There are many people that would describe Lennox Bercator as an extremely fortunate man. With five children all surviving to maturity, he has two daughters, an heir and a spare - and another spare. Not only that, he has now had the good fortune to inherit his brother’s holdings in the capital city of Tyrol. Most fortunate, Mr. Bercator, to have so glorious a destiny. However, not everybody was as pleased as Lennox was.
Let’s go back a few years. Eighteen and eleven months, to be a little more exact, when Dominic, fourth child, third son, was born in absolute silence. Every baby cries, the midwife exclaimed, and smacked him again just in case he was defective. Luckily for all involved, Dominic decided that being hit was unpleasant, and cried lustily for several hours.
Inheriting the signature Bercator blonde hair and the hazel eyes their mother had passed on, Firenze thought Dominic was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen. So what if he was the fourth child, he was not going to be the heir, and he wasn’t going to be the spare that was bequeathed to church or military. He was hers, and she determined that she would raise him to be that elusive thing which women of her generation had so adored: a gentleman; an artiste; to be graceful, to be elegant, and perhaps a little bit of the daughter that Hollis had so far failed to be.
In some ways she succeeded. Without any need for a further son, Lennox had taken a backseat and retained his focus on Hollis, Quinn and Lude, leaving Dominic and Paz to their mother. As a result, Dominic Bercator was in the first instance nothing like his brothers or his sister. Paz, too, took after the rest where Dominic failed to. The natural par for the course in a Bercator household was strength, manhood, intelligence, a propensity towards manipulation, pecking order, and toeing the line visibly whilst orchestrating whatever plots you wished to hatch under the surface. Dominic was intelligent, yes, but strong, no, and a long history of ill health plagued his youth. It is to be imagined that Firenze played this up far more than necessary; the sicker Dominic was, the less likely he would go out and be assimilated into the Bercator mold. Useless with a sword, she taught him to wield a pen and paintbrush, to communicate with the lightest touch of finger to ivory keys and hammer-struck strings that produced Dominic’s own form of emotional manipulation. Music became his passion, the paintbrush a medium for the dreams of landscape and lifestyle in his head.
Disappointingly for Firenze, Dominic’s siblings did not ostracise him as the strong often do to the weak. Instead he was lured from the nursery with prank and story, and where he was, perhaps, too weak to pick up a sword and deal out damage, there was nothing stopping Hollis, Quinn, and Lude from including him in their rowdy games. It was their unconscious intervention that saved him from becoming one of those dilettante boys who cling to their mother’s skirts, their playful fists and hazing that enabled him to learn to laugh it off and heal, and sometimes, just sometimes, hit back - and if his fists were never as solid as Quinn’s or as fast as Lude’s, it wasn’t a problem. Dominic’s strength lay in his thoughtfulness, his moderation, and his ability to appease. When Paz joined them, four years younger than Dominic, the family unit was complete, the country air, open spaces, and port town combining to produce a childhood that was perhaps a shade wilder than Firenze strictly approved of.
Despite that, Dominic remained his mother’s favourite, and strove to please her as much as any son in his situation would. He was also extremely close to Hollis, who stepped in when the games became too rough for him to handle, knew when the limits of his patience and strength had been sapped, knew before he did when it was time to leave and let Lennox play father to the children he needed as opposed to the children he had.
When she left, Dominic knew she hadn’t been kidnapped. A niggle in the back of his head told him Hollis had chosen to leave, had run to the winds and left the rest of them to pick up the pieces. It took a long time to forgive her for it, years in fact, a small, simmering pot of resentment that still flares occasionally although Dominic does his best to hide it. He’s eighteen now, nearly nineteen, he shouldn’t be grouchy over something that happened so long ago.
The only good thing that happened as a result of Hollis’ disappearance was that they got to travel more. As with most of the Bercators from Aix Mazarine, Dominic has a strong affinity for the sea. He loves the tang of salt on the air, loves the taste of it on his tongue, the feel of the wind in his hair. In truth, half of the frowns he directs towards Hollis are glimpses of envy. She got to experience the freedom of the waves and the intricacies of new coastlines and cultures without the trails and trappings of rank.
‘Searching for Hollis’ became an excuse all four of the remaining children were given for numerous boat trips, although of all of them Dominic and Quinn were the most eager. Quinn wanted to find his sister and slap the daylights out of her; Dominic just wanted to see what adventures lay on the other side of the thin blue line - if he slapped Hollis, she’d slap back and probably break his arm.
In the end, it turned out to be far more of an adventure than he could ever have imagined.
When Dominic was thirteen, a trip to Italy coincided with a public execution of the Church, the burning at the stake of a convicted witch. With little to no interest, Lennox had been content to ignore it and continue about his business, but Firenze, her traditionalism in line with how the Citadel viewed Others, decided it would be both fitting and educational for her children to witness what happened when one Deviated from the Path of Purity and managed to get them a spectacular viewpoint overlooking the whole disgusting affair. Naturally, Quinn and Lude were pleased as punch, their bloodthirsty teenage hormones eating up the screams. Paz hid her face in her father’s jacket, weeping openly. It was no place for a preteen to be.
Dominic, as he so often did, remained perfectly still and quiet while he gathered his thoughts and put them in order. The faggots and straw had not been piled so high as he had heard, and they left the victim’s face free. It was a woman - no, a girl, really, a girl with eyes as pale and green as a cat’s. It was no wonder she had been deemed guilty, but Dominic fiercely disagreed with the method used to punish her. In Aix Mazarine there walked people of all natures, a melting pot of society that got along by default. This sort of persecution was incredibly wrong on every level. For the first time in his life, Dominic directly disagreed with his mother. No God who supported this kind of event could be considered benevolent or worthy of following.
It was while he was finalizing these thoughts in his mind that it happened. Somehow between the threads of straw and the flicker of orange death at her feet, the woman locked eyes with him. She mouthed something, but he could neither hear her nor speak Italian, so all form of communication was rendered impossible. His fingers tightened on the balcony fencing, the polite mask he was required to wear in public cracking to reveal the absolute helplessness he felt at being unable to stop it. Pity warred with sympathy, and then something else moved in.
Dominic could not describe it, that feeling, the cold, invasive push of someone else’s mind overriding his own. He had no way of telling how he, a boy who could barely hit a target with an arrow at twenty paces, plucked a dagger from his belt and cast it above the heads of countless peasants and churchmen to see its point buried in the burning girl’s chest. The only thing he remembers is fainting, the summer heat of Italy too much for him, the mocking laughter of Quinn and Lude as they considered which shade of dress to purchase for their ‘sister’ on his next birthday. To this day, he is ignorant of how it happened without anyone seeing, would think he imagined it, even, but for the beating he got later that day for misplacing the valuable dagger and the fact that his eyes, once hazel, were now green, pale as glass.
It raised a few eyebrows.
His mother, bless her, considered it a sign from Cita that their visit to the Roman Church’s execution was in good favour. She thanked the Deity for his benevolence, suggested strongly to Dominic that he think about an eventual career in the Church of Cita. The rest of the family officially bought the story, although with varied levels of skepticism, and when nothing else out of the ordinary surfaced, it was gradually forgotten that Dominic Bercator had ever had hazel eyes to begin with.
At least until Hollis returned.
By that point, other things had started going wrong. Puberty had brought with it a whole host of interesting events, from the onset of firm, no-arguments training in sword and bow courtesy of Quinn and Lude to the sudden appearance of height. The Bercators were by genetics a tall family, but whatever illnesses had held Dominic back from growth as a child abruptly seemed to release their hold. He grew, and grew, and grew, until he stood inches taller than Lude, and even a good inch over Quinn. Unlike them, he didn’t bulk, and the common joke between the boys was that he made up for lack of muscle by being able to see over the kitchen wall to make sure Cook wasn’t around when thieving pies. Everyone had their uses.
He became interested in people; in other hormonal people, to be precise, and although he knew he was supposed to be looking only at the brimming bosoms and cat-slap hips swishing around the castle, his eyes wandered every which way, from the bulk of tensed muscle to the rough stubble on chins he had, hither to, never noticed. Confusion reigned supreme, and it was with some relief that he realised, on his fifteenth birthday, that Lude had procured him a delightful young whore by which to settle the argument once and for all. It didn’t settle anything, truth be told, but it certainly helped.
It was almost immediately after that the voices started. Wherever he went, whether it was in the depths of the Castle or in out in remote areas of the cliffs, they followed him, whispering for attention, begging for him to talk to them, threatening him that if he didn’t, they’d hurt him, they’d throw him off the cliff - just like they had been. They were dead, Dominic realised. He was imagining that he was talking to dead people. Had that whore given him something to affect his mind? Even as he considered it, Dominic knew he was incorrect. This curse that hounded his days was not insanity, it was not an illness that ate away at his mind. It was linked to his eyes, his alien green eyes and the witch that had created them. He had turned into the very thing that his mother would have burned.
It got to the point where Dominic would avoid certain rooms in the castle: the stables, for example, where there was a boy named Mandel who’d been kicked in the head and died from it, his father’s office, where nefarious hints of ancestral Bercators alternately purred and hissed that their offspring had produced the ability to hear them. He avoided the rock outside the front, where his father, and his father, and many father’s before that, had had to execute pirates and smugglers alike, and as for his mother’s boudoir, the old harridan in the corner who liked to stroke his hair and croon lullabies which nobody else could hear drove him to utter distraction.
Dismayed and confused, Dominic withdrew from the castle’s society as much as he could and retreated to his crow’s nest suite of rooms that overlooked the rolling sea. His brothers didn’t understand, but how could they - how could he tell them that the green eyes he had inherited from Italy were not a sign of Cita’s favour at all, but a sign of Hell pushed upon him by a desperate witch and her need to pass her ability on. He pled illness, pled the need to paint, to play the piano, to create, create, create, - and he did just that, producing canvas after canvas of people long dead, their lives strewn around them in oil and charcoal and the stains of the sea.
When Hollis returned, when she finally returned, he told her everything. He hadn’t meant to, at first, hadn’t wanted to see her at all, in fact. Hollis, though, bereft of her lover and caged, had not taken no for an answer and invaded his tower-top room. She found him a wreck, he found her bereaved, and for a few hours it was as if she had never left. He still hasn’t forgiven her, though.
Now at eighteen, life has held another upheaval. It was a somber day when Lennox announced that his brother’s family had all been assassinated and that they, Lennox, Firenze, and all of their children, were required to move immediately to Tyrol to take up the Bercator seat of power. Predictably, Quinn was thrilled, Hollis quiet, Lude a mixture of joy at the idea of the women Tyrol held, and reluctance at leaving the castle that had just become his inheritance. Quinn would inherit the Tyrol estate, leaving Lude more than he had ever dreamed of having.
Dominic, too, received a promotion. With Lude otherwise occupied, he would be expected to fill his brother’s shoes and join either the military or the church. Neither were a particularly appealing prospect, but of the two, it was no surprise at all that he selected to join the Church. The idea of joining the Golden Hour was very appealing, but to do so would come too close to admitting what he was. His mother would be ever so disappointed with him if he made that decision, and so for various reasons, he chose to apply to join Cita and His Followers at the Citadel. Such a decision would further the family’s status within the capital city, and served to please both parents. To his siblings it was more of a surprise, for Dominic had never borne any open love for the religion, and in fact loathed it, but what better place to orchestrate change than from within the very bowels of the monster?
Nevertheless, he viewed the move to Tyrol as something to be feared. He’d become accustomed to the ghosts of Nettle’s Nest, grown fond of them, had achieved a balance and a skill that allowed him to avoid answering them when he was in public. It had become a game, and one that he was not only sorrowful to lose., but frightened that the new location in a new city with new ghosts - possibly including those of his immediate uncle and cousins - would add stakes to the game that he was ill-equipped to meet.
Personality: Dominic Bercator is a particular young man. He likes people calling him by his full name rather than shortened nicknames, although he will occasionally answer to Dom if it’s used by his parents or a person in authority. His brothers (and sometimes Hollis) still tease him by referring to him with his ‘childhood’ nickname of Domi, which he finds both irritating and endearing at the same time. Self-conscious and reserved, there is an aloof quality to his activities around other people that is a direct result of natural shyness and paranoia. He speaks softly, but if he’s not paying attention, his comments can be sharp, revealing the quick mind and sniping tongue of Bercator renown. In day to day activity, Dominic can wax and wane between reservation and unstoppable chatter. He picks his friends carefully and prizes them above all else, handling them with utmost care in case they discover his secret and abandon him. He is exceptionally conscious of what other people think about him, but despite that knows where to draw the line and is far from obsequious or a suck-up, instead coming across earnest and perhaps a little more serious than his years should entail. This is balanced out whenever he is around his siblings or friends, when he laughs easily and quite enjoys playing the part of the hazed younger brother.
He is liable to avoid confrontation wherever possible, preferring to rely on stronger people around him to fight battles for him, although when absolutely necessary he will step forward and prevail on his own merit as much as he is able. All too often he sees both sides of an argument and has to bite his tongue to ensure he toes the party line. He is easily spooked, easily unsettled, and any mention of Burning at the Stake is enough to produce a hitch in his chest and a cold sweat on his brow. He gives the impression of being easily distracted, often absorbed in the conflicting personalities surrounding him, and often suffers from the idea of never actually being alone. He seeks solace from the resulting mood swings with paintbrush and piano, the former private, the latter producing improvised melodies that expunge the depression from his system. He is a dependent personality and has never had to look after himself in any kind of capacity barring the protection of his mental state and his family’s reputation, which he will defend to the death. He is deathly afraid of being outed as an Other, not because he fears for his own safety, but because he fears the disapproval of his father and siblings and the undoubted pain that it would cause to his mother. He would take his life himself before proving such an embarrassment.
Appearance: At an extremely slender six feet and three inches, Dominic Bercator gives the impression of a feather about to blow away in the first strong breeze. His build is more akin to his sisters’ than matching his stronger brothers. Like every other Bercator, his razor-cut hair is blonde, his skin fair, although his eyes are a rather startlingly pale green which can accidentally give him a cold appearance. He tans only lightly, and in the centre of his breastbone he evidences a scar that looks faintly as though he were at one time stabbed. He dresses carefully, insists on knowing theme and formality for each event he attends, and pays attention to his appearance at all times. He is excessively clean, demands a bath at least once if not twice a day, and abhors any form of dirt. Again, this does not stop him engaging in tomfoolery with his more boyish brethren, but you can expect him to insist on a thorough wash afterwards. He maintains a public front of polite, careful attention, although a close observer would be able to detect a permanent edge of uncertainty in his eyes and frequent lack of focus as though he is listening to a song that only he can hear. His hands are the strongest part of him, fingers long, slender, and supple, and he carries a scent of sweetened sea salt and paint.
Languages Known: English, French, a little Spanish, a little Italian Skills: formality, painting/drawing, piano/composition, remaining outwardly calm, well-mannered, book-learning. Strengths: Adaptable, quick-thinking, excessively willing to please, being fair, supporting the underdog, being a younger brother, a good memory, very fast runner. Weaknesses: Easily frightened, somewhat shy, can come across as being overly reserved, too willing to please, vulnerable, dependent, confidence, relies on his sister and parents to make most decisions, low confidence, perpetually distracted, cannot multi-task, useless at physical forms of fighting.
Let’s go back a few years. Eighteen and eleven months, to be a little more exact, when Dominic, fourth child, third son, was born in absolute silence. Every baby cries, the midwife exclaimed, and smacked him again just in case he was defective. Luckily for all involved, Dominic decided that being hit was unpleasant, and cried lustily for several hours.
Inheriting the signature Bercator blonde hair and the hazel eyes their mother had passed on, Firenze thought Dominic was the most beautiful creature she’d ever seen. So what if he was the fourth child, he was not going to be the heir, and he wasn’t going to be the spare that was bequeathed to church or military. He was hers, and she determined that she would raise him to be that elusive thing which women of her generation had so adored: a gentleman; an artiste; to be graceful, to be elegant, and perhaps a little bit of the daughter that Hollis had so far failed to be.
In some ways she succeeded. Without any need for a further son, Lennox had taken a backseat and retained his focus on Hollis, Quinn and Lude, leaving Dominic and Paz to their mother. As a result, Dominic Bercator was in the first instance nothing like his brothers or his sister. Paz, too, took after the rest where Dominic failed to. The natural par for the course in a Bercator household was strength, manhood, intelligence, a propensity towards manipulation, pecking order, and toeing the line visibly whilst orchestrating whatever plots you wished to hatch under the surface. Dominic was intelligent, yes, but strong, no, and a long history of ill health plagued his youth. It is to be imagined that Firenze played this up far more than necessary; the sicker Dominic was, the less likely he would go out and be assimilated into the Bercator mold. Useless with a sword, she taught him to wield a pen and paintbrush, to communicate with the lightest touch of finger to ivory keys and hammer-struck strings that produced Dominic’s own form of emotional manipulation. Music became his passion, the paintbrush a medium for the dreams of landscape and lifestyle in his head.
Disappointingly for Firenze, Dominic’s siblings did not ostracise him as the strong often do to the weak. Instead he was lured from the nursery with prank and story, and where he was, perhaps, too weak to pick up a sword and deal out damage, there was nothing stopping Hollis, Quinn, and Lude from including him in their rowdy games. It was their unconscious intervention that saved him from becoming one of those dilettante boys who cling to their mother’s skirts, their playful fists and hazing that enabled him to learn to laugh it off and heal, and sometimes, just sometimes, hit back - and if his fists were never as solid as Quinn’s or as fast as Lude’s, it wasn’t a problem. Dominic’s strength lay in his thoughtfulness, his moderation, and his ability to appease. When Paz joined them, four years younger than Dominic, the family unit was complete, the country air, open spaces, and port town combining to produce a childhood that was perhaps a shade wilder than Firenze strictly approved of.
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When she left, Dominic knew she hadn’t been kidnapped. A niggle in the back of his head told him Hollis had chosen to leave, had run to the winds and left the rest of them to pick up the pieces. It took a long time to forgive her for it, years in fact, a small, simmering pot of resentment that still flares occasionally although Dominic does his best to hide it. He’s eighteen now, nearly nineteen, he shouldn’t be grouchy over something that happened so long ago.
The only good thing that happened as a result of Hollis’ disappearance was that they got to travel more. As with most of the Bercators from Aix Mazarine, Dominic has a strong affinity for the sea. He loves the tang of salt on the air, loves the taste of it on his tongue, the feel of the wind in his hair. In truth, half of the frowns he directs towards Hollis are glimpses of envy. She got to experience the freedom of the waves and the intricacies of new coastlines and cultures without the trails and trappings of rank.
‘Searching for Hollis’ became an excuse all four of the remaining children were given for numerous boat trips, although of all of them Dominic and Quinn were the most eager. Quinn wanted to find his sister and slap the daylights out of her; Dominic just wanted to see what adventures lay on the other side of the thin blue line - if he slapped Hollis, she’d slap back and probably break his arm.
In the end, it turned out to be far more of an adventure than he could ever have imagined.
When Dominic was thirteen, a trip to Italy coincided with a public execution of the Church, the burning at the stake of a convicted witch. With little to no interest, Lennox had been content to ignore it and continue about his business, but Firenze, her traditionalism in line with how the Citadel viewed Others, decided it would be both fitting and educational for her children to witness what happened when one Deviated from the Path of Purity and managed to get them a spectacular viewpoint overlooking the whole disgusting affair. Naturally, Quinn and Lude were pleased as punch, their bloodthirsty teenage hormones eating up the screams. Paz hid her face in her father’s jacket, weeping openly. It was no place for a preteen to be.
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It was while he was finalizing these thoughts in his mind that it happened. Somehow between the threads of straw and the flicker of orange death at her feet, the woman locked eyes with him. She mouthed something, but he could neither hear her nor speak Italian, so all form of communication was rendered impossible. His fingers tightened on the balcony fencing, the polite mask he was required to wear in public cracking to reveal the absolute helplessness he felt at being unable to stop it. Pity warred with sympathy, and then something else moved in.
Dominic could not describe it, that feeling, the cold, invasive push of someone else’s mind overriding his own. He had no way of telling how he, a boy who could barely hit a target with an arrow at twenty paces, plucked a dagger from his belt and cast it above the heads of countless peasants and churchmen to see its point buried in the burning girl’s chest. The only thing he remembers is fainting, the summer heat of Italy too much for him, the mocking laughter of Quinn and Lude as they considered which shade of dress to purchase for their ‘sister’ on his next birthday. To this day, he is ignorant of how it happened without anyone seeing, would think he imagined it, even, but for the beating he got later that day for misplacing the valuable dagger and the fact that his eyes, once hazel, were now green, pale as glass.
It raised a few eyebrows.
His mother, bless her, considered it a sign from Cita that their visit to the Roman Church’s execution was in good favour. She thanked the Deity for his benevolence, suggested strongly to Dominic that he think about an eventual career in the Church of Cita. The rest of the family officially bought the story, although with varied levels of skepticism, and when nothing else out of the ordinary surfaced, it was gradually forgotten that Dominic Bercator had ever had hazel eyes to begin with.
At least until Hollis returned.
By that point, other things had started going wrong. Puberty had brought with it a whole host of interesting events, from the onset of firm, no-arguments training in sword and bow courtesy of Quinn and Lude to the sudden appearance of height. The Bercators were by genetics a tall family, but whatever illnesses had held Dominic back from growth as a child abruptly seemed to release their hold. He grew, and grew, and grew, until he stood inches taller than Lude, and even a good inch over Quinn. Unlike them, he didn’t bulk, and the common joke between the boys was that he made up for lack of muscle by being able to see over the kitchen wall to make sure Cook wasn’t around when thieving pies. Everyone had their uses.
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It was almost immediately after that the voices started. Wherever he went, whether it was in the depths of the Castle or in out in remote areas of the cliffs, they followed him, whispering for attention, begging for him to talk to them, threatening him that if he didn’t, they’d hurt him, they’d throw him off the cliff - just like they had been. They were dead, Dominic realised. He was imagining that he was talking to dead people. Had that whore given him something to affect his mind? Even as he considered it, Dominic knew he was incorrect. This curse that hounded his days was not insanity, it was not an illness that ate away at his mind. It was linked to his eyes, his alien green eyes and the witch that had created them. He had turned into the very thing that his mother would have burned.
It got to the point where Dominic would avoid certain rooms in the castle: the stables, for example, where there was a boy named Mandel who’d been kicked in the head and died from it, his father’s office, where nefarious hints of ancestral Bercators alternately purred and hissed that their offspring had produced the ability to hear them. He avoided the rock outside the front, where his father, and his father, and many father’s before that, had had to execute pirates and smugglers alike, and as for his mother’s boudoir, the old harridan in the corner who liked to stroke his hair and croon lullabies which nobody else could hear drove him to utter distraction.
Dismayed and confused, Dominic withdrew from the castle’s society as much as he could and retreated to his crow’s nest suite of rooms that overlooked the rolling sea. His brothers didn’t understand, but how could they - how could he tell them that the green eyes he had inherited from Italy were not a sign of Cita’s favour at all, but a sign of Hell pushed upon him by a desperate witch and her need to pass her ability on. He pled illness, pled the need to paint, to play the piano, to create, create, create, - and he did just that, producing canvas after canvas of people long dead, their lives strewn around them in oil and charcoal and the stains of the sea.
When Hollis returned, when she finally returned, he told her everything. He hadn’t meant to, at first, hadn’t wanted to see her at all, in fact. Hollis, though, bereft of her lover and caged, had not taken no for an answer and invaded his tower-top room. She found him a wreck, he found her bereaved, and for a few hours it was as if she had never left. He still hasn’t forgiven her, though.
Now at eighteen, life has held another upheaval. It was a somber day when Lennox announced that his brother’s family had all been assassinated and that they, Lennox, Firenze, and all of their children, were required to move immediately to Tyrol to take up the Bercator seat of power. Predictably, Quinn was thrilled, Hollis quiet, Lude a mixture of joy at the idea of the women Tyrol held, and reluctance at leaving the castle that had just become his inheritance. Quinn would inherit the Tyrol estate, leaving Lude more than he had ever dreamed of having.
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Nevertheless, he viewed the move to Tyrol as something to be feared. He’d become accustomed to the ghosts of Nettle’s Nest, grown fond of them, had achieved a balance and a skill that allowed him to avoid answering them when he was in public. It had become a game, and one that he was not only sorrowful to lose., but frightened that the new location in a new city with new ghosts - possibly including those of his immediate uncle and cousins - would add stakes to the game that he was ill-equipped to meet.
Personality:
Dominic Bercator is a particular young man. He likes people calling him by his full name rather than shortened nicknames, although he will occasionally answer to Dom if it’s used by his parents or a person in authority. His brothers (and sometimes Hollis) still tease him by referring to him with his ‘childhood’ nickname of Domi, which he finds both irritating and endearing at the same time. Self-conscious and reserved, there is an aloof quality to his activities around other people that is a direct result of natural shyness and paranoia. He speaks softly, but if he’s not paying attention, his comments can be sharp, revealing the quick mind and sniping tongue of Bercator renown. In day to day activity, Dominic can wax and wane between reservation and unstoppable chatter. He picks his friends carefully and prizes them above all else, handling them with utmost care in case they discover his secret and abandon him. He is exceptionally conscious of what other people think about him, but despite that knows where to draw the line and is far from obsequious or a suck-up, instead coming across earnest and perhaps a little more serious than his years should entail. This is balanced out whenever he is around his siblings or friends, when he laughs easily and quite enjoys playing the part of the hazed younger brother.
He is liable to avoid confrontation wherever possible, preferring to rely on stronger people around him to fight battles for him, although when absolutely necessary he will step forward and prevail on his own merit as much as he is able. All too often he sees both sides of an argument and has to bite his tongue to ensure he toes the party line. He is easily spooked, easily unsettled, and any mention of Burning at the Stake is enough to produce a hitch in his chest and a cold sweat on his brow. He gives the impression of being easily distracted, often absorbed in the conflicting personalities surrounding him, and often suffers from the idea of never actually being alone. He seeks solace from the resulting mood swings with paintbrush and piano, the former private, the latter producing improvised melodies that expunge the depression from his system. He is a dependent personality and has never had to look after himself in any kind of capacity barring the protection of his mental state and his family’s reputation, which he will defend to the death. He is deathly afraid of being outed as an Other, not because he fears for his own safety, but because he fears the disapproval of his father and siblings and the undoubted pain that it would cause to his mother. He would take his life himself before proving such an embarrassment.
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Appearance:
At an extremely slender six feet and three inches, Dominic Bercator gives the impression of a feather about to blow away in the first strong breeze. His build is more akin to his sisters’ than matching his stronger brothers. Like every other Bercator, his razor-cut hair is blonde, his skin fair, although his eyes are a rather startlingly pale green which can accidentally give him a cold appearance. He tans only lightly, and in the centre of his breastbone he evidences a scar that looks faintly as though he were at one time stabbed. He dresses carefully, insists on knowing theme and formality for each event he attends, and pays attention to his appearance at all times. He is excessively clean, demands a bath at least once if not twice a day, and abhors any form of dirt. Again, this does not stop him engaging in tomfoolery with his more boyish brethren, but you can expect him to insist on a thorough wash afterwards. He maintains a public front of polite, careful attention, although a close observer would be able to detect a permanent edge of uncertainty in his eyes and frequent lack of focus as though he is listening to a song that only he can hear. His hands are the strongest part of him, fingers long, slender, and supple, and he carries a scent of sweetened sea salt and paint.
Languages Known: English, French, a little Spanish, a little Italian
Skills: formality, painting/drawing, piano/composition, remaining outwardly calm, well-mannered, book-learning.
Strengths: Adaptable, quick-thinking, excessively willing to please, being fair, supporting the underdog, being a younger brother, a good memory, very fast runner.
Weaknesses: Easily frightened, somewhat shy, can come across as being overly reserved, too willing to please, vulnerable, dependent, confidence, relies on his sister and parents to make most decisions, low confidence, perpetually distracted, cannot multi-task, useless at physical forms of fighting.
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