Wtf im thinking about gast venom and wtf. You know how in Clôture he’s looking for somewhere to die, and how he’s originally like ‘idgaf about this riliane brat, the people who hired me are getting wrecked and i have no personal investment so im outta here’ up until allen begs to hire him to keep defending his sister (ironically this ends up almost having him kill germaine, Allen's other sister, instead)
And as we know ‘im trying to save my sister’ is one of if not the only motivation that gast will sympathize with deeply enough to consider it worth dying for, so he agrees. And obviously in canon this ends with gast and allen both dying. Which I find kind of unsatisfying, bc Gast really died for nothing in the end, bc he didn’t stop Germaine from capturing the princess, Allen did by being her doppelganger, which he could’ve done anyway.
So basically I just had the thought. What if, in an alternate timeline, Gast had succeeded at reclaiming the Venom Sword? And what if he knew how to use it?
Someone had to be executed at the guillotine, or the fighting in Lucifenia would’ve never stopped. But what if the real twins had both worn Allen’s clothes, and escaped out different exits of the castle?
What if Gast’s heritage, which was nothing but a source of pain and shame his entire life, ended up allowing him to have the noble, meaningful death that he craved? He believed combat was his only skill, what if he was proven to have worth beyond that as a fighter in his final action? And he remained an undefeated swordsman, whose sudden disappearance became the stuff of legend?
Of course, if Allen survived, Riliane may have never grown as a person or truly regretted her actions. That could take the whole next chapter of the story in another direction. Or perhaps, they lose track of one another, and Riliane doesn’t know about the Venom Sword, and when she finds out that the ‘princess’ has been executed, she draws the wrong conclusion, and mourns him anyway. Maybe Allen is injured and becomes an amnesiac like Gakusha, knowing that he’s forgotten someone important, trying to find his way back to who he should be. Maybe by the time he and Riliane find each other, they’re middle-aged and she’s long-since settled into her role as an orphanage nun and adoptive mother. Or maybe they never find each other, or he learns their story when he’s successfully tracked down by the children from Reach for the Stars.
I don’t know! I just thought this idea was interesting, and that Gast deserved more narrative closure than he really got.
