Brooke Behrer

This character is dedicated to Brett Auman. I wish I could reach beyond death to make it right.

Trigger warning: references to mental/emotional abuse. The worst of Brooke's backstory isn't here, but there is some discussion of why she is a Reaper, and the things she thinks are worth killing for.

*"It doesn't matter. You wouldn't listen to me anyway. People like you never do. Even when I'm killing you, you still won't listen to me. So when I do it, it won't be to make you listen to me. I'll be doing it so that people like me won't have to listen to you."*

**Threshold:** The Silent

**Archetype:** Reaper

**Keys:** Cold Wind and Stillness

**Favored Manifestation:** Rage

**Geist:** the Whiskey Lullaby

**Appearance:** Brooke just seems too *small* to be housing anything as powerful as a geist. It's not that she's so very short - she's 5'4" - and it's not that she's so very thin - 125-130 lbs precisely would satisfy any doctor. Rather, it's in the impression - or utter lack of one - that she makes on meeting her. Her voice is soft, her clothing simple, her features unremarkable, and her posture unassuming. Nineteen is too young to take seriously, but too old to be cute. Her blunted affect among other Sin-Eaters becomes pathologically flat in the social situations one her age should thrive in - a tad unsettling, but easily forgotten. She simply lives up to her Threshold name too well to be dangerous. But then, they never do suspect the quiet ones, do they?

[*The following is IC knowledge for any observant characters who take the time and effort to watch for such things, or who are insistent enough to pry the information out. It is OOC knowledge for anyone who waits for her to volunteer it. She won't.*]

Fellow Sin-Eaters who first encounter her on the job may mistake Brooke Behrer for an Advocate. She seems to have a natural affinity for ghosts who died feeling neglected. Occasionally, what a ghost needs more than anything else is to be *seen*, to know that someone has heard them, that someone understands, that he is not alone. Her face seems to soften ever so slightly, as she patiently acknowledges a ghost's need. She never becomes demonstrative, but that just prevents her compassion for being mistaken for pity. Unassuming as she is, even the newest ghosts seldom see anything in her to be frightened about.

Brooke's gentleness is likely the result of physical weakness. There is a deliberate grace in her movements, but such deliberation seems to suggest frailty, as one but lately recovered from a long illness, perhaps. Certainly she has yet to demonstrate any aptitude with weapons, firearms, or bare-fisted combat. Even her geist seems to spend most of its time sunk in a sodden, semi-conscious stupor. Who could be frightened by a stained and tattered housecoat, or a chest and chin glistening with acrid phantom spirits? There just doesn't seem to be anything dangerous about Brooke and the Whiskey Lullaby. Surely, even Rage is beyond the reach of so passionless a mouse - it is, after all, the provenance of those with Strength.

You'd be wrong. Deadly wrong. Her body may be weak, but Brooke's will is strong. Her Bargain was a revelation in more ways than one. Those deaths look innocent, don't they? Unmanaged chronic conditions, accidents and overdoses and suicides. But someone had to teach those people that they were worthless. Someone taught them they had nothing to live for, nothing to lose. Someone administered poison word by venomous word, until the victim finally reached a fatal dose. These dead were murdered.

That 16 year old male who hung himself in the garage? Tired of being called fag, and afraid of what it would mean if they were right. That 15 year old girl who ate the business end of her father's service revolver? First she was too ugly to have sex, then she was a slut because she did. The housewife who OD'd on Valium and vodka? Sole caregiver for a controlling, ailing mother who always told her she'd come to a bad end, that the miscarriage was her fault, that she deserved what her husband gave her. The hyperglycemic dead of diabetes complications at 35? It's not like he had any friends to miss him. The underage drunk driver who hit a telephone pole at 70 mph? A spaz with ADHD, too stupid to have a chance at a decent job and a decent life anyway.

In the First World, you're more likely to starve for love than food. The Silent know that that unassuaged hunger for human affection can be deadly, and hard words can kill. Sometimes the world is cruel, but when the cruelty of chance becomes the brutality of human evil, it makes small difference whether that brutality is expressed with words or fists. When such an abuser has killed before, and is in a position to do so again...well, any Reaper will agree that there are some people the world is better off without.

The Whiskey Lullaby is also not as harmless as she first appears. Long before it lulls the body to sleep, alcohol has sedated inhibitions and conscience, after all. The caustic spirits and slurred speech all too often bespeak a thwarted rage. Brooke either doesn't know or won't say, but the geist's appearance suggests Lullaby died trying to drown her emptiness, the long slow poisoning of one who died bitter, hating the world and herself. She sometimes lashes out, expressing indiscriminate hatred to spare - enough to pass for Torn, if one didn't know her. If Brooke is the weapon the Lullaby wields, she is also the mechanism that gives purpose and direction to that hatred. Brooke holds her caged within her own hollow hunger, containing dissolution with resolution until she finds a suitable target for the wrath of both.

The Whiskey Lullaby's keystone is a battered flask, always filled with cheap whiskey. Brooke always retrieves it from Twilight by reaching into a pocket, and returns it the same way. Using the keystone to aid activation of a Manifestation always seems to mean taking a nip. Brooke seldom expresses emotion more clearly than such moments, as she shudders and her lips twist at the taste. The public use of alcohol poses other risks as she is underage, and it wouldn't take many such nips to intoxicate one so physically frail. Even so, its use is ubiquitous - so much so that it seems Brooke may not yet realize the flask isn't actually required.

If the Whiskey Lullaby has tried to tempt Brooke to other forms of indulgence, she apparently has yet to succeed. Other than the circumstances above, Brooke doesn't drink. Nor does she take any other from of recreational drug, not even tobacco. Nor does she dance, listen to loud music,or eat anything other than a utilitarian balanced diet. She neither dates nor has casual sex, and is likely to assume any invitation to either is extended in mockery (given her withdrawn personality,she'd probably be right.) She doesn't seem to have any objection to anyone else enjoying such things, but at any given Flesh Fair, she's most likely to be found in a corner, reading the latest dissertation on ancient Mesopotamian funerary practices.

Brooke is enrolled as a freshman at Penn State, officially undeclared, but with an expressed interest in mortuary science. She lives in the dorms, and if it can't be bought with Lion Cash, she probably can't afford it. Her roommate is a bubbly thing, a natural social butterfly who can't begin to confront Brooke's strangeness. So she doesn't even try. Increasingly she spends nights away from their room, which frees Brooke to work on her vanitas-in-progress (a scrapbook of obituaries and leavings of Silent deaths) and to leave out her simple *ofrendas* of food in peace.

**Sin-Eaters Soundtrack:**

**Torn** - Tanya Tucker, *Blood Red and Going Down*; Garth Brooks, *Beaches of Cheyenne*; Confederate Railroad, *When You Leave That Way (You Can Never Go Back);* Ray Charles and Willie Nelson, *Seven Spanish Angels;* Marty Robbins, *El Paso*

* Leave it to Country and Western music to make cowboy violence poignant: *Angels* and *El Paso* are classics, and well worth a listen. *Cheyenne*is a straight-up ghost story, and *Leave That Way* is actually sung by the ghost, a wonderful depiction of how a person defined and ended by violence can still develop emotional depth.

**Silent** - Brad Paisley and Allison Krauss, *Whiskey* *Lullaby*; George Jones, *He Stopped Loving Her Today;* Shenandoah or Allison Krauss*, Ghost in this House*

* Is anyone surprised that Country music songs about death by deprivation are usually about people deprived of love? Is anyone surprised that my geist's name is stolen from a Country song? No? Alrighty then. Moving on.

**Prey** - Chely Wright, *The River*; Marty Robbins, *Prairie Fire* and *Cool Water;* Gordon Lightfoot, *Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald*

* *Fitzgerald* may be a classic, but I like *The River* for the singer's struggles with the senseless of "natural" deaths.

**Stricken** - Rhonda Vincent, *I Sang Dixie*; George Jones, *Wild Irish Rose;* Diana Williams, *Teddy Bear's Last Ride;*

* *Dixie* is about death by alcohol (another shocker!) but despite the name, *Wild Irish Rose* is not. Nor is it really about freezing. Instead, it is untreated mental illness as the result of Vietnam war trauma that slowly destroys the vet.

**Forgotten** - Marty Robbins, *Old Red;* various*, Wreck of the Old 97;* Johnny Cash, *Casey Jones* and *The Legend of John Henry's Hammer;* Gary Allen,*Don't Tell Mama*

* Yes, I've been listening to Marty Robbins. What can I say? A lot of people die in those old cowboy ballads. Odd that so many of the songs about the "Forgotten" are historical/pseudohistorical in nature. Chance deaths, but memorable stories.

**Special Mention** - The Highwaymen, *The Highwayman*

* In order: Torn, Prey, Forgotten, one cause unknown, (but probably Silent or Stricken, since he seems to know it's coming.)