personal information
You:
Name: Soujin
Contact: rainbowjehan
Character:
Name: Gaheris
Pantheon: Celtic/Arthurian
Current Alias: Matthew Wilkinson.
Apparent Age: Twenty-eight.
Occupation: Starving artist.
Personality: Shy, nervous, with a tendency to worry, and very weird issues with boundaries. When he’s relaxed, which he doesn’t do very often, he can joke and even snark, but you are not that likely to see this happening. Otherwise he tends to avoid people, although this is not always possible.
He has nightmares constantly, and has never really come to grips with the fact that he killed his mother.
History: Gaheris was always a very nice young man who was not very good at anything. As he grew up, and dealt with the fact that he was living in a family where he was expected to be good at things, he became considerably less able to cope with the world around him, particularly as it pertained to his mother. The only real high points of his early life were his on-again off-again love affairs with the sea and the selkies.
He eventually left home, married a bad-tempered woman whom he loved very deeply, and was actually doing all right, up to the point where he decided he was capable of visiting his mother again. This resulted in his killing her. To this day, he is not sure how or why he did. He was exiled, and while in exile his wife had a daughter, and when he was around them he really gave the impression of being an ordinary, normal husband and father, until you got him alone, or tried to have a more than superficial conversation with him, at which point you were probably going to notice that there was a point behind his eyes that was always moving, like something trapped back there and terrified, and the way he seemed kind of detached from you. He lived like this right up until Lancelot killed him while unarmed.
Except apparently it didn’t take.
In this day and age, Gaheris gets by as an artist, the only thing he's ever had a real talent for; and with nearly two-thousand years to practise, give or take a decade, he's gotten considerably better than average. He draws pictures of things from Arthurian legend, and sells them for less money than he’d like, and as a result he lives in something tolerably like a garret crossed with a cardboard box. He copes with the world in general by telling himself that it will probably go away eventually.
He is missing three fingers, his right pinky and his left middle and index, and his right ring finger is truncated at second joint. These things happen when you don't take care of your frostbite.
It's also fairly important to note that Gaheris has refused to adjust to the twenty-first century. He has a very, very basic understanding of the world he currently lives in, to the point where his last hospital stay was characterised by complete and utter terror on his part because he had no idea what was going on, and spent a lot of time ripping out his IVs because he didn't know what they were for. When you first meet him, you don't really notice this, but if you spend a whole lot of time around him, or try to introduce him to a toaster, you'll notice he's not totally up on what's going on.
PB: Ben Chaplin
Journal: notmyhome
Writing Sample: You sleep, you wake, sometimes you eat, sometimes you work. Gaheris thinks that he remembers that it used to be easier--there was a time when they didn't follow you as closely, when it was simple to fall out of the world and live alone without people demanding things of you, papers to identify you, cards to travel in and out. He remembers (he thinks) living in India, where it was hot like the devil's own hell but you weren't questioned for anything you did.
It's getting harder now. They want to know who you are. They look at you twice if you pay with money instead of plastic squares. They change the dress and the language and expect you to keep up with it--he thinks, a little bitterly, as if all the changes in the world are there to make it harder for him to blend in, to keep low, to slip out of everybody's hands.
God, cars--weren't cars a nightmare? He'd barely mastered carriages. He remembers spending a little time, maybe a hundred years, pretending to be an amnesiac man relying on the kindness of strangers, when old-fashioned German women permitted him to live without electric lights, and he cut wood for them and milked cows, and that was easy--but he had to keep moving, so he couldn't stay.
And the city here is unkind, but at least it gives back some of the namelessness, the facelessness. People don't track you, so they don't remember that you never grow old. They don't trust you, so nobody feels it when you go again. You sleep, you wake, you work, sometimes you get paid. Sometimes you have to leave again.
He wants to go back to the sea, but he doesn't know whether the selkies are there any more, waiting for him, up to their black pebble eyes in waves. Would they still be waiting?
That scares him more than the rest of it. That's the part that makes him sick like to dying. He could save up the money, he could go back to the sea, he could find it empty and dead and everything old gone from it. He could be proven to be alone.
It's better to spend it as it comes in on cheap beer and paper. It would be better to burn it if it came to it. There's nothing worse, there'd be nothing worse. You sleep, you wake, you die, if you're lucky, and if you aren't, you do it again. Don't think, he tells himself. Just do it. You sleep, you wake. You tell yourself that there's still something left, out where you aren't. They're out where he isn't.
God, let it be so.