Talk rarepairs to me

anon you are opening my pandora’s box. first of all im a multishipper and it takes very little for me to be like “yeah i could ship that” and muir gives us a book full of characters i can point at and say “gay” so im a kid in a candy store

right now i have an extremely niche set of rair pairs i am interlocking in my head. this all has pretty much 0 canon context but im having fun. so hear me out on something i diehard shipped in gtn: judith/marta. immediately shipped it on my first time reading gtn and we’re finally up to 5 whole fics in the tag.

the two most recent ones here and here captured pretty much the dynamic i had imagined for them

before i say anything: marta dyas is 100% my favorite minor character and i have a Lot of Feelings about her and i ship her and judith in gtn. i really like the dynamic of them both being ‘perfect’ soldiers but they allow a level of comfort around each other that they can’t have with anyone else. it’s so obvious that they have an implicit trust between each other and that marta would follow judith anywhere and judith is totally confident in the fact that marta will have her back. and the fact that tamsyn muir says that if cytherea hadn’t showed up, no one but ianthe would have become lyctorhood, i can reasonably believe a scene where judith would be forced to choose between gaining ultimate power to enter the emperors service as lyctor and marta, our perfect necromantic soldier would choose marta.

i think this ship could get really interesting with just how different the seconds necro-cav relationship is. again, the second necromancer’s specialty is the opposite of the eighths. while the eighth drains their cav like a battery, the second is said to augment a cavalier. i am so curious about the science behind it, and im assuming it works sorta like the final fight scene in gtn when harrow gets in gideons head and talks to her. i wanna see judith give marta some gogo juice so she can kick ass. in my head i view it as a pacific rim type “drift compatible” thing and i believe in the inherent eroticism fighting in sync with someone and trusting them more than you trust yourself, knowing them better than you know yourself.

i would just love to see that specific dynamic and power between marta and judith. and just a side note but i can imagine they got paired together pretty young like isaac and jeannemary, and i think that’s a skill they’d develop over time. i can imagine when they first got paired marta could see judith as nervous/bossy and i could for sure see judith struggle to trust marta at first, but i really want to see how they developed into the unified team they presented at canaan house.

now for the angst. marta dyas is 100% a person who would die for something she believed in, and i think it’s very clear that she believes in judith. marta followed judith’s lead unquestionably and it was judith who made the call to fight teacher and signal the emperor: a call that directly led to marta getting killed. that scene where judith refuses medical attention and tells them to help marta, who is obviously dead, just kills me every time. judith refusing to leave marta’s body and her line where she says “no one should have to watch their cavalier die” had me choked up so bad tbh.i think that’s a decision judith has to live with in htn and i think it is really going to change her in some way.

as for ships with them in htn, i like the idea of judith/coronabeth etl arc and i really like the idea of dulcinea/marta (yes i said dulcinea/marta) in the afterlife. i have a whole mental storyline of how those relationship arcs would go but for the sake of brevity ill stop here lol. i have a lot of feelings about these characters tho