( AARON TAYLOR JOHNSON. THIRTY. CIS MALE. HE/HIM. ) in texas, CASTOR QUINN is more commonly known as QUINN. they’ve been living in stratford for and currently ARMS DEALER/BUSINESS OWNER. some say they are DANGEROUS & MERCURIAL but i’m more inclined to believe those that say they’re KNOWLEDGEABLE & ADAPTABLE. if you walk by their house, you can sometimes hear DONT STOP THE DEVIL by DEAD POSEY playing from their window. ( a trio of three perfectly placed silver rings touched with turquoise, laughing as you throw the first punch & the sound of a shot gun cocking at the back of your head. )
Castor Quinn was born before his father lost his mind. He could never really figure out if his mother had a lapse in sanity, or if she’d just followed out of blind devotion, but whatever it was? They had a life that seemed like it had belonged on the big screen rather than anywhere else. The only problem was that this story? It didn’t have a happy ending. No one had bothered to tie up the loose ends, to make the right moves to give him something to hold onto, and it left the man he was today. Broken wasn’t the word, it was too weak, but maybe incomplete. Something was still missing, something he never could quite put his finger on.
The beginning of his fathers collapse was shortly after his sixth birthday. The voices returned, he’d said. This time they were telling him that they had to go, that they had to forsake the money and the comfort for something safer, before it was too late. He was persistent in his belief that they had been overindulgent, sounding like a tired cult leader ready to take the money of the masses. Maybe at first his mother hadn’t taken him seriously, but as they days passed, he’d force her to. He’d begin to sell off their belongings one by one, withdrawing their money from the banks (you can’t trust them), and stock piling nonperishables. The books began to pile up, mumbling something about education, before finally he’d emptied the entire house with what were surely his own delusions.
He finished this master plan by moving them out into the dessert, into a home he had built piece by piece, making sure they were tracked or marked in any way. They were safe, safe, safe. He remembers the repeatition. That became their life, learning from his mother during the day, thirsting for knowledge as power at night, reading everything so that he could imagine a taste of the real world. They’d gone back to it a few times for supplies, naturally, and because despite his out right insanity, his father had one thing: privacy. Privacy out in the dessert to do what he wanted, which included building bombs and weapons, and storing all sorts of things for protection.
Castor was ten the first time he shot a gun, and he remembers thinking the recoil had broken every finger on his hand. It damn near kicked his shoulder blade out of socket, but that didn’t matter. They needed to learn, he was to be the man of the house if anything ever happened to dear old dad. So he did, he became a one man army, days spent schooling with his mother and nights spent enduring what could have easily been called torture with his father. He learned it all, mathematics with a side of hand to hand combat, english right before how to take a handgun apart in less that sixty seconds. The curriculum was wild, but it was honest, and these were all skills that would surprisingly save him later.
After all, dad did eventually die. No one ever knew if it was him that did it, or the so called God above finally cutting them a break. He moved his mother back to town almost immediately, and she cried the first week she was welcomed back to a real bed and three square meals a day. He turned their old house in the desert into storage, and continued to funnel weapons, to make them, to make a name for himself: someone who could get anything, move anything, or make anything you wanted. A dangerous man who had earned his stripes on the underground scene easily: his first deal was cut in blood to make a point, killing all but one of the men that attended the meet to make a point. That man is still a client, and he still tells the story of the way the blood ran Castor’s curls red.
Now, he’s had years to expand outside of that tiny storage shed. Castor has moved on, bigger and better things, things he has deserved for longer than he nor his now dead mother would have ever admit. He’s seen the places he’d read about in those books, the ones he had dreamed about, longed for. He’s exported some of the worlds most dangerous guns, shook hands with killers, criminals and saints all in the same breath. But he never forgot where he came from, which is why the warehouse for his front business still sits on the outskirts of town, and a small storefront restaurant he owns closer to the middle of it: it holds his mother’s name, and boasts the best breakfast in town, all her old recipes constantly maintained in both his own memory and on the tables of all the guests.
Sure, some would say the businesses and the expansion is a way to wash the money: and they wouldn’t be wrong, but it’s never just that simple. He pays his own fucked up homage to his mother in them, and then still donates both money and time monthly to a domestic abuse shelter in the area. Again, a double edged sword that could say he was just keeping up appearances, because his hands would always be dirty, but only some knew the truth. Besides, there was only a thin line between sinners and saints.
