Matas
Relationships
History
Faruq wants to like Matas, especially since Matas has a good deal of interest in literature, but Matas' impatient, prickly, and rather headstrong personality mean he often ends up irritated with him. They still get along well enough, but mostly within the context of the larger group. They will swap and show each other any interesting literature they manage to get their hands on, but regularly disagree during discussions about it. Faruq thinks this is mostly still because of Matas' lack of experience and resulting perspective and feels confident that with time, Matas will start to "get it". He also really hopes Matas will calm down a bit in general as he grows older.
History
Out of any of the immortals, Matas gets along best with Geneviève. They have a very similar, sharp-tongued sense of humor. Geneviève is very fond of Matas, she likes his rebellious, passionate nature. Neither does she mind his impatience and angst, but simply views them as the other side of the coin and can often bring him back to his senses by turning it into a joke. She also figures that time will bring him a little more into balance. Geneviève enjoys the back-and-forth, the playful sniping at one another with Matas. They can keep it going to a point where it's exhausting for the others around them, who either leave as quickly as possible or tell them to knock it off. They generally have fun playing the younger generation to the older Fabia, Artur and Faruq. Matas has a natural sharpness of mind and taste for subverting authority that Geneviève appreciates, and which can be very useful although sometimes inconvenient when directed at the other immortals. Matas in turn is impressed by Geneviève's talent for deception and dissemination, how she can be either quiet and subservient, diginified and diplomatic or verbally tear someone to pieces depending on what she needs.
History
Matas practically hero-worships Artur in his admiration for him. Since Matas thinks himself too cool for this and has a natural instinct to rebel against those older than him, this doesn't always get expressed in a positive manner. Artur sees rather too much of his younger self in Matas and is reluctant to encourage those traits in him. Since Artur himself learned much of how to curb his recklessness, short temper and impatience from Fabia and she actually has a soft spot for Matas, Artur tries to nudge him in her direction. As Matas is both impressed and somewhat intimidated by Fabia he doesn't mind spending time with her, but he's also completely oblivious about Artur's efforts in this direction since Matas is occasionally so fixated on trying to get extra attention from Artur. Despite this, Artur does like Matas a great deal and Matas' antics, especially with Geneviève, make him laugh. To him, Matas' relatively young age and eternal 19-year-old body make him just a boy. So while Artur is careful to try to curb rather than encourage Matas' impulses, he sympathises with Matas' eager and passionate personality.
History
Although Matas looks up most to Artur, Fabia has an enormous soft spot for Matas. She finds his passionate, impatient nature endearing - he is after all similar to young Artur, albeit with more diverse interests and a very different cultural perspective. Matas does actually admire Fabia and is glad when he has her attention, but her position as leader of the group means he has natural angsty and occasionally rebellious reactions against her. He does always fall in line though when it's important or the priority is immediate. To Fabia, Matas is really one of her protégés and since both Artur and she think Matas is best off learning from her, they encourage him to seek his lessons from Fabia. Matas continues to be half oblivious to this as he trots around after Artur. Partly this is because although he finds Fabia impressive and acknowledges her as the leader, he hasn't quite shed the influence of his patriarchal upbringing and most societies they spend time in confirm this subconscious prejudice. Consequently when viewed from the outside Matas and Fabia have a somewhat rocky, contentious relationship. It's not one of frequent spats but rather recurring periods of several weeks where Matas tends to argue every unimportant decision, makes reckless decisions that often get him into scrapes, and generally avoiding Fabia's company for that of Artur and Genevieve's. Fabia doesn't exactly have an endless patience with this although she will tirelessly rescue him from his reckless escapades time and again. As a result, Matas does trust her enormously which causes the foundation of their relationship to be much better than you might expect based on some of their interactions.
History
Matas is jealous of Katherine, arriving after only spending about 20 years as the youngest and hence getting a lot of attention. He hasn't really managed to sort out a lot of stuff yet, like his relationship with Fabia considering his general relationship with authority, and how he is still very wary and suspicious. That wariness and suspicion don't help in how he views Katherine and she in return is also naturally wary. They tend to interact around each other, via others, rather than directly. This is mostly because they are both afraid they might cause a rift between themselves, but also don't trust the other person to be compatible with themselves and will inevitably dislike each other. Katherine is still too confused and busy trying to absorb everything to think much of it at the moment or consider how this should be handled in the future. Matas thinks, considering how well all the older ones get on, this will probably just resolve itself in the future. Currently he doesn't feel ready to forgive Katherine for appearing so early or to relinquish his jealousy.
History
Matas was initially designated as Helena's primary mentor and caretaker, since he speaks a fair amount of Polish and was the closest in cultural understanding. Artur and Fabia also speak Polish reasonably well, but Artur obviously wasn't an option when they first found Helena. Fabia already had her hands full mentoring both Matas and Katherine and was really thrown for a loop and needed to consider how they were going to handle the addition of an 8-year-old to the group. Since Matas had already lost his position as youngest more than a year ago and Helena was a literal child in need of help, he didn't feel threatened by her as he did by Katherine. Therefore, he was perfectly alright with showing Helena around for the first two months, before she adopted Artur (something Matas wholly sympathised with). Helena quite likes Matas, since he was both kind to her and pretty much just let her do whatever she wanted as long as it didn't put anyone at risk - and the list of things that were considered risky had suddenly become much smaller, compared to life before.
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