People would describe me as being:
As expected by his title, Nick has strong leadership skills. He's confident, assertive and friendly, and in general, gets along well with everyone. Helpful, loyal, protective, friendly, short-tempered, defensive, sensitive
-- WIP --


Some things I like are:

• Smoking - preferably weed, but cigarettes suffice when in public
• Skateboarding
• The ocean
• Hot meals
• Warm weather
• Adrenaline rushes
• Hotels

Some things I dislike are:

• Most outreach programs
• Expectations
• 9-5 jobs
• His temper
• Cops
• Christmas
• His father

Fears:
Never doing anything with his life. He doesn't expect to go to Harvard or anything, but being able to get a real job and a real apartment would be nice. As much as he wants it for his future-self, he's too in love with the freedom of the streets to give it up just yet.

Dreams
In the short term, he wants to help the others get their lives in order. He sees potential in a lot of them but unfortunately, knows that most of them will end up as just another "homeless" statistic. A more realistic wish of his would be to get another tattoo, although he isn't sure where he would want it/what it would be of.

I ended up here because:
Nick is the son of Emilia Perez, a flight attendant from America, and Gabriel Moreno, a businessman from Spain. The pair were both only twenty-two when they met at a bar in Madrid and had a one night stand. Emilia was only in the city for a night, since she was working and had just stopped there for a 24-hour layover, so neither of them were expecting more than just a drunk encounter that night. Four months later, after much fear and denial on Emilia's part, it was confirmed that she was pregnant.

She was not ready to raise a child and her parents couldn't afford to take guardianship of the unborn child, so seeing no other option, Emilia reached out to Gabriel. He was also not willing to alter his life in order to raise a child on his own, and if his parents hadn't gotten involved, Nick would have been put in foster care right after he was born. They, however, were thoroughly opposed to the idea of their only grandchild being put into "the system" and decided to take custody of him. They had been planning on moving to the Florida Keys to retire at some point, so Nick's arrival just caused them to do it a bit sooner than planned. He was raised by his grandparents for thirteen years and has nothing to complain about when it comes to his childhood. His family was a bit nontraditional but his grandparents took good care of him and really loved him. He never met his mother and only saw his father once or twice a year for the first eight years of his. After that, there was an argument severed the ties that Gabriel had with his parents, which resulted in Nick being cut off as well. While he doesn't know all of the details, he does know that the fight was about the woman that Gabriel planned on marrying and how he was going to father children with her but reject Nick.

Nick's downward spiral definitely started when he was thirteen and his grandfather died suddenly of a heart attack. Not having a real father sucked, but his grandfather had always been there to fill that role for him so losing him was a big deal. To top it off, he didn't have much time to cope before his grandmother had a stroke. It was six weeks to the date of his grandfather's funeral when she was rushed to the hospital. She survived, but the stroke resulted in the entire right side of her body becoming permanently paralyzed. It was decided that a nursing home would be best for her, so once she was sent there, Nick was placed in foster care.

He'll give you an infinite number of reasons for why foster care ruined his life, but if he was being honest, he'd admit that he wasn't exactly willing to try out the new life. He had the typical teenage angst, topped with bottled up emotions resulting from his grandfather's death and grandmother's stroke. Even if he was living in a mansion with people waiting on him, he probably would have been defiant. He spent around a year and a half in foster care, and in that time, was shuffled between six different homes. He was labeled a troubled kid and did a pretty good job at fitting that description. He'd skip school at least three times a week, never did homework, was disrespectful to his teachers and foster parents, and got involved in the wrong crowd. He decided to leave his foster home when he was fifteen, and by that point, he was not only smoking pot daily, but was the most profiting dealer at his high school. If he hadn't left on his own accord, he probably would have been kicked out or arrested within weeks.

Leaving his home life wasn't as dramatic as it seems it would be, but he never really considered anything besides his grandparents' home to be "home" anyway. He went to school and immediately after, visited his grandmother at her nursing home. She wasn't doing well and would end up dying three weeks later, but Nick knew that he wouldn't see her again. He didn't tell her that he was running away but made sure that she knew he loved her and appreciated everything she had done before him. Before leaving, he discreetly took one hundred dollars out of her bedside stand. She wouldn't be needing it, and if he had asked, she would have given it to him anyway. That money paid for his bus ticket from Florida to New York, and the couple hundred he had saved from dealing was what he planned on using to keep him afloat.

It was a bad plan, and almost as soon as he got to New York, he realized that. He didn't know anyone in the city, and the fact that it was the dead of winter didn't help in his quest to survive on the streets. Two days into his journey, he found himself accepting a bed at a shelter for runaway youth. It wasn't what he had hoped his "free" life would be like, but he had a warm bed, hot shower and two meals a day. For then, it was enough. Plus, the shelter connected him with a job at a local restaurant. Here, he met Miguel Escobar, a kid who was a few years older than himself, who was also waiting tables. The two became fast friends and Nick learned that Miguel and his brother, Chris were big players in a drug ring. Without going into too much detail, Nick agreed to join their team and not only started dealing for them, but moved in with them. About three years in, he quit his job at the restaurant because the drug money was doing more than enough to help him get by. He was living well, but again, this didn't last for long.

Miguel, Chris and another friend living in the house were killed that year by Miguel's cousin. Police pinned it as a gang-related murder, but in reality, the cousin had found out that Chris had been sleeping with his girlfriend and clearly wasn't happy about it. Nick was lucky that he wasn't home, because Miguel and the friend had just been caught in the crossfire and if he were present, his fate would have likely been the same. When police showed up at the scene, a hoard of drugs were found in the house and Nick didn't even try to enter or act like he had known the guys. Again, he was homeless and dealing with the emotional trauma of losing loved ones so suddenly. By now, he had grown an emotional wall though. He knew that he had to be tough to survive on the streets, and he did.

Although he continued to sell drugs, it was more low key and wasn't giving him as much cash as he needed to get back on his feet. He managed to find a job washing dishes in the back of a small pub, Finnegan's Irish Pub. The owner, Finn, was a recently-divorced alcoholic who took a liking to Nick, and offered to let him room in his basement until he could find an apartment. He took him up on the offer, and now, six years later, he managed to convince Finn into letting seven other homeless kids share the space too.

I make a living by:
Drug Dealer

Height/Weight or build:
6'1/Athletic build

Eye color:
Brown

Hair color:
Brown

Other:
He has tattoos on his arm.

Face claim:
Diego Barrueco