IAIN MCKEEGAN
Vampire
Posts: 36
Age:
305
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
Jodi
Sometimes silence is violent
Last seen Apr 8, 2024 21:02:51 GMT
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Post by IAIN MCKEEGAN on Oct 28, 2022 18:44:41 GMT
Rose was like a piece of cotton candy that he’d gone and dropped in a river. One minute she was, the next minute she was gone. He hadn’t lost hope for her, but he was starting to consider maybe he wasn’t the person who was going to help her turn her emotions back on. He’d spent the best part of a decade trying to help her. They were so close to the finishing line, but she disappeared into thin air. Now he was potentially faced with another decade of trying. He knew the sensible thing was to pack up and head back to Scotland, but he couldn’t bring himself to board that plane and leave her, even if she hated having him around. He’d probably been too soft on her. Fiona would always complain that Iain was too relaxed when it came to enforcing the rules in the orphanage and even more relaxed when it came to dishing out punishment. He was keen to give everyone the benefit of the doubt, which hadn’t worked out too well for him over the years. Truthfully, he had no idea what to do with Rose though. She wasn’t one of the children in the orphanage he could ground for a week or reduce their pocket money. Maybe he was just fighting a losing battle. Something kept him tethered to her though. Something strong. He searched various bars in Mystic Falls in the hopes of bumping into Rose so he could launch into another feeble attempt in trying to convince her to feel emotions again but there was a chance she’d already left. Slipping through his finger yet again without saying goodbye. Her specialty. He’d barely settled in the town and already he was considering heading back to his comfort blanket. Scotland. The place where everything made sense and his worries disappeared, but he knew if he ventured back there he would end up feeling even lonelier. Him, alone, in his house which he once shared with Rose. The last bar to visit was Campbell's Bar and he wasn’t surprised when he walked in to find no sign of the red headed vampire. Chasing after her was getting tiresome, but he brought this on himself. No one asked him to jump on a plane and head over to America. Everything was still so foreign to him. The currency, the accents, and the fact they drove on the other side of the road. Bizarre. He’d given up his search for the day and instead hauled himself up on one of the bar stools, casting a quick glance at the man sitting next to him. His attention was pulled away by the bartender that approached him. “Can I have a double vodka coke, please.” He wanted to reach over the bar, grab the bottle of vodka and knock the entire bottle back. His attention jumped back to the male sitting a few seats down from him. “Ye look very familiar, pal… yer ever visited Scotland?” Iain wasn’t considered a well traveled man, sticking to the places he knows and never venturing too far from Scotland or England. Everything outside that border was considered strange territory. FINN DE LA SALLE
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FINN DE LA SALLE
Phoenix
Posts: 264
Age:
651
Occupation:
French Teacher/Mercenary
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Apr 12, 2024 18:10:47 GMT
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Post by FINN DE LA SALLE on Nov 10, 2022 20:00:45 GMT
I have a son. The present tense still stuck in his throat, as though his body had not caught up to what his brain and heart had already accepted. Alec was no longer just an ache in his heart, a vacuum that had formed in the space his son was supposed to occupy once he’d returned to Scotland and they’d settled back into the croft – the three of them living a life of peace and freedom with the Bonnie Prince settled on the throne. Others had blamed Charlie for it, tossing all fault at his feet, but Finn knew that it hadn’t just been a failure in leadership, it had been a case of hope winning out over common sense. There’d been no way they could’ve defeated the English, but he’d bitten that truth back, weighing up losing just a few short weeks with his son against losing him forever.
If there was someone up there watching over him – Gadifer had tried to instil the belief in him that there was, and Bridget had been a devout Catholic – then Geraint would have been roasting in Hell for pushing the decision on him. A half dozen times in the weeks since Alec had appeared in his classroom, looking for a father just like him, he’d pictured his hands around the man’s throat, the heat pouring out of him and half wished he could do it over again. It was a bitterness he should have finally set aside, but for now that would’ve been like swallowing broken glass. You might be rid of it, but you’d be in a world of pain from the attempt. And that, Finn knew, would be one that would stick with him, ingrained under his skin as so many other things had been since he’d been plucked from those ashes.
Finn rose from the table in the corner of Campbell’s, clapping a hand against Jacobsen’s shoulder as the man headed for the door. ’Dinner with the family’. An excuse he once couldn’t have given, but even after more than half a century it was not too late for things to change. A life seemingly caught in a vicious cycle of flame and death suddenly shifting. Like it had all been knocked off course by that moment of recognition.
Heading for the bar – he wasn’t ready to head back to the near bare four walls of his apartment – Finn grimly considered how many pieces had needed to fit together just at the right moment for this. They had been close before, had spoken, had fought side by side, but without that last piece of information from the woman who had told Alec of his presence in town, the gears had skipped past one around, spinning, grinding, not clicking. The moment he had accepted the truth he’d practically heard the sound in his ears. Now there was a whir in its place, like the universe was suddenly running at a different pace – the right one.
He dipped his hand in his pocket as he settled on one of the stools, settling in for a different sort of drink to the aimless chatter and couple of beers he’d shared with Noah. Pulling his phone free, he set it down on the bar, moving it aside an inch as the owner set a fresh beer down in front of him. He hadn’t asked, but she’d seemed to have a psychic streak from the moment he’d first come here, complimentary to the English accent. ”Thanks,” he murmured, dipping his chin to her as he picked it up. Ice cold beer and a waiting game to see if his son popped back up this evening didn’t seem half as bad as staring at the walls, wondering when the other shoe was going to drop.
Dark eyes ticked from the bottle as a man settled beside him, briefly taking in a face that he likely wouldn’t remember in an hour’s time. Few stuck these days, those that really did were like thorns burrowing into his chest in this town. The rest slipped away on the breeze, never to be seen again. Unless….
Finn planted a forearm against the edge of the desk as he twisted. Not shy of studying the man’s face now. What Mystic Falls took in secrets and blood, it gave back in the form of treasure – albeit the kind you were only allowed to hold onto a short time. ”Visited, lived in, not sure how long you’ve got to be there for a Scotsman to shift you from one side of that line to the other.” Fine lines sprung up around Finn’s eyes as he continued to stare. ”What part are you from? It’s been some time since I was … there. The accents they all…” He made a low sound in his throat, waving the hand that clutched the bottle in the air. Grew muddy. If it had been French, he would have been able to tell the Dordogne from Paris in a heartbeat. The Scottish burr he’d tried to push from his mind, although Bridget’s voice had still invaded his dreams for years – in screams, in pleas, in those words of love it had taken him more than a year to fully decipher.
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IAIN MCKEEGAN
Vampire
Posts: 36
Age:
305
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
Jodi
Sometimes silence is violent
Last seen Apr 8, 2024 21:02:51 GMT
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Post by IAIN MCKEEGAN on Dec 29, 2022 17:18:59 GMT
Perhaps Rose was right and he just needed to find another baby vampire to mentor instead of trying to save someone who didn’t want his help. He never pictured himself as a mentor, even though he spent years scooping children up off the streets in London to provide them with shelter. That was different though. They were children, not humanity-free vampires. The only reason he helped Rose was because her reckless behavior was threatening to expose the pair of them to the village. He welcomed her into his home to save his own skin, with no intention of having her around for so long nor with any intention of helping her. Hopefully, fate would draw them back together one day, decades from now when she came to realize that the older she got the harder it was to control her emotions. For now, he was left staring into the bottom of his glass as he thought about Rose. It was near impossible to place every single face he came across, but he tried his best. Some were burnt into his memory for eternity. His parents, Sabrina, Fiona, and now Rose would take a place alongside them. Centuries would pass by and he still wouldn’t forget those people, no matter how hard he tried at times in the past. He yearned to wipe Sabrina’s face from his mind after he killed her, but it wasn’t like he could find himself a vampire to compel it all away. He was left dealing with the pain every day. Pain that he still endured nowadays. It never faded, rather Iain just learned to deal with it. It was the same thing he repeated to Rose, insisting she would find a better way to deal with her sorrow rather than shutting it out. He couldn’t blame her though. He would have done the same thing when he first turned if he knew it was possible. He would never tell Rose that though. It would only give her more ammunition against him. But there was something about the man next to him that stood out. He laughed lightly at the man’s comment. “Sounds identical? Don’t let a Glaswegian hear ye saying they sound lik’ they're from Edinburgh… in fairness, a’m feelin’ the same aboot American accents. Cannae tell the difference between the north and the south.” He’d been told there was a stark difference between someone from New York and someone from Texas, but he couldn’t pick it up. As for the Canadians? They all sounded American. “Some wid say a lifetime. Even then ye have th’ territorial Scots.” It wasn’t as bad as before when an Englishman would be hunted for daring to cross the line, but there were certainly some locals in his village that didn’t take kindly to those from over the border. “Inverness-shire… near a place called Glenfinnan.” He pulled an array of coins and notes from his pocket, handing it over to the employee as they placed his drink on the bar. “Where did ye live in Scotland? Ye'r na American?” He gestured towards his own ears for a moment. The man didn’t have that same accent that had been filling his ears since the minute he arrived in America. An accent that brought a smile to his face as it reminded him of Rose. FINN DE LA SALLE
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FINN DE LA SALLE
Phoenix
Posts: 264
Age:
651
Occupation:
French Teacher/Mercenary
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Apr 12, 2024 18:10:47 GMT
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Post by FINN DE LA SALLE on Jan 11, 2023 20:34:41 GMT
The law of averages said that at some point someone who showed up here in the Bermuda Triangle of the supernatural world would be a problem. You didn’t get this many pieces of a life as long as his had been colliding without something kicking off. He should’ve been watching for it, bristling as each face was revealed, but … merde, he’d grown soft. Mystic Falls wasn’t another base, or even the snake’s nest of a court somewhere, the world wasn’t going to explode with no notice – not that he’d been led to believe that the town was that quiet. He’d come because a war was supposed to have been brewing here, if it was it had been beyond his view, leaving him trapped in that Bermuda Triangle with the world around him only disturbed by those faint ripples of the past.
Could he call his son just a ripple? It wasn’t like Magnus or even Parrish, Alec’s presence here had been one of those explosions, tearing him open in a way he hadn’t expected. And where had he gone after? Straight back into those becalmed waters, only feeling faintly amused as the man next to him spoke, trying to turn his familiarity into an identification, or that polite brush off of someone who had no idea who he was. But he did, didn’t he?
Finn paused there, dark eyes studying the man as the man laughed at his flippant comment. The accents were all that had grown muddy over time. The memories that tried to stir in those still waters didn’t have the sharp edges that his ones of Alec did – his son hadn’t found him as a teenager in the war of independence here in the country his parents had brought him to for a better life after all. They were soft at the edges, like an old photograph, or the Scots burr that had been there in his wife’s voice. So many had gone the same way, the ones of Magnus the same until the man had started to sketch them in again.
He inclined his head at the warning, his lips curling faintly in an amusement he rarely felt for anything to do with his temporary home. The memories he’d built there had been overwhelmingly tragic, what had been good buried by the bad, buried with his wife and supposedly his son. ”The Americans would take offence at that too,” he reminded him, his own accent a soft edge to his pronunciation of certain words. ”Like I said, it’s been some time.” Identical was wrong there, the highland accent had certainly been softer, less like the sharp, aggressive bite of the Glaswegians he’d served with since. ”I’m sure there are plenty around here who would be glad to educate you on just how different the north and south are.” But he wasn’t one of them. That was an argument that wasn’t his, just as the fight against the English shouldn’t have been his.
Another amused sound rolled free as he lifted the bottle to his lips again, staring down into the mouth of it like the answers to all those turbulent turning points in his life were right there in the scummy looking foam of the beer. ”I wasn’t there that long. Just a few years … with the territorial Scots.” Geraint reminding him at every possible moment that he was only tolerated on the land because he was French and there’d long been ties between the King that should’ve been and his people. Closer ties than he’d known considering that the man he was threatening had grown up in the court that had embraced both Charlie and his exiled father.
Lifting the bottle, Finn gestured in the air, as though pinning himself on the map with the man’s question. Glenfinnan hadn’t been far, not in today’s terms at least, on the route from Drumnadrochit to the coast, one he’d taken to get a boat away from the place and the crumbling ashes of the man he’d left. ”Inverness-shire,” he echoed, smiling almost sharply. ”Not far from Drumnarochit.” Finn shook his head, watching the man for a moment before he lifted his chin slightly. ”No. French. Although my wife was Scottish. It was her family’s land I lived on. I guess my accent isn’t what it once was, hmm? Did you know the place?” Did like it was the past tense for both of them, his mind throwing up the tense before he could pull it back and really consider it.
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IAIN MCKEEGAN
Vampire
Posts: 36
Age:
305
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
Jodi
Sometimes silence is violent
Last seen Apr 8, 2024 21:02:51 GMT
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Post by IAIN MCKEEGAN on Feb 19, 2023 14:47:22 GMT
Out of the places Rose had chosen to settle down Mystic Falls seemed a little out of the ordinary for a vampire. He could understand why she might have gravitated towards somewhere like New York or Chicago. Her actions would have gone unnoticed, but why was she throwing herself into a small town again? This time there wasn’t someone like Iain keeping tabs on her behaviour and making sure she didn’t get caught. At least people in Mystic Falls were more likely to engage in a conversation with you. If he’d approached someone in a bar in London and struck up a conversation with them they would have walked off. It was like those city folk were allergic to talking to strangers or burst into flames if they smiled back at someone. “Most definitely. Ah ain’t bin in America all that long so I’m still learning .” He couldn’t imagine Rose sitting down and giving him a rapid lesson on how to identify the north from the south though. She would happily stand back and let him piss a local off by suggesting they were from Texas. He would have been lucky trying to find one of those YouTube videos all the younger generation raved about. A few years with the territorial Scots could feel like a lifetime, especially if they decided you weren’t one of them. Despite being there for ten years some of the locals were still a little skeptical of Rose, but they put their trust in Iain. If he trusted her, then so could they. If they knew the truth they would have banished the pair of them. “Did they have ye sportin’ a kilt and eatin’ haggis by th’ end o’ it?” He asked, letting out a low chuckle. He was quick to pick up that the man was referring to his wife in the past tense, along with Drumnadrochit. Dead wife, perhaps? Something the pair had in common, although it was unlikely this man had killed his own wife by ripping a vein open. “Aye. Home tae th’ famous Loch Ness Monster.” Iain would have been happy to bet money on the fact the thing didn’t exist. People had been wandering that area of Scotland for centuries, yet no one had solid proof there was something lurking in the waters. It was a fun story to tell the children though. “Wouldn't hae pinned ye bein’ French though. Ye leave a long time ago?” He picked his beer up off the counter top, taking a large mouthful. Maybe if he had ventured away from Scotland for more than a few years his accent would have been eroded down. His parents would have been turning in their graves by that point. “A'm Iain... Iain McKeegan.” He reached across with his free hand to shake the man’s hand. FINN DE LA SALLE
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FINN DE LA SALLE
Phoenix
Posts: 264
Age:
651
Occupation:
French Teacher/Mercenary
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Apr 12, 2024 18:10:47 GMT
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Post by FINN DE LA SALLE on Mar 7, 2023 19:15:23 GMT
If only he’d had thirty or forty life times to realise just how little difference there truly was between people, he wouldn’t have had to learn. Finn eyed the dark haired man with some amusement. Through the first couple – well, his first couple – you walked around slank jawed and stunned. Lives then had been lived small, most people never going more than a couple of miles from home. The thought of making it from the villages to Paris was wild, across the world, that was unfathomable. No. It was too far. Too alien. Full of savages and wild animals that would surely tear you to pieces. These were supposed to be enlightened times, the wild going out of the world long before this century – supposed to be.
Mystic Falls had retained some of that wilderness. Its population spilled out into the woods surrounding it like they’d once done elsewhere, only now they were bloodthirsty and either too lazy or felt too entitled to bother trying to clean up after themselves. It opened up a pocket for the people looking to stop them to sweep in. That hadn’t been his intention, but Finn saw the reason for it. The more lives you took, the more attention you brought to yourself and the town, the more trouble that would come looking for you. It was a vicious circle he’d thought he could perhaps help break, but instead had found a life here the way he once had done in Scotland.
The pangs worked their way through the pit of his stomach as he thought of it. He could’ve laid blame on the man for it, the burr of his accent taking him back more than two hundred years and thousands of miles. It had been almost indecipherable when he’d arrived, the highlands thick with people whose language was littered with Gaelic, just enough of their speech in English for him to catch the gist of it. By the time he’d walked into battle alongside them, he’d understood every word, those subtleties of language that made for an easier battle, not that there’d been any such thing against the English.
Finn’s lips pinched at the corners, about as close as he could get a smile despite the man’s chuckle. ”Close enough,” he admitted. ”It was broadswords at dawn and parritch after. Let me guess, that was the first thing in your luggage … your kilt. They go wild for that stuff over here.” Not so much the daily grind of the salted porridge and Bannocks that most Scots seemed to sustain themselves on. Diets had moved on from those desperate times. The kilts though, flash a bit of leg in one of and people here went wild.
He wasn’t Scottish, wasn’t even French really. Everything he had been was slowly covered up, layers of ash from dozens of rebirths building up until whatever had been there at the start was long hidden out of sight. His time with Bridget was clear enough, what murk of grief had hidden there was wiped free when Alec had found him. Finn huffed out a breath as he remembered how Bridget had taken him down to the Loch to try and spook him with stories of the Monster and the selkies that apparently lived in just about every Scottish body of water. ”You do know it then. Broch Tuarach was close enough to try and spot the beastie.” He put a burr on the word, the same way Bridget had.
Pressing the bottle against the back of his neck, Finn tried to ease the warmth of the memories before they sank like a hot coal into his chest. He rolled it back and forth, humming lightly. ”Spend enough time elsewhere and it all begins to fade. A few years in Scotland, more here, England, the rest of Europe … the middle East. It starts to blur in the end. It feels like a hundred years ago to be honest.” Or more like two hundred and eighty. Finn took a mouthful of the beer, swallowed it before he set the bottle down to take the offered hand. ”Finn de la Salle. Were there always McKeegans in Inverness-shire?” The name had struck like the chill of the beer, a freeze in his chest that had him staring at Iain as he released his hand. Had there been an Iain McKeegan in the area?
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IAIN MCKEEGAN
Vampire
Posts: 36
Age:
305
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
Jodi
Sometimes silence is violent
Last seen Apr 8, 2024 21:02:51 GMT
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Post by IAIN MCKEEGAN on Apr 13, 2023 20:39:27 GMT
It was surprising he had packed anything at all given the speed at which he left Scotland. There was no hesitation as he grabbed what little he could and headed down into England. At first he thought something bad had happened to Rose. Someone had snuck into his house in the middle of the night and snatched her. That was easy to comprehend that the idea she had left him, but they say bad things happen in three. First Sabrina, then Fiona and maybe Rose. “Only comes oot fur birthdays 'n' Christmas.” He had yet to bless Rose with the sight of that, although it would probably leave her wanting to rub bleach in her eyes. It was a story even his own parents told him centuries back about a wild monster that lived in the water and would eat little children if they didn’t do their chores. It was enough to have Iain washing the dishes and eating his greens. It was a story he intended to tell his own children, but the couple didn’t reach that milestone. He would tell himself it was because God had other plans for the couple, but there was no way God intended for Iain to kill his first wife. He made that decision. Memories of his homeland had barely faded considering he had only moved a few miles down the road and the furthest he had relocated was Portugal, but Scotland was barely the same place he remembered. Rose had endured that pain when she realised the place she died had been turned into a parking lot. People were now parking their cars in the area in which she took her final breath. The last place she was a human. “Middle East?” Certain places on that part of the map piqued his interest, but his lack of spontaneity held him back. The Americans struggled to understand him so who knows how he would have coped out there. “Nice tae meet yer, Finn.” He pulled his hand back from Finn’s, resting it back on his drink as he shrugged, “Ah suspect if ye look far enough back mah Dad's side cam fae Ireland.” There were plenty of fascinating sites out there where you could trace back your roots. He’d seen them advertised on the side of buses with enticing offers attached to them but he never took the bait. His name would be written somewhere on these sites with a death certificate pinned to the search. It unnerved him. FINN DE LA SALLE - wanna wrap up with yours?
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FINN DE LA SALLE
Phoenix
Posts: 264
Age:
651
Occupation:
French Teacher/Mercenary
Status:
Widowed
Played by:
ANGE
Last seen Apr 12, 2024 18:10:47 GMT
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Post by FINN DE LA SALLE on May 1, 2023 19:29:46 GMT
He’d never imagined he’d be homesick for the place after all that he’d lost there, but the longer the conversation went on, the more the pangs worked their way through his gut. It’d felt ridiculous given that his origins were hundreds of miles away and he could barely speak a word of Gaelic, let alone claim connection with any of the clans, but the morning of his wedding some of Bridget’s distance relatives had bundled him into a plaid. For Church, they’d insisted, slipping the blade into his sock to nip the heel of his hand with when they’d claimed blood of my blood, Bridget’s had stood out like a tiny ruby on the tip of the blade when he’d said the words back to her and her nicked her skin. Later that night, as they’d lain together in his cottage, their cottage, he’d kissed the heel of her hand, professing his love for her in his own tongue.
Finn glanced down at his hand now, wrapping it back around his glass as he murmured ”and weddings.” He folded his left hand back into a light fist, curling his fingers around the ring that Penny had tried to steal from him again, and had failed. Perhaps the records were still there in that kirk, his name and Bridget’s in slowly fading ink that nobody would’ve laid eyes upon again. Iain could’ve come from the local village and not recognized it at all. That had been a life left far behind when he’d sailed away from England, with his heart a charred hole straight his chest, burned out by the grief he still hadn’t been able to entirely forget. Finn peeled the bottle away from his neck to take a long gulp of the beer, and swore that he could feel it cooling the burning edges of that pain. He hummed in acknowledgement of Iain’s question. ”Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, all the highlights,” he said dryly. Those stories he wasn’t sharing here, they could stay in the back of his mind for now, their details the sandy grit that ground into every thought sometimes.
He nodded to the man beside him as Iain shook his hand, then reached for his beer again to half drain it. After more than two centuries, hell after seven, your memory started to sprout holes, details blurring except for those that would always remain sharp and doused in heartache. He was fairly sure there’d been McKeegans on Geraint’s estate but maybe it was like a Smith in England, or a Martin in France. ”There always were connections,” he murmured. ”Ireland, Scotland, France, none of them could stand the English very much.” And Charlie had known it, drawing as many of them as he could to the cause.
Tired of the thought, of the image of Bridget behind his lids every time he blinked, Finn set his half drunk bottle aside. He offered Iain another of those friendly smiles, a nod. ”It was a pleasure meeting a Scot so far from home,” he said honestly. ”Perhaps I’ll see you around again some time, Iain.” Perhaps for a third time. The thought that the man was familiar stuck with him as he raised his hand in farewell and moved off through the crowd in the pub. Maybe it was just this town, throwing so many faces from the past at him that he was gonna convince himself that everybody he came across had some tie to one of the lives he’d lived before he’d fetched up here to start over again.
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