Sugarhead

Other Names: Sugar

Species: Alligator snapping turtle (Macrochelys temminckii)

Birthday: June 23

Gender: Genderfluid, most often masculine

Pronouns: Depends

Occupation: Owner and bartender of the Tipsy Terrapin, a gay bar located downtown

Physical Description 

• Beefy
• Spiky and intimidating
• Can't bend over at the waist (shell gets in her way)
• She can't wear most normal clothes because of the shell, but she does wear a top hat and bow tie
• His shell is low-key sharp and will absolutely stab you if you were to run into him from behind
• His claws are very sharp and you should not touch those
• His beak makes his jaws a pair of scissors; there's a reason he's called a snapping turtle
• Can hold his breath for an inordinately long time, but can't really swim (he sinks like a rock)
• There are three vents in the back of his shell that emit greenish, sweet-smelling smoke
• Their voice is husky (and occasionally raspy when they're tired)
• They smell like alcohol and candy at all times

Personality 

• Extremely hard to fool
• Sensible, has learned from experience
• Cautious, sometimes overly so
• Always worrying about something
• Self-loathing
  • Convinced he's an awful person
  • Hates talking about himself
• Absolutely devoted to Truffle, though he's inordinately nervous about commitment
  • He's worried he's going to fuck something up and she'll hate him
  • Buuuut at the same time he wants to be closer to her because she makes him happier than he's been in a long time (and then he beats himself up about that because it feels selfish)
• Tl;dr Sugarhead is an emotional train wreck

Likes 

• Truffle
  • Truffle's gorgeous aesthetic
  • Truffle's effortless confidence and complete disregard for what anyone but Sugarhead thinks
  • How fun and sweet and supportive Truffle is at all times
  • The way Truffle gets wiggly and excited whenever he shows her affection
  • That warm, fuzzy, "everything's fine" feeling he gets when he's around Truffle
    • Gee, I wonder what that could be
• Showing off her guns
• Hard liquor
• Puns, wordplay

Dislikes 

• Himself
• Talking about himself
• Unruly patrons
• People getting too, ahem, intimate in his bar
• Worrying

Personal Info 

• Engaged to Truffle, loves her more than he thought possible
  • He considers her the best thing that's ever happened to him
  • He's never felt spurred to improve himself and start mending all his problems for the sake of someone else before, and Truffle certainly hasn't asked him to change himself for her, but he felt like she deserved better than him, so he fought to improve himself until he could honestly say he was better than him
• Absolutely excellent at mixing drinks
• Treats their two/three employees like family (Rotguts is their "son," Popskull is their "daughter," and Truffle jokes that they're already married)
• Lives above his bar, on the second story
• Suffers from PTSD which is triggered by fire; matches and barbecues are fine, but he shuts down around large fires, especially if they seem out of control
• Has a lot of stories to tell, but won't tell them if they're about himself
• He was really, really scared for the longest time about a bunch of stuff that he was honestly overthinking and wasn't that big a deal, but still had him locked up and unable to take his relationship anywhere until they slowly worked through it together
  • He's been a really shitty, red-flag-covered jackass in the past without even realizing he was doing it, and he was terrified he might start taking Truffle for granted and mistreating her
    • Truffle never bought into that particular fear, first of all because she'd immediately tell him if he was doing something that she thought was shitty, but also because Sugarhead was so paralyzed worrying he'd start acting like a jackass that he wasn't able to do anything
    • She was like honey I know you didn't realize you were being a shithead, but that was a long time ago, and now you're so concerned you'll do it again that I genuinely don't think you're capable of accidentally being awful anymore
  • Needless to say, he's also done some really shitty things, and while he was afraid she'd (rightfully) leave him if he told her about them, he also couldn't sleep well at night if he let their relationship progress further without coming clean
    • So it turns out she's really supportive and understanding (which he already knew, but that didn't stop him from worrying), and she pointed out to him that he stopped making those bad choices years ago, recognized they were bad, and has actively been trying to "make up" for them by hating himself and refusing to let himself be happy for years because he felt like him having a normal life years after the fact would somehow be an insult to the people he's hurt
    • Instead of being like "ugh you're horrible I'm leaving" she was more like "holy shit sweetie that's really unhealthy" and now Sugarhead's in therapy, where he probably should've been a long time ago
  • He was also just nervous about the more mundane worry that the love he's feeling is just the infatuation period of the relationship not wearing off yet, and that if they're together a little longer they won't feel so attached to each other and they'll both feel trapped in a lackluster relationship
    • Truffle understood where he was coming from, and agreed that's definitely a real thing, but argued that based on their feelings for each other (especially when compared to their feelings for their previous partners) it would be highly unlikely that they'd both decide to throw this relationship away because they somehow eventually find each other boring
    • While they'll probably get more "used to" each other the longer they spend together, so things will seem less new and exciting, Truffle's pretty sure it'll never get so bad that they end up feeling "trapped" with each other

Brief Backstory 

• Her father was killed by a fire that she accidentally started when he was much younger
  • He wouldn't have died if Sugarhead hadn't also hid in a closet because she was afraid she'd get in trouble for starting the fire
  • Her father went searching for his baby in the burning house and couldn’t be convinced to stop until firefighters found and rescued her 
  • By that point he’d been in there for way too long, and after a long, heart-wrenching battle with health issues from smoke inhalation, he died
• His death put a lot of strain on Sugarhead and her mother - he was the only man her mother had ever loved, and without him, she wilted
• Sugarhead always blamed herself for his death, and felt that her mother was blaming her too
• He made a lot more poor decisions in the years after that, especially as a teenager
• Finally he moved elsewhere without telling his mother either that he was leaving or where he was going
• He continued making poor decisions until he decided to get his life together and started working on improving his situation
• His bar is his proudest achievement

Trivia 

• Her name/nickname is a colloquial term for moonshine, which itself is slang for illegal home-brewed whiskey
• Never went to college
• They didn't intend for the Tipsy Terrapin to be a gay bar when they founded it
  • One day they looked up from the counter and realized that literally all their regular customers (and their employees) were queer, so they just embraced it
• Once bit a man's dick off

Date of Creation / Adoption: June 23, 2016