Archive of Our Own ^beta

The basics

• Because he's a separate person from Basil altogether, he has no ties to the Faraway gang and has nothing to do with the Mari incident. He never even meets any of them until after the events of the game.
  
  
• Rowan came to the States when he was ten years old. He's a native Scotsman who holds onto his dialect on principle. His accent is thick exactly because he chooses not to make his speech turn more American, though some mixing is inevitable.
  
  
• The household he grew up in was strict. His parents were rich and had expectations of him, and Rowan never quite lived up to those. He often got into arguments in retaliation for his imperfections. He began acting out as a way to vent frustrations, causing him to be dropped off at his family in the US when they deemed him too bad. This planted deep abandonment and anger issues within Rowan that he never quite got to process and that would ultimately rob him of his teenage years.
  
  
• Throughout the years, anger has always been an issue for him. He has a hard time staying calm, he's often frustrated, and he has a tendency to have outbursts that are ungrounded and turn aggressive, both verbally and physically. The best way to diagnose him would probably be with intermittent explosive disorder with a potential light case of psychosis surrounding his mood and a tentative case of avoidant personality disorder. Outbursts usually are followed by bursts of crying. Most would write him off as a short-tempered brat who isn’t worth their time, and he has issues making friends because of this.
  
  
• Rowan is also incredibly edgy as a way to fight back against his powerlessness. He peppers swears and insults into his conversations, and he’s been known to use slurs far too casually like they’re nicknames, often pertaining to his sexuality. He’s an asshole to people for no reason except he felt like it, and he finds it funny to see people suffer because of his actions. He has an interest in dark topics in theory and thinks that matters such as self harm and suicide are ‘so cool’, but he’s all bark and no bite as he gets queasy at the slightest sight of blood or injury.
  
  
• Self-deprecation is his default. Although he’s prone to megalomania in arguments, he also thinks of himself as lower than dirt. The way he talks about himself, it’s like he’s proud of how doomed and useless he is, well-aware that he’s a reject who’s never gonna be loved by anyone. The combination of his harsh self-criticism and the flat, almost comical tone in which he nonchalantly and openly shoots himself down comes across as shocking, and it’s clear that he’s never gotten actual help for his issues, just bandaid solutions that didn’t take into account his feelings.
  
  
• While he is self-deprecating, it also frustrates him when people agree that he’s terrible. His jabs are meant as a way to cope, but when others agree that he’s indeed awful and unloveable, that stabs deep and immensely emotionally affects him. It validates his worldview, and god, does it hurt.
  
  
• He doesn’t keep it a secret that he’s suicidal and has plans to end his life, but as he’s more bark than bite, it’s so clear that he’s looking for excuses not to do it and he ultimately is open for any reason at all to live, be it something insignificant such as that tonight’s dinner didn’t suck as badly or he got a new puzzle. Until Basil comes along, he hasn’t been given anything long term, yet he desperately keeps looking. He wants to be saved, but he knows that no one will, and he feels like he’s being backed into a grim corner he doesn’t want to be in more with each passing day. Which other solution could he possibly have than to become angrier, more violent, and more self-hating when he’s so doomed?
  
  
• Deserves so much better.

Story

• His exact circumstances depend on what Basil's fate ends up being after the good ending, because he’s ultimately a character I love to tie to Basil’s fate. In verses where Basil ends up incarcerated, they meet either in a youth correctional facility or in worse cases in prison. In verses where Basil gets taken into a psych ward, Rowan also got the help he needed and is a fellow patient. Dare I say that in Mari lives verses, he’s often doing better, but he’s still not quite happy? 
  
  
• A commonality is that when he was twelve, he almost beat a teacher to death in a fit of rage and he got admitted to a youth facility. Across all timelines, this was initially done to help him get better, but it’d soon become clear how deep-seated his anger issues are and how little he wants to be helped at that young age.
  
  
• He falls for Basil in quite a few canon timelines. Usually first because of an interest in what Basil has done to Sunny and Mari and his suicide attempt or his health issues, but that grows into a genuine connection beyond his asinine obsession. Both in the mental asylum and in prison, he tries to talk Basil into a suicide pact once they’re outta there, one of those promises where he’s far more bark than he ever is bite as it’s overwhelmingly clear that Basil not only makes him want to make the effort to make it back into society, but also to live.
  
  
• In my post-good ending where Basil gets taken in in a mental ward, Rowan is a fellow patient who resists treatment. He’s interested in Basil due to his suicide attempt, but he grows attached due to their similar backgrounds and abandonment issues. He has a bad influence on Basil, but he also at some point is the only person Basil even talks to. After Basil has a bad episode, Rowan is so terrified that he decides to give recovery a try. He wants to get out of there with Basil.
  
  
• In my Mari lives AU, Rowan didn’t spend as long in the mental ward, but his freedom has caused him to develop a severe eating disorder. He ends up in the hospital at the same time when Basil has his heart surgery and hides out in Basil’s room when he doesn’t wanna be given IV nutrients after his condition causes him to be hospitalised. He becomes friends and the Faraway gang helps him get his life back on track when he doesn’t really have anything.
  
  
• In my post-good ending where Basil goes to prison, Rowan meets Basil a few years down the line. In this verse, he’s been in the system for over a decade and has reached the final stop where he’s been rejected and is no longer offered help, only punishment. He bonds due to being so similar to Basil and forms a sort of pleasure-suicide pact where after they’re free, they’re gonna live hedonistically until one of them dies, after which the other kills himself. Doesn’t actually pull through on it because he does wanna live his life with Basil and make that ring that Elvis put around their fingers one drunken nigh worth its while.

Other trivia

• Rowan, in his full 159cm (5’3) glory, is exactly 6 cm shorter than Basil, a fact he is grumpy about. He’s the shortest of the entire group, even shorter than Sunny.
  
  
• Is a little older than Basil.
  
  
• On the scale of gay to straight, somehow ends up even more left of Sunny on the gay side. Exclusively homosexual and open about it.
  
  
• Rowan has a tendency towards disordered eating. How bad it gets depends on how controlled his environment is; the more freedom he gets, the worse he generally does, but a refusal to eat properly is yet another way to rebel and self-deprecate. He’s the worst in the Mari lives AU and the most stable in the mental ward scenario, but he is underweight in all verses.
  
  
• Puzzle enthusiast. That's the man’s main hobby. Give him a new puzzle box every week and he'll probably keep himself busy on his own and be very happy with his life. Just because he loves them doesn't make him good, efficient, or even fast at them, but by God if solving the same puzzles over and over doesn't put him at ease, nothing could.
  
  
• Related, puzzles are one of the few things that manage to calm him down. At the asylum, he has exactly three puzzles, and the lack of variety agitates him—but he does find peace in them and complies with making them. Hero gets him more puzzles.
  
  
• Rowan is the embodiment of a homophobic gay guy. Although he doesn't have a negative image of fellow gay people, his self-deprecation gives him a tendency to talk down on himself. He knows that his parents are disappointed in him that he turned out 'this way' and he internalised that. He fully accepts and even is openly vocal about the fact that he's gay, but the language he uses about it makes it sound like he hates himself for it and he thinks of homosexuality as naturally socially ostracising.
  
  
• Tends to go commando. No other reason than that he doesn’t like the texture and once again because he’s edgy and rebellious in small, insignificant ways.
  
  
• Miiiiiight be Flower’s older brother, but I’m still undecided on that. Flower would be six years younger than Rowan.