BECKETT “BECK” MURPHY
“DON’T YOU GET IT? IT’S ALL A JOKE, EVERYTHING.
GO ON, LAUGH. WE’RE THE PUNCHLINE.”
criminal occupation: the muscle & the driver
The grain of sand that slips into a clam irritates and swells until it is borne again as a gem. But nature has always been kinder to its heartless earthen children than those with limbs and blood and capable of feeling the bared teeth of living – sand enters a mollusk and leaves it as a pearl, but make a man swallow dust and dirt and grit, and he wretches up nothing but black bile. The world was not made to be kind to humans, and shouldn’t be trusted. That much Beckett was taught, and still believes.
It has always been a bitter amusement to Beck that sand is used as a way to measure time when trapped between two glass bulbs – having grown up caught on all sides between fine red dust, he knows how miles of sand can stretch and malform time into something meaningless. In the Australian Outback, hours can seem to be days, and a quick end would be a lucky one: anyone alone in the desert without proper training and supplies will have no comfort but the shadow of death. Which is exactly why Beckett’s parents relocated to the harsh interior region of Australia before their son’s birth. Though it’s said that opposites attract, the Murphy couple was bound together by a mutual paranoia that would breed into an obsession under the influence and encouragement of the other. Prior to meeting, both had shared an intense interest and belief in doomsday and the inevitable end of the world, but anyone who still remembers Sylvia and Adam Murphy will swear they incited a kind of madness in the other that hadn’t been there before. It was a relatively slow madness, only taking over completely years after their marriage vows were exchanged, but it came and it took nonetheless. By the time Beckett was born, they had already spent two years at the isolated survivalist cult hidden deep within Australia’s notoriously fatal outback.
He was an only child, but almost everyone in the compound was. It was a matter of practicality and limited resources, keeping mouths to feed to a minimum; those who did have siblings seemed to have an abundance of them, their parents following the reverse philosophy that more kin would mean more hands and a greater chance of survival. It was a grim place of concrete and starkness, devoid of luxury and occupied by either half-crazed, eccentric members or stoic and hostile persons that had travelled from across the globe to segregate themselves from society. In preparation for the end of the world, Australia’s inhospitable environment was an excellent practice ground. This was not just a hidden enclave with a large supply of water and canned goods meant to survive passively; for Beck and everyone else that came to live and stay in the compound, living was an act of aggression. Though there was a makeshift school run by a single ex-teacher, the content was largely oriented on survival in extreme situations – everything from how to triumph in physical encounters to weaponry knowledge and how to live off the land. All things that Beckett learned not through intention but repetition and boredom; with little else to do locked into an inhospitable nowhere, the only entertainment to be found (or tolerated by the elders) was training. And so he learned, the innocent lines of his fingers staining grey as he handled guns and weapons, hearing various predictions of doomsday recited reverently in the background, like hymns, while preparation was gospel. No one pretended to know how the world would end, so they made themselves ready for anything. Braided into Beck was an inherent distrust of anyone not within their grounds: when the End came, it would drive those lost in society out to their fortress, maddened by fright and grief. It would be up to him, along with everyone else, to bar them from taking provisions or raiding their veritable fortress. In this place, death was god.
And nowhere else was there a deity so easily accessible: suicide was a normality among their ranks, met with little shock and almost no grief. Imbued with nihilist ideologies and assured of the oncoming end, many opted to simply take their own life rather than wait for an inevitability. Watching his father help the other men drag off a fresh corpse - or an entire family of newly deceased, all deciding to go together - became a normality for Beck, who watched on with blinking, uninterested eyes. Where most others seemed to be sun-baked with a kind of erratic, bizarre energy, all of Beck’s heat manifested differently. He had anger, not fear. Though fights amongst young boys were not uncommon, or even discouraged, on the complex - they had little else to do but snarl and bare their fists - Beckett’s brawls never ended. On the extremely rare occasion someone from the compound had a reason to go into town, he went with them, and often he left with new bruises or rings of blood under his nails from the scuffles he had entered there. These trips were the only thing he could look forward to, though to see him wandering among the city wouldn’t be to know it. He spoke to no one and was never open enough to wear an identifiable expression, but he saw everything. Born in a specific kind of social isolation, the excursions nearly overloaded his senses when he was a child, unused to such busy sights. Still, he could not bear to shut his eyes. It did not take long into the forays for someone to spot Beck and his company’s ragged appearance, stoic countenance and dirty clothes. And so when the city boys taunted, Beckett didn’t bother in pausing before answering them with his fists.
As he aged, his discontentedness only evolved. He had been braided with all the same ideas of those around him, and they stuck and irritated his bones like a deep-set burr. Life within the cult was repetitive and small at the best of times, stifling and staunch at the worst. He fought with his parents and leaders consistently, defying conventions and orders set before him and receiving harsh corporal punishment meant to beat him back into line. Free of the fogged eyes and views that had swallowed up his parents and the rest of the company zealots, Beckett saw the world for what it was: he saw a sun that rose every morning, and a desert that never wavered in its colour or intimidation. He saw a breathing world with no intention of dying, and in that, Beckett and the earth had a commonality: he had no intention of waiting to die. He wanted to live.
He left at age twenty, telling no one of his departure and leaving no note – not out of a sense of drama or a belief that anyone would come after him, but because it would have only been a waste of time. There had been no room for sentimentality or remembering yesterday in a place concentrated solely on what the next day might bring. Nor, would it turn out, had the compound had any sense of practicality – in isolation from regular society, Beckett had not received any documents or papers to signify his birth or prove who he was. To the Australian government and the rest of the world, he was nothing but a boy filled with rage and fine sand – which was more accurate a description than any birth certificate could have ever been. Though he had made it with relative ease to the first town outside of his former home, and then to the next few by bus or hitchhiking, he could not get any farther without legal documentation. But it only took the right kind of wrong person to get around that, and Beckett hadn’t been raised to fight for survival only to crumple at a comparatively laughable legal issue; where his academic skills may have been lacking, his mind was quicker and more used to obstacles than anyone that raised a hand to stop him. It was a slow chain, going down a list of bruisers and lackeys before finding anyone worthwhile, but eventually, in a bar filled with thick Australian heat and debatable intentions, Beckett found someone who could help.
And all they wanted was a little death.
He was a low-budget kind of mercenary at first, more a gruntman than anything else, employed for the dirty jobs everybody else was too frightened to do, but the wings of the criminals employing Beckett turned his strides into a size that could traverse countries, and then continents. The fact that Beckett Murphy, technically speaking, existed only in body and the rumors he would later create made him the perfect felon-for-hire – there were no fingerprints or documentation of his existence on file that might incriminate him, even if he was caught. Moreso, his unusual upbringing made Back invaluable, a fact he was far too savvy about – a weapons and survival expert with a decidedly nihilist outlook and even more definitive lack of morals, Beckett was a tiger among wolves: he had no need for a pack, and he could not be mistaken for a simple, domesticated breed. Indiscriminatory in his work and violence, any guilt he may have ever felt was left behind on the compound, along with his sentimentality. As the years passed, he travelled between various hands, following the cash flow and whoever promised him the biggest payday or the greatest ride.
While money was motivation, it was adrenaline that ruled Beckett. Once he had abandoned his former life, Beck threw himself head-first and hoping to bruise into his new one: the only permanent proof of his existence that he left in his wake were the cracked bones of those that had been unfortunate enough to cross his peripheral vision at the wrong moment. Bar fights and women, alcohol and fast cars – everything crashed and burned under him, hearts and vehicles alike, but he craved that fire. He was mad to live in a way Kerouac had never meant, taking all the experiences he could and giving nothing back.
The heist came to him at random, another contract for another paycheque – yet it gripped him so tightly it left claw marks on his body when he had to be released and bought for the next job. His work over the past decade had largely been assassinations and other work of more than questionable legality, but it had taken Beckett ten years to participate in his first high-stakes theft, and then all at once he was hooked. The adrenaline of helping to steal a priceless object was one thing, but the satisfaction of success dragged on in a way he had never before felt when he got to watch the world marvel at an incredible loss. After a brief return to general mercenary contracts, Beck started to solely accept the jobs pertaining to grand theft, until eventually he came under the employ of the Rozanov clan, his favoured choice amongst the community he came to know as the Heist Society. Though he had never so much as contemplated working or living at one place or under one name (wildfires are not known for confinement), the hedonistic side to the Rozanov’s empire – with a matchingly attractive cash bonus – paired with the promise of constant travel and varying jobs had him signing over his allegiance with a semi-permanence that’s entirely new to Beckett, though this should never be mistaken as domestication. This isn’t a bull in a china shop. The world of the Heist Society is made of glass, and this boy is a h u r r i c a n e.
✕. He doesn’t participate in any kind of drug use, not even a seemingly harmless puff of a joint. While Beckett has absolutely no restrictions to when, where, or how much alcohol he consumes, he relies too entirely on his body and its performance (and appreciates its efficiency, it should be said) to jeopardize it by taking any kind of drug. He’s surprisingly staunch on this subject, and can’t be teased or goaded into relenting - unlike other areas of his life, where a dare is all it takes.
✕. Though Beckett is literate, reading and writing was a skill he quietly practiced himself after leaving the survivalist compound, where education was severely lacking. It wasn’t for any reason other than to avoid mocking, and he has no particular nostalgia for what he taught himself, nor has he ever told anyone this fact. He rarely has any need for writing aside from the occasional text or signature of his name, and doesn’t care enough to read more than the occasional newspaper. However, this late self-education should not be mistaken for a simplicity of mind – Beck is extremely quick-minded, and an invaluable member of the Rozanov team as well as an anomaly amid the Society. An initiation back on the compound saw Beck and every other child passing into adulthood living in the outback on their own for two months, and that’s only the beginning of his skillset.
✕. Notoriously, Beckett has no line to what he won’t make a joke out of. With no belief in god, king, or country, he knows there’s no one in white robes waiting to pass judgement on what he does in this life. Hence, he lives however he wants to and laughs at anyone who tries to restrain themselves in the effort to be “good.” Though no one would ever take him seriously, he might understand something here in a way that everyone else is simply too afraid to admit.
✕. He has numerous tattoos, but whenever anyone counts, they always find one less than he says he has. What the last one is, no one knows, though the younger Rozanovs and the Magpies like to make a game of guessing.
THIS CHARACTER HAS A FACECLAIM FLEXIBLE TO CHARLIE HUNNAM
& IS OPEN FOR AUDITION
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