Vikenti

[Zephyr]

Name: Vikenti
Age: Thirty (June 2993)
Gender: Male
Sexual Orientation: He's attracted only to obnoxious manchildren who don't know how to keep their hands to themselves and are theoretically straight. (He's got high standards.)
Rank: Journeyman II Healer

Physical Appearance

Vikenti is a good looking man. He has what people would call rugged good looks. He’s six feet one and has a lean, muscular body. His shoulders are broad and muscles are ropy; he’s deceptively powerful. Scars litter his body, all over. Small, twisting white lines of flesh that tell stories. Most of them are pretty small, but there are a few, such as the thick, twisting scar that extends between his shoulder blades, or the large one that stretches across his right side. There’s also a large scar on his left thigh, where he was attacked by a canine. The skin dips in here where he’s missing some of the muscle. He limps occasionally because of this scar, but it only shows when he’s tired or stressed; or when it’s raining.

He has very dark brown hair, that’s usually kept shorter. He likes to keep his hair pretty neat most of the time. He shaves, but makes sure to always have stubble; it’s by design, not neglect. He’s quite particular about his appearance and needs to have himself well kept most of the time. He doesn’t usually go anywhere unless he looks good, and that goes double for his hair. His eyes are dark green. There is brown extending out from the pupil though, causing his eyes to be two colors. This can cause his eyes to, in bad light look impossibly dark, but in bright light the bi-color of his eyes is clear as day. He has an oval shaped face and a nicely pointed nose, gorgeous lips, deft hands and an amazing smile; if you can get him to smile. A frown is far more at home on his face than a smile any day of the week. He’s got a pretty expressive face. His eyes can widen to almost impossible proportions and his eyebrows can move pretty much by themselves, giving him a manic look if he ever tries to use it; and he does. Though, most of the time if someone pisses him off enough, he doesn’t even realize how crazy he can look.

Vikenti’ wardrobe is perfect. He will never be seen in something dirty or anything with holes in it. Everything he wears is extremely nice and is kept perfectly clean at all times. He’s impeccably clean, and his wardrobe shows it most of the time. It’s immaculate.

Personality

If it were up to him, Vikenti would be left to his own devices every single minute of every single day. He mostly keeps to himself, having no real desire to converse with others. There’s probably some deep psychological reason why he’s like this, hell, if one digs deeply enough, they can find a reason for every facet of his personality. He doesn’t like dealing with the mind though, never one to try and figure out why he is the way he is. He’s far more interested in the physical side of things, healing and putting things and people back together. Even from an early age he was interested in the way things work, becoming a healer was a natural progression from this, and it fit with the overwhelming urge to care that he couldn’t get rid of.

It wouldn’t be entirely truthful to say that Vikenti hates people. He certainly seems like he hates people. He’s in a perpetual state of grumpiness. He barks and growls and grumbles and gripes to everyone, and he’s only slightly less grumpy to his patients. He’s always trying to put a barrier between himself and the outside world, almost like he can’t deal with it, and truthfully; he doesn’t even want to try. There’s always something he puts in front of himself, whether it is his healing , if given the chance, he can and will work himself to exhaustion; it’s far better than dealing with the outside world , or his grumpiness. He’s constantly trying to make himself seem as unapproachable as possible and knows that there’s nothing a well-placed scowl can’t get him. One isn’t likely to ever see Vikenti without a glare on his face. He considers himself a master glarer. He’s got these crazy eyebrows that he can move independently of each other and his eyes, when they’re wide, can achieve an almost manic look. He can cow even the most hardened of warriors with his glare.

He's got personal space issues out the ass. If you touch him, and he doesn't know you, you will probably get punched in the face. If you touch him and he does know you, you will probably get punched in the face more softly. But maybe not, he’s a fickle one with his affections. He hates being touched. Hates, hates, hates. He also hates being dirty, a little bit of a germophobe, which isn't all that surprising because of his occupation. He's seen it all and isn't keen on experiencing any of it. He isn’t completely cold, however. He’s got a crunchy exterior with a squishy inside. He has the ability to like people, even love, it’s just; he’d probably never come out and tell anyone he likes them. He’s pretty shit with feelings, preferring to insult someone to express his affection. So, you might not even know if he likes you or if he hates you. Except, if someone touches him and they’re met with only mild bitching, then they know that he likes them, at least enough not to maul them. If someone touches him and he doesn’t bitch , at least about that , or if he touches someone of his own accord; then you know he’s fallen; when Vikenti falls, he falls hard. This is probably part of the reason why he’s so eager to keep people away from him. He’d much rather deal with physical pain than emotional. He isn’t scared of much; of anything, but the one thing he’s absolutely petrified of is getting his heart broken.

Vikenti has a softer side, one that people never get to see unless they’re very close to him; very close to him. For all he bitches about being touched and tries to maul people for touching him, he actually likes, providing the person trying to touch him is close to him. He likes to cuddle, but don’t ever accuse him of liking it, or you will be mauled. He’s a diehard romantic; likes flowers and candy and stupid wine and shit. He can be terribly sappy when he wants to be, and epitaphs of love , including poetry , drive him to distraction. He’s viciously protective of those he loves, and he would do absolutely anything for those few people. They are everything to him, and he won’t lose them. He’s also pretty much an alcoholic. He loves to drink, because it distracts him from his life; he has very low alcohol tolerance, he gets wasted very easily…and he will. He's also afraid of heights. There's no real basis to this except being high up with the ground so very far away is just really frightening. Heights can cause him to run screaming like a little girl.

History

2993-3001: Benden Weyr

Vikenti was born in the turn 2993. He wasn’t really expected to even exist. His mother was a pretty little drudge who was under the impression that she was totally sterile; she’d been sick as a child, and the healers told her that she wouldn’t be able to have children. Of course, this made her pretty intriguing for some of the dragonriders who were looking for a bedmate that they didn’t have to force between the next morning. That and she was meek and pliant enough that she wouldn’t exactly complain about it, and they wouldn’t have to worry about any of the red tape that you had to deal with when sleeping with another rider.

Unfortunately for her, E’rei was the one who claimed her.

As a bronzerider, and a rather intimidating looking one at that, no one really disputed his claim, and the drudge, Vilari, had little choice in the matter. At first, it wasn’t all bad. He was a good looking man, maybe a bit older than she’d normally want…but he was rather kind to her at first. He all but moved her into his weyr, and even though she had to sleep with him whenever he wanted, she got out of doing a lot of work. Things were, while not ideal, nice.

Then she had to go and get pregnant.

No one really cared to look into the young drudge’s case enough to know that she could, in fact, get pregnant. It wasn’t easy, what with her illness, but it was entirely possible. And she was such a slight woman, that when the baby started to grow, no one really noticed. Believing that she was sterile, she didn’t even think that she could possibly be pregnant. So, sure, she got a little bigger, and was sick a lot in the mornings, but no one screamed pregnant at her. Imagine her shock then, when she went into labor and out came Vikenti.

This is about the time things went downhill for her, and to her credit, she never once blamed the child.

E’rei was pissed that Vilari hadn’t told him about her pregnancy, never mind the fact that she hadn’t even known herself. Not that her bronzerider cared. The fact that she couldn’t have children was the main reason he’d chosen her, and then she goes and pops out a kid. Needless to say, he felt pretty stupid. But she was still better to sleep with than most of the other drudges, so he decided to keep her and make her go between from now on. He had to punish her though, and he piled work on her, and started to abuse her in all the ways one can be abusive.

Their nice little arrangement turned into a nightmare in pretty short order. Vilari didn’t leave. There was probably a form of Stockholm syndrome going on there or something where she thought he loved her. He had been so kind to her for so long, that his beatings, both verbally and physically didn’t mean that he didn’t love her. And she had Vikenti, and she was going to be damned if her child didn’t grow up knowing his father, which was probably the worst mistake she ever made.

Because in this child, E’rei saw an opportunity. Sure, he hated it for existing, but it was a boy, and if he could mold the child, he could end up having even more sway in the weyr politics than he already had. He could just imagine what it would be like to have a young bronzerider wrapped around his little finger. So, he tried, and in the beginning, mirroring the relationship between mother and father, things were nice. Vikenti was too young to realize what was going on between E’rei and Vilari, and his father doted on him, spoiling him to attempt to earn his trust, and it worked for a while. Vikenti was the perfect son. As a child, he was perfectly loving and caring and inerrably kind, to everyone. He had a stubborn streak, but he wasn’t a bad boy and he worshipped his parents. E’rei couldn’t have asked for a better son. Until it became clear that the boy cared nothing for dragons, at all. In fact, it seemed he was quite frightened of them, from an early age. It didn’t matter how many times he was around his father’s dragon, or how kind to the boy the great bronze was, he would cry at the mere sight of the beast. E’rei’s patience with the boy was rapidly devolving into frustration when he couldn’t erase the child’s fear of dragons. He even tried taking the boy up on the back of his dragon one day. That was pretty much an awful idea, because the child freaked out. He was inconsolable and the rider ended up not being able to control him. Vikenti fell off the back of the dragon into the lake before. Fortunately, they weren’t all that high…unfortunately, he couldn’t swim. He was still freaking out and he almost died, but his father saved him before he did. Which was good. What wasn’t so good is that his frustrated father blamed him from then on out…and after this, the child developed a crippling fear of heights that would plague him through adulthood.

This was about when Vikenti’s life turned into hell.

Despite the rather spectacular failures of his attempts, E’rei was still determined to turn the boy into the perfect candidate, and, in time, the perfect rider that he could manipulate. When it was overly clear that he wasn’t going to be able to use nice tactics to get the boy to do what he wanted, he started getting physical. It wasn’t too bad, at first, but Vikenti’s stubborn streak was showing through, and all the beatings in the world wouldn’t make him change his mind about wanting to have anything to do with dragons. That’s when the beatings got progressively worse, and E’rei started to leave scars. He also began to abuse the boy verbally, trying to rip him down, bit by bit. It didn’t matter how hard he beat him, or how many disgusting things he said to the boy. He didn’t want to become a dragonrider.

He wanted to help people.

The beatings did have an effect, however. They were slowly morphing the patient, loving little boy into a bitter, cynical caricature of what he used to be. He started curling in on himself, trying to save himself from even more beatings. Any lesser child would have died long ago, but Vikenti was a survivor. He was strong of mind and spirit and unerringly stubborn. When he was six, he actually started fighting his father back, and he was realizing that he had to protect his mother from being beaten too. Of course, a six year old boy against a full grown bronzerider isn’t even a fair fight, and standing up against the man caused the beatings to get even worse. To the point where the man was not using objects to get the desired results; hurting the boy. Because, the beatings were less about making him become a rider and more about revenge. This new suge of vicious beatings got the child sent to the infirmary, with deep gashes from blades, burns and broken bones, not to mention the innumerable bruises that he always had all over. He always lied to the healers; told them that he’d fallen, or whatever bullshit that wouldn’t get him taken away from his parents, because he needed to be there to protect his mother.

For two years he endured this seemingly endless routine. He would try to fight his father back, or protect his mother. E’rei would beat him to within an inch of his life, send him to the infirmary to get fixed and when he was healed up, he’d be send back. Rinse and repeat.

These frequent and painful trips to the infirmary did have an impact on the child. Though he wouldn’t show his appreciation, he realized that the infirmary was the only place where he’d ever been treated with an ounce of kindness. Most of them had soft hands and they fixed him quickly and expertly. He was a patient enough times to see how people near death could be fixed so easily, and how easy it was for healers to soothe injured and frightened children. He wouldn’t have said then that he knew it was his calling, but he knew that it was certainly something to aspire to. Though he didn’t think about it too much. He wouldn’t dare leave his mother to his father’s hands.

Unfortunately, when he was eight, he wouldn’t have a choice. He was finally old enough to take up a craft, and his father was finally fed up enough with his disinterest in dragons to send him away. He realized that, at least in this particular case, the boy’s stubbornness wouldn’t allow him to be broken. The child was useless to him now, and beating him for the rest of his childhood wouldn’t do him any good. So, he sent the child away, kicking and screaming to Fort Hold. The child had to be knocked out to take the dragon to the hold, so frightened was he of leaving his mother and the dragon itself.

3001-3013: Fort Hold; Healer Hall; Jr. Journeyman

He was pretty much just dumped in Fort. When he arrived, he was completely bewildered and lost and just wary. He knew not everyone was as bad as his father, because despite his problems…and they were very obvious…he was a very intelligent child. He couldn’t help himself from being wary. He was apprenticed into Healer Hall surprisingly quickly, as he showed an incredible aptitude for healing. He didn’t indulge in the social interactions his peers did, so all of his concentration was able to go into his studies. After being beaten, cut, burnt, spit on, cursed and just generally belittled for the first eight years of his life, he was just far too broken to interact with others in a halfway healthy manner. He didn’t even want to. He associated people with only bad things, and this showed in his demeanor. He was an unpleasant boy. He was grumpy, gruff, short. He growled and barked and griped at anyone with the smart idea to talk to him, and he perfected the art of the glare early on. If someone touched him who wasn’t one of his patients? He would freak out, often resorting to physical violence to get out of that situation. For so long, violence was the only recourse he knew, and it seemed like an ideal way to get him out of sticky situations. When people weren’t bothering him, he didn’t go out seeking interactions. He was deadly quiet, keeping to himself most of the time.

In short, he’d learned that keeping quiet, and not interacting with anyone meant that you’d never say or do the wrong thing and people might just let you get away without breaking your arm or leg or opening up your back with a knife. It wasn’t a perfect assumption, hell, it wasn’t even right, but it was the only thing he knew.

It didn’t matter if he was flailing mentally. Professionally, he was thriving…excelling even. Vikenti realized that his studies were the perfect excuse not to have to deal with other people, and he submerged himself in his work; it was almost like a barrier between the young healer and the outside work. Every single ounce of his focus went into his healing, and he started gaining speed and ranks at an alarming rate. In two years, he became a senior apprentice. This promotion didn’t cause him to slack though. If anything, it was encouragement to try harder. He had even been known to work himself to the point to exhaustion, but it paid off three years later when he finally walked the tables as a junior journeyman. He was only thirteen.

Working constantly kept him from thinking about what got him sent to Fort Hold in the first place, not only had he been known to work until he dropped, but he would forget to sleep and eat. Too much time to think just made him live in the past and worry about his mother, so he didn’t. Even when he had free time he was working on his skills, or trying to figure out new ways of treating others. He was always a very hands on kid, and it showed.

Six years after walking the tables, he was still a junior journeyman. He knew that graduating meant that he’d have to leave the hall, and he wasn’t ready to face the outside world, so he paced his training, spread it out as long as possible. One thing he still wasn’t interested in was friends. Eleven years in the hall, and he hadn’t made one friend. Not that others didn’t try to befriend them…they did. He was just emphatically not interested, and made his desires known loud and clear. After the first five years, he was rarely bothered to make friends or hang out with people. All he needed…or thought he needed was his healing. It was truly an unhealthy existence, but it was all he knew, and the only thing that didn’t make him hurt.

3013-3017: Mattie

He was still working on graduating around this time, unfortunately, his perfectly laid plans to not get to know anyone…ever, were waylaid by a very stubborn young Harper boy.

Of course the first meeting hadn’t been his fault at all, shut up. He was minding his own business, wielding a scalpel and trying to threaten a particularly disagreeable patient into taking treatment when a messenger from harper hall surprised him. Of course, Vikenti doesn’t do surprised well and somehow, the scalpel managed to lodge itself into the stupid harper’s shoulder. And he was very stupid. You had to be a pretty dumb shit to get a scalpel embedded in your shoulder. For all of a second, Vikenti stared at the scalpel in morbid fascination before he started freaking out. Dismissing his earlier patient, he half carried, half dragged the harper boy over so he could examine him. The entire time, Vikenti was regaling him on how completely idiotic he was, and barking, griping and bitching in an endless stream of expletives that lasted the entire treatment. He didn’t feel sorry at all. The kid was an idiot. It didn’t matter that Vikenti was an expert at deflecting anything that might have been his fault, the kid just had this grin on his face that would not go away, no matter how nasty the healer’s words were. It kinda made him want to punch him.

It was the start of a truly dysfunctional friendship, and one that completely and utterly took the healer by surprise. It really shouldn’t have worked. The two boys were five turns apart, and polar opposites from one another. Matteo was every single thing that Vikenti hated in a person, but they became closer than the healer had ever been to anyone in his life. Maybe Vikenti saw a kindred spirit in the boy, another broken soul? Perhaps he saw a challenge, someone who needed fixing in more ways than one…and fixing he could do. Whatever it was, Matteo stuck around. He would return to harper hall, but he’d always come back, sometimes hurt, sometimes not. He was insufferably cheery and infuriatingly clingy, and Vikenti just couldn’t shake him off, no matter how hard he tried. Dislike turned into grudging tolerance turned into like…even though Vikenti would never have actually told Matteo that he liked him…it was kinda implied when he let the other boy cling to him like a leech. Vikenti even got to the point where he would touch Matteo…albeit most of the time to smack him or something, but there was never any real vitriol in those actions.

He never said anything, but Vikenti didn’t understand why Matteo would even want to hang around him. He’d finally gotten to the point where he didn’t care anymore to have the other man clinging to him all day, but Matteo never explained why. Not that Vikenti asked, he was almost afraid of the answer. People talked, of course. The grumpy healer boy who’d gone twelve years without so much as glancing to another person for companionship was suddenly tolerating the clingy presence of another boy. He didn’t care about the talking. They just didn’t understand that Vikenti’ constant abuse of the boy and bitching was the way he showed his affection. Hell. Vikenti didn’t even realize this. All he knew was that he hated this boy less than anyone else he had ever met before, and that was good enough reason for him. He knew that Matteo had some difficulties in his own hall, but Vikenti never brought it up. He didn’t seem keen on talking about it, and the healer, for all his bitching, didn’t ask. It really was none of his business. He just tried to help the other boy in subtle ways, like making it so that Matteo could spend as much time in the healer hall; and his room as he wanted. Most times he would only come over to do his homework or have lunch with the healer, and sometimes he would seek him out for the night…but as a healer, Vikenti knew that every little bit helped, and from then on out, Matteo was a permanent fixture in the young healer’s life.

It seemed the boys were slowly helping each other to heal. Having someone who actually cared about him ensured that he didn’t work himself to death, and Vikenti finally had someone he cared about more than himself and his own skeletons. This made for some somewhat reckless moves on the healer’s part, like the time he went to go capture a puppy for the harper boy. He ended up nearly being mauled by the mother, but a Fort sweeprider found him and brought him back to the hold. Once there, he had to endure the endless strings of Matteo telling him how stupid he was. But he didn’t regret it, not even for the massive scar on his left thigh where the cat had ripped out some muscle. Eventually, even that healed over, though occasionally he will limp; mostly when he’s tired, upset, drunk, or when it’s raining.

It wasn’t long after this incident that he received word from Benden. His mother was deathly ill and needed lifesaving surgery. Vikenti had always adored his mother, but the thought of returning to the weyr petrified him. He had worked so hard to try and forget everything that had happened to him when he was a child, going back you just exacerbate all those feelings. It was his mother though, and he was a healer. He wouldn’t trust anyone but him to work on her, because over the years he had developed a distrust of other healers. So, he arranged it with the hall so he could go and do her surgery. Returning to the weyr was an eye opener for the boy. He realized how lucky he had been to get out of there alive. He didn’t understand what had kept him from dying at the hands of his father, but he was grateful that he had. Unsurprisingly, his father hadn’t changed much in the twelve years he’d been gone. He was older, but just as much of a bastard as he remembered…and just as eager to see Vikenti torn down. And hell did he try. He cursed the boy out, spit at him, berated him until there was no air left in his lungs. He did everything he could think of to rip the boy apart short of actually hurting him and damaging things between the weyr and the healer hall.

It wasn’t too difficult for Vikenti to ignore his father. He wasn’t a child anymore, and he knew that he was there for his mother. She needed him, and he would not rise to his father’s bait. Still. He would have been lying to himself if he said that the trip back home didn’t bring back all the feelings of complete and utter inadequacy that he had felt before…and before he’d met Matteo. He couldn’t let himself be beat down though. He was a healer and it was his duty as a healer and a son to take care of his mother. Hatred for his father and all. Unfortunately for the boy, even the most skilled hand on pern wasn’t skilled enough to save his mother, and she died mid-surgery. Vikenti almost broke down. Her death was just one more blow to an already weakened soul. He blamed his father for her death, initially. He hadn’t taken good enough care of her; had beaten her too much; worked her too hard. Everyone else though, including himself in rather short order blamed Vikenti for her death. Almost immediately after her death, he returned to Fort Hold.

The only thing that kept him from shattering in that moment was his friendship with Matteo.

If anything, when he returned, he grew closer to the other boy, leaning on him when the guilt of killing his own mother grew too much to bear and he grew exhausted from beating himself up about it. He was reliving his past; everything that his father had said about him coming true. He was a useless boy. He couldn’t even save his own mother. He needed the reassurance from the other boy that he actually mattered, even if he didn’t think he did. He’d killed his mother, and he didn’t think he’d get over that. To the point where he was almost working himself to death, determined for the first time in seven years to graduate and escape his past. Matteo was the only reason he didn’t work himself to death and to remind him to eat and sleep. That stupid harper was a literal lifesaver for the grumpy, broken boy.

It was also in this year that he finally managed to become a senior journeyman. Despite finally obtaining what he’d worked so long for, he realized that he had little desire to leave Healer Hall. Matteo couldn’t go, and Vikenti didn’t think he’d be ever to get along with anyone else in the same way, so he arranged things with his Master so that he could stay and teach apprentices…at least until his friend graduated. The Master was quick to comply. Vikenti was one of the best healers they’d ever trained, and they were eager to feed his relationships with other people after having gone so long with such a solitary, unhealthy life…even if that was just one person and the relationship was developing into something oddly codependent. So Vikenti was allowed to stay and teach, even if he hated the kids he was teaching and was probably the worse teacher ever.

Five years later, Vikenti was still teaching…surprisingly, and Matteo finally walked the tables. The boy burst in on one of Vikenti’s teaching sessions to show him the reassignment. Healer Hall. Vikenti was stunned when the harper threw his arms around him and buried his head into his shoulder…but in a good way. He was staying, and he was free from the life that had broken him so. Well, not completely free, but close enough.

3018-3020: Healer Hall; Lore

With Matteo at the hall on a permanent basis, Vikenti found himself feeling a little surer about himself. He started to take care of himself, and not just because Matteo was everywhere he turned and would make sure he did…but because he actually wanted to, for the first time in his life. They didn’t room together, but they might as well have, for how often Matteo was in his room. Even his stuff found permanent spots in his room.

The year after, the boys met someone else. A girl named Elorein. She was too much younger than Vikenti for him to really bother to get to know, but somehow, the cheery girl actually liked him. She forced her way under his skin and he realized that he was developing a brother/sister relationship with her. He soon came to see her as the little sister that he never had, and he treated her in a way that he’d never treated anyone besides Matteo…who was just the exception to everything in his life.

After this, the dragonrider war was ending, and Vikenti was busier than he ever thought he would be in his life. The dying and injured came to the hold by the wagonloads and from dragonback. He had to treat everything from dragon slashes, cuts, even firestone burns. His eagerness to keep the injured from dying put him back to where he had been before, working constantly and not eating. It was his goddamn duty to make sure that these people didn’t die. Unfortunately though, even he couldn’t save everyone, and he was numbed into compliancy. He’d never lost so many people in so short a time, and though he knew, somewhere deep down, that it hadn’t been his fault that they’d died, he carried that with him, in the same way that he still carried his mother’s death with him.

Because for how much he carried on and bitched, he was an extraordinarily sensitive man when it came to his patients.

After the war ended, and he was no longer trying to save so many people, Matteo showed him in spectacular and dramatic fashion that he’d been reassigned to Benden Hold. Of course Vikenti bitched endlessly at him, but he soon worked it out with his Master to give him a similar assignment. Elorein decided to stay back at Fort Hold for a while longer. With their reassignments, the pair was off to Benden.

3020-Present: Benden Hold

They found themselves unceremoniously in Benden Hold. Things were hectic, even if they arrived before the weyr people and dragonriders did. Vikenti found himself with little time to acclimate however, and was put to work nearly right away, treating people who hadn’t adjusted well to the move. Vikenti didn’t have much time right off the bat to do much besides work, eat and sleep. It wasn’t even enough to drag him away from his work anymore.

But hey, he was adjusting, and with Matteo and Elorein, who showed up in the hold two years later, he had a reason to care.

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