Chapter Text
She breaks him gently, the way she does everything.
"Don't you think it's time you moved on, Wanderer?" she asks, casually, innocently. "I have no need for you anymore."
Wanderer stops breathing. His mind draws a perfect, expansive blank. When his tongue finally unsticks from the roof of his mouth, it shapes the words, "That isn't funny."
Nahida is not cruel. She is never cruel. She would not joke about something like this.
(Nahida is a god.)
Her head tilts ever-so-slightly. Her green eyes are round and untroubled, her lips pursed minutely, as though she honestly sees nothing wrong with what she's just said. "It wasn't a joke."
She doesn't tell him to get out. She doesn't make him leave. She shatters him with the same unobtrusive, self-conscious authority with which she rules Sumeru. He was always telling her she needed to be more assertive. She hasn’t taken his advice, even now.
Wanderer stares at her with a sweeping sense of unreality. A dream, he thinks. A nightmare. But after all the times she's crept into his dreams to comfort him or pulled him unwittingly into hers, he knows what the fabric of a dream feels like around him. This is horrifyingly real. He stares at her familiar face, perfectly pleasant, young and fey. He tries to identify a stranger in her guise. But try as he might, all he can see is Nahida: Nahida, who pulled him from the wreckage. Nahida, whose judgment he trusts. Nahida, bestower of unearned grace.
(Unearned. It was always unearned grace.)
Wanderer’s throat feels tight. His lips feel numb. "Don't be stupid," he says. "Of course you need me."
(He knows that she doesn't.)
"Truly, I don't," she tells him, and she sounds almost apologetic.
The silence stretches. His mind still balks. "Alright," he says. "Alright. I get that you're mad at me."
He clings to the idea with every shred of his being. It's the only thing that makes sense. Without it he will tumble into an abyss. He didn't think she had the guts to be this cruel in her anger, but maybe she's learned one thing from him, at least. They can still fix this, he tells himself. She’ll take it back, and he'll make himself forgive her.
But Nahida's head tilts in the other direction, now. Her green eyes are fathomless. Pitiless. Like he's a bug under glass. They sneak up on him, the moments in which she truly seems a god. "I'm not mad," Buer insists. "I really think this is what's best for both of us."
The first flutter of panic, somewhere in the hollow cavern of his chest. "Come off it, Nahida,” he snaps. “If this is about what happened in the desert last week, I'll do better. Just quit it, this isn’t-"
This isn't you.
But wasn't she always too good to be true?
The thought is like a trickle of ice down his spine. Mildly, she replies, "Of course it isn’t about that. You're being silly. I've actually been thinking about this for a long time."
Something is splintering inside him. An old hysteria settles into his bones. When, he thinks, did he stop expecting betrayal? Why does this come as so much of a shock to him? It shouldn't come as so much of a shock.
Wanderer did not realize quite how much he has grown to trust her until this moment, when she grinds it into dust. For the first days and weeks and months, he was watchful. Wary. Convinced this was a form of captivity, waiting for her sick little schemes to reveal themselves. Gods were not to be trusted. Gods were capricious and cruel. Gods were selfish, they were fickle, they took no counsel and justified themselves to no one.
But slowly, slowly, she smoothed over his sharp edges. Teased out his softness like detangling the snarled roots of a plant. She was unlike anyone he'd ever met, whether human or monster or god. With quiet, attentive care, she convinced him he didn't need to be useful to her to stay. She convinced him he was safe.
At first Scaramouche told himself that when her true nature was revealed, he'd be ready. He'd let the fury still boiling inside him burst loose without hesitation or regret. But he got careless. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she's taken his fury away. Like everyone else, he realizes suddenly, she's broken him down and reshaped him into a form more pleasing to her. Her hands were by far the gentlest in their reconstruction of him, but she was still the god who tore out his heart and traded it away. She's left her indelible mark on him, like every master that came before her, and like most of them, she convinced him first that he wanted it too. We can heal together, she insisted, and he let her whittle down the claws he worked so hard to sharpen, and now as he stares at her, no fury comes.
His throat clicks when he swallows. He tastes ash on his tongue. All he can do is croak, "What did I do wrong?"
Buer frowns at him. She doesn't reply. The world spins; he finds he's on the ground and he doesn't know if it's because his legs have ceased to hold his weight, or simply because gods must be greeted on their knees, and she is abruptly very much a god.
Despite it all, he thought he was still useful, even if she didn’t, strictly speaking, need him. He thought he was doing well enough. He wanted to be of use to her, even if she didn’t require it for him to stay. And she seemed to appreciate it; the scouting, the guarding, the political advice and Fatui intel and dispatching of enemies and every other little favor and errand.
"Buer. Please. What did I do wrong?"
Maybe if she tells him, he can fix it. Make the right promises, the right apologies. He thought she was something like a companion, but if she's decided she'd rather be just another god to serve, that's- it's not alright, but he'll force himself to be alright with it. He has practice. Help him one day, hurt him another- used to it, he's used to it. As long as he can keep from being discarded again.
(Not again. This can't be happening again.)
Buer seems sad, looking down at him, and Wanderer seizes the thought like a lifeline because if he can make her sad, she must still care at least a little. But then she says, "It's not anything you did, exactly, it's just..." She hesitates. Ruefully, a little shamefaced, she adds, "I made a mistake."
Wanderer inhales sharply, a pained sound, punched-out like he's been gutted. It would have hurt less to be gutted. (Has hurt less, when he's been gutted.)
Hasn't that always been the case? It's not what you did, it's what you are. It's all of you.
"I'm sorry," Buer goes on as he stares in shell-shocked silence, and she does sound it, a little. "I just don't think I can trust you."
No matter how frantically he tries, he can't think of anything he’s done recently that would have shattered her trust in him, unless she never truly trusted him in the first place. Unless this was all a test, a trial period, and he has failed. Even though it was going so well. Seemed to be going so well.
(Stupid, stupid, stupid puppet. Of course it was too good to be true.)
Desperation sinks its fangs in, and he casts wildly about for any compromise he can make. "Then lock me up!" he bursts out. "I can prove myself. Please. Anything you need. I can- I can-"
He thought he was a prisoner at first. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. Maybe he can earn the freedom back eventually. Of course he isn't trustworthy, but she never seemed to care before. Please. As long as she keeps him. Please. Don't throw me away.
"I don't want to do that," Buer says. "This needn't be so dramatic. It hasn't worked out; we can simply part ways."
Maybe it's that blaise 'dramatic' that finally unearths something of his rage. When a sudden laugh bursts through his lips, piercing and deranged, it's all Balladeer, none of the Wanderer to it at all. He's still on his knees and shaking, arms wrapped around himself like a denied embrace, nails digging into pale skin. "Was it fun for you, Buer?" he demands. The sound is a little too choked to be a snarl, but he refuses to name it anything else. "Was it all just a game? Is this what you intended all along?!"
Buer is quiet for some time. His vision of her blurs and doubles; he's lost another battle, he keeps trying to tell himself it hasn't happened until the first tear drips swift and soundless to splash on the Sanctuary floor.
"Please, Wanderer," Buer sighs finally. "Don't make this any harder than it has to be."
She won’t even respond to him properly. She just sits there with her all-knowing eyes, waiting for him to realize it’s already over. As if she can't spare him the energy of banishing him overtly; as if he is too insignificant for her to make the effort of taking out her own garbage.
He should rage; he should throw her cowardice in her face; he should stubbornly, selfishly, childishly refuse to remove himself from the place he's only recently, tentatively, began to think of as home. But the breath crushes from his lungs, and he keels forward with the effort of keeping his tears quiet, his forehead pressing to the cool tile as his body quakes, useless and unwanted as a crumpled paper ball. Eventually he hears the patter of her footsteps, light on the ground, and for one delusional moment- the last spasmic kick of hope in its death throes- he thinks she'll come over to him and comfort him as she has so many times before.
The footsteps move past him and then further away. He listens to them grow more distant until they fade from hearing entirely.
He is utterly alone.
In another time, another place, he might have run after her, continued to protest, to argue, to bargain; he used to be so good at bargaining for his keep. But none of that ever truly helped him in the end, and the suddenness of it has paralyzed him, wiping all logical thought away, leaving only the shaky, desolate numbness that always follows unforeseen catastrophe. He never thought he’d have to experience it again, and he feels impossibly small and defenseless in its wake. After all, this story could only ever have had one end, as inevitable as the tides or the wind. He’s experienced it too many times before; what use is it struggling futilely against fate?
He’s never stayed where he isn’t wanted before. He isn’t about to start now.
And so eventually he stumbles blindly, breathlessly, to his feet. He staggers from the Sanctuary of Surasthana, arms still a vice grip around himself he doesn't know how to release. He ignores the murmurs of passersby, ducking his head down to hide beneath the wide brim of his hat. He walks in a daze, on and on and on, down the steps of the Akademiya and through the twisting pathways of Sumeru City, into the fringes of the rainforest and then into its depths. He doesn't know where he's going. Doesn't care to know. Walks half with the intent to get lost. Only knows that finally, eventually, his ankle twists on a tree root and he falls to his hands and knees in the muck. His arms finally unlock from around himself, skidding numbly in the mud. An inhale startles reflexively into his lungs, the first in hours, loud and dragging as it claws down his windpipe; on the exhale, it comes out in the shape of a scream.
The sound is loud and long, wrenching and full-throated and insane, scattering the birds from the trees. Another breath heaves in without his permission, and this time it comes out as a wail. He curls into himself, sobbing, finally making noise now that there's no one to see. Now that he's safe. Alone. Safe. Alone. He can't get ahold of himself. It's all he can do.
In his mind, he watches the nameless thing's suffering from a bird's-eye-view, and all he can feel is disgust.
(Worthless, pitiful puppet. No wonder everyone leaves.)
*
Eventually, the body stops its pointless sobbing and shaking, and the puppet lies there motionless. The idea of revenge circles around him, poking him as a child pokes a dead thing with a stick. He's lived for it before. Couldn't he do so again? But there's no allure to it, just a dull throb like pressing a bruise, no temptation to the thought of her face twisted up in grief or rage. She pulled the instinct for revenge from him like a string of bloody pearls, showed him the righteous devastation he wrought was only ever the petulant thrashing of a child's misplaced blame. Only when he was defanged and defenseless did she divest herself of him- dump him on the roadside like an unwanted puppy, as if there were anywhere else for him to go-
There is nowhere else for him to go.
Why didn't she just kill him? Why don't any of them ever have the decency to just kill him when they're through with him?
Why did she peel him out of that crater and put him back together at all?
She must have thought, at the start, that there could be something of worth in him. She seemed to work so hard to unearth it. She was so kind to him for so long. But so were the people of Tatarasuna. But the people of Tatarasuna didn't betray him. They didn't, remember? So she- why did she-
(Nahida is a god.)
When did he fail? When did she lose hope that he could become what she wanted? Why didn't she warn him, why didn't she try to let him fix it? He didn't ever act grateful enough, that's true, but he didn't think he had to. He didn't think she wanted him to grovel, she told him so many times to forget his debts-
Why, why, why did he believe her?
People are liars. They're liars, and the only thing uglier than a human's heart is a god's.
It isn't true, he supposes, that there was no warning at all. His mind keeps circling around to that mission in the desert last week. He's failed her before, of course, a dozen times in a dozen little ways, and always the fear would knock the wind from him, but she soothed it every time, and every time it bit less sharply. But last week- he failed to protect her. She was injured. There was blood. He- panicked, a little.
It wasn’t supposed to be that dangerous of a mission. There was unusual activity near one of King Deshret’s ruins, and Nahida wanted to investigate in person, despite his objections. He accompanied her for safety reasons, but it turned out he just wasn’t quite quick enough to keep the haywire construct from grazing her in the side. Right after, she crushed it in a profusion of desiccated desert vines and stood there blinking, stunned, as blood-red ichor plip-plopped slowly into the sand. He wrapped the shallow wound up in bandages, then hurried them both back to Sumeru City even though she protested that they hadn’t found the root cause yet. She relented, deferring to his judgment, because she knew how badly she’d worried him the last time she got injured in the desert, when she went without him during all that nasty business with Apep-
(How much of any of that was real? How much of any of it had ever been real?)
Maybe it wasn’t his failure to protect her that damned him, but his panic in itself. Unsightly. Unseemly. Clinging, cloying thing, with his childish inadequacy and constant need for reassurance. He'd gotten her injured, and she was the one comforting him.
You're so dramatic, Dottore used to say. You're lucky I put up with you. But Scaramouche knew he would, because there was a need for him to fulfill, and so he gave and gave and gave, so eagerly, for centuries. It felt right to him; after all, only someone even more of a monster than he was would welcome him with open arms.
In a fleeting moment of pure insanity, he wonders if Dottore would accept him if he went to him now, their history wiped out by Irminsul. Blank slate, clean page. New canvas for the agonies only Scaramouche now remembers. Would Dottore be delighted at the opportunity? Would he praise him with enthusiasm, seeing his endurance for the first time again?
You hate him, Scaramouche reminds himself, you hate him, you hate him, all he did was hurt you, he ruined your life, you want him dead-
He rolls onto his side, curls up into a ball. You should die before you even consider that, he tells himself. You should die. You should die.
You should die.
*
He doesn't know how long he lays there.
He won't die from exposure to the elements. He won't die from hunger or thirst. The desire to end it all circles lazily around his head like a condor circling carrion, but it just sounds like so much work. He lies motionlessly in the bed of grass and tries not to think about where it all went wrong. This is harder than it sounds.
Maybe he should have seen it coming. She hadn’t spoken to him in the past few days. He thought she was just under the weather, had been trying to think of a way to force her out of her room to see if she was okay…
I just don't think I can trust you.
What should he have done - leapt in front of the blow himself? He would have. He wasn't fast enough.
But maybe she was honest when she said nothing really pushed her over the edge. Maybe she was toying with him the entire time and finally grew tired of the facade.
He knows he really has no one to blame but himself for clawing his chest open to this kind of hurt again.
He’s too miserable to get up and go looking for his fortune in a world that feels suddenly closed off to him entirely, but too exhausted to bother to take himself out of it. Only when it begins to rain does he finally haul himself up from the dirt. Mechanically, almost automatically. The rain won't kill him either, but he...
Well. Maybe he's been among humans too long. He let himself get used to comfort. On stiff limbs, he goes looking for shelter. Beneath one of the bigger trees nearby, maybe.
Turns out all this time he's been resting quite close to a cliff. It's pouring by now, the rain pelting down harder and harder, falling in rivulets from the brim of his hat. His foot slips in the mud and in one swift movement earth and sky are reversed as he goes tumbling off the edge.
He thinks - oh. That's actually rather a long way down.
His Anemo vision is still clipped to his chest. To summon a gale would take only a moment's thought.
He could catch himself.
He doesn't.
*
When the puppet opens its eyes, it's to pain and confusion. Everything hurts. Breath sputters in, then crunches in his ribcage like knives. He coughs it out, and the coughing hurts worse, rough and wet and metallic. His vision blurs. He tries to sit up, get his bearings, and agony arcs in a dozen fractals of lightning across his limbs and through his ribs as bone grates against bone. He can't get enough air to scream, can only fall back with a strangled groan, chest fluttering with quick shallow breaths.
Where is he?
What happened?
He fell.
Is anyone coming to get him? Where are they? Surely he just has to wait, and they'll-
Thoughts scatter like raindrops on glass.
Who?
He could be anywhere, after any one of the devastating falls he's taken. Is he crumpled like a discarded doll in the Abyss, waiting to gather enough strength to drag himself back to Dottore-? Has he plummeted from the Shouki no Kami, lying broken at the feet of his last chance at godhood, waiting for clemency or death?
(Get up. Get up. If he makes it back, if he proves useful enough to the Fatui-)
His fingers twitch, dragging pointlessly in the mud. He pants, a light mist of rain falling on his tongue. He's outside. He's on Teyvat. Not-
(Stay still, maybe she'll kill you quickly, she's already taken your heart and your dignity and everything else.)
Nahida, he thinks, like a plea or a prayer.
His mother doesn't want him. Even Dottore doesn't want him (left him there took the Gnosis back and left him) but the last time he was hurt this badly it was Nahida who came and scraped him off the ground, pieced him so slowly and gently back together, so surely she'll- she-
(Get up. She'll be worried if you don't make it back, won't she?)
Something worries at his mind, a needle that he can't quite thread. The Wanderer claws at the ground with his left arm, the only limb that seems to work, and pushes half to sitting with a burst of pain and light and color that he grits his teeth against. He's at the base of a cliff. His right arm dangles uselessly; the shoulder a deep and snarled knot of pain. Both legs are broken, one more badly than the other. His right leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, bone visible where his shin ruptured through the flesh. His left leg is more intact, just bruised, but the knee is fucked, screaming in protest when he tries to bend it at all. His vision thumps lightly against his chest with its who-knows-how-many fractured ribs. How did he get so badly hurt? He'll have to warn Nahida before she- she...
The vision flickers sadly in its Sumeru casing above that dangling golden feather.
Scaramouche fell.
He remembers, with a high whine of white noise in his mind, why he didn't bother to catch himself this time.
The puppet slumps back against the stone, a wracking laugh clawing up from its throat along with a clump of blood.
Of course. Of course... And when it came down to it, he couldn't even die right.
No one will be coming to help him. Mother left. Dottore left. Nahida left. Katsuragi and Niwa and the child left, and even Scaramouche left himself, but the world spat him back out as the hapless Wanderer, too tough a pill for even the oblivion of Irminsul to swallow. Buer handed him a new life and then tore it out of his hands. They must be laughing at him, fate and gods and humans all, even the false wheeling stars and the dead moons laughing behind their corpse-pale hands.
His body's too broken to even crawl off and find something to finish the job. It could be a long time, here. There's so little that can truly kill him. A Rishboland tiger could come along and claw out his entrails and still he would live. Oh, it would be miserable but he knows he'd survive it, awake and screaming the whole time. Ask him how he knows! Just guess!
What a joke. Grotesque and in poor taste, overplayed and overdone. He's the only one around to laugh at it, so he laughs. Knocks his head back against the stone again and again, lets the almost gentle pain of it distract him from the rest, and laughs. Until the stabbing in his ribs is too much and no more whistling breaths will come.
The puppet lies there and waits.
*
He doesn't know how much more time passes before someone happens upon him. Long enough for lucidity to wax and wane, long enough to somehow go cold in the warm humidity of the rainforest, long enough to chase at after Buer in a cruel and soundless half-dream, clutching at her skirts like an overgrown child. Long enough that when a shadow falls over him he's startled into breathing, forgetting that it will only feel like being stabbed.
The person screams and leaps back before he even has a chance to hack up blood on them.
"I thought- I thought you were DEAD!" the person wails.
Well, if wishes were horses, he does not say.
The Wanderer- is he still the Wanderer? He's always left behind his previous identity when he was thrown away, but Wanderer was not quite a name in the first place. The puppet glares blearily in the direction of all the noise and finds he vaguely recognizes the person making it.
It's a girl. A teenage girl with a head of mossy green hair and panicked purple eyes. Her name eludes him. She dithers, hovering over him like she's afraid to touch. He hears something about a doctor and gathers enough will to grate out, "No doctors."
She pauses briefly, astonished to hear him speak. "But you- you'll die! You're hurt really, really bad- I've got to go get Master Tighnari, and we’ll-"
"No fucking doctors," he says, and he tries to make it a growl but it comes out as more of a feeble cough. "I won't die. I..." His head swims. "In fact, you can just leave me here."
Best he can hope for really. He doubts she'll be agreeable enough to go find a rock to bash his head in with.
"No, I can't! What are you saying?!" Her voice goes high-pitched with distress. "I'll be right back, okay? I'm going to go get Master Tighnari. I'm going to get you help! Just- just hold on a little bit longer!"
And then, as quickly as she came, she’s gone.
Truly, the Wanderer expects that to be the end of it.
But a couple hours later, she comes blundering out of the brush again with her master in tow- a certain Valuka Shuna who he recognizes on sight.
Tighnari’s mouth falls open. "...Hat Guy?"
"Just... forget you saw me," the puppet manages.
"See! I told you he was saying really weird things!" the girl exclaims.
Tighnari's jaw sets. "Collei, help me get him on the stretcher."
All the Wanderer has time for is a wheezy, wordless snarl before he's moved. A dozen fractures of pain light up blazing-white and just like that, his consciousness winks out.