#i did theatre for a not insignificant amount of time trust me when i say that.

[butchlifeguard]

diversity loss. someone that i find so so so fucking annoying is also taking asl 3 next year

[deputyxjones-blog]

Muddy Waters Task 003 - Bloodlines

you look just like your mother (i guess i do carry her tenderness well) you both have the same eyes (cause we are both exhausted) and the hands (we share the same wilting fingers) but that rage your mother doesn't wear that anger (you're right this rage is the one thing i get from my father)

- rupi kaur

Trigger Warning: Abuse

ALEXANDER DU PONT // The Patriarch

”You may be my father, but I’m never going to be your daughter.”

Alexander was the born the first and only son of a du Pont. Yes, those du Ponts. From an early age, he was made clearly and painstakingly aware of the legacy that he had to live up to, and it was a lesson that followed him well into adulthood. There was a saying within his family that had been passed down for generations and that, upon hearing it for the first time, the young WASP took to heart more than anything else that he learned during his formative years.

Life is a battle, and you either enter it armed, or you surrender immediately.

So, that was what he did. He armed himself with effervescent charm, with ruthless ambition, and with an uncanny knack for knowing exactly when people could be bought and for what price. He armed himself with slightly different but distinctive personalities, each with their own individual purpose; to gain trust, to close the deal, to leverage his growing social clout into even bigger opportunities with even better rewards. Using the tools at his disposal, Alexander cut a straight path through two Ivy League institutions and into burgeoning success, returning to his home in New York with the sole purpose of establishing himself as one of the city’s most prominent and influential figures.

While he could seem both spontaneous and amenable when he wanted to, the du Pont heir grew increasingly controlling and manipulative; and he never, ever did anything without a clear purpose. Each and every detail of his life, no matter how small or insignificant it seemed, was chosen with great care and consideration. From his associates, to his wife, to the font size on his business cards, Alexander was adamant about always delegating the work, but never the decision. And if for whatever reason any given situation didn't go his way, that was when things started to get… Unpleasant.

He took it out on his family, mostly. Whenever bad things happened, whenever he had a remotely rough day or he made the wrong call and it backfired, he took it out on his wife Olivia; and when his daughter Isabelle was born, he started taking it out on her instead. His temper flared fast and hit hard, violent outbursts interspersed with enough parental pride and encouragement (or at least what passed as parental pride and encouragement in a blue-blooded household) to make it seem like maybe, just maybe, things would be different next time. But things never were different. And over time, it seemed that even the tiniest infractions could push the man over the edge.

But accepting his daughter’s interest in the arts and theatre and her growing similarities to his wife was one thing. Accepting that for various reasons, Olivia would not be granting him anymore children, specifically not a son, was another entirely. It was a chink in his long-term plans that there was no immediate solution for, and which not only served to escalate his rage toward the child that he did have, but made him feel more and more justified in the blame that he placed on her—burdening Isabelle with a guilt complex and a tendency to seek out abusive patterns that, much like the lessons he had learned as a teenager, she would come to carry with her well into adulthood.

OLIVIA DU PONT (NÉE ASTON-BISHOP) // The Consort

“All you care about when people look at me is what they think of you.”

There was a time when Olivia Aston-Bishop had such high hopes and dreams for herself. Born in North Carolina to a moderately wealthy family, she was well on her way toward a promising career as a stage actress when, during the run of her first off-Broadway show, she met a man who would change the course of her life.

Alexander du Pont was everything that she had ever wanted in a man. He was handsome, confident and charismatic, came from a good Episcopalian family, had good values and best of all, would undoubtedly turn their wedding into one of the social events of the season. She loved him, but she was equally in love with the idea of the life that they would have together; filled with summers in the Hamptons, winters in Aspen, and endless, limitless opulence.

But what her new husband had besides an enormous amount of wealth was serious control issues and an unbelievably bad temper. Nights on the town, luxurious holidays and dinner parties at their Upper East side penthouse were all punctuated with terrible fights that ended in either tears or violence, with Olivia methodically chipping away at her own wants and needs in a desperate attempt to save their marriage. Having a child was as much her duty as a wife---after all, there was no family legacy to speak of without an heir to pass it on to---as it was a last ditch effort to stitch together what remained of her plans for their future.

At first, she did her best to teach Isabelle all of the things that she needed to know to survive in their world; all of the things that Olivia wished she had learned sooner. How to temper her own expectations in favour of fulfilling other’s. How to smile even through her worst pain by using the art of compartmentalisation. Most importantly, how to know when to simply shut up and take it. She was neither a warm nor a nurturing mother, but what she tried to do was give her daughter the kind of life that she had always wanted in spite of their circumstances, believing that her constant criticism would only make the girl stronger. 

But as Isabelle increased in age, so did their physical similarities; from her cheekbones, to her brown hues, to the smile that didn’t quite reach her eyes. It got harder and harder for Olivia to look at her daughter and not feel resentful at the thought of a younger version of herself having her whole life ahead of her. What was once at least an attempt at parenting in an admittedly harsh but constructive manner eventually devolved into just picking on her daughter incessantly, taking out years of pain, and grief, and unfilled potential on someone who had no idea that it had nothing to do with her. Yet to her great chagrin, instead of turning vicious and cruel from absorbing the same bitter disappointment that she felt on a daily basis, it only made her daughter try that much harder to be better. Not only was she young, pretty and clever, but the little brat had the audacity to be a bigger person too? Unacceptable.

Faced with her own wilting beauty and faded aspirations, and feeling malcontent and cheated out of the life that she was supposed to have, Olivia poured what remained of her determination into making sure that when people looked at her, they saw only what she wanted them to see. If she couldn’t have the perfect marriage, or the perfect family, or the perfect life, then she would make damn sure that it at least seemed like she did.