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calebrhcdes · 5 months

Text

STATS

NAME: Caleb Josiah Rhodes

AGE & BIRTHDAY: Thirty-five & August 16th

GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis-male & he/him

SEXUALITY: Heterosexual

HOMETOWN: Covington

TIME IN COVINGTON: Until he graduated from high school, he'd come back to visit some, & has just recently moved back two weeks ago

OCCUPATION: Veterinarian

NEIGHBORHOOD: Orchid Park

BIOGRAPHY

Tw: verbal and physical abuse, cancer, parental death

Caleb’s father comes from a long line of powerful politicians. The Rhodes have been apart of the ruling political class for generations. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Caleb’s father, already governor of Georgia at this point, married someone from ‘the other side of the tracks’ so to speak.

Ariel Smith was the furthest thing from a young woman of standing that Damon Rhodes was expected to marry. With no education, no family name, no family period, the young woman was simply the exact opposite of everything Damon thought he wanted and yet couldn’t help falling for. The two bumped into each other at a community charity event in downtown Atlanta, with Ariel there as one of many beneficiaries and Damon a benefactor.. They locked eyes and were somehow inseparable for the rest of the night.

What started off as a whirlwind romance, quickly took a turn though once the couple got married. Damon clearly expected Ariel to be a subservient wife with none of the opinions or challenges to his authority that he had originally deemed as her best qualities. He talked down to her, put incredibly high expectations on her, demeaned her when she couldn’t meet them or be the trophy wife he wanted. What started off as love for his wife turned into a need to control.

Shortly after Caleb was born, his father’s verbal abuse towards Ariel turned physical. She tried everything she could to get him back to the loving man she first met, but nothing worked. And with Damon being such a powerful and influential person, there was no one she could turn to. Thankfully, as the heir to the Rhodes family line, Caleb escaped any physical abuse from his father.

By Caleb’s fifth birthday, the abuse had become too much for Ariel. So when an opportunity presented itself, she ran away, fleeing Covington for her life. Damon tracked her down, but at this point, he had begun to see her as more of a liability, someone who would distract his son from the greatness he had to live up to, so he let her go, promising that if she ever told anyone about who she was, if she ever tried to contact him or Caleb again, he would tell Caleb that his mother had been the abusive one. Once again, his power and influence were so great, Ariel knew he’d get away with it. So she stayed away.

Meanwhile, Damon told Caleb, and everyone else, that Ariel had died. With an intricate story claiming that Ariel had been diagnosed with an advanced stage of cancer, he pretended that he had taken her to a clinic on the other side of the country for treatment, but she hadn’t made it. Everyone believed him. Leaving Caleb to be brought up by his father - well, by the nannies and tutors he hired - alone. The young boy was devastated, as his mother was the only parent who ever made him feel loved.

Caleb was raised with the intention of carrying on the family legacy of going into politics. After high school, his father, with the help of Caleb’s good grades, got him into every IVY League school in the country, offering him the choice of any of them. However, Caleb very quickly realized he had no interest in politics. He wanted to study medicine. So, he went to Columbia in New York and majored in Biology. Medicine wasn’t exactly what Damon had had in mind for his son, but many politicians started off in different fields and being a doctor was a respectable enough job that Damon could see the benefits. So he allowed it.

Shortly after graduating from medical school though, Caleb dropped a bomb in his father’s lap. He had realized in the eight years since he had gone off to college, since he had gotten out from under his father’s thumb, that his passion actually lay in caring for animals. So he decided to start the process of becoming a veterinarian. This caused a fissure in his relationship with his father that never quite healed. The two had never been close, after all, Damon attempted to control Caleb almost as much, if not more, than he had Caleb’s mother, but one Caleb determined to go down a path his father deemed unconducive to the plans he had created for Caleb, their relationship dissolved into barely talking at all.

After the initial battle with his father over his career choice, and once he had moved about as far away from his father within the U.S. as he could, Caleb enjoyed several years of real freedom for the first time in his life. He moved around a lot, staying in small and big towns alike, getting jobs at different veterinary clinics, simply living the exact opposite kind of life than what his father wanted for him. A life with meaning.

It was during this time, while he lived in Seattle, that he reconnected with Kelebek Turan. Having been friends in school, when she brought her dog in to be seen at the clinic he worked in, the two instantly sparked a new connection. He fell hard and he fell fast and he knew pretty soon that this was the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. After dating for a year, Caleb proposed and they were all set to get married, despite his father’s disapproval of the relationship.

As they got closer to the wedding, Caleb began to become suspicious about his mother’s death (tbh, idk why yet) and started looking into it. The day of the wedding, he got word that not only was she actually alive and had been all this time, but she actually did have cancer this time and was currently on her deathbed. Caleb asked one of his groomsmen to explain to Kelebek that he had a family emergency, but that he was coming back for her, but unfortunately, when his father questioned said groomsman about Caleb’s whereabouts, he took it upon himself to communicate the message to Kelebek. Instead of passing along the correct message, that there was a family emergency, Damon simply told her that Caleb wasn’t coming back and left her to assume he meant that Caleb wasn’t coming back at all. Naturally, Kelebek thought she had been stood up. She left with an old friend who Caleb had always worried was more than just a friend and Damon was only too happy to tell his son that Kelebek had left with said friend because they were together once Caleb returned for Kelebek. Unbeknownst to both Kelebek and Caleb, his father had taken their situation, and with just a few insinuations here and there, had destroyed the whole thing. Their relationship was over.

After the fiasco that was supposed to be his wedding day, Caleb focused on spending what time he could with his mother, trying to piece together what had actually happened. He never told his father that he knew, waiting until he had all the facts and could actually do something about it. Unfortunately though, his mother passed away shortly after they were reunited. Caleb felt like his father had won yet again. He didn’t know it, but his father had taken away his relationship with Kelebek as well.

He has returned to Covington in the hopes of discovering more about his father and finding some way to bring him down, but is pretending to ‘come back’ to the family to get close to his father in the hopes of Damon letting something slip.

#covingtonintro #it's longwinded but i'm too lazy to do a tldr right now #sorry!!!

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