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fic: syllogism
Jul. 2nd, 2024 02:22 amsyllogism
tags: albedo/mona, canon-compliant, oneshot, porn without plot/pwp, oral sex, vaginal sex, cunnilingus, established relationship, first time (between them), character study only if you're really generous about what a character study is, unbeta'd
status: 2334w, completed, ao3 link
summary:
“I didn’t think you’d proposition me tonight,” says Mona, watching him shed the last of his clothing, set it to the side. She’s preening a little, she’ll admit — but it doesn’t seem to bother him. There’s a twist to his mouth that suggests that he’s smiling even with his face half-hidden in shadow as he stoops down to set his things on one of her low stools; she can see it in the light, now, as he draws closer.
Behind him in the corner of the room lies the abandoned research they’d been discussing. The astral charts he’d drawn her from his vantage point in Dragonspine sprawl over the face of the table next to the tea she’d poured them, the pot gone cool amidst matching gold-edged cups. The discarded shape of his black gloves lies folded in a little heap, the see-through edge of her hosiery tossed over the adjacent seat of one of her her tall-backed chairs; its shadow leads to the scarlet underbelly of her cloak from where it rests over the foot of her bed.
The bed bends under his weight as he sits next to her, slides his fingers up the slope of her arm: hooks them underneath the strap of her bra, slides it down over her shoulder. Mona shivers.
He presses a kiss to the side of her jaw; she loops her arms around his neck, draws him closer to her. His skin is cool. Her bra unhooks. He slips it on the post of her bed, pressing his cool fingers against the bare skin of her back, and her skin jumps in response. Heat prickles at her core.
“I thought you wanted me to,” he says, and gently pulls the rest of her hair loose. The ties fall to the side, falling somewhere on the ground. She’ll clean it up later.
Mona says, tart, “And you didn’t want to?”
“Didn’t I?” murmurs Albedo. He leans forward, brushing her hair back from over her shoulders from where it pools over her breasts with the back of his hand. His fingers knot in the dark roots of her hair, near her nape; he cradles her head gently, tilting her upwards to face him. He studies her.
The flickering candles in the room cast a pale light over Albedo’s face, his features painted gold; they suffuse him with warmth. His thumb is still against the side of her head. A slide of blond hair drops from behind his ear and slides against her cheek. It tickles.
“I’m not sure.”
She scowls at him. “Then why did you do it?”
“I thought you’d know.”
She does. She doesn’t. Both are the same: they’re scholars, not academics; students of knowledge that can’t be quantified, tied to a greater, wordless understanding — like the body knows how to breathe, how the living jolt into life. Mona can divine the direction of a ship, the obstacles it’ll face, the oncoming storm. She can’t divine why the heart stutters, though she can tell how long it has left to beat; her vision flattens the three-dimensional into a single layer, simplifying journey to result.
Her hand reaches upwards to touch his skin, searching for a pulse at his throat. It’s silent. Albedo pushes his head forward minutely, meeting her halfway. Her finger digs into his skin. Mona’s hand drops.
“Is it so hard to admit that you like me?” says Mona, tilting her chin up. She meets his gaze over the slope of her bottom lashes.
He smiles at her. “I do like you,” he says, “Miss Mona Megistus.”
“I know that,” she retorts. His hand curls around her waist, one sliding down to the back of her neck; he kisses her softly, gently, presses her back into the bed. Her hair presses flat against her pillow, the mark hidden in Albedo’s throat parallel with the slope of her body. Her mouth curves upwards. She says, “And you want me.”
“You expect me to want you,” he says. Corrects her — almost. Impossibly amused. “Like it’s fate.”
His fingers skim under her shoulderblades, sliding her dark hair out from behind her. She feels it fan out above her head in waves. Her gaze catches against his and holds it there. “That’s the one thing I’m never wrong about.”
His eyes settle against hers.
He murmurs, “I know.”
She thinks — hah! Triumph curls in her stomach with a flash of heat. She dips her fingers against the slope of his jaw, trails it over his throat again. The edge of her nail scrapes against the heart of his star. His whole body stutters. Mona’s self-evident triumph turns her voice velvet. “Tell me what else you know.”
“I know the eyes exist to see,” he says. He takes her hand in one of his and presses it against his cheek, where the edge of her nails grazes the edge of her lashes. Her pulse jumps; he kisses it there at the wrist, gaze fixed on her. “And I know the heart exists to beat.”
Her chest rises and falls. He holds his body above hers, perfectly still.
“Even components of a whole have their own destiny,” says Mona, curling her fingers over her palm. He laughs a little, inaudible; she feels it, wishes she could hear it too. She feels fingers slide against her shin to the tender skin behind her knee, smiles a little despite herself, shivers. They glide to the inner crease of her thigh. Stroke circles onto her hip, trace the line of separating her leg from the warmth between her legs.
“I know.”
“You know—?”
“I know if I want you,” he says, very softly, “I must exist to want you.”
His fingers interlace with hers. He leans over her, shadows her, and presses a kiss against the top of her ear, the side of her flushed cheek, the corner of her mouth, drops his mouth down the vulnerable flesh of her neck, the jut of her collarbone, the flat of her shoulder, the valley between her breasts, the skin that hovers above the bottom of her ribs. She gasps quietly. Her toes curl. Over her own body, she can make out the green of his eyes in pieces.
She’d thought about this before — what it’d be like, with him, but only ever idly. How he’d be during, how he’d look; how he’d approach it, because he couldn’t have done it before — he couldn’t have, could he? — which would make it a first, for him, which made it novel. Experimental. She’d wondered if he’d approach it like one of his trials, and phrase it like that, too; I’d like to study you. And she’d wondered if she’d give in, if she’d give him the time of the day. I’m not easy, Mister Albedo.
The thought had made her — she wasn’t sure. Turn red, certainly. But it wasn’t like this — hadn’t been like it was, earlier, compared to when she’d thought about it. She’d only been explaining her astral charts to him, and he’d been looking at her, and it wasn’t that he wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, but she could tell that he was paying attention to her — her, above what they were talking about. She’d stopped mid-sentence. Crossed her legs, tossed her head: said, I still haven’t finished my tea, and he’d reached over and taken her cup in hand, hooking the handle around his finger. She’d watched, stunned, as he swallowed it all.
And he’d looked at her, and said plainly, his voice softly, painfully amused: It’s finished.
No — she hadn’t thought about it like this: him under her, her under him, their bodies tethered through their singular points of contact that were only singular insofar as they felt singular — one-of-a-kind — like the eye of a ripple expanding outward. Like this, with his hands on her, with fingers longer and slender and a touch heavier than she’d thought it’d be, more sure; colder and warmer both at once, more solid dream than any imagining she could conjure. Like this, him open-mouthed and wet against her skin, with the oddest kind of body she’d ever touched: a glancing approximation of what it meant to be human, with all the intent and none of the flaws.
“And—” her breath catches. “Do you?”
“Mona,” he says, and kisses the inside of her thigh. His hands sweep to the space behind her knees; his eyes glitter, clear pools of water. Foci for divination, liquid beds of memory. She can make out the dark silhouette of herself in them, the broad strokes of how he sees her: her pale skin, now ruddy with flush, and the curtain of her hair. His canines gleam; his throat bobs as he swallows, his gaze fixed on her. He’s smiling. “You’re never wrong about fate.”
She stares at him, suddenly dizzy. And you want me. Albedo doesn’t breathe; he barely needs to eat. His body, crafted of the dust of the world — devoid of any impurity, any imperfection. All of his extraneous destinies have been removed, like salt purged from water; all of his extraneous desire, leaving only that which is not essential to life but existence. The pinnacle of fate: everything preordained by design. Everything he is, he needs.
He wants her. He needs her. Two facts alike one another, now made same.
Her weight shifts as he lifts her slightly, her hips separating from the sheets; Mona yelps, her fingers tightening into knots, and he settles her over his shoulders, the heft of her body borne by his own. His lashes, ordinarily gold, look translucent in the light. There’s nothing that separates her from the intensity of his gaze as he looks at her — watches her — drinks in the sight of her, and puts his mouth between her legs.
Her hips jerk on instinct. Albedo’s hand comes to press down on the side of her waist, stabilizing her, and doesn’t let go; it strokes little circles over the fat on the bone that reaches out there, the pale lines scoring her skin. She makes some kind of noise. She doesn’t know what it sounds like. What she knows is mostly heat — salt — the burn of air in her throat, as sudden as a summer apparation.
She can feel his tongue around — in — her, the way it moves slick between her folds; her body twists as she tries to move closer, move away, to meet the source of tension in her stomach, like a string about to snap. He doesn’t let her: his hands are still and sure on her, keeping her grounded. Her leg kicks out slightly, involuntarily, her thighs around his head; he drags her closer by the waist, hums. Pulls her upwards — sucks.
“Albedo,” she says, breathless. Her hand reaches blindly towards his and closes around his shoulder. “Let me…”
His hand goes to envelops hers, covering it loosely like an answer, and he does something with his mouth that makes her forget what she was saying. It can’t have been that important, she thinks wildly, even as she can feel herself grow impossibly wetter. Sweat beads the edge of her hairline, the paths of her palm. Her breath rattles in her chest.
She comes with a wordless cry. He brings her through it, licks at her come until it feels like she’s — wet? damp? one or the other, she can’t tell — with him instead of herself, the cool relief of his presence made stark against her overheated core.
“Kiss me,” demands Mona, pressing at the back of his neck with her ankle, and he lifts himself up in answer, delivers his body to her. His mouth is wet, glistening under the light, and she can’t stop staring at it, the way his face is smeared with translucent liquid. She touches it, half-transfixed, and he leans into her touch, turns it so she’s cradling the clean expanse of his skin.
Her thumb drops to his bottom lip. The weight of it pulls it downward, revealing a sliver of pink flesh underneath.
“Miss Mona,” he says, very low, and kisses her.
It’s salty — a little sour. She’s sitting on his lap now, all too-aware of the transferred heat from her body to his, the way he feels warm now instead of cold. It doesn’t bother her. She wraps her fingers around the back of his neck as his trace over the hidden curve of her spine. He tastes like her, mostly — her and the floral edge of the tea they’d had earlier, hers taken with one more sugar than his.
He tries to pull away. She kisses him again, rakes her fingers over his back to make him stay. His body goes slack against hers, like a puppet with its strings cut; his body doesn’t move, but she can feel every pulse that runs through him in a mirror of her own satisfaction, the lax, heady pull of her muscles.
“I don’t bleed,” he says into her mouth, their voices close enough to blend.
“I know,” says Mona, a little of her usual haughtiness seeping in, and pushes down on his shoulders. He goes with her, looking faintly bemused — at her. He’s always looking at her. She straddles him, examining the way that he looks in front of her: suffused with borrowed color, his hair loose. His mouth is slightly open. He looks at her like she holds the truth of the world in her bones. When she sees him, she thinks she might.
“Do you want me?” she says, peering down at him. Her hair curtains them away from the rest of the world — spills around the sides of her face, her shoulders, like a veil that cascades all the way down to his chest. He catches the edge of her hair, presses his mouth to it. She can feel her heart stutter.
“Don’t I,” says Albedo, smiling up at her.
She says, lightly — her voice as lofty as the wind — “Of course you do.”
not too much to say on this one. i will admit that albedo is — by far — my favorite character in genshin impact, and up there on my all-time favorite characters ever; that being said, my interest in writing fic about him is pretty much at nil outside of almona, and even then, when it comes to my absolute favorites, i tend to prefer reading about them instead of having to write them myself. that being said, i surprisingly enjoyed writing this one(??) even though i don’t usually write sex because it does pretty much nothing for me and also (mostly for this reason), i’m very bad at it. i'm actually really unsatisfied with where this piece went, but it's one of the few pieces i've actually finished, so maybe it's a w ???
the worst part was probably keeping track of where their respective body parts were at any given moment. i also generally see albedo as a doll (sexless) because he’s quite literally made out of chalk, so figuring out his genitalia was pushed aside, which is why you won’t see any direct references towards it. in the original document, i actually highlighted a section with the fic with the comment [why is albedo’s dick never mentioned]
there is some context for the fic where they’ve been dating/courting each other for a while now, though not in really a strictly defined sense that makes sense to anyone but the two of them [primarily because i think they still refer to each other by mister albedo and miss mona on occasion, and also albedo’s relationships tend to toe the line of what others would consider strictly platonic].
this is her divination subtly likened to alchemy [transmutation]. the fact that the “journey” matters and we have to find “meaning” despite already knowing the preordained result is an exercise of citrinitas, where as per albedo: “citrinitas is the final stage of the alchemical transmutation process. the meaning of the object being transmuted has finally been brought to light, becoming gold and revealing its true value…”
similarly: she checks for his pulse even though she knows it’s silent, which can be seen as her sort of double-checking the result of something even though she knows it’s fate/how it’s supposed to be, but is meant here to demonstrate how she’s trying to divine “how the heart stutters” — to peel away the layers of the completed “result” (albedo) and undress it as a form of intimacy; they are both scholars, and that’s not something that they can just take on and take off, but that act/reveal/divination is something inaccessible to her as an astrologist; like she said, she can’t figure out why the heart beats. but she’s still trying to figure it out as mona.
+ her finger digging into his skin there is a sort of penetration. she wants to get inside of him; he wants her in him. the unknowable to him isn’t alchemy, “magic”, or academic knowledge; it’s his heart, the quality of being “human”, and the thing that mona can identify though he cannot by nature. (to clarify, he is not directly designed to recognize these things; it’s not that he’s incapable of it.)
he’s not correcting her to say she’s “almost” right about him wanting her. she’s right; he does want her. the correction is that she expects him to want her -> she’s divined/discerned he wants her -> she’s never wrong about fate -> he does want her, a certainty that needs no assertion, which is mirrored in his later response (“i know if i want you, i must exist to want you”). this is meant to symbolize how their two fields of study (where albedo has been “refined” into needing only the essentials to his existence through alchemy, so if he wants/loves/needs mona, it’s because that want/love/need is essential to his existence, and where mona knows/divines/is certain that albedo wants her, it’s because it’s been pre-ordained, where they’re “fated”) both lead to the same conclusion. the conclusion is almona.
the most agonizing thing to me writing this was debating whether albedo was too much of a gentleman to take her cup from her or not. i think he would here, but there are unsaid details from the scene (omitted because it wouldn’t be in-character for mona to admit them herself); i think it was apparent here that mona was flustered, had no intention of finishing her tea, and said such because of that. and he actually did not proposition her here [explicitly], LOL, though it is definitely implied [by the way he’s looking at her].
he doesn’t kiss her immediately because he’s a little worried about it being kind of gross, but she touches his (wet) lip afterwards and then then he kisses her because he deduces she won’t mind.
no comments for this one. it just didn't fit.
> setting
this is not canonical to mona’s actual house and what it looks like… but also not non-canonical because we only get to see one room in it which is not the bedroom LOL so maybe it could be canon compliant, which is why i tagged it as that. anyways, i doubt anyone reading it would even check unless they were neurotic like me.
> rship dynamix
"is albedo dominant to mona [???]" well no. i think that a lot of the things that he does here are pretty, like, they are definitely on the more dominant side of things as far as things go, but it’s their first time here and we know that mona is generally easily flustered/embarrassed based on canon content, whereas generally albedo stays at an even keel. there’s also a lot of check-ins consent-wise that aren’t very explicit because neither of them are characters that i consider to speak very explicitly [despite the very in-your-face, heavy-handed content of this fic] during the actual sex and foreplay, which you can try to discern if you feel like it. i think that their relationship is more openly led by mona, who albedo is enamored with, and he generally would be disinterested in pursuing any direction that she’s not interested with. moreso a service top?
> personal grievances
really hard to phrase albedo’s dialogue for me personally as well as mona’s; struggled more with mona’s, actually. i think i have a really bad way of wording things instinctively and that i default to a very awkward, formal, jarring type of speech that doesn’t flow well or bounce off of other dialogues when characters are interacting. but everything gets better with practice etc etc etc.
> anecdotal fun
me sending beloved mutual qns during this: if i demonstrate the existence of modern-style bras in mond will it break your immersion
why did i transition from using ( to [ ? i don’t know…
tags: albedo/mona, canon-compliant, oneshot, porn without plot/pwp, oral sex, vaginal sex, cunnilingus, established relationship, first time (between them), character study only if you're really generous about what a character study is, unbeta'd
status: 2334w, completed, ao3 link
summary:
She’d only been explaining her astral charts to him, and he’d been looking at her, and it wasn’t that he wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, but she could tell that he was paying attention to her — her, above what they were talking about. She’d stopped mid-sentence. Crossed her legs, tossed her head: said, I still haven’t finished my tea, and he’d reached over and taken her cup in hand, hooking the handle around his finger. She’d watched, stunned, as he swallowed it all.Mona and Albedo have sex.
And he’d looked at her, and said plainly, his voice softly, painfully amused: It’s finished.
syllogism
“I didn’t think you’d proposition me tonight,” says Mona, watching him shed the last of his clothing, set it to the side. She’s preening a little, she’ll admit — but it doesn’t seem to bother him. There’s a twist to his mouth that suggests that he’s smiling even with his face half-hidden in shadow as he stoops down to set his things on one of her low stools; she can see it in the light, now, as he draws closer.
Behind him in the corner of the room lies the abandoned research they’d been discussing. The astral charts he’d drawn her from his vantage point in Dragonspine sprawl over the face of the table next to the tea she’d poured them, the pot gone cool amidst matching gold-edged cups. The discarded shape of his black gloves lies folded in a little heap, the see-through edge of her hosiery tossed over the adjacent seat of one of her her tall-backed chairs; its shadow leads to the scarlet underbelly of her cloak from where it rests over the foot of her bed.
The bed bends under his weight as he sits next to her, slides his fingers up the slope of her arm: hooks them underneath the strap of her bra, slides it down over her shoulder. Mona shivers.
He presses a kiss to the side of her jaw; she loops her arms around his neck, draws him closer to her. His skin is cool. Her bra unhooks. He slips it on the post of her bed, pressing his cool fingers against the bare skin of her back, and her skin jumps in response. Heat prickles at her core.
“I thought you wanted me to,” he says, and gently pulls the rest of her hair loose. The ties fall to the side, falling somewhere on the ground. She’ll clean it up later.
Mona says, tart, “And you didn’t want to?”
“Didn’t I?” murmurs Albedo. He leans forward, brushing her hair back from over her shoulders from where it pools over her breasts with the back of his hand. His fingers knot in the dark roots of her hair, near her nape; he cradles her head gently, tilting her upwards to face him. He studies her.
The flickering candles in the room cast a pale light over Albedo’s face, his features painted gold; they suffuse him with warmth. His thumb is still against the side of her head. A slide of blond hair drops from behind his ear and slides against her cheek. It tickles.
“I’m not sure.”
She scowls at him. “Then why did you do it?”
“I thought you’d know.”
She does. She doesn’t. Both are the same: they’re scholars, not academics; students of knowledge that can’t be quantified, tied to a greater, wordless understanding — like the body knows how to breathe, how the living jolt into life. Mona can divine the direction of a ship, the obstacles it’ll face, the oncoming storm. She can’t divine why the heart stutters, though she can tell how long it has left to beat; her vision flattens the three-dimensional into a single layer, simplifying journey to result.
Her hand reaches upwards to touch his skin, searching for a pulse at his throat. It’s silent. Albedo pushes his head forward minutely, meeting her halfway. Her finger digs into his skin. Mona’s hand drops.
“Is it so hard to admit that you like me?” says Mona, tilting her chin up. She meets his gaze over the slope of her bottom lashes.
He smiles at her. “I do like you,” he says, “Miss Mona Megistus.”
“I know that,” she retorts. His hand curls around her waist, one sliding down to the back of her neck; he kisses her softly, gently, presses her back into the bed. Her hair presses flat against her pillow, the mark hidden in Albedo’s throat parallel with the slope of her body. Her mouth curves upwards. She says, “And you want me.”
“You expect me to want you,” he says. Corrects her — almost. Impossibly amused. “Like it’s fate.”
His fingers skim under her shoulderblades, sliding her dark hair out from behind her. She feels it fan out above her head in waves. Her gaze catches against his and holds it there. “That’s the one thing I’m never wrong about.”
His eyes settle against hers.
He murmurs, “I know.”
She thinks — hah! Triumph curls in her stomach with a flash of heat. She dips her fingers against the slope of his jaw, trails it over his throat again. The edge of her nail scrapes against the heart of his star. His whole body stutters. Mona’s self-evident triumph turns her voice velvet. “Tell me what else you know.”
“I know the eyes exist to see,” he says. He takes her hand in one of his and presses it against his cheek, where the edge of her nails grazes the edge of her lashes. Her pulse jumps; he kisses it there at the wrist, gaze fixed on her. “And I know the heart exists to beat.”
Her chest rises and falls. He holds his body above hers, perfectly still.
“Even components of a whole have their own destiny,” says Mona, curling her fingers over her palm. He laughs a little, inaudible; she feels it, wishes she could hear it too. She feels fingers slide against her shin to the tender skin behind her knee, smiles a little despite herself, shivers. They glide to the inner crease of her thigh. Stroke circles onto her hip, trace the line of separating her leg from the warmth between her legs.
“I know.”
“You know—?”
“I know if I want you,” he says, very softly, “I must exist to want you.”
His fingers interlace with hers. He leans over her, shadows her, and presses a kiss against the top of her ear, the side of her flushed cheek, the corner of her mouth, drops his mouth down the vulnerable flesh of her neck, the jut of her collarbone, the flat of her shoulder, the valley between her breasts, the skin that hovers above the bottom of her ribs. She gasps quietly. Her toes curl. Over her own body, she can make out the green of his eyes in pieces.
She’d thought about this before — what it’d be like, with him, but only ever idly. How he’d be during, how he’d look; how he’d approach it, because he couldn’t have done it before — he couldn’t have, could he? — which would make it a first, for him, which made it novel. Experimental. She’d wondered if he’d approach it like one of his trials, and phrase it like that, too; I’d like to study you. And she’d wondered if she’d give in, if she’d give him the time of the day. I’m not easy, Mister Albedo.
The thought had made her — she wasn’t sure. Turn red, certainly. But it wasn’t like this — hadn’t been like it was, earlier, compared to when she’d thought about it. She’d only been explaining her astral charts to him, and he’d been looking at her, and it wasn’t that he wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, but she could tell that he was paying attention to her — her, above what they were talking about. She’d stopped mid-sentence. Crossed her legs, tossed her head: said, I still haven’t finished my tea, and he’d reached over and taken her cup in hand, hooking the handle around his finger. She’d watched, stunned, as he swallowed it all.
And he’d looked at her, and said plainly, his voice softly, painfully amused: It’s finished.
No — she hadn’t thought about it like this: him under her, her under him, their bodies tethered through their singular points of contact that were only singular insofar as they felt singular — one-of-a-kind — like the eye of a ripple expanding outward. Like this, with his hands on her, with fingers longer and slender and a touch heavier than she’d thought it’d be, more sure; colder and warmer both at once, more solid dream than any imagining she could conjure. Like this, him open-mouthed and wet against her skin, with the oddest kind of body she’d ever touched: a glancing approximation of what it meant to be human, with all the intent and none of the flaws.
“And—” her breath catches. “Do you?”
“Mona,” he says, and kisses the inside of her thigh. His hands sweep to the space behind her knees; his eyes glitter, clear pools of water. Foci for divination, liquid beds of memory. She can make out the dark silhouette of herself in them, the broad strokes of how he sees her: her pale skin, now ruddy with flush, and the curtain of her hair. His canines gleam; his throat bobs as he swallows, his gaze fixed on her. He’s smiling. “You’re never wrong about fate.”
She stares at him, suddenly dizzy. And you want me. Albedo doesn’t breathe; he barely needs to eat. His body, crafted of the dust of the world — devoid of any impurity, any imperfection. All of his extraneous destinies have been removed, like salt purged from water; all of his extraneous desire, leaving only that which is not essential to life but existence. The pinnacle of fate: everything preordained by design. Everything he is, he needs.
He wants her. He needs her. Two facts alike one another, now made same.
Her weight shifts as he lifts her slightly, her hips separating from the sheets; Mona yelps, her fingers tightening into knots, and he settles her over his shoulders, the heft of her body borne by his own. His lashes, ordinarily gold, look translucent in the light. There’s nothing that separates her from the intensity of his gaze as he looks at her — watches her — drinks in the sight of her, and puts his mouth between her legs.
Her hips jerk on instinct. Albedo’s hand comes to press down on the side of her waist, stabilizing her, and doesn’t let go; it strokes little circles over the fat on the bone that reaches out there, the pale lines scoring her skin. She makes some kind of noise. She doesn’t know what it sounds like. What she knows is mostly heat — salt — the burn of air in her throat, as sudden as a summer apparation.
She can feel his tongue around — in — her, the way it moves slick between her folds; her body twists as she tries to move closer, move away, to meet the source of tension in her stomach, like a string about to snap. He doesn’t let her: his hands are still and sure on her, keeping her grounded. Her leg kicks out slightly, involuntarily, her thighs around his head; he drags her closer by the waist, hums. Pulls her upwards — sucks.
“Albedo,” she says, breathless. Her hand reaches blindly towards his and closes around his shoulder. “Let me…”
His hand goes to envelops hers, covering it loosely like an answer, and he does something with his mouth that makes her forget what she was saying. It can’t have been that important, she thinks wildly, even as she can feel herself grow impossibly wetter. Sweat beads the edge of her hairline, the paths of her palm. Her breath rattles in her chest.
She comes with a wordless cry. He brings her through it, licks at her come until it feels like she’s — wet? damp? one or the other, she can’t tell — with him instead of herself, the cool relief of his presence made stark against her overheated core.
“Kiss me,” demands Mona, pressing at the back of his neck with her ankle, and he lifts himself up in answer, delivers his body to her. His mouth is wet, glistening under the light, and she can’t stop staring at it, the way his face is smeared with translucent liquid. She touches it, half-transfixed, and he leans into her touch, turns it so she’s cradling the clean expanse of his skin.
Her thumb drops to his bottom lip. The weight of it pulls it downward, revealing a sliver of pink flesh underneath.
“Miss Mona,” he says, very low, and kisses her.
It’s salty — a little sour. She’s sitting on his lap now, all too-aware of the transferred heat from her body to his, the way he feels warm now instead of cold. It doesn’t bother her. She wraps her fingers around the back of his neck as his trace over the hidden curve of her spine. He tastes like her, mostly — her and the floral edge of the tea they’d had earlier, hers taken with one more sugar than his.
He tries to pull away. She kisses him again, rakes her fingers over his back to make him stay. His body goes slack against hers, like a puppet with its strings cut; his body doesn’t move, but she can feel every pulse that runs through him in a mirror of her own satisfaction, the lax, heady pull of her muscles.
“I don’t bleed,” he says into her mouth, their voices close enough to blend.
“I know,” says Mona, a little of her usual haughtiness seeping in, and pushes down on his shoulders. He goes with her, looking faintly bemused — at her. He’s always looking at her. She straddles him, examining the way that he looks in front of her: suffused with borrowed color, his hair loose. His mouth is slightly open. He looks at her like she holds the truth of the world in her bones. When she sees him, she thinks she might.
“Do you want me?” she says, peering down at him. Her hair curtains them away from the rest of the world — spills around the sides of her face, her shoulders, like a veil that cascades all the way down to his chest. He catches the edge of her hair, presses his mouth to it. She can feel her heart stutter.
“Don’t I,” says Albedo, smiling up at her.
She says, lightly — her voice as lofty as the wind — “Of course you do.”
author's notes
not too much to say on this one. i will admit that albedo is — by far — my favorite character in genshin impact, and up there on my all-time favorite characters ever; that being said, my interest in writing fic about him is pretty much at nil outside of almona, and even then, when it comes to my absolute favorites, i tend to prefer reading about them instead of having to write them myself. that being said, i surprisingly enjoyed writing this one(??) even though i don’t usually write sex because it does pretty much nothing for me and also (mostly for this reason), i’m very bad at it. i'm actually really unsatisfied with where this piece went, but it's one of the few pieces i've actually finished, so maybe it's a w ???
the worst part was probably keeping track of where their respective body parts were at any given moment. i also generally see albedo as a doll (sexless) because he’s quite literally made out of chalk, so figuring out his genitalia was pushed aside, which is why you won’t see any direct references towards it. in the original document, i actually highlighted a section with the fic with the comment [why is albedo’s dick never mentioned]
there is some context for the fic where they’ve been dating/courting each other for a while now, though not in really a strictly defined sense that makes sense to anyone but the two of them [primarily because i think they still refer to each other by mister albedo and miss mona on occasion, and also albedo’s relationships tend to toe the line of what others would consider strictly platonic].
She can’t divine why the heart stutters, though she can tell how long it has left to beat; her vision flattens the three-dimensional into a single layer, simplifying journey to result.
this is her divination subtly likened to alchemy [transmutation]. the fact that the “journey” matters and we have to find “meaning” despite already knowing the preordained result is an exercise of citrinitas, where as per albedo: “citrinitas is the final stage of the alchemical transmutation process. the meaning of the object being transmuted has finally been brought to light, becoming gold and revealing its true value…”
She can’t divine why the heart stutters, though she can tell how long it has left to beat; her vision flattens the three-dimensional into a single layer, simplifying journey to result.
Her hand reaches upwards to touch his skin, searching for a pulse at his throat. It’s silent. Albedo pushes his head forward minutely, meeting her halfway. Her finger digs into his skin.
similarly: she checks for his pulse even though she knows it’s silent, which can be seen as her sort of double-checking the result of something even though she knows it’s fate/how it’s supposed to be, but is meant here to demonstrate how she’s trying to divine “how the heart stutters” — to peel away the layers of the completed “result” (albedo) and undress it as a form of intimacy; they are both scholars, and that’s not something that they can just take on and take off, but that act/reveal/divination is something inaccessible to her as an astrologist; like she said, she can’t figure out why the heart beats. but she’s still trying to figure it out as mona.
+ her finger digging into his skin there is a sort of penetration. she wants to get inside of him; he wants her in him. the unknowable to him isn’t alchemy, “magic”, or academic knowledge; it’s his heart, the quality of being “human”, and the thing that mona can identify though he cannot by nature. (to clarify, he is not directly designed to recognize these things; it’s not that he’s incapable of it.)
”You expect me to want you,” he says. Corrects her — almost.
he’s not correcting her to say she’s “almost” right about him wanting her. she’s right; he does want her. the correction is that she expects him to want her -> she’s divined/discerned he wants her -> she’s never wrong about fate -> he does want her, a certainty that needs no assertion, which is mirrored in his later response (“i know if i want you, i must exist to want you”). this is meant to symbolize how their two fields of study (where albedo has been “refined” into needing only the essentials to his existence through alchemy, so if he wants/loves/needs mona, it’s because that want/love/need is essential to his existence, and where mona knows/divines/is certain that albedo wants her, it’s because it’s been pre-ordained, where they’re “fated”) both lead to the same conclusion. the conclusion is almona.
She’d only been explaining her astral charts to him, and he’d been looking at her, and it wasn’t that he wasn’t paying attention to what she was saying, but she could tell that he was paying attention to her — her, above what they were talking about. She’d stopped mid-sentence. Crossed her legs, tossed her head: said, I still haven’t finished my tea, and he’d reached over and taken her cup in hand, hooking the handle around his finger. She’d watched, stunned, as he swallowed it all.
And he’d looked at her, and said plainly, his voice softly, painfully amused: It’s finished.
the most agonizing thing to me writing this was debating whether albedo was too much of a gentleman to take her cup from her or not. i think he would here, but there are unsaid details from the scene (omitted because it wouldn’t be in-character for mona to admit them herself); i think it was apparent here that mona was flustered, had no intention of finishing her tea, and said such because of that. and he actually did not proposition her here [explicitly], LOL, though it is definitely implied [by the way he’s looking at her].
She touches it, half-transfixed, and he leans into her touch, turns it so she’s cradling the clean expanse of his skin.
he doesn’t kiss her immediately because he’s a little worried about it being kind of gross, but she touches his (wet) lip afterwards and then then he kisses her because he deduces she won’t mind.
bonus! deleted scene
“Miss Mona," he says, subtly arch, an echo of how she normally says his name. She scowls, or tries to; this time, she can hear his answering laugh. He says, "It’s alright. Allow me."
"Hm," she says, trying for imperious. She peers down at him through her lashes. "I’ll think about it. Shouldn’t you convince me?"
"Mona," says Albedo, very soft. "I want to touch you. May I?”
"Can you?"
no comments for this one. it just didn't fit.
miscellaneous
> setting
this is not canonical to mona’s actual house and what it looks like… but also not non-canonical because we only get to see one room in it which is not the bedroom LOL so maybe it could be canon compliant, which is why i tagged it as that. anyways, i doubt anyone reading it would even check unless they were neurotic like me.
> rship dynamix
"is albedo dominant to mona [???]" well no. i think that a lot of the things that he does here are pretty, like, they are definitely on the more dominant side of things as far as things go, but it’s their first time here and we know that mona is generally easily flustered/embarrassed based on canon content, whereas generally albedo stays at an even keel. there’s also a lot of check-ins consent-wise that aren’t very explicit because neither of them are characters that i consider to speak very explicitly [despite the very in-your-face, heavy-handed content of this fic] during the actual sex and foreplay, which you can try to discern if you feel like it. i think that their relationship is more openly led by mona, who albedo is enamored with, and he generally would be disinterested in pursuing any direction that she’s not interested with. moreso a service top?
> personal grievances
really hard to phrase albedo’s dialogue for me personally as well as mona’s; struggled more with mona’s, actually. i think i have a really bad way of wording things instinctively and that i default to a very awkward, formal, jarring type of speech that doesn’t flow well or bounce off of other dialogues when characters are interacting. but everything gets better with practice etc etc etc.
> anecdotal fun
me sending beloved mutual qns during this: if i demonstrate the existence of modern-style bras in mond will it break your immersion
extremely miscellaneous
why did i transition from using ( to [ ? i don’t know…
