First was the sunlight, hitting your face as if it were conscious of where you were; then came the warmth of his chest that made you open your eyes.
There, in his bed, the two of you had fallen asleep. There, the two of you were naked and pressed against each other. There, you were still as exposed as a crab without its shell. It was everything hitting you at once that made your cheeks heat—a deep shade of red that made you incredibly aware of your skin against his.
But when you tried to move, his body acted instinctively, as if it were natural to have you there. His arm wrapped tightly around you, pulling you closer.
"Varka," you tried to call, which only earned a soft growl in response. The Grandmaster opened one eye, then both. Blue irises stared at you, and a lazy, unfairly charming smile spread over his lips.
"We have work to do... and we are late."
"Mmm..." His eyes closed again. You watched as he slowly began to drift off; you two hadn't slept very much, after all.
"Hey, wake up!" you reprimanded, trying to get his attention, but then he began to roll. "V-Varka!" You ended up caged beneath him, his strong arms on either side of you, and a now wide-awake man staring down at you with affection.
"I am awake," he said. You saw the way his eyes drifted to your collarbone; the memories of the night before seemed to hit both of you at once.
His pale cheeks flushed a soft pink, yours a deeper tone. You didn't know if it was the memory of your moans, the way your back had arched in pleasure, or... the sound that left his mouth when he finally gave in, pulling a soft cry from you and a whimper from him.
"..."
"You’ve gone unusually silent," he said with a knowing smile. You kicked his arm playfully, unable to contain a grin, which made him laugh.
"I will be late for work and you are responsible for it."
"Yes, I am," he whispered, his smile lingering.
"And Jean is going to reprimand you... both of us."
"Yes, she will." He leaned closer.
"And—" Before you could finish, his lips touched yours. It was a soft kiss, enough to make you forget every word of the sentence you wanted to form. "That was incredibly unfair," you whispered against his lips.
The color on his cheeks and the soft look he gave you didn't help your poor heart; he knew exactly how to make you lose your train of thought. Your hands tangled in his hair—the soft, blonde strands of his wolf cut, a mess from the sheets and from your hands during yesterday’s activities.
"Stay," he whispered, resting his head under your chin. "Stay a little more." He sounded innocent, not at all like the man responsible for the soreness in your legs.
"I suppose... I could stay a little longer," you said, pretending to ignore how soft his hair was or how his toned back moved with his calm breath. Then you felt a kiss on your chin, then another on your neck.
He brought his face back to yours, kissing you deeply. He shifted his weight to one arm while the other moved under your knee, hooking your leg against his waist.
And then you felt it...
"Oh..." The sound escaped your lips.
The realization hit you—the true reason behind his desire for you to stay. But then you looked into his eyes and saw that rare, shy vulnerability. The look in his gaze was a mix of desire and pleading that made you feel incredibly powerful. You pulled him closer, wrapping your arms around his neck to kiss him deeply.
Oh.
"I suppose I can stay just a little longer..."
You knew you wouldn't be leaving that bed anytime soon.
۶ৎ Warning: mention of stabbing, violence, blood, and hurting. MDNI
۶ৎ Masterlist: Strawberry's masterlist
۶ৎ Requests: Strawberry requests (closed).
૮꒰ 𓈒. ݂ .𓈒ྀི ꒱ა ┊ At this point, I am just spoiling you, bunnies. But I cannot wait to get him and study his personality and character story ໒꒰՞ ܸ. .ܸ՞꒱ა. Anyway, if you like it, leave me some love and a comment, じゃあね♡.
You never planned for it to end like this.
You always knew, in the quiet hours before dawn when guilt had the most room to breathe, that your crimes would find you eventually. That was simply the arithmetic of a life like yours. But up here, perched on a branch thick enough to hold you, heart hammering against your ribs, you hadn't accounted for him. For the young man sitting at the same height on the opposite branch, perfectly at ease, watching you the way a cat watches something it has already decided belongs to it.
"You're a freak," you called out, loud enough that there was no mistaking it.
He didn't flinch.
Why was he so eager? You were a thief, yes, but you were a thief who came home every night to a family that would go hungry without you. You worked through the day until your hands ached and it still wasn't enough, it was never enough, and so you took what the world refused to give you. That was all. That was the whole of it.
The first dagger came without warning.
It struck the branch beside your hand with a sound like a whispered threat. Before the shock had finished moving through you, the second one followed, close enough that you felt the air shift against your cheek, a centimeter, maybe less.
This man is insane.
The thought arrived clearly, calmly, the way thoughts do when the body has run out of room for panic. Was he trying to kill you, or capture you? Did he even know the difference?
"This bastard..." You didn't think. You reached into your boot, and you threw.
Your dagger found the space beside his face the same way his had found yours. What you didn't expect — what you couldn't have prepared for — were his eyes in that moment. Deep dark blue eyes with that slash of crimson through them, like a bruise that hadn't decided what color to be, an unsettling combination that had no business existing in one person, and they lit up. A spark of something that looked terrifyingly close to delight.
"Well, well." His voice carried the unhurried quality of a man rearranging pieces on a board he was certain he would win. "Look who decided to play back."
His hair moved with the wind, that strange pale-green color of his, bleached almost silver by the moonlight, and he looked at you the way people look at things that have just become interesting to them.
"I do appreciate when my prey decides to engage," Lohen said. "It makes the catching so much more... exciting."
The next dagger pinned your sleeve to the trunk.
You registered the fabric pulled taut before you registered the liquid, green, faintly luminous, that wept down the blade's edge and met your skin. The burn arrived a half-second later, vicious and immediate.
The scream left you before you could stop it.
"It hurts–!" And he was already throwing another one. It caught your palm, and this time, the pain was a white, wordless thing that wiped every other thought clean.
"You could always surrender." He sounded almost conversational. Almost kind. That pleased smile hadn't moved. "Though I suppose now you'll have to free your hand first. Don't worry, the poison takes a little time to spread through the body, so you have a moment to—"
Your last dagger left your hand.
Not calculated. Not strategic. Pure, distilled fury.
It buried itself in the tree trunk beside his face and drew a clean red line across his cheek. Thin as a whisper, enough to bleed.
He went still.
A rational person, pinned and poisoned, would have focused on survival. On the hand. On getting free. That was what instinct was for. But he watched you close your mouth against the pain you refused to give him, watched you close your fingers around his dagger and wrench it free in one sharp movement, and something shifted behind those unsettling eyes.
Blood ran down the bark in long, dark ribbons. You hadn't made a sound.
Then the blood loss hit you all at once, the way it always does, not gradually but like a door swinging shut, and the branch tilted, or you did, and you were falling.
You didn't even realize he'd called his horse beneath the tree. You only realized his hands were there, catching you, before the ground could.
Up close, his eyes were worse. Blue with that pour of red through it, the kind of combination that made something animal in you want to look away. But it was his expression that truly unsettled you, the color rising in his pale cheeks, the way that satisfied smile had shifted into something else entirely. Something that had no business being on his face at a moment like this. Something that looked, with horrible clarity, like wonder.
That was the exact moment when Lohen became obsessed with you.
⊹ ˖ Ი𐑼 | The art used to decorate this oneshot doesn't belong to me; it belongs to the talented artist Hanapen5. All credits go to her and her magnificent art.
۶ৎ Characters: Albedo x fem!reader, aristicratic!mc/reader.
۶ৎ Category: slow-burn, friends to lovers.
۶ৎ Warning: none.
۶ৎ Masterlist: Strawberry's masterlist.
۶ৎ Requests: Strawberry's request (Closed).
૮꒰ 𓈒. ݂ .𓈒ྀི ꒱ა ┊This is inspired by one of the chapters of The Apothecary & the Alchemist (you can find the novel on AO3), but~ it's a bit (a lot) different, so it doesn't count as a spoiler. Anyway, if you like it, leave me some love and a comment. Until next time, bunnies! 𐔌՞ ܸ.ˬ.ܸ՞𐦯.
It was an old tradition. Nobody followed it anymore, why would they? It had been planted by the aristocracy in the age of their dominion, a pretty chain dressed as custom, and you, daughter of one of those very houses, had every reason to let it rot where it belonged. People already watched you with the particular stillness reserved for things they didn't trust. When they watched you at all.
That was what made it so impossible to explain... him. A knight of standing. Head of the investigation division, no less. And yet, there he was, night after night, choosing your company.
How could they not? He was... he was him. That particular gentleness he carried without effort. The intelligence behind every quiet observation. That impossible composure that somehow never felt like distance.
Your heart had no discipline where he was concerned. It never had.
The morning he rode out, the air tasted like cold iron and approaching weather.
You saw him before he saw you, his hair pulled back and pinned low, so unlike the way it fell free in the evenings when it was only the two of you and the dark. His eyes, the color of deep glacial water, were fixed on his horse: a white gypsy vanner with a black mane like ink poured over snow. He was checking the saddle, issuing quiet instructions to the knights flanking him, and he wore his armor with the ease of a man who had grown into it rather than put it on.
Silver-white. Gold at the edges. The crest of the Knights of Favonius pressed into the chest plate, catching the morning light.
Something moved through you, something that belonged to a version of yourself you hadn't yet announced. Not fear, exactly. Not pride, exactly. A tightening. A want. The unreasonable wish that he could stay, and the equally unreasonable one that you could keep looking at him like this forever.
You stepped forward before you could stop yourself.
Eyes followed you. Some slid away; others sharpened with the particular interest people reserve for something they expect to find amusing. You felt them the way you always felt them, registered, filed, and set aside. Your feet carried you through the small crowd and up the low stone steps, and then you were standing in front of him, close enough that he had to look at you, and he did.
Curious. Still. Waiting.
The embroidered handkerchief was already in your hands. You hadn't planned what came next or perhaps you had, quietly, without admitting it to yourself. Your fingers found his arm and you wrapped the soft fabric there with a care that was more careful than it needed to be, smoothing the fold once, twice.
"There is an old tradition," you heard yourself say, steadier than you felt, "that if a lady gives a knight her handkerchief before a battle..." You looked up. Found his eyes. "They must return it to her."
Albedo watched you with that look, the one that meant he was thinking faster than he was speaking, that there was a distance between what he knew and what he chose to say.
"I have heard of it," he said, unhurried. "Does this mean I must return to you?"
The heat began at your throat. You held his gaze.
"Maybe." A breath. "Yes."
You turned to go. His hand caught yours.
The gauntlet was cold —metal and war and the business of knights— but the grip was the opposite of all of that. A question more than a demand. The softest possible pull.
You turned back, and he was already bowing, a reverence so slight it might have been missed by anyone not watching closely. His lips touched the back of your bare hand, warm, brief, precise and the contact traveled the full length of your spine in an instant.
He felt it. Of course he felt it. He felt everything; you had learned that about him in a hundred small moments that had seemed accidental and probably weren't. The pleased curve of his mouth told you before his eyes did.
The heat reached your ears. You looked away, necessary, self-preserving, at the square, the horse, the morning sky, anywhere that was not his face, but the world had grown very small and very quiet, and eventually your eyes returned to his like they always did.
"Come back to me, my dear knight." A whisper. Only his.
"I will," he said.
A promise, in his voice, meant exactly that.
Days passed like stones dropped into still water, each one slow and heavy, the ripples spreading long after.
You went back to the places you had made yours together. The church garden in the evening, when the flowers held their color longest. The fountain at the hour when the square emptied and the water caught stars. The archon's statue, calm and enduring. Each night you walked the same quiet circuit and told yourself it was habit, and knew it was something else entirely.
On the evening word came that the knights had returned, you were in the garden again. You hadn't planned it. Perhaps you had. Kaeya found Albedo before Albedo found you.
"Someone appears to be waiting for you at the church," he said, and the smile that accompanied it was the particular smile Kaeya used when he already knew the end of the story and was enjoying the journey.
Albedo usually found that smile irritating.
He didn't, this time.
He thought of you walking those paths alone. Returning night after night. He thought of it and his chest did something he would have struggled to classify, not a sensation he could chart or predict, not from any of his experiments, and yet unmistakably caused. By you. Only ever by you.
He found you in the garden, pacing slowly among the dandelion seeds lifting off the stems and drifting on the wind, your white dress catching the same light. You stopped when you heard his steps, armor makes no apologies, and turned.
And there it was. That look. The one that made him want to be very still, to not startle it, to keep it directed at him for as long as he possibly could. His heart —chalky-strange, not quite like other hearts, he had long suspected— did not behave rationally in your presence. He had stopped being troubled by this. He had started, quietly, to be grateful for it.
You closed the distance. He met you halfway. And your hand rose and touched his cheek, tentative at first, then settling, warm against the cold that travel and armor left behind, and you looked at him the way you sometimes did when you forgot to guard it.
"You're back," you said.
He took your hand and brought it to his lips.
"What kind of knight would I be," he said, "if I couldn't keep a promise?" A joke, even-toned, almost dry, and you laughed anyway, bright and unguarded, and the sound of it did something to him that he was becoming accustomed to.
"Keep the handkerchief," you said. "It seems to suit you."
He didn't believe in luck. He believed in variables, in conditions, in causes and their effects. But standing here with you, in a garden full of floating seeds and afternoon light, he thought he might be willing to call it whatever you liked.
"Albedo, I—" you began. And stopped.
He already knew. He had known for some time, in the careful way he knew things, observed, considered, and then held close until the moment was right.
He laughed —actually laughed, unguarded in the way he rarely was, the composure he wore everywhere else simply gone— "I leave for a few days, and you attempt to steal my opening."
The warmth that crossed your face was extraordinary. Not only the admission itself, that he had been planning one, but the sound of him, genuinely happy, without performance, without armor. The face he wore when he spoke about the things he loved.
The face he was wearing now.
You leaned in and pressed your lips to his cheek. He went very still, gratifyingly, completely still, and you felt the satisfaction of it even as your own pulse climbed. You were close enough now that your nose brushed his, and the space between you held everything unsaid.
"Very well," you murmured, breath mingling with his. "But allow this lady to be improper just this once. My poor heart has waited long enough."
The gauntlet found the curve of your neck, cold metal, careful hands, and drew you in. You reached up, fingers settling on his armored shoulders, and closed your eyes.
His lips found yours.
Warm, soft and certain.
He kissed you like the knights keep their promises
۶ৎ Warning: Violence, murder, heavy lore, poison and medicine, super slow burn, future +18 scenes.
۶ৎ Masterlist: Strawberry's masterlist.
۶ৎ Requests: Strawberry's request (closed).
૮꒰ 𓈒. ݂ .𓈒ྀི ꒱ა ┊Hello Bunnies~! ૮₍ ´ ꒳ `₎ა I'm super excited to share with you that, finally, I have decided to post my novels and works on AO3! I'm starting, ofc, with an Albedo x reader novel that I've been working on for a while. Here I will share the prologue; however, the chapters as well as other novels from other characters will be posted on AO3. Well, that's all for now, bye bye~! ִֶָ𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶָ🐇་༘࿐
݁ ˖Ი𐑼⋆ Note: This fanfic has been slightly inspired by Kusuriya no Hitorigoto (薬屋のひとりごと).
They say stories should begin at the beginning.
“Well. That depends entirely on who is telling it.”
It depends on who she is.
“That too.”
There are many versions of her.
In Mondstadt, they say she is a woman who appears at the edges of storms — that she has walked into houses where healers had already given up and walked out leaving nothing behind but the smell of herbs and a patient who would, inexplicably, live. No one can say what she looks like. No one can say where she goes after. Only that she was there, and then she wasn't, and somehow that was enough.
In Liyue, the rumors take a different shape. A merchant swears he once paid her in mora she never touched. A harbor doctor insists she corrected his diagnosis without introducing herself, then disappeared into the crowd before he could ask her name. The elderly speak of her the way they speak of things that have always existed — not with surprise, but with the particular quiet of people who have simply stopped questioning certain facts about the world.
Further out, past the places that appear on maps, the stories grow stranger still. A fallen god. A wanderer with forbidden knowledge. A woman who should not exist, healing people who should not have survived.
All of them are wrong, by the way.
“Are you certain? Some of them are close.”
None of them know her.
However, here is what the stories agree on, at least:
She does not stay. She does not explain herself. She leaves people alive who had no business being alive, and she asks very little in return — only that they do not look too hard at how she did it.
Most people find this arrangement acceptable.
Most.
“This is not a story about the legend.”
It is a story about the woman underneath it.
“Those are the same thing.”
They really aren't.
She would hate this prologue, incidentally. All of it. The mythology, the merchant anecdotes, the implication of anything remotely divine. She would read this far and put it down with the specific expression of someone who has bitten into something they didn't expect.
“Which is exactly why we're not telling her about it.”
Not yet.
There was, one person who did not find the rumors satisfying.
Not because he dismissed them — he was far too precise for dismissal. Every account had been filed away carefully, cross-referenced, turned over in his mind the way he turned over every problem that did not yet have a solution. The merchant's story. The harbor doctor's correction. The houses in Mondstadt where people had survived things they shouldn't have.
Separately, they were anecdotes.
Together, they were a pattern.
And patterns, in his experience, always pointed somewhere.
He was the Chief Alchemist of Mondstadt, a scientist by disposition and a solver of mysteries by nature — not out of sentiment, but because an unsolved thing had a particular weight to it, the kind that sat at the back of his mind and refused to be put down until it had been properly understood. He had dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth in all its forms. He had unraveled things far older and far stranger than one unnamed apothecary.
He told himself this was simply another puzzle.
He told himself that with the same calm certainty he told himself most things.
What he did not know — could not have known, standing at his desk in Mondstadt with her file open in front of him and the wind pressing against the windows — was that this particular mystery would not stay on paper.
"もしもし! I'm strawberry, the owner of this blog and a fan of Genshin Impact characters as much as you are! (. ❛ ᴗ ❛.). Here is the master list of my current writings, this will be updated while I post new headcanons, drabbles or one-shots.
In case you would like to make a request or ask a question, please go here: Strawberry's requests & rules. Here you will find all the details to make a request.
All being said I say good bye for now, hope you keep wishing and get all the characters you pull for, bye bye! ✦"
⊹⁺₊𓂃⋆⁺₊⊹ Hi there! I'm Strawberry ૮꒰ ˶• ༝ •˶꒱ა ♡. I’m in my 20s and have a heart full of stories to tell. When I’m not here yapping away, you’ll likely find me lost in lines of code late into the night or gently navigating my mental health ♡.
In those rare, quiet moments when I’m free, my introverted soul loves nothing more than curling up with a book, sketching, or getting cozy with some video games. Please feel free to say hi! I speak English, Japanese, and Spanish—along with a little bit of Russian and German. Don't be shy, I promise I don't bite!
Here is my masterlist and the rules for making a request. I hope to see you soon! じゃあね~♡ ⊹⁺₊𓂃⋆⁺₊⊹
