#and ari hit that threshold Very quickly without ari realizing it at all

[kerra-and-company]

4, 9, 20, 31, 34 for whatever TWO otps you want to talk about most! :3c

@mystery-salad

Double the OTPs!! :3 :D We'll do Casca/Brook and Cio/Ari, because I feel like talking about both of them and haven't gotten the chance recently!

4. How did they first meet?

Brook and Casca met in the Ash Legion fahrar, when they were very little (toddlers, more or less). They honestly don't remember not knowing each other, and can't remember the specifics of their first meeting, either.

Cio and Ari met for the first time when they were assigned to the same airship for the upcoming attack on Mordremoth. Ari was the pilot; Cio was the engineer more-or-less in charge of making sure the weaponry did what it was supposed to do. They were both stressed and on edge, and managed to get on each others' nerves very quickly--and then, very shortly afterward, had to rely on each other to survive in a jungle full of Mordrem after the fleet crashed.

(Putting a cut here because all of the other answers are Long!)

9. How are their personalities different?

Brook and Casca can both be abrasive, but it's slightly different forms of abrasiveness. If it's mission-related, both of them are more than capable of acting differently/playing a role, but in general, with no motive to act otherwise, Brook is just kinda...I think I described them once as "spiky", alsjdkf. They need a reason to be pleasant to someone (adults, at least; they're pretty good with children). Casca, on the other hand, can be...sort of aggressively pleasant, if that makes sense? Not in a cloying way or an insincere one. She's the kind of person who will tell you with 100% honestly that you're pissing her off and she's really exhausted and would rather not deal with your bullshit today so could you please fuck off while grinning. This still feels like it's not quite capturing what I mean, but I think it's close. (Side note, for whatever it's worth, Casca is very awkward with kids, though she does like them.)

Also worth noting for these two is that Brook has faith in the gods--more specifically, in Kormir--where Casca does not. Brook's faith is not in quite the same form as Kasmeer's, but it is pretty unshakable, even though (and partially because) they do believe in the gods' fallibility. Casca, on the other hand, has never had that kind of faith in any sort of higher power--not a god or gods, not the Legions, not the Pact. The closest she's ever gotten to that was the trust she put in Ari, but it's not really the same thing.

Cio and Ari both had walls up in very different ways when they first met. Cio was afraid of letting people get close because she was afraid of losing them, but she was still outwardly friendly/amicable to most people, just distant. Ari refused to confront all of the complex emotions she was dealing with as a result of past experiences, and therefore barely talked to others beyond what she had to for her job (or what slipped out as a result of being angry/irritated/pushed past her limits for the day). Their personalities without walls up have some semi-similar differences. Cio is entirely unafraid of calling out anyone who's being an asshole, but she's also quick to be friendly to a stranger, whereas Ari is not. Ari has a sort of gruff teasing thing she does with people who are (at minimum) on the cusp of progressing to the friend stage from the acquaintance one, but Cio really only teases the people she's closest to.

20. Who holds a grudge the longest?

For Brook and Casca? Casca, by a mile at least. She'll give a second chance, but very very rarely, if ever, gives anyone a third.

For Cio and Ari...hmmm. Cio, as far as who's actually held one the longest. Ari blamed herself more than anyone else for the losses she experienced, and she thought her primus was horrible (which he was) but didn't exactly hold a grudge against him. (To be fair, by the time she was in a space where that grudge would maybe have resurfaced over the various other feelings she was distracted by, the guy had already died, so.) I was going to say that I could maybe see her holding more of a grudge against Weylon (and Lifa, later on) if she thought more of herself, but...honestly, no, not really. She was in charge, and as far as she's concerned, on her head be all of it. Cio, on the other hand, does hold a very justified nugget of resentment with her towards a large part of Rata Sum and the Arcane Council, one that she would likely be holding even if they hadn't repeatedly proven over the years (often specifically to her face) that they're no better than they were when she was a child.

31. What’s the relationship like? Smooth? Rocky?

Brook and Casca were inseparable as cubs. They were a team before they really formed a warband with the others, and they remained a team afterwards. They got together romantically during their early teenage years, and their relationship was pretty much like their friendship. They had some arguments, some minor rockier times, as well as some things that were more or less related to growing pains--both of each other, as they were literally growing up at this point, and of the relationship. But they'd had a whole lot of practice with those things in the thirteen years before they got together and managed to navigate it pretty damn well in the following seven years. And then their warband was shattered, they were both captured by the Flame Legion, and they were separated for nearly ten years.

After reuniting, it's...both smoother and not as smooth. They have to relearn each other in some ways, but they're also not kids, and they have a sense of stability in a different way now. There's places they have to be cautious that weren't there before, triggers that are new, ten years worth of memories to go through together. But they've always known each other, and they still do after everything. And they love each other. And they're making it work. It gets easier every day.

Cio and Ari have a very smooth romantic relationship, but in terms of their relationship in general prior to that, it started off somewhat rocky. As kinda mentioned in question 4, they didn't like each other that much when they first met, but they worked well together when they were forced to, and their back-and-forth switched at some point during their trek through Maguuma from having a tone of "I'm irritated with your existence" to having one of "I care about you and would very much rather you didn't die"--not that neither of them would have admitted that at the time. They kept working together throughout the rest of HoT, and their friendship progressed from there, but it wasn't necessarily smooth or linear. They worked for different parts of the Pact (Whispers for Ari, and the Priory for Cio), and therefore were deployed to different locations at some points during LWS3 and early PoF. When they were together (or when they sent letters), there absolutely were miscommunications occasionally, and hurt feelings, and a decent amount of hey, I care about you, please eat/sleep more than you are currently. LWS4 was when they reached a point of making key decisions based on each other--which group they wanted to be deployed with, where they'd be stationed during the fight with Kralkatorrik, what they'd do afterwards. Whether or not they'd go to the All-Legion Rally.

These days, they're no longer part of the Pact, and they get to make their own decisions. They fight very rarely, though they disagree over smaller things on a semi-regular basis. They have somewhere they're comfortable and they're building a life together. Aside from that one time recently that the world almost ended thanks to the Dragonvoid, their lives and their relationship are both going pretty smoothly!

34. Do they give each other nicknames?

Brook and Casca will use shortened versions of each other's names when they're alone--just B and Cass, nothing super fancy--but that's pretty much it.

Cio and Ari have the nicknames that they originally gave each other as insults--Ari called Cio "Sparky", and Cio called her "furball". Both of those eventually became more affectionate terms. These days, the nicknames are used in more teasing circumstances. They use each other's names when they're trying to be sweet/romantic.