Sally: Emphatic and effusive, tone and volume indicative of her mood. Bright and energetic with undercurrents of restrained laughter, as if she's in on some grand joke of which no one else is aware.
Gray: Gentle yet gravelly, with posh pronunciation suitable to recording audio books. Gray's voice is warm and welcoming, deepening to the lowest registers when he's serious.
Kent/Kenna: Melodic and rich, the voice of a singer. Despite K's deliberate effort to keep their voice flat and collected, there's still a natural musicality to what few words they speak.
Glitch: Smooth and soft, the remnant of a Southern drawl fading their "t"s and blurring the pauses between words. There's a sort of rhythmic sway to their words, each sentence spoken to a different beat.
Rosy: Sharp and authoritative, a voice that demands others listen. Harshly unemotive, but saved from grating abrasiveness by an underlying husky note.
I had to sketch Kent from Mind Blind after my, like, tenth time rereading the demo. I love how he is willing to come, dressed to the nines, to help Button make a getaway. My Button loves a man in a suit, especially one who lets her cuddle with his dog.
Anyways, one day I will figure out how to draw attractive men. Until then, this is all I got.
Bonus, how I feel Kent really feels at any given time:
happy valentine’s day from sabrina wiseman and kent zarneki! (tagging @lividlyinlove, thank you so much for asking!)
When Sabrina first opens her eyes, the room is still dark. A bluish light bleeds through the curtains, promising sunrise and this twilight hour before it. For now, the darkness swallows blue shadows before they are half-formed, and she barely notices a difference when her eyes fall shut again. Sleep lingers at the edges of her mind, muffling her senses, though she is distantly aware of movement. The dull scratching of paws on a door, the low rumblings of canine discontent about to crest into a yap, the patient tut that stops it short. Footsteps, measured and slow—the mark of someone more alert, who hears everything more sharply in the morning quiet.
There is rustling at her shoulder, and then another doggy whine. Sabrina giggles, still half-asleep, and lifts the blanket just enough for Antigone to burrow under. She’s beneath her arm in seconds, nestling herself against Sabrina’s side and resting her head just below her shoulder. The wide-openness of her adoring eyes is contagious, and Sabrina comes closer to waking as Annie strains against her arm, struggling valiantly towards her face with tongue outstretched. She is intercepted by Kent, who appears beside the bed and leans down to kiss Sabrina’s hair, her temple, the corner of her mouth.
“It will rain soon,” he murmurs against her cheek, while Annie licks his earlobe. “So I’m taking them on our run before it does. Sorry for waking you.”
Her eyes close at his touch, and she’s half dozing again. Still, she grumbles as Kent scoops Annie into his arms— “She wants to stay. She likes me more,” she tries to protest, incoherently—and reaches blindly for their lost warmth. Kent chuckles, leans down for another kiss, and easily extricates himself from the weak grip that tries to hold him there by the back of his head.
“You’ll be asleep again in five minutes. We’ll be back by the time you wake up.”
“Five minutes” proves generous. The next time she’s conscious, the room is filled with the dull grey light of drizzling rain clouds, and Kent is beside her as though he’d never left. She might think she had dreamt his departure, if she couldn’t smell his soap. His hair is still damp from his post-run shower, and he sits up against the pillows, reading a book he keeps on the nightstand. (Some translation of some myth or other that Sabrina is sure she’ll be sufficiently interested and endeared to learn about from him, some other time, when a whole day with no obligations doesn’t stretch out before them and Kent isn’t curled beside her in the haze of morning.)
Sabrina kisses his bare shoulder, then rests her head there. One hand relinquishes the book to trail fingers up and down her arm, absently, but he’s too engrossed in his reading to acknowledge her further. She makes a token effort to read along, but the page offers nothing interesting enough to stop her pressing her lips to Kent’s temple and ghosting them down until she’s kissing his shoulder again.
He’s smiling now, but he still doesn’t look at her until she starts to pull away.
“Fine,” he says, and kisses her once, brief but firm. “Good morning.”
The “fine” is more fond than frustrated, but she still huffs her indignance against his smiling mouth. He laughs at her, then returns to reading.
Hmph. Must be some book.
Sabrina sighs and reaches for her own book on the nightstand—a poetry anthology she’s been working her way through on Glitch’s recommendation. After one poem, she sets it back down. Silences with Kent are always warm and never empty, but this one begs her to fill it. This quiet is a flimsy sheet failing to hide the outline of something beneath it, and nothing punctuates it—not even the sound of turning pages, she realizes.
Without moving her head, she scans Kent’s open book. He’s on the same page as when she awoke. Her eyes strain further sideways, towards his, which are already glancing sideways at her.
“Hey,” she says.
“Hey,” he says, with his barely-there smile, and she wonders how she could think anything might ever be wrong.
Kent still looks distracted, though now clearly not by the book. He stares at its pages without moving his eyes; he contemplates the window; he casts more glances her way. When Sabrina falls back against the pillows, content to close her eyes and wait for his voice, she hears his book snap shut and the sheets rustle, feels the bed shift as he turns towards her.
No voice comes, and she opens her eyes to find him lying on his front, chin on his forearms, gazing up at her. She gazes back at him—his curving mouth, his still-wet hair, his eyes grey like the comforting shroud of the rain outside. Her own smile only occurs to her when his widens faintly in response. One of his arms reaches for her, finding her hand where it rests atop the blankets.
“I want this,” he says finally, eyes never leaving hers. “You and me. Forever.”
“All right.”
Her tone is breezy, incongruous with the sudden weight of the morning. Kent’s thumb is dragging circles along her wrist, and he looks like he wants to laugh.
“Did we just… decide something?” She asks, and then he does start laughing. “That’s a yes? I missed a verbal contract somewhere, then. Are we married now?”
That last part was a joke, but it sobers Kent. “It wasn’t a proposal,” he tells her. “Not… that kind. If you wanted, though, we could.” He shrugs, and Sabrina no longer feels that she is the one acting unsuitably indifferent to what has apparently become an occasion.
“…Get married?” She prompts, filling in the last words of his sentence. He nods. “Okay.” Silence. “Was that a proposal?”
Kent rolls his eyes and scoots closer. “The question is whether you’re interested in marriage at all. No proposals until we clear that up.”
“You don’t sound very interested yourself, you know.”
“I just told you I want this forever,” he says, so casually that her heart sings. “If that means we get married, that’s fine. It doesn’t matter either way.”
“Wow. You’re romantic.” She laughs, like she doesn’t mean that wholeheartedly, like she isn’t giddy off his plain sincerity. “Keep up the sweet talk, and I’ll drag you to the altar today.”
“Yes,” Kent says, abruptly serious, nodding decisively.
“Yes what?”
“Yes, I’ll marry you. Since you asked.” His expression cracks, and he offers a grin that is very nearly a smirk. “That sounded like a proposal.”
“Oh, when I propose, you’ll know,” she tells him, grinning. “There will be roses. Me, in a red satin ball gown. A string quartet.”
When Sabrina lifts her gaze to the ceiling, pretending to imagine the spectacle, she finds that it’s only half an act. She envisions a proposal—lying in bed, on a morning like this; in some private restaurant corner, wearing a dress that matches his tie; out on the water, a ring box in Annie’s mouth, Cass nuzzling into their first affianced kiss. A wedding at a courthouse, in a park, on the beach. She wants them all, wants not one, wants to never leave this bed, with the scent of Kent’s soap and his hand on her arm and the rain that erases everything else. Wants this, forever.
Kent chuckles again, low and familiar and wonderful. He pulls her wrist towards him for a kiss, then stretches to reach her elbow, then joins her up by the pillows and settles against her.
“Drop the quartet,” he suggests, breath warm against her ear. “And then I’ll look forward to it.”
Thinking about how Glitch Parker looked at K Zarneki and Button Wiseman and said “is anyone going to befriend these traumatized rich kids?” and then didn’t wait for an answer.
