Chapter Text
The grave is a pitiful thing. The ground is frozen solid and laden with rocks; chipping through it is an ordeal, and the resulting hole is shallow and jagged and nowhere near as comfortable as a resting place ought to be. He has no means to mark the grave that won’t be buried in the snowfall, and nothing much worth saying in memorial anyway. As he lugs the remains from his camp, legs dragging loose in the snow, he holds his breath as if there is any decay to smell. He leaves it in some limp-limbed rendition of the fetal position; there is no other way it will fit in such a small space. Their mother would scoff if she could see him now: at honouring the so-called life of a broken prototype, at his reverence for the rituals of Barbatos and the dead buried behind His cathedral, and at what an utter failure Albedo’s own attempt has turned out to be.
He does not know how long he spends staring down into the grave – long enough for Kaeya to lose his usual nosiness, at least. “I’ll give you your space in case you’d like to say a few words,” he says, and then slinks off into the haze of white. But Albedo has never been to a funeral before; with Kaeya gone, the whole thing feels more like mockery than homage.
How does one start a eulogy? “I’m sorry,” is what he settles on, because if he doesn’t start talking now then he never will and the words happened to be stuck in his throat anyway. “I never could find an answer to your question. Though I suppose it doesn’t particularly matter to you now anyway – it couldn’t have changed anything, or brought you back to life.” Here, he strains, throat tensing against his best efforts to force out the words, and while it eventually yields, he gets the sense that a sentence is lost in the battle. “But I want to say it anyway: I’m sorry.”
And how does one continue a eulogy? In his inexperience, Albedo leans a little further down as if anticipating a response. After everything that’s happened these past weeks, the silence should be comforting, a reminder that he is no longer being haunted. Yet as he stands back upright, pain twinges between the tenth and eleventh stitch.
“It was all for me anyway.” The realization itself hits about a second after the words are out, harsh as the wind whipping against his cheek. “It’s all meaningless for you now, and maybe it always was. I was the one who couldn’t bear to leave a question unanswered. You could have died at the clean end of a sword, and now…” The rest of his words are addressed to the snow just to the left of the grave: “I’m sorry for my selfishness. I’m sorry that I wish you were around to hear this.”
How does one bear to deliver a eulogy knowing their words will forever go unheard and unanswered by the one person who needs to hear them? A madness beats through him, desperate to see one last fight, to deliver his conclusions to the only person who should need to hear them and get some reaction in return, something other than vacant eyes he cannot even bear to look into. He should apologize for this, too: for wanting to drag an unwilling body back to life, just so someone can hear his apologies.
“There was nothing I could have done for you. Do you understand that?” He snaps his eyes back to the body, fervent enough that he swears he sees some of the snow melt. His leg wobbles beneath him, but when he takes a heavy step forwards, his foot plants in the snow. “You couldn’t ever take my life – destroy it, render it unrecognizable, maybe – but in the end it would never be yours. It isn’t fair at all. But no matter how much anyone deserves it, my life will always have to be mine. There is a space carved out for me here. Do you understand?” His breath is fogging in the corner of his eyes.
With a single, tentative boot, he lifts the corpse’s face just to watch how the shadows fall. It does not resemble any expression Albedo has ever seen.
With that, the heat of desperation drains from his limbs to form a heavy pool in his stomach. His breaths are cold once again. “Maybe in a kinder world,” he says – but the rest feels too absurd to speak aloud even in complete isolation. Maybe we would have met sooner, known each other as family and not foe. Maybe there would have been space for both of us in Mondstadt’s welcoming arms. You could never have had my life, but maybe you could have had a piece of it. Maybe we could have carved a space for you, too, just as a synthetic being not created by the Gods’ own hands still slotted so neatly into this life. Maybe I could have shown you what it means to make a life for yourself, to be asked after and sewn together and held like you are more than chalk. “I think Master would have loved you, if she’d only understood. She loved me, after all, didn’t she?”
It is still a corpse that lies at his feet. It does not stir. But somehow the grief feels warmer now, pooling in his stomach not like a cold puddle, but instead the cerulean waves of Mondstadt’s shores. Whatever grip this body once held over Albedo in its rigor mortis has now loosened. Perhaps, as crude a rendition of the traditional funeral rites as this is, Barbatos has granted them His blessing – the thought is comforting, if nothing else.
“You haven’t been alive for a long time now, have you, even when Durin was puppeting your body? How long have I been talking to myself?” He smiles like he could be sharing some private joke with the lifeless mass before him. “I tried so hard to spin some meaning out of those final words that I nearly built you a life myself. But no one could ever have lived it – it wasn’t mine and it wasn’t yours either. I’m sorry there wasn’t more I could do.” But there is no one left to comfort now.
Silently, Albedo begins to cover the grave.
✦✦✦
He finds Kaeya just around the curve of the mountainside, huddled around a torch which seems to be on its last legs. It comes as no surprise, but the light flickers so delicately over his face, as if an artist placed it there intentionally to highlight his features. In fact, Albedo supposes he probably did it himself – there aren’t many other people who come around this part of Dragonspine, after all.
Albedo tries not to find too much amusement in the way Kaeya straightens up once his pupil locks onto him – but cold, rigid muscles really do not lend themselves to Kaeya’s typical mannerisms. “How do you feel?” he asks with a solemnity not matched by his face, leaning forward in interest and inching conspicuously close to the torch.
Pausing, Albedo glances behind himself, as if there is anything there to see. “Somehow… peaceful.”
Kaeya nods. The blue of his iris is rippling, like the shock of a single teardrop falling into an ocean. “Does it feel fair now? This resolution?”
“No,” comes all too quickly. “But it feels like the most I could do. He’s been put to rest by the closest thing he has to family, and that’s about as close to life as he could ever get now.” He nods as if only just convincing himself.
Dragonspine’s winds swirl around them, kicking up snow and howling through the mountain’s bones as they go, but their characteristic hostility seems to be missing. Slopes of ice and jagged rock stretch down further than Albedo can see, but for once the numbing silence of it all feels like a refuge, like the respectful closing of once-watchful eyes in this moment of mourning. He remembers why he once enjoyed spending so much time up here.
The quiet breaks as Kaeya sucks in a breath, setting up for a speech which comes out far too smoothly to have not been prepared while Albedo was fumbling through his makeshift funeral service. “There were some things I said yesterday which I believe I could have clarified better. So, if you’ll allow me…” He leaves a poignant pause but does not wait for an answer. “You don’t owe me anything, Albedo – not information, not your time, not your empathy, nothing. But whatever you have to give, I will take. I will take you, however you are. I need you to know that. You don’t owe me anything – but don’t hold yourself back on my account, because if it’s yours, then I will take it. And that choice isn’t yours to make anyway.”
Were Albedo a more principled man, maybe he would push Kaeya away regardless, chide him for inviting danger into his life with the same resigned smile he flashes before he downs one too many drinks. But here, the silence is privacy; no one is weighing his morals today. “Anything? Really? That’s a dangerous promise to make.”
Kaeya laughs and gestures vaguely like he’s just dropped a cue card and is stalling for time. It’s delightfully bashful, and on a normal day Albedo might just kiss him then and there. “Aha, well, I’d rather you didn’t make a habit of scaring the wits out of me in the middle of the night by looming over me with your organs hanging out.” At this, he slots his hand into Albedo’s, the touch nearly warm enough to burn. “But I’ve been through my fair share of less-than-pretty moments, so I’m hardly in a place to judge. I stand by what I said.”
“Have you ever dissected your brother’s corpse after killing him and keeping his body in the corner of your laboratory for a week?”
Kaeya’s mouth opens, then closes. “…I suppose I’ve never been put in such a position.”
Somehow, a smile still settles into its familiar spot on Albedo’s face, even after all this time. He squeezes Kaeya’s hand and it draws his attention just as it always had, in the brief year of solace before everything. “Well, you never know what the future will bring. Would you like to head back home now?”
“Please.”
✦✦✦
It almost comes as a comfort that there is so much to clean up. His first order of business upon arriving back home is, quite literally, bathing: fishing debris from his hair, scraping sediment from his skin with his nails, then scrubbing those clean too, until the last remains of his mother’s final failure are floating in the water around him. He drains the bath without looking, though he can’t imagine it’s a pretty sight.
Even with all the filth he’s accumulated over the past weeks, he can’t imagine the mass of it all could have actually been that heavy – but still everything, from his hair to his limbs to his chest, feels indescribably lighter. He cannot remember his skin ever feeling so soft, even before the dirt and the powder and the dried bodily fluids he’s been wearing for so long; he grazes the interior of his forearm and it feels just like checking Klee’s forehead for a fever, just as warm too, if only from the lingering heat of the water.
He redresses without looking in the mirror. His gloves and coat cover the worst of the scars.
Klee is, predictably, ecstatic enough to see him that she poses a distinct danger to nearly everyone in the vicinity. What a blessing that her joy at welcoming people back always outshines her disappointment in watching them leave – but it still lingers in the way she clings to his neck as he holds her, and in the silence that swallows her once the initial wave of excitement passes. “You must have a lot to fill me in on,” he prods, mustering all his newfound levity, but she only squishes her cheek further into his with her eyes squeezed shut.
And so, Klee comes along through the cleanup rounds, heavier than usual as Albedo wills himself not to disturb her by switching arms. She really should not be allowed in the lab, but it perks her up to see the myriad colourful vials and flasks from which she is usually forbidden, enough at least that she keeps her eyes open. Sucrose collapses onto a stool at the very sight of him, hair so mussed that it can no longer hide her ears drooping in exaggerated relief. “It’s great to have you back, Mr. Albedo,” she says, breathier even than usual and without lifting her face from her hands. “Please tell Timaeus he can’t put Fire Flower Stamen and concentrated Slime Condensate in the same reaction mixture. I don’t want to clean up broken glass again.”
There isn’t much actual work Albedo can get done with a child on his hip, but even the ambient sounds of him puttering around to assess the damage and rearrange his workstation seems to put Sucrose at ease. As he updates his notes, Klee makes shadow puppets in the afternoon sun, their working silhouettes as delicate as patterns painted onto the wallpaper. He takes care to wait until Sucrose has finished her meticulous collection of a pollen sample before he says his goodbyes – sure enough, she starts as she snaps from her focus, shooting him a smile as embarrassed as it is genuine.
Jean is far too understanding for her own good. In lieu of the reprimand Albedo expected, she only fixes him with eyes which look far too old for her face, eyes which have always made him nervous ever since his first day on the job, and welcomes him back to the city. “I’m sure you’re more than capable, but please let me know if you need help readjusting or catching up on the work you missed.” As if this is her mess to fix. “It sounds like the lab was really falling apart without you – but take whatever time you need. I’m sure we’ll sort things out regardless.”
Of course, it probably does not hurt to have his little sister playing defense. “Don’t be mean to Albedo! He’s only busy ‘cause he works super hard on super important stuff,” are the first words Klee speaks since his arrival back in Mondstadt, and the last before she hides her face in his cheek again. Suppressing his laugh, Albedo pats her back like Aunt Alice always used to do when she said something clever, back when she was still around to carry her own daughter.
“Don’t worry, Klee, I know,” comes Jean’s reply, though she is looking to Albedo as she speaks like they’re sharing a joke. He thinks he finds this one quite funny.
He figures he owes Mona a meal as well. Klee finally relinquishes her hold on his shoulder, instead settling into the chair next to him and helping to sort the mail he missed in his absence. Zhenyu is touching up the final draft of his latest novel and offering his illustrator an advance copy – though that offer might be running thin given how long ago this letter was sent. Even the ever-moving Traveller took the chance to reach out, in the middle of their visit to Liyue’s Lantern Rite at that. He has a much better excuse for missing things that come in the mail given how long they take to deliver, but somehow the sight of everything piled in front of him makes his guilt all the more palpable.
If Mona considers his divided attention rude, she has no time to mention it in the midst of retelling her recent struggles with the Steambird’s editorial team – though when he spares a glance up she is staring at the fork balanced atop his untouched dinner. All too quickly, she flips her hair and becomes entirely enthralled with Klee’s inquiries about whether a Steambird is a bird made of steam or simply one that produces steam (the answer to which, Mona decides after serious deliberation, is a bird that runs on a steam engine).
When the meal finishes, he humours the flurry of promises to pay him back for the sake of Mona’s pride, before informing her that, as always, her company is more than payment enough. Klee, keen on being helpful, skitters into the kitchen with a stack of plates which will fortunately be easy enough to remake with alchemy. Albedo is arranging his letters in order of urgency.
A quiet cough is not enough to draw his eyes, but he raises his eyebrows in acknowledgement. “You know I don’t like to read people’s fortunes to resolve petty concerns, least of all my own. It can hardly change the course of fate anyway,” she says, stressed and hanging in a way that suggests incompleteness – but all Albedo hears afterwards is the creaking of her seat as she leans back.
Mouth pressed together in something which might resemble a smile, Albedo retires his letter. “Spare me your wisdom instead, then?”
Mona hums, dismissive if not for the trill of pride underscoring it all.
“Do you think it’s our duty to understand the fates, or simply to receive their message and enact their will? Do you take the stars at their word?”
Her eyes narrow like there might be something hidden between the lines of Albedo’s face. “Gods, you sound just like the old hag. All these little riddles…” But the crash of a broken plate in the kitchen ends the conversation there, hanging just as it began.
He lets Klee lead him in intricate loops down Mondstadt’s streets and in and out of its gates, to burn off some of her regained energy before bed. She’s probably covered about three times the amount of ground Albedo has by the time she finally settles down, at the base of the statue of Barbatos at Windrise and with an armful of flowers. After much insistent tugging at his wrist, he settles into the grass next to her as tiny hands thread through his hair in childish mimicry of a trick he remembers teaching to her one lazy summer afternoon. The low sun bathes everything in gold – citrinitas, the final ascension – but no being here, from the trees to the frogs to the little girl fumbling through braiding flowers into his hair, needs the touch of alchemy to live, save for one. Still, the wind hisses between his out-stretched fingers just as it does through the leaves of the great tree behind them, and every being here, himself included, will live on even once the golden light dips below the horizon – save for one, far up a distant mountain on the horizon, who has been gone far too long to have ever seen it.
Once she’s satisfied with her work, Klee drags him to the river by his sleeve. He’s face-to-face with his reflection before he can think to flinch away.
It’s the familiarity that strikes most profoundly of all, he thinks, warm and fluid where it runs down weak limbs. The curve of rushing water warps some features and smudges the rest, but even with what little he can make out, some neuron burns at the very back of his head with the certainty that this is him, himself, Albedo as he exists not only as a physical form piloted by some unified consciousness, but as that very consciousness itself. A stray Windwheel Aster hangs loose from a lock of hair; he watches its reflection sway in the wind, feels the nerves burn as it brushes his cheek. Klee’s own reflection settles beside him, too washed away by the stream to make out her expression but beaming with a warm joy that heats the side of his arm.
He tells her a bedtime story as he tucks her in, recited by heart with little twists wherever creativity happens to strike him. He leaves the door open just a crack, because sound from the hallway reminds her that he is still there as she falls asleep. How absurd it now seems that he could ever bear to run from this.
The sun has dipped below the horizon now, and Albedo is indeed still standing. But there is another mess to be cleaned.
✦✦✦
“Albedo. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
This Kaeya is as familiar as all the rest, perhaps to Albedo more than anyone else: his hair is ever so slightly ruffled, not quite slept on but maybe intentionally mussed; his layers of clinking jewelry have been retired to a drawer somewhere; and the typical lilts of his voice fall mute with the low volume, reduced to a soft murmur. He leans against the doorframe, boneless, as if he could ever need its support to stand tall.
Quite suddenly, Albedo feels all too large: spilling out of the frame of this painting and into the streets.
Fumbling, he produces Kaeya’s house key from his pocket – only now cognisant of how long he’s been toying with it as he waits, stroking his fingers over its teeth – and proffers it with wide eyes he hasn’t remembered how to blink yet. “I completely forgot I still had this until just recently. It’s how, ah – how I was able to enter your home, that night… I never had the chance to return it sooner, as you’d understand.”
Kaeya tilts his head to examine the key, the slight movement throwing shadows over his eye. “Ah, well, it’s good to know where that went – though honestly, I hardly noticed it was gone.”
Albedo, too, is examining, locking onto every twitch of muscle and flutter of wind that graces Kaeya’s body – but he stays stubbornly still, more so than can be written off as natural even when he’s idle. Caution is due when barging back into a home you’ve been ushered out of, but Kaeya’s attention, dull as it is against Albedo’s fingertips, is a thrill he cannot deny himself. “I think I owe you a proper apology,” he says, just for the rush of seeing Kaeya’s eye flicker up to him.
A sigh, soft as the wind blows at night when even Barbatos is sleeping. “Albedo, you’ve apologized more than enough. Didn’t I make it clear that I don’t hold any of this against you?”
“Indeed you did. But didn’t you also make it clear that you’d ‘take anything I have to give?’” Albedo retorts, barely fighting a smile he knows is all too smug.
“What a dangerous promise that was.” But Kaeya is smiling too, head leaned against the doorframe in defeat.
“Then you’ll let me repeat myself for as long as I like until I’ve said my piece.” His arm, still outstretched, is beginning to ache. “I apologize for ending things as abruptly as I did. In my mind – well, I’m sure you can infer how I’ve been occupying myself since then, from everything you’ve seen. So you’ll understand why I couldn’t have someone seeing me undressed on a regular basis. It was no personal failing of yours – I was presented a problem with no easy solution, and so I chose a difficult solution which I was not equipped to handle. I apologize, for getting you caught in the middle of that.”
“Of course. Ever practical, aren’t we?” When does Kaeya shift his expressions? Albedo has been watching him this entire time and the curve of his mouth has not so much as shifted, and yet the softness of his smile from a minute ago has been replaced by cruel mockery, laughing not at the joke but at the fact that Albedo could never understand it.
Albedo blinks, unsure what answer Kaeya is vying for with sharp pupils and pointed words. “I… would like to think so.” His arm is visibly wobbling now, blurry in the foreground of his vision. “But then, I didn’t anticipate just how much it would upset you.”
Kaeya is not laughing anymore, not at anyone. He is still smiling – now like a bullied child scared of ruining the joke, wobbling with placation and sentiment he can’t spill. His mouth has not moved.
“If it were my sacrifice to make, then so be it – we all sleep in the beds we’ve made.” He does not have long before his arm gives out, and now of all times his voice is failing him. He squeezes the air through anyways and hopes this is enough to piece the words together. “When Klee breaks one of her toys, maybe tears Dodoco’s tail off by accident while playing too rough, then I can simply take it from her room at night and sew it back together, and – well, and she cries, of course, if I take too long and she notices it missing, but this is all to be expected – and you aren’t a child, anyway. Perhaps it’s simply a human trait then.” His metaphors are falling apart, and his words tumble out of order as he rushes to speak every last one. “I’m sorry that I couldn’t fix it,” is what he finishes with, and while it has none of the explanatory power he wanted, it feels truer than anything else he could say.
He jumps when Kaeya speaks again, steady and measured in contrast to Albedo’s winded desperation. “…And what toy of mine were you hoping to fix?” he asks, but it does not rise at the end like a question should.
The key clatters to the cobblestone as Albedo’s arm goes limp. Still panting with the effort of it all, he stares into the empty space it once occupied. “You’ve seen the stuffing now anyway. The magic is gone.”
“Albedo, come inside. This is no place to have a conversation.” And with an accusatory glance at the stars above, he ushers Albedo in.
The darkness of evening morphs the domestic warmth of Kaeya’s kitchen into something indiscernible, amorphous, and nearly illicit. As he presses further in at Kaeya’s heels, the layer of shadow wavers and buzzes around him, flickering with colours from the backs of his own eyes: a flash of silver from the countertop, brownish red between the tiles. This is a place to be taken apart.
Kaeya looks more at home here than he ever did in the daylight. His expressions, already opaque enough on their own, become completely indecipherable under the blanket of dark. “Give me your hand,” he says, nothing but lowered eyes and sharp canines and the vague silhouette of a man.
Albedo’s hand is limp in Kaeya’s palm before he can even think to move it. On a better night he might just blush at the sight of Kaeya popping his own shirt buttons one-handed – but when soft skin presses into his fingertips and a heartbeat flutters beneath his palm, he cannot so much as flex his fingers. “Kaeya…” Even his vocal cords barely vibrate.
Fingers curl around his wrist, loose but no less demanding. “You told me you wanted to hold my heart in your hand. What’s stopping you?” Kaeya’s voice is as breathy and hissed as ever, but with a controlled rasp hanging off his words that sends shivers through Albedo’s petrified muscles. “Go on, do your worst. Dig your fingers in. Slip them through the bone – or crack it if you like.” A single finger presses a tendon on his inner wrist; Albedo’s own twitches in tow. “There’s nothing particularly pretty in there. But if you want it, then take it.”
With a dry swallow that feels far more like a spasm, Albedo dares to tease a nail in and feel hot flesh give beneath his finger. Flushing with some perverse delight, he bears down the rest, like his thin fingers might really pierce through the cage of Kaeya’s sternum. He notices his own fervour only when he leans in and feels hot breath bounce back off Kaeya’s collarbone – further in, like once his fingernails fail him he might test his teeth, in hopes the sharpest of them all might slot through his ribs to graze the beating heart beneath – but in the end, all he does is press his forehead to Kaeya’s chest.
Kaeya laughs like this is the only way he can think to take the air in. “You’re… fucking terrifying,” he breathes, with a reverence usually reserved for the privacy of their bedroom. “I don’t want you to ‘fix’ anything, Albedo, I want you to dream about swallowing my heart. I’ve never been so excited to get eviscerated. What do I do with you?” But given how he runs his thumb across Albedo’s cheek, it seems he’s already decided on the answer.
“Eviscerate you… I wouldn’t.” Breathless, he noses further into Kaeya’s skin, braces his arms around his rib cage. “And I couldn’t possibly take your heart. I wasn’t meant to have one – you’ve seen it firsthand.” It’s all sleeptalk, murmured dizzily into whatever bone is beneath his teeth this time.
“You think far too much about what you deserve. Tell me what you want, love.”
Want… Albedo tips his head back, just enough to see the sharp lines of Kaeya’s pupil without losing his grip on skin and bone. Yes, Albedo wants – with lips and teeth and tongue and fingernails digging into warm skin. Of this much, he is certain.
✦✦✦
When the sun rises upon Teyvat once again, painting the windowsill with flecks of gold, the debts accrued over the last month of torment have finally all begun to be repaid. Albedo wakes with the sunrise, cocooned in warmth and dull nausea.
Driven out of bed by some buzzing beneath his skin, Albedo paces around the bedroom, thumbs at the dust collecting atop the dresser, stops by the window more to examine his own ghostly reflection than to look out at the still-sleeping town. In the pseudo-mirror of a glass pane, the finer details blur together and the scars smooth over.
All this walking, and just to end up right where he started.
Albedo is pulling on his coat when he finally recognizes the buzzing for what it is: a question, starving without an answer to feed it. He tries, with hushed breaths hissed into the silent streets, but nothing quite seems to take. What does it matter who deserves what? There was nothing else I could have done. We all sleep in the beds we’ve made. Don’t I deserve to play at life too? Isn’t that better than leaving us both to suffer? These are lifestyles, ways of swallowing the grief of living – but truisms and pleas masquerading as questions are no replacement for a real answer. By the time he reaches the heavy doors of headquarters, his breath is so quickened that he’s nearly laughing. He truly is right where he started, isn’t he?
He settles at his desk as if he could find some satisfaction in the banality of work. His master did not leave him with much to show for the time they spent together – nothing but a couple of letters and centuries of knowledge he’s never sure he’s living up to – but he’s been curating his own little collection of observations on his own nature and constitution, and every time he skims through it he thinks of her, huddled over her own notes as she plans to piece together a son, long before he ever knew what it means to exist.
And on those shameful days where he feels like an overgrown child struggling to walk in his mother’s shoes, he takes some infantile comfort in holding something so tangible between his fingers and knowing that someone has always had a plan for him.
Today, so early in the morning, the hallways are still quiet – and so he presses his nose in to smell the ink. These are answers right here, to all the questions he’s had over the years he’s spent without her, a heavy stack in his hands, real enough to leave papercuts when he flips through too hastily.
What makes Albedo so special? There’s no answer throughout all these hundreds of pages – but then, Master’s knowledge could hardly have been summarized in a single notebook. If there is anyone he can trust in this world, then surely it must be the woman who defied the very laws of nature to give him life? So perhaps Albedo cannot justify his own existence – but it was Master who weaved the threads of his life together, and it was Master who chose him over all the prototypes she discarded. Master chose me, he whispers into his own bones, face pressed so far into the rough pages of his notebook that he might as well be nuzzling it.
For the first time in a month, he feels calm.
Is that the answer you were looking for? Perhaps not. But Albedo spends the remainder of his day under sunlight’s warmth, indulging the people who worry themselves sick when he disappears, cradling a young girl who desperately needs some semblance of stability, alive – because it isn’t anyone else’s life to live, after all. Perhaps, as a scientist, he ought to be skeptical of conclusions he cannot verify himself. But there is a reason people take shelter in the cathedral when faced with peril, even if there are sturdier buildings in the city: it is easier to have something to believe in.
So Master must have known something, must have had a plan, must have sensed some quality in Albedo which he is still too naïve to identify himself, must have known the answers to all the questions that still plague him every night – and so long as he believes in her, the comfort of those elusive answers is his to claim. When she granted Albedo his form, Master did not pity that cold body now curled up in some distant cradle of ice, and so neither will Albedo let his ambitions be shackled by baseless sentiment.
For now, this is answer enough. Don’t you think so?