hc + love and romance [imagine the eye emoji here]
a headcanon meme
THERE IS A LOT TO TALK ABOUT THERE. character deaths below, rip gabriel’s mortal lovers.
WHERE DO I BEGIN, UHH. I’ll start with him as a kid and go down to present day. As a gremlin warrior child, Lugus didn’t care at all about crushes or love or romance or any of that. Or at least, that’s what he thought, until he got a cute kid crush on a fellow Lusitani girl named Treba (after the goddess of protection). Lugus expressed this crush by giving her a spear and asking her to fight him in battle. She won, and Lugus proclaimed them married, so Treba gave him a gold torc she helped make as a wedding gift. But she was a mortal and grew up into an adult while Lugus was still a child, and eventually she moved away to marry a Carthiginian merchant. Little Lugus still held on to his “wife’s” present though and wore the torc with him everywhere, it meant a lot to the kid. As Lusitania/Marinus, he had a crush on a Roman girl, but she broke his heart by dancing with another boy at Saturnalia and he swore he would never love another Roman.
Under the Visigoths and the Islamic Caliphate and start of the Reconquista, he didn’t really think all that much about love and didn’t have any crushes. It wasn’t until after he got his independence as a country and became a teenager that he finally lost his virginity, to a random woman he met travelling the countryside which was a very awkward experience for both of them. He also met Arthur during this time period, and instantly started crushing on him (there is a lot I can say regarding Gabriel w/ homosexuality but we’ll just skip that for now). Then the Age of Navigation took off, and here is where Gabriel underwent his transformation from awkward pretty boy to sexy suave man, after a sleeping with a long string of mortal women while sailing around.
And then came the love of Gabriel’s damn life, a mortal sailor man by the name of Celestino. He became Gabriel’s first mate (the crew position) late 15th century and they fell in love travelling together and exploring the world. For Gabriel, he didn’t have to be the empire or his whole country or anything else with Celestino, he could just be him. And for a while, he got away with thinking like this, that they were just two regular sailors at sea. But he was immortal and Celestino wasn’t. Eventually Tino grew old and retired to Madeira, and Gabriel returned every year to be together again for as long as he could. Gabriel held Tino as he died of illness, and felt like a selfish bastard that Tino had been with him his whole life, had never had any other lovers or kids, that Gabriel would continue his immortal life and love again while Tino…couldn’t.
And then came Sebastian. The Desired One, the handsomest prince, the king who fucked everything up and yeeted himself into the Moroccan army causing the Union. Gabriel loved him with all his heart like a fool, and his death (and the union) broke his spirit and tossed him into a decades long depression. He’ll still find himself standing outside on a misty morning, staring into the fog and thinking of the legend “he will return on a misty morning to deliver us to greatness again”.
Nowadays, Gabriel is an irredeemable flirt. He is a Romance nation, and loves romance. Fucking lives for it. Romance is a game and he’s fucking winning at it, step up your game y’all. However he’s also a difficult man to tie down into monogamy and will dance around the subject, preferring to be free and with whoever he pleases. Flirting is a game to him, and the more challenge the better. He likes to draw ‘the game’ out, enjoying the buildup of tension and the back-and-forth it involves. He takes the utmost pride in being a good lover, he’ll put whoever he’s with before his own pleasure and wants to make sure they leave satisfied.
