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Ticky Headcanon
ONE DAY, Hoshino is actually going to give me background for Ticky, and despite the fact that I have so far been pretty dead on with guessing what she is doing with him, I am fully prepared for the fact that we are going to find out Ticky had amnesia prior to joining the Noah, or perhaps didn't even actually exist, and all of my headcanon for him will be punched in the face and off a cliff.
And when that happens I will deal with it. But it's really hard to play a character for as long as I have, particularly in an amnesia game, while still skirting around his past and refusing to say anything concrete. So I have long since gone the opposite direction and just created a fairly thorough headcanon for him which I stick too pretty solidly.
I have decided to write it all down. This will be long! Also general warnings for all things because Ticky has lived a pretty unpleasant life.
27ish Years Pre-Canon - Birth - Born in Portugal, one of those babies who is just left at the door of an orphanage, so he never had any real parents or concept of it.
Infancy - 7 or 8 ish - His was not an orphanage where people came actually looking to adopt, so that was pretty rare. It was basically just a house for lots of kids run by people who were maybe not the nicest individuals in the world but minus a little bit of abuse weren't too bad. Still, it was not a good situation, and there were a lot of hungry nights, and he and other kids would hit the streets and steal and beg where they could, which subsequently lead to more abuse! He did have friends among the kids there, but he was to young to seriously bond to them and then he left.
7 or 8ish - After listening to some old hobos who hobo around stealing rides on trains or getting very menial labor work, tiny Ticky becomes ENCHANTED with this GLORIOUS LIFESTYLE of freedom and doing whatever the fuck I want. He runs away from his orphanage to pursue his dream!! And, promptly finds out that however difficult life in a fairly callous orphanage was, living on your own on the streets was a lot harder. In fact the only reason he doesn't run back is because the first thing he does is hop a train CHASING HIS DREAMS and then end up too far away to get back. He nearly starves to death several times, gets the shit beaten out of him several times, nearly freezes to death several times and is nearly sick to death several times! Not all at once but basically, constantly malnourished, exposed to the elements, disease, injury, etc.
He does however get his head in game and learn the ropes and he picks up street smarts quickly. He falls in with a group of a few other street brats and the work together on many occasions to steal money or food. He also starts learning the ropes of society and finds that manipulating the wealthy tended to go over better than simply begging and hoping for kindness. Which isn't to say that he never had any success with looking cute and pitiful, but he enjoyed the 'control' granted by playing a trick that leaves a wealthier person's wallet exposed. In that case he knows he succeeds or fails on his own merit, whereas with begging it was pretty much totally random whether he would be ignore, get some coin, or get kicked in the ribs.
Tricks largely paid off better working as a team, and as a result Ticky became very good at working with other street kids.
9ish - One trick Ticky generally tried to pull on his own was looking for the sort of men who looked for cute young boys that would follow them home for the promise of a bit of coin. Ticky WAS clever enough to pick targets who seemed nervous and unsure of themselves, thus probably not knowing how to protect themselves from kids trying to scam them! The first few times he did manage to run off with a pedo's wallet, but before long he failed and was raped rather badly for it. He did not actually entirely stop pulling this trick (and he did fail more than once, and over the years on a few occasion he relied on it more 'honestly') but after that he definitely attempted it less often.
9-10ish - After a few years surviving on the streets and sharpening his wits, Ticky decides to go back to doing his original plan, which is TRAVEL AROUND and SEE THINGS, and LIVE A FREE LIFE. He makes friends fairly easily and often travels with them. Whenever he stops somewhere for any length of time he is quite well liked by people of his level. (Which is to say, he's not popular among the middle class, but the lower class tends to be fond of him). He especially makes many friends with other street kids but it's usually short lived.
12ish - A particularly hard winter leads to one of his street brat compatriots turning on him and trying to steal all of his shit, at a time where that could very well have killed him (in less dire situations, Ticky had been stolen from and usually overlooked it). Ticky stabs his 'friend' in the ensuing and then sort of freaks out because OH GOD and runs away. Never finds out if the kid lived or not, but Ticky assumes not. Odds were seriously against him.
14ish - A frantic 'up and coming' young noblewoman is in a bit of a panic looking for men to serve at her party after a fight with the previous lot lead to them being fired. Not terribly street savvy, she sees Ticky on one of his good days (he'd gotten cleaned recently!) and recruits him and a couple of his friends to be impromptu waiters. They are groomed and put in suits that are quickly semi-tailored to fit, and it's the first time Ticky ever really looks 'pretty'. It's also the first chance Ticky get to people watch nobles closely. They are not, predictably, very great at their jobs, but Ticky probably makes out the best, and they steal some of the silverware and food before taking off at the end of the night. Good times!
15ish - Ticky falls in with the two guys who we see in his white life. Though he'd met other kids around his age and been working with them on and off his entire time on the streets, life was always a little too desperate to ever truly rely on or trust anyone else. Nothing TRULY DRAMATIC happened to seal them as bffs, but basically just good fortune and no one pulling any dick moves, sharing stories and gradually growing closer together, helping each other find work or sharing the benefits when only one could find work. Most importantly, they all shared the LET'S HOBO ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY SIDE BEING FREE AND HAPPY 8D stupid dream. Which they do! And the next two years were some of the best of Ticky's life, as they reached a medium where they could live in what was, to them, comfort and relative security. Somewhere in here Ticky actually had sex properly for the first time, and the sex several times after that.
17 - 18ish - Noah awakens 8D; Ticky has a few days of wondering why the fuck his forehead is bleeding and where are these awful memories coming from and assumes he's caught some sort of plague. Takes off from his group so he doesn't give it to them and probably to waits to die alone. Instead he gets an awful fever and sickness and horrible nightmares and Rhode cuddles him through all of it. When the fever breaks he has dark skin and a voice in his head, but unlike Wrath it isn't entirely overriding.
He DOES go a bit extra unhinged for a while, on the new information and power, and probably kills a few people almost idly... just to see if it's really that easy, but when he eventually comes out of it he's kind of bothered by how easily he did that and how much a part of him liked it. But thanks to the Noah there is also a disquiet over HAVING disquiet, and basically it is all too multilayered and big and Ticky opts to ignore it.
Ticky is taken in by the Noah, where he meets Sheril and possibly some of the other Noah, but The Earl, Sheril, and Rhode are the ones he comes to know the best because he's been officially adopted by the Camelot household.
He has a PRINCESS DIARIES montage over the next half a year or so where he is forced to learn how to dress and how to talk and what things are important to nobility and how to dance and how to flirt and blah blah blah boring noble stuff. It's kind of overwhelming! And also really crazy, and yet the undeniable sense of 'this is my family' keeps him tied to it and he never seriously considers just packing up and leaving. Also he definitely enjoys all the free delicious food.
He also learns about the world ending side of the Noah family, which he takes to with a certain lack of curiosity that would be troubling if he were around people who had any idea of what good mental health was. Part of this is because much of it is his head already, as the Noah's memories. He can ask 'Why do we kill the Innocence' but inside he already knows it's 'Because it betrayed us' even if... also not really. '-';
Mostly, he is blown away by his own power the power of everyone else in his new family, the monstrous akuma and what they are capable of, how numerous they are. And he just sort of realizes in a clinical sort of accepting way that the world is super, super fucked. And in accepting this he comes to justify it in the context of his life: humans weren't great, even if there were some humans he loved and he didn't want to die, that didn't change that humanity as a whole was full of just as much bad as good, so what was wrong about getting rid of it? If there are going to be people fighting to protect a thing, why not also people fighting to destroy it? He starts seeing the world in this white and black dichotomy that... in a way had always been there, but until he actually lived the other side of, he lacked enough context for.
Anyway, he figures out how to use his powers, slowly (he slips up randomly for embarrassing hilarious moments) and comes to be comfortable with and accepting of his family even while realizing this is basically all crazy and evil. He sets himself up to think of them as a 'necessary' evil, the other-side to a whole but fractured universe.
And, eventually, he has to actually kill himself. Or he gives into the want to kill himself? It's hard to say and Ticky does not look back on it and examine his first few kills very much. It is absolutely true that his Noah was driving him toward it more and more. He started to think about murder the way most teenage boys think about boners. Just... pretty much every human he met: gosh what would be fun about killing them, what kind of corpse would they make, that is an excellent dress to go to a casket in, etc. And at first he could also! Ignore it!
But eventually he started to want to give into it. Since the appearance of the Noah in canon is something of a surprise, I don't assume he never ran into exorcists do much as none of the exorcists that ran into Noah LIVED so they were kept a pretty solid secret. Still, it wasn't happening a whole lot because the Noah were still waiting to revive and weren't looking for the Heart in earnest at the time. But basically one way or another he did find himself in a position to kill some exorcists and finders and he did carry it out and he did enjoy it quite a bit, and afterwards he justified it to himself as hey we're in a war, hey one of my brothers would have done it, and well I already agreed to this by being here at all so it's silly to be upset now. And if I'm going to do it anyway I might as well enjoy it and not feel guilty about it because then no one wins!
And once he started down the road of justifying murder to himself, it was a gradual progression to doing it more often! He definitely become a serial killer. The first person he killed JUST FOR FUN was a guy who tried to rob him while Ticky was specifically making himself a target. But this didn't really... work, for Ticky's justification, because he has himself stolen just to survive many times. In time he came to embrace the additional awfulness of realizing that most people deserve to live and die equally, and there was little point to targeting the 'bad' or the 'good' because such concepts are so subjective.
Anyway, so basically. It was a BUSY YEAR AND A HALF for Ticky! He learned to be a lord, he gained a family, he learned to kill and enjoy it, and became a serial murder! And after a while, when he was finally finding comfort in this lifestyle, he began to really truly miss his 'white' life. Once he became comfortable enough in his new life that he wasn't worried about it suddenly disappearing, he really still wanted to go back to his friends. So he did! Probably without actually warning his new family! His friends were amazed and over joyed, they thought for sure he was dead, and he gave some awful secretive mysterious explanation about blahblah a special job. He showed them 'proof' of this with some money he'd gotten from the job (pretty much pocket money Sheril gave him) and he and his friends spent it on whores and beer and food and maybe new shoes and had a grand time =D
It did not take long for the Noah to track him down again (akuma are good for that) and Ticky was basically like. I'm not quitting or anything but I don't want to give up the pleasure of this life before I have to, so I'm going to be splitting between these two things. And while there was probably some whining from his dere family, they accepted it.
20ish-27ish - The majority of Ticky's transition happened in the year or two after his Noah awakened. From there it was basically a matter of 'sauntering vaguely downward' at a comfortable pace paved with disassociations and self-justifications. Once he had the foundation for 'this is the hand I was dealt so I might as well play it', he never seriously questioned his path. However, while he will deny it, he did at least subconsciously consider other options. The simple facts were Ticky did not HAVE many options. He never once considered that the Noah might just let him go, the memories he'd regained told him what a betrayal that would be. He lived with the Noah in his head and he knew he couldn't ignore it forever, so he didn't really try. He ultimately developed a particular mindset of learned helplessness (or rather, he'd always had a mindset of learned helplessness and it just applied here too), where he was clearly powerless to change his position in life, so he might as well take all the pleasure he could out of it. In short, he felt he had the power to choose happiness but not the power to choose his own path. So he chose what he could and convinced himself it was what he wanted anyway.
And after that point canon happens and you can see it yourself.
And when that happens I will deal with it. But it's really hard to play a character for as long as I have, particularly in an amnesia game, while still skirting around his past and refusing to say anything concrete. So I have long since gone the opposite direction and just created a fairly thorough headcanon for him which I stick too pretty solidly.
I have decided to write it all down. This will be long! Also general warnings for all things because Ticky has lived a pretty unpleasant life.
27ish Years Pre-Canon - Birth - Born in Portugal, one of those babies who is just left at the door of an orphanage, so he never had any real parents or concept of it.
Infancy - 7 or 8 ish - His was not an orphanage where people came actually looking to adopt, so that was pretty rare. It was basically just a house for lots of kids run by people who were maybe not the nicest individuals in the world but minus a little bit of abuse weren't too bad. Still, it was not a good situation, and there were a lot of hungry nights, and he and other kids would hit the streets and steal and beg where they could, which subsequently lead to more abuse! He did have friends among the kids there, but he was to young to seriously bond to them and then he left.
7 or 8ish - After listening to some old hobos who hobo around stealing rides on trains or getting very menial labor work, tiny Ticky becomes ENCHANTED with this GLORIOUS LIFESTYLE of freedom and doing whatever the fuck I want. He runs away from his orphanage to pursue his dream!! And, promptly finds out that however difficult life in a fairly callous orphanage was, living on your own on the streets was a lot harder. In fact the only reason he doesn't run back is because the first thing he does is hop a train CHASING HIS DREAMS and then end up too far away to get back. He nearly starves to death several times, gets the shit beaten out of him several times, nearly freezes to death several times and is nearly sick to death several times! Not all at once but basically, constantly malnourished, exposed to the elements, disease, injury, etc.
He does however get his head in game and learn the ropes and he picks up street smarts quickly. He falls in with a group of a few other street brats and the work together on many occasions to steal money or food. He also starts learning the ropes of society and finds that manipulating the wealthy tended to go over better than simply begging and hoping for kindness. Which isn't to say that he never had any success with looking cute and pitiful, but he enjoyed the 'control' granted by playing a trick that leaves a wealthier person's wallet exposed. In that case he knows he succeeds or fails on his own merit, whereas with begging it was pretty much totally random whether he would be ignore, get some coin, or get kicked in the ribs.
Tricks largely paid off better working as a team, and as a result Ticky became very good at working with other street kids.
9ish - One trick Ticky generally tried to pull on his own was looking for the sort of men who looked for cute young boys that would follow them home for the promise of a bit of coin. Ticky WAS clever enough to pick targets who seemed nervous and unsure of themselves, thus probably not knowing how to protect themselves from kids trying to scam them! The first few times he did manage to run off with a pedo's wallet, but before long he failed and was raped rather badly for it. He did not actually entirely stop pulling this trick (and he did fail more than once, and over the years on a few occasion he relied on it more 'honestly') but after that he definitely attempted it less often.
9-10ish - After a few years surviving on the streets and sharpening his wits, Ticky decides to go back to doing his original plan, which is TRAVEL AROUND and SEE THINGS, and LIVE A FREE LIFE. He makes friends fairly easily and often travels with them. Whenever he stops somewhere for any length of time he is quite well liked by people of his level. (Which is to say, he's not popular among the middle class, but the lower class tends to be fond of him). He especially makes many friends with other street kids but it's usually short lived.
12ish - A particularly hard winter leads to one of his street brat compatriots turning on him and trying to steal all of his shit, at a time where that could very well have killed him (in less dire situations, Ticky had been stolen from and usually overlooked it). Ticky stabs his 'friend' in the ensuing and then sort of freaks out because OH GOD and runs away. Never finds out if the kid lived or not, but Ticky assumes not. Odds were seriously against him.
14ish - A frantic 'up and coming' young noblewoman is in a bit of a panic looking for men to serve at her party after a fight with the previous lot lead to them being fired. Not terribly street savvy, she sees Ticky on one of his good days (he'd gotten cleaned recently!) and recruits him and a couple of his friends to be impromptu waiters. They are groomed and put in suits that are quickly semi-tailored to fit, and it's the first time Ticky ever really looks 'pretty'. It's also the first chance Ticky get to people watch nobles closely. They are not, predictably, very great at their jobs, but Ticky probably makes out the best, and they steal some of the silverware and food before taking off at the end of the night. Good times!
15ish - Ticky falls in with the two guys who we see in his white life. Though he'd met other kids around his age and been working with them on and off his entire time on the streets, life was always a little too desperate to ever truly rely on or trust anyone else. Nothing TRULY DRAMATIC happened to seal them as bffs, but basically just good fortune and no one pulling any dick moves, sharing stories and gradually growing closer together, helping each other find work or sharing the benefits when only one could find work. Most importantly, they all shared the LET'S HOBO ALL AROUND THE COUNTRY SIDE BEING FREE AND HAPPY 8D stupid dream. Which they do! And the next two years were some of the best of Ticky's life, as they reached a medium where they could live in what was, to them, comfort and relative security. Somewhere in here Ticky actually had sex properly for the first time, and the sex several times after that.
17 - 18ish - Noah awakens 8D; Ticky has a few days of wondering why the fuck his forehead is bleeding and where are these awful memories coming from and assumes he's caught some sort of plague. Takes off from his group so he doesn't give it to them and probably to waits to die alone. Instead he gets an awful fever and sickness and horrible nightmares and Rhode cuddles him through all of it. When the fever breaks he has dark skin and a voice in his head, but unlike Wrath it isn't entirely overriding.
He DOES go a bit extra unhinged for a while, on the new information and power, and probably kills a few people almost idly... just to see if it's really that easy, but when he eventually comes out of it he's kind of bothered by how easily he did that and how much a part of him liked it. But thanks to the Noah there is also a disquiet over HAVING disquiet, and basically it is all too multilayered and big and Ticky opts to ignore it.
Ticky is taken in by the Noah, where he meets Sheril and possibly some of the other Noah, but The Earl, Sheril, and Rhode are the ones he comes to know the best because he's been officially adopted by the Camelot household.
He has a PRINCESS DIARIES montage over the next half a year or so where he is forced to learn how to dress and how to talk and what things are important to nobility and how to dance and how to flirt and blah blah blah boring noble stuff. It's kind of overwhelming! And also really crazy, and yet the undeniable sense of 'this is my family' keeps him tied to it and he never seriously considers just packing up and leaving. Also he definitely enjoys all the free delicious food.
He also learns about the world ending side of the Noah family, which he takes to with a certain lack of curiosity that would be troubling if he were around people who had any idea of what good mental health was. Part of this is because much of it is his head already, as the Noah's memories. He can ask 'Why do we kill the Innocence' but inside he already knows it's 'Because it betrayed us' even if... also not really. '-';
Mostly, he is blown away by his own power the power of everyone else in his new family, the monstrous akuma and what they are capable of, how numerous they are. And he just sort of realizes in a clinical sort of accepting way that the world is super, super fucked. And in accepting this he comes to justify it in the context of his life: humans weren't great, even if there were some humans he loved and he didn't want to die, that didn't change that humanity as a whole was full of just as much bad as good, so what was wrong about getting rid of it? If there are going to be people fighting to protect a thing, why not also people fighting to destroy it? He starts seeing the world in this white and black dichotomy that... in a way had always been there, but until he actually lived the other side of, he lacked enough context for.
Anyway, he figures out how to use his powers, slowly (he slips up randomly for embarrassing hilarious moments) and comes to be comfortable with and accepting of his family even while realizing this is basically all crazy and evil. He sets himself up to think of them as a 'necessary' evil, the other-side to a whole but fractured universe.
And, eventually, he has to actually kill himself. Or he gives into the want to kill himself? It's hard to say and Ticky does not look back on it and examine his first few kills very much. It is absolutely true that his Noah was driving him toward it more and more. He started to think about murder the way most teenage boys think about boners. Just... pretty much every human he met: gosh what would be fun about killing them, what kind of corpse would they make, that is an excellent dress to go to a casket in, etc. And at first he could also! Ignore it!
But eventually he started to want to give into it. Since the appearance of the Noah in canon is something of a surprise, I don't assume he never ran into exorcists do much as none of the exorcists that ran into Noah LIVED so they were kept a pretty solid secret. Still, it wasn't happening a whole lot because the Noah were still waiting to revive and weren't looking for the Heart in earnest at the time. But basically one way or another he did find himself in a position to kill some exorcists and finders and he did carry it out and he did enjoy it quite a bit, and afterwards he justified it to himself as hey we're in a war, hey one of my brothers would have done it, and well I already agreed to this by being here at all so it's silly to be upset now. And if I'm going to do it anyway I might as well enjoy it and not feel guilty about it because then no one wins!
And once he started down the road of justifying murder to himself, it was a gradual progression to doing it more often! He definitely become a serial killer. The first person he killed JUST FOR FUN was a guy who tried to rob him while Ticky was specifically making himself a target. But this didn't really... work, for Ticky's justification, because he has himself stolen just to survive many times. In time he came to embrace the additional awfulness of realizing that most people deserve to live and die equally, and there was little point to targeting the 'bad' or the 'good' because such concepts are so subjective.
Anyway, so basically. It was a BUSY YEAR AND A HALF for Ticky! He learned to be a lord, he gained a family, he learned to kill and enjoy it, and became a serial murder! And after a while, when he was finally finding comfort in this lifestyle, he began to really truly miss his 'white' life. Once he became comfortable enough in his new life that he wasn't worried about it suddenly disappearing, he really still wanted to go back to his friends. So he did! Probably without actually warning his new family! His friends were amazed and over joyed, they thought for sure he was dead, and he gave some awful secretive mysterious explanation about blahblah a special job. He showed them 'proof' of this with some money he'd gotten from the job (pretty much pocket money Sheril gave him) and he and his friends spent it on whores and beer and food and maybe new shoes and had a grand time =D
It did not take long for the Noah to track him down again (akuma are good for that) and Ticky was basically like. I'm not quitting or anything but I don't want to give up the pleasure of this life before I have to, so I'm going to be splitting between these two things. And while there was probably some whining from his dere family, they accepted it.
20ish-27ish - The majority of Ticky's transition happened in the year or two after his Noah awakened. From there it was basically a matter of 'sauntering vaguely downward' at a comfortable pace paved with disassociations and self-justifications. Once he had the foundation for 'this is the hand I was dealt so I might as well play it', he never seriously questioned his path. However, while he will deny it, he did at least subconsciously consider other options. The simple facts were Ticky did not HAVE many options. He never once considered that the Noah might just let him go, the memories he'd regained told him what a betrayal that would be. He lived with the Noah in his head and he knew he couldn't ignore it forever, so he didn't really try. He ultimately developed a particular mindset of learned helplessness (or rather, he'd always had a mindset of learned helplessness and it just applied here too), where he was clearly powerless to change his position in life, so he might as well take all the pleasure he could out of it. In short, he felt he had the power to choose happiness but not the power to choose his own path. So he chose what he could and convinced himself it was what he wanted anyway.
And after that point canon happens and you can see it yourself.