Maddox Xiao | Twenty; Survivor
House: Torren Security Class: 2 Status: Infected - Telepathy
Everybody told Maddox he was so much like his father. But the truth was, he grew up much like his British adoptive parent, Miles, but he was nothing like his real father.
Not that being like Kevin Tsai would have been a bad thing, by most people’s books, even by his own, but Maddox was simply everything his birth father wasn’t. His ambitions were driven not by numbers or statistics or power, but by art and passion and love. There was nothing Maddox did that he didn’t put his whole heart into—in fact, he wore it on his sleeve. Propelled himself through life with an attitude of honesty and compassion.
A dancer, like his mother, and an artist, like her husband, Maddox spent his time listening to music, smoking pot on the beach watching the sunset, blowing glass at his father’s shop down by the harbor.
He was a box breaker, in every way. Did nothing he didn’t want to, nothing he didn’t feel, and he believed he was better for it. The world of the 2160s was a mechanical, hollow place, and he refused to live an equally empty life. Such was his determination, in fact, that he ditched his electronics. His phone, his gadgets, his 24/7 connection to the internet and to Echo, and he lived as unthethered to technology as he could. He made it his goal to keep himself grounded. Feel the grass beneath his bare feet. The sand between his toes. Know the heat of smooth rocks from the sun under his palm. These were the things worth living for. These were the things that were worth his energy.
These, and music. Dance. Expression. And for someone so in tune with himself and his spirituality, he was remarkably bright, well spoken and courageous. In fact, his friends had once (okay, more than once) compared him to Rufio, the character from the 1990's story of Peter Pan, Hook, and it’d funnily enough become a lasting nickname.
Losing Miles had been a hard hit. He’d been old enough to know what it meant that he was dead, but not quite old enough to understand it at the level that he should. And his pain manifested as anger and solitude, for a good couple of years. Everything about him got darker. His music, his mood, his friends, his art.
But eventually, time healed, as it often promises to, and as a budding teenager he had his whole life ahead of him.
Until he didn’t, anymore.
Having Kevin in his life had been something he’d gotten used to. He’d grown to love the man as a father, eventually, but nothing had brought them quite as close as the trauma that was D-Day. They’d had so little in common, aside from their unconditional and familial love for his mother Mia, and though the apocalypse didn’t change that, it didn’t change everything else.
Loss and fear has a way of breaking down walls. Bringing people together and forming bonds that might not have formed otherwise. It makes people vulnerable. And in times of vulnerability, it is in the nature of the human condition to want to be close to someone. To be protected and to protect.
Maddox had always had a connection to his “Uncle Kev” at least, as he’d basically raised him since Miles’ death, but the man never truly became his ‘father’ until after the sky had fallen, and taken Maddox’ mother with it.
The five miserable years of the aftermath were made somewhat less horrible, and significantly less lonely, with Kevin by his side, and together they made moving on possible.
Maddox grew up to be just as passionate and enigmatic as he has been in the Old World, except now he’s older, more wounded, and has much more to be angry about. He finds himself more and more intrigued with the idea of these ‘Rebel’ groups forming, and since the rise of the New Wave Reformists calling themselves ‘government’, his passion has taken the wheel. Their narcissistic, close-minded and unfair beliefs make him angry, on behalf of himself and the friends he’s made over the years, and he refuses just stand by and watch these people form the society their new world will be based on.
At the Colony, he’s begrudgingly willing to play along for the time being, in part due to his nagging, worried father, and in part because he knows the best thing he can do for himself right now is to keep a low profile. But he keeps his ears to the ground at all times for rumblings of a rebellion, and knows that though it may take time to become anything, it’s a side he wants to fight for. A stand he has to make.
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