Post by JOHN PATRICK HOLDEN on Mar 12, 2013 16:24:02 GMT -8
| [atrb=style,width: 420px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://i.imgur.com/6jh1H.png); padding: 5px, bTable] JOHN P. HOLDEN 27 | HETEROSEXUAL | BODYGUARD | TOURIST | TOMAS SKOLOUDIK PERSONALITY COLD | SELF-CONTROLLED | INFLEXIBLE | DAMAGED | GENTLE To get a firm understanding of who Jack is, there’s pretty much one thing you need to know: he’s a soldier. Well, he’s not anymore, but in his head… he always will be. Jack is everything you might expect of a military man: precise, organised, neat, stoic and relatively deadly. His older sister, the one person in the world who really gives a crap about him these days, frequently describes Jack as “having a stick jammed up his ass”. This is probably most often the impression that he gives to others. Jack is extremely meticulous in everything he does. He has extremely high standards in regards to how he thinks people ought to behave: he doesn’t approve of sloppiness, rudeness, lateness, lies, disorganisation… well the list of things Jack doesn’t approve of is a mile long. He’s stiff, inflexible and extremely resistant to change or ideas and notions that counter his belief set. He’s a perfectionist who expects the best from himself and from everybody around him, and is frequently disappointed, which has turned him into something of a jaded cynic. Years and years of meeting people who do not conform to his idea of what a good person should be (and multiple other bad experiences with the human race in general) has lead him to the conclusion that people just aren’t good. They’re bad. He believes people are chaotic and violent, and that the only way to combat the human condition is by maintaining as much self-control as possible. Jack is all about self-control. He is so in control of his emotions, has pushed them down so deep, that in fact they barely register with him. Everything he feels is always just a little muted, and none of it ever shows on his face. Poker face is an understatement with Jack. He is inscrutable. Unreadable. It’s very difficult to get a handle on who he is or what he thinks, because he’s so practised at hiding it. Sometimes even he finds it difficult to know what he’s feeling. Emotions are messy. Attachments are messy. Jack sees himself as much better off without either of them, and has gotten fairly far in life by coasting through without making any meaningful connections. Part of his trouble expressing himself is due to his past. His time in the army taught him that he is not a person, but part of a well-oiled homogenous machine. So outside of the army, unable to return to it, he will always see himself as lost. A spare part with no real function. Which in turns feeds into a sense of low self-worth: despite Jack’s air of cold unruffled indifference, he’s fairly insecure in himself and is constantly looking for something that will give him back his old sense of military purpose. All Jack really wants is someone to validate his existence, to need him, to make him feel as though he’s around for a reason and that reason is good. The stick up Jack’s ass and his general unapproachable façade may seem to suggest that he’s a raging asshole. To be frank, he’s more than capable of being one. He doesn’t like most people and has little to no patience for people he doesn’t like, so he can appear brusque and unsympathetic to strangers. It takes him a long time to thaw out around someone, but once he does, it’s almost worth the wait. Despite his violent past, Jack has a gentle soul. He’s not, by nature, aggressive and abhors brutality unless it’s absolutely necessary. He’s not a cruel person, and though he doesn’t exactly strive to be well-liked, he’s more than capable of acts of random kindness. Here and there. His loyalty, though hard won, is boundless. Once you have Jack on your side, he’ll be there to the bitter end. HISTORY THE ARMY | THE EXECUTION | THE ATTEMPTED KIDNAPPING John Patrick Holden was born on the second of March 1986 on a military base in Oxford, England. His father, also John Patrick Holden, was an American soldier. His mother, Rose, an English nurse. His sister Penny was three years old at the time of his birth, and took an immediate liking to her new baby brother, frequently having to be stopped from trying to pull him out of his cot to play with him like a doll. By the time he was a week old, his mother was already calling him ‘Jack’ just to differentiate between the infant and his father, and soon the rest of the family took up the nickname. Jack had a very comfortable, happy life growing up. His parents loved him and his sister very much. They loved each other very much. There’s little more a person can ask for in a childhood. Jack’s father being in the US army, they moved frequently. Jack has lived in more places than he can remember. On and around bases in small towns and big cities all over America and England. With his parents being both English and American and the almost equal distribution of his formative years throughout both countries, Jack was always just a little bit confused about his nationality. Having dual citizenship provided a wealth of amazing cultural experiences that non-army brats just don’t get, but in the same breath, it’s a strange thing to not have a specific national identity. And it’s a hard thing, to move nomadically from place to place and never know how long you’ll get to stay. As a result of their upbringing, Jack and Penny never really had many friends aside from each other, and grew closer than most big sister-little brother relationships usually do. So naturally it broke his heart when she left home to go to university. Fifteen year old Jack became more than a little withdrawn after she left, and struggled even more with the arduous task of coming out of his shell. At least until he was seventeen when his father was transferred to a base on the outskirts of London and the family moved back to the UK. Jack has always suspected he’s a little more British than American, as he’s always been more comfortable in England. London suited him better. He was closer to where his sister was studying – two hours by train, which was nothing compared to the ocean that had been between them before. And now, just a few months shy of his eighteenth birthday, he was perfectly poised here in London to enlist. His future with the army had been set down since the day he was born. Like his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father, it was always the expectation that Jack would go on to serve his country (well, either one of his countries). It wasn’t something that was thrust upon him. His parents never overtly pressured him into it. It was just the way his father’s war stories would always end with ‘Well, you’ll see when it’s your turn, Jack’ or ‘Wait until you’re telling your own horror stories to your kids, son’. Subtle things. He never once got the impression that his mother or father would be disappointed if he didn’t follow this path – he just got the impression they’d never really considered what else he might do. Neither had Jack. He was an athletic, obedient child who seemed well suited to the military. It only made sense for him to enlist. So enlist he did, on the afternoon of his eighteenth birthday. He completed his basic training and after showing outstanding promise, was bumped to the rank of Lance-Corporal before ever seeing active service. He got his first taste of action just shy of nineteen when he was shipped out on his first tour of duty in Iraq. The army did suit him. He excelled as a soldier. At twenty one, he was awarded the MC for bravery in the field. His superiors hinted at promotions. Rank. Glory. But at twenty two, he was shot. You can’t imagine the pain and Jack doesn’t like to relive it, but it was pretty awful. He was shot just below the knee cap, the bullet shattering the top of his tibia. He was then flown back to Britain, where he endured several reconstructive surgeries and recuperated in a specialist hospital. Later, he was transferred to a small clinic for wounded soldiers to undergo physiotherapy. He was told he would never return to active service, but Jack wouldn’t hear of it. The army was his life – he wouldn’t know what to do if he was medically discharged. He was determined he would walk – not just walk, but run, regain full movement in his leg and return to his platoon. The stakes were upped a couple of months into his physio when his sister announced her engagement to her long term boyfriend. Jack was fairly indifferent to the man who’d be his brother-in-law, but he definitely loved his sister, and when Penny asked him if he might be the one to walk her down the aisle and give her away, it just made him more determined to actually be able to walk in time for the wedding. Positive thinking is an exceptionally powerful thing, and just six weeks later, Jack did walk his sister down the aisle without the barest trace of a limp. Four weeks after that, his appeal hearing with the medical review board was successful, and he was reapproved for active service. He underwent some of his basic training all over again, and then even more prepared, was shipped off to Afghanistan. Where, just two months into his tour, he was wounded a second time. This incident was much more serious. It’s one thing to be hit in the leg by a stray bullet during a fire fight. What happened to Jack this time was completely another. He was on patrol about an hour’s drive from base with the rest of his platoon. He and two others had become separated from the rest of their platoon when they were taken prisoner. The enemy soldiers who took them quickly realised they had no real use for them, so they took them to the side of the road, had them all kneel down in a line, and executed them. Shots to the head. Quick. Brutal. Efficient. Later, while lying half-conscious in a London hospital, Jack would overhear the doctor tell his mother that “you could take a thousand soldiers and shoot them in the head a thousand times and not recreate the exact miracle angle of the bullet that saved your John”. The implication is that he was lucky, but after that afternoon in the desert, Jack would never feel lucky again. What happened after the attempted execution is something Jack has only the vaguest recollections of. He woke up in the hospital six weeks after the incident with a metal plate over his skull. Still alive, but the bullet had done a number on him. His brain was badly bruised, and for a long time afterwards while the contusions healed, he couldn’t stand without falling and had trouble performing even the simplest of tasks that required any degree motor control – feeding himself, tying his shoes. Impossible feats, all of a sudden. The shot had been fired right next to his left ear, which resulted in partial but permanent deafness there after his eardrum was part way ruptured. Swelling in his brain had put pressure on his optic nerve, which also caused partial blindness in his left eye. There had also been some damage to both the memory and speech centres of his brain. For a long time, for years afterwards, Jack was prone to randomly and indiscriminately forgetting things. And even now, he has a slight stutter. They offered to find him a speech therapist to work on this, but he wasn’t interested in more doctors. For the most part, Jack has trained himself to speak normally: given himself a repertoire of sentences and practised them again and again and again until he doesn’t stammer while saying them. It’s only when called upon to make spontaneous speech that he goes back to the stutter. The botched execution left him in a bad way, but as everybody told him: “It could be worse. You could be dead. The others are dead. Think about that.” Recuperating was long and painful. It took him a long time to heal. After two months in a specialist hospital, he was transferred to a hospice for more physiotherapy, continued observation and mandatory counselling. His therapist suggested that he was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after the attempt on his life and depression after the sudden jarring loss of his career (he had, of course, been discharged again, and this time was unable to fight it). Jack suggested the therapist go and fuck himself, and refused to talk to him again. He was eventually released from the hospice and, for lack of anywhere else to go, went to stay with his sister for a while. Penny welcomed him with open arms. She tried to help him. She really did. She set him up job interviews, but Jack didn’t want a civilian job. She introduced him to all of her single friends, hoping he might take a shine to one of them, but he didn’t want a woman. She tried to find him a hobby, but he just didn’t want to do anything at all. His interest in life had been sucked right out of him. He spent all his time tucked away in the dark corner of Penny’s spare room. He could sit there for hours. It was safe for Jack in the dark. It was the only place safe. His head hurt all the time. He couldn’t sleep for night terrors, and during the day he was tormented by relentless flashbacks. With hindsight, he recognises that the therapist may have been right, and that he was suffering from PTSD and depression. At the time, he just thought the problem lay with the rest of the world. They expected too much of him. How could they expect him to get up and carry on and behave as though all his actions had any meaning? Penny tried to make him see another therapist. He wouldn’t. Couldn’t. His twenty fourth birthday came and went and there was no change in his demeanour. Nothing changed. Not until Penny announced she was pregnant. This was enough to make Jack think twice about living in his sister’s spare room for eternity. Jack needed order and peace and quiet, and babies were chaotic and loud and sticky. The threat of becoming an uncle was enough to get him moving. Jack made other living arrangements for himself – he contacted an old friend from the army, also medically discharged after a shot to the back had robbed him of his legs, and it was decided he would go and stay with him. When he arrived at the friend’s address, he was surprised to find there were a number of others staying there. It was something of a halfway house for broken soldiers. If the threat of a niece of nephew was enough to get him moving, the halfway house was enough to keep him on the move. Surrounded by men in wheelchairs and men missing arms or legs and men with burnt off faces who screamed with terror all night long, Jack began to feel very healthy indeed. His leg pained him when it was cold, his hearing wasn’t a hundred percent and he had these headaches that never really went away, but who was he to complain? In comparison with the others, he was practically a perfect physical specimen. He began to feel stronger. Not just in body, but in mind. When one of the voluntary nurses that was always drifting throughout the house suggested to him that soldiers like him, the lucky ones, often went on to work in private security, the idea stuck with him. Bodyguard work was lucrative and in the states, the demand was high. The idea appealed, and not just because of the money or the availability of work. Jack thought he might have found a new sense of purpose. He’d failed in his duty as a soldier, but that didn’t mean he had to be useless forever. He could still protect people. He could still do some good. He called in some favours from the people he’d met over his short military career, and the people his father had met over his long one, and eventually got himself an interview with a personal security firm in New York. They offered him the job twenty minutes within meeting him. He spent two years there, working for wannabe politicians and rich snobby little girls. He was good at it, even if it quickly emerged that it didn’t fulfil him the way he’d hoped. Being a bodyguard was not his new purpose. However, nobody could deny Jack’s professionalism or his competence, and word eventually got out. A few months ago, he was head hunted by an extremely wealthy, powerful man named Jeremiah Fairmont, who was looking for a bodyguard for his daughter in Los Angeles. He was offering such a ridiculous sum of money that Jack cut his ties with the firm in New York and went freelance in order to work for the Fairmont family. The move was quick and painless for him. Despite living in New York for two years, it wasn’t as if he’d made any attachments. In fact, he’d been busy severing them. In those two years, Jack didn’t make a single visit home. He rarely spoke to his family, and never to his old friends. It had become very easy for him to just pick up and go somewhere new and start all over again. The attempted execution had set him adrift from life. So it was easy, moving to LA. What wasn’t easy was getting used to Arianna Fairmont – she wasn’t like the other clients he’d had. A shy, timid girl who rarely left the house, it didn’t seem like she really needed him at all. It didn’t seem like there was any possibility for danger to befall her. Given a couple of months, he’d grown complacent and naturally – that’s when it happened. To cut a long story short, Jack’s client was almost abducted while in a restaurant. He was horrified, blaming himself for letting his guard down, and immediately tried to resign. But it was pointed out to him that she hadn’t actually been kidnapped, so clearly he was doing something right. In the end, Jack decided to maintain his position with Arianna, and when she decided to run to Maine in a bid for safety, it was his job to accompany her. BEHIND THE MASK PUN | TWENTY | GMT | SHEER ANIMAL MAGNETISM. GRR. | LIAM KEALEY noooooooo. o.o |
