broken

Name: Brett Raymond Trent

Age: 36

Gender: Male

Type: Dreamer

Appearance:

With short dark hair, blue eyes - Brett doesn't take very good care of himself. Shaving is something that only actually happens when his scruff has grown long enough to threaten a beard and only because he hates having a beard, but he can't be bothered to shave every day by a long shot. Usually the only time he ensures he's clean shaven is when it's required for the job, and then he looks very uncomfortable about the fact. Brett is not a guy who looks at home in a suit. Tall (6'1) and broad shouldered, he's a powerfully built man and cuts an imposing figure - he gives off the strong vibe of the hired heavy, which is mostly the point, given his position. If he'd smarten up a bit and stop being so reluctant about his appearance, he'd probably get further within the family, but he appears to have no interest in doing that.

Brett was involved in the library fire thirteen years ago and, as a result, has been left with severe burns to his body. Burn scars run around and up the whole of his left calf, up the outside of his left thigh and lap across both his stomach and back. He also has scarring to his chest which creeps up onto his neck. The edges of the burn scars are visible above the collar of his shirt. Brett has got quite a few tattoos as well. The most obvious being a large dragon design on his lower right arm, together with an artistic rendering of a bird over a bowl of flames on his upper right arm in a native american style (though that is almost always covered by his shirt). On his upper left arm he has a large vine-like design. He also has one or two other designs. The only ones which are generally ever visible are the ones on his lower arms, however. Brett is quite happy to walk around with his shirt sleeves rolled up, but he is extremely conscious of the burns across his body and keeps them covered the best he can. The scars severely affect his body image and whilst once he may have been confident about his appearance, he is no longer.

Personality:

Before everything went down, Brett was easy going, humorous and comfortable with himself and with the world. He was active and eager and always ready to help and figure out people's problems. He believed he could fix the world and everything in it. He was an idealist. He wasn't the kind of person to let another's problems drift, or not be there to help. He was always ready to do things, or there to talk through an issue and try and actively find a solution. Letting shit drift just wasn't in his makeup. He was also a great guy to spend a night out with - rather too up for a night on the town, he loved a drink and had a large circle of friends. Or, so he thought.

But that was over three years ago now, and he looks back on that these days and considers that he was naive at best, but more likely just a plain fool. He realised that the people he'd trusted, couldn't be trusted. Or, at least, some of them couldn't, but his anger at everything was enough that he cut ties with everyone (or, everyone that didn't cut ties with him first in disgust at what they believed he'd done). He tarred everyone with the same brush. Deep down inside he knows that the job might only have involved one or two cops, but until recently, he didn’t know how far it went, or who to trust, so, for Brett. Today, his mantra is ‘trust nobody’. There are a couple of exceptions to that, but they are rare – an not total exceptions either.

Brett carries on a battle with undiagnosed depression. He has no intentions of ever getting it diagnosed either. He is not a man who admits to weakness easily. Or at all. But sometimes, things get to him and he just stops. Other than that, he’s bullish, stubborn, argumentative, and he doesn’t give a damn if you don’t like what he has to say. He's not the most sociable of guys unless pushed, though he's capable of it. He's actually capable of being funny, witty even - though he has a very dry sense of humour and a strong natural bent toward sarcasm. Most of the time he actively tries to avoid conversation though. He's prickly and defensive and will often try and purposefully offend in the hopes that the other person will just fuck off. It takes effort to even want to get to know Brett and he seems like he's just waiting to take offence. He also often acts much dumber than he actually is. He sometimes finds it useful for his continued well being that he be considered as little more than bullheaded muscle.

A lot of the time, Brett has only one functioning emotion: anger. He finds it hard (if not impossible) to express the softer emotions, and if he feels them, they often get expressed through anger, as it is his only way of channelling this. Likewise, he finds it hard to feel happiness. He’ll say he can’t remember what it feels like, and when he thinks he should be happy, there is just a black hole of nothingness instead. This is – or had been – slowly healing, or so it seemed. Now he’s alone again and the dark days are looming in his head.

City History:

Brett Trent joined the police force at 18 - it was all he'd ever really wanted to do. His early life hadn't been easy, but then again, whose had? His parents both died when he was younger and he ended up living with a maiden aunt in one of the darker parts of the city. Money was always tight, and the lure of crime as a way to make easy money was always there for the local kids, but Aunt Claire always kept him firmly on the straight and narrow. Very firmly - she could be a formidable woman, for all she looked like a harmless old biddy. She was always getting on though, and she passed away when Brett was nineteen.

He'd learned well from her all the same, and Brett was one of the very few cops in the force who was totally and absolutely on the straight and narrow. Brett was never on the take, never in the pockets of any other parties, and it did his career no good at all. There was never any direct proof, but Brett knew in his heart that the reason behind his being passed over for promotion time and time again was because he wouldn't play the game.

He finally made sergeant at 23 and things seemed to be going okay when he was called to the fire at the library in the middle of the night. Everyone was on hand, there weren't enough firefighters to control the blaze and everything else. It was just chaos and Brett ended up inside the burning building, because they knew people were still inside. He was helping out a woman and her daughter when the flames shot up. Brett barely made it out alive and he sustained severe burns down the left side of his body which kept him in hospital for weeks and led to months of recovery. When he returned to duty, he was given a medal for bravery and services to the city - a medal which he now keeps in the back of a drawer in a blue, velvet-lined box. The scars he's been left with are enough of a memento of that night.

There were no more promotions for Brett after that and he got quietly shifted around departments for the next ten years. There was always a 'good reason' why he was moved on, his colleagues always seemed honestly sad to see him go, but he was aware that he never seemed to get settled anywhere. He was just too much of a good cop, in the most literal senses. He was very good at his job, but he wouldn't turn a blind eye to things either.
Brett kept a positive outlook on things. He knew he had a reputation as a straight as a die cop and he was proud of that - he didn't care if it made him enemies, he didn't want those types of people as friends anyhow. He maintained the rather naive assumption that it was only a minority of cops that were bent anyway.

Then, three years ago, he was made an offer: the force needed someone to go undercover, to infiltrate the mob. They needed someone who could be trusted implicitly, and everyone knew that Brett was straight. That Brett could be trusted. Unfortunately, that also meant that as part of the job, he needed to publicly fall if it was to work. But the job involved the chance to take down one of the city’s biggest organised crime outlets, as well as that long sought-after promotion. And so, Brett went for it.

Very few other people knew the truth about it, the real tale was kept incredibly hush hush - that way nobody could be leaned on for information, nothing could be leaked. The plan would be watertight, and when it was all over, Brett would be the hero and the true story would be known. In the meantime, his cover would be simply that he'd gone over to the mob, sick of years as a low level cop with no prospects and wanting a slice of the bigger pie. It was arranged for him to steal some vital evidence implicating the O'Malleys in a recent job, together with a large amount of cash from the evidence locker. It was also arranged that everyone would know he'd done it. It was enough to get him through the door, and enough through the door that the mob would protect him from any police backlash. He was offered a job, of course, and things started. What Brett didn't realise was that shortly after he went, paperwork relating to his assignment started to quietly 'disappear', and the few people who knew his real purpose started getting special kinds of attention.

Brett didn’t realise how wrong things had gone until the day he tried to get out. he’d collected the evidence, and he was arranging to hand it in when he was called to a ‘meeting’. He was running late and he got there in time to see a Syndicate assassin murder Captain Hardy - his superior officer and handler for the undercover role. Within hours, Brett found himself being interrogated on a murder rap. Nobody seemed to know about his ‘undercover role’ and his erstwhile colleagues saw only a cop who had gone rouge and committed the ultimate sin: the murder of an officer. They were willing to lynch him there and then, no matter what he said. Brett took the only option left available to him. When the O’Malley’s sent their pet lawyer to help him - he took the help. This time he truly sold out, and it almost killed him inside.

He became what he’d been set up to be - an enforcer and general heavy for the O’Malleys. A thug. He played the game, acted the part and remained alive because of it. He considered that the good man inside had died.

He carried on like that for almost three years, until one night he was sent to dispose of a body (a common job for he who knew the rules of evidence so well). Only the woman he found wasn’t quite dead. And he couldn’t bring himself to finish the job. Instead, he took her to a back street doctor he knew, and paid the guy a lot of money to care for her. And that was supposed to be the end of that. Conscience, for once, clear. Only the guy couldn’t handle Eris’ mood swings, and he’d call on Brett, threatening to ditch the broad, or squeal. So Brett kept going back. And the more he went back, the more it became clear that Brett could handle her. And that he was becoming attached. So much so that the night that Doc Gray disappeared, Brett brought Eris home, back to his shitty little apartment.

It was far from an ideal situation. Brett’s main outward attitude to her was one of disdain and cold civility at best. They endured each other, apparently, for several weeks until he came home one evening to find she’d left. He considered this abandonment, and he hunted her down, ostensibly so that he could tell her where to go and never see her again. But, yet again, Brett kept coming back. Again and again, until he couldn’t deny even to himself that he had feelings for the woman.

He fought the concept of a relationship hard, but not hard enough, especially when he was fighting against himself. One developed - in both a personal and a business sense. Brett Trent and Eris Stockard opened an escort business (perfectly legal - he wouldn’t do anything illegal that way), took down the O’Malley family and officially moved into a penthouse apartment attached to their offices together. They were even planning on opening a club when Eris discovered who had set Brett up. The first Brett knew about it was when he came home to yet another note, another message that she’d left him. She’d gone to murder the man who ruined his life, he was too late to stop her and she’d known that this was so against his principles it was the end of them.

And so, just as Brett thought his life was rebuilding itself, he found himself back at the bottom of the pit. And he needs to find the energy to climb upwards once again. With everything else around him a ruin and with Eris threatening to turn herself in for what she had done, Brett realised that no matter how she'd betrayed him, he couldn't face losing her too, not like that. He couldn't be with her, but he couldn't abandon her either. So, he made a deal. She wanted him to clear his name, he wanted her to stay to of the clutches of the law. So, he gave her what she wanted: he cleared his name and returned to the force, yet walking away was far harder than that, and these days he's unsure what's actually going on between them. Unfortunately, with the trouble in the city and the overtime that's resulted in, he's not have the time to devote to really finding out.

Special Skills and Abilities:

Brett is a practical man and he's domestic in a fairly male way. He's good with plumbing and household electrics - mending things that are broken. He's also lived alone for nearly 20 years and he's an okay cook, as long as you like basic, filling food. He doesn't do 'fancy' anything. Due to his jobs, he's a good shot with a variety of weapons and he's pretty good at unarmed combat as well, though again, nothing fancy. He can throw one hell of a punch though! He's also got first aid training - some of it official, some of it picked up on the fly, like nobody ever formally taught him how to put in stitches, but he's had to do it enough times over the years to be good at it now.

Weaknesses:

Brett was born with a moral compass, and over the past few years, that went very definitely off course. Whilst in one light, he was forced into it, in another he knows he could have refused to go down that route. Sure, he would have ended up dead for it, but he would have maintained his standards, his conscience. Instead, he chose life, and it tore his soul apart for three long years. This has had several effects on the person he was and is. Firstly, he's suffered with growing depression over the last few years. No, it's never been treated, no he's never even put a name to it, but it's there. Some nights he still has difficulty sleeping, and even when he doesn't, Brett gets irritable very easily and tends to out at the slightest thing (though this tends to be verbal only - he reserves physical violence for situations where it is for some reason or other necessary).

His experiences also mean that he doesn't trust anyone anymore. He used to trust people easily, but he learned his lesson there. He doesn't know how far things went when he was fucked over, but he's not taking any chances either. He doesn't trust you, and he's not going to. Even people he knows very well, he's just waiting for them to turn on him, no matter what evidence to the contrary he's given. It's not fair on those people, but as far as Brett is concerned, when has life ever been 'fair'?

Brett has no wish to be liked, or to be your friend. He doesn't even like himself, so he doesn't feel the need to ingratiate himself with other people. He's blunt and rarely, if ever, employs tact, though he is capable of it. It's possible to consider his attitude these days as some kind of act of rebellion. He's very much a 'take me as you find me' guy - and he seems determined that you will find him an asshole. He is an anti-social person. He tries to chase everyone away, stating that he'd prefer to be left alone. This attitude of his has been complicated lately by the fact that he's set up to go into a business that depends upon him being able to have a public face. He's going to need to at least be able to play nice with some people, but that goes against the grain of his natural instincts: he's not sure how well he'll do with it. And now the one person whose opinion actually had started to mean something to him has gone and betrayed him.

Brett played his role for so long now that he believed that was all that there was. The part of what pushed him to rescue Eris, was his small piece of denial that he had truly and totally become That Guy. The events that followed after that have changed him in small ways. His desperate cling to some part of who he once was helped him start on the road back to that and stopped him from becoming the guy he was pretending to be. He now no longer believes that he's become that guy, that the cop, the good man, is well and truly dead. But that brings with it its own troubles. Because he's also learning that he's been locking himself away for far longer than he thought. His issues don't just stem back to three years ago and the O'Malleys, but start with the library fire, the burns. He's discovering that he's not only been suppressing his emotions, but he's pretty firmly locked them away. He has great gaping holes in his accessible reactions to things, and even if he wants to feel certain emotions (such as happiness and joy), he simply can't. He is, in fact, broken.

Brett has had a low self-esteem and horrific body image for years now, in relation to his burns. He keeps them covered at all times and avoids being seen in any kind of state of undress with anyone. He can't see how anyone would find him attractive and cannot let himself go in an intimate situation without twisting things to fit the few ways he can get around his own issues.

For Brett, there is no Plan B. There is only the plan. He can't plan for contingencies. If a plan fails, then he'll come up with another plan, but he can't come up with another plan before that first plan's failed. He's stubborn to the point of stupidity at times. if he makes a decision to do something, he's committed - and he'll keep with that, even if it's making him just plain miserable. It makes him an incredibly loyal person, but it's often to his own detriment.

Strengths:

He's bull-headed and stubborn, which, whilst often a weakness, is also something that he's managed to turn to his advantage on more than one occassion. He doesn't let things go and he'll make things work, somehow (as long as his depression doesn't trip him up and send him into a funk).

Family or Connections:

Connections: used to be a cop until he was set up - now he’s known as the cop who went rogue.
Eris Stockard - the woman he decided not to let die.
the back street doctor who went missing (open for someone to take!)
The girls at the Kitten Club (where he used to sometimes work as a bouncer on the stage door)
Danny McKinnon - colleague
December Trent - long lost cousin

Residence:

A small pokey apartment near the park

He also has an apartment with Eris in a building uptown, but he’s not been back there since she walked out on him.

Career:

18-33 - Police Officer
33-36 - Mob Heavy
Over winter, he ran an escort business with Eris Stockard
Now he's a police detective working homicide

PB: Brian Austin Green

Other Information:

Brett's handwriting font can be downloaded here!