#my ke'ri headcanons are one half fighting the fridging trope

[argetcross]

Ke’ri’s Story

I have receded back into my tried and true fandom habits so here are some Lon’qu headcanons where I try to construct something reasonable, in line with canon, but also with less poor writing tropes. Features a lot of Lon’qu as an unreliable narrator and also forgetting his own past with his disturbed reflection.  @u@

- Ke'ri was older than him and from a merchant family. She often smuggled him food. At first, she wasn't too impressed by him, just another slum rat. But he wasn’t rowdy like the others when he comes by to goggle at all the rare pinned insects in the shop. 

- Lon’qu had a gambling father who taught him about cards and that’s about it. He doesn’t have a mother, and gets taught most of his life lessons by a half-blind, crotchety former samurai.

- Ke’ri is the one that teaches him how to write. He's a fast phonetic reader which helps him learn Feroxi when he immigrates eventually but he can’t remember all the pictorial characters in the Chon’sin dialect to save his life. He, in turn, shows her the seedy underbelly of the town. She loves it.

- She was definitely his first love but he never told her because of their class difference and he is and was emotionally constipated. He regrets it to this day.

- Ke’ri was the first, but not the last to teach him discipline to match his hungry ambition. He credits her for saving him from a sullen and short life in poverty. He was her partner in crime, and she wanted to travel the world and often gave her parents the slip to go explore.

-During their childhood, Valm is in disarray, again. The bandits are Chon'sin discontents that have formed their own gang and intend to make their own little kingdom in defiance of Yen'fay. They target this town for its merchants. 

- Lon’qu overhears rumblings about the bandit plans. Ke’ri first takes this info to the magistrate but they are dismissed. Angry and worried about her family, they decides to do an investigation. They are discovered, however, because the two of them, a slum kid and a middle class kid aren’t exactly ninjas.

- The bandits offer them a chance to join on, especially after Lon’qu demonstrates zero chill with his fists. Ke'ri however basically flips out on them for trying to recruit him (’you’ll be their slave, Lon’qu!’) and Lon'qu then kind of takes it further by insulting them more. They bandits slap the two of them around a bit but Lon'qu draws blood because again, no chill. 

-That gets him almost killed and Ke'ri, who has never been beaten almost an inch of her life like this, throws herself over him to save him. The bandits lose interest, loot their pockets, and throws both of them in the river.

-Ke’ri is the only one conscious and can swim. At this point she kind of knows she’s dying because internal bleeding plus water chill. She basically drags Lon’qu’s unconscious body out of the water, into town, and to the doorstep of the magistrate. She warns the townspeople, extracts a promise they’ll care for Lon’qu, and then passes out.

- In the following days, she dies from internal bleeding before Lon’qu awakens. The bandits are beaten back by Yen’fay’s forces but they’re not totally destroyed either. When Yen’fay goes over to Walhart, they will garner strength again and they almost kill Ke’ri’s traveling merchant parents before Cherche kills all of them.

- Ke’ri’s parents don’t let him visit her grave although they pay for half a week of medical care. Sick with guilt and weak from near death, he starts walking. No one cares about him but they celebrate Ke’ri for saving the town. 

- For a while he lives and breathes and picks fights with only the desire to die. Although he doesn't realize it, subconsciously he begins to fixate on Ferox, the land across the sea, where Ke'ri had described the existence of snow and hardworking people whose lives aren’t dictated by strict class difference.

- He never tells anyone Ke’ri’s story and it starts to mess with his mind, where his nightmares start to conflate with reality. The only thing he can always cling on is his survivor’s guilt and a higher ideal to be untouchable. He becomes selfish, violent, and fixated, all the things Ke’ri had railed against the bandits for.

- But because he’s self aware to a point, he feels a level of self hatred that manifests into a desire to banish ‘weakness’. What does that mean? Who knows because it seems to be mostly removing himself from anything aside from contests of strength so he doesn’t have to fear hurting and being hurt. He starts to stagnate after seventeen.

- The fear of women on a neurotic and psychological level doesn't develop until several years later, near the end of puberty and after his first failed intimate relationship, in Regna Ferox. Basilio sees this transformation from reticence to full blown paranoia and decides, something has to change before this man snaps.

- When he joins the Shepherds, he hasn’t thought about Ke’ri as a person in a long time.

Bonus:

- Emmeryn dying was both traumatic and cathartic when he sees how Chrom dedicates himself to a selfless cause after tragedy. When the Shepherds head to Chon’sin, Lon’qu brings himself forward to talk about his home country for the first time in years. At first he just makes comments about the rebels but then Chrom gets something wrong and he is scoffing and talking more.

- The Valm War ends up becoming more personal and an exercise in self-reflection as he sees the factional destruction that plagued his childhood as an adult. Paradoxically he grows the most following his personal devastation when they hear of Basilio’s death.

- He cries at Ke’ri’s grave after the war against Walhart.