#anyway i love sjaak a little Too Much already

[vacantgodling]

thank u rose ( @void-botanist ) for the excuse 😭🥺

i had to do quite the amount of research today to even shamble this backstory together and it’s still Very Heavily a work in progress—but here’s the general gist up to where i want (insert name of wip here) to start:

sjaak de witte (sjaak being pronounced “shak” — the a pronounced like “aah”) is a mixed, black dutch man to a free house laborer mother and the employer she worked under—in secret sometime in the mid to late 1700s. it’s quite obvious who sjaak’s father is, as he and his father have very similar faces but his dark skin allowed the lady of the house (and lawful wife of his father) to feign ignorance. it was here that sjaak first meets eliseabell schwann (first name subject to be tweaked), as she is also the child of servants of the home and the two spend their youth playing and doing schooling as well as varying household chores when necessary together, with sjaak promising to marry her when they’re older. however, this time is cut short when his mother suddenly passes away, and having no use for a “stray child” in the home, sjaak is sequestered to the streets of holland. he finds and takes any job that will accept him, losing contact with eliseabell in the process, but never forgetting his promise. when he’s old enough he emigrates from holland to spain/the basque, and enters the spanish army as a mercenary foot soldier sometime around/during the peninsular war between spain and france. this is mostly to gain steady pay, but his luck runs dry when he is medically discharged after he starts to experience strange… “episodes” during his time in the militia.

(one of the soldiers there that is another character in the militia, known as gust (name also subject to be altered), unknowingly to sjaak fed him moonstone, which is what turns humans into vampire hunting beasts that prowl the night—or a werewolf in laymen’s terms. the “episodes” sjaak is experiencing are the side affects of turning into a lycanthrope. idk why gust does this yet but we’ll get there)

after his discharge, he first returns to holland to find eliseabell but learns through the grapevine of far off acquaintances that she has already been married off to one eduard insert-surname-here. they had been smitten with one another for awhile (from the rumors) and apparently she is now heavy with child. this news breaks sjaak at first, and he laments, but gust finds him and tells him that his lady love has been carried off by a vampire, and that the baby inside of her will tear her from the inside out and kill her as it is a half blood.

terrified for eliseabell’s life and furious that eduard was able to trick her into carrying his half blood child (in sjaak’s mind but it’s more complicated than that—obviously my boy Does Not have the full details) thus sjaak travels to where eliseabell and eduard are said to have settled after marriage, in the basque region of spain along with gust and gust’s wolf pack to hunt down eduard and his family and hopefully save eliseabell before it’s too late.

he is a resourceful man and one that can struggle with but usually succeeds against his own tempers. he knows how people view him and he strives to eliminate that stigma, but having a wolf literally living under his skin makes that somewhat of a problem. he has a slight flair for the dramatics and once he sets his mind on something it’s difficult to sway him from it. he’s an actions first think second person but he does have enough common sense to not be blindly reckless. he doesn’t necessarily trust gust or his intentions, and he does have Major Issues with yknow being turned into an immortal bloodthirsty beast against his consent—but for now they share a common enemy and so he’s willing to put this aside for now. much of his love of eliseabell has definitely been manufactured by the thoughts years of isolation (from proper love and nuture i mean) and his rigid ideals of what’s proper, and isn’t necessarily a one-to-one understanding of who she is now. how eliseabell could fall in love with a monster (if she even knows eduard is a monster) is beyond him, but he doesn’t stop to think about the irony of him trying to tell her this now that he too is a monster in his own eyes.

he’s my favorite type of guy tho: one with problems and so it is extremely unsurprising that my brain latched onto him as it has 💀💀

does anyone want to hear more about sjaak 👉🏾👈🏾