(no subject)
eyes like jade
Name: Gray Adams.
Age: Thirty-four.
Birthday: November 22, 1973.
Hometown: Somewhere small, in Indiana.
claws like blue steel
Location New York City.
Profession: Lawyer, specialising in family law at the highly reputable company Featherstone & Janson.
Email: g.adams@featherstonejanson.com.
inky-black skin
Fairy-Tale Character: Bagheera.
Fairy-Tale: The Jungle Book.
Abilities: None.
white teeth bared upon his lip
First Impression: Reticent, isn't she?
Gray Alone It is difficult to separate the Gray-that-was from the Gray-that-is. Difficult because they are enmeshed; opposites and yet the seam that binds them together is hard to pry apart. Growing up Gray was known for her sympathy. As a child, she would lug home half-dead things, and cry piteously over their inevitable death, nursing them in cardboard boxes. She would be found talking to inappropriate people and somehow in possession of the details of just about everybody's lives. Whilst in junior school, she was the one quietly holding secrets, the details of this or that blossoming teenage romance, while sharing herself unguardedly with everyone - an open book. To some extent, being a police-officer's daughter inspired some of her naive hope for good in the world. She had an unswerving trust in the legal system to do its job and a fervent belief that it helped and supported. At school, she was neither alone, nor the most popular, she was too simplistic and free with her affections for that. She was incapable of the cruel exclusion necessary to rise to the top. Gray could best be described as one untouched by the sordid side of life; quick to laugh, slow to anger, first to make peace.
Slowly the influence of the world reached her. Her best friend began to sink beneath the shit of his own life, and telling Daddy, helping to the best of her ability, did nothing to save him. Gray is stubborn; it was what shaped her high school experience, passing petitions around and meeting the disinterest with smiles. Her drive and idealism marked her from her classmates. Gray wished the world would change, and was convinced of her own part to play in doing so. She threw herself into studying with an abandon, while trying in small ways to change the world about her. She was invested in her convictions, but a kernel of doubt took seed. Nowadays, with the bruises of life, she is slower to smile, and harder to touch. She does not waste words; she never did, but now her humour is dry as dust, and her interest slower to stir. She has learnt caution in investing herself whole-heartedly in anything - although it happens despite her self-control, because she is someone who cares deeply. She is guarded; about herself, about her life and about who she is. Hard to get at in her working life, she has created boundaries about herself for her own protection, too easily bruised once got at. Her anger is still slow to burn up, but once inspired is fierce. She is hard to please, both in her working life, and also because she has been disappointed so many times in life by those she has given the benefit of the doubt. Life has taught her a measure of cynicism. The open book has shut.
The Tale: While Bagheera loved and indulged Mowgli fiercely, protecting him and defending him, he also relinquished the cub. A panther is a solitary creature, undisposed toward pack-ish behaviour, but self-reliant. While Gray craves a family, seeking the same kind of love Bagheera felt for Mowgli, something at the core of her prevents it from happening. Gray shows a complete lack of interest in the Tale-world; her life is full of her job although she dips in and out. At least, until now.
ripping-chisel talons
Parents: Becca and Mike Adams. (deceased)
History: It was not the first time. It would never be unusual, but the sad sort of thing that inspired pity. It was why she left. Becca Morgan was any high school girl. Big smile, red hair, looked pretty in certain lights. She had a crowd of friends, was no Queen Bee, but everyone who knew her found her comfortable company. There were a couple of friends with whom it was a regular tradition to go and get milkshakes at a small indie coffee shop with, hang out and talk and listen to the music played until the place closed at eleven thirty. They should have been able to drive; but - small town, everything within walking distance and Becca and her friends were content. So they walked.
It wasn't any different sort of night, but Becca was unlucky.
They didn't catch the guy: he was from out of town, it had been decided, maybe someone who had come to see the football game. It had been a big deal that Friday night. Hung around afterward, waiting. Becca happened to be the one he found. She coped. She moved, kept going until she found another town, where she was as anonymous as anyone else. One day she asked the woman who brought her pancakes if there was any jobs going in the diner. The next day she was working there.
A few years went by, and Becca was as well-known as anyone else working there. For the generous hand she poured the syrup with, or quietly refilling a coffee cup and looking as though she had nothing better to do but listen to troubles. It was hashing out the difficulties of work when Michael Adams, one of the local police officers, looked up at three am, at the waitress serving him and saw the compassion of her tired smile.
They married in the late autumn, in a small registry office with a reception at the diner just before Becca's twenty-ninth birthday and a few months before Gray was born. Gray's early childhood was one spent folded into the heart of her family. Nightlights and stories at bedtime, and a handmade lunch each day in a carefully unwrinkled brown paper bag. She was escorted about the town by her daddy, often eating lunch with him at the diner, overseen by her mother, and was a child whose right to childhood and innocence was heavily guarded.
No child can survive completely untouched. Gray's interest in others was her undoing. She befriended a young boy, much her own age, and as she gradually made her way inside his life, she was introduced to what could happen when a child wasn't made to feel safe every minute. It was her first taste of injustice, and her first real desire to effect change. Her high school days were filled with people; protests to save all sorts, drives and bake-sales, and trying to pry her friend from the desolation that was his life. Jas left without a word when high school ended, and Gray floundered for a little while, in UC Berkley. Across the coast from where she'd grown up, homesick and heartsick for her friend, she threw herself into the peace rallies and protests of a politicised youth, with an energy and a determination that was her signature when most wanting to forget. She met and fell in love with someone quite different, and was almost swayed to staying in California after graduating. However, she was led where the offers came from legal firms, and the one that extended an offer was in New York. Gray uprooted, and shifted into a tiny apartment with a very loud roommate, and began on her attempt to change the world.
Perhaps all that political interest would have led her to another area, but Gray was firmly fixated on family. She who had grown up in one as solid and stable couldn't stand by and see them destroyed, children hurt in the crossfire. It was then that the tarnish began to set in. A handful of cases, each more soul-destroying than the last as she saw how devastating the world could be. After two years of fighting tooth and nail to do something, she gave in to the calls of her boyfriend, and agreed to marry him. She moved back to California.
She joined a large law-firm and began to make a name for herself, blissfully happy for a while. She and her husband were exploring married life, had a new house to renovate, she was working on a variety of cases and seeing her efforts make a difference. Time now to take the break and have children herself. Except the dearly desired babies just didn't happen.
Perhaps it was investing so much of herself in her work that she had little to bring home to her husband at night. In the run up to a case, Gray's side of the bed at night was a mass of legal papers and her attention barely stolen to snatch dinner. Perhaps it was the long hours her husband spent at work in retaliation, until the line between work and social blurred. Maybe it was sex becoming far from a spontaneous and fun thing, among the crushed newspapers on an idle Sunday morning, but a thing of temperatures and charts and windows of opportunity. Whatever it was; several years down the line and Gray found her marriage hostile and brittle and no babies.
They started IVF. It was their undoing. Anticipation sharp as knives set in. A cycle took. They waited. A month passed. He brought home a little white sleepsuit only as big as his hand. They cried. And then, Gray miscarried and their marriage splintered apart, irreparable. Gray ran for home, and the safety and shelter of family. Except that her father's death and her mother's subsequent illness had left it broken, and she found herself using the last resources of her strength to complete the paperwork and procedure of rest homes and funerals.
There was nowhere left to run to, except New York, and Gray bought herself an apartment with the divorce settlement. She took a placement at a law-firm named Featherstone & Heering, the possibility of becoming a partner a not-so distant possibility with her track record. All she had to do was commit, and Gray, without the children and family she so longed for, had everything to give and nothing to keep her from doing so.
Except at this low point, began the dreams. Of a child, not hers but one she loved fiercely; nagging nights where she tossed and turned, and awoke with a dream-memory so strong she dreaded sleeping. Enter Patricia Goldberg with a Compendium, and the information as to whom Gray had once been. To Gray, it was a bitter joke, and she buried the Compendium for a good six months. It was only when her legal career had re-asserted itself completely; when she was buried in work that she examined this phenomenon.
furious with rage and grief
Appearance: Gray is in her mid-thirties. She looks older. Law school, and caring too deeply have worn her face. Her hair is no longer the same reddish of her mother, but coloured into submission in expensive hair salons where the hairdressers are paid enough to keep silent, so she can continue phone calls. She is tall and lithe, with little figure to speak of and dresses most often in severely-cut suits that only accentuate her angles. If she were asked to admire a part of herself, it would be her hands; they are elegant, and slim. Everything about her gives an impression of hardness, of bony lines and sharp angles. Her mouth is large, and the faint press of lines tell you that it is a mouth that has smiled hard and often, even if it is in repose now. Her eyes are cool, but capable of startling, as they fill with laughter, or sympathy. Her beauty is in her smile, and the warmth that it evokes.