Gabriel Ripley Xavier (District Four) finished

Name: Gabriel Xavier (formerly Gabriel Ripley)

Age: Seventeen

Gender: Male

District/Area: District Four

Appearance:

Gabriel Ripley Xavier awakens in a pile of garbage behind the Lazy Mollusk Public House.  He shields his sensitive eyes from the vengeful sun and groggily assesses his surroundings. The first thing he notices is the smell. The noxious aromas of cheap gin, unidentifiable food waste, and his own sweat stings his nostrils. His stomach churns as he wills himself not to vomit as he teeters to his feet. His clothes are ruined. His light t-shirt is badly ripped and stained with liquor and dried blood and he’s not positive, but he thinks he may have soiled his pants last night too. He runs his hand through his greasy mop of curly black hair and touches the unkept stubble on his cheeks from several days without shaving. He reaches for the gunmetal flask he always keeps on his person and his heart sinks as he realizes it doesn’t make it’s comforting sloshing noise. He lets out a groan of defeat.

Gabriel forces himself to trudge through the alley toward the Trident Academy. He catches a glimpse of himself in a greasy shop window. The creature staring back at him is wild and unkempt. His russet brown eyes are glazed-over and sunken in. They remind him more of a corpse than of the once joyful and inquisitive child he remembers himself to have once been. The heavy rings beneath his eyes are uncomfortably dark.  The reflection of a nasty violet bruise on his jaw brings back a flood of memories of a fistfight last night. Gabriel looks down at his blood-crusted knuckles and chuckled wryly to himself about the damage they must have caused some unlucky fellow. As he regains his bearings, his lean frame picks up speed as he moves through the district, hurrying now to make it to the academy in time for his morning training session. Finally, he arrives at the wrought iron gate, but he’s too late.  The fuming face of Remus Xavier glares at him from across the yard. Gabriel meekly mumbles an apology and begins another grueling day of training.

Personality:

I see dead people. Most don’t have much to say. They just complain about being dead, how unfair the world is, how much they were loved, how scared they are of moving on, or something else sad and banal. Listening to the recent dead gripe about their lives (or whatever they have now) is terrible. I never have privacy or peace.  Sometimes the wispy wastes of headspace drive me to drinking. They normally don’t last long. I don’t care if they pass on to an afterlife or fade into oblivion or if my crazy brain can only muster a few hallucinatory dead people at once. But by the time they stop bothering me, I’m too relieved to care what comes next. I’ve always been close to the dead. I used to dig graves at my dad’s cemetery. Now I talk to ghosts. I’m not bothered by death the way most people are; in fact, I’m more comfortable around the dead than the living. I think I make the live people anxious sometimes, but I’m not too bothered by that.

Not all the ghosts leave quickly. The Gladiator says he’s been around for forever.  He looks like an ephemeral one of those soldiers from our history textbooks with bronze armor and a spear.  I’m not sure if I believe he’s really the unquiet soul of an ancient Roman warrior, but he’s good company so I don’t press the question. He’s the reason I got recruited to train at the Trident Academy. See, when the Gladiator gets riled up, he points out when people are weak.  He tells me just when and where to strike to throw someone off balance or when somebody’s left themselves exposed for an attack. He helps me fight dirty and take advantage of my opponent’s every weakness. The Gladiator is angry. He wants me to fight and hurt people. He’d probably be pleased as punch if he ever actually got me to kill anyone.  Remus seems to think that the Gladiator is just an expression of my inner bloodlust and that listening to him could turn me into a victor in the Hunger Games. I’m not convinced I’d truly win, but if I go to the arena, the Gladiator and I will definitely do some serious damage to some of those Lower District bumpkins.

Lindsey’s another ghost that sticks around. She’s not as old as the Gladiator.  I knew her when she was alive; she was the first girl I ever loved. We met at school, back when I still worked for my dad. She didn’t think I was creepy and we spent a good half a year together. She used to sneak out of her house at night and we would hang out in the cemetery. One night, she scraped her calf climbing over a fence. It didn’t look bad, but a few days later, it had blistered up and Lindsey was having muscle spasms. She was dead within the week. She’s a pretty friendly ghost. She’s encouraging and funny. She tells me not to blame myself for what happened, but if she got hurt coming to see me, that sounds like my fault. When Lindsey visits me I’m happy I don’t have to drink or hit things to feel better. She even manages to get the other ghosts to buzz off for a while so I can have some quiet. I think I’d like to date again, someone with a heartbeat. I know I can’t spend my whole life loving a dead girl. But Lindsey is still my favorite thing about seeing dead people. I really think she makes everything else worth it.

I’ve saved the worst ghost for last. Rocky’s the last ghost that has taken to haunting me. I don’t know what he was like when he was alive, but in death, Rocky is a nightmare. He sees me for what I am--a volatile, destructive force of nature, leaving beaten husks of people in my wake. He calls himself my conscience and says he has to stay here to try to keep me from becoming a murderer. Between you and me, I think he probably killed someone and projects his own guilt onto me. But he doesn’t talk about himself; he just focuses on how terrible I am. Remus tells me not to listen to Rocky. Most of the time I don’t. If he gets too bad, I go to a bar, get wasted, and beat some poor bastard to a pulp for looking at me funny. That makes me feel better and  Remus is proud of me any time I beat someone. It makes me more prepared for the Games. But part of me wants to listen to Rocky. Maybe he’s right and I need to find a way not to fight. Settle down, quietly dig graves, get a calm hobby. I don’t want him to be right, but I wonder if maybe I’d be happier without the violence.

Remus isn’t a ghost. If anything, he’s more of a guardian angel. I guess technically, he’s my adopted father now, but I wouldn’t call him dad.  He’s more of a teacher than a dad. He pushes me hard to be a killing machine. More than anything, I want to make him happy. I want to prove that he made the right choice to pick me for the Trident Academy. I want to show Remus and all of Panem that I can do more than dig graves-I can fill them. One day, I’ll do something to crack Remus and force him to like me. Now that I’m at the Trident Academy, I’ve got new “siblings” too. Other killing machines chomping at the bit to get into the arena and represent District Four. To them, I’m kind of an outsider. I don’t share their discipline and I fight without illusions of being honorable. I exploit weakness where I see it and fight dirty. Even though I’m as good a fighter as any of them, I don’t think they really respect me. But they are the only other people in the world who understand the pressure of the Academy. They know what it’s like to live your life striving to meet Remus’s impossible standards. We share a longing for the affection of a man who is as cold as ice. So even if they don’t respect me, they understand me better than anyone else. In a strange way, they have become like my family.

History:

Gabriel grew up in the little house outside the Ripley Cemetery. His dad and uncles prepared dead bodies. His mother and sisters prepared food for funerals and consoled grieving families. And from the time he could lift a shovel, he joined his male cousins digging graves. He doesn’t know how many six foot holes he’s dug or how many corpses he’s covered with dirt. His early years revolves around the constant rhythm of the metal shovel on the cool dirt. The first time he met a ghost, he was nine years old, digging its grave. It gave him company during a boring task. He thought it was exciting while it was novel. But they kept coming and most of them didn’t have anything to say. They just lamented their situation as ghosts. It grew to be even more tiresome than the digging.

After about a year of hearing ghosts, Gabriel was visited by the Gladiator during a particularly boring history class. He finally met a ghost who was interesting. He told Gabriel stories about the glory of the Colosseum. They reminded Gabriel of the Hunger Games. That’s when he started to seriously consider being a tribute and bringing the glory of victory back to District Four. The Gladiator demonstrated his usefulness in school, when he helped Gabriel sucker punch an older student who had been picking on his sister. The young Mr. Ripley was already strong from digging graves and the violent advice of the Gladiator made him a force to be reckoned with at school. He got in fights often and almost always won.

As Gabriel grew older, he became withdrawn.  He’d spend much more time talking to ghosts than people and he’d beat up anyone who gave him a hard time about it. He got in a lot of trouble at school and his parents got to the point where they felt helpless to control his angry outbursts.  Gabriel attracted the attention of Rocky, a judgmental ghost who constantly criticized Him for his destructive nature. Gabriel’s violence cooled a little as Rocky tried to keep him from becoming a criminal.

He was thirteen when he met Lindsey. She had problems of her own and saw the benefits of a boyfriend who didn’t mind bloodying his knuckles on someone’s face to defend his girl. Gabriel made her feel protected and Lindsey made him feel seen.  They would talk in the cemetery late into the night, spending as much time together as possible. The two were as in love as thirteen year olds could be. Then, she died of an infection with little warning. Gabriel was distraught and he flew off the handle. He beat a stranger within an inch of his life and got arrested by the Peacekeepers.

Gabriel thought he’d spend the rest of his life in detention, but at the last moment, Remus Xavier arrived and offered him a way out. If Gabriel would leave his family and come to live and train at the Trident Academy, Remus would grease the right palms to let him walk free. Gabriel could learn to hone his fighting style, listen to the Gladiator and the angriest ghosts, and become a fearsome warrior. He could learn to win the Hunger Games and the only thing Remus wanted from him was unyielding loyalty. Gabriel was sold.

He’s spent the last three and a half years training to be in the Games.  Gabriel’s definitely a more accomplished brawler than when Remus adopted him. But he isn’t much happier. Remus turned out to be a demanding and emotionally withholding instructor. He pushes Gabriel to his limits and insists that he listen to the angriest of the ghosts and let their rage fuel every punch he throws. He thrives to be better than his siblings. They compete for the rare moments when Remus shows affection to his children. Gabriel spends his life fighting for the approval of a man who is seemingly never satisfied.

The pressure has proven to be a bit too much for Gabriel. He drinks to drown out the cacophony of the ghosts. He drinks to deal with the impossible expectations of his new father. He drinks because it’s the easiest way to get into fights and hone his skill for the Games. He drinks because if he doesn’t, it hurts. Gabriel thought Remus would be angry about the drinking. But he actually doesn’t seem to mind.  If Gabriel is getting into bar fights in his free time, that’s extra training. As long as he also makes it to every training session at the academy, a little rowdiness is tolerated. Remus appreciates the added aggression from alcohol. His siblings think the drinking is a form of weakness, but they really can’t argue with the bloody results.

Other:

Faceclaim is Sebastian De Souza