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The sun is high when Mona blinks into the waking world. She can feel her hair splayed across the pillow in wild, curling drives, yet her sheets are entirely unrumpled. It’s a curious sight, to be sure— she could have imagined she was having the most animated dream last night, though the details are escaping her with each ray that dapples across her face. With little else to do, the astrologist heaves out of bed.
That’s when she smells the sizzling.
Mona trudges as gracefully out into the living room as she can, wrapped tightly in her blanket as if she were some butterfly in a cocoon. It wouldn’t do to indulge the visual of such a thing— she just wanted to bring her bed with her, the lazy woman. He could certainly attest to such a truth.
Kunikuzushi is standing at her stove, and infuriatingly, he’s a vision. He’s dressed down from his usual garb, but the cinch of the apron around his hips leaves little to the imagination. Her eyes could trace over everything of him and see it more fit a meal than whatever he was preparing— the curve of his shoulders, the ripple of muscle in his arm, the technique that accompanied every flick of his wrist—
Mona curses herself for allowing her mind to wander like that. For all their time together, they’ve never been… intimate, in the sense of the word, and the mere thought of it has the heat rising to her cheeks like she’s some flouncy little maiden. Anyone would be, she reasons, for someone like Kunikuzushi. At least until he decides to open his mouth.
“So, the spoiled princess finally decides to join me in the land of the living. Good afternoon.”
Her gaze flits to a nearby clock mounted on the wall and scowls. “It’s ten to noon.”
“Same difference.”
Mona groans and shuffles closer, muffling obscenities into his neck as she leans in behind him. The wicked scheme to hinder Kunikuzushi is short-lived, as the pull of her arms around his middle only seems to make him work faster. How despicable.
He somehow manages to wrangle her into a chair between spicing and seasoning, setting a plate in front of her and flashing that Archons-forsaken little grin of triumph he does. The smell wafting up from beneath her makes her realize this smugness is earned, which is even more infuriating than the rise of her rumbling stomach to meet it.
”You,” she accuses between heavenly mouthfuls of rich eggs and chewy bacon, “went to the market without me.”
Kunikuzushi sits beside her, nothing before him but a mug of something fragrant. He doesn’t eat with her that often, which makes her frown. “You were asleep all morning. What else was I supposed to do?”
Mona can concede that her sloth had gotten the best of her today. Astrology was a discipline that demanded many late nights from her, so stealing her from the morning was certainly a sore point to remedy. She’ll just have to make it up to Kunikuzushi by allowing him to steal her as well.
By the time she’s drained the coffee he’s brewed and dresses herself, he looks just as ready to face the day (…or what’s left of it, he prods, and she elbows him in the rib). She takes his hat off of the rack and fixes it atop his head. The tassels jingle as he ducks away, hiding his cheeks, which always brings a small giggle forth to accompany the sound of their bells.
”Ah, Miss Megistus! You predicted the shipment order that just came in, hmm?”
Mona rolls her eyes and forces a laugh. Marjorie was feeling especially funny today, it seemed— though the quality of her stocks were greater than those of her jokes, which kept the astrologist as a loyal patron. Today, they have a tasteful arrangement of plushies on the counter— small, fat things with large, fluffy tails. She almost wants to squish one, but stays focused. “Of course I predicted the order. You placed it for me, didn’t you?”
She makes a reach for her wallet, and the manager tuts, pushing a few boxes over the counter. “Then you should also know that it’s already been covered.”
Kunikuzushi always hesitates slightly when she makes a grab for his hand. Mona notices it every time, but never thinks to comment on it. “Kuni, I told you—”
He sidesteps her easily, makes a grab for the boxes and saunters off. Mona gives a sheepish nod to Marjorie before furiously totting after him.
“I’ve told you countless times not to spend your Mora so flippantly!”
”Oh, but you can? Don’t be such a hypocrite, dear.”
”A hypocrite—!” She scoffs at the audacity. She, a seeker of worldly truths, a paragon of centennial genius, a hypocrite! With a wave of her hand, the boxes are swallowed up in a hydro vortex, leaving their view of each other unobstructed. The instruments themselves would be manifested neatly on her desk, where she’d giddily unwrap them later, but she won’t let him watch. She doesn’t want to incentivize this behaviour with a positive reaction.
“Commissions from the Adventurer’s Guild only make you so much. I should know, because I’ve been taking them for longer than you.” Mona looks to him with an imploring concern. She takes his hands in hers, softening her eyes in the way she’s learned he can’t resist. “I can take responsibility for my own research materials, Kuni. I appreciate the sentiment very much, but I refuse to put you out.”
Kunikuzushi and Mona first met on a commission, as it happened. The Adventurer’s Guild assigned them both to the same investigation by accident, but there was no disagreement on who the ‘accident’ was between them— an astrologist was far better suited to investigate a fallen asteroid, but to have company while she did it was something new. Everything after that just seemed to… fall into place. It was the most pointed example of fate, even if he’d mock her endlessly for it.
That mocking expression she’s expecting to see on his face melts at the edges, slightly, when beholden to her expression. She has this poor man wrapped around her finger, but alas, it couldn’t be helped if he was so stubborn. It was for his own good.
“You’re exhausting, woman. Since when have you disliked being pampered?”
“That’s besides the point,” she huffs, striding ahead of him, “but you’re going to at least let me return the favour.”
This is how she finds herself sitting across from Kunikuzushi at Good Hunter for lunch. She orders a salad, and he orders one as well, if only because she’s so ‘stubbornly insistent.’ He barely touches what’s in front of him in favour of staring at her while she chews, which is making this effort to do something kind exceedingly difficult. This was just Kunikuzushi’s flavour of eccentricity, she supposed. It was something she’d gotten used to, along with this little back-and-forth routine of theirs… and while she saw the value in the domesticity she shares with him, she often found herself pondering on if a genius would settle for less—
There’s a clinking sound that interrupts whatever Kunikuzushi had been saying to her. If he was talking at all, that is... she heard no sound, yet his mouth was moving, so it had to have been so. There’s just something… sinking in her ears, a sort of deafness she’s at a loss to articulate. Sara settles a pair of glasses in front of them and a tall bottle of wine, and the familiar label brings her partially out of the haze. His voice comes just as suddenly, and the jolt of it almost sends Mona reeling.
”We didn’t order this.”
Cutting. His voice is so, so cutting, she has to check whether the raw parts of her skin are bleeding or not. Sara doesn’t seem to share in the recoil, nodding cheerily.
“Oh, think nothing of it. When they heard Miss Mona was sitting down for lunch instead of simply ordering out, the chefs insisted on sending this out. On the house, of course— as thanks for your helpful predictions with the kitchenware.”
Ah, Mona remembered that well— her intuition had sparked once when picking up her food, words of caution urgently spilling over regarding the safety of their appliances. Word of mouth told her that, had she not interfered, the kitchen might’ve engulfed itself in flame days later. It was a mark of pride, to her, that the people of Mondstadt would trust astrology (and her, she supposed) enough to take these such warnings seriously. Being rewarded for it was another boon entirely, and while one of her pursuits would deny material indulgence, it certainly didn’t hurt every once in a while.
“Please thank them for me, Sara,” she gushes, looking it over eagerly, “would I be mistaken, or was this bottled in Dornman Port?”
Sara nods, and across the table, Mona notices Kunikuzushi’s fingers curl into his palms. “…It’s early to drink. Perhaps we’ll bring it home with us.”
There’s a rationality to his words she agrees with. Mona was hardly as excited by alcohol as a good Mondstadter should be, but her visits to the tavern were always punctuated by an evening gracefulness and all the mystique that came from swirling a goblet of house red. It made her feel dazzlingly mature, as any lady of the night as she ought to feel.
Mona orders a to-go box for Kunikuzushi’s salad and fights a hefty tip into Sara’s apron pocket (she insisted the meals also be on the house) before looping arms with her partner and happily trotting home. There’s a pep to her step that, otherwise inert, seems to infect him with a small smile to light up whatever gravity is plagueing him.
After she magics the food into the fridge and fumbles for her keys, she opens the door. There’s only a brief moment where she hangs up her hat before she’s whirled around all at once and pressed into its frame.
“Mona…”
It starts small. A small little rasping from a throat that hadn’t sounded so sore, today, until he remembers how to raise his voice.
“Mona, Mona, Mona.” His mouth is moving and she can trace every syllable, just as Kunikuzushi traces her hip and her waist and the dig of her shoulders against his palm. “I let it happen. I keep letting it happen. They keep finding ways to…”
His fingers tighten. There’s the right amount and too many all at once. Two hands become four and small becomes large and flesh becomes metal and they’re everywhere. Crawling and digging in her like maggots to flesh, squirming violently with every strain in his throat.
“You will not leave. You will not try. You will not.”
They’re in her mouth they’re pressing down on her tongue and she’s choking around them instead of speaking. Her curtains are wires and his eyes are the Abyss and the scrape of them on her teeth and the curl of them in her hair and the squelch of them in her ass and her cunt is new and horrible and divine and everywhere and she will not she will not she will not try she will not she will N̶O̵T̸ s̵̢͝ḥ̷̈́e̵͙͂ w̶͕̥͆͐į̸͆ļ̴͕̈ļ̷̗͠ ̷̥̗͂N̶̆͜Ô̶̢͕
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈.-. . -... --- --- - ┈┈┈
Mona blinks. The sky is littered with dozens of gleaming stars, spanning far beyond the horizon she can see but converging perfectly overhead where they sit. They don’t seem to… move, oddly enough. But she can’t recall the last time they did in any meaningful way. There’s a star chart in front of her and a pot of ink that she suspects she’s stained her fingers with more than the actual parchment.
Kunikuzushi looks up from the depths of his wineglass as he swirls it, capturing her gaze and smirking in such a way that has her heart leaping.
Oh, this man…
“Don’t drink it all on me,” she complains, shuffling the chart aside to reach for her own half-empty glass, “It’s not often I get a little piece of home in a bottle like this.”
He hums, moving to top her up. The wine is as floral as a freshly-watered rose, and coloured as deeply as one too. This, and him, under the stars… ah, it was just so sublime.
His hand finds hers, locking their fingers together. “You spaced out again. You were telling me about meteors?”
Right. She was, wasn’t she? Mona launches into a long-winded theory she’s drafting, drawing upon patterns in the sky and their own little misadventure from so long ago.
“They could be pieces of constellations… or, they could be coming from beyond the false sky.”
”The false sky…” His eyes are swimming in the way they do when he’s curious. She’s not sure if he realizes how he looks, but it’s adorable. “What do you suppose is beyond there?”
Genuine inquiries from him seem to be few and far between, lately, so she gives the query an especially deep consideration. The constellations of Teyvat were projected by the false sky, and fate was divined through reflecting them in a surface of pure water. If she were to reflect the true shape of fate through the same medium… “I’m not sure what sort of reality we’d come to see. Something unfathomable, I suppose.”
”Then I suppose it’s a good thing we’re down here, huh?”
Down here. Down here, in Mondstadt… the people are good to her. Her art is respected, she can research as often as she wishes, and she has a lover at her side to do it with. She shouldn’t find it as boring as she does— boredom was a blessing, and so was every day she got to spend with Kunikuzushi. He was someone she could fetch the same deliveries with, eat the same foods with, dᵣᵢₙₖ ₜₕₑ ₛₐₘₑ wᵢₙₑ…
…Wait, what?
Kunikuzushi’s eyes crinkle. He’s closer than she remembered him being, a moment prior, and his cheeks are dusted pink. “Mm.” He reaches up to brush her own face, and it’s only with the coolness of his touch that she realizes how hot it is. “Have you perhaps had too much to drink, Megistus?”
She scoffs lightly, but the edges of his face begin to blur as soon as he says it. His fingers curl up and down the length of her jaw, eliciting a shudder. “S-speak for yourself. You’ve got more colour than I do…”
“Do I?” He draws closer. From how she’s seated, it’s almost more like a slide— something fluid and slithering like a serpent. Something in her expects fangs and venom when he opens his mouth, but all she gets is his words. “I’m not sure if I do. I might need you to look closer.”
She does. She moves closer, he moves back, and suddenly she’s straddling him and the stars shine on, forgotten. His mouth opens like a blooming rose and she lowers her head to pluck it.
This was not their first kiss— their first was on her couch, and she was clutching a pillow between them in nervous anticipation— but it was by far their most rhythmic. She crashed against him like the tide, and he chased her with a fervency that would’ve made her unto the moon. Stainless and pure and glowing with a thousand empty nothings, it felt like bursting. Mona has never known such joy, and she never wants to leave the firm embrace he has her in.
Kunikuzushi leans back from the kiss, the webs of spittle between them arcing the distance. She protests the distance where he only seems amused.
“You’re so perfect like this,” he muses, fingers dancing across her scalp, “so perfect for me. I want to keep you like this forever. So pliant and sweet and needy.”
Needy? Was she being needy? It didn’t feel like a bad thing. Everything he just said which would otherwise spark ire felt like a good thing. She wanted to be a good thing for him. Mona wanted more.
Her clumsy, heavy fingers find the neck of the bottle. He watches with rapt intrigue as she lifts it and puffs breath over the rim before tipping it back past her lips. The sweetness is cloying, but she holds it in her mouth until her ballooning lips are pressed back against his. He opens his mouth and she releases, a bubbling swirl of Mond’s finest wine filling the space between the words on their tongues.
When she pulls away again, she can feel the red stain muzzling around her mouth. It prickles with a heightened excitement, and against him, it… dribbles, as if he’s ripped someone’s heart out with his teeth. The red on his lips rims the same as the red framing his eyes, and something in this haze of him… shifts.
“Kuni…” she mumbles, but then her gaze sharpens, slightly. She holds his face, as if struggling to recall some secret between them.
“S̸—S̸c̶a̴r̶a̵?̶”̴
Kunikuzushi’s eyes go wide and everything goes dark.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈.-. . -... --- --- - ┈┈┈
Mona wakes up in bed with a wicked headache.
She groans, fighting against the sheets as if they’re more constraining than the arms wrapped around her torso. Surely she hadn’t drunk too much last night… had she always been such a lightweight? She hardly even remembered how the night ended, so perhaps… they’d both gone a bit too far with the drinking. The thought of him carrying her all the way back had her heart prickling with guilt.
…And something else. The ache in her head doesn’t allow her to dwell on it. She’d make this up to him, too.
Slipping into her torrent to escape his grip, Mona wrangles her half-asleep legs into her bodysuit and grabs her hat from where it’s been neatly settled on the rack, casting a backwards glance at the domestic scene she’s leaving behind. If anything, she’s recreating what he did for her the previous day. He’s been so good to her lately, and she’s desperate for something fresh. Something new.
Mona hits the town with a renewed purpose. She greets passersby and offers some of her purchase of fish to her beloved stray cats, waltzing around the marketplace as a dancer might in a ballroom. The sky was just as bright and the vendors were just as friendly as they always were, and it would’ve been enough to just gather her groceries and scurry home— if home did not require her to pass With Wind Comes Glory.
Marjorie still has those fluffy plushies with the fat tails on display, and Mona can’t stop herself from smiling down at them. There’s something so charmingly familiar about their creamy fur and button eyes, but front and center has to be a new one. It has much more detailing on its fur in comparison to the others, and atop its little head is the most adorable little blue beret. Must be a Fontainian variety.
“Marjorie, I simply must know what these little things are called. I feel quite taken with them.”
She turns at the sound of her voice, smiling pleasantly. “Oh yes, they’ve been popular with the children for a long while now. They’re called dodoco, but the one you’ve got your eyes on there is Bₐᵣbₑₗₒₜₕ.”
The wind seems to warble around the word. She hadn’t heard her properly “S…say that again?”
Marjorie gives her an odd look. “…B̸̫̒a̴͖͂r̶̤̊b̷͉́ẹ̴͝l̸͈̈o̶͙̚t̴͖̃h̵̤͋?̸̥͐”
It’s even more of a garbled nothing to her than before, and something in Mona goes blank. She doesn’t know this word, but Marjorie is looking at her as if she doesn’t understand something simple.
Mona looks at the little… thing. The dodoco almost seems to gaze back, and there’s something so raw and cutting in it that she can’t rationalize. She just stares, and stares, and stares—
“They’re uh… from Dornman Port, I think. Or the… special dodoco is, anyway.”
She blinks. Had Marjorie been saying ‘special dodoco’ that whole time? It certainly didn’t sound like it. It sounded like… well, she didn’t know what it sounded like. Probably nothing good.
“…How much?”
Mona turns back on her way home, the little thing tucked in her pocket, not keen to dwell on the prickle of unease the weight of it inspires. If her fingers shake around the doorknob as her mind does over that indecipherable warble of words, she doesn’t dwell on that either.
Kunikuzushi isn’t in bed when she returns, but there’s a mug with her favourite tea on the kitchen table. It’s still steaming, so it hasn’t been left there for long. She pouts.
“It was my turn to make breakfast today.”
”Says who?”
She scowls, stalking into the kitchen and dropping the bag of groceries onto the counter. His back is to her, as usual, and the ripple of his muscle around her arms is a familiar comfort. He says something, but it hits her ears as a muted sort of rumbling sensation instead.
“Stop complaining,” he says a bit clearer, “I was under the impression that you enjoyed my cooking. Are you trying to hurt my feelings, Megistus?”
Mona growls, but the sound of it must be more like a yipping puppy than anything substantially intimidating. She tightens her constricting grip on him, mumbling. “Yes. I didn’t go out and buy all of this just to have you dote on me instead.”
She nudges her chin on his shoulder and peers down into the pan. There’s a pair of eggs sizzling within, with yolks as round as the moon and golden as the sun. He cooks her eggs like these often, if not every day— and every day, they’re perfect. They’re always this perfect, just like everything around them is all the time, and its…
Too perfect, perhaps. Mona is especially aware of the weight in her pocket, now. The dodo-thing was the only spark of dread amidst this cycle of comfort, which was more than enough cause to throw it away, much less fork over her coin for it and hide it from Kunikuzushi like some unspeakable secret. And yet, it was in the nature of an astrologist to seek after uncomfortable truths. Perhaps she was even looking for trouble, now, in these stationary times.
They eat together (she eats, he peers at her over his mug of tea) and Mona insists on making dinner tonight. He relents, if only because he’s taking on a longer commission today.
“Somebody has to pay the installments on your astrolabe,” he snickers on his way out the door, and Mona subsequently shoves him out by the back of his hat (but not without a sharp peck on the cheek).
The door clicks shut and Mona takes a breath. The special dodoco remains in her pocket, but there’s still something she needs to check.
She was meaning to go out to the library today anyhow, so it’s really a minute thing. Any self-respecting astrologist was always punctual when returning borrowed books, but her intuition had been especially twinging at the thought of it today, and now it was at the forefront of her mind. She can practically feel her pocket garbling as she pushes open the doors, allowing her books to slide neatly into the “return” slot before turning her attention back to it.
“Now, you listen here,” she whispers sharply, fumbling around for it, “I don’t know what a “B̸̫̒a̴͖͂r̶̤̊b̷͉́ẹ̴͝l̸͈̈o̶͙̚t̴͖̃h̵̤͋” is, but I’m going to uncover the truth if it kills—”
Mona almost drops it before she realizes what’s happened. The dodoco… changed colours, but not merely that— its shape was different, too, and its hat was completely gone. What was once a mature blue was now a deep purple, embroidered with black lace and striking green button eyes.
”…What.”
”Miss Astrologist!” A young lady totes over to her— Miss Ella Musk, if she remembers the library’s resident linguist well enough— and peers over at the dodoco curiously. “Is that a ᶠⁱsᶜʰˡ?”
…Who?
”…Yes,” she mutters, familiar with the pattern by now, “It’s a… special dodoco.”
Ella nods in appreciation, retreating back to her hillichurl encyclopedia. Mona feels like she’s been sent back to square one, now— had she said ‘fish oil?’ The garbling was hard to make out, but it couldn’t have been that… oh, F̷̺̀i̷̲͆s̸̲̃c̴̛͈h̶̗͋l̷̝̄, perhaps? (Mona winces. Why did that hurt her head?) As in ‘Flowers for Princess…’ she didn’t need to think of the name again. She was in a library, after all— with the series popularity, it was no question that there’d be a copy of it here. The little thing must have been giving her a clue! What clever garbling, this time around.
Mona scours the shelves and fishes out the violet cover of the first volume with laser precision, flipping it open with the eager anticipation a preteen might have with this sort of story.
Now, Mona has never read this book properly before, so she hadn’t really known what to expect upon opening it. Perhaps some gaudy exposition, melodrama or some sort of monologue— but the opening line is the only line.
“…The dream lives on.”
Everything beneath it is blank. She turns the page, and it’s blank too. Everything is blank, for the rest of the first volume to the second to the third and so on.
“What a waste of paper,” she murmurs to the dodoco, but that familiar unease is starting to gnaw at her again. The dream lives on. What was even the implication?
Mona shoves the thing back in her pocket and files a comment at the front desk before hurrying home, because it’s starting to get dark and she hasn’t even started on dinner yet. She’s able to cobble together something good enough, in her haste— nothing can beat a good Satisfying Salad after a long day, and since it’s so quick to prepare, she finds herself moving on auto-pilot.
“…Ah.”
There’s something in front of her she hasn’t made in a while. She hadn’t even realized she was making it until she could smell the telltale wisps of cinnamon butter and spiced apple from behind the oven door.
Mona used to eat Apple Roly-Poly when she was young, she thinks. They were the perfect sweet treat after an evening of stargazing, and the soft, crispy richness of it was more than enough to leave her yawning. It was bizarre that she hadn’t thought of them in so long, just now to recall them so vividly— who had she even learned this recipe from? Her mother, maybe, but why was the notion of it so…
Mona thinks about the wine and the dodocos and Dornman Port. Perhaps she was overdue for a visit home.
Posing this idea to Kunikuzushi at dinner doesn’t go over as well as she imagined.
“Why would you want to go all that way? We have everything we need right here.”
“It’s not a matter of necessity,” she frowns, thumbing at the edge of her plate, “it’s just been a while since I’ve visited. It’d also be a good chance for me to show you where I grew up.”
Something hardens in his gaze. He stabs at an apple slice like it personally offended him. “And where would you be getting the funds for this?”
“I keep a reserve for travel expenses. You know that.”
He does, and perhaps that’s why he’s so visibly agitated. Once Mona sets her mind on something, it would come to pass no matter what. She was a force that couldn’t be easily contended with— a manifestation of fate in her own right. The futility of dissuading her couldn't have been lost on him.
“…How can you be sure,” he asks slowly, “that it’s a good idea? To leave here, and go there?”
Don’t we have a good life? Haven’t I given you a good life?— is what her intuition whispers to her. Archons, it’s like he thinks she won’t be coming back! Such unnecessary melodrama.
“Kuni,” she croons in that assuring tone of hers, “it’s something new, isn’t it? New can be exciting… especially since our routine has grown a bit stagnant.”
His brows furrow and Mona’s heart leaps a small bit. Was that too harsh a word? Something about all of this felt harsh— as if some oppressive smog had descended to cloud the air between them. She can’t see through it, or him as easily, and something welling within her at this distance between them is suffocating and nauseating and she wants to reach for him before—
“Do what you like.”
It’s gone in an instant and Mona exhales a heavy breath. Her hands are shaking. His aren’t, and they reach to wrap around the stem of his glass of wine. His smile is tight. “…Cheers, then. To another long journey.”
“…Another?”
He shakes his head as one might shake off a mistake, or a simple slip of the tongue. He smiles again, and it's more himself, this time— she trusts this smile, and she trusts the man it’s attached to. Mona raises her glass, clinking them together in some harmonious chime.
When his ankle finds hers under the table, she smiles too. She smiles as they wash up, dress down and slide against each other into bed, if only to confirm everything she knows to be true Everything will be okay.
Mon wakes up in the middle of the night. The dodoco is staring holes into her from across the room, neatly settled atop her travelling bag, and she certainly did not leave it there. Strangely, she’s not surprised to see it.
You need to leave.
…Ah. It speaks, now. This is slightly more surprising, but mostly because it shares a tone that she can only compare to her insight. This surely makes it trustworthy, but with that piercing blue gaze… she’s not so certain.
”Why?”
Because he’s sleeping. He only sleeps like this before you leave.
Now, that was absurd. Kunikuzushi slept every night. This dodoco didn’t know what it was talking about, and that it would presume to know something of him she didn't was especially grating. Kunikuzushi was here, arms around her torso and his face in her neck and the dodoco was so, so distant. She couldn’t even tell what features it morphed into, this time, aside from its eyes. There was something in them that made her feel so forlorn, that almost compelled her up and out of bed, but the distance discourages her all the same.
You never listen to me, either.
Mona doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t move.
…I’m sorry I couldn’t be a better friend to you, Mona.
When she wakes up, her bag is untouched and the dodoco is nowhere to be seen. Nothing can hide from the exacting rays of sun shining in through the window, so perhaps the wisps of what she can recall were just some vivid dream. She knows better, but something in her lurches at some unspeakable loss.
Kunikuzushi grumbles when she shifts, feeling for her waist before pulling her back down. His mouth is on her shoulder in a second, grumbling hoarsely around the shape of it. “You’re just raring to go, aren’t you?”
She hums, grasping his head as he continues mouthing against her. Mona sighs into the motion, guiding his head and fighting the urge to blush. They’ve had so many close encounters, lately, and she’s not sure what it means in the grand scheme of what they are. They meld against each other with the ease of one body, but they’ve never gone further than that. Mouths on mouths and mouths on skin was as far as they’d go, and Mona has to wonder if that’s her fault. A part of her has always held back that part of him, and it made her feel the mildest guilt— but she couldn’t afford the distraction that would pose, now. There was a question out there only Dornman Port could answer for her.
Mona flicks his forehead and slides off of him. “Yes, I am. I’d prefer to arrive before the merchants start clogging the road.”
Her bag is packed light, restricted to only the most essential items for travel— her fourteen new astrolabes weep, but her scryglass would have to be more than sufficient for her purposes. Kunikuzushi seems to have followed her example a little too well.
”…No bags?” She looks him up and down with a wrinkle of her nose. All he has is the clothes on his back before reaching for his hat, looking her up and down with a grating passivity.
“Don’t need any. Neither do you, but I had a feeling you would pack anyway.” He holds out his arm expectantly, but Mona feels her fingers curl around her bag with a spike of something defensive has her shifting back. The motion is so slight and imperceptible, but the sight of it has Kunikuzushi retracting with that unreadable expression. He clicks his tongue— suit yourself, he seems to say, turning and beginning to stalk in the direction of the gates. Mona trots behind, the dodoco rattling somewhere in her luggage dragging every step she takes behind him.
The journey is silent, for the most part. They encounter more birds on their path than people, but it’s a welcome solitude, and they perch upon the rim of his hat with a sweet twittering that has both of them cracking a smile amidst the inarticulate tension. Mona cups a handful of poppy seeds between her hands, leftovers from her own snacking, and they’re just as eager to hop over to her. She strokes their fluffy heads, crooning down at them in a sing-song voice Kunikuzushi might otherwise tease her for, but he merely huffs.
“What’s the problem,” she probes cheekily, “upset that I’m stealing them away from you?”
“Yes, as a matter of fact— I was going to use this army of fat finches to take over the world. Distracting them was a cunning, underhanded little trick.”
Mona sticks out her tongue, because the trick worked and there was nothing he could do about it. Suddenly, there’s a grip on her arms, and they’re both tumbling down to the side of a grassy hill. The motion scatters the seeds and the army of birds to the sky in an instant, but all she can do is laugh at the absurdity of it all. Now, neither of them could take over the world.
There’s a weight on her legs, and Mona blinks through the light to see Kunikuzushi caging her against the ground. His expression is soft, almost misty, and the uncharacteristic sentimentality in it has her reaching back.
“You are infuriating,” he whispers into her mouth, “you have no idea, the things you do to me. The things I want to…”
He trails off, so she kisses him again. It’s an imploring action, one he feeds into with everything she knows of him. The telltale hand at her hip and his fingers in her hair; the wisp of the veils atop her hat grazing her skin in such a light, prickling sensation that has her nibbling the inside of her cheek. This is the only thing that feels unique, these different ways he touches her, and it’s enough to spark something hot in her gut. Triumph, perhaps— this new environment was exactly the thing they both needed to invigorate them. Change could be good, and her dear partner was finally understanding this too.
Mona is so absorbed in him that she barely notices the windmills towering from the corner of her eye, and the fluttering of another little thing that isn’t a finch. She flinches upright as it settles upon the pile of seeds, staring at the ethereal little moth with an indescribable wonder. Kunikuzushi’s expression reverts to that clouded, unreadable one he’s been wearing too often lately.
“I haven’t seen one of those before.”
“Of course you haven’t,” Mona’s lips are hushed as she gently rises to a crouch, “this is an Etherwing Moth, and they can only be found around the Windrest Peak area. We must be getting close.”
The moth seems to stir as they do, fluttering off in the direction of what she assumes to be Millhaven. She almost wants to jump to her feet and race after it like a child, but remembers herself.
For some reason, the rest of the journey is silent. Kunikuzushi only speaks again when they’ve arrived in the port properly.
“I wrote ahead and got us a room for the night.” It’s surprising, given how short-notice the trip was, but she detects no lie from him. Kunikuzushi takes so much initiative for her, and it’s enough to make her heart swell in her chest. He pauses before glancing back at her again. “You’ll want to visit your parents, won’t you?”
Her parents… yes, her parents did live here, didn’t they? She must have eaten Apply Roly-Poly and chased Etherwing Moths out here for years, as a girl. How something like that could evade her recollection was beyond the astrologist. There’s a guilt that stabs her for getting so swept up in everything, that seeing them wouldn’t be her first thought.
“…I don’t know if I’d like to do that right away,” she murmurs, feeling decidedly less prepared than he was as she grapples with the consequence of her spontaneity. “It’s already getting dark, and I’d hate to drop in on them like this. I want to introduce you to them during the daytime, preferably.”
He doesn’t protest, and he weaves between the closed-down shops and stalls with such an ease as if he had been the one to grow up here, not her. The quiet crowding them is unnerving in its own right— Dornman Port should be no different than Mondstadt’s main city, what with its teetering drunkards and merry bards. The night should be illuminated with flickering street lamps and fireflies, but the air around them now is dark, cold and silent. Mona would almost risk being suffocated by it, if not for the grounding grip Kunikuzushi has on her hand.
He is a small but persistent comfort in this jarring experience, and, as it turns out, excellent at underselling. The room he had booked wasn’t merely a room— it was a townhouse, tucked away in the enclave of the Port’s core and somewhere comparatively reserved for those of the upper-end of their economy.
“Kuni,” a familiar warning to him begins to edge her tone, “what did I say about spending your Mora like this? We could have perfectly settled for something less extravagant. I don’t want to—”
He produces a key from seemingly nowhere and opens the door with ease, gesturing her in without another word. She scowls, but obliges, and it’s just as perfect on the inside as it is out. The first real light she’s seen glows warmly from an artisan chandelier, illuminating the shape of a tasteful study nook, a set of cushioned armchairs and a large, plush-looking couch that she feels she could dive into any second. In the distance, she sees a hallway lined with more well-kept books leading to a staircase. It’s infuriating.
“Hm,” Kunikuzushi has sauntered over to the kitchen, inspecting each shelf critically before lifting a small container, “They have tea made with Windrest flowers, here. I’ll brew some while you get comfortable.” He looks her up and down once more before snorting. “The day has certainly had its way with you, Megistus.”
Mona glowers at him as she turns the corner. Kunikuzushi never did mince his words, but it was just how he expressed care for her. She never held anything back either, so she’d tolerate his nonsense as always— and nothing did seem to quell her nerves like a mug of tea, so she leaves the bag and all its weight behind before throwing on something looser. Emerging from the hall and meeting him on that couch with a mug of something warm does everything to melt her worry, as readily as she melts into him.
“…Thank you,” she sighs. “You’ve always been so good to me, Kuni. I feel like such dead weight.”
He scowls, positioning her to lean into him. “That’s hardly true. You motivate everything I’m doing here, and we’re doing it together. That’s all that matters.”
He was right, she supposes. He lends a lot of meaning to her life, but something about everything still has her feeling slightly off-center. Perhaps it was that she was drinking a tea that was familiar in scent but foreign on her tongue, or that she was trying to remember her life here in fragments or felt some guilt at not piecing that infernal dodo-thing’s clues together. It was everything and nothing all at once, and the contradictions confound her.
Kunikuzushi places a hand on her thigh. Mona takes a breath, sipping gently at her tea. The Windrest flowers smell remarkably similar to roses, and the familiarity calms her. Mona sets the mug down and looks up to the only person who seems to anchor her, nowadays.
“Kiss me.”
He does, and his lips are as sweet now as they were when whetted with wine. She crashes against him like the tide, and he chases her with a fervency that… that was so familiar, yet again, and Mona remembers the fear spiking in her stomach. She needs to feel something new, something deeper, and if she doesn’t everything is going to crumble and break and this cycle of monotony will just succeed itself.
Her body curves and her lips tremble more insistently, using everything save her words to plead for more, more, more. She slithers atop his lap and preens under the attention of his lips, and she can’t tell who is suckling and nipping whose skin between them. Her fists find his collar and she pulls until something pops and it’s even more of him under her. That ripple of muscle she’s hugged at every morning, that she’s wrapped around every night, and the sheer vitality beneath it that breathes meaning into this surreal static they’re caught in.
There’s a muscle lower than what she feels with her hands, and it strains imploringly against her thigh. This happens often, when they meet each other like this, and Kunikuzushi will always retreat somewhere else to tend to himself privately. It was always out of respect for her, to wait until she was ready, but…
Mona tugs him back when he moves to climb off of her. He looks at her as one might look at a ghost when her breath staggers.
“I… want to,” she mumbles, “I… can we…”
He presses their foreheads together in a sweeping motion. He seems shocked by this new development, but just as eager as she’d hoped.
“It’s never happened like this.”
He speaks it like a dream realized, and once again they’re of the same mind. This… would be something new, for her, and she trusts him to be an attentive lover. He mumbles her name as he kisses the glistening skin of her temple, lips trailing down and down until he’s crouched on the floor and looking up at her from between two legs.
“Mona,” he calls, a glinting reverence in his eye as he snaps a finger at her pyjama pants, “off.”
Her stomach leaps, but she obeys without question, standing to slide them down until the curve of her ass was on full display to him.
“No undergarments before bed. How sinful.”
He traces the shape of her, every bit of flesh exposed to his scrutiny. What could once be felt as feather light crawls into insistence when he pushes deeper against her, parting her legs and exposing the barest part of her. Mona tries to shy away, but he doesn’t let it happen. He wants to see her, as truly as she wants to see him, and Kunikuzushi looks at her as if she’s a thing divine before bowing his head between her folds.
“K-Kuni—”
He starts gently, setting a teasing pace as he licks around her slit. The rasp of his tongue has Mona quivering, and the sensation is an indescribable mix of a homecoming and something entirely new. To have him in this way, to have him probe deeper as she spasms, it’s… more than she imagined, but exactly what she expects. Kunikuzushi’s tongue works her, wrapping and flicking with a vigor that seems to hasten with each noise that slips past her. She comes so, so close until she’s teetering on the edge and—
Kunikuzushi draws back, leaving her to lurch after him dumbly. He makes sure Mona watches the deliberate sweeping of his tongue over his lips. A foreign blaze of outrage begins to light in her ribcage.
“Why would you—!”
A finger probes at the sensitive, quivering mess of nerves once more, and her own lips pucker for him all over again. His grin is almost manic as she flutters pliantly against the digit.
“Tasting is one thing… but we’ve tasted so much of each other, lately.” He slides it against the morbid slickness coating her thighs before bringing it back to his mouth, worming it back to its place between her all over again. “I want to feel you, Mona. Don’t you want the same?”
She does, she does want the same. Mona wants to feel him, because it’s been so, so long since the last time she’s felt him. This is what her intuition tells her, even when the rational part of her speaks to this being a first experience for both of them. Their first time, and he already knew her so well that her insight was confusing her. What a horrible, wonderful man. He slides the finger in, and she cries out all over again.
Kunikuzushi crooks his nail against her with ruthless precision. The languid pace his tongue enjoyed was an afterthought, now, and it took everything to not allow herself to be bullied by this new pace. Her lip bitten under teeth, her own fingers curled into the plush of the couch as he moulds her walls into an image of ecstasy, and his voice pervading it all.
“St…stop holding back, I want to hear everything. Can you… feel me?” Mona almost scoffs, because it’s a horribly redundant question. He’s atop her, hunched and caving as if to engulf everything existing beyond them— his hair clings to his forehead and his eyes shine with an earnest plea that somehow melts her heart even more, and she can’t deny the crumbling of her pride in that moment.
“Kuni, I… mmh, I c-can feel you, I…” she doesn’t know what possesses her to think it, but some deep-sated part of her needs to say it, “I need… another. More, I… ngh, n-need more—”
Kunikuzushi obeys the command immediately, and Mona is as surprised as she is relieved to feel a second finger slide in next to the first. She had braced herself, for whatever reason— expecting him to tease her for it, perhaps— but his composure is about as desperate as hers, and she doesn’t suspect he’d be able to restrain himself long enough to do so.
Her volume seems to spurn him onwards, but his own breathing is eerily quiet. He curls inside her with one hand while the other rises to grip the back of the couch, but all Mona can see of him is his eyes. They’re wide and unblinking and practically glowing against the dim ceiling light, and they seem to subsume her as eagerly as the rest of him. It feels like an exacting and almost clinical gaze, but it’s his, and she trusts him. Kunikuzushi is so good to her, and he’s making her feel so good.
“Remember this, please,” he rasps, “remember how much I love you— you chose this, you chose me, y-you…”
The pressure increases, and so does the intensity of his gaze. It mounts and it mounts and she buckles over into his shoulder, fingers scrambling for purchase in his hair until her legs tremble and she cries, a hot flash of white temporarily blinding her own vision from every wisp of lingering dread.
“I’m so happy,” she can hear the faint echoing of his hiss as she sinks, “I’m so happy we did it like this. Fuck, you… are everything, Mona Megistus.”
She smiles, because she is. He is everything to her, too, and she only wishes she could tell him so before everything falls limp and melts into the dark.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈.-. . -... --- --- - ┈┈┈
Mona wakes up in a bed she didn’t move to herself. She blinks into awareness of herself immediately, sitting upright and feeling at the sheets around her. They’re cold and unrumpled, save for where she’s been laying— as if Kunikuzushi had taken care to tuck her in without joining her himself. The gnawing edge of concern begins creeping in at the edge of her mind as she rises, feeling for her belongings in the dark until her fingers wrap around the shape of her bag. It’s already open, as it happens, and everything seems to be in its place except…
She freezes mid-breath. The dodoco is gone.
Mona hastily reaches for the lamp switch and the room floods with light as she practically turns the bag on its side to rummage through the contents. It’s really, truly gone, and so with it goes the one mystery that’s been probing her mind these past days. It was a fiendish little thing with fiendish little names, but it was something. Something to uncover, to know, to illuminate in some form of the truth, and she had allowed this opportunity to slip between her fingers like sand.
She almost feels like crying. She doesn’t know why. Mona shouldn’t feel so indescribably hopeless at the loss, and yet—
There’s a small thunk against the window that has her wheeling around. For a split second, she thinks she’s dreaming again, and that somehow the wretched dodoco had metamorphosed into a butterfly, but the shape of it lacks the fuzzy fatness that’s been consistent so far. This was… something else.
“…Ah. An Etherwing Moth.” It must have been attracted by the light… though it’s persistent tapping would leave her thinking that hers was the only light on. It could’ve been; she had no way of knowing the time. Turning the lamp out might do well to put both her and the little moth back to rest.
It’s a guide. Follow it.
Her insight jolts her back to stare at the window in bewilderment. The moth lingers in the air, floating like an intrusive thought. If she were to follow it… well, would it be any different from chasing the words that warbled around that dodoco? At least these words were hers. Mona takes a decisive step towards the door, only to be halted once more by the jittering lock.
She was… locked in. Kunikuzushi had locked her in?
Mona looks to the window with a renewed outrage festering in her chest. It swings open as soon as she makes the motion, clearly not intending to get in the way of this outburst. Climbing out of it is another ordeal, but the chill sweeping the wind is hardly a deterrent. The moth is already fluttering ahead and she can’t afford to lose another potential answer, desperate to keep pace as it cuts through the night air.
“You are going entirely too fast for an Etherwing Moth,” she hisses, threading through cobbled roads that become dirt and grass and pebbles, trying not to trip over her feet, “how am I supposed to—”
The moth staggers, and so does she. Her legs are trembling and the wind seems to be fiercer, what with the slant she’s been traversing. It feels as if it’s been a single moment, but the distance was insurmountable. This has to be some kind of dream, her head hardly feels caught up with her body before everything is lurching again. She braces herself against a wall before realizing where she’s been led.
“This is…” she traces the mossy stone as she traces her mind for its name, “the… Sanatorium, isn’t it?”
Mona doesn’t recall coming here as a girl. There were better places for a child to roam than some haunted relic of Mond’s past, but she has to admit that the view of the stars from this high up was breathtaking. Perhaps that’s why it was so familiar.
The moth is nowhere to be seen when she looks for it, which is just her luck for stopping to catch her breath. She follows the wall, instead, until it leads her to a large clearing in the heart of this ruin. She comes to stand before a litter of tombstones, but for each one she tries to read, the engravings become more and more blurred. The bouquet of wilted roses laid in front of them is the only proof that, perhaps, there was still someone out there who remembered the names of their dead. A statue of the Archon watches over them in the distance, and somewhere closer to her… Mona sees Kunikuzushi.
“You’re about as cunning as ever, trying to contact her like this.” His arms are folded, and he’s peering down at something. “But really, through a toy? It’s about as childish as I would expect, coming from you.”
“You’re far more childish than me, for allowing this to go on for so long.” The other voice is sudden and has her flinching. It feels like forever since Mona’s heard another voice besides theirs. “You’ve rebooted this singular cycle far more often than you have in any others before. She’s remembering more at a faster rate. You can’t keep doing this forever, Balladeer. It’s selfish.”
Balladeer? She’s never heard that name before, but it makes something under her skin crawl. She can practically feel the air around Kunikuzushi prickle with seething discontent, but he’s also dripping with a superiority against this person that sounds familiar.
“Well, it’s no matter. No mages of the Hexenzirkel nor ‘friends’ from her past are going to spur on any more memories, and that’s the end of it.”
The voice responds in a lower tone, and Mona’s practically straining to hear. There’s a shift and a stumble and a resonant crunch, causing her to stiffen. She looks down to see a bundle of crushed roses beneath her feet, and looks up to see Kunikuzushi looking right at her. There’s something distraught and apathetic and haunted as his gaze pins her in place, so she looks to his conversation partner instead.
She’s got bright eyes, a green-tipped tail and fur as pale as a birch branch. She’s also the ‘special dodoco,’ which isn’t as great of a surprise as she should have felt. Of all the incarnations of it, she seems to be among the most articulate, at least.
It’s because you’ve remembered they have something to say to you. Something important.
“Kunikuzushi,” she mumbles, clutching her chest, “…What is going on here? Why did you lock the door, why are you talking to that toy, why—”
It’s the toy that responds quicker, her small voice imploring. “His name is not Kunikuzushi, Mona. He hasn’t been called that for centuries. Do you remember what names he’s borne before?”
Kunikuzushi. Her Kunikuzushi. Scumba̴g̷.̷ ̴S̸c̴a̷r̵a̴ S̶c̵a̶r̸a̶m̵o̴u̴c̷h̴e̵K̷u̶n̶i̶ ̷B̵a̸l̸l̴a̵deer ̸̲̈́Ẹ̶͝v̶̛͇eř̵̠las̴̟̆tiň̶͉g ̸͎͌L̶̡̈́o̶̤͐rd̴̜̓ Kunì̴̘ K̶u̷n̸i̸̷K̸u̴n̴i̴ ̶͍̈́
Mona staggers back with a whine, skull throbbing. Kunikuzushi seems to snap out of his stupor at the pained sound, stepping towards her with a grave expression.
“Mona, you can’t—”
She steps back as if repelled. “What are these names, in my head— I’ve been hearing this garbling for days and I don’t know what it means!”
“You do, Mona,” the dodoco chimes, “you’ve done it before! Remember what he’s taken from you and—”
Lightning splits open the sky and strikes the earth where it lays. The dodoco is reduced to ash in an instant, and the loss of yet another answer strains against her rib cage. The flash illuminates a raw, violet fury in Kunikuzushi’s gaze, his face twisting in an anger that she could barely fathom upon his face before this moment. What… was he?
“Damned Lesser Lord,” he hisses to himself, “Damned Hexenzirkel and their wretched parlour magic—”
When he looks up at Mona, his expression doesn’t change, but the shape of his eyes soften imperceptibly.
“…Look at you,” he murmurs, “I’ve seen this look of abject horror on your face hundreds of times, and yet… you still never look any less beautiful.”
Mona blinks and Kunikuzushi is in front of her, reaching for a lock of her hair. These are the same hands and the same voice and the same face she fervently adored, but everything about him has… shifted. He may as well be upside down, holding his hand out to her, with this new feeling of distance between them. Even in this projection, their eyes never break contact.
“Hundreds.” She acknowledges, on the teetering edge of her composure. “What do you mean, hundreds?”
His finger twines around her hair, and she’s not sure why she’s letting him touch her. “Buer played a trick on me. I borrowed it from her.”
You were there. Remember.
His gentle fingers become the crushing grip of a segmented, mechanical hand. Its circuitry is sparking and exposed and the infrastructure of everything he’s become is creaking and groaning and about to come apart.
He’s lost. He’s lost. She calls and pleads for him to end this, to accept that every cycle he destroyed her friends was just a catalyst for his own downfall. Fate could not change, and he almost looked down at her from the mangled maw of the god-machine as if he believed it.
“A… Samsara cycle…” Mona staggers back again. Kuni—Scaramouche’s fingers remain suspended in the air where they once touched before flexing languidly.
“That’s right. I was robbed of ascension, so I had to take what I was owed.”
He sets a calm pace towards her again, and Mona can’t move any further back before her ankles are knocking against a gravestone. The sole of his shoe crushes the rose petals even further. Mona holds her breath and tries to reconcile this image of him as hers with the one of the monster he was distending into.
“And what could you possibly think you’re owed?”
He cages her against the tombstone and stares. It’s worse than touching her, to be so trapped under his gaze like this, because she could escape if she wanted to. But Mona was nothing if not stubborn for the answers she’s been seeking. He owes her this much, since they’re speaking of debts, and the mere utterance causes her insight to quiver once more.
He’s in her house, in her kitchen, everywhere she’s always known him to be, but he’s also got his hands around her neck and a glimmer of something wicked in his eye. He’s in her bedroom and he’s in her and she’s blinded by him over and over again until he’s walking away from her one final time with a glowing thing clutched in his fist.
A second chance. He truly is selfish.
“This is not my fate,” she snarls, “you’ve already realized yours when you… you can’t interfere in mine because you lost, scumbag.”
That he lost her, too, the moment he made his final choice is something that goes unspoken between them. Every spark of a memory that connects in her head leaves it a pounding, disoriented mess, and she can’t tell where her partner ends and her enemy begins. He leans in, closer, closer, and whispers in that tone of his that she so loves and loathes, now.
“My time with you in Mondstadt was simple, but... I still found myself thinking of it all throughout the construction of my divine body. So, when I saw you among the Traveler’s little retinue of heroes…” His touch is lined with a static that stabs into her face with a thousand prickling razor blades, numbing and freezing her expression. “I had to capture that disgusting domesticity you infected me with— but for one so set on predetermined orders, you never were inclined towards mundanity for long. You always make things change.”
It’s not an accusation any more than it is a curiosity, suggests his tone. Mona thinks about the wine and the moth and this half-constructed shell of Dornman Port that couldn’t possibly have existed in his own memories. She was influencing this place, it seems, and in increasingly proportional amounts.
Perhaps that meant she could conjure an exit. His lips meet hers within that revelation.
With everything that’s been turned in on itself since coming here, this, shockingly, has not changed. Mona expected to be overpowered and seized and taken with the force he’s clearly been holding back, but it feels the same as it always has, and that breaks her heart even more.
Scaramouche’s fingers trace every dip with an understanding that transcends this cycle. It brings her to tears.
“Please… I can’t.”
He kisses them away so, so sweetly. “You want this. You always want this.” Mona feels him against her thigh, again, and it's no longer her eyes that weep. They threaten to spill over again when she gasps. How many times has she given herself away to him like this? How many times has she remembered and forgotten the names of her family, her friends, her… how long would it take them to give up on her? They had to have known how futile of an endeavor this was. How many more of these cycles can repeat before her sanity caves and—
A light emits from the base of the statue of Barbatos. It’s a small glimmer that only someone as desperate as her might dare to look for, but it’s there, and it’s…
An escape.
Mona remembers herself and sprints into her hydro torrent. This singular moment is a firefly in a dead field, and she needs to seize it with everything. As an astrologist, she took great comfort in untangling the threads of the future, but all of it was in someone else’s hands now. She has to cut herself free if either of them could hope to return to the natural order of things, but she’s shocked out of the motion and sprawled in the dirt before she can even take a second breath.
“You run. You always run, like some— common little mouse.” He cages her under his arms and forces her to look up and face his bitter derision. “You say that fate can’t change, Mona, so why are you denying this? I made it easy for both of us. I made us a fate.”
The struggle to pin her jittering body down loosens the tie on his shorts, and if he put her to bed as she was… there was nothing to stop what was happening next. That her traitorous mind could feel an intrigue for his protrusion at all was heavily distressing. Scaramouche pushes into her without any ceremony, and while her mind floods with every memory of being in him or on him or under him, her body spasms and gushes as if a coronal, virginal thing.
Everything is so tight, and it takes all of her willpower not to scream. She refuses to give him the satisfaction, even as he sets that pace she was preening over just a few hours ago.
“The first time is usually here,” he groans, “but you changed that too. It’s probably the only change I favour… it truly felt just like before.”
“Before what, before you betrayed my trust?” Freedom was so, so close, and she was entirely too far away. An anger flares in her, punctuated by each thrust. “Before you made your choice and made me suffer for it—?”
Mona lets out a sharp cry as he finds that tender spot once more, bullying into it. He laughs just as sharply, though there’s no amusement to it. “How ironic, because I see you as a traitor, too. For every time in this long Samsara you left me in return, you have been my… eternal, final betrayal. My perfect little punishment.” He ruts more insistently, and Mona’s hips instinctively rise to meet the motion, to her alarm.
Muscle memory. She banishes the thought.
He speaks on of this and that, spouting melodrama as he moulds her back into his shape for the hundredth time. All she can think of is how many people tried to get her this far only for their efforts to be in vain. She’s a coward and a fool, just like her horrible lover. Even still, she speaks them into an existence suppressed by the obscuring weight of the Samsara.
Fischl. Albedo. Nahida. Her parents.
…Barbeloth. Master, I’m sorry I failed you all again.
His pace deepens and Scaramouche thrusts once, twice, and three times more before spilling in her with a guttural sigh. The blinding white light of euphoria dots the edge of her vision.
“I love you.”
He’s said it so often, in this cycle, but never in her memory of their past. Even still, he’s never said it with anything less than his full chest and the full truth. She hates him for it.
“…But not enough to let me go.”
For the first time since their first time, the would-be god smiles. His face is warm and soft and it makes her want to cry all over again. He touches her neck, soothing the sob welling in her throat with a low croon.
“Hush, I know. This is all so distressing.” He lightly kisses the bob of her neck. She trembles. “This is all just a bad dream, Mona. You have them far too often… but I’m here. Go back to sleep.”
No, no, you won’t wake u—
The voice in her head grows quiet. The voice in her head becomes his as everything melts just slightly enough to disregard it, and the sky seems so far away from them both.
I deserve this, is her last conscious thought. We are weak and pathetic and we deserve each other.
Mona closes her eyes.
-ˋˏ✄┈┈┈.-. . -... --- --- - ┈┈┈
The sun is high when Mona blinks into the waking world. She can feel her hair splayed across the pillow in wild, curling drives, yet her sheets are entirely unrumpled. It’s a curious sight, to be sure— she could have imagined she was having the most animated dream last night, though the details are escaping her with each ray that dapples across her face.
With little else to do, the astrologist heaves out of bed, and that’s when she smells the sizzling. Mona smiles.