(willa fitzgerald/34/ciswoman + she/her) ELEANOR WHITBY has been in Eden Ros for ONE YEAR, and is from SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA. They are 34 and work at THE MERCURY as a RESEARCH SCIENTIST. Rumor has it, they’re a VAMPIRE associated with DUCAYNE. They are RESILIENT and PRACTICAL, but also SELF-DESTRUCTIVE and FATALISTIC. (angie/29/est/none) Name: Eleanor Whitby Occupation: Research Scientist at the Mercury Age: 34 (turned at 33) Sexuality: Bisexual Species: Vampire Faction: Ducayne Hometown: Santa Monica, California Relationship Status: Divorced Personality traits: Self-destructive, dishonest, fatalistic, standoffish, resilient, practical, empathetic, quick-witted
TW: murder, suicide, child abuse, drug use, addiction
You’d harbored a dreaminess about you, once upon a time. It was hard not to; those first ten years were straight out of a story book. There was a warm vibrant home a few miles off the Santa Monica pier, brimming with books and music. A place you never minded being homeschooled out of. An older brother, your very best friend, with hair spun from gold and a smile borrowed from the sun. A whirlwind of a mother who specialized in fairy tales. Free-spirited and eccentric, she was the type of person who put almond milk in her kid’s hot cocoa and let them make science experiments out of her shampoos. Then there was your father, the enigma. Everything about him always felt shrouded in mystery. He didn’t live with you, that much you knew, but whenever he’d turn up he’d be armed with smiles and gifts. For you and your brother Charles there were books and toys; for your mother, handsome envelopes and a tug at her braid you took for sweetness. You’d have him for a few weeks over the summer while your mother taught classes at UCLA, and then he’d be off again, like some prince returning to a faraway kingdom. You may have asked questions about where he’d go, and someone might have answered, but you never remembered. You never remembered much around him. Quality time with him always left you and Charles feeling foggy after, and you’d liken it to a long afternoon spent at the beach. It was a sleepy feeling, but peaceful. Happy. You were happy.
The older you got, the more your father’s attention shifted away from your brother and onto you. “My shining light,” he’d call you, and praise you for your smarts. Life in your Santa Monica bubble was lovely, but so very small. Here was the feeling of being special. Important. It was enough to blind you to your brother’s sulkiness and the anxiety in your mother’s frown. Sometimes dreams follow the grogginess, strange, frightening dreams, yet you never think anything is wrong, really. Not until your mother is pulling you and Charles out of bed in the middle of the night and herding you into the car. You leave behind your home, your life, your father—all in the blink of an eye, and the only explanation your mother ever deigns to give the two of you is this: your father is a dangerous man; he can’t know where we are. You don’t believe her. In fact, you think you might hate her.
You start over in some shithole town in rural Texas. Your mother takes a job as an English teacher while you and your brother are thrown headfirst into the public school system. Your reception couldn’t be any more different. While you’re written off as standoffish and snobbish, Charles’ aloofness invites intrigue. Your arrogance is insufferable; his is somehow charming. It doesn’t seem to matter to anyone that you share the same sense of humor, or smoke the same cigarettes; that you’re two halves of the same heart. Simply put, he’s cool… and you’re not. He takes to the humanities and you dig your heels into the sciences, rejecting your mother’s influence, her love of stories. The closeness between the three of you shatters over time. Charles is still your best friend, but now he’s everyone’s best friend. Your mother’s an absence, stretched so thin by paltry finances and her own paranoia that she might as well not be around. She doesn’t know that Charles is selling weed at school, or that you were sent home in hives after the nurse found you’d developed a nut allergy. She’s hardly there, while Charles is somehow everywhere. You figure loneliness is a feeling you best start getting used to.
The week you see a familiar envelope sitting on the kitchen counter is the same week your mother decides to turn over a new leaf. She tells you and Charles that you’re having a family dinner that night, no if’s, ands, or buts about it. You both turn up, skeptical but curious, and find that she’s brought back all the old favorites: her baked mac and cheese, the hot cocoas, cookies and cream brownies… there’s something so painfully earnest about it that your resentment wavers. There’s tears in your mother’s eyes as she apologizes for her absence, for the move, for all of it and more— and promises things will be different from now on. Better. You pretend to take a sip of your hot cocoa for her sake and laugh at Charles gorging himself on brownies. Your mother squeezes your hand. It’s all so perfect you might have been ten years old again. … Until the choking starts. Then the blood, dribbling down their lips. Charles claws at his throat, tearing bloody gouges in the flesh. Your mother hits the floor, seizing, her bulging eyes fixed on yours, white with terror. She never lets go of your hand, and you never let go of this moment.
They send you to live with the local preacher and his family. “It’s better than the system,” they say, and besides—no one can track down your father. You hardly know who “they” are, these ministers taking charge of what’s left of your life. You don’t care. Some tell you your family is in God’s hands now, resting. Others whisper that only the flames of hell await your mother’s soul. You don’t care. Rumors abound, decisions are made for you, life drags on, but you don’t care. Something essential’s been carved out of you and all you can think about is tearing through mud and splinters in search of those twin caskets. Of joining them. You turn to benzos. You’re closest to them in your sleep and there’s a familiarity in the sedation, like a memory you can’t quite place, that feels comfortable. Soothing, even. And because you’re sixteen there’s alcohol too; bad choices, older men, truancy, screaming matches with your new foster family. Anything to get you through the day. You have no idea why they put up with you and you’re too loaded on your pills to ever notice the envelopes that come in every month. It takes driving your car off a ravine to get the preacher to check you into rehab.
It’s a wonder you make it to eighteen. But you do. Rehab is a lifeline. It stabilizes you some, but there’s still a chasm there. You just learn to fill it with other things. High test scores and a good sob story get you into Stanford. Returning to California is its own form of therapy and you lose yourself in your studies. You’re going to be a biochemist. The version of you that had once wanted to be a doctor, a healer, has been shelved away. You’re too much of a wreck to be of use to others and decide your talents are best placed elsewhere. The road to your PhD is a rocky one littered with the bones of toxic relationships, relapses, a failed marriage, occasional successes, and too many attempts at finding your father to count. Mostly, you find you’re tired.
One thing you never seem to lack, however, is funding. No matter how tight the deadline, last minute fellowship opportunities and unexpected donations from generous benefactors always find their way to you. It’s a trend that one day culminates in a prestigious job offer from a laboratory based out of Scotland. You’ve got no real interest in uprooting your life, but they offer a first class plane ticket, accommodations, and a tour of their premises to stoke your interest. It’s a free vacation, if nothing else, and you figure you have nothing to lose. You meet with a woman named Chiara at the Mercury Hotel in Eden Ross. She does not take your rejection lightly. You never make it back out of the hotel and the last thing you see before it all goes black, is your father’s face by Chiara’s side.
Your existence was a business arrangement. Terms in a contract your parents had agreed upon before your birth. Your father is a vampire. A vampire and a scientist who’d endeavored to create Fathoms. Hybrids. You and your brother were his little experiments, attempts at not only creating Fathoms, but at keeping them under close observation with the aim of understanding, and later harnessing, their abilities. Both of you were failures. When she realized that you were following in your brother’s footsteps and not manifesting any abilities, your mother feared for your lives and ran from your father. He found you again and her fear won out: death had to be a better alternative than whatever awaited you at your father’s hands when he discovered you were of no use to him.
Your father dismisses all of this as unfounded paranoia. The histrionics of a mentally ill woman. He would have never hurt you, he swears—but he does have to keep you here. Against your will. You can still be of use, you see, in studying Fathoms and their blood. He’s set you up for success. Who do you think paid for your studies? Who do you think got you to where you are today? You owe your life to him and the debt has come due. To cement the terms you’ve since been turned, securing your ties to Clan Ducayne and rendering you a prisoner of the night, as well as the hotel. You’re given a lab, proper tools, and live test subjects to experiment on. The cruel irony is not lost on you.
You are his shining light, your father reminds you. And the road ahead promises nothing but darkness.
HEADCANONS
Eleanor was left with very little in the way of personal possessions after her kidnapping, save for what she had in her purse at the time that wasn't confiscated by Ducayne. This left her with a few things she still holds on to: her black NA key tag, makeup, her cigarette case with a polaroid of her brother inside, the key to her Mazda Miata, sunglasses, an engraved lighter an ex-girlfriend got her, her favorite silk scrunchie, and the last book she'd been reading, Cat's Cradle.
Early into her vampiric unlife she attempted to stick to a diet of animal blood only, horrified at the prospect of having to feed on human beings or drain them. She was only able to sustain this for a few months, but still tries her best to stick to blood bags rather than hunting and feeding on humans. She's similarly principled about compulsion, refusing to engage in it as anything other than a last resort.
Post-turn, memories from her childhood that had been suppressed through years of continued compulsion have come rushing back. Some are clear as day, others are more fragmented, but all of them are equally unwelcomed. She's coped by breaking her sobriety for the first time in five years. When she's not squirreling away varied blood samples from the lab for personal use, Eleanor can usually be found haunting bars across Eden Ros.
She loves music and demanded a portable speaker for the lab. Anyone visiting usually has to yell to be heard over the din and more than one person has thrown her speaker against a wall to get her attention. She is on her seventh speaker.
