#and somehow that's what prompts Laurence to stop wearing neckcloths at all when they're at home :D

[andro-beaurepaire]

The people demands your headcanons about the neckcloth!

(It's me I'm the people)

This follows this excellent post by @fuckman360kickflip, and if you guys haven't seen it you absolutely should <3

So we all know Laurence is an extremely armored guy who is not necessarily aware of how much self-protective mechanisms he has in place, right ? Like, he thinks (mostly) of his own need for formal dress as natural for both his upbringing as a gentleman and his job as an officer, but I think it is just one more way for him to bottle things up and forcefully keep himself in check.

I mean he is a soldier, of course he is perfectly aware of what the purpose of an uniform is, aka armoring and hiding the individual as part of something much bigger than themselves : the mass of the army. And Laurence IS someone who tends to only define himself as a good soldier, a loyal subject of the king, someone who only wants to do his duty. That's why the treason shatters him so badly at first -because it is the moment he finally faces himself and realizes he is so much more than that. He is not a mere uniform amongst other uniforms, he is someone who would actually choose love over country, someone who would rather share the life saving medicine with the enemy rather than winning the war at all cost.

And it takes turning himself into an unthinking & heartless war machine as penance to finally see, in the mirror Tharkay hands him, what his crisply ironed and perfectly folded piece of armor actually turned into :

'Laurence, what the fuck ?'

Overall I just love the idea of Laurence being this extremely angry, lost and very easily hurt by others person who needs the rigid rules to function ; and who somewhere along the road lost track of the moment his uniform stopped being a shield and became the glue that was holding him together in the first place.

In one of my many, many WIPs, I have this storyboard about Laurence's history with suicidal tendancies, and how it didn't actually start with the treason, but during his teenage years. And in my heart, the neckcloth thing started during the Barstowe era, to hide an untreated injury that would have been the perfect excuse for the captain to leave him on shore, and that he did not dare to go to the surgeon for.

And if years later the neckcloth idiosyncrasy reveals itself very convenient to justify holding his neck very stiffly all the time, because nobody knows he did not fight back when the crew tried to hang him on the Goliath, and has never fully recovered mobility in his cervical spine ever since, well... :D