elias cross » d12 » complete

Stop stalling, make a name for yourself
Boy, you better put that pen to paper, charm your way out
If you talk you better walk you better back your sh-- up
With more than good hooks while you're all under the gun
It's time for us to take a chance

appearance - -

Some statues are made with thousands of years of care. With careful fingers and patient, tapping movements, with a thousand little pinpricks and a hundred scraping motions over the smoothest stone in the world. Some of sculptors take the highest amount of pride possible in their work, and make sure that every curve is natural and sloping, that every part melts together just right to create a product of only the highest standards. They aim not for excellence but for something above even that. They shoot for inhuman beauty, for a perfection beyond anything that mankind could ever be, so that if they fall short they still have a creature before them that's as radiant as a thousand burning stars.

But what happens when those days stretch into weeks, and those weeks into months? What happens when only a month before a deadline, something is only half-formed, half-human and half a simple block of marble? Then they have to rush, have to throw caution to the wind and create with hurried movements, with harsher hits of a hammer and a less steady hand as they fly over their work. They can't afford to perfect everything anymore, only to do the best that they can. Suddenly a god of all angles and hard-edges appears before them, towering and intimidating and handsome in a way that the sun glinting off a wicked blade is. They have not made David, but instead, Lucifer stands in his place.

A thin smile, as thin as the sharpest of razors adorns a face made of planes. High cheekbones and a jaw with a harsh corner at the end, as if the maker's hand slipped and too much stone fell away. Pointed, elfish ears, as if he's not quite of the world he's been placed in, a stranger to the rules of this Earth. He is nothing if not something to stare at, an oddity to the rest of the District and it's grey eyes and dark hair. He stands out like a sore thumb in a crowd of faceless men and women, something like a beacon. Or maybe a warning, a flashing sign telling all those who dare come close enough to read to not move any closer, lest they find his looks a specific kind of beautiful.

He has hair half shorn away from his head, buzzed down to nearly nothing on one side where it's dark. The only notice that he's anything like the rest of them. The other side is a shocking blonde, made from bleaches and chemicals and plants that should never get beyond the fence of District 12. A fact that he doesn't care about, not at all. As long as he gets to stand out, it doesn't matter what he has to go through to make sure it happens. His eyes are a piercing shade of blue, more wolf than man. Icy and startling, clear and watchful of all those around him. Fringed with dark lashes, their very own frame. He's proud of those eyes, of how they draw attention like a moth to a lamp. He's proud of anything that earns him stares.

Then there's his skin, a deathly shade of pale. In the right light, the kind that blanches and bleaches and turns even the most innocent of girls into gorgeous beings with clawed fingers and pointed teeth, he could turn into a ghost or a ghoul, something to board your doors against. A beast that will paint his name in blood on your window, begging for you to come out to play. Beckoning with one long, slim finger, graceful hands crafted onto slender wrists, curving into arms that seem too lanky, too long and thin to suggest a healthy childhood. There's something hollow about him, as if he can't quite shrug his roots, the way he'd starve and scrabble for scraps as a child. As if he never got the chance to grow. He's built like a marionette made of a spindly tree, a poor, tall thing that didn't have enough wood on it to let him fill out.

He's tried to make up for it, for the way he'll never grow to be broad-shouldered with muscles rippling under his skin. He's pierced his ears with thick needles, burnt at the tips. He's inked over his pallor, turned a matrix of lines on his shoulder black with natural dyes and a rag in his mouth, trying not to scream as he was stabbed over and over to get the curling thing permanently onto his skin. He'd never do it again, but he has that one reminder, that one constant to his ever changing form, thin to thinner and tense to charged with energy, a wild thing ready to explode from the grasps of his thumping mind. He's different. Not broken but not whole, a patchwork quilt of thrills found and adventures sought. Of screams and yells and whooping calls of glee as he makes a scene. A masterpiece made by a careless artist.

- - personality

Look at the alpha of a wolf pack, and tell me what he's afraid of. Being abandoned by his brethren, by those who should rely on him for everything? Or being taken over by one of his own, by one that he trusts and has tried his best to care for, to provide the best circumstances for them that he can? Or could it be fear of a stranger, of the things that he doesn't know and will never understand, of all the missing variables in the world that he'll never be able to uncode? No matter what it may be, even at the very top, the alpha is afraid of being cast away back to the bottom, to be left as nothing at the base of a heap of other nothings, to be knocked down from his position and left as a distant memory, if he's even that lucky.

Some people just don't realize that they could be as easily disposable. Some take their position and flaunt it, turn their noses up at all those who doubt their power, their influence. Even if, in the hierarchy of all those who have come before them and will come after them, they're barely a speck of dust. A necessity, yes, but one that can be exchanged at a moment's notice. Some are too arrogant to see the bigger picture, to notice that there are other things in the world than himself and those immediately around him. Elias is one of those people. Not particularly selfish, but unaware of his fragility, and if not unaware, uncaring. There is no question of whether he's interested with dreadful possibilities, he is. He just doesn't believe they apply to him. Not anymore.

Unreasonable. He won't listen to you, no matter what you say or how many times you say it. Maybe, if you're lucky or he is, it'll creep into his mind subconsciously, will burrow itself in the deepest corners and reveal an idea days later, telling him that it's his own. He'll claim it for himself and might listen, but only because he believes that he was never told to do better. To be better. He won't listen to warnings. He won't listen to anything that suggests there might be a way to knock him from what he's worked so hard to achieve. A poor boy with two sisters, someone who didn't mean anything to the District, to someone who fuelled the addictions of the weaklings that sold everything for just one more good day.

Reckless. Nothing applies to him, not even the rules of life and death. If he were to fall from a thousand feet and plummet to the sharpest of rocks, stretching up towards him and reaching for his throat, he would simply intimidate it into flinching, into recoiling back and turning into a pillow of grass that would catch him and guide him back to safety. For all of the times that he searches for a thrill, for the next big stunt, he never believes himself when his head tells him its dangerous. He doesn't receive the notice when he pops his shoulder back into place. Always searching for a way to put on a show and never wondering what the consequences are. If you want someone to live in the moment, then you're looking at your perfect candidate. A man unafraid of death.

Intelligent? No, maybe not, but certainly manipulative. He has a sweet tongue, a pretty mouth capable of forming prettier lies. He can change in demeanour at the drop of a pin, from a beast to a charming prince with a broken crown. He's nothing if not perfectly capable of getting out of a situation by any means necessary. He doesn't have boundaries or morals, doesn't have a regular human's messages telling him to stop, to back off, to have some pride or at least some self-worth as he offers up anything he can to get himself to safety. No, maybe not anything. The only thing off limits when it comes to his bargains are his own sisters, but he himself is fair game. If he cannot form the sentences that a person needs to hear or wants to be showered with, then so be it. He'll find other ways.

There is one thing that powers him above all others, one little tick that keeps him going no matter what. The want, no, the need to have the biggest reputation. The itch to hear his name whispered everywhere he goes, to have covert stares watch his every move, to calculate him the way you would a hurt animal, wanting to come close to assess and knowing it best to stay far away from something so unpredictable. He wants nothing more than to watch eyes flicker to him and twitch away just as quickly when he looks up with his dagger-smiles. To have his stories and his accomplishments - stupid behaviours to them - told for generations, to pass down long after everyone in a District covered in coal and crushed spirits are dead. He has no desire to be the spark of a rebellion, to make a difference in the world, to stand for anything good. To be anything but the ghost of a boy haunting children's minds. A hero. Or, more accurately, an antihero.

history - -

Once upon a time, there was a boy with two sisters. A boy with a brave tilt to his head and an alluring glint to his eyes, the expression of someone who would grow up to do big things. Maybe they were wrong, or maybe they were right and just didn't know what the extent of big was when you looked at a little kid guarding his sisters like a hawk. The only thing in the world that mattered to him, himself excluded. He was the oldest sibling and a brother at that. He recognized that they needed someone to keep them together when no one else cared.

They grew up in a land of outcasts, a rickety building for the discarded and unwanted children of District 12. Their parents were nobodies. They didn't have aunts or uncles, not that they knew of. If they did they didn't want them either, these children that were nothing but more mouths to feed when there already wasn't enough to go around. Instead they were thrown to the wolves, to the caretakers and tutors that inhabited the community home that wasn't so much home as it was prison, a bird cage for siblings who had so much more to do and see that couldn't be accomplished in the confines of a glamoured morgue. They were neither beaten down nor defeated, not terrified by the awful bedtime stories told or the curriculum that consisted only of warnings and threats, a list of things the Capitol could do and had done.

The prison gates never lifted for them, not in all the years they'd waited. But they did crack open, just enough to let a serpent slither in, masked as a man with a crooked grin and a glint to his eyes that suggested knowledge of the kind that would do actual good in the world, not just the stories told to keep children from dreaming or reaching or trying to break free. A man that slowly inched closer and closer to the perimeters of the property, spying or watching or searching for something, someone that would impress him. A little boy with messy hair and blue eyes would be that person. He was fifteen at the time, not finished becoming a man and not quite a kid, something in between and easily influenced, as long as someone told the right tales and tempted him with the right adventures. He was told of a way to freedom, to a life without adults that didn't care about him, a way to support himself and his sisters and never have to worry the way the rest of the District did about eating or freezing in their homes.

That was how he ventured into the drug scene, the illicit substances and the hushed voices, the flighty glances all around as he talked to men and women in the way that you do when you're afraid to be caught. That was when he first realized just how much he could accomplish with a bit of help, with the right connections and the right way of talking. He polished himself to be the man he needed to be, turned around his growth and turned from just a boy who didn't want to listen to a leader, to a runner that could drop all the right words and tangle his fingers around a crowds' throat, grasp them tight and tell all the right lies. Tell them stories of different lands with only one ticket, an escape from Panem and all of it's constrictions. He learned to be everything he needed to be to begin his plunge into the drug empire, a lowly runner, infecting the weaker citizens and dragging them down into the oblivion that pretty capsules and curling smoke could only bring.

As soon as he could, he pulled away from the orphanage, his sisters in tow. No one wondered how he did it. Everyone who ought to know did, and everyone else just didn't care enough. There were rumours, of course, and that was when he first realized how his blood pounded in his ears and how his lips spread into a grin when he heard tales follow him, when he became the antagonist of his very own story. A story filled with dark corners and shadowy parties, seen through a shield of smoke and shrouded in the heavy chemical sweetness of unnamed substances, decorated with the off-kilter giggles of girls who'd forgotten how to care and the dark snickers of boys who thought they knew everything just because they couldn't think straight enough to know that they had nothing at all, in their heads or in their hands. He moved them into a beaten down house, quilts keeping out drafts and falling to the ground whenever they had people over, chimneys for the poisoned air. It wasn't much, but it was enough. It was theirs and no one could touch them.

It wasn't enough to be something bigger than the rest of them. The mine workers who hated their jobs, who wished more than anything to just find a way out. The Peacekeepers under the orders of a tyrant who didn't care about their names. About them at all. The women with hands dried from all sorts of work. It wasn't enough to be more than enough. He started dabbling with the darkest of arts, started making scenes and living on the intoxication of screeches and hollers and yells behind him as he disappeared, yanked away by a more cautious sister and just barely slipping by the snapping jaws of trouble. He learned how to snap head after head as he ran past, every gaze watching him with a wary kind of awe. He wasn't so much of a trouble maker as he was a creator of disasters, and he took pride in his work. He took pride in everything that made him a mess himself. He didn't want to be another story that ended in happily ever after. He wanted to be the one that could end with his chin up and living shimmer to his eyes. He wants to be the worst thing to ever happen to District 12, and he's doing everything he can to get there.

plot by tristen, clover, and chime
template and graphics by chime
faceclaim is gryphon o'shea
lyrics by panic! at the disco