Rose, on the phone: How's the conference going? Sydney nerding out yet?
Adrian: I think she almost spontaneously combusted when we got into the Greek exhibit. But also, Alchemists, so its complicated. How's it going over there?
Rose: Its complicated.
Adrian: What? Rose, I can say its complicated. You can't say its complicated. You're watching my kid.
Rose: Sorry.
Adrian: So is it complicated, Rose?
Rose: No, its great. Wanna talk to him?
Adrian: Isn't he asleep? Its past 11.
Rose: Hence, complicated.
Adrian: Oh my god. Where's Dimitri?
Rose: Again, complicated. Everyone is alive and in one piece. But complicated.
I already had this post in my drafts. My answer to @biwonderland98 on the VA ask game is getting long, and tumblr mobile will only allow me to copy this one paragraph at a time. So I'm posting it as the answer the headcanons question, then I'll link it when I finish the ask. Am I gonna post on the tags every night this week? Maybe. Ask games are just so much fun, and getting work done is not.
Sydney and Adrian have a little herb garden for his cooking and her spells
Adrian organizes his books by color and it drives Sydney up the wall
Adrian bought remote controlled toy cars "for Declan", even though he was still way too young to use them. Sydney and Adrian race each other, and Eddie. Sydney gets adorably gleeful
I have zero reason to believe Trey speaks Spanish other than the last name Juarez, but I decided that he thinks Sydney is teaching Declan formal, gringo Spanish, and starts teaching him slang. It gets to a point where Sydney can barely understand him and has to play catch up
Adrian takes Sydney to the school where he teaches so she can do science experiments for his students, and they absolutely love it
Daniella is an incredibly doting grandma who spoils Declan silly. Declan is basically an example of communal child rearing so his parents still get the freedom to be young
Sydney and Eddie still claim to be twins, to justify why he lives with them. And because they are, they're twins, no one has ever been more twins than these two
Jared Sage and Nathan Ivashkov are utterly miserable, because their children's marriage humiliated them in their social circles, and they try desperately and fruitlessly to recover their status. Their dhampir grandchildren get very notorious, they take after their parents, so Jared and Nathan can never live it down. Some young Alchemist who used to suck up to Jared rises above him in rank, and he calls him Jeremy when he wants to be a dick. It gets even worse when Zoey leaves the Alchemists.
Sydney's mom (Deborah?) and Carly are a bit shocked by their relationship, but they still love Sydney very much and come to love Adrian. They absolutely cherish Declan.
Duncan and Chantal are very happy. I will be forever grateful that he was the first one to show Sydney kindness in so long, and she went through so much. They're in a queerplatonic relationship and live peacefully in a ranch somewhere, where they're healing. Chantal is a witch, that's why she was down in the punishment/torture level of re-education with Sydney. When the Alchemist revolution happens she gets to at least slap Sheridan.
Sydney used to get into trouble as a kid for asking too many questions, so she had to learn to suppress that and be more sneaky about her curiosity
Angeline eventually becomes an ambassador for the Keepers. I think for Angeline to become diplomatic it would require a lot of character development so that would be fascinating.
Declan and Eddie have matching raptorbot pajamas. I'm very attached to that headcanon and added that to my fic before it occured to me that a movie called Raptorbot Rampage is probably not age appropriate. It's alredy published, so I decided that there's a really cheaply made obnoxious Raptorbot animation that Declan loves. Even Eddie can't stand to watch it on repeat anymore but he won't admit it because if he does Sydney wins. It's a long term investment in turning Declan into his bad action movie buddy and torturing the whole family when it's their turn to pick a movie.
Also, I just decided this very second that Jill was the one who made their pajamas, since Raptorbot isn't that popular. Sewing is how she unwinds from her political duties.
Jill and Christian share A Look every time some big shot royal says something really stupid or heinous in a meeting. Jill advocates fiercely for his magical self defense program and attends classes herself when she can
Adrian Ivashkov absolutely, 100%, no doubt spends 2 hours painstakingly doing Declan's hair before they leave the house for any event. Declan will play with an iPad and eat snacks by shoving it in his mouth with the whole of his tiny hands, like tiny kids do, and Adrian will put a cover on him so he doesn't dirty up his mini-Adrian clothes.
Sydney rolls her eyes because he makes them late for everything (You can't rush art, Sage!), and Declan runs around and makes himself messy immediately after arriving, but she actually thinks it's the most adorable thing ever.
Sydney stretched and sat up. Then she glared at the alarm clock. “Adrian?”
There was no response.
She got up and wandered down the stairs. “Adrian?” She called again as she stepped into the kitchen.
Adrian stood over the stove while Declan babbled away in the Bumbo chair at the other end of the room. There was a mess of egg shells and powdered sugar on the counter.
“Adrian, did you turn off my alarm?” Sydney asked.
Picking up a plate, Adrian turned. “Happy Mother’s Day!”
“Oh, you didn’t have to do anything.” Tears stung her eyes.
“It was Declan’s idea.” He said with a smile, indicating the baby who was now bouncing a little more at the sight of his mother.
Sydney laughed and lifted him up. “Declan, eres tan dulce! Te quero mucho, mi bebe!”
“Sit and eat.” Adrian put the plate of French toast on the table.
Sydney had missed that there was a flower in a small vase covered in tiny fingerprints. She picked it up. “Oh, this is so cute! How did you get him to sit still for this?” She pressed a kiss to Declan’s head.
“I did it while he was sleeping.” Adrian said with a little laugh. “And Eddie helped me keep a hand on him so he didn’t twitch.”
Sydney laughed. “It looks great.” She looked down at Declan. “Es fantástico!”
“We’ll have so many more Mother’s Days.” Adrian dropped to his knees beside her. “But I hope this one is memorable since it’s the first.” He pulled a box out of his pocket. Inside was a bracelet with heart shaped links. “Declan picked it out.”
“Oh, did he?” Sydney held out her arm. “It’s beautiful.” She breathed as Adrian fastened it around her wrist. “I’ll wear it every day.” She leaned down and pressed a soft kiss against his lips. “Thank you. Don’t know how I’m going to top this for Father’s Day.”
“I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” He kissed her again and stood. “Eat up, Sage. Then you get to go relax in a bubble bath for as long as you want.” He sat beside her with his own plate.
if you could change one thing about how the bloodlines story played out, what would it be?
Oh this is a great question! Honestly if I could change one thing, it would be having Richelle elaborate more on Declan at the end of The Ruby Circle. Everything else was great to me but that part just leaves so much to question. It's literally huge. He could very well be the first Dhampir capable of magic and it being Spirit nontheless. And also would he be stronger than a regular Dhampir with him being born to two Dhampirs? Idk. I wish we got more on him so badly. He has so much potential already as a character and I wish there was another series to shed more light on him.
Me hiding my Declan fanfic from the Bloodlines fandom:
Olive seriously deserved better though, her story makes me so so sad.
She loved her family and gave up being a Guardian because she couldn't get assigned to them since they weren't royal. She got turned into a Strigoi fighting to protect them. She got restored then within about a year she got pregnant, the sister she cared so much about lost her mind and got catatonic trying to find her, then she dies painfully after giving birth.
Possibly the worst example of downfall/death by sex in all 12 books, and there's real competition.
Olive is also the only character that's described as looking native American, so that leaves a bad taste in my mouth considering her ending, though I might be overthinking it. But she deserved better than dying having a boring british boy's baby. She barely got to be a character. If I was gonna change that aspect of TRC instead of having Neil keep Declan, I'd have Olive survive.
I mostly have a problem with Sydney and Adrian's age in the ending, I tell myself that they're in a four adults household so they'll still get some freedom to be young and heal. But I'm obsessed with post canon and Alchemist revolution, so I made my peace with the ending, and I made myself fond of Declan by writing about him.
My thoughts on how an Alchemist revolution could go
I turned some of the initial points into a one-shot, but I'm very unlikely to actually write anything that sees all of it through to the end, so I'm laying out what I imagine would happen. I could follow the initial fic's format and just write cutesy domestic fluff with hints of what is going on in the Alchemist revolution in the background, but who knows
In The Golden Lily, Sonya thought Sydney's blood might be key to a vaccine, since it was undrinkable to Strigoi. Later, in The Fiery Heart, in their visit to Inez, we find out that it's because her blood is coated in human magic. That makes it taste foul to undead vampires, and also broke her Alchemist tattoo, by countering the compulsion of Moroi magic with human magic.
She eventually uses a similar principle to make the tattoo breaking ink she gives to Marcus, and that she uses to help the other re-education inmates in Silver Shadows.
So, with that in mind:
My initial idea was that one of Marcus' operatives, who got tattooed with Sydney's ink, would suffer a Strigoi attack. Their blood would turn out to be undrinkable. Since Sydney's ink breaks the Alchemist tattoo, the receivers blood would get coated with human magic, like a witch's.
I would like it if that person was one of the people Sydney helped in re-education, because I'd like to think those people stayed loyal to her, and maybe see her as a leader. Just because it's really touching to me how she was still worried about others, and risking herself to help, while she was going through her worst nightmare.
In my fic I went with Sydney's roommate Emma, "the Sydney Sage of re-education", because I really love her. She really did turn out to be the Sydney of re-education, at least in part, because while she was repeating the party line and trying to seem cooperative, she was actually a badass rebel who fights back. There are other reasons, I'll get to that in the end.
Sydney's ink potentially working as a Strigoi vaccine is something important enough that she would risk her truce with the Alchemists to investigate. And since the ink also makes people immune to their mind control, the Alchemists wouldn't work with them like they did for the spirit vaccine. I truly believe that they value their control more than human souls.
I'm sure Declan’s blood will be important to the spirit vaccine. They couldn't mass produce it since it required a recent Strigoi restoration, trapping the spirit before it left the blood, while his blood is described as brimming with spirit. But Sydney and Adrian don't want their son to be experimented on, so that's just more incentive to seek an alternative.
I think Sydney’s ink wouldn't work on Moroi, going by the logic of the magic described in the books (human magic wins out in humans), but helping humans is already a big deal, and it could maybe work on dhampirs.
Meanwhile, the Alchemists have been getting polarized. When it's revealed that some of them were helping the Warriors of Light in the end of the series, while Warriors were keeping Moroi captive, that causes controversy. They eventually start to get divided into factions.
After the US re-education center burns down, those who oppose re-education try to defend that it not be rebuilt, and that other centers be shut down. There are symbolic concessions, but they eventually get basically re-education by another name. Similar things happen when it comes to demands for more transparency, and less authoritarianism in general.
And of course there's a reaction to progressive demands. A hardcore anti-Moroi faction is amenable to teaming up with the Warriors. They're tired of "fighting evil by cataloguing it."
If this faction wins out, they won't actually care that Sydney is blackmailing them into letting her live with proof that they worked with the Warriors, since they openly want that, and they consider her continued existence a humiliation. So Sydney and Adrian wouldn't be able to sit out this fight.
There are more and more defectors who simply leave and join Marcus (or go into hiding and try to stay away from that whole mess). But out of those who stay Alchemists, as things start to devolve into an actual civil war, the moderate faction has a lot of infighting about joining up with the rebels.
That's at least in part because Sydney is one of their most notorious members, and while they might not want to see all the Moroi exterminated, marrying one of them is still going way too far to a lot of them.
So, let's talk allies. Sydney definitely put Marcus in touch with more witches and taught them how to make the ink. And I think besides kidnapping Moroi and dhampirs, the Warriors could be capturing witches too, which would turn them against each other.
In re-education, when it's revealed that Sydney has magic they say that has happened before, and I imagine they handled it with the same amount of compassion. I think maybe Chantal is a witch too and that's why she was fown in the punishment level with Sydney.
Alicia definitely showed that some witches might be willing to work with them for their personal gain, but I think as a community they would protect their own. They wouldn't look kindly on Alchemists torturing witches. And even if they were born into the Alchemists, they chose to be witches, so their allegiance to them would take precedence in their minds. Sydney's coven and Ms. Terwilliger are definitely on board.
I think the rebels might be able to get the Keepers on their side, since they have a complicated relationship with the Alchemists, where they seemto deliberately keepthem dependent. Marcus' stated goal for a long time was helping Moroi on their own terms, that's what he did for a long while. He definitely didn't have any plans to topple the Alchemists in the Bloodlines era, he didn't thinkthat was possible. So they occasionally helped them get better technology and resources that the Alchemists don't want them to have, and they promise to help them further in the future. That gets them the Keepers sympathy.
The Moroi government obviously isn't gonna side with the anti-Moroi faction, but I think they'd try to stay out of the conflict and not be dragged into the fighting for as long as possible. But they've come to depend on the Alchemists too much to keep them hidden, and they're now in chaos.
With the Alchemists weakened by a civil war they aren't really doing a great job of keeping up the masquerade, Moroi secrecy gets very precarious.
Now. While Alchemists claim to be very worried about human souls, absolutely no one in the VA universe seems that worried about regular humans' lives. They don't even know about the existence of Strigoi so they could protect themselves. And yes, there are humans who'd work with Strigoi. Strigoi seem to have zero issue finding those humans as is, they simply tell them about vampires themselves when they wanna get servants.
Now there's a vaccine that could help protect humans, and really reduce Strigoi's capacity to feed, but you have to actually apply them to humans. And more and more supernatural events are being sloppily covered up since the Alchemists are otherwise preoccupied.
I'm sure there are some valid reasons for the masquerade, and humans might not behave amazingly towards supernatural creatures, but leaving them completely helpless to this threat isn't very ethical, and certainly not when you have a vaccine that could help them.
And honestly, as cliche as that argument is in discussions of monster hunting, humans could potentially take the Strigoi out, we have some pretty amazing weapons. Or we could be massively incompetent about a problem that we are fully capable of solving. You know...
So the supernatural world gets revealed, and that makes the Alchemists pretty obsolete. Of course, although they have been weakened by the decade(s) of infighting, that doesn't mean they lose all of their resources and connections all at once, but it would be a huge blow their relevance.
They get splintered into a lot of different groups that can still cause trouble, but they're no longer the omnipresent shadow organization they used to be.
And if this whole process took about 15 years, Declan and his buddies would be neatly protagonist aged in time to deal with the huge upheaval and the new mess of problems brought on by the integration of the Moroi and human world. And he'd more capable of thinking about his own relationship to the spirit vaccine and making his own decisions.
So most of this post was written to be understood whether or not you read Silver Stars, but this final bit is more about what could directly follow. When it comes to the fic I was more worried about the characters and their feelings, and excuses for domestic fluff and hurt/confort. So here's the fic on AO3 and on Tumblr.
In the end of The Ruby Circle, there's indication that Zoe Sage and Stanton, with the incentive of Sydney's blackmail, will be trying to reform the Alchemists. I don't really think they're reformable, attempts to extinguish re-education would basically result in rebranding. @sydneysageivashkov has some lesbian!Zoe head that I think are pretty compatible with my headcanons for an Alchemist revolution, and what Zoe would be doing during that initial period.
I think it could take a few more years, 3 or 4, for Sydney to actually have to leave her home and go into hiding. Declan foes actually get a little bit of a normal school experience. I imagine this whole process going very slowly, as the situation gradually deteriorates. And the witches would now claim Sydney as one of their own, making it a bigger problem for the Alchemists to attack her directly, lest they make enemies of the whole magical community.
By the time Sydney has to go into hiding I imagine Zoe is gonna have to leave the Alchemists as well. The other reason why I chose Emma for the first fic, is that she was in re-education in part for her sister's actions, so it shows that the Alchemists wouldn't be above hurting Zoe for Sydney's actions.
Sydney has very important reasons to join the revolution, and in fact she might eventually not have a choice, but she knows that once she officially breaks her truce with the Alchemists her whole family and even her fellow re-education inmates that she got amnesty for.
I imagine Sydney, Adrian, Eddie and Declan could spend a while hiding in a ranch very out of the way that Chantal and Duncan got themselves. Insert Adrian joke about that escape plan where cute blonde girls had to wear cow girl outfits.
Duncan has been shown to be pretty hesitant to risk going against authority, and Chantal is even more psychologically messed up than Sydney and the rest of them. Sydney feels pretty awful about placing them in danger, but they're both very grateful to her for helping them escape. Also Chantal is a really badass witch, although a bit unstable, I'll eventually find something to do with that, revolution wise.
But Sydney and Adrian would eventually leave and get more active roles in the revolution. I would very much like it to be an actual collective movement and not one special girl bringing down the Alchemists by herself, but I think Sydney would have a pretty prominent role after everything she went through.
This is way too long, but I had fun with it, and if you got this far, thank you for reading 😀
