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proton-selfships · 2 days ago

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I have been lacking energy lately and I'm not familiar with the source, but if you'd like to talk about the early stages of your relationship with Meli, I'd love to hear it. When did you two realize your feelings for each other?

Thank you so, so much, Lee! Hope you can get some rest while you're feeling low on energy. It means a lot to me that you reached out. ;w;

This is gonna take some context since it's closely interwoven with her canon story, so I'm putting it under a readmore! (Vague mentions of violent events follow, very tame by ASoIaF canon standards though.)

Melisandre and Peryton have two "first" meetings, and they're very different people for both of them. The first is when they're kind of at a baseline for their characters prior to their big arcs, and the second is after they've faced a series of challenges on their own and come out the other side worse for wear.

Their first meeting happens in Book 3/Season 3. Pery is from a relatively minor but still well-off House, and so she's lending her resources and support to a group of guerilla fighters: the Brotherhood Without Banners, a band dedicated to protecting the common people from the ravages of the noble Houses' war—particularly the Lannisters, since they're the ones who have been pillaging the Riverlands where the Brotherhood is located. Meli has sought that group out because, unbeknownst to them, they're currently hosting a bastard son of the previous king, and she intends to use his "king's blood" for a sacrifice.

(That's a place where I'm making the executive decision to blend in some show canon. In the books, Meli still intends to carry out a sacrifice but it's a different son of a different man and she doesn't travel anywhere to make it happen. But I thought long and hard, and for the life of me I couldn't think of any other reason for Pery and Meli to meet prior to the events that send them on their downward spirals.)

Something important to know here is that both of these women have something off about them:

Melisandre is unnaturally attractive and most likely covering up scars from her past life as a slave and signs of aging from her having lived more than a century with glamor magic. (Her using a glamor to appear younger gets confirmed in the show.)

Peryton is mundane by comparison. She hasn't lived for over a hundred years and hasn't practiced magic, at least consciously. But people get the sense that she's haunted because of some indescribable chilling aura about her—they swear mist gathers and something shifts in the nearby waters when she's around. Pery doesn't believe them, but that's because she prides herself on her book smarts and thinks that any oddities that happen around her have a rational explanation that she can find.

So when Meli shows up (and stays overnight, in my version), she instantly senses that there's something going on with the obviously smitten lady who's spent the evening making excuses to sit closer and talk to her. She takes Peryton's face in her hands—earning a flustered reaction she's never gotten from another woman before—and looks carefully.

"Your future is shrouded in mist. And in that mist, I see a pair of eyes looming over your head. Reddened eyes, burning eyes, hateful eyes. Eyes kept open beyond their time. …This is not the last time we'll meet."

(Yeah, I'm taking the lines Meli says to Arya in this plotline in the show and adapting them to apply to my self-insert. There's already a character that Arya gets her bad omen of the future from in the books, let me have this)

Pery leaves this intersecting of their plots longing to be close to Meli longer, wishing to know more about this woman who reads just as off to other people as she does. Also, she's realizing some things about why she's never pursued marriage and how she feels about women. There may not be an equivalent identity category to "lesbian" in Westeros, but her lack of interest in men and crush on this woman are painfully obvious to everyone in the Brotherhood but her.

Meli, meanwhile, is disturbed by the whole thing and what she saw when she looked in Pery's eyes. When she looks to the flames for a vision of Pery's role in the greater war Meli's made herself a part of… Well, I talk about what she sees here. So she's convinced that she and Pery will meet as enemies when the army of the dead marches south. She did find Pery a little endearing, too, which makes that something she regrets.

The next time they meet happens much later. In my canon, Meli crosses paths with the Brotherhood again when she's in exile. I see this happening early-to-mid-Book 6, mid-Season 6.

(So earlier than it happened in the show, because I would want the relationship to have more screentime in canon—it wouldn't be hard to imagine what she did to earn said exile being found out sooner. And it's an indeterminate deviance from the plot of Book 6 because where's Book 6, George)

And, well. To give the short version of what they've been up to since then:

Meli burned a child alive as a sacrifice for the greater good. Said sacrifice turned out to not just be unnecessary, but tragically counterproductive. Now everyone she once considered an ally is either dead or will kill her on sight if they ever see her again.

Pery watched the Brotherhood fall under the control of a vengeful resurrected Catelyn Stark, determined to hang anyone associated with the Houses that wronged her, and failed to stop them from committing a very bloody massacre. Now she and what's left of the Brotherhood are trying to atone and find out what they should be anymore. …And she's received confirmation that she's haunted, because Cat's ghost persists after her second death in Pery's head for mysterious reasons. So that's fun.

So they're both trying to do right now by the same higher power (the god Melisandre serves, the Lord of Light, is the same one the Brotherhood follows due to them attributing the resurrections that have happened in their ranks to their prayers to him). But their past mistakes have shattered their faith in themselves—Pery wishes she'd done more and hates the parts of herself she sees reflected in the ghost of Cat, and Meli wishes she could undo what she's done and wonders whether everything she's seen in the flames has been a lie all along. And they're trying to shoulder their respective burdens alone, both because they don't think it's their place to burden anyone else with their responsibilities and because there's always been a distance between them and everyone else anyway.

I haven't decided exactly when or how it happens, but when they realize the comfort they bring each other and fall in love, they fall hard. Codependency is basically inevitable.

(And as I said in that post I linked, there's a period where their self-loathing becomes so strong that Meli is convinced that she'll be the one to make Pery her enemy as she thinks the vision showed her, so they spend a period apart. Which is followed by them coming together again, because they can be better for each other than they realize.)

So, there you have it! A very long yet still somehow abridged ramble about the first two times they meet and their consequences! I'm writing this very late at night, so there's probably stuff I forgot to clarify or could've worded better. If anything doesn't make sense or you're curious about something, my ask box is always open (and hungry for questions)!

And again, thank you so muuuuch~

#peyton got mail!#meliton #peryton flint #meli-posting #selfship #selfshipping #self ship #self shipping #s/i x f/o

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