#i live for foster dad gaius

[mushroom-through-the-stargate]

whether you see them as romantic or platonic, merlin and arthur are literally soulmates

[dragons-bones]

FFXIV Write Entry #29: Stormsong

Prompt: paternal | Master Post | On AO3

Well, this did not go where I thought it would, and certainly isn’t crack. But I think I like it?

Anyway, SPOILERS for The Sorrow of Werlyt through the quest “Sleep Now in Sapphire” as well as the Omega Raid story line.

--

A late summer storm had roared up the coast, driving the residents of Terncliff inside their homes and the Ironworks engineers and Resistance soldiers down into the magitek facility. Most were in their commandeered bunks—at least those not on patrol throughout the town—while waiting for the storm to pass, but for the engineers at least, there was still work to be done in the warmachina bay.

For a given definition of work.

Valdeaulin rolled his eyes as Cid Garlond and Synnove Greywolfe’s shouting echoed down the hangar. He couldn’t fathom the reason why Greywolfe was here, for all that she had taken it deeply personally that she hadn’t been involved in the G-Warrior’s development; something to do with the warmachina’s systems, perhaps, or the recovered pieces of the Sapphire Weapon, currently in one of the secondary bays. He could follow her ranting about aetheric principles to a degree, but the similarities between thaumaturgy and arcanima rapidly ran dry when the arcanist also dabbled heavily in engineering.

From his spot close to the exit out towards the bay, at least, the pounding rain and crash of thunder mostly drowned out the engineers’ row (Greywolfe was standing atop the G-Warrior’s shoulder, yelling down at Garlond as they both shook their fists and waved wrenches at one another for emphasis, the other Ironworks employees not reacting to them at all). If he closed his eyes, he could imagine for a moment that rain was falling on the stone roof of his home rather than sheet metal, that the cool wind blew in from the dark depths of the Twelveswood, that the voices he heard were those of his wife and daughter. But then something would crash in the hangar, and he would be drawn back to reality.

With an annoyed sigh, Valdeaulin opened his eyes and resumed his work on a map of the region surrounding Terncliff and heading towards Werlyt. He didn’t have to do it, but there was precious little else for him to do with the weather so foul and the hunt for Gaius’ wayward foster children and their Weapons project temporarily halted. And it would make the lives of the Resistance patrols easier, at least.

He was making notations on one copy about the local patterns of aether for any Resistance mages—eerily dead, but with the occasional strange spot he could sense of high activity that might be a natural golem, or a pocket of minor elementals—when he heard footsteps trotting towards his position. His ears twitched and he looked up, eyebrows going up despite his attempt to remain stoic.

His time with the Order of the Twin Adders had been relatively short—perhaps two years, if that—but Rereha Reha had been notorious well before she and her sisters-in-arms had stumbled into bearing the mantles of Warriors of Light. Valdeaulin hadn’t served in her unit, but he had seen the fallout of some of her “shenanigans,” both good and ill, and his commanding officer had spoken of her with fond exasperation. Like him, she was an outsider to the Twelveswood, but for some unfathomable reason, she had been permitted beneath its boughs by the Elementals to live and learn in Gridania.

She hadn’t changed much, appearance wise anyway, since that time he had last seen her before Operation Archon: devious, almost smarmy grin, pink hear dyed with streaks of white, skin astonishingly blemish free despite a career outdoors that he had once overheard a Gridanian noblewoman hiss over in a fit of jealousy and left him struggling to disguise his laughter as a cough. She still favored sky blue for anything that wasn’t a uniform, going by her leather coat, but her usual matching stockman hat with its jaunty feather was suspiciously missing.

And…was that a hatchling dragon in her arms?

When the lalafell came to a stop before him, he grudgingly said, “Lieutenant Reha.”

“Ooooh, that’s Captain Reha now, Sergeant,” Rereha said, just shy of cackling.

Valdeaulin nearly dropped his pen. “Dear good gods, why do they keep promoting you?” he said in disbelief.

“Mostly to make me someone else’s problem,” she chirped, easily hopping up onto a stack of crates next to him. The dragonet in her arms croaked reproachfully as it was jostled, but she merely patted it on the head and continued, “I think the plan is to get me high enough that it forces Grand Marshal Brookstone to retire already. I am also, apparently, quite good at getting the job done even if it means someone goes prematurely grey from shock, mortification, or both.”

“That sounds like a quote,” he said.

Rereha held a finger up to her lips in a ‘shush’ gesture, smirking, and waggled her eyebrows.

Valdeaulin shook his head and, to use one of Severa’s favorite phrases, decided to bite the bullet, gesturing to the dragonet. “And who’s your friend there?”

If he hadn’t once been the father of a precocious daughter (one who would be about the same age as this hedonist bard had she lived), he likely wouldn’t have noticed the very brief widening of Rereha’s eyes in the classic children’s expression of oh shite. But he did, and he kept his face studiously blank of anything except polite interest while the lalafell smiled bright and wide—too wide, just a hair—and said, “Oh, this little guy?”

She held the dragonet, a yalm long from nose to tail by his guess, up for inspection. He had black eyes, apparently all pupil, or perhaps his irises were true black, as well. His head was head was wedge-shaped, with fan-shaped protrusions on either side of his head of similar shape to his wings. The closer look showed that his scales were tiny; from a distance he had almost appeared smooth-skined. He was dark green, shading to a paler shade on his belly, and the undersides of his wings and ear fins, plus his extremities, were pink.

The dragonet was, quite frankly, adorable, despite the unsettlingly powerful glare. Something about his aether niggled at him, though; he could have sworn he had encountered it before, but that couldn’t be possible…

“I had heard you and the other Warriors of Light had brought peace between the Ishgardians and the Dravanians,” Valdeaulin drawled, “but I didn’t expect it had extended to babysitting.”

“Dragonets do what they want,” Rereha said with a sniff. “He usually stays in Anyx Trine, but occasionally he comes wandering to find us and beg for bacon jerky.”

The dragonet perked up at that word and he craned his neck and head back to chirp at Rereha imperiously.

She sighed. “Yeah, yeah, I got the goods.” She set the dragonet in her lap and slung her pack off her shoulder.

As Rereha rummaged around in her bag, Valdeaulin said mildly, “Does he have a name?”

“Hm? Oh! Yeah,” she said, popping her head up and triumphantly holding a wrapped packet. The dragonet began hopping impatiently, wings flaring, and Rereha shoved him out of the way, but he merely took that as an invitation to hop onto her head, lean over, and croak angrily in her face. She poked his nose and said to Valdeaulin, “He’s, ah, Deeh Sohm.”

His parental bullshite detector, as his Trisselle had called it, noticed the ever-so-slight hesitation, but as before, Valdeaulin didn’t comment on it. As hilarious as it would be to make Rereha Reha squirm, he assumed whatever it was that was causing her to react like someone with their hand in the biscuit jar, it some sort of Warrior of Light business.

Instead, he merely nodded, and went back to notating the map. Rereha, meanwhile, hurriedly unwrapped the waxed paper to reveal a pile of jerky and began breaking off pieces. For every piece she passed up to the impatient “Deeh Sohm,” she popped one into her own mouth, apparently as ravenous as her small companion. The jerky vanished completely into their stomachs in no time at all, and both dragonet and lalafell belched in satisfaction. A lick of blue flame accompanied the dragonet’s.

Valdeaulin did not comment, though he did briefly wonder if Lisie would have stayed as shamelessly irreverent had she grown up. The thought only hurt a little, this time.

Apparently now that snack time was over, it was time to sleep the food off: Rereha yawned once, laid down with her head pillowed on her back, and promptly passed out, in the manner of many soldiers and adventurers who learned to sleep whenever and wherever they could, with an inelegant snore. The dragonet, briefly dislodged from his perch atop her head, instead stomped down to her stomach, kneading it like a cat before he curled into a ball, wings tucked close.

Valdeaulin shifted just a bit on his own seat, shuffling back to make himself a better windbreak for the occasional stormy gust that howled into the hanger.

Suddenly, the dragonet’s aether signature…changed.

Valdeaulin very, very slowly raised his head, eyes wide. Before, the dragonet’s aether had felt dim, the faintest hum of a repeating tune of power, fitting for a creature that looked so young.

Now, though.

Now, it was a chorus of complex harmonies, of rhythms and tone and melodies that somehow blended into a coherent whole. It was heavy with the weight of antiquity, nearly crushing with how narrowly it was focused upon himself.

The dragonet stared at him, and now he would swear that fathomless, midnight gaze saw through him, right to the very heart of his being, weighing and judging and knowing. A loud, grumbling hmmmmmmm, almost two-toned with reverb, echoed in his mind.

Rereha snorted, though she didn’t wake entirely, and she patted the dragonet on the head. “Go t’ sleep, Dad,” she slurred.

Slowly, the ancient awareness folded itself away, bit by bit, until the dragonsong was muted once more to that simple cascade of notes of earlier. The dragonet blinked at him, yawned, and tucked his head under his wing to nap.

Valdeaulin stared at the pair for long moments, before resolutely returning to his work.

He did not want to know.

[master-apology]

I’ve had it up to HERE with FGO fans falsely identifying characters as DILFs or MILFs, so I’ve made a handy list of every Servant in the game who had kids and what their parenting role was, so hopefully we can get this whole business sorted out. This list goes by Servant ID.

Take note, I WILL be identifying genderbent female characters whose historical male counterparts had kids as DILFs, because the game doesn’t give any indication that their spouses in its universe were men, and I am of the opinion that Fate has proven that being a Dad or a Mom are not necessarily gendered roles. Also note, this will be mainly going off of their historical/legendary/mythological/literary depictions, as the game doesn’t always give information about their progeny. It’s also entirely possible that there are characters who aren’t on this list that should be, but we don’t have any records of them having had children (or I didn’t find it on wikipedia). Also, many of these characters are summoned at a younger age than they where when they had kids.

I will also only be counting characters with multiple versions ONCE, otherwise this list would be longer than it already is. Additionally, I WILL NOT be counting Pseudo/Demi Servants.

DILFs: Artoria Pendragon Nero Claudius Siegfried Gaius Julius Caesar Attila Gilgamesh Robin Hood (in some stories) Cú Chulainn Leonidas I Ushiwakamaru Alexander/Iskander William Shakespeare Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Hassan of the Cursed Arm Charles-Henri Sanson Heracles Lancelot Lu Bu Fengxian Vlad III Caligula Darius III Eric Bloodaxe David Hector Oda Nobunaga Diarmuid Ua Duibhne Fergus mac Róich Charles Babbage Solomon Arjuna Karna Fionn mac Cumhaill Rama Thomas Edison Geronimo Ozymandias Gawain Tawara Tōta Bedivere James Moriarty (via adopting Fran) Christopher Columbus Yagyū Munenori Katsushika Hokusai (hard to place, given he and Ōi’s shared Spirit Origin. we know that Ōi was married, but not if she had any kids. placing them here for now) Antonio Salieri Ivan the Terrible Achilles Chiron (lots of foster kids) Sakamoto Ryōma (similar thing with Hokusai, given he and Oryou are a package deal, although they adopted his older sister’s son) Napoléon Sigurd Lanling Wang (this dude lived almost 1500 years ago, but we only learned this as recently as 1999) Shi Huang Di (difficult to say with our Glorious Overlord, given that they’re non-binary and might not have had kids in their timeline, but our QSHD did)   William Tell Asclepius Jason

MILFs: Elizabeth Báthory/Carmilla Medusa (in the stories where she was not always a monster) Boudica Marie Antoinette Medea Mata Hari Tamamo no Mae Anne Bonny Mary Read (probably died while pregnant, so honorary mention) Scáthach Brynhildr (in some stories) Ryōgi Shiki Medb Irisviel/Dress of Heaven (she’s technically from a timeline where she and Kiritsugu never met, but she has the memories from the one where they did) Minamoto no Raikō (would normally be a DILF as per stated genderbend rules, but she identifies as a mother) Cleopatra Chacha Scheherazade Wu Zetian Tomoe Gozen Katō Danzō (like Raikō, she’s here because she’s identified as a mom) Circe Semiramis (both her legend and her actual historical counterpart, Shammuramat) Scáthach-Skaði (I know I said no alt repeats, but it’s worth mentioning Skaði had kids too) Qin Liangyu Murasaki Shikibu Lakshmibai Nagao Kagetora (had two adopted sons. would normally be a DILF, but there are a few historians that think Kagetora really was a woman, so I felt like putting her here) Calamity Jane (this version might not have had any, but real life Martha Jane Canary had two)

Final DILF Count: 55 Final MILF Count: 28

[levin-swort]

In the ptchrobin au, Robin finds 3 yr old Marc and Morgan on the ground while doing field work as a grad student and after going to the authorities trying and not being able to find their parents, hes like i am dad now and adopts them bc they grow on him quickly and so they dont get split up in foster care.

His heart melts when they call him Papa for the first time and he is a v caring dad despite being also massively busy w grad school and a research job. Morgan and Marc learn all ab rocks and shit, and Robin teaches them ab dnd too. Aversa loves to visit and play with the kids (shes a botonist and teaches them all ab plants and what u can do w them). Morgan and Marc learn early on that theyre adopted and are pretty ok w it for the most part.

Robin's Extreme Business (museum work, teaching high school, being a single dad), high blood pressure, and family medical history lead him to having a (somewhat mild?) stroke a few yrs after grad school. He takes a while to recover but he has the support of Aversa, Gaius, and his kids.

Gaius and Aversa helped out a lot and took care of the kids while he was in rehabilitation. Robin now has anomic aphasia, short term and spacial memory problems as well as joint pain and hemiparesis and does physical therapy and cognative therapy.

At the point where he starts teaching high school in South Town, hes figured out many ways to manage things and lives on his own w Morgan and Marc. He likes baking and cooking with them, and they ask him to play chess w them a lot, and he does.