lobotomite irl

Since most of the drama in Caesar’s life happened when he was a small child, thinking about him as a youth requires more focus on that stage of his life. He was born in a semi-rural part of the ncr (think upper middle class southern “rednecks”) so he had access to pre-war clothing and homemade mimicry of it for most of his life. His mom, like any godfearing country girl, knew a bunch of weird ways to make money on the side, and one of them was selling her blonde hair to local artisans, of which there were many in the Boneyard. When Edward was a little boy, she would allow his delicate, filmy yellow hair to grow during California’s cold season and shave it all off in the spring so she could sell it. His birthday was also in the spring, so part of these caps usually went to new toys and clothes for him. (This trope is often used to communicate great misery and desperation, but Miss Sallow had been doing this all her life and saw it as more of a game, so. Don’t feel too bad for them.) The hair selling carried on until Edward was in the third grade, when he became just aware enough of gendered aesthetics to get pissy about it.

Uhhh, what else. Edward committed family annihilation on a duck and its nest when he was eight (duck broth and pickled eggs, yum.) His mom got really mad at him when he was fourteen after she found an illustration of the Roman Charity exemplum in one of his books, so he started keeping secrets young. He got great grades in some subjects and horrible ones in others. He was less violent with girls than with boys, but still really cruel and possessive and fuckboy coded. “Girls” meaning “female kids,” cus he also moved out for a while after choking his mama out when he was a teen. That was one of those highly unhealthy, highly inappropriate relationships that crop up among suburban aristocracy, fostered between an entitled & anxious single parent in a new community and their aggrieved, privileged, closeted kid.

When he was little, he had trouble sleeping, but when he got older he liked to see how long he could go without it, like a morbidly masochistic game. He’d only stop when he started seeing things. His subconscious is not kind to him, lol.

Once he reached maturity, Edward became adept at developing fixations on women without ever actually knowing them. The only girls he ever “loved” were the ones he could set up to be reliably dishonest with him, through intimidation, manipulation or stalking. Edward treated dating like hunting. He knew it was an important part of entering manhood, but he didn’t know how to relate to women who weren’t older & sexually neutral to him, a blank spot in his perceived intelligence that made him extremely anxious.

As for Joshua, he grew up with a large extended family who oversaw his social life and education. He was taught to look on Non-Canaanites (including other Mormons from different communities) as duplicitous and dangerous, and the pressure to defer to the authority of local elders led to Joshua being adultified and taken advantage of in all sorts of ways. As a young boy, he was singled out as small and weak until he discovered firearms. He latched onto the technical aspect right away, and was just as happy to benefit from being talented in a masculinity ritual. He’s a homebody, fond of crafting and reading to other people, and he always had an interest in stories of violent religious martyrdom. Ironic, I know.

I used to use Frank O’Hara as a fancast for Edward, but the smoothness of his features and his pointy oval chin bring Joshua to mind.

Joshua also came from a one-man-several-wives family, which both decreased his level of safety at home as a result of all the distant relatives in the house and encouraged him to distrust outsiders due to the social oddity of the family lifestyle. Real rock and hard place situation, yeah? Perhaps because of this, Joshua is prone to protracted periods of anxiety paralysis, wherein he boils with fear and rage but does nothing. He’s very used to having no choices, or at least not good ones. He coughs a lot and he knows a lot of weird herbal remedies for it. He makes good coffee and strong tea. He can sleep basically anywhere, even sitting up. (Growing up attending church will do that to you.)