On roleplaying (Blaine in Districtmancy)

So, Districtmancy. (Shit, this got really, really long. >.>)

I'm not sure what it says about Blaine and Silverlock that whenever I roleplay them, they end up separating. In Dead Inside it was perfectly understandable, and mostly Silverlock's fault- he's occasionally very easily distracted by shiny things. And Drake is a very shiny thing; most of Blaine's dislike of the man stems from jealousy. Too, in Dead Inside, Drake and Silverlock were trying to take over the world, and Blaine will put up with a lot of nonsense, but he draws the line at world domination.

Blaine in Districtmancy is much, much less stable than Blaine is in his original incarnation. As much as it irritates him on occasion, his immunity to drugs and alcohol in Toggle saves him from a lifetime of battling addictions. And taking care of Foxbird gives him something positive to live for during the more difficult transitional periods of his life. He doesn't have either of those things going for him in Districtmancy; when his mother dies (unfortunate traffic accident), he starts stealing things and ends up getting thrown out a window by the police when they catch him. (Hence the scars on his face- face, meet plate glass window.) He's in juvie for a few years after that. Then his father dies (heroin overdose), and he gets sent to NYUAA for healer training, where he's an antisocial punk. He doesn't have many friends on Governor's Island; he's sixteen when he ends up there.

Orrin is four years younger, and a firemancer, but also something of a punk. He attaches himself to Blaine for no good reason that anyone else can discern. (Orrin is actually an incredibly accident prone kid- he mostly sticks to Blaine as a survival instinct, since Blaine never goes anywhere without a plentiful supply of bandaids.)

Between med school and keeping Orrin from cracking his skull open on things, he gets his life somewhat under control. He finishes off school and his residency a year or so early and gets a job at Columbia Presbyterian in the ER, and becomes addicted to his work. When he can't handle being addicted to his work, he gets addicted to cocaine, too. (It was actually a series of particularly brutal ER cases that pushed him into drug use as a coping mechanism.)

(Mildly entertaining things- chain smoking and twitching are characteristics of users, but Blaine didn't start doing either until he went into rehab. Jason may occasionally comment on this, but Blaine has been clean for the last five years, apart from the cigarettes and the occasional drink, and would take accusations of being back on drugs about as well as he takes reminders of the kidney thing.)

His dealer eventually stopped taking money and instead charged favors, which was how Jason and Co ended up busting him in the middle of harvesting an illegal immigrant's kidneys for sale on the black market. Blaine's only excuse was that he was higher than a kite on something new and unidentified at the time. He only used cocaine up until that point, but his dealer suggested he try something new, in exchange for a bigger favor than usual.

He sees that point in his life as hitting absolute zero; he comes out of rehab with an incredibly rarefied sense of self loathing that six years of counseling has just barely begun to dent. The real reason he hates Jason so much is not because he thinks Jason is an irritating fuckwit (though he does), but because Jason serves as a tangible reminder of how low he'd sunk as a human being, and how precarious his grip on stability really is. It's a touchy subject for him, which is why he flies off the handle and tries to hit Jason when Jason brings up the kidney thing.

He hates Orrin in part because they were best friends, and Orrin ratted him out to ARC- but primarily because they were best friends, and he never wanted Orrin to know how incredibly screwed up he was. At some point in the future, when Silverlock asks him if he'll ever forgive Orrin, his response is, "There's nothing to forgive." Which is true- he doesn't blame Orrin for turning him in, and he is, in fact, almost grateful for it. He hates himself now, but he hates who he was before even more. He hates Orrin as a defense mechanism- he doesn't think Orrin will ever be able to forgive him for sinking so low, and he certainly doesn't think he deserves Orrin's forgiveness.

He works for Paige, at Templar's Rest. Maddel worked with him at the hospital and at NYUAA, and got him the job- Maddel mostly did this because he knew Blaine could be useful, and he would be, at the very least, entertaining. (As surrogate father figures go, he kind of sucks.) The lower level of the Rest is an upscale lounge/bar; the upper levels are occupied by art galleries and private rooms that can be rented by the hour. Most of the time, he really does just do security work- he makes sure no one goes upstairs without a proper escort, makes sure clients treat employees with the proper respect, that sort of thing. When necessary, he beats people about the head and torso with the butt of a sawed off shotgun. Occasionally, someone from Faery with a few bullet wounds shows up in one of the rooms upstairs, and then he gets called on to deal with that.

More often than not, his patients give him a 0_o look over the fact that he's human. Blaine tells them this is merely an unfortunate accident of birth, and not something that should be held against him. He does genuinely enjoy being around citizens of Faery; something about their auras, if not their incredibly racist and bigoted attitudes, is soothing to him.

He meets Foxbird on his operating table; about a month later, he meets Silverlock, who thanks him for putting Foxbird back together. (And by "thanks him" I mean they kind of have sex in Blaine's office after Silverlock uses the worst pickup line in the history of ever. I kind of really want to write that scene, because it's hilarious for me.)

My characters are a lot sharper in Districtmancy; Maddel is more of a racist Nazi asshole, and Silverlock is more of a sociopath. (I need to stop watching Oz, or at the very least, stop equating Blaine and Silverlock with Beecher and Keller. It isn't pretty.)

Blaine and Rien (though Blaine and most of the people at the Rest call him Silverlock; I imagine Drake would, too) are together for about four years prior to the start of the game. Silverlock gets attached to the point where he would actually be monogamous if Blaine asked him to- but Blaine doesn't ask, because Blaine has no self esteem. (One would not characterize their relationship as being particularly healthy, no. But Blaine is less fucked up with it than without, so go figure.)

Life is fairly uneventful, until three days prior to the beginning of the game, when Blaine lets himself into Silverlock's apartment and finds Orrin there, mostly naked. (At some point when they were both in college, it's possible Blaine and Orrin hooked up drunkenly? And then never spoke of it again? But neither of them ever stopped thinking about it, except they tried really hard to forget about it because it was really weird for everyone involved, especially me? Yes.)

To be fair, Silverlock had a plan here- he was hoping to eventually get them back on speaking terms with each other (he meets Orrin by coincidence, but he knows all of Blaine's backstory, and he's seen pictures of Orrin). It was a very half assed plan, and he went about it in a very stupid manner, but he did have a plan. Both Orrin and Blaine flip out, and there is a minor brawl; Orrin's nose gets broken, and Silverlock ends up with a black eye and a split lip. Blaine gets out with a bitemark on his shoulder, because Orrin can be really fucking vicious sometimes.

Two days later, Jason shows up at his door, and points out that, hey, not only is Blaine a healer, but he's something of an expert on dark aligned soulmancers with ties to Faery! Blaine points out that Jason is as annoying as he is ugly, and also, fucking someone for four years doesn't make you an expert on their mancy. And Jason smiles, and says, sure, fine, sorry for bothering you, I'll just go ask Brannskada if he'd like to help- I'm sure he would, he's NYPD to begin with and this sort of case would look great on his record- and Blaine tells Jason to shut the fuck up and get off his porch, and also he'd better be getting paid in cash.

So, three days after his violent breakup with Rien, he goes clubbing for great justice with a necromancer and a cop; four days after, he has to go and visit Drake of all people, who feels the need to remind him of said violent breakup. Also, he gets attacked by an invisible stalker. Five days after, he gets attacked by a werewolf, finds the mutilated body of a fourteen year old girl, and becomes a vague older-brother-figure to the same werewolf that attacked him. And if the game stays on schedule, he'll be stuck seeing Silverlock exactly one week after their break up.

It's a good thing he's got a murder case to worry about and a bunch of crazy teammates to keep in one piece; if he didn't have something to distract him, he'd probably be finding himself a new dealer. As it is? He's still probably having a bad day.