Hvass

Thousand year old vampire, turned against his will in his teens by an ancient vampire lord and raised a brainwashed servant. The Lord's final addition to his slavelike coven, Einarr, is never properly mind-controlled and names, befriends, and breaks the others out of the Lord's control, unleashing them into the world to find themselves and do as they please in their immortality.

Hvass finds other cultures and languages utterly fascinating to learn about and experience and travels Europe - and later more of the world - extensively, disguising himself in a human form and taking jobs that allow him to remain nocturnal - or at least indoors. His most fateful stint is as a servant in a French nobleman's manor in the 1400s, where he falls in love with one of the local knights working at the castle. He and Sir Éstiene have a happy and only mildly secret courtship until Éstiene is killed in a duel. Distraught, Hvass makes the split-second decision to turn him (he had always planned to offer, just more gently), but Sir Éstiene does not take becoming a monster well, nor does he discovering his lover is one too, and attempts to kill Hvass once he awakens.

Hvass flees, devastated, and spends the next hundred years asleep in the reluctant care of his sister. When he finally shakes off his despondency, he's lost his formerly optimistic outlook, and though he resumes his anthropological travels with genuine interest he's drawn to riskier and more violent occupations. As more time passes and world politics heat up with colonialism, Hvass begins to enlist in militaries - he doesn't care if they're in the right as long as it makes him feel something, and he's not above being a traitor.

In the present day, Hvass is living in the UK? working as an overnight security guard or gay bar's bouncer - tired, disappointed with the state of the world, and just as heartbroken as he's always been. He would give anything to have Etienne back but is sure nothing has changed and he'd still rather him dead, provided Etienne's even alive anymore.

Hvass is unapologetic and openly hostile. Nothing he does is an accident: he may seem to act rashly but he knows what he intends to do and accepts the consequences. He is very much a lone wolf but will pick up friends more often than one might expect along his travels - he doesn't mind saying goodbye when it's his choice to do so. Despite his pessimism, he has a strong sense of morality and a caring nature somewhere deep down in there, and will defend the deserving to the death.