「THOMAS BRANNON 」
41 • PUBLIC • TAKEN BY KYLEE
TRIGGER WARNINGS: Mentions of death, parental death, war
DIRECT FROM LE PETIT JOURNAL:
Mes lecteurs, mes amis, what is becoming of Paris, our beloved grande dame? We can do nothing but watch as her ways are threatened, put at risk by the new arrivals littering her streets. Look to the Police nationale and their newly hired officer Thomas Brannon. Un Americain! Un immigré, investigating Parisian business! What of this man, tasked with enforcing the law? Is he merely a cowboy renégat seeking his own pleasures, or a puritanical Inquisitor seeking to undermine our culture and customs? It may yet be both. Sources tell me that Inspecteur Brannon is living in our city not with a wife, but with a sister. A man of middle-age, residing with his soeur célibataire? Perhaps he is here to test the limits of the very openness and liberté that France affords her people.
ABOUT:
Before Hell, Thomas Brannon was adrift. The oldest of four, heir-apparent to a case of Irish whiskey, mom’s good porcelain bowls, and a stack of waterlogged books. Centuries before, they’d have called him a Renaissance man. A jack of all trades, flirting with jobs as he flirted with women. And as with women, none could hold his attention for too long.
Then the war came. Crashing into the country like an errant wave, building for years as everyone watched, silent and somber, until it finally broke and swept them all under. The Great War, they’d said, eyes gleaming with something he couldn’t quite place. But for Tom, it was the answer to a question he hadn’t thought to ask—what was his calling? His point? His purpose?
Duty, his father told him. Honor. Save yourself, son, by saving others.
A year later, he was sitting behind some wire, staring across an empty field. 30-some years old, in a uniform that somehow felt more like home than anyplace he’d ever been. Routine and rules. Method and order, occasionally punctured by explosions and gas. By pulling friends out of the mud, tearing bandages, wiping blood. War was one hell of a god, but for Thomas, soldiering was communion.
He remembered the day the letter came, more destructive to him than any shell he’d seen before or since. They were dying, his father wrote. Neighbors. Relatives. Anyone and everyone, being snatched out of their lives as ruthlessly as a sniper’s targets. But their killer was silent. Unknowable, until it was too late. A factory fire had long since taken his mother…but it was the disease that took his sister. One by one, like the uniformed boys beside him, his family crumpled. His brother was next. Missing In Action, the telegram had said. And then his father, determined to ease his suffering by taking things into his own hands, making damn sure he beat his other children to the grave.
When the Armistice was signed, Thomas was sent home. A soldier without a war, tasked with cleaning up what remained of the homefront he’d left behind. And all that remained was Cora. The baby, or so she’d always seemed to him. The youngest sibling and the eldest, the last ones standing, tattered bookends of a once promising story. To her credit, the baby was gone, replaced instead by an elegant, educated artist. Someone, he realized, who would be worth knowing, even if their blood didn’t force them into it. Slowly but surely, they learned to get by… together.
No longer aimless, unable to stand still, he threw himself into another war–a new fight that helped him continue to serve the world in the only way that made sense. Thomas became a cop. His sister took another path, but they were already bound by what they shared, a bond forged by what they had in common rather than the stark differences of their day jobs. And as the years went by, they harbored the same delusion, silent and unspoken, even to each other: their missing brother, Henry, presumed dead. It started one day as a random suggestion, a casual conversation as they ate.
Let’s move to Paris.
Dead or alive, France was where he’d been. France was where they should go.
So they did.
CONNECTIONS:
The Novelist: One of the only people still in your life who understands what it was like in the throes of battle. They know you in a way that no one else does, the way only a fellow from the Front could; in an age where many simply want to forget the war, our twist its legacy to suit their purposes, you’re grateful you have a real comrade in arms to talk to.
The Fiend: While others celebrate their titanic industry and brilliant business acumen, you squint, a bad taste in your mouth. Maybe it's the soldier in you, roiling at the thought of someone turning a fortune off the horrors of war. But it's not as if they've broken the law. Right?
The Spiritualist: What a phony. You see through their little act - who could be so heartless as to defraud the widowed, the orphaned, the grieving? They're a faker, and one day, you'll prove it. Somehow...
Faceclaim & Pronouns: Josh Hartnett, he/him
The Savior is taken by Kylee, she/her.