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1
Albedo sees his reflection in its gleam, sometimes. When the air hasn’t dried it yet, when he allows his eyes to relax, he will catch a glimpse of his features. The black nail polish. Its shine, its smooth exterior. His face and his blond hair will come to focus for just a second or two, and then he will look away. He will blink and he will look away.
“Your hands are steady.”
And then his attention is stirred—“what?” he asks. His eyes, widening. His muscles, flexing, trembling, unusual.
He remembers where he is. His dorm room, the last one at the end of the hallway. He sneaks a glance at the clock above his headboard. It reads 7:31. Kaeya is in his bedroom, he’d let him in about an hour ago, and now he’s painting his nails because—
“What?” he repeats.
Kaeya laughs. Through dark lashes, he looks at Albedo.
“Your hands are steady,” he says again, slower this time, and he seems a little more bashful—like saying it again kind of ruins his original intent. So he shuffles in his seat. His lips twitch. He adds: “That’s why I asked you to paint them, you know.”
Albedo looks down. He cannot bring himself to look at Kaeya’s face—another trick of his psyche, he thinks, but he cannot do it, so he looks down. Black, black. Focus on the black of Kaeya’s nails instead. He sees his reflection, warped. He does not know where to look anymore.
“Oh,” he breathes out. There is nothing more to say.
So he gets back to painting Kaeya’s nails. He’s in the process of adding the second coat and trying not to focus too much on it when Kaeya’s voice comes up again.
“Aren’t you going to ask how I knew?” he asks softly.
Albedo screws the cap back on. Now they just need time to dry. As an afterthought, he blows on them lightly, and Kaeya’s fingers quiver.
“What do you mean? How you knew I had steady hands?” Albedo murmurs, getting up from where he was before—the desk beside his bed, the rolling chair beside his desk. Kaeya had pulled out a foldable chair from his closet to sit on, and Albedo quietly notes that he won’t have the need to pack it away if Kaeya’s going to be over as often as this. Especially since he doesn’t have any extra chairs.
“Yeah,” Kaeya responds, lifting his hands and turning them this way and that; he smiles at what he sees—a tug on the corners of his mouth. Then his focus shifts back to Albedo—Albedo who is wiping the bits of polish that have smeared on his own fingers.
“Why would I want to ask that?” he asks, genuine. “I thought everyone already knew.”
Kaeya just shrugs, slumping back on the foldable chair. “Maybe you just wanted to know,” he says pointedly.
Albedo doesn’t want to know. He doesn’t feel the need to, therefore he doesn’t want to. It’s really simple, but he feels that saying this to Kaeya will spur an argument he doesn’t exactly have the patience for.
A pause, before he speaks again: “I don’t,” he says instead. He provides no explanation. “I really don’t.”
2
Black, most of the time. Blue, when he’s in the mood for it, mostly on the weekends. Then, when he is feeling particularly bold—which he usually is—white. Albedo hates white days; the bottle is nearly empty, and hasn’t anyone ever told you that a near-empty bottle is impossible to use? No? So you’re just an idiot, are you? Alright, I understand. Buy a new bottle, next time.
Anyway, point is—it’s just an inkling, but—Albedo is starting to think Kaeya that is unable to do it himself. Painting his nails, he means. Either that, or he’s too lazy for it.
So he says so. On an afternoon on campus, there are marks of blue nail polish on his palm, and he says so.
“Jumping to conclusions, are we?” Kaeya says in reply.
“Of course not,” counters Albedo. “You know I don’t do that.”
Kaeya blinks. Then, with a devilish grin, he hands him the white nail polish bottle. Albedo almost scowls; he never should’ve said so. He takes it with reluctance.
“There. Your punishment.”
Albedo twists the bottle open, raises a brow at Kaeya while doing so. “You’re silencing me because I called you out.”
The laugh he receives is boisterous and nothing short of amused. He thinks Kaeya might be laughing at him, but then the smile that comes after is mellow and affectionate. Albedo’s mouth clamps shut; suddenly, there is nothing for him to say. Something twists in his gut, dark. He wants to shove it down further.
“Didn’t we talk about this already?” Kaeya remarks, poking his forehead. “My hands are steady, but yours even more so. Plus, I don’t have anyone to do my right hand.”
Albedo frowns. “Where did that even come from, the steady hands thing?”
Kaeya’s eyes are dark, but the glint in them is unmistakeable. “I’ve seen you paint. In your room, but sometimes outside—I’ve seen your concentration, Albedo. It’s kind of attractive, you know that?”
Something is spinning, spinning, in his stomach, in his head. It twists around his lungs until he can’t breathe.
Albedo wonders what else he’d seen. If he’d looked past the concentration, past the supposed attractiveness, and into the core of his artistry. Albedo is a painter. Albedo is a mess, he is troubled, but above the surface, he is a painter—and he hopes that’s all there is to notice; he hopes that’s all Kaeya saw.
3
Albedo sees his reflection in its gleam, sometimes. Distorted, mainly, but his brain fills in the gaps his eyes cannot, and sometimes—sometimes, he is frightened by what looks back at him. Sky blue and crystal, without the flaws he knows he has. The porcelain will crack; its interior is hollowed out, innards scooped out by golden hands. He’s done this to himself.
He wonders if it is sentient. He wonders if the person who gazes back at him has the same thoughts, the same emotions, the same feelings—like it is his counterpart. Like if he stares back at it too long, his consciousness will begin to merge with it.
“What are you looking at so intensely?” asks Kaeya. He puts down his phone and wiggles his fingers, trying to get Albedo’s attention. “Is there something on my nails? Did you mess it up, or something?”
Albedo tightens his grip on Kaeya’s wrist in an attempt to still them. His skin is smooth under his touch, soft in ways he never expected him to be. Kaeya is all confidence and casual swagger and indifference, Albedo thinks that he might have been blessed by the gods.
“Albedo,” Kaeya says, pulling him out of his thoughts. “You’ve been so quiet. You’re always so quiet nowadays.”
Albedo can’t deny it.
He is quiet because he’s afraid his voice might give something away. He is quiet because he’s scared someone might know something, someone might see his reflection instead of himself—someone might see the sky blue and crystal, piece together the crux of his problems, and everything he’s built up with start crumbling like he imagines it would.
What does he feel about Kaeya? What does he see when he looks at him, what does he feel when they speak? When they are in each others’ presence; when they bask in the comfort of their quiet understanding, something you will only begin to comprehend once you’ve spent a lifetime with that person, and Albedo has had an eternity.
“I’ve had many things to do,” he replies instead.
(He has had an eternity. Each second spent is out of a dream, he has had eons. He knows Kaeya. He knows him.)
“You’re lying.”
(And he would first be damned if Kaeya did not know him just as well.)
And then he sighs, long and hard. “Look,” Kaeya says, “if this is about the nails, you don’t have to if you don’t want to. I never thought painting them would be an issue with you, honest, but—”
“No!” exclaims Albedo.
He tugs Kaeya’s hand closer to him when he feels him beginning to pull away. His outburst is abrupt, unlike him. Albedo is anything but abrupt. He is anything but surprising.
“There’s nothing wrong,” he whispers, firm. “There’s nothing wrong, Kaeya.”
Kaeya looks unsure. Albedo wants to wipe it off his face.
He tries to steel himself, calm himself before he continues. “I want to do it. I like painting your nails, okay? I’m happy you want me to.”
It sounds like a confession. It is, in a way. His neck feels hot, and Kaeya’s fingers are so warm. His grasp turns almost reverent. He needs to understand, Kaeya’s not—Kaeya’s not the issue here, of course he isn’t.
He looks down, head tilted away.
He’d smudged the nail polish.
4
“Red,” he says, incredulous.
Kaeya doesn’t reply. He grins.
“Red,” he says again. Firmer, this time, but the look on Kaeya’s face doesn’t move an inch. Oh. He’s really serious.
“I don’t get what’s wrong with it,” Kaeya says, pulling Albedo down to sit beside him on the bed. He places a bottle of crimson-red nail-polish in his hand, like he’s trying to convince Albedo of the impossible.
Albedo peers at the bottle. It’s new; it hasn’t been opened yet, still full. “It just seems unlike you,” he mutters, unsure if Kaeya’s just joking, or trying to pull something on him like he usually does. If so, he’d rather avoid him for the next 48 hours—or, until he finishes up some research he hasn’t started yet.
“Come on,” Kaeya says, pinching his cheek. Albedo tries to swat his arm away, but Kaeya catches his arm and points at it. “Look,” he says, “want me to do it on you first? Then you can see that red is a pretty color.”
Startled, Albedo pulls his hand away. “I don’t—I don’t like nail polish,” he says, breathless. Suddenly, he feels a little self-conscious, though he isn’t sure why. Kaeya’s presence—whole and unwhole, will always evoke some feelings he cannot understand. Feelings he’s frustratingly unable to psychoanalyze.
And, most of the time, Albedo hates what he can’t understand. The lens he views the world with has always been cynical, and he fucking loves it. The technicalities in each being, the logic behind everyone’s actions, in everyone’s emotions, he will always be able to calculate. To put it simply: he likes knowing.
Won’t people look at you strangely? he wants to ask. Black is one thing—black is fine, he thinks, it’s neutral. But red has always been a bright color. Vivid, so vivid, eye-catching and attention-seeking. Red has never been his color, nor has it been Kaeya’s, and he wants to ask, because he cannot fathom why. He wants to ask, because out of all the systems he’s built and destroyed in his head, out of all the reasons he’s deduced in his brain, he cannot pinpoint a definite answer.
In the end— “fine,” he says, grabbing Kaeya’s hand, silently relishing in the latter’s astonishment. “Fine.”
Aren’t you scared?
And then he imagines Kaeya’s voice.
Scared of what? he would say.
And Albedo—he cannot figure out a response.
5
He’s used to the strong stench of nail polish remover.
Kaeya comes around every week or so, a new color in mind, and he never removes the previous layer of nail polish. It’s Albedo’s job to remove it—rub at his fingernails with cotton drenched in remover, find that his own hands have been stained with whatever color it once was, and he’s used to it.
Kaeya’d texted him an hour ago. Albedo lets him in once he arrives. He carries with him the scent of afternoon summer sun and acetone.
Albedo scrunches his nose a bit. “Why do you smell like that?”
Across him, Kaeya closes the door as he steps out of his shoes. His brow furrows. “Like what?” he asks.
Albedo’s lips twist into a frown, and now he’s a little confused. Now he’s a little frustrated. “Did you remove it? Let me see your hands.” He takes Kaeya’s arm, and normally Kaeya wouldn’t care, but this isn’t normally—it’s the opposite of normally, because why has he leaned away? Why has he retracted his hand, why does it seem like something is wrong?
“What are you doing?” Albedo presses, and he doesn’t know why he’s so worked up, really, “did you beg me to paint it bright red just to take it off so soon?”
Kaeya doesn’t reply. He pushes past Albedo into his bedroom, and this isn’t his dorm. This isn’t where he lives. He knows the layout so well. Belatedly, Albedo wonders when he’d started feeling so comfortable in someone else’s home.
He follows him inside. Kaeya’s seated on his bed. The foldable chair remains untouched, forgotten, and there is a bottle of black nail polish in his hands.
“Just paint it like you normally do,” Kaeya says, trying to integrate some of his usual conviction in his tone, but he only sounds stiff. “Okay?”
Albedo has so many questions. He has so many questions, and he knows the answer to all of them.
He doesn’t ask.
“Okay,” he says instead, quietly. He takes the nail polish from Kaeya and assumes his usual place on the floor, sitting by Kaeya’s knees.
The process is slow. Albedo is meticulous. Kaeya’s hands are warm again, but the polish is cold in contrast. He tries to keep himself still, but curiosity is prodding at his head, and Kaeya must’ve sensed this because he speaks up all of a sudden.
“Someone gave me a hard time today,” he admits.
Albedo blinks. His hands stutter before resuming.
Aren’t you scared?
“What did they say?” he asks, trying to keep his voice steady. He needs to be grounded—if not for himself, for Kaeya.
“Said some shit,” Kaeya says after a beat. And then, more hesitantly, “Albedo, you—you know I don’t like girls. You know that, right?”
He does. “I do,” he replies.
He tilts his head up, then. Uncertainty does not suit Kaeya. He doesn’t look good in fear, he doesn’t look good in sunken spirit, and Albedo cannot bear to see him in this state. Something is wrong, he feels it in his bones. That weird, twisty feeling again, the one in his gut; the one he thought he’d shoved away, it’s come back. Dark, darker this time.
And Kaeya—Kaeya won’t look at him. He is looking at the door. The door isn’t intersting—the door isn’t something worth looking at, but Kaeya is still looking at it, and Albedo cannot understand why he’s being like this. He is—
Aren’t you scared?
“Weren’t you scared?” Albedo asks. “Didn’t you see this coming?”
All of a sudden, Kaeya’s gaze is on him, but it feels the farthest from what he expected.
“What?”
“You asked me to paint it red that day,” Albedo murmurs. “Didn’t you anticipate this kind of reaction?”
Kaeya’s swagger is gone, the rigidness in his frame has become so prominent it’s noticeable. Fuck. This is not who he is. He needs to come back.
“I don’t—what are you talking about?”
Albedo pauses, gathers his thoughts. “You should’ve seen this kind of thing happening, really.”
This side of ourselves, he thinks. We must obscure it with shame. Don’t we?
Don’t we?
He doesn’t know. He doesn’t know, god.
Kaeya stands up. The nail polish bottle clatters to the floor, and Albedo’s eyes widen at the sudden movement.
“Albedo, what the fuck are you talking about?” Kaeya asks, but his voice carries none of the frustration he’d wanted. Instead, there is hurt. There is confusion, in his voice, in his face, in his posture—angled away from Albedo, like he is the one who hurt him.
“Why this happened to you,” says Albedo. His voice is rising. His voice doesn’t usually rise, but it is now, and he’s forgotten how taut his throat felt whenever it does.
Kaeya’s breath hitches. “I know you like me,” he says firmly. “I know you do, so I thought you’d be on my side. I thought you’d understand, at least.”
The world’s warping around him, he can barely feel the floor under his fingertips. The walls are closing in; the ceiling is right above his head, and Albedo’s scared it might fall. I like you. I like you.
“I don’t understand,” he says, his voice pitching at the end. “You’re—Kaeya, don’t—” he reaches out, but his grasp slips on his sleeve— “you can’t just go!”
But he does. Kaeya goes, he leaves. He closes the door behind him.
The bottle of nail polish has rolled underneath the bed. Albedo doesn’t bother looking for it anymore.
+1
Kaeya lives in an apartment south of their city, and is only a ten minute walk from the nearest station. He’d graduated a year ago; an envy for med students, especially Albedo. He works at his father’s office thing as a secretary-or-something (in Kaeya’s words, not his), and earns about as much as you’d think. He takes the weekends plus Wednesdays off, and bounds on over to Albedo’s whenever he can.
Bounded—bounded on over to Albedo’s whenever he could.
Albedo has not seen him in a week and a half. No texts have come in, let alone any calls.
Fuck if he doesn’t miss him. Kaeya, in his room. Kaeya, on his bed. Kaeya, with his hand in Albedo’s.
So then, the ingenious idea as per brilliant thinker Albedo: go to Kaeya’s place instead.
He tries to call before visiting, just to be polite, but there’s no answer. He comes over, anyway. Knocks on his door like anyone would, and finally, finally—he is let in.
Kaeya looks tired. “What.”
“Are you still mad?” Albedo asks, like an idiot.
Almost exasperatedly, Kaeya runs a hand through his hair. He looks like he’d just woken up. “What do you think?” he groans. “God, just come inside, okay?”
So Albedo goes inside. He’d been to this place once in the past few months, because Kaeya always approaches him instead. Nothing’s really changed; there is still clutter on the coffee table, the picture frames still hang slightly crooked.
“I’ll give you five minutes if you want to apologize. That’s more than enough, isn’t it?”
Albedo pauses. “I’m not here to apologize.”
Feeling more surprise than offense, Kaeya crosses his arms. “What are you here for then?”
Instead of responding immediately, Albedo shuffles through his bag and pulls out a bottle of vermillion nail polish. “Do my nails,” he says. Then, “please.”
“Not if you say sorry first.”
“Alright,” Albedo concedes. In a way, he supposes he is sorry. “I’m sorry.”
“Fine,” Kaeya says, leading him to the couch. He takes the bottle from Albedo’s grasp. “Bright red,” he comments. “You’re a hypocrite, aren’t you?”
Unable to refute, Albedo agrees. “I am,” he says, and there’s no shortage of conviction in his voice, because he really, truly is, isn’t he?
They sit on the couch, and Albedo doesn’t know what to do. He’s used to being the one doing the painting of the nails and whatever. He’s used to sitting on the ground and holding Kaeya’s hands and sneaking glances up at him wherever he can, but he’s never been the one to be the opposite.
Sensing his hesitation, Kaeya takes his hands. “Just sit still. I’ll do the rest, okay?”
Albedo is good at following instructions. He’s good at following Kaeya. He sits still—and maybe it’s the trick of the light, maybe it isn’t—but the sides of Kaeya’s lips quirk up a bit, and he is happy.
“What made you want red, anyway?” Kaeya asks offhandedly, beginning to unscrew the cap. “You’ve never ever had nail polish on, and your first choice is bright red?”
Albedo can feel his heart beating. He is suddenly conscious of it, like he is of everything his body does when he’s with Kaeya. “Says you,” he retorts.
Kaeya laughs. “I’m a different case. I’m not the one who made a big deal about it, was I? What, are you prepared for it? Do you see what kind of thing will happen after this?” he says, echoing Albedo’s words from that day. He can still feel the sting.
“I am, I do,” Albedo replies. “I am prepared. I know what kind of looks I’ll get. I know what I’m getting into.”
Kaeya goes quiet. His ministrations slow to a stop, so Albedo looks down and sees him staring at his hands pensively. He looks like he is thinking. He looks like he is conjuring up a revelation in his head, and Albedo couldn’t be any more in love.
And then, breaking the silence, he laughs. “Fuck,” he says, bittersweetly, like he’s come to an understanding. “Fuck.”
Albedo smiles. “What?”
Kaeya turns his hand over and kisses his palm. His lips are cold, colder than the nail polish. “I’m sorry,” he says, his breath fanning Albedo’s skin. “I get it now. What you said then—I was so angry, but I get it now.”
A sharp inhale, a hitch. “Do you?”
Grinning, Kaeya looks up at him. “I do. You have no shame at all, huh?”
Albedo grins back. He finds the sun in his smile.
He doesn’t, he thinks. Maybe a little bit—maybe in a deeper chamber of his chest, where he has tried to shove his shame away. Where he has tried to bury it, it rests there, but his face. His heart, his face, the whole rest of him, he hides nothing.