Edge of Infinity

About

【ᴛᴡ ғᴏʀ: ᴀᴛᴛᴇᴍᴘᴛᴇᴅ sᴜɪᴄɪᴅᴇ, sᴇʟғ-ʜᴀʀᴍ, ᴀʟᴄᴏʜᴏʟɪsᴍ, ᴇᴍᴏᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ᴀʙᴜsᴇ, ᴀɴᴅ ᴍᴇɴᴛɪᴏɴs ᴏғ ᴄsᴀ + ᴇᴀᴛɪɴɢ ᴅɪsᴏʀᴅᴇʀs】

Sethfire was born in London, England, to two wealthy, erudite parents; pretentious and high-aspiring, his name was given the -fire suffix in reference to Prometheus’s gift of fire to mankind. From the womb itself he was expected to represent the symbol of knowledge and intelligence for which he was named...And from an early age, something very clear about Seth was that he was different.
There are lots of smart people on the planet. Plenty of gifted and talented youth; scores of intelligent minds. Seth isn’t one of them, he never has been: Seth is above and beyond, a certifiable genius who would coast through a Mensa qualification test without issue. With an IQ at or approaching the 160s, both in practice and on paper, he’s superbly intelligent. That intelligence was already apparent in childhood, and his parents fawned over him endlessly for his potential. 

Unfortunately, no matter of genius or booksmarts can subvert the fallout of trauma, and when Seth was nine, a couple years after moving to Great Neck, NY, he fell victim to a year of grooming and molestation by the nanny who took care of him and Athena. Shame-bound to secrecy, Seth bottled the entire experience up...but it was the start of a slow, agonizing spiral.
He coasted along at the top academically with ease; school could hardly challenge him. Emotionally, though, he floundered. Low social self-worth, dissociation & the “othering” effect of trauma, the way teachers singled him out as remarkable—all resulted in Seth having great difficulty when it came to making friends. His height and obvious value to the school administration kept him insulated from bullying, but he was an emotional island. His parents encouraged a high-brow vocabulary and pretentious-sounding verbosity which isolated him from his peers; he himself felt socially inept and as though his only true value to other people was his intelligence. He could read other people well but struggled with knowing how to respond, dissociated from his own emotions, and so retreated into the role adults assigned to him: Self-sufficient scholar, who simply didn’t have time for the tawdry social culture of kids these days.
Most of his relationships in school were therefore shallow and only with other academics; the only bond of substance Sethfire had was with Athena, his little sister. She was vastly different from him: Outgoing, eccentric, disinterested in academia...and due to those traits, pointedly unloved by their parents.

As both he and his sister got older, Sethfire was forced to grapple with ever-increasing favoritism, which he detested. His parents made no secret that he was the favorite; the Golden Child, with his high marks and effortless intellectuality and unending potential. It was excruciating for Seth to be weaponized against the sister he so loved, and he made every effort to shoot down the barbed comparisons his parents threw at her. They never ended, though, and Seth both seethed and strained under the pressure of it all: Of being the ideal son to reach the goals his parents set for him; of being the protective older brother his sister needed to insulate her from their parents’ narcissistic nastiness; of being both of those while also bearing the silent burden of his childhood abuse. His internal turmoil came out minutely in the form of episodic cutting—which he kept a firm secret beneath his dress-shirt sleeves—but bloodletting is an archaic cure and wasn’t enough: The pressure kept building.
It was the spring after he turned seventeen that it became unbearable. He’d been dragging his feet on choosing a college to attend, having been accepted easily into nearly all of the Ivy League schools his parents had told him to apply to. With his future planned out in front of him by hands not his own, something snapped in Seth, and he decided to hell with colleges his parents chose in order to fit their image. To hell with medical school and becoming a surgeon just because that was what he was meant to become. To hell with scholarships, with Mensa, with his only value being his parents’ bragging rights. 
He was to become a doctor; of course he knew where his radial and ulnar arteries were—so he slashed them both, dragged his razor up both his arms—nicking his median antebrachial veins to boot—and attacked every inch of skin he could between wrist and elbow before he finally passed out from blood loss.
And really, he should have died there. But total coincidence brought Athena home early from school that day; eleven years old and walking in the front door just as he slipped from consciousness and plunged her into the hellscape of finding him. She called 9-1-1 and tourniqueted his arms as best her tiny hands could manage, and if it weren’t for her he would have died and stayed dead. As it was, he suffered clinical death at the hospital and had to be revived.

In the aftermath, Sethfire was left with permanent damage to his hands that ruined any chances he had at being a surgeon. He was faced with months of physical therapy, with a month-long stay in a psychiatric unit—which he spent expertly convincing the medical staff that he’d been hit by some form of transient psychosis and had no lingering wish to die. The latter part was, in fact, true at the time: Seth was wracked with guilt for the trauma he’d caused Athena, and couldn’t stomach the idea of putting her through more. The shooting pains in his hands were awful, but they were his and not his parents’, at the very least. 
He chose to attend NYU—which despite its high esteem, made his parents sigh at its failure to be Columbia. Still, they were glad for him to strive for higher education and gave him money to rent an apartment near campus. He, of course, found a cheap apartment complex in a poorer part of Brooklyn they’d be loathe to visit, took public transport or drove to class, and started working toward a degree; feeling, finally, somewhat in control of his own direction in life.
His guilt was an ever-present undercurrent, though, even if he didn’t realize it. He poured himself into school and began to withdraw in increments: He carried a great deal of shame for all that Athena had had to go through, and felt that being the owner of heavily-scarred arms wasn’t the mark of an ideal role model or an example of healthy coping mechanisms. As time wore on, too, the pointed comparisons still made when he joined the family for dinners drove him to feel that perhaps it would be best if he didn’t make himself as readily available a weapon for his parents to use against his little sister.

That withdrawal couldn’t last, however.In spring of 2011, Sethfire was called to his sister’s aid: She’d slipped into anorexia and her friend, Kato, had demanded she give up on her inattentive parents and call her brother for help. Their parents raised no objections when Seth asked if Athena could live with him; just told him to send her back if she was difficult or got in the way of his studies, and snootily offered the hope that he’d have a beneficial influence on her. He did: She bounced back from her ED under his care, and though he finished getting his BA in Psychology, he arranged for his pursuit of his MA in Counseling for Mental Health and Wellness to be mostly online, so he could be available to his sister. And a good thing he did, too.
In September, Seth was put in the position of having to subdue—and save—Athena’s friend, Kato, who was prepared to take his backpack-bound arsenal to school and do something unforgivable. In stopping him and saving his life, Sethfire suddenly found himself the guardian of two teenagers—a role he’d only been assuming for a few months when a third found his way under his roof: Seth having sprinted two blocks to the hospital, carrying 17-year-old Anarchy with the same arms that he’d all but severed at the same age. And he did what so many others would never do: Took a stranger—an addict—into his home, into his heart; determined to help him recover. 

At the same time Seth was saving lives, though, he started down a path that would threaten his own. Even as Athena persuaded him to get piercings and tattoos in an effort to help him reclaim his body from being marked only by scarring (“C’mon, how about a lip ring, though? Mom and dad’ll hate it”); and even as he got roped into a band he couldn’t play an instrument for but found himself intermittently a vocalist in due to an early morning rendition of Mariah Carey’s “We Belong Together” that Kato caught him in (“YOU BITCH, SETH! YOU CAN SING, YOU LYING MOTHERFUCKER”) ...on the side, Seth had started indulging—just every so often—in alcohol. 
It didn’t seem like a problem at first. Just sometimes. Just to help him sleep. Just for this evening; his hands were hurting him. But he finished his MA and started working towards the 3,000 hour requirement to become a NY LMHC and he was trying to do therapy with no therapist himself; trying to face trauma without dealing with his own. The trio he’d been caring for moved out and the drinking ramped up as he grew more stressed, and then the unthinkable happened and one inebriated night he found himself having relapsed, severely. Enough to need to go to the hospital for stitches.
He tanked from there, feeling increasingly like a failure; increasingly like he’d let Athena down enough already and was doomed to continue. He tried desperately to hide his alcoholism as it worsened, but he all but gave up on pursuing his license because of it and relapsed again that year. People were catching on to his dire straits by December of 2015, when out of the blue, Seth and the rest of EoI rescued Aetos.

Aetos, despite Seth’s best efforts, ended up being the one to adopt a care-taking role. Eagle-eyed and empathetic, Aetos noticed the alcoholism and started encouraging Seth towards recovery and reclaiming his life’s direction. The pair of them ended up bonding despite their age difference over their shared love of academic topics, and Sethfire (though still a chronic drinker) didn’t have any blackout-drunk relapse nights while Aetos was living with him.
Things took a turn after Aetos got his own place, though, and Seth had the worst relapse anyone could imagine in November of 2017. By the time Chey came around, everyone was aware of Seth’s struggles but feeling helpless. Thankfully, a combination of Chey’s outreach and Aetos’s persistence resulted in Sethfire finally opening up in autumn of 2018, and from there he began to make a great deal of psychological progress: He started reaching out on bad nights. He started opening up more to his friends. But he kept drinking. Hard. He had to; when he stopped, he’d shake. Shake and grow nauseous and irritable and disoriented. Even with his scars fading, his friends stay scared; they’re watching him slowly poison himself. But finally Aetos can’t take it anymore...and his desperate plea manages to persuade Seth to get help.

As he gets better, he finally manages to open his eyes to the love Aetos has been offering him, and though exceedingly nervous over the difference in their ages, he ends up feeling like going out for a coffee or two can’t hurt. Lunch, maybe. They’re not dates. ...Until they are, but even then it’s just going on dates, not ‘dating’! ...Until it is. Eventually he comes to terms with it. Aetos commends him for the amount of work he has to do to be both a genius and an absolute moron, and Seth, licensed thanks only due to his encouragement, promptly diagnoses Aetos with pathological cheekiness. 
In the end, it all does manage to work out. Athena gets her older brother back and then some, with his dry humor and dancing eyes, yes, but also the thorough closeness that comes with total trust. Both of them remain at a safe distance from their parents, who they realize can’t see past their own narcissism long enough to properly love their children; they ceased to extend regular Thanksgiving invitations sometime after Sethfire got his first facial piercings. He and Athena are healthier on their own, though; with each other and their found families. And eventually Seth, as a counselor, is able to offer others the support that he denied himself for so long. It’s an occupation based less in booksmarts than in compassion, and as it turns out...That was always his strongest suit.

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*•.¸☤ ᴀᴅᴅɪᴛɪᴏɴᴀʟ ɪɴғᴏ ☤¸.•*

ȯ Seth first realized he might not be straight during his third year of college, when he met and started tentatively flirting with a fellow student named Kole.

╚» Seth’s horribly broken nose is from the incident with Kato in 2011, but in order to protect Kato, Seth told Athena that it was an accident and in his haste to reach Kato he’d run into the second set of glass doors at the school. He’d never lied to her before, and she believed him.

╚» Seth’s suicide attempt at age 17 has left him with continuing transient nerve pain and weakness in his hands, + some loss of fine motor control; he makes use of key-turners and doorknob extensions, as well as other assorted assistive devices for particularly bad days. He has intermittent loss of sensation in some areas, especially lateral ​3 1⁄2 digits; transient and varying levels of numbness anywhere from elbow to fingertips, and assorted symptoms reminiscent of Guyon Canal Syndrome and Median Nerve Palsy.