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salemroleplayhq · 3 years ago

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❝You aren’t much, I said one day to my reflection in a green pond, and grinned.❞

MEET…

Johnathan Adamik

Age: 36

Birthday: April 23rd, 1984

Gender/Pronouns: Cis-male / he/him

Hometown: Great Bend, Kansas

Length of time in Salem: 1.5 years

Occupation: Fisherman

Faceclaim: Jake Gyllenhaal

HIS STORY

trigger warnings: child abandonment, military mention, death mention, attempted murder, near-death

His first name implies nothing, and his last, maybe even less. John: a colorless everyman name, when it's called, it doesn't make a sound, it's an echo.

It's a name that has claimed him from its genesis through the mouth of a father who seemed to name him by coincidence. What was an accident of noise to the passive ear of a god was the first voice that reverberated in his head. An echoing permanence he'd always answer to even after his father leaves him, his siblings and mother behind.

Just as the conception he'd been named, his father leaving was merely another incident, even if the tightly coiffured women that his mother flocks with on Sundays were domestically inclined to imply something else. Some kind of implicit tragedy under the speckle-clouds of their powdered sympathetic humor (little boy, big man, you’re not making trouble are you, you’re takin’ good care of your momma ain’t ya, little man of the house now…). It doesn't matter though, like most things in life, noise and all- that's how it goes. If you couldn't accept it, either way, it will make sense of itself regardless, and to him that's enough to be made of living.

How things go is how his mother charts the life that continues on beyond the stagnant echoes. And how could she not? The day after his father left, his mother, red faced - the color flushed to a forgotten youthfulness in her cheeks - crams the last box into an old rat colored clunker of a car. She'd decided that they were going to have to move to someplace smaller and though he doesn't remember what he'd said, it must’ve been something childish. But he remembers her eyes, darkly translucent and certain, looking at him when she goes well baby that’s just how some things go, don’t it?, echoes of unnamed prairie borderlands in her accent as it liked to remind itself to her sometimes. Only twenty-four, four children, and nothin’ else much to her name besides the car on a countdown to a wreckage (and that would’ve been a real tragedy), far away where she didn't quite belong in a town with nothing much but the sluicing river naming it. Great Bend, Nowhere.

After that, with a sense of resigned certainty is how he carries on with his life, the way most would in a living where days were another day after each, when they can barely afford to simply be let alone live beyond each one. Being smart enough, and being that ambition for as long as he'd understood it - past a time when he could stand in class to mumble I-umm--want-to-be-a-doctor-or-scientist-or… - was not something that could be afforded. Like his mother said, that's how some things go. So it goes that as soon as he could, he marched up to a recruiter- some matchbox patriot salesman of the hour on a quota beat, to be signed and shipped off without the complimentary pitch.

Then continuing on, to march with the rest of the other canned green tin men, distinguished in the patina of the Navy. In the blind, geared maws of The Machine though, every batch is the same. Being a tin man among other green tin men at the bidding of pressed suits assembling a conveyor tongue belt of necessary wars. It's necessary in wars that there must be a creed, streamlined from the veined hands into the synthesized consciousness of the tin men they move so the job (and it is just a job to him) comes assumed with ambition (that isn't his) because wars require dignity to be justified and it is presumed that having ambition dignifies. What else is more dignifying than a man who dies for it? If he were to argue, he'd say it's not ambition that dignifies, it's dying that does, but throughout the years the hands that pull the levers and turn the bolts of The Machine will occasionally drape a flag over a casket and say this is why it’s necessary.

So life goes on, more things that whatever else could be said- or wouldn't be said by him- simply happens. Deployments. Cycles of shittiness. Waiting and more waiting. Then the lapses in between, incidents made into whisky-blather fodder at a shithouse bar during happy hours. Then there are days when he's alone that he feels as if he'd woken up from an embryonic coma, realizing he's got hands that carry everyone's will but his own. Duty had become him. He'd once heard a chaplain drone on that service to man is service to god, but there's not much of god in the places he's been and still he's only got his hands.

One day he wakes up again after returning from a deployment, and wakes up to nothing. Nothing to return to either. It's less a delayed epiphany and more of a clarity that couldn't be ignored- finally seeing and not just looking behind peering half-lids. After living half-asleep, years of answering others to a name given to him from someone with a severed chord, he leaves the Navy. Distinguished, but not in any way that will say anything about him. Not anything that really means.

When he thinks of epiphanies- tries to picture them- it starts as a nacreous core, undefined, bursting outwards into a vague sensation that meant it was already too late. When he thinks of epiphanies he sees a bullet.

They'd called him Saint.

When he was still tinted with the dress fatigue greens he'd been diseased by a strain of prodromal benevolence that degenerated into terminal cynicism. Because you can't be a saint without looking at your fellow men to be able to say you still recognize them.

And he did look at the one that shot him, and he understood. Because to look is to still recognize in spite of your fellow man, and betrayal isn't hard to understand because it's one of the oldest acts in the history of humanity.

So a particular day goes that he's: ratfucked, someone gets angry wrong, the right person has a gun, so the tip of his right ear gets blown off, and he isn't meant to be alive. Then it follows that he disappears before someone learns to correct their mistake- scrounging up whatever measure of life he still had into a bag and a truck and no definite destination besides a road that will go and go. From one place to the next.

He ends up in Salem eventually, where the epiphanies are no longer like the ones he'd come to know- they're more like the afterwaves of one, like trying to familiarize to a place that will always be unfamiliar, ripples from somewhere in the vastness. At least here it's the right place for lingering ghosts. There aren't really days of waiting, more like something else that waits for him. Either way, they're days he can call his own- a kind of living, at least, and besides- people usually don't think to ask what else a fisherman is.

PERSONALITY

+ conscientious, dependable, patient

- cynical, stubborn, reticent

Johnathan is played LIFFI

#johnathan adamik #m #all #oc rp #town rp #city rp #lsrpg #original rp #literate rp

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