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In the quiet dawn of Mondstadt, where cathedral bells toll with all the sanctimony of a repressed nun's breathless sigh, Kaeya Alberich was already up to no good. Naturally. But then again, when wasn’t he?
“What if,” he whispered, eyes twinkling like sin in a goblet, “we stole the cathedral bell and replaced it with a foghorn?”
Albedo, crouched beside him like a war criminal masquerading as a florist, blinked once, slow and cold and calculating. “That would require at least five kilograms of demolition gel.”
“I’ve already acquired six.” Kaeya smirked. “I call her ‘Boombertha.’”
“Oh, you named it. That’s love,” Albedo said, fond. He reached over, gently stroked Kaeya’s cheekbone with the back of a gloved hand, and added, “Did you remember to smuggle the foghorn out of Liyue?”
“Of course. I had Beidou distract Ningguang with homoerotic subtext while I yanked it off a salvage ship.”
Albedo smiled the way a condemned saint might before flinging himself into hell. “Then let’s ruin Mondstadt’s morning worship.”
Elsewhere, in the Dawn Winery estate, Diluc Ragnvindr awoke with the keen sense that somewhere, somehow, a crime was being committed. By Kaeya. Specifically Kaeya. Possibly involving explosives. Possibly involving a scientific accomplice with the morals of a feral crow.
He stumbled to the balcony in a robe, clutching his teacup with white knuckles. In the distance, BAAAAAAHHHHHHHHP! went a sound not of this realm. Not a foghorn. No, that would be too obvious. This was worse. It was... a foghorn playing Careless Whisper.
“…they’ve escalated,” he whispered, horrified.
Back in Mondstadt, chaos reigned like a slutty little monarch.
Kaeya and Albedo stood triumphantly before the cathedral, where the foghorn was now lodged in the bell tower, blaring smooth saxophone porn-noir at seven in the morning. Sister Rosaria had taken one look at the atrocity, muttered “I knew I should have joined the Fatui,” and walked away smoking two cigarettes at once.
Jean, poor sweet Jean, blinked slowly and simply said, “Perhaps Barbatos wills it.”
Lisa cackled. “Hot.”
But no one—no one—suspected the true masterminds.
Albedo, whose face could launch a thousand ethical debates and at least two coups, feigned innocence like he was born doing it.
“I was with Kaeya all night,” he said sweetly, clasping Kaeya’s hand in the square.
Kaeya leaned in, drawling low, “You can ask Diluc. We were definitely making noise.”
“I heard screaming,” Venti offered, already three bottles into breakfast.
“Moaning,” Bennett added helpfully.
“It sounded like arson,” said Razor.
“It was arson,” Kaeya confirmed cheerfully. “The sheets caught on fire.”
Albedo sighed, dreamily, “His body temperature is unreasonably high. I had to test it. Repeatedly.”
Diluc, meanwhile, was suffering. Tremendously. Existentially. Biblically.
He pounded on Jean’s office door with the righteous fury of a man possessed.
“They are terrorists!” he hissed. “Kaeya and that soft-spoken warlock of a gremlin are destabilizing Mondstadt’s entire infrastructure—”
“Diluc, we’ve been over this,” Jean said, sipping chamomile tea laced with vodka. “They’re in love. Let them be.”
“In love?!” Diluc cried, scandalized. “In lust with dynamite! In a fornicatory covenant with public destruction! They’re going to kill us all.”
That night, Kaeya was making love to Albedo in an alleyway behind the Knights’ headquarters.
Because of course he was.
“Kaeya,” Albedo gasped, legs wrapped around his waist, shirt shoved up to his armpits, “tell me again how you disabled the church security system.”
Kaeya bit into Albedo’s collarbone like a starving beast at communion. “With my tongue. And a hairpin. Mostly my tongue.”
“You’re such a problem,” Albedo groaned. “You’re going to make me blow up another statue.”
“Oh no,” Kaeya said, devil-mouthed. “Whatever shall I do to stop you?” He pressed closer. “Do I need to punish you?”
Albedo whined. Whined.
The alley glowed slightly. Albedo’s alchemical circuits sparked like demonic fireflies. This was deeply erotic. And also, almost certainly illegal.
A glowing rune flared above them. A surveillance device. Kaeya reached up lazily and smashed it with a boot.
“It’s fine,” he whispered. “No one believes Diluc anyway.”
---
The foghorn had not stopped.
For seventy-two hours, Careless Whisper played at increasingly erratic tempos from the bell tower of the Cathedral. Every hour on the hour, it added new instruments. At dawn on the fourth day, it incorporated bagpipes. By noon, a sensual kazoo solo. Barbara cried in the pews. Rosaria packed her things. The pigeons moved to Fontaine.
Kaeya and Albedo, meanwhile, lay atop a rooftop draped in a plush, stolen tapestry, naked under the stars, covered in soot, wine, and sin.
“I think,” Kaeya murmured, nosing at Albedo’s throat, “we’ve outdone ourselves.”
“We,” Albedo whispered, pressing a gloved hand to Kaeya’s bare chest, “haven’t even begun.”
Below, Mondstadt crumbled in slow, sexy chaos.
Elsewhere, Diluc had entered what the doctors called his Paranoia Era.
His bedroom had become a Wall of Crimes. Red yarn looped between Polaroids of Kaeya with various incriminating objects: dynamite, a sacred relic, three ducks in a trench coat. One photo showed Albedo licking an Anemo slime with scholarly intensity. Another showed Kaeya shirtless and smirking while setting something on fire. Diluc had circled that one in seventeen colors of chalk.
“Look at them,” Diluc muttered to a bewildered Klee, who had just wandered in holding a soup pot. “They’re lovers. Terrorists. I saw them carving ‘Kaebedo 4Ever’ into the side of the cathedral with a laser. That’s not even their ship name. That’s what THEY call it.”
Klee blinked. “What’s a ship name?”
Diluc leaned in, crazed. “It’s what you give your OTP right before they blow up your winery with fireworks and blame it on the Abyss Order!”
Klee nodded solemnly and ladled him some soup. “This one has frog in it.”
Diluc did not notice. He had begun mumbling the names of crimes.
“Arson. Public lewdness. Fabrication of government documents. They printed fake Vision licenses and gave one to a duck.”
Klee’s eyes lit up. “I want a duck Vision!”
“NO,” Diluc snapped. “NO MORE DUCKS.”
At the same time, the Knights of Favonius held an emergency meeting regarding a matter of international importance:
A duck named Sir Reginald Featherbottom III had been named Interim Archon of Mondstadt.
“I’m confused,” Jean said, pinching the bridge of her nose. “How did a waterfowl become an Archon?”
Kaeya leaned against the table, fully shirtless, with his eyepatch replaced by a googly eye. “It was a democratic vote.”
“I never voted,” Lisa said.
“You were asleep. Democracy never sleeps.”
“It’s a duck, Kaeya,” Jean snapped. “You’ve forged fifteen scrolls of divine right in crayon!”
“He was chosen by Barbatos,” Albedo added serenely, presenting a wine-stained napkin that read “Quack means yes.”
Venti burped from beneath the table. “I approve this message.”
Diluc burst through the doors mid-rant. “DO NOT LISTEN TO THEM. THAT IS A REGULAR BIRD.”
“Archon,” Kaeya corrected, offended.
Diluc lunged. Kaeya dodged, caught Albedo mid-spin, and kissed him in front of everyone. It was vile. It was passionate. It was unreasonably romantic.
Klee cheered.
Lisa fanned herself.
Jean cried softly.
Diluc screamed.
Later that night, Albedo and Kaeya picnicked under the statue of Barbatos, which they had slightly defaced to look more like Sir Featherbottom. They lay among alchemical candles, wine bottles, and a series of wanted posters featuring their own faces.
Kaeya tucked a lock of blond hair behind Albedo’s ear. “Have I told you lately that your brain makes me hard?”
Albedo moaned, low and reverent. “Say it again, but this time call me your little heretic.”
“My little heretic,” Kaeya purred, straddling him. “My godless genius. My blasphemous waif.”
Albedo grabbed him by the hips, voice gone raspy. “I want to violate the tenets of natural law with you.”
“Let’s rewrite the laws of thermodynamics. With our bodies.”
They kissed like war. Their tongues had intent. Stars exploded in the distance. Albedo’s gloved hand found Kaeya’s bare skin, and the rooftop glowed like a divine battlefield. Somewhere, a duck quacked in approval.
In the City Square, the public awoke to a new horror.
A massive, glowing billboard had appeared overnight:
“Sir Reginald Featherbottom: Archon of Freedom, Forgiveness, and Fuckery. Kaebedo bless you.”
— Sincerely, The Committee for Hot People Against Diluc’s Sanity™
Diluc stared up at it, clutching a mug of black coffee and the last fraying thread of his soul.
“This is fine,” he muttered. “I am fine. They’re just two war criminals with beautiful hair and zero shame.”
Behind him, a small child shouted, “I ship them!!”
Diluc screamed into his coffee.
---
Mondstadt awoke to screaming.
Not the usual screams—those of Kaeya’s “Tavern Olympics” or the time Albedo gave a slime a Ph.D.—but a new scream. A primordial scream. The scream of the deep.
The sea had come to Mondstadt.
Or rather… Mondstadt had gone to sea.
Because, in the dark hours of morning, Kaeya and Albedo had stolen a whale.
To be clear: they had not found a whale.
They had not befriended a whale.
They had engineered a whale.
Albedo called it "Poseidon, Harbinger of Moist Justice."
Kaeya called it “Big Sexy With a Blowhole.”
It had wings made of alchemical wind turbines and a sound system that only played 2007 Eurodance. It had harpoons that shot fireworks. Its eyes glowed red. It was also disturbingly hot, in a way that made Rosaria drink more than usual.
“Why,” Jean whispered from the Cathedral roof, watching the behemoth glide over Cider Lake like an airborne leviathan, “why is it wearing a tuxedo?”
“It’s their wedding whale,” Lisa said, sipping tea through a straw. “They’re eloping.”
“Who told you that?!”
“Barbara.”
Elsewhere, aboard Big Sexy With a Blowhole…
Kaeya and Albedo stood at the helm, wearing matching silk robes embroidered with crime statistics.
Kaeya had braided his hair into a crown of thorns and roses. Albedo wore nothing but chemistry goggles and emotional vulnerability.
“We could run away,” Albedo murmured, brushing a hand over Kaeya’s hip. “Sail to Snezhnaya. Start a commune. Publish our love poems. Build an army of fireproof pigeons.”
Kaeya turned, radiant in moonlight. “Albedo, my glacial orchid. My forbidden thesis. My half-naked crime husband. I’d burn the Divine Texts for you.”
Albedo clutched his chest. “I’d rewrite the periodic table so your name was every element.”
They kissed. The whale moaned.
Meanwhile, Diluc was losing his fucking mind.
At the dawn council meeting, he slammed a fish down on the table.
“This was in my bathtub,” he said. “There are barnacles in my WINE BARRELS. Kaeya has kidnapped a whale, and you all just LET HIM.”
Jean stared at the fish. Lisa pet it. Klee tried to name it “Explody.”
“They got married, Diluc,” Jean said gently.
Diluc twitched. “No. No. That was NOT a real wedding. That was Barbara in a fever coma reading a Duck Scripture while Kaeya did a striptease.”
“You’re just mad you weren’t invited,” Lisa cooed.
“I’M MAD BECAUSE THEY SET MY HORSE ON FIRE.”
Everyone paused.
“You had a horse?”
“I HAD A HORSE.”
Back on the Whale, Kaeya and Albedo consummated their crimes.
Not physically. Yet.
But emotionally, erotically, and metaphysically?
Yes.
Kaeya had written nine poems in Albedo’s honor, each more obscene than the last. Albedo had chemically distilled the feeling of Kaeya’s voice and injected it into a clam. They stared at it for an hour. It glowed.
“You’re the only experiment I want to ruin me,” Kaeya whispered, clutching his hand.
Albedo’s pupils turned into hearts and citations.
“You’re my corrupted data,” he moaned. “My catastrophic peer review. I want you to violate my methodology.”
They kissed with such passion, a constellation blushed and Orion passed out.
Meanwhile, back on land:
Sir Reginald Featherbottom III, the duck Archon, now ruled Mondstadt from a wine barrel throne. He had outlawed pants and declared Wednesdays "Scream Into the Void Day."
Everyone obeyed.
Diluc, feral and covered in whale grease, scaled the statue of Barbatos with a crossbow.
“This ends now,” he snarled. “I’m taking out the fowl king. I’m ending the Kaebedo Industrial Complex. And I’m bringing back NORMALCY.”
“Sir Reginald is protected,” Venti slurred, dangling from a tree. “By the power of love. And also seven claymores.”
Diluc fired.
The duck caught the bolt midair.
With its beak.
And ate it.
Cut to: the whale wedding afterparty.
Everyone was drunk. Razor was DJing. Sucrose had made Albedo a “congrats on your depraved crime marriage” cake, which exploded. Kaeya was twirling around in a veil made of old wanted posters. Amber was crying.
“Why is this so beautiful?” she sobbed.
“They put me in a suit,” Venti said, holding a tiny violin. “Me.”
Meanwhile, in the belly of the whale, Albedo had created an aphrodisiac. Using pheromones. And cinnamon. And the essence of Kaeya’s laugh.
He drank it.
He wrote fourteen haikus and began weeping into Kaeya’s collarbone.
“You smell like war crimes and midnight,” he sobbed. “I want to die with you, you gorgeous bastard.”
Kaeya pressed their foreheads together, breath hot. “I want you to alchemize me into a better man. Then rail me against the navigation console.”
They did.
The whale cheered.
And Diluc, from his rooftop perch, saw it all.
The whale. The poetry. The erotic alchemy. The duck lighting a cigar with a Vision.
He stared. He whispered, voice raw:
“They’re happy.”
And it broke him.
He cried. Just a little. Then he screamed into the void. It was Wednesday.
---
When Kaeya awoke on the fourth morning of their honeymoon in Dragonspine, it was to find Albedo building a new continent.
“Sweetheart,” he murmured, dragging a silk robe over his violently bare chest, “is that a tectonic plate in your pocket or are you planning to assert divine sovereignty?”
Albedo didn’t look up. His pupils were spirals. His hair had grown four inches overnight. He was muttering in hexameter.
“I have seen the molecular structure of God,” he said. “It’s a dodecahedron made of lust.”
Kaeya nodded solemnly. “And what do we do with that?”
“We charge it rent,” Albedo whispered.
Then he kissed Kaeya on the mouth so hard the earthquake registered in Liyue.
Meanwhile, in Mondstadt,
Diluc was breaking.
And not metaphorically.
Physically.
His cape had fused to his spine. He could smell colors. He had not slept in sixteen days. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw a whale in lingerie whispering “You could’ve stopped this.”
He had tried everything.
Bribing the Knights? Rejected.
Appealing to Barbatos? Venti made a bong out of his emergency complaint scroll.
Burning Kaeya’s baby photos? They reappeared in his wallet, annotated with sensual limericks.
And worst of all…
Everyone loved them.
Albedo and Kaeya had declared Dragonspine an independent queer crime nation, renamed it "Frosthymen," and were somehow popular.
Frosthymen had a flag (Kaeya’s thigh), an anthem (Albedo moaning into a harp), and a theme park where you could pet cloned Kaeyas and buy “Albedo’s Forbidden Smoothie.”
The world rejoiced.
Except Diluc.
Diluc wrote ten manifestos. He started wearing a mask. He legally changed his name to “The Crimson Phoenix of Reason.” His horse returned. On fire.
“Finally,” he whispered.
Back in Frosthymen, the honeymoon had entered its ‘emotional devastation and knifeplay’ phase.
Kaeya was bleeding poetry.
Albedo was reading it into a volcano.
They’d fought. Passionately. Apocalyptically. Kaeya had accused Albedo of loving science more than him. Albedo had accused Kaeya of seducing the moon.
To be fair, Kaeya had seduced the moon.
Her name was “Selene.” She was into it. She sent him nudes.
Albedo summoned a second moon out of grief and jealousy.
Now there were two moons.
Teyvat wept.
At the Frosthymen summit, things went downhill.
Kaeya was giving a speech titled "I Made the Ocean Moan And Now I’m King."
Diluc crashed it on a horse made of flame, flanked by four men in feathered cloaks and trauma.
“I CHALLENGE YOU,” he screamed, eyes unhinged. “FOR THE SOUL OF MONDSTADT. FOR THE WINE. FOR THE DUCKS. FOR SANITY.”
Kaeya sipped a wineglass full of starlight and guilt. “No thank you, dearest brother. I’m a monarch now. Violence is beneath me.”
Then Albedo drop-kicked Diluc into a glacier.
But that wasn’t the end.
Because Kaeya and Albedo had a fight.
A real one.
It started with a sonnet and ended with cries echoing across Dragonspine.
“You don’t see me!” Kaeya screamed, eyes wet, mouth bleeding stars. “You see a symbol! A poem! A perfect vessel for your beautiful disaster—”
“I loved you before you were chaos incarnate!” Albedo shouted. “I loved you when you were just a sword in a bar and a smirk that hurt!”
“Then why—”
“Because I’m afraid!” Albedo sobbed. “Because I saw my soul in you and I couldn’t contain it. Because you make me want things I don’t understand.”
Their breath misted between them.
Kaeya dropped his wineglass.
It shattered.
Then he kissed him.
And it hurt.
And it healed.
And somewhere, far below, the whale sang a wedding dirge.
Meanwhile, in Liyue:
Sir Reginald Featherbottom III had seized the Church, declared himself Archon of Aesthetics, and launched a clothing line.
His first product: thigh-high vision holsters.
Lisa bought ten. Diluc wept.
The ducks had risen.
---
There was a war.
Of course there was a war.
It started when Sir Reginald Featherbottom III, Archon of Aesthetics, duck supremacist, and former teapot decoration, descended upon Mondstadt with a fleet of airborne gondolas powered by feathers and loose interpretations of physics.
He demanded:
All statues of Barbatos be replaced with “Kaeya’s left thigh.”
Liyue’s harbor be flooded with melted gelato.
Every citizen wear silk.
Mondstadt resisted.
Diluc stood atop the winery, bleeding metaphors and sweat. “I will not yield,” he hissed, holding a copy of Kaeya’s honeymoon poetry zine like a weapon.
“I may not have thighs, but I have principles.”
Then Kaeya showed up in a cape made of wind, lust, and tax evasion.
Albedo followed, dressed in a lab coat that had become sentient.
“Reginald,” Kaeya purred, slicing through six ducks midair with a flick of his braid, “your reign ends now.”
“Make me,” Sir Reginald squawked.
So they did.
Kaeya wielded a sword forged from three promises and a rejected love confession.
Albedo opened a portal to the erotic realm of theoretical physics and released the Fundamental Bosons of Yearning.
Sir Reginald, cornered, summoned the Featherpocalypse.
Ducks blackened the sky.
Kaeya laughed.
“I have faced worse. I have faced the morning after,” he shouted.
Albedo detonated a bomb made of memory and blushes.
Kaeya leapt through the flames, kissed him mid-combat, and together they performed the forbidden Lovers’ Arc—an acrobatic maneuver banned in every single nation for being “too gay and too lethal.”
Sir Reginald exploded into confetti and regrets.
Victory was theirs.
And so was Mondstadt.
Post-war.
The city lay in ruins.
Flowers bloomed from the wreckage. Albedo had accidentally terraformed it into a pleasure garden.
Everyone was happier.
Except Diluc, who had moved into a cavern and now only communicated in slam poetry.
“I saw the world break,” he muttered to a squirrel. “And it sang Kaeya’s name.”
Meanwhile, Kaeya and Albedo… tried to be normal.
Which meant:
Weekly poetry duels in bed
Public declarations of love in six languages
Romantic dinners on the edge of volcanoes
Matching lingerie (Albedo preferred lace, Kaeya: satin and sin)
They hosted brunches.
Lisa attended once and left with four restraining orders and a date.
Razor gave a speech at their anniversary: “They make strange noises but love strong. Wolf approves.”
Jean wept into champagne.
Barbara wrote a hymn called “Moaning of the Glaciers.”
But one night. One final night.
Kaeya sat by the window.
Snow fell like ash.
He was quiet.
Not sad. Just… still.
Albedo padded over, bare feet soundless.
“Thinking?”
Kaeya nodded. “About how I almost lost you. How we almost ruined everything. How you wore a crown of regret and I kissed you anyway.”
Albedo sat beside him. “I would have let the world burn for you. I still would.”
Kaeya looked at him.
“I know.”
Their hands intertwined.
Outside, stars fell in love with the earth.
Inside, two men who had defied kingdoms, gods, ducks, and themselves simply sat.
Together.
No war. No poetry. No chaos.
Just love.
And then, because they were disasters:
They made out on the windowsill and knocked over a priceless relic.
Epilogue:
They stayed married.
They adopted a duck.
Diluc eventually joined a commune.
Albedo published a romance novel titled “Stargazer’s Ruin: A Tale of Two Very Hot Men.”
Kaeya posed for the cover.
Mondstadt became the first queer-anarcho-erotic-scientific nation in Teyvat.
Everyone was confused, but happy.
And somewhere, deep in the earth, Big Sexy With a Blowhole whispered:
“Worth it.”