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Rubedo, he thinks. Rubedo, will it hurt?
He’s sure it will. Albedo saw the way Rubedo’s eyes widened. (Blue. Electric. Fading.) The way his body curled in on itself as the blunt edge of his sword pierced artificial flesh and staked its claim into a heart more human than his. (Albedo’s blue, staring back at him because it’s not really Albedo’s blue but Rubedo’s. Small, quaint, unassuming. Gentle where he hid behind the laboratory doors, away from the sharp carolina blue of their mother’s eyes.) Albedo heard the ragged sharpness of his faltering breaths. He knows that it will hurt because Rubedo had hurt.
Blue.
Rubedo’s electric blue, and the small (supposed to be harmless, forgotten, not–) thought seized Albedo. The mesmerizing sight (horrifying, reflective, splendor that burned in his gut and hazily formed the word family, a blessing meant never for him—) stripped him down to his core. Chalk in a vial, cecelia’s, and electricity. Burning, churning, becoming, asking, asking, asking—
What was blue to Albedo?
(The corruption wasn’t always visible. A thrum of a taut guitar string, a pull of a muscle, unprecedented results. The small cracks that appear along his veins. Starting from his arms, traveling up towards his chest—)
Blue was a reminder. A reminder that his life isn’t his but his mother’s. A reminder that his job, the position he worked so hard to maintain, wasn’t really his, but an obligation laced with gratitude towards Alice. Albedo is reminded day in and day out that all of the things he’s gained aren’t his, and all the things that are his, he will continue to lose because nobody was there to tell him that once you hit the top, the only way forward is down. (Blue was Rubedo, his failure, his origin, his life, his death. Blue was the falsity in his veins that chanted ‘you aren’t, you won’t, you can’t’.) A platform built by blocks that aren’t settled into the foundation you create, blocks that are misshapen and only fit into another’s life, results in an unsteady foundation. It crumbles.
The corruption in his veins glowed purple. A ghoulish imitation of blood that shone viridescent blue under the Dragonspine moonlight. (Family. False blood under plastic skin can only do as far as imitate. He wishes that for this, for the screeching under his skin that ruptured from his esophagus and imitated the word family at the sight of Rubedo’s burial site, to be something real.) Albedo is far past the moment where he could doubt. Masquerading around the walls of a city that posed as a haven for all who don’t fit and still finding respite within the beating, echoing, trembling mountain wall of a still beating heart in a long cold body. (He touches the space above his ribs. Feels nothing but a rhythmic thump of the rocky walls reverberate through his body, cold, unfeeling, imitation—) As soon as he saw the flecks of purple in his arms, the same purple underneath Rubedo’s cooling body (colder than ice, than the glacial warmth of a trembling hand pressed against his forehead when his mother wasn’t present. Cooling, cooling, cold.), he knew it would be him next. He knew what he had to do. More than that, he’s grown out of asking unnecessary questions.
(Still, he looks up at the false stars of Teyvat and mouths out a question, little puffs of air leaving their mark in the Mondstadt air. Rubedo, will it hurt? Some part of him is still the little boy with legs as steady as a fawn’s, pressed against the draping fabrics his master wore as she scribbled down answers after answers with each shriveling carcass that falls like breadcrumbs in her wake. Watching her with wide, afraid eyes because the world around him seemed so big, and he was so small— So he asks the only other person who would know what this meant. Would know what he will go through. Rubedo, Albedo asks the empty air. Will it hurt?)
(And when he’s brave enough to do so, Were you scared?)
The candle on his desk had long since melted into itself, wax dripping sluggishly down the iron holder like veins splitting open. He sits in silence, sketchbook open, charcoal poised between the spaces of his fingers. (Lines upon lines, fragments stitched together, emerging shapes.)
Until it wasn’t.
His hand spasmed once, twice, and the line dragged dark and ugly across the page. The petals of the cecelia warped, transformed into something sinister, bleeding through the fraying edges like an oozing wound. Albedo froze. His breath caught at the sight. (It shouldn’t matter. He could redraw it, flip the page, start again. But still—)
(Rubedo—)
The charcoal rolls from his grip, bouncing softly against the carpet under his seat and settling in a smear of dust. His hand hovered above the paper, trembling (purple pulsates under the plastic of his skin, brighter and brighter under the stretched expanse of his wrist, faint flickers of light pushing upward like cracks in glass. (Familiar. Too familiar. Rubedo’s veins had split this way, bright, uncontainable, as the electricity drained from his eyes.)
He does not move, (entranced, staring with trepidation as horror creeps into his bones), tremors growing stronger and stronger as a grating, hissing voice replaces the thoughts in his brain. Albedo watches, the control relinquishes over a body that wasn’t ever truly his. He pressed his palm flat against the ruined flower, smudging it further into a blur of black. (Petal becoming wound becoming nothing at all.)
He should have documented it. He should have taken up his quill and marked the progression, neat notes in ink. But the thought caught in his throat like ash. (He thinks of Rubedo again — the way his fingers curled in on themselves, rigid, alien. The way blue dimmed into absence. Whose hands were these, now? His, or Rubedo’s?)
The room is quiet as he lifts his hand, flexing the slowly stilling fingers, and for a moment, hovering them above the dying flame. (Measuring, testing, pretending, seeing how long he could keep this body as his own, how long it would let him stay.)
The candle sputters once and goes out. (Will it hurt, Rubedo?)
The telltale signs of Windblume were rustling in the air when he first arrived in Mondstadt. Alice tugged him by the sleeve of his jacket, gentle in all the ways he knew but warm in all the ways he didn’t. She weaved through crowds of people and narrow streets leading to narrower alleys; stopped to try all the food at the closest stalls (picked up a little trinket in the shape of an animal and clipped it to his knapsack when he was busy admiring the flowers being sold by a spirituality young girl yelling at a unique green-haired bard to ‘keep his hands to himself lest he want to reimburse her for damaged goods!’) No one was seeking them out, but they weren’t truly alone.
He felt the weight of eyes on him as soon as he entered the city gates, steadfast, following regardless of whatever sharp turn (which Albedo later realized Alice was only taking to avoid that omnipresent hair-raising of being watched, and not just one of her many eccentricities). Alice had taken. It was the weekend before Windblume, so he thought nothing of it. They were newcomers days before a festival; someone ought to be intrigued. (He clutched the back of Alice’s draping sleeves, the billowing silk of her disguise different from the roughness of his mother’s cloak.)
Each street was occupied by temporarily set up stalls. Near the central fountain, right by the small, smoothed down strip of wall with peculiar symbols etched into it, sat a boy (tall, lanky in the ways that made you feel taller than everyone else, singular blue, blue eye staring through a veil of blue hair.), laughing with a man Albedo realized with mild alarm, to have six fingers. They teetered on the edge of the fountain, the split falls spraying mist at them, summer breeze making their homey fabric accessories flutter. Park benches were scattered haphazardly in no particular order, similar to the placement of the rectangular plant pots lining the entrance steps of Mondstadt. People were scattered around aimlessly as well, (a girl with a bandage over her eyes shyly reaching out to touch a red-faced man's face, a woman whose name he later learned to be Marjorie, stopping to strike up conversation with a lonely man named Timaeus—) breaking out in laughter amidst clinking glasses filled with an assortment of alcoholic and the uncommon non-alcoholic beverages, and silently mulling over nothing in the dark spots lying just out of reach of the stalls’ lights.
Alice had disappeared, her eyes sparkling with mischief as she deposited him at the table near Good Hunter, leaving him with his vandalized knapsack and the wise words of ‘Don’t worry, dearest! Auntie’s going to get you a job!’
He sat down and pulled out his sketchbook, rough pages against his smooth skin, and looked around the bustling city. Inevitably, his eyes draw back to the pair near the fountain. (Towards the blue. Sapphire blue. Shielding a shimmering galaxy of cerulean.) The tall one, head thrown back at something the one with six fingers had said, made Albedo pause. He wanted to draw him. Draw the blue and the glittering brown of his skin and the black of his eyepatch. Wanted to draw the stars in his visible eye that reminded him so much of the star on his neck.
He maps out the figure, dynamic in its pose, frozen in the forefront of his mind as his hands helplessly fulfilled the itch to recreate the moment. The sketch came together almost without thought — charcoal sweeping over paper in swift, deliberate motions. He traced the arc of a laugh, the subtle creases at the corner of an eye, the way sunlight clung to dark skin as if reluctant to leave. (The paper, smudged in graphite, dark indentation of pencil lines, impossibly blue.)
When it was finished, he studied the likeness. (His mother always told him accuracy was the key to success. That the replication of the item you’re testing will yield better results.) For some reason, unknown to Albedo still, the genuineness spilled from each gentle scratch of charcoal, and he was suddenly possessed with the urge to return the life in his sketchbook back to its owner. He stood up from his seat, tucked in the chair, and suddenly felt the urge to fix his appearance. (Brushed back the unruly strands of hair covering his eyes, straightened the drooping collar of his cloak, checked his teeth for any food bits in the reflection of his knapsack’s buckle.)
He tore the page free and crossed the few feet it took to reach the stranger. The stranger (incredibly blue, eye shimmering with settling amusement and growing confusion, hair fluttering in the breeze–) looked down at him, head tilting to the side inquisitively. Up close, Albedo saw that the stranger’s lashes were incredibly long, ebony points gently brushing against the cheekbone.
‘For you,’ Albedo said simply, offering the sketch.
The man blinked once. Twice. His mouth opened, then closed again. ‘...Me?’
A nod. Simple, matter-of-fact. Albedo waited for the natural next step (acceptance, perhaps a brief acknowledgment, maybe even the offhanded glance that his mother would shoot in his direction whenever he called out to her), but instead the man stared at the drawing as if it had undone the fabric of the world around him. His lips parted, no words emerging, and his gaze flicked between the portrait and Albedo as though trying to reconcile them. Albedo looks at him, confusion beginning to also bleed into his expression. The moment had been his; now it belonged to him again. Yet instead of accepting this, the man seemed to flounder, staring between the drawing and Albedo with an expression of disbelief — and something else, something almost shy. Color touched his cheekbones.
Hm. Perhaps the gesture had unsettled him more than intended. The boy next to him, with the six fingers, slaps a hand over his mouth and turns red with the effort not to laugh at the expression the blue-haired stranger was making.
Before he could think of anything to say to ease the silence, (question the other peculiar man as to why his face resembled an apple’s—) a familiar voice cut through the marketplace;
‘Albedo! There you are — come along, quickly! Your dearest auntie has found you a job!’
He turns immediately. Follows her already rustling sleeves as she bounds across the cobblestone steps up to a large building with banners hanging from either side of the entrance. Behind him, he hears the peculiar boy let out an undignified squawk as he gasps for air. (‘Kaeya! Oh, you’re so red— This is hilarious, your face looks like Diluc’s hair!—)
As Albedo hurries after Alice, something compels him to glance back. The stranger (Kaeya?) is still standing there, clutching the page (with trembling hands that resembled the way his mother’s shook when she found a glowing red stone that had her mumble out something like ‘naberius’).
Strange. People usually said thank you. Or at least why?
Suddenly, as the peculiar boy slaps the blue-haired stranger on the back as he struggles to gasp for air, the boy makes a faint, startled sound, as if the encounter finally clicked into his head.
‘Wait, I—’ he started, but Albedo was already turning back, racing down the pathway and up the steps where Alice was waiting (watching, eyes curved into a smile that he associated with mischief— though softness curved the edges into something warmer, fonder.)
The sight lingered with Albedo far longer than he expected.
(Two days later, he was setting up his desk arrangement in the second floor’s empty office room. All his belongings lay out against the wood of his desk. A sketchbook, pencil, and the keychain Alice had left with him all nestled beside his empty knapsack and neatly folded cloak. It’s not until three years later, when he returns from his home in the mountains, that he meets the blue-haired stranger once more.)
Albedo has always known that he was born alone (doesn’t remember the touch of a mother’s hand when he first entered the world. Doesn’t remember, doesn’t know, doesn’t miss—), knows that he lives alone (hasn’t felt the warmth of another person since his countless adventures with his mother– feels nothing but the absence of a flame crackling as he falls asleep.), and will eventually, die alone. The corruption in his veins spreads like sand in an hourglass, like the tick of a timer leading to its eventual end.
But really, Albedo just wants one moment, a singular grain of sand in the swinging pendulum of his eventual end, where he isn’t alone. He wants to be seen, to see others, to know the breadth and depth of another’s adoration towards him. (Flinches back at the calculating stare his mother would send him, yearns for the cold of that gaze when the warmth of Alice’s smile becomes too much, remembers the blue-haired stranger—)
To turn away from the brilliance of the world around them, see Albedo in his entirety (the air Albedo steals from humans, the space Albedo takes up, the cruel, disfigured recreation of a human that is him, and nothing else) and still choose to love him.
(Rubedo, will it hurt?)
Albedo always used to look at the story of Icarus with amusement, a time when he thought reaching for the sun was foolish. Yet, regardless of that fact, he’s begun to find himself wanting to brush his fingertips along the surface of the sun (see if the flames consume him as they do a genuine human, see if he melts or burns, see if it hurts), grab the burning star within his palm, and swallow it whole. (He isn’t human, so he won’t die. He’s heard tales of the traveler absorbing marrow from the moon, so surely, surely, Albedo can house the sun. Even when he isn’t deserving.) To swallow the sun, you must be starved. Hungry. Albedo doesn’t feel hunger, is rarely hungry, but recently, he starves.
(He starves, aches, yearns, wishes to devour. It consumes him entirely, stronger than the poison, overriding the twitch in his hands and painting everything an intense vermillion red. Albedo looks at his arms, at the purple creeping through, and thinks of sapphire blue.)
‘Chalk is the spotless soil, and was used to make primordial man.’ (Spotless. Unsullied. His master said this once. Albedo thought nothing of it. Thought nothing other than that the chalk dust clung to her sleeves, white specks on velvet blue, and wondered if she minded. She didn’t brush them away. He supposed that was enough.)
‘From soil was birthed chalk.’ (He looks into a mirror, and all he sees are the lifeless eyes of Rubedo.) Her voice was soft when she told him this, rounded around the consonants, almost fond as the corners of her lips tugged up in a half smile. It was one of those evenings in the lab, where daylight bleeds into nightfall, and his mother delves into a strange state of barely there as she pores over pages upon pages of research. (Just him, an imposter, an incorporeal being and his master, just as inhumane and even then, more human than he’ll ever be, bent over her notes, candlelight dripping gold into her hair.) He hadn’t understood what she meant back then, not until later, when the blue-haired stranger was more familiar to him than himself, did he finally understand its entirety.
Chalk. (Fragile, fleeting. Leaves its mark but always fades away.) Soil. (Stained, trampled, forgotten. But it nourishes, holds life indefinitely.) What was he meant to be? Was he to resemble what he was made of? Fragile, fleeting, made to disappear, or ground that bears another's roots?
Sometimes, Albedo wonders if his master knew. If she looked at him and saw crumbling chalk, purple poison spilling through her palms. If she hoped that once she finally perfected his creation, she would wait patiently for his eventual demise, so that he’d leave behind something worth keeping.
(He hopes that his next thought isn’t just wishful thinking, that when parents speak to their children about the meaning of this world, they mean the pursuit of a happy life.)
Soil was what he came from. Chalk was what he was made of. (In between that, a child who wanted, foolishly, to believe that when a parent mentioned the meaning of life, the only complexity of that question was joy.) She’d asked him absently, as if the thought itself escaped her before she could cage it in formula. It startled him, not the words, but the tone. The lack thereof. (He stares are the loops of ink on her final letter to him, wondering if the wistfulness he senses is real. Stares, charcoal poised over rushed notations, if she saw him as he did. Parents. Children. The words fit strangely in his mouth.)
‘Your final assignment: show me the truth and meaning of this world.’
(Rubedo, Albedo thinks. Was she your mother, too?)
Nevertheless, if he must be comprised of chalk, stitched together with the thread of corruption and sealed shut with the promise of curses, let him leave behind something worth remembering. (Something that lingers after the downpour of crystalline blue rain.) Hasn’t he already done so? A page torn from his sketchbook, pressed into warm palms. (Sapphire staring into his own electric blue, lashes curved like shadows spun from starlight. The burn of red colouring shimmering skin that remained steadfast in the forefront of his mind.)
Moments like these, where he dredged up memories that shouldn’t belong to him, find solace in the flashes of the years he’s lived, and he cannot help but think ill of his mother. (Though, on nights where the moon resembles the shape of Rubedo’s eyes, he thinks of the reckless abandon that coloured his actions, how all he ever wanted was to be seen as something worth remembering by his mother. On those nights, he pulls the blanket tighter around himself and wonders if being family means hating someone so much you cannot help but keep loving them.)
His mother didn’t teach him to draw. But she taught him the common tongue of Teyvat. It was through her that he learned to communicate with all he holds close to him. (Late nights spent with the companionship of a flickering candle under the limelight of a moon hidden by densely forested plains. Old philosophers put meaning into words. Defining the world with their ink on paper.) He learned to name the world, prided himself on his innate ability to identify anything with meaning. (His mother was never able to teach him how to belong to the world he split open to memorize.)
Even then, many years later, when purple stains his arms so violently he rarely removes his sleeves, Albedo continues to learn a language he perfected. The blue-haired stranger worms his way into the space beneath his ribcage and teaches him his own version of the language he spent years learning. Kaeya had taken mankind’s words and, from those certain phrases, crafted his own definition. (Invariably so. A sun in the center of orbit. His orbit. And Albedo is helpless but to follow along. He cannot escape it, caught in a gravity he never asked for but doesn’t feel the need to disentangle himself from.) The blue-haired stranger had taken Albedo’s name and given it a different meaning. Albedo’s name was Kaeya’s love.
(He always thought himself a fake. An imposter. A monster wearing a human’s face.) And yet, wrapped in the bony, scarred embrace of a monster, Albedo feels the safest he’s ever been, feels Kaeya’s rendition of the common tongue wash over him like a wave of shimmering opalescent blue.
(If Albedo had the choice, the ability to rewrite with the same passion as Kaeya, he’d make Rubedo’s name his electric.)
(Will it hurt, Rubedo?)
(He thinks that if he were capable of it, he might be in love with Kaeya.)
Klee runs up to him, arms full of various flowers she’d picked from the hill they sat on. His canvas is propped up against the grooves of an old oak, the previous stand having been turned to dust as a byproduct of a fishing attempt. (She’s like Alice, incredibly warm, mischief peppered in her iris. He wonders if that’s what defines family.)
‘Big-brother Albedo! Look at all the flowers Klee found! I found your cecelia, and big-sister Amber’s lamp grass, and I even found big-sister Sucrose’s windwheel aster! Oh, but I couldn’t find big-brother Kaeya’s flower…’ She pouts, a watery, trembling thing as all previous excitement fizzles out of her. Albedo cannot help but smile, hand pressing against her hair in the same way he remembers Rubedo doing.
‘Big-brother Kaeya’s lilies weren’t on the hill, so Klee couldn’t find any! What do I do now?’ She pauses in thought for a second, free hand touching the point of her chin. ‘Do you know of calla lilies, big-brother Albedo?’ He pulls a stray leaf stuck in her hair.
‘Yes, I know lilies, Klee.’ He pauses, contemplates. ‘I have a garden full of them.’
(His goal is to find out all there is to know about this world, fulfill his mother’s request before the corruption consumes him fully. He only felt the continued kinship with his mother when the unknown turned to known. So when the Vision appeared, gleaming cold and perfect, he only stared at it for a moment. (It was beautiful, yes, but not his. Not the way Kaeya’s voice was when he spoke his name. Not the way Klee’s laughter was when she ran to him with arms full of flowers.) He set it aside.)
‘Really! Can Klee borrow one for her collection, pretty please?’
(For all of his life, Albedo never craved the presence of another. For the rest of his life, until the curse consumes him, he believes he will continue to crave Kaeya.)
Albedo nods and leads her to the garden.
Albedo wakes with tears in his eyes, salt dripping down his face and into his mouth. He curls over in pain, head aching, arms trembling, veins fully purple as his mind drifts deeper and deeper into all-consuming agony. (a relentless mantra of destroy, destroy, destroy—) He knows.
Albedo knows that this is the end.
Oh, he thinks. Rubedo, it hurts.