#and i know i write;;; a lot abt val cain but listen. she'll always be my first muse and i'll always love her to bits

[soulcrossed]

HEADCANON / VALKYRIE CAIN :   POST TDOTL RELATIONSHIPS

with a great thanks to  MAY  ( @foulefairs / @aasmahni )   for letting me ramble for a couple of hours. kind of a pt. 2 to  this ;  i’m going more into detail about her reaction to other people after her return from meek ridge,  AND  i’m explaining my interpretation of val & skul’s dynamic, their relationship in general, and how they ended up where they are. again, this is long af  ---  feel free to ask me for a tl;dr, but  please  note: i differ heavily from phase 2.

REACTION TO OTHERS

listen, here’s the thing. everybody HATES val. at least everybody she comes into casual contact with  ---  and she knows this. she expects this. that’s fair. but sorcerer politics is mainly an  image thing,  so -----  she’d not only avoid people who simply don’t like her, but also those who she  IS  on friendly / neutral terms with, if just to avoid damaging  their  reputation / career. it doesn’t really matter if people see her with skulduggery because a) skug doesn't give a shit about any of this and b) his reputation is fucked already anyway, so nothing to lose there. but say, like, fletcher? tanith? the remaining dead men? even militsa?* they’re all doing fairly well after ... everything and she wouldn’t want to make it any worse for them; wouldn’t want people to bother them  about her  and she’d. avoid them at all costs, in the beginning. anything beyond texting / skyping that isn’t case-related will be. cancelled. with the most ridiculous excuses. untill someone literally drags her out of the house. and the thing is, it doesn't really occur to her that these people  ( fletcher / tanith / dead men, other people from before )  also have major trauma she might possibly help them work through with providing the opportunity to  talk,  to get  closure,  since, you know, she played a major part in  causing  that trauma.  ( val is still self-centred at heart. she tries to take others into consideration, especially after tdotl and her exile but like. she's trained this into her since she was twelve and she didn’t really have any chances to work on that when completely isolated; it's a habit that is going to take her  A LOT  longer to unlearn. essentially, it’s good intention with bad results  ------  it’s partly fear for her friends’ reputations, and partly because she is simply not ready to confront  everything,  at least not all at once. listen. my girl needs therapy. badly. )   valkyrie feels so GUILTY looking at everyone and  still  has it so ingrained in her that she's bad for people. and she comes back to work on that because she feels  ready  to  work on that  again but? she's still super convinced that Any Association With Her is Bad. essentially, she’s still very in her head about it, and isolates herself  again  for a good while, just. on the same continent, this time.

( * i don’t personally like militsa’s attitude of almost-stanning val and i find the “hey so i was attacked by a lady with parasites coming out of her hands” - “haha was she hot” interaction ... questionable.  especially  with blandy’s track record of fetishizing lesbians / the train wreck that was dem.on ro.ad so. i’m not,, comfortable with blandy’s canon stuff. i’m willing to work something out with militsa muses but that’s something that needs to be  carefully  plotted out, especially if it goes into ship territory. note: at this point in time, i have not read bed.lam. )

gordon’s mansion / grimwood becomes her safe space and she does  NOT  do well with having that invaded. xena is a part of that, skulduggery is tolerated  ( in sight! she’s  very  uncomfortable with people in her space. especially when they’re off somewhere making noises --- she forgets they’re there and she’s  jumpy )  and very, very occasionally her parents  ( and only in the living room / in sight as well )  it’s just. hard for her to coexist with living beings again, it’s something she has to  RELEARN.  this also ties into meetings  ------  ALWAYS on neutral ground / preferably in the mortal world somewhere. and even then, she’s going to be twitchy. she has emergency plans memorized. she’ll want to call it off and she’ll want to take the opportunity to Run. she’s not going to, but--- things are hard and uncomfortable and when has val cain ever dealt with things like this properly? 

the thing is, dealing with other people, especially people she used to know, brings on a whole different type of guilt, and not one she can actively think about, at least not at first. there's a disparity between the "i almost destroyed the world and killed a shitton of people including my sister" kinda guilt  ( which is about an objectively bad thing )  and the "i left literally everyone to deal with the fallout of this, and i'm pretty sure i would've just made it worse in the state of mind i was in then, but what if i've been making it worse on other people after all and oh my god there's no way to know what would've been right and no matter what i would've done my existence is just not right" type of guilt that goes. a little deeper.  ( because  also  that was her active choice, just like alice. )  and it takes her a little longer to confront that than it does for the other things.

it’s going to take a lot of time and work for her to reintegrate herself and learn how to be around people again  ------ especially since said people have moved on with their lives. she's not a part of that anymore after five years in exile literally not speaking to anybody. and a big part of her coming back is a) accpeting her decisions and b) integrating herself in a sort of community again, if just so they can peacefully coexist without her having a panic attack every time she randomly meets someone on the streets or at the sanctuary. in summary, my interpretation has a long road ahead of her to work through things with most other canon characters.

RELATIONSHIP TO SKULDUGGERY

this also goes for skuldug  -----  and as an  IMPORTANT NOTE:  skul forcing her back into working cases is not part of my canon. it’s just bull, imho, and it goes against both how i interpret val and their dynamic as a whole. she comes back from america because she (thinks she)'s ready. she  decides  to go on cases again, but few and far between, and besides that mostly (really) keeps to herself and won't set foot into roarhaven if she can help it. and  THAT's  were skuldug pressures her ------ the getting back to roarhaven / old friends / acquaintances / the magical community itself; he knows she  needs  to find this connection again, and as i said,  she  knows it too, she just. avoids it at all costs, otherwise. when she’s not ready for  case work,  though, skulduggery couldn’t pull her back into that if he tried. if she learned anything in america it's  independence  and how to make her own decisions, and she's starting to stand firmer on that. before, she always had it somewhere in the back of her mind that she needed to impress skul to some degree, at least subconsciously. this is gone, now. don’t get me wrong, they’re still codependent af for reasons i will get into below, but val did become a lot more independent in her decision making in those five years. she's a lot less succeptible to skuldug's suggestions and she does, sometimes, put his ego in check  ( he's not getting away with ignoring issues anymore. he needs to actively apologize and confront them. death bringer level sneaking back into her good graces doesn't work anymore. )

the thing is. in those five years, val spent  A LOT  of time dissecting their relationship. and she  knows  it's very codependent and unhealthy and not good, but no matter how she turns and twists it,  none of this could've gone any other way.  she spends so much time on constructing alternate realities in her mind, changing details upon details, but they always would've ended up just the same. she always would've ended up on that first case with him, because it was her uncle, and because it was magic. what kid would decide to not go after that? and YES skuldug probably should've been a responsible adult, but then. she was literally the first one who believed him and didn't try to gaslight him about serpine.  ( she also spent a lot of time dissecting skug's personality and history. she never brings it up to him, though. )  so, yeah. he kept her around. the serpine issue is resolved and i think he actually would have made her walk away then, except by then, val has pretty much seen it all. she knows china, tanith and the sanctuary and where to find / how to contact them. and people know HER now. serpine's old goons know her name. she's a dot on the magical radar now and she knows this, and she thinks skuldug knew this and tanith, too, and that's why they agreed to train her. by the time faceless ones rolls around she's in too deep. skuldug was her connection to the magic world and to being a detective, a job she loves. skuldug comes back and he feels like he owes her, he'll always owe her. and when they discover the other's respective Murder Alter Ego, they're screwed, because no one else knows and there's no way anymore they can deal with this alone. they need this one person who loves and who they know will support them anyway. and is this fair to put on a teen? absolutely not. and val  RECOGNIZES  that. but she also knows that darquesse would've found a way, anyway, after the point she was introduced to magic. so from the point her uncle left her the scepter, essentially, she was doomed. 

and to sum up this way too long meta: val is VERY aware of all the ways her relationship to skul is just a little fucked up and she doesn't actively defend HIS choices, but she'll defend her  OWN  choices. because of her own issue about agency, her own choices are what she can really rely on  ( and lay blame upon )  so any conversation about her relationship to skulduggery is always going to be kinda uncomfortable and frustrating with everyone who tries to talk to her about it because. she see their point? but it doesn't change anything. they ended up where they ended up, and besides the fact that it, in her opinion, couldn’t have gone any other way, she also wouldn’t have  wanted  it to. she loves him. not necessarily in a familial or a romantic way, but simply because after everything they’ve been through and everything they  are  and are to each other, there’s just. no way not to. in the context of all of this  ( context most people lack! as they don’t know about the vile issue and barely know anything about the whole darquesse situatione except  evil worldbreaker )  that’s just. the way it is. plain and simple. she'll always stand by him and she knows he’ll always stand by her, no matter what. and that might not be good  ( for them or the world at large )  and it might not be right but that's what her character is like, as i see it.