Name: Frédéric “Freddie” Ian Lavoie Door: Door PassCanon: Original Character - modern universe, no supernatural elements. Canon Point: May 2025. Age: 33 Appearance: Freddie stands at 6’ even, with a tidy general appearance and good posture, always clean-shaven. The great irony of his bulimia and issues with body image is that he’s not actually that overweight—he's only carrying some recent addition of 30 to 40 pounds and was slim to begin with before that—and his metabolic issues stem almost entirely from prolonged poor diet, not body fat. On the whole, he’s still built fairly narrow; due to a combination of heredity and insulin resistance, he carries almost all extra weight as abdominal fat, giving him the appearance of a mildish beer belly (think: six months pregnant or so) without actually having much fat to his face or hands, and only a slight thickness to his arms and thighs—a dadbod. That said, Freddie’s cheeks still look pretty full because of the swelling brought on by such frequent purging.
Most of the tooth decay and erosion he's built up over the past four months is only really visible if his mouth is wide open for inspection and someone knows what they're looking at—in which case, it's glaring. What's outwardly visible—say, as a smile of a little flash of teeth shows as he's talking—is a coffee drinker's mild discoloration and a peculiar translucence to the ends of his upper two central incisors. They lack the little bumps at the ends most people keep into middle age, and the tips are also almost chisel-shaped as opposed to blunt and of equal with all the way down.
Freddie’s bilingual - fluent in French and English - but speaks French with a Quebecois dialect that is, for the most part, mutually intelligible with Parisian and African French speakers. He doesn’t have much of an accent or many regionalisms pinning him to any one part of the US, but a keen ear would be able to pin him as having a trace of New York State to his voice, diluted by assignments around the country during his ten years of active duty.
Freddie's only physically identifying mark is a shallow, penny-sized indentation on the outer side of his right calf, smoother than the surrounding skin with no hair growth (though his body hair is already fairly light to begin with)—the scar from where a pea-sized piece of hard debris became embedded about a centimeter into his calf while he was standing in the shrapnel radius of an IS group mortar blast on the ground and subsequently had to have it surgically removed. History: I. PAPAOUTAI
early childhood — an unplanned pregnancy interrupts a relationship on its way out; marriage for appearances; divorce, a child's unanswered prayers, and the end of freddie's catholicism
Freddie was born Frédéric Ian Lavoie in Rochester, New York on October 11, 1992, about seven months after the chapel wedding that bound his 25-year-old Irish Catholic mother and 26-year-old Quebecois father.
Freddie was, of course, unplanned - his parents, both practicing Catholics, had been using the notoriously ineffective “rhythm method” of contraception to avoid using a condom or birth control, and the relationship was on its way out, its initial spark now little more than a smoldering ember, when it came to light that his mother was pregnant.
Patricia, a liberal Catholic, privately considered an abortion, but she decided against it in part because she'd heard that having a baby together makes couples stronger (this is in fact the opposite of the truth). So they kept the embryo and scrambled to assemble a planned-looking wedding and a matching story about premature labor for use down the road. They had been dating for six months and 9 days on the day they promised each other eternity before a priest. That October, they told the family Freddie was born two months early, but that the baby was doing fine.
Patricia and Mathieu were fundamentally incompatible. Mathieu, who had never particularly wanted a child to begin with, became more withdrawn under the stress of raising an infant and never 'came back' to the relationship emotionally even once Freddie left the 'terrible twos'; he was somewhat involved in Freddie's childcare, and Freddie has some positive memories with him, but he was more distant, the less present of his two parents.
Even though Freddie was never told that he wasn’t a planned child, or one brought into this world because his parents wanted a child, he began to come to this conclusion on his own around age ten. His parents had no stories about how desperately they’d tried for a baby, or how excited they were waiting for him to arrive; they did what they had to and didn’t make him feel unwanted or burdensome, just… present, neutrally, as a fact of life. His mother had her loving moments, and expressions of genuine affection; Christmases were nice. But she didn't do the little extra things his friends’ parents did, the little touches that can only be explained by love. There were hardly any pictures of her during the pregnancy in their already slim family photo album, or of his father engaging with him. He wasn't unwanted, he wasn't neglected—but he wasn't expressly wanted, either. By the end of elementary school, Freddie understood that he had just sort of happened.
Patricia and Mathieu brought their son up to be Catholic like them from birth, and by age 5, Freddie understood that the relationship between his two caretakers was under a tremendous amount of stress. His parents tried to keep their voices low when they argued, and limited their disagreements to being snippy with each other while their child was in the room, waiting until he was in bed (lying awake and listening to them) before they dove into the night's arguments.
So, every night for two years, Freddie got down on his knees at the edge of his bed and prayed like the nuns in his parochial school had showed him, always with the same request: for Mommy and Papa to get along. He tried to be patient, and kept asking. Then one November morning about a month after his seventh birthday, he came out of his room, proud of having dressed himself for school and ready to grab his backpack, only to find both parents sitting stone-faced at the dining room table—Mathieu hadn't gone to work in the morning before he’d even woken up for school, as per usual. They told him he wasn't going to school today, and didn't need to worry about catching the bus. He didn’t feel the excitement a normal child would. Something was looming, even if he didn’t understand what.
He sat down, his mother poured him a bowl of Chex, and his parents explained to him about twelve hours after his most recent plea to the loving God he'd been taught about that they were getting a divorce. Papa would be moving out, but he would still see Freddie on the weekends. And that was all it took for Freddie, age seven, to feel with absolute certainty in one fell swoop that God was not real, although he'd spend the next 11 years of his life going along with the Church's rituals and pageantry anyway, taking the path of least resistance by pretending to believe while still under his mother's roof.
The divorce was incredibly stressful and traumatic, even if his father’s absence during the weekdays wasn’t actually felt that much; it was the worst thing that had happened to him up until this point in his young life. Freddie wasn't able to make sense of what had happened, and as he got older, he began to learn that it was commonplace for couples that didn't love each other to stay married anyway "for the kid's sake" until the child turned eighteen and then divorce — so what was the difference between himself and the children whose parents stayed together for them? Why hadn't he been good enough for his parents to hold on for 11 more years like these kids' parents—what did they have that he didn't? He saw the elementary school counselor once every two weeks for the remainder of that school year, and that was the extent of the support he got.
Mathieu stayed in Rochester and shared partial custody for the rest of Freddie’s childhood and adolescence. His father liked him, and seemed more interested in him once he had outgrown some of the inconvenience of being a child, but he wasn’t really a parent when Freddie stayed with him. They got closer in Freddie's teenage years and flew RC planes together on weekends, some days, but Mathieu never really felt like a father in the traditional sense—more like an uncle.
II. WHAT (THE FUCK) DO YOU DO WITH A B.A. IN ENGLISH PHYSICS? (summer 2010 - spring 2014)
college — the discovery of a life's passion three-and-a-half years into the wrong degree, $100,000 in student loans, and a 6-month forbearance
In 2010, Freddie, an eighteen-year-old bilingual dual citizen who had by this time matured into a very handsome young man, enrolled in Rensselaer Polytechnic for a four-year degree in physics. By his third year of the degree, however, aeronautics and the physics surrounding flight were becoming an all-consuming interest. Senior year, he took a passenger flight to Quebec to visit his paternal grandparents, and while it wasn’t his first flight, it was the first since the explosion of new knowledge about how the tremendous metal beast he was riding in worked. Something clicked into place this time. It was a thrill, being in the air, thinking about all of the forces at play, all of the controls the pilots were operating. Freddie realized that he wanted to fly, not teach Physics.
And then he graduated four months later–May 2014–with a hair over $100,000 in student loan debt and a six month grace period to find a job before he needed to start paying it off. Job search prospects for a baccalaureate in physics were utterly abysmal, and every Indeed search was haunted by the itch of his realization that this wasn't what he wanted to do. He just also couldn't afford flight school, and the idea of being approved for a second educational loan with no job and $100,000 hanging over his head was laughable.
III. ALL OF MY FRIENDS ARE RICH, THEY'RE PAYING THE BILL LIKE IT'S NOTHING (autumn 2014 - winter 2016)
the air force opens its checkbook; freddie lavoie learns to fly and to kill
But there was one party who could easily afford it and would be happy to pay the bill in full for a price of a less monetary kind: time, and possibly his life. He'd get a job, and some degree of loan forgiveness, and he'd learn to fly; he'd get a housing allowance and healthcare and great dental and make friends. Freddie thought about it in secret for about two months, mulling over the pros and cons, reading accounts of life on the inside online - and then picked a sunny Thursday to drive down to the Air Force recruiter's office at the strip mall after an Iraq War childhood and signed the devil's bargain on the dotted line: free flight school for a decade of his life.
A few weeks later, to his parents' shock, Freddie caught a flight to Pueblo, Colorado, where he passed through Initial Flight Screening and was routed into bomber training at Laughlin AFB (at six feet, he was far too tall to pilot a fighter, and he wasn't particularly heartbroken over that fact. Freddie didn't put a whole lot of thought into what he'd be doing overseas; his view was sanitized, myopic, and a little unconsciously self-serving—the Gulf War and Iraq War started and ended while he was younger, and American operations in the Middle East mostly seemed like monitoring now.
One month later, Operation Inherent Resolve—the United States' campaign against the IS group (then ISIL or ISIS; Freddie still calls it ISIS out of habit) was announced, but Freddie still had a tremendous amount of training to get through before he'd be allowed to fly anything. He went through Officer Candidate School, got pinned as a second lieutenant, then spent the next two-and-a-half years learning to fly with increasing specificity—first training planes, then heavy bombers, then his bomber, graduating a first lieutenant ready for deployment overseas.
During the last ten months of his two-and-a-half years of schooling, Freddie met Sarah, a girl his age who would end up being the first person he ever had a serious relationship with, at a concert put on for 'the troops' (she got in with her brother, whom Freddie had never met and never did meet). She was cute. Funny. Very nice. They hit it off, started dating, and four months before he deployed, the two of them moved in together in his on-base duplex.
By this time he finished Advanced Flight Training on the craft he was assigned, the so-called Operation Inherent Resolve was well underway in Iraq and Syria. Within a couple of weeks of his graduation, Freddie was informed that he was to pack his shit, organize his affairs, and get ready to go to Iraq.
IV. WELCOME TO A NEW KIND OF TENSION (iraq, spring 2016- spring 2017)
freddie joins the so-called global war on terrorism; a first deployment and first serious relationship
At various points over the next ten years, he'd be stationed in Iraq, Syria, and Libya for 12-month deployments followed by 20-month stints back in the states. He saw disturbing things while overseas, but it has to be emphasized that Freddie's war was not the war that was being shown on television—he was dropping bombs on the abstract squares of buildings and antlike dots he was told were IS group insurgents, and he never actually saw civilian casualties up close with his own eyes. There was no way to tell at 50,000 feet which dots were civilians and which were insurgents, and Intel told him with confidence that they'd been much closer and these were insurgents, so Freddie took their word for it and kept dropping bombs.
His interactions with civilians were largely limited to contractors on base, but there was enough interfacing between himself and civilians, and exposure to what the IS group did on the ground, that he really did feel a moral imperative to get the IS group out within a few months of getting deployed, and he trusted that the military knew the best way to do that.
Freddie's first deployment was to Iraq, shipping out in February 2016 with a promised return date of February 2017. It was a long deployment for a first, but he was told that at times he could be allowed to return stateside, that he wasn't going to go an entire year without seeing his family (or his girlfriend, with whom he videocalled once a week and messaged back and forth on WhatsApp most days). Freddie thought things were going great; he didn't initially catch the cooling of the relationship about 3 months into his 12 overseas, but eventually began to feel like she was losing interest. It wasn't a great feeling, but he figured that all they really needed was some time together again, and that maybe the two of them just weren't the ideal pair for a LDR. This was temporary, though. All relationships have rough patches. A lot of guys were going through the same thing. And besides, he had far more immediate, pressing concerns to occupy most of his focus.
V. I WAS LIVIN' ONE BIG LIE (SHE FUCKIN' HATES ME!) (august 2016)
freddie's homecoming isn't what he expected; a man scorned returns to iraq early with a new lease on commitment and fraternization; homosocial comfort becomes homosexual activity;
In August, halfway through his deployment and eighteen months into his relationship with Sarah, Freddie was granted the promised two weeks of leave stateside, and was excited to go home and re-establish their connection, seeing it as the answer to the slight distance he'd been feeling from her. She threw her arms around him at the airport, kissed him hello in front of people, and it was a joyful moment. Something felt off during the car ride back to the shared duplex, but he told himself it was just because they hadn't seen each other in a while. That was bound to be awkward.
When she parked in the driveway, she pulled the key from the ignition but didn't get out. "Freddie, we need to talk," she said, and he felt the same wave of cold dread he'd felt sitting down at the kitchen table with his parents when he was seven. He knew, but he didn't know the extent.
He vacantly listened to Sarah explain that they just weren't compatible and that it would be better for both of them without saying anything, at least initially—just trying to process the massive life change that hadn't really come out of nowhere but certainly felt that way. But then an impulsive desire to twist the knife crept over him before he could push it away. He knew what had happened to some of his buddies, the same thing they were all afraid of. So he asked if there was anyone else.
Sarah reacted with sudden hostility, over-the-top defensiveness disproportionate to the question. She started saying he'd never trusted her, that this was why the relationship was never going to work, that he was only saying that because he'd probably cheated and felt guilty about it and was projecting it on her, then men who accuse women of cheating are doing that because they cheat and think everyone else will too. The diatribe he'd unleashed was as damning as a yes, but more painful. Freddie pressed her. She broke down and confessed - yes, there had been other guys. Plural. She was crying. He was crying.
Sarah explained to him him that she hadn't wanted to break up with him while he was overseas; that it had felt kinder to do it this way. All Freddie could muster was a bitter laugh. He didn't realize the extent of it, but her primary motivation had been the feeling of guilt, and the image she would project to others, breaking up with her boyfriend while he was on deployment - something extremely taboo on a military outpost. And what if he did something drastic? Wasn't it better to give him something to hold onto while he was overseas and needed it?
Freddie told her to move out. In two days, she'd packed—he helped her in silence—and left, ending the longest-running and most serious relationship he'd had in his life until that point. Freddie stayed in the States for the rest of the week, went out drinking, tried to have a good time—but he was utterly miserable, staying in a house full of memories of the relationship that had just ended and wondering if he was sleeping in a bed his girlfriend had fucked other men on, and all of the friends he would lean on to help him through this were still in Iraq.
He saw no reason to stay, so after his week stateside, Freddie voluntarily returned to his duty post overseas, still heartbroken and desperately seeking an escape, a distraction, and homosocial comfort. That homosocial comfort from his best friend, Landry, ended up turning into homosexual activity after about a week—jacking him off (in the name of making him feel better, of course), frottage while telling him Sarah was a slut anyways, a dependa, and that he needed to forget about her. It helped him forget, and the sex felt good and was comforting in a way he could stomach.
This started Freddie's abandonment of any hope of a longterm relationship, and his several years of hooking up (mostly with men, having been burned by a woman and soured on the idea with a heaping dose of misogynistic beliefs on the faithfulness of women) around base. Freddie had a lot of sex. A lot of sex, only ever a few times with any one person before calling it quits, always on his terms, not theirs. He was a handsome 6' pilot, well-liked, a nice guy—he could have whoever he wanted. And if he got drunk and cried about Sarah in private, or needed a buddy's shoulder to lean on, or even—on one occasion—broke down and messaged her a diatribe containing everything he wanted to say capped off with insisting he could have had anyone for those first few months after the breakup, well, at least he was doing fine without her.
VI. BLOOD FOR OIL (sept 2016 - autumn 2024)
iraq, syria, and iraq again; the battle of mosul; an unwanted purple heart
Walking back to October 2016, Freddie had been in the country flying bombing runs for eight months when the Iraqi government and allies besieged the ISIL-controlled city of Mosul, starting the prolonged offensive that would be called the Battle of Mosul by Western forces. Freddie was a participant in the numerous airstrikes over the city until he was sent back to the States at the end of his deployment in the spring of 2017.
In 2018, he was promoted to Captain; Freddie deployed again in Winter 2019, this time to Syria, and stayed there for another year. This was the last deployment in which he saw major, frequent combat, but it was while he was on the ground, just—in Freddie's word's—"standing around" on base, that he finally was injured in a way other than hearing loss.
An IS group shelling on his duty post took him off-guard while he was in the open, and a mortar blast hit close enough to where he was standing that the explosion propelled a pea-sized piece of shrapnel into the side of his right calf while he was in the shrapnel radius of the blast.
The debris was about a centimeter deep, so it needed to be surgically removed during an outpatient, conscious procedure with local anaesthetic. Freddie was on a crutch for two weeks while the surgery site healed, but he saw no permanent disability from it—but because it met the two criteria of requiring medical treatment and being the direct result of an enemy offensive, he was put in for a Purple Heart just like someone with a much more seriously disabling injury, the kind people think of when they hear "Purple Heart"—in the same bolus of incident reports as someone who had taken so much shrapnel damage to one arm that it had to be amputated in the same attack.
Freddie was mortified - he felt guilty accepting it, like it devalued the recipients with “real” injuries like limb loss, and it drew attention to the fact that he got hit, that the enemy, in his eyes, got one over on him while he was just standing around. Freddie confided his guilt and embarrassment-driven intentions to decline it in his buddies after command filed for it, but his friends managed to win him over and keep him from trying to reject it by pointing out the very pragmatic benefits: preferential consideration for federal employment, zero-copay healthcare from the VA, and continued access to the on-base commissary and exchange after leaving the service. It would be a bad financial decision to turn it down, they said, and he wasn't the one who made the rules so lenient. With all the times he'd gone up in the air, it could be something much worse, they reasoned—this just happened first.
While he accepted their reasoning and accepted the medal as a result, once Freddie got out, he never mentioned the medal on job applications, and he doesn’t bring it up unless he is very explicitly and directly asked about it. When partners have asked about the scar—a rare occurrence to begin with, given that it isn't that noticeable—he just tells them that it was a "bad scrape" he got in Syria and leaves it at that.
The rest of Freddie's ten years in the military was unremarkable. He sustained hearing damage that couldn't really be prevented, but he's not HOH enough to disqualify him from commercial flight or to need hearing aids yet. He got out of his first deployment to Syria in Winter 2020, then got sent to Iraq again for a pretty uneventful one-year term contributing to ongoing U.S. presence in the Summer of 2022. Midway through that deployment, he was promoted to Major, then he went home unscathed in the spring of 2024.
He chose not to re-up his time in the military when his promised 10 years were over, having had enough of the frequent deployments and living all of the country in states he would never choose to live in—and he hadn't lost sight of how much more a commercial pilot makes. Freddie left the service with an honorable discharge in Autumn 2024, ten years after he'd signed on, and re-entered the civilian world with thousands of flight hours under his belt and quite a few decorations.
Now that he's out of the military echo chamber, Freddie is beginning to feel a little uncomfortable with some of his participation in the varying US occupations, but he's in the very early stages of that. He simultaneously carries a degree of survivor's guilt and feels out-of-place and uncomfortable when other guys talk about their deployments because he feels that all of his really weren't that bad or that traumatizing—sure, he got anti-aircraft fire, but he largely got a thrill out of his flights because he simply loves to fly. He enjoyed flying missions, and all he had to pay the piper was a nick on one leg and a little hearing loss.
VII. NOBODY'S GONNA TELL ME WHAT I CAN AND CAN'T AFFORD (autumn/winter 2024)
the dream job — freddie goes commercial
Once he had the credentials, getting a good position was easy for Freddie. He was a decorated officer, a veteran with 10 years of combat service who got preferential hiring status per American law. He moved back to New York as soon as he got out, briefly flew a regional airline, then got the dream job flying for an upper-echelon airline out of Laguardia International Airport in New York City, complete with an apartment in Queens.
This was a very dramatic lifestyle change for him. Adjusting to the new position was a whirlwind that took up most of his focus, he was no longer in PT, and he was eating airport fare—which, at Laguardia, didn't leave him with many fresh options, or many "healthy" options—and going out to eat on layovers or ordering in at hotels, occupying himself drinking the sweetened coffee beverage du jour on long flights, et cetera. Over the course of the next year, Freddie gained about forty pounds, which was an unprecedented shock for someone who had been very lean for his entire life, from a family of lean people. He was aware of the weight gain, and not thrilled about it; his mentality was sort of an 'in an ideal world, I'd slim back down, but I have time, I'm going to get set up here first and then focus on it', et cetera et cetera. He thought he didn't look his best, and it was a little knock to his self-esteem, but he wasn't self-loathing or obsessive about it, either. Yet.
VIII. THE FUCKIN' PRESSURE I WAS UNDER TO LOSE MY APPETITE (spring 2025)
the seed is planted.
Every 6 months, a commercial pilot has to have a medical certificate issued by the FAA declaring them still fit for flight. Freddie was aware that he'd gained weight, that he 'really should be eating better', etc., and going up a few sizes had affected his self-confidence a little bit, but the triggering event for his bulimia was actually his most recent FAA medcert exam. The doctor told him in no uncertain terms that he was "seriously overweight", that this was the worst type of overweight to be (he carries almost all of his weight on his belly, mostly visceral fat), and that his blood pressure and A1c and cholesterol were all higher as an effect of his diet for the past year. Freddie was diagnosed with metabolic syndrome—and insulin resistance, and symptomatic prediabetes very close to the cusp of Type 2. Freddie's A1c - a measure of one's blood sugar over the past three months - had risen from a normal range to 6.1 over the past six months, and the cutoff for a Type 2 diagnosis is 6.5 or higher.
A diabetic pilot who needs insulin loses their license to fly, or, in Freddie's case, their greatest joy in life, the interest their entire world revolves around. The doctor grimly told him that if he didn't get his lifestyle under control and his numbers continued to escalate at the rate they were going, he'd be "obese and Type 2 diabetic in a year". So Freddie, shellshocked, panicked.
IX. IT'S GETTING HARD TO BREATHE, THERE'S PLASTIC WRAP IN MY CHEEKS (spring 2025 - current)
calorie restriction becomes bulimia.
Freddie was prescribed metformin, an insulin sensitizer, to get his insulin resistance under control. Insulin resistance causes, among other things, overwhelming cravings for sugar that last for hours, insatiable hunger and an inability to feel satisfied even when the stomach is full, and for excess glucose in the blood to be immediately converted to fat, usually abdominal, as is Freddie's case. It creates a cycle, and is aggravated by the presence of visceral fat - a feedback loop that Freddie, at this point in the disease, would need external intervention and medication to break.
But 'just taking a drug' felt like taking the easy way out, and he was convinced that he could simply focus hard and fix his diet - he was in the Air Force for ten years after all, an officer. The internet and magazines are rife with stories of people reversing their Type 2 diabetes and losing dozens of pounds simply by buckling down and exercising willpower, as though they hadn't before and that was why they were fat. This was the trap Freddie fell into, the fantasy that he was sold. He doesn't recognize his insulin resistance as an endocrine disorder; to him it's a moral failing, a consequence of his actions, a punishment for 'letting himself go' and enjoying food too much.
For about a week, he tried to 'eat healthy' and eliminate every single 'bad' food from his diet at once, heavily calorie restricting and trying to ignore his hunger. Options for a 'healthy breakfast' at a place like an international airport are abysmal - breakfast for that week was usually just a small, compact, tasteless protein bar that wasn't remotely filling; lunch was always something like an 8.00 plastic clamshell of iceberg lettuce and one cherry tomato being passed off as a 'salad' in some airport bodega cooler. This would be intensely stressful and cause a lot of hunger for someone whose endocrine system was functioning as it should - and for Freddie, with completely unmanaged insulin resistance, it was utterly miserable. He held out for a week, constantly feeling like he was starving, never satisfied by any of the things he had decided he was allowed to eat. The hunger and cravings caused by excess insulin molecules in the blood, unbound to glucose and screaming out for it, were a severe distraction.
And, as is usually the case with severely restrictive dieting attempts, Freddie folded under the intense pressure and yielded to the cravings and the hunger as soon as his workweek was over. Having deprived himself for a full week, he found himself unable to stop. A regular meal wasn't enough. He binged for hours, past the point of painful fullness, to the point that he was sick to his stomach and trying not to vomit by the end. He'd felt no control after the first bite, as though his body had taken the wheel and he was just along for the ride regardless of what he wanted, long past the point of pain. He burned with humiliation and a kind of self-loathing he'd never felt before. He'd never had so little control over himself.
Still feeling godawful the next morning, he called out. He started anew with the calorie restriction attempts, but his body simply wasn't having it. By the evening, he gave in and ordered far too much doordash and binged for several hours. The guilt was worse this time—and the panic. He thought about how many calories he'd just ingested, and how much sugar, and what it would do to his blood sugar if he didn't do something. He was frantic. Physically, he felt terrible. So Freddie crossed an invisible line in the sand out of sheer desperation and went into the bathroom and stuck his fingers down his throat like he knew some flight attendants do and brought it all up.
Once was all it took for him to become entirely hooked on this behavior. A calm washed over him. The anxiety was smoothed over, soothed. He was empty. The crisis had been averted. His sin had been given absolution. He'd undone his mistake. Tomorrow he could start anew and do better. He brushed his teeth vigorously and went to bed thinking this was the only time he'd do it, a hard reset. Tomorrow he was going to start fresh and diet correctly.
That, of course, did not happen.
This is a key feature in Freddie's bulimia: he doesn't start the day planning to binge. Every day, he tells himself that it's different, that he's going to 'eat healthy' and calorie restrict and get over it. But he doesn't, and the feedback loop continues. Each purge feels like the last purge, undoing the binge that preceded it so he has a clean slate. He has a degree of myopia about it - within about a month he had reached a level of severity in which he was binging and purging three to four times a day between flights. He almost never, ever eats normally.
But he's also clever about it. He's escaped notice—in no small part because he doesn't 'look' like someone with an eating disorder. He's stopped gaining weight, but he's still chubby. The abrasions on his knuckles are minimal. He's a very successful 33-year-old pilot who seems to be in control of his life. He has a great job, an apartment with no roommates in Queens, and an air of confidence to him. He just doesn't seem like someone whose life has been completely taken over by an eating disorder.
A few weeks prior to the canonpoint I play him at, though, he finally was caught—by a young female dental hygienist during a cleaning. Since his last six months ago, he'd developed severe acid erosion on his teeth, multiple cavities, ulceration and swelling on the insides of his cheeks, inflammation in his throat and soft palate and on his uvula, and his hands—which look like dry skin in isolation—were the final damning piece of evidence that made it clear this wasn't just severe acid reflux in his sleep. This was deliberate.
She reported it to the dentist, and the dentist called Freddie into his office for a private conversation about it. He was stunned that he'd been caught - and denied, denied, denied. Acid reflux, he said. Sometimes it upsets his stomach to the point that he throws up during the day, but he wouldn't do that on purpose. Look at him. He laughs. Does he look like he has an eating disorder?
It didn't work. The dentist googled some outpatient treatment options and wrote them down for him. Freddie, having started to feel his body seriously start to give in under the strain by this point, never unfolded the paper after putting it in his pocket and thanking the guy. It's controlled. It's not an eating disorder, because he's choosing to do this—for his health. To keep flying. To control his blood sugar. And even if he's failing at that, too, if he hasn't managed to lose weight despite barely keeping down anything, at least he's not gaining, regardless of the cost.
Personality: Positive Trait: Sociable. Despite everything that lurks below, and for all of Freddie's issues forging deeper, more intimate connections with others—or, more aptly, keeping himself from fleeing once he realizes he is beginning to do so—Freddie gets along well with most people and finds it easy to strike up conversations, to relate to other people. He's not overly loud or rowdy, but he's a fun guy to go out with; he's kind, charming when he wants to be: there's a reason he has a lot of success on Tinder and got on well with his comrades in the military. He made friends easily when he first joined, and he's maintained those friendships even after getting out, though it does bear mentioning that none of these friends are people he can confide deeply personal things in. Relating to other people in a social capacity just comes very naturally to him.
Negative Trait: Perceived-inadequacy. Despite the air of confidence and comfort in his own skin that he projects, Freddie is haunted by persistent feelings of inadequacy in the back of his mind that tend to surface without warning, a man like a picturesque Florida neighborhood built atop hollow limestone caverns, ready to be swallowed by a sinkhole at the slightest tectonic shift.
But it's not particularly remarkable that Freddie's self esteem is built on a shaky foundation. His background has, from a very young age, conditioned him to believe that he's just not enough—it's fairly common for parents of children, especially young children and especially Catholic parents, to stay in unhappy marriages until their offspring move out "for the child's sake", but Freddie's parents only stayed together until he was 7, leaving him to wonder once he learned that this was not the norm why he hadn't been good enough to stay together for like most other kids. Growing up before and after the divorce, his parents didn't make him feel unwanted, but they weren't over-the-top loving and didn't frequently emphasize how happy they were to have him; his father was particularly aloof—and sometimes he still wonders if there was anything he could have been or done as a child to make them like him more.
Deep down, Freddie also still believes that being cheated on was, in some way, in his control - that there was something he could have done to make himself good enough to be the only one she needed. Maybe if he'd called her more than once a week, or was better in bed, or was a better romantic partner, he could have been good enough to not cheat on—a very false logic that doesn't account for the fact that sometimes people just do bad things.
These feelings really came to a head during his second deployment, after he was mildly injured by a mortar blast—it's standard procedure to put anyone who gets injured while engaging with the enemy, regardless of the severity, in for the Purple Heart, a medal the US gives to soldiers injured in combat. The injury simply has to be a direct result of enemy action and serious enough to require medical attention, and the piece of shrapnel that became shallowly embedded in his calf after the blast fit both of those criteria. However, it's up to the individual whether or not they want to choose to accept the medal, which comes with several benefits in healthcare, employment, and financial status. Freddie didn't feel that he had done enough to get it, or that he deserved it, because he felt inadequate compared to the other recipients - people who had been much more severely injured - and had to be talked out of making the mistake of declining free healthcare for life simply because he felt like he didn't "do enough."
These feelings of inadequacy also crop up when he's speaking to other veterans, and he usually stays out of conversations with people who have been deployed during wartime because of them; it's kept him from being able to form bonds over it and talk about the things he did see. Again, he feels like he didn't "do enough", despite having very much engaged in real combat for three years, because he didn't engage in any fighting up close, or endure the sort of trauma that he's heard ground forces describe—in Freddie's mind, to be adequate enough to join in these conversations, he'd have to be able to match their specific kind of experience, and the level of violence and up-close gore in them.
Negative Trait: Commitaphobic. Between his parents’ divorce when he was age seven, which set his first and most intimate impression of marriage as an institution, and then being cheated on in a two year relationship with his last girlfriend some 10 years ago, Freddie avoids commitment and tells himself he doesn't want to settle down or date seriously. He’s very active on dating apps, goes out on dates, has flings–but he dodges attempts to hang out too many times, tries not to go on too many dates with the same people in a row, and ghosts people if he feels like they're getting uncomfortably close to him or the conversations are getting too deep. Most of his liaisons usually only last 2-3 dates/hookups, and when they end, his partners are usually left bewildered, wondering what went wrong when they seemed to be having a genuinely good time before that.
But if Freddie lets them get close to him, they can hurt him like Sarah did; if they fall in love, they'll undoubtedly just fall out of love and come to hate each other like his parents did. It's better this way, or at least less scary.
But deep down, despite his refusal to acknowledge it, Freddie longs for closeness with another person and and craves intimacy with others, which is why he sleeps around to the degree that he does, constantly chasing fleeting glimmers of connection - but his self-sabotaging behaviors around dating make that impossible to actually achieve because he always cuts things off prematurely, usually after only two or three dates, even if he doesn't want it to end yet—a defense mechanism to avoid ever having to repeat the pain of being cheated on at the cost of depriving himself of a basic human need.
Negative Trait: Singleminded. Freddie doesn’t have many interests outside of flying and aviation, which is a large part of why the risk of losing his medical certificate in the future hits hard enough for him to immediately resort to unhealthy extremes. His life effectively revolves around one interest - flying - and during his stints of days off, he’s usually just piloting different aircraft than he usually gets to fly on a multiplayer PC flight simulator for hours or meticulously assembling model planes. He goes out drinking and does things like trivia nights from time to time, but the bottle to throttle time in recent years has become so long that it limits his ability to engage in his limited other hobbies: so planes and one night stands it is. Powers and Abilities: — Aviation. Freddie went through two and a half years of flight school in the Air Force, and he flew bombers for 8 years before getting his commercial pilot's license.
— Tinkering. He has a technical mind and understands machines, manuals, and the like very intuitively.
— Marksmanship.
— Basic survival.
— Other languages — French (fluent, Quebecois dialect), elementary Arabic (speaking/listening/reading only, no writing ability) Inventory: — pilot's license
— one (1) unassembled model plane kit
— handgun, standard issue Samples: Thinking (Prompt I) and Speaking (Prompt II) |
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