Alexandre “Alex” Lamar || Red Soldiers || The Survivor
Face-claim: Dane DeHaan
Age: 24
Occupation: Musician at the Nirvana
Nationality/Ethnicity: French // European
Enneagram: The Individualist Alignment: Chaotic Neutral MBTI: INTJ
+ Resilient, Cunning, Fierce
- Melancholic, Reclusive, Aggressive
No one knows what to think of him, the mysterious man behind the ivory keys. His words are blunt, harsh, even vulgar, and yet the sounds he can summon from his fingers are unparalleled. It would almost make him charming if it weren’t for the blood that stains them. He’s had to bite and claw and tear his way through this world simply to survive in it, and it’s made him visibly bitter. The barrier that guards whatever lies beneath that stoic surface is near impenetrable. Why, then, does his cold and dissonant face seem to melt when he has a song to play?
The only vivid, happy memory Alexandre can conjure from his tormented childhood is laying beneath the shadow of a baby grand piano, listening to its music and feeling the notes reverberate in the wood beneath his head. He was certain his mother played the most beautiful music there ever was in this world, before she was taken from him.
The poor Parisian theatres were no ideal place for a child to be raised, and yet Alex’s earliest memories are of damp stages that existed as barely a shadow of their grand counterparts. Paris was a city of the arts, but that didn’t mean all of what it had to offer was for refined tastes. A single mother, Brienne Lamar had a musical gift that would’ve taken her far if she hadn’t gotten so prematurely pregnant in her youth. Somehow, however, that never made her bitter towards her small child. While she played her music in productions that would never see the light of day, he grew not in a home that would ever know wealth, but had plenty of love and character. They spent a large amount of time in a dingy room rented in the back of said theatre, but eventually when she believed Alex old enough, she took a job as member of a touring production. A mistake that would prove fatal.
Alex was too young to get enlisted in the war at the time it began, but he remembers being in Russia when the worst of it broke out. There was then no choice but to stay rather than travel across a war-torn Europe; rats caught in a trap. Right next to the memory of his mother playing the piano is the sound of her screaming as she burned. Alex couldn’t proclaim to know the sorts of shows that were being played in the theatre he called home, and yet evidently the Secret Police saw it as displaying anti-soviet content and torched the building in the dead of night after a performance. He still has scars from the horrific incident, but escaped with his life at least. The same couldn’t be said for his mother or the rest of her troupe.
Just shy of ten years old and suffering from a terrible trauma, he was sent to stay in an orphanage in Moscow after his wounds were tended to in a nearby hospital. He’d been a quiet, polite boy before the incident, but now that he was alone in the world he was all but mute, completely withdrawn. He hadn’t even been in Russia for long and saw it as a strange place with people who spoke words he couldn’t understand. Most of what he could speak was French, and the other boys tormented him for it, beating him for fun as they called him “frantsuz suka.”
Eventually, as anyone would, Alex got tired of being helpless and unable to fight back. Pushed too far to be willing to take anymore, he began hitting back when the other boys surrounded him. It left him with more bruises and pain, but eventually it also began to make him stronger, with a sharper tongue he was learning how to use. When he wasn’t hitting the other boys, sometimes his frustration grew so much he would hit the walls, his pillow, anything to get the anger and hatred festering within out. In time even the worst of his tormentors stopped approaching him for how wild he’d become in a fight, too vicious to be fun to make fun of anymore. That didn’t keep Alex from continuing to pay them back for all the hate they put in his fragile heart, finding other ways to hurt them. He’d get pity from the cooks and have them serve them less portions, or ban together the other abused boys and steal all the things from their beds in the afternoon so they slept in the cold at night- little things that displayed not only a growing strength, but cunning.
There was only ever one reprieve from his hell in that Russian orphanage, and that came in the form of a splintered upright piano with a quarter of the keys missing. Someone was going to throw it away, and thought their trash might serve better in a hovel of orphan children instead. To him, this trash took the form of a sign to keep holding on. Part of his naïve, juvenile mind at the time liked to think his mother had sent it from wherever she was beyond this world, and while he knows better now, it was a thought that kept him strong. Even still, he’s sure he feels her ghost every time he plays.
There were complications and prejudices with the war that no child could ever truly understand, and so when the Secret Police raided the place because it was suspected of being run by traitors to the state, he didn’t know what to think. He merely watched as he and the rest of the children were gathered into the street, standing before the adults who’d watched over them before they were executed on the spot. The children were taken to a boarding school that would fill their heads with a vicious amount of propaganda following the incident, as if that would somehow “fix” them. For ones like Alex, who was now fourteen and old enough to form his own opinion, they were often pulled aside by teachers (usually members of the Secret Police themselves) to test his loyalty. By now, he was smart enough to play whatever role he needed to survive.
Only a few short years later, the Red Soldiers were beginning to take their own formidable form. The school was unquestionably a place ripe for disbanding a source of suspected Secret Police brainwashing, and so a mission found a group of this bloodthirsty syndicate infiltrating the school while it slept. It was a massacre for those known to be Secret Police, while the students were gathered for potential information and recruiting. “Recruiting” was something of a kind word for it. Alex remembers it to be varying levels of torment wherein it was determined whether or not they were worthy. First it was the torture to see what they knew of the Secret Police and how conditioned they were by them. After that, it was testing their willingness to follow their new regime by ordering them to kill a member of the Secret Police or be killed themselves. An easy choice for Alex, though not so for most. As much as he hated the Secret Police for what they’ve done, he’d never gone so far as to kill a man before, but he did it to survive. Everything he’s always done has been to survive.
Alex didn’t know what to expect at the sight of a man dead before him by his own doing. Logically, he knew most people were supposed to feel some kind of remorse or panic, but all he found was relief - that he’d live another day for what he’d done, that one of those monsters were gone from the world… Perhaps the Red Soldiers were their own form of monster, but he had no choice but to serve them now. He returned with their requested corpse, had a new burn scar to add to the others, and was given shelter in the tunnels for doing as he was told. In an odd way, it was the most free he could ever remember being, aside from the steadfast rules he had to follow. The moment he found himself a place at the Executioner’s establishment doing the only thing he could remember loving, however, he once again found that strength from his mother to carry on and survive. And, as always, he does.
