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5 Sedoretu AUs I am definitely not writing
Five Sedoretu AUs I am definitely not writing
1. Usually the core of a new House is two Morning people and two Evening people, all hands held crossed together and nobody kneeling. But sometimes the core of a new House is a Ship, and ex-Ship, their two favorite lieutenants, the teenage copy of the Lord of the Radch they accidentally adopted, her girlfriend, several houseless cousins of the Ships, and an undefinable quantity of Presger translator.
Breq doesn't think that one's going to become a new tradition.
2. Stormtroopers didn't get married, of course, but they knew about marriage, and they talked about it in corners when nobody was listening, the way teenagers everywhere taught each other about love.
FN-2187 listened as avidly as anyone else, but he though the whole thing was rather unlikely. It was hard enough turning four Stormtroopers into a combat unit, and they had hierarchy and structure and the ideology of the Order binding them together. Four people - four people, in exactly the right interlocking pattern - coming together with nothing in common except that they all happened to loved each other? He wasn't sure he believed it was more than a happy story, something to keep the civilians pacified.
"You're making it too hard," QR-7811 said once. She'd joined the Order later than most, and still remembered a little of who she'd been before. She hadn't lasted very long. "You don't need to find three other people. If you find one person you love in exactly the right way, one person who loves well, then of course you'll love the other people they love. It's that easy."
That's what Finn thought about after he met Poe. That Poe was the sort of person who other people found it easy to love, the sort of person who would draw a marriage around himself as easy as breathing, and you just had to be lucky enough to be one of the people he chose, and then you were set.
He didn't really think he would be one of Poe's people, of course. He dreamed about it sometimes, maybe hoped. When he saw Poe and Rey talking quietly in the ship's corners, and then - well, you could only call it courting - he wasn't surprised. Rey was also that kind of person, shining out with love. The sort of person other people were drawn to, the sort of person who could weave a sedoretu out of anyone they wanted.
So he wasn't surprised either when he caught Rey and Rose kissing in the commissary, because that was the kind of person Rey was, and Rose, too, all heart, magnetic.
He tried to explain this to Rose over a bottle of Corellian brandy, later. "That's what makes it work, yeah? There's a person who's-- beautiful, and brave, and good, and you all fall in love with them, and then it doesn't matter, because it all falls into place. You're all like that, all three of you, so of course--"
Rose giggled. "Finn, that's you," she said.
"What?" he asked.
"You're the one who pulled us all together," she said. "The one who's that brave and beautiful and good."
He stared at her blankly.
"Do you know what the first thing Poe said to Rey was, when he finally got her in private? She told me. He said 'So you're the other one Finn wants in his four,' and she said, 'Is that going to be a problem?' and he totally leered at her and said, 'Not at all,' but then he lost his nerve and he started going on about how if she didn't want him he'd back off because he just wanted you to be happy and then she had to shut him up by kissing him."
"Not really," Finn said.
Rose giggled. "Absolutely really! You do know Poe's a total dork, right? I mean he's an X-Wing pilot so he thinks he's a hotshot but if they aren't impressed by his dogfighting skills he has no idea what to do and slinks off and ends up sleeping in his ship half the time."
They both contemplated this for a moment, but then Finn said, "But really, no, that's not - I'm just. Me. I just lucked out by meeting you guys, that's all."
"That's the only reason I was brave enough to talk to Rey," Rose said softly, and leaned into him. "Because I knew if I wanted a chance with you, it had to work with her, too. And whoever told you that marriage was about everybody wanting one person enough was wrong about a lot of things - but I guess they were right that if you love the right person, it will be easy to love the people they love, too. Because I think we do, Finn. We all do."
3. Vanessa was still getting used to not being dead when she opened the apartment door - Real door! Real apartment! No glowy afterlife bullshit that was already going vague in her memory! - to welcome Wade home. Only Wade wasn't alone: there were two other people with him as the door. A Morning man who was, objectively speaking, hot as hell - she might be Morning too, but she wasn't blind - grizzled and tanned and muscle-y with a face that had earned its laugh lines. And an Evening woman who was even hotter - beautiful dark skin, gorgeous natural hair, a body that wouldn't quit, a take-no-shit expression on her face.
Vanessa felt her lips curving up into a smile without her volition. "Wade. Baby! You found us our other half!"
He spread his hands. "I told you I would!"
4. Thomas was trying to do his crossword, but he kept being distracted by Beverly looking intently at him from the other side of the atrium.
He'd have to admit that this wasn't one of the difficulties he'd expected when Peter finished his apprenticeship and they'd finally managed to alter the wards to let her spend more time here, but there it was. She'd come down from Peter's room about 9 o'clock, wearing mostly one of Peter's old T-shirts - just as Thomas was setting in for a quiet Sunday morning - sat in the armchair across from his - folded her hands in her lap - and looked at him.
It wasn't that it bothered him exactly, but a goddess gazing at one, even a goddess one trusted to a probably unwise degree, was difficult to ignore long term.
"All right," he said finally, putting the paper down, "Out with it."
She grinned at him. "You should marry us."
Thomas raised his eyebrows. "You and Peter and yours? Officiating at a marriage is not, sadly, one of the powers granted to a DCI in the Metropolitan police. But congratulations, I hadn't realized you were ready yet."
She rolled her eyes at him. "Not marry us, marry us. Stop being difficult."
"I. What?" Thomas said. That was, of course, what he'd thought she meant when she first asked, but he had known better than to believe it beyond the first reflexive mistake.
"You and I get on well enough, I have it on the best possible authority that Peter wouldn't kick you out of bed for eating crackers, and it would absolutely shut Ty down about the dangers of getting shackled to people who won't outlive me."
"I am quite certain your sister would have several other objections to make in that circumstance," Thomas said finally, trying to work around who the 'best possible authority' would have to have been.
"But imagine the look on her face when we told her!"
He could. Vividly. It was not the most tempting thing he could imagine about the offer. "I don't think that annoying your sister is a valid reason to join a marriage."
"That's not the reason I asked. You know that, right?"
"You didn't ask," Thomas pointed out, rather than addressing this directly, because he was a vile coward at times.
"Fair enough," Beverley said. "Thomas Nightingale, would you be interested in joining Peter and myself to make a marriage? Peter loves you already, and I think I could easily learn to."
Vile coward did not, ever, describe Beverley Brook. "Did Peter put you up to this?" he asked.
"He though I was less likely to cock it up completely," she said. "Did I?"
"No," Thomas said. "Did you have a fourth in mind?"
Beverly opened her mouth, then stopped, shook her head, and said, "I was about to facetiously ask if you had an immortal Evening wizard woman tucked away safely in an odd corner, and then I realized actually you do have one, in Holloway, and no."
"Not her," he agreed. Although, put to it, he thought Varvara had been fond enough of him, by the end; in another world they might have done, with the right Morning marriage. But not her for Beverly. "I suppose we could see what Molly thinks; I don't imagine anyone's ever brought it up with her before."
"Molly?" Beverley blinked. "I hadn't thought - did the two of you ever--?"
"No," Thomas said. "To be ruthlessly honest, I've never thought much about a Morning marriage for myself." And then he found himself holding his breath - he knew that didn't mean the same thing it had in his youth, and he was fairly sure Beverley and Peter had figured it out on their own, but it was still more than half a century since he'd said it so clearly. "Anyone you wanted, who is willing to live with that - with me - would, I'm sure, be fine."
"Is that... yes?" Beverley asked.
"Yes," he said, and ducked his head over a smile. "But I'd want to hear from Peter himself for his part."
"He's been eavesdropping on the stairs this whole time," Beverley said.
"I know," Thomas said. "He's not quite as clever as he thinks."
"Maybe I don't want to marry the two of you!" Peter called down from his hiding place, and absolutely didn't mean it at all.
5. "Wait," Dan said. "If he's with you, Eddie - but he's also been with Annie - what moiety is he?"
Eddie shrugged. Venom kept his head motionless, like that chicken in the car commercial.
"I'm with Eddie," he said, unhelpfully. "But I like Annie, she's delicious."
"You're overthinking it, dear," Annie said. "I don't think we're going to get any traditionalist to write us a marriage certificate that lists an amorphous alien symbiote, so does it really matter?"
"I agree," Venom said quickly. "So are you done? Can we all fuck yet?"
*Postscriptum: The thing that's been interesting me more and more about sedoretu AU - although you wouldn't be able to tell from the above - is the moiety system itself; fandom seems to render it down to something between a gender system and an incest taboo, but in the RL societies that use it, what it's really intensely about is networks of relationships. If you know your moiety and someone else's moiety, you know your exact relationship to each other, even if you've never met - and you know if you sat down and talked it over, you could trace your relationship networks out one person at time until you found the places that your people overlapped. And if you're an outsider coming in new, you only need to have a relationship to one person already in the network to know your relationship to everyone else in the network. It doesn't survive very well as part of a Westernized, mobile, large-scale, heavily individualist society, which is one of the reasons it fascinates me to try to AU a hegemonic world culture where a moiety system is fundamental and yet other things are still familiar. (The OT4s are just a bonus. :P)
Last night I forgot my phone at work, so instead of "Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men" I put myself to sleep by playing a game where I tried to figure out which moiety any given X-Men character was, starting from the single premise that Cable is a Morning person (because you don't pick up a name like "Dayspring" if you're an Evening person.)
I've only got up to the early 90s in Jay and Miles X-Plain so my knowledge beyond that is excitingly patchy, and some that work with early canon may break later, but the original X-Men are pretty easy:
Cable is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening;
Cable is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening so Jean is Morning;
And from there we can use Scott or Jean as our anchor for most people, so:
Scott is Evening so Alex is Evening so Lorna is Morning so Bobby is Evening;
Scott is Evening so Lee is Morning so Magneto is Evening so Charles is Morning;
Hank tends not to date or have family in the business so the best path I've found so far for him is this one:
Magneto is Evening so Wanda is Morning so Simon is Evening so Hank is morning;
And with Warren I can either just go "Warren had a crush on Jean so Warren is Evening" or I can try to take the long way round (for which I had to check a wiki); the best path I've got there is via Psylocke and wanders through several other X-Teams but still (I think) ends with Warren being evening, so let's do the second main set of X-Men next:
Jean is Morning so Rachel is Morning so Kitty is Evening;
Kitty is Evening so Piotr is Morning;
Piotr is Morning so Callisto is Evening so Ororo is Morning;
Ororo is Morning so Forge is Evening so Mystique is Morning so Rogue is (probably) Evening;
Mystique is Morning so Kurt is Morning;
And Wolverine has canonically slept with everyone in the Marvel Universe so I'm excluding him from the game, but probably he is Evening-ish via both Ororo and Kurt here.
Which takes us to Excalibur:
Kurt is Morning so Meggan is Evening;
Meggan is Evening so Brian is Morning;
Brian is Morning so Betsy is Morning.
which gives us a full path for Angel of:
Nate is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening so Jean is Morning so Rachel is Morning so Kitty is Evening so Piotr is Morning so Callisto is Evening so Ororo is Morning so Forge is Evening so Mystique is Morning so Kurt is Morning so Meggan is Evening so Brian is Morning so Betsy is Morning so Angel is Evening --
--so it's perfectly okay that he had a thing for Jean. (Although Callisto's thing for him was pretty screwed up.)
But there's probably a shorter path that I'm missing there.
1. Usually the core of a new House is two Morning people and two Evening people, all hands held crossed together and nobody kneeling. But sometimes the core of a new House is a Ship, and ex-Ship, their two favorite lieutenants, the teenage copy of the Lord of the Radch they accidentally adopted, her girlfriend, several houseless cousins of the Ships, and an undefinable quantity of Presger translator.
Breq doesn't think that one's going to become a new tradition.
2. Stormtroopers didn't get married, of course, but they knew about marriage, and they talked about it in corners when nobody was listening, the way teenagers everywhere taught each other about love.
FN-2187 listened as avidly as anyone else, but he though the whole thing was rather unlikely. It was hard enough turning four Stormtroopers into a combat unit, and they had hierarchy and structure and the ideology of the Order binding them together. Four people - four people, in exactly the right interlocking pattern - coming together with nothing in common except that they all happened to loved each other? He wasn't sure he believed it was more than a happy story, something to keep the civilians pacified.
"You're making it too hard," QR-7811 said once. She'd joined the Order later than most, and still remembered a little of who she'd been before. She hadn't lasted very long. "You don't need to find three other people. If you find one person you love in exactly the right way, one person who loves well, then of course you'll love the other people they love. It's that easy."
That's what Finn thought about after he met Poe. That Poe was the sort of person who other people found it easy to love, the sort of person who would draw a marriage around himself as easy as breathing, and you just had to be lucky enough to be one of the people he chose, and then you were set.
He didn't really think he would be one of Poe's people, of course. He dreamed about it sometimes, maybe hoped. When he saw Poe and Rey talking quietly in the ship's corners, and then - well, you could only call it courting - he wasn't surprised. Rey was also that kind of person, shining out with love. The sort of person other people were drawn to, the sort of person who could weave a sedoretu out of anyone they wanted.
So he wasn't surprised either when he caught Rey and Rose kissing in the commissary, because that was the kind of person Rey was, and Rose, too, all heart, magnetic.
He tried to explain this to Rose over a bottle of Corellian brandy, later. "That's what makes it work, yeah? There's a person who's-- beautiful, and brave, and good, and you all fall in love with them, and then it doesn't matter, because it all falls into place. You're all like that, all three of you, so of course--"
Rose giggled. "Finn, that's you," she said.
"What?" he asked.
"You're the one who pulled us all together," she said. "The one who's that brave and beautiful and good."
He stared at her blankly.
"Do you know what the first thing Poe said to Rey was, when he finally got her in private? She told me. He said 'So you're the other one Finn wants in his four,' and she said, 'Is that going to be a problem?' and he totally leered at her and said, 'Not at all,' but then he lost his nerve and he started going on about how if she didn't want him he'd back off because he just wanted you to be happy and then she had to shut him up by kissing him."
"Not really," Finn said.
Rose giggled. "Absolutely really! You do know Poe's a total dork, right? I mean he's an X-Wing pilot so he thinks he's a hotshot but if they aren't impressed by his dogfighting skills he has no idea what to do and slinks off and ends up sleeping in his ship half the time."
They both contemplated this for a moment, but then Finn said, "But really, no, that's not - I'm just. Me. I just lucked out by meeting you guys, that's all."
"That's the only reason I was brave enough to talk to Rey," Rose said softly, and leaned into him. "Because I knew if I wanted a chance with you, it had to work with her, too. And whoever told you that marriage was about everybody wanting one person enough was wrong about a lot of things - but I guess they were right that if you love the right person, it will be easy to love the people they love, too. Because I think we do, Finn. We all do."
3. Vanessa was still getting used to not being dead when she opened the apartment door - Real door! Real apartment! No glowy afterlife bullshit that was already going vague in her memory! - to welcome Wade home. Only Wade wasn't alone: there were two other people with him as the door. A Morning man who was, objectively speaking, hot as hell - she might be Morning too, but she wasn't blind - grizzled and tanned and muscle-y with a face that had earned its laugh lines. And an Evening woman who was even hotter - beautiful dark skin, gorgeous natural hair, a body that wouldn't quit, a take-no-shit expression on her face.
Vanessa felt her lips curving up into a smile without her volition. "Wade. Baby! You found us our other half!"
He spread his hands. "I told you I would!"
4. Thomas was trying to do his crossword, but he kept being distracted by Beverly looking intently at him from the other side of the atrium.
He'd have to admit that this wasn't one of the difficulties he'd expected when Peter finished his apprenticeship and they'd finally managed to alter the wards to let her spend more time here, but there it was. She'd come down from Peter's room about 9 o'clock, wearing mostly one of Peter's old T-shirts - just as Thomas was setting in for a quiet Sunday morning - sat in the armchair across from his - folded her hands in her lap - and looked at him.
It wasn't that it bothered him exactly, but a goddess gazing at one, even a goddess one trusted to a probably unwise degree, was difficult to ignore long term.
"All right," he said finally, putting the paper down, "Out with it."
She grinned at him. "You should marry us."
Thomas raised his eyebrows. "You and Peter and yours? Officiating at a marriage is not, sadly, one of the powers granted to a DCI in the Metropolitan police. But congratulations, I hadn't realized you were ready yet."
She rolled her eyes at him. "Not marry us, marry us. Stop being difficult."
"I. What?" Thomas said. That was, of course, what he'd thought she meant when she first asked, but he had known better than to believe it beyond the first reflexive mistake.
"You and I get on well enough, I have it on the best possible authority that Peter wouldn't kick you out of bed for eating crackers, and it would absolutely shut Ty down about the dangers of getting shackled to people who won't outlive me."
"I am quite certain your sister would have several other objections to make in that circumstance," Thomas said finally, trying to work around who the 'best possible authority' would have to have been.
"But imagine the look on her face when we told her!"
He could. Vividly. It was not the most tempting thing he could imagine about the offer. "I don't think that annoying your sister is a valid reason to join a marriage."
"That's not the reason I asked. You know that, right?"
"You didn't ask," Thomas pointed out, rather than addressing this directly, because he was a vile coward at times.
"Fair enough," Beverley said. "Thomas Nightingale, would you be interested in joining Peter and myself to make a marriage? Peter loves you already, and I think I could easily learn to."
Vile coward did not, ever, describe Beverley Brook. "Did Peter put you up to this?" he asked.
"He though I was less likely to cock it up completely," she said. "Did I?"
"No," Thomas said. "Did you have a fourth in mind?"
Beverly opened her mouth, then stopped, shook her head, and said, "I was about to facetiously ask if you had an immortal Evening wizard woman tucked away safely in an odd corner, and then I realized actually you do have one, in Holloway, and no."
"Not her," he agreed. Although, put to it, he thought Varvara had been fond enough of him, by the end; in another world they might have done, with the right Morning marriage. But not her for Beverly. "I suppose we could see what Molly thinks; I don't imagine anyone's ever brought it up with her before."
"Molly?" Beverley blinked. "I hadn't thought - did the two of you ever--?"
"No," Thomas said. "To be ruthlessly honest, I've never thought much about a Morning marriage for myself." And then he found himself holding his breath - he knew that didn't mean the same thing it had in his youth, and he was fairly sure Beverley and Peter had figured it out on their own, but it was still more than half a century since he'd said it so clearly. "Anyone you wanted, who is willing to live with that - with me - would, I'm sure, be fine."
"Is that... yes?" Beverley asked.
"Yes," he said, and ducked his head over a smile. "But I'd want to hear from Peter himself for his part."
"He's been eavesdropping on the stairs this whole time," Beverley said.
"I know," Thomas said. "He's not quite as clever as he thinks."
"Maybe I don't want to marry the two of you!" Peter called down from his hiding place, and absolutely didn't mean it at all.
5. "Wait," Dan said. "If he's with you, Eddie - but he's also been with Annie - what moiety is he?"
Eddie shrugged. Venom kept his head motionless, like that chicken in the car commercial.
"I'm with Eddie," he said, unhelpfully. "But I like Annie, she's delicious."
"You're overthinking it, dear," Annie said. "I don't think we're going to get any traditionalist to write us a marriage certificate that lists an amorphous alien symbiote, so does it really matter?"
"I agree," Venom said quickly. "So are you done? Can we all fuck yet?"
*Postscriptum: The thing that's been interesting me more and more about sedoretu AU - although you wouldn't be able to tell from the above - is the moiety system itself; fandom seems to render it down to something between a gender system and an incest taboo, but in the RL societies that use it, what it's really intensely about is networks of relationships. If you know your moiety and someone else's moiety, you know your exact relationship to each other, even if you've never met - and you know if you sat down and talked it over, you could trace your relationship networks out one person at time until you found the places that your people overlapped. And if you're an outsider coming in new, you only need to have a relationship to one person already in the network to know your relationship to everyone else in the network. It doesn't survive very well as part of a Westernized, mobile, large-scale, heavily individualist society, which is one of the reasons it fascinates me to try to AU a hegemonic world culture where a moiety system is fundamental and yet other things are still familiar. (The OT4s are just a bonus. :P)
Last night I forgot my phone at work, so instead of "Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men" I put myself to sleep by playing a game where I tried to figure out which moiety any given X-Men character was, starting from the single premise that Cable is a Morning person (because you don't pick up a name like "Dayspring" if you're an Evening person.)
I've only got up to the early 90s in Jay and Miles X-Plain so my knowledge beyond that is excitingly patchy, and some that work with early canon may break later, but the original X-Men are pretty easy:
Cable is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening;
Cable is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening so Jean is Morning;
And from there we can use Scott or Jean as our anchor for most people, so:
Scott is Evening so Alex is Evening so Lorna is Morning so Bobby is Evening;
Scott is Evening so Lee is Morning so Magneto is Evening so Charles is Morning;
Hank tends not to date or have family in the business so the best path I've found so far for him is this one:
Magneto is Evening so Wanda is Morning so Simon is Evening so Hank is morning;
And with Warren I can either just go "Warren had a crush on Jean so Warren is Evening" or I can try to take the long way round (for which I had to check a wiki); the best path I've got there is via Psylocke and wanders through several other X-Teams but still (I think) ends with Warren being evening, so let's do the second main set of X-Men next:
Jean is Morning so Rachel is Morning so Kitty is Evening;
Kitty is Evening so Piotr is Morning;
Piotr is Morning so Callisto is Evening so Ororo is Morning;
Ororo is Morning so Forge is Evening so Mystique is Morning so Rogue is (probably) Evening;
Mystique is Morning so Kurt is Morning;
And Wolverine has canonically slept with everyone in the Marvel Universe so I'm excluding him from the game, but probably he is Evening-ish via both Ororo and Kurt here.
Which takes us to Excalibur:
Kurt is Morning so Meggan is Evening;
Meggan is Evening so Brian is Morning;
Brian is Morning so Betsy is Morning.
which gives us a full path for Angel of:
Nate is Morning so Maddy is Morning so Scott is Evening so Jean is Morning so Rachel is Morning so Kitty is Evening so Piotr is Morning so Callisto is Evening so Ororo is Morning so Forge is Evening so Mystique is Morning so Kurt is Morning so Meggan is Evening so Brian is Morning so Betsy is Morning so Angel is Evening --
--so it's perfectly okay that he had a thing for Jean. (Although Callisto's thing for him was pretty screwed up.)
But there's probably a shorter path that I'm missing there.
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though I know not of the X Men outside movies and it makes it all look very complicated
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What exactly it tells you depends on the system, but in the system le Guin borrowed, people who share your moiety count as blood family - you treat them linguistically and socially as brother/sister/auntie/uncle - and people who don't share your moiety are (potential)boyfriend/girlfriend/in-law - and you have the social obligations to each other that go with that even if you've never met and can't trace the chain.
I mean obviously it gets more complicated than that - some places have up to 16 moieties, and they intersect with other social categories like clan and generation and class and patrilineage - but moiety gives you the basics you need for politeness.
(This is part of why I was so curious about ætt, different kinds of formal social lineages are so counterintuitive for us late capitalism people.)
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(I am learning it via the 'Jay and Miles X-Plain the X-Men' podcast which untangles things a little bit and also saves me from ever having to look at the unfortunately very bad art that a lot of the comics have.)
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I never did manage to assemble a complete sedoretu--the closest I got was Rachel/Kitty/Piotr/? with Kitty/Illyana as a socially accepted branch off from it--but I got a lot of amusement out of imagining the complications with Storm's supervillain suitors.
Considering Logan, I think it's possible that he doesn't actually know his moiety--unlikely to the point of impossibility under normal circumstances, but considering his memory issues and everything about Weapon X...
It was like the good old days of DW!
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2. is especially loved, of course
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