Spiraled Thoughts
This is written for @drarrymicrofic 's prompt: Sally's Song
CW: Implied Bad Things, Visions of Blood and Death, Open Ending and Angst
The future was ever changing. Every action and choice was an unraveling spiral. Nothing was ever certain and his visions were never clear. They gave him only mere glimpses of what could be. The images fractured and changed with every day, with every decision.
Trying to control the future was a fruitless endeavor. Nothing good ever came of it and more often then not, it only led him to what he was trying to avoid. It was a cruel gift. He was cursed to see every possible outcome, every possible way his loved ones could die, with no way to avoid it.
Seeing himself die was a constant; he had grown used to it. He was meant to be hit by a bus this morning. His spilt eggs had saved him.
Mother had never understood why he was such a cautious child. He had never understood why everyone else wasn't. It had taken him far too long to realize that his visions were not a common occurrence. It had taken him far too long to find the words.
He no longer payed any mind to the cryptic warnings; he would either be hit by a bus or he wouldn't. For if he had tried to skip breakfast, tried to outrun the bus, he would have rushed right into his own demise.
But his recent visions were never changing. It was the same every time, as if they were set in stone. They only grew clearer every day, showing him more and more blood spilling over the floor, more broken bodies. Potter was always at the center of it.
He couldn't make sense of it. The images were still too sporadic and unreliable to understand. Potter had always been in his visions, of course. He'd seen his lifeless body in the forest, seen him triumph over the Dark Lord, before any of it had happened.
Potter always plagued his thoughts, he was inescapable. Even now, he found himself worrying about him. Being such a public figure, his face was always plastered all over The Daily Prophet. Their futures had been intertwined for so long, always weaving together, but now it was as if they'd been severed, and all he could see was blood.
There had been a time when he had wished he would see glimpses of them together, as something more than rivals, but it never came to be. They were childish thoughts, really. The differences between them were too vast to mend. Still, sometimes he found himself wishing that things had been different, that he had been different. Would there be hope now, if he hadn't made so many wrong choices?
Would Potter even listen to him if he tried to change things now? Or would he think he was mad? He had once thought himself mad, so he wouldn't blame him.
He could feel that the bloodshed would happen soon, and he felt as if he were meant to do something. But what could he possibly do? Would it even be wise to try?
Still, he found his feet leading him towards the Ministry. Towards Potter, and he didn't try to stop them.
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in recent years, there's been a push in therapeutic circles to shift the language from "attention-seeking" to "connection-seeking" behavior.
i was an attention-seeker. i was the textbook example of an attention-seeker. i was a troublemaker. i would self-harm. i destroyed my own relationships. i was uncontrolled, dramatic, sensitive. i took everything personally. i had "nothing" to be depressed "about," but made a big show of how sad i was nonetheless. i was really unsafe about myself in a lot of ways.
the strange thing about that is: it meant others could ignore me. the prevailing wisdom behind knowing something is "attention seeking" is to say: well, since you want it that bad, you're not getting any. it meant i was lower-on-the-list of concern. it meant an eye-roll.
the belief was that: since i was obviously doing these things on purpose, it would be bad behavioral training if i was "rewarded" for it. it would "teach me" that i simply had to make enough fuss, and i'd finally get all that missing attention and love. no, it was better to ignore that stuff.
i was suffering. and it felt like - oh, it doesn't matter how loudly i am in pain, nobody gives a shit about if i'm living or dying.
awhile ago, i went through my journals from that time. a lot of them read the same thing. in them, i am convinced i am invisible. that nobody wants to hear me, to see me. that i could die or vanish and nobody would even notice. i didn't even want attention - not really - because it was always dismissive, mocking. nothing i ever did would be good enough to get someone to actually-worry about me.
that's a terrifying thing for me to read as an adult. that is a child who fully has no problem committing. that is a child who has no concept of feeling loved. the most basic human instinct is missing from her life.
i needed help. i didn't know how to ask for it. i was a kid. i was a kid in a bad home, and whenever i thought things couldn't get worse there - they almost always did.
and the ways i showed that - the ways i tried to deal with that - they made others dismiss me. i wasn't suffering prettily. after all, if i was really in trouble, why wouldn't i just march into the first counselor's office and ask someone to help me? i had the opportunities, right? what did i think would happen, exactly? that someone would finally stand up and do something? who even wants that kind of responsibility?
i heard connection-seeking for the first time about three months ago. my therapist mentioned it when we were talking about my history. it rang some kind of horrible bell, deep inside me. i don't know what she said in the rest of her sentence. i just started... crying.
"oh no", i said to her. "i think i just realized: i have no idea how to forgive them for minimizing the ways i was hurting."
how many other kids, though. how many other kids were out there drowning, snatching around for a lifevest, some kind of rope - how many were straight-up ignored.
how many of those kids aren't gonna get old.
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Okay so I did some research on Seam and realized that it would be a crime to not add him to my AU in someway where him and Jevil reconcile and they escape to the multiverse together and are free and they're best friends and- 😭😭😭
I had a dark story all thought up for this but half way through drawing I changed the story so this isn't really canon anymore?? Or it might be idk- my Deltarune AU is only a few days into development so its constantly changing <XDD Sorry-
If anyone's interested in the story I've got it below the Keep reading :}} (Fair warning, its rather dark and disturbing..)
TLDR: This story is super dark and interesting to me but it might not be canon XD
ANYWAYS! The story behind this was Jevil and Seam come from a very dark and corrupt AU. Ruled by an even darker and wicked King (Lancers dad). In this AU they were Kings royal Magician and Jester as per usual. They were best friends though and preformed these beautiful displays of magic together. Side by side, hand in hand. They were best friends for years and always dreamed of one day running away together and finding a safe place to live.
Eventually Jevil met someone. Someone who spoke of a way to leave this place. They spoke of walking through your own reflection. And if done right, one could leave their AU entirely.. Jevil believed them out of desperation and tried to tell Seam about it. Seam thought Jevil was losing his mind. Walking through your own reflection? That makes no sense..
King caught wind of them plotting to escape. And as punishment to both of them he commanded Seam to lock Jevil away using his own magic.
In Seams eyes, Jevil was his best friend. His brother, the only thing in this world that he could trust. But he was more afraid of what King would do to him or Jevil for disobeying him, then he was willing to stand up against him. So while believing Jevil was sick in the head and needed help, he acted out of cowardice and sealed Jevil away..
I'm thinking that eventually sometime later, Jevil is able to escape through his own reflection. A mirror. And either he goes back and sees Seam dressed in these beautiful robes and thinks "well the king must be treating him well. Guess I'll just leave him to reap the benefits of betraying me.. >:(" And leaves with a bitter heart. THAT, or he just left. Never going back to check on Seam or see if King was treating him well or not.
So the AU continues. With Jevil traveling from world to world, meeting new people and learning new things.. When eventually he's with the whole gang and they're all sitting in a restaurant or something.
When Jevil suddenly feels this overwhelming sense of doom. Something horrible is about to happen to Seam. He just knows it, its in his bones. Deep within his soul he can feel it. He knows- he needs to save him.
He falls back out of his chair into a mirror and heads straight for his old AU. Showing up just in time to stop Seam from.. well..
They end up talking. Turns out that after Jevil was imprisoned, Seam tried to sneak down to the basement and visit him. He wanted to apologize for imprisoning him and explain himself- but he was caught by King.
"I just wanted to see him!"
"For that I will take your eye."
"NO! Please don't take my eye!!"
"For talking back, I will take your voice too."
King took Seams eye and stitched his mouth shut. He could still talk but not very well. To make things worse, when Jevil escaped? Seam thought he had died. Why wouldn't he? His magical barrier was never broken and Jevil was gone. Surly he must have died somehow.. Meanwhile everyone else was under the impression that Seam let Jevil escape because they were friends.
Seam then suffered greatly for years as punishment for "letting Jevil escape". He was bound by these magical chains made by King. He was abused for years and at this point he had enough. But before he could do anything rash.. Jevil returned.
Jevil then felt the sinking horror realizing that he left Seam alone in this world to be abused by King. He abandoned him. After all those years of promising to one day run away together..
Seam betrayed Jevil, and Jevil abandoned Seam.
After realizing all of this and having a long emotional talk. Seam and Jevil deeply apologized to the other, and forgave each other. Marking the beginning of their new friendship. And despite Seam feeling like he doesn't deserve freedom, he agreed to run away with Jevil and finally be free with him.
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Now this story is super cool and morbid and all but now I'm questioning the story and wether or not I want it to be canon <XD
I have some other ideas that I really like too and this one is just a biiiiit dark... ish. I mean I've made worse- but idk I guess this one just has a bad taste to it..
I also like the idea that Seam has been with Jevil this whole time and was the first person he saved. Which motivated him to try and save other people and give them the same freedom that he gave to Seam. But then that would change the Grillby fight and Spamton situation a bit and also maybe effect the Goner kid situation- GAH!! I'll figure it out eventually- <XDD
I hope this wasn't too hard to stomach and if you read all the way through I thank you :}} 💖
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Steve smiles. It’s hard not to smile when Eddie is looking at him. When Eddie’s hands touch him gently. Big brown eyes bore into his. Surroundings don’t matter. How can they matter? But they should matter, shouldn’t they?
“I got ya, Sweetheart,” Eddie murmurs.
Eddie’s got him. Nothing can hurt him now. Everything hurts. There’s a choked sound that Steve ignores. Eddie’s here. He doesn’t have the energy to turn his head. He doesn’t have to be strong. Doesn’t need to be the hero.
“That’s right, baby, just be our support.”
“Bard.”
“What?”
“Last… last time… wanna… bard.”
It’s hard to talk. Throat raw, aching. Pain. Like he’s spent weeks screaming. Don’t think. Doesn’t matter. Eddie’s here.
“You… you wanna play a bard?”
“Yeah.”
He hums a few notes of the song Eddie had been playing for weeks nonstop. Before. It kept him going… Made the hurt hurt less. Thinking of Eddie. Thinking of the game he promised to play in. Singing has never been his skill, violin or piano he could do, as his mother says with her sad little smiles; he’ll never sing in the theater. Robin disagrees. Robin thinks he has a nice voice. Eddie likes his humming, smiles his own sad little smile. Steve is tired of sad little smiles.
“Tired,” he breathes out.
“Can’t sleep yet, Stevie.”
“Please? Safe now.”
He can hear the retort of Nancy’s guns. The breaking of glass and whoosh of fire. Eddie is here.
“Just stay awake a little longer.”
“Kay.”
He tries to stay awake. Listens to sounds of battle. Focuses on the calloused hands on him. Moves with the motion of the chest he rests against. But he’s so tired. So very, very tired. Fought for so long cause he knew they’d come. It’s safe now. His eyes close.
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Small edit there is now a Part 2
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Some Speculation on Kaveh’s Father
I actually started this post right after the Parade of Providence event last year, but never got around to finishing it. However, in light of Kaveh still not appearing on a banner, I decided to dust this one off and get it finished, so that I’d have at least a little Kaveh content in my life after being so cruelly denied by Hoyo.
So, without further ado, some stuff about Kaveh’s father I did not see discussed elsewhere but which I think is especially interesting.
1) Kaveh’s father likely first became depressed/disillusioned with humanity after witnessing (or possibly being the victim of) a murder attempt.
Without knowing the full situation and reading all the additional text from the Parade of Providence event, I feel like this might have been easily missed, but the entire “Kaveh’s dad became disillusioned and depressed and retreated to the desert to help people” seems--at first--like it came out of nowhere. He had a lovely family, was the pride of his darshan, and was eager and excited to win the crown to bring it home to his son. Yet theoretically, he did not win the crown (and, in fact, the crown was stolen before the last event and may not have been there during the Avidya Forest fight, so when, as the non-winner, would Kaveh’s father have come into contact with it to encounter Sachin through it in the first place?) Why would Kaveh’s father’s personality take such a massive turn all the sudden? What would drive an excited, happy person to suddenly withdraw from everything he loved and everyone who loved him, if he didn’t actually win the diadem to be influenced by it in the first place?
The event implies there was a trigger:
Huvishka’s friend (who is described as “honest and kind but vulnerable and sensitive”--obviously Kaveh’s father) went into the Avidya Forest with the other contestants, where no one was watching, and we’re not told what happened except that the Akademiya responded to whatever occurred by shutting down the entire competition and banning any sort of events in the future that cause contestants to become so desperate they would “fight to the death.”
This is a pretty obvious implication that Kaveh’s father either witnessed two other contestants attempt to kill each other or was the victim of an attempted murder himself, which prevented him from winning the competition even though he was the favorite to win by a long-shot. This feat of betrayal, demonstrating the depths to which humanity would sink, likely shook the idealistic world views of a sensitive person such as Kaveh’s father. This brush with death and with humanity’s capacity for evil in the forest would have been the exact trigger needed to make Kaveh’s father particularly vulnerable to Sachin’s message of nihility and despair, leading to the downward spiral that sent Kaveh’s father into the desert.
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2) Sachin may have way more culpability for Kaveh’s father’s death than Kaveh realizes.
For a while after the event, I was under the impression that Kaveh’s father must have met Sachin’s consciousness through the diadem and that’s where he got the idea to go into the desert. However, something was always a bit odd about the timeline, because...
Sachin was still alive when he gave the Akademiya his estate. This is why no one actually knew/believed he was fully dead, even to the present--because he willed the Akademiya the estate while he was alive and told them he was going to be personally watching over the contestants to award his estate to them if he deemed them worthy successors to himself.
So did Kaveh’s father run into a fragment of Sachin’s consciousness... or did he run into Sachin himself? The game doesn’t really clarify:
The fact that Sachin’s recording recognized Kaveh’s appearance as familiar makes me think it is much more likely that the consciousness preserved in the diadem already had knowledge of Kaveh’s father at the time it was preserved. Aka, Sachin actually met Kaveh’s father in person. This also makes sense of why, even though the diadem was stolen away during the last event and Kaveh’s father did not win it, he would still know about Sachin and Sachin’s research. (However, as a counterpoint, I guess we could say that the Diadem!Sachin had enough sentience to maybe have its own memory, separate from the real Sachin? And reached out to Kaveh’s father mentally even though he didn’t win the diadem? Maybe?)
Still, there’s one really notable aspect of the timeline that I think is important: Right after the Interdarshan Competition twenty years ago, the one which Kaveh’s father competed in, we know that Sachin went back out to the desert.
Who else went out to the desert exactly 20 years ago? Kaveh’s father, obviously.
This overlap in the timelines makes it seem very likely that Kaveh’s father, who failed to win the competition because of a murder attempt (and therefore never got the diadem), was nevertheless reached out to by the real Sachin, who saw in Kaveh’s father the kindred disillusioned idealist he was looking for to pass his research torch onto. From this connection, Kaveh’s father was driven to either directly accompany or at least pursue the still living Sachin into the desert. (This works even if we say it was only Sachin’s consciousness he was contacted by--in either case, he would have been driven go to out to the desert to meet the real, temporarily still living Sachin to join his quest to help the desert people.)
Only for Kaveh’s father to meet his end there while trying to aid a caravan that had fallen into trouble. What a tragic coincidence, a completely unpredictable twist of fate.
Or... was it?
How odd, in the same quest that Kaveh’s father’s connection to Sachin is discussed, that we’re given an account of a caravan that appears to have been deliberately sabotaged, where money was taken (from Sachin) and somehow sparked a betrayal, a “trial of human nature” that caused many people to die, with the takeaway being the exact belief Sachin wants to pass on and reinforce in others, that humans are horrific creatures who can only make the world a worse and worse place.
We know that Sachin’s “research” specifically consisted of doing this exact thing, manipulating situations to test humans’ moral character, conducting trials/experiments on “human nature” to reinforce his belief that humans were fundamentally selfish beings.
(It’s no accident the merchant ledger we receive uses the exact same words as Sachin does, “trial of human nature” and “experiments on human nature.” We’re supposed to assume what happened to the caravan in the note was deliberate sabotage on Sachin’s part, to create a scenario where he could observe the cruelties of humanity.)
Why would the game go out of its way to give us an account of a caravan being deliberately sabotaged and used as an experiment if there was no connection at all between what happened with this caravan and what happened to Kaveh’s father, who was also killed helping a floundering caravan?
It’s just too much of a coincidence to accidental. I think the implications of the ledger Dori gave us and the similarities in the language on that ledger to Sachin’s ideas was supposed to lead the audience to wonder:
Could Kaveh’s father have died in one of Sachin’s final “human nature experiments”?
Was the caravan Kaveh’s father tried to help one that Sachin deliberately sabotaged, expecting to observe humanity’s selfish, self-preserving nature?
I think there’s enough evidence in the story to suggest that we players are at least supposed to consider this a possibility. (There’s no reason to give us the ledger about the manipulated caravan otherwise.) And if you consider this a possibility, it would mean that Sachin didn’t just indirectly cause Kaveh’s father’s death--he would be the direct cause of Kaveh’s father’s death, an actual murder brought about by Sachin’s beliefs that humanity’s self-centered nature made everyone beyond saving.
This idea transforms Kaveh’s father’s sacrifice into the ultimate rejection of Sachin’s beliefs. This would mean that, even in a situation manipulated to bring out the worst in human beings on purpose, Kaveh’s father gave everything to protect the lives of others, for no gain at all of his own, doing everything he could just to desperately try to make the situation (the world) better.
SO yeah. I’m not saying we have hard evidence here, but I think the quest was trying to lead players to speculate very, very hard on the possibility that Kaveh’s father’s death was no accident.
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3) Finally, a cuter piece of speculation to brighten things up after that despair bomb I just dropped: it’s highly likely that Kaveh’s father had more than one Aranara buddy!
During the Parade of Providence, we hear about an Aranara who learned to read from Kaveh’s father:
However, this is a bit confusing, because later in the event, we hear someone else say that Kaveh’s father taught an Aranara to write specifically when he was a child:
While of course it is possible that Kaveh’s father taught the first Aranara, Arakasyapa, to both read and write, I think there’s also another possible answer here about why Kaveh’s father would separately mention teaching an Aranara to write:
Because there is an entirely different Aranara in the story which was taught to write by a “good Nara” who was a child--Arashakun, from the quest “Courage is the Heart.”
In this sweet little world quest, the Traveler discovers a flower talisman that has been snatched by some hilichurls, and seeks to return it to its rightful owner, a timid and shy Aranara named Arashakun.
We learn that Arashakun once had a kind-hearted “good Nara” companion who taught him to write (sound familiar?), and who, in order to encourage the poor Aranara, gave him a single flower dubbed “courage.” In describing this child companion, Arashakun specifically states that his companion was no strong warrior like the Traveler’s twin, but instead a gentle, comforting presence who never teased the Aranara.
All of these descriptions line up particularly well with Kaveh’s father, who the game repeatedly describes as vulnerable, kind-hearted, and giving to others.
To drive home the possible connections to Kaveh’s family even further, this quest takes place very, very near to the Palace of Alkazarzaray.
Although we don’t have any guarantee, I think it is strongly implied that the “good Nara” mentioned by Arashakun is indeed Kaveh’s father, and the “courage of the heart” that he extended to Arashakun as a child is the very same courage, kindness, and generosity that drove him to reach out to the people of the desert, hoping to make a difference in their lives--even at the cost of his own.
The takeaway? Kaveh’s father was a truly good person who aided everyone he came across, from timid Aranara to people whose very lives were in danger. He never meant to leave his family, and especially not his son, but repeatedly fell afoul of the worst humanity had to offer and was driven into a situation in which all he could do was offer his very life to uphold the altruism that was central to his idealism--the same idealism and goodness that Kaveh carries as “courage” in his own heart.
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