#hels is maybe hiding his guilt behind a vaneer of aggression or indifference

[hiding-under-the-willow]

ENAMOURED by your ghosts au I would love details on what happened to etho 👀 from my understanding it was hels??? Very obssessed with that art btw it's so cool

Yeah yeah yeah I've worked out a little more of the detail for this whole backstory in my head since I last talked about it so I can actually get into it sure :]

So while the property that Grian and Joel end up in during the main plot of the au is large, it's mostly taken up by like the giant ass manor that's on it and the grounds around that. Which is why they've got such a plethora of ghosts, there have been thousands of people living there over thousands of years. Etho's property however, which he bought for cheap maybe ten years before the main story of the au, is almost entirely undeveloped, and has very rarely been a place people lived, hence why he's got like 3 ghosts total. There's a single cabin on the property, one that hasn't been used since around the 1890s when the property was used as a hunting grounds, which was promptly abandoned after the hunting accident that led to Gem's death. Hels had, up until Gem's death and subsequent residence on the property as a ghost, been the only one haunting the property for about 500 years.

He was generally unpleasant in his life, but 500 years on his own building resentment and anger in his loneliness in his unchanging world as he watches Wels across the fence seemingly finding companionship in his afterlife hadn't exactly made him any better. He was stubborn, and unfriendly, and averse to change, and extremely quick to anger. He had lost the deft touch of control that most knights wield over their acts of violence. Lacking his sword in death and unable to leave any touch on the world other than the occasional scratch from the sharp talon like ends of his gauntlets' fingers, he has taken to leaving long, animal like scratches in his environment when he cannot ignore that call to violence in his anger. The cabin looks like it's been ransacked by a bear, claw dug grooves in doors and tables, old dusty furniture with fabric tears revealing rotted insides, wallpaper that peels in unnatural places and forms. The trees around the property are often similarly marked. The only thing seemingly left fully intact, is a dark sword mounted above the fireplace.

Gem, being the strong-willed individual that she is, manages to mellow him out a bit in the 100 or so years they spend alone together on the property. She herself is strange and unusual in a way that seems to throw him off enough to manage to endear her to him in the time he spends too confused to be angry. And so he remains this kind of sulking, possessive, angry thing, but they share the house, and having as sharp a tongue as she does, Gem starts to turn him towards more verbal sparing than enacting any physical violence on their surroundings.

And so that 100 years of joint solitude passes by, Cub dies on the property and haunts his respective corner, seemingly uninterested in sharing the little cabin with Gem and Hels, and so Hels remains comfortable in his unchanging world.

And then Etho buys the property.

And it isn't exactly strange that someone has bought the property, it had probably passed through a dozen hands in the time since Hels had been stuck there, but no one had ever really moved in. It had been used as a hunting estate and as a scout's meeting place and as a garden, but never had anyone looked at the little cabin he had claimed as his own and decided they were going to live there. And the assumption had been that with the state it was in, no one would. Until Etho came along.

He comes in, all on his own, and starts fixing things in the little cabin, pulling out old furniture, cleaning dusty floors and struggling through plumbing work and tearing out old wallpaper. The only other person around in this time is XB, who he seems to have hired to handle the grounds while he handles the house. By the time the house is even slightly livable he's moved in.

This, obviously, does not make Hels very happy. Gem is happy to see the house get an update, and is intrigued by this weird lonesome guy who has moved onto their property, and this only seems to upset Hels more. He starts acting out I little ways, tearing Etho's clothes, scratching new furnature he brings in, messing up repair work.

Etho isn't oblivious to this, and isn't exactly a skeptic when it comes to the supernatural, so he starts talking to whatever entity he imagines to be antagonizing him throuout the day, and decides to antagonize him right back, much to Gem's entertainment and Hels' increasing agitation.

It is the day when Etho finally decides to take down the old sword above the fireplace that things go wrong.

Etho probably should've known not to touch the sword when he watched a set of scratch marks appear in the stones of the mantle beside him as he prepared to take it down. But he kept going. And maybe when a second set raked across his brand new dining room table as he pulled the sword down he should've thought to just put it back. Instead he continues to verbally antagonize Hels as he brings the thing down. Maybe he gets a little too on the nose, connecting the sword to his antagonizing spector, either way he says just the wrong thing to set the ghost off. Hels, used to interacting with Gem, who he can touch but can't injure, attempts to grab at Etho in a moment of anger, instead managing to claw the shit out of the side of his face. In the panic of realizing what he had done he attempts to catch him by the arm as he stumbles back and does the exact same thing to his arm. Queue panic and blood and such. XB hears the commotion from wherever he is outside and is the one who calls an ambulance and such. I imagine Etho gets his first shaky glimpse of Hels right as he's passing out from the blood loss.

Etho survives, of course, but looses an eye and has some pretty severe damage to his face and arm. Gem is the first of the ghosts he meets when he returns to the property, Hels hiding away when he comes home. He kind of shuts himself away in the house after that. If it seemed like he was running away from something moving to this middle of nowhere empty property before, it certainly seemed like he was hiding now. Xb is the only one he keeps around, and even he's stuck at an arms distance. It takes him a long time to not be terrified of Gem, or of Cub when he meets him. How he and Hels eventually manage to coexist is a whole other story. But either way I've been typing for too long lol I need to wrap this up

Crazy place for this au to have ended up at from 'haha wouldn't it be funny if Etho was Grian and Joel's weird shut-in neighbor that can also see ghosts' but whatever