what do you consider the sort of "phases" of Brutus' life? like points in his life where it was going in one direction, and then something changed it. so he kept going that way until something else redirected him again. anything like that?
Thanks for the ask! This is actually a very fitting ask for him, providing that I’m interpreting it right!
Phase 1: His early childhood before the age of five. Originally called Benjamin, he lived in pre-Legion Flagstaff with his parents, neither of which was particularly attentive to him. His main memories of this period involve books, shops, and people, but he’s lost the details and wishes that he could remember more.
Phase 2: Enter the Legion. I imagine that, rather than leaving the citizens to live under their rule like with other cities, they fully took over Flagstaff the way they destroy tribes, deliberately to use it as their capital. His parents, along with every other adult he knew, were killed, and he was forcibly taken in for training and given the name Brutus Decimus (bonus name origin fact: the reason behind ‘Brutus’ will soon become clear, and ‘Decimus’ because it means ‘tenth’, as in the tenth man during a decimation. Just had to rub it in that he tends to draw the short straw in life!). The training itself was brutal and he barely made it through, forcing his only goal at that point in his life to be ‘survive’.
Phase 3: Life in the Legion after training and before 2277. A combination of being generally reserved, not the most physically capable in terms of strength and endurance, not completely on board with Legion culture, and openly holding some polarising- but not treasonous- opinions led to him being seen as a bit of an outcast in general, and being a particular unfavourite of his various centurions (one of which was Silus), but he was content with the small group of brothers-in-arms he was close to. He didn’t see too much action as he was usually assigned to cities in Arizona (acting as a guard etc), but he was a member of a small group led to Zion by the then Malpais Legate soon before 2277. This whole phase, but especially that journey, was definitely a time that he looked back on fondly and with some nostalgia during later phases.
Phase 4: Hoover Dam, take one. Like most Legionaries, he was sent west to construct and train in the Fort, which was intended to be a very temporary base of operations, a little while before the battle itself. Thanks to being low-ranking, he avoided the Rangers’ attacks, and was mostly unharmed by the explosion by good fortune, but most of his friends were not so lucky. Still stunned, he then watched his Legate (someone that he had come to consider a friend during the trip to Zion, but in reality was barely noticed by) suffer the consequences of his failure. Try as he might, he could not reconcile the defeat and deaths with what he had been taught about Lord Caesar. All in all, these experiences turned his heart against the Legion, and Caesar especially, and shaped the course of the rest of his life.
Phase 5: After a few years (during which he was mostly stationed at the Fort and back in Flagstaff for varying periods, but remained utterly disillusioned with the Legion), he met, travelled with, trained under, and fell for Charlie, another OC of mine. He was aware of her in the past, but had never been acquainted with her as a person. There’s... not much more I can say about that without going into a fact file on Charlie, but she was able to open his eyes to the truth behind the Legion and confirm many of his suspicions. This is the life phase he is currently in, but as soon as I get back into writing Charlie’s story, things are about to change pretty drastically for them both.
