terry / d2 / cb {fin}

T e r r e n c e
P e n h a l l o w

Big boys didn't cry,
and weapons didn't weep.

They didn't wear band-aids either; scabbed skin, open wounds, and ribcage exposed to decay — they endure. Wearing armor for skin, bearing fangs in lieu of teeth, Terrence was taught to never wear his heart on the sleeve because there was always harm in exposure and catharsis. Always a sense of overlying danger in 'em, or a buried scandal, coiled, waiting to bite.

A distant uncle got devoured by infidelity, plundered the trust of a partner, took his own life as a tool of compensation. The crook-nosed aunt, who would begin to slur out incoherence two minutes in a family gala like clockwork, had a drunken fit with a peacekeeper two years ago, was detained and she's yet to leave her compounds since, growing spider-nests, carrying decay.

That was why the Penhallows ruled out romance and intoxication all together — because of the downfalls and a general sense of risk, of everything breaking apart at the seams, of a dynasty fragmentizing upon itself.

Once Terry meandered into the seventeens, Caesar Penhallow summoned him up to his mahoganied office. And, with a lingering scent of age-old Scotch in breath, his father set a life sentence upon him, one he couldn't escape from as it was in an inevitable future.

“You are to marry someone, a girl from a pristine background, all elegance and no complexities, get it?”

Ingrid Penhallow, leaned against her husband's chair, staged complete oblivion to the conversation, as if she was on another planet. This was their dynamic : she weaved the strategies, he carried out the deeds. They were each other's missing pieces in a macabre jigsaw.

No objections were to be verbalized; he was to make a bow and take his leave and he did resignedly.

There was always a routine awaiting him at the breakage of dawn. Breakfast comes first: a bacon grin, feathery eggs, and carbs and carbs and carbs — followed spontaneously by career training, then a gentleman's class on principals and other heaps of nonsense. The day concluded after that and dinner, back to bed, retrace yesterday's tracks.

By now, he despised the cyclic,
and lusted after the unknowns.