#coloraverse sabine

[literarymotions]

Not a Caged Bird, Dammit; or, Tales From the Past Arc: Sofia’s Conflagration

(follows on from / links back to this discussion thread on my main blog. this post is not done / is subject to editing.)

Sofia has basically been raised by a terrifying conspiracy of people planning to use her for power, in a situation somewhere between “jinchuuriki” + “generic-evil-cult sacrifice” + “Avatar” except also mostly Jean Grey. (...it. yeah. this is not going to end well for anybody involved; and the more Sofia grows up, the more she is aware of that.) The thing is, this is /not/ the first time they’ve done this (there’s a sort of born-again immortality thing going on) so they know to keep the terrifying cosmic-force-in-a-personbottle calm and happy. All her physical needs are taken care of (that her caretakers are deeply terrified of ticking her off / ticking their bosses off couldn’t possibly have a negative impact here); she’s taught now to speak (but not read or write, because knowledge is power); she’s given everything she asks for (except she can’t ask for an open door outside).

So then Sabine, who is smol and has practice at being not-noticed (and, unbeknownst to herself, is going to be terrifically good at illusion-type magic in the future) more or less stumbles over this weird “Secret Garden” sort of place up in the rich part of town. The garden is Sofia’s backyard; which is nice, except she Cannot Leave.

Cue Prince-and-Pauper-type plot*; except mostly it’s about Sofia learning from Sabine how to sneaky, and Sabine learning from Sofia how to play the society manners game, and the girls accidentally-on-purpose helping each other out for Entirely Selfish Reasons-

[*They don’t look /exactly/ alike; but in one of those totally-not-narratively-contrived coincidences, they do have similar enough builds / facial features / skin tones to pass for one another from a distance (even without magical help). Quite different mannerisms / posture / styles, though.]

They get each other out of their respective societal / economic / whatever-system-induced pits, and they both move the fuck on with their lives. (They stay in touch, of course. Sabine was Sofia’s first actual friend; her first meaningful interpersonal connection at all. There is a part of her that continues to think of Sabine as ‘my way out’ - no, this is not healthy, but this is how this story is writing itself atm.)

And then Sofia dies. The firebird always dies; there are Rules set into the local magic system on a very basic level, and one of them is that the force’s mortal vessel /must/ die.

The difference is, now: instead of Sofia tragically killing herself in a tragic loss-of-control bc of course that’s the only possible ending for an innocent young maid with far more power than she ever could have been expected to control, of course-

Sofia sees her death coming, and sees this whole damn stupid cycle of god-children born to serve and die young- She reminds her old Family why chaining up a god is a bad idea. Put simply, she goes into the spell structures that will inevitably make a child to take her place as she dies, and she, ah - edits them, just a bit. Just one line. Specifically, the line that defines that child as the force’s /vessel/.

She still dies, and it’s still a goddamn pointless tragedy. It’s arguably /worse/ this way, bc this Sofia is a college graduate, a scholar - she had all these plans to go into business or politics or change something, do her part to change the world, make her mark, leave a legacy -

(can you hear me projecting? bc this is damn loud)

so, so this is it, that’s it. Her legacy is an apartment full of stuff that she willed to her friends (because she died alone, but she did not live lonely) and Sabine screaming every swear she knows at an empty grave, and a child. The child Sofia ran away from home in-large-partly so she wouldn’t have to have it in the first place, yeah.

That child, who will have a parent and a home, not a prison. Who isn’t dead in the cradle, who isn’t going to grow up in a fancy padded cage with flowers painted on, who Sabine will keep an eye on no matter how little she likes kids (spoiler: Sabine does not like small children, and she really  did not want one).

Sofia dies, because Plot Declares It. But first, she lived - and her legacy is a break in the cycle which perpetuates a very broken system. ...also an end-of-the-world scenario about to happen, bc planning ahead was not really one of her strong points. She didn’t live long enough to bother learning how to plan past the next year or so.

[On a related side note, as long as I’m working on a completely original cosmogony I might as well figure out what the afterlife system looks like in this ‘verse. (If there /is/ one, but. yeah.) I’m thinking that there’s at least /some/ kind of echo left behind, in a metaphor for how the impact someone has on other people’s lives doesn’t end when they die; but if there turns out to be a not-completely-contrived mechanic for it, then I am absolutely going to have Sofia ascend to a higher plane of existence as a result of all the destruction + rebirth magic floating around when she died.

Like, I still don’t like this “killed herself partially out of spite” revised ending I’ve come up with all that much, but. Sofia’s entirely capable of being a spiteful little asshat, when all else fails. If she can’t burn a bridge cleanly and peacefully and more-or-less happily for all parties involved, then she will burn it down with gasoline and C4 and a lighting strike. Yes, I said ‘and’. I know what I wrote.

Her successor in no way inherits this character trait, I promise. There is no way she is a perpetual ball of low-simmering anger.

...incidentally, Sabine is not going to be the greatest parent. I mean, she’s not terrible. She TriesTM. They’re just ...too much alike in all the worst ways possible - and then too different, as Michel grows older and starts divorcing her opinions from what she was raised with, and-

yeah, uh, totally not me projecting here at all nope.]