#ferocioushonesty

1. How does your character think of their father? What do they hate and love about him? What influence - literal or imagined - did the father have?

        First off, Blackwell doesn’t see anyone in his life as his father. There’s Augustus, his mother’s husband, who was probably the most present in his life, but wasn’t his father biologically and made it exceedingly clear he didn’t want to be his father socially. There’s Eoin, his biological father, whom he never met. And there’s Cathair, the gardener on his mother’s estate, who was probably the closest he had to an actual father figure, but… still not all that close, tbh.

        Augustus was entitled and insecure, a son of old English nobility reduced to marrying the noveau riche for money. He kind of hated the child’s existence. The child was a product of an extramarital affair; Augustus couldn’t look at him without seeing evidence of his wife’s infidelity and his own emasculation. He was all in favor of offloading the child elsewhere- they had three sons already, they didn’t need anyone else’s brat- but his wife Florence held the financial power in their relationship, and if she wanted the child raised as part of their family, Augustus had no way to refuse.He coped poorly, including projecting a lot of his rage and disgust onto the child.

        Publicly, of course, the child was Augustus and Florence’s own. The family knew of Florence’s infidelity, as did certain of their staff, but that secret wasn’t supposed to spread. The child looked more like his mother than either of his alleged fathers, so he didn’t seem out of place among the family, but Augustus worried that something about the child would give him away, so he wasn’t often brought with when the family went out in public. This was a matter of uneasy compromise between Augustus and Florence.

        When the child first started asserting his own gender, Augustus was… violently opposed. It took Florence’s interference to establish safety for the child, and even then Augustus only tolerated the child in the absolute worst sense of the word “tolerate.” If he couldn’t do anything about the child, he figured grudgingly, he might as well keep someone else’s bastard son as someone else’s bastard daughter.

        As soon as Florence died, Augustus found a way to get the child out of his sight. Florence’s will provided for the child’s schooling at a well-renowned boys’ school in England; what mattered to Augustus was that he would be gone. He sent the child away under another name, and gave him no reason to return.

        Blackwell doesn’t see Augustus as having had a significant impact on him or his life, but really- Augustus taught Blackwell to expect no compassion and no understanding. He taught him spite and stubbornness and survival, and to seek security wherever and however he could find it. He taught him how quickly things could be taken away.

        Eoin, as previously mentioned, was never part of the child’s life. Everything the child knew about him was secondhand: that he was a local (read: Irish), that he was a tailor, that he was a drunkard, that he left town six months before the child was born, that there must have been something wrong with him and that that must be why the child walked with a limp from his very first steps. Even then, the child held doubt on most of what he heard.

        And then there was Cathair, the gardener. Cathair taught the child the names of flowers and how to coax them into beauty. He taught him superstition and safety; he taught him which plants were safe to eat and how. He taught him Gaelige in stories and jokes and songs, even if the others would rip it back out of the child’s mouth. Cathair was the one who pulled the child out of the half-frozen pond when he nearly drowned one March. Cathair was the only one to show him kindness for kindness’s own sake.

        The child was attached to Cathair, of course. He tailed the gardener as he made his way through the grounds, listened to everything he said. They were far closer than Augustus and the child had ever been. Still, Cathair wasn’t exactly a substitute father. Close, but Cathair wasn’t available or reliable in the way a child requires. Which isn’t Cathair’s fault- it was never his responsibility to adopt or even care about his terrible boss’s creepy kid. The fact that he chose to show the kindness and care that he did, even if he couldn’t step in as an actual parental figure, did make a significant impact on Blackwell as a child, and on the person he would become.

2. Their mother? How do they think of her? What do they hate? Love? What influence - literal or imagined - did the mother have? 

        Florence was… very smart, and very driven, and very strong-willed. She was also petty and self-centered and often lacking in compassion.

        She cherished her fourth child as a symbol of her autonomy. She felt trapped in a loveless marriage, living a life that wasn’t entirely within her control. Her affair with Eoin was a rebellion against those trapped feelings, a way to prove to herself that she could break the rules that bound her. Her decision to tell Augustus about the affair came from the same impulse to prove he had no control of her, as did her decision to keep the child.

        She was the child’s first and strongest supporter when he began to assert his own gender. That, for her, was another power play. She knew how Augustus hated the child; defending and supporting the child was more about her showing her defiance of Augustus than it was about any actual affection or care for the child. 

        Of course, Blackwell was young when he knew his mother. A lot of the nuances of her motivations escaped him. He was always sharp, though, and he could read a situation well enough to know not to expect certain things from her: she wasn’t warm, she wasn’t particularly attentive, she wasn’t very interested in anything he had to say to her unless she could find a way to use it towards her own goals. But she was still the closest thing he had to a figure of safety. She defended him from Augustus’s wrath. She allowed him to grow up as himself. Whatever her motivations, she was a vital supportive presence in Blackwell’s early life.

        And then again, she was also the first of many relationships in his life to use caretaking as an excuse for controlling behavior. The fourth child was forbidden from many of the freedoms that his older half-brothers were allowed to enjoy (including such things as being able to leave the manor grounds), with his “delicate constitution” always being cited as the reason. (“Delicate constitution” can mean many things. Here, it is being used to mean you’re trans and disabled and we have no idea what to do with that.) To be fair, there may have been valid concerns about the child’s health- but no one ever brought up his health except to use it to prevent him from doing something. The real reason he was kept so cloistered was a compromise with Augustus. Florence had to give some ground, and that ended up being that the child’s existence was mainly hidden from the larger world.

        Florence taught Blackwell the importance of having allies stronger than he was. He learned that it wasn’t important whether or not someone loved him- what mattered was whether or not they were willing to defend him. She also taught him that any perceived vulnerability could and would be used against him, even by those who nominally stood on his side.