Huge fic rec for Tallies in Ice by TungstenCat:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the
Organization for Transformative Works
Like, they took the "Sucrose kills Reckless Pallad" prompt and spun it into a devilishly subtle character study of Sucrose, "harmless sweetie", trying to reconcile anger and protectiveness into a "logical", "objective" framework, a simple calculus of marks on a ledger. And the Sucrose characterisation is just... ahhhh. Perfect.
The tally marks burn in her mind. And those are only the fresh ones, from the last few days in Dragonspine. There are precisely forty-five others, accrued over the last two years since she began the ledger. Since the day that Razor, bleeding from a dozen wounds and choking on poison, escorted a whimpering Pallad back to the city gates.
Read it, it's amazing, I am just floored <3