Rudy Gill Sutton

Rusty

17, nearly 18

Male

Bisexual

Erudite

Dauntless

Dauntless.

Rudy is short but strong, standing at 5’4. (Don’t mention his height to him. He probably tried to sneak growth hormone while in Erudite.) He wears contacts because, unlike a lot of Erudites, actually had eye problems, but ditched the glasses after joining Dauntless. He wears a lot of the stuff you’d see on today’s punks: black leather, small dainty spikes, and so on. He has black skin and very dark eyes, with a buzzcut hair style. Has a fondness for fingerless gloves and combat boots, although if the weather gets hot you’re more likely to see him in a tank or completely shirtless, with some worn pair of denim jeans. He is surprisingly clear of tattoos, something that may change IC, and also clear of piercings, something that will never change as long as he lives. Generally, he looks pretty beefy, but thinks he needs to give his abs more work. (Could not find pictures, I hope that’s okay!)

Stargazing! Rudy is a whiz at naming his constellations, and at naming the stars in them. He finds it sublime to just lay down outside Dauntless headquarters and gaze up and wonder.

Adrenaline! Though much of Rudy’s personality will make the average person wonder why in the hell he chose Dauntless, his love of danger or simulated danger is something that most of his new faction can relate to. You know the part in the book when they’re playing capture the flag with projectiles that hurt like bullets? He’d absolutely love that.

Food! This doesn’t need much elaboration. He’s a teenage boy.

Pain--wait, what? No, he’s not a masochist. He just feels that the endorphins resulting from physical pain are good for him, in small healthy doses.

Common sense! Eventually, there’s probably going to be some edgy kid like Peter joining Dauntless and thinking that it’s about mindless brutality. Rudy very much enjoys the company of people who know what they’re doing.

Divergents (for now). Rudy has been brainwashed into thinking that Divergents are dangerous to society. However, being an open-minded little smarty-pants, he’ll warm up IC given the chance.

His brother, Gary. (He dislikes him in the way we all dislike our siblings.) He joined Candor, which didn’t at all surprise Rudy because he was always a complete asshat to Rudy growing up. Gary may be divergent, but Rudy is unaware of that.

Herd behavior. Rudy hates it when a large group of people believe in a lie or a number of lies, and act because the rest of their group is acting. Yes, he understands that humans are social creatures, but it wouldn’t kill anyone to think for themselves! Irony?

Piercings. Though he doesn’t care much if other Dauntless folk get pierced, the thought of having it done makes him shudder and feel nauseous.

Physical contact from people he doesn’t know well. This is a big one. Don’t hug Rudy if you’re a stranger to him; you might just get a deck in the jaw. It’s pretty impulsive too. Someone could be calling for an icepack before he even knows he wigged out.

Simulations, especially Dauntless’ fear simulations. He may have gotten the hang of them eventually (that’s why he’s still here!) but he always comes out of them feeling sick, shaky and, of course, anxious.

Rudy is a real math nerd, which I won’t go into because I suck at math. He also has a real tendency to just geek out and talk endlessly about things he likes: how the brain works, why people go stiff post-mortem, different classifications of stars… And so on. Crazy-hard math like calculus, biology and neuroscience are his favorite topics.

He, being a former Erudite, loves to learn, so he asks a lot of questions and during training spent many portions of his free time doing extra training, especially if he couldn’t pick up the skill as fast as he would’ve liked. He can be hard on himself for not picking something up in a snap, which of course, most people don’t- so he naturally can get frustrated pretty easily. Rudy also has a little bit of trouble staying still when he should; something has to be moving: he’ll swing his leg, twiddle his thumbs and things like that often without realizing. He is sensitive to prolonged loud noise which might just be a bit of an issue in Dauntless, and though he is perfectly capable and fine with it, social interaction can burn him out. He may be on the autism spectrum, but he feels that it doesn’t really matter because he’s enough of a smartie.

Rudy can, when he makes friends, fret excessively over their health and general well-being. This can naturally be annoying, but at least it’s well-intentioned.

Everyone thought Rudy was destined to stay in Erudite since he was very little. He learned to read and write early, learned new concepts surprisingly quickly, and appeared to have such a love of knowledge that it was generally assumed by those that knew him that he would grow up to be an affluent scientist or mathematician one day. However, most people were unaware that since he was around nine years old, Rudy had depression. Though he had a perfectly sheltered and uneventful childhood, with no space for life-altering traumas, he’d begun to feel as if he didn’t belong, as if he was living his life in a cage, as if he wasn’t really living up to what he really could be. Basically, he felt really pent-up, as if he couldn’t do anything except learn- which, of course, he did enjoy, but he wanted to do other things... Dauntless things. He wanted to learn things in muscle memory. He wanted to go stretch his legs and do something!

He’d naturally admired and sometimes envied the Dauntless kids at school, who arrived by jumping off of a train. At one point, he had a small crush on an older Dauntless boy, too, though he never acted on it and certainly never told anyone- not so much because he had a crush on a boy, but more because he was this nerdy spaghetti-arms and he was a handsome beefcake with some “damn nice ink.” Of course, nothing came of this, and the time came for his aptitude test, which everyone, including him, expected to be Erudite. Nope. It was Dauntless. So, both excited and terrified, he joined the faction, making his parents really sad and otherwise surprising the hell out of everyone in Erudite who’d known him. He found during initiation he got a lot of the mental stimulation that he’d longed for in Erudite. He has a job now patrolling the perimeter of the city, and is fairly happy with it, although he still hasn’t gotten any tattoos despite people pressuring him to, and is very much considering it.