OC October: Day 13 - Julien
Oct. 13th, 2015 08:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kittydesadeDay 13: Julien
JULIEN. Holy shit, was I going to talk about Julien today? This'll be fun.
Julien is one of my oldest characters who's still going. I mean, there are older characters, but none I've written off and on quite so consistently over the years. Julien is a musician, and half Sluagh half Leanan Sidhe, which accounts for his pale skin, eyes, and white hair, his inability to tolerate bright light (he wears sunglasses pretty much all the time) and despite all this, his fine features and tendency for humans at least to consider him beautiful and charismatic rather than freaky looking. If he didn't have the Leanan Sidhe side, going by his mother, his limbs would be too long and disproportionate, and too bony, his eyes would be more turquoise than pale matching the rest, and he would blister in the sun.
Julien's parents defied fae custom if not actual law (they consider themselves above such racial prejudices) by marrying and also pissed off at least a couple of people who wanted access to Julien's father's lands and considered themselves easily marriagable to a Leanan Sidhe princeling. They had him, they raised him in their world until he was of a comparable age to go to a human high school and then they put him into a human high school (he was about fifty or so) to have him learn about the human world. He enrolled in a human college, where he fit in fairly well and met Jackie Street. They were in a ballet class together, and a few other classes, and they began hanging out and he found a spirit in her that he could respond to, that he felt comfortable around the way he didn't feel necessarily around other humans, or even other people. They talked for hours, they sat around the lounges and while she tried to study, and he made some gestures in the direction of studying, they discussed each other and learned about each other. He never made any secret of the fact that he was fae or what type he was. She didn't know about the various prejudices but something about the way he said it made her ask, so they spent several nights talking about race relations among humans and fae, and it was the first serious conversation they had. He learned some about her own family, and she learned a lot about his and he discovered that not only did he feel comfortable talking to her about sensitive fae and family things, he found words for ways he felt and ways the rest of the fae treated his family in the way humans talked about such things, because the fae didn't. Or not around him at least.
At some point during college, more specifically during a summer break when he had gone back home, he found that this greater confidence and ease he had learned in the human world translated into attractiveness in the fae world. At least enough to seduce a young fae woman who had a somewhat more enlightened view of interbreeding and the Sluagh and so-on. They, too, were able to talk, although as the summer went on they found less and less to talk about (a thing that had not happened with Jackie although he didn't realize this until years later) and ended up having more and more intimate relations. Eventually he went back to the human world, and she tried to come to terms with that summer and what had happened, proving that magical summer bliss traps don't only happen to humans.
After college he went and managed to talk another fae his age into helping him start a club. A night club, somewhere he and his talented friends could show off, it basically started out as a vanity project so he would have somewhere to play music and turned into an evening entertainment shelter for many of his friends. He discovered a wider sense of people who were half-breeds or misfits or didn't belong in some way or another, and how they could all fit in together in their uniqueness or individuality or simply their being alienated from the people who were supposed to be their friends or family. So he kept up the club and made it safe, hired other people who knew what it was like to be on the outside of society to make it safe. And he and Jackie started a band.
Things went surprisingly well for a while until unrest started. Humans First started coming by, they started attacking his friends, and predictably, Julien retaliated. Unpredictably, this coincided with the return of his daughter into his life. Although her mother had (allegedly? I'm still working on this one) died in a car accident, not being used to the human world, her grandparents were seeking for termination of Julien's custody rights both in the human world, where he did maintain a legal identity and citizenship, and in the fae world. And to tell more would be spoilers, I think.
JULIEN. Holy shit, was I going to talk about Julien today? This'll be fun.
Julien is one of my oldest characters who's still going. I mean, there are older characters, but none I've written off and on quite so consistently over the years. Julien is a musician, and half Sluagh half Leanan Sidhe, which accounts for his pale skin, eyes, and white hair, his inability to tolerate bright light (he wears sunglasses pretty much all the time) and despite all this, his fine features and tendency for humans at least to consider him beautiful and charismatic rather than freaky looking. If he didn't have the Leanan Sidhe side, going by his mother, his limbs would be too long and disproportionate, and too bony, his eyes would be more turquoise than pale matching the rest, and he would blister in the sun.
Julien's parents defied fae custom if not actual law (they consider themselves above such racial prejudices) by marrying and also pissed off at least a couple of people who wanted access to Julien's father's lands and considered themselves easily marriagable to a Leanan Sidhe princeling. They had him, they raised him in their world until he was of a comparable age to go to a human high school and then they put him into a human high school (he was about fifty or so) to have him learn about the human world. He enrolled in a human college, where he fit in fairly well and met Jackie Street. They were in a ballet class together, and a few other classes, and they began hanging out and he found a spirit in her that he could respond to, that he felt comfortable around the way he didn't feel necessarily around other humans, or even other people. They talked for hours, they sat around the lounges and while she tried to study, and he made some gestures in the direction of studying, they discussed each other and learned about each other. He never made any secret of the fact that he was fae or what type he was. She didn't know about the various prejudices but something about the way he said it made her ask, so they spent several nights talking about race relations among humans and fae, and it was the first serious conversation they had. He learned some about her own family, and she learned a lot about his and he discovered that not only did he feel comfortable talking to her about sensitive fae and family things, he found words for ways he felt and ways the rest of the fae treated his family in the way humans talked about such things, because the fae didn't. Or not around him at least.
At some point during college, more specifically during a summer break when he had gone back home, he found that this greater confidence and ease he had learned in the human world translated into attractiveness in the fae world. At least enough to seduce a young fae woman who had a somewhat more enlightened view of interbreeding and the Sluagh and so-on. They, too, were able to talk, although as the summer went on they found less and less to talk about (a thing that had not happened with Jackie although he didn't realize this until years later) and ended up having more and more intimate relations. Eventually he went back to the human world, and she tried to come to terms with that summer and what had happened, proving that magical summer bliss traps don't only happen to humans.
After college he went and managed to talk another fae his age into helping him start a club. A night club, somewhere he and his talented friends could show off, it basically started out as a vanity project so he would have somewhere to play music and turned into an evening entertainment shelter for many of his friends. He discovered a wider sense of people who were half-breeds or misfits or didn't belong in some way or another, and how they could all fit in together in their uniqueness or individuality or simply their being alienated from the people who were supposed to be their friends or family. So he kept up the club and made it safe, hired other people who knew what it was like to be on the outside of society to make it safe. And he and Jackie started a band.
Things went surprisingly well for a while until unrest started. Humans First started coming by, they started attacking his friends, and predictably, Julien retaliated. Unpredictably, this coincided with the return of his daughter into his life. Although her mother had (allegedly? I'm still working on this one) died in a car accident, not being used to the human world, her grandparents were seeking for termination of Julien's custody rights both in the human world, where he did maintain a legal identity and citizenship, and in the fae world. And to tell more would be spoilers, I think.