the story;
basic
Name: Kelly Chandler.
Nickname: Kel.
Age: Twenty-eight (May 23, 1979).
Occupation: Assistant to ryandthebeast
Location: New York, New York.
fairy-tale
Fairy-Tale Character: The Tradesman's Daughter.
Fairy-Tale: The Oxford Student.
Kelly and the Tradesman's Daughter: Kelly deeply resents being the Tradesman’s Daughter. Or rather, she deeply resents being the Tradesman’s Daughter and living. The majority of her past incarnations were all killed moments after her realization. She was the first one, the Fox’s first victim. There was no ‘be bold, be bold, but not too bold’ for her. Now, she’s alive to tell her Tale. And she doesn’t want to. As such, she absolutely refuses to be the canary in the coal mine - despite the benefit of her Tale’s revelation, she will not warn the women Reynard interacts with what lies in store for them if he takes a special interest. She didn’t get a warning - why should they? It’s a far cry from the altruism she embraced as a doctor - but she’ll argue that she’s far from a doctor now.
Status: The Librarians know. Reynard knows. That's it.
personality
People who knew Kelly Chandler before she was broken by Jasper Reynard would remember a passionate, confident, sassy young woman. Never having to want for anything, and choosing her own life challenges, Kelly was used to taking life by the horns and fitting it to suit her tastes. She was fun, she was sarcastic - but never malicious - and always ready for a good time. Her parents’ agenda worked well - she very much does not think of herself as ‘above’ anyone in any sort of classist manner. The playing field - whether it be school, surgical residency, or a friendly competition - is another matter entirely. It works both ways - sure, she’s not better than you, but you aren’t better than her, either. She’s dedicated, and passionate, in all that she does.
Now, after her fall from grace, Kelly is still, on the outside, very much the same person. But there’s a deep bitterness now, and where her sarcasm was never meant to harm before, sometimes she does comment with malicious intent - she often regrets it, but her pride won’t let her take it back. Where she was once willing to freely admit her mistakes, she now defends herself guardedly, unwilling to take a blow to her ego for fear of falling to pieces again. In moments when she does let her guard down, it is not something she’s proud of. But she’s a broken girl on a slow mend - she needs time to forgive herself, to figure out where she stands and where she’s going to go next. She’ll never be the same person again - but she doesn’t quite know who she is now, nevermind who she’ll be in the future. She tenaciously holds to her old habits and mannerisms, but depression takes over and she inevitably turns to drink. It is much less of a problem than it used to be, but it is still, in truth, a problem - and not the least of them that she has yet to face up to.
history
The Chandlers were not by any means middle-class. Their income bracket far exceeded that which could be considered even ‘upper middle-class’, but if you asked them they would never admit to being upper-class. Maybe, if pressed, they would reluctantly say, ‘Oh, all right, lower upper-class.’ Certainly, they sent their four children to private schools - but so did everyone who wanted their kids to get a good education in New York City! Inner city public schools were not for the faint of heart, and certainly not for the progeny of a member of the Mount Sinai board of trustees.
All the same, the Chandler kids did not grow up with notions of entitlement, or superiority. Mr. Herbert Chandler would not stand for his children becoming snobby brats like Mr. Parsons’ daughter, who vocally protested being dragged to a hospital charity ball. His wife, Chelsea, harbored the same desire for her children to be well-rounded individuals. So, while Anthony, Kelly, Olivia, and Justin wanted for nothing in their cushy Manhattan (weekend house in the Hamptons) existence, they didn’t experience silver spoons or golden platters. They were all encouraged to participate in after-school activities, and to get jobs, and clean their own rooms.
Thus, Kelly Chandler - second eldest of the clan - had a fairly normal childhood. Certainly, there were charity balls and expensive dresses, but there were also outings in the park, mudfights on weekends, groundings and helping Mom bake muffins (that invariably turned out terribly). If they wanted something outrageously expensive for their birthdays, it was the only thing they got. Moments of snobby bratdom were ill tolerated, and the Chandlers got it out of their system by the time they were in first grade - just because Julio’s mom did their mom’s cleaning once a week did not make them any better than him.
Of course, they were far from perfect examples of well brought-up children. Justin, by virtue of being the youngest, was a spoiled brat, and loud and obnoxious (but terribly charismatic and funny). Olivia was the moody one, and prone to suddenly throwing tantrums regarding the misunderstanding of her artistic soul - but otherwise she was very kind and helpful. Anthony tended towards ‘neurotic freak’, weighed with the burden of being the eldest son, but his achievements make the family proud. And Kelly, well. Kelly was complicated.
On the surface, she didn’t seem much like her younger, brooding sister. In fact, she was all laughter and mild trouble, outgoing and sarcastic, and eager to try new things and enthused about learning. If Olivia was deciding to play martyr and deigning all her Christmas money was to go to a charity in Africa, Kelly was quick to ask for a new car. Not out of any particular greed, mind you, but hey, Mom and Pop were already donating to that charity, so why not put Liv’s allotment towards her own gain? (No dice.)
But then, when she graduated high school, she announced that she was going to defer her enrolment and instead go abroad. No, no. She didn’t expect Daddy to pay for shenanigans in Europe - she’d work her away across, as an au pair, or farm hand, whatever kept her busy and interacting with locals. She’d start in Eastern Europe. Obviously, this was met with great protest, but she was stubborn, and well-researched, and in the end she boarded a plane to a ten month sojourn burping babies and picking grapes in tiny towns. Her adventures were many, and the tales she told when she returned were tall.
She did, however, keep the promise she made to her father before she left. Once she did come back from Europe, she enrolled in a program that gave her a medical degree in 7 years. Fast track. Herbert Chandler dearly wanted to see at least one of his children go into medicine - Anthony’s interests lay more in law, and Olivia, well. You never knew what her ‘artistic nature’ might demand of her next. Justin was still far too young to think about university, but he did like the biology units of his science classes. Kelly found she had a passion for how the human body worked, and how she - a mere girl - could manipulate it, fix it. It’d be a lie to say that she breezed through medical school with flying colors - there were far more intelligent, motivated, and dedicated people than her - but she wasn’t anything to scoff at.
When she entered her surgical internship at Mt. Sinai Hospital, Kelly was at the top of her game. She was confident, she was ready to learn, and determined to rise above the insinuations of ‘daddy’s girl’ her fellow interns liked to throw around. It worked out well - she could prove her own salt while at the same time knowing that if she needed to, she could pull that ‘Daddy on the board’ card. While her peers were cowering, she was confident and maybe just a little bit uppity with her attendings. It was, at the time, one of the best and hardest years of her life. There were days she was on top of the world; there were nights she spent sobbing over a gin and tonic. Nevertheless, she made it through. And more importantly, she found that she truly loved being a surgeon - not merely for the sheer exhilaration that came from being intimate with the secrets of human anatomy, but for the ability to help people, and to connect with them in a way no one else could.
Kelly remained at Mt. Sinai for her first year residency. One of the more notable new residents, and apple of her father’s eye, working in something she really, truly loved, things could not get any better. Her life was on track. She was happy, confident, and comfortable with whatever the future held. It was two weeks into her residency when she got put on Dr. Reynard’s service.
Of course, she knew of the doctor, and had worked with him before. But now her colleagues were beginning to seek out specialties - neuro, cardio, ortho, natal - there were too many to choose from. For some reason, however, Kelly felt drawn to vascular surgery. Or rather, she felt drawn to Jasper Reynard. Indubitably the older man noticed this, too. It could have been her enthusiasm for his field, it could have been her vaguely flirtatious, sassy overtures, it could have been her general attitude toward medicine, but whatever it was, he took her under his wing. She was the first of her peers to choose a specialty, and she dove into with great vigor. All of her waking hours not spent at Dr. Reynard’s side were spent researching, and studying, and, all right, maybe occasionally going out with friends. But eventually she eschewed even the attentions of the most attractive of her male peers for a chance to scrub in with Dr. Reynard - and he certainly did nothing to discourage her.
Indeed, their professional relationship grew into something beyond the bounds of the hospital walls. There were dinners, nights spent at his place, breakfasts in diners far from the hospital. Arrivals to the workplace were carefully timed, and although people joked that she must be banging the esteemed doctor, very few people seriously suspected anything.
As she grew more intimate with - not closer to, mind - Dr. Reynard, he let her in on a few of his secrets. Namely, a revolutionary new procedure he was on the verge of introducing to the medical community. With whispers of sweet nothings and promises of medical fame, Kelly was drawn into this research, starry-eyed with the potential of having her name - her name! - appear next to Jasper Reynard's in the paper that would change vascular surgery forever. The crowning moment came when he took her aside in the hall and told her that they would be performing that procedure in that day's surgery... and, as a reward for her utter devotion to the research, she would be the one holding the scalpel, under his watchful eye.
It was supposed to be the best day of Kelly's life. She floated all throughout the rest of the day, only smiling coyly when her friends asked her why she was so happy (none of them knew about this new procedure, of course, because, well... why risk the competition?) and word quickly got around the surgical circuit that Kelly Chandler knew something everyone else didn't.
But unfortunately, what Kelly knew wasn't enough. Certainly, she knew the patient was a 25 year-old female with acute ischemia in all of her limbs, she knew which cuts to make and where and when - she knew everything there was to know medically. What she didn't know was that Dr. Reynard did not, in fact, have any sort of authorization from above to perform his brilliant new procedure. What she did not know was that, in trusting her to do all but the most intricate parts of that procedure, he was basically setting her up to fall in case things did not go as planned.
They didn't. There was a flaw in their revolutionary new surgery, and perhaps - perhaps, if it had been a different patient, a slightly different disorder, things would not have gone quite so badly. But they did, and the patient died on the operating table. One moment, she was on the brink of medical glory. The next, there was blood everywhere, and Dr. Reynard was swearing, shoving her aside. Nurses were staring at her in horror and she just stood there unable to move while her patient flat-lined. What followed? Too much, too painful for Kelly to recount. Morbidity and Mortality conferences. Malpractice suits. What was important was that all the blame was placed directly on her shoulders. Dr. Reynard swore up and down he did not authorize her to do anything, and, as he was a respected, full-fledged specialist surgeon and she was not? They believed him. To tell the truth, Kelly was too shaken by the bloody, bloody death of her patient to say otherwise. Indeed, she believed it was all her fault, and her fault alone. She was wracked with guilt and hurt and madly, stupidly, she accepted the blame and was disgracefully stripped of all her medical credentials. Her father couldn't stand the shame and injustice of it, and resigned from the board.
The thing that really broke Kelly, though - the thing that shattered her into a million little pieces, was the utter disdain with which Jasper treated her afterward. She could rationalize him betraying her - he was older, his career was more important, she'd do the same thing. But outside the hospital, in private rooms, he completely rejected her. This final, ultimate betrayal threw everything else into sharp relief - how Reynard set her up, betrayed her in the OR, let her fall from grace without any regrets at all. With that realization came the realization of her Talehood. Jasper Reynard, Mr. Fox. Kelly Chandler, the Tradesman's Daughter. The boughs, they bent, the leaves, they shook. With this revelation came the rush of memories of past lives, and the gory deaths she died in almost every one of them... for she always realized too late who she was, she always lived out her Tale to the bloody end, realizing the danger she was in just too late.
In this lifetime, she was lucky. Anser told her so, quite bluntly - he'd spent many a past life rushing to find the Tradesman's Daughter, all too often to find only a corpse instead. It didn’t really soften the blow.
Her life as she knew it was completely gone. She was no longer a surgeon. The past nine years of her life - glorious, confident, blissful years - were gone - down the drain, with the wind, like so much refuse, etc. Her father had stepped down, and she couldn’t stand to face him, or the rest of her family, for the shame of it all. She had nothing to be afraid of - they would never disown her - but the implicit disappointment, and embarrassment, were too much for her to bear. And worst of all, Reynard. She would have never admitted she was falling for him before that surgery. Hindsight, however, is a bitch, and it served only to rub salt into the heartbreak of being betrayed by her mentor and lover. She was in pieces.
The following few months are not ones that Kelly likes to revisit. There was alcohol. There was far too much alcohol. There were drunken phonecalls - sobbing, angry. There was extreme paranoia, and fear, and there were nightmares with glinting blades and fox-like grins. Only her very closest friends dared to stay near her, and it was a good thing - somebody had to be there so she could be admitted for alcohol poisoning one particularly bad night. To her own old hospital. She wanted to die.
But, she didn’t. Her sister, and her closest friends, pulled her up from rock bottom. It took a very long time. In fact, a year later, she is far from out of the hole. But after those first few months, she got back onto her feet - determined to not let this get the best of her, despite the gaping despair in her gut. She applied for a job as an executive assistant - something for which she was far overqualified for, but something that would keep her busy. She faced her ugly Tale nature head-on, and started interacting with the community - although she quickly became known for drinking and writing.
romantic
Status: Single.
Orientation: Heterosexual.
ooc
Portrayed By: Jennifer Carpenter.
Player: Emily.
Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with neither Jennifer Carpenter, nor The Oxford Student, or any students from Oxford. Also, my knowledge of medicine and Mt. Sinai is pretty close to zilch.
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