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 Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 8:54 pm
we did not make ourselves.trigger warnings: possible mention of suicide, self-harm.solo & general drp thread for the following characters:
Alexander Thorne | Maeve Hargrave-Carstairs | Skye Walker | ...
feel free to post text message d/rps to this thread or general drps with thorne & co if you're interested in a response. otherwise, this will be mostly drp solos for the crew.
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Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 8:56 pm
summer '99 thorne.
There is a memory in you, visceral, and sometimes you think that it shapes the foundations of who you are.
It is a memory that carries the scent of rain. A world on the verge of collapse. You remember watching as the sky in the distance darkened above the tree line, the wind blowing the trills of a storm across the miles and miles that separate it and you. You had been escaping in the back yard, kicking your bare feet through the dirt and grass, your fingers hooked into the car tire swing. Too young, too gangly, the bruises welting on your summer-slick skin, you looked at the sky and wanted it to swallow you whole. You remember knowing that you could escape it. You could outrun it if you wanted. Back to the house that burned down. Back to your brother and his faraway eyes and your mother and her strong jaw, the stubborn set of her shoulders against the world she was at war with. And your father – oh, your father. Who smelled of whiskey and hated or loved you depending on the day.
But you only waited. You watched. You listened as the storm approached, as the rain sliced through the air and over your skin until you were doused, until you were shaking and soaked and completely overwhelmed.
You could have run, but you didn’t. You could have left, but you stayed instead.
Why did you stay?
Sometimes you wonder that now, your fingers ghosting the skin of someone close to you. Someone that could get closer if you let them. Someone that could hurt you. Someone that could kill you, because it might be written in the stars that that’s how your story is supposed to go.
So why do you stay?
Because I’m afraid that if I run, I’ll never stop, you think sometimes, Because I’m afraid, and I don’t want to be anymore.
And the ghost of your mother laughs in your head.
And whispers, whispers sweet nothings in your ear.
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Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 8:58 pm
spring '16 thorne.
When you were ten, you watched a dog get beaten until it learned to bite back. Until it was so afraid that it became violent, it knew nothing but violence, how to bite any wandering hand.
Maeve told you that to people raised on poison, harm was a comfort, and then she said it was from a poetry book, but the bags under her eyes sang a different story.
She’s not here, anymore. To tell you those things.
The alley crawls with the scent of blood and bruises and sweat, the heat reaping any easy breath from the air. You don’t remember what you said to start a fight – what they said to rile you. You only remember this: your knuckles against their cheek, flecks of red in the air, and the sound of sirens in the distance chasing them off. Chasing you back into yourself.
Filthy mongrel, the memory, no longer reduced to static, snaps in your head with the wrong voice, the wrong face, know your place.
So you’ve run. So you’ve come all the way out here. So you’ve clawed your way through the military, through helping people the way you’ve always wanted. And now, finally, the past is catching up with you, and all you can remember is the approaching storm. The dog at the end of its chain, fangs flashing, fear in its eyes. You’ve run and you’re here, but it’s no good. It’s no good. Monster blood, you think. You can’t outrun the blueprints in your veins.
You close your eyes and let your body sink back against the alley wall, still damp with the aftermath of a summer storm. You press your knuckles to your mouth and pray, and pray, and pray.
To a god you don’t believe in.
To whoever might listen.
To yourself, most of all, because you know in the end, it is you.
It is not your ghosts, it is not the past, it is not the men and women who ran it, who pressed their dirty fingers into it and wrenched it apart.
It is you. Just you.
And you are terrified of yourself.
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Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 9:00 pm
spring '16 thorne.You try to forget who you are the first five days in dive bars, in motel rooms and alley floors. On the sixth day, you run your hands over the sharpened edges of yourself. You cut yourself on its edges. Memories bleed into one another, until it is almost too much to bear, until the bottle seems like a good idea, until you are on one end of a phone call reaching out, reaching out.
“Do you remember,” you say into the phone when he picks up, “the first time she bought us firecrackers?”
There is a pause, a burst of static. And then a soft sigh.
“We were so afraid,” Tenzing says, “We were so afraid he was going to come home from his business trip early and find us.”
“We ran with them all night though. He never showed. You wanted to kill me, I wouldn’t ******** stop.”
A laugh, sardonic. “No. You were ravenous about the idea of being free.”
“Only you would use the word ravenous.”
You shift, tensing as another wave of nausea bursts over you. The panic set in hours ago, but it’s left and left you shaking, left you curled beside your bed between the tacky furniture and the wall, the only light in the room the flashing red of a DVD player waiting to be used.
“Esen,” Tenzing says, and it is your name – the name she gave you - repeated that snaps you back, “What’s wrong?”
Esen. The name snaps you back to the years before Ashdown, the years spent in Academy, in high school, on couches that weren’t your own because you were too afraid to go home. But you had to. All roads eventually led back.
“Tell me,” you say instead, “Tell me a story. Anything. Tell me something, Tenzing. I just… I can’t sleep.” You laugh, and it’s sick and humorless. “I can’t sleep, that’s it…”
Tenzing says something too quietly for you to hear. And there is a whisper of sound and a scuffle. A door closing. You hear the creak of a chair leaning back. And then Tenzing speaks, and it is nothing but stories of your youth together. Your first time in church, the time you’d both gone to the 4th of July parties down at the waterfront for your birthday. The dog that she’d wanted to keep but couldn’t. The cat that hid under the porch. The summer-sick months when she’d gotten sick. The plane ride to Georgia. You’d played chess so much you’d both gotten sick of it.
“Esen,” Tenzing says again hours later, his voice cracking but quiet, calmer than you ever had any chance of pretending to be, “I’m going to come and see you.”
“Not now,” there is a soft trill of fear in your voice – you don’t want Tenzing to see you like this. More than that, you don’t want him to be – to be involved. In this. In you. In what you’re becoming. “Later. But not now. Just give me time, Tenzing. I’m trying, I swear I am.”
And Tenzing runs through a sigh, and you can imagine his expression on the other end. But all he says is, “I know you are. But you don’t have to do it alone.”
And then he picks up again, where he left off. Until the dreams become static. Until there is nothing on the other side but darkness, but the distant embers of a flame going out. And she laughs and tugs at your hair, and Tenzing grins at you, thirteen and unsullied by the world. And your father… he is gentler, and wears the right face. Not the face of a man you are trying to learn to love.
Not the face of someone that has never hurt you in this life that you know.
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Posted: Sat May 28, 2016 9:02 pm
summer '04 thorne.
“One day,” Maeve says, her hands reaching to the endless stars above them, “We’ll run away from this town.”
You look at her and she is gorgeous. She is gorgeous in the way that teenage girls are, deadly with boredom, wicked with their learnings, their newfound freedom. Their desire to consume the world bit by bit.
“You think so?” You ask her. Your voice is hoarse. She doesn’t ask why.
“You don’t?” She looks at you wild-eyed. “All those years spent dreaming, and you’re not even going to reach out and try?”
“It’s not that easy.”
“Yes, it is.”
You sit up and glare at her, but she only turns her eyes back to the stars. Back to the endlessness of the world beyond their reach. Everything that they will never be able to touch, to love, to embrace. A car rattles in the distance, something old, something from another time. You watch as it passes, headlights cutting a path into the dark. Going somewhere. Maybe close. Maybe far away. Maybe it will never come back.
God, you wish you could never come back.
Maeve says, “I’m going to show you. I’m going to take you as far away from you as I can. We’ll start over. Get boyfriends. Grow old.”
“You’re dreaming.”
“Yes.” And she laughs, and it turns into something heartbroken. Something that speaks about the ghosts she carries, invisible but just as real as yours. “I am. I am, I am.”
You reach over and touch her hand and she grips it like she’ll fall if she doesn’t. Like you’re her lifeline, but really, she is yours.
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Posted: Tue Jun 07, 2016 7:33 pm
summer '99 thorne.
You're tired. And you're alone.
And thank god you're alone.
The days have bled into one another, a monotonous churn of hospital visits and painkillers and beds that aren't yours and yours alone. But finally, here, now, you are reacquainting yourself with this world, this new, bright, dangerous facet of existence, and it. Is.
Disquieting.
The apartment is empty and rumpled in the way that a space well lived in becomes. The doors are locked and outside, the rain falls down in sheets. It's a summer storm, like the ones back home. And oh, you want to go back home. You want to run away. But you don't. The pain echoes inside you, wounds that tore open and scarred, but it's not that necessarily that is chasing you down, wearing you away.
The you, at least, in pictures. The you that is etched into this an entire apartment, from the paintings to the cat to the bed to the kitchen. Your hands itch, restless. You close your eyes and smell smoke. Smoke and summer air, a grassy field curving into the winds of a storm. Your father, his smile, his trust fund money, his fists and his laughter. And you could have loved him, you did, you did. But that didn't last.
Just like everything, that didn't last.
Slowly, you tread into the empty space in front of the windowed wall. Watch sparrows thrashing through the air outside, searching for a safe haven. You are surrounded by canvases, by would-be pieces of art. Commissions for people that will never know anything about you but the curve of your brush. You've always loved art because it speaks for you, and behind it, you can hide. Anonymity always tasted good on your lips and sometimes you miss it so much that it sends you running into the night, until your breath is burning in your lungs. Until the highway sounds are a lure, pulling and pulling and pulling at your strings.
Don't put down roots, your mother once told you, it will trap you. It will trap you like it always does.
You sit down and look up at the unfinished painting you've been pouring your heart into for the past few weeks, all of the energy that you feel reverberate in the edges of your fingertips on sleepless nights. The cat watches you from her perch on the windowsill, eyes aglow like pinpoints of light in the dark.
The shrikes are falling, or flying, or hunting. They are wild and untamed. They impale their prey on the thorns beneath them. And then they are impaled themselves. The thorns twist and turn, feathery and malignant, hungry and devouring, full of wings and beaks and white, white bone.
A cycle.
It is a cycle.
What are you trying to say? you think, restless, feeling trapped, feeling the cage sliding down. Your legs work but your body rebels, and you cannot run. You cannot do anything right now but sit and wonder, and burn and burn and burn.
Your fingers slide gently over the thorns that are not thorns and the birds that are not birds.
"Still incomplete," you say to yourself, and you sound angrier than you'd thought you would.
You stand up. And you start again.
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