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Carmen Bauman & Vanessa Nelson for @carmens-garden's Valentine's Exchange.
It has only just occurred to me as I've gone to post this I should have done something Valentine's day themed...Oh well. I tried something new though!! I hope you like it!!
As my birthday is tomorrow (today in Germany), I would like to gush about one of my favourite fellow September babies, Carmen Bauman.
She's a Stranger Things OC, who's a superpowered human. Unlike Eleven, she was not kept in the lab but a very similar prison.
Her parents were extremely religious and kept her locked away in the house as much as possible. When she accidentally uses her powers in front of them, they lock her in the basement for a month to perform exorcisms on her. She is eventually found and her parents are arrested, but Carmen is catatonic and doesn't wake up from that catatonia for a year. At that point she had already been moved from a facilit in Illinois to Pennhurst Asylum in Indiana.
With the help of Murray Bauman she escapes and ends up in Hawkins on the night Will Byers disappears. She finds her way to the Byers home during the search party and is taken in by Jonathan in secret.
Carmen has earth and plant-based powers. She loves gardening, reading, playing video games, and knitting among other things. She is sweetness encompassed and really just yearns for some closeness with anyone.
Throughout her story she'll be hit with a lot of curveballs but it helps that she has an ever-growing pool of loved ones to help her through it.
First, Happy Birthday! :)
. . . oh, my poor baby! How dare you torture her!!??!! (I know it's the storyline, I'm just teasing you - we writers sure like to torture our OCs. I love that Murray is important to her. And her powers sound awesome!
"Welcome back to Channel 5, where we bring you news from Indiana and the rest of the world every hour. We start off with a story that could have been ripped from a horror novel. A fourteen year old girl has been found locked up in the basement of her parents. Though it turns out, they were not her parents at all. Pedro and Antonia Navarro claimed to have adopted their young daughter, but no official records could be procurred and the girl has no official birth certificate. Local authorities are still searching for her parents, but it is assumed that they are deceased or that they don't want to be found. The young woman was found strapped to a bed, religious imagery was placed all around her. Her parents were performing several exorcisms over her for a month. By the time she was found, the girl was catatonic and rushed to the hospital. The Navarros have been placed under arrest and are awaiting trial. We will report more on this as the story unfolds."
Carmen's life so far has been anything but easy. Her parents have always kept her at arm's length, while somehow smothering her at the same time. They didn't let her be a normal child. But Carmen slowly begins to realize that she isn't normal, to begin with.
When her parents lock her in the basement after she displays powers, Carmen is found months later and eventually ends up in Indiana at Pennhurst Asylum.
On the night of her escape, she sees a little boy running through the woods of a town called Hawkins. The next day she meets his brother, who feels strangely compelled to protect her from whatever she is running.
For Carmen, it's out of the frying pan and into the fire, because suddenly, she is back to trying to figure out her powers and where she really comes from. The question is, where does she even start?
chapter one - the first night
Carmen hadn’t been taken care of so well in over a year, maybe ever.
Her hair still clung to her face, and the feeling of it started annoying her.
She assembled her mess of wet curls and slipped them into the rubber band she’d swiped out of the drugstore a town over, along with some food she had desperately needed.
The clothes Jonathan had given her were well-worn, but fitting for the weather.
She stepped into the sweatpants and pulled them up, tightening the band to keep them from sagging.
Then she slipped on the flannel, tucking it into the band of the pants.
Before she snuck back out into the hallway and to Jonathan’s room, Carmen gave herself another look-over.
She would give anything for a warm shower but knew she was already stretching Jonathan’s altruism.
Carmen wrapped her wet clothes up in the towel before turning off the lights in the bathroom and quietly slipping from the room on her bare feet.
As she snuck back to Jonathan’s room, her eyes wandered to the pictures on the wall, where two boys were proudly displayed, getting older in each passing picture frame. One was Jonathan, and the other one she assumed was his little brother.
She stopped in front of a picture of three people. Jonathan, his brother, and their mother.
A smile formed on her face as she found herself wishing to have had a family like this.