Munday: Strange Bedfellows, Familiar Partners
Pick two of your characters who have met or interacted in a more than superficial manner. Best friends, enemies, lovers, rivals, relatives... Something with some meat to it.
Then tell us how they feel about each other in as great a blithering detail as you can manage to do. What do they view as each others' flaws? Each others' virtues? Do they get along with each other, or are things tense? Do they respect each other? Despise each other? Find each other amusing?
Have their opinions of each other been the same throughout their relationship? If not, how have they evolved? What factors of each characters' personality influences how they relate to the other character?
When Prue met Cole, he was just the Assistant District Attorney prosecuting a murderer she and her sister Phoebe had stopped with their powers, making them the only eye witnesses. He was the innocent in the middle of a demonic conspiracy in the courtroom -- and the guy Phoebe began to take a liking to. As she began to see more of him as he and Phoebe got more serious, Prue admitted that something just felt "off" about him, that she didn't trust him. Then again, Prue is slow to trust anyone who could pose a threat to her sisters and herself -- and even when he was only a mortal prosecutor in her eyes, she knew full well the threat he could pose.
Cole, the demon with a deliberately suppressed human soul, initially saw Prue as the powerful adversary and thus, prize, that she is to the Underworld. Killing her would be the biggest coup of his mission, and he had plans to savor her humiliation before the final stab. He knew that he must keep the pretense of non-threatening, even helpful, humanity even more closely in her presence, lest she use the strongest power she was capable of -- her clout as eldest sister -- to try and steer Phoebe away from the romantic trap he was weaving. Yet from that he saw what his demonic self considers her greatest flaw as a good witch (and her greatest asset now as an emerging demon): her ability to ability to distance herself from emotion, to focus on rationality for as long as possible. Thus, he made her the target of a demon cursed with empathy -- in trying to aid the mortal she thought that demon was, she received the "gift", and the weight of the world's emotions very nearly killed her.
Prue --- the Prue of my AU who has begun to see Cole in his natural element, and learn his backstory -- sees what she perceives as his over eagerness to deal within the status quo as the greatest weakness of his affecting her at the moment. He wants to lay low and let the parts of the storm threatening them blow each other out. She wants to make the Underworld safe for the baby they've made and for them.
Virtues... again, the story is a morality flip for Prue, and a near return to old practices for Cole, but the virtue, and what they see in each other, is themselves. Cole's whole identity is about duality and the suppression of one or the other due to pain, hope, and convenience. And when he told her about having heard how she reacted to seeing the aftermath of her mom being killed by a demon, it was clear -- he saw the same need for suppression, in human terms. Prue, as a good witch, was made sick by the thought of sleeping with him -- because he returned to evil, yes, but also because as that empath? She felt (literally) that he loved her sister and vice versa. And yet, he's a guy who just fundamentally gets the nature and the stakes of everything she tries to do -- the unpredictable, yet dedicated, even devoted guy who cares about protection of her sisters in this ballgame. the guy she's been looking for consciously or not for nearly three years. And now, twisted evil fate handed him to her, handed her to him.
He did carry with him the stereotype-based rumors from the Underworld about her, and some survived contact with the enemy and some didn't. The idea that she's a cold fish (ahem) got disproved on her sister's wedding day, of all days. But there remained her not completely rational fear of loneliness, of never finding love, of what she knew she was missing out on by over devotion to her and her sisters' magical lives. He said to her, on their wedding night, "You worry that [the demons who sent him to kill her] were right, don't you?" By this point, they both know the facts say otherwise, and that the facts don't matter.
Prue begins to see Cole be capable of some goodness in the time loop, and sees she can extend some limited trust. His faithfulness to good and to Phoebe is proven especially when the Brotherhood resurfaces. Prue lights a candle for his soul when he first returns to evil, having killed. But it is while they are laying low in the Underworld that she hears how he argued his first case defending his mother from vanquish before the Source of All Evil at the age of seven (the same age she lost her mother) ... and she starts to admire him.
Do they respect each other? At first very begrudgingly, "as worthy opponents". Then, somewhat less begrudgingly after a bit of trust is established, as something like siblings-in-law...ish. And now, now that they are all each of them can truly depend on, and they are completely devoted to the same goals? Yes, they respect each other as partners.
Then tell us how they feel about each other in as great a blithering detail as you can manage to do. What do they view as each others' flaws? Each others' virtues? Do they get along with each other, or are things tense? Do they respect each other? Despise each other? Find each other amusing?
Have their opinions of each other been the same throughout their relationship? If not, how have they evolved? What factors of each characters' personality influences how they relate to the other character?
When Prue met Cole, he was just the Assistant District Attorney prosecuting a murderer she and her sister Phoebe had stopped with their powers, making them the only eye witnesses. He was the innocent in the middle of a demonic conspiracy in the courtroom -- and the guy Phoebe began to take a liking to. As she began to see more of him as he and Phoebe got more serious, Prue admitted that something just felt "off" about him, that she didn't trust him. Then again, Prue is slow to trust anyone who could pose a threat to her sisters and herself -- and even when he was only a mortal prosecutor in her eyes, she knew full well the threat he could pose.
Cole, the demon with a deliberately suppressed human soul, initially saw Prue as the powerful adversary and thus, prize, that she is to the Underworld. Killing her would be the biggest coup of his mission, and he had plans to savor her humiliation before the final stab. He knew that he must keep the pretense of non-threatening, even helpful, humanity even more closely in her presence, lest she use the strongest power she was capable of -- her clout as eldest sister -- to try and steer Phoebe away from the romantic trap he was weaving. Yet from that he saw what his demonic self considers her greatest flaw as a good witch (and her greatest asset now as an emerging demon): her ability to ability to distance herself from emotion, to focus on rationality for as long as possible. Thus, he made her the target of a demon cursed with empathy -- in trying to aid the mortal she thought that demon was, she received the "gift", and the weight of the world's emotions very nearly killed her.
Prue --- the Prue of my AU who has begun to see Cole in his natural element, and learn his backstory -- sees what she perceives as his over eagerness to deal within the status quo as the greatest weakness of his affecting her at the moment. He wants to lay low and let the parts of the storm threatening them blow each other out. She wants to make the Underworld safe for the baby they've made and for them.
Virtues... again, the story is a morality flip for Prue, and a near return to old practices for Cole, but the virtue, and what they see in each other, is themselves. Cole's whole identity is about duality and the suppression of one or the other due to pain, hope, and convenience. And when he told her about having heard how she reacted to seeing the aftermath of her mom being killed by a demon, it was clear -- he saw the same need for suppression, in human terms. Prue, as a good witch, was made sick by the thought of sleeping with him -- because he returned to evil, yes, but also because as that empath? She felt (literally) that he loved her sister and vice versa. And yet, he's a guy who just fundamentally gets the nature and the stakes of everything she tries to do -- the unpredictable, yet dedicated, even devoted guy who cares about protection of her sisters in this ballgame. the guy she's been looking for consciously or not for nearly three years. And now, twisted evil fate handed him to her, handed her to him.
He did carry with him the stereotype-based rumors from the Underworld about her, and some survived contact with the enemy and some didn't. The idea that she's a cold fish (ahem) got disproved on her sister's wedding day, of all days. But there remained her not completely rational fear of loneliness, of never finding love, of what she knew she was missing out on by over devotion to her and her sisters' magical lives. He said to her, on their wedding night, "You worry that [the demons who sent him to kill her] were right, don't you?" By this point, they both know the facts say otherwise, and that the facts don't matter.
Prue begins to see Cole be capable of some goodness in the time loop, and sees she can extend some limited trust. His faithfulness to good and to Phoebe is proven especially when the Brotherhood resurfaces. Prue lights a candle for his soul when he first returns to evil, having killed. But it is while they are laying low in the Underworld that she hears how he argued his first case defending his mother from vanquish before the Source of All Evil at the age of seven (the same age she lost her mother) ... and she starts to admire him.
Do they respect each other? At first very begrudgingly, "as worthy opponents". Then, somewhat less begrudgingly after a bit of trust is established, as something like siblings-in-law...ish. And now, now that they are all each of them can truly depend on, and they are completely devoted to the same goals? Yes, they respect each other as partners.