Lucid Dreamer (2/2)
part 1
Gepard stalls almost a week before he finally goes out to the safehouse, and it takes him a couple days to find it because Sampo didn't have the time left to be wasn't super specific about the location. But he does find it.
It's pretty bare bones, really. Gepard knows that was probably to be expected, but… It feels crushing, when he realizes there are so few personal things here. It's nothing specific to Sampo. Just some food, some medical supplies. A cot and a heater and a lot of mismatched blankets. Nothing to remember someone by.
But he does find the letters, in a metal box stashed away under the bed.
There are two for him. Three for Natasha, and two for Seele. One for Hook, one for Serval, one for Pela, one for Bronya.
Bronya's is mostly business. They knew each other from the whole Stellaron incident, but not much beyond that, and the incoming catastrophe is a more pressing matter. Seele's is actually two copies of the same letter, and Gepard realizes why when Seele is so angry she rips the first one up without reading it. He gives her the copy a couple days later, and she slinks off without a word.
Pela seems completely normal after hers is delivered, but Gepard knows better than to trust that. The next day, he finds her asleep in bed with Serval, bottles abandoned on the floor, both their eye makeup smeared and running and Pela's glasses horribly smudged and crooked on her face. Serval doesn't read hers in front of him, but she's clingy with Gepard, Pela, and Lynx for quite a while after. She throws herself into her work a lot. She insists the heater from the safehouse is busted and she needs to keep it. It's too dangerous for use by someone who's not an engineer. Might burn their house down or something. Gepard doesn't argue.
Hook's letter is short, with easy to read words. The rest of it is actually a treasure map, and she and the moles spend the next several days running through the Underground, finding hidden candy and toys. Hook asks them when Sampo is coming back, because one of the marbles she found from his map looks green, just like his eyes, and she wants to give it to him. Natasha shoos Gepard out of the clinic before he can even begin to think of an answer.
Natasha refuses to let him see what's in her letters, which ok, fine, he'll respect that. He hears from Bronya who heard from Seele who heard from Natasha herself though that one of the letters was a map and the other a catalogue, with all of Sampo's hidden "warehouses." Gepard promptly marches himself back out to the frontlines, where he can turn a blind eye. If a ton of stolen goods suddenly enters the black market, and if the orphanage and the clinic suddenly have new supplies, well, technically that's none of his business.
Gepard goes to bed, curls up under mismatched blankets and closes his eyes.
He doesn't dream.
One of Gepard's letters was also business, like Bronya's and Natasha's. He and Bronya follow everything meticulously, down to the letter, because there has to be some good to get out of all this, there has to be. Gepard can't let it all be for nothing, it would bury him.
And so the catastrophe passes. Not without casualties, and not without a lot of damage and destruction. But Belobog survives.
And after that, time just kind of…goes on. Gepard has been a part of the Silvermanes since he was old enough to enlist. The Fragmentum had gotten so much worse in the years before Welt sealed the Stellaron. He knows the statistics, it is literally his and Pela's jobs to keep track. He knows when he sees a face everyday in the camps and then it's suddenly gone. He's not unfamiliar with things like grief and loss.
He still catches himself checking the trashcans and the supply crates and soldiers' footprints sometimes, though.
But there comes a night where Gepard goes to bed, holding the mismatched blankets to his face, and he dreams. And it's strange, it's off, it sticks with him. Sampo doesn't look the same. He's thinner. His muscles have atrophied. He looks like how Gepard has seen soldiers after months in the hospital.
The most unsettling difference is there's a scar across the left side of his head, Gepard can see it over his ear, peeking out past his hairline, carving towards his cheek. Sampo is always careful about his face. Gepard once saw him dodge a Fragmentum monster and literally let it cut across his neck just to keep his face clear. He wouldn't let that happen for nothing.
Their actions in the dream itself aren't new. Sampo seems tired, run down and worn out, but he announces his presence with aplomb by lobbing a bunch of smoke bombs off the rooftops and sending his soldiers scrambling. Same shit, different day.
The new part is what he says when Gepard chases him out to the edges of the camp, tackles him into the snow. Gepard pins him to the frozen ground to detain him and Sampo doesn't even fight it, just looks up at him like he's seeing sunrise for the first time in months.
"I'll be home in one week."
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kinda thinking about how the women who serve as maternal figures/raise kids in yyh are never quite ready for it. genkai's an arguable exception, but like.. atsuko had yusuke at 15, shizuru's basically in charge of kazuma full time in her early 20s/late teens (depending on version) with very very absent parents, and even shiori is given a kid she wasn't expecting, in the form of an old, old demon rather than like. a regular, blank slate ass human baby. and although shiori seems to do quite well with kurama, kurama can never be honest with shiori about who he is, or much of what he's seen. if he was, it'd probably make things far more complicated and overwhelming. atsuko, no matter how much she cares for yusuke, Could Not Have Been and thus wasn't ready to have him at 15. her attempts to make the most of that situation have had middling success at best. shizuru has also been placed into a parental role. we don't really know how long she's been raising kuwabara, but that's.. probably still parentification anyway. she shouldn't have to do that, and she shouldn't have to do that so young. and i think some of her coarseness with kuwa is out of frustration with her own inexperience + inadequacy + uncertainty, his not cooperating, and their parents for putting this on her in the first place. the ones who know the full extent of their situation grow desperate and it squeaks out in unpleasant ways, and the one who seems unbothered by it is the only one who has no idea that she's in way over her head. and i mean. ok. gonna preface this by saying keiko is NOT yusuke's mom in any sense of the word. but she does take care of him in a way atsuko couldn't manage to. she's often looking after him and cleaning up after his messes and stuff. she takes him on as a responsibility, and that is, in a way, a caretaker role. not to say that it SHOULD be her responsibility, but it's how she ends up being.
and when the stress of trying to make someone take care of themselves or be kind or good or Whatever goes awry, again, the violence and arguing and distance and ugliness of caring for someone reveals itself.
and i wonder about that. for a series dedicated to physical fighting as a form of communication, what does it say that this extends to the complicated, quietly desperate situations of so many of the women/girls it depicts, whom our more central characters were shaped and raised by?
hell, even hiei touches on this, because hina loved hiei, but there was no way she was prepared for him, obviously, nor for the pain of losing him. rui (whom i also see as a sort of caretaker figure to hiei, inasmuch as either of them were caretakers) literally throws him off a cliff because she couldn't face down the village elders, and out of some mixture of care for hina and, likely, fear for her own survival. and the guilt and pain of that killed hina and deeply wounded rui.
it's like motherhood, this thing that's so often treated as sacred and beautiful, is a kind of stitched up, painful, eggshell-walking thing that hurts parent and child and it's just. oughh
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as much as i hate the fact that we cant let wyll make his own choice to break the pact or not when we can do so for pretty much every other huge origin choice, i kind of get why - because from what we know of wyll as a character, i really dont think he would ever make the decision to break the pact on his own. he hates mizora (understandably) and wants to be free of her (extremely understandably), but we also know about his insanely selfless, self-sacrificing tendencies. i love him dearly but i have serious doubts this man would ever knowingly sacrifice his father, no matter how much of a dick the guy is.
theres the argument of “but he must know his father would never want him to pact himself for eternity for his sake!!” but like. one, ulder wrote him off the moment he came home and saw him with a devil. that much is clear from wylls own testament and the things he says after you save him. two, even if that were the case, i doubt wyll would consider that perspective. because all he hears is “give away your soul to save a life” which is exactly what he did when he was seventeen.
is it an objectively bad decision? yes. have i made it repeatedly? yes, because of the points above and the fact that i think its the most in character decision for him, even if it makes me sad (wyll origin run is gonna be fun. and emotionally destroy me). do i still think we should be able to let him make his own decision? yeah, even if it means watching him sign his soul away again, because i think that happening 9 times out of 10 would really be a testament to what kind of character he is. tldr im at my limit and wyll ravengard makes me so fucking sad.
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Baby please, I am begging you to get out of the tags!! You can't keep those headcanons there! Because when I read that Butters is the museum owner in your Au I squealed so loudly!! He would be so cute! Getting all stary eyed everytime you bring something in??? AHHHH! 💖💖💖💖
Yes!! He starts off just so sad that the museum doesn't have anything. Constantly cleaning the display cases even though there's nothing in there.
But the farmer (you), come around with the little trinkets you find at the mines. Digging things up or finding them while fishing. And like you said he just gets these stars in his eye. (Yeah he still lost the other one)
Goes on for hours if you'll let him! Speculating the history behind the dwarven artifacts. He polishes those gems with such care! Butters is the happiest he's ever been since leaving the big city.
I think Kenny and him decided to just runaway one day. They grabbed Karen and moved out to the valley!
(That way if you ship Bunny it works, and if you don't it's just two besties supporting each other.)
As you start bringing in more things he starts looking over at the front door more. He perks up expecting you to come in covered in dirt, but he thinks it gives you a certain charm. He can smell the earth on you and immediately associates you with a flower of some kind. He'll change the flower pinned to his shirt to whatever that flower is. Got red hair? He's got tulips. The prettiest blue eyes ever?! Hydrangeas put carefully next to his heart. Oh you think your brown eyes are boring? How dare you, they're patches of soil that help support life!
Dude practically has hearts fluttering around his head when he sees you. Lips quivered into a smile, trying not to giggle just because he's nervous.
I swear his one heart event would be him crafting you something. He works with Scott to build a display case for it and sends it to you. It's not so big that it won't fit in the mailbox, maybe like a little box. It'll be something that doesn't belong in a museum but maybe one day it'll be in the house you share.
I'm working on Stan's sheet right while I'm at work! I'm writing up heart events like he's gonna be in the game ☠️
Tag List: @hunnysnoops @apple-butter-tea
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oh my god so i just saw this picture of froy guitterez with a bearded dragon and i fear i am going to have to give clyde a bearded dragon. i'm not sure how he got her, ( prolly by doing something extremely impulsive, dumb and unhinged ), but he snuck her into him and tolkien's dorm room and was like "okay! so don't get mad BUT--"
...he was Mad, btw. but rm!tolkien doesn't scream because he is a dignified british king ( the only one i respect ) and just speaks at a slightly louder volume and does things with his eyebrows like "Why. Do. You. Have. A. LIZARD. Clyde?" and he's like "okay, first of all, she's not JUST a lizard; she's a Bearded Dragon and her name is-" idk what her name is it's probably something insane like glizzy or salamanda or mary guana, i want to start crying, oh my god. clyde loves reptiles.
and tolkien is like "right...so does 'glizzy' have a cage? food?...water?" and clyde is just staring at him blankly like, "damn. i didn't think about that." KHSSDLKSDH HELP so they go to a lil pet store, i think they figure out a clever way to keep her warm and make her a strange makeshift enclosure. tldr, she gets all set up...except they have to Hide her ( also prolly in some elaborate way ) bc they're not supposed to have pets in the dorms and at first, tolkien was so Anti-Glizzy, like he made clyde put up lost lizard ads online/stuff on craigslist...
...buUUUUt accidentally got attached to her and secretly took the all listings down. anyways, happy pride month ft. rm!tyde co-parenting a lizard daughter together. the world is a beautiful place, in fact. <3
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