CIVILIAN . KING, LUCIUS

Lucius King

Eccentric. Audacious. Devious.

MISTER King. Lucy. Take your pick.

Twenty-Seven

January 27, 1985

Manly

Bisexual

Civilian

He is an academic research fellow at the UCLA, a political science theorist who enjoys dabbling a little in finance and economics. During his spare hours, he doubles as an inventor and creator of kink toys, selling his wares through a mailing service under his brother's someone else's name.

Personality

The world is turned by greed and by envy, and the amount of wiles and intelligence and gambits it takes to stand at the top is rarely worth the effort. Most men are content with mediocrity. Lucius f***ing King is not. I am good at this, he thinks, and throws himself into his work with flagrant abandon, devouring books and pamphlets and ideas and literature at breakneck pace, and every idea presented is considered, debated, mulled over with microscopic intensity, until it has proven its worth and is found acceptable or is otherwise discarded. He is good at this, at breaking the world and its people down into a series of equations with variables and probabilities, at dissembling reality until it can be compartmentalized, understood, analyzed, and then rebuilt with numbers to be estimated and solved and predicted. Life is so much easier when the rest of humanity is predictable, and Mister King is quite happy to do whatever it takes to make it happen.

It’s the hormones in the family, he thinks, that’s got me barking mad. Rationality is his brand of insanity, and he has creativity enough to make logic sing.

On Saturday mornings, he hums odd little English ditties while plotting all the ways to unify—take over—a world and make the world like it. (Lucy harbors a distaste for the word politics.) He is on his sixteenth, and there are fifteen other papers hidden in the drawer under his bed, all no shorter than a hundred pages, with notes and footnotes and and an extensive collection of research backing each argument. Some of the methodologies outlined are really quite callous, and some are outright cruel. When his pet of a conscience warbles at him with bleary eyes, he coos at it softly and ignores its tears. He has no big vendetta against humanity, prefers to treat mankind with a politely mild hostility, but sometimes he cannot help but think Hobbs has one thing right: life is nasty, brutish, and short. Half-cruel social contracts are but one way to get around human nature. Lucius King is not the type of man to let a trivial thing like a conscience or morality mope away his insatiable enthusiasm for ideas, for newness, for the different, and he does want to make a difference in the world.

On Sunday evenings, he sweeps his desk clean of papers and locks his door, leaving reality for the gambling den. He indulges in neither smoke nor drinks, but games are his greatest vice. Mind games, especially. A perpetual smile coupled with a flair for the melodramatic, with social conventions and restraints left at the door, he has little trouble gathering like-minded fellows into his hidey hole. Few things beat the superbly fun dance of blatant liars, especially one around a poker table, and there is often more than one card up his sleeve—and sometimes literally so. He cheats at many things, and admits to being a blatant, habitual liar, and sometimes not so blatant. Winning, he thinks, is everything. It is an insult to his rather sizable intelligence to not win. But when he loses, he pays his debts. It is a personal policy to repay all debts, tit for tat, in all the forms debts are garnered, including the ones owed to him. In-existence is not excuse enough to run from one’s dues.

History

Augustus Williams-King showed her son one thing before she left home for good: this was a heart and this was a stone, and it was a difference all boys should know.


Some men had stones for a heart, and Engel King just happened to be one of them.

Engel King was a bright young trader destined for leadership, attracting all the right attention at the bank. Augustus Williams was a high school beauty queen of only eighteen. He married a girl for a lark; his vows were taken with the fleeting enthusiasm of a half grown pup, and dreamed of a future with a wife with no face. She married a man because her father said so, took her vows gingerly in a choked voice, and mourned the bygone days of suitors and dances and roses and love. They were friends of acquaintances of friends, pushed together by convenience and family and society and need.

The newlywed couple lived as untrained tightrope artists did, clumsy feet tiptoeing on spider-silk threads, balancing the tension of his needs and her needs and their families’ needs besides. He tended to stay away all day. She tended to leave at night. Long stretches of silence permeated the little apartment where they slept. They were husband and wife in name only, had consummated once in eleven years, and even a child could not bring them together.

Lucius King was born nine months after the exchange of vows, an unplanned annoyance that Augustus never bothered to be rid of. When the boy was born, the arctic chasm between the couple already ran six thousand miles deep. She was alone in the hospital that day. The man was busy at work.

Lucius, she whispered to nobody when the pain between her legs finally ebbed away. Lucius, after her grandfather. The crazy one.


Lucius grew up with one thought chasing its tail in the backburner of his mind—my family would soon break apart. The signs were clear. Other children had parents who screamed and argued and battled and aggressed. He had parents who were cold as Siberian nights, who treated each other with all the civility of passerby strangers, who treated him like a stranger.

Engel King and Augustus Williams were inexperienced parents, but they treated the boy well enough. They fed him. They clothed him. They bought him toys and sent him to school. They touched the boy only when the boy asked, but he almost never asked. There was one truly heartfelt smile and pat on the back in nine years because a third grade teacher requested the boy be moved up a grade. On most days, the couple treated him like someone else’s son. Lucy did not mind.

So he grew, and he grew to be an odd child, rarely crying, fiercely solitary, and always listening to something nobody could hear. Fantasy was his refuge. Stories painted his universe. There were dragons in the backyard and demons at the breakfast table, and those always had interesting stories untold. Augustus sometimes wondered if the other children could sense there was something off with her son, if that was why those children always struck with all the cruelty at their disposal when she brought her son to the playground on lonely Saturday mornings when Engel was stuck in the office. Augustus never wondered if she had something to do with her son’s strangeness, if Engel had anything to do with her son’s nature.

“You should at least pretend to have friends,” she said one afternoon, mild disapproval in her voice as she drove him home after another trip to the library. His little shoulders slunk downwards as he looked out the window.



He was eleven when the family finally did break. The fireworks were not spectacular, and fizzled out with a whimper instead of a bang.

The eleven year old Lucius King was a tricky child, all smiles and eloquence and begrudged politesse covering a sort of inner preoccupation entirely personal and unconcerned with other people. But mother said to pretend, and so he did. Lies sprung from his lips with nary a thought, and he learned to adapt to impromptu acting sessions while becoming the characters sprung on him by force.

“I brought a friend,” he announced on a particularly special Wednesday afternoon, with a self-satisfied smugness that could be likened to when a young peacock first learned to spread its tail. A pretend-friend, mostly, because real ones were too high-maintenance, but a pretend-friend was still more than what Lucy had before. Yet, on Wednesday afternoon, he stopped in his steps before his friend could scurry through the door. For the first time in memory, father was home before nine in the evening, sat next to mother, and there was a lawyer too.

Augustus Williams-King had finally had enough and wanted to be Augustus Williams again. Against a nettled, upset, stubborn woman who had stomped into his workplace and slammed divorce papers in front of his face, Engel King had no choice but to say yes. And so, on Lucius King’s eleventh birthday, the first chapter of his life came to an official end. He could not quite bring himself to care.


Father started coming home more often after that, and Lucy learned to know the man as a father instead of a title at the back of his mind.

He admired his father from afar the way one might admire an exotic tethered beast in a circus, the unending narration in his head going: here is a perfect specimen of an unscrupulous human being, and look at how it wraps the world around its tiny fingers! When his father was around, Lucy was prone to a polite sort of rebellion, pushing all the wrong buttons while sipping from a teacup with a smile. In return, the man treated the boy with a weary amusement, half approving and half exasperated, convinced that the boy needed a mother to keep him in line.

Soon, there was a housekeeper, and she was a frightening woman with a mean hand in the kitchen. Lucy did not mind her, not the way he minded Augustus, and thought Maria was like fire crackling in the middle of the night. Father liked her too. Father might have loved her. Father might have traded his stones for a heart and fallen in love. He was thirteen when Maria became his mother. He called her Mama the way the new boy did, Jesus did, kissed her on the cheek before he went to bed at night, counted the days and wondered when this one was going to go away too.

Jesus, though, Jesus—Lucy pronounced Jesus with a J instead of a H, loved the way the other boy hid and sputtered and took offence to every little thing. Jesus was a wild animal trapped in a cage, forced into a human body much too small for his personality and might. So Lucy plotted and cajoled until Jesus and he lived in a sort of weary peace, not quite brothers and not quite friends, and this way they stayed for the next four years.


Seventeen-year-old college-bound Lucius King was too intelligent in some ways and feeble in others.

Books were still his world, and he did well enough in school to be one of the better ones—not quite the best, because education was the sort of high-maintenance thing that he understood, and therefore it could not hold his attention for long. He liked interesting things. Childhood fantasies of dragons and demons were relegated to the back of the mind, and instead his fancies were taken up by studies of social structure and global hegemony and all the rules of ruler-ship. On some days, Lucy wondered how Homo sapiens had survived so long, staring at all the evidence against morality and goodness in the broadest sense. Life filled him with the sort of mild ache that tended to plague the faithless who had seen too much of human ugliness without any of its redeeming qualities, but four years of being around Maria and Jesus, whose lives burned so brightly, had ridded him of part of his inability to give a damn.

But only part, because he still felt as though most humans were droll and tedious and doomed to mediocrity, with motivations too simply understood and easy to derive, and therefore worthy only of his derision and disregard. Jesus, though, Jesus he held in a special regard, treated like an especially interesting specimen to be kept fresh before dissection, because the not-brother was politely strange and strangely polite, and was a slippery eel Lucy could not quite grab the hold of. The best sort of attraction was one that he did not understand.

He entered college firmly at the middle of the pack, spent four years debating all the ways to unite the world and then destroy it with professors and peers—the intelligent ones, the interesting ones—and graduated close enough to the top that he was offered a research position with one of the professors immediately after. And Lucy jumped at it, throwing himself into his work with reckless abandon, publishing papers one after another as though he was afraid that he would not have enough time during a lifetime dole all the ideas out. Theory was his first love, and he preferred being kingmaker, policymaker, a minister to someone else’s king.


The next time he saw Jesus was two years later, when he was twenty-three, when he had earned some degree of credibility in his field and earned enough of a promotion to have his own home and hearth. It was Jesus’s birthday, and all of a sudden the not-brother had went from a boy of fifteen to a man of twenty-one. Lucy approached the business with a troubled sort of anxiety, under stiff orders from dear Mama to ply the other with alcohol and spirits to celebrate the auspicious occasion. Six years could change a man, and Lucius King was not fond of unpredictability.

Indeed, six years was too long a time to stay unchanged, and when the twenty-one year old Jesus, under the influence of alcohol, invited Lucy to his home and kissed Lucy silly, all the older man could think was you were supposed to be the honest one with almost a note of disappointment, because Lucy had researched Mexican birthdays the day before and knew this was not a tradition. That night he dreamed of his not-brother and violence and gunshots in the air.

The morning after was yet another shock, and Lucy displayed a degree of social ineptness even worse than usual. When Jesus killed a man, all Lucy could think was murderers are a good source of stylistic inspiration and oh my and ahh, well and aren’t you a dangerous one with a note of amusement in his mind. He touched his spoken-for lips with a finger at the scene of a crime, watched the bleached sunrise that promised no better tomorrows, and cocked a curious eyebrow at the foreign swirling ball of emotions pregnant in his heart.


Some men had stones for a heart, and Lucius f**king King just happened to be one of them. Augustus and her men, he thought, a crooked grin inching across his face while attempting to juggle pebbles with one hand. Stones. He stayed away from Jesus for weeks after the disastrous birthday, to give himself a few weeks to get his mind back in working order and cool his heart again. For the first time in over a decade, he remembered his birth mother and wondered how she was doing.

The color of his world had been pallor gray since birth, but Jesus had managed to lighten the shade. At night, Lucy dreamed of a different life when Maria wasn’t Mama, just a housekeeper, and his not-brother was just another face in the crowd. Perhaps then there would be no confusion, and then he could write Jesus off as boring with the same sort of flippancy he judged everything else. But those dreams were stillborn babes with waxy eyes, fingers cold, wrinkled, tightly clenched, and in their fists they held his heart. His stony heart.

“Your mother should pray for my soul,” Lucy would mutter to Jesus on the nights when the other man would drop by unannounced, when Lucy just happened to have almost-full bottles of vodka and beer in his cupboards despite his own aversion to drinks. Whatever happened after Jesus was too drunk to know any better was just a fluke, a temporary lapse in judgment on both their parts—never mind that Lucy was sober as day—, and that was the way Lucy liked it. During the day he went about his work pretending nothing had happened, that there were no marks on his body in places so blatantly obvious and uncovered and those definitely were not mosquito bites, and that his definitely-not-brother had not pushed him against a wall or a door or something else cruelly hard during the course of the night. And if he started doing research that leaned towards biology every so often, took up wood-curving and design and created toys of a certain shape, it was only him being Lucius King and Lucius King dared.

And so life went on. And so it went on.

Miscellaneous

§ Memory is a tricky, slippery thing that Lucy is not prone to trusting. He likes to keep records, notes and photographs and verbal recordings too, and keeps them cataloged with neat little titles in the study that sometimes double as his bedroom.

§ He does not like being confused, does not enjoy not understanding, cannot stand black boxes with only answers and no explanations. Yet, that which confuses him holds his attention the best.

§ No one has luck like his. His luck is atrocious.

§ Clothes make the man, and Lucius King is quite fond of the classical three-piece suit with a crisp white shirt, immaculately neat and sharp enough to cut through skin.

§ Closet masochist.

Roleplayer Information

Schema;; Also plays no one else. Yet.

AFFINITES;; Staff pick yo!~

FACE CLAIM;; Karneval – Hirato