InsaneJournal

Tweak says, "I was hit by a bus!"

Dylan is armed with (jazzhands) wrote,
@ 2012-12-11 00:27:00

I know we're not saints or virgins or lunatics; we know all the lust and lavatory jokes, and most of the dirty people; we can catch buses and count our change and cross the roads and talk real sentences. But our innocence goes awfully deep, and our discreditable secret is that we don't know anything at all, and our horrid inner secret is that we don't care that we dont.

DYLAN MCKENDRICK

And we learn as we age
We've learned nothing
And my body still aches

Player Info;

Name/Handle: L2
Are you 18 or over?: & beyond!

Character Info;

Alter’s source work, author and character: OC.
Character Journal name: ~jazzhands
Character Name: Dylan McKendrick
Character Age: 33
Character Played By: Josh Hartnett

Character History and Personality: It is an old story, the kind of incident that one simply didn't pay attention to if they weren't in the circle of things. Considering the pedigree of his family, most people weren't even close to the field of gilded crops that his circle demolished with their cryptic laughter and silver spoons. The incident was social suicide rather than any true tragedy. Unfortunately, to his grandmother such things were one and the same. The worst of it was that nobody in the family knew the truth - or could have even begun to have fathomed the budding disarray that lurked just beneath their upturned noses. When the house of cards came tumbling down, it was far too late.

It begins with a cellist and a literature major at Yale University, and continues nine months later with a swift drop out of class schedules and a trip to the emergency room. So he was, Dylan McKendrick. Named by his father after one particular Irish poet and an absolute nightmare in his first few months before both sets of grandparents came to terms and forced marriage on the undergrads. It only made sense since the public atrocity made adoption even less apropos. While it wasn't a perfect scenario, that little trip up to city hall worked as a promise ring that neither student could shrug their way out of easily. In the summer of 1980, the teenagers were married at Le Mont-Saint-Michel in a clandestine ceremony of all their parents' friends and none of their own. The wedding pictures are painful. The grimaces and twists of brow are confused and mirrored in young faces before a stony priest, the lighting is glamorous, the plastic expressions in a sea of chairs are vacant as ghost ships.

His mother was capable of returning to school the following semester, although transferred to Julliard at the insistence of her parents. It wasn't anything cruel or even designed, the separation of family from the start. It made to her side; if she was to be a cellist, she should take a chair among the best. The baby was cared for by a full-time nanny in that first year, and Dylan didn't really know his parents at all. Besides, what was the hurt if sacrifices paid off? After her graduation, Dylan's mother gained a rear chair in the New York Philharmonic and she took up the baby at last as a kind of side project.

Dylan's father was another story entirely, he set migraines loose with his choice in major(religious philosophy), but set panic attacks further with a perversion into the realm of poetry post-graduation. Poets were not stable people, they were notorious for being madmen and drunks.. so while the family was concerned, their concerns were well founded. His father was chaos, the man was flames dancing on gasoline and wild tales told from rooftops during extravagant parties that didn't require holidays or weekends. Wednesdays were as good a reason as any to set the flock of like-minded fiends loose on their property. Dylan remembers its chaos as elegance. Absinthe in teacups, everyone smoking, the laughter, the psychedelic nudity. Alternating records of Vivaldi and Hendrix. The random bonfires. Dylan remembers the goldenrod carpet and the way it was so plush between his fingers. How the wall paper glinted with metallic filigree and velvet lines, some three-dimensional tricks left back from the 60's, which his parents seemed strangely fond of. His parents were not artists in the traditional sense, but they were of a hippie age where anything was art, most assuredly words and music. It was the earliest form of art, and so Dylan grew up in a house of spasming strings and mashing typewriters. His first word was Blue.

Naturally, the grandparents on both sides disapproved greatly. With their chosen fields as much as their lifestyle, and it wasn't long before funds were cut off in an act of desperation. Too little, too late. It had no affect on the McKendricks, who at this time were blooming into popularity in their respective circles and positively thriving with creativity. At the age of 26, his father won the Pulitzer Prize for a collection of prose titled Selected Gravel for the Shadows, and his mother was quickly becoming a favorite among enthusiasts.

Despite his parents budding success, their style of parenting was loose and bizarre by competing standards. Dylan was encouraged to draw on the walls. When he threw tantrums, his father would pause in his typing long enough to drop his reading glasses down his nose in regard of the six year old. "Now again Dylan, but make it rhyme.." Like any teenager, rebellion was essential.. but when drugs and eccentricity were the norm, traditional chaos was out of the question. Seclusion seemed like the best option, and by the age of fourteen he was rarely home at all. School took up a good chunk of time, although he had little interest in studying. He joined football and lacrosse because it made his mother roll her eyes. He got an after school job at Home Depot because it made his father cringe. Everything continued in that fashion for the remainder of Dylan's school years. His parents missed his graduation because they'd traveled to Sweden for a preliminary ceremony for the Nobel Prize, which his father won the following October for his contributions to literature.

Dylan joined the police academy that fall to the horror of both his parents, and he moved out shortly thereafter, when an argument with his father progressed to shoving and swings. His parents assured themselves that it was just a phase, and they waited him out with the belief that Dylan would eventually flake as the real world sank in on him. As the months progressed, their worrying turned to dead silence when they realized the severity of the situation. Upon Dylan's graduation from the academy, he returned to his single bedroom apartment to find both of his parents waiting for him. Sober and stern. It was an intervention of the strangest kind. After nearly two hours of negotiating, Dylan agreed to a college education and put his interest in law enforcement on hold. Of course, Dylan had a card of special interest up his sleeve, and when his parents agreed to pay for his education, he saw no need to refuse.

Four years later, Dylan graduated with a major in computer science and a minor in law. It was a strange and disappointing combination for his parents. Again, they did not show for his graduation.. but he did receive several voicemails of disappointment(alternately growling - from his father - and shrieking - from his mother) when he applied to the FBI. It was far from what they expected, even if it had been Dylan's plan all along. What could they do but cut the strings? He was his own man at 25, and became a field agent a few years later after the traditional hazing of desk duty and paper pushing.

Seven years later, it is not a coincidence that he has shown himself in Vegas. Even if his name is the same, his papers are botched. His social security number is scrambled and his history after college graduation has been erased for the crucial secrecy of undercover work. The journal and key arrived to Dylan while he was still in DC, that whisper of Las Vegas luring him. Which is why when the bureau opened a slot for an investigation into mob connections in the city of sin, Dylan tossed his name into the hat for a chance. The detail was simple, more monitoring than infiltration. Young heiresses and affiliates had flocked to the city in recent months, people that the higher ups made a point to keep an eye on. They needed him on the inside, they needed his eyesight and his wireless technology. Dylan was on a plane the next day. That journal and key tucked away in the luggage beneath his gun and badge.

The assignment wasn't all it was cracked up to be, and with some much needed time to clear his head(after discovering that his Las Vegas contact was a former girlfriend), Dylan put in a request for momentary reassignment. The FBI were stateside by nature, but certain talents were legendary and with very worthwhile pricetags as far as the government was concerned. They put him on a sixty day loan to Israel where he upgraded their defense system software among the chaos of pipebombs and carbombs and bombs strapped to children in marketplaces. Then it was down to Syria for some hacking on the behalf of private investors that even Dylan didn't know the name of, only that the superiors of his superiors approved it and when shit like that gets handed down the foodchain, one tends not to ask questions.

While in Vegas: The hotel brought him hell in half a dozen forms. Life reimbursed him with reunions, bombings, and dates with a woman who wore her gun to bed. He attended sick jokes that masqueraded as parties and he lost his comfy government job when he thought morality and honesty were things worth salvaging. He dealt with being blacklisted and being an asshole and being shot at. And then one day, just like that, it was all gone.

& After: There was suddenly a new world and a new life laid out for him. None of his friends, none of the people he'd fought alongside were there. He had a technologically advanced apartment and a job with the government again, but this time they were called the Thought Police. It was their job to preserve Oceania, to uncover and punish thoughtcrime. He pursued thought criminals with psychology and omnipresent surveillance. Telescreens, terror, and torture.

From where Dylan stood, with the clean and orderly sector of town where he lived, it was easy to believe in utopia. The world worked and it worked well. Oceania was the true future, and Dylan did not have to fake his smiles in the beginning. But it didn't last long. Dylan's patrols eventually took him into the poorer networks, into the parts of the country where rebellion was rampant. But the world wasn't what they said it was, and the government didn't have everyone's best interests in mind. This was not the land of the free, not even close. Dylan began to see through the acts of the Inner Party, and when he voiced uncertainty in the matter of one man's alledged crimethinking, he too was taken into custody.

And suddenly he was a criminal, and suddenly time stood still in the realm of a torturus world that spanned years. They told him that one day soon he would meet release, if he was the model citizen. And so he rebelled, and then he conformed, and when a week became a year, and finally, he didn't dream anything, and he didn't think about getting out. Just when he'd accepted the fact that he was going to die there, the door opened again.

Journal/Key: Pure tech.

Storylines;

Friends, in the loosest terminology possible:

published

hauterois
On again off again:

ipseity