#mercenaryduo

[brrrridgette]

who hates their sibling more competition

[ssupercuts]

Mmmm c!mercenaryduo angst...

[krebble]

cpunz appreciation post + headcanons/rambling

cpunz is agender, intersex, and gay :) his pronouns are he/him, but every now and again he pulls out the they/thems and xe/xirs when he feels like it.

ABSOLUTELY wears those dollar bill boxers. really likes gold jewelry and likes to wear lots of rings. he used to have enormous ear gauges but has toned it down a bit. he has multiple piercings but doesn't always wear all of them (he has a septum piercing for instance but I just never draw him with it in)

has a bunch of tattoos he got in his teens when he was first getting onto the mercenary scene to make himself seem tougher and hardcore. they're all REALLY bad. skull and bones tattoo type shit. during the revival book experiments he actually has dream carefully remove some of the sections of skin (with the dumbest tattoos) and revive him so they scar over lmfao

he can't draw a stick figure to save his life but is actually a really good cook. he likes spicy food, which he doesn't think is all that spicy, but the first time he made dream food it put him on the ground. that however is more a testament to the fact that dream tends to eat his meat not only unseasoned but uncooked.

plant guy actually. he has fifty billion succulents in his house and some of them are pretty small but the majority of them are unnervingly large.

cpurpled is his little sibling (nonbinary, xe/they) and they have the same mom but different dads. punz's mom was exceptionally neglectful and from a young age used him expressly for the purpose of garnering sympathy and money. when he was younger punz was happy to be useful but as he got older he quickly realized his mom was just about the fakest person alive and that nothing she did ever came without strings attached or was out of true love for him. a lot of her boyfriends treated him like shit as well, and whenever he managed to save up some money for himself to get something he'd have to hide it or she'd find it, take it, accuse him of being selfish, and he'd never see a penny back.

at fourteen he left. he got by for a while doing under-the-table work and getting paid in cash, sleeping at night in really cheap crappy rooms or at homeless shelters. since he's in such a crappy part of town (not having the money for anywhere better) he gets exposed to the dark underbelly of the city ooooooh pretty quickly and that's how he gets into the mercenary trade. he starts only as help for hire, basically doing a lot of the same stuff his mom had him do but getting paid for it this time (being a distraction as part of a con, for example). however, he quickly figures out where the real money is and starts leaning into more mercenarial work. he teaches himself to fight first out of self-defense, then starts seeking out the mercenaries and assassins with reputations (difficult to find them, but doable). a few of them are willing to give him a bit of help, but for the most part punz figures it all out himself. he gets pretty good at what he does, builds up a reputation, is getting paid well. he hits twenty, a big milestone for him, has a decent house.

then one night his mom shows up out of nowhere, and dumps purpled on him.

punz grew up in an area with a fair amount of hybrid prejudice. however, hybrid genes can be dominant or recessive, meaning hybrids could appear completely human but carry the genes, whether they know it or not. (ex: I hc cphil as a fox hybrid who looks entirely human, minus the crow traits given to him by the death goddess. cwilbur looks similarly human, minus a few vaguely fox traits, but cfundy is very foxlike in appearance despite his mother having not a drop of fox blood in her. hybrid genes are weird and take specific conditions to activate.)

anyway, his mom gets with a guy, they have a kid (purpled), all's well. until at the age of seven, purpled starts sprouting scales and antenna and all sorts of things. second eyelids, teeth, etc., as hybrid traits sometimes don't appear until later in life. (another hc of mine is that hybrids are hybrids of specific species. purpled is a fish hybrid, specifically an angler fish, so his antennae are actually lures. he has two because the mixing of human and nonhuman blood is in itself a genetic mutation, so hybrids often have features not found in the nonhumans they're combined with). so punz's mom goes full throttle "DISGUSTING DEMON BABY!!" and remembers she has another kid who is an adult and whom she can dump this kid on. so that's exactly what she does.

suddenly punz, who has never been interested in kids in his life, is saddled with what he considers a toddler. purpled, meanwhile, is a seven-year-old who's just gone through the worst experience of xeir life--first they wake up with a ton of weird stuff sprouting out of xem (the scales sprouting actually hurt quite a bit), then xeir mom and dad start screaming at each other, their mom accusing their dad of lying to her about some thing or another, they scream at each other for a while until xeir mom tells their dad to get out and xeir dad leaves without saying a word to them. then xeir mom drags them out of the house and dumps xem at this stranger's house and leaves. who even is this guy?

for a very long time, punz treats purpled like they're temporary, hoping his mom will come back and get this kid after she cools off. he doesn't even tell xem he's their brother for a month. finally, after scouring the city looking for her, he's forced to accept that she isn't coming back, that this kid is his to take care of now, and that he's gotta leave town to keep his younger sibling safe.

punz teaches purpled the mercenary trade, takes care of them, feeds xem, all that, but the two of them are never really as close as they should have been. a part of punz resents purpled, even though he knows it's not their fault, for bringing back a part of his life he thought he'd left behind and forcing his current life into upheaval. he leaves purpled alone a lot, because he never wanted a kid and has a hard time dealing with xem sometimes. he does love them, but his experiences with his mother early in his life make him really spiteful about and distrustful of 'love'. his mercenary attitude furthers this by making him see love as something useless. he teaches purpled this along with fighting lessons as part of becoming a mercenary.

purpled, for their part, also kinda resents punz in a way. it's not really punz's fault and it's not purpled's, but the facts remain: what purpled wanted more than anything was for punz to be xeir new parent. punz did not want to be a parent and wasn't emotionally equipped to do so anyway. purpled usually considers their upbringing good--made xem tough, a good mercenary, a good fighter, all that--but also a part of them really, REALLY wanted punz to be their loving older sibling parent-figure, and punz never was. they're both bitter in their own ways, but seeing punz so unabashedly and proudly love dream with all of himself hurts purpled deep. why wasn't I good enough for him to love me too (in a different way obviously but y'all know what I mean)? why wouldn't he do that for me? why is he doing it for him?

sorry guys purpled/punz sibling angst on a Friday night 💔

[maruteru]

Sixteenth Day Event Prompt:

Purpled's UFO in winter

Finally participate in @sixteenth-day-event!! Have been wanted to join for a while but I always forgot lol ;) Thanks for the prompt!

[brrrridgette]

Hiii long time lurker here, love your art I ate it for breakfast.

So! Thought's on mercenary duo? Personally I think they're genuinely mean to each other but they're still each other's emergency contact (but in Punz case after Dream) I really love your purpled design!

Anyways have a nice day

HIIII THERE THANK YOU SO MUCH!!! here's some mercduo...

i LOVE doomed siblings c!mercduo... actually i wrote a fic i never finished or posted in like early 2024 about them if anyone wants to read it, here it is (#dontjudge)...! but basically, i agree with you lol...

umm the way i think of them kinda branches from the fic so i'll just quickly contextualize my made-up lore for them (cw for mentioned experimentation/body modification): punz and purpled were originally from the hypixel server, and purpled was experimented on in order for him to be the "best" player... punz was "too old" so they didn't really do allat... the two would also kill on their behalf, eliminating cheaters and the like. dream saves them from the server, and punz is not only friends (+ more...) with dream, but they also "owe" him in a sense for saving them and purpled...

punz cuts contact from purpled to keep him safe (bc hypixel is still on the hunt for the both of them) but also out of some guilt of not being able to properly protect him while in hypixel and not wanting to confront it... then, it goes on for too long and they just drift apart + purpled genuinely cannot find him...

purpled doesn't remember any of this stuff, though, only rlly remembers punz bc he's repressed most of it...? purpled despises punz because they abandoned him, but in the end, purpled came to the mainland of the dsmp in search of them bc he still cares sooo much unfortunately (and wants answers on top of that...)

on the other hand, punz mainly sticks with dream and avoids purpled for the most part, and really only comes to see him when dream tells him to. even then, they act very snarky and relatively friendly like no time has been lost between the two of them

they still hold trust for each other, though... like purpled would rather Die than have someone see him vulnerable and weak (kind of a result of the experimentation, but he doesn't know that) but he'd let his guard down around punz even if it takes a while... and punz knows purpled wouldn't genuinely try to kill him given the chance... but the weight of everything is just tooo much so their dynamic when they interact is so stilted and weird anddddd loaded and i hate them

idk if that even made sense but YEAH that's them...

[brrrridgette]

the potential of c!mercenary duo needs to be studied in a lab

[brrrridgette]

when ur card declines at therapy so they bring out ur older brother who only comes to see u when money is involved