Anyways I Wrote This Because Vile And Valkyrie Have A Wasted Dynamic In The Canon - Tumblr Posts
Actually writing out this AU in full because I’m deciding to be cringe and free
Also I think it would make a good writing exercise
This is a Skulduggery Pleasant AU that basically serves as a replacement for Seasons of War (although I made it up before Seasons of War). If I was an interesting person with time on my hands, I might try to actually write it out in book form, but oh well.
Skulduggery, Valkyrie, Tanith, Saracen, Dexter, and Luke (no Serpine this time) are sent to Dimension X to kill Mevolent, as goes in SoW. However, Lord Vile isn’t doing his draugr thing and Mevolent probably doesn’t have any plans for all-out war.
They end up getting involved with the Resistance, which leads to them going around and getting into fights with Mevolent’s people (in which Luke dies, because the man can’t fight for shit). Eventually, the main gang gets separated in a pretty nasty fight (Dexter, Saracen, and Tanith go one way while Skulduggery and Valkyrie end up a ways away). Skulduggery ends up being possibly killed in an explosion (Val can’t see, but explosion happened right where he was supposed to be standing) and Valkyrie, disoriented, attempts to flee.
However, Mevolent chases her down and takes her prisoner. He decides she has the potential of a good general and starts assigning her to work alongside Vile and Vengeous. Valkyrie, naturally, tries numerous times to escape and/or follow through with the mission and kill Mevolent, but he always catches her and tortures her whenever she tries something, so her will to leave dies pretty quickly. (Also, Serafina from the main dimension shows up with a shunter at some point, so now Mevolent has his wife back. She mostly ignores Valkyrie and is pretty condescending when they do talk, much like their canon interactions).
He also assigns Lord Vile to keep watch over her and make sure she never escapes, so he ends up following her around a lot. She doesn’t like him and is very verbal about this, but there really isn’t much she can do to get rid of him. Meanwhile, her knowing Vile’s secret identity (presuming that nobody else in Dimension X knows) and just knowing a whole lot about him in general leads to him becoming just slightly obsessed with her, making him even more controlling and hard to get rid of.
At this point, being tortured (formerly regularly, now on occasion) and being an active part of an oppressive regime by the man she’s supposed to kill has badly worn down on Valkyrie and she becomes borderline suicidal, but never kills herself because she keeps insisting that Skulduggery survived the explosion and will eventually come rescue her, even as Vile actively taunts her by saying that he’s dead and she’ll be here forever.
Valkyrie eventually latches on to Lord Vile as a sort of temporary replacement for Skulduggery, because it has been over a year now and she is struggling to keep going. It also makes his obsessiveness slightly less unbearable.
Now, during all this, Dexter, Saracen, and Tanith have been going around, uninvolved with the Resistance, and quick-striking and killing as many of Mevolent’s Redhoods and Sense-Wardens as possible. Is it making a dent? Not really, but they’re hiding their time until they get an opportunity to get into the palace. They know that Valkyrie has been captured and has become a general, and they also believe that Skulduggery is dead, so they really don’t have anything better to be doing.
They eventually hear about a new Resistance leader described as being similar in appearance to Lord Vile and very good at organizing the Resistance fighters, and immediately the three of them get suspicious and go over to meet the guy. It turns out to be Skulduggery (who insists an explosion could never kill him) wearing bits and pieces of his shadow armour, but not all of it. Dexter, Saracen, and Tanith are, of course, livid, because he pretty much stranded them and left Valkyrie with Mevolent for a year. They’re also angry about the whole “being Lord Vile” thing, and Tanith gets to slap him before they tentatively agree to team up with the Resistance and start doing assignments with them.
Around this time, Skulduggery starts sending Valkyrie anonymous letters through a spy network in the castle basically talking (in VERY loose language) about what’s been going on in the Resistance lately. She puts two and two together and realizes that it’s Skulduggery, which makes her suddenly much more hopeful about the future and able to keep going a little longer.
Eventually, she quietly goes out and meets up with Skulduggery in a forest somewhere to verify that it’s actually him and he says that she has the potential to be useful within the castle, but isn’t able to get into much detail before she has to leave. She’s too happy to see him to be angry at how long he left her in that castle without contacting her or trying to save her.
As it turns out, Lord Vile has seen some of the letters they were exchanging and also figured out that Valkyrie was probably talking to Skulduggery, and he goes to confront Valkyrie about it. It leads to a fight, they throw each other into the walls a few times, but Vile eventually agrees to not tell Mevolent on account of the fact that if he found out, he’d probably kill Valkyrie and then Vile would have nobody to talk to. His only condition is that Valkyrie stop exchanging letters with Skulduggery, to which Valkyrie resentfully agrees.
A week or two passes and Dexter, Saracen, and Tanith are captured by Mevolent, which leads to Valkyrie trying to find ways to sneak them out of the castle (while Vile tries to stop her). Skulduggery, now with a fully-organized Resistance, attacks the castle in hopes of getting all his friends back and killing Mevolent in a single blow, which leads to the castle becoming a chaotic war zone that ends with Valkyrie using the Sceptre to kill Mevolent (causing the explosion that allows her to absorb the katehedral crystal), Meritorious to be freed from prison by a Resistance fighter, and the Resistance getting Serafina, Vile, Vengeous, and the rest of the castle to stand down.
With their mission accomplished, the gang teams up with Professor Nye to find a shunter who can take them home, leaving . Does Lord Vile try to stop Valkyrie from leaving? Probably, but at this point there really isn’t much he can do about it now that she’s been reunited with Skulduggery.
By the time they make it back home, it’s now been close to two years and everyone has assumed they are dead. Militsa was grieving for Valkyrie and was frustrated that Val was gone for so long when she got back, but could also clearly tell that Valkyrie did not have a happy time in Dimension X. People try to get the five of them to talk about what happened and what caused them to take so long, but all of them mutually agree that nobody wants to or should discuss what happened. Instead, they make an effort to move on with their lives, rest of the series happens as normal.