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AND AT ONCE I KNEW

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[attr="class","freiwantmid"]CHARACTER FACTION team rocket

[attr="class","freiwantmid"]CHARACTER RANK grunt

[attr="class","freiwantmid"]FACE CLAIM viktor // arcane

[attr="class","freiwanttop"]I WAS NOT MAGNIFICENT

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coffee rings / sleeping through the alarm / eye bags / morning fog / the creep of dusk / climbing ivy / wisteria / organized chaos / empty vials / scattered paperwork / dog-earred books / a well-worn field journal / the burden of memory / impulse purchases / coffee gone cold / morning aches / late nights, early mornings / oil stains from missing picture frames / becoming the misplaced object / rot-gut whiskey / the bruise of never letting go / wedding rings tucked in a drawer / phantom ache / feet dangling off the edge of a precipice / a ghost in the hall [break][break]

deadpan / tired / obsessive / passionate / polite / formal / eccentric / habitual / curious / tinkerer / jaded / equal-opportunity / rambling / opportunistic / melancholic / guilt-stricken / haunted / disillusioned / insomniatic / in disarray / unmoored[break][break]

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You do not have to be good.[break]
You do not have to walk on your knees[break]
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.[break]
You only have to let the soft animal of your body[break]
love what it loves.[break]
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.[break]
Meanwhile the world goes on.[break]


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There is a grit to your teeth the day you come up out of what should have been death, a tearing sort of panic. The thrash and shake of a dog with a gristly piece of meat. You can’t remember, you don’t know (not at first.) There is a name to your face, a hospital room with no one to visit.[break][break]
Call you walking revenant, call you unknown, call you a nightingale cry.[break][break]
Where your memory should be, there is only inky dark. Vague patches and bursts of recollection that cause more confusion than clarity. Bursts of flame and the burning tear of flesh. There’s no ties to crawl back to—only a childhood of empty bottles and heavy hands serves to make up the blueprints of your life in the before. Tough crowds, black eyes and dubious activities to make a living. Nothing glamorous, nothing gold. Or really, whatever is gold is just plated copper.[break][break]
On your own, you tie the strings together. Your mind is a red yarn conspiracy board. The focus is the coming together of You.[break][break]
There is something soft that tugs itself to the forefront. Rises up out of all the muck of your early years. There is shame. There is embarrassment. It cuts through you when you sit in the mandatory group sessions as you put yourself back together. A broken piece of pottery.[break][break]
There are people here who were harmed in service to others. There are people who lived normal lives, people who made something of themselves. Next to them, you’re like the gum on the bottom of someone’s shoe. What good do you have to contribute? You had one good thing, and you lost it. There was something–someone who strung your days together. Drew you back down from interplanetary orbit into the solidity of their gravitational pull.[break][break]
And you can find them, right? You can find them if only you can leave.[break][break]
Call you bright-mouthed, call you bettered, call you all the things you always wanted to be.[break][break]
Nothing gold stays.[break][break]
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Nothing gold stays.[break][break]
It all ends with a crack that explodes in the dark. One big burst of exploding light against the nighttime backdrop. It’s loud like a thunderclap, the lash like lightning. When you finally make your way home, free of the facility you’ve been bound to, there is nothing left to find. Empty rooms, dust on the countertops.[break][break]
They flicker into view in the eye of your imagination, spun in fabricated elaboration. Illuminated in the brightness. Glowing and angelic. Brittle and human. Then they drop and it all collapses shatters—[break][break]
breaks[break][break]
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Call you tenderfoot, call you lamb heart, call you an open wound that won’t close.[break][break]
You are now skittish in a renewed way. Jumpy and erratic more than you’ve never been before. Or perhaps, in a way you’ve never expressed. It makes you cagey, makes you angry and raw and so much, so much, so much.[break][break]
They wouldn’t just leave you, right? Right? But no amount of looking, or checking in all of the places you know, with all of the embassy officials you can hound reveals them to you. And so, it only affirms the fear that has taken root in your mind. Grief sets in, ugly and unkind, and there is only the work you were doing to distract you. To bury the sense of loss in layers that only pile up. Hide you from the sorry truth: this is on you.[break][break]
Call you yellow-bellied, call you lily-livered, call you coward.[break][break]
There is no abandoning the cause–not entirely, at least. The fragments that remain are pieces you gather, cradled in knicked palms. The sting is payment for the fear that makes you snap like a cornered animal when you think of severing the cord that keeps you tethered to Rocket.[break][break]
Because what else do you have but this?[break][break]
You traded your stability for the chance to reach further, only to plummet back to ear. Melted wax and crumpled wings. An impulse that didn’t pay off in the way that it should have. In the way that you’d hoped.[break][break]
You feel like a lit barrel of gunpowder, only the fuse is so long no one can see the ignition coming from miles away. Closing yourself off hides the powder residue staining your skin, and you think maybe this is it— you were never built for a family you don’t deserve. So desperate to preserve it that you destroy it. When all you ever really should be is alonealonealonealone, lonely alone.[break][break]
But you’re selfish, you’re jealous for the way it was before. The revenant of what you lost slips through your fingers and lingers at the edges of your dreams. It aches, and you wish for that sleep, but sleep can hardly pin you down. You would have stayed into those hollow rooms, void of warmth, forever if you could have. But work calls you to Hoenn, and so you go. You plant yourself somewhere new and try to make it the same. It is not the same, it is never the same, and it never will be. Maybe you’re the specter now, drifting through your days with the consistency of work dragging you out into the world.[break][break]
Call you prodigal, call you a wayward soul, call you an empty house looking to be a home.
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- raised in kanto, is half-galarian on his father’s side. mother is kantonian. [break]
- highly educated, very curious. degrees in biology, phd in toxicology?[break]
- worked in a science facility as a researcher, but in a chance opportunity, agreed to be a rocket informant for access to more research opportunities (yikes.)[break]
- assumes that his partner, adele veronesi, was killed during the kantonian takeover when he was unable to locate them anywhere. (surprise!!)[break]
- leg and side were savaged by an aggressively trained houndoom to a severe extent at some point during a skirmish amid the takeover. was eventually discharged due to these injuries, but spent a considerable amount of time cooped up. relocated to hoenn during recovery to continue working discreetly for rocket.[break]
- during this time, he reverted from using 'veronesi' back to 'bishop'. Both because it was painful to keep, and out of discretion.[break]
- remains due to curiosity for the regional anomalies, but is also reluctant to move because he is stagnant and steeped in grief.[break]
- requires use of a leg brace and cane to retain mobility; pretty regularly in pain.[break]
- has a decently severe aversion/fear to houndour and houndoom as a result, save for (1) he's raised from infancy in order to study the toxins in its saliva. it's the only one he will trust, and even then, there's still a degree of wariness.[break]
- continues to work as an informant for rocket, though also occasionally works on low-intensity assignments. surprisingly pretty good at skulking about, eavesdropping, and acquiring info.[break]
- might seem flighty and scatterbrained from the general state of his disarray, but he's not.[break]
- might also lowkey sell toxins and their antidotes to interested parties on occasion.[break]
- has disgruntlements with both factions, and is generally pretty jaded about it all. if you expect him to have a sense of injustice or hatred toward one group for what has happened to him, don't. [break]
- resides in mossdeep where he has a nice little brownstone that he doesn't really like to leave.[break]