#adkob

*that first idea was more of an urban gangland thing.

At a little over two years old Miklos was neither too small or too tall for his age. He was a solemn but not sullen child, bright but untalkative. He observed everything he saw without offering a word, remembering it all and forming his own private thoughts. Only his mother defied this scrutiny. He only knew he found her very pretty in her dark blue dress with the pale flowers, that her hair was sun yellow, that she told him they had the same eyes. She would forever remain a mystery to him, and, he later on realized, he was as inscrutable to her as she was to him. Miklos enraged and delighted Katarina by turns. Sometimes she would stare at him with a look both abstracted and penetrating, as though he was becoming more and more strange to her by the moment. Other times she would pick him up and dance him around the living room, while the staticky voice of a now-dead singer warbled at them from the small television set or the squat hospital green radio, rocking him in her arms to the swing-time even if a two year and ten months old child was far too big and heavy to be carried. She read to him and invented stories about imaginary boys and girls who lived in countries far away. She caressed his blond head and called him her angel.

I’ve been thinking for a while now that a few years previous to the start of ADKOB, Cross and some other aid workers had been abducted while on a medical mission and held captive for ransom from their various governments.

The part I’m iffy about: I’m currently enamoured by the idea of Cross and some of the captives getting away, and getting involved in a violent cat and mouse, Seinen greatest game type of face off with their captors. Most of them don’t make it, but Cross does (badly dehydrated and with a busted nose lol). Eventually the captive survivors stumble into friendly armed forces in the area, having done away with most of the pursuing captors. Ofc this isn’t very “realistic”, but I like the idea of this secret violence and the fact that the Karnsteins would have paid the ransom/staged some sort of rescue via a mercenary group or their military contacts. (My head canon for the past three or so years is that the Karnsteins are military industrialists. Their family had relocated to the Volga region in Russia in the mid 17th century. IIRC this became a large military industrial area and Russian Germans made up a great number of engineers, scientists etc queue the Socialist era etc etc but basically at some point the Karnsteins moved back West where they still had family. Their grandfather left them no wealth but he did gift them with a significant intellectual legacy). They would have kept the story of the escape out of the news as well. While Cross is a dude of independent means and doesn’t rely on ‘family’ money or influence (family extended, not family as in his mother and father, he inherited their money and property some years ago) they’re going to step in when needed.

So my question is; how does that sound to you lol

My first ideas for this setting were v. ultraviolent and gratuitously sexual. Lately I’ve been wanting to keep some of those ideas but make them a little less extra, one of those ideas being that Cross has been into kink and D/S since he was in university, but is tired of safewords/negotiations/rules/play. That’s a general theme for the character, curiosity, a desire for knowledge, wanting to go beyond the confines of what is socially acceptable in pursuit of something more. Thus the quite unecessary enlistment and years spent as a military doctor, then the medical aid work in high conflict zones, the tattoos, the various small cruelties etc.

So Cross develops a fascination with a person who lives outside of these established rules, on the borders of society, someone who could potentially be fatally dangerous for him . Also probably explains the weirdly prisoner ready cellar lol.

Oh yeah the crackpot idea I mentioned last week: I talked a little about wanting to adapt the Story of Nastagio degli Onesti and I was being super literal. If you don’t know the story it’s basically this; Italian patrician falls for a woman from a family of a much higher social standing than he, she gleefully scorns him, he begins to hate her for refusing him. Heartbroken, he goes to live in the countryside in luxurious gloom and goes on long maudlin walks in the woods. On one of these walks he encounters a knight hunting a naked woman with a pair dogs. The dogs tear the woman apart and the knight kills her before Nastagio can intervene, but the woman simply leaps up from the ground, alive, and dogs pursue her again. Anyway the knight explains that they were being punished; the woman for scorning his affections and he for his suicide over a broken heart (and for his ungoverned lust, unsuitable in a knight, despite the “courtliness” of his love?) and are doomed to repeat the cycle for as many years as the months she refused his suit. Nastagio decides to invite a whole bunch of people, including the girl he desires, to a banquet at the scene of the crime. The hunt frightens the girl into accepting Nastagio’s marriage proposal, the end.

Andrea: (takes his time finishing whatever he’s doing before turning around. Presumably to gather his thoughts. Possibly he’s already prepared for this exchange)

Miklos: Without telling me.

Andrea: It’s a very safe treatment for long term pain management. 

Miklos: But it is an antidepressant.

Andrea: It is a serotonin reuptake inhibitor, yes. The aim was neuropathic not neurological. You weren’t responding to regular painkillers. Out of a score of different medications this was the most safe and effective.

Miklos: (short, incredulous laugh) I guess it was a little stupid on my part to accept something from you without pressing for more information first. You know this is the kind of thing you’re supposed to tell someone before the fact of them taking a pill a day for the last two months.