#man. i just love the idea of seam visiting him in jail at least only a single time just to see if the guy he once knew was still there..... | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

parabcllums · 5 years

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⧼ phoebe tonkin, cis female, she & her / mr rattlebone by matt maeson + oversized t-shirt containing the entirety of the ‘cool girl’ monologue over a lacy black thong, sheer black tights that have been pulled at all the seams with a shadow of ouroboros inked high on pallid thigh, chipped nail polish and fingers covered in dirty bandaids and stubbed out cigarettes in an overflowing ashtray & the best fake orgasm a man could hope for. ⧽ ━━ let me tell you a thing or two about MONICA LAUREL “NIKKI” BARTON. the TWENTY FIVE year old child of BARNEY BARTON is a UNDERGRAD at paragon academy and WAITRESS in town, and has sometimes been referred to as THE AMY ELLIOT DUNNE. they’ve always seemed very SELF RELIANT & RELENTLESS, though i’ve heard that they can be pretty SARDONIC & REACTIVE, too. it’s common knowledge that they have the ability of VIOLENT SELF DESTRUCTION & WICKED SEXUAL PROWESS ; guess we shouldn’t get on their bad side, huh? redirect to her stats page HERE and her pinterest board HERE.

what did you EVER do to deserve THIS? in all PROBABILITY, something terrible.

SECTION ONE OF TWO: BULLET POINT HISTORY trigger warnings: talk of alcoholism, drug abuse & dealing, death, murder, jail, physical assault / abuse and attempted sexual assault

only daughter of barney barton aka trickshot ( a barely functioning alcoholic ) and jacqueline taylor ( a barely functioning addict of whatever she could get her hands on quickest ), MONICA LAUREL BARTON was born on the fifth of october, 1994, in waverly, iowa.

up until she was three years and two months old, monica lived with both her mother and her father in a rundown farmhouse on the edge of town that had most certainly seen better days. it was never perfect - but in those first few years that flew by far too quickly, there was a kind of balance. it WORKED. barney had his issues. jackie had hers. but they were TRYING. jackie had been clean for six months. barney was more on the wagon than he’d been in twenty years. and then - like so many addicts before him, and like many more that would come after - he fell off of it again in a spectacular fashion, going on a weekend bender that didn’t come to an end until he stumbled in on the tuesday morning right before monica was supposed to be dropped to playschool. he toppled into and knocked the rickety kitchen table and proclaimed, LOUDLY, that the baby could have a day off and spend it with her pops - and as jackie tried to hold her out of his reach ( and the range of his alcohol soaked breath ) she had an epiphany. SHE COULDN’T DO THIS. monica deserved better.

she had two bags packed with essentials just an hour later, and after loading up their shared car, left with monica in tow - never stopping to look back or reconsider. they settled in iowa falls.

she’s four, five, SIX, and her memory of her dad is dim, if not completely gone. she’s growing up, FAST, and jackie can barely keep up - and sometimes, barely keep it together. a prescription pill here and there takes the edge off enough to get by. monica is walking and talking and conversing now and she asks sometimes where her dad is and why he’s never come to her recitals - she imagines, like every little kid in her situation would, all the things her dad would do, and all the things she’d show him, and yet when he turns up out of the blue in a wrinkled old suit, a court order in his hands that says he now gets supervised visitation - she’s suddenly struck shy.

it takes a lot of those supervised visits for her to open up to him. he’s not exactly what she always imagined her dad would be - he doesn’t always know how to respond and never has any ideas for the games they can play in their few hours together - but she makes do. she realizes that he doesn’t know the rules of monopoly or the life game so she asks him to read to her instead, and over the next few years, they got through a lot of books that way, TOGETHER. it was nice.

she was eleven when her mom died. she came home from school early, and she didn’t get a reply when she shouted her greeting. she searched all of their tiny little house, jackie nowhere to be found, and when she came to the bathroom door that wouldn’t budge, she KNEW she had to call someone. the first person to come to mind was her dad. she remembers sitting on the steps out front, while he broke down the door that was locked from the inside - she remembers hearing his shout, and then his cries, and then, a little while later, the ambulance sirens as they approached the house, but it was too late. when she thinks back now, she understands the word OVERDOSE. at the time, it didn’t really click.

a lot of things had to be smoothed over following that. she couldn’t just go home with her dad - no matter how much she had cried and begged as the cops had led her to their car, KICKING AND SCREAMING AND BITING, to wait for social services. over the months that followed, monica was shuffled from foster home to foster home while barney fought the courts. she wasn’t a prime adoptee, so he had THAT in his favor - but there was a lot of hesitancy in allowing him full custody when he hadn’t had that sort of access to her since she was three years old. too much hesitancy, in fact. not a single person he came up against thought he would be a suitable guardian, and no amount of appeals were overturning the initial NO.

monica was old enough to understand, when her dad turned up in the middle of recess and urged her to leave with him, that it probably wasn’t a good idea. but he was the only familiar thing she had left. he was her DAD. so of course she went with him - against court rulings she didn’t have any knowledge of - and after an extended stay in california ( she remembers the beaches, and the ice cream, and how it was the last time she and her dad were really HAPPY ), they made a triumphant return to the now uninhabitable barton farmhouse, in waverly, where she hadn’t lived in YEARS. as they had pulled up in their tiny little car, he had turned to her with a bright eyed smile and said they could fix it up together again - just like he and her mom had, years before. the caravan out back was only supposed to be temporary. it WASN’T.

in spite of that, they had a few months of perfect serenity. for a while, barney held it all together, and monica got to just be a KID. then he fell off the wagon again - LIKE CLOCKWORK - and things changed. they always had a couple of months peace before a great many more months of chaos, and over time, monica learnt to be the grown up. she was old enough now to know that wasn’t right, but young enough, and with just enough experience of the system, to know that she didn’t want to go back to it - and it wasn’t great, but at least she was with her dad, right? and sometimes, SOMETIMES, she’s lucky enough to be sent away. sent to the OTHER barton’s.

the weeks and months that she would sometimes spend with the other side of the barton family are now memories that monica holds close to her heart. they’re something that she SMILES at, when remembering, in spite of herself. they welcomed her with open arms. uncle clint was always kind, and aunt bobbi…- at a time when monica needed an older woman in her life, aunt bobbi was everything she could have wanted and MORE. she wishes she could have been better, for them.

she wishes she hadn’t ruined things.

fast forward again. she was a bratty fifteen year old with a tongue sharp as a knife and a new name, now, given to her by her new favorite cousin - NIKKI. it was meant to be a name of love, but it fit the image that she had cultivated for herself. more out of school than she is in it, she’s a party girl. AT FIRST, she drank at them to be a part of the IN CROWD that never really did accept her, and then, she started to take a little bit of something stronger to help her have a good time, and then a LOT of something stronger when she realized it would help get her through the sleepless nights and days when she was taking care of barney and making money i the last deadend job she had instead of going to school. she was far too young to be so exhausted and taking on all these roles that she shouldn’t have had to, just to get through life, and they didn’t really have all that much money, so when a friend of another ex tells her about a job she could do INSTEAD of waitressing or delivering newspapers, she was ALL over it.

the first time she meets CALLUM MAARX, it’s in a denny’s parking lot. he’s easily TEN YEARS her senior, but she’s flattered by the attention that the overly charismatic man she shakes hands with gives her, honored when he calls her PRETTY, touched when he says he knows that she’s a SMART girl. she was. but not smart enough to say no to waverly’s most DANGEROUS drug dealer.

SHE wasn’t dealing. that was what she told herself. it wasn’t so bad when SHE wasn’t the one working a street corner and waiting for people to come on by. she was just moving his gear from place to place for him - delivering the sales wherever they needed to be. sometimes that meant skipping school for a couple days to catch a bus across the next state. sometimes it meant feigning interest in visiting the other barton’s, just so she could be nearer to whoever it was she needed to see. sometimes it was the guy next door, and she didn’t have to go ANYWHERE. she never knew, for sure, where she was going or what she was doing until she got a text to say she was needed, but she didn’t want to know, either - something told her, even then, that the less she knew about what she was doing, the BETTER. she was sixteen, when she decided to drop out of school and quit her small town jobs to start working for callum FULL TIME.

she realized, at a point, that callum got paid a whole lot more than she originally thought based on her ‘wage’ for each bag she delivered. she had been grateful, of course, at least at first. the huge amount of money coming in meant she had been able to fastrack some of the ‘never completed’ renovations on the house - she and her dad were able to move in, in that first year, and out of the caravan that she had been BULLIED for over the previous few years. but she got greedy. she was trusted, by then, enough that she thought she could get away with skimming a little powder off the top in lieu of paying for her own growing habit - and she got a BLACK EYE for her efforts, and a tarnished reputation that would come back to bite her, later.

she was a MULE and an ADDICT. she wasn’t trailer trash, anymore, wasn’t the girl that she had always been TEASED for being, but in a lot of ways, she was WORSE. back then, though, she still had HOPE. she believed the best of people. when her high school invited her back for prom, nikki knew it was a mistake to go, but she had never been to a DANCE - and she really, truly, thought that it would all be OKAY. she goes in a dress that probably cost a lot when it was new but was a hand me down, and she facetimes her aunt to show her what makeup she had done, and when she gets there, she flies under the radar - keeping to herself, and really attempting to ENJOY the night. she gets voted prom queen. she protests, but the crowd is impossible to push against, all the fellow students she had left behind making her head towards the stage where the head cheerleader, the SHOE IN, declares her WHITE TRASH QUEEN and shoves a scepter made of beer cans into her hands while her friends place a crown made of the same atop her head. she had always been quick to RAGE. always had trouble, keeping herself in line. her first instinct was to throw both back at the girls who had given them and exit for the nearest bathroom, to cry. her second, as discovered an hour later, when the would have been prom queen went looking for her boyfriend, was to bang the prom king in the backseat of his car. her third, ejected from the prom once and for all, was to head to CALLUM’S PLACE and ask for something STRONGER. something she had never TAKEN before. that night is the first night she tried coke. it’s not the last.

she turned nineteen. it felt like every weekend, she was bailing barney out of the local jail. she was running drugs across a couple towns, or even a couple STATES, and during the days when she WASN’T being a MULE she was working as a chef in a shitty two star restaurant that hadn’t seemed to care she had no qualifications to be working around food. she had received her GED, and she was taking online courses because a part of her was hoping she could still make something of herself, but she was acutely aware, now, of the fact that she was living a life no one would have been proud of. and things got worse. somehow, they still could.

she realized what her dad did for a living for the first time when his “friends” turned up one afternoon, while she was trying to nap on the couch. she’d only seen them a few times before, and had always been told to leave when they were visiting. more often than not, her dad would disappear with them for a couple days and come back with more money than she could make in a year - but it was always gone quicker than she’d ever have spent it. something must have changed. she wasn’t being told to LEAVE.

instead she sat in and she listened to them talk about their next heist. SHE WEIRDLY WASN’T SURPRISED. they left and came back the next day, and this time nikki served them food, and when there was a break in the conversation as they all went quiet, trying to work out how they could get past a certain level of the security that had them BAFFLED - she dropped a suggestion. it was a good one, and she was allowed, if not ENCOURAGED, to make more. before she knows it, she’s fallen down the rabbithole and pulling off the rare heist with them - all the while continuing to run drugs and doing all the shitty stuff she’s always done, pulling herself in every direction to make things work.

and then she had just turned twenty one and she had a moment of epiphany, not unlike her mother had years before. as she’s looking down at the plans for the next job and whittling the time away until she has to go and pick up her next delivery from callum, she realizes, blankly, that something had to give. she was doing jobs more often now with her dad and his “friends” ( she learned there were airquotes around that word the first time one of them put his hand on her ass during a meeting, as she went around the room with a cheap cheeseboard. no friend of your dad’s would ever do that ) but she’s built up quite the reputation for herself, running drugs for her OWN “friends” ( she’s always known the airquotes that are there. ever since that first and last time, callum had been suspicious of her - and every so often over the years, he’d get it in his head that she must have stolen some of the product to fuel her own habits or even taken some of the money for herself, and she had broken ribs and fingers and bruised eyes and chipped teeth aplenty to show for what had happened each and every time ) - and something would have to give. at this point, she knew she was tempting fate, and eventually … fate was going to bite, hard.

even now - nikki can’t believe she was wrong. she thought it would be shield, or another government branch, who’d catch them out on one of the heists and haul them all to jail. there’d been times where they were only two steps ahead and had almost been able to TASTE the shitty prison food, they were THAT close to getting caught. she’d always sort of believed that was going to be what happened, and she’d let her guard down back home. she was waverly’s best drug runner - she’d stopped thinking that that part of her life, and CALLUM, were even a danger to her. that was a mistake.

here’s the truth: a guy in iowa city, a loyal customer of nearly eight years, had finally hit the bottom of what had seemed like an endless supply of money to waste. he had 180,000 of a 200,000 bill - meaning he was 20,000 short. nikki didn’t realize. it wasn’t her job to count all the money she was being given - she just had to get it from a to b.

here’s the truth that callum convinced himself of as he drove to her farmhouse at 3:40 am that same night, FURIOUS: she had obviously been given the 200,000 by his loyal customer, and she’d taken twenty thousand and hoped he wouldn’t notice.

her dad was out, drinking somewhere in town, or maybe already safe in a jail cell for the night. she didn’t know. a part of her didn’t care, either. she was asleep on the couch when he pulled up outside. when the furious banging had started on the door she had assumed that it was her dad, after forgetting his keys again. him, or the cops, hauling his ass home.

sleepily, she had gotten up and went to open the front door - but as soon as the lock was undone, it was pushed VIOLENTLY into her, and she couldn’t regain her balance in the time that it took for callum to launch himself at her. they fell, him on top, his weight CRUSHING. he had always had a temper. a BAD ONE, like HER. she hadn’t always known - had once thought him CHARMING - but all the injuries she had ever been given at his hands, all the times she had found herself in a&e over the years since she had started working for him, they could all attest to the truth. this was different, though. this was MURDEROUS, a kind of rage that she had NEVER seen before, and it was obvious that before they got to the finale, he had thought of one OTHER way that he could make back the money he thought she had stolen.

nikki wasn’t much of a fighter. she had never been formally trained, sloppily using her fists to solve her problems, but never really knowing how to land her shots PROPERLY. but she was a SURVIVOR. that had shown itself clearly enough throughout the years. she had survived the system for the three years she was in it. she had survived her dad, and her life, and she had pulled together SOMETHING out of nothing for herself. even SHITTY, her life was her own. she struggled beneath him and he hit her, over and over, but between it, he was finding a way to begin tearing at her clothes - making his way THROUGH them - and gods, she wasn’t going to let this happen. she REFUSED. there was an old iron doorstop in the front hall, that had been in the house since her grandparents had owned it. things were happening FAST, he was already at her underwear, she could barely move, but she stretched her arm as much as she could, grimacing through the pain, and she REACHED, and REACHED, and strained her fingers as far as they could go -

she was a SURVIVOR. she wasn’t going to die. she wasn’t going to let him get what he wanted, either. she doesn’t remember actually hitting him with it. she doesn’t remember how she KEPT hitting him with it, tears streaming down her face, until he fell away from her and she was able to move away. he wasn’t moving. a half an hour later, she was sat on the front steps of her house, just like she had when she was eleven. WAITING. except this time, she was drenched in blood and tears and waiting on the cops that she had called, not her dad, and the person that was dead inside wasn’t her mum, but CALLUM.

she didn’t get much of a fair trial. it was far too cut and dry. on the stand, everything came out - all the things that she had been involved in with him, all the things she had done without - and since he couldn’t face HIS crimes, she DEFINITELY needed to face hers. she was sentenced within a month to seven years, minimum, without a chance of parole.

she served three and a half. then, in january this year, the door to her cell swung open and she was told that she was being handed over to SHIELD custody. some sort of a new SCHEME. nikki hadn’t signed up for any - and knew she wasn’t likely to have been considered, even if she had - and naturally, her survival instincts kicked in. she kicked and screamed and kept telling them she WOULDN’T go -

and inside the room she was lead to was a shield agent. they wanted information on TRICKSHOT - still at large, under the radar ever since his daughter’s arrest. they figured she would have everything they needed, and they told her she could WALK FREE ( or, well, more free than she was at present moment - she would have to stay at PARAGON ) if she told them what she knew about charles barton and his associates. she would have been a fool not to agree.

SECTION TWO OF TWO: POSSIBLE CONNECTIONS / WANTED

foster families she lived with for a time, between ages 11 and 13 ! she bounced from home to home a lot, so she’s prob.. stayed w a lot of ppl.

a tutor !

party squad ! i have a wc for four ppl i think that she parties with, but.. gimme.

old clients ! people she would deliver to, people she rubbed shoulders w cause they knew callum. if ur character is ANY sort of a gang member, then we could prob work smth out where callum.. worked w them or smth!

flings ! current, previous, whatever

i think it’d b super fun to have that guy she slept w at prom sksk he was prom king , was dating the girl who crowned nikki ‘white trash queen’, and ,,, kinda lowkey got used , but like , it’d be FUN .

hmmm ANYTHING.

#sidekick.intro #⌜ ･ﾟ ☆ ･ * parts of her died in the house she grew up in ― biography. ⌟ / barton.

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