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lakeham · 5 years

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EVELYN HAWTHORNE is 35 YEARS OLD, resides in HARTLINGTON and has lived in Lakeham for 2 MONTHS. She is FEMALE and works as a PRIVATE SECRETARY. She is portrayed by ANTONIA THOMAS and is played by DOVE.

Trigger Warnings: Death, verbal abuse, pregnancy, sex work.

Evelyn was born the fourth sibling of seven in a family who gradually loved their children less as they were born. With one older brother and two older sisters, she was raised more by them than her own parents. There were too many mouths to feed, lack of consistency with birth control, and ultimately an incredibly unhealthy situation for children to be raised in.

Her three younger sisters were born in quick succession, and while her older sisters acted more as moms than anything else to them, Evelyn was too young to be of much help. They huddled together for safety - while their parents never hit them, verbal abuse was in frequent succession, and Evelyn quickly learned that if she was spunky and sharp with them, she’d take the pain of their words and her siblings wouldn’t have to.

There was nothing glamorous about that life. Her eldest sister dropped out of high school just to work and support them to the best of her ability. The youngest children were often sloughed off on Evelyn, who had a very small amount of patience in dealing with them. But they managed to survive, each finding little dreams to cling to.

Evelyn’s dream came unexpectedly in high school in the form of a wealthy boy named Edward. He’d only just transferred into their school at the age of sixteen. His time there was to be short - the local private school that his family had more than enough money to pay for had no space for admission at that point, but he was guaranteed an opening the following year. Inexplicably he took to Evelyn, and she to him - and if he was the reason she forced herself to get out of bed after staying up all night listening to her parents fighting, then who was she to be judged for that?

Inevitably the shoe dropped. Evelyn was not suitable as a lover, even as a teenaged girlfriend, and Evelyn’s parents rejected the idea of her acting as if she deserved better than they did. The two were forcibly separated. It didn’t matter. Edward had a car of his own - within days, they were sneaking out together, buying time for a full year even after his transfer.

Evelyn’s pregnancy wasn’t anticipated. She was seventeen with no familial support, and Edward had no one to lean on either. Foolish as it was, their only option was to take what unspent cash Edward had been hoarding over the past year and get out of town. They fled to New York City, where they spent time among a number of questionable communities and homelessness until at the age of 18 they were able to marry. Wasn’t easy, dodging police, avoiding inquests that could only be sent by Edward’s family - but by the time they were of age, it didn’t matter. They had their whole lives ahead of them.

And then the accident came. She has yet to speak of it - barely thinks of it. Only lets it exist briefly in her mind before she moves forward.

The birth of her daughter, Cora, was only barely celebrated by a teenaged girl alone, with no one to support her, no way to even pay the bills for the hospital. The first few years were a struggle of working overtime in restaurant gigs just to avoid a studio apartment and daycare for Cora. In the end, something had to change, and Evelyn made a bold move: she entered the realm of sex work.

As a professional Domme, Evelyn managed to make appropriate connections that let her bring in enough money to provide for her little family in addition to getting her GED. College wasn’t in the cards: she put aside money for eventual college for Cora, determined to give her a far better job. But her career of choice was unstable, unregulated, and rumors were bound to spread. Cora grew fast, constantly being taunted by the other children about her mom - parents even threatened to remove her from her mother’s care.

The seeds of discord were sewn between Evelyn and Cora before either had a strong chance to bond. Only two years before, Evelyn finally had enough money set aside, after pinching pennies their whole life, to guarantee she could pay for Cora’s college with no struggle, and she left the business, turning instead to secretarial work at a nearby real estate office. But there wasn’t enough time to heal their rift. One day, a week before turning 18, Cora left the apartment with a simple note that she was leaving town with her friends and not to look for her.

Evelyn waited. She waited for months. And then she left - and came to Lakeham.

❝ ONLY IN THE SHATTERING CAN THE REBUILDING OCCUR.❞

Two months ago, Evelyn used the money that had been sitting and waiting for Cora’s college education to purchase a fixer upper home. Foolish? Yes, especially when she had no other source of income. A miracle came in the form of a job for an overworked owner of a hotel, harried and looking for someone to help keep him on task. Now, at least she’s well paid and constantly too busy to think.

It’s a process. She’s running from her shadows as fast as she can, only occasionally finding Cora where she can on social media to make sure that she’s happy and well and living her life. Eventually it all has to come crashing down - it’s a matter of when, not if.

Thanks to sinking so much money into her crappy house, Evelyn actually has very little money available to her. She lives leanly like she did as a teenager, directing most funds toward making sure her house isn’t going to fall apart during the next strong thunderstorm.

One of Evelyn’s favorite hobbies is pottery, and every dish in her home is one that she made herself. She has regrettably less time to pursue it now that she’s working for Mr. Smith.

Evelyn in the past worked with a number of politicians, celebrities, and other wealthy people under the table - she knows more gossip and has more blackmail on her former clients to live on for the rest of her life, but refuses to cash any of those secrets in until she’s at her lowest.

(+) Patient, protective, logical. (-) Controlling, assumptive, guarded.

#evelyn hawthorne #antonia thomas #all #female #hartlington #tw death #tw verbal abuse #tw pregnancy #tw sex work #tw prostitution

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lakeham · 5 years

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CAMELLIA "CAM" PATTON is 24 YEARS OLD, resides in SOUTHPORT and has lived in Lakeham for 2 MONTHS. She is FEMALE and is UNEMPLOYED. She is portrayed by MARGARET QUALLEY and is played by SAY.

Trigger Warnings: Drugs, death.

Born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut, Cam was always called the “black sheep” of the family. While her five brothers and sisters forged their own successes and paths in life, she liked to say that she was maintaining the Patton family name as liars, thieves, and good-for-nothing citizens of the community. Lionel Patton and Justine Wright were New Haven natives and heroin addicts, and had a distinct penchant for eschewing modern birth control, so it was only natural for them to pop out five children, with Cam being the baby. Her older siblings, having seen the wreckage addiction left on their family, worked hard in school and at their jobs to create a successful life for themselves, but Cam was different. Ever since she could remember, she would get into fights with her classmates, including the boys, and was often sent to the nurse’s office for a black eye or a bloody nose. Often left to fend for herself at home, she grew into a bitter, hardened child who was prone to outbursts and violence. In the 6th grade, while her oldest brother was receiving a full-ride scholarship to go to UConn, Cam took her first puffs of a cigarette. And the fall of her freshman year of high school, while her older sister started her own fine-dining restaurant in New York, Cam began to deal weed to the upperclassmen, having ample access to it at home.

Things changed, however, the summer before Cam turned sixteen. Although she grew up a tomboy, mostly by default, she realized that boys and men alike began to notice her in ways that they hadn’t before. Although she always managed to get herself out of sticky situations by using her wit and charm, this was the first time that she realized she possessed a physical allure as well, and Cam was quick to wield it in any situation possible. Now, not only did she use it for getting out of situations, but to get what she wanted as well, whether that be money, drugs, or sexual favors. By the time she was eighteen, Cam was an alcoholic, fully addicted to heroin, and a high school dropout.

Her siblings, whom over the years were often tasked with pulling Cam out of various situations, all decided to intervene and put her in a state-of-the-art addiction rehabilitation program in Massachusetts, with the hope that she’d come out clean and ready to face the world with a new outlook. She did, at first, and tried to make a life for herself in Boston, but she’d always find herself back in the ring of her heroin addiction, strung out on her bathroom floor. The worst of it came six months ago, when her parents were found dead in a car, overdosed on some cocktail of opiates. Although Cam never had a close relationship with her parents, she still felt deeply affected by her parents’ unseemly death, and ended up in her own overdose — except she was saved, as her landlord called an ambulance when she went in to fix the sink.

❝ NOBODY EXISTS ON PURPOSE, NOBODY BELONGS ANYWHERE, EVERYBODY’S GONNA DIE.❞

At the funeral, it was decided that her siblings would move Cam to Lakeham, as it was closer to her siblings and a nice, clean city. They pitched in to pay for a small studio apartment in Southport, hoping that she’d eventually get her GED, find a job and stand on her own two feet. However, Cam has no intention of finishing school or getting a job. She feels as if she can weasel her way into getting what she wants without working for it and plans to live off of her siblings as long as she can. As for Lakeham, she’s ready to wreak havoc on the residents’ perfect little lives in their perfect little town, and leave a mess behind, as she’s always had.

Cam absolutely hates her given name, ‘Camellia’. When she was seven, she asked her mother during one of the rare moments she was sober, what her name meant. Her mother told Cam that she was named after a flower, so she’d “grow up to be delicate and beautiful”, like her namesake. From that moment on, Camellia decided to go by ‘Cam’, which suited her tomboy-ish personality more.

Cam is closest to her oldest sister, who is the second oldest child. She is the most understanding and forgiving of her behavior. She’s always been there for Cam to bail her out of any situation, while her other siblings are less inclined to do so.

Cam found out she was bisexual when she was thirteen, and kissed a girl on a dare. The girl was a fellow classmate and friend she always found to be attractive, but she didn’t know her feelings for women until she locked lips. Cam now identifies as pans — although real attraction is far and few in between, when she does find herself liking someone, gender identity doesn’t matter to her.

(+) Witty, charming, outgoing. (-) Mean, violent, lazy.

#camellia patton #margaret qualley #all #female #southport #tw drugs #tw death

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lakeham · 5 years

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MATHIEU "MATTIE" FRENIER is 29 YEARS OLD, resides in SOUTHPORT and has lived in Lakeham for 2 MONTHS. He is MALE and works as a BARTENDER AT AFTERLIFE/EX CON-ARTIST. He is portrayed by DANE DEHAAN and is played by L.

Trigger Warnings: Sexual abuse, drugs, alcoholism.

Children generally rely heavily on their parents from birth, unless they aren’t given that opportunity. But humans adapt. They learn to rely on whoever is nearest to them. Mathieu’s mother lived in a dilapidated old warehouse in Southern France with a handful of junkies and her older son, Louis. Louis had never known a life outside of stealing what they needed to live, or cleaning up his mother’s bodily fluids when she’d gone on a bender. He lived in near-constant fear of being caught, and taken away from the only person he could love. He watched his mother do what she had to do in order to survive. He knew she didn’t love him nearly as much as she loved drugs, but she kept him anyway, and so he loved her with everything that he was.

Mattie came along when Louis was eight. Their mother died in childbirth, or immediately following, nobody was really sure. Louis carried a backpack of canned food, his late mother’s identification (she’d always kept it, he figured he should too), and his baby brother wrapped in a dirty blanket away from the warehouse, following the other vagrants as they left his mother’s body to rot. Mattie was tiny, frail, and sort of sickly…Louis loved the infant as he had loved his mother, wanting nothing more than to keep the tiny thing safe. For the first few years of Mattie’s life, Louis was everything to him. A boy under the age of fourteen, his caregiver, teacher, and hero. When they had no place to sleep, Mattie slept in his brother’s jacket against the boy’s chest. When there wasn’t enough food for both of them, Mattie ate while Louis went without. And they were moving, constantly moving. They learned together. How to slip through the cracks, how to avoid notice in public, how to stay clean enough that a shop owner or bleeding heart on the street wouldn’t stop to wonder whether the children had a home to go to or not. These were two children that didn’t exist in the world. Nobody knew them. There was no record of them. And that made it hard for Louis to provide. When he was twelve and Mattie was four, he found himself a mentor. An older man who owned a shop near the cathedral the boys were sleeping in. He said he could help, he could teach Louis how to get them a better life…and the man would only profit a little.

The shopowner helped Louis utilize Mattie’s young innocence to their advantage. Louis wanted to take his place, but Mattie was where the real money was. Louis had his fair share of motel rooms, but most of those few years he spent holding his brother, calming him, helping the little boy into the bath and letting him cry. It was going to be okay, things were going to get better, this was only for now and then they would move to somewhere beautiful where nobody would ever hurt Mattie again.

For four years, Mattie suffered as quietly as he could. And one night, it was too much. Louis was sixteen now, and angry enough to beat a man nearly to death because his little brother had been hurt pretty badly. The police came to find the young teenager at the hospital, holding the nine-year-old’s hand as a doctor stitched him up. Louis needed little prompting to tell the police everything. That night, the boys were separated. Mattie was placed with a family nearby for the time being, and Louis was put into a center for other lost teens. Louis was able to provide just enough information for authorities to identify their late mother, a woman who had gone missing seventeen years prior. The boys’ grandparents were contacted, and the elderly couple agreed to meet both of them.

It was odd for Mattie, young as he was, to be dragged to doctors and then into what he can only recall as a frighteningly clean room with sofas and a television, and a box of toys that he probably was supposed to play with but couldn’t bring himself to. Instead, he clung to his older brother, just content to be close to the other after being separated longer than they’d ever been separated in their lives. It wasn’t just their grandparents they were meeting, their mother’s sister joined them. The woman had flown in from Boston, Massachusetts, where she’d been living for almost ten years with her husband, an American military man she’d met when he’d been stationed in Europe. The grandparents were kind, but a little distant, seeing their daughter in the boys’ faces. Their aunt was warmer, more inviting, and Mattie liked her almost immediately.

When she offered to take the boys, Mattie didn’t have much choice. Being nine years old, officials were more than happy to send him on his way, get him out of the system. Louis was sixteen, though, and given the choice. Be on his own, or move to Boston to be in the care of his aunt. He chose being on his own, and Mattie was wide-eyed and staring out the window of a plane without even getting the chance to say good-bye to what had been his primary caregiver for so long.

For two years, Mattie wouldn’t be touched. A hand on his shoulder, fingertips against his hair, it sent him into a tantrum not fit for a boy his age. He’d kick, scream, shriek until he was alone, curled up in a ball on the ground. In school, his aunt was told he had an emotional/behavioral disorder, and given exercises to work on with him at home. Mattie struggled constantly, never having been to school before, never having lived in a house before, never having a healthy family dynamic before. But after a few years, he started to get the idea. Having to learn a new language as well as attend a real school for the first time in his life was extremely challenging, but his aunt and uncle paid for tutors and after school programs to help him catch up. Mattie would always be a little behind his peers, but the gap became less noticeable after time.

In middle school, he started falling in with the “wrong” crowd. He was ditching school, smoking cigarettes, drinking, experimenting with marijuana and prescription painkillers, that sort of thing. It escalated by the time he went to high school, doing a line of coke before class, shotgunning a beer before dinner with his aunt and uncle, that sort of thing. He became shameless, each moment looking forward to his next high, riding a xanax-cloud through life. He only managed to graduate from high school because his aunt and uncle pushed him to practically his breaking point, though he didn’t end up going to college. Mattie lived with his aunt and uncle for another year before they finally couldn’t take it anymore, and kicked him out of the house. He was living on the streets for the most part, occasionally couch surfing with friends, living what he considered to be his ‘best life’, pretty sure it wasn’t going anywhere else.

Mattie had gone back to what he considered to be his “roots”. The reason he’d been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder when he was young, the reason he had so many issues with being touched, the reason his brother had thought he’d failed Mattie. It was just easy, and it was all he really considered himself good for, anyway. He was cute enough, frail from substance abuse and too many missed meals, with a dark look to him that enough men found alluring. He made an okay income, enough to support his bad habits anyway. As it turned out, one illegal activity quickly spiraled into another, and he got really good at swindling people out of more money than they would normally just hand out.

❝ PEOPLE NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF UNTIL ALL OTHER OPTIONS RUN OUT.❞

For a short period of time when he was twenty-three/twenty-four, Mattie had gotten clean. He did so with the support of a friend who was struggling with some similar issues, and for a while things were good. He got himself a job as a bartender, started paying rent for a small apartment, went on jogs on a regular basis, etc. When his friend said she was leaving, he’d done his best to be supportive, though as soon as she was gone he felt alone, and lost. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, just Mattie’s dependency issues coming to bite him in the ass. He didn’t quite fall into old habits, or he told himself he didn’t. A bump here or there was different than daily use. He forced himself to take days off, to keep up normal relationships and his steady job, that sort of thing. When he realized he was headed down a very, very familiar road, he packed up his things and made his way to Lakeham, thinking a change of pace could be good for him. He needed to start new, bushy-tailed and fresh-faced, and he knew he might find some kind of support in the city. All he had to do was hope that a change of scenery was all it would take to un-fuck up a life that was so monumentally fucked up.

Though Mattie is fluent in English, since he started learning it twenty years ago, he still slips into French for convenience. When he’s stressed out or frustrated, French is the language he’ll mutter under his breath in. He’s also a little more at ease when he finds someone else that speaks French; it just reminds him of home, a little bit. The good parts of home, anyway.

He hasn’t seen his brother since he was nine and moved to Boston. They tried to write letters, but after a few years even those sort of fizzled out. He knows his brother probably isn’t in the States, but he still imagines that he sees him on the street now and then, still sixteen and unchanged and definitely just in Mattie’s head.

While he’s not as weird about people touching him as he used to be, he doesn’t freak out and throw temper tantrums, he does still have issues with it. Mattie’s a super affectionate guy, but only so long as he initiates it. If he’s taken by surprise when someone touches him on the shoulder or goes in for a hug, he shies away from it. He also has days where he just doesn’t want to be touched, and his body language says it better than words ever could.

(+) Quick-thinking, stoic, friendly. (-) Impulsive, loud, cynical.

#mathieu frenier #dane dehaan #all #male #southport #tw sexual abuse #tw abuse #tw drugs #tw alcoholism #tw alcohol

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