THESEUS RHODIUM D6 [fin]

They don't chant it in the audience after a performance, so you won't already know my name, but I'm Theseus Omaha Bolin Rhodium, or Theo for short. I've been alive for seventeen years, most of which were fairly.... interesting, for lack of a better term. And I live in District Six, too.


Love of mine some day you will die
But I'll be close behind
I'll follow you into the dark

My father was a scientist that researched many diseases and tried to find cures for them. I don’t quite know how he met my mother; I just know that they hit it off fairly well in the beginning after he graduated from the college in the district. My dad was immediately sent to the disease center, where he quickly rose up to tackle great diseases and search for cures. Really, he’s gifted in science, and his pay reflects that. Ever since she married my father, my mother has never had to work a day since. This got to her head and turned her from a sweet, innocent lady into a cocky, snotty person.

My father was indifferent to having a kid, but my mother thought I was the spawn of the devil. While Dad was at work, Mom kept me home from school just about every day so I could attend to her every need and wish. Kind of like a personal slave. She didn’t like me, so why treat me like someone she liked? Dad was too busy with work – always leaving early and coming home late – to notice how my mother shoved me around, telling me to clean endlessly and cook for her and stand around to wait for her next order.

I don’t remember exactly when my ‘slavery’ started, but even my earliest memories are of her shoving me around. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve cleaned each of the rooms in that large house, but it was never good enough for her. She’d constantly yell at me, “It’s not good enough! Do it again, you filthy little maggot! No, no, what are you doing? You’re ruining it! You are a failure! How many times have I told you to fix this? Get it right or you’ll sleep outside!” I’d always do my best, but I tended to end up sleeping outside, curled up in a blanket underneath a tree in our backyard, occasionally crying myself to sleep when I wasn’t shivering from the cold. Dad never noticed – he always came home late and I was either hidden in a room cleaning or out in the backyard, so he never knew I was there. He never really cared much for me anyway. Well, I kind of take that back. Whenever he did talk to me, he was always kind and I clung each of his words, but they didn’t come frequently. Short conversations between us always came maybe once a week, if even that. And before I knew it, he was gone – off to the lab for countless hours of peering down a microscope and research whatever it is that they’re trying to figure out.

On the days that my mother just couldn’t stand the sight of me, she would send me off to school. Even though I only went maybe once every two weeks, I did meet this one girl who helped teach me to read. She was very kind and understanding even though my story didn’t make very much sense: a boy from a rich family not being able to read. I’d stay afterschool and she’d stay too, going over little children’s books with me and helping me pronounce each word. After a few meetings, she commented on how I always seemed to smell like bleach, so she gave me the nickname Bleach. At first I didn’t like it because it reminded me of my mother and how she’d shove me around to clean, but it slowly grew on me.

Sometimes when I’d be forced to stay home and my mother was off rubbing her wealth in other people’s faces, I’d run away to school just to find her, bringing a book with me so we could read together. The girl was my only friend, really. Mother soon found out about my sneaking away to go meet the girl, and she quickly slammed the hammer on that by supervising me as I slaved away, scrubbing the tiles (with bleach to make them ‘whiter than a cloud’), wiping windows, scrubbing toilets with toothbrushes, etc. And then her yelling. “You failure! Why was I cursed with a wretched kid? Damn it all, just damn it all. I’ll be rid of you soon enough.” She never realized how much it hurt to hear that. What child wants to hear that from their own mother? All I ever wanted was to be good enough. I didn’t want to be seen as some sort of peasant – I wanted her to see me as her own flesh and blood. Her son. And the same with my father, I wanted him to at least notice me. The short conversations were nice, but it wasn’t enough. I wanted – no, needed more.

Nothing changed for quite some time. I continued to rub my hands raw and get my clothes stained with bleach, become nauseated with the smell of ammonia and run through way too many toothbrushes. I wasn’t allowed to go back to school ever since my mother found out that I was staying after to learn to read. I kept practicing, though; I’d take a book or two off the shelf when no one was looking, and I’d try to read to myself in the dim moonlight of either my room or underneath that tree. I also picked up singing. I’d make up songs about anything and everything and just sing as I worked. Mother didn’t quite like that either since I was being loud, but I ignored her and just kept on going. I often ignored her so much about it that she resorted to taping my mouth shut. Not just a short piece of tape over my mouth, but taking the entire roll and circling it around my head and over my mouth a few times. Tearing it off hurt like hell, and she just ripped it all off, not even taking care since it was tearing out the hair on the back of my head.

And as all bad histories go, I gathered up the courage to run away when I was almost sixteen years old. I didn’t want anything to do with money or riches, or even having a house to clean, so I snuck off one night when I was sentenced to sleep under the tree and I just picked up my outside blanket and walked away. I kept walking until I reached the District Square, and I just hung out in the alleys. It was great, actually. There was no one to nag me, to one to tell me I just took up space and was a failure, no one to shove me around, and no money-rotten people. I was free.

At times, I found myself tidying up the back alleys that I occupied, putting trash into dumpsters and sweeping up broken glass and stuff. I resisted the urge to get down on my hands and knees and scrub the pavement clean, though; that would have been the death of me. I picked up a volunteer-type job at the butcher’s and vegetable shop – I didn’t get paid in money, but rather in food and clothing. I helped out in their shops and they gave me some of their food. Not much, but enough to keep me going. I liked it much better than just rolling in money. As much as I wanted my mother’s love, I did not want to end up like her – the spoiled, snobby demeanor – so I took the more humble approach to life.

The people I worked for noticed how I had a quirk for cleaning and making sure things were in perfect order, but luckily no one said anything about it. They just let me do my thing, and hey, they got a clean shop out of it.

Someone found me at the butcher shop one day and took me to the Tempus Opera House. I don’t exactly remember who it was, but that doesn’t matter. The people of the Opera House are my family now. They don’t mind me being such a perfectionist and they – to my knowledge – don’t care that my background is messed up financially. They don’t tell me that I’m a failure. They don’t yell at me and tell me to fix things. The Tempus Opera House is my home. It’s my home.

It’s my home.

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark


You would think that coming from a rich family I’d be more robust, but I’m not. My overall body type is lean and muscular, but believe me, I won’t win any wrestling or combat awards. You can see the muscles shifting and moving underneath my skin whenever I do something strenuous. Unlike my arms, my legs are thin. There’s not much meat on them and I don’t have great leg strength. I can jump pretty high, but that’s about it. I am the worst when it comes to competitions involving leg strength, too. Running? Slow as a turtle. Squats? I’d be lucky to do three correctly. I guess I make up for it with my upper body strength, though. I can do chin ups and pushups all day long – well, more like a quarter of the day long – and be more efficient about it than I would with my leg strength.

My head is shaped narrowly, and since it’s more so than others, it’s pretty noticeable. Along with that, I have thick, dark eyebrows, but luckily they match the dark muddy brown of my eyes so they’re not too horribly colored. At the same time, though, my eyes appear a lighter shade of brown in direct sunlight. I don’t prefer one color over the other, especially since I think they both suite me pretty well. My hair is the same dark brown as my eyebrows and I usually keep it trimmed short, but not close to my head. It has an unkempt fluff on the top of my head and it can’t be tamed is quite unruly. I don’t bother trying to flatten it except for performances. As much as I like things to be in order and clean, my hair is the only thing I don’t have a problem with being all crazy. And lastly, down to my mouth, when I smile I have small dimples on both of my cheeks.

The torso area isn’t chiseled, but it’s not very bad, if I do say so myself. Sure, it’s not like a hardcore Career’s rock hard set of abs, but who wants to have a body feature that’s blocky like those abs? I don’t think they’re very appealing, so that’s why my abdomen is kind of ‘soft,’ as people tell me. I don’t mean that I’m fat, because I’m not; I’m just not well defined.

I have callouses all over: my knees, hands, feet, and even my elbows. Most of it is from constantly being on my hands and knees, so I don’t mean to impress you, but I can kneel on any carpet for hours on end and not get a carpet burn, or scrape, or whatever it’s called.

Because of my obsessive cleaning, I try to always keep my nails free of dirt and grit. Usually it works and I can keep all the nail tips smooth and curved. If one nail chips, I have to either grind it down so that it’s smooth or just cut it all off; it’s not because I’m girly, but because I can’t stand it being out of order and not neat.

I don’t know why, but I can’t ever get the faint scent of bleach to get off my skin.


If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the no's on their vacancy signs

I guess my quiet nature and constant irritated look puts people off a bit and they don’t want to talk to me. I don’t particularly care much for that. No one but the girl ever cared much for me, so why should I bother caring for anyone? What goes around, comes around, you know? And besides, I don’t want people yelling at me. I suppose, though, that they’ll just yell at me anyways, but while I can get away with it, I’m going to continue distancing myself from people outside the Tempus Opera House crew. While I’m not extremely close to anyone – not even Gwynn – I do see my fellow actors as friends. Now, I’m not exactly sure what the term ‘friendship’ completely entails, but I’m working on it. I try to be there for people, but I usually come off as being agitated, which I guess I am. I get defensive and irritated easily, especially when I don’t really mean to, and I guess I just don’t know how to take out my frustration in an effective manner. A lot of times, when I’m mad, I’ll either go scrub something until my fingers are raw, or I’ll play the piano.

Ever since I came to the Opera House, I found that I really, really love the piano. I don’t really know how to read music, but I know the sounds that each of the keys makes and I enjoy trying to put them all together into a melody of some sort. Sure, I’m not advanced like the pianist in the pit orchestra, but working it out is all a learning process, I guess. Whenever I’m not trying to sear my stage lines into my head in the middle of the night, I’ll sit down at the piano and just let my fingers take control. I’m no “Mozart,” as they say, but no one knows that. I only play the piano at night, when no one else is awake. Well, except Mercury, but you can’t hear the piano from the sleeping quarters or anywhere else, really. Just the theater. I haven’t told anyone that I like to play the piano, nor am I very willing to let anyone know. It’s kind of like my little secret – not one that I need to keep hidden, but one that I prefer to keep under wraps.

Cats are nice creatures and I admire their solidarity, but I don’t like them. I only dislike them because I’m allergic to them and having them up near my face makes me sneeze constantly. If I get scratched, then my eyes start to water and get itchy and euh, it’s just horribly unpleasant. I tried to avoid all the cats when I left the house to live in the streets, and it worked out fairly well. I discovered that I was allergic to cats when I was at school and someone brought in their cat for show-and-tell. I petted it and then must have rubbed my face, or something, and then I just started sneezing uncontrollably.

The reason I admire a cat’s solidarity is because I like being alone. I like not having anyone to nag on me, pester me into something, or blame me for something I didn’t do. I hate yelling, too, so my voice tends to be on the quiet side. I can have a good deal of patience with people that tolerate me, but with myself I get very easily frustrated. I’m a Debbie Downer on myself all the time, but that’s also my greatest motivator. The harshness I give myself makes me strive to do better, but it always drives me way too hard. I have to do perfect or else I’ll feel like a failure. Because I was so young when my mother started yelling at me for being worthless and stupid, I always believed her and still, to this day, I think that I’m a failure if I can’t get things exactly right – and when I say that, I mean exactly right. I’m terrified that if I screw up, then other people will see me as a failure, too. Like I’ll be walking around with “FAILURE” branded onto my forehead, or something. Everyone will know if I don’t get it right and they’ll yell at me, for all I know. I don’t want to be scolded anymore; I don’t want to be yelled at. I just want to be good enough for one person, you know? That way it won’t seem like the whole world thinking I’m worthless.

If there's no one beside you
When your soul embarks
Then I'll follow you into the dark