#*ask.

[soothfog]

just wanted to say hi and that your promo for this blog is one of the most interesting and intriguing teasers for a character ever. I’ve been around the rpc for eight years and I’ve never thought ‘sold. I’m in.’ Immediately upon reading a promo. I hope you are genuinely proud of the character you’ve created!!!

hello! this is incredibly kind of you to think. even kinder of you to voice. thank you!

[eyeshone]

❛ If you keep standing that close, I’m going to assume you want something. ❜ /joey

If Jessica let him touch her throat, this woulda been over already. He's gotta sneak his voice studying in somehow. By ear alone is a slow, roundabout process.

A person's breathing is as unique as their vocals. Jessica's breath is raspy. Kinda gritty. On the inhale, her lungs sound like the crunchy recoil of a teenager bottle flipping. Joey knows what that means.

"Did you get pneumonia as a kid?"

He's so close to her their comic book renditions are lady-and-the-tramping an umbilical speech bubble cord.

[eyeshone]

❛ Tell me the truth ...did you miss me, even a little? ❜ joeygrave

Oooh there it is. That feeling. Joey's stomach flips—hot and goopy—like an over-filled hotel waffle maker.

"Yeah."

Sizzle spillage: "I listen to all'a the voice notes you sent. Every day." Presented as evidence—overwrought: "I called a bathroom the loo!" Imperializing his vocab by sheer overexposure.

[hypocratic]

[ groom ]  will adjusting frederick’s appearance , such as straightening a tie , fixing their hair , or buttoning their shirt for them , etc . 

+

"are you done interrogating me?"

Will’s shower head oscillates in arhythmic pulses. Swampy secretion or biblical hail. Both temperaments are unfavorable; the pipes wetly wheeze, signifying, Frederick has learned, another fit; the water pressure builds so high it is like God sneezing loose tonsil stones. He is bathing in tonsil stones. Frederick leans out of that divine diaphragmic-dioramic plague, a shoulder propped against the tiled wall for balance, wishing his realer (equally fabricated) judicial fate could be as easily yogied from.

Blood dilutes into translucent, dental-gums pink and dribbles like impossible veins undulating atop his skin (it canals between his pecs and grouts his body's crevices: elbow creases, the pale, beveled stencil of his stomach scar, the thimble-dip of his navel, his toes). Water rattles against his hair-dulled skull in such a manner it reminds him heads are first and foremost drums—and not very good ones.

Pomade strips from hair slower than blood; a newly discovered factoid too morbid to ever be ostentatiously useful during smalltalk. Impatient, and sufficiently molted out of Hannibal’s red-mottled crime, Frederick bends to turn the shower off, his palm covering his bagless stoma like an impolite yawn.

Nothing but the two weekender duffels Hannibal packed him has been provided. Hannibal, marked absent and responsible for Frederick’s gory sabbatical, is a better host than Will—in Will's own home. Nary a bath towel considerately folded on the sink counter. Nor any towel at all. One, lone hair care bottle gargoyles the tub’s corner: flea-and-tick dog shampoo; Frederick's hair smells lamentably generic. Poodly.

Frederick—emperor-unclothed—finds, for himself, a pile of towels in the bathroom closet. He grabs the top one, promisingly white, and presses it to the lower half of his face to sniff its cleanliness; the cartilage tip of his nose crooks like an over-sharpened pencil and the tactile sensation of Hannibal's chloroformed washcloth swaddling his mouth and nostrils (the terry fabric, thready and chemical-damp, tickling his skin like freshly mascaraed eyelashes) mere hours ago intrudes upon his mind as forceful as the remembered act itself. The towel drops. His fingers jitter. He leans on the sink that juts out from the wall like a severe underbite. In the mirror, his face emulates the ceramic basin well: fast-draining and glossy-white. His mouthy panting cataracts the glass.

Panic has a puny lifespan. Twenty minutes at most. He can outlive it. He can eradicate it. He is a medical doctor. He grips the rim of the sink. Tight: the hollow ceramic bowl incubates his pestering pulse; echoes it. Which is indistinguishable from doubling it. Physiologically, fear is indistinguishable from exhilaration, too. They are monozygotic twins. What name we call them is what crawls forth. Frederick meets his own reflected gaze—black pupils grown to a melonomic mole girth, that cancerously self-cannibalistic—and calls it exhilaration. His breathing hastens. He calls it exhilaration. His breathing tremors. It is exhilaration.

Will knocks on the bathroom door.

Three softly firm knuckle taps. So as to not be mistaken. Or ignored.

Frederick's face swivels to the source. He breathes substantially; stiff and methodical; assuaging. From one of the provided go bags (propped on the shut toilet lid (the other on the water tank)) he procures a dress shirt. When he bends to retrieve the towel, his months-old scar tugs like a brass-ball lamp chain; discomfort alights—despite the lubricated nature of the inner body, the pain feels akin to an internal rug burn. Frederick's face winces (his brow, so angularly pronounced, momentarily hems the round arch of his eyes into a stark line). He ties the bath towel around his waist. It blocks his legs into a featureless, marble slab. Above, he is formed; half-realized; half-free. Water droplets matte, old sweater-y, to his bare skin and bauble on his arm hair. Frederick opens the door.

Hannibal has tarnished his occupational image, and Will, his vainer one. Transferred testiness: "When did you last buy toiletries for houseguests? Pets excluded. When did you last have houseguests?" Without looking, Frederick jabs a pointed finger behind himself to the shampoo in the bathroom. "That bottle expired in two thousand and ten! It is for dogs!"

"Are you done interrogating me?"

Frederick begins to button his dress shirt. He thinks of the three FBI agents strewn in parts about his home. Of Abel Gideon—shall he say decanting—in his wine cellar. His pitchy—colloquially, bitchy—tone punctuates his perky-jerky movements, his fumbling fingers galavant-vamping from button to button as he recomposes: "As the saying goes, where there is a Will, there is a waaay" his face drops, theatrically severe, "—ke." The entire placket is off by one. The bottom button dangles, prolapsed below its intended hole; askew like an extra chromosome, a small but catastrophic disruption in structure.

Will moves carefully. Operational. Every movement, to him, is a procedure. And undoes the top button to correct Frederick's error. That aiding touch tingles his skin like a small allergy. Sarcastically defusive: "Bogey." One over par.

[alulars]

🧠 : what do they assume people think about them? 🧩 : what part of themselves do they not understand yet? 🧨 : what pushes them past the point of restraint?

🧠 what do they assume people think about them?

hmm, that’s interesting. i don’t know if he does have these presuppositions. i think he expects and wants a god-fearing reverence extended toward him that is his right. almost child-like, I don’t think he has a full capacity to, like, inhabit a theory of mind: the ability to not only understand others have beliefs and perspectives different from your own but being able to conceptualize those beliefs/perspectives without explicitly being told them. as an angel, he previously had a perfectly objective/integrated understanding of the world and that origin has made it difficult if not impossible for him to understand that being “right”/sound doesn’t mean he is correct especially when it comes to subjectivity.

🧩 what parts of themselves do they not understand yet?

johnson doesn’t understand his sense of self whatsoever. he is adamantly refusing to acknowledge the existence of his own will and therefore somewhat successfully unaware of how present it already is. he has a static sense of self that he is acting on—more than he knows.

🧨 what pushes them past the point of restraint?

people not living up to their potential—he despises this. he hates seeing luster dull or go unused or un-honed. or unholy things that aren’t black and white. he’ll lash out and hurt or kill you even if it’s an impermanent solution.

[alulars]

⚖️ : what line will they never cross?

what line will they never cross?

johnson will do anything if he thinks it’s holy. violence, murder, threats, mutilation, curses, etc. little can’t fall within the confines of holy. but the line he’ll never cross is physical or sexual romance. he’s repulsed by emotions but he’s even more repulsed by physically expressed romance: kissing, sex, etc. emotions so intense it’s a kind of bodily element. he’d well and truly sooner cut his own heart out (i mean this very literally) than let himself feel and express himself that way.

🧷 who failed them?

god inadvertently has abandoned him but he’s incapable of thinking that. he’s growing bitter and his feelings are burgeoning into something he soon won’t be able to ignore and will outgrow the voiceless void of god.

🌊 what emotion do they drown in when they're alone?

any emotion is drowning to him. he regularly attempts to bastardize any feeling into anger or disgust because he feels those are the most tolerable and rebuking of emotion itself (they’re not but it’s the closest he thinks he can get). when alone, he sometimes attempts to microdose on the more internal, self-centered emotions like desiring the presence of another. he usually does this in public places like parks, watching humans. he feels like he’s doing something disgusting and unforgivable when he consciously and directly attempts to address the existence of an ego (that wants things of others that isn’t divine). genuinely will repent, penance-like after this. violently slit a demon’s throat or some other easy, obvious cleansing of the world that requires no subjective thought.

[alulars]

🔪🕯️📉

🔪 what would they do if survival demanded cruelty?

what we call “cruel” johnson views as honored honesty. he’s readily willing to be cruel. especially if it is for his own self preservation or—and he can mentally twist this so it seems to him this way—for god.

🕯️ what do they grieve that no one else sees as a loss?

collectivism but without ego. which isn’t possible because you are an indivisible part of the whole. similarly, perceiving the world authentically without it sieving through the limited senses of a human and more importantly without it being tinged by the emotional/subjective/personal conception of a human perspective, something he is confined in having possessed a human vessel. he knows he will never be able to return to an egoless/identityless state even if he were to vacate his vessel and live as a true form angel (that is essentially slipping into the physics and cycles of the world). it’s an ironic maddening ouroboros cycle: to grieve that he is able to grieve, to want to not want. he’s so cyclically mad. the second best thing from not wanting is making himself never accept or get used to it which is a very violent and deliberate and almost (ironically) mindful/existential never-ending exercise. he’s more fucked and incorporated than he realizes.

📉 what's their most common self-criticism?

that he cares too much or at all. there’s no room or reason for him to care—god’s plan should be filling and fulfilling enough.