Hi! First off, I just wanted to say I really, really love ARV. Sterling has become my favorite person to romance and a hyper fixation at this point. He is just so babygirl that it just makes me scream at all of his dialogue. If it wasn't for the fact my farmer is 5'0, she would carry Sterling bridal style, over her shoulder, on her hip like a toddler lmao
But onto my actual question, I found out that Sterling has a butterfly and hummingbird tattoo. I think I read that the butterfly tattoo is from when he started to recover from his substance abuse as like a symbol that he's changing his life like a caterpillar to a butterfly sort of thing.
But I haven't been able to find if the hummingbird tattoo has a meaning. Or maybe it's just so explanatory that it doesn't need to be explained lol (So sorry if this has already been asked!)
It's because he's a WHORE. and he jumps from flower to FLOWER.
(I am pulled away exit stage left)
Sterling was never much of a kid who read, but he was an older brother (cousin, really, but he leaves the role of being a pedant to Henry) and that meant having to walk Gloria the few country miles from the farm to the library so she could.
She was one of those kids who derived pleasure from inane things such as *school* and *education* and had larger dreams than the stretch of horizon bathed by the orange glow of dawn at Cooper Farms. Sometimes she'd squint her eyes at the line where the sun went to hide behind the mountains, and Sterling could swear she could somehow see through stone and dirt all the way out to the city.
"Did you know the hummingbird is the smallest migrant bird?"
Sterling didn't know that. Sterling didn't know a lot other useless things either, like how many kilometers in a mile or how much resistance a chair could handle before it would tip over backwards. In a few minutes, Gunther would remind him once more to keep his feet off the table and the legs of the old, repurposed school chairs on the floor, but for now, he yet had a few minutes of freedom.
"Did you know you are the tiniest Cooper? Just a few years and it'll be official. Smaller than my aunt Mary, there ought to be a prize for that."
It wasn't even approaching one of Sterling Cooper's best retort, so the spine of the book to his stomach that stole his breath away was entirely warranted.
"Can you even feign being a little impressed?"
"Birds travel together, Gloria." The chair snapped forward as he leaned in, fingers outstretched to pinch her nose in between two fingers. He was starting to sound like his uncle, unable to ramble about anything more than the importance of family sticking together when there'd never been even an ounce of warmth between the kitchen walls of their dining room. "They can do anything when they stick together."
Empty platitudes had only earned him that book spine slamming into fingers.
"Hummingbirds do not." Years later, Sterling would catch a midnight screening of Harry Potter on national TV and he'd hear Gloria's voice again in the echoes of Hermione Granger. It would drive him down the bottom of another six-pack of beer until Emma Watson's was reduced to nothing more than pleasant gibberish, far from the echoes of ghosts. "They travel alone, up to 500 miles at once. Even in spite of their size."
"It's just in their nature, Ster."
She was doing it again. That thing she did when she watched the horizon, arms folded over what would become her favorite book in years to come. That thing where she somehow understood the weight of the world, years before her older brothers would ever come to.
The look she'd given him, all quick wit, raised brows and disbelief, had shamed him into silence.
"If the tiniest bird can travel all alone to fulfill its biological destiny, what do we have to be possibly scared of?"
"Little hummingbird." Sterling had snorted, trying to chase away the loss that would not come to fruition for years to come yet. "My uncle's going to beat you if he hears you talking like that again."
A small shrug. The weight of the world, of family, legacy, and expectation shaken off her shoulders.
"I think we could all be hummingbirds."