♠️ Well. Cress’ crush on Melete is a virtue of a couple things.
1) Melete doesn’t really pay attention to her. She likes it when she gets attention.
2) Melete only pays attention to REALLY WEIRD SPECIFIC THINGS ABOUT HER AND IT MAKES HER MAD.
3) Melete’s socially awkward as hell and Cress thinks she can improve that. Who better to teach social manners than an empath? 3:) (the answer is honestly, basically anyone else please. AUBADES AREN’T EMPATHETIC IF THEY CAN’T HEAR ANYONE, and also like... some of cress’ social skills are learned from Manipulation 101)
I think a proper pitch for her would probably definitely involve someone who wasn’t as focused on appearances and would turn their nose up at Cress’ obsessive maintenance of her image. Someone who could deal with the fact Cress is pretty ruthless and vicious when she puts her mind to it, and tease her into loosening up a bit.
If Cress relaxed for like more than two seconds and wasn’t always on the grind, she’d write and play more music that she likes instead of what she thinks is popular, go star gazing, read a trashy romance book, maybe get a massage. She’d do real people things instead of just chasing after power and praise.
Unfortunately ambition is like 60% of her personality and would do these things she likes kinda grumpily.
oh geez i dont know. Getting a rail would probably be pretty difficult for Cress- she can manipulate people pretty easily thanks to the hearing part her power, and not even the speaking one. Definitely would have to be a highblood, she’d fuck up someone lower, kind of because she just doesn’t respect lowbloods really. Torrent is highblood heavy as compared to the rest of the IPC and she wasn’t exactly accepted by the lowblood community she grew up with.
Her moirail would probably be kind of low energy and be not easily manipulated. Her rail can’t be at all judgy, because as soon as Cress feels judged in some way she’d pull on all of her appearances and power play. Ideally, her rail would be someone she could just be herself around without yanking on gossip threads or pulling some kind of power play.
I’m honestly a bit at a loss as to how Cress could reciprocate healthily in a pale relationship. She’d default to manipulation tactics to “fix” people in pale, and if it worked, then her hypothetical rail probably wouldn’t be so great for her either so i guess she’d probably work best in a traditional pacifier and pacified