Olbrecht, Benjamin

Face Claim: Sal Fisher // Sally Face

APPEARANCE

Benjamin stands at 5'6" on a good day, his entire form almost worryingly skinny even for his height. He weights only a little over 115lbs. His hair, once a placid and cool blonde like the rest of his family, has since been dyed a brilliant shade of blue in an almost rebellious act against the traditional dark strands one might actually expect him to have. His entire body is boney, limbs and joints jutting out and ribs sticking to his pale, scared skin despite being hidden underneath baggy clothes and thick fabrics for the most part. When he's not holding a guitar, his fingers are fiddling with various points of his body. Mostly his hair. 

His face is a mess, scarred and disfigured on the right side to the point of near grotesqueness. His right eye is fake, a glass substitute given to him by a doctor's office long ago. To hide the sensitive scar tissue and the looks he has become so wary of, he wears a mask over his entire face. A prosthetic if you will, a face to replace the face lost in an accident so long ago. It's a part of him now, bathed in white and salmon silicone as to prevent infection as it presses to his skin. His eyes are as blue as his hair, part of the reason he chose its color, and he almost always has his nails painted black. Piercings rest in his ears, gotten with his brother when his mother and father weren't home and they had the equipment for it. 

He dresses with little care for presentation. He doubts anyone is looking at him anyways. 

PERSONALITY

Sensitive, observant, and quiet make up the majority of Benjamin's personality. Despite his intense appearance, he has little presence in himself and prefers the shadows of situations over the light. He's a wallflower by nature, unsure of how to interact with others in a way society might deem 'proper' but doesn't mind making new friends when the bond meshes well enough. He has high empathy towards people, often experiencing their emotions as his own to a terrifying degree. His sensitivity tends to make him a pushover, however, and he would rather die than raise a hand against anyone who might want a fight. He treads lightly where he can, often getting his movements mistaken for someone who is hiding something. In reality, he is just incredibly offhand and vague when it comes to his own personal motives and movements.

Benjamin often suffers from PTSD-induced hallucinations and tends to offer odd habits or phrases to people without realizing it in an effort to 'test' if they are real or not. Though most are grotesque and of his family, it won't stop Benji from taking someone's picture at random (rudely without asking) or reaching out to touch them out of terror that they might be something in his mind. He doesn't always apologize right after, and tends to avoid the subject if that person does want an apology. He's not fully socialized or understanding of social cues and misses many of them, often getting himself in trouble due to being too tactless, too bothersome, or too nosy in situations he likely shouldn't be in. 

He likes to insert himself into other's lives in an effort to be a force of good for them, which causes sever bouts of depression and paranoia when the person of his interest states that they don't want him around or that he is bothering them. He can come off as a bit of a creep at times, but, his heart is in the right place. He's trying his best. 

HISTORY

Born in Washington State, Benjamin was the second son in his family of estranged folks who preferred the company of the forest to the people the far-away feeling city of Seattle. His parents were the local morticians, in charge of the town’s only graveyard and subsequently the funeral house as well. His house was located next to that funeral home, its massive brick walls feeling more like prison bars than household structure in the days of his youth. Many spoke of the house as haunted. Ghosts and ghouls and the demons of those buried around the area were said to rise from the ground at night and watch them as they slept. It resulted in the Olbrecht family being treated as outcasts. As a far away myth. 

It worked well for Benjamin's father, who used the grounds and outlined forest of his beloved cemetery to grow and raise marijuana plants for buds and hemp alike, selling them to eager distilleries who would turn a blind eye to his lack of grower's license and groups of people who happened to pass by. Grieving family members even came to procure some of his crop in their moments of vulnerability, making them a chunk of money on the side. 

From a young age, Benjamin was taught not to be afraid or unsure of dead bodies surrounding him. They were simply the bodies of people he once knew, just as friendly and open as the people were when they were alive. By the age of five, he was even allowed to help out within the funeral home, preparing bouquets for aisles and the coffins as well as helping decorate the corpse with makeup and artwork for its burials. It was something the family did together, and provided a source of comfort and almost enjoyment to him and his brother as a child.

His only friend was ever his older brother. Even from a young age, Benjamin could remember that much. 

When they were in school, both siblings were treated as an outcast still. Elementary school consisted of waking up every morning at ungodly hours to get ready and have their mother drive them to school, and then wait hours after classes were over to be picked up and driven back. The habit became normal soon, though, and grew into Benjamin's enjoyment for early mornings. He liked watching the sun rise over the treetops of their home and appreciated the quiet of the world as it was still waking up from its slumber.

Benjamin never particularly minded this isolation, however. His time at school was spent studying, doing work, and reading every book from the school library that he could get his hands on. He read about mythological creatures and cryptids on a daily basis, drinking up the information along with anatomy manuals similar to the ones that his father kept in his study and allowed him to stare at. He learned to play guitar as he got older, the music strumming in his mind the way words read on paper to others. He was good at it.

Benjamin became interested in the pictures of skeletons and bones, along with the instructions for their care and the names of each of them. When not studying or in the library, he was with his brother. The two would wander woods together or skip classes together, hiding in halls they were sure that even teachers never knew about. Closets became forts and sibling rivalry became a past time as they fought to see who could find the coolest bone or best hiding spot. The two found solace in the fact that, no matter how people made fun of them, they were all the same on the inside. All just large sacks of meat on top of hollow, calcium-rich bones and marrow.

As they got older and summers came and went between school years, they spent those alone too. Most of the time, summer was spent wandering the endless expanse of woods that surrounded their house and picking up strange and new animal bones to take home and clean off to admire. They slowly accumulated a pile of bones in their rooms, leading to almost complete skeletons of forest-like animals as well. Their parents didn't mind. So long as the boys were together, well, what could go wrong? The forest was safe and they were allowed to have fun. To enjoy their summer as children for as long as they could.

Until...that last summer, of course.

Though their home was never too busy, the streets nearby were. One of the major freeways that ran through the forests on their property was often as far as the brothers would go. Elias, Benjamin's brother, always longed to go further, however. He longed to push the boundaries of trust his parents had given him. To steal weed and dig up graves and pass that highway into something more. Benjamin refused, however. He preferred the view from the side he knew to be safe. The endless expanse of nothingness on the other end daunted him, but, Elias did not listen. He never did. As weak and quiet as Benjamin's protests were, they were nothing on the roar of the highway Elias chose to cross one day, claiming that his brother was a crybaby and that nothing bad would actually happen. He grabbed Benjamin's hand and pulled him with him out into the road. Benjamin could remember running with his brother. Dancing in the streets and then the sound of a truck roaring in his ears, along with his brother's screams.

Elias Olbrecht died the following day after being hit by a truck, his neck twisted backwards and his blood spilling out. Benjamin had the distinct memory of laying there in the road, his face burning and his vision blurring shades of red and scrap metal as Elias seized at his side. Of his own blood and his brother's soaking his form. Pouring from his face. Down his shirt. Soaking his body. Red filled his memories and his nightmares as the family found themselves in the hospital. Benjamin survived but Elias? His family soon found themselves having to bury their beloved eldest son in the same cemetery they ran.

Benjamin was held at the hospital for two months after his brother was pronounced dead, his body healing but his face never the same. His face would never heal right, the doctor's said, and his family would have to live with that. They handed him a prosthetic mask and told him, grimly, that he was lucky to be alive.

Being in the cemetery was hard after that. Benjamin saw the hallucination of his brother wherever he went. His twelve-year old mind unable to process just what it was seeing and when it was seeing it, the further isolation of suddenly becoming an only child shattered something far in the back of his mind. His brother's mangled corpse followed him like the ghosts he lied and claimed to be able to see. His father and mother grew angry at him when he brought it up, accusing him of lying and trying for attention so soon after his brother passed. That wasn't it though. It was never it. He really did see things, but, even he began to wonder if they were real.

With PTSD, a ruined face, and hallucinations going untreated in him, Benjamin spiralled further into isolation. Further into confusion as each new dead body that came into the cemetery held the face of his brother. His mother, also, suffered greatly from the loss.

His mother spiraled into depression. She blamed herself not only for the death of her eldest son, but the slow mental breaking of her youngest. She put a brave face on for a long time, but even Benjamin and his father could tell something was the matter. Benjamin was told to go to bed early one night, but he stayed in the corridor and listened as their father asked his mother what was wrong. An entire sort of argument ensued, fierce and angry and loud that made him flinch with every awful word his parents said to one another. There was something in that argument that shut him off afterwards. Benji went to bed crying, but not making a sound.

A few days later, Benjamin’s mother killed herself. She hadn’t picked Benjamin up from school that afternoon, and he waited and waited until his teachers were forced to call their father, who picked him up hours later. On the car ride home, Benjamin dared to ask where his mother was. In a casual and almost far-too stressed yet cheerful voice, his father said, “At home with your brother, of course. Something happened, but she will be fine.”

When they got home, Benjamin discovered that their mother was dead. She had overdosed on medication in the bathroom, apparently, from what his father explained, but something was wrong. His father refused to acknowledge what was going on beyond explaining what an ‘OD’ was to him. He had dug up his brother's corpse and organized it neatly with his mother's at the dinner table. He continued to treat their bodies as if they were the people that he loved. When they started to rot, he finally took it down to the basement, where he cleaned the flesh off of the bones and arranged the bones in an altar just near the furnace that kept the house warm. Benjamin was told by his father that that was where the two dead family members lived now, safe and sound and warm, and that they should say hello and goodbye to them every morning and afternoon and night.  He told no one of her death except Benjamin, and the family was to go on as if it were still made of four people instead of two.

Benjamin's habits grew more and more self destructive as he was forced to live with this charade along with his father. As he ate dinner with bones and the scent of rotting became common inside of his household. He found himself avoiding meals with his father and hiding in his room, or running off into the forest and leaning against headstones to get away from it all. The fog of the graves became his friends. The dead around him made him relaxed. He wondered, for a while, if death would be as peaceful for him as it was for those who died in their sleep...or if it would be as bad as it had been for his brother. He developed the habit of thinking these things while wittling away at wood and bones, carving them into statues that never really meant anything but stress relief.

Before Benjamin was set to go to high school, though, it happened. His father, deep in a drunken stupor talking to his family's bones, crawled his way up to Benjamin with a knife and cried, claiming that he had to kill him. Claiming that he had to kill his son and clean his bones so that they joined the rest of his family and then, when it was done, he could kill himself and they could be together. Benjamin, in terror, ran from his father, begging for him to stop. Asking him to leave him alone. 

Instead his father pursued him into the kitchen, forcing Benjamin to grab a knife and turn on his own parent, stabbing him through with it and gutting him on the kitchen floor. 

Benjamin suffered a severe psychotic breakdown shortly after, adding to the mutilation of his own face and other parts of his body with the knife still covered in his father's blood. The memories of his mother and his mangled brother's corpse flew in and out of his mind, burning him and twisting his stomach until tears fell from his eyes and, god, they stung like lava. With what energy he had left, he got up from the kitchen floor, slipped on the blood, and ran.

He ran into the woods, deeper and deeper into the Washington wilderness. His breath burned his lungs, tasting like blood. His heart hurt. He needed to go. To leave.

He was stopped only when a figure approached him in the foggy woods, their form causing him to slow down and stop. It was blurry through the tears. Burning through the blood. They reached out to him and gave his shoulder a squeeze, forcing him to put the knife he didn't realize he was still carrying down and away from his body. They told him that the could see how much he hurt. How much he had gone through...and how much better it would be if he could help others go far more peacefully than he almost had. He was scared, but oh...their smile was so sweet as they spoke:

"Death can be kind too."

So he took their hand.

Two years later he remains at the school, a student learning the art of his craft, hiding behind his mask as he does so in hopes that, one day, he might bring a sense of peace to someone who was even worse than his father.