Why hello dear. Turnabout is fair play and all that, I want your director's cut thoughts on the part where Vex meets her first, extremely undeserving soulmate in i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart). Tumblr won't let me quote the entire thing, though.
In elvish, he said, “Be on your way, mutt.”
Under her sleeve, Vex’s forearm stung, as though the skin was cut through, and she resisted the urge to sneak a hand through her shirt to rub the words hidden there. She’d traced the shape of the large, block letters written on her arm enough times to recognize them when spoken aloud without checking.
The elf was a fair deal older than her, likely late twenties-early thirties to her seventeen. He wasn’t terrible looking, but he wasn’t handsome either– he was plain, and it was not improved by his severe expression. That was the thing with fate, it could account for events, but not for time. In ten, fifteen years, this man will have learned the error of his ways, you understand. In ten, fifteen years, they will be more or less the same age, physically, and she will have more gold than he could ever dream of, and he’d be kind, and redeemed by her. This was the original schematic, and while it wasn’t ideal, it was functional. Fate always errs towards functionality, when it can.
But Vex did not have ten, fifteen years to wait for a man to glean redemption from her, nor had the capacity to invest ten, fifteen years in him to make him a halfway decent man. She was seventeen, and tired, and she had mouths to feed and a roof to find shelter under.
So she left. She never learned his name, nor had interest in ever learning. In a way, it was liberating, knowing she never had to worry about meeting her soulmate again.
thank you! i really liked your response, and this is one of those scenes i basically had in mind as soon as i brainstormed the fic, so it saw a lot of revisions and thought, so i’m gonna do my best to sum it up, i hope i do it justice.
the weird thing about “i carry your heart” is that i was never actually that big a fan of soulmate aus before i started writing it, and learned to like it as i was writing it. a lot of my early reservations with the concept kinda get channeled into writing vex’s first, ill-fated soulmate, who i am only just now realizing i never actually ever sat down and gave a name to. oh well, he’s a dick at this point in the story anyway, so he doesn’t get a name.
i think that if vex and percy have the best possible version of redemptive love, wherein both support one another and encourage each other to improve themselves rather than each trying to fix their partner, then i imagine the potential relationship between vex and her planned soulmate would’ve been a much much worse kind of redemptive love. the kind where a racist dude is taught the error of his ways by a half-elven bastard who has to bare the weight of his redemption.
and vex ain’t about that bullshit.
i think what i was trying to go for in writing this part in is to get a sense that, while fate does exist in this au, it’s fallible. it pairs people up because of convenience, it puts people through a lot of misery for no justification, and, first chance it gets, it changes its mind. plus, i always really liked how part of the reason why vex and percy work is because they came into each other’s lives in the right moment, and i wasn’t sure if i could get that across in a more standard soulmate au, though others have successfully, and i needed to go along with vex’s insecurities in canon. also the thought of them being so right for each other that they made the powers that be change their mind was cute to me.
