#oc: Elga Loire

[lunamanar]

Hey, Luna, are you still doing the ask thing? If so, I was wondering if you had any headcanons regarding the Leonhart and Heartilly extended families? As in, do Squall, Linoa or Ellone have other still living relatives? People always talk about the parental issues in this game, but the rest of their families possibly being around never gets brought up.

I’m always “doing the ask thing,” haha~ 

(pardon me I’m gonna ramble real quick and then I’ll answer your actual questions)

I actually used to do this quite a lot before I got a new job and had to move my entire family of three people and eight(8, VIII) cats 500 miles northbound. Which was…incredibly stressful, and I just had no energy or brainspace left at the end of each day to communicate much, if at all, with large groups of people. So this stuff was right out. It pretty much tore me away from tumblr for a year and a half. I’ve been really bummed about that and kept trying to “get back into it,” but my several meager attempts at jumping back in got sidetracked by life responsibilities, and especially with tumblr’s new restrictions on external links not being searchable, the whole trawling for art thing I used to do just isn’t as feasible at this point in time because I have to edit each post very carefully so it will still show up in a search. That’s time-consuming. Maybe when I go back to 3rd shift in December (I hope) I’ll be able to art-hunt “full time,” again, but I just have a limited space in which to do that, now. 

However, I can still do asks! And I really enjoy them, they’re fun and engaging and, hell I admit, I like it when people want to hear my opinion on things. But I was having a hard time, uh…asking for asks, haha. It felt too much like I was begging for attention. But then stuff happened and I had the worst pain spike I’ve had all year, and I kinda just broke down and said I needed a distraction. My chronic pain issues can be absolutely debilitating, and can lay me flat in bed for days (I had to take two days off work last week). But if I can manage to engross myself in something creative, it’s like a shot of cortisone. I think I get something of a rush, an adrenaline/endorphin kick out of it, and it does a lot to mitigate whatever the hell it is that causes my problem. I mean, that’s probably true of a lot of illnesses; you get attention and positive feedback and your brain rewards you with pleasant chemicals. But whatever, it worked and now I feel like I’m getting back in the game. I just have to keep the momentum up, now. 

*cough* Ahem. So you asked me a thing. I will answer. 

I do have headcanons about Squall’s extended family, specifically. I’ve not built out Rinoa’s yet…partially because it just never really comes up in the stories I’ve either plotted out or written. So I can’t answer that part of it–yet–but I can talk about Squall’s. 

Working backwards: starting with Laguna’s side, Laguna is the oldest of two siblings, and not one, but both of them are kinda “black sheep” in the family. Partially it was their upbringing; Their mother, Elga Loire, was overworked and underappreciated, often working two jobs to keep food on the table (which she did very well). She didn’t have a lot of time to spend with her kids because of this, and the main reason for it was that their dad, Sevren Jr., was…kind of a loser? I mean, no, that’s not a good word, but a lot of people would call him that. He was an inventor. And always, always on the verge of the one that would make it big, this time. Automated chocobo saddles, “sliding” shoes to make walking more efficient, paramagic-powered chairs….yyyeah. You get why they were broke all the time. Sevren often traveled to demonstrate his newest creations, so he was absent a lot of the time, too. But when he came back, he would always bring the boys–Laguna and River (you must see where I’m going with this double-entendre)–some new toy or strange item from whatever country or town he’d visited. 

This was fascinating to Laguna, in particular. Even as a kid, he dreamed of traveling the world. When he got older, joining the army seemed like the fastest way to do that, soooo….he roped his two best friends into joining with him. Heh. 

Now, River…wasn’t into that stuff so much. He thought it was silly. He preferred to help Elga when she was at home, and even when she wasn’t, he ended up doing a lot of the house chores while his older brother went out and nearly died repeatedly trying to do dumb things. River was ‘fine’ just keeping to himself, reading and listening to music when he could get the radio to pick something up. As he grew up, he became a bit of a…punk? Like, he would be listening to Bad Religion in 1992. On the other hand, maybe Dream Theater when he was feeling happy. I imagine him looking a lot like Leon in KH2, but with hazel eyes (Sevren’s were brown) and no Griever all over his clothes. He cut his own hair so it always looked a bit jagged and unkempt, and he left it semi-long. Just generally prescient. He became pretty resentful of authority because he saw how it treated his mother and conspired to keep them all poor, and him too, when he got old enough to get a job (Laguna never had one until the army). It made him all the more determined to help his mother (and father, to an extent) weather the storm until the tides changed. 

But then…well. They changed. But not for the better. Their dad died, and very suddenly, of an embolism. And, bitter as she was about having to support the family nearly single-handedly, Elga Loire loved Sevren quite a bit, and fell into some pretty deep broken heart syndrome. Inconsolable, she lost both her jobs. Laguna had already traipsed off to the army with his friends, and wouldn’t be aware of any of this for several weeks. River was left to care for their mother alone, and although they owned their small home, she had to sell it just to make ends meet. She moved in with a friend, and River…well, she sent him to the army, too. She insisted, thinking it was the best way to get both her sons out of this mess. Laguna already seemed to be doing well. 

River did not do so well. He survived boot camp, but deserted his first year in service. 

Laguna never heard from him, after that…and their mother passed away not too long afterward. 

So…that’s Laguna’s end of it. As far as anyone knows, River is still out there. But Laguna hasn’t seen him in nearly 30 years. So, Squall has a missing uncle out there, somewhere, maybe. 

Raine’s side…haha, geez, I might need to make a chart. In some ways, Raine is easier because she has no siblings and doesn’t know who her dad is. But I’ve traced her lineage back a bit further, and it gets…weird, in places. I might not be able to describe all of it, here. 

Raine’s mother’s name is Gale. Gale is still alive, and Squall does meet her, once. It’s a solemn, one-time meeting, more an acknowledgement than a reunion. But it’s good. Gale is very practical. She never married, and never told Raine’s father she was pregnant (she didn’t like him for a permanent fixture). She was also a businesswoman. She owned and ran a hotel in middletown Dollet for many years. That’s where Raine got a lot of her experience before setting out on her own. Gale has sandy brown hair that she keeps short, and looks a bit like a taller Ellone in business casual, haha. But, but–those blue eyes. She has those. Her relation to Squall is evident. 

It’s important to remember that although I enjoy both “he named himself” and “it’s Raine’s maiden name” theories, I’m pretty firmly in the camp of Raine’s last name being Leonhart. The story of Gale’s mother, Shiara (this is Arashi [storm] with the syllables reversed), depends on it, because she is the originator. I can’t detail the entire thing here–just too long–but the brief synopsis is that Shiara was a sorceress, in a time when sorceresses (”witches”) and “resistance” groups hell-bent on killing them all were in a state of cold war with one another. When Shiara became a sorceress, she panicked and ran away. She ended up being captured by one of these resistance factions, and had what I can only call a very complicated relationship with the faction’s leader, Dericho (this is the river Jericho with the first letter changed, making it phonetically very similar to Derecho, which is yet another type of storm). 

Dericho’s faction was called, yes, the Pride, and they operated under a familiar leonine emblem. Of all his ancestors, Squall probably most closely resembles Dericho facially. Dericho is slightly shorter, his hair is a bit darker, and his eyes are a bit more on the grey side, but his posture, the way he carries himself, his facial expressions, his voice, even the sweep of his hair and the length he tends to keep it are all very familiar. A lot of those qualities were apparently recessive and just skipped a couple generations before thy found a match and popped up again. 

How Shiara came to have Gale is a story I’d personally rather tell in prose, but I will say that it was Dericho who essentially named her, telling her in all his years of vetting people who want to be worthy of being called a Lion, Shiara was the only person he’d met with the heart of one. She carried that with her the rest of her life.

She is not, sadly, alive, having died at a ripe old age (and not terribly, since she was prepared with a willing successor nearby). She never actually told Gale about her powers, and to the very last, Gale never knew. The touch of sorcery ended there, seemingly. Dericho is also gone. 

But I’m not done yet. One more generation, and this time, Hyne’s power is quite evident. Dericho’s mother, Hanwei, was a sorceress, his father was her knight, and they were quite open about it, feeling safe with it in their particular neck of the woods. Dericho was very familiar with the touch of his mother’s magic–she used it with him the way any mother would use a gentle hand, soothing scraped knees, gently grabbing his arm to pull him out of trouble–from fifteen feet away. His father, Mael[strom], was quite happy in his service to his wife and sorceress, and both Dericho’s parents loved him very much. When they embraced him, he could feel their connections tangling around him, and it was a very comfortable, safe way to be a child. 

Of course, we can’t have that, can we?

When Dericho was about 5 or 6, they had been attending a fair that ran late into the night. Dericho started to nod off, so they went home early. It was a short distance, so they decided to walk instead of paying to ride a carriage to their home. Unfortunately, as you can probably guess, they were ambushed, by a particularly nasty faction called the Ridgebacks. Upon discovering Hanwei was a sorceress…well, let’s say the result was not pretty. At all. Dericho watched both his parents die, and his mother in particular, because she had no nearby successor. He was then “adopted” by the very faction who murdered his parents before his eyes. 

Without going into specifics, they took this traumatized child, a blank slate, and turned him into one of them. But…not quite. By 17, Dericho didn’t know any other way of existing than as part of the factions, anymore, but he knew he still hated the Ridgebacks for what they had done. He murdered his “mentor” of a dozen or so years, killed several people, and took several more boys near his age on his way out of that particular clan. He started his own faction, with his own rules, and one was a “special” way of dispatching witches without having to burn them to dust. The Pride made their name on this and other standards which set their bar just a tad higher. They’d been in operation for almost ten years when Shiara showed up. 

Then, as I said, things got complicated. 

I should also note that Shiara and Dericho both lived in Centra. It was not long after Shiara flew free that the fateful Lunar Cry occurred, which deposited the Crystal Pillar and destroyed a third of the continent. Shiara barely escaped that disaster with her life…and her newborn daughter. 

So….yeah, I think that’s about it, for now. If I ever get to working out my Rinoa’s tree, maybe I’ll put that up here as well, but for now, Squall’s all I’ve got, and his is hell in a handbasket. 

I hope you enjoyed it, though!