denver born n’ raised in a wealthy tycoon fam with too little to do and too much to gossip about, alexei was the youngest born and essentially black sheep of the otherwise sugar cut picture. while his eldest siblings obsessed over designer brands and the scoop on the latest celebrity, he could often be found working with his hands or mooring over noir films, almost imagining himself within the grey scale confines. his parents wrote off his ‘unusual’ (aka humble as shit) behavior as an oddity of a phase, crafting jokes over it with higher ups to mask their shame. though it never bothered him to never truly fit in the pristine fold.
the only thing within million dollar estates that could dazzle him were the structural designs and supernal gardens, his love of building and mapping out projects encompassing his youth and brimming the voids his family didn’t urge to fill. by the time he was ten he was already working on a gazebo on his parents grounds, their participation being a gift of tools simply to get him to stop raving on and on about it. although mocking and taciturn, internally they were impressed with his passions and abilities.
fixations progressed into infatuations with the opposite sex well into his teens, a genuine want to make somebody (if not his progenitors) happy winding alexei into a keen and naive target. the love of his life came in the form of an impoverished but wily girl named carson at age sixteen, where they proceeded down a supposively committed route. he was intent on spoiling her in any fashion possible, bathing her in sincere promises that as soon as they were of age he’d marry and support her. despite her lesser upbringing his parents adored her for the way she strove to be of importance and excellence, and all seemed to be well in-between doting on her, taking god awful golf lessons and maintaining a 4.0.
the sole time alexei believes his father ever had a smidge of love for him was when he came to be eighteen, and confided that he wanted to construct a quaint bed and breakfast in honor of carson. that he wanted to live his days out with her there amongst meager profit (because all they needed was each other, right??) and the display of business savvy aligned to his own was what drove his father to agreeance. with his father’s loan he began building the nightingale bed & breakfast with his bare hands, a sweetly modernized design with notes of her all throughout the floor plan. it took him two years to complete the three story with a back garden included, and the running of the inn with him and carson at the helm began in their early twenties.
things were artificially blissful for awhile with his father applauding his success at the b&b, eventually proposing to carson and fantasizing about the three kids and mutt they’d cultivate. little did alexei know his optimistic, dreamy little realm was to shatter by the time he was twenty four. he walked in on carson sleeping with another man, and not just any man, his own fucking father. apparently they had been indulging in an illicit affair for the last four years, his father subtly doing it out of spite for his ‘too soft’ son and carson going along simply because she wanted the martine fortune. this absolutely and utterly ravaged alexei’s heart, and he made the harrowing choice to cut ties with both his family and his former flame. they could all go be miserly rich, cheating fucks with each other so long as he had time to heal with his own unaltered self.
he’s since dissolved into a false happiness and blind optimism as a means to cope with the bitterness that often peeks through the facade, still so bent on finding fulfillment within a another that it’s as if he hasn’t learned anything from the incident at all. still wholesomely humble and the type to yes ma’am you after every word, empathetic and diligently peaceful despite the resentment and foolishness that wrecks his thoughts. every cent he has goes back into the maintenance of the nightingale and he’s built up a friendly patronage to appear relatively stable...but really he’s awkwardly drowning 24/7 and rarely leaving the house, moping over his fractured heart and building stupid little bird houses because he can’t get a god damn grip on anything.
needs // forever friends to drag him out of the b&b!! people to beat him up bc man ur too soft!! chicks he falls in love with after five minutes of conversation and they they tell him to fuck off!! no really anything tbh i have no future plans for this bub