Matthew Ian Thomas

[Matthew Ian Thomas]

THERE'S A STORM
ON THE STREETS
B U T Y O U S T I L L D O N ' T RUN
W A T C H I N G A N D W A I T I N G
F O R T H E R A I N T O C O M E


_________________________________________________
and some nights I’m scared you’ll forget me again
but I still wake up, I still see your ghost

NAME|| Matthew Ian Thomas
NICKNAMES|| He’ll answer to Matt/Matty
AGE/BIRTHDAY|| 22; May 20, 1990
GENDER/ORIENTATION|| Male; heterosexual
SPECIES|| Werewolf
CANON|| Nope


FACE CLAIM|| Matthew Czuchry
HAIR COLOR|| Brown-blonde
EYE COLOR|| Brown
ANIMAL COLOR|| Light brown
BLOOD DIET|| N/A
BUILD||

Matt is very… average in build. He’s on the tall side, standing at 5’9”, but nothing very noteworthy. He is also rather fit; his current job (and the one he has had since his mid-teens) requires physical labor on a daily basis, so that isn’t entirely surprising.

STYLE||

Matt has very simple style. He tends to prefer jeans and t-shirts (or long-sleeved shirts when the weather turns colder) or anything else. However, even without purposefully doing so, Matt still goes for higher-priced or brand name items over others. That’s just what comes from growing up with his parents’ reasonable wealth. It also means that he knows how to clean up pretty damn well when he needs to.

DISTINGUISHING FEATURES||

The only very “distinguishing feature” Matt may have is a tattoo he got on the outside of his right calf. He also has various scars from incidents on the farm, or basically the life of a somewhat-accident-prone boy (and, you know, from all of the werewolf transformations and whatever his wolf gets into, but no one hears about those stories).

PERSONALITY||

Matt has changed a lot in the last few years. Of course, becoming a full-fledged werewolf may just do that to some people. Throughout his childhood and teen years, Matt became known as quite the charismatic guy – someone who makes friends incredibly easily and doesn’t worry too much about public opinion (whether or not he spent much time with the friends he made), and that hasn’t changed much. What has changed is how Matt sees the world – and with all the supernatural chaos going on at the moment, it’s not surprising that he’s not very optimistic about it. Because of all of this, he’s a lot more mature than many of his peers, but Matt’s also always been the kind of guy that tries to put on a smile whatever’s going on. He did it with Alina, and now he does it with his curse. So to most people that know him, Matt’s just a little bit of a work-a-holic, but a good and loyal friend if you need him.

SKILLS||

x. Well, he changes into a ferocious, uncontrollable wolf every full moon, but he doesn’t consider that much of a skill.
x. He’s good with animals, particularly horses.

OCCUPATION|| Working his family’s farm
FAMILY|| Eliza Ashlyn Thomas (nee Massee), mother, 52, prominent defense lawyer; Russell Lee Thomas, father, 50, farmer/horse breeder and contract consultant, dormant werewolf; Aidan Robert Carter, son, 3
HOMETOWN|| Mystic Falls, Virginia
HISTORY||

Eliza Thomas was six months pregnant when her husband Russell received news that his uncle had died in a hunting accident – and that the man who had been a father-figure in his life had left him the large family farm outside of Mystic Falls, Virginia. See, Russell’s uncle had pretty much raised him on that land (his father had disappeared off the face of the earth before he was born, and his mother was a drunk perpetually in rehab), but he had left many years ago to go after a law degree. He had met Eliza in school – a much more well-off student than he was – and over the course of their studies and budding careers, the two fell in love and married, and eventually went about starting a family.

However, Russell made a snap decision upon the news of his uncle’s death, and moved the whole family from Washington D.C. to the outskirts of Mystic Falls. It wasn’t a very popular move for Eliza, and she quickly went to work figuring out how she would commute to a more proper location for her work, despite her maternity leave. And that ended up being a pattern in the family: Eliza was always rushing off to D.C. or other big cities for her career, and Russell and little Matt (once he was old enough to help) patched up the farm and made it quite successful. Of course, part of the reason was that the family had enough money to invest in the farm to make it a success, and weren’t depending on their returns to get by like many of their neighbors. It was more of an indulgent hobby for Russell, and because of that he and his family weren’t the most liked people of the farming community; that is, until Matt started going to school and became more well known among the other children.

He was a rather popular child – a bit spoiled maybe, but he made friends quickly and easily. He had an innocent kind of charm that he had inherited from his father. The funny thing was that his best friend, from age six to eighteen, wasn’t one of his young school friends. No, instead he met his somewhat-neighbor when he was out traipsing through the forest with Sammy, the big dog his dad had brought home the Christmas before, and she was – of all things – out hunting. He and Alina bonded almost immediately, and from that day forth neither could go anywhere without the other trailing behind.

Matt’s childhood went by in a flash. His father invested in horses alongside their farm workers, and the boy spent much of his time with them and Alina or at school. He honestly didn’t mind school, unlike some of his peers, but an easy explanation for that would be that he had friends there he didn’t see anywhere else. However, as he swept through the strange transition of his teenage years, he realized more and more that his time at school was time away from Alina. In fact, there was a faze where he coordinated with his best friend ways for him to sneak out of his classes and play hooky with her. They would go riding or hunting (he was never as good at it as she was, and she often poked fun at how awkward he looked decked out in hunting gear, but he just laugh along with her), or just hang out as they always had. Those were the kind of carefree days that Matt enjoyed the most – at least until his parents found out.

They weren’t very happy with him, as could be expected, but his mother was determined to make sure that Matt not only got the education he needed, but to send him off to college afterward. To make him successful and not get stuck in the middle of nowhere because of his father’s rash decisions. Now, that might make her sound bitter, which she certainly wasn’t. But Eliza had always been a far more practical person than her husband, and she wasn’t going to settle with a son that was just a farmer or horse breeder. And when she confronted Matt about such possibilities, Russell nodded along and agreed, much to his son’s dismay. It made sense in hindsight – they didn’t want their son to depend on the land as badly as some of their neighbors did – but at the time Matt’s only thoughts on the matter were that he never wanted to leave. He liked his home, and he liked being close to Alina. Was he supposed to leave her behind?

Unfortunately, the opposite soon started to be true, although neither of them moved away. The fact was that they earned a new neighbor: Liam.

Matt was irrationally jealous the moment he met the other boy, but that was likely because it was Alina that introduced the two of them, and she was already clinging to him like the stereotypical high school girl caught in the throes of love (at least in Matt’s opinion). He hadn’t consciously thought romantically about Alina – there had been thoughts there; there was a reason he liked her, and their level of “best friends” was just a little short of “soul mates” – but it wasn’t long before his jealousy was given real evidence. Alina seemed to spend every spare moment with Liam, and while she and Matt still had hunts and rides and the like every now and then, she spent the whole time talking about her boyfriend.

Now, he tried to be the good best friend and support Alina in her relationship. After all, Liam wasn’t the worst she could do. He treated her right, at least. It was just hard to accept that his best friend now didn’t see him as important as he had used to be, and even though Matt focused on his other relationships, it was hard to ignore what he had lost.

It also didn’t help that he felt about as emotional as a girl was supposed to be during PMS – but it was constant, as opposed to the “once a month.” It was mostly anger on his part though; he now had a temper like a flash-fire. It wasn’t like he had been a saint before or anything like that, but he certainly wasn’t the type to get in a fight in the cafeteria because some jerk was tossing tater-toters at anyone who walked by. And that was only the strangest of his string of trouble-making.

Matt decided that it must have been that he was just tired of the small town. Like many of his peers, he finally wanted to get out of there and not look back – but unlike them, he had a far better chance of doing just that.

He spent his senior year burying himself in school and college applications, deciding to follow an interest in biology he had discovered the year before. His parents were delighted – not only with his dedication to going to a university and getting a degree, but also in the fact that his fights and similar “delinquent” behavior seemed to have passed. The truth was that it never really did; Matt just gave himself far less chances to get into situations like that. He was seeing less and less of Alina as well, besides little get-togethers they had because she swore they had to keep happening. Those were times Matt both treasured and dreaded, especially because after two years together, everything out of Alina’s mouth seemed to be “Liam this” and “Liam that.” Okay, that was an exaggeration, but not by much.

That is, until one night Alina came to him, scared and in need of advice – advice that Matt couldn’t really give her. But he was able to comfort her and calm her down. For the first time in a long time, things felt normal between them, for a little while. However, the way that night ended took the gulf of space that had been forming between them and turned it into the Grand Canyon.

You can’t really blame Matt for thinking that things were looking drastically up for the he and Alina after everything that happened between them. He had confessed that he loved her – that he had for a long time – and she had reciprocated. For one night, Matt felt as if the world couldn’t get any better. But then Alina turned around and announced that she was pregnant with Liam’s child. It was a shock, to say the least, and the news compounded with her engagement to Liam soon after little Aidan was born and the new family’s decision to move pretty much shattered whatever relationship Matt and Alina had had left. They haven’t even spoken since she left, much less seen each other. Matt has also never seen the child that is – biologically – his own, something he has never suspected.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Matt’s life took a turn for the worse after that – not by a long shot.

The truth is that one night, not very long after the whole fiasco took a turn for the worse, Matt was sitting out with one of the grooms his father employed for their horses – and a friend from high school in fact, throwing a bit of a pity party disguised as just hanging out and getting drunk. The beer was provided by said friend and groom (Matt’s parents would have killed him if they had any idea that he was drinking in the first place, he still had a year or two till it was legal), and then spent most of the night telling tall tales of hunting and drinking and goofing off. Matt’s not even entirely sure when the atmosphere changed between them. It had something to do with the number of beers he had downed, and something to do with an errant comment about Alina.

One moment he was drowning his sorrows like some sort of cliché, and the next he was up on his feet, screaming abuse at the man that had insulted Alina. Things went downhill fast – or perhaps a more accurate image would be that things went flying off the edge of a cliff in a perfect swan dive. It’s a miracle that their exchange of shouts and insults and profanities didn’t bring anyone running. Of course, they probably would have been too late, because words escalated into blows without a moment’s hesitation, and then, suddenly, there was only one man breathing out on the far edge of the Thomas family farm.

Anger fled quickly, replaced by panic – and the only thing Matt could think to do was to get rid of the body. Thankfully (depending on your point of view) he managed to do that rather well, and dispose of any evidence that the night had ever happened. He was paranoid and jumpy after that night, even though common opinion on the groom’s disappearance was that he had finally caught a break somehow and ditched town – it wouldn’t have been strange.

Things were finally starting to settle back in to normal when the full moon came around, and everything that Matt knew or thought was turned on its head. He woke up in the middle of the woods, naked and covered in someone’s or something’s blood, with no memory besides blacking out from some extreme pain. Suffice to say, he panicked again.

He managed to get back home and lock himself in his room – and stayed that way.

Like any reasonable eighteen-year-old who thought he was going batshit insane, he turned to the internet. Unfortunately, he didn’t find much – or nothing at all, really. And the pages and pages of nothing didn’t calm his nerves very much. If anything, the hours he spent searching for any kind of answers wore away at his hope that this was something normal or fixable. Not that he thought it was very normal in the first place, otherwise he wouldn’t have been panicking as much. But you know, a guy can hope, right?

It took about a week before Matt felt even a little bit comfortable venturing out of the house. His parents had definitely noticed, but he claimed he was sick – and he certainly looked it. By then he realized that whatever the hell had happened wasn’t going to keep happening (for now at least), and he found himself going to a very familiar house down the street. Matt hadn’t exactly planned to go to Alina’s father, but he definitely wasn’t going to either of his own parents for any of this, and after the childhood that Matt and Alina had shared, it wasn’t surprising that he saw the man as a second father of his own.

What was surprising was just how quickly Robert Carter realized what was going on. Matt had attempted to stumble over the night he blacked out, and then he was being interrogated. Had this happened? Had that happened? What day exactly did it happen? They went on, some vague, some terrifyingly specific. And, eventually: have you ever killed anyone?

There was a surprised (maybe even outraged) denial, and it was almost accompanied by a stormy end to the conversation as Matt made to leave. He was stopped by a hand around his upper arm forcing him back into his seat, and then a scarily calm recounting of everything that had happened to him, except that the death Robert had caused was a hit-and-run accident, not outright murder. The older man continued on to explain what had actually happened – the werewolf gene, the shape-shifting, the blackout. He explained everything he knew about the lore and other supernatural creatures; it wasn’t much, but it was far more than Matt could have possibly guessed.

Disbelief was his first reaction, but in light of everything that had happened since Alina had left, he had to believe it. He had no other choice; it was the only explanation that made any sense.

It took quite a while for Matt to completely accept Robert’s story, but when he did, the man became much more of a mentor to him – showing him the best way to lock himself up during a full moon, and helping him get by normally, as if none of it had really happened. Not to the rest of the world, at least. Of course, Matt’s parents didn’t exactly like the idea of him giving up the college career that he had previously been aiming for, but they learned quickly that nothing they could say on the matter would change his mind. Instead, Matt continued to work on their farm, taking a far more hands-on approach than he had ever willingly done before. He even helped out on neighboring farms for more money (his family had enough, but they weren’t all that happy supporting him endlessly), and seemed to settle in almost completely to the life he had swore a few years ago to leave behind.

Matt is among the many that see the whole “werewolf” thing as the curse that it is, but he has finally accepted it – and the strange little pieces of it that still surprise him. The news of a vampire-werewolf hybrid hunting down werewolves and their packs was one such thing. Robert decided he had to go off and find a pack he had ties to so that he could warn them, but when he left he made Matt promise one thing: to stay and keep an eye on Alina. He also saw fit, as he was climbing into the driver’s seat of his Jeep, to tell Matt a little family secret, and made him swear up and down that he would never breathe word of it. Not even to Alina.

So now that Robert is going chasing down wandering werewolves, Matt has the task of finally facing his old best friend again, and finally meeting the now-three-year-old that is apparently his son. Things just keep getting better, don’t they?

BEHIND THE SCENES|| Jelly
OTHER CHARACTERS|| Clementine Louise Mudgett, Niklaus “Klaus” Freiherr
CONTACT|| PM/MSN
RP SAMPLE||

This certainly was a lot to take in; even Klaus would admit it. However, he had had centuries to get used to the idea and everything that should have come with it. The blood lust, the issue with the sun light (thankfully that didn’t affect him – that would be irritating), having to be invited in, compulsion, etcetera etcetera. There was a long list of things and details that one could really only learn over time, and poor Alina here was getting a crash course. And she also had to deal with the fact that she had just murdered her fiancé, and had almost done the same to her three year old child, at the same time.

So it was understandable that she was having a hard time wrapping her head around everything. Still, Klaus didn’t enjoy being the lecturer. He had more important things to do with his time.

Thankfully Alina didn’t push the explanation about his compulsion of Aidan any further – and she thanked him, in fact! Her words almost elicited a laugh from the hybrid, but he caught it before it escaped and merely grinned in the way that only he could: satisfied, amused, confident, and completely and totally in control. Whatever Alina might have thought about it, Klaus definitely was in control. She was in the palm of his hand, and she would do just what he needed her to. There was no way around it; it was that simple.

Of course, it helped that she was now slightly indebted to him for saving Aidan. However short lived that moment was before she went off yelling at him again. She had a pair of lungs, she did. But it was amusing more than anything, which was a good thing for Alina. If she had irritated Klaus instead, things wouldn’t have gone nearly as well for her. If things had gone well at all from her perspective. At least her son wasn’t dead? That had to help her outlook, at least a little.

“Oh come now,” Klaus tossed back at her, “think about it. I’m not pushing the blame onto him as you put it, I’m just pointing out the facts. You would have been left to continue your happy little boring human life if your father hadn’t kept his secrets from you. If he hadn’t run, I would have gone straight to him. But he had to make things difficult.” He shrugged, shifting his weight on his heels and the weight of little Aidan in his arms. It wasn’t that the boy was heavy in any respect, but it was odd just holding him there. Although, it must have been an interesting image, especially if anyone who actually knew Klaus say him holding the sleeping child. Most of them thought of him much like Alina did, which had to only make it more interesting.

“You misunderstand me, dear. I’m not after them to harm them. There have been a few… casualties, but that is far from my intention.”

Was it really that simple in Klaus’ mind? Yes, honestly. At least this point in his “plan” was simple and not targeted at anyone. He wanted to make more hybrids, and really, what was the downside of that? Sure, many of the werewolves he had attempted to turn had ended up dying or being killed because the transition failed, but that wasn’t Klaus’ fault. Not really. Hell, you could go as far as blaming the original witch in the first place. If she had never cursed Klaus to restrain his werewolf side, he would have known centuries ago how to effectively create another hybrid. There would be none of this testing, none of this trial and error. It was nothing malicious on his part – not yet anyway.

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N O W T H E R E ' S N O W A Y B A C K
F R O M T H E T H I N G S Y O U ' V E D O N E
I K N O W I T ' S T O O L A T E
TO STOP THE SETTING SUN

[Jelly]

Moved!