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bloatedandalone04 · 1 year

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➪the one where you try to move on and jack comes home.

Part 1

Warnings: angst, fluff, sad times all around

Word Count: 3k

Do not repost this anywhere, reblogs are fine <3

Jack sighed as he entered his house, his eyes glued to his phone as texts flooded the screen. The door shut loudly behind him, making him cringe in hopes he didn’t just accidentally wake his mom up. Deciding not to find out, he quickly walked through the house and towards the kitchen, where the door to the basement was.

He discarded his jacket on the armrest of the couch before falling against it, this thumb scrolling through text message after text message. Some old friends of his were trying to make plans for the weekend, but every idea given was something Jack refused to do.

Hey, buddy! Congrats on that new movie haha. I was thinking we could go out for breakfast sometime soon, just to catch up.

Hey, Jack, not sure if you remember me, but I just wanted to say I always knew you would make it big as an actor. Let’s meet up soon.

Hi Jack ;) Saw that movie you were in and just wanted to say you look good. Take me out to dinner sometime?

Man, he regretted not changing his number early on in his career.

He ignored each message as he opened his contacts and put in his password for his voicemail. His eyes closed when he lifted his hand and brought the phone to his ear, his heart skipping a beat when he heard your voice.

“Hey, it’s me. Um, you failed the test I gave you. I don’t know what happened to us or what happened to you, but I’m…I’m done,” the way your voice wavered had his heart beating loudly and his eyes stinging. “I’m sorry I wasn’t enough for you, I really wish I was. You meant everything to me and I wish you kept your promise. Good luck with everything. I wish you nothing but the best, and, yeah. I’m done. Goodbye.”

He squeezed his eyes tightly before opening them again, his vision slightly blurred as he kept the phone to his ear. “End of saved messages. To listen to this message again, press one. To delete this message, press two. To save this message, press nine,” his thumb moved and clicked on the same number he had pressed countless times now. “Message will be saved for two days.”

He seriously had no clue what he was going to do when the message deleted itself two days from now. It was, literally, the last thing he had of you as his mom had helped you clear out the clutter you had at his house. The hoodie you got from high school was no longer thrown over the chair in the corner, the pile of your favorite movies had disappeared from its place on the TV stand, the bag of chips he let you keep on the shelf was gone. You had successfully erased yourself from his life.

The only thing left was your voicemail. And the framed picture that was sitting beside the TV. It was the same picture you had beside your bed, and his heart ached as he wonders what you might have done with it. Did you keep it? Is it still on your nightstand? Did you destroy it? Pack it away in a box? Was he the only one with a copy of the picture now?

Each question made his heart burn as he tossed his phone onto the coffee table - his mind going back to when he did that the day he came home. At the time, your own phone was next to his, both powered off as you held each other.

Now, he was alone. His phone was the only one on the table, and he reached over to grab the pillow you had fallen asleep on too many times to count. He wrapped his arms around it as he fell against the cushions, his face buried in the pillowcase as sleep slowly took over his body.

Jack sighed heavily as he entered his house for the first time in three weeks. It was safe to say he was missing his own bed more than ever at this point and had long since grown sick of hotel rooms.

He couldn’t wait to fall face first into his sheets on his own bed, in his own room. The only thing that would make it better was if you were there with him.

The front door shut quietly behind him as he knew his mom was asleep. He pulled out his phone and clicked on your contact. He groaned when he realized what day it was and the plans with you that he had completely forgotten about.

He moved his thumbs to type out the most heartfelt apology ever written and offer to make it up to you tomorrow, but paused when he saw the notification at the bottom of the screen.

1 New Voicemail - Urgent.

Jack clicked on the message and put in his password before bringing his phone up to his ear. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting the voicemail to be about, but it definitely wasn’t you breaking up with him. He felt his heart skip a beat at how sad and defeated you sounded as he replayed the message two more times, his eyes stinging with unshed tears.

He saved the message before clicking on your contact again, his heart further deflating at the texts you had sent him earlier in the day.

9:32 AM

My girl <3: Hey, you’re home now, right? Are you still wanting to go out today?

The vagueness of your text should’ve been enough to set off alarms in his head. The fact you asked if he was still wanting to see you made his heart ache with guilt and regret. He always wanted to see you and he thought you knew that. The feeling only got worse as he continued reading the messages he had somehow missed.

10:01 AM

My girl <3: Sorry, you’re probably still sleeping. It’s been a long 3 weeks without you, I don’t blame you for wanting to sleep in.

10:03 AM

My girl <3: Just get back to me when you can.

The lack of your usual sweet words and the fact you weren’t adding any heart emojis at the end of your texts showed him exactly what you said in the voicemail.

You were done.

There were no more texts after that one and Jack felt his heart break when he realized that you probably thought he was flat out ignoring you, when it was the opposite.

He couldn’t wait to come home and see you. The past three weeks were hard and packed full of promo, interviews and press. He was hardly in control of his phone the whole time and only had it at the end of the day. Something about not wanting him to be distracted? Whatever the reason was, it was definitely not worth you feeling like he was ignoring you.

Jack clicked on the call button and brought the phone back up to his ear. Disappointment and guilt took over his body when he was sent straight to voicemail.

You didn’t want to talk to him.

You spent weeks trying to fight for your relationship, you had nothing left to give.

He squeezed his eyes shut when he heard your voice ask him to leave a message. He could only hope that you would get back to him as soon as your past self promised you would. “Y/n,” he said desperately, his eyes opening quickly as he brought his free hand up to tug on his recently cut hair. “Fuck, baby, I am so sorry for not answering you, I- things have been so crazy lately and I know that’s not an excuse, but, please. Let me make it up to you, let me explain everything, please.”

He was rambling, trying to get everything out in a single message. There were no words to describe the fear that was currently looming in his body, his heart aching and terrified that you wouldn’t call him back - terrified you wouldn’t let him explain.

“I can fix this, I can fix everything, I promise, just please,” he realized that his promises probably meant nothing to you now, but he was desperate at this point. “Please, just don’t… Don’t leave me. I love you, I-”

The sound of a beep cut him off and his pleas were sent to your voicemail.

He stood in silence for a few seconds, his phone still pressed to his ear as if your voice would come through the device and give him the comfort he hadn’t given you when you needed it most.

Finally, he dropped his hand and loosely held his phone between his fingers. His legs moved before his mind had the chance to keep up with them as he scrapped the idea of heading upstairs to his room.

He walked through the kitchen in complete darkness and opened the door to the place he spent hours with you in, the door closing loudly behind him.

GUYS I think they broke up fr.

Um…did Y/n and Jack break up? I haven’t seen any new posts with her in months.

Y/n hasn’t been active at all on social media….I think her and Jack are done.

JACK AND Y/N BROKE UP PARTY.

Hopefully they’re both okay, they seemed really happy together.

The comments he received on a daily basis were a form of torture Jack had never felt before. It hurt to read them, especially the ones that were applauding him for breaking things off with you.

She was holding him back, sorry.

He’s thriving now that she’s gone.

Yay, she’s gone.

God, people really were brutal.

He couldn’t bring himself to read anymore and closed the app. He was met with your smiling face as his background and felt his heart skip a beat.

You are so beautiful.

Jack felt his throat begin to close as he recalled all the times he should’ve told you that more. His eyes burned and his face heated up, but he couldn’t cry. Not now, not in public.

He’d be back home in a few hours and only then, when he’s in the comfort of the basement and holding the pillow that no longer smelled like you, would he allow himself to wallow in self pity.

Damn, he felt pathetic.

He just missed you more than any word in the world could describe.

He was right in believing you wouldn’t get back to him after he poured his heart out to you through voicemail. It still didn’t lessen the heartbreak, though.

If this was how it felt to be completely shut out from the person you loved, Jack couldn’t hate himself more for allowing you to feel this way about him. There were only a few times where he wanted to redo something, and this was one of them. If he could, he would go back a month or so ago and redo the entire thing, but this time so differently.

He would never let you feel the hurt and sadness that he provided you with every time one of your texts went unanswered. He would call you everyday, distractions be damned, and tell you that he missed you, that he loved you and that he was coming back to you.

Maybe he was imagining it, but he could’ve sworn he heard your laugh. It sounded distant, and maybe if he went a few more months without you he would’ve forgotten what it sounded like, but not now. Maybe not ever.

It was a sound he had been wanting to hear for weeks now. A sound he knew so well. One that belonged to you and only you.

He looked up and that was when he felt the first bit of happiness, the first bit of relief in what felt like forever.

You looked good, a lot prettier than he remembered and perhaps happier than he had ever seen you. It hurt to think that he was holding you back all this time. You were miserable for weeks because of him, and now you were happy without him.

That still didn’t stop him from crossing the busy street, breaking a couple of laws that he’d apologise for later, and standing a mere few feet from you. Your eyes opened and you took a step forward when your friend grabbed your arm as she had seen Jack before you did.

Giving her a confused look and raising a brow, you turn to where she was looking and almost instantly the smile you wore faded. Your arm slipped from hers as you held eye contact with your ex, your eyes ringing as heat flushed your face.

She mumbled something to you, along the lines of, “Are you okay? Do you want me to stay?”

You’re broken out of your trance as you turn to face her, a tight lipped smile on your face. “No, it’s okay. You go on, I’ll catch up,”

She nodded, giving Jack a suspicious look before walking away.

You were left to stand alone, with the exception of the broken looking boy in front of you. Shifting awkwardly, you hesitantly meet his eye. “You’re home,” you state, chewing on your bottom lip as you play with your fingers.

“Yeah,” Jack says quietly, his eyes never leaving yours. “You never called me back.”

It was a bad thing to say as Jack had also failed to call you back on multiple occasions, but his heart had more control over his mouth than his head did.

You break eye contact and look down at the broken sidewalk below you. “I know,” the silence returned for a second or two as you tried to think of what to say. It had been weeks since you last saw him, since you last talked to him, yet you couldn’t think of a thing to say to keep the conversation going without turning it into an argument. Observing his appearance, you force out a smile as you say, “You cut your hair.”

“Y/n,” he pleaded and you once again looked away, feeling your face heat up for the second time as you blinked away the tears that were beginning to form. While you couldn’t look at him, Jack couldn’t take his eyes off you. “Why won’t you look at me?”

He hated how he sounded so desperate, but he didn’t know how else to act.

You shake your head but look up at him anyway, shrugging as you ask, “What do you want me to say, Jack?” You ask and watch as his face falls and his own eyes become glossy. “You were gone and you…..you shut me out. I tried everything to get you to talk to me, to text me, to acknowledge that while you were out there living your new life, I was still here. You forgot about me.”

“No,” he said quickly, shaking his head and stepping closer to you. “No, I thought about you every day I was gone. I fuck-”

He cut himself off as he ran his tongue over his teeth, his disappointment in himself growing as the conversation went on. This was not how he wanted things to go at all.

“I fucked up, okay? I know that. There’s nothing I can say that would excuse what I did, but I’m sorry for everything. Hurting you was the last thing I ever wanted to do,” he paused, glancing back up at you with the saddest look you had ever seen on him. “I love you, and I’m sorry I didn’t keep my promise.”

You give him a weak shrug, desperately trying to hold off on crying in public. “Sorry I wasn’t worth it,”

His hand grabbed your wrist without him even meaning to, stepping closer to you as if to hide your body behind his from the prying eyes of the world around you. “Don’t say that, baby, please,” he quietly begged, trying to ignore the way his heart leaped when you placed your hands on his forearm. “You’re everything to me. I’m the one who isn’t worth it.”

Your teary gaze met his and you had no control over the way your bottom lip quivered. “I can’t go through that again,”

Your words were hardly audible, but Jack heard you clear as day. His other hand came up to caress the side of your face as his guilty eyes stared into yours. “I’m so sorry,”

A few seconds pass with you staring up at him, and he knew you were trying to see if he was lying or being untruthful at all. It was the way you protected yourself before letting someone in. It reminded him of the early days of your relationship, back when you were cautious about allowing an actor to own your heart.

“Please,” he mumbled and you hesitantly placed your hands on his shoulders, trying to ignore how protected you felt as his figure towered over you. Without saying a thing, you tug on him and wrap your arms around his neck. Jack let out a quiet, dry sob as he tucked his face away in the space between your neck and shoulder. “Take me back.”

Your fingers played with the ends of his short hair, hiding your face away so your tears dampened his shirt. “Please,” you begged when he placed small kisses against the skin of your neck. “It can’t be like last time.”

Jack quickly pulled away from you and kissed you, his thumbs reaching up to wipe away your tears as he did so. “I promise,” he murmured when he pulled away, resting his forehead against yours. “Wherever I go, I’m taking you with me.”

You rolled your eyes, not believing him until you pulled away a bit to see the truthfulness in his eyes. “What?”

“That or I’ll just stay home,” the words flowed easily out of his mouth.

“You’re not serious,” you trail off, holding eye contact with him. “You’re serious?”

“I love you,”

You don’t say anything as his words, the ones you craved to hear for weeks, sunk into you. Reaching up, you press a chaste kiss to his mouth before holding him close to you once again, melting into the way his arms wrapped tightly around your middle.

#jack champion #jack champion x reader #jack champion imagine #jack champion imagines #ethan scream 6 #scream 6 ethan #ethan landry imagines #ethan landry x reader #ethan landry #scream 6 #scream 6 x reader #scream 6 imagines #angst

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gogolstoelicker · 4 months

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Dorm leaders with a Razor!MC

a/n: totally lost the pookie who asked for this but if by some miracle yk its you, pls dont beat me up for taking so long </3 /j

also if tumblr did smth weird with the bullet points again, point ur guns at the app

its one week before my exams so im using my adrealine for smth!!

You are generally good-natured person who considers your wolf pack your family and becomes enraged if they are hurt by other parties. You love your wolf family but dislike the fact that you aren't fully like them. You considered the few humans you do encounter to be your friends and are willing to protect them from danger if it means sacrificing your and your pack's dinner for the night. You are a quick thinker. You are also honest and forthright due to your limited exposure to human life. You are not used to speaking and only speak in short phrases and words, finding it troublesome, but you continue nonetheless.

Riddle

my mans stopping you like this to take a look at your uniform

pookie, youre a lil messy rn -he said this in anger, I'm just giving you the nicer version

its ok, he helped you clean up a lil after!!

u absolutely trying not to mess up the collar and tie up bcs its so uncomfortable:😢😔

it always goes back to the messy version as soon as hes out of sight or its half the day already

he wont find out (i lied he absolutely did)

he can always count on u to tell him the truth should your friends ever do smth bad

"broke. chair." while pointing at ace and deuece

they have tears in their eyes as riddle approach them

honestly some of ur behaviour makes him go⁉️

fr thought u were a beastman or smth

then found out youre just a human whos lived with wolves their whole life

FUCKEKEKE REMEMBER THAT TIME IN HIS OVERBLOT WHEN HE WAS TALKING ABT PARENTS

u being an orphan as he goes on with his speech: /JOKE

ace beats his ass up for u its ok

him trying to figure out how they didnt try to eat u🤔

he didnt try to stop u but that wont mean he wont go😅😅

ALSO eat ur veggies pls

hes chasing u around heartslabyul trying to make u eat a wee bit of carrots

Leona

"veggies:( bad:(" "so real"

^ur real time convo

whenever youre given food with veggies, u pass it off to leona

leona then pass it to ruggie who then muched it off

he absolutely told u to give ruggie any veggies btw (free food for the man‼️)

ruggie is forever happy to receive free food

he actually thought u were a beastman too because of your scent

"r u a jack kinnie?" he would ask (he didnt ask it like that)

turns out you just got raised by them

idk savanaclaw might be an ok? place for u? considering most of them r beastman there

like its not even surprising to see u practicing with them every morning anymore

ruggie dragged both u and leona by the collar to practice btw

"im all the way in ramshackle" leona surprise adopted u to savanaclaw, dont resist /J

u surprisingly get along well with him‼️‼️

leona acting like he doesnt care abt the youngsters👴🙄 (hes failing)

he totally didnt take a nap with you in his usual spots, no who did that?? pft not him

no he did NOT save u from accidentally getting hurt by your friend's troubles btw no

also, he did not mind that you do not talk much

the less words the better for him!! he encourages this (he got beat up later by the people who thinks otherwise)

Azul

youre so simple, azul actually had a great time

"pls sign this contract to save ur friends" "ok:)"

well youre homeless now (not rlly u have a home in savanaclaw)

yk those super villains laughing evilly everytime their plans r going so well?? thats azul

he didnt even need to put many efforts in trying to trick u, u just go thumbs up at him

he does not feel bad btw

he does not care if youre a beastman or not. a business opportunity is all you'll ever be to him

maybe a friend too but you'll need to unlock friendship level 10 for that

can wolves swim underwater, im sayign yes for plot reasons

anyways u came back from trying to get the painting(?) picture (?) like a wet dog

im saying nonsense rn i think i need sleep its almost 1am

he threw his head back 90° to laugh dramatically at how u reminded him of a wet dog

this is a joke, do not come for me

honestly he had to drag u away from the lounge once bcs u tried catching the fishes in the aquarium

"MF LEAVE MY FISHES TF ALONE IF U WANT TO LIVE" is what he wouldve said if hes not a professional businessman

he is a professional guys do not worry💯

honestly, he is pretty ? that you had trouble speaking

after finding out its bcs youve been isolated from the human things, he kind of goes🤔

the business in his head is controlling him before he can stop them😖🫣

would u like a potion from him to help u with that problem<33

honestly head empty rn

Kalim

rhey all thought you were a beastman and he is not an exception

is def surprised bcs ur ass howled one time at a full moon

he witnessed that, he had the front row seat as witness

he lets u do ur thing its ok

even asked u if its family tradition HELP /J

"oh man u have such fluffy hair"

he said before trying to touch it and realising its literally tangled all over

him and jamil whos right next to him

were u raised in a barn??

kalim assumed theres no hairbrush in ramshackle

u dont have to worry bro, kalim is more than happy to stock u up with some hairbrush

"oh its nothing much dont worry😊🙏‼️" the literal gold handles on the hairbrush:

u dont have to worry abt not speaking much, he speaks enough for the both of u

he spoke such strange things u dont understand him sometimes

u just nod along and gave him thumbs up

its like sun and moon but the moon is confused /j

if youre sleeping outside, he will join u btw

he brought his pillows and blanket out to have a small sleepover with u

jamil had a mini heart attack when he went to wake kalim up in the morning to see hes missing from his bed

Vil

vil when be sees u

yk how yall lived in pomefiore for a bit after the idia thing??

yeah he polished u up so much bro

u came into the dorm looking like someone abandoned u so youe only option was to live in the jungle with the help of ur jungle friends and have survived through the way of the mammals since u were an infant

and u came out looking like a brand new person

u came out of the dorm looking like u got new skin that its literally shining under light, ur hair softer and no longer tangled and no more eyebags and u smell like flowers

vil wiping his forehead after a job well done😊🙏

also he was pretty shocked when he found out u were pretty isolated from the human norms or whatever

he did try his best to break you bad habits, like literally running in mud

he also helped u with like speaking problems?

he got u a whole dictionary in case u dont know the word bro

also fix ur uniform for ueach time u try to loosen it up because its too suffocating for u

if u try to loosen it up one more time, he'll add the veggies in ur plate

he absolutely does makes u eat ur veggies

he'll tie u down a chair and make u eat them even

/j he wouldnt. he have rook to help him with that

Idia

him after he fixed ur dorm with the greatest and newest updated quality just for u to sleep outside

he gets it, youve been raised this way

but he just fixed it for u bro😢😢cant u at least sleep in there

grim sleeps in diff rooms every day bcs of the upgrade and u did this?? /j

oh well at least the outside kind of looks better now too he guess....

u dont even use the tv, u dont know how it works

"people in there real?" "? no ?"

he beats u in every video games ever because u literally could not keep up with technology

hes slaying everyone and youre wondering how to make ur character walk the way u wanted them to

u accidentally drowned somehow in the video game

he feels a tad bit bad for u

he cant bond much with u because like

hes quiet, youre quiet

hes a modern dude, u dont even know whats a phone

he likes video games, u prolly like hunting for food

if you two r in a room together, the only people who r talking r literally the wind

"whoosh whoosh whoosh🌬" whoosh whoosh🌪

Malleus

he spoke enough for the both of u (its abt gargoyles)

he actually spoke so much confusing words for u

u looked at him like 😃🫨 (ur head is spinning and u r dying)

u can always ask him if u dont understand tho

he will explain in another paragraph but its ok, at least u understand now

barely actually

ur brain hurts and its fried from talking to him since he use big words

he did try to use simpler words for u!!

oh u two can kind of bond i think

youre both not familiar with technology so it will work well

u know those faces grandparents make when looking through new technologies

like the eyes squinting and eyebrows furrowed look with thag confused look

yeah thats the both of u

u both try to figure it out together (it did not work out)

yall asked lilia for help

peepaw is into the trends, he can help the both of u dont worry!!

he saw how messy you could be sometimes and went damn

he'll fix u up with magic its ok

show me funny things, magic man

anyways its a habit of his to fix anything in ur appearance whenever u have ur nighty walks

like u have this dirt on ur white uniform? say no more.

theres a damned branch in ur hair (dont ask how u got that) and its tangled in ur hair?? he got u pookie

part of ur clothes r literally ripped off because god's knows what youve been doing in your free time??? u dont even need to ask bbg

#also i think razor and silver can get along quite well #the adoptive sons #twst wonderland #twst #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #riddle rosehearts #leona kingscholar #azul ashengrotto #kalim al asim #vil schoenheit #idia shroud #malleus draconia #how do i usually tag #in my boomer era i forgot how to post #is this what i usually tag???#say yes pls

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mcflymemes · 1 year

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ASK PROMPTS ABOUT THE PAST & REGRET * requested by tatsunotsurugi

yesterday is gone.

you have to let go.

i never look back. it distracts from the now.

i just don't see why the past has to matter.

it's pointless to dwell on it, you know.

i don't know who you used to be.

memories are dangerous things.

the past is never where you think you left it.

i wish i could go back.

we all do things we desperately wish we could undo.

my past does not define me.

we can never go back again.

we were so intimate once upon a time i can't believe it now.

if we had met years ago, would you still have liked me?

scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real.

the past beats inside me like a second heart.

looking back you do not find what you left behind.

no one saves us but ourselves.

no trouble ever got fixed late at night. midnight is for regrets.

i wish i knew you back then.

what's past is prologue.

i want everything back the way it was.

put your energy into today.

my scars remind me that i did, indeed, survive my deepest wounds.

that was... the dumbest thing i've ever done.

no one is rich enough to buy back his past.

are you still thinking about what happened?

there has to be something we can do to change it.

it's being here now that's important.

there's so much i wish i could change about what happened.

i'm a product of my past, but i don't have to be a prisoner of it.

my past is everything i failed to be.

i regret knowing you.

what's done is done.

it might have been.

you are the only person i'd like to say goodbye to when i die.

it made you stronger. i hope you know that.

i am worthy of a future.

me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody.

memory is a mirror that scandalously lies.

take it from me. if you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging up your back and running its fingers up your spine... the best thing to do, the only thing... is run.

if only. those must be the two saddest words in the world.

the past can't hurt you anymore, not unless you let it.

my yesterdays walk with me.

i loved you so much once.

i like who you are now.

i wish you'd just let go.

there's no future for me.

what do you regret most?

do you ever miss it?

there are so many things that i want so badly to tell you, but i just can't.

the past no longer holds you captive.

maybe in another life.

i hope you never have to think about anything as much as i think about you.

i never should have done that.

i'm trying to forget you. it's not easy.

you're just another story i can't tell anymore.

how many regrets do you have?

those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

you can learn from it... but you can't change it.

#rp starters #rp memes #rp prompt #rp meme #rp musings #roleplay memes #roleplay prompt #roleplay meme #writing prompt #rp asks #ask meme #rp inbox meme #sentence starter #sentence starters #sentence starter prompt #mcflymemes #thanks for the request!!! :)

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things-arent-what-they-seem66 · 1 month

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Just a Dream

Inspired by that one scene in IT Chapter 2.

Adamsapple angst below

Content Warning: Violence, blood, gore.

Lucifer looked around the dark room. There was nothing for as far as the eye could see, everything was gray and black.

Turning around, his eyes landed on Adam who was back to him. "Adam?" He called out, the sinner turned to face him looking surprised to see the devil.

"Where in the seven rings of Hell are we?" Adam asked, he started walking towards Lucifer only to smack his face into a glass wall he didn't see. "Ow! The fuck?" He placed his hand on the glass, Adams face creased in bewilderment.

"Adam?" Lucifer came over and placed his hand over Adams on the glass. "I'm not sure where we are."

"Get me the fuck out of here, this isn't funny."

Lucifer looked both ways, the glass seemed to go on forever on either side. "I will, hold on." He tried to summon his power to blast it, but nothing came. "What the-"

The growing sound of static grew in the air. Adam turned to look behind him, his face drained of color. He turned back and started beating on the glass. "Hurry up! This isn't fucking funny!"

"I'm trying!" Lucifer started hitting the glass too, not sure why his powers were failing him. His own blood went cold when maniacal laughter filled the air. "No.... Adam!" Both Adam and Lucifer started pounding on the glass, it only started to crack from the pressure slightly, it was thick and almost seemed tempered.

Black shadowy tentacles started to wrap around Adams body. "Luci, help me!"

"Adam!"

"Don't let him take me!"

Lucifer started throwing his whole body into the glass. "I won't, you're gonna be fine!"

A spiky tendril pierced through Adams back coming out through his chest, red blood splattered on the glass. Adams face was stuck in shock with a twist of pain painted on his features. His jaw fell open, blood came out and dripped down his chin, gold eyes wide and tear filled.

Lucifer watched horrified and helpless. "No! Adam!"

"Luci!" Adam was pulled back into the darkness by the tendrils and everything was quiet for a moment until Adams screams filled the air.

The sound of shoes clicking on the floor. Lucifer's face twisted into a snarl as Alastor came into view, his smile ever present. "You fucker, what did you do?!"

"Oh I think you know." Alastor smiled wider as he flicked the golden band that was once on Adams hand towards the glass at Lucifer. He leaned in, his smile cruel. "So much for keeping him safe."

Lucifer jolted awake, sitting upright in bed panting. Looking around he noticed he was in his and Adams bedroom. Looking down beside him, his husband slept peacefully, some drool pooling on his pillow.

Lucifer sighed in relief. Just a nightmare, none of that was real. He settled back into bed, his eyes never leaving Adams sleeping face. It might have been a dream, but that didn't mean it didn't bother him.

He would fight Heaven and Hell to keep his loved ones safe, he would never be powerless to save them. Maybe tomorrow that prick Alastor would start something just so he could beat his ass.

Lucifer smiled, he remembered how Adam had beaten the radio demon as an angel and then a few months after he became a sinner he beat him again after that prick challenged Adam to a rematch.

He knew Adam wasn't completely defenseless, but he could still die again for good. The thought made his chest ache.

Gently, he laced his hand with Adams free one that rested on the bed and lightly kissed his knuckles. He finally closed his eyes and drifted off back to sleep.

Better dreams found him this time.

#adamsapple #hazbin hotel #hazbin hotel adam #hazbin hotel lucifer #lucifer x adam

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jujutsukgojo · 1 month

Text

The bell tolls for me

satoru gojo x reader

Summary: “Say it.” The few times he has spoken to you, they are always the same. He wants confirmation of your evil. No matter how you word it, he isn’t satisfied until you say it plainly and he’ll only hear the worst part of it. He doesn’t want reason, he wants pain, hatred, and anger. It is what is keeping him going. You will give it to him for now. “I killed them.”

1.5k+ words tw: angst, illness, mental illness, ptsd, depression, mentions of death, spoilers, i think suicide thoughts (?), idk what else (if there's something let me know!) i'm not an expert on mental illness or a doctor! i don't own jjk either.

Gojo wipes his face with his hand. Despite his eyes being rightfully considered divinity, they cannot beat the exhaustion. He hasn't worn a blindfold or glasses in about a couple of months or so. He can’t really remember the exact number anymore.

He spies a single white petal fall in front of his window. He sees pollen in the back and a few people walking around. He hears the bell toll once again. Satoru understands that the people of his past will never hear it again. They will never see the petals and sneeze from the pollen anymore.

The bell rings again. God, he could swear that the bell is only for him.

“Gojo? Are you ready?” He hears a small voice that causes a heaviness in his chest and an icy hatred in his bones. You.

He ignores you completely, making you sigh at his behavior. It isn’t a secret that he hates you and when he is up to it, he’ll kill you. All because you failed. You completely betrayed him and those who mattered most. Rather than finishing what you promised, you went against it and did something he just can’t forgive.

You are disgusting, vile, stupid, hideous, a failure of a being.

You whip out your jar of bones and begin the healing process. Ever since the Culling Games, you have had to learn to deal with these newfound abilities that totally destroyed your life. Yet, that destruction has also given you a purpose now. The usual healer, Shoko, has been extremely busy lately because of the aftermath of the Culling Games, Kenjaku, and Sukuna. So, when you were discovered during all of that, you were immediately put to work.

And your abilities had fit for a plan that you messed up.

You work your fingers to thread the crushed bones into Gojo, who remains silent. You know that one wrong move and he’ll rip you to shreds. Until then, you might as well make up for it by healing him and taking the pain away.

Opening another jar, you take a finger out of it. In the palm of your hand, colors swirl all around. The bone reshapes into a softer and smaller structure, something easier to swallow. You hand it to Gojo, childishly hoping that he would give you something to work with. A smile, a thank you, eye contact, anything.

You receive nothing.

You place it down on the desk and take your leave.

“Was it worth it?” Quickly, you turn your head around to see Gojo still staring out the window. “You know-”

“Say it.”

“There was no hope, Gojo. None at all.”

“Who said?” Sighing, you turn to him fully. “He did, Satoru.”

Satoru stands up. You have to try to stare into his red rimmed eyes. They’re mesmerizing jewels, precious things that see and know all. They're damaged from the strain and the pain.

“Megumi didn’t want to live, Satoru. You can only save those who want to be saved. Him and Geto never wanted to be.”

“And Tsumiki?”

“She was dead the moment she was cursed, way before she woke up. I didn’t even know her. I had nothing to do with that.”

He takes a few steps forward. His long legs carry him to you. He’s menacing and tall. Majestic and radiating a power that you could never handle.

“Say it.” The few times he has spoken to you, they are always the same. He wants confirmation of your evil. No matter how you word it, he isn’t satisfied until you say it plainly and he’ll only hear the worst part of it.

He doesn’t want reason, he wants pain, hatred, and anger. It is what is keeping him going.

You will give it to him for now.

“I killed them.” Although you went against his plan to trick Sukuna, you never meant for your actions to cause such a catastrophe. That it would cause for his world to be ruined.

Before he can do anything, you leave quickly.

He finally goes into the shower after a while. The water is boiling hot and the steam is thick. Satoru stands under it not moving to bathe at first. Nothing goes through his mind other than the sensation of the water and the scars on his body. He barely has any feeling on the long scar across his abdomen. It is nothing but a reminder of you.

You were supposed to save them. Not him.

And yet, here he is. Holding the weight of everyone’s soul all because you didn’t want to follow directions. He killed Sukuna and is hailed as the strongest sorcerer in history. But the glory that he’d usually bask in is a terrible thing now. Why wear it like a badge of honor when it is covered in the blood of those he loved and never got to tell them?

You. You fucking snake.

Now, he has to sit here and heal. According to Shoko anyway. Whether it’s mentally, emotionally, or physically, he doesn’t know or care. He wants to leave. To be free. If only for a moment, to get away from this place and breathe. Away from you.

When he met you, he thought you were plain. Nothing really special except for a weird but cool technique. Then when he lay on the bed after the fight, you were the first in his sight. The light acted as a halo. You were glowing and had an ethereal appearance.

Even Lucifer was the most beautiful and enchanting of angels. And look what happened.

Look where it got Gojo Satoru.

To find out that he had healed mid fight because of you at the expense of so many people hurt him. You had one job, only one.

Why did you make him kill his loved ones? He needs to get away. A fresh start or at least some air. Yeah, that’s what he’ll do.

Gojo stands tall among the sand. The smell of the water is refreshing. Waves against the rocks and the white sand, the sun against his skin and the birds flying overhead, is so serene.

“Gojo.” Everything comes to a halt at the sound of that grating voice. He doesn’t face you yet. No, you won’t ruin this for him too.

“You have to come back, Satoru.” You’re finally face to face with him. “Go away.” He dismisses you quickly and quietly. He doesn’t want to ruin this for himself.

“We have to go back.”

“Nanami would have loved this. They all would. Maybe even Megumi.”

He can still hear his students, his friends, too. The past life he lived as he raised the Fushiguro’s echo in his mind. Megumi was always gloomy, always. Tsumiki was a ray of sunshine with a solemn look in her eyes. She was forced to grow up at an alarming speed in order to take care of the grumpy troll. And she was never thanked. He knows that was what Megumi was thinking.

That he never got to thank her for loving him. For standing for him at his lowest and never letting go. Yeah, Tsumiki was amazing. And Satoru Gojo, her adopted dad, didn't say thanks, either. She would have loved the sea. Maybe in another life, he can take his kids here.

“I want to stay. I think this is how I get back to the airport.” He hears you sigh. “I know. But you left the airport for a reason, remember?”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“If you didn’t, they’d be gone, too. We can’t-” He scoffs and interrupts. “We? Since when are we ‘we’?”

“You can’t heal if you can’t see what’s left.”

“ Nothing’s left!” He screams with his face red. You reach for his hand. “We are here. Hold onto us.”

The bell rings again. He wonders how it keeps following him. He looks around curiously. He questions, “The bell tolls for me, doesn’t it?”

“No, it’s for everyone to know the time.” You answer in a patient voice. He hates that. You talk like a doctor. There's enough of those to go around, he doesn’t need any more.

“Stop talking. Don’t ruin it for me.”

“What?”

“The bell is for me. I’ll be right after them, you’ll see.”

You hold out your hand and reluctantly, he takes it. You lead him out of the street with cars honking their horns. You hold him close out of his delusion. It is his price of using too much curse energy and the reverse technique. Gojo doesn’t know that he’s not in Malaysia as he imagined Nanami would have liked. He doesn’t know the truth of his students. He doesn't realize that the airport he wants to return to doesn't exist.

He blames you, yes, but you’ll stick with him. He'll heal one day.

Right now, he doesn’t understand that the bell isn't for him and hasn’t been for these past four years since Sukuna. That he has suffered so much that his head is stuck. But one day, he’ll heal, and he won't be alone. Even if he doesn't, you will hold his hand, nonetheless.

#gojo satoru x reader #satoru gojo x reader #jjk #jjk fanfic #angst #q #gojo satoru #satoru gojo #spoilers #tw: suicide ideation #i think?

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saint-siren · 11 months

Text

A World For Her Alone | A child of ill omen

Chapter 1 Chapter 2 Chapter 3 Chapter 4 Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 8 Chapter 9 Chapter 10 Chapter 11 Chapter 12

cw (chapter specific): emotional infidelity, abuse, illness, murder, self harm, suicide, childbirth, vomiting

pairing: claude x fem!reader

summary: in which Claude tries again.

author's note: oh boy.

When he opened his eyes he was in his bedroom. He jolted from the sudden change, looking about him and trying to make sense of what he saw. He was lying on a soft bed instead of the hard, splintery wood he remembered from before. Just a second ago he had been sure to die and now he was home and unharmed. He felt for a wound in his chest, believing that perhaps he’d been saved from his fate, the knights who tried to stop your knight from killing him had taken him back home. But there was no pain there, not even a scar. He had felt the pain searing him for a few beats, the blood drowning him and then there was nothing, there was only this. But it couldn’t have been a dream. He did not dream like this, not so prophetic and pained.

A knock at the door made him jump, every ounce of stimulation made him feel as though he were going insane, as if any moment he would find himself back on the ground. “Come in” He said, in a voice that did not even sound like his own. It wavered with uncertainty very much unlike him, it sounded weak even to his own ears and he resented it. As soon as the butler greeted him with a measuring gaze, concerned he might be ill from the distress on his face and in his voice, he was asking about you.

“You are due to see the lady today. The preparations have been made as you commanded.”

A broken, relieved sound fell from his lips at the words. You were alive. This life he’d arrived in was new, unblemished from the faults of his past and you were the proof. He lived again, you lived again. The day was miserably overcast, the light was a dull gray and much of the room was cast in shadows. This realization of his second life felt like fool’s gold and yet he wanted it badly enough that he reached for it anyway.

“I see…” He murmured “Nevermind that, prepare a carriage now. I will visit her early.”

“My lord, are you feeling alright?” The butler asked anxiously, clearly baffled by the unusually emotional state of him.

“Do I have to tell you again?” He asked sharply, impatient. He sounded like himself again.

The butler looked mortified and had the sense to chasten himself before responding. “No, my lord. I will prepare it right away, I apologize.” He excused himself quickly but not so much so that Claude did not catch a sliver of remaining worry on his face as he looked up at him.

It didn’t matter how he looked, it couldn’t wait. He needed to see you. He needed something to tether him to this bleary new life, to confirm it was all more than a dream, more than a hell made for him where he’d be forever in waiting. He remembered what Felix said. “Do you even know how she died? How long she was held in that filthy, inhumane place?” Had you waited for him then?

This time, without fail, he’d show up for you. Even if it could not change the fact that he hadn’t before.

When he arrived, he was greeted by your parents who were surprised that he was there early but instead of meeting him with an edge of reproach, they apologized profusely for the tea party not being prepared yet. It was ridiculous how much reverence they showed, it was well past courtesy. Claude couldn’t help but notice the way their faces changed when he asked for you, when they told him you’d hurry along and be down in a minute. It was almost as though your name was unsavory gossip, existing only to be whispered and grimaced at.

Nevertheless, they directed him outside to wait for you at the table. His body had never been so wrought with anxiety as then, he thought he might truly go insane with the waiting, the desire to see you again and the fear that in his deserved punishment, he might never.

A sense of foreboding came over him, an insistence this was a doomed desire. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he believed something awful was about to happen. What he didn’t know was whether to trust in it or in his hope, his intention and need. He chose neither and merely observed the beautiful and wretched day he’d come back to, trying to hold fast to the feeling of relief he’d felt when he realized you were still alive but wielding his wariness as a weapon in front of him.

When he set eyes on you, finally, he might’ve flinched. For, even though he wished so desperately that you were here, part of him didn’t expect it to ever really happen. He expected some divine punishment, perhaps it was wishful thinking on par with wishing you would alive and safe. But it couldn’t be a punishment, not if you were here. Not if you were really alive again as he was.

He didn’t want to wait for you to reach him, he wanted to meet you halfway and take you into his arms so that he could feel your heart beating, your breathing, the little sounds of surprise you’d let slip. But he remained seated, somehow, and he was able to ignore the tendrils of doubt creeping into his always so cynical mind. Shortly after you, a figure in red. He could not yet take his eyes from you but his lips could not form words. What could he say to you that would make any sense? And how did he speak without falling apart?

When you reached the table, you stalled a moment, eyes unfocused and dead. You greeted him as you always did but somehow you felt far away from him, from everything. There was a murky look in your eyes, like something waiting to emerge from a great depth. He stood, mercifully his body obeyed, he came closer to you. It hadn’t been like this before. Did something happen to you? It unnerved him see you see you look so dead; even in the sunlight your eyes looked so flat and dark to him that they reflected nothing, conveyed nothing. Unreal, like an ink drawing.

His hand had begun to tremble. Something dark was hanging over this day, over him, over you. Ah, would he wake up now? Would he wake up to the true nature of what he believed was his second chance?

“Are you alright? This isn’t like you.” He heard himself speak, but not from the horror that ruminated in his mind, words that seemed to be at a slight disconnect with his intentions. No…what was this?

Your body was trembling, swaying like a tree in the wind. All of the sudden, life poured into your eyes, something fragile took the place of the shadows. He might’ve been glad for it, for a moment at the least, but he realized that the look in your eyes was utter ruin. Those were not the eyes of his fiancée, not steadfast or bashful and avoidant, these were the eyes of someone who had seen it, the sword falling over her head. Those eyes, he was certain, were his condemnation.

Did you know that he had killed you before? Had the you from his past lent you the view from below?

Lady Diana, whom he had not even considered until that exact moment, finally reached the table. The tightness in his chest immediately unwound. The rose red dress, her golden hair on the wind, these were images he hadn’t known he’d held to until he saw them again. The unwitting euphoria flooded his body yet again, reaching deeply inside his mind and caressing every anxiety. Diana was here. She lived just as you did. That thought was not cause for anything really, it shouldn’t be but…he felt that he wanted to cry when he set eyes on her again alive. He couldn’t take his eyes off of her and she, under his attention, looked bright and curious. Alive. Such a contrast from her before, already cold and dressed in a thin, bloodied gown. Her throat had been slit but from the struggle there were many bruises on her pale skin, along the whole of her body. He ached to see her unharmed like this, the bright girl he had loved well before. He couldn’t help himself, even with the nauseous feeling that accompanied, he longed for her. It was the only thing he could hold on to for the turning of this strange new life. That familiar and far reaching feeling drove itself past flesh, bone, blood, into something immaterial.

It wanted him back.

You dropped a teacup onto the grass, freeing him from the hold momentarily as he turned back to you. His stomach sank to see you, your jaw was clenched and your eyes were glassy with unshed tears. Had you been shadowed by something as he had?

“Are you alright?” He was desperate to know. He felt like he was speaking in a rush, something was creeping up on him as sudden as the clouds blocking the sunlight. Something cloyingly familiar and unwanted. Were you specter or human? Retribution or revision? And what was she, then? What was Diana?

You were the little ghost of something he had killed. You would not respond and he wanted to touch you, so much that his mouth went dry. When had he ever wanted something this badly? He needed to take you by the shoulders, to look into your eyes, maybe his could communicate something to you. Some sincerity that his lips refused to muster. Perhaps if he could only touch you, you’d understand.

“What happened? You’re not yourself today.” He heard it from outside his own body, automatic like breathing. He could not reach you; he was, in all reality, quite far away from you despite the closeness of your bodies.

“I’m sorry…” A wavering voice that sounded as if on the verge of tears. It made him ache inside when you showed him the same smile you always did, the smile that seemed to always be at the verge of collapse. It was as though he could feel the reverberation of the pain he felt when Felix’s sword broke his skin. It was a burning pain, the breaching of his heart. He smiled back at you and soothed a hand over your back.

This was what it meant to be ghost. He understood finally, you were not the ghost, he was. He was immaterial, unable to affect anything around him.

Interestingly, you were different this life in more than the bleakness trapped behind your eyes. You worked with a ferocity and you became a much more cunning lady than you’d ever been before. You were more involved in politics and court, willing to shake hands with twice as many people who before you would not have paid any mind to. When had you ever had any desire to be so congenial to everyone? Had you ever had such ambition in the past life? Your intelligence had always been impressive but now it was frighteningly astounding. It seemed in this life that you had somehow become more proactive in amplifying the position of the marquisate, you were fortifying it against its enemies.

It was just another way in which you were looking after him and he appreciated it but inside, there was a certain hurt that came from seeing you work that hard and be condemned by others for it. They called you a “horrible woman” and rumors swirled around high society about you more so than before when you were merely a “jealous, fearsome lady.” He could only stand beside you and your actions, he couldn’t dispel the notions about you that seemed incessant no matter how ubiquitous your goals were among nobles. He wanted to hunt those who would harm your reputation further, to hold their deeds up to the light and make them see they were not, would never be, in any position to act scandalized over what you did.

He meant what he said, he was lucky to have you for a wife. Even more than that, he was lucky that he was able to make himself express it outwardly. That was a good omen, he thought. This time, things would be different. He was no longer a ghost, he had just needed to see you to come alive. His feelings for Diana, compulsive as they were, would not win him over this time. He would not let them. Maybe he had not been saved completely by god but he had been given the chance to save himself. And he would, he would save you too.

He had all the arrogance befitting of his station.

You had become very protective of your little sister, it was a good thing, he tried to tell himself. If Diana could avoid her death, you would not be a suspect. He knew you hadn’t killed her before but the moment it was murmured into his ear that you might be the culprit, it was decided. And for how many others was that the case – considering how badly everyone wanted you to be a villainess? There hadn’t been a single voice that rose in doubt of you being capable of murdering your sister, the voice had been his and that was buried under the weight of something unmovable.

That was why he agreed when you asked him to look after her one day. He didn’t want to, he hated how his affection for her defiled what convictions he held. He tried to keep in mind that it was for your sake more than anyone’s, to guard himself. But it didn’t work, at the mere suggestion, his heart leaped. He was inundated with a joy that smothered the him that lived beneath. The sweetest of any happiness he’d ever held was to be found at her side, he could not deny that truth but it came with a horrible remorse, a violation of the self that a greater part of him wished to kill.

Diana was glad to have a visitor, no, glad to have him. The thought thrilled his dulled senses. Your parents gave no sense of wariness about having a man alone with their unwed daughter which baffled him, he knew he practically had hearts in his eyes when he arrived, overflowing with anticipation of her. He couldn’t have been more obvious and yet, all your mother did was smile. “It’ll be nice for Diana. She’s really fond of you, my lord.” Her voice was so soft and teeming with the affection she had for Diana, as if she was truly glad for her. Diana was not even her child, born to her or adopted, she came from an affair. At first, he’d thought your mother only showed courtesy out of your father’s desire. But this…it was the smile, the happiness of a mother. And she did not show it for you.

How it felt to be in her room. It was indescribable, what being surrounded by her scent, her books, her things, did to him. Her room to him was like a secret cave, shielded from society. The pink painted walls were not walls at all but barriers from the world itself. All of hell could rage outside and what would they know of it? In that room only, they could get lost inside each other. Diana was feeling better that day, so the two of them were able to have tea together. She showed him some of the books she kept, she would read her favorite parts in her airy voice that always, always betrayed her feelings. She was bursting with happiness at having someone to show them to.

He stayed for hours, captivated by every little detail he learned from her and greedy for even more. She was nothing like a wonderful hostess should be but he liked her that way, she was innocently impolite and honest, unrestrained by the graces of high society. It made her easy to talk to, easy to tease and laugh with. Had he ever laughed so much as he did with her? He felt delirious from the contrast of his headiness and his dread, the heavy stone weighing on his stomach. His body and the greater part of his soul belonged here but his mind was with you. He wondered what you’d think, knowing he promised to be home by dark. You were probably worried and that bothered him, he wanted to be the sort of husband you wouldn’t have to fuss over. He wanted to be dependable and yet it was decided now that he could not.

Diana felt like the center of the earth, a small divot in the earth for him to rest his tired body. Diana felt like a noose around his neck at the gallows, sure and wrested around his neck tightly. The inevitable she. A veritable stranger no matter how he felt he knew her. All he knew was you. You were not important, another part of him argued. You were his wife. You were not Diana.

And so raged his thoughts until he could bring himself to come home to you. He’d been told you’d gone to bed and his stomach dropped with disappointment. He’d at least wanted to bid your goodnight, tell you that he’d come home safely so that you didn’t wonder. He wanted to sleep in bed next to you but his feet led him to another room. He justified it in his mind – you needed to sleep and he would only disturb you. Because he could not control his actions, he made up flimsy justifications for them. Though, he was not sure from which voice they came from. He wasn’t sure which he hoped they came from.

The months that came after were as he imagined they would be, still he could not help but hope, he was yet unused to the kind of weakness he displayed. He was born to be strong, to be responsible for many lives, many fates and yet when was the last time he had felt in control? He needed this dichotomy of his two selves to be a war, he needed it to be something he could fight.

Even in his failure, he treated it as if it were his own fault. When he sent a letter to Lady Diana, feeling as if he had only watched somebody else’s hands write the words, he cursed himself for not trying hard enough to resist. The next time was to be different, he would gather his strength. He told himself this even knowing it wasn’t true, even when the steward gave him Diana’s response and he felt relief soothe every tense muscle in his body. He told himself the next time would be different even when he responded to that letter.

He needed to believe in this second chance. This time around, things were actually going quite smoothly with your relationship. To a certain extent, he’d been able to praise you for your efforts as he hadn't before. He’d made you happy when he told you he was lucky to have you, you looked up at him shyly with a genuine smile on your face, a very rare sight which had only grown increasingly rare over time. It was only in that moment that he was able to feel unconflicted. It was only in that moment that things were simple.

They didn’t stay that way.

A letter arrived to the manor, it was placed directly in his hands rather than yours both because he was the only one who ever received anything from your home and because it was specifically from Diana herself. The steward had whispered the urgency of the matter so he read it at the table before you, even though the him within cringed at the shamelessness of such an act. The larger part of him refused to show such inhibition and as he read the words, his heart only dropped for their contents and not for his wife watching him warily from across the table.

With a shaky breath, he announced to you that Diana’s condition had worsened significantly. He only managed the words because he had to, because it concerned you. The darkness was spreading through his body again, rotting even the reasonable part of himself he’d held above it. He could think of nothing but Diana. Her condition was such that she felt she was going to die, she couldn’t even leave bed without fainting and couldn’t keep down food. The fact that she’d been able to write him would have been a comfort, except that she’d included that she’d had to have her maid write the letter for her.

It shouldn’t have struck him so, Diana had always been ill, this outcome was not a surprising one but he felt as though he might lose his hold on everything if she died. What would he do if he never again saw that smile? He tried to stifle the ache rising in his body, his inner self had not stayed hidden, it objected and raged against the grief. He commanded himself to come together, to grin and bear it if he couldn’t make it go away. But his body did not listen, how could it when his voice was only a whisper?

Claude stood up and announced his departure, he rallied what strength he had to stop himself but it was entirely futile. His body moved regardless of his objections, just as it had the last time. Even so, he strained himself against the almost autonomous machine he’d become, until the very end, he tried to make his body stop. Even the sound of that pleading voice behind him did not give him what he needed. You were begging him to take you along and he kept finding reasons to deny you. It was vile. He knew she was your sister before he was your anything but inside him, woven around his throat was a pressing need to see her. A selfishness that demanded to be alone with her.

The thoughts were stirred up to the surface of his mind easily and they lashed against each other. You didn’t care about Diana, why should you be there? She had asked for him, not for you. You were only trying to cling to him. But why shouldn’t you? He was your husband and he was leaving you behind in matters that concerned your family. No – Diana was hardly your family, if he wasn’t going, would you have even bothered? Of course you would have, he refuted within his mind, you were a dutiful sister even if you weren’t close to Diana. How vile you are, wouldn’t Diana be able to see how little you care for her? Would she have to die knowing her sister curses her for having his affection?

Even though all his eyes saw was the picture of a woman desperate to get to her sister, he was quickly growing agitated with you. Whatever the cost, he simply did not want to be with his wife while he was falling apart over her sister. He thought his face should be the one Diana saw, he wanted to see himself reflected in her eyes. He wanted to be the one to give her hope. No, you couldn’t be there, hovering over his shoulder and serving as the cruel reminder of all that had been robbed of Diana. It didn’t matter if you were her sister or not, he wouldn’t let Diana be unhappy on top of what she was already going through. Why did you insist on being a burden so much?

He shuddered when he felt himself grab you harder than he ever would have and put you from his body. He caught a sliver of your expression and his misery only grew, suddenly stricken by the thought that he might hurt you worse and be unable to stop it again. Would he yet again be helpless? This time, would he be aware and powerless to watch himself harm you? Would he have to watch himself kill you, beat you, betray you — knowing that the difference between himself and this darkness scarcely mattered anymore?

For once, he surrendered and did not try to rebel when his body moved away from you, out the door.

Through the balmy night air, he moved like arrow darting through the sky. He reached Diana, his princess in her tower. Yet again, your parents showed him reverence and did not so much as ask about their other daughter. It was as if they were only expecting him in the first place, no — that they only wanted him in the first place. In consideration of his status, they were courteous and asked about him, congratulating him on a promotion given to him as a knight. He wanted to tell them to shut up, to stop with the small talk if they couldn’t be bothered to ask about you. He was curt with his answers, he didn’t know whether that was by his design or something else’s.

The instant they caught him up on Diana’s condition, however, he was alert. He was fully consumed by the doomed desire for her life to be spared. Every word that came from your mother’s mouth broke him. When he went into her room, finally, he was left alone with her. She was pale, thin, the light had been siphoned from her. When he went over and brushed the hair from her sweaty face, murmuring sweet words of comfort that he’d never been given himself, she opened her eyes and a little glimmer returned to them. Since when had he known of such romantic words when he was a pitiful man who could not even tell his wife once that he loved her? Since when did he have such power that he could return life to this girl?

Diana nearly exhausted herself trying to sit up to talk to him. He’d had to lay her back down as tears rolled down her ivory cheeks from the frustration of her body giving up. It broke his heart, he felt as though he might really bleed to see her cry so hopelessly. She, with her body and her beauty such a temporal, fragile thing, knew that she was withering and could do nothing to stop it. She cried as she squeezed his hand and he could bear it no longer. He leaned over, taking her face in his hands and kissed her until she calmed, until she thought of nothing but him. Her lips tasted like bitter medicine.

When he pulled away, Diana looked at him, docile and sparkling with an ill fated hope. His love for her in that moment caught in every cavern of his heart, it blanketed all else. It was a gentle intrusion like rain seeping in through his clothes. It quieted his better self for the moment. For the time being, he knew nothing but his desire to comfort her. And so he did.

His inner self was already quite tired after a few days, longing for home, for mercy from this place that seemed to revolve around Diana. She’d become the object of his misery and he’d held to the hope that you’d show up soon but you hadn’t thus far. Where were you to save him from this? It was a pathetic thought but it was true that he wanted to be at your side if his body would not allow him to come home. He knew that as long as he lacked control, it was much better to stay away from you and yet he could not deny himself the simplest desire for the sight of you.

He got his wish months later when he needed to return home for work. He saw you in the foyer waiting for him to stop, even though he kept walking as if he didn’t. He raged at himself in that moment, full of righteous fury against his own body. He wanted to hurt himself, to break his bones, to bruise and bleed his frustration, his anguish. But the moment you blurted out the news: “I’m with child!” He was able to stop, everything stopped, his vengeful thoughts and the anger churning inside his heart.

On one hand, Claude felt soft at the thought of a child between you two. You had asked him to start trying for a baby and it was the one time the greater force inside was forced to do something that his inner self was more than approving of. It was satisfying, to finally have some piece of a real marriage to you. It was more than needing an heir, it was wanting to have a family with you who would definitely make a great mother and could teach him to be a good father. His heart was satisfied in that regard.

On another…he was terrified to have a child while he was like this. He was already afraid of hurting you, of the disdain he felt for you. What would he feel for this child? There was no promise that he’d never hurt he child that would be born from you, no promise he wouldn’t be resentful that it wasn’t born from Diana. The fear was like a vice, strangling what joy he’d had about the prospect. This voice inside was like a curse.

And even still, there was another front on which he was conflicted. The greater voice inside made the other conflicts seem like drops of water in the sea. The most pressing issue was that you were pregnant and Diana was about to die. You and this child would force him from her. Why now? Why did you have to be pregnant at a time where his greatest responsibility should be comforting her? How could he tell Diana he would have to leave her for the sake of his child knowing that she could never have the family she desired? Agony filtered through his body, sapping away what warmth he felt before and leaving him empty.

In the end, with such things inhabiting his mind, he could not even express a perfunctory “That’s wonderful” or even tell you that he was thankful to you. He only left, disappearing like a coward with his poorly concealed tears to feel sorry yet again for Diana, for himself. To feel a need to break his own body.

He went back to cheer up Diana, to keep her happy even while you lay at the back of his mind. He knew that he should be there for you while you underwent something so stressful and important but the rest of him didn’t seem to mind ignoring that fact. It was glad to surrender you to thoughts of Diana. He trembled with each sign that she might recover, he died inside at every indication that she would not. He fell up and down the sliding scale of her health and all the while, whispered his love in her ears to reassure her. He felt more justified with every day he spent, that a dying woman needed him more than his wife who had always had robust health and was surrounded by servants and doctors. He strengthened this lie even as a voice of doubt tried to gain his attention. You hadn’t had robust health, not according to Felix who knew you best. Perhaps things would be different in this life but he mourned every single day he spent away from you, he wanted to crawl back home to you. He wanted you to be well, he wanted to make sure you were well.

He could not. His place was with Diana. What pleasure he took in the center of that tragedy, in living in his fantasy of being unburdened and free to love her. It was consolation he felt that he deserved. Soon, Diana did ask to see you and he had to put his greed aside.

Although he did not desire to break the immersion of him living with her functionally as if they were the last lovers alive, her wishes were more important and she was not long for this world. She, who loved you even despite your coldness, had to leave you with something.

When you came, he could not help but notice the difficulty with which you walked. Your skin was wan and you wore a grave expression, the one he’d have been wearing if he had the choice not to smile for Diana’s sake. You were heavily pregnant, he wanted to ask about your health but his mouth would not open. Your parents also did not inquire, although he had hoped with all his might that they would so that his worries would be soothed. He could only translate Diana’s wish to you.

You left nearly as quick as you came once she required nothing else from you, he wanted to catch your arm as you walked by and tell you to stay here the remainder of your pregnancy. It was dangerous to travel, especially looking as sickly as you did. In his stead, who had been looking after you? What was being done for you? He was forced to watch you leave, not even waiting to see you walk through the door before turning back to Diana’s room. His own consciousness screamed for the loss, for the feeling of impending tragedy. The darkness inside relieved the tension in his body and thought only of Diana.

He went into Diana’s room again to find her crying. She refused to tell him why even as he begged for the reason. “Is it because the lady has gone back? She’ll come back soon, it won’t be long at all before I can call her back.” He was scrambling for something to put an end to her tears when his sweet nothings wouldn’t. “No, don’t send for her. It’s nothing” Diana said as she tried to hold back sobs. “What did the two of you talk about?” He murmured as he held her, trying to bring her back to the sated girl she had been. However, his question only seemed to further upset Diana. “I told her that I loved you. How can I confess something like that to my own sister? How can I be in love with you like this? I should have kept it inside until the day that I die.” She sobbed into his shirt. It took hours to calm her to sleep.

He was soft with Diana, reassuring her that it was alright, that you would never blame her for falling in love, that you would forgive her. But when he came home, he was nearing madness with indignation. He was certain that you had lashed out at her in jealousy, if Diana had told him what she was planning to say, he would have talked her out of it. She shouldn’t need to confess to you, who already hated her.

It didn’t matter that his own voice spoke up and refuted, desperately citing that you had every right to be angry with her. What an awful girl she was, stealing away her own sister’s husband when she needed him most and then begging like a dog for her forgiveness, using her illness to force her to be graceful about a situation she should be allowed to have anger about. That denial was thin, it evaporated easily. It was insignificant amongst louder, greater ones that favored Diana.

He took his anger out on you, even though his inner self trusted that you wouldn’t have said anything to Diana. He said awful things to you, feeling like her knight, feeling as though he was seeking retribution for her. He watched you grow smaller before him, your eyes go bleak like they had the first time he saw you. He knew what he was doing to you and he hated himself for it but it was if he were only a player in a story who could not diverge from the role he’d be cast in.

Stop, please, stop.

“Everything you’ve done so far to other people”

Bile rose in his throat as each word left his lips. He tried to stop with all the desperation as one trying to save his own life.

“How can I believe you? You used that same face while scheming against others without a thought”

He knew what his next words would be, he knew they would kill you. And he could see that there was no end. He surrendered to the darkness, he wanted to escape what came next, what he knew would be another sword through his chest.

“That child you’re carrying, is it even mine?”

He left you reeling, with a visceral disgust for his wife whose jealousy knew no limit. To think that she would even choose to attack her sister as she lay in bed dying. He had no doubts that the child had to be his but it didn’t matter to him, he felt that you deserved to be humbled that way. This was the consequence of your actions. If you behaved as an untrustworthy, nasty woman, wouldn’t it make sense to treat you as such?

He went back to Diana, he wanted to be at her side before she woke up.

Diana’s room felt like a place constantly in stasis, the world was on pause when he was there and she was never to die. In his own misery, he had begun to wish that she would finally die. He knew that he would be there until she did so he prayed that she would set him free. Let her die, he thought, Please. Undoubtedly, his eyes must show it. His gaze must be casting the blame he felt she deserved. Why was she still alive, monopolizing his time? If she could only see it. No, if he could only free his body to smother her and end it.

A messenger arrived with news from the mansion. His heart dropped in anticipation. In the halls and safely away from Diana’s ears, the steward told him that you had gone into labor. He saw the fright in the steward’s eyes and knew he absolutely had to be there, regardless of what Diana needed. You mattered more. He said that it was a tumultuous birth and encouraged Claude to be there in more reverent language befitting a servant. Despite the screams from inside, he heard himself brush off the request, citing Diana’s condition even as the steward spluttered objections in shock. He himself was shocked at the extent of his helplessness even though he had no right to be. When he could not win the right to control his own body, when he watched the messenger leave, all hope abandoned him. He was a ghost and this home was his only domain as the world kept turning around him.

Diana finally passed the day after that, as he held her in his arms. Something broke apart and allowed him finally, to vent the anguish he had been feeling for months on end. He cried, he let his fingers dig into his hands so hard they bled. It didn’t matter that he knew the tears were not brought forth out of sadness for his wife, he gave them to you anyway. The only thing worth considering anymore was that he would finally return to you. Those tears were his relief, his daybreak. They were his grief and regret.

However, he was again visited with more news. He was told that you had died giving birth. The situation was further explained to him but he did not hear, all sound negated as he seemed to detach from his worthless body. He had let you die alone. Was he only brought back so that he could watch you waste before his eyes? Why, this time, could he not save you? He had let you die, weak and helpless to even do so much as be there with you as you did.

He’d likely been holding onto Diana as you died. The darkness receded and gave way to grief which weighed his body down, it left him gasping for air as his body returned to his control. He was no longer floating, he was painfully aware of himself, of his failure and what it cost. He reached for his dagger, it was the only thing he could think to do — if this was his punishment, he’d learned his lesson and he would gladly move on to the nothing which surely awaited him. But the steward stopped his hand. “My Lord!” He cried, wrenching the dagger from him and cutting his own hand in the process.

“I’ve already prepared a carriage, please, the daughter Madame left behind still needs you” He was bleeding quite a lot, but he kept his eyes on Claude as he used a handkerchief to wrap it.

The daughter. His child. He’d accused you of being unfaithful, he had said such things knowing they couldn’t be true simply because he knew they’d hurt a fragile woman already in a desolate state. And now she was dead from trying to deliver that child. His child lived same as he did. It was the same as before, same as if he’d killed you himself. Was this all that he lived for?

He allowed the steward to lead him to the carriage, made docile by the numbness that preceded. He came home to the wailing of an infant who, the steward had anxiously explained, had not stopped crying since her mother died. He was urged to rest but refused, he only wanted to see your body, to punish himself further. He wanted to commit it to memory this time, where before he’d abandoned you to a prison far away, he needed now to make himself see.

He wielded the image of your body against himself like a dagger, like his nails digging into his hands. He ripped open his wounds with it, he retched at the sight of you, bloodied and still. He was disgusted at himself, at knowing you had been torn apart for his weakness, as if presented with life he’d taken with his own hands.

He made himself look at his daughter. This pitiful, small thing who resembled him so closely…he’d used her to hurt his wife. He couldn’t bear to hold her and look down into eyes that seemed to damn him with their resemblance. It was as if god had given him his copy to say “You, who would condemn a good woman as an adulterer, have your proof of her fidelity.” When he had demanded an explanation from the doctor, even knowing it was unfair of him, the frail and weeping old man managed to confess that she had declined to save her own life by giving up the child’s.

He wished that reality would break open, would fracture and crumble. He wished that he would lose his sanity so that all that occurred would be rendered nothing to a mind who could no longer comprehend the definite nature of reality. But there was only one way toward even the sliver of a chance for mercy. It would not be given to him as a gift. He held the dagger up to his throat. In the moment before it bit into his skin, he thought of the perverse escape the darkness had offered.

tags: @kage-tobiuo @kreishin @rosephantomhive@yeahdrarry@splaterparty0-0 @dear-dairiesss @qluvrv @hafsuhhh @eissaaaa @ayolk @doan-19 @fourcefulcupid@ariachaos@cerisearan@irisspade@yaesflorist@jcrml@xiaosprettygf@yevenly@amaris08atoshi012022 @obsessed-with-a-fictional-man @softbummiee @cassanderasblog

#claude x reader #wmmap x reader #claude de alger x reader #claude de alger obelia x reader #wmmap fanfic #x reader

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butterflydm · 10 months

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wot reread: a memory of light (chapter 38-epilogue)

spoilers for a memory of light!

Well, the rest of the chapters have fewer pages in total than chapter 37 did, so this is going to be my last full reread post, though I do have a couple of follow-ups planned.

My timing ended up being pretty good, even though my original intention was just to reread books 1-3 in anticipation of the second season of the show. And now I’ve still got over a month to get good and excited about everything the show will be bringing to the table.

1. We go back to Rand, still deep in his conversation with TDO. The chapter “the Last Battle” really revolved around the battle between the forces outside Shayol Ghul, because it ended when the commander of the other army finally was killed (though there are still a ton of his forces to take care of, the head of the snake was cut off and so was the person who fancied himself Demandred’s replacement).

2. The ‘let go’ that Rand is hearing in his mind is in his father’s voice, and the meaning expands here -- let them sacrifice. it is their choice to make. And then Egwene’s voice -- am I not allowed to be a hero too?

Because this is something that Rand has been resisting over the course of the books -- basically ever since he accepted that he will be the sacrifice, he’s struggled with knowing that he’s not the only one, with knowing that other people are sometimes even sacrificing just to get him here, to this place. And, I imagine, with his tentative plans to maybe even survive this ‘sacrifice’, that’s going to make him feel even more guilty about other people giving up their lives in this fight.

3. He talks in dialogue with Egwene’s voice in his head (given that he’s existing around and between reality, it might really be Egwene’s voice too). He is not in charge of protecting her. He decided to take that charge on himself, back in EotW, but it was never his to claim. Let us die for what we believe, and do not try to steal that from us.

4. And so Rand takes himself through his list again, backwards, this time, releasing his feelings of shame for failing to save them, releasing his need to protect them. Letting go of the mountain that has been crushing him for the majority of the series.

He hadn’t realized how large it had become, how much he had let himself carry.

...

Ilyena was last. We are reborn, Rand thought, so we can do better the next time.

So do better.

5. And now Rand, as he stands surrounded by all time and nothing at the same time, comes to understand that the Darkness was never a being, never an entity of its own. It is the between of everything. It can only win if no one is willing to keep fighting against it.

6. Mat gets the news of Lan’s reported death. As he did with Egwene and with Elayne, he swallows the grief and doesn’t let it show to anyone else, instead using the news to spur the army onward to attack the now-stunned foe.

7. Rand tells TDO that he can’t win, and TDO argues that it has Rand in its grasp right now, and Rand says that that’s missing the point, because it was never just about his victory. The people he lists:

Morgase (?) - a woman, torn and beaten down, cast from her throne and made a puppet

Thom - a man who remembered stories and took fool boys under his wing

Moiraine - a woman who hunted truth before others could

Perrin (?) - a man whose family was taken from him, but who stood tall

Nynaeve - a woman who refused to believe she could not Heal those who had been harmed

Mat - a hero who insisted with every breath that he was not a hero

Egwene - a woman who would not bend her back while she was beaten and who stone with the Light for all who watched

Rand realizes -- “it was never about beating me. It was about breaking me.”

8. Okay, I have to say. I have to! But this is... this is literally also how the Seanchan work. This is their philosophy of life -- to take people and break them to the Seanchan’s purpose. As I’ve said before, there really is no way around the fact that the Seanchan are going to be the Great Evil of the Fourth Age. There are just too many Shadow-Seanchan parallels! Maybe Mat and Min can slow the train slightly but I don’t think they can actually put the breaks on it.

9. But back to now -- Rand and TDO watch the battlefield, where Mat is fighting -- Tam at his side, then Karede and his suicide-slave troops, then Loial and the Ogier. “Outnumbered three to one”. Mat is shouting in the Old Tongue: For the Light! For honor! For glory! For life itself!

I will take a moment to be glad that, despite the first half of this book trying so hard to align Mat with the slavers for whatever fucking reason, he’s not fighting for the slavers in this battle. That he actually did become the General of the Forces of the Light, not primarily the General of the Slavers. Looking back, it really does feel like the change was signaled when Mat first took off his Seanchan clothes and put back on his Two Rivers coat*. That seems to have been a visual cue about his change in characterization -- how he started pushing back more against Tuon, forcing her into more compromises, and standing more aligned with the Forces of Light rather than pandering to the slavers all the time. idk, maybe forcing Mat over to Ebou Dar at the start of the book was Sanderson’s way of trying to finally create a synthesis between the horrible Mat of CoT & KoD and the non-horrible Mat of the earlier books, and he felt like he actually had to take Seanchan!Mat to his worst conclusion before bringing him out again? It still really sucks that the Mat and Rand reunion happened during our low point of Mat’s characterization, though.

(* which appears to have been triggered by the ‘not pleasant’ conversation that Mat and Tuon had after Tuon berates him for not telling her that Egwene was briefly enslaved by the Seanchan. After that (off-screen) conversation, Mat starts being much more combative re: the Seanchan -- after that conversation is when he has his bitter/sarcastic thought that he’s not done much to convince Tuon to stop using damane and when he suggests to Min that she mislead Tuon about her viewings to try to soften her stance on Aes Sedai; so I think we can safely give Egwene credit for the turnaround in Mat’s characterization -- I wish that that conversation between Mat and Tuon hadn’t happened off-screen! like so many important emotional moments!, but it seems like perhaps that was a watershed moment for Mat)

Rand and TDO watch, and TDO taunts Rand “the son of battles. I will take him [Mat!]. I will take them all, adversary. As I took the king of nothing [this is Lan, I assume]”.

10. Mat thinks about how he knows he can win this battle, despite the horrible odds. He just needs “a favorable toss of the dice”.

And, not too far away, with the Trollocs outside his hiding place, Olver gives up on the idea of trying to get the Horn to Mat, and lifts the Horn of Valere to his lips.

11. First Mat, and then everyone else, hears Rand’s voice -- he calls out Shai’tan as wrong, telling everyone that Lan isn’t dead. And just after he says that, Mat hears the familiar golden and clear note of the Horn of Valere.

...wow, the Seanchan feel so superfluous to requirements right now. They didn’t show up until after the final combat was engaged, after Rand had his final necessary epiphany, after the Horn was blown (they have still not shown up, technically).

I’m going to take a moment to daydream about a world where Tuon’s nature as marath’damane was revealed and accepted, so she really did flee with the Seanchan (so that she can try to recover from this blow to her powerbase) and the Seanchan never returned to the Last Battle. This would be a much easier way to de-tangle Mat from the Seanchan than whatever he’s gonna need to actually do post-canon.

12. The Heroes of the Horn return and our first sight of them is Birgitte coming to save Elayne from Mellar, with a shining silver arrow. 😍

Birgitte standing over her own corpse kinda cracks me up. Good for her! It’s also probably the first time she’s felt like herself in books and books.

“That was the bloody Horn of Valere!” Mat announces to his troops. “We can still win this night!” Inside, he marvels over how the Horn was sounded without him, showing that one of the things that he’d believed that he was permanently tied to isn’t tied to him after all.

Well, if that knot can be untied, Mat, maybe another one can be as well.

13. Between losing Demandred and the appearance of the Heroes of the Horn, the Shadow are now the ones who are on the defensive, with some Trollocs breaking and trying to run away.

The mist of the Heroes forms near Mat and he feels a moment of worry, wondering if maybe someone on the side of the Shadow summoned them. Hawkwing rides up to Mat, and tells him, “Do take better care of what has been allotted you. Almost, I worried we would not be summoned for this fight.”

I know, right? The lack of urgency in the Mat-in-Ebou-Dar half of the book about actually getting him to Merrilor to blow the Horn was really frustrating to me too!

When Mat confirms that this mean they’re fighting for the Light, Hawkwing tells him, “We would never fight for the Shadow.” The rumors about the Horn are wrong -- I feel like we learned this back in TGH as well but, you know, Mat was dying at the time, so I don’t blame him for not remembering.

Yeah, here’s the line: “We have come to the Horn, but we must follow the banner. And the Dragon.” So it was Rand, Perrin, and Mat who learned that. But, like I said, I don’t blame Mat for not remembering.

14. Hawkwing and Amaresu both scold Mat for not showing Rand enough appreciation for saving his life. Honestly, so fair and legit for Mat to finally be on the other end of a scolding like that. “I have seen you murmur that you fear his madness but all the while you forget that every breath you breathe - every step you take - comes at his forbearance. Your life is a gift from the Dragon Reborn, Gambler. Twice over.”

Mat feels so scolded. As he deserves.

He’s told that they can fight here because they have Rand’s banner and because Rand is... technically sort-of kind-of leading them... from a distance.

Amazingly, Mat takes a moment out of this encounter to marvel at how pretty one of the heroes is and then Remind Himself again that he’s married. He really does have to keep Reminding Himself. One of these days, he’s not going to remember to Remind Himself until after he’s already slept with someone else. It’s been more subtle in this book than in ToM, but Mat is still constantly checking out Every Other Lady around him.

15. Olver gets dug out of his hole by Trollocs but Noal, now one of the Heroes, arrives to save him. I don’t care about Noal, and Jordan definitely didn’t do enough to build up their relationship in CoT & KoD, but I still got a little misty at the tiny orphan child feeling grateful that one of the people who ‘abandoned’ him has finally come back.

16. haha, this next chapter is called ‘wolfbrother’ so I guess that Perrin is finally gonna wake up. But first, we have Elayne!

She’s able to wriggle lose enough to make the medallion copy shift away from her skin and fall to the ground, and now she can embrace saidar again. Elayne apologizes to Birgitte but Birgitte laughs it off, “Why do you mourn, Elayne? I have it all back! My memory has returned. It is wonderful! I don’t know how you stood me these last few weeks. I moped worse than a child who’d just broken her favorite toy.” Ah, yeah, that confirms that Birgitte’s spiral into bitterness was not meant to be a reflection of Elayne but on the dark place that Birgitte was in, with her loss of memories, I think. But it’s a shame that it feels like parts of the fandom just took Birgitte’s unrelated bitterness as a reason to slam on Elayne more. My girl gets so much undeserved hate.

And Elayne and Birgitte will ride back into the battle together. Not as Aes Sedai and Warder, but as friends. 😍 😍 😍 😍

17. Aviendha! I’ve missed you! Her timeline isn’t advancing as quickly as it has been for those further away from Shayol Ghul, so not as much as happened here in the valley. She can feel the channeling inside the Pit of Doom - “a quiet pulse”. Oh! The wolfbrother of the chapter’s title is actually Elyas, who Aviendha runs across now. The Darkhound Wild Hunt is happening, and hundreds of wolves have come to fight back against them.

Aviendha is about to go fetch channelers to help bring down the Darkhounds, when she spies Graendal a bit higher on the slope, with some Turned channelers, and Aiel guards under compulsion. Aviendha alerts her companions (Amys & Cadsuane) and then begins the fight against Graendal.

18. Elayne has a sword again. Where is she getting these swords? I’m just gonna assume it’s made out of Air or something. More useful than the sword, Elayne creates a banner with the Power, the red lion of Andor, lighting up the night.

19. [Mat] remembered, within those memories that were not his, leading forces far grander. Armies that were not fragmented, half-trained, wounded and exhausted. But Light help him, he had never been so proud.

...

This was the moment he had been seeking. It was the card upon which to bet everything he had. Ten to one odds, still, but the Sharan army, the Trollocs and the Fades had no head. No general to guide them.

...

Elayne’s death had been a lie. Her troops had been in disarray - they had lost more than a third of their soldiers - but just as they were about to be routed by the Trollocs, she rode into their midst and rallied them.

20. Catching up with Moggy! Hi, Moghedien. I bet your Last Battle is going pretty shitty. She kicks Demandred’s abandoned corpse. Oh, his devoted Shendla just left his body there to rot? Yikes. For Moghedien, she discovers that now that so many of the Chosen have been killed off, TDO is ready to let her have a taste of that sweet sweet True Power.

She disguises herself as Demandred and heads to the Sharan forces. I have to admit, given how open Min has been about her Talents, it’s kinda astonishing that Moghedien doesn’t know about her viewings. Min will tell anyone who stands still for five seconds, plus Tuon announced her as a Doomseer and has been plumping her up for the past whatever-number of chapters.

Moghedien starts to gear up for her role as Fake Demandred...

...and then she gets a blast of cannon/dragon-fire in her face from the Band’s part of Mat’s plan.

21. Instead of the Band leaving their caves to fight; channelers are opening them up brief windows to shoot through. Aludra is placed up on a high location with a spy-glass, giving orders to the channelers for the next locations for the booms. Honestly very clever.

22. As Aviendha fights in the valley, plants grow to cover her passage.

They had come right when she had needed them to hide her approach. Happenstance? She chose to believe otherwise. She could feel [Rand], in the back of her mind. He fought, a true warrior. His battle lent her strength, and she tried to return the same.

Determination. Honor. Glory. Fight on, shade of my heart. Fight on.

😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍 😍

23. Aviendha kills a Compelled attacker, only realizing it’s Rhuarc after she has struck the fatal blow. She kills him moments before he would have killed her, and only her shoulder gets injured.

She does her best to convince herself that she only killed a shell. That Rhuarc was already dead.

There is a burst of determination from Rand (Strength, Aviendha) and her fatigue leaves her, and she refocuses on the fight.

24. Aviendha studies Graendal and decides on her approach -- she creates a spear made out of fire and light, and some other weaves in reserve -- and charges for Graendal. See, this makes a lot more sense that Elayne randomly having a sword, because this is a weapon and Aviendha knows and has trained in most of her life. I think that Sanderson Just Likes Swords tbh.

I really love the description here because of how it brings back Aviendha’s Maiden roots as she launches her attack on Graendal. The ground explodes underneath her (her legs get pretty destroyed, it sounds like), but she’s leaping up already aimed like a spear herself, and she sinks the spear into Graendal’s side just as Graendal is using the True Power to Travel... and because they’re touching, she goes along with Graendal when she Travels.

25. Mat rides with the Heroes of the Horn. He gets them to confirm that he isn’t one of them. He can see Elayne from where he is.

Mat saw Elayne’s banner glowing above them in the sky, crafted of the One Power, and caught a glimpse of someone who looked like her riding among the soldiers, hair glowing as if lit from behind her. She seemed a bloody Hero of the Horn herself.

26. And then the great battle is over, at least here on the battlefield.

He would have to thank Tuon for returning. He did not go looking for her, though. He had a feeling she would expect him to perform his princely duties, whatever they might be.

Hmm.

27. He does feel that tugging. Rand needs him. He tries to convince himself that this was his part, out here, and whatever is going on where Rand is... that’s Rand’s business. The dice are still tumbling in his head. This part here manages to capture Mat’s double-think in a way that I didn’t feel like came across in the actual chapter when we had the Rand & Mat reunion.

After trying to talk himself out of it, Mat ends up saying that he’s a fool because “I need to go to Rand.”

As a parting note, he asks Hawkwing to go have a conversation with “their Empress” (Tuon), and hmm, interesting. Okay, I need to break this down a bit.

So, one of the things that gave Tuon the big jollies back in the negotiation chapter with Rand was Mat referring to the Seanchan forces as “our forces”, which she basically interpreted as “haha you’re mine now, no take-backs”. And here, he does not call the Seanchan empress “my” Empress. He says she’s “their” Empress. The Empress of the Seanchan, who he is not currently identifying with, it would seem. So. That’s interesting.

We don’t get to see the conversation between Hawkwing and Tuon, of course, but what would Mat assume about what Hawkwing would tell Tuon? Why would Mat send Hawkwing to talk to her? The Heroes of the Horn follow Rand, pretty explicitly. They literally just recently scolded Mat for not appreciating Rand enough. They are aware of current events in the world and of the Seanchan Empire.

Which is to say... of course, Mat is assuming that Hawkwing will try to set Tuon straight on how to be an Empress without abusing millions of people under her power. Hawkwing told him that they would never fight for the Shadow. I think it’s reasonable for Mat to assume that he would disapprove of slavery. And Hawkwing’s hatred of Aes Sedai in his lifetime was canonically influenced by Ishamael, if I recall correctly, so the idea that Ishamael’s corruption is still influencing him in his Horn-form just seems like kinda silly to me. So. That’s my stance on that. Mat has clearly stated in recent chapters that he disapproves of the damane system, in particular, and that he wants to influence Tuon to soften her stance on Aes Sedai. So we know what Mat’s motivations are in sending Hawkwing off to talk to her. And it kinda fits Mat’s pattern of trying to use other people to influence Tuon to be less awful.

28. Rand has thought about Mat often, here in the battle with TDO. He thinks of him again -- Beneath them, on the battlefield, the Trollocs had fallen, beaten by a young gambler from the Two Rivers.

29. Oh, hey, Perrin just woke up. Page 853. He went to sleep on page 670. Nice long nap. Missed... a lot of stuff.

He learns that the battle at Merrilor has been won, but the battle at Thakan’dar, outside of Shayol Ghul, rages on. He gets his exhaustion washed away by one of the Aes Sedai and goes physically back into TAR (where he left Gaul to guard the cave where Rand fights).

30. In the waking world, Thom is the one guarding that cave entrance and he ponders the various ways that the ending of the world can be turned into a song, once this is all over.

31. Mat goes to Grady and tells him that he needs to be taken to Shayol Ghul. He’s brought Rand’s banner with him. Hanging out with Grady are Olver and Noal. The dice are still tumbling in Mat’s head. As far as I can tell, they haven’t stopped since Elayne asked him if he knew what he was doing.

Mat, on thinking about Noal/Jain becoming a Hero of the Horn:

Well, you wouldn’t find Mat trading places with him. Noal might enjoy it, but Mat wouldn’t dance at another man’s command. Not for immortality itself, no he wouldn’t.

Another data point that I’m placing into the pile.

Grady says that Traveling is wonky in that direction. Can’t be done.

Mat won’t accept that as an answer, and he gets Grady to take him (and Olver) as close as they can get -- a Seanchan scouting camp, a day away.

32. lol, we get a tiny glimpse into Fain the mist god-demon here. This just feels so anti-climatic, to still have Fain around at a time like this. Anyway, he’s basically a walking Shadar Logoth at this point. Fain kinda suffers from the same issues as Slayer, in that it feels like he’s a villain that the story grew past and yet he hung around anyway.

33. Gaul has been standing alone against Slayer all this time in TAR, fighting against him and protecting Rand, on his own, while Perrin was taking his restorative nap. But now Perrin is back to help. On the plus side, because of the time dilation stuff, only two hours has passed for Gaul in here.

34. Since he couldn’t take a gateway to Shayol Ghul, Mat is going by dragon to’raken. And, yes, Mat takes time out of his terror at being up so high to notice how pretty the morat’to’raken is, even as he thinks that anyone willing to do this must be “completely insane”. Olver, who is riding with them, is having a great time, though.

From up high, Mat sees a mist covering the valley below and gets a tingling that tells him... it’s about Fain and the dagger.

35. Then their to’raken gets hit by arrows, killing the rider or knocking her out. Mat undoes his straps and climbs over to take the to’raken’s reins. So he’s... he’s riding the closest thing that this world has to a dragon. Subtext, fun for the whole family.

He does his best to give them a gentle landing. It is not terribly gentle.

36. In the aftermath of the crash, Mat thinks that kidnapping Tuon (aka marrying her) is the worst decision that he’s ever made. Hmm. And this is after she ‘returned’ to the battlefield per their plan.

“That,” [Mat] finally groaned, “is the worst bloody idea I’ve ever had.” He hesitated. “Maybe the second worst.” He had decided to kidnap Tuon, after all.

And he doesn’t undercut that thought with any kind of caveat. He just lets it stand as he moves on to the next thing. Another interesting data point.

37. Mat literally panics when he realizes that Rand’s banner has gone missing during their dragon to’raken flight. Why does it seem like Sanderson is so much better at writing Cauthor-related scenes when Mat and Rand are separated from each other?

Olver points out that the swirling clouds above them are forming Rand’s sign, and then he blows the Horn again, for good measure.

38. Rand breaks out of his frozen battle with TDO and re-enters his own body. “From his watching of the Pattern, he knew that although only minutes had passed here since he’d entered, in the valley outside this cavern, days had passed, and farther out into the world, it had been much longer.”

He points Callandor at Moridin, and Moridin promptly throws a knife at Alanna.

Broke back to consciousness by Nynaeve’s herbs, Alanna pulls herself together long enough to release the bond she forced on Rand before she dies.

...I kinda feel the need to point out that Moiraine has done nothing but be a battery for Rand since she entered the cave with him.

I also feel bad for Alanna, who really disappeared from the story once Min was bonded to Rand and could take over as Cadsuane’s Rand mood-ring, and now is only here so that she can die. I have extremely large beef against Alanna for forcibly bonding Rand but it feels like the story really should have used that beat even more than it did, rather than it disappearing after WH.

39. Perrin kills Slayer. Finally. And then he pulls back out of TAR and is “on the rocks in the valley of Thakan’dar”, near where the Aiel are gathered.

40. Mat leaves Olver with the Heroes and meets up with Perrin at the mouth of the cave. So, yes, Mat and Perrin get another reunion. Why does Perrin! Get all the reunions! This is what I was talking about when I said how annoyed I was that Mat thinking about Rand tugging on him wouldn’t end up with any good payoff. All we get is yet another Mat and Perrin reunion.

That Rand is literally inside that cave and yet the three ta’veren do not reunite here is honestly somewhat infuriating for me. Genuinely those two things: the Emond’s Five reunite and the ta’veren three reunite should have been at the TOP of Sanderson’s priority list! There is a lot that I have enjoyed about AMoL but there are just way too many important emotional moments that were either skipped or didn’t happen at all but should have happened.

And, fuck, letting Mat and Rand have a scene that doesn’t take place during Mat’s weird Ebou Dar adventure. That would have been nice! Once Mat decides that he’s not going to be a lapdog for the Seanchan/Tuon anymore, his storyline and his PoV get so much better and so much more enjoyable and I am just... eternal bitterness that our only Mat & Rand reunion was plopped into our most lapdoggy-Mat era.

Mat came here specifically to protect Rand and then he never sees him! That is just fucking awful. They deserved a better reunion. What was the point of having the Heroes scold Mat if we didn’t actually get to see Mat and Rand interact again after it? This is kinda a place where the epilogue is mostly at fault -- Mat just strolling off to plan a fireworks show for Tuon post-Last Battle conflicts pretty hard with him spending time with his dying best friend, tonally-speaking -- but that really just makes it all the more frustrating that the only Cauthor reunion took place when Mat was in his worst Seanchan-era.

41. Aviendha attacks Graendal with an exploding gateway; and Mat kills Fain/Mordeth/etc.

And Perrin almost takes off to go searching for Faile but manages to resist the urge: If Rand died, then he would lose Faile. And everything else.

Yes. I have tried to yell this at the fictional characters so many times: if the world dies, then so does your sweetheart! It’s nice that Perrin finally listened.

42. And for his final trick, Moridin grabs Callandor, and Moiraine and Nynaeve spring their trap, using the flaw in Callandor to take control of the ‘circle’ that Moridin has accidentally formed with them. With Moridin having pulled the True Power, Rand is now able to enter the link, and Moiraine and Nynaeve can feed him all three sets of Power: saidar, saidin, and the True Power. Light explodes from him, and from Shayol Ghul, as Rand uses the True Power to protect himself as he reaches through the Bore and grabs onto the Dark One.

43. We get a quick beat of people reacting to the light:

Elayne is on the battlefield of Merrilor, as they search for the living among the dead. She feels the “swelling of power in Rand” and her attention focuses on him.

Thom shields his eyes as the light bursts from the entrance to the Pit of Doom.

Min appears to have managed to get away from the Seanchan for now, changing linens for the wounded, perhaps also on the Field of Merrilor.

Aviendha is drawn back from the darkness of near-death by the light and the warmth of Rand inside her, and realizes that her explosion twisted the compulsion weave so that Graendal compelled herself to worship Aviendha. Awkward!

Logain sees the light and knows that it’s what was meant by the message that Egwene sent, and he breaks the seals on the Dark One’s prison.

44. In TAR, Perrin runs across Lanfear. Together, they walk into Shayol Ghul, and we learn that she apparently compelled Perrin a little while ago? He’s able to pull out of it by reminding himself of his duty and of Faile, and he snaps her neck, killing her.

*squints at the scene*

Yeah, I mean. That’s certainly still what looks like happened? Sorry, Sanderson, I’m not seeing your hints here about Lanfear tricking Perrin and surviving.

45. Rand holds the Dark One in his hand. Or the representation of his hand. And, once again, when Rand tells TDO how pitiful he is, all I see are echoes of the Seanchan:

You would have enslaved me as you would have enslaved the others. You cannot give oblivion. Rest is not yours. Only torment.

Rand can feel himself dying, his life blood slipping away. Realizing that the world that he’d seen without the Dark One would have been the truth, he knows that he cannot kill it. So he thrusts TDO back into his prison, braids saidar and saidin together to reforge a new shield onto the Bore.

With this new form of the Power, Rand pulled together the rent that had been made here long ago by foolish men.

He understood, finally, that the Dark One was not the enemy.

It never had been.

(because it only reflected the evil that people were already capable of)

46. The black hole inside the cave expands, as Moiraine and Nynaeve run for the safety of the cave entrance.

47. And now we are at the epilogue.

Much like I did with The Last Battle chapter, I’ll take the epilogue in sections by character. Rand & co will go last, this time.

Perrin

The spirits of the dead wolves fade back into the dream. Perrin voluntarily worries about Rand? Wow, that feels kinda out of character for Perrin, who has always been way better at pushing away thoughts of Rand than Mat has been, but I guess let’s go with it. It seems to exist to tell us that Perrin no longer sees color swirls and no longer feels any tugging towards anything. “Those seemed like very bad signs.”

“Have you sent for the three?”

What a weird way to ask “do Rand’s girlfriends know that he’s dying?”

I’m going to take a minute and count up the PoV & page counts everyone gets in the epilogue.

Rand: 3 PoVs (4 pages total)

Mat: 2 PoVs (1 1/5 pages)

Perrin: 3 PoVs (6 1/5 pages)

Loial: 1 PoV (3 pages)

Moghedien: 1 PoV (1 page)

Nynaeve: 1 PoV (2 pages)

Birgitte: 1 PoV (1 page)

Tam: 1 PoV (1 page)

Min: 1 PoV (1/2 page)

Cadsuane: 1 PoV (1 page)

That’s a lot of Perrin, comparatively-speaking.

Anyway, Perrin finds Faile, happy ending, etc.

...oh, I just looked it up and Sanderson answered some questions about the epilogue (tor[dot]com/2013/01/23/brandon-sandersons-wheel-of-time-answers-from-torchat/)! He added Perrin’s and Loial’s scene(s). Ha! I knew that Loial was a Sanderson addition because he uses “Matrim” instead of Mat (that is, imo, by far the easiest ‘tell’ of a Sanderson scene -- someone using ‘Matrim’ when they normally wouldn’t). And the Perrin scenes make sense too because it really builds off of and finishes the narrative thread that was at play earlier in the book for Perrin, which was presumably all written by Sanderson.

Mat

Mat strolls away from the aftermath of having killed Padan Fain, calling the dagger “a gamble I don’t want to touch”. The dice stop rolling in Mat’s head after he decides not to pick up the dagger. Hmm. Mat avoiding becoming the new Fain for the Fourth Age?

After that, we skip to his scene with Tuon. And there are only those two scenes with Mat in the epilogue -- killing Fain and finding out that he’s been baby-trapped into the Seanchan Empire. Though Perrin confirms in his own PoV scenes that he no longer gets the swirls or the tugging, we don’t get the same kind of confirmation in Mat’s (very short) scenes.

I will say that there is more subtlety in Mat’s ending here than I had remembered -- I was extremely unhappy about his ending but this marriage is pretty troubled already in the text, and so it’s not really the book that tries to pretend this is a happy “babies ever after” ending for Mat; I feel like that’s maybe more of a vibe that I got from fans at the time, rather than from the text. There are a lot of “male power fantasy” fans who just really like that Mat ends up married to an Empress and commanding vast armies, I think, at least from what I’ve seen around the internet (and especially back when the series was originally published).

And Mat specifically forces a grin at the news that Fortuona is pregnant, so he’s not genuinely happy about it (and we got things in recent chapters like Mat thinking that kidnapping Tuon was the worst idea he’d ever had).

But, honestly, I do still hate that it happens. I hate it up one side and down the other. It sucks as an ending for Mat so much. Miserable marriage, awful wife, horrible shackles tying him to a terrible fascist empire built on slavery.

That being said... just Tuon’s rule is incredibly fragile, this marriage is also incredibly fragile (which is probably why Jordan slapped a baby in there to begin with -- otherwise, given his general misery level in many of the Seanchan-related scenes, it’s difficult to see how Mat could bring himself to stick with Tuon for long enough to do whatever plot-related things Jordan was imagining would have happened in the outriggers -- the baby is a trap for Mat, not from Tuon but from Jordan).

There are still so many things about the Seanchan that could end up being deal-breakers for Mat if he finds out about them!

(ex. Bodewhin Cauthon is never mentioned in the books after Knife of Dreams, so it is entirely possible that she is among the new damane who were taken by the Seanchan in recent days, and Mat might end up seeing his sister with a collar around her neck post-canon. How would he react to that? And to Tuon’s unwillingness to let her go?)

In addition to Mat potentially seeing people he knows and cares about in collars, we also have the possibility of him learning just how brutal Tuon’s attack against the White Tower was (there isn’t any indication that he knows about the attack at all yet); or Talmanes telling him about Verin’s letter and Mat realizing how damaging his fear of Aes Sedai has been for the world; or further in the future there’s Mat’s potential reaction to the lethal political wrangling that Imperial heirs are meant to get up to (he was disturbed enough that Galgan liking him only means that subpar assassins will be sent against him -- when he realizes that Tuon might well encourage their own kids to kill each other to win her favor, it’s very hard to see him brushing that off). Plus he’s regained his sense of disgust over the damane system. So there are a lot of powderkegs waiting to be blown sky-high for Mat, post-canon.

idk, Mat’s storyline is maybe the one where I most have to untangle whether I dislike it more because I feel like it was executed poorly or if I dislike it because it sets up a situation that will never get resolution. And how connected are those things?

A big frustration that I’ve had with how Jordan and then Sanderson handled Mat’s storyline over the course of the last few books of the series was how many shortcuts were taken with his character and how artificial forcing him into the Seanchans’ arms has felt to me.

a. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar and then all the characters involved taking a vow of silence when it came to telling Rand about it. Mat getting trapped in Ebou Dar is plot nonsense: relatively forgivable. But having multiple characters being given the opportunity to change that situation and just... not bothering to do it is... that’s a characterization issue. It severely impacted my feelings about Nynaeve for Jordan to turn her into the kind of person who just doesn’t bother to tell Rand that his best friend was left behind in that kind of perilous situation. Plot manipulations... that’s just how the plot works. But over and over, characters got broken or bent for the purpose of jamming Mat into the Seanchan storyline.

b. Setalle Anan is a minor character, so I get why people don’t care about her, but she’s a character who pretty much completely reverses her characterization between WH & CoT (in WH, she is anti-slavery and finds Mat charming and trustworthy; in CoT & KoD, she protects and waits on Tuon while treating Mat like the dangerous one, including betraying Mat’s secrets to Tuon -- and her betrayals are never acknowledged by the text in any way; she just keeps on being treated as if she’s a friendly supporting character) and, from what I could see, it’s just so obviously done in order to protect Tuon from ever having even a sliver of character growth rather than it making sense for Setalle Anan’s character.

c. We keep tiptoeing up to the brink of Actually Having A Plot Happen with the Seanchan and then backing away at the last minute without really having a good reason to do it. Incredibly frustrating. This was one of my main annoyances with CoT & KoD. And in AMoL, both Rand and Egwene inexplicably back down when they have Tuon on the ropes and off-balance.

d. Mat’s teleportation to Ebou Dar in-between Towers of Midnight and A Memory of Light. I’ve talked about this one a lot but yeah. It’s just... really bad? I do suspect that Sanderson couldn’t figure out any way to actually make it believable that Mat would go to the Seanchan and that’s why he had it all happen off-the-page. But the careless damage that it does to Mat’s characterization is just horrific. Mat gets ripped out of the action of the first third of the book, and doesn’t get to the Last Battle itself until the book is more than half over. Once Mat is actually engaging in the Last Battle, his characterization steadies a lot but especially those first four chapters with Mat, it feels like we’re only working with half of his characterization and the other half has vanished somewhere in-between ToM & AMoL.

(and if Mat hadn’t been cut-and-pasted from the Tower of Ghenjei over to Ebou Dar, then we would have had a full reunion at Merrilor. So I’m annoyed/bitter about that too)

I could keep going but... let’s keep it at four issues for right now so that we’re not here all day, lol.

All of those issues are problems that I had with the execution of the storyline.

I am not inherently opposed to depressing endings for characters that I love but... it has to be done well. It has to make sense. And Mat’s ending just... required cutting away too many parts of him (and other characters) for it to make sense to me.

But though it is not always handled well (to put it mildly), Mat’s storyline with Tuon (and Tylin before her) is an example of the ‘typical gender roles are swapped’ done in a way that is more down to the very core of his storyline than a lot of other storylines, which are more on the surface.

He’s much less politically powerful than his spouse and needs to use guile, intrigue, and manipulation to get his way and try to persuade her to a gentler and kinder path than her warlike nature naturally aligns towards.

He undergoes something of a gender-swapped version of “The Taming of the Shrew” storyline, in which a fiercely independent person gets coerced/’tamed’ into being a properly submissive spouse (or, depending on your interpretation, into pretending to be one) -- many of the tricks that Tuon and Tylin use are similar to what Petruchio does to Katherine in the play. Mat gets publicly humiliated and starved by Tylin into submitting to her (which is what Petruchio does to Katherine during/after their wedding), and isolated away from his past connections during his time with Tuon, where he constantly has to act to try to figure out how to appease her without provoking her temper (Petruchio compares taming Katherine to falcon-taming, but Tuon would probably compare it to horse-training or damane-breaking), and Petruchio changes her name from ‘Katherine’ to ‘Kate’, which fits pretty well with Tuon’s insistence on never once calling Mat ‘Mat’.

Plus Mat getting his name changed to indicate that he now ‘belongs’ to Tuon’s people fits into this general category -- and historically, in the culture that Jordan belonged to, that’s normally a role given to women, to be given a new name that shows that they are now of their husband’s people and not their father’s; it’s usually their last name but, in the not too-distant past (and maybe currently in some places as well, idk), at least in the USA, women were often referred to as Mrs. “husband’s first name” “husband’s last name” with none of their own name making it into the address.

But a lot of the issues that I have with how this was written is that it felt like Mat was behaving like his hand was forced even when it wasn’t. Which is definitely a writing issue -- it’s a similar issue to the one that I have with the Rand & Min romance, for example, where Min desperately chases after something even though she doesn’t really want it at the start. Prophecy gets used as a way to skip actually writing important character or relationship beats, instead of prophecy being one of many tools in the writer’s kit.

So, yeah, it really is the execution of the storyline that is the biggest problem for me with Mat & Tuon, and the way it feels like he is pulled away from his other attachments whether or not that makes any narrative or character sense.

I really hope that the show does better with them, and with Mat in his endgame (should we get there, etc.).

I will say that I do think that Sanderson handled the romance better than Jordan did; the main problem was that it was already fundamentally broken by how the relationship was written in CoT & KoD, imo (the KoD collaring chapter in particular made me despise them as a pairing and my feelings never recovered from that moment). But in Sanderson’s books, we actually see the effects of Tuon compromising with Mat during various points of the Last Battle (though we see don’t actually see their private discussions and/or arguments that lead to those compromises), and there’s always a throughline showing how miserable the Seanchan lifestyle is for Mat, and those are two things that were majorly missing from CoT & KoD for me, but that make sense as the only way to make the romance even half-believable for Mat’s pre-established characterization from WH and earlier.

The three big issues that I have with Sanderson’s Mat are: the terrible first chapter of TGS (with the gross sexism); the terrible first chapter of AMoL (now featuring inexplicable teleportation); and the deep deep disservice done to Mat and Rand’s friendship (Rand got a personal goodbye with EVERYONE important to him EXCEPT Mat! And Mat got a personal reunion with everyone important to him, except Rand! All they got was the negotiation scene that was ultimately all about Fortuona and the Seanchan treaty, with Mat and Rand’s friendship being the set dressing around the scene).

But the relationship with Tuon honestly... makes a lot more sense in this book than it did in CoT & KoD (once we work past the brain-breaking logistics of the first chapter or so). There are TONS of hints that Mat has uncomfortable vibes going on underneath his casual exterior, plus Tuon actually does make some attempts at compromising with him, and if the well hadn’t been poisoned by how much I despised CoT/KoD-era Mat & Tuon then... I might have had a chance at enjoying AMoL-era Mat & Tuon for the toxic trainwreck that it is.

But, like all the characters & relationships in AMoL, we skip some pretty big moments in the Mat & Tuon relationship -- we see the effects of them compromising but we never actually see them coming to that compromise in private, which I feel like we needed after how unyielding and frankly how annoying Jordan made Tuon about everything.

We do end up with a Mat & a ‘Fortuona’ who remain at cross-purposes -- Mat continues to think of and refer to her as ‘Tuon’ while Fortuona has kinda reversed from thinking of him as a ‘buffoon’ to instead believing that he has the same kind of practical motivations behind his choices that she does, which is also not accurate. But Sanderson did add in some actual give-and-take to their relationship, which Jordan never seemed willing to do, so the AMoL-era Mat & Tuon is a lot more genuinely engaging for me, even if I do still think that they are one of the most obviously doomed fictional marriages that I have ever seen.

Final Mat-related question for the moment: the Seanchan Empire is based on authoritarian governments throughout history, so does how the Seanchan Empire operates mimic the behavior of a cult?

The popular model for cults is the BITE model, which was developed by a man who was deprogrammed from the Moon cult in 1976 (Steve Hassan). It’s an acronym:

Behavior, Information, Thought, and Emotion control. BITE.

Do the Seanchan seek to control people’s behavior? (yes) Do they seek to control the flow of information that the people under them learn? (yes) Do they seek to have their members reject critical thought and only apply to the group-think? (yes) Do they manipulate the emotions of their followers, usually instilling fear or paranoia about outsiders? (yes)

We know from earlier books that the Seanchan culture =/= the Seanchan Empire. There are constant civil wars and uprisings in their native land. This is explicitly why they are such good soldiers, because they are always fighting each other. Yet they present themselves as a monolith when they come to the Westlands, bragging about how they’re here to bring ‘order’ to a lawless continent. What they say about themselves does not match the truth of what else we know about them.

How does the Seanchan Empire exercise its control over its people? Everything I included here is something I think we’ve see the Empire do, but I did bold ones that are particularly blatant in the text.

Behavior control: Control types of clothing and hairstyles; permission required for major decisions; rewards and punishments used to modify behaviors both positive and negative; discourage individualism; encourage group-think; impose rigid rules and regulations; punish disobedience by beating, torture, burning, cutting, rape, or tattooing/branding; threaten harm to family and friends; encourage and engage in corporal punishment; instill dependency and obedience; kidnapping; beating; torture; murder

Information control: Distort information to make it more acceptable; systematically lie to the cult members; minimize or discourage access to non-cult sources of information; ensure that information is not freely accessible; control information at different levels and missions within group; allow only leadership to decide who needs to know what and when; encourage spying on other members; impose a buddy system to monitor and control member; report deviant thoughts, feelings, and actions to leadership; ensure that individual behavior is monitored by group; extensive use of cult-generated propaganda

Thought control: require members to internalize the group’s doctrine as truth; adopting the group’s ‘map of reality’ as reality; instill black and white thinking; organize people into us vs them; change person’s name and identity; use of loaded language and cliches which constrict knowledge; encourage only ‘good and proper’ thoughts; thought-stopping techniques to shut down reality testing: denial, rationalization, justification, wishful thinking; rejection of rational analysis, critical thinking, constructive criticism; forbid critical questions about leader, doctrine, or policy; labeling alternative belief systems as illegitimate, evil, or not useful

Emotion control: teach emotion-stopping techniques to block feelings of homesickness, anger, doubt; make the person feel that problems are always their own fault, never the leader’s or the group’s fault; promote feelings of guilt or unworthiness; instill fear, such as fear of: thinking independently, the outside world, leaving or being shunned by the group; ritualistic and sometimes public confessions of sins; phobia indoctrination: inculcating irrational fears about leaving the group or questioning the leader’s authority, no happiness or fulfillment possible outside of group; shunning of those who leave; being told there is never a legitimate reason to leave.

“Destructive mind control can be determined when the overall effect of these four components promotes dependency and obedience to some leader or cause; it is not necessary for every single item on the list to be present.“ (in this case, that would be to the Empress, ~may she live forever~)

(all taken from freedomofmind(dot)com -- not linking because sometimes outside links make tumblr act weird about posts)

On the page, we witness the slow process of Leilwin née Egeanin pulling away and deprogramming from the Seanchan Empire, and then in this book, it feels like Mat has begun that process as well. And it feels like they started the same way -- because of a massive overreach by Tuon, the leader of the cult/Empire. Leilwin née Egeanin gets humiliated and punished by Tuon for no reason; just because Tuon felt like being a brat that day, and that moment of humiliation -- the re-naming and the forcing of the jewelry on her in a way that treated her like a slave -- was really what made Leilwin née Egeanin start to pull away from the other Seanchan and go into the path that eventually led to her being, however briefly, Egwene’s Warder.

For Mat, it really seems like whatever happened in that ‘not pleasant’ discussion that he and Tuon had after she berated him for, essentially, prioritizing Egwene’s privacy over Tuon’s desire to get information from him... that discussion (that we didn’t get to see) really seemed to lead to the more combative Mat who refused to back down and roll over for her. Mat still feels a level of protectiveness and affection for Tuon through the rest of the book but he stops letting her push him around and he starts acting like he cares about doing something about the slavery system in the Seanchan Empire again, which was a part of him that we lost at the start of CoT and I have hated so much that we lost in his character. But it slowly grows back over the course of the second half of AMoL.

Again, my big regret here is that the Mat & Rand reunion happened before Mat started his spine regrowth program. Even though Mat does start to push back on Tuon more here, he still never finished several of his character arcs that were set up over the course of the entire series: namely his own mistrust of Aes Sedai and his fear of Rand as a channeler. Both of those fears were things that he was actively working in the text and that he abruptly backtracked on when Tuon was introduced into his life (because being chill with channelers and being chill with people who enslave channelers is contradictory and so Jordan decided... to go with being chill with slavers). So those are two flapping loose ends for his character at the end of this series that never got to fully be addressed because the ‘romance’ was prioritized over Mat’s characterization.

Loial

Loial is looking for people to help him with accounts for his book and “Perrin ignored me and Mat cannot be found”.

Mat just completely disappearing from the Westlands side of things to go set up a fireworks show for Tuon (and asking Aludra to be the one to set it up, which just seems kinda mean, considering that the Seanchan pretty much completely eliminated the Illuminators) is just... frustrating. Apparently Mat visited the battlefield here “smiling and healthy” but then vanished. So, in theory, there’s an empty place here where Mat might have visited Rand and talked to Elayne & co one last time, since Rand is in the main healing tent on this battlefield.

Loial also notes how odd it is that Elayne and Min don’t seem to feel any urge to go in to hold Rand’s hand while he’s dying (Aviendha is getting her legs looked at). I know, Loial! They’re the worst fake-grievers who ever lived, I swear. If the whole point is to trick people into thinking Rand is dead, then it might be a good idea to... actually try to trick people?

Moghedien

In which Tuon’s people are already breaking the terms of the treaty by snatching up channelers from the battlefield at Merrilor. No hundred years of peace, Rand. I’m sorry.

Rand (& all those who say ‘goodbye’ to him, or who don’t)

Rand leaves the mountain, slipping on his own blood and carrying a body. Shayol Ghul is trying to close before he can leave and he only barely makes it out in time before the cave snaps shut behind him.

Moiraine tells Rand that he did well, and Nynaeve tries desperately to keep him alive, but eventually, and without ever waking back up, ‘Rand’ dies.

Elayne, Aviendha, and Min do the absolute worst job of playing grieving widows ever. Like, if Rand had actually died, I could understand this better. Because they might really be in shock. But they know he’s alive! And their whole job is to convince people that they absolutely believe that he’s dead! Just... pinch your arm until you start crying! This is literally the most suspicious way that they could have gone about things -- Nynaeve is already extremely suspicious of how they’re acting. Seriously, she’s gonna wiggle the truth out of them pretty much five seconds post-epilogue.

Birgitte comes to say goodbye to Elayne because she’s about to be reborn... and to mention that she’s tossed away the Horn of Valere. Sure hope that Elayne doesn’t regret that in ten years when they’re at war with the Seanchan!

Tam hopes that now his son can get some rest. My hope is that Rand will, you know, go and talk to his dad after he’s had a chance to recover from the stress and trauma of the Last Battle. Also, Tam... you’re gonna have grandkids. No thoughts on that, I see. Still no thoughts on that.

The funeral scene frustrates me to pieces.

Honestly, the most frustrating thing about the funeral scene is how easy it would have been to casually mention that Mat and Perrin were there? Like, that’s ONE SENTENCE. Just... the erasure of those years of friendship, because heterosexual marriage, in Jordan’s fictional world, meant that close male-male friendships just stopped existing. It’s depressing. That CADSUANE is considered to have more right to be at Rand’s funeral than his childhood friends who were also vital parts of the Last Battle. It’s insulting. And apparently Tam organized it? But he couldn’t be bothered to invite his kid’s best friends. Definitely a place where Sanderson should have done some editing of the original epilogue. One sentence is all that was needed.

*sigh*

I do think that Sanderson did try to set up why Mat wouldn’t have gone -- we have seen Mat, in several of his recent PoV scenes, swallowing his grief over losing people he loves and not letting it appear to affect him openly, even as it rocked him deeply, so Rand’s death would be another of those gut-punches that he would do his best to pretend didn’t happen. But, fuck... it just sucks that the friendship between Mat and Rand is such a sublimated thing in this last book, when Rand and Mat both got to much more openly deal with pretty much every other important relationship that they had (though I will note that Rand and Sulin never got a reunion either! Rude!).

Perrin didn’t get anything like that kind of subtextual explanation, but Perrin actually did visit Rand’s healing tent while he was dying, so at least he got that much. *shrugs*

Min thinking here about how the assembled people expect a ‘show’ of grief -- yes, they have all found it exceedingly odd that none of you appear to be grieving the man you said that you loved.

Rand wakes up in his new body, washed clean of the wounds that he’d taken over the course of the series. No more missing hand; no more agonizing pain in his side.

I have to admit “she left me some money” feels like a pretty anti-climatic way for Alivia to “help Rand die”? She wasn’t really involved in his “death” at all -- it was really Moiraine and Nynaeve who were the ones who ‘helped’ him die. I mean, any one of Min, Elayne, or Aviendha could have left him some money, since they all know he’s alive. I wonder if Jordan was originally thinking that Alivia would be the one joining Rand & Nynaeve for the cave journey, and it was Sanderson who decided that Moiraine would be more appropriate? Nothing distinctively Moiraine happens in that cave, not the way that Nynaeve was needed to be there to heal Alanna without using the Power. Like, this poor woman was harassed by Min for a handful of books because of that prophecy and all she did was leave Rand some money! Min better find her and apologize to her! (I already know that she won’t)

Haha, so confession: my brain edited out that new!Rand had lost saidin. My brain was just like “nope, of course he can still channel”. Personally, I’m not a huge fan of Rand not being a channeler at the end of the story, so that part I’m not thrilled about. He does have his newfound ability to use the threads of reality to basically channel anyway, though. Or at least I assume that’s what the pipe scene is about.

And then his thought, too, about ‘which’ of the women will follow him - yeah, you’re right that thinking that means you’ve gotten a swollen head! They all have responsibilities! Though since Rand leaves so abruptly here, there’s a lot that he doesn’t know, and the two things that most affect this specific question are: the extent of Aviendha’s injuries and the extent of Min’s involvement with the Seanchan. Literally zero of them is in a position to go chasing after Rand, even if they wanted to! Rand is the one who has no obligations and can easily visit them if he wants (well, maybe not ‘easily’ if Min does end up in the Empire).

But I can still remember, wow, what a relief it was that he was alive at the end, and free and unbound. The rest can be... adjusted by post-canon theories.

In terms of ‘things that aren’t covered but that we can probably assume’:

It does look like Elayne ended up with all three of the medallion copies -- the one Mellar used on her, the one that was on Birgitte’s body, and the third was with Lan and she probably reclaimed it (there’s nothing to indicate that Mat spoke with Lan and got it back), so the slaver empress never gets that medallion that Mat wanted to give her back in ToM. Tragic.

Despite Elayne and Tam speaking frequently over the course of AMoL, they somehow never speak about the whole grandkids issue. I feel like we can assume that this happens at some point, post-epilogue? Elayne and Aviendha both seem like they would go back to Caemlyn to rebuild. And Tam doesn’t really have a reason to go back to the Two Rivers at this point, so I can see him ending in Caemlyn too because: grandkids.

Technically, Min has slipped the Seanchan net at this point and could just not go back if she wants, so she can either go back to the Seanchan or she could go to Caemlyn with Elayne & Aviendha, but if she does stay away from the Seanchan, Tuon is going to try to get her back. Unless she was super-turned off by Min actually standing up to her in front of all the Blood and hastily makes Selucia her Truthspeaker again. That’s another possibility.

Ah, since we were told earlier that Melaine was about ready to give birth and Birgitte tells Elayne that she’s about to be reborn: Melaine might be her mom. I feel like Birgitte being reborn as Aiel sounds kinda fun.

I feel like Rand would not actually enjoy traveling all on his own after a while, given what we know about him, so he would probably end up visiting Caemlyn. And given how suspicious Nynaeve already is in the epilogue, I’m going to guess that she knows the truth by the time Rand goes to Caemlyn.

If Mat decides to leave the Seanchan behind at any point, he will probably also go to Caemlyn, and Mat and Rand can finally have a good reunion.

All in all, there are things about the ending that don’t thrill me but there are also things I really like. And having an ending at all helps in terms of sparking the imagination for fanfiction or meta or... an Amazon Prime television series. I don’t think we would have ever gotten the series if the books had stayed unfinished.

The epilogue checklist (and my theories about how it affected AMoL)

So, while reading AMoL, it felt like Sanderson took a couple of shortcuts in order to bruteforce the characters into reaching their epilogue endpoints, because there simply wasn’t enough time for it to happen naturally. This is my list of things that I believe got shortchanged due to “writing to the epilogue”:

Fortuona is pregnant in the epilogue: at the start of AMoL, Mat gets teleported to Ebou Dar without any kind of narrative or logistical explanation (contradicting his PoV chapter in the ending of ToM, where he was planning to return to Caemlyn, which would have thrust him directly into the main stories at play in the prologue & early chapters). I feel like part of it is that Sanderson really wanted to get that bun in the oven as quickly as possible.

“they expected something from the three of them; a show of some kind” : There’s just a wide acknowledgement in the epilogue that literally everyone knows that Rand has three girlfriends, so everyone just already knows in AMoL that Rand is in a relationship with three women now. No need for anyone to have emotional reactions to it, please! (not even Rand’s literal dad!) This one also ends up being weird because it seems to change from moment-to-moment whether or not the whole army knows that Rand has three girlfriends (if everyone knows already, why is Rand playing spy games with Elayne?).

Min is Fortuona’s pregnancy test: Min instantly respects ~Fortuona~ as an empress even while thinking that she doesn’t normally respect nobility. Bizarre, considering Min’s own history with the Seanchan from Falme.

Mat kills Fain: we got two super-quick glimpses of Fain earlier in the book to set up this moment but Mat had so much other stuff to do that Sanderson couldn’t really do more than say: yeah, Fain exists and he’s bad, lol.

Minor elements I think were affect by the epilogue:

Rand is still pondering over the idea of choosing between Elayne, Aviendha, or Min: we get Rand’s going “am I allowed to love three women? idk sounds fake” when he and Aviendha sleep together in chapter 4, which just was kinda silly. I think the epilogue is also the genesis of the vibe where Rand appears to consider “having sex with Min for months” to not be any kind of “choice” when it comes to the three women, but having a romantic interlude with Aviendha or Elayne would signal a choice -- because the epilogue acts like the situation between Rand and each of the three women is roughly equal, so “months of sex with Min” appears to hold the same emotional weight to Rand as “pining from afar with two nights of intense passion” does when he thinks of either Elayne or Aviendha.

Mat has no thoughts about any of the Westlands characters: I think that this is more of a subconscious effect -- as he focused more on the final book, I think Sanderson focused on the relationships highlighted in the all-important epilogue... and the only person that Mat cares about in the epilogue is himself *cough* I mean, Fortuona, of course, lol. In both TGS and in ToM, Mat’s deep affection for various Westlands characters was constantly on display, as shown in his own ‘loves lying to himself’ way. This gets curtailed in AMoL, especially in the early Ebou Dar chapters.

I think I’m going to let myself might let myself marinate over the various books before I post a final list of my personal ranking of the books.

One thing that I’ve really noticed is that, more than any other character, the quality of Mat’s storyline has a huge impact on my overall enjoyment of the book. In CoT & KoD, Elayne and Egwene (both of whom I love), got pretty good stories. But Mat’s story was so bad that it made it difficult for me to enjoy the good parts. But maybe some time just letting myself think about the series as a whole will balance out my thoughts. Does that make Mat my favorite character or just my most impactful character? idk. I feel like Elayne or Rand would more consistently hit the top of my favorites.

Overall top five characters throughout the entire series:

1. Elayne

2. Rand

3. Egwene

4. Mat (might be higher if not for CoT & KoD)

5. Nynaeve (might be higher if she didn’t basically disappear after she married Lan)

Then, moving on to the next favs, I think there’s more uncertainty there for me:

6. Verin, probably, but it could be Moiraine. Let’s say they tie.

7. Aviendha and Siuan can both go here. Both generally very good and interesting characters.

8. You know, I had a real turnaround with Gawyn in this reread of the books; I’m gonna put him here. He can share this spot with Leilwin née Egeanin.

9. Loial, probably. Needed more PoV; that would have been nice. I’ll put Faile here with him.

10. For more minor characters, I gotta give a shout-out to Narishma (favorite Asha’man), Sulin, Pevara during her Black Ajah Hunter phase, Olver is really good in his sections here in AMoL, Asmodean for being my favorite fail-Forsaken and Moghedien for sticking it out until the very end, Elaida honestly very fun PoV as far as villains go, Teslyn and Joline for being troopers and enduring Mat Cauthon at his very worst, my girl Berelain who always deserved better, the ‘Finn in general always lots of fun, Aludra and Juilin who always kept their integrity intact.

#wot #wheel of time #wot reread #wot book spoilers #wot spoilers #wot amol spoilers #wot a memory of light spoilers #mat cauthon #rand al'thor #elayne trakand #so it really feels like the 'main characters' of the actual last battle #were rand mat egwene and elayne #with everyone else being more of a secondary character #who helped the one of those main four storylines #posting this today because ao3 is being slightly iffy right now #so i'm going to post the next chapter of voice on thursday #and just give ao3 some time to work out whatever the connection issues are

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