tell me about your characters! give me some facts you've been excited to share!
Harley
Harley - He becomes Harley on day 1. He becomes Harley when asked for a name that doesn't have consequences in the skin that wears it and he gives the name Harley that it's not been paid for in blood, like it hasn't always been something he held behind his teeth. He gives Harley to Thomas and it feels like receiving something instead. He doesn't know how he'll ever thank Thomas for that.
Michael - He chooses Michael on day 32. When he and Thomas are collecting flowers in the marsh and Thomas says his full name to the faeries that don't exist on the bankline, Harley wants to follow and say his own. He chooses an angel that has never chosen him, but he remembers his grandmother's crepe skin fingers on his wrist, telling him about the angels that she had known in her life, telling him about her Michael, and how she could only hope her little one could find a man like him someday. He names himself after his grandfather, but also after his grandmother, also after his aunts and his uncles and all of the people in his life who will never know that he is Harley, and maybe they wouldn't have taken it well, but they're still his. They're still family.
Austin - He's always been an Austin. He has not always known what that meant. When he was small, being an Austin was a point of pride, his father's stone hands on his shoulders, lifting him up to put him onto his father's own shoulders so he could see above the sky. When things got more difficult at home, when the family collapsed and both of his parents found their hope down at the bottom of a bottle, Austin was a point of contention. Is your family really your family if they don't take care of you? If sometimes, it feels like they don't love you? Austin is just a word he says now, a period at the end of his sentence. He doesn't always know what it means.
Harley Michael Austin is a spun glass firecracker, the original glass canon, he does not know how to protect himself instead of lashing out at everyone else. He is fiendfyre, honest and horrible destruction, but only because he doesn't know how to be anything else.
Thomas
Thomas - When his mother decided to call him Thomas, it was after a father that no longer exists in Thomas's life. His father was always Tom, never Thomas or Tommy or Tim or anything else, just Tom, so Thomas is Thomas and sometimes his mom calls him Tommy, but that's it. He's never, never Tom. Thomas has two meanings: twin, and leader. Thomas has never wanted to be either.
Hayden - Hayden has always been his favorite part about his name. It's soft, sweet, kinder than Thomas knows how to be, he thinks, kinder than anything he can put his hands to without breaking apart. Hayden. It's the parts of him that have never been touched by the rougher things he's seen, and Hayden is who Thomas could be if maybe, maybe he hadn't been touched by those things either. Thomas Hayden. Maybe one day.
Sparks - His mother's surname. Thomas changed his last name when he was fourteen, didn't want to be connected to his father like that anymore, didn't want to be someone that he wasn't, just wanted to be his mother's son and his sister's brother and exactly what everyone wanted from him.
Thomas Hayden Sparks is a weaponless peacekeeper, the safety of an unloaded gun. He will protect and protect and protect until he runs himself ragged, and he just wants to spare everyone else the trauma of knowing that he was working very hard at all.
Taglist
@wildswrites, @jostenwrites, @drowsy-quill, @elusiveink, @writeherewaiting, @ecritblr, @7chee, @bookupastorm, @the-starlight-writer
