Lev Smirnov

Forest

Born in St Petersburg in Russia to Igor and Ekaterina, Lev was raised in Russia until he was 7 years old and his baby sister was born. His parents got overwhelmed with the additional mouth to feed and the constant crying of the newlyborn and decided to give the kids up for adoption in America - to give them the best shot in living a good fulfilled life full of opportunities.

Growing up as the more extroverted twin, Lev felt responsible for his younger siblings, Yury and Lilia. He showed interest in sports from a young age, and always flung himself into odd jobs around the orphange and the streets outside to scrounge up any extra money for him and his siblings to use. Lilia was only a baby, and they needed money for all the milk and suppies she needed as the orphanage themselves didn't seem to care.

Lev didn't understand why his twin brother - who he thought was meant to be exactly like him- couldn't be more different. He had high expectations of what it meant to have a twin. He'd thought that Yury wasn't only his brother, but his twin, and no one would or could ever know him better than him... but as the years ticked on and their distance only grew and morphed into a divide of distance, Lev refused to call Yury anything more than a brother.

The day Yury punched him was the day Lev really knew he fucked up.

She worked odd jobs all over the city to get as much money together as possible to help her family as they went into financial turmoil, but since she was known as the weird freak no one gave her any work. She felt like a failure, and no one other than her brother there to tell her otherwise.

At the age of 15, Darya's rage switch flicked on as her father began to physically abuse her, her brother and her mother. She had regular PTSD triggered flashbacks in school as well as panic attacks and spent most of her school day isolated in the school chemistry department mixing acids and bases. She began to eat lunch alone in a bathroom stall as people gossiped the latest drama and arranged to go to the mall outside. The closest person she had to a friend was Beatriz Ramos, but it was clear that she favoured her brother over her.

Her father's abuse continued until she was 17 and a half years old, when a neighbour overheard one of the instances of violence and called the police who arrested his father who was later sentenced. A few days after her 18th birthday, her parents got legally divorced.

She worked hard to escape high school no matter what to escape her town, her family and her reputation as that weird kid who no one wanted to speak to. She put in the work, staying at the library every night and scored late night tutorting with one of her teachers. Eventually she opened up to her teacher about all of her anxieties and trauma and was finally able to vent out her rage and embrace her weirdness.

As she started at the state's top university for Chemistry, Darya began to take anti-anxiety medication as well as attending therapy to work through her childhood trauma.

University went by in a breeze. She kept top of her class but did everything alone. She was invited to one party, but after accidentally getting too comfortable in sharing her weird side and bringing up The Human Centipede to her classmates, she gained a reputation for being a downer and wasn't invited to any more. She joined the gardening and needle appreciation societies and hung out with her lecturers after class to learn more about Chemistry. They became close and she was gifted an ornate, one of a kind distillation funnel.

Upon graduation, she worked for the university as a junior technician for a short while before being offered the opportunity to complete a fully funded PhD at a downtown hospital where she would work to help ease the patient's pain, especially those with chronic or live shortening illnesses.

One of the worst days of her life was when a scraggly paediatric nurse broke into her lab without permission searching for a specific medicine and broke her prized funnel into a million tiny irreplaceable pieces. She snapped at him and even threw a couple of empty plastic trays at his head as he scampered pathetically out. She held the broken pieces in her hands, the symbol of the first person to ever understand her weirdness, and couldn't stop the tears that followed. However, the next morning there was a similar new funnel on her desk with a sorry note. It wasn't the same... but she appreciated the gesture. Maybe this Nurse Leon wasn't a total dick afterall.

For weeks afterwards, she felt like she was being constantly watched, as if she was purposefully being spied on but discounted it as simple paranoia. A few days after, when her colleagues once again attended a quiz night without her, the same nurse from before waltzed in cockily and started to lecture her about how nursing was a more impactful field than chemistry. As first she was shocked and an argument soon followed. They argued all night into the morning about the smallest little details, pointing out discrepancies and flaws in each other's logic and only stopped when her co-workers came back with dreadful hangovers. It was only then that she realised why he'd done all that. She hadn't felt lonely for one second.

She learnt the nurses' name, Tauro Leon, and arranged for an argument rematch. From then on, they became the closest of friends... but as a scientist she couldn't help but hypothesise why her heart rate picked up a few more beats when he was around.