If i was Hesero Nelaran I would be so mad at Setheris. Your beloved husband gets banished from court because he got into a tussle with another court buerecrat, and hes sent to the ass end of nowhere to rot to take care of the Emperor's most hated son, and you spend a decade constantly petitioning to have him returned to court, and then, the luckiest thing ever happens. Not only is the Emperor dead, the new Emperor is that kid that your husband has been taking care of, and by all logic he should think of Setheris as a sort of father figure. Not only is your husband coming back, its almost certain that he will soon be catapulted to the highest levels of government, you two are set for life baby.
It takes a while for him to properly meet with you two, makes sense he's very busy. Eventually you get your audience, and hes a very nice young man, gets a bit flustered at you maybe, but hes very polite and everything seems great. Then he refuses to have any audience with your husband for ages, and gives him a relatively minor post UNDER your husband's hated enemy that prevents him from currying any Imperial favor. Then, your husbands enemy launches a full blown coup against the Emperor, and your husband is arrested due to working for him, not great, but Erdrehasivar almost certainly knows that your honorable husband would refuse to join with Chavar, not just for personal spite, but also for moral considerations. Heck, its a rough patch, but perhaps with Chavar out of the way Setheris has a shot at some more influential office again?
Then the Emperor tells you, while youre begging to have him released, that your dipshit husband spent the last ten years beating him and subjecting him to pointless cruelties. The seemingly shoddy treatment your husband has received thus far is suddenly revealed to be surprisingly generous for a hormonal teenager who has suddenly been given near absolute power. What should've been a First Class Meal Ticket for the rest of your political lives is now going to result at best in some far away functionary position with no real influence. I would've killed him.
#YEAH PRETTY MUCH #i fucking C R A V E more fic about hesero nelaran dealing with this fucking catastrophe #do you think she was hoping to have children before setheris was relegated? #my guess is probably. she would have been raised to. #plus she's very warm toward maia at first. #anyway. do you think she thinks about it still. now that she knows what kind of guardian setheris was. #i think she probably does. (via @words-writ-in-starlight)
SO LIKE!!!! first of all talk to me more about hesero nelaran generally for all of the above reasons, holy shit. but SECOND OF ALL. CONSIDER.
i feel like the first couple months setheris was back, hesero was sort of... it's been a long time since the last time she saw him, she knows they've both changed, she's trying to help him find his footing at court again and trying to find her own footing in their marriage again, and she's hoping that she'll be able to see more of the man he used to be as time goes on until she learns. All That.
and she barely even has time to process any of it before setheris is packed off to The Ass End Of Nowhere 2: Not Official Banishment Boogaloo and you KNOW that he's not handling it gracefully and like.
There's A Divorce, is the thing.
(csevet experiences a euphoric rush of spite handing hesero's petition to His Serenity to be signed. serves the bastard right.)
she comes back to court and maia really had nothing against her before the whole clusterfuck but this time she sees something almost like vindication in his eyes, swaddled by weariness and pity - an unspoken sense of you see it now. you get it. i'm sorry that you had to, but i'm glad someone else understands. it burns, but she can't deny it, either.
and i'd like to think that some time after that, she gets a letter in the very carefully tidy handwriting of lieutenant telimezh.
he hadn't particularly wanted to insert himself into that whole... Situation... especially when it seemed like hesero was settling in as well as could be expected in the wake of the multiple consecutive scandals she'd so recently weathered. but he also thinks that maybe it would have been easier, after dazhis, to have had someone to talk to. someone who understood the disorienting wrench of having a person you were meant to spend the rest of either your life or theirs working together towards a common goal, and realizing that you never knew them well enough to suspect their now-demonstrated capacity for ill.
it's not the same, he knows it's not the same at all, and he doesn't even expect a reply, but he thinks it might have haunted him a little if he hadn't at least made the effort.
and anyway the point is i'm fascinated by the idea of telimezh and hesero who are both in the unique position of being the one left standing, absolved of guilt for their partner's assault on the imperial person, and not entirely knowing what the hell to do with themselves about it, thank you for coming to my ted talk
