Chapter Text
Scaramouche still couldn’t believe he was so drunk that he’d just tossed his fucking coat to a smoking hot naked mermaid. Scratch that, he was still confused as to how he was deluding all this random crap. He was tripping, that was for sure, but since when did shochu induce hallucinations? For the sake of the Seven, it was shochu, not absinthe!
The girl - Mona, was it? - blinked (it was fucking sexy seeing the droplets of water roll off her eyelashes and down her face, Scaramouche mused) and considered his coat with much dubiety. “Pray tell, what is this, Sir, um, Scaramouche?”
Scaramouche almost lost it then and there; his subconscious apparently knew him way too well. However, he was able to hold back his irrational desires in exchange for normal conversation. “Those are the clothes you were asking about earlier. Now, hurry up and fucking wrap that thing around yourself. I don’t know where you come from, but if you crawl around like that at pretty much anywhere I’ve been, you’d be dead meat.” Assaulted dead meat, Scaramouche added mentally. Now, Scaramouche and Tartaglia made doubly sure there weren’t any sick fucks like that in their legions, but fuck knows how many criminals were hiding in the Fatui ranks. Most Mirror Maidens and Cicin Mages could hold their own, but once in a while, Scaramouche or Tartaglia did have to go and save a poor girl from being defiled, and boy oh boy, once one of them was done with the beast who tried, not a soul would be able to recognize the bastard from how fucked up he’d be.
Rather clumsily, Mona tied the mantle around her waist before promptly removing it. “I’m sorry, but it dries up my gills. I think this material soaks water.”
As he heaved a huge sigh, Scaramouche stumbled to his feet while cursing his drunken wobble. Hobbling over to Mona, he grabbed the coat from her and dunked it into the seawater, carelessly draping the now moist fabric over her shoulders, and in the process, sobering up as the icy sea spray hit his arms. “Fucking hell, that water is freezing!”
With a cute tilt of her head, Mona replied, “Is it? It feels rather normal to me, though.”
That was the exact moment that Scaramouche took in her scale-plated legs and luminescent fins in full.
Slipping in a moment of distraction, Scaramouche fell to his knees and brushed his hand against one of the scales by accident, deeply slicing his finger open. Archons , she was definitely not a human . But for some reason, that didn’t seem to stop a blush from blooming on his cheeks. Internally slapping his hand to his forehead, Scaramouche harshly chided himself. No, Scaramouche, that is the alcohol, you fucking fool! The alcohol! Unfortunately, it was to no avail, so he settled with hunching over, desperately hoping Mona wouldn’t see what was going on in his pants. Although, he surmised, based on what he knew so far about her, Mona probably wouldn’t know even if she did notice....
Shaking off the rather sordid scenarios that flooded his mind - many of which involved a sort of education , if you may - and purging his mind of all unclean thoughts, he refocused his attention on his realization.
Mona wasn’t human.
She wasn’t… human.
Fucking hell, she wasn’t human!
Scaramouche felt his spine stiffen just a tad more, this time not from the cold.
“You- uh, Mona, what exactly, per se, are you?”
Blinking her large, wet eyes, Mona seemed to be considering the question pretty damn seriously. “Well, my name is Mona, and I… I….” She fell silent. “My name is Mona, and…. I- I mean, I am Mona….”
For some reason, Mona’s bewildered mumblings raised the hairs on the back of Scaramouche’s neck. There was no way she didn’t know what he was talking about… right? Forcing a harsh laugh, Scaramouche barked, “Not your name , you fool! What in the fucking name of the Archons’ wide world are you?”
Upon seeing Mona shrink back in fear at his outburst, Scaramouche instantly regretted yelling. It was obvious she knew next to nothing about what he was talking about. She lived in the ocean, for fuck’s sake! Taking a deep breath for what seemed like the millionth time, Scaramouche slowly and calmly removed his clogs and socks, pointing to his bare legs and feet. “I’m not like you.”
Mona blinked again. “What do you mean?”
“Take a long, hard look. Do I look like I have scales?”
As the realization dawned on Mona’s expression, Scaramouche proceeded to yank his socks back on before a cold, clammy claw adorned with shiny silver scales abruptly jerked at his wrist. Fuck. She had claws . (How the fuck hadn’t he noticed? Maybe he had noticed, but had just chalked it up to his drunkenness. ( Or maybe he had noticed the very moment he had seen her and her starry silver eyes, but still stayed. ) He preferred to pretend it was the former.)
Mona’s dumbstruck expression that somehow still maintained her elegant demeanor betrayed her evident shock and morbid curiosity. “Why are you bald?”
“Pardon?”
“No protection means danger. Did you not grow scales, or did someone peel them off? Stars, did you peel them off?”
Somehow, this banter cheered Scaramouche up. “No, I’m not into peeling scales off or whatever the hell you’re on about. I don’t grow scales since I’m human.”
“Hu-ma-hn?”
“Think of it like this. You know all fish are different, right?”
“Of course.”
“I’m a different kind of fish than you, in a sense. Just, we’re not fish. We’re sentient beings.”
“Fish are sentient as well, though.”
Scaramouche rubbed his temples. “For our purposes, we’re going to say that we’re only considering shit we can communicate with. Can you talk to them?”
“You cannot? Well, I suppose they don’t exactly speak words, per se…”
This time, it was Scaramouche’s turn to be surprised. “You can talk to them?”
Pausing to collect her thoughts, Mona eventually replied, “I suppose it is something like that. I am the ocean; it makes sense that those in the ocean’s domain can express their emotions to me. Albedo and Rhinedottir did say it was something similar to that.”
Her casual statement was met with Scaramouche’s disbelief. “You are the ocean? The hell are you talking about?”
“How do I explain it? I came from the sea; that is all that I can say.”
As he unconsciously wrinkled his eyebrows, Scaramouche tried to keep the frustration from creeping in. It was pretty fucking obvious that Mona only knew about as much as he did. But how did a creature so innocent even survive underwater?
Deigning to change the topic after the uncomfortable silence his persistent questions caused passed, Scaramouche awkwardly asked, “Well, what do you do all day in the ocean? I mean, I don’t really know shit about what happens there.”
Immediately, Mona brightened up. “Stars, I adore the stars! I love looking at them through the water. I don’t know what it is about them, but they’re just so beautiful. But for most of my time… I think I mostly help around Rhinedottir’s lab.”
“Who?”
“Oh, I didn’t mention her, did I? She’s, it could be said that she’s my guardian, of sorts. I’ve known her since I was young.”
“Is she,” Scaramouche gestured to Mona’s legs, “like you?”
Mona frowned. “Not really, but slightly. She can stand upright and breathe air. Well, I can breathe air too now, so I guess it’s only that she can stand upright.”
“And you can’t stand upright?”
Shooting Scaramouche a pointed look, Mona tucked her now mostly dry night-colored locks into some sort of self-sustaining bun and heaved up her torso. (Scaramouche felt his heart leap out of his chest when his cloak nearly fell off of Mona’s shoulders, but thank the Archons it stayed on. He did not think he could stand a full frontal view of her nude.) However, Scaramouche soon realized what she was attempting to do: Mona was moving onto her knees - or at least, what seemed to be her equivalent of knees - to get up.
“If you can’t stand up, it’s really fine, you know-”
Just as Scaramouche worriedly spoke, Mona wobbled to an unsteady upright position, her scales screeching against each other as they shifted, before promptly falling down into the soft grass. Having unsuccessfully attempted to lunge forwards and catch her, Scaramouche flushed a bit out of embarrassment. Pulling a leg closer to her, Mona motioned to the ends of her legs - she had no feet. “I can’t balance. I usually use crutches in the lab. But enough about me; what do you do?”
Scaramouche hesitated. How could he tell her what being part of the Fatui meant?
“Well, I mostly do paperwork nowadays since I got relocated, but I used to collect debts and shit- wait, do you know what those are? They’re like-”
“Yes, I know what debts are; paperwork too,” Mona interrupted. “Go on!”
“Well, that’s mostly it.”
Mona blinked. “Don’t you have a hobby?”
Gazing up at the sky, Scaramouche wondered how to explain that being a Harbinger left no room for anything else in his life. ( Not even time enough for her , that dark, ugly part of him whispered. That’s why she left, you stupid, lovesick bastard . We’re a Harbinger! One does not simply disrespect a Harbinger without consequences! Scaramouche knew better than to trust that voice, though.)
“You see, my job doesn’t allow me to have anything else in my life. I can’t leave it either, so I just have to fucking put up with it.”
“But don’t you have something you love to do?”
“...I suppose…”
“What?”
Scaramouche felt his ears burn furiously. “I suppose I can learn about the stars with you.”
Her jaw dropping, Mona exclaimed, “That’s wonderful! I can also introduce you to Rhinedottir and Albedo - on second thought, maybe just Albedo - and-”
Somehow, Scaramouche found himself nodding along. Before he knew it, they had arranged to meet regularly ( What the fuck? He found himself thinking, but consciously chose to ignore it.)
Finally, just as the sky started to light up again, Scaramouche directed his gaze towards Narukami Island. “You see that island over there?”
“Yes?”
“There’s a city there; a city’s like a big gathering of people. You’ll see these ships, you can wait for me-”
And that’s where Scaramouche stopped as he was knocked out by a blow to the back of his head.
The last thing he remembered was Mona’s surprised expression and a man who seemed to have giant crab claws (
What the fuck?
) for hands pushing Mona into the ocean.