𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞 : malakai salinas . 𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞𝐬 : kai. 𝐬𝐤𝐞𝐥𝐞𝐭𝐨𝐧 : the mayor . 𝐝𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐨𝐟 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡 : tba. 𝐚𝐠𝐞 : fifty-one. 𝐟𝐚𝐜𝐞𝐜𝐥𝐚𝐢𝐦 : pedro pascal . 𝐛𝐢𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐩𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞 / 𝐡𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐭𝐨𝐰𝐧 : lafayette, louisiana . 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫 𝐬𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐬 : leo . 𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫 : cis male . 𝐩𝐫𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐬 : he + him . 𝐞𝐲𝐞𝐬 : brown . 𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐫 : brown . 𝐡𝐞𝐢𝐠𝐡𝐭 : 181cm / 5'11" ft . 𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐭𝐲 : chilean. 𝐦𝐛𝐭𝐢 : enfj-t ( turbulent protagonist ) . 𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 : bisexual. 𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐮𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐬 : english, spanish . 𝐨𝐜𝐜𝐮𝐩𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 : the mayor. 𝐝𝐞𝐠𝐫𝐞𝐞 : associate of applied science . 𝐬𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐞𝐬 : tom loftis, michael robinavitch, steven crain, ted lasso.
tw: death of a loved one, grief.
kai isn't originally from misery. he grew up in lafayette, louisina, with cell service that actually worked ! the one disruption in an otherwise steady childhood came the summer before his senior year, when his father’s work relocated the family out to the island - ugh!! new kid, last year of high school, the worst possible timing to have to start over.
but blessings are often delivered in disguise: high school is where he met his first and only love. same graduating class, same handful of shared classes, and by october he’d worked out that he was completely, uselessly sweet on her - it was a crush that made him rearrange his whole schedule around a two-minute hallway crossing and never once turned into an actual conversation worth remembering. so yeah, little, shy kai never made a move. told himself there was time, that senior year was soooooo long, that he’d say something eventually - and then eventually time ran out, and graduation scattered them before he ever worked up the courage.
years passed. he wasn’t ambitious in any real traditional sense - no burning drive, no five-year plan. he drifted through a couple years of community college, worked odd trade jobs, and mostly just waited for life to feel like it had started. then the internet found its way into his living room, the way it did for a lot of restless twenty-somethings in the early nineties, and he started spending his nights in chatrooms half out of boredom, half out of some vague sense that life was happening somewhere else and he wanted to experience that too.
what he didn’t realise was who he was talking to at first - a screen name, nothing more, someone anonymous who happened to mention the island thst they both lived on. it took a few weeks of talking before the pieces lined up for either of them. when they did, it knocked the wind out of him a little - the women from that hallway, still somehow exactly as easy to talk to as he’d imagined she’d be if he’d ever actually tried. this time he didn't let the moment run out. they talked for the better part of a month at all hours of the night, and just like that, he fell for her again.
they were a year into dating when they married in the local church. they bought a house that kai fixed up himself, room by room, over the better part of a few years. and when they were ready, they welcomed a child. kai hadn’t planned on being a natural at fatherhood, but he was. he was the dad who showed up to everything, who fixed the bike before anyone asked, who never made a big performance out of caring because caring was just his default setting. he wasn’t a soft touch, exactly - he had rules, expectations, a low tolerance for excuses - but it came wrapped in enough warmth that it never really felt like discipline.
as the child got older, that closeness didn't fade so much as it changed shape: fewer piggyback rides, more drives with the radio low and kai asking careful, sideways questions about school, friends, whatever was actually going on that his kid wasn’t quite saying outright. he was, by most accounts, the parent his kid could talk to if they wanted to - not because he pried, but because he was patient enough to wait out the awkward silence until something came out of it.
which is precisely what makes the years that came after so hard to deal with. he didn't just lose a spouse and then, functionally, a child - he lost the one part of his life that had NEVER once felt uncertain. his empty house, the unanswered text messages, all of it landed on a man who genuinely believed, right up until the day it happened, that his family was the one thing in life he’d gotten unambiguously right.
losing her. the call came early, before he was properly awake, and he’s never once managed to shake the specific cruelty of that - that the worst moment of his life started with him fumbling for the phone half-asleep, irritated at being woken, before the voice on the other end changed everything. he identified her body himself. he has never told anyone, not even his own flesh and blood, exactly what that looked like, and he has built a quiet, permanent wall around the memory rather than ever letting himself go back to it. the not-knowing is its own separate wound - accident or not, he genuinely doesn’t know, and some nights the uncertainty is worse than either answer would be, because it means he doesn’t even get to grieve in a straight line. he just gets to grieve in circles.
losing them, too. he didn’t get a phone call the second time. he got silence - a bedroom door left open, a closet stripped down to nothing, and a voicemail so short he’s listened to it enough times that he could probably recite it in his sleep. for months after, he called every week, sometimes every day. people in town started to look at him a certain way about it - not unkind, just a very specific pity reserved for a man everyone quietly suspected was calling into a void. he kept calling anyway. he would have kept calling for the rest of his life. by the time his child finally picked up, he’d spent so long bracing for the worst that the relief nearly took him out at the knees.
somewhere in the middle of all of it - arriving on the island, finding love, the funeral - kai became the person the town leaned on without ever officially deciding to. he organised search parties for other people’s missing when he couldn't organise one for his own. he fixed what broke in other people’s homes when they didn't have the energy to do it themselves. he sat with people through nights he had no business having the strength for, considering he was barely getting through his own. so when the previous mayor resigned, it wasn’t ambition that put kai forward - it was years of accumulated trust from a town that had watched him show up, over and over, long after he had every reason to fall apart instead. well, that and the fact that nobody else wanted the job !
quick tidbits.
doesn’t dress like a mayor at all, and that's half deliberate, half he genuinely never got around to buying a ‘mayor wardrobe.’ crew necks, a beat-up downjacket he's had for years, and jeans instead of slacks more days than not.
salt-and-pepper stubble he forgets to maintain during bad weeks.
reading glasses pushed up into greying hair instead of worn properly, because he’s always mid-task when he needs them and never remembers until it’s too late.
he has a rage saved up for his child and he has no idea where to put it now that they’re actually home. it comes out sideways: going quiet when he’d normally joke, a control over his voice so tight it’s obviously a performance.
will often fall asleep in his office some nights because he doesn’t want to be at home.
