NAME. Ian Fawley
AGE & BIRTH DATE. 28 & July 19th, 1996
GENDER & PRONOUNS. Male & He/Him
SPECIES. Human
OCCUPATION. Firefighter
FACE CLAIM. Steven R. McQueen
( tw: guns, hunting, violence, death )The youngest of four boys born to a fisherman and a school teacher, Ian’s childhood was spent on his father’s fishing boat in St. John’s. Quiet and unassuming, Ian suffered the standard youngest child syndrome in that he could get away with anything he wanted. Doted on by his mother and father, his brothers were forced to drag him along everywhere they went and look out for him every step. Ian was naturally curious, precocious, and at times capricious. Mischief was something he seemed to be born with but there was no inherent maliciousness to it, in his youth Ian just liked to make people laugh, even if that meant that it was at his own expense. Growing up on the boat meant that from the end of May until the end of the Summer there wasn’t much time on the land itself. In the winter, the current was stronger, the waters were less forgiving, and because the salmon were sizably larger, they were more difficult to net and pick. It was in the colder months that Ian’s mother would keep him back, this was something that he loudly complained about but was promptly ignored; in February in St. John’s there wasn’t much to do but shovel snow, so to keep Ian busy that was exactly what he did. Out on the water there was enough to look out for, when he was older, when he was bigger, and when he was stronger; that would be when he could go out with them.
In the off season Ian’s father and his older brother would take him hunting, in August bow hunting began, late September they’d open it to rifles. Ian was a natural, his father had said as much after the young boy had first held a gun; out in the rural areas of Newfoundland they’d hunt moose, deer, caribou, foxes, wolves, black bear; far enough North and they’d hunt polar bears as well. Ian learned how to trap and to track, snaring small game like porcupines, otters, lynx, martens, arctic hares, grouse, and more. Skinning, cleaning, and preserving was brutal work but Ian had never baulked at hard labour. His parents and brothers showed him the ropes but even still it felt like a second nature to him, they’d sell the furs and the hides, meat to the butcher, to neighbours, or to their own stores, and for Ian this just felt like a very natural part of his life.
One of the plus sides of this was all the boys usually had cash in their wallet, most of the young people in St. John’s did, at least the ones who worked on the boats. Fishing paid well when you did it commercially and fisheries were willing to pay handsomely for long, hard days of work. While his eldest brothers squirrelled there’s a way for future down payments or cars, the one above him blew through his just as fast as it hit his pocket. Indulgent and bad with cash, Ian’s approach was different, he just saved it. Saved it and thought about how someday he was going to get out to see the world, he had a list of places he wanted to see and his plan had always been to do that as soon as he finished high school.
Other kids his age had very similar lifestyles, they went out on the boats in the late winter months and were on them through the summer. And much like his parents they grew up around guns and hunting, so when not tasked with the menagerie of chores that came with this sort of lifestyle, Ian had a close knit group of friends who all more or less came from the same place as him. Despite all of this there was the lingering feeling that somehow he just didn’t quite fit in, like Ian didn’t really belong. He loved his family and he got away with a lot more than his brothers had when they were his age, but there was something about the sea that made Ian want to see what was on the other side of it. There was something about looking at the unpolluted night sky from the deck of a fishing boat in the Labrador Sea and questioning the extent of things. The world was larger than the fishing town at the top of the Saint Lawrence, and somehow Ian felt like he was called to do more somehow.
Volunteering at the fire department started when he was in high school, while his family had been fishermen for years, that burden had always been on his eldest two brothers while Ian was encouraged to do more of what he wanted. At times this was a point of contention within the family, because while Ian could go off after school and work elsewhere, his brothers were stuck scrubbing down the boat while the one above him took to disappearing for entire days on end. Drugs plagued the small town and sunk their teeth into Ian’s family. They were a god fearing family and while his parents took communion and his dad liked to have a beer when they stepped off the boat, there wasn’t a lot in the way of alcohol around.
At seventeen Ian had nearly completed high school and was already enrolled for the following September to begin training as a firefighter when his brother suddenly passed away; found dead in his apartment the family never really recovered. While the two eldest remained to pick up the slack, the sudden schism pushed Ian to leave St. John’s for a time; he ignored whatever bitterness came off of his brothers as he talked about the money he’d been putting away over the last few years. To see the world, but in doing so Ian would end up on the other side of it; all his life Ian had been talking about places he wanted to see, about people he wanted to meet, and about the stories that he’d found in books or were filled into his head in school. Ian graduated from high school, bought a plane ticket, and then he was gone.
Ian managed to mostly break even in the places that he travelled to, working mostly as a labourer doing odd jobs here or there. His brothers had said that he wasn’t going to last a month, but then one month turned into two, then three, and then from four months up to a year. Ian stayed in one place for a month or two, and then he’d head elsewhere; the thing was that he always felt like he was looking for something, like he was laying on the boat again watching the sunrise over the ocean and just feeling like something was missing. There were questions that he wanted answered but the truth was he didn’t really know how to get started. He’d get work on the boats along the coast, netting, picking, cleaning, scrubbing, whatever he had to do. Ian gained a lot of experience this way and as he moved more inland he began to look elsewhere, at twenty-two Ian had gone from island to island in Italy before he made his way up the coast and then into Rome.
Whatever it was about the city, it felt like he was meant to be there, like he’d nearly found what he was looking for. Here, he ended up working as a laborer while studying to become a firefighter, eventually participating in public competitions when notices were posted.
Five years in, and Ian hasn’t missed a Christmas back home yet; while being away from his family has been challenging, there’s a very dominant part of the man that could never shake the feeling he’d gotten when he first stepped into the city; this was where he was meant to be. Completely unaware of the supernatural world and the forces behind the city, Ian’s job has always been to put out fires wherever they may appear.
+ independent, opinionated, compassionate
- shortsighted, impulsive, stubborn
played by shane. est. he/him.
