neverreallyalone | (no subject)

There’s a wiki page, but there’s not a hell of a lot there yet, so in the meantime here are the broad strokes as we know them so far (CW for drug addiction):

Luke was born 90 seconds before Nell, and is half of the pair of the youngest of the Crain siblings. He and Nell were six when the hauntings at Hill House took place, and while he was too young to remember much about his mother, that’s not to say his time there, no matter how brief, didn’t scar plenty.

Luke was always something of an imaginative child. He loved to draw, and tell stories, but because of his imaginative nature he was also generally slow to be believed. When he made a new friend at the house, Abigail, none of his siblings really believed she existed. Nobody except Nell, anyway, but then she always believed him when the others didn’t. It was a twin thing; she always seemed to know what he was feeling or thinking, and he the same with her. When he ended up stuck in the basement, nobody believed him until they saw it for themselves. When he saw monsters in the dark, nobody believed him, at least not until they started bothering everyone else too.

It’s something of a character trait, a Cassandra complex, of a sort, that has over time steadily chipped away at him. He had an overactive imagination to start, and tended to be sensitive and nervous in constitution, only really brave when Nell was right there with him, so most of what he saw was dismissed as a child afraid of the dark until it got to be too much for anyone else to ignore. As he grew older, the events lingered instead of fading. The ghosts followed him, and whether they were real or only a lingering after-image of the horrors he’d lived through didn’t really matter. He turned to drugs to block it all out regardless and never really moved past it, halted in a state of perpetual arrested development, unable to move forward. A teenager’s rebellion grew into full-fledged addiction, into petty theft and lies and desperation, into rehab after rehab without anything ever really sticking, at least until he’d driven away everyone else except for Nell.

It was a last ditch effort to get clean that finally turned it around. A trip in the car to the facility with Nell and her plea to make it stick this time. To ‘bring my brother back’. He stuck to it, for 90 days. Kept to it even after his world came crashing down around him, woke him up in the middle of the night with the feeling of being strangled when everything was set into motion.