What would Tiago have thought of Julian? 👁👁👀
finally had the chance today to sit down and hash this out omg thank you alex... so juicy lmao
my plan is actually for a Tiago reveal in Monterrey; he’s on business for his domitor (who i think ive mentioned before is a very powerful Lasombra and has ties to the weird shit going on in Nuevo León during 2021, real world + wod). you get Tiago’s limited perspective of Julian later in that story but i still went a little meta for now.........
i’ll start with the hypothetical because i think the differences are interesting. Tiago vanishes in ‘97 and Julian shows up in 2000. Tiago’s been out of the picture for 3 years and never gets to vet Julian the way he would as normal, and both their characters at that point vary quite a bit from where they’ve developed by 2021
so! if they hypothetically met in 2000:
Tiago's radar is well-tuned to a specific frequency: entitled hunger. soldiers, crew guys, local boys with powerful families—more often than not, white. Julian doesn't broadcast on that frequency at all. he's a chatty overgroomed nerd, clearly educated but self-deprecating, and he isn't looking at Sol like meat, rather a fascinating problem. that flat deadpan, how nothing fazes her. she diagnoses the area of fault in his engine by ear in minutes, then plucks a bark scorpion out from under his hood on the shop rag—sweetly, like lifting a sleeping cat—and carries three inches of the most venomous arachnid in North America to the edge of the lot and tips it into the dark. Julian watches that the way other men watch her legs. spatial reasoning, somatic processing, that innate mechanical affinity. it’s a mind that runs on a different instruction set, and runs beautifully. Tiago would recognize his own conclusion about his sister being independently confirmed by an outside auditor. hard to hate a man for agreeing with you about the most important thing you believe
second component: Julian wouldn’t be afraid of Tiago. Julian is well-spoken, funny, deferential, and would be wholly at ease with Tiago in the room—his body simply does not register the man as a danger, because a Kindred among kine has nothing to fear from a lone enforcer. that would itch at Tiago. you don’t just relax with a 6ft slab of glaring, hardened muscle sharing space. and it can't be sheltered obliviousness, because the mouth is doing stand-up while the eyes do inventory and analysis—nothing in Julian is switched off
Tiago can't name it. there's nothing to hang it on. so he does what professionals do with threads that won't resolve: files it, and issues the working verdict.
annoying. looks harmless. makes her laugh.
that last item probably buys Julian more grace than anything else, because Tiago knows what Sol’s laugh costs and who she performs softness for. someone getting it for free—real and sideways and surprised out of her—is doing something no one else has managed in a long time. including him, lately
seventeen years of ghouldom teach Tiago what Kindred are, what a domitor is; what the Blood does to a man from the inside. he learns the taxonomy of monsters how he once learned syndicates, that every Kindred relationship is a supply chain, and he learns it from the bottom, addicted to the leash
that hypothetical itch from 2000 would quietly resolve itself here. perhaps what doesn't fear you isn't sheltered, isn't oblivious, isn't crazy. it's above you. it’s natural order
if 2021 Tiago had a fuller picture, he’d map Julian onto the only lens he has under Lasombra. sire equals domitor, scaled up. want stops being distinguishable from need, so he assumes the same for Sol.
he would not be aware that between Kindred, blood bonds can be mutual. he would certainly not be aware a blood bond can decay, or that you could survive it. but that’s true: starve it of vitae and it thins; force and hold distance and it snaps (with intense psychological distress)
and the record shows Julian never once downplayed it to Sol. he tried to be careful, warned her numerous times and she didn’t listen, and in 2010 he amputated the thing entirely. cruel, but Tiago, who wakes up inside crippling dependency every night, knows to the decimal what abstention costs. in his whole catalogue of monsters by this point, he’s never seen one voluntarily put the leash down, let alone one who cuts it at cost to himself. confusion would convert to suspicion before anything else. when something looks like restraint, or cost, or care—Tiago’s framework has to reclassify it as technique.
but the sting he'd never voice: Julian gave Sol the honest briefing about the Blood that nobody ever gave him
then there is the ugly mirror. Julian left her in 2010 with no note, no warning, no body to bury—because distance was protection and because he'd decided unilaterally what she could survive knowing. Tiago ran that exact operation in 1997. he can’t condemn Julian for that without condemning himself.
i think his final assessment lands somewhere like: this man will never hurt her carelessly. everything he does to her will be deliberate
and that’s not comforting…