MATHIEU "MATTIE" FRENIER is 29 YEARS OLD, resides in SOUTHPORT and has lived in Lakeham for 2 MONTHS. He is MALE and works as a BARTENDER AT AFTERLIFE/EX CON-ARTIST. He is portrayed by DANE DEHAAN and is played by L.
Trigger Warnings: Sexual abuse, drugs, alcoholism.
Children generally rely heavily on their parents from birth, unless they aren’t given that opportunity. But humans adapt. They learn to rely on whoever is nearest to them. Mathieu’s mother lived in a dilapidated old warehouse in Southern France with a handful of junkies and her older son, Louis. Louis had never known a life outside of stealing what they needed to live, or cleaning up his mother’s bodily fluids when she’d gone on a bender. He lived in near-constant fear of being caught, and taken away from the only person he could love. He watched his mother do what she had to do in order to survive. He knew she didn’t love him nearly as much as she loved drugs, but she kept him anyway, and so he loved her with everything that he was.
Mattie came along when Louis was eight. Their mother died in childbirth, or immediately following, nobody was really sure. Louis carried a backpack of canned food, his late mother’s identification (she’d always kept it, he figured he should too), and his baby brother wrapped in a dirty blanket away from the warehouse, following the other vagrants as they left his mother’s body to rot. Mattie was tiny, frail, and sort of sickly…Louis loved the infant as he had loved his mother, wanting nothing more than to keep the tiny thing safe. For the first few years of Mattie’s life, Louis was everything to him. A boy under the age of fourteen, his caregiver, teacher, and hero. When they had no place to sleep, Mattie slept in his brother’s jacket against the boy’s chest. When there wasn’t enough food for both of them, Mattie ate while Louis went without. And they were moving, constantly moving. They learned together. How to slip through the cracks, how to avoid notice in public, how to stay clean enough that a shop owner or bleeding heart on the street wouldn’t stop to wonder whether the children had a home to go to or not. These were two children that didn’t exist in the world. Nobody knew them. There was no record of them. And that made it hard for Louis to provide. When he was twelve and Mattie was four, he found himself a mentor. An older man who owned a shop near the cathedral the boys were sleeping in. He said he could help, he could teach Louis how to get them a better life…and the man would only profit a little.
The shopowner helped Louis utilize Mattie’s young innocence to their advantage. Louis wanted to take his place, but Mattie was where the real money was. Louis had his fair share of motel rooms, but most of those few years he spent holding his brother, calming him, helping the little boy into the bath and letting him cry. It was going to be okay, things were going to get better, this was only for now and then they would move to somewhere beautiful where nobody would ever hurt Mattie again.
For four years, Mattie suffered as quietly as he could. And one night, it was too much. Louis was sixteen now, and angry enough to beat a man nearly to death because his little brother had been hurt pretty badly. The police came to find the young teenager at the hospital, holding the nine-year-old’s hand as a doctor stitched him up. Louis needed little prompting to tell the police everything. That night, the boys were separated. Mattie was placed with a family nearby for the time being, and Louis was put into a center for other lost teens. Louis was able to provide just enough information for authorities to identify their late mother, a woman who had gone missing seventeen years prior. The boys’ grandparents were contacted, and the elderly couple agreed to meet both of them.
It was odd for Mattie, young as he was, to be dragged to doctors and then into what he can only recall as a frighteningly clean room with sofas and a television, and a box of toys that he probably was supposed to play with but couldn’t bring himself to. Instead, he clung to his older brother, just content to be close to the other after being separated longer than they’d ever been separated in their lives. It wasn’t just their grandparents they were meeting, their mother’s sister joined them. The woman had flown in from Boston, Massachusetts, where she’d been living for almost ten years with her husband, an American military man she’d met when he’d been stationed in Europe. The grandparents were kind, but a little distant, seeing their daughter in the boys’ faces. Their aunt was warmer, more inviting, and Mattie liked her almost immediately.
When she offered to take the boys, Mattie didn’t have much choice. Being nine years old, officials were more than happy to send him on his way, get him out of the system. Louis was sixteen, though, and given the choice. Be on his own, or move to Boston to be in the care of his aunt. He chose being on his own, and Mattie was wide-eyed and staring out the window of a plane without even getting the chance to say good-bye to what had been his primary caregiver for so long.
For two years, Mattie wouldn’t be touched. A hand on his shoulder, fingertips against his hair, it sent him into a tantrum not fit for a boy his age. He’d kick, scream, shriek until he was alone, curled up in a ball on the ground. In school, his aunt was told he had an emotional/behavioral disorder, and given exercises to work on with him at home. Mattie struggled constantly, never having been to school before, never having lived in a house before, never having a healthy family dynamic before. But after a few years, he started to get the idea. Having to learn a new language as well as attend a real school for the first time in his life was extremely challenging, but his aunt and uncle paid for tutors and after school programs to help him catch up. Mattie would always be a little behind his peers, but the gap became less noticeable after time.
In middle school, he started falling in with the “wrong” crowd. He was ditching school, smoking cigarettes, drinking, experimenting with marijuana and prescription painkillers, that sort of thing. It escalated by the time he went to high school, doing a line of coke before class, shotgunning a beer before dinner with his aunt and uncle, that sort of thing. He became shameless, each moment looking forward to his next high, riding a xanax-cloud through life. He only managed to graduate from high school because his aunt and uncle pushed him to practically his breaking point, though he didn’t end up going to college. Mattie lived with his aunt and uncle for another year before they finally couldn’t take it anymore, and kicked him out of the house. He was living on the streets for the most part, occasionally couch surfing with friends, living what he considered to be his ‘best life’, pretty sure it wasn’t going anywhere else.
Mattie had gone back to what he considered to be his “roots”. The reason he’d been diagnosed with post traumatic stress disorder when he was young, the reason he had so many issues with being touched, the reason his brother had thought he’d failed Mattie. It was just easy, and it was all he really considered himself good for, anyway. He was cute enough, frail from substance abuse and too many missed meals, with a dark look to him that enough men found alluring. He made an okay income, enough to support his bad habits anyway. As it turned out, one illegal activity quickly spiraled into another, and he got really good at swindling people out of more money than they would normally just hand out.
❝ PEOPLE NEVER KNOW WHAT THEY ARE CAPABLE OF UNTIL ALL OTHER OPTIONS RUN OUT.❞
For a short period of time when he was twenty-three/twenty-four, Mattie had gotten clean. He did so with the support of a friend who was struggling with some similar issues, and for a while things were good. He got himself a job as a bartender, started paying rent for a small apartment, went on jogs on a regular basis, etc. When his friend said she was leaving, he’d done his best to be supportive, though as soon as she was gone he felt alone, and lost. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, just Mattie’s dependency issues coming to bite him in the ass. He didn’t quite fall into old habits, or he told himself he didn’t. A bump here or there was different than daily use. He forced himself to take days off, to keep up normal relationships and his steady job, that sort of thing.
When he realized he was headed down a very, very familiar road, he packed up his things and made his way to Lakeham, thinking a change of pace could be good for him. He needed to start new, bushy-tailed and fresh-faced, and he knew he might find some kind of support in the city. All he had to do was hope that a change of scenery was all it would take to un-fuck up a life that was so monumentally fucked up.
Though Mattie is fluent in English, since he started learning it twenty years ago, he still slips into French for convenience. When he’s stressed out or frustrated, French is the language he’ll mutter under his breath in. He’s also a little more at ease when he finds someone else that speaks French; it just reminds him of home, a little bit. The good parts of home, anyway.
He hasn’t seen his brother since he was nine and moved to Boston. They tried to write letters, but after a few years even those sort of fizzled out. He knows his brother probably isn’t in the States, but he still imagines that he sees him on the street now and then, still sixteen and unchanged and definitely just in Mattie’s head.
While he’s not as weird about people touching him as he used to be, he doesn’t freak out and throw temper tantrums, he does still have issues with it. Mattie’s a super affectionate guy, but only so long as he initiates it. If he’s taken by surprise when someone touches him on the shoulder or goes in for a hug, he shies away from it. He also has days where he just doesn’t want to be touched, and his body language says it better than words ever could.
(+) Quick-thinking, stoic, friendly.
(-) Impulsive, loud, cynical.
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