Full name: Tate Henry Sawyer
Age: 29
Date of Birth: 23 December
Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky, USA
Sexuality: Bisexual, Biromantic
Apartment: 10B, Master and Mirsress Section
Plus: Personable, Steady, Protective
Minus: Detached, Unemotional, Guarded
Tate Sawyer was never expected to amount to anything in life. With a poor and single mother, a younger brother by another father, Tate grew up in poverty — even more so when his mother suffered a psychotic break when he was ten, trying to drown his younger brother. Tate and his brother Colin were removed from her house, placed into foster care, and separated. Devoid of all stability, Tate bounced around from foster home to foster home, never finding a lasting family, feeling cut off from human connection and ultimately unimportant.
His teenage years were characterized primarily by anger. Too old to have any hope of being adopted, Tate was in the most overcrowded homes, with parents who took kids in for tax breaks rather than out of any true desire to build a family. Often the oldest and the biggest, Tate had a strong protective instinct that saw him hurling himself in front of fists, taking the brunt of any abuse in order to spare the younger ones. When not in his turbulent and ever-changing homes, Tate was hanging out with the wrong crowd. Rather than alcohol or drugs, Tate’s vice of choice was stealing cars, living for the adrenaline rush that he only ever got when he was behind the wheel — or about to take a punch.
A crash in a stolen car that put his good friend in the hospital had Tate sent to a juvenile detention center, and it was there that he started to turn his life around. Realizing that he was caught in a downward spiral and with no means of assuring a future that was any less bleak than his past, Tate took the only option that he saw available to him: he joined the military when he turned eighteen. While Tate had never wanted to be a soldier, he found that he was good at it, that he thrived under an environment of rigid hierarchy, of orders and discipline and purpose, finding himself calm and steady in the face of pressure, a rock for whoever needed it.
A routine mission gone awry left him with two friends for life: Andrew Kay and Jonathan Riley, and their experience and shared loss of a friend turned into a business venture that would change the rest of Tate’s life. He had no plans for once his five years in the Marines were up, ended up living with Jonathan and going to school, only to have Andrew approach them with the idea for a private security company. With Andrew’s family money financing the idea, they established SRK Industries, soon renamed SRK International as it rapidly expanded.
However, with all the money that he’d never had came problems that he never expected. He used the resources at his disposal to find his brother, still in Kentucky, a drug addict and a grifter who only saw Tate as a source of money — and, when Tate decided to stop being that to him, someone to try and blackmail. His relationships, too, were often secretive, and always short-lived. Despite the unexpected success of SRK and the fact that Tate had more money than he knew what to do with, he still felt unfulfilled, and constantly in search of himself.
Reason For Coming to The Apartments:
Tate had never wanted to be a soldier, and found that while building SRK had given him a future where he’d had none, it also meant that he had never quite stopped being one. A crisis of conscience had him resigning from his active role in the company, although he maintained partial ownership that his partners had talked him out of giving up, he uprooted himself to move to London, deciding to work on a Masters degree and gain some perspective.
He thought that the man had been fucking with him, the retired four-star General who had told Tate about his brief stay in the Apartments over drinks after a conference. But the few faint details he’d remembered had led him to Madam Vettra. Tired of feeling used, yet longing for the too-brief feeling of connection and closeness that he got from sex, upon moving to London, he made the snap decision to move in. He couldn’t be expected to find himself if he didn’t step out of his comfort zone, could he?
With a relaxed and affable demeanor, Tate is casually charming, good at making people feel at ease around him. But what his personable nature belies is a distance and detachment that has proven extremely difficult for him to overcome. Tate has a strong desire to protect, to make himself useful by taking care of others around him, and is drawn to those with a perceived need for someone calm and steady.
Some quick chance encounters in bars, a few failed relationships, lingering discomfort with his bisexuality and a frustrating tendency to develop stubborn and persistent crushes on straight men meant that his sex life had never been particularly prolific. Besides Andrew and Jonathan, he found himself almost incapable of connecting to anyone else, and he nurtured an unrequited crush on Andrew that the man noticed, but used only to toy with him. In relationships, he sought out people that needed help, needed protecting, only to find himself left behind and feeling used when they didn’t need him anymore.
Tate is a difficult person to get to know beyond the surface level. Having found that most things just roll off his back, he sees no point in discussing his past, seeing himself as a person who wants to support others with no need for support in turn, even though he tends to cope by just moving relentlessly forward, leaving things in the past where he thinks they belong. Some of this is bravado, a standoffishness that comes from growing up without any kind of stability or permanence, and while Tate often feels lonely and desires a stronger human connection, he’s been unable to find it and has almost stopped looking.
Likes: Sunrises, hunting, physical activity, classic rock, cars, wide open spaces
Dislikes: Laziness, false promises, red wine, small dogs
Dominant/Submissive: Emotionally dominant, sexual switch
Kinks: Come play, spanking, light bondage, giving orders, edging
Anti-Kinks: Most types of roleplay, sensory deprivation (him), bloodplay, scat
Tate Henry Sawyer looks a lot like Garrett Hedlund and is taken.
