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She sees him sitting by a cliffside, his dark hair dappled with silver starlight. He stares out over the jagged cliffs of Mondstadt as one might look at their wedding– happy, but with the undeniable sense that things will never be the same, that they've lost something they will never be able to get back.
He notices her not long after, with only a blink or two revealing his surprise. He says nothing, though, and she says nothing too. There is something fragile between them, she thinks, and she could not stand to break it with something so unwieldy as words.
Inevitably, not knowing what else to do, afraid of what might happen if–
She leaves. She goes back to her apartment, with her stacks of well loved books and overdue rent, and for the first time in a very long time feels lonely.
~
Good astrologers, she's told, do not dream. Dreams are the reflection of troubles and desires both, and good astrologists, true astrologists, have neither. They are simply a vessel for the voices of the stars.
That night, she dreams that he runs his fingers through her hair, that he rests his head in her lap. He looks up at her, smiles, and they trade kisses in the midsummer breeze.
It does not really feel like a dream. When she wakes, she can still feel the shape of his body where it'd pressed up against hers. It is almost like–
~
"Have you ever wondered what it would be like to completely understand someone else?"
He's right where she saw him last night, still staring out over Mondstadt, still blue in the moonlight. She had come back because she didn't really have a choice, because she was always going to come back, because her entire life has been on rails heading towards this moment.
"Yes," he says, "but it's impossible. You could see all of someone's memories, even inhabit their body for a day, and you still wouldn't get them at all."
She, with a confidence she hopes he doesn't notice is just an act, sits beside him.
"That doesn't mean we can't try."
"No," he replies, "it doesn't. If we didn't try then life would be a joke."
She laughs, and then silence falls between them. She feels like something is very wrong, somehow, like he is both too close and not close enough. They should not be sitting here, close but not touching; rather, he should be all over her or else many miles away.
"What brings you to Mondstadt?" She finds herself asking for the sake of asking something.
He pauses for a moment, giving the question more consideration than it almost certainly deserves.
"I did not want to be a prisoner anymore," he says. "To myself, to my past, to Kusanali– I just wanted to be rid of it all, and where better to do that than the city of freedom?"
It's the kind of thing that both is and isn't true, one of those statements that flirts with honesty and dishonesty both. She wonders, briefly, if he thinks it's true. She thinks he might want to believe it, because doing so is far easier than the alternative.
"Freedom doesn't exist," she says, choosing her words carefully. "After all, there's another bind waiting for you here, isn't there?"
He doesn't say anything, just looks off into the dark. After a moment, one so long she thinks she might have been able to live a full life away from him within it, he rests his head on her shoulder.
~
She wakes up alone. She'd invited him back to her place, but he'd refused, saying he was not ready quite yet.
She remembers being very distressed the first time she'd called her apartment home, not because she had some other place to call home, but because she did not want people to think that she didn't have another place to call home.
Her childhood, if it could be called that, was spent constantly on the road with her master. Home was wherever they happened to rest their heads for the night. She has no childhood home, no building in which she was raised and still knows as intimately as the back of her own hand.
She has never known how to respond when people talked about wanting to go home, when they expressed a deep longing for a place that by any measure, even if still standing, did not exist anymore. There has never been anywhere she wanted to return to, and she doesn't know if she wants anyone else to know that.
Her heart pumps loudly, traitorously, in chest. She is reminded that nostalgia too is a form of longing, but for a point in time rather than in space. She wonders if there is a similar word for wanting to go back to a person, or if people change too much, too frequently, to ever really meet them again.
~
The streets of Mondstadt are always bustling on Saturday afternoons, with everyone out doing their shopping for the week. She likes to step out around this time, not to buy anything herself– she's smart enough not to try and fight the lines– but just to watch the people.
She has never felt like she quite fit in. She hates to draw categories, to label herself as an other at the cost of denying everyone else a rich inner life of their own, but thinks it is reasonable to say that her life has been very different from most.
It's fine, most of the time. She is herself and she likes who she is. Sometimes, though, the loneliness creeps in, wrapping around her throat with dark fingers, and she begins to feel as if there is nobody in the world whom she could ever possibly relate to.
It's times like that when she watches the Saturday rush. These people are her friends, her neighbors, and in the grand scheme of things she has more in common with them than she does otherwise.
It is easier than normal, far easier, to play that little game of hers today.
It is very strange to see him in the crowd, chatting with the shopkeepers as if he's the most ordinary person in the world. She was not quite convinced that he wasn't a strange figment of her imagination, a dream she'd brought to life with a wish, before. Perhaps that was all terribly silly of her.
He notices her, and, seemingly involuntarily, smiles. The shopkeeper he'd been speaking with says something she's too far away to hear, and he turns towards them sharply, as if embarrassed.
She begins to make her way towards him, and he comes to meet her in the middle.
"I didn't think you were the type to like the crowds," she says.
"I could say the same about you."
She scoffs to hide a laugh, and very gently he reaches to take her arm.
"... There's still a few things I want to buy," he says. "Would you like to come with me?"
~
She feels the shape of him against her, late into the evening after he'd gone, and knows this cannot continue. They cannot continue like this.
There are two principles of astrology she's found herself thinking about quite frequently as of late: that an astrologer may not look up their own fate, and that one should always beware the false sky.
She thinks her fate must be printed on the false sky alone, not that she's ever looked. Perhaps it would be presumptuous of her to say that something is different about her, but she can say with certainty that something is wrong.
Something has been changed that ought not to have been changed, but despite that none of the mess of her life has been cleaned up. She is the same, but the world is different, and deep inside her she knows that he must have had something to do with it.
What is someone to do when home doesn't exist anymore? When even the memory of it has been erased? When he's standing in front of you, but both of you have changed and it is far too terrifying to try and see if you still fit together?
She fears that her reliance on fate has made her a coward. One them needs to make a move soon, or everything will fall apart, and despite everything–
It won't be her. The gap between them is too big, and without the stars she does not think she can bridge it. She will retreat into the inky blackness of the night, leaving the first move to him and the white tree from which he was carved. She hopes, sincerely, that he'll play an opening she can't counter.
~
It's him who finds her this time, stargazing at Starsnatch cliff. This place, she's heard, is for lovers. She does not think she's ever brought anyone here before.
"You know," he says. "You must know by now."
He wraps her arms around her, his chest against her back, and presses his face into her shoulder. She wants to tell him that she does, wants to reassure him that she understands him, but such a thing is by his own admittance impossible.
"Isn't this awful? Do you even know how to be this vulnerable?"
"Of course not," she says.
He looks up at her, blue eyes shimmering like the dark sea.
"I swore I would never depend on another person again," he says, small but with enough conviction that she feels every word, "but here I am. Spare me any kindness– Mona, what are you going to do with me?"
She can feel his heart, bloody, broken, and sewn back together with stands of fine gold, in her hands. It is not a beautiful thing, corrupting everything it touches with dark mire, but for her a long time ago it was already too late.
"Come home with me," she whispers.
This time, he does.
~
She's curled around him, the next morning, lying in bed as if nothing else in the world matters at all. In a way, she thinks that might just be true.
"Mona Megistus," he sighs, content.
The two of them are so close that it is difficult to tell where she ends and he begins. This does not bother her as much as it probably ought to.
She opens her mouth, and, like it is the only thing that matters, says his name.