Nasir

Urban Youth - Nasir lived his whole life in middle-class housing in the urban areas of Grey Harbor. He'd be known - if known - as an odd child with unbridled dedication for all manner of mechanical things, and an unfailing schedule to visit the local Pawn shop every Thursday and Friday morning with his father as escort, until the age of twelve, going alone thereafter until sixteen. He made ephemeral attempts at fitting with other oddities; card groups, movie aficionados, the rising videogame scene, yet nothing clicked; nothing lasted long. Still, some may remember.

Army Veteran - Nasir didn't just serve, he gave the best half of him on the dunes of Iraq and returned with what little worse for wear remained. He was a Sapper, and grew a reputation for madness in the taciturn, disconnected way he approached his duty in the cold pursuit of deactivating improvised explosive devices. His specialization saw him change platoons many a time, and perhaps barracks where once share with this man, nicknamed endearingly 'Pagan'.

Vice - The voices never go away on their own. Alcohol, cigarettes and drugs, all manner of things that find his table and soon his metabolism. If he's an addict, he hasn't made up his mind about it yet, but he's certainly known as a troubled veteran amongst the unsavory sorts in search of an escape, and ripe for their trade.

Troublemaker's grit - He's prone to violent outbursts; to be the staggering man in the middle of the night, drunk out of his mind, singing a chanty out of tone, while swinging a half-emptied beer bottle around on what he thinks is the road to his jalopy of a trailer. It finds him like a curse, and he thrives in it with an angry, repressed frenzy. He's a known troublemaker, and a red flag at most bars, for an unrestricted ability to escalate every singular affront made to his person spectacularly. Thus far, the law has turned a blind eye due to his service, but nothing good ever does last.

Tittering on the brink - There's a limit in every man, and Nasir has come to it closer than most. He knows his life's one of what brief moments he gets from it, for he feels an inescapable thing manifesting on the firmament of his fate. The Glimmer makes of his mind a revolting playground of feelings unfurled, and he hasn't come anywhere near close to controlling the crestfallen sink that festers in his mind. Psychiatrists, psychologists, and verbose gurus would find his rather picturesque case file from the army - for the interested - a known thing, and could reasonably be acquainted with it, its information, and his happenings, described with the sardonic jargon of the army popular of such documents.

To the people around him, it didn't matter where Nasir was born - in Gray Harbor itself - but where his father was. They mocked him, since childhood, for the color of his skin; for the dark of his eyes, and the forlorn stare he never officially subscribed to, but clung to him like a curse, and warded off any who'd approach him since a child with a hint of good intentions. He was lonely, then, in his growing years. Kept to himself, mostly; himself and the many gizmos he chose to distract himself with at home. His mother was a nurturing woman of Irish descent, married to his father, a Hashemite who came to the states alongside his now-wife in search of a better life, with the promise of said marriage. The promise was kept, and three children came from the union; Nasir was their last.

In his youth, on the verge of puberty, he suffered greatly at the hand of bullying. A delicate child of no true muscle or mass, with a face wrongfully blamed for terrorist acts, it made him a target, and he was a victim, yet not the only one in the family. He grew watching his father's dignity be put to the test every day on his return from work; he saw every day his sense of dignity be constantly compromised by a world that never ceased to let him down.

At the age of sixteen, a basket of repressed anger that festered in his head made him a naturally bellicose young man. Lacking a place to fit in, he signed into the army after an enamoring speech by a recruiter who promised him the world, but never entered into detail about said world- it'd be later for Nasir to find out that it'd be a world of shit.

His fate saw itself repeated while in boot camp. Young men preparing for war, and many made of Nasir the first- his existence while under military barracks was torture, but soon it ceased to be a deterrent to his mind, but rather a whetstone of his wits, and he learned to weave through such hate; to learn to survive when the walls closed in, and only enemies remained. Eventually, a particularly perceptive Sergeant caught eye of his industriousness, and he was prompted - forced - into the necessary channels to see him become an engineer. OSUT, BCT, and attitude scoring, all came without blemish, and he was enrolled as 12-B in the Marines in a unit that didn't immediately sock him to near death while asleep, a brief respite to what'd come next.

Iraq was hell for him. As a sapper, duties saw him at the forefront of combat with the need to create foundations for the machines of war where the sand was soft, and the concrete broken. Or so he thought- that was only at the very beginning of the invasion of his ancestor's homeland, for come the end of his first tour - and the beginning of his second - it was explosives. His platoon came to admire him in the way he jumped into the moving sands to find and deactivate the evil, explosive contraption made by the more subversive enemy, but he didn't find them all. Fate robbed him of brief friends, and it was in one fateful battle for an unspecified bridge where in the carnage; in the slaughter, and the littering of corpses, with boundless misery, that he saw it. A thing without name, but form; a distending of reality that brought the first bouts of depression in his life, and truly broke him. A thousand crows, bloodletting and shapeless, slender silhouettes that looked and didn't look, peaking through a veil from a dark world into his darker own.

A brief conversation with his NCO of the happenings, an even briefer conversation with his Captain, and they signed him off for psych evaluation. A couple of weeks seeing a careless old man, they stamped him begrudgingly into a discharge - however honorable - and shipped him back to the States as a defunct, useless thing. They claimed it to be PTSD, the shadows; the voices, the whispers. It all fit a bill, but Nasir knew such illness; he lived to witness broken men every other day, and he knew his was a different thing, yet no less darker.

He returned to a near-empty home. On his father's last wishes, he asked his mother not to inform Nasir of his declining health while he was on tour- it was a matter of cultural dignity, not to weaken his resolve while at war, but Nasir never understood it. His two sisters had made lives of their own, with families so perfectly shaped that there was no space for his imperfections. A shadow loomed over him where he walked, and many bridges were burnt in his failed attempts at reconnecting with his family. Pushed into a corner, he was quick to return to the pursues of his youth, to tinker and make of useless things useful, other things. Desperation for income and a letter of recommendation and prompt from the army as the last ditch effort to repay his service - emphasis on last - he found himself as custodian in the local Pawn shop, an old store he often visited since young to buy the necessarily unwound things to fix at home and spend the time. It was a cold irony of life, that he returned grown to work as a man hired to fix broken things when he couldn't fix himself. The Glimmer helped him then- it was a thing he didn't understand, the catharsis of success from difficult, successful work accursed with sadness and memories of a hurtful past made it all a triangle of bittersweetness that now became the rule of his dejected life.

Brooding, is the way his features are naturally shaped. His is a stare that demonstrates longing, dark and peppered with amber lines that cut through its expressive, narrow windows that showed a hint of the black that plagued him. His cheeks were high against his face, pushing into relatively small eyes circled in black bags that hung beneath them prominently, remanding his looks to a harder, more rugged side of looks. It didn't help to have a nose as crooked as his, with a tilted bridge by its half that diverged directions and looked askew all the way to the nostril and from the dorsum. His lips were often cracked by the atmosphere's humidity, and a mean habit of biting into them with unevenly long incisors, the left which showed in even the briefest hint of his (mostly cynical) smiles, being the longest.

He was once on a peak of physical capacity, but such days are long gone, such as it is. Decadence ruined the notion and he now was naught but the threadbare promise of what once was. Thorough his body, if bared, the extent of his failings littered the flesh as scars, some old and fading; some fresh and festering still, in their brown anchoring of the flesh, made wrinkled by such malformations, yet none was as prominent as that which ran up from the left corner of his jawline's chiseling, bridged through his lips, and ran across his right cheek only a fingertip shy of his ear. It wasn't deep, but shallow- white and fading, but there it was, a striking flaw to a face in no short supply of them.

His shoulders were broad still, his arms made lankier by neglect yet strapped with certain vascularity to them down from his bicep's bulk; with a grip of visible veins and thawed sinew hard on the skin, representing a grit mostly aligned with beings experienced in hardship. His knuckles were pronounced, and his fingertips held a yellow and brief discoloration product of his nicotine abuse. It was subtle, yes, but there nonetheless. His hair was a curly mess, somewhat long - longer than his father would like - and marred with some ginger hairs lost in the maze of chestnut.