Buer was the one who produced the memory crystal and held it out to Scaramouche.
He looked at it for a moment, uncertain. Then he saw Makoto give a small nod, and he reached out and took it.
The memory did not ease into him. It arrived all at once, a flood with no preamble, carrying everything simultaneously.
His own past. The parts he had always known: being made, encountering the nameless boy, the years wandering through Inazuma, everything that had happened at Tatarasuna. Joining the Fatui. The Five of Inazuma, and what that had cost. These were the bones of his story, the things he had never managed to forget and had never quite managed to reconcile.
But now the bones had flesh he had not seen before.
Detail that had always been missing. And faces.
Dottore.
He watched it happen in the memory as though standing outside the architecture of his own life and seeing its load-bearing walls for the first time. Dottore calculating him from a distance. Dottore positioning people, events, and information with the unhurried precision of someone who had all the time he needed. The manipulation of his friend's death, the specific choreography of it, each element placed just so. The door to the Fatui opening at exactly the moment Scaramouche had nowhere else to go.
And then the conversation between Dottore and the Jester. Talking about him in the way you talk about a tool that has performed adequately. The dismissiveness of it. The complete absence of anything that might be called regard.
The crystal cracked and dissolved.
Scaramouche stood with his eyes unfocused.
"This is, "
"A memory crystal from Irminsul," Buer said quietly. "The World Tree holds the record of everything that has occurred in Teyvat."
A long silence.
"So all of it was real."
She did not answer. The answer was in the crystal he had just held.
"I see."
The stillness that followed was the wrong kind. Not the stillness of someone who has processed something and arrived at peace, but the stillness of someone who has gone somewhere very deep inside themselves and is not entirely present in the room. There was no anger in his face, no heat, no urgency. There was almost nothing, a quality that was more unsettling than any visible emotion would have been.
Makoto had noticed. Her voice came carefully.
"Scaramouche, "
His head came up. The movement was the only thing that had happened in the past thirty seconds, and the eyes that found hers were the colour of something that had been burning for a long time in a contained space.
There were blood-red tears at the corners of them.
He went to his knees before her.
The movement was not dramatic. It was very quiet, and very deliberate, and it had the quality of something that could not be taken back.
"I am sorry, Aunt Makoto." His voice was level, which was somehow worse than if it had not been. "I am sorry, Your Majesty."
"I was deceived, and I used that deception as reason to do wrong. I committed myself to people who had no claim on my loyalty. I harmed people in Inazuma who had no part in what was done to me. I harmed people in Snezhnaya who expected better of me. I am a person who did not look carefully enough, and who let that carelessness become the excuse for everything that followed."
"I am a fool. I am an ungrateful person. I am guilty of things that cannot be repaired."
"I deserve to die. The Five of Inazuma. The civilians I killed. Every innocent person who encountered me while I was in the Fatui's service, "
"But before I die," he said, and something shifted in the quality of the stillness around him, not heat, not urgency, but a kind of immovability, "I have something I must do."
The killing intent that rose from him was not loud. That was the thing about it. It was not the theatrical rage of someone who has just learned they were betrayed. It was older than that, more settled, the kind that had been sitting in the body for a long time without a target and had just been given one.
The red that spread around his outline was not an elemental effect. It was the accumulated weight of centuries of harm, his own, and others'.
"Dottore and the Jester will not die well. I will see to that personally. I will collect what is owed. And after, whatever punishment anyone decides is appropriate, I will accept it."
"But first. I must kill them."
Ryen reached out and tapped the table once.
The Imaginary Energy moved with the light touch of something that did not need to announce itself. It passed through the room without pressure, found the specific turbulence in Scaramouche's consciousness, and smoothed it, not suppressing, not overriding, simply providing the kind of clarity that grief and rage, left entirely to themselves, tend to dissolve.
In the MC World's context the Imaginary Energy was constrained, as all forces were by the world's own logic. But this was not a large task. The world's law and the Imaginary Tree's law existed at comparable levels of authority; where the world's law yielded slightly on specific points, those points could be used.
Scaramouche's eyes cleared.
He did not stand. He remained kneeling, head lowered, saying nothing.
Makoto exhaled through her nose.
"You were deceived. That does not close the account, what you did under that deception is still what you did, and the people it cost are still gone. I am not going to tell you otherwise."
A pause.
"But the account cannot be settled by your death. The people you harmed cannot be returned that way. And at present, " she glanced at the Cryo Archon briefly ", Barnabas is understaffed. You still have work to do."
"The matter of the Fatui, and of what you owe Inazuma, we can return to it after Dottore is dealt with. That conversation will happen. But it will happen later."
Scaramouche did not respond. He took the words in, held them somewhere, and remained where he was.
Diluc, who had been watching from nearby with the particular quality of observation he reserved for people who were making calculations he was interested in, looked at Scaramouche with eyes that had lost their earlier hardness.
He had no particular complexity of feeling about most people. His relationship to the world was generally direct: what you did told him who you were, and what you were determined what you deserved. He was not a man inclined toward nuance for its own sake.
But anyone who wanted to kill Dottore was someone Diluc could work with.
He had eliminated one of Dottore's clones. He knew what the man was capable of. He also knew that the eliminating of a single clone had not been his own doing, not really, Venti had led that engagement, and the power differential had been plain. Diluc was honest about this with himself even when he did not say it aloud. Against the full Doctor, without the Witchcraft mod's most powerful tools available to him, he would last a handful of exchanges at best.
But Scaramouche had worked alongside Dottore. Knew his methods. Understood his systems. And the Delusion work, whatever Scaramouche might be able to develop from his experience with the Fatui's false Visions, could provide capability that the Alliance did not currently have.
There were practical reasons to want Scaramouche's participation that had nothing to do with sympathy.
Diluc was also honest about that.
Scaramouche, still in his self-imposed silence, stood at last and moved to one side of the room without a word.
Ryen watched this with a mildly puzzled quality around his eyes. He had not expected the response to be this fragile. Scaramouche was not weak, he had seen enough of how the man carried himself to know that, but the specific kind of devastation that came from having the architecture of your past dismantled and replaced with something colder was its own category, and it had its own particular way of finding the gaps in a person.
He left it alone.
---
"That is a strange thing," Lumine said, in the tone of someone transitioning from a heavy subject before the weight could settle. She was scratching the back of her head with the air of someone who has been turning something over and has finally decided to say it. "When we were in the World Tree, there were memory crystals everywhere. I could see Aether's. But I did not see mine."
She looked between the people nearby with the slight puzzlement of someone who expects an answer and is not sure where it is.
"By my reckoning I have been travelling long enough and done enough notable things that at least one memory would qualify. So why is my record missing?"
Zhongli and Venti exchanged a glance.
Zhongli considered his phrasing with the careful deliberateness of someone who has said something important before and is recalling whether it landed.
"Do you remember what I told you during the Rite of Descension?"
Lumine blinked.
"The Rite of Descension?" She thought about it. "Which part specifically? You said quite a few things."
A silence.
"…I said," Zhongli began again, with the patient quality of someone who has decided not to comment on this, "that you are a Descender. And that Descenders cannot be recorded by the World Tree. Irminsul does not have the capacity to hold the memories of beings who are not originally from Teyvat."
Lumine was quiet for a moment. Zhongli could see the edge of genuine reflection approaching in her expression. He allowed himself the faint beginnings of satisfaction at having apparently reached her this time.
"Can you just say *person* instead of *being*?" Lumine said. "Being sounds strange."
Zhongli closed his eyes briefly.
Venti stepped in with the practiced ease of someone who has been doing triage on Zhongli's conversational injuries for a long time.
"What the old man is saying," he offered cheerfully, "is that you are not from Teyvat, so Irminsul cannot write you down in its record. Which is actually a good thing."
He tilted his head.
"He also told you, once, I believe we have both told you this at various points, that the better way to travel is to carry the memories of your journey yourself, rather than letting the world carry them for you. Does that ring any bells?"
Lumine's expression moved through several configurations before settling on something close to recollection.
"Vaguely. I think I remember something like that." A pause. "But then, Aether, "
"He is different from you," Zhongli said, with the particular quality of returning to a point he had been working toward since the beginning of the conversation. "You remain a Descender. Irminsul cannot record you, because you are not Teyvat's life, you are a traveller through it."
He paused.
"Aether made a different choice. The path he walked, becoming what he became, binding himself to the role he has taken on, meant accepting this world as his. And a being who belongs to Teyvat, even if they arrived from outside it, can be recorded by Irminsul. He is part of the world now, in a way that you are not."
Lumine went still for a moment, in a way that was different from her usual motion.
"So Aether is completely stuck. He can't leave Teyvat."
"He is not imprisoned in any physical sense. He could move within Teyvat freely. But crossing between worlds, the way a Descender can, that path is no longer available to him, not while the thing he has committed to here remains unresolved."
"Which may," Zhongli added, with the measured tone of someone presenting a fact without editorialising it, "never be resolved. The conditions are such that the probability is not high."
Lumine absorbed this.
Ningguang had begun to position herself to offer the quiet presence of support that was one of her most consistent qualities in difficult moments.
She did not reach Lumine in time.
Lumine's face broke into a smile. Both hands came together in a single clear clap.
"Finally!"
The room stared at her.
"That smug, self-satisfied, *three-minutes-older-than-me* expression he has had since the beginning of time, " She was practically glowing. "I have been waiting for something like this for years! He is stuck in Teyvat and I get to go wherever I want! He is going to have to listen to me telling him about every world I visit and every adventure I have and there is nothing he can do about it, "
A pause.
"And I can bring Paimon. We always go together anyway. The two of us, everywhere, while he stays here and gets increasingly annoyed about it, "
"Your sibling bond," Ganyu said, carefully, after a moment, "is genuinely unique."
Lumine waved this off.
"Is he in danger, though?" she added, as an afterthought, with a quality that suggested the question mattered to her even if she was not going to be visibly moved by its answer.
Zhongli considered.
"Previously, yes, the Heavenly Principles represented a real threat to him, as did the Abyss's internal instability. At present, the Alliance intends to address the Heavenly Principles, and the Abyss's trajectory is a matter of time. His physical safety in Teyvat is not the primary concern."
"The more likely outcome," he continued, "is simply that his plans fail. That he remains caught in this world without accomplishing what he came here to accomplish."
"Perfect," Lumine said, with complete sincerity.
"Truly," she added, folding her hands. "From the bottom of my heart. I hope that very specific thing happens to him."
The room regarded her with a collective expression that contained several things at once.
"It is not that I do not care about him," she said, apparently feeling this needed clarification. "He is my brother. If he were in genuine danger I would do something about it."
She paused.
"But he is not in danger. He is just stuck. And he has spent every year of our shared travel history treating those three minutes like a lifetime of seniority. Telling me what to do. Making decisions without me. Walking two steps ahead and expecting me to follow."
She spread her hands.
"He has the MC World. He has the Alliance. He has people looking out for him. He is going to be completely fine. He just cannot leave."
She smiled again.
"And I can."
Lisa leaned toward Ryen from the nearby chair she had settled into.
"You know," she said quietly, "Lumine is genuinely getting more like this by the week."
"I know," Ryen said.
"That is somewhat your fault."
He spread his hands. This was factually accurate, and he was not going to pretend otherwise. Lumine had always had this quality, the particular irreverence, the willingness to find the funny side of something that was also real, but extended proximity to someone who treated the universe as a project to be optimised, with no particular reverence for the categories it came packaged in, had given her sharper edges.
He did not consider this a bad outcome.
What he also knew, and had not said, was that Lumine's relationship with Aether was exactly what she had described: two people who had been through everything together, who drove each other comprehensively mad, and who would each do something about it without hesitation if the other were in real trouble. The comedy of her reaction was real. So was the fact that she had checked whether he was in danger before deciding to enjoy the situation.
The two things existed at the same time.
That, he thought, was probably what a sibling bond looked like when you had been travelling the universe together for longer than most civilisations had been standing.
~~----------------------
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