Darlene Alderson

[Cat Rescue 101; CW: child abuse, attempted but not actual animal cruelty]

When she's a little girl, Darlene finds a kitten. It's soft as a marshmallow and the colour of fall leaves, and she names it Moonpie and kisses it on the nose even when it bites her. Moonpie lives in her bedroom in secret, while she manages construction of a ramshackle cardboard house in the backyard. It lives off her leftover tuna sandwiches, her okra and coriander.

A few days after affecting the move into the backyard, Moonpie is discovered by Darlene's mother- a stern woman with Darlene's scowl and a loud voice. The drive out to the lake is long and winding, and full of her mother's screaming; Darlene holds Moonpie's box in her lap and just seethes the whole drive.

At the lake, Darlene's mother drags her daughter to the edge of the water, and insists that the kitten be drowned. To the adult ear, there's a justification in there about responsibility there, but to little-girl Darlene it's just white hot rage and volume. She slips her mother's grip, takes Moonpie and runs- throws the kitten into the bushes and runs farther, out into the countryside and the dark night.

The police bring her home three days later, filthy and surly and absolutely sure that she's won.

[Happy Halloween]

The best memories of Elliott are Halloween. He and his best friend Angela would get together and put on a horror movie, and Darlene, four years younger, was always invited. Elliott gets sick when he's older, and Darlene feels more protective of him than anything else- but when they were kids he was the beacon of comfort and safety, especially after the loss of their father. This memory is just Darlene crashing out at two in the morning, tucked onto the couch with the two teenagers, her eyes closed and the movie buzzing in the background.

[Court, Aftermath. CW Murder]

When Darlene is a little girl, she sits through a big trial. The details are lost to her comprehension at that age, but her father is recently buried, and to her little girl mind the fleet of corporate lawyers sitting across the room from them are the ones responsible.

One woman, fit and immaculately dressed and assertive, has a particular tendency of tearing witnesses apart.

A decade and change later, face to face (and now standing eye to eye with her) Darlene will hit this woman square in the heart with a handheld taser, and shove her into a darkly lit swimming pool. Hate, joy and terror combine to make her nauseous; the woman floats face down in the water.

[CW Death, Gunfire]

The diner is brightly lit, and even though she's tired, Cisco is making her smile. The world is closing in on them, the trouble they're in is serious, he shouldn't be joking, she shouldn't be laughing. She kicks him hard under the table, and wonders if they'd still be sitting here right now if she'd just agreed to marry him when he asked. Instead, she'd left his apartment, fucked a stranger, moved in with Elliott, burnt down everything-

He winces, rubbing his shin, and opens his mouth to say just the right thing, when a woman appears at the edge of the table. Darlene feels the bottom of her stomach drop out, at the cut of her suit, the tilt of her head, the FBI badge in her hand. She's so caught up in staring that she doesn't notice the bike pull up outside the diner window behind her.

Then, Agent DiPierro is the least of her worries. There's a crash of glass, a hail of gunfire, bullets passing close enough that it's a miracle she isn't killed.

Cisco, who she could probably have married, bleeds out on the restaurant floor.

User Name/Nick: Steph
User DW: None
E-mail: underwater.owl@gmail.com
Other Characters: Quentin Coldwater

Character Name: Darlene Alderson
Series: Mr Robot
Age: Twenty four.
From When?: End of season three.
Inmate: Darlene is a sexy trainwreck. She's a ringleader in a major network of hackers responsible for the single most cataclysmic hack in history. She murders a woman in cold blood. She's ruthless in pursuing her goals and will use anyone or anything to get her way.
Arrival: Snatched at the moment of her death.
Abilities/Powers: Human.

Personality:
Darlene is a take-no-prisoners character who learned her willful disobedience early from an incredibly abusive home life, and translated her utter contempt for the rules into running an underground hacking ring that reshaped her world as she knew it. She is one of the founding members of fsociety, and holds her own as queen and goddess of the nerds, ruling through intimidation, manipulation, and awestriking skill. Darlene is a tech genius, with a brutal understanding of computer systems and a ferocious dedication to causing trouble, and a symbiotic relationship with her older brother who shares the same hate of capitalism.

Elliot and Darlene are working together to bring down capitalism as a whole, and carry out the hack of E-Corp, a data and finance megagiant that shows in as a show analog for Big Banks/Big Data/all things evil. Their father was killed by an environmental catastrophe that resulted from the company's recklessness and cost cutting, and so has been a target for the siblings' long term festering ire ever since. Darlene takes this rage a step further than Elliot, though. She's truly fanatical about it, and even goes so far as to kill the company's lawyer- holding her hostage in her own home then hitting her in the chest with a taser, even though she knows the woman has a pacemaker. She tips her into the pool to drown, then cremates her for a few hundred dollars at a local vet. Before she kills her, Darlene reminisces to her victim about fixating on her as a child, seeing her in court. She'd been holding on to the thought for years.

As well as being murderously enraged and lit with a quixotic inner light, Darlene is also self-destructive on an interpersonal level. Her boyfriend proposes they marry, and it's enough that she leaves him and goes out for a night of casual sex with strangers, then decides to crash on her brother's couch ("I'm stealing your clothes. My dress has cum stains on it." "Jesus.")

That said, Darlene also has one or two pro-social traits. She's deeply protective of her big brother. Elliot has more severe mental illness than she does, and Darlene checks on him often, keeps in touch with their mutual friends about his mental health, and is generally there in his life. They're close, even though Elliot occasionally gets so bad that he forgets who she is, and even though Darlene does sometimes seem to pressure him deeper into the dangerous world of economy-breaking hacks.

Elliot shares an anecdote about Darlene in which she finds a stray kitten and adopts it secretly, naming it Moonpie. When their mother finds the animal she begins screaming and drives Darlene and Elliot out to a nearby lake to order Darlene to drown the animal to teach her a lesson. Instead, the tiny Darlene takes the cat and runs away, escaping their mother and vanishing for a period of several days. She returns, but only after she's rehomed her kitten. I like this anecdote about Darlene because to me, it reflects a lot of her otherworldly inhuman determination. What little kid would not only disobey their parents but voluntarily make themselves homeless for the shake of sheer stubbornness? It's a worrisome sign of a severe attachment problem (kids are just. not supposed to run away and sleep rough voluntarily unless something has gone terribly, horribly wrong) and a testament to the best parts of who she is. Fanatic, protective, free thinking, and completely unshackled by the expectations of others.

Darlene and Elliot's home life was terrible abusive in this and many other ways. Darlene also shares the story of being abducted from the fair as a child, and preferring life with the woman who'd kidnapped her. She was sorry to be burst in on by police and returned to her real family.

Darlene has an element of frailty to her that she knows how to leverage into a deep, sexy vulnerability. In addition to having rage, alienation, trauma and panic attacks she also manages to compell the wild and self-destructive attraction and devotion of people all around her (her hacker boyfriend, an innocent local banker, the FBI agent investigating her for her crimes.) She's a femme fatale for a modern age, as well as a radiant destroyer of worlds.


Barge Reactions:
Darlene is going to be in pretty severe shock when she arrives on the barge. Having no internet is going to be a huge adjustment, as are the variety of types of people around. She's used to being credibly dangerous in her world, and will not measure up here against warriors and assassins and sorcerers. She's also pathologically unable to let anyone have the upper hand over her, so is going to be snide as heck and insubordinate to the bitter end. Darlene is probably in for a longer than average period of 'fuck you, you're not my REAL mom' to whoever ends up responsible for her.

Path to Redemption:
Darlene is definitely a redeemable inmate. Her destructiveness and rage come from pain and disconnectedness and the momentum of events she's found herself swept up in. A good warden for her would take a little emotional care, and help her feel like she's in control of the parts of her life that she feels like she isn't- and encourage her to stop trying to take control of the things she shouldn't. More accepting friendship and less destroying the world economy.

History: Link. Content warning for child abuse.

Sample Journal Entry:

okay so ive been here a few months now and my warden is telling me i have to communicate more openly with people so I thought it was time to tell you the story of how my life ended up turned upside down
i grew up in w. philly where id say i was a pretty normal kid. a bit of a tomboy i guess more into basket ball than ud think
but it ws a p. rough neigborhood
i got into like one little fight and my mom totally freaked out and was all like 'ur getting out of here u gonna go live with ur aunt and ur uncle in california' and so she sent me alone to the airport in a taxi even though i was an unaccompanied minor with a history of getting into fights which as i type it out seems thematically inappropriate
but okay
so now here i am child of inner city poverty transplanted from my roots and just trying to stay out of trouble and keep idk
fresh
thats me :/
i guess i just needed to say all that

Sample RP:
Darlene spends exactly one week lying in her new bedroom, catatonic with shock and clutching her nails into her palms with a death grip, trying to wake up from what is clearly a massive ongoing break with reality. Then she reads the entirety of the network. Then she wastes another few days trying to hack the network.

Darlene knows enough about psychology to understand the implications of being able to retain number order, and enough about hacking to recognize what the fuck, magic when she tries to code it. If this isn't real, it's so close that the difference is basically immaterial.

She blows her nose into a shirt sleeve, then gets up and heads for the weird as fuck deck- the phrase 'rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic' springs to mind, but she pulls on up to the railing anyways, and falls into it dramatically. She lounges, naked legs and combat boots and a fur lined jacket, hair a tangle, mascara drawing streaks down her cheeks out from under her sunglasses. She puts her boots on the rails, looks up at the stars, and starts chewing her fingernails. They're already bloody at the cuticle, and she hadn't even realized she'd picked the habit back up.

Darlene needs a drink. She needs a cigarette. She needs to stop crying, but she refuses to do so just yet, giving into one ugly jag in utter public, in the absolute hopes that it'll make all the people around her hideously uncomfortable. Fuck them. They should feel weird about kidnapping her. She's ugly-crying, too, red eyes behind her sunglasses and snot bubbling, pawing her face with the sleeves of her coat and absolutely refusing to feel better. She misses the internet. She misses Elliot. She's dead, and Cisco isn't even in her weird afterlife with her to keep her company. She bawls her fucking eyes out.

It helps.

Special Notes: None!