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Albedo wakes to a tight hand on his shoulder, shaking him awake with a grip hard enough to bruise.
This is unusual for a great many reasons. For one, he is sleeping outside of Mondstadt, in his lab in the mountains. He should be very much alone out here.
The touch is unfamiliar. No one ever wakes him like this.
His eyes slide open smoothly.
The cold of Dragonspine, the smell of dying embers. His warm breath ghosting in the air. The scent of wax and paper.
The cold eyes of Rosaria staring down at him.
“Get up.” Her voice is hard-edged and colder than the mountain air. Something about it rings dull, like the edge of a dagger dulled by too much use.
Her presence is an anomaly. He sits up slowly, eyeing her as he does so. Her hands are empty, she does not hold a weapon, but her eyes burn into him with intensity. “You are going to destroy Mondstadt.”
This wakes him fully.
He does not move. His mind catalogues every possible reason for this accusation. She should not know the thing that slumbers in his bones, or the instability of his creation.
He swings his legs off the cot, tilting his head in measured inquiry. “I have no intention of harming Mondstadt,” he speaks carefully.
“I know.” The thin morning light carves hollows into her face. She looks exhausted. And… something else. Something he cannot place, though it sets him on edge. “I know. It’s the last thing you want. But you bring the gods down upon us anyway.”
He frowns. The certainty in her voice leaves no room for contradiction. “Explain.”
“You are a homunculus. An artificial being created by the alchemist Gold. Her creations have a long history of destroying things. Today, you open the gateway to Celestia, and everything ends. I know because I have seen it happen. It keeps happening. Now get out of bed and help me.”
There is no disbelief in him, only the slow crawl of ice up his spine.
He stares at her. He swallows dryly. His brows furrow slightly. “If that is true, then the solution is simple. Kill me.” If what she says is true, she should not have compunctions about killing him. He knows this about her.
“I have. You won’t stay dead.” She is rummaging through journals on his desk, looking for something specific. He stares at her. She is going through his things, back turned to him. Somehow, it is the least guarded he has ever seen her around him. “We’ve burned you, drowned you, used every possible elemental reaction. Impaled your heart, your head. The Traveller tried to unmake you. Your body pulls itself back together faster than we can tear it apart.”
He presses a palm to his forehead, feeling faintly sick. "Solutions," he murmurs. "If death is not an option, then containment-"
"No," Rosaria says. "We've tried it."
"Binding sigils, cryostasis-"
"No."
He glances up at her. She has seen all of these failures before.
He exhales slowly. He pushes himself to his feet and joins her at his desk. He does not stop her from looking through his notes. He finds himself believing her, which places him in the uncomfortable position of playing catch up. She holds an immense amount of knowledge and experience that he does not, and he is left rapidly trying to piece everything he knows together into a clearer picture.
"What… of Venti?” he asks carefully.
Rosaria’s face hardly shifts, only darkens by minute shades while she pulls all of his journals from his shelf, discarding books to the side as useless without even opening them. “He is controlled as surely as you are.” Voice grim. “When it begins, he kneels. He does not move again.”
Albedo’s hands tighten on the edge of his desk.
“Okay. What are you looking for?” He asks. He supposes she would not be looking for something she had already tried. She is not stupid. If she is here, telling him all of this, it must be because she has another plan, an idea. He would like to believe he can help.
“Your mother.”
He frowns. “You won’t find an answer in any of my notes. I don’t know where she is.”
“I know that.” Rosaria snaps, before rearranging her face back into something collected. “I know. We’ve tried to find her before. You… I don’t know why, but you’re convinced she isn’t behind this. And I believe you. You’ve told me she might have a way to stop you though, if we can find her. We only started looking a few cycles ago, so I don’t have many leads. We start here.” She jabs a finger into one of his journals.
“We can spend this entire cycle reading through these, or if you have letters? Anything. We look for anything that stands out. We pursue it. We follow this lead to its completion. Until we find her and she saves you or destroys you, until we find her and she makes things a million times worse. I don’t know. We haven’t found her yet. But this is our only lead, and we only have so much time. One day. So please, tell me anything you know. I can only carry what I remember into the next cycle. The more I know, the faster I convince you, and the more time we have to work.”
It is at this point that Albedo realizes there is very little she does not already know about him. He went to sleep last night unknown. And he has woken up to a Rosaria who knows him far too well. He might as well assume he has no secrets left. It is jarring. And yet she is telling him all of this, not lurching to violence. She is trying to work with him, not against him. So for now, he must cling to that. By the sounds of things, he will be exposed by the end of the day, regardless.
“You’re right. I do believe you,” he murmurs, opening a false bottom in the drawer of his desk, and pulling out a stack of papers. “We can start with these. This is… my journal from when I was travelling with her. I have not shown this to anyone else. It is very old. Please be careful with it. I also have some correspondence between her and Aunt Alice. Alice let me keep them, presumably because she thought they would hold some sentimental value to me. But perhaps something in there may hold a clue as to where she is.” He hums at that thought. “In fact, Alice herself may know. I could write to her.”
“There’s no need.” Rosaria murmurs as she takes the journal and opens it with utmost care. “She will arrive later today. When the winds rise and the sky breaks open, she’ll be here. I can ask her then.”
“... Won’t it already be too late?”
“For this cycle, yes. But everything I learn here will hold value in the next.”
Albedo frowns. “That is—that seems a dangerous way of thinking. What if there is no next cycle?”
“There will be.”
He watches her face. “... How many times have you lived this day?”
“Hm, I stopped counting after three hundred.”
He has no reply for that as he stares down at scattered pages. His own careful handwriting, his mother’s pristine cursive, and the nearly illegible scrawl of Alice. For a long time, there is only silence. The sound of wind howling through the mountain spires of his brother’s bones, the dusty scrape of old curling paper, and the quiet sound of Rosaria breathing. She is incredibly calm for someone who knows the world will end today, though he supposes she has had a great deal of time to come to terms with this.
What he doesn’t understand at all is why the woman who has always distrusted him the most is suddenly so unguarded around him. All of her misgivings have been proven true, there is a foundation for her distrust, and he should be, by all counts, her enemy.
So why is she sitting across from him, eyes glued to the page, without a single sideways glance to keep track of him?
Softly, he asks, "Why are you telling me all of this?"
A simpler question might have been - why are you trusting me?
Silence. He cannot tell if she is ignoring him, or if she is so focused she has not heard him. She flips a page in the journal, her brows furrow lower on her face. Reminiscent of a scowl, but not quite. She frowns.
Her voice breaks the silence, grim. “I could never distrust you again.” Her eyes are shadowed and she does not look up. “For a year, I have watched you fight. To the bitter end, you do not give up. I have seen you kill those I love, and I have seen your face while you do it. I have seen you killed by them as well. I have lost count of the ways I’ve seen you die. Mondstadt is the nation of the free, and you are not free when you bring the end down on us.
“I’ve seen you choose Mondstadt over yourself a hundred times. I’ve watched you tear yourself apart for the smallest chance to change things.” Her expression, for a single moment, flickers to something haunted. “I promised you that I would find a way to save you, too.”
A promise made that he himself did not remember, and would never have held her to.
Silence is a heart beating between them, and Albedo thinks to himself, what a lonely existence this must be for her.
“I am glad you don’t remember,” she says softly.
Every time, they have lost.
Every time, the city has burned.
Every time, he has been the one to light the match.
Albedo feels something stirring beneath his skin.
Outside, the wind rises.