⟡ SAMUEL BAUDELAIRE INTRO ⟡
★ IN CHARACTER ★
FULL NAME: Samuel Baudelaire
AGE: 35
GENDER IDENTITY: cis-male (he/him)
OCCUPATION: bartender
SEXUAL ORIENTATION: bisexual
FACE CLAIM: david corenswet
★ BIOGRAPHY ★
TRIGGER WARNING: dysfunctional family, fighting, neglect, drugs & alcohol addiction Samuel always felt out of place. He thinks he was born wrong. When he was a kid it wasn't so obvious. He was happy, loved—hiding all his flaws under the veil of a functional family. Maybe if it had stayed that way he wouldn't have gotten so much worse. He was always protective of his siblings, but his mom had asked him to be. Back then, he had assumed that it was because he was the oldest. Now, he knows its because she was sick and needed to know someone would look after them. He'd get into fights at school over them, almost giddy when someone sneered something nasty their way. He'd broken another kid's nose before he even reached the 6th grade. He was proud of it. Maybe he had wanted to be like his dad and stand up for those who couldn't defend themselves, but that ended soon after he turned 15—when his mom passed away from cancer. It was a shock—to Sam especially—when their mother passed. Or maybe he hadn't been paying attention to how truly sick she had gotten. He definitely hadn't been. He had been stirring up trouble at school again, and the night before she had passed she had begged him to just be normal, just be responsible, just think of his siblings. It made Sam so mad he could only see red. All his life all he had done was "think of his siblings" and try to be "normal". When was someone going to start thinking about him? Worrying about him? He shouted and screamed and cursed at her—told her he hated her and she never cared about him—and ran away. He didn't come home until two weeks later to the news she had passed. He didn't even get to attend her funeral.
He didn't get to grieve like the rest of his family. Even his father got to feel miserable and pathetic. Sam didn't get that chance. He stuffed it down. He let it crawl under his skin and fester like a necrotic wound until he just didn't feel anything. He picked himself back up, pissed off and hurt and wrong, and simply moved on. Someone had to take care of his siblings. It was easy to step into the role even at 15. The only hard part was everything he didn't realize he'd have to sacrifice. Friends? Asking a girl to prom? Joining the football team? Learning how to skateboard after school? All the things a 15 year old should have been doing vanished from Sam's life because he was too busy joining the work force and becoming Mr. Mom to his younger siblings. He didn't even realize everything he was missing out on until he graduated and the entirety of high school just felt like a small smudge on the reel of his life. Despite raising his siblings, he just didn't feel connected to them. Hell, he didn't feel connected to anyone anymore. His dad especially was difficult to feel any kind of sympathy for. He still took care of him, picking him up from bars and driving him home, maybe just because he knew that that's what his mom would have asked him to do. It was strange how he felt the dynamic shift between them when he returned home.
Now, he was lecturing his father everyday about being out all night getting drunk while he slumped over in the passenger seat of the car instead of asking him for advice on growing up or starting a family or even just how to change the oil in his truck. It used to upset Sam, now it just pissed him off. The anger all came from that wound, he told himself. He thought it was why people avoided him, why dogs growled at him in the street, why he was always getting into fights with strangers. He thought people could just smell it on him—like he was diseased with it—or maybe the universe just really had it out for him. Either way, fighting made the wound, the anger, worse. He didn't know how to handle all the rage he was feeling, all the loss he was suffering and ignoring, or all the sacrifices he told himself didn't matter because he was never destined to have those things anyways. The only thing he knew how to do was fight. Soon, he started looking for any kind of underground fighting, and trained everyday to learn how to win. Maybe it was a type of punishment for himself, or maybe it was truly the only way he could deal with that numbing wound under his skin—by putting himself through the brawls just to feel again. Risking his life didn't stop at just fighting. Hanging around bars and clubs gave him something else he could follow his father's footsteps in—being an addict. Drugs and alcohol soon became something he couldn't live without along with the matches, and he wasn't doing much to hide it from anyone—except for his siblings. He was still trying his best to take care of them, to think of them and only them, but it wasn't something he could keep hidden forever—eventually putting a strain on his relationships with them.
