Age: 27
Appearance: Zane stands around 5’11, slightly taller than the average infantryman in WWII. His jet black hair is kept short, but has grown out of army regulation by the time he returns home. His face is cleanshaven and best described as granular, as if roughly carved from stone. Zane’s dark brown eyes always seem to rest in a stern, almost glaring, gaze.
Personality: Zane appears silent and stoic at first glance, and is often described as menacing when his mood sours. Very few know him past his reputation as a soldier, but those that do would speak endlessly about his sharp tongue and dark sense of humor. He’s also far more laid back than his stern expressions often suggest.
Zane is a man of few words, and generally avoids small talk. He’s often blunt, but rarely to the point of injury.
While Zane is not one to fly off the handle, he does frequently show a lack of impulse control, sometimes to the detriment of those he cares about. Still, those that know him would say everything he does is for those rare few he cares about, even if he often has the worst way of showing it.
Background: Zane was born on January 18th, 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts. Raised in the early vestiges of the foster care system in the United States, Zane never really knew his birth parents. For the first few years of his life, he was moved around a few orphanages. Eventually, he was adopted by a foster family outside the city in Groton. The Carters owned a sizable portion of land and struggled to have children of their own, so they decided to adopt to assist in the running of the farm. Zane was later joined by fellow foster children Nadia, Luke, and Ulysses. Zane was the oldest, and did his best to protect his younger foster siblings. Especially Nadia, as she was the youngest.
While life on the farm was far from perfect, it was stable and Zane quickly bonded with his new sister. Unfortunately, things took a turn for the worse when the mother, Margaret Carter, passed due to complications with her pregnancy. The father, Will Carter, fell into a depressive state and took the bottle to cope.
As Zane neared adulthood, things grew worse. As the eldest, the father relied on him the most, and he received the worst of the old man’s drunken outbursts. Eventually, it grew too much and Zane left one night unannounced. He joined the military recruitment for the US Army after Pearl Harbor in 1941 by lying about his and never looked back.
Ten year passed by the time he finally returned home a changed man.
Life during and after the war was hard, but coming home to return to civilian life would force him to confront many of the choices he made. Especially those that hurt his family, Nadia in particular.
Only time would tell if he would manage to reconnect or lose them entirely.