Chapter Text
Micah Bell
Stims: Twirling his revolvers, sharpening his knife, cleaning his weapons.
Sensory Heaven: The scent of gun oil and leather. Baylock’s soft mane under his fingers.
Hyper- or hyposensitive? His vision and hearing are both hypersensitive, so Micah wears a large, brimmed hat to keep the sun out of his eyes, and he hates loud noises unless he makes them himself (so being in a gunfight is okay, but the gang singing when Javier plays the guitar hurts his ears). Touch is hypersensitive too, so Micah can’t stand being touched without being asked, or people getting into his personal space. His sense of taste is hyposensitive, so he likes strong flavours, but his hypersensitive sense of touch makes food textures difficult in his mouth. Smell is hyposensitive, and Micah loves strong smells like leather or gun oil.
Meltdowns or shutdowns? Shutdowns. He finds it harder to talk, his reactions slowing, and he eventually needs to hide away somewhere and rock himself back and forth. If he’s feeling particularly bad, Micah will self-harm by pulling his hair and biting himself.
Special Interest(s): The mechanics and history of double action revolvers. He’ll infodump about it if someone asks, but if you call him weird/laugh/tell him to shut up, he’ll punch you or kill you for it.
Social Issues: He hates eye contact, but he’s used to forcing it so people don’t find him weird—although his hat makes it easier to hide his eyes without it being obvious he’s avoiding eye contact on purpose. Micah has no idea how to make small talk. Sucking up to people is easy, as is manipulating people (because after struggling with socialising for his entire childhood, Micah has become very, very good at reading other people and finding their weaknesses), but having normal conversations about the weather/how he’s feeling etc are almost impossible. As a coping mechanism for how bad his small talk is, if someone tries to strike up conversation, Micah will snarl insults at them to make them leave him alone.
Communication: He didn’t have speech delay as a child, but struggled with a language delay, able to talk but finding it difficult to hold conversations. When very stressed, Micah will go semi-verbal, stammering and leaving large pauses between his sentences, struggling to get his words from his brain to his mouth.
Canon examples:
- If you follow Micah around camp, he is constantly doing something with his hands (cleaning his weapons, sharpening his knife, whittling etc). He’s also very antisocial, preferring to stay on the outskirts of camp, only interacting with people to harass them. If you make Arthur stand right in Micah’s personal space, he might tell you that he doesn’t like people so close to him. We never see Micah eating, making it easy to infer that he might be a fussy eater/hate eating around other people.
- Micah only starts calling Arthur ‘Cowpoke’ after Arthur calls Micah that name first, suggesting it’s a form of delayed echolalia (copying other people’s words). He then calls Arthur ‘Cowpoke’ all the time.
- Before you start A Short Walk in a Pretty Town, you can spot Micah twitching his hands beside his holsters, his head lolled backwards like the action relaxes him.
- In a camp interaction where Micah tries to flirt with Mary-Beth, he lacks all the rude, cocky confidence he displays when flirting with other women in camp, instead sounding like a nervous teenage boy. He stutters over his words, his hand shaking as he tries and fails to ask her to dance.
- In another camp interaction, Micah tries to suck up to Dutch. But rather than telling Dutch that he’s a good boss, Micah chooses to say, “You’re amazing,” in a tone that sounds rather flirtatious, before walking off. Both Arthur and Dutch think he’s up to something because of how weird that was. Micah is usually good at sucking up to Dutch, but his word choice and tone were totally inappropriate for the situation.