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You’ve got it all
You’ve lost your mind in the sound,
There’s so much more,
You can reclaim your crown.
—
It is the little fledgeling’s birthday, but he is dead.
The promise-breaking, wee little boy that The Wanderer has so many names for, almost as many as others have for himself…is dead. Has been for many winters now.
The Destroyer of Nations, Balladeer, Prodigal, Vassal of Raiden, Scaramouche, all of these he has morphed himself into. There is always one that everyone seems to forget, however, including himself:
Friend.
A long time ago, before any of these names came to being, he was a friend to a tiny boy he’d met off Tatarasuna’s surface. The fumes were already taking effect on the boy’s mortal body, infecting his veins with poisonous Electro energy, yet he still greeted Scaramouche with a wide smile.
He’d always had the widest, most infectious smile of them all.
“My dad will return to the countryside later, so I’m here waiting for him today.” The boy grinned, showing a mouth that consisted of half gum and half tooth. It was innocent and so, so beautiful—so unattainable. It reminded Scaramouche of the promise they’d made to each other all those weeks ago. “I’ve collected melons for him.”
“Melons?” Scaramouche inspected the medium-sized purple orbs in the boy’s palm. They gleamed like amethyst. “These seem unripe.”
“I know, but these are for his sickness. He’s also been getting sick because of the furnace fumes recently, so…”
What a nice child.
“You and your dad will heal.” Scaramouche said simply, though he didn’t know if that would be true. It would be a shame if something were to happen, like the last two times he’d tried to befriend someone.
“I hope so.” The boy plopped down right next to him. The lull of the afternoon sun and cool breeze, and the soft humming of his new friend pulled Scaramouche into the first peaceful sleep he’d had since he’d been born.
When he woke, it was sunset, and his chest felt hollow. A child, screaming in the near distance, instantly made him jolt up on his bed of grass and wheat. It was raw, unbridled with despair, twisting low and high and cracking in all the wrong places—
It sounded like him.
Like the horrid sound that had torn from his chest when Beelzebul had dropped him down a thousand stories from Tenshukaku. It sounded like that.
He pushed to his feet, painfully so, up from his meadow of sleep, residual traces of Electro frying sheaths of wheat and grass to crisps.
Then, he ran.
He ran, and he ran, and he ran. Purple fruits dangled on the trees along the path. He snatched them right off their boughs. It was a futile attempt at saving someone long gone, yet he took six in two arms and pelted off towards the rickety farmhouse in the distance.
He’d never been able to walk for more than a few minutes on his own since a month ago, when he fell down and broke his artificial back on the roof of a domain in Tatarasuna. Today, however, he was running on pure adrenaline and fear.
The air sizzled. Scaramouche burst into the door, braced himself to see a child kneeling over its dead father.
Instead, it was the child on the floor instead, blood streaming in red rivulets down the dirt floor.
Scaramouche drops to his knees. A strong bout of deja-vu shudders through him, cold and slick. He is about to be separated from yet another friend, but still, he stays. “What happened!? Tell me, what happened!”
“He’s gone,” The child fights for breath, spasms racking his body. His face is marred with purple cracks. “He never came back last night.”
“He will.” Scaramouche urges, but the boy only cries harder.
“No!” It pounds the dirt floor with its tiny fists. “He won’t! He’s never coming back! I’ll never see him again!”
Scaramouche wrapped the boy in his arms, even as poisonous purple smoke began to ooze out of the cracks in the boy’s face and limbs. It ate into Scaramouche’s bionic skin, tore at the material there, but he’d always had an extremely high pain tolerance level, and oh no .
“I don’t want to die. It hurts so bad.” The boy shivered against Scaramouche’s supporting arm, little gasps of pain tearing out of its lips every few seconds.
Oh, no. Oh no. Oh, no.
“No.” Scaramouche said, trying—and failing—to keep the grief out of his voice. He will not cry. He will not. The last time he did, he’d lost his Mother. “But you will see him again.”
“Did you see your mother again? When she left you?” The boy asked. It was very close to death, and thus, Scaramouche began the act of purging false memories, bygone emotions, from his mind and soul. He was not capable of controlling the crushing inevitability of mortality, but what he could control was how he felt about it.
A strange memory made its way to the forefront of his thought: That day they’d made tiny wheat scarecrows under the setting sun. Scaramouche came home to a hot meal and peeled ripe lavender melons, made by the boy’s eager father. Though he didn’t need to eat, that was the most delicious, filling meal he’d ever had.
“You’re like a second son, honestly.” The man patted his back gently, and it was at that moment that Scaramouche’s phantom heart beat like that of a real human. “You’ve taken good care of my boy. I thank you.”
For a while, he had been a son. For two short whiles. And for some reason, Scaramouche finds himself not wanting to forget any of these whiles , any of these identities, that these people had gifted him.
“Well?” The boy coughed. “Did you see her?”
He hesitated.
The feather necklace on his neck glowed purple.
“Once.” Scaramouche planted a featherlight kiss on its head as it took a shallow breath. “I saw her once. In my dreams.”
“That’s good.” The fledgeling smiled. The cracks broke off of his face in chunks, and he finally slipped into endless dreams.
And if a passing adventurer saw a curious little farmhouse, purple flames lapping at it, beautiful and haunting like a funeral pyre left to burn out, well, that was none of their business, was it?
Standing now at the final resting place of his friend, The Wanderer sets down the handful of purple fruits and says a few silent prayers, the kind he’s heard wayfarers and citizens say on his travels. It’s all he can do, really. The house is gone. Most of his memories of the boy are gone. But there is still the whisper of a broken promise, and the warm flicker of flames on wood.
And in another world, perhaps that same, innocent boy would’ve grown taller than The Wanderer himself, smiling fully with teeth and little gum, and maybe—just maybe—they would’ve traveled together, at least for a short while. They would visit Mondstadt, the land where his new heart came from, and pick Sweet Flowers and Windwheel Asters and do what friends do.
(But that is in another world even The Wanderer cannot wander into. That is in the world of dreams and what isn’t there.)
Some memories can’t be purged so easily, nor does The Wanderer want them to be.
For the first time in a very long while, he sits down amidst the endless field of wheat and green, and begins to peel the melons, one by one.
—
You’re in control,
Rid of the monsters inside your head.
Put all your faults to bed.
You, can be king, again.