OOC: How I write Sark...
Note: Almost everything here is personal headcanon, gleaned from details from actual canon and expanded upon. considering how few details there are. I do not mean to suggest that any of this is actual fact- it’s just how I write the character. This is also woefully incomplete, but whatever. I've just been meaning to put this up FOREVER.
History
-Born in Moscow, Russia on June 14, 1981. His birthname is Julian Afanisey Lazarey.
-Who his mother is greatly depends on what ‘verse I’m working with, but in every ‘verse the story is pretty much the same: the woman was Lazarey’s mistress who either died in childbirth or left the child in Lazarey’s hands, believing that he would take care of him.
-As it was a well-known fact that Lazarey’s wife was sick and near death and thus couldn’t conceive, Lazarey was paranoid of anyone finding out he was unfaithful through his bastard son and left Julian in the hands of servants, so, for the first couple of years of his life, Julian never saw his father’s face.
-Showed signs of being a prodigy at a very young age, but was mostly too quiet and withdrawn to prove it.
-Was abused by his father in the period between Lazarey’s wife’s death and the time he was left at boarding school in England. Lazarey was prone to bouts of drinking due to his depression and took a great deal of his frustration on his wife’s death out on Julian.
-Sent to the Westminster School in England at the age of five, a full two years younger than most boys are allowed to be admitted. He arrived in the company of Nicolai Stravinsky, his father’s best friend, attaché, and personal physician, who claimed that he would return for him during the holidays on his father’s orders, but he never showed up again. Julian was smart enough to realize that this meant he’d been abandoned.
-Due to the worthless feeling associated with both being abandoned and his father’s general disregard for him, he threw himself into everything he could find, clawing his way to the top of the heap on sheer premature ambition just to prove to his father that he wasn’t a complete waste. It was never a matter of perfection with him, it was a matter of being the best. Despite being two years younger than his peers, he excelled faster than any of them, which intimidated most of the other students and set him up as a target for harassment and bullying for others. For that reason, he became extremely avoidant and shy around other children.
-Spent his holidays learning how to pick the pockets of people around the city.
-By thirteen, he was doing college level maths and science and reading at a phenomenally high level- that coupled with his ambition and the fact that he passed a certain standardized test with flying colors attracted the attention (on top of his father being a renowned Rambaldi scholar) of one Irina Derevko, who pulled him out of school and set about to training him.
-Was broken extensively as part of an experiment to see if one could turn children into actual spies, not just sleeper agents- a continuation of Project Christmas’s protocols (this plan was designed by Alexander Khasinau, who believed that children, if they could be properly trained, could be better assets than adults). The project was a success, but it was scrapped as being too much trouble for the long term. Julian (now going by the name of Julian Sark), however, took to his training so well that Irina began to groom him as her lieutenant and protege.
-For the first three years of his training, he shadowed Irina while on operations. Being forcibly thrown into that world on top of his conditioning put him in a position to accept and come to appreciate that life.
-Met Nicolai Stravinsky again, who had left Russia and fell in with a bad enough crowd to wind up becoming a torture expert. Apparently, it is a small word after all.
-He lost his virginity at the age of fifteen to Katya Derevko when he spent the summer with her while Irina was out working on her own, although no one knows this except the two of them. If Sark ever had to own up to it, he'd say that he did it out of childish annoyance at Irina leaving him behind.
-Became a full-fledged operative by the age of sixteen and, at that point, was permitted to take on missions on his own.
-Was tortured extensively at the age of seventeen, after being captured by an enemy spy. He was extracted, but not before revealing a few details about Irina's operation. Thankfully, the safehouse he had compromised had been one already discovered by the CIA and by allowing her enemies to ransack it, it set them all up for capture. It was lucky, but that stroke of luck was what kept Sark alive and inspired her to let him give her up should he ever be captured, because she could find a way to use it to her advantage.
-He and McKenas Cole were partners for a very brief time when Cole was first brought into Irina's fold. "Brief," of course, meaning they went on one mission together. Sark will never tell anyone what happened on that mission, but it probably has a lot to do with why he's terrified of Cole.
-Met Allison Doren when he was nineteen and the two of them carried on a secret affair under Irina's nose. Sark has tried to avoid thinking that Irina ordered Allison to undergo Project Helix to punish him for letting himself get distracted from his work, although that's probably exactly what happened.
Canon (You can assume that anything not expanded upon here happened just the way it did in canon.)
-Became Irina’s Director of Operations immediately following his successful raid on FTL (he was 20, at the time). He and Cole were both up for the position, so Sark got it by default when Cole was taken into custody, but Irina probably would have given it to him anyway.
-Everything that happened with him in the first half of S2 was done on Irina’s orders- Sark, at that point in his life, wasn’t really capable of handling his own operation (note that when Sark tends to get IDEAS in his head on his own, they, uh, generally fail) and was just acting as a proxy, while Irina was infiltrating the CIA.
-He knew Irina was going to give him up in Stockholm. He did not know that she was never going to come back for him. He never quite forgave her for that… Well, until she came back and hired him again, that is, but he was still really sore about it.
-He was actually genuinely pleased when he found out that Sydney wasn’t really dead.
-He really and truly expected to get killed when he was traded to San'ko.
-The Covenant was really the sticking point to his wanting to become a free agent, because they treated him like the worst kind of dog and it made him bristly. The only reason he never tried to leave them was because they had his money and because they knew they’d kill him if he tried to run.
-The only reason The Covenant never killed him anyway for being an insubordinate little shit is because Cole told them not to. Cole likes Sark a lot. Sark is terrified of him for reasons I haven’t figured out yet.
-He did not kill that couple in Façade. That was extravagant and pointless and he could have gotten his own ticket for that flight without the unnecessary body count.
-He loved Lauren more than Lauren loved him and, in fact, knew this. Everything he told Vaughn about what Lauren said about his passion and how she loved him was just a load of crock to make Vaughn twitch and just something he wished were true.
-The only time he ever felt guilty for his own actions was when he gave Lauren up and, thus, contributed to her eventual death. The whole thing really broke him.
-That guilt was pretty much the sole reason he decided to go legit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to sustain him.
-He was actually only legit for a few months and was planning on coming back into the game when the boredom overtook him, but sort of got dragged into it when agents of Elena Derevko tracked him down and tortured him for information on the Mueller Device when Irina wouldn’t break. He escaped with his life and wound up in Savgoda trying to track Irina down… So he was there that whole time, just somehow missed most of the major action. He did, in fact, intercept Irina at the border. Irina, however, didn’t want him back as her lieutenant and essentially sent him off to be a free agent, promising she’d call him if she ever needed him.
-Used his ambition and obsession with being the best to rise through the ranks of freelancers.
-He did/does really like Rachel Nichols, but a lot of it is because she’s fascinatingly similar to Sydney. He also really didn’t want to torture her, but he doesn’t disobey orders easily.
-He really, really didn’t want to set off those nukes, but, again, he doesn’t disobey orders easily. He thought the whole thing was excessive and pointless.
-After Vaughn let him go, he went deep underground for a few years and when he finally resurfaced, he'd gathered enough resources to put himself back on the map, although, occasionally he was more than willing to sell his own clients out secretly to the CIA for an extra paycheck.
Psychology
-Fears abandonment and being considered worthless most of all and every other fear he has is just a smaller part of either one or both of those two things.
-He’s afraid of dying because it means that the world would go on without him and, in the end, nothing he ever did meant much of anything. In the end, he’ll just be one person to be forgotten.
-He considers Irina his primary maternal figure while still being deeply attracted to her (which is ridiculously oedipal, really) and tends to seek out women who remind him of her- strong, domineering, often controlling, etc.
-Conversely, he's in love with Sydney Bristow because she both reminds him of her mother and is his exact opposite. His feelings for Sydney Bristow fluctuate between lust, respect, jealousy, and a variety of other emotions and sometimes it's hard for him to say whether he wants her as a partner, a lover, an adversary or some weird combination of all three. One thing's for certain, if he weren't usually under orders to eliminate her if she gets in the way of his employer's plans, he would never actually be able to bring himself to kill her. He likes having her around even if she does get him in a confused snit.
-He never once blamed Irina for the torture he had to endure as part of his conditioning- it was a necessary evil to get him to the point he is now and he’d rather be anything that than that lonely, withdrawn, worthless child that Andrian Lazarey abandoned.
-He loves being a spy, because it gives him power and forces people to respect him. For someone who had a whole lot of neither growing up, both are things he craves deeply.
-He's surprisingly affectionate behind closed doors, but he has a reputation to uphold when out in public, so it's very rare that anyone other than the people he finds worthy of his affections actually see that side of him.
-His competence is greatly dependent on who has control over him, because he was hardwired to follow orders to the point that it takes a great force of effort to actively disobey a direct order. He's gotten to a point where most of the plans he concocts on his own without the aide of someone telling him what to do tend to fail epicly. Despite being calculated, he's not a strategist at all and it usually shows.
-It annoys the hell out of him when people don't take him seriously because of his age, hence why he tries his hardest to appear older than he is... It doesn't work, because even with the suits and the clipped, articulate, well-educated vernacular... He still looks like a little boy. Making fun of his age and ability is probably one of the most surefire ways to piss him off.
-McKenas Cole is the only person who has ever consistently outright terrified him.
-He has a capacity for hatred, but he doesn't often think most people are worth getting that annoyed at. He hates Michael Vaughn with a blind fervor, however.
-He detests senseless violence for the sake of violence, but will do whatever his employers tell him to, because that's just what he does. He shows no remorse for his actions, however, simply because he was trained not to, and whether he likes what he's being asked to do means nothing in the long run. He takes no pleasure in killing people who didn't have it coming to them, but it's just a fact of the job and nothing more.
-If anyone asks, he'd rather tell people that he willingly joined up with Irina and he was always a amoral little shit, because somehow that's better than admitting that he was absolutely nothing before Irina found him and she had to tear him apart to make him what he is right now. It deeply bothers him that he was broken and twisted into this and never actually made the choice. He likes his job, but after all that conditioning, it really becomes debatable whether he likes it because he likes it or because he was conditioned to like it. It's a fucking crazy thing.
Other Random Facts
-One thing he was never able to do was play the piano flawlessly, but not for a lack of trying.
-Because he wasn’t much for instruments, he was placed in the choir in the hopes to socialize him better. It didn’t work, but now he has a very classically trained voice, provided you can get him to sing.
-Was never actively interested in Rambaldi as a lifestyle, but he was fascinated by the artifacts and the sort of things they could do. Most of his interest was because of Irina.
-Hates tea. This bothers people, apparently. He does have a fondness for coffee, however.
-If he's mad or frustrated enough to swear, he will only use invectives in languages other than English (it's more polite that way somehow) and because of this, he can swear in more languages than he actually speaks fluently.
-Technically, he speaks eight languages fluently- English, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Irish-Gaelic, Hindi, French, and Spanish and speaks several others passably well.
-Socially, he'll drink just about anything even if he doesn't particularly enjoy it (but he usually won't drink very much of it if he doesn't). He prefers red wine and champagne over pretty much anything else. He doesn't particularly care for white wine.
-Extremely well-read and has a rather eclectic taste in literature, although if you asked, he'd only make it a point to mention the more pretentious classic titles he enjoys and never, you know, own up to the fact that he read Watership Down seventy-five times when he was in school. He's also fond of poetry, although not to an extreme extent. His favorite line is, unsurprisingly, something by Alexander Pope: "I am his Highness's dog at Kew. Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?"
-Had to pick up ballroom dancing for the sake of a mission and hated every second of it... Until he got to the tango. He's fucking good at the tango.
-He has a passion for Cryptology and is damn good at cracking ciphers. It's one of his primary talents.
-He makes it a point to never get drunk because when he drinks too much, he doesn't stop talking. More information could probably be gotten out of him by shoving hard liquor down his throat than torture, more than likely. He also tends to be a moody, existential drunk and no one wants that.
-There are a lot of weird, ridiculous, and often creepy things that he knows, but he is so weak on modern pop culture that most references of that nature will completely go over his head. It's kind of pathetic, honestly, in an adorable way.
-Despite the above, he is rather fond of James Bond film, but mostly for the irony.
History
-Born in Moscow, Russia on June 14, 1981. His birthname is Julian Afanisey Lazarey.
-Who his mother is greatly depends on what ‘verse I’m working with, but in every ‘verse the story is pretty much the same: the woman was Lazarey’s mistress who either died in childbirth or left the child in Lazarey’s hands, believing that he would take care of him.
-As it was a well-known fact that Lazarey’s wife was sick and near death and thus couldn’t conceive, Lazarey was paranoid of anyone finding out he was unfaithful through his bastard son and left Julian in the hands of servants, so, for the first couple of years of his life, Julian never saw his father’s face.
-Showed signs of being a prodigy at a very young age, but was mostly too quiet and withdrawn to prove it.
-Was abused by his father in the period between Lazarey’s wife’s death and the time he was left at boarding school in England. Lazarey was prone to bouts of drinking due to his depression and took a great deal of his frustration on his wife’s death out on Julian.
-Sent to the Westminster School in England at the age of five, a full two years younger than most boys are allowed to be admitted. He arrived in the company of Nicolai Stravinsky, his father’s best friend, attaché, and personal physician, who claimed that he would return for him during the holidays on his father’s orders, but he never showed up again. Julian was smart enough to realize that this meant he’d been abandoned.
-Due to the worthless feeling associated with both being abandoned and his father’s general disregard for him, he threw himself into everything he could find, clawing his way to the top of the heap on sheer premature ambition just to prove to his father that he wasn’t a complete waste. It was never a matter of perfection with him, it was a matter of being the best. Despite being two years younger than his peers, he excelled faster than any of them, which intimidated most of the other students and set him up as a target for harassment and bullying for others. For that reason, he became extremely avoidant and shy around other children.
-Spent his holidays learning how to pick the pockets of people around the city.
-By thirteen, he was doing college level maths and science and reading at a phenomenally high level- that coupled with his ambition and the fact that he passed a certain standardized test with flying colors attracted the attention (on top of his father being a renowned Rambaldi scholar) of one Irina Derevko, who pulled him out of school and set about to training him.
-Was broken extensively as part of an experiment to see if one could turn children into actual spies, not just sleeper agents- a continuation of Project Christmas’s protocols (this plan was designed by Alexander Khasinau, who believed that children, if they could be properly trained, could be better assets than adults). The project was a success, but it was scrapped as being too much trouble for the long term. Julian (now going by the name of Julian Sark), however, took to his training so well that Irina began to groom him as her lieutenant and protege.
-For the first three years of his training, he shadowed Irina while on operations. Being forcibly thrown into that world on top of his conditioning put him in a position to accept and come to appreciate that life.
-Met Nicolai Stravinsky again, who had left Russia and fell in with a bad enough crowd to wind up becoming a torture expert. Apparently, it is a small word after all.
-He lost his virginity at the age of fifteen to Katya Derevko when he spent the summer with her while Irina was out working on her own, although no one knows this except the two of them. If Sark ever had to own up to it, he'd say that he did it out of childish annoyance at Irina leaving him behind.
-Became a full-fledged operative by the age of sixteen and, at that point, was permitted to take on missions on his own.
-Was tortured extensively at the age of seventeen, after being captured by an enemy spy. He was extracted, but not before revealing a few details about Irina's operation. Thankfully, the safehouse he had compromised had been one already discovered by the CIA and by allowing her enemies to ransack it, it set them all up for capture. It was lucky, but that stroke of luck was what kept Sark alive and inspired her to let him give her up should he ever be captured, because she could find a way to use it to her advantage.
-He and McKenas Cole were partners for a very brief time when Cole was first brought into Irina's fold. "Brief," of course, meaning they went on one mission together. Sark will never tell anyone what happened on that mission, but it probably has a lot to do with why he's terrified of Cole.
-Met Allison Doren when he was nineteen and the two of them carried on a secret affair under Irina's nose. Sark has tried to avoid thinking that Irina ordered Allison to undergo Project Helix to punish him for letting himself get distracted from his work, although that's probably exactly what happened.
Canon (You can assume that anything not expanded upon here happened just the way it did in canon.)
-Became Irina’s Director of Operations immediately following his successful raid on FTL (he was 20, at the time). He and Cole were both up for the position, so Sark got it by default when Cole was taken into custody, but Irina probably would have given it to him anyway.
-Everything that happened with him in the first half of S2 was done on Irina’s orders- Sark, at that point in his life, wasn’t really capable of handling his own operation (note that when Sark tends to get IDEAS in his head on his own, they, uh, generally fail) and was just acting as a proxy, while Irina was infiltrating the CIA.
-He knew Irina was going to give him up in Stockholm. He did not know that she was never going to come back for him. He never quite forgave her for that… Well, until she came back and hired him again, that is, but he was still really sore about it.
-He was actually genuinely pleased when he found out that Sydney wasn’t really dead.
-He really and truly expected to get killed when he was traded to San'ko.
-The Covenant was really the sticking point to his wanting to become a free agent, because they treated him like the worst kind of dog and it made him bristly. The only reason he never tried to leave them was because they had his money and because they knew they’d kill him if he tried to run.
-The only reason The Covenant never killed him anyway for being an insubordinate little shit is because Cole told them not to. Cole likes Sark a lot. Sark is terrified of him for reasons I haven’t figured out yet.
-He did not kill that couple in Façade. That was extravagant and pointless and he could have gotten his own ticket for that flight without the unnecessary body count.
-He loved Lauren more than Lauren loved him and, in fact, knew this. Everything he told Vaughn about what Lauren said about his passion and how she loved him was just a load of crock to make Vaughn twitch and just something he wished were true.
-The only time he ever felt guilty for his own actions was when he gave Lauren up and, thus, contributed to her eventual death. The whole thing really broke him.
-That guilt was pretty much the sole reason he decided to go legit. Unfortunately, it wasn’t enough to sustain him.
-He was actually only legit for a few months and was planning on coming back into the game when the boredom overtook him, but sort of got dragged into it when agents of Elena Derevko tracked him down and tortured him for information on the Mueller Device when Irina wouldn’t break. He escaped with his life and wound up in Savgoda trying to track Irina down… So he was there that whole time, just somehow missed most of the major action. He did, in fact, intercept Irina at the border. Irina, however, didn’t want him back as her lieutenant and essentially sent him off to be a free agent, promising she’d call him if she ever needed him.
-Used his ambition and obsession with being the best to rise through the ranks of freelancers.
-He did/does really like Rachel Nichols, but a lot of it is because she’s fascinatingly similar to Sydney. He also really didn’t want to torture her, but he doesn’t disobey orders easily.
-He really, really didn’t want to set off those nukes, but, again, he doesn’t disobey orders easily. He thought the whole thing was excessive and pointless.
-After Vaughn let him go, he went deep underground for a few years and when he finally resurfaced, he'd gathered enough resources to put himself back on the map, although, occasionally he was more than willing to sell his own clients out secretly to the CIA for an extra paycheck.
Psychology
-Fears abandonment and being considered worthless most of all and every other fear he has is just a smaller part of either one or both of those two things.
-He’s afraid of dying because it means that the world would go on without him and, in the end, nothing he ever did meant much of anything. In the end, he’ll just be one person to be forgotten.
-He considers Irina his primary maternal figure while still being deeply attracted to her (which is ridiculously oedipal, really) and tends to seek out women who remind him of her- strong, domineering, often controlling, etc.
-Conversely, he's in love with Sydney Bristow because she both reminds him of her mother and is his exact opposite. His feelings for Sydney Bristow fluctuate between lust, respect, jealousy, and a variety of other emotions and sometimes it's hard for him to say whether he wants her as a partner, a lover, an adversary or some weird combination of all three. One thing's for certain, if he weren't usually under orders to eliminate her if she gets in the way of his employer's plans, he would never actually be able to bring himself to kill her. He likes having her around even if she does get him in a confused snit.
-He never once blamed Irina for the torture he had to endure as part of his conditioning- it was a necessary evil to get him to the point he is now and he’d rather be anything that than that lonely, withdrawn, worthless child that Andrian Lazarey abandoned.
-He loves being a spy, because it gives him power and forces people to respect him. For someone who had a whole lot of neither growing up, both are things he craves deeply.
-He's surprisingly affectionate behind closed doors, but he has a reputation to uphold when out in public, so it's very rare that anyone other than the people he finds worthy of his affections actually see that side of him.
-His competence is greatly dependent on who has control over him, because he was hardwired to follow orders to the point that it takes a great force of effort to actively disobey a direct order. He's gotten to a point where most of the plans he concocts on his own without the aide of someone telling him what to do tend to fail epicly. Despite being calculated, he's not a strategist at all and it usually shows.
-It annoys the hell out of him when people don't take him seriously because of his age, hence why he tries his hardest to appear older than he is... It doesn't work, because even with the suits and the clipped, articulate, well-educated vernacular... He still looks like a little boy. Making fun of his age and ability is probably one of the most surefire ways to piss him off.
-McKenas Cole is the only person who has ever consistently outright terrified him.
-He has a capacity for hatred, but he doesn't often think most people are worth getting that annoyed at. He hates Michael Vaughn with a blind fervor, however.
-He detests senseless violence for the sake of violence, but will do whatever his employers tell him to, because that's just what he does. He shows no remorse for his actions, however, simply because he was trained not to, and whether he likes what he's being asked to do means nothing in the long run. He takes no pleasure in killing people who didn't have it coming to them, but it's just a fact of the job and nothing more.
-If anyone asks, he'd rather tell people that he willingly joined up with Irina and he was always a amoral little shit, because somehow that's better than admitting that he was absolutely nothing before Irina found him and she had to tear him apart to make him what he is right now. It deeply bothers him that he was broken and twisted into this and never actually made the choice. He likes his job, but after all that conditioning, it really becomes debatable whether he likes it because he likes it or because he was conditioned to like it. It's a fucking crazy thing.
Other Random Facts
-One thing he was never able to do was play the piano flawlessly, but not for a lack of trying.
-Because he wasn’t much for instruments, he was placed in the choir in the hopes to socialize him better. It didn’t work, but now he has a very classically trained voice, provided you can get him to sing.
-Was never actively interested in Rambaldi as a lifestyle, but he was fascinated by the artifacts and the sort of things they could do. Most of his interest was because of Irina.
-Hates tea. This bothers people, apparently. He does have a fondness for coffee, however.
-If he's mad or frustrated enough to swear, he will only use invectives in languages other than English (it's more polite that way somehow) and because of this, he can swear in more languages than he actually speaks fluently.
-Technically, he speaks eight languages fluently- English, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Irish-Gaelic, Hindi, French, and Spanish and speaks several others passably well.
-Socially, he'll drink just about anything even if he doesn't particularly enjoy it (but he usually won't drink very much of it if he doesn't). He prefers red wine and champagne over pretty much anything else. He doesn't particularly care for white wine.
-Extremely well-read and has a rather eclectic taste in literature, although if you asked, he'd only make it a point to mention the more pretentious classic titles he enjoys and never, you know, own up to the fact that he read Watership Down seventy-five times when he was in school. He's also fond of poetry, although not to an extreme extent. His favorite line is, unsurprisingly, something by Alexander Pope: "I am his Highness's dog at Kew. Pray tell me, Sir, whose dog are you?"
-Had to pick up ballroom dancing for the sake of a mission and hated every second of it... Until he got to the tango. He's fucking good at the tango.
-He has a passion for Cryptology and is damn good at cracking ciphers. It's one of his primary talents.
-He makes it a point to never get drunk because when he drinks too much, he doesn't stop talking. More information could probably be gotten out of him by shoving hard liquor down his throat than torture, more than likely. He also tends to be a moody, existential drunk and no one wants that.
-There are a lot of weird, ridiculous, and often creepy things that he knows, but he is so weak on modern pop culture that most references of that nature will completely go over his head. It's kind of pathetic, honestly, in an adorable way.
-Despite the above, he is rather fond of James Bond film, but mostly for the irony.