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blakexmd · 4 years

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Character: ― Nathaniel ‘Nate’ Blake Faceclaim: ― Casey Deidrick Age/Pronouns: ― 32 | he/him Occupation: ― backstreet doctor, car thief/mechanic (he uh... steals cars for you and customizes them? but also likes just tinkering tbh) Hometown/District: ― born in Chicago / lives in Red Line District, Houston

HEADCANONS

Drives an old-timer, and not just any old-timer but a raven black ‘69 Boss 428 Mustang. That thing was expensive as hell and really hard to find, but Nate wanted it in a good condition and takes care of that thing like his life depends on it. Sure he’ll push it to its limits, but otherwise he takes better care of that stupid car than himself. That car is his guilty pleasure, most of the time though he’s on his motorcycle - he’ll say it’s more practical, but really it’s all about the adrenaline and constantly putting himself in near death situations.

He loves street racing, the more illegal the better. Whatever project he’s currently working on for himself is probably being prepared and perfect for the next race. It’s probably going to send him to an early grave (if the myriad of other issues doesn’t do it sooner), but he can’t shake the addiction he has for the feeling of the steering wheel and the gearshift under his fingers.

Has a thing for collecting stray animals. It started when he was a kid, his mother had allowed it and taught him how to take care of them if they were wounded, and he just never grew out of it. There’s two dogs and a raven that have taken up permanent residency in his house, but there are other animals that sort of come and go as they please and come when they need food, shelter or help.

Has a tattoo that covers his back, an intricate drawing of thorns and roses and a raven mid-flight. It’s sort of a project that spanned almost a decade and he would get it done little by little, working on the drawing before taking it to the tattoo parlor. There are many, many details within it, each with its own meaning that only makes sense to Nate, an homage to people in his life and his past. Also there’s a snake tattooed on his chest that he got back in school, as well as a myriad of small tattoos scattered across his skin - his mother’s handwriting, dates of death for his fallen comrades etc.

His most noticeable scar is the burn mark on his stomach, vaguely shaped like whatever piece of metal he’d been burnt with during an interrogation, but he doesn’t mind it all that much. What he does mind are the million silvery scars from the IED that killed Liam - he hates thinking about those.

His knuckles are always beat up, to some degree. He loves fighting in various fight-clubs throughout the city, just for the sake of another hit of adrenaline, and because it makes him feel somewhat alive. So it’s not really a surprise to see him beaten and bruised, it’s more of a surprise when he’s in one piece... When he’s not doing that, he’s probably taking his frustrations out on an old, worn-out punching bag he’s had since forever, or jogging around the city at strange hours of the night.

He’s got a myriad of vices - alcohol, fighting, cigarettes, an occasional hit of drugs. It’s his attempt to fill some hole in himself that’s been left gaping open ever since his father died. It’s a temporary fix, but he’s the type of person to live his life day in and day out anyway.

He’s got an old silver zippo with engravings from the army such as “As I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for I am the evilest son of a bitch." and dates and initials of his fallen comrades. He loves that beat up piece of trash though, and you’ll never see him without it.

Prefers knives to guns, but he knows it’s stupid to bring a knife to a gunfight so he’s learned how to handle those too. Though he’s not actively involved with any side, he’s always got weapons on him - just in case. It comes with the territory of being involved with the murkier side of the population.

He loves music - it’s his outlet. You can sometimes see him jotting down notes on a napkin when he’s sitting in a diner at 4AM - it calms him to write these things down, helps get the music out of his head. When he can’t sleep, he’ll play his Stratocaster until he’s able to pass out, even if just for a few hours.

He’s all dark leather and worn military boots and silver rings and a smell of cigarettes and gasoline and trouble. That’s pretty much his MO. I feel like when someone sees him, you could show them his diploma and they wouldn’t believe you this guy’s a doc that’s worked as a corpsman for the army for years.

Probably the weirdest quirk of his, is his penchant for faith. His mother was religious, and she sort of instilled that in him at a young age. He must have lost his faith a thousand times over the years, but he always ends up coming back. No doubt in his mind God doesn’t want anything to do with his messed-up ass, but he likes this concept that there’s something out there, even if it’s not for him. Then at least for the good people in his live that he loves. It sort of brings him peace, and if he can’t be found at his usual joints around town - he’s no doubt sitting in a dark, empty church, head bowed down, seeking solace. He’s never going to admit it though, unless you catch him in the act.

His father is the only man he truly feared in his life, otherwise he’s just pretty much indifferent and is generally lacking in the self-preservation department...

Every Wednesday and Saturday, like clockwork - he goes to visit his mother. He brings her flowers, takes her out in the gardens for a walk, sits besides her and reads her a chapter or two of whatever book they’re going through that month. She’s pretty much an empty shell of a woman she used to be, but holding her hand is the only comfort he feels these days. It’s still as warm and soft as he remembers it, and though it breaks his heart to see her like this, he’ll probably never give up hope that she’ll come back one day. And even if she doesn’t she’s still his mom.

Also plants, his house is filled with those? Idk, he’s so bad at taking care of himself and is probably in a complete organ failure, but the plats and the animals - they’re thriving like he’s been studying vet medicine and botany all his life.

WANTED CONNECTIONS

The Brother - He’s one of the Reapers, and someone Nate cares about deeply, even if he’s rarely showing it. It’s a complicated relationship between these two, Nate envies him for leaving when he did, but he can never quite get rid of the feelings he has for his brother. It’s a sensation of bone-deep loyalty he can’t shake. I think it would be super interesting to explore this connection, and I’m intentionally leaving it vague so it can be discussed!

The Friend’s Wife - She’s the wife of his brother-in-arms and army best friend that died during an explosion. I think their relationship was shaky at first, considering Nate’s feelings for her husband - but Nate can see why Liam loved her so much. Nate once promised Liam that if anything ever happened to him, Nate would take care of her and the kid, and Nate’s never been one to break promises. That’s why he came back to Houston after he was honorably discharged, and why he took up odd jobs - to pay for the debts and to make sure those two had everything they needed. He’ll probably care for them until the day he dies, whether or not she likes it. He adores the kid though, revels at her innocence and the way she’s delighted at everything, she also represents the only memory he has of Liam.

The Ex-comrade - Someone Nate also considered a good friend, he’d trusted them enough to admit his darkest thoughts after Liam died. But though they promised to respect his decision not to be saved at the risk of others, they risked their life for him when it came down to that. Oddly enough, Nate resents them for it. He feels like it was a good way to go, and he should’ve been left behind when they had the chance. It’s a sick and twisted logic, but it’s hard reasoning with him. I would love to work on this dynamic, because this person has seen him at his worst, and they obviously care about him so I think it’s a good spot for growth for both of them.

The one he hates - This will sound ridiculous, but it’s someone he’s been involved with at some point in his life (leaving this flexible) They butted heads a lot, hated each other even, but I feel like they also got addicted to each other because at least it made Nate feel something, even if it was rage. They are far too similar for their own good, and they feed off each other’s troubles. It’s a bit selfish on both sides, and definitely unhealthy, but I’m super interested in exploring that because lbr Nate can’t make a good decision for the life of him. This could be either old or fresh I’m up for anything, and we can develop/discuss it further!!

The Friends - Someone please put up with him? He can be funny, sometimes. In a dark, tragic sort of way. Like someone has to be there to explain to him breakfast isn’t cereals in a bowl of vodka. I mean he’ll probably sarcasm his way out of it, but at least someone tried…

The Exes - And by exes I mean hookups, or real exes who got sick of him being a mess, or they were too much of a mess together, or someone ill-informed tried to save this jackass from himself. Anything works honestly, it can be angsty or a tragicomedy, I’m there for it all, I want to hurt him real bad.

Also everything else, if you’ve got an idea or want to discuss any of the above, feel free to shoot me a message! I’m super duper excited about plotting with him and I’m always here to explain if anything up there was unclear, don’t be afraid to reach out!

THE STORY

He was born in Chicago, the son of a nurse and a father who played an integral part in the city’s criminal scene. From a young age he was thrust into the life his father led, nudged further into it by an older brother he’d always looked up to.

He wasn’t all his father though, even if he’d inherited his temper - as a kid he used to adore his mother, she represented this beacon of light and kindness for him that’s still there today.

Since very young age he developed this duality when it comes to his identity - he would try to satisfy the wishes of both this mother and father, which would result in the man he is today. On one side, he wanted to follow his mother’s footsteps into med school and do some good in the world, and on the other side he was drawn to the seedy underbelly of the city that his father roamed. It was like an addiction he couldn’t quite shake no matter how hard he tried.

His father would be beaten to death in front of Nate when he was just 15, and though he was used to seeing blood and death by now - this shook him to his core. Though he was messed up, Nate loved his father, and seeing him die in his arms broke something in the boy.

It wasn’t made easier by his brother taking off to go to Houston, leaving Nate scrambling back in Chicago, trying to take care of his mother who was now withering away like a plucked flower, and trying to figure out how to survive.

It was a pretty miserable existence - work low-paying jobs for the gang, go to school, take care of mom, rinse and repeat. It’s no wonder this was part of Nate’s life during which he developed his bad habits and a bitter attitude. It’s the only thing that made sense.

He had a knack for survival though - earned better gigs eventually, got into med school, got better at whatever it was that the gang required of him (car theft, hits...), but he felt like he owed it to his mother to for once put what she had dreamed of for him in the first place, instead of what his father had wanted.

He tried to clean up his act then - figured military might do it and after he had enough money to put his mom in a really good place - he enlisted. Worst decision of his life, or so he thinks anyway.

Sure, it cleaned up his life, established order within it, but he’d never be the same after it. The things they had to live through, were much, even for him.

He made friends there though, fell in love - though it was unreciprocated. It was naive though, to think that he was done with heartbreak, in the midst of war of all places. An IED struck as both Liam and Nate were shuffling, trying to figure out how to stop whatever was happening without harming a child, and before Nate could think - Liam was already shielding him with his body. Maybe it wasn’t exactly the type of love Nate had hoped for, but Liam had loved him dearly nonetheless.

They’d have to drag him away from Liam’s body after he’d been doing CPR for good 40 minutes, and it was a point at which he spun out of control once again. He would purposefully put himself in harm’s way, and had made it a point to make it clear to everyone that in case of trouble, he did not want to be saved. Not that anyone would listen to him.

He’d come out of combat very much alive. Though pretty beat up after he ran into harm’s way in an attempt to save someone, and had been dragged from the bring of death by a comrade. At the end of the day he was left with wounds, empty medals and an honorable discharge that sent him to Houston to lick his wounds.

Why Houston? His brother was there, and Liam’s wife too. Home wasn’t a city - it was people, he knew that much about life. It was far from ideal, but if Nate had anything left, then it was his honour, and he had a promise to keep.

Some weeks before Liam’s death, as if somehow he knew - Liam had asked him to go to Houston if anything ever happened to him, make sure his wife and his kid were taken care of. And it wasn’t like Nate had anything of his own left, just this promise he’d made and whatever was left of his broken family.

He’d work as a contract killer for a while - bad things were what he was good at, after all. And it paid well, well enough to help Liam’s wife pay off her debts and take care of the kid, and whatever was left Nate put to side - for what, he had no idea. Outside of that, his life pretty much spun out of control - he couldn’t stop dreaming about Liam’s limp body in his arms, or the things they had to do to survive over there. He went numb, more numb than before - and he was still desperately trying to feel something. Rage, pleasure, pain, anything but this nothingness. So it was no wonder he slipped so easily back into his old habits.

Word got around though - of a doc that had a way of taking a bullet out of you so you didn’t die, and instantly forget you were his patient to begin with. And that money he left on the side? There was enough of it to get proper tools and drugs, make his work easier, but also enough to buy place from which he could do that one thing that still brought peace to his mind - cars. Tuning, fixing, creating - you name it, and he could do it.

So for the last two years he’s been working as a backstreet doctor - though his practice is rather professionally equipped and sterile (don’t worry, he’s a nerd about that stuff), and focusing on cars as his ‘day’ (?) job. Whatever it is you wish, he can acquire it, and then make it better. It doesn’t matter if it’s a 1967 Impala or something... wilder, and newer. He’s got it covered.

#gowtalk #here... have this mess hahah #if you'd like to plot with him feel free to give this post a <3 #but there's going to be a lot of sarcasm involved #i love him though pls someone give him a chance #tw suicide

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lokilickedme · 6 years

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Hello My Lady! Just because you asked, here are my faves of yours: #1 King (no surprise here), #2 Jack (too crazy not to love, and the stream crossing of pretty much all your stories is genius) #3 Chem/BD/TTW/TKH/TWK/can't remember them all. They're all special in their own way! Can't believe it'll be 3yrs soon since I started squatting your page!!! God time goes by fast! I'd like to add a special mention for the Muse Meetings, sooo funny, and a Golden Snowflake to Aleks. Cute little bumkin.

Thank you @fudgemuffinanon! Dear god, has it been that long? Seems like I joined up last year…*sits here blinking at my posts from 2015, wondering how that happened*

**LONG TEXT POST COMING UP**

You drew the lucky straw today my darling, I’m feeling wordy and in the mood to share. A lot of people have asked me over the last couple of years how some of my stuff came about, and you mentioned one that gets a lot of asks.

Lemme tell you something about the Muse Meetings. Way back in 1998 when I got my first computer, one of the very first things I ran across by way of internet fanfiction was a little something called The Very Secret Diaries penned by a writer named Cassandra Claire (who is now professionally published under the name Cassandra Clare). The Very Secret Diaries (which are hilarious, btw) woke something up in me - mainly because, as a lifelong writer who had never allowed anyone to read 95% of my work, I finally realized that yeah, there were other people out there whose brains deviated from the standard in the same way mine did. Her writing style back then (in the Diaries specifically, I’ve never actually read anything else she’s written) was very similar to the way I wrote, and those Diaries were exactly the sort of silly, ridiculous, irreverent thing I’d scribbled in my notebooks for most of my life. And people liked it, she had a huge following based on just those out-of-context glimpses of her characters’ personal thoughts. She was writing behind the scenes thoughts of characters, things that would never make it into books, and it was brilliant. That was the kind of stuff I loved to write but had never given myself permission to show anyone. She was showing hers to people, and they were loving it.

Which gave me the inspiration to not only put my work out there in the public eye for the first time ever, but to stick with my personal writing style (which I’d always assumed wasn’t what other people wanted to read, based on the books I’d been exposed to most of my life). Not change anything. Just do me. And doing me meant writing silly nonsense if I wanted to.

So - The Very Secret Diaries are more or less the inspiration for the Muse Meetings, or at least the official written version of them. I’d always imagined dialogues with my characters outside the confines of whatever story I was working on, but never thought anyone else would be interested in seeing me write it out.

The Diaries made me realize different. Not only were her characters yammering and complaining and snarking at each other (both out of character and in), they were doing it in exactly the way I’d imagined my own characters interacting in the real world. I loved it. Seeing someone else do what I’d always done in my head - and do it in an official, out-there-in-the-public-eye capacity, was a revelation. Finally I was able to give myself permission to write the way I wanted to, without restricting myself to the styles and methods in the books in the family library. It had always been in my head, but now it didn’t have to stay there. I could write proper stories, but I could also write what was going on in the other room, where the reader seldom gets to peek. And other people besides myself might like it because hey, there’s precedent.

That was freeing, and I am grateful to Ms Claire for that.

So, a little history that leads up to how and why I finally started writing out the Muse Meetings:

My first fandoms that I wrote for online were Harry Potter and Star Wars (Kenobi specifically). And yes, way back then (late 90′s - early 2000′s) there were already muse meetings among my characters. I’ve been doing these for a long time, and I wish the out-of-character stuff I’d written back then still existed (my HP stuff bit the dust when The Restricted Section shut down, and my SW stuff was on FF.net for a little while but honestly I don’t remember my user ID there or the titles of the fics, though I have searched…so they’re most likely lost as well). It’s sort of a shame because there were some old Anakin/Obi-Wan muse meetings that you guys would have loved…and the stuff between Remus and Sirius while we were hashing out what was going to be in their next chapter? It still pains me that it’s all lost, but maybe it’s for the best. That was nearly two decades ago, we move on to bigger and (hopefully) better things.

After my urge to write HP fic fizzled out I stopped writing for a while, but there were always muse meetings going on in my head for stories I scribbled mentally. To me they’ve always been more fun than the actual stories, which explains my love for gag reels and behind-the-scenes featurettes for movies (I watch those first, always).

And then I found AO3 - funnily enough, I discovered it while searching the internet for one of my lost HP fics - and I decided to start writing in earnest again. With all those thousands and thousands of fics and endless fandoms, it seemed like the perfect place to indulge my need to share what went on in my head. And as I settled into the MCU and my stories started to grow to include multitudes of characters, those impromptu staff meetings with my muses kept being called to order. Stuff that my characters would never say in the context of their stories got said. Scenarios that were too ridiculous to waste time writing were played out. Arguments and fights and bantering between characters who, in the restrictive confines of their own tales, would never in a million years interact…now they were throwing poptarts at each other (and occasionally knives) while the side characters wandered out of the room to watch TV or raid the fridge or sat in horror as someone’s until-now unassuming wife brandished a melon baller as a weapon.

It was messy and fun and was by far my favorite part of the writing process.

That’s what eventually became the Muse Meetings. You want to know how they escaped my head and became an official thing?

Well I’m gonna tell ya lol

One of my very first friends in here, the fantastic @elvenfair1, was one of my first readers at AO3 and she told me I should post links to my fics at this site called tumblr to bring in a bigger audience. So I opened an account here, followed her, posted some links as suggested, and she and I began messaging back and forth pretty much every night as we wrote our respective fics, bouncing ideas off each other and discussing plot points and brainstorming for character names. And as my characters sassed me and refused to cooperate with what I wanted them to do, I would tell elvenfair what was going on in my head with my dumbass OCs and OFCs and we’d laugh and gripe about trying unsuccessfully to reel in our unruly muses.

And then one night back in 2015 she said “You should post this muse stuff, it’s hilarious.”

You know what the first thing I thought was? Cassandra Claire did it 14 years ago and people loved it. So yeah, I can sure as hell do it if I want. If nobody is interested in it, at least it’ll amuse me and elvenfair and that’s cool enough.

And so I did. I started posting them in here first, then as people started requesting them more I eventually moved them to AO3 in a more structured format. And now you guys have multiple Lokis hurling curses at a bartender and viciously baiting a hapless movie star while teenage versions of two other attendees flirt with unsuspecting OFCs, with an occasional appearance by Thor dropping hints about future chapters and looking for fruit roll-ups. It’s messy, but it’s fun and I’ve always enjoyed writing it as a way to let my brain decompress, especially when one of my “real” stories has hit a roadbump.

Since then I’ve seen countless other professional writers doing the exact same thing - J.R. Ward even posts her own version of muse meetings on her official website AND has a published book (her Insiders Guide) that is almost entirely nothing BUT muse meetings. It’s surprising how many writers actually do this and I sometimes wonder if authors like Poe, Steinbeck, Vonnegut, Tolkien, Gaiman, McMurtry didn’t do it themselves (I’d bet money on McMurtry). Just goes to show there’s not an original idea anywhere in the universe…no matter how much you might believe you came up with it first, someone out there has been doing it for a long damn time before you - and a million more will do it after you :)

Anyway, I haven’t written any muse meetings in a while but they still go on constantly in my head. I get asked about once a week to go back to doing them, and one day I will, when I have time for it. My actual fics are struggling for writing time as it is and I made a conscious decision to weed out the unnecessary stuff in favor of “real work” (yeah right lol)…but yeah, the Meetings are still one of my favorite things and I won’t stop doing them permanently - they’ll be back.

So thank you Cassandra Claire for inspiring me to let them fly…if it weren’t for those whacked-out Diaries, the Muse Meetings would all still be in my head with only one person (me) laughing at them.

#fudgemuffinanon #long post #it's been a while since I got to talk to an adult IRL due to the kids being sick #so here have all the words at once lol

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