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“One glass of red wine for a Ms Megistus.”
Mona raised her head from her notebook to see Diluc standing in front of her. She thanked him as he placed the glass on the table before her.
“Slow night?” she asked, looking across the floor at the handful of patrons sat around their tables, lit by the warm glow of the Angel's Share's nocturnal lamps. That same glow caught Diluc's ponytail as he took a seat across from her, making his red hair burn like flames.
“The Cat's Tail is running a TCG tournament,” said Diluc. “Though you probably knew that already, didn't you?”
Mona smiled around a sip of her wine. It was always endearing how unsure Diluc sounded when talking about her astrology.
“My insight usually comes at random,” she said. “But indeed, I did sense some kind of commotion at the Cat's Tail as I left my house.”
It helped, of course, that Mona's house was just a street away from the tavern, and the 'insight' in question was the sound of TCG players and punters loudly congregating outside its doors. But Diluc didn't need to know that. Better to let the mystery remain.
“I'm sure things will pick up towards the weekend,” she offered.
“Mm.” Diluc rubbed his jawline with gloved fingers. “Not that I'd say no to a quieter evening every now and then.”
Mona was inclined to agree with him. While there was something to be said for a full tavern bustling with cheer, she'd always preferred it a little calmer like this. The quiet gave her space to think and work on her notes in preparation for her next Steambird article. She'd been coming to the Angel's Share to do her work of an evening more and more recently, sitting in her corner and sipping wine until her brain became too comfortably muddled to concentrate anymore. It wasn't the most orthodox way of organising her research, but it certainly beat sitting alone in her study every night of the week, and the setting made her feel like she was at least trying to be social, even if she rarely ended up talking to anyone that wasn't Diluc or Charles.
She watched now as a man slowly meandered his way to the counter while digging into his coin purse. Diluc sighed and made to stand up, though not before his gaze drifted over to a lone figure sitting in the far corner. His eyes lingered on him deliberately for a few seconds.
“Someone you know?” Mona asked.
Diluc shook his head. “Looks like an outlander.”
Mona was hardly surprised. The Angel's Share was something of a tourist destination in Mondstadt, after all, famed for its local beers and wines. It only made sense they received their fair amount of travellers. When she mentioned this to Diluc, he nodded and stood up.
“Just be careful. He's been looking over at you a lot.”
The line sent a chill down Mona's spine.
She waited until Diluc had returned to the counter before sneaking a proper look at the outlander. He was sat at an angle that meant Mona could only see his back and a slither of his profile. Just as Diluc had pointed out, he seemed to be an outlander, his flowing white kimono-like shirt and the wide-brimmed hat resting against his chair reminiscent of Inazuma. His hair was dark and neatly cut to his neck, and his posture was almost rigid compared to the Mondstadters slouched and leaning over the tables near him.
Just then, he turned his head to the side slightly, and Mona caught the sight of a sharp profile and a pair of dark eyes looking over at her.
The sight of him sent a shiver through her. It was an odd feeling, close to familiarity, even though she was certain she'd never seen the man in her life. She turned her head away, expecting the sensation to fade, but it continued to linger in her chest, as unnerving as it was strangely nostalgic.
Just ignore him, she told herself. Most likely she was simply misinterpreting an amorous gaze. It wasn't unusual for people to take an interest in her, especially with a few drinks inside them. Most of the time, she politely turned down their advances, and that was the end of that. Only once had Diluc had to make his presence known. Naturally, the situation had resolved itself quickly enough.
Mona turned back to the notebook on her table and picked up her pencil. She could already feel the warmth from the two glasses of wine she'd had spreading through her veins and leaving her mind fuzzy at the edges. It took her several seconds to reread through her notes and catch onto the train of thought she'd been following before Diluc had interrupted her. Ah. That was right. She'd been writing about the dangers of forbidden knowledge and how relying too hard on the stars could be a budding astrologist's downfall. A less-than-cheerful subject, but one that was shaping up to be an interesting article her editor would surely love.
She'd only just put pencil to paper, however, when she sensed a presence behind her.
“What are you writing?”
Mona knew who it was before she'd even turned around. Sure enough, she lifted her head to see him standing over her, a look of mild interest on his face.
“Oh. Nothing.”
She was about to flip her notebook shut when the outlander reached down and snatched it off the table.
“Hey! What are you doing?” she hissed.
The man lifted the notebook higher, out of reach of her snatching hands. He snorted. “'Forbidden knowledge.' 'Destiny.' Doing a little research project, are you?”
At last, Mona managed to grab the book from his hands. Her face was burning. In her peripheral vision, she could see Diluc staring over at her.
“For your information, I'm writing an article for a magazine,” she snapped. “And I don't appreciate you touching my things.”
The man's mocking smile widened a little, and for a moment, Mona thought he was going to retaliate. Then he shrugged and said, “My apologies. Would you let me buy you a drink to make up for it?”
Mona should have no – she'd certainly turned down company for less – but she could sense a hint of genuine apology in his tone that cut through the snark. Not only that, but she found her mind drawn back to that strange sense of familiarity she'd felt just now.
Surely that was worth keeping him around for, at least for a little while?
“Fine,” she said at last, folding her arms across her chest.
She watched him walk over to Diluc, who shot Mona a wary look. She gave him a nod. Not a minute later, the man was strutting back to her with a glass of red wine in hand.
“You're not drinking?” she asked.
“They don't have anything I like.”
Mona looked over at the bottles of eclectic wines, beers and spirits arranged on the wall behind the bar, then back at the stranger as he placed the glass before her. He took a seat in the same place Diluc had.
“Have you ever tried dandelion wine?” Mona offered. “It's something of a local speciality here. I've always found it a little too sweet, but lots of people seem to like it.”
“I don't like sweet things,” said the man simply.
“What about beer?”
“I'd sooner drink swill.”
Mona wasn't sure whether he was deliberately trying to be difficult with her, or genuinely did hate the vast majority of alcohol. Either way, it wasn't her business. She finished up her old glass in a couple of sips, then picked up the one the man had brought her. To her relief, Diluc had given her the same as before.
“So, what does a vagrant from Inazuma drink on his travels, then?”
The man's head snapped around to her. “What did you just call me?”
The sharpness in his voice took Mona aback. She frowned. “Well, you're a traveller, aren't you? And your clothes look Inazuman to me. Correct me if I'm wrong, of course.”
She wasn't wrong. She rarely ever was. Sure enough, the man's expression softened a little, a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth.
“Very impressive,” he said in a tone laced with sarcasm. “Anything else you want to point out while you're at it?”
Mona sensed he was mocking her, but she took the invitation anyway. Her eyes travelled over his clothing once more, taking in the thin black gauntlets wrapped around his hands, the gold lock-like pendant hanging from his neck. When she reached his lips, her breath hitched involuntarily.
“That ornament on your chest,” she said, quickly turning away. “You keep a Vision there, don't you?”
The man balanced his elbow against the table and leant his chin on his hand. If he'd noticed anything strange going on with Mona, then he didn't show it. His smile widened.
“How observant you are. But the real question is, what kind of Vision?”
Mona stared at the empty space on his chest, glad for the distraction. In the back of her mind, she heard a rustling, like the play of the leaves on a windy day.
“Anemo.”
“Correct.”
“Why aren't you wearing it?”
“I don't like to draw attention to myself.”
Mona almost laughed at the irony. If only he knew how much his so-called low-key behaviour had attracted Diluc's eye this evening. Not that much escaped the young master in his own tavern.
Hearing her reaction, the stranger cocked his head. “Something amuse you?”
Mona grimaced into her wine. “I'm just trying to work you out.”
A harder task than I thought, she told herself. The sole consolation, she supposed, was that a Vision meant a constellation she could read. Mona had lost count of the number of times she'd been asked if she could determine a person's whole life story and future from looking at their constellation, a popular lie she tried to dispel where she could. In reality, the stars revealed as little or much as they wanted to, and often the truths that did come to light were as abstract as the web of fate itself, even for an experienced astrologist like Mona to read. Of course, she rarely dug more deeply than she needed. If there was one thing her master had taught her, it was that nothing good came to those who tampered with fate.
The sound of a chair creaking snapped Mona's attention from her thoughts. The man was leaning back to cross his legs. Despite the fact he was clearly more relaxed now, there was still a rigidness to his shoulders. Mona wondered whether it was simply force of habit.
He held out a hand, palm up. It took Mona a moment to realise he was indicating for her to give him her glass. She hesitated before grudgingly handing it over. He had paid for it, after all.
It was as she was retracting her hand that the tip of Mona's finger brushed his, and she felt a flash of that strange feeling all over again. This time, it manifested as a tightness in her chest, one that had her heart jumping and a warmth spreading through her.
The man took a long drink and paused to savour the taste. He shrugged. “Not as bad as I remember.” When he went to gave it back to Mona, she raised a hand.
“Keep it. I'm finished for the night.”
Archons knew her head was swirling enough as it was.
“Something the matter?” asked the man, a look of concern on his face.
Mona hummed softly. She could have lied and said no, but with the way the discomfort she felt was growing, she sensed there was only a certain amount of time before she couldn't hide it anymore.
“I just...” She turned to face the man properly, leaning on an elbow as he'd been doing a minute before. “I can't shake the feeling that I've met you before.”
Mona could have imagined it, but she swore the man's shoulders stiffened.
“It's a possibility,” he said. “This isn't the first time I've been to Mondstadt. Perhaps you saw me in a crowd once?”
“Perhaps,” Mona mumbled. Still, it felt like more than that.
“I wouldn't overthink it. The less you know about me, the better.”
“Don't do that,” Mona said with a snort.
“What?”
“Just... that.” She gestured towards him. “The whole 'mysterious stranger' act. It doesn't work.”
The man raised his eyebrows, a playfulness to the gesture. “You think I'm trying to impress you?”
“Well, there was a reason you came over to annoy me, wasn't there?”
Despite her irritation, Mona could feel a light-heartedness bleeding into her mood, too, no doubt spurred by the fact she'd aired her worry at last. The man smirked and leant over the table. Mona mirrored his action until their faces were close enough that the man could drop his voice to a whisper.
“I came over because I was bored and you looked like the most interesting person in the room. Besides...” He flicked his chin upwards. “If I wanted to impress you, I'd do something like this.”
Mona looked over his shoulder to see Diluc working his way down the bar space. He was just about to reach for a cloth sitting on the countertop when suddenly Mona felt the smallest gust of wind sweep past her and the cloth flew off the edge. Diluc watched it flutter to the floor with lips pursed in pure exasperation.
The joke was immature, childish, and certainly not funny, but it didn't stop Mona from stifling a grin anyway as she pulled away from the stranger. He leant back in his chair and finished the wine in one swig, his dark eyes never leaving her.
“He'll kick you out, you know,” Mona warned him quietly. She could already sense Diluc shooting glances at the pair of them as he walked around the bar to pick up his cloth.
“How? I don't have an Anemo Vision.” The man placed the glass in the centre of the table, where it met the other empty one with a clink. He turned his head to see Mona glaring at him and clicked his tongue. “Fine. I'll apologise in revenue.”
Only when he'd stood up did Mona realise what he meant. She drew in a sharp breath, causing the stranger to turn.
“No?”
Mona paused. She hadn't intended to stay for another drink, but suddenly, the thought of leaving didn't feel as appealing as before. Was that simply because of her tipsiness, or because she felt more relaxed around the stranger now? She glanced up at him as he looked across at the bar – likely for a drier wine, if his claims to hate the sweeter kind were true. He'd certainly peaked Mona's curiosity, and while she had no intention of letting her guard down around him, she saw no harm in talking a little more.
“Yes,” she said with a wave of the hand. “I'll have the same as before.”
The stranger gave a short, theatrical bow of the head. “One glass of wine for a Ms Megistus.”
As he returned to the bar, long white sleeves swinging as he walked, Mona couldn't help but smile to herself again. She reached for her notebook and scribbled down a few notes while she waited, if only to have something to do that wasn't staring at the back of his head.
Strange, she thought to herself absently. I don't remember telling him my name.
*
It was gone midnight by the time Mona finally left the Angel's Share on the stranger's arm.
“I told you, I can walk fine on my own,” she insisted, but the man just snorted.
“You tripped over a crack in the floorboards. If I let you loose out here, I'll end up scraping you off the cobblestones with a broken nose.”
Mona wanted to tell him that wasn't true, but she didn't have the energy for it, so instead, she let him lead her back through the softly-lit streets towards the main square. Plus, as much as she hated to admit it, the feeling of his hand on her waist wasn't the worst in the world.
She glanced up at him as they walked. He was finally wearing the hat she'd spotted by his chair, a huge thing made even more extravagant by the bells that jingled softly at the ends of hanging ribbons with each step he took. Not that Mona had ever shown restraint with her own choice of headwear. She'd wrapped her mage's hat around her notebook and now clutched both underneath her arm.
She hadn't been able to glean much from her hours-long conversation with the stranger. They'd kept the subjects mostly to small talk: their individual travels through the seven nations; the upcoming Windblume festival in Mondstadt; the recent troubles in Sumeru with the Akademiya (during which the man had fallen quiet a few times, something that hadn't escaped Mona's notice). Once or twice, she'd started on a wine-fuelled tangent about something astrological, even opened up her notebook to show him diagrams before realising it was something he probably didn't want to hear about. Nevertheless, he'd listened to the end without complaint, even if his eyes had betrayed his waning attention.
The sound of running water up ahead signalled that they were approaching the main square with its fountain. From there, they took a left towards the main gates, then a right into the back streets. The Cat's Tail still had its lights on, and the last thing Mona wanted was to draw attention to the fact she was letting a stranger accompany her home – a rather pointless exercise, she realised now, given that everyone had already seen her leave the Angel's Share with him.
“We're here,” Mona said when she glimpsed her house up ahead. She tried to untangle herself from the man's grip, but he still insisted on walking her up the wooden steps of her porch with his hand on her waist. Only then did he finally let her go.
“You live alone?” he asked while Mona placed her things on the ground so that she could dig into her pocket for the key.
She smiled to herself. “And I suppose this is the point where you expect me to invite you inside.” Then she paused. “You do have a place to stay tonight, don't you?”
The man crossed his arms. “Don't worry about me.”
That was something else Mona had noticed during their evening together. Whenever she'd asked the man a question about himself, his responses had come back dry. In fact, aside from a few anecdotes, she could safely say that she knew no more about him now than she did when they'd first met.
Her fingers closed around the key, but instead of slotting it into the lock straight away, she turned back to the man. He was looking up at the hanging baskets on the first floor, the moonlight falling across his pale face and catching the golden frame of his hat. Again, Mona found her eyes lingering on his lips.
It's the alcohol, she told herself. What else could explain the return of that strange feeling as she stared at him now? It was almost as if... No, that was impossible.
As if she'd felt those lips against her own once.
Suddenly, her vision was swimming. She raised a hand to find tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. The man frowned at her.
“Are you crying?”
“I don't know,” said Mona truthfully, and even her voice trembled around the words. “I think so. I mean... I have no idea why.”
None of it made any sense. She had no attachment to this stranger, yet here she was crying at the thought of him leaving nonetheless. How could she possibly begin to explain that to him in a way that didn't make her look crazy?
The man took a step towards her, and she jumped back. Her shoulders hit the door.
“I'm sorry. I don't know what's happening,” she wept. “It's just the weirdest feeling. Like déjà vu but... stronger, somehow. I know I've met you before, right here in this city. But I can't say when, or how, or...”
As her voice dissolved into a frustrated sigh, the man took a tentative step forward again. This time, Mona didn't stop him. He placed a hand on her waist, his skin surprisingly warm through the thin material of her leotard.
She stared down at the pendant around his neck, if only to avoid looking into his eyes. What she would find there, she had no idea. Sympathy? Bewilderment? Or something deeper, something that would explain the tears that continued to spill uncontrollably down her cheeks.
“Archons, I don't even know your name,” she muttered.
“If I told you, you'd forget it by morning,” the stranger said softly.
Mona wanted to tell him she wasn't that drunk, but she had a feeling that wasn't what he was talking about. She tilted her head upwards to look up at the sky. The city had been blanketed by clouds over the past few days, making any kind of astrology near impossible. Tonight, though, the stars were out in full, twinkling down like a sea of distant lanterns. A private show just for the pair of them.
“It was fate that we met tonight, and I think fate is trying to tell me something,” said Mona.
The man scoffed. “We met because I walked over to you. There's nothing else to it.”
“And why is that?” Mona dropped her gaze to his face, but still, she found she couldn't look into his eyes directly. “Why me? There were others drinking alone in that tavern, and I'm sure you've met all kinds of 'interesting' people in this city. But you chose me.”
Her words left a silence in their wake, one that seemed to stretch into minutes. At last, Mona felt something warm on her cheek. The man brushed away her tears with his thumb, one side and then the other. His hand lingered on her jaw.
“Perhaps I simply wanted one final drink with an old enemy.”
Before Mona could process what that was supposed to mean, the man leant forward and pressed his lips to hers. The images that followed hit her all at once: a taunting smile flashed at her from a cliff's edge; the burn of Electro, a hand seizing her throat while a voice roared her name; the dapple of morning sunlight on naked skin and fingers tangled between sheets. Each swept through Mona with the intensity of storm winds, utterly foreign yet undeniably familiar; like memories viewed through a sheet of glass, melting away on this stranger's lips.
When she pulled away, Mona was breathless, aching. She stared at the man. “Enemies.”
He nodded.
It was the act Mona had been putting off since they'd arrived on her porch. She took her time studying his face, the painful familiarity in the shape of his nose, the curve of his cheeks. As she finally turned her gaze to his eyes, the emotion she found there made her freeze.
He was hurting, just like her.
Mona let him pull away slowly, his hand slipping from her jaw. Just before he could turn, she grabbed his wrist. He stared back at her expectantly.
But what was there to say? Which words could possibly wring some kind of sense out of this situation?
Mona had no answer to that question; and so, she let him go.
She watched him vault over the railing of her porch and land on the ground below. His hat ribbons fluttered as he walked, heels clicking against the cobblestones. When he turned the corner and disappeared from sight, Mona felt like a weight had been lifted from her chest as much as a void had opened up inside. Her fingers drifted upwards to slowly trace her lips.
Perhaps I simply wanted one final drink with an old enemy.
Clenching her jaw, Mona traced a circle in the air. A constellation shimmered into life before her, the vivid blue stars connecting to form the shape of a figure. It took her a moment to work out it was a doll. The name came to her as easily as a whisper on the breeze: Peregrinus. The outlander from afar. The wanderer. She probed a little more, magnified the lines of the circle and peered between the stars.
Her eyes flew wide.
“Wait!” Mona called him.
She swiped a hand through the constellation to dismiss it and jumped down the steps. Her heels wobbled on the stones, but she managed to catch her balance and started to run in the direction the man had gone. If she was fast enough, then she could surely catch him before he got back to the gates.
But as she turned the corner, her heart fell. The street was empty. She dashed along it to the end, peered along the adjoining one, and then the next. Nobody was there. The man was gone.
With a sigh of disappointment, Mona began to trudge back to her house. If only she'd have turned her head up at that moment, she might have glimpsed the figure crouched behind the chimney of the building above, staring down at her over the eaves.