Chapter Text
Nahida gasps excitedly, skipping off the trail after whatever it is she’d just seen through the foliage.
Wanderer rolls his eyes for the umpteenth time but follows the little god nonetheless. Nahida so often acts like a mentor to him, it's easy to forget that he is essentially her prisoner when an outsider passing by could mistake him as the babysitter of a curious child.
“Come look at this!”
He stops beside where she's kneeling on the ground in front of something. She grins up at him, but he only stares down with an unimpressed deadpan.
“A dead twig.”
“Huh?” Nahida frowns, confused as she looks back down at what Wanderer indeed recognizes as a dead twig lying in the dirt. “Oh!” she whispers loudly, almost to herself, as she looks from the ground back up at him, “you can't see them, can you?”
“What?” Wanderer deadpans.
“Do you remember why we're here?”
“Yes.” He doesn’t. Though he hadn't necessarily forgotten either. He hadn’t listened to the full explanation as it had contained more information than he cared to process.
Nahida looks doubtful. “We're here because I wanted to check on the aranara in person.”
“And…” He prompts, raising an eyebrow.
“You can't see them.” Nahida hums in contemplation. “Usually, only children can see them. But you're with me, and they still won't show themselves to you… They probably just don't trust you?”
Wanderer pauses for a moment before letting out a laugh. “So they're smarter than their archon, huh?”
Nahida narrows her eyes in disapproval before standing and skipping ahead with a bounce in her step. “That's okay,” she declares, unperturbed. “We can work on it.”
---
Sharp pain shoots through his side, his arm, across his ribs, down his leg. Wanderer grits his teeth as his artificial nervous system seems to have been lit on fire. It's irritating. It’s nothing compared to what he's endured before. But when he tries to move his arm, it trembles uncontrollably. His artificial muscles stubbornly ignore all signals from his brain.
His legs give out suddenly and he sinks to the ground. He curses as the pain reaches his head too.
It’s beyond frustrating but bearable. It does hurt, but this pain is nothing. He'd have dealt fine with pain alone, but this? He can't even stand—can't move a stupid muscle in his limbs. This has happened before, he knows the paralysis won't last. He still despises every second.
How pathetic. Like this, he’s even weaker than a human. He can almost hear Dottore’s unimpressed hum as he notes every side effect of his own tampering in the long list of Scaramouche’s failures. Improvement always remained the goal but fleeting weakness was a humiliation nonetheless.
There’s a little blur of color and Wanderer whips his gaze towards the movement, to where his arm lies slack and useless at his side, only to find a small bundle of flowers cradled in his open palm.
Wanderer draws out a frustrated sigh, slowly adjusting his awkward kneel to sit on the uneven dirt, propping his functioning arm up on his knee.
“That’s not gonna help me, you know.”
Of course, there is no response. He rolls his eyes, stifling a groan of pain as white-hot agony shoots from his shoulder blade, down his back. Were he human, his jaw would ache with how tight his teeth are clenched. He tries again to move his arm—his fingers at the very least—but to no avail.
Another flower appears on his thigh, then a third; this time a little bundle of grass with some kind of colorful trash woven between the blades.
Great. At this embarrassing lapse, he is being ambushed by invisible vegetables who are supposed to hate him. What had compelled him to agree to Kusanali’s cruel request? Running around the rainforest doing chores for the aranara hasn’t gotten him anywhere yet.
Well, actually it's gotten him sitting on the damp, muddy rainforest floor, vulnerable and unable to move. Fantastic.
“I’d prefer you not,” he tells the invisible space around him.
Two more flowers appear; one on the ground at his knee and another balanced on his shoulder.
Wanderer mutters some particularly offensive things in his frustrated exasperation—things that he doesn’t really mean and the vegetables wouldn’t understand, but Nahida certainly would have kicked him had she been here.