(no subject)

[rie]

His name is Eugene. He's 24 years old.

The thing about Eugene is that he's not - well, he doesn't care much about being like most people. He was born into money. And when I say money, I mean yeah, the kind of money where tossing bills off the yacht and shouting "Do it for the Vine!" was definitely a thing that happened in his life. Back when Vine was still a thing. His father was an investment banker, and his mother was a socialite. He saw both of them pretty damn rarely over the course of his childhood, but he liked them well enough. His best friend once called his mom hot and Eugene decked him in the face, and that's about the most interesting interaction once-removed he ever had with his parents. An army of nannies and tutors raised him. His older sister, too, but she was ten years older than him and convinced that she was Michelangelo reborn, so she spent most of her time coked to hell drawing boobs and stick figures on her ceiling wall and using dad's money to throw lavish art shows. Eugene went for the champagne.

He got bored, though. Dropped out of college at nineteen and went roadtripping through Europe. Fell in love about six times, got pickpocketed, got arrested during some protest in London (he didn't even know what they were protesting) and did a metric fuckton of drugs. He worked as a waiter, just for the heck of it. As a museum docent. A dog walker. A very unlicensed massage therapist, happy endings and all. A street busker. A farmer, for a hot minute, until the smell of sheep shit got to him.

Then his sister died. Shrooms are great for creativity, but mixing shrooms and coke and fucking speed on top of that leads to some pretty dire shit. He came home, now adorned with a prison tat from his two-day sojourn in jail. He even pulled out his septum piercing for the funeral.

It's not that he's cold or unfeeling. People like Eugene: he's generous in the way that rich people can be, he's charming, he's charismatic. He has very long eyelashes and a cute little cupid's bow of a mouth. He's good in bed. He has steady hands and kind smile.

But he's also lazy, he can be terribly cruel, and he's completely directionless. He's currently moonlighting as the guitarist for a punk band just because it's fun - the lead singer's an old friend of his, the drummer's a girl he chose at the auditions because she'd sucked his dick in the bathroom beforehand, and they haven't been able to keep a keyboardist for longer than a week. The band's called Michelangelo because his lead singer friend thought the tribute to Eugene's sister would seem weighty and meaningful to fans, but - in truth - Eugene doesn't really miss her all that much.

He'd loved her, of course. She was his sister. It's just... he'd never really known her all that well.

But there's something about making music, you know? The sum's greater than their shitty parts. He hasn't seen a check from Daddy for months now, but he still spends money like he has too much of it. Even though the band only plays shitty gigs at shitty bars and Eugene's living with five other guys in a one-bedroom. It's fine, because he's young and stupid and drunk 95% of his waking hours.

In his canon, I delved into dumb magical realism stuff to give him a character arc, but - it might be best to take him from this point. He's lost but he doesn't think he is, he's excellent with people. He's kind as much as he can; his cruelty is from thoughtlessness, not design. He's also kind of a paradox, in that he cares little about grandiose social justice (which is why getting arrested at a protest was a laughable event) but he cares deeply about the people in his life, the people he's actually connected with.