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The pain was excruciating.
All those needles. All those syringes. All those shocks flooding into his body, testing its endurance. It was a fusion of sensations that pushed his mind to the brink. And he screamed. He opened his mouth to scream, to wear his throat raw with every outburst he could muster. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t move at all. His wrists and ankles were shackled to the table he lay upon, and there was nothing he could do. He had no Vision. He had no powers. He was nothing but a wretched puppet, born to be the vessel of a Goddess who had abandoned him, a mother he had never even been allowed to call such.
The shocks were too strong. He couldn’t see anything, even though his eyes were wide open. He saw a dark, oppressive ceiling, flashes of light, tubes connected to his back, injecting a liquid meant to bind him to whatever twisted plan that mad scientist, whom he had trusted, had in mind. The same man who had promised to open the doors to the destiny he had always longed for. He had managed to steal his mother’s Gnosis with tricks that hadn’t even required brute force, and he had walked away from the Fatui for the only thing that truly mattered: his own existence.
At last, he would be seen. Right?
At last, no one would betray him or abandon him again.
So why… why did it hurt so much he couldn’t even breathe?
“Balladeer, don’t give in just yet. We’re only at the beginning.”
A voice, amused and grotesque, slipped through the crackling electricity, a voice belonging to someone who had mocked him since the dawn of his life.
He screamed again, thrashed as the energy intensified and his consciousness threatened to fade completely. He clenched his fists, arched his back, as all that pain became his alone, a mere tickle compared to every time his heart had been stabbed by those he trusted. He squeezed his eyes shut when he felt the liquid surge into his spine once more, when his body began to burn hotter and hotter.
He felt like he was about to burst.
He swore his head would explode.
It was too painful.
More painful than anything he had truly lived through.
He couldn’t take it anymore.
Enough.
“Enough!” he broke down. “Enough! Please!”
“Please! Please!”
His body jerked against something, something holding him down on that bed. Trapped beneath that gaze, that mask, those blue hair strands he would never forget.
“Hat Guy!”
A shrill, frightened voice snapped him back to reality.
Wanderer’s eyes flew open, and he realized he wasn’t in that laboratory at all, but in the room at the tavern they had chosen to stay in at Nod-Krai, after Columbina had vanished to shield herself from the power of...
His back.
His back burned so intensely it stole his breath.
He tore himself away from the hands resting on his shoulders and sprang to his feet, stumbling back as he clawed at his shoulders, desperate for the pain to stop. He staggered through the darkness, lit only by the faint glow of the false moon shining over Teyvat, before collapsing to his knees, feeling like he was suffocating.
Eyes wide and furious, he clawed at the nightshirt he wore in place of his usual clothes, but couldn’t manage to pull it off. So he seized it spasmodically and, with his own Anemo power, tore it from his body, letting the cold night breeze strike his bare skin. His frantic breaths fogged the air, but the gesture did nothing to steady his chest, which rose and fell all wrong. He was still there.
Still on that damned table, believing that all that pain had somehow justified what he had lost.
“Hat Guy?”
That voice again.
Wanderer shot a glance over his shoulder and recognized who had invaded his private space. The window was open, something he didn’t remember, and there stood Durin, wearing only a black shirt and the white trousers of his usual outfit. Like that, it was easy to see his wings, wrapped tightly around himself as if he were afraid, afraid of what he was witnessing.
And Wanderer understood.
Because he was showing his bare back.
Covered in scars. Scars left by the tubes that had been violently driven into him.
“What did you come here for…?” he tried to sound annoyed, but his ragged, broken breathing betrayed him. “Who gave you… you permission to come in?”
“I just wanted… I just wanted to…” Durin shrugged, climbing down from the window and stepping further into the room, unable to tear his eyes away. “To play a little…”
That defenseless tone didn’t even manage to make him angry. Wanderer ignored him and curled further into himself, unable to recover even a shred of composure.
“Go away…” he managed to say between one breath and the next.
But Durin couldn’t.
Not after what he was seeing.
He didn’t know exactly what it was; he knew Wanderer must have had a nightmare, but he didn’t understand why he was breathing like that, as if he couldn’t calm down, despite doing nothing physically exhausting.
He didn’t fully know his past; the single crumb Wanderer had shared concealed a pain far greater than he could have imagined. Just the nature of his being, nothing more than a puppet, created and then abandoned by his own creator, made it clear that the wall he had built around himself, pretending to push everyone away, was nothing but a silent plea that said the opposite: don’t leave me alone again.
So he didn’t leave. He walked barefoot toward him and knelt in front of him, looking straight into his eyes. He reached out and took his hands, trying to stop him from clawing at his skin like that. He saw that the Wanderer didn’t resist; on the contrary, he stared at him in disbelief, as if that kind of contact was the only thing he had ever wanted in life: kindness. Comfort. No violence.
And yet, he still felt rigid. As if he might recoil at any moment.
“Don’t… pity me.” The puppet clicked his tongue against his palate and avoided eye contact, pulling his hands away.
“I’m not,” Durin replied honestly. “I just… want to understand what happened to you.”
Wanderer let his shoulders drop and closed his eyes, finally managing to calm himself, if only on the surface. In the end, he had been seen. Heard. There was no going back now.
“That man… the one who forced Columbina to flee, after taking possession of the two lunar marrows…” he began, keeping his gaze lowered to avoid meeting Durin’s worried eyes.
“Dottore?”
The boy nodded. “As you could see, he has this obsession with trying to equal the power of the gods, so that he might become one himself, not by following the laws of the Heavenly Principles, but knowledge alone.”
The little dragon listened closely. He had noticed how Wanderer’s expression changed every time they mentioned Dottore over the past few days, whenever they had all gathered to discuss what to do next. He had seen his friend mutter under his breath, gruff, impatient, distant, but he had never seen that bored façade darken with such shadowed rage as it had the moment that man had appeared in the sky. In truth, it was from that very day that Wanderer had begun to pull away from all of them, choosing to remain on his own.
“Before he could test his research on him, he had a test subject who helped him, falling miserably into his trap with the hope of being able to… fulfill what he had been born for,” Wanderer continued, clenching his hands into fists against his thighs. “In truth, once the experiment failed, after months and months of unbearable sessions and relentless suffering, the subject was abandoned to his fate…”
Vague words, but Durin absorbed them straight into his heart, his eyes widening in disbelief.
“Dottore did this to you?” he asked, shock plain in his voice.
Wanderer bit the inside of his cheek.
But he nodded.
“I lived a lie for my entire existence.” He stared at his hands, which began to tremble, just like his voice. “Everything I went through, I believed had been done to me by humans… by everyone I trusted. I–Instead…”
He hated speaking about what he had lived through. Because everything came rushing back like a tsunami of pure horror and terror. Actions, choices, paths he could have avoided if only...if only he hadn’t been a naïve, frightened puppet, made that way by what his creator had done to him. By all those emotions that had only blinded him, blinded him into believing he could obtain salvation and happiness.
Trembling, his hands returned to his shoulders, as if trying to warm himself, because now the cold wrapping around him was no longer a relief, but a prison dragging him back into the past.
The chill of Tatarasuna.
The snow of the Fatui base.
The loneliness of Dottore’s laboratory.
The isolation within that armor that had nearly drained the life from him.
He ground his teeth in rage as his eyes began to sting, his vision blurring. Even though he too had lost his memories, when Nahida had returned them to him, he had understood that everything he had done in his life had been pure malice. Yet he had accepted his past and carved out a new path for himself, determined to move forward without falling into the same mistakes, without running away from who he was.
Revenge.
Revenge against the one who had turned his life into hell, and who continued to bring suffering to those around him.
Something warm enveloped him.
Wanderer opened his eyes again and realized that so much shadow had fallen over him that he could no longer see anything. Someone stood before his legs, and the warmth had become comforting, soft. Lifting his head in confusion, he noticed that Durin had spread his wings and drawn them closed around his body, creating a private space where only the two of them could see and hear each other.
“I want to help you, Hat Guy,” the little dragon said with determination, his brows drawn together in anger. “You’re doing so much for me: you’re helping me grow. You taught me to write my own story, to be the author of my own destiny.” He placed a hand over his chest. “For you, it’s not too late. We can’t rewrite the past, but the future isn’t set. And that doesn’t apply just to me, it applies to you too.”
Wanderer let out a nervous scoff and brought a hand to his face. “Now you’re the mature one between us?” he said, laughing softly. “The lines of Teyvat can’t be changed. Dottore is trying to oppose something far greater, and if he needs that much power, then I...”
“We can’t know what awaits us, even if it’s written,” Durin said, taking his face in his hands and looking at him with courage and seriousness. Wanderer’s gaze grew uncertain. “But if you walked away from that life and you’re aware of your mistakes, then it means you’re on the right path.”
Wanderer struggled to believe that those words had come from that child who looked like a young boy, yet at the same time he couldn’t bring himself to call them false or mere consolation.
From Durin, he knew he would find help, because no matter how much he distanced himself to keep him from ruining his life, from making new friends, that insecure little dragon always came back to him.
“Tsk… You’re ridiculous…” He wriggled free of the hands on his face, shaking his head.
“Maybe,” Durin replied. “But Dottore will pay for what he did to Columbina.”
For a brief instant, Durin’s eyes changed, a single blink the other didn’t notice, hidden by the darkness of that small shelter. His heart, now in perfect balance, was able to control and stabilize the corruption of the Abyss. Because all that hatred was converging into a new thought.
He wrapped his wings more tightly around Wanderer.
“And for what he did to you.”