Will Byrne
- Mar 4, 2016
- 2 min read
occupation: Crystal Springs Sawmill; millworker
story: Will grew up in next door neighbor Seattle's King County foster care system, never knowing home or family as it existed beyond sitcom television. The first place he can remember ever having felt like home to him was the music room where he started guitar instruction in middle school, thanks to a blue state agenda to better fund music education for low income public students.
After he aged out of the system, he took odd minimum wage jobs and busked the downtown streets to make meager ends meet. The possibility of post-secondary education seemed like a pipe dream... until it wasn't. At the late start age of 23, he received an acceptance letter and a full ride scholarship from some overseas university that he'd never heard of, before, and had definitely not applied to. Scholarship for what? The only thing he could do well was piss people off with what came out of his piehole. It seemed too good to be true, but he went anyway.
Spoiler: It was too good to be true. His biological father, who had ties to the university, suddenly had reason to want to know who he was. Upon discovering that his paternal bloodline was both well-to-do while he'd lived most of his life wondering where he'd be putting his head down from night to night and bat-shit crazy with delusions about being witches and wizards, Will wanted nothing to do with the Byrnes. Still, they were footing the bill for the university, and there was the small but mysterious matter of why the weather seemed to kick up into storms around him when his temper flared. His rational mind blamed some freak meteorological disturbance for that. His wise mind knew that there were things about himself that he could only learn from Alistair Byrne, and that without the old man's influence and money, he would lose his shot at university. His emotional mind said, "Fuck this, I want to go home."
London was, in a word, enlightening. He left it three years later with all of the credentials he would need to begin the career he'd dreamt of having ever since the first time anyone had asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, a slightly less cantankerous attitude toward his surname and those he shared it with -- slightly less, it was a marginal improvement, at best, really -- and a cat, Schmoe.
Something happened between then and now. Those who knew him then might notice, but those who know him now wouldn't even think to ask about it. It wouldn't matter if they did; he'd only change the subject. Will spends his weekdays lost in hard manual labor at the sawmill instead of using his degree, most of his cash at Broken Saints Tattoo Parlor, most of his Friday nights at the Middle Of nursing a pint of oatmeal stout and smarting off, and the occasional Sunday morning at Better Living Through Coffee, where Nowhere Island's coven meets for reasons harmless and non. He's friendly enough, in a lazy, grouchy, foul-mouthed, trouble-making kind of way. Just don't call him a lumbersexual.
face claim: Charlie Winzar
aol/aim sn: It is you spirit (itisyouspirit)
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