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ᛝ pairing: yan ! scaramouche x gn ! reader

tw .ᐟ.ᐟ obsessive behavior, delusion, unhealthy attachment, emotional isolation, derealization, implied psychological distress, fixation and emotional dependency

summary: Scaramouche builds a perfect replica of your world. The doll looks like you, never moves, never speaks—but it watches. And for men like him, that's enough.

He keeps it behind a door no one has the key for. And if anyone so much as breathes too close, he will swallow the key in one clean move and ensure the person chokes on soil.

They talk, of course. They always do. Palms cupped to mouths as if words bite, voice filed down to gossip, teeth stained with fear and want. They say it holds an ex-archon’s skull turned inward from shame, a sword that hums when you lie, an arrow fired at Celestia and returned with a thin thread of gold around the shaft—a warning that means 'seen'.

The truth couldn’t be any more different. He sometimes imagines how their faces would be like if they learn that that room they speak of actually smells faintly of lacquer and fabric glue.

Scaramouche sits on a tiny wooden frame with rigid shouldersand the tip of his tongue pressed to the corner of his mouth in concentration. His stretched shadow on the wall is long, the body is curled over and small. His hands—the ones that can still a throat, seal a fate, silence a scream—move with immaculate precision. One curtain hook at a time. A pinhead-sized brass that would tremble under any hand more flesh than machine.

Every floorboard is measured and pressed into place until it gleams. The paint? It's mixed by memory, not by name, mostly. He gets the color of your wall right by closing his eyes and waiting for the word to arrive beneath his eyelids. The chip in your nightstand is there, too: the small chip you made with a ring on a bad morning. He re-creates the way dusk slides across your floor in a long, gentle blade, angles the tiny windows so the lamp inside will cast the same obedient shadow of yours he once traced with a finger once your back was turned.

At first glance, it could be foolishly mistaken as a child’s treasure. But at the heart of it, it is not.

There you are.

The doll of you doesn’t breathe, but it tries.

He carves your name on its back so small even he needs a lens to read it. Every strand of hair is fixed. The iris is painted in layers oh so thin, and the pupil, kissed in gloss, gleams like it knows something. When the flame trembles, the doll’s chest almost remembers to do the same.

He sets you in the bed he carved and adjusts the blanket. His palm lingers on your porcelain cheek long enough for him to remember what warmth costs.

It’s fake, but it isn’t. It’s play, but it isn’t.

He’s a boy that learned what men look like. His heart somewhere he can’t hold. But in here—he can pretend it’s resting in your palms. Isn't that the most important thing? Pretend. Pretend he remembers how to cradle with his arms instead of crush with his heel.

On long nights he sets you on the corner of his desk, knees bent, hands folded in your lap, watching him. (Of course you watch him.)

He stamps death warrants with one hand and traces your tiny porcelain leg with the other.

He drafts haikus, mouthing the words soundlessly while you listen.

Sometimes he presses the pad of his ring finger to your tiny palm before he stamps a seal.

On good days, he tells you stories.

When he’s angry? You go in the drawer. He slams it shut. He lasts seventeen minutes, on average. Loneliness eats rage.

Then he opens it.

Then he straightens your clothes and sets you back in the exact same place, hands folded in your lap, wrists now bound with a single silk thread torn from his own uniform sleeve.

Outside: winter names its saints.

Inside: he catalogues the warmth.

When he’s lonely, he dresses you.

There is a new linen matching his shirt. He boils water with soldier's precision, pours tea into a thimble cup and leaves it on a saucer the size of a coin. Then he sits across from you and pretends silence is another kind of conversation.

Desperation arrives like snowfall. On the worst of the worst nights, his fingers twitch and the only image in his mind is him breaking your chest open to check for proof.

So he sets your head on his pillow, climbs in like a child and nails himself to stillness. A doll beside a harbinger, a specimen beside a relic. There is no breath that haunts the air; so, naturally, he fakes his own.

But the next time you pour tea—chamomile, today—he watches. His gaze dances on the bend of your wrist, and lingers on the fingers. He notes how many minutes the kettle spent singing. He knows the way you set cups (one askew).

His face is still, but his fingers twitch. Not because of joy, but because he has already done this a hundred times in a room that does not exist, with a you that does not move. Because he wants to reach out and say, “I remember when you did this the first time.” But he can’t. He won’t. Because that would make it real and real things die. Real things leave.

He doesn’t speak in the carriage ride to his estate.

By the time his bedroom doors shut behind him, his clothes are already waiting folded neatly on the bed, just as he left them that morning. By the time steam fills the air he already has slipped into them.

He wakes ‘you’ up with a nudge to your cheek just as the chamomile scent has seeped into the floorboards.

Still, porcelain that is colder than his fingers.

He does not flinch, but his eyes narrow as something behind them buckles.

Just a little.

...

[The urge to drink whatever was inside was strong. Very strong. Charlie could never resist eating or drinking things they really shouldn't. Like a mystery liquid from a flask in the sand.]

...

[Charlie takes a tentative sip. Holy shit, that was amazing! Like the most delicious wine they'd ever tasted! They drank more of it. Wow! So good!]

*unknowing the strawberry will grant 1 wish in the most evil why*