Chapter Text
Scaramouche staggers up the hill, breath scraping in his throat. Dark sheets of rain lash against him, the wind whipping around him and making his veil thrash violently about his face. His movements are jerky, imprecise. Another spasm runs through his leg unexpectedly and he stumbles, just barely catching himself before he would've fallen flat on his face. The numbness in his extremities is worsening, violet flickers of electricity still seizing his limbs at random. His chest is on fire; every jarring step he takes makes the wound shriek in protest.
He badly underestimated the severity of his injury when he chose to come here.
It's not fair.
The same thought keeps beating in his head, like a child's wail against the world. Everything was perfect. Finally, he had what he desired in his hands. Finally, he would claim the birthright he was denied. Finally, he would show up his creator. So how, in the closing scenes of the play, did everything go so wrong?
Scaramouche laughed, wild with glee. If it was a touch manic, there was no one around to hear. By the roots of the Sacred Sakura, far from prying eyes, he held up the gnosis. It glinted and glowed from within, hummed in his palm, the very gravity around it warped by its divinity. To think Yae Miko would give it up so easily...
She had known. She had to have known what would happen. She's probably in hysterics of laughter right now, up there in her stupid, opulent shrine, at the fact that the wayward puppet had thought he...
The time was now. He pressed the gnosis to his chest, every inch of him thrumming with anticipation. It only resisted slightly before it gave and sank in with a violet glow. For a moment, nothing -
- Then it punched through him, divine power shooting to every extremity from his core. It was a heady rush unlike anything he had ever felt before, singing through him like tension on a bowstring, or a shamisen strung to a celestial tune. It fizzed and pulsed and granted him a heartbeat, and for one shining moment, he was complete.
Another spasm yanks his limbs to the side, more powerful than the last, and this time he slips in the mud and falls, unable to catch himself on his paralyzed arms. Unable to stifle the strangled cry that escapes him as he lands heavily on his side, feeling several of the hastily-applied stitches tearing in his chest.
The power kept building. The gnosis gave a hot, warning throb in his chest as the fizzing feeling intensified to a painful burn. Arcs of purple lightning began to escape it, running uncontrollably up and down his limbs.
Scaramouche grit his teeth and bore it. Of course the transformation wouldn't be painless. This was a small price to pay for attaining divinity. He was strong enough - he would endure.
The gnosis felt like it was whirring in his chest. Vibrating out of tune, no longer perfectly in sync as it had been a moment before - a wineglass trembling, about to break. He only had time for one flickering moment of doubt and dread before the Electro energy lashed out from his core and the pain swallowed him whole.
Scaramouche slips in the mud, hands trembling as he forces himself back to his feet. One hand grips tightly at his side, where blood is steadily soaking through the bandages again. Only a little further - he just has to get somewhere safe. The wind howls around him. He starts forward, toward... Toward...
His body was made to handle incredibly high voltages of electricity. Since having his powers unsealed, he hadn't met a single Electro vision wielder that compared to him. But this was something else entirely. His limbs seized and jerked as he toppled to the ground, head slamming against stone, iron bursting in his mouth as his teeth sliced into his tongue. Through the haze of agony he could distantly see himself writhing, his body contorting without any conscious control, like the marionette he had never wanted to be. Distantly, he could hear someone screaming, awful muffled choked-out sounds, unable to escape fully from behind a jaw that was involuntarily locked shut.
He could feel his blood sizzling in his artificial veins. He could smell his own singed hair and cooking flesh. This was how he was going to die.
The gnosis grew hotter and hotter in his chest, whirring, liquid, molten. The electricity coursing through him didn't stop, but it let up just enough to let him collapse on his side with a whining keen. He clawed and scratched at his chest, frantically, Get it out get it out get itoutgetitout getitout -
It was like he'd swallowed a star. It was going to dissolve him from the inside. It pulsed once more, ominously, and then -
The shockwave threw him across the room like a ragdoll. It felt like shattered glass ripped through his core, the explosion eclipsing all past notions of pain, and then his head slammed into a rock once more and everything went black.
...
When he came to, everything hurt.
His head throbbed. His joints ached. His limbs barely responded to him at all. He hacked wetly and nearly passed out again from the agony and swooping vertigo the simple motion caused.
Across the room, the gnosis glinted tauntingly at him, perfectly unblemished where it had landed on the stone floor.
He looked down. His hands moved, hovered disbelievingly over the gaping hole in his chest. He could feel his body beginning to tremble all over as he hunched around the wound and screamed.
It was a long, wrenching sound, tearing out of his throat with all the strength of the gnosis tearing itself out of his chest. Guttural, raw and scraping. It wasn't so much because of the physical horror or the pain. Rather, it was because, for the first time, he truly wondered if this meant his creator was right.
She isn't. She can't be. He just needs to lie low, wait for his body to recover, and then he'll figure out what went wrong. He'll find a way to harness the power of the gnosis. He just needs time, away from the prying eyes of the kitsune and Fatui.
If it were up to him he would've fled to another continent entirely - like he was always planning to do the moment he held the gnosis. But he knew he couldn't make it far in this condition. That's why he came here, to this cursed place ravaged by the Tatarigami. An island he knows better than anyone else, from deep in the fathoms of his wandering days.
But now... Now...
The wind shrieks in his ears, mournful and discordant. The rain slaps against him in a thousand tiny blows. It feels like he's been trudging up this hill for decades.
Which one of his ancient, ferreted-out hiding places was he heading to, again?
Scaramouche doesn't know.
This could be anywhere on Yashiori Island. He can barely see a foot in front of his face. Another warm gush of blood escapes between his fingers; it feels scalding against his skin compared to the frigidity of the storm. Numbness is descending on him like a shroud.
(He can't die from blood loss, but that doesn't mean it's pleasant.)
He forces one wavering foot in front of the other. Move forward - keep moving forward. That's all he knows how to do. That's all that drove him for so long, forsaken son of this earth, his wandering stride taking him from end to end of the world. Move forward. Keep surviving. Put yourself back together, shamble onward out of spite.
(Is he Scaramouche or Kunikuzushi in this moment? Has he returned to the island to hide from his mother and her foxes or is he dodging Nagamasa's men, searching for home to deliver his news?)
The scent of ozone building harshly in the air around him hardly registers. To someone who wields that power, it has long since become a comfort.
He forgets himself. Always, always, always, he forgets how weak he is.
The lightning strikes barely a foot away, and his body doesn't easily absorb the energy the way it always has in the past. His system is fried already, overclocked. Scaramouche is still stubbornly trying to labor up the hill when the electro leaps from the ground into his living lightning rod of a body, scorching through his bones. He is still stubbornly toiling toward a future only he can see when his eyes roll back in his head and he collapses to the ground one last time, a discarded doll.
Ah, he thinks, how ironic, and the nothingness takes him.
*
"Hey! Are ... alright?"
Small hands, shaking and jostling.
"... minute ... take you to ..."
Steps, racing away and returning.
"Hold on ... help you ..."
Being moved, lifted. Bumping roughly over the earth.
"Don't know if ... try my best ... I promise."
The nothingness swirls him away.