“If you’re going to make a desperate, hopeless act of defiance you should make it a good one.”
--Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie
BASICS
NAME: Bre'q, previously Bretoreq
GENDER: Agender
PRONOUNS: she/her/hers
ORIENTATION: Polyromantic asexual, but there's way too much going on with her right now
BIRTHDATE: Summer 2753
AGE: 22 as of 2775
LOCATION: Semaca Weyr
OCCUPATION: Weyrfolk
WING: N/A
APPEARANCE
EYES: Brown
HAIR: Black, kept quite short
HEIGHT AND BUILD: 6'7", androgynous
PLAY-BY: This picrew
EXPY SOURCE: Breq (Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie)
FULL APPEARANCE:
Bre'q has dark skin and keeps her kinky hair quite short. She has an oval face with a defined jaw line but nothing especially notable about it. She is on the taller side with an average build, though she is not especially curvy which makes her come across as slightly more androgynous. She tends to wear practical clothes, but she doesn't seem to care much about their quality or upkeep these days. She also tends to wear gloves, often only removing them after she's removed the rest of her clothes.
Bre'q delivers syllables with the precision of a well-trained singer, but her voice is a bit rough, betraying that this was not in fact her calling. In point of fact, she's a little tone-deaf, which can sometimes make her incessant humming a little painful, especially for more sensitive ears. She has threadscoring on the limbs of her right side and part of her back and tends to wear long sleeves to cover that. She tends to develop a limp when it gets too cold and/or damp, a result of a bad break in her left leg from right after she left weyrlinghood.
PERSONALITY
PERSONALITY:
Bre'q was always something of a cold fish, even before...well. Before. She has never really been one for physical displays of affection. She prefers to show affection by quietly making a person's life easier, ideally without their even noticing she's done that. She likes to be in the background making things run smoothly and isn't really interested in being the center of attention. When she doesn't like someone, it can be hard to tell since she treats most people with the same basic respect and courtesy. She simply does not make any efforts to make their life easier, and when there is a rule or authority figure she disagrees with, she engages in malicious compliance.
Bre'q's coldness could easily be mistaken for misanthropy, but she actually cares very deeply for people. She has a particular fondness for the oddballs, the weird ones, and the underdogs, showing extraordinary patience for their antics, always ready to explain the things they don't understand and smoothing over rocky dynamics between them and other people. Her lack of warmth can make it hard for her to engage well with children, but she tends to treat them the same way she does adults which sometimes works in her favor. She will go to great lengths to defend people, even people she doesn't particularly care for, as long as she feels like their injury is unwarranted. People being hurt by their own bad choices or to stop them hurting others does not bother her in the slightest.
Bre'q loves songs and will often hum them without realizing, which can get irritating. It's easy to tell when something is troubling her or she is in pain, because she will stop humming her endless repertoire of melodies she's memorized. While Bre'q does feel emotion, she doesn't really enjoy showing it or even really talking about it. She sees emotions as a way of motivating action, but beyond that they're a more private matter. And even when they're not, trying to use words to capture something as ineffable as emotions is an exercise in futility. She's extremely practical in some ways, and is often frustrated by how deeply she does feel her emotions, how hard it is for her simply stay objective and logical about everything.
HISTORY
FAMILY: Igen dragonriders
SIGNIFICANT OTHER: None
BIRTHPLACE: Igen Weyr
HISTORY:
TW: Death
All her life, Bre'q had other people telling her what to do, where to be, what they expected of her. First, as Bretoreq, in the creche and from her parents, then from the candidatemasters. Still later, at seventeen, when she impressed to white Dliqueth and became Bre'q, she answered to the weyrlingmasters. She and Dliqueth survived weyrlinghood easily enough, but early on in their tenure as fully fledged riders, Bre'q broke one of her legs in a bad landing. Apart from that, though, the pair had an uneventful career and followed the orders of their wingleaders fairly unquestioningly. Like most dragonriders, Bre'q had a vague expectation that one day she'd either die in threadfall along with her dragon or live long enough to die of old age, though it was an expectation she didn't really dwell on, more an unspoken thought everyone had at one point or another.
And then Dliqueth died during threadfall. And Bre'q didn't.
She was twenty, and for the first time in her life, no one was telling Bre'q what to do. Oh, the mindhealers were telling her to share her feelings and how to handle the indescribable loss, but no one was dictating when she ate, when she slept, there was no clear expectations for how to live and die. For the first time, there was absolutely no direction to her life. She started memorizing Harper songs to have something to do. She ultimately decided to keep the name Bre'q. She'd always preferred how it sounded to Bretoreq, but there was also some spite in the decision; if following the orders and expectations of the Weyr hadn't kept Dliqueth alive, why should she follow everyone else's example now that she was dead?
Eventually, Bre'q started to get used to the aching emptiness that came with being dragonless, but even changing her quarters couldn't help her move past the memories of Dliqueth that were so intrinsically woven into Igen Weyr. So she decided to transfer to Semaca. On top of holding no memories of Dliqueth to hit her unexpectedly, as the newest Weyr, there was always work to be done, and keeping busy was the best way she'd found to stay out of her own head. She moved in 2775.