Happy holidays! And spoiler alert for my FFXIV fanfic! Nero tol Scaeva (right) is a smug, arrogant, ambitious, brilliant magnificent b*stard, hells-bent on becoming the greatest engineer the world has ever seen (frustrated by being seemingly effortlessly thwarted at every turn by his rival since college). Vivienne Urselmert (left) is a cold, angry, stubborn, emotionally-constipated antihero who suffers grievous hardships in silence and slaughters monsters without mercy. Together, they are a match made in… something, considering he started out as a villain and she was very much trying to kill him at the time. After she blew up his boss’s base, he had nowhere to go and began wandering aimlessly, looking for advanced ancient technology to tinker with, occasionally ping-ponging off of the heroes and usually sort of helping them. He woos her sarcastically and she snaps back defensively, until those rare moments when one or another of them drops their walls (shockingly, often Nero first) and does or says something sincerely genuine. Apologies if it still doesn’t make sense to you, but it makes me laugh so I drew it.

Vivienne I traced from a screenshot, obviously, so drawing her was actually pretty easy. Nero… I had to piece together from several screenshots, mostly from that one Omega quest where he puts his armour on to fight alongside you. And boy did I regret it. Dude has way too much detail! I called him so many names while I was drawing this… all affectionate of course… /s… I was originally going to make the background purple because it’s Vivienne’s colour, but green contrasts better and makes Nero look Christmassy. The background pattern is from this site: Image by macrovector on Freepik, I just wanted to have a little something to pretty it up.

The aftermath of Nero’s attempted flirting:

Someone’s a tsundere all right.

Now I just need to get these printed and mailed! I am still working on my Europe trip blogs and my Halloween cosplay blogs and the next chapter of my FFXIV fic and a certain Holiday Special (not to mention WORK) but this has taken precedence this week. I’m sure you understand.