#claudebert

scheaming and stuff (4)

i admit i like the looming part! any taller guy looming over claude will at least pique my interest!

Words: 1700 | Rating: T

When Khalid became Claude, he didn't expect to run into the Fódlan dancer he saw at the border sometimes. Neither of them should've been there back in the day. A shared secret might not be the worst thing for them now.

I drew my favorite pairings for Hubert 🖤

Tanaras (2020, Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

You know how sometimes you read a book and then you begin to write just like that, as if your entire brain was just a sophisticated word digestion and expulsion machine? Tanaras is probably the clearest example I have of that.

By that time we're still in lockdown, and I have lots of time on my hands (you know, because of this whole social isolation thing). There are three past-times I practice religiously: walking, reading, and chatting to my pals from the Claudeleth server. Around that time I pick up two books in particular: Madeline Miller's Circe and T. H. White's Once and Future King.

Tanaras is the ungodly Frankenstein's monster of all those. Picture a beautifully green English countryside at the turn of spring to summer, suffused with that profound loneliness of not being able to speak or see anyone but through that dry eye-inducing rectangle in your pocket. Add the melancholic Arthurian vibes, spruce it up with Circe's poetic syntax, and then put it all on the soil of wanting to see my Claudeleth pals suffer - and here you go. Tanaras. Written slowly and with leisurely angst in the middle of a global disaster.

I miss having time to read that much, though.

Tanaras lives here.

In Obscurum (2021, Fire Emblem: Three Houses)

Okay, now shit's getting weird.

It's still the pandemic, mind you. I am working full-time, studying for a masters with impending first-term exams, and having an extended mental health crisis. There's a bunch of works in progress I have going for my actual ship - you know, Claudeleth - but in the meantime, I get an idea for Claude/Hubert.

I think the hook for it was something stupid, like a line I've written in an earlier fic where Claude mentions wheedling Hubert for intel on Byleth. The idea that came out of it was: Hubert von Vestra's POV as he EXTREMELY UNWILLINGLY falls in love with a little golden trickster that could theoretically, in a perfect world, reciprocate. I initially wrote maybe five hundred words and left it there.

Then a wet, dark, miserable November came, life turned stressful, and I started writing the biggest vent fic in the history of vent fics. In between studying and lying face-down on my bed I was spewing chapter after chapter of absolute fucking venom, hating my POV character and everything about him. It was enjoyable, I think, to write such an awful human being and then having him struggle with his just desserts. Pure catharsis. In the meantime, I started publishing the fic and picking up regular commenters.

And then, I'm not sure when exactly, I grew to like Hubert and his awful conniving little mind. It was still a tragedy, an inevitable bad end, but now barrelling towards it gained an extra poignance. When it was complete, and I went back to beta it with a friend, we added the chapter titles: excerpts from the Catholic chant for the dead. What started as In Obscurum (In Darkness) became recontextualised in its broader quote: ne cadent in obscurum ([So that they may] not fall into darkness). At some point, my little hateful spew turned compassionate.

I'm not sure what I learnt from that one, except that I am capable of writing awful people but not irredeemable ones. It's a weird, weird fic. I enjoy coming back to it.

In Obscurum lives here.

<- previous

gotta make one of those text posts memes except i aint doing more 10 images (unless...)