Eighteen.
District Five.
Male.

Luke Marling is a fine specimen of a young man, and he won't hesitate to share this fact with anybody who cares to listen. Standing at a somewhat lackluster height of five feet, six inches, he acknowledges that he may not be the textbook definition of tall, dark, and handsome, although he likes to think that two out of three isn't bad by any stretch of the imagination. He isn't one of those skinny twig-boys, weighing in at a rather substantial 160 pounds, but Luke will always throw into a conversation that it's all muscle, thank you very much.

His build is typical of any District Five boy who was raised on a farm as he was, what might have been a considerably smaller form made rather stocky from years of hauling around heavy loads and working with animals. Luke has disproportionally broad shoulders, making his torso appear like an inverted triangle as his frame tapers into a waist that is smaller than you would expect, hinting at the fact that he might actually have a slight figure if he didn't work so hard to make his body appear to be more bulky.

Even though he is what would be considered diminutive for a male of his age, Luke has long legs that make up most of his height, ending in very large feet that make finding shoes a near-impossible chore. His hands are large as well, bearing the burden of butter-fingered clumsiness that only disappears when he holds a guitar or touches a keyboard. In these instances, his work-roughened fingers, nails chewed to ragged stubs by force of habit and old scars and calluses from his days on the farm stubbornly refusing to leave, tend to have a distinct air of grace to them, a refined delicacy that he loses altogether the second the music stops, going promptly back to tripping over his own feet and inevitably dropping anything expensive and breakable that someone might be stupid enough to let him handle. His arms are more proportionate than his legs, comparatively stubby to his usually lanky-limbed peers but fitting right in with his compact (call him short and he'll put your lights out, punk) stature, still toned and muscular even though he hasn't baled hay or hauled feed bags around in almost four years.

But as he'll gladly tell you, none of that pointless drivel matters when it comes to his self-adulated rugged handsomeness. It's all in the face, baby. And the hair. Don't ever forget about the hair. The aforementioned locks are thick and dark brown in color, falling in a slightly wavy pattern that tends to get a little shaggy at times. Luke never lets his hair get overly-long, though, always making sure he gets a haircut before the dark strands grow much beyond the bottom of his ears. He was at least raised to be a clean-cut, upstanding young gentleman, and sometimes old habits die hard. He does the best he can to take care of himself, but limited income doesn't exactly leave allowance for things like deep conditioner, and his hair has been known to get very dry and brittle at times (hey, it's what happens when you have all kinds of nasty things in your bloodstream), although its usual state is shiny and reasonably soft. Luke usually does something with his hair rather than just let it hang there, making an effort to comb it into some semblance of order, but there are days (hangovers, the odd morning after a really bad trip, aftermaths of binges on ridiculous amounts of illegal substance) when effort just seems so blasé, and he can be seen shuffling about the slums of the Fifth District with hair disheveled and clothes rumpled. But hey, dollface, everyone has bad days, and he looks damn good ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time. Nothing to sneeze at, if you ask him.

Luke Marling is not a pretty boy.

He's a goddamned stud, and he'll thank you not to comment on the length and fullness of the dark lashes rimming wide, molten-chocolate eyes that have gotten more than a few females out of their clothes in record time. Other than the eyelashes and rather full cupid-bow lips, he's every inch a macho type of guy when it comes to facial features. Luke's face is a bit long and square-shaped, a chiseled jawline and defined chin framing his mouth, which is often either spouting insults or honey-coated compliments (it depends if you're male or female), smirks or charismatic grins parting his lips to reveal teeth that are straight although slightly yellowed. His nose is a bit large, the bridge strong and firm-looking as it tapers down to be accented by high, elegant cheekbones (okay, so maybe he's a little effeminate. Doesn't mean he can't still kick your ass). Defined, dark brows make an appearance over his eyes, resting on a rather wide forehead that is more often than not hidden behind a shock of hair.

Clothes are an important part of looking good, but Luke doesn't really have the financial means to purchase designer duds (although a few very nice pieces have gone missing from local shops and mysteriously reappeared in his closet. He blames it on the gremlins. Sneaky little bastards). The standard fare is usually classy-looking things with a quirky spin, button-ups with the sleeves rolled to the elbow and vests or nice blazers over old tee shirts paired with dark jeans and high tops. He's been known to wear glasses even though he's had perfect vision his whole life (babes dig guys in glasses, it's a proven fact), although he's never been known to turn down worn out tee shirts and ratty jeans when he's just hanging with the guys. But when it comes to impressing people, Luke likes to put his best foot forward, and tends to dress the part. Just because he makes an effort to look his best doesn't mean he's got self-confidence issues. Hell no. He's sex on legs and he knows it.

And so do you. Admit it.

Okay, okay, so maybe he doesn't have the most winning personality on the face of the planet. But everyone has their flaws, and it's damn hard being this awesome. Luke will swear up and down that he doesn't have a problem with arrogance. No, no, no, friend, he doesn't have arrogance, he has swagger. There's a distinct difference. Arrogance is what you have when you think you're hot stuff but can't really back it up. Swagger is what you have when you're Luke Marling, self-proclaimed king of the shadier side of District Five. It's a burdensome crown, but someone has to wear it.

He's a badass. No arguments. No comments. He. Is. A. Badass. From a young age, Luke's always had a desire to stand up above everyone else and shout the world is mine and you'll never take it from me, to be seen and noticed and respected in a way that he never experienced in his younger years, always left behind in favor of bigger and better things. No more. Today he'll take on anything that comes at him, accept any challenge, climb any mountain, win any bar fight, because dammit, he will prove himself (go ahead, call it a little guy complex. You'll wake up next Tuesday with half your teeth and your wallet missing).

And that's about the extent of what people see when they look at him. An overconfident asshole with a penchant for asserting his rule over the little patch of the slums that he can call his own, strutting through life with his head held high and a smirk on his face. People never really seem to examine Luke's darker qualities, but maybe thet's because they'd be scared out of their wits if they really tried to catch a glimpse of what's really going on inside his head. Hell, he scares himself sometimes.

Anger. Some would say that it's all the brain-cell-melting drug cocktails making him emotionally unstable, but Luke knows better. It's been there longer than the drugs; it's the whole reason he started dabbling into the underworld in the first place. Anger at his parents, his life, and more and more often as of late, himself. He's not to be confused with some whiny teenager drowning in self-loathing for no apparent reason, not in the slightest. Luke is fully aware of what he's done, and not a day goes by where he doesn't want to kick himself in the teeth for it.

He wasn't always a selfish bastard.

And really, at his core, he knows that's exactly what he is now. He used to be a pretty good guy, chronic overconfidence and penchant for mischief aside. He was just like any other farm kid: doting big brother, loved his sisters more than the world, took them out for ice cream on Saturdays even though it burned up every cent of his meager allowance to do it. Ink and Imi were his life, and for a while, he'd been content with that. But morphling changes your alliances rather quickly.

Oh, it's gotten into more than morphling over the past few years. Acid, heroin, nameless pills that send you reeling through worlds of vibrant color until you wake up the next morning with the headache to end all headaches, Luke's tried them all at one point or another. But at first it was just the morphling. Just those sweet little pills that made him a little more mellow, more complacent, made life a bit easier to manage. But that was before the addiction set in, before his parents found out, before screaming and fighting and terrible withdrawal symptoms that finally made him realize that he cared more about those little white pills than he did for anything else. And that realization is what really made him wake up to the fact that he was about as low as you could get.

No one sees the anger, the regret, that deep-seated desperation for life to be easy again. But they hear it. The shady clientele of that little hole-in-the-wall bar that Old Man Hendrickson runs down on East Twelfth street hear it every single night when the Marling kid picks up a guitar or sits behind a piano, opens his mouth, and makes magic. Or at least that's what they call it. For Luke, singing's it's just another outlet, one that he happens to get paid for. And the money's definitely a good thing, seeing as it's the only thing besides dealing all varieties of euphoria-inducing poisons that funds his multiple... vices (some people would call his lifestyle criminal but he prefers to think of it as creative survivalism).

God knows he needs an outlet. Over the years he's gotten better with facing the low-down scum that he's turned into (you'd never know that there are some mornings when he looks in the mirror and wonders how he lives with himself), but there's just something about it that he can't escape no matter how many pills he knocks back or how many songs he writes about the injustice of it all. There's just always something that feeds that burning anger, kindles it until it swells into something he could never hope to control, a big, snarling monster of self-deprecation that forms the stuff of nightmares.

And he knows one day it will consume him.

Luke doesn't like living in the past.

He'll say it with a defiant smirk, a nonchalant wave of the hand. The past is dead. The future's uncertain. All we have is now. But he knows it's not true. The past is everything, everything that haunts him with how it was and how it could have been if he hadn't made stupid decisions and wrecked any possibility he might have had for a good life. The past makes him think about how it might have been if he'd never left, and it hurts.

When he thinks back on it, everything wasn't as bad as he thought it was. Really, Luke had it all in his childhood. Reasonably wealthy family, a huge farm to play on, all the guitar and piano lessons he could ask for, and two adorable twin sisters four years his junior that he would have gone to the ends of the earth and back for. Inkling and Imriahl Marling were in every sense the apples of their big brother's eye, all wide-eyed innocence and easy smiles that would have made him walk barefoot over hot coals if he thought it would make them happy. It's Ink and Imi that he thinks of when he realizes exactly what he's done, realizes everyone he's hurt, all for the sake of his own weak, selfish motivations. And Luke hates it, picturing their faces, wondering how they've managed growing up without him.

He has one picture to remind him of how it was. That's all. One framed photo thrown into a hastily-packed duffel bag as an afterthought before he slung in and his guitar over his shoulder and bolted off into the night all those years ago. It sits in a dresser drawer now, thrown under old clothes and collecting dust (because looking at it causes all kinds of heartache, and blubbering like a toddler is something his image can't afford). The family portrait is old, dating back before everything happened, back when the Marlings were a functional family filled with nothing but love for each other. His mother and father are there, grinning widely at the camera, arms wrapped around their children. There in the front is ten-year-old Luke, childhood skinniness beginning to fill out into fledgeling musculature, and right beside him are the six-year-old twins, beaming in stereo under the adoring gazes of their parents and brother. In the few times he's glanced at the picture over the years, Luke always finds it surreal to think that there was a time when everything wasn't tense and convoluted and messed up, a time when there was no screaming under the roof of the Marling house, only laughter.

It had all been his fault. He realizes that now, looking back on the whole ordeal from an older and (not much) wiser perspective. It had started when he was thirteen, his mother wringing her hands in concern and trying in vain to tell him that he was hanging around the wrong people. And he had been. His friends in middle school were the big, tough guys that liked to skip class to go hunker down behind dumpsters and sneak a cigarette or two, coughing and sputtering with each puff but stubbornly forcing their bodies to accommodate the intrusion because it was cool, dammit, and being cool was important above everything else. But as they matured, it moved from cigarrettes and the occasional swig of beer that someone snuck out of their dad's stash to things that were distinctly more illegal and therefore made them badasses of the highest caliber. Dope. Vodka. Morphling.

Luke still gets that cloyingly sweet taste in his mouth whenever he even thinks the word, remembering the blissed-out first two weeks or so when one of "the wrong people" had brought the bottle of pills with him to a party, shaking them tantalizingly with a wicked grin on his face. C'mon, Marling, don't be a wuss. This stuff's great. You'll feel better than you've ever felt in your whole life. He hadn't been wrong. Those little pills were absolute miniature miracles, turning the world into a brilliant place where everything was okay and nothing ever went wrong. At least, nothing went wrong until the addiction started rearing its ugly head.

He went from merely wanting the pills to needing them, body lapsing into full revolt as his tolerance built up and the irregular supply from his sole connection to the stuff, that one friend from that one party, dried up. Left with no choice, Luke began a considerably bad chain of actions, including but not limited to back-alley deals in the heart of the District's slums to get increasing dosages of morphling and getting hooked on one or two other things in the process. He was fourteen years old.

His parents suspected, of course, taking a very loud-voiced note of how his grades had plummeted and how he had stopped taking his sisters out for ice cream on Saturdays (every spare penny went into his habits, there was just no time for Ink and Imi anymore). The fights began, the screaming matches, the demands to know what's going on, son, we don't even know you anymore! He just swallowed more pills and drifted further into a haze of drug-induced apathy, simply patting the twins on the head with a cloudy reassurance and promising them that everything would be all right when they voiced their naive concerns.

He was fifteen when his mother finally found his stash. Everything absolutely exploded from there, screaming the like of which he'd never hear in his life, his mother collapsing into tears, his father looking for a moment like he might actually hit him. Of course, everything was confiscated, the morphling and other things (he still doesn't understand why they were stupid enough to think they'd starve it out of him cold turkey). The withdrawal nearly killed him, sending him into fevered hallucinations and shaking that never stopped, and all the while he was being watched by the unsympathetic eyes of his parents, who remained convinced it was all an act. At least they kept the twins away from him for all of it, claiming he was sick. Thank God, he wouldn't have been able to live with himself at all if they'd seen him like that.

Eventually it all became too much. The withdrawal, the disappointed glares, feeling like a prisoner in his own home. So one night, Luke made the stupidest mistake of his life. Packing up his guitar and a bag full of belongings, he left, but not before leaving the twins the two identical silver bracelets that he'd stolen gotten them for their birthday, which was in a few weeks. After that, he climbed out his bedroom window and never looked back. After all, they were all better off without him.

The first year or so was rough. He lived on the streets, playing guitar and singing on corners for money that he promptly went and blew on his growing number of addictions (he weaned himself off the morphling, though. He'd never touch that stuff again), curling up in alleyways at night with sheets of old newspapers for blankets. But with each passing day the slums felt more like home than that suffocating house ever had, and the streets began to embrace him, the people began to love him, he began to carve himself out a new life, albeit one that was on the wrong side of the law.

Dealing was something that Luke found himself to be disturbingly good at. He had the charisma, he had the discretion, and he quickly built up a reputation for only selling good stuff, nothing cheap or cut with mysterious substances, although he would never sell morphling, something his clients found to be odd but ultimately accepted. With enough money to feed his habits and a little on the side, he gradually saved up enough to make the first payment on an absolutely awful apartment right in the dead center of District Five's ghetto. The place leaked when it rained and had a serious rat problem, but it was a roof over his head and there was even a mattress lodged into the corner, a luxury he hadn't had in over a year. It was more than he could have asked for.

The job down at Hendrickson's bar was really more of an accident than anything else. He'd ducked inside one day to meet someone for a deal, only to be taken aback that such a rotten dive of a place actually had a piano. So he'd messed around for a few minutes, singing a few songs, only to look up and realize that every eye in the place was fixed on him. The Marling kid with the golden voice became somewhat of a legend after that, drawing in the slumdogs who likes to fancy themselves cultured enough to go get hammered while listening to good music (not to mention the fact that he also sold great smack), finally finding a niche for himself where he could thrive, even if only in the degenerate way he did. Luke started making a decent amount of money, making connections, catching the eye of a gorgeous girl or two or five. By all accounts, he should have been happy.

But he wasn't.

No matter how hard he tried, he couldn't stop hating himself for what he'd done to his family. Hell, they probably thought he was dead. Luke wanted to keep it that way. They were better off without him, and Ink and Imi were certainly better off not knowing what he'd become. Besides, going home wasn't an option as far as his family's safety was concerned. Being a drug dealer tends to make you a fair few enemies, and while Luke wasn't concerned for himself, the idea of one or both of his sisters getting hurt because of him made him absolutely sick (or maybe that was just the heroin again. The dosages were tricky, you'd make yourself puke if you took too much). So no, he's very content to stay where he is, a king in his own mind of the dirty, grimy kingdom where he makes his home, acting like he's on top of the world.

He'll never say it, but he really feels like he's being buried alive.