Somewhere beyond Chicago, he fell in with a handful of men moving westward. They rode beside the lines when they had to, slept beside the treelines and open fields, and ate whatever livestock they could trap or steal. He picked up quite a few words and sentences as he listened to their conversations on the way. However, the group soon began thinning; one found work and stayed, another vanished into a jail cell after a night gone wrong, a third left with their pooled money and did not look back. By the time winter arrived, only Le Lapin and another young man remained, who eventually succumbed to an infected wound. He neither had the will nor strength to bury him, so Le Lapin took the man's horse and rode on, now on his own.

By late winter he reached the Montana Territory. Weakened, frostbitten and riding with several untreated injuries, his horse collapsed under him, cracking a rib in the fall. It was there that Reverend Glasseye found him and carried him into shelter.

Today, he sleeps in the church stables and keeps to a loose routine of small, dubious work. It is enough to get by, though rarely more.

Le Lapin is known best by the saloon owners and the men who lose their coins to him. He’s not the friendliest face in town, nor the most threatening. People often mistake him for a boy at first glance, which really gets on his nerves. He carries himself with charm, grin ready, arms open, always trying to take up a little more space than he naturally has. His gaze never stops moving, always keeping an eye on the nearest door out. When he speaks, it’s with an accent, often accompanied by his hands. Some consider him a cheeky flirt, others say he swears like a sailor.

Le Lapin often wakes before sunrise, preferring to get his chores, such as cleaning the stable and church, done as early as possible. The later mornings are spent eating with the reverend before making his way downtown. He often does some miscellaneous work, be it writing or reading aloud letters for illiterate townsfolk for a few coins. When he's really low on money, he might do some stable hand work or unload wagons, though he'd leave before he's asked his name. His evenings are spent in the saloons, pickpocketing when he needs to, smooth-talking strangers for a meal or a drink, and now and then joining small gambling circles behind the saloons. He only pickpockets drunkards or rowdy men, refusing to steal from women or anyone that looks worse off than him. He cheats and lies without carrying any real guilt over any of it. He sleeps poorly most nights, either unable to fall asleep or awaking in a cold sweat.

Le Lapin spends a lot of his free time writing. Be it short essays or stories no one will ever read, letters he never sends, fictional conversations, lists of rules, debts, names, lies. Sometimes it's badly organised self-directed studying by copying passages from books or newspapers and correcting or arguing with them in the margins, or trying to reconstruct lessons from school from memory, be it scientific ideas half-remembered, bits of philosophy, or math. His handwriting is a scribbled mess only he can read.

He has a strange fascination with death and endurance, often watching public hangings from the edges of the crowd, less drawn to the spectacle than to the process itself. Privately, he tests his own tolerance for pain in small, controlled ways, pressing injuries or exposing himself to discomfort as if measuring how much he can bear without breaking. Alongside this runs a persistent fixation on the sea. Having grown up among docks and shipyards, he is drawn to the sound and smell of the water and often imagines distant crossings, particularly the long passage across the Pacific, which he envisions in restless, recurring dreams. The sea represents both escape and inevitability to him—an expanse that promises movement, erasure, and the possibility of beginning again. He cares about how he looks, at least to a point. He keeps himself reasonably clean and put-together. Stress sends him reaching for a cigarette, or pacing circles, or tapping his foot restlessly against the floorboards. Even in private, he’s rarely still.

When praised, he reacts poorly. He deflects with humor, sarcasm, or self-insult, even going as far as to sabotage the praised behaviour afterward. When upset, he becomes crueler, almost surgical with his humor, provoking others into overreacting, even engaging in self-destructive behaviour such as reckless theft. When it turns violent, he ducks, runs, pleads, does whatever it takes to slip away before fists or steel find him. What he fears most isn’t pain, it’s powerlessness. Being pinned or held or silenced, dying under someone else’s hand unable to move.

He tries to hide himself behind jokes, chatter, anything that keeps the world from seeing the tremble behind his grin. What he wants is simple: to be treated like an equal. Not a child, not a street rat, not a joke. On the rare occasion someone speaks to him eye to eye, he tends to grow jealous and uneasy without meaning to, half-convinced they’ll turn on him or leave him behind. And yet, for all his stealing and lying, Le Lapin is still here. Still running, still talking, still making himself larger than he feels, determined not to be swallowed whole by a world that doesn’t expect much from a small young man with a crooked smile.

Family

NOTE: Some details may sometimes be omitted for the sake of simplification when drawing him.

Le Lapin is a short young man, standing around 163 cm (5’4”). He has a very slender boxy build, being partially underweight. His skin is fair and freckled, especially across his mid-face and shoulders. His hair is short, and dark brown, usually parted to the side with a spiky fringe. He has a large amount of scattered cutting scars across his left arm and shoulder, as well as a scar across his chest from an infected broken rib wound, and a few mottled frostbite scars on his chin, nose, and left cheek.

His face is thin and angular, with a slight overbite and large ears that stick out at the sides. His nose is upturned, and his teeth are noticeably crooked, with the two front ones especially prominent. He is occasionally seen with light stubble.

He typically wears a simple black hat, a yellow bandana, and a beige jacket. Under it, he wears a grey-green vest, sometimes with a single gold pocket watch attached, and a plain white button-up shirt. He wears blue jeans with a brown pair of chaps over them, along with a black gunbelt with a holster and a gold buckle. Lastly, he has a pair of black gloves, black boots with a tucked in knife, and gold spurs.