okay! so i was gonna write up a post on chiroh’s current sitch and recent revenge cycle that she’d had more than a hand in, but i realized that there’s some necessary backstory that has to be written out first! plus i’ve never properly explained why chiroh uses ‘we’ and ‘us’ on either this blog or @candidgunner
pre-ascension chiroh was a decent flarper with long, shiny hair and a vicious little bat lusus that would hide in her braid and bite the shit out of people when they got too close. despite the lusus and the flarping, she was a good deal nicer, friendlier, and more open than current chiroh. she didn’t know that dolios even existed, at this point. that came later. they weren’t the kind of person that she’d associate with.
pre-ascension dolios lived way out in the boonies, all by themself. their lusus got ganked by an orphaner when they were wee and they lived by themself in an increasingly decrepit hive with no wifi connection up until they were forcibly hauled out by the drones at ten to go get processed and installed in a ship.
iss havoc-reaped-upon-a-quivering-enemy-planet-as-the-glorious-empire-brings-it-to-heel-in-her-condescension’s-name
the captain of the havoc was extremely particular, needed to have everything in it’s proper place and matched nicely and clean and pretty. so when he came aboard his new ship and found an olive and a rust hanging in tandem helms it just wouldn’t do! they were as different as different could be, and didn’t look the better for it. so slowly, carefully, over the course of about a sweep, he poisoned them. once that was done with, he requisitioned two new helms, and threw the most incredible hissyfit until the poor admin on call at the psionic processing center caved and gave him what he wanted: two neatly matched psionics, tiny and yellow with eyes that mirrored each other.
which is how chiroh and dolios met! this also marks the last point in time where chiroh petrae was 100% chiroh petrae and dolios moksha was 100% dolios moksha, the few horrible, baffling moments before they were brought online and came crashing into each others’ heads, and into the gunship-body they shared.
not long after install, they docked on a spacecraft carrier called the iss feeling-of-elation-that-comes-when-you-decapitate-a-hostile, or iss elation for short. the elation’s main helmsman wasn’t especially chatty, but the aux(hermes) certainly was! he talked chiroh and dolios through their first landing in his hangar, back when everything was still fresh and new and painful and chiroh was still sort of chiroh and dolios was still sort of dolios, instead of them both being the havoc and only the havoc, which happened by slow, terrifying degrees. he kept taking to them even after they left, through a subnet maintained by sufferists, (not that you’d know it by looking) and introduced them to his moirail, kahloh, who was another helmsman. the four of them stayed in contact, and fell for each other in the way only desperate people with no other romantic options and a helluva lot of reasons to throw themselves into escapism can, kahloh and dolios into flush and hermes and chiroh into black. which was p awesome, (given value of awesome) for the first couple perigees, before how tangled and mushed together chiroh and dolios were becoming was too obvious to ignore. kahloh and hermes got to watch chiroh and dolios become we, and then i, and then just the havoc. things probably would’ve continued going downhill til chi n dol couldn’t even remember that they’d ever been two, been anything but havoc, if their cap hadn’t taken a shortcut through a less protected chunk of barely-alternian space and gotten ensnared by a less than legal salvage ship that fried the controls, killed the crew that couldn’t get into the escape pods in time, and begun dismantling the ship, starting with the most valuable components, the helmsmen. one of the salvage ship’s admins (even criminals have bureaucracy! ) had both a soft spot for helms due to certain events in her past and a shrewd understanding of exactly how useful having two helm-quality psionics indebted to you would be.
the first half sweep was undoubtedly the roughest. from reeling from having their connection to their ship so quickly severed, to never being able to get quite close enough to each other to ever feel anything but terrifyingly, cripplingly alone, to the p serious physical effects of being jammed in a meat pillar, to dismantling their malfunctioning obedience protocols, their life was no walk in the fucking park. not to mention the incredibly creepy way they moved in unison, spoke in unison, and responded to each others’ names when called. it was so bad that they couldn’t even fathom a moiraillegiance for the longest time- how can you be pale for yourself? they’ve only been together for about a sweep.
they couldn’t let go of each other for the first sweep, literally would never not have some part of their bodies touching, and even now, a sweep and a half past rescue, with all the leaps they’ve made and the ground they’ve gained back, chiroh and dolios still can’t be without each other for more than a couple nights without dissolving into heaps of erratic uselessness.
chiroh and dolios, when they first got out, were havoc. they used singular pronouns as a reference to havoc, as if they were one person instead of two. the process of separating themselves back out into two people is long, hard, terrifying, and fraught with missteps and relapses. chiroh latched onto whatever aggression she dimly remembered having, and dolios to their shyness. in their effort to differentiate they’ve kind of become caricatures, with chiroh dismissing any nervousness or niceness or shyness as a thought from dolios and vice versa. she’s unlikely to ever fully stop dismissing anything other than aggression and abrasiveness and a devil-may-care attitude, because nuance is hard and once she’s finally, finally dragged herself out of being havoc she sure as hell isn’t going to fall right back in. it’s not that she doesn’t have morals- she does, she’s extremely principled, which would be super awesome if her personal code wasn’t so fucked up. it’s just that she doesn’t see kindness as something she can afford, not if she wants to stay chiroh and force people to see a person instead of a helm when they look at her and keep anyone from fucking with her ever again. so far, she hasn’t often been proven wrong.
but! happy ending! despite all this bullshit, she (somehow) has friends and clade and a job she’s proud of, has so much more than she ever thought she’d have as a kid. and things can only go up from here! she’s been through hell and she’s taking on the world and going about it completely wrong, but at least she’s trying to move forward.
