ceylonmoon capiscara comeback we (all 4 capiscara fans) all cheered ⁉️⁉️⁉️
summer is falling (it is a distant dream)
G | 2.8k | Capitano/Scaramouche
Tags: Grief/Mourning, Haunting (but in a loving way), Angst, Bittersweet, a Smidge of comfort
Summary: In which the wanderer and Capitano navigate the peculiarities of grief.
ao3 link:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
The wanderer is no stranger to loss.
He was created as a vessel, after all; not for the Gnosis, nor for any sort of divinity, as he had once believed and dreamed. But simply because where else would his mother’s grief go, if not him?
What a fickle thing mourning is. One moment he’s on the verge of becoming a god, and the next, Makoto’s ghost has somehow been superimposed upon his lifeless face, the tear slipping down his cheek has shifted into hers, and then Beelzebub abandons him. In shame, the kabukimono had once thought, perhaps a touch of disappointment. Or even cowardice, Scaramouche had sneered, too scared to see what her creation could become.
The wanderer now understands. There’s no use in over-complicating things or trying to make sense out of the nonsensical. The Raiden Shogun had seen a spectre within a shadow’s shadow, and she left him out of grief. Nothing more, nothing less.
It follows, like a shade, and haunts just as well as one: from the spindrift shores of Tatarasuna, to a rickety wooden cabin, to the frostlands of Snezhnaya, and now here to the viridescent depths of Sumeru City. He thinks it very well may be intrinsic to his existence. What is Teyvat without its elements? What is the wanderer without loss?
(A husk, the Traveler tells him, blunt as ever, before looking a little ashamed.
The wanderer cackles and agrees.)
———————————————————————
So when Nahida approaches him one particular day, her verdant eyes wilted and lips pinched, the wanderer is already expecting the worst.
“You may want to sit down for this,” she warns him. Though it’s phrased like a statement, the way her words pitch up at the end whittle away any commanding presence they could have contained.
“There’s no need to coddle me,” the wanderer says, frowning despite how his mouth suddenly feels bone-dry. “Whatever bad news you’re about to tell me won’t change depending upon whether or not I’m sitting down.”
Nahida doesn’t even look vaguely disapproving at his sudden turn back into old habits; she just nods, taking his acerbic barb into stride as she looks back up at him.
”Il Capitano has sacrificed himself in Natlan,” Nahida says, simple.
The wanderer blinks. “Alright,” he says.
“Alright,” she repeats back, more uncertain.
And that’s that.
———————————————————————
Except it isn’t—because when have things ever been easy for the wanderer?
He hadn’t thought about Capitano for years up until that moment, or if he had, it wasn’t memorable enough to be notable. But all of a sudden, it’s like Capitano has crawled out of whichever grave he’s buried himself in, and selected the wanderer as the victim of his first haunting.
A cat with a distinctly noteworthy ruff of black fur stalking along a ledge? Hah, an exact copy of Capitano, the wanderer thinks before he can stop himself. The metallic clamour of a windchime or shopkeeper’s bell causes his head to snap up, expecting the otherwise uncannily silent form of Capitano to be hovering near him, save for the clink of his chains. The wanderer smells something honeyed in the breeze and idly wonders what saccharine pastry he decided to make today.
It’s irritating, for one. He doesn’t find any particular enjoyment in being bombarded by thoughts of the Fatui during random periods of his day. Secondly, it doesn’t make much, if not any, sense. He had hardly known Capitano, when it came down to it. Does three centuries of being coworkers mean he now has to grieve him despite this?
The wanderer watches the first whispers of the night emerge and tries very hard not to think about the nebulous void of Capitano’s mask.
(He fails. Obviously.)
———————————————————————
The wanderer dreams sometimes.
Not often. And of largely unimportant things when he does. Halcyon glimpses into the morning of the kabukimono, an uneventful expedition as Scaramouche, or the aimless travels of the last five hundred years. It’s a natural consequence of deleting one’s existence, he supposes. Where else would his memory be allowed to rebuild itself without the interference of Irminsul?
…Well, most of Irminsul anyhow.
However, he doesn’t recall ever being an actual participant in these dreams.
The room he wakes up in is unfamiliar—if it can even be called a room, with how the stone walls seem ready to collapse at a rogue breeze and the general moth-eaten state of all the furniture. He takes it in, eyeing the architecture with a critical gaze; it’s unorthodox construction at best, and the product of a madman at worst. The design lacks any distinctive detail linking it to any architect or to any nation. Weren’t dreams supposed to draw upon things you’ve seen?
“Apologies for the lack of hospitality,” a voice rumbles abruptly, thoroughly interrupting his train of thought. “If I knew I’d have a guest, I would have attempted to make this place more presentable.”
The wanderer turns around, and behind him is the undeniable silhouette of a ghost. He’d feel more ashamed of how he hadn’t noticed the presence of another if dreams weren’t such unreliable things.
Though the spectre is sitting in one of the decrepit armchairs and polishing a sword, the wanderer can tell at a glance that he would be uncannily tall if he were to stand. Would fill the room like a penumbra, bitumen tendrils scraping at the ceiling. Pin-straight, obsidian-black hair veils the slant of his shoulders, and his eyes are a peculiar, cyanic shade. A slash of midnight plucked from just beyond the window. They fixate on him, pinning him down like an insect on display, and lack a true pupil. Instead, there is an eight-pointed star assuming its place—he knows enough to draw his own conclusions.
“…It’s fine,” the wanderer says, after deliberation. There’s something strange in the way the spectre carries himself, an unsettling familiarity despite how the wanderer can count the all of Khaen’riahns he knows on one hand without using all of his fingers. “Who are you?” he asks flatly, throwing caution to the wind.
The spectre pauses in his meticulous polishing and stares at him. His eyes reflect like a cat’s in the dark underneath a stray beam of starlight, indigo mourning, violet recognition, a glimpse of scarlet humour.
“Thrain,” the spectre offers at long last, tilting his head. “Sentinel Knight of Khaenri’ah. And you?” Thrain’s voice is quiet, resonant in the blue abyss—the wanderer’s gaze skitters about, deeply unnerved, as stone and mortar fall away into stardust. The soft edge of a bygone accent lingers in the spaces where a phantasmic chorus should have been, a knowing there that had no place in the mouth of a stranger. The wanderer’s spine stiffens, a curse bitten back at the last moment as he finally traces the amused tone. Though it hasn’t been directed at him for nearly five centuries.
“I suppose Sixth is no longer an option, is it?”
The wanderer jolts up from his slumber, gasping. When his imitation heartbeat eventually slows, he buries his face in his hands and resists the temptation to groan obnoxiously.
He also fails at this—obviously.
———————————————————————
Capitano joins the funeral procession following the wanderer.
He still doesn’t know the full extent of the circumstances surrounding Capitano’s death, and he doesn’t care to dig into it until it becomes necessary. But somehow, some way, the Captain has managed to escape his chains, if only by the barest amount. The wanderer had known for centuries, after all, that there was something inhuman about Capitano. He had bet his entire existence—but perhaps the humanity in Thrain was the most monstrous thing about him.
The wanderer, quite frankly, refuses to address him as Thrain anywhere but the sanctity of his mind. There, he does not resemble the entity that bore the name of the Captain for hundreds of years. There, the muscles of his face have not atrophied into something more rot than flesh, his exposed jawbone does not glint like a switchblade, nor does his mask conceal all the decay in an amorphous abyss.
There, he looks…normal. A completely ordinary man, save for a few more scars than can be considered truly normal, but it’s nothing extreme.
The wanderer despises it. He cares little for Capitano’s secrets now; Scaramouche, perhaps, had held a touch of intrigue about the elusive Captain, but what does the Balladeer matter in a Teyvat that does not remember him? The entire situation is much more trouble than he ever asked for.
He wonders, for the better part of his days, why Capitano’s even here. In Sumeru. With him. Is this the curse of being a vessel with loss carved into the nape of his neck like a collar? To attract ghosts like flies to a corpse? This version of Capitano doesn’t even know who he is, besides being the former sixth harbinger. There’s nothing left to tether their existences.
At least Capitano is a considerate enough ghost—but that’s the bare minimum, so the wanderer isn’t going to sing his praises for that one.
(“Do they truly refer to you as ‘Hat Guy’?” Capitano asks him, sounding a little mystified as an underclassman scampers away.
“Be quiet,” the wanderer scowls.)
———————————————————————
Capitano is an ancient, terribly immemorial being. A little older than the wanderer, anyhow, who has no firsthand experience in the Cataclysm, and certainly older than every other Harbinger. So it’s no surprise that he isn’t a stranger to loss as well, but perhaps it is his first time haunting someone; though like everything else, he’s a natural at it. Perfectly vague, appropriately terrifying, and miserable enough that the wanderer seriously considers exorcising him for his own sake.
But again—what does the wanderer care? There is no red string binding them together, no stars that crossed to bring them closer. He’s a rest stop at best, regardless of his nature. There’s little reason for Capitano to stay long. He just needs to be patient.
Not that that stops him from getting annoyed, though.
One evening, Capitano disappears. In the loosest meaning of the term, given that the wanderer finds him immediately on the parapet of the Sanctuary. He’s nearly translucent in the moonlight, an infernal blip in reality, and he looks more than a little ridiculous in his Snezhnayan get-up in the depths of monsoon season.
“Trying to escape?” the wanderer asks, landing next to him and perching on the balcony.
“A shame. You’ve caught me,” Capitano intones, making what would’ve almost been a joke into something that sounds more like a confession.
The wanderer pulls a face at him. “You haven’t changed at all,” he says, and immediately feels the urge to snatch the words, still buoyed by the solstice air, and shove them into his pockets. Familiarity would only prolong the inevitable.
The evening cicadas and mosquitoes clamour in the humidity, the stagnant breeze, a tuneless ballad winding around the pathways of the city. Yet, this far above the common folk, there’s hardly any noise but the thin whispers of the rustling leaves.
“Sixth,” Capitano says, quiet. He sounds like he’s not smiling behind that mask—he sounds like he’s profoundly, desperately mourning something.
“Wanderer,” he corrects, just as quietly. He steps off the ledge and stands, moonbeams pooling around them in a lake of mercury.
“Wanderer.” Capitano inhales deeply, rattling within his chest like an earthquake, looks at him very somberly. “Do you still miss the ocean?”
———————————————————————
Do you know what it is like to lose your heart, Thrain asks him, waves lapping at the mildewed pier, calciferous shells and bioluminescent skeletons solidifying around their feet. Limestone manacles snapping shut around their ankles and towing them under the currents. He looks tired. A bone-deep sort of exhaustion that remains even in death. The wanderer kicks at a conch and sends it careening into the ocean with hardly a splash.
Of course I do. The wanderer exhales a plume of smoke, a wispy cloud of ashes. He was born with a cavern where his heart should have been and then he lost it to grief.
Thrain is silent for a moment. When he speaks, hallowed blue eyes staring out over the sea, he murmurs, “I, as well.”
———————————————————————
And, well, here’s a bygone confession:
The wanderer is no stranger to loss, but he has never known what to do with it. What positive precedent was he to follow? His mother’s? The Tsaritsa’s?
Gods do not handle grief well; they forget that their divinity does not mean that they will live forever, that archons can destroy archons, and that there is a leash around all of their necks, trailing up into the nimbostratus clouds. The wanderer has witnessed, experienced denial, bargaining, fury, and—
What is he to do with it? Now that he’s aware of the time slipping from between his fingers? One cannot mourn something that had never lived, surely, so it’s absurd to consider this grief. A temporary melancholy, perhaps. A fracture in his composure, and the memories of his past staining the present like sun-bleached seaglass.
The wanderer does not know—so he does, as he always has, and turns away.
———————————————————————
“Wanderer,” Nahida says. She curls a white ringlet of hair around her index finger. Her lips are still pinched and unhappy. “Are you certain you’re doing alright—“
“Just fine,” he grits out.
———————————————————————
Does he miss it? Of course he does. The wanderer had known nothing but the sea for over a century, and then he had been dragged to a landlocked, hoar-frosted cell for another four. There are no plateaus of slate-grey rocks, wet and shimmering like quicksilver here in Sumeru. No thunder sakura roots protruding from the sand, crackling and crystal, an oppressive haze drifting from the electric ripples that plagued Tatarasuna.
The wanderer glances out the window. On the smoking horizon, he swears he sees tobiuo leaping and disappearing between the heatwaves like arcs of lightning, a deep and dense kelp forest stretching beneath him as the cumulus gannets plummet and burst into roiling fog. An indigo sky blazing overhead, the world drowned beneath a tidal wave of—of—
———————————————————————
The wanderer is a coffin and he thinks that Capitano might be the tombstone marking the grave. Or the wanderer is a columbarium and Thrain is one of many urns lining the corridors of his ribcage. Or maybe the wanderer is just losing his sanity, and the ghost is just some demented manifestation of his psyche.
In the corner of his eye, Capitano looms. Like the tangled and primaeval forests beneath the sea, a tragedy, a chasm. He is an ancient, terribly immemorial being. He was younger than he deserved and terribly human. The wanderer knows more than he ever wanted to know about the situation in Natlan and still, he cannot understand why Capitano lingers.
“What do you get out of this?” the wanderer whispers. The room is very dark and very still; if you had looked closely at the shadows creeping along the walls, you’d see something almost resembling vulnerability.
“…It’s rather quiet,” Thrain murmurs, form flickering in the moonlight, “without a heart.” His flesh is flayed and withering away. His exposed jawbone is a switchblade. His eyes are the only things that are perfectly intact. He is as handsome as ever.
“And I’d know, wouldn’t I?” the wanderer answers, sardonic.
Thrain smiles then; his teeth show where they shouldn’t along the sunken curve of his cheek, but it is gossamer and genuine and only a little grotesque underneath the light from the aperture. “Who else would?”
“You’re too sentimental for your own good, Captain,” the wanderer tells him, glancing up. Don’t you know that grief is drawn to him like a storm drain? Don’t you know that the wanderer is a coffin first, and a body second? If you stay long enough, you just might die a second death, Captain. Is that what you wanted?
Thrain’s oil-slick hair falls over his eyes like a whalefall, a starquake without his mask to push it back. He says nothing; he doesn’t need to. The wanderer’s trembling reflection in the windowpane illuminates his hypocrisy bright enough for Celestia to see.
———————————————————————
Thrain died in the height of summer.
He did not die alone, as you would expect. He dies with thousands of comrades and with an archon and a descender as witnesses, a noble, glorious star that burned so incandescently there was nothing else to consume but itself. He dies challenging a marble, sanguine pillar of Teyvat. He dies with his head held high, his own bleeding, mechanical heart ticking away in his hands, and no regrets.
He does, however, die very lonely. You see the difference, Wanderer?
———————————————————————
(What is a god without a red neutron leash around their neck? What is Teyvat without its limestone columns? What is a coffin without a body?
A husk, the pale-eyed executioner answers, interstellar smile gleaming like a blade as they burn, burn, burn.)
———————————————————————
“Alright. You win,” the wanderer says, affectless. A blink, a tear slipping down the curve of his cheekbone, and this time, it is his and his alone. “…Let’s go see the ocean, Captain.”
ahh i fear the answer isnt all that interesting LOL i just use 0.5 mechanical pencils that i bought in like a 20-pack at walmart 😭 but im very loyal to them they’ve never failed me 🙏🙏🙏
