I FORGOT SOFTNESS / BECAUSE IT DID NOT SERVE ME.
NICKNAME(S) baz, probably won’t answer to any others. ZODIAC scorpio AGE / D.O.B. thirty6, november 20th. PLACE OF BIRTH redacted, only alluded to the rural english countryside. GENDER / PRONOUNS cis man, he / him ORIENTATION repressed bisexual OCCUPATION sergeant for the london metropolitan police & bodyguard of the prime minister.
PARALLELS lenny bruce ( marvelous mrs. maisel ), paul spector ( the fall ), harry hart ( kingsman: the secret service )
POSITIVE TRAITS independent, ambitious, imaginative, competitive, reliable. NEGATIVE TRAITS enigmatic, nihilistic, domineering, perfectionistic, penitent.
BIOGRAPHY.
TRIGGER WARNINGS emotional / physic abuse, religious trauma, drowning, violence, gun use, mentions of war, mentions of ptsd.
TL;DR rural british evangelical - raised boy does what he knows how and bows to the hand that feeds until it ultimately strikes him down. and still, he becomes theirs to command: one of their finest assets even though he’s nothing more than a finger on the triggered. marred by war, this man now stands to atone for what he could not previously protect.
OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN
the dusty nowhere surrounding hartlepool is where you grew up, a wooded edge that kisses right up against town and teeters on shire lines. you were an odd child, born to a peculiar family that lived in a little yellow house on the edge of a bluebonnet field. for years, these hues of pallid yellow and lavender paint your life ━ though they only paled as the years marched onward. your hometown is one that’s never felt quite new, rather, there’s always been a tinge of the past. like this old mining town, you were run down sooner than you knew.
the sacred walls of his little yellow house are where you’d tell your first lies. crosses nailed in each room, wallpaper cracking with temperature and peeling away at the edges. you spent your childhood wondering if it was always like this. soil-covered hands pressed together, you would pray for the unfortunate children down the road who’d just lost their gran. god, you would say, but you knew you were speaking to your father. the shadow in the door frame that stood in that small creak of light, a lean figure stretches out as if you did not see him there. oh, please bring them good graces in this time. let you take the pain from their shoulders. learning to be a ghost in your own home.
taught to behave like a young man ought to, you are taught to take the deer by the antlers but not to look it in the eyes. you knew only to pray for others, only to care for the world around you, rather than the bruises on your back, or the grazes on your knees ━ or your mother who left when you were too young to know. the woman who now lives with her new husband, and kids ━ leaving you and your brother with him.
you were just a child that first time pa took you and you watched him wash the old town sinners clean. you watched them cry out hallelujah and praise jesus, praise your pa. it was your pa’s hands on them, not god’s. pa tells you that god is in you too, but this will be the first and last time a reflection you recognized would ripple across the water.
OUR FATHER WHO ART BURIED IN THE YARD
god is in you, boy. so you let pa take you to the water’s edge again once you were a bit older. you can still hear the hum of the hymnals even now. do you hear the word of god? have you believed another gospel? you’re like an angel fallen in the dirt, something out of place prickling beneath all the holiness. you looked just like the woman your pa hated most, and this would be the sin for which only you could attest. so pa plunges you, washes you of the sins not committed at your hand, but rather, those of your mother. because if she could not be here, you would take her place. shoved beneath the frigid surface by the hands of your pa, under the guise that god made him do it, sending his own son thrashing like some wild thing your pa once claimed he could tame.
he considers it only a miracle of god that you hadn’t drowned that day. you were returned to your siblings, sopping wet on the porch of the little yellow house with the peeling wallpaper. you begin to pick at it when no one was looking, chipping away the watery gray floral print to unveil the wood paneling beneath it. life is stripped of its color but at least you were not alone in your suffering. not that it makes it any better that your brother is subject to your father’s delusions.
it stays like this for a long while. seeing your little brother off to school each morning, and making a point of not eyeing the brown and green glass bottles that he strings up on the tree in the front yard like liquor store wind chimes. your father isn’t the man you thought him to be. you consider that maybe he was always like this and that you were the last to realize, the last one to find complacency in his disillusionment. and that only makes it worse so he pledge that one day you’d leave that little yellow house. that you would rebuild himself like an old factory town and come back two times better than before. had only you’d known you would always be that odd little boy, with the odd family in the yellow house on the edge of town.
your brother is the first to leave, and there’s nothing left in a town that wasn’t made for staying so you follow him. you pledge yourselves to manmade horrors, trading one ghost for another if it meant the cause you had served was deemed more righteous than the last. had only you’d known that it would be another thing to sever you. you soar ranks, spit out commands like a morning prayer even when things had become everything but what you wanted. you were no longer fighting the good, noble war ━ you, and again your brother ━ were the casualties.
HEADCANONS.
served in the british military & was permitted leave after 10 yrs; swiftly arose in ranking for his aim as a sharpshooter. called for leave following his brother’s passing and has since been passed up with several ( theorized black ops ) agencies.
indecent and irritable but also charming and a great believer that perhaps there is still some goodness left in him.
never quite returned home following his service, worked in veteran affairs in bristol intermittantly before finding placement at the police academy in london.
third bodyguard personally contracted to look after the prime minister since his appointment & just wants to do his fucking job no matter how much he sorta hates it.
the brother who had the privelege of becoming prodigal. his brother died in the line of fire, and though not entirely unscathed, baz was the one to escape with a life he was never truly able to wholly return to.
avid wine lover, doesn’t drink much outside of classical swills. keeps the cork from every finished bottle & has red wine with almost every meal off duty.
reconnected with his mom following his brother’s passing and has since maintained loose contact with her.
studied briefly at the university of bristol, majoring in art history with a concentration in architecture.
undiagnosed tinnitus from direct exposure to an implosion on the battlefield; can indirectly trigger ptsd episodes.
a shadow that serves a purpose: sworn to protect and willing to die by the gun he lives by if it means no harm is inflicted upon who he was made to protect; though this was not his initial sentiment.
WANTED.
coming soon.