Post by atticus mikael svenenström on Feb 3, 2012 0:43:13 GMT -6
[atrb=style,width: 500px; background-color: B9B9B9; border: 10px dashed #754A4A; border-right: 15px solid #754A4A; border-left: 15px solid #754A4A; padding: 5px, bTable][th] atticus svenenström fbi agent, law enforcement, nathaniel buzolic | |
 the basics FULL NAME "sven nikola mikkelson" REAL NAME: atticus mikael svenenström AGE & DOB TWENTY-SIX | FEBRUARY 29TH HOMETOWN stockholm, sweden ETHNICITY half swedish, half american LANGUAGES SPOKEN english, swedish/finnish, french SEXUAL ORIENTATION heterosexual HAIR COLOR brown EYE COLOR blue HEIGHT & WEIGHT 6'1 | 180 lbs. DISTINGUISHING MARKS several scars from suicide attempts. tattoos: "all good things come in threes" in swedish on his back, swedish flag on his bicep, bones on the sides of his left fingers. LIKES/DISLIKES likes: sweden, the cold, heavy metal, betting on sports, abusing alcohol and drugs, razor blades, blood, being ignored, mystery, murder mysteries, walking a fine line, medical shows, infomercials, the person he used to be, the past, new york city, his partner, his birthday, knives, fooling everyone, keeping secrets, control. dislikes: getting caught, american soil, mockumentaries, the irish, country music, indian food, crime dramas, confrontation, arguments, hospitals, doctors and therapists, being analyzed, being controlled, being bipolar, taking medication, schedules, guns, the person he's becoming most of all. STRENGTHS/WEAKNESSES strengths: balancing two very dangerous worlds, wearing a mask, getting what he wants. weaknesses: self-mutilator, overly sensitive, easily frustrated, keeps too many secrets, quickly losing control. the list goes on. SECRETS atticus here functions on his secrecy. more accurately, what does he tell the truth about? despite being partners with his best friend, he's been keeping even more from her. like her, he works for the fbi, undercover in the russian bratva. secret enough? he's been falling over the edge for quite sometime, often toying with going dark side completely. he recently committed his first kill in order to keep the verrentenikov family from finding him out. getting messy, this fellow. overcome by his overactive conscious, he dealt with it the only way he'd seen people: out on himself. this marks his first real suicide attempt. he likes to keep his bipolar disorder from people, as well as his dark past with drugs and alcohol. there can only be more. | in depth |
PERSONALITY
"oh, i'm not sure. never thought about it, to be completely honest. too many things have happened. who was i supposed to be? would i be the person i am today? following such logic, i suppose you could say i am a disappointment. my parents lived a legacy. i ruined it. they would have been proud, once. but the people my parents were long disappeared by the time they died. my demons shape everything. bottom line, i try and honour the person i could have been. i am on the quiet side, anyone can tell you. i don't say much, and i have really grown to like being ignored. seriously. the less people are aware of my presence, the better. marloes is better at that sort of thing. i never question myself. if i have a certain feeling, you had better know i follow it. that, people often say, makes me a control freak. i have to be in charge. it works, because people seem to listen. of course i like to do the right thing. i joined law enforcement, didn't i? at the beginning, i wanted to live up to the family name. i just got a little sidetracked is all. i like to think of myself as stable, but we all know that's a lie. i am upfront that way: i never lie to myself. even if i lie to everyone else.
i wish i was that person, simple. unfortunately, when does that happen? let's be honest, i've grown into a monster. i let the skeletons in my closet shape me. the twisted smile on my mother's face as she let out her last breath; the emptiness in my father's eyes after he discovered her body. i never learned how to be "normal". i have trouble interacting with average human beings. i get frustrated easily. over the past several months, i've grown frighteningly impatient and get disturbingly defensive when someone mentions anything about me. i keep secrets. while honest with myself, i lie to everyone else. look at what i do. i was undercover, eager with my white stripes to help bring the russian bratva down. now what? i'm falling deeper into their world. i have to do things in order to maintain my facade. it kills me. the sensitive conscious my mother once had follows me around. i deal with my issues in the only way i saw growing up: on myself. it's really no secret, just how deep my abandonment and self-hateful issues run. while i try and try to keep my bipolar disorder - diagnosed when i was nineteen - from the spotlight, how difficult is it to fit the pieces together? my mood swings are astonishing. when neutral, i'm demanding, threatening and leave no room for question. my hands are stained with blood that will never disappear. all i can do is continue that way.
i don't like who i am. i want recovery and balance more than anything. i'm just too sick to get there. and you know what? i kind of like being sick.
i wish i was that person, simple. unfortunately, when does that happen? let's be honest, i've grown into a monster. i let the skeletons in my closet shape me. the twisted smile on my mother's face as she let out her last breath; the emptiness in my father's eyes after he discovered her body. i never learned how to be "normal". i have trouble interacting with average human beings. i get frustrated easily. over the past several months, i've grown frighteningly impatient and get disturbingly defensive when someone mentions anything about me. i keep secrets. while honest with myself, i lie to everyone else. look at what i do. i was undercover, eager with my white stripes to help bring the russian bratva down. now what? i'm falling deeper into their world. i have to do things in order to maintain my facade. it kills me. the sensitive conscious my mother once had follows me around. i deal with my issues in the only way i saw growing up: on myself. it's really no secret, just how deep my abandonment and self-hateful issues run. while i try and try to keep my bipolar disorder - diagnosed when i was nineteen - from the spotlight, how difficult is it to fit the pieces together? my mood swings are astonishing. when neutral, i'm demanding, threatening and leave no room for question. my hands are stained with blood that will never disappear. all i can do is continue that way.
i don't like who i am. i want recovery and balance more than anything. i'm just too sick to get there. and you know what? i kind of like being sick.
FAMILY LIFE
the svenenström is a legacy. for generations, my family has been a substantial part of swedish society. even when we moved to the states when i was four, i often heard the name. everyone thought i'd have a perfect childhood. why would there be doubt? i came from a brilliant family, no scuff marks in our long history. too bad. it was lovely from the outside, i can't lie. i often looked from the other side of the mirror and was jealous. but, really, power hurts people. my father was a lawyer. he was running for senate when i was seven, and of course…who can stay away from pretty rods with sizeable assets? my mother didn't divorce. she let him turn it around on her and for three years, let him tear her mind away. my mother was gone. she was not maternal, with a haunting smile and seemed to forget i was her child. she slit her wrists in front of me. i watched her die for four hours. how do you think my life went? i raised myself because my father forgot how to be a parent. i heard he killed himself, too. i could have had such a nice family life. too bad they had to ruin it by forgetting how to have a family."
PARENTS/SIBLINGS
father: niklas svenenström, deceased. would be sixty-four. defence attorney turned politician. jumped off the brooklyn bridge. stopped being a father after his wife died.
mother: kendall svenenström, deceased. would be fifty-nine. high school teacher. committed suicide almost twenty years previous. forgot how to be a mother long before.
mother: kendall svenenström, deceased. would be fifty-nine. high school teacher. committed suicide almost twenty years previous. forgot how to be a mother long before.
HISTORY
"my doctor said i need to learn to "talk". i never really understood that. people learn to speak in their first years. i can hold a conversation just fine, thank you. oh. i see. you think i need to learn to really "talk". i appreciate the opinion. no one wanted it, but it's appreciated all the same. i've done plenty of talking. done too much, actually. or i wouldn't be sitting here, pretending to be healthy. this story people are saying i've lived is waiting to be written, is it? i could accept that. people seem oddly fascinated by my history. that'd be nice, if it were the trailer for a film. i'm the one who had to live through it all. and you know what? i wish i hadn't. that should probably be clarified first: i don't want to be alive.
really, i guess that's where it all begins - not wanting to be alive. my family name would be picture perfect; they wouldn't have needed to replace the carpet. if no one ever committed suicide, life would be incredibly different. funny, isn't it? the way a single death can affect a person. it can destroy them, actually. you should try and not let outside influence impair your recovery process - i learned that in therapy. too bad that's never the case. when your god people were busy writing out the beginning chapters of my life, they were probably excited. there is potential here, jacob (that's a bible guy, right?)! good family, excellent parents, it's going to be golden. i couldn't disagree. i would have thought my life would be perfect too, if people had decided to want to stay alive.
i was born in stockholm. my father, niklas svenenström, was born into a legacy. he lived a legacy. everybody before him lived a legacy. i think my parents had hoped i would find fascination in the endless amount of family history junk we had in the attic. too bad it could wake the dead, and then lull them to sleep. all i know of my family name is that i should be "proud" and people would be "jealous". i don't see it that way. i'd prefer to be living another life, thanks. my mother, kendall, never brought this sort of identity. i think part of her was sad, because she didn't offer for bragging rights to the in-laws. oh well. she was just some american commoner, twenty and wide-eyed, exploring europe for the first time. i don't think she ever left. she must have fucked up, because the stories explain my parents met while my father was hard at work. he should have been concentrating on some ridiculous claim made against a fence maker, but he was staring at the pretty blonde thing instead. i could get behind that. my father was a ridiculously romantic man, much like a preteen girl. regardless, that's how they met. everyone else in my family met and married an equally entitled mate - doctors, authors, lawyers…whatever. kendall svenenström was a lowly teacher from brooklyn. niklas was a lawyer, bursting with more promise than allowed.
perhaps there was an issue. probably wasn't. i don't know, no one bothered to explain the early turmoils in what could have been a very happy marriage. i was raised isolated from the rest of this supposed family. technically, i'm swedish. too bad i've been there maybe twice since moving when i was four. i don't remember any sort of childhood there. i think we moved back to new york - my mother's original home - to get away from the insanity of the "svenenström" name. that would have been lovely. kendall has family in the states! new york, even! she could have been excited, had her parents not died some two years previous. so we moved to the united states to be more isolated than before. the only people ever around me was the forgotten children left at the school where my mother taught. some company. even then, i was quiet. i preferred my own company, and would rarely seek the companionship of another. didn't help my development much. i can imagine the first several years in new york were happy. my parents did not have an unhappy relationship. on the contrary, i think they loved each other in some tragic sort of way. it would have been more poetic to die at the same time as your wife, dad. lesson learned? i just don't understand why we all couldn't shut up and be happy with our existences. there was potential for greatness, but who needs that when you have balance and health? niklas svenenström, apparently. he was a family legacy, a lawyer. of course he headed one of the most substantial law firms in new york city. and of course he had to have more. when i was seven, he ran for senate. that's when he had to fuck everything up.
it was only a few weeks when the scandal broke. i don't know how no one suspected it. my father was not a tidy human being. he left his issues all over the place. he was never home. he was impatient and angry when he was home. the only thing he focused on more than the political race, apparently, were the girls. young, impressionable rods with sizeable assets - the eager interns wanting to work with such a legend. repeat that in a simpering voice stained with bubble gum. the papers dragged his name through the manhattan sewers and back again. the legacy the svenenström's had been seamlessly developing over the past several generations was broken in five minutes. job well done. but it didn't matter. no one really cared. he lost the race before he could withdraw. kendall didn't divorce. it faded from memory in a matter of months. too bad my poor excuse for a father couldn't leave it alone. part of me thinks she had gotten passed it. but her eyes grew empty, her smiles grew painful. my mother was slowly rusting, and was going to break in two the second a hammer came around. he was the one who started fighting. arguments at first, and then words, angry sentences painting my mother out to be some sort of monster. he managed to turn this entire scandal around on her. it was her fault, all because of her. his reasoning never made sense, even to me. for three years. my father tore at my mother. she had stopped being my mother long ago. it was never physical, never. but who said it had to be? he was slowly leaking poison into her brain. i guess it finally destroyed her shortly before i turned eleven.
kendall svenenström was of fragile mentality. i must get it from her. to be completely honest, i never understood how she hadn't broken long before her brain decided to break. she had been a lovely woman all through the abuse. she was soft-spoken, kind. my father was the twisted fuck. but words can change a person. i had caught her staring at herself in the mirror, repeating the very words my father had spewed hours earlier. i think she was trying to convince herself he was right. at the beginning, she'd known herself. kendall svenenström had a silent strength to her. maybe if she was the person niklas made her out to be, their marriage would be saved. she loved my father more than she loved herself, apparently. i don't know what sent her sprawling over the edge that day. minutes after he departed for court - defending some rapist - i noticed a difference in my mother. her outside looked just like her insides must have. crooked and defeated. her eyes grew empty, and her smiles grew haunted. i had been avoiding her for weeks. my mother had stopped being my mother long ago. she was no longer a parent, more of a roommate. i was only alarmed when she called my name in this sickeningly sweet voice, motioning toward me to come to the bedroom. she looked like some sort of twisted murderer. her eyes were wild, her smile turned manic. i think i was scared. there was this woman i barely knew staring at me, approaching me, locking the door behind me. the answer is no, i know you're itching to ask. please retrieve your mind from the gutter. kendall svenenström's mentality was fragile, remember. it broke and she wanted to have the power. my father got a sick high from it. maybe she could reconnect with him if she had more common ground. i understand her logic now, disturbing as it is. i was the only person there. i wasn't special, and i'm not special now. she chose me because no one else would listen. a child's loyalty, despite how i knew she was no longer my parent.
she said everything. all the ugly words she heard, and all the ugly words she repeated to herself - she told me everything. graphic detail. it was me me me. my fault. my issues. my aloofness and jealousy. i jump to conclusions. i do it all. i stopped listening an hour into her lecture. it was more of a surprise she could think of that many insults and one-sided arguments. i guess she thought i was talking back, since she took my silence for answers. i was ten years old, what did i know? i don't think it affected me then. i barely understood. or i thought i didn't. i hear her voice sometimes, now. not then. and no, i am not going to tell you. i'm not going to tell you anything. her manic turned to insanity in hour two. i desperately wanted…someone. for the first time in a long time, i needed someone. i wanted my father's protective arms around me, barking at this woman to leave his child alone. he would have done it. i think. i didn't cry. i didn't do anything. i sat against the far wall, curled as small as i could get. i think she forgot i was in the room. everytime something was said, she simply added my name onto the end. funny. because she originally decided on my name because she hoped i would grow to be like atticus finch. atticus finch would not have found himself in this sort of situation. the razor she had belonged to my father. it was thick, sharp because he liked a close shave. niklas svenenström does not do five o'clock shadows. never appear exhausted, he used to tell me. she was talking to it like it was…well, me, i suppose. i don't understand how a broken brain works. a fractured brain, of course. not one belonging to a person so far gone they should be in a straightjacket, on suicide watch. sweet irony, isn't it? regardless, the cuts were deep from the beginning. one for each reason i was a failure and ruined her life. they danced over her veins, refusing to give in. her body was strong, even though her mind was weak. i think she flashed her wrist bones at me when she finally collapsed. kendall svenenström bled out in less than fifteen minutes, leaving her ten year-old son in her corpse's company for another half hour before her husband, now a widower, arrived home, euphoric because he had succeeded in allowing a monster to rewalk the streets. perhaps he wouldn't have yelled at her that night.
he was more damaged than i was. i think. my father withered away before my eyes. i don't think he ever fully accepted his wife's death. he questioned it: why? what happened? could he have stopped it? i suppose you can imagine the lack of respect i have for my late father. he had yet to realize how much of it was his fault. he never even asked if i was okay. the man i thought my father could be was the opposite. he was not strong. he was weak, just like her. fletcher svenenström still had no idea how to be a parent. i was left to raise myself. teenage years suck, if you weren't aware. i was a turtle trapped in its shell during my childhood. parents are supposed to nurture you, show you the world isn't the big bad monster in the closet. too bad my father was too preoccupied being a wasted existence to show me that. all i knew was what i'd grown up around - darkness, torment. i was awkwardly developed. when does that work for anyone? i practiced all my mother had shown me: silence. nothing, blow after blow. i sat in the dark, shivering at night, starving my brain. i whispered ugly words. i offered my hand to the big bad wolf and didn't scream when he took his first bite. sharp teeth feasted on my mind all throughout my teenage years. i was teased. i was bullied. i was pushed in the gutter and called names i could only quietly agree with. teachers looked concerned, but then decided i wasn't work the effort. guidance counsellors may have called my father, his son was so incredibly fucked up, it was scaring them. but they knew he was worse than i was. no one cared. i stopped caring. he stopped caring. there was no point in stressing anything in our lives. we lived in a hotel, splitting the bills and saying "'sup?" whenever we happened to cross paths. he grew into a mere shell of the power lawyer he had been ten years previous. he lost his job. he lost his firm. he lost everything. by the time i graduated high school, niklas svenenström was an insurance lawyer, defending clumsy slobs who thought they could chew the government. i'm surprised he managed to add anything to my education.
i'm surprised i made it through my teenage years. i thought nothing could get worse. the only things i was bothered by was just how wasted my life was. no ghosts haunted me. no skeletons scrambled from my closet and came out to dance in the rain. i was miserable, i think. all i knew was what my mother was, an invisible existence questioning its purpose in the world. i left my roommate and disappeared to columbia university. i still don't know why i applied there. or why i decided to degree in criminology. it was because it was close to home and the guidance counsellor thought it would be a good fit. "lots of different people." "like-minded students". "a place to find myself". it was true. there were so many different people, i learned how to succeed in slipping through life completely invisible.
when marloes petrova smiled at me from across the quad, i thought it was at someone behind me. no one ever said anything to me. my professor waved at me once, but i think it was because he thought i was someone else. she was a freshman, younger than a toddler. her hyper-intelligence would have intimidated me had i ever bothered to care. we had common ground, because we didn't like to talk about a lot of things. we shared a common goal. we had a few of the same professors. we have the same birthday. it's surprising how much that can bring two people together. we became best friends, a term i had never used before. i never will. i let her into my life because…well, just because. i'm not going to do it to anyone else, because i know all i'm going to do is end up hurting her. or pissing her off. or something demented that only my family has the talent to do. we studied sometimes, but i usually gave up because she's so much smarter than me, i'd get frustrated. we hung out at cafes around new york. i showed her the city, because i had grown up here and i privately was proud i knew things she didn't. our friendship grew organically. it still is, shaping up to be the only good thing in my life. until i ruin it, anyway. but this was long before then.
she was twenty when we graduated, i was almost a lot older. shut up. that was when i began to struggle. the skeletons were coming out to play more often, with the hollow eyes and twisted smiles that my mother held the final hours of her life. ugly words were whispered to me in her voice. i took a lot of pills to shut her up. i took my medication and threw the empty bottles at her because she wouldn't go away. i should have to the therapist one of my professors convinced me to "try, see if i could lighten my stress load" but i didn't. he was getting frustrated with me because i wouldn't explode and throw things in his office. he marked down i was a "manic depressive, explosive mood swings." he wrote prescriptions for a hundred different medications. i don't even remember what ones i take now. chalky white pills, popper-red capsules, little round yellow ones. it balanced my brain chemistry, he said. too bad it didn't work. i was numb, forced to hold the company of my dead mother, cruel enough to have killed herself in front of me twelve years earlier. i abused alcohol when she screamed at me. i took little blue squares when i wanted to forget altogether. i grew into a monster because i didn't want to become the person i was. i hate that person. that was when i grew secretive, when i discovered just how vicious and defensive i could be. marloes was my best friend and i couldn't tell her any of this, even though i should have because no one else would understand. i don't think i wanted to ruin our relationship, because if she knew how messed-up i was (am?), she would roll her eyes and leave, to find someone who wouldn't ruin her life. i surrounded myself in darkness when she accepted her internship at the embassy and i floated around doing nothing. i think i did an internship too, but i don't remember. i remember police stations and writing a lot of tests. i studied law and how to use a gun and why patrolling the streets really isn't as useless at it sounds.
i never focused on how i got here.
the federal bureau of investigation looked at me shortly before marloes. probably because i had been hanging around and they were sick of me loitering with no real reason. she was picked up soon after i was. i think i was happy, because i had my friend back and her silly smile would make me laugh sometimes. i was disconnected from my life at this point. i was caught between worlds. i hated the person i was, but i kind of liked the person i was before these demons wrestled with my brain and held it hostage. she got pulled into some fancy department, handling the backstage work because she did the best when she was directing the show. i wish i could have ran the light board. but they discovered i'm good at pretending and i can be cruel and i really have no problem with hurting people. i got to be the star of her show. you heard about our newest assignment, just after getting transferred here to valkyrie. undercover work, trying to destroy the dam surrounding the russian bratva. i think it was because i still had a little bit of an accent and she was fluent in more languages that actually existed. i was inserted right into the bratva, paperwork in hand. they stole someone right off the street, destroyed him and gave me his life. no one knew this one. he was invisible, like me. the janitor, there to clean up any mess a useless criminal made. that's good. i don't think anyone knows, not even the verrentenikovs. well, not yet. i'm secretive because i don't want people to see just how destroyed i've become. i'm doing nothing to make myself healthy, so i just keep getting sicker. it scares me because these darkness is hovering right around me, all of this power right at my fingertips without any effort. i can do anything, say anything, and most people will do exactly what i say, no questions asked.
except when i get told to do something. then i can't ask questions.
stanislav scares me, too. i think he scares everyone because he isn't a psychotic wanderer prone to random acts of violence. he is remarkably composed, i think i had immediate respect for him. don't tell anyone that. he contacted me for the first time since i began to work. i don't know why, or how, or even what he said. just that he trusted me, only me, with this work and he needed it to be quiet. i had never actually killed anyone before. i did some very bad things for some very bad people, but that's because i promised my superiors i was committed, one hundred percent. if anyone found out, i think i'd be pulled and made to disappear. no one should be these involved, especially not emotionally. someone pissed him off. he needed them to simply…disappear. no problem. i pulled the little bastard with a german accent clean off the street because he thought he was smart enough not to catch attention. i even pulled his teeth out with no issues. i didn't listen when he begged me for mercy. i didn't even care. i think my mother possessed me and decided to inflict her pain onto someone else because she hadn't been able to in a very long time. i don't know. but he wanted me to kill this faceless person, shrouded in an illegal mask of drugs and prostitution. he was no malicious killer, and i think stanislav wasn't impressed. bit of entitlement, that one. i guess he's allowed to. i didn't want to pull the trigger. i almost didn't. but it happened because i was shaking and not looking at him and was thinking about the empty orange bottles back at my apartment, and how i could numb this all out. i am committed, remember. no one bothers to ask what i do. if they did, i would be slammed into prison and as disgraced as a good law enforcement agent could be. but i did. i killed a meaningless man who apparently had more of a reason than i was allowed to know. this person's job is to do what he is told, and he can tell people to do whatever he wants. but he can never know the details, because he's not important enough. i think that's when my brain broke.
i finally understand, mom.
see these bandages? right around my wrists? his eyes haunted me for days. the final begging, the last breaths. even watching the light fade and his body go limp. it followed me around as clearly as my mother's voice did. nothing i did could make it stop. i wanted to die. i wanted to disappear just like he did. no one would care, anyway. i was so isolated and alone in this assignment, i didn't know where i stood anymore. i still don't, if you have to know. i liked the darkness the criminal world offered, existing in the seedy underbelly of society. i almost had a purpose there. no one bothered me, except when i wanted to be bothered. two people can tell me what to do. three, maybe, if they feel charitable. what do i have waiting for me in my old life? a partner i keep everything from because i don't want her to see the ugly person behind the mask? a desk? a crappy pay check? i don't know. i don't think i ever did. i float through the current of life and adapt where it happens to take me. i took the razor i've had for eleven years. i pulled it out of kendall svenenström's hands that day, washed it off and waited with her empty body. i copied the ways she did it. up at down, because it hurts more that way. i shouldn't have done it so badly. i failed at that too, trying to kill myself. because i collapsed on the sidewalk and someone saw and i got pushed into the hospital. they stitched me up, poked me with sticks, shined lights in my eyes, and forced the truth out of me. they came up with conclusions. i sat in a big ward, staring out the windows, not talking to anyone because the only company available were drooling and had no sense of time or location. i got pushed out because someone found out and wanted me to be okay. i have a doctor and a strict plan that i'm supposed to tape to my bathroom mirror. i'm supposed to tell the people closest to me to monitor my status, make sure i don't relapse or whatever. i don't have an addiction, what could i relapse to? no sharp objects, atticus. no negative talk, sven. whatever. no one knows the details but me, because my life is complicated.
now leave. my ride is here to take me back to one of the lives i think i can still lead."
[/td][/tr]really, i guess that's where it all begins - not wanting to be alive. my family name would be picture perfect; they wouldn't have needed to replace the carpet. if no one ever committed suicide, life would be incredibly different. funny, isn't it? the way a single death can affect a person. it can destroy them, actually. you should try and not let outside influence impair your recovery process - i learned that in therapy. too bad that's never the case. when your god people were busy writing out the beginning chapters of my life, they were probably excited. there is potential here, jacob (that's a bible guy, right?)! good family, excellent parents, it's going to be golden. i couldn't disagree. i would have thought my life would be perfect too, if people had decided to want to stay alive.
i was born in stockholm. my father, niklas svenenström, was born into a legacy. he lived a legacy. everybody before him lived a legacy. i think my parents had hoped i would find fascination in the endless amount of family history junk we had in the attic. too bad it could wake the dead, and then lull them to sleep. all i know of my family name is that i should be "proud" and people would be "jealous". i don't see it that way. i'd prefer to be living another life, thanks. my mother, kendall, never brought this sort of identity. i think part of her was sad, because she didn't offer for bragging rights to the in-laws. oh well. she was just some american commoner, twenty and wide-eyed, exploring europe for the first time. i don't think she ever left. she must have fucked up, because the stories explain my parents met while my father was hard at work. he should have been concentrating on some ridiculous claim made against a fence maker, but he was staring at the pretty blonde thing instead. i could get behind that. my father was a ridiculously romantic man, much like a preteen girl. regardless, that's how they met. everyone else in my family met and married an equally entitled mate - doctors, authors, lawyers…whatever. kendall svenenström was a lowly teacher from brooklyn. niklas was a lawyer, bursting with more promise than allowed.
perhaps there was an issue. probably wasn't. i don't know, no one bothered to explain the early turmoils in what could have been a very happy marriage. i was raised isolated from the rest of this supposed family. technically, i'm swedish. too bad i've been there maybe twice since moving when i was four. i don't remember any sort of childhood there. i think we moved back to new york - my mother's original home - to get away from the insanity of the "svenenström" name. that would have been lovely. kendall has family in the states! new york, even! she could have been excited, had her parents not died some two years previous. so we moved to the united states to be more isolated than before. the only people ever around me was the forgotten children left at the school where my mother taught. some company. even then, i was quiet. i preferred my own company, and would rarely seek the companionship of another. didn't help my development much. i can imagine the first several years in new york were happy. my parents did not have an unhappy relationship. on the contrary, i think they loved each other in some tragic sort of way. it would have been more poetic to die at the same time as your wife, dad. lesson learned? i just don't understand why we all couldn't shut up and be happy with our existences. there was potential for greatness, but who needs that when you have balance and health? niklas svenenström, apparently. he was a family legacy, a lawyer. of course he headed one of the most substantial law firms in new york city. and of course he had to have more. when i was seven, he ran for senate. that's when he had to fuck everything up.
it was only a few weeks when the scandal broke. i don't know how no one suspected it. my father was not a tidy human being. he left his issues all over the place. he was never home. he was impatient and angry when he was home. the only thing he focused on more than the political race, apparently, were the girls. young, impressionable rods with sizeable assets - the eager interns wanting to work with such a legend. repeat that in a simpering voice stained with bubble gum. the papers dragged his name through the manhattan sewers and back again. the legacy the svenenström's had been seamlessly developing over the past several generations was broken in five minutes. job well done. but it didn't matter. no one really cared. he lost the race before he could withdraw. kendall didn't divorce. it faded from memory in a matter of months. too bad my poor excuse for a father couldn't leave it alone. part of me thinks she had gotten passed it. but her eyes grew empty, her smiles grew painful. my mother was slowly rusting, and was going to break in two the second a hammer came around. he was the one who started fighting. arguments at first, and then words, angry sentences painting my mother out to be some sort of monster. he managed to turn this entire scandal around on her. it was her fault, all because of her. his reasoning never made sense, even to me. for three years. my father tore at my mother. she had stopped being my mother long ago. it was never physical, never. but who said it had to be? he was slowly leaking poison into her brain. i guess it finally destroyed her shortly before i turned eleven.
kendall svenenström was of fragile mentality. i must get it from her. to be completely honest, i never understood how she hadn't broken long before her brain decided to break. she had been a lovely woman all through the abuse. she was soft-spoken, kind. my father was the twisted fuck. but words can change a person. i had caught her staring at herself in the mirror, repeating the very words my father had spewed hours earlier. i think she was trying to convince herself he was right. at the beginning, she'd known herself. kendall svenenström had a silent strength to her. maybe if she was the person niklas made her out to be, their marriage would be saved. she loved my father more than she loved herself, apparently. i don't know what sent her sprawling over the edge that day. minutes after he departed for court - defending some rapist - i noticed a difference in my mother. her outside looked just like her insides must have. crooked and defeated. her eyes grew empty, and her smiles grew haunted. i had been avoiding her for weeks. my mother had stopped being my mother long ago. she was no longer a parent, more of a roommate. i was only alarmed when she called my name in this sickeningly sweet voice, motioning toward me to come to the bedroom. she looked like some sort of twisted murderer. her eyes were wild, her smile turned manic. i think i was scared. there was this woman i barely knew staring at me, approaching me, locking the door behind me. the answer is no, i know you're itching to ask. please retrieve your mind from the gutter. kendall svenenström's mentality was fragile, remember. it broke and she wanted to have the power. my father got a sick high from it. maybe she could reconnect with him if she had more common ground. i understand her logic now, disturbing as it is. i was the only person there. i wasn't special, and i'm not special now. she chose me because no one else would listen. a child's loyalty, despite how i knew she was no longer my parent.
she said everything. all the ugly words she heard, and all the ugly words she repeated to herself - she told me everything. graphic detail. it was me me me. my fault. my issues. my aloofness and jealousy. i jump to conclusions. i do it all. i stopped listening an hour into her lecture. it was more of a surprise she could think of that many insults and one-sided arguments. i guess she thought i was talking back, since she took my silence for answers. i was ten years old, what did i know? i don't think it affected me then. i barely understood. or i thought i didn't. i hear her voice sometimes, now. not then. and no, i am not going to tell you. i'm not going to tell you anything. her manic turned to insanity in hour two. i desperately wanted…someone. for the first time in a long time, i needed someone. i wanted my father's protective arms around me, barking at this woman to leave his child alone. he would have done it. i think. i didn't cry. i didn't do anything. i sat against the far wall, curled as small as i could get. i think she forgot i was in the room. everytime something was said, she simply added my name onto the end. funny. because she originally decided on my name because she hoped i would grow to be like atticus finch. atticus finch would not have found himself in this sort of situation. the razor she had belonged to my father. it was thick, sharp because he liked a close shave. niklas svenenström does not do five o'clock shadows. never appear exhausted, he used to tell me. she was talking to it like it was…well, me, i suppose. i don't understand how a broken brain works. a fractured brain, of course. not one belonging to a person so far gone they should be in a straightjacket, on suicide watch. sweet irony, isn't it? regardless, the cuts were deep from the beginning. one for each reason i was a failure and ruined her life. they danced over her veins, refusing to give in. her body was strong, even though her mind was weak. i think she flashed her wrist bones at me when she finally collapsed. kendall svenenström bled out in less than fifteen minutes, leaving her ten year-old son in her corpse's company for another half hour before her husband, now a widower, arrived home, euphoric because he had succeeded in allowing a monster to rewalk the streets. perhaps he wouldn't have yelled at her that night.
he was more damaged than i was. i think. my father withered away before my eyes. i don't think he ever fully accepted his wife's death. he questioned it: why? what happened? could he have stopped it? i suppose you can imagine the lack of respect i have for my late father. he had yet to realize how much of it was his fault. he never even asked if i was okay. the man i thought my father could be was the opposite. he was not strong. he was weak, just like her. fletcher svenenström still had no idea how to be a parent. i was left to raise myself. teenage years suck, if you weren't aware. i was a turtle trapped in its shell during my childhood. parents are supposed to nurture you, show you the world isn't the big bad monster in the closet. too bad my father was too preoccupied being a wasted existence to show me that. all i knew was what i'd grown up around - darkness, torment. i was awkwardly developed. when does that work for anyone? i practiced all my mother had shown me: silence. nothing, blow after blow. i sat in the dark, shivering at night, starving my brain. i whispered ugly words. i offered my hand to the big bad wolf and didn't scream when he took his first bite. sharp teeth feasted on my mind all throughout my teenage years. i was teased. i was bullied. i was pushed in the gutter and called names i could only quietly agree with. teachers looked concerned, but then decided i wasn't work the effort. guidance counsellors may have called my father, his son was so incredibly fucked up, it was scaring them. but they knew he was worse than i was. no one cared. i stopped caring. he stopped caring. there was no point in stressing anything in our lives. we lived in a hotel, splitting the bills and saying "'sup?" whenever we happened to cross paths. he grew into a mere shell of the power lawyer he had been ten years previous. he lost his job. he lost his firm. he lost everything. by the time i graduated high school, niklas svenenström was an insurance lawyer, defending clumsy slobs who thought they could chew the government. i'm surprised he managed to add anything to my education.
i'm surprised i made it through my teenage years. i thought nothing could get worse. the only things i was bothered by was just how wasted my life was. no ghosts haunted me. no skeletons scrambled from my closet and came out to dance in the rain. i was miserable, i think. all i knew was what my mother was, an invisible existence questioning its purpose in the world. i left my roommate and disappeared to columbia university. i still don't know why i applied there. or why i decided to degree in criminology. it was because it was close to home and the guidance counsellor thought it would be a good fit. "lots of different people." "like-minded students". "a place to find myself". it was true. there were so many different people, i learned how to succeed in slipping through life completely invisible.
when marloes petrova smiled at me from across the quad, i thought it was at someone behind me. no one ever said anything to me. my professor waved at me once, but i think it was because he thought i was someone else. she was a freshman, younger than a toddler. her hyper-intelligence would have intimidated me had i ever bothered to care. we had common ground, because we didn't like to talk about a lot of things. we shared a common goal. we had a few of the same professors. we have the same birthday. it's surprising how much that can bring two people together. we became best friends, a term i had never used before. i never will. i let her into my life because…well, just because. i'm not going to do it to anyone else, because i know all i'm going to do is end up hurting her. or pissing her off. or something demented that only my family has the talent to do. we studied sometimes, but i usually gave up because she's so much smarter than me, i'd get frustrated. we hung out at cafes around new york. i showed her the city, because i had grown up here and i privately was proud i knew things she didn't. our friendship grew organically. it still is, shaping up to be the only good thing in my life. until i ruin it, anyway. but this was long before then.
she was twenty when we graduated, i was almost a lot older. shut up. that was when i began to struggle. the skeletons were coming out to play more often, with the hollow eyes and twisted smiles that my mother held the final hours of her life. ugly words were whispered to me in her voice. i took a lot of pills to shut her up. i took my medication and threw the empty bottles at her because she wouldn't go away. i should have to the therapist one of my professors convinced me to "try, see if i could lighten my stress load" but i didn't. he was getting frustrated with me because i wouldn't explode and throw things in his office. he marked down i was a "manic depressive, explosive mood swings." he wrote prescriptions for a hundred different medications. i don't even remember what ones i take now. chalky white pills, popper-red capsules, little round yellow ones. it balanced my brain chemistry, he said. too bad it didn't work. i was numb, forced to hold the company of my dead mother, cruel enough to have killed herself in front of me twelve years earlier. i abused alcohol when she screamed at me. i took little blue squares when i wanted to forget altogether. i grew into a monster because i didn't want to become the person i was. i hate that person. that was when i grew secretive, when i discovered just how vicious and defensive i could be. marloes was my best friend and i couldn't tell her any of this, even though i should have because no one else would understand. i don't think i wanted to ruin our relationship, because if she knew how messed-up i was (am?), she would roll her eyes and leave, to find someone who wouldn't ruin her life. i surrounded myself in darkness when she accepted her internship at the embassy and i floated around doing nothing. i think i did an internship too, but i don't remember. i remember police stations and writing a lot of tests. i studied law and how to use a gun and why patrolling the streets really isn't as useless at it sounds.
i never focused on how i got here.
the federal bureau of investigation looked at me shortly before marloes. probably because i had been hanging around and they were sick of me loitering with no real reason. she was picked up soon after i was. i think i was happy, because i had my friend back and her silly smile would make me laugh sometimes. i was disconnected from my life at this point. i was caught between worlds. i hated the person i was, but i kind of liked the person i was before these demons wrestled with my brain and held it hostage. she got pulled into some fancy department, handling the backstage work because she did the best when she was directing the show. i wish i could have ran the light board. but they discovered i'm good at pretending and i can be cruel and i really have no problem with hurting people. i got to be the star of her show. you heard about our newest assignment, just after getting transferred here to valkyrie. undercover work, trying to destroy the dam surrounding the russian bratva. i think it was because i still had a little bit of an accent and she was fluent in more languages that actually existed. i was inserted right into the bratva, paperwork in hand. they stole someone right off the street, destroyed him and gave me his life. no one knew this one. he was invisible, like me. the janitor, there to clean up any mess a useless criminal made. that's good. i don't think anyone knows, not even the verrentenikovs. well, not yet. i'm secretive because i don't want people to see just how destroyed i've become. i'm doing nothing to make myself healthy, so i just keep getting sicker. it scares me because these darkness is hovering right around me, all of this power right at my fingertips without any effort. i can do anything, say anything, and most people will do exactly what i say, no questions asked.
except when i get told to do something. then i can't ask questions.
stanislav scares me, too. i think he scares everyone because he isn't a psychotic wanderer prone to random acts of violence. he is remarkably composed, i think i had immediate respect for him. don't tell anyone that. he contacted me for the first time since i began to work. i don't know why, or how, or even what he said. just that he trusted me, only me, with this work and he needed it to be quiet. i had never actually killed anyone before. i did some very bad things for some very bad people, but that's because i promised my superiors i was committed, one hundred percent. if anyone found out, i think i'd be pulled and made to disappear. no one should be these involved, especially not emotionally. someone pissed him off. he needed them to simply…disappear. no problem. i pulled the little bastard with a german accent clean off the street because he thought he was smart enough not to catch attention. i even pulled his teeth out with no issues. i didn't listen when he begged me for mercy. i didn't even care. i think my mother possessed me and decided to inflict her pain onto someone else because she hadn't been able to in a very long time. i don't know. but he wanted me to kill this faceless person, shrouded in an illegal mask of drugs and prostitution. he was no malicious killer, and i think stanislav wasn't impressed. bit of entitlement, that one. i guess he's allowed to. i didn't want to pull the trigger. i almost didn't. but it happened because i was shaking and not looking at him and was thinking about the empty orange bottles back at my apartment, and how i could numb this all out. i am committed, remember. no one bothers to ask what i do. if they did, i would be slammed into prison and as disgraced as a good law enforcement agent could be. but i did. i killed a meaningless man who apparently had more of a reason than i was allowed to know. this person's job is to do what he is told, and he can tell people to do whatever he wants. but he can never know the details, because he's not important enough. i think that's when my brain broke.
i finally understand, mom.
see these bandages? right around my wrists? his eyes haunted me for days. the final begging, the last breaths. even watching the light fade and his body go limp. it followed me around as clearly as my mother's voice did. nothing i did could make it stop. i wanted to die. i wanted to disappear just like he did. no one would care, anyway. i was so isolated and alone in this assignment, i didn't know where i stood anymore. i still don't, if you have to know. i liked the darkness the criminal world offered, existing in the seedy underbelly of society. i almost had a purpose there. no one bothered me, except when i wanted to be bothered. two people can tell me what to do. three, maybe, if they feel charitable. what do i have waiting for me in my old life? a partner i keep everything from because i don't want her to see the ugly person behind the mask? a desk? a crappy pay check? i don't know. i don't think i ever did. i float through the current of life and adapt where it happens to take me. i took the razor i've had for eleven years. i pulled it out of kendall svenenström's hands that day, washed it off and waited with her empty body. i copied the ways she did it. up at down, because it hurts more that way. i shouldn't have done it so badly. i failed at that too, trying to kill myself. because i collapsed on the sidewalk and someone saw and i got pushed into the hospital. they stitched me up, poked me with sticks, shined lights in my eyes, and forced the truth out of me. they came up with conclusions. i sat in a big ward, staring out the windows, not talking to anyone because the only company available were drooling and had no sense of time or location. i got pushed out because someone found out and wanted me to be okay. i have a doctor and a strict plan that i'm supposed to tape to my bathroom mirror. i'm supposed to tell the people closest to me to monitor my status, make sure i don't relapse or whatever. i don't have an addiction, what could i relapse to? no sharp objects, atticus. no negative talk, sven. whatever. no one knows the details but me, because my life is complicated.
now leave. my ride is here to take me back to one of the lives i think i can still lead."
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the player
ALIAS asia, professional hockey whore.
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE the big bang theory, bud.
OTHER CHARACTERS them flingers, duh.
HOW'D YOU FIND US? hah.
RP SAMPLE
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE the big bang theory, bud.
OTHER CHARACTERS them flingers, duh.
HOW'D YOU FIND US? hah.
RP SAMPLE
once upon a time the flames won the stanley cup. and then we woke up from the dream.
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template created by anna of the industry. do not take without permission!
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