bittersweet somethingness - he met Pipin only a scant few times in his first year of association with the immortal flames, half of those even oblivious to who he was beyond rank and title and a vague notion that raubahn had some manner of family ties somewhere among the marshals. a dissimilar last name and more dissimilar appearance tends to waylay assumptions, especially to someone too busy keeping his eyes down to bother looking closely. The final bewildered puzzle piece of realization clicking into place jostled him out of his determined willingness to not remember names and faces, if only out of sheer curiosity of the story there.

It made sense to him, in hindsight. Raubahn’s concern over nanamo is much too familiar and transparent, even in the small glimpses he saw of it at first and what he knew from general societal absorption. He fits too well in the slot of quiet, perpetually worried parental figure, too genuine and frank to be something put on. It warms him to raubahn immensely, a little human factor in a figure that’s portrayed larger than life, if he isn’t listening too closely to the added ember of envy it stokes in the back of his skull. When he and raubahn foster something of what could be considered the beginnings of a friendship, made between ready insights shared by someone who isn’t afraid to bite his tongue or have it gilded by monetarist pockets, vanxx eases it warily into conversations. Heavily veiled in politeness and good-natured curiosity, familiarity wrung out of it. Either out of the corners of something seen in the topic or the habit of glancing over things that inflate his already beyond him reputation, raubahn in so many words explains Pipin’s background as one that didn’t deserve him and that he took him under his wing when he was a boy.

I don’t think Vanxx needs any precise details to understand this and all its implications. Misplaced pride with nowhere to go, tiny but frustrated all the same, this boy from a nebulous background growing into where he stood now. At the beginning it’s an uglier kind of envy, well hidden but stewing when no one else is there to see it. Any resulting distance he tried to jettison between him and Pipin in the time after was quickly and effectively erased in hours following the bloody banquet, immediacy of an ally he was in any effort to try and interject on whatever fate awaited raubahn. I think it’s at some point during mutually sleepless nights is when vanxx learned from Pipin the full details about his upbringing and was privately served a buffet of feeling like a complete asshole for feeling the intense jealousy he does. oh, for this to be a lesson in reflecting himself too much on someone! What a concept!

The envy is less front and center afterwards, pipin as a real person introduced to him and not just a concept in his head to wind himself around. He’s learned that he likes Pipin, past the layers of discomfort - quick wit, loyalty as humanly capable of rivaling his dad’s, down to earth. They have a funny, strained little sense of camaraderie borne from the terror of trying to save raubahn from imprisonment and execution, bullrush way such an emergency has of absolutely tearing down walls. Pipin is more comfortable than Vanxx is with him, who has trouble getting around a sense of formality and not knowing where or how to center himself on their diagram of relationships in consideration of themselves and others. Which I think pipin finds endearingly and patiently funny more than anything, informed deeply by gossip performed below knee height with nanamo and his own ability to read raubahn. Vanxx is Also Aware of this which doesn’t help the ice skittering feet frantically trying to navigate things with Tact

SNFF..... for the first little while I think he would not know what to do with himself and be a little lost at sea. defining himself with busy hands and responsibility all his life, what do you do without it? I think first and foremost would be time, ACTUAL time, with the scions and raubahn and be people instead of figures defined by what's on their shoulders. what a concept! he isn't a man of extravagant taste and it's the little things he would treasure - coffee, indulgence of sharlayan libraries, restoring old and forgotten little oddities and trinkets, esp of the mechanical variety (he has a particular fondness for clockwork and tiny automata; things that need a delicate hand), cooking.

cooking!! he would devour metaphorically and literally recipes from the world over just to try them and experiment; his main love language is food and sharing it and he would adore rifling through dogeared recipe books to try the next thing he's never made or tried. food was largely a necessity of basic staples for much of his early life, so interesting and unique dishes feel like an absolute indulgence while not too much of one because it's food and it still has a purpose no matter its bells and whistles.

he'd also visit his momma a lot :') maybe momma would insist on visiting the scions sometime bc I'm losing it imagining that interaction FHSKFHDJDL

closes my eyes and descends into my grave

evie is home, evie is worrying - his presence is a warm familiarity unlike anything she's used to, and his down to earth hands in the garden nature is a comfort more than she can describe. to the point where the dark marks under his fingernails are willed to be soil and not blood - if only she wasn't well aware of too many hints that say otherwise, but then she knows about trying to scrub her own palms. whatever evie's past, she's made up her mind that nevertheless she adores him and the quiet spaces they share together.

jericho is. worry, also, a deeper worry than evie, a deeper refusal to see things in front of her face. frustration, trickle of fear, desperate want to see him okay, desperate want to smack him sometimes LMAO - I think Io is also the most susceptible to jericho's laundry list of lies, if only because she wants so badly to believe them and grip the hands of someone who can see and understand and maybe if she doesn't question things she can hold on a little longer. she's good at not questioning! she's good at being lied to. she's good at looking to a ribbon tied to an arm instead of eyes dancing around in the way she's learned signals something.

gordon twists her brain up a little FHKDHSK;FJ I think she experiences a benign kind of smiling bewilderment at his escapades, all while reflecting on his illegal world bouncing practices and sprouting from the political background that would delight in seeing them both very dead and/or arrested. extremely steep spite in his place for his family, despite the extremely questionable nature there's an unrelenting kernel of pride for gordon going so against the place he came from

he had a mentor throughout his youth into his young adulthood: a grizzly old roe woman named Eifasthal whose cabin was situated just close enough to his childhood village that she would go there for supplies and restocking. she was the kind of person who spoke a maximum of five sentences when she was in town and left as soon as she got what she needed. it wasn't a secret that she was in military service for decades before Garlemald descended and vanxx ate up every rumour about her before he made up his mind that she would teach him something beyond working in fields and other small town boy jobs.

eifa. reluctantly. saw the opportunity to have someone with not fucked up knees and old injuries to help her take care of things around her home and make the trek to the village for her. vanxx was more of an errand boy than anything at first for a long time but that cabin was an extraordinarily welcome escape despite the hard work. Eifa wasn't afraid to watch her tongue around him and she was the first person he could have open and frank conversations with, vent ugly frustrations, share aspirations that weren't safe and small. While Eifa's concern for him started mostly out of the halfway concern that he'd go and put himself in an early grave if someone didn't ground him in reality, her cabin eventually became something tied to a sense of real self, and it was one of the few places he felt utterly and completely safe. Things and fears and worries he couldn't share even with family and friends he could confide in Eifa to, on and into adulthood. A great many of his fond earlier memories are centred around long cold walks in the middle of winter to Eifa's where he'd be shouted at for his crummy coat before thawing in front of the hearth; summer forest smell, campfire smoke still in the air from whatever they'd caught that day while Eifa groused about proper form

(AHH THANK YOU LUPIS)

COMPLICATED,, gods have always held a place of deep reverence in his community, all the more so by his mom being an extremely respected leader in the more religious parts of life. the feeling gods have, for them, is less fear of some ultimate smiting being and more the sense of a deeply beloved elder to be cared for and who cares in kind. It’s a twist in the brain for him to contrast this benevolent but dutifully respectful familiarity to the absolute bitterness of the god and how it’s separated the both of them from everything they both knew. Betrayal first and foremost, frustration and confusion; the initial part of their relationship was contested to say the least and the flavour still carries throughout.

The god always existed paired with an ancient hero (think an equivalent of what you see in ancient epic poems; Gilgamesh, Rama…) until eventually it slowly faded from retellings, not that the bond forged in the beginning ever went with it. Jen being slotted into the god’s empty space of mythical ancestral figure that it is always beside has made him a funny little extension of a limb to it, and it to him. (Which is also why he technically can’t be “enthralled” by it; it’s like trying to pin down your own shadow). So he’s tied to this thing that by all appearances hates him and wants them both to be forgotten, all while in the head spinning position of being shoved into the place of an impossible figure he could never fill. Purposeful on the gods part, he always suspects - self sabotage in trying to distance itself from part of its soul and make it lesser, file that connecting string down as much as it can, which is the funniest mistake on its part because Jen immediately takes it to the challenge of making the most of his humble little humanity being forced under the spotlight.

Trying to find a way around the god’s tempering of his home starts at first in a frantic scramble to seek out its forgiveness, and then failing that, wholly in spite. Carving a little (pointedly) humble wooden charm for the god to inhabit when there’s no murals and paintings for it to borrow for a body, taking it with him so it can see for itself every new person who he meets and remembers. Part to give the god a scathing refusal to give in, part in gripping this mutual binding string and pulling back because it goes both ways and he can drag it into remembering why it was a god, once. It’s a combo journey of grief, Jen travelling and trying to outrun his own funny little version of what I’m realizing is a lot like meteion attached to his soul LMAO and trying not to succumb to the same thing. I think it turns around in his head one day that the god is steeped in its own awful version of grief that it’s been sitting in for lifetimes of being forgotten, and while it’s hardly a 180 in attitude change it leads to little things. Bittersweet companionship that looks like a one-sided conversation when otherwise alone on the road. Paint on the charm, little beads embedded in, tiny additions to the smallest altar in the world; half for it, half for him, remembered reverence taught to him since he could talk. Repeat asking of the god what it itself remembers from ages past until it eventually replies unprompted late in the night. Sorrow for the both of them that this is what they have left to remember them, what they both used to be, quiet determination that the god will find itself and they’ll rediscover its name