#aroace adaine is so valid so please also feel free to interpret this as my second favorite trope

[recycledraccoon]

What happens next? What happens when The Bad Kids do what they do best and save the world? What happens when the RAGE is suddenly gone?

Would they ashamed of themselves? Of what they did? Of who they became?

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You were a naive teenage freshman, and two teachers you trusted were manipulating you into a monster. You didn't notice, distracted by typical teenage problems and petty insecurities. You didn't fight it. You walked willingly down the easy path and became pawns in their grand plan.

You know how it started. This is how it ends.

(YOU HATE THEM THEY ARE IN YOUR WAY AND YOU ARE GOING TO KILL THEM AND PROVE YOURSELF BETTER FINALLY! THERE IS NO MORE WAITING YOU ARE CROSSING BLADES AND FLINGING SPELLS WITH UNRELENTING WRATH AND DEADLY INTENTIONS-)

They fight you. Their teamwork is flawless in a way your party's has never been. Their awareness of the battlefield and their control over it makes it all the more apparent that this battle is a raging wild thunderstorm trying to break apart a mountain standing tall and insurmountable. The mountain does not so much as bend, for all that you blast holes and carve deep into the rock. The mountain does not bend, nor bow, much less-

The storm will always break first.

It ends like this-

(WHY ISNT THIS WORKING WHY ARE THEY STILL FIGHTING THEY WONT DIE THEYWONTDIETHEYWONT-PAIN. IT HURTS! IT HURTS! NO!! NO NO NONONOPAINNOPAINNOPAINNOPAI-)

You die.

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Dying like this is vengeance. It is retribution.

.

.

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But it is not JUSTICE.

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Let's try again.

You wake up.

(Doubt shepherds you back through the dark.

Justice and Conviction, like sunlight warm and golden, breaks over the horizon.

The rage implanted inside you dissolves into golden light to join the dawn.)

You are a Dragonborn, no longer little or weak by any means, but it still feels like nothing ever changed at all from that very first day. You feel very small, rubbing at a chest that is incredibly tender and sore.

Before your blurry eyes, are The Bad Kids. Battered, bruised, bloody. Standing tall, heroic, and undefeated.

The Cleric of Doubt and Paladin of Justice both have brought you back to breathing, and you watch in awe and horror as all of your friends are awake too.

Idly, you realise they also rub at their chests near immediately. You look down and find no red star-like gem of rage embedded there. Only ugly, fully healed scars like a jagged star.

(What have you done?)

Later, there will be questions and officials and repercussions. Justice for you will look like second chances, and the hard unending road of righting the wrongs you have done.

Death is the easy way out.

Redemption is hard.

For right now, the heroes before you are wearily celebrating, cracking jokes and rubbing blood off their faces. All the while your party is still gathering your bearings, and you have no idea where your glasses are.

Shame rolls in your gut and even as you and your friends sit together you can barely look at each other.

Finally, words are exchanged, a clearing of the board. It doesn't fix anything of what you've done, but you know without doubt if you ever try anything again they will not bring you back a second time. You settle in to wait for whatever authorities will be coming.

(Later, while you are in a cell waiting to find out what happens next, your party will be told that the friend you killed was brought back, the curse preventing her revival broken. You are not the only one in those cells to weep, loud and ugly and so so relieved.)

A pair of cracked glasses appear in front of you, held by a hand with bloody knuckles. You put them on, blink as you adjust to the cracked glass but vision once more clear. You see the bloody knuckles again, and with a jolt realize those are the hands that killed you. You died under the crunch of a furious fist you never anticipated.

You look up.

When you saw her for the first time, she was a cute, if sometimes awkward, elven girl in your Thursday classes. You kept seeing her, even as she became renowned and remarkable, even as you had been slowly getting angrier.

The first time she ever smiled at you, you had hated her already. She had been very pretty, and if you had been anything less than actively planning to kill her, you think her expert spell craft but awkward stumbling of words and red cheeks would have left you utterly enchanted in truth.

Later, before you fight and die, the look she gives you is cold and piercing, determined. The only red on her cheeks is blood that had splattered there.

You look up.

The Elven Oracle, the most powerful divination wizard you have ever met or will ever meet again, stands towering above you for all that you know logically she is at least a foot shorter than you.

Her blonde hair is a mess, clothes dirty and ripped and stained dark in some places. Her eyes flicker with the magic of the powerful Oracle she is, as she stares down at you.

(You wonder what she sees about you in those flickers.)

She frowns, lips pursed for a moment, but her hands clench and you think for moment she might punch you to death again. Or yell at you maybe, but is biting her tongue.

Instead, with one last look of piercingly cold eyes that could kill, she turns to join her friends, leaving you behind without hesitation or second thought, or even a last word.

(Good for her.)

You are a horrible coward. Selfish and capable of cruelty that makes your shame increase tenfold. She had smiled at you and chilled a drink in your hand. She defended you and called you cool to her friends that day in the cafeteria. You took advantage of that, of those tender early feelings, and crushed them under an angry, undeservingly bitter, heel.

You are a horrible selfish coward, and you don't think you've ever seen anyone more beautiful in your life than her, even as she walks away from you.

You can't ever imagine she will ever smile at you again now. What future will there ever be, where she sees you and her eyes aren't cold and scornful? Nothing more than a bitter memory to be forgotten and set aside for better things. How could she ever see anything you say or do as genuine ever again? You certainly wouldn't.

(The way your heart pounds in your chest, fast and heavy, feels like yet another sin on your sagging scaled shoulders. There is an intense moment of painful, shameful yearning that you swallow down, down, down and away. Watching her back as she walks away will be more than you ever deserve to have gotten in the first place. More than you think you will ever deserve again in whatever life you scrap together after this.)

Life, as ever, continues after that day like it always has and always will.

You go to prison for a time, as what you and your friends did as minors- manipulated or not- are legally responsible for in the aftermath is decided. You go to therapy, serve a very forgiving sentence, and when you go on parole your time is eaten up by both mandatory and voluntary community service.

You try to get better. To be better. You think you and your party are true friends now, bound together by bitter shame at what you've all done and gone through together.

(The first person who visits your party while in prison who isn't a member of any of your families, is Lucy Frostblade. Even as a Cleric of a Sorrowful God, you don't think you've ever seen her more sad than sitting across from all of you, warded glass between. There are no apologies that will ever be enough.

But Lucy has always, always been braver and stronger than any of you. The power of her conviction is something wondrous.

She always tried to be that fire to keep the cold and dark at bay, even as it risked burning her. By all the gods, you had burned her to ash, and yet here she is again. Alive and renewed. A campfire relit and flickering in the distance, promising safety and warmth.

Despite everything, Lucy sits across from all of you and promises to see you through this.)

Days go by. Never again are the seven of you known as The Rat Grinders, except in past tense when speaking the history of your sins. You don't go back to being High Five Heros, but you grow into something new together.

You still fight rage some days. It makes you feel sick and scared. You always are afraid of what is genuine emotion and what is lingering from the star-scar on your chest.

You still think about her sometimes.

(Selfishly you hope you are a distant memory to her, and she never thinks of you and your cruelty to her again. Even more selfishly, even more shamefully, there is a tiny part in your heart where you wish she doesn't forget you like you know you won't forget her. It's better to smother that part of your heart into deeper and deeper depths, hoping beyond hope that painful yearning doesn't overcome you and cause it to rise up again. She deserves a life without having to deal with people like you.)

The thing about The Bad Kids, is how ironic their name is given how genuinely and unabashedly good they are.

Lucy remains their friend, even as she helps the rest of them on their steady journey back from evil.

This means it's inevitable that the two once rival parties meet again. It's awkward at first, but The Bad Kids give them shit and rag on them as easily as they extend kindness. You will meet more people and realize that you are not the first villains in their lives they've forgiven.

You give the beautiful Elven Oracle as a sincere apology for the past as you can. She quirks an eyebrow at you, and as lovely a sight as it is, the shame is greater. You don't know if she believes you in the slightest. You don't want to find out.

You do your best to not bother her at all, on the occasions the two parties meet.

(Try as you might, you are powerless to stop your eyes from locking onto her the second she enters any room you are in. You always look away as quickly and casually as you can, frazzled heart pounding like a traitor. It's harder to not watch whenever she walks away, the memory of the day she walked away from you locked in your mind like crystal glass.)

You keep moving forward. Life goes on. You keep a pair of cracked spectacles in a box in your closet. On the bad days, when you hate yourself the most, you look and remember that you have been given kindness and a second chance by people who hated you. If they gave you a second chance, you feel it would be in poor taste to not extend yourself that same courtesy.

You and your friends become legally speaking, free souls. You get qualifications and find work that feels right for you. There are some things you and your friends never joke about again, but you find new things to fill in those gaps.

You move on. You're not sure if it's working sometimes, but you keep moving anyway. Relationships become easier, you try new things and meet more people. You have a whole life left to live. One day you find yourself capable and confident, which is a bit of a surprise. You try every day to be as sincere and honest as you can.

(Sometimes, you feel a powerful, almost familiar, gaze on you. You were a coward once. You never took on a quest you thought you couldn't beat, the fear of failure hanging above too great. It's been a long time, and you are a very different person now. You are still too much of a coward to ever turn around to find that gaze.)

One day, you agree to go do a job as a favor to a friend. Your field is specialized, and you enjoy working in a field that makes your brain work, writing out pages and pages of complicated maths and spell work. Either way, you have the qualifications and are confident you can get it done and settled far faster and better than anyone else your friend could have asked.

You go to the job, and are caught off guard and flustered when there happens to be a beautiful Elven woman also working on the project. She looks up at you with a powerful gaze, a cocked eyebrow and a smirk that feels a little like a challenge, a dare.

(You want to run away, hide, calm the heart that you find to be a selfish, shameful traitor even after all this time. It pounds in your chest hard enough your afraid it might just kill you.)

You walk in to get started, hands already reaching for a folder of information being handed to you from a college as you gets the run down, ready to work.

Minor thoughts on Oisin and how he seems primed to fuck over Adaine specifically. The flustered ping-pong balls that were a plan all along. The quoting her own words on the previous Elven Oracle back at her in regards to the storm.

I mean...imagine you're a skinny little dragonborn wizard, in a class with a cute elven girl. You don't talk to her, but one of your adventuring party members is pissing thinking that party is getting preferential treatment, so you KNOW about her. You watch from the corner of your eye or from a spot on the back of the class whenever she's actually there. Partway through the year she goes to jail, and when she comes back she and her adventuring party save the world from a dragon. (A dragon of whom your Grandmother had been fond. ((Also, coincidentally, the Vice Principal.))) One of them created a god.

(Your entire party is being groomed into rage by two of your teachers.)

You're in her class again. She is the Elven Oracle, already an accomplished adventurer. She and her friends are popular. She's very pretty. She does not know your name. She does not know who you are, just a skinny dragonborn a few seats back.

You go on your Sophomores Year Spring Break Adventure and don't bother to think about her party at all.

(You and your party are going to kill a god. Your teacher is going to ascend to godhood in their place and you and your party will have Made That Happen. You are angry and determined with each final blow you deal.)

You return from Spring Break angry and with a sore chest.

You find out the elven girl's party has resurrected a dead god and the live streamed the entire fight. They must think they're so much better than you and your party. You'll show them.

(Your friend refuses to change her faith. She cancels the paperwork. The rest of you kill her, confident she will make the right choice and join you again as a proper Champion for your new god. You help kill her. She does not get back up. You hide the body and none of you can say anything. You're so so angry.)

The world descended into darkness and you can do nothing. The sun finally breaks across the sky again right before Junior year. You and your party have made plans and are on the cusp of greatness. You've gained muscles to spare and ink on your scales in carefully selected runes, no longer just a skinny little dragonborn.

(You have a new cleric. He's not your friend. He's a haystack hick from that cult-church from Freshman year, and he's here because the god you're going to kill needs a Champion and he fits the bill, nothing more.)

The first day of school the plan starts to be put in motion. Immediately that party of kids is interfering, in your way. It rackles. You push on anyway, seething inside even as you act the part of being reasonable.

You go to a party at the houses of one of her friends. You've been practicing making spell runes on the inside of ping-pong balls. You're ready.

The pretty Elven girl in your class finally looks at you. She approaches you, gives you a drink, and chills it in your hand. She has to ask your name. You have shared certain wizarding classes with her since Freshman year, tho she was barely there. You have to tell her that.

You chat. She clearly gets flustered, calls you great, and flees back into the house. Your friend teases you for others to overhear. It's a convenient excuse to use your geometry and apply physics to miss every single shot and lay your trap. The drink isn't so perfectly chilled in your hand anymore.

(You talk to her. Play nice. She isn't smooth, but she smiled at you and maybe a part of you is vindictive in seeing her flustered. It's a shame she turned down the diamonds, as dragon madness would have been so poetic. You steal her summons to steal something from the house. She didn't know your name. Didn't remember you. You feel justified. Your anger burns cold like frostbite, like static in the air. You purposely don't wonder if that first miss was intentional or genuine.)

You see each other in class sometimes.

You plot and kill monsters the woods. You will win the battle. You will win the war.

Your parties have a standoff in the cafeteria. You play your part to diffuse the situation, your teacher has been harping on your friends to stop antagonizing the other party. You feel her mind touch yours gentle probing of intentions, her friends all around her as you lock eyes.

(The devil's honey your group gets from that bee girl all goes to your teacher. He is preparing himself to ascend to godhood, and he needs it for his prayers.)

She is searching for your intentions and feelings. You tell her only 'Sorry'. She believes you. You are not entirely sure why. She and her party will hopefully die during their Last Stand exam, and have no way to revive themselves in time, be trapped there until after elections.

Maybe she just wasn't perceptive enough to see the deception.

(You hate her and all her friends. You have had no devil's honey. She believes you. Briefly, you wonder if it was a lie at all.)

They catch you. They know. Your team goes to ground and waits out the remaining days 'til elections and the culmination of everything you've been working for.

It rains at the party, and you have no more masks. You are angry. She must never have been that good of an Oracle at all, and you take joy in mocking her with her own words from long ago.

She's nothing more than an elven girl in your class who was full of herself to remember your name.

(There is nothing left now to stop you from being as openly angry as you like.)