radcliffe-carter, xzuun atticus

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XZUUN ATTICUS RADCLIFFE-CARTER THE BASIC INFORMATION FULL NAME Xzuun Atticus Radcliffe-Carter NICKNAMES Xzuun (It rhymes with Moon. The first sound is pronounced like the s in pleasure.) GENDER Male AGE & BIRTH Nineteen. Born October 31, 1992 SEXUALITY Straight CLASS Lower PLAYED BY Tom Sturridge THE PERSONALITY Xzuun is really an enigma from an outside perspective. He doesn’t let people in for several reasons. His experiences with people have been very bad, and he’s developed Schizoid personality disorder, (read the Wikipedia article about it here) so he rarely seeks out relationships with people. His personality is very layered. Outward Negative Xzuun speaks very little. Doesn’t make eye contact very often. Hates people touching him. May act very apathetic when people are upset. Very driven to stay away from people, to the point of perhaps being offensive. Oblivious to any romantic advances. Has a difficult time trusting anyone. If someone is trying to have a casual conversation with him, he will often refuse to talk to them or just walk away. Can be very disagreeable when people to him about himself. May sometimes be visibly uncomfortable around people, particularly those older than him. Displays no emotion. Positive Quite compassionate towards those he feels comfortable with. Dedicated, hard worker. Good listener, provided he is comfortable around the person. Loyal to those who prove loyal to him. On the rare occasion that he does speak, is polite and tries to please those he respects. Works as a waiter, is very good at his job (this is the exception to his not speaking. He can talk to people in a customer / serviceperson relationship, but not in casual conversation). Does his best to help people that need it. Inward Negative Despises himself. Tries to forget the past. Works to have no emotion. No self-esteem. Not suicidal, but would gladly accept death. Ruled by fear. As hard as he tries to maintain walls, is still hurt by unkind words. Positive Even with all the hate he has of himself, is able to motivate himself to keep going. Loves learning. Knows five languages: English, German, French, Spanish, and American sign language. The people Xzuun works with all care for him very deeply, but he’s rather blind to it because he doesn’t think he deserves it, and he’s rather afraid of most of them. He believes that everyone hates him and doesn’t understand why people wouldn’t. He doesn’t recognize his own positive traits. Every aspect of him is the way it is because of his past and the way he reacted to the things that happened to him. As much as he pretends that these things did not happen to him, he is unable to move past any of it. FAMILY TIES & HISTORY MOTHER Emmiline Patricia Carter, would be 38 (died at age 26) FATHER Aaron Vincent Radcliffe, 48 SIBLINGS None that he knows of OTHER Michael Anderson, 41, father figure; Katrina Mason, 39, stalker / mother of his four year old daughter, whose name he does not know STORY Xzuun’s story really begins when his parents were children. Emmiline was part of a family of adopted children. She was the youngest of four. Her oldest brother, Allen, was ten years older than her. She absolutely adored him, but much of her adoration came out of the love of his best friend, Aaron. Allen and Aaron were not good people in any stretch of the imagination, but Emmiline was blinded by her love. Aaron, aware of his own good looks and the young girl’s crush on him, amused himself by using her in the boys’ troublemaking schemes. No matter how much trouble he got her in, she continued to be immensely infatuated with him. The crush that began at age four lasted her entire life. When she was eighteen and he twenty-eight, Aaron agreed to marry her, though he had no love for her. Just as he had been as a teenager, Aaron was not a good person into adulthood. He remained with her for one a number of months, long enough to impregnate her but not long enough to find out that she was carrying his child. Without a husband to support her, Emmiline struggled to get by. Her parents had died, two of her siblings had moved across the country, and Allen, whom she had loved so much, took Aaron’s side and did nothing to help her. She worked as a writer but made little money from it, since her passion was fantasy writing and she struggled to get published. She had elaborate novels full of a fantasy world and she found herself wishing to be part of them. In vain, she wished for things to work out so that she could give her baby a good life. On Halloween night, Emmiline went into labor and gave birth to a son, whom she named Xzuun after the main character in one of her books. His middle name, Atticus, came from the name of the father in To Kill a Mockingbird, as he was her favorite literary character. She gave her son both her name and his father’s name so that Xzuun would not forget the father he had never met. Life was never easy for the two of them. Writing still wasn’t paying off, and there were two mouths to feed now, and two bodies to clothe. She worked hard, but life was very difficult for five years. But she loved her son more than she had ever loved anyone before. She clung to him desperately as he was all that she had of the man she loved. Shortly after Xzuun’s fifth birthday, however, Aaron returned. To say that he was angry to see that Emmiline had a child was an understatement. Despite Xzuun looking so much like his father, Aaron denied that the child could possibly be his and was furious that Emmiline would dare to have an affair after Aaron had finally married her. No matter what she told him, he refused to believe that he had anything to do with the boy’s conception. Over the years of his absence, Aaron had grown even more violent and cruel than he’d been before. He never called Xzuun by his name, instead preferring to call him profane names, which he claimed were less stupid than the one she’d given him. He abused Emmiline physically, verbally, and sexually, justifying his behavior by saying that she had asked for it when she decided to marry him. The abuse didn’t reach Xzuun until he was seven. One evening in April, Emmiline tried to stand up to Aaron and he got angry, so he killed her with a knife to the gut that he staged to make it look like suicide. Xzuun’s earliest memory is hiding under the dining room table because he was afraid of the yelling and believing that his father would come after him next. Having killed his outlet, Aaron’s target for his violence became his young son, whom he still denied any relationship to. Xzuun became a game Aaron loved to play. It began as mild physical contact (hitting, kicking, etc.) but quickly grew to be worse. That Christmas, when Xzuun was eight, Aaron took Xzuun to Allen’s and the two of them amused themselves by burning Xzuun with pokers for the fireplace. Later, back at their home, Aaron snapped Xzuun’s wrist for refusing to talk to him about it. A few months later, Aaron was bored so he broke Xzuun’s right knee. It was all great fun to him. As soon as the break healed, Xzuun tried to escape one night. He ran down the street and hid in a church, which was empty except for the pastor, who had lit candles and was praying in the sanctuary. He did what he could for the panicked child, but when Aaron found him moments later, he was essentially useless. Aaron knocked the pastor out and pushed Xzuun down, which cracked his skull when he hit a pew. The fighting knocked over a few candles, which started a fire on the carpet. Aaron grabbed Xzuun and fled. The police who later investigated never found out what happened, as the fire had killed the only witness. After Xzuun turned nine, Aaron started carving patterns and words into Xzuun’s body, especially his chest and arms. He also amused himself by breaking or dislocating his son’s fingers. Until age twelve when he tripped and broke his right ankle trying to escape again, this was essentially the only physical abuse occurring. Thirteen was a bad year for the boy. Out of frustration at him one night, Aaron pushed Xzuun down a flight of stairs, which broke his left shoulder, wrist, humerus, and radius. His skull was also fractured again. Later that year, Aaron broke his left ankle out of boredom. A crucial part of the abuse all these years, however, was not the physical brokenness, but the psychological and emotional damage. To rid him of any self-esteem, Aaron frequently abused him verbally, but also forced Xzuun to talk himself down. From the very beginning at age seven, he was made to stand in front of a mirror and repeat things his father would dictate to him, such as being stupid, worthless, or ugly. He was forced to maintain eye contact with his reflection, which added to the damage. This exercise caused him to not only hate himself, but also cause a fear of his reflection and appearance as a whole. He was also occasionally abused sexually, forced to do things for his father’s pleasure as well as being touched himself, but this was rare in the grand scheme of things. In addition to the fear of his appearance and reflection, Xzuun is also afraid of the dark and small spaces due to multiple occasions where Aaron locked him in the trunk of a car for several days. He also has an extreme sensitivity to hearing swear words, which make him visibly flinch when spoken to him, due to the frequency with which his father screamed them at him. Aaron’s friendship with Allen never faltered. The latter became a doctor and was always happy to patch up Xzuun whenever Aaron broke him or there was a cut bleeding too heavily. It was this that allowed things to go unnoticed for so long. Life at school was no better than at home. He was bullied relentlessly and had no friends. In the May that he was thirteen, he was expelled for being involved in so many fights, even though he was the victim in all of them. Unable to stand the idea of facing his father with the news that he had been expelled, he ran away from home. This is how he reached Caroline. Inside the new city, Xzuun did what he had to do to survive. He was used to not eating much, as his father cared so little for his heath, so he didn’t need much food. He slept in the space between two abandoned buildings in a part of town that hardly anyone ever goes through, which is still his home six years later. As soon as he turned fourteen, he started looking for a place to work. He was slowly dying from never having enough to eat or drink, and he needed money if he was to survive. (Here’s where I start taking literary freedom. I realize this is highly unlikely in real life but for the sake of the character it has to.) The owner of a restaurant called L’Or, a man named Michael Anderson, was one of the people Xzuun interviewed with. Michael didn’t buy his story of needing extra money to support his sick mother, and he somehow convinced Xzuun to tell the true story. Xzuun explained being homeless and having run away from his father and how he hadn’t been in school since being expelled the past May. Not only did Michael give Xzuun a job, he also posed as his father to get him enrolled in school again. For this reason, Michael is one of the only people in the world that Xzuun trusts fully. Michael offered to allow Xzuun to live with him, but Xzuun refused. Nothing bad ever happened to him outside, he explained. All the abuse and bullying he had experienced had all happened inside, and, while he trusted Michael, he didn’t want to be forced to be inside when he was content living outside. While Michael wasn’t happy with this decision, he allowed it to happen, after making Xzuun promise that he would seek out indoor shelter when the weather got too bad. In the December after Xzuun turned fourteen, he did just that. It was snowing heavily and he was unable to sleep outside, so he went to a motel and intended to stay one night in the heated room. Exhausted and freezing, he entered the room and immediately undressed to take a shower, unaware that he was being followed. Katrina Mason had been watching Xzuun since the first time he had stepped inside Caroline’s borders. She went to the restaurant specifically to watch him and take pictures. She followed him around the city with a camera, waiting until he looked away to steal shots. She was legally insane by this point and had developed an elaborate fantasy in which he was in love with her and they were meant to be. The night where he checked into the hotel, she followed him and hid in the room until he emerged from the bathroom, at which point she drugged him and raped him. He spent the next nine months completely shutting down. He didn’t do anything but work anymore, desperate to forget what had happened to him. In early September, shortly before he would be turning fifteen, Katrina found him again. He was terrified by the sight of her, but when she handed him a baby and told him it was his before leaving, everything he spent months forcing away came back and he broke. The girl was undeniably his. She had his dark eyes and dark hair and he could see his own face in hers. He hated it, but mostly he was afraid. He was fourteen and homeless. There was no way he could take care of a baby when he could hardly take care of himself. He left the baby on a doorstep and never saw her again. The next two years were peaceful, relative to the rest of his life. However, when he was sixteen, Katrina showed up at the restaurant where he worked and followed him into a back room where she confronted him about his neglect of the baby, holding him at gunpoint. She had been watching him, she said, and she had never seen their child. She started screaming about how he had killed her, and he was too afraid of the sight of her to say anything in his defense. In her anger, she threw him to the ground and tried to shoot him in the heart, but missed and hit him in the left shoulder. By then, other employees were able to interfere and get her away from him. He was taken to the hospital and suffered no long term effects. Life since then, however, has been rather quiet. He’s spent his time working and trying to forget. He graduated high school at age eighteen and continues to try to repay the debt he has to Michael for essentially saving his life. He doesn’t see life ever getting better, but he’s trying to keep it from getting worse. ALL ABOUT YOU ALIAS Kirsten AGE & EXPERIENCE Sixteen, I think I’ve been doing this for about 8 years now ANYTHING ELSE I’m sorry this is so long! I just know a lot about him, is all. AFTER ALL, WE'RE ACTORS ON A STAGE