Onorata Verse Backstory (the teal dear edition)
[Archived for old time's sake, but no longer active.]
An ex-pat from Denmark, Badou grew up in Copenhagen with his older brother. As a teenager he had a first hand view of the latest plunge in the city's slow steady decline: it was hard to find someone his own age who hadn't had a friend or family member disappeared, or murdered, or raped, or all three.
Badou's brother was a freelance journalist who investigated what the police would not-the culprits of the attacks, mostly on children and young teens. Badou was with him when he snapped pictures; he waited outside closed doors while he met contacts. But he wasn't there on the night that his brother became another statistic in the long list of the disappeared. And he was only there belatedly at the morgue-the only next-of-kin they could call to identify remains so mutilated and torn that they looked like nothing more than an absurd caricature, more like a ruined doll than a man.
Unsure what had happened and with no other family, Badou set out to find answers: he tracked down sympathetic contacts he knew had spoken to his brother, asked questions the best he knew how-at sixteen it was all clumsy, graceless, cumbersome.
But that was how he met Schuldig, in a run down youth house outside of Fristaden Christiania. The German run-away was a year his junior but gritty and streetwise in the ways that only need can school. Badou knew that Schuldig was running-they were all running from something-he just didn't have the chance to find out what.
What happened next he only managed to piece together afterwards. It's hard to make sense of a whirlwind when you're caught up in it, and at the time it was all just a blur of running, and hiding, and running, and red-he always remembers the red because there was so fucking much of it.
Someone, it seemed, considered Badou a nuisance, or maybe the plan had always been to get rid of him along with his brother. They caught him and Schuldig together, and there were things they said that Badou still can't make sense of, but he knows it wasn't chance. None of this was chance except that he and Schuldig had met to begin with, and had needed each other that much, like something instinctual, something below the gut. Maybe that meant that it was all chance. But anyway, Badou knew how to shoot and he wasn't giving the damn sewer-rat snatchers-"dogcatchers," yeah-the only friend he had.
They came so close to getting out in one piece, but then there was the hallway, and the ammo running out, and the man with the knife, and Badou's hand flying up to block it, and the red. Everywhere. And mostly what Badou remembers now are flashes of Schuldig's face, pale under the low hum of fluorescents, daubing up blood while he sat too stunned to even tremble with his remaining eye staring blankly, barely focusing on Schuldig's face.
He's pretty sure that if it weren't for Schuldig, he'd have died in Copehagen, but they kept each other moving, running, clinging on to barely spoken promises-When we get to Central Station… When we get on the plane… When we get to Reggio Calabria…
And they did, but then Schuldig was taken and everything fell apart. Badou not knowing the country, the city, the damn language, where to search, who to ask, what to do. He scrabbled and scrounged, believed that Schuldig was dead, and finally reassembled himself from broken pieces, an absurd caricature held together by cigarette smoke.
It was during those early months in Reggio Calabria that Badou first met Heine Rammsteiner. They've worked together on more than a few occasions in the five years since. And in the nearly two years between Schuldig's disappearance and Badou's discovery that he actually wasn't dead-another bobble of chance, Badou's glimpsing his face on the advert for a porno in some trashy magazine-Heine became about as close to family as Badou was able to manage.
With no living relatives left, family for Badou is a matter of the people he chooses. Not that he goes around saying it. It's just that he figures you've got to appreciate the value of teamwork. Schuldig taught him that lesson, along with a lot of others that Badou never figured any words for.
Mostly, Badou is a pragmatist-his most immediate concern is always paying the bills and keeping up his uninterrupted supply of smokes. He'll take most any job he can get if the money is right, but he's not a hitman. If he kills-and he will if needs must; he's both incredibly skilled and incredibly brazen with the two sub-machine guns that he keeps on him at all times-it's because of something personal. In all likelihood it's because someone he considers a teammate has asked him to do it. So long as he's got his nicotine, it's hard to get Badou riled up enough that he'd want to kill anyone.
That doesn't mean he'll just roll over if pushed though. His run-in with the don of the Borudoune family-one of the relatively small local crime families-happened in the few brief weeks between learning that Schuldig was alive and managing to actually contact him again. Badou happened to snap some photographs of the don in a rather…compromising position. Of course the family chased him. Of course he ran. But they hadn't been counting on the mania with which he fought back, or the aftermath in which the story of what had gone down, if not the actual pictures, got leaked round on the streets. Badou still maintains that technically the disintegration of the Borudoune family was not his fault. But by the time he'd reconnected with Schuldig, on the streets of Reggio Calabria he already had a reputation as the man who brought down the old West Fourth Street Gang.
An ex-pat from Denmark, Badou grew up in Copenhagen with his older brother. As a teenager he had a first hand view of the latest plunge in the city's slow steady decline: it was hard to find someone his own age who hadn't had a friend or family member disappeared, or murdered, or raped, or all three.
Badou's brother was a freelance journalist who investigated what the police would not-the culprits of the attacks, mostly on children and young teens. Badou was with him when he snapped pictures; he waited outside closed doors while he met contacts. But he wasn't there on the night that his brother became another statistic in the long list of the disappeared. And he was only there belatedly at the morgue-the only next-of-kin they could call to identify remains so mutilated and torn that they looked like nothing more than an absurd caricature, more like a ruined doll than a man.
Unsure what had happened and with no other family, Badou set out to find answers: he tracked down sympathetic contacts he knew had spoken to his brother, asked questions the best he knew how-at sixteen it was all clumsy, graceless, cumbersome.
But that was how he met Schuldig, in a run down youth house outside of Fristaden Christiania. The German run-away was a year his junior but gritty and streetwise in the ways that only need can school. Badou knew that Schuldig was running-they were all running from something-he just didn't have the chance to find out what.
What happened next he only managed to piece together afterwards. It's hard to make sense of a whirlwind when you're caught up in it, and at the time it was all just a blur of running, and hiding, and running, and red-he always remembers the red because there was so fucking much of it.
Someone, it seemed, considered Badou a nuisance, or maybe the plan had always been to get rid of him along with his brother. They caught him and Schuldig together, and there were things they said that Badou still can't make sense of, but he knows it wasn't chance. None of this was chance except that he and Schuldig had met to begin with, and had needed each other that much, like something instinctual, something below the gut. Maybe that meant that it was all chance. But anyway, Badou knew how to shoot and he wasn't giving the damn sewer-rat snatchers-"dogcatchers," yeah-the only friend he had.
They came so close to getting out in one piece, but then there was the hallway, and the ammo running out, and the man with the knife, and Badou's hand flying up to block it, and the red. Everywhere. And mostly what Badou remembers now are flashes of Schuldig's face, pale under the low hum of fluorescents, daubing up blood while he sat too stunned to even tremble with his remaining eye staring blankly, barely focusing on Schuldig's face.
He's pretty sure that if it weren't for Schuldig, he'd have died in Copehagen, but they kept each other moving, running, clinging on to barely spoken promises-When we get to Central Station… When we get on the plane… When we get to Reggio Calabria…
And they did, but then Schuldig was taken and everything fell apart. Badou not knowing the country, the city, the damn language, where to search, who to ask, what to do. He scrabbled and scrounged, believed that Schuldig was dead, and finally reassembled himself from broken pieces, an absurd caricature held together by cigarette smoke.
It was during those early months in Reggio Calabria that Badou first met Heine Rammsteiner. They've worked together on more than a few occasions in the five years since. And in the nearly two years between Schuldig's disappearance and Badou's discovery that he actually wasn't dead-another bobble of chance, Badou's glimpsing his face on the advert for a porno in some trashy magazine-Heine became about as close to family as Badou was able to manage.
With no living relatives left, family for Badou is a matter of the people he chooses. Not that he goes around saying it. It's just that he figures you've got to appreciate the value of teamwork. Schuldig taught him that lesson, along with a lot of others that Badou never figured any words for.
Mostly, Badou is a pragmatist-his most immediate concern is always paying the bills and keeping up his uninterrupted supply of smokes. He'll take most any job he can get if the money is right, but he's not a hitman. If he kills-and he will if needs must; he's both incredibly skilled and incredibly brazen with the two sub-machine guns that he keeps on him at all times-it's because of something personal. In all likelihood it's because someone he considers a teammate has asked him to do it. So long as he's got his nicotine, it's hard to get Badou riled up enough that he'd want to kill anyone.
That doesn't mean he'll just roll over if pushed though. His run-in with the don of the Borudoune family-one of the relatively small local crime families-happened in the few brief weeks between learning that Schuldig was alive and managing to actually contact him again. Badou happened to snap some photographs of the don in a rather…compromising position. Of course the family chased him. Of course he ran. But they hadn't been counting on the mania with which he fought back, or the aftermath in which the story of what had gone down, if not the actual pictures, got leaked round on the streets. Badou still maintains that technically the disintegration of the Borudoune family was not his fault. But by the time he'd reconnected with Schuldig, on the streets of Reggio Calabria he already had a reputation as the man who brought down the old West Fourth Street Gang.