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Post by Forte! on Oct 12, 2008 12:01:56 GMT -5
Name: Dmitri Vladimir Petrova Nicknames?: Dmitri, Vlad. Ivan insists on calling him Petrova. Age: 20 Gender: Male Physical Description: Dmitri has an overall threatened look about his person, like he's constantly being hunted by something or the other. He always has his shoulders well up, making him look a bit of a hunchback, and his blue eyes are always shifting, inconstant. He is rather pallid, with a smoky pallor to his black hair, and always seems to have hay or shavings stuck to his constant blue sweater. he looks cold all of the time, and in the winter he looks rather like a snowman, he's so wrapped up. Unlike Ivan, he refuses to wear fur, and thus is swathed in cotton. He doesn't go for any of the shiny vinyl stuff.
If he would ever straighten up enough to make it noticeable, Dmitri is actually an extremely tall person. He has long limbs that sometimes give him an appearance akin to that of a gorilla, and he is by no standards a handsome man. He has a nice face, but otherwise doesn't have a whole lot going for him. His right leg is twisted at both the knee and heel from a birth defect, and though this is not obvious when he's standing still he walks funnily and can't run very well, or very fast.
Because of his leg, Dmitri has a lot of trouble riding even the most gentle of horses, and giving even simple leg aids is a struggle. Never mind finding tall boots that will fit him without putting him in a large amount of pain. Thus, it is unlikely that he will ever compete in a riding competition, much less be able to jump or gallop without losing his balance. Despite the defect, he is strong, he can lift bales of hay or bags of grain without any problem. Weight: 182 Height: 5' 10" Personality: Dmitri is shut off, not shy, but reserved. He doesn't speak English terribly well, and has a very thick accent when he does. He tends to appear, in his own words, like a blubbering idiot with a gimp leg. In actuality, he is a remarkably fast learner, having known next to no English when he came with Ivan, and has a keen intellect and hunger for knowledge. He comes off as rather childish due to his upbringing and limited vocabulary. In fact, he does think somewhat like a child would, although this appears to be because of his constant sense of fear.
He's extremely jumpy, and can be scared by the merest noise or sound. In part this is due to his leg, he had to be wary to keep from being trapped by fellow students in his younger days. In part it is due to his own nature. Even without the defect he would have been wary, it is deeply ingrained into his nature. Animals calm him like nothing else can, particularly horses. Though he is not a great rider, he loves to be around them, to take care of them.
He is highly impressionable, since nothing has ever been set in stone for him. Thus, he tends to think that he has no clue about the real method of horse training, which he is forced to believe is Ivan's. But his good natured soul leads him to know that he could never raise the whip on a horse, could never become the monster that Ivan is with his beasts. Dmitri relies on the ability of the horse to see that he means well, to see that he is forced to do what he does.
It is hard to raise emotion from Dmitri, he is so use to keeping it bottled up inside. His quiet rages against Ivan, the fear that the man will do something unforgivable. The worst are the looks, the furtive looks of disgust that people give him when they see him working for Ivan. He longs to scream that he had no choice, longs to leave the place forever. But who would accept him? A boy who cannot speak English and has a gimp leg has very little chance of ever being hired to another stable.
And without horses, Dmitri is nothing. History: Dmitri grew up in a suburb of Russia, to an impoverished family that could not afford the surgery that it would take to fix his leg. His seven older siblings put his fragile life in danger constantly, not able to understand the effects of his gimp leg, except for his eldest sister, Petra. She became something of his guardian, protecting him from the younger children. In fact, she did the same for each of them, as their mother and father had to work constantly to keep them fed. Nonetheless, all of the Petrovas went hungry at some time or another, and as soon as Petra was old enough she had to go off to work to keep the family. Eventually the entire family had to go get jobs, underage as they were.
An 8-year-old Dmitri found himself skulking about the barn, doing menial chores for a few cents a day. It just so happened that the owner of the stable would come to be the mentor of Ivan Mazepa, who was 20 at the time and tended to bully Dmitri around a bit, though he soon forgot about the younger boy when the trainer took him under his wing. Ivan was the lust of all of the stable boys, to work alongside that master of cruelty. But Dmitri knew that this could never be his dream, that he could never be what those two became, and as he aged he worked quietly about the barn, keeping his head low and his mouth shut.
It was only when Ivan left the stable that Dmitri got his break. He had been working there for 12 years, and Ivan remembered him as a particularly obedient boy, albeit with a gimp leg. So, along with Bartok, Dmitri was loaded onto a steamboat, smuggled on board so that Ivan wouldn't have to pay for his ticket. For the long voyage Dmitri's only friend was Bartok, and he grew to love the horse and understand him, as well. Bartok was him. The prisoner in a world that was forced upon them both.
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