DNA
DNA - What was your Muse's home life like?
Before the unending isolation in Mount Massive, Rick lived in an open floor-plan studio refurbished from an old mill. Upper floors, probably the third. He kept a variety of teas in his cabinets, and his favorite place in the flat was the kitchen. It was the cleanest room of his home.
There was always order. Specific things had specific places, A vase filled with twigs and red ferns near the door, the couch pillows each had a partner they nestled up against in the crook of the couch's cushions. Not a picture frame was ever out of place. In Richard's eyes, his home was the one thing he knew he could control, and he felt content in that thought.
He preferred to not have company over, unless he felt desperately alone. More drugs for him, he justified. The rare occasions he'd have someone over were the quiet, late nights when everyone in the city was asleep. He needed to feel some sort of connection to what he was, after all. Drugs can't mend a person-sized hole in your heart. As life before the engine had it, Richard could never hold onto one person for long enough. He was too messy, she was too loud, he wanted too much cocaine, they wanted to 'Fix Him'--- the list of Not Right People didn't seem to have an end for Rick. Eventually, his days began to bleed together during the florescent blindness of the asylum, and his home became a sore memory of another love lost.
As sore as the more recent memories were of Richard's apartment, the home he shared with his family gushed like a stuck pig if he poked it, and he abandoned that light before it could die out first. He remembers only the fun he'd made with his sister when they were children. That haven is half of the reason he has any concept of his current self at all. A treehouse he and his sister made of twigs and rope felt sturdier than the insured, two-story home his parents owned at the end of a cul-de-sac.
He blocks out the recalling of them, but often will have nightmares of terrible arguments his parents would have, and the terror would take form of the subject they'd fight about; another man or woman usually overbearingly affectionate towards Rick and his sister, a devil or dead man with coins over his eyes and gold nuggets falling from his sleeves, whipping sounds would crack and disorient Rick, blind him, even... It wasn't ever alright.
A horrid memory will creep its way into his mind's eye from time to time, when he and his sister found a lake that buoyed a corpse towards them, all bloated and foul. He dared his sister to touch the corpse, and after her crying and refusing, he pushed his sister onto the corpse. He vividly remembers how he felt when he did it. Frustrated, cynical, bitter. His sister would crawl back onto her feet after getting soaked and pushing the corpse's head into the murkiness below the water, and like a light switch, Rick snapped into the reality of what he'd done. Tears flooded his eyes, and he grabbed his sister up, apologizing profusely. The relationship would never be the same, but she expressed forgiveness the night Richard left his parents' home.
That night was muggy. Cicadas and beetles chirped outside, hiding the back door opening and closing. Rick woke his sister up, and took her to the treehouse they made together. The tweens shared a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey, as Richard told her his plan of leaving, and he swore. He swore he'd find her and whisk her away to another treehouse he'd make just for them. He kissed her on the forehead, and they hugged for a long time. It was the last time they would share a bottle of whiskey. This, he reminds himself, I will always remember.