In the harbinger shared darling au who do you think would be the first to fall in love and who do you think would take the longest amount of time?
aahhh what an interesting question!!! let’s see...
childe is the first to fall in love. you remind him so much of his siblings, fragile little beings in constant need of his love and protection. he is a man with little interest in romance, so his love for darling is fueled in large part by an existing love he has for his siblings, as he sees them in darling. it’s only when darling’s presence in his life begins making him feel...different does he realize that perhaps this isn’t the type of love he thought he felt. his desire to ruin them, to betray their trust and bind darling to him in a way that the other harbingers can’t, is one that makes him the most dangerous of the harbingers. his morals are so low that it makes you wonder how far he’ll go to make you his.
arlecchino is a close second. she does not let others in easily, but the moment she saw you, all she could feel was pity. as the days turned to weeks, that pity did not fade, because no matter how you’d managed to capture the harbingers’ affections, you are nothing more than a normal, pathetically weak civilian. you remind her so much of the abused and abandoned kids that end up in her orphanage... except you are not afforded the luxuries they are. they are free to grow and to learn, to find family and forge friendships, to go and come as they please so long as they pledge their lives to the tsaritsa. but you... all she can describe you as is a bird trapped in a small, rounded cage. your world is so small, and she wants nothing more than to steal you away to a world where you can be hers, one where you are always under her control and her constant watch.
dottore takes the longest to fall in love because he finds the purpose of love useless. it is an emotion that compels lifeforms to act recklessly and selflessly, and while those parameters do have a place in his research, they disgust him. what dottore feels for you isn’t love, but rather a fond affection like one might have for an amusing pet. losing you wouldn’t damage him too much (he’d miss you of course, but he’d never admit it), and dottore has little willpower to constantly fight for your attentions or affections like the others. his love for darling is more akin to a platonic love, one whose company he can tolerate where he can talk about whatever he sees fit. just.. don’t be fooled. platonic love or not, dottore doesn’t care if his actions come off as anything resembling ‘romantic love’ (which, to your bewilderment, sometimes does). you are something he keeps around for his own curiosity and amusement, nothing more than an experiment for his sick fantasies. the bruises and gauze on your body prove that much.
overall, i think the order would go like this:
childe
arlecchino
columbina
pantalone
scaramouche / pierro *
sandrone
capitano
dottore
outside of childe and arlecchino who fall in “love” with you almost instantly, the harbingers merely feel an intense obsession with darling (columbina, dottore, pierro, childe, scaramouche) or desire to control them (pantalone, sandrone, arlecchino, capitano). the first to truly fall “in love” with darling, at least by the definition of putting darling’s needs above their own, is arlecchino, but even she is a control freak who would slowly descend back into her perfectionism once darling is safely within her control.
bonus:
* scaramouche and pierro do fall in love... but their love isn’t love for you.
in scaramouche’s case, his ‘love’ is one of delusion and hatred... paradoxically so. he does not ‘love’ you for any genuine feelings, though it isn’t quite true to say he doesn’t harbor any genuine affections for you either. sometimes, he finds himself feeling... at peace within your arms. as if the outside world fades away and nothing more can harm him again. but even then, he does not love you, because all you are is a vessel through which he can maybe, possibly, come to love himself.
in pierro’s case, he harbors a love that existed long before you did, a love he held so dearly for his family and his lover of a time long past, a love he never thought he could indulge in again. after all, do failures deserve love? he finds that answer in you, because sometimes you remind him of those happier times. it’s almost as if you’re a stand-in for the people he lost, so one couldn’t possibly call this love. more of an infatuation with who he sees you as or who he wants you to be.