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“You…” Your hands having risen instinctively at his appearance, you swallow thickly awhile trying to come up with a not-so-suspicious greeting. “Lord Scaramouche, sir, I-I… What are you doing here, sir?”
Arms crossed, chin raised, and eyebrow cocked, “I’ll have you answer that very same question for me. What business did you have at the Grand Narukami Shrine after dealing with the Traveler?”
“Er… being in Inazuma has left me feeling more spiritually inclined than normal, sir, so… I-I’ve decided to take up on religion,” you mumble flatly, immediately inwardly cursing at yourself for spouting such a shitty lie.
“Funny. Try again.” You sigh at him.
“I’d heard once… that you had ties here in Inazuma,” you start, your tone quieter than usual. “Rather than bother you with my questions, I… initially came here to check on the Traveler’s condition, but then… I ended up… speaking with Guuji Yae, but…”
Scaramouche shuffles his hands to his hips, looking almost pleased by the idea of you being turned away. “Oh, the fox woman wouldn’t tell you?”
You shake your head. “Not exactly. When we started speaking of… other things, I decided I’d rather chance waiting for you to want to answer me, yourself, if I ever asked them. If you ever wanted to answer me.”
Scaramouche’s hard gaze seems to linger on you from beneath his hat, something that leaves you warm, cagey, and a little concerned that just maybe, he doesn’t believe your ignorance to be false, after all.
“I simply… was worried about you,” you add.
“Worried,” he parrots, sounding almost offended. “Why would I need you to worry about me?”
“If you’re suddenly seeing things as if I’m making you out as weak or as looking down on you, that’s not what’s happening here, sir.” Past him, you look to the cliffs you knew would eventually bring you to a lesser shrine but a moment after feeling the sharp crawl of electricity creep up your back. “Could we walk and talk, sir? The Electro energy the mountain channels is starting to fry the hair off my arms…”
“… fine.”
And so, you lead the way, trapped between the quiet of a promised conversation and your nerves, unable to speak and walk at the same time. It’s a surprise to you, just how patient the Balladeer is being. Perhaps in your constant busyness, with your typically need to leave your Harbinger stress-free from these menial duties, you’ve never truly noticed just how differently the man walking beside you treats you. How much more patience he has for you versus the rest of his underlings. It didn’t even have to do with you being his second-in-command, because if it were anybody else in your position, this conversation might not have gone so non-aggressively. At the very least, what’s mutual knowledge between the two of you is that your relationship has always been one of respect, and not one drowned for fear of him like the others have so easily admitted to.
Finally, having descended the rest of the mountain, now far away from the crackling and sizzling of its natural Electro pond, you lead the Balladeer to the front of the abandoned shrine, to sit at its steps and take a large breath. Scaramouche remains standing, arms at his sides, eyebrows now pinched.
“S-So… I just… recalled,” you clear your throat, eyes flitting up to meet his briefly before flying back down into your lap, “that you had a look on your face when the Tsaritsa gave the order to have us come out to Inazuma. I remember you once saying that you were from here, and I was only wanting to be prepared to help you in any way I could. And then, the next look on your face when you were given the Gnosis by Guuji Yae…”
“And so, your first choice of preparation was to go and gather intel on me from that fox envoy?” he queries.
“I-I suppose,” you murmur. “I didn’t want to overstep or… um…”
“Or what?”
“… or make you sad.” You finally look up at him, not in sudden confidence, but of the pure desire to simply look at him. As per usual, his impassiveness shines clear as day in the night air, illuminated by the lanterns glowing along the shrine’s engawa. “Lord Scaramouche, Lady Guuji Yae did not tell me of your history by my own request. Instead, she helped me reach a certain point of clarity of myself regarding you… That the reason I sought her out to speak about you was more b… because…”
“You’re burning the midnight oil, here, ______.”
You huff at him. “It’s because I’ve grown extremely fond of you,” you finally blurt. “Romantically, if that wasn’t clear. I-In other words, I believe I’ve fallen in love with you, Lord Scaramouche.”
… there is a moment of silence that leaves your heart aching. At the very least, you’d expected a retort, or a comment of disapproval for bothering him with something that might’ve seemed so trivial to a man like him, but in his wordlessness, he simply stands before you, eyes trained hard in your direction.
Throwing his foot up against one of the steps to your left, you find yourself suddenly trapped between him and the railing, the air in your chest swirling. And everything happens all too quickly – his hand finding the crown of your head to tilt it toward him; his gaze rising and falling between your widened eyes and your parted lips; his subtlety in wetting his own dried lips, tongue darting carefully past his teeth to soften them, before leaning into you and pressing them firmly against yours.
You can’t control the noise that escapes you, nor your instinct to brace yourself against your surroundings — the porch, the step beneath you, the railing, his chest — in your attempt at registering the Sixth Harbinger’s actions.
He is unmoving in them, indigo eyes half-lidded as he studies your face, your reaction to him. When he just barely moves his mouth upwards, his lower lip slotting between the two of yours, and carefully moves his hand to fall to your nape, he catches your flinch of surprise, feels your fingers tighten around the sleeves of his shirt. In pulling away, he hears your small noise of disappointment, and takes in the heat resting upon the apples of your cheeks.
“L-Lord Scaramouche,” you pant, and from the corner of your mouth, you lick away the bit of saliva that remained. Was it yours? His? He’s not sure he cares.
“What?” he says, tone accosting. “Wasn’t that the definition of the “love” that you desired from me? You and I have worked together for long enough to know that that is an undeniable impossibility, and yet you still decided that the best course of action to take would be a confession?”
“I-It’s not so simple like that!” you argue, and you push his leg off the step and stand up, now an extra foot or so taller than the man. “A confession – my confession to you – is not something so fleeting; it’s not some passing emotion I’ve suddenly started feeling because I spoke to Guuji Yae. This is something I know I’ve felt since the first days I began working for you, something I’ve tried to ignore for both our sakes, and for the longest time, it worked. I managed to be good at keeping our relationship professional.
“And you’re right— we have worked together long enough that I could feel safe in telling you my truth. All I could hope for was maybe some understanding, and in a long shot, maybe a bit of reciprocation. Either way, I’d at least have something off of my chest.” You glare down at the man, fingers twitching— “A-And just so you know, I’m going to be kissing you again after that, because speaking frankly, sir, you… are an awful kisser!” – before reaching for his shirt with them and tugging him up and toward you.
He jolts, thrown off by the height difference the staircase offered and by your sudden bravado, gripping at either railing of the shrine’s staircase. Your lips, as warm as the heat that seemed to radiate from you, as soft as he’d experienced them to be the first time he’d touched them, press against his. You can only dare in closing your eyes that he wouldn’t retaliate, but you still half-expect him to push you away and scold you, something said in his flavour of retaliation and ridicule. But his hands give rise to where your hands stretch out the material of his shirt, skinny fingers wrapping tightly around the bones of your wrists to spin you off the higher step and onto equal ground.
Pulling away from you, a smirk crawls onto his visage. “And who gave you permission to speak frankly in the first place?” he asks. You can’t tell if his tone is serious and taunting or humoured and teasing. You swallow when he leans further into you, your heart racing, his lips pausing just before your ear. “Insulting your superior officer,” he whispers to you, a dry chuckle escaping him a second later when he returns to face you. “That’ll get you places.”
Taunting and teasing, you decide shakily.
To your surprise, the Balladeer leans into you once more, his glistening, parted lips slotting between yours, hands slowly moving to take hold of your cheeks in his attempt at keeping you close. It’s sloppy, teeth clacking together at times, and a little wet, but your heart threatens to burst with joy and relief at his effort, his reciprocation being something you wouldn’t have expected him to put any into.
A hand of your own raises to take the smooth curve of his jawline into your palm. He mumbles against your murmurs, and grunts at the wet, wriggling sensation invading his mouth. Their tongue? he realizes, doing poorly to mask his shock at how pleasant he finds the feeling to be. Unpredictable as per his usual routine, he returns the gesture, his own joining with yours to swirl and dance in the space between you. The softest of moans escapes him, and he tears away from you, embarrassed and breathing sharply, his pale cheeks tinted with the softest of rouge and lips tainted by your mixture of saliva.
Your laughter is faint as you lick away the liquid gathered along your own.
“So…” Scaramouche glances at you from beneath his newly summoned hat, barely having time to recover when you’ve shot him a look unfamiliar to him—it’s startling, how warm it makes him feel; how unfocused his mind is when your gazes lock; how impossible he finds it to begin stringing words into a sentence after what he’d engaged in – dazed, your eyelids flutter on incident at him, and in that starstruck, awestruck daze, “Did any of that get me anywhere with you?”
— until these words exit your mouth, that is. Your flippant attitude was not something he’d accounted for in the aftermath, and even worse, you’d caught him in a moment of vulnerability and weakness and decided to deliver them before he could collect himself.
“Something like that,” he says breathily, his eyes rapidly widening at you. You chuckle nervously in response, daring to reach forward and adjust his slightly tilted kasa. He turns on the spot when you’re finished, clearing his throat, and beginning the rest of your descent down from the base of Mount Yougou. “Come along, then. We’ve got work to do.”