This journal is for an alternate version of Xerxes Break, developed by calliope_love. For fic associated with this character, see my journal, under the Modernverse tag.





This journal is retired, other than PSLs. Please don't hesitate to get in touch if you'd like to play, no matter how long it's been. Comments are screened.

The "canon updated" version of this character can be found at almost_elderly.

Light Affection: Comfort hugs? Hair ruffling? The odd cuddle? Absolutely, if he doesn't hate you and if it won't be really awkward later. This Break is a bit of an affection whore. Particularly when he is under the effects of his curse and stuck in cockatoo form, just about anyone can get away with headscritchies.

Sexytimez: At first this was a straight-out no; nowadays, I am willing to play him this way, but only in certain situations and mostly in meme-land. If the characters have no chemistry I am still quite disinclined, and I may choose not to keep any sexy!CR generated in his canon. All of this would be discussed in detail prior to playing anything out, and I can promise that he will always be IC for any sex scenes written -- which is to say, he may not cooperate very well with your character.

Fighting: Excluding the time in which he had an injured knee, Break can still hold his own, with and without knives on hand. Due to his medical difficulties he no longer dances around like his sword-wielding counterparts; his style is more to stand defensively and end things as quickly as possible. But though he won't run unless there's no other choice, he has made sure to keep himself ferociously strong, and his reflexes are as good as ever.

After his death, Break devotes more time to learning to fight with a sword, but he will always be a street-fighter at heart -- far more likely to just punch you in the face and have done with it than engage in a noble duel.

With the Ouching and the Hurting: I'd really rather you didn't, and so would he. He quite likes being alive and goes out of his way to avoid putting himself in situations that would get him hurt in the first place, except on those rare occasions when he has a fit and feels the need to go pick a fight or defend someone. You can always ask me, if your character develops a particular grudge against this Break for some reason.

About the Mun: I am up at random hours so time-zone is irrelevant. Mostly, I rely on backtagging. When I am at my best I attempt to answer all of my tags once a day, but as of now -- think between January and June of 2012 -- that isn't happening due to real life constraints, so please be patient with me! I play multiple characters and am often scatterbrained enough that I must sometimes focus on only a few threads at a time, so it may be a couple of days between tags, but it is very rare that I drop threads. Likewise, even if it has been a few days since you tagged me, tag me anyway. No apologies necessary!

The Mansion has been known to bring Break slices of his own home from time to time. It gave him electric lights once during a crisis when he was too busy to fuss with gas lamps; food and candy he knows pop up in the stores here on occasion, and twice, it's given him photo albums. This time, what with the city being modernized and all, it's given him something even grander -- Oz's videos from home.

The boy makes a new one every year. It started as an amusing side-project that gave him a reason to play with his camera, becoming more and more serious as he pursued his career in photojournalism. The camera goes with him everywhere, capturing photos and video of his friends. Sometimes he sits them down for interviews about what's happening, capturing everyone's thoughts and feelings, and at the end of the year he compiles it all into a "year in review" documentary and gives a copy to everyone.

It's something that's grown more and more precious to everyone as the years pass.

A full fifteen years' worth of these videos is in Break's living room now. For the first time since he arrived, he's able to really relive his memories of his own home -- and see into his future. Perhaps because of Liam's influence, Break has been able to pick up right where he left off, catch up, and keep going, and see himself as Liam has described. He sees Sharon's daughter climbing into his lap and chirping a slaughtered version of his name, and more tattoos starting to appear on his left arm. A pair of young girls are adopted and join his household; Oz manages to capture Break freaking out about his very first bout of midterms when he finally goes back to school, and there's even footage of him getting along with Rufus Barma, and not quite terrorizing Gilbert in his kitchen. That, perhaps, is the most important part of all this. For the first time, he can show his friends here their other selves, show them what they are capable of being in this other world that most of them will probably never truly see otherwise. Shelly is a grandmother. Oz and Alice are grown; so is Elliot Nightray. Jack and Glen remain fast friends their whole lives. Even Lacie makes an appearance, toward the end, hair streaked with gray and smile as wicked as ever. Perhaps, in the end, the arrival of these videos will hurt just as much as they amaze, but wouldn't it be even more wrong to keep them secret?

So, this month kinda sucks. Bad enough that Liam had to vanish on him and Break is now living alone, but for a couple of Chains and anyone who decides to check in on him -- and the cats, of course. That's bad enough. He would have been plenty happy for that to have been the worst. But no, no, then Jabberwock had shown up out of nowhere, going on about yet another fucking Jack bloody well ruining everything. This one had taken it into his head to kidnap Lacie and drug her into submission, and one of the Glens would like to know if Break's house could be used as a safehouse again...?

Five. That's five Jacks that Break now actively hates. And as far as he's aware, that's all the Jacks currently present in this world. It's just as well he wasn't told of this until after she'd already been pulled out of danger; if he'd been along, he probably would have just killed the man, along with anything else with a blond braid that happened to wander into sight. As it is, he just rushes around and swears to himself, getting the house ready so that Lacie can stay there while she recovers. Given all he and his loved ones have been through, if there's one thing Break is good at, it's recovery. He'll have her back on her feet and with her nose in everyone's business again in no time. At least he can provide that much for her even if he can't do anything else, and he's sure Glen and his Chains will ensure the safety of the house in the meantime.

Something has to change here.



[Aftermath post for Lacie's rescue. Visit her here, if you can get past Break and Glen...]

Break is more than aware that he has been conspired against.

He doesn't know the details, of course -- that Liam had cornered Lacie with a scowl and ordered her, "Take him on an adventure," when Break was well out of earshot -- but he knows this was orchestrated behind his back. He's a Break. Most of his paranoid notions are delusions, but dammit, there's real ones mixed in along with them. He may not be able to tell the difference, but he still knows. He knows.

"I can't believe Liam auforized this," he announces for the third time, stomping along behind Lacie and refusing to acknowledge or enjoy the calm serenity of the woods. Liam may have authorized it, but Break is not making it easy for her, and it's been bitch, bitch, bitch the whole way so far. "I told him what happened wiv the 'shrooms."

The bitching is better than the depression, anyway. There is little that is more pathetic than a Break moping in a windowsill, which is what he had been doing when Lacie came to collect him this morning.


[Private to gather_ye_rosebuds.]

It's a down-the-rabbit-hole kind of a thing, really.

They fall for a little while, not particularly quickly, through simple black space. When the ground finally appears, it looks like something blew up in it and left a crater, cracked rocks and jagged edges and little cliffs and all that. Whatever has pulled them in plunks them down right at the bottom of it, just hard enough that they both bounce a little and dramatic little dust clouds poof up around them.

There is a pause.

Then Break starts swearing unintelligibly. To those in the know, he's actually going on a long and eloquent rant about how rude it is to put dimensional portals or whatever into a perfectly good pantry and how he has children (for Gilbert) to feed and goodness knows what's going to happen to the chicken now that it's been left unintended, to say nothing of what his blood sugar is probably doing right now. No one in the know is around, however, so he's pretty much just swearing unintelligibly.


[Private to retraced; set after the mansion has been restored, post Jackquake. Continued from here.]

Much, much later in the night, when the worst of it is over, Break can be found dancing slowly in the light of the oil lamps positioned around the shelter, a white-haired little boy resting in his arms. He needs to sleep himself, but Aiden had been understandably restless even after he'd fallen asleep, waking with bad dreams he didn't have the words to explain properly yet -- and Break isn't about to simply shush him and put him back to bed. Instead, he sways back and forth to the singing flowers, rescued from the rubble of his house, and sings along, quietly. Aiden has his head resting on Break's shoulder, mouth hanging open, firmly konked out. Fortunately, Break didn't have to use Bat's most draining power to calm the boy. The singing and swaying were enough.

"I was just guessing at numbers and figures,
Pulling the puzzles apart --
Questions of science, science and progress,
Do not speak as loud as my heart.
Tell me you love me, come back and haunt me;
Oh, and I rush to the start.
Running in circles, chasing our tails,
Coming back as we are --

Nobody said it was easy.
It's such a shame for us to part.
Nobody said it was easy.
No one ever said it would be so hard...
I'm going back to the start."

He's one of the only people awake, now.


[Private to the_smokescreen, set during the Jackquake.]

Sinuses be damned! Break has been as mobile as it's possible for him to be this week, enjoying life to the fullest. He's still reliant on his cane and far slower than he'd like to be, but he's been out every day, enjoying the warm air and the ease of the heat on his various aches -- and, most importantly, a renewed sense of independence. Whenever he's been away from home recently, it's been with Liam at his side and a Chain to transport them both, and being able to go out on his own has been doing wonders for his cabin fever.

But he's misjudged the end of the weather. It's been a week, yes, but because the false summer had appeared overnight, he'd assumed the return of the cold weather would, too. He isn't expecting the temperature to suddenly plummet and the snow to begin to fall while he's walking home from a visit to the mansion.

Break feels it in his wounds, first -- the old one on his shoulder, the new one in his knee. Then the shivering starts, and soon he's gasping for breath as the air thins out. He debates turning back, but he's well over halfway home now, and as his leg stiffens painfully underneath him he has to make the choice of getting to the house as fast as he can or stopping at one of these houses to beg a stranger for aid.

He makes the wrong one. When he tries to move faster his cane slides on a fresh patch of ice, and down he goes. He gasps when he falls and keeps gasping, that phobia of being suffocated that he's had ever since losing that lung surging to the front of his mind; and as he lays there shaking in the cold, he's too stunned to even comprehend just how much trouble he's in.



[Backdated to the "summer in winter" event; private to darkbrightflame.]

The mistletoe has infiltrated the house of the modern Break and his Liam.

No doubt this is because this is probably the worst possible day for there to be mistletoe in the house. Break was more or less okay when Liam went off to work this morning -- just still in that particular mindset where he didn't want to get out of bed. When he finally forced himself to, it was only because he was hungry enough to be shaking, and that's when the plant got him. It was waiting for him in the door between the living room and the kitchen.

He's still there now, sitting on the floor with his back up against the wall, looking a little haunted. And he's...well, he's a bit of a wreck, really. He's still hungry and a little dizzy and he has no idea when Liam will come home to save him from this and he keeps cycling through anger and panic and being upset that he can't go put his butt straight back into bed. Good thing the front door is unlocked, and at least he's got the pajama pants with the skulls on instead of a skirt today.

Fair warning to any Gils who might drop by, though -- the cats are out.

Break and Liam have a house, now.

Liam was an absolute brat about surprising him with it; he'd kept Xerxes thinking they were just getting an apartment right up until Knave had magicked him into his knew home. After that he'd gone all gloaty and teased his partner for having babbled about wanting a house with a white picket fence and a dog, but really, Liam deserved to gloat. The house was perfect. There was more than enough room for all the books, a room that could serve as a studio for Break, and a downstairs bedroom where they could sleep if Break didn't feel up to navigating the stairs on that knee. Bat had a whole attic to himself now, and there was a cozy little nook of a room under the staircase for Trump and Sally to curl up in. The upstairs held a guest room or two, something they would never have needed at home -- but now, it's not unlikely that they'll be entertaining company now and again, particularly with Break so close with so many of the children.

Much as he'd like to know what else he'd jabbered at Liam about while on this particular round of very good painkillers, Break is more than pleased with how this has turned out, and Liam is pleased that Break is pleased. It is a very cozy house.


[ooc: Permanent post for visits any time between now and the rest of the year. If you want a thread to correlate with any specific DR timelines, let me know!]

Having spent more than enough time in bed of late, now that he's allowed to sleep in his own room and now that he has a pair of crutches, Break has been wandering around the mansion as best he can, trying to reclaim his own mobility. By rights, he really shouldn't be out at the moment -- Liam is elsewhere -- but one of the Hatters is shadowing him, he knows, and he's having one of those moments when he wants to manage things all by himself.

And in his defense, he's being sensible about it, stopping whenever he feels even slightly like he needs to. Such as now. He's resting in one of the sitting rooms, his injured leg propped up on a coffee table. It's pajama pants and socks with grippy bits on the bottom, today, and around his knee, there's a strange black brace -- something Liam had helped Canterbury to put together, to keep it from moving too much as Break shifts.

It makes him terribly nervous to be out and about alone, truth be told. But at least he's doing it. He has some notion that if he hides himself away in his room, it will only hurt Shelly worse...

[Private to bittynightrage and his puppy. Takes place after this thread. <3]

Break spends the first few days after the attack and subsequent rescue-by-Gilbert unconscious in the infirmary, watched over by Canterbury and his Liam. During that time, he's just as sick as he is injured, the fever caused by the poison taking up most of his energy; when he does wake up enough to communicate, nothing he says really makes sense. Once the fever finally breaks, it's the painkillers that keep him knocked out, and by the time he's coherent enough to (grudgingly) admit to Liam what happened, Shelly is back to normal.

And Break isn't going to be. Most of the wounds are trivial; they likely won't even scar, and if they do, well. It's not like he doesn't have a whole wealth of scars already. But his knee -- it isn't going to heal properly. He may not be able to bend his damn toes ever again, let alone walk on that leg. Given how much time the man spends moving, and how much he values his own physical strength, it's not unfair to say that a large part of his life is now over.

Pride keeps him from letting them carry him back to the bedroom; he'll stay in that damn infirmary until he can make it back on his own somehow, even if he has to drag himself down the hallway. Arrogance makes him sit up and do his best to be a brat when people visit, so no one has to deal with seeing him as hurt as he feels. But sometimes Liam has to bring him his cats to snuggle for a while, and sometimes he just can't manage to come up with any light conversation and retreats into silence, and underneath all the anger he's trying to summon so that he can push himself through this, he's sad. He's just incredibly sad, and he's grieving, for himself and for what he had with Shelly.

He loves Shelly. That hasn't changed, and it probably won't. And Break blames himself for letting things go so far.

[Thread is not finished at time of posting; latecomers welcome, and all of the backtagging. Break's Liam will be around on some level for all of these threads.]

It hasn't been as difficult as one Xerxes Break had expected to adjust to mansion life again after the house ceased to be modern anymore, especially with the city appearing to amuse him and his favorite holiday of all swiftly approaching (whether the rest of the mansion celebrates it as well as he does or not). Today, however, is not a day for galavanting about scandalizing random townsfolk and getting frowned at for having a "peasant" accent; sadly, it also isn't a day for secretly enjoying his old-fashioned home, free of beeping things with too many functions. No. Today, Break is feeling the change in the seasons rather acutely. It's starting to cool down and it's going to rain tomorrow. He can tell because certain old wounds of his, most especially the scar across the right side of his back, are aching, and all he really wants is to curl up with tea and a movie.

There aren't any movies. So he's in the library, staring blearily at a random shelf in the stacks in the hopes that something new and exciting will present itself without his having to go through the effort of finding it. He doesn't want anything as epic as Holy Knight, and he doesn't want anything so intelligently written that he'll have to think too hard about what he's reading, and --

Maybe he should just go get his tea and do nothing but cuddle the calm cat all day.


[Private to grim_candy.]

Break practices every morning, without question. It helped him get his anger out after the Sinclairs. It kept him fit once he settled down with Liam and Pandora. It moved him to regain his confidence and his strength after the surgery, and here in the mansion, it's been a link to the familiar -- a ritual, of sorts.

But it just hasn't been quite the same without his music.

Which is why, now that he's done his morning yoga and he's run through all of the sword drills his younger counterpart has been teaching him, there's a stereo off to the side blasting one of his favorite Nightwish songs. His knives are in his hands and his hair is in a ponytail and his shirt is off and he's dancing.

They're not moves anyone in this world would know, of course, and he doesn't see it as that, but it's exactly what he's doing. He's slipped into that place still in the back of his head that fights so instinctively he may as well be a machine, and the beats of the song guide his movements -- down, up, down, away -- as he spins and slices and destroys imaginary enemies. Now and again he flips his grip on his knives to punch at the air and then slash back down, or drops into a roll only to spring back to his feet a moment later, so smoothly it's as though he were pulled up by something unseen. His movements are graceful and controlled, and for the most part, unlike the other Breaks, he stays in one spot -- he can't run like they can.

What he doesn't realize -- or care about, really -- is that his music is loud enough to be heard out in the hallway.



[Takes place during the modern mansion event; private to smallkindnesses.]

You know you want me~