bandaids don't fix everything

i. basics.

name: lee raejun. nickname: rae. date of birth: march 9th, nineteen seventy. age: twenty-nine. gender: cismale. pronouns: he + him. romantic orientation: biromantic. sexual orientation: bisexual. hometown: seoul, south korea. current location: mistwood. ethnicity: korean. languages: korean (fluent), english (fluent), japanese (conversational). career: soldier, guard, former laborer.

ii. appearance.

height: six foot. eye color: dark brown. hair color: black, kept short and neat out of habit more than preference. notable features: a long scar across his left shoulder blade from shrapnel, a stillness to his face that people tend to find either reassuring or unnerving depending on the situation. tattoos: none. piercings: none. faceclaim: cha eun-woo.

iii. relations.

parents: lee donghyun (father, status unknown), lee sooyeon (mother, status unknown). siblings: lee chaeyoung (younger sister, status unknown). significant other: n/a. notable figures: park jinho (childhood friend, deceased), a dark bay mare he rode out of new jersey and never named.

iv. biography.

raejun doesn't bring up where he comes from. it's not shame, exactly. it's just that he's watched the information land on people before, watched something shift in the way they look at him right after, and he stopped wanting that a long time ago. it's easier, mostly, to just be whoever the room needs him to be.

the lee family had money the way old houses have weight: quietly, structurally, present in everything without anyone needing to say so. his father was a retired general, the kind of man who walked into a room and rearranged it by being in it, not loudly, just with the particular gravity of someone who has spent decades expecting to be listened to. his mother was a different kind of force entirely. she kept that household running with a precision that would have impressed anyone who understood what they were looking at, which most people didn't, because she was too good at making it look easy. raejun understood it later, as an adult, what that kind of invisible effort actually costs. he thinks about it more than he used to.

he was the oldest. nobody had to tell him what that meant. he just knew it the way you know the layout of a house you grew up in, in your body before your mind catches up.

he was a careful kid. not cold, just watchful. the kind of child who stood at the edge of something and understood it before he stepped in, which some of his teachers found reassuring and others found a little unnerving, like he was always one beat ahead. he was good at school in the way that felt almost incidental, like it was just something happening alongside whatever he was actually paying attention to. he had a sister three years younger who was sharper than anyone gave her credit for, and he was quietly, ferociously proud of her in the way he was quietly ferocious about most things: privately, without much external evidence, and completely.

then there was jinho.

park jinho, three houses down, who had been around for so long that raejun genuinely couldn't identify the moment the friendship had started. it had just always been there, the way certain things are just there. jinho was the opposite of him in almost every way that showed on the outside. loud, fast with decisions, the kind of person who laughed with his whole body and didn't seem to have a volume setting below enthusiastic. by all logic they should not have worked. they worked completely. jinho was one of the only people in raejun's life who could look straight at him, past the composure, past the careful distance he kept between himself and most of the world, and not need it explained. he didn't dig at it or try to break it down. he just waited, and there was a steadiness in that, in being known without being pressured, that raejun has never found a clean word for. he was grateful for it every day and said so almost never.

jinho enlisted in eighty-eight. raejun followed in eighty-nine, nineteen and certain about almost nothing except this one thing. people who knew his father assumed they understood the decision. they didn't. it was the first choice he could remember making that felt like it had come entirely from inside him, not from the name, not from expectation, not from the shape of the life that had been kept ready for him. he served through ninety-two, three years he doesn't unpack for people, not because there's drama in the withholding but because most of it belongs to him and he doesn't see the point in giving it away. what he kept from it, practically: a hard-won understanding that courage and usefulness are not the same thing, and that only one of them actually matters when everything goes sideways. he'd seen people confuse the two. he'd seen what it cost them.

jinho got out the same year. they came out different from how they'd gone in, both of them, and neither of them said so because they didn't need to. jinho went back to seoul and built himself a life that looked like what a life is supposed to look like: routine, neighborhood, reasons to be in a specific place. raejun visited when he could. called when he couldn't. told himself the distance was manageable because jinho always made it feel that way.

raejun didn't go home after his discharge. not for good. there was no blowup with his father, no moment he could point to. it was quieter than that. somewhere near the end of his service he had arrived at the understanding that walking back through that front door and settling into the shape his family had kept warm for him would mean slowly becoming someone he'd already decided against being. his father was military to his core. he understood choices that didn't require long explanations. their conversation was short and it was enough.

he spent time in seoul after, working jobs that had nothing to do with the lee family or what that name could have gotten him. loading docks. warehouse shifts. the kind of physical labor that leaves you tired in a simple, uncomplicated way, the kind of tired that doesn't follow you to bed. he liked that. liked being just a body doing a job in a place where nobody knew his father's rank and he wasn't going to tell them.

he came to new york in ninety-six.

his english was functional, which meant it was good enough to work and uncomfortable enough to keep him alert. he landed in flushing, which suited him. the neighborhood had its own rhythm and its own rules and it didn't ask where you'd come from or what you were working through. he got a job, then another job, then another. delivery routes, a construction site in brooklyn, warehouse work when nothing else was moving. he got his english to the point where he stopped translating and just thought, where he'd wake up from a dream mid-sentence and not be able to tell which language it had started in. he made some friends and kept most people at just enough distance that they didn't notice the distance. he was good at that.

he hadn't expected to like new york. he did. not the parts of it that show up in photographs, he was mostly indifferent to those. the anonymity of it. he'd grown up in a house where every room already knew who you were, where the name arrived before you did and shaped how you were received before you'd opened your mouth. new york didn't know him from anyone. he was just a man with an accent and a work history and a face that didn't give much away, and the city treated him accordingly, which felt, honestly, like relief.

a contact who'd heard about his service record pointed him toward a private security firm sometime around ninety-eight. it was solid work. steady, and quiet when it was good, and manageable when it wasn't. he was good at it in the particular way you're good at something that fits the actual shape of you. he moved to astoria, smaller place, better light. he got close enough to a life that he stopped bracing for it to come apart.

then january of ninety-nine, and his mother's letter arrived.

he knew her handwriting before he'd read the address. something in the particular way she made her letters, careful and familiar in a way that was so specific to her that seeing it from across a room was enough. he set the envelope on the table. he didn't open it. he's never been able to explain that to his own satisfaction, only that he wanted to be in the right state to receive whatever was inside, wanted to be ready for it, and he kept thinking he'd get there. he didn't get there in time.

february 20th, 1999, and the world became a different kind of place.

he was on a job in lower manhattan when the reports started coming in, fragmentary at first the way catastrophic things always begin, pieces that don't add up to a picture until all at once they do. he got the people he was responsible for to somewhere defensible and then did what several years of training had built him to do: move fast inside a deteriorating situation, make decisions without stalling, keep functioning when functioning was the hardest available option. what he hadn't been trained for was the particular nature of this. there were no rules on the other side of it. nothing to negotiate with. nothing to de-escalate into. he figured that out in the first few hours and let it recalibrate everything else, because that was the only thing to do.

he got out of the city on the third day. he doesn't call it luck. luck is passive. he calls it surviving and means it as a verb.

new jersey, then. weeks of moving, gathering information, staying in motion because motion was the one thing he could control. somewhere outside princeton he found the mare.

she was standing in a field with the gate hanging open, dark bay, calm in a way that felt almost pointed given the circumstances, like she'd decided the panic happening everywhere else wasn't her business. he'd grown up around horses, one of the few remnants of his upbringing he'd never found a reason to set down, and he recognized the particular quality of her steadiness for what it was: real, not just the absence of stimulus. he didn't hesitate. he took her. he told himself he wasn't going to name her because names meant something and he wasn't in a position to mean things right now. that resolution lasted about a week. he didn't name her, technically, but he talked to her, and he saved the best of whatever food he found, and when she picked her way around something dangerous on the road ahead of him he felt something uncomfortably close to gratitude toward a horse, which was not a feeling he'd anticipated having.

she took him south through pennsylvania and then toward washington, because the roads had become something engines couldn't reliably navigate and she moved through the landscape with a patience that he found himself trying to match. they slept in fields and barns and once in the vestibule of a church that had been emptied of everything except the pews. he fed her what he could find and she kept going and they arrived in washington together, which was more than he could say for most things he'd tried to hold onto that year.

jinho's tag found him in pennsylvania. a survivor he crossed paths with, someone who'd known jinho through the korean community in queens, had been with him in those first days and then hadn't been. the man put the tag in raejun's hand and raejun took it without asking for details he'd already figured out. he'd known since the second day, when the calls stopped connecting, in the way you sometimes know things before you have the evidence to confirm them. the tag just made it something he could hold. he put it around his neck and he hasn't taken it off.

he showed up at metrocenter with the tag on, the watch in his pocket, and the letter still folded and sealed at the bottom of his bag. he found a place for the mare. he offered what he had, which was a specific set of skills and a disposition toward using them before being asked. guard work, patrol, security. it fit him in the way things fit when they're actually suited to you, not comfortable exactly, but right.

he doesn't talk about what might be happening in seoul. he holds that question in a compartment separate from his daily functioning because the alternative is that it becomes something he can't work around, and he can't afford that. he doesn't talk about jinho. he doesn't explain the watch, which stopped at 4:12 on a day he doesn't discuss, and which he has not wound and will not wind. he gives people what the moment calls for and keeps the rest behind something most of them don't register is there until they've already run into it.

the letter is still in the bag. he's aware of it the way you're aware of something you haven't dealt with, a low and constant presence at the edge of things. she wrote it in january and he still hasn't read it and he can't tell you with any honesty whether he's waiting for something specific or just not ready to hear her voice through paper in a world where he has no way of writing back. maybe those are the same thing. he doesn't know.

what he does is show up. every shift, every patrol, every moment that needs someone willing to put themselves between the people inside and whatever is coming from outside. he shows up without announcement, without keeping a tally of what it asks of him, without needing anyone to notice. the distance people sense in him, the composure that can read as cold, it isn't indifference. he just speaks a different language than most people expect. presence instead of words. action instead of declaration. staying, even on the days when the weight of everything he's not saying makes staying the harder choice.

whether this place ends up being somewhere he actually roots himself or just another point on a route he's still traveling, he genuinely doesn't know. he's been careful not to need it to be anything in particular. but he comes back every morning. he takes the shifts. he stands where he's needed and he doesn't move.

for raejun, if you know how to read him, that's the whole sentence.

v. notes.

methodical. fiercely protective. unwaveringly composed.

cold under pressure. slow to forgive. deeply self-sacrificing to a fault.

grew up wealthy, in a prominent military family. makes no mention of either unless cornered.

has done more kinds of work than most people bother to count. did all of it on purpose.

expresses care through action. you'll figure out he likes you by what he does, not anything he says.

carries jinho's dog tag. deflects every question about it.

keeps a cracked watch stopped at 4:12. it has never been wound since he found it.

has his mother's letter in his bag. sealed. unread. has been that way since january.

the composure is genuine. so is everything it's holding together underneath.

got himself from new jersey to washington on horseback. did not name the horse. was completely devoted to the horse anyway.

speaks three languages and defaults to none of them when silence will do.

vi. wanted connections.

veterans, former military, anyone who understands what that particular kind of silence means.

survivors from the new york or new jersey area, flushing, astoria, lower manhattan.

people who somehow end up past the wall he's put up.

those he has quietly appointed himself the protector of without mentioning it to them.

unlikely friendships with people who have no obvious reason to get through to him.

slow-burn romances, things that go unnamed for too long, histories that are complicated and messy.

rivals with a mutual respect neither would admit to. enemies without it.

potential friends-with-benefits.

I. BASICS.

name: murphy lawrence. nicknames: murph, karma (ironically, given his name). date of birth: may 9th, nineteen seventy-three. age: twenty-six. gender: cismale. pronouns: he + him. romantic orientation: polyromantic. sexual orientation: bisexual. hometown: milwaukee, wisconsin. current location: mistwood. ethnicity: danish + german. languages: english (fluent), danish (fluent), german (fluent), ASL (fluent), limited lip-reading proficiency in multiple dialects of english. career: hunter, survivor, former record store clerk/college student studying psychology.

II. APPEARANCE.

height: five foot ten. eye color: dark brown/hazel. hair color: brown, often unevenly cut. notable features: cochlear implant behind the ear, subtle head-tilt when trying to catch sound more clearly, expressive face that makes his emotions difficult to hide even when he tries. tattoos: none. piercings: none. faceclaim: felix mallard.

III. RELATIONS.

parents: ruairí lawrence (father, lawyer), hede faerberg-lawrence (mother, therapist). siblings: milo lawrence (older half-brother), micah lawrence (older sister, strained relationship), malakai lawrence (younger brother, deceased). significant other: tbd. notable figures: tbd.

IV. BIOGRAPHY.

murphy lawrence figured out early that understanding people mattered more than hearing them clearly. he figured out a little later that his own head was something he'd spend the rest of his life negotiating with.

he was born may 9th, 1973, the second of four kids in a house that never quite felt like it was at rest. his father was a lawyer, sharp in the way that certain men are sharp, the kind who chose his words the way other people chose weapons and expected everyone around him to do the same. his mother was a therapist, which sounds like a balance but rarely worked out that way in practice. she spent her days helping strangers untangle what they actually meant from what they'd actually said, and she brought that same careful attention home with her, which was sometimes a gift and sometimes just a different kind of pressure. four kids grew up caught between those two ways of seeing the world: milo, murphy, micah, and malakai. murphy landed in the middle in every sense.

his hearing loss started quietly. quietly enough that the adults around him wrote it off as inattentiveness, quietly enough that it went unaddressed for years while murphy built workarounds on his own that nobody had taught him. what nobody caught, not for a long time, was that the inattentiveness wasn't only about his hearing. his mind moved fast and sideways and refused to stay where people put it. he'd lose the thread of an instruction before it finished, follow one thought into five others, surface somewhere unrelated and have to backtrack. in a different house it might have been caught sooner. in his father's house, where falling short of precision was essentially a character flaw, it just looked like carelessness. at school it looked like a kid who wasn't applying himself. the adhd diagnosis didn't come until his mid-twenties, well after the habits it created had already become load-bearing parts of who he was.

the hearing loss came first, though, and with it came adaptation. lip-reading. pattern recognition. a working instinct for reading faces and posture and the particular way someone's shoulders move before they say something they don't want to say. by the time anyone formally acknowledged what was going on, murphy had already built a way of getting through the world that didn't depend on hearing it correctly. the anxiety came alongside all of that, low and constant, a frequency he didn't have a name for yet. he just knew that rooms felt off before he could say why, that he'd replay conversations hunting for what he'd missed, that sitting with uncertainty did something to his chest that it didn't seem to do to other people. he scanned exits before he sat down anywhere. he got very good at anticipating problems, which served him well, and wore him out in ways nobody around him could see.

his parents pushed for a cochlear implant the moment one became an option. murphy didn't want it. he couldn't have articulated it then, but the feeling was that something was being done to him rather than for him, that the way he'd learned to move through the world was being treated as a defect that needed fixing. he was a kid. his opinion didn't carry much weight. the implant went in, and what came back wasn't the clean fix anyone had described. sound returned fragmented and mechanical, an overwhelming mess of input he had no way to sort. for a brain that already had trouble regulating what it let in, it was genuinely awful. it didn't close the gap so much as create a different one.

his mother was the one who sat with him through it. she was the one willing to slow things down, to stay in the room with the disorientation instead of pushing past it. his father treated the implant as a solved problem and anything less than full function as a choice murphy was making. that split ran through a lot of murphy's childhood without anyone ever saying it out loud.

his siblings each found their own way of relating to his situation. milo, his older half-brother, was steady in the way that remote things are steady: dependable without ever being quite reachable. micah, his sister, resented the amount of space murphy's needs took up, and that resentment hardened early into something neither of them ever really worked through. malakai was the youngest, born with similar hearing loss, and what formed between him and murphy wasn't exactly a typical closeness. it was more like a shorthand they'd both arrived at independently. no explaining required. neither of them would have been able to describe it well, but they both knew it was there.

school did what it tends to do to kids it wasn't built for. murphy learned to watch rather than listen, and eventually watching got him further than listening had anyway. he got good at reading a room before anyone opened their mouth. what he couldn't manage was slowing down enough to meet the pace everyone expected from him, and the anxiety took every missed instruction and every frustrated teacher and turned them into further evidence that he was, at some core level, a problem that didn't have a clean solution. he broke things he hadn't meant to touch. he moved too fast through spaces that wanted stillness. he fell, tripped, miscalculated distances, knocked things over with a regularity that eventually stopped surprising anyone, least of all him. his body and the world around it were in a constant low-grade argument, and he lost that argument more often than not.

hunting came into his life as a teenager and was one of the first things that fit without forcing. tracking required patience and the ability to treat absence and stillness as information, which were skills murphy had been developing his whole life without anything useful to apply them to. being out in the field gave his restlessness somewhere to burn. a clear, immediate task quieted his head in a way that almost nothing else did. it didn't ask him to be easier to manage or simpler to understand. it just asked him to pay attention, and paying attention was the one thing he had never had trouble with.

the outbreak hit february 20th, 1999. murphy was twenty-five and had been operating on incomplete information his entire life, so the collapse of systems and communication didn't so much break his understanding of the world as confirm the parts of it he'd always suspected. he moved through the early months on instinct: hunting, scavenging, watching people and learning quickly that they could be as unpredictable and dangerous as anything infected. the anxiety that had always been a background frequency got louder and rougher in those first weeks. it didn't stop him. it never had. but it was taking more out of him than it used to.

his family didn't make it. the details are the kind that come in fragments: last known locations, gaps that quietly stopped feeling like uncertainty and started feeling like answers. milo. micah. both parents. gone in the ways people went in those first months. malakai held on longer.

that almost made it worse.

by the time murphy found him, malakai had already turned. there was enough of him left in the way he moved, in the particular shape of how he held himself, that murphy knew who he was looking at before he understood what he was looking at. he was the one who put him down. there wasn't another option, and some part of him understood that clearly even in the moment, but understanding something and being able to set it down are two very different things. he hasn't closed that distance yet.

the shot was close range. the sound of it, even processed through the implant, was enough to take what was left of his natural hearing. everything he hears now comes through the implant, a device that needs maintenance and power and a certain amount of luck, sitting between him and the world with no backup if it fails.

what that day left behind wasn't grief alone, though there was plenty of that. it carved out the kind of damage that becomes ptsd: showing up at the edge of sleep, pulling him under without warning when something in the air or the light hits a particular way. he startles hard and takes longer than he'd like to come back. some sounds, even filtered, send him somewhere he can't get out of quickly. he manages because managing is the only mode he's ever known, but it shows at the seams, and when the pressure gets high enough the adhd and the anxiety and the ptsd stop being separate things and start feeding into each other in ways that make him impulsive and difficult and more likely to end up hurt. he's had no shortage of injuries since the outbreak. some from bad luck, some from moving faster than the situation could handle. he deals with them and keeps going because stopping has never really felt available to him as an option.

he doesn't talk about malakai much. when he does, the details shift depending on who's asking and how much he trusts them. that second part is usually the limiting factor.

like most things getting to washington wasn't a straight line. nothing in murphy's life ever was. he'd heard from a trader somewhere outside of kansas city that the pacific northwest was holding together better than most places, that there were pockets of survivors who had managed to build something worth building, and that was enough of a reason to point himself in that direction. not hope exactly, more like the absence of a better option. he moved through nebraska and into wyoming on foot and by vehicle when vehicles were available, which wasn't often and never for long. he followed highway stretches that had gone quiet and avoided the ones that hadn't, reading the landscape the way he'd always read everything, by watching it carefully before trusting it.

he hunted along the way, rabbit and deer mostly, trading what he didn't need at the small survivor outposts scattered along the route, picking up information the same way he picked up supplies: carefully, and without revealing more than necessary. idaho was rough. a stretch of two weeks where the terrain and the weather and a nasty run-in with a group that didn't have sharing on their agenda left him holed up in an abandoned ranger station longer than he'd planned, eating whatever he could find and waiting for his leg to heal up a fall he'd taken while moving too fast through icy ground. he pushed into washington when he was mobile enough to do it and not a day before. by the time he reached the metrocenter he was worn down in the specific way that prolonged survival wears people down, not broken, just stripped of anything that wasn't essential.

assimilating into the survivor population there was its own battle. communication in a group setting, especially one still finding its feet, was loud and fast and frequently chaotic, exactly the conditions under which his implant performed worst. people mistook his missed cues for indifference and his slow responses for defiance. there were confrontations in those early weeks that didn't need to happen, trust that got poisoned before it had a chance to form, and more than one person who decided he was more trouble than he was worth before they'd given him a real chance. he didn't always make it easy to give him one. but he stayed, and he pulled his weight in ways that were hard to argue with, and gradually the people paying attention started to notice that the problem wasn't that murphy wasn't listening. it was that the world they were all living in wasn't built for people like him. it never was.

murphy has been at metrocenter plaza longer than most of the people there now. hasn't always liked what it's become or how it's handled him in the process. as murphy is not particularly easy to have around. communication is where things tend to fall apart. he misses things in ways that aren't always visible. a word lost to a bad angle, a conversation moving faster than the implant can cleanly process, a room too loud for any of it to work right. he fills the gaps with inference, which holds up well enough that people don't notice until it doesn't, and when it doesn't it reads as recklessness or defiance depending on who's watching. the adhd means he cuts people off, lands on conclusions ahead of the actual information, and acts on the picture he's already built before anyone's finished filling it in. the anxiety means he's already calibrated for a fight before one exists, and sometimes that calibration is what starts it. he's been called a liability more times than he can remember. he's had more arguments that began as simple misunderstandings and calcified into something nobody wanted to untangle. the accidents are their own category: a pattern visible enough now that people have started to notice even if they haven't said anything directly.

he doesn't make it easy to understand what's going on with him. some of that is because he's spent his whole life pushing back against the idea that his experience is a malfunction. some of it is that explaining himself requires trusting someone first, and he doesn't get there quickly or easily or often. underneath all of it, underneath the capability and the friction and the distance, there's a version of murphy that the people around him think they know, and then there's the actual one: quieter, more worn, still paying attention to every room he walks into like something in it might finally make sense. he came into this world having to fight for every piece of it, for the right to be understood, for the right to move through spaces that weren't built with him in mind, for the right to grieve the people he lost without it swallowing him whole.

the outbreak didn't break something in him that was previously intact. it just raised the stakes on a fight he'd already been having his whole life. he knows how to lose things and keep moving. he knows how to hurt and stay functional. he knows how to be the most difficult person in the room and also the most necessary one, and he has survived long enough to understand that those two things are not mutually exclusive. he doesn't expect to be understood. he stopped waiting for that a long time ago. but he's still here, still surviving, still reading every situation before it reads him, still patching himself up and getting back to it when the world knocks him down, which it does, regularly. that stubborn, inconvenient will to keep going is the most honest thing about him. it always has been. and whatever this world throws at him next, it's going to have to work a lot harder than that to be the thing that finally stops him.

V. NOTES.

quick to act, slow to fully trust.

highly skilled hunter and tracker, relying on visual cues and environmental reading.

fully deaf following a firearm-related incident in 1998; relies entirely on cochlear implant.

learned lip-reading and observational communication from early childhood due to progressive hearing loss.

strained and fractured relationship with many of the other survivors.

deeply affected by the loss of his entire family during the outbreak, particularly his younger brother kai.

impulsive under stress, but highly effective in survival conditions.

resistant to authority structures that do not account for nontraditional communication.

keeps emotional distance as a default survival mechanism rather than a choice.

has a tendency to take off his cochlear to spite others during arguments.

spends a lot of his downtime playing arcade games or playing music. he can play bass, guitar, and likes the drums because he can feel the music.

religiously plays tetris and pokémon yellow, when he can find batteries for the gameboy he is emotionally attached to.

VI. WANTED CONNECTIONS.

fellow hunters, scavengers, and survivalists.

people who communicate with him through sign language or nonverbal understanding.

authority figures he regularly clashes with.

survivors who knew him prior to the outbreak.

people who remind him of his family in ways he cannot ignore.

rival(s) who see him as unpredictable, insubordinate, or unreliable.

unlikely friendships or relationships formed through shared survival and adaptation.

someone who knows what happened to his brother or witnessed it from afar.

I. BASICS.

name: mischa mikkel lucas. nickname: mickey. date of birth: february 14th, nineteen seventy-two. age: twenty-seven. gender: cismale. pronouns: he + him. romantic orientation: panromantic. sexual orientation: pansexual. hometown: chicago, illinois. current location: mistwood. ethnicity: danish + czech. languages: english (fluent), czech (fluent), danish (fluent). career: former thief and conman, drifter, scavenger.

II. APPEARANCE.

height: six foot one. eye color: brown. hair color: dark brown, often overgrown and in need of a trim. notable features: a scar on his palm from accidentally slicing himself hunting, perpetual dark circles beneath his eyes, and a smile that somehow convinces people he's harmless. tattoos: a small stick-and-poke star on the inside of his left wrist. piercings: none. faceclaim: nick robinson.

III. RELATIONS.

parents: josef lucas (father, status unknown), eva lucas née novák (mother, status unknown). siblings: lena lucas (younger sister, status unknown). significant other: n/a. notable figures: the unknown owner of the engraved switchblade, a stray german shepherd named atlas (deceased).

IV. BIOGRAPHY.

mischa lucas was not the kind of kid who caused trouble because he was angry. he caused trouble because he was bored, and because he was good at it, and because nobody ever made him feel like stopping.

he was born february 14th, 1972, in chicago, the kind of chicago that doesn't make it onto postcards. a third floor walkup in a neighborhood that smelled like exhaust and fried food and someone else's laundry. his father was a man who believed that difficulty built character, which was a convenient thing to believe when difficulty was the only thing on offer. he worked hard, expected the same from everyone around him, and had very little patience for the distance between what he wanted from his son and what his son actually was. his mother moved quietly between the two of them like someone who had learned early that the best way to survive a storm was to not become part of it. she kept the peace where she could and paid the cost of that quietly, in the way that women in houses like theirs often did.

then there was lena. three years younger, sharper than anyone gave her credit for, and one of the only people in mickey's life who could look straight at him without needing him to be something different. she didn't excuse him. she just knew him, which was its own thing entirely, and rarer than it should have been.

mickey figured out young that charm was a tool and that he had a natural talent for using it. not the loud performative kind, but something quieter and more effective: the ability to make people feel like he was genuinely interested in them, like whatever they were saying mattered, like he was on their side. it wasn't always a lie. sometimes he actually was interested. but he learned early that the feeling it created in people was useful regardless of whether it was real, and once he understood that, certain doors stopped feeling locked.

he started small. lifted things from stores without thinking much about it, talked his way out of situations that should have ended worse, ran small cons on people who probably deserved it and some who definitely didn't. he was never mean about it. that was the thing people got wrong about him when they eventually figured out what he was. he wasn't cruel. he was practical in ways that looked like cruelty from the outside, which is a different thing, though the distinction matters less to the people on the receiving end.

school was something that happened to him rather than something he participated in. he was smart enough to pass without trying and restless enough that trying felt beside the point. teachers either liked him or found him exhausting. there wasn't much middle ground. he slipped through the system the way water finds the path of least resistance, leaving behind just enough of a mark to keep moving forward without anyone looking too closely.

by sixteen he had a reputation in certain circles as someone worth knowing. by eighteen that reputation had gotten him into situations he had to be clever to get out of. by the time he was nineteen the arguments with his father had stopped being arguments in any real sense and had become something more like two people confirming what they already knew about each other. the last one ended with a door slamming hard enough to rattle the frame, and mickey standing on the sidewalk outside with a duffel bag and the particular feeling of someone who has just done something they cannot undo and isn't entirely sure yet whether that's a relief or a catastrophe.

he left before his twentieth birthday. he told himself it was temporary. he did not go back.

the years that followed were not glamorous. that's the honest version. the version mickey occasionally tells, the one with the narrow escapes and the charming near-misses and the sense that he was always one step ahead, is entertaining but selective. the real version had more cold nights and bad decisions and moments of sitting in places that smelled like mildew wondering how he'd gotten there. he drifted through the midwest in the way that only people with nothing anchoring them can drift: fully, completely, without any particular destination pulling at him. chicago to indianapolis. indianapolis to st. louis. st. louis to kansas city and then further west and then back east again because west hadn't offered anything better.

he worked when he had to. dishwasher, warehouse hand, mechanic's assistant, day labor when nothing else was available. none of it stuck. he wasn't bad at the work. he was bad at the part that came after, the part where you came back the next day and the day after that and built something out of the repetition. he'd last a few weeks somewhere and then the restlessness would start climbing his spine and he'd be gone before anyone had learned his last name. stealing filled the gaps, and the scams, and the card games he'd learned to rig with a subtlety that took years to develop. he wasn't proud of the life he was living. but pride had never been something he could eat.

the map started as a practical thing. folded road atlas he found in the glove compartment of a car he probably shouldn't have been in. he started marking cities as he passed through them, crossing out the ones he'd left behind, and somewhere in the repetition of that small ritual it became something else. proof, maybe. that he'd been somewhere. that the places he'd passed through had been real, that he had been real in them, even briefly, even without leaving anything behind worth remembering.

he found atlas in kansas, behind a truck stop, methodically working through a dumpster with the focus of someone who had survived long enough to stop being optimistic about it. skinny dog, bad attitude, completely unbothered by mickey's presence in a way that felt like an insult and then, after a while, like something else. mickey told himself he'd keep the dog until he found somewhere to leave him. that somewhere never materialized. he named him atlas because it seemed right, a creature that had been carrying its own weight for so long it didn't know how to put it down. mickey recognized that. he fed him half of everything he had and didn't examine what that said about him.

for almost four years, atlas was the closest thing mickey had to a home. not a place, just a presence. something that was there when he woke up and there when he went to sleep and didn't ask anything of him except basic competence and the occasional kindness. they crossed state lines together. slept in the same cramped spaces. survived situations that required a combination of luck and bad decisions that mickey has never fully been able to explain. if you asked him whether he loved that dog he would find a reason to change the subject. if you watched him for long enough you'd stop needing to ask.

then february 20th, 1999 arrived, and the world stopped being the world mickey had known.

he was in missouri when it started. the reports came in fragmented and contradictory the way bad news always does before anyone understands the shape of it. violence. riots. something spreading. by the time anyone started using the word infection the roads were already getting complicated. by the time anyone started understanding what the infected actually were, complicated had become something much worse. mickey had spent his adult life moving through uncertain territory, reading situations fast and making decisions faster, and even he needed a few days to fully accept what he was seeing.

he adapted because adaptation was the only thing he'd ever been reliably good at.

the first weeks were the kind of chaos that strips people down to whatever they're actually made of. mickey found out what he was made of and was not entirely surprised by the answer. he kept moving. he kept breathing. he made choices that kept him alive and tried not to spend too much time sitting with the ones that didn't feel clean. other survivors moved around him like weather systems: some of them useful, some of them dangerous, most of them both. he learned fast that desperation didn't make people better or worse than they already were. it just made them more so.

atlas died in the second month.

mickey doesn't talk about it, or when he does the details change enough that you can tell he's managing what he lets out. what doesn't change is the absence itself, the way his hand still finds the worn leather collar hanging from his backpack strap without him seeming to realize he's doing it. four years of a particular kind of company, and then none. he kept moving because there was nothing else to do. he's been keeping moving ever since.

the months between then and arriving at metrocenter plaza are a collection of things he shares selectively and in pieces. survivor groups that formed and fell apart. supplies found and lost and found again. a switchblade he acquired somewhere on the road, engraved with initials that aren't his, which he carries without explaining and deflects questions about with a speed that suggests the explanation exists and he has decided nobody gets to have it. he did things he needed to do. some of those things he'd do again. some of them he works not to think about too directly.

he shows up at metrocenter the way he's shown up everywhere: with very little on him and more going on underneath than he's going to tell you about anytime soon. the backpack. the map, half-filled and worn soft at the folds. the collar. a face that defaults to easy and a smile that arrives right on cue and a way of making you feel, within the first five minutes, like he's genuinely glad you exist.

and he might be. that's the complicated part. the warmth isn't entirely manufactured. the humor is real. the resourcefulness is genuine, the kind that comes from years of making something out of nothing in places that offered very little. he can find supplies where there don't seem to be any, talk down a situation that's heading somewhere bad, make the weight of everything feel slightly more manageable just by being in the room. those things are true.

so is the rest of it.

he lies the way some people breathe, not always out of necessity but out of habit, because honesty has historically cost him more than it's returned. he trusts sparingly and conditionally and with a kind of internal accounting that most people never see. he keeps the parts of himself he doesn't like carefully out of view, not because he's ashamed exactly, but because exposure has never worked out particularly well for him and he's stopped volunteering for that particular experience. he expects people to leave. he expects them to take things with them when they go. that expectation has been confirmed often enough that he's stopped questioning it and started building around it instead.

what sits underneath all of that, underneath the performance and the deflection and the easy charm, is someone who has been running long enough that he's not entirely sure he remembers how to stop. someone who still sends that hand to the collar on the backpack strap when he's not thinking about it. someone who crossed out every city he left and has never once gone back to any of them, and doesn't let himself wonder too hard about why.

whether metrocenter becomes another mark on the map or the first place he actually stays is a question that's still open. mickey doesn't know the answer. some days he thinks he wants to find out. most days he doesn't let himself get that far.

V. NOTES.

quick-witted. fiercely loyal. disarmingly charming.

reckless. chronically dishonest. slow to trust.

excellent liar, terrible at talking about himself.

will steal from people he dislikes without losing a wink of sleep.

once he genuinely cares about someone, his loyalty borders on self-destructive.

carries a switchblade engraved with someone else's initials.

keeps a hand-drawn map of cities he's travelled through, most of them crossed out.

wears atlas' dog collar wrapped around his backpack.

always knows more than he's willing to admit.

VI. WANTED CONNECTIONS.

former travelling companions.

survivors who knew him before the outbreak.

people he's stolen from and never apologized to.

unlikely friendships.

partners-in-crime.

fellow drifters.

rivals, grudges, and enemies.

someone he had a close call with or someone he owes a debt to. or both.

people trying to teach him how to trust again.