Body and Soul
Chapter 8 Up
I’m surprised this was a rather quick update... muse has been kind to me.
Talcott: Dinner Date
Talcott never put too much thought into how young he was. Perhaps if the circumstances had been different, he would have realized that what he was doing was out of the norm for a child but with the long night. Normalcy was a fleeting emotion that wasn't worth having. Nothing about his youth would be the same anymore. Talcott was sure that many children felt the same way. One day, they were attending classes in Insomnia, but the next, they were worried about bombs being dropped on them while they studied, holes being blown into their chests by Imperial soldiers from Niflheim, or their properties being looted and burned by MTs. No one from the royal houses down to the poorest plebians had seen or experienced anything like that before. The wall had always protected them, and not one citizen in Lucis could ever conceive that it would fall, that Regis would die, that everything that their kingdom had been built upon would be decimated in a matter of months.
Reality had been horrible. Talcott had concluded that the naive ideals that he had were meaningless. He wanted to believe that everything would work itself out, but the more time went on, the more that he saw how hard people were trying to survive and fleeing for their lives, of course he was going to grow up. No time had been more apparent when he thought of the men that had taken Jared away from him. Talcott hadn't realized what he had been saying to the Niflheim troops at the time. He could not know the cruelty of man when such a small comment about Lucis could transgress the way that it had. He could see the lifeless eyes of his grandpa after he and Iris had found him shot to death. Even back then, he didn't understand why such a thing had happened. The world that he had come from had people willing to help, people that were warm and inviting. But the world outside of Lucis was savage. He wasn't ready for it at the time, no child could have been.
When Jared died, so did a part of Talcott. The psychological wound he suffered wasn't as bad when his mom had died of illness. Not even when his father who had been drafted and proudly served in the Kingsglaive died on the war front defending the capital that they all loved. Those deaths were justified for when you are a soldier you take the oath and risk life and limb for king and country and illness strikes everyone regardless of age, status, or creed. Talcott supposed Jared was that way too, a retainer to the crown for House Amicitia. Unlike his parents though, Jared was not on the battlefield when he died. He was merely trying to mitigate the damage from the chaos brought onto Niflheim's assault on Insomnia. He was trying to bring peace in the minds in those that didn't want to be caught up in the war.
Read the rest here:
https://archiveofourown.org/works/25175203/chapters/63017581
