Meet VIOLET YOUNG. They are THIRTY-FIVE years old and hails from SANTA ROSA, CA. Violet embodies the star, GLOAS. They use she/her pronouns. Their faceclaim is ALISHA BOE.
Gloas reminds me of glass perfume bottles, frayed friendship bracelets, overgrown vines threaded through cemetery gates, sort price: high to low, lace bralettes, a study in survival, neither asking permission nor begging forgiveness, thanks for nothing, a vision board filled with pictures of cities that you’ve only ever visited in your dreams, thorny roses, drinking boxed wine on the beach at 2am, and being willing to risk it all.
BIOGRAPHY
The girl born as Merope Sweetwine can tell you that she knew her parents were both terrible people and that her childhood dreams were filled with plans to leave them both behind. She can tell you horror stories about her mother’s narcissism and her father’s cruelty, how she always knew what sort of monster he was. She can tell you any number of things, but none of them would be true.
Other than having a pretty stupid name (she’s still not sure which parent to blame for that), Merope’s early years aren’t too noteworthy. She thinks her parents were divorced, but it’s also possible that they weren’t together past the point of her conception. She’s never figured out the full story. What she does know is that she grew up in a large, beautiful home, with a filled three-car garage and staff that took care of everything from cleaning to collecting the mail. It never crossed her mind that her mother didn’t have a job to match her expensive taste. It also never crossed her mind how little regard her mother had for her, rarely checking to see if Merope was still there on the rare occasion the two of them went out together. Other parents would clutch their children’s hands and tell them to stay close, but not Helen Sweetwine.
Her father was more myth than fact, someone she only ever spoke to on the phone or saw in fleeting glances on their front porch, talking to her mother at 11pm. An unmarked birthday present left on her desk every year, vague memories of a hand stroking her hair as a toddler. There weren’t any photos in the house for her to know what he looked like, and by the time Merope was old enough to be curious, she’d learned that asking her mother for anything beyond the PIN to her debit card was useless. Helen was physically present and nothing more; her father didn’t even have that much backing him.
By the time adolescence hit, Merope had stopped caring about their absences. She had bigger concerns, like letting boys see her topless so that they would do her homework, or seeing how far she could alter her school uniform before a teacher called her out. Her partner in crime, forever and always, was Light. The two first met at St. Agnes’ Preparatory Academy (the for young witches and wizards went unsaid) as children, and were inseparable right from the start. Light was the only person who knew about Merope’s dissatisfaction with her home life, and Merope was just happy to have a friend. She would’ve taken every last second of her parents’ negligence if she it meant the rest of her life stayed as is. Pretty, young, rich, and with a best friend to conquer the world with.
Until her father came to collect.
She doesn’t remember the date or what she was wearing when she came home that day. She remembers that her lipstick was smudged and that she’d left both her shoes somewhere on the beach. She was due to meet Light for coffee in a few hours. She was seventeen and reckless. But there was a strange man in their sitting room, with her nose and her cheek bones and a voice that said she would be going with him. Merope knew this man was her father. What she didn’t know was how many clearance racks he must’ve scoured you find that audacity.
* She would have gone down biting and screaming (her shoes were too nice to resort to kicking) when her mother finally spoke up. He’s telling the truth dear, she said. You have to go with him, that was the deal, she said. What deal? Using no attempt to paint either of them in a better light, Merope learned the circumstances of her birth. Her mother hadn’t wanted her and would sooner have put her up for adoption had her father not prohibited it (so the audacity wasnt a new development). Instead, they struck up an arrangement. In exchange for large monthly payments, Helen was to raise Merope until her father decided it was time for him to take her in. She wasn’t so much a child as she was a cash cow, given the bare minimum to survive not out of love but out of a desire for her mother to stay draped in expensive jewelry and fancy cars. So that sucked monumental dick.
* She’ll admit it: her main reason for going to as to get away from her mother. And a very ill-conceived notion about what she was getting herself into. Her father was such a mysterious figure throughout her entire life, but when he appeared so normal in front of her, all mystery was gone. Merope had no reason to think him anything less than your average wizard, with some admittedly skewed ideas on parenting. But he couldn’t be dangerous, right? He had still wanted her to some degree so maybe she could get away with attending the same school, drinking overly sweet wine straight from the bottle, and racking up insane credit card amounts on a weekly basis with her friends.
Wrong.
The exact details are fuzzy — a trauma response: you block out the details to make it easier to go about on a daily basis, her therapist might say. Merope does know that it took many fights and an attempt to run away before her father made things very clear. She would do as he said or she would die. Simple as that. Now, Merope loves herself far too much to risk dying for this man, so she just gave in. Let herself become trained in all manner of weapons, learned what it’s like to have complete dominion over someone else’s life. She was used to adrenaline rushes from seeing four digits ring up on the register, but this was something entirely different.
More than the adrenaline, Violet found a beauty in her specific brand of killing. Winding thorns through someone’s veins may be a rather harsh way to kill them, but it did give her some solace. At least she was giving them beauty in death. Flowers blooming through their ribcages, succulents popping up in their gaping mouths. Dark? Twisted? Absolutely. Beautiful? You have no idea.
Her appreciation for the beauty behind her kills is what, she believes, helped her to raise so high in the ranks. Not nepotism. In fact, her father had made it very clear once she was out with the others they none of them could know who she was. It wasn’t necessary, since not even she knew his name, but Merope changed hers either way, if only to distance herself from her mother. Firstly, fuck Merope. If she was going to be a living garden, her name should reflect that. She dropped her last name altogether and became simply Violet. No other details were needed.
To this day, she’s still gobsmacked about how Light came to be roped into it all, and they never did figure out those details. But Light was still her best friend, and considering all of the secrets that had been thrust upon Violet, she needed to share them. Telling Light her father’s identity was mistake number one. Trusting Light to be the same person she knew was mistake number two.
By the time their little group had formed, Violet was willing to do anything to get out. Killing her father — in name if nothing else — was particularly satisfying. Once the idea of freedom was in front of them though, it seemed too foreign to take. Most of them had spent years becoming weapons, and while Violet vaguely recalled watching the sun rise over the beach after a careless teenage night of shenanigans, that life was no longer hers. But that didn’t mean she couldn’t make a life that was.
Her first order of business was to have herself a nice, long shower willer with the most bougie lavender soap she could get ahold of. Second order of business was to figure out her father’s financial situation and promptly cut her mother off from all of his funds. And if someone happened to report her to the IRS about never having reported any of those earnings and being unable to show where they came from.... well, Helen does love fashion, and orange is the new black.
Third order of business was to once again give herself a new name. It wasn’t completely necessary, but it gave her a sense of identity that she’d let slide while under her father’s control. Young is a reminder to herself that while many years of her life may have been lost, she still has time ahead of her. And in between their small group taking on missions of their own and continuing to live their most murderous lives, Violet dreamed of what would come next.
Her next mistake came in the form of being so vocal about wanting to leave. When Light confronted her and threatened to tell the others about Violet’s father, a flip finally switched. She should have seen it before — this was not the person she had grown up with and considered to be her friend. If the others found out about her father, would they think Violet was a double agent this entire time? Would they think her a traitor or worse, someone just as bad seeing as how his blood flowed through her veins?
Ask her to her face, and Violet will swear up and down that of course she didn’t kill Light. They were her friend, someone who occasionally knew her better than she knew herself. But say hypothetically that she had. In spite of her hands-off childhood, Violet had always been under someone else’s thumb, existing for their benefit before any actual care for her life. And Light was forcing her to get again exist under someone else’s control — that of someone she thought she could trust. So yes, Violet will go to her grave denying that she could ever kill Light. But if she had, could anyone blame her?
INCLINATION
Word on the street is that Gloas’ abilities were very different some centuries ago, but have changed in that time as a result of human pollution and deforestation. Gloas’ hope was that by instilling it’s users with the gift of creating plants and flora wherever the slightest bit of life existed, they would be able to once again help Earth flourish in its naturally beautiful state. With powers tied so heavily to the idea of clean air and unspoiled land, Gloas users do find themselves sensitive to environmental changes. Their skin and bronchial tubes in particular can be effected. They are often times asthmatic, react poorly to intense heat and cold, and become completely lethargic when too far away from nature.
CONNECTIONS
Filling the role of Vidia Oma’s I Want You to Want Me
Former Classmate: Another witch or wizard who spent their early years attending St. Agnes’ Prep (think bougie rich high school with a population of about 98% magic folks, 2% oblivious humans) and who would have known both Violet (then known as Merope) and Light to some degree, mostly by the fact that they were attached at the hip. Now that Violet and this person are back at Polaris, she makes a point to pretend they don’t exist, if only because she wants to forget her life from back then.
Let’s Get Some Shoes: Shopping buddies tbh. Violet has expensive taste, she has the funds to match it, and she has a friend (?) who will tell her rather or not the $320 pair of shoes she’s eyeballing would look better in black or red — the correct answer is for her to buy both, obviously.
Penned by Jeanne ★