<em>Neither Pleasure without Pain, nor Pain without Pleasure...</em><br/><div class="floatright">(http://26.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lk75b54L461qgeq3co1_500.png)</div><br/><br/><br/><div align="center">                              <span class="bbc_u"><em> "I Yield"</em></span></div><br/><br/><br/><strong>Name</strong>: Yves de la Courcel nee Valerian<br/><strong>Age</strong>: 44<br/><strong>Gender</strong>: Male<br/><strong>Sexuality</strong>: Bisexual, Equal Opportunity Offender<br/><br/><br/><strong>Occupation</strong>: Servant of Naamah<br/><strong>Rank</strong>: Valerian Dowayne (I totally went there!)<br/><br/><br/><br/><strong>Personality</strong>: Unyielding Thrillseeker.  Roguish, somewhat jaded -- okay, quite a bit jaded -- and very self-possessed. Confidence: he has it in spades, though some have been heard calling it arrogance -- nevermind that most of those 'some' are counted among the very small number of patrons he is occasionally said to entertain still.<br/><br/>Valerian; is he, really? It is a question that hasn't gone unasked since the time he caught the eye of his first Dowayne, and all through his service in a life dedicated to the House. It is also one that's more likely to be answered with a knowing smirk or in the privacy of an assignation than word of mouth. It is true that his patrons are known to stay mum as to their encounters -- how could it not be, if it is in the contract, right? Yves doesn't exactly fit the stereotype, but then no one such would be able to fill in the Dowayne's administrative duties as well as he does. Once billed as a 'challenge' to the patrons, he has very much remained so; if there ever was any subservience instilled into him, it must be long buried beneath layers upon layers of experience and scars.  He usually comes off as self-contained but roguish, as perfectly able to wield his tongue with the surgical precision of a flechette as he is to withstand its Kiss. As much as some would accuse him of being more Mandrake than Valerian, there is a marked difference between Yves and those of the thorny rod: He doesn't particularly go out of his way to have people yield to him.<br/><br/><strong>Appearance</strong>: D'Angeline to the core and a scion of Elua to boot, he was once upon a time: adorably cute. That youth morphed into a handsome young man throughout the length of his Service, and forward even into the stalwart gentleman he happens to be today. He does retain the charm that made him sought after by a particular niche of patrons:  sun-kissed hair, neither long enough to touch his shoulders nor short enough that cannot be used against him; long eyelashes over taunting eyes of sea-gray; a once-broken nose that is both gift and reminder of just how little use his signale has ever seen. He is tall and broad-shouldered, eminently masculine in physique and with all the trappings of one who has endured, and will even more so.<br/><br/><strong>(Not So)Brief History</strong>: It was a joke, really -- meant to be one, anyway. They only had to slip some of those sweets to the coddled boy, and dare him to eat them longer than they could; from there to laughing their asses off it was only a matter of time. Well, the joke was on them, really: the young man not only ate them under the table but also demanded they get him /more./ Natch, those spiced candies were not all that easy to get; eventually the pair of rascals got caught sneaking out with them, and nobody really believed their tale about whom they were taking them for. Some time passed, but soon enough Muriel Gascogne, then the Valerian Dowayne, visited the palace again -- only to be targeted by the erstwhile Yves in his dogged search for Spiced Candy: He hadn't forgotten. Muriel watched him go with his treasure already half eaten, and from there on she kept an eye on the little noble. A few eyes, as it were, because she was a busy woman and he ended up being rather difficult to follow after a while: the boy had a rare knack for getting himself into all kinds of trouble. By the time he was seven, it was obvious that his daredevil behaviour might prevent him from ever reaching the age of eight; the Dowayne met with his parents then. After two more years of denying the truth -- and quite a few more close calls -- they finally admitted that something had to be done, and Yves Eoganan de la Courcel became the newest fosterling of House Valerian.<br/><br/>The third child born of a second child in any noble line has few possibilities in sight anyway, right? There is no land to inherit or titles to wrestle for -- or less of those anyway, for those of the Courcel lineage. On the other hand, the responsibilities are much less as well; while expected, it was not strictly required of Yves to carry the name any further and, whereas a foreign marriage might once have been in the charts, Service was always a good option until it ended and such things could be properly arranged.<br/><br/>Living in the night court is very different from growing up in the d'Angeline court itself, really, but Yves took to it like fish to water. There were always too many novices around for him to jump into the Aviline (again) or stick his hand into the fireplace -- well, in fact he did that once, but nobody tried to stop him and he got sweets instead of a talking to; it wasn't half as fun and he still had to sweep the floors, blisters or not. The other novices weren't particularly impressed by his name, either, but as the months went by they did start flocking to him for other reasons. Everyone knew he would eventually go to Mandrake by then, or Bryony perhaps, because assessing risks and results was soon proven to be one of his greatest strengths. He did a tour of the houses, in fact, when it was time, and those who remember will say he was rather wanted by those two and more. Dahlia had a stake on it, of course, by din of birth alone, but he wouldn't go to it. The Mandrake Dowayne agreed that he was a good anvil against which to hammer her own adepts' self-control, but it was as obvious to her as to Muriel then that that wasn't exactly what the youth was after: valerian he remained.<br/><br/>He was most definitely no anguisette either. Pain shook him like it did everyone else, even if Yves proved himself singularly capable of withstanding it -- stubborn as a mule, many of his teachers concurred. By the time most valerians his age were thoroughly conditioned to turn pain into pleasure, there were no obvious signs that he ever would. For him it was a sport instead -- how much, how far, and just how long; who would endure the most. His debut was brokered quietly in the end, by the Dowayne and her Second, and there was no talk about it at all. In fact, the young man virtually disappeared from sight for several weeks after that night and didn't get his back actually limned until two months later. He was then, they have said, eerily at peace for the first time in his life.<br/><br/>His patronage grew very slowly as it were, but the prices paid more than made up the time spent between assignations. Gifts started to pile soon in his coffers, and yet he didn't bring them to the marquist as most would have -- just a handful of them would have had him free of the house's purview in no time at all. Yves kept the lines on his back growing slowly instead, no more than a leaf or petal at a time, and the times spread out as far as his patrons' visits. He continued to learn avidly in the meanwhile, using some of his coin to hire the tutors he wanted on the subjects he cared to touch rather than the extensive syllabus from before, never asking for or accepting his family's say in the matter -- in fact, it was as if they had forgotten about him, and him about them. There were several foreigners to hone his language skills; more than a few warriors; the occasional visit to another house; and the cultivated long friendships with a few cassiline brothers. When Muriel finally retired, Etienne took her place and, without fanfare at all, Yves took Etienne's own as second -- he was almost thirty years old, and wasn't going anywhere else.<br/><br/>It was a little more than ten years later that Etienne retired as well, leaving him to take over the direction of the house. Nothing much has changed, really, since it was rather clear that he had been calling the shots for a very long time already, but now he has become quite a bit more visible. Visible enough that his birth name has been remembered again. When the eventual letter arrived about arranging a match with an Aragonian duchess, Yves respectfully declined -- citing his duty to the companions was best served where he was instead -- and pointed out exactly why his third cousin was a much better choice for it. While he has stayed out of the political games in the court, this and other similar answers prove that he has never /quite/ been ignorant of any of them. Courtesans may keep their patrons' secrets close to heart, but they can never keep much from their Dowayne. These days, he divides his time evenly between the duties to his House and the duties to himself, allowing his second to shoulder much of the administrative weight while he makes a point of spending time with his adepts: ensuring he knows each of their strengths and weaknesses so that he can pair them just right to their prospective patrons, and at court: ensuring he knows exactly the same about the d'Angeline nobility. At least that's his story, and he is sticking to it.<br/>