𝕥𝕙𝕖 𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕚𝕟.

charlie weber, for better or worse, was born with a silver spoon in his mouth. the only child of a doctor and a lawyer, what his parents lacked for in time they made up for in experiences and material goods. 

he was born and raised in san francisco, often with a nanny and, as he go older, more often by himself. he was a bookish kid who had problems making friends and would sometimes get stories confused with reality. 

while friends didn’t come very easy to him, as he grew up, he found that romantic partners were much more willing to overlook his eccentricities, and he learned a lot about the world through them, his first real portal to it outside of his books. 

charlie had a high school sweetheart, and the two couldn’t bare to part when they were going to leave for college. rather than doing the sensible thing, attending the same school, and seeing if they could make it work, they eloped so that they could spend every second together. that was 1999. before they finished undergrad in 2003, they’d be divorced. one marriage down.

charlie actually got through a semester of med school before he realized that he needed to defer, to get out there and see the world, or at least get his hands dirty and see if this was what he wanted to do. he spent eighteen months in the peace corps, where he met and married spouse #2, roughly 2004.

he followed them back to new york city, the only reason why he ever came here, readmitting to med school and going through with it. med school passes, he and spouse #2 get a divorce right around 2007 or 2008, right before he was set to graduate

2008, maybe coincidentally and maybe not, charlie weber meets who he is sure is the man of his dreams, aaron wright, while aaron is working at a bar. he offers one night to walk him back to his apartment, one thing leads to another, and they get married in 2010. 

aaron and charlie stay together through his residency and the first year of him practicing fully, up through 2014. it’s an amicable divorce-- the two just don’t see enough of each other, and are at different places in their lives. 

charlie is single for the longest period of his life after he and aaron divorce, nearly three years. he says that he’s going to take it slow, that three divorces is enough of a red flag even for him, and that he needs to learn about himself, and focus on his work. he’s still miserable.

that all comes to a screeching halt when charlie meets elijah. he’ll take the ridicule of a fourth marriage in twenty years. this is what it’s all been leading up to, every moment of his life has just been coming down to this. it feels ridiculous, but it’s true. and charlie does his due diligence this time. they date for years. their loves grows and changes, but stays strong. he proposes, and the two are only recently married when we launch back into the present day.

sam scott-simon, born samuel simon, is an all-american boy that was raised the heart of harlem’s sugar hill neighborhood. he, his parents, and his two brothers spent his childhood in a two-bedroom walk-up. they may not have had a lot, but they had each other, and that’s one of the most important vales that sam was raised with.

sam can count on his fingers the number of times that he’s left new york city. whether it was a school trip to albany or an impromptu weekend away to atlantic city, he’s still never been far, and he definitely hasn’t been on a plane. he wouldn’t know what to do away from the sights and sounds that he’s accostomed to.

sam was a solid b- student, but was always well-liked among his peers for his generous and gregarious attitude. his real talent was in sports, specifically baseball. he made the high school’s junior varsity team when he was in eighth grade, and there were people expecting big things from him.

things changed when sam was sixteen. he learned that he was going to be a father. wanting to do the right thing, and encouraged by family, he stepped into the parent role immediately. baseball was traded out for a part-time job as he worked to finish high school and give his child the best start possible. 

it’s hard out there as a parent, especially when, as well-meaning as your family is, there isn’t a lot of room for economic support. but sam wasn’t the only young person solely in charge of children at his high school. he’d only spoke to ethan scott in passing a few times, but he started to go to him when he needed advice.

this blossomed into a friendship, and the two started living together after high school, splitting the rent and working different shifts so that someone was always home to watch the kids. 

sam got a job at the hospital as an orderly, which is generally the same position that he holds today. as orderly jobs have been phased out, he’s gotten the training to be a patient care assistant, and has been considering getting his cna for about five years now, though he’s yet to take the plunge. 

sam never really had time to date, between fifty or sixty hour workweeks and spending time with his family. it might have been why the agreement was so appealing at first-- if sam and ethan were both still single at thirty, they would just get married. sam laughed about it at first. he liked women, for starters, and he’d never looked at ethan that way.

over years, those reasons faded away: he was, in fact, bisexual, and the longer he looked at ethan, the more he liked what he saw. he still didn’t make a move, terrified that a wrong step would blow up the family they had formed.