#au where no one else is willing to go after the novablade so callum and viren take the most awkward roadtrip possible

[kradogsrats]

i love your writing and i was wondering, do you have an idea where viren’s character arc might be going post s5 if he survived n realized aaravos was lying like? especially after the revelation that he doesn’t have to be a dark mage anymore, where claudia is giving up everything in his stead… i’m all here for the viravos like i need but idk im trying to think of a feasible way they would interact in s6/how viren would get drawn in again, and failing lmao

Aw, thank you! I do hope that Viren stays hanging out with Claudia and Aaravos just because I think him interacting too early/much with the main trio would be kind of tedious. Actually that's a lie, there are ways it could be done, they just seem kind of unlikely at this point.

To be realistic, I'm not sure there's a good way to maintain Viren's involvement with Aaravos that does not involve Viren Has A Bad Time. Like, there are plenty of ways that Aaravos can keep him essentially wrapped around his fingers—keep Claudia all-in on working with him, threaten Claudia directly, threaten Claudia indirectly, and of course he technically could probably just possess either of them any time he feels like it (unless that's a thing that requires line-of-sight, it's hard to say). Is there a way to have Viren to genuinely buy into it without regressing his character? I'm not so sure.

The fic I'm very grudgingly working on basically starts with Aaravos like "omg did you seriously think you could have a single empowering hallucination and I'd somehow let you go? that's adorable" and Viren being like "ah fuck I forgot he's also hot." Which... it is what it is, lmao.

I do think there's another question at hand, which is whether Aaravos will still have interest in Viren, or even Claudia, going into s6. He might ditch them entirely now that his prison has been found and start to work the Callum angle toward freedom. It would be smarter for him to hang on to both ends in case one falls through, particularly since now that Claudia has failed him once he has an incredible amount of leverage over her, versus Callum being hostile toward him. But it's still possible that Claudia, Viren, and Terry will go off on some thread less directly related to Aaravos.