after the rain; on neuvillette and childe (and fontaine's prison complex but not really)
i haven't played the archon quest yet but i think neuvillette should visit childe in prison and i think they should have many conversations about guilt and its innate relation to necessity. about how doing things for the greater good allows the smaller regrets to eat away at your life. about duty to their archons and what that means in the time of power both bestowed and forced upon.
i think childe should get to confide in neuvillette. i don't know about what. maybe the ways the abyss drove him first into aggression out of necessity, and later into the fatui where he found a meaning for violence. maybe the way being a soldier means he views himself as a weapon, and one devoted to his archon no matter the cost. maybe the way the abyss encroaches on his mind and psyche and body the more he uses it. maybe the way he struggles between becoming a monster to carry out the tsaritsa's wishes, and staying big brother ajax to his siblings.
and i think neuvillette should have the chance to listen to this young man talk about all the circumstances that tore him away from a beautiful life of mundanity.
he's not listening to the story of childe.
he's listening to the story of ajax, a little boy who just did his best to survive.
neuvillette knows that childe is irreversibly tainted by the powers named poison to his kind. he chooses to listen anyways. because despite the fact that childe is almost everything that opposes him, he may also be one of the few people that can intimately understand the struggle neuvillette goes through every day.
i think necessity may be a large part of both childe and neuvillette's motives. necessity to family, to duties, to the greater good.
and i think, maybe, that for these men whose lives have been spent for something greater, they deserve some selfishness.
two men on opposite sides of the battlefield can pry into each other's chests to find the same blood and bone.
two men on either side of a prison cell can, too, find a selfish necessity in one another.
