100 Things about Cary Vaughn-Blair

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

[pretty header graphic ASAP; wanted to post this for reading before a call came in!]

1. His full name is Cary Naomhán Vaughn-Blair.
2. He spells his middle name 'Niven' whenever he can get away with it, so no one mispronounces it.
3. He and his brother, Allan, were both named for Cary Grant. (Grant is Allan's middle name.)
4. Cary's mother, Christabella Vaughn, is still living in England, though they rarely speak.
5. That's because they're not very close, which is strange seeing as how Cary is Christabella's only remaining child.
6. His brother Allan and sister Josephine both died in early adulthood, Josephine leaving behind a little girl named Nicole.
7. Cary and Nicole basically make up a two-person family these days.
8. Nobody really calls him Cary except Isabella. He usually goes by Vaughn or VB.
9. They call him Cookie at the pub.
10. The funny thing about family is that despite the fact his living relatives only amount to three: Nicole, himself and his ailing father Cormag, Vaughn has more of a family within the place he lives, 93 Gloucester Road. He considers everyone who lives there, including the part-timers from America, his family. (That'd be Ryan Bertrand, Bianca Wernher, Derek Wernher, Ezra Thacker, Carlton and Antonia Lindale, Elaine Brandt, Mel Davenport, Dorothea Jordan and Emily Bertrand, plus Ethan, Alaric and Gremlin.)
11. They are a very relationship-confused little family. But they're a family of the soul, and that's the most important thing.
12. Isabella is, in his heart and the mind of the others, too, moving to become a part of that family if only she'll let them make her one.
13. He's afraid she never will.
14. Ryan and Bianca know him as well as he knows himself, and he knows them just as well, too. This is sometimes very dangerous.
15. He goes to the Orkneys to visit his aging father once a year. Sometimes Nicole comes with him. Once, Ryan did too, and they got along pretty well.
16. Vaughn loves crowds, which is funny considering he spent his very early years on an island with a population of approximately 70 people.
17. He's an interrogator by nature, and thus has an incredibly naturally nosy personality. He wants to know everything you're hiding, and yes, he does have the training to weasel it out of you. He's happy to use it.
18. If he were ever to get a university degree, it would be in kinesics. But he probably never will, because school isn't quite his thing.
19. Sometimes he can come off as having a very flat affect, but that's a shield. Get him somewhere where he feels safe and he's an extremely emotional person.
20. But his temper isn't as bad as Ryan's.
21. He grieves intensely and quietly for a long time. Only thanks to plot developments in 2007 has he managed to stop grieving for his sister, who died in 1996. He's still grieving for his brother. He's still dealing with Isabella's sudden death, and she's not dead anymore.
22. Cary himself almost died on his own birthday – he was shot in the femoral artery on May 2, 2008, his forty-second birthday. This should have scarred him, and while it had a little bit of an effect, he was really more grateful that it fixed his luck in love when Iz came back to him after hearing about the incident through Alice.
23. He still doesn't believe he's done enough to thank Alice for that.
24. Without Iz there, his healing would likely have taken longer ... and seeing as how he was in hospital until mid-June, that would have been a very long time.
25. Vaughn's had about three lovers he actually still cares about – Bianca, Valentine and obviously Isabella, who he doesn't plan on letting go of anytime soon. He also still adores Gwen, the woman he loved and never did anything with (despite the fact it was mutual). He only has romantic interest in the one anymore, though. It's only Iz for him.
26. He tries to pretend Aludrah, the worst of his bad relationship choices, didn't exist.
27. I'm not really sure he's ever made a good relationship choice. He's had good relationships, and still has a good relationship, but every single one was entered into on a very sketchy or uncertain basis. And they've almost all been too young for him.
28. No, really. Bianca was a law student and much younger. Gwen was his partner's wife, and he was still married to Bianca at the time. Valentine was the relative of a victim. Aludrah was trying to assassinate him. That makes the hookup with Isabella, who he thought was about 21 years old and a relative of a friend's, the sanest of them, and as a cop, even that isn't all that smart. The relationship isn't a problem in itself; the choice to enter into it based on the information he had probably was.
29. His favorite band is The Police, which oddly has nothing to do with the fact that he is one of them, only lowercase (the police).
30. Specifically, his favorite song is "It's Alright For You," despite the grammatical incorrectness of the title.
31. He always wanted to be a detective. His sister thought detectives weren't real, his mother though detectives were shameful, and his father and brother just thought it was funny.
32. The Orkney accent is still there, but he can turn it off at will and usually has it off. Just ask, though, and he'll sound as unintelligible as you'd like him to (he'll always be able to undstand himself, after all).
33. Despite that, it always comes back when he's drunk. Full force.
34. It makes him laugh like nothing else when Nicole tries to do the accent, though. She can sound Glaswegian quite easily, but North Ronaldsay is a bit distant from her voice.
35. Sometimes Bianca tries to do it, though, and that's even funnier since she's technically Egyptian, and sounds Egyptian.
36. Despite himself, Cary's actually very fond of Egypt, and would likely keep spending time there even if he stopped ever talking to Bianca or her family.
37. Which he can't imagine doing, unless there's some huge falling-out in the future. Which is of course possible. He hopes not.
38. He thinks he's a little fucked up for still being friends with his ex-wife, and on the other hand it's impossible to imagine not being friends with her. They're better as friends.
39. He bleached his hair in secondary school.
40. And not just bleach from dark brown to bleached orange. Bleach from bleached orange to platinum blonde -- the kind of painful platinum blonde that would be obviously fake even if he had eyed his eyebrows and eyelashes.
41. Which he didn't do, anyway. Pictures exist, but he tries not to ever show them to anyone.
42. It was a good thing his mother already disapproved of a lot of the things he did by then, because if she hadn't been prepared all the fighting over his hair might've gotten him disowned.
43. He genuinely does not have a favorite food. Can't think of a thing. Ask him this question and you will get a dumb blank look.
44. But that's because he doesn't consider frozen yogurt, his hands-down all-time favorite thing to eat, to be a food. It's a dessert.
45. Sometimes, Cary still wants to keep sheep. Except now he wants to keep them in the house, with the dogs.
46. He drives a police-issue Chrysler Sebring that is on its last legs about equal with Ryan's LeBaron.
47. And is actually frightened of having a different car. Even if he'd rather something more reliable than an American car.
48. While he can ride a motorcycle just fine, he hasn't got a license and doesn't want one. Their team has enough biker tough guys already.
49. If you were to ask him, Ryan is enough biker tough guy for six teams. If you were to ask Ryan, Cary's a coward.
50. He's never found it odd that he lives with his partner, and is confused by people who do. They're obviously very close and obviously just friends. And people in the force who are more than just friends, which they're not supposed to be ... they get away with living together!
51. The idea that people might think he and Ryan are or were together never occurred to either of them; largely due to the fact they feel nobody in the force is an idiot and can tell. (He would be appalled if he knew about partner slash in crime show fandoms. Appalled.)
52. He overworks himself often and by standard. Taking too many hours and too many cases is just what he does, and what he has done as long as he can remember.
53. There's a benefit to that – whenever not right in the midst of a case, he's always granted time off. A good thing, when you've got a madcap family like his and a desire to be with his girlfriend like his.
54. Him being at work has not stopped him from being with her, though. Not in this current relationship. And the funny thing is, while he'd never gone in for even semi-public sex before, not only does it not bother him with her, he enjoys it.
55. As for sex while on duty? He'd never done it before. Not once. Now he does it all the time.
56. In many exciting ways. He's not a kinky person but he does like it rough and he does like to tease. Especially considering how she reacts to it.
57. When it comes to verbal teasing, though, Isabella always surpasses him, knowing just what dirty thing to say at the exact wrong time for him to be able to focus on other things – you'd think this would cut down on the phone sex in the office, but it doesn't.
58. On the subject of sex, he lost his virginity in a train bathroom.
59. On the subject of trains, he's always found them calming. This is most likely due to the fact he spent a very large part of his life on thirteen-hour train rides, going from mother's home to father's home and back and forth and back and forth.
60. The train was where he really bonded with his siblings.
61. Back on the subject of his virginity, because I'm sure that's what everyone's still wondering about: he was sixteen, it was April break, she was his girlfriend from Calderstones and it had in fact been pretty much planned.
62. He still talks to her, every now and then, because she's also with the police. Coincidentally.
63. In fact, at this point, most of his friends are with the police, though that's largely due to the fact he rarely socializes out of cop bars and work events more than anything else. He likes his co-workers, he likes the friends he's made through them.
64. It creeped him right the fuck out when he found out that one of his Blackburn "missing persons" was, in fact, actually Aingeal Duncan.
65. The entire Blackburn thing freaks him right the fuck out. He knew there was something weird about Reinhart's methods of hypnosis; he didn't really think it could possibly work that way, he knew that people shouldn't ever do anything they wouldn't normally do, that the world wasn't Curse of the Jade Scorpion ... but he really wasn't expecting the supernatural influence.
66. If Burton didn't exist he'd probably be able to handle it.
67. Well, Burton and the coincidences. Dealing with the whole thing long-term has turned Cary's de-facto job into being the one who says, "This is ridiculous. We have to counter ridiculousness with ridiculousness; how about trying [thing]?"
68. When everyone else rallies together to try [thing], he can never quite believe it.
69. He's come to truly loathe coincidences, and isn't actually willing to believe that anything really is coincidental anymore.
70. This is furthered by the fact that usually, it does turn out to be a coincidence, whatever it is ... leading him to believing that coincidences are just defying logic in general, and possibly that all coincidences are preplanned.
71. Thankfully he doesn't really believe that.
72. Birthdays are important to him. So are traditions.
73. This is why he tends to try to recreate important moments; every September 13 he gives Bianca flowers in some extremely strange way. For every one of Nicole's birthdays they go horseback riding through the streets of Westminster, logic be damned.
74. There was unfortunately never a tradition for Ryan's birthday, which bothered him; Ezra has now provided one. It further bothers him there's no tradition for Isabella's birthday. But, he insists, sometime when the summer is not completely insane, there will be.
75. ... He says 'um' a lot. Enough for it to be a catchphrase. I can't believe myself that this is #75.
76. Cary also can't believe he's grown himself a catchphrase.
77. His shoe size is 11.
78. People down at the station are keeping a tally of how many times he's gotten talked to by Cress for his sexual activities while on duty. They've also got a betting pool on how long it takes before his new bird gets him suspended; the best part is that Cress thinks the whole thing is grand fun and will hold out as long as he can before any kind of disciplinary action.
79. Cary doesn't know about any of that, except a little bit about the tally. It's a useful tally to have for his own records, so he keeps doing it.
80. He's become fonder and fonder of tuna salad over the years, in part because there's always some of it available, anywhere he goes with Ryan.
81 . His favorite film is The Italian Job. No, the one that came out in 1969.
82. He refused to even see the remake, but likes the soundtrack just fine.
83. Despite it, he still never expected to be in a real car chase. He's now been in more real car chases than he thinks any one person should ever be in.
84. He likes them, though.
85. That might be why most of the time he sees Iz's driving as an adventure, instead of something to fear for his life with.
86. Once upon a time, he made jokes with her about crashing. Now he can't. He's afraid she might do it again, or might be hurt by what he says.
87. He truly hates the rain.
88. Except when he needs to take long walks to think, something he used to do a lot more before he got shot.
89. Now he frequently takes long drives to think; the drives come with better music.
90. He's only actually been sanctioned for on-duty activity once, and it was for getting into a verbal war involving way, way too much swearing on the radio.
91. His favorite possession that doesn't have some kind of familial sentimental value is easily his king-size High Country bed, which looks like this. That isn't what his bedroom looks like, though.
92. He's starting to get more and more afraid of Nicole growing up and starting to do things like spend time around boys, and is extremely grateful that between Isabella, Antonia and Bianca, she's got strong female influences in her life.
93. Right now his biggest fear in life is that he's going to make some mistake that causes this relationship to screw up too; Isabella is as important to him as job and family, now, and he can't let himself lose her. She didn't want her to love him a year ago; why did that change, and how long will it last?
94. He still actively denies wanting a family of his own, or at least a wife again; he actively denies it so much he doesn't even realize it.
95. Part of him still does want to marry her someday. A small part of him expects he has to, if he loves her so much.
96. He'll never ask. (I might eat my words someday; we know that happens in this universe. But I'm pretty sure he'll never ask.) He wouldn't ever try to tie her down, as he understands that's not what she wants or needs, and he is truly happy with what he has.
97. If he can get away with going around shirtless, he will.
98. The idea of using cuffs during sex disturbs him, because it reminds him too much of police who would rape suspects. It's a visceral disgust that he tries very hard to shake very frequently. (He is happy to pin people with his hands, though.)
99. As far as he's concerned Nicole will always be a virgin, even if she's telling him about the amazing orgy she was in the night before – men can't touch her, not after what happened with her mother. Not, of course, that he'll actually fight boys off; he'll let her try. But he doesn't want to know about it.
100. His favorite drink is a cocktail known as a Blue Goose.

Comments

[rimestock.livejournal.com]

Comments!

This is ... surprisingly hard to read, actually, in monotype. :(

#45 made me giggle hysterically at the mental image.

If not for #2, I would definitely have gotten #1 wrong!

#4 and #10 contradict!

#15 amuses me, and #21 makes me want to give him a really big hug. Or possibly several 100s.

re: #26... yeeeeeah.

re: #28, oh Cary, you idiot. ♥

#39-#42 – AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

#49 is also v. lol-worthy.

#61 is also also pretty ridiculously hysterical. :D

I can't believe it's #75 either!

#s78 & 79 are amazing.

Considering #84, what did he think of Lindsey's driving?

#88-89 – why didn't he just wear headphones? :(

I wish I could read #90.

#91 is a very nice bed!

#98 makes me want to give him a hug, too.

And #99 was definitely the best choice for cut tag out there. :D

[nepheliad.livejournal.com]

#4 and #10 are just lazy writing; he's completely estranged from his mother and doesn't count her as family.

[chimbleysweep]

So I'm thinking that she shouldn't show Nicole the photos Elijah took in Chicago?

Whatevs, she's so doing it anyway.

It always surprises me how much he really probably doesn't know about her. She needs a FAQ glued to her forehead.

Also, I wish I could reassure him about her, but I'd need to play with her constantly to get her to evolve. JUST REMEMBER, IN HER WORLD ANDY ONLY DIED A YEAR AGO. And the world is awfully different. She won't leave him, but things like #94 ARE THINGS SHE KIIIND OF ASSUMES. I mean, how could he not want a baby and a marriage and something nice and rounded and sane.

She is the way she is only because she wants him to be happy with someone who can make him completely happy, and not just sexually satisfied :|||

And she dares him to use #17 to get any information out of her.

Such as the l word.

Ummm.

It's also scary how he shares two big factors with her: the island thing and the mother thing.

She's going to make it a goal to get him suspended, you realize. Until then, she's apparently failing in her mischievous duties.