fuck, i'm trying.

the story so far.

trigger warnings : mentions of death, infidelity, depression .

oceanside, california: it makes for a pretty portrait to sit on someone's mantle, but not kennedy's. it's not for a lack of trying on the part of her parent's; her mere existence falls upon the ley lines of appearance and complacency. like every sibling before her, she is yet another attempt to try and fix something that was never complete to begin with. kennedy brooke is the result of one last try and this time will be different and maybe this is what we need. she's not, of course. she's barely a month old before her parents are back to living in separate bedrooms, cold to the touch, like abandoned satellites just floating in the gravitational pull of their children that demand they be in the same room. it's an arrangement that doesn't bode well for kennedy, who starves for the family unit that does not exist. she is a sunflower sprouting on a planet that has never known anything but darkness, and it leaves her feeling disproportionately sized for her body from a very young age. she's too loud for her thoughts, too cramped inside four walls, too big for the physical frame she's trapped in. she tries to make her childhood as colorful as she can, but the world around her has felt grey in comparison. her two siblings are her saving grace — they have lived under the lovett roof for years and know what to anticipate, attempt to show her the ropes. kennedy is not the kind for complacency, though, and has to bite her tongue until she tastes blood to hold back. she demands change, something meaningful or just plain different ( because the stifling nature of her family and the way they all seem to tiptoe around the timebomb of their parents' marriage is suffocation ) but there's usually a jaded look accompanied by, "ken, this is just how the world is. you'll see."

she'd see to it that she wouldn't.

kennedy's bright, quick on her feet, easy to bore and hard to satisfy. she moves through her school years like a tornado, a master class in how to be a lovett natural disaster with a charming smile on her face. she's typically ushered in as "one of the boys" with the way she constantly insists on challenging lincoln mattheson on the playground to the eighty-first rematch of their foot race, ribbons in her hair discarded in the dirt and long forgotten as she bikes throughout her neighborhood until it's no longer light out. she fits in well enough with the girls at school, but kennedy's not everyone's cup of tea. boys tend to be more forgiving, because tea's not typically their drink of choice. it works for her. she makes it work, because home is a lost cause. she throws herself into any extracurricular she can think of to keep from sitting around her solitary confinement sentence in bedroom, where the walls talk louder than she does and her siblings are too far out of reach as they mold their own lives, far ahead of her and far away from here. even if she's not good at it — which, she's not good at most of them, but she's having fun and spreading her social butterfly wings — she gives it a chance. surfing, cheerleading, pottery classes, ice skating ( she has short-lived dreams after watching the olympics one year ) painting, lacrosse, dance, even volunteering to read books at the public library on tuesdays for the mommy and me classes. she loves being in the presence of others. she fits in best when she's letting her chameleon's scales reflect those around her. after all, she was born into a world with pleasing others in her blood stream. it's no surprise her entire world revolves around the opinions of others.

she goes through girlfriends in high school like she's wearing the quarterback's number. no one and nothing was ever enough to satisfy her; her attention span was short, her ability to commit a shallow pond. they wanted something real, something serious to take with them to college and kennedy wanted someone so she wouldn't be lonely. she'd say she was in love if it kept someone close. perhaps the only time her need for the approval of others found itself superseded was when it came to the feeling of confinement, a clashing in her chest and a rising panic at the thought of being stuck. her senior year girlfriend, marissa, asks tons of questions about the future and where she's going to school and wouldn't it be wonderful if we roomed together? and the thought of a future so vast with possibility feels cheated somehow when the word 'college' is thrown into the equation. academics aren't for her the same boys aren't for her — no matter how hard she'd try, it wouldn't fit in the box in front of her. something else was meant to go in its place, something else calling like a siren song buried under the waves. kennedy graduates in the middle of the road, breaks up with marissa at a party, and gets in her van the next day to drive up the coast. she winds up in fairford with no plan, but her whole life in her hands and in her control.

being away from her parents is freeing. it's like finally seeing the sun.

life in washington doesn't move at the same pace as it did in california. kennedy juggles things and is driven by the pressure, thriving from the adrenaline rush. there's a certain underlying current of thrill that comes with paying the bills hours before they're due, showing up to work right as her shift starts. it's no surprise that, coupled with a servant's heart, she winds up as an emt shortly after her ninteenth birthday. she's young and doing her coursework while bartending and life is different from one day to the next, which is all she could ask for. what she doesn't ask for is maisy. maisy is one of the few female firefighters in the station kennedy's assigned to once they knight her and send her off into an ambulance, who has a wicked gleam in her eye that puts kennedy on her heels in record time. maisy, who is soft despite every hard exterior and impenetrable wall that makes it impossible for kennedy to not fall in love with her, far from her first girlfriend but by fair the first person that kennedy has ever wanted to shed her skin and be new for. maisy's the person who teaches kennedy about what it means to really be in love. she scares the living shit out of kennedy, and every time that she tries to walk away, maisy reminds her that love is not a prison sentence — love is supposed to be more than a pair of shiny manacles on ring fingers, it's flying instead of falling. maisy is who makes her grow up, makes her the version of herself that she has always hoped she was able to be and makes her happier than anything she's known in her life. they make breakfast together on the mornings they both have off in kennedy's apartment, they adopt a dog and name her bunny, they bitch and fight and worry about each other and go to sleep every night dreaming of the other. kennedy, for the first time in her life, chooses to please herself, doesn't fear being trapped — she goes out, buys a ring for maisy and proposes after two and a half years. they pick a wedding date and taste endless amounts of pie ( because maisy hates cake ) and kennedy even finds a wedding dress that she likes. her life is her own, and it's always daytime.

there's a nasty apartment fire six months into their engagement. kennedy is on the scene for all of two minutes before she is hell on wheels headed for the nearest emergency room. she and her partner make sure the patient gets settled in the emergency room okay before they head back out to the ambulance, ready to return to the scene. dispatch reroutes them to another case, and by the time they finish and are pulling back into the station, the hair on the back of kennedy's neck stands up. no one has returned from the apartment fire, and they haven't been recalled to the scene.

it's not long after that when kennedy gets a call, asking her to come back to the hospital. everything from there is akin to her head being dunked under the water, no real sense of direction or sense itself. all she knows aside from the burning in her own lungs is that the fire was out of control, and maisy went into cardiac arrest. maisy is gone. she is untethered, floating aimlessly in the universe of her grief.

she loses herself in a haze as life forces itself to move forward. it's hard for anyone to coax her out of her grief and it begins to mar her day-to-day, stain the life she's made for herself. without maisy, it's a plunge back into the dark ages, the sunflower wilting. no one comes to pluck her, water her, or put her out of her misery and cut the head off of the stem. she's just left there in the soil, time endlessly stretching on. kennedy nearly gets herself fired a few times, before she has to quit altogether; there's a few weeks lost to her, all blurred together as she tries to tape herself back into a shape that resembles her former self. she begins bartending again, taking advantage of having liquor at her disposal and circling the drain before someone grabs her squarely by the chin and reminds her, ken, this is just how the world is. the world fucking sucks. but it spins on.

pulling herself up by the bootstraps and reminding herself what it's like to run a brush through her hair, kennedy is uneasy in hitting the resume button on her life. she has to, at some point, with the way everyone is tiptoeing around her and offering up horribly shitty sentiments like maisy would want for you to be happy. it's almost her way of lashing out when she attaches herself to katrina: see? she wants to yell out, middle finger her banner proudly hoisted high. i can move on. i can pretend to be happy. the two of them are only together for six months before they're engaged, married before it's been a year. kennedy paints her plastic smile on and dips her toes back into the world of being a fully functional human being, despite feeling like she's dead and rotting from the inside out. she gets a job as an artist at ink city, hoping the owner will take a chance on her and look past the fact she’s holding the tattoo gun to see if she can bring some kind of pain onto herself to feel something again.

and then, there's a spark.

at first, it's nothing, it's just a salve to another fight with katrina and a way to offload the tension that follows them into the office and borders on the edge of unprofessional. as time goes on, kennedy realizes just how long it's been since she's breathed a lungful of air. it's as though the world slowly retuns to focus, kennedy beyond uncomfortable at this halfway point she's found herself building a little life on. she loathes it, and she loathes who she's woken up and found herself becoming, but her hands are bound. true discontent becomes fully realized, and kennedy begins to kick in order to give herself a leg room. she and katrina have never been good, truly, but they deteriorate as time goes on until they’re unofficially officially separated, living on different ends of town and kennedy trying to cover up that black hole of her life with a tiny throw rug in her new apartment. it's the first time in years that kennedy's been willing to take a chance on herself; a little part of her hesitates still, but she's ready to jump the gun. in her rebirth, she has grown restless. she'll engineer her own goddamn light to grow in if she has to.

connections.

brendan nichols: perhaps the only person not blood related to brendan nichols that will give him the time of day, kennedy’s something like his wing woman (and he for her) whenever they go out. they get into shit together, bicker like siblings, but at the end of the day, they’d ride or die for each other.

kyla donovan: stoner buddies.

desired.

roommates. i'll be putting this in as a wanted connection, but i would adore some roommates for kennedy. she's currently separated from her wife and is living on her own yet again downtown, and rent do be expensive! would love at least three more roommates of any gender, and i'm envisioning sort of a bold type / friends dynamic. they're chaotic as fuck, probably a lil' problematic in their own ways whether it's kennedy level or something as simple as forgetting to unload the dishwasher, but they're there for each other through all of the shit.

the middle lovett sibling.

situationship.

friends. i envision kennedy's got friends in high and low places — drinking buddies, bad influences, good influences, new friends, former roommates from her teenage years, best friends, friends she met when she was forced into group therapy / counseling, people that encourage her to take care of herself, the friends who were there for her during all of the maisy shit, someone that kennedy thinks hates her or vice versa but their random acts of kindness towards her are off-putting, kennedy's go - to to call at midnight when she's lonely, anything goes here!