"Hope"

☙ Backstory

Born Charlotte Elise O'Hare alongside her twin sister Catherine to a military records keeper and an artist, her childhood was simple and happy in the beginning. Their family was fairly well off, her father's job paying decently high and coming from generational wealth. The two girls were often spoilt by their grandfather, a distant and cold man to most who had only just begun to soften in his later years. Charlotte's best friend, a boy her age named Adrian, was the son of her mother's best friend. Though Catherine found the boy off-putting, Charlotte was taken with him from the start and they quickly grew to be inseperable.

However, everything went south the day of Adrian's sixth birthday when, under mysterious circumstances, both childrens' mothers were murdered and Adrian disappeared. Only Charlotte was left at the crime scene, having hidden from the unknown perpitrator behind the sofa. The trauma she suffered left her mute and mostly unresponsive, incapable of telling anyone what she saw. In the end, the case remained unsolved and Charlotte was privately tutored at home, despite having once been so excited to start school.

A month after the murder, Charlotte, left unattended for just a moment, walked into the path of an in-coming car. In a state of blind grief, her father and sister scrambled to ressurrect her, losing both their lives in the process. Charlotte, now a reanimated psuedo-human with no need of food or sleep, began to wander the country aimlessly, only eventually taking refuge in a church and changing her name in the hopes of staring a new life. For years, she lived there in peace, never thinking she would ever be discovered, until one day when Adrian reappeared. Not reccognising Hope as his old friend but still finding himself drawn to her, he informed her that he'd been instructed to bring her to escort her to a special house where anomolies such as she were to be kept seperate from the world. He had apparently suffered a similar fate to hers and had been taken in by the house's owner, a fate Hope actively resisted, as she found the idea of living apart from society frightening and only wished to atone in some way for causing the death of her father and sister. Unfortunately, she was denied a choice and, following her initial conversation with Adrian, was spirited away to the house in the dead of night.

Due to being considered a flight risk, Hope is disallowed from even occassionally venturing out of the house and as such is often found listlessly sipping tea in the study or hiding in her room. Despite the rough reunion with Adrian, their friendship quickly rekindled itself, though Adrian still failed to reccognise her as Charlotte, which Hope hesitates to bring up. She also grew close to another boy their age, Torin, whose optimism often works to counterbalance Hope's tendancy to spiral into depressive episodes. Hope strives to one day formulate a plan to leave with Adrian and Torin, running away to a new place where they could live happily without the fear of rediscovery.