⚠️TW: Death, Grief⚠️

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He shouldn't have said it.

Any of it.

Maybe he should've just kept his mouth shut for once. Just one time. His pride wasn't worth anything in the face of what he had to pay for now.

And yet, Lumine smiled.

An eternal smile, frozen on her face forever now.

If he had been there... if he hadn't driven her to prove himself to him even though he already looked up to her so much she might as well have been a goddess to him. How ironic.

But the dead body in Scaramouche's arms was proof of her mortality.

It was too late.

He was too late.

Now, he couldn't ever tell her how he really felt. Apologize for the countless insults, the banter that only existed to hide his flustered face when Lumine attacked him with compliments... she brought a smile to his face that was unique, so pure that he had to check if it was really himself still.

Now, that smile would be gone forever. All this time it had taken to open up again, to trust someone other than himself was now being flushed down the drain, pulling his heart with it. This kind of emptyness felt familiar, but Scaramouche could never get used to the pain of grief.

What he had lost was his only piece of hope, the lonely ray of sunshine breaking through storm clouds. Just like that, the sky closed back down on him and reminded him that the world just didn't want him to be happy. Tears rained from Scaramouche's face onto Lumine's, mixing with the dried blood on her cheeks.

"I wish... I wish we had met as different people."

Was he crazy? Talking to someone who couldn't listen anymore. Probably, but right now this was the only thing keeping him sane. The hole in his heart filled with emotions, but none of them were pleasant. He wanted to scream, to kill who hurt his sunshine, to cry over the loss and to erase his existence and the pain that came with it.

Yet, he did none of it.

With gentle hands, he held his... what even was she to him. He couldn't call them friends, that's for sure. Not when he never gave Lumine the chance to make it official. Archons, how Scaramouche hated himself for being so insecure that he lost out on everything he could have wished for. It had been right in front of his nose, he only had to reach out and grab it.

All his hands could hold now was the cold shell of a person he once adored. If only he hadn't...
But all the if's and but's could never breathe life back into Lumine's lungs. Nothing could bring her back.

...

Scaramouche must have sat with the remainder of Lumine for hours. Drenched with blood and tears, his clothes slowly started resembling his old outfits color palette rather than his new one. The faint footsteps of a millelith solider signaled him to go. If he had stayed, somebody would frame him for sure.

If there was one thing he didn't want now was to cause more trouble for Lumine even after she passed. Still incapacitated by a blurry vision, Scaramouche escaped behind a nearby hill, climbing a tree to make sure Lumine was taken care of properly.

"It's just a dead person, stupid millelith."

He cursed to himself when he saw the solider freaking out over their findings. Again, he did not mean what he said. Realizing such was like walking into a knife he taped to the wall on his own. Empty promises as always.

Scaramouche swore he would change.

If Lumine was watching, then he knew she would be proud of him. Even with her body now buried under several layers of earth with only a rock with her name on it remaining, he felt like Lumine was still right beside him. Even if the spot next to him was always empty when he checked.

It took Scaramouche a month to return to her grave.

None of the citizen knew he visited her, none of their friends knew he had been there to witness her passing. That didn't matter. What he had to say to Lumine was something between only her and him.

He thought about apologizing and giving her a lenghty talk about why he was the way he was, but half way through Scaramouche realized that she had always known. There was only one thing he finally needed to vocalize.

"Thank you for being my friend."