STORY

[Donald Campbell]

This application is: (at last) COMPLETE!
Warning: this is very long. <.<

forward they cried

Your Name: Sav
Age: 21
Contact: PM; AIM: savvy savvy yo; PM me for MSN and YIM
Desired Member Title: i know our filthy hands can wash one another's
Other Characters?: Annemarie Bishop, Gilbert Sykes
Where did you find GC?: beneath the Bixby Canyon Bridge. o.o

you know my name, look up the number

Character Name: Campbell, Donald Joseph
Aliases, nicknames Don (preferred), Donny, DJ; Donald Henry (birth name)
Age: 25; December 4, 1983
Affiliation: Jade, because of where he works (secretly in determined opposition of the Family system)
Occupation: Cashier at Safeway; graduate student of Social Work; volunteer
Gender: male
Sexuality: heterosexual
Portrayal: Matt Loewen



Height: 5'11"
Build: Pretty average, with broad shoulders and fairly toned muscles. He doesn't habitually work out but tries to stay in decent shape.
Eyes: blue.
Hair: light brown with a reddish tint, short, little attention paid to it beyond washing.
Tattoos/scars/distinguishing marks: Occasionally scruffy facial hair? A big scar across one knuckle. Nothing really important.

don't give a damn about my reputation

Personality:
Don is nothing if not matter-of-fact. He does not allow himself to be manipulated or jerked around, and will not hesitate to call someone out on trying to so to him. He doesn't make excuses for himself, and he doesn't make excuses for other people. He expects people to respect him in the same way that he respects them. He is straightforward, though rather quiet. He has never and does not now believe in talking just to talk. He always says exactly what he means—no more, no less. He doesn't see the value in lying or trying deceive people and has a strong fondness for truth and fairness. But he’s no fanatic; he’d never tell a girl she looked fat in a dress if she did, just to be honest. He’d find something nice to say, somehow. He has a lot of empathy and tries to be kind to people. His adoptive mother Jillian always says that there isn’t enough kindness in the world, and he agrees.

He is a man of careful action. Things that need to be done get done, and they get done right, as simple as that. It might taken him a little extra time as he is very methodical, very thorough, and prefers a steady pace in all things, rather than haste-that-might-make-waste. He disapproves of waste. He recycles, he reuses, he saves pennies in a jar. He doesn't like to waste time talking things over unnecessarily, but swiftly identifies the most desirable or practical route in his mind, then takes that route. He strives for efficiency in all areas of his life. He is patient, and he is persistent; he is not at all one to make rash decisions or give up on anything until he feels he has done all he can.

To others he may seem cold or indifferent, maybe even rude sometimes, as he is very self-contained and rather serious. He doesn’t really like talking about himself, or rehashing old business and news, and has a limited patience for trivial conversation. It takes him awhile to warm up to people; he is very cautious in all relationships, waiting until it is earned before he trusts people. This is not to say that he believes people are in general untrustworthy, just that he knows people are, to a point, very unpredictable. He doesn't rush into anything, if he can help it, but he is capable of swift action or judgment when the situation or individual calls for it. He may seem unemotional, but he is in fact capable of deep, intense feelings. He struggles, at times, to keep his anger in check--when he's angry, it grows and grows and grows to the point of irrationality, a fact that used to get him into a great deal of trouble. His struggle to keep his emotions to himself is not limited to anger or negative emotions; when he is especially happy or excited he is likely to be much more talkative or jumpy than usual, though this embarrasses him. In general, he doesn't like to broadcast what he is feeling at any given time; displays of emotion make him feel very uncomfortable and out of control. He tries to avoid spending too much thinking about things that upset him, with the notable exception of the news and politics going on, which he tries to keep abreast of.

He has very well-defined beliefs about life and personal conduct and will not falter on those. He believes in helping those in need to the fullest extent of his capability, even if he has to sacrifice his personal comfort to do so. Even though he values his privacy and personal space very much, he doesn't believe in putting his comfort or convenience over the needs of another living being. He is deeply compassionate towards people, especially the poor and homeless, and children in bad situations, who he believes in general are victims of circumstance. He believes it is everyone's duty to do what they can to help other people, when possible, and to leave things in better shape than when you found them. He believes the strong should protect the weak, and that (almost) all people are valuable in some way. But he doesn't go around spouting his beliefs or trying to convince people of things; he simply lives and acts in the way he believes is right, without discussion or attempts to flaunt it.

(Would you believe I could probably write more here? D:)

Likes:
• Honesty
• Blueberries
• Exercise/hard work
• Sitting on the roof of his apartment building around 11-o’clock on a warm night, leaning back on his hands and breathing.
• Comfortable silences
• The way girls smell without perfume
• Flannel
• The Red Journal
• That pink, liquid handsoap in public restrooms...
• Kids (they make him smile)
• Junk food
• Energy drinks
• The Gaimen City Dissenter
• Reading—especially cheap science fiction from the 50s
• Efficiency
• Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches
• Feeling useful
  
• Stability, constants.
  
• The courage and dedication of the Libertines
• Courage and dedication, in general
• The colors blue and yellow
  
  Dislikes:
• Nonsense, bullshit, and April Fool’s Day
• Gossip and discussing people behind their backs
• Inside jokes
• Drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol (except beer), and people who (over)indulge in such things
• Bullies
• Liars, sneaks, and cheaters
• Safeway
• Ham, and bacon
• How he feels after eating junk food
• Cheap, easy, loud girls
• Loud people; rudeness
• Magazines
• Too much free time
• Clutter and dirt
• Allergies!
• The Family system
• Some of the methods of the Libertines...
• Being fucked with
• Abstract art
• Dancing
• Excess
  
  Individual Traits/Quirks/Secrets:
• Not a big smiler. It doesn’t really work for his face, for one thing, but mostly he just never got in the habit.
• Subscribes to numerous newspapers, underground and otherwise, and reads all of them very carefully every day, taking notes while he reads. He has a tendency to get very upset or agitated over the material. Then he throws them all away and sits in grim silence for a few minutes.
• Cannot resist a person in need--he rarely technically lives alone because he often takes people (runaways, homeless people, etc.) in and does what he can to help them out, even though it is often extremely inconvenient for him, both financially and as far as his preference for privacy. But he doesn't believe in putting his comfort over the needs of another person.
• Something of a clean-freak, because of his allergies. He vacuums his apartment almost every day.
• Has two letters from his mother, sent years and years ago, which he has never read. He has no plans to—at this point, he believes her words are worse than meaningless to him. Still, they're his, so he hangs onto them.
• He has made no efforts to reconnect with his blood relatives, despite the likelihood that they are all still in the city.
  
  Strengths
• Very strong convictions, which he does not fail to stand by.
• Stoic, not easily rattled.
• Patient, decisive, dogged.
• Straight-forward and honest.
• Thorough, meticulous, methodical.
• Genuinely wants to and tries to help people.
  
  Weaknesses
• People/animals/things in need.
• Cheap science fiction novels from the 50s. He's addicted to them.
• Not very emotionally giving, sometimes over-cautious; too reserved, at times, sometimes to detriment of his relationships.
• Asthma and allergies! Dust, cigarette smoke, animals (alas!), flowers, and certain brands of fabric band-aids turn him into a sneezing, coughing, watery, rashy wreck.
• Doesn’t trust people easily, especially women—he knows this isn’t really fair, though.
• When roused to anger, he can be completely irrational.
• Can get wound up pretty tight without even realizing it, especially when dealing with rude or unsavory people. Which makes him tense. Which makes him look mad, even though he's really just tense.
  

and you may ask yourself, how did i get here?

Family:

• Allison Henry (birthmother—status unknown)
• (father and grandparents unknown—he met all of them as a small child, and he and his mother lived with his grandparents for awhile, but he doesn’t remember any of them or know anything about them and hasn’t made an effort to find out)
• Jillianne and Markus Campbell (last set of foster parents/adoptive parents--he contacts them generally only on holidays. Although he cares about them, he doesn't have a lot in common with them).

History:
Though the few memories Don has of his mother are not necessarily unpleasant, he prefers not to think about her at all. He often dreams, however, about the last time he saw her, when she was nineteen and he had just turned four. In the dreams, as it happened in real life, they are sitting side-by-side on the top of a short set of concrete steps in front of a small house. With one hand, she holds one of his; with the other, she brings a menthol cigarette to her mouth from time to time, dropping ash on her faded blue jeans. It is hot out and he is bored and nervous. They are waiting for a car to come get him; she had told him this, he thinks, but he isn’t afraid to go because she said it would only be for a little while. In his dream, the car never comes but they remain sitting together; he watches the smoke coil up from her hand into the sky. The dream always segues into something else completely unrelated, and he wakes up later feeling melancholy and irritable, and tries to find something to take his mind off of it.

In real life, they did not sit waiting long before a gray car pulled up and an older woman got out. Donny assumed at the time that she was some kind of grandma since she had silver in her hair like his grandma, who he and his mother lived with. He didn’t really understand why he needed a new grandma but wasn’t the kind of kid who argued with adults. His mother hugged him goodbye but didn’t say anything to him, so he didn’t say anything either. He always took her lead in any given situation, trying not to make them stand out. She didn't like attention. She didn’t look at him, so he did not look at her either, but instead at the glowing cherry of her cigarette, which he worried would fall and catch the grass on fire. For some reason he worried more and more about this even as the grandma-type-lady put him and his Batman backpack into the gray car. He was relieved when his mother finally put the cigarette out on the concrete steps, grinding the little bit of red fire into darkness; her face was turned down towards the ground, her deep gold hair falling over her features. Then the older woman said something to him as they began to drive away, and Donny, listening to her, forgot to look back again. This is not something that bothered him until he was older and had a reason to think about this kind of thing.

The woman took him to a tidy neighborhood, mostly comprised of little neat white houses, just outside the city. Another woman came out of the house to greet him, and she told Donny that she was going to take care of him for a little while. She wasn't young and pretty like his mom--she was older, and plain, with very short hair--but he liked her well enough because she was nice to him and didn't bend down to talk to him like most adults. Donny was more shy of her husband, who was the tallest man he had ever seen, and the only man he had ever talked to. The man and woman showed him the room where he would sleep, and the Batman sheets on the bed, and he felt excited about being there, even if he didn't know why he was there in the first place. The grandma-woman, who turned out to be his social worker, left after dinner, but she came back to see Donny every now and then. He missed his mom and his real grandma a lot, but he didn't think about them too much at first. The little white house where he stayed with the man and woman was very clean and didn't smell like smoke, and the books and toys were new. He liked it there.

Donny lived with Mr. and Mrs. Larson for almost two pleasant year. Then, one night, not long after Donny started first grade, he woke up to the smell of smoke. It was almost a familiar smell, though stronger, sharper, and more bitter than cigarette smoke, and for a moment he thought he was with his mother again. But when he opened his eyes, he remembered he was in the Larsons' house. And he saw an orange glow under his door. It was not the first time he'd seen a glow like that, and he knew what it was like. And just like the time when his grandmother left a grilled-cheese sandwich cooking for several hours while she went grocery shopping, Donny sat up in bed and screamed. A raging electrical fire in the hallway separated Donny from his foster-parents and the rest of the house, but after he screamed, it was only a minute before Don was rescued by Mr. Larson through his bedroom window. They were all unharmed, but the house was destroyed and the Larsons lost everything.

Though the Larsons were more or less willing to retain their guardianship of Donny, they didn't feel that living for months in hotels and various relatives' houses would be good for him, and his social worker agreed. Don wouldn't at all have minded staying with the Larsons, who he liked, but he didn't argue with adults. He found a new home with a single woman, Janet, in her late thirties, who doted on him and talked to him as frankly as she talked to other adults. He liked her immediately, and settled in comfortably. He liked to sit on her bed and go through the coupon section in the newspaper with her, and he sat at her desk with her, reading, while she wrote romance novels. He lived with Janet for three years before she got pregnant on one of her infrequent dates. He was unhappy when she told him she was going to have a baby, because he liked spending time with her alone. And he was even more unhappy when she told him she wouldn't be able to take care of him anymore, that she wouldn't have enough time, money, or energy. He wasn't surprised; he understood, kind of. Like Janet's baby, Donald didn't have a father; he was pretty sure, by then, that that was why his mother had given him up. He figured it was too hard for mothers to take care of people without a father to help, and didn't think it would be long before Janet gave up her baby as well as him. He thought he understood the situation, but that didn't keep him from crying as his social worker drove him away from yet another mother.

This time around, Don was not nearly as receptive to a new family as he had been in the past. By now he knew that he didn't have a real family, and that no home was permanent for him. He arrived at Jillianne and Markus Campbell's squat brick house with an air of bitterness that was almost obscene on a ten-year-old. He was prepared to maintain his distance from them, since he "knew" it was only a matter of time before the social worker came back and took him someplace else. He coldly rebuffed the Campbell's efforts to draw him in and rejected their gifts. He refused to speak to them more than was necessary, and spent a lot of time alphabetizing his small collection of books by author and practicing how to tie different kinds of knots.

In his new school he was surly and cold to his classmates. He hated being the new boy, and he hated being the only one in his class who didn't have real parents. Though he eventually warmed up enough to his new foster parents to be polite to them, he made no attempts to engage with them. He was vaguely but deeply angry in a way he didn't know how to express, and so his anger just grew and grew. He let it out in tiny, occasional bursts, getting into minor scrapes with other kids, and slamming doors when his foster parents confronted him about it. This kind of behavior really didn't come naturally to him, and made him even more upset with himself. The matter finally came to a head when he was thirteen or close enough to it, and a classmate made a snide remark to the tightly-wound boy. They took turns bloodying each other's noses and blackening their eyes, and Don humiliated himself by bursting into furious tears when teachers pulled them apart.

The situation could have turned out more seriously than it did, though luckily the other boy's parent declined to make it a serious matter. In the end, Don was only suspended for a week, grounded for a lifetime, and sold into a month of servitude at a local homeless shelter. The Campbells, by this time, were understandably fed up with his rather anti-social behavior, and decided it would do him good to spend time around people who, in Jillianne's words, "actually have a reason to mope around like you do". Don was surprised that they grounded him rather than got rid of him; that realization was strangely comforting to him. He uncomplainingly gave up his time for the shelter, continuing to go there after school even after his foster-parents said he'd fulfilled his sentence. Jillianne was right; he did have it better than a lot of people, despite the things he didn't have. Doing what he could to help other people occupied his time and his mind to the point of beginning to fill a hole inside him, and he no longer felt so transient.

It is not to say that working in the shelter totally changed his attitude, but it certainly helped. After three years of rejecting the Campbells, he finally let himself place a small amount of trust and faith in them. It changed things, a little. And as time went on, and he trusted more and more that they weren't going to get rid of him lightly, and things changed a little more and a little more. On his fourteenth birthday, the Campbells officially adopted him. Don felt like he could relax for the first time since he left his mother, and he wasn't so angry all the time.

By the time Don graduated from high school, he was already certain of what he wanted to do with his life. He took a gap year to work and save money for university, hating the idea of being in debt before he was even twenty. Then he plunged into the wonderful world of academia, pursuing a degree in social work with such intensity as to temporarily but completely obliterate his social life. Then, to make a very long part of a very long story short, he met a girl in class who he really gelled with, who brought him out of his cocoon of studying. They dated for several years, and then she got tired of never really knowing what he was thinking, and left him soon after they received their bachelor degrees. This was his first and, so far, only serious relationship, and, perhaps needless to say, her leaving him did nothing to endear him to the female species, which had already (in his eyes) proved itself as flighty and generally unreliable.

He threw himself into a Master's program and jobs to pay for it, to take his mind off things. Things were rough inside his head for awhile, but then one day he found the Red Journal in his mailbox. He was instantly intrigued and wholeheartedly agreed with the sentiments written there. He had for the past couple of years read the newspapers on a daily basis, and knew that they did not often print the truth about important things. To see truths written out in black and white like that really struck a chord in him, impressed him, intrigued him. In the same way that he had found a sense of direction working in the homeless shelters, he felt him pulled towards the people who would be bold enough to publish such dangerous words. He wanted to be a part of something like that. So he began making discreet inquiries here and there--which was hard, since he didn't know who it would be profitable or dangerous to ask about something like that--and read everything he could find about the Libertines and other revolutionaries in the city.

It was a long, frustrating time before he made any headway in his little investigation. Then, not long after the First Riot (which he was not present for, but wishes he had been), he was contacted by the People's Front of Gaimen City. Long conversations between Don and members of the organization ensued, and finally he was able to convince them of his sincerity and support of their cause. He at last met Peter Quentin, the writer of the Red Journal, and eventually became a sort of assistant to him. Now he helps with the distribution of the Red Journal, delivers messages, and occasionally acts as a go-between for the PFGC and the Libertines. It isn't much, and he hopes he will one day be able to help more, but for the moment he is glad that he is able to help promote a revolution in any way at all. Like any good person, he just wants to help make the world into a better place... Though, really, anything beats wasting time thinking about his failings and the things he still does not have.


(None of this came out quite the way I wanted it to...)

the ship is taking me far away

RP sample: See Annemarie and Gil. =D

[Donald Campbell]

Done at last and ready for judgment. <.<

[GC.admin]

Welcome Donald, to Gaimen City.
post a plots page, sign up for character extras, enjoy yourself!

he's terrific, sav. i loved the way you wrote his early history, the way it was written gave as much insight into donald as the content. he's just what the city needs to change its evil ways! xo