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The thing that nobody tells you about avalanches is how quiet they are.
Well, the aftermath, at least. Albedo is fully aware that anybody else in this situation would be in significantly more dire straits than he, and that the reason there are no records about the penetrating, deafening silence of being buried under a dozen feet of snow is that it's unlikely anybody has ever survived to write of such an experience.
Still. His is a scholar's mind, and it wonders at the novelty.
He tries to wiggle his fingers, and finds that he cannot. The snow around him is heavy enough that it has become compressed, so thoroughly immobilizing him that even to twitch a finger is unfathomable. His toes have some leeway thanks to space within the reinforced toe of his boot, but the chalk of his ribcage creaks threateningly under the weight of the ice. It’s a wonder how the same white fluff that alights gently and ethereally on Klee’s little eyelashes as she plays with snowmen is the same substance that has become Albedo’s tomb.
He is lucky that he wasn't crushed to so much white powder, left to fade away without leaving even a noticeable mark in the snow.
Albedo isn't sure which way is up. The initial tumbling head rush of being overwhelmed by a rolling stampede of snow seems to indicate that he is approximately forty-five degrees deviated from the direction of gravity and normal force, with his head pointing generally downwards. His senses, however, refuse to agree with him. The snow presses in so unyieldingly from all sides that he may as well be buried in the center of the earth.
There is no up or down. There is simply the dark, and the cold.
It takes slightly over ten minutes for the average human being to suffocate if deprived from a supply of air. Thankfully, Albedo is not an average human being. He breathes, but mostly to avoid unnerving people. The extent of development allotted to his lungs and functional diaphragm exists only as a testament to Rhinedottir’s exemplary anatomical knowledge and alchemical skill, and to provide airflow for his vocal chords. There is no blood to carry oxygen through his veins—only chalk. The moment he was buried, he simply stopped breathing.
And yet his alchemical heart beats in his throat, a vibrating thrum of… not adrenaline, but something similar in terms of his experience of it.
It’s an illogical reaction—a vagary of human emotion, an instinctual response to the rush of pounding snow that buried his camp. And isn’t that a shame? All of his alchemical notes, his art, the little candies that Timaeus left when he was last working with Albedo: all buried. At least now Albedo doesn’t have to figure out how to explain to Timaeus why more than half of his sweet flower candy is gone. Albedo doesn’t have many vices, but there’s something about the soft, sweet rush of melting sugar on his tongue that he hasn’t quite been able to stay away from. He always feels a bit like a thief when he takes them, and tries to stick to a one-daily allowance, but...
A breath shudders out of him, and a plop of soft snow trickles into his mouth. Albedo flinches and shuts his mouth, the thump of his false heart kicking up a notch.
The snow melts on his tongue, not a trace of sweetness to be found.
The pounding in his chest is really starting to become inconvenient, Albedo decides. Things like this are often a mechanical issue, even if the root cause may be emotional, and have mechanical solutions. He takes a slow, deep breath in through his nose for four seconds. After holding it for four more seconds, he breathes out slowly.
The next inhalation he takes feels like trying to breathe through a wet blanket pressed over his nose, and his chest presses into a wall of snow before it can expand any farther. His breath hitches, and he falls back into breathlessness, white spots dancing across the overwhelming blackness of his vision.
Hallucinations? A symptom of his physical panic, or oxygen deprivation? There shouldn’t be. He doesn’t need to breath, it doesn’t matter that his ribcage is pressed low against the delicate membranes of his lung tissue, it doesn’t—
Albedo is fine. He is buried, but he is in no physical danger, and will be able to extract himself when the snowmelts of spring start properly. The mountain never really unfreezes, but it does get warmer, lightens its load in sparse, intermittent snowfalls. That’s likely the reason Albedo is buried in the first place: a miscalculation about the safety of his camp’s location in combination with the powdery snowfall higher up the mountain the previous night.
So it will melt, and he will be freed. He just has to be patient for the next few… days.
Or weeks.
It’s unlikely that it will take months, he tells himself. If it takes months, then it won’t happen at all. Instead, the previous melts will freeze over the snow that covers him currently, forming a—
His heart pounds.
—forming a thick, permanent layer of frost and snow and—
—the alchemy that powers his heart is self-renewing, he would be trapped here for eons, an archeological find for a future researcher, if any ever comes—
Albedo shudders at the thought. The movement doesn't go anywhere, and in that split second he finds that experience so maddening that the tension in him ratchets until he screams, muffled by the snow, and yanks on his limbs with all the force he can muster. His body doesn't move, but a smattering of snow tumbles and presses into his mouth, and he clenches his lips and teeth together so tightly that his jaw aches with it, suddenly paralyzed by the thought that the snow will simply keep on coming, pressing into the branching pathways of his artificial lungs until he is surrounded by snow both outside and within.
He barely even heard the sound of his own scream.
He stays like that, shuddering, for a long time. He can't sob—there is no room for his chest to expand, no air left for him to gasp with. But the snow gluing his eyelids shut grows wet, and he is reminded that Rhinedottir created him with the capability to produce tears.
He’s fine.
He’s fine.
He’s fine.
He counts the beats of his heart. It’s too rapid and irregular in pacing to adequately tell time with, cycling through short-lived slower moments and then speeding up when the slow beats inspire his focus to shift elsewhere and he starts pondering the reality of his circumstances. Counting doesn’t help so much as it staves off a worsening of his irrational condition, the breathless pressure in his chest that is one part emotions and two parts simply the reality of being entombed.
It would be disappointing if he were trapped here indefinitely. Before he came to Mondstadt, he traveled with his master—Rhinedottir, the alchemist known as Gold. She was his mother, his creator, and his world. It was a simpler time, when all he knew was to please her, and that so long as he did so, she would not leave him.
She left anyway. Albedo ponders and wishes, sometimes, whether she simply wanted her creation to experience the true humanity of life on his own. Other times, he wonders if he had erred so terribly that he hadn’t even realized. Or, on his worst nights, if her last command to find the truth of this world, was simply an excuse—an order that she knew he could never fulfil, and thus reason enough to leave him then and there, knowing he would never be good enough.
He will never know if he doesn’t try. And he will not be able to try if he stays trapped beneath the snow. He won’t ever see Alice return to Klee, either, nor watch his little sister grow from a young girl into a young woman, never again hear her laugh or cry or watch her pout as Jean stands over her with arms crossed as Albedo pretends that the chunk of hair that’s singed off his head is simply the victim of an alchemical experiment gone wrong and not the remnants of Klee’s latest treasure.
He counts for a long time.
He gets to 349,080 when something shifts in the snow around him, pressing down just that tiny smidgeon heavier—and something in Albedo’s ribcage finally gives, a hairline fracture of chalk dust scattering across the protective membrane that covers his lungs.
A punched-out whine creaks its way out of his throat. No. No, there can’t be more snowfall. One avalanche can’t just follow another like that. The first one should have cleared all the snow—
Another shift, and another creak of the snow around him. He curls his toes in his boots, sluggish with the cold, because he needs to move something, and he’s afraid that if he opens his eyes, snow will press in and he won’t be able to close them again.
There is no air left, but Albedo’s damnably human respiratory system prompts him to gasp regardless. It’s like trying to force air out of a vacuum, and in the moment the snow shifts again, too often and irregular to be an avalanche, and powder collapses around him and fills his mouth as he chokes and swallows and—there’s nowhere else for it to go, until he shudders once more and breathes it in—
And then something wraps around his left ankle and heaves.
Albedo must black out for the next bit. Perhaps it is the vertigo of being moved, or the disturbance of the frozen, settled components of his body being jerked from their sedimented resting places, or maybe his feelings finally overcome him and he experiences what is simply the very human ordeal called swooning. Regardless, when he regains awareness, what feels like a split second later, he is—aboveground. Daylight shines brightly even through his closed eyelids, there is no pressure on his chest beyond that of his crushed rib, and there are people.
A voice, low and airy and painfully familiar, resonates through the air beside Albedo: “Shit. It really is him.”
Albedo would laugh, if he weren’t still trying to remember how to move properly. Something tickles fiercely in his throat, blocking the flow of air. To think that after all his time fearing the silence, that would be the first thing he hears.
“It’s a relief that we left Klee at the camp,” replies another, softer and higher in tone and no less familiar. “I wasn’t certain we would find him at all, but she... shouldn’t see this.”
“Mm. She’ll have to grow up eventually, but Albedo wouldn’t want this. Frankly, I’m not sure you should be here, Miss Sucrose.”
“... Captain Kaeya, do you really think—“
That’s when the itch in his throat becomes a sharp pain, and Albedo rolls over onto his elbows and vomits snow and meltwater onto the ice.
Someone screams. Another person swears. Albedo can’t quite tell who, as he’s busy shuddering the foreign materials out of his body, but he has his suspicions. It’s difficult to see, but some chalk spills out with the snow, the powdered remains of at least one rib—unfortunate, but not difficult to repair, in the long run. Now that he’s free, at least.
He’s so cold that the tears that leak out of his eyes burn painfully against his frostbitten cheeks. His vision is bleary, eyelashes caked with ice crystals, and he wants to say something, anything, to express the desperate gratitude that washes through him for the mere ability to take a clean breath of air and struggle to his knees.
Instead, the only sound that escapes him is something ugly and sad, and when he finally scrubs his eyes open with a numb, equally-frozen fist, he comes face to face with a pair of black pants tucked into knee-high boots.
“Al-...Albedo?”
Albedo tips forward and wraps his arms around Kaeya’s legs.
“Oh.”
“Mr. Albedo!”
Sucrose falls to her knees in the snow beside him, and Kaeya wriggles in Albedo’s increasingly tight grip until he can lower himself as well, replacing Albedo’s arms around his torso instead. Albedo simply curls inwards, towards the source of blessed heat, and also a convenient place to hide his face as his entire body threatens to shake apart.
“How is he alive?” comes a furtive whisper over his head, and Albedo feels Kaeya shake his head.
Tentative hands alight gently on his back, and Sucrose hovers anxiously. Albedo has never been overly close to Mondstadt’s cavalry captain, but he learns now that the fluffy white shawl that he wears is precisely as soft as it looks, even matted down with melted snow. He’s too cold to feel the chill on his face anyways.
“Thank you,” Albedo finally manages to rasp out, his fingers clawing almost violently into the back of Kaeya’s jacket. His other hand reaches out for Sucrose, nails digging into her sleeve even as he refuses to face her. “Thank you. Thank you.”
“Hey, hey, it’s alright,” Kaeya mutters, spitting out a bit of Albedo’s hair that’s been haphazardly shoved under his face and drawing an arm down the curve of Albedo’s spine. It’s a line of fantastical heat, prickling in welcome pain along Albedo’s back. “We’ve got you, Chief Alchemist. We’ve, uh… we’ve really got you, huh.”
To Albedo’s severe consternation, his body chooses that moment to heave out a single, almost violent sob, and Albedo flinches back, away from Kaeya’s hold and Sucrose’s wavering hands. Kaeya doesn’t let him retreat far, maintaining a death-like grip on the corpse-cold skin of Albedo’s upper arms.
“Sss-sorry,” Albedo hisses out, trying to regain control over—anything. The shaking, his trembling vocal chords, the shuddering cry trying to crawl up his throat. “It’s—my apologies. I am merely—out of sorts. I thought I would—regardless, I appreciate your… presence. Rescue.”
None of that was the right thing to say, and even Sucrose’s social awkwardness—usually a comfortable mirror to his own—retreats to show naked concern on her face. To think that he would fall apart like this in front of his own assistant, especially after being freed and thus ascertaining with full surety that he is going to be fine…
“Hey, Sucrose,” says Kaeya, grip tightening on Albedo’s arms. “Why don’t you go get the… rescue supplies, hm? To warm Albedo up?”
“Rescue supplies?” asks Sucrose, shocked out of her stupor. “But we only brought—“
Kaeya shoots her a look.
“Right,” Sucrose says, shuffling in place. “... Rescue supplies. I’ll see what I can find! And, um, bring the stretcher back down.”
“Leave it for now. We might still need it.”
“Right,” Sucrose repeats. Albedo doesn’t look up at her.
Her footsteps creak in the snow as she leaves, and Albedo shudders in Kaeya’s grip.
“Thank you,” Albedo whispers, pressing his hands to his face and feeling like a broken record. He doesn’t know what else he can say. There is so much wrong with this situation, and he has no doubt that Kaeya will not let the issue of his miraculous aliveness lie.
“No need for thanks,” Kaeya declines smoothly. He opens his mouth to say more, but hesitates, and Albedo takes the opportunity to interrupt.
“How long was I…?”
There is a long pause during which Albedo drags his gaze up to Kaeya’s face. The cavalry captain looks… less put together than Albedo usually finds him.
Truth be told, he usually avoids Kaeya. The complexities of social interaction and the effort of maintenance required for relationships are both things that take up a great deal more of Albedo’s limited time and energy than he suspects they do for the average person—likely an effect of his homuncular nature and, judging by Sucrose’s similar affliction, having spent the majority of what would be considered his formative years interacting only with his master.
Kaeya, in comparison, appears to be a social butterfly. That isn’t necessarily off-putting—Albedo is certainly content to allow his conversational partners to shoulder the brunt of social energy expenditure—but speaking with Kaeya always feels like he is being maneuvered around, or even trapped. Kaeya’s conversational skills are far beyond Albedo’s, and he weaves words the same way that Albedo paints landscapes. It’s… disbalancing. Out of his depth. Occasionally, somewhat frightening.
And then there is the issue of the cavalry captain’s star-shaped pupil.
“Two and a half days,” Kaeya finally answers. “Which—after this long, I confess, Chief Alchemist, a living victim to rescue was not the purpose of our search. Avalanche victims, even those who wield Visions, seldom last more than a dozen minutes buried in the snow like that. Care to elaborate on the mystery of your survival?”
“... I would… prefer not to,” Albedo admits. The itch in his throat rears its head again, and he coughs, once—a powdery white material that poofs like dust across his own hands and Kaeya’s coat. It isn’t snow.
And Albedo is certain that Kaeya Alberich isn’t going to let this go.
“Very well,” Kaeya allows, and winds his arm under Albedo’s armpits to pull him up to his feet.
Albedo yelps as he goes up, staggering on numb, prickling legs, and ends up clutching at Kaeya’s side like a drowning man with a lifeline—which is not entirely inaccurate to how he feels, standing in ankle-deep snow.
“Wh-what?” Albedo asks. “That’s it?”
“Albedo,” Kaeya huffs, hefting Albedo’s weight higher onto his shoulders, “I’m not certain what your opinion of the Knights of Favonius or myself is as a whole, but personally, while I’m more than happy just to see you alive, I would hardly be comfortable describing you as ‘well’. I’m captain of the cavalry, not the investigation team. The rest, including my admittedly burning suspicion, can wait.”
They step over a stretcher as they walk, and Albedo manages to get his feet under him more properly. He should thank Kaeya, he thinks, except he’s already done that. He’s also apologized, and thus reached the end of his script for interactions… well, not interactions ‘like this,’ given the unique circumstances, but at least drastic circumstances as a whole.
“... I don’t think I am very well,” Albedo admits instead. “I appreciate you allaying your suspicions for the time being. I understand that they are warranted, given the circumstances.”
Kaeya huffs again, this time in laughter.
“That’s alright, Chief Alchemist,” Kaeya tells him. His smile has a tired look to it.
“Oh,” Albedo says. “Good.”
And immediately falls over as his legs give out.
Kaeya puts a solid effort into trying to keep him upright, but ends up very nearly dragged back down to the ground alongside Albedo.
“I’m sorry,” Albedo repeats, unable to find any other words for this moment. “I’m afraid that the effects of the frost and my… extended lack of movement may have left me somewhat indisposed for the time being. Perhaps that stretcher you brought…”
“Nonsense,” Kaeya decides, already pulling Albedo’s arm back over his shoulder. “What you need now is a heat source.”
That is how Albedo ends up slung across Kaeya’s back, arms and legs wrapped around him as he uses Mondstadt’s very own cavalry captain his steed in a way that seems as profoundly incorrect as it is ironic.
“So,” Kaeya starts as he begins to tromp across the snow. “That was a very enthusiastic hug, just then. Can’t say I’ve had the pleasure—I was under the impression that you rather disliked me, in fact!”
Albedo blinks snowflakes out of his eyes, winding his arms tighter around Kaeya’s shoulders. “I don’t dislike you. You merely… intimidate me, sometimes.”
Kaeya makes a surprised note in the back of his throat. “Intimidate you? The charming Mr. Albedo, who has half of Mond wrapped around his finger without even realizing it?”
“I-I don’t know about that,” Albedo hedges, trying not to sound like he’s mumbling. “Regardless, I… was overwrought, I suppose. Two and a half days…”
“If you won’t tell me how you survived, tell me this: How long would you have survived for, down there?” Kaeya asks.
Albedo buries his face in the back of Kaeya’s shoulder. It’s an infantile, vulnerable gesture. He’s feeling rather infantile and vulnerable at the moment.
“I see.”
Do you? Albedo wants to snap, but it would be unfair. He himself was hardly of a rational mind down in the snows. And besides that, Kaeya is being…
Well, Albedo supposes he is still being very Kaeya-like. It’s just that instead of using his adept conversational skills to talk circles around Albedo’s social awkwardness, Albedo realizes he’s using them to give Albedo a soft landing. He’s being… rather considerate. Gently flattering, reassuring Albedo that he won’t prod, and, well, the warm pseudo-hug that Albedo has wrapped around his shoulders certainly helps. It just feels like Kaeya is here, and that he’ll make everything okay, the same way that Klee un-wilts when she sees Albedo arrive to rescue her from Jean’s well-deserved ire.
Even if that’s an entirely irrational conclusion to arrive at. Everything is okay because Albedo is no longer buried. Kaeya gentling Albedo’s lacking social skills has nothing to do with it.
It helps calm the frenetic anxiety still buzzing from his chest to his fingertips, though, and Albedo isn’t sure that the feeling that replaces it is any better—he wants to bury himself in this. Instead, he finds himself blurting things that are better kept to himself.
“It did not occur to me that there would be an expedition launched in search of me,” Albedo whispers. This close to Kaeya’s ear, he will surely hear it.
“We left as soon as we heard that Dragonspine had experienced an avalanche,” Kaeya reassures him, voice softening. He stops speaking, then, skidding a few feet down the slope he’s carrying Albedo over, in a quick swoop of a motion that sends Albedo’s heart right into his throat.
He doesn’t realize he’s reacted visibly in any way until Kaeya grunts, and Albedo realizes he may be strangling his rescuer. He loosens his arms carefully, and tries not to pant too obviously in terror. Something about the way that they’d very nearly tumbled…
“My apologies,” Kaeya says. Albedo opens his mouth to respond, but just then, they move through a part in the trees, and—
“ALBEDO!”
Albedo nearly strangles Kaeya again trying to wiggle out of his grip, and if he stumbles to his knees immediately afterwards, that is perfectly fine, because that’s the exact height he needs to be at for Klee to fling herself at his chest.
She impacts so forcefully that he’s almost knocked back, stabilized only by Kaeya’s hand before it disappears—the first time, Albedo realizes, that the cavalry captain has let go of Albedo since he pulled him out of the buried snow.
“Klee,” Albedo replies, and wraps his arms around her as tightly as he can bear.
“Albedo,” Klee cries into his ear, painfully loud and tearful and the best thing he’s heard all week. “Albedo, Albedo, I missed you so much! Jean said you were lost and that Kaeya and Sucrose were going to go get you but that they might not be able to find you and I wanted to help look for you so that you could come back home and—“
She runs out of air, then, a wet hiccup turning into an airless wheeze, and Albedo thinks of his master, who wasn’t supposed to leave him as long as he never failed his assignments but disappeared anyways, and Alice, who was supposed to take care of Klee them both her daughter until her dying breath and left regardless, and of himself, who promised to stay in her stead and has spent two-days-going-on-years buried in the snow.
Albedo lowers his head to Klee’s blonde, poofy pigtails to hide the misting of his eyes and hugs Klee very, very tightly, until she starts squirming.
“Owww,” Klee whines. “Albedo, you’re hurting me. And you're cold!”
He loosens up immediately. “I’m sorry, Klee,” he says. “I just missed you, too. Very much. I didn’t mean to get lost, and I’m very grateful that Kaeya and Sucrose came to find me.”
“I came, too,” Klee said, “but they said I couldn’t go up any farther because someone should be here in case you came back to the camp.”
“That was very kind of you, Klee,” Albedo tells her, and gives her one last squeeze before pulling back to look at her face.
Her eyes are watery and her cheeks are rosy, the snow-nipped tip of her nose pinkening in the cold air. He looks back up to Kaeya for help, knowing that Klee needs someone warmer to cuddle up to, and finds both Kaeya and Sucrose staring at him with odd expressions on their faces.
Albedo is not the best at reading people on the best of days. This is not his best of days. Sucrose has a palm pressed to her mouth, and Kaeya’s face is entirely indecipherable. It makes something twist uncomfortably in the hollow space under his ribs.
“Do you think,” Albedo finds himself saying, “that Jean would approve a motion to set up my laboratory somewhere closer to…”
“We retrieved all of your left over things,” Sucrose blurts, gesturing vaguely with her arm at some scattered notes and sealed containers set in crates by the singular tent they have set up. “We can help you carry everything. Down and out in one trip, even.”
Albedo blinks, plastering a shaky smile onto his face. “Yes. Thank you. Just a break, I think. Until the spring thaws end.”
Sucrose blinks once, very hard, at that. “... Yes, Mr. Albedo,” she says, and he feels a pang of embarrassment as Klee finally extricates herself from his arms and starts to tug at his hair. His braids somehow survived the ordeal, but they’ve fallen to the sides of his face, not unlike the style that he’s seen a popular bard wear around Mondstadt.
“... I-It just, seems prudent,” Albedo defends himself, pressing his palms against the ground and letting his Vision flare at his throat to summon a solar isotoma. The artificial flower rises, pushing him to his feet. He’s not afraid—he survived, after all, no worse for wear once he gets his hands on some chalk and an alchemy table. He has no reason to fear Dragonspine any more than he did prior to this incident. He is simply making a logical decision about lab safety. It would be unfortunate to lose his progress once more. “With… the weather changes.”
“Yes,” Sucrose agrees, nodding decisively. She ducks around the isotoma and pauses, hesitating for an anxious moment, before visibly making a decision and wrapping her arm around his waist. His legs are doing better after spending some time in Kaeya’s proximity, but he still sags somewhat into her hold until she heaves him over to a bench and drops him on it.
“Just for the rest of spring,” Albedo feels compelled to add.
“Mhm,” Sucrose hums as Kaeya starts stacking crates.
“Spring!” Klee cheers, hugging his legs. It’s a gesture much more befitting a small child than it was Albedo, he can’t help but think. “And summer, Albedo! It’s cold here—summer is nice and warm and we can go swimming and fishing and, um, we can’t build a snowman, but maybe we can make a sandman and it’ll be even better because he’ll have seashells!”
“Summer doesn’t sound so bad,” Kaeya throws over his shoulder with a smirk.
Klee cuddles up against Albedo’s waist and Sucrose is a bundle of warmth under his arm. Kaeya, boxes packed and loaded onto a small, hand-pulled wagon, stands close enough that Albedo could reach out and touch him—or that Kaeya could catch him, should the need arise. He can practically feel the warmth radiating off of him—or perhaps the thermos Kaeya is holding out to Klee, which smells of something sweet and puffs clouds of steam into the chilled Dragonspine air.
“Summer,” Albedo agrees, and is grateful for the courtesy everyone does him in pretending that his voice doesn’t wobble.
He can’t help but draw his gaze up to the sky, marveling at its blank whiteness. It’s overcast and gently snowing, a vast nothingness that could not more adequately represent the greatness of it—the diametric opposite of his view for the past two-something days.
So why does he still feel so locked in place? His limbs tremble occasionally, not from the cold that barely affects him, but in jolts and shudders that remind him simply that he can move freely. He watches Kaeya bundle another scarf around Klee’s neck, tucking the ends of it into her coat and whispering a fingertip along the edge of the thermos he holds to cool it slightly before handing it to her. The whole time, Albedo’s own fingers shake.
“Yay!” Klee cheers, lifting the thermos over her head with both hands and nearly spilling the brown liquid inside. “Look, Albedo! Captain Kaeya said if Klee was good and didn’t let him see me leave the camp while he found you, then I could have more hot chocolate!”
Albedo raises an eyebrow, rubbing his palms together, and watches Kaeya flinch at the sudden realization of his faulty phrasing.
Klee, who is not so oblivious nor as lacking in deviousness as some assume, also notices, and smiles so widely that it crinkles her eyes. She leans in to whisper into Albedo’s ear, childishly loud enough that he’s sure Kaeya’s keen ears pick it up: “Captain Kaeya taught me that when people say things like that, then it means you can still do stuff, but you just have to not let them see. But I stayed in the camp anyways, because I remembered that you got lost, and you’re the smartest person ever except maybe mama, so if you got lost, then I might get lost, too.”
“That was very smart of you, Klee,” Albedo says, and wraps an arm around her puffy little coat. She squirms for a moment before concluding that he’s not going to hug her as hard as before, and letting him leave it there. “It sounds like you’re on your way to be just as intelligent as your mother.”
The hot chocolate wafts warm and sweet under Albedo’s nose, and he’s not so immature as to ask for a sip when the drink is busy serving its purpose in chasing the redness from the tip of Klee’s nose, but he—sort of wants to. Wants more of all of it, really. Klee’s loving chaos, Sucrose’s hesitant but well-meaning encouragement, Kaeya’s particular brand of in-control supportiveness. This desire, to lean on someone else and let them handle everything without worrying about it all—Albedo feels like he did the day he showed up on Alice’s doorstep, alone for the first time in his life and carrying a letter detailing whatever failure he must have committed for his master to abandon him.
Kaeya presses a plastic cup into his free hand.
Albedo blinks, train of thought thoroughly derailed, and stares at it. It’s bright red and matches the pattern on Klee’s thermos.
“Klee,” Kaeya is already saying. “How about you share some of your hot chocolate with your older brother, hm? Remember how cold he was? I bet it’ll warm him right up, don’t you think?”
Klee hesitates for just a moment, but then nods very seriously. “You have to get warm, Albedo,” she tells him, and carefully tips her thermos until it thunks lightly against the edge of his cup, pouring. “Or else you’ll get sick!”
“Oh,” Albedo says, throat tight. He takes a sip.
It’s sweetness, melting on his tongue. He doesn’t produce much heat on his own, hands always cool and stone-like when Klee holds them, and the hot chocolate warms the frigid flesh of his throat as it goes down. It’s not quite as sweet as Timaeus’s candies, but this single sip is the best thing he’s ever tasted, red plastic cup warm against his palm, and —
Albedo puts the hot chocolate down and scrubs a forearm over his eyes.
‘Sorry,’ he wants to say again, ‘Pardon my lack of control.’ But his throat is thick with tears and all he can do is take a single ragged gasp, pressing his palm over his eyes in a poor attempt to hide his face.
“Oh no,” Klee whines, and presses herself into his side. Sucrose makes a sound that isn’t dissimilar, hands brushing against his arm. She looks at him like he’s fragile, except he’s not, that's the whole problem, he’s not fragile enough, he’s just—
“How—“ Albedo gasps. “How can you treat me this kindly when—when you’ve discovered I’ve been lying—?”
“You’re allowed to have secrets!” Sucrose rushes to reassure him, grabbing onto her first opportunity to ameliorate the situation. Despite her scholar's mind, sometimes she truly can't bear the awkwardness. “Privacy is important! You don’t have to tell us!”
“I’m not even human,” Albedo tells her. “Two days—I could have—I could have been down there for years if—if you weren’t so inclined to extend me the courtesy of—of finding a corpse to bury. Nobody should have—it would have been my fault. For not telling anyone. I didn’t think—and I didn’t even think anyone was coming,” he finally blurts, ripping his hand away from Klee to bury his face in his palms properly, folding in half over his knees.
Sucrose finally gives in and wraps her arms around him. Klee sniffles and does the same. A hand brushes gently through the ice crystals frosting his hair, and Albedo simply shakes.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be,” comes Kaeya’s voice, finally.
Albedo whimpers into his palms. He’s completely lost control. He’s throwing a tantrum over nothing. He’s being a child. An infant. Klee has more emotional control than this.
The hand in his hair presses more firmly, petting down the back of his head.
“Don’t be,” Kaeya repeats, crouching down in front of Albedo. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Being unfamiliar with where you stand with people doesn’t mean you deserve to be forgotten. So many people love you—we wouldn’t damn you over whatever the circumstances of your origins are.”
The words feel heavy, falling out of Kaeya’s mouth like that, and Albedo thinks of his diamond-blue eye.
“I want—I want… I don’t know.”
Klee squeezes Albedo’s side with all of the strength in her little body. A little bit of vengeance for earlier, and it steadies him. “I want to go home,” Klee says. “This mountain is awful. I hate the cold. Let’s go home.”
There’s a puff of air, like Kaeya just huffed. “Wise words from Miss Klee. Let’s go home, Albedo. You have a lot of people waiting for you. You need to decompress after a rather traumatic incident, and this cursed mountain is no place to do it.”
“I—yes. Yes, alright.”
“Finish your hot chocolate first, though.”
“Yes.”
“And hold Klee’s hand on the way down.”
“... Yes.”
“We’ve got you. I promise.”