D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton

L△LIA RP Tutor 3,567 POSTS last seen Jun 24, 2019 15:25:10 GMT -5 BOOM SH△KALAKA	D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Jul 28, 2014 0:33:49 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by L△LIA on Jul 28, 2014 0:33:49 GMT -5 Info box placeholder. I forgot to make a pretty thing for it. Tomorrow is another day. ~~Nocturne Vargas~~. Hawthorne Hamilton. Male. Eighteen. District Nine. Odair.
	Last Edit: Aug 19, 2014 0:00:44 GMT -5 by L△LIA ( C H A R A C T E R S )

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D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Jul 28, 2014 0:44:56 GMT -5

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Post by L△LIA on Jul 28, 2014 0:44:56 GMT -5

i'm as fucked up as they say
i can't fake the daytime
found an entrance to escape
into the dark

It's a funny story, really, the way it all happened.

Back in the day, the two boys were friends in the way that all children are friends: shared laughter, messy smiles, and scraped knees. Growing up next door to each other, Nocturne Vargas and Hawthorne Hamilton would walk to school together in the mornings, kicking tin cans down street gutters and occasionally tugging at the Hamilton girls' pigtails as if each yank were the punchline to the world's most hilarious joke. At the time none of it meant much and once they got where they were going, the two would part ways until the walk back home.

Friendship became a habit, however, and at some point the pair of haphazard boys began borrowing pencils from each other during class, sitting together at lunch, and hanging out on the street curb in front of their houses after the day's walking was done. Anyone passing by might have thought them so much alike. One glance at their overgrown haircuts and grass stained jeans wouldn't reveal the difference between a pair of six-year-old boys, but closer inspection might have made it clear that the grass was a little greener on one side of the property line than the other. The Hamilton boy's smile was always a little wider, the space behind his ears scrubbed a little more carefully, his clothes less frayed at the edges.

It's not that one of the boys' mothers loved him less, but the Hamiltons had both parents and Caroline Vargas was a single mother. If anything, Nocturne was better loved. The boy was his mother's world, the only thing she had, and he had no gaggle of siblings to compete with for her affection. Maybe the two of them had half as much money to get by as the Hamilton family, but she tucked her son into bed every night, dotingly stitched his name into the collar of each of his handmade shirts, and worked her hands raw at the local soap factory to keep dinner on their table. Still, giving Nocturne everything she had didn't amount to much and this was never more apparent than the first night the Hamiltons invited the Vargas boy over for dinner.

It was loud. Crowded. Full. Oh, Ripred, Nocturne didn't think he had ever been so full in his whole life. It wasn't just the food swelling his belly, but that every seat at the table was occupied and how the air was an endless tangle of voices. He ate and he laughed and leaving to go back to his own ~~quiet, empty~~ home made his childish heart ache with jealousy. More than anything else, Nocturne Vargas wanted to be Hawthorne Hamilton.

At the time he might not even have been seven yet. He had no idea that Hawthorne Hamilton was exactly who he would grow up to be.

Overnight Nocturne got it into his head that maybe he was switched at birth or that he was destined to marry Hawthorne's pretty sister Saskia, because obviously he was meant to be a part of the Hamilton family. Suddenly everything Hawthorne had, he wanted too. The same shirts. The same haircuts. The same crooked smiles. The boys practically became twins and Hawthorne loved it just as much as Nocturne, having gained a new brother to help balance out all those sisters... at least, he loved it until the other kids at school began making fun of them for it.

Hawthorne had two choices: Stand by his new friend or join the bullying to save himself. Like adults, children rarely seem to make the right decision and the Hamilton boy begged his mother to cut his hair short that night and wore one of his father's shirts to school the next day, despite it being ten sizes too big. Even at that age, Hawthorne had the kind of gutsy, smart-mouthed swagger to pull off being ridiculous; What mattered most was that his father's shirt was something Nocturne didn't have.

The boys stopped walking together. Hawthorne left for school early and puttered around after class so he could head home late on his own. They didn't sit together at lunch. Worst of all wasn't any of this or even the disappearance of their shared smiles, but the words that began coming out of his mouth when the other kids were around — childish insults, yes, but mean and wounding nonetheless. In every class there always seems to be an odd man out and Nocturne Vargas had that invisible target marked on his forehead. Too poor, too desperate, too unlucky.

I suppose there isn't much that's funny about it after all, but although Nocturne wasn't laughing, everyone else certainly was.

Last Edit: Aug 4, 2014 23:34:34 GMT -5 by L△LIA

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D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Aug 4, 2014 6:22:37 GMT -5

Quote

Post by L△LIA on Aug 4, 2014 6:22:37 GMT -5

got false lights for the sun
it's an artificial nocturne
an outsider's escape
for a broken heart

Childhood friends became childhood enemies. Somewhere along the way they both grew up enough to stop antagonizing each other on a daily basis, but Nocturne always felt a grudge (siamese twins, perhaps, with his endless jealousy) curled up deep within his gut, laying in wait. Nearly a decade would pass before that feeling would find the opportunity to rear its ugly head and many things happened in the in-between time.

Nocturne's mother would fall sick and pass away, leaving him in the highly questionable care of a gambling drunkard of an uncle. The friends he made after Hawthorne would turn out to be the town hooligans, smoking the funny hoodoo grass growing in the ditches on the outskirts of the District and giving each other tattoos with rusted thumbtacks for shits and giggles. One of the boys would contract tetanus, nearly dying, and the idea that it might have been due to Nocturne's own handiwork would only cause the Vargas boy to ink himself up more, like a game of blood poison roulette. Penance. Meanwhile, Saskia Hamilton — the pretty could-have-been wife he would never have — fell in love with someone else before promptly getting herself murdered for a cheering Capitolite television audience.

Other things would stay the same, seemingly small details. Stubbornly, he would continue to wear the shirts his mother had so lovingly sewn for him (sleeves rolled up to hide how the cuffs no longer reached his wrists), his name stitched into the collars and this... this sameness is what would change his life. Well, exchange, technically.

Nocturne Vargas and Hawthorne Hamilton were sixteen when they ran into each other at a party. Not having attended school together for the past several years, neither of them even recognized the other until they were already halfway through a six person game of strip poker, Hawthorne triumphantly winning Nocturne's shirt and finally doing a double-take at the name stitched into it. Barely twenty minutes later it was sort of like the old days, with Nocturne dressed to look like Hawthorne's twin (granted, with bloodshot eyes and crude ink swirling across his skin). This time, however, it went both ways: Hawthorne also wearing the clothing he'd won off the back of a former friend. The pair reminisced the way only incredibly drunk people can and things were looking up until the old grudge within Nocturne's belly decided to throw a fist into the other boy's face, spitting insincere insults about Saskia just to ensure the bruises and split knuckles would go both ways.

One of them was rumored not have have turned out very nicely, you know.

Despite the cheap shots about his dead sister, Hawthorne wasn't as easily riled up as his antagonizer, but that hardly mattered. Nocturne had turned into a bit of a recreational brawler and threw enough punches for the both of them. Between them there were black eyes, bruises, blood, and a broken knee that would damn the Hamilton boy to a limp for the rest of his life. (Which, to be fair, would not be all that long of a time...) Unfortunately, the real damage wasn't quite so easy to see.

If sixteen-year-old Nocturne Vargas were still as honest as his six-year-old self, he might have been willing to admit that he thought he'd killed Hawthorne and while, in a way, he would be responsible for Hawthorne's death two years later, this was not the time. ~~But the third time... it's true what they say about that.~~ In this moment what was lost wasn't life in the sense of breathing or heartbeats, but in the sense of misplaced things. Hawthorne Hamilton lay sprawled out in a back alleyway with his head cracked open wide enough for all his memories to spill out and Nocturne's knuckles were covered in the bright red blood of that fresh guilt, once again looking at someone he had called a friend, his mouth a looping murmur of terror: "I killed him. Fuck, oh, fuck. I killed him. Fuck —"

— and he smoothed the hair from Hawthorne's face and kissed his forehead and begged him not to be dead and shook and quaked and wiped the blood that wouldn't come off his hands against the pavement until bits of gravel were lodged in his palms and he didn't know whose blood was whose, only that he still wanted it gone either way and he still wanted Hawthorne not to be dead, please oh please oh fucking please, because maybe he'd never actually loved Saskia, but he'd loved Hawthorne and he'd hated him for that more than probably anything else and —

His pleading lips pressed against the sweatbloodbetrayal stained forehead, he swore to the angels above and the devils below that he was willing to trade his own life away to keep Hawthorne alive and then he ran. Away away away... He couldn't even bring himself to stay long enough to see his own wicked prayer answered.

When Hawthorne Hamilton woke up, he couldn't remember where he was or how he'd gotten there or when he'd fallen flat-back and pulverized against the asphalt or who had done this to him or even his own name. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. In fact, the only thing he knew was the name so lovingly stitched into the collar of his shirt: Nocturne Vargas. He assumed this name belonged to him and clung to it the way the real Nocturne had always wanted him to, as if it were something precious.

After Saskia's death a few years before, the Hamilton family had become reclusive to the point that few people in the community remembered them beyond the occasional re-run clips of the 68th Games played on television. Hawthorne in particular had taken things badly, demanding to be home schooled and only venturing out when a sibling forced him back into the world. This party had been his first outing in Ripred only knows how long and the rest of the people in attendance hadn't recognized him any better than his old neighbor had, so after the accident, everyone assumed that the boy limping around town and calling himself Nocturne Vargas was exactly who he said he was. It didn't really matter either way; no one had bothered much with the old Nocturne and they weren't about to start caring now.

It took about a week before the original Vargas boy began piecing the puzzle together: Hawthorne hadn't died, but he had lost his life that day — his memories. His family was still shut away from the world and although they were searching for Hawthorne, no one else knew what the Hamilton boy looked like anymore and eventually they would give up, unable to understand what had happened. The amnesiac took to sleeping in alleyways and clumsily stole food until he was well enough to pick up an odd job here and there and rent himself a lousy one room hellhole of an apartment above a convenience store.

Nocturne kept a wary eye on him and even talked to him once or twice when Hawthorne would spend an entire Sunday sitting on a park bench, desperately people watching in hopes that someone passing by would be familiar. There was never any flare of recognition, however, not even when looking straight into the eyes of an old friend. The two didn't talk about anything in particular, but when a hand was held out and introductions were made, Hawthorne Hamilton said, "M'name's Nocturne Vargas." And the real Nocturne Vargas brazenly replied, "I'm Hawthorne Hamilton," without hesitation.

The world didn't stop or stutter or even pause to blink at the tilted sunshine of a too-bright lie. It just kept turning, as unstoppable as the deception that had been put into motion.

Last Edit: Aug 18, 2014 23:16:19 GMT -5 by L△LIA

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D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Aug 4, 2014 6:23:36 GMT -5

Quote

Post by L△LIA on Aug 4, 2014 6:23:36 GMT -5

i'll make all that i believe
i set myself free
so take all the time you need
and let yourself be

Back in District Nine, the real Nocturne Vargas is watching an innocent boy die.

He's crying as if it isn't too late for redemption, ugly, heaving gasps wracking his lungs as his body pleads for oxygen and he loses his mind. It was supposed to be him in that Arena, but although his name was called, his friend stepped up for him and took his place. ~~But the other boy didn't know, he didn't know, he didn't fucking know... and he wouldn't have taken his place on that stage if he had~~. Of course it was wrong — everything had always been wrong — but the lies couldn't have been stopped by then, even if he had tried. (At least this is what he has been telling himself over and over since the Reaping so he can sleep even a little at night, forever restless.) Besides, when someone volunteers to die for you, ~~regardless of whether or not it's actually done voluntarily~~, that's not an easy thing to turn down.

And he couldn't.

On the government-issued television before him, a trio of blades hack away at his old friend's skin and the boy keeps rambling persistently through it all, with a drawling voice that makes his heart twist in feverish regret. ("That's the stupidist thing I ever heard. I mean, d'you have any idea how many stupid things come out of m'own mouth every day? I just told you I arm wrestled a bear in a saloon fire, but you —") He used to practice slurring his words in just that way, mashing them together with abandon and hitching up the corners of his mouth so they could be exactly the same. The television before him doesn't belong to him any more than that voice ever has though, seeing as how he broke into the apartment of the boy on screen in a backwards act of remorse, searching for some kind of evidence to absolve him of his sins.

All he has found so far are a series of photo albums strewn across the floor in front of him now, filled with found photos of strangers and scattered newspaper clippings. Articles and images of weddings, funerals, and birthdays of countless people neither Nocturne Vargas has ever known fill the pages, but there is one photo in particular that bothers him. His own. He can't recall what it's from, but it has been circled with red ink to emphasize importance and it's accompanied by a caption that reads: HAWTHORNE HAMILTON. I ACTUALLY KNOW HIM. Looking at this is like shamelessly reading someone's diary and he swipes mercilessly at the tears rolling down his face, nearly giving himself a black eye in his efforts to stop the flood.

He had never stopped to wonder why he'd wanted the Hamilton boy's friendship so badly, why it had to be him, or why even now his stomach twists from wanting everything about Hawthorne for his own. The name he stole. The life he took. The gruesome death happening on screen that truly should have been his own. Strange jealousy still burns within him as he clutches one of the albums to his chest, greedy for even the worst, most tragic things and the lies his former friend had been filling his empty head with for the past two years. All over again, he loves him for this unnameable feeling and hates him for it just as much, but where that line is drawn or even what it's drawn for seems to blur in the face of such incredible denial. Instead there is only a pathetic keening that haunts the room as both Nocturnes come to the realization that they are dying.

He killed him. Fuck, oh, fuck, Nocturne Vargas has been killed. He's dead and he can't ever come back. Fuck —

There are countless clichés that try to warn people to be careful what they wish for, but as one heart stops, another races. This cannot be undone; Nocturne Vargas has grown up to, quite literally, become Hawthorne Hamilton and it's insane and illogical and can't possibly be real... but it's the only name in this world that belongs to him now.

Last Edit: Aug 18, 2014 23:51:37 GMT -5 by L△LIA

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L△LIA RP Tutor 3,567 POSTS last seen Jun 24, 2019 15:25:10 GMT -5 BOOM SH△KALAKA	D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Aug 18, 2014 23:53:59 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by L△LIA on Aug 18, 2014 23:53:59 GMT -5 ~~Tbh, I think there was something else I was going to write, but I cannot for the life of me remember what. I suppose I can add it in later, but otherwise...~~ I think this is done! ^^
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ᴥ Head RP Tutor 4,545 POSTS Pronouns: he/him last seen Apr 18, 2024 16:28:25 GMT -5 oof	D9 :: Hawthorne Hamilton Aug 19, 2014 4:50:44 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by ᴥ on Aug 19, 2014 4:50:44 GMT -5 absolutely stunning
	Last Edit: Aug 19, 2014 4:51:51 GMT -5 by ᴥ the m o o n controls the t i d e, it could cause you to d r o w n