steps on you. squashes you like a bug. shoves you in a rat trap. tosses you into the sea shackled to a ball and chain. sends you to space without oxygen. throws you into the sun.
"well." the world rolls over his tongue to break the hovering silence. perhaps not quite the best way to respond to his own assassination, a hand through his stomach. still, with a cough, he manages to speak, the lilt of his tone ever playful despite the graveness of a limb impaled across his stomach. "that's not very polite of you to do is it, scara?"
dying, childe imagines, isn't much of a humorous affair. the world ends with him, where the stars die out, the ocean retreating into depths, the earth left to dust. a puppet, no matter how hard he will thrive to be more than he is, is nothing without his strings. a boy, no matter the blades he will wield and the lives he will take, is barely a warrior without his roots.
and perhaps it was about time for a reality check. still, he imagined death to look less mundane than a co-worker. if not scaramouche, it would have likely been one of his superiors. still... the thought makes him wrinkle his nose, staring down at the shorter man who seems to be waiting for a more fulfilling response.
childe stares down at his body, amazed by arm pierced through his organs. the pain sears childe inside out, the blood dripping from the gaping hole in his body, but childe cannot bring himself to care. he has been in this stage many times before. the human vessel is soft and vulnerable. he notes that scaramouche's quick work of him is a much more precise hole, with little jagged edges. but of course. he knows what it is like to be void of things.
"are you empty too? is that why you've hated me, all this time?" gloved fingers bury themselves into the balladeer's cheeks, as if trying to pierce holes into scaramouche too. a rough flick of his wrist to raise scara's chin. dull blues meeting violets. artificial as he is, scaramouche does well to mimic humanity. "i could have shared this body with you."
a tilt of his head, eyebrow raised in mild curiosity. "you don't want to admit it? then i will." his lips bloodstained / his voice quivering into the winds / his smile wide, his teeth stained in red. godkin be damned, tartaglia dares to grab his shirt and draw him close, laughing into his face. "balladeer, it is here we always return to: to nothing, to the end. we are nothing."
