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