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When The Balladeer awakens, it is an experience akin to that of a trapped animal in a cage. The days and weeks of sleep dwell in the cracks of the facade that makes up his body, and he doesn't feel connected to it. He never does, the synthetic limbs with their fake fluidity providing a pathetic imitation of the life he’d never truly deserved. He awakens instead with ghosts in his head and knives stabbing through his heart.
No.
He doesn't have a heart. He never would have, not now. Not after the gnosis was wrenched from his grasp by that wretched god, and nor did he have one when he was created. Not when surrounded by fire, with nothing left but ashes in the shape of the organ he craved, for it was never once his to hold.
He wills his shaking hands to clench at the place over the gaping maw in his chest. They shouldn't shake, for that was a human trait to have. He's never been human, and will never be again. He isn't sure he even wants to be, not anymore.
Denouncing the world had been easier, hiding the hurt between layers upon layers of hatred. The hatred is the type that runs so deep that it obscures all else; the blinding rage against those who abandoned him proves a soothing balm of numbness.
There's someone in his room, he thinks.
Between patches of consciousness and wavering darkness, he thinks he hears a voice.
It reminds him of her.
In his dreams, he sees red. He sees the stark, crimson sky of her plane with its bloodied dying sun, the burning red of abandoned love that claws and winds into his throat, that he disguises so carefully as a burning hatred when she discards him.
He wonders if a thing like him can learn how to see in color.
He wonders what it would be like, to feel without the mask of scorching agony winding through his limbs. Would there ever be a depth beyond this? Hues beyond black and white and red and pain in his chest?
He doesn't know. He wonders if he truly cares.
(He does, somewhere in the depths of the void that this vessel holds within him.)
He cares so much it burns, searing through his plastic veins and filling them with scorching ire. The feeling crawls inside, settles deep within him and breathes venom instead of oxygen through his lungs.
His body is burning. It's burning and he can't take it –can't hold the memories, as they eat him alive. There's someone else here, he thinks. He's stopped caring who. What did it matter? He is trapped here in his final resting place. They finally have him where they wanted him, and it’s ostensibly more gratifying for his captors to watch him become singed in the flames of his own psyche, than it would be to end him in well-deserved retribution.
It is inevitable for him to end, as all things are fated to be.
That's wrong too, he's reminded distantly. The Doctor’s laugh echoes through his fevered mind, years of being brought to the brink of death at his table reminding him of his own cursed immortality. He couldn't die, he'd said. He was never permitted to. Not when he yearned for it above anything else, and not when the flames enveloped him back in that wretched building filled with ghosts. He was created to be the perfect immortal being, capable of holding boundless divinity.
He’d failed at that, too, somehow.
He drifts.
“Sleeping for so long? How curious. I thought your form didn't require such mundane things as rest.” Il Dottore smirks behind his words, all too aware of the power his position gave him over the sixth.
Scaramouche finds himself unable to muster language beyond the strangled groans uttered from his cracked lips. He'd willingly submitted to the doctor's meddling; he would continue to do so as long as he fulfilled his birthright at the end of it all. It was the means to this divine end that drove him to endure the pain.
The doctor was the worst person in the world. He was also the best, a shining, blinding pillar to glare up into as he led Scaramouche to his promised glory.
But oh, the doctor did so love to test the inhuman limits of his ability to suffer.
For all that Ei had created him as an emotionless vessel, he feels emotion so strongly that he had wondered what type of cruelty she must have had in mind for his birth from the beginning. No benevolent god would bestow such pain into his chest in absence of a heart, and catalyze its destruction with their betrayal. Every hurt is a reminder of his failure, every human feeling a reminder that he is anything but human. It burns.
Another wave of pain crashes through him, and he stops fighting against the pull of darkness. Falling into the cold embrace of an inhuman sleep means he will not have to endure, even if only for a fleeting moment.
When the puppet awakens once again, it is not to his current body. The flames lick at his limbs, and it is a familiar scene. He wishes desperately that it wasn't, that he wasn't reminded of this scorching feeling of loss every time he closed his eyes. For a being that never necessarily needed sleep, he found himself in its clutches far too often.
But when he looks down, it is not to his manufactured limbs and ball joints that refuse to burn. The limbs he inhabits are human, a child's flesh.
Someone's screaming, and he realizes belatedly that it is him.
His raw throat is bleeding and his body is melting, as all he can expel are wet, dying coughs. His chest clenches, and in his numb awareness of his surroundings his eyes are drawn downwards.
The cavity that once held his electro heart is blackened and weeping. Blood pours out of the hole and as he reaches a trembling hand to it, his fist closes around an organ. Bringing it to his face, the boy's tiny heart crumbles into ashes that slip between his fingers and evaporate with the heat.
The child was the only one between the two who would find release in the flames, and the only one who neither deserved nor desired it in the end.
He dimly registers his own laughter at the cruel irony of it all.
When he wakes, it is to the fresh, dull sensation of pain.
His body aches so deeply, tightly coiled and wound with tension. His jaw has been clenched for too long and his skin stretched taut. It is strange; odd that his limbs are capable of something so human, so weak. They are weighted under the layers of exhaustion that settle into his joints and find home in the empty space between bones. And yet, for the first time since he fell from the Shouki no Kami, he feels entirely awake.
The false stars shine their light through the window to his prison. Casting his gaze around the room, the Balladeer notes that for somewhere that has to be intended to contain him, it is laughably equipped for comfort. A foolish endeavor, if it were meant to keep him imprisoned.
The moonlight reflects off of the green-clad walls, casting an emerald glow upon his cage. The embers of the moon bounce and dance, landing upon the almost indiscernible form that prowls in the shadows.
Buer.
The contempt in his heart crawls its way onto his face and sits in the space between his eyebrows. Her presence fills his mouth with a bitter, unpleasant taste.
“If you’re here to observe me like a little experiment, you'd have been better off ending me back in the workshop.” The puppet spits.
“Why do you think that?” The tiny god asks.
“Why did you keep me alive?” The puppet retorts. It doesn’t have the time or the will for this, the farce she wants to create between them. “If you think I’m giving up whatever secrets you think I have for you just because you defeated me, you’re wrong. I’d sooner die.”
He bitterly wants his limbs to move, but the things stubbornly refuse, decayed and useless. He’s as good as bed-bound in this chamber against his will. Confronted by the Archon’s divinity, he feels reduced to something less than even inhuman in the face of the young god.
The puppet is a broken object, rotten to its core. Its body is lined with synthetic gore, ash inlaid neatly in the crevices between its bones.
“You hold a great sadness.” The god observes.
“I was not made to be happy,” it replies, “for I was created in Her image.”
“Do you not have your own life, separate from that which you were made to be? A sapling grows from a tree, but it blooms into its own being of its own accord.”
“Most people live,” it says, “I merely exist.”
“Do you not dream, the same as anyone else? Do you not want and desire for more, the way every human does?”
The puppet stares at the ceiling with its fractured gaze.
“I don't know, not anymore,” it says.
“I think you do,” the god replies, “you just need time to grow.”
A moment of time passes in silence. The puppet does not open its mouth. It does not need to.
“Healing is for humans,” the puppet murmurs finally, “and I am no such thing.”
The little god returns to her contemplative quiet, and the space is filled with a solemn silence.
The room is plunged back into starlit dark as she leaves him alone to stew in the aftermath of his thoughts. This too, is what he knows he deserves.
Tomorrow he will wake up to a plate of Ajilenakh Nuts and the morning sun filtering through the blinds. He will push her away again, and scream, and then cry his corroded sobs in her absence.
Tomorrow, he will lament the life he did not get to live, and begin anew in the space sown between death and rebirth.
Tomorrow, his phantom heart will beat in the empty cavern laid within, and it will grow into something new once more.
Fin.