shi_rayu_ki on x for the header
“The One Who Left” part 2
note: sorry for the extremely late post I was super busy the past few days and I still am but I couldn’t leave you guys hanging.
Warning: Angst
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They whispered his name like a curse.
Scaramouche. The Balladeer. The puppet who clawed his way to power through fire and lightning, leaving ruin in his wake.
To the Fatui, he was a harbinger of terror.
To the world, he was nothing but a weapon of destruction.
But to himself? He was still the boy no one stayed for.
And the proof of it lingered in the memory of you.
He thought he buried it—the night you walked away from him. The sound of the satchel’s strap sliding over your shoulder. The finality in your voice when you said he would destroy you.
But no matter how far he rose, no matter how many knelt at his feet, that memory haunted him.
He told himself he didn’t need you. He told himself you were weak for leaving. But every quiet moment, when the halls of Fatui strongholds echoed empty, he would find his gaze wandering to the door, waiting for footsteps that would never return.
And so, when he climbed into the seat of the Divine Machine, when he seized godhood for himself, he thought—finally. Now I’ll never be abandoned again. Now no one will dare leave me.
Yet in the roaring silence of his throne room, all he could hear was your voice.
“You’ve become the same as them. Cruel. Unfeeling. A god who rules by fear, not love.”
The words carved deeper than any blade.
And when they came for him—the Traveler, the Dendro Archon, all those who dared to defy his ascension—he fought with everything he had. The sky split with his storms, the earth trembled with his wrath.
But beneath the thunder, there was only one thought screaming inside him:
If you had stayed, would I have become this monster?
When the Divine Machine fell, when his godhood shattered into ash, the truth hit him harder than the blow that ended it.
It was never the world he wanted to conquer.
It was never divinity he sought.
It was you.
He only ever wanted you.
Collapsed in the aftermath, stripped of his power, Scaramouche’s breaths came shallow, ragged. The world around him blurred, fading in and out, but the memory of you remained sharp as glass.
He laughed, hoarse and broken. “I thought if I became a god, I’d never be left again. But even now… even like this… you’re still gone, aren’t you?”
The laugh crumbled into a sob he couldn’t suppress. For all his claims of being heartless, the truth was cruel: he had a heart, and it was still tethered to the one person who had walked away.
“Do you know what you did to me?” His voice cracked, trembling as he stared at the empty sky. “You ruined me. You left me hollow, and I thought I could fill that void with power. But all I did was lose myself even more.”
His hand reached out as if to grasp something, someone—but only air met his fingers.
“You should have killed me that night instead of leaving. It would have hurt less.”
The wind howled through the ruins, carrying his words into nothingness.
And Scaramouche, the puppet who had tried to be a god, curled in on himself, broken and abandoned once again.
No one would ever know that the storm of a false god was born not from ambition, but from the absence of one soul who had once believed in him.
And even as he remade himself into the Wanderer—discarding his name, his past, his so-called godhood—the memory of you lingered. A wound that never healed, an echo that haunted every step.
Because in the end, he wasn’t searching for freedom.
He was still searching for you.
And he always would.
