author: kiyaar fandom: elden ring pairing: background ranni/blaidd rating: M for (canon) themes around suicidality word count: 3.2k summary:
Ranni’s grievances have had time to solidify, to stratify. A glacier takes thousands of years to advance. She can wait.
She knows what she cannot abide: the invisible hand puppeting her into that throne, bending her to a will that is not hers. She will not live on that mountain, breathing in gold until the end of time, choking on it, nothing left in her even of the dark wild sky.
Ranni meets Seluvis in his own tower, the feel of death still crusting her skin beneath her gown, the air heavy with fragrant incense to cover the grime of his work. He would have made a fair perfumer, once upon a time. He has the vicious little heart for it. My lady, he says, with a puerile little bow.
Ranni has brokered this favor upon a lie. She has been quiet and queer and bold enough over the years that her proposal and the attendant projection of sadism did not startle nor deter him. Seluvis would never assume to question her own private perversions. Besides, she is the only royal still haunting these grounds. Everyone else has fled to grieve and conquer in other corners of the world, and men like Seluvis are always sniffing around for heels to nip.
The face is not her face. It is not Renna’s face, either, though she is certain she described it perfectly. It evokes something of her hardness, though, her implacability. The limbs meet the body in a coaxed tangle of dull silver driftwood - wood from Ainsel that has never seen the sky, has never shined with gold. The skin is burnished glintstone enamel. She does not ask Seluvis whose hair it was before it adorned this shape; she does not wish to know.
I thank thee, Ranni says. She will be sufficient.
I am gratified, my Lady, Seluvis tells her, over the prone, empty thing that she is to become, that she is to inhabit.
Do AIs have the ability to love, or are they simply complex programming? This is the question @kiyaar explores in this Earth-616 fic, accompanied by @gen-syz-art’s striking artwork.
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thank you, anon, this honestly would never have occurred to me
now thinking about the anon ask that i am still rolling around that asks me about the ethical billionaire fantasy of tony and the ways in which tony and steve do and don’t own their entanglement with us-led systems of imperialism and war and whether or not the good guy with a gun (institutional) fantasy is also dead for the average comics reader at this point
Steve being forced to torture Tony by the bad guys. Tony either knowing Steve’s being forced or Steve isn’t allowed to tell him.
Maybe an Avenger HAD to volunteer and they don’t have someone like Natasha on the team, so Steve is the closest to a baseline human on the team and is the least likely to harm him more then necessary. Steve volunteering because he feels responsible, Steve volunteering because he’s the one that has watched the most amount of tortures of the team (on his orders no less, right Commander? Maybe it’s justice that he now has to get HIS hands dirty for once), Steve volunteering because Tony maybe thinking Steve WANTS to do this one way or another, STEVE learning that maybe there was part of him that wanted to? Trying to keep that raising feeling/fear at bay
Steve trying to make Tony hurt without causing lasting damage. Maybe the bad guys are knowledgeable enough to know if Steve is doing a good enough job and so that fact is hanging over Steve’s head, that he has to do it RIGHT or if he doesn’t hurt Tony enough they’ll take over and make it even worse or lasting. Maybe the bad guys are actually more lucky and sadistic and dumb, and knowing these idiots are the ones making Captain America torture Iron Man is another layer of maddening
Steve trying not to let all the times Tony has hurt him make his hands heavier on the knife, Steve trying not to let the image of Tony bleeding and begging (is he playing along or is Steve really hurting him so bad?) send HIS blood south, because this version of Tony is just SO pretty, red has always been his color
(Is this torture for information? For sadistic pleasure? Is there a goal? Or are they just running out the clock?)
reading this has me realizing it’s hard for me to situate an abstract forced-to-torture-their partner situation without substantial plot scaffolding. like. who is the bad guys. what are the stakes here. is it about tony and tony alone or is tony shorthand for failing to protect the world at large.
i think there are a lot of situations where steve would be like. lol. fuck you. at someone who is like. i can hurt tony or you can hurt tony. because steve knows what is a weapon and who is wielding the weapon. and i think 616 steve’s ideas about ‘am i complicit’ in this are uncomplicated. like yes. i made war. i killed people. it was atrocious and the times were atrocious and i hope i don’t have to go back there again but i will if i’m called. and i also think - i know this is contentious - i think that the panel of him from secret avengers is true to his character and honest in a way i wish more people would engage with when thinking and writing about steve. like. there are realities about what goes on when you are the special glutes boy king of black ops after 9/11 in the united states.
like the panel of him walking away. we see his back. he’s leaving the dirty work to his friends. specifically nat (implied). is he absolving himself of the dirty work? i don’t think so. his orders, his responsibility. but i think he knows about the boundaries between what he’s capable of and what he lets himself do. what he stops himself from doing. but he is a pivotal cog in a system that perpetuates violence. 'we don’t torture people.’ okay. you don’t. but your organization does. people you handpicked for your team do, have done, as a matter of institutional policy. even if you say no! stephen. someone is going to take him downstairs and do it for you. steve is powerful and has political and social and superhero caché but he cannot stop the world from turning.
this is also why i find it incredibly stupid when writers are like. steve was in wwii but he doesn’t kill! okay. are you sure? this isn’t a mel gibson movie. i actually know someone who went to jail for being a conscientious objector. that is not steve rogers (616). i also know about physics and he is severing spines with that shield, baby. they are not walking it off. like. i’m sorry. it’s not fucking realistic. he ran all over the globe with the invaders and steve 'i have anger issues’ rogers came away from that experience being one of the more emotionally well-adjusted surviving members of that team.
steve. to me. is a man who has, a long time ago, in a world no one else (okay, except his 3-4-5-6-7-8-9 plausibly implausibly alive friends) remembers at this point, learned things about himself, and his character, and what he was willing to do and what he was willing to do it for. and he made that his whole personality and then he fucking locked it away. and it’s deep in there. like it’s in his bedrock but you don’t really see what’s in the bedrock unless you use sonar or you drill all the way into it and take core samples. i don’t think steve is a pacifist. i don’t think steve craves violence. i don’t think he struggles with the violence we see him doing on a daily basis. i think he thinks in tiers of evils, greater, lesser. i think he knows that he is a human and not a god. and sometimes you have to stop another human’s heart so you can keep living. it’s pretty bad. that’s why he’s an olympian-level bottler.
so. to bring this back. i think there are like less than 10 situations where i can see steve willingly picking up a knife to put it in tony’s body. metaphorical knife. he’d have to be really hopeless. i think there would have to be no backup on the way. i think tony would have to be in danger of permanent disfigurement or disability. losing a limb. losing a primary sense. dying slowly and painfully. i do think steve could handle doling lesser violence to tony in the face of that level of threat but i think there is a line that i know in my heart that he would try not to cross and if he crossed it he would spend the rest of his life not forgiving himself because tony is his precious touchstone in a world that continues to not fucking make sense.
incidentally sins of omission has become the length of 3 SFF novels and the last one includes steve being forced to do terrible things to tony, but it is truly a 'there is no light left in the world’ extreme situation. i can’t say more. but fwiw that is the sort of setup where i enjoy this trope most. very long. very steady foundation. very upsetting when most narrative structures build towards hope.
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