#and i kind of like the smell. it’s alright. vaguely reminiscent of incense

[fingertipsmp3]

Reddit fountain pen drama is my favourite thing I swear to god

[archivesdiveronarpg]

Congratulations, ARK! You’ve been accepted for the role of HORATIO. Thank you so much for bringing us our beloved Hector! I enjoyed reading every word of your app, particularly your plot ideas. They were written beautifully and were very thorough; the emphasis you placed on Hector’s dedication to Hiran and to his people—rather than to the Montagues—was spot on. I loved your interview questions (Hector wondering if God could touch him in the back of church, Hector reminiscing about the Cathedral but offering up a bland, more acceptable response), and your para sample lived up to the precedent the rest of your app set. You’re right; there’s an art to forgetting. There’s also an art to understanding a character, and you’ve mastered it. Welcome! Please read over the checklist and send in your blog within twenty-four hours.

                                                                          WELCOME TO THE MOB.

Out of Character

Alias | Ark

Age | 18+

Preferred Pronouns | they/them

Activity Level | around 4-7/10. I currently have 4 active RP accounts I’m juggling, but my work is very flexible and I can be online a lot (case in point, submitting this application at work). I’m a little bit patchy when it comes to activity- I’ll suddenly be crazy active one or two days in a week and be spottily lurking for the rest, but I try not to leave replies too late.

Timezone | GMT+8

In Character

Character | Horatio / Hector Sawiris

What drew you to this character? | Honestly all of it. All of Hector’s bio and my heart. This is just everything I love best in characters pulled into one character and I was like. “well, well damn”. Loyalty, sacrifice, walking a knife’s edge waiting to topple, also Rami Malek. My soul lmao. (like honestly it was Circe or Hector and in the end Rami cinched for me) (i had no choice)

What is a future plot idea you have in mind for the character? |

tw: gore (mention), violence (mention), alcoholism (dubious sort of vague mention)

&&. immolatio ;           –you’ve never known how to save yourself

the way you worship that boy, like a sinner to a saint and you would tear your heart out for him, break it from your aching ribs and place it on an altar. or perhaps he is the sinner and you are the saint who would die for him, you would raise him up and give him all your blessings until you had none left to give.

the truth; you know how to sacrifice. you know how to die for someone, how to make a slit in your bones and pour out the marrow from within for another to eat, how to starve and sacrifice, piece by piece, limb by limb, feeling the weight of the air drag on your body, drag you down into the loam of the earth and the bones of the birds beneath it. you know how to die for someone, you have been doing it all your life.

you have never been taught how to live for them.

&&. amare ;           –loyalty, shaken; faith, unmade

there’s a flush on your cheeks and it might be embarrassment, it might anger. sometimes you want to manhandle him into the nearest alley and maybe you’d bash his head into the concrete, maybe you wouldn’t (maybe you’d just press all of him against the brick wall and with your hands shaking give yourself to the devil). but honestly who would blame you.

you have never been good at control. you watched strangers with wary eyes and when your mother told you to smile the expression was never quite right on your child’s lips. perhaps it was never a matter of control; perhaps you were only ever too honest.

and- you don’t know what this is, what game this is, you only know that you’re being played as if a string on a lyre and you do not know how to stop it.

it is, after all as they say; the devil does not come in a red cape and pointy horns.

&&. proditio ;           –for them, and you would take judas’ mantle and wear it as your own

do ut des. i give so you may give. all things have a price. to take you must pay something of equal value.

they speak of blood, of loyalty, of brothers and you understand that, you were raised that way after all. you were raised with them. you fight and your hands no longer shake when you raise a gun, your grip is steady and your aim precise, your knives are always clean when you put them back where they belong. there are nightmares that come at night and they have become a part of you. you have given so much and yet you know that this is still not enough.

(you understand the principle of this; the tower of babel and when everything crashes there will be no war left to fight)

you do not know what price you will have to pay, you do not know the price for saving your friends. you do not need to; however high it is, you will not hesitate to give it.

&&. terminus ;           –it’s not a question of if, you simply don’t know when

you’re slipping more and more, day by day and it’s alright, that’s alright- you’re falling so they won’t have to, you’re breaking so you can keep them whole.

you don’t intend to survive this war, and even if you did you do not think you could. you’ve cut your hands on shattered bottles too many times, your back is bent from picking up the debris and you’ve dropped to your knees trying to keep them from falling. there are some things you do not return from. there are some things that you cannot.

(you forgive him and every time you do a little bit more of your heart withers away. the cuts on your palms and the stain of liquor that doesn’t fade away, and forgiveness is what will kill you.)

every night when you close your eyes and the deadness returns, you do not resent it. this is the price you pay for death. you owe a debt now, the shadow of it will linger behind you all your life.

(there’s only one way to pay, after all)

// on immolatio, because well, mostly his relationship with hiran, the lengths he’d go to to protect him and those other people close to his heart. i want to see just how far he can go, the things he would do. all the blood he’s spilt and everything is for them. he knows it, it’s why he hasn’t broken yet. this ties into terminus, because like i wrote, everything has a price. taking another’s life indebts you to death, and the shadow of it will hang over him until he can pay it. but terminus isn’t just the end, it’s the boundary, the breaking point and sometimes the breaking point is the end, sometimes it is only the beginning. i want to see hector break. somehow or somewhere- i’d like to see him completely and utterly shatter and never be able to go back to what he was before. because he’s breaking more and more every day and one of these days all the pieces of himself he’s holding together are going to crumble out of his grasp. will there be anyone there to put him back together? or is that just it, is that the end, at that point will he give up or will he still want to survive, will be still be able to pull all the twisted, broken pieces of himself back together into the semblance of a man.

proditio; he doesn’t trust either the montagues or the capulets to win the war. he doesn’t trust them to leave his family safe. he’ll fight this war, he won’t hesitate to fight, he won’t hesitate to die but- he won’t let the anyone he loves die. the witches are a different matter than the capulets- he knows they have power beyond either families, he knows they will never involve themselves in the war- and he will sell more than his soul and he will not see it as betrayal. his loyalty was never to the montagues, his loyalty was to the people within it. and i want to see the consequences of that, i want to write him betraying his ‘people’- because truthfully that’s where i want it to lead to- and i want to see how it ends up all panning out. because i’m a sucker for angst.

and finally amare; because hector’s always been guarded as a person, he’s never easily accepted anyone else in- what would it take for him to falter. he’s only ever had several select people that he’s held close, what would he do if someone just broke in. someone who wasn’t ever meant to be anything to him, who he doesn’t think he’s anything to and hector doesn’t even realize until it’s too late. how would that affect his dynamic with everything and everyone else? this can be anyone really. i mean i kinda allude too much but ayy it’s an application, ayy hypotheticals ayy pls nobody take it seriously least of all me. (me, aside from being plotting trash: also basically shipping trash) (also me: lmao im joking unless ur up for it) In Depth

What is your favorite place in Verona?

Stone spires and marble arches, the scent of wax candles and incense burning. Light coming in at every angle through the glass, every sound echoing. The carpet smells of moss and damp. Capulet territory, and yet he’s been coming here since he was a child, a single man slipping in with a crowd, and who would ever notice. Sitting in the third pew from the back, wondering if God could touch him from there, wondering if he could reach salvation with his hands- his hands that were stained red by the light shot through stained glass windows. It was reminiscent of a different kind of red entirely.

A holy place and yet he had never believed in it, his Grandmother had taken him every Sunday as a child, had prayed with her fingers cracked and her voice quivering, eyes turned upward towards the Heavens beyond. Hector had watched, followed, never quite known what he was there for. He never believed and yet he had tried to find salvation in God anyway- or perhaps he had already given up on salvation, perhaps it was only the comfort of the musty pews and the creaking seats that had him returning time and again, a pilgrimage that did not offer him any grace.

It was beautiful though, the stone that echoed and the comfort in silence, the murmurs of latin in the dim light, the choir’s soft hum and the organ that made the benches tremble with the sound of it. He liked going there in the quiet times inbetween. It was solace, perhaps.

He blinks, the memory fades. His answer is slow in coming, bland and quiet and it tilts a little towards the end, almost a question. He’s never been good at half-truths. “The Museum’s nice.”

What does your typical day look like?

“The sun wakes me up at around six. If it… doesn’t, my alarm wakes me at seven. I go to work. I…” he trails off, wonders what else to say. What else there is to say. “I come back.”

He wonders what a day could be described as. What it looks like. But the days are all the same, the hours bleed into each other and like the sun rises in the morning it falls again at dusk, he sleeps his broken dreams and then he wakes again. Nothing changes.

“That’s all, I suppose.”

What are your thoughts on the war between the Capulets and the Montagues?

The war. The blood. The tension in the streets and the way it rose as a crescendo rose, they were the orchestra and it was a discordant, dissonant cacophony they played, the unease that wove into every note and cadence-

the gurgle of a man falling under him, blood in his lungs and blood on his tongue and hector’s knife stained with it, filthy and red and

a sacrifice, a sense of inevitability in the dark of the night

(the question: who was sacrificed)

“Necessity.”

In-Character Para Sample:

tw: (implied) depression

Night in Verona is quiet, bright with the glow of the stars above. Wandering the streets at night was never a good idea. Hector didn’t have many good ones nowadays. He was still blinded by a haze that blurred his sight and a cold that numbed his limbs- it was nothing out of the norm and yet- (and when, he asked himself, had it become the norm)- and yet. This time, and he’d felt so empty- as if something snapped and then everything drained out of him, all the power and the will and the helplessness and it was gone. Just like that. He’d left, terrified in some distant part of him that Hiran would see, terrified Hiran would realize.

Hiran, he’d said, begging, pleading, never angry, how could he be angry, please, and perhaps he already knew that whatever he did it would not be enough, whatever he said it would have no bearing. Perhaps that was it, perhaps that was why.

The Cathedral was closed, now. He wouldn’t make it that far even if he tried. There was nowhere to go except his home. So he walked aimlessly instead, walked until he found a bench by the river and buried his face in his hands beside the running tide beneath him. What’s wrong, he thought again, what’s wrong with me. But there was a hollowness in him and he wondered, foolishly, stupidly, how much he had left to give.

(he’d give it all, but how much was left, how much did he have left to give)

(but that’s easy, as long as his heart beat and he lived there’d still be something left)

There was an art to this, to forgetting. And he’d forget all of this by tomorrow, if tomorrow came. The hollowness would be gone, alongside the cold. There was a method to this, a method to staving this emptiness away until it left.

He closed his eyes, and wondered, not for the first time, if he’d ever open his eyes again. He found himself barely able to care.

Additional Para Sample: here.

Extras: N/A!

Although I was just about to submit this and remembered a song I thought would really fit and HERE it is. I just remembered it and thought- wow, bam. B a m.

(also i’d just like to say sidney poked me to this rp this morning and i blame sidney for everything) (and i only met them this morning too what)

also, small snippets I wrote and never put anywhere:

he is damned and perhaps he was always destined for this, his hands that hated violence, he was cold and terrified and as he made them their salvation they were the ones to damn him.

//

(ask of yourself this; if not a sawiris, if not for that name, then what;

there’s a museum in verona, an art museum, walls of baroque art and perhaps he would have been able to go into art after all. perhaps he would have enrolled in an arts school, perhaps he would have found work at that museum after coming home, he would have been content with his job, his life. perhaps he would have had a cat, he might’ve called it hamlet.

in the evenings he might visit the cafe beside the river, watch the boats trail past, his eyes fixed on the flowing water and the houses on the other side- his sketchpad would be on his lap and charcoal would stain his fingers black.

perhaps, later on, he might have found himself a love, not a love meant for history or legend but a love of his own, quiet and soft and they might have had just a couple more cats. just one or two more. or maybe five, because five was a good number and they would have bought a house beside the river.

he might have found contentment.)

//

sometimes he wondered what it was- sometimes he wondered if it was a sin. him, he, this. he did not know when it started, did not know when it would end- he found himself aching and it was a nameless, wordless ache, but they were brothers and this was not a thing to be felt between brothers, this was not a thing to want for.

it was easy to ignore the sensation, easy to forget it in the presence of his brother, easy to overlook the struggling thing in his chest that twisted harder every time, that left some hollow spot above his heart and grew with every passing day he kept his silence.

but he knew sin, perhaps he should not have been surprised after all.

//