Kaycey

|A National Anthem|

When her sounds of vomiting ceased, he waited a few more moments. Nathan decided she had nothing left to throw up and walked the few feet back over to the bed. He’d since pulled on gray sweats to keep warm – the seniors often kept the ac running even in the winter. Nate grabbed the box by the outside corners, careful not to touch the contents.

He left the room, carrying it down the stairs and out into the trash on the curb. It was an early Wednesday morning, and there was a blue-grey tint over the earth as the sun considered rising. He was thankful not to be stepping over drunk bodies like on a Saturday or Sunday morning. He returned swiftly after grabbing a chilled can of sprite from the cooler in the kitchen. Leaving the bedroom door slightly cracked to allow some light to trickle in, he handed her the can after opening it. She had nails she never wanted to chip on the metal contraption. “It’ll settle your stomach,” he told her, running a hand up her thigh and kissing her bare temple.

“Go brush your teeth, little girl,” he teased her, sitting on the bed and leaning back against the wall with a hand rested on her lower back.

|A National Anthem|

Nathan quickly came back into his alertness. He’d lost his chance to sleep. It would be another week until his mind gifted him the opportunity again. If he was lucky. He gripped her waist, sliding out from under and pushing her body upright, onto her knees on the mattress. All he wore were his former fitting boxers – a gift from his mother. Of course she meant to provide her son with hygienic products required to be a normal human, being but the Armani label caused it to be somewhat of an eyebrow raise to any he told. Which he didn’t tell. They were black, but you couldn’t make out much more detail than that in dimly lit morning.

His mind was foggy, crying for him to lay back down and curl up and to rest. He usually had a trash can but it’d been snatched and taken to the den for ‘Yale’s finest innovation since DP,” beer game.

“Fuck,” he muttered, grabbing a cardboard box that had been shoved under his desk. Textbooks had arrived in it days earlier. Stumbling over clothes and shoes, cautiously squinting to ensure he wouldn’t step on needles, he brought it to her. “C’mere,” Nathan handed her the oversized and less than ideal catch-all for her bile. Her hair band was pulled up over her bare bicep, and he slid it down her arm and off of her wrist. Using his own wrist as a place holder, he tied her hair back in a lopsided high pony, missing some of the baby hairs at the bottom. Her pretty water color tattoo was exposed now.

Nathan rubbed his eyes, running his hands through his hair several times as if it would stay out of his face. He begun tidying their strewn clothes, organizing by owner.

The Beureau

So instead of playing characters, we would kind of debate issues as if we were politicians and try to solve problems?

|A National Anthem|

Her laugh was only cut short, the sweet sound tarnished, at the mention of her imperfection and demerit. Was that not a perfect characterization of her life thus far? Her happiness and carefree attitude were blemished by her lack of self-control.

‘Great job, Marlene. Try being sober your whole life like everybody else fucking is,’ he wanted to say.

But Nathaniel had a soft spot in his heart for her. He always promised himself there was some other reason she used that he wasn’t aware of – no matter if he understood every scanty inch of her tarred soul. He sought to grasp WHY; to avoid judgement he convinced himself she participated in such a detestable way of life for some inducement he was not conscious of.

Originally, Nathan had lived within the approximation that drug users lived on the street and begged for money. They didn’t eat or work, just used and leeched off of others. But Marcy had greatly revised his way of thinking. She kept it so well hidden, which is something he thought about often during the years they spent together. He continued to return, after carrying his cross around the circle of reason, to the possibility it was all for attention. If so, she wasn’t doing an adequate job at it. Other than a select few friends, her dealer, and Nate, everyone was oblivious. As if her wild child phase would end, because they didn’t know how deep her lawless affectation ran, they patronized her as a girl who was taking a little longer than everyone else to grow up. But she still hadn’t grown up, throwing a tantrum this very moment. She always had a way of bringing old shit up, unpacking it and bringing it out of the warehouse of history, into the light.
He remembered the junction in which her ‘fun’ stopped being a behavior he could attribute to wanting to try new things and having new experiences, to being young.

They had slept together plenty of times, maybe just enough to count on his fingers and toes. The fraternity house was poorly monitored and girls spent the night on a regular basis. Though, perhaps the single difference between Nathan and his housemates was the non-plural nature of the girls that stayed with him. It was just Marcy. He had a college-issued twin sized bed in his room in which they slept. She laid on top of him, chest to chest simply because there was no other arrangement that would afford comfort.

As Nathan drove, remembering his route from years of living in D.C., he remembered how soft she was. She felt so little in his arms, providing him nothing variant from warmth and solace. Her breath was even with sleep, and his hand stroked her bare back underneath the thick fleece he’d brought from home. Many nights he stayed awake, one of the intended effects rather than a side effect, of his own drug. Sometimes it worked too well and still held him days after ingestion. He wondered if Marcy envied that quality of his more subtle white bottle and solo cup of water, rather than spoons and needles, which had been shoved under his bed in a fruitless attempt for discretion. It always seemed as if her high became shorter and shorter, less and less euphoric.

He presently flinched as the image came back into his mind. Perhaps that night his medicine had begun to release him and allow him to drift. The pretty creature on top of him jolted awake, bringing her head off his chest and leaning over the side of the bed. His eyes opened, head turning to face her. A nightmare? He felt her abdomen flex and relax, flex and relax as sounds of dry heaving inaugurated.

How to RP certain traits

I see a lot of times people will put down that their character is extremely smart or charismatic or something like that yet I rarely see any of this in the actual RP. So I have a question: How do you RP those traits exactly?

@ClocktowerEchos

I have a character currently who's morphed after me in a lot of ways. We have the same astrological sign and some of the same mannerisms. I describe him as very mathematical and calculated - even during emotional, non-analytical, and technical situations. I incorporate this for example by 1) when realizing he's been living in the same town as an old flame, in his head, calculates exactly how many steps, at his height, she was away. My post goes into mathematical detail. 2) when discussing how his lover's mood changed with the wind, his eyes kept flickering to the display on his rear view mirror that gave him the wind speed and direction, waiting for it to alter.

You can't just claim your character is intelligent and have them read everyone's minds.. Flawless characters are so extremely boring and they lack any dynamic angles.

|A National Anthem|

With a double click of the top button, he unlocked the two doors. Swiftly he tossed the duffel into the back, having to fit it between the driver’s headrest and the frame. Nathan slid in, reaching up and pulling the door down and into shut position. It was a shame he didn’t possess the means to drive something as sweet as this during his racing days. “We’re going to find out,” he replied jokingly to her question. He drove every couple months or so. Driving after a long break was very similar to simply switching vehicles. It didn’t take long to adjust. “I drive a lot overseas, not so much here,” he smirked to himself. “Will knows how to have a good time.” As in, Prince William.

Nathan frowned a moment as he adjusted the air conditioning for mid-august in the south. “Wait… is it the left…or right side of the road?” he watched as a Toyota rolled by in the dimly lit parking garage. Nate gave her a sideways glance as he easily slid the machine into drive and
pulled out with a flat, flexed palm steering the way.

What had Marcy been doing for the past decade or so? A combination of drugs and wearing thirty shades of the same purple lipstick? “How long were you in the straight-jacket joint?” He made a few turns at green lights and merged onto the 295 north. Nathan had never imagined he’d see her again, that she would allow him within 100 feet of her. But their dynamic seemed almost… unchanged, just more grown up. How long the social politeness, with minimal mention of their flawed history, would last, he wasn’t sure. Would she see him again, after today? Her moods shifted with the direction of the wind. According to the i8 rearview display, the wind was 15mph south. He kept his eyes on it, waiting for it to waiver, but it didn’t even as his speed fluctuated.

In the time he had been away, learning at the hands of politicians who planned to groom him for presidency, where was she? Nathan had forgotten their last encounter, allowing it to fade away as easily as he pushed the rest of her imprint away. He had a system, a method to force his mind away from her memory, thus his subconscious threw away some of the details he tried to recall when he wanted to torture himself. Some trigger would finds its way under his skin, and he would encourage the anguish by reliving the pain others had caused him.

Others being Marlene. You can move mountains with that feeling of despair. He reminded himself of how important it was to bathe in sensation, good or bad. It was important to feel, to experience and to understand all aspects of human capabilities. It didn’t matter that his heart was broken, it was easily buried by the mountains he carved and the rubble left when he detonated. His feelings would change, time would heal, and he would have yet another notch in his belt to draw from.

After all she was the real failure.

Right?

|A National Anthem|

Nathaniel glared at her in mock annoyance. Had she grown up at all? Maybe he wasn’t any better than her for doing something with himself, because if it weren’t for others’ expectations of him, he probably wouldn’t have become anything more.
“You’re very fortunate, Ms. Burke, I haven’t carried my own things in years,” Which was mostly true.

He didn’t particularly enjoy her calling him any name that reminded him of his career choices. Nathaniel didn’t want to mix her with the idea of being the president… the two never mingled well before and they weren’t going to now. Nathan used his one free hand to pull the fallen hood back over his head in disguise. “I have gotten them to leave me alone. I’ve promised legal pardons if anything happens to me.” It sounded very foolish, but the benefits were endless. “Usually I have them with me. But it’s much easier than trying to sneak away, which is kind of impossible.” How had he not been assassinated? But, truthfully, other presidents have been assassinated and they were with service guards. Besides, the risk of dying was far from the worst thing involved in being the leader of a country.

He caught a whiff as she tied her hair, again, the fragrance reminded him of how he’d let the memory slip. She always smelled good, even the day she got that tattoo. Against the advice of everyone, including Nathan, she gotten drunk right before her appointment. He drove her to the smoky tattoo parlor and waited for three hours while she got inked right on the spine. Marcy wanted him to get one, too, but for some reason unbeknownst to Nathan, he’d refused. Refusal to try something new truthfully wasn’t in Nate’s repertoire. Usually. That tattoo was the only precipice in which his body wouldn’t let him jump off of. Since then, he’d gotten one or two.

Nathan was in sneakers, and easily kept a little ahead of Marcy as they walked. He skipped the check-in desk where the discharge papers would have been waiting on him, should he have taken the normal route and not asked for them ahead of time. He led her down the hall, quite a ways before guiding the way down the stairwell and all the way down to the parking garage.

Fishing deep in his left pocket, he found the keys to the Beamer i8. Row something, number something. It beeped after he hit the lock button enough times.

|A National Anthem|

The words fuck and Marcy always sounded like a good idea when combined.

But that was a long time ago. It was a senator and a presidential term ago. A lot of stuff happened since then, things Marcy would never understand, nor was he able to help her understand. The world wasn’t black and white anymore. Nathan couldn’t “Just see what happens”, like his soul wanted him to. He couldn’t just be in it for the experience like he once was. This was bigger than him. Even though Marcy made him forget it, he was a leader. It was an annoyance that was always present.

She could see his life wearing on him, represented in the worry lines across his skin. Nathan frowned and then relaxed his face, wondering if they had gone away now, if his forehead was smooth again. Probably not. Those lines were reinforced every second of every day. But, Nathan often forgot how lucky he was. His secret service was very lenient and allowed him to leave their sight quite often per his request. He had them to thank for these moments alone with her.

“As much as I try to be off the grid, it’s hard for people to get enough of me,” he couldn’t help himself. As if they followed him around because they liked him or cared about him.
Nathan moved over to the window. She was pretty high up. Curiously, he checked the engineering of the windows, but you couldn’t open them. Figures.

“Your brother seems worried,” he fibbed. He didn’t seem unconcerned, per se, but Alan never felt overly affectionate or brotherly towards his sister. Perhaps that’s why he was able to remain friends with Nathan when he knew without a shadow of a doubt he was sleeping with his sister in the next room over. Though, to most it might seem wrong, Nathan was more brotherly to Marlene than Alan. A really weird and dysfunctional sibling relationship with a lot of kissing.

No matter their past, she could not stay in his house. With Alina. It would be on the cover of every magazine within days. And he might be castrated by every feminism group he’s done so much work with. “Yeah, it’s pretty big but a lot of it is open for the public. We only occupy about a fourth of it.” He would tell her later that she wasn’t staying with him. Is that really what she wanted? Sure, he could afford every meal and mortgage for her for the rest of her life, probably even her drugs, too, but she wouldn’t want to be so reliant on someone. Especially someone in as bad of a political spot for a personal relationship such as himself.

Nathaniel turned back to her now, grabbing a black duffel off the bed and slinging it over his shoulder. She didn’t seem to have too many belongings with her. Just two bags, one being a very small purse. Alina had purses that looked like that, with a lot higher price tag. “You ready?”

|A National Anthem|

Her change in posture spoke volumes to him. Maybe she had only requested his presence to see how much older he’d gotten or so he could see how well she was doing without him (which by the looks of it wasn’t very well). But somewhere deep down she remembered him, and he made her feel something. Whether it was good or bad she had not yet reached the tone of indifference.

“Who wouldn’t try to get in your pants?” Maybe she needed a boost of confidence. He could blow her horn, and other things. Had she been with other men? A large part of Nathan had always hoped the drugs kept her too busy to fuck anyone else after he left.
He finally let his gaze drift from her. The hospital room was dreary and white, and the white tile was, as anticipated, speckled with beige, as if beige was a color. The layout wasn’t what he had imagined. Is protocol to send someone experiencing withdraw to a psychiatric hospital? Here

Nathaniel had thought prison was the first step. But then he remembered the means Marcy came from. The Burke’s bathed in it and made sure everyone knew it.
His eyes returned to hers as she mentioned his well-being represented on FOX. Oh, had she seen Alina? “Being the most searched man on Google has its perks,”

Not really. That was a lie. The travel and experience was great, but as a hot, yet very cold, blooded Aquarius, he wanted nothing to do with the leash he felt put on him by responsibilities and security. Nathan was barely left alone long enough to get head, let alone enjoy a vacation. Of course, over the course of four plus years he had come to accept the things he had given up. He told himself many times a day ‘You made this decision, you made your bed, now lay in it’.

But what was the alternative? Would he have ever stopped messing around? Would he have even graduated? It was a miracle, truly, that he was able to make it through, by society’s standards, unscathed. By his own standards, very lost.

He had 2,000 dollar suits but that was never the kind of thing that impressed Marcy.

“I thought you might not remember me, so I went for the nostalgic sleep-deprived college-senior.”

|A National Anthem|

Goddammit.

She wasn’t haggard and worn like he might have hoped once or twice. She barely looked any different. She was still his best friend’s little sister who hung around them even when they less than kindly hinted at their distaste for her presence. When high school ended and the two boys, hardly worth the namesake of men, moved the half hour away to New Haven, into dorms of one of the most prestigious universities in the country. Nathan almost saw her more frequently then than he did when he practically lived in her house.

It wasn’t until he saw her repeatedly, over and over again at every Friday night frat party, that he really gave any thought to the conversations he overheard her parents having. When she wasn’t around, he would hear them discuss the trouble they foresaw on the horizon. Her “promiscuous mannerisms” as Mrs. Burke referred to her behavior, “was going to cause real trouble”. Marcy had a lot of older friends. They would bring her up for parties, and they were the drug guys the seniors always seemed to be on good terms with. Though, they were more attracted to the molly and Adderall than Marcy and Nathan’s choices.

It was a Halloween party, which is always the first detail Nathan recalled within this story. It was very early in his freshman year, just over a month past the start of school. He was barely legal, and she wasn’t at all. He recognized her that night, right away, her and her friends were a little late arriving to the party. All the guys there knew damn well she was way too young. He kept his knowledge of her to himself, though. What did it matter to him what his best friend’s baby sister did?

Soon, she was much more than someone’s sister, even now, she was so much more than that.

‘Oh that face, makes me wanna party,’ he thought as their eyes met. He promised himself he wouldn’t look away from her, for days he’d promised over and over again that he wouldn’t take his eyes off of her. His heartbeat was in his ears now.

It was like he was fifteen again, and he shoved his palms in the pocket of his grey sweats. ‘Don’t say something douchy like you would have in college,’ his conscious muttered, whom Alina had deemed his only useful vice president.

He returned her smile, nervously. Still, he didn’t know why she wanted him here. To see him again, but this time as the leader of her country? Nathan didn’t feel so big in this moment. He couldn’t seem to recall a moment when she did him wrong, but rather the opposite. Every raised voice and every outburst, every assignment and quiz and midterm that he’d blamed on her. The smile on his lips widened as he remembered how it was exactly she’d moaned when he made it up to her…

“I’d really rather Nate,” he confessed, taking a few steps closer. He could smell her, and he never realized it until now, that he’d blocked out the fragrance.

“How have you been holding up?”