#as opposed to the 'your fate for mine' version where she decides to just stay in the Fade so nobody else has to die for her

[shivunin]

14 / 38 / 48 for the Florence asks! ✨

Oooh, thank you so much! I will answer one here and do the other(s) in separate posts c: This gave me a push to finally finish fleshing out an idea that's been sitting for over a year, so double thank you for that! 💗

(Florence + the Machine Writing Prompts)

Hold Me Down

Summary: In the aftermath of Here Lies the Abyss, Cullen finds the Inquisitor alone at the edge of the camp.

(Elowen Lavellan/Cullen | 1,206 Words | CW: Blood, descriptions of shock/panic attack)

“Hold me down, I'm so tired now Aim your arrow at the sky Take me down, I'm too tired now Leave me where I lie.” —Florence + the Machine, “Sky Full of Song”

“—foremost priority should be seeking out and destroying any remaining demons who might have escaped the battle,” Cullen was saying to a scout as they walked, “take a group and scour the fortress for any signs, and then relay the information to Commander Rylen. He’s kept a troop in reserve for cleanup duty.”

“Yes, Commander,” the scout said, peeling off. Cullen paused as he saw an odd shape tucked between two tents and a stack of crates. 

He knew the shape of that staff. 

“Inquisitor?” he called, peering over the stack of crates. The shape shifted, turned slightly, and lifted its head. 

Behind the cowl, her face was still spattered with blood; it was almost enough to obscure the pale lines of her vallaslin entirely, and what the blood didn’t smear was peppered with ash and dust. Her hands were set on her lap, just as filthy as her face, half-curled and limp. And her eyes…

“Lavellan?” he said, and she blinked, blood-clogged eyelashes sticking for a moment to her cheek. Her eyes did not come into focus. 

Ah—he’d seen this before. 

Cullen sidestepped the crates and crouched several inches away, leaving her room on the other side to get away from him if necessary. 

“Can you hear me, Inquisitor?” he murmured quietly, and her bitten lips cracked open. 

“I am fine.”

“That isn’t what I asked,” he said quietly, glancing over his shoulder when he heard movement in the camp. Just a pair of sentries wandering past. He returned his attention to the Inquisitor, whose attention remained fixed somewhere over Cullen’s left shoulder. 

“Can you hear me?” he asked. “Do you know what I am saying?”

There was a long pause. He noted the rapid rise and fall of her chest, the way her blood-soaked hands trembled in her lap. 

“...yes,” she said at last, her voice faint and flat. 

“What do you hear?” 

A soft gasp and her hands twitched in her lap. 

“You.” 

“And what else?” 

She was still breathing too quickly. Cullen eased himself down until he was kneeling between her and the rest of the camp. If nothing else, he could shield her from their speculation. A meager enough offering, but it was one he would give her without hesitation.

“The…the tents in the wind.”

“And?” 

“Metal on stone. People talking.”

“Good. What do you see?”

A frown collected between her brows and she slowly glanced at him to frown. That was good, too. 

“Sand. Tents. The stars.”

“And?” 

“Why?”

“Answer the question.”

She sighed, but her breath had slowed slightly. 

“The crates. My…my hands,” her voice shook on the last word. “You.”

“Alright,” he paused, “Are you with me?”

“Yes, I…yes,” she moved to set her face in her hands and flinched when she saw them clearly. “I—it was…The Fade was…”

“We needn’t discuss it,” Cullen murmured, shifting onto his knees to tug the tail end of his cloak loose. “You don’t have to say anything now. May I see your hand?”

Lavellan extended one hand silently and Cullen pulled the cork from his waterskin to wet the crimson fabric of his cloak. He could not properly clean her skin here; he hadn’t carried soap with him, and the cloth of the cloak was not especially absorbent. Maker, he was covered in his fair share of grime after the battle. Even so, he could get the worst of the blood off. He knew all too well what it meant to have to deal with such aftereffects of a fight. 

To be confronted with the concrete proof of what had happened. 

Her hands shook in his grip, and they were cold even through the barrier of leather. Cullen pressed his lips together, trying to decide if he ought to offer his gloves. Would she take them from him? He could not guess either way. 

“Is that any better?” he asked when he was done. Lavellan took her hand from him and peered at it in the flickering torchlight of the camp, curling and uncurling her fingers. 

“Yes, I—thank you,” she said. She lifted the other hand slightly and froze with it there, hung halfway into the air. Cullen carefully reached out to take it, selecting a different section of fabric to clean the skin with. 

Someone ought to be helping her properly. Someone needed to make sure she found a bath, food, somewhere soft to lay her head. After all he had seen of her, all he knew she had done, Cullen knew better than to think she was fragile. Even so—it tugged at him, to see her so shattered now. 

“It had so many legs,” she whispered hoarsely after a moment. “Too many. I—I couldn’t—I should have—”

Her voice broke at the end, and when the Commander glanced at her he saw that tears had begun to clear some of the muck from her cheeks in clear, straight lines. They dripped from her cheeks black and red-brown, leaving tiny, damp circles on her coat. 

“You’re here now,” he told her, holding her hand for a moment longer than necessary once it was clean. “You aren’t there anymore. It is done.”

“I let him die,” she said quietly, searching his eyes. “I—I told him to stay behind. It’s my fault. And the Divine—it’s my fault, Commander. All of it is.”

Cullen waited for her to continue, but she didn’t go on. She bit her lip again, staring at him. Ah—but what could he say to her now? There was nothing to be done about one’s past mistakes. He knew better than most what it meant to live with regret at one’s back. What to say? All he had was the words he gave his own soldiers when they’d made a mistake, and the words seemed ill-fitting here.  

“Whatever has happened,” he told her, “I’ve no doubt that you made the best decision you could with the resources available to you.”

Lavellan withdrew her hand. Cullen let it go without protest. 

“I…” slowly, the Inquisitor pulled her cowl down and away from her face. She ran her hands over the relatively clean plait beneath. “Thank you.”

It was recognition, but a dismissal as well. Not “thank you for thinking so,” but “please go away.”

Cullen tucked the soiled end of the cloak away and stood, careful not to move too close. 

“If there is anything you need, Inquisitor,” he said softly. “Please—do not hesitate to ask.”

Lavellan inclined her head, but she’d turned away to stare out at the vastness of the dunes and stars beyond. Cullen exhaled slowly and moved to step around the crates. He halted when she spoke again. 

“Cullen?” Elowen said; not Commander, for once, but his name. He turned to look at her and found her eyes, full of tears but clear and focused on his. “Thank you. Really.”

 “Of course,” he said, and cleared his throat. “It was…my honor.” 

Her eyes slipped away again, but her hands were clasped softly in her lap. Cullen straightened, gathered himself, and strode back into the camp beyond.

[badrpstories]

Hiya, so a friend of mine brought up one rp here and now I’m real salt so let me vent about this for a little while.

So we’re gonna ignore how he messed with the experience because tbh my problem wasn’t even his character. Yeah I didn’t like the character at all but once I learned “Hey just have my character avoid his” we stopped having conflict for the most part.

I’m instead going to rant about the host of this rp and how he did because god was it a disaster.

Note: The only reason I’m okay with naming the canon (besides the fact that my friend already did it) is because this rp is hosted offsite and is nearly impossible to find without knowing anything about the rp, if it’s even still up.

So let’s start with the people involved in the story, I’m going to name them for colors.

Red: Host of the rp and a very bad host at that. Character: Bella

Blue: My friend who submitted the story. Red’s best friend. Character: Braig

Green: My best friend, very much my main confidant in everything. Character: Shintaro

Yellow: Me! Basically just claiming my color even though I doubt I’ll mention myself by name at all. Character: Blake

Black: My twin sister, who’s background mostly. Character: Selene

Orange: Somebody relevant only to how badly this rp was hosted. Red’s best friend. Character: Kirito

Pink: Also only relevant to how badly this rp was hosted. Red’s Kohai. Characters: Sakura, Light

Okay so before we start with the rp itself, let’s just start with inaccuracies to the source material. (Ignoring the extra lore added to make it its own “unique” thing.)

So the changes to canon in this rp were just bad. So let’s start with why Blue got a questionable view of the canon, which makes everything make a lot more sense. The reason why his view was so messed up was because of how the team building exercise was done.

In the show RWBY, the team forming exercise is a literal team forming exercise. It featured people partnering up with the first person they ran into, and then forming a team by grabbing an item that matched another duos item. They then fight off the Grimm while going on this treasure hunt.

In the rp, it was a combative capture the flag where teams were encouraged to fight each other rather than cooperate to survive. It also destroyed the teambuilding aspect of the game because teams were already formed according to the random algorithms (read: host choice) that were used to pair people up, meaning the entire meaning behind the formation of teams and everything else was lost.

This in turn made the teams already a lot more cut throat, especially given some of the powers that Red gave his character and how it affected one of Pink’s, and created the violent environment that bothered Blue so much, that in the end created the conflicts between my character, and his.

He also butchered the White Fang completely (he made the White Fang leader a kitsune, not a fox, a kitsune with multiple tails), several RWBY character’s personalities (Ozpin in particular), and he added so much convoluted bullshit to the lore (as I mentioned with him making it his own “unique” thing) that it didn’t even feel like RWBY anymore, it felt like generic fantasy Hunger Games/treasure hunt, yeah it got that bad.

Oh yeah, and then there was Bella’s semblance, aura manipulation, which is not a thing. At all.

But now we can go to outside of canon critiques and go into the actual issues with the rp began.

So the issues all start off with the fact that the host could pick the teams. This problem started since the Red very obviously had ideas on what he wanted the teams to be. Almost immediately, he’d picked out the people he wanted on his teams based on his preferences within the players in the rp, at the time his preferred allies being myself, Green, and Pink. Now, Pink was pretty inactive and taking a while to sign up, and Green and I really wanted Black on our team, since we wanted to interact with Selene. Selene had had great interactions with Bella in a past rp (Bella’s only good ones, imo) and Black and I had wanted Selene and Blake to interact, and Green loved Selene before. Not to mention combat build would’ve been a lot better with Selene as well, since we would’ve had one whatever the hell okay fighting Bella did, one long ranged with Blake, a strategic mind in Shintaro, and a close range with Selene. This would’ve been a great team build with a lot of room for growth, and considering the majority of our group wanted it, we should’ve been able to get our way.

But then Pink entered Sakura and he was thrown into the group and that was it. Selene got cast off to a side group with Black’s other character, Green’s other character, and Red’s other character, and we’ll go off more into Selene stuff later. This decision actually almost made Black quit the rp because a) she hated any interaction with Bella/Sakura together because of how Red baited her with a ship for Selene and Bella in the previous rp, and b) she was annoyed at being cast off, but Green and I convinced her to stay.

Anywho, Red decided his teams, casting people like my now boyfriend and some other people (including my second character) into the irrelevant “nobody gives a fuck about you” teams for all the care he gave to them, put Blake, Shintaro, Sakura, and Bella into a team, and put Pink’s other character (Light) and Orange’s character (Kirito) into a team alone (impossible but done at the time because Blue wasn’t in the rp with his character yet and they couldn’t be excluded), and then shoves them into the exercise.

Now this makes it very clear with the capture the flag game the agenda for this rp. You can almost immediately tell who the favorites are when the two irrelevant teams are out first, followed by Light’s and Kirito’s team of two. I should also point out that these very clearly align with his favorite people in the rp, with both teams holding Red’s characters being the last two in the game. My team won and we got our reward which led to the incident that sparked all the shit between Blue and I, but he elaborated on that enough on his story so I won’t harp on that.

Anyways, the rp continues onwards, and it seems from this point on it’s literally just ripping off the plot of RWBY at this point. But with a few minor details, like the White Fang’s foil being Selene as opposed to an actual Faunus (like Blake). Most of the team dynamics are bad with the exceptions of a few here or there (my secondary team had a nice dynamic, as did Shintaro and Blake) but they were still very bad overall. The one thing that had me want Blake and Bella interacting (Bella being a Faunus racist) were removed because of the bad tensions between our team and Orange/Pink/Blue team, and Sakura in all honesty had zero interaction potential with anybody (Blake can only do so much with a cinnamon roll who never interacts with her, the ship between Bella and Sakura which was the whole reason for him being on the team is bad, and while Shintaro and Sakura could have a few cute interactions, they overall didn’t work.) Unless my boyfriend touched your interactions, you were blessed with shit and that was it, that was how badly Red picked the early teams.

But then finally, tensions were alleviated in favor of in jokes between Braig and Blake and my boyfriend’s character (and not so coincidentally, the three of us), and the Vytal Festival arc arrived. The favoritism again was painfully obvious as Red moderated the fights and made it very clear it was rigged in favor of the players he chose, and it wasn’t long until the irrelevant teams were eliminated in favor of my team and Black’s team.

 And if you all know what happens in RWBY, you can guess what happened next.

Red decided for me, that Blake was going to take Pyrrha’s role in the show, and fight against another of his ocs, and thanks to the manipulation of the villains, kill him. I never got a say in this, she was just shoehorned into a role that I never got a say in. That would’ve fit Selene’s goals so much better. That also completely reset any luck I’d had at smoothing over things between Braig and Blake.

So we finally keep moving and I’m like “alright you know what, I can take this, I’ll give Blake her crux of an arc and have her die a tragic death, I can work with this” because I’m expecting her to get Pyrrha’s tragic sacrifice as well, but no, she doesn’t. Bella sacrifices herself for Sakura while passing on her powers to Sakura to make him bullshit powerful, and then somehow this rp’s version of Cinder dies, I don’t really know.

And then Selene runs into the White Fang leader who is somehow the only member of the White Fang left and partners up with her even though they were hated a little while ago. So there goes all those plot threads.

And remember those two ocs I mentioned, Snake and Kirito, yeah remember how they weren’t relevant to anything and only talked to each other? Well guess who got mystical chosen device.

And yeah, everybody else’s ocs still get fucked and split up too besides Team Treasure, because like I mentioned earlier, generic fantasy treasure hunt.

Anyways, Blake, Shintaro, and Sakura are now cut off from the rest of the group (forcibly, I might add, Red threatened anybody who might have chosen to stay with them with death if they didn’t split off) and get the same plot dump everybody else did. How the world needs seven treasures to stop all the Grimm (what happened to RWBY lore?) and blah blah blah when chosen one trope decides Sakura is the chosen one because of Bella giving her aura powers to Sakura, and he’s just so enamored over the fact that Bella sent this bitchy oc to guide him that he gets mad at Blake and Shintaro being cautious.

So bitchy oc introduces the generic fantasy Hunger Games elements I mentioned (also known as the Fate series) and Blake and Shintaro try to tell Sakura to be careful and that they don’t trust this new person, but that they’ll work with him anyways, he gets mad because “Bella sent her so she must be okay” even though Bella is dead and Shintaro (who randomly lost an eye without Green’s permission) and Blake (who just murdered somebody in cold blood and lost a friend) get upset and leave for their own mental health since it’s not like they had much time to know Sakura because he clung to Bella.

This action is highly frowned upon by a lot of the players, which sucks and starts getting to Green and I, but in spite of this we keep persevering even though we’re no longer having fun, hoping we can get to the point where they Blake and Shintaro can get to Team Treasure so we’re not putting undo pressure on the plot and getting them to the point where they’re away from Sakura and can recover from their own issues.

And then Red has the oc they’ve been traveling with try to get mad at Blake and Shintaro go right back to Sakura. Keep in mind this was a decision that Green and I both got a lot of flack for towards our characters ooc and hurt us because it was based in our own model of thought (that there comes a point where your mental health is more important than helping others) and this was not kept private either, and having Blake and Shintaro get yelled at was the final straw. Green quit, and I strongly considered it. So there was that aspect of railroading and character voicing for the player.

And then there’s continuing the favoritism, let me post the list of people who got the plot relevant roles.

Braig (Blue)

Villain (Red)

Selene (Black)

Kirito (Orange)

Sakura (Pink)

Random OC (Red)

Selene’s Teammate (Red)

Aside from Selene (who was likely picked out of guilt for the ship baiting from the earlier mentioned rp), they’re all people who were Red’s best friends or closer to him than Green and I were, the blatant favoritism in this couldn’t be anymore obvious. And Kirito was basically irrelevant, Braig wasn’t loved by a lot of people, and three of the people who have these characters belonged to Red. And that’s not even talking about the fact that Selene should’ve had somebody not White Fang related and Sakura was such an incompetent cinnamon roll that he shouldn’t have even been considered for this role. Literally Braig was the best character for this position of the ones chosen because at least he was relevant and his choice of partner character he got didn’t basically fuck with plot. It was so bad and so frustrating that when Red cancelled the rp tbh I was glad.

And while I’m at it regarding his plot, he decided that his trainwreck of a generic fantasy Hunger Games/treasure hunt/maybe RWBY fusion was such a good plot that it was the best plot we’d ever had in any rp…because you know, generic plots with bad main character choices are such a good story.

Tl;dr: Red outright ignored the canon of the world he was hosting for, rigged the rp to favor specific people who were his friends or who he felt the plot needed to do it instead of letting it be a fair match up or the choice who would’ve made more sense for the story, railroaded everybody to the spots he wanted them in instead of letting them go to somewhere that made more sense, forced people into things without permission, often times without purpose, and just in general fostered so much conflict with a bad plot that it was a travesty of an rp.