Owen Blake ♂
"Let's go back to my place and do all the things I'm going to tell people we did anyway."
Basic:
Name: Owen Noonien Blake. His full name is Owen Noonien Blake-Gupta, a blend of his North American and Indian heritage. However, he only goes by Owen Blake, not Owen Gupta, and he'll probably slap you on the back of the head if you call him it. There's nothing really wrong with it, but his preferences are made clear upon introductions. If you're going to make up any silly nicknames for him, then they better be pretty damn clever. Blake is also acceptable.
Age: 18
Gender: Male
Height: 6 foot 2
Weight: 215 lbs
Scrummy roguish lookin' fella with near-constant stubble squibling his prominent, punchable jawline. There's a hardness in his eyes that's hard to miss, from seeing too much, too quickly, and without having the proper time to grieve. The most noticeable thing about him is his body; Owen is at the peak of his strength. He's in his golden years, towering at six feet and a handful of inches, Owen weighs in around two-fifteen. He's not some hulking oaf, grunting like a gorilla, mind you. He's made of leaner slates, built for endurance and lengthy treks, supple, slender muscles and smooth skin. He does both with keeping himself mildly presentable; with little inspection you can tell he goes to meticulous grooming lengths, keeping his teeth sparkling and hair handsomely slicked back.
The boy's harsh dimples create little crooks beside his nose whenever he smiles, turning up a little at the edges – and if you glance quick enough, they look a little like puckered scars; little knife-point slivers. He's got a windswept scruff of shaggy brown hair that stubbornly denies any, and all, efforts at taming its wild ways. He manages to keep it trimmed short, shearing off inches whenever it becomes too unmanageable. For a guy who's never cut hair before, he's pretty damn good.
There is something attractive about his confidence.
Personality
Owen Blake is, at his core, little more than an immature young pup thirsting after adventure, silly misdeeds and untold treasures. He can easily describe himself as outrageously daring, subjectively outgoing or the life of the party. He's still recklessly stubborn. There's no budging him once he's made his mind on something. He'll throw out his anchor, and wait for you to sweep past him like the tide.
To the world:
Outwardly Owen oozes pure charisma and conceit. Inwardly, too. He's beautiful, funny, and desirable, and he knows all that, uses it too. There's no denying he's fun to be around. He's the type of person whose presence fills the room; he's impossible to be ignored, like a hurricane of smiles and laughs and vulgar jokes that makes you want to be at the eye of it.
Negative traits:
If you've known him long enough, and if you are able to see through the thick curtains he's managed to pull up around his intentions, then you'll know that Owen is a bit of a sly bastard. He keeps meticulous tabs on every angle, on every beneficial opportunity, working them like a crooked dealer with several pockets jimmied into his sleeves. Make light out of an awful situation? Most likely. He's not one to dwell on the inevitable.
In fact, he's not one to dwell on much of anything. While he's intelligent enough, he's hardly mature. He's a flirt, a heartthrob, endlessly optimistic and even more bottomlessly irresponsible. Owen seems to suffer from a severe disability to take account for any of his actions. He lives in the moment, lives for the thrill. He's an addictive type, and an overachiever, always reaching for the next benchmark or high-- head of the football team, most popular kid in school, prom king-- but those are only the harmless goals. He's a sex addict, and he's charming enough to have it whenever he wants. He dabbles in drugs but doesn't consider himself a druggie.
Positive traits:
Despite all this he isn't such a bad guy. On the positive side, Owen is a leader. He's sensitive to others and their feelings, a momma-bear big-brother type, fiercely loyal to those he's in charge of, with oodles of optimism and a never-say-die attitude. His courage is endless. It isn't very hard to befriend Owen, his nature being (almost promiscuously) friendly with a teetering dollop of cheerfulness. There's a marked understanding that no one gets very far without companions, allies, or acquaintances. Friends are always worth the trouble. His shoulder is open for salty tears, and he's a stable friend.
Still, all these things can be hard to see past his self-love and attitude of entitlement. It is difficult to reach the childish kid at his core, silly and cheerful and carefree. He himself loses touch with it, snapping back to the easier persona of cold apathy and I-get-what-I-want attitude. Perhaps you can be the one to reconnect him with who he started out as, the smiling, energetic little boy, not a care in the world, loving life and loving living, wearing his heart on his sleeve and trusting everyone who comes in his path, whose only goal in the world was to have fun.
Opening up to someone, letting them in and admitting to the terrible deeds he's committed and getting a negative reaction. It's easier with his football team who prize his exploits, but he knows that there are many who laud him to his face and secretly judge him behind his back. He's not exactly sure why it would bother him, but it's one of the main reasons why he keeps himself behind closed doors. He fears that he'll make the same mistakes he's made in the past, that he's bound to repeat everything all over again and lose the same kinds of things he's already managed to drive way. He fears a meaningless death having accomplished nothing. He's desperate to make a mark on the world, to show everyone that he has lived. Creatures with several sets of eyes also give him the heeby-jeebies.
All in all, he needs goals, needs more things to accomplish and benchmarks to hit. He takes big risks for big returns. He needs to feel that adrenaline in his body, that thrill of another virginity taken, another girl's heart won, another football tournament conquered, another high survived. This junkie side of him frightens himself. Working with mechanics and playing football calms him and gives him some solace from regrets. He just loves his team. Friends are good, even though he does not often disclose his own thoughts with them, he likes people. He's a smiler and a laugher and an easy-going-er, even as he works hard to accomplish goals.
Quirks: Two words: weird. Food. Owen will eat the strangest things! Pickled octopus in raspberry sauce, chocolate-covered turnips in ranch dressing... it's like a train wreck; you want to look away but you can't. He also eats ridiculously fast, which always tends to give him stomach aches. There's nothing he can do to stop himself from scarfing down whatever someone puts in front of him. He swears he doesn't do it to be polite, but there's something about always being prepared to get up and move – and he's not gonna move on an empty stomach unless he absolutely has to. He checks his arms for bugs pretty damn often, for fear that any random tickle is probably a hornet or a bee, or any other threatening insect crawling across his hands, arms, wrists. It's usually nothing. Stray strands flailing off someone's shirt drive him crazy. He needs to sever them. Cut them off. Eradicate them. He paces a lot. He always puts his right shoe on, his right pad on. Everything must begin with the right side, followed by the left.
Likes:
• Swimming and fishing
• Sports and competition (very athletic)
• Mechanics (family trade; he's handy with a wrench)
• Sunny days, warmth, heavy blankets
• Intricate vehicles or inventions
• LEMONS. Lemonade, lemon pie, fresh lemons off the vine-- he lives for the stuff.
• Sex and power. He's less than a gentleman in the sheets, but boy, does he know how to do it right. He's like some kind of Adonis in bed. Sadly, that would usually be the last time you see him.
• Drugs, to an extent. He truly isn't a hardcore addict but he dabbles.
• Baking. Fun fact, and one that he doesn't really let out, but he likes getting covered in flour and pulling made-from-scratch brownies from the oven. Now cooking, on the other hand-- for whatever reason, he's a master of pastries, but if you ask him to cook a real meal, well, just don't eat what he gives you, that's all I'm saying.
• Silliness, goofing around. Lighten up!
• Climbing. He's like a monkey.
• Board games. For whatever reason it draws out his inner competitor-- he'll be red-faced and sweaty and shouting over a game of Life, and man, if he loses, watch as he spirals into self-doubt and confusion.
• Dogs. Definitely a dog person.
• Boobs and porn. Hey, but that's all guys for you.
• Video games.
• 90s cartoons.
• Hollister.
• Nature. He's an outdoorsy type.
• Laundry (loves the smell of freshly laundered clothes; it drives him mad)
• Stars. Wanted to be an astronaut when he was little.
• Fights
• "Rebellious" or "slutty" women. Firstly, they're hot; secondly, they're easy.
• Alcohol.
Dislikes:
• Work, chores. Neat freaks. Busybodies. Calm down and relax.
• Extreme temperature drops
• Incompetence, selfishness, unnecessary rudeness (oh, the irony).
• Blood. It's a phobia.
• Bugs. Another phobia.
• Ovens! Yet another phobia. Despite his love of cooking, he is freaking terrified of ovens. They are monsters from Hades itself sent to give his hands third degree burns. He always makes someone else get his food out of the oven for him, he will not go near it.
• Math and reading. It frustrates and embarrasses him to end, but he cannot grasp numbers and he's a slow reader for his age. He may be slightly dyslexic.
• Being outdone.
• Women refusing his advances.
• Prudes, "pure" types.
In his life he's had a lot to live up to. Both his parents were Harvard grads despite his mother immigrating from India with her family when she was eighteen. His father even had some length of success as a football player before it all went sour. They were a happy family for the longest time-- Owen, Mr. and Mrs. Blake-Gupta, his two little sisters and one older one. Always incredibly pressured to make perfect grades as well as excel in extracurricular things, Owen always felt a little cracked to be the "man" in a family of girls, the one who his parents wanted to point to and say "That's our boy, that's our Owen". But the memories weren't all bad-- his father and he spent countless hours thick as thieves in the garage when he wasn't practicing for football; they would fix and improve cars, motorcycles, lawn mowers, bikes and trikes and $20 remote-controlled Transformers from Walmart. Owen got pretty good with his hands. He was never so transparent in his life as he was in that garage with his Dad; they wouldn't emerge until they were streaked with oil, reeking with the stench of gas, and grinning with secrets told and trusts confided.
Things started to change.
Owen Blake was born side-by-side with violence, baptized in brutality the day that he went into the garage still decked out in his football gear (the Little Crusaders, the sixth grade team was called) and found his father beating in the skull of their neighbor Mr. Shelton with a wrench. He screamed and his dad looked up. Recognizing his little boy, what did Mr. Blake-Gupta try to do? Run. He pushed past Owen, leaving him staring at the corpse on the ground. Owen's dad was caught, tried, and imprisoned for life within the week. Apparently Mr. Shelton had (in Mr. Blake-Gupta's mind, which had, apparently, been unraveling for quite some time under the surface), been looking at Owen's mom a little too broadly and Owen's dad didn't like it.
Unsatisfying childhood? Probably. Mentally scarred from the absence of a father, leaving lasting scars and eating him from the inside out, destroying who he once was and could have been? Yeah, definitely. In Owen's opinion he didn't leave the situation all that much worse for the wear, but he didn't do the noble thing and man up; entering his high school years, instead of becoming the man of the house that his mother and little sisters needed, he just brought more and more girls into the backseat of his car and came into the house at 3 AM trashed, more and more often. Conversely, his school life was never going better. He had a 2.3 GPA, sure, but football? Oh he was smoking. He could easily get any scholarship he needed to go to college (which he doesn't want to do-- despite the money colleges have been throwing at him left and right, he's considering just not doing it and starting up a mechanic's shop or even God help him a bakery). Still, he liked playing football, so he may do that. Either way, he's in summer school and he's a senior, so he better make the trip quick.
After the murder, his family removed the Blake from their names and became the Gupta household. Only Owen refused. Owen Blake sounded a lot sexier than Owen Gupta. His mother worried for him and considered getting him therapy, but she didn't realize that it was in order to have a cooler name on the back of his jersey rather than any affection still in him for his mentally delusional father.
However, it was a direct result of this choice to retain his last name that his mom decided to take him with her on vacation instead of leaving him at home to watch the girls. She could get a babysitter, she decided-- Owen needed to get away and relax and work out all that had happened. She was partly correct; even though their family was shattered so many years ago, it had left calloused scars on his heart. Owen, surprisingly, thought that it might not be too lame. He'd get out of summer school and get to fish and swim. He was initially annoyed when he heard there would be other people there-- he'd be cooped up and half to deal with a bunch of losers-- but hey, they might have some hot daughters he could seduce.
Secretly, he's a bit worried about going off without the backup of his faithful football team.
Theme Songs:
For his lover
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGmTOwzD2gg
I beg you to listen to this all the way through!
(I debated between this and The Lightning Strike Part 1 by Snow Patrol. And Love Song by Anberlin. God I can't make decisions. All are very true.)
For his life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0idI4WiGSg
(I debated between this and The Take's Over the Break's Over by Fall Out Boy. Both are very true.)