As a genshin fan (and someone who enjoys fandom crossovers too much), you don't get how absolutely STOKED I was upon seeing commdia dell'arte names in tfc for the sole reason that they are related to genshin. This made me wonder, what if the harbingers (Pierro, dottore, arlecchino and columbina for now) met the their tfc counterparts?
I dont have the tfc characters personalities nailed down too well, but I feel like the funniest one would definitely be arle and harle
If my memory does not fail me, arle and harle are both based off the harlequin stock character, with arlecchino using a different regional spelling/pronunciation
The sheer DIFFERENCE in their personalities with arlecchino being more reserved and harlequin being well, harlequin is purely comedic. I can imagine him trying to talk to her with the tone he most often uses and arlecchino just sitting there like 😐
I would say the the same goes for the jester and pierrot with pierro (pretty sure pierros title is the jester), except I feel they would be more similar ish when compared to arleharle? I mean pierrot wouldn't even talk but with how animated he seems around others it wouldn't make much of a difference, he'd still be world's apart from pierro. I suppose the jester could hold a conversation with him for a while, but nothing of great note.
Dont know too much about the doctor, but I do know he would be FREAKED OUT AS FUCKKK by dottore after a certain point. From what I know, the doctor is pretty tame in comparison to dottore. I don't have much for this since I don't know a whole lot about the doctor. I do feel like they'd initially bond over han experimentation, but dottore would be far more knowledgable on medical topics than the doctor (ha). This kind of difference would probably create mild discomfort, which would grow as more time would be spent around dottore.
As columbina and columbina, I feel like they'd get along the best. I mean columbina is practically just columbina with social skills. I feel like they'd tell each other about their coworkers and friends, and if the conversation is post nod krai, then columbina would tell her a lot about the moon, the frost moon scions, and the people of the land. They'd also sing together. Columbina would love meeting the kuuhenki I feel, and columbina in turn would enjoy hearing about the circus and it's happenings.
Just wait till I learn more about the characters I'll be unstoppable I swear
Synopsis: Reader has family issues and witnessed a traumatic fight between their parents, so they go to wanderer for comfort.
After the fight, you go to Scara looking for comfort, and his heart drops seeing your pained expression. He doesn’t question you right away, prioritizing you feeling calm first. His arms wrap around you tightly, and he hugs you, rubbing your back soothingly. When you start to breakdown he pulls you towards the couch so you can sit down. He lets you rest your head on his chest while one arm wraps around your waist and the other runs through your hair. You two stay like that for some time, and he lets you cry on him, not being bothered by his damp shirt or your snot, only worrying about how to make you feel better. When you feel a bit better, you open up to him and tell him what happened, and his grip on you tightens.
He would be very angry with your parent and would want to get revenge on them for hurting you and your family and for making you feel like this, but alas, he knows you need him more, and you don’t need anger right now. So instead, his hand leaves your head to rub your back as he responds to your words. “You are an incredibly strong person to be able to stand up to your parent like that. I know how scary that must have been for you. It’s just a shame that your bravery must be used for this. You deserve better, and I’m sorry you had to witness that.”
When you focus, you realize that he’s not rubbing your back in random motions but rather using his hand to draw hearts repeatedly. He knows his words and actions can only do so much, especially with how difficult your situation is and how society is not in your favor. This is part of the reason why he hates humanity, as it allows this to happen and protects the ones doing harm. He doesn’t want anyone to have to go through this, let alone you, the sole person he cares about. He wishes he could just fly you away far from here, so you never have to go through this again. Scara decides that once you’re rested and calmer, he’ll bring you somewhere beautiful to distract you. For now, he’ll try to distract you with his words.
He starts making plots against your parent, ranging from serious to stupid, just thinking out loud and listing things from the top of his head. You don’t know if he’ll do them or not, but the sound of his voice soothes you. A part of you feels like he may not be lying, and that uncertainty is a bit comforting. Eventually, he says a genuinely nonsensical revenge plan, and you let out a small laugh. He smiles at hearing his favorite sound, and cups your face, his thumb rubbing your cheek. “There you go.” His gaze is softer, and he wipes away tears, still looking at you like you’re the most beautiful person he’s ever seen, even if you’re a mess right now. That’s when you realize that his plans were dumb because he wanted to make you laugh, to distract you even for a little bit. Then he speaks again, his voice incredibly soft.
“I know I tend to not say this much, but I love you, and you have the most beautiful smile in all Teyvat. It is what drew me to you in the first place, since whenever you smiled at me, I felt everything else melt away, and I couldn’t hold up my guard despite how hard I tried. You are my sunshine, the light of my life, and I don’t know what I would do without you. I know other people see how brightly you glow too. So, I hope you never lose your light or let someone take it away from you.”
He plants a kiss on your forehead before letting you rest on his chest again. If you want to keep talking about how you feel, he’ll listen to every word. If you want to lie in silence, then he’ll keep holding you. Eventually, with his soothing ministrations, you fall asleep in his arms. Once he feels your breathing even out, he carries you to bed and wraps a blanket around you. When you look cozy, he lies down next to you and holds you. He stays like that almost all night. Why almost? Well, he wasn’t lying when he said that he wanted revenge, but you’ll find that out later.
Warning: trauma dump, request for someone to write something if they are free or able to
I feel like it would be best to request a specific account or something for this but finding one with reqs open is too much work. I would write it myself but I feel too fucked up for that.
Request: (by me) could someone write wanderer x reader hurt comfort in which reader has extreme family issues and witnessed a really traumatic fight in her family? If you read the context, it's fine if you exclude the religious bits.
Context:
TRIGGER WARNING: BLOOD, DOMESTIC VIOLENCE
my mother commented on my dads habits while eating which caused him to lash out and hit her. He called her a bunch of names which I won't repeat here, and insulted our religion (hes atheist). He tried to hit her again but I got really scared and stood in front of her and stuff. I grabbed a knife incase anything went wrong but my mom told me to put it down so I did. I stayed near her but dad tried to throw a chair at her and I got really scared and threw a cup at him. I don't think it hit him but there were pieces on the ground so I'm pretty sure he picked one up and cut himself and then tried to pin the blame on us. I was screaming at them to stop so my throat really hurts right now. He then went around the house splattering blood everywhere and did it on a portrait of him and my mom and portraits of God and whatnot. He then screamed at her a bunch more until I gave him a bandage and stuff. He then went out. He'll probably be back which I greatly dread. If he ends up killing my mom I'll probably kill myself tbh.
We had to clean up the blood and I saw my mom crying. I want them to divorce I want him to die I want my mom to get a restraining order but unfortunately I love in a patriarchal society.
If you read up to here, thank you. I apologize for not writing this neatly and asking of anyone to do this. I would however, be grateful if someone could.
in which, when your plans of stargazing appear to be ruined, wanderer takes it into his own hands to show you the world beyond cloudy skies.
contents. wanderer x gn!reader, fluff, academic burnout/stress, confession, reader apart of vahumana darshan (humanities basically), dunno what clouds are like to touch, no beta we die like niwa
tagging. @prettysweet02, @yourdarlingdevotion (I hope you remember that one ask I sent you :> not exactly stargazing but i hope you don't mind either way)
Your date was ruined.
It wasn't exactly a date, per se, but you told yourself for sure that you'd confess to your stupidly pretty friend. Your plan was perfect; with finals season coming to a close, what better way to celebrate than with the dazzling stars of Teyvat? They were far more beautiful that the walls of the Akademiya, the very ones that imprisoned its disciplines in stressful times
Except, all you saw were clouds and black. Even when the clouds decided to expose parts of the sky, you couldn't see a thing, squinting only blurred your vision and the restless wind was only convincing you that it'd rain soon.
You didn't even try to look at Wanderer, instead stunned by your misfortune and embarrassment. Suddenly, your favourite thing to admire was the drab scenery, over his sharp gaze or the crimson traced around his eyes.
"Layla—I mean, I heard it was going to be sunny today..." Needless to say, the weather was reminiscent of your mood; infinitely grey and unpleasant. "Sorry I wasted your time..."
It was almost as if the universe disagreed with your feelings for him.
Arms crossed, he frowned. "Why are you apologising?"
"Because I made you come out here for nothing." And it killed off your confidence to confess to him. "Now we'll have to hike back down to the Akademiya."
He scoffed, cocking a brow. "And how were you supposed to know the weather beforehand? I don't see why that's your fault."
"Th–that's true..." You murmured, deciding your confession would have to wait. "Guess I just felt bad. Since I was excited for exams to be done."
'Bad', didn't even describe it. You were heartbroken, even. For the past few torturous weeks, your mind wandered to this day; it pushed you through each painful study session, kept you more focused than coffee ever could, for it was easy to tolerate sleep deprivation and stress if it were for Wanderer's sake.
His eyes softened, before returning to their solemn demeanour. "That's fine. I still want to celebrate with you. C'mon, it's already late. I'll buy you whatever you want." Wanderer turned around, taking a step down the hill. "Hello—?"
But you stared up at the sky again, as if the clouds would open up if you asked nicely enough.
Ignoring your planned confession, you really wanted to see the stars. Maybe next time, they'd want to see you too.
From behind you, you heard Wanderer sigh, a sign for you to hurry. "I'm coming—just give me a bit."
"Do you trust me?" He asked, adjusting his hat.
"Yes? What's this for all of a sudden?"
His hand clasped onto yours, skin cold and smooth in comparison to yours. "Hold onto me tightly, okay?"
You questioned him. Tried to. But it manifested into a yelp, and suddenly your feet were no longer planted on the ground, now hanging uselessly below you.
What the fuck?
Your hand squeezed Wanderer's, grip so impossibly tight that you wondered why he wasn't bleeding yet. Looking down made you nauseous, but looking up stressed you out.
"What the fuck." You screeched, other hand holding onto Wanderer as well. "I'm gonna die."
"You're not going to die—"
"—I like you."
"What?"
It was too late to stop now, and you couldn't, even if you wanted to. "I wanted to confess to you but then the stupid weather ruined it and now I'm gonna die because of a stupid elemental anomaly or whatever—"
But this "death" you spoke of never came.
"Y/n. I have an anemo vision."
Oh.
It was lost amidst your panic and freak, alongside the rest of your rationality.
He cleared his throat. "I wanted to show you the view. But we can go back down if you want to."
"I–I'm good...I want to enjoy the scenery too." And avoid confronting your awful confession too.
A few more minutes for you to adapt, then Wanderer squeezed your hand.
"I like you too, by the way."
And with that, Wanderer pulled you along, soaring through the night.
Your stomach twisted in all sorts of ways, and the wind was harsh on your skin, but you didn't mind it. Sumeru was far more beautiful than flying was stressful.
The view was exhilarating. The infamous Akademiya no longer held its intimidating air. It was beautiful when you were a bystander instead of one of its overworked scholars. And all its patrons appeared as tiny green dots. You wondered if your good friends Kaveh or Alhaitham were among them.
You can recognise the Vahumana building, where you and Wanderer had spent countless hours, scratching heads over tricky content and working on papers together.
There, held your worst memories alongside your warmest ones, from Wanderer sitting with you every lecture without fail, to whenever he'd comfort you after a bad assessment. The Vahumana Darshan has seen both the best and worst of you, where you'll remain 'til the end of your degree.
"You're being awfully quiet." He murmured, slowing down the pace. "Everything okay?"
You nodded, now marvelling the clouds. "I can't believe you can fly—how come you never do this?"
He shrugged, grip on your hand remaining tight. "Not exactly normal to see a person flying."
"Who cares—" No student of the Akademiya was normal, from the insanity of senior scholars to young geniuses who defied the laws of age and normalcy. "This is so pretty."
It was the same grey scenery, but it was all the more beautiful when you were apart of it. The cold wind didn't bother you nor did the height. All you could think about was how exhilirating it was to fly, and to no longer be confined to the ground and by rules for the ordinary.
You looked up, and Wanderer's gaze followed. "Can I touch one?"
The clouds above you were upset, threatening to brew a storm. Yet their resemblence to cotton candy and whatever childlike wonder left in you, urged you to try touch one.
His hand squeezed yours, but he nodded, slowly drifting upwards. The world beneath you grew smaller with every moment.
It was breathtaking, being so close to the sky you could never reach alone.
An arm reached out, swallowed by white. It was mere fog, nothing like the cotton candy texture you'd always imagined as a kid. It left your arm cold and wet.
Your head spun, enamoured by Sumeru and the night.
"Are you alright?" Wanderer called, almost interrupted by the wind howling in your ears. "We're going down a bit, the air's thinner up here."
You nodded, stomach sinking as he brought you a bit closer to the ground, almost passing the Akademiya entirely.
But thunder boomed as warning, Wanderer heeded it carefully, gliding onto the ground as rain paid a visit.
Your legs trembled as they met with the stone pavement, adrenaline and awe rushing through your veins. Wanderer's fingers remained intertwined with yours, his other hand ready to catch you just in case.
Raindrop after raindrop, the rain kissed you. "Holy shit—I can't believe I just flew, I touched a cloud! It was nothing like what I thought it'd be—I mean makes sense because it's just a bunch of vapour but—"
You finally remembered to breathe properly. "God, what am I saying? Thank you so much."
The rain had already half soaked your clothing, and your hair was sticking to your skin. Wanderer held back a chuckle, holding up his stoic mask for as long as he could. "That was nothing. I can easily do that."
The weather worsened with every moment, but through heavy rain you swear pink blossomed on the apples of his cheeks. Wanderer cleared his throat. "Just...ask. I'll do anything for you if it'll make you happy."
A smirk tugged at your lips, before you could even think so. "Then say that you like me. Again." Shock had caught you off guard temporarily, but by no means did it erase his reciprocation from your memory. "Please?"
The man sighed, before taking his hat off and placing it on your head. "Only if you can find shelter. I'll say it as much as you want, then. I don't want you to get sick right before our break."
Your hands found their way to the golden rim of his hat. "Easy—hurry up then." You called before sprinting off, splashing in every puddle on the way.
Over the aggressive sounds of rain, you heard him scoff before he followed.
You never saw it that day, but from the corner of his lips, a special kind of joy paid him a visit, as you hurried towards shelter together.
It is on a fair afternoon on which you tiptoe on behind the distinct hat-donning figure dubbed hat guy, aka wanderer, feigning stealth. If you weren't feigning, you'd be smearing dirt on the fleet footed individuals and treasure hoarders renowned for their discrete nature. Wanderer obviously notices you, not even in a hundred fates would he not with the kind of stealthyou have. He's walking on the path way cutting across the grand bazaar, and you're tailing him, attempting to camouflage within the rather spaces out crowd.
In summary, a failed display of sneakiness.
Just as he turns his head around to confront you he is met with the soft press of your lips upon his cheeks, paired with a somewhat quiet 'mwah'- just before you pulled away giggling with the kind of eyes one could only encounter in a 'yae-miko type sly and mischievous smirk'. And yes—specifically Yae Miko's, that lady's smirks are on another plane entirely.
Unlike you, wanderer is not as amused, being the one caught off guard. His expression is unlike any other, and seconds before you pulled away he was spluttering as if he heard the entirety of teyvat laughed at cyno's jokes. If he had blood, he would probably be blushing by now. When he looks at you, the best word to describe his expression would be flabbergasted, just before he regains his composure and sighs, attempting to look annoyed.
You let out a light snicker at that, muffled by your hand (how the fuck do I describe a fufufu 💜) before skipping over to his side.
"Look at that—I've got you all flustered!"
"Quit following me." He grumbled, rolling his eyes.
Obviously, you wouldn't comply, but that didn't matter, for he would never actually want you to quit being by his side, quite the opposite—really.
As you two walk together, like many other instances, you begin rambling about things you saw or your opinions, like you would on any other. Though it may be an uncommon occurrence, to wanderer, who had all forms of love in his life ripped out of his hands, it was akin to a precious crystal often overlooked, a quartz perhaps.
I'd just like to say that the Dazai x reader tag has some of the best borders and dividers out there, and the scara x reader tag has absolutely elite smaus.
Maybe if he had a heart he’d be able to feel it flutter. He would be able to feel what the novels describe as his heart ‘skipping a beat’. If he had a heart, he’d be able to feel it speed up past its normal pace when you first met him. His heart would’ve sped ten-fold at the first interaction. It would’ve gone past the average pace each time you kissed him, purposely avoiding his lips to leave him wanting more.
If he had a heart, you would’ve been able to feel it beating as you rested your hand against his chest when you laid next to him. You would’ve been able to feel his pulse as you rested your fingers against his wrist.
If he had a heart, he would feel a gut-wrenching ache in it whenever he saw tears fall down your face. He would feel his heart rise and get stuck in his throat as your sobs wracked from your chest. If he had a heart, maybe he would be able to spare a bit of remorse for you. Maybe if he had a heart, he’d be able to feel it ache as tears welled in his eyes as he stared at your unmoving form.
You weren’t dead. No, you were going to die though. He knew it. It was what people would describe as a ‘gut feeling’. Normally, Scaramouche wouldn’t indulge in such cliches, but that’s the only way he could describe what he felt.
He placed his hand over your still-beating heart. He knew it wouldn’t be beating for much longer. But unlike him, you wouldn’t be able to live without a heart. If he had a heart, maybe it would beat in sync with yours. If he had a heart, he’d feel it sync to the bottom of his chest as he watched you breathe as you slept.
If he had a heart, he would’ve felt it stop as he was informed of the news.
At least now your hearts would finally be in sync.
a/n: she's long.... hope you enjoy reading this ( ╹▽╹ ) I'm going to slowly work on the request!!! hehehe thanks for your patience
🪙 coin inserted...
⋆｡°✩ whirr... clunk!
🎁 capsule obtained!
[prompt name - star crossed lovers!]
—
"you're staring," march whispers into your ear.
"no I'm not."
"you are," stelle says in your other ear.
you look over at caelus, pleading him with your eyes to save you. he simply chuckled at the two other female members of the express, teasing you. oh he'll sooo join them later.
standing before you and the other express members, was a guy called sunday, the head of the oak family and the person who runs this place, next to him was his sister, robin, a well known idol here in penacony.
he carried himself with grace, his smile never meeting his eyes but genuinely fake to welcome people into the planet. you can't help but blush when he offered his hand for you to shake, shakily taking it as he gave you a satisfying shake, a firm hold and a smile as a package deal.
to the others, you looked so cute trying to hide your growing blush and the way your chest seemed to heave faster every time he steps a little closer to you. does he noticed too?
—
"girl, calm yourself down!" caelus laughed, throwing his hand over his mouth to sniffle his noises down.
"what-"
"you've got a crush on him!" comes march.
"oh aeons, I do not."
"how can you say that, when you're practically glowing red!" stelle chimes in.
you deadpan, huffing at your fellow crew. even if you did develop a little crush on the bird man, you can't have him. he's sunday, head of the oak tree. you're... you, a nameless, wandering planet to planets with maybe little to no goals for yourself. you're a nobody.
"it's not like I can have him," you mumble out quietly, they didn't hear that except for a certain dragon.
—
fast forward when business ended at penacony, you met new faces, witnessed your beloved changing to some aeon looking thing, defeated him together with the others, the expedition was like no other- annoying but fun. sooner or later sunday decides to board the express.
"it's a decision I can't make alone," mr welt had said, bringing the lost sunday to the huddle.
they looked at you, before turning their gaze back on the newly added face. caelus gently nudged you, you hear march and stele giggling with himeko right next to you, dan heng remains himself. calm and composed.
the outcome was easy, sunday gets to board the astral express, not because you're in love with him and everyone knows, he's simply just like them... a little?
—
"he's our roommate!" both caelus and stelle cheered, grabbing sunday arms, one arm in each of their hands as they tugged him along before you could say anything.
"jealous?" march snickers, pink dusted your cheeks.
"no, I'm not."
you pout, dan heng for the first time smiled at your misery crush. you glared at him when you notice the little tug at his lips.
"you can show him around after they're done helping him settle in their room," dan heng says.
and you do, sunday follows you like a lost chick, trying his hardest to remember everything.
"it's fine, you can always ask if you're not sure. they're all friendly."
—
life settled in a new rhythm.
sunday learned how to make coffee after three failed attempts.
march dragged him into photos whether he liked it or not.
caelus and stelle convinced him to join movie and game nights.
himeko smiled everytime he laughs.
and you...
you were simply happy.
he smiled more, his smile reached his eyes. he looked lighter and more... free.
no one brought up penacony, it was kinder that way. he was just sunday, a nameless and a member of the astral express.
—
movie nights was a weekly tradition.
caelus and stelle had insisted everyone to cram into their room because the television was 'strategically positioned'.
"it literally isn't," march replied.
"it has aura."
"it has dust."
you settled onto the couch just as caelus flopped beside you.
the cushions bounced.
"ow."
"you literally did that to yourself."
he nudged your shoulder.
you bump him back harder.
"HEY."
"you started it."
he frantically clutched his chest.
"I've been betrayed." laughter filled the room.
another playful shove from caelus sent you sideways. for the briefest moment, you had accidentally bumped shoulders with sunday.
your heart skipped a beat.
you immediately shifted back to your own space, mumbling out an apology.
then you turn back to caelus, elbowing him again.
"watch the movie."
sunday smiled politely.
"... of course."
but he barely registered anything from the movie. one thought quietly settled in his mind.
she never touches me.
—
over the following weeks...
he never stopped noticing.
you let stelle suprise tickle attack you. you hugged march after every mission without hesitation. you linked arms with himeko while shopping. you'd hold onto dan heng's sleeve when he's walking ahead too quickly. you'll fist bump mr welt after repairing an engine component together. even pom pom occasionally received head pats from you.
yet...
when you stand next to sunday, you always left the smallest distance. enough that your sleeves never brushed. enough that your hands never meet. enough that- somehow...
he missed contact that had never existed. he shouldn't be bothered by that, he tells himself. it was all harmless. he never considered himself as a jealous man. he envied yes, but jealousy?
—
movie night ended around midnight. everyone slowly filtered out of the room.
"im going to bed," march yawned dramatically.
caelus stretched.
"my back is ruined."
"it was one movie."
"it was a long movie."
"it was two hours."
"hmm... it was spiritually longer."
you laughed.
"I'll see everyone tomorrow, goodnight."
one by one, everyone disappeared down the hallway. sunday lingered by the door.
"goodnight sunday."
"goodnight..." he watched as you walked to your room.
only when your door finally click shut, did he return.
"you're thinking."
caelus didn't even look up from the game console in his hands.
sunday paused, "am I?"
"you've been standing there for like... three minutes," stelle raised three fingers in triumph.
he remains quiet.
"so."
"no."
"you didn't even know what I was going to ask."
"I do. you have a crush."
sunday nearly dropped one of the cups he was picking up.
"I beg your pardon?"
"you've got that look..."
"like you're trying to solve the meaning of life," stelle giggles poking his furrowed eyebrows and stealing the cup in his hand.
"I assure you-"
"it's y/n."
"I see..."
caelus blinked.
"wait."
"yes?"
"I was just joking."
sunday excused himself before the twins could ask anything more. the joke had unfortunately landed wrongly.
—
the next morning sunday had found himself helping dan heng organised supplies in the archive car. neither spoke for several minutes.
"you're thinking too much."
sunday sighed.
"was I that obvious?"
"no," dan heng continued sorting out the files, "I simply guessed."
sunday sighed once more before continuing.
"am I truly that transparent?"
"not usually."
sunday hesitated, his fingers rested on the edge of a crate.
"may I ask something?"
dan heng looks up.
"you may."
"... have you ever noticed..." he paused, searching for the right words.
"...that y/n is rather comfortable around everyone else... but me?"
dan heng tilts his head at the question.
"I don't think that's true."
sunday frowned.
"I've seen her."
he coughed into his fist.
"she hugs march, link arms with himeko, bumps shoulders and laugh with the twins so naturally, she fist bumps mr welt and pats pom pom's head... and sometimes holds onto your sleeve. she never initiated physical contact with me."
dan heng laughs.
"you're not jealous of me, are you?" sunday glares at his fellow crew mate. dan heng stops.
"sorry... but I think you misunderstood."
sunday blinked.
"how so?"
"watch."
—
it happened over the next few days. dan heng never points it out, he simply let sunday see.
march threw herself around your shoulders after returning from shopping. you laughed and hugged her back.
caelus leaned dramatically against you after he finished his training. you shoved him away with a grin.
mr welt offered a celebratory fist bump after you helped fix a navigation error, to which you immediately accept.
dan heng reached for a box on a high shelf. you lightly caught his sleeve.
"you're going to make it fall."
"thank you."
then sunday entered the room, you smiled. he walked over to take the box from dan heng. you took a step back.
as he puts the box away, you were about to leave reaching for the handle. sunday was also reaching for the handle. you pull away quickly.
"um, you first." not because you minded.
because you always treated him differently, like touching him required permission. like somewhere in your heart, he was like a noble man.
"oh I was just holding the door for you, I still have things to do here." you step out, waving him goodbye.
"do you see it now?" comes dan heng's voice.
sunday remains quiet.
"she's not avoiding you... she's just careful."
"careful?"
"people aren't careful around someone who makes them uncomfortable," a pause.
"they're careful around someone who matters."
—
that sentence followed sunday for days.
someone who matters, could it truly be that simple?
—
a week later, the express had returned to belobog.
nothing urgent, just to visit, shop for a few supplies and an excuse for march and the twins to drag everyone to the snow.
"look!" she pointed at the frozen lake.
"it's exactly like the last time!" the twins shout.
"it's the same lake." dan heng replied.
—
snow falls gently in the city, you were walking around the city with sunday following behind you. just the two of you.
"it's beautiful..."
"it is," sunday replied. like you...
you looked back, snow had caught into his hair.
"it suits you," you laugh, pointing at his head.
he chuckles, gently shaking the snow out of his hair.
just as you turn to continue walking, your boot had caught onto something, making you fall forward before you could fall, you reached for anything- anyone.
before you knew it, you had accidentally grabbed onto sunday's arm hard.
you felt him wrap his other hand around you, hoisting you up.
"so-sorry!" you put both your hands up, taking two steps away from him.
"I'm sorry," you look away, not daring to meet his eyes. you feel your cheeks flaring, it's definitely the cold. the hammer of your chests bangs even harder than before, it must be the cold!
sunday laughs once more.
"it's fine, you know. if you're scared of slipping in the snow, you could just hold my hand." he offers his hand out.
how could you say no? he grabs yours without waiting for your answer. he tugs you closer to him with your intertwined fingers. this time your shoulder does brush against his, sometimes.
it's nice. the once head of the oak family sunday whom you never could reach because he's way too out of your league, now walks right next to you as a fellow nameless. the stars have finally crossed and he's finally closer to you.
“Welcome everyone,” Scara greeted as he pulled up the game lobby, and as usual, he was the only one ready, “Why are all these fuckers late?”
“Let’s all agree not to snitch on me this time,” he mutters, “Last time you guys snuck into Albedo’s chat and told him to vote for me,” he continues as he adjusts his camera. He’d put more effort into his outfit that day for a certain someone, causing him to start later than usual.
xingyunclouds donated $15
so tell us about this y/n?? 😏
A small smile crept onto his face at the mention of y/n, much to his dismay, which didn’t go unnoticed by the chat.
“Don’t embarrass me tonight. They said they’re watching this stream,” he grumbles, stifling his emotions as he busies himself with decorating his character, “Also, it’s none of your goddamn business.”
ventismacchiato donated $20
HE'S BLUSHING CAUGHT IN 4K
“Everyone here?” Tighnari calls out. They were all streaming from their respective rooms in the house.
“Guys, should I leave the cheese hat on or not?” Childe asks instead of answering, his voice in Scara’s ear as he ran around the lobby.
“Just start it,” Heizou says, and Scara could hear the smug grin on his face, “You guys are going to lose anyway.”
“Play nice, Heizou,” Kazuha reprimands as the game starts to load.
“You know he’s ruthless,” Star answers, and Scara gets a tight feeling in his stomach. It’s been a year since he’s heard Star’s voice properly, but instead of how it usually unsettled him it felt oddly familiar. Perhaps he was tired.
“Shut up,” Scara remarks, ridding himself of those thoughts.
“Make me,” Star easily responds, which makes Scara pause and everyone else crack up.
“The fuck,” he mutters, “Y/N isn’t going to like that.”
“Get ready to listen to them fight the entire game,” Venti sings.
“Everyone mute until voting,” Tighnari instructs as the game loads.
“I swear to the archons if I’m imposters with Childe again I’m killing myself,” Scara complains as he mutes himself from the main chat, knowing Childe would start defending himself if he heard Scara’s comment, “He’s always been shit at lying. One time he ate the cake I baked for Y/N and lied to me about it with frosting smeared on his cheeks.”
The screen on his computer loads and instantly his chat is flooded with laughter as he and Star’s characters appear under the screen as the imposters for that round.
frzenhans donated $420
THEY ARE NOT GONNA GET ANYTHING DONE LMAO
“I take it back, I’d rather have Childe,” he mutters, joining a private call with Star.
“Hey partner,” Star calls out, laughing in his ear. It tickled his nerves.
“Shut up,” he says on instinct, “Do not be the cause of my first loss.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” Star chuckles as they load in, “Who should we kill first?”
Scara trails behind Venti in the game, “Wait until two of them are together so we can double kill,” he offers, pretending to do tasks beside the blue character.
“I think Heizou saw me vent,” Star confesses.
“It’s been two minutes why are you this dumb?” Scara sighs as a meeting is called as expected and they all join the main chat.
Much to his surprise, Star defends themself with ease.
“I’m pretty sure Heizou vented in front of me,” Star falsely accuses, “I can’t be for sure though but he got there pretty quickly when my back was turned.”
“YOU BITCH!” Heizou yells into the mic, “You know damn well—”
“Babe,” Kazuha hums, “Deep breaths.”
“The fucking audacity,” he continues, “You’re the one who vented right in front of me!”
“Let’s just end the meeting, Heizou is trying too hard,” Scara interrupts.
“If this happens again we should vote out Heizou,” Tighnari says as the game resumes.
“I hate you all,” Heizou huffs as they all go on mute once again.
“I’m going to kill Venti,” Star says in his ear.
“Why don’t we sabotage first and double kill?”
“But he’s literally right in front of me, I’ll let Heizou find the body,” Star adds.
“Alright,” Scara muses, tailing behind Heizou, “I’ll do tasks with him.”
He follows Heizou into the Medbay, where as expected, was Venti’s dead body.
They both join the main call and are immediately hit with accusations. None against them though.
“WHO KILLED MY VENTI,” Aether cried out.
“It can’t be Scara since he was with me,” Heizou thinks out loud, “Childe has been real silent.”
“That’s because I cannot figure out how to do shit in this game,” his best friend whines, “I would never kill Venti.”
“Can anyone back up Heizou’s location?” Star questions.
“He wasn’t with me, he’s lying,” Scara answers, his lie garnering a gasp from Heizou.
“I swear to the archons above if you guys believe him,” Heizou starts, getting riled up.
“I’m with Scara on this one,” Tighnari hums.
“No, don’t do this. Kazuha please,” Heizou wails, “You guys are making a mistake!”
“I’ll vote for Childe,” Kazuha softly laughs, not able to rid of his fondness for the other male even during a game.
“Simp,” Aether comments, “I’ll avenge you Venti.”
They all place their votes, and apart from Heizou and Kazuha, it’s unanimous.
Heizou gets voted out.
“Why did we slay that,” Star comments, their giggles ringing in his ear once the two of them are back into their private call. He shakes the light feeling that it fills him with. Absurd.
bongohat3r donated $2
not him gaslighting
“I’ll admit we worked well together,” Scara hums, distracting himself from having Star directly in his ear by walking around the game’s floor plan.
“Why can’t you just admit we make a good pair?” Star asks, taunting him and following behind him.
“We don’t,” he sighs.
“We would make a great pair!”
“Mute yourself I’m sick of your voice,” he grumbles.
“You’re in your denial stage.”
“Enough, Y/N is watching.”
“You talk about them often,” Star muses.
“Jealous of my love life?” Scara smirks as they pull off a sabotage.
“Nothing to be jealous of,” Star huffs.
“You’re not slick.”
“I just think me and you fit better.”
“Is that the hill you want to die on? Because I can make that happen.”
“I’d like to see you try,” Star retaliates as they both walk into a room with Aether and Childe in it. Aether doing his tasks and Childe attempting to.
Words go unsaid as they silently agree to go through with a double kill, easily slicing their friends. A discussion wasn’t needed to know they should self-report. They worked too well together, it made his stomach churn.
“I literally saw Kazuha go in for the kill,” Star says as soon as the call loads, “I’m betting it’s him.”
“How could you accuse me of such a thing?” Kazuha muses and Scara can hear the smirk on his lips, “It was obviously you.”
“Well, there were two bodies so it’s Kazuha and someone else,” Tighnari comments.
“Unless he killed one then let the cooldown run and killed the other after,” Star thinks aloud, “We all know Childe still doesn’t know how the game works.”
“See, now you’re thinking too highly of me,” Kazuha laughs, “I can’t pull that off.”
“You didn’t because we’re going to vote you off,” Scara replies.
“Guys,” Kazuha starts, and it’s like Scaramouche can hear his pout, “This isn’t fair!”
“Life isn’t fair,” Tighnari says as he puts his vote in.
The victory screen loads in and Star cheers in his ear.
“We did pretty well, didn’t we?” Star asks, eager for his approval.
“I guess we did, good job,” he muses, hoping Y/N stayed until the end to see him annihilate the others.
“Scara complimenting me?” Star sarcastically gasps, “A dream come true.”
“It’s more of a nightmare.”
“Are you insinuating you think of me while you sleep?” Star says, their voice in a low murmur in his ear. Scara finds himself swallowing and his cheeks growing warm.
“Stop being a perv,” he manages to croak out, joining the main call so he wouldn’t have to be stuck alone with Star for longer than he had to. He wasn’t flustered, just annoyed.
“I TOLD YOU GUYS,” Heizou shrieks as soon as everyone loads into the main voice call.
“I believed you,” Kazuha answers, a soft laugh escaping his lips.
“I’m so sorry, Venti,” Aether calls out, “I couldn’t avenge you bestie.”
“It’s alright, you served well,” Venti solemnly says.
“Can we go again I think I figured out the controls this time,” Childe ponders.
“I’m killing myself for getting duped by the duo who despise one another,” Tighnari sulks.
Scaramouche tunes them out as he gives his attention to his chat, which consists of them all complimenting his and Star’s skills. He tears his eyes away from it, calling back on all the out-of-character comments they made throughout the stream.
In response he opens up a new tab and pulls up Star’s stream, listening to how they were praising his skills. He hastily exits it.
“Let’s do another round,” Aether huffs, determined as a new game loads in.
Scaramouche exits his zoned-out state and gets back into his streamer personality, masking the incoming fleet of emotions.
He couldn’t help but steal a glance at his phone every now and then, expecting a certain someone to get his mind off everything.
No new notifications…
behind the lens !
masterlist — prev | next
hope u guys liked the scara pov 🤭
ik u can have ten ppl in among us but i was too lazy to edit all that and realized too late so 🤷
lmk if u see urself in the twitch chat HAHA
zhangrenlin on ig as scara
guys my among us knowledge is limited it has been years so dont come for me if i got shit wrong
author’s notes — BRO THESE EDITS TOOK FOREVER YALL DONT EVEN KNOW I DID EVERYTHING FROM SCRATCH INCLUDING THE CHARACTERS SO PLS LOOK AT THEM 😇 was rlly fun tho i was looking forward to editing this chapter the most
synopsis — you, better known as STARDUST, and BALLADEER have always been in competition for the top streamer spot on twitch, which is especially impressive since the two of you have never shown your faces. you’ve never been on good terms, constantly one-upping each other in matches and getting into petty arguments on twitter, causing your fans to also dislike each other. that’s until BALLADEER does a face reveal that breaks the internet with his good looks…which makes you realize it’s the same guy you went on a date with last night. the type of date that made you crave to see him again. the only problem was he didn’t know you were STARDUST and he was way different behind the lens than he portrayed himself online to you. should you keep your identity a secret to salvage the relationship or just let him go?
Note: Requested by a follower. I very rarely write for this guy, so my apologies if it's ooc T^T This takes place before Scara becomes Wanderer. ~850 words.
Tags: Scaramouche x reader, implied established relationship, implied grief, comfort (in the odd way scara can do it)
"You'll get cold idiot." Scaramouche didn't care that you jolted when he broke the tense silence that hung around you. Snezhnaya was unforgiving for humans, especially during winter.
The rustle of his harbinger coat as it fluttered through the air was all the warning you got before its heavy weight settled around your shoulders. Something about your lack of reaction unnerved him, he'd expected at least a wide-eyed look of surprise and some ridiculous stammer asking what he was doing.
Instead, you just tugged the fur-trimmed coat tighter around you. Barely even deigned to look in his direction at all. It made his lips curl in annoyance.
"Not even a 'thank you', did you go-" Scaramouche pauses the moment he steps between you and the balcony rails, forcing you to retreat. There's a painfully familiar look in your eyes and despite himself Scaramouche can't find it in himself to snap at you.
Not while your eyes are red-rimmed and your cheeks streaked with frozen remnants of tears.
Maybe your trembling hadn't only been caused by the cold.
You don't offer any explanation, don't even meet his gaze. But you do nuzzle into the fur collar, the small gesture enough of a tell to know that you wanted his presence.
So Scaramouch steps to side and lets you reclaim your spot, watching with his arms across his chest as you lean forward to rest your arms on the railing. Time ticks by in silence as you sniffle and wipe your eyes, several puffs of air turning to mist and dispersing whenever your lips part. Scaramouche doesn't feel the cold. He doesn't feel is what he reminds himself repeatedly.
Every muffled sound you make rips his chest further apart.
He perks up when you mumble something. "What? Speak up."
"..said I'm sorry.."
"For what? It's not like I had anything else to do."
Not smacking your fidgeting hands takes more restraint than expected. If he had gloves, maybe he'd have put them on you just to make it harder.
Snow falls quietly to the ground, reflecting the pale moonlight and casting shadows across your face that do nothing to hide what you aren't telling him. There's only the occasional rustle of branches, snow falling in little piles onto the ground, the few unlucky soldiers patrolling back and forth along the outer wall.
He's not interested in hearing what's bothering you, obviously, or he would've asked.
More time passes, and Scaramouche notices the exact moment you take a final shuddering breath before your shoulders relax. The change is visible even beneath his coat, you'll probably be sore tomorrow. His own shoulders mirror the movement.
"Do you have someone you miss?" You sound careful, almost frightened when you ask. The kind of question that's essentially based on a lie, you're not interested in his answer, but looking to steer the conversation towards what's on your mind. Scaramouche knew the technique, had known many humans who used it to their advantage.
"I used to."
The words taste foul on his tongue. A half truth only admitted to because there was no one else around. You, unfortunately, already knew that there were still traces of worldly filth left in him.
"Used to," you repeat while turning your hands, "so it hurts less with time."
Scaramouche pinched the bridge of his nose, but before he could find a proper retort you were already talking again, spine a little straighter.
"What if I forget what all the good moments felt like? That's probably what scares me the most.."
It was easy to refute in theory. Part of Scaramouche wanted to tell you about the dreams he still had where he was back with his first 'family'. There still weren't anyone else around, no one out on the balcony or anywhere in view, no one lurking behind windows that he could see.
Before you could continue the talking yourself down a spiral, because he knew you would if given the chance, Scaramouche pressed his lips against your cheek. One hand found yours and intertwined your fingers, yours worryingly frigid, and he unceremoniously dragged you towards the door.
"Hey-"
"Shut up."
He didn't bother to turn when you made a sound of protest, there was no need seeing as you were still obediently following as he stepped back inside the palace.
"At least tell me where we're going," you demanded, voice no longer shaky with emotion. Good. He'd jostled you out of it after you'd failed to do it yourself.
"Kitchen. You need something warm to drink." He gave your hand a subtle squeeze, ignoring how his thumb had been rubbing circles into your cold skin. It was a pity he couldn't offer much in terms of body heat. "Then you can tell me all about who you're missing or whatever."
"Really?"
Scaramouche wanted to scoff at the hint of disbelief in your voice, instead his voice softened just enough for it to be noticeable. "Next time, come talk to me directly instead of freezing your ass off alone."
Hello!!! Could I request a wanderer x reader where the two are in the forest and an aranara startles them? It'd be funny if the aranara hid from the reader repeatedly because it wasn't familiar with them (unlike wanderer).
Have fun with this prompt and take care! 🩷
wanderer and his too pretty nara ⋆ MASTERLIST ˎˊ˗
"Remind me again why we're here?" The Wanderer asked, his tone laced with mild annoyance as he pushed aside the branches that hung too low. In front of him was your figure doing the same thing.
You glanced over to you shoulder, just enough for you to catch a glimpse of the wanderer and his thoroughly unimpressed expression toward nature.
As usual.
"You said the forest was peaceful." You replied with a smile and the Wanderer let out an irritated huff.
"I lied." You heard the Wanderer say and you let out a laugh as you continued to walk forward carefully. The Wanderer had to roll his eyes to hide the fact that enjoyed the sound of your laughter.
The leaves crunched under your shoes, the forest was quiet save for the birds happily singing somewhere in the distance. "I thought you were too shy to ask me out on a date so you casually mentioned how peaceful it is here." You teased, not looking back but you can already imagine the Wanderer's face turning into a look of shock with his brows raised.
The Wanderer let out a scoff, "Don't be ridiculous—"
A nearby bush rustled.
You stopped in your tracks and your gaze moved towards the bush while the Wanderer let out a sigh, "It's probably an animal." The moment he finished speaking, the bush rustled again—
A small pair of eyes peeked out from behind the tree beside it.
You blinked.
It blinked back.
Then immediately vanished.
You stared and then turned towards the Wanderer who was just standing there with his arms folded in front of him looking at the scene in front of him, watching with complete indifference.
"...Did you see that?" You asked as you walked towards the tree and placed your hands on it's trunk as your circled around it, finding nothing. No creature, no sound, no eyes blinking back at you. "Huh.. maybe I imagined it."
"You didn't." The wanderer replied, a hint of amusement flickering across his face.
"Then where did it go?"
"How should I know?"
You rolled your eyes at his reply before continuing deeper into the forest. Five minutes later, you caught movement from the corner of your eye— there was a round little figure peeking from behind a mushroom, you immediately turned your head—
Whoosh!
You stared at the spot where you swore you saw the little figure and Wanderer stared as well before snorting, "It ran away from you."
You felt offended, "Why would it run away from me?"
Wanderer shrugged, "Maybe you're frightening."
You looked even more offended, "I'm not frightening."
Wanderer couldn't help the lift of the corner of his lips, "That's what frightening people say."
The third encounter was when you were more prepared but it was also the worse. You spotted the creature first and the creature on the other hand thought that you wouldn't see them through the bush but you slowly crouched down in front of it and smiled, "Hello." You said softly.
The creature froze and for one glorious second you finally thought that you finally succeeded. "Eek!" It let out, a tiny startled noise before launching itself behind the Wanderer's leg.
A complete betrayal!
"It chose you." You said as you looked at the tiny figure hiding behind the wanderer's leg but then you saw a different colored creature and then another. "There's something behind you.." Curious, you stood up from your position and looked behind the wanderer.
Only to find out that these tiny creatures were hiding behind the wanderer all along, even the ones that had ran away from you earlier!
Eventually you knew that this was what they call the Aranara and somehow they were familiar with the Wanderer or at least they recognized him, you however was just a stranger and whenever you took a step forward, the Aranara took a step back.
Several minutes of trying to make friends with these little creatures wearing a bowtie and another holding a stick, the Wanderer finally crouched down and a number of Aranara popped out instantly, "Hat Nara!"
"Mhm."
"Pretty Nara scary."
The forest became quiet, even the birds must have been at shock at the words of the forest spirit. You looked horrified and the Wanderer looked delighted, very delighted.
"Did it just call me scary?" You looked at the Wanderer.
"Apparently,"
"Why?" You asked, brows furrowed now. The Aranara poiunted at you and said, "Pretty Nara too pretty." You heard a huff beside you that almost sounded like a laugh but then you really heard the Wanderer laugh, a rare, genuine laugh and now you understood that you had been defeated by a forest spirit wearing a bowtie.
Hours later, you turned around to wave goodbye to the forest spirits only to find that one of them was holding a flower and cautiously approached you and then offered the flower in it's hands.
When you accepted it and gave it a small smile, it squeaked and immediately hid behind the Wanderer's leg again. The Wanderer laughed and you let out a small pout at that.
"Congratulations." He said, grinning at you, "You've somehow become the first person in history to intimidate an aranara by being attractive."
"That's not a thing." You said with the pout still on your face.
"Apparently it is."
You let out a huff and lightly bumped your shoulder against his as the two of you walked out of the forest. You looked behind one last time and saw the Aranaras hiding behind those bushes and trees again. You smiled before you looked at the Wanderer, "So.."
He gave you a sideway glance.
"You think I'm attractive?"
The wanderer looked at you with a brow raised as though you said something utterly absurd.
But you knew that look in his eyes and that tiny smile that was a little too fond.
You stare at his closed apartment door, clutching your bag, hesitating to knock. There's definitely some hasty shuffling inside – like someone is frantically cramming stuff into a closet or relocating junk in hopes it looks good enough. But what really concerns you is the voices.
“Wait no- don’t put that-”
“I think it looks fine here?”
"If you break that vase I'll break your neck-"
A loud thud. Followed by the sound of something shattering. Followed by more yelling.
"Please, Albedo, chill, it's just a vase- I'm sorry, I swear-"
“Childe, you idiot, shut up and keep vacuuming”
You finally ring the doorbell. And suddenly it’s a lot quieter, though you still hear some hurried steps and muffled curses. The door swings open. Venti stands there, exhausted looking and panting as if he just finished a workout. He takes a few seconds to regain his breath before plastering on a weak smile.
“Heeey you must be here for the uh… project thingy? With Scara?”
He looks more dead than alive, a little concerning.
“Yeah… Are you okay? You look a little…”
He quickly interrupts, not giving you an opportunity to ask about his wellbeing, which you seriously question right now.
“Yup, all good. Yn, right?”
You open your mouth to answer, but a sharp voice cuts through.
“Venti. Move.”
You catch the sight of Scara down the hall, wearing a scowl that could turn someone to stone. Venti turns his head to Scara, then back to you, with a teasing smile.
“He made all of us clean here. Even forced Albedo and Xiao. Haven't seen him this… particular in a while.”
Scara storms over, grabs your arm, and yanks you inside.
"Ignore him, come on."
Before you can protest, he drags you down the hall to his room. You see the sad remains of Albedo's vase on the way.
He shuts the door right after you enter and sighs. Before you can comment on what Venti said, something soft brushes your ankle. His cat immediately ran to you to nuzzle your leg, so naturally you kneeled to scratch behind his ears.
"Aww, Scarameow", you coo. The cat leans into your hand, purring quietly.
"That’s not his name", Scara scoffs.
You glance up at him, still petting. “Then name him yourself, if ‘Scarameow’ is such a crime.”
“What am I supposed to call him? He’s not even my cat.”
You arch a brow. Sure. The way the cat practically claimed you the second you walked in made it very obvious this was his cat. “Yeah right. He’s literally your shadow.”
He tilts his head. A pause. "Weird, usually he hides from strangers. And Childe."
That earns a full on laugh. "Childe? Why him?"
"Can you blame him? Maybe it's his good instincts." He shrugs.
You grin, "The instincts that made him cling to me too?"
Before you can laugh more, Scara drags over a second chair and sits at his desk. The surface, just like in lectures, completely tidy and neatly organized. Notebook – which he to your surprise owns one- and laptop perfectly angled parallel to the desk's edge.
"Come on", he says with the ghost of a smile on his lips, "Time to ponder about the meaning of life."
"Well technically the question is 'What makes life worth living?'", you correct him, sitting down on the second chair. That’s the topic for your display, which you should be able to handle. Sounds fairly simple.
"Yeah, yeah, same thing."
The two of you start working on the project, just brainstorming for ideas and coming up with a concept for how the display will look like. You write a list of supplies you’re going to need. He’s surprisingly chill to work with, a lot less strict than you’d think while still staying true to his perfectionism.
(Originally, I had this study section fully written out, but I felt like it dragged out this chapter unnecessarily. If you still wanna read about it, go read chapter 17.5 – its fully skippable tho if you don’t care about that. I still think it’s worth it but I also don’t wanna waste your time so yeah)
“Come on. Craft store."
“Now?”
“Yeah, when else? We have the list of supplies.”
“Okay, sure, let’s go”
He drives you to the craft store, the cat really didn’t want you to go but you had to leave him with a heavy heart and head scratches. And a promise that you’ll be back soon that he didn’t understand anyways. Scara did side-eye you and said “It’s only going to be like half an hour and you act like you’re leaving for war”, but you ignored him. He’s not going to stand between you and Scarameow.
You enter the craft store together and he takes a cart. Time to search for the stuff you need. While wandering the aisles, you find a rack with poster papers of various colors and thicknesses. As you reach for the pink one, he grabs your wrist to stop you.
“I think we should go with white. The prof grades design too, and he probably wouldn’t appreciate pink the way you do”, he advises.
You groan. But he’s right. “The prof can go die. Ugh.”
He lets your wrist go. “Don’t worry, I trust you to still make it look cute somehow”, he then pauses to think for a second, before suggesting, ”You can add some pink accents if you want to.”
“Okay, fine…”, you sigh and take white instead.
“Not the flimsy one”, he frowns, taking it from your hands and putting it back where you got it.
“So picky.” You huff, showing him a sturdier white paper, “Is this to your liking, your highness?”
He snorts, “Sorry… but yeah that one works.”
You roll your eyes but can’t hide a smile. You put it in the cart and mentally cross it off the list, looking for the rest of the items. You tell him to pick out a pinboard, not feeling like dealing with his nitpicking on that one as well. Besides, he probably knows what will get you the better grade even if it probably doesn’t come down to the pinboard.
You threw in a few more things into the cart that you need, so did he. The only things missing are pins and markers.
“You said I can add pink accents. So...” You hold up a pack of pink markers, looking at him expectantly.
“Okay sure, just make sure they’re not too light or neon” He actually approved???
“Of course not, chef”, you say, tossing the markers into the cart.
He raises his eyebrow. “Pfft chef?”
You just shrug, not elaborating further. He throws a pack of black markers into the cart as well, something about ‘also taking neutral colors’.
You go look for pins and find cute flower ones, but before you can take them to show them to Scara, a voice cuts in.
“Scara? Didn’t expect to see you here.” You turn around to see Albedo with a basket full of acrylic paints.
Scara clicks his tongue. “What, I’m not allowed in a craft store now?”
Albedo blinks, unbothered. “Not at all. It simply doesn’t strike me as… your natural environment.” His eyes flick to the cart you’re pushing – the poster paper, the pinboard, the growing pile of supplies. “Philosophy night preparations?”
You offer him a polite smile. “Yeah. Our stand. What about you? Shopping for your next masterpiece?” You’ve seen his paintings on twitter before- he’s quite talented.
“Uh yeah, buying paints”, Albedo hums absentmindedly, probably not interested in small talk. You can see the gears turning in his head. “Interesting pairing… you’ll balance each other out well.”
Scara narrows his eyes. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Albedo continues to be unfazed, stating his observations. “Yn tends towards warmth and accessibility, while you… don’t.”
You choke back a laugh, pretending to cough. Scara shoots you a sharp glare.
Albedo finally senses Scara’s… sour reaction and adds, “I’m just saying that you’re good at meeting the academic guidelines and catering to the prof while yn is good at not scaring off the audience.”
Your mouth drops open. “Wow so I’m basically dumb but approachable?”
Scara scoffs. “And I only know how to suck up to the profs?”
Albedo tilts his head. “Interesting way to interpret that.”
You and Scara exchange a look, equally offended for different reasons. You muster a smile regardless, chalking it up to Albedo not being a social butterfly either. “Yeah, we do work well together I think.”
Albedo thinks for a second, before offering, “I can lend you some paints to make it more visually engaging if you’d like.”
Before you can answer, Scara cuts in, sharp and flat. “We’re fine.”
Albedo just hums, giving you a little nod. “Well, tell me if you change your mind. Good luck working with Scara.”
Scara bristles. “What, like it’s hard?”
Again, Albedo is oblivious to Scara’s reaction. “Not hard but challenging.”
“Yeah – thank you,” you say quickly before Scara explodes, smiling. “That’s really nice of you.”
With that, Albedo turns and strolls away, basket swinging lightly at his side.
Scara keeps glaring at his back until he disappears around an aisle corner. He let’s out a frustrated huff. “Like he’s any better than me.”
“I think he wasn’t trying to be rude?”, you say that more as a question than a statement, not sure yourself.
Scara’s eyes narrow. “Not trying to be rude? Yn, he basically called me… hard to deal with. Challenging. Difficult. I don’t see how that’s not rude.”
You shrug lightly, holding your hands up. “I mean… maybe he just phrased it badly? He probably meant that you have high standards, which is good in an academic context. Just wanted to be helpful in his own awkward way. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have offered his paints.”
“Stupid show off. Let’s just pay and leave.”
You push the cart towards the check-out. As you load your supplies on the band, you notice the flower pins you were going to show him. “Huh? When did we get these?”
“Don’t worry about it”, he brushes you off, avoiding eye contact. You drop it, knowing he won’t explain anything anyways.
You drive back to Scara’s place to continue preparations for philosophy night. A few hours later, the poster is fully done, with the question ‘What makes life worth living?’ written as the heading, both of your takes below it – Scara helped you word yours more smartly – and then also some philosopher’s opinions as well. It came out quite well, the pink accents not looking too informal and the actual content being relevant. Maybe Albedo was right about you two as a team.
Since you finished the bulk of the work and it’s the afternoon already, you decide to cook a late lunch together. Though, Scara does most of it.
“Are you sure you want to do most of this?” you ask, trying to sound casual so that he lets you help him maybe.
He immediately shuts that idea down. “You’re the guest here.”
“I can still help… seriously, I’ll feel bad”
“Sure, you can taste test”, he once again refused to let you do any actual work and instead hands you a fork loaded with the almost ready garlic noodles. “Tell me if it’s seasoned enough.”
You taste it, humming approvingly. “This is really good. Didn’t know you can cook so well.”
He smiles proudly. “Of course I can. So?”
“Seasoning’s good.”, you confirm, “Where do you keep your plates? I can at least set the table.”
“Over there”, he points to a cupboard and you open it, taking two plates. You set the rest of the table as well, at least contributing in a different way. He finishes cooking the noodles, turning off the stove and serving them on both plates.
“If anyone walks in, I made only two servings”, he says flatly. “The others can make their own food.”
“Pfft okay sure.”
You eat the noodles, complimenting his cooking multiple times. It’s kind of embarrassing but also he did do a really good job so he deserves it.
You do the dishes together – you clean, he dries and puts them away – and then go back to his room for more work. The rest of the project is mostly planning rather than actual studying, which makes it much more relaxed.
You move to his bed since it’s far more comfortable than sitting in two chairs. Scarameow at some point settles in your lap, which makes Scara scoff at the ‘needy cat’. Though his hand reaches out to lightly scratch behind the cat’s ears, betraying his words. Deciding a little distraction wouldn’t hurt, you throw on a movie on the side, since you’re getting tired of working non-stop.
You finally finish everything by 9pm, but the movie was still running so you keep watching it. At some point you slump against his shoulder. He stiffens immediately.
You glance up, expecting a comment, a teasing remark, anything– but he says nothing. He sits a little straighter, jaw tight, eyes locked on the screen, as if nothing happened.
A few minutes pass, and then he shifts. Slightly. He’s leaning into your side too now, not looking at you, not speaking. You feel his warmth, the quiet weight of him there, and something in your chest tightens, a mix of comfort and anticipation. You return your focus to the movie, but your thoughts keep drifting to the subtle press of his shoulder against yours.
Eventually, the movie ends. Neither of you move right away, instead you both linger for a bit until the credits are rolling.
“I should probably get going,” you say softly, hesitant to break the silence.
He nods, standing first. “Yeah… I’ll drive you.”
The ride is quiet, but comfortable. He glances at you now and then, you don’t know why. When you get to your place, he waits while you gather your things.
“Thanks for driving me. Text me when you’re home.”, you say, just like last time.
He huffs in amusement. “I’ll be fine. But sure.”
You close the car door after saying your ‘good night’s and enter your apartment building. You wait for his text again.
previous masterlist next
summary⎯ It starts with a note in philosophy lecture. They sit together once, then again. Now they’re texting, sharing notes, and maybe something else they won’t admit. Minor in philosophy, major in denial.
" dial tone part 2 " ; bound together by little more than coincidence and a literature assignment, [name] and scaramouche slowly uncover the quiet parallels between their lives. What begins as reluctant companionship becomes an unspoken refuge, unbeknownst to them that even the smallest act of being seen can alter the course of a life that had long believed itself forgotten.
part 1; part 2; part 3; masterlist. TRIGGER WARNING. depression, anxiety, abuse (specifically abusive parents), hints of s3lf-harm; not fully proof-read so might look messy and have some mistakes! CONTAINS. scaramouche x female! reader, high school au, slowburn, angst, part II of III, kazuha and scara will get into a fight, also published in wattpad. WORD COUNT. 22.8k ( I SWEAR I TRIED TO KEEP IT BELOW 20K...)
The school library seemed perpetually detached from the passage of time. Even during the brightest hours of the afternoon, a subdued stillness lingered between the towering shelves, untouched by the liveliness that characterized the rest of the school.
Sunlight filtered through partially lowered blinds in narrow bands of gold, illuminating countless particles of dust suspended within the air. They drifted lazily through the light, rising and falling in slow currents that rendered the room almost motionless.
Rows of shelves stretched across much of the library's interior, their dark wooden surfaces worn smooth by decades of use. Some leaned ever so slightly beneath the collective weight of thousands of books, while others stood rigid and orderly, their contents arranged according to a system few students genuinely understood. Small handwritten labels remained affixed to several sections, their corners faded and curling from age. Between the shelves, narrow aisles wound through the room like quiet passageways, secluded enough that a person could disappear among them for hours without attracting notice.
The scent of the library was as familiar as it was unchanging. A mixture of aging paper, worn bindings, polished wood, and faint traces of ink permeated every corner of the room. Some books bore visible signs of decades spent resting undisturbed upon their shelves, their pages yellowed at the edges and their spines softened by time. Others appeared almost forgotten entirely, preserved within quiet rows where they waited with remarkable patience for readers who seldom arrived. Near the rear of the library stood a collection of tall windows overlooking the school grounds. The glass muted the sounds from outside, reducing distant conversations and athletic activities to little more than indistinct echoes.
Scattered throughout the room were study tables of varying sizes, their surfaces marked by years of student life. Faint scratches crossed the wood, accompanied by the occasional carved initial left behind by generations of teenagers convinced their presence deserved permanence. Several lamps cast warm pools of light across the larger tables, creating small islands of illumination amidst the library's muted atmosphere. Even the air itself seemed different here. Heavier, quieter, carrying the peculiar feeling that every conversation should be lowered and every movement made with greater care.
Scaramouche entered at precisely 3:58 PM.
Not because punctuality particularly mattered to him, but because arriving late implied a level of carelessness he found irritating, while arriving exactly on time carried the risk of appearing eager.
The library was nearly deserted at this hour. Most students vacated the school grounds within minutes of the final bell, fleeing toward clubs, going out with friends, or coming back to the comforts of home. Their absence left the library unusually peaceful, occupied only by a handful of students scattered among distant tables and the occasional librarian moving quietly between the shelves.
Only a handful of students remained within the library's expansive quiet. A girl occupied a table near the far corner, her head resting upon folded arms atop an open chemistry textbook, the pages fluttering faintly whenever the air conditioning stirred. Two boys sat several rows away, bent over a phone screen as they exchanged urgent whispers regarding what appeared to be a gaming tournament. Behind the circulation desk, the librarian remained absorbed in a novel discreetly concealed beneath a stack of administrative paperwork, occasionally turning a page with the practiced subtlety of someone long accustomed to avoiding responsibility.
Scaramouche selected a table near the rear of the library. It offered a clear view of the entrance while remaining sufficiently removed from the windows and surrounding students.
The chair produced a brief scraping sound as he pulled it back, the noise carrying farther than it should have within the library's subdued atmosphere before being swallowed once more by silence. He set his bag upon the table and withdrew the assigned novel, a notebook, and several pens. Each item was placed with deliberate precision until the arrangement appeared less suited for a literature assignment and more reminiscent of preparations for a task of considerably greater importance.
Then he waited.
The minute hand advanced steadily.
4:00 PM arrived and passed without incident.
Scaramouche informed himself that her attendance was ultimately irrelevant. The project could be completed independently if necessary. In many respects, that would be preferable. Working alone was simpler than navigating the inefficiencies that inevitably accompanied collaboration. But despite the certainty of that reasoning, his attention continued straying toward the library entrance. Each time movement appeared in the doorway, his gaze shifted automatically before returning to the open pages before him. The repetition grew increasingly irritating.
At 4:03 PM, the entrance opened once more.
This time, it was her.
The moment he recognized her figure standing in the doorway, a small portion of the tension he had spent the last several minutes pretending not to feel eased so naturally that he failed to notice it altogether.
She paused briefly upon entering the library.
The brighter light spilling from the corridor outlined her figure for only a moment before the door eased shut behind her, returning the room to its usual quiet dimness. Her gaze moved carefully across the interior, passing over rows of shelves, scattered study tables, and the handful of students still occupying the space. The assessment appeared almost instinctive, as though she were unconsciously familiarizing herself with her surroundings before committing to them.
When her eyes eventually settled upon the table near the rear of the library, a subtle shift crossed her expression. Recognition, perhaps. Relief, though considerably more restrained. Whatever it was, it disappeared almost immediately as she began making her way toward him.
Her footsteps were nearly inaudible against the floor. Even among the library's prevailing silence, she seemed to possess a remarkable ability to move without attracting attention. By the time she reached the table, Scaramouche had already become aware of her presence despite keeping his attention fixed upon the open novel before him.
She stopped beside the chair opposite his.
For several seconds, she remained standing. One hand rested upon the strap of her bag, fingers curled around the material with unconscious tension. There was something oddly hesitant about the gesture, as though she were waiting to determine whether her presence was genuinely welcome before allowing herself to occupy the space.
"You're late."
The remark arrived without preamble. Scaramouche didn't look up from his notes.
"I'm sorry. I couldn't find—"
The apology halted midway through its escape. A faint crease appeared between her brows. "I'm here now."
"Sit down. You're making the place look cluttered."
The response earned the slightest narrowing of her eyes before she lowered herself into the chair opposite him. Her bag was placed carefully beside the table, making scarcely any sound as it touched the floor. A moment later, she withdrew her copy of the assigned novel and placed the book between them.
For a time, neither of them spoke.
The silence that settled across the table wasn't particularly uncomfortable, yet neither was it entirely natural. Around them, the library continued its quiet existence uninterrupted. The low murmur of the two boys several shelves away drifted intermittently through the aisles, occasionally punctuated by muffled laughter. Somewhere near the circulation desk, a page turned with a soft rustle. Beyond that, there was little else. The stillness seemed to gather around the table, isolating them within their own small corner of the room.
Scaramouche remained leaning slightly back in his chair, one hand resting upon the novel while his gaze wandered aimlessly across the page before him. Opposite him, [Name] appeared occupied with arranging her notebook and pens, though he suspected the gesture served more to fill the silence than any genuine need for organization.
"So..." The word emerged quietly.
"The project," [Name] continued, lowering her gaze toward the open notebook before her. "Ms. Nakamura said we're supposed to analyze themes of isolation and connection in modern Japanese fiction."
"I can read the assignment sheet."
A brief pause followed. "Right."
Rather than appearing offended, she merely nodded before flipping to a blank page near the middle of her notebook. The paper produced a faint whisper as it turned.
"I was thinking we could start by identifying the main—"
"The protagonist isn't actually isolated."
The interruption arrived so suddenly that she stopped speaking altogether. Scaramouche tapped a finger lightly against the cover of the novel. "Everyone keeps saying he is," he continued, his attention fixed upon the book. "But that's not what the story is about."
Something shifted in [Name]'s expression. Not disagreement or offense, but interest. The change was subtle, revealed less through her features than through the sudden attentiveness with which she regarded him. The hesitation that had accompanied the beginning of their discussion seemed to recede, replaced by genuine curiosity.
"What do you mean?"
Scaramouche's fingers paused against the cover of the novel. "He isn't actually alone," he said. "Not in any literal sense." His gaze drifted briefly toward the pages spread between them. "He's surrounded by people for most of the story. His coworkers. His family. That woman he keeps meeting at the convenience store." He paused. "Everyone keeps treating the novel like it's about isolation, but that's not really what it's exploring."
The words emerged more easily than he intended.
Ordinarily, he avoided explaining his thoughts in such detail. Most discussions ended the moment he delivered his opinion. Yet there was something about the way she listened that made interruption feel unnecessary. She wasn't waiting for an opportunity to disagree. She was trying to understand.
"It's about disconnection," he continued. "About being surrounded by people and still feeling detached from them. Like you're participating in the same conversations and routines as everyone else while somehow existing several steps removed from the rest of the world."
Silence followed. Not the uncertain silence from earlier, but the thoughtful kind. Across the table, [Name]'s attention remained fixed upon the novel, her gaze slightly unfocused as she turned his interpretation over in her mind. Several moments passed before she spoke.
"I think you're half right."
Scaramouche looked up immediately. A faint crease appeared between his brows.
"Half right?"
Rather than shrinking beneath the challenge, she lowered her eyes to the page and lightly traced the margin of one of her annotations with her fingertip. "He does have people around him," she said slowly. "I agree with that part." Her voice grew steadier as she continued. "But I don't think he feels like he's the only real person."
She glanced toward him.
"I think he feels like he's the only fake one. As if everyone else understands something he doesn't. How to connect with people. How to belong. How to move through life without constantly questioning every interaction." Her fingers stilled against the page. "Everyone around him seems to know what they're doing. He's the one who's pretending."
Something tightened within Scaramouche's chest.
The sensation arrived with uncomfortable suddenness, sharp enough to command his attention yet impossible to identify precisely. He found himself staring across the table at her, at the slight curve of her shoulders as she leaned over her notebook, at the absent-minded way her pencil moved across the page while she organized thoughts that seemed to come naturally to her. There was no self-consciousness in the observation she had offered. No awareness that, with a handful of carefully chosen words, she had approached a truth he had spent years circling without ever fully grasping.
"That's..."
The response stalled. He looked away briefly, as though the shelves beyond them might provide a more satisfactory answer.
"That's a reach," he said eventually. "You're projecting."
"Maybe." Her reply arrived without resistance. She sounded thoughtful rather than defensive. "But isn't that what literary analysis is?" she asked. "Recognizing parts of a story because they reflect something true about people?"
Scaramouche clicked his tongue softly. "It's supposed to be based on evidence. Not feelings."
"Okay."
Without argument, she opened the novel and began turning through its pages. Scaramouche's attention followed almost unintentionally. He hadn't realized it earlier, but looking at the condition of her own copy now, the book bore the unmistakable signs of having been read repeatedly rather than merely studied for an assignment.
Pencil annotations occupied the margins in dense clusters, some consisting of only a few carefully chosen words while others stretched across entire sections of the page. Tiny arrows connected observations to specific sentences, occasionally branching into additional notes squeezed into whatever empty space remained. Certain remarks had been written lightly enough to suggest hesitation, while others appeared darker, the graphite pressed firmly into the paper as though the thought had demanded recording before it could disappear.
Different colours of highlighter appeared throughout the novel with a level of organization he found vaguely alarming. Yellow marked recurring themes. Blue seemed reserved for dialogue. Green appeared alongside descriptions she considered significant, while pink highlighted passages that had evidently struck her on a more personal level. The colours threaded through the pages like interconnected routes on a map, guiding the reader through thoughts accumulated over multiple readings rather than a single afternoon of preparation.
Small adhesive notes protruded from various sections of the book. Some had curled at the corners and faded slightly from repeated handling, clinging stubbornly to the page despite appearing only moments away from surrendering to gravity. Others looked recently added, their surfaces still crisp and flat against the paper. Several contained nothing more than a single question mark or brief observation, while others were crowded with writing so small it seemed impossible anyone could have expected to read it comfortably later.
'Huh,' a scoff escaped from Scaramouche, although he only did so internally, only his head hearing such expression while his expression remained neutral. The further she turned through the novel, the clearer the pattern became. It's as if she didn't simply read the book but lived with it for a while.
'So she's really into literature.'
"There." The beginning of a conversation with himself disappeared as quickly as it appeared, blinking to see her index finger already pointing at a certain part in the copy of her novel. She rotated the book toward him.
"Chapter seven." The pages slid across the table's surface. "He's attending his sister's wedding."
Scaramouche lowered his gaze to the passage. "'I am performing the role of brother, of son, of guest, but I cannot remember when I stopped being these things and started only playing them.'"
Her voice softened slightly as she continued. "That doesn't sound like someone who believes he's more real than everyone else." The page remained open between them. "It sounds like someone who's watching himself from a distance. Someone who's become so accustomed to performng the person he's expected to be that he no longer knows where the performance ends."
The passage remained open between them, its words resting quietly upon the page while the library's subdued atmosphere settled once more around their table.
Scaramouche focused his gaze to the excerpt.
Then read it again.
He recognized the passage immediately. The corner of the page in his own copy had been folded months ago, preserving the section without any conscious decision to do so. He remembered lingering on those lines during his first reading, returning to them repeatedly afterward without ever managing to explain why they had remained lodged within his memory. Like a fragment of glass suspended beneath the skin, the words had persisted long after the chapter itself had faded.
"Fine." His fingers nudged the book back toward her.
"So he's performing a role."
The concession sounded reluctant. "That still doesn't explain the isolation theme. If he's surrounded by people—"
"You can be surrounded by people and still be alone."
Her voice was quiet, yet the interruption carried enough certainty to halt his argument before it fully formed.
Scaramouche looked up. [Name]'s attention remained fixed upon the open pages. "If nobody actually knows you," she continued, "their presence doesn't necessarily change anything."
Her fingertips rested lightly against the margin of the novel. "If every conversation, every reaction, every version of yourself you show to other people is carefully chosen, eventually those relationships stop belonging to you." She paused briefly. "They're connected to the person you've created for them."
"After a while," she said softly, "I think it becomes difficult to tell where the performance ends." The observation was offered casually, as though discussing nothing more significant than a fictional character. But something about it settled heavily between them nonetheless.
Scaramouche found himself looking at her rather than the novel. The observation bothered him enough that his gaze shifted elsewhere almost immediately. His attention wandered across the library in search of distraction, only to discover how much the room had changed without him noticing. The two boys who had spent the afternoon whispering urgently over a gaming tournament had vanished. The girl asleep over her chemistry textbook was gone as well, her abandoned chair pushed neatly beneath the table. What remained was the librarian at the circulation desk and the two of them seated near the rear of the room.
Only then did he understand the sudden quietness. Everyone else had simply left.
The realization settled strangely within him. At some point during their discussion, the library had emptied almost entirely. The occasional whispers that had once drifted between the shelves were gone, leaving only the faint turning of pages from the circulation desk and the distant hum of the building's ventilation system. The quiet felt larger now, stretching through the rows of books and settling over the room like a blanket neither of them had noticed being pulled into place.
His gaze returned to her.
The same composed expression remained in place, familiar enough by now to be expected. Yet there were small fractures within it that most people would likely overlook. The way her fingers remained curled around her pen even while she wasn't writing. The way her attention lingered upon the pages between them rather than meeting his eyes directly.
"The author uses water imagery throughout." The words emerged before he had fully decided to speak.
He pulled his notebook closer and flipped through several pages. "Every time the protagonist becomes disconnected from the people around him, water appears somewhere in the scene. Chapter three, during the office party. Chapter nine, during the phone call with his mother. Chapter fifteen—"
"When he's lying beside someone and feels farther away than ever." The continuation arrived without hesitation.
Scaramouche glanced up.
[Name]'s eyes remained fixed upon the novel. "I noticed that too."
A faint crease appeared between her brows as she considered the passage.
"It's almost as if the water isn't separating him from other people." Her fingertip traced lightly along a highlighted sentence.
"It's the opposite. The closer someone gets to him, the stronger the imagery becomes."
"Like he's sinking beneath the surface while everyone else remains unaware of it."
"Exactly."
Scaramouche leaned his face against the hand resting on the table. The hesitation that had characterized the beginning of their meeting had vanished so gradually that neither of them noticed its departure. His pen moved steadily across the page, capturing observations almost as quickly as they surfaced. Ideas that had previously existed as disconnected fragments now seemed to assemble themselves with unexpected ease.
"If we build the analysis around that metaphor," he said, writing as he spoke, "the water imagery becomes more than a recurring symbol. Isolation isn't represented by physical separation. It's drowning." The graphite scratched softly against the paper. "And connection becomes the inability to surface," he continued. "The more he tries to reach people, the further he sinks into the role he's created for himself."
Across the table, [Name] leaned forward slightly, her attention fixed upon the notes taking shape between them. A loose strand of hair slipped forward as she glanced down at her own copy of the novel, scanning passages she had marked long before this discussion began. "And then we contrast it with the moments where he actually feels connected."
Her fingers paused upon a highlighted paragraph. "They're always temporary."
Scaramouche looked up.
"The old man in the park," she continued. "The child on the train. Even the woman he speaks to outside the convenience store." The examples emerged effortlessly. "They're all people who exist on the edges of his life. People he doesn't know well enough to disappoint."
"Because there's nothing to maintain." His pen stilled. The thought developed further as he spoke. "With them, he isn't responsible for being anyone in particular."
The table seemed to shrink beneath the accumulation of notes. What had begun as an assignment gradually transformed into a shared effort to untangle something neither of them could fully articulate, each interpretation drawing another from the pages. "He can speak honestly because none of those relationships are permanent."
"Right." [Name]'s voice was quieter this time.
Her gaze remained fixed upon the open novel.
"The isolation isn't about being physically alone." The pages rustled softly as she turned one corner back into place. "It's about whether anyone actually knows who you are."
Neither of them spoke.
The observation remained suspended between them, settling quietly among scattered notes, annotated pages, and half-finished arguments. It hadn't sounded particularly profound when spoken aloud. If anything, it had emerged naturally from the discussion. Yet something about it resisted being dismissed.
Scaramouche averted his gaze toward his notebook, where a collection of hastily written observations occupied the page. Among them, two lines stood apart from the rest, 'the fear of being seen' and 'the exhaustion of being invisible'. He stared at the words for a moment longer than necessary. They had begun as commentary on a fictional character, written without much thought as the conversation unfolded. Looking at them now, however, they felt uncomfortably familiar, as though they belonged less to the novel and more to the people discussing it.
The realization settled gradually rather than all at once.
The assignment still lay open between them, accompanied by highlighted passages and carefully organized notes. Yet somewhere during the past hour, the discussion had drifted beyond literary analysis. The novel had become less of a subject and more of a mirror, reflecting observations neither of them had intended to make. Scaramouche rested the pen against the page and found himself wondering, when exactly they had stopped talking about the protagonist and started talking about themselves.
"We should probably start organizing this."
The suggestion arrived somewhat abruptly, as though Scaramouche had consciously decided to steer the conversation back toward safer territory. He flipped to a clean page within his notebook and tapped the tip of his pen against the paper. "Figure out who's writing which sections before we end up rewriting the entire assignment twice."
"Okay." [Name] drew her notebook closer and glanced over the collection of notes scattered between them. "I think four sections should be enough. An introduction establishing the thesis, the analysis of the water imagery, the discussion of the stranger-intimacy paradox, and then a conclusion about what the novel is saying regarding modern isolation."
"Five."
Scaramouche didn't hesitate.
His pen moved across the page as he added another heading. "We need a section for the ending."
"The ending?" [Name] furrowed her eyebrows.
"The entire argument falls apart if we ignore it." He looked up briefly. "Whether the protagonist actually connects with someone at the end changes the meaning of everything that comes before it."
[Name]'s attention returned to the novel.
"He does connect," [Name] said, There was a quiet certainty in her voice this time, almost defensive. "At the very end, when he finally tells someone the truth about how he feels. Even if it doesn't fix anything, even if the other person doesn't understand, he still tried. That matters."
"That doesn't mean it succeeds."
"No." Her gaze remained fixed on the passage. "But it means he stopped hiding." The answer came without hesitation.
For a moment, neither of them looked away from the open book lying between them. "Sometimes that's all a person can do," she said quietly. "Be honest long enough for someone else to see what's actually there." The statement settled into the space between them.
Scaramouche's pen remained motionless against the page.
He should have disagreed. The argument was already there, half-formed somewhere within his mind. He could have pointed out the flaws in her reasoning. Could have argued that vulnerability was often indistinguishable from recklessness, that honesty rarely accomplished what people wanted it to accomplish. Experience had taught him that exposing the parts of oneself that mattered most did not guarantee understanding. More often than not, it simply provided others with something they could mishandle.
Yet the rebuttal refused to materialize. The words remained frustratingly out of reach. Instead, he found himself looking at her.
At the same girl who, only days earlier, had apologized repeatedly for an accidental collision in a hallway. The same girl who seemed to treat every inconvenience she caused, no matter how minor, as something requiring immediate atonement. The same girl who had stood silently while others directed their cruelty toward her, enduring it with a composure that had felt less like patience and more like long-practiced resignation. She had thanked him for a simple text message. Thanked him for defending her. Thanked him for things most people would have accepted without a second thought.
And yet she was also this.
Someone who annotated novels until the margins became crowded with thoughts and observations. Someone capable of dismantling his arguments without hostility and rebuilding them into something stronger. Someone who noticed details others overlooked and drew connections he had failed to consider despite reading the same pages. Every interpretation he had offered throughout the afternoon had been met not with agreement, but with genuine engagement.
She questioned. Expanded. Challenged. Not because she wanted to prove him wrong, but because she wanted to understand. The contradiction was strangely difficult to reconcile. Scaramouche had assumed her silence stemmed from passivity. That her tendency to retreat from confrontation reflected weakness or uncertainty.
Sitting across from her now, he realized how mistaken that assumption had been. There was nothing uncertain about the way she discussed something she cared about. Nothing passive about the conviction hidden beneath her quietness.
And perhaps what bothered him most was that talking to her... didn't feel exhausting.
"Fine. Five sections." His pen moved across the paper as he spoke. "I'll handle the introduction and the water imagery analysis. You take the section on the stranger-intimacy dynamic and the ending. We can split the conclusion."
"That works."
[Name] immediately began reorganizing her notes. Her pencil moved steadily across the page, turning scattered observations into a structured outline with the same meticulous attention she seemed to apply to everything involving books. Arrows connected ideas. Supporting passages were listed beneath section headings. Within moments, the blank page had transformed into something far more organized than anything Scaramouche had intended to produce.
"When should we meet again?" she asked without looking up. "We'll probably need another couple of sessions before the draft is due."
"Friday." The answer came immediately. "Same time. Same place."
"Okay." She noted it down before hesitating briefly.
The pencil paused above the paper. "And... thank you." The words were quiet enough that he almost missed them. "For actually discussing this." Her gaze turned toward the novel resting between them, visibly avoiding eye contact. "I figured you'd probably rather work on it yourself."
Scaramouche's immediate instinct was to dismiss the comment. A familiar response hovered somewhere at the edge of his thoughts, something dry and dismissive about group projects being inefficient or people being generally useless. The sort of answer she likely expected from him.
Instead, he found himself glancing toward the heavily annotated novel lying beside her notebook. "You actually read the book." The observation left him before he could reconsider it. "Most people would've looked up a summary and called it research."
The statement wasn't intended as praise. At least, not consciously. Yet the moment it left his mouth, he realized it sounded remarkably close to one.
Across the table, [Name] seemed caught off guard by it. Something softened briefly in her expression before she lowered her eyes once more. "It's a good book." A faint smile threatened to appear. "Depressing. But good."
Scaramouche leaned back slightly in his chair. "The good ones usually are."
After that, the conversation settled into a quieter rhythm.
The discussion never fully disappeared, but it became less frequent, surfacing only when one of them encountered a passage worth mentioning or disagreed with an interpretation scribbled in the margins. More often, the only sounds came from turning pages, the scratching of pens against paper, and the occasional rustle of notes being shifted across the table.
As the hours passed, the workspace between them expanded steadily. What had begun as two notebooks and a single novel gradually transformed into a landscape of loose papers, photocopied excerpts, annotated chapter summaries, and hastily written observations. Several pages overlapped one another in uneven stacks, while others had been pushed aside only to be retrieved later when a forgotten point became relevant again. Pens, sticky notes, and folded scraps of paper occupied nearly every available space. The assignment itself seemed to have spread across the table like the roots of a plant searching for room to grow.
Their notes reflected them with surprising accuracy.
Scaramouche's handwriting was compact and disciplined, each line straight and deliberate, every observation reduced to its most efficient form. His pages resembled architectural blueprints more than study notes, clean headings, numbered arguments, arrows connecting themes across chapters, conclusions distilled into precise statements. There was little wasted space and even less decoration. Every mark appeared intentional.
[Name]'s notes, by contrast, seemed alive. The margins filled as quickly as the pages themselves. Observations branched into questions, questions into further observations. Arrows crossed entire sheets to connect ideas separated by several paragraphs. Different colours distinguished recurring themes, while small comments crowded the spaces between larger analyses. Certain passages had been revisited so many times that the surrounding paper bore layers of graphite accumulated over multiple readings. Looking at her notes felt less like reading an outline and more like following the path of someone's thoughts as they unfolded.
At some point, Scaramouche became aware of something unusual.
He had stopped checking the clock.
Ordinarily, any prolonged social interaction was accompanied by constant calculations, how much longer he was expected to remain? the most efficient point at which he could leave without appearing rude, the distance between himself and the nearest exit. Such thoughts had become habitual over the years, operating almost independently of conscious effort.
Yet when he glanced toward the wall clock now, the position of the hands surprised him.
Far more time had passed than he realized.
It felt strangely disorienting. Because he hadn't spent the afternoon enduring a conversation. He had spent it having one.
Listening. Responding. Arguing over interpretations. Building ideas alongside someone else rather than retreating into his own thoughts. 'Weird,' his actions halted to a pause, heaving a subconscious sigh. 'I can't remember the last time a conversation didn't feel exhausting.'
The announcement came from the circulation desk with enough politeness to soften the inconvenience.
"Attention students, the library will be closing in fifteen minutes."
The words drifted through the room, breaking the concentration that had settled over their table throughout the afternoon. Both of them looked up almost immediately.
For a moment, neither seemed to understand what had been said. Then the meaning registered, accompanied by the surprising realization of how much time had passed unnoticed. The notebooks spread across the table, the loose pages covered in annotations, and the collection of half-finished outlines all stood as evidence of hours that had somehow disappeared without either of them keeping track.
"I should probably go." [Name] glanced toward the clock before beginning to gather her belongings. The process was characteristically methodical. Loose papers were stacked neatly together, stray notes tucked between notebook pages, pens returned to their proper place. Within minutes, the organized chaos that had occupied her side of the table vanished back into her bag.
"Same time Friday?"
"Yeah." Scaramouche was already shoving papers into his own bag with considerably less care. Several pages resisted cooperation and folded awkwardly in the process. "And actually read the chapters we're covering."
He zipped the bag shut. "I'm not carrying this project by myself."
A faint smile appeared at the corner of her mouth. "I will."
She rose from her chair and adjusted the strap resting against her shoulder, shifting the weight of her bag more comfortably against her side. Her foot moved as though to leave, only to stop before the step could be completed. The hand curled around the strap tightened slightly, fingers pressing into the fabric as uncertainty crossed her expression.
It was subtle enough that most people likely would not have noticed but Scaramouche saw it at the corners of his sight. His attention flickered toward her briefly before returning to his own belongings. Without acknowledging the hesitation, he swung his bag over one shoulder and pushed his chair neatly back beneath the table. The silence that followed felt deliberate, as though he were offering her the opportunity to speak without forcing her into it.
"This was..." The sentence finally faltered briefly. "I mean, I think we made good progress."
"It's a literature assignment, not a life-changing experience." The uncertainty lingering in her expression had not disappeared, as though she was still debating whether she should have said anything at all. Scaramouche held her gaze for a second before adding, "Don't get emotional about it." The remark carried the familiar shape of a jab, but the usual edge behind it was noticeably absent, softened by a tone that sounded far less dismissive than the words themselves.
[Name] nodded. The uncertainty that had lingered across her features eased slightly, replaced by something faintly amused before she turned toward the exit. Scaramouche watched her disappear between the shelves and through the library doors, his gaze lingering longer than necessary.
The familiar irritation from the previous evening returned almost immediately. Not because of anything she had done, but because he still couldn't quite make sense of the effect she seemed to have on him. He had expected quietness. Expected awkward conversations, forced cooperation, and the usual exhaustion that accompanied prolonged interaction with other people. Instead, she had challenged nearly every conclusion he offered, dismantled arguments he had considered solid, and forced him to reconsider interpretations he thought he understood.
Worse still, he had enjoyed it. The realization sat uncomfortably within him, impossible to ignore and equally impossible to explain.
By the time Scaramouche left the school grounds, darkness had already settled over the city. The digital clock mounted above the entrance displayed 7:02 PM, its pale numbers glowing against the evening.
Most of the school had emptied hours ago. The athletic fields stood abandoned behind chain-link fences, their floodlights extinguished. Classroom windows reflected the night like sheets of black glass, interrupted only by the occasional security light burning somewhere inside the building.
A cool breeze moved through the grounds, stirring loose leaves across the pavement and carrying the distant hum of traffic from roads beyond the school. The station lay several blocks ahead, marked by scattered streetlamps and the intermittent glow of passing cars.
As he walked, his thoughts repeatedly returned to a single sentence spoken across a table covered in notebooks and loose paper. Sometimes that's all a person can do. Be honest long enough for someone else to see what's actually there. The words lingered with unusual persistence, resurfacing each time he attempted to dismiss them. Irritatingly enough, he could not decide whether he disagreed with them or simply wished he did.
He had reached out. She had responded.
What should have remained a practical arrangement between classmates had somehow become something else entirely, a conversation that extended beyond deadlines, group assignments, and required cooperation. They had spent hours discussing a novel, yet the discussion itself lingered in his thoughts long after the pages had been closed.
Isolation.
Connection.
The peculiar loneliness of existing among other people while feeling fundamentally separate from them. Subjects that should have belonged solely to fictional characters had found their way into the spaces between them instead. Scaramouche disliked how much of that conversation remained with him. Disliked how easily it resurfaced whenever his thoughts wandered. Most of all, he disliked the unfamiliar feeling accompanying it, something warm enough to unsettle him, subtle enough to evade definition, and dangerous enough that he immediately tried to bury it beneath logic and dismissal.
By the time he boarded the bus, the city beyond the windows had dissolved into ribbons of reflected light streaking across the glass, road signs and passing buildings blending together beneath the darkness. He lowered himself into an empty seat and watched the scenery pass without truly seeing it. The familiar instinct to compartmentalize asserted itself quickly, urging him to file the afternoon away as nothing more than a successful study session.
A productive meeting. Nothing worth dwelling upon.
Yet the explanation felt increasingly insufficient. Somewhere between shared notes, literary debates, and observations neither of them had intended to reveal, something had shifted. The change was small enough to escape notice at first, yet impossible to ignore once recognized. And no matter how determined he was to dismiss it, Scaramouche found himself unable to return things to what they had been before.
Over the following days, the original purpose of their conversations gradually became more difficult to identify. The literature project still existed, technically speaking. Yet somewhere between late-night discussions about chapter analyses and casual observations exchanged throughout the school day, the distinction between project partner and person he regularly talked to had begun to blur.
Scaramouche could no longer remember exactly when it happened. More importantly, he discovered he had little interest in examining it too closely. The conversations continued because they did, and for once he found himself making no effort to stop them.
His phone vibrated against the desk shortly after lunch began. Scaramouche glanced down.
[Name]: Question
[Name]: Do you actually eat lunch or do you just materialize in classrooms fully sustained by spite?
The corner of his mouth twitched.
At that moment, he was occupying an abandoned classroom on the third floor, seated beside a window with an onigiri balanced in one hand and his phone in the other. Outside, the courtyard stretched beneath a pale afternoon sky. Students occupied their usual territories with remarkable consistency. Groups clustered beneath trees, gathered around benches, or occupied the same corners they claimed every day. Watching them often felt less like observing friendships and more like observing migration patterns.
A short laugh escaped him before he could stop it. The sound seemed oddly out of place within the empty classroom. His thumbs moved across the screen.
Scaramouche: Spite is surprisingly nutritious. Highly recommend.
The response appeared almost immediately.
[Name]: I'll keep that in mind for my dietary needs.
Scaramouche: What about you?
He typed back.
Scaramouche: Let me guess. You eat lunch alone somewhere forgettable, trying not to take up too much space.
The message was sent. Three dots appeared.
Disappeared.
Reappeared.
Then vanished again.
Scaramouche watched the screen longer than necessary. When her reply finally arrived, it was noticeably shorter than usual.
[Name]: Wow. Okay.
[Name]: Calling me out before noon.
[Name]: Bold choice.
Scaramouche: Am I wrong?
[Name]: No.
Scaramouche: Where are you right now?
Another long pause.
[Name]: Library. Second floor.
[Name]: Back corner behind the reference section where nobody goes.
Scaramouche stared at the message for several seconds. Then he looked at the half-finished onigiri resting on his desk. Then at the classroom door.
The response should have been obvious. Stay where he was. Finish lunch. Continue minding his own business. The library was on the opposite side of the building, and there was absolutely no reason for him to interrupt whatever she was doing. The thought lasted all of three seconds before he found himself stuffing his phone into his pocket and gathering his things with visible irritation.
His brain objected the entire way. His feet ignored it.
Scaramouche: Stay there.
The message was sent somewhere between descending the second flight of stairs and crossing the hallway connecting the academic wing to the library. By the time he arrived, the notification indicating the message had been delivered had long disappeared from his screen.
The library during lunch period occupied a peculiar space between busy and abandoned. Officially, students weren't permitted to eat there. Small signs reminding them of the rule had been posted throughout the room, tucked beside shelves and pinned near the circulation desk. In practice, however, enforcement depended almost entirely upon whether the librarian cared enough to intervene that day. Most students understood the unspoken arrangement.
Keep the noise down. Clean up after yourself and don't leave evidence behind.
A handful of students had taken advantage of that understanding. Scattered throughout the library were small pockets of occupied tables where lunches had been discreetly unpacked between stacks of textbooks and open notebooks. Conversations remained subdued, reduced to murmurs that rarely traveled beyond the nearest shelf. The occasional rustle of packaging blended with the turning of pages and the soft hum of the building's ventilation system.
Sunlight no longer reached many sections of the library at this hour, leaving entire aisles resting beneath the muted glow of fluorescent lights. The shelves stretched in orderly rows toward the rear of the room, creating narrow passageways and secluded corners where students could disappear for an entire lunch period without attracting attention.
It took Scaramouche surprisingly little time to find her.
She had chosen one of the most secluded locations available, a small table positioned near the back corner of the library, partially concealed behind a tall reference shelf and shielded from immediate view by several rows of books. Someone entering the room would have needed to deliberately look in that direction to notice the space at all. The location was neither accidental nor entirely hidden. It existed in that careful middle ground she seemed to prefer, distant enough to avoid unwanted attention while remaining accessible should someone genuinely wish to find her.
A lunch cloth had been spread neatly across the table's surface.
The arrangement upon it was almost meticulous. Few containers had been opened and positioned with quiet precision, each occupying its own designated place. White rice filled one compartment, while vegetables, tamagoyaki, and small side dishes occupied others. Nothing appeared store-bought. The portions were balanced. The presentation was tidy. Even the chopsticks rested perfectly parallel beside the containers.
It looked less like a hastily assembled school lunch and more like something prepared by someone who found comfort in routine, someone who measured ingredients carefully and folded corners neatly and preferred things to remain exactly where they belonged.
Surprise crossed her expression before she could conceal it. The reaction was subtle, visible only in the slight widening of her eyes and the way her posture straightened almost imperceptibly. It was clear she hadn't expected him to take the message seriously enough to leave whatever he had been doing and come looking for her.
"What are you doing here?"
Her voice barely rose above a whisper, instinctively lowered to avoid carrying through the library.
Scaramouche found himself looking at her longer than intended.
Not because he was searching for an answer. Quite the opposite. The question was straightforward enough, yet the reasoning behind his presence felt considerably less so. He had abandoned a perfectly acceptable lunch spot, crossed half the school building, and tracked her down in a corner of the library that most students likely didn't know existed. The decision had made perfect sense while he was doing it. Looking at her now, he was significantly less certain.
"Eating lunch. Obviously."
Without waiting for an invitation, he pulled out the chair opposite hers and sat down. The movement was casual enough to suggest he belonged there. His convenience store lunch landed on the table with a soft rustle of plastic packaging, immediately highlighting the difference between their meals. Her gaze flickered briefly toward the food before returning to him.
"You said you were on the third floor."
"I was."
Scaramouche unwrapped the onigiri. "Now I'm here. Try to keep up."
The response earned another look. Not annoyed sort of expression but merely puzzled.
She studied him in silence, as though attempting to identify a piece of information she was missing. Scaramouche could practically see the question forming behind her eyes. Why did you come? The problem was that he had already asked himself the same thing several times on the way over and had yet to produce an answer he found particularly convincing. So instead of addressing it, he took a bite of his lunch and pretended there was nothing unusual about any of this at all.
"You're going to make people talk," she said finally, her voice careful. "If they see us together."
"People always talk. That's what people do." He unwrapped his onigiri, taking a bite and chewing deliberately. "Besides, nobody comes back here. You know that yourself."
"Still."
"Still what? You want me to leave?"
"No." The answer arrived with immediate certainty, slipping out before she could temper it. Realization flickered across her expression an instant later. She lowered her gaze to her lunch, her fingers absently adjusting her chopsticks as if the small movement could occupy the discomfort settling beneath her skin. "I just don't want to make things harder for you."
"Things are already hard. That's baseline. You're not making anything worse."
"You don't know that."
"I know that I'm sitting here by choice. So unless you're planning to physically remove me, you're stuck with my company."
She looked up at him then, and something in her expression shifted, softened maybe, or just relaxed slightly. "You're really bad at being nice."
"I'm not being nice. I'm being practical. This corner has better lighting than the third floor, and you're less annoying than most people."
"Wow. 'Less annoying than most people.' I'm truly honored."
"You should be. That's basically a declaration of friendship in my language."
The sentence settled between them, and Scaramouche immediately wished he could take the words back. The comment had been intended as sarcasm, another dismissive remark thrown out without thought, yet somewhere between intention and delivery, it had emerged sounding far more sincere than he would have preferred. Across the table, [Name]'s expression shifted subtly. Surprise appeared first, followed by something quieter that she seemed unable to conceal quickly enough. It softened her features before caution returned, tempering it almost immediately.
"Is that what this is?" she asked. "Friendship?"
Scaramouche felt an unreasonable amount of irritation at the question. "It's a literature project." His answer arrived too quickly. "Don't read into it."
"Right. The project."
The words were accompanied by the faintest hint of amusement. Not enough to be called a smile outright, yet enough for him to notice. Irritatingly enough, he found himself noticing more often than he should.
After that, the conversation faded, leaving only the quiet sounds of lunch. By all reasonable standards, the situation should have felt awkward. Two students who had known each other for only a matter of weeks sat together in a secluded corner of the library, sharing neither a table nor a silence that conventionally belonged to them.
Yet the discomfort Scaramouche expected never arrived. The absence of conversation felt neither strained nor forced. It simply existed. Comfortable enough that neither felt compelled to fill it. He found himself eating without calculating when he could leave, without searching for an excuse to end the interaction and retreat elsewhere. The realization settled quietly in the back of his mind. Somehow, being there with her required remarkably little effort.
"Can I ask you something?" [Name] said eventually, her voice quiet.
"You're going to anyway."
"Why did you help me? That day with Hana and her friends. You didn't have to do that."
Scaramouche kept his eyes on his food, unwrapping his second onigiri with more focus than the task required. "I told you. They were being loud and annoying."
"That's not a reason to get involved."
"It's my reason."
"Scaramouche."
The sound of his name pulled his attention away from his lunch. He looked up and was met with a level gaze that made it immediately clear she wasn't going to let the conversation slide past so easily. There was a quiet certainty in her expression, an unwillingness to accept the explanation he'd offered simply because it was convenient.
It reminded him, irritatingly enough, of the way she'd called him out over text days earlier, the same tendency to look past whatever answer was being handed to her and search for the one underneath it. Scaramouche held her gaze for a second before looking away with a click of his tongue.
"I don't like bullies," he said at last. "That's it. That's the whole reason. Don't turn it into something it isn't."
"Okay." The response came easily enough, though the slight tilt of her head suggested she remained unconvinced. Still, she let the matter rest, lowering her gaze to her lunch rather than pressing further. Her fingers adjusted the lid of one container before she spoke again.
"Thank you."
Scaramouche frowned. "For what?"
"For that day." Her voice softened slightly. "I never actually thanked you for it."
The words settled between them, simple and sincere in a way that made him unexpectedly uncomfortable. "Don't. It's weird."
"Accepting gratitude is weird?"
"Yes. Extremely. Stop doing it."
She laughed, a soft sound that seemed to surprise her as much as it surprised him. "You're so strange."
"Says the girl hiding in the library reference section."
"Fair point."
They finished the remainder of their lunch without much conversation. The silence that settled between them required no effort to maintain and no urgency to break. Eventually, the bell rang through the building, its sound muffled by walls and shelves yet unmistakable all the same. Chairs shifted. Bags were gathered. The brief illusion of stillness dissolved as movement returned to the room.
Scaramouche remained seated for a second longer than necessary, his gaze drifting toward the rows of shelves surrounding their corner. He didn't particularly want to leave.
The thought felt absurd enough to irritate him. For years, solitude had been something carefully cultivated, a preference refined through habit until it became second nature. Yet this felt different. Sitting across from [Name] in a corner of the library that most students overlooked did not resemble the isolation he had spent years constructing around himself. There was no tension in it.
The space felt quiet not because he had driven everyone away from it, but because he had chosen to share it with someone. The distinction was subtle, yet impossible to ignore. And though Scaramouche disliked admitting it even to himself, the feeling was surprisingly pleasant.
'Hey, Mom.'
Scaramouche walked at an unhurried pace toward the bus station, his hands tucked into the pockets of his blazer as the city settled into its evening rhythm. The streets had begun to thin, leaving only scattered pedestrians weaving past convenience stores and small family-owned shops preparing to close for the day. Bicycle wheels rattled over uneven pavement before disappearing into narrower side streets, while the soft chime of a crossing signal echoed briefly at the intersection ahead.
A delivery truck idled outside a grocery store as workers unloaded crates of produce, their quiet conversations blending into the distant hum of passing traffic. The faint scent of brewed coffee drifted from a café he passed, quickly replaced by the aroma of grilled meat and simmering broth escaping from nearby restaurants where the first dinner customers had begun to gather.
The familiar route required little thought after years of repetition, allowing his feet to carry him forward almost automatically while his mind wandered elsewhere.
'The new girl I mentioned before...' He frowned.
No, that sounded too distant, like she was still just another classmate.
'Remember that girl I told you about?' The thought took shape slowly, his mind turning over different words before settling on any of them.
It was a peculiar habit, speaking to someone who could neither respond nor acknowledge that he had spoken at all. Years ago, he might have called it pointless.
Now, he tried not to question it. The silence that filled his mother's hospital room had never stopped him from talking. If anything, it had become the only place where he could arrange the scattered pieces of his thoughts without interruption.
Whether she heard him or not had long since stopped mattering. Telling her had simply become his way of making sense of things he didn't yet understand himself.
'We've been talking a lot lately.'
His shoulders tensed immediately. No, that sounded wrong, like they've been too close with one another. The sentence carried a subconscious warmth he wasn't comfortable hearing from himself.
He tried again.
'We've been working on that literature project together.'
He considered, it was technically true.
But somehow it felt incomplete, like he was deliberately leaving out the part that actually mattered.
Another sigh escaped him.
'She likes books.'
'She's really good at understanding them.'
His brows knit together.
That wasn't right either.
It sounded like he was reviewing a character from a novel instead of talking about an actual person.
The words dissolved before they had the chance to settle.
Silence stretched between each step.
'I think...'
'I like talking to her.'
Scaramouche stopped walking.
His face immediately twisted into something between disbelief and irritation.
What the hell was that?
He almost laughed at himself.
The sentence lingered in his head despite every attempt to dismiss it. The more he tried to replace it with something less embarrassing, the more stubbornly it remained.
He dragged a hand roughly through his hair.
'Forget it.'
'I'm not saying that.'
When had this become something he even wanted to tell her?
Of all the things he could have spoken about tomorrow, it wasn't another exam, another pointless argument at school, or even the stack of novels he'd finished over the past week that occupied his thoughts. Instead, it was a girl. A girl he'd known for only a few weeks, yet who had somehow slipped so naturally into his daily routine that he found himself instinctively wanting to mention her.
"...I sound pathetic," he muttered beneath his breath.
The words earned nothing except the faint scrape of his own shoes against the pavement.
By the time he reached the shopping district, the streets had begun emptying. Store owners pulled half their shutters down while warm lights flickered to life behind glass storefronts. The sky overhead had softened into layers of pale gold melting gradually into muted violet near the horizon, the last traces of daylight stretching thin across the rooftops. He adjusted the strap resting over one shoulder and turned toward the bus terminal at the end of the street.
He had barely taken a few more steps when something caught his attention.
Scaramouche slowed until stopped entirely.
"...Seriously?"
Several meters ahead stood a figure he recognized almost immediately.
[Name].
She lingered near the bus stop sign with her phone held loosely in one hand, glancing down at the screen before lifting her head to study the streets around her. Her gaze wandered from one intersection to another, then back to the display, repeating the same motion with increasing uncertainty. Every few seconds she pivoted slightly, as though comparing what the map insisted should be there with the reality surrounding her.
She looked... lost.
Scaramouche stared at her for another second before letting out a long, exhausted sigh.
"...You've got to be kidding me."
"I'm sorry."
The apology left [Name]'s lips with the effortless familiarity of a word that had long ceased to require thought. It drifted between them almost as naturally as the evening breeze weaving through the streets, disappearing into the open air before it could linger.
Scaramouche didn't acknowledge it immediately. His stride remained unhurried, hands still buried deep inside the pockets of his blazer as he continued along the sidewalk without so much as turning his head. A faint crease settled between his brows, not enough to suggest genuine annoyance, but enough to betray the quiet effort of holding it at bay.
The wind wandered through the narrow streets like an invisible current threading its way between buildings, lifting loose strands of indigo hair that brushed lightly across his cheek before scattering again in restless directions. It tugged lazily at the hem of his blazer and carried with it the mingled scents of old paper, fresh bread cooling behind bakery windows, and rain that still lingered faintly within the cracks of the pavement from days before.
"It's fine," he replied at last, his voice carrying its usual blunt edge. "You've said that... what, five times already? Are you trying to beat your own record from the day you walked into me?"
[Name] looked at him, instinctively drawing breath to apologize again before catching herself halfway through the first syllable. The word dissolved into a quiet sigh instead. Her gaze slipped toward the ground. "...Force of habit."
Scaramouche let out a short scoff. "It's a terrible habit."
She raised an eyebrow, giving him a look that hovered somewhere between mild offense and reluctant amusement. "I just felt bad since you have a quiz tomorrow," she admitted quietly. "I thought I was getting in the way."
The words settled between them without demanding an immediate answer.
Come to think of it, he still couldn't explain why he had approached her in the first place. The easier option had been obvious. He could have looked away the moment he recognized her, boarded the next bus home without interruption, and spent the rest of the evening reviewing the mathematics notes scattered across his desk. The quiz waiting for him the following morning wasn't one he could afford to neglect, especially in the advanced mathematics class where every lesson seemed intent on outrunning the last.
None of what happened at the bus stop had been his responsibility. She had simply been another student standing there, visibly lost in a part of the city she didn't know, and he could have left without a second thought. Instead, before logic had the opportunity to present its arguments, his feet had already changed direction.
His body had crossed the street almost instinctively, his voice offering help before his mind had even decided whether it wanted to. It wasn't that he regretted helping her. What bothered him was how naturally the decision had come, as though some quiet part of himself had already made up its mind long before he had become aware of it.
Scaramouche remained silent for several steps, the steady rhythm of their footsteps carrying the conversation forward in their place. Another breeze wandered beneath the canopy of roadside trees, slipping through branches before brushing against his face. Several loose strands of hair fell across his eyes. With an absent motion born entirely of habit, he lifted a hand and swept them back, only for the wind to undo the effort almost immediately. His fingers lingered briefly against his temple before falling back to his side.
"...Yeah, well," he muttered. "Studying an hour earlier doesn't magically make you smarter."
He glanced sideways. The faint crease of worry hadn't left her expression. For reasons he couldn't quite explain, the look in her face bothered him.
His shoulders relaxed almost imperceptibly as he looked ahead once more. "It's fine," he repeated, quieter now, the sharpness that usually accompanied his words softening without his noticing. "If it actually bothered me that much, I would've just kept walking."
The sentence slipped out with surprising ease.
Scaramouche frowned inwardly for the briefest moment before deciding it wasn't worth examining too closely. Instead, he shifted the conversation elsewhere, his gaze following the road stretching toward the shopping district ahead where rows of storefronts gradually came into view beyond the trees.
"Why are you going all the way to Yae Publishing House anyway?"
"I wanted to pick up a few books."
"A few?" His question was replied with a nod, "there's some books I've been meaning to read."
Scaramouche finally looked at her. "Oh?" his expression changed from visible irritation to what looked like a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips without himself even realizing it, his eyebrows furrowed together in thought before a quiet laugh left his lips, "so you're one of those people."
[Name] glanced at him in confusion, their eyes meeting as they looked at each other. "What people?"
"The kind that walks into a bookstore and buys books based on how aesthetic the cover is." He knew full well she wasn't. Anyone who annotated novels the way she did and paid haevy attention on the book's content and its meaning clearly cared about more than dust jackets and foil lettering. [Name] looked genuinely offended, making his amusement grow more. "What? No." She looked at him with an expression of disblief, as if such words shocked her heavily especially coming from someone like him, "I actually read the books I buy!"
She rolled her eyes, "unlike some people who fill shelves just to look intellectual." The last sentence came out under her breath.
Another laugh escaped him, warmer this time. "So you've got opinions too." He tilted his head thoughtfully, "What kind of stuff do you even read? Let me guess, romance novels with protagonists who have no personaluty beyond being clumsy and relatable."
A firm shove landed squarely against his shoulder without warning. The force was hardly enough to hurt, yet it caught Scaramouche completely off guard, disrupting his stride just as he shifted his weight forward. His balance faltered for an instant, one foot instinctively stepping sideways to steady himself before he could recover. The movement pulled a quiet click of annoyance from his tongue as he straightened, smoothing the front of his blazer with an absent brush of his hand before turning toward the culprit.
[Name] had finally succeeded in drawing his full attention. She looked up at him from the corner of her eye, her brows knit together in unmistakable offense, the earlier indignation still lingering across her features with surprising persistence. One hand adjusted the strap of her bag higher against her shoulder, the motion accompanied by a faint huff that carried more wounded pride than genuine irritation. "You have a very low opinion of my taste."
"For your information, I just finished rereading Kokoro. Again."
He was quiet for a moment, reassessing. "That's... not what I expected."
"What did you expect? Twilight?"
"Something like that." He shoved his hands deeper into the pockets of his blazer, "Kokoro's depressing as hell. The whole thing is just about guilt and isolation and the impossibility of truly knowing another person."
"I know. That's why it's good." [Name]'s voice carried an unmistakable note of quiet conviction, the kind that surfaced only when the subject mattered to her. "The way Sensei carries that weight his entire life, the way he can never escape what he did to K, it's honest. Most books try to make you feel better about being human. Sōseki just shows you how much it costs."
Scaramouche's footsteps slowed almost imperceptibly, studying her profile with an expression that had softened into something thoughtful before he even realized it. There was no trace of hesitation in the way she spoke, no rehearsed analysis borrowed from classrooms or review articles. She wasn't repeating interpretations she'd read somewhere else. She had reached those conclusions herself. It was obvious in the certainty behind every sentence, in the way her words carried genuine understanding rather than the desire to sound intelligent.
"You actually get it."
[Name] blinked.
"Get what?"
"Why it matters." His attention drifted back toward the sidewalk stretching ahead, though his voice remained unusually engaged. "Most people read that book for class and complain about how nothing happens, how it's just people talking and feeling bad. They don't understand that the nothing happening is the point. That sometimes the worst violence is the kind that happens in silence."
"Exactly." She looked at him with unconcealed surprise, her eyes widening just slightly before a small, almost incredulous smile touched her lips. "I didn't think you'd— I mean, you don't seem like someone who'd care about Meiji-era literature."
"I don't seem like someone who reads at all?"
"That's not what I meant."
"But it's what you thought." There wasn't any irritation in his voice, only quiet observation, as though he had grown accustomed to reaching the same conclusion about how people perceived him. "People see the hostile loner act and assume I spend all my time brooding in corners. They don't consider that I might actually have interests beyond making everyone uncomfortable."
"Okay, fair. I'm sorry for assuming." She paused. A brief silence settled between them after his words. It wasn't uncomfortable, merely contemplative, as though both of them had become aware that the conversation had quietly wandered beyond books and into something far more personal. "So what else have you read? If you're going to judge my taste, I get to judge yours."
"I don't have taste. I just read whatever's good."
"That's a cop-out answer."
Scaramouche considered for a moment. "Dazai. Obviously. No Longer Human is required reading for anyone who's ever felt like they're performing humanity rather than living it."
"Gosh, yes! That book destroyed me." [Name]'s voice carried genuine enthusiasm now, neither of them realizing how close they were walking the more they talked. "The way Yozo describes feeling like an alien observing human customs from the outside, never quite understanding the rules everyone else seems to know instinctively—"
"It's like reading your own thoughts written by someone decades before you were born," Scaramouche finished. "Proof that this particular kind of alienation isn't new. People have been feeling like fraudulent humans for generations."
"That's either comforting or deeply depressing."
"Both. That's what makes it good literature."
The streets unfolded around them in an endless procession of narrow streets and weathered storefronts, each one carrying the quiet imprint of decades spent watching people come and go. Small family-owned shops stood shoulder to shoulder beneath faded awnings, their windows crowded with books, groceries, stationery, and trinkets arranged in careful disorder that somehow felt more inviting than immaculate displays ever could.
Vending machines hummed patiently beside brick walls softened by creeping ivy, while bicycles rested against rusted railings as though their owners had only stepped away for a moment. Apartment balconies leaned overhead, crowded with potted plants and freshly laundered clothes swaying gently above the sidewalks. The streets possessed a lived-in warmth, not polished enough to be picturesque, yet filled with the quiet beauty that only accumulated through years of ordinary life. It reminded Scaramouche of an old novel whose pages had yellowed with age, not pristine, but richer for every crease and worn corner it had collected.
The roads narrowed into quieter neighborhoods where towering trees stretched their branches above the pavement, weaving a canopy that sheltered the street beneath like the ceiling of an old cathedral. Leaves whispered softly whenever the wind passed through them, scattering shadows that drifted lazily across shopfronts and cracked stone paths.
Warm signs glowed beneath the foliage, their light spilling gently onto stacks of books displayed outside secondhand stores and cafés tucked into forgotten corners, while handwritten menus and aging wooden signboards hinted at places that had long outlived changing trends. The entire district seemed to breathe at its own unhurried pace, suspended somewhere between memory and the present, as though time itself had chosen to slow down within its streets. Walking through it felt less like crossing a city and more like wandering through the margins of a well-loved book, where every storefront, every alleyway, and every weathered bench carried the lingering traces of stories quietly waiting to be discovered.
"What about contemporary stuff?" [Name] asked. "Or do you only read things written by dead Japanese authors?"
"I read Murakami. Before you say anything, I know he's polarizing. People either love him or think he's pretentious garbage."
"Which camp are you in?"
"Both, depending on the book." Scaramouche's tone was matter-of-fact. "Kafka on the Shore is genuinely good. The metaphysical stuff actually serves the story instead of just being weird for the sake of weird. But some of his other work feels like he's trying too hard to be profound."
"That's a surprisingly nuanced take."
"I contain multitudes. Try not to look so shocked."
[Name] laughed, a genuine sound that seemed to surprise her. "Okay, but Kafka on the Shore, the part with Nakata and the cats. That whole section about language and consciousness and what it means to lose yourself—"
"The idea that you can be so traumatized that you literally lose the ability to read, to access the symbolic systems that make you human," Scaramouche said, his voice taking on a sharper edge. "And then spending your whole life as this empty vessel, simple and kind because you don't have enough self left to be anything else."
"You sound like you've thought about that a lot."
"It's an interesting concept. The idea that trauma doesn't just hurt you, it erases you. Removes the parts that made you a person and leaves something simpler behind."
Their conversation gradually gave way to a companionable silence, leaving only the measured rhythm of their footsteps against the pavement. From the corner of her eye, [Name] found herself studying him with quiet curiosity. This wasn't the version of Scaramouche she had expected to discover. At school, he carried himself like the sharpened edge of a blade, precise, distant, and deliberately difficult to approach, moving through crowded hallways with the detached confidence of someone who neither sought nor welcomed company.
Yet the person walking beside her now spoke of novels with a familiarity that reached far beyond simply having read them. He remembered passages without effort, dismantled themes with careful precision, questioned authors as though arguing with them directly, and discussed fictional lives with the same seriousness most people reserved for reality.
It was the kind of understanding that could only come from someone who had spent countless hours lingering within the pages of books, returning to them not merely to follow a story but to inhabit it, to pull apart every sentence until the meaning beneath it revealed itself. Beneath the abrasive remarks and habitual sarcasm existed a mind that observed with remarkable attentiveness, one that had concealed itself so thoroughly behind indifference that she wondered how many people had ever cared enough to notice it at all.
The conversation then drifted from one author to another with the ease of people rediscovering well-loved shelves, debating the quiet optimism woven through Banana Yoshimoto's novels before wandering into discussions about Salinger's restless cynicism, Ishiguro's restrained tragedies, and the peculiar loneliness that seemed to bind so many of the stories they admired.
They challenged each other's interpretations without hesitation, interrupted one another only to build upon the other's point, disagreed over endings, characters, and the purpose of literature itself, yet never with enough force to sour the conversation.
Scaramouche found himself speaking with an enthusiasm he rarely afforded anyone, while [Name] matched every observation with one thoughtful enough to make him reconsider his own. Somewhere between arguing whether books should reflect reality or possibility, whether hope belonged in fiction or merely comforted its readers, and laughing over their increasingly ridiculous assumptions about each other's reading habits, the world beyond their conversation gradually receded.
The steady flow of pedestrians, the passing traffic, even the gradual cooling of the evening dissolved into little more than distant movement at the edge of their awareness. By the time the discussion finally lulled into silence, they realized they had been standing directly in front of Yae Publishing House the entire time, its broad windows filled with neatly arranged displays of newly released novels only a few steps away. Neither of them could remember exactly when they had arrived.
Yae Publishing House stood quietly at the corner of the street beneath the broad canopy of an old tree whose thick branches stretched protectively across the storefront, filtering the afternoon into shifting patches of light that wandered lazily over the brick façade. Time had weathered the building with quiet dignity rather than neglect, reddish-brown bricks framed tall windows that reflected fragments of the surrounding neighborhood, while a deep mustard-colored awning extended above the entrance, its fabric gently stirring whenever the breeze found its way beneath the leaves.
Through the open glass doors, rows upon rows of books rose in neat columns toward the ceiling, their colorful spines catching the warm glow of hanging lights that spilled invitingly onto the pavement outside. Wooden display stands crowded the entrance with newly released novels and carefully arranged recommendations, while handwritten placards rested beside them in elegant brushstrokes, lending the place the unmistakable charm of a bookstore curated by people who genuinely loved literature rather than merely sold it.
The entire building seemed almost hidden beneath the embrace of the towering tree overhead, as though the years had allowed nature and architecture to grow comfortably around one another, turning the publishing house into less of a storefront and more of a quiet sanctuary tucked away from the relentless pace of the city beyond.
"Are you going back now?"
[Name]'s voice broke the quiet as she turned toward him, catching Scaramouche still standing a few steps behind the entrance, his attention wandering over the building from the weathered brick exterior to the broad awning overhead before drifting through the glass storefront where endless rows of books disappeared into the warmly lit interior. His gaze lingered there for another second before shifting to meet hers. One corner of his mouth curved upward almost imperceptibly.
"I came all the way here with you and you're already making me leave?" He tilted his head with exaggerated disbelief, one hand pressing lightly against his chest in an almost theatrical display of offense. "I'm hurt."
The gesture was so deliberately insincere that [Name] immediately recognized it for what it was. She frowned, though the corners of her lips threatened to betray her with the beginning of a smile. Before she could answer, however, the expression faded almost as quickly as it had appeared. Her eyes dropped toward the pavement.
"Actually..."
The single word lingered unfinished.
Scaramouche's posture gradually straightened. He had begun recognizing these small shifts in her without consciously meaning to. The way her shoulders drew inward. The way her fingers found the strap of her bag whenever uncertainty crept into her thoughts. The slight hesitation before speaking whenever she was trying to decide whether something should remain unsaid. His hand settled against his hip as he waited, expecting her to continue. Instead, silence stretched between them.
His brows slowly drew together.
"What?"
"I..." She swallowed almost inaudibly. "I came here to see Kazuha."
Everything about him stilled.
The faint trace of amusement disappeared from his face so quietly it was almost imperceptible. His lips parted as though to respond immediately, yet no words came. The hand resting against his chest dropped loosely to his side while the other slipped away from his hip, leaving him standing unnaturally still. His expression settled into something carefully blank, but not quickly enough to conceal the brief flicker that crossed it first. Confusion. Then something sharper. A restrained irritation that surfaced before he had the chance to bury it beneath indifference.
"...Kazuha?"
The name sounded strangely unfamiliar leaving his own mouth.
"Why are you meeting him here?"
[Name] looked back at him, the question catching her off guard. Something in his expression had changed so abruptly that she instinctively became more cautious herself. Her fingers tightened around the strap resting against her shoulder. "He mentioned this place after practice," she explained quietly. "Said they have a good selection of contemporary fiction."
She hesitated, her gaze lowering once more.
"And I wanted to apologize to him."
Scaramouche's brow furrowed a little deeper.
"...Apologize for what?"
"For being rude. He was the first person to approach me when I transferred school. But when he tried to talk to me, I kept pushing him away because I was scared." Her voice grew quieter with each sentence, the words leaving her carefully, as though she had rehearsed them countless times without ever quite finding the right way to say them. She paused, unaware that the expression on Scaramouche's face had begun to change.
"But he was just being kind, and I treated that kindness like it was something bad."
Her gaze fell to the pavement between them, lingering on the cracks running through the stone as though they were easier to face than his eyes. "He didn't deserve that. So I'm going to apologize and try to explain, even though I'm not sure I can explain it in a way that makes sense."
Something settled heavily inside Scaramouche's chest. It was colder than pain, a quiet heaviness that spread without urgency, gradually filling the spaces where the easy rhythm of their conversation had been only moments before. His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly as he stared ahead, the name she'd spoken echoing through his thoughts with an insistence that irritated him precisely because he couldn't explain why it did.
Was he jealous?
"...Kazuha."
"Yeah."
The reply came so naturally that it only deepened the strange discomfort coiling beneath his ribs.
He should have left. The thought presented itself with perfect clarity. He had done what she'd needed him to do. She had arrived safely. His responsibility, if it had ever been his responsibility to begin with, should have ended here. All he had to do was say goodbye, turn around, and continue toward the bus station before it grew any later.
He could still make it home in time to review for tomorrow's quiz. He could leave her to meet the boy who seemed to move effortlessly through other people's lives, offering kindness with such ease that even someone as guarded as [Name] had found herself wanting to apologize for pushing him away. Instead, Scaramouche remained exactly where he was.
Then, before he had consciously arrived at the decision, his feet carried him forward.
One step.
Then another.
The glass entrance drew closer with each quiet stride.
Stepping through the entrance felt less like entering a bookstore and more like wandering into a quiet maze assembled entirely from stories. Narrow aisles branched gently in different directions, bordered by tall wooden shelves packed so densely with books that only thin slivers of the shelving itself remained visible between colorful spines.
New releases occupied carefully arranged display tables near the entrance, their covers angled outward beneath handwritten recommendation cards that spoke with the unmistakable enthusiasm of devoted booksellers. Above, warm pendant lamps and paper lanterns cast a mellow amber glow across polished wooden floors, their light catching dust motes that drifted lazily through the still air like tiny embers suspended in time. The faint scent of ink, aged paper, and freshly printed pages lingered everywhere, blending seamlessly with the subtle aroma of brewed coffee drifting from a small reading corner tucked farther inside. Soft instrumental music flowed almost imperceptibly through hidden speakers, never loud enough to intrude upon the quiet murmur of turning pages or the occasional rustle of shoppers carefully browsing the shelves.
Every corner of the store seemed deliberately lived in rather than meticulously arranged, handwritten staff recommendations, neatly stacked magazines, literary journals, and small displays of bookmarks and stationery filled the spaces between towering bookshelves, giving the impression that the building had grown naturally around its books over many years. It possessed the quiet intimacy of a sanctuary, a place where time surrendered its urgency, inviting every visitor to slow their steps and lose themselves among countless voices waiting patiently behind paper and ink.
Kazuha was already there.
He stood near the fiction section, his school bag set on the floor beside him, still wearing his practice clothes, athletic pants and a jacket with the school's emblem. His hair was slightly damp, suggesting he'd showered after whatever sport he'd been playing. He was flipping through a book, his expression relaxed and content, completely absorbed in whatever he was reading.
Then he looked up.
Scaramouche caught the change the instant it happened. Kazuha's expression had brightened the moment he recognized [Name], the warmth arriving naturally, almost effortlessly. Yet as his gaze shifted and settled on Scaramouche standing beside her, that openness receded with quiet restraint. It wasn't hostility, nor was it overt displeasure. The easy warmth simply withdrew behind careful composure, subtle enough that most people might have overlooked it. To Scaramouche, however, it resembled the slow closing of wooden shutters before an approaching storm, not forcefully slammed shut, but deliberately drawn until nothing of the light behind them remained visible.
The warmth that usually radiated from Kazuha like heat from a fire simply vanished.
"[Name]."
Kazuha was the first to speak. His voice retained the same gentle courtesy it always carried, calm enough that anyone passing by would have heard nothing unusual. Yet beneath that familiar warmth rested a new restraint, almost imperceptible but undeniably present. Each word seemed chosen with greater care than necessary, as though he had become acutely aware of the person standing beside her.
His attention remained on [Name], though the briefest flicker of his gaze had already acknowledged Scaramouche's presence before returning to her.
"What are you doing here?"
"I wanted to go see you." [Name] glanced between the two of them, her eyes lingering for only a second as though searching for something she couldn't quite name. The subtle shift in the atmosphere hadn't escaped her notice. The conversation had grown noticeably heavier, though she seemed unable to identify where the weight had come from. "And talk with you a bit."
Only then did Kazuha look directly at Scaramouche.
The silence lasted no more than a heartbeat, yet it was long enough for something unspoken to pass between them. His expression remained composed, courteous even, but there was a quiet attentiveness in his gaze that resembled someone carefully measuring the distance between himself and an unfamiliar cliff's edge. Scaramouche met it without hesitation, his own expression flattening into practiced indifference.
"Is he bothering you?"
The question settled awkwardly in the space between them.
Scaramouche's jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. Not because of the concern itself, but because of the assumption hidden beneath it. Before he could respond, [Name] spoke almost immediately, her voice carrying a quiet urgency as though hoping to smooth over a tension she still couldn't fully understand.
"Oh no, he actually helped me get here."
Kazuha's eyes returned to her, and with that movement, the guarded edge softened once more. "How fortunate." A small smile appeared across his face, gentle as ever, though it was unmistakably meant for her alone. His gaze briefly shifted back toward Scaramouche before settling once more on [Name]. "I didn't realize you two were... walking together."
"We weren't." Scaramouche answered before [Name] had the opportunity to respond. His voice was level, stripped of emotion, each word delivered with the detached certainty of someone correcting an insignificant misunderstanding. Beside him, [Name] turned slightly, her brows drawing together in quiet confusion as she looked up at him, clearly caught off guard by the interruption. He never acknowledged her glance.
His eyes remained fixed on Kazuha, unwavering. "I was going to the bus stop. She was going the wrong direction. I corrected her trajectory. That's all."
"I see." Kazuha's fingers rested upon the spine of the book he had been holding. Without taking his eyes completely off the two of them, he slid it carefully back into its place on the shelf, aligning it with the surrounding volumes until its edge sat perfectly flush among the others. The movement was calm, almost meticulous, as though he refused to allow even the smallest gesture to betray whatever thoughts had briefly crossed his mind.
Only after the book had settled into place did he look back toward Scaramouche.
"Well, thank you for helping her."
The gratitude was impeccably polite. It left no room for continuation.
To anyone else, it might have sounded like the natural conclusion to an ordinary exchange. To Scaramouche, however, it resembled the quiet closing of a door. The conversation had reached its acceptable endpoint. He had been acknowledged, thanked, and, just as subtly, dismissed.
He understood the invitation perfectly. All he had to do was leave.
Turn around.
Walk back toward the station.
Return to the evening he had intended to spend solving equations and memorizing formulas instead of standing inside a bookstore between two people whose conversation no longer required him, yet his body refused. Some stubborn, unreasonable impulse rooted him exactly where he stood. His hands remained buried inside his pockets, shoulders relaxed, expression emptied of anything readable.
Across from him, Kazuha met his gaze with the same composed attentiveness, neither of them looking away first. "You're welcome," Scaramouche replied, his tone carrying just enough quiet sharpness to make his intentions unmistakable. "Nice place. I can see why you'd recommend it."
Kazuha inclined his head ever so slightly. "It is. The owner has excellent taste in contemporary fiction."
"Contemporary fiction." Scaramouche repeated the words as though testing them for flaws. His mouth curved into something so faint it hardly qualified as a smile. "Let me guess, you're into the kind of books where broken people learn to heal through the power of friendship and positive thinking."
"Is there something wrong with stories about healing?"
The question hung in the narrow aisle between them. "There is when they're dishonest." Scaramouche's reply came without hesitation. His gaze remained fixed on Kazuha, unwavering. "When they pretend that caring about people is enough to fix them. That kindness is some kind of magic spell that makes trauma disappear."
Something shifted behind Kazuha's calm expression. The easy warmth that usually softened his features receded, leaving behind a composure that felt noticeably firmer.
"I never said it was magic." His voice remained measured, but a quiet resolve had settled beneath every syllable. "But it's better than your approach."
"My approach?"
"Pushing everyone away. Acting like isolation is some kind of virtue. Treating anyone who tries to connect with you like they're the problem." Kazuha's eyes never left his. "You act like you're the only person who's ever been hurt, like that gives you permission to hurt everyone else."
Scaramouche's expression didn't change. His posture remained loose, one shoulder resting casually against the bookshelf beside him, hands still buried inside his pockets. Yet something almost imperceptible tightened beneath that practiced stillness. The silence before he answered stretched only a heartbeat longer than usual.
"I don't hurt people," he said. "I just don't pretend to be something I'm not. Unlike some people who collect broken classmates like charity cases to make themselves feel noble."
"That's not what I'm doing."
"Isn't it?" Scaramouche tilted his head only slightly. "You see someone struggling and you swoop in with your perfect smile, acting like you're saving them. But you're not actually helping. You're just making yourself feel good about being the hero."
"At least I try."
Kazuha took a single step forward. The distance separating them contracted until the air itself seemed to tighten, like the moment before two opposing currents finally collided.
"At least I don't look at someone who's suffering and decide they deserve it because they're not performing gratitude the right way."
"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"
Beside them, [Name]'s eyes moved quickly between the two boys, confusion written plainly across her face as she struggled to understand how a conversation about books had unraveled into something she hadn't even realized had existed beneath the surface.
"Um... you two—"
"You don't know anything about me."
"I know enough." Kazuha's voice never rose. If anything, it became quieter, the restraint in it making every word land with greater certainty. His expression remained composed, yet the gentleness that usually defined it had been replaced by something resolute, as though he had long since decided that some things were worth saying even if they invited conflict.
"I know you're terrified of being vulnerable that you'd rather be alone forever than risk letting someone in. I know you look at people like me and decide we're fake because we're not as miserable as you are. I know you think suffering makes you special, it makes you more real than everyone else."
"And I know you think being nice makes you better than everyone else," Scaramouche shot back, the sharpness in his voice slicing cleanly through the aisle's suffocating stillness. "That your kindness is somehow more authentic because you smile while you do it. But you're just as judgmental as anyone else. You just hide it better."
"I'm not judging you for being hurt. I'm judging you for using your hurt as a weapon against people who don't deserve it."
"You don't get to tell me how to—"
"I'm not telling you anything." Kazuha didn't allow him to finish. "I'm asking you to think about someone other than yourself for once. To consider that your actions have consequences. That when you push people away, it actually hurts them."
Silence settled over the aisle with startling weight.
The quiet instrumental music drifting through the bookstore continued without interruption, impossibly serene against the invisible fault line that had split the room in two. Somewhere farther inside the shop, a customer turned the page of a book. A cashier quietly scanned another purchase. The ordinary sounds of the bookstore carried on as though nothing had happened, yet within the narrow space between the three of them, the atmosphere had become so taut it felt capable of snapping beneath the slightest movement.
[Name] remained rooted where she stood.
Her eyes moved uncertainly between Scaramouche and Kazuha, searching each face as though hoping one of them would explain what she had somehow missed. Confusion gave way to disbelief, disbelief slowly yielding to something quieter, something that bothered her far more deeply.
Only moments earlier, she had imagined this meeting unfolding very differently. She had come to return an apology that had weighed quietly on her conscience for weeks, to tell Kazuha she regretted meeting his patience with distance, that she finally understood kindness didn't always arrive carrying hidden conditions, and that she wanted to learn how to accept it instead of shrinking away from it.
Yet as she watched him now, listened to the certainty with which he spoke about someone whose burdens he had never carried, that carefully rehearsed resolve began to fracture. The image she had pieced together of him, built from quiet conversations and unwavering gentleness, shifted ever so slightly, like light striking polished glass at a different angle and revealing imperfections that had always been there, simply hidden from view.
Compassion, she realized, could become strangely rigid when it decided it already understood another person's pain.
Before she could untangle the growing conflict in her thoughts or gather the words that had seemed so certain only minutes ago, Scaramouche had already turned away. His footsteps were measured, neither hurried nor hesitant, carrying him toward the bookstore entrance with the quiet finality of someone drawing a line beneath a conversation he no longer wished to continue. "I'm leaving." The words reached her only after he'd begun walking, pulling her abruptly from the whirlwind of thoughts that had rooted her in place.
"Wait— hey!"
Her voice followed him through the bookstore, but it arrived a fraction too late. The glass door swung shut behind Scaramouche with a heavy thud that reverberated through the quiet interior, the sound seeming far louder than it should have been amidst the soft music and rustling pages. [Name] remained rooted where she stood, her gaze fixed on the entrance long after it had closed, as though expecting it to open again if she stared long enough.
The apology she had intended to give Kazuha, the conversation she had rehearsed countless times, and the argument she had just witnessed collided into an indistinguishable haze, leaving her thoughts suspended like shattered pieces of glass that refused to settle.
She didn't notice Kazuha approaching until he had already stopped beside her. His footsteps were quiet against the wooden floor, measured and familiar, and when he spoke, his voice carried the same gentle warmth it always had. "[Name]," he called softly, his hand lifting toward her shoulder in an instinctive gesture of reassurance. Then his fingers made contact—
SLAP!
The sharp crack split through the bookstore with startling clarity. Every nearby sound seemed to collapse beneath it. Kazuha's head turned abruptly to the side from the force of the blow, loose strands of pale hair falling across his face before slowly settling back into place. He didn't raise a hand in response. He didn't step back.
For several long seconds, he simply remained motionless, absorbing what had happened while a faint flush spread across the reddening imprint blooming against his cheek. [Name]'s hand remained suspended where it had struck him, trembling almost imperceptibly, her breathing uneven as though the movement had escaped her before she had consciously chosen it. Her eyes, usually so hesitant, no longer wavered.
"Why did you do that..?"
Kazuha's expression softened immediately. "I-"
"You just decided that you know what's best for me," she interrupted, and there was something unfamiliar in her voice, not anger, but a quiet conviction that refused to retreat. "You decided that Scaramouche is bad for me without asking what I think. Without considering that maybe I'm capable of making my own choices about who I spend time with."
A subtle crease formed between Kazuha's brows. The surprise faded from his face, replaced by a firmness that settled into both his expression and the steady cadence of his voice. His posture remained composed despite the sting lingering across his cheek, his eyes meeting hers without avoidance. "I'm just trying to look out for you."
"I didn't ask you to look out for me."
The words emerged more quietly than the slap that had preceded them, yet they carried a far greater weight. [Name] drew in a slow, deliberate breath, willing the air to steady the tremor threatening to climb into her voice.
The bookstore around them had become strangely distant. The warm lights hanging from the ceiling blurred into soft halos, their edges dissolving like wet watercolor bleeding across paper. Somewhere above them, the second hand of an old wall clock continued its patient circuit, each measured tick falling between the notes of the gentle music drifting through the store. The two sounds overlapped without harmony, one orderly and mechanical, the other calm and comforting, creating a quiet dissonance that echoed the unrest gathering beneath her ribs.
Her gaze refused to remain still. It wandered across the shelves, the polished wooden floor, the rows of books standing perfectly upright, searching for something solid enough to anchor itself before reluctantly returning to the figure standing before her.
"I came here to apologize to you," she continued. "I was going to tell you I was sorry for being rude when you tried to be my friend. For pushing you away when you were just trying to help."
She stopped. The sentence fractured before reaching its end.
For a brief instant, silence expanded around her, filling every empty space between the ticking clock and the distant melody winding through the bookstore.
She struggled to keep her breathing even, swallowing against the tightness gathering in her throat. Her vision had begun to lose its sharpness, not from tears but from the effort of containing emotions she refused to let spill over. Everything before her seemed slightly out of focus, as though she were looking through a pane of imperfect glass.
When she finally lifted her eyes toward Kazuha, the image that greeted her no longer resembled the person she had spent weeks convincing herself she understood. The version of him she had carefully assembled in her mind seemed to crumple inward like a sheet of paper clenched tightly in someone's fist. The familiar warmth she had always associated with him had vanished beneath harsh, unfamiliar lines until his features became difficult to recognize, as though an impatient child had taken a pencil and scratched over a once-carefully drawn portrait, obscuring it beneath restless, uneven strokes.
Someone unrecognizeable.
"...I don't think I want to anymore." The words left her quietly.
She watched them reach him. Watched the fragile hope she hadn't realized he was holding recede from his expression almost imperceptibly.
Kazuha looked at her, and for the first time since she'd met him, uncertainty replaced his usual composure. Hurt surfaced first, followed by confusion, then disappointment, each emotion passing across his face with restrained honesty. "You don't know him, [Name]. I can't watch you get hurt by someone who doesn't care about you."
"You don't know that he doesn't care."
"I know what I see. I know his reputation. I know how he treats people."
"You know what everyone says about him. That's not the same thing as knowing him."
Her voice no longer shook.
The uncertainty that had accompanied her into the bookstore had quietly fallen away somewhere between Scaramouche's departure and this conversation, leaving behind a steadiness she hadn't known she possessed. "And maybe I'll get hurt. Maybe you're right and this is a mistake. But it's my mistake to make."
Kazuha remained silent for several seconds before reaching down to pick up the canvas bag resting beside the bookshelf. The motion was slow, almost reluctant, as though he were delaying the inevitable by occupying his hands with something simple. He slipped the strap over one shoulder and adjusted it absentmindedly, his gaze never quite leaving [Name].
There was no resentment in his expression now, only the quiet exhaustion of someone who had realized persuasion had reached its limit. He searched her face for a long moment, his eyes moving ever so slightly as though hoping to discover even the smallest hesitation hidden beneath her resolve, something he could still appeal to before the distance between them became irreversible. Whatever answer he found in her expression seemed to extinguish that hope. His shoulders lowered almost imperceptibly. He gave a single, restrained nod.
"I hope you know what you're doing."
[Name] couldn't bring herself to answer.
The silence between them stretched with the heaviness of a page slowly closing over the end of a chapter, neither cruel nor gentle, simply inevitable. Kazuha studied her one last time before turning toward the exit. His footsteps were unhurried, disappearing gradually beneath the soft music drifting through the bookstore.
"Take care of yourself, [Name]," he said, and there was a weight to the words that made them sound like goodbye.
The moment the door closed behind him, something inside her lurched into motion.
She was already running.
The bell above the entrance rang sharply as she pushed through the glass door, the evening air striking her face with enough force to scatter loose strands of hair across her vision. Her breath came unevenly as she hurried onto the sidewalk, eyes darting frantically across the streets beyond the bookstore.
People drifted past in blurred silhouettes, bicycles rolled quietly toward the intersection, buses groaned to a stop farther down the road, yet none of them were the person she was searching for. The lingering haze clouding her thoughts since the argument still clung stubbornly to the edges of her vision, making the city feel strangely distant, its outlines softened as though everything around her had been submerged beneath rippling water. Her pulse pounded loudly enough to drown out the sounds of passing traffic.
Then she saw him.
Several meters away, Scaramouche had just turned his back to the bookstore, one hand tucked into his pocket as he resumed walking toward the station. His pace was quicker than before, almost purposeful, as though he had already decided the conversation behind those walls no longer concerned him. For the briefest instant, it looked as though he had been waiting, not standing still, not lingering obviously, but never truly leaving either, as though some quiet part of him had remained tethered to the bookstore until the very moment she stepped outside.
The change within her was almost immediate.
The pressure crowding her chest eased just enough for her to draw a full breath. The dizziness that had blurred the world moments earlier receded without explanation, carrying with it the suffocating confusion that had clouded her thoughts since the confrontation began. The streets sharpened back into focus, storefronts regaining their edges, passing strangers becoming faces instead of indistinct shapes. Relief arrived so suddenly it nearly weakened her knees. He was still here.
Without allowing herself another thought, she hurried after him.
"Scaramouche!"
The distance between them disappeared one uneven step at a time until she finally caught up, her breathing still ragged from running. She slowed only when she reached his side, falling naturally into the same rhythm as his footsteps. Neither of them spoke immediately. She simply remained there beside him, matching his pace, quietly grateful that she hadn't been too late.
"You didn't have to do that."
Scaramouche's voice was quiet enough that it nearly disappeared beneath the distant hum of passing traffic. He never stopped walking. His gaze remained fixed on the road stretching ahead, his expression unreadable beneath the fading evening sky. Yet there was the faintest hesitation in the cadence of his steps, as though another sentence had reached the edge of his thoughts only to be abandoned before it could take shape.
You should've stayed. You were right to apologize. You didn't owe me that.
Any one of those words could have left his mouth. Instead, they remained buried beneath the familiar restraint he had spent years perfecting, sinking back into silence before they could betray the quiet conflict stirring beneath his composure.
When [Name] looked at him, she found nothing she could easily interpret. "He treated you badly," she spoke. "I don't think I can talk to him after what he said to you, at least not for a while."
Scaramouche lowered his eyes for only an instant before looking ahead again. The evening breeze slipped between the buildings, carrying with it the distant hiss of buses arriving and departing somewhere beyond the next intersection. He let the silence linger longer than necessary, as though carefully examining her words from every possible angle before deciding whether they deserved an answer.
"We should hurry," he said finally. "My bus leaves in the next hour."
"Right. Yeah."
She nodded almost automatically.
The conversation dissolved once more.
The road that had seemed so effortless on the journey toward the bookstore now felt strangely unfamiliar, transformed not by distance but by everything that had happened between its beginning and end.
Their footsteps remained in quiet rhythm beside one another, yet the easy exchange that had once woven naturally between them had unraveled into long stretches of silence. It was not the comfortable quiet they had grown accustomed to over shared lunches and discussions of literature.
The silence possessed weight. It lingered like fog settling over a river at dawn, obscuring thoughts neither of them knew how to give voice to. Around them, the city continued with indifferent certainty. Neon signs flickered awake one by one beneath the deepening sky, bicycles rolled past with the soft whir of spinning wheels, and buses exhaled clouds of compressed air as they pulled away from crowded stops.
Life flowed steadily around them while they walked through its current like two people carrying separate storms beneath the same horizon.
"For what it's worth," Scaramouche said at last, his voice so low it almost dissolved into the wind before reaching her, "Kazuha's not completely wrong. I probably will hurt you."
The words settled between them with the quiet inevitability of rain gathering before it finally falls.
Neither of them spoke again.
By the time the bus terminal came into view, the evening had fully settled over the city. Fluorescent lights reflected across the damp pavement while electronic signs flickered with arrival times overhead.
Commuters gathered beneath the shelters in loose clusters, conversations blending into the steady rumble of idling engines. They stopped together near the platform without needing to discuss where their paths would separate. When the bus finally arrived, its brakes sighed heavily as the doors folded open. Scaramouche stepped aboard without looking back immediately, one hand slipping into his pocket as he climbed the narrow steps.
[Name] remained where she was until the doors closed and the vehicle gradually disappeared into the stream of evening traffic.
Only then did she turn toward the opposite side of the station and begin the quieter walk home alone, the distance between them growing slowly, not only through the roads that led in different directions, but through the unanswered words each carried away in silence.
The night had long since settled over the city. Not the lively darkness of evening, filled with traffic and illuminated storefronts, but the quieter hours that followed, when most lights had been switched off and entire neighborhoods seemed to withdraw into themselves. It was the stretch of time that existed between one day and the next, when the world felt strangely suspended, untouched by schedules, responsibilities, or expectations.
Scaramouche lay awake beneath the dim glow filtering through his curtains, his gaze fixed on the ceiling above him. Sleep remained frustratingly out of reach. Every attempt to close his eyes lasted only minutes before his thoughts dragged him back to wakefulness. The shadows cast across the room shifted subtly whenever passing headlights slipped through the gaps in the curtains, tracing pale patterns across walls he knew well enough to navigate in complete darkness.
His room was quiet in the way only late-night rooms could be. The faint hum of electricity lingered somewhere beyond hearing's edge. Occasionally, a distant car passed several streets away before fading into silence again. The rest of the house remained undisturbed. His aunt had retired hours earlier, and no sound emerged from the hallway beyond his door.
The isolation was familiar enough to be comforting. Most nights, he occupied these hours alone, scrolling absentmindedly through his phone or staring at the ceiling while waiting for exhaustion to eventually win. Tonight was no different. The pale light of his screen illuminated his face as he drifted through articles he wasn't reading and messages he wasn't responding to, his attention scattered and unfocused. Then his phone vibrated.
The sound cut sharply through the stillness.
Scaramouche frowned.
A call at 2:47 AM?
Scaramouche stared at the illuminated screen, his thoughts lagging several seconds behind what his eyes were seeing. The vibration continued against his palm, persistent enough to become irritating. He blinked once, then looked again as though the name might somehow change.
[Name] [Last Name].
The sight of it was so unexpected that it took a moment for the absurdity to fully register. His first instinct was immediate and entirely reasonable, decline the call and deal with whatever this was in the morning. Nobody called at this hour unless something had gone catastrophically wrong. The problem was that the more he thought about it, the less sense it made. If there really was an emergency, why was she calling him? They had exchanged a handful of lunches, several late-night messages, and one literature project. That hardly qualified him as the person someone contacted in the middle of the night.
The phone continued vibrating.
Once.
Twice.
A third time.
Scaramouche exhaled sharply through his nose. Against his better judgment, his thumb pressed the accept button before the rational part of his brain could construct a convincing argument against it. The call connected and he immediately lifted the phone to his ear.
"Do you have any concept of what time it is?" His voice emerged colder than usual, sleep deprivation sanding away what little patience he possessed. The irritation was genuine, though not quite enough to mask the concern already beginning to form beneath it. "This better be important."
Silence answered him. Not entirely the absence of sound, but the kind that existed when words failed to emerge despite someone's best efforts. Through the speaker, Scaramouche could hear her breathing. Each inhale arrived unevenly, catching slightly before being released, as though she were concentrating on the simple act of keeping herself composed. The noise seemed unnaturally loud against the stillness of his room. Around him, the house remained buried beneath the weight of the hour. The darkness beyond his window was uninterrupted. The hallway outside his bedroom door was silent. Yet through the phone, another world bled into his own.
A voice rose somewhere in the distance, somewhat muffled.
Then another answered it.
The words themselves dissolved into distortion, but the hostility survived the journey intact. It hung beneath every syllable like rust beneath paint. Suddenly, something crashed. The sound splintered through the speaker with enough force to make him flinch. Glass, perhaps. Ceramic. Whatever it was, it shattered completely.
"I'm sorry." Her voice finally surfaced through the noise. There was a peculiar restraint to it. The words were quiet, but not uncertain. They carried the impression of someone holding themselves together through concentration alone, speaking carefully enough to prevent whatever lay beneath the surface from becoming audible."I shouldn't have—"
A door slammed somewhere behind her. The impact reverberated through the phone. "I'll let you go."
"Wait." The response escaped before he had the opportunity to reconsider it. Scaramouche pushed himself upright against the headboard, the blanket falling into a heap around his waist. Sleep had vanished entirely now.
His pulse felt sharper. More alert.
The irritation that had greeted the call only minutes earlier was already eroding, stripped away piece by piece by everything he was hearing. "You already woke me up." His voice emerged rough from exhaustion, though considerably less harsh than before. "Might as well tell me what's so urgent it couldn't wait until morning."
Nothing followed immediately.
Only another stretch of strained silence.
Then the argument in the background surged again.
This time the woman's voice was clearer, rising into something jagged and vicious. It cut through the air like broken glass, followed by the deeper roar of a man shouting over her. The sounds collided violently, each attempting to drown out the other. Another object broke. Then another. The noises arrived one after another like stones thrown against a window, each impact revealing another fracture beneath the surface.
Scaramouche sat completely still.
"It's nothing," [Name] said, the words were followed by the slightest fracture in her voice, a crack that appeared and vanished so quickly it might have gone unnoticed under different circumstances. "I just... I needed to hear someone's voice. Someone who wasn't—" She cut herself off. "Never mind. This was stupid. I'm sorry for bothering you."
"You're not bothering me." The lie came easily, automatically, even though they both knew it wasn't entirely true. "I was awake anyway."
"Liar." But there was something almost grateful in the accusation. "You sound like I just dragged you out of sleep."
"Fine. You woke me up. Congratulations. Now are you going to tell me what's going on or are we just going to have a staring contest over the phone?"
A sound that might have been a laugh escaped her throat. "We can't have a staring contest over the phone. That's not how it works."
"Then I guess you'll have to settle for talking instead." Scaramouche adjusted the grip on his phone. "What's with all the noise in the background?"
"Nothing. Just... neighbors. Thin walls."
"Bullshit." The response arrived before he could reconsider it. Scaramouche frowned into the darkness. He wasn't entirely sure why he kept pushing. Most people offered lies because they wanted them accepted. Normally, he was more than willing to grant that courtesy. It simplified things. Preserved distance. Yet the explanation sounded so obviously false that allowing it to stand felt impossible. "Those aren't neighbors. That's your apartment."
The silence that followed seemed to stretch longer than it actually did. "Yeah."
The admission settled heavily between them. Scaramouche stared into the darkness beyond his bedroom window, watching the faint reflection of his own face in the glass. He could hear the distant argument continuing through the phone, reduced now to indistinct bursts of anger bleeding through walls. The reality behind those noises had finally been given a name, and he found himself with nothing useful to do with it. Sympathy felt inadequate. Reassurance felt dishonest. The situation sat beyond the reach of easy responses, exposing a vulnerability he had neither expected nor asked to see. Predictably, he retreated toward familiar ground.
"So, what?"
Scaramouche shifted further against the headboard, drawing one leg closer to his chest. The phone was pressed between his shoulder and ear, allowing both hands to remain free, though neither had anything to do. One rested loosely against his knee while the other absently traced the seam of the blanket pooled around his lap. His eyes lingered on the empty space beside him rather than the darkness outside. The words that followed carried their usual bite, but there was something quieter underneath them now, an attentiveness that hadn't been there when he first answered the call.
"You called me at three in the morning so I could listen to your parents fight?" He exhaled softly through his nose. "That's a new level of weird. Even for you."
"I called because I needed to hear a voice that wasn't screaming." The response arrived immediately, sounding defensive.
"I've been sitting here for two hours with my hands over my ears and it isn't working." Her voice tightened with every word, composure straining beneath the effort of holding it together. Somewhere behind her, another door slammed hard enough for the impact to travel through the phone speaker. She continued anyway. "Every time I think they've stopped, it starts again. Every time it gets quiet, I'm waiting for the next thing to break." Her breathing grew uneven before she forced it back under control. "I just needed..." The sentence faltered. For a second, only the sound of her breathing remained. "I just didn't want to be alone with it."
Something tightened uncomfortably within Scaramouche's chest. The words struck closer than he wanted it to.
He recognized the exhaustion woven through her words, the desperation of being trapped inside circumstances that refused to change no matter how badly you wanted them to. The constant anticipation of the next outburst. The helplessness of knowing there was nowhere else to go. It was a feeling he knew far too well.
He had felt traces of it sitting beside a hospital bed, speaking into silence and receiving nothing in return. He had felt it walking through crowded hallways where laughter always seemed to follow a few steps behind him. He had felt it every time he returned to a house that provided shelter without ever managing to feel like a home. Different situations, different forms of loneliness, yet the same suffocating sense of being cornered by realities neither of them possessed the power to fix.
"Okay," he said, and his voice came out softer than he'd intended, coming off almost as a gentle whisper. "So talk. What do you want to talk about?"
"I don't know. Anything. Everything." A crash in the background, followed by more shouting. [Name]'s breathing hitched. "Tell me about the book. The one we're analyzing for the project."
"At three in the morning? You want to discuss literature?"
"I want to think about something that isn't this." Her voice was steadier now, as if focusing on something concrete was helping her regain control. "So yeah. Tell me about the book. Tell me what you think the author was trying to say about isolation."
"I think the author was full of shit," he said. "All that poetic nonsense about isolation being a choice, about people who withdraw from society being somehow noble or enlightened. It's garbage. People don't choose isolation because they're too good for everyone else. They choose it because connection is exhausting and disappointing and it always ends badly."
"That's cynical."
"That's realistic." He spoke, stealing a glance at his desk that had said novel and his notebook filled with the analysis on it, remembering the project they had. "The protagonist spends the whole book pretending he's alone by choice, that he's above all the petty social games everyone else plays. But really he's just scared. He's terrified that if he lets anyone in, they'll see how broken he is and leave anyway."
"Maybe that's not cynical," [Name] said quietly. "Maybe that's just honest."
"What's the difference?"
"Cynicism is when you expect the worst because you've decided that's all there is. Honesty is when you acknowledge the worst while still hoping for something better."
Scaramouche scoffed. "That's a pretty distinction that doesn't mean anything in practice."
"Doesn't it?" There was a challenge in her voice now, the same sharpness she'd shown when they discussed the book in the library. "You defended me from those girls. You gave me your number. You're talking to me at three in the morning instead of hanging up. If you really believed connection always ends badly, you wouldn't do any of that."
"Maybe I'm just bored."
"Liar."
The conversation faded into a quietness neither of them seemed eager to disturb. The argument continuing somewhere within her apartment had diminished from explosive shouting to a dull, persistent murmur, like distant thunder rolling beyond closed windows. Through the speaker, Scaramouche could still hear her breathing, steadying gradually now that she no longer had to endure the noise alone.
Without meaning to, he found himself constructing a picture of her in his mind. Curled beneath layers of blankets on a bed that likely felt far too small for the weight of everything pressing down upon her. The edges of the blanket tucked tightly around her legs to keep out the night's cold, while the fabric gathered around her shoulders and chest remained clutched firmly in her arms, as though holding it close could somehow create the sense of safety the apartment itself failed to provide. Her phone rested against the pillow beside her ear. Strands of dark hair had undoubtedly escaped wherever she usually kept them, scattered across her face and pillowcase without her noticing.
It was an oddly vulnerable image, one that stood in sharp contrast to the careful composure she carried through school every day. Stripped of that distance, she seemed less like the girl who apologized for everything and more like someone simply trying to make herself feel secure in a place where security had become unreliable.
"Do you ever feel like you're disappearing?" she asked suddenly. "Like you're so good at being invisible that sometimes you forget you're actually there?"
"Every day." The words left him before he could stop them. There was no familiar pause preceding them, no internal debate weighing whether they should be spoken at all. Usually, every sentence passed through layers of scrutiny before reaching his mouth. His thoughts were rarely quiet.
They crowded his mind constantly, overlapping and colliding until even simple conversations became exercises in restraint. Yet now, sitting alone in the darkness with only her voice on the other end of the line, he found himself speaking before he had fully processed what he intended to say. The realization arrived a second too late, catching up only after the words had already escaped. "It's easier that way. If nobody sees you, nobody can hurt you."
"But nobody can help you either."
"Nobody helps anyway. They just pretend to care until it becomes inconvenient, and then they disappear and you're left worse off than you were before."
"Is that what happened to you?" She carefully asked. "Someone pretended to care and then left?"
A brief paused engulfed the conversation. "My close friends," he heard himself say instead. "When I was eleven. My mom collapsed at work and ended up in a coma, and suddenly I was the kid with the tragedy. For about two weeks, everyone was sympathetic. Teachers gave me extensions on assignments. Classmates were nice to me. My friends said they'd be there for me no matter what."
Scaramouche expected the memory to leave the same bitterness it always did. But as the recollection surfaced, he found himself unable to summon the anger that usually accompanied it. Her voice remained steady on the other end of the line, quiet but constant, grounding him in the present.
The noise in his head, ordinarily a tangled mass of overlapping thoughts and old resentments, seemed strangely distant tonight. For once, he could look back at what had happened without being swallowed by it, examining the memory with a vividness he rarely possessed instead of through the haze of static that usually distorted everything it touched.
"Then their parents decided I was too much of a downer. Bad influence. Might make their precious children sad. So they told them they weren't allowed to hang out with me anymore, and my friends—m, my close friends who'd promised they'd always be there, they just... stopped." Scaramouche breathed.
"Stopped talking to me. Stopped sitting with me at lunch. Started pretending I didn't exist. And I learned that promises don't mean shit when keeping them becomes inconvenient."
Silence on the other end. Scaramouche waited for the empty platitudes, the 'I'm sorry that happened to you' that people offered when they didn't know what else to say. Especially coming from [Name], he wouldn't be upset or surprised if she said such words.
"That's fucked up," [Name] said instead. "They were cowards. And their parents were worse."
Scaramouche blinked, caught off guard. A faint tug appeared at the corner of his lips, threatening to turn into a small smile before he quickly suppressed it. "Yeah. They were."
"For what it's worth, I don't think you're a downer. I think you're honest about how much everything hurts, and people can't handle that because it reminds them that they're hurting too."
"When did you become a philosopher?"
"When I spent enough time alone to think too much." A pause. "Do you visit her? Your mom?"
"Every day, but lately I only visit her every Thursday. I sit there and talk to her about my day, about school, about all the mundane shit that doesn't matter. The doctors say she might be able to hear me, that coma patients sometimes retain some level of awareness. So I talk to her like she's listening, like she might wake up any day and want to know what she missed."
"That's not pathetic. That's love."
"It's pointless."
"Maybe. But you do it anyway." Her voice was soft and understanding. "That says something about who you are."
"It says I'm an idiot who can't let go."
"It says you're someone who doesn't give up on the people you care about. Even when it hurts. Even when it would be easier to walk away."
Scaramouche didn't know what to say to that. The words settled somewhere deep within him, catching against thoughts he usually kept buried beneath layers of sarcasm, annoyance, and deliberate distance. It felt strange to be understood so clearly without having explained himself directly. She hadn't dissected him or demanded answers. Somehow, she had simply looked at the pieces he had offered and assembled them into something alarmingly accurate. The realization left him unexpectedly uneasy. Not because she was wrong, but because she wasn't.
A faint tension crept into his chest. He's calling it honesty. Keeping her company. Giving her something else to focus on besides the shouting beyond her bedroom walls. Yet now he found himself questioning how much of that conversation had been for her and how much had been for himself. Somewhere along the way, he had stopped speaking in careful half-truths and started revealing things he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge.
The thought made him acutely aware of his own breathing. A slight hitch caught in his chest before he looked away from the darkness beyond his window, as though physically distancing himself from the conversation could somehow lessen the vulnerability of it.
Immediately, he changed the subject. "Your turn. Why are you really awake at three in the morning listening to your parents destroy each other?"
"Because if I go to sleep, I might not wake up."
"Because sometimes the fighting gets physical and I need to be ready to run. Because I've learned that staying alert is safer than being vulnerable." The casual way she said it made it worse somehow. Like this was normal. Like living in constant fear was just another part of her daily routine.
"How long?" he asked.
"How long what?"
"How long has it been like this?"
"Always. For as long as I can remember. Some nights are worse than others, but it's always there. The anger. The violence. The feeling that everything could explode at any moment."
Scaramouche thought about his own home, quiet, empty, devoid of warmth but also devoid of active danger. He'd spent so long resenting his aunt's emotional distance, her refusal to engage with him beyond the bare minimum of obligation. But at least she'd never hurt him. At least he could sleep without worrying about being woken by violence.
"Guess that makes more sense now," he said, clicking into place. "No wonder you're always acting like you want the floor to swallow you whole."
"Yeah." A restraint laugh escaped her throat. "And then I came to this school and tried to stay... invisible, but Kazuha noticed me anyway, and suddenly everyone was looking at me, and I didn't know how to handle being seen. I still don't."
"Kazuha's an idiot," Scaramouche clicked his tongue, supressing the anger creeping behind him at the thought of what happened earlier. "He thinks kindness fixes everything. He doesn't understand that sometimes being noticed is the worst thing that can happen to someone."
"He means well."
"Meaning well doesn't matter if the result is making things worse."
"Is that what you think you did? When you defended me from those girls? Made things worse?"
Scaramouche considered the question. "I don't know. Maybe. Probably. I'm not exactly known for making things better."
"You made it better for me." Her voice was quiet but certain. "For the first time since I transferred, someone stood up for me without expecting anything in return. Someone saw what was happening and decided it was wrong. That mattered. You mattered."
The words landed with unexpected force.
You mattered.
The statement shouldn't have affected him as much as it did. It was a simple observation, spoken without ceremony or exaggeration. Yet it struck something buried deep enough that he had almost forgotten it existed. He found himself staring at the darkness beyond his window, suddenly unable to remember the last time anyone had looked at his actions and found value in them rather than obligation.
The memory refused to come. All he could think of was how unfamiliar the sentiment felt, as though it belonged to someone else entirely. "Don't do that," he said, his voice coming out harsher than he'd intended. "Don't make me into something I'm not. I'm not a hero. I'm not even a good person. I just—"
He stopped, the words catching in his throat. What had he been about to say? That he'd defended her because seeing her hurt made something in him hurt too? That he'd given her his number because the thought of her being alone felt wrong in a way he couldn't articulate? That talking to her at three in the morning felt less like an obligation and more like something he actually wanted to do?
"You just what?" [Name] prompted gently.
"I just..." Scaramouche stopped, irritation bleeding into his voice as he searched for words he clearly didn't want to say. His fingers tightened around the phone. "Watching that was pissing me off, alright? The way you just stood there and took it. Like every shitty thing they said was somehow your responsibility."
He exhaled sharply through his nose and looked away, staring into the darkness beyond his window. "You kept apologizing for things that weren't even your fault. Acting like you had to make yourself smaller every time someone looked at you." The frustration in his voice faltered unexpectedly. "And it reminded me of—" The words caught before he could finish them. Silence followed. By the time he realized what he had almost revealed, it was already too late.
"Of yourself," [Name] finished quietly.
"No. Yes. I don't know." Scaramouche dragged a hand across his face in frustration. The conversation felt like trying to hold water in his hands, the harder he tried to regain control of it, the more it slipped through his fingers.
"It's not the same." His voice dropped slightly. "I stopped expecting anything from people a long time ago. That was a choice." A humorless laugh escaped him. "A stupid one, maybe, but still a choice." He stared at the shadows stretching across his ceiling, already aware he was saying more than he should. "You, on the other hand..." The words stalled briefly before continuing. "You still bother trying. You still give people the benefit of the doubt even when they don't deserve it. You still hope for things."
"And you don't?"
"I can't afford to." A shaky breath was heard. "Hope is dangerous. It makes you vulnerable. It sets you up for disappointment."
"Then why are you still here?" The question came quietly through the speaker. There was no challenge in it, no attempt to corner him into an answer. "If people are such a disappointment, if getting attached always ends badly, why didn't you hang up?"
Scaramouche opened his mouth and immediately closed it again. Irritatingly, he knew the answer. The problem was that putting it into words would require acknowledging things he had spent years avoiding.
He could have hung up the moment she called. Could have ignored the ringing altogether. Could have told himself that none of this was his problem and gone back to sleep. Instead, he was still here, sitting awake in the middle of the night with a phone pressed to his ear, listening to her breathe through the silence. Somewhere between shared lunches, pointless arguments over books, and conversations that stretched far longer than either of them intended, her presence had become something he looked for without meaning to.
"I don't know," he said finally, which was both a lie and the most honest thing he'd said all night.
"Liar." But there was warmth in the accusation, something almost affectionate.
The conversation continued long after either of them intended it to. Topics shifted naturally from one subject to another without either bothering to keep track of how they got there.
They argued over books they had both read, disagreed about whether people were shaped more by their choices or their circumstances, and wandered into discussions about loneliness, resilience, and the strange social structures that governed high school life as though they were analyzing a particularly absurd piece of fiction.
Scaramouche found himself speaking more than usual, offering opinions he normally kept to himself, while [Name] challenged them with observations that were thoughtful enough to make him reconsider his own conclusions. Somewhere during the exchange, the conversation stopped feeling like two people filling silence and started feeling like something far more familiar.
The hours passed unnoticed. The shouting that had dominated the background earlier gradually faded until it disappeared altogether, leaving only the occasional creak of settling walls and the faint hum of her apartment. In its place, Scaramouche began noticing other things, the increasing softness of her voice, the slight delay before some of her responses, the way certain words blurred together at the edges. Exhaustion had begun creeping into her speech, slow and inevitable, like someone losing a battle against sleep one blink at a time.
"I should let you go," she said finally. "It's almost five. You need to sleep."
"So do you."
"I will. Now that it's quiet." A pause. "Thank you. For answering. For talking. For not making me feel stupid for calling."
"You're not stupid." The response left him before he had the opportunity to reconsider it.
"You're just—"
He stopped.
His brain finally catching up to his mouth, realizing what he'd been about to say. That she was brave for reaching out. That she was stronger than she thought. That talking to her had been the best part of his entire week.
That she was different from everyone else. That she made him want to try hoping again.
"I'm just what?" [Name] asked.
Scaramouche felt the words catch somewhere in his throat. He already knew what he was about to say. The realization arrived so suddenly that it almost knocked the air from his lungs. His pulse quickened, a sharp unease spreading through his chest as he became painfully aware of what was sitting at the edge of his tongue. The answer felt dangerously close, close enough that he could almost hear himself saying it, and that alone was enough to send every instinct he possessed into immediate alarm.
"Nothing," he said abruptly. "You're just tired. Get some sleep."
"Scaramouche—"
"I have to go. I'll see you at school."
The call disconnected.
The phone, which had been trapped between his ear and shoulder for the better part of two to three hours, was abruptly yanked away and tangled between his fingers. Scaramouche remained seated on the edge of his bed, one leg folded beneath the other, the device resting heavily against his lap as he stared at the dark screen.
His breathing refused to settle. Each inhale felt too shallow. Each exhale disappeared too quickly. The room seemed strangely unstable, his vision struggling to focus on any one thing for more than a few seconds before drifting elsewhere. Thoughts crashed into one another without forming anything coherent.
What he had said.
What he had almost said.
The terrifying ease with which the words had appeared. None of it aligned with the version of himself he understood. It was as though some other part of him had seized control during the call, speaking freely while the rest of him lagged several steps behind. The realization left him feeling cornered by his own thoughts. How had he let himself get that far? How had he become comfortable enough to forget, even briefly, how dangerous attachment could be?
His chest tightened sharply. Before he fully registered the movement, he was on his feet. The sudden motion sent a wave of dizziness through him, forcing both hands onto the edge of his desk for support. The furniture groaned beneath the impact. Several books stacked carelessly near the corner slid off the surface and struck the floor with a loud thud, papers scattering after them. The noise echoed through the room.
Scaramouche's gaze dropped instinctively toward the cluttered desktop. Pens. Mechanical pencils. Loose stationery. A cutter. School supplies abandoned wherever he had last set them down. His eyes lingered there longer than necessary. Not because the objects themselves were important, but because some restless, frustrated part of him wanted an outlet for the storm building inside his chest.
A distraction. A punishment.
Something sharp enough to cut through the panic clawing its way beneath his skin and replace it with something simpler. Something easier to understand. The thought appeared so suddenly that it made his stomach twist.
No.
You stopped doing that months ago.
You can't go back.
He stared at the desk, jaw tightening. Then, with a sharp curse under his breath, his fist slammed against the wood hard enough to rattle everything resting on top of it.
The impact snapped him back to himself.
Silence flooded the room.
Scaramouche remained frozen for several seconds, one hand pressed flat against the desk while the other hung uselessly at his side. His breathing was still uneven. His pulse still raced. Yet now there was something else layered beneath the panic. Horror at the direction his thoughts had begun drifting.
Slowly, he lifted his head to the side. Next to him, a mirror reflected a version of himself he barely recognized. His hair was disheveled from constantly dragging his hands through it. His chest rose and fell unevenly. His expression looked strained, exhausted, almost frantic.
Not angry nor intimidating. Just tired. The sight made something bitter twist in his chest. "Idiot," he muttered coldly. His reflection stared back at him, equally unimpressed. Scaramouche let out a shaky breath and laughed once without humor.
