Elianne Backstory for Nautilus AU
Mar. 13th, 2017 03:58 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elianneEli was born on Crescent Isle, which was a pretty name for a group of neighborhoods ruled by gang bosses. The law across the bridge had no jurisdiction on the Isle, and the neighborhoods came to take the names of the crime lords who ruled them. Elianne knew two of them, Nightshade and Barren.
She was born in Nightshade, and raised at first by her mother, a sickly woman named Tara. If her father had stuck around at all, she didn't know, he was no part of her life. When she was about four, Elianne met an older kid named Severn. He helped take care of her as her mother got sicker, and when her mother died when Eli was five, he took her away to the room where he was squatting, and taught her how to survive. How to steal. He tried to teach her to fight. She refused.
Then when she was about ten, in the dead of winter, they found another little girl. Steffi. Elianne insisted that they take Steffi in, because she would die on her own. Severn eventually relented, and Steffi became the little sister Eli had always wanted.
A year later they found another little girl. Jade. Jade was being chased through the streets at night, by a man. But the streets at night in on the Isle were the hunting ground of the dogs of the crimelords. Literal and figurative. Some of the dogs were nearby. They got the man. Eli and Severn got the kid to safety. She became part of the family.
Eli loved the girls. HER girls. She was willing to learn to fight so she could defend them. So they didn't have to. She wanted them to be children, and to be safe.
They were almost happy, for a time, insomuch as anyone living on the Isle could be. Until she was 13. That was when everything changed. One night Severn was gone. Overnight. He wouldn't tell anyone where he went. He had been more and more secretive. The day after, he sent Eli to the shop with some small amount of coins to try and get a small amount of food. When she came back, the room they lived in was painted in blood. Severn was standing over her girls, her dead girls, still holding the knife he used to slit their throats. She fled.
She ran from Nightshade's turf to Barren's. She was found by a woman named Morse. Morse was gruff and asked Elianne what she wanted. Eli, hurt by what Severn did, said that she wanted to learn how to kill a man. That was the best thing to say to Morse, it turned out. Morse didn't coddle or care or love. Morse was hard. She worked directly for Barren, and when she took Eli in, Eli worked for Barren too.
It was six miserable months and Eli tries not to think about what she did as Barren's dog. About the people she killed, the people she didn't kill that died because of her anyway. The things he did to her and made her do. And then one day, he decided to get rid of her. He sent her to kill the chief of police across the bridge. He never expected her to survive, she didn't know that. Not then.
So, she went. Morse told her she was being an idiot, smacked her but good, but ultimately let her go get herself killed. She crossed the bridge and snuck into the tower where the Chief's office was. She snuck in while he was out, and when he returned, she tried to kill him. She was 13. He... was not.
Needless to say, he subdued her easily. But he made her speak, and listened to her. Heart the heartsick pain of a child who was bitter and disgusted because he didn't - to her mind - care about the people living and dieing across the bridge. She didn't tell him everything, but she told him enough. He explained that he and his cops did in fact care, but that as they are made to enforce laws, so much they obey them, and they had no authority on the Isle. He saw her just... give up. He told her about the law, what being an officer meant, and saw her fighting to keep hope from rising. He asked her her name.
She lied. A lie that would become its own truth in time. She took a new name - Kaylin Neya - and shed her old one like a snake shedding its skin. He said that now that she was on his side of the bridge, he could help her, if she wanted help. She did.
He sent her to live with one of the office secretaries while he contacted child protective services. She stayed with Caitlin at first. A sweet woman who was shocked and horrified when Kaylin's first question upon seeing cops carrying in a dead body was "Why did they kill him?" Caitlin was nice and did genuinely care for the child, but it was clear after a day or two that it was unhealthy for her to stay there. Caitlin was very neat and tidy, Kaylin was a walking disaster area. Schedules, habits, manners... nothing matched, nothing fit.
So Kaylin wound up being sent to live with Sergeant Marcus Kassan.
She quickly came to adore him - him and his wives. They were gruff and their affection was rough and physical, but it was clean. They asked nothing of her she didn't want to give, and they always offered
hugs and other physical comfort. They spoke German, natively, so she learned German. It turned out she had an actual gift for languages, and by the end of her first week, she could carry on basic conversations.
Unfortunately for her, Child Protective services finally sent someone to see to her case after her second week with the family. They felt that "for a child of her unfortunate beginnings, a polyamorous home was not suitable." All the adults realized by then that it was better not to explain to Kaylin that what they meant was that they were afraid Marcus was looking at her as a potential wife. He wasn't. She was another daughter. But they took her away anyway. She was sent to the Foundling Halls, an orphanage ran by a rather intense and protective German woman named Marrin.
Marrin, like most of the cops, respected Kaylin's wish to be called Kaylin. CPS and nearly everyone else she met through them called her Elianne or Eli. She's learned to answer to both.
Kaylin spent much of her time at the police station, as her time with Caitlin and Marcus left their marks, as did her first interaction with the chief. She trailed along underfoot of the detectives, befriending several, including Teela and Tain.
So CPS put her with another cop, Clint, and his wife (singular) Setsi. This worked out for a few months until they discovered Setsi was going to have a child of her own. They... could not take care of two children, and she went back to Marrin, even though she still stayed close with Clint. She even learned to speak Hindi while there, because it made him so happy when she tried.
By 14, the chief realized that she was determined to be a detective, and that that wasn't going to change. So he enrolled her in classes through the precinct, since she wasn't staying in any one home long enough for traditional schooling.
He came to regret that. Her reports from her teachers were almost unprecedentedly bad. She managed to learn French, which was good, since all the laws were written in French, and she could read and write it decently. Her English literacy was worse, and that was her native tongue. She could speak it, but reading and writing were... limited. She learned Itallian because many of the cops spoke it. Like most people in the precinct, she learned to curse in every language offered.
And she introduced betting to the office.
She was their mascot. They started letting her tag along on investigations, so long as she touched nothing, and trained her.
She had one teacher, she failed to annoy, and not for lack of trying. Sanabalis was often more patient than he ought to be, and made lessons practical, since practical skills were all she could be bothered to learn. He took her on a lot of field trips and made things more real to her. She still failed, but... she paid more attention to his classes than most. Then again, he was physically imposing and she had seen what he could do in a temper. Which helped.
They had tried her in some homes that weren't cops' homes, like the disaster when they sent her to live with Margot. Margot was a fortune teller. Kaylin hated her at once, and it quickly became mutual.
They had sent her for a while to a woman named Ybelline, and that had gone better, but Ybelline was very much a creature of her community, and while she did everything she could to make Kaylin comfortable there, nothing worked.
She was with Evanton for a whole day before CPS realized they left her with the wrong person, but when they brought her to Evarrim.... Kaylin refused to stay with the pompous, self important, over dressed peacock. When she finished calling him that, he quite agreed that this was a bad fit.
She asked Sanabalis a few times why he couldn't adopt her. He had an adult son, and no other kids, and lived in a nice home. He told her simply, and calmly, "I have learned, from my son, not to live with those I teach. It leads to a temptation to strangle the young in their sleep."
But without telling her he was doing it, Sanabalis spoke to Marrin and they worked together to get her signed up for the school. She's been there now a few months and already is somewhat infamous. She blew up the chem lab her first week. Well, part of it anyway.
She is, according to some "Distressingly bright with a complete lack of focus" and has achieved "Dangerous levels of boredom". Mostly in the chem lab. She views school as a waste of her time as she'd rather be "out there" with the cops, solving crimes and doing things that matter, than learning why a p and a q and a b and a d are not all interchangeable. She cuts class, tries to sneak off campus, and barely pays attention. But when you can get her attention... she is bright, gifted even. Very intelligent. But she "fails to apply herself" and "doesn't live up to her potential". The only classes she does well in are language studies - but not English, she spoke it since she was a kid, so she doesn't see the point - and gym. Of course, the problem with languages, is she will follow the teachers around after class, trying to cajole them into teaching her swear words.
She is almost always hungry, and her stomach decides to comment on that at inopportune moments, usually to her horror or embarrassment. Marrin sends her what she can, but she has all the foundlings to look after, and gets most of the money to do so from charity. Caitlin and some of the others send her care packages of food sometimes, but after Garrity decided to repay her invisible ink in his work pen trick with mac and cheese laced with ghost peppers, she has learned to be wary of those packages.
Sanabalis... she feels like he passed the buck, sending her here, and she's hurt...because she had let herself like him. He could be loud at times, and his family was louder, but... he was one of the few people in her life - Marcus and the chief being the other two - who felt like he could almost be a father or an uncle to her. She's still too young and impulsive to see the wisdom and kindness in his getting her into the school, and sometimes her acting out is her attempt to get the school to give up on her, like he did.
Elantran - English
Leontine - German
Low Barani - Italian
High Barani - French
Aerian - Hindi
She was born in Nightshade, and raised at first by her mother, a sickly woman named Tara. If her father had stuck around at all, she didn't know, he was no part of her life. When she was about four, Elianne met an older kid named Severn. He helped take care of her as her mother got sicker, and when her mother died when Eli was five, he took her away to the room where he was squatting, and taught her how to survive. How to steal. He tried to teach her to fight. She refused.
Then when she was about ten, in the dead of winter, they found another little girl. Steffi. Elianne insisted that they take Steffi in, because she would die on her own. Severn eventually relented, and Steffi became the little sister Eli had always wanted.
A year later they found another little girl. Jade. Jade was being chased through the streets at night, by a man. But the streets at night in on the Isle were the hunting ground of the dogs of the crimelords. Literal and figurative. Some of the dogs were nearby. They got the man. Eli and Severn got the kid to safety. She became part of the family.
Eli loved the girls. HER girls. She was willing to learn to fight so she could defend them. So they didn't have to. She wanted them to be children, and to be safe.
They were almost happy, for a time, insomuch as anyone living on the Isle could be. Until she was 13. That was when everything changed. One night Severn was gone. Overnight. He wouldn't tell anyone where he went. He had been more and more secretive. The day after, he sent Eli to the shop with some small amount of coins to try and get a small amount of food. When she came back, the room they lived in was painted in blood. Severn was standing over her girls, her dead girls, still holding the knife he used to slit their throats. She fled.
She ran from Nightshade's turf to Barren's. She was found by a woman named Morse. Morse was gruff and asked Elianne what she wanted. Eli, hurt by what Severn did, said that she wanted to learn how to kill a man. That was the best thing to say to Morse, it turned out. Morse didn't coddle or care or love. Morse was hard. She worked directly for Barren, and when she took Eli in, Eli worked for Barren too.
It was six miserable months and Eli tries not to think about what she did as Barren's dog. About the people she killed, the people she didn't kill that died because of her anyway. The things he did to her and made her do. And then one day, he decided to get rid of her. He sent her to kill the chief of police across the bridge. He never expected her to survive, she didn't know that. Not then.
So, she went. Morse told her she was being an idiot, smacked her but good, but ultimately let her go get herself killed. She crossed the bridge and snuck into the tower where the Chief's office was. She snuck in while he was out, and when he returned, she tried to kill him. She was 13. He... was not.
Needless to say, he subdued her easily. But he made her speak, and listened to her. Heart the heartsick pain of a child who was bitter and disgusted because he didn't - to her mind - care about the people living and dieing across the bridge. She didn't tell him everything, but she told him enough. He explained that he and his cops did in fact care, but that as they are made to enforce laws, so much they obey them, and they had no authority on the Isle. He saw her just... give up. He told her about the law, what being an officer meant, and saw her fighting to keep hope from rising. He asked her her name.
She lied. A lie that would become its own truth in time. She took a new name - Kaylin Neya - and shed her old one like a snake shedding its skin. He said that now that she was on his side of the bridge, he could help her, if she wanted help. She did.
He sent her to live with one of the office secretaries while he contacted child protective services. She stayed with Caitlin at first. A sweet woman who was shocked and horrified when Kaylin's first question upon seeing cops carrying in a dead body was "Why did they kill him?" Caitlin was nice and did genuinely care for the child, but it was clear after a day or two that it was unhealthy for her to stay there. Caitlin was very neat and tidy, Kaylin was a walking disaster area. Schedules, habits, manners... nothing matched, nothing fit.
So Kaylin wound up being sent to live with Sergeant Marcus Kassan.
She quickly came to adore him - him and his wives. They were gruff and their affection was rough and physical, but it was clean. They asked nothing of her she didn't want to give, and they always offered
hugs and other physical comfort. They spoke German, natively, so she learned German. It turned out she had an actual gift for languages, and by the end of her first week, she could carry on basic conversations.
Unfortunately for her, Child Protective services finally sent someone to see to her case after her second week with the family. They felt that "for a child of her unfortunate beginnings, a polyamorous home was not suitable." All the adults realized by then that it was better not to explain to Kaylin that what they meant was that they were afraid Marcus was looking at her as a potential wife. He wasn't. She was another daughter. But they took her away anyway. She was sent to the Foundling Halls, an orphanage ran by a rather intense and protective German woman named Marrin.
Marrin, like most of the cops, respected Kaylin's wish to be called Kaylin. CPS and nearly everyone else she met through them called her Elianne or Eli. She's learned to answer to both.
Kaylin spent much of her time at the police station, as her time with Caitlin and Marcus left their marks, as did her first interaction with the chief. She trailed along underfoot of the detectives, befriending several, including Teela and Tain.
So CPS put her with another cop, Clint, and his wife (singular) Setsi. This worked out for a few months until they discovered Setsi was going to have a child of her own. They... could not take care of two children, and she went back to Marrin, even though she still stayed close with Clint. She even learned to speak Hindi while there, because it made him so happy when she tried.
By 14, the chief realized that she was determined to be a detective, and that that wasn't going to change. So he enrolled her in classes through the precinct, since she wasn't staying in any one home long enough for traditional schooling.
He came to regret that. Her reports from her teachers were almost unprecedentedly bad. She managed to learn French, which was good, since all the laws were written in French, and she could read and write it decently. Her English literacy was worse, and that was her native tongue. She could speak it, but reading and writing were... limited. She learned Itallian because many of the cops spoke it. Like most people in the precinct, she learned to curse in every language offered.
And she introduced betting to the office.
She was their mascot. They started letting her tag along on investigations, so long as she touched nothing, and trained her.
She had one teacher, she failed to annoy, and not for lack of trying. Sanabalis was often more patient than he ought to be, and made lessons practical, since practical skills were all she could be bothered to learn. He took her on a lot of field trips and made things more real to her. She still failed, but... she paid more attention to his classes than most. Then again, he was physically imposing and she had seen what he could do in a temper. Which helped.
They had tried her in some homes that weren't cops' homes, like the disaster when they sent her to live with Margot. Margot was a fortune teller. Kaylin hated her at once, and it quickly became mutual.
They had sent her for a while to a woman named Ybelline, and that had gone better, but Ybelline was very much a creature of her community, and while she did everything she could to make Kaylin comfortable there, nothing worked.
She was with Evanton for a whole day before CPS realized they left her with the wrong person, but when they brought her to Evarrim.... Kaylin refused to stay with the pompous, self important, over dressed peacock. When she finished calling him that, he quite agreed that this was a bad fit.
She asked Sanabalis a few times why he couldn't adopt her. He had an adult son, and no other kids, and lived in a nice home. He told her simply, and calmly, "I have learned, from my son, not to live with those I teach. It leads to a temptation to strangle the young in their sleep."
But without telling her he was doing it, Sanabalis spoke to Marrin and they worked together to get her signed up for the school. She's been there now a few months and already is somewhat infamous. She blew up the chem lab her first week. Well, part of it anyway.
She is, according to some "Distressingly bright with a complete lack of focus" and has achieved "Dangerous levels of boredom". Mostly in the chem lab. She views school as a waste of her time as she'd rather be "out there" with the cops, solving crimes and doing things that matter, than learning why a p and a q and a b and a d are not all interchangeable. She cuts class, tries to sneak off campus, and barely pays attention. But when you can get her attention... she is bright, gifted even. Very intelligent. But she "fails to apply herself" and "doesn't live up to her potential". The only classes she does well in are language studies - but not English, she spoke it since she was a kid, so she doesn't see the point - and gym. Of course, the problem with languages, is she will follow the teachers around after class, trying to cajole them into teaching her swear words.
She is almost always hungry, and her stomach decides to comment on that at inopportune moments, usually to her horror or embarrassment. Marrin sends her what she can, but she has all the foundlings to look after, and gets most of the money to do so from charity. Caitlin and some of the others send her care packages of food sometimes, but after Garrity decided to repay her invisible ink in his work pen trick with mac and cheese laced with ghost peppers, she has learned to be wary of those packages.
Sanabalis... she feels like he passed the buck, sending her here, and she's hurt...because she had let herself like him. He could be loud at times, and his family was louder, but... he was one of the few people in her life - Marcus and the chief being the other two - who felt like he could almost be a father or an uncle to her. She's still too young and impulsive to see the wisdom and kindness in his getting her into the school, and sometimes her acting out is her attempt to get the school to give up on her, like he did.
Elantran - English
Leontine - German
Low Barani - Italian
High Barani - French
Aerian - Hindi
