i will wade out
till my thighs are steeped in burning flowers
-E.E. Cummings; i will wade out
NameHanna Oswin
NicknamesOz
Ozzy
Han
Age18
GenderMale
Sexual OrientationHomosexual
GradeSenior
Social ClassGifted
AppearanceForgettable. An apt way of putting Hanna in a box and Hanna's okay with that box. More than okay. It makes him ecstatic. Lean, skinny, with muscles out of necessity rather than vanity. When a doctor tells you if you don't get some kind of mass, and continue having a diet consist of crap, crap, and more crap, then you're not going to live past 30. And if you do, good luck with the rest of your life. So, for a shut in, what's the best solution to that problem? Get a treadmill and hack yourself a senior discount at the local grocery store for all those lovely organic veggies and what not. Leaving soda behind, however, was a nightmare and Hanna quickly tried to substitute it with unhealthy doses of coffee. Of which his mother decided, no, that's not going to happen and bought him a variety pack of different teas.
Hanna approaches fashion as one approaches a work of art, having no sense of what the hell that Dali painting means and how it got there in the first place. Most people of a better fashion sense call Hanna's style Hobo Chic Aesthetic, or WoW Addict Vogue (Clean Version). It mostly consists of numerous amounts of sweatshirts, hoodies, sweaters, jackets, and baggy pants of an all kind variety. Mostly in the colors black, grey, dark grey, light grey, or brown. Underneath it's usually a button up that's two sizes too large because his mother thought he'd grow into them. She thought wrong.
Of all things, Hanna's features could be considered striking, in a 'he could be handsome but I really don't know' kind of way. Honestly, though, Hanna's just a bit plain with a flare of 'exotic', as his mother's boss calls him (she just strains a smile and keeps from punching him), due to his father's ethnicity and ancestry. Wide, green eyes tend to draw the most attention; it doesn't help that he either always looks like a kicked puppy or a crack addict, depending on who you talk to. Most of his features usually hide behind a laptop screen, or in the shadows of a hood, lessening the sharpness of his jaw, prominent lips and coarse, curly hair—it's always short due to the difficulty it poses when long.
Just a lot of things for the simplicity of it. Hanna likes simple. It means he doesn't have to deal with complications and if some do arise, they're usually relatively easy to handle. Low risk; low reward. That's how he likes to approach most things that aren't his laptop or on the internet. Though maybe simple lacks the change he needs, but Hanna likes that his slouch brings him from a 5'9" to a 5'7", or that people tend to consider him invisible. It eases Hanna's anxiety by miles when no one bothers to even look at him.
I will take the sun in my mouth
and leap into the ripe air
Personality"I see you in your ivory towers, singing hymns I sang in my slumber.
And I'm here, stuck under thorns, bending in prayer."
The silence carries his smiles under the hush of voices in dimly lit hallways. Rolled in Persian rugs, laughter dusted underneath with all the grey and the dirt. Bent at the knee in quiet prayer. For solitude. For courage. For strength. Give me fruitful labor and let me lead my life unbound, yet chained to your will.
No one knows the lash of oppression quite like Hanna Oswin and his father before him. Vast intellects, stretching miles and stars and flesh, crammed into a scrunched up, frail body of an unwilling devout man. And his son beneath him, set at the bent knees of his father to look up at what the people demanded of him. At the shining crowns of golden emperor's in their pure, cream white glory or the bearded man speaking in tongues wondering of faith and god.
And when father gave up, what was his son to do? When picking up pieces made every facet of your being. When purpose dwindled down to making sure papa ate and drank and slept. A child has nothing other than to curl in on himself, and make sure the nasty world that broke Atlas down and crushed Atlantis into the ocean depths couldn't reach him. They couldn't see him and his shaking, frailty, hidden under a mother's skirt when she wanted to do the same. Not knowing of what bearded men said to their own, or what dusty kings on salt thrones meant when they said things of God and hacks and blind miracles, turning lead into gold through prayer.
The son knew nothing but what his father showed him of the world, through the vicarious eyes of a child. Thus the world wasn't meant for him and the sun never rose, so dawn never broke. And now the world, in it's darkness, wants nothing more than his complete obedience, to monitor and censor every word from his mouth, to hollow him out and put someone better in his place. Better. Not this shaking child afraid of the door and the sun and the air.
Suddenly, the strings and the hand and the wood seems far better an option than living crippled by fear.
Likes- Computers
- Programming/Coding
- Robotics and Engineering
- Space
- Computer Games
- When people touch him
- When people touch his things
- Mouth breathers
- Tapping
- Loud obnoxious people
- Getting doxxed by people; or generally having his info taken from anyone, most likely the government
- Being wrongfully accused and punished for something he didn't do
- Cows. Fuck cows. They're scary. Jesus Christ.
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
Strengths- Computer Savvy
- Online Networking
- Quick Thinker
- Dire Anxiety
- Always Paranoid
- Can't Do Real Life Social Interaction
Family full of immigrants? Check. Father lacking any sense of America's spoken language? Check. A mother who has to translate literally everything into Arabic? Check. A grandfather with a crippling sense of faith and a nasty attitude toward his daughter-in-law, despite the fact that she pays his medical bills? Oh, check times a thousand.
Military lad or lady falls in love with the on base computer tech, who suffers from a terrible lack of confidence, has a child, gets married, and then gets discharged for an injury that was hereabouts fatal. She survived, hurrah, then honored with a purple heart and left to live her life. Mostly, though, her life consisted of paying for frequent medical bills to a father in law that hated her, had diabetes, and required frequent dialysis.
That, in a nutshell, began Hanna's life from Egypt to San Francisco, California where, his mother, Rowena Oswin's family all presided. To say the entirety of her marriage dropped a bombshell on her family might have been the understatement of the century. What more, Rowena brought news of her recent pregnancy, thus bringing Hanna Oswin into a constant state of tumult. Both father and mother lived continuously under bombardment from both parents, of injury, of faith, of raising a child with little money to offer themselves. And Hanna came born into all of it.
Yet, both parents spent their time giving him something. Giving him time and love. Making sure he knew who he was and where he came from. And maybe skirting the edges of what most conservative parents with rather strict religious backgrounds would attempt. But Rowena was a practicing Buddhist and Hanna's father, Aabir, was a tentative Muslim. Tentative being practicing, but not quite as devout as his father wanted him to be and not quite as sacrilegious as Aabir's boss demanded he be.
Unfortunately, with the state of things, Hanna couldn't hide from all of it, no matter how well they'd hid him. And suddenly Mrs. Oswin reprimanded Rowena for brainwashing their grandson with hocus pocus, mumbo jumbo; Mr. al-Enezi reprimanded Aabir for denouncing his faith by not strictly teaching his child respect, and devotion to his religion. Despite his parents' wishes, Hanna was stripped and torn both ways in subtleties and circumventing. Navigating around both parents to teach a kid conflicting views of right and wrong while exposing him to continuous arguments and yelling over the phone about this and that—financial instability and prejudice slurs. It scared Hanna. It put him in a shell and told him never to come out again. And though his mother stood proudly, confident, assertive, and so set in her ways, Hanna watched first hand his father crumble.
Yet, the man took his time to teach Hanna everything he could about technology. About computers and science. About the way things worked in the world. It hurt worst of all because Hanna looked to his father and saw a beacon of knowledge and wisdom; a font for which Hanna could gather answers upon answers to any of his questions. And he'd be taught for all he was worth.
Despite the cumbersome ordeals both families put their children and their grandson through, Hanna cultivated his love and his knowledge for computers with a fire. At the age of five he was already hands deep in hardware, learning words and meanings and clearly lining wires and circuits. It was difficult, he may or may not have gotten burned a few times, but this opened a world of endless, ceaseless dreams to a young boy who could barely count to twenty. Not necessarily a child savant, and mostly guided by his father's ever hovering hands, Hanna quickly took to algorithms and coding and before he could even enroll in school, Hanna's life revolved around computers in the best possible way. Soon enough, Aabir took his child swiftly out of first grade and sat him down to teach his child himself (possibly the only thing Hanna's grandfather approved of). From then on, it was less about learning how to read books and more about learning how to read code, binary, python, the entire works of programming including building up to calculus and complicated algorithms.
When she could, Rowena always came around to teach her son what her husband missed in his enthusiasm. After all, more knowledge and education could only help cultivate his budding talent.
As the years drove on and young Hanna took more and more into his mind, a vast database of computing knowledge, Aabir began to wilt. What work demanded of him, what prejudiced coworkers and bosses thought of him and tore form him piece by piece, began to eat away at Aabir. And eventually, when Aabir's own father died of kidney failure, he crumbled and broke and asked himself what faith, what science, what this world gave him. Suddenly, all he could see were his wife and child and, though that was enough to continue living for as long as they needed him, that wasn't enough to continue with passion and purpose. Eventually, Aabir broke completely and he became a shell of the man he used to be, driven to alcohol and utter silence, utter compliance, and an entire lack of faith that he once looked toward for guidance.
For Hanna, that moment defined his personality. It shaped him into what he would become and what he felt was an inevitable. Hanna grew scared of life, grew scared of what it could do and what it could turn people into. Though his mother remained vibrant, he took the hardship of caring for his father for what it really was: the world telling him that the man lying in his bed refusing to eat or drink was going to be him. That the purpose of this was to show him who he'd become. Hanna's father crumbled, from an golden idol to the remnants of Pompeii.
Computers became all Hanna could do for a long time. It became who he was when he wasn't with his father. The things he created with formulas, numbers, letters, codes, consumed his life until it molded a life of his own. Soon, Hanna's sights set on various small company pages, various sites with untouched bugs and botched lines in their algorithms. What once was picking up the pieces of his life became picking up the pieces of others. From there Hanna grew, hacking into various small company websites and fixing their processes and pages, finding bugs in small app updates or things on steam that stumped various indie game developers. And then it grew from there, and Hanna dove into various networks and companies to pick up their pieces, to adjust their coding, not because he was better than them, saw better than them, but because his life was rife with problems, issues, and things that Hanna just couldn't fix that crushed him. What he could fix, though, was computers, software. He could walk in and walk out with things patched and renewed, with maybe a minor bug here or there (hey, being a perfectionist and a programmer was a near impossibility, in fact it was a death sentence), but with most of the larger issues all nice and clean.
It wasn't until he hit the big names that the spotlight shown on Hanna. Young 16 year old waltzing into Facebook's network and walking out as if he didn't just fix the a site crash kinda made you think, 'Huh, why is that kid not my employee?' the same could be said for Google, when shielding the massive company from a hip young 30 year old hackers who thought they were all that. Of course, that put a spotlight right where Hanna didn't want it and suddenly people wanted to one up him (and they did, plenty of people did), but that also meant he was a target. Not only for companies to snatch him up and squeeze what they could from the kid, but also hackers and malicious assholes with a knack for causing havoc with a laptop. His parents were at risk, his father wallowing in his grief couldn't rightfully defend himself.
Which was exactly why Hanna took what opportunity he could and shipped himself off to Northern California's Elite Rosewood Academy, Home for the Gifted, where he found himself not only a student, but a prime candidate for the enforcing the school's cyber infrastructure. Yet, they only found a kid who they could exploit and use to their whims. And maybe they offered a little help, seeing as Rosewood Academy's own dean was married to a current director of a CIA bureau somewhere in So-Cal. That meant his parents were practically off the radar and he could do them as many favors as he could... no matter how awful they were.
Eventually, it became more than a burden to bear and when Caelbury proposed a counter offer with less blackmailing, Hanna took it. And thus it landed him as a full time student, able to further hone his gift at an institute that didn't look to exploit him. Or, he hoped.
Favorite memory"Mom, you look gorgeous."
She bit her lip, white canine threatening to draw blood for how nervous she was. Renewing her vows. Not only that but renewing her vows in front of her son. And maybe. Maybe that meant Aabir would come out of his own shell too because seeing two gorgeous faces smiling for her, for them, that meant the world. More so than that. Just seeing them happy meant everything.
And when they said those words again. And the way his face lit up. Suddenly, Hanna was a little boy again, wondering what this card did in a computer or this or that with his father hovering above him, smiling just that smile he was seeing, and telling him, "You'll get their, shamsi," and meaning it. Both he and his mother would keep this moment for eternity because that's how long it lasted.
Least favorite memory"What happened? Ev, babe, what's wrong?"
Hanna didn't know then, nor would understand why his father felt so strongly for this man. For all he knew, his babba was a bad man, who yelled and screamed at his father and pointed out everything wrong Hanna did, and by extension everything wrong his father did. Yet, here he stumbled in, Aabir with a whiskey in his hands and alcohol on his breath. Of course, his father sulked when he drank, which was likely why he avoided alcohol in the first place, but this was unlike any of the times he'd sneak a bear or two. Hanna's father was smashed. And yet, all he did was lay on the couch while Rowena came in with a glass of water, setting them in a row until he'd finally drink and all Hanna could remember was his father's eyes on him, until they closed shut and his snores rattled the house.
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
BirthdayDecember 8th, 1997
Astrological SignSagittarius
Twitter NameTwitter - @ozwins
Snapchat - plsdont
Instagram - @halsworkshop
Tumblr - albatrosshopes. tumblr. com
Extra- Knows how to speak English and Arabic
- Is agnostic, but leans a little toward Buddhism, since his mother's meditations actually helped with his anxiety
- Yes, his mother did get him a treadmill for his birthday and, after that doctor visit, forced him to eat healthy until he was peeing out organic smoothies
- Became vegan for a day, like his mother (exciting her immensely). Couldn't take it and stopped immediately (which disappointed her immensely).
- His mom did show him how to shoot a gun. He nearly took his arm off. Doesn't like guns anymore.
- Rowena got him into a workout routine. He cut it down by half (really not a half, more than a half. She went hardcore marines on him. It wasn't pretty) and does his minimal, but it helps. He's got lean muscle to prove it and at least it makes his mom happy.
- The reason the family name is Oswin and not Aabir's was due to him preferring it when they moved over to the United States. Aabir's father disapproved tremendously and refused to learn English because of it.
- His mother doesn't have her left hand, and her right leg up to her mid thigh. Military occasional offers prototype prosthetic but only the leg they gave her works rather well.
Will i complete the mystery
of my flesh
I will rise
After a thousand years
lipping
flowers
And set my teeth in the silver of the moon
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