#yes lyse has flaws in her expectations of how eyrie would be

[impossible-rat-babies]

under the cut bc this is just. paragraphs of eyrie and lyse’s friendship stuff

the conflict between eyrie and lyse is just. kinda tragic? it’s the inevitable of two people changing, and the conflict of realizing that change and longing for when it wasn’t like that. how change isn’t always upwards and for the good. it’s the disillusionment of lyse in her admiration for eyrie—that they are a hero and yet they can still do terrible things, as humans are wont to do. they lied to her. committed acts of violence and murder. have been callous and rude. they are nothing if not terribly flawed.

it’s eyrie’s pain of realizing how they have changed, and not for the good. they cannot deny what is in the mirror when lyse is shoving it in their face, asking them why it is different than she remembers. Were they always this bad? what made them like this? the difference between being aware of your own flaws v. showing others those flaws. the vulnerability and exposure. how shameful it would be to admit the cruelty of their life to her, and how they are not a good person. (good as in worthy of her admiration, respect and friendship.)

stormblood changed lyse for the better despite the hardships. she suffered and learned and grew—she saved her homeland, and is a leader that will continue to grow over time as her nation rebuilds from the ravages of war. how they will, in time, pave a new path and hopefully make themselves into a nation many people can be proud to call their own. much of lyse parallels that. (also additionally how she will learn about the culture of her father as the nation discovers and redefines that culture for themselves in the wake of 25 years of garlean occupation.)

She did well by the memory of paplymo.

she isn’t the same person who eyrie met in gridania. no longer is she the ditzy young woman stuck in the shadows of her sister and the scions. she gets to decide who she is going to be. And eyrie has been along with her for so much of that. As tentative as their friendship was in ARR, they still were friends. even if eyrie kept their heart and feelings close to their chest, she still saw how soft, warm and intelligent they were beneath all of that because that’s how they were with papalymo. she watched them grow from a simple adventurer to this grand hero. And a lot of that came with the expectations of being a hero and the static nature of that. A bit of their humanity left behind in favor of The Image of a Hero. how could they be different? they’ve always been this way—a soft, respectable, kind and selfless.

but stormblood was a lot. much of it for eyrie was spent in the volley between the numbness and rawness of grief for both haurchefant and ysayle—the horrors they had seen during the war. the loss of papalymo, most especially. they never stopped bleeding from that. the simmering rage and frustration at the injustice of death. thordan looking at them and asking not who they were, but what they are. zenos gets under their skin—pokes and prods at these monstrous feelings. how they are a hero, but how much that has separated them from being human. they are distinct—divorced from their humanity by the seemingly impossibility of the actions and fortitude. raised so high up as to become an impossible ideal. Trapped behind that reputation. they live in a gilded cage of a reputation.

twenty five years sees a baby grown into a man, but for eyrie who has lived the lifetime of a man already, it’s the not so distant past. they remember being there when Ala mhigo burned—the terrible things they did and saw when the garleans conquered it. they are not scars, but festering wounds to these people. they see this and none of them know their hand in that this is their reality. even as nothing but a common foot soldier, they still hold that shame and guilt close to their chest for their actions. they did these things and yet they would be asked to save this country. it’s ironic to a laughable degree—enough to make them scream.

they feel like a monster, and if zenos does understand that, maybe there is some justice to be found in indulging him. letting themself go to be the monster zenos craves so they can be the “right and good and just” person for killing him. a wolf in sheep’s clothing, devouring the other wolf. they get to be the right person, and hope to god the parts of them that are the same as him die with him.

but Zenos dies—by his own hand. Denied catharsis, they are left alone—the last monster standing. The last rat in the cage, blood soaked with corpses and all around. A monster by virtue of killing the rest—the horror above all the other horrors. the one left to suffer alone with the thoughts he put into their head. they should feel right—they did a good thing fighting zenos and his death, but they just feel Alone. this just builds and builds as they try to look for a way to take their mind away from it. put the choices in someone else’s hands—have someone else decide how and what they are going to do. it worked well enough in ARR to keep them safe. it should work now. If they can take all the power of deciding to be that hero away—put the choice in the public and the scions—then they’ll be safe. they aren’t responsible for their actions.

it’s that sort of line of thinking that has them kill the qalyana woman in the throne room before she can summon lakshmi. the scions combat the threat of primals, and they are the champion of the scions. they were doing their duty. it doesn’t matter that she was a person with her own hopes and dreams for the future—even tempered, it was still there.

It’s eyrie’s cold detachment towards killing the woman that truly bothers lyse. She is no stranger to the reality of what happens to the tempered, but it’s never not uncomfortable. but to her eyrie is just….stone faced. appearing as if there is no regret or remorse to their actions, or even a thought to it. because there was no thought. they didn’t think—they did as they had been taught and believed to be the right thing from all their previous experience. they just took out a step by killing her before the summoning could happen. it saved lives, didn’t it?

and their fight about it really boils down to all of that. This simmering change into something utterly unrecognizable and is no longer salvageable. they are too different now—far too changed and in opposing ways.