Profile

Please note that there are mentions of sexual, physical and psychological abuse/violence in the history section of the application.

Player name: Scy
Characters played: Michael Brennan 10♠, Iollan Chives 2♠, Caleb Caustello 8♣ & Nicholas Lancaster 6♦
Character Name: Michael Brennan
Age: 56
How long They've Been in the Deck: ~36 years (spent ~20 years Outside)
Character's Current Rank: 10
Face Rank Applying For: Jack
Personality: Michael is first and foremost diplomatic - he defers to authority, is assertive towards the lower ranks if they act out of line, and doesn't go out of his way to upset the status quo - and he doesn't seem to be all that ambitious. He's mellowed out over the years and he's not as gung ho and impulsive as he used to be. He's not going to win in any sort of physical challenge over some young punk half his age, and he knows that, but he's not losing any sleep from the prospect of getting killed by someone eyeing his rank. It will happen eventually if lung cancer or liver failure from all that smoking and drinking don't get him first.

For someone who comes from one of the richest Deck families, he certainly doesn't act or flaunt it. He has nice suits but he doesn't like wearing them. He has some refined tastes but he prefers spending Friday nights at a pub with a friend than going to the theatre. He could move back in to the old Brennan Estate or buy up every single property on the market but he chose to rent a one bedroom apartment in Town. He could have hundreds of servants but his house is a complete mess. He lives in a state of perpetual chaos and he insists that it's the only way he can live and work and breathe. The people who think they know him will tell you he had been thoroughly spoiled in his childhood and can't look after himself. Others will tell you that it's his unconscious way of rebelling against the upper class upbringing.

He's one of the more approachable Spades, and the people who really know him will tell you that he can be quite laid-back. He dresses and speaks casually when he can and he dislikes titles, formalities and other things that others will use to create an and maintain impersonal distance. He doesn't seem to get angry over anything, takes things in his stride and takes his time working around obstacles as he encounters them. There will be a few people who he simply doesn't want to have much to do with, but for everyone else he's a good listener if you can get him to sit down with you for a few hours, and he's someone you can count on to be there when you need him (even if you're one of the few people he doesn't seem to like). He might not have been that reliable when he was younger but he's come to value the relationships he builds with others. He cares - perhaps it's because of his impersonal upbringing, or maybe he's trying to compensate for a certain dark-haired boy who may or may not be his secret raison d'etre - but he tries not to be overbearing and won't offer advice or guidance if it's clearly not wanted.

Not everyone might appreciate his dry sense of humour or liberal usage of sarcasm but they'll have to put up with it if they want to spend any amount of time with him. As for the less obvious things, it might take a while for his acquaintances to realise that he's easy to be friends with, but difficult to get really close to. He has his share of secrets - most people do, and many Spades in particular seem to have them in abundance - and he is far more willing to listen than he is willing to talk.
History: Michael was born the first and only son into the Spades to a Seven and Eight, both bankers as was the family tradition - not particularly religious, not particularly conservative - at a time when the suit was in turmoil. He was raised in a dog-eat-dog world where it was more accurate to judge someone by the freshness of the blood on their hands than their rank, and from a young age he was distrustful of his own ambitious parents, whom he knew next to nothing about. Other than the obvious facts that they were made of money, money was all they cared about and they didn't like getting their hands dirty; their opponents were all taken care of by throwing money at them, or throwing money at other people who would take care of them.

Michael started out like every other trust fund baby - raised by hired tutors and caretakers in a sprawling estate near the outposts, and an army of servants trying to groom him to become a proper Brennan - a well-educated, cultured young man who would eventually succeed his father. And while he had been good with numbers, was a musical prodigy and was interested in things like chess and theatre, it was clear early on that he resented tailored suits and all that fanfare, and he wasn't going to be anything like Mr. or Mrs. Brennan. He might have owned his first suit when he was 3 but he quickly decided he absolutely hated it. Hated being called Young Master Brennan too, or anything that wasn't simply Mike.

While he had spent a lot of time in the company of adults rather than other Spades around his generation, he had had numerous encounters with fellow youngish Spades like Laureline, Sean and Medea. While most would have described him as shy - and that might have something to do with the fact that he suffered from selective mutism until the age of 9 and struggled to speak to strangers - he had warmed up to Medea. He wanted to help her when she first started showing signs that something wasn't quite right with her, knew that the little things like playing the violin for her could put her at ease - but the others... well. They played a little rough, so to speak, and they had put him in hospital quite a few times. When the caretakers became concerned enough to take action, he became better at playing rough when he was a little older; learned a few 'knife tricks', so to speak, out of necessity. Young Master Brennan couldn't flourish if he was going to be bullied to an early grave. And this Medea friend of his seemed to be able to defend herself - maybe it wasn't so bad to let her teach him a thing or two about sharp objects and how to wield them.

Then of course, there was that one notorious Shea Cleary who'd almost driven him insane. 11 years Michael's senior, he was violent, cruel, sadistic and abusive. After raping a very inexperienced and underaged Michael who hadn't yet gotten his head around his homosexuality, Shea alone put the Brennan boy in hospital for three years. Michael's also been psychologically toyed with, through being tied up, doused with petrol and threatened with a matchstick, and through water torture which had left him screaming and crying for months afterwards every time he was dragged into the bathtub or shower. He had every reason to loathe and be afraid of Shea Cleary, but the not-completely-unwanted sexual encounters and occasional positive attention left him with a very severe case of Stockholm syndrome. Even after Shea destroyed his dreams of becoming a professional musician by breaking his hands multiple times, Michael's traumatic bond endured for many, many years afterwards. To this day, those scars on his neck are still 'shaving accidents', and he spent all that time in hospital from 'falling down stairs' and 'doors slamming' onto his hands breaking all his fingers.

Shea was a lot to deal with, but Michael was otherwise relatively safe as a Two from everyone else trying desperately to climb to the top of the pyramid. Things could and did only get worse because of the monarchs. The Queen had taken a liking to the young man she had seen drifting around the bowels of the Castle from time to time, and the King's jealousy saw Michael at the receiving end of his anger and brutality. He suffered at their hands for years before he was able to muster up the courage to leave, and they had inflicted upon him an assortment of scars that will continue to haunt him for many years to come. Because of everything that's happened to him during his childhood, there are parts of Spades Castle he has not been to in close to forty years, and things he will never talk about from the time before he left the Deck.

It finally became clear to him around the age of 16 or 17 that befriending Medea had been a mistake (even though, he will concede now, the one friend he had made from the Clubs had been telling him this for years). She enjoyed hurting Michael as much as she enjoyed helping him - sometimes she didn't even know; she had stabbed him once in the stomach only to start screaming and ask him what happened - so he ended up liking her as much as he hated her. He can't bring himself to blame her for too many things that had gone wrong growing up in the Spades but to this day he hasn't quite been able to make sense of their complicated relationship.

Killing a fellow Two of Spades with a steak knife for the Faces' entertainment was the last straw. At 18 Michael ventured Outside for the first time, and he did not return - could not return if he wanted his sanity intact - for 20 years. It was not an easy 20 years, but the world Outside had been much more tolerable than the chaos he had grown up with. He ran away from home and though he had come from old money, he dissociated himself from the Deck and made his own way from scratch, doing odd jobs at places like shipyards and building sites.

In the first few months he lost a lot of sleep and turned to alcohol and smoking to help him get through each day. It took him years to transition from simply existing to living, to get a point where he stopped simply going through the motions of each day and was actually an autonomous functional individual.

Over the course of those two decades, Michael would settle down in one place and earn enough money doing various jobs until he had saved up enough to move somewhere else again. He drifted from one country to another, trying to find a place he could call home. He couldn't put his roots down anywhere and his first and only attempt at finding a girl, settling down and doing all those things people Outside did with their lives ended in disaster. Her parents didn't approve of this drifter who had no family, no formal qualifications and next to no money to his name. When they found out he got her up the duff it was too late to force their daughter to get the child terminated, so they shipped the baby off as far away as they could and made sure Michael never showed his face again by pressing statutory rape charges against him.

He's only ever held Julien the once as a baby, and no amount of anger, guilt, shame or self-loathing can change the fact that the baby - his son - was snatched out of his arms and shipped off to an orphanage like a bundle of damaged goods.

Lasse happened shortly after Julien. His old friend from the Clubs didn't become more than a close friend until a night of comfort sex days after he lost Julien changed things between them. Michael's known for a while - he might have loved Julien's mother but it was a different kind of love, and he hadn't enjoyed sex with her the way he did with Lasse - but he didn't come to terms with it until the hurt, frustration and exhaustion from losing and trying to locate Julien waned away and allowed him to focus on himself.

Once he found Julien he kept tabs on his son and his return to the Spades after twenty long years away from home 'coincidentally' coincided with Julien's entry into the Deck. The Spades was under new management now, and David was different from the Kings before him. It made Michael's transition back less arduous - that and the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Brennan had since passed away and left him with enough money to do whatever the hell he wanted. They had also left him vacancies in the Spades' financial department which he promptly slipped into. A proper Brennan after all - the servants would be proud if they were still alive.

Nevertheless it did take him some time to get used to the new regime. It didn't help that David knew about his real relationship with Julien. Just because he had never been blackmailed by that particular piece of information didn't mean he had never felt threatened by the prospect of it. But not everything had changed - Medea was still the Queen, and he'd spent quite a bit of time with her while she was still alive, mostly talking and playing her music to calm her down. It was clear she'd gotten worse during his time away, but she'd had some moments of clarity which had been painful for him to go through with her. It'd be a lie to say he wasn't saddened by her death, but he did believe that she wasn't going to suffer from her affliction anymore.

After her death, he finally afforded himself some time to work on his ascension through the ranks. Whatever lessons on humanity and morality Michael might have learned during his sojourn Outside was discarded now that he was back among the Spades. David can't change an old Spade overnight. He considered it doing David small favours, his resentment of the old ways making it easy to pick out certain specific targets as he worked his way through the ranks to get from 2 to 10. When he first issued a challenge for Three back when he was 17 before his sojourn he had challenged by piano. Shea Cleary in an unprovoked fit of rage broke all the fingers in his right hand three days prior to the challenge - one by one just to make sure he screamed five times - so Michael didn't make that same mistake again. Each challenge had been issued hours before the event and each ended with dead opponents - no loose ends that can kill you to get their rank back; this Spade was brought up in the old ways, got rid of other Spades who were brought up in the old ways, and old habits die hard.

That was around a decade ago. Michael's been a Ten of Spades for ten years and plenty of members of the Deck have gotten to know the good side (and perhaps only the good side) of him - a bit of a black sheep compared to the other Spades; gentle, goes the extra mile because he cares, warm, approachable, humourous, light-hearted. Perhaps it is these qualities that has gotten him appointed Jack of Spades.

But the old dog still has sharp teeth, and try as he may to keep the closet full of skeletons closed, there are ways - ways that may or may not involve people like Julien and Lasse - to bring out the Spade within him.
Character's Goals/Ambitions: Michael isn't ambitious by any stretch of the word. He might refuse to admit that making Ten of Spades was just an excuse to enact his personal vendetta and finish business that had been left unfinished when he left the Deck, but if that was part of why he made Ten, it certainly wasn't the only reason. He had done his fellow Spades a favour at the very least by getting rid of some rather unsavoury characters in their midst.

He did it more for Julien. The boy was carving his way up to Ace and being a Ten put him closer to Julien than it did staying a Two. Made it easier to talk to him without needing a dozen excuses.

Jack will likely put him in the Castle - he'll have a hard time saying no to Chives yet again once he accepts Katya's proposition for Jack to continue living in his apartment in Town - and Michael resents the idea of living in the Castle. He resents the prospect of being addressed by titles and he knows people won't look at him the same way, won't tell him the same things they used to.

In fact there are so many unappealing things about being Jack that at first, Michael didn't know how on earth he had been convinced enough to agree.

It's about time, though. Time to get over the reasons why he fled the Deck. Time to come to terms with all the things he has repressed over the years. Maybe it's also time to tell Julien the truth. He doesn't know how to tell him just yet - hasn't figured it out even after all these years - and there's never a right time to tell the truth. But he does knows he doesn't want Julien to find out through a lawyer who comes knocking on the Ace's door with Michael Joseph Brennan's will in hand, letting him know that he is in fact the Brennan heir and has just become a billionaire while he's standing in the doorway.

Jack of Spades won't make things much different for Michael. He might be reluctant but he's not completely unwilling. He won't suddenly find it within himself to want to work through the stretches of darkness in his past, or have an impulse to tell Julien everything overnight. Being Jack is less to do with his own agenda and more to do with the Suit as a whole. The Spades have changed, and changed for the better. He should quite like to keep it that way. He did his part as a Ten - and Tens can do a lot, sometimes more than what he envisions a Jack can do - but at least he knows that as long as he stays one of the Faces, he can do something to make sure the Spades aren't going back down that old road.
Why should they be chosen for this position? People talk to Michael. That might change after he's become Jack but becoming Jack won't change the past. People feel comfortable talking to him even if he doesn't feel comfortable talking to them, and communication between the Numbers and the Faces is important.

You won't find anyone - not even the Jokers - who is completely impartial towards each Suit and every other person on the Deck. But personal is personal and business is business, and Michael isn't one to let personal mix with business. After all you don't have to like the person you're dealing with and vice versa - you just need to get them to agree with you. The latter is something he is familiar with and comfortable doing.

It just so happens that Michael is on fairly good terms with many members of the Deck, new and old - and he can be fairly quickly if he's not acquainted. He's been on the Deck for too long to simply not know people, and there's very little he can do to not make new faces - or returning ones - feel welcome. There's no such thing as a harmless Spade, but as far as Spades go he leaves a fairly benign first impression, which will be to his benefit if he's wanting to do things with the title of Jack.

His vision for the Spades is in line with the current King and Queen. He's not going to be leading them back into the days before David in his lifetime. He's not the type, anyway. His day job keeps him fairly busy and while he might have the resources, he doesn't have the time to be scheming and financing plans to lead the Suit astray on the side.
Challenge: N/A (appointed)
Writing sample: N/A (already in-game)
Character PB Liam Neeson