#jesus. the fic practically writes itself. the bridge. the tower. the safehouse. hrghh.

[erstwhilesparrow]

anyway. i'm rotating divorce quartet. because. it's not as if they didn't look for each other. they looked all over the map, cleo says. none of them went into it assuming they would fail or abandon or be abandoned by their soulmate. and it's easy to forget that because by the end of session 1 it's already fallen apart, but. there's a world where it worked out for them. maybe it still wasn't good--certainly the other pairs make it clear things can go bad even if you're together--but at least they'd each have their soulbound partner there, right? they had, all of them, bought into the premise. and it's still. i don't know that they ever shake it off completely.

scott and cleo choose each other, allegedly in defiance of the soulbound, but it's still. two people. deciding to stick together against everyone else. there's a world where pearl joins them, or joins a different soulbound pair, but that's not how the soulmate system works, right? it's always two. to be three is unthinkable, unless you assume the exclusive primacy of some particular pair in that three. the third will always just be... tagging along for a bit. it was never going to work. and it's not as if there weren't external pressures to do the teaming up with your soulbound thing -- being able to keep an eye on this other potential avenue from which harm could arrive at you, not having to guess if that tick was your soulbound or a skeleton you can't see are advantages in a death game.

but the thing is they don't think to try. your options are to go with the partnership that has been forced upon you, or to stand in the most vocal opposition to it you can manage. but you're still being defined in relation to the original thing you're against? there is still the fact that anything you can dream up for yourself is still founded on the initial shape of two soulbound partners versus the whole rest of the world. there's nowhere to fit yourself if you try something else. at the end of the game, it still comes down to pearl and scott. at the end of the game, martyn still dies when cleo does. they still bought into the premise. it was never not going to eat them all.