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The wanderer first meets Childe on a sunny day in Lumine’s teapot.
Lumine’s teapot is pleasant - She’s set it up to look like the floating isles of the dreams that the Aranara inhabit, and she’s decorated it tastefully with brightly coloured flowers, blooming beautifully under the artificial sun of her teapot realm, and intricately carved stone fountains, with calm, flowing waters.
Perhaps that’s why he makes the mistake of lingering so long.
By all accounts, their meeting is perfectly normal. Childe introduced himself easily, and his well-practiced smile widens into a genuine one when he spots the anemo vision hanging off the wanderer’s vision. He sidles up to him smoothly and asks a bemused wanderer if they could maybe spar. Childe’s not expected to be anywhere in the next few hours and he’s sure it would do them both good to get a spot of exercise in, and hey, hydro visions are pretty rare so wouldn’t the wanderer like the opportunity to see how it works in combat?
Childe’s too excited, too taken in by the presence of another vision holder and the opportunity for a good fight to have noticed Paimon’s eyes flicking between them rapidly with an odd expression on her face, only keeping her mouth shut because of Lumine’s pointed glare.
The wanderer plasters on a bland smile, “I’m afraid I’m not feeling up to sparring right now.”
“Ah.” Childe visibly loses interest, turning away from the wanderer. “Well, if you change your mind, comrade, I’ll be in the area for the next few days,” Childe says, fingers drumming against his leg, impatiently waiting for Lumine to leave with him for whatever commission they were both about to embark on.
The wanderer waves him and Lumine off, pointedly ignoring Lumine’s searching glance as the trio walks past him towards one of the strange devices that Lumine claims allows her to ‘teleport’ to and fro.
“It was nice to meet you.”
That’s a lie, of course. Their introduction was a rather dull conversation that was unfortunately a necessary part of making polite conversation when meeting a new person, and Childe had immediately tried to cajole the wanderer into sparring with him. His paper-thin veneer of good manners dissolved so quickly, it was almost funny. Hardly a nice meeting, the wanderer would think.
It’s also a lie because this is far from the first time they’ve met.
The first time they’d actually met was when the wanderer had gone by the name of - well, that wasn’t important anymore.
The news had already spread that Pulcinella had gone and picked up some kid from his last journey into Snezhnaya’s barren countryside. The wanderer’s men had whispered about how the child had been cursed by a witch living in the frozen forests that swallowed a majority of the desolated western frontier of Sneznaya, only broken up by tiny settlements dotting the countryside, connected by fragile supply lines.
A demon child who’d brought calamity and ruin to every village he’d been let loose on. Alexei from the combat engineering division swore that he had a friend who’d had a friend who’d had been sent on a rescue mission for one of these camps and they hadn’t been able to find any of the men or their corpses. They’d only found bones with all scraps of flesh picked clean off, but all the animals in the area had long since fled. Most of the bones had been drained of marrow.
Natalya, a new transfer into the mirror maiden programme, piped up, she’d heard that not only that, their tents had been eviscerated, but it hadn’t been the usual signs of battle, no, there were teeth and claw marks in the metal posts propping up the tents and some foul, stinking liquid sprayed across the battlefield that ate through fabric when touched by it.
(Signora laughed at the rumours. A demon child? No, she’d seen Pulcinella’s little mongrel and he’d been nothing more than a half-starved brat. Certainly, a cut above, combat-wise, from the regular Fatui recruit but that was a low, low bar.
Columbina chimed in dreamily, “Signora’s right. He’s like a little puppy - all bark, no bite.” She tilted her head, wings fluttering in the glacial wind of Zapolyarny palace, and giggled. “He ran away from me, you know? Adorable.”
Her smile widened imperceptibly, eyes gleaming an unearthly red. “Maybe I’ll catch him next time.”)
Still, while his men likely had half a brain cell to rub together between them and could hardly be trusted to relay information accurately, the wanderer hadn’t expected this.
This being a shock of ginger hair, freckles and skinned knees in the form of a tiny slip of a child standing on a stool in their field kitchen, aggressively stirring a pot of concerningly red-coloured soup as Fatui agents more than twice his size cowered behind him.
In the wanderer’s long centuries of living, he’d honestly thought he’d seen it all, but the sight of a runt of a boy waving his wooden spoon around pointedly as he scolded grizzled soldiers in a thick western Snezhnayan accent - “How do you city folk even survive if you don’t know how to cook basic meals? Dmitri, start chopping the leek now, or do you not even know how to do that?” - was certainly one of the more interesting ones he’d laid his eyes on.
The wanderer watched them, out of sight behind a wall, as the Fatui soldiers scurried about, fetching, peeling and chopping ingredients under the boy’s stern gaze. The colour of the soup deepened, and while visually, it looked like the mangled remains of one of Capitano’s victims on the battlefield, it certainly smelled - acceptable. Rich, salty and fragrant.
Not that the wanderer was getting hungry or anything.
The soldiers began to chatter excitedly as they portioned out the soup, with the boy sighing exaggeratedly as he watched them, hand on hips. “I hope you lot actually learned something from all of this.”
There was a weirdly domestic atmosphere in the kitchen as the soldiers milled about, some stuffing their faces with soup, some washing the dirty pots and cutting boards.
The boy watched them, not quite smiling or engaging in any conversation. The wanderer watched as the little boy took small mouthfuls of his soup listlessly, caged in by the broader shoulders of men and women almost thrice his age, looking almost … lonely.
Something about the scene, harmless as it may be, sat unpleasantly in the wanderer’s stomach, thick and oily. The wanderer tried to push the boy's face, eyes downturned and mouth set in a firm line, out of his mind as he left the kitchen.
He’d wasted far too much time here.
The next time he sees the boy, he was crouching in an alcove of the corridor separating the wanderer’s quarters and Dottore’s. The boy was pale-faced, flecks of dried saliva at the corner of his mouth. He smelt of antiseptic, barely masking the odour of stale sweat.
The wanderer noticed the swollen scrapes and cuts on his ankles and wrists, the deep red needle marks peppering his arms.
All characteristic of the unfortunate souls who had been tossed into Dottore’s lab.
The wanderer would know, he was rather familiar with the life cycle of Dottore’s subjects, by virtue of being one himself.
The Doctor of the Fatui had been very eager to study an autonomous, intelligent puppet. One created by the electro archon, even. The wanderer hated the idea of being made a lab rat to some Akademiya nutjob, but the Tsaritsa had been clear that this was non-negotiable if he wanted to stay in the Fatui.
So the wanderer had been subject to an unending cycle of venturing into the abyss or, when the Tsaritsa was happier to give him a break, some backwater part of the nation and coming back, broken limbs and shattered skin to Dottore’s operating table
The feeling of cold metal against his back, scalpels cutting into his skin, wires welded to his muscles and the glaring white light of the overhead bulb, felt more familiar, more tangible than his own Fatui-issued quarters, which had been located near Dottore’s for convenience.
At a certain point, the wanderer had grown used to the endless litany of upgrades, wires replaced, limbs ripped out and grafted back in, if you’d like, Dottore could certainly add a cannon attachment to your new arm component? No? How about a sword attachment then? That would be a little less invasive. No again? What a shame.
Every limb, every artificial bone, every hair on his body had been once replaced by a new model painstakingly crafted by Dottore. The wanderer sometimes wondered if it was still accurate to say that he’d been made by Beelzebul when hardly anything she’d crafted remained within him.
The wanderer snapped back to reality as he heard a sharp inhale.
Ah. The boy noticed him, body stiffening as his eyes flicked between the wanderer and the door that led back to Dottore’s quarters.
After a beat, the boy tentatively spoke up. “Mister - would you let me stay in your quarters for a while? Please? Just until the day ends, I swear.”
The wanderer tilted his head, “Why would I do that?”
The boy shrank back, “The loan period for my unit from Lord Harbinger Pulcinella to Lord Harbinger Dottore will end by then.”
The wanderer paused.
He should really refuse. In fact, the wanderer didn’t know why he hadn’t refused the boy from the outset. It was a pain to get himself involved with the Dottore, and he’d really rather deal with him as little as he could, outside of Tsaritsa-required experimentation. And whatever dick-measuring contest the Rooster and the Doctor found themselves in to the point that a unit swap had been mandated sounded like it’d be exhausting to find himself in the middle of.
A little brat certainly wasn’t worth all that.
Yet, when the wanderer opened his mouth, fully intending to tell the kid to fuck off back to Dottore’s lab and deal with it himself, what had come out was, “Come with me.”
(See, the wanderer was, pathetically enough, soft and weak on children. He’d have to turn away when Dottore’s segments had been experimenting on a child as a test subject, and Dottore had must have noticed because there was always, always a child in the room with him when Dottore carried out his maintenance, watching them with vacant eyes and reddened skin.)
The boy's face brightened, “Okay.”
In the darkness of the alcove, he could have sworn that the young boy's eyes were pitch black but as they step out of the alcove and into the brighter corridor, they were a regular shade of blue, a little dull and clouded, like unpolished agate but blue nonetheless.
Out of the corner of his eye, the wanderer noticed as the light caught something .. metallic protruding from the skin of the boy’s shoulder, like dark indigo scales forcing its way through skin. The boy quickly slapped his hand over his shoulder when he saw the wanderer looking.
Curious. But none of the wanderer’s business.
The wanderer opened the door to his room. The boy peered into the room, eyes squinting as he tried to take the contours of the dimly lit room, before stepping in and promptly stumbling over a cabinet, which then toppled over the wanderer’s tea set.
“S-sorry.”
The little brat was really dead set on making the wanderer regret his decision, wasn’t he? What a shame, he’d like that set too.
The wanderer sighed, “Be still. Or you don’t get to stay.”
The boy stood up straight, arms clasped behind his back and feet spread in a perfect parade rest, almost comically rigid.
Adorable. The wanderer bit the inside of his cheek to stop himself from laughing.
The wanderer busied himself with the bureaucratic tedium of paperwork for some mission or the other he’d completed a few months ago, but it wasn’t long until the boy began to fidget again.
Blue eyes peered up at him from below his desk, as the boy chirped, “What’s your name, mister? I’m Ajax!”
“It doesn’t concern you.”
Ajax fidgeted for a few more seconds before slowly shifting closer to the wanderer. They sat in silence for several minutes, the wanderer finding the warmth emanating from the figure sitting close to him almost - soothing. And then the wanderer felt small hands wrap around his elbow - his very obviously artificial joint.
“Woah, cool!”, Ajax exclaimed.
The wanderer stood shock still for a moment, it had been a long, long time since he’d been touched by warm, human hands, rather than the cold press of metal and latex, before he remembered himself and jerked away from the boy.
He barked at him, “Do not touch me.”
Ajax shrank back and his face fell, and the wanderer would not feel bad for rebuking an idiotic, nosy child, not at all.
Shit. He felt bad. But before the wanderer could open his mouth to begrudgingly apologise, Ajax peered up at him consideringly, face scrunched up in concentration.
“Hey, mister?”, the boy began, tentatively. “Um … my body is also - kinda strange too.” The boy gestured at his shoulder, in full view now that it wasn’t blocked by his hand. And the metallic protrusions on the boy’s shoulder, now that the wanderer had a better view of it, seemed to look like the beginnings of a shoulder plate extending out from within the boy’s skin.
“Look! Sometimes, if I get really angry or excited or scared or um - you get the idea, I grow armour and other stuff like claws and a cape and I get really tall.”
The wanderer blinked, this boy really didn’t have a lick of common sense, revealing his clearly dangerous combat technique to a complete stranger.
“And -”, Ajax pressed his lips together, “Some people can get a little freaked out about it but like - they just don’t get that it makes us super cool and crazy strong in fights.”
The boy smiled at him, eyes bright even in the gloom of the wanderer’s poorly lit room. “And it’s not their fault that they don’t know but - you shouldn’t let it get to you.”
The wanderer stared at him for a moment, stunned - Did that child think he needed reassurance? The idea of a child trying to encourage the wanderer to be more self-confident was so absurdly laughable that the wanderer couldn’t muster the energy to stay upset at Ajax. He snorted and patted Ajax on the shoulder, “Good one, kid.”
Ajax’s eyebrows furrowed in confusion before he shrugged and clambered back to the wanderer’s side like nothing had happened.
Ah, children and their short-term memory.
Still, the wanderer couldn’t help but think that it was nice that the kid was so comfortable in his own skin. It was a rarer quality than most people would think.
The time ticked by, and the wanderer slowly worked through his paperwork. The sound of his pen scratching against his paper, and Ajax’s chattering was oddly peaceful. By the time the clock struck six, Ajax had been halfway through telling the bemused wanderer an elaborate story about knights, dragons and death lasers.
They both looked up as they heard the bells chime in the distance, signifying Ajax’s freedom from Dottore’s clutches. Ajax smiled at him and pried open the window by the wanderer’s study, “See you soon, mister.”
The boy jumped out of the third-story window, clearly one for dramatics even in his goodbyes. The wanderer couldn’t help but laugh. As he closed the window, he looked down and saw a small figure raise his arm in a goodbye before running off into the distance
The wanderer hadn’t interacted much with the child after that. Not until the boy had been inducted as a harbinger.
By that point, Childe (who had finally gotten the good sense to adopt a code name) had gained a certain notoriety within the Fatui. It wasn’t just his overwhelming battle-lust and propensity for dragging random soldiers into the sparring range and thoroughly beating them into the dirt but also the infamously long and fawning tales of his family that he would spontaneously launch into, and apparently he even roped some of his subordinates in to act them out sometimes.
It was impossible to stop when he started, and at that point, the entire army could probably recite word for word how Childe’s precious little brother had lost his first tooth by sledding down a slope in their backyard and colliding with a tree - but he hadn’t even cried because he was just so strong, wasn’t he?
Fortunately, Childe seemed to have two brain cells to rub together beneath his layers of muscle, and he had the good sense to omit their names or personal identifiers.
Still, it had been a while since the wanderer had seen Childe, instead of hearing of him from the grapevine.
It made a ridiculous picture, Pierro pinning the harbinger insignia to Childe’s lapel, as Childe stared up at the Tsaritsa in reverence, mouth agape, eyes widened, and face flushed, either from the cold or sheer religious fervour.
As he gave the perfunctory acceptance speech expected out of ceremonies of certain pomp and circumstance, he wanderer noticed that the lilting tones and drawls of his old western accent had been drilled away, replaced by the crisp, even syllables of Zapolyarny Pronunciation.
Shame, it had given him a certain charm. Still, it seemed to creep back in when he got excited or agitated.
The wanderer watched dispassionately, as the boy he remembered from all those years ago threw away his life. He wondered why someone like Childe, so human and so full of life, would let himself be reduced to a mere weapon for the Tsaritsa when he could have been so much more. For the wanderer, the choice was natural. The Tsaritsa’s insane and heretical plans would be a more interesting experience than mindlessly letting the centuries pass him by. And on a certain level, utility gave a puppet like him worth.
But that wasn’t true at all for Childe. The wanderer sighed, what a waste of human life.
But then Childe finished his speech and made eye contact with the wanderer. His expression brightened as he saw the wanderer, and smiled at him. The wanderer’s breath caught in his throat, as the sight of Childe’s smile jolted him right out of his internal monologue.
(Despite the pointlessness of the whole ceremony, Childe looked good like that, cheeks a delicate pink from excitement and the snowflakes that clung to his lashes a startling white.)
There is perhaps, one memory of Childe that the wanderer keeps going back to, a small moment within the unending drudgery of life in the Fatui that the wanderer can’t let go of, and holds close to his chest greedily.
It happened on a joint mission that both Childe and the wanderer were sent on in the mountains of northern Snezhnaya - to recover a stolen artefact of the Tsaritsa’s or something along those lines. An unexpectedly harsh blizzard had hit the mountain ranges they’d been combing through, and they’d had to seek refuge in a cave.
They were prepared for cold - they’d worn their cold weather gear and brought insulated tents, thermal blankets, and pyro smile condensate for emergencies but it was barely enough. In the end, they’d laid their clothes, soaked from getting caught in a snowslide, to dry by a pyro lamp, pushed their thermal blankets together, and huddled against each other for warmth.
They laid there, limbs tangled and bodies pressed against each other as they waited out the cold. The wanderer hadn’t been so close to someone, for such an extended period of time since Niwa, and the feeling of warm skin against his was disturbingly soothing.
He could even feel Childe’s heartbeat, thrumming against the wanderer’s hollow cavern of a chest. Childe muttered something in his sleep, curling further into the wanderer's body, the wanderer greedily letting him come closer and closer. He shifted his body so he could raise his hand against Childe’s nape, brushing aside strands of hair to loosely cup his neck and feel his pulse.
The planes of Childe’s body that he could see were littered with countless scars. Soon he’d be more scar tissue than unblemished skin, like his body was a canvas for a twisted entity who was intent on marring Childe’s skin. Childe was so reckless , throwing away his humanity and precious life in the pursuit of glory. None of them mattered in the end, for even a puppet like the wanderer could obtain power but nothing could recreate the flesh, blood and soul that made up Childe.
He wondered what Childe’s family would think of him, discarding his safety to be a weapon for the Tsaritsa. He’d never been to Childe’s family home, nor had he ever seen his family, but the wanderer pictured a wooden house covered in snow like a gingerbread house dusted with icing sugar. Warm yellow light emanated from the window, as the sound of laughter and the scent of freshly made stew drifted out of the house. He saw pink-cheeked, red-headed miniature versions of Childe smiling brightly at him, their furred coats speckled with glinting grains of snow.
How could Childe even bear to spend a single second away from them?
Childe shifted again in his sleep, arms wrapping themselves tighter against the wanderer. The wanderer shivered as he remembers the sensation of smaller hands wrapped around his elbow - so long ago but the feeling was still stark in his mind. The wanderer hated being touched, but somehow, it felt almost right around Childe. He - didn’t mind this. Being pressed up against him, chest to chest, bodies so close that the wanderer could almost believe that the thrumming of a heart he felt came from his own ribcage. He moved his other hand to Childe’s neck, just to let himself feel Childe’s pulse a little more intimately.
And then those blue eyes opened, Childe making a soft sound as he slowly gained awareness. His gaze, still heavy from drowsiness, shifted to the wanderer’s hands, still wrapped around his neck. Childe hummed, “... what’s up?”
The wanderer’s throat dried up, and he whispered hoarsely, “Can I keep doing this?”
Childe closed his eyes again, burrowing his head in the blankets around them, “ … you can be really weird, you know. But if it’s you, then it’s fine.”
For the next few hours, they stayed there like that. Cocooned from the cacophony and the stench of the outside world by the cave, and then their tent, and then their blankets, and then each other’s embrace. The wanderer would have stayed like that forever if he could
As the wanderer drifts along the glittering streets of Sumeru, dotted with the warm glow of light emanating from stained windows and curved street lamps, back to the room provided by him by Lesser Lord Kusanali ( Nahida, she would chide him gently if she overheard him addressing her in that way) to retire for the night, the wanderer finds himself thinking about what Childe meant by the words “if it’s you.”
For all the time they spent together, he doesn’t know if Childe had ever felt the same pull to him that the wanderer had to him. It would have been nice, if in that previous world, the one that existed before he’d wiped it away, Childe had also felt something - special, for the wanderer.
He tried for so long to convince himself that he looked down on Childe. When the traveller asked him of his opinion of Childe he said what he knew to be true - he didn’t lie. Childe is dull, weak and yet so covetous. That is his opinion.
But he did … omit certain personal details. Because how could he explain how warm Childe’s arm was that night? How easily he had let the wanderer close? There is an odd sentimentality when he thinks about the night he spent huddling against Childe in the cold, the memory hazy and dream-like, that he could never articulate or hope to explain.
Besides, it wouldn’t matter since that moment was erased from time. The odd camaraderie they sometimes shared never existed at all.
The last time he saw Childe before everything was in Zapolyarny palace.
The towering walls of crystalline ice surrounded them, the light refracting off of the walls cast a pale shadow on Childe. With the Tsaritsa’s plan finally coming into motion, the disparate harbingers would now be cast out into the far-flung corners of the continent, like chess pieces on a board that spanned the entirety of Teyvat. Hardly any of them would remain in Zapolyarny anymore, and Childe, in particular, was due to embark on his long-term mission to Liyue Harbour.
Childe had been rambling about his family again, “It takes at least a month for letters to arrive in Liyue from Snezhnaya. I’ve been spending time with the kids recently to make up for my absence, but I think that’s only made them even more attached.:
The wandered scoffed, “You’re not suited for this kind of work at all.”
In the distance, the bells of Zapolyarny palace chimed.
Childe didn’t grimace or even laugh it off like the wanderer expected. Another second ticked by, and Childe huffed out a laugh, breath condensing in the frigid air. “I was thinking the same thing about you.”.
The wanderer raised his eyebrows sceptically.” You’ve never once beaten me in a spar.”
“No, it’s not that,” Childe shook his head and paused for a moment looking at the wanderer consideringly, “It’s just -".
He took a breath, and cringed a little before his expression hardened, like he knew something about to blow up in his face but was resolved to see it through anyway
“I know why I’m here. I’m not blind to the sins committed in the Tsaritsa’s name, or to every last Snezhnayan sacrificed for her plan, but I know my place is by her side - and when her dream is achieved, I’ll conquer the whole world.”
“But you,” Childe met his gaze impassionately, eyes like hard chips of ice, “you don’t really believe in anything the Fatui do, do you? Don’t you have a dream? A goal? Isn’t there something you want out of this life? Whatever it is, it’s obvious that it’s not here.”
The wanderer blinked, and then Childe’s words registered.
“How - dare you.” He could barely hear his own voice over the rush of blood in his ears, rage so overwhelming that his nerves felt like they were lit on fire.
How dare Childe look at him like he thought he knew him, like he could see right through the wanderer, and act as if he could tell the wanderer how he felt.
What did Childe know of desire? Anything he’d ever set his mind to, anything little childhood fantasy he’d dreamt up in his mind could not compare to the centuries the wanderer had spent feeling empty and alone, so worn down that he could barely muster the energy to drink water and eat.
He distantly heard himself speak, “You don’t know a single thing about me.”
Childe stared at him, mouth twisting downwards into a hard, unyielding line.
For an unbroken moment, it was eerily silent, with the only sound the wanderer could hear being the wind whistling through the frigid mountaintops, but the wanderer’s anger built and built and built until he felt like a bomb waiting to go off, waiting for a stray spark to explode and level things to the ground.
And then Childe opened his mouth again, “You don’t seem to know anything about you either. Tell me, Scaramouche, what do you want ?”
And - something in the wanderer, the hard, ugly edge of a sentiment long since crushed in the ground with everything the wanderer ever cared about crumbled.
He’d had enough of this.
He spat out, bitterly, “I’m not capable of wanting anything. That’s the problem.”
He spun on his heel and left, but not before he heard Childe sigh.
The next day, the wanderer was dispatched to Inazuma.
When that pink-haired hag gave him Beelzebul’s gnosis, he wanted so, so, so badly, and yet he couldn't help but remember Childe's words.
(Is that what you want? )
Fuck off.
(As the wander lays in his bed, he wonders if, in the end, Childe had hated him. They hadn’t exactly parted on a pleasant note.
Maybe this was for the best.
The wanderer closes his eyes and lets his mind drift into the warm, comforting darkness that was oblivion. )
“ … hear …me? ”
There was someone calling out to him in the distance. The wanderer sighs and rolls over, trying to burrow himself into his pillows to drown out the noise and fall into a deeper sleep.
“ … hey …”
Again? Ugh, It was far too much effort to move his eyelids.
“Scaramouche ?”
His eyes fly open.
He’s sitting by a lake, bare feet dipping into the cool, clear water. The lake stretched outward into the horizon, warm whorls of sunset sky dying the water a rich orange.
“There you are.”
He turns his head towards the voice and Childe is sitting across from him, jacket discarded behind him and smiling at him carelessly.
He looks good like this, ginger hair falling messily into his eyes and freckled skin glowing in the warm light of sunset. The wanderer never thought he’d see -
Oh.
“I’m dreaming.”
Childe tilts his head. “Are you disappointed?”
“I - why are you here?”
“It’s your dream.”
Fair enough.
They sit together in silence for a moment. A breeze sweeps over them, gently ruffling Childe’s hair. For a moment, the wanderer idly thought about fixing Childe’s hair, letting his fingers graze on ginger strands and tucking them back into place.
Archons, he was pathetic.
Childe clears his throat, turning his head to glance at the wanderer “Do you remember what I asked you the last time we saw each other?”
The wanderer turns to look back at Childe and shrugs, “You asked me for a spar.”
Childe huffs out a laugh, “Don’t be like that. You know what I’m talking about.”
(“What do you want, Scara ?”)
The wanderer scoffs. “The last time I wanted something, it didn’t go so well. Or did you forget about how it was literally torn from my chest?”
Beelzebul’s gnosis felt like a jackhammer in his chest, thrumming, and thrumming and thrumming , never slowing down. It was so much , overlapping emotions and currents and voices screaming in his head that it hurt , sparks of pure energy carving Lichtenberg figures deeper and deeper into his skin, cutting flesh, meeting bone and etching itself onto his artificial skeleton. But it still felt better than that emptiness, like being a hollow shell in the crude image of a person.
“Did you really want the gnosis?”
The wanderer narrows his eyes, annoyed. Archons, this man had to be irritating even in his own dream.
“Oh, sure,” the wanderer replies dryly, “I definitely didn’t want the gnosis. I just went along with Dottore’s psychotic plan, subjected myself to his and the Akademiya’s fucked up experiments, and risked death-by-Tsaritsa just ‘cause I don’t even know why, maybe it was just something to do for fun. I got some glorified chess piece out of it but that was totally an incidental thing.”
Childe throws his head back and laughs, and the wanderer has to fight the urge to swallow as he stares at the smooth column of Childe’s neck. Childe’s eyes and nose crinkle as he smiles at the wanderer fondly, before his expression smooths out and grows serious again.
“Very funny, but no. What you wanted was the feeling that you thought the gnosis would give you.”
The wanderer bites out, “I didn’t take you as a pedant.”
“I didn’t take you as the type to play dumb. There’s a difference and you know that.”
“Is there?”
Childe turns towards him, and the wanderer realises just how close they are as he stares at Childe’s face, mere inches away from his own. He could count the freckles dotting Childe’s nose and cheeks. He could pick out individual lashes. He could reach out and - touch him.
“It’s okay to make mistakes. It’s okay to get confused about what your dream is and get lost on the way. But that doesn’t mean you should just give up on what you want.”
“Go away, Childe.”
Childe’s gaze bored into him, infuriatingly calm. “You’re kind of a coward, huh? You run away the moment you get hurt.”
The wanderer clenches his jaw.
“It’s normal,” Childe smiled at him, gently, “It’s our instinctive sense of self-preservation, after all. But it’s time to grow up. In this world, we get hurt. We fail. But we keep going. We keep trying.”
The wanderer sighs, “Why do you even care?”
Childe looks across the lake, watching the sun start to plunge into the lake as it disappears over the horizon, light glittering brilliantly as it refracts off the crests in the water, like thousands of stars living and dying in infinitesimally small fractions of a second.
“You know, it’s not really me, right? I’m just a product of your mind.”
The wanderer blinks, at a loss for words.
“And what I think is that you want to be treated like someone who has desires. You want someone to listen, someone to care about you. Like the real me did, like the others before me did. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here, talking to you like this.”
Childe turns towards the wanderer, dull blue eyes refusing to break eye contact. Some called it unsettling, how dull and lightless his eyes seemed to be. The wanderer would never say it aloud, but he vehemently disagreed. Childe’s eyes reminded him of the oceans off the southern coast of Kannazuka, dark not because they were empty or desolate, but because they were so deep, and there was so much beneath the surface.
Something about that had always appealed to the wanderer.
“So tell me, Scaramouche, in your own words. What do you want? What have you been looking for since you woke up in Shakkei Pavilion? What was it that you thought having a heart would give you?”
There was a time when the smell of burning iron and lightning in the air was comforting to him.
He remembers the feeling of Katsuragi’s calloused hand against his shoulder. The warmth of chazuke, made just for him because he never ate enough, on a cold, wintery night.
Niwa’s smile.
A worn-out doll, lopsided stitches coming apart.
And the wanderer hates that he had an answer. He’d always had an answer, but he’d stuffed his pathetic desires in a little box in his mind and tucked it so deep inside himself for so long that it hurt to remember what it was. A puppet capable of harnessing the power of the gods, dreaming of something so mundane, yet something so out of reach for him? No wonder Beelzebul decided that she’d had enough of her foolish, deluded little creation.
“All I ever wanted was to be human,” The wanderer chokes out. The words almost seem to scald his throat as he expels them. “To have a normal life. It’s so pathetic it’s funny. Why would I want some hag to nag at me constantly? To live in a shitty house and to have mindless conversations with brainless idiot friends and to eat bland, homemade food.”
“What a joke.” The wanderer barks out a laugh, staring at his fists, knuckles white from exertion. He hadn’t noticed that he’d started clenching them.
“But I wouldn’t have minded. Because I would have been so happy.” He feels his eyes begin to well up with tears and hates himself for it. Despite his best efforts to blink them back, small droplets of tears splash onto his lap.
( He was in a cold, empty room, painted violet with shadows. He’d died here, once, his body grafted to a mechanical monstrosity. It towered above everyone in the room, sharp where he was dull, unyielding where he was brittle, he’d once thought it beautiful, in the way that a deer might admire the rich ochre of a tiger’s fur, painted with stark black stripes.
He knew better now.
Arcane wisdom? Divinity? The Shouki No Kami was no miraculous being. It was still a puppet, clothed in cheap pyrite that reflected a lustre far too yellow to be real gold, adorned in garish rhinestones and costume jewellery, and hollow, so hollow on the inside. A sad, pathetic, eyesore of a puppet.
He stared upwards, unable to look at the mausoleum of his foolish, ruined ambitions, upwards towards a ceiling that had no windows but still emanated a pale, gentle light, and he’d begged God, any god, anyone at all to give him an answer.
And someone answered.
“ Whoever has tasted the joys and sorrows of life in the human realm is human. Whoever has loved and lost, cried with grief, howled with rage at the tragedy of death that eclipses the miracle of life... they are human, too .”)
He feels a hand on his shoulder, warm, solid and real, “Why can’t you even let yourself have this one, small thing?”
“Because everyone I ever feel human around always ends up being taken from me. They’re all gone. You’re gone.”
The wandered swallows, wishing those words didn’t leave his mouth. He feels so stupid, like he’s back in Shakkei Pavillion, a pitiful child throwing a tantrum, begging for attention.
But Childe doesn’t ignore him. Instead, he draws the wanderer closer, the warmth of his body so startling that the wanderer has to fight the urge to flinch.
“It hurts, doesn’t it? To be cut loose from everything.” Childe murmurs into his ear, voice low and gentle. “But just because it hurts doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing. It means you have no more burdens. No more strings. The only thing that remains is your knowledge of the wishes and hopes we had for you. We cared about you, Scaramouche, and even if we’re not here anymore, why can’t you still try?”
The wanderer’s voice runs dry, “But I didn’t want to leave you behind. I - I thought I could fix everything. I thought … If I just got rid of me -.” The wanderer can’t breathe properly, his breaths coming in shallow and rapid bursts. His vision starts to get blurry, and he can’t even see Childe’s expression as his eyes fill with tears again and he’s crying again because he’s so stupid and so weak.
“But I didn’t want this - before I- before everything, at least I had you. And that was - that was enough. I just didn’t know it and - now you’re gone too.”
Childe’s arms circle around him. “I’m still here.” The wanderer pushes his face into Childe’s chest. He remembers how Childe used to smell, like the fresh salty spray of the sea foam gently kissing his skin on a bright, sunny day.
“I’m still the same person I always was.”
That familiar heartbeat pulses steadily against his ear.
“If you reach out to me, why wouldn’t I reach out to you too? Even if it takes time for me to get to know you again, you know me. ”
The wanderer feels a hand rub circles into his back. He breathes in more of Childe’s scent, greedily holding on to the moments he’s lucky enough to spend in the warm embrace of Childe’s arm.
Childe’s still here.
“Yeah.”
“Pinkie promise?”
The wanderer laughs wetly, “You’re such a kid.”
“C’mon. You make a pinkie promise, you - “
“I know how it goes. Blah, blah goodbye to my pinkie and my tongue if I dare break the sacred pinkie promise.”
He moves his face out of Childe’s chest to wrap a pinkie around Childe’s. The wanderer looks up at Childe, and his smile is radiant . For a second, the scars etched deep in the wanderer’s soul stop aching as he just soaks in Childe’s expression, and even if Childe is just a figment of the wanderer’s imagination, and even if he’s not real, the wanderer did that. He put that expression on Childe’s face.
He whispers into Childe’s ear. “I don’t want to wake up.”
Childe reaches forward and entwines his fingers with the wanderer’s. “Why not? You have so much to look forward to.”
He wakes up on his mattress - it’s plush, Lesser Lord Kusanali had always treated him far too kindly for his own good, but this morning the wanderer feels warmer and more at ease than he usually does. He stares up at the earthy green of his ceiling, shivering as he feels the ghostly sensation of fingers against his, and arms gently encircling his body.
He sits up. There’s no time to waste lying in his bed - he has to catch the traveller before she heads out for another commission. He has to tell her that he’ll be joining her party for a while. He knows that someone is also going to be there.
He has a promise to keep, and he’s not the type to break them.