#yes it did bury their reputation. not a difficult conclusion. they made their own damn grave with that yknow

[zeb-z]

“bad and pierre were the heroes of today the server will never know how they sacrificed their reputation to save everyone 😞” yeah and they will never know either, what are you talking about. they made their decisions without having any of the information elquackity had - there were no heroes making a difficult decision to save who they could save. there was no honor in their actions today. bad assumed everyone would be using the same underhanded tactics he planned on using. pierre just wanted to win, survival his priority even if it meant the cost of the others. any so called “heroism” was entirely accidental.

[kivaember]

Tumblr Prompt: Memory with a relative

(I accidentally answered private to @lumei-xiv because i’m a fucking moron so pls imagine this as a reply to an ask with the prompt: Memory with a relative

CW: mental health’s discussed quite a bit in this) 

Sometimes, Bluebird felt so out of her depth with the hot mess that was her brother.

It was three in the morning and they were both sitting in the far corner of the Forgotten Knight. Only the hardcore alcoholics and depressed assholes were still mooching about here, keeping quietly to their own tables. It smelled like shitty ale and smoke and Bluebird hated it. She just hated Ishgard in general, with how it was grinding Aza’s spirit into dust and fucking them over with new dramatic shit at each turn. Aza had been getting better when they came to Eorzea, and now…

Her brother always had a drinking problem, but it was manageable. They just made sure to have one of them soberish with him at all times, and they weren’t afraid to wrestle him away from the bottle and bundle him into bed to sleep it off. This time Aza just… well, he’d been drinking, but Bluebird had no idea how much. She just found him like this, sitting at the table holding a half full tankard of ale and just staring at nothing. He hadn’t said a word when she sat down next to him, and he still hadn’t said a word or even moved after her staring at him for the past hour.

She recognised this behaviour, though she hadn’t seen it in a good, long while. When Aza was upset enough, he just… shut off. He blocked everything out and disappeared inside his fucked-up brain, thinking up fucked up things, and coming to fucked up conclusions that were so wildly wrong and damaging that Bluebird just wanted to beat him around the head until she smacked the illogical crazy out of him.

Even after all these years, seeing him at his worst, at his best, she just didn’t understand him. She couldn’t predict his moods or thoughts. One day he’d be fine, then something would just set him off and he’d brood or get quiet or weird and snappish, and it drove her nuts. It wasn’t his fault, though, she knew that. He tried his best, he had coping mechanisms, and they worked most of the time, but other times he had unhealthy coping mechanisms, and just tried to destroy himself and it was… exhausting to try and keep up.

Bluebird had no idea how he was keeping up with it.

It was a little after three when Aza stirred out of his blank staring, and Bluebird smiled tightly when his unfocused gaze slid over to her. “Oh,” he rasped, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Bluebird said breezily, acting like nothing was wrong. This was normally the best way to go, she found, even if she had to smile with gritted teeth and clenched hands, “Rough day?”

Aza made some vague, incoherent noise in the back of his throat, “Yeah.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

Aza looked back at his tankard and said nothing.

Bluebird took in a slow, deep breath, “Okay.”

She refused to sit here in silence again, though. Telegraphing her movements, she scooted her chair towards him, letting the legs scrape noisily over the floor. A few of the loser drunkards gave her irritated looks, but like she gave a fuck what they thought. Aza was looking at her irritably too, which she liked, because it was better than that creepy, blank staring. Irritated Aza was an aware Aza.

“Could you be any noisier?” he muttered.

“Yes,” Bluebird said, settling her chair next to his with a triumphant clatter. She bared her teeth in a wide smile at Aza’s wince, his ears flicking back, “Do you want me to do it louder? I can go back and do it again.”

“Don’t,” Aza groaned, rubbing a hand over his face. He looked drained, “What time’s it?”

“Three or four in the morning, thereabouts,” Bluebird rested an elbow on the table, her cheek pressing against an upturned palm as she observed her brother with heavy-lidded eyes, “You were doing that creepy staring again.”

“It’s not creepy,” Aza said, abruptly pushing his tankard away. Bluebird quickly claimed it for herself, before he changed his mind and decided to chug the whole thing. He looked… alarmingly sober, “And I was… thinking. Deeply.”

“Hmmm…” Bluebird dragged the sceptical hum out, “About?”

“Nothing.”

“You were thinking deeply about… nothing,” Bluebird drawled, “Geeze, Aza, are you saying you’ve got just empty air in between those hairy ears of yours?”

Aza grimaced, and Bluebird smiled a little more sincerely at the childish expression. He hated walking into traps like those.

“C’mon, tell me,” she ordered.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Aza said snippily.

Bluebird poked him in the ribs, carefully gauging his mood. Normally it was difficult to tell if he was in a ‘I will break your hand if you so much as exist in my close proximity’ mood or ‘ugh I’m not in the mood but fine I’ll tolerate you because I love you for some inexplicable reason’ mood until one made physical contact and had to rapidly save their fingers from being broken. Luckily Aza just glowered tiredly at her. Tolerable mood, then.

“Tell me,” she poked him again, grinning when Aza’s upper lip curled enough to bare very sharp fangs at her. It was like baiting an ill-tempered dog, she loved it. But, there was a time and place for Aza-baiting, and now wasn’t it, sadly, “Or I’ll start guessing.”

Aza watched her warily but said nothing.

“Fine,” Bluebird sat back in her seat, tapping her bottom lip. What had happened recently? Too many things, honestly. There was Estinien running for the hills without so much as saying goodbye. Thancred was back, edgier and broodier than ever, and so was Y’shtola, except now blind. Minfillia was one hundred per cent dead (in Bluebird’s expert opinion when someone says ‘she no longer has a physical body as she now serves as the Mothercrystal’s voice’, it’s pretty much the same as ‘she’s pretty fucking dead, bro’). Haurchefant had also joined the Dead Peoples Club, which was a shame because she never got a chance to rematch that arm-wrestling contest with him and win back her title as Having The Buffest Arms In Ishgard. The Warriors of Darkness were now a thing, being edgy tryhards and interrupting sexy dinner dates with sexy Lord Commanders…

Hmmm.

“Those Warriors of Darkness sure are cringey, huh?” she tried, “They’re so transparently bad at being, well, bad.”

Aza’s shoulders relaxed a fraction – damn, her blind shot missed, but she was rewarded with her brother’s mouth curving into a very amused smile, “You think so too? I almost gave myself an aneurysm rolling my eyes at them. So edgy.”

“Clearly not natural born villains like us,” Bluebird scoffed, “You’re more menacing after just waking up with serious bed hair.”

“Crisp says I’m a monster before morning coffee.”

“Ugh, a bitey monster,” Bluebird muttered, bearing many scars on her wrists and hands when she, in her stupid youth, thought it was fun to bait a just awakened Aza. She very quickly learned otherwise, “But they, uh, don’t bother you?”

Aza shook his head and started picking at a scratch on the table, “Well, they do, but… compared to Nidhogg imminently burninating the entirety of Ishgard…”

“Point,” Bluebird said slowly, narrowing her eyes – she skirted close to what was bothering him then, she could sense it, “They haven’t really done that much to us, have they? Well, they almost poisoned Alisaie, yeah, and interrupted your dinner date with the Lord Commander-”

There. Aza twitched.

Bluebird grinned broadly, “That’s it, isn’t it? The dinner date.”

“Bluebird,” Aza said in a very strained tone, “Drop it, please.”

“No,” she dug her heels in, scenting blood. When Bluebird saw weakness, she went for it no matter what, “Now, let me think on why you would be sitting here, sulking-”

“I’m not sulking!”

“-after having a dinner date with the hottest bachelor in Ishgard. From what I heard, you two were having a good time… even flirting, according to some…”

“Bluebird,” Aza hissed, starting to go a rather damning shade of pink. Bluebird’s grin eased into a very lazy smirk.

The thing was, while Bluebird didn’t understand Aza, she did know him. While she couldn’t follow the fucked up twists to his mind to see how he came to his stupid conclusions, she could kind of guess things or recognise certain behaviours and tells. This… the last time she saw him like this was when he and Haurchefant got half-drunk and slept together, and Aza had a near meltdown when he realised he liked him. Really liked him.

Aza was fine with casual flings… in a way. He was very particular, and only on certain days when he was in certain moods, but he did have casual sex. But that was it: it was casual. Anything resembling a relationship was treated as some terrifying thing that needed to be handled like it was an unstable bomb. Aza had too many issues to pin it on one specific thing, but long story short he had a veritable cocktail of traumas and issues that meant Aza and romantic relationships were as compatible as oil and water.

Still, Aza got cravings, she supposed. Everyone had a desire to be loved and cherished, even abused, scared children like him.

“He seems decent and he really likes you,” she said, gentling her tone, “I bet he’s the kind to write disgusting love poetry though.”

Aza looked away from her, putting his elbows on the edge of the table and burying his face in his hands.

“I can’t,” he whispered into his palms.

“Why can’t you?” Bluebird asked, then grimaced because she could think of several reasons why, “I mean, aside from the obvious stuff like, he’s the Lord Commander and blah blah blah?”

Aza dropped his hands, puffing out a short breath as he muttered, “Those are pretty big reasons why.”

“Well, yeah…” Bluebird trailed off. Right, the Lord Commander was more firmly in the public eye than Haurchefant ever was. While one could ignore what some bastard son of a noble was doing under his own roof out in the frozen countryside, the Lord Commander was always scrutinised and needed to keep a very impeccable reputation what with his opponents keen to sling mud at him. Taking a Miqo’te to bed would… ruin that, wouldn’t it?

“Just drop it,” Aza said, looking so worn down at the edges that Bluebird didn’t have the heart to needle him further, “I know it won’t go anywhere. So, don’t… please don’t speak to me about it anymore.”

Bluebird hesitated. It kind of rubbed her wrong to let Aza give up before he even tried but, she was also painfully aware that pursing Aymeric would hurt him too, if it went all wrong. Aymeric clearly liked him, you’d have to be fucking blind to miss the looks he gave Aza, the way his voice dropped an octave when he spoke to him – but Aymeric was also so utterly devoted to Ishgard that he was willing to kill his best friend to save it. If Aymeric had to choose a potential romance with the Warrior of Light, and serving Ishgard, Bluebird knew which one he’d choose.

Maybe it was for the best, for Aza to give up on this one?

This was so beyond her abilities to puzzle out, Bluebird thought exhaustedly. It was too early in the morning to try and figure it out. She’ll hassle Crisp with it later…

“Fine, I’ll drop it,” she said, mentally tacking on for now.

After all, while she was out of her depth dealing with Aza’s bullshit, that didn’t mean she shirked from it. As frustrating and confusing he could be, he was still her little brother… one that she genuinely wished to see happily in love with someone so they could help him out too. Bluebird was just one woman here, and she could only satisfy his emotional needs in one way. So, maybe, they could try with Aymeric...? Possibly, if she...

“C’mon,” she said, nudging her brother’s shoulder, “Let’s get you to bed. You can cry over your pitiful love life tomorrow.”

“Tactful as ever,” Aza grumbled, but he looked relieved at her dropping the issue.

How cute. If only he knew what she had planned.