HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS, DISTRICT FOUR

✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
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5,831 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:37:45 GMT -5

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck

HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS, DISTRICT FOUR Feb 8, 2014 4:56:55 GMT -5

Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Feb 8, 2014 4:56:55 GMT -5

[presto]

"moral. respectful. noble.
some inner thoughts of
rebellion, not voiced.
manners doesn’t mean mercy
when it comes to a fight.
one of the toughest brawlers.
mature. defacto leader.
sees l as younger brother."

I got the new world in my view
On my journey I pursue
I said I'm running, running for the city
I got the new world in my view

N a m e : HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS
A g e : TWENTY-THREE
G e n d e r : MALE
L o c a t i o n : DISTRICT FOUR
F a c e c l a i m : BANG SUNG JOON
J o b : CLOCK MAKER / HEIR / DEFACTO LEADER OF THE BRAWLERS
S o n g : RUNNIN - DAVID DALLAS
P l o t : BRAWL
O t h e r C h a r a c t e r s : HERE!
C o d e w o r d : ødair

[/presto]

Last Edit: Feb 8, 2014 8:38:00 GMT -5 by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

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clown car / pietro
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✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ
Graphics

5,831 POSTS
Pronouns: they/them
last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:37:45 GMT -5

“And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck

HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS, DISTRICT FOUR Feb 8, 2014 8:26:54 GMT -5

Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Feb 8, 2014 8:26:54 GMT -5

"GET IT WHILE I'M LIVING
ALL I EVER HEAR IS THE CLOCK
TICK TICK TICKING"

I can remember a day, deep down inside of me. It is held tight to my heart, like a secret. There was a day, I could not have been more than six, that my father brought me to his office. I can remember being amazed, I had never really been in such a rich part of the District before. All the buildings rose up tall and shining around me as I held tightly to my father's hand and watched his shoes hit the pavement and take off again. Edgar was always meticulous about his appearance, I think I inherited that aspect of my personality from him. Edgar was never sorry about me, I always felt loved whenever he held me tight in his arms. He showed his pride and joy for me when he walked into his office building and announced to his entire work force that I was son. Never mind the fact that I was not really, never mind the fact that he was engaged at the time to a woman named Victoria Easterwick.

He took me into his personal office and I sat behind an old oak desk that seemed to me to be near a mile long. He told me then that his grandfather had purchased that very desk, and his father had sat behind it too. He told me that one day I would sit behind it as well. Of course, now I know that words like those were all just jam on my egg. Edgar could call me his son all he liked, it never made it true. I could go ahead and call him Dad, it did not make it real. My biological Father was always waiting for me at home like the monster in my closet.

See, my life is a little different in the fact that I do not know who my mother is. However, it doesn't matter because my Dads are rather inclined to each other, in other words, gay. Well, Tom is not one hundred percent, but fifty percent is good enough. Ellis is always sighing fondly, talking some sissy shit about how romantic my Father used to be. I don't know if he and I are ever talking of the same man because my Father, the Tom I know, is not romantic in the slightest. The Tom that I am acquainted with is a pitiful drunk who I have been dodging the fists of ever since I could crawl.

I could tell you all about how utterly terrible it is to live with a man with a vice, but I will not. For all my Father's faults, I think I pity him more than I hate him. I guess to understand my thoughts on it, you have to understand what happened to my father. Tom was just another kid growing up in District Four that was slipping between the cracks. They lived above the clock shop that I live above now. It has been in the Gauge family for a good many years. His father was a dirty drunk that would come home from the bar to belt him and his little sister. He was a hero, he was. He'd always try and take the beatings for my aunt as well. I guess it made him a little crazy, all that living in fear all the time. I know it did it a bit for me.

Well he had to find a way to let all that emotion out. He swore that he wouldn't touch the drink at all, instead he ended up sleeping around the entire District. He might have gone on doing that forever if it was not for Edgar. Apparently, it was that bullshit fairy tale sort of love, when all that happened is their eyes met and it was like they could see each other between the sheets already. I can not really say, seeing as I was not there, but that is not how things turned out. It never says in the story that Cinderella fell in love with her Prince Charming but then had a family on the side.

I am half the reason that they were ruined. A woman who I have never learned the name of seeing as it was flushed from Tom's moonshine-drowned mind told Tom that she was having his baby, whether he liked it or not. When all that happened, Edgar swore to Tom that he would love me as if I were his own son, he told him that it did not matter. They were going to make it work I think. It might have too for all I know, if things had been different.

However, my mother died giving birth to me, so what happened was two young men were saddled with a little baby boy. They did not know what to with me, and Tom's mother had been killed years and years back by one of my Grandfather's drunken nights. Edgar's mother was certainly out of the question, he had been raised by a Nanny. I got my early life nutrition from the neighbor, who had just had a baby of her own, other than that, I was left to Tom and Edgar to care for. Well, that was fine. Those were the days before my Dad was married off to some rich woman and Tom got depressed. It must have been happy for a while, even with a baby. It must have been.

All good things come to an end, so I have heard and found. Edgar eventually left Tom and I not because he really wanted to, but because he had to. He had to marry and have a kid so that his family's fortune could have an heir. I was not even an illegitimate son, I did not count.

I guess that is when things started going bad. My father had learned his parenting skills from his father and most likely his father before him. It is a dirty chain that never ends. He was saddled with a crying toddler and a house that never stopped ticking. I do not blame him for what happened next, I do not think I could find it within myself to. He could not deal with his depression by sleeping around, he could not take any pills for it. He did the only thing he knew how to do to shut the voices in his head up. My Father turned to drinking. It made his words string themselves together and all the lines that he always said he would never cross.

Now that I am grown, I realize that all he did to me, he did because it was all he knew how to do. I can not blame him for the years I spent tiptoeing around our flat so that he would not hear me. I can not blame him for the afternoons I spent licking my wounds or laying flat behind my bed in fear. I guess it is just because I am far too understanding. Well, I learned things too. I was not to go into his workshop, there were too many things that hurt when he threw them, I learned to be quiet, to cook, to clean wounds, to read, to put myself to bed.

Of course Edgar did not cut himself out of our lives completely. He sent regular checks that I am sure he wrote off as personal expenses in his accounts. Sometimes he would come to visit and if Tom was feeling under the weather he would go into his room and they would shut the door. I often could hear Tom crying through the door and I know that there was something really wrong with him that maybe even Edgar could never really fix. My dad was a broken man. To this day he screams in his sleep. I can understand that, how frightening it is to be laying in the dark and know that your father is coming up the stairs, always drunk and always angry. I wet my bed until I was twelve.

So my childhood was spent wishing I could be anywhere else but at home. I tried to spend as much of it as I could outside, and often left the house in the early mornings, scampering back in only at the last moment, when the sun was setting. I made many friends when I was young. Despite Tom, I had Edgar. He was always kind and caring, with such a gentle look in his eye, even though you could still see his strength. The man was and is still my hero. I tried to be just like him. I became a natural leader, King of my small Kingdom. The biggest hardship in those streets for me was figuring out what to do next. It was classic then, packs of kids that never grew up with much running down side streets, bare foot and dirty only because we didn't care and we didn't have to.

I forged relationships at the age of eight that I have kept strong and steady to this day. My best friend though, Knot Hollis, was the one who got me into the ring.

When I was reaching sixteen and Knot was seventeen, she and I would chat a lot. She was a great listener and I was a great talker. I loved to speak about things we learned at school that day, like Greek Myth, or speak about what we thought we might do with the others on the weekend. One particular week she had an idea of what we could be doing. She told me about this club where they fight just for the hell of it, and not because Jimmy Prest said something about me in class. (The Wanker). I knew about brawling of course. I'd been doing it since I was a small thing, it was the thing to do when you met with other kids in the street. It was like shaking hands.

I remember that first night, what it felt like to beat the shit out of some poor, unsuspecting boy. I do not know why I went so hard that first night. It could be because I still had fresh hurts of my own across my torso, bruises where my father had decided to throw his weight around. Whatever reason it was, I seemed to get instant respect. Knot and I kept going after that, it was addicting. I kept going even when Knot left to become a Peacekeeper. I was not too worried, I thought I was going to be following her pretty quickly anyway. Well I was wrong because Fate spun the board around while I was blinking.

Edgar and his wife had had themselves a baby girl a few years after I was born. She was ten years old the day she died. She'd always been weak and all, something wrong with her heart, but she should have been fine for much longer than just ten. By all rights, I should have been insanely jealous of Inta. She had everything that I always wanted, a mother who loved her and a father who was decidedly sane. However, I was hit with 'older brother syndrome' the first moment I laid eyes on her. She was sickly, always small and tired, but always lovely and sweet. She was one of the reasons I think I never really ever broke. I had her to worry about so I never found myself thinking about going a little crazy myself. Everything I did, I did to make her proud.

She died because her heart up and quit on her one afternoon when she was watering her vegetable garden. I remember planting it with her, how hard we laughed because I ended up so covered in dirt and mud. It wasn't like she was even doing anything particularly straining. All she had done was lift a hose up.

Her funeral was difficult. I left Tom at home because the morning of, he was so drunk that I could not even keep him standing. He'd loved her too, even though she was one of the reasons Edgar could never fully be his. As I said, she was difficult to hate.

I couldn't dream of becoming a Peacekeeper after that. I couldn't remember what had made me want the job in the first place. I'd always shouted about justice when I was ten years old and running through the streets playing 'Peacekeepers and Rebels' but what was justice. It wasn't fair that my sister had died, where was the justice in that? I knew there was nothing that the legal system could do, except for, you know, if she had access to the medicines that the Capitol does, she could have had a new heart, and lived a full life that ended with her dying in bed at the age of one hundred. Instead she only got to see a decade.

Besides, I couldn't run off to play at being a hero, I was Edgar's only remaining heir. Although I still was not really his, my Dad named me as his heir anyway, saying that his Father might be rolling in his grave but he did not give a damn. Thing is, I never really wanted to own his company anyway. I wanted to see the world.

Still, although it was a late start, I began spending half my week in the Ellis household. I was taught manners, the proper way to speak, what a gentleman wears and everything else that I might need to know. Still, after every lesson I would sneak out of that big old house and head off to the Brawlers. I don't know where Edgar thought my bruises came from. I think he knew that Tom was not really safe as houses, but I think as well that it hurt too much for him to believe that, so he chose not to.

Sometimes he will look at me and sigh. "I can see so much Tom in you," he says. He does not understand that it is not really a compliment. I would not want anyone mistaking me for Tom. Just because I pity my father, the clock maker, it does not mean that I want to look like him. I have his eyes, brutal and sad all at once. Sometimes I stare into the mirror, waiting for myself to blink, I scare myself. I can see the will to live floating around in them, looking a tad hopeless and confused. Yet I have my mother's dark hair and her cheekbones (So sharp he might have actually cut himself on them once) according to Tom. I have inherited looks from both of them. That's not the only thing either. I get my voice from her. Where it is still deep, like my Father, it also has a decidedly nice tone to it. I can sing.

Mostly just little ditties and tunes I hear as I make my way home along the docks, but I have perfect pitch. It's useless really, seeing as I am not really interested in music, but it makes me feel a little more balanced, like someone saw fit to give me something. From my Father I have actually managed to learn the trade of clack making. Long hours spent passing him tools and watching him work has allowed me to learn something. Nowadays when we get a commission it is usually me doing all the work. I don't mind. My Father seems more peaceful these days, I guess it is easier now that I am grown and he does not have to worry about trying to raise me.

Our roles have been reversed. I take care of him now, I try to fix him up, I pick him up out of his puddles of vomit and god knows what else because there is no one else but Edgar and I who care for him. I love him, I do. Half of me is still scared as shit of him but the other half is too empathetic to be mad. There are things that he has done that are unforgivable, that I will never forget. The day he found out Victoria, Edgar's wife, was pregnant, he threw a gear at my head and it actually lodged himself in the skin just below my hairline. There is still a scar. Or there is the time when He threw a wrench at me. I ducked, but when it hit a glass display case, it shattered it and shards embedded themselves into my torso and arms.

I am a patchwork of scars. They cover my body. I will never have smooth skin. There are so many things that he has done to me mentally and physically. There are nights when I wake up in darkness, thinking I can hear him coming for me, insane and angry. Still, I love him.

What Tom gave me was a lack of disillusionment. I never grew up thinking that life was all gold and roses. That is a gift in this world we live in, trust me. I have always known where I stand, have always thought about what I could do to change it. I started small, too small. I was thinking that if I could become a Peacekeeper, things would be great because I could make a difference. Now I am thinking that might be wrong. I think I might have to think bigger. I am starting with the Brawl Club. Even if I have to drag them all kicking and screaming, we are going to change things. I have to.

I can feel my life ticking away. I may only be young still, but when Inta passed away I think it reminded me of just how fragile life really is. Every year I am reminded of that when the games are reaped and appear on screen. I am reminded of my own mortality. I know things have to change, we can not go on living like this. We were not made to watch our children die each year, we were not made to learn to hate and distrust each other. I know that change is in the air. Edgar has trained me now, taught me how to lead people, well I can do it. I started really training myself up at sixteen, to do better with the Brawlers. I can feel my own strength with every move I make. I create watches and fix them with precision, and I am one of the smoothest talkers you will ever meet.

We were not made to live in fear.

I can change that.

[presto]

NO BACKBONE, I STAND ALONE

[/presto]

Last Edit: Feb 8, 2014 8:36:29 GMT -5 by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ

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clown car / pietro
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✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Graphics 5,831 POSTS Pronouns: they/them last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:37:45 GMT -5 “And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck	HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS, DISTRICT FOUR Feb 8, 2014 8:36:44 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on Feb 8, 2014 8:36:44 GMT -5 complete!
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rook Veteran Member 2,361 POSTS Pronouns: he/him last seen Sept 26, 2023 15:42:53 GMT -5 who needs another thing to be sad about?	HALEON GAUGE-ELLIS, DISTRICT FOUR Feb 9, 2014 8:34:20 GMT -5 Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by rook on Feb 9, 2014 8:34:20 GMT -5 Accepted~
	an hourglass is just a glass with sand inside