ragingratbastard replied to your post: I still have a LOT of things to say about the Iron...
I do think a lot about how even after a year Clay still feels like a newbie and how none of his ties to the nein are particularly strong, especially in comparison to Molly who knew them for a much shorter amount of time but had stilled established amazingly strong relationships with each member of the nein before his passing, it just makes me real sad in a way
It makes me sad, too! Also, it’s fascinating, which of course makes me terribly happy, so it’s really just a very confusing position to be in all around.
I think a lot of what it comes down to is...so much of what bound the Mighty Nein from the beginning is the feeling that none of them, not a single one of them, actually have anywhere else to go. Any homes they ever had between them are lost, and they don’t have a whole lot of options besides each other. There’s a desperate codependency inherent to the whole group. They need each other. It’s the only alternative to being entirely alone.
They also understand each other, because everybody who started out in the M9 can recognize that feeling of being lost and adrift from personal experience. They can all empathize with loneliness and doubt, with self-recrimination. Having literally nowhere on the planet to call home hurts. When the Nein found each other as a new family, they found other people who knew that exact same hurt from the inside.
Except for Caduceus. Caduceus is so sure he still has a place waiting for him at the end of this adventure. He doesn’t need these people to echo or comfort his core loneliness, to be his new family, because he still believes he has one out there somewhere. These people are his friends and coworkers. He needs them to fix his home, not to become his home.
It’s such a contrast to Nott, who’s recently been faced with the possibility that she could maybe someday get her old home back after all, and is straight-up melting down over it. It’s so unlike Jester, who went back to Nicodranas and then left again, Fjord who spent two months out at sea and then rode inland away from it as fast as he could. Yasha and Caleb are terrified of running back into their old lives. Beau’s refused her family and keeps ducking the Cobalt Soul at every opportunity. But Caduceus still has the hope of returning in his heart, and he’s still using the tools and the rules that surrounded him his whole life.
I’m not sure this can change, unless Caduceus is somehow pushed to the point of needing the group emotionally for something his family cannot fulfil. Finding out his whole family is dead would probably do it, but that honestly feels too boring for me to expect Matt to go there. We did that with Percy. What would it take, then, for Caduceus to face things or need things he has no faith in his old family to ever again provide? Maybe he needs to see too much and experience too much and change. Maybe he’ll dig in his heels against changing and finally find his siblings out in the great wide world, and discover that they’ve changed, that they’ve turned away even as he was trying to save things for them. I’d be super into that.
Of course, if the group picked up another New Guy, well, he’d be the Old Guy then. Depending on the new New Guy’s issues, the fabric of the group would change all over again. The main core of group bonding would eventually be different, and Caduceus would help write this new one. It wouldn’t need to be based on codependance and having no other options then.
(I vote against that option on every possible level, of course--but it would be hella interesting.)
