Bardeen

Bardeen is fast, quiet, and capable. His life has been lived almost entirely on the streets and his personal and budding “professional” skills reflect this rough life of quick thinking, adaptation, and being unseen when needed. He has friends out of necessity, but he’s alone intentionally much of the time and studies others from a distance or right within their midst, focusing specifically on being around, but unseen or unnoticed. Beneath his aloof (sometimes eccentric) attitude is a pit of empty desperation he’s been looking to fill without even realizing it, and it's leading him to take some risks that represent to him some test of what life is about, if it's worth living at all.

The only facts he knows of Bardeen's his mother are unsubstantiated rumors that she was a prostitute and gave him to a stranger, and that he was training as a servant since he could walk, and before he could even remember it, he'd walked out one day and found himself on the street begging for scraps and the kindness of strangers.

While this story is factually untrue and has only the haziest of reflections into what really happened in Bardeen's life, he spends substantial idle time pretending his mother could have been any of a variety of fictitious persons, lovely or spiteful, rich or destitute, pious or an idolater. He watched other people have families and role-played what it might be like if he had a mother like this or like that. He considered how she would treat him, and over time realized for himself that she wouldn't have let him go if she was any decent sort of person, so his vivid imagination lead him to seeing what exactly he could get away with no matter who it was, and also has developed in him a rebelliousness against mother figures. Any female leading anything he's involved in will have a hard time relying on him to do as she asks him to do. Due to his code of making no promises to people (because it would end up meaning he was eventually relying on them for something), he only makes promises if he will do everything he can to keep them, and women leaders can rely on him best if they can get him to make a promise with very clear instructions. He will take any loophole he can to get out of doing something someone else's way.

Bardeen was raised at times by Andrew Tillicum, also a Bahman, and a generous and kind man to the worst-off of the children. Bardeen considers him father enough for his needs, and as an older teen he now spends most of his time out and about, and every few days may check in on Andrew from a distance, sometimes staying around until this foster father happens to notice him in the shadows. Rarely, and typically only in the worst of situations (severe injuries, dangerous weather), will he come over to sleep on Mr Tillicum's couch.