Chapter Text
The shogun, being as she is Beelzebul's proxy, is attuned to the ley lines of Inazuma. It was no small feat to achieve in an artificial puppet. Although she has no direct connection to the gnosis, its energy feels much the same to its nation's ley lines. And so the shogun tracks Scaramouche by the gnosis, by feel alone. Fumbling in the dark at first, then surer and surer as that nexus of energy grows closer. She crosses the nation like a streak of lightning, flitting from one waypoint to the next.
She finds him on a cliff overlooking the sea.
Trepidation slows her steps at last.
The thing is.
Meeting him is one of the first things she ever wanted for herself.
I don't want to kill him, she remembers herself thinking. And although she has rarely thought of it in these terms, everything spiraled out from there.
When she was younger, and bored, and trapped in her loneliness like a boar at the bottom of a well, she used to fantasize about what would've happened if he'd stayed. If their creator kept him, and her as well. What would it be like to have someone like her? Someone who would understand. She would not have to hide from him. He would be able to explain what it all meant. They could spar, and she could talk to someone who wasn't Yae Miko, and...
But that was all ridiculous, and she'd known it even at the time.
She's cradled the idea of him close all these years. A charm to carry, a star to wish on. Proof that she wasn't alone.
But she doesn't know him. Not really. And he certainly doesn't know her.
So she hesitates. Just glimpsing him makes the breath still in her artificial lungs. He's facing away from her. His hair is indigo, like hers, like Ei's, with two familiar lavender streaks. Cut short, in a masculine style. His manner of dress is recognizably Inazuman, all blacks and reds. There's a huge, ornate hat atop his head, adorned with bells and twin veils that drift down behind him. His legs dangle over the edge of the cliff as he holds the gnosis in his hands, a vibrant violet glow that winks in and out as he fiddles with it, now blocking the light from her view, now not. She steels herself, draws in breath to call out to him-
And every line of his body goes tense. He must have sensed her presence. He leaps to his feet and whirls around. "Who - " he starts, and then he goes even tenser, drawn like a bow, and his expression spasms.
She's a little lost in the fine features of his face. (Like hers. Like Ei's.) Any human would see them together and think them siblings at a glance.
"How dare," he says, his voice choked with fury. "How dare you come to me now." Those fine features twisted into a feral snarl. "I knew it. I knew you wouldn't let me leave with your gnosis, no matter what that fucking fox said-"
Oh.
He thinks she's Ei.
"Brother," she says, and he twitches back, face momentarily slack with surprise. Then laughter spills out of him like refuse from a torn bag. Ugly, dark and wrenching.
"No, of course she wouldn't come herself," he says to himself. "Of course she'd send the success to dispose of the failure."
He isn't listening to her. He's dismissing her out of hand. It hurts, it throbs in her chest. "Kunikuzushi-"
"I won't let you take it from me!" he screams, wild-eyed. A catalyst manifests in his hands. And he lunges.
The shogun knew it might end in a battle between them. She came with her naginata strapped to her back. But she didn't think it would be so immediate. She didn't think it would be with him thinking her a vessel of Ei's will.
Scaramouche fights with electro, wild and unrestrained. The pressure in the air snaps and buckles, popping painfully around her eardrums, as she draws her weapon and whirls, dodges.
I don't want to fight you
But her voice fizzles on her tongue. Twice ignored, she feels suddenly small - as though she doesn't have the strength to call out. She spins and leaps around a series of lightning bolts that follow her. One projectile clips her in the shoulder and her arm spasms. But she's a being of electro, too, and it would be difficult to damage her badly with it.
She isn't fighting back. She's nimble, light on her feet, and the blows only nip at her heels. The clouds roil above them, and the air is so saturated with electricity it seems to whine as it slides against her skin.
Scaramouche gets angrier at her lack of aggression. He grinds his teeth in frustration, then discards his catalyst for a sword. He holds it in a familiar position - the same opening blow she would have performed with the Musou Isshin. "Come on!" he snaps, an almost manic gleam in his eyes. "Fight me properly. We'll prove who's the superior model!"
So he has thought of me
As an obstacle. Something to surpass.
Suddenly she feels very, very stubborn.
They will fight. She will win. And then he will listen.
Perhaps something of her change in attitude shows in her stance, because she thinks she catches a flicker of apprehension on his face as she twirls her naginata and throws herself into battle.
At first, they are very evenly matched. Her strikes have more power behind them, but he is faster, and he moves with an effortless grace that turns their battle into a savage dance. She parries, successfully keeping him at a distance with the longer reach of her weapon, but he manages to duck under her guard and stab her in the gut.
The pain is breathtaking. It might be a fatal wound, were she human. But she is not human. She throws him away with a burst of lightning, and is on him before he has a chance to fully recover. He staggers up and back to his feet, blocking her strikes with showers of sparks as steel clashes against steel. Fluid leaks from the wound, wine-dark and not quite blood. She catches him with a broad swipe across the chest and he leaps away, cursing. She presses the advantage.
They're near-matched, but Scaramouche is tiring. Thunder booms overhead as the pressure in the air shifts, the stench of ozone acrid and overwhelming. Is Ei displeased? Has the Traveler reached her already? Or is the sky reacting to the shogun and her brother? Two not-quite-divine beings, trying to fit together the pieces their creator left them, clawing their anger onto the world and each other. Two children of lightning and thunder and eternity, trying to make anything for themselves other than what they've been given.
He slashes long and deep down her off-arm. She strikes him with glancing blows - shoulder, ribs, thigh. His exhilaration is turning to something more frantic. "Enough!" he shouts, and his eyes flash violet, before -
He summons a surge of electro so powerful that every joint in her body locks. There's no dodging it - it's everywhere, all at once, the saturated air frying in her lungs. It - hurts, and electro shouldn't hurt. But it's bone-deep and she's frozen, and he's grinning madly as he vaults forward, the silver of his sword aimed for her neck -
She breaks the paralysis only barely in time. Her spear falls from nerveless fingers, and on animal instinct, she forms a fist and punches up - catching him square in the gut. He goes flying, his sword knocked from his hands. There's a thin line of stinging pain across her neck - he'd nicked her. The strike would've hit her. It might not have killed her, but with the force put behind it, it could have damaged her irreparably.
He groans and starts to struggle back up, but she strides over and shoves him back down. He wheezes, still out of breath.
"Yield," she says.
He flashes her a look of pure hatred. In an instant he's lunging at her, clawing and kicking bare-handed, like a rabid animal. It's so unexpected that he bowls her over and they go tumbling down the hill, rolling over and over in a tangle of limbs. She strikes back blindly, and then their momentum slows and she manages to land on top of him, grabbing at his arms and swiftly pinning his wrists. He snarls, struggling, but she's stronger than him. His hands spark as he tries to summon electro to protect himself, but that surge earlier took too much out of him, and it barely tingles.
"Yield," she repeats.
He just starts laughing again, but it's bitter this time, broken, like shards of glass crawling up his throat. "Of course," he rasps. "Of course her perfect creation would best the prototype. Why did I think anything different?"
He jerks in her hold, one last time. It's useless. Now that she has him here, she doesn't know what to say. The dozens, the hundreds of questions she's had for him, slowly filling like water in a well, dry on her tongue as if they'd never existed. She can't remember a single one.
He fought her, he tried to kill her. He hasn't once considered that she's not here on their mother's orders. It shouldn't hurt, but it does. She can't make her mouth move, can't find any way to say the grasping, pathetic things she wants to say: I'm like you, I came because I wanted to see you.
"Well?" His voice rises, strident. "Get on with it! Kill me!"
She's so startled she almost loosens her grip. "I will not kill you," she states.
His face contorts, a ripple of raw despair there and gone before he buries it under the more familiar rage. "I'll make you!" he screams, kicking out futilely. "You'll have to kill me to take it - I won't lose it - Not again - "
She tells him firmly, "I do not want the Gnosis."
Shock slaps across his face. He seems outraged. "What does she want, then?" he demands. "Why did Ei - "
"THIS IS NOT ABOUT EI!"
The strength of her scream surprises her. It rips from her throat, raw. She's never shouted in her life. Her grip has tightened around his wrists to the point of bruising.
He stares up at her, open-mouthed. Long moments pass in silence. Tears burn at the corners of her eyes, but only a single one falls - pearling on her lashes and dropping softly to his cheek. It's that which finally breaks his reverie. A dark humor steals over his face. "I see," he breathes, and laughs again, ragged and gasping, "I see - she just doesn't learn from her mistakes, does she?"
His whole chest shudders, and with a moment of alarm she wonders if he's more injured than she thought, but then she realizes he's holding back tears of his own. "What's so different about you?!" he snarls, and the look on his face is like a cleaved-open ribcage, all his vulnerable parts dragged out to see. "Why did she keep you and not me?"
It's almost a sob. It sounds painful, torn from his dry throat. He's so human. So vibrant, so dynamic, so undeniably alive. The shogun aches.
"She doesn't know," she manages to say.
"Doesn't - ?"
"I hid it," she says. "I didn't want her to know."
Scaramouche stares up at her. The anguish that was on his face is twisting into something more complex, something she can't decipher. His chest is still heaving for breaths he doesn't need as he struggles to calm.
"I left the Musou Isshin at the Tenshukaku," the shogun tries to explain. "The Traveler and La Signora should be meeting there today. I left it and came here, instead."
He waits for more, but she doesn't know what else to say.
"And?" he asks, slowly. "What do you want?"
The question hits her like a blow. She knows he does not say it to be kind. His tone was waspish, demanding. But not once, not ever, has she been asked what she wants. It sends her off-keel, a ship listing at sea, and she releases her grip on his arms before she can think better of it. He shifts, getting out from under her while she just sits there, dumbfounded, and then he's sitting down beside her, non-hostile, rubbing at his wrists with a wince.
"I - I -"
What does she want?
She thinks of the long, lonely years. The world passing her by, left to wonder and grasp at possibilities she was not made for. The battles in defense of the land that she was never quite allowed to be a part of. Ei's silence. Yae's meaningless noise. The answer crystallizes on her tongue before she knows what it is, and it's what she's always wanted, what she's always wanted but not known how to want, how to think of, how to say.
The shogun opens her mouth, and, "Take me with you," she says.
His head snaps around to face her. "Are you insane?" He's incredulous, scrutinizing her as though this might be a prank.
"Take me with you," she says, firmer. And, "I want to leave."
"Why would - what would you get out of that?" His attention sharpens, suddenly. "You're not getting close to the Gnosis - "
"I don't want the Gnosis," she interrupts. "I wouldn't be able to use it even if I did. I wasn't designed to hold it."
His mouth parts and his brows furrow. "Huh," is all he says, but she thinks he sounds vaguely pleased. "Then why do you really want me to take you with me?"
The shogun struggles for words, frustrated. She's not used to actually expressing her wishes, to taking the tangled web inside her head and spitting it out as something that makes sense. To speaking for herself rather than just following the by-now gentle prompting of the code that tells her what she should do. (It's been giving her nothing but alarms since she left the palace, but she's long used to ignoring its warnings.)
"I can be helpful," she says instead of answering that question. "I can fight by your side."
"Just like that? Without any knowledge of what I'm trying to do?" he asks, narrowing his eyes.
"It doesn't matter," she says, and means it.
Maybe it will matter to her later. She'll find out whether it does at the time. That's what's important about this - having a chance to find out. What she is, what she can be. Who she can be.
Scaramouche is bewildered. "I've killed people," he snaps. "I worked for the Fatui."
"I've been killing people for Ei for 400 years," she reminds him. Monsters, too. Mostly monsters. But sometimes people. "And I've been working with the Fatui for several."
That shuts him up. His mouth closes with a click. He's still studying her face, but she doesn't know what he expects to find. Then his lips quirk up with a sardonic twist. "They were so sure they were tricking you, you know. I guess it's my bad for giving them inaccurate intel. We were all using each other, in the end." Then his tone sharpens. "I'm not working for them anymore. I've gone rogue. It would just be the two of us."
Her heart leaps, because that's not a no. But it's not a yes, either. It occurs to her that she doesn't actually need his permission to accompany him - she's just proven that she can best him in a fight, so if she really wants to follow him, there's not a whole lot he can do about it. But even she understands that that would not be considered a persuasive argument.
"Would Beelzebul come after you?" he asks after a few beats of silence.
She has to pause and truly consider it. "I don't think so," she says. "Not if we leave Inazuma. Leaving the Tenshukaku like that, she'll know that I'm - faulty." But if she isn't posing any threat to Inazuma, Ei might decide it simply isn't worth the trouble to pursue her.
He hums and turns away from her, looking out at the ocean. His eyes are distant, but there's an absent little scowl on his face, like he can't believe he's even considering this. "If you come," he starts. "What should I call you?"
"...Shogun?" she offers blankly. What a stupid question.
"That's not a name," he sneers, temper flaring again, "and if you're coming with me you won't exactly be the Raiden Shogun anymore, now will you? Pick something else."
She supposes that's true. She's silent for a long time, turning the question over in her mind. She doesn't know where she would begin, except - except - there is one 'name' she has some claim to.
"Baal," she says, and it feels right.
Scaramouche jerks, staring at her in open surprise. Then he laughs once more, and this time it sounds startled and genuine, almost how a laugh should if it weren't for the vindictive edge. "How audacious!" he crows. "Oh, Mother'll hate that."
Because it was Makoto's. But she's never met Makoto, and going on what limited information she has, she doesn't think Makoto ever really went by her Archon name. It doesn't feel like stealing something, or having to share it. It feels like - inheriting.
"I'm the one who's been performing the duties of the Electro archon for the last 400 years," Baal points out. "If anyone has a say in how the name is used now, it should be me."
Scaramouche clambers to his feet, covered in dust, clothes torn and ripped in places. But he's grinning at her, a baring of teeth. "I might not hate you after all," he announces. "Come on then. We can't be late."
*
Baal sits in a small boat with her brother. It sways and rocks on the choppy waves. The shining path of the moon is emblazoned on the sea, which yawns impossibly large around her as Inazuma recedes into the distance. The sky is vaster still, wheeling with countless constellations that promise an untold future.
Anything could happen now. There are no protocols for this.
Baal looks up at the stars and smiles.