Wow! Another sub-AU! @whenalltheeyesopen came up with the basis for this one, and wrote up the summary for it! It also features characters by @alexthebordercollie , @ranchsoda92 and @matcha-milkies
The Summary: Redistribution of Power
Overlap with main canon
In main canon, H finds D, stalks him for a while, falls in love with him, and lures him into a weekly DDnmD session. Dill tolerates it because it keeps his dog enriched enough to be less annoying and more fun. Hill tolerates it because he wants to stick it to Dill and because the game night crew is fully of such completely harmless little nobodies that he isn't threatened.
What we would call the DDnmD era lasts between two and three years. (What H calls the DDnmD era lasts about five years because he experiences time nonlinearly and includes landmarks like "when I first pretended kitten was talking to me and not a moth.") During that time:
1. D comes to love and depend on H absolutely.
2. Fruit comes to consider the DDnmD party her best friends and spends a lot of time with them between sessions.
3. JP goes through a period of intense rebellion against H which is too complicated to summarize here, but which ends with him voluntarily rolling over and submitting to H's authority and losing any particular will to fight.
In the main canon, this period ends after those two and a half years because D is kidnapped by the Eusophontarians, launching the chain of events that would become what we call Good Ending.
Instead... that. doesn't happen.
D Snaps
Before the Eus have a chance to yoink him, D somehow snaps. In a moment of intense emotion and raw magic power, he kills Dill and eats his corpse, which ends Weirdmageddon, collapses the Bubble, and supercharges his magic powers so that he's functionally a demigod.
H is thrilled. He hated Dill and he wants his kitten. In the aftermath of this event, D is pretty traumatized and delusional, not really understanding what he just did or what just happened. To take care of him, H purchases a huge estate in a relatively unpopulated* part of New York to keep D in, then sets up a trust fund and stipends so that Big Stan and Jean-Paul can dedicate themselves to taking care of him. Jean-Paul is pretty apathetic to what H has him do, and he's happy to help Phospho, so he moves in without complaint. Big Stan is terrified for his brother and doing everything he can to help him snap out of it and rejoin the land of the living.
Meanwhile, H is having a hell of a time negotiating with his husband. Hill was only ever okay with D because D was completely harmless and nonthreatening. Now that he fucking ate his Bill, that 'harmless' status is in question. To make matters worse, when D starts to come out of the suicidal depression that immediately followed Dill's death, it's as a violent mage who is happy to kill more Bills.
H annexes part of 04 as his own to protect it from other Bills laying claim, but he wants to use it as functionally a summer home. Hill has been wanting to jump ship from the crumbling, entropy-ridden 08 for years; if his husband insists on keeping this dumb backwater with a dangerous mage in it, he wants to actually use it.
This conflict between the 08 emperor and his consort goes on for a while - and then, in the middle of an argument between dimensions, Hill vanishes.
*04 North America is much more densely populated than canonical North America because a huge chunk of it was consumed by the Weirdness Bubble.
Life Without either Bill
H has no idea what just happened. He frantically looks for his husband to no avail. His rings are still drawing power from somewhere, but it's not clear where. He's almost certain he's still alive, but he has no idea if this was a time anomaly, a cosmic event, a targeted attack... all he knows is that Hill is gone and he doesn't know why.
For a while, he's doing his damndest to manage 08 and keep Hill's disappearance a secret. He also doesn't know when Hill will come back, so he needs to try and manage things the way Hill would want them managed. This looks a lot like his life before, but he doesn't have the emotional support that he relied on Hill for, he doesn't have the full power of a much mightier god to back him up, and he has the weight of this huge secret on his shoulders. He spends most of his time managing the 08 empire, but every free moment he has is spent in the 04 estate wrestling with the immense pressure he's under.
Hill's absence stretches for years. Slowly, H slowly begins to change his approach to ruling. He finally says fuck it to the things he hated about Hill's rule and begins to build hospitals and public infrastructure. He still feels like his husband could show up at any time, but he's more apathetic to it. He also decides to do something wild that he could never do under Hill's authority: He's been maintaining an affair with 13's Ford Cipher-Pines (the Married Life dimension) this entire time, and he's wanted to break him out of that relationship. So, he funds a proxy attack against Mill. This would be a direct violation of the treaty between Bills... but H isn't a Bill, he's a Ford, and his Bill is missing.
D got his power from eating his Bill, so H decides that he might as well give the same thing a shot: he mixes Mill's corpse into a cocktail and drinks up. He offers some to ML; ML is still in shock, so he drinks without much thought or complaint. He ascends to demigodhood himself. In addition to his new innate magic, he's given the ability to draw magic from the same source H uses. ML is installed as the new king of 13, which becomes a part of H's empire.
ML is now a powerful wizard king and the a lover of the emperor of not only 08, but portions of two other dimensions. He still has the brain modifications that his late husband gave him, so human flesh is delicious to him; also, H's blood is a powerful narcotic. Consensual cannibalism is a major part of their relationship. Over time, ML begins to lean into the imagery. H gives him vampire fangs and he develops the ability to not only consume human blood as food, but to absorb and process thoughts and memories through blood.
(His own blood is an aphrodesiac, but that's neither here nor there.)
Meanwhile, during this time, D is slowly stabilizing from the death of Dill. He spends a lot of time terrified of the world at large and refusing to leave his house. He's still one of the most hated people on Earth, since Dill did everything in his power to tank his reputation and pin Weirdmageddon on him.
Fruit has been spending most of her time on Earth out of concern for him. D's severe depression has her worried about him, and she wants to cheer him up. When humans mess with him, she defends him, and that oftentimes means straight-up eating the punks who decided to graffiti mean names on his house. D himself is unstable and extremely magical, so he's a destructive force in his own right. The estate develops a reputation as a dangerous, cursed house full of monsters and wizards; this reputation is correct.
One day, someone breaks into the mansion on a dare and meets D. Terrified, D does some sort of defensive magic to scare them off. It works extremely well.
That's when D realizes that people are scared of him. He realizes he has power over them. He can do whatever he wants and they can't stop him.
He likes this. 🙂
D slowly begins to venture outside the Estate more and more. the man behaves like a creepypasta character: you have no idea if you'll find him in an alley digging through the trash or at a science museum correcting the displays. He sometimes just straight-up mugs people for no reason. Irene moved to New York and is still his primary care physician, so he's been going through physical therapy and getting generally healthier over time; the first time he encounters antimage tech on a restaurant he wants to break into, he dedicates himself to getting stronger and becomes almost as swoll as he is in the GE timeline.
He is a weird evil cryptid that emerges from the woods to cause havoc and kill people, and he is absolutely thriving. He doesn't end up with GE's self-esteem or body image issues. He's busy being a fucking wizard.
H, JP, Fruit, and D are therefore still the squad. ML joins them after a while as an extra member and as H's secondary partner after D. D will turn into a dragon, then he and Fruit will go cause chaos. H is extremely proud of him and will sometimes sic them on targets that need to be dealt with anyway.
ML is pretty morally horrified, but he has to rule his own territory now and is starting to understand the sort of situations that puts you in. He can't change the fucked up world he lives in, his life now is better than his life then, and, well... if you have power that you can use to improve the world, you might as well do it.
JP has been slowly getting more comfortable and happy. When he isn't actively fighting H, they actually have really good chemistry, and JP really respects the good work H is doing to improve 08. He becomes properly devoted and starts to consider himself a Kingsman. H initially refuses to Mark him and properly integrate him into the cult out of fear for what Hill will do when he comes back, but in all other ways JP is one of his priests. At one point H picks up on the fact that JP is feeling bored and isolated all alone in the estate, and deduces that it's because he misses making a positive impact on the world; H's response is to found a Kingsman temple to serve as a refuge for mentally ill people in the area and to put JP in charge of it. In addition, D decides that JP should be installed as the king of New York. At first this isn't really much more than a title, but he does figure out that he can use this power to install fair housing initiatives and break up monopolies, so he ends up getting a bit more into it than you'd expect.
It's not necessarily a healthy family. JP and ML have to become desensitized to the death and violence that are inherent to this lifestyle, since D and Fruit will come home covered in blood. But, relatively speaking... they're all happy.
Hill Returns
One day, Hill comes back.
Nobody is quite sure what happened to him, in no small part because what happened to him is impossible to describe in finite mortal terms. He was trapped in some sort of incomprehensible space which forced him to experience millions of timelines' worth of his own past and future over and over again in an order that even he couldn't really understand. He was being folded through spacetime like a sheet of origami paper run through the gears of an industrial factory. He comes back slightly depowered and psychologically destroyed.
H tries to take care of him, but with years of separation under his belt, he soon realizes just how shitty his husband really is. He hasn't had to deal with his abuse for a long time, and you know what? He doesn't have to now, either! Hill is no longer physically or psychologically capable of dominating H!
The two of them start to fight, and with Hill in this condition, H wins all of those fights. Spite for his husband and a determination to take control of his life sets him on the path to stop keeping up his quiet existence and start asserting himself in all of the ways that he kind of wished he could, but never thought were possible.
Things that he does immediately after fights with Hill:
- Establishes himself as full emperor and not just consort, nullifying a lot of Hill's policies
- Marries D formally, beginning his royal harem and installing D as the head of it
- Elevates D to the status of co-god of the Kingsmen; the two of them adopt Sun and Moon imagery, giving D a level of symbolic importance that Hill never had
- Formally marks JP as a Kingsman, changes the mark on his head from a triangle to the Lunatic Eye that D has adopted as his own symbol, and stops keeping the Kingsmen in general at an arm's length
and, crown achievement of this whole arc:
- kidnaps and mindwipes his Fiddleford.
08's Fiddleford has been the chief anti-Cipher arms dealer for as long as the Ciphers have ruled. H finds him, takes him, de-ages his body to remove all of the physical damage H did to him years ago, and wipes most of his memories.
It's kind of a rough adjustment for Fiddleford. The fact of the harem is now pretty firmly established, though. H's husbands are, in order of eminence:
1. D, the main Consort and co-god of the Kingsmen, H's favorite
2. Fiddleford, his first love, who's kind of confused about everything
3. ML, king of 13, who's slowly coming to terms with this weird lifestyle
4. JP; he isn't actually a husband, but he and H started an affair* a while ago and he's an honorary member
5. Hill, who's the scapegoat/punching bag of the whole family.
The family also includes Fruit, a small army of Kingsman servants who JP is in charge of training, and JP's kids (more on them later, I'm not going to go into them in this thread).
*in JP's human form
H has to work very hard to make it so that D won't actively try to kill Hill. He succeeds, and it overcorrects: D imprints on Hill and decides that he likes this pathetic little guy. Hill has learned that being a small, nonthreatening little creature is in his best interest, so he's functionally D's purse dog.
So is JP.
So is Fruit.
Basically, don't look in D's pockets. There are a lot of monsters in there.
JP tolerates Hill and they form a sort of cautious friendship. Fiddleford and ML, though, both actively despise Hill, avoiding him when they can. Fiddleford will bully him when he has an excuse. H is a better husband to Hill than Hill was to H, but that is a very low bar and H is still pretty shitty to him.
This family has a very clear pecking order. It's even more toxic than it was before, but H does still do his best to take care of all of his spouses. In particular, Fiddleford demands rules and structure, so things become more stable and eventually everything levels out.
Lunar Demigod D
D is a badass, terrifying creature with uncontested power. He wears a cloak that will melt your skin if you aren't one of his approved people, and sometimes just leaves it lying around in foreign countries (and planets). He never went to therapy for his binge eating disorder, so most restaurants have food on standby for him. He keeps monsters in his pockets and will sic them on you unprompted. He does not obey the laws of man, god, or physics. He fears nothing, is quick to anger, and feels entitled to the whole world. The only thing keeping him from being even more dangerous is that he knows that JP doesn't like it when he hurts people, so the citizens of Earth have all learned to breathe a sigh of relief when they see his high priest on his shoulder. That raccoon can mean the difference between the Lunatic God* mugging you or taking you out for ice cream.
*The Lunatic God is a self-adopted title. Moons and madness go together! 😄
All of his favorite restaurants have been blessed by H with infinitely refilling cabinets so that D and Fruit can visit them together without bankrupting them.
His favorite restaurants all have a system in place to send out a specific staff member to bring him whatever food he wants. He grows to strongly bond with these people and will bring them presents. These presents could mean anything from a dead deer to the Hope Diamond.
Anywyay, congratulations! This guy rules the world.
How's Big Stan doing?
Bad. Big Stan is doing bad.
In fact, he's actually the foremost smuggler of the anti-mage security tech that businesses in 04 use to keep D out.
Big Stan lived at the estate for a while, but as D kept getting more violent and unstable, he eventually left. He tried to take JP with him, because he knew JP was a kidnapping victim and saw the ways that this lifestyle was changing him, but it was too late: JP didn't want to leave anymore. In the DDnmD era, Big Stan and JP were good friends and allies as the two people who cared about D; now, Big Stan feels like he's lost another person the way he lost his brother.
D is allowed to visit Big Stan's new home whenever he wants - as long as he behaves. D will leave if his brother tells him to leave, even though there isn't technically a way of enforcing that. D has poor impulse control, but does his best.
Big Stan and JP half-heartedly stay in touch for a while, but that friendship breaks off pretty bitterly. On the other hand, he's gotten to be pretty good friends with JP's parents and siblings, who tried to keep in touch with their boy for a while before he drank the koolaid and become a high priest in a damn Madness Cult.
Some final notes
Each of the members of the harem has a celestial body symbolically assigned to them by H. Obviously H is the sun and D is the moon; the rest of them are:
- ML: Mars
- Fiddleford: Saturn
- Hill: Venus
- JP: Pluto
Canonical JP is a paranoid little creature - as in, he literally has a mental health disorder that gives him paranoid delusions. This version of JP has a god managing that for him, so he's a lot calmer overall. He's also had the chance to deal with a lot of his fears by exposure therapy, including things that a normal person would never be able to be "exposed" to. At one point in the years before Hill came back, he literally asked H to help him deal with is fear of death... by, y'know. Dying a bunch. He's actually a really hard bugger to kill permanently.
In the Good Ending, D spends most of his time in the Compound, only venturing out when he's particularly bold. On the other hand, redistribution of Power D is more likely to stay home when he's feeling happy and content. When his anxiety begins to act up, he soothes it by going out to terrorize people.
Hill develops a strong unrequited crush on D because he's a big, cool, badass, confident wizard.
Fruit is a Scene Kid. She looks adorable.
D has a massive menagerie of anomalous animals. He breeds his own mutated species!