Glittering lights and the swell of Paris served as the backdrop for Gabriel Beaumont’s tumultuous childhood; a city glamoured by Hollywood that cradled a hollow home infested with shadows and monsters.
The only son and rightful heir to the illustrious Beaumont family line, Gabriel hailed from a family steeped in greatness as relics of French nobility of generations and centuries gone by. The history and culture of his country, rich and thick as honey, flowed through his veins, giving the young boy with eyes like starlight and a smile like broken glass impossible expectations to live up to. But while Gabriel was a child in the strictest sense of the word, the Beaumont boy found that he had to scrabble for a sense of independence and self-awareness from a young age. Sheltered by wealth but abandoned emotionally, Gabriel folded in on himself as years of emotional negligence at the hands of his unhappy, apathetic parents transformed into what would later become an unseemly, tedious period of adolescence.
To live was to rebel against the forces controlling his life; to exist was a revolutionary form of thought for a family who had spent centuries drowning under the oppressive weight of tradition and stiff morality.
Lonely and isolated from any companions who weren’t characters from the literature he pored over, Gabriel found that books and education were the only things he had to lean on. But then, for a wide-eyed and uncertain thirteen year old, fresh-faced and curious about the openness and unknown of the world around him, seemingly found solace in a family friend. Alejandro Cabello, a friend of the Beaumont patriarch for decades, grew to impose his company on young Gabriel, insisting on being present when his parents were not. Gabriel thought–naively hoped, even–that Alejandro could grow to represent a stable and healthy adult relationship in his life; Gabriel wished desperately for Alejandro’s approval in all things, including art, literature, and opinions. But Gabriel, a butterfly tentatively emerging from his cocoon, found himself pinned down and his wings stripped under Alejandro’s perverse gaze and oppressive hand. Gabriel felt himself begin to flicker and smolder; the starlight in his eyes snuffed out like a candle. The constellations in his gaze became fallen stars, and his smile cut like knives. Gabriel’s first attempt to free himself from the chains that bound him to his abuser resulted in an altercation he talked away as an “unhappy accident”, but the resulting scar bisecting Gabriel’s cheek sat puckered against his skin like a crooked, filthy secret.
The survivor of serial sexual and physical abuse, Gabriel managed only to escape from the toxicity that threatened to drown him by the time he was nineteen. Alejandro became a painful mold in Gabriel’s past, but as he separated himself from his family and the man who had left the battered soul of a boy behind–later inheriting his parents’ estate and wealth upon their passing–Gabriel continued to thrive in his stifled, dark silence. Introverted to the core, Gabriel grew into a man who enjoys the solidarity of his own company and loathes the intimacy and companionship to others. An apathetic and emotionally reserved individual, he has closed himself off from building relationships of any kind with the people he meets, choosing instead to engage in sexual bouts of pleasure and satisfaction only from an emotionally detached distance.
Perhaps he can grow to love again, if he can learn to stomach a shred of humanity. Perhaps, but he doesn’t want to.
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