Original Writeup
Possibly the most dominant component of Teodoro's personality is, arguably, an impermanent and fairly recent one: he hates himself. He'd probably hate himself less if he didn't deserve it, but such as it were, he was the direct cause of an innocent girl's death and completely alienated her then-boyfriend, his estranged younger brother. Giving the moment the proper recognition, his life changed age seventeen. He's become something of a circular peg hammered into a square notch, defaulting to reverse the kind of person he had been before, to limited avail.
As ever, he is characterized by great physical courage, intellectual restlessness, and admiration for his brother. For the past eight years, however, these traits have been counter-balanced by an effortful avoidance of any antisocial behavior, pathological insistence on seeing discrete tasks through to the end, and being at a complete loss about what to do with his family— though he remains extremely protective of all of them and fond of his Sicilian friends too. In the end, he's well-aware that it should be him out there, wandering the world, getting through knife fights and ignoring books in favor of dangerous passions, but it isn't. He would do, give up, allow anything Romero asked.
Floating through odd jobs and between weird feats, his tendency to avoid major commitments or academic accomplishments conceals a crippling sense of responsibility. Though deeply unhappy, he's a far more practical soul than romantic. He lacks direction but keeps an immovably strong sense of self, easygoing yet confident, as eccentric as he is comfortably ordinary. His sense of vengeance is derivative of a powderkeg temper at the end of a long fuse rather than any abstraction of honor. His sense of humor, as often facetious as it is abrasive, gives him balance.
Despite not really liking kids, he takes to teaching extremely well. This, as with his association with PARIAH and the amount of time he's invested in work and study, can readily be interpreted as paying penance. He's extremely Catholic, which probably accounts in part for his heavily polarized sense of sin and virtue as well as his capacity for guilt. His faith comforts him.
Post Timeskip
Many years later, then many years back again, then many years added together and halved for an imprecise mean, and Teodoro still dislikes himself. It's no longer the self-immolating regret that used to fuel his freedom-fighting and his nightmares, however. These days, he has a much more balanced and reasonable-sounding internal rhetoric about all that. He isn't evil and toxically selfish. He's merely painfully average and fallibly human, with a much severer amplitude for his mistakes when he makes them than most people, very sad, and done pretending he has anything even remotely approaching a good solution for any real problems.
It's very annoying, to those of us who would like him to take a stance.
In other ways, though, Teo is still very much how he was, and how he always has been. Psychologically active, inquisitive, susceptible to flights of passion, talkative— in a way that can often be prying and uncomfortably intimate. Still problematically, not nearly objective enough when it comes to the concrete flaws in his closer friends, endlessly forgiving in the face of remorse. He's incapable of admitting to any kind of pain, outside of a joke about injuries or a plea for reconciliation. He has a big heart, sometimes at odds with his dependency on adrenaline highs. He likes guns and poetry. He's a little bit vain and equally self-deprecating, stubborn like a donkey rather than the protagonist of a YA novel with convenient consequences.
