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Months ago, Albedo had said that he loved her in the same breath that he claimed to finally understand Rhinedottir’s demands of him: to find the truth of this world, and his eventual conclusion that it was the pursuit of a happy life. A life with her.
Lumine traced her finger around the edge of her glass. He had sat her down in the noon light, covered her in plush throws and pillows, fixed her hair, given her a smoothie and then scurried over to his desk without a word. She sighed as she watched him scratch away at his notebook with the faint smile he wore when truly enthralled in a task.
His admission was sweet and tender and a million other things, but along with it came a seed of doubt. Did he only pursue his own happiness because his mother commanded it? From what little he’d actually said of Rhinedottir… she doubted that was the intent of her message. But, the notion made him happy. She was content to keep her concerns to herself.
For months.
Every now and then, something would slip up. He’d mention the riftwolves being a product of her design, or that she fed her failed experiments to the dragon rotting away on the mountain. And yet, despite every atrocity Rhinedottir committed, he still spoke about her with the same reverence normally reserved for Lumine and the stars.
It worried her, and also confused her. He talked about his mother as infrequently as she talked about her brother – both abandoned and not understanding why. At least Lumine could claim that her brother had been a good person at one point.
“Done.”
Albedo’s voice pulled her from her thoughts. She looked up as he flipped his sketchbook around, proudly displaying his interpretation of her. She sat forward and squinted at the woman shining brighter than the afternoon glow on the page.
“Aww! That looks great! Can I get up now?”
“Of course. You did not have to sit still in the first place. I’ve memorized you by this point.”
She shoved off the couch and went around to his back, slung her arms around his shoulders and kissed his cheek. He tilted his head back to meet her properly and she hummed into his mouth.
“Don’t you ever get tired of drawing me?”
“No,” he said, totally flat. “Though I do have an additional purpose for this piece beyond my love for you.”
“Oh?”
His pupils widened as he looked up into her eyes. He’d said once that it was an involuntary response to observing something of interest or desire, that everyone did it, proof that he was human in the ways that mattered. She thought it made him look like a cat.
“I told Alice about you in my last letter,” he said, twisting a piece of her bangs between his fingers. “She’s insisting on pictures. Do you mind if I send this to her?”
Heavens below, she missed having a family. She laid her forehead against his and thumbed at the blaze on his neck while her heart swelled. “Go right ahead.”
Albedo looked back down and teased the page out of his book. He started a fresh sketch on the next page. “I look forward to introducing you two.”
The woman had adopted half of Mondstadt. Lumine knew even less about her than she did Rhinedottir, but she’d seen enough of her work to decide that she liked Alice. She just wished Albedo seemed half as impressed by the love and light she left in her wake as he did his master’s monstrosities.
Rather than say all that, she adjusted to put her chin on top of his head. “Me too. When do you think she’ll be back?”
“I have no earthly idea. Klee’s mother is even more unpredictable than she is.”
Her thumb paused in the hollow of his collarbones, his pulse drumming in that slow, easy way it always did. “...Klee’s mother? Not yours?”
The tiniest frown furrowed his forehead while he continued drawing. “Mm… hm. She has asked me to call her ‘Mom’ before, but I would rather not.”
“Can I ask why?”
“You can always ask”
Expectant silence rang out. It took a few moments for Lumine to realize that he wasn’t going to elaborate unprompted, so she plopped down on the arm of his chair and leaned against his shoulder. “Why don’t you consider Alice your mother?”
He pressed against her and chewed on the end of his pencil. Eventually, his eyes flicked over to hers, slightly strained at the edges. “Can I be blunt without seeming cruel?”
“You’re never cruel, but go ahead.”
“Alice is wildly irresponsible.”
Lumine snorted. She couldn’t help it. Albedo gave her a pleading look and she choked back the giggles. “Sorry, sorry. It’s just the way you said it. Go on?”
He shook his head and went back to his sketch, the rough outline of Klee looking out over a pond taking shape. “Alice is so full of love for life that she doesn’t know what to do with it all. It bubbles out of her like magma from a volcano, with the destructive force to match.”
A few more strokes and dodoco appeared at Klee’s hip, its fuse ticking down. “While she does have important work to do, her inexhaustible exuberance feeds her wanderlust beyond what you would expect. She’s utterly incapable of focusing her attention on, well, anything, even if it means leaving behind the daughter that she loves most of all.”
Cartoon fish filets appeared in the pond. “I don’t fault her for it, of course. She’s a wonderful mother and her unrestrained affection is a wonderful quality, but it also means that her love isn’t… special.”
Lumine picked at his braid while she debated whether to ask what she really wanted to know. “What about Rhinedottir?”
He brightened immediately, sounding like one of the Sisters at the church preaching the gospel of the equally disinterested Barbatos. “My master was nothing but responsible. She produced results through diligence and hard work and instilled the same ethic in me. Her respect had to be earned, and I was the only one of her creations to do so.”
His pencil scratched against the paper. He mis-lined Klee’s smile and went to redo it, his own falling. “That is why she permitted me at her side for as long as she did.”
Well that was valid about Alice and deeply concerning about Rhinedottir.
“What is it?”
Lumine flinched as he turned his full attention to her, only blinking when absolutely necessary. “Huh?”
“You’re making a face. Did I say something unusual?”
“Ah…” she stuttered. Perceptive as always. Between the alchemy, the artistry and his interest in her, he noticed everything.
“You’re doing it again.”
“Give me a second!” she laughed. “I need to figure out how to word it.”
He cocked his head at her, beautiful, his bangs flopping into his face in a wordless request for her to continue. She didn’t want to see the hurt in his eyes, but there was really no nice way to say it. She grimaced. “Can I be blunt?”
“Always, love.”
“It just seems like Rhinedottir didn’t… like you,” she said, trailing off to a whisper at the end.
“Oh, she didn’t.”
He didn’t even hesitate. He said it as casually as he commented on the weather. She… expected that to be a big revelation. Now that it wasn’t, she didn’t know where to take the conversation. Lumine drummed her fingers on her thigh, praying that he would expand on that, but unfortunately it seemed that he was waiting for her to give an explanation. She swallowed thickly. “You get that that’s bad, right?”
“No?” He frowned, cocking his head the other way. “Doesn’t that make the work that she put into me more valuable?”
Lumine shifted to sit fully in his lap. He moved his sketchbook to accommodate her while she traced his jawbone with her thumb. “Being around you isn’t work You’re not a burden and spending time with you isn’t a sacrifice.”
His eyes fell away to the middle distance, thoughtful, not upset, humming quietly. “But… it is, though?” He looked back up at her, pressing his cheek into her touch. “I find it very draining to socialize with Kaeya and Jean and the other knights, but I will make the effort to do so because I care about them.”
“That’s a little different. They’re your friends, not your responsibility.”
“I don’t understand how it’s different.”
Her heart broke at his confused tone. “You didn’t make them. Regular parents have to love and care for their children to the best of their ability, doubly so when you can’t just accidentally get pregnant or something. Rhinedottir had a lot of places she could back out, but she insisted on making you anyway and then didn’t… try.”
“You can love someone without liking them,” he said lamely.
She honestly wasn’t convinced that Rhinedottir even loved him, but that was a conversation for another day. Or never. She cupped his face and brushed her thumbs over his cheekbones. “You deserve to be liked, too. You’re very likable.”
Hopefully this wouldn’t offend him, not that he was the type to get annoyed over observations, but he was protective of his monster of a mother. She kissed between his eyes and pouted. “And… I don’t think her being stingy with affection is something to admire.”
He was quiet for a moment. When he spoke, his tone was cautious, hesitant, like he didn’t quite believe himself. “I disagree. While I admit that my master was cold, she taught me how to behave. You, at least, appreciate how I turned out, so she must have done something right.”
She squeezed his hand and put on her softest voice. “Do you think you might be a little biased? I mean, do you logically think that reminding someone that they’re one misstep away from being recycled would ever benefit them?”
“You make it sound like she threatened me,” he half laughed.
“Didn’t she?”
Albedo stared into his lap, his chuckle trailing off into a thoughtful hum. “Not… not explicitly, no. She was quick to put down her failures, but so long as I succeeded, I was never in any danger.”
She didn’t like the look on his face. If he didn’t think that Rhinedottir’s definitions of success and failure were completely arbitrary, more power to him. Convincing him otherwise wasn’t worth suggesting that his mother left him because he did something to deserve it. She could see it in his eyes – the twisted thought that maybe her leaving was the closest she could manage to mercy for her favorite failure.
Lumine slipped her arm around his neck and gave him a little shake, drawing his attention back to her and away from his rare insecurities. “I think you would still be the wonderful, considerate, perfect man you are no matter what. I just don’t think she did you any favors by treating you like a project instead of a person. It wouldn’t kill her to show that she loved and liked you.”
“Perhaps,” he hummed, clearly grateful for the subject change. “But other people find things that are scarce and fleeting more valuable, do they not? Isn’t that the logic behind limited edition drinks at Angel’s Share? Or rare gemstones?”
She felt a little dirty for taking the shot, but, “Well, I love easily. Does that make my love less valuable?”
“Of course not!”
She let him sit with his outburst for a moment, watching cooly while the thoughts raced behind his pretty blue eyes. He put his fist to his mouth and frowned, his eyebrows knitting together and his other hand playing with the fabric at her waist. She waited until his face softened to something more sad-looking before she bent down to catch his eye.
“And you love easily, too. You’re just not as touchy-feely with it.”
That got his eyes to flick back up to hers, one eyebrow raising. “Are you certain? I’ve yet to be described as warm.”
She twisted in his lap to lean on his shoulder, nestling her head in the crook of his neck. “Yeah! Just look at the way you see the world,” she said, gesturing to his many sketches on the table, the recent Klee among them. “You fall in love with every stick and rock and bug you come across. It’s what makes you such a great alchemist and artist, and it’s one of my favorite things about you.”
He tucked his arm tighter around her and rested his head against hers, absently rubbing her side. She felt his voice reverberate through his body and into hers as he spoke nearly too quiet to hear. “...Does that mean she loved easily, too?”
Probably not, at least not in a healthy way. Good love didn’t mangle everything else into its own poisonous image or kill it trying. He had whispered the question mostly to himself, though, so she refrained from sharing her thoughts. Instead, she nuzzled tighter to him and listened to his slow, even heartbeat.
He shifted under her. “May I ask why you brought this up?”
“I’m just a little worried about you. I feel like you want something from Rhinedottir that you’re never going to get. I hope you’re not rejecting it from Alice because you want it from her instead.”
His thumb paused its little circles against her hip. She heard and felt his breath hitch, then slowly release while he blinked and leaned back. At length, he spoke. “I… hadn’t considered that.” He was quiet for another moment before he cleared his throat and looked at her. “...Thank you. You’ve given me a lot to think about.”
Lumine leaned forward to kiss him on the lips. He reciprocated as she closed her eyes and only broke away to whisper against him. “Anytime. You know I’m here for you.”
-
They sat like that for a few minutes, tangled in each other’s arms and lulled into a reflective doze. Albedo gently picked at a small tear in her dress while he thought and she snuggled tighter to him, mumbling sweet things to him under her breath in her own language. The movement of his face turning into her hair roused her from her sleepiness and she cracked an eye.
“Lumine?”
“Yes?”
“Have I been clear that I like you?”
And this was another of the many reasons she chose him over everyone else in this world and others. Rather than fumble emotions that would be difficult for even the greatest empath to interpret, he just asked. Other people should take notes.
She pulled away just enough to look up at him and laughed. “Of course.”
He relaxed at that, shoulders sagging and a small smile tugging at the corner of his mouth. “And do you know that I love you?”
“I do.” She cupped his cheek as he craned down to kiss her forehead, waiting until he was done to continue. “And I love you.”
Satisfied, Albedo gave her one last squeeze and shifted to indicate she should get up and release him. He stood and stretched the tightness out of his wrists, then got to work tucking his sketch into an envelope. He pulled out a few sheets of paper to start his letter, then paused and looked back at her.
“Since you’re so interested in Miss Alice… would you like to write a letter to her, too?”
“I’d love to.”