Everybody Lies

(They aren't her nightmares. That's the worst thing about them, that they don't belong to her, there's no reason they should be forced on her, it's not fair that she should be paying for the things her parents did, as if bad dreams could be passed down through blood like her mother's dark hair and her father's thin face.)

She's asleep in her armchair, not her bed--the beds are too big and have too many fluffy blankets, and she's aware of how small she looks sleeping in them--with her arms over her face. For the last few moments now she's been making sucking, gasping noises, as if she were underwater and out of air.

(She's aware she lies, aware of everything she's been taught. Linden was a servant, Morgause was the queen, and as they were always perfectly correct (if there were any values of correct that fit the domain and range of their house) it was years before she realised she was his daughter, that her father wasn't the mysterious lover her mother had had back in the place they lived before, where Leonato was born. And even then she hardly understood what it meant. There were no fathers: Leonato had none: Hero the maid's husband had died somewhere else. Linden practised inconspicuousness, blending into rooms when he entered them, always mild and friendly and hidden.

Their household is cobbled and patchworked and made up of orphans. She knows that. People with no homes and no parents.

All they have is the bad inheritance left to them. Nightmares and cruelty, wounds and lies, her mother's slender magic, Leonato's grave bearing--Linden's eyes, always bruised with sleeplessness, and Hero's wistful smiling, the way she took them walking when they were younger and brought them home with baskets of olives and dust-stained clothes, and the way she always thinks of Morgause as the Lady, not the mother, and whatever it was that made them come to Italy that nobody ever talks about but left something bitter and sad as a residue on everything in their house--)

She begins to sob.

Typist
Name: Soujin
Contact: rainbowjehan@gmail.com

Character
Full Name: Magdalen Kohlrabi
Parents: Linden Kohlrabi; Queen Morgause.
Fandom(s): Fly by Night; Arthurian legend.
Approximate Age: Twenty-one.
Approximate Time Period: Approximately nineteenth-century.


History: She was not supposed to be born, given that her mother was an Older Woman; but for that matter, her mother was not supposed to take up with her hired assassin. Linden was all for naming the baby Sagebush, but one thing he was not for was raising her himself--he was more than a little screwed up by his own parents, and was not remotely comfortable with screwing up his own child, at least not until she was about five. Her mother was not really interested in the child-rearing process, either, so Magdalen got passed off to Morgause's maid, Hero, and was raised with Hero's son Leonato, her elder by about six or seven years.

Her parents did choose to make life weird for her as she got older, particularly Linden, who couldn't leave well enough alone to save his life--dead charming, yes, very smart, yes, but not emotionally stable by a long shot, all his input only served to make Magdalen less comfortable with him, herself, and her mother. Morgause tended to ignore her, although every now and then she would interfere, much as she did for all her children, in ways that were less than helpful.

Personality: Magdalen has her mother's loneliness and emotionally manipulative streak, her father's nightmares and guilt complex, and a sense of self that is highly defective. She finds it hard to trust anyone, with the exception of Leonato, to whom she is deeply attached. She will not hesitate to mess with people's heads if she doesn't feel secure, and she doesn't feel secure very often at all.

PB: Indira Varma
Journal: warmheart

Sample Post: N/A