Bio

[itsametaphor]

about

NAME: Augustus Waters

NICKNAMES: Gus

AGE: 17

DATE OF BIRTH: October 15 1994


MARITAL STATUS: Single

SEXUALITY: Straight


OCCUPATION: NA

HOMETOWN: Indianapolis, Indiana

CURRENT RESIDENCE:

SIBLINGS: Julie & Martha both older half sisters

FAVORITE BAND: The Hectic Glow

ooc

NAME: Kristi

AIM: rageiscute

CONTACT: email or private plurk rageblackouts

TIME ZONE: central

{

Augustus Waters

I’m on a roller coaster that only goes up.

personality

QUIRKS: verbosity, puts cigarettes in his mouth but doesn’t smoke them

LIKES: video games, smart girls, reading, Natalie Portman

DISLIKES: basketball, cancer, hospitals

Gus is possibly one of the most optimistic people alive, at least until you know the reality of his situation, then the optimism takes on a slightly sarcastic edge. It’s hard to tell if he’s optimistic because anything less will mire him in a pit of despair or if the sarcasm is intentional. For the last several years, he’s been bombarded with ‘encouragements’ of the most optimistic kind. His parents are determined to surround him with optimism both in an effort to make his quality of life better and in an effort to buoy everyone’s attitude. By the time we see Gus in the novel, he’s been dealing with having cancer and the remission of said cancer for at least two years, possibly a bit longer so he’s had a good deal of time to adjust to being an amputee as well as being a cancer survivor.

The thing that you have to understand about Gus is that everything he presents to the world is a façade. He is charming and pretentious as hell, funny, witty, and arrogant and it is all a desperate (if very good) façade to keep everyone from seeing how terrified he is, not necessarily of dying, but of not being remembered, of not making his mark on the world. Gus wants to be the hero of his own story in every way possible. He wants to live a good life. He wants to be remembered after he dies. I think part of this is spawned from the hopes and dreams that he would one day be a famous professional basketball player as well as being one of the popular kids before he got cancer. He mattered at one time as more than the kid that got cancer or the kid that lost his leg. He wants to matter that way again. This is supported by something he says to Hazel when he first meets her. He wants to know what her story is. She starts to tell him about her cancer and he interrupts her saying ‘no, not your cancer story, your real story’. He wants his real story to be more extraordinary, more pervasive than his cancer story. This fear is the driving force behind everything that Gus does from the way he speaks to the way he plays video games.

Despite everything that he has gone through, Gus is hopeful. Yes, in part it’s for his parents, but part of it is for him. He wants that miracle.

Gus is also, beneath everything, still a little bitter about what cancer took from him. He makes a point to say a couple of times that he loathes basketball now. In my opinion, he doesn’t loathe basketball so much as it hurts because at one time his life revolved around basketball and now it’s simply a reminder of everything that’s been taken from him.

While he’s not terribly inclined to shout about his condition to everyone (and less so as he gets worse) once someone knows that he’s sick, he’s not afraid to play the cancer card either. He’s well acquainted with Cancer Perks and he’ll take them where he can get them/when they help him get something he wants.

Gus is determined and stubborn. When he wants something, he goes after it with a dogged persistence. His relationship with Hazel is evidence of this. She refused to date him at first he persisted until she relented. We see more evidence of this when his cancer returns and he wants to go to Amsterdam. He and his mother argue with him eventually yelling at her that it is his life and he will do with it what he wants. He then puts on a calm face, walks out the door and goes to Amsterdam rather than start chemo again.

In some ways, Gus is fearless. Part of it is knowledge of his own mortality lending him courage, but I feel as if Gus was fearless before he got sick. He’s got that casual sort of attitude about things. He’s had his heart broken before (his ex girlfriend died of a brain tumor) and he understands that part of life is getting hurt. He says ‘You don’t have a choice in this life about whether you get hurt, but you do have a choice in who hurts you’. He’s not afraid of putting himself out there and getting hurt. Maybe it’s because he’s already experienced a massive amount of physical and emotional pain as a young person or maybe it’s that same ‘I’m immortal’ illusion that so many teenagers have. Either way, he’s wiser than his age would imply.

appearance

HEIGHT:6’4

WEIGHT: 175

HAIR: brown

EYES: brown

In Teleios, he does have two legs now thanks to Agentmas and Annie Cresta

history

Augustus is the only male in a family of girls. He has two older half sisters who are about 10-12 years older than him. He is the baby of the family and his mother and father’s only child together.

In school, Gus was always the popular kid: funny, charming, good looking, intelligent and talented. Gus’ parents have a video of him at five years old running circles around his older sisters with a basketball. He knew, even at that young an age, how to dribble it. He was, according to all mentions, an incredibly gifted basketball player. His room is full of trophies and medals from his time playing basketball. The plan was always to play basketball, get a scholarship to a college and eventually, if he was lucky, end up in the NBA.

His entire life changed one day when he was about 13 or 14. He was practicing and felt a pain in his hip. That pain was osteosarcoma, the most common form of bone cancer. In the course of his treatment, his leg was amputated just above the knee in hopes that it would rid him of the cancer. He also underwent chemo therapy to that end and it worked. Gus officially went into remission.

When the novel opens, Gus is at a cancer support group to support his friend, who has a cancer of the eyes. He meets Hazel and appears to fall head over heels for her. Hazel has thyroid cancer that has spread to her lungs. She is responding well to an experimental therapy that shrinks her tumors, but it is only buying her time. She will eventually die from her cancer. Hazel and Gus begin dating and Gus uses his make-a-wish wish in order to take Hazel to Amsterdam to meet her favorite author.

In Amsterdam, Gus tells her that he is no longer in remission. He went for an annual checkup a few weeks ago, had a PET scan and he ‘lit up like a Christmas tree’, which means his cancer has spread everywhere. From there, Gus’ cancer gets rapidly worse. They try an experimental chemo therapy on him, but he doesn’t respond.

Throughout the series Gus goes from yearning for his life to be something more, something bigger, something more important to telling Hazel before he dies ‘it’s a good life, Hazel Grace’. He gains a sort of acceptance about what his life is and how it matters despite the fact that it wasn’t a very big or very long life.

CODE BY TESSISAMESS