Collection of Hearts

Tomas Bio

Name: Tomas

Species: Human

Gender: Male

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Description: Tomas has brown eyes and hair, his skin tone lighter than usual due to long hours inside studying and later working in an office. His hair is kept short for work, but it had been grown out in college when you two met, something you had enjoyed as you ran your fingers through it once you got past the awkward part of your early relationship. You had actually mourned the loss when his job required he cut his hair short, causing him to joke that you had only loved him for his hair.

Personality: Tomas tries to support those he cares about, but when faced with a true challenge in life, he has a hard time facing it head-on. As long as life is easy going and the hardest choice he has to make is where to go for dinner or what job to apply for, he is fine. The moment it becomes a choice of how to move past a major accident or finding out if you can still love him afterward, he doesn't know how to handle things anymore. Rather than face such a hard choice, he instead vanishes, trying to hide from the responsibilities that he doesn't know how to deal with, whether because he actively chose to ignore such things or perhaps because he was never taught how to face up to and make hard choices.

For all his faults, he did love you, and he honestly thought leaving you was for the best. After all, how could you love the man who ruined your life?

Perhaps in another world, he would have made a different choice in how to handle the aftereffects of the accident, ending in a different future for himself and you. Maybe he would have married you, taking you to Greece for your honeymoon as planned.

Perhaps you would have even been happy with him. And maybe he would have taken you on a tour of the islands...

Favorite things: His favorite food is duck a l'orange, which he used to order at least once a month when taking you out for dinner. He enjoyed trying new foods when given the chance, often trying to convince you to try them with him, but made it a habit to order at least one familiar dish so neither of you would go hungry if what you tried didn't appeal to your taste buds.

He prefers neutral tones, often favoring soft browns and pale greys, although he will usually have something on that brings a splash of color to his outfit. Due to his job, he is usually seen in suits, with casual days allowing for him to lose the jacket and just wear the slacks and a button-down shirt or a really nice polo, but those were few and far between.

Hobbies: Tomas' hobbies tend to run alongside of his favorite things, mostly focused around trying new foods and traveling to new places. This once included dragging you along with him to those places, even if most of them were simply whatever place he could find that was within a few hours drive, always on the lookout for new parks or trails that he hadn't been to before.

He also had the odd hobby of going on walks through public gardens and taking pictures of them during the different seasons, then organizing those into an album. He was always convincing you to look at them with him so he could show you how different everything looked through the various months of the year and even from one year to the next.

Tomas is both fascinated and bothered by the effects of time on the world around him. He abandoned the copious amount of notes he once kept on the small changes he noticed over the years, be it a new scar on his hands from a cut he'd gotten at work or a small laugh-line appearing on his mom's face when he went to visit her. It was both his obsession and a deep-rooted fear that he hid from the world.

History: Tomas was coddled by his older middle-class parents as he grew up. They doted on him since they had given up on having any children of their own after years of trying. He has one older sibling that was adopted just a couple years before his own birth. He always looked up to her as they grew up together, never seeing her as anything but a sister regardless of their different origins.

When a few people pointed out their different skin tones, Tomas would simply stare at them before making a scathing remark upon their poor manners and walk away. He cherished his sister and simply wished to protect her as she had always done for him in his childhood. Soon, the comments stopped, enough people speaking out after feeling their own courage to do so given strength by Tomas' refusal to back down.

When the time came that she finally left for college, Tomas was the one to constantly ask her if she had packed everything, if she was sure she really wanted to go someplace so far away, to remind her that if she changed her mind, he was just one phone call away.

Sadly, she never made that phone call and two years after leaving home, she was buried in the local cemetery next to her and Tomas' grandparents. At the age of 15, Tomas had lost the person who was most important to him due to violent rioting outside the college campus one evening. It took him years to move past the loss and try looking forward to his own future.

When he finally started thinking about what he wanted in his life, all he could think of was the dreams his sister used to always tell him about, how she wanted to change the world for the better. How she wanted to create a world where everyone could feel the same happiness and love that she had found within the family that had taken her in, even though she had been past the baby stage most families wanted when adopting.

By the age of 19, Tomas was off to college, eager to learn everything he could about both law and politics so that he could find ways to change how the world treated its people. Or at least help further the movement that was already underway.

He hadn't even been there for a full year before he met the girl who would change his life, for better or for worse. After all, nobody ever said love was an easy road to travel.

My personal thoughts on Tomas: Tomas started out just an idea of a character who would help start the story, give the reader insert a reason to leave her life behind (even if just for a short time) and go on the trip she always wanted to take. However, the more I thought about Tomas as a character, the more he grew in my mind. Even though he only shows up a few times in the story, in my mind he evolved beyond those few paragraphs. It was for this reason that I wrote the alternate story (oneshot) that featured more time with Tomas, a kind of "what if" chance for Tomas to stay with the reader insert. Even then, he did not get a happy ending and it still failed to build him up to the character that was running through my mind at times. It was only in this bio that I was finally able to expand on him as a person, as well as a drabble for him that showed a peek into his future after having left the reader behind.

It would be weeks (in the book's time, because irl about a year passed before the ending finally appeared) before he finally got to show up again in the first Alternate Ending, confronting the reader so he could finally apologize for not having been strong enough. It would hurt him to find out she had already moved on from him, but he would be strong enough (finally) to accept that and help her when she needed it. It was Tomas who took the blinded reader back to Greece, returning her to the island where Medein dwelled.

And then he left, alone once again, but happy that at least the one he (still) loved could be happy with the one that she loved.

Honestly, I felt sad for Tomas because he was too afraid to stay beside her. He feared her reaction to seeing him, feared her blaming him for what happened, feared seeing her grow to hate him. He had thought he was a strong man, but what happened broke him far easier than he ever thought possible. Mostly because he blamed himself. For the accident, for the injuries she sustained, for not being the one to find her and pull her from the wreckage... But mostly for not being able to face a future where she would no longer love him as she always had.

Tomas is the guy who might have started as a small side character, but while everyone's back was turned, he grew into a person in his own right. Even if most of that was inside my own mind while I typed furiously away at the book he was only hinted at within. I was happy to be able to finally show people more of this and only hope that for some of you reading this now, maybe you will come to see him as something other than just the guy who left the reader behind. Even if that is, ultimately, what happened.