#because sklonda deserves someone who will support her

[thefandomcassandra]

👀👀

And then Hallarial became enamored with Sklonda.

If you asked Fabian of his thoughts on the matter, he would reply with something along the lines of, "It isn't my first choice for Mama, but she is a grown woman and at least it isn't Gilear."

If you asked Riz the same thing, he would answer with a shrug and, "My mom can date whoever. I don't care."

To whit Fabian would shoot back that he seemed to care very much when Fig was trying to set Sklonda up with Gilear. Riz then would turn a muddled turquoise around his ears and become increasingly engrossed in the triple-encoded message he was supposed to be breaking for rogue class.

This is, of course, a purely hypothetical conversation. Definitely not one they had many times during one of the Bad Kid's many sleepovers. And certainly not one that involved gross insinuations about Hallarial and Sklonda accompanied by heavy make out noises and one instance of Fig misusing Disguise Self and getting beat upside the head by a pillow by a very flustered Riz.

Nope. Just an imagined situation. Nothing more, nothing less.

[masculinepeacock]

W: Wish for @dimension20alphabet

Summary: Sklonda writes a letter to Pok after Riz finds out what really happened to him.

A/N: This is angst-y, but I feel like Sklonda would need a way to get her feelings out about what happened, and it isn’t exactly a conversation you can casually have with someone else!

Whenever Sklonda went to visit Pok’s grave, which happened more often now that Riz was in high school and had joined a truly insane adventuring party, she got this weird feeling that he could hear her, wherever he was. 

She knew it was irrational, but a lot of things that happened to them were irrational. So she didn’t feel comfortable saying this to his grave, because what she had to say was spiteful and mean and he didn’t deserve it. But right now, she needed to be able to blame it on someone else. 

After Pok died, she knew she couldn’t just not get help, not if she was going to be a good mother to Riz. So, she had gone to a support group for widows. Eventually, she stopped going, she was getting better and work was getting busier and it all felt like a lot. The reminder of her husband’s death wasn't exactly something she liked. One of the women in the group suggested once that when she had things to say to Pok she should write him letters, sometimes it wasn’t convenient to go yell at his grave. 

That didn’t really bring Sklonda any catharsis, she had tried it for a little while but it didn’t do much. But tonight she had done just that, she looked at the letter in front of her, what she had written while sitting in Pok’s own office. 

Riz was out with his friends tonight, which was a sentence Sklonda was excited she could finally say, but it did make her nervous that him and his friends got into the wildest shit. He was her and Pok’s son. Which was the problem right now, and drew her attention back to the letter. 

The letter had tear stains on it, which embarrassed Sklonda more than anything, but she had kept everything together for so long that maybe she deserved a good cry when writing a depressing letter to her dead husband. She reread it, before she prepared to throw it away.

Pok,

It’s been a while since I’ve done this, written a letter. To anyone, but especially you. Yelling at your grave is just so much more satisfying, which I’m sure you could’ve predicted from me. You did always know what I was going to do before I did it. 

That used to piss me off, but now I miss it. I miss a lot of things about you. I wish you were here so I could tell you all of them. But I wish for a lot of things that are never going to happen. 

I wish I could turn back time and make sure that Riz never found about what happened to you, or that he never found your gun. I wish that you were never a spy in the first place, that you were really a boring accountant. So none of this would happen. 

It’s so much easier to blame you for the man who Riz is becoming, he takes after you so much, it’s plain to see. In a hateful way, I wish he wasn’t like you. I wish our son was normal and didn't go to the damn Aguefort Adventuring Academy. At this point I would settle for fucking Mumple, just anything for our son to get the chance to be normal. Because Pok, he’s turning into you and that terrifies. My son can’t die the way you did. I won’t survive it. 

You had always told me that we would be a family of goblin badasses, and you were right. As much as I wish it wasn’t happening, if it has to, you should be here to see it. It’s not nearly as fulfilling without you. 

I’m just so mad, and spiteful, and I need someone else to blame for what’s going on. Right now, that’s you and I wish I could be sorry but I’m not. Because you’re dead, and for me to keep going I need to be able to be mad at someone else. I’ve been mad at myself for so long and it’s not working, and if I let myself be mad at the people I work with I think I’d go insane. 

This isn’t really all I have to say, but it’s all I have the energy for. I miss you, I wish you could be here, but you aren’t. And I’m the one who has to live with it.

Love, Spitefully,

Your wife Sklonda

Sklonda looked at the letter in her hand and sighed. It was sappy and spiteful and all of it was true. She went to crumple it to throw it away, but some part of her felt bad doing it. Which was stupid. she should just throw it away. She couldn’t bring herself to, instead, she folded it and tucked it into one of the drawers in Pok’s desk. 

She collected herself before leaving the office, walking out into the empty apartment, just taking it all in. It felt like a weight was lifted off of her shoulders, and she rolled them. Maybe, for the first time in months, or even years, she would be able to sleep peacefully.