FIRST MATE PERSEUS EDWIN FINCH, D4

“I GET UP IN THE EVENING”
And I ain't got nothing to say.

YOHO, EDWIN . Seventeen.
LET'S GO FAR AWAY . Male.
SOMEWHERE, WHERE THE CAPTAIN WON'T BE MAD . District four.
YOHO, EDWIN . First Mate to the good ship Red Star.
I WANNA LOVE YOU GOOD . None of your business where I put my sword, is it?
TALKING . 797965
DOING . Stage Fright
DEEP THOUGHT . 6C4C47
HEARING . Steak tartare
OTHER . Superior society

“I COME HOME IN THE MORNING”
I go to bed feeling the same way.

"THINK NOT I AM WHAT I APPEAR - LORD BYRON .

His mother used to stare at him, holding her cheek in one hand, a soft smile playing across her lips. Where there was a vacancy in her eyes during spaces of the day, people would say she came alive when she saw her son. He had always been a handsome little boy, since he his firstborn blue eyes had finally darkened to a deep, muddy brown. He takes after his father, all dark, dark eyes, and dark hair. Nothing like his mother, with her hair so blonde it challenged the sun, and eyes so blue as to sing with the sea. She was fond of him, her handsome little boy, and he was.

They said that he really started coming into it when he turned fifteen. He had always been pleasant to look at, but by his teenage years, he already had muscle, gained from obligatory career training. That, mixed with working on his parent's fishing boat, gave him a defined abdomen. This mixture with a lean frame, made for a real catch. When he was fifteen, he suddenly shot up like a tree to stand at six feet tall. After that, he had girls chasing him left and right, and always taller ones. Something about his height made him desirable but he never really saw it. He never really knew what to do about them when they talked to him either. He didn't know how charming he could be, and never really meant to.

When he'd blush, his cheeks would go two shades darker and his throat would almost close up he was so nervous. He wasn't ever nervous with Jasper though. He preferred Jasper to many people's company. When he smiled, it would happen slowly, like the tide slowly coming in. It didn't really happen often. People always told him that he had a lot to be happy for. A loving mother and father, a mean of trade, a boat that would pass to him when he grew of age. They didn't know the secret. The secret was the thing that kept him from smiling, the hook in his jaw that kept it turned down. For all the happiness he knew in life, there was always something missing and you could always see it in his eyes.

With the years they had only become darker. Already minted in their own sort of beauty, they gained a soft lightness. Those eyes mixed with his smile could light a whole room. black lashes framed each eye, and above them sit two long eyebrows. So long in fact, that the other boys used to say they could join together. His mother thought it was endearing, his father's had. From his father, he also took the cleft in his jaw. After puberty hit him full force, not only did he have a couple zits, but he began to have to shave away the stubble that grew along his jawline like seaweed to a shoreline.

He had a fine mop of hair that sprouted off the top of his head and grew so thick and so long that his mother had to cut it weekly. A dashing twist served as a bangs, and when he was younger he had ringlets until he hacked them all off. His mother had cried but he thought it lent him a certain fierceness. He had always meant to look fierce, something he hadn't accomplished until recently. His clothes lent to it. He'd often forget articles, such as shirts or shoes. He almost always forgets the shoes.

For a fifteen year old boy, he always seemed too weary. Supposedly tireless, he was somewhat missing the standards of a normal boy his age. It wasn't in the curvature of his body, or the way his callused hands would slide along the wooden rail of the boat. It wasn't in the slight smirk that he learnt to call up, nor was it in the way his body would twist like a dancer's when throwing the harpoon. It was all in the way he would watch. His brows would furrow in thought, and he'd stop in his tracts as if he had suddenly seen something he hadn't been expecting. He'd plant his feet and search, but he couldn't ever really tell what it was for. It would just suddenly look like he had reached the peak of his youth, and time had already begun to chip away at the timeline of his bones.

But he was a strapping young lad, and a lot of the sadness was thrown off like a worn cloak. Especially when he was running around with the orphans. His house was very close to the orphanage, and when they were let loose to play, he'd play with them. He owes a lot of the scars along his body to the kids in that orphanage. He never really minded however, he thought that the scars made him tough, especially his nose, slightly crooked from the break he sustained when he was fourteen. Despite the nose, most still agreed that he was handsome, and kept agreeing with that notion, even after the accident when he suddenly turned into an altogether different boy.

He no longer smiled, they all began to notice that. He changed more in a short week than he had his whole life, they liked to say. He lost laugh lines, took inked lines. When he was seventeen, he got a tattoo, a very cryptic to most quote from an old book. It's possible to see a hint of lettering sliding up from his pelvis, but the tattoo is private and not a very seen thing. Although people say that he had changed drastically in the week he turned seventeen, they couldn't tell him how. It wasn't in the way his mouth worked, or the thick taste to his movements. It wasn't in the way his hands worked mechanically across a net. It just was.

Maybe he was no longer handsome. The beauty that he had as a young man had shed from him slowly, and the last had come away in one short week. his mouth no longer looked so inviting, in fact it almost held a soft cruelty. Where all his parts had equaled a sum, it was as if he had lost more than one, and suddenly he was an equation with no answer. There was no longer a fearful chemistry to the way he moved, but more of a terror. He was almost more graceful, more evolved, more of everything. Where he had always been colourful, he looked vibrant.

“YOU CAN'T START A FIRE”
You can't start a fire without a spark.

"IS THERE NO WAY OUT OF THE MIND? - SYLVIA PLATH .

Something, someone, somewhere, sometime hurt Edwin Finch. Back when he was Perseus Edwin Blackbeard, that they all agree on. It hasn't made him anything less, almost too much, as if he is simply a picture he painted for himself to be. He seems to play the part of the rough edged, but likable street rat almost too well. They all wonder where the mighty boy who called himself Perseus went, and who Edwin was. Only Jasper ever seemed to recognize him anymore. It was as if he had taken flame and burnt everything he was, rising to be something new out of the ashes. All when he became someone else, did he find out what he really was.

See, Edwin wasn't ever really meant to be a fisherman, Fate decided on a different roll of the dice for him. Like a river changes it's course with a small catalyst, Edwin did as well. He was meant to be golden, to shine, but as most seem to always forget, stars fade and rocks erode from salty air. Maybe he was meant for something else entirely, but the path he chose became him. From a bright and sunny childhood emerged a phoenix from the ashes. A boy with an easy smirk, and a dark grin. Not bad, just one that hid things for him to take out of his pocket and look at later. He'd always been a boy of little intricacies after all, an enigma with too many questions, and very little to answer for.

He's always been that question, and only now has he begun to find answers, to collect them, to shield him. He collects them to wrap around his body and keep his head from thinking thoughts when the saying already gets done by his lips. He never thinks first, he's always too busy acting. Then again, most would argue that he doesn't really think. That's only half true, because he does think, just not really about others very much. There are no others to think about anymore but his brothers in arms. He thinks, he does, but not if he has to. He's sharp, and can think very well when he chooses to, but he prefers the illusion of stupidity. People leave stupid people alone. That was all he ever really wanted, to be left alone. As it turns out, people have a way of trying to tattoo themselves to your membrane until you're half insane. So instead of trying to make them let him be, he let them in.

The boy became what they wanted him to be, and more. He lost his parents, he must be a mess! So he became one. He'd spent his childhood becoming exactly what he thought his community wanted him to be, so it only made sense that when everything changed, he did too. He stopped fishing. He stopped smiling, he stopped visiting friends, stopped doing much of anything except for sleeping in late, and waking up at weird hours. He began going out at night, the emptiness of the house haunting him, and coming home to sleep in the morning. He slipped off the face of the Earth for a good couple months, stopped visiting the orphanage where he had so many good friends. He was supposed to go live there, and he did. When they caught him at home after the first month, he lived there. But he always slipped away, didn't talk to anyone, not even Jasper, his very best friend.

Until, one day, he did. There was something off about him, something horribly wrong. When people called him Perseus still, and when they did, he flinched. He was not Perseus anymore, son of two fisherman, and a happy young man. He was Edwin Finch, an Orphan scoundrel, stalking the streets at night. He wasn't afraid anymore either. He wasn't nervous at all when talking to anyone. He could wrap them around his little finger. See, he learned how to play people, to find their trigger and squeeze, more and more until they popped and they were his. Where the opposite sex had always been something to stay away from, and even the same sex confusing, Edwin learned to play them both. He dipped his fingers into every pot of honey that came his way, simply trying to forget.

Not just his parent's death's no. The guilt that came along before that, long before that. When he was given a secret to cup between his hands and stare at every now and then. Sometimes his mouth would open to say something, to yell it out loud. but sense would always grab him when he was near the secret and he wouldn't. He didn't know why he kept it, even with them gone. But it was important, and had been held so long that to say it now would be treacherous, and so he couldn't. He could only watch the secret grow, never saying anything. That, that was the thing that killed him every night.

When he found that losing himself in another person's scent was far from enough, he began to try and lose himself in other ways. he discovered a foul elixir, something the old sea dogs called rum. He fell for it, fell into it, fell about it. He lived life that way, drunk as often as could be, to the point where sobriety was simply a word and something he could pretend at even better than the pirates game his friends and he had played at such a young age. There was where he found relief, found the ability to wake up before the end of the day and crawl out of bed to sunlight. There was where he found the courage to greet the day again and live it. There was where he found his compassion.

Where so many only found anger in the bottoms of bottles, Edwin found his ability to return to the boy he had been, instead of all the anger swirling down and down below his stomach. Through the devil's drink, he began to see the worth in the common tongue again, to see why talking was important. Through the drink he found empty courage, bravery that made him do unbelievably stupid things that Jasper would fish him out of. He began to fight, earning cuts, bruises, broken noses. Never leanred to step down.

He'd take the old beat up guitar his father used to play on cold nights almost everywhere with him, barefoot with the scratched wood across his back. He'd take it down and strum out songs, stealing lyrics out of thin air as he went. He let them wash away again just as quick, never writing anything down because he didn't care to. He doesn't care for a lot of things. Not much really, just the ocean, a drink, and his brothers. People think that he has all these things that he grabs at like ribbons of hope, but he has no wishes anymore, just the curse of life that he lives under.

It's supposed to be a gift, but how can it be gift when there is a secret born under thick skin, and the only two who know it other than him left him. They left him, abandoned him to the ocean, to try and swim by himself. Well he can't. He is drowning, to be perfectly honest. Slipping farther and farther down with every stroke, but it's okay. He's diving, propelling himself deeper and deeper into the water, running out of air, as the pressure reigns over him. He held responsibility once, and never gained the taste for it. Although Edwin is overbearing, loud, and sometimes too physical, the idea of responsibility makes him cringe. He's always sliding in and out of tales that don't belong to him, and coming out with only a scratch or tw. The more hearts he breaks, the less he feels, the more he drinks the less he cares.

“THIS GUNS FOR HIRE”
even if we're just dancing in the dark.

"I'M NOT AFRAID OF DYING, PIECES OF ME DIE ALL THE TIME - SAGE FRANCIS .

Edwin was born to two fishermen. A feisty young woman, raised on a boat,
Eliza Waters. His father had been born and raised on a boat too, Peter Blackbeard, descendant of a long line of Fishermen. So of course Edwin was meant for the ocean, just as the ocean was meant for Edwin. His parents were a young and happy couple, but not very rich. The waters were treacherous, and fishing wasn't always a great money bringer, especially when half of what they caught always went to the Capitol. Still, they wanted a child desperately and were overjoyed when Edwin was born to them. For two long years, they were a happy family, just the three of them. Edwin, in fact, was born on the family boat, in the middle of the ocean. Where from came his name, Perseus, son of the ocean it's self.

Two years after his birth, his mother fell pregnant again. This pregnancy was not as joyous as it should have been. Peter and Eliza din't have the means to care for two children, barely enough for one. They were left with not a lot of choices. Not a lot of choices but one. Two friends that they'd known since childhood were married as well, and just couldn't seem to conceive a child, yet they wanted one so badly. Although what they proposed was horrifying and something that seamed ugly and beneath them, they realized that this child would have a better life with parents that could afford to raise it. So they did what they had to do, and they sold the life growing inside Eliza to their friends.

Still, a three year old Edwin never forgot the first glimpse he caught of his baby sister. The light fuzz on the top of her head, her eyes tightly shut. He remembered taking her tiny hand for just a moment, and understanding that this thing was his baby sister and he had to take care of her no matter what. She was his, and no matter what, he would protect her, always. He had one day with her. One whole day. Then when he woke up in the morning she was gone, and his parents told him that she had been a secret, a special gift for the family down the street. He was allowed to go visit, but he wasn't allowed to say anything. She was a secret, no not his. Never his, the little girl was not Edwin's sister, his neighbor, that was all. That was all she was allowed to be. Edwin didn't understand. he thought that was okay, he could still look after her. Not true. Soon after, his parents moved them farther across the district, closer to the orphanage, the docks and the slums of the district. He was never to see her again.

As he grew, she lived precariously at the back of his mind, always present but never fully there. Sometimes he would make the long trek across town to see her, but he'd never make it all the way there. By the time he got old enough to walk so far, he had forgotten what the little house she grew up in looked like, until she lived in the back of his mind. As he grew older and they never spoke of the little sister that never was, Edwin began to forget everything but the way that little tiny hand had felt in his, and there was his anchor.

When Edwin was six, he met Jasper Finch, a boy a year older than him from the orphanage. Everyone from the orphanage had the same last name, as the orphanage was called 'Finch Orphanage'. Although he was older, he was quieter than Edwin already, who's booming laugh took up the whole courtyard sometimes. So Edwin immediately stuck to him like glue, liking the way the older boy liked to think things out, and attracted to the stories he'd tell, and the dreams he had. Something about the way he said them made Edwin want them to come true. Jasper never was the doer though, so Edwin would take Jasper's crazy ideas and make them even crazier, and then do them. This often landed him in trouble, which Jasper even than, was quick to slide him out of. They were thick as thieves from the get go, and are to this day.

He grew up on the little boat his family owned for catching fish, was sailing her by the time he was twelve. He knew the name of every little piece and was near a master at sea. The ocean was his home more than the land almost, putting him at odds with dirt and the way people worked. He had a happy childhood, marked by tesserae bought by him to support his parents, and days spent training with harpoon and throwing knives in the district's training center. Although he was a street rat from the slums, he was a force to be reckoned with.

When he was sixteen, the accident happened, and his world entire was flipped upside down. His parents went on a routine fishing trip, and did not return after a small storm sent their boat somewhere untraceable. They pronounced them dead after a week long search. He slipped away for a week, then a month, disappeared entirely until one morning the Peacekeepers caught him slinking back to his family's home and dumped him in the orphanage. Even there, he kept to himself for a long while, swimming in guilt and pain. guilt for not being on that boat with them, pain for losing them. More guilt for a sister who didn't know her parents were dead, for a sister who never knew them. Pain because she was all that was left of his family and he didn't even know her.

One morning, as he slipped back into the orphanage after a long night, he spotted her, a girl, long blonde hair and blue eyes. But that wasn't what stopped him in his tracks. It was the fact that she looked too much like a younger version of his mother for him to understand why. The shape of her chin too much like his mother's to bare. So he avoided her for a time, trying to figure out what to do about it, until it was easier not to. After a few months in the orphanage, and of spending every night out, Edwin let himself taste the devil's drink, and had himself an addiction. He never stopped drinking it, it became his version of water. There was nothing they could do about it. Besides, they liked it. It made him sleep at night, stopped his screaming, his tears when he woke up from horrifying nightmares. The orphanage let it go because it was easier. He would be out of there in a year anyhow, what did they care?

It was easier to not care, he found. In that way, he could begin to. He tried to hide himself inside other people, but found it didn't really work. Where he found he liked to feel any hands on him, boys or girls, he didn't find anything but physical pleasure in these embraces. He let his mind tuck it's self away so he wouldn't have to feel. He spent days pouring over old sea charts, and playing the old guitar that his father had owned. Spent afternoons studying Charlie Finch out of the corner of his eyse, and night at the bars, hiding from the rest of the world.

After a few months of this, Edwin became almost normal. Not sober, no. But as close to normal as he could get. A liveliness wormed it's way back into his step, he almost seemed cheerful. He finally began talking seriously to Jasper again. He had spoken before, but it had always been brush offs of his best friend's concern, growled 'leave me alones'. Now it was pouring over a map, practicing once again with his knives. They kept yelling at Edwin to stop making dents in the wall. Edwin yelled back. Gone was Perseus Edwin Blackbeard from just pass the orphanage gates, here was Edwin Finch, charming little asshole that liked to swipe the Matron's sherry. After weeks of talking about it, and of Jasper's little 'I wishes', Edwin convinced his friend to form a crew, take a boat and go out onto the water. He just didn't expect his little sister to be one of those coming along too.

ANYTHING ELSE ?

OUT OF CHARACTER .

FACE CLAIM .

BRIAN OLDHAM • PERSEUS EDWIN FFINCH

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I, ELEGANT .
am firing myself, don't worry.

CODEWORD . odair