M A T T E O ;Age- 25
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Birthmonth/year- November 2998
Gender- Male
Sexual Orientation- Heterosexual
Rank- Journeyman II Harper (Dance/Artist)
Appearance- Matteo’s got the ruggedly pretty looks down to a tee; the man stands at 6’1” with broad shoulders that slope down to narrow hips and long legs, built lean and muscled. His skin is fairly pale, although it tans well in the spring and summer, and Matteo distinctly lacks the excessive scarring present in some Northern men; there’s a small but distinct one aged to white on his shoulder, and a few other assorted souvenirs of plans gone awry in the clumsiness of childhood, but very few are starkly new and eye-catching, whether due to lack of injuries or simply meticulous aftercare.
He moves with an easy, thoughtless grace in dance, all fluidity and careful lines; causally, though, the man’s more like an overgrown puppy than anything else. Matteo’s endlessly restless, bounces on his feet and likes to jog instead of walking; he’ll lope circles around people if he’s
got to wait for them and they’re just being slow, although he’d much rather they just get with the program and keep up. It’s debatably possible that Matteo literally has two settings—total inability to sit still, or total inability to move; slapping a book into his hands is the kinetic equivalent of hitting the ‘off’ switch.
His face is a strange mix of the masculine and feminine; the angle of his jaw is nearly permanently dusted with stubble, since Matteo forgets to shave more often than not, his lips warm and full. His hair’s brown and kept reasonably short, but it’s still plenty long enough to go aggressively bedhead on him, which it does with frequent and frankly vindictive glee. His eyes are a series of contrasts, too, dark thick eyebrows and long eyelashes against vividly blue eyes.
For a Harper, Matteo’s got this surprisingly aggressive vendetta against fancy clothing. By which he means anything that does not come in a holey, saggy form; he takes
casual clothing to a new extreme, although in his defense, he usually does pick clothing most conducive to dancing. That said, he does, reluctantly, acknowledge the fact that sometimes looking presentable is in order, in which case he likes to shamelessly steal clothing from his favorite grumpy Healer.
Personality- He’s a man whose intellect outstrips his age just as his maturity lags behind it: Dramatically. Matteo is a bizarre mix of paradoxes and quirks all wrapped up in a neat package with a too-bright grin and a penchant for dramatics. He’s larger than life in a way that’s typically perceived as rude—talks too much because he likes to hear himself, literally, totally lacks the brain-to-mouth filter that most people have; he wants to know too much, whether or not it’s his business; he has no perception of personal space; he’s incapable of expressing his emotions even if he has very little problem dancing other people’s.
Matteo tends to be frankly insensitive and irreverent; his sense of humor is totally offbeat, gleefully and unrepentantly immature. He’s got sarcasm down to an art form, tends towards unconscious manipulation—even very blatantly, he just doesn’t think of it as manipulation, so it’s okay, right? He curses with a truly awe-inspiring amount of cheeky enthusiasm, has an extraordinarily one-track mind, and he’s a self-imposed perfectionist, even if it rarely shows.
He’s honestly way more intelligent than he likes to show, too, and his memory is truly impressive—Matteo has a thing for libraries and books. Any books, but poetry and philosophy in particular are his favorites, and he’s exceptionally good at quoting lines from famous poetry. People that he loves are much rarer; he’s extraordinarily quick to befriend but equally slow to love, be it platonically or otherwise, and it’s frankly difficult to tell where the line between the two lie—probably because not even Matteo really knows.
He makes a point of not psychoanalyzing himself; he’s pretty sure the results would
not be pretty.
That said, Matteo’s certainly got his own skeletons in the closet. Harper Hall, obviously, is the root of a lot of them; it wasn’t exactly a happy place full of butterflies and sparkles, but he likes to think he’s pretty much put that behind him. He’s a generally warm man, outgoing if not overly flirtatious, lives life to the rhythm of his own offbeat music and a string of one-night’s stands; insecurity lingers only in the deepest corners of his own mind, and Matteo’s plenty good enough an actor to put off most would-be sympathizers; cliché as it may be, he
hates pity.
History-
2998-3006: Fort Hold Matteo was born the third-eldest son to a fairly well-off family at Fort Hold; his older brothers were distinctly older than he and considerably more interested in each other than they were in him, since he was no real threat to their inheritance, and his father was entangled in cutthroat Hold politics, which left his mother, Ashevei, to dote on him with single-minded dedication.
The boy grew up with an impressive range of freedom, although he honestly never pushed the boundaries much—as soon as Ashevei taught him to read, as was expected among the upper-class families, Matteo made his preferences for reading over exploring clear. Even when his oldest brother tried to introduce him to the deadly political game that even the youngest children played, Matteo withdrew with quiet dignity and returned to his books—and after a while, his brother gave up, and nobody else really tried. The third-oldest would never really have a decent place in the playing field anyway.
When Matteo turned seven, Ashevei began to introduce the concept of becoming apprenticed to a craft to the boy, but try as she might, he showed absolutely no interest in smithing, fishing, farming, mining—even healing was dismissed as uninteresting.
Harpercraft was his oldest brother’s suggestion—honestly suggested as a malicious joke; the Crafthall’s reputation was widespread and frankly vicious, but to Matteo, it sounded wonderful. Despite his mother’s anxious appeals, he presented the idea to his father, who was thrilled with the idea; Harpers had connections, after all, and to have a son in Harpercraft would be a welcome advantage in a political game made even more unstable by the war that had begun.
So, as soon as Matteo turned eight, he was officially apprenticed to the Harpercraft Hall.
3006-3018: Harper HallAt first, Matteo adjusted fairly well; he kept his nose clean and adhered to the tyrannical hierarchy set in place in the Crafthall, accepting it with quiet grace, and did his lessons well. He rarely made friends; the lessons his brothers had tried to teach him had stuck to some degree, and the main one was
don’t trust anybody, and so Matteo didn’t—he knew he wanted to become a Harper, and he knew he was bright enough, sharp enough, to accomplish it on his own, and if he didn’t need anybody to help boost him up, he didn’t need anybody to drag him down, either.
Matteo reached graduation level when he was fourteen.
That was about when he also figured out that being pretty—knowing way too early that the right kind of smile and look could get him things that just being smart couldn’t—wasn’t always a good thing. The Master that had previously acted as advisor to Matteo refused his graduation, and Matteo wasn’t stupid enough to believe that it was anything but a demand.
He held out for three months.
Three months of watching the boys he’d grown up with walk the tables, looking at him with condescending pity in their eyes.
Three months of sitting classes he’d already taken, unable to look at his Master.
Three months before he made the worst deal of his life, and was finally allowed to walk the tables to become a Junior Journeyman Harper and specialize in dance and the visual arts.
It didn’t really get better after that, not when he had something to lose now.
Matteo started offering to run messages not long after that—getting out of the Harper Hall was honestly his best option, for the most part, even if it slowed down his studies dramatically. However brief the excursions were, they were usually still better than sticking around in Harper Hall. And it wasn’t like any of the other apprentices or Junior Journeymen liked to do it, so they were usually more than happy to foist it off on him.
When he was fifteen, Matteo was sent to run a message to Healer Hall. He got there fine, but on his way back out again he turned a corner just in time to run into another boy. Who was holding a scalpel, up until Matteo intercepted him and it ended up in his shoulder instead.
The boy’s response to this was to drag him into an examination room and stitch him up while bitching steadily at him in a truly impressive spew of vitriol.
As first meetings went, Matteo had really had better, but the twisted, disturbingly abusive and
close relationship that it spawned was a revelation for Matteo—having a Healer for a friend was a politically sound move, he justified it, but honestly he just
liked the other boy, for all his scowls and dislike of being touched. His name was Vikenti, and he and the Healer Hall became Matteo’s refuge from his own life at Harper Hall, and for all Vikenti’s disgruntled complaints when Matteo showed up, he never failed to shift over in his bed or offer to share a meal.
With Vikenti as his stabilization—even if Matteo never actually told him about what, exactly, made him stray from Harper Hall so often, what made him show up without any sleep and dark bags under his eyes sometimes—Matteo made up the time he’d lost running errands, and most of his homework was done in Vikenti’s room with or without the Healer there. If he needed a muse or a model, Vikenti was his go-to, and a few years later, when Matteo turned twenty, he walked the tables again to become a Senior Journeyman with a specialization in art and dance.
Of course, most Harpers expected to get sent all over the world when they became old enough to represent the Hall adequately—Matteo only wanted to go one place, and he was willing to pay the price to get there.
He told Vikenti his stationing at Healer Hall was luck, and Vikenti, for all intents and purposes, believed him.
3018-3020: Healer HallFor all its proximity to Harper Hall, Healer Hall was
different in all the best ways, and Matteo had no idea how to handle it; he spent his first three days completely disregarding his actual responsibilities in favor of tagging along at Vikenti’s heels.
He was sociable enough on his own, eventually, since Vikenti sure had no interest in making friends with anybody else, had a string of casual friends-with-benefits, but it was always Vikenti’s room that he went back to at night—his own appointed room showed startlingly little use. His clothes, art supplies, instruments, toiletries—all migrated to Vikenti’s room and stayed there.
It was at Healer Hall, too, in 3019, that Matteo met Elorein—a girl seven years his junior, but nevertheless more amusing company for long stretches than most girls that he actually flirted with. Sure, he was jealous at first—he’d never known Vikenti to like anybody except him, and he was disturbingly
nice to Elorein sometimes—but he got over himself in pretty short order.
A year later, the world broke.
The decades-long dragon war came to a dragging, devastating end—particularly for Fort and its Holds. The Healer Hall was kept predictably busy, and by proxy, so too was Matteo, recording accounts of the turmoil from the people brought in, marking down endless tallies for the wounded and dead and the missing and the found, and sketching scenes of the chaos as told to him by survivors and as seen within Healer Hall itself in his ‘free’ time.
As the influx eventually slowed, news came of the leaders of Pern gathering—the first Summit, as it were.
Immediately following the Summit’s dismissal, Matteo received orders for reassignment, and barged straight into one of Vikenti’s teaching sessions to shove the orders in his face. The thorough tongue-lashing he received was worth it when Vikenti got his own assignment arranged to match, though, and Elorein, although she wasn’t there at the time his assignment came, had her own schedule anyway—shifting bases was a simple matter.
3020: Benden Hold They arrived at Benden Hold about a week before the main flow of Weyr crafters did; adjustment time was practically nonexistent before there were
countless other extremely confused and usually completely lost people also wandering Benden’s halls, often grumbling indignantly about the necessity of the transfer. Despite the chaos of the situation, Matteo got familiarized with the appropriate people and locations—learned the way to the Infirmary and library from his quarters with his eyes closed within the fortnight.
His orders were never explicitly stated, but Matteo knew what they were anyway—observe. Listen, watch, learn. Read people; understand their moods and discontent; be subtle; be loyal; manipulate where necessary; don’t
interfere until told.
A standing order.
And hey—Matteo was plenty good at that, even as the weeks turned into months turned into years.