originally posted on tumblr, Jan 18th 2022
Desmond headcanons that only make sense to me:
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He can play the guitar, something he learned by hitching rides with a band as a groupie (poser) and that skill helped him have at least enough loose change for a coffee and toast on his drier days;
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He had a rundown old guitar he always spun as a heirloom from an uncle, when in truth he snuck it from a yard sale one time, along with a blanket and a pack of faded 80s stickers;
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Some time after, he slipped the money on an envelope to the yard sale house, now that he could afford paying back for the items;
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He really likes bird watching, and he even befriended a flock of pigeons that lived near a Virgin megastore where he worked for a season;
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Early on his escape, he did a lot of hitchhiking which dragged him in a zigzag around the eastern half of the US before he finally headed to New York, and he sincerely regrets never going to Las Vegas or California before that;
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He did however take a diversion on his way to New York to go to a week-long music festival in Miami, and to this day he’s not sure how he managed to survive that for a number of reasons;
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Most of his early days in New York was with squatting groups, who supported him a lot and helped him get a bit of a grip on his trauma in the Farm, and once he was well-off enough to rent his own place, he always made sure to donate some of his tips back to them;
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He is in fact, very left-leaning when it comes to politics, but he's also impeccably chill about it. If he doesn’t vibe with a person because of their views, he just cuts ties and moves on;
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He’s taller than both his parents, a handful of inches compared to Bill but a whole foot compared to his mom;
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His mom is called Francisca Martinez (she didn’t change her last name) and she’s from spanish and indigenous descent. Her nickname is Cica (pronounced See-sah);
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Desmond has a fondness for radio pop, as it was the first type of music he heard once he was out of the Farm, and 20s and 30s jazz, because of his father’s inheritance vynil disks;
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On a related note, becoming a bartender was a bit of a bitter irony, since his father got those vynils from his own mother, who ran a speakeasy bureau during the Prohibition;
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He in fact has a very sweet tooth, but it only comes in bursts. One moment he’s eating chocolate and drinking Coke every two hours for a few weeks, then he can barely stand looking at a candy for too long;
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He has a habit of collecting recipes wherever he finds them, from magazines to the back of packages, or even asking people if they can share theirs. It started as things he wanted to try making once he had a place of his own and could afford to cook things, but afterwards it became a ritual of his; he can’t keep pictures or afford that many souvenirs, but recipes are easy to store and then remake to relive memories;
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That said, getting used to spicier or heavier foods was a learning curve to him, since most meals at the Farm were a far cry from what he could find most of the time. He did take it as a personal challenge though, which helped;
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He’s an incredibly fast reader, a skill he learned early as a kid devouring book after book in the Farm library, small as it was. He only got sharper as he sped through every pamphlet and billboard and sign and booklet he could get his hands on after he escaped, catching up on years of cultural knowledge he missed out on;
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He befriended a group of bikers at a diner one night, and three days later he came up with the design of his arm tattoo and one of his friends tatted him up for free and taught him how to ride;
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Desmond promised that once he got his own bike, he’d go find them and join them on a cross-country roadtrip;
