✦NARESSA VALDEZ, CIS WOMAN, SHE/HER ✦ DOMINIQUE “DOM” ALMEIDA the TWENTY SEVEN year old has been in Hidehill for ENTIRE LIFE ON AND OFF and was a ACQUAINTANCE to Ronnie Nilsson, the most recent shadow of Hidehill. Whispers on the streets are that the CHEF AT VERDURE CAFE who lives in HORWICK are said to be PASSIONATE and CYNICAL but I guess we’ll find out for ourselves.
Statistics coming soon.....
BIOGRAPHY
TW: Adoption, Parental Neglect
There is something so different about cruelty when it comes from children. Maybe they haven’t learned quite what boundaries are, including the one that leans into basic human decency. Dominique knows this first hand, and she bares the scars from this particular lessons learned, even if she doesn’t show them all physically. Sometimes she can see them, playing back the highlight reels of her life and how those experiences shaped them; but now, she finally learned to use that twenty-twenty hindsight for good, rather than for evil, or anything in between.
Growing up in the system is no one’s dream, and honestly, it’s something that people don’t talk about enough, probably for good reason. It holds a different weight though, when you got a short time to experience what love was like. A few good years, memories of them kept like a band aid that was supposed to serve as a cure all, but couldn’t quite stop the emotional bleeding. After all, she’d watched her mother die slowly, and while she didn’t understand at the moment, now she knows what all the tears were for. Her mother wasn’t crying for herself, she’d cried for her daughter who would be left to grow up without her love, always missing something.
Foster care was a very powerful level of hell. Because she had been there since she was seven, she never fit into the crowds. She wasn’t one of the lifers, abandoned at birth by people who never deserved her, and she wasn’t one of the ones just temporarily there before they moved on to a family member or friend who actually cared. Instead, she was bullied by children who thought, in all their naivety and stolen innocence, that they might ease their own hurt by giving it to someone else for a change. It never worked though, and maybe that was the greatest tragedy of them all.
When she was finally adopted officially, into the home of a family that had been designed to be deceitful, a part of her still held out hope that her happy ending was right around the corner. It just kept getting stalled, and delayed, until the reality set in: these people did not become parents because they wanted children, they wanted checks. Any part of the many siblings she had, by circumstance not by birth, was typically an inconvenience to them. While this may have stolen hope from most, she’d used it to learn that softness didn’t equate weakness, and that sometimes the most resilient strength came from the mentality to keep holding out your hand, no matter how many times it was slapped.
It was in the care of these people that she began to teach herself how to cook, reading recipes and cookbooks early on so that someone could take care of them all. Their parents certainly had no interest in it. It’s also where she learned that food was sometimes a love language in and of itself, allowing you to provide warmth wordlessly, with a value that didn’t know a maximum. Soon, she wasn’t just working through what was easy, she was moving on to things that they actually enjoyed. Sometimes, it was a special cake for one of the kids birthdays, others, a meal that reminded them of the family they’d lost along the way. Whatever it was, she welcomed the challenge along the way, because in the end, watching someone else smile over it, was the reward she’d been chasing for a long time.
Once she got older, she sometimes indulged the occasional weekend bound urge to run, convincing her friends to let her share a couch, or the floor, but she always came back home. She never could leave that little found family behind, she never could just abandon those that needed the hope she’d loaned them, time and time again. This, also, however, taught her to be decidedly street smart, and she moved in a way that was unique, edging around the confines of the mantra “take no shit, but do no harm”, for the most part.
Growing up, she’d had a center focus, and that was the friendship that had managed to bind her together with someone that finally, finally felt like home. Some would say that it was a trauma bond, the two of them wrapping around one another based on abandonment issues and a host of other feelings that came along with their eerily similar upbringings. Knowing what she knows now? Maybe she should have seen it coming. Most people in her life discouraged her, when she talked about finding the father than had left her with a dying mother, but she needed to know.
It was the answer that shook her though, the one that changed that dynamic she’d learned to love. Somehow, for her, she was terrified of that truth because she knew the explosive nature of her best friend, she knew what hurt did to people. The other part of her relished in it, in the way that fate finally gave them a win, and allowed them to find each other before finding out that not only did they share a bond, they shared blood. They say you don’t get to choose your family, and for the most part they’re right, but damn if she wouldn’t have chosen this sister, chosen Monroe, a thousand times over.
Now, she is holding onto the secret; not wanting it to be tarnished by the way that death seemed too content to walk beside all of them right now. Maybe that was selfish, but in her mind, she was baring the weight of her truth so that no one else had to, at least not yet.
POSSIBLE CONNECTIONS
Dom enjoys cooking and baking to a point where it brings her joy and relief to be able to feed folks, so she runs a catering business on the side. Anyone who would have ordered from her, big or small, would be a cute little connection.
Anyone who was a part of her life in the foster system, whether it being a temporary foster family that didn’t work out, the family that actually adopted her, or anyone from that time who allowed her to spend a weekend or few nights on their couch/floor/spare room to get a chance to get away, too.
Someone who lived next door growing up, I’m picturing the love and basketball scene where he sneaks in her window when his parents are fighting. The sort of, neighbor that grew up with her, tight knit friendship that edged around something more, or something else, as they grew up. Or didn’t, whatever works.
People who have mistaken her kindness for weakness and fucked around, and found out.
Exes
Hookups/one night stands/friends with benefits
The one who shows up at all hours of the night asking her to make xyz thing because “no one knows how to make it like you do/how I like it but you”
Someone who has come to the cafe or to her privately for cooking/baking lessons (also the cute option for both of them covered in flour from a baking mishap and a little “whoops” kiss)
Cafe employees
The friend that encourages her to do more than the cafe and start her own business/open her own restaurant which is her eventual goal
The ride or die friends/friend group
A friend or hook up/anyone that would be in her home for whatever reason that found the results of her looking for her father, or helped her look, and knows Monroe is her sister but she hasn’t told her yet
