ᝰ🖊 Entry 01: On Pulcinella, the slow decay of flesh. On Childe, life span measured in dog years. On Dottore's lab, the violence of attention. On Scaramouche, the longing that hides beneath detachment.
🗒️ scars, acne, body image references, dark humor
♡ Archive
Pulcinella talks slower, moves slower now.
Even when Childe boasts with the kind of voice that could rattle Mondstadt’s gates, he has to lean in, palm cupped to one ear. Squints—like the force of will alone could clarify the sound.
No wine, too. Something about blood pressure, iron levels, enzymes, enzymes and—hell—other metrics Scaramouche didn’t even pretend to listen to. All he remembers is that Pulcinella’s plate looked like it was assembled by a mortician (as always). Saltless broth. Fish so soft it could be a gesture. He even has milk alternatives.
Milk. Alternatives.
It should've been funny. It is funny. Except it isn't.
He used to clap Childe on the shoulder; now he pats the air above it and lets the boy close the distance. A kindness mimed. At dinner he tells stories with edges filed off, about winters that cracked horses and men in half all the same and treaties that were won with soup, and Scaramouche watches the room fall into that benevolent bear-trap of nostalgia. They don’t hear the part where survival looks identical to betrayal at scale.
Pulcinella asks for salt once and pretends it was a joke. He reaches for the wine that's placed near someone else and turns it into a pat on the arm.
“Eat,” he tells the Eleventh. “It keeps the cold from counting you.” Childe laughs and obeys. Of course he does.
Shame, but not really. Age attracts death like how light attracts flies. Scaramouche only wishes it would take the Mayor faster.
—
Childe, Tartaglia, Eleventh.
That boy has three names and none of them make him less of a migraine he's surprised to have the neurons to feel. In fact, they only seem to amplify the effect.
The light in the dining hall runs lower—golden, warm, civilized. A gentle hue, really. As if whispering, ‘’you'd have to be clinically insane to fight here, too’.’
Alas, Pierro’s presence alone is more than enough to seal some mouths shut. Not his, though, never his. (Except that time. And the other one. )
Dottore’s lab is the opposite.
Hard, cutting, white lights at the center burning and bouncing off sharp surgical instruments arranged the way Scaramouche imagines Pantalone stacks his endless new watches at his palace of a house—not whispering but daring you to try something. Or wishing. Both are true when it comes to Dottore with too much funding and imagination. And the darkness sits in the corners like traps. Always hiding something. Probably something with a pulse.
Scaramouche always felt like it was done on purpose, as if Dottore’s red-rimmed eyes, sleepless creases he wears like badges and smoke-thin presence weren’t enough; now people—no, he has to feel like some loose rat whose blood Dottore replaced with something neon-bright was going to pounce on his face any moment.
Whatever.
Two days ago he was in there—no—he wasn’t avoiding responsibilities. Shut up.
It was Childe’s medical inspection day. Dottore didn’t care about Childe’s privacy enough to get into an argument over it. Scaramouche couldn’t care less about the bloodwork of a boy who was going to be a feast for insects in a decade, if he was being generous. And Childe didn't mind either. Probably thought it was bonding.
He watched anyway because no distraction meant hyperaware, and hyperaware meant he’d have his eyes darting around the corners in front of an unlicensed doctor who takes him apart weekly and a Snezhnayan idiot who couldn’t keep his mouth shut even if Abyss mages held his hypothetical wife in a chokehold.
Childe took off his shirt as per procedure and Scaramouche’s eyes caught... marks. Faint, shallow, pitted. The same ones that decorates Childe’s cheeks and temple—what he’d written off as mosquito bites, attracted by low IQ and the punchline that is his life.
‘’...What are those?’’
Dottore’s eyes didn’t even look up. Childe answered quick—as always.
''Oh. Um—acne marks, sir.''
‘’Right.’’
What marks?
“During puberty,” Dottore said, flat as ever, “hormones increase sebum production, which clogs pores and causes acne. Some leave marks. Some don’t. They definitely do if you can’t keep your hands off your face.”’
He answered like he’d read Scaramouche’s mind. Again. Fourth time this week. He’s keeping track. Great. He's going to kill him.
Scaramouche was already losing sleep over if that creep had slipped a tracking device in his skull. Now, what—a fucking antenna? Maybe he should ask him to embed a horse tranquilizer behind his canine next. The Tsaritsa forbids if he comes to the decision to further enlighten him and have a second discussion about demonic skin deviations of adolescents. With charts. And fresh examples.
Acne marks. Childe had said.
Scars. Marks.
And there’s more: faint smile lines bracketing Childe's mouth. Deep enough to gather dusk. Etched in with a kind of reckless joy that shouldn’t have lasted this long, like the laughter never stopped—long past the point it should've.
Even when he should’ve stopped smiling twelve years ago.
What kind of man keeps smiling through war? Through Abyss? Through the cold silence of a dinner table where everyone’s waiting for you to die first?
A man who doesn’t know when—or how—to stop.
Scaramouche would never admit it, but it rattled something. So he waits. Waits for the day the laugh stays lodged in his throat. For the day Childe can’t pull it off. For the moment the boy’s face finally catches up to the ghosts behind it.
Childe's voice still cracks sometimes. Mid-sentence, like boyhood never set quite right in his bones.
No one comments.
But he always smirks when it happens. Childe calls him a bastard, low and slow.
ᝰ🖊 Entry 04: On Childe, meat in a freezer. On Innokentii M., the one who got away. On the village children, the innocent betraying the innocent. On Scaramouche, mice and gods.
⚠️ Scaramouche semi-glorifying suicide, his''clarity'' framing is in character, absolutely not an endorsement; child exploitation, systemic abuse, trauma recollection, religious imagery, moral injury, implicit and explicit references to sexual violence and CSA (non-graphic), implied parental sexual abuse, implied oral rape via metaphor, depictions of suicide of a minor , attempted-murder, victim‑blaming,” PTSD, dehumanization, child soldier indoctrination.
♡ Archive
Dottore had dumped a crate of comm-crystals on Scaramouche’s desk and told him to “audit the anomalies ten months back”. Who better than a thing that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t blink and can fast-forward human stuttering without feeling mercy?
He skimmed. He skipped. He let ten, thirty, fifty then a hundred days fall off the calendar.
Static, laughter, coughing, sniffling, the monotonous drone of training reports. A blurred argument about rations. Someone crying and pretending they weren’t. All of it washed past him in a grey blur of noise.
Then—
“Is that… normal, Lord Tartaglia?” a young voice asked. Not young like the ones who die at dawn—young like the ones who don't scream when they do.
A hand came down in the recording—a palm to back.
“Of course!” Childe laughed, bright and stupid. “Tough love makes tough soldiers, comrade. I was weirded out at first too. Hell, I was younger than you! But you—” he squeezed the boy’s shoulder, “—you be better than me. That’s what brotherhood is all about.”
He said it the way heretics say their prayers: syllables inherited, not chosen.
“My fa—“
“Hey—men take care of their own.” Childe cut in, smiling, leaning, looking like a sunrise drawn. “So, if anything ever confuses you, come to me, alright? Door’s open. I've got things that help with... aftermaths…“
Laughter in the barracks, thick with smoke and sweat, card decks shuffling like restless bones. In the background, a rat chewed on something soft and wet and not meant for teeth, and it sounded too much like ecosystem eating itself.
Silence.
Scaramouche let the crystal darken in his fingers, listening to the hum of the machine and the faraway clatter of palace life, and something inside him—the part that refused to die even when they kept trying—twisted on itself. Because memory is a disorder of shape: bend it once, and it knows itself crooked for eternity.
If he was ever forced to name something as close to a childhood as he got, he'd still never say it, but he would think: Kabukimono. The island, the village, the soft, idiot hours in which fruit juice stuck to his fingers. The comedy of tripping. Getting pulled into games and little hands finding his.
He remembered the samurai who came the way men arrive when they think the world owes them tribute.
They took what was easiest to reach first: names, stammered answers, shy glances. Then their eyes stumbled over him and fixed.
“That one,” one of them said, already half-bored. “We’ll let you go,” another added, generosity dripping off his voice like grease, looking straight at the children, “if you give us that one.”
Oh, the math that bloomed on their faces.
The children turned toward him—toward him—as if arithmetic proved he was the answer. Three plus two equals five; remove one, and the sum still holds. Extract one so the rest stays positive.
They pushed him forward with the sincere brutality of innocents in panic.
It would be funny, if he blamed them. Cleaner, too. But he doesn’t. Smart boys. Smart girls. Correct answer. The universe is not built to reward nobility; it rewards whoever has the fastest reflexes with never having to re-learn to hold a cup without shaking.
Hands inventorying his clothes like they were never there at all—until they weren’t. Sweat kissing, then soaking into him like something devotional.
He remembered the blades on their hips that sparkled like promises—sleek, shining things that didn’t look like the ones Niwa taught him to birth from ore. He remembered thinking, distantly, blankly, that the blades were fake, ornamental, clumsy, dull.
He remembered hearing the wheeze, the animal sound, and the weight of a man who would have lost a chase. He thought: If I had grabbed them—took the children by their sticky palms and run—they wouldn’t have been able to catch up.
After: calloused hands at his throat, squeezing and finding no breath to steal, nothing to throttle, only the useless gesture of violence against something that doesn’t need oxygen. After: the dawning comprehension in their eyes when they realized the creature they had used was not born, but made. After: left there, the condition in which mankind leaves gods in when it forgets gods can resemble girls.
He lay there for a long time. Hours, days—time collapsed on itself like cheap tin.
When he finally came—crawled—back, he let the children cling to him like drowning men and cry salt. The children were terrified. The children were sorry. The children were relieved.
He brewed tea with measured hands and stroked their hair without humming, because what else do you do with a throat that has just learned how it can be rearranged without a blade?
An old woman pulled him aside later, fingers like claws on his wrist, and said he should be grateful to be desired.
For a while, no one could peel the children off his side. They slept piled against his side, clutched at his sleeves, used his lap as proof the world hadn’t broken entirely. Long enough for them to learn, slowly, the difference between human things and made things.
After: the children were afraid of him.
All four things can be true.
Click.
New crystal.
Childe again, in a different transmission with a different tone—the cadence of a drill, the grin audible even through a crystal.
‘Men keeping men warm in winter,” he said, laughing, when someone teased him about the way he still slept with his back pressed to walls.
He said it lightly, almost fondly, like touch had been issued alongside rations, like survival hadn’t left teeth marks on him too.
Tartaglia still thought weather was the only cruelty worth naming. Child soldiers often do.
Fine. If the comms weren’t enough, there were always the files.
Name: Innokentii M. Age of enlistment: Sixteen. Region of Origin: Snezhnaya, coastal village. Family: father, surviving, no correspondence post-conscription.
(He pauses here; says nothing. His eyes say it for him.)
Deployed: Under Tartaglia, Harbinger No. XI. Signed: Pulcinella, Harbinger No. V. Placement: standard. Physical aptitude: High. Temperament:Withdrawn; responsive to structure. Noted: “a passive strength.”
They wrote it like a recommendation letter. He almost laughed.
Disciplinary Record: Disobedience x1 — refusal to share sleeping quarters. Status: resolved via corrective dialogue. Supervisor Comment:“Adapting to culture. Will settle with mentorship.”
The page smelled, in his imagination, like wet wool and cheap tobacco.
He kept going.
Final Status: Deceased. Age of death: Sixteen. Cause of death: Self-inflicted gunshot wound to frontal lobe. Instant. Close range. Weapon:Standard-issued Fatui shotgun. Scene Description: Subject found in his tent by teammates, who rushed to the scene after hearing the firearm discharge. Notes: Body, cremated and sent to region of origin. Awaiting claim.
Brains scattered like confetti on the canvas and pole. He imagined the boy's body folded on the floor—a child soldier still.
No note.
The official language hummed a lullaby for wolves: Likely side effects of fatigue, post-combat disorientation, wartime dissociation—common in new recruits with weaker constitutions.
Scaramouche didn’t—still doesn’t—agree.
He crossed the lines out with a pen that smelled more like Dottore's gloves than his and scored a line straight through the explanation. Underneath, he wrote:
Clarity—the only logical conclusion.
Because what else is there?
Clarity, after months of being passed from bunk to bunk, dirt to dirt between men-shaped filth who called him ''comrade'' with hands that never shook. Clarity, after being given an answer heavier than the warmth that asked for payment in flesh painting reds and purples where no medals sit.
Poor Innokentii, who learned, with the arithmetic of survival, some truths weighs more than his own head.
Innokentii M., who understood he could not survive the warm nights anymore.
Innokentii M., who couldn’t survive the answer.
Scaramouche sees the sun the boy must have chosen. They all do.
Tartaglia, Childe, the Eleventh Harbinger—a morning soldiers look at. Warmth you can lace your boots by. Light that shines upon the reason you picked up your weapon in the first place. A god that bleeds gold and laughs with all of his chest, eyes deliberately closed so he doesn't have to watch what happens in the dark, so you don't see which parts of him the dark has washed over like a tide and never gave back. A proof—a living exhibit—the world keeps for itself, that, sometimes, boys do make it through. That you can fall into the abyss and the story doesn't end there.
Innokentii must have looked at him and called it promise.
He must have lifted his palms, tentative and reverent, toward that light like a chapel’s parishioner, and thought: If the sun’s laughter can boil snow, then surely there is hope left for me.
But when the sun he worshipped did not soothe the scorch marks on his skin and mind—only revealed its own—Innokentii learned the oldest truth.
Light is not salvation.
Light is only heat.
And if even the sun can take damage, then who would rescue a moth?
Then hope, haven and heaven—ashes, all of it.
Well. Innokenti found the answer. He fired it through brow.
Clarity—before surrender.
Scaramouche, who deleted the comm.
Scaramouche, who ended the entry: Smart boy.
Scaramouche, who poisoned a water barrel on Tartaglia's next campaign.
Not because they were the right men—there are never any right men when the arithmetic is the empire itself—but because the barrel was the closest throat he could squeeze shut. Only the nearest barrel. Only the nearest mouths
Half a winter later, Arlecchino’s voice drifted across some marble corridor. “Do your siblings know you smoke, Tartaglia?”
Of course they don’t, Scaramouche remembers thinking. Of course not. Tartaglia keeps them innocent like meat in a freezer. Like himself.
Childe stammered about manners, about setting good examples, about later.
Setting good examples.
Setting. Good. Examples.
There is, somewhere in the archive, a rumor of a letter that never reached its destination—found crumpled in a laundry heap, logged as nothing important and filed under nothing at all:
I’m sorry, comrade. I cannot survive summer.
Of course he couldn’t. Summer here is not flowers and festivals; it is hands. It is hot breath against the back of your neck. It is men keeping men warm because the sermon said so, and the sermon is always right and the only thing the boys need are cheap ointments in little glass vials to 'help with the aftermaths'.
The Fatui march on.
Child soldiers keep growing up into parables. Some become unclaimed dust in boxes that never leave the logistics office because no one signs for them—Innokentii’s father, after all, sent no reply; his silence counted as a signature. Others grow into teachers, men who mold boys into echo chambers with their own scarred hands, each passing the sickness down like inheritance. And some—some of the most devout—become preachers. Like Childe. Who burned none—not in that way, not ever, but never pulled anyone back from the bonfire either.
Childe, who still sleeps with his back to the wall and refuses to keep the ghost, and so keeps repeating the sermon instead.
He has survived it and therefore decided that meant it was survivable.
That’s all a system needs to keep spinning.
From father to son. From senior to recruit. From the idol to barracks to sermon to tent to gun to floor.
From Scaramouche to barrel.
Undesired women that were born; desired Kabukimono that was created. Children’s abacus beads being children’s survival, one life on one bead, sliding each other back and forth, teaching the next thing that could be spent. And the beautiful equation where Kabukimono could’ve grabbed them with hands that do not tire and ran with legs that do not cramp, to a place where he won't see a blade—real or ornamental—reflected on their small eyes fear has widened.
But then again, no such place exists.
Somewhere, someone’s daughter is learning, right now, that heat never meant salvation, but appetite.
Somewhere, the sun’s followers, poisoned slowly by the moth’s corpse, keep burying each other—and the water in the barrel still remembers the aftertaste of summer.
⤷ 𝓢 [signed by the Sixth, The Balladeer. The most reliable narrator you will ever get.]
What is this?
A collection of psychological (and sometimes physical—ouch) breakdowns, written in Scaramouche’s own voice (against his will, probably) yet still third person pov. Each chapter will focus on one or multiple Harbingers. Think: unreliable narrator meets emotional autopsy (mostly his own). Good lord, this is going to be horrible.
❕⚠︎❕
This series will explore heavy topics. I do not condone any negative and harmful language or actions described. These characters aren’t morally perfect, but that doesn’t make them good either. Warnings will be given at the start of every chapter𐔌՞. .՞𐦯
ENTRY LOGS:
❀ O1 - Time’s arrow.
Subject(s): Pulcinella, Childe, Dottore's lab.
Keywords: Time, saltless broth, acne, inevitable decay, inevitable death.
''Right. Like I would be making separate entries for them.''
❀ O2 - Birdsong is just screaming with rhyme.
Subject: Columbina.
Keywords: Nightingale. choking. on. marble.
''Ugh.''
❀ 03- Prototype legs and calcium.
Subject: Sandrone.
Keywords: Body image, obsession, disordered eating habits, physical disability
''Yes, those prototype legs are her exact skin color. Don't ask. One mission, one medical emergency, one unfortunate angle.''
❀ 04- Are you warm, comrade?
Subject: Childe, Innokentii M.
Keywords: ⚠️CSA, warmth as predation; cold as safety, hands and empty lessons, military norms forged in war, meat in a freezer, ‘men’ helping ‘men’ out.
“You were not a man, Tartaglia.”
“The boy’s name was Innokentii. Which, in the old tongue, meant ‘innocence’. A joke, I assume. Or an old prayer, deceased.”
❀05- Parasitic orbits.
Subjects: Dottore, Pantalone.
Keywords: Air balloon, the sky, altitude, rot and fly, weak knees, weak lungs.
“Of course the Regrator would have loved it. He's been aiming to flatten things that will always be greater than him since birth.”
