*sucks in painful breath*

Oh gods, can you imagine him in the cavern seeing all the trolls and dwarfs frozen in time, sitting back to back, united in death. Can you just imagine the thought process he goes through, slow and terrible like an avalanche, but not because it’s hard, but because it hurts. This isn’t hard for him to process because he knows, he’s done the same thing. He’s sat back to back with a dwarf in a freezing meat locker and felt his life begin to slip away while still trusting the dwarf would save him…he knows that dwarves and trolls can be friends because there’s a headstone in the cemetery of the Small Gods with his fingers worn into the top like weather worn grooves it should have taken centuries to form.

It hurts to know that he could have had his dwarfish friend for longer, if only people had known, if only they’d known, so much hatred could have been avoided, so much war, if only they’d known…and he knows it’s wrong, he knows it’s stealing when he reaches down to take a piece of the ground and tucks it inside his breastplate and Mister Vimes would likely go spare, but there’s a headstone back in the cemetery of Small Gods that has waited for this moment and it’s a Trollish tradition to leave precious rocks at the burial site of a loved one and there’s nothing more precious than this, this sacred space where peace was forged not out of an inferno, but from the gentle understanding that All things strive.

Even though death is inevitable and hardship unavoidable. All things strive, if only we’d let them…

He doesn’t take without giving though, so he finds a quiet moment to pry one of his teeth free and deposits the diamond into the outstretched hand of a stone faced dwarf, careful not to break the ancient fingers. It feels like a paltry thing, compared to what this place has given him. But it’s something.

Cheri knows of course, she knows all about Cuddy. She’d found out after Detritus had made it his personal mission to keep her safe at all times, not because she can’t, but because he can.

Because all things strive, no matter how many times those in power try to stop it, all things eventually thrive. And it all begins with thinking of the other person as “us” and not “them”. Because we are them, just like they are us, and he thinks he might not be very clever, but he’s clever enough to know that.