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It's warm.
He isn't surprised that it is, exactly. He has felt blood on his clothes before, has been soaked through. Has bled and been bled and felt the tear of skin and muscle and sinew, that awful wrenching wrongness that screams here there is power and known, always, what to do.
This is familiar.
He still knows.
The man presses even further against him and Scaramouche feels the twist of the blade. The way it bites, eating and eating and eating, desperate to make its way straight through. It would be mercy to let it, maybe. He isn't sure.
Mercy is not a lesson he's ever tried to learn.
Night is pressing down. They've been out here for too long, they've been out here for seconds, they've been out here for days. The stars are hidden beneath a veil of clouds and it doesn't matter, anyway, the world is going to swallow him, is going to pull him back down into the earth and crunch his bones between the shifting rock, chew him into iron and blood and dust and he wishes it would hurry up.
He closes his eyes.
He's thought of death, before. Has imagined the impossibility of an ending, all that time shuttered, abrupt. His life folded down into a single layer and then closed. Creased and burned.
Scaramouche thinks of hands in his, on his, twined with his. Thick fingers ridged with calluses, the sharp edge of an otherwise blunt nail, where it's chipped. The soft intimacy of bare skin, of gloves discarded on counters and tabletops and the floor, sometimes, when he was too tired or too aggravated to be neat.
Of heat and sweat and freckles scattered across skin, spots speckled in by the sun's careless strokes.
"Make me a promise," Childe had whispered against his neck, breath twisting the ends of his hair against his nape, something like softness pressed into his mouth.
"No," he'd said, just to be difficult.
"I'm going to die on the battlefield."
"Don't get my hopes up."
"That's the only place possible, the only thing left to me. This is the deal I've made."
Scaramouche hadn't been watching the words forming around his lips but he'd seen them, anyway, in the soft flutter of fingertips, in the grasp of his hand. Childe grabbing for him, reaching, always reaching. Trapping his palm in the cage of that large, broad grip, taking like that was right, not privilege.
"If it ever looks like death is coming for me from somewhere else . . ." Hesitation, then, a breath like a secret. "If I'm going to die, I want you to be the one that kills me."
"How generous of you." Scaramouche had never had cause to wonder, before, if the beat of every heart was numbered. He'd felt the pulse press into bone and counted too-slow time. "Absolutely fucking not."
And then Childe had laughed. Like life and death were parlour games, were tricks that he shined like careless trinkets to show off in the light. See this facet here, the edge of a blade, rubies and garnets and red red red. "Calm down, it's a slim to nothing chance. I'm just covering my bases."
"What difference does it make where your pathetic fucking excuse for a life finally ends?"
It was the stillness that mattered most. The glaring wrongness of it, the way that touch had lain there, warm and unmoving. A faint tick, every beat of that heart growing slower like it was fading to a place farther than sleep. Scaramouche had wanted, suddenly, violently, to return that grip with aggression. To hold too hard and too sharp and feel the slick assurance of blood, of life, running beneath his fingers.
"There is a place I've been before that I don't think I've ever really left. But I can't go back." Said like fact and not confession, each word brushing against his sprawling bangs. "No matter what, I will not let it take me back."
A pause. A beat, and Scaramouche had still been counting, been piling each measure into his own pulse, sliding the hard pebbles of them beneath his skin. "I'm sorry to break it to you, but even I don't know where to point a blade when you're in Foul Legacy."
Childe had hummed. Had taken his hand and pressed it, careful, between his ribs, in a space below his heart. It would have been easy to pull back, to break free. Instead the warmth of him had burned, a raw flame charring flesh and he had let himself be led there, searing. "Here. Strike me here and kill me."
Scaramouche did not close his eyes, and when he looked back up at Childe all he could fathom was the sea.
The earth does not swallow him.
Dawn comes, instead, light breaking awful through the sky. A pink, a tenderness, the world washed soft by colour and clouds and a gentle morning breeze. It chills the blood, tightens his skin over bone and makes him feel like he will burst, nothing but sharp points and a raw ache and release.
Scaramouche will have to leave Childe behind.
There are things he wants to say to him, but it's too late now. Feels insincere, somehow; a display of uncharacteristic sentimentality. He folds Childe's shredded hands together, over his chest.
He almost wishes he could see his face.
Goodbye, then. No apologies, though he almost says one to be contrary. Feels amusement like an itch, small irritation starting in his cheek.
Childe wouldn't want him to be sorry.
He turns. The dark abstraction of the ruins fade into blues and greys and monochrome in the distance, an archaic horizon that might be fable, might be truth. He can make it before the day is out, if he goes now. Can disappear into history before they even think to look. Scaramouche straightens his hat on his head and starts off.
Every step he takes away feels like breaking.