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He awakens with his arms bound and a sword aimed towards his throat.
“Don’t move,” someone warns, and he blinks his eyes hard until they manage to focus on the source of the voice. A stranger with golden hair and golden eyes is staring at him intensely. Several other people behind them are also watching him, with expressions ranging from concern to sheer hatred. He... doesn’t know how to parse what’s going on.
It feels like something in his brain is lagging, and it’s distracting him. Fleeting almost-thoughts keep slipping away from him. He doesn’t recognize any of these people, nor can he remember where he is, or why.
...His head hurts.
“Where is Il Dottore now?” the stranger continues, sword still held steady at his throat.
Is that... a name? A title? He feels like he should recognize it, but he can’t place it. So all he can think to reply is, “Who?”
“Don’t play dumb with us!” A small white-haired figure peeks out from behind the stranger and stamps her foot on the air. “We saw him standing over your body right after the fight!”
“Fight...?” he echoes. Was there a fight? Now that he thinks about it, he can feel a dull throb in his chest, as though he’s been injured. He looks down.
His body is broken.
That’s the only word he can think to describe it. His train of thought, which has already been stuttering and incomplete, short-circuits completely as he tries to take it all in. His body is broken. The artificial skin that’s supposed to cover his torso has been forced open and pulled aside, revealing the machinery beneath. That by itself wouldn’t be so bad; he dimly remembers, as if by instinct, that removing his skin is sometimes necessary to make repairs to the delicate robotics that make up his skeleton and innards. But this...
He’s not sure if this can even be repaired.
Metal pieces have been dented and pried apart. Maybe the way his lungs have been punched out through his back is what’s causing most of his pain. Oil is still slowly drip, drip, dripping out of them into his open chest cavity. The cut ends of loose wires lay exposed, still sparking with residual electricity. It’s a fire hazard, really, though that’s the least of his concerns at the moment.
He’s vaguely aware of the other people whispering and arguing back and forth, but he can’t seem to process what they’re actually saying. After a long minute where he doesn’t respond to anything, the golden-haired stranger returns from the debate to thoroughly search his expression.
“Do you even remember who you are?” they ask quietly.
He tries to kick his brain back into motion. “I’m...” He should know this. He still understands how his body works. He still understands that he is not quite human, and that he was created by someone’s hands. He knows a lot of the practical things about himself.
I’m...
So why can’t he remember his own name...?
“Shit.” The stranger’s sudden curse startles him. “We were so close!” They slam their foot into a giant plate of metal nearby on the ground, grimacing as it clangs loudly. “What did Dottore do to him? Dammit!”
A tall gray-haired man speaks up from the back of the group. “Calm down, Traveler. We knew this might happen.”
The golden-haired stranger – Traveler? - clenches their hands into fists. There is a tense silence as the whole group seems to be waiting for them to speak.
“Everyone leave,” they order, finally. “I want to talk to him alone.”
“Even Paimon?”
“Go.”
Everyone else files away, some casting glances over their shoulders or whispering among themselves. He doesn’t pay any of it much mind.
He still can’t stop staring at his ruined torso.
He thinks he can almost make out a memory of someone’s hands carving into it, long ago, but not for destruction. For rebuilding. For reshaping something that was... not broken, but just made wrong, and turning it into something right. But the memory seems corrupted, like pieces have been cut out or overridden. Whose hands are they? For what purpose was his body being altered?
His attempts to bring the memory into clarity are cut short when the sword is once again leveled at his throat.
“I want to know everything you remember,” the Traveler says.
The interrogation doesn’t last long. Mostly because he genuinely doesn’t remember much, although the Traveler’s impatient, frustrated attitude doesn’t help things much either. They keep pacing around, muttering to themself, something about a sibling and gods and finding the truth of the world. He answers everything as best as he can, but even he knows that none of his replies are satisfactory.
“She is too gentle,” she said once, when she thought he wasn’t listening. “Too fragile. I cannot allow her to hold the g̶̡͍̦̗̠̑n̴̳̥͚̍o̴̲̹͉̲̤̎͂s̷̰̫̰̃́į̶̳͆́̕s̶͚͑̾͗͂ͅ. She... It might get broken.”
His head hurts.
Something about watching the Traveler get so riled up makes him want to smile. But that doesn’t feel right. Or maybe he wants to laugh at them instead. But that doesn’t feel right, either.
He’s kept locked up in a room somewhere, without light or food or basic amenities. Not that he needs them, after all; his body doesn’t have many of the baser functions that humans’ bodies do. It’s only right that he would be treated this way.
He can’t tell if being treated this way should inspire anger or indifference. Mostly he just feels tired.
You really would be better off dead.
A whole parade of strangers keeps coming past his cell. He can’t really see most of them, owing to the darkness here and the tiny opening in his otherwise solid door, but he can certainly hear them. Researchers, most of them call themselves, clamoring to get a look at this miracle of human ingenuity. Others hurl insults at him through the opening, decrying his creation as blasphemous and a slap in the face to everything the Akademiya stands for.
“You are an abomination.” His friend’s voice trembled as he warily backed away. “Get out of my sight.”
He doesn’t understand the foreign pressure he feels around his eyes when he listens to their words.
“You killed Nahida,” the Traveler tells him on one visit.
It’s been a while since anyone has come to see him. He thinks maybe the place he’s being kept was finally closed to the public, or else perhaps they just lost interest in him. That’s okay. Being left behind is a familiar experience for him.
Even if he still can’t quite remember why.
And so the Traveler is his only consistent visitor, stopping by at random times to just stare at him through the opening in the door, or to talk at him, or to ask him more questions that he doesn’t know the answers to. At least they finally seem to believe that he truly doesn’t remember anything they think is important.
On this visit, for whatever reason, they’ve taken an interest in repairing him. His chest has been left open for... well, he’s not sure how long. A small eternity, perhaps. He’s distantly surprised that this hasn’t killed him yet. The disconnected wires alone should have disrupted some of his functions, surely. And yet, aside from the apparent memory loss, his body still seems to be working perfectly.
The Traveler grips the remains of his lungs and pulls. Metal screeches against metal as they shift back closer to where they’re supposed to be. But even without looking, he knows they’re still misshapen.
“I don’t know who that is.”
“I know you-” the Traveler starts, then cuts themself off and forces themself to take a deep breath. “I know you don’t,” they say after a moment. “That’s why I wanted to tell you about her.”
He listens. There’s not much else he can do, locked up in here as he is.
“Nahida is... was the Dendro Archon.” The Traveler’s gaze unfocuses, and he knows they’re no longer truly looking at him, even though their eyes stay fixed on his ruined chest. “She was kind, and gentle, and really just a child compared to the other gods.”
“She is too gentle.”
"̴H̷o̵w̴ ̴w̶o̷u̶l̷d̶ ̷y̸o̵u̵ ̶l̷i̶k̷e̸ ̸t̷o̴ ̶b̴e̶c̶o̴m̴e̸ ̶a̵ ̷g̷o̵d̶.̶.̷.̷?̶"̶
“She lived her whole life in the Sanctuary of Surasthana, forced into captivity by the sages who thought they knew better than the gods. But she didn’t give up on her people. No, she was always there for them.” The Traveler rubs their thumb against their opposite wrist. A self-soothing gesture, he thinks, though he doesn’t know why he knows that.
“And I killed her?” he asks.
“And you killed her,” the Traveler confirms.
He considers the implications of that. Killing a god? A laugh almost bursts out of him, but he manages to keep it down. Death is difficult for humans. It is also difficult for gods.
A woman with a long purple braid knelt on the ground, bent over low, keening and sobbing with grief. He doesn’t know why she’s crying, but he feels tears well up in his own eyes anyways.
He is getting so tired of crying for her.
He tries to clutch at his head, but his hands are still bound. It hurts again. It all hurts.
Everything hurts, and he doesn’t understand why.
His body seizes up. The Traveler has touched the ends of two wires together, and the resulting electric shock has caused a tingling feeling around the area.
“Sorry,” the Traveler says, not sounding entirely sorry. They let the wires go loose again.
“It’s alright,” he replies, though he’s not sure why he says it. The tingling feeling goes away.
“Do you even need to be repaired?” The Traveler tugs his flayed skin back over his chest to cover the gaping hole. The torn edges don’t quite line up anymore, though, leaving gaps where robotic parts and sputtering wires still show through. Before... well, before, it would have been indistinguishable from any other human’s chest, albeit with a few extra scars that he knows most humans don’t have: two horizontal incisions across his chest, and one vertical one right down the middle.
Human? a voice scoffs from somewhere in the back of his mind. You've never been human. You’re better than that scum.
He’s not sure why that thought hurts so much.
“You can cry?”
The Traveler’s eyes are wide with mixed emotions as they reach up to brush something off of his cheek.
Look how fucking weak you are. Pathetic.
If we’re going to end up like this, I think I’d rather just die.
“I don’t want to,” he whispers. He’s not really certain which voice he’s replying to. Possibly it’s both.
The Traveler leaves. They don’t come back for a long time.
He’s lying on the ground, limbs twitching and spasming. It hurts. Dammit, it hurts. That damned fool Traveler shoved their whole fucking hand into his chest and ripped out his new heart, and it hurts. If he needed to breathe, he’d be suffocating. If he had a typical nervous system, he’d probably be going into shock right about now.
Good fucking thing he doesn’t have a typical body. At least he’s still alive.
Not that that’s much consolation when what passes for his guts are spilling out all over the floor.
Attempting to move proves a monumental task. Signals must be crossed in his brain, the broken wires causing a disruption in his functions. He can barely even bend his fingers, much less get his legs under him to make a retreat. In the end, all he succeeds in doing is getting himself sprawled out in a slightly different position. It’s embarrassing, really. If this is how he’s going to end up, he’d really rather just die here.
Ahh, he wonders what the Traveler will do when they see him like this. Will they feel vindicated? Relieved? Justified in wiping this abomination off the face of the earth?
He can’t wait to see their expression when they finally end him for good.
But the next face that crosses into his line of sight is not the Traveler’s.
A familiar pale-ass scientist crouches by his side and leans down close to inspect his eyes. That stupid light blue hair tumbles down into his mouth, and he spits, disgusted. The newcomer leans back slightly, a complicated expression coming over his face.
“Oh. You’re still alive,” Il Dottore says callously. “That’s a shame.”
“Fuck you,” Scaramouche replies.
“All my precious handiwork has been ruined,” the other Harbinger laments, ignoring Scaramouche’s insult. His fingers delicately trace the edges of the gaping hole that’s been ripped out of Scaramouche’s torso, hissing with pain when a stray wire catches against his bare skin. “What a waste of perfectly good materials...”
Voices and clattering sounds echo out from nearby, and both Harbingers flinch. “You’d better run, if you don’t want to end up dead too,” Scaramouche taunts.
Dottore once again ignores the remark and begins muttering to himself about logistics that Scaramouche only partially understands. “...its memory storage... the manual overrides I installed... yes, that’ll do.”
He shoves a hand up into Scaramouche’s chest and yanks on something, hard.
“Wh-” Scaramouche doesn’t even get the full word out before his body convulses once more. System notifications that only he can see flash before his eyes, warning him that an override has been activated and that a large amount of data is being deleted. The flood of information overwhelms him, and he can feel himself start to black out as more and more of his functions start to shut down. Even the blunt force trauma of having his heart literally ripped out of his chest hadn’t caused as much damage to his systems as Dottore’s one simple action.
He doesn’t understand what’s going on, but for perhaps the first time in his life, he thinks he’s well and truly terrified.
“You... bastard...” he manages to grind out through the pain. “What... did you...”
But Dottore straightens up before he can finish saying anything. “Ah, it looks like the guests of honor have arrived. I suppose this is my cue to make a graceful exit.” He looks over at something past all the rubble that Scaramouche can’t see, smiles, and gives an exaggerated salute.
He doesn’t even spare a second glance at Scaramouche before he leaves, quickly vanishing from sight amidst all the wreckage of his biggest creation.
Scaramouche’s last conscious thought is of his mother, and then he slips away into oblivion.
The next time the Traveler visits the cell, they immediately notice that something is off.
Even though he’s seemingly lost most of his memory, Scaramouche was usually at least somewhat alert. The puppet could still talk and interact with the Traveler, and as frustrating as those interactions could be, it was clear that there was still some form of consciousness there, even though it was obviously damaged too. The Traveler isn't very well-versed in robotics or anything, but they had a feeling it was nothing short of a miracle that Scaramouche was still functioning at all.
So when they shut the door behind them and Scaramouche doesn’t so much as look up at them, they can’t help but feel a little bit unnerved.
“Hello?” they try, carefully stepping forward towards where the body sits, still chained to the wall, as it has been all this time. “Anybody home?”
Abruptly, the humanoid machine whirs to life, straightening up and raising its head to look at them. The movements look stiff, mechanical, nothing at all like the fluid, powerful, conscious movements of the monstrous god they’d fought so long ago. There is no recognition in its eyes.
“Reboot complete. All superfluous data has been erased.” The feminine voice that issues from the robot’s now-motionless body nauseates the Traveler even more than the gaping hole in its chest had. They understand the implications immediately.
Scaramouche is gone.
“It is nice to meet you,” the robot continues, oblivious to the Traveler’s internal repulsion. “My name is Raiden Yasuko.”