roy walker (there are no bandits here). (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fallasleep) wrote2013-05-08 11:33 pm
fallasleep) wrote2013-05-08 11:33 pm
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ataraxion
Okay uhm. Content warnings in this app for suicide, internalised ableism, and a bucketload of depression. In every significant section. I'm sorry.
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Roy Walker
Canon: The Fall (2006 film)
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Right after his suicide attempt via sugar pills (that he thought were morphine).
Okay, I think I need to explain why I chose this canon point. Roy finds a reason to live afterwards because Alexandria falls on her head and was badly injured trying to find him actual morphine pills when he woke up and threw a massive, massive fit. He continues to live after he kills off all of the characters in the story he's telling her, including his alter ego the Red Bandit, and she begs him to live, because she wants him to live.
So in the film, Roy's reason for living is very much tied to his guilt for tricking Alexandria into getting him morphine pills. That's actually kind of a terrible reason to want to keep breathing. It suits the movie, but at the same time I really want to see how he might be able to find ways to like himself and want to live if he doesn't have guilt over Alexandria as a catalyst. Especially in a new place where everything is a clean slate and no one knows how or why he broke his back. A new place where, basically, he doesn't have to be constantly reminded of all the reasons why he wants to die. (His broken back is pretty much an excuse.)
Number: 020 » 003
Setting: Wiki article for the film. Basically: 1915 Los Angeles, the dawn of American/Hollywood movies.
History:
Roy Walker has no history. The film is far more concerned about showing the story his tell than his story. But there are a few things.
The Fall takes place in Los Angeles, 1915. If Roy is in his mid-twenties, he would have been born in 1890 or so, just in time for the first movie camera to be invented. He probably lived during a time when there were vendors with kinetoscopes on the streets, and paid a quarter to watch tiny, short celluloid films on those cameras. In my headcanon, he was born in Los Angeles, and it was during his teenage years that the first silent films began to made and shown through Edison's new movie projectors. But given that he is most likely an orphan - no mention was ever made of his family - he probably was far too poor to afford watching many of those films.
The 1910s was also the period when World War I (known as the Great War at the time) began. But as Roy is American and it's the beginning of the war, it probably didn't affect him that much. Also given that he lost all use of his legs, the war will probably never directly affect him.
Roy's life really began in the year 1915, really, when the movie starts. All that's known of him is that he had a girlfriend at that point, and that girlfriend left him for a man named Sinclair, the famous silent movie star at that point. He's either a stuntman for a long time or a small-time actor. At some point he said that the stunt that cost him his legs was his first, but given that Roy is an unreliable narrator and that it's not probable that anyone will let a first-timer take on such a heavy stunt (he has to jump from the train tracks onto a horse's back around fifty feet below), I'm guessing that he has been a stuntman for some time.
After his accident - called his 'fall' within the movie, one of the many falls within the film - Roy is basically locked up in a charity hospital staffed mostly by nuns. He has a severe intimacy issue at this point, most likely caused by his girlfriend's betrayal. This is shown through how Nurse Evelyn in his story ends up betraying him and that his 'happy ending' is when he rejects her. In the hospital, he meets a girl named Alexandria - she's five years old, and she becomes, of sorts, Roy's surrogate daughter within the film.
Honestly, nothing actually happens in the film itself. Like I said, it's a lot more about the story that Roy tells, about the relationship that he slowly builds with Alexandria (which I will elaborate on in the personality section) than anything about Roy himself. He spends most of his screentime telling Alexandria stories, and the rest of the screentime he spends trying to kill himself.
Roy tries to kill himself three times at the very least. The film shows three times anyway. The first is his 'fall' in itself, because no one really knows why he took on the stunt and Roy refuses to say, but it's implied that he volunteered for it after his girlfriend left him for Sinclair. I would say that he's less trying to die than simply not caring if he did. The second time he tries to kill himself is when he asked Alexandria to steal morphine pills from the dispensary of the hospital. He wrote 'MORPHINE', but she read it as 'MORPHIN3', and brought him only three pills, so he's thwarted. The last time he tries to commit suicide is when he steals the bottle of morphine from one of his wardmates' nightstand cupboard. He steals the key from the man, and he bribes Alexandria with more of the story he's telling her to take the bottle of pills, and he eats them all thinking that they're morphine pills.
In other words, Roy tries to commit assisted suicide three times. First via a stunt, the second two times by manipulating a five-year-old girl to get her to steal him pills. He lies to her and tells her that he's trying to 'sleep' and he can't 'sleep' without those pills - Alexandria, being so young, doesn't understand what 'sleeping' actually means.
It's after his third suicide attempt that he comes to the Tranquility.
Personality:
The problem with trying to figure out Roy's personality is very simply that the movie he appears in shows only the period in which he's in a great amount of stress. Half of the movie is also about the story Roy tells rather than Roy's own story. At this point, he's almost entirely defined by his complete lack of will to live and his desperate, immensely selfish want to die. What The Fall does, beyond the beautiful visuals and the metafictive methods of storytelling, is to lay completely bare how absolutely terrible a person can become when they're consumed by despair.
As a person, Roy isn't inherently terrible. But he acts terribly. His behaviour is unforgivably incredibly selfish and self-centered. He befriends a five-year-old girl and tells her a story and holds that story hostage until she gets him morphine pills. After the first time she fails, bad things start happening to the characters in the story as a form of punishment to a little girl who doesn't know any better. He forces her, unwittingly, to become a party to his suicide attempt. He's forces Alexandria into a position where she will be responsible for his death. And he does it knowing that she's getting attached to him; he does it knowing that she will be absolutely devastated and almost definitely traumatised if she ever realises what he's doing. He does this because he absolutely, completely does not give a shit.
Roy is fixated upon dying. He's fixated on wallowing in his misery, fixated on thinking, in a continuous loop, 'my life is absolutely terrible and there's nothing I can do to fix it and I don't want to fix it and I just want to die and everyone in the world are terrible people because they are trying to make me get better and I don't want to get better'. Roy's behavour hinges on his deeply held belief that he's worthless as a person and he desperately believes that he's going to die soon, and hence there are no consequences for his actions. There's no point to him being a nice or kind person. There's no reason for him to feel attached to anyone.
He cuts off ties from people and keep himself separate from them with almost an almost absolutely vicious glee. He has a friend, a one-legged actor who comes in and tries to get him to accept the insurance payout (because he was injured on the job), but Roy refuses and there's a definite joy for him to see the confusion on the one-legged actor's face. It's as if he's saying, "Look at you, you don't understand me, you can never understand how I feel because my misery is beyond everyone else's'. He practically hordes his misery, turning away any form of hope - whether it's his friends visiting, the money from the insurance company, or his doctors' attempt to help him. Roy has gotten to a stage where he sees all kindness as almost a personal insult, all attempts at understanding as an attempt to steal the precious few things he has left for himself.
To put it in the bluntest of way: Roy thinks his misery makes him a special snowflake, and he likes being a special snowflake.
But Roy, despite everything, isn't a terrible person. He's not blameless, and deep within himself he knows that his behaviour is terrible and abhorrent. Despite himself, there is still Alexandria - the little girl who worms her way into his heart. Despite his multiple attempts to use her to try to kill himself, there are still shreds of decency, of perhaps what is his original personality, when it comes to his interactions with her.
Roy doesn't want Alexandria to see him 'like this'. He doesn't want her to watch him die, because, deep down inside, he knows that it's something she should have never been forced to see. That maybe she is what he needs, but he's everything she should never be exposed to. Roy is absolutely broken, but there's still decency left in him to chase Alexandria away before he 'falls asleep' so that she won't have his death shoved right into her face.
Because, with Alexandria, Roy learns, at least a little bit, to not be so selfish. She tells him about the story of her parents: of her house burning down, of how her family lost everything. Yet Alexandria is still there, still able to find joys in little things - unlike Roy, she's not consumed by despair. And Roy watches her and though he doesn't think - at least at this point - that he should emulate her, he doesn't really want to destroy that innocence, that optimism and that will to live. I daresay that if it's someone else who told him about their crappy life, Roy would've mocked or dismissed it, or he would've lashed out and said that he knew he was pathetic and they didn't need to rub it in. But not with Alexandria. With her, he feels, at least a little, empathy.
If I say that Roy is complicated, I think I will be doing him a disservice. He's really simple as a character, honestly. He's lost all will to live. He doesn't want to live and doesn't think he's worth the air he breathes. But even in that darkness, even in that despair, there's still a part of him that cannot help itself, that reaches out and tries to grab onto something good, onto someone to whom he might mean something, onto someone who might mean something to him. And that's Alexandria. Honestly, Roy tries his best to stop living, but he can't - he genuinely can't - stop himself from still being, in one way or another, a living, breathing human being with human reactions and needs. He can swallow a whole bunch of pills - he did - but he still can't stop himself from tasting the sugar on his tongue.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: His back is broken. He can't walk. His leg muscles are likely to have atrophied to uselessness. It's not very likely that his arms and torso are strong because he doesn't seem to have any motivation to get out of bed. He's never seen out of bed before his canon point, actually. Basically: What... abilities?
The only ability he has, I think, is that he's a pretty damned good storyteller.
Inventory: Wheelchair from 1915. A small, empty glass bottle that used to contain pills.
Appearance:
He's also extremely skinny since, you know, atrophied muscles and lack of a will to live.
Age: Lee Pace was 25 when he played Roy. Let's go with that.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
A small, soft hand. Tiny lips. On his cheek. Light as butterfly wings. Sweet as the breath of a little girl. Leave now, Roy thought. Leave, Alexandria. Leave and never come back. Forget about me.
She called him 'daddy'. In the part of the story Roy didn't narrate, the story which remained in his mind (now forever dead along with him), she was his daughter. Wishful thinking. Roy had a thousand wishes and had none fulfilled. Except this; this which was all of them, none of them, at once. His grip on consciousness was slippery. The Black Bandit could not swim. (Roy drowned in the deep blue sea like the Black Bandit would have, and suddenly- the dead weight of his legs were useful, pulling him down, down, all the way to the bottom of the ocean where light could not reach.)
——Hell was blue. Hell was a tube in his throat. Roy's eyes flew open and there was glass, then there was none, and he fell. Fell again, fell to the floor, and there was sharp pain exploding on his shoulder, pain that burned and it should not burn. He wanted nothing, wanted to feel nothing, wanted to feel nothing about feeling nothing. The floor was cold. Did hell have a floor? He tried to turn himself around. Cold stone against his skin. The cold bit. Cold against his chest. Not his hips. He couldn't feel anything below his waist, but there was pain- painpainpainpainpain sharp as a punch, driving all air of out his lungs. Roy gasped. Tried to breathe. Tried to stop breathing. His legs remained still, refused to move.
Once he liked pain. Liked cold. It told him he was alive. Told him he still breathed, still felt. But now- now- nonononononononono- Roy gasped again. Flipped himself around withot knowing while. Stone against his side. Cold, so damned cold. His legs remained sprawled, calves flat on the floor. He dug his nails into skin, into flesh. Nothing. Nothingnothingnothing- he was curled naked on the cold floor and he could feel it all. He could feel and there was something and it was not nothing- not nothing where it counted, nothing where he wanted something.
His mind screeched to a stop. He was alive. There was, he thought faintly, sugar on his tongue. No.
A laugh started in his chest. It burbled out, like poison. Like blood from a punctured lung. Like foam from sickened lips. Roy laughed. High-pitched, hysterical. Was that really his own voice? It was- it was- but no, look, listen, it was changing-
He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. His nails tore the skin of his leg. Red against his own pale skin. Roy stared, and that sound kept going on. That screaming. He didn't know how to stop. Didn't know how to end it. He clawed at his own throat.
There was blood on his nails.
Comms Sample:
video;
[ When the feed switches on, Roy is sitting, as always, in his bed in the medbay. His tablet is seated on the table in front of him, and Roy has his arms folded neatly on his lap. ]
You know, I think life on a spaceship in space should be the least thing from boring. [ He pauses, and chuckles, a bitter sound. ] But then again, there's never anything to do for a guy who can't walk. It's a good thing I'm so good at entertaining myself.
[ He cracks a smile. It's an ugly expression. ]
I've been reading. Useful things, these tablets, the way they store so many books so you don't have to bug anyone else to try to bring you some while you're stuck in bed. [ Dramatic pause. ]
There's this book I read about a young man named Werther. He falls in love with a girl named Lotte, and she has the most beautiful black eyes. [ His smile softens at the edges. ] He's passionately, deeply in love with her, and he would have married her, but from their very first meeting she tells him that she's already engaged to another man, named Albert.
Werther tries, oh he tries, to be a good friend to both of them. But he loves Lotte too much, so eventually he has to go away to somewhere else. But he can't stay away for long, so he goes back to Lotte and Albert and realises they have gone and gotten themselves married. [ At this point of his narration, Roy laughs, and he turns away from the camera, looking off to the distance. ] Lotte tells Werther that she can't see him much anymore, because she's married now, you see.
"Life's blossoms are only appearances. So many pass and leave not a trace, so few of their fruits set, so few of those ripen." Or so Werther says. There's nowhere left for him to go. He can't have her; he can't kill Albert so he can have her; he can't stop loving her either. There's only one thing he can do. So Werther shoots himself in the head. [ He looks back to the camera, looks beyond it, and takes a glass of water and sips at it. ]
It's the best possible thing that could've happened to him. [ Is Roy talking about Werther anymore? He doesn't even know himself. ] If he didn't shoot himself, he'll be constantly reminded of what he can't have, everything he has lost. You see, there's nothing quite so painful than to have to keep breathing when every breath turns out to be... [ he makes a gesture in the air ] hollow.
[ A pause, and he smiles again. Changes the subject. ]
On the subject of books, I'm looking for a poem by a man named Keats. Something about a nightingale? Does anyone know it? [ He tilts his head, and gives another hollow smile. ] It won't stop bugging me.
Notes: Roy will definitely have a permissions post for people to opt-out of interacting with him, given that so much of him talks about suicide and major depression. I figured that this is necessary given just... everything about Roy.
C H A R A C T E R I N F O R M A T I O N
Name: Roy Walker
Canon: The Fall (2006 film)
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: Right after his suicide attempt via sugar pills (that he thought were morphine).
Okay, I think I need to explain why I chose this canon point. Roy finds a reason to live afterwards because Alexandria falls on her head and was badly injured trying to find him actual morphine pills when he woke up and threw a massive, massive fit. He continues to live after he kills off all of the characters in the story he's telling her, including his alter ego the Red Bandit, and she begs him to live, because she wants him to live.
So in the film, Roy's reason for living is very much tied to his guilt for tricking Alexandria into getting him morphine pills. That's actually kind of a terrible reason to want to keep breathing. It suits the movie, but at the same time I really want to see how he might be able to find ways to like himself and want to live if he doesn't have guilt over Alexandria as a catalyst. Especially in a new place where everything is a clean slate and no one knows how or why he broke his back. A new place where, basically, he doesn't have to be constantly reminded of all the reasons why he wants to die. (His broken back is pretty much an excuse.)
Number: 020 » 003
Setting: Wiki article for the film. Basically: 1915 Los Angeles, the dawn of American/Hollywood movies.
History:
Roy Walker has no history. The film is far more concerned about showing the story his tell than his story. But there are a few things.
The Fall takes place in Los Angeles, 1915. If Roy is in his mid-twenties, he would have been born in 1890 or so, just in time for the first movie camera to be invented. He probably lived during a time when there were vendors with kinetoscopes on the streets, and paid a quarter to watch tiny, short celluloid films on those cameras. In my headcanon, he was born in Los Angeles, and it was during his teenage years that the first silent films began to made and shown through Edison's new movie projectors. But given that he is most likely an orphan - no mention was ever made of his family - he probably was far too poor to afford watching many of those films.
The 1910s was also the period when World War I (known as the Great War at the time) began. But as Roy is American and it's the beginning of the war, it probably didn't affect him that much. Also given that he lost all use of his legs, the war will probably never directly affect him.
Roy's life really began in the year 1915, really, when the movie starts. All that's known of him is that he had a girlfriend at that point, and that girlfriend left him for a man named Sinclair, the famous silent movie star at that point. He's either a stuntman for a long time or a small-time actor. At some point he said that the stunt that cost him his legs was his first, but given that Roy is an unreliable narrator and that it's not probable that anyone will let a first-timer take on such a heavy stunt (he has to jump from the train tracks onto a horse's back around fifty feet below), I'm guessing that he has been a stuntman for some time.
After his accident - called his 'fall' within the movie, one of the many falls within the film - Roy is basically locked up in a charity hospital staffed mostly by nuns. He has a severe intimacy issue at this point, most likely caused by his girlfriend's betrayal. This is shown through how Nurse Evelyn in his story ends up betraying him and that his 'happy ending' is when he rejects her. In the hospital, he meets a girl named Alexandria - she's five years old, and she becomes, of sorts, Roy's surrogate daughter within the film.
Honestly, nothing actually happens in the film itself. Like I said, it's a lot more about the story that Roy tells, about the relationship that he slowly builds with Alexandria (which I will elaborate on in the personality section) than anything about Roy himself. He spends most of his screentime telling Alexandria stories, and the rest of the screentime he spends trying to kill himself.
Roy tries to kill himself three times at the very least. The film shows three times anyway. The first is his 'fall' in itself, because no one really knows why he took on the stunt and Roy refuses to say, but it's implied that he volunteered for it after his girlfriend left him for Sinclair. I would say that he's less trying to die than simply not caring if he did. The second time he tries to kill himself is when he asked Alexandria to steal morphine pills from the dispensary of the hospital. He wrote 'MORPHINE', but she read it as 'MORPHIN3', and brought him only three pills, so he's thwarted. The last time he tries to commit suicide is when he steals the bottle of morphine from one of his wardmates' nightstand cupboard. He steals the key from the man, and he bribes Alexandria with more of the story he's telling her to take the bottle of pills, and he eats them all thinking that they're morphine pills.
In other words, Roy tries to commit assisted suicide three times. First via a stunt, the second two times by manipulating a five-year-old girl to get her to steal him pills. He lies to her and tells her that he's trying to 'sleep' and he can't 'sleep' without those pills - Alexandria, being so young, doesn't understand what 'sleeping' actually means.
It's after his third suicide attempt that he comes to the Tranquility.
Personality:
The problem with trying to figure out Roy's personality is very simply that the movie he appears in shows only the period in which he's in a great amount of stress. Half of the movie is also about the story Roy tells rather than Roy's own story. At this point, he's almost entirely defined by his complete lack of will to live and his desperate, immensely selfish want to die. What The Fall does, beyond the beautiful visuals and the metafictive methods of storytelling, is to lay completely bare how absolutely terrible a person can become when they're consumed by despair.
As a person, Roy isn't inherently terrible. But he acts terribly. His behaviour is unforgivably incredibly selfish and self-centered. He befriends a five-year-old girl and tells her a story and holds that story hostage until she gets him morphine pills. After the first time she fails, bad things start happening to the characters in the story as a form of punishment to a little girl who doesn't know any better. He forces her, unwittingly, to become a party to his suicide attempt. He's forces Alexandria into a position where she will be responsible for his death. And he does it knowing that she's getting attached to him; he does it knowing that she will be absolutely devastated and almost definitely traumatised if she ever realises what he's doing. He does this because he absolutely, completely does not give a shit.
Roy is fixated upon dying. He's fixated on wallowing in his misery, fixated on thinking, in a continuous loop, 'my life is absolutely terrible and there's nothing I can do to fix it and I don't want to fix it and I just want to die and everyone in the world are terrible people because they are trying to make me get better and I don't want to get better'. Roy's behavour hinges on his deeply held belief that he's worthless as a person and he desperately believes that he's going to die soon, and hence there are no consequences for his actions. There's no point to him being a nice or kind person. There's no reason for him to feel attached to anyone.
He cuts off ties from people and keep himself separate from them with almost an almost absolutely vicious glee. He has a friend, a one-legged actor who comes in and tries to get him to accept the insurance payout (because he was injured on the job), but Roy refuses and there's a definite joy for him to see the confusion on the one-legged actor's face. It's as if he's saying, "Look at you, you don't understand me, you can never understand how I feel because my misery is beyond everyone else's'. He practically hordes his misery, turning away any form of hope - whether it's his friends visiting, the money from the insurance company, or his doctors' attempt to help him. Roy has gotten to a stage where he sees all kindness as almost a personal insult, all attempts at understanding as an attempt to steal the precious few things he has left for himself.
To put it in the bluntest of way: Roy thinks his misery makes him a special snowflake, and he likes being a special snowflake.
But Roy, despite everything, isn't a terrible person. He's not blameless, and deep within himself he knows that his behaviour is terrible and abhorrent. Despite himself, there is still Alexandria - the little girl who worms her way into his heart. Despite his multiple attempts to use her to try to kill himself, there are still shreds of decency, of perhaps what is his original personality, when it comes to his interactions with her.
Roy: When I fall asleep, you have to go.
Alexandria: Why?
Roy: Because I don't want you to see me like this.
Roy doesn't want Alexandria to see him 'like this'. He doesn't want her to watch him die, because, deep down inside, he knows that it's something she should have never been forced to see. That maybe she is what he needs, but he's everything she should never be exposed to. Roy is absolutely broken, but there's still decency left in him to chase Alexandria away before he 'falls asleep' so that she won't have his death shoved right into her face.
Because, with Alexandria, Roy learns, at least a little bit, to not be so selfish. She tells him about the story of her parents: of her house burning down, of how her family lost everything. Yet Alexandria is still there, still able to find joys in little things - unlike Roy, she's not consumed by despair. And Roy watches her and though he doesn't think - at least at this point - that he should emulate her, he doesn't really want to destroy that innocence, that optimism and that will to live. I daresay that if it's someone else who told him about their crappy life, Roy would've mocked or dismissed it, or he would've lashed out and said that he knew he was pathetic and they didn't need to rub it in. But not with Alexandria. With her, he feels, at least a little, empathy.
If I say that Roy is complicated, I think I will be doing him a disservice. He's really simple as a character, honestly. He's lost all will to live. He doesn't want to live and doesn't think he's worth the air he breathes. But even in that darkness, even in that despair, there's still a part of him that cannot help itself, that reaches out and tries to grab onto something good, onto someone to whom he might mean something, onto someone who might mean something to him. And that's Alexandria. Honestly, Roy tries his best to stop living, but he can't - he genuinely can't - stop himself from still being, in one way or another, a living, breathing human being with human reactions and needs. He can swallow a whole bunch of pills - he did - but he still can't stop himself from tasting the sugar on his tongue.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations: His back is broken. He can't walk. His leg muscles are likely to have atrophied to uselessness. It's not very likely that his arms and torso are strong because he doesn't seem to have any motivation to get out of bed. He's never seen out of bed before his canon point, actually. Basically: What... abilities?
The only ability he has, I think, is that he's a pretty damned good storyteller.
Inventory: Wheelchair from 1915. A small, empty glass bottle that used to contain pills.
Appearance:
He's also extremely skinny since, you know, atrophied muscles and lack of a will to live.
Age: Lee Pace was 25 when he played Roy. Let's go with that.
AU Clarification: N/A
S A M P L E S
Log Sample:
A small, soft hand. Tiny lips. On his cheek. Light as butterfly wings. Sweet as the breath of a little girl. Leave now, Roy thought. Leave, Alexandria. Leave and never come back. Forget about me.
She called him 'daddy'. In the part of the story Roy didn't narrate, the story which remained in his mind (now forever dead along with him), she was his daughter. Wishful thinking. Roy had a thousand wishes and had none fulfilled. Except this; this which was all of them, none of them, at once. His grip on consciousness was slippery. The Black Bandit could not swim. (Roy drowned in the deep blue sea like the Black Bandit would have, and suddenly- the dead weight of his legs were useful, pulling him down, down, all the way to the bottom of the ocean where light could not reach.)
——Hell was blue. Hell was a tube in his throat. Roy's eyes flew open and there was glass, then there was none, and he fell. Fell again, fell to the floor, and there was sharp pain exploding on his shoulder, pain that burned and it should not burn. He wanted nothing, wanted to feel nothing, wanted to feel nothing about feeling nothing. The floor was cold. Did hell have a floor? He tried to turn himself around. Cold stone against his skin. The cold bit. Cold against his chest. Not his hips. He couldn't feel anything below his waist, but there was pain- painpainpainpainpain sharp as a punch, driving all air of out his lungs. Roy gasped. Tried to breathe. Tried to stop breathing. His legs remained still, refused to move.
Once he liked pain. Liked cold. It told him he was alive. Told him he still breathed, still felt. But now- now- nonononononononono- Roy gasped again. Flipped himself around withot knowing while. Stone against his side. Cold, so damned cold. His legs remained sprawled, calves flat on the floor. He dug his nails into skin, into flesh. Nothing. Nothingnothingnothing- he was curled naked on the cold floor and he could feel it all. He could feel and there was something and it was not nothing- not nothing where it counted, nothing where he wanted something.
His mind screeched to a stop. He was alive. There was, he thought faintly, sugar on his tongue. No.
A laugh started in his chest. It burbled out, like poison. Like blood from a punctured lung. Like foam from sickened lips. Roy laughed. High-pitched, hysterical. Was that really his own voice? It was- it was- but no, look, listen, it was changing-
He screamed and screamed and screamed and screamed. His nails tore the skin of his leg. Red against his own pale skin. Roy stared, and that sound kept going on. That screaming. He didn't know how to stop. Didn't know how to end it. He clawed at his own throat.
There was blood on his nails.
Comms Sample:
video;
[ When the feed switches on, Roy is sitting, as always, in his bed in the medbay. His tablet is seated on the table in front of him, and Roy has his arms folded neatly on his lap. ]
You know, I think life on a spaceship in space should be the least thing from boring. [ He pauses, and chuckles, a bitter sound. ] But then again, there's never anything to do for a guy who can't walk. It's a good thing I'm so good at entertaining myself.
[ He cracks a smile. It's an ugly expression. ]
I've been reading. Useful things, these tablets, the way they store so many books so you don't have to bug anyone else to try to bring you some while you're stuck in bed. [ Dramatic pause. ]
There's this book I read about a young man named Werther. He falls in love with a girl named Lotte, and she has the most beautiful black eyes. [ His smile softens at the edges. ] He's passionately, deeply in love with her, and he would have married her, but from their very first meeting she tells him that she's already engaged to another man, named Albert.
Werther tries, oh he tries, to be a good friend to both of them. But he loves Lotte too much, so eventually he has to go away to somewhere else. But he can't stay away for long, so he goes back to Lotte and Albert and realises they have gone and gotten themselves married. [ At this point of his narration, Roy laughs, and he turns away from the camera, looking off to the distance. ] Lotte tells Werther that she can't see him much anymore, because she's married now, you see.
"Life's blossoms are only appearances. So many pass and leave not a trace, so few of their fruits set, so few of those ripen." Or so Werther says. There's nowhere left for him to go. He can't have her; he can't kill Albert so he can have her; he can't stop loving her either. There's only one thing he can do. So Werther shoots himself in the head. [ He looks back to the camera, looks beyond it, and takes a glass of water and sips at it. ]
It's the best possible thing that could've happened to him. [ Is Roy talking about Werther anymore? He doesn't even know himself. ] If he didn't shoot himself, he'll be constantly reminded of what he can't have, everything he has lost. You see, there's nothing quite so painful than to have to keep breathing when every breath turns out to be... [ he makes a gesture in the air ] hollow.
[ A pause, and he smiles again. Changes the subject. ]
On the subject of books, I'm looking for a poem by a man named Keats. Something about a nightingale? Does anyone know it? [ He tilts his head, and gives another hollow smile. ] It won't stop bugging me.
Notes: Roy will definitely have a permissions post for people to opt-out of interacting with him, given that so much of him talks about suicide and major depression. I figured that this is necessary given just... everything about Roy.