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Chapter Text

She breaks him gently, the way she does everything.

"Don't you think it's time you moved on, Wanderer?" she asks, casually, innocently. "I have no need for you anymore."

Wanderer stops breathing. His mind draws a perfect, expansive blank. When his tongue finally unsticks from the roof of his mouth, it shapes the words, "That isn't funny."

Nahida is not cruel. She is never cruel. She would not joke about something like this.

(Nahida is a god.)

Her head tilts ever-so-slightly. Her green eyes are round and untroubled, her lips pursed minutely, as though she honestly sees nothing wrong with what she's just said. "It wasn't a joke."

She doesn't tell him to get out. She doesn't make him leave. She shatters him with the same unobtrusive, self-conscious authority with which she rules Sumeru. He was always telling her she needed to be more assertive. She hasn’t taken his advice, even now.

Wanderer stares at her with a sweeping sense of unreality. A dream, he thinks. A nightmare. But after all the times she's crept into his dreams to comfort him or pulled him unwittingly into hers, he knows what the fabric of a dream feels like around him. This is horrifyingly real. He stares at her familiar face, perfectly pleasant, young and fey. He tries to identify a stranger in her guise. But try as he might, all he can see is Nahida: Nahida, who pulled him from the wreckage. Nahida, whose judgment he trusts. Nahida, bestower of unearned grace.

(Unearned. It was always unearned grace.)

Wanderer’s throat feels tight. His lips feel numb. "Don't be stupid," he says. "Of course you need me."

(He knows that she doesn't.)

"Truly, I don't," she tells him, and she sounds almost apologetic.

The silence stretches. His mind still balks. "Alright," he says. "Alright. I get that you're mad at me."

He clings to the idea with every shred of his being. It's the only thing that makes sense. Without it he will tumble into an abyss. He didn't think she had the guts to be this cruel in her anger, but maybe she's learned one thing from him, at least. They can still fix this, he tells himself. She’ll take it back, and he'll make himself forgive her.

But Nahida's head tilts in the other direction, now. Her green eyes are fathomless. Pitiless. Like he's a bug under glass. They sneak up on him, the moments in which she truly seems a god. "I'm not mad," Buer insists. "I really think this is what's best for both of us."

The first flutter of panic, somewhere in the hollow cavern of his chest. "Come off it, Nahida,” he snaps. “If this is about what happened in the desert last week, I'll do better. Just quit it, this isn’t-"

This isn't you.

But wasn't she always too good to be true?

The thought is like a trickle of ice down his spine. Mildly, she replies, "Of course it isn’t about that. You're being silly. I've actually been thinking about this for a long time."

Something is splintering inside him. An old hysteria settles into his bones. When, he thinks, did he stop expecting betrayal? Why does this come as so much of a shock to him? It shouldn't come as so much of a shock.

Wanderer did not realize quite how much he has grown to trust her until this moment, when she grinds it into dust. For the first days and weeks and months, he was watchful. Wary. Convinced this was a form of captivity, waiting for her sick little schemes to reveal themselves. Gods were not to be trusted. Gods were capricious and cruel. Gods were selfish, they were fickle, they took no counsel and justified themselves to no one.

But slowly, slowly, she smoothed over his sharp edges. Teased out his softness like detangling the snarled roots of a plant. She was unlike anyone he'd ever met, whether human or monster or god. With quiet, attentive care, she convinced him he didn't need to be useful to her to stay. She convinced him he was safe.

At first Scaramouche told himself that when her true nature was revealed, he'd be ready. He'd let the fury still boiling inside him burst loose without hesitation or regret. But he got careless. Bit by bit, piece by piece, she's taken his fury away. Like everyone else, he realizes suddenly, she's broken him down and reshaped him into a form more pleasing to her. Her hands were by far the gentlest in their reconstruction of him, but she was still the god who tore out his heart and traded it away. She's left her indelible mark on him, like every master that came before her, and like most of them, she convinced him first that he wanted it too. We can heal together, she insisted, and he let her whittle down the claws he worked so hard to sharpen, and now as he stares at her, no fury comes.

His throat clicks when he swallows. He tastes ash on his tongue. All he can do is croak, "What did I do wrong?"

Buer frowns at him. She doesn't reply. The world spins; he finds he's on the ground and he doesn't know if it's because his legs have ceased to hold his weight, or simply because gods must be greeted on their knees, and she is abruptly very much a god.

Despite it all, he thought he was still useful, even if she didn’t, strictly speaking, need him. He thought he was doing well enough. He wanted to be of use to her, even if she didn’t require it for him to stay. And she seemed to appreciate it; the scouting, the guarding, the political advice and Fatui intel and dispatching of enemies and every other little favor and errand.

"Buer. Please. What did I do wrong?"

Maybe if she tells him, he can fix it. Make the right promises, the right apologies. He thought she was something like a companion, but if she's decided she'd rather be just another god to serve, that's- it's not alright, but he'll force himself to be alright with it. He has practice. Help him one day, hurt him another- used to it, he's used to it. As long as he can keep from being discarded again.

(Not again. This can't be happening again.)

Buer seems sad, looking down at him, and Wanderer seizes the thought like a lifeline because if he can make her sad, she must still care at least a little. But then she says, "It's not anything you did, exactly, it's just..." She hesitates. Ruefully, a little shamefaced, she adds, "I made a mistake."

Wanderer inhales sharply, a pained sound, punched-out like he's been gutted. It would have hurt less to be gutted. (Has hurt less, when he's been gutted.)

Hasn't that always been the case? It's not what you did, it's what you are. It's all of you.

"I'm sorry," Buer goes on as he stares in shell-shocked silence, and she does sound it, a little. "I just don't think I can trust you."

No matter how frantically he tries, he can't think of anything he’s done recently that would have shattered her trust in him, unless she never truly trusted him in the first place. Unless this was all a test, a trial period, and he has failed. Even though it was going so well. Seemed to be going so well.

(Stupid, stupid, stupid puppet. Of course it was too good to be true.)

Desperation sinks its fangs in, and he casts wildly about for any compromise he can make. "Then lock me up!" he bursts out. "I can prove myself. Please. Anything you need. I can- I can-"

He thought he was a prisoner at first. It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine. Maybe he can earn the freedom back eventually. Of course he isn't trustworthy, but she never seemed to care before. Please. As long as she keeps him. Please. Don't throw me away.

"I don't want to do that," Buer says. "This needn't be so dramatic. It hasn't worked out; we can simply part ways."

Maybe it's that blaise 'dramatic' that finally unearths something of his rage. When a sudden laugh bursts through his lips, piercing and deranged, it's all Balladeer, none of the Wanderer to it at all. He's still on his knees and shaking, arms wrapped around himself like a denied embrace, nails digging into pale skin. "Was it fun for you, Buer?" he demands. The sound is a little too choked to be a snarl, but he refuses to name it anything else. "Was it all just a game? Is this what you intended all along?!"

Buer is quiet for some time. His vision of her blurs and doubles; he's lost another battle, he keeps trying to tell himself it hasn't happened until the first tear drips swift and soundless to splash on the Sanctuary floor.

"Please, Wanderer," Buer sighs finally. "Don't make this any harder than it has to be."

She won’t even respond to him properly. She just sits there with her all-knowing eyes, waiting for him to realize it’s already over. As if she can't spare him the energy of banishing him overtly; as if he is too insignificant for her to make the effort of taking out her own garbage.

He should rage; he should throw her cowardice in her face; he should stubbornly, selfishly, childishly refuse to remove himself from the place he's only recently, tentatively, began to think of as home. But the breath crushes from his lungs, and he keels forward with the effort of keeping his tears quiet, his forehead pressing to the cool tile as his body quakes, useless and unwanted as a crumpled paper ball. Eventually he hears the patter of her footsteps, light on the ground, and for one delusional moment- the last spasmic kick of hope in its death throes- he thinks she'll come over to him and comfort him as she has so many times before.

The footsteps move past him and then further away. He listens to them grow more distant until they fade from hearing entirely.

He is utterly alone.

In another time, another place, he might have run after her, continued to protest, to argue, to bargain; he used to be so good at bargaining for his keep. But none of that ever truly helped him in the end, and the suddenness of it has paralyzed him, wiping all logical thought away, leaving only the shaky, desolate numbness that always follows unforeseen catastrophe. He never thought he’d have to experience it again, and he feels impossibly small and defenseless in its wake. After all, this story could only ever have had one end, as inevitable as the tides or the wind. He’s experienced it too many times before; what use is it struggling futilely against fate?

He’s never stayed where he isn’t wanted before. He isn’t about to start now.

And so eventually he stumbles blindly, breathlessly, to his feet. He staggers from the Sanctuary of Surasthana, arms still a vice grip around himself he doesn't know how to release. He ignores the murmurs of passersby, ducking his head down to hide beneath the wide brim of his hat. He walks in a daze, on and on and on, down the steps of the Akademiya and through the twisting pathways of Sumeru City, into the fringes of the rainforest and then into its depths. He doesn't know where he's going. Doesn't care to know. Walks half with the intent to get lost. Only knows that finally, eventually, his ankle twists on a tree root and he falls to his hands and knees in the muck. His arms finally unlock from around himself, skidding numbly in the mud. An inhale startles reflexively into his lungs, the first in hours, loud and dragging as it claws down his windpipe; on the exhale, it comes out in the shape of a scream.

The sound is loud and long, wrenching and full-throated and insane, scattering the birds from the trees. Another breath heaves in without his permission, and this time it comes out as a wail. He curls into himself, sobbing, finally making noise now that there's no one to see. Now that he's safe. Alone. Safe. Alone. He can't get ahold of himself. It's all he can do.

In his mind, he watches the nameless thing's suffering from a bird's-eye-view, and all he can feel is disgust.

(Worthless, pitiful puppet. No wonder everyone leaves.)

*

Eventually, the body stops its pointless sobbing and shaking, and the puppet lies there motionless. The idea of revenge circles around him, poking him as a child pokes a dead thing with a stick. He's lived for it before. Couldn't he do so again? But there's no allure to it, just a dull throb like pressing a bruise, no temptation to the thought of her face twisted up in grief or rage. She pulled the instinct for revenge from him like a string of bloody pearls, showed him the righteous devastation he wrought was only ever the petulant thrashing of a child's misplaced blame. Only when he was defanged and defenseless did she divest herself of him- dump him on the roadside like an unwanted puppy, as if there were anywhere else for him to go-

There is nowhere else for him to go.

Why didn't she just kill him? Why don't any of them ever have the decency to just kill him when they're through with him?

Why did she peel him out of that crater and put him back together at all?

She must have thought, at the start, that there could be something of worth in him. She seemed to work so hard to unearth it. She was so kind to him for so long. But so were the people of Tatarasuna. But the people of Tatarasuna didn't betray him. They didn't, remember? So she- why did she-

(Nahida is a god.)

When did he fail? When did she lose hope that he could become what she wanted? Why didn't she warn him, why didn't she try to let him fix it? He didn't ever act grateful enough, that's true, but he didn't think he had to. He didn't think she wanted him to grovel, she told him so many times to forget his debts-

Why, why, why did he believe her?

People are liars. They're liars, and the only thing uglier than a human's heart is a god's.

It isn't true, he supposes, that there was no warning at all. His mind keeps circling around to that mission in the desert last week. He's failed her before, of course, a dozen times in a dozen little ways, and always the fear would knock the wind from him, but she soothed it every time, and every time it bit less sharply. But last week- he failed to protect her. She was injured. There was blood. He- panicked, a little.

It wasn’t supposed to be that dangerous of a mission. There was unusual activity near one of King Deshret’s ruins, and Nahida wanted to investigate in person, despite his objections. He accompanied her for safety reasons, but it turned out he just wasn’t quite quick enough to keep the haywire construct from grazing her in the side. Right after, she crushed it in a profusion of desiccated desert vines and stood there blinking, stunned, as blood-red ichor plip-plopped slowly into the sand. He wrapped the shallow wound up in bandages, then hurried them both back to Sumeru City even though she protested that they hadn’t found the root cause yet. She relented, deferring to his judgment, because she knew how badly she’d worried him the last time she got injured in the desert, when she went without him during all that nasty business with Apep-

(How much of any of that was real? How much of any of it had ever been real?)

Maybe it wasn’t his failure to protect her that damned him, but his panic in itself. Unsightly. Unseemly. Clinging, cloying thing, with his childish inadequacy and constant need for reassurance. He'd gotten her injured, and she was the one comforting him.

You're so dramatic, Dottore used to say. You're lucky I put up with you. But Scaramouche knew he would, because there was a need for him to fulfill, and so he gave and gave and gave, so eagerly, for centuries. It felt right to him; after all, only someone even more of a monster than he was would welcome him with open arms.

In a fleeting moment of pure insanity, he wonders if Dottore would accept him if he went to him now, their history wiped out by Irminsul. Blank slate, clean page. New canvas for the agonies only Scaramouche now remembers. Would Dottore be delighted at the opportunity? Would he praise him with enthusiasm, seeing his endurance for the first time again?

You hate him, Scaramouche reminds himself, you hate him, you hate him, all he did was hurt you, he ruined your life, you want him dead-

He rolls onto his side, curls up into a ball. You should die before you even consider that, he tells himself. You should die. You should die.

You should die.

*

He doesn't know how long he lays there.

He won't die from exposure to the elements. He won't die from hunger or thirst. The desire to end it all circles lazily around his head like a condor circling carrion, but it just sounds like so much work. He lies motionlessly in the bed of grass and tries not to think about where it all went wrong. This is harder than it sounds.

Maybe he should have seen it coming. She hadn’t spoken to him in the past few days. He thought she was just under the weather, had been trying to think of a way to force her out of her room to see if she was okay…

I just don't think I can trust you.

What should he have done - leapt in front of the blow himself? He would have. He wasn't fast enough.

But maybe she was honest when she said nothing really pushed her over the edge. Maybe she was toying with him the entire time and finally grew tired of the facade.

He knows he really has no one to blame but himself for clawing his chest open to this kind of hurt again.

He’s too miserable to get up and go looking for his fortune in a world that feels suddenly closed off to him entirely, but too exhausted to bother to take himself out of it. Only when it begins to rain does he finally haul himself up from the dirt. Mechanically, almost automatically. The rain won't kill him either, but he...

Well. Maybe he's been among humans too long. He let himself get used to comfort. On stiff limbs, he goes looking for shelter. Beneath one of the bigger trees nearby, maybe.

Turns out all this time he's been resting quite close to a cliff. It's pouring by now, the rain pelting down harder and harder, falling in rivulets from the brim of his hat. His foot slips in the mud and in one swift movement earth and sky are reversed as he goes tumbling off the edge.

He thinks - oh. That's actually rather a long way down.

His Anemo vision is still clipped to his chest. To summon a gale would take only a moment's thought.

He could catch himself.

He doesn't.

*

When the puppet opens its eyes, it's to pain and confusion. Everything hurts. Breath sputters in, then crunches in his ribcage like knives. He coughs it out, and the coughing hurts worse, rough and wet and metallic. His vision blurs. He tries to sit up, get his bearings, and agony arcs in a dozen fractals of lightning across his limbs and through his ribs as bone grates against bone. He can't get enough air to scream, can only fall back with a strangled groan, chest fluttering with quick shallow breaths.

Where is he?

What happened?

He fell.

Is anyone coming to get him? Where are they? Surely he just has to wait, and they'll-

Thoughts scatter like raindrops on glass.

Who?

He could be anywhere, after any one of the devastating falls he's taken. Is he crumpled like a discarded doll in the Abyss, waiting to gather enough strength to drag himself back to Dottore-? Has he plummeted from the Shouki no Kami, lying broken at the feet of his last chance at godhood, waiting for clemency or death?

(Get up. Get up. If he makes it back, if he proves useful enough to the Fatui-)

His fingers twitch, dragging pointlessly in the mud. He pants, a light mist of rain falling on his tongue. He's outside. He's on Teyvat. Not-

(Stay still, maybe she'll kill you quickly, she's already taken your heart and your dignity and everything else.)

Nahida, he thinks, like a plea or a prayer.

His mother doesn't want him. Even Dottore doesn't want him (left him there took the Gnosis back and left him) but the last time he was hurt this badly it was Nahida who came and scraped him off the ground, pieced him so slowly and gently back together, so surely she'll- she-

(Get up. She'll be worried if you don't make it back, won't she?)

Something worries at his mind, a needle that he can't quite thread. The Wanderer claws at the ground with his left arm, the only limb that seems to work, and pushes half to sitting with a burst of pain and light and color that he grits his teeth against. He's at the base of a cliff. His right arm dangles uselessly; the shoulder a deep and snarled knot of pain. Both legs are broken, one more badly than the other. His right leg is twisted at an unnatural angle, bone visible where his shin ruptured through the flesh. His left leg is more intact, just bruised, but the knee is fucked, screaming in protest when he tries to bend it at all. His vision thumps lightly against his chest with its who-knows-how-many fractured ribs. How did he get so badly hurt? He'll have to warn Nahida before she- she...

The vision flickers sadly in its Sumeru casing above that dangling golden feather.

Scaramouche fell.

He remembers, with a high whine of white noise in his mind, why he didn't bother to catch himself this time.

The puppet slumps back against the stone, a wracking laugh clawing up from its throat along with a clump of blood.

Of course. Of course... And when it came down to it, he couldn't even die right.

No one will be coming to help him. Mother left. Dottore left. Nahida left. Katsuragi and Niwa and the child left, and even Scaramouche left himself, but the world spat him back out as the hapless Wanderer, too tough a pill for even the oblivion of Irminsul to swallow. Buer handed him a new life and then tore it out of his hands. They must be laughing at him, fate and gods and humans all, even the false wheeling stars and the dead moons laughing behind their corpse-pale hands.

His body's too broken to even crawl off and find something to finish the job. It could be a long time, here. There's so little that can truly kill him. A Rishboland tiger could come along and claw out his entrails and still he would live. Oh, it would be miserable but he knows he'd survive it, awake and screaming the whole time. Ask him how he knows! Just guess!

What a joke. Grotesque and in poor taste, overplayed and overdone. He's the only one around to laugh at it, so he laughs. Knocks his head back against the stone again and again, lets the almost gentle pain of it distract him from the rest, and laughs. Until the stabbing in his ribs is too much and no more whistling breaths will come.

The puppet lies there and waits.

*

He doesn't know how much more time passes before someone happens upon him. Long enough for lucidity to wax and wane, long enough to somehow go cold in the warm humidity of the rainforest, long enough to chase at after Buer in a cruel and soundless half-dream, clutching at her skirts like an overgrown child. Long enough that when a shadow falls over him he's startled into breathing, forgetting that it will only feel like being stabbed.

The person screams and leaps back before he even has a chance to hack up blood on them.

"I thought- I thought you were DEAD!" the person wails.

Well, if wishes were horses, he does not say.

The Wanderer- is he still the Wanderer? He's always left behind his previous identity when he was thrown away, but Wanderer was not quite a name in the first place. The puppet glares blearily in the direction of all the noise and finds he vaguely recognizes the person making it.

It's a girl. A teenage girl with a head of mossy green hair and panicked purple eyes. Her name eludes him. She dithers, hovering over him like she's afraid to touch. He hears something about a doctor and gathers enough will to grate out, "No doctors."

She pauses briefly, astonished to hear him speak. "But you- you'll die! You're hurt really, really bad- I've got to go get Master Tighnari, and we’ll-"

"No fucking doctors," he says, and he tries to make it a growl but it comes out as more of a feeble cough. "I won't die. I..." His head swims. "In fact, you can just leave me here."

Best he can hope for really. He doubts she'll be agreeable enough to go find a rock to bash his head in with.

"No, I can't! What are you saying?!" Her voice goes high-pitched with distress. "I'll be right back, okay? I'm going to go get Master Tighnari. I'm going to get you help! Just- just hold on a little bit longer!"

And then, as quickly as she came, she’s gone.

Truly, the Wanderer expects that to be the end of it.

But a couple hours later, she comes blundering out of the brush again with her master in tow- a certain Valuka Shuna who he recognizes on sight.

Tighnari’s mouth falls open. "...Hat Guy?"

"Just... forget you saw me," the puppet manages.

"See! I told you he was saying really weird things!" the girl exclaims.

Tighnari's jaw sets. "Collei, help me get him on the stretcher."

All the Wanderer has time for is a wheezy, wordless snarl before he's moved. A dozen fractures of pain light up blazing-white and just like that, his consciousness winks out.

Chapter Text

When the Wanderer wakes up again, everything still hurts, but differently.

He's lying in a bed. Soft sheets. Warm afternoon light. He squints down at his body and sees that while he was unconscious someone peeled him out of his sodden outer layers. His limbs have been wrapped and splinted, the bone sewn neatly back under the skin. His left arm is in a sling to help immobilize the damaged shoulder. The broken bones complain with a deep, abiding ache, but everything's back where it belongs, and that's usually enough to kickstart his body's self-repair. His chest, though, is still fucked- from the sharp pain when he tries to take a full breath, there's almost definitely a rib speared through one of his lungs.

It should probably be a relief to have been spared the pain of everything being put back into place, but Scaramouche finds himself indignant they'd had the audacity to do it while he was out cold. It's a familiar humiliation- waking up somewhere different, in different clothes, trying to figure out what'd been done to his body in the meantime. Even if it was necessary, he despises feeling so exposed.

Nahida ran into this issue very early, when he still saw her as little more than a captor. He was weak as a kitten and near-paralyzed in those first weeks after his defeat; not just from the fall but because he was never meant to detach from the Shouki no Kami, let alone rip himself out of it like that. Nahida kept his consciousness away while she worked on fixing him, wrapping him up in a dream, and when she let him come back up it- well, it was pathetic really. He was frantic. He could register that he felt better but he kept demanding what she’d done to him. It was near muscle memory- the only time Dottore ever knocked Scaramouche out was when he wanted to get away with something. After trying to explain herself several times, Nahida stunned him by apologizing. Sincerely. Told him she wouldn’t do it again.

And she didn’t.

Even when it would have been so much more convenient for her. Even when he watched in suspicious, sulky silence and refused to speak. Even when he screamed and threw things with his barely controllable limbs, awkward and uncoordinated but desperate for a way to vent his rage.

It was almost a challenge. Will you keep the high ground even now, Buer? Just knock me out and do what you like. I know you want to.

Still, she didn’t.

From then on she always talked things over with him first, no matter how obstinate he was or how concerned she was for his wellbeing. She was so careful with him. So consistently considerate.

He never saw this coming.

(Was it all perfunctory? Getting the desired emotional response out of her doll?)

(...He doesn't want to think about any of that right now.)

In any case, the most unpleasant part of it all is going to be realigning that rib, so if they were going to mess around while he was unconscious anyway, he would've preferred they took care of that while they were at it.

The pointlessness of it all weighs so heavily on his chest. After a few minutes he stills his breathing; all it does right now is hurt, and they should know for sure now that he isn't human, so there's no reason to keep up the charade.

Eventually there's the sound of movement as someone enters the room, and the puppet shifts to get a look. It's that jumpy green-haired girl; she startles badly at his movement, jumping back with an "Eep!" Then she just stares for a moment, blinking those big purple eyes.

"A-are you awake?" she stammers. "It's hard to tell when you don't breathe!"

The Wanderer pulls in a deliberate, raspy breath, but the desire to speak unspools as soon as it arises. He's just so goddamn tired.

"Oh-" The girl's eyes widen and she darts from the room, hollering, "Tighnari! Master Tighnari, he's awake!"

A moment later, she returns with Tighnari. He remembers- this is the Amurta scholar Wanderer kept from getting heatstroke in the desert, the one Scaramouche struck with lightning at Pardis Dhyai. "Hat Guy," Tighnari greets him, relieved. "I'm glad to see you're awake. I did what I could to stabilize you, but I'm not, er, the most familiar with your biology. What happened?"

Is that an actual question? Is it not self-evident? The puppet stares at him for an uncomfortable length of time, enough that Tighnari shifts on his feet, before forcing out, "...I fell."

"...Right," Tighnari says. "Well, as soon as this rain lets up I'll see about getting in contact with Lord Kusanali, and then-"

"No!"

Panic squeezes at his chest and before he can think better of it the Wanderer's jolted half-upright, only to collapse back into bed with a fit of wracking, bloody coughs. Immediately, Tighnari is at his bedside, hovering warningly. "Careful!" he reprimands. "Don't move around too much, you have some internal damage."

Wanderer does not reply at first. He is too busy having a series of sudden and devastating realizations, things that should have been obvious to him from the start. They know him as their archon's weird, unfriendly retainer; word must not have spread from Nahida about his dismissal yet. But if they reach out to her- if they-

What will she say? He finds he has no idea. She threw him out because she thinks he's untrustworthy, right? If she tells them he's a potential threat to Sumeru, they'll hardly keep being so kind and friendly. It's with a cold, sinking dread that he realizes there isn't a single person on the face of Teyvat who would believe him over the God of Wisdom. Hell, the Wanderer barely even believes himself. If Nahida says he's untrustworthy, he probably is.

"You can't... don't contact her," he wheezes. He’s aware that the request alone is suspicious, but he doesn't know what else he can do.

"...Why not?" Tighnari asks, perplexed. "She'll be able to help you better than we can, won't she?"

"I... She-" The Wanderer is shaking. The white noise is so loud again in his head. His throat squeezes at the thought of articulating that she won't bother. "I'll heal on my own," he manages finally. "It's fine."

Tighnari has a dubious expression. "I really think we should at least let her know where you are," he reasons, beginning to move away. "You're close, aren't you? She'd want to know that you're-" He stops abruptly when the Wanderer uses his undamaged arm to grasp desperately at his sleeve.

"You can't," he repeats through grit teeth. And then, swallowing what very little remains of his pride, "Please."

Tighnari stares with narrowed eyes, the cogs turning visibly in his mind. "...Did something happen between you two?" he asks.

It isn't quite accusatory, but Wanderer feels a burst of humiliation and fear and a sudden knee-jerk rage anyway, giving him the strength to kick the sheets aside and start struggling out of bed, ignoring every protest of his broken body. "Fine," he snarls. "Fine, call her then, I'll get out of your hair-"

"Hat Guy!" Tighnari protests, alarmed. "You've got broken legs, you can't go out like-"

Oh, but he can. It'll hurt, but give him a walking stick and let him pause every now and then to shove the biggest fractures back into place and he can drag himself around like this. He always makes it back, that's what's special about him, that's why they kept sending him to the Abyss. He shoves to his feet, leaning against the nearby cabinet as spots explode in his vision and fire runs up the breaks in his legs but he, he-

Seeing he's serious, Tighnari backs down. "Okay, okay, we won't call her. Just- calm down, sit back down, you're hurting yourself-"

The fox is crowding too close, putting a hand on his back, trying to guide him back into the bed and- "Don't touch me!" the puppet snaps, finally losing patience, but his stupid traitorous body is giving out and he slumps forward against the cabinet, forehead on cool wood, nearly dry-heaving from the pain.

"Alright," says Tighnari, suddenly gentle like he's soothing a frightened animal, and Wanderer resents this more than he would have resented being manhandled. "Alright, I'm sorry, that's my bad, I should've asked. Collei-"

Only when he calls the girl over does Wanderer remember she's been watching this the whole time, wide-eyed and silent in the corner of the room. She looks familiar, he thinks again, but he still can't place her.

"Can we- can we help you sit back down?" she pipes up, mousy and sweet, and he-

He lets out a low, ragged laugh. "Just- do whatever you're going to do."

The girl and her master silently, but nevertheless audibly, exchange a glance.

“Um,” says Tighnari flatly, “No. Do you want us to help you back to the bed or not?”

Wanderer grits his teeth. Does he want them to? No. How humiliating. His skin crawls at the thought. But he doesn’t truly want to try it himself, either. He can feel his legs trembling, threatening to give out completely; can feel the agonizing grind of the fracture in his left leg threatening to twist back out of place. He really, really, really doesn’t want to feel it tear back out through the stitches.

“...Fine,” he snarls after a moment.

"Alright," says Tighnari, "Okay. Collei- help me. We're just going to set you back down."

Together, the pair of them haul his broken body back over and set it gently on the bed, and then they decide to give him some space. The Wanderer goes back to being quiet and still and staring bleakly at the ceiling.

He knows he can't really stop them from contacting Nahida if that's what they want to do.

*

For two days, the Wanderer lies there in the little house in Gandharva Ville as his broken bones begin to mend themselves and his lungs fill up slowly with blood. This concerns him in only an abstract sort of way. It seems much less immediate and devastating than the reality of being abandoned again. He can hardly breathe with the weight of that on his chest already, so his increasingly sickly pallor and the sputtering, wet rasp of air when he bothers to use his lungs doesn't particularly bother him. It probably won’t kill him, but what would it matter if it did?

He doesn’t want to admit that it’s grief weighing his chest down like a stone as much as injury or exhaustion. That he’s grieving her. Nahida is still alive, but the loss feels as sharp and cutting as death. After all, the person he thought she was doesn’t exist in the world. He will never see her again and the thought is an ache. It isn’t fucking fair- she doesn’t deserve his grief.

But the grief isn't just for her. It's also for the world she showed him. Scaramouche had long since written off the world as a miserable place not worth caring about or experiencing, but he had been coming around to the idea that it had redeeming qualities if you knew where to look.

Some of that, he thinks, was influence from the memories of the empty, amnesiac Wanderer. That version of him was fond of the world and its small joys even as he constantly yearned for something he couldn’t name, floating hollow and lonely through the meaningless centuries. The world and its openness was the only balm he had.

Those were false memories. A pretty varnish over what had actually happened in those centuries. Over what he’d actually done. But they couldn't be dismissed so easily. They clashed badly with the much-louder voice of the Balladeer's past, but he'd slowly been putting together the disparate pieces. Now he feels freshly split down the middle; his mind, when he cares to listen to it at all, is a riot of discordant thoughts. Scaramouche’s scathing cynicism and furious despair, the Wanderer’s stubborn passive persistence- he cannot resolve them. None of his various selves offer a viable way to comprehend or cope with this.

How can he begin to find a way forward in this world when he can’t even decide which world it is? So he sits in Tighnari’s guest bedroom in Gandharva Ville, waiting for his hosts to get sick of his malingering and kick him out, nearly as paralyzed as he was after the fall from Shouki no Kami.

Tighnari and Collei offer him food and water several times, leaving it by his bedside when they get no response. He's too exhausted to even bother declining, but when the girl returns and pleads that he'll die, he gathers his strength to rasp, "I won't. Not from that."

He sleeps and wakes, sleeps and wakes. In one dream his mother drags him by his still-long hair to throw him through the gates of Shakkei Pavilion, though she was never rough with him in what little time they spent together in life. Nahida used to pull him from his nightmares with a deft and soothing hand, but this time he glimpses her standing motionlessly at Beelzebul's side as he's tossed into the lightless domain. "Nahida!" he cries, sprawled uselessly on the ground. "Do something- don't let her-"

Buer’s face is distant and impassive, and her gaze slides off him as if he hasn't even spoken. She turns to Beelzebul and says, "You were right."

That pathetic nameless puppet sobs so hard that the Wanderer wakes up choking on it, his cheeks awash with tears and his mouth full of blood. In the moment of disorientation between sleep and waking, he doesn't remember why he can't breathe right. He flails, panicking, more blood sputtering painfully from his stupid ruined chest, and can't calm enough to stop. It feels like there's a spear in his side, stabbing and stabbing as he heaves for air like a fish on a hook. His anemo vision glints in the corner of his eye, swaying innocuously in its Sumeru casing, and in a burst of rage he uses his one good arm to tear it off his chest and throw it as far away as he can. It thumps against the wall and falls uselessly to the floor.

Finally the noise summons Tighnari, who comes running in and hovers over him anxiously. "Stay still, stay still," he urges, and only when the Wanderer has mastered himself enough to be motionless for several long moments does he venture, "...Your internal injuries aren’t getting better on their own. At this rate, we’ll have no choice but to contact Kusanal-"

"No," the Wanderer snarls. And then, because Tighnari only keeps standing there looking stubborn and grave, he pushes past the intrinsic disgust of asking for help and goes on, "Can't you... can't you do something? You fixed my legs up well enough. This isn't that much more complicated."

"...As a Forest Ranger, I have extensive training in field first aid, but I'm not actually a doctor," Tighnari says with a complicated expression. "We could bring someone in to treat you, but-"

"No doctors," the Wanderer snaps, "They wouldn't know what to do with me anyway. It isn't that complicated, just cut here-"

He raises his hand to demonstrate, but Tighnari pales slightly and protests, "I definitely don't have the experience necessary for that kind of surgery- let alone the anaesthetics we'd need!"

"I don't need anesthetics, they wouldn't even work," the Wanderer says crossly. "Listen, this is our best bet to get me out of your hair quickly."

Tighnari only balks further, his lips pressing into a grim line. "That's- no. I'm not doing that."

This really is quite unfortunate. It's times like these that the Wanderer almost misses Dottore. At least he had the guts to do what needed to be done. If he were still with the Fatui, Scaramouche would already be well on the way to healing from this. Sure, if Dottore were doing it the surgery would probably take hours longer than it had to, and take several totally unnecessary detours along the way, but…

(...No, actually, that’s not any better than this.)

***

Luckily, a solution presents itself soon enough. Since Tighnari isn't willing to help with it, the Wanderer has decided that he needs to take care of this on his own. The only problem is that he'll need some sort of sharp implement to do it with, and with the looks Tighnari has been casting him he doubts he’ll hand him one if he asks.

But a few hours later, Collei walks in. The first thing she does is notice his vision on the ground. "Oh!" she gasps, "You dropped this," and tries to hand it back to him.

"I don't want it," the Wanderer mutters, not looking at her.

It only feels like it's mocking him now. Just a symbol of a place where he might have had a home, of a freedom that's utterly worthless if there's no one to spend it with.

Collei wilts and sets it down on the endtable. "Even so, you should be more careful with it," she says quietly. Then she sits down in the chair next to his bed, pulling out a knife and a piece of fruit.

"What's that for," he asks.

"Well... even if you don't need to eat you'd probably have more energy if you did, right?" Collei says, which does hit the nail on the head. She begins to slice up the apple, and the Wanderer's nose wrinkles at the sweet scent that fills the air.

Except.

He eyes the knife.

It's probably just barely sharp enough for the job, but he doubts he's going to get a better option. "...Let me help with that," he says finally.

Collei's eyes brighten, and he feels a little bad about what he's about to do, but not bad enough to change his mind. "You're feeling up to it? Are you sure?" she asks.

"Yeah," he says, and she transfers the plate and knife and fruit into his lap. He grips the fruit with the hand in the sling, holding it steady as if he's going to cut it. Then, "Hey," he says. "Is Tighnari already back from patrol?"

"Huh?" Collei turns toward the door, perplexed.

With swift, fluid motions, the Wanderer sets the plate down, yanks his shirt up, and plunges the knife into his side. It takes a lot of force, but he's stronger than he looks, and he grits his teeth, only letting out a grunt as he yanks the slightly-dull blade down and across to make a lengthy tear in his side.

Collei turns back and screams.

She screams bloody murder.

To be fair, it does look like bloody murder. He doesn't know why his mother even thought he needed this much blood. The girl stumbles away, pale and shrieking for help. Scaramouche disregards it because he needs to focus and get this done quickly; it's going to be really fucking inconvenient if he passes out. He shoves his good arm into the wound he's opened, up and into his chest, feeling for the problem rib with the certainty of someone who's seen the inside of their own body way too many times. It hurts like a bitch, but he finds it. Awkward angle. Yanking it out is going to be awful.

He braces himself, vaguely aware of Tighnari running into the room and Collei blubbering to him, and then Scaramouche grasps the section of broken rib and pulls it out of his own lung with a sick squelch. His body doubles over, a scream trying to choke out of his mouth and coming out as mostly blood. For a moment he just gasps, trying to get enough focus back to finish the task, and then there are hands on him and he snarls wordlessly. Fingers pry at his arm, trying to pull it out his side. But he has to make sure the rib is back in place. Only when he's got it approximately back into position does he allow the weak human grip to move him, and with his hand slipping out of his body comes a wave of such sudden dizziness that he does exactly what he said he wouldn't do:

The puppet passes out.

***

"You shouldn't have done that," Tighnari says.

"Well, it had to get done somehow," the Wanderer says.

"You ruined the bedsheets," Tighnari says.

"It was that or try and walk out of here again," the Wanderer says.

"You scared Collei," Tighnari says, this more forceful than the rest, and... the Wanderer doesn't have a snarky response to that one, actually. At his silence, Tighnari presses the advantage: "You should have told me it was that urgent before doing something so crazy yourself. That shouldn't have been possible. How was that possible?" A little frazzled, he adds, "I had to drain your lung."

"...Oh," says the Wanderer, listlessly, "Was it interesting?"

Tighnari stares at him, incredulous. "...Pardon my Fontainian, but what kind of a fucking question is that?"

The kind of question that makes sense if you've had my life experiences, he does not say. Sure, Dottore might have left him with a slightly skewed impression of the average scholar, but he figures normal ones would find his insides at least a little interesting. "...What am I supposed to say?" he mutters. "Were you looking for a thank you?"

"I mean- I wouldn't mind one!" Tighnari splutters. "If anything, you should apologize to Collei! She's been through enough in her life, she didn't need to see- what! What do you find so funny about that!" he snaps.

"Oh, nothing, nothing," Scaramouche manages between dry, crackling laughs. "Just- I remembered something, is all."

Yeah, he supposes it was rather inconsiderate of him to cut himself open in front of another one of Dottore's former pets. He only glimpsed her the once when he was the Balladeer, but he's sure that he's right.

That mop of green hair, those poisonous purple eyes, their color just a few shades more saturated than his own. She was so small, wrapped up in bandages and scales and choking black smoke. Like the vast majority of children who went through Dottore's labs, he didn't expect she'd ever see the outside of them again.

Good for her... good for her, truly! He didn't recognize her without all the suffering and hatred in her eyes. She's doing well for herself, even got something like a family out of it. What a coincidence. It really is funny. He...

(He doesn't know why he feels like he might cry.)

It's a very strange look that Tighnari's giving him now. But the fox doesn't press further.

"When... When should I head out?" he mumbles at last. After that debacle, he doubts Tighnari wants him around longer, and he could probably make it out of Sumeru on his own now. Maybe.

But the strange look on Tighnari's face just gets worse. "You cannot possibly convince me you're good to go already," he says flatly. "I stitched you up like an hour ago."

"That's..." He tries to gather himself to argue, but his side is throbbing, and his aching limbs remind him that two-and-a-half days isn't nearly enough time, even for him.

"Listen, there's no need to hurry," Tighnari sighs. "Just try to be a bit more considerate, won't you?"

After a pause, the Wanderer's head dips toward his chest in a nod.

*

Collei doesn't look particularly scared when she visits him next. She walks in with a pre-sliced tray of apples, sets them on the endtable, and sits down in the chair. Then she says, somehow both meek and pointed at once, "I'm not allowed to bring sharp objects in here anymore."

Wanderer, slowly, begrudgingly, picks up a slice of apple and eats it. It pretty much tastes like ash, but it earns him a tiny smile from Collei. That's really about as much apology as he feels capable of.

Collei sobers after a moment and asks, "...Didn't that hurt?"

"...Is that some kind of a trick question," Wanderer asks.

"Mmm," Collei scrunches down in her seat, looking embarrassed.

Wanderer sighs. "Don't worry about it. I've had worse."

Too late, he remembers this is not actually typically comforting to people. But Collei just mumbles, "...Mnm. Yeah," and promptly flees the room.

(She's kind of a weird one, he thinks. But she'd have to be, wouldn't she, to survive this long.)

Chapter Text

The tentative peace evaporates when the General Mahamatra arrives.

It's been a few more days since the Wanderer was brought here, long enough to rip off the casts Tighnari put on him - against Tighnari's advice, but the fox had to admit he was healing quickly. Still not long enough he should really be moving around freely, but he's beginning to wait for the other shoe to drop. It's time to stop indulging the foolish notion that anyone would want him around without a reason. Once he's a little stronger he'll find a way to pay off the debt he's incurred to them, and then...

Then.

His mind goes dangerously blank whenever he tries to think of what will come next. It's pretty clear he can't stay in Sumeru, but...

(The Wanderer has started over so many times. He doesn't think he has it in him to do it again.)

It was revenge that picked him up off the ground, dusted his clothes off, and set him on a new path the last several times he was abandoned. Hatred was easy, immediate, and instinctual each time he was thrown aside before. It may have taken some time for the Kabukimono's sorrow to coalesce into rage, but that's because he was too naive and stupid to know better. It was fury that allowed Kunikuzushi to be born from the ashes; hatred that fueled him for centuries as Scaramouche. Even last time, when Nahida scraped him off the ground, it was anger that motivated him to recover at first. (Before she sanded him down and sifted his soft parts back to the surface. Before he bought into the farce that this world could ever have a gentle landing place to offer him.)

The closest he's ever come to feeling like this was the emptiness after he lost the Gnosis, but even in that devastation there was at least the righteous fury of having his destiny stolen from him. With this betrayal there is only desolation as far as the eye can see, a salt plain stretching to all horizons inside him. After all, the Wanderer trusted her so much, and it only confirmed the guilty suspicions he's had all along. Such a fate was too good for him. It was a dream, that's all, and now he's woken up. Try as he might, he cannot fully blame her for it, cannot fully hate her.

It would hurt so, so much less if he could simply hate her.

He wishes he could believe everything he knew about her was a lie. In those first moments, he was ready to think so. But as the days pass with nothing to do but ruminate, this conviction falters. The Wanderer was there. He was beside her every step of the way as she tottered uncertainly into godhood, as she tried the mantle on, stumbling and improving and changing. He's been her enforcer, her retainer, almost her familiar, and the way she wielded her archonhood had begun to inspire a kind of faith in him he thought he'd long outgrown. Maybe a kind of faith he'd never experienced at all.

There was no way all of that was a lie. Yes, he let himself forget that despite it all she is still a god, but he just can't make himself believe that at her core she isn't basically good. And maybe that's the problem - it leaves no realistic place for him with her. He never fully understood why she bothered with him, why she wanted him there, and now that she's decided she doesn't, how can he possibly tell her she's wrong? This is what she should've done from the start. She never owed him anything more than a swift execution.

Oh, he's angry with her. He is. But trying to truly hate her is futile. It boils back into self-recrimination in no time at all, and it makes him hate himself all the more that he no longer has the good sense to hate the people who've wronged him.

(The idea of just... finding a taller cliff when he leaves is all too tempting at times.)

The Wanderer tries not to think about it, but there's not much to do but think of it. The only saving grace of the situation is that at least Collei and Tighnari don't know the pathetic truth of his circumstances.

...And then the General Mahamatra arrives.

Collei is "keeping him company", doing her homework at the little desk in the guest room, when he hears the front door open. Tighnari's footsteps are followed by a second pair this time, and Collei perks up only to wilt a little as the sound of a tense, hushed discussion filters in. Wanderer can't tell what they're saying, but his instinctive wariness is justified when after a few moments the General Mahamatra busts into the room, trailed by a troubled-looking Tighnari.

The Wanderer doesn't particularly get along with Cyno, but that's not saying much- he typically doesn't get along worse with him than anyone else. Cyno seems consistently befuddled at Nahida's decision to keep the Wanderer- from his perspective, a surly outlander who came out of nowhere- by her side, but has come to accept him as a fixture in the Dendro Archon's life. They have something of a mutual respect for each other, both knowing how far the other will go for Kusanali. Or rather had. Because now Cyno is looking at the Wanderer like he's something to be wiped off his shoe.

"So it's true. This is where you've been hiding," says Cyno.

The Wanderer's throat goes dry. Normally, he'd immediately bite back at anyone who used such a contemptuous tone with him, but all he can think is-

Cyno must have come here from Sumeru City. He's the person who works most closely with Kusanali other than Alhaitham and the Wanderer himself. He'll have heard it from her by now. And really, it was stupid for the Wanderer to even think he could stay here, knowing that Tighnari is close with the Grand Mahamatra.

The Wanderer's gaze darts from Collei to Tighnari and back to Cyno. Even if there's not much use denying it, he doesn't want his shame flayed out in the open. Weakly, he denies, "...I don't-"

"Don't even try," Cyno scoffs, eyes narrowing. "Your guilt is plainly obvious."

Guilt? Guilt? Has Nahida seen fit to actually charge him with something? Feeling like he might throw up, the Wanderer snarls out roughly, "Did she send you?"

"No. She's far too good for that," Cyno snaps. "But she didn't have to. Tighnari asked me to investigate the situation. It's clear something went awry- and it's clear the factor is you."

Wanderer shoots an acidic look at Tighnari; the fox at least has the decency to look a bit shamefaced about it.

"I, um, I don't understand," Collei pipes up meekly. "Did Wanderer do something wrong?"

Cyno doesn't answer directly or even look at her. Instead, he just keeps staring the Wanderer down, implacable, stubborn as a dog with its jaws locked around prey. "I think he should answer that."

"...What do you want me to say," the Wanderer grits out. No longer able to stand this staredown, he breaks eye contact and glares down at the bed, where his hands have curled into fists. Last time he checked, being unwanted was hardly a crime.

"I want you to own up to whatever you did to upset Lord Kusanali so badly," Cyno replies, evenly, ruthlessly. He begins to lay out his case: "She isn't herself. She's been turning away all visitors. In the same timeframe, there's been no sign of you. Then I get a letter from Tighnari saying you turned up injured in the rainforest and refused to allow him to notify Kusanali. When I finally was able to see her, she very clearly wasn't feeling alright. And when I mentioned you? All she'd tell me was that you'd been dismissed. Tell me. Just what the hell did you do?"

Something in him squeezes painfully. She wasn't feeling alright? Was the injury from the desert still bothering her? Then his mind and emotions catch up with the present, and he bites out, incredulous and wounded, "You think I did something to her?"

Cyno stalks forward, towering over him. "I know you did! Lord Kusanali would never dismiss you without reason. Everyone was aware of her favor for you. Although you were a complete unknown, she kept you as her right hand and shielded you from all inquiry.” The Wanderer knows he must look stricken; every word the Mahamatra speaks feels like claws raking over a raw and open wound. Cyno continues, “I always found you suspicious, but I trusted in my god. We both know she's too kind. It must have been something dire indeed to change her opinion of you, so tell me! What did you do?!"

"I didn't do anything-" the Wanderer snaps, only to yelp when the Mahamatra surges forward and grabs him by the front of his shirt, pulling him half out of bed to get into his face.

Collei leaps to her feet, and Tighnari protests, "Cyno, he's still injured!"

He's less injured by now, probably, than Tighnari thinks, though the rough treatment still aggravates his tender ribs. But Cyno pays them no mind. Raising his voice, he demands, "I won't accept that for an answer! What did you do? Tell me, what did-"

"I DON'T KNOW!"

The pressure boils over into a wretched scream. It bursts from the Wanderer's throat painfully, leaving him heaving for breath, and he uses his good arm to claw at Cyno's hold on him. Cyno releases him and takes half a step back, stunned, and the Wanderer protests, "I don't know, okay? She-" Alarmingly, his voice cracks. Even more alarmingly, he realizes he's started to cry, the tears spilling over hot and fast and entirely without his control. He can't stop himself from finishing the sentence, hoarse and desolate: "She wouldn't tell me. She just didn't..." want me, he nearly says, but modifies it to the marginally less pathetic, "didn't want me around anymore."

Everyone is staring at him, taken aback. The Wanderer feels horrifically small and exposed. Pitiful and ashamed, the proof of his worthlessness in full view. The familiar feeling of his skin flayed back and his guts dragged out for display, hardly less excruciating for the fact that this time it isn't a physical pain. He scrubs at his tears, bites hard at his lip, head hung low like a beaten dog. His shoulders hitch up. (He wants to die.)

"That... doesn't sound like Kusanali," Cyno says, slow and uncertain. He seems shaken, but still he goes on, "Surely you must have done something..."

Scaramouche laughs, ragged and broken, even as the tears still fall. The shame sours, grows teeth, twisting into something darker and more dangerous. "Oh, I've done plenty," he rasps. "But none of that was why she threw me out!"

He lifts his head, hollow chest burning with a cold fire. Collei stares at him, wide-eyed, and he can't tell if she's frightened or horrified or pitying. Tighnari's expression is pinched, stance tense like he wants to get between them. But Cyno's wavering hardens at the Wanderer's words. "Are you admitting to a crime?" the Mahamatra asks.

A sneer pulls onto his face, ill-fitting but well-remembered, looking all the more crazed for the remaining tears he blinks out of his eyes. "Sure," he laughs. "Sure! You were right. You were right about me, General Mahamatra- I was the worst of criminals, and Buer thought she could reform me. I did everything she asked, did everything she told me, but in the end she decided it wasn't enough. It couldn't make up for being me!" The last words come out in a feral snarl.

"What are you saying?" Cyno presses, an indecipherable look on his face.

"I'm saying she should have done it sooner!" Scaramouche spits. "Do you remember the fledgling god that nearly dethroned her? That endangered all of Sumeru? That was me."

Cyno's expression spasms. "That doesn't make sense," he says slowly. "The Akademiya's false god was a mechanical construct."

"Yeah," Scaramouche scoffs, "based off me. Piloted by me!"

Cyno's gaze hardens, hand inching toward the polearm on his back. "If that's true, why hasn't anyone so much as heard of you?" he asks.

Scaramouche really doesn't feel like explaining the whole deal with Irminsul, so he just leans forward, sneering. "Are you stupid? Of course I wouldn't keep using the same name. Buer simply obscured my crimes as long because I was useful to her."

"Do not speak of Lord Kusanali in such a manner," Cyno snaps. "She would never behave so dishonorably."

"Dishonorable? Maybe. It was as much about keeping me on a leash as anything else, I suspect," Scaramouche says. He keeps staring at the General Mahamatra, resolutely not checking the reactions of Collei and Tighnari behind him. A giddy, desperate mania buoys him forward as he sees disgust begin to glimmer in Cyno's eyes.

"If all of that is true," Cyno repeats, "Why would Kusanali take the risk with you in the first place?"

"Who knows!" Scaramouche exclaims. "Maybe she was feeling merciful that day. But every god's mercy has an end. What about you, General Mahamatra?" He shoves out of bed and to his feet in a viper-like motion, thrilling at the way Cyno is startled into drawing his weapon.

"Whoa, hey-" Tighnari protests, and Collei makes a wordless cry of dismay, but the puppet and the general both ignore them.

"How do you judge me?" Scaramouche purrs. He takes a step forward. Dull pain jars up his legs, still not quite ready to bear his weight, but his poise doesn't falter, the signal expertly ignored. "I conspired with the sages to replace your archon. I struck Tighnari with lightning. I killed countless people in my time as a Fatui Harbinger."

With every sin he confesses, he takes another step forward, arms spread wide and fingers clawed as though electro might leap to his call again. When he mentions Tighnari, Cyno's pupils shrink. "You-!" he hisses, bringing his polearm to bear, but he freezes when Scaramouche's next step brings him so close the tip of the spear nearly presses into his chest. Cyno takes a half-step back, a bewildered fury painted across his face as electro crackles across his shoulders, just barely keeping in control.

Tighnari tries to protest, "Let's not be too hasty-"

But his voice dies as Scaramouche snarls, "I didn't know you to get cold feet, General! Without Buer keeping an eye on me, who knows what I'll do. I could go back to the Fatui. I could sell out her secrets. I-" Not enough. It's not enough. A bitter smile twitches onto the puppet's face: "I worked hand-in-hand with the Doctor, you know?! He owes a lot to me! Who knows what we could accomplish next!"

A primal rage sparks in Cyno's eyes. "Scum!" he snarls, moving to strike with his polearm at last-

And a small green blur throws itself forward, shoving Scaramouche away from the Mahamatra's weapon. The puppet goes down, unable to maintain his balance on already-shaky legs. A strident young voice is shouting out, "That's not true!"

The puppet stares up incredulously. Collei stands between him and Cyno, her eyes afire. "That's not true," she repeats, more quietly but just as firmly.

"Collei...?" Cyno asks, shaken. He's already dismissed his polearm, spooked to have had it so close in proximity to the girl.

Collei's hands curl into fists. Her chest heaves, and she bites her lip as she struggles with herself to say something. In the end, she can't say it to either Cyno or Tighnari. She turns to the Wanderer sprawled on the ground, and her tone wavers back into nervousness but loses none of its resolve as she says, "You're like me... aren't you?"

Scaramouche feels like he's been punched in the gut, feels that gaze spear straight through him like a harpoon. That troubled but gentle gaze, which he'd once seen so full of suffering and darkness. The solidarity she's offering him is one of the kindest things a human can do for another, but for a wretched creature like Scaramouche, he only feels exposed again, detestable and ugly with his damage dragged to the surface. Is it really that obvious? he wants to scream, Did he ruin me so thoroughly you could tell at a glance?

The smart thing to do, if he wanted to continue this whole farce, would be to deny it outright. But Cyno has already put away his weapon, and Scaramouche doubts he could drive him to another ledge of temper, and every scornful word dies in his throat under Collei's steady, determined gaze. In the end, the Wanderer only snarls out, humiliated, "You... You shut up! You don't know me-"

"Don't speak to Collei like that," Cyno snaps. He looks down on the Wanderer, dark and conflicted, but there's a damning edge of pity to it now, like the puppet is more a worm than a viper.

"Is that... is that true?" asks Tighnari, staring. His eyes are round and alarmed. “When you... said you remembered something. About her?”

Cyno inhales sharply, and Collei turns to look at him, startled.

…Scaramouche can't make himself deny it. He wants to laugh, but it tangles in his throat. The truth of it is that neither he nor Collei is wrong. Scaramouche describing himself as a collaborator, Collei’s assertion that they’re similar- both are correct. He was no hapless victim like Collei; he chose it all on his own, kept choosing it again and again. But he's not so delusional anymore either as to deny he was manipulated and scarred, used up and thrown away.

“...She wouldn’t remember me,” he says finally. Then he amends, “She shouldn’t.”

Something complicated and glossy shines in Collei’s overbright eyes. But Cyno’s focus is on something else. "You saw her there, and you didn't help her?" he demands.

"...Are you stupid?" Scaramouche grinds out. "Even if I freed her, there'd be a dozen kids just like her the next day. And it's not like I'd just get away with that. He'd..."

Cyno is unmoved. "You said you were a Harbinger. You could have helped her."

Scaramouche grits his teeth. He truly doesn't know how to explain it, is pretty sure he doesn't want to. He knows it sounds strange, being afraid of pissing off Dottore when they were both Harbingers. But Scaramouche always had to come back to Dottore, because there was no one else who knew how to repair him. And Dottore had ways of making his displeasure known.

Maybe that's still not a good excuse to let a bunch of kids be tortured to death. But Scaramouche numbed himself to a lot of things, back then.

"It's okay, Cyno," Collei says softly. "I understand."

And she would, wouldn't she? There is no pity as she looks at him, only quiet acknowledgment. He wants to put his head in his hands and scream. He puts his head in his hands. He doesn't scream.

It's so embarrassing, the person he was around Dottore. Hardly a person at all. Packaged and parceled into the man's waiting greedy hands for years and years and decades and centuries, all of his own free will.

(He really isn't anything like Collei, who had no choice in it. He's something much, much worse.)

"...You're really content not to judge me," he sneers out feebly, not looking up from the ground.

"If Lord Kusanali has pardoned you for your crimes, it's not my place to do so," Cyno says evenly. "And if she was willing to accept you despite them, I don't see why she'd cast you out now."

"She doesn't trust me anymore!" the puppet snaps from the floor, helpless and furious with it, "Isn't that enough for you, you stupid oaf-"

Cyno says slowly and clearly, "Your sins are not within my purview. I can neither punish or absolve you for them."

Another sob wells in the puppet’s throat, a painful animal sound only barely muffled behind the hand that flies up to cover his mouth. Once again, he's too insignificant to even crush.

He thinks he hears Cyno and Tighnari speaking about something over his head, thinks he hears them move away and leave him to his disgrace. He cries as silently as possible, tears hot and blinding, and he isn't even aware Collei has remained in the room until she asks hesitantly, "Can I- can I help you up?"

The Wanderer's shoulders hunch in. "Whatever," he chokes out.

It's an awkward scramble across the room, and then he crawls under the sheets and rolls to turn his back on her. Collei hovers over him for a moment, hesitating like she might say something more. But in the end, she flees.

Chapter Text

When Tighnari comes in a few hours later to check on him, the Wanderer is cried out and avoids looking him in the eye, just waiting for the ultimatum to come. It would be unbelievably stupid not to throw him out after everything he admitted to. But Tighnari doesn't say anything about it, just starts checking over the bones in his legs. The Wanderer's skin crawls but he allows Tighnari to poke and prod at him until he comes to a prognosis: no significant damage, but the Wanderer has aggravated his injuries, and should probably take another few days of bedrest even with how fast he heals.

"...What's all the concern for," the Wanderer mutters as Tighnari stands and starts to move away. "You sic the Mahamatra on me and now this?"

He can't exactly fault Tighnari for it - it was the sensible thing to do - but, well, it didn't exactly feel good.

Tighnari winces a little. "I only asked Cyno to investigate," he says. "I'm sorry it turned out like that. He came to a conclusion with the information he had, but it turned out to be the wrong conclusion."

Wanderer eyes him. "And, what. He's content to just leave it at that?"

"Now he's investigating in other directions," Tighnari says. He turns again to leave and the Wanderer can't take it anymore.

"Are we really not going to talk about any of what I said?" he blurts.

Tighnari stops short, one oversized ear flicking. “Do you want to?” he asks.

“No,” the Wanderer says. “But don’t act like you don’t know what I mean. Pretending it didn’t happen is bizarre.”

Tighnari sighs. “I’m not pretending,” he says. “Once I thought about it, it made a lot of sense.”

The Wanderer stares. He can't come up with anything to say but “...Huh?”

Tighnari turns back to face him fully. “Listen, Wanderer, we’ve had a betting pool on your shady past at guy’s night for months by now,” he says bluntly. “It’s not a shock that you have skeletons in your closet, they're just a little more dramatic than we imagined. I don’t think any of us won that bet… well, Kaveh was probably the closest.”

The Wanderer’s mouth opens and then closes. “...I struck you with lightning,” he says dumbly.

“Yes, which was very unpleasant, but now you’re on parole and saved me from collapsing of dehydration in the desert. Which may not be quite even but I’m willing to let bygones be bygones. I mean, if we’re not going to believe in rehabilitative justice where are we even going as a society?” Tighnari rambles, rubbing his left shoulder which is, if Wanderer is remembering correctly, where the lightning struck him.

Tighnari is ignoring that the entire "dragged you in from the rain half-dead and patched you up" thing really throws off his calculation of debts, and that rehabilitative justice as a concept is nowhere to be found in much of Teyvat, but these things feel less important to point out than, “...I’m not on parole anymore. I’ve more or less been exiled.”

“...Right, well.” Tighnari rubs his forehead. “The entire time I’ve officially known you you’ve never been anything other than helpful, if a bit grouchy. So I’m going to choose to trust you. Just… be careful with Collei, won’t you? She could really use a friend her own age.”

For a long moment this leaves the Wanderer speechless. “What do I have to do with that?” he manages. Tighnari shoots him a slightly puzzled look, and the Wanderer has a realization. “Oh fuck off,” he says. “I am not a teenager, I just look like this.”

Tighnari raises an eyebrow. “Well either way,” he says, and the Wanderer genuinely can’t tell whether he believes him.

"You should respect your archon more," the Wanderer mutters, with that familiar twinge of indignation from whenever someone underestimates Nahida. But Tighnari has already turned again and vanished through the doorway, and the Wanderer can't tell if he heard him. Advocating for Nahida isn't your job anymore, he reminds himself, dropping his head into his hands. She made damn sure of that.

(Why does he even want to? It should mean nothing to him that Tighnari is willing to dismiss her judgment wholesale. It should maybe even give him a vindictive glee. But it doesn't. At this point, the Wanderer has stopped expecting it to.)

(What he really should be worrying about right now is the fox's delusion about his ability to make friends, and how he'll react when that inevitably fails.)

*

Collei does keep visiting him. The next day she drags her textbooks into the room to keep him company, stealing furtive glances at him but too shy to speak up. The Wanderer has nothing to say to her, can hardly look at her, can barely bring himself to mumble thanks when she brings him a freshly-brewed cup of tea. She smiles sadly at him and he wants so badly to resent her. It’s a kind of cruel double vision, a Dendro girl sitting at his bedside when he can't be bothered to pretend at wanting to be alive.

"I'm not, you know," he speaks eventually into the silence. "The same as you."

Collei’s eyes flick up from her textbook, large and dark, a little spooked. "I mean, no one is the same..." she hedges. "Did I say that? That we're the same? We're probably not. But... you're like me. I can tell."

“I’m not,” he insists. “I wasn’t trapped there. No one forced me. I went to Dottore because of what I stood to gain.”

There’s a mulish set to her jaw, a flintiness to her eyes. “He hurt you, though,” she says.

“That doesn’t matter,” Wanderer retorts. “Don’t you get it? I was a terrible person. I was fine with playing my part in all that evil as long as I got what I wanted. You shouldn’t have shielded me from-”

“I don’t care!” Collei bursts out, shutting her textbook with a clap. “That’s not… that’s not the only thing I meant when I said you were like me, you know. Even if all of that is true… I still had to help you!”

“Why?” he demands.

“Because… because! I knew what you were trying to do! I’ve tried it too!”

Collei’s face is scrunched up when she says this, her eyes squeezed shut and her arms stiff at her sides with her hands curled into fists. Scaramouche is taken off-guard for a moment. Is she really saying what he thinks she is? That she saw through his ploy at rousing the Mahamatra's aggression- the ploy he was barely consciously aware of even as he carried it out?

Is she really saying that she too has tried to goad someone into killing her?

…If he were a good person, the person Nahida once wanted him to be and the person Tighnari is hoping he is, he’d treat her carefully after such an alarming admission. But he’s not. When his throat finally unlocks, it’s to croak, “...What. So, because you didn’t get to die back then, I don’t get to either?”

“No!” Collei shouts. Her eyes snap open, glaring down at him, anger well and truly piqued; he’s oddly relieved to see it, to have proof that she isn’t meek all the way through. “I’m really… glad to be alive now! I want you to be able to feel that way someday, too!”

Truly laughable. But he isn’t laughing. “Okay,” he says, flatly, “Why though?”

“It’s… you…!”

She bares her teeth at him like a little tiger, nearly shaking with the force of an emotion she can't find a way to express- and in the end, she snatches up her textbook from the desk, turns tail, and flees.

*

He wonders if he’s pushed them far enough, if now they'll make him leave. There’s really no reason why he couldn’t - he can walk now, if not painlessly. It's nothing he couldn't push through.

But the next day, when she gets back from her patrols, Collei sits down at the desk with her sewing as usual. Then she turns, her back curved away from him so he can’t see her face.

“You asked me why,” she says quietly.

“...Yeah,” he rasps. “I don’t understand what you get out of this.”

There's always a reason. His heart is too battered to accept otherwise.

Collei speaks slowly. "I suppose you could think of it as... repaying a debt to the world.”

Heh. The ghost of a laugh escapes his lips, a near-soundless huff. Oh, very well-reasoned. He can’t reject that explanation, not without upending the very framework he builds his own interpersonal relationships on. Still, it doesn’t feel fair. “What kind of debt could you possibly have?”

“I’m not a good person.” Collei speaks the words softly, but with utter certainty. There’s no bitterness, no bite, just a simple statement of fact; only a slight subdued dullness to indicate the thought causes her pain at all. The Wanderer is tempted to protest, but Scaramouche remembers that he doesn’t believe goodness exists in people’s hearts at all. Collei takes a deep breath and continues: “A long time ago, I decided I’d never reach out to another person again. I wouldn’t help anyone, and I wouldn’t ask for help. Not anymore.”

She’s so young. For some reason, that is the first thought to his mind as every snarky retort he was considering shrivels and dies on his tongue. A familiarity beats in his chest like a heart, heavy as a closed fist or a dying star. She’s so young, and yet she speaks as if she truly…

(It took Kunikuzushi three betrayals to come to that conclusion. He wonders how many it took her.)

“...And then I went to Mondstadt,” Collei says. There’s a secret smile in her voice, but then her composure falters. “I was awful there,” she goes on, rough and wavering. “I killed people. I killed people and I didn’t care. I still don’t know if I…” She pauses and quietly admits, “I just wanted revenge.”

She sounds embarrassed as she says this, like she’s relating a childish dream. One that’s lost its shine.

(The Wanderer knows the feeling.)

“But the Knights… Kaeya, Lisa… Amber. They wouldn’t condemn me. No matter what I said… she wouldn’t attack me. I didn’t understand why they’d help me. I didn’t understand it at all!” Collei laughs a little, disbelieving.

The pause lingers. “...Did you ever figure it out?” the Wanderer asks, his voice as dry as timber. Almost, the words tried to come out fond and wry. But the memories of the grace he received aren’t sweet anymore. They’re like gravel on his tongue.

She finally turns to look him in the eye. “You know, I’m not sure I ever did! But it doesn’t matter. They gave me another chance, even though I didn’t deserve it. It’s up to me to choose what I do with it. And I’m trying to be a better person. I want to help people the way I was helped. I want to help you.”

Her eyes are a little watery, but they blaze with conviction. For long moments, the Wanderer is speechless.

Where Nahida understood him so intimately in the pain of being judged unworthy at birth (or at least he thought she did), Collei is someone who has lived in the darkest parts of herself and come back from it. A killer given grace at her lowest. He could almost be dizzy with it; can feel the temptation to soften, to collapse into her coaxing hands.

(He’s always been a liar. It took him four betrayals in the end.)

“It won’t last.” The words scrape out of his throat like bloody shards of glass.

“...Huh?” She sounds so innocently confused.

Scaramouche laughs, crackling and exhausted like dead leaves underfoot. “It never lasts,” he says. “You’ve forgotten. This isn’t the first time for me. I know how it goes.” (Nahida, her luminous green eyes and stubby fingers he flinched from at the start.) “You might have fun at first, helping me for your own self-satisfaction, making me your pet project-” (Nahida, her boundless patience as she slowly tamed him and taught him to heel.) “But it’ll end! It always does! And I’ll be right back at square one, because I was stupid enough to believe in someone!”

(Nahida, crushing him as easily and apathetically as one might crush a spider, not even turning around to see where his broken body would land.)

“Th-that’s not-” Collei stammers. “I don’t-!”

He’s been shouting. He’s sitting up, half leaned out of bed, twisted toward her like a predator. Collei has stood from her chair. Her eyes are so wide.

“You think you’re like me?” He laughs again, wildly, and she flinches as if from a blow. “If you’re really like me, you should know! We’ll never truly find a place to belong!”

And Collei has dealt admirably with everything he’s thrown at her. She’s been patient. More than patient. But she is still a teenage girl. And when Scaramouche throws this accusation at her- she bursts into tears.

It’s the kind of sight that, so often in his life, has felt like a victory to him. But something shakes him by the scruff and screams, APOLOGIZE. He can’t blame it on Nahida this time.

He doesn’t give in to it. He doesn’t apologize. He stares at her, letting the feeling curdle in his stomach until her face twists even more miserably and she flees from him again.

*

This time Tighnari’s reaction is rather prompt. His ears are flat on his head and his brown-green eyes spark with ire as he demands, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

Do you want an itemized list, the Wanderer thinks of saying, or perhaps What is wrong with you that you thought encouraging her to socialize with a known war criminal would never result in her crying. He doesn’t say either. The shame of the outburst has stayed with him over the past hour or so, only growing heavier.

“One thing,” Tighnari goes on. “I asked you for one thing. I know you’re hurting, but it’s just low to take it out on her when she’s going out of her comfort zone for you already.”

I know you’re hurting, said so casually, hits him like a slap. He wants to bark out, Excuse me?, but how can he when he was bawling in front of them just the other day? “I didn’t ask her to,” the Wanderer mutters instead.

“Okay, well, Mr. Not-a-Teenager, if you told her you didn’t want her to hang out in here, she would have respected that,” Tighnari says. “Have you said that?”

No. He hasn’t. And try as he might, he can’t find the desire to do so. Instead, “I’ll go,” he mumbles, and begins to get unsteadily to his feet-

“Would you sit back down,” Tighnari snaps, so scathingly the Wanderer obeys before his conscious mind catches up. “Don’t run away either. What you’re going to do is apologize to her for making her cry. And then you’re not going to do it again, or we’ll put you up with- I don’t know, Alhaitham or somebody.”

Why would you be in charge of picking where I go, have I been fucking detained, the Wanderer thinks, slightly hysterically. But he swallows it back again, because he really can’t deny that he’s fucked up. “Okay,” he says, rubbing at his temples, and it comes out almost meek.

Tighnari glares for a moment more, but then he softens, releasing his tension with a sigh. “Listen,” he says. “It’s not like I don’t get it. Collei was a lot like that when she first came to stay with me.”

This arrests the Wanderer's thought process entirely. “Like what?” he asks.

“I don’t know, feral? Scared and lashing out?”

Wanderer doesn’t know whether to be more appalled at those descriptors being applied to himself or the girl in the other room. Even knowing what he does now about her, it's hard to imagine. This time he does splutter out, “Excuse me?”

Tighnari laughs a little, fondly reminiscing. “She’s come a long way, but when she first got here, she- I mean, the first time I tried to brush her hair, she bit me.”

…Actually, when he thinks of the little sprite he saw in the lab, he can picture that quite easily. The real question here is why Tighnari would think he’d be allowed that close to her unprotected neck in the first place.

Tighnari, seeing his silent reaction, snaps his fingers and points to him. "See? That? That's what I mean."

"...That's what you mean what," the Wanderer says warily.

"You understood it immediately," Tighnari responds. "Collei needs that. She needs someone to talk to. I know she doesn't tell me everything."

"...So you're, what," the Wanderer says incredulously. "Throwing us in a room together and hoping we therapize each other? That's why you haven't thrown me out?"

Tighnari gives him a look, long-suffering and more pitying than he would like. "No," he says slowly. "I haven't 'thrown you out' because it's wrong to do that to someone who's injured and has no place to go, and because you still haven't done anything so awful as all that. And supporting each other is just - that's what a friendship is. Obviously you don't have to make friends with her to stay here, but you'll be civil to her while you're under my roof. So, if you don't think you can manage that, be sure to let me know."

And with that last waspish remark, Tighnari bustles out of the room, leaving the Wanderer alone with his thoughts.

*

But surely, he thinks, Collei has come to her senses now. Surely she won't be back, for him to apologize or any reason else.

If anything, she comes back sooner than before.

She shows up the next morning and stands silently in the doorway as if she's not sure she should come in. Wanderer is rolled toward the wall, not facing her, but he knows it's her. He doesn’t turn to look at her when he mumbles, “I shouldn’t have said all that.” And after a moment further, because he promised, he grinds out, "I'm sorry."

Truly, there's a lot more he should say. It's not like he actually wants her to take over the thankless task of fixing him - that's way too much to put on some random teenager with trauma of her own. He should have told her that's an insane expectation to put on herself, especially for some fuckup of a guy she just met, even if she does see herself in him. Instead he blew up on her, essentially telling her it was pointless because she'd give up anyway. It wasn't even really her he was yelling at - in that moment she simply reminded him far too much of Nahida, and it hurt too much to bear. So he shoved her away as hard as he could, flinging out whatever he thought would hurt most. He doesn't actually believe she'll never have a place to belong; it's pretty obvious she already does, and just because it’s true for him doesn’t mean it has to be for her. They may be similar, but deep down, they're fundamentally different. She's human- she doesn’t have to justify her existence to anyone.

(But he had to scrape deep inside himself to apologize at all. To be capable of saying all that to her, he'd have to be a different person entirely.)

He hears Collei walk gingerly into the room, and then for some reason she sits down, not at the desk across the room, but in the chair right at the side of his bed. She takes a deep breath, and her voice is firm as she says, “I’m not going to promise I won’t leave you.”

He inhales sharply.

“I-I mean! That would be ridiculous, wouldn’t it?” She's waffling again, sounding much more like herself. “There are so many things that can happen! And we haven’t known each other for very long, and I… it’s true when you say that I don’t really know you! Maybe… maybe we’re not even really suited to be f-friends! So- so… I’m not gonna say anything tacky like that! But I… I…!”

Unconsciously, he holds his breath as she winds up to the conclusion. It bursts out of her in a rush, heartfelt and passionate: “Wanderer! I really am glad to have met you!”

Abruptly, he feels his eyes grow hot, threatening tears for the millionth time. How could that possibly be true? He’s been nothing but awful to her. He hasn’t repaid her or Tighnari’s kindness in the slightest. But the degree of conviction in her voice leaves no room for questioning.

She means it. Somehow, she means it.

The Wanderer rolls away from the wall to face her, his eyes wide and wet. Now Collei's the one not looking up, eyes fixed on her lap as though she won't get through this otherwise.

She continues to ramble on. "Even though I don't like to think of that part of my life... Even though everyone here is kind to me, even though Tighnari and Cyno know my past and accept me… Even still, I've felt so alone. Like there's a part of myself I’ll always have to hide so that people won’t pity me, or be scared of me… I didn't think I would ever meet another person who really understood. Ever since the rest who escaped all died, I didn't think there was anyone else who-" She cuts herself off, takes a deep breath, and bends forward, her whole face scrunched up. "So thank you!"

She holds still for a long time, eyes squeezed shut, entire body tense as if waiting for judgment. "I didn't think there would be anyone else either," the Wanderer says at last. She twitches at the sound of his voice, raising her head to look back at him hopefully. He averts his gaze, unable to bear it, and says carefully, "...Everyone else always died so quickly. And you were so small. I didn’t think I’d ever meet someone else who got away.”

He hears the echo of Dottore’s crowing laugh in his mind, the one he gave when he was particularly pleased. They're all used up so quickly, Scaramouche, but not you, he'd say. The odds of someone escaping was infinitesimal, and even if they did, no one should have been able to recognize him.

Truthfully, meeting her isn’t some beacon of hope or solidarity to him, the way she describes experiencing it. He doesn’t want to belittle her emotions, but he can’t help but feel a bit incredulous; all he’s done is exist, and quite wretchedly at that, so he’s not sure he can understand how it means so much to her. If anything, she seems to have done better than he has at overcoming her past. Is it really so significant, the mere fact of knowing she’s not alone?

(It is. He knows it is. He remembers how it felt to know he was not the only hapless god-thing judged worthless at birth and tossed aside. To know that Nahida could empathize with him in this very specific way about this very specific thing that had made up so much of the fabric of himself. He remembers how it felt thinking she’d hold that understanding for him forever.)

(..Maybe the wound is simply too fresh and too deep for him to easily find value in such things anymore.)

And yet… and yet, he still feels touched to know that even like this, utterly useless and forsaken by all- there must be something of worth in him, to affect Collei like that.

He’s… glad, too, that they met. He’s glad she was able to feel this way. He’s glad he got to hear her say it.

He hears Collei laugh nervously, and shoots her a sharp, questioning glance. Hesitantly, she explains, "Oh, that's just... I remember the Doctor saying stuff like that to me. 'The rest died so quickly, why didn’t you...?'" She trails off, fingernails digging into her wrist, looking a little ill at even quoting him.

An irrational flare of jealousy is the first thing the puppet feels, as Scaramouche always felt for anything or anyone that rivaled him for Dottore's attention. It's quashed beneath an immediate and much stronger flare of self-disgust. "Heh," he says, glancing away. "Well. There are downsides to being so resilient."

Collei nods, lips pressed together firmly. "I really thought so at the time. I wished I could just hurry up and die. But... I'm happy now. I'm happy I survived."

The Wanderer says nothing. There is nothing he could add; she shouldn’t bear the burden of the way jealousy struck him again hearing her so confidently say such a thing. But in this, too, Collei understands him perhaps too well.

“Wanderer…” She hesitates, sadness flickering across her face. "Can I ask you something?”

He makes a noncommittal grunt, and it takes Collei a long moment to steel herself as she looks down at her lap and fiddles with her hands. To her credit, she looks him in the eye when she actually asks it. “Wanderer. When I found you… Did you jump off that cliff?”

…Oh. They’re going there.

He’s not sure why he thought she didn’t have it in her.

He doesn’t deny it immediately, not the way he should if he wants it to be believable. “...No,” he says finally, and it's the truth, but his voice comes out sounding more hollow than flat and nondescript. “I didn’t. It was an accident.”

Something burns hot in his chest, and he can’t look up at her. Shame, maybe, or anger, or a bit of both. Is that what they've been thinking all this time? Is that why she and Tighnari have been handling him with kid gloves despite all the horrid things he said?

(Why does it bother him so much to think they’ve been assuming that? Isn’t it close enough to the truth?)

“You have an Anemo vision,” Collei points out gently. “Tighnari saw you fly with it at the Interdarshan Championship.”

“Maybe it just happened too quickly,” he snaps. “Maybe-”

Collei was there. She was there when he tried to goad Cyno into killing him. When she called him on it days ago, he tacitly admitted it.

That burning feeling buckles and explodes, tearing through him like shrapnel. What’s the point of denying it to her? What’s the point of her asking? Why is she doing this to him if she’s already decided what must be the truth? He looks her in the face and he snarls at her, “Yes, fine, I didn’t catch myself and when I woke up I was disappointed, is that what you wanted to hear, are you happy? Going to judge me? Tell me I have so much to live for? I don’t!” A laugh ruptures from his throat in a short, unhappy burst. “I don’t, I don’t, I don’t!"

Oh, this is - this is bad. He’s losing control. He's going to scare her. He’s just lucid enough to recognize the point of no return as he rockets past it, doubling over and clawing at his chest where his Gnosis used to be, breath coming in gasps. “I wanted to die after I lost the Gnosis, do you know that? The only reason I stayed alive til now was because of her! I had one thing to live for and I didn’t even deserve that and she knows it too and I, I - I can’t start over from nothing again! Not again! It isn’t fair!”

He’s…

Oh.

He’s sobbing.

Ugly, pathetic creature.

“Wanderer, can I… hug you?”

She sounds nervous. She sounds sad.

The Wanderer doesn’t know what he wants. He doesn’t know if that'll help or make it worse. He’s crying so hard he can barely see. But Collei must read something from him because a weight settles next to him on the bed, not touching but close enough to touch if he- he-

He slumps against her, forehead on her shoulder. She flinches a little at the contact and he almost pulls away but then she wraps an arm loosely around his back. She’s slight, like a willow. Not as small as- As.

“‘M sorry,” he gasps out. “Sorry, sorry.”

He doesn’t know who he’s apologizing to. But he feels like he should. He has to. Look what he’s doing to her. (Don't leave.) His whole body shakes as he tries to gulp back the sobs, tries to will himself to calm. But the tears keep coming, pulled from deep inside him, convulsive and wracking. Even when he stops his breathing in an attempt to smother them, still they come. He gives up, lets out a terrible blustery sob that he tries to muffle by turning his face into her shoulder.

Nahida was the only one who ever told him it was okay to cry, and she left him, too. But Collei already admitted she’ll probably leave anyway so is it okay? Just this once, could it be okay?

“It’s okay,” she says, like she can hear him. She holds herself very still. She isn't making any soothing motions. He doesn’t think she’s used to being touched either. But she’s doing this anyway. For him.

He’s so awful.

“I shouldn’t- maybe I shouldn’t have pushed,” she goes on, so meek.

“S’okay,” he makes himself say, strangled.

He sounds awful.

“It’s not,” Collei says. “And, um. This part - it probably isn’t okay for me to say it right now either. But I’m going to say it anyway, because - I think I need to and I had the whole thing planned out and I - I’m not gonna be able to make myself say it later if I don’t do it right now.”

She’s rambling nervously again. Wanderer gives a vague nod of assent. Listening to what she has to say is the least he can do when she’s still letting him use her shoulder as a pillow. A very damp pillow, by this point.

“I, I just wanted to point out that… Well, if you really wanted to die… There’s nothing stopping you from doing it now, is there?”

For a moment, the Wanderer is speechless.

“Because! I know you’re mostly healed now, and I mean, there would be nothing stopping you from wandering off and…”

She’s interrupted by a sputtering, gasping laugh that the Wanderer takes a moment to recognize as his own. He’s so surprised he can’t even be offended. It doesn’t fit with anything he knows of Collei, but it really sounds like she’s telling him to go die. “Do you,” he laughs through his tears, “do you want me to-”

“What? No, no no no no! That came out wrong!” Collei protests. She sounds so honestly distraught that the Wanderer only laughs harder, and it comes out as a strange, watery hiccup as even more tears blink from his swollen eyes.

“How are you so bad at this?-” he asks, sitting up to scrub at his eyes.

Collei looks flustered, her own eyes red-rimmed. “I mean! What I mean is, thinking about that helped me! Whenever I would start thinking about dying again, I’d think, but I haven’t done it yet, have I? It’d be easy to, but I haven’t, so I must not really want to all that bad! And then I would try to figure out what was keeping me from doing it, so I could focus on that! Instead of just- just sitting there thinking about death. So I want you to really think about it. Is Lord Kusanali really all you have to live for?” She puffs up a little, steadfast and stubborn.

At first, Wanderer wants to scoff at such naive logic, but he swallows it back, something heavy and solemn settling over him at the fact that she's speaking from experience. When she poses her final question, right away he wants to snap, Of course, but something prevents him.

Is that really true?

…Of course it’s true, isn’t it? Buer gave him this new life. Buer pulled him out of the rubble, saw the worst parts of him, and pardoned him anyway. He’s always needed a direction in life, and atoning became his. Atoning as her right hand. Paying her back, balancing his ledger. It gave him worth and meaning. And then Buer decided none of it was enough, and now his life is worthless and meaningless again.

…But is that really true?

Hasn’t that all just been a pretext for a long time now? Buer has tried to gently nudge him away from the framework of debt a thousand times. She acknowledges his past sins, but she's never seemed to dwell on them. She's encouraged him to atone if he finds meaning it, but she’s never actually acted the part of a jailer or warden, no matter how many times he ascribed it to her.

If anything… Before the moment she decided to throw it all, throw him away…

She’s been trying to encourage him to just live a life.

To seek friends and hobbies and all the myriad little things that humans do. He always grumbled at it, called her a pest, but…

When he thinks of his time in Sumeru, it isn’t just his work for Buer or her approval that he thinks of. Those things are important, but just as defined in his memory are the simple things.

Going to Zubayr Theatre. Walking through Sumeru City, no one reacting to him with fear or hostility, the sun warm on his artificial skin. Dusky peaches, chopped ajilenakh nuts, black coffee from Puspa Cafe. A stray cat twining around his legs, leaning down to pet it as if it was no momentous thing. A haphazard collection of acquaintances, not-quite-friends but not enemies or strangers either- the Haravatat scholar who review his essays, the blacksmith on Treasures Street, the red-haired dancer who smiles when she sees him.

He wants to… He wants…

A part of him hurts so bad he just wants it to end, wants himself to be crushed into nothing so he doesn’t have to endure the pain of being abandoned again, but-

A part of him doesn’t. A part of him likes this simple little life he’s carved out, this slice of peace after the turmoil of everything, and doesn’t want it to end. Wants to get to keep experiencing all those things, with or without Nahida.

Oh archons. She’s right. Collei’s right.

Just like that, the Wanderer’s expression crumples, and he collapses back against her shoulder with a fresh burst of tears. It feels impossible, feels like he should be all cried-out, but it happens anyway.

“Oh no!” Collei yelps. “Oh, I’m sorry, did I make it worse?-”

“You’re right,” he says, more aggrieved than anything, but it’s wrung out of him with the same force as devastation.

It feels in the strangest way like a betrayal of Nahida, but even now she doesn’t want him dead. And maybe… he… doesn’t want him dead either. Not entirely.

That's terrifying. Committing to being alive would mean he’s still going to hurt. He makes a frustrated noise against Collei’s shoulder. “I don’t- that’s worse,” he says, distraught. “That’s worse. Why does it feel worse?”

Collei looks as surprised as he is that she actually managed to help in the end. She moves her lips soundlessly for a moment, looking like a startled little fawn as she tries to formulate a reply. “I guess… Because hope hurts?”

“It does!” he bursts out vehemently. Finally someone who gets it.

“But it’s… it’s worth it,” she says- firmly, but almost like she's trying to convince herself too.

“It’s not worth it," he stresses. “It almost never is. What if- what if this time too-” He can’t go on.

Collei makes an understanding noise. For the first time, she moves her hand that’s wrapped around his back, gently swiping her thumb over his spine. “But don’t you want to find out?”

He cries harder. He can’t say if this is hope or despair, not really. It feels like giving up a safety blanket, a tried-and-true weapon in the midst of the Abyss. It feels like a shield torn out of his hands. It feels like an epiphany, a revelation, the kind he thought he’d run out of long time ago.

Because he does want to, god help him; some part of him does.

Chapter Text

The next day Tighnari pronounces him “healed enough for light exercise” and invites him to help with the daily forest ranger patrols.

I told you so about making friends with her, Tighnari does not add, though he must have heard all that humiliating wailing from the next room - Wanderer’s luck isn’t nearly good enough that he's going to assume Tighnari was out of the house.

“Collei could use a bit more company on her junior patrols,” Tighnari tells him casually. "She's always weaseling her way into going out in the woods alone."

“Are you,” the Wanderer says. “Trying to hire me?”

“Hm? Really nothing so formal as that,” Tighnari answers, raising an eyebrow. “Are you looking for a job?”

Wanderer’s face falls into a glower, because this sounds to him all too much like a jab at his recent and very abrupt unemployment. “Really I should just move on,” he mutters. “I don’t have a place to stay, and-”

“Oh, for the love of-” Tighnari’s hand hits his forehead with a smack. “You cannot be this dense.”

Dense?? Tighnari specifically told him he hadn’t made Wanderer leave because it was wrong as long as he was injured and had nowhere to go. Well, he’s not injured anymore, which means it’s now time for him to move on.

“You can stay here for as long as you need.” Tighnari speaks slowly, as if explaining to a particularly stupid child. “As long as you abide by our previous agreements." He ticks them off on his fingers: "No more doing surgery on yourself, no being rude to Collei, and yes I'd appreciate it if you helped out a bit. Think of it as doing me a favor if you have to, we’re always short-handed this time of year.”

The Wanderer… hesitates.

He should say no. Really, he should. Sumeru is not a place for him anymore. He’s caused Tighnari and Collei quite enough trouble, and as long as he stays in the nation, he risks Nahida deciding to actually do something about him.

But…

He doesn’t want to move on.

He doesn’t want to have to reinvent himself again. After that last breakdown in front of Collei, some of the heavy fog of despair that’s been blanketing him has lifted, but he still feels wrung-out and fragile. Like some soft wretched thing barely tumbled out of its shell. It wouldn’t take much to topple him back over that ledge again and right now he doesn’t want to fall. He can hardly believe it himself, but there it is.

And that is thanks to Collei and Tighnari. If he can lighten that debt somehow… he should, shouldn’t he? Here Tighnari is, offering him quite a simple way to do so.

“...It is high time I started paying you back,” he muses finally, a wry smile on his face as he looks up to meet Tighnari’s eyes.

For a moment Tighnari looks like he might contest something about that but instead he just nods firmly. “Good,” he says. “You can join Collei on her patrol this afternoon. I don’t know if you experience muscle atrophy, but it’d probably be good to get moving again soon.”

A very polite way to point out you’ve been doing nothing but bedrotting in my guest room for the past week. More than a week? Wanderer lost track of time. He’s not about to ask anyone, though.

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, a little gruff. “As long as you don’t expect me to start calling you ‘Master Tighnari’, too.”

Tighnari’s nose scrunches up. “Eugh, no,” he says. “I’ve been trying to get her to drop the Master for years at this point. Really, that girl…” His exasperation is utterly fond. Wanderer can tell that he really cares about her. (Once again, the thought hits him overfamiliar and bittersweet.)

*

“Aren’t you going to bring your Vision?” Collei asks him that afternoon, a touch apprehensive.

He… Oh. He forgot he never put it back on. It’s still on the bedside table where Collei set it after she retrieved it for him, gleaming innocently in its Sumeru casing. There’s a lump in the Wanderer's throat as he picks it up. The golden feather attached to the Vision catches the light as it dangles. Its glass remains pristine and unscuffed. His fingers move numbly as he clips it back onto his shirt.

That’s that, then. He’s still in a bit of a daze as he follows her all over the forest, letting her walk him through her usual duties. His muscles won’t atrophy, Tighnari, thank you very much, but it’s still strange at first to be up and moving again, to emerge into the actual world with its light and noise and color after allowing himself to curl for that long into a miserable little cocoon. His body doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to him. It hasn’t for about as long as he can remember, but usually the disconnect isn’t so apparent. Nevertheless, he tries his best to be helpful. Chases away a Rishboland tiger that roams too close- a couple of wind blade strikes to scare it off, summoned as easily from his Vision as ever despite his temporary rejection of it. He carries a bundle of herbs for her, catches her by the back of her shirt collar once when she nearly trips.

Collei seems like a quiet person, overall. Introverted. The third time she tries to awkwardly fill the silence, looking physically pained as she casts about for a topic of conversation, the Wanderer says, “I don’t mind the quiet,” and she seems greatly relieved. She doesn’t offer him any more life advice today, for which he is relieved. It’s really all quite embarrassing when he thinks about it. It's not that he's ungrateful for it, but she’s a teenage girl with her own problems. She shouldn’t have had to deal with him in such a state. If anything, Tighnari should have put a stop to it...

But a lot of people in Sumeru seem to be cut from the same cloth in that regard. Always giving him too many chances. (Until they don’t.)

They return to Gandharva Ville as the Sumeran dusk drapes itself around them, sticky and softly purple, and when they reach Tighnari’s house, instinct takes over. The Wanderer grabs the basket of Rukkhashava mushrooms they gathered and goes into the kitchen, casting around for a cutting board and knife. He eventually finds them and goes looking for other ingredients, when-

“Um… Hat Guy?”

Oh. Tighnari is standing there in the entrance to the kitchen. He’s giving Wanderer a quizzical look, something a little sharp-edged to his tone.

Wanderer pauses. He looks between Tighnari and the giant steak knife in his hand. Remembers with a sudden flash of comprehension tearing himself open in the guest room and being kind of a right tit about it when Tighnari talked to him after sewing him back up. He wonders again whether these people qualify as insane for still wanting him in their house - his words and actions over the past week look quite different under the harsh clarity of a fresh pair of eyes without the suffocating gravity of wishing he was dead. “...I wasn’t going to do anything,” he manages.

“Okay, but... what are you doing?” Tighnari asks, as if it is not self-evident.

“Making… dinner?” the Wanderer answers anyway.

Tighnari doesn’t seem to know how to respond to this, which is maybe fair, because this is his house and the Wanderer didn’t even ask before starting to dig into his kitchen things. It just felt so… normal. Like coming back up the winding steps of the Akademiya with Nahida, washing up and whipping up something for the both of them. (Like several hundred years ago, putting together whatever scraps he could find for his fledgling.) “...Can you cook?” Tighnari asks eventually, with such skepticism that the Wanderer’s hackles raise.

“I’m not entirely useless outside of fighting, you know,” he snips. “Supervise me if you feel like you have to, but my cooking comes personally endorsed by your god.” (A pang deep in his chest, his fingers white-knuckling around the knife handle. Why did he say that. Shit, why did he say that?)

Tighnari doesn’t react to it directly though. “O…kay,” he says, slightly wide-eyed. “I’ll leave it to you tonight, then.”

So he makes dinner for three, and Collei praises the meal profusely, Tighnari compliments it too, if a little more sedately. Wanderer preens smugly over his own plate and tries to pretend that the now-inescapable thought of Nahida in Sumeru City dining alone, or worse, with someone else, has not taken away his appetite almost entirely.

*

He blames the whole... depressive haze on the fact that he never really questioned what Tighnari meant when he said that Cyno was “investigating other avenues". Collei’s usually rather quiet, but when she’s got something on her mind she tends to ramble out loud, and somehow they come to the topic of Cyno. She makes an offhand remark about something Cyno taught her, and the tension winches in her shoulders when Wanderer makes only a noncommittal grunt in response.

“...My first meeting with Cyno wasn’t too great, either,” she tells him after a moment. “We met after the situation in Mondstadt was mostly cleared up, but… Well, he had to seal the archon residue inside me for my health and it hurt enough that I was nervous of him for ages after…” She laughs a little and rubs her arm unconsciously. “I hope you don’t hold it against him too much… just, he can be a bit overprotective.”

Wanderer rolls his eyes. “I don’t,” he says, which is true. Well, mostly true. It was severely unpleasant but he can admit that Cyno wasn't being particularly irrational, except for when Wanderer baited him specifically into irrationality. He doesn't expect them to become best chums, but he isn't holding a grudge. A thought strikes him. “Is he avoiding me? Haven’t seen him around again. I thought he and Tighnari were supposed to be close.”

Collei gets a sort of hunted-rabbit expression on her face. “He’s, um… well, he’s been out of the country.”

Wanderer stares at her. “...For what?” With all that blather about his worry for Kusanali, he thought Cyno would want to stick nearby to keep an eye on her.

The immediate hunch of her shoulders and guilty darting of her eyes off to the side tells the Wanderer he isn’t going to like the answer.

“...How long has he been gone?” he adds, eyes narrowing with a sudden suspicion. “Did he leave right after that argument?”

“Umm.” She hems and haws. “Pretty much?”

Wanderer supposes it’s natural for her to be apprehensive with him after he shouted her into tears at least once, but it’s getting frustrating that she won’t give him a straight answer. “Collei,” he insists, crossing his arms. “Come on. I won’t be mad at you.”

“Mrngh,” she says, and then turns so she isn’t facing him, spine straightening and hands curling into fists. “He - he left to go looking for the Traveler!” she yells in the direction of a moss-covered boulder just off the path.

…Whatever he expected to hear, that wasn’t it. “Why?” the Wanderer asks, baffled.

Collei, impossibly, tenses more. She wraps her arms around herself in a self-soothing gesture. “They - he and Tighnari think there’s something wrong with Lord Kusanali,” she tells the boulder all in a rush.

“...” The mere mention of the name makes his mood plummet, but that isn’t important. He said he wouldn’t be mad at her. Don’t be mad at her. “I told them I didn’t attack her,” he says sourly.

Collei's shoulders hike up to her ears. “No,” she says. “They think- think there’s something wrong with her mind. They think she’s sick or something. And the Traveler I guess has a purifying ability so… Cyno left Alhaitham to keep an eye on her and set out toward the Traveler’s last known location. It seems like it’s taking awhile to find them so…”

There’s a ringing in the Wanderer’s ears. Collei finally chances a look back at him and does not seem comforted by what she sees. “Corrupted,” he says numbly. “They think she’s corrupted.” He swallows, but his mouth is dry. His voice comes out sounding distant and strange. “Why - why would they think that?”

“Wanderer…” She seems sad. Uncomfortable. “Don’t you know?”

“That,” he begins, and doesn’t know what he’s feeling, only that it’s buzzes through him like a livewire, out-of-place and too much of it. “That doesn’t make sense. She was fine. She seemed fine.”

“They said she’s been behaving out of character,” Collei insists, hesitant, and a fist closes around the heart he doesn’t have and squeezes.

“It wasn’t-” he snaps, and then wheels around, slapping a hand over his mouth. (Don’t yell at her again. Don’t yell.) He thinks he may be shaking. “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” gets out, but faintly, vaguely, as though he may be sick. He feels like he my be sick.

Horrible, awful, traitorous hope sprouts and tries to dig its thorns into his flesh. He recoils from it violently. Wanderer can’t possibly allow himself to hope again, not after what it did to him this time when it shattered. And besides, if it’s true, that means Nahida could be dying. That he left her alone to be eaten by alive by Abyssal corruption because he was too self-absorbed to take her sudden rejection at anything other than face value. He knows just how dangerous it can be, especially to a divine being. There’s every chance the Traveler will be too late to help her. The Wanderer could’ve gotten her help much sooner, if only he-

But it can’t. It can’t be true. Yes, when she summoned him and told him she didn’t need him anymore - yes, he thought for a moment, this isn’t you. This isn’t like you. But her kindness was the aberration all along, wasn’t it? Isn’t that so much easier to believe?

If it’s the other way around - if he’s truly abandoned her when she needed him most, all because he’s a broken creature incapable of ever fully trusting anyone -

He’d never forgive himself.

Maybe she wouldn’t forgive him, either.

“...Wanderer,” Collei finally ventures, voice tremulous with worry, and in that instant the Wanderer comes to his conclusion and straightens up, spinning back around in so violent a motion that Collei flinches.

“That’s ridiculous,” he says flatly. “She isn’t corrupted. The General’s wasting his time.” None of his previous distress shows in his voice. He’s severed it, shoved it all back down into the yawning cavern of his ribcage.

“...Wanderer,” Collei protests, saying it like her heart aches.

“Don’t bring it up again,” he says. Calm. He's calm. “We’re done talking about it. It’s not worth considering.”

Collei watches him for a long moment, gaze troubled. “...Okay,” she agrees eventually, voice small.

They continue the patrol as if nothing happened, but the heavy, awkward atmosphere follows them all the way back to Gandharva Ville.

*

Days pass, and true to her word, Collei doesn’t bring it up again. The Wanderer can’t help thinking about it, even if he tries not to. He just keeps trying to pay it back to them. Tries to be a good houseguest, make his presence unobtrusive when it isn’t helpful.

He notices that Collei, despite being universally liked by the residents of the village, doesn’t seem to have any close friends. Whenever they return from patrols, half a dozen people call out to her, thanking her for her help on their roof repair or treating their cold and so forth. Children run up to her, bouncing around and asking her to take them into the forest to play. But the village has no one her own age, and Collei rarely seeks out anyone on her own. Although she’s pleasant to everyone she meets, her demeanor kind and thoughtful, there’s an ever-present tension that only falls from her shoulders behind closed doors.

She’s far from alone, but when he observes more closely, he can understand why Tighnari worries about her, why she said she was lonely.

She seems the happiest when she’s writing letters. A subconscious smile will appear on her face as she hums tunelessly to herself. At first, Wanderer thinks it's just more homework, until he asks, “What’re you up to?” and she jumps in her seat.

“O-Oh!” Collei stammers. “I’m, uh, I’m writing to my friends in Mondstadt.”

“...The ones who helped you back out then?” Wanderer ventures.

Collei beams. “Yeah! We’ve stayed penpals ever since!"

Wanderer’s not sure why he asks. Maybe it’s because she’s listened to him so much, and this is another way he can pay her back. Maybe he's just genuinely curious about the people she says turned her life around so completely. “...Do you want to tell me about them?”

Collei cocks her head to the side like a curious bird. “Do you… want to hear?”

Wanderer shrugs, slouched over with his chin in his hand and his elbow resting on his knee. “Sure,” he says. “Got nothing better to do.”

Collei smiles again, small and private, and taps her pencil on the paper. “Hmm… where to start…”

She spins the tale of a small, hurt, resentful Collei, who escaped with a group of companions only to lose them one-by-one and be spurned by everyone she met for her illness. She wandered into Mondstadt expecting it to be just as unwelcoming as anywhere else. She describes the black fire and its serpent spirit that she wielded with careless malice.

“No real loss,” Wanderer grunts when she describes killing the two Fatui ‘diplomats’ outside the gates of Mondstadt. But Collei stops speaking and looks so dismayed that he allows, “...I can see why it’d weigh on your conscience, though.”

(He doesn’t, not really, but he has to remember that not everyone is as used to casual murder as he is.)

She’s almost bashful as she tells her story. The Wanderer listens attentively, wondering if he should be doing something different- she doesn’t look at him for most of it, and when she does it’s only a quick glance before her gaze darts back away. But she keeps telling it, so he figures it’s probably her personality.

The star of the story is Amber, who held a hand out to her and wouldn’t let go, even after learning she was a killer. After the knight called Kaeya pulled the blow that would have killed her, Collei tried to goad Amber into fighting, but she refused. In Collei's telling, Amber is a warm, thoughtful, energetic, and extroverted person; Collei can’t help but smile just speaking of her. Amber showed her how to have fun again when she had long since forgotten the feeling. Amber showed her how to connect to others when she long since decided the attempt was worthless. The other players in the story are important - Lisa and Jean and even Kaeya - but it’s clear that Collei idolizes this Amber. That the feeling hasn't waned in the years that followed.

“I was lucky that Lisa happened to know Cyno,” Collei says, winding the story down. “And then he brought me to Sumeru, where I met Master Tighnari! It was frightening to leave behind everyone in Mondstadt at first, but Cyno and Tighnari are some of the most important people to me now. And I write letters to Mondstadt every week! It’s good practice for me, too.”

“Practice?” The Wanderer squints.

“Ah…” Collei looks embarrassed all of a sudden, even more than when she described herself as a 12-year-old with only hate for the world in her heart. “I’m, uh, I’ve gotten better at it now, but when I first came to Sumeru I couldn’t read or write at all…”

Wanderer frowns. “Did you forget how while you were in the Fatui?”

She shrinks down in her seat, humiliated, and the Wanderer curses his nosiness. Being around Nahida, who’s always prying for more information- and usually obliged in it, seeing as she’s an archon- has perhaps been a bad influence on him. “N-No,” she stammers. “I never learned before Master Tighnari taught me? Because, uh, I was basically a baby when I was given to the Fatui?”

She was what.

“How the fuck did you survive?!” the Wanderer blurts before he can think better of it. He’s seen the kind of conditions those kids live in before the experimentation inevitably kills them. A baby? A fucking baby?! How did she not die? How is she as well-adjusted as she is if she spent all of her formative memories with the Fatui? Not even Scaramouche did that. That shouldn’t be possible!

“W-w-w-well!” Collei stammers. “I don’t, I don’t think they did anything too bad until I was older? They were just? Treating my Eleazar? Which is why my parents brought me to them? Because I was pretty much born with it and, and maybe I wasn’t actually a baby when they took me there, more like a toddler, I just don’t remember anything before that but it wasn’t, I mean I don’t remember seeing the D-Doctor until I was maybe seven, just the Seer, not that I really know because no one knows my exact age haha saying I’m sixteen is actually only guessing and we uh, we made up a birthday for me but- but-”

Her nervous flood of words finally stalls out for a moment. “That’s so long, though,” is all the Wanderer can think to say, utterly appalled. If she escaped when she was- what did she say? Twelve? And was there since she was a toddler? He doesn’t think he’s ever heard of a human surviving the labs longer.

“You- you- Stop it!!” she exclaims, flustered, angry, and too late the Wanderer realizes he’s been staring at her in horror- the exact thing she said she didn’t want to see from people, one of the exact reasons she said she was grateful to meet him, because she figured he wouldn’t react that way. And here he is, fucking it up. Ah. He’s too slow to formulate an apology before she bursts out, red in the face, “How- how long were you with the Fatui, anyway?!”

…He.

He doesn’t think his answer to that question is going to be particularly helpful.

But doesn’t the Wanderer owe it to her to be honest after she’s told him so much sensitive information about herself? He looks away and puts a hand over his mouth. “...Mmmrnghf. Fewhundred.”

“...Wh,” she sounds winded. “Huh? What? Few hundred what?”

He glares really hard at the wall and says, “...Years.”

The resounding silence drags and grates on his ears until finally he starts rambling, “But it’s not like- I mean, it was only the first few decades that I spent all in the labs- after I was promoted to Harbinger it was just the occasional… you know-”

“Decades?!” she cries out, sounding honestly distraught. He finally chances a look at her and finds this- shattered expression on her face, like she genuinely might cry, and it hits him like a punch to the gut.

“Hey, cut it out,” he snaps. “I don’t like that pity shit any more than you do!”

He’s glad now that he lowballed it- it should probably really be described as “several” decades rather than a “few”. It was, what, something like fifty years before he got pulled out and switched over mostly to the Abyss? Sixty? But hey, who’s counting.

“Yeah but- but!” Collei protests. She wrings her hands, entirely distracted from her previous offense. “Decades??” she repeats. “I remember thinking- that if I didn’t get out pretty soon- that there’d be nothing of me left. Even if I was still alive! And that was just a few years! I can’t imagine…”

And what can the Wanderer possibly say? Yes, Collei, you’re right? There was nothing of me left? That the Kabukimono is so alien to him now that thinking of him longer than a few seconds feels like putting his hand on a hot stove, that even Kunikuzushi for all his crimes feels like a spoiled, bad-tempered brat? That Scaramouche consumed all of him and Scaramouche wasn’t really a person at all, just a hollowed-out shell, a collection of the traits he thought would make Dottore keep him longest, all his worst impulses melded together into a miserable thing held together by strings he never even noticed until after they snapped? That his time with Nahida was the first time he felt like a person since before he was a century old and that’s why he’s taking it so hard that she decided she didn’t actually like that person at all?

“...Wanderer?” someone squeaks. He jolts.

She. Someone. Collei squeaks. There’s a pain in his wrist, his own fingers digging into it so hard the bone creaks.

He narrows his eyes at her. “What.”

“...You. Um.” She’s staring at him, wide-eyed. Bravely, she asks, “Were you remembering?”

“...Something like that.” He breathes out, slowly, letting as much tension lift as possible. “The point is - the point is at least I wasn’t a fucking infant.”

Though he does know, now, that Dottore has been meddling in his life ever since he was the Kabukimono, which is the closest thing he’s ever experienced to a childhood… Hm, oh, nope, that’s bad. Feels bad. He boxes that thought right back up and refuses to entertain it any longer.

Collei crosses her arms, pouting. “I told you already I was probably more like two or three.”

“Yeah, like that’s so much better,” he says flatly. “And anyway, you didn’t have a choice in that. Your parents sent you there without you having any say in it. I agreed to it all, so it’s really not the same. And I was a horrible person the whole time. You shouldn’t feel bad for me at all.” He scoffs and crosses his arms as well, confident in this argument.

Collei, however, has developed a pensive expression. “Did you really agree to all of it?”

And Wanderer- he feels an unexpected pang. What, did she just not believe him when he said that before? She has such a serious look on her face now, and he really can’t read her. He knows he'd deserve it, but the thought of her compassion turning to judgment now is more unpleasant than he expected. “Yeah,” he says brusquely. “I did.”

Sure, early on there were times he wanted to take it back, but he was already deep inside the lion’s den by then. And it all worked out eventually. Those were the last dying throes of his weakness, before he accepted it was all necessary…

Except it wasn’t. The promised returns never materialized in full. All the times he nearly went mad with pain - there was no real justification for any of it.

Wanderer swallows hard. Aside from the loss of the Gnosis, that was the most difficult thing to come to terms with after his fall from the Shouki no Kami. Even now, he hates to think of it.

“But,” Collei begins, and he braces himself. “Did you really know what you were agreeing to?”

Wanderer squints at her. “Huh?” he utters, sensing vaguely that they are stepping onto very dangerous ground.

“I mean, my parents didn’t,” Collei says. She squeezes her hands together where she’s let them fall in her lap, looking down with a melancholy expression. “They thought they were doing what’s best for me. That the Fatui were helping me. And the Fatui were helping me… My Eleazar was controlled for as long as I was with them. Just… the way they did that wasn’t so… They weren’t upfront about… what that would be like. And they were testing other things, on the side. Master Tighnari calls it, um…” She scrunches her nose a little, sounding the words out carefully. “A predatory arrangement.” Her eyes dart back up to look at him. “Was it like that?”

No the fuck it was not, he wants to open his mouth to say, but the words don’t come out. Because regardless of whether he'd prefer to be, he is not actually so self-deluded that he doesn’t understand that the bare bones of the stories are the same:
- The Fatui did actually help with what they said they would, but
- It involved an amount of pain that was unfathomable at the time of agreement, and
- Also, other liberties were taken in the process.

Yeah, of course Kunikuzushi didn’t understand what it would be like until he was actually strapped down to that stupid exam table. How could he? Some things have to be experienced to be understood. And of course Dottore was always going off on countless fucking detours to research what he wanted to research, that’s just the way the man was. But he fulfilled his end of the bargain to unseal Scaramouche's power eventually; even improved his capabilities beyond the allowances of his original design over the long years. By the time Scaramouche was a Harbinger, the two of them had a complicated, self-involved system of barter and trade to ensure they both got what they wanted out of the arrangement. With the sole currency being Scaramouche’s body, but it all seemed to make sense at the time. Except even the things Scaramouche wanted out of it still involved excruciating surgery and it wasn’t like he could always guarantee that Dottore do only what he said.

But. But.

“I agreed though,” he mumbles numbly. “It doesn’t matter.”

And that's Dottore speaking. He knows it is.

You agreed to this, don’t go thinking you can back out now!
What, is that all you can take? You agreed to this, you know.
Enough with the sniveling, dear puppet. You already agreed.

Dottore said it again and again and again. No matter how much Kunikuzushi might break down in the middle and beg for it to stop (by the time he was Scaramouche he knew that begging yielded no results and only had the side effect of making him look pathetic), it didn’t matter, because he already gave permission for it.

But… Predatory arrangement. That just wasn’t right. Scaramouche was the predator. He was the one who hurt people. He was hurting people constantly in his time with the Fatui… (At least as much as he was being hurt.)

The thing is, he’s been aware for a very, very long time that Dottore and the Fatui were just using him, but he thought it was fine, because he was using them back.

Nahida has approached this topic with him before, but not often. Most of their time together before the incident with Irminsul consisted of Nahida attempting to establish a baseline modicum of trust, and trying then to convince him that there was any point in existence at all, and that his best bet was to gamble it out with her rather than attempt to crawl back to the Fatui. This was a slow and agonizing process, and because he'd blow up whenever he thought she was pitying him, there was not much chance to directly address the "centuries of manipulation" thing or its many ramifications.

Revealing the truth about Tatarasuna, however, did most of the work for her. It quite handily divested him of his remaining non-hatred-related feelings about Dottore, and erasing himself from Irminsul ensured there wasn't a place in the Fatui for him to try and return to anyway. (In hindsight this was all very convenient for Nahida, leaving him no remaining option but to work for her instead.)

But even if the reality of Tatarasuna forcibly recontextualized centuries of the Wanderer’s life, many of the underlying notions were not so easy to let go of. And they never talked much about it after, because they were mutually aware that Nahida's way of lancing mental wounds in experience feels sometimes indistinguishable from psychological torture. Not for any lack of empathy, but because she is the God of Wisdom and truth is paramount to her, whether or not that truth feels like boiling acid thrown on one's face. She doesn't know another way. And after the Wanderer's stunt with Irminsul, she seemed hesitant to employ it any more. From then on Nahida tended to only gently poke at his neuroses. She always seemed to know when to let up, probably because she had a bad habit of reading his mind. Instead Nahida mainly focused her efforts on forward-facing things since then, like encouraging him to have "fun". This was easy to do, because Nahida herself had also never directly experienced having "fun", and whenever she tried to get Wanderer to do anything it was at least half an excuse to try it herself. In turn, this made it much easier for Wanderer to agree to whatever it was because he could tell himself he was doing it purely for her sake. A mutually beneficial arrangement, see? (At least until she got far enough, and apparently decided she did not need him anymore, and left him to self-destruct in peace.)

But Collei has no mind-reading abilities and is now stabbing rather wildly at one of the most painful corners of his gnarled psyche, and it hurts enough he does not even feel the impulse to explode at her, and is freezing instead as he’s learned to do in the face of any sufficiently enormous pain.

“I don’t think that’s right,” Collei is saying. Still timid, but with that stubborn set to her jaw that the Wanderer now recognizes means she refuses to give up no matter how nervous it makes her to be saying what she’s saying. “I mean… like, what if you agreed for me to make you dinner? And I did make you dinner, but I, uh… then I also punched you in the face when I gave it to you? Would you not be allowed to be hurt by that? Would other people not be allowed to point out that’s messed up?”

Scaramouche stares at her, no idea whatsoever of what expression is on his face. He wants to say that’s not even remotely the same, but again the words don’t emerge when he opens his mouth- only a slightly hysterical laugh because actually yeah, maybe it is the fucking same. Boiled down to the point of absurdity, but yeah, isn’t that kind of what happened? He rakes his hands through his hair and realizes he’s shaking a little.

Does he believe if he says it doesn’t matter enough times, somehow it will become true? Why does it only feel like more violence done to him for someone to see it for what it was?

He kept himself going that way for centuries. It was how he survived. He agreed, so it didn’t matter. He agreed, so he was still in control. And if he was in control, it could only hurt him as much as he allowed himself to be hurt. It was fine. He could handle it. He could just keep telling himself that, ad infinitum.

He isn’t in it, anymore. He doesn’t still need those mantras to keep going.

But it feels like he does.

If it was really that fucked up, why didn’t he ever protect himself? Why did he let it just keep happening and happening and happening? Why did he betray himself like that?

“...Wanderer? Um. Did I say something wrong?”

He doesn’t even know who that is for a moment. “Wanderer”. He looks up, hands still fisted in his hair, and sees a scrawny green-haired girl. He remembers her. She was in the labs.

“It still doesn’t matter,” he hears himself say. “I was a horrible person.”

“I - I still think it matters.” There’s a fierce expression on her face. “Even- even if you hurt other people. That doesn’t cancel it out. That’s just more hurt to go around. No matter what, I think it matters that you were hurt.”

“Collei,” he says, and it comes out from far away. Right. That’s who she is. Collei. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

She looks startled. “...Um. I’m sorry. We don’t have to.”

You’re right, he doesn’t want to tell her again.

Of course it matters. But what good does it do him to grapple with that? All it does is make him feel more irreparably broken than ever before. If he was a horrible person who did it all to himself, at least he was still a person, not just a toy that had been played with until it broke and then thrown away.

He wasn’t really in control. He knows that. He knows. Dottore let him feel just enough in control to make sure he would stay.

But it’s genuinely less painful to blame himself than to accept that he was truly so manipulated and played for a fool. Because then all of it was nothing to be proud of, not a testament to his strength and resolution even if nothing came of it in the end, just the pitiable efforts of a deluded puppet to aid in its own destruction, too weak and fragile to ever face the truth - and too callous and cruel to care who else he was hurting.

(How convenient must it have been to Dottore, for Scaramouche to have seen it as something to be proud of?)

Wanderer wants to have it both ways, to hate Dottore with all his strength and yet still take credit for the wreckage of his own life. Because if he doesn't, the rest of that hatred doesn't go to Dottore- it just redoubles on himself. Wanderer hates himself more if he thinks of himself as a victim. Fucked up, maybe, but true. He wants to hate Dottore for not delivering all that he promised, for abandoning him, for being a smug condescending sadistic bastard and yes, of course, for Tatarasuna. Not for touching him at all, for remaking him as he pleased, for branding a reflexive cruelty so deeply into him that the Doctor's particular sort of sneering condescension became precisely the way Scaramouche spoke to his own subordinates. Deep down he still wants to believe that all of that was somehow necessary, or the enormity of that meaningless suffering will swallow him whole.

It's swallowing him whole.

He doesn't notice when Collei slips out of the room. Doesn't hear if she says anything else. But eventually he becomes cognizant of a warm cup of tea in his hands, heat curling gently up toward his face. On the endtable is a plate of freshly sliced peaches.

Wanderer takes a deep, shuddering breath, and remembers not to let himself drown.

Chapter Text

The thing is, Collei is only just now trying to figure out how to live.

She's spent a lot of time thinking about death. Her death specifically. And not just because she's messed up in the head, though she is that also.

See, for the longest time it didn't much matter whether she wanted to live or not. She knew she wouldn't. She lived with the threat of death every day in the labs, watching the other children rotate out around her again and again and again - and then, once she escaped, there was the Eleazar.

By the time she got out, she had almost convinced herself that the Eleazar wasn't a big deal. That that was another Fatui lie, like the idea her parents hadn't loved her. Her memories of them are very faint, but she knows they loved her. She thinks they were allowed to visit her a few times when she was little, before things got too openly sinister. And she knows they wanted to take her back, and they were killed for it.

(She wasn't supposed to hear that. But she did. It will weigh on her soul for the rest of her life.)

Collei knew she definitely had an illness (that's why her parents brought her to the Fatui, after all,) but she thought the Fatui were probably lying about it being untreatable and incurable and grotesque and all that.

Except it was only a couple weeks after her escape that the first dark scales pushed up from under the skin on her wrist. Even when she kept it wrapped up in bandages, people could tell there was something wrong with her, and they didn’t take kindly to it.

It was different after she was brought to Sumeru. Having Eleazar in Sumeru is better than having it anywhere else; everyone here knows what it is and that it’s not contagious. She isn't an object of fear and disgust, isn't seen as some filthy plaguerat with a mysterious disease. But on the other hand, everyone in Sumeru knows it for what it is: a terminal degenerative condition. She learned quickly that she would always, always be an object of pity. It's better than fear. Better than disgust. But that doesn't mean she has to like it.

Collei took it hard, being properly educated about her disease. The fragile hopes she eked out in Mondstadt of maybe having a normal life were quickly dashed. When imagining her future, Collei learned to think in mid-term goals at best. Learn to shoot a bow like Amber. Learn to sew like Amber. Become a passable Forest Ranger trainee. Learn to read and write.

But "What do you want to be when you grow up?" was a pointless question. "What do you want to go to school for?" was a pointless question. By the time she reached that age, her Eleazar would most likely progress enough to render her nearly immobile. Many sufferers slip into a coma by the age of thirty. She might get a handful more years of consciousness and movement if she's lucky, but Collei in her life has not often been lucky.

And so she saw no point getting close to people either. Even if they could look beyond her checkered past and overall awkwardness, she would be dooming these people to sadness just by knowing her. Collei didn't want to upset more people than she had to when she inevitably died. So Tighnari, and Cyno, and her friends back in Mondstadt - they were enough for her. They would have to be.

Sometimes the idea of hastening her death felt appealing. Maybe it would be better to be in control of it. To take it into her own hands before they lost the dexterity to do that. Then she wouldn’t have to live out the latter part of her life as a burden dependent on others. Did it really matter if death came now or in several years? Collei’s life often seemed a pointless endeavor. Even now that she was doing her best to be a good person like Amber, she was destined to bring misfortune to others. Hers was a short story with a sad ending, and there was nothing she could do to change that.

But Collei knows that death comes cheap. It comes in an instant, at a moment’s notice. She’s seen it countless times. A snapped neck, a missed footing on a cliff, a dose just a little larger than the one given to her, a nick to an artery that bled out too fast to be patched. She saw it in the labs all her life and in the wilds as the companions she escaped with were picked off one-by-one. It would be easy to die, but she hasn’t killed herself yet. She hasn't even really tried. So, deep down, she must not want to. She must not want to, right?

Collei is a survivor through and through; she wouldn't have gotten this far if she wasn't. She clawed and fought and bled for life, clung to it with all the meager strength she had. Deep down, Collei just wanted a life other than this. Wanted to be a normal girl. Wanted it so badly it was killing her, because she knew she would never get it.

Sometimes it helped to think of all the little things she still wanted to do while she had the strength to do them, all the little blessings bestowed on her each day that she could barely even dream of in the labs. Sometimes it just made her angry, though. Collei didn’t want to have to be grateful for the scraps life gave her. Didn't want to have to fight her way for everything, against everything, even her own mind. She's always kept so much anger buried inside her. At the Fatui, at herself, at the injustice and unfairness of the world. At the fact that she was struggling to enjoy the few years she'd have even though her life was better now than ever before. It got so exhausting to exist like this, always struggling to keep her head above water. Sometimes when she hated herself badly enough, it was actually a bit of a dark comfort that she came with an expiration date. Collei wouldn't have to go on like this forever. That was a guarantee.

There were a lot of things she told Tighnari, but though he can tell something is wrong when she’s in her darker moods, she never opened up to him about that. And so it went for nearly four years as Collei struggled to come to terms with her looming death, trying all the time to neither fear it nor want it too badly.

And then one day she woke up and found out she was going to live.

Lesser Lord Kusanali had properly taken her place as Sumeru's archon and cured the sickness of Irminsul in the process. And by doing so, she cured Collei and every other Eleazar patient in Teyvat.

Tighnari cried when he understood what it meant. Collei was still in shock - too in shock to even mind when he wrapped her in a hug and squeezed so hard it hurt. He apologized for not asking, voice warbling, still crushing her against his chest. She'd never seen him cry before. She let him hug her as much as he wanted.

It's been months since then, and Collei is still struggling to understand that she's going to have an entire life to live.

And this has only proved to her more how messed up she is, because while the first thing she felt after the shock broke was a bone-deep relief that had her laying down on the floor and staring unblinking up at the ceiling like a fish at the top of the ocean, that only lasted about fifteen minutes. The second thing Collei felt was all-encompassing terror. There's an entire life of unknowns waiting for her. Will she ever really be capable of meeting the challenges of life after the rough start she’s had? Collei never prepared herself for this. She didn’t think she would have to.

(If only Lord Kusanali had done it sooner! In time, Collei learns, Lord Kusanali could not do it sooner because she was being imprisoned by her own sages. Collei thinks if she ever met those sages she would like to cut their heads off. This is probably not a thought that a good person would have, but Collei has it fleetingly anyway.)

On the good days Collei is more excited than afraid. But it’s a lot to adjust to. The idea that she might get to go to school, that she’ll have to get an actual grown-up job someday… (That she'll have to live with herself forever, now. No easy outs.)

And that, just maybe, it might make sense to try to make new friends.

But Collei never learned how.

She has more or less mastered the art of being likable on a superficial level, but she’s always made sure those friendly acquaintanceships didn't go any farther. She comes with so much baggage. Who would ever want to be friends with her if they really knew her?

Meeting Wanderer is fortunate for Collei in a lot of ways, she thinks. And one of them is this: she took one look at him in front of Cyno, puffing himself up as he all but begged for death, and thought with a sweep of guilty relief:

Ah. This is a script I know.

This is how Collei made the best friend she has. Only that time, she was in the opposite role.

She stepped between him and Cyno easy as breathing. Suddenly, she knew exactly what to do.

*

When Collei declared them the same, really it was just on a hunch. So many little things added up since the moment she met him: his incredibly blasé reaction to pain, his reflexive loathing of medical attention, his familiar reaction to being touched without warning. But all of these things could easily have been explained by some other trauma. At first Collei was certain she was reading too much into it; after all, what were the odds? But then, as the Wanderer argued with Cyno, he mentioned the Doctor by name. And suddenly, Collei was certain.

It would've been pretty embarrassing if she was wrong. But his reaction made it immediately clear that she wasn't.

Now, Collei can't pretend that she didn't pause and doubt at least a little when he said he'd been a Fatui Harbinger. In just about any other case this would be enough to propel her into blind hatred of the person in question.

But she kept it under wraps until she could go off on her own to think about it, and honestly, it didn't take her very long to decide that it didn't really matter.

Wanderer's been hurt, very badly, for a long time. Probably he was an awful person for a long time too. But he's done nothing but good since he appeared at Lord Kusanali's side, and Collei would be a massive hypocrite to write someone off just because they were an awful person in the past.

She does understand that he's done worse things than her (at least she never tried to take over a country) and probably killed more people total (though that would be hard to quantify, because between her escape and a few black fire incidents Collei doesn't know the exact number of deaths she's caused). However, there are some things that no one deserves to suffer, and the Doctor she's pretty sure is near the top of that list. So even if Wanderer was being truthful when he claimed that he helped the Doctor do nefarious things -

Well, she decides she can't really judge him for that, because in her experience going through the labs will drive people to do all variety of things they otherwise wouldn't. At least, Collei would like to think that she was not born with the potential for murderous intent.

She spends an entire afternoon puzzling this out from the safety of her room and then nods to herself firmly: she does not have to feel completely comfortable with the fact he was Fatui, but that isn't going to stop her from trying to be his friend.

*

Of course, that doesn't mean it's easy.

Collei knows she tends to latch on to people, okay? She does know this.

She's gotten enough raised eyebrows from Tighnari that she suspects he finds her imitation of Amber just… the slightest bit creepy.

But he wasn't there. He doesn't know how it was! Amber remade her whole world, put light and color back into it again. She was everything Collei wasn't, everything she wished she could be. It's only natural that Collei would try to be like her.

And okay, maybe the degree of imitation is a little weird. Collei formed her fighting style around Amber's, and took up her hobbies, and even tried to steal her smile. It’s really worked out for her, though. Other people like Collei a lot better when she's being Amber. In fact, Collei likes herself a lot better when she's being Amber. Even though it takes a lot of effort to lean into being friendly and helpful and bubbly and pleasant all the time (and yes, she does know she falls a little short of being actually "bubbly").

But Amber is safely away in Mondstadt, unable to directly observe her, only hearing things curated and secondhand in letters. Wanderer is… right in the other room. It's not like this is exactly the same as with Amber - she's not about to go copying his personality or anything, haha, that probably wouldn't go great for anyone - But. She's probably been coming on a little... strong.

She kind of thinks he really needs the pestering, but she's probably lucky that she hasn't completely creeped him out.

Collei creeping him out doesn't seem to be what Tighnari is worried about though. Especially after the time Wanderer yelled and she ran off crying.

"Listen, just say the word and I'll send him away," Tighnari tells her while she sits on her bed sniffling, not patting her shoulder because she doesn't like her shoulder patted and probably he still remembers all the times she bit him when she was twelve, but close enough that shoulder-patting remains an option.

"I don't want you to," warbles Collei, aggrieved. "You were the one who said we should try to keep him here until Cyno finds the Traveler!"

Because the working theory is now that their god is not in her right mind, and that the Wanderer very likely tried to kill himself after arguing with her, and that Lord Kusanali will be unhappy if she cannot find him again once she's back to herself, so they should probably keep him from fleeing the country if possible.

(Beside all of the regular reasons to keep an eye on an injured acquaintance in crisis, of course.)

"Well, yes, but not at your expense," says Tighnari hotly. "I'm sure I could convince Alhaitham and Kaveh to watch over him instead."

"I don't want you to," Collei repeats, scrubbing at her face and hiccuping pitifully. Yes, having her own struggles thrown in her face was beyond unpleasant, but this is nothing compared to how Collei acted in Mondstadt with Amber. Their friendship began with Collei causing an explosion at the city gates which killed two people the Knights were supposed to be guarding. Wanderer has not done anything so horrible as that. Aloud, she insists, "I want to help him."

"...I know you do," says Tighnari. "And Collei, that's a wonderful thing to want to do. But you know it's not your job, right? I don't want you putting too much on your shoulders."

...Okay, and if not on her shoulders, where the heck should she put it?!? Collei would probably be dead in a ditch by now if it wasn't for Amber's determination to help her. It's not right for him to get any less than she did. Right now, this feels like something only Collei can do.

Seeing her mutinous expression, Tighnari sighs. "I really am thrilled that you're taking the initiative to make a friend," he says. "But you can't force someone to be your friend if they really don't want to."

"I know that," Collei snaps, a bit offended that she's being treated like some little kid who doesn't understand boundaries. "I don't think that's why he yelled."

Wanderer was just lashing out. Collei can tell. She considers herself something of an expert on lashing out as someone who has done it spectacularly enough to accrue a body count. And yeah, he was really mean, and it SUCKED, but she gets it. It's not that he didn't want any help but that he didn't think he could be helped.

It seems like Tighnari is at least a little tempted to write the Wanderer off and really, that makes Collei sad. It makes her wonder if Tighnari wouldn't have liked her if he met her in Mondstadt. Which wouldn’t be too surprising; Amber was a really unique person to be able to look past all that. It's just that everything Wanderer has done so far has made perfect sense to Collei, but she doesn't know how to explain that to Tighnari without admitting to some things she doesn't want to admit to.

After all, if Tighnari threw her out someday with no warning, Collei might try to kill herself too. And while it was very upsetting to turn around and see Wanderer suddenly slice himself open like it was nothing- enough to send her into a minor panic attack once she’d scrambled off to hide in her room- that was easy to understand too. There comes a point when doing it yourself feels like the only viable course of action. In fact, when Collei twisted an ankle a couple months after coming to live with Tighnari, she didn't even think to ask him for help. He had to notice her limping himself. And then she was so full of nerves at the very concept of medical attention that it took a full two hours of cajoling and false starts and tears before Tighnari could treat it at all. She trusts Tighnari to help her with stuff like that now, but it took years!

Tighnari has regarded the Wanderer as if he's unpredictable since then, but the truth is, it was perfectly predictable. You just would have to be a certain kind of messed up in the head to get it.

And that's the other thing. Just where else is Collei supposed to find someone else messed up enough to understand her?!

Collei loves Tighnari and Cyno and Amber very, very much, but there are things about her that none of them understand. Things that she will never try to make them understand.

On a deep level, deep enough that not even Tighnari's steady affection can wipe it out, Collei is convinced that she is a nuisance. She doesn't understand why. Tighnari has never given any indication he thinks of her that way. It's true that the Seer used to tell her that her parents gave her away just to get rid of the burden, but she knows that wasn't true, because they tried to come back for her. And yeah, for months after she escaped, everyone she met treated her like a rat or cockroach to be chased away and screamed at and beaten, but really, she doesn't know why that should affect her now, because that was only a couple terrible months out of her whole life, and wasn't anywhere near as terrible as the labs anyway.

Collei has gotten way, way, way better at going to Tighnari for advice or help or comfort and trusting he isn't just "putting up with her". She's talked with him about some really difficult things. But some things are just too much to burden anyone with. Collei doesn't see how she could befriend any normal person without hiding everything about herself so they never realize how weird and damaged she is, and that's just so stressful. Wanderer might be just about her only chance to make a friend who actually gets her the way friends in storybooks do. And yeah, maybe that motivation's a little selfish - but it’s not like it's her only one, okay!

"Alright, alright," Tighnari sighs. "You know I honestly want to help him too. But you’re my priority, Collei, okay? If this happens again, I'll have to put my foot down. I'm not going to stand by and let you get hurt."

"It'll all work out. You'll see," Collei insists, scrubbing the last of her tears away and glaring down at her lap.

*

And it does. It DOES seem to work out! And Wanderer is honestly pretty good company when he is not, as Tighnari puts it, in "hissy-cat mode".

Tighnari is very pleased to be able to assign the Wanderer on patrols with her. He's always disliked her going off in the woods alone, but he gave up on preventing it long ago, because no matter who he tried to send Collei out with she'd invariably give them the slip and finish the route on her own. She's very, very good at not being found when she doesn't want to be. Being alone in the woods is one of the only times she can really decompress - it's almost impossible to do with other people around.

Surprisingly, Wanderer doesn't actually detract from her decompression time too much. He has a healthy appreciation for just hanging out together in silence. When he lets her know she doesn't have to fill up the quiet, it takes off a lot of pressure she didn't even realize was there. And he's a really good cook, which she didn't expect at all, and he listens when she talks, and he's good with animals too (she doesn't think she's seen that village stray let ANYONE pet it before)-

Collei might have messed it all up now, though.

She doesn’t understand how it all went downhill so quickly. She told Wanderer her story even though it was kind of hard, because he seemed genuinely interested in hearing it, and that made her happy. But then he got that awful look on his face that everyone always gets, which felt kind of like being stabbed, because she had figured if there was one person in the whole world who wouldn’t do that, it would be him. So she got a little mad, only then he started telling her things about himself that were objectively way worse, and Collei immediately became a hypocrite by being horrified in return. Although she’s really not sure how else she possibly could have reacted. And he was acting like it was nothing, so she argued with him about it even though he was starting to get kind of a nauseous expression on his face, which didn’t worry her too much because in her opinion that’s a pretty normal expression to have when thinking about the Doctor. Only then he shut down completely and his gaze went all distant and he didn’t react when Collei called his name or tried to apologize, at which point she freaked out and ran to Tighnari.

Tighnari is currently gardening in the backyard, tamping down the soft earth with a trowel. One of his ears flicks and he turns to face her as Collei runs to him in distress. "I MADE HIM ZONE OUT," she wails.

She knows what this is because it used to happen to her a lot in the first year or so after she arrived in Sumeru. After the black fire was sealed, before she learned the bow or got her Vision, she knew she had no way to fight back, and her fight-or-flight response went all wonky for awhile. There were more than a few times when her panic displaced her right out of her body, leaving her floating in numb silent terror the way she’d spent large chunks of her childhood.

Tighnari looks a bit alarmed. "What? How?" he asks.

"We were just talking..." Collei says, and hesitates.

"About...?"

"About the Doctor..." she mumbles, scuffing the ground with the toe of her shoe.

"You were?!" Tighnari's eyebrows shoot up. The surprise is perhaps warranted, because Collei virtually never willingly approaches the subject.

“Yeah, but, I... I don’t know what I said! I was just trying to help!” she exclaims, near tears. “What should I do?”

Tighnari casts a concerned glance back at the house. "Is he… I mean, is he, like, okay? Do I need to go in there and do something?”

She supposes this is a reasonable question because there were a few times that Collei got so worked up she started clawing at her wrists in her delirium. Tighnari didn’t leave her unsupervised in that state after the first time he came back to find her patches of Eleazar a bloody mess where she dug at the scales. Collei can't recall ever deciding to do that but it did used to occasionally happen if she was under significant enough stress. Wringing her hands, Collei says, “No, I don’t think so, he’s just sitting there…”

Tighnari sighs. “Then probably all we can do is wait,” he says. “It might not be safe to approach him.”

This is also reasonable enough. Sometimes if Tighnari touched her in that state, Collei wouldn’t react at all, and he could gently guide her somewhere out of the way to recover. But sometimes it jolted her back to herself, and she’d surface in a violent screaming clawing panic. With the abilities he has, Wanderer could do a lot of damage with the second reaction. She just feels so awful to not do anything to help when this is her fault in the first place.

"What if he hates me after this?" she worries.

"I doubt he would," Tighnari says. "Why don’t you just... apologize? When he comes out of it? Maybe ask if there's something you shouldn't do again. He's been less hissy-cat lately, hasn't he?"

"Masterrrrr," she whines, slightly disapproving.

“I mean, he did make you cry that time, so he can't hold you against it too much," Tighnari adds, half-joking.

"Master!!" Collei scolds.

Tighnari both softens and becomes more serious. "Listen, it sucks that he's having a hard time, but you don't have to help him with everything," he says gently. “Why not just focus on trying to be friends?"

Because, Collei does not say, that is something she knows how to do even less than this.

*

The first thing Collei does to try to fix her mistake is bring Wanderer some tea and zaytun peaches and then tiptoe back out of the room.

It's not only Amber that Collei imitates - she’s copied Tighnari a little, too. This trick of sneaking someone tea and snacks as an apology, or an overture of goodwill, or just to let them know you're thinking of them: that's something she learned from Tighnari.

At first, when Tighnari had inadvertently upset her or he could tell she was feeling down, he'd try to put a comforting hand on her shoulder. This did not work at all, and in fact usually made things worse. But Tighnari adjusted to this quickly.

"I get it, a little," he'd told her. "People are always trying to touch my ears and tail without even asking me, and that upsets me. I'll ask you from now on, okay?"

And he almost always remembered to ask. And Collei's answer was almost always no. But he never made her feel bad about it, just took it in stride, and gradually, she started scattering in a few "yes"es. Just to see what it was like. Eventually she found she didn't always hate it. Sometimes a side-hug or a shoulder-pat was even quite nice if she knew it was coming.

The point is, Tighnari often had to come up with other ways of expressing his affection. He does it in a thousand small ways. He takes care of her, and notices if she's sad, and buys her favorite foods and supports her hobbies and teaches her patiently day after day. But one of her pivotal memories, one of the first times she really felt safe with him, was when he brought her a cup of tea. Collei was twelve years old, huddled under a pile of blankets crying, refusing to let anyone come near her, upset over she doesn't even remember what. He came in and left a freshly-brewed cup of tea and left without another word. It smelled nice, and before long Collei crawled out of the blankets to investigate. The steam curled softly in the air and it smelled nice, so she picked it up and drank it, and it tasted good and was nice on her throat, and soon the tears were down to sniffles, and then to nothing at all.

It became a shared language between them. I'm sorry or I'm thinking about you or I love you. A way of respecting her need for space while letting her know that he'd be there for her when she was ready. Of showing he wouldn’t force her out of her comfort zone but that he still wanted to do anything he could to support her.

Now, one might think Collei would sour on using this tactic on the Wanderer after she wound up letting him stab himself with a fruit knife.

But Collei is nothing if not persistent.

*

The next time she peeks her head in the door Wanderer’s eaten a couple of the zaytun peach slices, which she takes as a good sign. Then his gaze slices up to meet hers with a distinct, if exhausted, awareness and Collei nearly bolts but forces herself not to. Okay, just apologize, she tells herself, he hasn't started yelling or anything-

And then he stuns her by beating her to it. "I'm. Sorry," Wanderer says, still as stilted as the first time he apologized to her.

"For... what?" Collei squeaks out.

Okay, now he's glaring at her. "For. You know," he says, waving a hand around, "For acting... Like that. The way you... You know. Hate for people to act. About it."

Ohhh okay, Collei honestly already forgot she'd been upset about that because she was too busy panicking about what happened after. "It's... okay," she says, and does mostly mean it. "I mean... I kind of... did the same thing? So if anything we're... even?" She finally creeps into the room instead of continuing to hide halfway behind the door. Collei perches next to him on the couch, on the very edge of the cushion, poised so she can flee if she needs to. Not! That she thinks she'll need to! Just, feelings are as frightening as physical attacks sometimes. He's not looking at her now, fingers tight around his half-empty cup of tea, expression a grim shade of poorly-hidden shame. Tentatively, Collei offers, "It's all just... Really messed up. In different kinds of ways. That we don't... necessarily have to talk about! But all messed up."

Wanderer blows out a breath. A little tension lifts from him, but not much. "Yeah," he says. "Messed up."

Okay and here's her opening. "And I'm! Sorry too! For making you, uh..."

"What?" He looks up and oops okay there's the sharpness in his voice that she was worried about!

"For making you... you know...!" Why can she not say it?

"Collei," he says tartly, "You could never make me do anything."

"I'm sorry I said something wrong and you zoned ooooouuut," she says all in a rush.

He frowns. "I what?"

"Zoned out?” she explains nervously. “Like, when everything gets way too overwhelming and then you're not... there for awhile...?"

"Oh,” Wanderer says, “Nahida called it something else," and then immediately looks annoyed at himself for having even mentioned her. He winces as if to chase away the thought. "That wasn't your fault Collei, that was just my own stupid shit."

Okay, well, Collei doesn't think she'd call a reaction to centuries of trauma "stupid shit" but she also doesn't think it'd be helpful to point that out right now. In many ways it's clear that Wanderer is more messed up than Collei is, which only makes sense if he was there for hundreds of YEARS and also it sounds like he's only been out of that situation since the coup while Collei has had four whole years to get better. Is it awful that she feels a bit better about herself if there's at least one person out there more messed up than she is? Yeah she's probably an awful person for that. But it does make her feel better that she's not the only one out there this broken.

Not that. She's. Irreparably broken. Or that he is. She believes that! Yeah!!

(The thing about hope is it's a constant process, a decision that you have to make again and again and again. It's not a one-and-done, oh I have hope now. Choosing it every morning is the hardest thing she's ever done and yes that INCLUDES breaking herself out of an evil lab!!)

"I guess we're still friends then," Collei says, and then freezes because actually she's never directly applied that word to him yet and if he's anything like her (which he is) he probably has some kind of complex about it.

But Wanderer just gives her a really long look, and then sighs, and says with great weariness, like he can't believe the words coming out of his own mouth, "Yeah. Still friends."

And Collei feels like she could explode right then and there or maybe ascend to Celestia on that happiness. There have been some missteps, and she's clingy and weird and messed up in the head, but she has a friend now that she made all by herself, and all she can do is try not to beam too giddily in response.

Collei knows this won't last forever. Eventually Cyno will find the Traveler and with any luck they'll be able to help Lord Kusanali, and then probably Wanderer will go back to live with her and Collei will be alone on her patrols again. And actually Collei doesn't even really want him to live here forever, because as wonderful as this has been it's also been stressful in all sorts of ways.

But she really, really, really hopes they can keep being friends afterward. Maybe they can write each other letters, and maybe he can come visit sometimes, or she can go see him in the city, and they can... have lunch or go to the theater or talk about books they've read or whatever it is normal people do with their friends.

Collei doesn't know. She doesn't think Wanderer knows, either.

But they have time to figure it out. Because both of them are going to live.

Chapter Text

After Wanderer fails to deny to her face that he considers them friends, Collei spends the next few days in very high spirits, all humming and smiling with a spring to her step.

(Wanderer cannot even remember the last time he spoke the word without a mocking slant to his tone. He's trying not to think about it too hard.)

For a brief span of time, things are very nearly idyllic, which unnerves him perhaps more than it should. He helps Collei rescue a moron who ate a poisonous mushroom in the forest, berating the adventurer so soundly for their idiocy that by the time they've been dragged back to Gandharva Ville they apologize profusely to Tighnari for considering him the 'scary one'. He participates in 'board game night' with Tighnari and Collei and is only a little smug about it when he wins. And then, one particularly empty afternoon, Collei drags out the torn and stained outfit Wanderer arrived here in and declares she intends to fix it.

"Give me that," the Wanderer snaps, snatching it out of her grasp. He's been kind of assuming Tighnari threw it away and was attempting to have no emotions about that whatsoever, and now he stands and stares at it for a moment too long before clearing his throat and saying pointedly, "I can fix it myself."

Collei blinks owlishly. "You can sew?"

"Pretty good at it too," he grumbles.

He's always found it meditative in a way. He learned the basics on Tatarasuna, and it proved an important skill to have when he was taking care of his fledgling. He’d patch up their clothes again and again and again because they didn't have the money to buy more. As Scaramouche, he didn't have any reason to practice such skills, and of course could not be seen doing anything so domestic. But more recently...

Wanderer hesitates, then reaches into a pocket of the outfit, unsure if the item was damaged in the fall. But when he pulls it out, he finds it remarkably intact, if a bit squashed.

He is not expecting for Collei to let out a squeal that could shatter glass and pounce toward it, forcing him to swipe it out of the way with a glare. Seems she can be a typical teenage girl from time to time after all. Collei's eyes widen and she backs off, suddenly bashful. "Sorry! Sorry!" she squeaks. "But... did you make that?"

The Wanderer huffs. "Yeah," he says. Admittedly, he was never skillful enough to make something like this until fairly recently. Nahida had been chattering on about "art therapy", usually while working on that box of puzzles, but the Wanderer never planned to join in. And that actually honestly wasn't what he was thinking about when he made it, it was just that he met that old craftsman on Treasures Street, and one thing led to another, and well... maybe there's a little something to the concept after all. Because usually the thought of the Kabukimono would instantly spark some disgust in him, but it's a little hard to hate something he spent so many hours working on, trying to get every little detail right.

"It's so cuuuuute," Collei exclaims. "Is that supposed to be you?"

"...Sort of," he allows.

"Can I hold iiiit," she pleads, in a prematurely dejected sort of way as if she expects to be refused but has to try anyway. When the Wanderer’s contemplative silence stretches on a bit too long, she perks up and goes, "Look, look! You can hold Cullein-Anbar!"

Collei produces out of nowhere a very cute knitted green cat, brandishing it in front of her and peeking out from behind it with her eyes round and shining.

"...Sure," Wanderer says, for reasons he does not entirely understand.

So they wind up sitting cross-legged on Wanderer's bed in the guest room like two kids having a sleepover while Wanderer holds Cullein-Anbar loosely in his lap and Collei continues to gush over the little cloth Kabukimono.

"Where did this thing come from then," Wanderer asks, poking at Cullein-Anbar.

Collei explains, a little shyly, about Amber's Baron Bunny and how she was inspired to try to create something similar. This is in fact the eighth iteration of Cullein-Anbar, she says, and she finally feels confident enough to show it off to Amber when she gets the chance. And then she starts praising how neat some of his needlework is, and does he have any projects he's working on at the moment, and how did he do this bit, she'd like to try it sometime...

This is how Tighnari finds them. He pokes his head in the room, probably to tell them to wash up for dinner, and then pauses. "Have I interrupted something?" he asks, amused.

Collei brightens, swivelling and proudly presenting the Kabukimono doll before Wanderer can stop her. "Master, look!" she exclaims. "Wanderer can sew!"

Wanderer flushes and says, just a little pointed, "Yes, quite the talented daughter you've got, too."

Now, he did mean it as a bit of a jab, because he is still an asshole who kicks back reflexively when embarrassed and probably always will be. He thought they'd probably be flustered if he said it. But he didn't expect Tighnari to make a spluttering noise like a kicked duck or for Collei's entire face to immediately flame red while she stammers incoherently.

"Okay, alright, hold on a minute," Tighnari wheezes, leaning heavily on the door and looking like he's just taken a blow, "Hat Guy, I'm only twenty-seven."

Wanderer glances between them. Collei's hands are now plastered over her face, and she’s peeking between her fingers like she's scared to take them away. "So what?"

"So Collei's sixteen," Tighnari stresses. "If anything that makes me more of a... big brother figure?" But his nose scrunches up even as he says it, tail giving a dissatisfied flick. Behind her fingers, Collei makes a vague noise of dissent.

"You're Master," she contributes valiantly, a little strangled.

Tighnari rubs the back of his neck bashfully. "Listen, we're family," he says, with an ease that seems to startle Collei, though she nods furiously in agreement. "But it's not really like that. I don't think we fit into any box in particular. We're just... family."

"Yeah!" agrees Collei, emphatic, and then she giggles as she drops her hands from her fac, the blotchy blush beginning to recede. "Don't call him a dad, Wanderer, you'll scare him."

"I aged ten years in one second," says Tighnari, smiling wryly. "Okay, now come wash up for dinner for real this time."

"Sure!" Collei chirps. "...Wanderer?

He's gone very quiet. The bittersweet feeling he sometimes gets when he watches them is worse this time, painfully acute like a hook caught in his chest and tugging. They're a pair of people thrown together by happenstance after a backdrop of crime and tragedy, no formal claim to each other, unable to neatly define their roles in each other's lives but undeniably family all the same. Suddenly the thought is almost unbearable, and Wanderer has no idea if the expression on his face as he watches Tighnari depart is wistfulness or contempt or despair.

Nahida and Wanderer never really defined what they were to each other. Attempting to do so would probably have been a fool's errand. It's been hundreds of years since he was last foolish enough to consider anyone family; Nahida has no experience with the concept at all, and evidently thought a lot less of him than he'd wanted to believe anyway. But it's hard to deny that Tighnari and Collei are like a warped reflection, an echo of something he lost before he even quite realized he had it.

...It's been too long. Collei's going to get concerned again. Wanderer pastes a wan smile on his face and says, "Coming."

*

Things really have been going quite well. So of course Wanderer has to do something to ruin the mood. He’s been ruminating on the Fatui more than usual, and he knows Collei has been too. He's a light sleeper, and he’s heard her have a few nightmares. Probably all the Wanderer’s fault for dredging it up and putting it on her mind.

Collei is once again working on her letters to Mondstadt, rambling on about the upcoming Windblume festival. Tighnari and Cyno have promised to take her to it this year now that her health is stable, and she's both excited and nervous to see her friends in person again. Wanderer nods along and makes the appropriate indications of interest, but a thought is nagging at him.

When he briefly encountered Collei during his time in the Fatui, it was purely by chance. His relationship to Dottore’s segments has always been odd and contentious - well, even odder and more contentious than usual. He tended to avoid them when possible, and they were both aware and resentful of that fact. The only reason Scaramouche ever laid eyes on Collei was because he had to stop in with one of them for emergency repairs. It’s quite possible the remaining Dottore has never heard of Collei, and even if or when he does, he probably won't do anything with the knowledge; in all likelihood, if the Fatui were going to try to recapture her, they’d have done it years ago.

And doesn’t Collei… deserve to know that? Wanderer can’t help the fact that his very existence reminds her of things she'd rather forget, but maybe it’d help if she at least knew her tormentor had died. Died pathetically, helplessly, betrayed by his own flesh and blood. It’s really too bad Wanderer didn’t get to dispose of any of them himself, but sometimes it comforts him to think of the sheer confusion and terror and helpless fury each one of them must have felt as they were snuffed out.

Though… maybe he won’t say that part. She probably wouldn't want to hear it.

So when Collei lapses into quiet, the Wanderer says abruptly, “The Doctor.”

Collei tenses at the mere mention of him. “Y-Yes?” she asks. “What about him?”

“He’s… gone, you know,” the Wanderer says slowly. “The one that did that to you.”

Suddenly, all her attention is on him, big purple eyes riveted to his face. “He… what?” she asks. “What do you mean… gone?”

And suddenly the Wanderer remembers that Dottore’s segments are not common knowledge outside the Fatui. Even many in the lower ranks don’t know of them. “Alright,” he sighs, rubbing a palm against his forehead. “First of all, there’s more than one of him-”

“There’s more than one of him?!” Collei cries, voice dropping to a whisper-shriek. She looks stiff with fright, and he regrets this decision already.

“Yes. He cloned himself,” the Wanderer says shortly, and does not elaborate. Perhaps she’d feel less amicable toward him if she knew that on some level he was responsible for her suffering, since the segments would never have existed if Dottore hadn't been able to study Scaramouche in the first place. Perhaps that’s more reason to say it. But it doesn’t seem the appropriate time to open the tangent. Collei’s lips quiver with horror, and he swiftly corrects himself: “Or. There were more than one of him. Nahida made him destroy all the others.”

“Made... him?” Collei asks faintly. Her pencil has dropped from her hand, its inertia slowing as it rolls back and forth on the desk.

Wanderer scowls and says with no small amount of bitterness, “As part of their bargaining at the conclusion of the Fatui plot in Sumeru.” After my defeat, he doesn’t say. While I was comatose in a crater. He didn’t didn’t even ask after me. Nahida had to bring me up. The only thing either of them were interested in was the heart she tore out of my chest.

(He’d gone quite some way in forgiving her for that. Had been trying to learn forgiveness, just for her.)

Collei’s voice distracts him before he can ruminate on it too deeply. “He was in Sumeru?” she whispers fiercely, sounding ill.

“He-” The Wanderer raises his head, startled out of his brooding. “Yes? Did Tighnari not tell you?” he asks, disconcerted.

“No???” Collei sounds distraught.

“Tighnari talked to him,” Wanderer recalls. “They had a squabble over my-” first follower, and oh what a punch to the gut it always is to think that Haypasia doesn’t even remember him now, “over a mad scholar. You- Are you okay?”

“Auwrgh,” exclaims Collei, a dry snarl more than anything. “That- How could he- I’ve asked him not to-!!” Wanderer watches as she bares her teeth, her eyes flashing darkly. For the first time he can easily picture the feral child she once was. “He thinks it’s better if I don’t know things that’ll upset me, but he’s wrong! It’s always better to know!”

A Dendro vision holder, indeed.

“I can’t believe he, he-...” Collei falters again with an odd lost look on her face, as if she feels hurt but is confused as to why. “He, what, he just… talked to him?”

…Alright, Wanderer can understand why she might feel a little betrayed by that, but they’re getting sidetracked again. “No, listen,” he insists. “It wasn’t the same one, Collei.” He steeples his fingers, pinning her under a serious gaze. “The man who hurt you is dead.”

She freezes, studying him with wide, wide eyes.

As the silence continues, he somehow feels the need to expound on this. “I’m sure there are still notes on you somewhere,” he says. “But the Dottore that's left probably doesn’t even know you exist. You…” and he hesitates, because he doesn’t want to make this claim unless it’s ironclad, but it’s probably close enough: “You should be safe from him.”

Collei continues to stare. It’s starting to become unnerving. The Wanderer’s not even sure she’s breathing.

“...Collei?” he prods finally.

Suddenly, she bursts into tears.

*

The Wanderer curses himself as she flees the room. How did this happen again?! He wasn’t even trying to upset her this time! The opposite, in fact! He’s really not sure if he should go after her, but after a few frozen moments he decides that he will. If she doesn’t want him around, she’s assertive enough to tell him to scram. Besides, this is his fault.

But she’s not in her room, or indeed anywhere in the house. And on the way out the door, the Wanderer runs into Tighnari, who has his arms crossed and a suspicious expression on his face. “What happened now?” Tighnari asks.

“I-” Wanderer scrubs a hand over his face, wondering if he'll get kicked out for real this time, then decides that he doesn’t care because he still doesn’t know where Collei is. “Listen, it was my fault. I - upset her. I didn’t mean to- I mean, this time I was actually trying to help-"

“The both of you…” Tighnari's eyes squeeze shut with a world-weary sigh, and when he opens them it's with the arch question, “What on earth did you tell her?”

“That the Doctor’s dead,” Wanderer says, brusque.

“The Doctor’s dead?!” Tighnari yelps. “Is that true?”

“It- yeah, sort of. I can explain it later, we don’t have time for this,” he snaps.

Tighnari stares at him for a moment longer, and then says, “...I think she went out to the woods. In which case there’s no point looking. She knows how to stay safe out there, and no one will be able to find her until she decides to come back.”

But the Wanderer pauses, remembering in crystal clarity something Collei mentioned on a recent patrol. “The woods? Then I think I know where she is.”

I like to come out here to calm down, she told him with a secretive twinkle in her eye, rapping the hollow trunk of a big tree stump with her knuckles. You can always tell things to a tree.

If she’s gone all the way to the woods, perhaps she really does want to be alone. But Wanderer feels like he ought to fix his mistake before it can somehow worsen. He should've realized this would be a sensitive subject.

So into the woods he goes. Collei had a head start, but Wanderer has an excellent memory and it isn’t hard to find the right path. When he arrives at the hollow log she showed him, Collei is not telling the tree her troubles so much as screaming into it, the sound wordless and raw and only somewhat muffled by the bark. A trio of dusk birds takes off, squawking, from a nearby perch.

He waits for her voice to taper off and then says, tentatively, “...Collei.”

Collei’s head of fluffy green hair pops over the rim of the trunk a moment later; it’s large enough for her to sit inside with her knees curled up, but only barely. Her eyes are red-rimmed, haunted like a hardened soldier's. She sniffs loudly to clear her nose and asks, voice rough, “Did he suffer?”

Wanderer stares at her. There’s a sense of wonder bubbling up inside him, wholly inappropriate for the time and place; Oh, he thinks, you really are like me. He hesitates for too long, or maybe something in his face betrays the answer, because she bares her teeth at him like a little tiger. Wanderer can’t help it then and chuckles, folding himself neatly down to sit on the loamy soil, his back to her so as not to disturb her privacy too much. “Probably not,” he says, dull as he can make it. “Nahida said it was like flipping a switch.”

Collei screams into what sounds like her hands, and there’s a resounding thumping noise that must be her feet kicking against the inside of the trunk. Then there's a quavering sob. And another. Wanderer politely pretends not to hear.

“...They panicked, at least,” he tells her. “They knew they were going to die.”

(He knows that much because Nahida shared the memory with him. It had been necessary to prove certain things.)

Collei makes an inarticulate sound of distress or anger, something that was maybe trying to be words but fell apart on the way out of her mouth, and follows it up with something he can only describe as offended weeping. It might have been funny in another circumstance, or if she was someone else, but as it is the Wanderer’s guilt gets worse. It sounds like she is feeling too many things to begin to make sense of them all. He’s well-acquainted with what that’s like.

“...I’m sorry,” he says, at length. Bold and upfront about it this time, wouldn’t Nahida be proud? He bites the inside of his cheek until it bleeds, then forces himself to go on. “I thought… I don’t know. I thought you would feel better.”

Loud, congested snuffling. “I think I do,” comes Collei’s voice, unhappily bewildered. “I think… it feels better. Safer? I don’t know… I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I don’t know why I’m crying.”

The Wanderer considers. Rifles through Nahida’s catalog of therapy terms, although doing so hurts. “It’s… a lot to process,” he offers eventually.

“Yeah,” Collei agrees, indistinct enough her face is probably smooshed into her knees.

They sit there together for a while longer, the ambient hum of the rainforest disturbed only by the occasional sniffle. Collei doesn’t tell him to go, so he must have done something right by following her. Eventually her sniffling peters off too, and then there’s little to hear but breathing and birdsong and the rustles of movement in the brush.

“Yeah," says Collei at last. “Okay. Let’s go back.” She clambers out of the tree trunk, the tips of her ears burning. She’s almost all shy, sweet girl again, and it really does look like a weight has been lifted from her shoulders. “Thank you,” she murmurs awkwardly, one hand clutching the opposite elbow. “For telling me, and for not leaving me alone.”

Trying not to show how relieved he is, the Wanderer replies, “Anytime.”

They’re almost back to Gandharva proper, Wanderer leading with a loping gait so that she can trail behind and continue to collect herself unobserved, when Collei says, flat and sudden: “The Doctor.” He turns and finds her glaring at the ground, her hands curled into fists.

“...Yeah?” the Wanderer prompts warily.

“There's still one of him.”

“...Yeah,” he confirms. “But I don’t think that-”

“Will you kill him someday?” she asks the ground, her voice firm and fierce.

For a moment, the Wanderer is stumped. But because they’re alike, he chooses to be honest with her. “Collei,” he says, tone heavy but wry, “I really, really hope so.”

Collei nods once, hard. Then they resume the walk back into the village. And that is that.

…At least until they reach the house, where Tighnari is waiting for them. Collei shrinks back a little under his gaze, almost hiding behind the Wanderer, and what is that about?

“Alright, family meeting time,” says Tighnari, harried, and before the Wanderer can wander off, “Yes, Hat Guy, your attendance is required too.”

*

Today has been very up-and-down emotionally for Collei. Actually, it’s just been an up-and-down few weeks.

She is glad Wanderer told her, because now that she’s calmed down, she does feel pretty relieved. Just, also kind of like she’s been cheated out of something, which makes no sense because obviously she was never going to personally take revenge on the Doctor anyway? But maybe she used to think about it a lot, okay, and maybe she doesn't think it’s fair that he died so painlessly when he spent his entire life bringing suffering to others! She tries not to be bloodthirsty - but, well… if there's anything that called for it-

It’s mostly a weight off her shoulders, though. Really. She thought she’d have to worry about the Doctor somewhere in the back of her mind for the rest of her life, because after all what’s out there that could kill him? Apparently, the answer is her archon. It's incredible the things Lord Kusanali has done for her, whether they were specifically for her or not.

The thing is, this dredged up a lot of other feelings too. Collei tries so hard to be trustworthy and to trust others. She tries so hard to overcome her past and to be someone Tighnari doesn’t have to worry about. She knows she’s put a lot of strain on him over the years, and it just really didn’t feel good to realize that the Doctor had been in Sumeru and Tighnari met him and didn’t even tell her. Like he didn’t think that was something she should know. At least someone here is honest with her!!

So as they seat themselves around the dining table, Collei and Wanderer are both examining the grain of the wood as if it’s the most interesting thing in the world.

“First things first,” Tighnari says, looking at Wanderer, “What did you mean the Doctor’s dead?”

“I meant what I said,” Wanderer replies, unaffected. “Well. I mean. There’s at least one of him still out there, but the rest of them- including the one Collei knew-”

“...There was more than one of him,” Tighnari interrupts, utterly flat. He’s pinching the bridge of his nose. “Alright. I guess I’m not as surprised by that as I could be. He did seem egotistical enough to figure out how to clone himself.”

Wanderer makes a startled chuckle which he tries to hide in a cough. Collei scrunches down further in her seat. She feels her face screw up and realizes she’s genuinely on the verge of crying again, which seems like it should be impossible after how long it took her to wind down in the woods, but somehow- Tighnari acknowledging it so casually-

“...Collei,” Tighnari pries gently. “If you’d tell me what’s-

“Did you really talk to him??” she bursts out.

Tighnari hesitates, and then his expression shutters, cautious and just a touch grim. “I did,” he says carefully. “It didn’t seem… wise to do anything else.”

Collei is at a loss for words, and when she tries all that comes out is a glum “Mm..." She’s not sure what she wanted him to say. Obviously Tighnari couldn’t have fought the Doctor. Collei knows that. She wasn’t the slightest bit upset that Wanderer didn't try to help her when he saw her all that time ago, and it’s not like she really expected Tighnari to fly into a vengeful rage on her behalf if he ever had the misfortune of meeting the Doctor. He probably wouldn’t have made it through that encounter safely if he hadn’t kept a clear head, and that's what's most important - hearing from Wanderer that they’d met, the first thing Collei felt was a shiver down her spine, as if Tighnari could retroactively be harmed by him. But even still, a knot of confused betrayal sits in her chest that she doesn’t know how to express. The silence spins on, and finally she asks frustratedly, “But what did you say?”

Tighnari seems to ponder how to explain. “Well - we didn’t talk much. But Collei - the man was completely awful. He didn't make any overt threats, but just the way he spoke about people -” Getting worked up just thinking about it, Tighnari pauses to calm himself. “He wanted to take my patient away for ‘treatment’ -” he pronounces this word very dubiously, as he should - “so I told him he was being rude and reckless and to go away.”

Collei’s jaw just about drops, while Wanderer’s laugh is more of a guffaw this time. “What did he do then?” she demands. She can't imagine anyone speaking so brazenly to the Doctor.

“I mean, he said something unpleasant and arrogant and then he left,” Tighnari says, shrugging. “And then he sent a bunch of jack-booted thugs after us, and we might’ve been in a lot of trouble, except…” Frowning, he looks over to Wanderer. “Why did you send that thunderstorm, anyway?”

“Well, I wasn’t about to let him take Haypasia away,” Wanderer says, sounding a bit offended. “She was a believer of mine, after all.” Then, just above a mumble, “I didn’t intend to hit you, you know. You were just collateral damage.”

Collei smiles a little to herself. Wanderer’s always saying he was such a horrible person, and maybe he mostly was, she doesn't know, but look at that - as soon as he had enough power to do so, he did protect someone from the Doctor, so he couldn't have been all bad. It’s just... too bad Tighnari had to get injured in the process. It was really scary hearing he’d been struck by lightning and seeing the physical therapy he had to do on that arm. Collei’s smile fades, and she realizes they still haven’t talked about what’s really bothering her. “Why didn’t you tell me, though,” she asks.

“Collei…” Tighnari looks pained. “There was so much going on. I was recovering from the lightning strike, Cyno had just staged a coup, and then we found out you’d been cured. Would you believe me if I said it honestly slipped my mind?”

“You… You!” Collei scowls and scuffs her foot on the floor. Yeah, that would make sense for an excuse at first, but- “No,” she bursts out, “You could’ve told me later! I know you must’ve thought of it!”

“Sure, but he’d already been out of the country for a while by then,” Tighnari protests. “I didn’t think it would do you any good.”

Collei’s heart squeezes painfully - is she really still just a troubled kid in his eyes who has to be shielded from reality? “I’m not that fragile!” she retorts, glaring. “You’re always… you always want me to tell you about the important things but you wouldn’t even tell me that?” Her voice wobbles perilously and no, oh nooo, seriously, again??

Tighnari’s expression just sort of… crumples. “Collei… No, you’re right, I should’ve told you,” he says. “I’m sorry. I worry about you a lot, but I shouldn’t underestimate you. It was hypocritical of me.” Collei sniffles. It doesn’t sound like he’s saying it just to pacify her, but does he really understand why it upset her so much? “Do you want to… come over here?” Tighnari offers awkwardly, opening his arms.

An indecisive “Mnn” comes out of her mouth, but honestly, she does. She’s still a little upset with him, but his hugs feel safe, and she needs that right now. As she stands up and moves over to Tighnari, she can see that the Wanderer is sidling out of the room with an expression of profound discomfort, hoping to go unnoticed as he escapes all of the emotions taking place, and she might laugh if she was feeling even just the slightest bit less emotionally battered. Tighnari stands and Collei presses herself up against him, face smooshed against his chest, arms hanging limp at her sides. She feels his arms settle around her in a loose circle, just barely brushing the small of her back; easy to break out of if she wants to.

“I just want you to trust me,” she mumbles into his shirt, listening to the steady thump of his heartbeat, and a few tears finally slip loose.

“I know,” Tighnari soothes. “I know. And I do, Collei, honestly.”

“It really doesn’t feel like it sometimes!” she cries.

Tighnari hesitates. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “It’s hard to know what to do, you know? I’m not - I really try to be someone you can look up to, but there are so many things I’m not an expert in, Collei. I don’t… I don’t always know what will help and what won’t.”

“I don’t want you to always have to be trying to help me,” she says, which is a stupid thing to say, because she’s always needed help and probably always will to some degree, and shouldn't she just be grateful there's someone who's willing to help her and help her even if she'll never be fixed, especially since she knows what it's like to not have anyone? But she doesn’t want Tighnari to put that kind of pressure on himself, to always be thinking about her like she’s a puzzle, like she’s more of a patient than an apprentice or a family member. It’s not fair on him, and surely one day it'll burden him too much, and how is she supposed to ever feel like a normal girl if she knows that he’s always-

…Oh. Something clicks inside her, and Collei lets out a helpless, watery laugh as the last thread of resentment falls away. That’s kind of exactly what Tighnari has been trying to tell her about her friendship with Wanderer, isn’t it?

“...Collei?” Tighnari asks, hesitant.

She makes a vague noise of dismissal and shakes her head against him. “I’m not mad,” she says, throat thick.

Maybe Tighnari does understand. Maybe they’re all just trying the best with the hand life has dealt them. And maybe she should really try to take all that to heart a bit too. All that’s left is, “I’m glad he didn’t hurt you,” and it comes out more than a little weepy, her own arms finally lifting to grip hesitantly at his shirt.

“Oh Collei,” he says, with enough fondness to make her heart ache.

It isn’t the first time she’s been upset with Tighnari. It probably won’t be the last. But the mistakes they make are made out of love, and never so terrible they can't be worked out.

(Maybe, Collei thinks, that's what makes them family.)

Chapter Text

It’s hard to say how many more days might have passed that way, Wanderer tiptoeing his way toward a life after devastation, were it not for the sudden and rude intrusion of reality.

Wanderer is washing up the dishes from lunch when there’s a knock at the door. “I’ll get it,” Tighnari calls, because Collei is currently ensconced in a knitting project, and lopes over to the door.

“Oh- Traveler!” Tighnari exclaims, and Wanderer nearly fumbles the soapy plate in his hands to the floor. Swiftly, he drops it in the suds and wipes off his hands, then cranes his neck to see around Tighnari with rapidly growing dread. Sure enough, there’s the Traveler and their floating nuisance, Cyno a dour half-step behind them.

From the other room, Collei gasps, “You found them?!” She puts down her knitting and comes skidding around the corner, joyously relieved.

"Cyno caught up to me in Fontaine," the Traveler explains, expression serious as they step inside. "I was able to bring us back with a shortcut once he told me what was going on."

“I'm sorry it took me so long," Cyno adds, following them over the threshold. "How have things been on the home front?”

Tighnari clasps Cyno's hands in his, smiling. "Nothing too wild," he assures him.

Cyno casts a skeptical glance in Wanderer's direction, but seems to accept this. "No news from Alhaitham?" he asks gravely.

Tighnari hesitates, smile fading, and also casts a glance at Wanderer for some reason. "He's kept us apprised," he says. "No major developments as of a few days ago, but..."

Meanwhile Wanderer just stands there, frozen and numb. The Traveler turns to him, big golden eyes soft with worry. “Wanderer. How have you been? We’ve heard-”

“Shut up,” he says his mouth, with no input from his brain.

“That’s some way to treat a person who’s worried about you!” Paimon exclaims crossly. “How’s it been going out here? You better not have been bullying Collei.”

The Wanderer takes a long, shuddering breath, his sneer resurfacing like muscle memory. “We got along fine.”

“Really?” Paimon asks, skeptical. “You and a sweet girl like Collei? Collei, is this guy telling the truth?”

Collei turns and blinks at Paimon. “Yeah!” she exclaims, “We’re really good friends!” Paimon, Cyno, and the Traveler all turn and stare, some more disbelieving than others. Collei wilts a little. “I-I think?”

“...Yes,” the Wanderer says, though it's still a bit like choking on a wishbone to get it out, “We’re friends.”

The Traveler seems startled. They shuffle a bit closer to the Wanderer and murmur, “You’ve really been okay? I know that Nahida - well, she means a lot to you -”

“We’re not talking about this.” Wanderer’s glare is acidic. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does,” says the Traveler, surprised and sad. “I meant to ask- will you come with us to help her?”

The Wanderer stares. At length, he grinds out, “Help her with what.”

“Uh, with the corruption, of course?!” Paimon exclaims.

The Wanderer says, with grim conviction, “There is no corruption.”

The Traveler is taken aback. “You can’t really believe that,” they protest, dismayed. They study his face, golden eyes widening ever-so-slightly when they see that he does. “Wanderer,” they press. “You know she'd never do that to you if she was in her right mind.”

The Wanderer bares his teeth. “You’re welcome to your fantasies,” he says acerbically, “but some of us have to live in reality.”

“Don’t be stupid!” Paimon yells. “She needs our help! Are you really gonna sit back and do nothing after everything she’s done for you?!”

“Paimon!” the Traveler snaps a rebuke. Wanderer turns sharply and makes for the door.

“Wanderer!” Collei calls, plaintive.

He pauses, his fingers curled into claws, breath wrestling itself in his chest. “Don’t follow me,” he says, and leaves.

He doesn’t know where he’s going; he's just certain that he has to get away, and fast. His feet carry him into the woods, his chest a confused whirlwind of emotion. Seething anger and the ache of abandonment gnaw at him anew, sizzling through him, insidious as poison. Honestly, he'd have preferred poison. Stupid, stupid Traveler, always wanting to think the best of everyone, always believing they can force a happy ending. Isn’t it enough that he's even still here? Why do they insist on guiding his hand onto the razor-blade of hope? He doesn’t care if they still want to be friends with Nahida. They’re friendly enough with Raiden Ei, after all. But to come to him and so boldly ask for his help -

They don’t know what they’re talking about. Nahida’s fine, she’s fine, she’s fine. She came to her senses about him, that’s all. The Traveler will return to him with a doleful apology. They’ll ask him if he has anywhere to go and offer that stupid teapot like they did once before, and maybe he’ll even accept their pity and journey with them for awhile this time, if only not to burden Collei and Tighnari any longer. He’ll write letters to Collei and he’ll live, he’ll live, and maybe someday the thought of living on and on won’t strike him like nails hammered under his fingernails.

Wanderer blunders blindly through the rainforest with only barely enough presence of mind to keep an eye out for more falls onto jagged rocks. He pants for breath he doesn’t truly need, cursing out all of Teyvat for consigning him to this samsara of abandonment after abandonment. He tries again to curse Nahida and can’t, and curses himself for a fool all the more. He’s just beginning to calm and consider returning to Gandharva Ville to see if the houseguests have gone yet when he spies something that sends any stability he regained careening off its very own cliff.

Wanderer falls to his knees in the loamy soil like some sort of fainting maiden. His vision blurs and unblurs and the thing in his chest whirs into overdrive, furnace-hot and nauseous, despair and regret and fear kicking against him like a ceaseless rolling drum.

Right there in the heart of the forest, sickly red and sprawling, is a nascent Withering Zone.

*

Wanderer doesn’t remember the trip back. One moment he is kneeling before the Withering and the next he is kicking the door of Tighnari's house open, scanning frantically for the Traveler in the hope they haven’t left yet.

They haven’t. They are sitting at the table taking tea with Cyno and Tighnari. Nahida could be dying and they are taking tea. The Traveler and Tighnari stare at him in bewilderment, but Cyno and Collei both half-stood at his explosive entrance, Collei's face paling.

“Take me with you,” the Wanderer demands. “I’m going. We’re going now.”

The Traveler’s eyes narrow. “What changed your mind?”

He doesn’t even want to admit it, as if to say it makes it real. “Withering zone,” he answers shortly.

“It’s urgent then,” says Cyno grimly, and Wanderer wants to shake him, an impulse which dissipates into grudging respect when he agrees, “We should get going.”

Tighnari stands, expression terse, and says, “I’ll get my things.”

“Me too,” says Collei with the air of someone litigating an ongoing argument.

“For the last time, no,” Tighnari says.

And she bares her teeth, little tiger that she is; the fox’s ears swivel with an instinctual animal wariness. “For the last time, yes,” she insists. “I didn’t get to help the last time the world was ending. You didn’t even tell me anything!”

“Collei,” sighs Tighnari with great weariness. “You are sixteen. You’re just as sixteen as the last time something this dangerous happened. I’m your guardian, it’s my job to protect you.”

“You don’t think she can fend for herself?” Wanderer asks, genuinely a little surprised by it, but Tighnari and Cyno turn on him with pointed glares, and he lifts his hands in the air in half-mocking surrender.

“Thank you,” says Collei emphatically. “I’ve been through things a lot more dangerous than this! Don’t pretend like I haven’t!”

“Lord Kusanali is a god, and we have no idea what state she’ll be in when we arrive,” Cyno retorts. “This isn’t something you should be expected to handle.”

Collei crosses her arms, admittedly looking every inch a teenager, and says, “Well, I want to.”

“Absolutely not.”

“I didn’t get this Vision for nothing!” Collei protests, shrill. “Just trust me a little! I can be helpful, and I’m not going to undo my seal!”

Cyno looks at her as if she has sprouted a second head. “This is not about your seal.”

“Then what is it about!” she protests, high and angry as a teakettle. “I don’t have Eleazar anymore! Stop treating me like I’m useless!”

Cyno stares at her, apparently at a loss. “Collei, I have never thought of you as useless.”

Wanderer decides his input is warranted and breaks in briskly, “We’re all going to be there with her, just let her.”

Tighnari turns to him, incredulous. “Excuse me? You're really not lending much credence to the idea you aren't also a teenager, you know.”

Wanderer sighs and waves a hand in the air. “Just look at her. If you don’t let her come with, she’ll probably just sneak along anyway, and then we won’t be able to monitor her.”

Tighnari looks briefly affronted, opening his mouth as if to protest that Collei wouldn’t do such a thing, but then he glances in her direction and closes his mouth again, silently admitting that the Wanderer has a point. Her lack of protest to the accusation is audible.

“Again, we face a god,” Cyno insists. “A god who is out of her mind, and potentially capable of anything. What if she hurts her?”

“She won’t,” says the Wanderer firmly.

“How can you guarantee that?” Tighnari demands.

The Wanderer leans forward and speaks deliberately: “Because I won’t let her.”

There are a lot of heavy glances shared around the table that he does not care to analyze. Collei vibrates with adrenaline, her bow already in her hands and her jaw set with determination.

Ultimately, she comes with them.

*

The trip to the Akademiya is tense and quiet and the Wanderer spends most of it trying not to contemplate every mistake he’s ever made, a feat he finds difficult even in calmer times.

He could’ve known. He should’ve known. Nahida was injured in the desert. That must have been when it happened. He assumed her distant behavior afterward was just her being cross with him in her own polite and understated way, that he’d unravel the knot of it later the way he had to do for every other untidy emotion kept beneath the barrier she holds around her child’s heart. But it should have been obvious it was something more. Though she has a bad habit of expecting too much decorum of herself, she isn't the type to be passive-aggressive. She has plenty of foibles, but not that one.

Nahida, Wanderer decided early on, was a hypocrite, and that was why he could love her. If she was as perfect as she wanted to present herself to be, swanning about with the all-knowing eyes of an arbiter of fate, he would have hated her to his last breath. He could never have forgiven her for what she had stolen from him, for being the successful heir to a destiny that he has always, always been too unworthy to claim.

But in truth she is messy and imperfect, insecure and inexperienced and perpetually anxious behind the casually cutting regard of her moon-bright eyes on the world. She gives infuriatingly astute advice to everyone and follows less than half of it herself. She is nosy and stubborn and pedantic, not nearly as enigmatic as she wishes to be but still obfuscatory enough to frustrate anyone. She dug his soul out with her hands for perusal as if it were a matter of course and was then meekly surprised and bashfully pleased when he perceived her in return, and he loved her with a fierceness that startled him whenever he allowed himself to acknowledge the depth of it.

There are no words for what they were to each other, but perhaps they were not so dissimilar to Collei and Tighnari. She took care of him when he needed it most, even when he didn't appreciate it, and he was supposed to take care of her, too. But instead he abandoned her in her hour of direst need because even now he is too self-involved to see beyond the end of his nose, and if after all this she does not want to take him back he will hardly be able to blame her.

And because he is a self-involved creature, a kicked dog wary of any hand that reaches for it, he still cannot fully discount the possibility that her dismissal of him may not have been solely due to corruption. Perhaps it only drew her feelings to the surface; perhaps she truly has tired of him. But even with that thought burning a hole in the back of his mind, he wants, he needs, to save her. Nahida is a mirror, a moon, the vast and shining sea. On the long and winding path to the Sanctuary of Surasthana he acknowledges what she has done to him in all its grotesque beauty: she has inflicted a love for her that cannot be undone by betrayal. She will sit like a bird in the white perch of his ribcage until such time as the world finally sees fit for him to die.

(He can only hope that he has laid a curse of anywhere near such magnitude on her.)

*

Their party begins to notice signs of disturbance as soon as they reach the Akademiya. Students skitter about, recalcitrant and anxious, and when Tighnari manages to stop one for answers they admit the Dendro archon hasn’t been seen in days. They then scurry away in fright, quite possibly at the Wanderer's expression, which has gone very dark. But before he can go completely ballistic Alhaitham comes out to join them, bringing their party to an unwieldy six (seven, counting Paimon, but who does).

On the way up to the Sanctuary of Surasthana, he gives them a clipped and clinical report of his observations: Kusanali has become paranoid, and this has worsened steadily. She’s been erratic and forgetful and defensive. She hasn’t been physically aggressive - “until three days ago,” Alhaitham recounts, “when she defenestrated me from the House of Daena and locked herself in the Sanctuary thereafter.”

“You were thrown out a window??” Tighnari exclaims.

“Yes,” says Alhaitham tetchily. “Defenestrated.” On second glance, he does look a bit more scratched-up than he ought to be, but still remarkably unharmed for such a claim.

Cyno asks, “What did you do to her?”

“I was attempting to check her for injuries,” Alhaitham says. “She had been acting unwell, and would not give me permission nor agree to allow someone else to do so, so I-”

Wanderer swears under his breath and breaks from them at a run toward the Sanctuary of Surasthana.

“Wanderer! Wait up!” Collei calls, but he can’t.

She needs him. She needs him she needs him she needed him-

She needed him and he wasn’t there.

(Never enough. Always too late. Lavender melons dropping from his nerveless hands, rolling uselessly across the floor as he stood in a horrified stupor-)

He doesn’t stop until he stands in front of the Sanctuary. Even outside of it the air is heavy and oppressive, choked with the scent of Withering and rot. The delicate stained-glass windows are dark. The leaves of the Divine Tree up here are brown and dead, some already fallen and scattered around him. Wanderer intended to storm in, rip the door off the hinges if need be, but suddenly he’s terrified of what he’ll find. At the very obvious physical evidence that something is badly wrong, his feet abruptly refuse to move. He stands rooted in his cowardice until he the pounding footsteps of the others catch up with him.

“She’s-” He swallows thickly. Then: “Scribe. Why didn’t you do something?”

“I tried to,” says Alhaitham from behind him, infuriatingly placid. “She defenestrated me.”

Wanderer feels like screaming. He breathes, in and out, harsh and rough. Fingertips touch featherlight at his elbow. He doesn’t recoil, doesn’t deck them in the face, but it’s a close thing.

It’s Collei. He doesn’t want platitudes right now. He doesn’t want to be told to calm down. But Collei just raises her eyes to his, steady purple on wild indigo, and asks in a small, firm voice, “How do we get in?”

“We,” he says, and gulps down another few breaths. Somehow, his feet unfreeze. He strides up to the door and tugs on it.

Unsurprisingly, it’s locked.

The Wanderer doesn’t really pause to contemplate. He stares at the door for two seconds, and then with a burst of Anemo, rises into the air and shatters one of the stained-glass windows with a powerful kick.

Glass scatters everywhere. His allies shout in surprise and wheel back from the falling fragments. Coiled vines spill immediately out of the window, soggy with premature decay, slapping limp and heavy as dead bodies onto the terrace. Wanderer feels like he might throw up.

But the Traveler starts clambering up and into the dark, fetid cave of the Sanctuary of Surasthana with no hesitation. Alhaitham and Cyno follow only a beat behind, and then Collei and Tighnari start to move, and Wanderer kicks himself back into motion in time to duck inside in tandem with them.

It’s like a Withering Zone inside, hot and muggy, everything illuminated dimly in lurid red light. The twisted plant life is so thick there’s no discernable path further in, and the moment they disturb its peace, a group of twisted fungi come bouncing angrily toward the party.

Wanderer takes a deep, deep breath, and they ready themselves for a fight.