Curate, connect, and discover
Cicero oh so humbly asks the listener to make some headcanons about him~
Of course! Crackhead Crusty the clown, love the bastard. This is gonna be long.
- Cicero is a very good whistler. On days where his voice grew hoarse and faint from speaking to the Night Mother for hours on end, he’d opt to whistle a sweet tune for her instead. It’s one of the few things he can do in the sanctuary that won’t get on everyone else’s nerves. Though, at times it can be a bit creepy. Imagine waking up in the middle of the night in a dark, underground cave, and the only thing you can hear is an eerie, solemn whistle from a direction you can’t even discern. The fact that he’s an actual assassin and a jester makes it worse. He definitely does it to toy with his victims and freak them out when he’s traveling with the Listener.
- When he was much younger and much less insane, he was a bit of a ladies man back in The Imperial city, where he grew up. He’s always had a knack for sugaring up his words, especially so by song and prose, even before taking up the jester persona. He was definitely very good at using it to his advantage in his youth. He could charm near any woman willing to make eye contact, whether by reciting a memorized poem, or singing a sweet song. His silver tongue got him out of sticky situations where he almost got caught on his jobs as well.
- Get’s very antsy after a while without being told what to do or given a task. He’s dedicated his entire life to serving the Night Mother and the Listener, and being without an objective for too long really bugs him out. He literally doesn’t know how to function properly without having someone order him around and have him do things for them, it’s kind of sad.
- He has very vivid nightmares from time to time, where he’s back on his last contract when The Jester was killed. Only this time, he’s the Jester, and he’s under the raised knife of shadowy figure he can’t quite see. His chest aches from the action of manic laughter, but nothing escapes his open mouth. He’s wrapped in deafening, creeping silence as the shadowy assailant plunges their knife into his chest, again and again. He sees the night mother standing near him, peering silently, scrutinizing him with a disappointed and angry look. He knows she’s angry that he won’t laugh for her; instead, he’s dying in pathetic silence. No manner of grisly death or torture frightens this man, except the disappointment of his unholy matron. He’s almost shook back into sanity when he awakes, and many of the other members revel in the fact that Cicero is silent for once, unaware of the unfortunate reason why.
- His excessive attachment to the Night Mother stems from the unfortunate loss of his own mother when he was at a young age. On one summer night in the Imperial City, when the air was sticky and warm and the sun was melting out of the evening sky, his mother did not return from work. She was a strong-headed woman, hardened by a life of poverty and the struggle of surviving while raising a child alone. He scarcely remembers her now in his adulthood, but as a young boy he would trail her all around their small shed of a home, clinging to the ends of her tattered dress. She worked for meager pay as a seamstress, stationed daily in the back rooms of a clothing shop patching holes, sewing buttons onto robes, and trimming fabric. She never came come after the sun set, adamant on not leaving her son in the care of her elderly neighbors after dark. When the moon peaked through the dusk clouds, he was sent to bed by the elderly couple who watched him on his mother’s work days. When he awoke in the morning, and his mother still had not returned, his insisted on helping search for her. He was met with a firm “no, you should wait here while we go find your mommy” but he was not having it. He screamed and cries until they gave in and let him tag along. They had turned down an alley nearby at the sight of torn clothes discarded on the ground, and the old couple pushed him backwards and covered his eyes a moment too late, for he’d already caught a glimpse of his mother’s bloodied, lifeless body. He has no conscious memory of those moments, he has no memory of ever having a mother to begin with, and he has no memory of the folded paper left next to her body, with an inky black handprint smudged into the middle of it.
- He spent a good portion of his childhood after that at a rundown orphanage. He was a loner among the other children and scarcely spoke a word. He spent his waking hours playing by himself in the corner, picking apart dead bugs and skeevers with pins and shards of glass he found strewn about. He’d giggle and chortle as the blood smeared onto his hands, painting on scraps of old parchment with it. Any couple looking to adopt would immediately turn their gaze away from him, and onto one of his peers. He went many years without being brought to a new home until one day, close to his eleventh birthday, a pair of men dressed in darkened robes with red embellishments made their way inside the orphanage. Much to his surprise, they approached him. He was sat on the floor, carving away at his wooden bedpost with a dagger he most certainly was not permitted to have. For a moment he feared they would tell on him and get him in trouble, but they did nothing of the sort. Instead they asked his name, and when he murmured out a very shy “Cicero”, they took him by the hand and led him outside and to his new home. He was educated from that day on about the ways of the Night Mother, and the importance of the Five Tenets. He was glad to see there were a few handful of other children near his age at the new home that the two men called “The Sanctuary.” As a young child, with repressed trauma from his mother’s murder, he ate that cult shit up and immediately swore unwavering fidelity to the Night Mother and Dread Father, and not for a moment in his life did it ever diminish. Not in the silence of his matron, and not in the presence of the false leader.
- He really likes carrots because he finds it cool that they match his hair. Literally, that’s the only reason why. Ironically he also loves rabbits, despite hating most other animals. Probably smuggled a few pet rabbits into the sanctuary over the years growing up. Definitely pesters and prods the Listener/dragonborn to let him have one as well, now that they’re the leader and can demand the other members put up with it. Eventually he gets one and names it something stupid like Cornelius.