baronuberstein asked: 1, 13, 20, 25
(for this meme)
#1 is already answered here!
13: their embarrassing memory from years ago
Sometimes the Jarl’s steward posted bounties for bandits. Other times, it was for frostbite spiders.
Mother did her usual negotiating to gather up a group of reliable mercenaries, and they were off for the southern mountains within three days. Lleros enjoyed the boisterous company as much as he ever did, and watched the sell-swords– fellow sell-swords, he reminded himself, even if all he had was a hunting knife– with glowing attention as they travelled. He hung on every word around the campfire, and eagerly volunteered to take any night watch that would let him keep company with the three Nords who were most amenable to taking a skinny Dunmer under their wing. Mother watched with a tolerant eye and kept her own quiet company with the lone Redguard, with whom she murmured in Yoku.
But frostbite spiders were not a prey Lleros had ever hunted before. He had only ever driven them off with torches during the few cold winters when they came for the village’s goats. That had been terrifying enough. For once, he was happy to let his companions think he was a boy of fifteen rather than a twenty-four year old who should have been a man.
To his relief, he wasn’t expected to hunt spiders with the rest of them. That relief quickly turned to outraged dismay when mother told him he would be gutting corpses instead.
“A hundred gold each,” he growled, elbow deep in the belly of a massive spider. His fellow mercenaries were up in the treetops close to the infested cave, ready to skewer the next wave of spiders drawn to their bait. Their bowstrings were loose but their arrows were trained on the goat tied up and bleating its panic below.
And where was Lleros? Stuck on the ground far behind the archers, cutting out arrows and digging through spider guts. Njeland had stuck around him only long enough to show him where the spider’s silk glands were, to demonstrate how to cut out the right bits without rupturing anything important. Then she was off into the trees, giving Lleros a mocking grin.
The Weavers Guild paid a hundred gold for a frostbite spider’s silk gland, mother had said, while alchemy shops paid only a fifth of that per venom sac. Skilled websters could draw out the spider’s liquid silk into fine thread for weaving expensive clothing or stitching up open wounds when there was no healer to be found. So here was Lleros, covered in sticky and stinking green ooze.
But then--
The bushes behind him rustled. He froze like a rabbit. Oh god, oh no, he hadn’t meant it, he didn’t want to kill frostbite spiders, not on his own. All he had was a knife, a tiny little knife, and some of these spiders had fangs longer than his arm and they could spit poison anyway, spit it right in his eyes and then sink their fangs into his belly and rip his guts out and--
The bushes erupted in a screaming burst of movement. Lleros screamed in return, slashing his knife wildly, stumbling backwards--
--and tripped straight into the corpse of the spider. Its carefully slit belly burst like an overripe fruit and he pitched right into it. Liquified guts sloshed over him.
The terrified goat bounded off into the woods, its broken tether trailing behind it.
As it turned out, the insides of a frostbite spider hardened like glue on fabric. Much as Lleros swore and squawked his outrage, mother had to help him cut off the last of his undershirt and loincloth where they had stuck to his body hair. Worst, though, was the way Njeland and Oskjar howled laughter along with the rest when they saw Lleros shaven, his shoulder-length hair a total loss.
Mother never laughed, but he suspected she was pleased that he didn’t complain about doing farm work for the rest of the winter.
20: their reaction to a mystery love letter
“Hm? Oh, good day, sir, my father’s just insi-- what? Me? Oh. Oh! Who is it...? Oh, well. I see. Yes, thank you. Thank you! Have a safe journey!
“Mm. Mm mm mmm! Oh, shh, this is exciting. I wonder who...
“’Dear Lleros, beloved-- beloved?-- I write from afar because I cannot contain my... only wish you could... see...’
“Oh. I. Oh. Ohhhh sweet mother Mara. I-- is this? ‘Lovers.’ Lovers, really? Eee! Shhhh, shh sh-sh, Lleros, honestly, just...
“Lovers! But they didn’t even sign it, why wouldn’t you sign something like... I can’t believe-- Who wrote this? Who is this? ‘Wish you could see how I adore you,’ oh my gods, who are you, where do I know you from? How am I supposed to write back if...
“Ohhh. Oh oh oh. Divines. Mara and Dibella, what a darling. Beautiful. Sweet soul. Gods, you are lovely. Magnificent pen, who are you?
“--Sir? Sir! Where did that courier-- Sir, wait, wait! I need to send a letter back!”
25: why you enjoy them
Well, much like an evil Professor Utonium, I go around sprinkling bits of myself as ingredients into the creation of all my original characters. Lleros got my PTSD, albeit a much more severe case of PTSD than I have. His whole story arose as a result of a therapist encouraging me to write about my PTSD in order to figure out some of my problems at the safe distance of another person’s head. Between my own self-analysis and the analysis of some very keen reviewers, I’ve gotten a much better grasp on some of the reactions and thought processes of my PTSD, and I’ve been able to deal with them a little better. So that’s a reason to like Lleros right there!
I also enjoy getting to dig into the meat of Skyrim’s paper-thin worldbuilding. “A mile wide and an inch deep,” as sunderlorn said. Lleros makes a lovely outlet for my feels about culture clashes and Fantastic Racism and immigrant children and overwhelmed 20-something adults-- plus magical academia and High Fantasy travelogues.
Plus-- plus I am the biggest sucker in the world for Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Heel-Face Turn, Secret Relationships, I Shouldn’t Want You But... all those good tropes that Lleros gives me the chance to write. ^_^
In addition to that, though... Good god, this boy might be just the most heroic character I’ve ever written. He’s a good person. His defining characteristic is that he wants to help people. He was trained as an alchemist first, then as a hunter and a warrior by necessity... but when he got older, he chose to return to that path of creating/mending and become a healer by trade. He’s endlessly compassionate and tender to those who need it, and he only becomes savage against those that he feels deserve retribution-- those who hurt others. He may kill people and eat dragon souls, but it’s always an act of necessity, not something he wants to do. His tendency to get into fist fights when angry is one of his worst traits, not his best.
Lleros starts off the story scared and weak and hurting and arguably broken in some ways. He doesn’t start from the typical place of “naive boy who will become a man”-- he starts from “wounded man who has to re-learn how to be himself.” The reader only gets to see who Lleros used to be in limited flashbacks, in his bitter reflections on who he was and what he no longer is or can do. And that... that was one of that hardest things about PTSD for me: the realization that you’re a different person now.
And then the story asks... does it matter who Lleros was before he was traumatized? Do you ever get to go back to being the person you used to be? Or do you just heal as much as you can-- keep yourself from limping and twisting too much because of wounds that you didn’t treat properly-- and learn to live peacefully with the scars you can’t get rid of?
Lleros’ entire story is about healing, learning, and growing. The point of his narrative is not to become a hero and save the world-- it’s about the difficult, painful, crucial, life-saving, life-affirming work of personal growth in the process of saving the world. So as much as the whole “become a hero, kill the evil dragon, save the world” thing is a literal narrative in Skyrim, it’s also entirely symbolic in this fic.
So, yeah. I’ve got feels about a tender-hearted boy whose journey is more about character development than swords and dragons.
