Name:

Joseph Bichler

Nicknames:

None.

Age:

26

Gender:

Male

Familial Dynamics:

Pretty much tries to stay out of the public eye, pays no mind to any of the family other than Cheyenne. He's frequently out and about with his best friend, Riley.

Appearance:

Although Joseph is Cheyenne's fraternal twin, she looks much more like Chase, and he looks more like Foster. He is roughly 6'2, very lean, and has dark, messy hair and bright blue eyes.

Clothing Style:

Joseph wears practical, outdoorsy clothing that he can wear without changing as he goes from thing to thing. He wears a lot of plaid, although he also boasts a large collection of sweaters. He is also frequently seen in a cowboy hat.

Scent:

He smells woodsy and natural, not taking the time to put on cologne or fix up his appearance in any certain way.

Social Dynamics:

Joseph really pays no mind to anyone, so it would take someone interesting and special to draw his attention. He is a fan of anomalies.

Backstory:

Joseph has always done his own thing, and always had a superior horse sense to the others. Since graduating high school, he's worked at the local coffee shop and bar, Vancouver's, with his best friend, who now owns the joint. He's also always taking on a different client for training horses, teaching horsemanship clinics, and things of this nature. However, he doesn't compete because he doesn't want to be in the spotlight.

Skills:

- Horsemanship

- Artistic Sense and Intuition

- Self-Sufficiency

- Unassuming

- True Outdoorsman

Other:

none for now :)

...

Name:

Chase Bichler

Nicknames:

Cheyenne sometimes calls him Chasey in an older sister, teasing sort of way.

Age:

23

Gender:

Male

Familial Dynamics:

Chase is young and a bit arrogant and stubborn, so he frequently gets into fights with Foster and knows he is avoided by Joseph. He's pretty close with Cheyenne, and was his father's favorite. This is part of why Foster dislikes him so much.

Appearance:

Chase has fairly messy blond hair and hazel eyes. He's the only sibling with curly hair, and it remains unkempt and unmanaged beneath a cowboy hat most of the time. He has a much broader, more muscular figure than the others as a result of the physical work he puts in around the farm and at the gym.

Clothing Style:

Of the guys, he's got the most adventurous fashion sense. However, he frequently stays within the cowboy aesthetic, although it's more of the show business side of things than the true outdoorsman that Joseph is. He wears bolder colors than his siblings, and his clothing is a bit more distinctly masculine.

Scent:

Smells strongly of cheap cologne, something musky that lingers in a room.

Social Dynamics:

Chase is not the kind of guy to commit to anything, be it a friendship, a relationship, or a job. He doesn't mind being entertained by something for a minute or two, but he'll never be the one to chase anyone or anything. Would pair best with someone who would make him chase <3

Backstory:

Not as intelligent as the others, Chase has purely relied on his brawn for as long as he can remember. His father trained him to be a rodeo star like himself, and he dropped out of high school when things got tough and left to join the rodeo. After several years of barely scraping by, he's returned on Cheyenne's request for their father's funeral, and to get things in order with the business.

Skills:

- Able to charm anyone

- Skilled rodeo star / horse sense

- Physically very strong

- Good manipulator

Other:

none for now :)

Name:

Bodhi Kazan Ariti

𝓂𝑒𝒶𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔: 𝐵𝓁𝑒𝓈𝓈𝑒𝒹 𝒶𝓌𝒶𝓀𝑒𝓃𝒾𝓃𝑔

(very ironic, I know)

Age:

23

Gender:

Male

Pronouns: he/him

Sexuality*:

Bisexual, with a slight preference for women

Appearance:

bodhi

Despite his human nature, Bodhi walks with an aura of a demon, or some other dark and unsettling form. When walking the streets, he is often avoided by young ones, and even some of the older children hang back at his seemingly ghastly presence. His skin is pale, almost deathly so, and despite nearly every moment of the day he walks the streets, but the sun seems to barely touch his ghostly flesh. His porcelain skin is something he prizes, obsesses over, even. He takes great care to keep his hands unmarred as possible. His back is nearly covered in scars, but he never speaks of where he gained these. He seems to thrive in the moonlight, when he stalks the streets, seeming even more devilish than he does in the sun.

His eyes are the colour of bitter coffee, dark, and unyielding, framed by strangely feminine eyelashes. He has high cheekbones, and a jawline sharp enough to cut diamonds. His dark hair is cut raggedly, longer on the top, and cut close around his skull on the sides. He has a lean, muscular build, and stands around 5'10. His shorter stature leaves people uneasy, wondering if his height is going to leave him at a disadvantage to them, or whether he will use it against them. He often speaks in a low, raspy voice, which doesn't quite seem to match his face, nor his age. His lips are round and full, a dusky rose colour. Despite the fact that they are often turned down in a frown, when he does smile, it lights up his whole face, causing one small dimple in his left cheek to appear. He is rather self-conscious of this feature, and this is a tiny part of the reason he normally chooses to keep his emotions hidden.

Bodhi dresses quite classily, in dark fabrics, often accentuated with gold or silver designs stitched in, such as paisleys (his personal favorite), roses, and feathers. These threads are usually hidden amongst the dark ones, causing the light to seemingly sparkle off the black and dark grey threads, which adds an air of mystery that he likes quite a bit. He has a tattoo on the back of his neck, a crow in flight, and a tiny sun on his right thumb. He has no piercings or any other man made marks upon his body, besides his scars. He normally stays as covered up as he can, in suits to rival Armani. Bodhi is rather broody, and often his face shows no emotion, besides a bit of a frown.

He walks with a slight limp, due to a childhood injury, and is highly irritated at this. He tries to act as though it doesn’t pain him at all, but once one knows him well, it is easy to catch the slight grimaces, and flashes of pain in his eyes.

Personality:

Bodhi isn't really that well known by anyone. He's mostly closed off, and those who don't know him well are eager to spread rumors.

Often described as cold and ruthless, Bodhi is willing to do almost any job for the right amount of money. He is rather manipulative and conniving, and is keen to let others know that he is in control of any situation. He is quick witted, and always has a trick up his sleeve, unless he's with someone he trusts with his life. He isn't a huge fan of trust, and will exploit almost anyone for his gain. Despite this, he is fiercely loyal to those he does love and trust, and once his trust is gained, it is not easily broken.

Bodhi is normally aloof and indifferent, hiding his true emotions behind a cool façade. However, he holds grudges close to his heart, and vengeance is practically his hobby. There isn't much you can do to rattle him, besides strong emotions. If someone is crying, or honestly feeling anything too strongly in front of him, he gets skittish and unwieldy. This stems mostly from his traumatic childhood, and he struggles with the fact that he doesn't really feel anymore.

One of Bodhi's biggest fears is mirrors. As a child, he learned to dislike his own appearance, and although he takes great pride in it now, he prefers to do as much of it as possible. This fears also comes from his uneasiness with how mirrors distort images, making him on edge with how appearances are not always what they seem.

Bodhi sometimes comes off as paranoid and lost in his own mind, he is good at riddles, problem solving, and is quite the perfectionist. When he finds his crowd, he is slightly more easy going, but for the most part, he prefers to be left with those select few, rather than in a group setting.

Backstory*: WIP

Likes:

-dark clothes

-money-

-riddles-

-sleight of hand-

-knives-

-poisons-

-foxglove-

Dislikes:

-mirrors-

-emotions-

-bright light-

-overly cheerful people-

-deep water-

Theme Song or Quote*:

Some Nights by fun.

Cheyenne Bichler | Bodhi, Chase, Foster, Joseph

As an extraordinarily long journey came to a close at an airport on the outskirts of the largest local city, Cheyenne couldn’t help feeling a pang of nostalgia at the notion of being home. Although she was the girl who typically never missed an opportunity to get the family together and on better terms than they usually were, she hadn’t been back from Europe in three years, which had felt like a lifetime. She, like everyone in her family, had plenty of skeletons in a closet that was moments away from being opened at all times. She, like everyone, had her reasons for staying away from the small town and everything that it meant to her for so many years before she’d become someone she barely recognized. This trip was an unwelcome opportunity to confront that, and the implications that it seemed to have on every facet of her complicated little life.

It was unsurprising that her eldest and youngest brother had sent her twin brother to pick her up, especially seeing as her flight had been delayed and had arrived at an ungodly morning hour that only Joseph would be available at. He had a penchant for working and living at odd hours that no one else seemed to want to, and by the time Cheyenne made her way through the airport and they took the lengthy trip from the airport back to their much smaller town, Foster and Chase would have already been more than consumed in their morning responsibilities at the ranch. If Chase wanted to, he likely could have swapped out with Joseph for the morning, but the young woman was absolutely convinced that he had his reasons for avoiding her. She wasn’t sure exactly what they were, but it wasn’t like they wouldn’t come out eventually.

“I barely recognized you, city slicker vibe and all.” The dark-haired man leaned against the side of his truck, arms crossed. His intelligent, blue-eyed gaze examined her from beneath the frame of a weathered stetson.

Giving her brother a hug, Cheyenne murmured, “Something tells me you would recognize me anywhere. I missed you.” She stepped backward, out of his rigid embrace, gesturing with her hands to the whole of his appearance. “Unlike me, you look exactly like you did the day I left. Have you even bought a new shirt since I’ve been gone?”

“Not a new shirt, but several old ones,” he replied cooly, opening the door for his sister and throwing her luggage haphazardly in the back. His brow furrowed at the fact that she had only brought one bag. “You pack light these days.”

Meeting his devastated gaze, which he tried to conceal by focusing on starting the truck and fumbling with a few of the necessary items in the front console, she offered him an apologetic look which only seemed to confirm his larger fears. She wasn’t planning on staying. “You know I have a life-”

“A life over there. I know, Chey, but that doesn’t mean you didn’t have a life here too. Do the others know?”

She drew in an uneven breath, unsure how to answer the question in a way that would cause him peace. Before she could find an approach that she could live with, he confronted her a second time.

“Do they?”

“No,” she admitted, buckling in her seatbelt as he started to drive. In her peripheral vision, she caught him shaking his head in disbelief.

“When are you going back?”

“Does it matter?”

“To me, yes.”

“In nine days.”

—————

While the first hour of the trip was spent trying to tackle the uncomfortable silence and Joseph’s one word responses to any questions she tried to ask him, the latter half seemed to fade into an easier silence and an easier conversation. He couldn’t stay mad at her, not for long and not forever. By the time they arrived back to the ranch, the sun had barely risen, reflecting off of the dew in the lush green pastures that stretched on for miles beyond the main house.

As a certain blond stepped out of the shadows, leading behind him a buckskin mare that was full of sweat and hadn’t shed her winter coat yet, Joseph shut the door to the truck and directed his voice in the young man’s direction.

“Look who I found at the airport. Your favorite.”

The blond stiffened, as if trying to remain visually indifferent beneath layers of emotion. He stood in his tracks, looking her up and down judgmentally.

“Hmph. City slicker,” he grumbled, in a way that showed significant similarity to her other brother’s reaction earlier. Nonetheless, he leaned into her hug, allowing one of his arms to be jerked backward with the reins at the mare’s impatience.

“Chasey,” she smiled softly, easing into the intimate moment with her brother. He avoided her gaze and seemed uncomfortable with himself and whatever thoughts he was thinking at that moment. “You look great, I barely even recognized you with all this muscle.”

“A lot can happen in a year, let alone how many it’s been since I saw you,” he responded defensively, seeming to regret his choice of words as he shifted quickly to a different approach. He gestured to her outfit, smiling mischievously. “Did you attend a business meeting on the plane, or do they make you dress like that all the time?”

Before she could respond, a third brother came into eyesight with a dark and brooding figure she had never seen before. It was early in the morning for business negotiations, even for Foster. He seemed more tired, more pale, and more sickly than he had been last time she had seen him, and his general demeanor toward the man he was with indicated to Cheyenne that he was part of the problem and not the solution. Despite this, he paused in his conversation at the sight of his sister, and the other figure seemed to follow his gaze toward the blonde.

“Is that my sister, in the flesh?” He excused himself politely from the side of the dark-haired man to approach her, giving her an awkward hug that felt even more uncomfortable than that of the two brothers who had greeted her prior. “God, I thought they were lying when they said you were coming.”

Shoving his arm lightly, she allowed her gaze to flicker between her brother and the figure looming in the background. “Don’t kid yourself, you were just trying to manifest my absence so you didn’t have to express another feeling.” She smiled teasingly at him, gesturing to the figure behind him. Lowering her voice, she said, “who’s that?”

The first of her brothers to seem more suspicious himself than skeptical of her, Foster cleared his throat, lowering his voice to match hers. “I’m sure Joseph has told you?”

“Told me what? We barely talk anymore.”

“I didn’t want you to find out like this, but we were falling behind financially and I didn’t know what else to do.”

“Foster? What did you do?”

Gesturing to his brothers, he said, “we made a business arrangement with the Ariti family. We combined dad’s land back in exchange for merging our businesses. They moved in last week to the downstairs bedrooms.”

Letting her gaze return to the dark-haired man, she studied his features, looking for any sense of familiarity that might have indicated that she knew him. She remembered her father’s absolute hatred toward this family before his passing, one that had surely caused, in part, his heart problems. For the life of her, she was sure she’d seen him in passing, but couldn’t distinctly place whether this was true or not. She’d only remembered his father from the various times he’d come over to work on his contact with her father.

Still processing the information, Cheyenne decided that it wasn’t the time to ask questions. She could ask later, once Chase and Joseph were out of earshot. Based on the way that Chase had brusquely moved past the young man to get to the mare’s stall without interacting with him, she knew that the would was still fresh for all of them. She wondered if Chase and Foster were even talking at all about everything that was going on.

“Well, are you going to introduce me?”

Foster stepped back, walking beside Cheyenne toward the man who was still near the barn, a few steps misplaced due to Chase’s confrontational movements. “Bodhi, this is our sister, Cheyenne. She’s back in town for a while, and if we’re lucky, she’ll be working beside you as a co-instructor and horse trainer.” Zeroing in his gaze on her, he said, “we can talk more about the specifics once you’ve gotten some sleep, yeah?”

“Sure,” she responded distantly, unsure of how to tell him what Joseph already knew without Chase reacting at being the last to know. She extended her hand, briefly meeting the deep gaze of the man before her. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Bodhi. I'm sure we'll get an opportunity to talk later?"

As if on command, Joseph yelled for Cheyenne from the side door of the main house, and she briefly responded that she would be there in a moment. Excusing herself from the conversation, she retreated from the two brooding frames and into her childhood home, one she had not wanted to return to nor had intended to until this moment.

The unpacking process was incredibly brief for Cheyenne considering that the majority of her things were still in Europe, and the early afternoon hour allowed her a substantial amount of time to catch up on all the sleep she had lost in the last day before she had to get situated with anything that was expected of her by her siblings. Among these things was, apparently, family dinner, if the looming figure in the doorway that told her so was any indication. As she opened her eyes slowly with the newfound noise, she nearly jumped out of her skin, seeing the tall man in the dim light.

“Jesus, Foster,” she mumbled, rubbing her face with her hands as she became alert enough to identify the situation with less confusion.

“Sorry,” he stated, although it was in a flat, neutral tone that suggested he could not have cared less. “I cooked, we’ll be expecting you in five minutes.”

With the lack of time that had been allowed for Cheyenne to alter her appearance in any way, she came out into the dining room dressed in the business clothing she’d worn on the plane and subsequently fallen asleep in hours prior. Her hair was messier now, but it wasn’t something she was particularly keen to change when she was already still exhausted and was likely going to be facing some level of conflict and interrogation at the dinner table. Everything else, she could deal with later, granted that she survived this.

After making her plate and sitting down beside Chase on one side of the table, Cheyenne felt Joseph’s gaze flicker around her left hand. She followed his gaze to the engagement ring she wore, then back up to meet his eyes, which were already on her.

“Nice ring,” he mumbled, in between forkfuls of spaghetti. This was all he said, although this directed Foster and Chase’s attention toward her hand as well.

“You’re engaged?” Foster was the second to chime in, looking equally vulnerable as Joseph had at the idea that she had withheld something like that from them. “Were you planning on telling us?”

She sighed, placing her fork down and glancing between the two men across from her. “Gosh, guys, I don’t know. Were you ever planning on returning any of my phone calls while I was away, or were you just expecting me to magically return home one day to live the life you wanted me to live?” She looked directly at Foster when she said this last piece, and the honesty in his expression verified the validity of what she’d said.

“Who’s the guy?” Joseph said, trying and struggling to keep the conversation moving away from an argument.

“Why the hell does that matter,” Chase chimed in, picking up his plate and putting it in the sink. “All Cheyenne ever thinks about is herself anyway,” he mumbled, storming down the hallway and slamming the door.

“He’s not wrong,” Foster said, picking up his plate as well, but in a quieter and gentler fashion. He too left his dish in the sink, but lingered in the living room. His presence only contributed to the growing tension in the room.

As she looked to Joseph, he simply shrugged, lacking the ability to choose a side when he knew that she would only be staying for a few days when her family and everything around her was crumbling here. He wasn’t sure anyone in that argument was right, and he generally preferred to stay out of it. After finishing his dinner in silence with Cheyenne, he rose to his feet and repeated the same action as his siblings, murmuring something about heading to work for the evening as he exited out the side door.

Now that Cheyenne was at odds with at least two of her three siblings, she had no real desire to go back to sleep or to try to make amends. Instead, she took the opportunity to shower, change her clothing, and get her clothing organized into a tidier fashion. When this was all done, she exited the house to go find Bodhi. Unsurprisingly, she found him in the barn with some of the horses, which was the first place she’d looked.