#but they did these albums out of an obligation to armys or the agenda of a ceo and look how they turned out

[solarwynd]

giving the members just a year to fine tune their individual craft now seems so gimmicky in retrospect. and I know some members didn’t have a choice with that age cap for that new law, but even with that, there’s absolutely no satisfaction from this chapter even outside everything that hybe has pulled because their debuts were stacked ontop of each other with no room to breathe. it really didn’t feel like an opportunity to find themselves, more like an extended break where they just put out solo albums because they needed to.

[hellstate--rp-blog]

↪ b a s i c s ;

N A M E: Nikita Lauren Charles A G E: 33 P L A C E   O F   O R I G I N: Dallas, Oregon G R O U P: None F C: Sonequa Martin-Green

❝ The world is full of painful stories. Sometimes it seems as though there aren’t any other kind. ❞

↪ p e r s o n a l i t y ;

P O S I T I V E   T R A I T S: straight-shooter ; heroic N E G A T I V E   T R A I T S: sardonic ; self-deprecating

↪ b i o g r a p h y ;

L I F E   B E F O R E   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

The one thing that young Nikita knew, when she was asked as a girl what she wanted to be when she grew up, was that she wanted to save lives. A serious and inquisitive child with a lot to say, she was still plagued by inattention and, though a smart girl by all means, she was not always the best at scoring high in classes. Her stoicism made the ADHD a tough diagnosis and it wasn’t until she hit fifth grade that anybody suggested it to her mother. Classes demanded that she focus, sit still, and keep her eyes front–difficult tasks for a young girl. In her age, they didn’t make special dispensation for kids with attention issues. Ethel Charles would sure as hell have no daughter of hers hooked on those drugs, but that resolve faded as easily as the breath that carried the promise as years went by.

Adderall helps. It’s Nikita’s dad, Ferdinand “Freddie” Charles, who finally caves. Nikita focuses. Her grades aren’t perfect, but she makes an effort. She plays some sports, does a school play or two, but nothing seems to stick. She’s always felt like there’s nothing in the world she’s perfect at and her varied interest pull her in a dozen different directions. It isn’t until she takes the ASVAB that Freddie considers the benefit a military career could have for her. He loved his time as a marine. He knows the kindness in her heart that lurks beneath a strong face and clenched fists. The more they talk about it, the more excited she gets. Who wouldn’t want to save lives for a living? They talk all night while, Freddie gets out his old photo albums of his time deployed and Ethel braids her hair. It’s only in retrospect that Nik can remember how perfect that moment was.

Navy Corpsman: a five year enlistment obligation. It’s an easy thing to do and when she graduates in 2003, she follows the ceremony with a straight shot to bootcamp, She wants to be where the action’s at and so she grinds through corpsman school. It’s not glamorous, but it’s good work and it’s practical ( it means something ). She doesn’t believe in the war when she goes in, but she believes in honor and she believes in saving lives. ( At the end, she’ll wonder what she believes ). She does two tours in Iraq. It’s a mess of a place of hot sand, smart asses with unintelligible accents like Gambit from the xmen cartoons she grew up on and angry men whose adopted families can never fill the hole of birth parents in a land so far away. These men do more for her then she could ever ask. It’s through thick and thin. She’ll miss them most when she gets home and things fall apart.

When she comes home for good, it’s not like Vietnam, but it sure as shit isn’t WWII either. The mother, who had sent her cookies on her birthday to some burning desert where her daughter sometimes laid awake wondering if she’d die, has early onset alzheimer’s. She can’t keep her hands on a job, but her parents don’t mind. As Ethel gets worse, Freddie needs the help more and more. So Nik stays and does what’s right and Freddie tries not to let his heartbreak when he hears her reassembling her guns in the middle of the night. He tries not to let it bother him when he wakes up and she’s standing over their bed, seeing him but not truly seeing him, hoping to protect them from invisible threats ( family comes first of course ).

The first time he wakes up to her in the room with a knife, he makes her go to the VA for a mental health evaluation. She’s honest there, but guarded. She thinks if she hasn’t fallen apart, she’s got her shit together. Christ, she takes care of her mother well enough, doesn’t she? Nik thinks all they’ll do is refill her adderall and send her on her way. Instead they brand her with new letters. PTSD. Chronic Pain Syndrome. These are conditions from which there is no cure.

Nik’s from Dallas, Oregon and if she wants something she can find it. First it’s just the adderall ( she won’t be going back to the VA or any other doctor for that matter, they don’t know what the world is really like and she doesn’t know how to live in theirs ). It migrates to other things depending on the severity of her pain that day. Some days she just wants to feel something other than the hell she’s made for herself. It turns out that heroes are Greek tragedies more oft than they are GI Joes. At least methamphetamines can make that reality a little more dull around the sharp edges ( they really do cut too deep ).

L I F E   D U R I N G   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

Ethel passes away and Nik shoots up for the first time, assaults her dad while hallucinating and confused ( it’s not him she thinks, but an imposter sent to harm her ), and is brought it for meth induced psychosis during the outbreak and locked in seclusion. Her dad is treated for a laceration to his eyebrow ( he’s lucky ) and doesn’t press charges. Instead he goes to Ethel’s grave with a bottle of her favorite wine and cries himself to sleep. Ethel would’ve loved the sunflowers he sets on her grave. By the time he wakes up to the chaos, the petals are wilted and stuck with a cold sweat to his cheek.

Nik doesn’t remember much when she finally settles down–something about some guy named Raul hassling her, a concern that her mother is really alive and is stealing her money, and something about aliens and the ‘fake army’ or some crazy shit. Dirty, short cut nails dig through the paper scrubs they’ve changed her into and Nik ignores the sensation, which feels weaker than shame and stronger than any sense of self she might’ve had in awhile ( it’s hard to know yourself, when your mother hasn’t known you in years ).

After the Zyprexa wears off, she finds herself looking out the small plexiglass window through streaks of blood. Eyes play tricks on her–the mind plays tricks–and it took a long time before she realized what she saw and two days before help arrived on the vengeful wings of Azrael ( an angel of death ). The staff is gone. No nurses, none of the techs, no security or doctors…hell, not even another poor soul stuck in the room across from her.

It’s a day and a half before the men come. They’re tall and broad shouldered men with hard eyes–the kind that don’t have creases in the corners ( men who never smile ). She’s starting to feel normal again, but run down–exhausted. The men aren’t unkind, but they don’t let her out either. They’re the kind of survivalists she expects were prepared for this sort of thing. If they believe her about having served their country, they don’t care ( men like them aren’t interested in supporting the troops unless they can leverage them as some sort of agenda ). She listens, says little, and doesn’t mind that they don’t trust her or let her out. There’s hints of the outside world, others fill up the two other secure rooms. They’re other people deemed untrustworthy. Nik figures she can’t trust them either. Some of them look like they’ve been dead for weeks.

It’s months that she’s locked up with no explanation. She figures it’s because they can’t trust her. She can see the seclusion signs on the other doors. It’s clear by the paper scrubs and the foam mattress that she wasn’t able to be trusted before whatever happened happened. It’s months before she notices the infighting on her regular trip to the bathroom under armed guard. In the other room one of the men is standing halfway in the door. Inside something inhuman snarls and screams. It sounds like a cougar and sets the hairs on the back of her neck on edge before she hears the man put a bullet in whatever it was. The screaming stops.

L I F E   A F T E R   T H E   O U T B R E A K:

Men fight and things fall apart ( the center cannot hold, as Yeats would say ). Whoever her captors or protectors are, they don’t last long. A coup takes place. She’s seen the threads of it being woven over several months, biding her time. If she can wait in the fucking Iraqi sun then she sure as hell can survive this tomb. The guards are spread fewer–farther between–and soon they only send one. She’s never caused them trouble before ( has she? )–silent listener, cooperative and calm. She dispatches the man with the same ease, a muscle memory from long ago. She doesn’t save his life; if he’d wanted to save hers, he would’ve let her out a long time ago. It’s not until she gets outside that she wonders if she was wrong.

The shock of the world she’d missed fall apart spilled from her lips like a last meal. There’s nothing so shocking as having spent an eternity inside a box only to find your home set to ruin. Nik goes home, but her dad’s long gone. She thinks maybe he could’ve survived. It’s hard to tell anymore. The sick lump in her stomach hardens like cement as she remembers their last moments together. She’ll never get another chance to make it right, but she sure as shit knows she’ll never touch crank again.

Nikita is hypervigilant, claustrophobic, but stoic. Her anxieties are hidden well–an internal panic that she hides behind a strong face. A black woman in the military, she has lost any shred of the privilege of vulnerability. Dallas, Oregon was hardly kinder to her than Cheyenne, Wyoming. After escaping the hospital, Nik cut all of her hair off and did her best to disguise herself so that she could travel alone with less trouble from the living ( unwilling to become another prisoner ). Hair grows and roots do too. Cheyenne doesn’t promise her anything, but she needs the structure of a real place; she’s never known who she was without structure.