#dark!douxie

1. "A good friend wouldn't let me do this." "It's lucky I'm not a good friend, then." "You're right about that."

So, this takes place in a potential bad ending for that one AU I wrote where Douxie was an Arcadia Oaks High student. (The bad ending is not Jim becoming a troll. The bad ending is about what Douxie becomes.) (I have no idea where Archie is in this fic and only realized that he’s not around after I wrote it. Maybe his lack of presence is a contributing factor.)

CW: drowning, Douxie being an OOC-on-purpose dickhead.

~

“A good friend wouldn’t let me do this,” Jim said loudly enough that his voice could be heard over the sound of the tub filling.

“It’s lucky I’m not a good friend, then.” Ah, so Douxie was self-aware enough that he knew how many people he was betraying. But, in a twisted way, he was right. If Douxie were a good friend, he would be trying to talk Jim out of recklessly sacrificing half his humanity to save the world. They’d be wasting time sitting and talking and trying to figure out if there were any plans they could make that would keep Jim as himself.

“You’re right about that.” Douxie had definitely seemed like a good friend before they’d found out that Merlin was still alive. And maybe he had been, but he’d changed. At first it’d been in subtle ways, like his posture or facial expressions. But he’d been agreeing with things that Merlin had been saying or doing, things that everyone knew normally would go against Douxie’s conscious. He had never been one to sacrifice the many for the few.

He would have never sacrificed his friends.

“You know, you don’t have to do Merlin’s dirty work. You have a life outside of him,” Jim said. Douxie had complained to them once, when the three of them were loitering around at the book store where Douxie worked, that sometimes it felt like as a child all he had done for Merlin was the unimportant dirty work. Nothing important, nothing interesting, and nothing that would finally earn him a staff.

“Yes, a life I owe to him.”

“Did we mean anything to you?”

“More than you’ll ever know,” Douxie said, and for just a moment the emotionless mask started to slip away.

“But not as much as finally earning your staff.” Not as much as earning the approval of a father figure who would probably never give a damn about him. Funny. Jim had always thought Douxie was the wiser of the two of them, but clearly Jim had learned a lesson at five-and-a-half with only half a year of abandonment that Douxie still hadn’t learned at seventeen after three years of abandonment.

Douxie turned his once-again blank gaze from Jim to the tub.

“Right, right, it’s not about any of us. It’s about the world. I hope you’ll be able to face Toby and Claire after today, because we both know they’re going to hate you.”

And then Jim let his former friend push him into the darkened waters.

Oh, Merlin’s death, definitely. I wouldn’t say it redeemed him. In Trollhunters, he’s a grumpy, selfish old man who at best is jaded from living so long and operating on old-fashioned/outdated ways of interacting with people. At worst, he’s cruel and manipulative on purpose. Wizards doesn’t really do anything to redeem him for his actions, aside from clarifying that Morgana didn’t lose her hand until after she betrayed Merlin and the rest of Camelot, and also the reason why he (and Douxie, though subconsciously) are Like That towards Claire is because she was a handmaiden of the woman who was presumably Camelot’s princess.

However, Merlin’s death did recontextualize him. In Trollhunters, it seems like he only cares about himself. Sure, he doesn’t want for Morgana and Gunmar to destroy the world, but he’s fine with innocents potentially dying (and beating up Jim/being a jerk to everyone) to get his magic back (and also save the day from Morgana and Gunmar but in the way he thinks is best). In Wizards, it’s shown that he cares about his apprentices, but how much does he care about them? For most of the series, it seems like they’re not as important to him as the bigger picture. And yet, in his dying moments, he reveals that he loved Douxie as a son. It really makes you wonder just how much, under his selfish, cantankerous facade, he cared about other people.

Morgana, on the other hand, had an arc that fell flat. She needed a lot more redemption than Merlin did, and her redemption felt forced. Her death didn’t even recontexualize her past actions; it through them out the window in a blatant lie. “Neither of us can resist gravity!” says the bitch who, throughout the two shows she showed up in, was constantly levitating herself, and also forcibly levitating Claire. That’s definitely resisting gravity! It didn’t even make Toby, the guy who literally has gravity powers, plot important! Now, did she deserve to die? Yes. It would have been hard to create a believable place for her in the modern world post-Wizards (aside from maybe moving in with Douxie or moving to the wilderness and making a cottage with chicken legs for herself since she’s Baba Yaga). Her death just could’ve been handled better, like if she was having Toby kill her to kill Arthur in turn (and then the line about gravity could’ve made a little more sense), or if she decided that she was going to try and atone for her actions by saving one of the few people she directly hurt who’s still alive: Claire.

Second question: oh, that’s just cruel, making me choose between angsty options for the three characters I enjoy torturing.

Evil Douxie is easiest to eliminate, because you aren’t specifying if you mean willingly evil or unwillingly evil, and I’ve gotta say I always love unwillingly evil former heroes so much more than willingly evil ones. (Also, it’s harder for me to see Douxie as becoming willingly evil for long, because I can’t see him losing that much faith in people.) That being said, I might be giving you a different answer if he’s being forced to commit evil acts against his will 😈

Afterwards, between Possessed Claire and Gaylen's core Krel... hmm. I think I’ll have to go with Possessed Claire just because I like how it’s handled in canon (though I’d like her trauma explored more). Krel, I don’t know how well it’ll be handled in just one movie, if it becomes canon at all.

17. Spy AU

G. Forbidden Love

Option one: Krel is the spy. So is Aja. They’re pretending to be human so they can better help their parents conquer the planet. Douxie uses the power of music to make Krel fall in love with him, and the power of love to convince Krel to betray his family and save the Earth.

Option two: At barely 100 years old, Douxie is the spy. Due to not being born until late in World War 1, he was never found by Archie, much less Merlin. Instead, he was raised by the Arcane Order as their weapon. Douxie was sent to Arcadia Oaks, and was immediately hit by a road block: he’s aged so slowly that he’s forced into attending classes at Arcadia Oaks High. Krel could just as easily be a nonmagical human as he could be his canon self (if an Akiridion, Douxie wouldn’t be able to tell until Krel or Aja revealed themselves), but no matter what he ends up convincing his classmate to give up the immortality given to him by the Arcane Order and fight on the side of Arcadia Oaks.

Option three: Once again, Krel is the spy, but instead there aren’t any Akiridions in this AU. Instead, he’s a changeling. He and Aja treat each other as siblings since they were both half-conundrum trolls (aka distant relation to Dictatious and Blinky), but their familiars are from different areas of the world, therefore they have different accents. Krel and Douxie have, for several hundred years, had a homoerotic rivalry that constantly teeters between something more sweet and something more violent. They can never actually call themselves lovers because they feel too much loyalty to Morgana and Merlin, but they could never bring themselves to injure the other in a way that would take more than a week to fully heal.

Normal science and magic won't bring Krel's parents back, but dark magic and Gaylen's Core might do the trick.

Fic can be read as shippy or platonic.

Vaguely inspired by this post. And I mean really vaguely inspired.

AO3

FFN

Krel hears the doors to his lab open, and someone walk into his lab. It’s not Lucy, because Krel can’t hear her heels click against the ground. Still, Ricky has tried to get him to come to dinner before. “I told you, I’m not hungry,” he says.

“We’re worried about you,” says Douxie. Krel looks up from his work to scowl at the wizard. He must have messed with the various shields. That, or tricked Ricky and Lucy into letting him in.