muscular compared to other knights. It was best to describe him as perfectly adequate, entirely optimised for the everyday. Sucrose could feel her blush flare as she realised her staring, as observational as it had been. She couldn’t possibly shift her focus away as her eyes were drawn to the striking mark at his throat, the diamond’s glow subsiding.
“Mister Albedo, what is that mark?” The question slipped out before she could help herself, shame boiling at her lack of a filter, gaze falling to her shoes. “Sorry. Ah, if you’re not done yet…”
“Please, don’t apologise.” Albedo assured her after checking for any further injuries he missed “I’m uninjured now. Thank you for your patience, I’m sure you have your questions, correct?”
“Are you a clone?” She blurted, mortified at the gall of her own question. Albedo huffed a little chuckle, embarrassment making the girl shrink into herself.
“I wouldn’t say that, though I’ll admit, it’s an interesting theory. To answer both of your questions more comprehensively, the mark on my throat was given to me as a signature of sorts by my creator.” He explained, rifling through the closet they kept on hand to provide an emergency wardrobe in case an experiment went south. “Or alternatively… a mark of my own inhumanity, I suppose.”
Sucrose couldn’t picture something like that - Someone smarter than even Albedo - capable of such a feat.
“Created… t-through alchemy?” The disbelief was apparent in her voice. Such a complex idea should be completely impossible to achieve through the art, even with its extensive range of products it was able to make. To create life wasn’t entirely unfeasible, as Albedo had proved. But human life? That was an entirely different concept.
“Indeed. Perhaps the more accurate term would be a ‘homunculus’. But yes, I was created with chalk by human hands that were not my own.” Albedo looked pensive for a minute, eyebrows pulling together as his ungloved hand brushed across his chin. “Do you feel deceived?”
“Huh?” Sucrose was startled at the personal nature of the question. Deceived? No, she didn’t, since that had very little to do with the work the two completed… She just felt more alone? No… that wasn’t it either. “I’m just surprised, really. Maybe I feel as though the gap between us has just increased. N-not as though that’s your fault, of course! Please don’t think my deficits extend to you!” Sucrose cursed herself at the series of blunders falling past her lips. Could Albedo feel faulted? Would his nature as a created being extend past the physical? The questions were coming fast and overwhelming her entirely, ears pinned to the back of her neck with shaky knees for the better part of this whole experience.
“The gap?” Albedo inquired, thankfully now fully clothed again. The girl retreated more into her seat as the alchemist’s unmoving gaze picked her apart
“Um… If I’m being honest, I don’t really act like normal people and I presumed you were like me in that aspect. B-but you’re so much better at being around others than I am.” Sucrose’s voice grew small, hands gripped tightly around her pen. “...Sorry”
Another little laugh “I don’t think that my status as a homunculus changes my ineptitudes around people. My humanity as a whole might be debatable, but that isn’t.” Albedo cracked his knuckles and bones in the reformed arm, popping the carbon bubbles no doubt formed between the joints.
“B-but you’re not inept!” Sucrose argued, frustrated and overwhelmed.
“I haven’t always been like this. My time with humans outside that with my master has been something of an extended experiment. Before I came to Mondstadt, I was given a singular, nigh impossible question and I believed I might be able to find that within the people of this city.” Albedo frowned somewhat. “While I may not have found that answer, my time with you, Sucrose, has been unique in the sense that you are most similar to what might be my ‘true self’ - untouched by other influences and people.”
She sat with that for a few seconds, hands crossed in her lap and feet fidgeting furiously under her designated table. She could feel two distinct ideas warring in her mind: Albedo was exactly as she’d hoped, hellbent on achieving a goal as lofty as the one Sucrose strived for versus the now more apparent fact that in some ways he was everything she’d been afraid of. She put the facts on the scales, factoring the missing information with blanks and formulating questions that would answer them efficiently.
“What is the difference between us at all, then?” Sucrose adjusted her glasses and went back to anxiously fiddling as Albedo paused for a second.
“Our origins… but I suppose as of now in most ways I have adapted. Even so, I don’t believe my humanity is so easily defended, as I have exhibited tonight.” Albedo touched the diamond mark at his neck “Can I boy made of chalk wish for a body of flesh and blood… or is it simply a result of a survival instinct to blend in with one’s environment?”
Sucrose couldn’t answer such a deep, philosophical question - a similar question had plagued her for years, and even then she couldn’t quite understand what he meant. But science was something she could always fall back to, her eternal ally in a murky world of variables yet to be exposed to her.
“I was right…” She whispered to herself, then looked up as Albedo gave her a quizzical glance “You’re just like one of my Tetratanic sweet flowers!”
“Pardon me?” It was the first time Sucrose had seen him look legitimately lost, his brows raised.
“R-right, of course. U-um, even though my Tetratanic sweet flowers are made through alchemy… does that not make them any less of a sweet flower?” It had entirely clicked into place. He might not be fully human, but was so directly adjacent that it didn’t matter outside punctuated moments like these. So were her inventions - if they weren’t real, then what would be the point of pursuing her dream? Perhaps they were more similar than what Sucrose could have ever first imagined.
“Hmm, I didn’t ask this question myself, but your answer is certainly one I can accept.” Albedo seemed quite pleased, the echo of a smile playing onto his features.
“Who asked then? D-do other people know of your constitution?” She inquired shyly, voice wavering.
Albedo looked oddly shifty as he glanced over to the closed door before confirming. “There are three others, beside yourself. I have no intention for there to be more.”
Sucrose tried to think of who could possibly know. Perhaps they weren’ in Mondstadt? Klee certainly didn’t give the impression she knew, overly transparent and vocal everytime she managed to bounce into the two’s shared lab space. Though it wasn't as if Sucrose got out much, and the occasional visiting knight and the butcher's store were the only outsiders she managed to interact with, albeit in her awkward, stumbling manner.
“I-I won’t tell anyone! S-sorry” Sucrose realised what Albedo was implying after a few seconds of silent introspection.
“Good. Thank you Sucrose. I apologise for asking twice.” Albedo nodded then glanced towards the clock. It read three forty-nine in the morning. “You should head to bed.”
“Ah. Right. Um… before I do, can I ask one more question.”
“Go ahead.” He invited kindly.
“What did this to you?” She felt as though she had misstepped as Albedo’s face went blank, but it eventually formed to his usual thoughtful expression.
“Hm… Dragonspine occasionally gets… unwelcome visitors. It’s nothing to worry about, if that’s what is concerning you.”
“O-okay. Thank you. Please be safe!” Now her questions had been answered, the room felt stifling, the molecules electrified from the unknowably powerful alchemy, her vision still uncomfortably far away. Exhaustion that she couldn’t fully describe weighed on her heavily, eyes burning as the pressure behind her temple slowly began to dissipate in favour of forming a deep fatigue.
“Of course. Please don’t feel obligated to come in tomorrow. I’ll guide Timaeus' practicals.”
“B-but you-?” Sucrose stopped her protest when Albedo laughed
“Truly, there is no problem now. Goodnight.”
“Goodnight!” Sucrose returned as she clipped her vision back at her throat and exited the suffocating labs as quickly as she could without giving away her terror at the events that transcribed.
As tired as she was, when Sucrose reached the little apartment every time she closed her eyes, the sight of Albedo’s melted face flashed across her vision. Hours later, sleep did eventually take her, though not willingly, as she had passed out at her desk while trying to finish her report on evening that had transpired. That night she dreamt of a dark dragon and its poisoned heart.
When she woke the next day, she decided in a rare moment of courage to exit the city and take a walk to the base of the mountain, wondering what else Albedo might have hiding underneath his perfect facade.
Once she returned, all she surmised was that she wanted to be done with this side of her superior now she’d seen it, deciding to bury it in a place where she could never go again.