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paradisamods) wrote2014-02-01 06:11 pm
GAME IMPORTED CHARACTER APPLICATIONS
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cassel sharpe ♛ curse workers ♛ cr au ♛ reserved ♛ 1/?
NAME: Anne
PERSONAL JOURNAL:
EMAIL: tavrosno[at]gmail[dot]com
AIM: No AIM, but
CURRENT CHARACTERS: N/A
CHARACTER
CHARACTER NAME: Cassel Sharpe
SERIES: Curse Workers
CANON POINT: Post-canon - that is, about six months post-Black Heart; he's running away with Lila when some Brennans track him down and shoot him for reneging on the deal he broke, like, a book and a half ago.
LOSS: The suit that Kon made for him to remove the blowback side effects of his work, and the faces of all non-family members he has ever loved, both at home and on the Barge. Voices stay, memories stay, but faces are gone.
cassel sharpe ♛ curse workers ♛ cr au ♛ reserved ♛ 2/?
Cassel Sharpe is a big ol' bundle of issues. He has mommy issues, daddy issues, brother issues, girl issues, but most of all he has trust issues. Cassel's trust issues are so serious that he can't even tell himself the whole truth most of the time and only manages half-truths half of the time. No matter how he paints himself, Cassel is just as much of a pathological liar as his brother, Barron, which makes a lot of sense, given how similar their lives have been.
The environment Cassel grew up in was toxic to say the least. The entire family was and is steeped in violence and organized crime. While Cassel doesn't talk much about his father, it's implied that he was one stone cold mofo and was as much a part of pushing his kids into a life of crime as Shandra was. Of course, Shandra was not only emotionally abusive but literally emotionally manipulative; she had the ability to stick her fingers in her sons' emotions and twist them around, and she used that ability almost constantly. She set out to create three little sociopaths, and three little sociopaths she did create, with unhealthy violent-switching-with-codependent relationships to each other, piles and piles of resentment, and the bone-deep understanding that their survival went hand in hand with the survival of the family, which went hand in hand with being able to be a good criminal, to run a good con. Besides which, when Shandra did emotion work her own emotions shifted violently with the blowback, leading her to physically and verbally abuse her sons on a regular basis. Cassel pays a lot of lip service to being aware of the dysfunctionality and abnormality of his upbringing, especially in White Cat, but while he might logically understand this he doesn't believe it on an emotional level. He can only ever see his family having been the way it was and can't conceptualize a childhood not tainted by curse work and cruelty.
In other words, Cassel was both explicitly trained by his family to be a sociopathic criminal and implicitly encouraged to do so in order to keep himself out of trouble, at least in the insular family context. Being a worker criminal in a worker family was considered the "good, normal" thing to do, and Cassel wanted more than anything to be a powerful, valuable worker. Instead, it seemed like he was a powerless kid, so he had to strive to be a good criminal, at the very least. Even so, he was always on the outside, not only of his family but of the Zacharov family, because he wasn't as useful as his brothers.
This was where his rival relationship with Barron came into play. It was really only a semi-rivalry, because Barron seemed to want to look out for him and care for him as much as Barron could care for anybody. It was Barron who watched scary movies with him on the stairs over Philip and Anton's shoulders even though it was against the rules; it was Barron who learned how to pick locks with him; it was Barron who helped him out of scrapes. It was also Barron who protected him from the fact that he was an assassin - which was a shitty thing to do, but was at least partially motivated by a desire to keep Cassel safe, even from himself. Cassel, though, considers Barron to be his chief rival and even pathologizes him as one of the major forces in the way of him achieving happiness, while on some level wanting desperately to have a normal, brotherly relationship with him. Hence Cassel writing in Barron's fake journals that they had pizza day once a week: he really wants that. He wants to have a normal brother and a normal family. He wants to be normal.
The problem with that is that he's also convinced himself that he can't be normal, not ever. While society has told him since he was small that it's wrong to be a criminal, it's wrong to lie, and it's extra wrong to be a worker, his family has always said the opposite: that you can't survive unless you're a criminal, that you can't survive if you don't lie, and that you're the best to your family if you're a powerful worker. Until he was seventeen years old, Cassel believed he was an outsider in his family because he wasn't a worker and tried to fit into society by acting as normal as he could. Once he finally found out for good that he was a worker, he sank into it with, frankly, a lot of gratitude and resigned himself to being an outsider in society but a valuable member of his own family. However, he was so used to be an outsider in his family and was so betrayed by the way Shandra, Barron, and Philip had kept the truth from him that he couldn't ally himself with his family either, so that in the end he forced himself into paranoid isolation, trusting no one, not even his friends or the girl he said he loved.
His self-perceived dual status as an outsider, in his family and in society, led him to romanticize himself as the anti-hero of his own personal narrative. It's said repeatedly of Philip that "it's not just a weakness but a continued romantic need to believe himself manipulated against his will instead of admitting he wants power and privilege." Add the word belonging to that list and you've got Cassel in a nutshell. The trouble is that, as much as he wants to belong, as much as he wants to trust people, he can't bring himself to. He's pushed himself so tightly into a life of isolation, paranoia, posturing self-sufficiency, and above all lying that every time he takes a step forward, he slides two steps back. He can't bring himself to make himself vulnerable by telling the truth more than a few times in the entire series, even to those people he's closest to. Furthermore, he's so attuned to lies that he can read other people's tells like a book. He comes from the automatic assumption that people are lying to him, so when he catches a tell it just confirms what he already suspected, and he is always attuned to others' tells and vulnerabilities. He assumes that everyone functions on the same dishonest wavelength that he and his family do, so he gets caught off guard when people do manage to convince him they're being truthful. Even when someone does convince him of their honesty, though, Cassel truly doesn't believe there's a single person in the world with his best interests at heart. He also has trouble understanding empathy because he has trouble accessing his own, so it's almost impossible for him to put himself in another person's shoes and feel the pain they're feeling.
Cassel is pathologically attached to his own behavior patterns, and especially doesn't want to relinquish the thrill of the con. For example, he dismisses aloud Mina's desire to go after "the big con" while subconsciously agreeing with her 100%. Lying and fooling people, hoisting them on their own petard, is as much a thrill to Cassel as it is to Shandra and Barron; he's just less honest about that fact. He talks a big game about wanting to be normal, and he does want to be perceived as normal, but if normality comes at the price of running cons, he's going to find a sly way to sabotage himself. To him, the con is a way to do his family proud, prove his intelligence, and prove his value, and he's unable or unwilling to come up with a creative substitute for that that would allow him to live a civilian life.
Not that it would have worked anyway; is attempt to be normal at Wallingford was a colossal failure because Cassel is not as smooth an operator as he thinks he is. People are constantly remarking on how dangerous Cassel has always seemed, how they were afraid to set him off; his roommate Sam compared him to a tiger pretending to be a housecat at one point, something dangerous trying to wrap itself in an unconvincingly innocent skin. His family can read him even more easily, because he's never seemed normal to them and never tried to seem normal around them. He clings to a world where "worker kids have to play cops or robbers" underneath his attempt at normalcy, and that's what ultimately undermines it. People can tell he doesn't 100% buy into his act, so they don't either.
Cassel's also a coward, which is a true Sharpe family trait. Because they're workers, they as a family have never had to own up to anything or face up to any consequences, Shandra and Barron being the best example of this. Cassel talks to talk about guilt and owning up to his mistakes, but when push comes to shove he runs from the consequences every time, most notably at the end of Black Heart, when he literally runs away from all of his problems and into Lila's arms. Instead of facing up to his mistakes and his flaws, he oversimplifies the world into a false paradigm of good and bad. When he does bad things, he dismisses it and says that he's an irredeemable "bad guy" instead of facing up to the fact that he's basically a dick and working on his own malfunctions.
Cassel's biggest hang-up is on Lila Zacharov. He claims to have been in love with her since they were thirteen, but let's think about this logically for a second. Cassel knew Lila for a few months when they were thirteen. He probably did have a crush on her, maybe something more, but she was always an unattainable ideal to him, the spoiled, haughty princess of the mob family that Cassel's family worked for. She would never be his, not really, and that seems to have been part of the appeal. Then he thought he murdered her and pined after her for three years, even fantasizing about her when he thought she was dead. By the time Lila - the real Lila, not the idealized Lila or the dead Lila or the Lila as Cassel had preserved her - came back, she was an entirely different person than she was at 13, but Cassel was still in love with Lila-the-13-year-old. This Lila was vengeful, even crueller than before, and frankly a little insane from being locked in a cage as a cat for three years. Hell, she had tried to kill him. But Cassel never allows himself to acknowledge that she's not the girl he used to love. Instead he chooses to interpret her actions in a way that will allow him to romanticize her and preserve that idealized tragic love affair that he's so intent on. Her feelings hardly come into play for the majority of their interactions. Even when she's been worked by Shandra, the tragedy is his tragedy and not hers; he's been robbed of his true love, he's the one in danger of doing something bad rather than her being in danger of him doing something bad to her, and when he's had enough of "resisting" her he labels her as an irresistable femme fatale and very nearly rapes her under the influence of his mother's emotion work. But it doesn't matter, because she's dangerous, seductive Lila and therefore he doesn't have to take responsibility for his own actions.
The bottom line is that Cassel is a danger to Lila just as much as she's a danger to him. He goes so far as labeling her his "death instinct;" he wants her because she's exhilarating and at least used to be a door to the criminal underworld he wanted to be a part of. He built her up to superhuman perfection in his head and convinced himself (probably accurately) that he could never have her. Instead he possesses her in other ways, by rewriting her in his head to be the femme fatale for his narrative anti-hero. And by stalking her. Can't forget that one.
Beyond all this, though, Cassel is in a lot of ways a typical teenager: broody, mopey, moody, and overly dramatic. He's blatantly cruel, sardonic, and vindictive, especially when frightened or threatened as a means of self-defense. He uses taunts and sarcasm as coping mechanisms for negative feelings, especially fear, and also as a means of relating to his peers. Finally, Cassel is angry, every minute of every day. His feelings of persecution, justified as they may have been in the beginning, are off-the-charts paranoid by now. He thinks everyone is out to wrong him, and he is royally pissed about it 25/8.
cassel sharpe ♛ curse workers ♛ cr au ♛ reserved ♛ 3/4
Note: In the game I am taking him from, Cassel had a suit that he made, a replication of his warden's, that mitigated the effects of blowback. As mentioned in the LOSS section, that is going to be part of his loss; he will experience the full effects of blowback if he chooses to use his work.
PREVIOUS GAME HISTORY: Canon history.
First, a brief note on the set-up of The Last Voyages. Essentially, it is a place where quote-unquote damned souls are taken after death to redeem themselves, guided in their journey by the allegedly pure. Or at least purer. Or at least a little less fucked up. It is a large ship floating through space and occasionally crashing into really terrible places because the faceless Admiral appears to be unable to drive.
This is where Cassel found himself after death. Naturally, he was unimpressed by this premise to start with and began to make alliances with people he felt a natural kinship with, while scheming to get back home as soon as possible. His most prominent relationships were with Barron Sharpe, his brother; Chris D'Amico, his best friend and later boyfriend; Zane, an assassin and later his adoptive brother; and of course Kon-El, his Admiral-assigned warden and guide to being a less shitty person.
His initial approach to the Barge was to take nothing seriously, cause as much trouble as possible, and be unaffected by anything. This proved difficult in close proximity to Barron, whom Cassel had always pitted himself against. It also became more and more difficult to keep himself emotionally distanced from the other passengers of the Barge, especially after being stabbed to death by a tiny serial killer he'd been trying to con. His first real step towards emotional connection came when he confessed several of his impulsive lies to Chris and told him about Lila.
Shortly after this, several major exciting crises occurred on board, culminating in a ship-wide takeover by one of the wardens and Barron jumping overboard with his warden in the hopes of making his way back home, somehow, using mysterious logic. Cassel flipped out and attacked several people, but later used to aftermath of this experience to open up to a few people, warily but more or less without lying. After that, they found Barron and his warden on a medieval world riding a dragon. It was actually kind of cool.
After bucking Kon's authority repeatedly and getting banned from the bar for drinking without supervision and being smacked in the face with the revelation that he is actually worth more than just his work and doesn't need to put himself through excruciating pain in order to be a "useful" person (thank you Chris), Cassel decided to get into other trouble other ways. He approached Zane, the isolated new arrival, and decided to channel his own latent masochism and Zane's frustration and aggression into giving him permission to beat him bloody. Which he did. Then Cassel broke a bunch of rules by giving him metal to use his powers with, then Zane freaked out because Cassel was getting close to him, then they both had too many emotions to deal with.
All of which pushed Cassel to coax an alcoholic character off the wagon for no reason other than that he could, and nobody can make him be a good person for anything, so there. After this, he was locked up for a week and had a number of breakthroughs about the fact that apparently even that can't push people away for good, so maybe they weren't lying this whole time after all. It was only after this point that he truly began to uncover his old traumatic memories that had been subsumed by Barron, with the help of a telepath, and started to heal.
Another series of clever life choices began with Cassel antagonizing Harvey Dent, then getting beaten to pieces so that Harvey could get back at Chris. However, this was actually a pretty significant moment of growth for Cassel, because he was able to hold his own without antagonizing Harvey further at the time and was able to stay away from him in the future without seeking revenge. It was shortly after this that he graduated and decided to stay on board the Barge as a warden. I will be taking him from the end of this past October, after he was transported to a mirror version of the Barge and shown the worst possible version of himself, an assassin and sadistic torturer.
So in sum, Cassel has changed hugely in his more-than-a-year on the Barge. He is more open with his emotions and makes a concerted effort to be overhonest rather than catching himself up in a web of compulsive lies. He has some, although admittedly not comprehensive, understanding of his own trauma, and has come to an understanding that many of his previous relationships before the Barge were based on lies and self-delusion. His greatest personal change in that respect is that he now has the understanding that his obsessive love for Lila was just that: obsessive, unhealthy, based on an old vision of who she was when she was thirteen, and with no real focus on her needs and her wants. He has made new relationships, some of them healthy, some of them just as obsessive, but he is at least trying to start from a solid place - most of the time. Unless he feels like backsliding a little bit back day.
Which is also sort of the point. He's better, but he'll never be "good"; he's a stronger person, but he'll never leave his trauma behind; he knows himself better, but he's still a seventeen-year-old boy with a dark past and an unknown future. And he's still scared of a whole lot of shit. Where he goes from here is up in the air.
cassel sharpe ♛ curse workers ♛ cr au ♛ reserved ♛ 4/4
It feels like there's a hole in his head.
This time it's so much clumsier than when Barron did it. When his brother did it, Cassel never even knew.
He takes a few moments to let the sick satisfaction of his brother's superiority sink into his stomach, then brushes that away. Thinking about Barron won't help now. Thinking about how Barron would probably laugh at him won't, and thinking about how he'd inevitably come up with a plan for what to do now won't help at all.
All Cassel wants to do is think about pizza night, and all the stupid talks they had on the Barge, dancing around each other like either of them really knew how to be a good brother at all.
He vigorously scrubs at the corners of his eyes. He is not gonna fucking cry. This isn't the time or the place. He's got - he has shit to do. Like find out where it ends, and when the ship is coming back. Call Chris. Can he call Chris?
I want to go home, he thinks pathetically, and his heart sinks when he realizes that home means the Barge. It sinks a little bit every time. His mom would be so disappointed.
Sighing, he runs his hands through his hair, pushing it into some semblance of order. His gloves have little spots of product on them; he smooths his hair out some more and then wipes his hands on the bedspread, a petty little gesture of dismissal. This place isn't his. He won't own it.
Instead, he stands straight and tall, cracking his back before slouching. A smirk grows on his face like it was planted there.
Ready or not, he thinks: here I come.
FIRST-PERSON JOURNAL SAMPLE: try (cw: self-injury) these & this | NB: these are from a couple of months before his graduation, the day of his graduation, and a couple of months after. I chose the ones I did because I feel like they represent the erratic nature of his emotional state and presentation, but if you would like a further sample I'm happy to provide it!
INTENT: Cassel's experiences on the Barge have led him to try to take his life in a new direction. Rather than being a deluded, vicious, self-destructive asshole with serious codependency issues and a massive amount of self-loathing, he's only mildly deluded, normally not vicious, rarely self-destructive, and standard teenaged levels of codependent and self-loathing! In other words: he's made a start, but he's not Young Adult of the Year or anything, and he would not be voted Most Likely To Succeed in any graduating class, like, anywhere.
So he's trying. What I want to do with him in the context of Paradisa is push him to try outside of the counterintuitively stable environment of the Barge, where he is a known and relatively safe quantity. I really want to push him outside of his comfort zone and see how well he adapts, and I think this would be a great place to do that.
Cassel Sharpe | APPROVED
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Cassel Sharpe | APPROVED