#and yes i know jones is nearly forty but damn she looks ageless

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Name: Blair Sabrina Lafleur-Blackwood

Age: 29

Place of origin: Calabasas, California

Survivor group: Saddle Ridge Elementary School

Survivor job: Healer

Faceclaim: January Jones

personality ;

Two positive traits: Eloquent, insouciant

Two negative traits: Hedonistic, disrespectful

biography ;

Life before the outbreak:

Born with a silver spoon isn’t the right descriptor. A Blackwood child was born with the whole damn cutlery drawer. Firstborn of a business mogul and a fashion model, both her parents were the textbook definition of WASPs. They passed their lavish tastes and high expectations on to their eldest daughter. Blair grew up riding horses in Jackson Hole, took private tennis lesson at the courts of Wimbledon, skied in the Tetons. She lost her first tooth and learned how to swim in Capri while staying at the Blackwood’s family home there. By the time she was thirteen her younger sister Ivy was born and her parent’s marriage was well and truly dead. The couple stayed in the same house officially and didn’t divorce though. The waves it would cause in the elite circles was too much ( public image was everything ) but each started seeing their own lovers.

Everyday was a bid to see how much excess and waste one family could produce. Every member contributed in their own way. James, Blair’s father, hosted near weekly parties. They featured never-ending parades of lingerie models that he paid off with morning after pills and rolls of twenties, his Fortune 500 exec buddies that did lines with him at startling speeds, and political allies he plied with exclusive vintages of alcohol, all set against the backdrop of his veritable castle in Florida. 

Adalicia retreated for weeks at a time to her childhood home in France- sometimes bringing her daughters with her, sometimes not- but not really caring either way. Then she would emerge like a rare butterfly at whatever fashion show or ball that pled for her attendance, check in on her daughters and pat herself on the back for being a ‘good’ parent all while stringing along lovers not much older than her daughter. Meanwhile Ivy didn’t actively try to participate in the extravagance but she just did, simply by existing, and would became an idol for young girls in her own way.

Yet Blair’s was the one that caught the public’s eye, starting at age 16. Blair was brought out at a debutante’s ball by the desire of her mother but what really rocked the world was the fact she stepped out in a fine tailored tuxedo, hair cropped and lipstick a perfect red to match the girl’s on her arm. The night went beautifully, the boy she replaced had taught her how to lead in gorgeous smooth movements, and she had her first kiss with a girl that night. The tabloids were all abuzz at the Blackwood name being besmirched like that, but Blair paid the gossip rags no mind at all. Her parents were an entire other matter. 

Her father raged and screamed at her, demanding she married one of his business partner’s son or something similarly boring, and not attractive in any way, in the future. Meanwhile her mother’s reaction was even worse in Blair’s mind. Adalicia simply continued on like her daughter coming out never happened. She continued to try to set her up with boy after boy, fussed over making her recently cropped hair ‘beautiful’ and ‘lady-like’, and treated her like another piece of furniture to arrange to her liking. Blair ignored her parents, their combined wrath and indifference, and continued in her schooling. She also took over caring for her younger sister because her parents seemed to have abandoned Ivy to a series of incompetent nannies. 

Eventually her parents accepted the fact Blair was gay, or at least gave the appearance of it. Blair graduated high school and went on to medical school, aiming for the goal of becoming one of the top neurosurgeons in the world. She went to John Hopkins, and Adalicia finally took responsibility for Ivy, bringing her with to France. Ivy got private tudors until she was ten, when she came back to the United States. Blair demanded Ivy live near her, instead of being foisted off on another series of bad au pairs. Blair got her wish and Ivy went to Lycée Rochambeau, a French international school in Bethesda, Maryland. As it was an hour drive away from John Hopkins where Blair spent her days, she hired a private security guard for her sister.   

The situation suited Blair, who was able to look after Ivy and pursue her goals at the same time. She even got some nice dates in with some sweet girls from her university, crammed between finishing her graduate studies and watching over Ivy. Her father left her alone, as he found his own protege to take over the companies, while her mother was busy with her own life. Blair breezed through her medical exams, and entered residency at John Hopkins. 

In her first week, she overheard some other residents talking about strange a brain sample they had gotten, something about ambulatory movement without a functioning higher cortex or nervous system. Blair thought it was just an isolated case until the teaching doctors started looking more frazzled around the edges, and more and more classmates seemed to be dropping out. Blair, for all her smarts, didn’t connect the dots and couldn’t understand it until it was happening outside, until it was happening in her halls.    

Life during the outbreak:

The night had been like any other, Blair was working late ( again, luckily Ivy’s guard understood ) when she heard a scream down the hall. Was someone playing a prank and scared a resident? Blair peeked into the hall and was greeted with a bone chilling sight — a patient, bent over one of her cohort, chewing on her fellow student’s neck as they gurgled. The following two hours was a blur of blood, screams, and burning cityscapes descending into chaos.

She made it home to Bethesda, relieved to find Ivy safe in their home due to the vigilance of their guard who had immediately withdrawn Ivy from school when the first news reports came in. While Blair thought the should leave as soon as possible, Ivy brought up the point that everyone else in the D.C. Metro area was no doubt thinking the exact same thing that night. They decided to stay the night, and boarded up the doors and windows.

The next morning they emerged to find the streets near deserted, save the occasional soccer mom van with blood splattered on the fender driving quietly out of town. The trio found they couldn’t take any of the highways, as they were packed with stalled cars and corpses, so they made a slow crawl out through residential streets. They hugged the Potomac River, watching the bloated corpses floating in the murky water for movement, and made their way west. 

Life after the outbreak:

They spent nearly half a year drifting, living day to day as Blair and her younger sister improved their skills. They by-passed raiders and stopped in small towns, little chokeholds of normality scattered across the country. Blair would offer her medical skills as payment for food and shelter, while Ivy offered clothes repair. They squeaked by on this system of trade, moving on every few days or weeks, never staying for long enough in one place to establish connections.

Neither of the Blackwood girls missed their parents, as they never really were their parents. Blair thought about possibly finding their father, who might still be in his mansion in Florida, but every time the thought struck she remembered how harshly he had treated her when she came out. Ivy grew from a moody pre-teen into a cautious teenager while Blair gathered a small arsenal of medical supplies. They finally stopped in the capitol of  Wyoming, Cheyenne during the spring of 2016 — two years after the outbreak.

Ivy had sprained her ankle and Blair had rather not move her until she recovered, so they stopped in a house in the suburbs of the frontier town. At first glance the town had seemed almost abandoned, but over the course of the first week, they kept running across people who talked about the ‘camps.’ Blair grew curious and followed one of the residents to their camp, the Cheyenne Regional Hospital. She wanted to see what sort of medical facilities the town had and when she arrived at the camp, Blair realized they were far more established than she thought. They had a system of trade with other such camps and even couple of other nurses or other such medical professionals. 

Blair went back to the trio’s little home and after much discussion, they all decided that staying in Cheyenne for the time being was the best option as they were all road weary and wanted somewhere nominally more safe than a tent on the side of the road or an abandoned house. They moved into the hospital and Blair became a healer, while her sister became a carer and their guard joined the patrollers defending their new home. Then the Fall of Cheyenne happened. Blair, Ivy and their guard survived the chaos and found a new home in Saddle Ridge Elementary School — still holding their old jobs but far more weary about the possibility of attacks to their second home. 

#hst:task #( » » tasks. ) #( » » tasks | 005 ; the swap. ) #switch!blair has her life together far more than blair or even me #also she's gay as hell and that makes me happy #and yes i know jones is nearly forty but damn she looks ageless