Adventure Beyond The Firmament [Heiscara]

Chapter 14

It was rather late at night, exactly two weeks after returning to Teyvat, when Scaramouche was sneakily walking across the corridors of the Zapolyarny Palace. There were very few people still awake, so he didn't find it difficult to avoid being seen by anyone. Even the Doctor needed to take breaks from his experiments to sleep, so even his laboratory was empty. The puppet knocked, anyways, just to be safe, and went in after he received no reply.

The room was shrouded in complete darkness, but that wasn't a problem to him. As quickly and silently as he could, the indigo-haired man searched through drawers and cabinets for a specific object. He was about to give up, thinking that Dottore could have thrown it away, when he finally found what he was looking for. Scaramouche immediately left the eerie lab immediately, closing the door behind him gently, so as to not make any noise.

Shortly after, he was away from the Palace and crossing seemingly endless plains that were covered in snow. Many would find the cold to be unbearable, give up and go back, but the cold never bothered the Balladeer. He didn't particularly enjoy it, though, mostly because every once in a while he had to remove his hat due to the snow that would gather on top of it.

There wasn't a single soul around him, the only things he could hear were the wind and the jingling of the ornaments hanging from his hat. This gave him the opportunity to think one last time about what he was doing, it was his last chance to back down.

A few days ago, he was in Liyue, the nation of contracts, to assist Pantalone. There, when Scaramouche opened the door to a room in the Northland Bank, he saw something he wasn't expecting, two Diplomats making out. They immediately separated and started begging the indigo-haired man to not say anything to the Ninth Harbinger, since that was the Harbinger they were working for. The Balladeer had had to deal with similar situations in the past many a time, yet this was the first time he even considered doing nothing about it. It was almost as if Scaramouche was feeling for them, to some degree.

Later on that day, when he had returned to the room provided to him during his stay in the bank, his mind wandered back to that couple he caught kissing. Despite being way older than both of them combined, surprisingly, Scaramouche had never kissed or been kissed by anyone. For couples to do it frequently, it must be a pleasant experience, he thought, but, back then, he didn't care about experiencing it for himself. That wasn't quite the case anymore, though.

The Harbinger remembered, when he was stuck in the base of the Crux and Kazuha mentioned that his and the detective's counterparts were in a relationship.

"You must miss your boyfriend a lot, no?"

"Heizou must miss you a lot too."

What if, like their counterparts, they, too, were together? Scaramouche thought about this more often than he would like to admit. He knew not if this wish was fueled only by his curiosity about relationships or if there were actual feelings involved (although the answer would be obvious to anyone else). Would the green-eyed man abandon him, just like everyone else? "Of course he will." The Balladeer replied to his own question, thinking that Heizou, being a mortal, would end up dying on him one day, whether he wanted to or not. But that wouldn't happen anytime soon, certainly. He was still much too young for that. Knowing that the detective would stop being around eventually, caused the puppet, who still refused to believe he held feelings for him, to have an epiphany. Scaramouche realised that time was limited and he couldn't spend an eternity pondering on whether he should try to reunite with Heizou or not.

After some hours of walking, Scaramouche reached his destination, the port of Snezhanya, before the sun had even risen, which meant he wasn't behind schedule. Naturally, nobody knew he was there, he was supposed to be preparing for a trip to the Abyss, but he had no intentions of going down there again in the near future. To be completely honest, he didn't exactly mind visiting the Abyss again, he knew of some gorgeous locations that he would love to see again. Scaramouche's issue lay with him going down there alone. "Would Heizou find those places beautiful?"