Alsjtbsjbt thank you!!! I'm putting the paragraph in ask format so its easier for you to see. Mostly what I need is just whether it gets an emotional reaction, although if you do find spelling or punctuation mistakes lmk😂 its from an Albether oneshot I've been writing and it is an au so a little dialogue at the start might not make sense now but it will in context. In advance I am sorry if this makes you cry 😅 aight here we go
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“All right,” Albedo said, placing his tools on a nearby rock, “let’s suppose I’m not dreaming. Why are you here? I never made a prayer, or… summoned you.” At this, Aether’s face dropped from a smile to sadness. He took Albedo’s hands in his, gazing into his eyes.
“Because you’re lonely. You’re so, so, lonely and it’s so hard to watch so the moment you thought about it I just couldn't help it. You’re surrounded by people just like you, and yet you’re so deep in your anxiety about being different that you’ve pushed everyone away.” Aether’s voice broke, eyes brimming with tears. “I know you’re not very good at socialising, I don’t blame you for that, but you don’t need to isolate yourself because of it. Not being human isn’t something to be ashamed of, and even if it were there’s hardly a difference between you and a normal human anyway. How you were born makes no difference and it’s no reason to isolate yourself so much. And I know that I have no right to say this, no right to just waltz into your life and tell you how to live, but I cannot see you look at your city, your home, and cry yourself to sleep on a desolate mountain. Not anymore.” Aether was crying now, tears spilling off his cheeks and falling on Albedo’s hands as the star’s voice broke into a whisper. “Please.”
thespian I’m actually under the impression you personally find pleasure in my tears.
I HADD TO PACE MY ROOM THREE TIMES. THREE TIMES TO COPE WITH THIS.
The dialogue is actually writtten just so beautifully I took a bit to think about how I should respond. But I’m here now and oh boy did this make me emotional
The “Because you’re lonely. You’re so, so, lonely and it’s so hard to watch so the moment you thought about it I just couldn't help it. “ line KILLED ME. KNIFE PLUNGED IN MY HEART, TWISTED AND THENN RIPPED OUT. DEARRR GODDDD
the way it’s not an explicitly negative sad I’m feeling too??? It’s like a hopeful-sad?? Does that even exist??? I don’t know??? All I know is that reading this MAKES me want to see them happy. Desperately. So desperately in fact I’m now gonna be stuck thinking about this for the next three hours. And longer, probably.
I think the thing that made it so much worse was the added please at the end. It’s separated from everything else and I think that’s what’s killing me; it’s a genuine plea and THAT is gonna kill me.
You did so well at encapsulating a like. Not explicitly sad-sad mood,, but like such a hopeful and thoughtful one?? Like it’s so unique and sweet and my GOD is it gonna kill me.
Thespian you are genuinelly so amazing but if you continue this trend of making me emotional; I don’t think I can take it anymore.
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“Come in, then,” says Irileth, gruff as ever. Then, gruffly fond: “You can use the door, you know.”
Jenassa, spidered in the other woman’s window, smiles and slips inside.
For the past three nights, since a thing with wings blazed from the clouds and razed the western watchtower, she has climbed to this high room with linens and liniment. (One part oil, one part limewater, shaken.) What comes after has become routine. Irileth’s face is no longer gaunt with pain, but she still shuts her eyes and sets her jaw when Jenassa’s hands, merciful as any good assassin’s, peel the shirt from her back to bare the bandages beneath. Tonight, these follow the shirt to the floor in a stained coil. The burns bared to the light, Jenassa notes with relief, look less like raw meat than they had the night before—and they’re cooler to the touch, though the dragonfire still festers in the skin.
But there’s something else tonight, Jenassa thinks. She traces the tense line between Irileth’s shoulders. Then she almost laughs.
“You’re worried,” she says lightly, dabbing liniment into the crease, “about the girl.”
“Of course I am.” Irileth’s bulwark of a back twitches beneath Jenassa’s hands. Jenassa does not have to see her face to see it, drawn and dangerous, roiling like a pyroclastic cloud. “An oath of fealty should be freely sworn, not—not—it was ill done of him,” she snaps, volcanic as she always is when speaking in private of her jarl, “to bequeath his own fosterling to some—thespian.”
Jenassa recalls how the girl’s face, fierce in the firelight of the Jarl’s meadhall, had flamed when she kissed the hand of her new thane. She raises an eyebrow. “She thinks it a high honor.”
“Of course she does,” Irileth grumbles. “Her head’s full of Nord nonsense.”
A lock of her hair slips free of its hard knot. Jenassa, after some deliberation, noses it aside.
“Not our Lydia,” she murmurs against the nape of the other woman’s neck. When she kisses it, soft as a shadow, she smiles to feel the stubborn shoulders sink. “Some of it is our nonsense.”
She waits. After a long, haughty pause, Irileth sighs through her nose.
“She’ll be safe at High Hrothgar,” she admits. Her voice is heavy and hoarse. She shifts as if to lean against Jenassa, then remembers the blisters and rocks forward again. “Balgruuf wants her gone before Ulfric batters down our gates.”
Jenassa stills. She stares at Irileth’s broad back—the burns glistening with balm, the old, tired muscles bunching beneath—then speaks with studied diplomacy. “So Balgruuf’s cast his lot.”
“The Legion is sending a detachment.” Irileth’s voice is brittle, now, sharp as foyada-glass underfoot. “Gods only know what we’ll feed them, if they’re not snatched by great lizards on the way. Caius has it in his head that—”
She stops. Jenassa, after a moment, hears the cause: footsteps, soft and familiar, in the hall.
Irileth rubs her forehead with a weary hand. “Didn’t want her to see this.”
“She knows,” says Jenassa in her most patient voice. “You’ve been staggering around like a draugr for—come in,” she says in Nordic to the door, before the girl starts banging.
The door creaks open. She’s taller than them now, the Jarl’s fosterling. She’s broader. Her arms are like barrels. Still, she ducks her head in the doorway with sheepish deference: their scrib, their little Lydia, whose eyes widen when she sees Irileth’s back.
“I—I came to tell you that we’re leaving tomorrow,” she says, wrestling pain and resentment from her face. She had wanted, Jenassa remembers, to ride to the watchtower with Irileth—who’d barked at her, with customary tact, to man the wall instead. “At first light. That’s all.”
Irileth, with customary tact, lifts her chin like a legate. “You should be asleep, then.”
Lydia raises her eyebrows.
“Housecarl,” she murmurs, and stoops to kiss Irileth’s cheek—and Jenassa’s, too, smiling against the flaking yellow paint. Then she slips out again, quick as she came, sure and silent as a wolf.
It’s Irileth, after, who is strong enough to speak. She clears her throat. Her voice, when she finds it, scrapes like an ash-choked gate. “Nilo.”
Jenassa swallows. The room feels darker. Smaller. She is glad she did not laugh.
“I know,” she says.
She waits. It is much of what they say to each other, this waiting.
“Outlanders,” Irileth mumbles at last, in disgust. She is speaking of the war, of course, rather than the more painful subject. “Can’t squabble over a chair without—marching their children at each other.”
They are outlanders too, now, Jenassa does not say. She rests her forehead on Irileth’s shoulder. She slips a careful arm, scored with long Tong ritual-scars, around the other woman’s waist.
“Our way,” she says in wry Velothis, “was better.”
* * *
At first light, so as to evade any fanfare, two travelers ride out of Whiterun. They sit straight and stern and awkward in their saddles, rising tall above the rubble and scorched wheat, and say nothing at all to each other until the sun glints, far ahead, on something bright.
Helmets, Lydia thinks. She squints down the road. “Legionaries?”
The Dragonborn raises her eyebrows. Her sword-arm, which Arcadia has assured them will heal quickly, sits snug in a sling bound to her chest.
“You will defend me,” she says, straight-faced, “if they try to cut off my head?”
Lydia recalls the solemnity of her oath. She decides against smiling. “Yes, my Thane.”
They rein their horses aside to let the cohort pass. A soldier near the head of the line—a Tojay standard-bearer, perhaps their age, with an open, clever face—casts a curious glance back at them as her fellows, fresh-faced and bright-mailed, nudge her in the opposite direction.
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[ lore ]
“That’s a very cute bunny you have, who gave it to you?” - the one and only dad (idv-thespians)
The voice of the older hunter seemed to break some sort of barrier as the young girl looked around, confused. The hand that had been previously dragging her around had suddenly frozen upon the question, with the unknown man frozen on an expression… one the young girl never quite understood. But the hunter knew it all too well. It wasn’t an expression of happiness or disgust or even sadness.
It was an expression of malice. Frozen in place for all to see. But yet… Everything except for the two of them seemed to be frozen in place. In that moment, something else had seemed… strange. Why was he holding onto her so tight?
“Huh..? Oh, this?” She looked at the pink stuffed bunny, also seemingly frozen in time, much like everything else. She reached out, trying to grab ahold of the bunny from where it was floating midair. “My brother made it for me when I was younger. But he was really bad at sewing. It also used to be white…”
She looked up at the hunter with an expression of confusion after realizing her bunny rabbit was stuck. A further expression of dismay appeared when she realized she was stuck too. Stuck in the man’s grasp, and therefore too, stuck in place. Stuck in place, much like everything else surrounding them.
[ @idv-thespians ]
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