How the Other Halves Live

How the Other Halves Live is a story written and illustrated by Iron Eater. It ran in Issue 85 at https://www.shousetsubangbang.com/mirror/how-the-other-halves-live/.

Summary

Turning one's back on a lifetime of questionable decisions is hard, and it only gets harder when there's multiple lifetimes involved.

“May the sea and the sky, the light and the dark, and all things between the seasons witness it: I declare you, O Great King of Devils, and you, O Champion of Light, to be wed, and the cycle of strife between you thusly dissolved. Embrace and be joyful!” Those words still echoed in Diarmuid’s head as he rode along in the magic carriage Lloyd (his long-time rival, now short-time husband) had commissioned to whisk them both away to history’s least likely honeymoon. The wedding itself had felt like it took forever to be done with, and given how it had been attended by both representatives of the Dread Multitude and a whole slew of heroes alike it was a wonder that no fights had broken out. Peaceful ceremony or no, his nerves were shot; save for a few nibbles of rosemary bread and the traditional handful of fruit from the wedding cornucopia he hadn’t had anything to eat all day, and his anxious stomach didn’t feel like it was going to change its mind any time soon. At least he was guaranteed a week of not having to talk to anyone else but Lloyd. It wasn’t perfect, but it’d do.

Connections

This story is based very loosely on all manner of fantasy fiction and games, particularly JRPGs, with a strong Dragon Quest flavor. It is not meant to depict any characters or setting in particular.

Related Links

This story has no related links.

Author's Notes

People 100% done with constant reincarnation? Shades of my very first story and I am not sorry.

My original draft of this story was vastly too long by several thousand words. I was able to recover a lot of that by cutting the wedding reception (originally shown to the reader and used to set up the confrontation on the third day), as in my experience sometimes the best way to make a story go is to put the opening sentence as close to Something Happening Plotwise as possible. I still had to perform some painful edits to get in under the limit, and at the end I was shaving off individual words in places. GDocs' final word count was 24,999. This apparently earned me quite the laugh when the editors were giving it a check-over.

I knew I wanted this story to be from the POV of a villainous character since I wanted to really explore why he kept doing what he did without wimping out with some "he was just misunderstood!" answer. Sometimes people are misunderstood, but sometimes they're also capable of hurting others and ruining friendships and making bad decisions in general, and confronting one's capacity for Messing Everything Up will always be more interesting to me than absolving people of everything wrong they've ever done because of some other slight, major or otherwise. Diarmuid's going to have to work pretty hard to undo some of the things he's done. That's the point. His exhaustion with his role wouldn't hit the same if he was just some well-meaning woobie getting kicked in the dick every time.

Originally Lloyd had a much fouler mouth, intended to further contrast the two in everyday conversation, but in the end I decided keeping to milder swears fit the tone I was going for a little better, not unlike the bouncy tone used in Slime After Slime. For those concerned: this did not change any dialogue during the sex scene. Balancing how much profanity, and of what potency, I use in a story is generally something I decide on early, since it can majorly inform how a character thinks and the other diction I use to frame their thoughts and conversations. Give it a try some time if you've never thought about it much before!

While not shown in the illustration I turned in, Diarmuid usually rocks an immaculate rockabilly 'do with his crown. The only reason he isn't doing so here is because I didn't figure this detail out until a few weeks after the publishing date! So it goes when one goes back to redraw folks in finished pieces.

Aggressive power bottoms don't get nearly the love they ought, so Diarmuid is here to address that. He deserves nothing less than an attentive and experienced service top, so good thing that describes Lloyd to a T; also mirroring Slime After Slime, beefy sword-havers whose careers are built on solving other people's problems for them just make sense as people who can and do follow orders well. Their relationship wouldn't work if their differences didn't dovetail so well! If you want to think of it as a Virgin/Chad partnership, or maybe a prep-jock/goth-nerd combo, you're not wrong.

While I'm sure other people who play too many video games can spot some of the obvious stuff I've played with here, I'm proudest of Lloyd not knowing how to interact with people outside of transactional support ("Gift accepted! +5 affection!"), and on an entirely different level, him watching the sky and "thinking about everybody that helped [him] get where [he is] while [he waits] for the sun to rise;" that's representing the staffroll after beating a game. It's not diagetic, for the record; nobody in this setting "knows" they're in a game, novel, whatever. Because that's the coward's way unless you're going hard on the isekai, that's why.

I may need to do something with these two in the future. Their interplay is too fun to write not to.