Aaron Vesre (SWAP AU)

Forever the golden boy of the Virion Project, it’s impossible not to picture Aaron Vesre with the bright, charismatic smile that he always wears on his face -- regardless of how pained that smile might seem, at times. As the last survivor of the Project’s “golden age” and the poster child for most of the Project’s public outreach efforts, Aaron’s always believed that he doesn’t have a choice but to repress the immense grief and guilt he carries from the Outbreak Incident. He has a manic energy to the way he interacts with others, given that he’s constantly performing a happiness that he forces himself to feel. It doesn’t matter how disturbing or tragic the scene in front of him is. If the people around him are smiling, he can smile too. As long as he can laugh about it, everything must be fine!

Aaron refuses to even entertain the notion that he might need to process his own trauma -- no matter how apparent it might be to the people around him that something’s deeply wrong with him and his behavior, compared to how genuinely friendly he was before the Incident. A deep fear of failure runs through him; he wants nothing more than to protect and make the people around him happy, no matter what the costs might be in doing so. Aaron believes that the Virion Project will succeed. Anything less than that -- and he’s not sure if he’ll be able to hold himself together for much longer.