IC
NAME: Leonardo Timens NICKNAMES: Leo AGE: 34 OCCUPATION: Bookseller at Emerald City Bookstore EDUCATION: Master's degree in Mechanical Engineering from MIT
"Being brave doesn’t mean you aren’t scared. Being brave means that you are scared, really scared, badly scared, and you do the right thing anyway."
FAMILY: Melanie Hanks (ex-wife), Claire Timens (daughter) HISTORY: The Timens family went back generations in the Marines, and Leo didn't really think twice about it when he enlisted at eighteen, even if he preferred tinkering over target practice with his father. The military opened up all kinds of doors though, paying for school, and graduation was the point where his life suddenly branched in two possible directions. He might have stayed home with his wife and their daughter, found a job at a university or a base, and lived happily ever after. He's not sure he ever really considered it. Instead, he stayed on the path he'd been put on. Perhaps he was too afraid to leave it.
Fear was a joke in the field though, or at least, Leo always made it out to be, the soldier most likely to be making wisecracks under his breath even with the very real threat of death hanging over them. His unit was his second family, and they were very, very good at what they did. The missions got more secretive, more dangerous, but even when he started to wonder if this was the life he really wanted, he couldn't leave them. They counted on each other.
Then most of them were dead, and Leo didn't have the grace of forgetting the way Fiyero did. There was so much time in the hospital, while his body had been torn apart and put back together, to replay every moment of that day in vivid color. He wasn't missing pieces like some of his friends, at least not on the outside, but it was obvious that Leo came back wrong. It was months of surgeries and physical therapy, months of his wife pulling further away, unable to handle the extent of his injuries or him screaming himself awake every night.
Still, he had no idea what was left lose. Even once he was home, as whole as he was going to get, things got worse. He was in the middle of a divorce, his friends were still in and out of hospitals, the PTSD was as bad as it had ever been, and going out and pretending to be normal was looking more and more like a joke. Losing his daughter in the custody battle wasn't the definitive end for him, but it might as well have been. By that time, they were working in the bookstore, and he hasn't set foot outside of it in years, not even when a little girl from Kansas turned up.
OOC
VERSE: Ever After STORY: The Wizard of Oz CHARACTER: The Cowardly Lion FACE CLAIM: Paul Rudd