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fullscoreshenanigans · 3 months

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About your idea of Norman keeping for months at Lambda to the memory of Isabella's last hug. I have better:

Little AU where everything is the same except that, while Isabella hugs Norman to say him goodbye…

For a second, just three little seconds, she let her mask fell and said, in a whisper, a "I'm Sorry" in his ear. Because Norman was her little boy, she has raised him for 11 years. And she knows that this Peter will send him to a slow and painful death, rather than a quick one like all her other kids. She didn't want that to happen to him. She knews he'll suffer, so much, because she heard about Lambda. Maybe norman's shippment to Lambda was planned for months (for his 12th birthday, maybe) and has just be advanced.

For a moment, just a little moment, she feels her heart cracks. So she wisphers "i'm sorry" in his ear. Peter didn't hear her, he was letting her saying goodbye, he thought she was saying "goodbye".

Then he took Norman.

For 15 months, both the hug and the words stay in his mind.

"I'm sorry"

She was really sorry?

"I"m sorry"

She had no reason to tell him that, considering that he was sent to a slow death and that she would never seen him again. She told him she was happy and then….she said she was sorry.

It makes him cry. He hates being emotional about it. Does this hug and those words were geniune? Did she was really sorry? Did it mean that she wasn't happy?

At a point, after the evasion, he asks Vincent.

"Do you think she was really sorry?"

Vincent has no answers. He didn't have someone like Isabella. He wasn't betrayed until the very last moment. He was not as close of her than Norman was of Isabella before learning the truth.

"If she wasn't sorry, why would she tell you that?"

It's all Vincent can say.

A little part of Norman is sure that she wasn't lying, that she was really sorry, thisq litrle part of him hopes so much her love was real and that she was truly sorry, but his ressentment is stronger at this point.

It's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly when Legravalima made the push for Norman to be sent off to Lambda instead of the demon god.

(Chapter 152)

The way I interpret this sequence is that she'd been eyeing him up for years, her gluttony and avarice festering, knowing that he was supposed to be served at the 2046 Tifari after he reached full Grace Field maturity.

(Chapter 7)

And then this could just be early series weirdness because Shirai wasn't 100% sure what reasoning he wanted to provide at this point, but to make up for the extremely lackluster harvest of the other Grace Field farms, in October 2045 Norman's shipment was bumped up to just a few days before the 2045 Tifari in November. Yverk says "that will certainly please The One" in response to Isabella saying the trio's shipments can occur as planned, or "whenever [the demons] like."

He could be lying to pacify the rest of the noble court at Legravalima hoarding the highest grade meat for herself, but it doesn't sound like he's aware of there being another plan to send Norman off to Lambda at this point, and it doesn't seem like Isabella is aware of any other alternative path for Norman and Ray either until she's given the letter and suitcase on the first of November.

(Chapter 20)

There could have been other Grace Field children sent to Lambda, but with how we don't see them among any of the rescued children in the paradise hideout, Adam focusing specifically on Norman's identification number, and how the narrative wants to highlight Norman is special and isolated during this time partially because of how he interprets and internalizes that perception of himself, it seems like a safe bet he was the first Grace Field child to go to Lambda in its less than fifteen years of existence.

(Chapter 72 | Chapter 73)

I have a difficult time seeing Isabella say sorry to him in this moment given how pointed her saying she's happy just a few minutes earlier is with how it's just as much a lie to herself as it is to Norman. If it isn't true, then all the cognitive dissonance she's maintained up until now was for naught, and she had to fight so, so hard to kill the hope she had at opposing the system as a little girl.

(TPN Light Novel 2: Moms’ Song of Remembrance - “The Starry Sky and Leslie’s List” Chapter 9)

Her commitment to maintaining that facade in such a tense moment at the expense of providing the son she's raised for ten years a concession of any sort of sentiment that what he's experiencing is wrong is more interesting to me in how it adds to the emotional climax of the arc.

Vincent and Norman interactions, though, my beloved,,,

It throws a wrench into the carefully cultivated persona of an ice-cold emperor he maintains (like mother, like son), but I do very much enjoy the thought of Vincent being able to provide Norman support outside of his competency in all matters related to the technical side of their plans with how similar they are and Norman losing all the older siblings he had at Grace Field.

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