this isn't in that list of Qs but you said gourd was obsessed with fray. TELL ME MORE

THE frayknower asks….SORRY for the late answer and for the fact this is going to be uber convoluted head sauce. also to fray because it’s kind of gnarly for him and selfish on gourd’s part though there’s no way for it to not be. world’s most co-opted corpse of all time

OK to preface gourd spends all of the time from the Calamity to post-SB in a bizarre and extreme denial of the fact that the band of mercenaries that raised him (bar one, who vanished) all got blown up at cartenau. he essentially “convinces” himself they’re still alive and had just been delayed in their return, which is why he takes off run circles around eorzea. you don’t have to recieve bad news or be left alone waiting for your loved ones if you run first right—so he does and maintains this thought that he still has a place to belong, that he’ll eventually return to, and everything will return to the way it was. cue years of stagnating as a person, not wanting to find his own selfhood, and refusing to form any deeper and lasting bonds with other people because he didn’t want to change and shatter this illusion. he’s polite, distant, tells nobody anything, and lives life as (to himself) a passive observer who also thinks it’d be fine if he just died somewhere along the road and never Found Out. he also thinks he has an obligation to live, like his life doesn’t belong to himself but to the imagined person he was. BUT ALSO obviously it’s not like he can actually fully convince himself of the trick and all of this is really just a very thick muffler cased around a self that can’t help but be curious, to desire, to judge, to change and to be changed by others and to crave survival.

SO it’s heavensward and he finds a dead guy in the brume, our beautiful fray, and in my canon fray’s individuated soul still holds on to his body and crystal pretty much locked in the seconds before their death, so: REALLY juiced up on adrenaline, bleeding hatred, desperation, bitterness, and the animal terror of dying. it’s everything gourd doesn’t know how to feel but needs to feel and he pulls fray’s soul into his. in a near instant they converge and you get Repression Man fusing thoughts and emotions with Bleeding Man and gourd feels sooo alive at the moment fray is shocked breathless and confused in the impossible untethering from his self. he essentially steals the terror of fray’s death to feel alive.

and fray is perfect. fray is gut-wrenchingly attractive to him, to start, whatever that says about him. fray is angry at and for him for things he’d never think to be angry about. fray wants him to run and live in a way that only another person can want for another, and he knows it’s true every time. fray finds his existence unfair, just like he does. fray forgives him. fray desperately longs to return to those they loved; they are waiting for him. fray already knows everything about him. and fray is unattainable. he is dead. but he is a whole other person and he can desire them as much as he wants without breaking the spell, because (in his mind) for everything he feels and wants, it has nowhere to go in the world where it can be seen and made real.

BUT OF COUARARSEEE it’s not that simple because fray’s thoughts and memories and feelings slowly trickle and flood back in as the raw fear of death and seperation subsides. and fray also puts a lot of his problems on gourd; he has a very “it was hideous to die like that only to have someone like you, ridiculously strong and touched by gods, stroll in a bell later and do the impossible, when all my anguish and everyone I have ever known could not change a thing” view of the situation. fray lived their whole life really craving the power to save anything and change anything and only in death and bound to someone else’s soul does he get it. fray plays out the fantasy of being able to escape his lot through him. fray can’t understand his passivity, struggles to reconcile their experiences with the fondness gourd has for the world, and wants this (what he initally thought was) child of god to forgive him too for being afraid and wanting to live and wanting to run in those final moments. and of course neither of them can hide a single thing for each other.

so they coexist in this miasma of nine trillion contradictions and gourd, guilty and obsessed, thinking of himself as an interloper, comes to want to give his life to fray the more he knows about him. it’s like, perfect to him. he can exchange his ghost of a life for someone else’s vivid one, who actually really wants to live and has people to return to, and he can do it content, having been given the opportunity to experience feelings he honestly thought he never would though fray. besides, he stole him anyway. and of course fray is like wtf wrong with you man. but at the same time the 2guys1brain means he gets it, he has to. and also gourd knows it’s true that fray, when all the pain of his death fades, knows he doesn’t want that and and GOURD has to understand that too. it’s a really weird experience. guy intent on living in his own isolated one man suddenly does the unthinkable of sharing body mind heart and soul with someone else.

anyway it’s really fucked up for sid and rielle too because he lets fray take the wheel sometimes suddenly but hasn’t explained anything (he does to rielle later) & kind of leeches off communions with sid just to attain more pieces of fray’s life. like their face. he never removed the helmet, he doesn’t know what fray looks like and the body is way decomposed by no, so he used sid’s memory to reconstruct it while sid had no idea why this random dude appeared covered in fray dust and constantly brings hom up and apparently has his soul stone and apparition popping out sometimes. sorry for feeling human vicariously through the tulpa of your dead best friend