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I.
“Ah,” he says, letting out an involuntary expression of pain, even though it was little more than a sting. His fingers loosen around the stem as he examines the puncture left by the thorn on the tip of his thumb. He had taken off his gloves in a rare impulse to handle the more delicate parts of the specimen. An oversight.
Sucrose, working on the other end of the lab, jumps a little when the silence breaks. “Oh- Mr Albedo, are you—“
“I’m fine,” he says quickly. “Just a thorn.”
Sucrose’s ears flatten. “Should I get you some linen to clean the wound?”
“No, no, it's fine.” He frowns at the pockmark on his white skin, rubbing it against his forefinger and feeling the chalk crumble into dust. “It’ll heal on its own.”
“But,” Sucrose says, “but you might get an infection, or there might be an irritant, or—“
“Don’t worry about me, Sucrose.” The skin has smoothed over the gap already, leaving a tiny crevice that he would have to cover up later. “I'm used to this.”
Chalk, he has found over the years, can be quite malleable. While his body is surprisingly sturdy for the most part, he tends to scrape and weather away quite easily, the layers of his skin eroding over time. Rhinedottir had left him tools to remedy this, fortunately, but it is still quite annoying to get paper-cuts every time he turns a particularly sharp page.
Sucrose still looks worried, but she lets it go. She has a tendency to fret over him a bit. He supposes this is partly his own fault. According to her, he doesn't take good enough care of himself; apparently having a non-existent sleep schedule or only eating when necessary are deemed unhealthy habits. So far she has chalked this up to his scholarly eccentricities rather than his…unique nature.
He glances back at her and sees her frowning into the delicate carcass of a finch torn open, the red of its exposed organs blooming on the tabletop. Sucrose has been studying the effects of Anemo concentration on living organisms native to Old Mondstadt. Her crimson fingers carefully scrape past the bone and feathers to collect the congealed blood, almost black, that has clotted in the bird's heart.
Albedo is not a squeamish person. Blood does not affect him, but there is something about seeing a bloodied flesh-wound that does not sit right with him. It is an uncomfortable reminder of his own alienation. Albedo does not bleed, will not personally experience the fragility of a mortal existence; and it unnerves him. He cannot imagine living like that, knowing your existence depended on nothing more than the flutter of a pulse. He cannot imagine living knowing that your life rested between some lump of meat that sat in your chest and beat at regular intervals.
He stares at the dissected bird, bloodied, dry, empty. Its wings lie limp at its side, mangled and stained with dull red. The filmy strands of its translucent veins hang from its heart like chains. Once, it might have soared, free from the bounds of gravity that tied down the rest of them. At the end, like all living things, it is chained to the pulse in its chest. All that brightness gone within the space of two heartbeats.
He pinches the puncture on his finger, hard, and tries to imagine some semblance of pain.
II.
Albedo likes being on Dragonspine. He likes the keen, stinging breeze that shocks the numbness of his skin. He likes the heavy stillness, like a portrait or a picture caught in a singular, crystalline moment. He likes the way the snow buries the land in broad strokes of unblemished white, the luminous flakes that drift from the sky and get caught in his hair.
It is quiet here on Dragonspine, with no one to distract from his work. The knights still keep him up to speed in their correspondence, but they know better than to disturb his peace for something trivial.
Well. One person hasn’t gotten the memo yet.
It is almost like clockwork, how Kaeya sends him a letter every three days, sealed with his signature stamp that he uses for his personal mail. He is strangely insistent about keeping in touch and oddly invested in their friendship but Albedo can't bring himself to mind, not really. Kaeya is fascinating; like a particularly challenging mechanism that Albedo can’t help but to take apart, to see what clicks. He enjoys it, the poking and prodding at different angles, trying to chisel away at the layers of costumes and masks; and Kaeya reciprocates, disarming smiles used jointly with devastating honesty that cracks apart the soft spots of his chalk skin. The fact that Kaeya openly refers to them as friends and actively tries to engage with him is a testament to his progress.
He opens the seal and sees Kaeya’s elegant scrawl, the unmistakable tilt of his i’s; a tiny part of whatever stardust that Kaeya stores up within him bleeding into the ink.
Kaeya dresses up his words so often that his sincerity is blindingly obvious. Albedo, being among Kaeya’s list of chosen people, finds himself privy to a slice of his genuine personality; it is a privilege he hoards, every moment filed and labelled in his mind. It never fails to make something warm blossom and unfurl in his hollow chest, in mimicry of a pulse.
Kaeya is excellent at spinning the most ordinary happenings into grand tales that Albedo must know about, because of course it is of utmost importance he knows about Klee’s latest exploits in the realm of interpersonal relationships. Apparently she's gone on a successful playdate with Timmy without setting off a single explosion. Clearly Kaeya has his priorities straight.
Today's letter ends with a note that Kaeya will be leading an expedition into Dragonspine in a couple days’ time to get the new recruits familiarised with the terrain; and it would be such a pleasure to catch up with a dear friend around a fire, such and such.
Albedo would not mind hosting the party in his lab as long as they gave all of his equipment a metre-wide berth. He says as much in his response, and encloses one of Dragonspine’s strange blue flowers, cold to the touch with cryo energy, pressed within the page; the way he usually does.
They arrive three days later in the late morning; Kaeya leads the party of shivering recruits, dark hair wind-tossed and speckled with silvery white.
His starlit eye brightens when he spots Albedo at the mouth of his cave, torch in hand, and he waves, the smirk he wears like armour unwinding into something more genuine.
“Fancy seeing you here,” he says in his teasing lilt. He speaks like music, the way decorative ribbons are meant for nothing more than to please the eye. It is a familiar tune.
Albedo smiles back despite himself. “Can't say it was a surprise to me, Captain.” He peers over Kaeya to see the shivering recruits in their snow-soaked boots. “I dare say you're the only one out of all of us that's actually happy to be out here.”
Kaeya grins. “Surely you're happy to see me, Sir Alchemist?”
Albedo hums noncommittally. “We’ll see.”
After a stern talking-to about the no-touching rule in his lab, Albedo serves up the goulash to the knights; it is still bubbling, and curling with steam and hearty fragrance. Their countenances improve drastically after that, colour returning to their cheeks.
Kaeya, who has a pass to be in close proximity to lab equipment, sits on a stool by Albedo's workbench as he explains his latest project.
“I'm running out of samples,” he says, “but I've found similarities in the genetic makeup of the plants that can grow in Dragonspine. I was planning to collect mint samples and compare them to the general variety, if I hadn't gotten a spontaneous visit…”
“Shall we go find some?”
“What, now?”
Kaeya grins. “No time like the present.”
“Your expedition,” he says, in an attempt to be stern. From Kaeya's expression, he doesn't do a good job of it. “You can't just leave the rookies to fend for themselves.”
“Mint is everywhere, Albedo. They won't freeze to death if we nipped out for a moment or two.”
So this is how they end up, the two of them, going round the mountain in search of mint. Familiar footsteps fall in line with his own, and for once Albedo doesn't prefer the silence.
Kaeya talks about everything and nothing but somehow still makes it into something musical. Speech is an art to him, and one that he's perfected. Albedo listens and embellishes with the careful eye of one who picks apart conversations like a machine and inserts his own mechanisms in it; together they make for unhurried conversation like a bubbling brook, a river of unexpected bends that they navigate smoothly.
“You should come down the mountain more,” Kaeya says. “The new recruits all think you're some kind of enlightened hermit.” His eye gleams with amusement. “Or, well, a mad one.”
“They say every genius is a little mad, in some respect.”
“Just today when I told them we’d be meeting with the chief alchemist, one of them - the blonde one, Alfie, he said–” Kaeya pauses, a laugh bubbling from his throat. “He said to me, oh, he's a real person? I thought he was made-up; he seems too good to be true —”
“I do go back to Mondstadt,” Albedo says defensively. “ I go every other weekend to see Klee.”
“Still, you should introduce yourself. Imagine being the chief of an entire department and people still think you're non-existent.”
“Better than being the chief of a non-existent department, cavalry captain.”
Kaeya makes a mock noise of offence which Albedo wholly ignores.
“We should probably get a sample from Wyrmrest valley,” he says, when they come to a fork. “The concentration of abyssal energy there would certainly have some effect on local plant life.”
Kaeya makes a face. “That place creeps me out.”
“Trust me,” Albedo says, “I know.”
They make their way down into the valley, the arching, slate-grey ribs curving over them like the bars of a cage. The hollow drum of Albedo’s artificial heartbeat echoes in his ears, louder the nearer they get. He wants to claw it out.
Kaeya watches him from the corner of his eye, carefully. They have talked about this before, about the star that brands them both. Neither of them liked that conversation particularly much, but he likes to think that dragging the past out into harsh daylight has chased away some of the surrounding shadows.
“I feel him,” Albedo says, and Kaeya nods.
“What's it like?” He asks.
Like something inside me is trying to crawl its way out. “Uncomfortable.”
There is something about the raw red of Durin's heart, like a wound gouged into the snowy rock, that makes Albedo uncomfortably aware of his own. His not-quite heart spasms in his chest like some fleshy creature trapped in his hollow rib cage. The ground is stained crimson with blood; blood is everywhere . It is on the ground, on the walls of the cave, its metallic stench thick in the air. It is the blood of his brothers that came before him, that bled before him; the red of completion, perfection. Albedo wonders if they had known about the cold, silent permanence of ‘death’ before they had succumbed to an endless stretch of unfathomable darkness.
His brother is a snow-buried skeleton now, cold and empty. His blood is all that is left of him, seeped into the soil, etched into the lines of the earth which no amount of snowfall could ever bury. He has become the mountain itself. He has returned to the dust of the earth, and left this world which he had so dearly wished to know with his still-bleeding heart. The crimson chambers pulse faintly from where it clings against the rock and bone. He can hear his heartbeat, and his own, synchronised, beating in the same breath.
A warm hand rests on his shoulder and steadies him, anchoring him to the ground. “I got the sample,” Kaeya says. He's holding a bunch of mint-plants, an obtrusive, cheerful blue in the red-cavern of his brother’s heart. “Shall we go?”
Albedo follows him out. At the mouth of the cave, a fox bounds past with a fresh kill hanging lifeless from its muzzle.; it leaves behind a scarlet trail on the immaculate white snowfall.
As they walk away he turns back to glance at the red stain of his brother’s heart; the drifting snow blankets it in a whirl of fog until it is perfectly white once more.
III.
Albedo remembers the first time he saw human blood, in the abstract manner that pools from scorned unbelievers and fallen soldiers who bled red, red rivers and seas; some faraway suggestion of suffering, of death and pain. He remembers standing over cold, still bodies drenched in a red so dark it appeared black; he remembers shaking them and coming away with his white hands stained a sticky crimson.
At the time he had not understood what it was that he held in his fingers.
Mortality had taken him a while to grasp. He, a being of chemical compounds and pure soil and ancient magic which his master had woven together, could not comprehend the permanence of death. It had all seemed so complicated, when in fact it was but a very bare and simple truth.
Klee, when she was smaller still, waddled rather than walked; her rucksack comically huge on her back, Dodoco’s fluffy tail trailing on the ground. She already had the habit of barreling towards a desired target once one has been identified, and her coordination skills left much to be desired. Alice, when she was still in Mondstadt, had always chided Klee for the bruises and scratches littering her limbs while treating them with gentle hands. She’d noticed his attentive gaze the first time round, how he had followed her every step as if fascinated by the process; she later showed him where the equipment was stored and how to use them since that old hag must not have taught you first aid, how can one become so proficient in alchemical science yet still forget something as basic as this?
She had always accommodated his strangeness, looked past his pale exterior to find someone kinder, gentler, picking out the faint, almost unnoticeable threads of humanity Rhinedottir had carefully braided into his being. And then she had left and entrusted him with Klee.
He remembers the day when Klee had barged into his newly minted lab with fresh tears in her eyes and a red scrape on her left knee, a couple of knights not far behind.
“ Albedo ,” she wails, loud, insistent. “Big brother Albedo.” The tears dribble down her dirt-streaked face, and she looks very small in his doorway, limping on one leg and sniffling.
He drops the notes in his hands, lifts her carefully by the arms up on the small chaise he puts up for show and settles her amongst the cushions. “Are you alright?” His voice is even, though his breaths come quickly in his chest; ridiculous. He doesn't even need to breathe.
Blood oozes from the wound, sluggish and muddy; it looks shallow but spans the entirety of her knee, the skin around it flecked with dirt and dust. Beads of red well from the cracked, grimy skin, peeling off like paper, running over the dried streaks of blood. The sight of it makes something inside him lurch.
“It hurts,” Klee says, quiet, her voice thick through the tears, and Albedo snaps out of his trance. Right. The wound.
He washes it first with a clean towel and brings out the gauze, the disinfectant, the bandages; methodical and exactly how Alice had done it.
“What happened?” He asks, and she puffs up with hurt indignance. “I was being so careful,” she says, “I swear! But I saw a frog by the pond, and I really wanted that frog because Ms. Lisa said they were good for po-shuns. She said they could make my bombs even sparklier and bigger and huge ! But the frog was mean and ran away really fast and when I tried to catch it I fell.” She pouts. “It was an ack-sident.”
“Accident.” Albedo gives her arm a squeeze the way Alice sometimes squeezes his shoulder in greeting and tells him to loosen up a little. “If you wanted frogs you could have asked me.”
“But I want to get them myself!” Klee puffs her cheeks up comically. “I want to have my own frogs, not borrow yours.”
Personally, Albedo does not see the difference. But he carefully wraps the bandages around her knee and lets her hold onto his sleeve as she sniffles pitifully.
Klee does not typically make a big fuss out of things that do not call for one. The tears roll quietly, big fat droplets down her face and onto Albedo’s sleeve, on the gauze, on the wound, in a steady plip-plop. She wails when Albedo swipes the disinfectant over the wound, and he has to secure her leg at that point. Other than that, she lets him tend to the wound without major resistance.
Her hands are still clinging tightly to his arm after it's done. “Does it feel better?”
She hesitates. “It still hurts,” she says, petulant. “But it's less sticky now.”
Albedo nods. “Be more careful next time.” He stares at the wash-basin, the water murky with blood and dirt, the dull swirls of it eddying on the surface. Through the pale fabric of the gauze a stain blooms like poppies in a field.
Klee is on her feet again already. Albedo cannot look away from the gauze, the wound on her knee. He can feel the rush of blood in his veins, the not-blood that stains gold instead of the red from Klee’s wound. He looks at his hands and finds flecks of her dried blood in between his fingernails. Red.
“Are you sure you're alright?” He hears himself ask. Klee nods, testing her weight on her knee.
“It's not that bad,” she admits. “I can pretend it isn't there, and it won't hurt as much.” She pats his cheek clumsily. “Thank you, big brother Albedo.”
“You're welcome,” he says absently. He swallows the bitter knot in his throat. “Be more careful,” he says again.
The red of Klee’s blood burns on the back of his eyelids like a red-hot brand. The dried flecks tingle on his skin. He wants to scrape them off; this awful, awful red that is his sister’s blood, the sickening colour that stains his white fingers. If it were up to him, she would never bleed ever again.
IV.
Albedo doesn’t bleed; slice open his chalk-soft skin and you will find only dust mingling with gold fluid in the dark, hollow recesses of his body. It flows in a cycle, some ancient magic that pulls his limbs like puppetry. He is a puppet, made, put together like a puzzle by a clever magician. He can be taken apart and put together over and over again, and he will work if you put the pieces of him in the right place.
‘Death’ for him is a faraway concept warranting a great deal of curiosity but never personal involvement. But humans are different. If they were like machines they would be made of so many interlinking gears and machinery that to take out one piece or alter another would collapse the entire system. But they are not machines; these intricate systems of blood and flesh, once broken, would never work again.
Kaeya was one of the only people he has ever entrusted with the truth. Their relationship is fundamentally one that is based around the exchange of information, of secrets, as they each try to puzzle out the other. It is only fair that in exchange for Kaeya’s secrets, Albedo gives him some of his own to keep.
It is only Kaeya who visits him this time on the mountain. He had written to Albedo that he happened to be in the area; his men were currently spending the night at the encampment at the base of the mountain and won’t you entertain a dear friend in your lair, Sir Alchemist?
Albedo is working when he arrives in a flurry of snowflakes, and looking no less downtrodden in the cold as he sweeps into the laboratory as per his usual fashion.
“My dearest Sir Alchemist, prince of chalk and starlight, I know you are impervious to cold weather but would it hurt to light a few more fires? I am positively freezing .”
“You look rather cheerful for a freezing man,” Albedo says without looking up from the flask. Something warm blooms inside him despite the apparent lack of fire. “Matches are in the drawer over by my desk. Help yourself.”
“Your darling friend treks through the harrowing mountains of Dragonspine to visit you on this rare and joyous occasion and all you do is work,” Kaeya laments. “How unchivalrous of you.”
“Just until I've extracted the compound,” Albedo mutters. “I need a spatula; any chance my darling friend could be of assistance?”
“I see how it is, you've called me here to be your lab assistant,” Kaeya says, playfully accusatory. “I'll have you know I took the day off tomorrow because I fancied we could go traipsing round in the snow and–”
He suddenly falls silent. It is a jarring enough pause from his typical banter that Albedo looks up from his experiment. “Is everything ok?”
Kaeya’s expression is terrifyingly blank. “You're hurt,” he says, sounding almost confused.
“Oh.” He looks down to the gouge marks on his side, ugly slashes that had torn through the fabric of his coat and straight through the chalky exterior of his skin. “I encountered a couple of hilichurls earlier who took me by surprise. I’ll fix it later.”
“Are you…okay?”
Albedo looks up. Kaeya is looking at him with a mixture of shock, concern, and something like pity. It makes his skin prickle, the frayed edges of his skin tingling with artificial nerves.
“It's really not that bad,” he manages to say. It’s true; he’s had worse. Somehow it seems inadequate. “It’s just a scratch.”
Kaeya’s expression flickers, uncertain. “You should take better care of yourself,” he says.
Albedo shifts. “You're starting to sound like Sucrose,” he murmurs. “You know what I’m like.”
“I just don't like seeing you hurt,” Kaeya says, a wry smile making its way to his lips. “I know it’s nothing serious for you, but at least try to take it a bit more seriously.”
“I..it's fine, really,” Albedo says. The weight of Kaeya’s gaze feels too much, somehow. He doesn't deserve to be the subject of unnecessary worry. “You don't have to fret over me like…” He trails off.
He’s not human. He doesn't get hurt like they do.
“I want to,” Kaeya says simply. He hands Albedo the spatula. “Wrap up your experiment. I’ll help you dress it.”
Albedo quickly gives the flask a stir, spoons some of the precipitated solid into a glass dish on the side. “There's no need,” he says. “I usually just stitch up the gaps and layer over some of my master's formula. It smooths over in a day or so.”
“I want to help,” Kaeya repeats. He takes Albedo’s free hand and clasps their fingers together. “Please?”
Albedo looks at their fingers. Kaeya's hand is just the right size to fit against the curve of his palm. “Okay,” he says.
This is how Albedo finds himself stripped of his top, sitting on a stool next to Kaeya, who is stitching the gashes on his side with neat rows of thread, his face furrowed with concentration and cast in a bronze glow from the flickering flames of the nearby fire.
Albedo feels strangely exposed like this, Kaeya seeing beyond his exterior and getting a glimpse of the interior, like he is some machine being taken apart and Kaeya is studying the mechanisms within. His fingers are gentle and precise as he sews the gap shut. They ghost over his skin and though his body doesn't react to temperature, Kaeya’s touch, his mere presence, fills him with a golden warmth like mid-afternoon sunshine.
“It's done,” Kaeya says, leaning back to inspect his handiwork.
“Thank you,” Albedo says gingerly. His wound aches; He feels not the pain of the wound but the warm tingle of Kaeya’s fingertips dancing over his skin, so gentle, so careful with a thing like him. It makes something foreign flare to glorious life in his chest and the artificial organ that drums out a heartbeat next to it pales in comparison.
He presses his fingers along the seams. “It’s strange having this done for me.”
“Hasn't anyone helped you when you were wounded before?”
Albedo unscrews the lid of the jar and reaches in for the powdery chalk his master had given him for the general upkeep of the wear-and-tear which a chalk body experiences. “My master helped me the first few times but always trusted me afterwards to handle it on my own.” He smoothes over the cracks of his skin. “And you can imagine why I do not let others operate on my body.”
“Lift your arms,” Kaeya instructs, and winds the bandage over his torso, pressing the paste into the cracks of his fractured skin. “Just…be more careful. Just because you can't die from a wound doesn't mean you should be going round getting hurt.”
Albedo shrugs his shirt back on, careful to avoid jostling Kaeya’s handiwork. “I assure you I am perfectly fine, though I suppose I do feel better with your presence and your assistance.” He gives Kaeya a small smile. “Well enough to go traipsing in the snow if you so wish.”
Kaeya returns it, a soft, private curl of his lips. “It’s okay,” he says. “We can just stay here. If you walk me through your experiments I can help you write up a lab report for Jean. Also, where did you put that bottle of vintage I sent you a couple weeks ago?”
Albedo slips back into his coat. “I thought you meant it as a gift for me.”
“Obviously not. I meant for it to be an emergency provision of alcohol for us to share on a particularly moody winter night." Kaeya is already in motion again, walking towards the crates at the back, his long shadow dancing on the cavern walls in some facsimile of life, a mere fraction of the vitality that exudes from the man on a daily basis. “Now where did you put it…”
“Wine is meant to be shared,” Albedo agrees. “On your right. Get the nice set of glasses as well, would you?”
Outside, the wind howls a raging, blinding white. Inside, it is lit with a golden, bruising warmth. The chafe of his wound grounds him, a pulse that echoes the foreign, fluttering thing in his ribcage. Kaeya is smiling. Albedo finds himself smiling too.
“Sit, sit,” Kaeya says. “We have all the time in the world.”
V.
It is almost offensive how ordinary the day had seemed before the moment it all came crashing down. Of course, that itself was not unexpected; being who he is, Albedo is certain he is on Celestia’s list of top ten people to spite. The point is, fate is cruel in how it blindsides you.
Albedo is once again on Dragonspine, wrapped up in a white cocoon of cold, crystalline silence, lost in the pleasant hum of focus which has him patiently measure and record traces of chemicals from the various samples he’d prepared in the morning. The day is still bright when he finishes, the landscape a brilliant, blinding white; perhaps he could stop by Mondstadt to hand in the experiment report and drop in to visit Klee.
It is strange to think there is someone waiting for him now, instead of the other way around. Nowadays he has friends and a sister and a job with nice colleagues and a comfortable, personal lab.
He thinks that what he has could be called a home. An unfamiliar word that he has always been slightly wary of, a novelty that he has never really had before. Now it gives him a strange thrill to refer to his apartment in the barracks as ‘home’. Lately Kaeya and Klee have taken to having afternoon tea there, where they could discuss very serious matters of frog-catching and fish-blasting over tea brewed with the new specialist kettle the knights had given him for quality testing. In truth the testing has been over for a while; either they’d forgotten to take it back or had just decided to leave it with him permanently. Anyway, Kaeya is apparently obsessed with how it prepares coffee, so Albedo has no complaints.
He spots a particularly lovely specimen of pinecone and decides Kaeya might take a liking to it; it would look nice on his mantelpiece, perhaps.
The day is still bright when he arrives, though the sun has dipped down considerably. But something is off, from the way the knights are murmuring amongst themselves and a couple of them are in a flurry rushing through the streets and crying out for more assistance. He follows the commotion to headquarters where he can more clearly see the bloody footprints of the wounded, red and stark against the cobblestone, and he feels his own flesh writhe with discomfort at the sight of dark, sticky puddles that litter the floorboards.
He taps a nearby knight on the shoulder, about to ask him the source of commotion, when the injured unit passes by; light surface wounds for most, though a couple bleed sluggishly from their thighs and arms, limbs hanging in awkward angles and staggering unevenly to the infirmary. At the back of the group, surrounded by frantic medical personnel, is a horrifyingly familiar silhouette, and it is as if time slows to allow a yawning pit to open up in his stomach in excruciating slow motion as his false heart plummets like his brother did from the very top of Dragonspine, the world shattering around him.
Kaeya is almost unrecognisable because of how bloodied he is. Red, red, red all over his torso, sticky and blooming from the jagged gash in his side. He is drenched head to toe in the colour.
For a moment Albedo’s heart stutters, a misstep in his design, and his vision flickers; it narrows in on the blood, Kaeya’s blood, which has stained the floorboards. Something in his stomach drops like a stone from a mountain and splinters into a million tiny shards, sharp, biting into the insides of his flesh, as if he’d swallowed glass.
They swiftly carry him to the infirmary. Albedo follows without registering what he is doing. He just knows he cannot let Kaeya out of his sight.
What happened , he hears but doesn't say himself, couldn't say himself. He hears snatches of conversation; a Cryo Abyss Mage. The reports had mistaken it for a Hydro one. An ambush by a band of hilichurl shooters.
Someone is calling for the nurses, for Sister Barbara and her team of healers. They talk to him too, but he cannot hear what they are saying. It is like he has been submerged in the freezing depths of the sea; all he can hear is the slow, rhythmic drum of his heart which pumps his blood through his veins. Their voices are very far away, indistinct, and he is somewhere beneath the sea where everything is blue except for Kaeya and his damned red torso, red everywhere.
They stop attempting to get him to leave; he thinks they've accepted that he's here to stay for now, even though he doesn't know what he can do. What can he do?
Kaeya is bleeding out, the red draining from his skin, and Albedo can do nothing about it. He stares at his pale, synthetic hands, white and spotless, and does not feel like a miracle, or the best of his master’s creations. He feels an unfamiliar, sickening lurch of fear. He feels mortal.
Then there is a clamour in the general direction of the door, and the knights all spring into action. Someone drags Albedo by the arm before he can think to protest- before he can think, really, and when he sees a blur of red by the door his heart lurches but he sees that it’s Klee, desperately shoving at the group of knights huddled at the threshold and blocking her view of the interior.
“Albedo,” she says, voice wobbling, “is big brother Kaeya okay? I heard - I heard that he got into some trouble, and I just wanna see if he's okay – please, Albedo, please —”
And just like that Albedo resurfaces, the air a cold shock to his senses as he regains clarity very briefly.
“Kaeya is okay,” he says, in a very careful, neutral voice. “I promise, Klee.” His throat feels too-tight, like he’s drowning. “He's fine. It's nothing serious. Why don't we go drawing in your room?”
The knight closest to him - Swan, he thinks - lets out a discreet sigh of relief. His eyes are tired. “We’ll handle this end, don't worry, sir-”
And then they're alone in the empty, blood-stained hallway. A trail of red leading into the infirmary. Something in Albedo’s head is ringing again.
“Let's go,” he says to Klee, and he links their hands together. Her fingers are small and warm against his cool chalk skin.
It is late at night when Klee is finally asleep that Albedo heads to the infirmary. The blood in the hallway has been cleaned up. It does nothing to remove the faint metallic scent of it, clogging up the hallways. The door is left open with a crack where faint golden lamplight spills out onto the floorboards. He slips in quietly.
Kaeya is very, very still in the bed, his skin ashen and sticky with sweat and grime. He lies there like a butterfly pinned, rust-red blooming like flowers through the pale gauze and bandages wound around his middle. His hair spills on the pillow and clings to his forehead in strands.
Albedo feels sick with the mechanical pulse in his hollow chest, so loud it chokes him. He cannot even bring himself to reach out to Kaeya for fear he would crumble away under his touch like an over-exposed specimen of leaf. Or perhaps a bloodied bird with its porcelain skeleton, too-small and too-fragile and left open with its red heart gushing.
He feels the artificial life inside him burn like some miniature star, a sun glowing hot and heavy in his chest. If only he could rip open his chest and pour some of its red-hot light into Kaeya, who is so very pale, his colour drained away, a shade of his usual self. Kaeya is flesh and blood and his life is seeping away into his bandages one red blossom at a time. Albedo is chalk and dust held together by a false heart that only bleeds gold, and he has never felt so achingly empty.
Outside, the air is cool. Mondstadt is quiet at night, steeped in blue shadow and silver moonlight. The wind is soft, a gentle breeze that follows his footsteps.
Home. Albedo doesn't know when he started thinking of this city as home. Though he knows he is very much foreign, he doesn't feel like much of a foreigner any more. He knows the streets, the shape of the buildings, the scent of flowers and clean rain and wine that fills the air. He knows the caress of the breeze and the soft murmur of its people; a song so familiar to him already, the steady breathing of the city humming beneath every footstep.
He finds himself at the cathedral; a tall, imposing shadow draped in silky twilight, regally presiding over the people. In the centre of it all stands Barbatos himself: his marble likeness serene and smiling, moon-stained hands turned to the heavens.
There are still few stragglers at this time of the day, people deep in prayer or just hanging about the church grounds. Albedo goes to sit by the statue, sketchpad flipped open to a blank page, and begins to sketch the cathedral. A few minutes later he becomes aware of a presence over his shoulder.
He turns, blinking, and sees a bard dressed in green with twinking cerulean eyes. It's one of the loiterers he spotted earlier.
“What artistic skill you have, sir,” he says. “To see you draw is truly a pleasure.”
“Just a sketch and nothing more,” Albedo says, but something about his manner piques his interest. He turns his attention away from the cathedral, now seeming rather dull, to his conversation partner. “You’re out late for a street performer.”
“I'm off hours, silly.” He takes the initiative to plop down next to Albedo. “Besides, I'd say it's still early. What are you drawing?”
“I was drawing the cathedral. It looks different at nighttime.”
“It does, doesn't it.” The bard gazes appreciatively at the cathedral. “You don’t seem the religious type, though.”
“The gods mean very little to me,” Albedo admits, “but I do admire some of their deeds. I have Barbatos to thank for this city, for example.”
The bard laughs, a tinkling sound like wind chimes. “Cities are built by humans, not gods. The Archons who preside over it are merely guides to the people who shape it over the course of generations.”
“Very powerful guides, I'm sure,” Albedo murmurs, and the bard laughs. “But even they cannot stop their people from dying before they can see the realisation of their efforts.”
“You know what they say. From dust thou art and shalt to dust return.” The bard turns to Albedo with a knowing smile. “I suspect that's true even for you.”
“I suppose so.” Albedo stares at his pale hands and wonders how long it would take for him to completely erode. He thinks of the snow-buried skeletons of his kin.
“To dust they must return, but their descendants built this city from their ashes, and every single Mondstadtian after them,” the bard says. “However brief their lives were, their efforts coalesced into something beautiful. Something permanent.“ He smiles like they’re sharing an inside joke. “They made this city what it is today."
“It seems unfair,” he murmurs, “for beings so complex and full of wonder to have a life constricted by a weak vessel.” He thinks of the glint in Kaeya’s eye, that window into his soul; a brilliant, unwavering spirit constrained within a fragile shell of flesh and blood.
How do you do it? How do you live knowing you could die so easily? Knowing you could get hurt? Knowing that your life is held within some tiny delicate thing in your chest? Albedo thinks of red all over his hands. His hands, now, are stained with charcoal; life in another form.
The bard looks down at his lyre and aimlessly plucks out a melancholy chord. “Death waits for all of us. But mortals despite their weakness in their flesh and blood, they live for something beyond their existence, believing that when their time comes, others will carry the torch so that their memory continues.”
“This world remembers all that came before us. They are never truly gone; they become their deeds and their legacies and the people whose lives they've shaped.” The bard gazes at the statue of Barbatos with a sad smile. “When all else burns, when we remember Mondstadt only in songs and ballads, you will be a part of the melody. And isn't that all we can ask for?”
Albedo returns to the infirmary soon after that. The candlelight flickers, like the beating wings of a fly struggling in a spider’s web, a passing butterfly here one moment and gone the next. It casts morphing shapes on the walls and floors and Kaeya is a pale blue shadow caught in its black web. He turns when Albedo approaches, his single eye glimmering with starlight.
“It’s late,” he says, and his voice is scratchy from disuse, so unlike his usual smooth manner of speaking, the words polished till they shone like jewels.
“You could have died,” is the first thing he says. It is the only thing he finds that he can say. You could have died. Ugly, unflinching, they echo in his head, some awful premonition. You could have died. You would have died .
You can die. You will die. And what will be left behind? A cold, bloodless husk, that brilliant spirit extinguished so easily it is almost unthinkable.
Kaeya takes his hand, clasps their fingers together. He smiles, weak, the mask he reserves for public appearances discarded. “But I didn't. I’m here.”
“Not forever,” Albedo mutters, and then he feels his eyes sting, keen, a sensation so unfamiliar that it makes him shut his eyes. “Archons, how do you mortals deal with this?”
“With what?” There's a quirk to his lips. “Mortality?”
“You die so easily,” Albedo whispers.
Kaeya’s eye glints like a gem buried in shadow. “It takes more than a stab wound to get rid of me.”
“You know what I mean.” Albedo stares at their intertwined hands; Kaeya’s skin is rough and brown and calloused, well-worn. He holds Albedo’s chalk fingers with such excruciating gentleness that it makes his false heart shudder. “I’m not like you. I don’t understand how you even live knowing that you can be here one second,” he breathes in, breathes out; “and gone the next.”
Kaeya is still smiling. His thumb traces a comforting circle on the back of Albedo’s palm. “I’ve always found beauty in impermanence. Doesn’t it make things worth more if you know they don’t last forever?”
“I’m scared for you,” Albedo lets himself say, because at this point neither of them want to wear their masks around each other anymore. Kaeya’s eye widens and his face crumples a little, though he's still smiling, wry and sad. “Oh, Albedo.” His fingers squeeze Albedo's hand, an anchor tethering the two of them “Don’t be. That's just what it means to be human.”
To be human.
“We live, and we die, but every one of us leaves something behind for those who continue.” There is a faraway look in his eye, the star suspended in a pool of midnight-blue. “I was once a part of your life, and many others, and I know that when I am nothing but ashes you will remember me and I will live in every memory we shared, good or bad.” Kaeya meets his eyes with a smile. “Why should I be scared of that?”
Albedo exhales. “I see,” he says, and finds that he mostly means it. What a terrifying existence, to be human, to bleed. What a lovely thing it is, to live despite it. To entrust your life to others, an unbreaking chain of legacy and memory and joy. And here is Kaeya, trusting him.
“It’s enough that you’re here with me right now,” Kaeya says, face softening.
“I’m here,” Albedo agrees, and squeezes their intertwined hands. And though their hearts are fundamentally different, for a moment it feels as though they are beating to the same, fluttering pulse.
(A memory comes to him from the recesses of his mind; a gilded, glittering thing like the flutter of an iridescent wing.
Midsummer, midday, middle of the Mondstadt countryside; burning with the warm glow of afternoon sunshine that pools on their hair and skin like liquid honey. They are having a picnic with Klee in Springvale; Klee has run off to splash in the cerulean shallows of the lake. Kaeya is weaving together flowers with a deft, practised hand while Albedo attempts to follow along,
“There,” Kaeya says, admiring his handiwork - a wreath of calla lilies. He looks directly into Albedo’s eyes, an unusually gentle smile curving his lips. “Beautiful.”
“They’ll wilt by the time we’re back,” Albedo says.
“Does it matter? They look lovely now. Isn't that enough?”
Albedo had never seen the point in impermanence. What was something worth if it would not last? “Perhaps we could preserve them..maybe a potion..”
Kaeya had merely laughed. “Save your alchemy for more important matters than a flower crown.”
But it was important to Albedo. If only he could make it so that every moment with Kaeya lasted forever. If only those flowers would stay fresh and Kaeya’s smile burn endlessly like a star close enough to touch.
Klee had loved her flower crown so much she insisted on making one for Kaeya. Albedo remembers calla lilies woven into dark hair and a brilliant smile. Beautiful; a singular moment in time where everything is as it should be forever. The flowers would wilt and he would spend the evening picking out dried bits of petal from Klee’s hair but in his memory he will remember them bright and lovely in her hair, in Kaeya’s hair, as they both traipse about in the pond looking for frogs, painted in the last, golden rays of the setting sun.)
“Kaeya?” Albedo says, voice soft. The man hums in response, his face awash with candlelight, in soft shades of burnished bronze and gold like an oil painting.
Albedo reaches for Kaeya’s face with his free hand and brushes a finger over the curve of his cheek. “Let's go out tomorrow. For a picnic with Klee.”
Tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, too. As long as Kaeya will have him. What a beautiful, terrifying thing, to exist. What a wonderful experience it is to exist together.
Kaeya’s lips brush against his palm, gentle as the fluttering wings of a butterfly; he feels them curve into a smile. “Yeah. I'd love that.”