Malak

For once, he's right on time.

Maybe a tiny bit late, which gives him enough time to close up the shop and drop off the girls at their mothers' places. From there, he has choices: he has the remnants of artificial Alpha scent, as well as enough food and water to take care of himself through the heat. Or he can go out. Find someone.

He hates the former. Not that it's serious physical hardship; he's, thank God, never been one of those omegas who goes totally insensate and fevered. Heat has always been more pleasurable than painful for him. He just... he hates being alone with the ever-present knowledge that this is of his own making. That he's alone because he chose to be. That it was the right choice never seems to matter, in the moment.

He chooses without choosing, pacing back and forth in his apartment as he picks out one outfit, and another -- what do people wear for this? What exactly does he want to signal? -- and he traces the natural lines of his lashes with a darker kohl. He has the kind of face that can be startlingly beautiful, but he isn't so young as he used to be.

He'll try, that's all.

--

He chooses the bar because it doesn't look like all the others. He has noticed it before; relatively near both his shop and his home, and the vague familiarity makes it less threatening.

Oh, he is so totally unprepared for this.

White shirt, dark pants; not dressed like a teenager going clubbing, that's for sure. And good, because this doesn't seem like that kind of place. He's aware that he smells... good, right now, not the siren call of omega in heat, right here, come and get it, not yet, but certainly appealing. Provoking unwanted attention is always a risk.

So he moves carefully through the bar, takes a seat off-center at the countertop and at least two spots away from any person sitting there already. It's a dusty summer 6PM outside, not sundown yet. Malak swallows his nervousness.

The meeting took twenty minutes. Twenty torturous, endless minutes, with her hard and angry face across the table and the smirk of her lawyer as he eviscerated the legal claims Malak had thought were so solid. That Malak's lawyer had agreed were solid. And he knows that the lawyer probably presented it in the most negative light possible, that the lawyer wanted to intimidate them, but Malak can't help it: his head is full of visions of losing his girls, and he can't think.

He moves towards the elevator, his lawyer jogging to make it to his elbow. "Hey," she says, "we're still going forward, all right? You still have a good chance."

A good chance. A good chance, as opposed to the sure thing that a custody settlement would be. He gets Brenna three days a week. That's still the offer. And it would be all right -- for him. He tries to explain, every time, and he stammers, gets turned around and tongue-tied, and still he can't express to any officer of the court the sheer disaster it would be to give Brenna so much time with her mother. The girl is becoming a bully. He can feel the sheer feeling trying to flutter out of her, and can see the way she vents it in all the wrong ways. He needs her away from any cruel, manipulative touch. She can't be a bargaining piece.

Malak pushes the elevator button three times, his hands shaking.

"Malak," says his lawyer.

"I'll," says Malak. He swallows. "How about we just meet tomorrow, like we scheduled? I need some time."

"Listen," she says, "I'll fight for you."

Yes, she will. She will, in her J.C. Penney suit and her Bargain Shoe heels with the stitching coming apart at the sole. And Alaina will come in with Gucci and hand-tailored jackets and six experts and she'll demolish them.

"I know." He forces a smile. He still has hope, which is the deadly part. He still thinks that maybe the justice system will see through Alaina's expensive machinations. "I'll see you then."

The elevator dings open, and a dark-skinned, shockingly handsome man emerges. Malak tears his eyes away, and realizes that a weight from his pocket is missing. He touches it -- flat, empty. His phone. "Damn," he says. "I forgot my phone. I'll catch up with you."

"You sure you're all right?"

"I'll see you tomorrow."

He turns back, and as luck has it, he ends up several meters behind the dark-skinned man. He makes a left turn into the conference room, retrieves the phone on the counter.

Malak's past contains triggering content, including rape and emotional abuse. If you would like to opt in or opt out of mentions of this backstory, please fill out the permissions post below! If you are not on here, I will ask before mentioning anything.

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Player name: Ryann
Age: 25!
Contact: I’m cornichaun @ gmail, plurk, AIM, etc.
Other characters: None.

Character name: Malak
OC info: There are a lot of legends about the origin of the Spinward Islands. Not the islands themselves; they’ve been around for millions of years, a little volcanic and formerly-volcanic scattering of small, medium and large islands angled between the continents of Ursei and Tesk. (The ‘Spinward’ name comes from when they thought the sun went around the planet; it was the direction the sun set every night. But then they figured out the thing, and realized that the Spinward Islands were actually anti-spinward from the most populated continents, but the name stuck.) The legends are about the culture on the islands. And some of them involve curses, some involve gods, some involve diseases - but the gist of it is: five hundred (or so) years ago, something happened on these islands, and the inhabitants became unable to bear male children.

One would expect the society to die out fairly quickly. That wasn’t what happened. In less than a generation, the formerly peaceful, fishing-and-gathering villages transformed into warriors. There were no men native to the islands, so they found their own, turning pirate and taking a toll on the booming trade between city-nations in Ursei and Tesk. Sometimes they would even raid coastal villages.

Perhaps in compensation for the humiliation of being forced to exist this way, Spinward culture became proud and matriarchal, rooted in a tradition of fierce female warriors. Honestly, no army or alliance on either of the closer continents could manage to get the clout and the sea power sufficient to try attacking the Islands; on top of that, these women were trained from an early age to be strong and to survive and that was exactly what they did. Strength became the root of beauty; skill in combat became necessary for any kind of status in the community.

And the men? They weren’t really highly regarded. They weren’t the ones bearing the children. They weren’t natives to the islands. They were set apart, all of them, even though the majority was kidnapped before they could even remember. Of course there was love, and strong bonds between married men and women, but the culture had a sharp divide, and men were definitely a step down, not allowed to inherit or own land or hold jobs without permission of their adopted clan leader.

Over the course of centuries, the status of men swung back and forth. Sometimes there weren’t enough. Sometimes there were too many. Marriages and the siring of children became ritualized. Things started to fall into a balance. Treating men as commodities worked, and the women in power saw no reason to make any fundamental changes. On top of this, the Spinward Islands have some of the best standard of living anywhere. Everyone is cared for; there’s schooling and medical care and clean streets. It is a sign of strength and power not to be greedy and selfish but to contribute to the common good, and so the rich are expected to do so, and pressured to do so.

Important Cultural Elements:
- Men have to deal with a standard of beauty that’s a little contradictory. Men have strength, but their strength should be the last-ditch strength, and it shouldn’t be warlike, just protective. So men have to be pretty, and they have to be strong, but not too strong.
- The general outlook on child-raising is: listen, I carried it for nine months, I endured a horribly painful birthing process, I get food on the table, it’s your job to take it from there. Fathers are considered the nurturing parent, and mothers the parent in blood and flesh.
- Arranged marriages and sirings are common, done by clan leader. The way they bargain off their adopted men is pretty gross.
- Beyond arranged marriages, the most prestigious way to win a man is via a ritualized contest that takes place once a year. The eligible females of certain ages take on one another in combat; the overall winner gets first pick of the eligible males. The second gets second pick. And so on. Surprisingly, this actually turns out way more romantic and less creepy than the arranged marriages; it’s pretty customary for the female warrior to court the man beforehand, and to gain his acceptance and affection before anything happens. That isn’t necessarily the case, of course.
- Men should be beautiful, but not show off that beauty. They should obey their clan leaders and wives always, but should have enough fire in them to be proper sires for warriors. They shouldn’t spill seed willy-nilly. Men should be graceful, and quick; the best men should learn dance to please their wives. Men shouldn’t attract scandal. Men should be seen, not heard. Men have fragile emotions, and are prone to overreaction.
- Men DO NOT FIGHT.

For a scattering of other information about the universe:
Gods. There are probably about a hundred gods in this world. Some have sired lines of mortals, some have appeared only once or twice, some are major, some are minor, but one thing they all hold in common: to name a god is horrifying blasphemy. Given that what they're the god of tends to vary with human cultural forces, this leads to a lot of confusion. Humans tend to err on the side of caution.

Technology. Think 15-1600s China in level, if not in culture, with enhancements provided by various magics. Bows, swords, horses; complex boats and buildings; lots of writings; gunpowder is definitely a thing.

Climate. The Spinward Islands are temperate and heavily forested, mountainous. There isn't much large flat land for farming, but what there is is heavily utilized. Common domestic animals are goats, horses, and chickens; common wild animals include mountain lions, goats, wild pigs, and lots of small furry burrowing or climbing creatures.

Clothing. Ranges from rough homespun-and-homewoven tunics and pants to beautiful and elaborate jeweled, tailored and gorgeous gowns. Women's dresses are nearly always kept short, so as to allow for freedom of movement, and it's common to wear some kind of legging or pant underneath. Long gowns are worn pretty much exclusively by those in power or the elderly, as a signal that they don't have to fight. Men can also wear these longer gowns on formal occasions, but they're more likely to be pressured to dress simply and elegantly. Silk, cotton and leather are common.

Summary: ( CW: SEXUAL ASSAULT ) Malak doesn’t remember his life before he was kidnapped. He was young, three or four years old, taken in a raid on a temple orphanage - Spinward warriors’ favorite kind of raid, because it means that no one’s going to come looking for the children. It doesn’t necessarily mean that he was an orphan. More likely, he was unwanted, excess, left at a temple because no one else could afford to care for him. By all accounts, he has a better life in the Spinward Islands than he would have at home.

It doesn’t stop him from wondering.

The most important thing to know about Malak is that he should have been a perfect fit for this society. He’s always been calm and sweet, a nurturer at heart, gentle, beautiful. It should have worked, and he believed in the picture painted for him by the women on Poleimachmanei Island. As a child, Malak knew that he was going to grow up, marry a strong woman warrior, and take care of the children, and he was happy with that. He played house, he played with dolls. He did as he was told.

But it didn’t work. Because Malak had a mind of his own - because Malak started to understand and resent the inequalities as he grew up. He stayed “good” and kept to his trapped lifestyle, because he still trusted that things were going to work out. That the elders of his adopted clan (his kidnappers) knew what was best. Unfortunately for him, this wasn’t the case.

Malak was selected for the ritual contest, held once a year, when he was sixteen years old. He was young, but he was already growing into a fine young man, and his elders thought it best that he have the chance to sire a daughter and still be married young enough to be valuable. Malak was courted by several of the women warriors participating in the ritual, but he bonded with none of them, and on the day of the contest, he entered the arena terrified and unsure. It could have been fine, if someone gentle had won him. Instead, Malak was picked third, by a competent and brutal older warrior named Alaina. He wasn’t willing. She wasn’t willing to waste a contest year, and skip out on the chance to have a child. She took his resistance as him protecting his virtue, and praised him for it, even as she forced the issue. In her mind, there was nothing wrong with what she did. But, afterward, Malak’s faith in the world around him was shattered. He was abandoned; there was no one who could truly sympathize with him, or anyone who even understood why he reacted the way he did. The ritual, after all, was supposed to be romantic. If he’d just picked someone beforehand…

Alaina bore a child named Brinn. As was custom, even though Malak wasn’t married to her, he did a great majority of the child-raising for the first several years of her life. (Brinn was like her mother, tough from an early age, blustery, covering up her own personal weakness: that she wanted affection, and love. But she never could get it from Alaina, who simply didn’t function in an affectionate way.)

Malak imposed isolation on himself, and this was only broken by the local blacksmith, a woman named Jend. She was older, the strong and silent type, long past childbearing, and Malak started drifting around her, using the area around her forge as a safe space. Jend, in response, eventually started teaching Malak her techniques. Smith wasn’t an unacceptable job for a man. It was unusual, but allowable, and Malak’s clan leaders thought it might loosen him up and ready him for marriage.

It didn’t. But five years later, when Malak was getting damn good at the smithing, someone stepped up to court him. He was still unmarried, which virtually guaranteed that he would get picked for the ritual again (something he dreaded and ignored). Stubbornly, he turned his would-be courter away, as he had many others in the past five years. The difference was, Ymani didn’t end it there - but she did respect his wishes. She gave him flowers. She got to know him as a friend. She made it clear that his desires were respected at every turn. So he began to doubt his own resistance, and reach out to her, tentatively. He was chosen for the ritual; she won; she picked him. What followed was a much better experience for Malak, sweet and romantic. A child resulted, a little girl named Viere. Malak expected an offer of marriage.

It didn’t come.

Instead, Ymani offered him a position as a consort - powerless, belonging to her. Stung, he rejected the offer, leaving him, in the eyes of the community, damaged goods: who wants a man who is twice a father and still unmarried?

So, then, this is Malak now: a soothing presence, calm. He seems solemn and serious, only rarely showing happiness, amusement, joy. His body language is close and contained. He doesn’t attract attention to himself; he moves under the radar, lets other people take the spotlight. He is mild by nature and shies away from people who don’t respect boundaries.

But he is not trusting. His trust was broken with Alaina, and then again with Ymani, and now he doesn’t give ground. Ever. He constantly fights against society’s thoughts about who he should be and how he should behave, because he fully believes that his society failed him when he was at his most vulnerable. He’s not naturally a dominant person and would ordinarily like going with the flow or being told what to do, but experience has taught him that he cannot yield his own autonomy and happiness, and this causes him to be brittle and reticent. His innate pride is what holds him together in the face of society’s quiet derision and disregard of his emotions and accomplishments. He doesn’t fight back against rumors. He raises his chin and he keeps on doing what he needs to be doing.

Malak feels everything extremely deeply. He loves his children - and, at the same time, his feelings for them are also profoundly conflicted. Brinn, especially. She will never stop being related to violation, in Malak's mind. He loves her, but he is still so angry about what happened to him and how he never got any true closure. He has never stopped wondering about what his life would be like if that hadn't happened to him. This makes him somewhat stiff in his parenting of her. (Part of Brinn's misbehavior is undoubtedly from this innate stiffness; children are very perceptive, and she especially is extremely reactive to what she feels. She also more outwardly responds with jealousy when Malak shows plain affection for Viere.)

In daily life, Malak capably manages his forge. He is the best blacksmith on Poleimachmanei Island because he is an artist: he doesn’t just work metal, he coaxes it, he shapes it. He makes it something beautiful. The weapons he makes are in high demand, and he also makes jewelry and cold-works silver and other soft metals when necessary, on top of making the usual tools, horseshoes and nails. Essentially: he does what he wants, and the freedom of this career is his only true outlet.

He is a good parent, as much as he can be. He reads bedtime stories to his children, and takes care of them, and teaches them. But he tries to be too much for everyone, and he tends to fall a little short on everything: a little too harsh with Brinn, a little too forgiving with the shy, younger Viere.

What he wants is love. Even after all of this, he longs for happiness, and there is a willingness in him to open his heart to the people who come into his life. He wants to be happy, to be loved for himself and to be secure in that love. He can find a way to be happy with his work and his daughters, but love is what he’s always dreamed of, and he feels the lack of it very keenly. He is lonely, a pariah; he feels the lack of love very keenly, but has no idea how to get it.

Powers:Malak actually has a god in his ancestry - way, way, way back. By this point, the power has been watered down so that it often doesn't manifest at all, and when it does manifest, it's pretty useless. In Malak, the force of his caring for his daughters actually caused it to manifest as a very, very mild healing power. And by mild, I mean almost completely useless. It requires his touch, and there are two parts to it:

Soothing. Malak's touch can soothe pain. It's not going to take it away, it's just going to ease it. Think Advil more than morphine. The only reason he might be more useful than Advil is that he can soothe emotional pain as well as physical, to about the same extent.

Healing. This part... does almost nothing whatsoever. Malak doesn't enhance healing in any way, just nudges it towards healing the best way possible. Like, he can make it less likely to get an infection, less likely to scar. Frankly, this part is somewhat less effective than a tube of antibiotic ointment.

Malak’s power would be a three-a-day.

Entry: He’s probably going to freak out and need rescuing from the Skyway.

Player Information
Player Name: Ryann
Player Contact: cornichaun @ aim, plurk, gmail, dw
Are you over 18? Yes
Current Characters: None

Character Information
Name: Malak Spencer Sutton
Canon: Original
Reference Link: Some explanation of his ordinary backstory and world are here.
Canon Point: When his second child is 4, and his first child is 9.

Age: 29

Appearance: An Egyptian mother and a white father have left Malak with olive skin, dark hair and light-colored eyes. He's slightly above average height, slim and pretty; he keeps his hair short-cropped. PB is Saleh Bakri; image is here.

Orientation: Submissive. Malak is the quiet sort; he prefers being taken care of, defaults to gentleness and unobtrusiveness. He doesn't feel he needs to be assertive or in command to be happy, and he exists comfortably in a world where he is valued for beauty, both his own and the beauty of what he creates. Registering as submissive was an easy choice for him.

What it doesn't mean to him: that he yields control over his own choices, that he gives up his own right to be happy, or that he is unworthy without someone to control him. He does not submit except to people who he feels are absolutely worth it. He is also generally suspicious of the attitudes of dominants, and will look for excuses to refuse them; this is a result of poor past experiences and a general lack of faith in society's perception of submissives.

AU History: Born to an Egyptian mother, an immigrant and submissive, and a rich, traditional American dominant of a father, Malak was the third of three children and by five years the youngest. His two older siblings, one girl and one boy, both displayed the sort of academic, sports and social acumen valued by their father; Malak, in contrast, was intelligent but withdrawn, even as an infant preferring the company of his studious and hardworking mother to his siblings, his peers, or his nanny. Too often, in his father's opinion, Malak could be found chewing on his fingertips curled on top of a warm laundry machine, watching his mother fold clothes.

Though his parents were loving and devoted to one another, the power structure in the home was very traditional. Malak's mother had very little say in how the household was run, and her voice was often eliminated entirely from family decisionmaking. Particularly, her heritage was never discussed. Malak was not taught to speak Arabic, and he was not educated in Islam. The family was avowedly atheist. The only nod to half his genetic heritage was in his first name: Malak.

At soon as he had the manual dexterity, Malak would build things. He would make structures out of pillows, out of books, out of messes of Scotch tape. This delighted his father, who immediately inundated him with as many toy sets as he could find - Legos and wooden blocks and train tracks to build. Engineer, he thought, to follow Malak's elder brother, destined to inherit the family business, and Malak's elder sister, a budding lawyer. He never did much with the toy kits, though, preferring knives and forks at the dinner table, pencils from his father's desk, the headscarves that never came out of his mother's top drawer unless he stole them. Something in Malak, even as young as he was, recognized how maddening his father found this and persisted because of, not in spite of it.

Registering as a submissive was an easy choice for him. He took much more after his mother than his father, regarding her as his role model even as his father gave him concerned lectures about his lack of assertiveness, competitiveness in school. Sexual experimentation only affirmed his instincts. His father was disappointed when Malak turned 18 and registered submissive; even so, he made a valiant, if patronizing, effort to be supportive and grew much more protective of his youngest son. He sent Malak to school to study engineering, graciously allowing Malak to explore his artistic interests in his spare time.

Malak was extremely intelligent and intuitive, and quite possibly would have made a good engineer if not for what followed.

It was November of his freshman year when he went to the party. Got drunk, and wandered out with a senior dominant, a female pre-law major named Allison who invited him up for a little wine and some conversation after the close quarters of the party. She cuffed him to the bed by one wrist; they made out, and he told her that he didn't want to go any further. But every time he said that she laughed and gave him another drink. His memory of that night is fuzzy, but his memory of the morning, still drunk and clumsy with a half-hangover, is clear. He fought her that morning, but she took it as consent for rougher play.

He went to the police, as his father always told him he should. They were sympathetic but disbelieving, and they asked him why he went up with her, why he stayed, why he didn't make his own desires more clear. They told him the case would never go anywhere, and that he should drop it. So he returned to his dormitory and tried to continue on with his life. Over the course of the next several weeks he quietly emotionally collapsed in on himself. He went to class less and less, stopped eating, stopped speaking to his parents, and lost touch with the few friends he'd made at school. Allison, the pre-law student in question, found him and told him she was pregnant; after hearing this, and after he failed every one of his exams, he dropped out of school entirely.

The next seven months were torture for him. No one ever said the word failure but he saw it when he looked at his parents, heard it in the spaces between the things they said. He lived his life in a greyish daze, unable to identify or pull himself out of his turmoil.

Allison had the baby and named her Brianna. And after speaking with her, after seeing the child, Malak decided, at Allison's wheedling, with heavy reluctance, to try and make them into a family. This lasted all of three months, with Malak telling himself he would wait, wait until a line was crossed into abuse, that he would make himself be happy unless and until Allison behaved beyond the pale. And then there was one morning when Malak woke up, and Brianna was crying in another room, and he realized that the moment Allison met him was when she went beyond the pale, and that he was fooling himself if he thought he could do this. He walked out on her, a decision his parents simply didn't understand and only supported because he told them that Allison hurt him, just that, no extra explanations. He started a custody battle that went on for more than a year before it split 70/30 in Allison's favor (thanks, for the most part, to Allison's attorney relatives); he had Brianna Thursdays to Sundays every other week.

It was at this time that Malak's childhood really ended. His actions during this time created a rift between himself and his parents that never closed again. His life became his, not theirs, and he was the only one responsible for himself. He moved out of their home, and though he still loved them, he'd gone through a painful growing-up process that involved learning to trust his own instincts, and to believe in himself above others.

During this year, Malak stumbled on a job assisting a whitesmith on a Craigslist ad. He was desperate enough to go over and see what the job actually entailed, though it seemed truly bizarre. The whitesmith was a muscular woman, a former boxer and submissive named Gemma. She worked metals for a living, and had a workshop in a very expensive area of the city. He had no experience, but she sized him up and decided to take him out to coffee and talk to him. She found something worthwhile in his own personal strength, and decided to hire him over numerous art school applicants. This started Malak down on his eventual career; he had a gift for metals, for material strengths and weaknesses, and she trained him in shaping silver, gold, tin, pewter, brass, copper - he loved all of it.

This turned into a stable life for several years. Malak lost himself in his work and pulled himself out only to take care of Brianna, who was becoming more and more unmanageable. His already conflicted feelings on his child were aggravated by her attitude, which was one of dismissive disrespect towards him. She was a very insecure girl, and Malak learned, over time, that Allison would give Brianna anything and everything - except affection, encouragement, which is what she needed. So he learned to weather Brianna's tantrums and learned to coax her along when necessary. Besides a handful of failed first dates, he had no romantic involvements during this time.

One day, a professional tennis player named Yvonne came into the shop. She wanted a charm bracelet made as a gift to her tennis partner, a fellow dominant. Gemma deflected the job towards Malak, and thus began a flirtation that lasted most of a month. Yvonne began coming in unnecessarily, giving Malak flowers and asking him on dates. Every refusal of his was met with calm acknowledgment and respect, and eventually that respect wore him down. After the charm bracelet was done, he fell into a relationship with her, one that helped him open up his emotions and make huge strides in personal recovery. She was patient and caring, and even good with Brianna, whom she taught to play tennis.

Six months into the relationship, they slipped up and Yvonne got pregnant. She decided to keep the baby, despite the impact to her career. Malak expected her to marry him, and he would have said yes, if she had asked. But she didn't ask. And partway through the pregnancy, she sat him down, and calmly and gently told him why. She said with her career and his job, she didn't believe that their lives would be compatible with a child. She wanted a spouse who could stay with the baby. And one who was college educated. She loved Malak, but she was practical, and she didn't want sentiment to get in the way. The same straightforwardness that had attracted him to her gave him a sudden and devastating breakup. A month later, she was with someone else, a younger girl, an English Lit graduate who was willing to stay at home with the child, soon-to-be-named Vivian. Malak found himself embroiled in another custody battle, and though he was the father and the submissive, the judge decided that Yvonne's household was a good and stable one too, and only awarded him 50%. Every other week.

It's been three years since that verdict. Vivian, now four years old, is a quiet child who takes strongly after her father and clings to him, shy and withdrawn. Brianna is nine, and her school has begun to report behavioral problems affecting other classmates. Just recently, Gemma decided to retire, and passed ownership of the shop onto Malak. He is now one of the foremost metalworkers in all of Manhattan, and has several employees of his own. And besides handfuls of passing commitments, Malak has not fallen in love again.

Personality: Outwardly, Malak is quiet, a soothing presence, calm. His hands are always moving, working on craft, writing, twisting a pencil between his fingers. He seems solemn, serious, only rarely showing happiness, amusement, joy. His body language is close and contained. It's not hard to pin him as a submissive. He doesn't attract attention to himself; he moves under the radar, lets other people take the spotlight. He doesn't like being brash and loud; he is mild by nature, and shies away from people who don't respect boundaries.

Malak was like this from an early age. As a child, he rarely cried; he was perfectly happy to let his older siblings boss him around and to follow his mother rather than playing with his own toys, making his own games. Making other people happy makes him happy. He was the sort, as a kid, who would let other kids make fun of him and laugh along with them. As a result, he almost never made long-term enemies; bullying rolled off of him, and bullies tended to give up before they would push hard enough to really hurt him.

This child, however, grew up in a world that told him, constantly, that his desires did not matter as much as everyone else's. For a boy who already minimized his own wants and emotions, the environment of his household (solely controlled by his father, with his mother barely a voice in his upbringing) had the effect of quieting his own strength of will almost down to nothing. For most of his life, this wasn't a problem. Malak's father may have been a tyrant, but he was a benevolent tyrant: he was fiercely defensive of his children, and Malak almost never felt threatened or unsafe. He trusted the world around him. This was the guy who went off to college: one that was submissive, who tended to minimize his wants, but tended to assume that his wants would be taken care of anyway.

When he entered the larger world, this wasn't what happened. His sexual assault was what first led him to question his assumptions. Since what happened was what Allison wanted, and it was something that hurt him so badly, and it was something that on the surface looked a whole lot like an ordinary sub/dom relationship, it led to a deep and wrenching cognitive dissonance. His attempt to date her was an attempt to solve that dissonance the wrong way, by brutally stamping down his own feelings in favor of what he was taught to value for his whole life - the ideals of family, loyalty, loving a dominant. It wasn't long before his entire psyche violently rebelled from that state of being. The months afterward were a constant struggle to define himself, his boundaries and his needs; Malak had to start from scratch, and figure out how to defend his own needs without trusting the world at all.

His trust, since then, is as good as gone. Malak is still a sweet person, kind and calm, but he doesn't give up ground. Ever. He constantly fights against society's thoughts about who he should be and how he should behave, because he fully believes that society failed him when he was at his most vulnerable. This yields a contradiction: on the one hand, he is a submissive, and he likes being a submissive, especially in sexual situations; on the other hand, he does not want to give up his own autonomy and happiness as a human being, and this causes him to be overly unyielding.

Malak feels everything extremely deeply. He loves his children - and, at the same time, his feelings for them are also profoundly conflicted. Brianna, especially. She will never stop being related to violation, in Malak's mind. He loves her, but he is still so angry about what happened to him and how he never got any true closure. He has never stopped wondering about what his life would be like if that hadn't happened to him. This makes him somewhat stiff in his parenting of her. (Part of Brianna's misbehavior is undoubtedly from this innate stiffness; children are very perceptive, and she especially is extremely reactive to what she feels. She also more outwardly responds with jealousy when Malak shows plain affection for Vivian.)

He channels his passion into his art. Malak finds incredible beauty in the inherent flexibility and changeability of metals. Metals can be made entirely different through alloys, can be drawn to thin wire or cast into solid statues. Subtle, invisible flaws can ruin the whole piece. And metals can be shaped, smoothly and flexibly, without heating them or changing them into unrecognizability. This is his craft and his art. He sees it as molding bits of himself, his soul, his mind, into the physical world.

In daily life, Malak capably manages his own business. He is in charge of the metalworking shop, with a handful of employees to staff the store in the front while he spends his time making things in the back. His leadership style is understated, focused on cooperation rather than competition. He is in charge; he does not let his employees walk over him (this is where his unyielding nature comes in handy), but he does take and incorporate suggestions, and delegates many responsibilities. He would rather it be a friendly environment, and he's completely willing to fire someone whose worst crime is disrupting the work environment for everyone else.

He is a good father, as well. He has Brianna and Vivian on varying custody schedules, but when he does have them, he takes them to zoos, reads them stories, cooks dinner with them. He gives them both the affection their mothers don't, and, in Brianna's case, the discipline her mother doesn't. He doesn't want to be his father, raising his children without giving them any choice, but he doesn't want to be his silent and overruled mother either; he tries to be both dominant and submissive for his daughters, and generally he falls a little short on both: a little too forgiving with Vivian, a little too harsh with Brianna, because he thinks that forgiving and harsh are, respectively, what the two girls need.

When he dates, these days, he tends to look for submissives. They seem safer to him, and he is also able and willing to take a more dominant role and satisfy what they need. Submissives seem, to him, to understand each other's needs better and to satisfy them without any egotistical nonsense. Doesn't mean that he doesn't hunger for a good dominant now and then - it just means that his trust issues take his ability to be a switch and make him lean more heavily on one side than the other.

What he really wants is love. He wants to be happy, to be loved for himself and to be secure in that love. He can find a way to be happy with his work and with his daughters, but love is what he's always wanted, and he feels the lack of it very keenly. He wants it - he just has no idea how to get it.

Abilities: Malak is a metalsmith; he works metals like silver and gold, tin and pewter, iron and steel. He makes expensive, high-end custom metalworks, including a lot of jewelry, both of his own design and working with professional jewelry and interior decoration designers. He is extremely talented and has a 'feel' for metals and shapes.

Writing Samples
D/s Sample: Here on bakerstreet.

Non-Specific Sample: "Sweetheart." He lifts Vivian into the air, lets her settle into his arms. As usual, there are no words in return, just her legs going around his waist and her nose pressed silently against his neck. "How was your day?"

She makes an indeterminate noise, a sort of unh-un, not quite positive or negative. He smiles a little smile, lifting up her backpack with the other hand. Has to go out of his way to pick her up at the daycare that Yvonne uses, but he doesn't mind. They'll take the subway back up to his work, and then walk the rest of the way to the apartment.

The world falls away, now. On the way in, he'd watched the people around him, considered them, had that eternal hyper-awareness of the dominants nearby that he never can quite shake. Now, he only has eyes for her. It's always like that. Never fails to surprise him.

"Can you tell me something you learned today?" he asks, on the train. She shakes her head, shy, turns away from the watching eyes of a girl - probably a submissive. Young, probably without children too. Malak flashes her a brief smile, and turns his coaxing tone back to Vivian. "Did you learn anything about the alphabet? A, B, C, D..."

"E, F, G." Her voice is so quiet he can barely hear it over the clacking of the train. He gives her an encouraging smile. "H I J K..."

"Perfect, that's perfect."

"Elemenna pee."

When they're out, she lifts her hands up to be carried again. He hefts her. "You're getting too big for this." Though Malak is stronger than he looks; working with his hands all day needs strength.

Her little fingers grasp in his shirt.

She's too shy. He knows this. He knows he shouldn't enable it so much, shouldn't encourage it. But the sweetness in her - it's too close to home. He wants to preserve it too much. So he does. He coaxes, but he doesn't put his foot down. He persuades, but when she wants to be held, he's always there to pick her up.

So he isn't perfect. He loves her. Isn't that what matters?