Work Text:
The dream always goes like this:
He’s standing on a cliff. He doesn’t know where he is, but his kimono is made of the finest silk, and there’s an ornate gold flower pinned to his breast. His hair is wild and long, streaked with periwinkle blue, and the grass around him is flattened in a circle, edges scorched and burned.
He doesn’t remember anywhere like this, but it must be a memory, because Scaramouche was not made to dream.
The dream always goes like this:
The cliff is awfully high, and the wind whips around him. The sky is bruised and deep purple, and the clouds are suffocating thick, bearing down on him, swollen with rain and lightning. Thunder rumbles, and far down below the sea is a churning maelstrom, waves exploding against the teeth of the rocks that jut from the black maw of the water.
Scaramouche is not afraid of the storm. He has never been afraid of the storm. He has never been afraid.
“You cry in your sleep, sometimes,” Tartaglia says.
It cuts through the gloom of the bedroom — sharp, like the hot edge of a knife.
“Go away,” Scaramouche replies.
His back is to Tartaglia, hands curled into fists. His shoulders fold in as if they could armour him, but the truth is that Scaramouche is naked and laid bare.
The truth is, too, that by now any touch of violence that would come from Tartaglia would be tinged with reverence. It’s all part of some twisted joke Scaramouche has allowed himself to fall into.
Tartaglia has no right to touch him in this way. No right to act like Scaramouche is anything more than a mistake. Shaped by the divine, full of muddied errors. He cries in his sleep. He dreams of a storm over a sea that will never break. He wishes he were facing Tartaglia, because maybe then he could fight him. Claw at his face, kick him in the stomach, push away the warm body that seems to fill so much of his space. The bed feels huge and like a coffin all at once, like he’s already six feet under. Like he’s back in the mansion, wandering dark halls for endless days, staring at the waxy moon over the maple leaves.
“What do you dream about?” Tartaglia asks.
Scaramouche wants to run. He wants to run and never return. Maybe this could be his third act — the end of all things. Maybe he could fulfill the prophecy he wrote for himself when he chose his name. Bring ruin. Bring an end.
No. Tartaglia already knows too much. He would have to deal with him first.
Scaramouche curls in further.
“Go away.”
“This is my bed,” Tartaglia says.
“Sleep on the floor,” Scaramouche says, and Tartaglia’s touch against his bare back is warm — hand spread flat and wide between his shoulder blades, heel of his palm resting against the sigil etched into Scaramouche’s skin.
Scaramouche slips out of bed. He drags the sheet with him, wrapping it around his naked form, only stopping to look back when he’s almost at the door frame.
The light is weak and gloomy, but even so he can tell Tartaglia is watching him. He can feel it, in the way the hair on the back of his neck stands up. He hates that he has this effect on him.
Scaramouche doesn’t go to his room. He doesn’t even get to the door of Tartaglia’s quarters. He should leave, really, but that flawed part of him roots him to the spot, and instead he stands in the kitchen, staring at the mess of their dinner on the countertop.
His chopsticks rest on top of Tartaglia’s plate, and there’s a high tide mark of orange around the edge of the bowl he’d eaten his ramen out of. Very few Inazumans were foolhardy enough to venture into Snezhnaya for long, and thus the dinner paled in comparison to his memory of home.
Still, maybe for now, it is enough.
When he gets back to bed Tartaglia is already asleep. Lying on his chest, arms spread out, his hair soft where Scaramouche runs a hand through it.
Last time he touched Tartaglia’s hair, he’d been trying to pull it out. An attempt that had been unsuccessful, as Tartaglia had bit his thigh in retaliation. Scaramouche kneed him in the jaw for that; dragged his head up then backhanded him across the cheek, and the result of that had been so sweet.
Tartaglia on his knees, eyes blow wide with lust. It’s so easy to beat him. The Eleventh Harbinger, nothing more than a toy. Scaramouche wonders if he could kill him.
(Scaramouche knows, somewhere deep down, that he wouldn’t. He knows it changed one day. He stopped pointing his sword at Tartaglia’s heart. He stopped trying to tear his throat out.
Once upon a time it was ‘I wish you would die’. Now it is ‘I am the only one who is allowed to kill you.’)
Here, Scaramouche only touches with gentleness. The wet streaks on his cheeks have dried to no more than crusted salt, and the air in the room is far too cold, like he’s trapped at the bottom of the sea.
All human flaws. All Dottore’s fault. He was not meant to feel. He was not designed for this. How could he have been? What use were tears? What use was a weapon with a heart?
What use is the warmth of Tartaglia’s skin below his, the smoothness of his scars as Scaramouche traces his fingers down the broad muscles of his back, counting every lash that had been laid out to him.
Disobedient. He always has been. Punishment has never done anything for Tartaglia; if anything he craves the blood running down his back. He craves the lightning, he craves the way Scaramouche would try to tear him in two, like he might dig his fingers into his chest and pull him apart, crack open his ribcage and feast on his heart.
It takes Scaramouche a while to realise Tartaglia is awake — that his eyes are on him again. Hooded and dark, something flickering in their depths.
“You’re back,” he says, and there it is again. The tone of voice that makes Scaramouche want to turn his skin inside out.
“Don’t touch me,” Scaramouche warns. He curls his fingers inwards, drawing his nails against a particularly prominent scar crossing over Tartaglia’s spine. All skin he knows well. All skin he has touched innumerable times.
When did he get this comfortable? Why does he allow this? He has lived hundreds of years without someone beside him — the last he has ever needed is a mere human, someone whose life flickers like a candle flame in a downpour. Scaramouche might blink and Tartaglia could die, but Scaramouche will live for hundreds of years more. He will live past this — so what truly is the purpose?
This is another reason he wasn’t good enough: the way his entire chest seizes when Tartaglia reaches out and touches his collarbone. The hiss that escapes his lips. This never-ending curse.
“I said don’t touch me,” Scaramouche says, and Tartaglia’s hand traces upwards, his fingertips brushing against Scaramouche’s jaw. Cupping it, pulling him down into a kiss that is lazy and warm, something roaring in Scaramouche’s empty chest like the flame of a forge.
Don’t touch me, he wants to say, if only for the token act of pretending this isn’t what he desires.
How can he lie anymore? He is here of his own free will. He walks to Tartaglia’s room. He throws him against the wall, stands on the tips of his toes and pulls his head down to kiss him until he’s flushed and breathless. He takes Tartaglia into his own bed and unmakes him, leaves his mark on his skin, and then he stays.
And then he stays. And then he lets Tartaglia see him like this — kiss him like this. Kiss him without purpose, only to drink in the shape of his body. Only to draw nails down Scaramouche’s back, touch lingering on the sigil his creator burned into him, a reminder that he would forever be nothing more than a discarded doll.
“What do you dream about?” Tartaglia asks, and Scaramouche sinks his teeth into his throat.
Some nights he dreams of a dark room. Sharp light filtering through broken shutters, dust like ashes of fallen cities piled up around him. He’s wearing the same clothes as he does when he stands on that cliff, and in this dream he wanders for hours on end. Through a never ending labyrinth, through empty larders and basements filled with shattered wood, through a courtyard where a great maple rains leaves around him. He wanders for hours on end, and he can never find the exit. There was never an exit.
Some nights he dreams of a lonely beach, of grey skies, of lying in the silt. His clothes are wet and heavy, and the sand clings to his skin like a desperate lover, begging for his embrace just one more time.
He rises. The waves lap at his toes. The blade in his hand is blunt, and a painted gourd weighs heavy on his belt.
Who are you? a voice would ask, but when Scaramouche replies he can never hear his own answer.
The dream always goes like this:
The gulls wheel in circles, and Scaramouche longs desperately to reach out. There’s an itch in his chest, and he wonders if he’s supposed to draw his kodachi, though no matter how hard he tries he cannot grasp the lightning wreathed hilt. He cannot grasp anything — it all slips through his fingers, like steel coated in oil.
He shouts, but his voice is a whisper. He takes a step, but the thunder bursts, and the world trembles around him.
The storm breaks, and the sky opens up.
“Kunikuzushi,” it says.
The water rushes towards him. He tastes salt when he wakes up.