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fandralxthexstabulous · 7 years ago

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*whispers* What made Fandral /want/ to work for Asgardian Intelligence? Obviously, he's good at it, but where did his real passion for it come from?

Short version: His grandparents. Both of them.

Long version:

We all know that Lady Sunneva was the one who kickstarted his training as a spy. She was the one who taught her grandchildren how to read a room and a crowd and an individual, how to be discreet, how to subtly pry information from unknowing targets, how to hide your thoughts behind a smile and how to distance yourself from the questionable nature of what you were doing.

His grandfather, on the other hand, taught him about service. Brandt Holmesson was the younger of two sons of a then-newly-established merchant house. His elder brother Andor was the heir, and while Brandt grew up in and among merchants, he was ultimately sent off to the army, winding up with the cavalry and eventually becoming an officer. Ideas of service and honor run deep in the Asgardian army, particularly in the days of Bor Allfather. One owed service to one’s superiors and inferiors alike, protecting both those above you and below you above all else. The people above you led; you owed your service so you could help them get things done. You led the people below you; you owed it to them to keep them safe, to lead them fairly, and to not waste the precious resources of their lives. As far as Brandt was concerned, that mindset ought to carry on outside the army. A merchant house could not get far at all without its clerks and ship crews, after all. To protect them and see them prosper was to see everyone prosper.

Brandt held on to that kind of thinking after the war with the Dark Elves, when he was enobled by Bor for his outstanding service. He was given the lands and holdings of Jokulsfell, and when his brother Andor died he took over the family merchant business, relocating it to Jokulsfell. As a landowner and head of a merchant house, he dedicated himself to seeing that all under his purview were treated fairly and that their service was rewarded.

By the time Fandral came along, his House was more or less made up of a collection of service-minded individuals, with a few notable exceptions. Fandral responded to his grandfather’s leadership and ideals- as the only son and second in line for the family title, he spent a lot of time growing up at his grandfather’s side. It was Brandt who insisted that the family help their people with the harvest and planting, who taught him that the people Fandral led had value and deserved his protection, that helping others was a worthy cause. His parents echoed that ideology, doing their best to teach him how to balance compassion with ambition.

This was the moral foundation Fandral had in place by the time Sunneva started her training. Brandt died when Fandral was a boy. He was old enough to remember the man well, though his his youngest sister Dalla had only the vaguest of hazy memories and Aetta had spent relatively little time with him at all. Sunneva’s teachings had a markedly different slant than Brandt’s had- shaken by her husband’s death, she embarked on a quest to ensure that even without the patriarch who’d originally held their family’s new title, the House of Brandt would remain a force to be reckoned with among the nobility. She sought power to ensure their house and name would remain strong- even at the expense of others.

Fandral initially fell in with his grandmother’s teachings, but even at that age he could see that her goal was the accumulation of power and standing, not the service to their people that already lay in his bones. He spent a long time being rather confused about that discrepency even as he absorbed what Sunneva had to teach him and his sisters. At the same time he was being trained as a fighter, discovering his skill with a sword and bow, and continuing to learn about the family business and how to manage an estate. He recognized, dimly, that his grandmother was trying to make him into someone who only cared for his people, his family, his standing, but that didn’t sit entirely right with him. Why care only for his family, when there was a whole world out there of people who could benefit from having someone protecting them?

In his adolescent confusion, he turned to one person he trusted- his weaponsmaster and sword teacher Bjorg Esbenson, finally telling his teacher about his uncertainties. It was Bjorg who first broached the idea that Fandral could serve more than just his own House with his grandmother’s lessons, for Bjorg was a retired agent of Asgard’s spymaster Fritjolf. Bjorg recruited the young swordsman and refined his lessons, expanding on Sunneva’s teachings and supplementing them with his own lessons on spycraft, promising Fandral that as an intelligence operative he could work to serve all of Asgard rather than simply the ambitions of his grandmother.

Fandral took to the idea like a duck to water, mastering the new lessons quickly, particularly the ones about acting and developing personas since those were ones he needed to put into play immediately if he was going to thwart his grandmother right under her nose. He also saw to it that Dalla got similar lessons, and passed on the familial convictions on service. Her own sweet nature was already in conflict with Sunneva’s laser-focused ambitions, and Fandral did his best to help Dalla protect herself against becoming like her.

Fandral started his intelligence work in small ways, tagging along with Bjorg on excursions to the town to socialize and listen in taverns, making a point of learning how the family trade business was run so he understood how to look for things that didn’t fit, starting to play with disguises and personas when he got a little older. A young adolescent was still somewhat invisible, and Bjorg took advantage of it as an opportunity to let Fandral get his feet wet.

When Fandral was a bit older and finished with his initial training under both Sunneva and Bjorg, it was decided that he would be sent off to be presented at Court. Sunneva wanted the heir in place to begin working to advance her interests. Bjorg pointed out that such a fine swordsman desperately needed the teachers available at Court, for the advanced training he couldn’t provide himself. Under the cover of these two reasons, Bjorg had a third- presenting Fandral to Fritjolf as a new agent. The intended plans got slightly disrupted, however. Fritjolf came himself to Jokulsfell to look over this promising youngster and suggested to Sunneva that Fandral spend a few years studying with a noted blademaster before coming to Court. Fandral was instead sent off to study bladework- and then on his first undercover assignment on Midgard, inserted into the armies of King Richard the Lionhearted when he went off on crusade in foreign lands. Fandral was only supposed to spend a few years honing his ability to act, lie, and listen.

Instead he wound up in the position of impersonating a completely different person from the one he was supposed to be playing, leading a peasant revolt against an abusive and particularly cruel sheriff, mediating some degree of truce between the people he led and the interim ruler, falling head over heels in love, marrying a mortal woman, and becoming a folk hero. The role of Robin of Locksley- or Robin Hood- helped lay the foundations for the persona of Fandral the Dashing, and eventually led Fritjolf to present the young swordsman to Thor and Loki as a companion who could secretly guard them from enemy agents.

Fandral’s experiences as Robin of Locksley rehoned the ideals that Brandt had initially instilled in his grandson. He got to see, firsthand, how horribly people could suffer from a person in power who took advantage of those below him. He also met in Marian a woman with complementary beliefs in the duties a noble owed do his or her people. For the first time he really got the chance to act on those ideals as well, openly and secretly working to better the lives of the people who now looked to him. When he returned to Asgard, it was with the fundamental belief that the order and structure of Asgardian society was a good one, but it absolutely required people in the high ranks acting to protect everyone, especially those below them, in order to remain good. It was also with the knowledge that not everyone he worked with would have the same moral compass and dedication to service that he did, and that people like him were important to keep a certain amount of leash on the less morally-concerned among Asgard’s operatives. A great deal of his time as Robin had been spent keeping his allies pointed in the right direction- at the goal of overthrowing the Sheriff and establishing better conditions for all, rather than in exacting revenge.

He thought at one point he’d be able to use his position with the princes to help influence them towards the ideals of feudal service, but between his youth, inexperience, and unwillingness to risk exposure he isn’t sure how well he succeeded in instilling those ideals in them.

#headcanon

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