REPOSE

Isolde Blythe's curry entry

thread summary: Isolde visits her comatose girlfriend, Vivienne, in a hospital room in Hoenn months after a car crash left them both broken in different ways. Guilt and remorse nags at Isolde for the fighting she knew preceded the crash, followed by the frustration that she can't piece together the meaning of the events due to gaps in her memory. It is here as she wrestles with these feelings that Seamus, Vivienne's older brother, enters the room. A sexual tension that neither has ever admitted to permeates the encounter, and Isolde's guilt only heightens at the realization that maybe she doesn't want Vivienne to wake up after all.

why is it important?: Isolde and Seamus are a remade pair of characters that Gunsmile and I wrote in a much different setting several years back. They are the sort of couple that has so many odds against them that it's really best, in many ways, for them not to get together at all. There's too much messiness, there's too much pain, and too much mutually shared trauma for them to perhaps live a healthy existence with one another.

And yet that's the fun of writing characters like this, isn't it?

Writing this thread doesn't just let me write Isolde, but write memories of her girlfriend, Vivienne: a conniving narcissist who has wrapped her brother and her girlfriend both around her finger, manipulating them both so that they continue to orbit around her like the sun itself. Both Isolde and Seamus are blinded by their unconditional love for her, and yet their secret mutual attraction to one another feels like a cruel betrayal of that affection.

Vivienne has wronged them both many times, but they both resist wronging Vivienne. Or have, at least, for many years now.

Isolde is a timid, sheltered woman who was born into a life of privilege, and she struggles to make sense of her needs and wants outside of the context of someone else's. She has lived most of her life for other people: first for her parents, who expected her to be a proper lady, and then for Vivienne, who selfishly dragged her along in her chaos, without caring how it might affect Isolde's relationship to her family or herself. Part of Isolde suspects that the rosy-tinted romance she shared with Vivienne is missing crucial pieces of memory, that things were Not Quite Right between them, but guilt rules her that she would think such things of a woman lost to a coma.

The silent discovery that she has less than platonic feelings for Vivienne's brother fills her with shame, but at the same time, loneliness is a powerful thing. Seamus's desire to protect and to care for Isolde is something she quietly aches for, the same way he quietly aches to comfort her in her time of need. It's the beginning of a slow descent to selfishness, to taking what you want despite the fact it hurts someone else.

A sentiment that Vivienne would approve of, were she not the collateral damage.

(I'd missed writing these messed up beans with Gunsmile very much, and I'm grateful she wants to play in this shipping sandbox of angst and longing again. It's been fun reimagining them in a modern setting, and I'm delighted by the ways in which Guns is exploring Seamus here in all his conflicted, brooding glory. <3)