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yoditorian · 4 years

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lacuna- part 4

din/reader

i put our favourite idiots through the absolute wringer in this one and i refuse to apologise. it’s nECESSARY i swear.

MASTERLIST

word count: 3.4k

warnings: swears, graphic violence and injury, some naughty thoughts from our favourite buckethead so for that reason 18+ no babies thanks

The distant, rhythmic clanging echoes off of the stone staircase as he descends into the tunnels.

They’re empty, devoid of the usual flurrying activity, save for the guards that stand tall either side of the entryway. He doesn’t ask where everyone is, he doesn’t need to, the noise is enough to know where he’s going. Winding tunnel after winding tunnel, Din comes to a sharp stop after rounding a corner.

Armoured bodies spill out of the entrance to the forge, kids in and out of helmets clamouring to watch the action in the gaps between their buirs’ legs. He remembers being that small, trying desperately to see what was going on during gatherings. But he’d never seen anything quite like this.

Din shoulders his way through the crowd, watching out for the little ones under his feet, towards where Paz stands a head above everybody else. A pale, willowy man sits hunched over on his knees in the centre of the forge beside a set of armour carefully laid out on a bench. Is he a thief? The Armourer stands tall above him, ceremonial furs wrapped around her shoulders in place of the shorter, more practical ones. There’s so much sound, so many angry bodies packed into the small space, he can’t decipher exactly what it is they’re all doing there.

“What is this?” He nudges Paz, unable to take his eyes off of the man on the ground.

“He has dishonoured the creed.”

Din offers nothing in return, hoping his confused silence is mistaken for acceptance. A thousand possibilities run through his mind at breakneck speed. There are so many rules, so many afterthoughts and double meanings, he knows the newly-sworn kids struggle to remember everything from time to time. But this is a grown man, an adult who sits so shamefully in the centre of their most sacred setting. Did he kill a vod? Did he intentionally harm the ade? Did he question the Armourer? Paz, unsurprisingly, senses the question that hangs in the air between them.

“He removed his helmet, vod.”

No.

But how would- how would anybody know? How would something like that ever get back to the covert? Din doesn’t ask. He only nods, and returns his gaze to the man in the circle, while he silently prays to every deity he can think of.

The crowd around him gets louder, hurling insults and clanging their arms together in anger. Din understands the gravity of what this man has done, what he has done, but there has to be a reason. Surely, there’s an explanation. A loophole, somewhere. Their secrecy is their survival and their survival is their strength, but at what cost? The cost of your touch, of you? The cost of knowing and being known so intimately isn’t something he’d known he’d be so unwilling to pay back when he swore the creed. Din Djarin would be a lesser man had he not shed his helmet and armour for you, he is as sure of that as his creed. The creed he has broken, more than once. What would become of him, if anybody here found out?

The Armourer moves, worn metal of her tools colliding like a thunderclap, and the covert falls silent.

“Cork Gyll, you have been charged with the gravest of crimes against the creed: the removal of your helmet.”

Din can’t help but flinch as Cork does when the crowd roars again, anger and betrayal cracking in the air. He doesn’t know Cork, but his spiraling thoughts are way ahead of the game. Filling his mind with images of himself in Cork’s place, stripped of his armour and everything he knows himself to be. The taunting of his covert, of his family, echoing in his ears as though it’s meant for him. Din feels sick.

Memories of every time he’s shed his helmet for you. Every time he’s pressed his lips to yours, to every inch of you he could find purchase on. Is that why it always felt so good? An almost religious experience, the permission you give him to touch you is one he holds in the highest regard. Nothing comes close. But is that why? The thrill of breaking the code he’s lived by for a lifetime? No, he knows that’s not it. He knows it’s you that makes him feel that way, more than any rule breaking. He hates the warmth that spreads through him at the phantom taste of you on his tongue.

“Do you deny?” The Armourer speaks again, and the noise ceases.

“No, Alor.” Cork does not raise his eyes from the dust in front of him.

Anger replaces Din’s fear. At himself, at his creed, at the galaxy for being so cruel as to hold you just out of reach and deny him the only real, tangible connection he’s had since he was taken in by these people. He craves you, and everything you are, but you’re not allowed. Part of him feels like a petulant child, one of the ade denied a sweet before dinnertime. How could he be so stupid? So reckless? He should be caught. He should be exiled. He deserves it, he deserves nothing but loneliness.

“Is there reason that you should not be stripped of your armour and exiled?”

“No, Alor.”

“You will be Dar’manda. This is the way.”

“This is the way.” The words echo in chorus around the forge, as they always do. It doesn’t escape Din’s notice that Cork remains silent in the centre, head hanging low.

The clanging from before begins again, in unison this time. The younger warriors follow the elders’ lead, rhythmically hitting their vambraces together until the sound reverberates through the ground. It’s loud enough that nobody notices that Din’s own wrists barely make contact. The Armourer lifts the tray of shed armour over the forge in front of Cork, the sparks of the flames reflect harshly in the gold of her helmet. The condemned man still does not raise his eyes from the dirt.

Paz and another heavy infantry soldier step out of the crowd to haul Cork to his feet, and people start to dissipate. The show’s over, now all that remains is to serve his sentence. A life in exile. Dar’manda. Din doesn’t stick around long enough to find out what they do with him next.

He goes straight to his room, unaware of the path he treads. He can’t remember in all his time as a Mando seeing somebody actually get exiled, actually be stripped of the creed and sent away. He was half sure it was just a story told to get the ade to take the creed seriously. The guilt only digs it’s cold claws into his heart once he’s alone.

Door secure, Din all but rips the helmet off of his head. Breathe, in and out. Just like you taught him. Oh, you. Your face swimming in his memory only makes his guilt grip tighter, twisting itself in his guts until he can’t remember what he feels like without it. You’re a traitor, Djarin. He can’t tell if the grotesque voice in his head is talking about the creed or the way he’s treated you. He’s not sure it matters. Because even after all this, after everything he’s just seen, he thinks about where you might be. Whatever you’re up to, he only hopes you’re safe.

“Oh, fuck.”

Shara’s too far into the armoury to hear you call out when the guards descend.

Only a handful of them, faces all concealed by crude looking helmets, but they waste no time in splitting up to take you on. Three of them against you, they’re not the best odds you’ve ever faced. Then again, they’re definitely not the worst. You take a moment, let them try to predict your first move, until one of them gets impatient. He swings for your legs with the long barrel of his blaster, which you evade with so much ease you’re almost embarrassed for the guy. It’s less of a fight and more of a standoff. You’re cornered at the end of this dark hallway, nowhere to go. The sounds of Shara struggling against her own adversaries echo off the metal walls, and you strike.

You hit the middle guard square in the chest, splintering the weak armour, and you take the momentary panic from the others to make a break for it over his body. You don’t get far. Shara’s pained cry from the armoury stills your heart in your chest at the same moment that a stun bolt digs in between your shoulders, voltage way too high for something as delicate as human flesh. You’re out before you even hit the floor.

Your legs aren’t working like they should, muscles still jerking as the electricity works its way out of your system. A pair of guards unshackle you from the post and you hit the floor before they can catch you. Of all the ways they’ve hurt you, it’s the boss’s cackle at your weakness that makes you cringe. You’d held out for so long, stayed quiet for what feels like days, until they pulled out whatever it was that turned your blood to lightning. You’re dragged up out of the dust and back down the narrow hallway to the cell. It’s too dark in there to even see an inch in front of your face. But at least you can hear Shara through the wall.

“We’re getting out, I know it.” She’s optimistic, you’ll give her that. But you know that if you do ever make it out, it’ll be on your own. The Rebellion just doesn’t have the numbers to spare on a rescue mission for a couple of pilots who got a little too big for their boots.

“Well I’m not dying until I beat your track time, so we better.”

Shara laughs from the cell beside yours, loud and familiar, if maybe a little forced. It’s easier to join in her amusement when you don’t focus on the blood dripping down under your collar.

It’s a suspiciously easy bounty, something he’d normally pass up on. But there’d been an odd tug in his chest at the low-level puck and Din had negotiated it into his assignments from the Guild before he even really knew what he’d done. Some wannabe crime lord on a planet he didn’t care to learn the name of had set a bounty on an ex-guard, wanted him hand delivered. A deserter, he’d called him. Din pretended like that didn’t tug at his chest too.

He finds the man, oddly enough, digging up vegetables in a garden. Presumably it’s the quarry’s family home, nestled between the trees on a riverbank, and something about the way the man regards him feels extremely final. He doesn’t run, he doesn’t plead or try to fight, he simply places the bundle of freshly harvested vegetables on the doorstep and walks slowly back up the path. The bounty doesn’t say a word as his wrists are bound, nor as they start the trek through the wood towards the gang’s base.

A helmeted guard meets them at the doorway, gesturing into the dark hall, and Din only hesitates for a moment before nudging the quarry ahead of him. They barely make it into the main meeting room when a blaster shot hits the bounty right between the eyes. He crumples where he stands, Din has enough control not to flinch in surprise, and the man holding the smoking blaster splits a slimey grin. The boss, then. He points at the body, talking pointedly to his guards about loyalty and vows. It’s enough to leave a bad taste in Din’s mouth. He catches the pouch of credits thrown his way, and is ready to leave this whole mess behind him when the boss turns his attention onto the hunter.

“You have to stay for the show, Mando.”

“Show?” Was that not enough of a show?

“We found a couple of rats digging around in our armoury a few days ago, thought we’d have a little fun before they meet the same fate as our dear deserter.”

He leads Din to a small room with staggered seating above a lit area like a crude stage, clearly made for a larger audience than the six of them. There’s a single post in the middle with a woman in a dirty orange flight suit cuffed to it, blood on her face. An interrogation droid, he suppresses a shudder, is zapping her every few seconds to keep her from blacking out.

“We had the bantha-prod on the other one yesterday. Oh, the screaming.”

Unable to take his eyes off of the woman, he can’t stop himself seeing you in her place. He doesn’t even think before he’s unloaded a plasma cartridge into the boss and the four remaining guards. Din swings his pulse rifle around his body, aiming carefully, and disintegrates the droid before it can shock the woman again.

“Get your friend and get gone.” Din huffs out as he swipes the keys off of the boss and jumps down into the pit to unshackle the pilot. Her legs give out underneath her, dropping like dead weight, and for a second he’s not sure she’ll get back up. But she does, gritting her teeth the whole way.

“You think we were planning on sticking around?” She’s shaky, a little out of it for a moment before she steels herself and looks him in the eyes. Right in the eyes. It’s the same determination and strength Din always sees in you, and he knows she’ll be okay.

He leaves before the little voice in his head, the one that sounds like you, makes him do something stupid. Like stay and help the pilots, offer to take them back to their base, get sucked into a war he doesn’t have the cause to care about. Aside from one, glaringly obvious, you-shaped reason.

Shara wastes no time in ducking down the hall to the cells and getting to you. Her fingers shake when she flips through the chain to find the right chip, but the tension leaves her a little once the door slides back to reveal you curled in a dank corner. The light is harsh, after who knows how many hours sitting in complete darkness, and you’re only vaguely aware of her telling you somebody killed your captors.

“-Swooped in like a fucking knight in shining armour,” Shara laughs as she fumbles with the key to your binders, “It was crazy.”

She’s pulling you out of the cell and down the hall before you can really get your feet under you, knocking elbows and knees against the walls of the narrow space. But the logic of a pilot, a scrapper pilot, kicks in once you’ve adjusted to the movement.

“Dead guys don’t need guns, right? Might as well get what we came for.”

It takes Shara a moment to realise what you’re saying, but then she’s dragging you after her along the dim corridor. The wrong way. You have to tug on her hand to get her to slow, to point her in what you know is the right way to the armoury. You’re not sure exactly how you can be so certain, just that you know. You’ve always had a better sense of direction than her so she, at least, takes you at your word and barely stumbles in her haste.

There’s no welcoming party waiting on the landing pad for you, only a very tired looking command officer and a couple of medics, and the floodlights threaten to blind you as you and Shara lean on each other down the loading ramp. Tired, you’re both so tired.

“They’re in the cargo hold.” You manage between breaths, nodding your head towards the netting keeping the liberated armoury in place. The officer releases you to the medics at the same moment Shara loses consciousness and falls dead weight against your shoulder. The adrenaline starts to wear off as they catch her before she can hit the ground, you don’t argue when they sit you on the trolley beside her.

“What did they hit you with, Lieutenant?” A doctor you don’t recognise is in your face before you even register that you’re in the medbay.

“Forgive me if I was a little too preoccupied to ask.”

It hurts. The torn material of your flight suit is matted into your wounds, and you feel every little pull right down to your bones when she moves to lead you up and off of the trolley towards an empty bed. Even the lightest touch of her fingers around the singed edges threatens a wave of nausea. You bite it back with a grimace. If standing is this agonising, you really don’t want to find out what heaving feels like.

“Bantha-prod, looks like. Nasty burns.”

Another pair of hands guides you to lean forwards and brace your arms on the bed, and you try to remember to keep breathing while the doctor begins peeling your charred flight suit out of the half-healed burns on your back. More scars. Spots dance in your vision, blurring the world around you, and you lock your jaw up so tight to keep from screaming that you swear you crack a tooth. Even through this, this pain that seems to lick at every inch of your body, your only thought is that you want him. There’s a sharp scratch on your neck and a low groan that you think might have come from you, before the pain finally pulls you under.

Din finds no solace in the dusty tunnels of the covert, not the way he normally does. The image of Cork kneeling in the forge, enduring insults and anger and the loss of his creed without so much as a whimper. The quarry, walking from his family’s home to his death with no complaint. He’s not sure he could be that strong, that unaffected, if his treachery ever comes to light. He wonders what you would look like in the orange flight suit of rebel pilots. Maybe you knew the ones he freed, maybe he’d unknowingly saved a friend of yours. It might be the only honourable action he’s taken for years.

His lingering thought, as he finds his way to his quarters and collapses on the bed in a pile of armour and exhaustion, is how much more comfortable he is when you’re tucked into his side. Where you should be, he’s sure of it.

You plague his dreams that night, just like every night. Din sees nothing but your eyes, hears nothing but your laugh, feels nothing but your smile against his skin. He dreams about being somewhere far away with you, the way he wishes he could be. No rebels or creeds or empires, just you and him lying somewhere in soft grass watching clouds roll by. You’re wearing that old red sweater he took off of you the first night he touched you, and his armour is nowhere to be seen. He likes it that way. He can feel the warmth of you beside him like this.

But the pink-streaked sky morphs and suddenly he’s encompassed in darkness, the feeling of you surrounding him. He’s not afraid, not like when other dreams fade to black before he wakes. He knows you in this darkness, he knows himself. The sounds you make when you’re together in the dark, the heat of your mouth on him, sliding his cock past your lips. He wants this, you, for as long as you’ll let him have it. Everything you are, the smiles, the jokes, the sex, the exhaustion. The fire you get in your eyes stokes the one in his, he’s not sure who he would be without it. He could love you, one day, if that’s what you wanted. If he’s what you want. But nothing lasts, the Armourer’s voice breaks through your heady moans to condemn him as Dar’manda and you’re gone. Just like that.

Din wakes with a start. Hard in his flight suit and an even worse ache in his back. He can never see you again, a decision that leaves a pain so deep in his bones far worse than a wet dream or falling asleep in his armour ever could.

The comm buzzes late one night, weeks later.

“I’ve got a job on Akiva, if you’re anywhere near there.”

He leaves it unanswered.

TAGLIST (lmk if you want on or off the list):

@brothersdrxke @remmysbounty @aq-vetina @1800-fight-me @mandos-co @kesskirata @sarahjkl82-blog @firstofficerwiggles @keeper0fthestars @wille-zarr @rebloogggs @plants-are-better-than-humans @schreibsuchtis (tag machine broke again)

#lacuna #the mandalorian #the mandalorian x reader #the mandalorian x you #din djarin #din djarin x reader #din djarin x you #star wars #fic #liz does words #obligatory prayer to the tag gods that they work #smut

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glittering-snowfall · 4 years

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When talking to people about the ice boat scene from different corners of the fandom, I found it fascinating that both the Elsanna shippers I’ve talked to and the Kristanna shippers I’ve talked to are incredibly pained and devastated by it.

The Elsanna shippers I’ve talked to describe a sense of pain and heartbreak that Elsa would push Anna away again. I’ve talked with people who’ve described watching the scene in horror, in grief, because, “Elsa, what are you doing? You promised Anna you’d do this together! Don’t push her away again! Elsa, please, don’t do this!”

I know that I, as an Elsanna shipper, felt that devastation in my heart. Watching the ice boat scene feels crushing to me because it feels like a betrayal. The sisters were able to heal Arendelle in the first film because they came together, because Elsa finally let her heart feel what her heart had been yearning for, for years, and let Anna in. All those years in the first film, trusting the prescripts of others instead of your own heart, and you’re able to help heal the land when you stop putting p walls against your sister. Their love, their faith in each other, gives them both strength in the first film and saves the land.

Elsanna shippers feel hurt because the ice boat scene feels like Elsa putting up those walls again. And many Elsanna shippers sympathize deeply with Anna’s position in Frozen 2. They sympathize deeply with Anna. Anna, who has been talking good sense this whole movie: “Elsa, don’t be reckless. Don’t be rash. Don’t run into fire. You don’t have to go this alone. We’re stronger together,” while Elsa hasn’t been listening. It’s heartbreaking for them to watch, especially as the movie emphasizes Anna having to learn things (apologizing for leaving Kristoff behind because she was just so desperate to protect Elsa) when it seems like, Anna doesn’t have to learn anything. Anna is in the right. Anna is in the right. And yet the film frames it as her having to come to terms with change and her sister operating out of her sphere when really, the conflict rests on trust.

There’s a definite sense from Elsanna shippers (myself included) that Elsa should be better than this - that she shouldn’t have pushed Anna and Olaf away. There were other ways, ways that were more rooted in actually “doing this together” - in making a mission plan together even if it meant Elsa going on alone. And there’s also a sense that - even if Elsa isn’t better than this because it logically makes sense that she’s in a traumatic situation and does not want her loved ones to die - she should have more clearly apologized for her actions.

It does genuinely feel out-of-character for Elsa to me - at least to a degree. I’m not one of those people who claims, “Elsa was completely rewritten in F2!” In fact, seeing Elsa relapse into bad choices that were ingrained in her from childhood seems very in-character for Elsa during a crisis. People don’t outgrow things like that easily - and having Elsa completely outgrow that conditioning would be unrealistic. But it feels off to me that Elsa wouldn’t apologize immediately upon reunion with Anna and Olaf. And, I know, the filmmakers wanted Elsa to be less apologetic in this movie. But they also wrote her doing something that they wanted to stress was so intense that they had Olaf get angry about it. Elsa apologizing for her actions in this one scene wouldn’t be like the times she’s apologized for existing.

(On that note, to the people who used the post about the ice boat scene I wrote on my other blog to claim that “Elsa never apologizes because Elsa never feels she’s done something wrong,” your assessment of Elsa is factually incorrect. Elsa feels she does things wrong constantly, sometimes to a crippling degree. Elsa has apologized multiple times throughout the franchise and that anxiety and pain on Elsa’s part is why the filmmaker’s desire for her to be less apologetic makes a certain degree of sense. It doesn’t make sense in the context of the ice boat scene and its aftermath, however, because of the specific way the filmmakers frame the moment for Anna and Olaf... meaning that we as the audience want Anna and Olaf to get closure and then... the film doesn’t give it to them.

And that’s the thing: the sentiment of pain, grief, and anger from Elsanna shippers over the ice boat scene isn’t irrational. In fact, it’s very rational because the film itself frames the moment as a kind of betrayal. The film wants the moment to be a gut-punch. That’s why it goes so far to have Olaf, the most innocent of characters, express anger at Elsa’s actions. So Elsanna shippers aren’t just angry because our headcanons/hopes of the sisters genuinely working together were dashed. We’re feeling what the film explicitly wants us to feel and conditions us to feel.

And the fact that Olaf’s anger and Anna’s anger never gets brought up again? That’s a legitimate flaw in the film. I know I’ve seen people’s defenses of it saying, “It makes sense in-universe that Anna would be too relieved to be angry at that moment, and they must have talked it over at a later time,” but that’s an excuse for a dangling plot thread, not a resolution to the plot thread. It’s headcanon.

So Elsanna shippers have to sit back and watch, while agreeing with the sensible things Anna is saying, and suffer through the film trying to teach Anna a lesson when Anna’s protectiveness of Elsa (Elsa, who is doing increasingly reckless things without consulting her family much at all) makes the most sense onscreen.

Meanwhile, Kristanna shippers can be incredibly devastated by the ice boat scene as well. (I’m specifically referring to a specific number of Anna fans, most of whom ship KA, hence my initially describing them by ship and not just calling them “Anna fans” - because there are Anna fans who ship Elsanna too and I don’t want to be needlessly confusing.)

And, interestingly, these KA shippers’ frustrations often mirror the EA shippers’ frustrations in key ways. They relate to Anna’s pain deeply. Like the grieving Elsanna shippers, they also feel, Anna is in the right, Anna is in the right and I’ve talked to people in this circle who feel the most agonizing thing about F2 is watching Anna try to hold her family together while being torn apart at the seams. And I sympathize with that deeply. It also stings me to see Anna leaving Kristoff behind.

But, where the EA shippers tend to feel, “Elsa should be better than this,” there’s sometimes a tendency among these KA shippers to be like, “Elsa should be better than this - and, because she isn’t, that proves that Elsa is a horrible person and Anna needs to break free of her.”

Where the EA shippers see Elsa’s actions as out-of-character (or, at least, in-character but a character flaw that needs resolution by the film’s end... which the film doesn’t give), this group seems to see Elsa’s actions as validation of something they’ve been arguing since before F2 - that there are unhealthy aspects to the sisters’ dynamic and/or awkward elements in the way the franchise writes that dynamic. And, judging from F2, there are uncomfortable and negative aspects to the sisters’ dynamic (which the film doesn’t really give any firm closure on - yes, they’re in different places now, but did they talk about what happened with the ice boat? Did anyone get closure on that, and what does that say about both of them?) And, yes, the franchise can sometimes idealize Elsa at the expense of Anna. These are valid critiques.

Still, as someone who remembers cracks about “Elsa never letting Anna enjoy a party” before F2 came out, I feel that some of the negativity towards Elsa is born of these people’s own biases. (For those unfamiliar, there was a post going around before F2 came out “joking” about how Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party. First she flees the coronation ball and Anna has to go after her. Then she gets sick in Frozen Fever and Anna has to be stressed about her all the time. Then she shuts the door on Anna in OFA. Of these examples in the “joke,” I feel the first two are very much unfounded. Elsa’s powers were revealed at the coronation ball and she was fleeing for her life; she didn’t “ruin the party” out of spite. Also, how dare Elsa... get sick and still want to give Anna a happy experience on her birthday? However, I don’t like the moment in OFA either, myself, especially considering the visible pain on Anna’s face seeing that door close again. Regarding the “Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party” comments, I mentioned to a friend that I found them mean-spirited. She told me they were “just a joke” and I was overreacting.)

EDIT: A friend came to me, frustrated that I was bringing up the “Elsa never lets Anna enjoy a party post from years ago - even though I made clear that the post was from years ago by saying that it was from before F2 came out. I realize that it is unfair to equate the negativity towards Elsa in that post with the negativity I have seen in recent weeks towards Elsa. So I want to make clear again that I didn’t mean to EQUATE that negativity with the anti-Elsa negativity I’ve seen from certain people recently.

I mean, I tried to make that clear by making a deliberate distinction between people who are critical of Elsa for valid reasons and extreme people - and by “extreme people,” I mean people who put things like this in their bios:

I didn’t want to bring up this individual, even though they ship KA, because I didn’t want people to feel I was generalizing all KA shippers as being like this person. I know all KA shippers are NOT like this person, that’s why I describe people like this person as “extremists” and “people on the other extreme.”

I brought up the party meme, not to dredge up old wounds, but because the party meme was a lesser example of negativity towards Elsa that didn’t feel as incendiary as bringing this person up.

I’ll also admit, I was trying to convey a sense of the history of negativity towards Elsa by bringing up a time before F2 and all of its controversial choices came out, when people were still making what I felt to be unfair statements about Elsa that are contradicted by looking back at the actual text of the franchise.

I’m sorry to those that felt hurt by me mentioning this again. I’m sorry that I still feel that the old joke was in poor taste and distorted and twisted canon for the sake of snark.

I do feel, though, that the extremist negativity towards Elsa that is around today doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It didn’t just emerge fully formed out of the blue - and citing something from the past can highlight that. it can prove that there was undue negativity towards Elsa in certain circles even before F2 came out.

And I know it was just a joke and I don’t mean to rain on your fun years later, but I still feel it’s a joke rooted in a deliberate misreading of the text. If people years ago said, “Elsa was being hurtful to Anna by fleeing for her life” and “Elsa was being hurtful to Anna by trying to make her birthday a happy one even at the expense of Elsa’s own health,” then that’s a deliberate misreading of the text, especially in the first instance, even if it was just a joke, a lark (jokes can still be in poor taste, or based on falseness, however old they may be) - and such misreadings of the text have only gotten worse in the intervening years.

But I NEVER meant to equate the joke from years ago with the “Elsa should have been killed off” attitude.

And I apologize - because I know all too well what it’s like to be lumped in with extremists. People do it to Elsanna shippers all the time. Again, that’s why, across the post, I made distinctions between the beliefs of extremists and the beliefs of people who have genuine frustrations based on the franchise’s flaws.

Forgive me, I meant for this post to highlight connections between disparate groups of people - and I went out of my way to express sympathy and solidarity with KA shippers who have valid critiques. The purpose of this post was meant to be connective, not disruptive - and I’m sorry I failed in that.

END OF EDIT

I don’t believe the filmmakers intended to make Elsa a horrible person. I also don’t believe the filmmakers meant to portray the sisters’ bond as inherently toxic.

But, like the EA shippers, these KA shippers are reacting to legitimate flaws in the text, loose ends that the film doesn’t return to. If the ice boat scene was important enough for there to be a visible turning of Olaf’s emotions, something that is so notable that even the film takes note of it, then the fact that the scene is brushed aside later in the movie feels... off. Like we’re not getting resolution or conclusion. Besides the sentiment, “It makes sense that no one would bring it up at the end because that would kill the mood (even though it seems emotionally important for all involved) and of course it was all resolved offscreen somewhere more fully instead of being resolved onscreen.” And I can sympathize with that, even if I fundamentally disagree with those that overly-demonize Elsa.

Interestingly, when I wrote my old post about the ice boat scene on my other blog, Isa of all people reblogged it (as did several KA shippers) - but I get the feeling her take on the ice boat scene is probably something like, “Yes, it’s out of character for Elsa... but that means the filmmakers hate Elsa and want to prop up Anna.” Which is wrong. Like, really wrong. Isa’s tone can also be surprisingly callous towards Anna - which is why I didn’t include her in my discussion of EA shippers whose heartbreak about the scene stems mainly from their empathizing with Anna. Her racist rhetoric and her fury is corrosive to everyone.

Likewise, the people on the other extreme who feel that Elsa is abusive and that the filmmakers hate Anna and love Elsa are wrong. (Note: I am not equating people’s Bad Takes on Elsa with racism. But the Bad Elsa takes are still wrong.)

I think extremists need to shake the idea that filmmakers “hate” their characters. Sometimes, bad writing is just bad writing.

Sometimes, bad ramifications can come from good intentions.

Like, I’ve spent a great deal of this post criticizing the ice boat scene - and especially criticizing the way the aftermath is handled onscreen. But the scene itself also has many merits. It’s complicated. It’s a moment of crisis. And both sisters are partly right and partly wrong. In and of itself, the scene actually displays good writing. But the fact the film later brushes aside the complicated themes it introduces in that moment, undermines the good in the scene taken alone. It leaves that aspect of the narrative feeling emotionally unsatisfying.

Sometimes, the flaws in a film are complicated.

And sometimes, people can agree on certain things without even realizing it. Because I’ve referenced ways that two groups of people with opposite ships actually have similar frustrations about the scene.

And I know, I’m not “on the outside looking in” when it comes to any of this. I ship EA and KA, so I’m in the thick of it and I’m not trying to portray myself as a neutral third party. That’s why I wrote about my own grief and frustrations with the scene.

And to everyone who was aggrieved that my post about the ice boat scene from ages ago furthered anti-Elsa sentiment because it was reblogged by negative people, that was never my intention. And I hope this post comes across as more neutral and well-argued.

Thank you.

#frozen #frozen 2

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rangerslayer-97 · 3 years

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For the OC interview thing: 2, 4, and 23 for Violcrik !

Right then, questions for the walking trash fire Jedi in denial about her entire life. Take it away, Violcrik!

~~~~~

2. Who is your best friend? Tell us about them!

Violcrik: Well… I have a few best friends, ones that I’m certain will not stab me in the back or have reasons to betray me. I’m getting more picky about friends after about five different betrayals I went through. Those I consider my best friends are Lana, Kira and the rest of my crew. My friendship circle is a bit small, but better small than having the possibility of someone stabbing me in the back. Literally.

Lana Beniko… we had a rocky start all the way back with the Revanites conspiracy, but it smoothened itself out. Plus, I owe her my life, she searched for me for five years after I was out into carbonite and freed me. She even cured me of my carbonite sickness. For a Sith… she made me realise not all Sith are that bad, some are pretty pragmatic and open to change. She’s only a few number of Sith with an open mind on how to approach something. I trust Lana, I wouldn’t trust anyone else as my advisor.

Kira is another story, a really long one, so everything else can be spoken about another time. The rest of crew, what can I say? They would follow me to the ends of the galaxy’s edge. Scourge made a promise he would stay by my side and protect me no matter what. I couldn’t ask for better friends.

You expect me to talk about Theron too. I may have spared his life and banished him from Odessen, but I’m still angry at him. He WAS my friend, the only friend I could trust within the Republic. Then the whole Zildrog conspiracy thing happened and his betrayal felt too real. He’s lucky to be alive, when others weren’t.

Sorry if that finished darkly.

4. What is your least favorite childhood memory?

Violcrik: Least favourite childhood memory!? Ha! What childhood? I barely had a childhood! My entire childhood is a least favourite memory. My twin and half-sister were fathered by man from a lesser noble house on Alderaan. My twin was separated at birth, so it was just myself and Kateake for the first six years of our lives. Those six years were Hell! Since we were born out of wedlock, we were ridiculed by other families and nobles. Been called things like a ‘bastard child’, a ‘wasted space’ and someone who brings ‘shame on the noble house’.

When we were just children, our father literally ignored us, refused to acknowledge us. He turned his back, when the only thing my sister and I wanted was his love and comfort. No, we were born out of wedlock and deserved to be reminded about it, every single day. This went on until Council Member, Master Tol Braga found me. He sensed me in the Force and brought me to the temple of Coruscant. I left Kateake in that hell hole, I begged the Jedi to go back and get my sister out of there, but I kept being lectured about attachment and not to let it cloud my mind. That was the last time Kateake and I saw each other.

Temple life was OK, but I admit I was picked on by a few upstart Initiates who have been in the temple since they were young. Some spread rumours about my "Alderaanian nobility". Lies, my father wouldn't have left anything in his will for my sister or myself. I may have developed a few issues that I believe I can manage, sometimes I have lashed out in anger. May have started a few fights with other Initiates and broke one person's arm in sparring when they said something they shouldn't have. Then... then the Sacking of Coruscant happened. I saw and heard it all, watched the Jedi die, the temple being burned down. I survived, at a heavy cost. I admit, I was fearful and scared. I was a 10yr old Initiate and forced to survive. Survive I did, for sure until Satele found me a year and half later. I'll stop now. Don't really enjoy talking about my past.

23. Have you ever had a crush on someone? Do you have a crush now?

Violcrik: There were two people I certainly had a crush on: Kira and Lana. I might have had a crush on Theron, but then I realised yes, I am bisexual, but I prefer women than men.

My feelings were a bit all over the place then. In our early days, I admit to having an attraction to Kira, but she was my Padawan at first. I didn't want to cause any confusion and tried to make myself a good Master. Even though my methods and lessons were more unorthodox than Master Kiwiiks. Then I couldn't deny my feelings towards Kira, but I was unsure and scared to approach her. I want sure if she even had a crush on me, let alone feelings. So, I kept them hidden, but they lingered for long time.

It wasn't until years later we reunited, when I am currently Commander of the Alliance, she found me again. It was when we finally admitted our feelings. Kira gives me the reason to keep fighting, but I hide from her where my true loyalties lie. I aligned with the Empire, she'll soon see the Republic is worthless. Until then, she cannot know the truth. I am doing it because I love her. I can't lose Kira again.

Lana? Well... Lana is cute and I have flirted with her. Otherwise, what turned from a crush, went to a fling and we agreed what happened on Yavin, stays on Yavin. While we did have a crush on one another, Lana was happy to step back, that we are better off as friends. She would never stand in between my relationship with Kira. If anything, she's happy for me.

Anyways, I got to run, apparently we have a lead on Malgus' whereabouts.

~~~~~

Thanks Violcrik! Although your loyalties will come out eventually and Kira will realise something.

#star wars #swtor #swtor oc #violcrik #jedi knight #rangerslayer 97 answers

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dragonofdarknesschaos · 4 years

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I've been thinking (because I'm quarantined and bored, sorry )..how it could be possible for Jack to form a good friendship? ...I mean even if a person shows affection, good intentions or a real interest on his stuff... the chance of Jack's betrayal is still there. I don't know I'm wondering ..if he can have a healthy friendship.

*cackles* Jack Spicer, as he is in XS, is not capable of forming a stable and healthy relationship, despite the fact that he desperately wants and needs one. And if that ain’t the tragedy of the whole series.

The Jack of Showdown

Just when Jack finally starts to actually warm up and be open and honest about his feelings with others, he either gets grossly mistreated (“The Deep Freeze,” “The Apprentice”) or is presented with the choice of being loved and accepted, despite who he is and what he’s done, or giving in to his baser instincts and double crossing his new would-be friends to get praised by someone who could not care less about him (“The Apprentice”). It’s difficult to tell if Jack feels he doesn’t deserve to be happy for some deep and personal reason, or if he’s so focused on being seen as EVIL™ and not good; that he believes he must take any and all opportunities to prove his evil worth. Whatever the reason, the Jack in XS would need someone that will stick by his side no matter what decisions he makes, or what actions he takes to push that person away. Someone who unconditionally supports him and wants to be by his side. The problem is, that’s more of a pet and has the potential to become quite toxic.

The Jack of Chronicles

As for the Jack of XC, he has some boundaries, and he’s not quite as ruthless. He knows he’s kind of a loser, but he still really wants a girlfriend to help boost his sense of masculine ego. But more importantly, he just wants a friend, to the point that he was willing to pay people to hang out with him (just like in XS “Something Jermaine,” “Judging Omi” and XC’s “Magic Stallion and the Wild Wild West,” “Buddy Blue Ray and the Golden Bunnies,” and “Heal Me”).

Jack enjoys Wuya’s company, but she gets frustrated with his lack of action in favor of building capital or just having fun (the Golden Toilet arc, “Super Cow Patty,” “Tokyo Madness,” and “Omi Saves the Holidays” among many others). Jack seems to have moved out of his parent’s basement, and is now in his own warehouse/factory, so he’s really trying to focus on starting up his Evil Business idea and often refers to himself as an “evil entrepreneur” throughout the series. While Wuya appreciates the “go get ‘em” spirit, she still feels that Jack isn’t doing enough to help her, which is the whole reason they teamed up in the first place. Because of her nagging attitude and matriarchal approach to the relationship, Jack often feels smothered and refuses to act. However, he still has boundaries and refuses to do certain things if they are not in his interests as well (“Back in the Flesh Again”).

Jack and Shadow

With Wuya as Jack’s pseudo-mother, he needs a datemate to call his own. Gone is his curiosity in Kimiko (though he does seem to think she’s still cool), but if it’s any other girl, he will do his best to impress her.

Case in point Willow--who he tried to ask on a date if he won the Showdown Trio in “The Fall of Xiaolin.” She strongly states that she isn’t interested in him in the least, and because the two never see each other again, I would assume Jack dropped the pursuit.

Shadow on the other hand, he likely sees a lot of himself in her. They’re both evil, admire Chase, they seem about the same age, and... that’s about where the similarities end. Shadow’s actions say that she is repulsed by Jack, but she never pushes him away, and even praises his “doo-hickies” (“The Laws of Nature,” “Rocco”). With the use of camera drones, Jack witnessed a lot of the private behavior and abuse between Chase and Shadow, and even some of the abuse in person ( “Tigress Woo,” “Rocco”). Even the cold open of “Who Shrunk Master Fung?” features Jack being very careful not to harm a strange bird, who is later revealed to be Shadow. Case in point, the Jack of XC has a streak of kindness in him, and it is unclear if Shadow sees that and resents Jack for having it, or if she admires that aspect of him. Regardless, after the events of “The Laws of Nature,” where Jack effectively double crosses Chase (and her by extension), Shadow likely made the choice to never trust Jack completely. She double crosses him at the end of their wonderful team up in “Back in the Flesh Again.” And Jack doesn’t even get upset or angry about the loss and betrayal. He’s even more smitten and tries to brag to Omi and Ping Pong before realizing they aren’t into it and flies off.

Overall Jack and Shadow have feasible grounds for a relationship--even a romantic one--if they could both create some honesty and trust between each other, but neither is willing to do that, despite Jack’s over sharing (literally every time he opens his mouth around Chase). For further reading on Jack’s relationship with Shadow and Chase, check out this post.

Jack doesn’t interact with Tigress, Kimiko’s older sister, much, but he does bother to keep tabs on her and warns Kimiko about her sister’s more nefarious activities (“Tigress Woo”). It’s unclear if he did this in an effort to get closer to the Monks as a friend, or if he was stalking Tigress because he was attracted to her. In either case, Tigress is never seen again or mentioned by Jack.

Jack’s Other Interests

There are a handful of episodes in XC that revolve around Jack seeing or meeting another evil-doer and fixating on them, often trying to model himself after them in some fashion. He does this with PandaBubba to a lesser extent in “Magic Stallion and the Wild Wild West,” then goes full blown fan for Super Cow Patty (in his self-titled episode) and later Le Mime in the same episode, making fan videos and full costumes with personas for both his fixations. In both instances with the truly evil characters (PB and Le Mime), Jack was looking for a sense of acceptance by an Evil Businessman and entrepreneurial peer, and a sense of belonging to a larger community with Le Mime and his henchmen. That desire for belonging to a larger community is reiterated earlier in the series with “Heal Me” and Reverse!Jack’s cult.

However, when presented with an actual fan of his, Tiny Sim, Jack is actually somewhat reluctant to have the fan tag along with him. And maybe that was for the best, as Jack soon discovers that the fan he inspired to become Evil is actually a lot better at it than he, himself, is (“Drawn to be Evil”). In retaliation, Jack confines the fan to being just a creative idea intern. Jack is essentially taking credit for all of Tiny Sim’s ideas, and not paying the kid a thing. Sim, either because he’s doing what his idol taught, or because he feels cheated, makes it a priority to take a Wu or two when he can out of Jack’s stash (“Mark of the Dragon Spirit”). Sadly, the series ended before the relationship between these two could be further developed. It wouldn’t have been healthy, but at least it would have been something.

Another important note, Jack does make the clear distinction in both series that the gallery of sellswords he pays to be around him are only in it as long as there’s money for them to be had. They are not his friends, they will never be his true friends, they’re just people he pays until the money runs out (“Something Jermaine,” “Judging Omi”). So Katnappe, Tubbimura, Cyclops (after their initial debut), and to a lesser extent Vlad will never truly be Jack’s friends. Vlad does make a return in XS’s “The Demon Seed” to try and cheer Jack up (not that he’s very good at it), but he doesn’t seem to want anything from Jack other than to do evil things and pal around. This is a bit of a departure from their first encounter where Jack was presumably paying Vlad to be his hired muscle and inside man (“The Deep Freeze”).

Jack’s Robots

Jack’s relationship with his various Jackbots and other robots is an interesting one. It’s possible that he created them out of a sick sense of wanting to have friends that he could control, but it comes back more to how the bots are presented in both series.

The Jackbots of XS seem to have a hive mind of sorts, as they will blindly (and sometimes literally) follow their master’s commands. Those that fall are replaced as if nothing happened to the fallen Jackbot; their numbers are legion. The bots are later programmed with emotions and feel sadness, but not fear. This is interesting, because Jack is shown having temper tantrums from time to time, but he doesn’t break things, only tosses them around (“The Journey of A Thousand Miles”).

Jack’s relationship with the more “custom” humanoid robots is split into a binary. On the one side are the bots that went rogue and have tried to annihilate him or simply want nothing to do with him: Chameleon Bot, Robo!Jack, and the patent-pending Shen Gong Wu Detect-o-bot. On the other side are the bots he grew very attached to: Yesbot, his Cheerbot squad, and the Shen Gong Wu Detect-o-bot before it went rogue. Both Yes~ and Detect-o~ allow Jack to be more of a child, as he is depicted being held like a scared child with both of them (if I remember correctly. “Oil in the Family,” “The Demon Seed”). He treats them like the parent he doesn’t have around. The Cheerbots are his hott Barbie dolls that he gets to dress up and maintain. He doesn’t go much farther than projecting personalities and life problems onto them. Eventually they are absorbed into the Jackbot hive.

Remember how Jackbots don’t show or know fear in XS? XC opens with Jack having a tantrum, and many of his various designs of bot run away from him. Jack is left cornering Chefbot, who has darts sticking out of his chef’s hat. Rather peculiar for robots to be afraid of their master, especially since they are meant to be hoards of drones. As Chefbot is developed as a character, Jack comes to respect his creation more, but Chefbot says he has no interest in hanging around someone like Jack; he wants to go places and be a real chef! He can’t do that if he’s making paltry snacks for Jack. Chefbot’s last appearance in the series is on a cooking show (either on TV or YouLook) making pizza, while Jack follows along from his RV. Jack seems quite relaxed and at ease, even using the Banyan Twister Shen Gong Wu to stretch his body and the pizza dough. It is never stated, but perhaps Jack is proud of his creation accomplishing it’s dream.

Thank You for Being a Friend

In conclusion, the Jack of XS is incapable of having a healthy friendship with anyone, either because he thinks he doesn’t deserve it or because he really is just a terrible person and pushes everyone away. He would need someone to stand by and support him no matter what he does and no matter how horribly he treats that person. Such a relationship has the potential to become toxic if boundaries are not set and if Jack doesn’t grow as a person.

The Jack of XC is desperate for a single friend, but 98% of the cast sees him as a pathetic loser, and not worth a second of their time. Those that do see value in Jack’s companionship have all been hurt by Jack’s betrayal and lack of trust, or have betrayed Jack, because they have no trust in him (often from a previous encounter). For this Jack to form a stable friendship, he needs someone who he can talk to honestly, openly, and not be judged for his feelings, and he seems to want someone who talks the same way to him. He’s ready for a relationship, he just doesn’t have the rapport or trust built up with anyone.

TL;DR

Jack lacks basic trust in all his relationships. He would need someone he can constantly count on, while also setting healthy and reasonable boundaries with that person. If honesty and trust--ABSOLUTE TRUST--is there, Jack can have a friend, maybe even something more.

#Chaos replies #anon #Jack Spicer #analysis #//the potential is there with Shadow and I strongly believe they were going to become an end game in XC #//but yeah he's burned so many bridges and there aren't even ropes left on some for him to climb on

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unpeumacabre · 4 years

Text

my kingdom for a horse: epilogue

the year is 1601, a messenger has been sent to dongnae, and he has not returned. lord cho-hak-ju advises the joseon king to send crown prince lee chang to dongnae to investigate, but the plot he unravels there threatens the safety of the entire kingdom, and the stability of the dynasty.

a rewriting of kingdom, and lee chang finds love.

Rating: Mature

Relationships: Lee Chang/Yeong-shin

Read on AO3 (bc tumblr might mess up the formatting + more extensive author’s notes on the story)

Count: 4k

<-- previous

(included my author’s notes at the end this time since this is the epilogue, and i had a lot of feels lol)

“He was a brave man,” Lee Chang says softly. The girl stares quietly down at the square of blue fabric, slightly stained with blood – even though he had scrubbed and scrubbed, the guard’s blood had not faded – and she says nothing.

The guard’s wife has her hands around the girl’s shoulders, and she herself shakes with the force of her crying.

“He was a brave man,” he says again, more gently, and the two of them look up at him. There are tears trailing down the face of the girl, now, and she grips the talisman tightly in her chubby hands. “We found his body again from where we had buried it, and we would like to arrange the funeral for him. He will be given every honour that befits him, for he died to save my life, and I will be eternally grateful to him for his sacrifice.”

“Your Highness,” the woman says, but she cannot continue. Tears choke her throat and render her next words unintelligible. Lee Chang waits patiently for her to compose herself.

“Your Highness, thank you,” she finally whispers, throat hoarse with her tears. “Thank you for bringing Mun-pyo back to us. Thank you for your generosity.”

“Don’t thank me,” Lee Chang says uncomfortably. “It is the least I could do. You have lost the breadwinner of your household, and so it is only right that I give you enough to support yourself and your family. Please – no - ” He catches onto her forearms as she attempts to lower herself in a bow.

“Take it as the fulfilment of my debt to your dear husband,” he says to her, as she lifts her tear-stained face to his in bewilderment, “for I owe him my life.”

***

When he returns to his chambers, he is exhausted, both physically and mentally. The day had been spent meeting and speaking to the families of the three guards who had died to save his life, all those weeks ago when they had been journeying to Dongnae. The men had left behind two wives, two daughters and one son between them, and an aged mother who had broken down completely when told of her son’s death. Lee Chang had arranged for gifts of gold and silk to be given to the families, in compensation for the loss of their men, and for the old lady, he had given her care over to the girl who had given him information in Naesonjae. She was an orphan, all alone, and the two women had taken to each other immediately. The girl herself he had given employ in the palace, under the eye of a lady-in-waiting he knew to be kind and just.

Lee Seung-hui had been found in the dungeons of Hanyang, in one of the dark, damp cells buried deep within the surface, with the basest of criminals as his cellmates. Eventually, under strict and torturous questioning by Commander Min, he had cracked, and finally admitted his motivations for spreading the disease. It turned out that, three years ago, the event that had ended the war had been the formation of a large corps of monsters from the sick people of Sumang village – a plot devised by Cho Hak-ju, and carried out by Lee Seung-hui. It had been fear of exposure of the part the physician had had to play in such a dastardly plot, that Cho Hak-ju had used to coerce Lee Seung-hui into beginning yet another epidemic that had eventually devastated the south.

“One of the men was desperate, and ate the flesh of one of the monsters I was conducting my studies on,” Physician Lee had told the commander. “Then we found that it was eating their flesh that transmitted the plague far more effectively than infecting them manually. Lord Cho wanted to use that to his advantage, to create a distraction in the south that would draw His Majesty’s attention away from his plans in Hanyang. And he had hoped…” Here, the physician’s eyes had wandered towards Lee Chang, who had been standing unobtrusively in the background and watching the interrogations. “He had hoped that one of the monsters would keep the Crown Prince occupied in the south, far away from Hanyang, and that eventually, he would be killed.”

Lee Chang had exhaled then. Finally, the pieces were falling into place. Finally, he understood all.

He had granted Lee Seung-hui the mercy of death, a quick, private death at the hands of Commander Min’s sword. It seemed the thing to do, for the physician no longer wanted to live, and indeed, seemed to have gone half-mad with anguish and self-flagellation at having been the cause of so many deaths. He did not tell Seo-bi of anything he had learned in their interrogations, choosing to spare her the cruelty of the truth, and told her instead that he had died in prison from exhaustion.

He rather thinks she knows something of the truth, but chooses not to pry further. She is perfectly happy in her ignorance.

Lord Ahn Hyeon had also been implicated in the events of the war by the physician’s testimony, and at first, Lee Chang had not known what to think of his former master. The news had brought him anger and betrayal, at first, terrible anger, and a feeling that he had not truly known the man to whom he had looked up his entire life. That this man had been capable of such brutality and mercilessness towards his fellow countrymen had been something Lee Chang had been unable to reconcile with the gentle but stern guardian figure of his youth.

Then, after his initial grief, he had calmed himself, and thought more rationally. It was likely that Cho Hak-ju had been the mastermind of such a scheme, as he alone had the sly, ruthless mind that would have thought of such a plan. Furthermore, reading between the lines of the physician’s testimony, it had apparently taken days for Lord Ahn Hyeon to give in to Cho Hak-ju’s wheedling, and for him to agree to sacrificing the villagers of Sumang village. It had clearly been something he had been unwilling to do.

Lee Chang had forgiven him somewhat, then. He knows that he himself knows nothing of war, real war, despite his experiences in the south – the desperation of fighting against an enemy they had had no chance of triumphing over, the terrible choice they had had to make – sick villagers in Sumang, or the lives of the rest of the Joseon people.

Besides, it turned out to be a moot point in the end. Lee Chang had received a missive a few days after his coronation that had informed him that Lord Ahn Hyeon had passed peacefully in his sleep, the day prior. He had collapsed from stress and overwork, and it was found that he had been suffering from a chronic disease of which the cure was unknown. It had been a quiet, pain-free death, by all accounts, and a fitting end to the dignified and noble man whose only stain on his perfect reputation was something that two people in the entire world knew.

Speaking of ghosts from the past, Beom-pal had turned up in the capital the day before the coronation. Lee Chang remembers the encounter with a kind of resigned amusement. The man had had an unlucky encounter with a troupe of monsters, which had forced him to live in a cave behind a waterfall for weeks until he had been rescued inadvertently by soldiers sent from the capital to clear out the remaining monsters in the south. Beom-pal had emerged a hardened man, lean and fit, with little of the spoiled naïve Haewon Cho scion he had been before still in him.

Lee Chang had promoted him to Minister for Taxation, and summarily fired the previous one on the spot.

“I need support from those who once supported Cho Hak-ju,” he had explained later, drinking tea with the Minister for War, now a good friend and staunch ally of his, “and who better to bring them on my side than the last remaining member of the Haewon Cho clan? Besides, Minister Han was not to my taste. It was as good a reason as any to dismiss him.”

The man is indeed a far better minister than his predecessor, for he learns quickly and now knows how to carry out his duties in a manner that pleases Lee Chang. He still chases after Seo-bi, however, something that never fails to amuse Lee Chang whenever Seo-bi visits him and, with extreme confusion and worry, describes a new malady that Beom-pal has acquired in the past few days and needed her assistance with.

“First it was an infection of a cut on his hand, next a burn on his thigh, and now gonorrhoea,” she reports with obvious distress. “I worry for his health. He must take better care of himself!”

Lee Chang wonders how someone can be so intelligent, and yet so dense at the same time.

For she is indeed bright, and using her intelligence to great ends. Using their experiences in the south and the select few live monsters the soldiers had been commanded to bring back for her, she has been studying the disease that creates the monsters.

Lee Chang misses her dry wit and sharp tongue, honestly – for the past few days she has been gone, visiting the Yalu River to investigate a potential breeding ground for the resurrection plants, but he reminds himself that she is due back any day soon, and that reassures him.

Mu-yeong and his wife are now living in the palace, happily caring for their child, and spending all their days in oblivious marital bliss. It is almost impossible to be around Mu-yeong these days, for all his attention is – rightfully so – completely and wholeheartedly devoted to his wife and child. And so Lee Chang has been forced to take on another, lesser personage as his guard, a younger man who had been Mu-yeong’s protégé and good friend.

He is finding the lack of petty thievery of his daily desserts strangely vexing. Perhaps he will pay a visit to Mu-yeong’s rooms one of these days, and brave the infuriating cloud of marital bliss that hangs around his chambers, just to see his old friend. They had had beef cakes for dessert the other day, after all. Lee Chang remembers that it is Mu-yeong’s dear wife’s favourite. Perhaps he will pay them a visit, one day soon.

And as for Yeong-shin…

A lump rises in Lee Chang’s throat as he thinks of Yeong-shin, and he takes another drink from his cup. The soju burns its way down his throat and brings a pleasant buzz to the edge of his senses, but it is not enough to wipe his memory.

Not that he would want to.

The past two months without Yeong-shin have been… difficult, to say the least. At first he had felt nothing, thought nothing, and busied himself entirely with the running of the country. It had been easy at that time, after all, for there were always power-hungry officials trying to latch on to the throne, and petty land disputes, and aid to be delivered to the south, to occupy his attention. His days had been packed with his duties, and so he had had little space in which to think on his lost companion. Even in the nights he had had little effort to drag up his old hurts, for exhaustion overtook him the moment he fell into bed.

But as his position became more secure, and things began clearing up in the south – and elsewhere, where he was working on resolving the famine that had been plaguing the other parts of Joseon – there came more time to think, and more time to brood.

He regretted nothing, of course. Yeong-shin would have left anyway, with or without the kiss, and Lee Chang had not wanted him to go without at least taking some piece of Lee Chang with him. But it still hurts, to know that he is not wanted.

All his life, he has felt nothing like this, and he likely never will. Their bond is one forged through the flames of death and destruction, and any other romance seems insipid and lifeless in comparison. The officials parade their daughters in front of him often, attempting to find just one who will take his fancy and force him to break his vow, but it is to no avail. The more they flutter their fans and turn their skirts and peek out demurely at him from under beautiful eyelashes, the colder he feels.

A younger him would have appreciated the attention, he supposes. A younger him would have leaped at the opportunity, would have begun a harem like his father, and his father before him, perhaps. But now he is older, and he is tired.

This will likely be his life until he dies, he thinks, and it is not an unhappy thought. He has his friends around him, and a son to coddle and teach when he grows older – and, he has sworn to himself, he will be present for this boy in a way his own father had never been for him. He will give the boy all that he wants, and if that includes his time and his love, so be it. There can be nothing too good for his son, the boy who will be the heir to his legacy.

Yet despite all that, he realises suddenly, he is painfully and terribly lonely.

The thought brings him peace, as if giving voice to his feelings is an absolution in itself, and he looks down at his cup as he fills it once more.

“To loneliness,” he says, with a bitter smile, and his voice echoes around the empty room.

“To not being lonely,” comes a voice from behind him, and a hand reaches out and takes the cup from him.

Lee Chang jerks around, his hand flying to the hilt of his sword, a thousand thoughts running through his mind. It is impossible that someone could have broken through the guards in the palace, not to mention the guard at his door – why, he’s going to kill Mu-yeong when – if – he manages to get out of this, for leaving him to be guarded by a mere youngling of a man who could not even stop one bloody intruder from breaking in –

Then he stops, and blinks. He cannot believe his eyes.

Yeong-shin throws back the drink, and wipes his mouth. He nods approvingly at the cup, and sets it back down on the table. It makes a soft thud as it makes contact with the wood.

Lee Chang’s tongue lies leaden and heavy in his mouth, and at first he cannot speak.

“You - ” he finally manages, and stops there.

Yeong-shin sits down across him, and Lee Chang’s eyes follow him, unbidden, against his will, watching as if to make sure he does not disappear on the next blink. But he remains very real, and very much not a dream.

“You need better security,” Yeong-shin says seriously, picking up the jug of soju, and pouring himself another full cup. This he downs again with a flourish, and Lee Chang watches his throat bob with the swallow. He feels a thin layer of sweat begins to form on his skin.

“You grew a beard,” Lee Chang manages, a particularly asinine contribution to the conversation.

“So did you.”

Lee Chang fingers his beard self-consciously, and does not reply.

“It suits you,” Yeong-shin says abruptly, and makes an abortive moment as if to reach for the jug of alcohol again, but he draws his hand back at the last moment, and sets the cup aside instead. There is a beat of silence.

“Where did you go?” Lee Chang asks lowly, and the rasp of his voice is grating in the silence.

Yeong-shin turns his head, so his face is cast in shadow, and all that Lee Chang can see is the line of his profile, silhouetted against the dim light from the lamp.

“Back to Sangju. To my village. To find my brother.” His knuckles are white where his fingers grip onto the wood of the table. “He is not alive,” he says bitterly. “First I searched Gongju, but the magistrate said they’d never caught a boy stealing a jade hairpin from his wife. At first I thought him to be lying, but the guards’ stories aligned with his. And so I went back to Sumang.”

Sumang, Lee Chang realises, and he feels something horrible coil up in his gut.

“What did you find?” he asks, his voice quiet.

“Nothing. I found nothing.” Yeong-shin’s voice is toneless; there is no expression on his face, and somehow that makes it worse. “All I was chasing were ghosts. Beom-il lied – ah, I was a fool to ever believe him.”

Lee Chang feels his fingers twitch, and before he is able to stop himself, he has reached over the table, and his hand closes over Yeong-shin’s own. There is a roughness to his skin that Lee Chang finds foreign, calluses that mark him as a rifle-wielder, cuts and scars of a history Lee Chang does not know. But his hand is warm, and it feels familiar in his grasp.

Yeong-shin looks down at their hands, clasped against the grain of the wood – one dark and scarred, one paler but no less hardened. Something in his body softens, then, almost unnoticeable, were it not for the fact that Lee Chang knows his every, subtle movement by heart. Under the weight of Lee Chang’s palm, Yeong-shin’s hand relaxes, and the tension bleeds out of him – although he still carries himself ramrod-straight and alert.

“I am sorry for your loss,” Lee Chang murmurs, and the words have never felt more hollow. Yeong-shin side-eyes him.

“Do you remember what you said to me two months ago?” he says suddenly, standing up. He crosses to the window and stares out into the darkness. He remains motionless, calm, steady as a rock in the face of a snowstorm – and abruptly Lee Chang feels a wave of irritation wash over him at his composure. It is simply unfair, Lee Chang thinks furiously, that he is the only one so affected by Yeong-shin’s presence, when Yeong-shin is so clearly unperturbed by his!

So caught up is Lee Chang in his inner train of thoughts that he does not answer, and he only realises that Yeong-shin is waiting for a reply to his question, when the man turns and looks questioningly at him. Lee Chang blinks, and comes back to himself.

Then he notices how tightly Yeong-shin’s jaw is clenched. Sees how the tip of his forefinger is beating an agitated rhythm, ever so slightly - but still detectably - against the wood of the windowsill.

“I remember,” he says carefully, weighing every word, for every syllable he utters drops heavily into the silence of the room, “that I confessed my love for you. But I also remember that I asked for nothing in return – that I expected nothing in return.”

“And I told you that I needed time to think,” Yeong-shin says.

“Yes.”

“It has been two months.” There is something in his voice that Lee Chang cannot quite place, and Lee Chang feels a vice begin to clench around his heart.

“Yes. Are we going to keep exchanging statements of fact, or did you come here with something else to say?” Somehow, he keeps his tone light.

It startles a sudden startled harsh bark of laughter out of Yeong-shin, and the sound is surprisingly bright. The snow drifts quietly past the window, piling up on the windowsill, and lending a soft glow to the light that suffuses Yeong-shin’s skin. He looks almost regal then, despite his tattered clothes and rough features, as if he belongs there in Lee Chang’s quarters, and the vice tightens.

“You are a prince – no, the king of Joseon,” Yeong-shin says softly, running his fingers absently on the windowsill, but his eyes are intent on Lee Chang. “And I am a chakho. Nothing more than a commoner.”

Ah. He thinks, finally, he sees where Yeong-shin is going with this.

Something begins to unfurl in his chest, filling his body with a warmth he has not felt in months. Lee Chang stands, slowly, and makes his way over to the window – quietly, gently, as if approaching a wild animal with hand extended, an animal which could either bite or flee at any moment. But he does not think Yeong-shin will do either of those things.

“And so, in our time apart, you have thought of all the reasons why we should not be together,” Lee Chang says lightly, “and you have convinced yourself that these reasons are unsurmountable.”

The stubborn silence from Yeong-shin is enough. He does not make any move to reach out to Lee Chang, but his eyes follow Lee Chang’s movements as he crosses the room, and there is an almost hungry light in his gaze that urges Lee Chang on.

Lee Chang reaches his side, and lays a hand on his arm. The man startles in reaction, just a minute tremor, but because they are connected, Lee Chang can feel his every movement. They are so close that he can feel Yeong-shin’s body heat radiating against his skin, and hear every quick shallow breath he takes.

“I have not, however,” Lee Chang says, “heard anything of what you feel for me.”

“You have not married in the last two months,” Yeong-shin says, looking away and out of the window again. The snowfall is deeper today than it had been all those weeks ago, when Lee Chang had stood by the same window and refused to look at the door till his room was empty. The footprints the palace maids and guards leave – they stay in the snow, now, and remain even as fresh snow falls.

“Yes,” Lee Chang replies, suddenly losing patience. “It is unlike you to be so unsure, Yeong-shin. What is it you wish to say to me?”

“When I lost my brother,” Yeong-shin says jerkily, his gaze blank and unseeing, “The pain was… like nothing I’d ever felt before. I’d sworn to protect him, but in the end, my promises meant nothing, and still he was taken from me. Yeong-ryu… he relied on me, and I could do nothing for him still. Even with all my strength and weapons, there was no one I could save.

“And you…” Yeong-shin’s eyes drift shut, as if he can no longer bear to look out the window. “I can protect you, for now, but there is no guarantee that I can do so indefinitely. The officials will not let you live without a wife, and they will plot and scheme until they can take control of the throne, and if you died… if you died, I do not think I would be able to go on living.”

Lee Chang feels as if he has just been struck by lightning.

Finally he sees Yeong-shin laid bare before him – unsure of their future together, unwilling to be the reason for Lee Chang’s demise, and yet, warring with that fear because of his desire to protect. At the core of this bright, shining, powerful man is someone who is afraid of loss, for it has been his constant companion all these lonely years.

But Lee Chang is different. Yeong-shin will protect him, and he will protect Yeong-shin in turn.

Gently, Lee Chang lifts his other hand to Yeong-shin’s face, and cradles his cheeks in the palm of his hand. Yeong-shin’s eyes open, slowly as if hypnotised and against his will, and he fixes his gaze on Lee Chang’s face.

“I am the king,” Lee Chang whispers, and every word is infused with conviction, for his words come from the heart. “What I want, I receive, and if I want you, there will only be one thing that can stop me – you. You know I will not let the ministers or the people have any say in my private affairs. If I am to be allowed some, occasional, arrogance – why, I have been a good king, so far, and I have done nothing deserving of complaint. I have named my heir, and he is under great protection here under my roof. There is no one who I will allow to have any say in our relationship.” He grips Yeong-shin tighter to him, as if it will stop the subtle tremors that have begun in the other man’s body. “Be mine to treasure,” he murmurs, his head lowered, their foreheads brushing feather-light against each other. “And I will be yours to protect.”

There is a long silence for a while.

“I did miss you,” Yeong-shin says quietly. “Every day. I missed you fiercely. At first I thought I missed the loss of a fellow warrior, someone I respected and loved as a shield brother. Then my longing became more terrible, and I thought it was because I missed you as my charge, as someone to protect. But the truth is not so simple.” He turns his hand, palm-up, so that his fingers intertwine with Lee Chang’s.

“I love you,” he says simply, and Lee Chang must forgive him for not meeting his eyes as he makes his confession.

“And I, you,” Lee Chang sighs, as he leans in for a kiss.

There are many problems as yet unresolved. Lee Chang knows that this will not be the last time their insecurities and inner demons – both his and Yeong-shin’s – damage their relationship, or set them back. There is as yet so much unknown about the resurrection plant, and out there, somewhere, monsters may still be made. The officials wilfully persevere with their scheming and plotting behind his back, and he must continue to strengthen his precarious hold on the throne, all while keeping safe the people who matter to him.

But those are problems for a future him, and a future them. Right here, right now, with Yeong-shin in his arms and the snowflakes falling on the footprints in the snow, Lee Chang feels invincible, and he feels like a king.

A/N: ahhhh it's finished!!! thank you to everyone for sticking with me all the way (readers both old and new) - this has been my first experience with the kingdom fandom and i have to say i've enjoyed every single moment of it. y'all are seriously such gems and it's been amazing hearing your thoughts, speaking to y'all etc ahhhh <3 this was my first (and probably last) kingdom fanfic unless inspiration suddenly seizes again, lol, but this pretty much covered all my kingdom feels.

(shameless self-promotion) and i'm currently writing another monster fic for mdzs/cql so if you're in that fandom i hope to see you again!! please talk to me here on tumblr and seriously, i love all of you so much, thank you!!

read on for long rambly thoughts on this monster:

writing this was sort of a cathartic purge for me, after binging kingdom... i loved lee chang's character so much, honestly, and i wanted to give him a proper love story. i have to be honest, it wasn't till i went onto ao3 that i even considered changshin as a pairing, but after i read a few fics i was like, i'm in too deep ;;; and i wound up wanting to write a story that was a slow evolution of their relationship, from reluctant acquaintances, to brothers-in-arms with unconditional trust, and then slowly, to love. which is why it took yeong-shin so goddamn long to realise he loves lee chang, sksksksksk

but yeah i thought it was far more realistic to write this kind of love story rather than one in which they fell in love at first sight, especially in the (somewhat) au i built, where it probably never even occurred to either of them that (1) they were possibly attracted to men, and (2) that they should even be thinking about love in this period of time wtf ;_; but yeah i thought what would draw them to each other was sort of a more intellectual, spiritual attraction, rather than one based purely on lust (even though they're both very good-looking, i fully admit)...

at first i was dissatisfied with the ending, because it seemed a bit lukewarm, but then on reading it again i thought it had the kind of hopeful, tender feeling which i wanted to conjure... although y'all might feel differently?? I KNOW, I WOULD HAVE WANTED A MORE FLESHED OUT KISS SCENE TOO AHHHHH in my head i was like wtf is this, is it a barbara cartland novel??? what's with that shitty regency-esque kiss description??? but in the end it didn't feel natural with the style of writing and the flow of the chapter to write more into the kiss, i'm sorry, i think i'm just a coward T.T but yes!! please let me know your thoughts!! (and thank you for reading all the way, i know i always ramble lmao)

#upm works #upm #changshin #kingdom #kingdom netflix #lee chang #yeong shin #seo bi #beom pal #kingdom fanfiction #changshin fanfiction #lee chang x yeong shin

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churchyardgrim · 4 years

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#2 from the d&d ask meme? it is a fantastic question

before they met their party, what was their main goal?

oooo excellent opportunity to plug my boy’s four page backstory that i just realized i never posted here!

tldr Silas wants to study a perfect immortal in order to defeat death, bc death insulted him once and he never got over it hghdfg

Silas Edelhart has a problem. That problem is death.

He was born to minor nobility, old money making use of their hereditary ambition to generate new money on the merchant routes, and he was lucky enough to not be his father’s preferred heir; he was allowed to take to academia, or else join some priesthood and curry favor with the lesser sons of other noble houses. He chose academia.

He was enamored with it. The libraries! The minds to learn from. The men. The women! The men. The only disappointment was that apprentice physicians did not get invited to many parties, something Silas was hard at work remedying when he was presented with an unwittingly significant patient.

A farm hand from outside the city had been delayed in reaching them for medical care, and his injuries - an accident with a plow, they were told - had gone gangrenous. He was insensible with fever, and would have lost the leg even if his people hadn't taken so long in getting him to the medics; as it was, despite amputation and efficient treatment for blood poisoning, he expired overnight, in Silas's care.

Silas was crushed. He had done everything right, double and triple checked his protocols, and still the man had died. “No one blames you, of course,” one of the senior physicians said to him, “these things simply happen.”

Maybe they ‘simply happened’ to other people, Silas thought bitterly, but he was better than that. He had decided the man would live, and his performance had been flawless! The terminity of a mere natural law to stand in the way of his will was intolerable. Incensed, Silas threw himself at his studies, dead set that it should never happen again.

Resurrection magic wasn't what he was after initially; he only wanted to keep the living where they were. But he found quickly that the popular consensus was that healing magic could only do so much, and most simply accepted its failures as they did any other misfortune. So he hunted out spells to wrench the dead back, hidden and fragmented in books his instructors only grudgingly let him read. Time would tell if they would be enough, however; none of the accounts of their use he had read gave any indication of the effects being permanent. It would be so embarrassing, to put so much work into defying death only to have his prize killed in a careless accident! He would not settle for anything less than complete immunity from death.

His practice only pushed him deeper into this conviction; plenty of his patients lived, much improved from treatment, but a few still died despite his efforts, reigniting his rage at death every time. He began to get a reputation for it, and some of his peers started tactfully funneling away those patients that seemed likely to die with or without medical care, to spare themselves his rants. Many of them thought his anger came from an insult to his skills, but this was all wrong; he knew his skills were exceptional, the failure was not his.

It is the gods’ fault, Silas decided. The gods had set this wretched law in place, to kettle and humble mortal creatures. But... no, the gods themselves are yet subject to death, have died in scores. So, death is a greater power than even them.

But in one book, ill-used and forgotten, Silas found mention of a god returning from death. A resurrection on a divine scale. And once that possibility had revealed itself, the hints between the lines of other books made themselves apparent; someone had performed that resurrection, exercised mastery over death in such a way that it left Silas’s mouth watering. How? How had it been done?

The next few months of frantic research and evasion - the concern from his tutors was enough to warn him that no one wanted him to go looking for this - led him eventually into the university’s vaults. To a broken-legged construct, dormant, containing a withered, desiccated hand. Not the hand of the godly resurrectionist, no, but the hand of someone who, certain books implied, might have been a devotee of that individual. A relic of a necromantic saint.

Silas stole it, of course he did. Made use of a debt owed by an engineer of the local guilds to repair the construct housing, and treated it as a treasured prize. Such mysteries, opening to him now with the artifact’s communion; he graduated quickly from books to practice, retreating into his own rooms to make frogs twitch and test ancient ideas on the animation of flesh. He took on fewer and fewer patients, withdrew from the society of his peers… for the most part.

Sera Mournleaf was brilliant. Sera Mournleaf was intense. And some days, Sera Mournleaf was the only thing that could distract him from his work. An elf with connections, she did him many favors in getting him subjects to work on, meat with which to test his theories, and had an insightful and sparkling mind with which to discuss the less publicly acceptable aspects of spitting in the face of death. So what if she stayed up later than him some nights, reading and rereading his notes. So what if every time she visited her aging human father she came back slumping with worry. He cannot expect things to be about him all the time!

Besides, he had little focus to spare for things not his research, now. He had been forced to take up the shovel himself, more than once, to find fresh bodies that would be more difficult to trace back to him - they keep a close eye on the university morgue, he learned better than to try that more than once. And he had had no small success, stripping corpses of their unnecessaries and stitching the most promising parts to one another, speaking to his prized relic with equal parts demand and prayer.

The results infuriated him at first. Lurching, wretched things, no better than flesh constructs, most of them had to be destroyed; that shriveled hand granted Silas holy fire as easily as it had clues to the resurrectionist arts. But he persisted, and grew to view them as necessary stepping stones towards a greater perfection. He grew more bold, more reckless, and felt himself forever on the verge of a cataclysmic revelation.

It was not to be. He was found out. The right word in the right ear brought the law crashing down on his shoulders, and he watched them burn his experiments with a guardsman kneeling on his back. It was broken, all of it, his research carted away in boxes (fewer boxes, maybe, then he thought there should have been), and Silas himself thrown in prison to scream his rage at the uncaring stone.

The trial was a farce. Somehow, Silas's family managed to find reason enough to pull half the lawyers in the city to his defense, while at the same time making it very clear that under no circumstances was he to darken their doorstep ever again. In the same two hour span his prospects went from life imprisonment to a mere slap on the wrist of exile, and then summarily informed that he had been neatly removed from the last will and testament of his every living family member. It was a very trying day.

At the end of it he was stripped of his qualifications, most of his wealth confiscated, and ejected from the city with his mouth sewn shut with wire; an archaic punishment for heresy, invoked here merely as sorry consolation on the part of the law that they couldn’t execute him outright. In the proper spirit of the thing, he should have left the stitches in place and let himself starve, and in deference to the bare truth of his crimes Silas endured it for three days before getting sick of the whole thing and cutting himself loose.

He had managed to keep his precious relic in its construct housing, the only thing worth bribing a minor official to sneak out of evidence lockup, and he quickly put distance between himself and wretched Misthaven, thinking nothing but bitter thoughts towards his betrayer. Selfish, horrible Sera; she had gotten cold feet, most likely. Come over all moral about what he had been doing, let slip to the magistrate that perhaps she knew who had been plundering the city's burial grounds at night. Well! She will just have to wait and see, won't she. Wait until he can begin his work again, reach as yet unseen heights of resurrection. Then he would return to Misthaven and enact some fitting revenge, on her and all those who had a hand in ruining him.

(Miss Mournleaf could have argued, the better part of a year later, that his unwitting parting gift was revenge enough. Babies scream like they’re being murdered, and the damn thing looks just like him. She left it with the nuns and got on with the business of saving her father.)

And so he wandered, working as a physician in small towns and middling cities, trying his damndest to reestablish his research in some capacity. But his funds never stretched that far, and neither did the patience of his neighbors; more than once he had to flee under cover of night, for misdeeds real or imagined. Most of these were unmemorable affairs, and only irritated him. Once, the mercenary paid to kill him proved a delightful match, in combat and energy, and the man made an affair of running away with Silas, and Silas ended up growing remarkably fond of Cassian Hellier, for all his unrefined brutishness. They still keep in touch, whenever either of them is in civilization long enough to hire a messenger to carry letters.

A decade passed in this fashion before Silas began to hear rumors. Travelers between worlds, fading in and out of unearthly mist, serving a genuine immortal. He seized upon these threads, passion alight again; a near perfect undead, far superior to the wretched things he had managed to raise back in Misthaven, yes. He would follow the travelers, seek out their master, see what, if anything, of the rumors were true. If they are... he would study, and learn, and replicate the results. And if not? Well, the corpse of even a lesser undead would be a beautiful thing.

#dnd #silas #boyo's a death cleric/graveyard rogue and i LOVE HIM #Anonymous

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finleyjayne · 4 years

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Break a Leg Chapter 2: Hope lost

Chapter Summary: The sickness is most definitely worse than the cure for you, and running away only makes life harder. Can you still be the knight in shining armor our are you going to be the one in need of rescuing?

A/N: This Chapter uses an altered prompt from @firefly-in-darkness ‘s Summer Challenge. My prompt was “Just ‘cause you fall on your ass doesn’t mean that you have to stay there” I kinda switched the phrasing but it is bolded.

If you haven’t read the first chapter and would like to here is a

Handy Dandy Link to Chapter 1

If you would like a tag, send me an ask! I’d love to add you so you don’t miss what happens next.

Warnings for this chapter include but are not limited to: Swearing, Angst, and lost hope...

LAST TIME ON BREAK A LEG

"No," Stark turns from the blond man and back to you. "No fucks given, Next, please."

"Wrong, ALL THE FUCKS GIVEN," Amanda snarled, her polished heel coming down directly into your foot, causing you to sing out the zinging agony up your leg from the bruised puncture.

What was supposed to be a double entendre excusing yourself from the situation while still insulting Stark, ended up as a pure, clear note. Not sung really, but not really spoken or screamed. The sound resonated through everyone in the room, grabbing their hearts and holding fast. Amanda shot you a glare. You broke, mind reaching into words long since memorized, performed, and forgotten, perfectly fitting the anger and betrayal you felt from your best friend. Before your brain could make it out of the emotions to tell you how to react, your mouth opened, and you were singing.

You have shown me the sky, But what good is the sky To a creature who'll never Do better than crawl?

You turn to Amanda, your voice piercing through the eerie silence that had followed your outburst. Her eyes grew wide in shock as You glower at her. Your all-consuming hurt blatantly affecting her. Her soft, beautiful lips popped open as she watched the scene play out.

Your anger only grew as you see hope still shining in her eyes. You were a jealous green monster, there was no sense in denying it anymore since your one last shot went out the window. Why did she still have hope? Why did she have to share it with you? You were happy with how things were, and she made you believe that this time would be different. That this time you had a chance. Now you were dying from the rejection. You knew after your accident it would be harder to continue, it definitely didn't help you had lost 70% of the feeling in your leg, and gained 50 pounds as your activity levels changed so drastically. It was an actress' worst nightmare. You almost choked on the fury as you continued.

Of all the cruel bastards Who've badgered and battered me, You are the cruelest of all! Can't you see what your gentle Insanities do to me? Rob me of anger and give me despair! Blows and abuse I can take and give back again, Tenderness I cannot bear! So please torture me now With your "Sweet Dulcineas," no more! I am no one! I'm nothing! I'm only Aldonza, the whore.

As the last line leaves your lips, you shoved past Amanda and run as fast as your heeled feet can take you. Fueled by the rage and adrenaline that heats your heart and head. Using every instinct in your body to keep from running into some unsuspecting passerby.

You didn't stop running until your lungs were burning, and you could no longer see through the tears gathering in on your outrageously curled lashes. Not paying any attention to which direction you went, you continued to run following the flow of pedestrians until you turned into a lesser-used street.

As you turned the corner swiftly, two things happened consecutively; one, you broke the heels Amanda had stuffed onto your feet that morning and two, you ran into a hard surface. The combination was lethal to your balance. It would have been ridiculous to witness as you bounced off of the wall you had run into and landed with a sharp smack onto the filthy brown cobblestones that paved the grocery storefront. The pain was the last straw of your long sleepless morning as you broke into sobs, curling up into a ball where you landed crying.

However, the wall wasn't a wall, wasn't that just your luck. "Bitch, Watch where you're going! Other people are walking here, ya know!" the grumpy young man growled at you as he kicked past you, not even really stopping in his powerful stride. All you could do was sob harder.

The traffic flowing around your huddled form seemed to thin as a few minutes passed. Just like typical New York, no one seemed to notice you. All of them were busy rushing to and from there business. The stream seemed to be almost nonexistent before someone finally took notice of you.

"Woah," A soothing tenor cut through the sounds of your sobs. "Hey, Hey, Hey, It's goin't' be okay, Are you hurt?" You shook your head, still hiding your face in your knees, barely catching a glimpse of his half-laced combat boots. "Okay, why don't we get you up outta the dirt. keep that pretty dress from gettin' all ruined."

"n-no," you hiccupped. Your fingers fisted themselves into your dress, trying desperately to force yourself back together.

"so you're just gonna sit there in the muck?"

Your subsequent nod was met with a delightful sounding chuckle.

"Ya can't really be expecting me to let ya do that, can ya?" The man squatted before you, his half-laced combat boots sending a spark of envy through your addled brain, shaking you back into more of a semblance of sanity.

"Yeah," You answered him lamely. Flinching away as the man crouched down in front of you.

"Hey now, just a'cause you end up on your ass, don't mean you have to stay there." He said, "Also, if you stay here, people are gunna step on you, and we don't want you getting' all hurt now do we?" Your shrug seems to pull a longsuffering sigh from the man. You could feel his eyes staring at your natural hair that sat pinned to your head in an intricate bun that lay somewhat skewed from all the action you had had before landing where you sat. His gaze moved, roving over the rest of your shaking, disheveled appearance.

You scowl at the scuffed toes as the man talked, not sure what to do anymore. This man seemed nice, but your parent's warnings about 'men these days' kept ringing in your ears, keeping your internal hackles raised even through your uncontrollable sorrow. You really didn't want any company, you just wanted to rewind the whole terrible day and refuse Amanda's damned puppy dog eyes.

At the thought of Amanda, your anger came roaring back. Why did she have to be so hopeful and unaccepting of your new reasonable life? Couldn't she grasp the fact that you weren't what people wanted anymore? You weren't skinny; you weren't pretty; you weren't perfectly proportioned. You were never going to make it through a cattle call, and never getting through cattle call meant you were never going to make it anywhere near a stage again unless you went back home. Which wasn't going to happen. You couldn't imagine going back to playing the game of church is state, and if you swear, you are looked at as if you were outside fully nude. You didn't know it when you were there, but now you KNEW that it was literally hell on earth.

The man's overdone Brooklyn accent fell slightly as he watched you for a few more minutes. "Fine, if you won't stand up, I'll just have to sit here in the dirt with you. My ma would strangle me if I left a pretty girl like you crying in the middle of the sidewalk by herself." Showing his conviction, the man took a seat on the ground in front of you. You snapped your head up in surprise, meeting his intense blue-grey eyes. You couldn't help but stare into them. His eyes were beautiful, so kind, they held all of the gentleness of the most delicate mist. Unintentionally, you found your worry fading away. As your mind relaxed to the man's presence, his words finally registered.

"I'm not pretty," your thoughts escape on your traitorous tongue, "And seeing me crying probably doesn't help anything. Nobody likes a crybaby."

"Au Contraire dollface, you are putting Julia Roberts to shame. And I know for a fact that it's healthy to cry. Though most people choose someplace less dangerous to cry than the middle of the sidewalk. It has gotta be something pretty bad if you couldn't even make it to the bench over there before you stopped. Why don't you tell me what happened? It will make you feel better."

"Oh really?" you snap, his words leaving a nasty taste in your mouth. He was pitying you. You don't need pity, your feelings were valid, and pity makes them feel cheap. He could take his pity and stuff it right up his ass. "And pray tell, how would telling a complete stranger the pitiful tale of how life has brought me to my knees, only to serve a final blow and cleave my head from my shoulders, would make me feel better? I don't need you to pity me, all I need is to get home, sleep for more than an hour, or have a cup of coffee and a nap. Then maybe stab my best friend in the foot with these stupid heels that she made me wear. That will make me feel better."

"I don't want to pity you, I want to listen to you. There is a difference, and I can make it worth your while. I don't know about the sleep or the stabbing thing, but I know a café right around the corner that has the best cup of coffee this side of the Brooklyn Bridge. At least let me buy you a cup, and sit with me until you stop shaking. It will make me feel better."

Asshole, you think, he has just as bad of puppy dog eyes as Amanda, except his were so clear that they were a deep bottomless pit of emotion, clear as the sky after a good rain. All he wants is coffee, worst-case scenario, I say something stupid hail a cab and leave, and never see this man again. Best case, I have coffee with a nice man, and never see him again. Either way, this will be fine. It's free coffee, in a public space, with someone who looks genuinely concerned. Honestly, all you wanted to do was to go home and sleep for the rest of the weekend, but how could you say no to those damned puppy eyes? Fuuuuuck.

"Fine, but if I feel like you are pitying me, I am going to leave," you grumble, unfolding yourself from your seat on the ground.

"Wouldn't expect anything less, doll." His smile, wow. His whole face lights up like taking you to coffee was the best thing to happen to him all day. Wasn't that just a confidence boost. He offered his hand after getting to his feet. You tentatively take it, but barely give him any weight as you rose to your feet. Smoothing your skirt down, you step on your broken heel and stumble slightly. A single warm leather-clad arm braces you, keeping you from being reacquainted with the pavement.

"Woah, I know I'm handsome and all, but I thought it would be a tad bit harder to get you to fall for me than that." He smirks. That added to the teasing tone and how easily he supported you, brought a blush to your cheeks.

"Ain't nobody falling for anybody," you growl, taking your eyes off of your rescuers face to look down at your shoes again, you notice just how built he is on top of having a handsome face. His plain white crew neck T-shirt, leather jacket and dark wash jeans hugged him just the right amount to accentuate his features without looking too small. His cologne made you dizzy but in that sweet intoxicated way. Or maybe that was your week and the crying session catching up to you. You caught yourself before you could yawn, looking back up at him, His hair was nicely cropped around his head, a dark chestnut brown that looked really soft to touch. His overly warm hand wrapped around you as he guided you to the bench.

Sighing, you look up to him again. "I'm sorry for being such a mess. I promise I'm usually the one rescuing the damsels in distress. But every knight has its day… And today has been an excruciatingly long day, and it's only-" You pat yourself down, looking for your phone to check the time but finding yourself without pockets, and therefore without any of your things. Since you hadn't thought of grabbing your purse when you had made your escape. "giornataccia!! Che Palle! People who don't put fucking pockets into their dress designs should be hunted." {Italian: really bad day!! $%>@!}

The man looks at you, a little shocked at your outburst. "Not that I don't agree, but…"

"I left my phone, wallet, purse, and extra pair of shoes back where I was..." You say, throwing yourself onto the bench and rubbing your eyes with your hands to hide the frustrated tears that were fighting to break loose.

"I see, what exactly could you have had happen to cause you to run away without anything? Should I be escorting you to a police station?"

"Ha!" The self-deprecating laugh popped out of your mouth, harsh, rough, and cracked. "No, I don't think the police are needed. Just had a drama queen moment, and now I can never show myself in a theater again. Talk about the worst audition of my life. That's saying something because I vomited on my BFA panel during my audition for them."

"It can't have been that bad." The man crouched in front of you, gently taking your hands away from your face, you avoided the trap of his gorgeous grey eyes by looking up into the sky.

"Oh, it was definitely that bad. I didn't even know about it until my best friend pushed me into the front doors. She then continued on her warpath, distracting Mr. Stark during cattle call, and then followed it up by an encore of stomping on my foot to get me to open my mouth. And in true MUSICAL THEATER FASHION. I just hAd To SiNg OuT mY FeElInGs. Talk about the most melodramatic thing that I could have done." You leaned lounged back on the bench, glaring at the sky.

"Okay, that does sound pretty bad. But how could you not know you were going to be auditioning? Especially if you were auditioning for Tony Stark. Those auditions are closed call."

"My best friend is the reincarnation of Puck. I'm pretty sure she worships gods of mischief. She has been secretly planning this for years. Ever since I stopped performing with her." At this point, you weren't sure your mind was awake enough to stop yourself from saying the first thing that came from your brain. "And why did you stop?"

"Accident. Left me lame for a while, and by the time I got myself back out there, I wasn't what people wanted to look at."

"Looks like you still have the function of both your legs. And even if you didn't, that doesn't mean shit, dollface, so what has really kept you away?"

"Fucking hell, it doesn't mean shit, and have you looked at me? I'm not what they want. I'm fat, and slow, and fucking ugly."

"Then do something about it."

"Yeah, whatever." You couldn't handle anymore of this man's bullshit. You had TRIED to do something about it. You had tried to do MULTIPLE somethings, and none of them worked. Your rekindled agitation put you back on edge. Sighing, you looked at him again. "I know you said you wanted coffee, but honestly I'm just tired, would you mind if I used your phone? I need to call someone to come get me since my wallet is wherever my friend is."

The man nodded, fishing his phone out of his pocket, handing it to you with a leather-covered hand. Nodding in appreciation as he walked a few paces from you to give you privacy, you quickly typed in Amanda's number hitting the call button.

The phone rings for way too many seconds for you to feel comfortable. When she answered, you didn't give her a chance to say anything. "I left my phone and purse there, I'm stranded on a bench at Cliff and Fulton. If you don't get here soon, I will have to retract your best friend privileges. You got me into this mess. You owe me big time. And you owe me a new pair of heels."

"I'm so so— "Before she can even finish her apology, you hang up. Turning to hand the man his phone back, surprised to find him conveniently absent. Looking around again, you see him across the street, walking towards you with two steaming McDonald's cups.

"I know you said you didn't want any, but I felt like you deserve a pick-me-up, It's not what I was planning on treating you to but, it will have to do." He gives you a smirk, handing you one of the cups.

"Thanks," you handed him the phone, introducing yourself casually, "my name is Y/N."

"My friends call me Bucky."

"Am I, your friend?" You ask, your eyebrow quirking upward.

"Who knows? I think we could be." He says, taking a seat on the bench beside you, splaying his legs so far apart you could probably sit pretty comfortably between his legs.

"Well, seeing as you are playing the role of knight in shining armor, why don't you tell me a story of your brave quest. You've heard my tale of woe, what's yours?"

His lights lit up at the request for a story. It wasn't until then that you realized how dark and sad his eyes really were.

|Next Chapter|

My own happy bubbles: @tossacoin2yourwitcher @buckys-broody-muffin

and people I hope will share my work because Even though I am fierce I really am small fries: @cavillanche & @star-spangled-man-with-a-plan.

Thank you four! You are each amazingly sweet and lovely humans that helped me push past my cognitive issues to get this out today! Thank you!

#bucky x you #bucky x reader #bucky barnes imagine #marvel fanfiction #marvel fanfic #Break A Leg #I'm Trying #today I had to tell myself outloud that the word You was indeed spelled y o u and not e w e...#yeah it took me all week to write this and even then it was painful #cognitive migraines #firefly's summer challenge #fins reads #fins' fic recs #fins' recs #fins recs fics #fanfiction #fic reblog

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fandom-imagines-stories · 5 years

Text

Punishment

Elijah Mikaelson x Reader

Words: 3781

Summary: Based on episodes 1x7 and 1x8, after Elijah assumes the worst of his brother, Klaus bites the reader, a fellow Original and Elijah's wife. As the sickness and hallucinations from the venom set in, the reader is forced to face some of the darkest moments from her history, including betrayal and conspiring with their greatest enemy: Mikael.

Notes: I’m so glad to finally have an Elijah imagine! Rewatching the Originals, I thought that this would be an interesting take on the episode The River in Reverse. Enjoy!

You cursed Tyler for forcing your rescue mission into the humid and bug infested bayou. You could have been sitting comfortably at home enjoying your returned husband’s presence, but instead, you were arguing with Klaus over his intentions for his unborn child.

“Tyler Lockwood brought Hayley here to test a theory.” Elijah began. “That the blood of her child could be used to sire hybrids. He claims that you knew that. Furthermore, that you intended to use this knowledge to build an army.” He gazed furiously at his brother, but Klaus’ expression held only the hurt of betrayal.

“And of course you assume it's true.” He growled. “I mean, why else would I show any interest in my own flesh and blood?”

“Just tell us if you knew, Nik.” You pleaded. You wanted so badly to believe that it wasn’t, that he was only concerned with his child’s well being, but after a thousand years, your instinct was to assume the worst when it came to Klaus.

“A heartbroken little cry baby points his finger at me and my own brother falls in line.” His gaze shifted from Elijah to you. “I expect Elijah to always make me the villain, but I had expected more sympathy from you.” Your eyes fell to the dirt, unable to look him in the eye. Elijah continued.

“Spare me your indignation.” He spat. “When have you ever demonstrated any kind of concern towards Hayley or her child beyond your own selfish pursuits?” Klaus was growing more irritable by the second.

“Elijah, he might be telling the truth.” You started, hoping to diffuse some of the tension between the two brothers, but he ignored you.

“What was it you once said to me?” He mimicked Niklaus’ voice to mock him. “Every king needs an heir.” Klaus’ expression deepened with hurt and anger.

“My big brother...” His voice was quiet and fuming with emotion. “So you doubt my intentions, well, I can’t say I’m surprised. Standing beside the noble Elijah, how can I be anything but the lesser brother. A liar. A manipulator. Bastard.”

“Klaus, please.” You stepped towards him, but he only glowered towards you.

“That’s all I am to all of you, isn’t it?”

“Brother-” Elijah tried to begin, but Klaus stopped him.

“We have said all that needs to be said, brother.” Klaus’ voice was now a low and menacing growl. He stepped back with a devilish smirk. “I’ll play the role I’ve been given.” He walked away before turning back and grabbing your arm. He yanked you into him, digging his fangs into your neck as you cried out in agony.

“No!” Elijah exclaimed, rushing towards you as Klaus pushed away. He wrapped his arms around you, shielding you from whatever else his brother may have planned. But Klaus merely backed away.

“I hope the three of you enjoy each other’s company. But I’d be careful once the hallucination sets in, Elijah. Our dear Y/N may have a few secrets tucked away in that subconscious of hers.” He disappeared.

“What the hell?” Hayley gasped.

“Help me get her inside,” Elijah ordered, helping you stand.

“I’ll be fine, Elijah.” You insisted, taking a step on your own, but ended up stumbling back into his arms.

“Hayley, please,” Elijah begged. Hayley put your arm over her shoulders and helped Elijah walk you to the cabin sitting on the water.

“Seriously, what the hell is wrong with your family?” Hayley shook her head with an exasperated breath. Elijah sat you down on the bed, cupping your face in his hands.

“I’m going to kill him.” He muttered angrily, examining the bite on your neck.

“I’ll be fine, Elijah.” You sighed. “It won’t kill me.” You gave him a weak smile. “This isn’t the first time Nik has used me to punish you. It’s not even the worst time.”

Elijah knew exactly what you were talking about. It was not a memory he often liked to think of. It was the early 1500’s and the four of them lived in Copenhagen, Denmark. Not long before, you and Elijah helped the young girl that you’d befriended escape Klaus’ ritual. He hadn’t forgiven you for letting Katerina Petrova get away and you feared that his wrath would intervene with the wedding. After nearly five hundred years of being vampires, Elijah finally felt safe enough to propose. It was the night before the wedding was when Klaus exacted his revenge on his brother and his soon-to-be sister in law.

“Y/N!” Elijah called out, practically skipping down the corridor to your room. He had a dinner prepared, just for the two of you, and a moonlit walk through the gardens with his bride to be. “Y/N, darling, come downstairs-” As he opened the door, he was surprised to find his younger brother instead.

“Haven’t you heard that it’s terribly bad luck to make love before the wedding, brother,” Klaus smirked, twirling a dagger around in his fingers. “I would so hate for something to befall you… or your bride.”

“Niklaus, what have you done with Y/N?” Elijah seethed, looking around the room for some hint as to where you could be. Klaus’ smug smile only grew.

“We had a row.” He shrugged. “Perhaps she took a walk to calm down. Or perhaps some rest might do her good.” Elijah realized what dagger Klaus was holding and his heart sunk.

“You didn’t.” He shook his head in disbelief. Klaus chuckled deeply and stood, walking across the room to his brother. Elijah clenched his fists. “Where is she?”

“Now that’s for me to know, and you to spend the next seventy years agonizing over.” He continued to toy with the weapon until Elijah shoved him against the wall, his voice practically a growl.

“Need I remind you that I am getting married tomorrow?” He spat. Klaus tried to push him away, but Elijah stood his ground in anger.

“Consider it punishment for your betrayal concerning the Doppelganger.” Klaus hissed. He finally pushed Elijah back by holding the dagger pointed at his brother’s chest.

“Do it.” Elijah dared. “Box me away along with the other problems you think you can escape. For I will make your life a living hell if you do not release her.”

“Oh, I don’t think you will.” Klaus laughed. “If you so much as feed without my permission, I will ensure that you never see Y/N again. And if you try and find her, brother, I will see to it that her coffin winds up at the bottom of the ocean. Or perhaps I’ll just leave her behind and let Mikael have his way with her. I’m sure he’d enjoy ripping her apart.” The look in Klaus’ eyes scared Elijah more than he cared to admit, but he knew that Klaus would destroy you if he didn’t obey.

“How can you be so willing to destroy your own brother’s happiness. To harm a woman that you’ve known almost all your life. A woman who has shown you nothing but love.”

“I wouldn’t speak such praises of Y/N, brother, for there are things about her you do not know. You should consider this a favor.” Klaus began to storm out of the room, but Elijah called out one last remark.

“I was right.” He fell to his knees in front of your bed, his hands finding the sheets, searching to feel your warmth. He could not stop the tears in his eyes, for he knew not when or if he’d see you again. Klaus had taken the one person that he truly loved, without remorse. “You really have lost all of your humanity, brother.” He spat out the last word as if it left a sour taste in his mouth. Klaus didn’t turn back, but even as he walked back down the hall, he could hear Elijah’s anguished cries. If only he knew the truth.

He didn’t see you again until they arrived in New Orleans… 200 years later. Somehow, Klaus had kept your coffin hidden among Kol and Finn’s. Elijah and Klaus’ relationship had never been the same since that night and Klaus knew that there was one thing he could do to even gain the smallest bit of sympathy from his brother again. Plus your punishment had gone on long enough.

“Do you remember that day?” You laughed painfully. Elijah asked Hayley to get him a bowl of water and a towel to sooth your fever. “I’ll never forget your face.” You reached up your hand and caressed his face.

“Nearly 200 years and you never moved on.” Klaus stood by his brother on the balcony of their new home, thanks to the mayor’s love of gold. He held to glasses of the finest whiskey. “No amount of harlots or far off princesses deterred your love for her.”

“I don’t let people in, Niklaus.” He shook his head. “You took the one person…” He took a deep breath, trying to keep his emotions at bay. “The one person that meant something to me outside of our ‘always and forever’.” He turned to Klaus and ignored the glass he offered him. “Do you honestly think that I’m going to just let her go? I was going to mary Y/N, Niklaus.”

“Ah yes, the nuptials that I so rudely interrupted.” Klaus drank from both glasses and set them on the railing. “To be fair, I didn’t cancel the wedding, dear brother. I merely postponed it.” Elijah’s face contorted with confusion.

“What are you saying, Niklaus?”

“I’m saying,” he smirked. “That you can come out from around the corner, love, before Elijah snaps my neck.” Elijah slowly turned around and there you were. Your smile was radiant and you wore a new dress.

“Hello.” You greeted nervously. Even after all this time, you still felt the butterflies in your stomach whenever he looked at you. And now, his eyes held more love and relief and joy then you had ever seen.

“Y/N.” He rushed to you and lifted you up in his arms, taking in the softness of your skin, the scent of your hair, and as you lifted his face to meet yours in a kiss, he memorized the taste of your lips. “My love, I have not lived since the day you were taken from me.” He kissed a trail from your jaw to your shoulder.

“Well,” Klaus coughed with an amused grin on his face. “I suppose I could have a talk with the mayor about hosting us for a little celebration. What better way to introduce us to New Orleans than with a wedding?” He left the two of you in peace, but not before giving you a warning glance. You felt your cheeks burn with shame, but luckily, Elijah didn't seem to notice. He still couldn't quite believe that after all this time, his heart had finally returned.

You were married not three days later. Rebekah wanted a grand celebration, but you and Elijah simply couldn't wait. And despite the family drama and Klaus’ paranoia over the years, the two of you were happy.

“Of course, I remember.” Elijah placed the cloth on your forehead with a loving smile. “How could I forget?”

“Elijah,” you began weakly, “you should leave.” You could almost feel the hallucinations coming as the venom coursed through your veins. He scoffed.

“You don’t honestly think I could just leave you here?” He laced his fingers through yours, kissing the back of your hand gently. “Not that I’m doubting Hayley’s nursing skills, but I’d prefer to take care of you myself.”

“Klaus wasn’t lying, Elijah.” You breathed heavily and felt yourself losing control. You kicked the bedpost, crying out. Elijah just held onto you, soothingly running his fingers through your hair. You tried to push away. “I’m going to start hallucinating and you can’t be here.” It wasn’t until then that he could see your fear. You were scared, not of the pain or the venom, but of what he might see. Even now, he could see your memories as they flowed from your mind to his, your subconscious barriers weakening. Flashes of darkness and stone and blood.

“I’m staying.” He persisted. You screamed, your hands latching onto his arms.

“Elijah, please.” You begged. “I have loved you for a thousand years, but still, there are things I’ve never told you. Things you can never know for they will make you hate me.” Your eyes were filled with horror and his were pained to see you in such a state.

“Y/N,” He pushed a hair out of your face, tucking it gently behind your ear. “Nothing that you could’ve done could make me hate you.” He pulled your head into his lap, dipping the cloth in more water to keep you cool.

“I didn’t want you to find out like-” You cried out again and this time you couldn’t stop it as you were both thrown into your past- five hundred years ago.

The gardens were your favorite place to go when you needed to think. You could hardly breathe. Elijah proposed. After all these years of running, he finally felt safe enough to officially bring you into his chaotic family. You, of course, said yes, but he still wanted to give you the option of having time to think. As you walked through the flowers and bushes, there was nothing you wanted more than to become his wife.

One of the reasons that you loved the garden was its calming quiet. You knew every sound by heart. The trickling water of the nearby creek, the sound of insects buzzing about the flowers, and the birds singing in the trees. The footsteps that drew closer to you were not among those sounds.

“I must say, you have grown more radiant over the years. I can see why Elijah keeps you.” The voice sent fear through your whole body. A fear that you hadn’t felt in a long time.

“Mikael.” You gasped, turning around to see the subject of your nightmares. Without giving you a chance to run, he snapped your neck and carried you away from the estate.

When you woke up, there was no use in screaming. He’d taken you far enough that running would be in vain. He was more powerful and you knew it. So you had no choice but to sit and await your fate.

“Get on with it.” You spat. He loomed over you with a dark expression. You stood, keeping your head high. You would not let him see your fear. “Kill me.”

“Why would I do that?” He sighed, looking at you as if you were a child that he was scolding. “You have always meant a lot to my family, especially Elijah. Even the beast adored you when you were children.”

“Since when do you care about your family.” You growled, taking a step towards him. “You’ve been hunting us down ever since you turned us into monsters, trying to erase your mistake.” His hand found your throat, crushing the air out of you.

“You would be wise to watch your tongue, girl, or I may rethink what I’m about to offer you.” He released you and you recoiled back, your body shaking. “You are going to help me defeat the one that I am truly after.” You clenched your fists.

“Klaus.”

“He is the one that tore this family apart, not I. He corrupted our name and turns our blood to filth. He is a beast that must be destroyed.”

“Save me the sermon, Mikael. There is nothing that you can say to me that will make me turn against Niklaus.” You started to turn. Maybe if you could distract him, you could run.

“I’ll let Elijah live.” Those four words got your attention. “I’ll let all of them live, and you.” You crossed your arms, taking a defiant stance.

“If you think that I would turn against someone I love for the sake of my own life, you clearly don't know me, or your children for that matter.” You took one last look at the door. “Whatever you’re planning, I want no part of it.” And then you ran.

You didn’t get far, of course. Mikael was faster, stronger, and more experienced than you. He caught up with you before you were even halfway back to the estate. You didn’t realize that he had the white-oak stake until it was piercing into your chest. Your eyes widened and your mouth hung open in shock. All it would take is one last push.

“You will tell all but Klaus to flee the castle and lock him on his chamber for me to find him.” Mikael spat, twisting the stake, causing you to scream. “If you do not follow my instructions, your first engagement present will be Elijah's head.” He vanished the stake in your chest with him. You collapsed against the tree, tears stinging in your eyes. Could you betray the man you loved in order to save him? Did you even have a choice?

Elijah's mind reeled as you tried to fight the visions. Your hands gripped his and your eyes begged him to leave. But he was stubborn and you were both pulled back.

You wandered hopelessly down the hall, dreading Elijah's approach. He rushed to you, for they had been searching the grounds for you all afternoon.

“Where have you been?” He inquired, taking your hands in his. You looked into his worried eyes with despair. “My dear, what is it?”

“He’s here.” You whispered, the terror in your voice real. “Mikael is here.” Elijah froze a similar terror to yours washing over his face. “He attacked me in the woods, but I escaped and came to warn all of you.”

“I must find the others.” He said urgently. You grabbed his arm.

“You find Rebekah, I’ll find Klaus.” You felt every fiber of your being screaming out at him, telling him the truth as the guilt churned in your stomach. You put a hand on his cheek, fearing anything that should happen to those beautiful brown eyes. As he rushed to find his sister, you found Klaus in his chambers painting.

“To what do I owe the pleasure, dear sister-to-be?” He smirked as you entered. You took a deep breath.

“I'm sorry.” You cried. Mikael appeared at the window and Klaus’ face morphed with anger and betrayal. You ran, holding the door shut as you heard the fight inside ensue. Tears streamed down your face as you heard Nik’s cries. Unable to listen any more, you fled. You ran as far and as fast as you could into the forest, knowing that if you were to see Elijah now, you would break. His beloved brother, dead by your hands. You might as well have been the one to plunge the stake into his heart.

Elijah pulled away slowly, finally released from your mind. You looked up at him with shame and regret, but you're expression quickly changed as the venom-induced hallucinations began. His face morphed into his father's and you stood, your teeth grinding with anger.

“Mikael.” You snapped. Elijah stepped back in confusion. “This is your fault.”

“Y/N, it’s me.” He tried to explain, but it was too late. The venom had taken over. You pinned him against the wall, your hand wrapping tight around his throat, your fingers finding his heart. If you couldn’t kill him, you’d make sure you left a mark.

“I lay in a box for 200 years and now he will hate me.” The fury in your eyes mixed with sorrow and Elijah placed a hand on your face. “Don’t touch me you-” You stopped suddenly and your limp body fell into Elijah’s arms.

“Seemed like you needed a little help.” Hayley shrugged, taking out the stake that she’d planted in your back.

“As grateful as I am to be rescued,” Elijah brushed off with a sarcastic look. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t stab my wife.”

Night soon fell and Elijah waited in solitude for you to awaken. He had encouraged Hayley to return home and find out more about the area before she explored much further. Since she felt slightly guilty for staking his wife in the back, she didn't argue.

When you emerged from the cabin, your fever was gone and the past few hours hit you like a wall. Elijah barely looked up from the fire as you sat across from him.

“Why do you think my parents turned you with the rest of us?” He asked calmly, his expression indecipherable. Your eyebrows knit together.

“I guess I’ve never thought about it.”

“The fact that we were betrothed had little to do with it. They were private people and trusted few who weren’t part of our family, even if you were to become my bride. Surely, I would have found someone else in the expanse of time immortality gave us. I believe that by the time they turned us into what we are, they no longer believed in love, not that my feelings for you would have influenced their decision.”

“Perhaps I was a mistake.” You stared deeply into the flames, turning when he appeared beside you, his eyes blazing in the light. They held not anger, but love.

“They turned you because you were one of us.” He placed a hand on your cheek. “You have always been one of us.” You felt a tear slip down your face and your lip begin to quiver. “Mikael was a tyrant, one that frightened even Niklaus. We have all done terrible things in fear. I myself have turned against Klaus when I believed him to have destroyed my other siblings.”

You remembered that time well. You and Elijah had spent years trying to find Klaus, all the while you tried to convince Elijah to forgive him. It wasn’t until he discovered that the boxes that contained his siblings did not ly and the bottom of the ocean that he rejoined Nik.

“While I wish you would have told me of these events, I do not hate you for them. Besides, Niklaus punished you enough.” His stomach still churned at the memories during those years alone. “And if there is one thing that those 200 years have taught me is that my parents were wrong. There could never be anyone else. Our paths are intertwined together,” He gently pulled your face towards his for a sweet, passionate kiss that vanquished all of your doubts. When you parted, a small smile graced his lips. “Always and forever.”

#elijah mikealson x reader #klaus mikaelson #1x8 #the originals #original vampires #the originals imagine #Daniel Gillies

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osleyakomwonkru · 5 years

Text

The Failure of Experience: Team Adults and the Destruction of Octavia Blake

(No S6 information here, this is all from S5)

Let’s be clear about one thing. Regardless of whether or not you agree with any of the characters’ specific actions or not, or which character’s side you come down on, there’s one indisputable truth about season 5: The adults of the bunker (Kane, Abby, Indra, and to a lesser extent Jaha and Gaia) made a traumatized and unstable teenager with anger management issues their leader, forced her to make impossible and horrific life-or-death choices, and then abandoned her to face the repercussions, both personal and political, on her own, disavowing any responsibility or complicity in what she became.

This is despicable on so many levels, and the reason why Kane, Abby and Indra occupy three of the five spots on my “most hated The 100 characters” list for the season - which is a damn shame, because Kane had been one of my favourites since season 2. His relationship with Octavia, as well as the relationship between the Blake siblings, have always been my favourite non-romantic relationships on the show, and having both of them shattered to pieces in season 5 was just devastating.

Jaha

One of the biggest tragedies of Octavia’s story is that the bunker forced her to become her greatest enemy - the same kind of ruthless leader that controlled the Ark of her childhood and forced her to live under the floor. For Octavia, Jaha was the embodiment of all she hated, since he had been the Chancellor, though Kane and Abby were also complicit.

So the conversation she had to have with Jaha in 5x02, and where he told her to make the Grounders stand down otherwise he wasn’t going to open the doors to the farm - you can see the light go out of her eyes when she knows the kinds of decisions she’s going to be faced with now. What she’s going to have to do to keep her people alive. And she hates him - and herself - for needing to do it.

But at the same time, while Jaha gave her the tools and blueprint to follow, thus beginning the creation of her tragedy, but he wasn’t the one responsible for breaking her. For destroying her. That blame sits primarily on Kane and Abby’s shoulders, as we’ll get into below.

I think that had Jaha lived, he would have been the guidance that could have prevented Octavia’s destruction - unlike the other adults, he didn’t judge the younger generation, but tried to provide guidance whenever he could. This is because he knew he had no moral high ground to judge from. He has a similar discussion in 4x02 with Clarke as he does in 5x02 with Octavia, and I don’t think that’s an accident. His words to Clarke there also wouldn’t have been out of place to Octavia here: “No leader starts out wanting to lie, or imprison, or execute their people. The decisions you face just whittle you down piece by piece.”

Jaha was the best surviving member of Team Adults (I liked Sinclair better), but now he was gone too - leaving Octavia with those of questionable morals and advisory capacity.

Gaia

Now, Gaia isn’t an adult like the others, she’s probably of the same age as Octavia herself (and Tati Gabrielle is in fact a decade younger than Marie Avgeropoulos), but her position of authority as a Flamekeeper and her resulting influence on Octavia merits her inclusion on this list.

I think the biggest flaw when it comes to Gaia in season 5 is that we didn’t see the alleged “influence” that she had on Octavia. Indra references it a number of times, and we see Gaia there with her in 5x02, but that’s all. Gaia is completely absent from the Dark Year flashbacks, and as I described in this post I don’t think that’s an accident on the show creators’ parts. Nor was the fact that we didn’t actually see Gaia’s alleged influence on Octavia. Those are all points I will address in a later post, however.

What we do know, however, is that Gaia was instrumental in creating the Blodreina cult (whenever it happened, it didn’t after the farm mutiny, that much is clear and again something I’ll get back to), she was even the leader of it, as we saw at the fights in the arena. But despite this intense loyalty to Octavia, Gaia was ready to turn tail as soon as a Nightblood showed up. Her old faith wasn’t as dead as she thought it could have been.

However, it should be noted that Gaia was still loyal to Octavia, even after discovering what Madi was - she was only turned against Octavia when Indra, her own mother, manipulated her for her own purposes, so that she would in turn manipulate Madi into taking the Flame. I don’t think Gaia (or Madi, for that matter) knew the truth of why Octavia was “sick”. Indra and Bellamy did, but they kept their cards close to their chest and didn’t reveal that to anyone else, especially not Gaia or Madi, who were loyal to Octavia.

Indra

To her credit, Indra does (privately) acknowledge the part she played in destroying Octavia, unlike Abby and Kane. However, that does not absolve her of her sins.

One thing that bothers me about Indra - and always has, I guess you could say - is that she’s simultaneously loyal to a fault and the traitor behind the curtain. This hypocrisy is a dangerous combination. Take her early appearances in season 2 and 3 - she’s exceedingly loyal to Lexa and the throne of the Commanders, even when it pains her to be so. But at the same time, she goes behind Lexa’s back when the moment suits her - such as when she gave Lincoln the means to escape at the end of season 2.

It could be said that she did this for Octavia - because each instance where she was pained by her loyalty to the Commanders was also a situation where Octavia was somehow involved (such as leaving when Lexa sounded the retreat, and when she left Bellamy in the cave when the new ascension call sounded). And indeed, by the beginning of season 4, with no Commander on the throne, Indra’s loyalty shifts completely to Octavia, as it were. Indra is the first to embrace the idea of Wonkru, and even the one who inspires her to think in that direction in the first place - “I taught you to fight. But who you fight for is up to you.”

But I guess it shouldn’t be any surprise that her old behavioural patterns continued in the bunker, except this time Octavia was the leader she simultaneously supported and undermined at the same time.

She didn’t appear to try to convince Kane of the necessity of cannibalism, even though she was the most pragmatic of the bunch about it. She bent rules to allow Kane and Abby to see each other before Kane’s fight. She released Kane and made it possible for him to escape - subsequently setting in motion all of the conflict of season 5. Then she worked alongside Bellamy and Clarke to foil Octavia’s plans and ultimately depose her.

But why? That’s the answer we never get. She even agreed with a lot of Octavia’s more brutal plans - she clearly says to Bellamy and Clarke “good plan” with regards to the worms - but still for some reason works against her, under the guise of “protecting Octavia from herself”.

Indra knows Octavia better than almost any other living character. She knows the pain that Octavia went through as a result of the Dark Year - and she knows that she stood by and let it happen. But instead of supporting her and fighting with her, she worked against her, taking away her agency - which she would know is the most hurtful betrayal of all.

Indra spent 30+ years as a Trikru warrior and war chief, ready to fight at the slightest insult (not even provocation, just insult was enough), especially against Skaikru or Azgeda. But after six years in the bunker, she wants to make peace with an enemy that they have absolutely no reason to trust? Gaia lampshades this entire situation in 5x09 - “Suddenly you’re a peacemaker, mother?” Gaia doesn’t buy it either. None of it makes sense.

So for all of Indra’s claims at the end of season 4, where Octavia says that she didn’t do this on her own and Indra replies “No leader ever does” - Indra was no different than the others, where she abandoned the girl she molded into the leader she became. Great mentoring there, seda.

Abby

One thing I didn’t expect 5x11 The Dark Year to do was give me sympathy for Abby. I’ve never liked Abby, ever, and while she’s still on my top 5 hate list, this episode did bump her down a spot or two. Because there’s a reason why we’re watching Octavia’s tragedy through Abby’s eyes in this episode - because it isn’t only Octavia’s tragedy, it is Abby’s too. The big difference, however, being that no one seemed to know the role that Abby had played.

Of course, it still ate her up inside and that’s why she was consumed by her addiction, but leaving the public burden on Octavia’s shoulders, that’s the part that I consider unforgivable. There was so much that Abby could have done to make the Dark Year less awful than it could have been, for Octavia as well as Wonkru as a whole.

As a doctor and a part of Octavia’s inner circle, she would have commanded respect. She should have stood up with Octavia in the cafeteria, and told them what she told Octavia - that choosing death by starvation wasn’t just a personal choice, it was a choice that would affect everyone, because if people starved to death, they wouldn’t be able to supply adequate nutrition to those who were willing to eat and make sure the human race survived. In her capacity as a doctor, people would believe her. Instead, she just stood by and watched.

Some might say that Abby didn’t know that Octavia would kill to get resisters to submit, but I don’t think that’s true. When Octavia asks “So what do you want me to do? Make it a crime not to be a cannibal?”, Abby nods. She knows what it means to be a criminal in the bunker. She knows that means death. When Kane questions her as he comes in with “what’s with the guns?” she says nothing, clearly understanding why they’re there.

Abby knew exactly the burden she was placing on Octavia’s shoulders. She said “the Blight generation, they had a choice, and they never recovered from it. The people who ate, had to watch the people who didn’t eat die slowly. And their guilt nearly destroyed them” - this isn’t to convince Octavia of the necessity of everyone eating, this is to convince her to take the burden of that guilt onto herself by removing their choice.

Abby asked a 19 year old girl to bear all of the guilt and horror of roughly a thousand people, the last remnants of humanity, so that they would survive. No wonder Abby has flipped perspectives with Kane since S1 - in S1 she wanted to make sure the human race deserved to survive, now she was willing to sacrifice the soul of a teenage girl to make it happen. S1 Abby would have never done that.

Kane

Kane, Kane, Kane. Where do I even start? As I said above, Kane was one of my favourite characters in seasons two through four, so I’m really disappointed that he’s now at the top of my most hated list.

I know a common complaint about season 5 is that people feel that they don’t recognize the characters they’ve come to know and love. In most cases, I don’t agree. I do recognize most of the characters, they are the same characters we know and love, just with six more years on them in differing extreme circumstances. The cases I do agree on, however, are Kane and Bellamy (an to an extent Clarke, but Bellamy and Clarke we’ll talk about in another post). Kane has often played the part of a self-righteous bastard, but in doing so, he’s usually provided options, solutions, other ways from what people were doing at the time.

However, here he offers no such options, and that’s the part that I find most frustrating. He’s opposed to cannibalism, but he knows what the stakes are, and still doesn’t suggest another option, even when Octavia begs him for it. As I outlined in this post, he knew exactly the situations Octavia had to lead through in the bunker - because he’d done it himself. If he knew where and when he made mistakes in his time as a leader on the Ark, he damn well should have been speaking up with other options to Octavia, instead of just offering “no”.

And then to discover in 5x12 that Kane knew that Abby had forced Octavia’s hand into making people eat - and that he didn’t hold Abby responsible at all - that was despicable on so many levels. I mean, what level of cognitive dissonance is there at play in this man’s head? Yes, Octavia made the choice to pull the trigger, but she wouldn’t have put herself in that position in the first place if Abby hadn’t convinced her of the necessity of it. Abby definitely has moral culpability on this matter, as does Kane himself, yet somehow he feels he can blame Octavia for all of it? As if.

That horrific situation aside, there’s the difference between Kane in the bunker and Kane out of the bunker. Let’s dive into this one shall we?

No one liked the bunker. Everyone wanted out of it, Octavia included (and perhaps more than anyone else, given the burdens she carried). The sealed bunker was the circumstance that created all of the horror, so when the bunker was opened, that meant everything finally had the opportunity to change, after six long terrible years.

So then why is it that when that obstacle was removed, that Kane went running for the hills, when up until the very moment the bunker was opened, he was still trying to reach out to Octavia? Even as she was about to take his head off, he’s telling her “it’s not too late”.

Had the bunker stayed sealed, it would have been too late for him. But it opened, and he survived. This was the prime opportunity for him return to those words - now that everything could be different since they weren’t trapped anymore. But he didn’t. He and Abby told Clarke that talking to Octavia would be hopeless, but had they even tried, now that the bunker was opened? Nope. Instead they helped along a war that would then last the rest of the season.

I also wonder just how much he told Diyoza. Did he tell Diyoza about the cannibalism? About the rise of the Red Queen? What they all did in the past - both on the ground and on the Ark? In 5x08 he also starts his sanctimonious pageantry at Diyoza, and while he talks about how he knows what it’s like to make the bad choices, I don’t know if she knows the extent of the one’s he has made.

But really, all of the above details really pale to what Kane’s most horrible deed was - and that was the betrayal of Wonkru to McCreary.

There was absolutely no justification for that. None.

I don’t care what he thought about Octavia. I don’t care if all of the evil that he believed of her was 100% true. I don’t care if she spent six years sitting on a throne of blood eating babies and cackling like a maniac (I mean, she didn’t, but for argument’s sake). That does not justify sacrificing the innocents of Wonkru in the hopes of taking her out too.

Maybe Kane believes that McCreary wouldn’t have slaughtered them all. Which would make him a naive idiot, because he knew exactly what kind of a man McCreary was. And even if he wasn’t completely clear on it, his partner in crime Diyoza certainly was. Expecting anything but total annihilation from McCreary was monumentally foolish and has no justification.

Octavia never wanted to lead. She never wanted to have to make horrific choices to keep what was left of humanity alive. And she shouldn’t have had to - she had plenty of people whispering in her ear with what to do and what not to do. She took their advice, she learned their lessons, she tried to do what they hadn’t ever been able to do - unify people and give them a chance to survive instead of being sent straight to the execution chamber.

But instead of congratulating her for her achievements, or helping her through the hard times, or taking some goddamn responsibility for their own roles in the drama - they abandoned her. They disowned her, they tried to kill her, they destroyed her.

They put the world on her shoulders, and let it slowly crush her. And that’s unforgivable.

#octavia blake #the 100 meta #marcus kane #abby griffin #indra kom trikru #thelonious jaha #gaia kom trikru #the 100 #team adults #are trash but we knew that already

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royalreef · 5 years

Note

A letter from one of your imagination serf has been left upon the princess desk! Dear Princess Miranda I have imagined for you the most Nobel of plots! With the ever growing risk of plots and rebellions against you, what better way to remove them then to lead them yourself? With this you may gather all your foes under one banner only to crush them in one mighty swoop! Maybe your sister could help, her majesty is adept at crushing lesser folk.

( @cleaverbilt)

Huh, that was a bit odd. Miranda wasn’t expecting any kind of note today, and particularly not from her serfs. That was why she had them, after all, to run most mundane tasks for her so that she could focus on the important things - like gazing out of windows on a chaise lounge, looking longingly off into the distance. If she was getting a note of this unplanned caliber from one of her imagination serfs, then surely it had to be something important, correct?

Her claws delicately lifted the piece of parchment off her desk, her eyes scanning over it. Rapidly, the thoughts and concepts sunk down, into her gut, and settled there, sick and foul. A growing dread crawled up her esophagus, choking her from the inside out.

Ah. Well.

The idea was novel and quaint. It would be a true victory to pull it off, to make an example of the false hope and blind desperation of rebels. But any rebel worth their salt would never allow themselves to be led by a princess, the shining beacon of all they wished to destroy. They would never allow her in, and Miranda could never be trusted, The first rebel to find her in their midst would destroy Miri as heartlessly as crushing a parasite, and no rebellious faction of her kingdom could be trusted to even stay in the same room as Miranda and not slaughter her where she stood.

But there were even bigger problems to face than that. No Vanderbilt would stand by while the heir to the throne so willingly labeled herself a rebel leader, even if it was in a ploy to destroy the uprising. That was unquestioned, ubiquitous - such a dent in the Vanderbilt pride would prevent them from even falsely wearing the title of doubting their own power.

Even Bellanda would surely react in a similar nature to this ploy. Her sister, a rebel? It would be treason, a betrayal of the trust and love that the two placed in each other. After all, Bell was the merciless warlord here. Any schemes to undermine Bellanda’s power, her cunning, her ability to cut down any in her way - that was treason, and not just in the law-making way, but in the way of the two’s bond. Miranda didn’t want to hurt her sister, didn’t want to make her doubt herself, and especially didn’t want to betray that trust. Not to mention the sheer idea would certainly be appalling to Bell. The rebellion had thwarted the military too many times, and for Miranda to assume even the false title of working against her sister - it would be a direct insult. The equivalent of spitting in the face to all that Bellanda knew.

And Miranda wouldn’t allow herself to be the disappointment in the family.

Especially when disappointments were slaughtered as soon as could be.

The letter was quietly destroyed, no trace remaining behind. Miranda would have to… see about this imagination serf. Later, always later, but absolutely, in time.

#The masked ball || Anonymous #Dreaded rumors || Asks #cleaverbilt #A pair of pitied twins ; Burdened by our destiny || Bellanda Vanderbilt #Glory and Gore || IC #(( THIS IS WHY WE CAN'T HAVE NICE THINGS

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loquaciousquark · 7 years

Text

Critical Role Wrap-Up Tell-All, Summary Post

Missed the first few minutes, but here we go! New campaign starts Jan. 11! No episode next week for Christmas.

First round of questions: Episodes 1-23: The Underdark.

They trusted Clarota more than Kima because the girls were super proud of finding him and they liked the underdog story of befriending the cast-out. Travis brings up writing “I don’t trust Clarota” five weeks running.

Matt designed the entire duergar city around the stronghold (including social encounters) that they missed. They also saw a shimmering portal to the Far Realm that they could have used but bypassed.

Matt had multiple layers for the actual pyramid he’d envisioned as a dungeon crawl, which the players completely bypassed by flying up & dropping a giant on top of it.

Re: Vax’s insight check on Keyleth: the DM said that Keyleth seemed unsure, scared, and cut off from the surface. Liam found that was the first time in the entire campaign he didn’t feel Vax questioning Keyleth’s decisions. This may have been the beginning of the crush. (Sidebar: Marisha is wearing a slate blue dress, gold heels, and stockings, and looks stunning.)

The Earth Ashari visions occurred right after Keyleth killed the kid in terms of plot. She was having a hard time with magic & spells out of fear, and Marisha used it as a catalyst to have her come to terms with the costs of inaction. “You figure it out or you die.”

None of the players felt there was much of a change in their characterizations in transferring from the home games to the show. This is also the point they switched to Vox Machina instead of the SHITS. Taliesin feels they would have done this in universe even without the show; Laura felt it was driven by the knowledge they would be streaming shortly.

Matt: “It would have had to have been a lot of work and roleplaying” to get Clarota to turn on the Elder Brain, but it was not impossible. Laura: “He’s Hugh! From Star Trek. :(”

Percy flashed his name so much in the beginning in an effort to put out feelers for information. Matt points out that what happened to the de Rolos was kept very quiet outside of Whitestone--the Briarwoods circulated a rumor that the de Rolos had gotten ill and died and their close friends had taken over. Percy would have been assumed to be a distant relative if recognized at all. “Who knows the name of the royal family of Nova Scotia?”

Ashley wanted Pike to be stronger after she died so that she could offer more to the fights than just healing. She felt that spending time on The Broken Howl would have improved her strength. (Brian tells us that Ashley lived on a boat for a while as a kid and knows her way around ships, which surprises some of the cast too.)

Percy had to make his bullets (as opposed to Vex having to buy arrows) because bullets don’t exist in this world. Vex also bought a thousand arrows right before the show started and put them in the bag of holding, and Matt was glad not to have to track it.

Liam thinks the real feelings for Keyleth may have started with the whisper, but does remember intending to keep it very very quiet up until Vax almost died in the Briarwoods arc.

Grog has no idea where/who his mother is. In the herd, you love who you love, have a kid, and teach the kid to fight, and he did not care about her existence until he met Pike and learned what a nurturing relationship could be like.

Matt forgot Grog’s last name was Strongjaw because they didn’t use last names much in the home game. That his dad’s name was Stonejaw was a complete coincidence that wasn’t put together until much later.

One of the members of the Arcana Pansophical was the one who put out the contract on the rakshasa. The idea was that they were working on a portal that connected to the Nine Hells and needed parts for the ritual (either not understanding or caring about the cycle of revenge).

Matt already had the Kima/Allura relationship in his mind from the second session ever in the home game. He had envisioned a past possible fling, but the Underdark arc allowed them to rekindle their relationship. He had no idea that they would become so beloved in the fandom.

Marisha had no idea that Keyleth’s antlers would become so iconic. In the home game, she had an undescribed circlet that was the last relic from her mother, and Kit Buss was the one who drew it as antlers. Kit also created Vex’s feathers, and everyone wove them backwards in time to create them. Kit also created Percy’s four-lens glasses.

Matt designed the Thunderbrands to be allies in the journey in the Underdark, including sending a Thunderbrand family mage along with them--there was a lost family member they were supposed to find. (Instead, VM attacked their wards with magic and Scanlan snuck inside while invisible for no reason, so that plot thread died.) They did find the necklace that belonged to this person.

When Ioun was wounded during the Calamity, her followers had to go into hiding (including Osysa, who is apparently quite old). Matt envisions them as equivalents to modern-day truth societies that emerge, disseminate truth, and go into hiding again. The Slayer’s Take is a cover for this society.

Matt declines to divulge the location of the other Horn of Orcus, as it still exists in the world. :O

CR Stats Break! 10,819 total rolls throughout the campaign, 548 total natural 20s, 497 natural 1s. Most natural 20s: Vax with 107, Percy with 104. Most natural 1s: Vex with 76, Vax with 61. Travis gets great delight out of Laura’s dice’s betrayal.

Episodes 24-48: The Briarwood Arc.

Seeker Asum’s dinner plan (before Vax ruined it) was to find proof that the Briarwoods didn’t actually have the political power to build the bridge over the Searing Channel to Wildemount.

Travis, re: the shaving of half of Grog’s beard--”That was a pretty hot moment.” That kicked off months of Grog trying to get Vax back. “A new world order had started.” However, Vax was too slippery and often frustrated Grog. Liam didn’t realize how furious Travis was until much later. “It was magical, I figured it would just come back! I thought it was tit for tat. I was wrong.”

The woman Percy saw with his natural 20 was just a hunter citizen with her wolves, which was intended as an opportunity to either gain information about the state of the city or (if it had gone poorly), a chance for her to report back to the Briarwoods and given them an advantage over VM.

Liam genuinely thought Vax was going to die during the Briarwood attack. He intended it as a monologue to exit the game. (”The stuff with Kiki had started, but Vax’s world was still 98% his sister.”)

Sam knew Percy’s gun had to be destroyed because he “did crazy shit with it and--weren’t you marking stuff off it all the time? That’s weird!” Everyone enjoys the memory of Percy/Taliesin’s real shock and upset. Sam genuinely hadn’t thought he would be upset at all and was surprised at how mad he was. Taliesin is still upset he never managed to build another one because of how priceless it was. “It was priceless! It was--Two magical elements welded into--oh, Lord!” Matt says the only other way to break the curse would have been to go kill Orthax in the Abyss. Taliesin points out that means Orthax is still out there. Matt: “As far as you know.”

Matt wants the new story to be wholly unique and new. There will be VM choices that will affect the world, but it won’t be a direct continuation.

Taliesin only told Matt that the Briarwoods murdered his family & deliberately kept it as limited as possible. He didn’t know anything about them. (Matt points out it’s good to only write as much as your character knows when creating a backstory.)

Matt: Delilah was a lesser mage working at an academy in the Dwendalian Empire (they were minor nobles), and her husband had gotten sick. She went to find a cure & found one, but by the time she got back, her husband was dead. She was so distraught she began “screaming into the astral sea and one day, a whisper answered back, ‘I can help you,’” which was Vecna. These whispers continued, leading her to one of Vecna’s old laboratories (guarded by an undead creature so old he’d forgotten his own name), where she found the secrets of vampirism in exchange for now owing Vecna her life. However, because of her toying with illegal necromancy, they were pursued, discovered, hunted, arrested, escaped, and hunted again for execution, which is why they fled the empire to the Menagerie Coast, which is where they ran into Ripley who was fleeing her own hunters. They began working together there and had heard about Whitestone, so this is where they began getting them to take their guard down (since Whitestone had gone to such lengths to cut themselves off politically). Taliesin notes that he’d not intended to give them supernatural powers, but during their creation he had thought of a ghost story in New Orleans where survivors of a horrible fire got into a coach and left, even though they shouldn’t have been alive, so he enjoyed the similarities in the tone of their love story.

Vex had feelings for Percy already at this point. “Darling, take the mask off.” She also thinks the darkness attracted her to him more.

Percy didn’t know the voice in his head was real. The smoke in the show was the first time it had ever happened. Liam notes they’d never had any hints of demonic power in the home game. Matt says the demon would never have manifested until Percy confronted someone directly from his revenge list.

Trusting the DM with your stories and mysteries is half the fun, according to Laura. Matt feels it gives him the opportunity to collaborate with the players.

Sam: “The first session [of the new campaign] is just going to be asking Travis why he’s talking like that.”

Keyleth was close to leaving the party at the beginning of this arc. She had issues with some of VM’s moral decisions and felt she had to continue her Aramente.

If Ripley had been left in her cell & was unable to escape, and they had figured out who she was, she would have done everything in her power to convince them she was as used and abused as everyone else (such as Cassandra) until the first opportunity to escape.

The dead de Rolos were left in public in Whitestone after the coup (they were the first to hang from the Sun Tree) in almost the exact same arrangement Matt used for the VM effigies later. VM did not ever fight their skeletons. Percy: “It’s just one more ghost story for that bloody castle. It’s highly appropriate for Whitestone.”

Ashley likes to think Pike’s ability to astral project is because she’s special to Sarenrae, but feels it’s just a reality of her city/film situation.

Matt says Delilah’s ritual actually succeeded, that she just didn’t know what she was looking for. She created the siphon, which was the whole purpose of the ritual. VM might have discovered that it had been successful if they’d spent more time with it. Delilah realized later (after reincarnating into her clone body) that she had fully done her part and Vecna was pleased.

Re: Craven Edge: Travis had no idea what a sentient weapon was and was just entranced with the description of the fancy sword. He was excited when Percy got nervous reading the card and was completely surprised when Matt began talking. “Grog was just enjoying this new friend that helped him shish-kabob people really well.”

Matt intended the acid trap to be broken by strength towards the wall, blocking the acid chutes, or by using another button on the wall Vax didn’t find. No one remembers how they actually got out.

If Scanlan had learned of Kaylie first before she found him, he would have probably run away from the information.

For Taliesin, the final barrel on the List was meant for “Percy’s acknowledgement that the List was not the end,” that this was an unending cycle he was starting. The empty barrel was meant to be the start of a brand new List, that he had started a revenge run that would never end. Percy was glad to kill thousands of people indirectly to kill these five directly--he knew what he was doing the whole time in the creation of these deadly weapons, which is part of why he says so often that Percy is a terrible person. (He clarifies it was never intended for himself.)

Vex got Simon back by flirting with the guards. “There was a lot of winking involved.”

Matt had always intended Cassandra to be the final name on the gun. Matt didn’t know Taliesin had intended the same thing in re: revenge not ending and reveals that if he’d killed those six, another six would have appeared. Tal and Matt are both delighted by this reveal of their minds working in the same direction. (Sam: “I knew that. I knew aaaaaaall that.”)

Marisha hadn’t intended Keyleth’s leadership to begin to emerge here (the roc, the skeleton army), and thinks Keyleth didn’t fully believe it herself until she got the mantle. She does remember the kraken fight as one of the first moments she forced herself to step up and take responsibility. Liam notes her decision to take as many as she could at the end of that fight as a good leadership moment.

Marisha asks Matt what would have happened if she hadn’t rolled a natural 20 on the ziggurat. Matt says the DC was an 18 to resist the impact--if she hadn’t, she’d have gone through, taken a ton of damage, and been thrust into the Shadowfell on the outskirts of Thar Amphala. It would have changed the story if Keyleth had survived the damage to return safely & reveal Vecna’s plot early. However, no one would have even known she’d been gone. Matt realizes belatedly that it would have been horrible to have such an emotional success on this arc only to have a beloved character suddenly disappear without warning (if she’d failed the DC and died in Thar Amphala). When they’d finally gotten to Thar Amphala at the end, there would have been an undead Keyleth to fight.

CR Stats Break! 50,074 damage dealt in total. Most damage taken: 5646, Grog. Most damage dealt: 10,038, Grog.

Episodes 39-83: The Chroma Conclave!

Matt had decided who would die in Emon before the attack. He wanted a central figure (and a powerful ally) to die to emphasize the danger. The most brave, resolute members of the Council were the most likely to throw their lives away.

Liam doesn’t know if Vax would have left VM if the Conclave hadn’t attacked. He would have been conflicted, tap-dancing around why he was there. The prank war with Grog had escalated into head-butting; Vex would have left with Vax if he’d firmly made the decision, even if she didn’t like it.

The attack was just a coincidence with being the same day VM messed with the orbs. It was all long-planned by Raishan. However, the orbs allowed Thordak & Raishan to recognize VM as meddlers & to get information on them earlier than otherwise.

Matt had planned the Conclave attack since Krieg’s original introduction. Coincidentally, if they were still playing at the home game pace of once every six weeks, that would have been this weekend.

Percy was calm in the Grog fight because he knew what was in all the bottles/kilns and because he knew he could give Grog disadvantage on every attack. He would have set him on fire/acid and blinded him as quickly as possible. Liam thinks Grog would have still turned Freddy into paste.

Gilmore was one choice from dying when they found him. If they’d gone for the treasure, he would have been dead by the time they found him. It was meant to be a crux choice in learning what it meant in moments of crisis to choose against your own greed. Liam points out that the last times they had dealt with death at this point were the home game and Vex’s death. They had no idea what the rituals were or really what they entailed; they had no idea what permanence it would have. Every death was rough, but in the beginning it was very unsettling.

Vex found a bunch of love letters from Gilmore and his first boyfriend under Gilmore’s bed. It was good confirmation they were in Gilmore’s actual room. Matt says it was another Marquesian (Markeesian?) boy that he would have had to name on the spot if pressed.

Vesh was “a dangerous entity for the levels you were dealing with at the time.” Vex’s resurrection ritual piqued her interest and would have resulted in her turning her eyes to VM if the Raven Queen had not intervened. Matt: “So much turned on that choice!” Also Matt: “Vesh isn’t necessarily a god, though she likes to say she is and Kashaw believes she is.”

The boon of the Dawn Martyr was a huge part of Pike feeling important in battle/getting the courage to be in the middle, knowing it would be okay if she got knocked out a few times. Grog, tearfully: “It’s not okay!”

Sam asks who the guy she was in love with for the second time. Ashley ignores him. “Oh, I heard him, I’m just not acknowledging it!” Everyone, including me, dies a little inside.

Matt envisions Kevdak getting the Knuckles by chance, by beating the previous owner to a bloody pulp. (Kevdak was not the herd leader at the time.) He had no aspirations beyond taking what he wanted and expanding the herd. Then the Conclave attacked and distracted the guards of Westruun, and he saw this as an opportunity to carve their way into the city. He saw himself bending Umbrasyl to his will later once the herd was stronger.

Ashley interrupts the timeline to ask Matt about what was in Senokir’s box because she can’t stand it anymore. She forgot to tell Matt she wanted to go look for it during the plot break and has been kicking herself the whole time. Matt confirms it was legitimately, 100% his wife’s ashes. “Let this be a lesson to you; not every NPC is out to get you.” Ashley: “I still don’t believe you!”

Liam had planned on multiclassing into Paladin even before the Raven Queen’s tomb. He saw purpose he lacked in Pike, then began to consider it when Taliesin made an offhanded comment about him going cleric. Liam alludes to a rough time in his personal life and talks about an out-of-game meeting where he was very, very upset with how the game had turned that day in the tomb. “It was heavy on top of my heavy, and I was not happy.” He says he wouldn’t change it for anything, now.

Liam asks Matt about Fate-touched. Matt says he knew Liam was going through tough stuff and wanted to give him a little hope in the middle of personal difficulties. He had no idea when it was going to come up--he’d envisioned later in the story when they were dealing with more divinity, that one of the gods then would have commented on it. Liam gets up and briefly bows at Matt’s feet.

Laura asks if there are more cookies and is given permission to get them at the break.

Travis had no idea if he could win solo against Kevdak, but wanted to start the fight that way. He got to face him on his terms, and that was all he wanted. Matt says he could have actually won the fight, but the dice were against him.

Laura doesn’t think she deserved that change in alignment. “All I did was steal a broom! I was gonna give him a whole bunch of dragon scales but he walked away too fast!” Liam is shocked Vex’s alignment changed and Percy’s didn’t; Matt says thoughts don’t necessitate alignment change, but that shooting the kid through the hand put him very, very close. If Laura had stolen the broom for a greater purpose, he wouldn’t have changed her, but it was purely selfish. However, he feels alignment shouldn’t guide roleplay, it should be reactive to the roleplay. “It’s not a big deal.”

Sam reads the letter he wrote to Pike. [Edit: transcribed here.] My fingers wither in anticipation. I can’t keep up. He tells her his age and says he realized his soul would be forever incomplete the moment he met her. It’s a darned good letter and Sam comments on that: “Jesus, this is good.” He compares her gloriously to the sun and asks her to protect Kaylie. “Don’t you see? This whole time, I thought I was chasing a lover, but instead I was chasing a mother for my child. You are the savior for my daughter I could never be. In death, my heart will be beside you in Kaylie.” Sam legitimately tears up reading the end and I do too, a little. Wow. Travis: “Don’t you feel bad for reading that early?” Ashley: “Nope!”

Matt intended certain vestiges for certain players, but didn’t have plans for the Ward, Cabal’s Ruin, or other open-ended vestiges. He didn’t know who would take the Ward. Laura’s still bitter about the wings.

Re: Percy’s death ritual--Taliesin planned to ignore any attempts to call upon a god to help him. He was looking for reasons to come back, but thought it would be a great end to Percy’s character if it panned out that way. Elements of Taliesin’s next character started originally as Percy’s replacement.

Raishan was trying to do an ancient variant of Speak With Dead with Thordak’s corpse. She was concocting an intense version that tortures and forces information that would be true. She wanted the secret to getting rid of her disease and got Opesh’s lair location, then the rest of the information she needed once she arrived at the lair. (Matt confirms the soul curse on Raishan was real, and that she can see truth, which is how she knew Thordak genuinely knew how to cure her.)

Eggs: Thordak was mutating, becoming something new. The Soul Anchor began to change him in the Fire Plane & allowed him to asexually create progeny (”like Jurassic Park!”). They were a new elemental species. “We killed them all!” “As far as you know.” “Oh no!”

CR Stats Break! 86 total Grog rages. 3658 healing from Pike. 474 Vex arrows shot. Percy misfires: 36. DM facepalms: 264. Keyleth beast shapes: 110 (most used: 15 Earth elemental). 136 Scanlan inspirations, and every one of them gold. Vax: 21 one-shot kills. (Tal: “21 friends we never got to make.”)

Episode break, featuring guest stars! (No actual break, which means that bottle of water I drank earlier is now only suffering.) Attending tonight are Darin de Paul (Sprigg), Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (Zahra), Will Friedle (Kashaw), Jason Charles Miller (Garthok), and Noelle Stevenson (Tova).

On the biggest difference between the show & their home games: Mary & Will had never played before, so it was all new to them. Both preferred learning by fire. Darin feels it’s ultimately acting, “yes, and,” and loved it. Noelle points out that people are a lot more invested in her character than other players would be in a home game, and enjoys that feedback. Will agrees, since he never cared about anything like this before playing himself. Darin: “When you play at home, you don’t get fanart.” Mary loves the community & shared world-creating. Jason loves “what happens after” the game and how people can love your character more than you.

Mary was terrified on her first game. Her whole philosophy was, “Don’t kill the team. Don’t kill VM.” However, since she was so comfortable with Laura & Travis, she felt free to make mistakes. Will’s philosophy was to “smile, nod, and shift papers like I know what I’m doing.” At one point, Wil Wheaton told him to “turn undead” & he had no idea clerics could do that. However, when Will and Mary got to go back on the show, they spent time ahead teaming up and figuring out what their bond was, and that’s how their relationship started.

Darin’s first live show on set was the one where Kash kissed Keyleth & he dreamed of being part of that world. Will had no idea what he was doing would matter to people and thought it was tons of fun seeing the huge reaction to the kiss that he hadn’t expected. Zahra decided she would be pregnant right before they came onstage the last time, and Will loved the idea and told her to roll with it.

Jason has the CR theme as his ringtone. He enjoyed the uneasy tension of the truce with VM but expected foul play if the relationship had continued. He was surprised by the instant feedback of Twitch chat (Liam had it open on his phone during his game) being happy he called for an attack of opportunity.

Noelle jokes she wished she’d played a shopkeeper so she could have gotten into her episode earlier, but found it very intense once she arrived. She created Tova as something of a “burner character,” so that she would be okay if she died, but was glad she survived. She didn’t want to step on any big moments for the team and wanted to help them get to their next fight. She was glad she was there for their last scene--it felt important and was cool to see. She laughs about running the bear society from Marisha’s oneshot.

They all comment on the excruciating wait to be introduced in each episode. Will comments on the reality of being a guest star and being okay with dying for that reason, but also being terrified they might take someone from VM with them.

Will, Brian, and Mary had a death pool going for the final fight.

Sprigg’s theme of redemption was intense and unintended. Brian comments on Sprigg existing 37 years ago in the game with Matt’s mom; Darin loves that he intended him to be a Fagan character who steals everything, but ended up having a wonderful exit while arguing with Ioun. Darin loves funny, tragic characters and loves that Sprigg got to have his hero moment.

Mary mentions how surprising emotional moments could be (specifically mentioning Vex’s resurrection) and the complete investing of yourself in your character. Mary points out that she’s not a writer--this is one thing she has created herself, and she’s very proud of it. Darin: “It’s as special for all of us as it is for you.” Jason had someone yell, “We love you, Garthok!” at a concert. Will knew Matt from Thundercats and everyone else a little, and he loved the games, but he treasures the friendships he developed with the game’s players more. Darin deeply treasures the moment he had with Marisha in his game.

Brian remembers Darin taking pictures of the TM set the first time he saw it.

Will: “A good story is a good story.” Noelle: “There’s a universal nature to D&D.” The first time Mary met Noelle, Mary was wearing a d20 necklace and they bonded over both playing tiefling warlocks. Brian loves the idea of mainstream entertainment being about creation, not just observing.

Episodes 84-99: Taryon Darrington!

If Revivify had been successful, would Scanlan still have left? Yes--it was the act of dying, not really the circumstances of waking up, that put him over the edge. “There was a long buildup to him leaving.” He felt unloved & between Kaylie and the drugs, and the terrible streak of loss/dying, he felt nothing was going well. The prank on waking up felt poorly timed, but he admits he probably would have done the same to someone else if the situation had been reversed.

VM could have killed the kraken, but the lodestone sources that maintain the Water Elemental rift & keep Vesrah aloft would have lost power over the next five or so years. They’d have had to find another kraken & lure it back to preserve the city and the rift.

Pike was able to say most of what she wanted to say at Scanlan’s leaving in follow-up games, but Ashley as a player was sad that she was gone when he left and came back to “a new guy. I wanted to play with Scanlan!” Once Pike got up the courage, she was able to say what she wanted, but doesn’t feel she would have changed his mind at the time. Sam: “She absolutely could have stopped me. She was the only one.” Sam notes the rest of VM (esp. Vex) did persuade him to go with Kaylie instead of alone.

If Keyleth had failed her Aramente, she would not have been allowed to try again. She would have been allowed to join a council, and someone else would have gone to the Aramente instead. It’s not blood-determined--someone else worthy could have gone instead.

Tary’s wealth had little effect on tempering Vex’s greed. “Once she got money, then she mellowed.” Sam: “That’s how rich people work. They get money, and then they stop.”

(Funny aside where Brian forgets who Hotis is, confuses the rakshasa with the Pit Fiend, and Matt immediately pulls out the Pit Fiend’s name as Utugash.)

By the next time Hotis would have come back, the campaign would have been over (i.e. Vax would be gone), and his rage would have turned towards Ashley.

Vax’s Invisibility Ring was the only reason Tova survived.

Sam had no exact plan for Scanlan’s return, but only intended Tary to last one or two sessions before dying. However, “Tary was so dashing and charming and everyone fell in love with him instantly” that he lasted a little longer. Scanlan went back to Ank’harel for revenge, but it took some time for the two guys who wronged him to come back to town. He took their antiques counterfeiter away from them, publicly shamed them via the Meat Man, and chased them out of town. He and Matt did a whole series of rolls in which he identified the counterfeiter, chased them out, and created this small power vacuum, and when Matt asked what he wanted to do, he decided to step into the role himself.

The soulstones from Dis weren’t meant for much besides the temporary rush right before battle. (This makes me think of a really creepy 5-hour energy drink.) Vex still has one in her inventory.

Percy never wanted to kill Scanlan after the scrying eye; he wanted to sneak in, cripple him, take all his stuff, and tell him to never come back again. Percy didn’t like that he’d taken a vestige and other stuff from the house and felt he’d not deserved any of it. (Liam: “Neutral good, folks. Neutral good.”)

None of Grog’s lady friends were “the one that got away.” Liam, then Sam and Tal shortly after: “Nymph! Nymph! Nymph! Nymph!” and Travis reveals they didn’t sleep together. Grog was very meek and intimidated; Matt was mostly trying to make Travis uncomfortable in his own kitchen. Travis: “He just wanted to let you wonder for five years.” “Who, Grog or Matt?” “Yes.”

Laura reveals Vex & Percy briefly broke up during the break, then married each other quietly in front of the Sun Tree with Trinket.

Feywild theater: if you’re found listening to the theater without being a member, they converge on you to make you a member (e.g. pull out your soul and force you into it). However, there are members that have sought it out by choice.

Vex & Percy were out on a loch, talking about marriage and not wanting to be Vax & Keyleth, and decided to just go for it. The priest from one of the temples performed the ceremony. Tary knew first because he was in the same house. Liam: “Probably one of the biggest heartbreaks of the entire campaign. If there had been any other circumstances, [Vax] would not have known what to do with himself.”

Scanlan never heard Pike talking into the earring. :( However, he did do a fair amount of praying to Sarenrae “on his Aramente.”

No one found Scanlan during the break. Ashley and Grog were the only ones who seriously searched for him (everyone else decided to give him his space), but they didn’t look far enough, only staying in Emon & the surrounding area.

Scanlan never shot the gun except for that one time at the end.

Laura doesn’t even remember telling Vax not to get married without her. Va wouldn’t have been bitter or angry, just would have asked “why.” Liam says it would have been different if Vex had not specifically said not to get married without her. Laura’s genuine agony gets even worse for not remembering it. “I’m a terrible person!”

Marisha points out it’s another facet of Keyleth’s struggle to not waste time on inaction. “If you love someone, go marry them RIGHT NOW.”

Keyleth feels the Spire best serves the world by being in her hands right now, but has considered donating it to Melora’s followers after death.

Ashley would have enjoyed playing an evil Pike if the Trickfoot curse had been real. “That would have been fun!”

Matt: if Tary had not rolled well on his final roll, it would have been the end of the Darrington family unit: “an unfixable divide between him and his father. His mother would have had to choose; it would have sundered the whole family.” Matt had actually forgotten about the fate die. “You can’t call it a fate die more than that fucking moment!”

Laura sidelines to ask about Vax’s favor to the hag. Matt had had plans for it, but by the time it came time for him to try to use it, Vax already belonged to the Raven Queen and she wouldn’t try to interfere with that. “It’s a lost investment.”

Grog was not angry at Scanlan at all until he came back, disguised, with a new barbarian at his side. “An idiot, a barbarian, a half-ass imitation of Grog. I was ready to pick Scanlan up and smash his brain into jelly.”

CR Stats Break! Most-cast spell per character. Keyleth: 43, Transport Via Plants. Scanlan: 47, Healing Word. Percy: 27, Hex. Vex: 80, Hunter’s Mark. Vax: 25, Lay on Hands. Pike: 40, Guiding Bolt Up the Butt? No, Cure Wounds. (Aw.) Grog: 18, Enlarge.

Episodes 100-115: Vecna!

They could have acquired boons from each deity they tried to talk to, but others they didn’t have a strong connection to would have required research, searching, and time Vecna would have used against them. If they’d gone for a fourth deity, Vasselheim would have been destroyed and Vecna would have begun to understand his powers after achieving his miracle. If they’d gone for a fourth trammel, his power would have spread beyond the oceans. Matt thinks they struck the perfect balance.

Scanlan stayed so long in Ank’harel because he had to wait for the two guys to return, and while he waited he got a taste for “crime power!” and decided to stay. “Tastes like pleather.”

A lot of Pike’s feelings started with the letter, but she and Scanlan did flirt slightly in the home game. She didn’t take it seriously because she didn’t think he was serious until the letter. “That letter is very intense.” When he left, she realized how much she cared for him and missed him, and when he came back she thought he was more mature and maybe the time had passed. It was a slow climb after the letter.

Matt declines to say where Vecna keeps his phylactery. “That’s not campaign information, that’s world LORE information!”

Vex took the name “de Rolo” after her marriage.

When the Knuckles were resonating, it was because they were close to the surface from which they were carved (the earth titan), and because they had a structural extra bonus to sieging the titan from the inside. They could have slowed down the titan by attacking its legs, but that would have alerted Thar Amphala and they’d have had an uphill fight the rest of the way. They had lots of options to stop the titan.

Percy was not troubled by Silas’s escape. He’d transferred that angst to other people and felt at that point they could handle him if he attacked again. “It was never about Silas.”

The Death Knight was the nameless servant that had been keeping Vecna’s laboratory for countless centuries, rewarded for his service.

If he could have, Vax would have said goodbye to (at least) his father, Korrin, Gilmore, and Velora.

Marisha feels Keyleth was at last ready to lead her people by the end of the campaign. She had made her peace and was ready to be done. Brian: “Heavy is the head that wears the antlers.”

Matt guessed what Sam wanted to do with his level 9 Wish spell in the final battle. Sam had asked him about its limitations ahead of the game, and he tried to answer in general terms in case he was wrong. He didn’t realize the exact implications until the moment Sam used it as Counterspell. It’s one of Matt’s favorite moments of the game. Sam: “Great. Awful.”

Scanlan can’t reconcile his immense power with being unable to save his friend. He feels he ultimately failed, but suspects that in his older age he will realize it’s okay to fail & you don’t have to succeed at everything to make a difference in people’s lives. He’ll try to be a hero for his wife & his kid, and he still might use Wish every once in a while to see if he can get a message to or from old Vax. Liam: “Vax would never have seen that as a failure.”

Matt: “I imagine there are a lot of stories told about Vax’ildan and what he did.” Sam: “It’s okay not to be the best at everything. It’s okay to do what you do.”

The opposite side of Entropis had ancient holy relics that had been destroyed (the site of the seed that ascended Vecna).

Percy wanted to save Vax by selling his soul, get the punishment he deserved, and use the contract to get something out of his certainty he was going somewhere awful anyway. Then the moment of uncertainty crept in and he wondered why he kept making all these awful deals. Matt says that was one of his favorite Percy moments of the whole show & that he loved how he could see him break.

Matt says both Percy and Scanlan could have gotten the Wish off in a way that could have possibly circumvented the RQ’s will, but Liam had no idea how that would have played out, because in his mind the only way he could live was if the RQ gave him her blessing.

Re: reading--Grog just wanted to get smarter.

Syldor was grieved at Vax’s death & regrets the treatment of his children--he’s been spending a lot of his life trying to reconcile the choices he made in how he raised them with the pride at what his children have accomplished. “He’s learned a lot of lessons” and is doing the best he can do improve acceptance of outsiders in Syngorn society.

Vex feels she made peace with Syldor after having five kids with Percy and beginning to understand what having children means--it became important in a different way to reach out to Syldor.

Matt feels Vax is able to reconnect with his mother occasionally, but also prevents loneliness for the small mortal sliver left in the RQ & doing her will. He declines to explain the ethereal further.

The titan could only really be damaged from the inside.

Keyleth tries Speaks with Animals on the large raven that visits after a long, long time, without expecting the results she hopes for. “Almost better to keep the illusion that it’s Vax, rather than have the confirmation that he was never there at all.”

The Bag of Holding contained at the end: “silverware, candles, caltrops, handcuffs, stones, dried poo, some armor, the big black sapphire, bottles of wine. It was like a busted-up Home Depot.”

Liam declines to answer how Vax felt after his death, but in the moment itself he felt very heavy and very full. He knew his sister was taken care of.

FINALLY. Pike’s other love interest was....drumroll... “For a very long time, it was Percy.” She felt that through her faith and the light she had from Sarenrae that he was a marked man, and she did so much thinking and praying for his soul that everything became very confusing for her. She feels now, though, that it never would have worked out between them, and that somehow in the end, “...it was always Scanlan.” Tal: “He was oblivious, man.” Sam: “Even Tary was in love with that guy! He’s the worst!”

Favorite moments. Travis: "Dropping on Kevdak.” Liam: “Saying goodbye.” Marisha: “Cherry blossoms, and the tree.” Sam: “Cows.” Laura: “Talking to Trinket for the first time.” Sam: “Trying to kill Trinket for the first time.” Liam: “Gilmore stabbing me.” Marisha: “The hanging tree.” Taliesin: "Letting go when Ripley shot me. Realizing that Percy was in love with Vex. I’d never had a PC turn on me like that before that moment.”

Sam realized at the end that while he’d always imagined Scanlan spending his days telling their stories grandly, his favorite moments in the end were just healing his friends, impressing his friends and making them laugh. Marisha thinks about the cannonball contest, and Liam loved that Sam played the whole last fight against the gods with one hand held behind his back. Matt thanks Sam for playing bards to their full power. Ashley thinks about her first game, and how personal it was. How it changed her life.

Matt finds it strange that he’s a 35-year-old man who has spent his whole life trying to make something, and who genuinely believes the greatest thing he has ever accomplished is this story he’s told with his friends.

#critical role #critical role spoilers #matt mercer #talks machina #kind of #very very very VERY long post #cr spoilers #vox machina #epilogue of sorts

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evils--reign · 7 years

Text

* mentality !!

TRIGGER WARNINGS ; mentioned in this post are references to child abuse ( both mental, emotional and physical ), sexual abuse ( marital rape ), anxiety, an eating disorder ( anorexia nervosa ) , violence and suicidal thoughts ( depression ), infertility, and an undiagnosed case of dissociative identity disorder ( multiple personality disorder )

regina is not mentally stable, especially in her youth, her marriage and, predominantly, her reign as queen. none of this information condones what regina did, the people she killed and/or terrorised - but it does explain a lot of her habits and why she does/says the things she does/says.

( SOCIAL SKILLS )

in “regina rising”, there are passages that imply regina was not permitted to interact with other children her age, let alone children of a lesser class.

“my mother and i had gone to town, and a pair of little girls had invited me to play marbles. my mother had scooted me past before i’d even been able to answer, and when i’d begged her to let me play one little game, she’d said - we’d had more important things to do - only i couldn’t think of a single thing we’d done that afternoon that was important at all”

it’s imperative for a child’s development to spend time with children their own age. more than that, it confirms that regina didn’t have a single friend until she was sixteen years old ( and she later learns that that friend was actually spying on her for cora ) - regina isn’t very good at making friends, even during the curse where the evil queen didn’t hang over her head. this explains why - because she’d never really had one that she made herself ( until maleficent ).

in season four, ( though i do not portray anything beyond season three ), emma mentions to regina about being friends, and regina was genuinely surprised at the suggestion. at first, it might seem to be because of their history but it makes sense that regina would be confused by the idea of friendship with a supposed enemy.

friendship in general is a concept regina is unfamiliar with. she has severe trust issues, which will be discussed, but it doesn’t help that after being kept from making any by her mother, she was then trapped inside a castle as the queen. befriending anyone then would have been entirely out of the question, because any friend of the queen was just that - a friend of the queen.

( ABUSE )

in season one, “the stable boy”, cora restrains regina with leather straps and raises her in the air until regina submits, begging “i’ll be good” as she cries. in “regina rising”, cora locks her daughter in her room with her magic and regina expects to be there for far longer than just an hour. cora also verbally belittles regina’s attire, her figure, her eating habits and her talents. cora instills in regina the idea that she needs to watch what she eats otherwise she will put on weight, and that would be unacceptable in cora’s eyes. later in the book, she then slaps regina across the face, viciously.

“i reached for the biscuits, but my mother slapped my hand - you’ve had enough, regina ‘ she said, almost sweetly. - i’ve only had one. i’d like another - i sounded like a little girl, and i hated myself for it.”

“ - i’ve heard quite enough from you, regina - my mother narrowed her eyes and waved her hand. i covered my ears and steeled myself as best i could for whatever terrible magic she had in store for me** …….. the sash that had been tied around my waist loosened. after floating before my eyes for a second or two, it snapped straight and wrapped itself over my mouth and around my head.”

“the words were barely out of my mouth when her hand crashed against my cheek. i held back a whimper and stood still.”

** - clearly, regina is used to cora using her magic against her as a form of discipline. she comes to expect that it will hurt her and it surprises when it doesn’t initially.

in another passage, regina is anxious to show cora her progress at art. when cora sees regina’s painting, she says “well, we cannot be good at everything” - in another chapter, young regina sings and dances with village children and cora later comments that she cannot sing. while not necessarily as damaging as previous put-downs, it does make regina feel insecure and thus, i class it as abuse.

while it is not touched upon in either the show itself of “regina rising”, regina is eventually married off to king leopold who is more than three times her age. regina is only seventeen when she saves snow white and it isn’t long after that she is forced to marry the king. in the show, leopold is originally interpreted as a jovial character, a kind king and loving father. but he is still a king, and he is still much, much older than his new wife. it is not outside the realm of possibility that regina was forced to endure sexual acts with her lord husband.

in “regina rising”, cora attempts to force regina’s hand at courting an older “prince” named benjamin who had already been through two marriages. it is implied in the books that regina’s youth would suit benjamin well and also supports the implication that young wives were often forced to please their husbands.

it is not confirmed, but i will be writing it as if it were - regina suffered through marital rape in the early years of her marriage to king leopold. she never told snow white, and would not tell her even now.

( ANXIETY/TRUST ISSUES )

regina, as a young girl, craved cora’s approval more than anything. she was trained and conditioned to cora’s expectations and quickly learned that nothing she did would ever live up to them. until “regina rising”, when she is sixteen years old, regina is submissive to cora’s every whim and fancy. she suffers from panic attacks when she knows that she has done something that would upset her mother but has since learned to hide them until she is safely hidden in her room. in “regina rising”, it is mentioned that regina digs her nails in to the palms of her hands and at one point, wishes that the marks would bleed. this is caused by loss of control and her attempts at regaining it.

it is a subtle habit that she has not broken. while not as present in storybrooke as it is in the enchanted forest, if she feels the need to, she will clench her fists until her palms bleed, or her skin is marked red.

because of past experiences, regina has come to expect the worst from people. it’s why she does not trust as easily as she used to when she was younger. in “regina rising”, the story includes a girl named claire fairchild who regina befriended, her first friend, whom regina later learned was playing her all along. she was really there at cora’s request, and cora even stole claire’s heart at some point in the story. regina was so utterly heartbroken by the betrayal and she even questioned her own naivety.

it was this act that prompted regina to commit her first grey deed that belied her then pure heart. regina made a deal with cora in exchange for claire’s heart to be returned to her, and a forgetting potion. she then instructed claire to read a note that told her about her impending wedding before cora gave her heart heart back, and then slipped prince benjamin a forgetting potion. she then lied to him, telling him that he was to wed claire.

this was regina’s first glimpse of true betrayal and it leads in to her meeting snow white in the show. though regina’s trust in others her age and those older than her is fleeting, she has no reason not to trust children until she meets snow again. with her already questioning her faith in other people, snow’s betrayal and the subsequent death of daniel as a result immediately broke what was left.

( EATING DISORDER )

anorexia nervosa is characterised by persistent energy intake restriction, intense fear of gaining weight and disturbance in self perceived weight or shape ( link ). as mentioned above, cora belittles regina’s eating habits and in later chapters of “regina rising”, regina catches herself limiting her food intake as a result. it does not go in to detail in either the show or the book, so i have taken some liberties with this aspect of regina’s mentality.

in season three, “quite a common fairy” ( referenced again later ), regina sits at a banquet table, alone. the table is full of food but regina only drinks out of a goblet. though it is a lot of food for one person, it doesn’t actually look like she’s attempted to eat any of it. maybe she’s just not hungry? in the back of her mind, cora will always be there telling her that she’s had enough to eat and that she should watch her figure, especially now that she’s officially the queen.

in storybrooke, she seems to have overcome this disorder, no doubt in part thanks to her newfound freedom in a new world. in season two, “welcome to storybrooke”, it’s reaching a bit high but she honest to god looks like she’s in love with the pancakes granny serves at the diner. though it is not as prevalent in storybrooke as it was in the enchanted forest, she does sometimes still catch herself counting calories or pushing food around her plate.

i do want to point out that her eating disorder is not so severe as to make her sick or skeletal. cora would have never allowed her to show such weakness. but her constantly thinking about what she’s eating does affect her to the point where she has gone without eating every now and then. she also forgets to eat as the mayor in storybrooke and has to be reminded.

( DEPRESSION )

in season three, “quite a common fairy”, regina falls from her balcony and is then saved by tinkerbell, who later asks regina why she jumped. regina laughs and plays it off as if she fell, but tinkerbell doesn’t believe regina’s story one bit. and regina stops laughing.

there is a massive gap between young regina the newly crowned queen, and queen regina the reigning monarch, who has the king killed and a hunter sent after snow white. what turned regina from the docile queen resigned to her fate into the vengeful monster desperate for freedom? i have not yet decided what to headcanon for this.

there was a fanfic i read once where regina had made a deal with rumplestiltskin. i think the deal was that he promised her that she would be happy one day, and she wouldn’t try to kill herself. this deal is a brilliant theory and i’ve decided to incorporate it in to regina’s backstory. let’s look at all the things so far that could contribute to regina contemplating suicide.

she’s abused as a child

she’s forced in to marriage

and then sexually abused

she has to play mother to a child only six years younger than her

that child broke a promise, that resulted in the below

her true love was killed right in front of her

she was trapped by a spell of her mother’s that prevented her from leaving the castle before she was married

regina was not happy. she was miserable and at some point, she thought the only way out was dying. at least then she would be with daniel. but rumplestiltskin needed her to cast his curse, because she was apparently the only one capable of casting it ( i have a headcanon about why ) - maybe he genuinely cared about her well-being, but in my opinion, he only cared about himself and he didn’t want to wait another few centuries to find someone who could take him to the land without magic. so he did the only thing he could do ; strike a deal. regina wanted to know if living was worth it, so she asked him to swear that she would be happy in the future. he swore, and she agreed to not kill herself.

but that didn’t stop her from hating every minute of her life as the queen, as leopold’s wife and as snow white’s mother. and with snow white getting everything that she wanted, regina’s resentment only grew. eventually, when she saw a way out, she took it without hesitation. that way out was the genie and the death of the king.

( DISSOCIATIVE IDENTITY DISORDER )

also known as multiple personality disorder. i have mentioned in previous posts that regina has a lot ( and i mean, a lot ) of layers. there are so many different aspects of her character and several different personalities where most are completely different to others. it could just be character development, but i have decided to go a different route. the below points are all experiences that come with dissociative identity disorder ( link )

DEPERSONALIZATION. this is a sense of being detached from one’s body and is often referred to as an “out-of-body” experience.

DEREALIZATION. this is the feeling that the world is not real or looking foggy or far away.

AMNESIA. this is the failure to recall significant personal information that is so extensive it cannot be blamed on ordinary forgetfulness. there can also be micro-amnesias where the discussion engaged in is not remembered, or the content of a meaningful conversation is forgotten from one second to the next.

IDENTITY CONFUSION or IDENTITY ALTERATION. both of these involve a sense of confusion about who a person is. an example of identity confusion is when a person has trouble defining the things that interest them in life, or their political or religious or social viewpoints, or their sexual orientation, or their professional ambitions. in addition to these apparent alterations, the person may experience distortions in time, place, and situation.

it first started when daniel died. depersonalization - an out of body experience, feeling detached from one’s body. she watched in horror as daniel’s heart was ripped out and then crushed in to dust. at first, she didn’t understand. it happened so fast but to regina, it happened in slow motion. then daniel fell and regina screamed, and she came too.

it happened frequently after that. in season one, “the stable boy”, at the end of the episode regina is being fitted for her dress. if you look at her, she looks completely out of it. as if she’s not really there. she’s not really paying attention to what snow white is telling her until she mentions telling cora about regina and daniel. something snaps in her then. we get the first glimpse of what will one day be the evil queen in that scene where she looks away from snow white, processes what was said, and then transforms on screen ( in the commentary, you can hear adam and eddy talk about it with lana, about how that’s how she gets in to character usually off-scene ) - when regina walks away, she is a completely different person. it doesn’t last long, but it is a glimpse.

it happened the most during her marriage to the king. she would disassociate herself with her surroundings. it was almost automatic, the way she would smile and the things she would say. no one paid her much attention beyond being a pretty thing on leopold’s arm, so it wasn’t out of the ordinary for her to stare of in to space, completely lost.

the amnesia aspect also comes in to play here, as well as at some points in time during her reign as the evil queen. but during her time in leopold’s bed, she would often lose track of time and after long enough, she started to black out what she would go through. she remembers the first few nights, but anything after that, she doesn’t recall.

as the evil queen, she found it difficult to remember faces and names, especially of those she victimised ( re. season three, “snow drifts” and “there’s not place like home” - she didn’t even remember having held marion as the evil queen, or when she met her again in the diner )

identity confusion and identity alteration come in to play with the evil queen. though i have not seen the episodes themselves, season six includes the evil queen as a separate entity to regina mills. to regina, the evil queen is someone else entirely, and not really a part of who she is. it is my opinion that the real regina lost sight of who she really was and what she believed in, and the evil queen was born. nurtured by both rumplestiltskin and her growing resentment of snow white, the evil queen came to life the moment leopold died. regina is a completely different person from before his death compared to after it. she’s not nearly as deranged as she is in later years, but that comes with time and isolation and addiction ( magic )…

magic absolutely is an addiction. once you learn it, you can’t let it go without serious consequences. it has always been my headcanon that if you were born with magic, you cannot survive without it. for example, rumplestiltskin and cora were both given magic. but regina, emma and zelena were born with it. despite canon information, it is my opinion that if cut off from their magic or if their magic is taken away from them, born magic-users would get very sick and could possibly die. it is a part of who they are. taking it away is as good as taking away their soul. it can be locked inside you, and once it is released it is near impossible to put back away.

it’s affect on you depends on how you use it, and with rumplestiltskin feeding the evil queen’s magic with his own influence, it heightened regina’s reliance on it.

during the curse, magic still existed in storybrooke, regina just did not have access to it. it was still there though, and it was enough to keep regina’s addiction sated.

after regina’s failed execution and the subsequent result ( her inability to directly hurt snow white ), regina’s desperation only grew stronger and so the queen’s delusion grew to match. regina does remember most of her actions as the evil queen, but some things she completely forgets until she sees it in her sleep and she wakes up screaming.

though she does originally feel like the evil queen is a completely different person, that does not mean that she denies responsibility for her. she knows what she’s done but she justifies it as, in a nutshell, karma.

when the curse is cast, regina is finally free of the enchanted forest, the crown and the queen. it’s easy to slip in to the role of mayor mills and completely ignore the monster that still resided under her skin. she put the evil queen aside, and didn’t think about her until the book came to be, henry started to pull away, and emma swan came to storybrooke.

this is where regina first started to dig her nails in to her palms again. it was the only way she could think of to control her more malicious instincts and she didn’t want to release the evil queen when she had other options to consider.

regina has a temper that she was both born with, and built on as the evil queen. she’d always been stubborn, and she had always been hot-headed, but in her youth she was very submissive, and so she bit her tongue. as the queen, she didn’t have to, so she took advantage of that. in storybrooke, she had to relearn how to control herself otherwise she would completely lose it.

** in my characterisation, my main storybrooke verse regina has not yet come to terms with the evil queen and has not accepted her as a part of herself. until she does that, the evil queen is another entity sharing regina’s body that she has difficulty controlling.

EXTRA INFORMATION. as mentioned in my rules, regina took an infertility potion not long after marrying the king, to ensure she did not fall pregnant with an unwanted baby. this is canon information for both main verse one and main verse two. regina does not like to talk about it and will become hostile if it is ever mentioned to her, the possibility of her ever having a biological child. in “regina’s rising”, cora mentions only wanting the best for regina, and then tells her that she will understand when she has her on children. regina then starts to think about it and decides that she would rather marry an older prince than have a child, because she is absolutely terrified about what kind of mother she would be. obviously, she overcomes that fear when she adopts henry. but there is still that inkling of insecurity and self-doubt when she takes henry back to the adoption agency and considers giving him up - not just because she learns he’s the savior’s son, but because she doesn’t think she has it in her to raise him right. later, henry’s continued insistence that she is nothing but evil and his manipulations of her dredge up all that insecurity and it hurts her deeply.

#aesthetic * isms . don’t apologise for the way you chose to survive #* long post /#* meta post /#* trigger warning /#misc * reference . something to think about

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