Archive of Our Own ^beta

He had never meant this as a lie.

… But perhaps pure honesty was still out of his reach as long as it wasn't pulled out of him by someone else.

The delicate petal slowly fluttered to the ground, yellow on blue tiles, and the Wanderer cleared his throat as quietly as he could in the stillness of the Akademiya's library.

It had been easy to ignore, at first. Only a mild itch in his empty chest when he watched the Traveler go about his business as he followed, the feeling of something that might have scratched his throat on the way down when he swallowed – but it was only his imagination, he knew. He was a puppet, for one, and artificial beings did not get sick, and any injury he got would heal in a few moments. It must have been irritation at the Traveler's antics, he had thought, impatience contrasting with his former enemy's seemingly bottomless well of goodwill towards the world.

Towards him.

When was the last time someone had done so many needless things for him? Gone out of their way to visit him, seeking his unpleasant presence? Attempting to celebrate his birth?

Who would do such a thing, and why?

Every time the Traveler decided to pretend he enjoyed his company for more than his battle skills, the itch in his chest got a little worse.

Yes. It must have been irritation. The Traveler did not need to coddle him or to pretend he liked him. The Wanderer would have helped all the same – he had promised he would.

The first time he had spat out a flower petal, the Traveler had already left Sumeru, gone on another of his grand adventures to a foreign nation – no doubt on his way to help save the world once again instead of minding his own business. The thought had made the itch climb in his throat until he finally indulged in letting out a small cough.

Lesser Lord Kusanali had called him to her sanctuary, as she often did, and he had thought she would ask for his assistance, send him on another investigation – or perhaps pester him about his progress with his studies, seeking out a debate with him on the state of the world or the human condition.

As if he would know anything about that.

Instead, as he entered, she had held out a slightly crumpled envelope with only his name and the words Sanctuary of Surasthana, Sumeru City, Sumeru scribbled on it.

He had stared for a moment, uncomprehending – he had seen this penmanship before.

At last, he had lifted his head to meet Buer's gaze; she had been looking at him with one of her signature enigmatic smiles, the ones he disliked, the ones she used when she thought she understood something about him. In her small hand had been another piece of paper.

The Wanderer finally found himself sitting on the branch of a great tree, deep in the rainforest, having given up on chasing the birds that persisted in using his hat as a seat, instead staring at the envelope as if it had offended him personally.

Why would the Traveler send him a letter? Did he need the Wanderer's help for something? He must have known that as Buer's prisoner, he couldn't leave Sumeru. She hadn't mentioned anything of the sort anyway.

With an impatient sigh, he chased the questions from his mind and carefully opened the envelope.

The Wanderer snorted – but his aborted laugh morphed into an uncontrollable coughing fit as he felt something coming up his throat.

Something small and bright yellow fell out of his mouth and onto the paper, and he stared for a good few seconds, the initial theories his brain was providing entirely unhelpful. It couldn't be a component that had gotten knocked loose; this had never happened before despite the countless battles he had survived, and he wasn't so shoddily made as to fall to pieces at random times. Nothing in his body would be that color anyway.

He looked closer – and froze. A flower petal rested on top of Aether's messy penmanship, delicate, and beautiful, and definitely impossible.

No.

This wasn't happening.

The Wanderer wasn't a starry-eyed maiden in a stupid Inazuman romance novel.

He must have accidentally swallowed it when he flew here. It was the only rational explanation.

Wondering if the Wanderer liked reading his ramblings didn't seem to prevent the Traveler from sending more. Every other week, another envelope was handed to him with the latest events in the fool's adventures in Fontaine – he had made up with the Fatui twins, met some more people, become friends with them too, eaten himself into a food coma with Paimon, gone to see a few operas, discovered he loved exploring the ruins scattered everywhere under Fontaine's great lake...

Each time, the Wanderer's cough got a little worse.

One petal here and there grew into two at a time, then three. He wasn't sure what kind of flower they came from.

Who knew such a renowned hero could be so selfish.

And who knew someone like the Wanderer could be so foolish as to keep reading these letters despite knowing they made his condition worse.

Perhaps the rational thing to do would have been to act as the Traveler expected. Throw them away, instead of folding them carefully as he did and storing them in a desk drawer locked with a key he always kept on his person.

Then again, the Wanderer had never been known for his good life choices.

Sometimes, something in his traitorous brain compelled him to sit at his desk in the dead of night, a blank sheet of paper in front of him, a quill in his hand.

What was the point? What could he even write?

His day-to-day in this new life of his veered into the exceedingly mundane; the most interesting would probably be the work he did for the Dendro Archon, but even this couldn't even begin to compare to whatever ridiculous events his former enemy currently found himself embroiled in. Again.

Perhaps if he replied with detailed descriptions of his long hours in the Akademiya library, the technical contents of his essays on Inazuman society, and inane gossip about the students who had been whispering behind his back lately, the Traveler would be so bored he would realize it was foolish to send letters to someone like the Wanderer and finally stop.

His chest hurt.

He ignored it, and just like all the other times such absurd fancies had taken over him, he tossed his quill away, crumpled his messy draft, and threw it in the trash.

It was useless. Where would he even send his stupid ramblings to anyway? It wasn't like the Traveler had a fixed address.

There had been a pause in the letters for the last few weeks; the Wanderer wondered whether the foolish man had finally grown tired of his new hobby.

Something had been living in his chest lately, vines twisting around his ribs and thorns poking experimentally at his artificial lungs.

He could bear it. He had survived much worse.

One evening, the Wanderer found another envelope on his desk, the unmistakeable aura of the Dendro Archon left behind in the room; the paper was very crumpled, smudged with what looked like water stains that had made the ink run, the words only barely decipherable.

An image of the Wanderer in the idiot's head? The words were read, and reread again, and still he couldn't make sense of them. Surely there were many others who would be suited to keep the Traveler company inside his own brain – or perhaps the fool was truly devolving into insanity. Having conversations with a former enemy within one's psyche seemed nothing but unhealthy.

A vine twisted itself around the Wanderer's ribcage and squeezed until he felt like he couldn't breathe.

What a foolish notion. He didn't need to breathe.

For the first time, complete and perfect was the flower that fell from his mouth, beautiful and painful with an otherworldly yellow glow, and he plucked it between two fingers to tuck it beneath his Vision, wiping the blood dripping from his lips.

Buer had finally noticed something was wrong with her prisoner; she had happened upon him several times as he gasped with the aftermath of another coughing fit, and he wasn't able to hide the rattle in his breathing so well anymore – he would have preferred to just not breathe at all, and perhaps he could have, except for the fact that speech still required air filling his artificial lungs. It was a wonder the thorns residing beneath his skin hadn't simply torn them to pieces already.

Then again, he thought they might have. His body had been living its own eternal samsara for a while now, immortal flesh pierced through over and over and over again, falling apart one moment, going back to its original state the next, inexhaustible fertilizer for what was swallowing him from the inside.

Of course, Buer was benevolent, so while she was perfectly capable of reading his mind, she refrained from doing so, instead following him around insistently, an expression on her round features that should have been directed at more deserving targets.

The growing worry in her tone unsettled him. Jailors shouldn't care about their prisoners.

“The disease that is afflicting you,” she started – he cut her off.

“I can't contract diseases. I'm a puppet.”

“Your state says otherwise. This is an Inazuman illness, is it not?”

“More like a curse,” the Wanderer muttered. “Quit looking at me like that, Buer. My ribcage can be entirely filled with flowers and vines and I will still live and continue assisting you. I am no mortal. I won't die from this.”

“Perhaps. But it is hurting you,” she said, and she suddenly sounded very small as she added, “I do not want to lose friends, or to see them suffer, when I have spent so long in solitude. You have looked ill for some time now.”

A friend, she said – they were friends? When had that happened? He certainly hadn't been informed.

“You need to tell him,” Buer pleaded. “There is no need to live in pain like this.”

“Who said anything about him?”

The look she sent him said it all; she searched in her pocket before handing him another envelope, and he said nothing as he snatched it from her hand, turning on his heels to find a secluded place to read in peace.

It was a single, almost blank page, only a few words scribbled lopsidedly on its surface.

The words merged together as the Wanderer's vision blurred, and he cursed Aether for giving him another coughing fit; and if his cheeks were wet after that, it was only because of the rattling sensation in his throat.

From the envelope, a long wilted purple flower gently fell on his lap. It had been a long time since the Wanderer had been to Fontaine, but he thought he remembered these being called lumidouce bells.

Parting. The wish for reunion.

The dried flower, too, was inexplicably blurry in front of his eyes as he picked it up and placed it in the center of the letter, folding the corners over it as one would a precious treasure.

It joined the yellow, wilted flower resting against his chest.

Perhaps he had lied to Buer about this being unable to kill him.

It was just as well the Wanderer didn't need sleep or air to live. These days, he wouldn't have been able to find rest even if he'd wanted to, the sharp thorns under his skin pricking him every time he moved.

He had definitely survived worse.

The Traveler was supposed to arrive today, if the letter Buer had received was to be trusted. Perhaps being there to welcome him – to kick his teeth in and throw up a pile of glowing yellow flowers on his lap – would be cathartic.

Or perhaps the Wanderer should just fall back to his traditional strategy and avoid the city entirely until its streets were once again emptied of a golden braid and eccentric, foreign clothes.

But of course, the fool wouldn't let him have his peace. There he was, painstakingly climbing the long way up to the treetop where the Wanderer had found refuge. At least the Traveler's floating companion was nowhere to be seen. He didn't think he had the patience for her chatter right this moment, when the thorns under his ribs had turned from daggers to swords and there was a persistent taste of blood and pollen in his mouth, no matter how much he had tried to wash it down with the local coffee.

“I got your letters,” the Wanderer said in lieu of a greeting. “All of them.”

He relished his small triumph as the sentimental fool's face suddenly became very red.

“Oh,” muttered the Traveler, bringing a gloved hand up to scratch awkwardly at his cheek. “Sorry for... all of that. I had a few, uh, bad moments.”

“Don't apologize. If anything, they were sort of comforting. I thought you were some kind of boring, selfless hero from a fairytale, but as it turns out, you are just as selfish as any other. Makes you more bearable.”

“That's...” The Traveler frowned – and there it was. The same unnecessarily worried expression as Buer's, marring his deceptively youthful features. Of course she had told him.

“Nahida told me you're sick. That you're coughing up flowers. I think I heard stories of it in Inazuma, but... I thought they were just this. Stories. It was real? Are you going to be alright? Shouldn't you speak to whoever...?”

The Wanderer stared. So. Buer hadn't told him everything, it seemed. A proponent of free will in all situations.

“I'll live,” he said. “Worry about yourself, since your brain seems to be malfunctioning lately. Telling someone who tried to kill you that you miss him?”

The Traveler's cheeks became even darker, and he pouted childishly. “I'd really hoped you hadn't received that one.”

“I said I got a –“ The Wanderer was interrupted by a new fit of coughing, petals filling his mouth until he gasped for air and his eyes watered, and he used his fingers to get the offending flowers out, dropping them on his lap, yellow stained with unsightly blood. “...I got all of them.”

There was no reply; and when he raised his head, puzzled by the Traveler's long silence, he found him staring at the flowers, transfixed, reaching a hand towards one of them before the Wanderer could protest.

“...These are from my own world,” the Traveler murmured. “It's been so long since I've seen them.”

Paralysis wasn't a symptom he had experienced before, but at that very moment, the Wanderer found that as much as he wished to fly away, he simply couldn't – rooted in place, as it were, forced to watch as the fool responsible for his misery raised his head towards him, golden eyes watery; and then, the eyes were gone from his field of vision, and he found himself engulfed in arms that were much too warm for his cold, artificial body to bear, the pressure on his skin forcing the thorns beneath to recede to the blessed void from where they'd sprouted.

“I thought it was only me and my one-sided feelings,” the Traveler – Aether – sniffled next to his ear. “I'm sorry. I made it worse with my letters, didn't I?”

“I could have sent one back,” the Wanderer muttered, and shame replaced the thorns beneath his ribs. “Couldn't bring myself to think of a reply to your nonsense.”

Aether gave a watery laugh. “Sounds like you.” He squeezed one more time, and added, “I missed you.”

The vines around his ribs came alive; they twisted, and they squirmed, and he thought he might throw up before he felt them recede entirely just as the thorns had, and traitorous tears pricked at the corner of his eyes from sheer relief as the pain left his body. It was a puzzling sensation. He had been accustomed to suffering. Enduring was not particularly novel or difficult.

Surely the absence of pain was nothing to weep about?

“You wrote as much,” the Wanderer murmured once his breath had returned. How embarrassing that his voice wavered so noticeably from only uttering a few words. He hid his face in the Traveler's scarf, trying not to think of how long it had been since someone had held him.

They stayed like this for a long while still, until Aether finally leaned back, taking his face between gloved hands as a boyish grin slowly spread on his lips. “So. How's your thesis going? Is everyone in the Akademiya still alive? Since you didn't grace me with a reply, I still don't know the answer to these vital questio – ”

The Traveler's voice died in his throat when a fed up Wanderer grabbed his cheeks in turn and crashed their lips together – and then immediately released him, doubling over to indulge in another coughing fit.

But this time, as the petals fell from his mouth, he felt his chest emptying, nothing growing to replace the blooms being expelled.

Blessed emptiness.

How ironic.

A hand rested on his shoulder, and he lifted his head to meet worried gold.

“Are you alright?”

“...Yes. These were the last ones.”

“Oh, good. Good. I'm glad,” Aether laughed shakily. Were his eyes getting misty again? What an absurd person, getting this concerned over a former enemy.

Then again, the Wanderer was just as ridiculous, and the yellow petals glowing faintly in the low light of dusk were proof of it – they flew away, carried by the wind, and he felt a twinge of regret at seeing them all disappear; but his thoughts vanished just as quickly as the blooms had as Aether's lips were on his again, and he closed his eyes.

Ridiculous.

Ridiculous, all of it.

Ridiculous, to think he would ever feel such peace from an empty ribcage and warm hands on his shoulders.

To think that anything as vibrant and effervescent as love could ever sprout from dead wood.