Theodore "Theo" Blakely
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— It is often the little things that make life worth living, I should think. Familiarity is home.
「Theodore blakely」
age 34 (canon, age at death) ; 35 (MFRP)
height 6'2", built fat
gender Cis male ; he/him
SexualityHomosexual
Ethnicity Yharnamite (English) ; Indian
role GP ; rudimentary doctor
Described as quiet by those who know him, Theodore carries with him an aura of awkwardness and perpetually seems to have something on his mind. Though stony faced (the fault of his mother's genetics, he would say; the pair look far more annoyed than reality would have it), a heart of gold undeniably sits behind that furrowed brow. Kind in nature; kinder still in touch. A fine doctor til the end.
Design Notes
- Designer: @ username
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- Full Reference
Kindhearted
Levelheaded
Patient
Intelligent
Generous
Reserved
Pessimistic
Avoidant
Has the "I'll try to fix a burning building" trait ; struggles to stop and say no if in too deep
Born to a long line of medical professionals, Theodore was quick to follow in the footsteps of his surgeon father to continue the trend; however, where his father manned an operating theater with gruesome efficiency and boisterous showmanship, Theodore would delegate himself to rudimentary medicine to treat the average layman. A man who kept his head down and stood fiercely by his oaths.
Perhaps then, there's a cruelty to be found in the way that his life would pan out. Come the worsening presence of the scourge in his early twenties, Theodore would reluctantly side with the Healing Church in the strain to treat those who had become infected, unaware of the true nature of the church itself until whispers of kill orders caught his ears. Rebelled how he could in kinder ways and paid the price with his health and ultimately, with his life.
——
Headcanons.
✎ His father was a famous surgeon in line with Robert Liston: someone renowned for his speed and showmanship in the operating theater, making the Blakely name somewhat well known. Many have varying opinions on Theo's father, ranging from quack to a spokesperson for the efficiency of medicinal advancements, but none are more profound as Theo's opinion of his father: an ass. Theo inherited his father's speed but without the insufferable flourish, meaning he works fast but without the... er, occasional slip ups.
✎ An only child in a long line of medical practitioners. Was expected to follow in their footsteps from birth, which he did semi gladly. Has always had an interest in medicine... less so in the feelings of inadequacy and the burden of expectation.
✎ Is the Bloodborne equivalent of a werewolf. Has no control over when he shifts, often with disastrous consequences. It's a miracle he lasted as long as he did without being caught. Episodes usually result in him mentally "blacking out" - he doesn't remember much of what happened in shifted states, and must read context clues from his (often) ruined surroundings. In his shifted form, Theodore is 8ft tall; in his inbetween stage, somewhere around 7ft.
Likes
- Reading
- Fishing
- Banana chips
- Candles
Dislikes
- Raisins
- Dogs
- Public speaking
- Cress
01.
Early life
Theodore Grayling Blakely, born September 9th 18??, to Ernest Blakely and Adelaide Blakely née Singh.
Theodore’s early life was a comfortable one; well off, by Victorian standards; set up with a home and inherited fortune both from his immigrant grandfather, Bhaskar, an archaeologist from Shimla. Despite his cushioned lifestyle, Theodore as a boy was the lonely sort, his parents keen to see him flourish in ways not entailing the indulgence of childish whimsy. A family of scholars and doctors painted a clear picture of his own future, with his father eager to see him with his own doctorate in hand like the long line of Blakely men before him. It left little room for Theodore to decide what to make of himself, turning him into a wallflower and busybody of their design.
It would be wrong to call them abusive parents. Their intentions were that of the best for their son, particularly Adelaide, who had struggled systematically in Yharnam and sought better for her only child. To call them dysfunctional would be more appropriate in connotations – inadvertently negligent and emotionally difficult, thinking the most loving thing they could do for their child was to prepare him for the future young. It left Theodore well acquainted with the sensation of yearning even as a little thing, and far more than the textbooks and private tutoring did he just want to cuddle, or to play, or to be taken to the park to romp with other children his age. He was hard pressed to find coddling in the people he truly wanted it from, but Amma was a blessing to him in that regard where his parents failed to be.
Theodore was Amma’s world; the reverse was just as true. Adelaide’s mother, his grandmother, who lived in the Blakely residence long after Bhaskar’s passing, was arguably Theodore’s primary carer with the busy lifestyles of his parents. When Theodore’s parents weren’t privately tutoring him, or otherwise retreating to their respective studies come evening, they were individuals in high demand, and often out of the house on business. Adelaide herself would take to touring away for a year when Theodore was four. As a surgeon, Ernest was frequently on call at all hours where need arose. It meant that Amma was the most reliable presence in Theodore’s life, and she helped to raise him from a young babe with steadfast patience and a kindly hand. Her love was a stave for him. He clung to her desperately, fondly, and the pair were two peas in a pod. She encouraged him to play with toys, to get himself grubby in the yard in the sorts of ways his parents wouldn’t have deemed worthwhile.
It did him well to be shown and taught the proper ways to love.
He was a shy child, for all his social inexperience – equally curious, affectionate, eager to please, yet never quite satisfied. He would watch his mother from afar and ache to be in her arms, in the sort of feeling of quiet disaffection that would follow him for many years.
Theodore’s malaise begins early.
Amma dies when Theodore is twelve.
She’s elderly; it shouldn’t come as a surprise, not truly, but there’s never a right time or way to say goodbye to someone, no matter how long of a life is lived. It throws his world into unrest and in his grief, turns him difficult, understandably. His father had planned to take Theodore as his apprentice that year, but the state of the boy made it impossible to suggest. Theodore wouldn’t hear it. Theodore could hardly entertain much at all. It was, in the end, Adelaide who put her foot down; butted heads with her husband to tell him no. There’s no way to put an expiry date on grief- it is, after all, the sort of thing that never goes away- but a year would be taken by Theodore and Adelaide both, to mourn and share in what was lost.
His mother, on a respite from work in her mourning, remained at home with Theodore while the rest of the world chugged onward.
Losing her own mother put much into perspective for Adelaide, and despite the misfortune and gravity of the absence Amma left in her wake, it was sobering in many ways for her to realise her own motherly shortcomings. Theodore and her would grow closer during this time. They spoke more; confided more; reminisced more, getting to know one another in ways beyond the superficial recognition of being mother and son. He would be hard pressed to say it even remotely filled the void that his grandmother left behind… but it did his aching heart well to be held and soothed by her in the sorts of ways he always wanted. It didn’t matter that it was too little too late: he needed it. They both did.
Come thirteen, now a young teenager, his apprenticeship would finally begin at the operating theatre his father manned. He became an apothecary – responsible for not only pharmacist work, but the prescription of medicine and the application thereof. It was at fourteen that Theodore would begin to dabble in his father’s surgeries as well; helping to hold down a screaming patient here; treating skin diseases there; doing minor stitches, setting bones, applying bandages. He was even taught to ride a horse, Victoria, gifted to him as a necessity for making house calls. Being a one-stop shop gave him first hand experience abound, and despite his fears and reservations, Theodore would learn quick, becoming a familiar face to those seeking medical care.
It was a rewarding profession no doubt,, but it weighed heavily upon him. The highs were soaring; the lows, plummeting. Victorian medicine was messy and unpredictable, often painful. He could tell intimately when patients were in agony during necessarily brutal amputations, or when something had gone amiss somewhere in their treatment. Young Theodore always wished he could comfort them, could do something to better help them, but coming up short in his searches for solutions or platitudes that would even begin to touch upon the levity of their conditions, often found himself simply selfishly thankful that he wasn’t in their shoes.
Out of everything, it took him the longest to grow desensitized to the surgeries. For years he dreams of vivisection.02.
LATER YEARS
Hailing from a long line of scholars and men of medical renown, the final step in Theodore’s academic journey aligned neatly with his predecessors.
At eighteen Theodore enrolled in Byrgenwerth College, set to receive the certifications that his parents held in such high regard. He remembers feeling reluctant, at first – feeling a sense of trepidation for sealing his predetermined fate in writing and a mortar board. It seemed, in his mind, the point of no return, and yet the longer Theodore dwelled upon it, the more he realised that it could actually be quite the opposite of his fears: rather than a binding, it spelt freedom. Four years away from home would afford him time without obligation breathing down his neck; for him to explore the world in the sorts of ways he was deprived of as a young boy.
His parents were overjoyed with him for his eventual agreement. So proud of their son for his eagerness; in his heart, he could not bring himself to tell them the truth.
And still, for all his fantasising, Theodore struggles during the first few months.
It’s not an academic issue – he’s bright, quick to grasp the material and quicker still to help himself to college resources in furthering his studies. Rather, the issue lies embarrassingly in social inexperience, having never gotten the chance to mingle with children in early schooling as many of his peers had. It seemed to him that people already knew one another, and those that didn’t had enough charisma and courage to form and find their chosen group. He remains somewhat of a recluse by unfortunate necessity, too shy and uncertain for more, until one Jude Webb and Alicja Kukulski would come to hold him in a headlock without much prompting at all.
Jude is the opposite to Theodore in many ways. An athlete; a philosophiser; optimistic, charming, popular. It seems, by all accounts, that they shouldn’t get along as well as they do, and yet they take to one another like bees and flowers. Alicja is much the same. An artist; passionate; outspoken; beautiful; witty. He feels insecure and displaced besides them both at first, almost questioning his ability to interact with them and captivate them, but they care for him dearly, find him good company, and for the next four years, the three of them would be inseparable to varying degrees.
Alicja eyes Theodore. Theodore eyes Jude. Jude eyes them both; sets them up, and Theodore agrees, because it feels the proper, sensical thing to do.
It’s not that Theodore dislikes her. It’s that they’re incompatible, at least in the ways she wants. She daydreams of marriage; of a family; of the sort of lifestyle that makes sweat prickle at the back of his neck for reasons yet unknown. He enjoys spending time with her, in the beginning – it’s not that he takes offence to the hand holding, or to the ways that she wants to lay her head in his lap, or have him play with her hair… it’s that he realises he wishes this could be as platonic as he feels it to be in his heart. It makes slightly more sense when he realises he spends a little too long thinking about one Mr. Webb, or the way butterflies take to his stomach when they get a little too intimate for comfort while raiding the wine cellar.
He realises soon thereafter that he doesn’t have feelings for Jude, either. But a realisation blossoms just the same.
Theodore surmises that he likes men around the same time he starts avoiding Alicja. Decidedly, it’s not the way to go about things whatsoever, but between his own increasing discomfort and Jude’s simultaneous declining health, it feels like the only option he has. He knows it’s cowardly – knows it’s unfair, that it hurts her, even though it’s the last thing he wants to do. It’s with enough prodding and poking from Jude himself despite his condition and arguably far more pressing priorities, that Theodore musters up the courage to break things off. To say she takes it well would be a lie. But time heals all wounds, Alicja finds another love, and the three move towards graduation together with their sights on the future and a willingness to let bygones be bygones.
Four years does well to allow Theodore to think. Despite rejecting his father’s whims, Theodore truly does want to help people. It feels his calling, to become a doctor – the sort of nagging purpose that grows stronger and stronger the closer it comes for him to leave again for home. When Jude asks if he’ll return to Central, he says yes.
And he does.
-
Upon returning home from graduation, twenty two and a diploma in hand, Theodore realises quickly the sorts of changes that come with adulthood.
No longer a child, no longer is it necessary for Theodore to assist in the operating theatre. He claims his own office not far away from his father’s building; establishing his own branch of the Blakely family business. He tries not to dismay too heavily over gaining traction through riding his father’s coattails, but quickly proves his own capabilities as a professional separate from Ernest. He’s a kindly hand – patient, a pioneer as his father was in the way of minding hygiene, though these techniques are applied in more rudimentary ways. Business is a steady flow. He becomes well familiar with family units. The MacUchtraigh’s remain especially under his care, meaning Theodore fills something of a niche in his field; possessing medical knowledge of Pthumerians and the unique ways in which they need to be treated. It’s around this time that he too begins to take Jude as a patient, a sickly teenager now a sickly young man in need of frequent check-ups.
At twenty three, Theodore’s parents leave the city. It’s a stroke of luck that they do – hardly a sixth sense for what’s to come, but they avoid a fouler fate through their whims. When they ask Theodore to come with them, he declines. The country life doesn’t appeal to him too terribly. He’s duty bound, besides.
This is life, for some years. But a lot changes just shy of a decade.
He lives through the ashen blood; through the rise in popularity of the Healing Church; through the burning of Old Yharnam; through the Cainhurst massacre; through the amputation of Angus’s arm, Angus’s death, Malo’s disappearance. When Yharnam spirals, it spirals fast, and very soon he’s living through a plague and an apocalypse in the truer senses of the word. Sickness permeates the city, and a doctor already in high demand suddenly becomes desperately sought after. Life as he knew it, as everybody knew it, takes a drastic turn. People, sick or not, begin to live frugally, hungrily, dirtily, by necessity. People begin to distrust one another. All the while, Laurence is profuse in his promises of salvation.
When Theodore is thirty, he receives a letter, beckoned by the First Vicar. It’s a private summon that fills Theodore with trepidation, wondering what and why could possibly be needed of him. In the end, it’s an invitation – an invitation to join the Healing Church; a commending of his efforts as a healer and the desirability of his skills during the worsening plague, with the streets infested with beasts. He flounders, of course he does, but how can he refuse?
He’s not a religious man; still, he understands the church to be good.
He wants to do good. He wants to be good.
They tell him that he is, even when rumors of unease and distrust begin to circulate; even when the Church begins to kill their own, branding them as heretics; even when patients die, and people die, and he’s told that the answer is prayer, prayer, prayer; even when Theodore is handed a blade and told that killing is divine despite the fact it makes him sick. He believes it, for some years, not because he wants to, but because he has to, because he’s afraid of what will happen if he doesn’t. Theodore is not a brave man, but it’s by the persistence of Jude that he finds himself wanting to be. Strange to find out that the institution in which you pledged your loyalty was little more than a cult. Sensical was the decision to act in opposition.
Theodore begins to treat people in secret, despite the fact it could spell his death. The Church aims to brutally kill the sick and at risk to prevent the spread of infection, but Theodore cannot bring himself to any longer.
He tries all manner of medicines and treatments. When those too begin to fail, he tries kindness. He isn’t sure what to make of it, the first time a patient asks for a kinder death, but Theodore becomes well acquainted with the concept of voluntary euthanasia and dying with dignity, too.
03.
THE END
It’s between all of this that Jude’s condition worsens, and the worst comes to light: the healing blood that Jude had been imbibing over the years to cure his respiratory problems had instead began to blossom and bloom the seeds of beasthood within him.
Of course, Theodore can’t accept it. It’s a mess of panic and denial and bargaining, until he eventually vows that he’ll finally concoct a cure once and for all. Jude reassures him; remains optimistic in ways that Theodore has never found himself capable of doing, but Theodore is hellbent. He throws himself into his research and becomes so blindsided by desperation that deep into the witching hours one night, he scarcely notices when his friend shifts into something more, more beast than man in the growls that rattle in his chest. Theodore is no match for the way that Jude attacks him – bitten, bloodied, afraid, he does all he can think to do in the moment.
Jude is shot to death at thirty. Just shy of thirty one, Theodore becomes infected with beasthood.
And so begins a painful few years of disorientation, of bodily shifts, or slipping in and out of lucidity like the gentle ebb and flow of the tide. He never resented Jude for what he did. But the feelings were complex. It could be argued that there’s a sense of prideful arrogance to be found in Theodore’s downfall, or otherwise a great sense of irony for succumbing to that which he refused to condemn. In his mind, his greatest threat was the Healing Church – those who would punish his good will as treachery. It didn’t occur to him that his patients could be a hazard: they were sick, and their sickness he would treat with the sort of gentle hand and understanding that Yharnam had long forgotten. For all his hope, it marked the loss of his life as he knew it, and Theodore understood from the moment the infection began to spread that he was on borrowed time. He had seen it progress in his patients closely enough to understand the varying stages as it moved through his own body in waves – scarier than waiting in ignorance was knowing medically when and how the other shoe would drop.
He remembers well, the early days of becoming infected, how painful it was in body and mind to feel parts of your former self shift beneath the skin in preparation for something more. It was nausea; vomiting; dehydration; disorientation; sharpened teeth; sharpened fingernails; bones cracking and clicking and distending until the first inevitable shift came, his newfound form wreaking havoc on his home. He remembers being too big for his body, taking up too much space in the universe, and feeling the inevitable sense of dread as his sense of self began to crumble and peel away.
It was almost a blessing, when his memory and grip on reality eventually began to wane. He tried to keep a diary where he could, as he had throughout his entire life, of thoughts and feelings and notes on his progression. It made keeping track of his thoughts easier, this much is true; though it did little to make his thoughts sensical or to ease him from the pit of despair. Plagued by delusions, hopelessness, and a nagging bloodlust, Theodore could no longer remember the chunks of time that he spent in a more bestial form, only realizing with profound grief that the blackouts seemed to be happening with more and more frequency. He thinks he hurt people. (He did). He wonders if he ever truly helped anyone. (He did). He considers drastic measures because he hopes he'll feel better. (He doesn’t).
When a neighbour goes missing and Theodore awakes the next day with iron in his mouth and blood beneath his fingernails, it becomes the final straw in many ways. Sensing his own demise on the horizon, Theodore makes a choice. He had given many of his patients a choice in their passing – the mercy of a kind, dignified death, where their illnesses would have instead brought them to unrecognisable ruin.
Giving away his worldly possessions for the inevitable comes easy. At least, he pretends it does. It wounds a great part of him to see his keepsakes and trinkets fall into hands that can scarcely comprehend their value, but he knows they’ll see no use with him anymore.
In that regard, he offers his belongings a kinder burial than the one he offers himself.
It’s a crisp morning, raining from grey, thinning clouds, when Theodore Blakely dies at thirty four.
I still have much love left in me to give.
Varré
Partner ; MFRP Crossover ship
Aimless and withdrawn after being manipulated by the Healing Church til his ultimately demise, Theodore would find guidance and company in one White Mask Varré following their arrival in Quietus: a newfound world with newfound opportunity.
Where Theodore had been strung along by a cult of one kind with eventual release, the claws of the Mohgwyn Dynasty remained deep in Varré, who sought new recruits for his eventual return to the Lands. Though his preaching of a love filled world roused appease at first to the doctor's weary heart, Theodore would quickly realize the reality, perhaps reminded of his own cult traumas. So began a difficult, messy process of removing Mohg's tenterhooks from the surgeon, with both learning well the ways in which they had been used by their respective factions.
Patient with one another; simultaneously settled in their age and yet quick to make each other feel young again.
Friend ; Patient
A patient from Theodore's days as a general practitioner. Theodore was the MacUchtraigh family doctor at the age of twenty one, fresh from graduating at Byrgenwerth and eager to begin a medical career of his own outside of his father's business. Theodore would grow close to the family in the time he spent working for them, at the same time gaining specialist knowledge of Pthumerian health in ways many doctors did not. Met Sterling when Sterling was only twelve; recalls him best as a scrappy young boy with large, round glasses, rather than the Keg he would become.
Friend ; Patient
Another patient from Theodore's days as a general practitioner, the eldest son of the MacUchtraigh family. Theodore's bond with Angus perhaps ran deeper than that of the bond with Angus's younger brother, Sterling, by virtue of an unfortunate hunting accident that would leave Angus with the loss of an arm and subsequently in Theodore's care during his recovery. Though Theodore was not the one to amputate the limb, he would remain the one to tend to Angus as it healed, finding himself protective of the young man. While doctors and their patients remain strictly professional, many of the feelings surrounding the MacUchtraigh boys and their parents were faintly familial towards the end.
Best friend ; First crush ; Last enemy
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