HI GUYSSS DID U MISS ME 😖😖😖
im so sorry for not updating this in ... *checks notes* TEN FREAKING MONTHS 😭😭😭😭

I WANT A LOT OF COMMENTS GRRRR 👹👹👹👹👹👹

i honestly lost motivation to continue the plot bc I didn't know what to do ...
HOWEVER I HAVE RETURNED !

and i have decided to just write various stories / oneshots with the characters that loosely resemble what i would've done in the plot , as i am too lazy to flesh out an entire idea for this story ( could you tell i was making the plot up with every chapter 🤭 ) but love all of your characters regardless and am desperate to torture them all 😇😇😇

chapters titled 'chapter X'  will most likely be continuations of the plot if i can think of something , but chaoters titled independently will be my own oneshots

crevaise and scapino father-son brainrot BUTT you only get a paragraph of it 🤞🏿🤞🏿🤞🏿

TW FOR ( buckle up )
violence - cmon guys this is osore we're talking about
themes of child soldiers - loading up crevaise with angst, as is my duty
blood and gross and ew descriptions - nothing crazy , but still there
my writing mistakes - at the time of writing this , it's 03:05 in the morning . yes, there are mistakes of almost every kind . PLEASE BE NICE TO ME 😞😞😞😞

Oh.

Crevaise barged into the armoury room, shoulder brandished outwards as a battering weapon and caked in fine glass and dust. The intricate glass frame of the once-locked door crumbled to the floor behind them, vomiting its stained-glass insides across the floor, lightly painted with crimson smears of blood. The dull ache in their shoulder would surface to a nasty bruise soon enough, red-rimmed and ugly, he knew, but that was a matter to deal with later.

Preferably after Osore's funeral, though he wasn't fussy.

He stared at the scene in front of them in transfixed horror. Osore, bloody, beaten and bruised, leering over Scapino like a man of unearthly shadow. One hand curled into
claws, fingernails digging impossibly deep into the wound, the wound that Crevaise had seen in Dragonspine that had left Scapino gasping and twitching upon the floor when touched.

And Scapino, Scapino, Scapino, rasping motionlessly on the ground, one weak had wrapped around Osore's wrist and attempting uselessly to pull it away. He might as well be tickling him with how ineffective his ministrations were.

"Crevaise," Osore drawled, voice dripping red like sin incarnate. He did not turn to face them. "How nice of you to join us."

The word us was punctuated by the sharp jerk of Osore's left arm and the snap of bone. Scapino jerked on the floor, a puppet with its strings pulled. His mouth opened in a silent, horrid scream and clawed with renowned vigor at Osore's wrist. His lips formed around weak curses, scowling at Osore through his wet lashes.

"What... are you doing to him?"

Crevaise would've liked their voice to sound deeper, tougher, more like Erik's monotonous hum rather than the weak squealing of a rodent, promising mind-numbing pain that reflected the fire igniting his veins. Something stirred to life in the pits of his chest.

"What am I doing?" Osore turned to look over his shoulder; Crevaise stepped back despite the comfortable distance between them. Osore's eyes were practically white, so shrunken were his pupils, little pinpricks of black in a clear soundless void. He looked crazed, desperate, mad. His teeth stretched wide into what Crevaise thought was supposed to resemble a smile. It seemed more like a show of teeth. "I suppose Scapino and I are having a little fun."

The thing in their chest grew stronger, expanding like hot air in a balloon. It devoured the fear in their chest like an all-consuming beast, and replaced it with something hot and sharp that hr could use to cave Osore's head in.

He looked past Osore, past his widening, senseless eyes, at Scapino. He lay motionless on the cold floor, save for the occasional twitch of his muscles and the curling of his lips. His eyes, glazed over, flitted from Osore to Crevaise to Osore.

Scapino, the only one to accompany them to Dragonspine. Scapino, the man who had cooked for them, despite his incredulous ineptitude at it. Scapino, the man who had listened to them talk endlessly about Ruin Guards and automations and Khaenriah, and had wiped the tears from his eyes silently when the memories grew suffocating.

Scapino, the man who was there when Crevaise woke from yet another nightmare, rescuing him from the murky, inky depths of his own self-destructive imagination. Scapino, who had given them hot chocolate to soothe the numbness of his limbs. Scapino, who had loved them, perhaps from a distance veiled by fear and a fumbling inability to understand them, but had loved them nonetheless.

Scapino, who was going to die under Osore's hands.

Crevaise regretted that he did not remember much of the words he said next, nor what happened immediately after. But he remembered the swelling beast in their chest, growing to overtake the pounding expanse of their heart, rising to overthrow the logic-oriented, smooth plane of his mind. The pragmatic, strategic sense implanted into them from years of hardship and experience was all-too quickly replaced by a maddening sense of bloodlust.

He remembered their legs springing out beneath him, fueled with brain-rushing, spirit-soaring chemicals, towards Osore. He remembered throwing themself upon the man with mad fury, hands grabbing, clawing, scraping against whatever inch of skin he could reach with blunt nails, screaming curses and threats that he had every intention of enacting. Words that Krone would cringe at, if she were around to hear.

Osore threw his head back and laughed, laughed at Crevaise's newfound bravery as if he was no more threatening than a petulant child, his wounds no graver than the tingling of a hummingbird's wings. He reached behind himself with nary a glance, grabbed a handful of Crevaise's clothing and pulled, taking the screaming, raging boy with it. He flung his arm outwards and across the room.

Creavise hit the wall with a dull thud. Only by stretching their arm outwards beneath him did he avoid landing on his face and cracking their nose or splitting their lip. Their arm bent unnaturally against the ground. He did not think their elbow was supposed to jut out like that. Any child would cry out in that moment, bewildered by such unbridled pain that spread to the tips of their extremities and the sockets of their eyes.

Crevaise, as it was, did not consider themself 'any child'.

He rebounded with double the murderous intent, spurred by not bloodlust, but by grotesque, uncontrollable Khaenrian power that flurried from his wretched heart. He managed somehow to push Osore over, releasing his agonizing grip on Scapino's shoulder. And now his face was exposed, teeth bared like a rabid dog, nose irritatingly unbroken.

It was only a matter of time before Osore would fling him off, again, so Crevaise wasted no time in raising both of their hands above their pounding head and bringing them down, down onto Crevaise's face, powered by blinding rage and absurd amounts of foreign power. Something crunched beneath their hands and wetted their fingers with warm, sticky blood.

Osore groaned, low and vibrating against Crevaise's skin. It was not a sound of pain, much to Crevaise's rumbling irritation. It teetered on the precipice of anger and pleasure, accompanied hand-in-hand with Osore's bloodied grin.

"Not a bad punch, Crevaise." Osore tilted his head to the side and spat out a tooth. "Not bad indeed."

Crevaise's nape tickled with the fiery dance of cutter ants. Their fist throbbed, slicked with sweat and blood. The beast in their chest faltered. A sliver of logic poked through the crack like sunlight tumbling through the openings of high-tree leaves. Something tapped his shoulder and asked them if he thought this through.

Osore blinked. His left eye twitched. Crevaise hoped it would bruise horribly come morning, so horribly that he'd hide his face between his hands at breakfast in shame.

The beast in their chest cringed, reeling back in on itself like a fishing line or a startled horse. The adrenaline rush that had prompted their attack dissipated in their body, taking with it the traces of Abyssal power he strove to hold control over. Rather selfish, he thought. Their chances were that much higher with it.

Or, maybe, it did not shrink as it did leave, traversing their young, weak body in favour of a stronger vessel. For just as the adrenaline in Crevaise's veins ran dry, something truly ineffable sparked to life in Osore's eyes. The blacks of his eyes practically swelled, prompting whiteness red-rimmed with crimson. His left eye twitched again, with more fervour than the last. Crevaise saw teeth, more teeth then he thought the average man should possess, especially of that sharpness. He no longer wanted to beat them from his mouth as much as he wanted to hide from them.

"My turn."

Crevaise did not see. He could not see, not when primal fear had clouded their retinas and washed their vision in white and black static. Osore's skull collided with they're in a terrible, calamitous force, hot and heavy like a branding iron to the forehead.

He did not see, only felt, felt in an awful rush of numbness as the blanket of white gave way to black and green and yellow and blue and, most notably, warm red, trickling down his face and over the bridge of his nose in a little river. He brought a distant, quivering hand up to his face and swiped absently at it.

He'd forgotten he could bleed. He expected it to be ugly void-black, not mortal red.

And then the pain, oh, the pain! It washed upon them in a rush of feeling so startlingly unlike anything he had ever had the mortal— or immortal, or maybe something in-between— misfortune of experiencing. He threw his head forward violently into his hands, grinding his teeth into his lip to stifle a cry.

Osore's fingers dug into their temples and wrenched their gaze upwards. The pads of his fingers pressed inwards. Crevaise wondered if his skull would collapse under the pressure.

To their side, something stirred. A figure slumped on the floor, twisting over weakly, interrupting its fight with the throes of death to speak to him.

"Crevaise," it said. Crevaise had to strain their ears to hear it over the rush of blood. "You need to run."

"No, no he doesn't," Osore jeered, tightening his grip. Crevaise thought their head would surely give in that moment, spilling the ugly innards of their brain all over Osore's hands. "He needs to stay right here and fight like a man. Don't you, child?"

Child, boy, boy, child. Crevaise doesn't think he is either. A child would be at school learning to read and write and count. A child their age, the age of fourteen, would be enjoying the new glimpse of freedom, having just started the stretch of teenage years. A boy would be perched on his father's lap, listening to stories of past adventures and debating their truth. A boy would be fishing with his father on the lake, shifting the beating sun on his back.

At age six, Crevaise could wield a blade with such pinpoint accuracy that it seemed to disappear in their hand. At age nine, Crevaise could kill someone without blinking, even when blood got in their eyes and he had to wash it out with salt water. At age eleven, Crevaise could sit on the shoulders of a Ruin Guard marching into battle and remain there for hours on end, only ever moving to raise their hand, commanding an onslaught of bullets to gun down men that he did not know the names of, nor did he know the names of the children they would not return to.

At age fourteen, Crevaise is in Snezhnaya. He travels the snowly planes of Snezhnaya with his head tilted low to mask his blood-red eyes, because people startle when they seee them, and Crevaise does not like that. Especially when they are children smaller, weaker than him, whose smiles fall into the snow when their light-bearing eyes meet soulless, crimson ones.

He is on a first-name basis with the 5th Fatui Harbinger, one of the most feared men ever to step upon the soil. He calls him Scapino instead of sir or lord. He spends his time thinking of cheeky nicknames to try on him. He wants to try Pino, because it sounds like peanut, and it reminds him of the peanut cake Scapino had given him a slice of when he'd woken up and tried to tear out his heart.

He wants to try friend, because Scapino is a friend, and a good one at that.

He wants to try Father, too, because Scapino is like a parent, in more ways than one. He has that knowing parent head-tilt when something bothers Crevaise but he does not speak of his. He does that sad parent stare when he finds Crevaise hunched in the corner of the kitchen in the morose hours of the morning, a kitchen knife between his hands with the blade pointing towards him. He does that comforting parent back-rub when he carries Crevaise back to bed— whether it is their own bed or Scapino's he doesn't know, but he hopes it's the latter because that bed is warm and safe.

"Crevaise," the figure to his side rose onto unsteady knees, and Crevaise tried not to look. His eyes were traitors to his mind, and so he subjected them to take in Scapino's form. It is nightmarish. It is bad. Is is worse than bad. It is the type of bad that Crevaise feels when the servants clean the blood from his sheets. It is the type of bad Crevaise feels when Krone forces them down and pulls knives from their skin. It is that kind of bad, knowing that he has single-handedly caused such suffering onto another being simply by existing wrongly.

Scapino bled from places Crevaise did not know one could bleed from. It trickled from his hairline, staining such beautiful periwinkle ugly, matted brownish-red. It painted his lips pink and dribbled down his chin. It trickled from the corners of his eyes like tears, which Crevaise thought he could understand, crying blood.

But it was the wound that demanded Crevaise's attention. When he had stolen a glimpse at it in Dragonspine, it was layers upon layers of scarring tissue, still soft and bloody. But there were evident signs of healing. Little stitches along the sides, dabs of ointment here and there. In Dragonspine, it looked as though it would heal into a nasty scar, but heal nonetheless.

But now? Osore's fingers had dragged the wound from the depths of screaming hell back into bloody mortality. It wept blood all down Scapino's shoulder, down the front and across his pectorals, across his shoulder blades. The stiches held their arms up and claimed defeat, loose around bleeding skin as if they no longer possessed the strength to hold it together. The redness of tbe wound had spread down to Scapino's bicep.

It took Crevaise a moment to realize that he and Osore were viewing the wound in tandem— one aghast, one proud. He glanced from his peripheral vision the boastful glint in Osore's eyes and the swelling of his chest, as if he was proud of his actions, proud to cause such unbearable agony to a fellow man of flesh and blood.

"Do you like my work, Crevaise?" Osore held Crevaise's head steady in his grip, directed towards Scapino and his leaning frame. The pressure relented as Osore pressed his flat palms against the sides of his head, so if Crevaise moved, Osore could snap their head— or his neck —back into position.

Something wet dribbled on Crevaise's cheek. It ran away from its source and splashed against their open palm. He flicked their eyes down, unwilling to test Osore's willingness to break their spine, to the new wetness on his hand.

It was a tear, not yet muddied with dried blood. It was a completely transparent, water-still tear resting on his palm, quivering in sync with their hand.

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HAHAHA no hurt+comfort for you, just HURT 😈😈😈😈😈😈 now sit back and wait for the next update in 2 years when i forget this book exists

NEXT UPDATE will come back to the main heroes trying to stop our dastardly dashing villains !! i miss the gang and the little 10-year-old psychic 😞😞😞