I Feel Like Every Fandom Needs To Have That One Mind Reading Fic Wherein A Character Gains The Ability

i feel like every fandom needs to have that one mind reading fic wherein a character gains the ability to read someone's mind and like so much stuff is revealed in the process

and i feel like there HAS to be one for Kaveh & Alhaitham but one where only Kaveh gains said ability and Alhaitham doesn't know Kaveh has it.

so Kaveh's like: finally, i know just how badly he thinks of me. but, like, it's just 20.000 words of him trying to get Alhaitham to think a single bad thing about him and he never manages to do it. all Alhaitham thinks are just such mundane small things like "oh, i need to make a copy of that" or "what am i gonna eat today?" and when he does think of Kaveh it's just him being like "why is he mad at me?" or silly stuff like "did his fanclub make a tcg card of him yet?"

of course there's a subplot wherein Kaveh thinks Alhaitham has to know and he does a trillion tests only to find out Alhaitham really has no clue.

and then Kaveh has to face the bitter reality that he's a MASSIVE overthinker and there's a really impactful moment where he realizes Alhaitham's harshest insults only come as reactions to HIS OWN rude quips born from the assumption that Alhaitham secretly hates his guts

PART TWO of my stupid Iliad doodles.

Here's part one.

My boy, My Sonion, Neoptolemus as a proper Hades game fake screenshot

I’m thinking about Song Of Achilles again and like….I cannot think of the logic behind how Madeline Miller wrote Pyrrhus (Neoptolemus).

Like, he was a cruel asshole in the myths, so she got that part down.

But she added the wrinkle of him being raised by Thetis and did….nothing with it.

He quite literally exists solely to be a hate sink and to drag the plot out just a little longer.

Maybe he exists to give Thetis some form of redemption, by having her correct his big mistake.

But that raises even more questions because Thetis had been filling the role Pyrrhus had nearly the entire book. Pyrrhus may exists to show why its a good thing Thetis didn’t raise Achilles, but that is never the focus.

As far as the book is concerned, Pyrrhus is just a hate sink like Thetis (until the end) or Agamemnon to throw onscreen to get in the way of Achilles and Patroclus’ happy ending, and the inherent tragedy of him being a twisted Achilles or him being thirteen fucking years old by the time he’s onscreen is never touched upon.

Pyrrhus quite literally exists solely to be a replacement hate-sink for Thetis, and to provide some damn-near unearned last minute redemption for her.

Was Pyrrhus an ass in the original myths? Yes. Does that mean Madeline Miller could have wasted a potentially interesting character so she could throw in yet another one-note hate sink? Absolutely.

The king of Epirus and his bodyguard.

Little king Pyrrhus and his bodyguard Chaon who used to be a trojan prince. Pyrrhus should have kept eating his veggies and drinking his milk

kaveh remembers returning from the desert, from his project, only to find the akademiya thrown into utter disarray. the sages gone, a large portion of the ground near the sanctuary of surasthana collapsed and crumbling, and rumours spread like wildfire. remembers realizing just how much he’s missed, how much danger alhaitham was in without his even knowing (alhaitham was injured, and he was none the wiser—). remembers hearing divine knowledge capsule and the scribe in conjunction and ice flooding his veins until he finds alhaitham, alive and well, in the house of daena. only then does the cold finally fade.

still. it could’ve so easily gone wrong. he could’ve returned only to find alhaitham dead, or gone, or his sanity shattered.

(there are fates worse than death, kaveh knows. that—that would’ve been one of them.

what is alhaitham, without that cunning, that stubbornness, that surprising deep-seated kindness? what would be left of him, without his mind?

kaveh has nightmares about it sometimes, about how he could have come back to find alhaitham an empty shell of himself, that brilliance so neatly excised. to see him without any of his sharp intellect, to look into his eyes and find no recognition there. for all their disagreements, kaveh does not think he would have been able to withstand that.)