FACECLAIM: ROBERT SHEEHAN AGE: 29 SPECIES: WITCH (DARKNESS) OCCUPATION: Freelance videographer & editor ARRIVED: January 18, 2019
DECLARED
Declan Foray was born into his older brother Michael’s shadow. As the youngest son of a wealthy Irish father, Curtis, and a beautiful French mother, Sabine, in a brownstone on the Upper East Side, you might think that Dex wanted for nothing. But he was smaller than his brother, less athletically inclined, and more prone to getting up to mischief. So, the golden child of the Foray household he was not. In fact, it seemed that his parents (mostly, his father) were happy to ignore his meager existence entirely unless it was to reprimand him for trouble he’d caused. (Which, to be fair, he did a lot). It wasn’t until shortly after he turned ten that things really began to turn for the worse. In the midst of receiving a particularly brutal verbal thrashing from his father at dinner, Dex could only remember feeling small, powerless, and terrified, wishing more than anything he could just disappear, when suddenly, the entire room went utterly silent. For just the briefest of moments, Dex had gotten his wish. Before their eyes, he’d flickered into nothing but shadow for just the briefest of moments. But it was long enough for the fear and anger to seep in, to forever shift the already strained relationship Dex had with his parents.
His mother began drinking much more heavily than before. There had always been the gratuitous cocktails throughout the day, as any bored, rich housewife would tell you, but she drank herself into spells of rage where she’d pound on Dex’s door, scream that she wasn’t herself when she had him, that he wasn’t her son, not really, that he was the spawn of the devil. You know, the stuff every kid wants to hear. As he grew older, he knew it was the powers that scared her. But they scared him too. He didn’t understand them, didn’t understand himself, and the rejection from his parents only seemed to make matters worse. His father worked more, leaving his brother and him alone for days on end sometimes with a mother that could fly off the handle at the drop of a hat.
Relief came in the form of a nanny named Pippa. While both the boys griped about being too old for a nanny, Dex was secretly relieved to know he wouldn’t be left alone to endure his mother’s verbal abuse. Pippa was gentle and kind. She was the motherly figure Dex had never known, so when, merely two months into her employment with the Foray’s, she found out about his abilities, he was terrified she was going to leave him. But, to his surprise, it turned out that she was like him. She helped him understand his powers, worked with him to control them, told him everything she knew about being a witch. Over many months, his performance and outlook on life in general began to improve, slowly at first and then seemingly all at once. And though his mother continued her near-nightly torments, shouting at him through the door, and though it still wore him down mentally and emotionally, having someone like Pippa on his side made things just a little bit easier.
Things began to fall apart again when Dex turned sixteen. In an uncharacteristic show of fatherly concern, Curtis Foray gave Pippa enough money to cover a little getaway to the Hamptons for a three day weekend for her and the boys. It was a great weekend for Dex, free from his parent’s angry disapproval, and he was feeling refreshed and replenished by the time they made it back home. That feeling lasted exactly 0.3 seconds until they walked inside their brownstone to find all of his father’s things gone. He’d simply left nothing but a note. It was not a heartfelt letter, no teary goodbyes. He stated simply and concisely that he was leaving and he wouldn’t be returning and he’d left details for trust funds he’d left to both of his sons for when they came of age by way of a parting gift.
Things unraveled quickly from there. Since their mother hadn’t worked in years and their father had left nothing but those untouchable trust funds behind, Pippa was unceremoniously let go because they couldn’t afford to pay her, and Dex’s life was uprooted, moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn. Transitioning from a private school to a public school was hard on him. The kids were mean and he was angry. He got into fights often and got suspended almost as frequently. After a particularly nasty fight, Dex was sent home from school in the middle of the afternoon. His mother had found work bartending late into the night at a bar just around the corner from their apartment building and he expected to find her asleep when he got home. Instead, he was met with the overwhelming smell of melting plastic as he opened the front door. He found her sitting cross-legged in the middle of his room, burning a pile of his CDs. She’d been sober for nearly a year, but when she looked up at him, he knew that she was drunk. In a blind panic, he ran for the kitchen, dishes clattering to the floor as he scrambled for something big enough to fill with water to put out the growing fire in his room. When he turned to run back, his mother was standing before him.. She was looking at him but he wasn’t seeing him. Even when she clawed for the bucket of water and tried to yank him towards her, he knew she was somewhere else. He tried to yell at her, to beg her to stop her, but she kept clawing, yanking at the bucket between them, trying to grab for him. He shoved her back and she slipped on the floor where water from his bucket had splashed to the ground, knocking her head hard against the counter before falling silently and unmoving to the floor.
Dex couldn’t recall much after that, but life moved quickly. His mother was fine despite her head injury. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia and admitted into the hospital while they got her sober and under control. Dex spent the next four months in foster care until he aged out and came into the money his father had left him. The ink on the official attorney papers hadn’t even had a chance to dry before he was on a flight to Seattle to start his own life away from his fucked up family. He took a gap year and tried to sort his own shit out (he didn’t) and then was accepted into Seattle University the following year.
College was perhaps the first chance he really got to shine. There was no Michael to cast a shadow larger than life itself, no parents to beat down what little self worth he felt he actually had. He found he was actually good at things. He was good with a camera, great at editing, he made friends, joined a band, became a grade A partier, and actually had one girlfriend. You know, like, monogamously. It was great, if a little superficial on both their parts. He even managed to meet some fellow witches and after a great deal of hesitation, he joined a coven. His coven power, he found, was that of mediumship. That hadn’t meant he’d been prepared when, eight years after he’d seen her last, he awoke in the middle of the night to see his old nanny, Pippa, just standing in the corner of his room. Up until that moment, he’d been able to communicate with the dead, but he’d never been able to see them. Thus began a bout of ‘new normal’. He didn’t really love seeing ghosts but they never struck him as malevolent so he supposed he could handle it.
The members of his coven, small as it was, had become like a family to him. So when the smartest of them decided to set out on a business venture, something called ShowNet which was supposed to be like HBO but strictly online, Dex invested some of his money and all of his skill into it. He was just happy to have a place to be himself. The website reached a small amount of success, a show called Wine Babes that starred Dex’s girlfriend Jennifer, being the most successful. He wasn’t necessarily proud of the show’s lack of substance, but it was all his editing and camerawork, so it was something even if it wasn’t the passion he’d thought it would be. He sunk about two years of himself into the show before it became too stale and he wanted to try something else. On a whim, he broke into an old abandoned lighthouse that locals claimed to be haunted one night to film a rough outline of a ghost hunting show idea he had been toying with. Even if the place itself was made entirely of nothing but dust and cobwebs, he knew with his powers, he could make nothing look like cinematic mastery. There was no doubt in his mind that he could make this successful. What he hadn’t anticipated, however, was the girl he’d find snooping around the same abandoned lighthouse, camera in hand. Perry Palomino was young and fiery and he’d been taken with her from the moment they’d met. Even though she had no actual powers herself (at least none she knew of) she claimed to be able to see ghosts and an idea began to form in his mind. He needed a host for his new show, and their banter was easy and fun and exactly what he was looking for.
Thus, their ghost hunting show was born. It wasn’t a hit right off the bat, but it gained momentum fairly quickly. People seemed to love the relationship between Dex and Perry, seeming to care more about their banter (which was, admittedly, quite entertaining) than the premise of the show itself. Everyone that is, except Jennifer. She detested the closeness that seemed to just simply exist between Dex and Perry. His relationship with Jennifer had never really been anything more than hot sex and comfort, but with Perry, he just seemed to come alive. And even though the show was hardly ever more than Dex’s own powers and parlor tricks, he began to think that maybe this could be his thing, his mark on the world. And then everything came to a screeching halt. One night, he awoke to find his mother standing at his bedside. He hadn’t received word of her death, but there she was, standing before him, her eyes black and empty. It was different than any of the other encounters he’d ever had and it left him shaken. She never spoke to him, not once, but every single day following, she was there. She was his reflection in the mirror, the silhouette on the other side of the shower curtain, the creeping sensation at the back of his neck that someone was watching him. He began to act erratically, blowing up on his coven, his friends, Perry. He fell into a vicious circle of self-sabotage and even began seeing a therapist who, after insistence and clear desperation from Dex, prescribed anti-psychotics and anti-anxiety medication that made him feel more like his mother than anything else. It did help keep the ghosts at bay, but they also made him indifferent to, well, pretty much everything. Even when he found out that Jenn had been cheating on him with his replacement at Wine Babes, he couldn’t find it in himself to care. In an effort to feel something, or perhaps just to wreak havoc on his own life, he took advantage of Perry’s attraction to him. He allowed them to cross a line he knew they could never uncross and took her to bed. But he felt nothing. Not even when afterwards when he told her to leave, told her to pretend nothing had ever happened, and saw the look of heartbreak on her face as she did what he asked, quitting the show as she spat words at him like venom and then slammed the door behind her. He down spiraled hard after that. He hadn’t meant to hurt her the way that he had and the guilt found him days later, ate him up, made him chase the numb feeling as far as he could. He successfully alienated everyone in his life and lost everything that meant anything to him. And still, there was only a small part of him that could find the strength to care.
It wasn’t until he was removed entirely from ShowNet, despite his investments, and was asked to leave the coven– the only place he had ever truly thought of as home– that he knew he needed to make a change. Being without the coven meant that his coven power was lost but even that was little comfort. He checked himself into rehab with only a half-hearted desire to get himself back on track. The parallels with his mother were not lost on him and when he was released six months later, he found he could no longer stand the sight of Seattle. He was angry at everyone and everything even though he knew he’d done everything to himself. So he did what he was best at: he left. He bought a map at a gas station, threw a dart at it, and followed it all the way to Shadow Falls. There was nothing about the town that called to him, no reason except chance that brought him there. But he still had a hefty inheritance in his bank account and all his problems were in the rearview mirror. He once again had a chance to reinvent himself, and boy, was he gonna enjoy fucking it all up once again.
Dex is his own worst enemy. Deep down, all he truly wants is for someone to take him at face value, to accept him for the mess that he is, and love him despite all his insecurities and fears. But he holds people at arms length and does what he can to push them away because he’s conditioned to believe that they’re going to leave anyway, so what’s the point in trying? He’s known to be selfish and self-indulgent, but he’s really not all bad. He could actually be quite charming if he put his mind to it, but he normally doesn’t. He’d do pretty much anything for someone he cares about, but he keeps that circle very, very small. He has a quick wit and a sharp tongue, and he’s always unapologetically himself. Even when he probably shouldn’t be. Always when he probably shouldn’t be.
