Character Study! Colton
Name: Colton Daniel Walker
DOB: March 17th
Height: 6’4”
Hair: Blond
Eyes: Mid-Blue
Likes: Comfort food, playing guitar, reading, rainstorms, History
Dislikes: Shrimp, cold weather, shopping (for anything), being interrupted
Greatest Fear: Losing a loved one
Colton grew up in Morrisville, North Carolina, with his parents (Daniel and Carolyn) and his older sister, Charlotte. He has blond, wavy hair that he keeps long enough to pull back at the nape of his neck, and he has piercing blue eyes. He remembers a lot of his childhood growing up; mainly summer days of running through the tall grass with his friends trying to find snakes to scare the neighborhood girls with, or climbing trees in the backyard. His sister, Charlotte, was only three years older than him, but for as far back as he can remember, she was always very nurturing and protective. He loved her very much and looked up to her when they were growing up, often following her around, but she never seemed to mind much. Her personality was infectious; much like Maritza’s, and it is that - and Maritza’s natural over-protectiveness that she seems to possess - that makes him think of Maritza as a sister to him.
Once, when he was six, there was a loud thunderstorm that came through in the middle of the night that woke him up out of a sound sleep. He became scared of the thunder and the bright flashes of lightning, but before he could even leave the bed to run for his parents, Charlotte was there, pulling him from the bed and over to the window on her knees. He cried, saying he didn’t want to go near the window, but she soothed him and told him that thunderstorms were God’s fireworks. She pointed to the jagged lines that crackled across the sky, and smiled widely with each resounding boom of thunder. She called them pretty, and Colton stopped crying, watching the light show going on outside his bedroom window. Ever since then, Colton has always loved thunderstorms, and will often stand outside on a covered porch or balcony just to watch the sky.
He used to love watching his father play guitar. Daniel was a good guitarist - even having played professionally for some venues when he was younger - and Colton asked him to teach him how to play. He began learning guitar when he was eight, and he stuck with it, despite the cracked and bleeding fingertips he used to always get before they began to callus. When his parents and sister died in the car accident when he was twelve, Colton refused to even touch the guitar for nearly a year; it reminded him too much of his father. It was eventually his grandmother who talked him into playing again, and he has never put it down since.
Colton is a very sensitive guy, although you would never guess that, given his gruff exterior. He puts a lot of thought into gifts for people, and he usually has an uncanny knack for getting them the perfect gift that they never knew they needed or wanted. He is supremely observant of others, and can usually read someone very quickly and accurately within a few hours of knowing them.
He keeps his emotions very tightly locked up, and the only person who has ever had success at reading him correctly has been Claire, although she is oblivious to the fact that she is usually right. The reason he is so stoic is not something he was born with, however. He developed his habit of hiding his emotions when he was living with his grandmother. He didn’t have a very good outlet for his grief when he lost his family, and being only twelve, he had no idea how to grieve. He tried talking with his grandmother about it, but he soon noticed that continued mention of the incident only seemed to pain her more, and so he stopped mentioning it altogether. The school tried to intervene and force him into counseling the first year, but he stopped going to his meetings after about three months, claiming he’d gotten help outside of school. The school officials never checked to see if this was true.
For a very long time he blamed himself for their deaths, even though he knew there was nothing he could have done to change the outcome had he gone with them that day. He used to cry silently at night, smothering his tears with his pillow so that his grandmother would not hear him. He was angry that they’d died so suddenly and without warning, without a chance for him to say goodbye. It was not until he was nearly seventeen that he could finally be grateful that their deaths were practically instantaneous and that there was no suffering involved. He used the same philosophy when his grandmother died; at least she hadn’t suffered - she’d died in her sleep. He was quicker to accept her death, although he began to develop a superstition about saying ‘goodbye’ to someone before leaving the house. Losing someone he loves is one of his biggest fears to this day.
Colton has chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome. He says things that come out completely opposite of how he’d intended them to sound, but it’s always too late to call the words back. Sometimes his fear of saying the wrong thing gets in the way of him actually saying anything, and he is often misunderstood because of it. He tries very hard to do what is right with actions rather than words, but sometimes, as we all know, that can backfire just as much - if not worse - than if he’d simply said what was on his mind in the first place.