@witchysolfan HI THAT IS THE EXTREMELY GOOD SHIT THANK YOU, YOU’RE HIRED
honestly i’ve been so caught up in all the dynamics that might have played out before (or during) things going downhill that i have COMPLETELY neglected to consider friends-to-enemies breaok and that’s a fucking crime, you’ve snapped my third eye right open
this is gonna get Long as Fuck and is therefore going under a cut, prepare your britches folks
SO there’s two ways i could see this going (at least staying fairly close to the canon events of s1):
they’ve interacted more or less the canon amount; brea has seen much more of his cruelty than his kindness, and he has seen much more of her resourcefulness, determination, and iron will than her naivete and (apparent) impressionable nature.
post-battle of stone-in-the-wood, skekok looks for her on the battlefield at every opportunity, and at this point he’s not even sure if he wants to capture her or kill her; all he knows is that the longer she evades him, the more obsessively determined he is to hunt her down
(especially if skeklach was killed. he’d have a grudge, holy shit)
brea, meanwhile, notices before too long that he seeks her out sooner or later in nearly every battle where he’s present unless he’s (presumably) been ordered otherwise; she starts using this to their side’s advantage by luring him away from the others, and therefore effectively taking one of them out of commission for the rest of the battle. it’s dangerous as hell, especially when he starts to wise up and lay traps, but she’s brave and quick-witted and quick on her feet, especially after some training, and it’s a risk she’s willing to take.
(and she’s more than prepared to lay some traps of her own.)
the more battles they’ve fought each other in, the more she’s seen of his cruelty and bloodlust, and the more he’s seen of her courage and determination, and the more they’re drawn to clash with each other.
and if the way they’ve increasingly learned each other’s strategies and movement inside and out, the way they continue to find new ways to catch each other off-guard, has become an uncomfortably intimate, hateful dance… well, it keeps them alive, and that will just have to be enough.
(so they tell themselves.)
(deep down they’re both starting to know differently.)
the two of them have known each other for a while before the events of the show, and been good friends. sure, the nature of their relationship is somewhat dubious–there’s very much an element of him enjoying the idea of wowing an impressionable young gelfling he sees as bright, but simple and small-minded, especially at first; and over time she starts to pick up on the fact that there’s a person she doesn’t know just under the surface of the way he presents himself to her, and she’s not sure it’s a good one–but they get along well and are fairly close. there’s definitely some tension there, but neither of them have quite acknowledged it yet; it feels like something that will unfold naturally in its own time, and they’re in no rush.
(well, brea is, a little. she’s not very patient by nature, but she’s enjoying the way all this is happening too much to interrupt it.)
and then the shit hits the fan.
for most of the events of s1, skekok is a lot more concerned about keeping tabs on brea and making sure she’s safe, whether the skeksis have no idea where she is or have her in their custody. especially when she’s in their custody, honestly. he tries not to be too obvious about it to the others, but he’s sneaky and underhanded enough to try to put in a good word for her to the emperor, mainly by convincing him that she’ll be useful.
unfortunately… the skeksis get worse over time, including him. and if anyone’s good at rewriting history for himself and others, it’s skekok. at some point toward the latter third of the season there’s a specific event that makes him jump off the slippery slope and convince himself that he never cared about her, that there was no real friendship or connection between them, that she was an idiot child for being so blind to what a monster he really is.
by the time the skeksis try to drain brea, fara, and seladon, and brea confronts him from inside the cell, he’s both deep in denial and out of his mind on essence; he feels so drunk with power, physical and emotional, that he revels in taunting her and ripping her heart to shreds without the burden of worry and of having to care. brea is, understandably, completely fucking devastated, especially because he’s much too carried away to feel or display even a little remorse or hesitance about it at the time.
fast forward to the battle of stone-in-the-wood. she runs into him on the battlefield, but instead of a short clash, once the dust clears she ends up chasing after him to keep fighting. out of rage, sure; betrayal, sure. a large part of her might even want to kill him, after everything he’s done to her, after he tried to murder her sister, after he murdered maudra fara.
but she’s also heartbroken. she’s confused, both angry at herself for ignoring all the signs and in denial that maybe, maybe he didn’t really mean it, that maybe it wasn’t all fake. maybe even that the other skeksis pushed him into it, that he’s not in his right mind, that there’s some explanation for all of this that isn’t what she’s seen with her own eyes.
just as much as she wants revenge, she wants answers.
this time she’s the one who keeps following him throughout the battle, and engaging him at every opportunity. every moment she’s face to face with him is a moment she can at least try to talk to him, even if it’s shouted between his attempts to cut her down where she stands. at first he’s vicious, both physically and verbally; but the more she pleads with him, the more she calls him out, the more she demands to know why he’s done what he’s done, the more he starts to falter. physically he’s getting tired and she’s gotten in some pretty good blows, and the essence is starting to wear off enough for her words to get through to him a little. it’s not enough to change his mind, but it’s enough to make him feel pinpricks of guilt for what he’s done, and by now he’s getting exhausted enough that he has no mental capacity left over to wall it up and paint over it, at least for now.
they eventually reach a stalemate, or otherwise something happens to break up the duel, and they don’t see each other again for the rest of the battle.
in fact, they don’t see each other until the next one.
skekok has had some time to lick his wounds and try to talk himself around from the words that got under his skin during the battle at stone-in-the-wood, like he always does; but these went a little too deep, and instead of making it disappear completely the best thing he can do is paper it over and try to convince himself it’s not there. the bandaid is resilient, but it’s there for the ripping-off if you know where to look for it.
she didn’t get what she was looking for the first time. but she saw the cracks; she saw that she was starting to chip her way through; and if she’s done it once, she’s determined to do it again. even if the others are getting concerned for her, even if it turns out that what she had with skekok was fake all along, she will do what it takes to get to the truth.
tl;dr, instead of just trying to hunt him down out of Pure Hatemance, deep down brea still really cares about him and is trying to figure out what the fuck happened, maybe even has a sliver of hope to talk him around. skekok cares about her too, and is drawn to her because he misses her even if the only way he can talk to her again is in deadly combat. neither of them will admit to themselves or each other that this is their motivation. angst is had by all.
AND THERE YOU HAVE IT. obviously there are a Great Many More Ways This Could Go to Varying Degrees of canon divergence one of them getting captured by the other side, for example, but these two are the first ones that occurred to me and now i want to write some goddamn fanfic, fuck, i guess i know what i’m doing for gelfskek ship week
bless you for the reply, i will literally always take any excuse to infodump about these two
