In the interest of continuing to celebrate #10daysofSPM, this post will be going over some of my ideas of where the Bleck gang ends up post-canon!
This post will be referencing a few of my Ao3 works, namely The New Void and Moving Day! Spoilers for those works abound!
Nastasia has the hardest time of them all after the Count is gone. Without his orders to follow, she's left to process everything that she's been through. How does it change a person, to not only love a man who would never have loved you back, but to also watch this man slowly become the antithesis of who he used to be--and then, at the very end, to catch a glimpse of the man you knew before, and then, for him to be gone?
Most of my post-canon explorations of Nastasia are focused on this idea that she would not only miss the Count, but would look for a trace of him somewhere, anywhere, to make up for the closure she never got.
In my Moving Day fic, she returns to Castle Bleck and finds his room, left in a state of emptiness and disarray. She cleans it up, as a way of honoring him and reflecting the way he changed in the end.
In The New Void, she struggles to let go of the Count and holds onto the Dark Prognosticus, as it's all she has left of him. Mimi ends up getting wrapped up in that too, but I'll get to that in a bit...
O'Chunks is unfortunately not a character I've explored much, but I think of all of them he'd actually have the easiest time coping with the Count being gone. Given his background as a soldier who lost everything, well, he's dealt with loss before. I think he'd want to honor the Count's memory, but would also be grateful for still having Mimi and Nastasia around. Depending on whether you believe the Nastasia x O'Chunks implication, he might even be extra dedicated to helping Nastasia through the loss.
In The New Void, he's actually a bit upset with Nastasia for keeping the Dark Prognosticus, I think because he knew it's not what the Count would've wanted, and because he knew it wasn't good for Nastasia to hold onto the past like that. He ends up leaving, but they set out to find him again, and he eventually rejoins them with open arms.
Mimi is in my opinion the saddest instance of post-canon angst from the crew. She's very kid-like, and it's easy to see the Bleck gang as having been a family to her. With the loss of the Count, I think she feels this found family structure has become destabilized. If she can lose the Count so easily, who's to say she couldn't lose O'Chunks and Nastasia in some way too? This idea comes from her speculated origin in canon of having been a failed Pixl experiment. I think this hints she was probably abandoned before having been found by the Count and recruited onto the team.
In The New Void, when it's just her and Nastasia, she tries to protect Nastasia's secret, even though she doesn't agree with Nastasia's possession of the book either. She feels alone because O'Chunks has left and Nastasia is so consumed by the past that it doesn't feel like she's around for Mimi at all. Mimi even starts to miss Dimentio, despite his prior torment of her. This is because to her, she isn't just sad because the Count has disappeared. She misses the way her family used to be...some days go by where she thinks she'd do almost anything to just go back to those days, even for a moment.
Dimentio is in the Underwhere post-canon. End of analysis.
Okay fine, Dimentio for real
I feel like Dimentio is the most open to interpretation among the fandom, but for me I've interpreted him as being pretty sociopathic. He doesn't exactly miss the others in the way most people would, he misses how much fun he had teasing them and getting reactions out of them.
However, my headcanons also make it so he doesn't really REMEMBER them, as once he's in the Underwhere he becomes a Shayde and is subjected to slowly losing his memories and sense of self. When he does recover his identity, he only very briefly reflects on the idea that THEY might miss HIM, which is just a little odd of a concept to him. How could someone who he deliberately tormented genuinely miss him? That's all to say, I think he could've learned a lot from them, in a different time perhaps, and under wildly different circumstances.
He doesn't really remember his time as Mr. L, so I think for him it's more of a detached sort of familiarity that makes him turn less of a blind eye to the way the minions are each struggling with the Count's absence.
And of course, you can't discount the Count himself! After all, they were a found family put together by him. I wholeheartedly believe in the idea that Blumiere and Timpani end up in their own little dimension together after canon. However, for whatever reason, this dimension is virtually cut off from the rest of the worlds. There's no way of contacting anyone outside of it.
Blumiere has a lot of time now to reflect on everything he did as Count Bleck. This includes reflecting on his behavior with the minions, and reflecting on the fact that he wasn't the only one going through a hard time back then. Given this awareness, it's natural he'd want to go back and apologize, try to right his wrongs--only, he's completely powerless to do so. So he thinks about them, he worries about them, he hopes that they're doing okay.
In The New Void, he's told about Nastasia's possession of the Dark Prognosticus by...Olivia from PMTOK??!?!? Yeah so, he's not exactly happy to hear this, and feels a mix of disappointment that Nastasia is still holding on, as well as guilt because he blames himself for it.
One could only imagine how different things would be if the family could reunite once more...
And that's it, those are my post-canon Bleck gang headcanons! If you'd like to see more, I'd recommend reading the works that I referenced a bajillion times in this post, as those are where I explored these ideas the most. Thank you for reading, and happy #10daysofSPM!
