GENDER/PRONOUNS: Cismale, he/him.
ORIGINALLY FROM: Boston, Massachusetts.
OCCUPATION: Taxi driver/aspiring musician.
CURRENT RESIDENCE: Lockwood.
“Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it.”
Trigger warnings/content warnings: Drugs, death, suicide, depression.
Adolescence was largely an unpleasant memory that Casey Scott had long since buried inside of himself. Interposed most unfortunately in the middle of ten siblings, Casey was born during a season of struggle and misfortune in the Scott family. His father had been arrested on drug charges two days after his mother had given birth to Casey in the hospital, leaving the woman to raise five kids and a newborn on her own. Between the constant grapple for sanity and money, Casey’s mother began to medicate herself with heroin and move from one bad boyfriend to the next in order to escape the circumstances that she had no control over. Her kids, unfortunately, did not have the same luxury. Without a stable adult to support them financially, homeless shelters and the backseats of cars became a mainstay for the Scott children while growing up. Casey’s oldest brother, Frankie, eventually took it upon himself to support his younger siblings (and their half-siblings) by following in their father’s footsteps to pursue a life in crime.
Casey, like the rest of his family, struggled to find a role in both school and society. He was angry at everything and everyone all the time. The toll of a chaotic environment and a neglected upbringing caused the boy to lash out against his peers and anyone he perceived to be an authority figure. When he wasn’t getting into fights with his classmates, or skipping classes to drink and party with his brothers, he was getting into trouble outside of school with the law. By sixteen, despite the academic potential that his teachers kept insisting he had, Casey gave up school altogether, opting instead to spend his days helping Frankie to boost expensive cars and push his products on the streets of Roxbury.
It didn’t take long for the law to catch up to the brothers. Casey, who was relatively quiet and kept to himself when he wasn’t getting into trouble, was not prepared for prison. It was pure, unadulterated anarchy relegated to a 100,000 square foot concrete hell. He suffered through those eight long years alone and separate from the world that he thought he hated —- it was nothing compared to the world that he had been involuntarily thrust into. The experience changed him, for better and for worse; above all else, it forced him to consider his future and the past that was trying to drag it down. Somehow, he found the outlet that he needed in music, letting all of the anger and pain inside of his head spill out onto the page.
Music had always run in the blood of the Scott family. His father, before prison, had been the owner of the intergenerational EP Records; a hidden gem in the heart of Boston. It was through his business that he had attracted the attention of a most beguiling folk singer — Casey’s mother. It seemed that the passion carried over in their children (although folk had been substituted with death metal somewhere along the way) and when she didn’t have that faraway, drug induced glaze in her eyes, their mother encouraged them to pursue the song that she had never quite been able to find in herself. Casey was determined to find it for the both of them.
He was twenty-four years old when he left both prison and Boston behind. New York was a clean slate for Casey, a new city for him to sink his teeth into. Though, a brand new life on the mostly straight and narrow was an adjustment period to say the least. He found steady work as a taxi driver, having no formal education or experience to strive for anything higher, but in Casey’s mind, it was always going to be temporary — a job to pay the bills while he worked on his real passion —- nothing more, nothing less.
By his late twenties, Casey had made something of a name for himself in the underground metal scene, for his guttural vocals, unusual guitar riffs, and aggrieved but commanding stage presence. His band, Ursa Major, was well on their way to becoming the next Amon Amarth, perhaps even Metallica if they played their cards right. For the first time in a long time, he was halfway hopeful for the future, excited for it, even.
Life always seemed to find a way of fucking him over whenever things were going in the right direction. He received the dreaded call from his younger brother, Julian, on his way to a show in Pittsburgh. His mother had overdosed the night before, alone in some back alleyway, found cold by the cops in the morning. Suddenly, he felt the numbness start to give way to something that had been subdued for all those years. Grief. Grief for his lost childhood, grief for the father that he had never known, grief for his brother who was probably still rotting away in a cell somewhere, and now grief for the mother who had died long before the cops had found her choked on her own vomit in some unnamed alley.
It all came to a head when he learned the news of his youngest sisters suicide not even three weeks later. Beth had always been the most sensitive of the Scott children, fragile as porcelain and incapable of seeing the bad in people. After their mother’s death, having been the only one of them who had volunteered to stay behind and take care of the woman, she just wasn’t able to find the will to go on. Depression settled like mist on a grey sky morning and despair felt like a dark tunnel with no light at the end. Casey shut down. He left his band, quit his job, and fell back into the same pitfalls that had landed him in jail in the first place. He came close to going away forever, had it not been for his oldest brother intervening.
Frankie, it seemed, had also turned his life around after an early release from prison. He found love, became a father, and had carved out a good life for himself as a mechanic in a small town just outside of Boston. His brother also seemed to carry a heavy burden of guilt, feeling as though he had let Casey and the rest of his siblings down all those years ago — that he was the reason for the downward trajectory that Casey’s young life had taken. He took his younger brother back home with him, to take care of him while they both tried to work through their grief.
Six years have passed since then, and now Casey is finally managing to piece his life back together. He’s found work once more as a taxi driver, although business is nowhere close to booming (not like it had been in New York). And though he is no longer the front man of Ursa Major, Casey still has not given up on music or his goals for the future, mostly at the persistent behest of his brother. He takes things day by day, keeping to himself and trying to stay out of trouble. He’s not sure how long this period of grace will last, but for now he’s cautiously optimistic.
+ Sympathetic, virtuoso, intelligent .
- Deadpan, recalcitrant, melancholic.
FACE CLAIM: Henry Cavill.
pixelskylines
theartofmadeline
2087
turnnoffyourmind
origamiaround
jacobvanloon
blakekathryn
izzy806
