Kievan Russell

Kievan Andrew Russell

Not so much an alias, but his name gets mistaken for 'Kevin' a lot.

31

He/Him

Construction / Aspiring Architect / Coffee Shop Owner

Werebeast (Wolf)

August 4th

Adam Driver

6 FT 2 IN (1.8m)

Muscles & Bulk

Hazel

Dark Brown/Black

He tends to keep it a bit long and shaggy, enough to cover his ears

Yes

No

Kievan tends to wear nice yet comfortable clothes, the epitome of business casual in button downs and slacks. Otherwise his outfits are jeans and comfy cotton shirts or his workout clothes.

He now bears several from the fight with his relative that nearly killed him, but none are visible unless he has his shirt off.

Kievan does not carry himself as well as he should considering his size. He is endlessly clumsy thanks to a rapid growth spurt and a rough bout of puberty, as if he doesn't quite believe how big he is now. He has long and lanky limbs and has the ability to knock into everything all the time.

This has gotten worse as he threw himself into working out after the death of his fiancee and is now all muscles and bulk. He is very much unaware of his own strength and size on a regular basis, to the point where he subconsciously draws himself in and tries to make himself small to avoid being a bull in a china shop.

Kievan is an introvert. He has never been great with crowds or loud parties, preferring more intimate settings. He has a few close friends instead of a wide array of acquaintances, and he often has to be pushed into going out and doing new experiences. He is a lover of the routine and the mundane. He prefers a steady schedule and structure and struggles with anxiety in the face of spontaneity.

Kievan has always been a sensitive soul and has never been afraid of expressing his emotions. He prefers time to cool off when he's angry, and then communication to try and get to the root of the problem. In saying that, he's never been a pushover and will shut down and go cold if someone tries to take advantage of his open nature or tries to walk all over him thinking he's too nice to fight back.

He does, however, tend to put off the energy given to him. He looks grumpy and unapproachable a good deal of the time, so those who approach him often have their guard up before they get to know him; and thus, so does he. His temper, when finally ignited, takes an age to actually cool back down. He tends to become reckless and impulsive when that happens.

Kievan found himself in Bear River seeking revenge for the death of his fiancée, who had been killed when a relative went berserk during a Lunar Change and murdered several members of their pack.

He and Faina found themselves the victims of a love potion one Valentine's Day. They didn't do anything more than kiss during the potion itself, but the strength of the potion was enough for their emotionally starved wolves to equally latch onto; so once it had faded she gave him her number to keep in touch and they ended up casual friends - with a hint of romance - as Faina's life fell apart and Kievan continued seeking his revenge.

Their relationship came to a head when Trinity and Cerberus were tasked to complete his kill request. He used himself as bait and ended up severely and seriously wounded by his relative and as a casualty of the shot. Madison called Faina, and Faina rushed to his rescue.

It took 6 weeks for Kievan to recover fully, at which point Faina had practically moved herself in already, and they began to date casually once the 6 weeks were up and Faina moved herself in on a more permanent basis.

They dated for just over a year (14 months or so). They were close emotionally but not sexually, an arrangement they were both fine with. The relationship was good for Faina. Kievan was an ordinary guy with an ordinary life and she craved that sense of calm and normality. On top of the fact that they were both able to provide a companion to each other and their wolves.

Their breakup wasn't a great one, it was hurt and heartache on both sides, as Kievan left Bear River and Faina moved back in with Isaac. But they kept each other's numbers, under the excuse in case Skully needed anything, and Kievan got back in touch after Bear River was destroyed to make sure that Faina made it out and was all right.

They've kept in touch ever since, as casual friends despite being exes. Faina doesn't hate him (after she got over the initial hurt of the break-up) and they are still friendly. Kievan has even helped with the occasional problem between herself and Isaac, and he is invited to their wedding.

Isaac doesn't like him on principle, but they've never met in person.

There's no risk of a relationship resurfacing these days; Kievan and Faina have both admitted any residual feelings that may still remain are as a result of the history they share due to the love potion, and have both moved on; Kievan is happily dating a woman who is helping him with his dream. Faina recognizes that she gave up any kind of a future they could have had when she joined Trinity, and has no desire to go after it now.

Super Rough BR Timeline

please note some events may not occur as they appear here because of timeline changes or adjustments

• While job hunting one afternoon, Faina runs into a man, a werewolf, on the sidewalk and knocks everything out of both of their hands. Faina's classified ads fall to the ground and the man's coffee spills all over them, ruining them. They're both super pissed, the guy more so because Faina is being a total bitch about an accident she caused, and she makes him pull out his wallet and fork over enough change to pay for replacing her newspapers. She sees his name on his driver's license is Kievan Russell. She does not offer to replace his coffee.




• The two go their separate ways, only to run into each other at the cafe less than an hour later. Kievan is buying a replacement coffee and asking after a relative he thinks is in town and Faina uses the cafe to hide out and job hunt without being yelled at for not ordering anything. Faina sees him and accuses him of stalking her, he fires back that she's the one stalking him, and then sits down across from her at her table to drink his coffee just to piss her off more.




• The meeting is all around fuckery. Kievan is a grumpy douchebag who is purposefully needling her, but she was bitchy and rude and was completely asking for it, so it's fairly equal treatment on both sides. He manages to get her name out of her and she manages to find out he's in town on the hunt for someone, a relative of his. She comments BR is a good place to find people who don't want to be found.




• Kievan finally annoys her so much she goes to leave in a huff and vows never to talk to him ever again, and he vows the same. Little did they know what would come later...




• Fast forward to the love potion incident: Everyone who drinks from the town's water supply falls under a love potion spell for six hours, and Faina and Isaac are equally and separately affected.




• Faina is at the diner, ordering dinner (now that she has money) but starting with water, when she drinks from the water supply. She looks up to see Kievan Russell eating dinner a few booths down, alone, and when they lock eyes they are instantly in love. Kievan grabs his dinner and goes to sit with her, but they quickly decide they want to let their wolves run and abandon the diner to make their way back to Kievan's isolated, rented condo on the outskirts of town. They strip in his home and then Change and run off into the woods together, where their wolves play and their futures seem totally set.




• Faina and Isaac each fall in love and fall in love hard, they are both over the moon with happiness and their futures with their newfound loves and then, after about six blissful hours… the love potion wears off and everything comes crashing back to reality.




• Faina wakes up in human form out in the woods with Kievan, naked, their wolves having evidently taken a nap, and has a very long and very awkward walk back to his house to retrieve her clothes. She gets dressed, leaves her phone number for him, and flees before either of them can talk about what the fuck just happened.




• Fast forward again to murdering the doctor while still fighting with Isaac: She is so heartbroken and distraught she reaches out to the only person (besides Madison) that she's still in contact with: Kievan. They had awkwardly texted a few times back and forth since the Love Potion but it wasn't until the doctor's murder that she decides to reach out again, as a way to have some sort of companionship as well as work through some of the conflicting feelings from the love potion incident, since she couldn't with Isaac.




• She steals some TERRIBLE gas station coffee and goes over to Kievan's condo to apologize for being such a bitch when they met and for running off without resolving things after the Love Potion Incident. The gas station coffee is a peace offering to make up for spilling the coffee when they first met. Kievan thanks her for the effort (even though the coffee is, again, TERRIBLE) and apologizes himself. So, they try to get to know each other.




• While the love is no longer there, the romantic sparks still are, and the two are able to form a friendship with relative ease with romantic undertones lurking under the surface. They have a surprising amount in common: both parents are dead/gone, both have siblings they haven't seen in years, both lost their first loves and haven't recovered, etc.




• Driven by memories of the Love Potion incident, Kievan lets slip the story behind why he's in BR: a male relative of his had his mind broken by the werebeast curse, and he snapped and attacked their pack while the men were out. The few women within the pack were slaughtered, including Kievan's first love and current fiancee, before the men returned and the relative ran off. Kievan's been hunting him down to exact revenge ever since and he believes the man to have taken refuge here.




• Faina is sympathetic to his loss, and in an attempt to both explain her own reaction to the love potion and to comfort Kievan, she talks about Sam and their relationship for the first time with a neutral party. (Isaac not counting; he's not neutral and his feelings for her make things complicated.) They end up comforting each other for their losses, and that combined with their commonalities and Faina's own desperation for understanding and comfort after the doctor's death provokes romantic attraction left over from the love potion and romantic tension as Faina winds up spending the entire day with him.




• In fact, an opportunity presents itself where they almost kiss at the end of the night. Faina realizes at the last moment and decides to shut that down, kissing Kievan on the cheek before noping out for the night. They make plans to "hang out" more later. Faina does NOT tell Kievan about the doctor's murder, but feels better for having made things right with someone for once.




• Faina starts spending more time with Kievan; Kievan becomes an outlet for support and a way to avoid hurting Isaac. Coffee "dates" become their thing - Kievan's mom used to run a coffee shop back home and after getting his revenge that's what he really wants to do, he's a construction worker and he has plans for when he can build the cafe. They grow very close; Faina is attracted to his normalcy and his lifestyle, the way things are always calm and safe and quiet with him. And they have no history to complicate things.




• Faina joins Trinity. The deed is quickly done, and Faina becomes the newest recruit for the Trinity mafia family. Madison lets her go to explore and Faina finds Isaac in the bike shop pretending to work while he was really hiding. She threatens to beat him to death with a wrench for lying to her about working for Madi when the whole 'not being a criminal anymore' was his idea in the first place. He apologizes and says that he wanted to give her a chance at another life. He tells her that this isn't like when Leo left the Ravagers, they can't just bounce out of Trinity, so he wanted her to have the option if she wanted to do something else.




• Faina faintly thinks of Kievan and his dream of a coffee shop but instead brushes it off and asks who's Leo? Isaac says he was before her time. She asks if he's still alive? Isaac just shrugs.




• Now, unbeknownst to Faina, Kievan already had ties to the Trinity mafia. His pack had taken a hit request out on his relative that Kievan was well aware of, and it was partially Trinity's acceptance of the contract that led Kievan to BR. If Faina had known that Kievan had a contract with Trinity - or if Trinity had known of her connection to Kievan - things may have gone differently.




• But as it was, the relative is found hiding out in the woods outside BR but has discovered Kievan's presence, so is tracking Kievan just as Kievan is tracking him. With this being the case, Madison approaches Kievan to be used as a kind of live bait: Kievan can get his confrontation in for his revenge and Trinity can get the kill for the contract, it's a win-win for everyone, so Kievan very readily agrees.




• Kievan lures his relative deep into the woods to an open clearing but loses himself in his beast form to an uncontrollable rage and attacks the relative. They tussle, with quite a lot of bloodshed, not giving Madi a clear shot, so she has to shoot twice; the first hits Kievan, the second hits its mark, and the Vampire finishes the Werewolf off with a blade. Kievan is not dead from the shot but is fairly close, and not knowing who else can take him, Madi calls one of the only other lone wolves she knows in the area: Faina.




• Madi takes Kievan back to his condo at Faina's request, and Faina rushes to his rescue. She is able to take care of his wounds but they are so extensive (and the rapid healing not working) she has to take time off from Trinity and basically tells Isaac she won't be back for a few weeks. Isaac doesn't ask who it is, assumes it's the wolf she's been spending time with, and only tells her to let him know if she needs help.




• It takes three weeks for Kievan's wounds to heal outside the danger zone, during which Faina spends almost every waking moment looking after him, and once he's conscious again and out of the danger zone it takes another three weeks for the Werewolf to heal enough that he's back on his feet and able to take care of himself.




• Bit by bit over the course of this time the story comes out of what happened and his contract and that his relative is dead; Faina helps him with both the physical and mental trauma of that event, eventually revealing how she killed the doctor, making Kievan only the second person who knows and adding another thing that they now have in common. Kievan has nightmares of his own, which they help each other with.




• They are very intimate during this time, mostly out of necessity; Faina has to help Kievan shower, clean his wounds, change his clothes. She tries to sleep in a chair by the bed or out on the couch in the living room at first, but eventually has to move to the bed because Kievan wouldn't stop moving awake or asleep and the only way to keep the wounds from ripping open again was to stay near him. Faina does whatever she can to keep his mind off the wounds, the pain, or the kill; they watch movies, Faina reads out loud, they talk - mostly Faina talks and he listens, but all the same.




• After six weeks Kievan is in a well enough state that the wounds have completely healed and besides some residual pain the Annunaki healing has taken over the rest and he's almost good as new. Faina returned to work two weeks beforehand and he seemed fine on his own. So one day she tells him it's time for her to go home and she starts to gather her things. Kievan takes the bag out of her hands and kisses her and tells her to stay. Without hesitation she says okay, completely abandoning her own apartment… and Isaac.




• Faina starts to live a dual life at this point. Being at home with Kievan is domestic bliss; there they have their little condo, things are calm and safe, things are normal. They do normal and boring home-related things like dinner and laundry and yard work, they talk about normal boring stuff like bills and finances and work. She craves that sense of normality; while some might argue that she would get bored eventually, at the moment, it was all she wanted.




• But Kievan didn't know that she worked for Trinity. And she didn't plan to tell him. She keeps her life at work, the life she grew up in and was a constant part of - Isaac, Madison, Trinity - separate from her home life with Kievan. For a little while, she could go home to him and pretend that the world of crime and nightmares was just that: a nightmare.




• Kievan gets Faina a puppy as a present for her 22nd birthday. It was a doberman pinscher puppy he rescued from a local puppy mill that he saw while on a construction job, that he and his coworkers went and busted up. She names the puppy Skully, and Skully becomes her partner when she goes into her wolf form. For a few blissful months, things were happy.




• But as is usual in Faina's life, trouble quickly arose. Now that the relative was dead and his love avenged, Kievan had nothing tying him down to BR except Faina. Everything else - his pack, his family, his friends, his old job, the people and places he grew up with - were back home. Including his dream of building and owning a little coffee shop like his mother. One day, he gets the news that the plot of land where his mother's shop once stood is now up for sale, and his opportunity for his dream cafe has finally come.




• He excitedly tells Faina about his plans and tells her that he's going to move back home and take her with him - because as far as he knows, she has nothing and no one to tie her to BR either. Which, of course, is a lie. Faina panics and tells him that they can't go, that their lives are here now, their jobs, their home - they argue about it, but Faina eventually convinces him to give up the idea for now and to try and make the coffee shop work in BR so they can stay there.




• Then Faina is hurt while out on a job for Trinity. A very minor injury, nothing the Shifter couldn't handle, but not something that could be explained away by an accident at the shop, and not something she could hide from Kievan. Kievan asks her about it, and then confronts her when she lies; she eventually has to confess and tells him about Trinity, and the past she had previously told him was firmly in the past.




• Kievan's not angry that she's in Trinity or a criminal, but is angry she lied about it. He asks if that was the reason she didn't want to leave BR, and when she doesn't answer, firmly tells her he doesn't want her to get hurt and she should get out of the Family. That the pack can help her get out if Trinity won't let her go. Faina tells him off, that that's not how the mafia works and she didn't want to leave Trinity anyway. This was her life and her job, which Kievan angrily retorts is a life she neglected to include him in. She doesn't answer and instead says that she's exhausted and needs to sleep, so the argument ends there unresolved.




• Because Faina is terrible at dealing with emotional things, rather than sit down and talk things out with Kievan, she starts to distance herself and put more time at work, directly against Kievan's wishes. This starts the vicious cycle of Kievan being frustrated, Faina getting defensive, withdrawing further, Kievan getting more frustrated, talking it out doesn't change things, rinse repeat. They start to argue quite a bit.




• He tells her again that he wants to go back home and she should come with. He outlines the plans for the cafe that they could do together, a future they talked about on more than one occasion, but a future Faina clearly never saw as more than a daydream. Again Faina refuses, which makes Kievan angry and he lashes out, telling her she is being possessive and selfish for not letting him follow his dream because it would inconvenience her life. Faina realizes he's right, but is both too stubborn to admit to it and too inexperienced in relationships to realize their constant back and forth is hurtful and unhealthy; considering she and Sam had the same goals and direction and future plans, she doesn't know how to handle Kievan's desire to veer her off in a completely separate direction.




• Finally, one night Faina comes home to Kievan's condo and he is packing his things. He tells her that he loves her, but he can't build a life with someone who keeps so many secrets and controls his own life, and that he is going back home with or without her. Kievan gives her an ultimatum: run away with him, they can start over and she can leave her past behind, or stay in BR and give up her life to the criminals and the murderers. Her choice, but he can't put his life on hold for her mafia family.




• Faina is completely torn; stay in the daydream with the first man to make her feel love again, or go back to reality and the only world she's ever known? The choice had already been made for her years and years ago, but it didn't make the answer any easier to bear. She tells him fine, fuck him, leave, go back home, she didn't care. Him and his stupid coffee shop wasn't what she wanted anyway. She gathers her things, grabs Skully, and leaves, feigning fury but really just feeling brokenhearted.

Kievan's beast is a bipedal all black wolf with silver-green eyes. His beast form has always been massive, thanks to his height and growth during puberty, but it is now hulking and muscular thanks to all the body building he does as a human.

The relationship between Kievan and his beast has been strained at best since the death of his fiancée. Though Kievan is a born were his psyche took a severe blow after losing his love and his control has been fractured and tenuous ever since. His beast is not fun to be around during a Lunar Change.

• Kievan got Skully for Faina; Faina says to anyone who doesn't know that she is the one who rescued Skully from the puppy mill, but it was all Kievan. She, in fact, tried to refuse the puppy at first, who had been given to her as a 22nd birthday present - but that changed real quick.




• Faina's current dislike of coffee has nothing to do with her actually disliking coffee, and everything to do with coffee was her and Kievan's 'thing' - coffee dates especially, but it was Kievan's dream to reopen his late mother's cafe bakery, and they spent a good deal of time discussing that future. A normal, boring, non-dangerous future. So drinking coffee reminds her of what she gave up when she turned down Kievan's offer to run away and start over.



• 
  

  Kievan is, so far, the only one who has gotten Faina to admit that, should things work out and should she feel safe, that she doesn't actually hate the idea of having children as much as she says. She's just scared of having the same cycle repeat itself, of cursing any children to have the same kind of childhood she had, broken parents and ending up orphaned and damaged. She managed to convince herself she would be a terrible mother, which is why she always said she never wanted any kids.

  
  
  • This convo came about discussing futures, where Kievan said he wanted a large family and Faina said she didn't want kids. He was able to convince her that she would be the farthest thing to a terrible mother, she was always great with kids, and to at least be open to the idea; it was left to be revisited should they ever be seriously talking about marriage and kids and all that to decide whether the family size would be a dealbreaker
  
  
  • However, since they broke up, the topic has never come up again. Isaac knows her child-free stance and has never broached the topic, so neither has she.