Ivan (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
deservesadaisy) wrote2026-04-10 07:34 pm
deservesadaisy) wrote2026-04-10 07:34 pm
Entry tags:
Info
Ivan;
well fuck it, maybe it should happen
BASICS
aliases: Spiteri; Ducard
pronouns: he/him
dob: circa 1772
age: 237
species: vampire
nationality: Russian
spouse: Daisy Hannigan
APPEARANCE
Ivan is tall, with a calm, detached air that makes him imposing only when he chooses to be. He's not conventionally handsome, though closer to it when he has at least a bit of facial hair (which vampires grow as normal humans do, five o'clock shadow and all). His coloring is a bit pale, especially when he hasn't fed recently. His hair and eyes are dark, and the later go jet black just before he feeds.
PERSONA
positive
observant. curious. well-read. polyglot.
observant. curious. well-read. polyglot.
neutral
devoted. loyal. consistent.
devoted. loyal. consistent.
negative
callous. predator. addict. stubborn. sarcastic.
callous. predator. addict. stubborn. sarcastic.
ABILITIES
Being A Vampire
Ivan is possessed of superhuman strength, more-than-human speed, and better-than-human senses (especially sight, including night vision, and smell). He is dead, but can do many things humans can (eating, sex, sleeping), though he generally doesn't need to. Unlike many other vampires, he finds sunlight unpleasant, but not debilitating; garlic does nothing, but faith symbols can mildly inconvenience him if the bearer has sincere faith in the object and reason to wish him ill. He has no reflection, and can't be captured on film (or its digital equivalent). Blood increases his strength, but he also craves it, much like a drug. Going without for any length of time leaves him ill, weak, and incredibly bad tempered — forced deprivation can get very ugly.
Ivan is possessed of superhuman strength, more-than-human speed, and better-than-human senses (especially sight, including night vision, and smell). He is dead, but can do many things humans can (eating, sex, sleeping), though he generally doesn't need to. Unlike many other vampires, he finds sunlight unpleasant, but not debilitating; garlic does nothing, but faith symbols can mildly inconvenience him if the bearer has sincere faith in the object and reason to wish him ill. He has no reflection, and can't be captured on film (or its digital equivalent). Blood increases his strength, but he also craves it, much like a drug. Going without for any length of time leaves him ill, weak, and incredibly bad tempered — forced deprivation can get very ugly.
Being Very Old
Ivan has picked up a variety of knowledge and skills just through living as long as he has – history, culture, etiquette, a variety of languages. He is native-speaker level fluent in Russian, English, French, German, Mandarin, and Portuguese; conversational in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Turkish; he has phrase-book level knowledge of Japanese, Hindi, Polish, Greek, Farsi and Czech; he can read Latin fluently. He's interested in technology and is apt to be an early adopter. He has a lot of practice at lying.
Ivan has picked up a variety of knowledge and skills just through living as long as he has – history, culture, etiquette, a variety of languages. He is native-speaker level fluent in Russian, English, French, German, Mandarin, and Portuguese; conversational in Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Vietnamese, and Turkish; he has phrase-book level knowledge of Japanese, Hindi, Polish, Greek, Farsi and Czech; he can read Latin fluently. He's interested in technology and is apt to be an early adopter. He has a lot of practice at lying.
Being Russian
While he makes no reference to his human life as a matter of routine, he has a variety of 18th and 19th centuries skills including horseback riding, calligraphy, and balancing a ledger by hand. These come up rarely.
While he makes no reference to his human life as a matter of routine, he has a variety of 18th and 19th centuries skills including horseback riding, calligraphy, and balancing a ledger by hand. These come up rarely.
BACKGROUND
[you must be at least level 4 friend to unlock Ivan's tragic (prevampire) backstory]
A vampire named Helena turned Ivan in the early 19th century. Helena was old - she never told him her exact age, but he was eventually able to approximate that she must have been around 300 when they met - and saw in Ivan the potential for a long-term companion. Subtly and over time, Helena shaped Ivan's natural tendencies to her own taste. She also went to work teaching him to appreciate travel and culture, and she developed his preferences to be more compatible with her own.
By the late 1850s, Ivan was a respected vampire in his own right. He and Helena were little involved or interested in European vampire politics, but kept enough allies on hand to be allowed to keep to themselves. Though the pair remained on good terms, Ivan began to get restless, and they started drifting apart. Helena gave him her blessing to wander on his own for a time, and Ivan took to seeing the world on his own terms.
He and Helena drifted into and out of one another's lives for the next few decades, and though they weren't together at the time, he felt angry and betrayed when she was staked in Paris in the late 1880s. The mutual friend who'd informed him had already killed the humans responsible, leaving Ivan to cope with the loss on his own with no vengeance to focus his energy.
When Ivan re-entered vampire society, the loss of Helena combined with nearly a full century of vampirism had removed most of his lingering human edges. He traveled again, charmingly detached and more interested in watching humans (and occasionally vampires) self-destruct than becoming directly involved in such destruction. During this period, he met many vampires, including several of the Old Ones, but never settled for very long.
Wandering from disaster to disaster, war to war eventually took him to England to view the Blitz up close. By chance, in 1941 he ended up in a makeshift shelter with a terrified young Scottish woman. He'd never recruited anyone before, and she seemed an excellent candidate – her disappearance (under the circumstances) would go completely unremarked. So he recruited Daisy.
Ivan fell for Daisy quickly and violently. She stoked his own appetite for excess, and watching her discover the joy of vampirism gave him his own second wind after decades of jaded cynicism. The two of them were married shortly after her death, and he took pleasure in showing her the world. They cut a bloody swath, though Ivan kept them careful and neat enough not to attract unwanted attention.
Daisy's brutality was sometimes hard to control, and Ivan couldn't ignore the fact that she was distinctly unbalanced, a volatile and sometimes unpredictable aspect of his life. Sometimes he enjoyed the unpredictability, but more often than not he had to work to control collateral damage. She was less interested in culture than he was, growing easily bored with some of his pursuits. The daughter, Pearl, from whom she'd felt so alienated in life also nagged at her and the concept of her kept drawing them back toward England. Daisy was less well-designed for fidelity than Ivan, and he was well aware of her liaisons with a series of werewolves, never emotional but also never subtle.
Still, he did love her, and she loved him back in her way. Though she'd wander, she'd always return, and the two of them became known as a unit in vampiric circles. (A trio, if you counted the addition of Ivan's car, a Citroën DS he picked up in the early 1970s.)
In 2009, a vampire of Ivan's acquaintance called John Mitchell let a werewolf kill Herrick, the vampire who'd recruited him and a power player in the U.K. Daisy and Ivan were in Singapore when word reached them, and Daisy was quick to suggest a trip to Bristol, lured by the double attraction of a new werewolf and her now-elderly daughter. Ivan, though reluctant, agreed; if nothing else, he was curious to see what filled the vacuum Herrick left.
Upon returning, predictably, Daisy bedded the werewolf that killed Herrick: George Sands, who was sharing living quarters with Mitchell. Ivan's disdain for werewolves generally and George in particular wasn't subtle. But Ivan soon found himself temporarily settling in Mitchell's orbit, and so leaving George alone in favor of a longer game. Mitchell, now a mess with guilt and blood withdrawal, was attempting to get all the Bristol vampires to give up blood as well, setting up a “Vampires Anonymous” modeled on AA. Ivan was willing to give lip service to the idea but not to actually participate. He felt Mitchell might have taken a lesson from Carl, a mutual acquaintance whose stint blood-free ended with him killing his human lover. As a favor to Mitchell, Ivan got Carl out of the country before returning to see how things would play out.
Mitchell, however, more and more desperate to control himself, finally turned to Ivan, begging him to take over in Bristol. Ivan flatly refused at first. He had no interest in leading the group of vampires, or in furthering Mitchell's aims. When, however, Mitchell inadvertently revealed he needed to step down for a woman he loved, Ivan relented. He had always been a romantic, and thought he would sort out what to do later, once Mitchell didn't look to be on the verge of tears.
A vampire named Helena turned Ivan in the early 19th century. Helena was old - she never told him her exact age, but he was eventually able to approximate that she must have been around 300 when they met - and saw in Ivan the potential for a long-term companion. Subtly and over time, Helena shaped Ivan's natural tendencies to her own taste. She also went to work teaching him to appreciate travel and culture, and she developed his preferences to be more compatible with her own.
By the late 1850s, Ivan was a respected vampire in his own right. He and Helena were little involved or interested in European vampire politics, but kept enough allies on hand to be allowed to keep to themselves. Though the pair remained on good terms, Ivan began to get restless, and they started drifting apart. Helena gave him her blessing to wander on his own for a time, and Ivan took to seeing the world on his own terms.
He and Helena drifted into and out of one another's lives for the next few decades, and though they weren't together at the time, he felt angry and betrayed when she was staked in Paris in the late 1880s. The mutual friend who'd informed him had already killed the humans responsible, leaving Ivan to cope with the loss on his own with no vengeance to focus his energy.
When Ivan re-entered vampire society, the loss of Helena combined with nearly a full century of vampirism had removed most of his lingering human edges. He traveled again, charmingly detached and more interested in watching humans (and occasionally vampires) self-destruct than becoming directly involved in such destruction. During this period, he met many vampires, including several of the Old Ones, but never settled for very long.
Wandering from disaster to disaster, war to war eventually took him to England to view the Blitz up close. By chance, in 1941 he ended up in a makeshift shelter with a terrified young Scottish woman. He'd never recruited anyone before, and she seemed an excellent candidate – her disappearance (under the circumstances) would go completely unremarked. So he recruited Daisy.
Ivan fell for Daisy quickly and violently. She stoked his own appetite for excess, and watching her discover the joy of vampirism gave him his own second wind after decades of jaded cynicism. The two of them were married shortly after her death, and he took pleasure in showing her the world. They cut a bloody swath, though Ivan kept them careful and neat enough not to attract unwanted attention.
Daisy's brutality was sometimes hard to control, and Ivan couldn't ignore the fact that she was distinctly unbalanced, a volatile and sometimes unpredictable aspect of his life. Sometimes he enjoyed the unpredictability, but more often than not he had to work to control collateral damage. She was less interested in culture than he was, growing easily bored with some of his pursuits. The daughter, Pearl, from whom she'd felt so alienated in life also nagged at her and the concept of her kept drawing them back toward England. Daisy was less well-designed for fidelity than Ivan, and he was well aware of her liaisons with a series of werewolves, never emotional but also never subtle.
Still, he did love her, and she loved him back in her way. Though she'd wander, she'd always return, and the two of them became known as a unit in vampiric circles. (A trio, if you counted the addition of Ivan's car, a Citroën DS he picked up in the early 1970s.)
In 2009, a vampire of Ivan's acquaintance called John Mitchell let a werewolf kill Herrick, the vampire who'd recruited him and a power player in the U.K. Daisy and Ivan were in Singapore when word reached them, and Daisy was quick to suggest a trip to Bristol, lured by the double attraction of a new werewolf and her now-elderly daughter. Ivan, though reluctant, agreed; if nothing else, he was curious to see what filled the vacuum Herrick left.
Upon returning, predictably, Daisy bedded the werewolf that killed Herrick: George Sands, who was sharing living quarters with Mitchell. Ivan's disdain for werewolves generally and George in particular wasn't subtle. But Ivan soon found himself temporarily settling in Mitchell's orbit, and so leaving George alone in favor of a longer game. Mitchell, now a mess with guilt and blood withdrawal, was attempting to get all the Bristol vampires to give up blood as well, setting up a “Vampires Anonymous” modeled on AA. Ivan was willing to give lip service to the idea but not to actually participate. He felt Mitchell might have taken a lesson from Carl, a mutual acquaintance whose stint blood-free ended with him killing his human lover. As a favor to Mitchell, Ivan got Carl out of the country before returning to see how things would play out.
Mitchell, however, more and more desperate to control himself, finally turned to Ivan, begging him to take over in Bristol. Ivan flatly refused at first. He had no interest in leading the group of vampires, or in furthering Mitchell's aims. When, however, Mitchell inadvertently revealed he needed to step down for a woman he loved, Ivan relented. He had always been a romantic, and thought he would sort out what to do later, once Mitchell didn't look to be on the verge of tears.
ammmy . US eastern . dm or ![[plurk.com profile]](https://plurk.com/favicon.ico)
prettiestwhistles