original character aesthetic meme » alexandros grey
swallowing mud, swallowing glass, the smell of blood on the first four knuckles.
- r.s., little beast
Born in the idyllic, consumerist bubble of a post-World War II suburban America to a traditional Catholic family as picture-perfect as any other, Alex is a man of could-have-beens who’s childhood was merely a veneer of idealism easily shattered by an absent father and abusive mother. He was a restless youth who could never abide by the rules and despised ‘respectable standards’, an unruly child unable to be contained under his mother’s smothering hand who grew into an increasingly violent, reclusive young adult. Desperate to smash the calm surface of suburbia’s sameness, terrified of living his mother’s life - of being stuck in a vacuum of packaged identity, manufactured to appearance, functionally dead.
He didn’t sign up for Vietnam so much as he was handcuffed into it, a grateful lamb to the slaughter at the fresh age of eighteen. Rather than be locked up behind bars for arson and assault, Alex accepted a promise of future freedom - should he survive - at the cost of his immediate autonomy, undergoing several chemical exposure experiments at the hands of the CIA. The war became his home, a natural extension of self allowed to unhinge in the ugliest way, and for nearly four tours Alex savaged his way through the meaning of survival no matter the cost.
Returning home found him becoming involved in a string of criminal businesses, dancing in and out of prison sentences, various addictions, gang wars and other unsavoury affairs. Alex refers to this period as “the card shuffle”, unable to retain many memories beyond a hazy gestalt of alcohol and hedonism, sandwiched between the raw and visceral violence of Vietnam and the savage mauling that marked its end as if cutting the deck - and then, with all his cards upon the table, his rebirth as a werewolf.
Falling further down this new rabbit hole saw him join an even deeper underground with a mafia dedicated to and run by others of his kind, a dog-eat-dog world wherein he put his acquired skills and taste for the violence of chaos to good use as both a bodyguard and a hitman for the Madeiro family.
The poster child of bad decisions and disaster, vice wrapped in savagery and sin; your regular tall, dark and not-exactly-handsome straight from the pages of what could only be bad news, all crooked nose, dark hair and bar-fighter bruises.
His nebulous dedication to amusement without responsibility is contagious but in a fatal way. There’s a viciousness hiding in him like a sleeping sickness and it’s almost terrifying, his careless savagery – but is it apathy or control? Having fallen too far through the cracks to ever hope to pick himself up again, Alex has come to a point where playing by the rules is of no value or interest. Alex does what Alex wants and, while it’s always been this way (in some form or another), the inherently predatory nature of his disease lends him a threatening gravity.
Morality holds no meaning for him - having seen humanity at the peak of its ugliness in the darkest corners of Vietnam, he believes any search for higher understanding is a pointless affair (man is, after all, the worst animal of all). Alex lives purely for the moment and cares for little else besides the instant gratification that vice provides whether carnal or carnivorous by nature, addicted to the high of adrenaline no matter the price.
In the deck of karma, he is the Hanged Man and he is the Fool; a martyred Saint Sebastian figure in the flesh, who, even pierced by a countless array of arrows like a holy wreath, has accepted whatever terrible fate he is inevitably destined to befall.
