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It’s a perfectly normal day, except Scaramouche’s knee has been clicking when he walks, which he assumes has to do with kicking the shit out of things a little too hard in his last mission. It isn’t really a reason to go bother Dottore. When Scaramouche is angry at Dottore, he’ll ignore such things until those tiny malfunctions build up and cascade to the point he’s barely functioning. At which point some of his subordinates will talk to some of the Doctor’s subordinates - he hasn’t figured out who it is that’s doing this yet, or they’d be dead - and one of the segments will show up to drag him down to the lab, and Zandik will berate him for acting like a child about it, and that will be that.
He hasn’t been angry at Dottore recently, though. He hasn’t really been seeing him enough to be angry at him. They don’t need each other as much as they once did. Scaramouche still needs the Doctor for some things, because Dottore is the only one who knows how to repair him when he’s damaged, the only one willing to help him become a god, but in truth it’s been twenty years since Dottore needed him. Once the segments were completed, the balance between them was upset rather terribly.
But Zandik still wants him, and because they were built to reflect him, the segments do, too. Even if, Scaramouche thinks bitterly, Zandik has other options for company these days. Used to be Scaramouche was the only one in the Fatui who could stand him for long, but now there’s that annoying banker and the strange little goddess from Nod-Krai, too. Neither of them can compete with Scaramouche’s sheer usefulness, of course, but when they came along the balance went even further out of whack. Certainly they make the silent treatment a less effective tactic. Even so, it rarely hurts to make yourself a limited resource to get a little more leverage. And aside from that…
He’s felt funny around Zandik recently. Scaramouche doesn’t like that he’s looking so old. Yes, Zandik is working on getting the elixir of immortality to work on himself, will probably figure it out any day now, but it’s frankly ridiculous the man let it get to this point in the first place. A scientist of his caliber suffering from the effects of advanced age, it’s laughable. If he actually applied himself, he probably could’ve figured it out years ago.
(It was Zandik’s eighty-fifth birthday a couple days ago, Scaramouche knows. The thought itches at him. Plenty of humans don’t even make it that long.)
So there’s no good reason for Scaramouche to be doing this, really. None that makes sense even to himself. Nevertheless, he finds himself marching down to the labs, hell-bent on kicking Zandik in the geriatric knee and getting him to fix Scaramouche’s knee.
When he walks in, he finds every damn one of the segments clustered around the main workspace, poring over the results of some experiment together. They turn as one to stare at him like a cadre of demonic owls, their eerie red eyes unblinking. What’s the special occasion, Zandik, Scaramouche is about to scoff, but as he scans the heads of tousled blue hair, he realizes one is missing. The one that really matters. He feels himself stiffen, his body trying to tell him something’s wrong before his mind is ready to know it.
“Where’s Zandik?” he asks tightly.
The segments don’t answer immediately. They don’t exchange glances - half of them don’t have eyes anyway - but he gets the sense they’re doing it mentally. Finally 45 says, brisk and clipped, “He died.”
Scaramouche stares. Something churns in his gut, in his hollow chest.
But he promised, is his first thought, small and pathetic.
(Promises mean nothing. A human’s promise means the least of all. How many fucking times does he have to learn that?)
Leave me alone, let go of me, Kunikuzushi screamed at him plenty of times, and Zandik would laugh and say Dear puppet, you’re never getting rid of me.
When do you think you’re going to die? the puppet asked him idly a couple decades in, when the first wrinkles appeared on Zandik’s face. Zandik laughed then, too, and told him warmly, Oh, I’m not. You’re going to make me immortal.
The segments are a form of immortality, sure, but they don’t really count. The puppet told him so, a decade after their creation, when Zandik started needing a cane to get around. Yes, and that’s why I’ve focused on studying immortality recently, he told the puppet calmly. My research is already well on its way to producing results.
And though it worked for the stupid banker, Zandik kept getting older. His back became hunched, his eyesight started failing, the familiar planes of his face sagged and wrinkled. His movements grew stiffer, his fingers less dexterous. He started calling the segments in to help with the most delicate parts of surgery, his arthritic fingers no longer capable of the necessary precision.
About five years ago, Scaramouche was made a Harbinger. He’s more powerful now than he’s ever been, while Zandik has only continued to degrade. It pissed him off. He didn’t think Zandik was taking things seriously enough. A couple years ago they had a screaming match, or Scaramouche was screaming anyway, Zandik didn’t bother. He accused him of being unfocused in his old age, said he hadn’t produced relevant research in years, that he might as well hand it all over to his segments and go into retirement already if he’d become this much of a doddering fool.
And Zandik looked him in the eye and said evenly, Don’t make a scene, Scaramouche. You know I’m too stubborn to die; I only need a little more time.
Scaramouche went red and stormed out of the lab. Zandik always knows what he’s thinking, always cuts to the quick, as incisive with words as he is with a scalpel. It’s unbearable, being seen like that. Even more unbearable to watch Zandik age, every part of the man he knew stolen gradually away by the looming spectre of mortality until it’s all Scaramouche can think about when he looks at him.
He barely spoke to Zandik at all these last few years. Avoided the lab as much as he could. Even went to the segments for treatment at times, whereas previously he insisted on being treated by Zandik if at all possible. When they crossed paths Zandik’s gaze on him was uncharacteristically patient, unusually fond, like he was savoring something he didn’t expect to enjoy for much longer, and that was the most unnerving thing of all.
But Zandik said he was working on it. He said he was almost there. Maybe they haven’t been as close lately, but Zandik wouldn’t do this to him, wouldn’t just go and die somewhere when Scaramouche wasn’t looking.
“…How did it happen?” Scaramouche hears himself ask. His voice, to his credit, is steady.
“He was eighty-five,” says one of the segments, somehow condescending and cautious at once. “It was a heart attack.”
A heart attack. It isn’t right. It doesn’t feel real. Zandik, larger than life, ever the blasphemer, ever the heretic, tearing down natural laws and laughing in the heavens’ face. He should’ve been able to stop it. How dare he not stop it, thinks Scaramouche, even as another part of him thinks Serves him right to die in such a pathetic way, that’s what he gets for never listening to me the stupid old sadistic fuck. On some level he’s expecting the man to stroll around the corner and laugh in his face any moment now, admit this was all a cruel joke. He’s done crueler things.
“Where’s the body?” Scaramouche gets out. “Let me see it.” He doesn’t think he’s going to be able to believe it if he doesn’t see it.
There is a lengthy silence. Normally Scaramouche would glare out at them, leveling his ferocious gaze on each one in turn until someone caved. Somehow he can’t muster the energy for that, right now.
“We dissected him,” one of them finally admits, awkward but unapologetic about it.
Scaramouche feels a great surge of something impossible to name. Aghast, he demands, “Without me??”
It is an insane thing to say. Scaramouche has never been very interested in that sort of thing. But the audacity of the segments to do something so final when Scaramouche didn’t even know Zandik was dead is like a blow to the head. Didn’t Scaramouche have some claim to him? More than the segments did, if anything! Opened his chest to the man countless times and the segments tore him up like trash and left the remains to rot and didn’t even tell him, let him walk around for days not knowing Zandik was gone, if he didn’t come here on a whim he still wouldn’t know, how dare they, how dare they? He was there at Dottore’s beginning. He should’ve been there at his end.
The segments seem taken aback. “We didn’t think you’d be… interested,” 35 says at last, head cocked in birdlike fashion, hands folded behind his back, as falsely nonchalant as ever. “Would you like to be present next time?”
Scaramouche imagines Zandik laid out on the exam table, imagines the Y-shaped incision of the autopsy on his chest, imagines his greying skin pulled back and the organs pulled from his cooling corpse.
“You know what, yeah. I fucking would,” he snaps.
It’s only fair. He should get to stick his hands in Dottore’s guts just once. To pull him apart and poke at the weak squirming things inside of him. Zandik is always saying how touchy Scaramouche is but he’s the fucking same, as pleased to be seen as he is repulsed by it, as likely to curl his lips into that indulgent smile as he is to lash out like a feral dog, and he deserves to be carved open and toyed with, too.
Was. He was all of that.
…How can he possibly be gone?
“Are you trying not to cry?” asks 8, all clinical fascination, the obscene youth of his voice unmistakable.
And Scaramouche realizes the segments are all staring at him unblinkingly, the fucking vultures, and furthermore that there is an alarming lump in his throat. “Do you want ‘next time’ to be ‘right now’?!” he snarls, blinking back the unwanted burn in his eyes, his hands curling into fists.
There is a prolonged and awkward silence.
“…We preserved some of the organs,” the teenage one speaks up eventually. “Would you like to see those?”
What is this? Pity? How unbecoming of Dottore, even some gangly teenage version of him. Yet when Scaramouche opens his mouth what comes out is a bitten-off, “Sure. Whatever.”
So he follows 18 to a side room where the Dottores keep some of their preserved specimens. He stands there, arms crossed, as 18 pulls out the jars and lines them up on a counter for his perusal. Then the segment comes to stand beside him, chin lifted and hands folded behind his back, sneaking glances in Scaramouche’s direction just a little too often to be casual about it.
Scaramouche barely notices. He’s too busy examining the jars in numb silence. Heart, liver, kidney. Each floating perfectly-preserved in formaldehyde, when just days earlier they were hard at work keeping Zandik’s squishy human body alive. This is all that’s left of him now. As he stares at them, Scaramouche doesn’t feel any sense of catharsis or finality, just a gulf of emptiness opening inside him.
Why does he feel like this? He should’ve known better than to trust any promise from a human. He should’ve known that everyone always leaves. And he hated Zandik a lot of the time anyway. The man was condescending and controlling, always pushing boundaries, always getting his way. Things broke in him in Zandik’s lab that had survived all the cruelties of the world until then. This was the man who cut into him as he screamed and sobbed, who forced him beyond his limits again and again and again, who drained the weakness from him like blood from a cow at slaughter and with just as much brutal precision.
…The man who brushed the hair out of his eyes when he cried, who told him he was worth something, who built him back better, stronger. Made him feel special like no one else ever has. Told him his anger at the world was justified, told him he believed in his potential, gave him back the power his mother stripped from him, gave him this entire illustrious life.
He was the person that knew Scaramouche best in the entire world. The person Scaramouche knew best in return. Zandik did things he knew would hurt him and then laughed at him for being hurt. Zandik was the gateway to every good thing he has. Zandik was exactly as rejected by the world as he was and exactly as venomous because of it. Fifty years they spent together. Fifty long years of solace and agony. Just fifty measly years.
(He promised.)
Scaramouche just can’t wrap his head around it. What was Zandik doing when it happened? Didn’t he realize what was going on? He must have. Scaramouche can’t imagine him meekly accepting death. He would have fought til the end. What happened that he couldn’t help himself, couldn’t get to help fast enough?
“…Where did you find him?” Scaramouche asks.
“Oh, on the floor,” says 18 idly.
How dismal. How plebeian, how damnably human.
(Zandik has always been human. He was just good at making people forget it.)
“And you dragged him off to dissect him right away?” Scaramouche mutters, glaring at nothing.
“Well, no,” 18 says. “It took him some time to die.”
The puppet’s head whips up to face the segment fast enough that something in his neck clicks. “He was alive when you found him?” Scaramouche croaks.
18 blinks, nonplussed. “…Yes?”
There’s a dull roar in the puppet’s ears. “And you didn’t stop it?!” he demands, recognizing that he’s teetering on the edge of hysteria but unable to help it. “Surely you segments are skilled enough to stop a heart attack when you see one!”
18 frowns, head tilted in genuine confusion. “But why would we?”
Scaramouche stares at him.
There was a layer of resignation settled like sediment at the bottom of the ocean of emotions he’s been trying to keep bottled, because Zandik was human and so of course this was how it was always going to end. Bad luck that it caught up to him before he could find a way to transcend it, but ultimately unpreventable.
Except they could have. They could have prevented it. They could have saved Zandik, and they chose not to.
Scaramouche doesn’t remember moving, doesn’t remember making any decision to act at all. The next thing he knows 18 is shoved up against the cabinets along the wall, his nose bloodied, Scaramouche’s fist drawn back for another blow. “What the fuck is wrong with you,” he hears himself scream, “Bastards, you fucking bastards, you-”
He doesn’t know how many times he hits him. He thinks he gets in a good three or four blows before he hears the tell-tale whine of one of Dottore’s defensive mechanisms activating behind him. A searing pain burns into the base of his spine as the triangular machine fires off a plasma bolt and his legs crumple unceremoniously beneath him, all control of them neatly severed. A familiar trick, and he’s as angry with himself for not dodging it as he is with 18 for using it. Scaramouche screams in wordless rage and lunges at the segment, grabbing at his stupid baggy pants, trying to claw his way up and savage him with his bare hands, anything to hurt him, anything, anything.
18 scoffs, irritated. He kneels down, easily catching Scaramouche’s wrists in each of his hands to hold him still. Scaramouche struggles, still screaming - Fuck you, I hate you, let go of me, let go, let go, let go - but he can’t break free. Zandik built the segments based off of him, after all, built them to be a match to him. Even his electro won’t do any good, they’re nearly as immune to it as he is. 18 just watches and waits for him to settle, lips pressed into a thin, firm line. His nose is bleeding, and the corner of his mouth is swollen, and there’s a little scratch above one of his eyebrows that must have been made by Scaramouche’s fingernails, but that’s all. Scaramouche always had to be careful with Zandik, had to keep his mortal fragility in mind, but that’s never going to be a concern again. Scaramouche falls still, panting, and to his horror, his fourth or so breath comes out as a sob. He realizes that he’s crying, has maybe been crying this whole time, and he can’t get it to stop.
18 sighs, sounding only mildly bothered, staring at Scaramouche like he is a puzzle he can’t solve yet isn’t particularly impressed by. Like Scaramouche is beneath him, and that isn’t right, because he wouldn’t even exist if it weren’t for Scaramouche, if it weren’t for Zandik who he let die on the floor, and Scaramouche hates him. He hates him. “I wish you didn’t make me do that,” says 18 calmly. “Which of us would you like to fix you up?”
None of them have the right to touch Scaramouche after what they did, and he tries to convey that but what comes out of his mouth is “I WANT ZANDIK,” half a sob, half a scream. He gives another convulsive struggle in the segment’s grip and then gives up, head hanging, tears blurring on his lashes as they drip to the floor.
“You are acting like a toddler,” 18 informs him with great disdain.
Scaramouche knows. He knows. He hasn’t cried like this in decades, and he hates himself, hates this disgusting weakness that ought to have been burned out of him by now. He knows Zandik saw it as a failure of his, just as his mother did. Zandik was supposed to fix it for him, help make him a god. Scaramouche was supposed to show him that was possible. Another sob bursts out of him, his shoulders trembling, his head hanging lower in shame.
He didn’t even like Zandik. He made Scaramouche feel small and inadequate as often as he made him feel valued and important. The man probably knew perfectly well he was going to die, filled Scaramouche’s head up with lies like every other person who’s ever mattered to him. Knowing these things does nothing to quell the maelstrom in his chest howling out abandoned, abandoned, abandoned.
The last of the fight goes out of him and he droops in 18’s hold, wilting toward him. It’s pitiful beyond measure but he barely cares anymore, his dignity already in shreds. The sawing pain of abandonment is as sharp and immediate as any he’s felt during surgery and he can no longer hold back the pathetic part of him that only wants to be held, can’t stop it clawing its way up from the well he tries to drown it in. The segment hesitates, but then lets go of Scaramouche’s wrists, allowing the puppet to slump against him. Scaramouche’s hands come up and his fingers grasp at 18’s shirt like claws as he buries his face against him and cries.
It’s all wrong. 18’s build is too slim, and he doesn’t know what to do with his hands, and every now and then blood drips from his nose onto Scaramouche’s head. Scaramouche’s back is bent at an awkward angle, unable to correct it with his legs nonfunctional, and the hole in the base of his spine burns and burns. After some time, 18 lifts a hand and awkwardly pats the puppet on the head as though he is a dog. Scaramouche despises him for it but the crushing emptiness in his chest compels him to accept any modicum of comfort, no matter how mocking. He hunches his shoulders, struggling to get ahold of himself, only to stiffen when 18 speaks.
“I don’t know why you preferred him so much,” the segment sighs. “He lost much of his clarity of vision to age.”
There’s an understated but notable bitterness to the words, so close to what Scaramouche shouted at Zandik during that last big argument, but he didn’t mean it, not really, and he doesn’t like hearing it from 18. “Shut up,” he snarls wetly.
Dottore has always been a fiercely jealous person. That extended to his other selves. It doesn’t help that they’re all interested in the same things, which of course includes Scaramouche. He knows the segments fought over who got to assist Zandik with him. He took a smug satisfaction in it, even. Well, now they have him all to themselves. Now Scaramouche will have to learn to depend on them too.
“We’re Zandik too, aren’t we?” 18 goes on, as sullen and insecure as any other teenager. “I don’t see why this should be so upsetting. Between us we even have most of his memories.”
Of course they’d have let Zandik die. Of course. Dottore can’t stand to be in competition even with himself.
“It isn’t the same,” Scaramouche says, and he tries to growl it, but it comes out a sort of humiliating furious hiccup.
Zandik did seem to think of the segments as extensions of himself, but this was always a point of contention between him and Scaramouche. How could Scaramouche see them that way, having watched as Zandik constructed their bodies, as he painstakingly drew up the blueprints? It was very ambitious, what he did with copying over chunks of his memory, but that doesn’t make them the same person. They’re imitations at best. Diverging branches of a similar base. All of them are Dottore, yes. Only the original was Zandik.
The ones that have chunks of memory from after Scaramouche joined the Fatui are actually eerier to him than the others, because they remember some of that shared history but not all of it. And whatever Zandik did when programming them kept them from continuing to develop the way he did. They remained stagnant as Zandik mellowed out in his old age. At first that change repulsed and frightened the puppet, but he grew to appreciate it. Oh, Zandik always remained a possessive egocentric freak, but as he got older he learned to choose his battles. He slowed down enough to be a little more accommodating, listen a little more to other points of view. There was a pride in him when he looked at the puppet and though it made Scaramouche’s skin crawl the way Zandik sometimes acted like he owned him it’s the sad, ugly truth that there are few things the puppet wouldn’t do for someone to be proud of him and they both knew that. They fought less often and less viciously than they used to, those last ten or so years.
“It really is fascinating that you’d cry for him,” 18 says.
A laugh bubbles out of Scaramouche, bitter and derisive. To be honest, he doesn’t know whose reaction is stranger, the segments’ or his own. Perhaps Scaramouche is the only one on the face of Teyvat crazy enough to shed tears for Zandik. As if in defiance of the observation, he takes in one last shuddering, gasping breath, quelling his tears and willing himself not to shake.
With some trepidation, 18 asks, “Are you done?”
Scaramouche feels wrung-out and exhausted and no better than before. The abyss of loneliness in him hurts, aching like a wound, and he knows it won’t ever be fixed. It’s accompanied now by a deep self-disgust for his loss of control, for screaming and crying and acting hysterical, for being so affected by Zandik’s death at all. Still, he nods, only to yelp as 18 suddenly stands, scooping Scaramouche up with him. The puppet’s legs dangle uselessly over one of 18’s arms as he grasps instinctively at the segment’s shirt for balance.
“What are you doing?!” he demands, glaring furiously up through still-reddened eyes. 18 picked him up so casually, so easily, and something about it stabs Scaramouche in the chest again because Zandik hasn’t been strong enough to carry him around like that for years, and that’s stupid too because he didn’t ever like Zandik carrying him around. Or maybe he did. He doesn’t know anymore. Everything is all jumbled up in his head.
“Well, someone still has to fix your spine,” 18 says reasonably. Disturbingly cheerful about it, but then, he would be. It’d be the first time he’s ever had Scaramouche to himself in a medical setting.
…Scaramouche could do worse than 18. At least it isn’t the fucking child, and he’s going to have to get used to this from the segments anyway. “Fine. I suppose that’s acceptable,” he bites out, and 18 graciously lets him pretend he has any actual choice in it. “Just… don’t tell the rest of them about all that.”
“Mm,” hums 18, unconvinced. “They’ll wonder why my nose is bleeding. And they’ll probably have heard the shouting.”
“Make something up, then,” Scaramouche snaps. “Bullshit something, you should all be good at that. Be glad I’m letting you touch me at all.”
18 laughs good-spiritedly. “I suppose that’s a fair transaction,” he allows, and the indulgence in his voice, almost right but not quite, causes Scaramouche another poisonous bolt of longing that he has to close his eyes against. The hurt keeps beats on and on against his ribcage, intangible, impossible to ignore.
Zandik was selfish and arrogant and obsessive and awful and got motionsick on trains and complained about the dearth of spices at Harbinger banquets and played piano for people he liked and he was all Scaramouche had.
The puppet lets his head loll against the segment’s chest, and waits for the pain of repair, and hopes that oblivion will follow.