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“Klee, would you like to introduce me to your new friend?” The one with the mark on his neck says to the young girl with pointed ears currently holding his hand as she leads him into the city of Mondstadt. Scara has been here before, though it was so long ago that his memory of the city is hazy. There have been more buildings erected, and the people look more lively since the last time he was here. He peers at the man looking at him with curious eyes, and somehow, he remembers seeing him there too, even back then. He wonders if the man remembers him.
“This is Scara! I found him walking around Wolvendom while looking for Razor.” Albedo smiled at her smile.
“And why bring him to Mondstadt? What if he was looking for Wolfhooks?” Klee’s fidgeting quieted as she processed this thought. In truth, Scara wasn’t looking for anything in particular. Just wandering as he was wont to do now. Taking in everything he missed while in the Fatui.
“Oh. I didn’t think about that.” Klee turns to Scara, looking up at him with apologetic eyes. “Were you looking for Wolfhooks, Scara?” Her bottom lip sticks outward and he knows he’d never be able to say anything to upset her.
“No, not really. Just exploring the scenery.” He says truthfully.
“Where are you from?” Albedo asks him and that’s always a hard question to answer for him. It changes depending on his mood.
“Sumeru.” He says this time. That might change by the next day. Albedo nods and leaves it there. Klee starts getting restless, beginning to fidget again.
“You don’t seem like you’ve ever been to Mondstadt before. Do you want Klee to show you around? I can show all my favorite fish blasting spots!” Behind her, Albedo clears his throat, and Klee quickly corrects her sentence. “I mean…I can show you where the knights work. And all the best places to get food!” Scara wants to smile, but his mouth has forgotten the shape of a genuine smile long ago.
“That sounds nice.” He says, trying to at least make his face form an expression of happiness, but he can feel his lips twitching and can imagine that his face looks more like it is cringing. He doesn’t know why he tried in the first place. Regardless, Klee’s smile grows and she seems to accept his answer, tightening her hold on Scara’s hand and turning back to Albedo.
“Klee is gonna show Scara around Mondstadt now! I promise I won’t blow anything up!” She’s bouncing on her toes, looking giddy, and Scara can’t fathom why. It was just a tour of the city. Perhaps it was her childlike glee, her younger mind that let her feel so…happy about everything. Scara missed when he felt the same.
“All right Klee, I’ll trust you. Just remember not to get in the way of everyone working when you show him the knight’s headquarters.” Albedo says to her, then he goes to stand next to Scara, leaning much too far into what Scara considers personal space. The mark on his neck seemed especially visible to Scara, and he couldn’t keep his eyes from straying toward it. If the alchemist noticed, he didn’t say anything to him. “Keep an eye on her for me, will you? She can be a bit too excitable at times and her first instinct is to throw a bomb somewhere, so if you see her beginning to look restless, could you try to steer her in a different direction please?” Scara nods, finally bringing his eyes from the diamond symbol on his neck to clear blue eyes. “Thank you.”
The rest of Scara’s day is spent following what he comes to know as the ‘Sparknight’ on her tour-turned-adventure in Mondstadt. The people all smile at her as she passes them, promising her things like food and escapades to go on, an occurrence Scara found a bit odd. Never had he seen someone offer a dungeon for exploring to a little girl as a gift. Then again, it has been decades since he was last here. Besides, he never cared much about getting to know the people in the cities he went on missions for. He wasn’t Childe, after all, wasting time making useless attachments.
“What did you think, Scara? Isn’t Mondstadt so cool?” Klee is bouncing again he nods, looking around to see if he can spot someone to take Klee off his hands. He didn’t dislike the girl, and that was exactly the problem. He thought she was adorable, hence why he needed to get away. Children have always been a weak spot of his.
“Traveler!” And there goes another.
Looking up, Scara spots the head of long blonde hair that helped save his life not too long ago (or maybe it has a long time ago. Being immortal can skew one’s concept of time). The Traveler looks around them, brows crinkled in confusion before his eyes land on Scara’s, widening in surprise. Then, they soften again, and Scara isn’t sure if it was at the sight of him with Klee or him alone. He isn’t sure if he wants to know the answer.
“Hey there, you two. How’s it been?” Aether says amiably, his smile lightening his face. Scara shrugs just as Klee jumps again.
“Klee has been showing Scara around Mondstadt since he’s never been here before! I showed all my favorite places to hide from Master Jean and all the best places to test out bombs!” Klee still hasn’t let go of his hand, and he wonders why. The entire trip, she’d been gripping him as tight as her small hands could, as if afraid he would disappear the moment she let go. Scara knows all too well what that felt like.
Aether bends down to be at eye level with Klee. “Would you say that you found a new friend?” Klee nods rapidly, smiling so hard that Scara is sure it has to hurt.
“Yup! Scara is my new friend! I can’t wait to go on more adventures with him!” She says so heartfelt that it makes him wheeze like her sincerity was a punch in the stomach. He had to get away from her soon.
Aether looked back up at him, his sunlit eyes scanning the entirety of his face, and Scara felt like he could read minds sometimes with the way he looked through people. He hoped the Traveler wasn’t reading his at that moment, sure that he would be in for a lecture after this if so. “Sounds nice, Klee. Mind if I join you both?” He says to her, his smile no less genuine than it was before.
“Of course not! You’re also Klee’s friend! Klee would be happy to go on an adventure with both of you!” She exclaims, and Scara begins to feel guilty that he didn’t plan to see her again for some time after this. The Traveler nods at her.
Sometime later, Klee is finally out of Scara’s hands and into the care of a knight named Kaeya Alberich, another name that sounded familiar to him, though he couldn’t quite pinpoint why. He had the same diamond shape the Jester did, the same one on Albedo’s neck. Scara was curious about the correlation, but couldn’t be bothered to look deeper into it. Perhaps he’d ask the Traveler about it later.
“What’s on your mind, Wanderer?” Aether flutters next to him on his walk out of Mondstadt, long hair billowing behind him. When Scara glances at him and sees the way the sunset catches in his hair, Scara swears that, for the nth time, the gods favored Aether more than they ever did him, blessing Aether with the ability to wield elements without a vision and power he didn’t have to work for the way Scara did. He wonders why, each time the thought crosses his mind, but it leads him into a downward spiral, and he'd promised himself he’d be better when the Traveler has already put in the effort to restore his memories. It’s a fight every day for him.
“Nothing, really,” Scara says because he can’t tell the Traveler that he’d been contemplating his luck again, lest he has to sit through another one-sided discussion turned reprimand about how he had to stop being so consistently negative. It didn’t matter what he said anyhow because Aether looked like wouldn’t have believed him if the raised eyebrow he gave Scara was anything to go by. Still, the Traveler left it alone.
“You should visit Klee again soon. She’ll miss you.” Aether declares, and Scara is about to refute this because how would Klee miss him if she’s only known him for one day? when Aether continues. “Albedo too.” This stops Scara in his tracks completely because that made even less sense than the last statement.
“…What?” Scara’s mouth hangs open and this time, he fully looks at Aether rather than hasty glances. He still thinks the Traveler is a lot to look at most times. Too bright to gaze at fully. For him, at least. Someone whose soul was so weighed down by their sins that there wasn’t ever hope of redeeming himself.
“I think Albedo has taken a liking to you.” Aether takes his braid into his hands, toying with the tufts at the end of it. A nervous habit Scara noticed after traveling with him for some time, though Scara couldn’t figure out for the life of him, what the Traveler was worried about and why.
“And just how do you figure that? I’d only seen him for little over a minute.” Aether gives a vague shrug, and Scara hates that. If there was one thing to dislike about the Traveler, it was that he was entirely too benevolent. Scara noticed that he rarely ever said no to anything, if at all, happy to do whatever anyone else told him. He was all too willing to shrug his shoulders at a request, which people often interpreted as acceptance. All too willing to keep his honest opinions locked away from the world. Perhaps it was Scara’s own candor, the tenacity that made him loathe that ‘kind’ side of Aether, but was it really kind if the Traveler planned on leaving Teyvat after completing his goal? Why go to such lengths for people he had no sort of connection to? To let them form a dependency only to withdraw that steadiness seemed like one of the cruelest things a person could do.
“I could see it in the way he looked at you looking at Klee. It’s obvious that you don’t hate her, and it’s even more obvious you’d be willing to go to lengths to keep her smiling, despite only having known her for about a day. Klee has that effect on people.” Scara gapes at the Traveler once again displaying their astute ability to read people
“You should ask him next time to see him.” The Traveler turns away from Scara again to head in the direction of the Windrise plains archon statue, leaving Scara to realize just a second too late that Aether thought he’d be going back to Mondstadt.