:: where hope is currency ::

Honesty. I'm supposed to be honest in this, and there isn't any way this would fall to hands that I wouldn't want having it, so here we are. Honest.

I have no family. I have not had a family for a very long time. If you want to be technical about it, I have a mother in the south part of London, a father as well. No siblings, and I'm quite sure my parents didn't even want the child they ended up with (for you slow studies, that would be me). No point to having more, certainly.

They believe that I am dead.

I can never contact them. Never speak to or of them. I left the comfort of telegraphs and letters home at twenty-six, penance paid for becoming a reconnaissance agent. I had to be invisible - I had to be dead. And so, dead is what I became.

I am a scavenger; I take my names from the dead as a magpie takes bits of Easter straw or a ring carelessly left on a windowsill. I wonder, sometimes, what my parents would think of me if they knew. I wonder what Malcolm Fletcher's parents would think, knowing that their son was no longer their son, that a stranger had taken his name.

I wonder if Nicholas Deacon has ever existed at all, apart from in my own mind, and what does it mean that he is so utterly separate from Samuel Price?

Nicholas Deacon - Sir Nicholas Deacon, nice bit of flash they put there - has a brother in London, two sisters not far from there. Parents are dead, that's handy. None of them are real. Nicholas Deacon is a lie I tell from day to day, an appropriated personality, a man who is somewhat like me and then again nothing at all the same, down to appropriated handwriting, appropriated left-handedness, appropriated speech patterns.

I have so many questions, and none can answer them but myself. But if I never know the answers, what does that say about me? What does it mean to have family that isn't family? To bear the name of someone's dead son? To be a man invented?

Dead is what I've become. In so many ways.


[[ signed, "Samuel Price", but the signature is scratched out, a loopy, affected handwriting proclaiming "Nicholas Deacon" added to the end like an afterthought ]]

Home? Where is home - that's a good question, really.

A very good question.

Home, right now, is a cramped flat off the street and two buildings down from a tiny cafe that's nearly as cramped as the flat. It's got room enough for a kitchen that only one person could ever cook in, a bed and a table and even a pair of chairs, but try pulling much else into it and you start forgetting how to breathe.

The walls are sort of yellow. I'm sure they were white, once, but they're not anymore and they never will be again, judging by how long it looks like those stains have been there. The carpet's a bit fresher, but I can't really tell what color it was originally intended to be. Presumably "this happened to be on sale at the time". That's a color, isn't it?

Harriet makes it home, I suppose. I never had any intention of thinking of this as home. My home is my (equally cramped) flat in London. But then I had to go and pick up a kitten off the street, and now it's "home," because it's where she comes running at me the second I open the door, mewling like someone's stepped on her tail and begging for food.

I guess that home is not so much where one's heart is, but where one's pets are.

I've had a lot of houses, and a lot more flats, but not many homes.

It was home in London when I was a child, full of table-legs peeked out from behind and closets hid in. Home was, for a time, the barracks I shared with other soldiers. For a while it was with Miranda, that lovely understanding woman who knew who I wasn't and didn't care.

Now it's a cramped flat in Paris in the middle of a Nazi occupation, because of a cat.

I am possibly the strangest person in the universe, but at least I know it.

Nicholas Deacon is an alias, but who the hell is the man?

Bit of OOC information, assorted facts and whatnot. Have fun with this. I'll add to it as I think of it - right now it's just a repository for character ponderings and a place to keep my facts straight.


( On His Character in General, and its Quality )


( On the Life and Facts of the Alias Nicholas Deacon )


( On the Life and Facts of the Alias Malcolm Fletcher )


( On the Life, Disappearance, Facts, and Finding of Samuel Price )