NAMED          marala  bhargava-byrne
      KNOWN  AS          mara   +   sunday
      DOB   +   AGE          9  feb   +  thirty-four
      ZODIAC          pisces  sun,   aries  moon,   taurus  venus,   scorpio  ascendant
      GENDER   +   PRNS          cis  woman   +   she  &  her
      SEXUALITY          undefined,   irrelevant

      FACE          sobhita  dhulipala
      EYE COLOR          warm  brown,   honeyed  in  daylight
      HEIGHT          5'  8"   +   172  cm
      PERFUME          a  bright  warmth    ;    apricot,   belladonna,   neroli,   a  touch  of  ginger   &   salt.
      SPEAKING  VOICE          lauren  bacall
      LANGUAGES          english,   +   fluent   (   first language   ).    irish,   +   fluent   (   marriage   ).    italian,   +   conversational   (   marriage   )

      HOMETOWN          ridgewood,   new jersey,   usa
      EMPLOYMENT          field  agent,   the  mercy  organization   (   nine  years   )
      SKILLS          close-range knife work,  knife throwing,   boxing,   judo,   coercion and manipulation,   peak human stamina,   marksmanship and sharp-shooting  (  reluctantly  ),   information gathering,   restraints,   breath work,   pick-pocketing,   misdirection,   poison tolerance  (  mithridatism  ),   and resilience.
      FAULTS          tbd
      BLOOD          mother,   abirami  "amy"  bhargava.    +    father   ishaan  bhargava.    +    older  sister,   sahana  bhargava.    +    late  husband,   malachy  byrne.    +    daughter,   redacted.

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triggers        childhood illness  +  death,   neglect,   abuse implied,   mob violence,   surgical imagery

SYNOPSIS:    girl is born an unloved host of parts for her sick older sister..    denied all affection,   even after her sister's death,   and tumbles head first into an insatiable hunger for anything that feels like love;    that feels like anything at all.    marries the violent heir to the o'byrne family crime syndicate.    adapts to life as den mother,   wife,   the anchor of her warm watchdog family.    her first taste of coercion,   using warmth and percipience as a weapon   —   multiplied when she fully realizes the extent of the violence,   innocents buried in unmarked earth.    anything for o'byrne sovereignty in chicago.    a lifetime of anger realized,   systematically dismantles the family from the inside.    the big finale:    after murdering her husband   (   an intimate death,   to be sure   ),   she successfully fakes her death and her daughter's.    rendezvous with the mercy agent who had made it possible,   promised her a place among their ranks,   but required mara place her daughter in a mercy-affiliated foster program until she graduates training.    but by then,   her daughter is almost six,   well-integrated in her pretty little life.    as mercy surely anticipated,   mara did not recover her daughter.    will spend her life proving that the decision was worth the sacrifice.known for her undercover work,   long and short term.    her warm,   sultry appetite,   persistence makes her a veritable danger in the field   —   when she sees an opportunity for gleaning more information,   tying a loose end,   she takes it.    always.    a reckless use of her body as a weapon.    lost her motherly touch,   but maintains that bite that drove her to murder in the first place.    the relentlessness,   too.    if someone's in danger,   she will readily intervene,   and will not step down until the danger is resolved.    thought to be part feline,   given her low purr,   casual slinking,   falling asleep in sun spots,   and her knack for coming back from the dead.

the setup

blood ties are only blood,   darling,   if you both defend the tether.    but you were born with purpose,   bones and flesh grown in a petri dish,   that never belonged to you.    a colicky palladium,   lungs rubbed red-raw with the effort,   rash blistering under so much antiseptic.    an unwilling host,   mother and father force that golden marrow from your bones and filter it through the honeycomb bones of your older sister.    stem,   heart cells,   lung fragments are retrieved and synthesized into a cardiovascular system that replaces her rotting one.    and you,   dear creature,   are unloved absent your ability to heal the first daughter,   cherished .    it should have spoiled that sisterhood.    but you are born her near twin,   damaged dna carefully removed,   and your mirror image hearts thrum in a circadian synchrony.    until the rot sets in again,   eight-year-old cells turning napoleonic.    you watch from the doorway as your own heart,   lungs stutter into a permanent silence.    you beg for the love you know you will not receive,   that unholy vacuity transforms into reckless,   unchecked self-satisfaction.    without a template,   you see love in everything   —   obsession,   jealousy,   watchdog violence.you are married at eighteen to a man who listens,   touches,   commands your mind and body as his own.    when he reorganizes your atoms into a beautiful,   docile wife of a thing,   you fit neatly in the palm of his hand.    it feels like the hollow of home,   the negative space.    you feel safe.    teach yourself to forget the moments when you do not:    douse the panic,   the bruises and blood in antiseptic.    forget you're allergic.    tend to your rash and ignore the wounds.but i've neglected the crucial milieu.    husband born the heir to the o'byrne family who have held chicago's politics,   finances,   and law enforcement hostage since the early eighteen hundreds.    you,   well-molded thing,   are his wife.    learn from his mother how to support him,   what it means to bolster his violence with your constance.    become den mother and wrangle the wolves,   serpents,   sloths of men who consider your house their home.    a woman who's felt the constriction of control tight around her neck since birth,   you now tenderly turn it over in your hand and learn its mechanisms.    let it sink into the bones you still do not call your own and finally take the silent control so crucial to the smooth running of the family.    and it is a family by every tender,   protective,   uproarious definition.    the love is profound,   and you gratefully soak yourself in its warmth.

the conflict

you're twenty-five when your husband wins the mayoral race and your daughter lodges in your womb,   a brutally wanted thing.    but there's a simplicity to motherhood that is lost on you,   the girl who had only experienced her own mother through the heart in her sister's chest.    it does not come naturally,   but it does come,   sharp and insistent,   like a knife edge.    you are whetted into percipience,   velvet eyes consuming your world through your child's eyes.    sees the plush endlessness of threats,   coercion,   killing,   the cold gaze of family turned from beaten,   bloodied innocence in the name of legal ignorance.    this,   too,   the negative space of her childhood:    unspoken violence of neglect turned on the tip of a knife,   drawn over and through bodies unfortunate enough to be born under the wheels of a lead-cased irish mob.    bodies buried in the nameless earth for the sake of despotism.    you see the innocence of your child polluted,   her love manipulated into a thing for use,   violence made to feel like tenderness.    the hand that bruises brushing away tears.you have broken down your mangled sense of love into an anger that cannot be limited to tongue bitten restraint.    this is not be the world your child will be born to endure.    revenge will come in the form of eradication by poison.    a slow, painful death.but the o'byrne family is a self-mutilating,   venemous hyrdra of a world that has survived centuries of beheadings and crucifixions,   and it will not bend under your thumb alone.    you must remove its burr-and-garrote heart the body with such tenderness that they don't feel the blade dip under scaled flesh.    the long-dead history of righteous queens becomes a guidebook,   their mastery of pestilence,   paranoia,   poison.    with your hard-earned good faith manipulation as den wife and mother,   you systematically turn son against father,   brother against brother.    spoil the hibernus shell that has coated their peaceful violence for centuries.your daughter is eight months old and dressed in funerary black as you lay the last of your husband's siblings to rest.    the work nearly finished,   you know how this shakespearean stage play must end.    just north of the maldives,   a hired helicopter bursts into a sudden,   brilliant firework;    the wreckage is never found,   but its passenger list acts as a preemptive obituary:    you,   your husband,   and your child,   all presumed dead.

the resolution

you've chartered a boat from the maldives to miami under the name "sara,"   a name rotten-sweet with implications of your sister.    you connect with a mercy agent,   discuss your future and its indisputable terms and conditions   —   most excruciatingly,   the insistence that you cannot,   as a junior agent,   maintain guardianship of a child.    in those sticky swamplands of mississippi,   there is radio silence for seventeen days while you grapples with your limited,   bitter options.    you feed,   cradle,   bathe your child who celebrated her first birthday in the moth-eaten graveyard of a motel six.    she's still young enough to forget you,   you know.    to endure a life of remarkable normalcy,   untouched by the mess her mother has made,   the blood of men you were always going to and will continue to spill.    and yet,   selfishness clings to your skin like the thick, unrelenting humidity.you leave your child in another woman's hands.    your child,   stripped of her name, heritage.    you,   of your motherhood.

denoument

growth as a mercy agent is turbulent   —   emotionally,   physically,   intellectually.    unlike most of your training class,   you have little first-hand experience with oblique violence.    you will struggle for years before it becomes second nature,   albeit a nature you still prefer not to engage.    not so strange that you should be better with a knife than a gun,   all that intimacy.    still,   suffused with a desperate,   primal need to prove your sacrifice worthwhile.    strength manifests itself in agility and stamina,   pain tolerance.    your train yourself in the art of poison immunity.    and when the opportunity to receive solaris arises,   there is no hesitation.nine years an agent,   your strengths lie in the up close and personal attack on the mind, the senses. manipulation and coercion,   candy and tenuousness,   swift violence and long-winded poison.    you are no assassin,   and you do not relish in wearing the blood of life taken.    and yet,   men must,   as a matter of nature,   die   —   you does not wrest with the complications of taking the mortal life of a man who has already been living a moral death.but that silken spiderweb of a fine line between the work of the o'byrne family and that of mercy organization does not evade her,   that "good" work of one and that "necessary" work of the other.    it doesn't matter which is which.    it comes down to who pulls the strings,   doesn't it?    despite that hard-triggered disillusionment,   you're a viscerally loyal creature,   still desperate to prove your worth as a mother to a child who does not know you.    your daughter,   as of last november,   is ten years old.    she has your eyes.

      EDITA  OTERO          connection detail
      SABINE  BOGELOT          connection detail
      WARDEN  BECK          connection detail