touch, don't feel

arthur raymond foxcroft. twenty-eight. human. town royalty. all dressed up in bad news i know you've been hurt too this could be the wrong move maybe we should leave soon

[arthurfoxcroft-blog]

ameliafoxcroft:

Damn this broken nose. 

And fuck Willa Potter, for good measure. 

Unsurprisingly, her siblings hadn’t come to her rescue after the unceremonious decking. Amelia almost sensed a vein of glee washing over Arthur. Though that could have been a side effect from the marijuana he’d smoked before coming to the service. She didn’t do drugs, but she wasn’t dumb; the red eyes and glazed expression clearly gave him away. 

So with a bleeding nose and wounded pride Amelia had had to soldier on alone. Alone in the misery of the disappearance of her brother’s body, alone in this brutal, physical pain. She held ground and gave a statement that the show would go on. A show of strength even in the most difficult of times – something only Amelia Foxcroft could do with a broken nose. 

She had Marcus drive her in her car to the house, refusing proper medical treatment until she had cleaned up and assured the reception was in full swing. Other than the throbbing pain, she felt numb. Amelia hadn’t dared look in the coffin; the shouts and gasps of horror were enough to confirm Adam’s disappearance as she dripped blood onto the white floors she had paid money to be cleaned. Was she insane for continuing on as nothing had happened? 

Well, maybe. But it was the only thing she knew how to do. If she broke, she’d never be able to fix herself. 

Marcus drove a shortcut so they could beat the traffic of other mourners to the house. Once inside she excused herself to her room to clean herself up. Her bathroom mirror reflected a creature she’d never met before – a wild-eyed girl, red and strawberry blonde. The sight of a her that wasn’t her brought fresh tears to her eyes. She avoided all contact with her reflection after that, soaking an ivory washcloth in warm water and sitting on the toilet, dabbing the drying blood off her pale cheeks. 

Voices began to fill the space downstairs. She shut them out for the time being, allowing a moment of weakness for her chin to tremble, her body to shake. Then, a knock on the door she’d left slightly ajar. Amelia jumped off the toilet and faced her reflection once more, attempting to assume battle positions. “Just give me a minute,” she wobbled, wincing as she dabbed a rather painful part of her nose. “I just – I’ll be down once this stops.” 

The murmurs that began to fill the sitting room were all indistinguishable. After such a long, repetitive chorus of, ‘we’re so sorry for your loss,’ the words began to lose their meaning — had they ever held any meaning to him at all, because what had he truly lost? His job, his love, his world, but that loss was another one entirely, in a sea of its own, disjunct entirely from the so-called hole these near-strangers dressed in black attempted to fill with their oversized bouquets of flowers and casseroles that would go uneaten. He couldn’t mourn the brother he’d never gotten to know, the brother he’d never allowed his heart to beat for, and yet the charade was still kept up. For whose sake? Arthur wasn’t sure — more than likely, Amelia’s.

Stoned had been the only way to make it through Amelia’s sham of a speech, and while any noble elder brother would’ve pulled the drunk girl off of his sister before she’d had the chance to break a nose, Arthur Foxcroft was far from noble on a good day. Truth be told, it had only brought a hint of a chuckle to his lips — that, and the bullshit she’d spewed about loving Adam in different ways, and keeping him safe, and pillow forts.

Fucking pillow forts. He snorted at the recollection of it — in the version he could remember, his perfect fort blueprint always got fucked by Amelia’s micro-managing, Adam’s fucking around, and Avery’s obliviousness. Picking himself up from the armchair he’d sat himself in, he turned himself towards the staircase. While liquor still burned his throat, it would take just one more puff before he’d be able to sit through another few hours of the Foxcroft Family Facade. His steps carried him down the hallway towards his room, but the sight of a crack in Amelia’s door stopped him. 

Arthur offered a gentle knock, but he waited not for the voice on the other side to invite him before pushing it open and letting himself inside. Jumping off the toilet and adjusting herself in front of the mirror, tissue dabbing at her black and red nose, was Amelia. Arthur’s arms folded, he leaned himself against the doorframe, chuckling to himself with a low shake of his head. “Now that back there was a fucking show,” he hummed, eyes glancing upwards to meet hers in the mirror. “Which teen movie did you lift that speech from, Ames?”

[arthurfoxcroft-blog]

An empty fucking coffin. Adam had never done anything right in his life — Arthur should’ve known better than to think dying would be an exception. Had he’d been in a different state of mind, perhaps he’d have gotten up during the service to pull Willa off of his sister, if only to play the role of the supportive brother and settle the crowd, but the gram he’d smoked before everyone’s arrival had managed to keep him in his seat with his hands folded all the while, from interruption to brawl to empty coffin.

Truthfully, sober or not, he’d waited years to watch someone knock Amelia off her pedestal. He sure as hell wasn’t about to interrupt the show.

He’d waltzed calmly afterwards through the chorus of frightened whispers back to the Manor, pouring himself a bourbon and settling himself in an armchair in the sitting room. In all too typical Foxcroft fashion, not even the raised question of whether or not Adam was dead at all would interrupt their pre-planned festivities. Amber liquor swirled around the bottom of a crystal tumbler while Arthur’s glazed eyes simply watched, mesmerized by the dancing of its waves. “What a shit show, wasn’t it?” he mused, to no one in particular. “I suppose it’s almost poetic, though, with his send-off so aptly mirroring his life on earth.”

[arthurfoxcroft-blog]

@shaemckinley

He kept his head bowed as he walked down the grungy sidewalks, hoping to god for the first time in his life that no one would recognize him. His brother was to be buried in a matter of hours, and if Arthur was going to endure a day in memoriam of Adam, he wasn’t about to do it with a level head. His heart would only be half-present anyway, having seen the boy more as a distant cousin with whom to be reunited for awkward family gatherings where everyone pretended to love each other. His mind, though, craved the same kind of release — it was the only way he’d be able to make it through without a visible eye roll or audible scoff.

He’d never have called himself a stoner — there were too many connotations associated with the word, too many stereotypes of lowlives just like his brother, but what smoke he inhaled in the confines of his office or bedroom concerned no one but Arthur himself. It was only ever to give himself a mental break, he so often assured himself. When he’d gone home to find Elias gone, it had been an all too easy solution to numb the pain, if only temporarily. The same had gone for when he’d heard the news about Adam, but hardly for the same reason. No, he didn’t mourn a loss — not in the way a brother should have. Instead, he was haunted by another feeling altogether — how inescapable that hell hole of a town was, how all it brought anyone was a spiral downwards, some quicker than others.

The witch’s shop, as he’d heard in passing whispers, was where he’d find what he was looking for. He couldn’t recall having ever ventured into that neighbourhood, never mind behind the doors of whatever bullshit voodoo tourist trap the woman seemed to be operating. Then again, so long as he got what he came for, he didn’t particularly care what kind of wool she pulled over the eyes of a couple of small-town idiots. Arthur’s eyes settled on her, stood behind the register at the counter. From his pocket he pulled his wallet, and from his wallet he pulled a crisp hundred dollar bill. Head still bowed, his eyes dared glance up — first, quickly darting around the room to ensure no one worthwhile would catch a glimpse of him, then to meet hers. “I’ve heard you’re the person to talk to about certain particular herbal remedies,” he breathed, sliding the bill towards her. “For your discretion, of course.”

[arthurfoxcroft-blog]

@willapotter

He’d rather have been anywhere in the world but here, in the town that, its name considered, should’ve felt more like home than anywhere else. It should have been a part of him, and perhaps it was, but he’d always had a talent for rejecting the parts of himself, of the world, that he’d never developed a fondness for. Selectiveness was simply the mark of a man with taste. As he’d roamed the streets of Foxcroft, hands tucked into the pockets of the suit jacket that he wore simply to remind the town that he’d spent the last ten years making something of himself (if anyone asked, all traces of his failures would go conveniently unmentioned), he studied the doorways of the downtown square he’d left gleefully behind. Nothing had changed. It was all exactly as he’d remembered it — dingy, in desperate need of a new coat of paint, beneath him.

But swallowing his pride and playing patron to any of these places was a far more alluring plan for his first night back than the alternative — to spend the night within the eerily empty halls of Foxcroft Manor, forced to grit his teeth through conversation with his sisters or endure strange silence. Which sounded more torturous? He wasn’t quite sure, and so his feet had carried him to Parma — the only somewhat respectable establishment he could recall, and the first time he’d walked to dinner in nearly a decade. Though it hardly compared to the bistros his tastes had grown accustomed to back in the city, it was still miles ahead of whatever fried garbage he’d find anywhere else — and, surely, the kind of place he’d be least likely to run into any of the people his nose so naturally turned up at. He’d taken care to order the most expensive dish on the menu, despite his tastes being more drawn to another, if only to assert to the wait staff that he was above this meal, this town, this place.

What a deluded thought, for a man with nowhere else to go.

With a crisp fifty left on the table as his tip, his good deed for the month, he smoothed out his jacket and stepped out onto the streets. It was a flash of raven hair beneath a dimly lit street lamp that caught his attention — he’d seen the same flash years ago, as Willa Potter had thrown her head back in what he’d call ecstasy, though frustration was far more likely. He afforded himself a quick glance down at his watch — nearly ten o’clock.

He took a pair of slow steps towards her. “Isn’t this the time of night you usually spend, I don’t know, knocking down stop signs? Throwing cheap liquor bottles at windows? Or have the years finally caught up with you, Potter?”

[foxcroft-rpg-blog]

“Why you always wanna love the ones who hurt you? Then break down when they go and desert you, no, oh, no. It’s so hard to let ‘em go. And watch 'em scatter when you start asking questions, like why we always in the wrong direction? Shame, such a shame, but you’re doing it again.”

ARTHUR FOXCROFT / TWENTY-EIGHT

↳ LORE

Smile, boy, you’re rich. That means love can be bought and your secrets can be paid away. Everything you could ever want is right at your fingertips; every boy or girl you could love is right there for the taking – at least that’s what could have been, had you wanted that. They told you to look forward, but you got caught up in it all. You let yourself feel human for once in your life. Don’t look down, don’t look down or you’ll fall. Too late, and now you’re tumbling backwards, and no one is reaching out to catch you.

ARTHUR FOXCROFT IS HUMAN.

↳ HISTORY

Eleven months of peace – eleven months that he can’t even remember. That’s all the time Arthur had to believe he was all his parents could ever want, or at least, that’s what he says now. After those eleven months came another, wrapped up in a pink blanket, his sister Amelia. From that moment on, Arthur had to fight. He had to be better, do better, steal the spotlight, honor his family’s name. When he was young it seemed harmless; he was always so competitive in everything he did. His parents praised him for every medal, every trophy, but Arthur didn’t care about those things. He didn’t care about winning at all, he just wanted to feel loved. As he got older, he had to push away that desire. His parents were almost never openly loving towards each other, but instead they were united in their ambition, their drive to do better, to be better than the backwards town that took their family name. Arthur saw love as a weakness, as a hindrance to success, and so he kept his emotions in check, covered them up with charm and only engaged in surface conversations. He had to be his family name, not the nowhere town that his family named long ago. There were a handful of lovers, ones Arthur left because he saw himself becoming weak, but the only tie Arthur truly had to this town was his family – which made it so much easier to leave.

After high school, Arthur left Foxcroft, heading to New York City with a hope of honoring his parents with the kind of life they wanted. After college he got a Wall Street job and a high rise apartment. He should have loved it, should have been proud of all he’d done, but he didn’t and he wasn’t. Still, no matter how empty he felt, Arthur kept going to work, kept living the life he’d taken so long to create for himself, kept working hard. A few years later, Elias, a low-level executive at his firm took notice of him and said he saw promise in him, said he saw a future for him at the company. A few words made Arthur feel something, like maybe this was all worth it – but it wasn’t the promise of a future that did it, it was the praise. Elias and Arthur started working more closely together, and after a few months and even more time spent at the bar than working, they started quietly dating. It wasn’t allowed, but for the first time in a long time Arthur felt loved, and he felt safe enough to risk everything. That’s why when Elias asked him to cheat the system to make more money, to help them start a life together, Arthur didn’t even flinch. 

It was fun at first, and for a while Arthur really thought that Elias and the city could be what he’d been searching for, but when they almost got caught, everything changed. Elias confronted him, told him that Arthur had to quit to save them both, that it was the only way, and so he did. Arthur quit because he thought it was the only way to save their relationship. Little did he know, Elias was playing him the entire time. The last time Arthur saw Elias was when he was packing up his desk. He waved goodbye, told him he’d see him later at home, but Elias never came home. Two weeks later Arthur got a call from Amelia; Adam was dead. The nowhere town that raised him was calling him, laughing at him for trying to escape. His brother is dead, but all he can think about is how he’s failed, how he let his heart get in the way, how he let the one thing he truly wanted get in the way of everything he worked for. 

THE MASKS YOU KNOW, THE PEOPLE YOU DON’T …