Ryan Bertrand
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Out of Character
WAS NOT INTENDED TO BE PLAYED MUCH. Take that, enablers.
A note on his name: Inspirations from the Kathy Reichs novel Deadly Décisions were taken for this character in the idea of his background being biker-turned-cop, and therefore his name is an amalgam of two of theirs, Andrew Ryan and Jean Bertrand. It gets confusing when rereading the books. But his name's an homage, and a seriously intense one because Rue is a major Reichs fangirl, to the point of wanting to be Kathy Reichs.
Nothing else about his background is really close to theirs. Inspiration, not adaptation.
In Character
Specifics
Full Name: Ryan Alexandre Bertrand (when not undercover)
Nickname(s): Rat to some.
Species: Human
Birthdate: April 1st, 1965
Birthplace: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Hometown: Montréal, Quebec / Camden, England
Currently Resides: 93 Gloucester Road, Kensington & Chelsea, Greater London
Family: Father, Michael. Sister(-in-law, but they ignore that), Emily. Daughter, Dorothea. Notably deceased brother Ethan, daughter Diana Stanwyck-Whitaker, mother Amanda Kent. Also related to everyone else cited as a member of the Kent family.
Sexuality: Gay
Relationship Status: Ezra Thacker.
Schooling: St-Georges School in Montreal.
Occupation: Undercover officer/detective, Metropolitan Police (Kensington via Belgravia)
Detailed Information
Physical Description
Well, he looks ... like his PB, really. Ryan Bertrand is five foot eleven, with shaggy hair and glasses, and white skin that tans easily. He wears a wedding ring when he's undercover as Corin Beauregard, and he almost never wears contact lenses. His hair's brown, his eyes are brown, and he's vaguely slender for his occupation, considering cops tend to be burly.
He has a wounded left ankle, and thus uses a cane frequently.
Bertrand has some tattoos: a flaming wheel with a wing (think the Detroit Red Wings logo) on his right upper arm right by the ball of his shoulder, a symbol on his left inner thigh, 1979 on the small of his back, 2003 on his inner right wrist, and 2002 on his left ankle. (The last three are the years of deaths: his mother, his brother, his daughter.)
Personal Information
Ryan Bertrand is an undercover cop. That really speaks for most of his personality, as he isn't usually steadily one person. He, Ryan Bertrand, is a sensible, logical man -- the sensible and logical one, period, balancing out the brutal Vaughn and impulsive Bianca.
But a lot of the time, Bertrand is actually Michael Fontes, the arrogant and pushy bodyguard of Guillaume Iche, and some of the other times he's Corin Beauregard, a nervous, stammering antisocial antiquities dealer.
Backstory
The first three and a half years of Ryan Bertrand's life are pretty absent from his memory, and considering the human mind can't actually form permanent memories that early in life, this is no surprise. The narrative 'we,' however, can inform you that almost nothing of consequence happened in this time except for the birth of his little brother Ethan in 1968.
As he grew up, Ryan began to come to the quick and early conclusion that Ethan was far more his responsibility than either father Michael's or mother Amanda's, and so it was no surprise to anyone that the brothers grew up close. They also became close to the children of the neighboring Barhydt and Reeve families, Emily and Thomas. Ryan and Thomas were best friends through St Georges, and Ethan and Emily were generally inseperable as well.
The tight binds began to break when Thomas, Ryan and a few of their other friends (namely Preston Carter, Lafayette de Montesquieu, Lucas Trent and Katriona Royce) fell into some rather unsavoury habits, and during their early teen struggles to attempt to become motorcycling delinquents they all fell under the wing of part-time responsible tune-up shop owner and part-time Rock Machine outlaw biker Milton "Tuna" Haynes. They were all allowed into the gang as prospects and all received better biking lessons, crimes to committ to earn both respect and money to purchase their very own bikes and earn their patches – and all new names. So from age thirteen on, Ryan Bertrand was to be known as Rat.
(His babysitting charge, another member of a ealthy neighboring family, named Zacharias Huntington, insisted that Rat wasn't a name, and was thus the only person besides family allowed to call him Ryan.)
Soon after they became fully patched youths, members of the Hells' Angels decided they didn't like the idea of Rock Machine's growing into the younger set, and opted to emphasize this point by nabbing a choice young member – that being Rat – and beating him near to death. They probably would have beaten him all the way to death if Tuna and the gang hadn't turned up and Preston, now PC, hadn't hit the Hells' Angels' ringleader over the head with a lead pipe before running away.
As if things couldn't get more dismal for the Bertrand family life after they learned of their elder son's dangerous gang involvement, Amanda fell ill. Her condition only worsened over the next two years. Michael grew distant from both of his sons, and Rat and Ethan just became more and more troublesome around town. In early 1979, Amanda Kent Bertrand fell into a two-week coma and never awakened. (Rat subsequently had '1979' tattooed on the small of his back shortly after.) Afraid of how to handle things next, Michael sent his sons to live with Amanda's sister, Samantha, in Camden, England.
Ethan and Rat – who, of course, still went by Rat and was accepted right into Rock Machine's UK chapter – had significant trouble truly adjusting to British life. They had trouble with the town and the school and even with each other, and it was no surprise that when they returned to Canada during summers they clung to the Bertrand house and to Thomas, now Twister, and Emily and to the others, hating when August came and they had to return to bleak London – until that one year. That year when Rat was 18 and Ethan 15, and they had decided to simply stay inCanada once Rat could obtain legal custody of his brother ... when everything changed in an instant. In a conflict between Rock Machine and the Hells' Angels, Twister was shot off pont Jacques-Cartier, and fell to his death in the icy waters before the very eyes of the entire rest of their gang. After promising Katriona, then Kid, who had become Twister's girl, that he'd always be there for her if she needed him, Rat took off back to Camden with Ethan.
The next few years were mostly harmless and fairly empty of significance, Rat and his local friends stirring up trouble with the local police, Ethan finishing school and spending a fortune talking to Emily Barhydt (who by then was his girlfriend) on the phone long distance. Yet by the time he was 21, Rat, needing funds to get himself and his brother through and feeling disheartened with just about everything, became a confidential informant for the Metropolitan Police – and truly a sincerely odd series of twists of fate and bold and unusual rescues and odd moves, by 23 and a half, Officer Ryan Bertrand was on his way to becoming a premiere undercover cop with the MP. Along with working on gang cases, he'd gained a frew secondary identities and began worming his way into other corrupt industries. He became the partner of Inspector Cary Vaughn-Blair, one of the subjects of the unusual rescues, by the time he was thirty. Meanwhile, Ethan had joined the RCAF.
Over the next ten years, various cases and associations made the passing of the days for Ryan rather difficult to chronicle. Thanks to his partner's wife – who became a very close friend and even very very briefly a lover – Bertrand managed to infiltrate the illegal antiquities trade (a favour to Interpol, in part, despite Egypt's distant Commonwealth ties) as Bianca's black sheep cousin Corin beauregard. Department affiliations got Bertrand a role as a Mafioso bodyguard, Michael Fontes. Several other identities formed when the need for them arose, one oft he most intrguing ones that of novelist Samuel Whitaker. As to be a novelist, Bertrand needed a novel, he fell in to working with law student and clearly brilliant writer Garet Drexler (introdcued to him by housemate, close friend and de facto family members Carlton and Antonia Lindale) and the two of them together pieced up and created a bestseller, Fuel From Water. Bertrand's life became even more difficult when he-as-Whitaker caught the romantic attentions of a Beauregard Foundation employee, Gwen Stanwyck. Against his better judgement the two started to date, and Stanwyck eventually learned the truth of who he really was. Not caring, or wanting to help with the cover's image or perhaps both, she proposed marriage – to Whitaker, not to Bertrand. Despite the fact that he wasn't really deeply physically attracted to her, nor had he been to anyone as far as he really knew, not only did they marry, but the two had a daughter, Diana Stanwyck-Whitaker. Sadly, happiness was yet again not to last as Diana began to show signs of the deadly condition of infantile Tay-Sachs disease as early as six months old, and succumbed to it at the age of two. The death of Diana shattered the already tenuous relationship between Ryan and Gwen, and an announcement was publically made that the already exceedingly private and personal novelist's marriage had ended. As Gwen had never actually married Ryan Bertrand, there was no need for an authentic divorce. Since the death of his daughter, Ryan has never used the name Whitaker and no one he has met after 2002 even became aware that he had a daughter or that he ever was Samuel Whitaker.
In 2003, Bertrand's second serious relationship with a woman began. His closeness to Antonia Lindale, who had always supported him through every traumatic event that hit them, every police disaster, every death and every sleepless evening spent due to night terrors, seemed to have manifested into what they both thought was love. Her support was especially useful when Ethan Bertrand was killed in Iraq in the middle of that year, and Emily gave birth to their son, named for Ethan and Ryan both, without his ever having known his father. However, two years later the relationship ended in a convoluted way, and Antonia too had come to the conclusion that Bianca, Gwen, and plenty of people with very good senses for that sort of thing had come to: that Ryan Bertrand was a homosexual so in the closet that he didn't even know it.
It didn't even really come up to him, that funny issue of sexuality, until shortly after he became friends with Ezra Thacker, who nearly almost hit him with Jasper Charlene, Ezra's Vespa. After this almost-but-not-quite accident, in which Bertrand ended up concussing himself on the curb trying to get out of the way (an uneccessary gesture, as Ezra wasn't that close to hitting him), Ezra took him to dinner at The Rusty Goat and then brought him, horribly hungover, back to his own flat to sleep. Ryan ended up, to Ezra's surprise, sleeping there all day and staying for dinner and a movie the next night.
Over the next few months, the two became fast and close friends, and Ryan also befriended the other keepers of the previously mentioned public house Nancy Armin, Sidney Remy and Nancy's wife Jack, who named him "Sandy" (without ever knowing that his middle name was, in fact, Alexandre). The trouble was that it wasn't Ryan Bertrand that Jack, Nancy and Sidney had come to like, and it wasn't Ryan Bertrand who Ezra had found himself with a hopeless crush on, either, but that of the antiquities dealer Corin Beauregard, who they all believed was a comfortably married man witha funny limp and an awkward stutter.
(Of course, they also all knew he was gay. Hence 'comfortable' as opposed to 'happily.')
This changed, slowly, when Ezra and Bertrand kept getting closer, and actually ended up sharing a quite passionate kiss on New Year's Eve shortly after Bertrand decided that Corin, someone who was never even meant to have friends let alone friends such as these, was going to separate from his wife. He wasn't quite sure why he made that decision, though he knows now it was because of the fact that somewhere inside he wanted Ezra to feel safe making moves on him. Not that he actually responded too favourably from the kiss Ezra gave him – it instantly became awkward, and Corin took off ... just to resurface on Ezra's birthday, finding the poor man flu-sick and taking him home and taking care of him.
After that, well, in a nutshell, Ezra's hopeless crush on Corin wasn't at all hopeless. Or a crush, anymore. It was never precisely spoken, but they were, in fact, quite clearly together. Funnily enough, this association lead to Ryan's being the one to get the wedding ring for dear friend Bianca without ever knowing that it was for her – Fabian Fitzwilliam went to Ezra on Derek Wernher's request for an Egyptian ring, and Ezra took the request straight to Corin.
Shortly after that, life and relationships imploded yet again for Bertrand. For the fact that he was out of the country for the death of Gabriel Thorne, it certainly had quite a hold on his life. Of course, it did for everyone else he worked with, too – but even more on his than he'd expected. Because Ezra was involved, and he didn't know quite how much – he had no way of knowing that Ezra had grown up with Derek, and with Scott Laurence and especially with Aingeal Duncan, who Bertrand worked with as the police correspondent to the county mortuary.
It was because of the fact that he worked with Aingeal and the mortuary that Ezra found out that Bertrand wasn't Corin at all, but Bertrand. The events of that day were, to say the least, bad. Very, um, bad. And just like that, it was all a mess again – and Bertrand didn't know where he stood with Ezra, besides feeling like a horrible liar.
When Ezra ended up the only witness in a shootout related to the good old Rock Machine-Bandidos gang of old, though – a gang war that looped back to them and the Thorne case yet again, because if Lydia Montag hadn't met Faolàn Kavanagh none of it would have happened – of course it was Bertrand's case. And so he took Ezra's statement. And then took him home. And then left him a really painfully sappy note whose wording was quite possibly influenced by hanging around Bianca, but was entirely sincere nonetheless.
It wasn't the note, though, that repaired their relationship. To say the least, it was quite possibly the kidnapping. Used as gang war bait by Zipper, the same fellow who'd caused Bertrand's limp due to shooting him in the ankle at a Newcastle crime scene some years back, Bertrand's dire state was announced over the dispatch radio, and having been spending the afternoon with Aingeal, Ezra heard it – and used his gift of finding (and quite possibly Corin Beauregard's wedding ring) to track Bertrand down.
Things got better after that, and they've been getting better – Derek and Bianca were married, Ezra moved in with Bertrand and Vaughn and the Lindale twins, and everything mostly settled into its usual chaotic mayhem that managed to still be relaxed after all. Things stayed in their regular state of chaotic mayhem, that is, until Antonia's best chum from high school, Elaine Brandt, and her sister, Mel Davenport, came to stay at number ninety-three.
That was when through a cruel twist of fate or three, Bertrand found out that Mel's Very Best Internet Friend, Téa Jordan, was not only the presumptive daughter of his sister's romantic interest back in Montreal, but that said romantic interest was Elaine and Mel's cousin and that Téa's biological father was none other than Ryan Bertrand himself.
He knew he'd slept with Elsa Ivanova years ago for purposes that may have related to conception – there was a request involved, after all – but what else he hadn't known was that Elsa was one of Aingeal's two best friends in school back in Blackburn (the other one being a woman now going by Allie Rashid) and that Ivan had lived in Blackburn, too.
Bertrand now knows that he really is not very fond of this Blackburn place and its coincidences at all.
He also now knows he has another daughter – a living, healthy, and fun-to-be-with daughter who was practically living at number ninety-three while Bertrand and Mel try to keep Ezra from killing himself over a sudden unprecedented load of work.
The unprecedented load of work, on the other hand, turned into a crime, and the death of Stewart Pierson ended up calling in Interpol, who in fact moved into the Yard, as an antiques expo provided them with far more work than they expected. One of these agents, Kita MacGruder and Spencer Carlin, were old associates of Bertrand's as well as his brother's from flight school. That made it awkward, and it only got more awkward when the lot of them went off to America in MacGruder's father's ungodly car to follow after Hadrian Fox, a suspect in the case.
While chasing, they - along with Ezra, the Lindale twins, JD Monet and Lindsey O'Gevany - realized they'd run onto the trail of Timothy Nolan, the person they'd been tracking the last time most of this group was together (in the very same ungodly car).
They didn't actually manage to catch Nolan. Not yet. But they learned a few interesting things, including an association with Fox that made them all rather ill.
Returning to London, Ryan and Mel settled in to stick around for a while - but he didn't stick around very long at all, as Sidney Remy mentioned to him that his young cousin, Cameron, was coming to stay with her family in Paris for a birthday, and wouldn't he like to come along? Shrugging, Ryan went, and spent some time with the Rémi family, returning only a day or so before Ezra and Friends headed off to Blackburn for a holiday.
A lot of time passed and a lot of things happened since Rue last actually updated this. He and Ezra got engaged on his 42nd birthday, and as of summer 2008 still haven't married – their September 2007 planned wedding was swallowed up by the Anglican Church of Canada's changing its stance on gay marriage. Things have been largely settled since despite it. Ryan has custody of Téa when she's not attending college at New York University and living with the Brandt-Davenport clan in Greenwich Village. (Short holidays she spends in Montréal. Sometimes they all spend long ones there.)
When Vaughn started dating Isabella Fitzwilliam, Ryan ended up involved in more business of the supernatural. He'd always known there was something a little odd about Claire, though he never knew as much as Bianca did – until he found out when Tobias Dixon's article came out and he was the one to help deliver the news to Iz (who could be found in Vaughn's hospital room after Vaughn was shot at a bank holdup on his birthday). Ryan got to see wings – and it was a good thing he knew, too, because he and Kita were the ones to help out when Alice and Fabian were taken and abused by Iri Burton. Burton made Ryan's fifth kill on the job, for all that Alice was the one to deliver the final blow. He was still there.
Ryan came to the legal aid of the Fitzwilliams again shortly later – this time, taking Ezra and Téa with him to Surrey while he, Vaughn, Kita, Claire, Robert Capio, his own cousin Evangeline, Dawn Sullivan, Tanner James, Zachary Owen and a hostage witness went to free Isabella and Alice from the captivity of an insane vampire bent on "researching" Isabella and trying to find out the secrets to immortality. (That is a wonderful sentence.) Leroy Emerson, the examiner in question, became the sixth kill on the job, for all that Vaughn and Robert were the most direct contributors.
External Links
Bertrand's LJ (unused)
