Madison Dewitt D3 {FIN}

odair

It is hard to see much of his face most of the time as his nose is almost always between the covers of a book. Over the top of it his hazel eyes can be seen occasionally darting up to analyze and observe his surroundings before flicking back down and moving from left to right like a typewriter as he absorbs or is absorbed by the material, framed by the thick wire rimmed glasses that sit perched on his nose like a double lensed magnifying glass. Above that, his brows are generally furrowed in deep concentration, the shade of those hairs matching the honey brown coif on the top of his head. It is always smoothed back to give him a cultured look, complete with enough hair product to make it well worth his while to steer clear of open flames, lest his head burst into one itself. When the book is finally put down, one can see his strong nose and the constant half smile that graces his lips when he is ruminating on important matters.

Maddy’s voice is soft but deep, the words sliding forth from his mouth are airy, yet heavy enough that they are not whisked away by the wind. Of all the Dewitts, he is likely the best dressed, always making sure to look the part of a businessman, even if that is not how he really spends his days. It is common to see him wearing a tailored suit, complete with tie and freshly shined shoes, not a wrinkle to be found in his entire ensemble. The manicured hands that grip his reading material are softer still, not having had to perform any type of hard labor in his seventeen years. They are unblemished, without callus, just like the rest of his body; as starched and pale as the pages he is almost never seen without.

Madison has a voracious appetite for words in any form; his main drive is to learn and then file everything away in the caverns of his mind. Fiction, literature, strategy, instruction manuals,cookbooks, anything he can get his hands on and it shows in his speech. Once someone has gotten him going on a subject it is hard to get him to stop talking about it; he lacks tact in the sense that he is never sure when a conversation should end. It is common to hear him prattle through several definitions for whatever word someone else’s sentence ends with for no apparent reason other than that it helps him to think. His naturally inquisitive nature has gotten him into trouble on several occasions; however, he doesn’t mean to be nosy, he really just wants to help. It’s just that too often he’ll stick his nose where it wasn’t wanted. For whatever reason, he has a very clinical and critical but not cynical view of the world. Some would call him detached.

But he is not without emotion, it is just difficult for him to show it without coming off as a smart aleck. Actual, physical human contact is foreign to him as it is one of the few things that should be easy in practice but is not in application. He finds it frustrating that such things cannot be learned from an instruction manual. Because of this, outside his family, Madison has a tendency to carry himself in a stand-offish demeanor while managing to be awkward about the more simple things in life. When placed into a situation that he finds unbearably uncomfortable his normally straight forward mind will desert him, ripping his tongue all over itself as his carefully uttered words become haphazardly stuttered sentences.

It is hard for him to believe that anyone can do wrong; there must be a motive to everything. A rational explanation for every action and reaction. He knows that the capacity for good exists on everyone, though all utilize that trait to varying degrees. It is part of the reason he is so vocal about finding diplomatic solutions. Violence never solved any problem, nor create anything other than to give people the reasons they need to perpetrate further acts of harm. Some would call this naivety. He prefers to call it his own unique sense of practicality; a way to use speech in a different fashion since in the end it is the only and greatest weapon that he has, or would ever choose to use. The truth is he’d rather get lost in his books than in anything else.

The third Dewitt child and the second son under Lux and Luce, Madison has always found himself in the middle of things, forced to straddle the line as one half of the middle child alongside his adopted sister Emilie; with whom he most often comes to blows with. It was an unremarkable childhood largely spent reading in a nook of the Dewitt household. Maddy was always a bright child and largely taught himself how to read at the age of four, happy to be left to his own devices when his siblings were busy. Emilie he always viewed as a sort of bully who cared little for academic pursuits and was going to break her neck if she didn’t watch out. As he grew older, he became accustomed to his siblings coming to him for advice, whether it be for schoolwork, tiffs with friends, recipes or anything else that they had a question for, treating him as a type of dictionary, thesaurus, encyclopedia and almanac. All of which he’s read several times over the years.

That is, until the day where his father was discovered lying dead in a pool of blood. Madison did not mourn; not outwardly, and not in any manner that would allow his siblings to see his grief. Instead, he threw himself into his books with greater fervor, seeking an escape from the harshness of reality, growing distant while remaining amiable. When the Sullivan patriarch was murdered shortly thereafter, his inquisitive nature got the best of him and he put his intuition to work, studying everything surrounding the families business and trying to find a common denominator. Clearly an outside party was desperate to splinter their combined empire and pick up the pieces by pitting the Dewitts and the Sullivans against each other. Countless hours within sleepless nights were spent trying to make everything fit together in a way that made sense, the only thing to show that he was still awake being the dim lamplight shining from under his bedroom door. He refused to believe the peacekeepers explanation of these events as unconnected and entirely random. Far too many detective novels had been dog eared for that to make any sense.

But when the pieces finally lined up, he wished he had never tried to see the big picture in the first place. The corkboard on his bedroom wall with the dozens of push pins and lines of string connecting times, places, conversations and people pointed to one person. And not the killer of his father no; all the signs pointed to his sister Luce being the one who killed -- Sullivan. Motivation? Some form of revenge. He gave up on amateur detective work after that, believing his findings to have come to a dead end. If -- was killed out of revenge, then none of his data could prove who killed his own father. In the months following these harrowing turns of events, he has come to believe that life is a series of choices that determine where we stand, when we stand and when we fall. It also decides who will pick us up again, or if we can no longer rise. Who will win, and who will lose.

There is no middle ground.

There are no shades of grey.

Not here. Not for them.

Dewitt. | Sullivan.

If only the lines were not drawn in such sharp relief.