extended notes: S11 au

[sword_logic]

S11 au headcanon masterpost! plus some worldbuilding/inspo stuff so essentially this is a glorified A/N

first off, huge shoutout to @anneapocalypse for putting together the halo/rvb merged timeline, which is really neat and EXTREMELY helpful!

i’m going to start off with the “how i got halo canon and rvb canon to work together” headcanons — halo is super, super important to me and i honestly cannot separate it from rvb no matter how hard i try, so a lot of S11 au has been herding cats, except it’s been more like trying to fit 50 screaming, clawing cats into a paper bag.

anyways:

• armor was honestly my biggest obstacle, unfortunately. imo it’s one of the biggest ‘limitation of the medium’ things about rvb, since it’s machinima, and you can’t separate the characters from the armor, but the issue with that is that no one in rvb could possibly be a spartan. no one. so therefore, no one should be wearing mjolnir armor. alas, limitation of the medium, still at square one.
• anyways, there’s literally no way in hell wash and maine should be able to get their armor on and off with ease. a more likely explanation would be that everyone is wearing the spartan-III SPI armor, which can be taken off without a literal assembly line, but, Yet Again, see point 1
• so basically, i just handwaved the entirety of armor as it exists in halo. rvb has made mention of getting armor on and off and stuff so this is where i had to clench my teeth and just let it go
• i took a HUGE amount of inspo for chorus from the kilo-five trilogy, and especially (obviously) the parts detailing life on venezia as a “get the unsc off my lawn” colony world. a lot of the planning for this fic took place before S12 aired and clearly a lot of it’s been jossed, but whatevs, right?
• specifically i drew a lot off of how new tyne as a center of population is described -- don’t trust your neighbors, don’t trust anyone who smells like unsc, always be armed, etc. etc. etc.; a city that has its own rhyme and reason and rules, a place that’s open to outsiders if they’re the right kind of outsiders, if they’re the right kind of suspicious
• i can’t believe i forgot to mention this, but the borderlands series (and specifically borderlands 2) was also a huge, huge inspiration to me, as a story about a planet that refuses to be tamed
• the chorus trilogy in canon is actually pretty similar to the overarching plot in the borderlands games (and especially so with some of the stuff that happened in S13) so there’s a lot about it that resonates really well with rvb
• (first and foremost, the humor)
• i drew a lot off of pandora and elpis for how i set up chorus, since people are either a) thrill-seekers who ended up on the planet, b) the people who got abandoned when the dahl corporation ended their mining efforts, or c) hyperion corporation trying to “restore” “order” while exploiting natural resources and uh, committing genocide
• basically: a backwater planet that got swept under the rug and then, upon “rediscovery,” fought back with everything it has 

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and character/AU-centric headcanons:

• wash is 36 years old, born on earth in 2520
• he was supposed to attend corbulo academy of military science, but after the battle of circinius iv in 2526 and the subsequent glassing of the planet, he attended the military academy on luna instead 
• his mother was high-ranking military, syrian; his father was a civilian engineer contracted to work for the UNSC, spanish/north african; both died in service during the human-covenant war
• maine is 34 years old, born on harvest in 2522
• he and his parents escaped harvest shortly before it got glassed, though he doesn’t remember much
• he’s sámi, though he doesn’t remember much of the language or the culture, since everything changed so much after harvest. his father enlisted immediately after the battle of harvest, and was KIA when maine was 17; maine and his dad both enlisted once maine turned 18 (i.e., shortly after the death of his father), and his dad was KIA when maine was 20
• wash is 6′0″, broad-shouldered and broad-chested, generally stocky, looks taller than he actually is
• he’s got a stocky build, but he’s mostly lean muscle -- quick, precise, flexible
• maine is 6′11″ and just huge – the kind of huge that the first thing you register when you see him isn’t ‘tall,’ it’s ‘big,’ and it’s only after that that you realize he can’t fit through doorways
• maine’s so fucking Big that it impacts his range of motion, his muscles literally prevent him from being able to do certain things (eg., touching his thumb to the same shoulder)
• i knew someone like this, it’s mildly terrifying
• also, maine is the “i’m not tall, you’re just short” type of person
• wash is asexual, no specifics on romo
• maine is nb, he/him pronouns, and “i don’t care” in terms of romo/sexuality
• re: maine’s speech 
• (to preface – i’m not trying to say that nonverbal maine is incorrect or anything! this is just my takeaway from my background knowledge + what canon’s given us)
• so for starters, when we speak, we pass air through our vocal folds (voice box), and then direct the “shape” of that air using our tongue, teeth, and lips to make all the different speech sounds we make – so if maine got shot in the throat, then technically speaking, he should be 100% able to make all speech sounds with tongue/teeth/lips, but the airflow itself would be interrupted because of scar tissue in the throat, making a wheezing/whistling sound, almost like when you have a bad cough, or the stereotypical ‘chain-smoker voice,’ etc
• again, this is absolutely not to say that maine can’t or shouldn’t be nonverbal, but rather this is an explanation of how this kind of injury would affect the ability to form speech sounds; being verbal or nonverbal doesn’t always have to do with whether someone is physically/physiologically capable of making speech sounds.
• therefore, someone who’s used to the particular way maine’s speech sounds sound because of his obstructed airflow (so at this point in canon/in the AU, wash and carolina) should have little to no issue understanding him, and given time, others should be able to understand him too
• moving more into headcanon – maine types often because it gets painful for him to speak for extended periods of time, since your vocal folds are a series of muscles, and scar tissue, as anywhere, makes it more difficult for muscles to work efficiently
• after losing his voice he stopped making any real effort to be talkative; he says what he needs to say, and body language can do the rest for him. he’s got no patience for people who are unwilling to accommodate for him
• maine is a very tactile person and always has been; he’s pretty quick to touch a neutral area (arm, shoulder, etc.) and he’s not very shy about being in someone’s space, though he’s also very careful to not intrude or make people uncomfortable
• wash, on the other hand, is awful at physical contact. it mostly boils down to a) not knowing how to ask for physical contact from someone else (verbally or otherwise), and b) anxiety when it comes to initiating – is this person really going to be okay with it if i touch them? is it okay for me to get in their space right now? what if they don’t like this (even though i’ve done it millions of times)? is this an inappropriate gesture for me to make? what if they think i’m coming onto them (and then they start coming onto me when that’s the worst-case scenario)? etc. etc. ad infinitum
• he’s also just kind of unsure of what to do when offered contact sometimes (most of the time). he does try, though, and eventually, as he gets more comfortable with someone, it gets a little easier to reach out, even though there’s always the underlying irrational fear that he’s doing something wrong or bad or incorrect
• (me? projecting? nonsense.)
• when they share a bed, either wash is big spoon or they face each other and curl up (either is fine by them)
• wash has thick af hair that’s unruly and does whatever it wants; maine has the type of hair that looks fantastic no matter what. helmet hair who?
• on that note, maine grows out his hair because he wants to cover up the meta tattoo – that’s not him, that’s not something that he himself put on his body. he doesn’t need to see it or show it
• for maine, using sign language is a last resort, and most of the time he just signs “can’t speak”/”don’t speak” and leaves it at that, since the sign is so overt that it’s easy for someone who doesn’t know sign language to figure out what’s going on
• i haven’t seen anything in halo canon about sign language other than unsc hand signals but i assume the military has a standardized form (though this is…….. part of a larger issue i have with sci-fi of this type BUT I DIGRESS), so i just went with “universal sign language”/”USL”
• wash is a heavy sleeper – noises, lights, etc. won’t wake him up, but it’s also really hard for him to get to sleep, so it usually takes him a long time to actually fall asleep. the reason he sleeps so little and so poorly because nightmares and/or night terrors usually wake him up every 3 or so hours; he won’t usually wake up if maine’s having a nightmare, but it happens every so often
• maine is a light sleeper, but usually falls asleep (almost) instantly, (almost) anywhere; he wakes up when wash has nightmares, but generally (unfortunately for him) sleeps through his own. usually wash (unintentionally) waking him up because of a nightmare will interrupt his own nightmare, so it kinda works. sort of. maine never begrudges wash for waking him up bc of a nightmare anyways, definitely partially bc maine knows he’ll be asleep again within minutes
• both of them suck at driving. both of them. (wash sucks a little less, and enjoys driving more)
• wash has dyscalculia. his memory is excellent (too excellent), so he remembers the order of events, who/what/how it happened etc. but remembering (or calculating) dates/times/years is something that borders on impossible; he’s awful at judging the passage of time when numbers are involved (has it been 3 minutes? 15? who knows), so he has a lot of timers and stopwatches going on his HUD. when it comes to maps, he lets maine deal with distances in kilometers, and instead judges distances relatively, based on how long x took or how far y felt
• maine knows how to translate wash’s ETAs and knows that he usually overshoots/overestimates (some of the other freelancers did too; carolina, CT, york)
• also goes for estimating distances if he doesn’t have a map/tool/etc. wash is good with cardinal directions but he wouldn’t know whether to say something is 6 meters or 16 meters away 
• (and again, maine/carolina/CT/york/etc know this and how to work with it; caboose clearly couldn’t give a shit whether wash is giving him the right numbers or not, and you’ll pry dyscalculic lavernius “sixteen days? that’s almost two weeks” tucker out of my cold, dead hands)
• (me? projecting? p r e p o s t e r o u s)
• related to the above birthday/family points (and i think i’ve mentioned this before) -- project freelancer only took on candidates without living next of kin. no parents, no grandparents, no siblings. not too hard to come across during the war. it just left the director with that many fewer liabilities; no need for awkward explanations to grieving family members if (when) something went wrong, no need to worry about keeping secrets if no one has family to blab to and keep in touch with.
• carolina, south, and north are the obvious exceptions for obvious reasons, their living family is the reason they’re part of PFL
• this is bouncing off the spartan-III recruitment philosophy -- to make cannon fodder, they kidnapped orphans 
• (also i still haven’t gotten off my ass to watch S14 so i don’t know if this has been nuked by canon, but if it has, uh, i do what i want, so)
• wash absolutely hates people standing behind him or being over his shoulder. usually he’ll just automatically turn and/or move out of the way and position himself so that his back isn’t to anyone, but if someone does catch him with his back turned, it’s a profoundly uncomfortable experiences -- prickling at the back of his neck, crawling skin, even skyrocketing anxiety if he’s in a way.
• maine is very careful about respecting this. never approaches wash from behind (and if he does he makes it clear where he is and what he’s doing), never stands too closely behind him, and absolutely doesn’t initiate any kind of physical intimacy business which would involve this specific discomfort.
• so, if u were to scroll up just a tad, u would notice that sleeping arrangements is “either wash is big spoon or they face each other and curl up,” and that would be precisely for this reason
• anything that doesn’t involve wash being little spoon is a-ok, and it’s not any kind of trust issue thing -- it’s just something that has always made wash uncomfortable, and layered on top is years of military training and experience telling him to watch his back. so, not strictly an anxiety thing, but close enough, and maine respects it completely, which is all that matters to wash.