Febuwhump Day 2: “i can’t take this anymore” Alt: hostage situation
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Characters/Ship: Sanson Smyth/Guydelot Thildonnet
Triggers/Content warnings:
“You’d best hold on to this,” Sanson’d said, handing him Gylbarde’s journal. In case it all turned out to be a trap after all, he hadn’t said, too preoccupied in hurrying to answer Nourval’s call. And Guydelot’d watched him go, relieved to know the Warrior of Light would have some backup - sure, his sister bard was a force to be reckoned with, but they’d seen for themselves just how many allies Nourval had to call on. Two were a damn sight better than one, and Sanson would be more than fine with the Warrior of Light there to give Nourval’s cronies a proper thrashing.
Febuwhump Day 1: Mind Control
Fandom: Final Fantasy XIV
Characters/Ship: Sanson Smyth/Guydelot Thildonnet
Triggers/Content warnings: Mind control (…obviously) in the form of tempering
When he was thirteen years old, Guydelot watched some poor fool who’d been tempered by Garuda put to death. Ugly business. He’d come stumbling in out of Coerthas laughing and raving, howling to the sky about his “lady,” and… Guydelot remembered the looks of grim helplessness that passed between the guards on watch. None of them noticed him: few people did; Guydelot was an expert even then at avoiding being found when he didn’t care to be - otherwise they might have sent him away before driving a lance through the poor mad bastard’s heart. He’d had nightmares about it for weeks. Sometimes he still did.
I’m taking a stab at doing an angst-themed daily prompt... thing during the month of February (specifically this one). Chances are pretty solid most if not all of them will turn out to be FFXIV-flavored, particularly Sanson/Guydelot flavored, since I have a continuing hyperfixation on the BRD quests (though I won’t say it’s impossible that some of these may turn out to be Steph-related).
Is that... something y’all would like to see cross-posted here? Do we want some bard boys angst here?
SE: So here’s this pair of random background bards who will never be seen again; they do not have names or, really, personalities. One of them never even speaks.
Me: Oh cool they’re mine now; they have lore and extensive backgrounds
SE: Wait-
Me: Nope you dropped them they’re mine no take-backs
I sat down and just blitzed the MCH quests back to back today (like I knew I would) and let me tell you what, there is nothing that brings me greater joy than my beautiful gun- (and wrench-) toting children.
The good news is my FFXIV hyperfixation is alive and well. The bad news is it’s all tied up in the BRD quest NPCs instead of Stephanivien, where it could at least be productive.
The other good news is at least I haven’t made any RP blogs for these muses that will inevitably burn out.
The good news is my FFXIV hyperfixation is alive and well. The bad news is it’s all tied up in the BRD quest NPCs instead of Stephanivien, where it could at least be productive.
The other good news is at least I haven’t made any RP blogs for these muses that will inevitably burn out.
“listen to your big brother and make some friends.” For Steph and either Chlode or Francel. Gimme brothers
Scarcely out of mourning, Francel looks nearly a corpse himself, pale and drawn - as though losing Chlodebaimt has killed something within him, as well, some vital piece of his soul. Never the brightest flame in their family, his brother’s death has left Francel a guttering ember, sure soon to flicker out and go cold.
Not the ideal commander to send to Skyfire Locks. Left frigid by the Calamity and remote by design, the Locks make for a dismally lonesome posting… and they are within a day’s march of the Steel Vigil. Or what remains of it.
Mama wept when Francel insisted upon it.
There has been, Stephanivien decides, enough weeping. If he cannot be merry, at the very least, he supposes they’ll all be best served by some cheer: it will not do to send Francel off as though his own family questions his aptitude. ‘Tis more than clear now that the gentlest of his siblings will not be swayed from this course - stubbornness befitting a man of House Haillenarte, after all, dismaying though the cause itself may be.
And so he smiles, ignoring Francel’s look of wariness at his approach (for nearly all the family has tried to persuade him to remain home, to seek a safer post, to not throw his own life after Chlode’s, to be less determined to follow in Chlodebaimt’s ill-fated footsteps), and Stephanvien claps a hand on his youngest brother’s shoulder with a grin.
“To the highlands for you, then, is it?”
Caution, like a rabbit sensing a snare. “The Locks require a new commander, after-”
“After the previous commander’s retirement, of course! Of course.” The man couldn’t bear to keep the post, after learning what had befallen the Vigils. So close, so close, and unable to help, unable to save more lives, too snowbound and blizzard-blinded to reach either fortress in time. “But the garrison is still much unchanged, of course, and do you know what that means?”
“I… I hesitate to hazard a guess.”
Stephanivien grins. “Why, friends, of course! You’ll need to make friends among the soldiers and suttlers of the Locks, dear brother, and not merely your own men, but those of the other settlements in the area. Lord Haurchefant holds the command at Camp Dragonhead - I’ve no doubt he’ll introduce you to his men, as well.”
Something like life surfaces in Francel’s deep-shadowed blue eyes, and for the first time in what feels like years, ages, eternities, he smiles.
The crypt was silent and empty at last, the last of the mourners gone - doubtless retiring to the Haillenarte manor to recount tales of the departed: the late Count de Haillenarte, at peace at last. Long-since replaced in his duties by his well-suited son Baurendouin, the old man had been withering away for several long years now; ‘twas only a matter of time… though in his youth he had been nigh-infamously vigorous, to say nothing of his popularity among the many fair maidens of Ishgard. The true surprise, in the end, was that the man had sired only one bastard.
That you know of, Ciceroix corrected himself, sighing into the silence of the empty crypt: in the end his father hadn’t even publicly acknowledged him; who was to say there weren’t a half-dozen or more Greystones out there with Haillenarte blood in their veins? Stones in the rose garden, so to speak, siblings he may never meet. ‘Twas but one of the many things he wished he’d thought to ask before the end.
He rested a hand on the foot of his father’s stone likeness. The sculptors had done a fine job of capturing the man as he’d been in his prime, not as the wasted husk he’d become these last few years - the father Ciceroix remembered from his boyhood, though of course he’d not known his mysterious benefactor was his father, not at the time, not until years later. Merely a kind nobleman, a lord from one of the four High Houses, charitable enough to pay for a promising young lad’s schooling and knightly training, as well as housing for both himself and his mother. As a child, oblivious to the ways of the world, he’d thought nothing of it.
Later, the truth came out: he was a bastard son of House Haillenarte, but no one was to know of it, lest he - and his mother - be stripped of all they’d been given. Would the late Count have acted on his threat? All he knew of the man suggested he’d never be so cruel, but it was a threat that kept Ciceroix’s lips sealed.
But it did not keep others from knowing.
“I’d thought to see you at the ceremony.” The tone was clipped, moderated; Ciceroix could not recall ever hearing his half-brother sound half so polite, and still the crypt seemed colder. He let his hand slide off of the effigy’s foot, gathering his nerve before daring to turn, slowly, to face Baurendouin. Count Baurendouin.
“I cannot imagine why,” he replied, conversational, as lightly as could be managed under the circumstances. “As I recall, you last threatened to see me hurled from the Steps of Faith if ever you saw me in the city again. Brother.”
Baurendouin had the decency to look abashed for half a second - but only half, before indignation reclaimed him. “You owed him some respect, wastrel. He saw to your welfare, your education-”
“And my mother’s burial? No, wait, perhaps I misremember. He called her a ‘misguided harlot,’ said he hoped the Fury would have mercy on her soul, and slammed the door in my face.” Ciceroix nodded as though to himself, walling away the pain of the memory beyond a facade of indifference. “I had to sell my armor to pay for her burial... though I suppose you’re right,” he added, as Baurendouin’s face grew redder. “He did pay for the armor, so in a roundabout way-”
“-you disrespect the man while standing over his crypt.” The newly-annointed Count de Haillenarte fumed, slamming his own fist down upon his father’s stone effigy; if the blow hurt his hand, he gave no sign of it. “You, who took the archery training he paid for you to receive and became an adventurer; you, who took the noble features he gave you and used them to whore yourself to every gutter-dweller who captured your fancy-”
“We’ve been over this. There are two of them. Two. Two lovers, Baurendouin; is counting beneath you now?”
“You,” the young Count spat, “You have the nerve to come crawling back to the city with my father’s body not yet cold, and for what? What do you want, Ciceroix?”
The chance to speak with him one last time, he didn’t say, his blue eyes (so very like yours, brother dear; so very like his) drifting toward the effigy’s face; the wry little twist to his father’s lips exactly as he remembered. How strange to see a face so like his own carved eternally in stone... and to know that beneath it lay all the answers to the questions he never had the nerve to ask. Forever silenced. There was a song in that, somewhere, could he ever bring himself to write the lyrics. Some bittersweet lay. Someday, beyond the numbness, perhaps.
But there was nothing for him here.
“Nothing.” Hollow in his own ears, Ciceroix’s voice seemed suddenly too loud in the hushed crypt, as though he might wake the sleeping dead. He looked at Baurendouin at last, truly looked: exhausted, as only a man lately bereft of his own father and with two young sons of his own to drag kicking and screaming to adulthood (and a third on the way, if rumors held true; in whatever ways Baurendouin was his father’s son, he seemed unwilling to stray from his lovely wife) could be. Ciceroix breathed in... and exhaled slowly, patting the effigy one last time. “Nothing at all. I’ll see myself out, brother.”
He would never, he decided, be returning to Ishgard.
