Marc Spector / Steven Grant / Jake Lockley / Moon Knight / Mister Knight
AFFILIATIONS: Nomads, technically. AGE: 41 SPECIES: Human
WANTED ARCS: Knock knock, someone let him into Mousehole? He just moved here. Whether in support or against him, Marc is setting up shop helping people get out of the country who may not be welcomed because of former connections to militia and the Sokovian civil war by making fake documents. He technically has a legitimate job working with and identifying artifacts of magical origins, just only when you’re talking to the right parts of Marc. Moon Knight has a reputation for eccentricity, sometimes earned, but not many people actually believe him about the god Khonshu giving him his powers. Maybe you do? BIO:
Standard superhero childhood, no reason to linger on it. Lower middle class parents in Chicago, a pushover dad, a mother with undiagnosed mental illness, a brother he failed to keep from drowning, and just over a decade of abuse. A year and a half in a mental hospital to get his own official diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder, went down from over a dozen or so alters into four or five, and got a clean bill of health if he kept going to therapy. Then, running off to join the Marines as soon as he could pack a bag and absolutely not getting that therapy.
Marc Spector was a good Marine. He’d gotten into more than his fair share of fist fights in high school for being the weird kid and it turned into special forces training pretty damn quickly. He thrived under the order and structure. It was all turning around, the years of fear and abuse, the voices in his own head the doctors tried to get him to ‘merge’ with. It all went quiet in fights. Until it didn’t. His second tour. Sergeant Spector went off the reservation and Marc was left with a full month where he had next to no memories of what happened, no communication with the alter who had been fronting, he couldn’t even tell who it had been, and he woke up in a hotel room with a message that he was being served a dishonorable discharge. So he ended his twenties about how he started them. Broke, jobless, unemployable, with people living in his head who apparently wanted to ruin his life. Somewhere in the last ten years, Steven Grant had apparently been working on his bachelor of anthropology and completed it. He had graduation photos on his phone and a certificate and everything. Maybe Marc had been missing more time than he thought the last decade.
Somehow, Jake Lockley got a job with the CIA. How in the hell Jake had the connections to get a fake set of documents so good, he couldn’t be traced back to his dishonorable discharge as Marc Spector, he didn’t know. But it gave Marc a job again. So maybe his thirties were looking up. Jake clearly didn’t actually want the job, he was never much of a communicator, but he showed up when contacts got rough and Marc would wake up to his body filling out a report and have to rewrite everything so the handwriting matched properly. Five years in, it went sideways again. He had never remembered what triggered him so badly he went out for a month, but whatever it was happened again, because he woke up six months later in England. Someone had been using the body to make contact with the CIA because he apparently quit very suddenly according to a string of emails, and one of his coworkers begrudgingly put him in contact with someone called “Frenchie” who could help him out.
Jean-Paul DuChamp, or Frenchie, was his point of contact. Whoever had been playing at Marc had done a good enough job that Frenchie didn’t seem to notice any difference in his behavior, or at least he didn’t say anything about it. A few short muscle for hire jobs, a few underground fights, that was how he had been affording the flat in London. Apparently Steven had a part time job helping advocate for artifact repatriation to their native countries and outlining what different things needed for safe transit and display. Part time because of his sleep disorder. It was the first time Marc realized Steven didn’t know about the system. Steven didn’t know, and Marc could wake up relaxed on days after Steven took over for a long period of time. Usually with a book in his lap and a half finished cup of cold tea. Marc was never the kind of man who could sit down with a book and a cup of tea. He preferred to be in motion.
The first person who ever just… noticed that Marc was not always only Marc was an archeologist and it was by mistake. He’d come to the museum when Steven was working and they’d had a discussion about a few jars from a tomb and how it was a shame they’d been excavated so poorly and lost the artwork in sections. Then Marc was hired as a part of his protection detail on a trip to Egypt. The same night they talked about it, about how Marc was sick, about how maybe he wasn’t sick at all, he was just different, about how maybe he needed to communicate more with himself, he remembered why he had gone dark with the CIA and gone MIA with the Marines. Bushman killed everyone.
A switch wasn’t something that happened fast, he usually had at least a minute of dissociation, a humming in his ears, disconnecting with the body, before someone else took over. As he dragged his body to the temple seeking something, asylum, warmth, a place to sit up while he died, he wished he could feel any of the symptoms coming on so he didn’t have to be the one who knew what dying was like. Selfishly, he wanted it to be Jake. Instead the voice he heard in his mind as his fingers started going too cold to feel was a stranger’s. Khonshu, God of the Moon, Protector of the Travelers of the Night, and Deliverer of Vengeance.
Later, when enrobed in the Vestments of Khonshu, Marc would wonder if he only made the deal because he was afraid to die, or if he really believed he could get Bushman. He thought maybe, since the power of the god could heal his wounds, literally revive him from death, and enhanced his body with super strength and speed, it might have healed his mind. Instead he started seeing his alters in mirrors. That was new. Khonshu said it was because he was weak and fractured in that way already, he needed to ignore it and work harder. Marc Spector was put on international watch lists for the slaughter of the dig crew. It wasn’t like he had a life to go back to anyway. So he did Khonshu’s dirty work in the mortal world.
The god rarely lived up to his name as protector, Marc mostly stole back Egyptian magic and artifacts from black markets, intervened in squabbles between gods, and killed when Khonshu demanded to be fed the blood of an evil heart. Marc used the vestments for his own purposes. Hunting down human traffickers, protecting the streets of New York quietly, destroying drug and weapons operations. He had a few known run-ins with Punisher and Spiderman. Steven worked three days a week in a gift shop, frustrated he didn’t understand why he couldn’t manage his sleep disorder well enough to work in the museum proper, and Marc went out at night, healed by the vestments of the fact that they didn’t sleep. Jake mostly went away. Until fucking Raul Bushman showed up and blew up his plans.
By the time Marc had control again, he had returned to London. Steven loved London. They’d managed to keep making payments on the shitty one bedroom so Steven’s books could be there. He never really questioned why they were in New York for any time at all. Only this time when he woke up, Sokovia had been blown to hell. Sokovia had been blown to hell and apparently fucking HYDRA were taking to the streets trying to scramble to collect artifacts and people all over Europe. And to top it all off, something about seeing dead kids on TV, kids who reminded him of his brother, triggered Steven out in the middle of a job as Moon Knight and he had to finally confront the fact that it was not a sleep disorder. He was one of three, usually three. They rarely split anymore after the mental hospital unless something happened, something like this. Steven, vegan Steven who hated fighting, accidentally created Mister Knight to try and protect himself from the memories of violence coming up as he was forced to integrate in the middle of some of the most hellish months between the fall of Sokovia and the UN’s fight to put all vigilantes on watchlist and own them, and the criminal organizations taking advantage of the open space leading them to spend more time fighting.
He didn’t even have a therapist, or Frenchie, to help get Steven to calm down and trust them and put himself back together with Mister Knight. And Mister Knight apparently had beef with Jake and Marc, which didn’t make being in his head any easier. Marc wasn’t really proud that when his mental health went haywire, he was the alter most likely to try and just… vanish. But he was. He went to sleep and didn’t want to wake up, until suddenly he did.
Apparently it wasn’t because Steven was tired, or because Jake had information, that Marc was finally drawn out of his own mind. It was Khonshu forcing him out and telling him to go to Sokovia. He was pissed. Apparently a human was meddling with the kind of magical power only gods were meant to have access to. Apparently he’d been aware of a growing force there for some time, but decided to wait. Gods were interested in politics, apparently. He knew of a gathering there opposing the iSA he didn’t want interfered with, since he’d rather the ISA be taken down. He didn’t like humans interfering in his divine work. Marc didn’t really care why Khonshu wanted to go. He was going because people there were hurt. Because he knew the feeling of being a scared kid in an unstable situation. Because part of his job was to protect, even if Khonshu forgot that.