Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Everything hurts but Fluch can’t cry. Or maybe she is crying. Maybe the cold of Dragonspine was freezing her tears before they even hit the ground.

Maybe she has been crying this whole time and she hopes that uncle will forgive her. He didn’t like it when she cried. It made him mad.

But she was going to go to sleep forever on the mountain soon so she knew it didn’t matter. Uncle would be happy. Uncle would be happy.

So she closes her eyes. She is ready to go to sleep forever.

But Zhou holds onto her small hand, with his tiny little frost bitten fingers and she cant. Zhou looks at her with his big brown eyes, the same as hers, and he doesn’t say anything but she understands. Like she always has.

Don’t close your eyes. Don’t go to sleep.

And then he grips her hand tighter.

Don’t leave me.

And what is she supposed to do now? She has come here to sleep forever but she can’t leave her brother.

He is her twin and she is his. They have always been together. No matter who comes and who goes, they always have each other.

So she grips Zhou’s hand tighter and she cries out. Her voice is weak and quiet and her throat hurts. But she has to do this for them. She has to use her voice for the both of them.

So she cries and cries and cries out as the snow of Dragonspine falls.

She cries out for her brother and for someone to save him. She cries out for herself into the empty open space.

She cries out for the dream of having at least one person who wanted them, against all odds, to survive.

Chapter Text

“I found these children halfway on the path to death at the peak of Dragonspine. Please help them.”

A man slightly taller than him with a mix of dark green, black hair and the most piercing golden eyes Albedo has ever seen currently stood in front of his lab with two sleeping children straddled to his back. His eyes swirl with desperation and every inch of his body is punctuated with urgency.

Upon closer inspection Albedo can see that the children were indeed in extremely poor condition. Their faces were almost blue with cold and the rotten smell of blood lingered in the air around them. Albedo’s heart lurches with an instant brotherly urge to protect and he ushers the man inside.

“Please come in.”

The man steps inside his lab and Albedo directs him to the cot which he usually used for sleeping. It fit him perfectly and it should be big enough to accommodate the two children.

The man lays them down gently and Albedo gets to work setting up a fire as close to them as possible. “ Warmth is essential for survival here, our first priority should be to fight off the chill from their bodies.”, Albedo answers to the man’s inquisitive gaze.

“I - I see.”

Albedo sparks the kindling and a flame jumps to life. He can now see the children more clearly. They seem to be a young boy and a girl, a little younger than his Klee and his heart hurts even more. They wear an odd mishmash of clothes from both Mondstat and Liyue that honestly seem a little small for them but the children already have extremely small, thin frames. They share an identical unnaturally bright blue stripe of color in their otherwise chestnut brown hair. Their tan faces are obviously marred with the signs of Dragonspine cold and Albedo moves the fire closer to them.

Albedo checks their vital signs with a shaky anxiety but a small wave of relief settles over him once he determines a small pulse beating inside both of them. There's hope for them yet.

The stench of blood only gets more nauseating so Albedo guesses that the children are suffering from wounds somewhere. He turns back to the mysterious man who was now awkwardly standing in the corner.

“Here, come help me with this. I’m afraid it seems like they’ve gotten hurt.”

The man with the golden eyes steps forward albeit reluctantly. He had previously holed himself up in the corner as if he was scared to be near the children which was odd considering he was the one to bring them to his lab in the first place. But Albedo had no time to worry about that now or ponder over the trio’s strange circumstances, he had children to care for.

“We need to remove their clothes to treat their wounds. I’ll tend to her and you can start with him. Be gentle yet remember that speed is of the essence, time is cruel here.”

The man with the golden eyes nods grimly and they get to work. Gingerly peeling back thin layers of soaked clothes reveals stark red stains near her arm and it is as Albedo feared. The little girl was bleeding.

“How is he?”, Albedo frantically asks glancing to the side to the man with the golden eyes. He wants to assess the state of both children so he could know what to tend to first.

The man with the golden eyes lets out a shaky breath. “There are no wounds on him. He is just frightfully thin and cold.”

Albedo feels another wave of relief and thanks Barbatos. It would’ve been too cruel to choose between which of the children to care for first with time slipping away as quickly as it did.

“Alright, good. Please remove all of his wet clothes then make sure he’s completely dry. For now like I previously said we need to focus on preserving his body heat. There are blankets under the cupboard over there and please keep his body near the fire. Do whatever it takes to make sure he’s warm.”

The man with the golden eyes nods again and Albedo prepares for his next course of action.

“This child has wounds on her which need to be treated. I will be caring for those but please call for me if anything is needed.” Albedo hopes there wouldn’t be any reason to.

“Understood.”

Albedo gives him a silent nod of thanks and gently cradles the small girl into his arms.He carries her over to the table on the other side of his lab next to his shelf of potions and other concoctions. He lights a small fire in the pyre next to the table to keep her warm.

Emergency training with the Knights of Favonius had prepared him for moments like these and he prays that Barbatos will continue to keep him cool headed enough to properly treat the young child.

The small girl is now dry and completely free from her wet clothes and with a heavy heart he can clearly see shallow cuts littering her right arm. The wounds emit a strange familiar energy, almost pulsing and Albedo knows there is no way that it was due to natural causes. The cuts are flimsy yet clearly intentional. He feels that the situation at hand may be even bigger with more dire consequences than he had managed to consider. He fears for the childrens’s lives.

Albedo quickly scans his shelves for the vial of purified healing water he knew he had attained from Deaconess Barbara. She was the best healer in Mondstat and ideally he would be able to transport the children under her care but the geography of Dragonspine made that trip logistically impossible. So he would have to do with his discount version of whatever services of the healer he could offer.

He finds the clear liquid in a quaint bottle with a heart shaped stopper and grabs it immediately. He discards of his previous gloves and changes to a pair of new ones as to avoid the risk of infecting the child’s wounds. He grabs clean cotton pads and douses them with healing water.

As he moves closer to clean the little girl’s wounds, he notices traces of red crystal stuck to her skin. It pulses with the same familiar energy he had observed before … red, crystal, familiar, and suddenly his mind snaps with an answer. Crimson Agate.

Strangely enough it seems that the specks of crimson agate are fusing with the little girl’s skin and Albedo knows that it’s not right. He had previously assumed that the warmth emitting solely from the little girl’s arm was due to the wounds inflicted there, but he had inching suspicions that it was more in part due to the Crimson Agate residue bonded with her skin. The skin with the red crystals were burning hot, contrasting sharply with the freezing skin surrounding the area.

Albedo gently wipes at the little girl’s arms with his cotton pads to remove the offending particles but they stubbornly stick on. The pulsing seems to get more and more intense and Albedo knows that he needs to get it off of her somehow. He is no healer, but he can instinctively understand that the particles were slowly draining and killing her.

He can’t let her go cold. That would spell death. He cant. He cant let her die. He frantically wracks his brain, for anything, anything he could do to fix the situation.

Give up. You cant save her.

He can feel his coolheadedness slipping away and giving into panic. Images he kept locked away in nightmares flash to his mind and he begs them to stop. He needs to focus on this child right here and now, he needs to-

Klee smiling at him as Mondstat burns around her. How can she smile like that when he did this? How can she keep smiling at him like he’s her brother? Like he didn’t destroy EVERYTHING?

Wait. There’s something wrong. No, it can’t be. Klee’s not smiling at him. Her face isn’t supposed to look like that. No No No No No, please no. Leaking red, not the bright happy red that belongs to Klee but - NO NO IT CANT BE NO NO N-

A deep low hum breaks Albedo out of his nightmarish trance. His body is pulled back to reality.

The man with the golden eyes is humming somewhere behind him. It’s soft and gentle and quiet. A lullaby.

Albedo doesn’t know why he’s humming. Their backs are turned to each other, each too preoccupied with saving the child in front of them but Albedo is aware of his presence again and it grounds him.

He listens to the gentle lullaby and looks at the child in front of him. She looks like she could be one of Klee’s friends, playing under the sun, kissed by the bountiful breezes back home. She is tiny and small and her life is in his hands. So Albedo makes an oath.

He moves towards the cupboard again knowing what he has to do. The life of the child in front of him is precious. The child on the other side of the lab was probably her brother and being acquainted with the bonds of sibling hood himself, Albedo knew he would need her. So he makes an oath.

Albedo rummages around the cupboard looking for what he knew he kept there. It was an extreme measure with great risk that he was well aware of, but something in him was telling him that this was the only way.

He wanted her to survive for the mysterious man with the sharp golden eyes. He didn’t know of their relation or if they frankly had any real relation. But he understood the look of weak desperation in his eyes. It was real. The way the man had pleaded and bared against the terrors of Dragonspine for these children, it had to mean something. He needed her to survive for the man with sharp golden eyes. So he makes an oath.

His hands finally find the special first aid kit that Rhinedottir had left him with, specifically customized for the harsh conditions of Dragonspine. Memories flood back, but this is no time for nostalgia.

He remembers Rhinedottir teaching him how to amputate a limb, a skill that he needed to know in the dangerously common risk of land and snowfalls on Dragonspine that could leave you with a limb trapped in an unfavorable position.

He never predicted that his master’s lessons would be useful to him in this way. He knew it was extreme but it became even more glaringly obvious now that the wounds, binded with crimson agate, were leeching off the life out of this poor little girl. If he didn’t do something now, worst would come to worst. So he made an oath.

He wants this girl to survive. He wanted to prove to fate, prove to whoever was sending him these awful horrid visions that he was capable of protecting life. That no matter how stained with destruction his hands could become in the future, that right here and right now, he would do everything could to save this girl. So he makes an oath; to protect this little girl and her brother. He selfishly needed them to survive.

Albedo opens the kit and pulls out the first tool he recognizes from Rhinedottir’s lessons on amputation. He understands that fundamentally his body would be different from this little girls but he hopes that structurally they are similar enough for him to complete this amputation successfully.

“ I am going to do something very risky, but I need you to trust me.”

Albedo only felt that it was right to inform the man with the golden eyes behind him. As of now he was the closest thing to a guardian he could guess that the children would have.

The humming stops.

“ I can do nothing now but trust you. Please just make sure that … these children survive.”

Albedo has no idea what his expression is like, their backs still turned away from each other, but he can almost imagine. The man with golden eyes’s words cause him to grip the scalpel knife tighter. He needs to do this right.

“ Please keep humming.”

A momentary pause and the man with the golden eyes continues. Low, soft, and gentle.

Albedo listens to the sweet tune to center and calm himself. He brings up the scalpel right next to the top of the little girl’s right arm and prays to Barbatos. Prays that he can keep his oath.

And to the backdrop of nothing but the but the man with the golden eyes’s lullaby, he makes the first cut.