#character-build meme

[squarizona]

also talk feuilly to me baby

happily!

7. What clothing do they like to wear, and what do they wear most often?

feuilly grew up with a nearly feral need to preserve, protect, make the most of, to endure. he hates charity and gifts because he believes that the world has taken too much from him to be paid back in small favors. despite this, he buys what little clothes he actually does buy (he has a bad habit for stealing clothes on occasion from department stores and outlet shops) from the thrift shop. he would like to dress like courfeyrac, with color palettes that match well and have a scarf that pairs perfectly with these pants or that shirt or that jacket or anything close to it, but feuilly mostly sticks to his hoodie and jeans and t-shirt. this disguise served him well on the streets and in the boys’ home and in the various foster homes he was bounced between growing up, and he saw no reason to betray himself to the world now. not out of charity but of sheer friendship (a concept that feuilly has only recently been introduced to), courfeyrac will sometimes let feuilly go through his closet and the stacks of clothes that no longer fit him or that he no longer wants before giving them to thrift stores.

9. As a child, what did they want to be when they grew up? Did they realize their dream?

he always knew he would be an artist of sorts. he doesn’t remember much of being young, but he clearly remembers drawings of his family  that he’d done in heavy-handed marker that bled through the paper framed on his father’s desk. he liked to draw pictures of things and slip them in little crevices of his parents’ lives where they might happen upon them and have a little bit of a better day. after their funerals, he didn’t draw for a long time, stifling the desire for fear of remembering and missing them too much. it wasn’t until he moved out of his last foster home that the stress of adult life pushed him to pick up art again. he never thought he would be an artist like this, literally starving, working to get by. but he wouldn’t change it for all the riches in the world.

19. What is their favorite texture?

he loves the feel of paper of all sorts. playing cards, dollar bills, stationery pages, printer paper, the almost semi-gloss receipts that he tears off at work at the coffee shop. it reminds him that things can be quantified, physically represented, and it brings a sense of order into his life. 

25. What do their hands look and feel like?

feuilly’s hands are rarely seen, but that’s changing since he’s picked up a job as a barista where he uses his hands constantly to take orders and make orders and deliver orders and make receipts and take cash over and over. charcoal smears usually crisscross his palms and wrists; papercuts dance on his fingertips from folding and creasing things. his nailbeds are bruised from nervous biting and picking, and the skin around the edges comes up in painful shards from being chewed at in nervousness. small, unfading scars from long ago still wrap his fingers, stories that he won’t tell from living in alleyways and putting up his hands in defense when the older, bigger boys in the boys’ home decided to have a go at him. he doesn’t like his hands, only the things that they can do.

[squarizona]

do any number you want for your joly and jehan??? just talk about things about them i love how you talk about things

CRIES OKAY

for joly:

3. What is their preferred method of transportation?

joly prefers taking a bike or being driven in a car; he doesn’t like driving, but he’s content to ride along with whomever will drive him. he feels certain that public transportation is going to be the facilitator of the next great plague and he’d rather not be a participant. airplanes are an anomaly of physical proportions and they’re just these thin little metal tubes full of oxygen shooting through the air at hundreds of miles an hour and he doesn’t understand how people can so easily give themselves up to that kind of thing, and airports are breeding grounds for all kinds of disgusting fungi and no he will not remove his shoes to walk through the security scanner do you know how many thousands of people have stood here with their nasty athlete’s feet and so many businessmen coughing without covering their mouths, ugh, no thanks, he runs to the bathroom breaking out in nervous hives and looking for a paper bag to breathe into.

21. How well do they take criticism? How do they react to others noticing their flaws?

for a soon-to-be doctor, cause for criticism is unacceptable. he feels that he cannot afford to make a mistake because, even if it’s not now, someday it might be the difference between life and death for someone under his care. for someone to notice his flaws would not be a surprise in a traditional sense because he believes that he will always scrutinize himself more harshly than anyone else could ever; all the same, it doesn’t really feel great when someone points out something you’ve done wrong. in fact, it gives him a fever and makes him feel like fainting. but he can stomach that because he doesn’t want to look even weaker.

30. Do they have any allergies or chronic conditions?

hah. haha. HAHAHAHAHAHAH

(yeah)

(I’m avoiding answering the ones directly related to illness or surgery because I think I could write a novel on that aspect of joly alone)

(for real tho joly probably has some pretty serious ocd/generalized anxiety disorder going on)

for jehan:

5. What kind of weather makes them happy, and what kind makes them sad?

jehan was made for sunny days. he loves being outside, being able to walk along creeks and backroads and pull daisies from twists and tangles of bramble and take naps in a little copse of ash trees far back enough in the woods to where only the wind can find him. he can find beauty in rainy days, although they make him sad. overcast days are okay. but any day above ground can be a good day for jehan.

15. Where in their body do they keep stress or tension? 

jehan keeps a lot of tension in his stomach. he sometimes finds himself curled up in a chair, knees to his chest because his gut is a coiled spring that could snap loose if he moved even an inch. he doesn’t like for anyone to see that he’s stressed, and that makes him more stressed.

25. What do their hands look and feel like?

jehan’s hands are soft. even the calluses are soft and were brought on by a pencil bearing hard on his finger when he writes. often, they’re smudged with ink and graphite, because writing left-handed brings your hand to rest directly on top of freshly-written words, but that’s alright with jehan. he sometimes paints his fingernails light pastel colors like an easter egg, just because. long, slender fingers that are usually laced together because his hands like to be held.

[squarizona]

OKAY do marius and choose whatever questions you want~

eeee okay!

8. Do they eat a healthy diet? A varied one?

marius really tries to eat a healthy diet, but he’s always had a fast metabolism and has never had to give much of a thought as to what’s considered healthy. growing up, strawberry poptarts were healthy because, well, strawberries. now, he usually goes for various types of x meat salad sandwiches (chicken salad, tuna salad, whatever salad) because, well, salads.

14. What are they like when they are drunk?

marius is a very self-conscious drunk. he has the tendency to cling, which is annoying to most people. he doesn’t like to be left alone when he’s drunk, but generally doesn’t realize he’s been left alone until he realizes the person he was talking to had walked away. he doesn’t like to feel annoying, but he can’t really help it when he gets hammered such as he does.

16. What do they think about where they currently live? If they could move elsewhere, would they?

he loves it, though he doesn’t quite feel like he fits in completely yet. courf’s his roommate and is always (er, usually) on the top of his game, trying to include him and make him feel at home. but as it stands now, he has nowhere else to go and wouldn’t leave the house for the world.

[squarizona]

Your Combeferre, and I sincerely want to know everything, but I'll restrict it to 1, 4, 6, 10, 20, and 28.

bless your soul. <3

1. What foods do they love, and what foods do they refuse to eat?

Combeferre’s a pasta and bread guy, but he firmly believes in the theory of “everything in moderation.” which is to say, everything except banana peppers and green olives. his mom makes a killer potato soup that reminds him of better days.

4. Who did they look up to the most as a child? Who do they look up to as an adult?

as a child, definitely his mother. he was used to being looked up to by all his younger siblings, but his mother is his rock and taught him everything he knows about being there for people. she read to him at night every night until he started to read to her, and he looked up to all the heroes in all the story books she brought home for him. as an adult, he still looks up to her, and having grown up and branched out a bit in his education, he looks up to the big name peacemakers like Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. more than anything, he looks up to his friends, because they teach him how to be more dimensional, less static, more mobile. they teach him how to love actively rather than just from the sidelines.

6. What languages do they speak? Do they have any idiosyncrasies or identifiable patterns of speech, word usages, etc?

english, french, (though it’s not spoken exactly) latin, and a tiny bit of italian. it comes from being a voracious reader and the nagging thought that one can never know exactly how much integrity something loses when it’s translated. he’s very specific and particular about his words and how he uses them, and he has the tendency to touch his fingertips to his lips and hum a soft, single note when he can’t figure out the perfect word to use. he has seen words go to waste too often to use them flippantly, and he sees his vocabulary as the sharpest weapon in his arsenal.

10. What makes them feel safe or secure? What makes them feel insecure or unsafe?

being home, above all else, is how he feels safe. he generally doesn’t believe in the “anywhere I lay my head” method of defining home; home is the walls of the house he grew up in, his bedroom at the top of the stairs and the sound of his kid siblings crashing around in the hall wrestling over something small, the clockwork of a well-cooked homemade meal, sitting at a dining room table. home is candlelight, home is dumping out pots and pans full of rainwater captured in the act of dripping through cracks in the ceiling.

and home is also where he is now, a full-size bed in a big enough room where his will-be doctor roommate can’t sleep a full night and wakes himself up every few hours just to make sure he’s still breathing. home is doing homework at the scratched, ugly dining room table that was carried in from a street curb where it would’ve been thrown away. it is his new set of brothers, and for all their loudness, he loves them. home is helping people. home is being there.

what makes him feel insecure is anything that threatens his loved ones. he puts everyone he cares about before himself, and sometimes just realizing how little he has the capacity to care for himself is enough to set him off-kilter. feeling unsure or unable.

20. Do they like to travel? How do they pack and prepare?

Combeferre loves to travel, though he doesn’t do it often. he travels mostly to go back to his family home, to visit for holidays and long weekends and whenever he can. though it defies the logic that tends to define him, he likes the feeling of weightlessness and anonymity that comes with being on a train or airplane, knowing that everyone around him has a thousand stories that make them who they are just simmering under a thin surface that can only be broken by beginning a conversation. but he usually doesn’t begin conversations, content to look out a window or read a book. he likes the feeling of moving that fast, that far, knowing that he can always come back to wherever he’s just left.

he packs his bags with just enough measure and precision to not stress himself out. he packs items in groups rather than in outfits: shirts, then pants, then underwear and socks, toiletries, books, chargers for his electronics. he doesn’t pack until the night before he leaves because the pressure makes him focus. he lays out his clothes for the next day on top of the suitcase, mostly folded. he tries to get a good night’s sleep.

28. What is a gift that they have received that was especially touching or significant?

his mother gave him a copy of Little Women with a beautiful inscription in the front. he keeps it on his bookshelf so that he can always see it.