#Celia [satisfied and amused]: I always suspected he was capable of violence

[void-botanist]

🌻 🌻 🌻 fuck me up

From this ask game.

It was a toss-up between a discussion of the Semilsstroms' insect eating preferences and Leon's vague angsty family drama. However you said "fuck me up" so it's drama time.

In Drowning in the Stars Christina ends up leaving Kat with Horatio, so Kat can take advantage of the safehouse plan Horatio had originally put together for Christina. No one realizes at this point that Kat and Horatio are related, but then the pieces come together: Leon's estranged brother (originally called Ed but that name now belongs to Uncle Ed so for now I'm just gonna call him Nate) is Kat's grandfather. Leon and Nate are estranged in the first place because of Kat's grandmother, Nate's wife Shirley, who is the worst. It happened through a combination of Nate being sick of Leon bitching about Shirley and Leon being sick of Nate always siding with her, when it was obvious to him that she was gaslighting the hell out of Nate. They had a fight so bad that Leon just gave up. Just moved localities and didn't tell Nate where he was going. But he left his contact information with Shirley's brother Jedediah so he would know if he was needed.

Fast forward to now, some forty years later, and I know there's some complicated shit going on in that family. Leon has heard basically nothing from Jedediah, and when he left, Nate and Shirley's eldest, Kat's mom, was a baby. I considered having Nate be dead and Leon being one million percent ready to murder Shirley with his bare hands upon finding this out, but then I didn't want Nate to be dead, and when I realized Leon would have had contact with someone, it wasn't so straightforward just to have Kat surprise him with this news. So he's probably not dead. But maybe in a coma? Or some other situation where he's neither Dead TM nor Alive And Ready To Have A Chat (my Sunless Sea brain: he's a Drownie obviously). And I think that whatever put him in that situation is what Kat's parents are busy being vigilantes about. Kat, meanwhile, has mostly associated with the other half of the family, Jedediah's kids, who are all involved in running the Murian Library & Archives. She hasn't hard sided with them because that would make things way more complicated, but really Shirley is just ignoring that Kat clearly thinks her cousin Meredith is the true matriarch of the family (#justonlygrandkidthings). But Shirley and Nate have another kid, Barnaby, who is ostensibly devoted to the point of obsequiousness but is really essentially a spy for the other half of the family, and maybe for others. There's a lot of ??? in this setup actually lol. I suspect there's some twisted webs being woven here that are about more than just Shirley being shitty but they haven't come to me yet.

Anyway I'm still thinking about Leon, the world's chillest seventy-something, absolutely losing his shit because he thinks Shirley has to be responsible for what happened to Nate (she probably is on some level, though I don't think she wanted this to happen).

Kat: aw man it's so good to finally meet the part of my family that has no drama Leon: yeah, yup, no drama here. brb literally stabbing your grandmother with a knife