gnashing my teeth over vetinari and vimes in this au because you know what happens when you take 'not close but the closest another human can come to understanding me' and then give a thirty year headstart to the slower guy?

Harold, its just actually understanding . It's just understanding and being understood by another human, if only for brief, precious moments.

Sure vetinari understands vimes, that's not exceptional. (Except it is, it is, already so few knew him anymore, and now in the past again, having lost everything, everything - but this fresh faced dictator to be. This man who looks into people's souls and then gives vimes a double look).

But who really gets vetinari? Who else looks at children playing with garbage and sees the arteries of a world that could, must be? Who looks at pisstained ruins and sees the schools that will be built overlayed with every grueling step it will take to get there? Who's only weapon and only constraint is his own flesh and time, too much time, never enough time? Who has a Duty to The city beyond religious, ordained by the creator of their universe, something above gods and yet far, far beneath them.

Vimes doesnt need someone to direct his life. He's never needed that. Except holy shit he does, he definitely does, he needs a whole fucking support team but hes making less than minimum wage now. Give him something, anything to believe in.

Vetinari doesn't need to be believed in . He's never needed that. But he is still a man, and whoooo booooooy it is a heady thing to be trusted so recklessly, especially by someone like him, who mistrusts everything.

take that late canon Synergy, break it apart and then put it back together with a little bit more breathing room, a wee less intense power dynamics...!

Anyway they're friends. Best friends. By default possibly, since they don't have any other ones, but still. Two friends with souls too weathered for the lives their bodies have lived, bodies which are, at least at one point, and I'm not joking, teenage guys.

...

I just think they're neat.

...

Is it homerotic? Well first we have to remember that Samuel Vimes is doing Bad. We remember that? Ok. Now, let me ask you - is vimes the type of depressed that masturbates to feel something, or the type of depressed that cannot fathom human contact without pain. Exactly. It's like the cat that's both in the box and not or whatever. Sometimes one of them will be laying on the ground staring at the sky through the ceiling and the other will come and lay down next to him and their fingers will lightly brush against eachother and it will be the singular most intimate moment of not just their lives but also the life of the assassin that was watching in confusion from the window.