AN: I was all set to do a chapter about Tucker's mother and how she dealt with Alton's change of faith and her husband's issues, because Fluehatraya wanted more Alton and I take requests. Then this came to me and drove other ideas out until I did it. Maddie's parents have a weird origin, though this is mostly about her father. I really hope this doesn't come off as dark or depressing. I'm not trying to make it that, and I believe her parents loved her very much. I just also believe that a lot of kids go into what their parents were into, so... cue the longwinded chapter that acts as Maddie's father's lifestory.
Anyone have requests? I'll be on it if so.
Vincent Vankirk was predestined to be an unusual man.
His parents were German, and his father had returned to Germany from the United States in order to go forth and 'do what must be done for the motherland'. Or, to put it as bluntly as possible, he left his son and wife to go be a Nazi. He managed to send supplies and money back home under the current trade laws, but they weren't rich, and the first few years of Vincent's life passed with only his Mama and his Uncle Lukas. They were the ones who hid the news from him when his father fled to Argentina to avoid war crime charges, they were the ones who raised him, but they couldn't hide him from the fall out of WW2 on an innocent German American boy in the US. The war may have ended when he was ten, but the other kids still remembered.
Descent upon him was swift and ruthless. He never found out how the other kids knew his father was a Nazi, life became a rollercoaster. There were angry shouts, names he was called, kids doing a fake 'Heil Hitler' at him, and looks of disgust and even fear from some of the younger kids in his neighborhood. Teachers were harder on him than they were other kids, at recess no one played with him, and more than once his glasses were stolen or broken.
His purple eyes were exactly like his father's: unshakable, unreadable, expressionless blanks. Even as he smiled pleasantly and said hello to his tormentors, the message in his eyes was as blunt as it was real: just go ahead and try me.
There was something about him that was unshakable. No amount of yelling, kicking, punching, or mean spirited trickery could get him to lose his cool. He was no fiery redhead, he was embers, a slow burn that did not go out no matter what happened. There were simply things that he was that he refused to change even subconsciously or on a day to day level. His silent stares were unnerving. When he spoke he timed his words from the time he discovered his ability to play piano onward, keeping a short, blunt cadence of words that held attention before halting. Vincent was not someone it was wise to bully. He would have a comeback that would do more emotional damage than it was worth to keep pursuing him. To have a fight with him was to take your reputation into your own hands, as the piano had taught him something else: soft notes rang loud. A simple whisper of a rumor to someone else could snowball, destroying the person who hurt him physically long after the bruise or blood nose was over.
He wasn't vicious. But he was unemotional. He let loose verbal warfare and watched the results without caring much about anyone who stepped in his path. If someone were to try to engage him about something, they'd find he had two passions: piano, and the supernatural. Though he grew up to be a fine concert pianist for several years, he spent those same years sneaking off at night to go look for ghosts and, after ten years of this, decided at twenty eight to turn his passion to the full time pursuit of ghosts. His mother fretted over him, her educated and dignified son pursuing such a 'silly' career, yet she loved him enough to simply leave him be. Changing the mind of Vincent Vankirk was like stopping the tide from rolling in.
There were ghost attacks, on what he referred to as 'the Lines'. Historical evidence found towns near bodies of water or on top of underground rivers to be most likely to be haunted. Using this and newspaper records as he travelled, looking through many an archive, he became the founding father of the science of ghost hunting. There was no discussing spirituality or religion with him; he kept his thoughts on those matters locked up tightly. If ghosts were to be tracked and studied they would need the help of the general public, of scientists who didn't believe old wives' tales. Nothing but pure science, provable patterns and facts would do. He charted the Lines of North America, he gathered books upon books of old tales and first hand accounts, he recorded over a hundred hours of interviews across three countries and thirty nine cities, in all three languages he spoke.
Vincent envisioned a government trained group, a task force, people who would work as relief and combat against ghosts in affected areas. They would help the people devastated by ghosts. In this vision and his passion in discussing it, his purple eyes lit up, his features animated and he came alive, voice losing the carefully calculated cadence he'd trained into it, replaced with passionate sincerity, a desperation and earnestness that defied everything anyone knew about him. He had built himself up as being as cold as the lavender tinted glaciers of the Arctic, but revealed himself in those rare moments to be as soft as the petals of a lilac flower. This want to keep people safe in spite of the ridicule a 'ghost hunter' like he received was what drew his wife to him in the first place.
He was twenty years her senior, a man most people found fascinating but ultimately unbearable, someone who could stare into the eyes of an attacking ghost without flinching or raising his voice. He was harsh and critical, never offered up praise, never relented on any point, and yet she loved him almost as if it were to spite him. Vincent could try every word in every language they both knew to cut her down without making a dent in her. His dispassionate nature protected him; her passionate one protected her. She was the fiery one, despite being short and pixie-featured, with feathery black hair and piercing blue eyes set to blazing while his purple ones stayed on cool. Determined to find something that would convince the government ghosts were important enough to invest time and money in, he began to plan a trip.
If water, ice and underground liquid, combined with certain longitudes, meant ghosts were more likely to appear, that meant the most haunted place on the face of the Earth was in Canada's northern territories, up past what would one day be called Nunavut, in the wilds far north where islands held no name outside of Inuktitut and the sun went missing for months at a stretch. With sixty four people, himself and the infuriating blue eyed Jaclyn DeLage, they made off for an island far up north known only as Quittinirpaaq, the place on top of the world. It was where Greenland and Canada touched, a place of rock and ice where even caribou and polar bears rarely ventured. It was a land of absolutes. In this place there were many streams and an abundance of water, places where ghost Lines intersected, and the Inuit people begged them every step of the way not to go on. Past the Inuit port of Iqaluit, only one Inuit guide would take them, for an obscene amount of money, and they had to find their own way back. Vincent remained as steadfast as ever. This had to be done.
They returned four months after they were supposed to, with five people, two of whom were badly injured.
Every shred of collected evidence – and there was more than they could properly carry with more awaiting any brave souls who would venture up there – was confiscated by the government. It was only when they received a large chunk of hollowed pietersite that could contain and release and recontain a ghost that the true horror of what ghosts could be was realized. When they released it, it was only seven civilian casualties and a hellish night later it was recontained. The government of the United States heard him out at last, all his evidence, the books, the recordings, the old and new, the theories and scientific evidence. But Vincent's hair was streaked with white, his voice often faltering, soft as if it had gone raw from screaming. He left the arguing to his still passionate best friend, Jaclyn, who he referred to with uncharacteristic affection as Jackie. They held hands for most of the discussions and meetings with officials until finally an agreement was made to form the organization Vincent had long lobbied for. He suggested their primary color be white, in 'honor' of the whiteness of the bleak place that had brought the danger's apparancy to the world.
By that point, however, Vincent had to wave off running the organization. Jackie, he explained, was two months pregnant. They needed to start a family. And so while his peers tried to wrap their mind around the whirlwind of events that had brought them together, they were married on his forty second birthday. They took a substantial damages settlement from the government, and relocated to a place where snow was only present briefly, settling in to have their beautiful baby girl.
Purple eyed and curious, she would often sit by the fireside in their living room as he played eerie, otherworldly tunes on his piano long into the night, and read his old journals from the days of Quittinirpaaq, forming her own opinions on ghosts.