Name | Nickname | Age: Richard Nathaniel Blackwood Jr. | Nate (exclusively) | 31
Birthday | Astrology: April 27, 1990 | Taurus
Pronouns | Sexual identity: He/him | Heterosexual
Birthplace | Raised: New York City, NY
Residence: Downtown
Occupation: Unemployed
Faceclaim: Matthew Daddario
1989 - Gwen Davis, daughter of conservative mayoral candidate Ryan Davis, meets Stephen Weiss after his concert and the two spend the night together. The night results in a pregnancy that no one but Gwen want to see carried to term.
1989 - The Davis and Blackwood family come to an agreement on the future of their children, encouraging (read: requiring) a fast wedding between Gwen and Richard Blackwood to avoid the scandal of a child out of wedlock.
1989 - a large sum of money is exchanged between Stephen Weiss and Gwen Davis to keep the truth of the child’s parentage. The money is placed in a trust.
1990 - Richard Nathaniel Blackwood Jr is born on April 27
1994-1996 - Nate is placed in various lessons (piano, foreign language) and left mostly in the care of his au pair
1997 - Nate begins attending Camp Walt Whitman every summer
1998 - Nate asks to be referred to by his middle name exclusively after the older kids at school/camp start calling him Dick Jr. It marks the beginning of the decline of the relationship between father and son
2006 - Nate gets an after school job at a subsidiary of Blackwood Industries
2007 - During a party for his father, Nate gets drunk and chats up a woman he thinks is interested in him and talks openly about his father. An article comes out the following morning detailing the entire affair. Richard Sr. and Nate have it out and do not speak for several months
2008 - Shortly after his mother tells him the truth about his father, Nate is arrested after taking one of his dad’s boats out on a joyride with a woman and crashing it into the docks on the way back in. Money makes the problem more or less disappear, though it further strains the near-nonexistent relationship between Nate and his father
2009 - Nate begins studying business at Brown University
2015 - Several bad business ventures have Nate trying to bridge the gap between his father and himself and prove that he’s worth investing in
2018 - Nate is involved in a public altercation at his father’s 50th birthday party after news of an affair with a married woman made its way to the ear of said woman’s husband
2020 - Nate invests the entirety of the trust containing the money from his bio dad and several large sums of money from other friends and investors and loses it all
2021 - In a desperate attempt to recoup the money lost (and save his own ass), Nate follows the breadcrumbs leading to Stephen Weiss’ only acknowledged child all the way to DC where he intends to get the money he believes he’s owed
They say heavy is the head that wears the crown, and while the Blackwoods were not royalty by any sense of the word, the name still carried with it weight. It wasn’t just a name, but an expectation. A legacy. And for Nate, it was his biggest adversary.
Richard Nathaniel Blackwood Jr. had been set up to fail from the beginning. In a true show of what Nate believed for all of his childhood to be narcissism, his father had bestowed his name and every single impossible expectation upon him. For reasons he wouldn’t understand until early adulthood, an impossible chasm existed between himself and the man he so desperately wanted to impress.
Gwen Davis was a nineteen year old rebellious daughter of a conservative mayoral candidate. She’d long since perfected the art of getting whatever it was she desired and on a hot night in mid-July of 1989, that was Stephen Weiss. The two shared a night together and went their separate ways. It probably shouldn’t have been such an unexpected surprise when she wound up pregnant, and even less so when it seemed that Gwen was the only one interested in seeing the baby carried to term. In lieu of actually being a parent, Stephen and his team sent along a large sum of money to keep his involvement a secret. That was more than okay with the Davises, who were enraged by the news, worried more about the threat to her father’s mayoral position than the son Gwen would be bringing into the world. They went to work pulling strings and trying to cover their tracks, the answer found in a marriage between Gwen and the son of a family friend, Richard Blackwood. Though the Blackwoods didn’t come from old money– its origin only two generations back– they had their hands in a little bit of everything. The union hadn’t come out of nowhere (which made the haste in which they married less suspect), but it was not necessarily what either of them would have chosen for themselves. It was a marriage of convenience, of favors, and of power.
Life was… fine. Nate was born after a lengthy labor and they settled into a routine that worked for a while, but then Gwen found that she was still too young, too rebellious, to be tied down by a child and resentment set in. It was a different kind of resentment than the kind wielded by the man who masqueraded as his father, but it was felt nonetheless. But again, that was fine. He had a wet nurse and then an au pair and they were fine– if not a bit too easy to manipulate. And yes, it seemed that was a trait passed down beautifully from mother to son. It was a craft to be honed and perfected, practiced on the unsuspecting children and teachers at school.
As Nate grew, so too did his need for acceptance. It wasn’t until he began attending Camp Walt Whitman that he realized most families didn’t appear nearly as fractured as his felt. He’d thought the impossibility that was impressing his father was simply a part of the deal. He’d thought yearning for acknowledgement to be just another component in the equation of family. The realization had him cultivating a resentment of his own. He became angry, began to act out in ways he hadn’t before, began to draw the kind of attention to himself that turned little Richard Jr. into the butt of a small dick joke. So he became Nate. Richard Jr. hadn’t known any better, but Nate? Nate knew how to charm, how to sweet talk, how to channel his endless rage into a symphony loud enough to gain the attention of his parents.
The rift between himself and his father only began to grow larger and while he’d go to his grave swearing he didn’t give a single fuck about what his father thought of him, it seemed that some days, that longing for acceptance was the only thing driving him forward. His father was a businessman, so he tried to show an interest in business. His father liked golfing, so he practiced alone in his room with a solo cup and a club stolen from an old set stashed away in the attic. None of it mattered.
So, eventually, he did the opposite. He leaned into the role of the slighted son. He got drunk at a party meant to honor his father and some new business venture or big sale or who-gives-a-fuck, and aired his grievances to a pretty stranger. Reading his words in print the next morning had only solidified the notion for him that it was never about him, only about what he could offer. To her, it had been an exposé, to his father, it had been an embarrassment. The silent treatment that followed could be felt spanning coasts.
Right at the start of the summer before he went off to college, his world changed. In perhaps the least tactful way she could manage, his mother dropped the bomb about his biological father. It felt as though the floor had fallen out from underneath him. He didn’t know how to process or how to cope and he had no one he could talk to about it. So he did what he did best: he acted out. He stole his dad’s boat: a feat that ended with the vessel crashed into the docks and Nate in jail. Money made the problem go away, polished off his record, just in time for him to attend Brown.
He was good at college, he found. Maybe not so much the academia of it all, but the partying? Aced it. But still, that niggling need to please his father– even if the man wasn’t really his father at all– rotted in the back of his mind. It drove him to desperation in his professional life and found him fumbling through one bad venture after another. He made risky moves knowing that if only ONE came through, it could change everything. But they never did. Instead, he found himself on the knuckle end of an angry husband whose wife had apparently been Nate’s woman of the week. It was his father’s fiftieth birthday party and even though Nate hadn’t known she was married (though… it likely wouldn’t have mattered if he had), it changed nothing. The tenuous and tattered relationship with his father all but dissolved in that ballroom. He thought he’d known desperation before, but he knew then that the damage was irreparable. He had nothing to show for anything.
In a last ditch effort, Nate came up with a business plan. He emptied the trust left behind by his biological father– money he promised himself he’d never touch– and somehow managed to convince some acquaintances and bigwigs to invest money in his newest venture. It should have worked. It should have, but it didn’t. He lost everything: his money, their money. All of it. Gone. And because Nate has always been captain of good ideas, instead of facing the people whose money he lost, he tracked down the only child his sperm donor seemed to give a shit about. Sure, he was gone. But his money wasn’t. And he owed him that, at least, didn’t he?
Nate is written by Jamie.
