well apparently angst is in the air today and it bit me too so

i've always examined vince vs jay from his own perspective but what do pule and verica even think.

edit post-writing this: oh this is a hot pile of half-formatted brain vomit. click the read more at your own risk. my goal was to get my thoughts straight, and i did, and now this is a mess and i'm not fucking fixing it

pule did his grieving while he was still human, i think. he never did expect to see jay again, but once he remembers the worst period of his fucking life while sitting next to the two (well, 1.9) people who notable weren't there for it, it's... well, a shock is putting it lightly, i imagine. they know his name, they have the right vibes that, despite the fact he'd never felt them as human like he could now as a warframe with transference, just fit - mostly. not all of it is correct, but enough is, and the second he manages to ask if it's jay, he gets swiftly but gently corrected, that, well, yes, but also it's vince now.

once he finds out Why it's vince now, pule struggles hard with being confronted with the walking, breathing truth of accidentally getting his best friend actually killed for a while still. part of the grieving process gets reset entirely, and as friend fashion show has pointed out so excellently, it does do pule a lot of good to hang out a lot with others (bruiser, notably) that he doesn't have a painful shared past with. the threads he dropped with jay are easy to pick back up with vince, though: sharing old jokes and making new ones referencing stuff only they know, ways of thinking that are still almost identical after years of close friendship, etc. they grew together for a significant formative period of their lives, and that still affects just how suited to be each other's friend they are.

verica has a more complex headspace around this. she actively searched for him, knowing that he hadn't died but instead had become a warframe, even though he stopped pinging on the orokin radars even before she got apprehended and warframe'd herself. there's such a huge chance that he's dead, but dammit, if anyone can do the impossible, it should be the mathematician who'd managed to put a pencil into a pocket dimension between solid reality & the poisonous void. and she's... partially right.

when she wakes up on kelth's orbiter, she's going to think the idiot before her is jay. he'd done it, he'd managed to come back from the dead, and found her scattered clues. and, well, we know it isn't really jay anymore. he doesn't even confess the whole thing, at first - he just says, well, i go by vince now. and she rolls with it completely because why wouldn't she. it's only when the cracks start to show, both in his behaviour and in one certain scene between the three of them that i'm sure i'll die two and a half times while writing before i'll get it just right, that she actually realises that Nope, Not Jay. Not Like That Anymore.

she struggles with even just accepting it in her head, at first - he's so much like jay, pinging Correct in so many little ways, but he's Not, calling him by that name hurts him, and thinking of him as jay is wrong for the person vince is now. she goes through the period of grief she hadn't allowed herself even before everything.

and now, all three of them are in the same space, grieving the shit that happened to them, that one of them had to die, but at least they now have each other again. for reasons mentioned before, bonds with vince are built up extremely fast, and they quickly get to the same level of friendship they were at with jay. they go beyond, even - vince needs them more than jay did, even if he might not want to phrase it like that to not force them into anything, but they respond to it in kind. one of the consequences of the way warframes are fundamentally changed, made more rigid and less flexible, from humans in my lore makes it so that they will seek out familiarity at ridiculous costs. removing the memories from fresh frames was a fix for that by the orokin, but you can't just make something Rigid/Inflexible, apply a Change, and expect it to not eventually pop back into its original shape like memory foam.

pule & verica is also an interesting initial dynamic, i think. pule feels guilty for, well, everything - he's still under the impression that he'd gotten ghosted for life, and the fact that the warframe he'd been glaring at from the corner of his eyes, the one that had looked way too much like the recently-vanished artist octavia to be anything like a respectful tribute, had actually been her all along and he hadn't even bothered to look into it- he does struggle with it. of her own part, verica's shocked to see him at all, didn't realise that he'd whole ass up and volunteer for the program if she also disappeared, didn't realise that sitting down and letting herself grieve with him had also been an option. i imagine she does also initially carry some guilt over this, though she gets over hers significantly faster than pule does, both because it's just Less Significant Levels of Guilt & because she's just way more prone to Alright Oops Let's Move On than he is (hi. musician who's been in public about it here. making mistakes & moving on like nothing happened is a Necessary & Learned Skill. show must go on & all that)

i think pule would initially expect her to be hostile towards him, after he gets over the shock of "holy shit you're a warframe too? holy shit you're That Warframe? i was never ghosted on purpose??". but 1. even if she did have the right to get hostile, which she knows she doesn't, it wouldn't do anything, and 2. buddy friend we're still here after everything why would i be mad about getting this second chance at life. i've already lost my other friends and family and everything from that life, just let me hang on to you and this other idiot with all the strength left in me.

anyway, that's how the three of them become inseparable on an almost-physical level. a true triad. they get a shared bedroom and sleep together in a pile and everything. you'll find out