please welcome to the stage . . .
DAMIAN, drummer & mechanic & brother. sweet as honey.
inspo. & threads. & playlist. & playlist (b-side).
AT A GLANCE —
FULL NAME : damian [FOGHORN NOISE]
NICKNAMES : not a huge nickname guy, but he'll answer to dami like 75% of the time!
AGE : twenty-three
BIRTHDAY : [FOGHORN NOISE]
GENDER & PRONOUNS : trans man & he/him/his
ORIENTATION : kinda just thrilled to be there!!
+ : caring, genuine, methodical, open-minded, perceptive (in some ways...)
- : tactless, naive, insecure, judgmental, obsessive, oblivious (in some ways...)
OUTSIDE —
FC : donny pangilinan
SPECIES & ETHNICITY : non-mutant human & filipino
HEIGHT : 178 cm / 5'10"
OF NOTE : earlobe piercings. would like to get a tattoo (he's been reading about innovations with subdermal nanotech!!), but scared of committing to it.
FASHION SENSE : values practicality above all else, including coordination and aesthetics. nonzero chance he's wearing navy with black thinking they were the all the same color when he got dressed. would like a leather jacket like neon's, but doesn't want to come across like he's trying to jack his style. has never seen a hawaiian shirt he wouldn't wear.
INSIDE —
MORAL ALIGNMENT : lawful good
CARDINAL VIRTUE : fortitude
CARDINAL SIN : lust
LIKES : tactile puzzles, deep dives, dive bars, history, novelty, crunchy foods
DISLIKES : strong umami flavors, being told no, doctors, public attention, tongue twisters, getting interrupted in a flow state
HABITS OF NOTE : likes white noise; often goes to the engine room to think. paces. hyperfixates easily and often. easily flustered, generally speaking. writes everything on sticky notes (and freaks out when they inevitably go missing). tendency to overexert himself. walks laps (does not run) around the ship like an old man.
CURRENT CONERN : i gesture vaguely toward the supernova expedition generally. is this anything.
I WOULD TRUST HIM WITH... : fixing a shuttle. taking me at my word. telling it to me straight. going along with my craziest plan. holding my phone without snooping. anchoring trivia night.
I WOULD NOT TRUST HIM WITH... : following a recipe. listening without judging. delivering a speech. remembering our plans next week. watering my plants. anchoring my track team.
A DREAM FOR THE FUTURE : taking blossom on a vacation. no touring, no world-saving or soul searching, just a regular vacation.
BIOGRAPHY —
soon. but the quickish version is this: damian is a control in an experiment not designed to accomadate one. the cherish is built for the express purpose of preparing mutants to save the world and top the charts; entertaining a little boy without the fortitude to serve either of those missions falls outside of those parameters. as such, unlike the rest of the orphans, damian has a very unstructured childhood. there are classes and there are (many, many) clinical tests, of course, but he's otherwise largely left to his own devices.
this gives him about seventeen years of getting underfoot of adults when his health allows, and learning & dreaming about the world outside of the walls of the cherish when it does not. a damian in good health is hard to track down, because he's liable to be anywhere—watching supplies get unloaded in the hull, bugging the music engineers about track layering, or even sitting quietly in the corner of maverick's office. it's a childhood observed, but never quite lived, a constant state of being on the outside looking in. kind of ironic for someone who's functionally trapped in four walls of the cherish.
damian can get kind of insecure about not having formal degrees. but his love of knowledge will always win out, i think.
the lab techs speculate that his immunosuppression is actually the partial manifestation of a power similar to blossom's: damian's white blood cells siphon energy from his organs, but the energy just kind of...dissipates, leaving him in a permanently weakened state until the day his body is no longer able to function. as far as damian's concerned, it is the way it is. but not all the lab techs are as fatalistic as he is, and eventually propose an experimental treatment to replace his bone marrow with a synthetic antigen. damian goes through with it because he figures he either dies slowly or he dies quickly, and after the worst eight months of his life, he actually...improves. like, dramatically.
like, dramatically enough that he can leave the station for the first time in his life. that he can go experience the world he's read so much about. that he can actually participate in his life instead of just observing it. that he can be something other than a burden on the cherish's resources.
and so he goes. there are missteps, of course, and disappointments, and hardships…but there’s wonder. there’s life. there’s a vividness that damian couldn’t even have known how to imagine, and it coaxes out a self that he didn’t even know that he possessed. his body is also stable enough to start hrt :)))))))
but every time a supernova girls song plays in the crowd, he can’t help but feel guilty. he messages blossom and angel regularly, of course, stays up-to-date on their releases and their schedules, but it’s a constant reminder of the sacrifice that his sister and his friends are making—because he knows, now, that what they’re doing is a sacrifice and not simply the way things are.
and so when his mailbox pings with an offer to return, he takes it. (not immediately, admittedly. he shuts off his tablet to think on it, only to be met with his lockscreen: a photo of him, angel, and blossom. it's never really a question, in the end.)
