*talking about Scar* Impulse: “Does anybody else’s anxiety go through the roof when he’s around?” Bdubs: “It’s more like a spooky baby than anything – cause I know he can’t hurt me, it’s just weird to look at him.” Tango: “It’s disturbing, but not threatening.”
i was going to make an edit based on this post but i felt bad subjecting other people’s art to this horrible idea so i… made something worse. i think. happy new year.
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Oh my God Desert Duo + Renchanting Spy x Family AU
Grian, a spy, is sent to investigate a mafia boss called Red King who is powerful enough to threaten peace between countries. To infiltrate into RK’s inner circle, he needs to find a child and enrol them into Dogwarts (???) Academy, where RK will make his only public appearance. Grian goes around and finds this mind reading child little shit called Martyn, and Martyn’s like “yeah I’m bored to tears, why not”. Scar, an assassin, is in need of a cover for his assassin job (Hawkeye pew pew sounds) so he gets into a fake marriage with Grian. Martyn is very amused by Desert Duo shenanigans. Grian’s like “scAR” every ten seconds and thinks Scar is dumb as hell. Scar is just oblivious to all of Grian’s strategising and plotting and is very :D
Scott, who collects intelligence for Grian, is extremely amused by how Grian gets so flustered by Scar and Martyn. So he takes every opportunity to annoy Grian and fuel Martyn’s shenanigans lmao
At school, Martyn is placed in the same class as Ren, the son of the Red King (yeah they’re two different people, bear with me). Ren is all like “HEAR YE HEAR YE BOW DOWN TO YOUR FUTURE KING” and his friends Skizz and Etho are like “REN MY BOSS-MAN!!”. Naturally Martyn’s like “man this kid sucks, he’s so stuck up.” But Grian needs to get close to RK for the mission, and thus relies on Martyn getting close to the son of RK. Martyn grudgingly tries to befriend Ren but Ren doesn’t really care for the “peasant” Martyn. Martyn gets pissed and his hand comes flying into Ren’s face (“You DARE lay your hand on me, laddie?? YE COULD’VE BROKEN MY NECK AND BEHEADED ME”) and Martyn’s like “well he had it coming!”
…This is chaotic. and i have no idea who the becky is
Grian stares out over the edge of the perimeter. He’s been sitting here a while. He kicks a rock, watches it clatter all the way to the deepslate and bedrock floor of the thing, even as he hears someone approach.
He looks up. He looks at the other for a minute before looking down into the perimeter once more. “You know, on the anniversary of when it all started, we threw a party.”
Ren sits next to Grian and shoves his hands in his pockets. “Maybe today’s less of a partying sort of day, my friend.”
“Maybe,” Grian says.
They’re both quiet again for a while. Grian curls his wings tighter to himself. They almost feel heavy, like this. They almost feel like they wouldn’t catch the wind.
“Any reason you’re out here instead of, I don’t know, bothering S—”
“I’m not… I can’t look at him today,” Grian says.
“Funny,” Ren says. “Neither can I.”
Grian snorts.
“I could ask you the same about—he’s one video call away.”
“Well,” Ren says, and they’re both quiet again. Grian’s hands feel awful. He’s already washes them several times, though. He could go land in one of the little ponds nearby, or the river, and wash them again, but it won’t make his hands or feathers feel less grimy.
After a moment, Ren hands him a can of cheap domestic beer. Grian stares at him, baffled. “Well, despite Doc’s grumbling, I don’t drink the good stuff when I’m sad,” Ren says reasonably. “I don’t taste it that way.”
“I’m not sure getting drunk is a great idea,” Grian says.
“Just a toast then,” Ren says.
“Fine.”
Ren thinks for a moment, cracks his can, and then, in a deep, affected, barely-Scottish accent, says: “To the Red Kingdom! May those bloodstained stones rest peacefully.”
“…to us,” Grian says, “and can we rest peacefully too.”
“Hah!” the Red King says. “I’ll drink to pointless dreams, laddie.”
“Youwould.”
Grian takes a swig of the beer and promptly chokes. It tastes absolutely terrible, as expected, but is unfortunately grounding. Great. He’ll have to admit to Ren at this rate that he might have been right about something.
He stares out over the perimeter a while longer.
“To one year,” the Red King says.
“To one year,” Grian echoes.
“To your victory,” the Red King says.
“To never winning again,” says Grian. “It’s a long way down. It’s a long way down.”
Neither of them leave that spot for a long time, not until after the sun has set and a nearby skeleton arrives to drive them off.
“You’re the one who asked if the Cod Empire had stories,” Jimmy says, sitting next to Scott by the edge of a mangrove island. In the distance in the swamp, they can watch several young codfolk attempt to play—Scott doesn’t know the name of the game. Something that involves a lot of treading water and throwing a ball around and makes Scott look exhausted just watching it, at least.
“Yeah, but I don’t get it. Don’t fables normally have like… morals?” Scott says. “The ones I knew did.”
“I mean, I’d say the story about the catfish was always pretty clear to me,” Jimmy says. “Doesn’t change, but adapts. It’s willing to eat anything, but not change who it is, and it outlives the goldfish, who change all the time, because of it—”
And Scott stands, distant from Ren but still covered in blood, red crystals floating around him. He raises his sword silently, then he sits down with the axolotl and waits. He’d finish it himself, but he’s always simply tried to survive, survive without changing who he is in the process. He doesn’t know if he’s succeeded. His teeth taste like iron and bile. If he’d been about to throw up, though, he would have done it days ago. Maybe that’s what victory tastes like.
“—that’s a moral, right?”
“Other people change the goldfish though. The goldfish don’t choose to change. That’s… that’s the point of goldfish breeding, Jimmy.”
“Yeah, and they die if you breathe on them funny. Don’t you know what a metaphor is? You’re the one who said fables normally have lessons!”
Scott sighs. “Yeah, yeah. Fine.” He sighs. “The oyster one, though.”
“Well that one’s just literal. Did you not know you can crack open oysters to check water quality? They’re a good indicator!”
Scott throws his hands up. “No! I didn’t grow up by the ocean! And the story’s more like that an animal just kills the oyster one day, and it finds out the pain the oyster had been preventing—”
And as Jimmy bleeds out on the grass, he realizes he’s bleeding out for them a second time. He hears, distant, Grian justify himself, but all Jimmy feels is like he’s somehow been cheated. He’s been killed first, again. The first name in a bloodbath of them. How is that fair? He’s never asked to die first! He’s never asked to die at all!
“—which is just. Really sad for the oyster?”
“Scott, they’re oysters.”
“They’re fables! We were just talking about metaphors!” Scott flops back. It’s undignified. He’ll get leaves in his hair, and mud all over his clothes. He doesn’t care. Here, the mangroves in the brackish swamp water smell like salt and something he hadn’t smelled anywhere else, and it doesn’t smell good, really, but he’s figured out it smells like life, and also maybe Jimmy, in a way that makes it easy to not care quite so much about appearances. Maybe it’s the bird in him, he thinks jokingly. He does have wings, and so many of the birds come to roost around trees like these.
They’re quiet for a while, Scott flopped back, children screaming and laughing in their game, and Jimmy watching all of them.
“Did you have a favorite?” Jimmy finally asks.
“Would it be cliche to say the one about the lovers? The seahorses, the one who builds a beautiful thing for his lover.”
“They die in the end, though.”
“Yeah, but, like—”
The war never comes to the hobbit hole. It’s funny; in the end, the two of them had gone to the war instead, when it came looking. Maybe they’d known better. Maybe, thinks Scott, in the afterlife their four hands had built, maybe they’d known better than to taint it.
“—the things they made were real.”
“Huh.”
Jimmy helps Scott up again. He looks at Scott in the eyes in that way that makes Scott either want to kiss him or strangle him. Scott’s never fully decided which, which probably makes it all the stranger that he’s sitting here, getting covered in swamp water and talking about fables.
“And yours?”
“Mine? Oh, uh, it’s one—funny, I think I learned it from Lizzie? I have no idea why that would be.”
Scott raises an eyebrow.
“It’s simple. It’s just that all things start as water, and all things will be water again one day.”
“…what? Why would that story be your favorite?”
Jimmy is quiet for quite a while.
“Maybe it’s because… no matter how badly we were to mess up…”
And he watches the explosion and he runs, he runs, because he doesn’t know what else to do.
“…no matter how bad of a decision we have to make…”
And Scott looks at the sword, and looks at Xonorth, and he doesn’t know what else he could do.
“…we’ll always end up back where we started.”
“That’s… oddly optimistic,” Scott says, although he’s not really sure that’s what he thinks about it. Somehow, instead of optimistic, it makes Scott feel like he’s somehow both too big and too small for his skin, thinking of the world like that. Thinking of everything going back to how it started.
On a circle, once again, they agree on their rules, and they shake hands, and they make their kingdoms. Again, and again, and—
“Well, I do like to keep cheerful when I can!” Jimmy says brightly. “Oh look, they’ve finished with their game!”
