#this au was my first child let me liveee

[featherlouise]

How does PK react to Hollow's death in the HFD au??

POORLY, to say the least

Like, we already know how WL and PK deal with grief in canon, with WL shutting herself in her gardens and PK fucking off to the dream realm with his palace in tow, and that's after the infection presumably slows down for a bit bc of the sealing.

In the Hollow Fkin Dies au (which is what I'm now calling it if I post any more about it so ty for that lmao) I doubt they'd really get the chance to properly react bc Radi just kinda goes apeshit.

I think maybe with the realisation that Hollow wasn't actually hollow would probably bring PK and WL together in their grief, at least enough for WL to end up staying in the palace, which ends up being a terrible fking idea.

At least her gardens were secluded, but the city is densely populated, and by the time she realises that pretty much everyone is infected, it's too late to make her way to her gardens, so she's effectively stuck. PK would be absolutely RACKED with guilt, and would probably shut himself in his workshop for days at a time, feeling every time one of his people's minds is ripped away from them (hc that he's the god of the mind I figure he can tell when his gift is torn away from one of his people).

He'd be constantly fending off assassination attempts from infected citizens, and it doesn't take long for him to be paranoid enough to bring a small squad of kingsmoulds with him everywhere he goes. With this in mind, I'm gonna retcon him being killed by a random infected person.

After Hollow's death, I figure he'd be haunted by the question of 'if the pure vessel wasn't hollow, who's to say any of them were,' and eventually would find himself venturing into the abyss for the first time since the pure vessel emerged.

By this point, any surviving vessels have either escaped or died, and all he finds at the bottom is thousands of children's corpses, and a bunch of very angry shades. Idk maybe he throws himself into the void sea or something, refusing to allow the Radiance the satisfaction of killing him herself. Maybe he's just a coward. Maybe the guilt becomes too much.

Radi doesn't really have any quarrel with WL, so leaves her to her grief, and she roots herself down inside the palace.

As for Hollow's body?? PK makes a fkin shrine snow white style, where their body is preserved. PK spends a lot of time just sitting in there, staring at them, trying to memorise their face, recontextualising all the little moments during their childhood where they let a sliver of their personality shine through, bc PK never really knew his child, and now he never will.

Alternatively: seeing his child succumb to infection could be the last straw for PK, and after centuries of burying his past as a Wyrm, he shows her what it really means to be an angry god. No I won't elaborate on the alt ending bc I've put exactly zero thought into it and have no clue where to take it lmfao