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The Wanderer never learned how to love.
He was created with an empty hole in his chest, a crevice meant to hold his mother’s Gnosis. But that hole was never filled; instead, she cast him out, sealing his powers and abandoning him in what she thought was an eternal slumber.
Segment #3a427B9 never had his own identity or purpose in life.
He was created in a test tube, born to be expendable, to die in some horrible scientific experiment. But he ran away, preferring to be slain as a traitor than thrown away like his fellow clones.
...
Now they are on the run together. The discarded puppet and disposable clone, their hands linked, running away through the woods and hills of Teyvat. They sleep under the stars, and they eat whatever they can hunt, gather, or steal. They don’t steal because they lack money. They steal because they fear recognition. They never know who might be a Fatui spy in disguise or locals who think they’re still with the Fatui and want to turn them over to the Knight of Favonius or the Akademiya. They trust no one but each other.
It is a cold night in Sumeru, one of the first cold nights of the year. They’ve set up their camp deep within one of Sumeru’s many caves, on a grassy hill beside a deep underground pool. Dim light fills the room, although neither of them are sure where it comes from. Some strange and massive mechanical beast stands dormant beside them, appearing to be frozen in mid-attack, sealed in place by a strange glowing green seal. Above them, the ancient Ruin Golem sleeps, eternally keeping watch over the mountain. Guarding them from anyone who might try to hurt them.
“It’s a perfect spot,” Dottore says, plunking down cross-legged in the grass. He isn’t the real Dottore, of course. But it’s the name every segment goes by. Their collective identity. The real Dottore is sleeker and more refined. This one is younger, skinnier, and paler, with curly hair the color of mint toothpaste. He wears a knee-length white lab coat with the sleeves rolled up, a blue-and-white pinstripe vest, and a short-sleeved pink button-up.
“I guess so,” Scaramouche responds. After all this time – nearly a year of wandering the world – he no longer feels excited about the new places they discover. His main focus is the exhaustion wearing on his inhuman body as it breaks down, longing for care and treatment that Dottore, even with his expansive knowledge of mechanics, cannot give him without a proper workshop full of tools.
Dottore notices his exhaustion. “Are you okay?” he asks.
Scara sinks to theside him and sighs. “Eh. I’ll live.” He’s been through worse. After all, he’s literally an immortal being. A robot created by the Raiden Shogun. Designed to last forever. Even if he were to run out of power or fuel and die, he could always be recharged and refueled, and then he would be immortal again. Rinse and repeat.
“That answer my question,” Dottore says. He sounds annoyed, but Scara knows he isn’t really annoyed, just worried.
“Fine,” he sighs, pulling his knees up to his chest, “no, I'm not. I'm exhausted.” He folds his arms around his legs and buries his face in his knees.
It takes about half a second for Dottore to slide beside him and wrap an arm around Scara’s thin body, his head resting on the smaller man’s shoulder. Scara can feel the warmth emanating from his arm, his hot breath beside his ear.
“I’m right here,” Dottore says, "If you want to talk a it."
“I know.” Scara leans into Dottore’s chest, feeling his warmth throughout his own cold and lifeless body. Dottore wraps his arms around Scara, holding him so close he can hear his heartbeat.
“Why do you even care?” Scara asks. “You could’ve stayed with the Fatui, you know. Why did you come with me?”
“Cause I fell in love, duh,” Dottore says bluntly. “And because I would probably die there anyway. You know, get stuffed into a comically large cannon and blasted off into space, or something.”
Scara makes a weird noise, a combination of a sniffle and a giggle. “I’d pay to watch that,” he said.
“It’s mostly because I’m a cheesy pathetic loser that fell in love, though,” Dottore says, more or less ignoring Scara’s response as he kisses the top of his head.
Scara’s brief smile faded away and he looked back up at Dottore, with a look of sadness and concern. “How do you know when you’re in love?” he asked.
Dottore hesitates. He had only fallen in love once, but he knew what it was immediately. He never second-guessed himself or questioned it. He simply knew that he was in love with the short, purple-haired robot beside him. He’d always been in love with him.
“Well…” he said, thinking out loud, “You get this weird feeling in your gut.omething slimy moving around.”
“Sounds unpleasant,” Scara wrinkles his nose.
“It really isn’t. But you also get nervous. Like every time you see the person, you get all jittery and anxious and feel like you’re about to spontaneously combust.”
“And people like being in love?” Scara raises an eyebrow.
“Well, yeah, of course,” Dottore says. “It’s the best feeling in the world.”
“…Are you a masochist?” Scara asks.
“What? No! Well, maybe. What, are you into that?” Dottore almost looks excited.
“No. I don’t mean…that. I mean like, how do you like feeling like there’s slime in your guts and you’re about to explode?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Dottore sighs, exasperated. “It’s not the physical sliminess. It’s the fact that I’m in love with an awesome person, and he’s right here in my arms.” He hugged Scara, whose face turned bright pink.
“You’re fucking cheesy,” Scara rolls his eyes.
“By now all the weird feelings are more or less gone,” Dottore continues. “Now it’s more like having something nice and warm in your chest. Like your heart is beating specifically for one person.”
Of course, that was it, Scara thinks. Love is stored in a heart. The essential human organ that he doesn’t have. He runs his fingers over his chest, feeling the surgical scar Dottore carved to insert the Gnosis into its cavity, and sighs. The Gnosis is only a power core, it is nothing like a human heart. It is a lifeless, aromantic piece of concentrated lightning. And although it sparkles and pulses with purple light, it doesn’t even beat like a human heart.
“What’s wrong?” Dottore asks, his fingers resting on top of Scara’s.
“I don’t… I don’t have a heart,” he says. His voice is hollow. Empty, like the cavity in his chest.
“Well, of course not, you have the Gnosis. Like how you have air filters and exhaust pipes for lungs, circuit boards for brains, and hydraulic fluid instead of blood. You don’t really need a heart.”
“But I can’t feel love,” Scara sighs, resting his head on Dottore’s chest.
“Oh,” Dottore thinks out loud, “well, that’s okay too because I love you. I don’t need you to reciprocate it to be happy. I’m happy so long as you’re happy.”
“But I want to love you,” Scara says. He feels tears building up in his eyes, and he brushes them away.
“Hearts aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, anyway,” Dottore says, obviously trying to make his partner feel better. “They’re easily broken. Metaphorically and literally. Just think, without one, you can eat as much unhealthy shit as you want and you’ll never have a heart attack!”
Scara smiles a little at Dottore’s stupid joke, and Dottore hugs him and ruffles his hair, and kisses the top of his head. “Hey, quit it!” Scara giggles, pushing him away. Dottore grabs onto him and the next thing they know, they’re rolling down the grassy, underground hill, tumbling over each other until they land in a messy, laughing heap at the bottom of the hill. Scara is on his hands and knees on top of Dottore, who lies in the grass, his curly hair tangled with bits of leaves and grass. Their laughter echoes off of the cave ceiling.
...
Their camp is little more than a single tent that is really only big enough for one person. A fire crackles in front of it, filling the cavern with flickering orange light. Both men sit cross-legged between the tent and the fire, eating whatever food Dottore has scavenged from the foliage in the cave. They are both wrapped up together in one oversized Fatui coat, Scara resting his head on Dottore’s shoulder, Dottore leaning his head on top of Scara’s. Neither one speaks, each is too engulfed in his own world.
Scara is still wondering what it would be like to have a heart. Dottore is busy wondering if he could scavenge some bits off of the nearby ruin machine to give him one.
“It’s getting late, we should get some sleep,” Scara says after some time. He’s right. The human needs to recharge his brain, and the puppet needs to recharge his energy. They climb into the tent and lie down in the heap of blankets inside. Scara curls up on the tent floor, his back pressed against Dottore’s chest. Dottore wraps his arm around Scara’s body, resting his hand on the smaller man’s chest, feeling where his heart should be. But he feels only the surgical scars he himself gave him, and the faint sparkle of the Gnosis’s Electro energy. He nestles his head beside Scara’s, his nose pressed against Scara’s neck, breathing in the scent of his foamlike body and rubbery skin.
The younger man still seems sad. Dottore wonders why the Shogun didn’t give him a heart. Was she so cruel that she refused to let him feel what Dottore thought was the greatest feeling in the world? After all, she was cruel enough to lock herself away while her people suffered. What would stop her from hurting her own child in that sense too?
That night, Dottore’s dreams are strange, to say the least. A woman who looks strikingly like Scara stands in front of him. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” she says, her voice seeming to echo from far away. “But I can no longer help him. It is up to you now.”
Dottore snaps awake, sweat dripping down his face and body, his shirt sticking to his skin. Scara is still sound asleep beside him, and the woman’s words echo through his mind.
“It is up to you now.”
He looks at Scara, sleeping peacefully, a sad expression on his face. He rolls Scara onto his back and opens his shirt, careful not to wake him. He can see the Gnosis’s faint glow under his skin.
He may only be a clone of the real Dottore, but he is still a doctor. He can give him a heart. It wouldn’t even be that difficult, just unplug the gnosis, and put it in its place. Simple. Scara probably wouldn’t even wake up.
But where would he find a heart…?
He wandered outside of the tent and began to search. There were some small animals, but they wouldn’t do. They weren’t human, and Scara needed – he deserved – a human heart.
Dottore snatches up his box of surgeon’s tools and quickly marches away from the camp, hurrying up the hill slope and down a narrow cave passageway. He remembers hearing treasure hoarders in the cave on their way down. They will make perfect candidates for an involuntary heart transplant.
A few twists and turns later, he finds them. Three men sleep on the cave floor amidst some ruins, while the fourth sits up, keeping guard. Dottore watches him from the shadows, pulling a scalpel wrapped in aluminum packaging out of one of his coat pockets. He unsheaths it and creeps up behind the guard, nearly tripping over his own feet in the process. He crouches behind him and, in one swift movement, slits his throat with the scalpel before the guard can react or make a sound. The man crumples to the cave floor, gasping as he drowns in his own blood.
Dottore immediately gets to work. He slides on his teal surgical gloves and kneels beside the body. He cuts the treasure hoarder’s clothes away from his chest with a dainty pair of scissors, then makes a deep incision in the man’s sternum. He pulls away the skin and muscles, then opens his surgeon’s kit, retrieving his bone saw to cut away the dead man’s rib cage.
There it is. A human heart, still beating feebly, muscles constricting and relaxing in a final, feeble attempt to keep their owner alive. Shame, that they will inevitably fail. Dottore reaches into the man’s chest cavity and grips the heart, feeling it moving and pulsing in his hand. It is disgustingly fascinating.
He cuts it free of the man’s body, severing the blood vessels that connect it to his lungs and slicing through his aorta, which spurts out blood with enough force to hit the cave ceiling. Dottore pries the heart out of its cavity, tearing away whatever bits of muscle and ligament still hold it in place, and examines it. It’s a perfect human heart, all right. It no longer beats, but when hooked up to Scara’s body, Dottore is certain it will work.
He wonders if anything will change, with Scara’s new heart. He hopes his personality won’t be too badly affected. Hopefully, he won’t suddenly become enamored with hunting treasure, or worse, suddenly be attracted to girls. Dottore shudders at the thought.
Even more terrifying, though, is the thought that Scara might feel love, just not towards him . He can understand Scara simply not feeling romantic attraction, that’s perfectly normal. He can love him just fine, even if Scara doesn’t love him back. But he doesn’t even want to imagine how badly it would hurt if Scara was to love someone else instead of him.
He slips back to the campsite and into the tent. Scara is still lying exactly how he left him. He is more or less programmed with a strict sleep schedule, so Dottore doesn’t expect him to wake up any time soon.
He sets the heart down on his surgeon’s kit, removes his gloves, and slips Scara’s shirt off, careful to not get any blood on it. He puts on a clean pair of teal gloves and finds a new scalpel, and carefully cuts open the rubber skin of his chest, in the same place where he cut it to insert the Gnosis.
He doesn’t bleed. Instead, a thin stream of dark purple fluid dribbles from the cut. According to Sandrone, the fluid was a sort of oil, used to keep Scara’s joints from seizing up. Dottore wonders how it got into his chest. He assumes that it is probably his own fault, but clearly, it isn’t causing any harm, so he ignores it.
The first time he put the Gnosis into Scara’s chest, he intended it to be removable. Therefore, it is easy to remove his breastbone and get into his chest cavity, where the Gnosis glows bright purple between Scara’s lungs. They aren’t really lungs, of course. Rather, they are a coolant system for Scara’s body, to keep him from overheating with the power of the Gnosis.
Dottore carefully opens Scara’s ribcage and deftly removes the Gnosis. He flinches in his sleep as the wires connecting it to his brain stem detach, but he doesn’t wake up. Dottore flings the Gnosis off to the side and begins to work on inserting the heart.
He lowers it into the cavity of Scara’s chest, hooking it to the wires that stretch from his brain. He can’t help but grin like a maniac at his own genius. An electric pulse fires from Scara’s brain, shocking the heart. Its muscles constrict and relax, and it beats once, twice- Dottore watches, awestruck, as the heart begins to pulse regularly, beating in tune with his own.
And then it stops. The heart does limp, once again lifeless. Dottore pokes around inside Scara’s chest, pushing the heart around, searching for whatever had made it stop. It doesn’t take long for him to smell the burning human flesh, and realize he neglected to connect the heart to the air vents in Scara’s lungs. Without an outlet for excess energy, the electricity from his brain burned the heart to a crisp.
Dottore mumbles irritably under his breath and removes the heart. Thick, purple smoke rises from it, filling the tent with the stench of burned flesh. Dottore carries it outside and lobs it down the hill. It splashes into the shallow lake below, creating a cloud of steam as it strikes the water's surface.
“Good thing there’s four treasure hoarders,” Dottore shrugs. He once again picks up his surgeon’s kit and marches back to the camp in the cave passageway. The three remaining treasure hoarders are still asleep, unaware of their guard lying dead beside them. His wounds are no longer bleeding. By now, he has no blood left to lose. Dottore wonders in surprise that the others weren’t woken by the stench of it.
But hey, Dottore isn’t one to look a gift horse in the mouth, so he crouches beside one of the sleeping treasure hoarders and pulls out his scalpel. Swiftly and silently, he slits the man’s throat to keep him quiet, and goes to work at retrieving his heart. He has it in his grip and is about to cut the aorta when he hears a soft, fearful footstep behind him.
He whips around, still gripping the heart in the man’s chest. The other two are awake and staring at him in horror, their backs pressed against the far side of the cave, their faces paper-white with shock and fear. He recognizes one of them as a scout by his white shirt and the knife gripped in his trembling hand. The other is a gravedigger, recognizable by his floppy hat and the large shovel leaning up against the wall behind him.
“I’ll be going now,” Dottore says, not wanting to hang around and fight. It’s not that he doesn’t think he can defeat them, but he’s busy and would like to finish one project before starting another. He’ll come back and kill these guys later, once he’s put this heart into Scara’s chest. Correctly, preferably.
He cuts through the dead man’s aorta, once again spraying the room with blood, then takes the heart and his tools and turns his back on the treasure hoarders. He walks away, laughing maniacally, admiring the heart in his hand. It is a bit smaller than the last one, but it will work perfectly. It’ll probably fit into Scara’s relatively small chest better, too. As far as he’s concerned, the treasure hoarders are too shocked at their friends’ violent and gory deaths to even run. He will deal with them later.
But he underestimated them, he discovers, when he suddenly feels a sharp object sinking into the back of his ribs.
Dottore whips around, nearly dropping the heart, as a second knife flung by the treasure hoarder scout narrowly misses his head. The man’s face is pale and sweaty. He flings a third knife in Dottore’s direction, and it spins in the air before sinking into his thigh. He stumbles, swearing under his breath. The gravedigger takes this moment to run at him, shouting some sort of war cry and raising his shovel over Dottore’s head. It crashes down, and he blacks out for a split second, the slippery heart flying out of his hands and hitting the stone floor of the cave with a disgustingly wet squelch.
Dottore backs away from the treasure hoarders, blood dripping down the side of his face, giving him a more crazed look than usual. The gravedigger prepares to strike again, but this time, Dottore is ready. He raises his right arm to block the man’s attack, digging into his pocket with his left and pulling out a syringe full of a glowing green liquid. The man’s shovel crashes down on his arm and Dottore ducks under it, stabbing him in the base of his neck with the needle of his syringe and pushing down on the plunger. The man staggers backward as the glowing poison seeps into his bloodstream, flowing through his veins. It reaches his heart and kills him within seconds.
The scout stands with his back against the wall, his entire body shaking, holding onto his last knife with trembling fingers. “P-please,” he begs. “I’ll go. I won’t tell anyone, nobody will know. J-just let me go.”
“Nah,” Dottore shrugs. Now that he’s started killing the treasure hoarders, he may as well finish the job. He wrenches the knife out of his thigh, wincing as the blood starts to flow down his leg. He wipes it off on his sleeve and aims to throw it at the man’s head. He doesn’t want to damage his heart. Just in case he needs a backup one.
The scout throws his knife a second before Dottore does. It cuts through Dottore’s left hand, milliseconds before he lets go of his own knife. He feels like he’s watching in slow-motion as his knife changes trajectory ever-so-slightly, twirling in the air, before landing in the center of the scout’s chest.
Dottore slumps back against the wall of the cave, catching his breath and watching the scout crumple to the ground. “Fuck,” he mutters. Now neither of their hearts will be any good. One has a knife stuck through it, one is full of poison, and one is squashed from being flung across the cavern with considerable force.
Dottore picks his surgeon’s kit and the heart up off the floor and limps back to the tent. He examines the heart as he walks. It’s bad, alright. One side was scraped so badly it tore open, exposing the ventricle within. Dottore sighs and flings the heart backward over his shoulder. It lands on the ground behind him with an oddly satisfying squelch .
...
He sits down on the ground outside the tent, looking dejected at the blood on his hands and clothes. He shrugs off his white lab coat, forgetting about the knife in his back until he feels the jerk of pain as the weight of his coat pulls it partway out.
He looks at the tent, where he can just barely see Scara, still sleeping inside. Still heartless.
Dottore strips off his bloodied gloves, flings them into the water, and buries his face in his hands. All he wanted to do was give his best friend and lover a heart. He wanted Scara to experience the sliminess and explosions in his stomach, the warmth in his chest. And maybe, a little selfishly, Dottore himself wants to know how it felt to be loved by someone. He wants Scara’s heart to be his, the way his heart is captivated by Scara.
He wants Scara’s heart to be his.
He raises his head, looking back at the tent. He feels his warm blood dripping down the side of his face. He presses two fingers beside his neck, feeling his own blood pulsing through his body, driven by his own perfect, beating, human heart.
Of course. There was still another heart in this cave. How could he forget? And on top of that, his heart is perfect . The Master ensured that every one of his clones was flawless. Dottore’s heart will never give out. It can last forever, tucked away inside Scaramouche’s body. Beating within him for all eternity. Forget wanting Scara's heart to be his; he wants his heart to be Scara's.
Dottore digs through his surgeon’s kit and quickly finds a notebook. He scribbles a lengthy note for Scara inside. He is surprisingly calm, for someone writing his spur-of-the-moment suicide note. He tells himself that it’s not like Scara would miss him. He is just one of a thousand clones. Scara can find another.
With his letter written, he tucks it in the pocket of his pants and quickly gets to work. After all, he won’t have much time to do this. He finds a bottle of steroids in the bottom of his surgeon’s kit, a drug that will keep him awake no matter how hard his body tries to knock him out. He pours it into a clean syringe, attaches a sterile needle, and pokes it into his upper arm before plunging the stimulant into his bloodstream.
He lifts Scara up and carries him outside of the tent, laying him down on a blanket atop the grass. He doesn’t know why, but the idea of doing this inside the tent feels suffocating. He would rather work where he has the space to stretch out.
He strips off his stripey blue vest and pink shirt, both of which are stained with so much blood that he doubts they will ever come clean. He finds a syringe of anesthetic, which he injects into the skin right above his trembling heart. He hopes that the pain will be brief, but he doesn't mind if it isn't. Maybe he is a masochist.
Dottore waits a few minutes while the anesthetic sets in, sitting down in the grass beside Scara’s head and running his fingers through Scara’s hair. He knows that he’s insane. This whole situation is insane. But he will do anything for the purple-haired puppet sleeping beside him. He already sacrificed everything to run away with him once. What is a little more, after all this time?
He is satisfied that his chest is sufficiently numb. He finds a clean scalpel, grips it carefully in his left hand, and squeezes his eyes shut as he cuts a deep slit in his chest.
Despite the anesthetic, it hurts like Hell. He falls back on his elbows, watching the blood ooze out of his chest, panting to catch his breath.
He sets the scalpel down and digs out his bone saw. He has to hold it at an awkward angle, but he somehow manages to cut through his own ribs, opening his chest cavity. It is fascinating, to be able to look down and watch his heart beating and his lungs inflating and deflating with every labored breath.
He picks up the scalpel again and, without hesitation, severs the blood vessels between his heart and right lung. The pain nearly makes him black out even with the drug keeping him awake. He starts to cut his heart away from his other lung, but his hand hovers over it hesitantly. For a split second, he wonders if Scara would be happier with him. But then he remembers that he is just one of a thousand. Maybe this is his, Segment #3a427B9’s, true purpose. To be Scaramouche’s lover, to literally give him the heart he so desperately wants.
So he makes the cut.
His heart hangs onto his body by nothing but his aorta. Blood spurts out of the cut vessels on either side, as the organ tries to oxidize his blood but to no avail. He coughs and blood spatters out of his mouth.
Dottore shifts so that he is lying directly beside Scara. He knows that once he makes this final cut, he will only survive another minute or so. He has to be lightning fast. He can’t screw up, or it will all be for nothing, and Scara will wake up with neither his boyfriend nor a heart. An absolute waste of perfectly good resources.
He closes his eyes as he severs his own aorta.
He lifts his own heart out of his chest and looks at it for a moment, his eyes blurred by tears of pain. It is still pulsing, trying to beat, trying to do its job even though it is totally severed from any brain that would tell it to. It is the perfect size to fit between Scara’s lungs.
Dottore sits up on one elbow and lowers the heart into Scara’s chest. He connects it to his lungs, hooking hollow tubes up to the blood vessels. An exhaust system, to keep it from overheating.
Finally, he plugs in the wire from Scara’s brain, and all they can do is wait. Scara inhales and an electric signal fires down his brain stem. The heart pulses and he exhales, his lungs allowing the hot energy to escape his body. He inhales again, and the cycle repeats.
Dottore can’t help but smile, despite the tears that run down his cheeks. He watches, both overjoyed that Scara has a heart, and horribly sad that he won’t survive to witness it in action. He can already feel himself fading quickly as his blood drains from his veins. It pools inside his empty chest and spills onto his stomach as he sits up higher, using all his strength to stay upright.
His arm buckles out from under him and he collapses. His brain is shutting down, powering off as he goes into shock. His only thought is of Scaramouche, lying beside him. With one hand, he finds Scara’s and laces their fingers together. He rolls onto his side, and, with his last strength, turns Scara slightly to face him. His eyes are still closed, still asleep.
“I love you,” Dottore whispers, and he kisses him on the mouth. He closes his eyes and his body goes numb. He can no longer feel Scara’s hand in his, he can barely feel his warm lips, but he knows they are there.
And then he’s gone.
...
When Scara awakes, he is lying alone on his back. He opens his eyes to find himself staring at the cavern ceiling. Odd, he thinks, because he remembers falling asleep in the tent.
As he wakes up more, he recognizes the scent of blood in the air around him and feels an odd pulsing in his chest. He sits up slightly and looks down at himself. In the center of his chest is a deep hole, directly between and a bit above his top surgery scars. Inside the hole, he can see a beating human heart. Well, that's new, he thinks.
“Dottore?” he asks, amazed. Of course, Dottore did that. He is absolutely weird enough to wait until you’re asleep and then give you a cool new organ, harvested from Archons know where.
“Dottore!” Scara calls again. He looks around, wondering where he's run off to. He hopes he's not hurt. It dawns on him how strange it is that Dottore didn't finish his job and stitch him back up, and he begins to worry.
Then he feels something cold and squishy in his hand, and fear jolts in his body. He looks down and sees clammy, gray fingers intertwined with his own. His eye follows the fingers as they become a hand, and then an arm, both splattered with partially dried blood. His gaze moves to a shoulder, attached to a chest, cut open and full of congealed blood. To a pale, bloodless face and a head of curly, mint green hair.
Scara scrambles backward, struggling to free himself from the dead man’s tight grip. He only feels fear. He looks around frantically for Dottore's attacker, but his eyes continuously dart back to the man's empty, hollow chest, horrified that someone could do this. He thought Dottore was the only person who was eccentric enough to rip out his victim's heart and then let them bleed out.
And then it hits him like a truck.
He collapses on the ground beside Dottore's corpse as realization washes over him like a storm-tossed wave, threatening to drown him in his own agony. He can't breathe, he can only gasp as massive sobs threaten to choke him. He feels like he has been stabbed in the chest.
He wanted to experience love.
But this? This must be heartbreak.
He buries his face in Dottore’s chest as memories of all their time together flash through his memories. Dottore carried him when his energy was too drained to go on. The two of them sheltered under a cave together as a storm thundered around them, bundled together to keep Dottore from freezing and Scara from rusting. Both of them snuggled in their tent night after night, as Dottore wrapped his arms around Scara’s body and Scara fell asleep, safe and secure in his lover’s arms.
His lover. He loved him, all this time, without knowing it. And now he is gone. His lover lies dead in the grass. He sacrificed himself for no reason. Scara never needed a heart at all. And this new realization floods his body with pain once again, and he screams through the sobs. “WHY? WHY WOULD YOU DO THIS TO YOURSELF? WHY ARE YOU SO FUCKING STUPID?” His voice breaks, and he crumples on the ground beside the body, his saltless tears streaming down his face.
As if in an answer, he sees the note in Dottore’s pocket. He scrambles for it, desperate for closure. Praying to whatever god might still be watching over him that his lover hadn't killed himself purely for the sake of giving him a heart. His hands shook as he opened the paper, which was stiff with dried blood and covered in Dottore's horribly illegible handwriting.
Dearest Scaramouche,
If you are reading this, it means my operation was a success, and I’m dead. Don’t be too upset about it. I was literally created with the sole intention of being killed for some kind of stupid experiment. So, in my opinion, this is a happier ending for me than anything the Master could have come up with. Truly, it’s a scientific miracle, seeing as you’re the first artificial human to have an actual human heart as a power supply. I’m honored my death comes by something like that, and not something like getting shot out of a comically large canon.
Besides, I’m just one of a thousand. There are literally a thousand other clones out there exactly like me, so it’s not like my death is a huge loss. You can always find another one of me, we're literally everywhere. You can't swing a fucking cat in this world without hitting another replica of me. So don't miss me, okay?
Maybe I'm a hypocrite, but I will miss you. I’ll miss your pretty eyes, your soft skin, and your stupid haircut, and I think most of all your beautiful laugh. I know we’ll never see each other again, not even in the afterlife (if it even exists). After all, you’ll never really die. But I loved you for every second that we were together, and I hope that you and your cool new heart will learn to love someone else just like I loved you. And I hope it's the best thing ever, because I meant it when I said that I’m happy so long as you’re happy.
My heart is yours forever,
Your Dottore <3
P.S: in case you need to sew your chest closed by yourself, all the stuff’s in my surgeon’s bag. Nothing's labeled in there though, so good luck finding anything lol.
Scara rereads the letter several times over, and every time it feels like his new heart breaks again. If Dottore felt this worthless, why didn’t he tell him? As for the thousand other clones…Scara doesn't know them. He doesn't love them, and they don't love him. Dottore – this Dottore, his Dottore – was the first person to love him, and now he’s gone. He’s nothing but an empty, heartless shell, bled dry on the grass beside him.
Scara wants to rip his brand-new heart out and fling it across the cave. He wants to kill himself too, but Dottore is right. He has no soul that can go to an afterlife. He can always be salvaged, repaired, and reawoken. He can never know peace. Not without Dottore, his traveling partner, his lover, his beloved, the man who sacrificed everything to travel the world with him. The man who gave him his heart, metaphorically and then literally. Who loved him more than his own life, and valued his happiness over all else. And Scara knows that he can never give his heart to anyone else. It belongs to Dottore. His Dottore.
The fact that he can't go on without Dottore is what forces him to leave his new heart in place. He will go on with him. Their hearts will be one, in eternity and in death.
...
The Wanderer finally learned how to love.
He was created with an empty hole in his chest, but now that hole is filled by a broken heart, too precious to ever be given away.
Segment #3a427B9 finally had an identity.
He was created in a test tube, born to die in some horrible scientific experiment. His death still was a horrific waste, but to the Wanderer, he is not just one of a thousand clones.
His tears are still wet on his cheeks and his heart is still shattered within his chest as he carves the phrase, “my heart, my lover, my Dottore," into the smooth surface of a large rock, and leans it against the cavern wall, above the shallow grave where the dead man is buried.
Years will come to pass. The body will turn to dust, and his headstone will be buried beneath a century of history. But his heart will beat for all eternity, sealed in the chest of his lover.