• • have you ever seen lightening and snow

history
Mitch Cooley was, for all intents and purposes, the knight in shining armor Camilla Svarda had been searching for her entire life. Though he was a little rough around the edges, it was his free-as-a-bird attitude and carelessness that drew her in. Having grown up under the watchful eye of her strict catholic parents, he was the adventure she'd been looking for. It didn't matter that family and friends alike were all too keen to tell her to keep her head on her shoulders, Camilla was swept off her feet. Their warnings meant nothing to the girl and in a rather hasty decision, she was moving out of her tiny hometown of Sleepy Hollow and off to Chicago. It would be a decision she would regret eighteen years later. All the same, life wasn't so bad in the windy city. While it was certainly no fairy tale, it was a comfortable life. The two shared a small apartment just blocks from the garage where Mitch found employment. It wasn't a bother that it was a very blue collar life, Camilla was comfortable and they were happy as far as anyone could tell. She wasn't even bothered that she had yet to receive a ring on her finger. There was a roof over her head and food on the table, those things were much more important. Certainly more so when, just after a year of living together, the couple learned they were expecting a child.

Trinidad Gabriel ( most commonly called Gabe ) was born on a sunny may afternoon. There were ten tiny little fingers and ten tiny little toes. Two eyes and the same little nose as his mother. He was a perfectly healthy baby boy with a head of dark hair. Upon first glance, he was deemed the apple of his mother's eye and the proud father was charmed by the tyke. In Camilla's eyes, their life was absolutely perfect just the way that it was. In fact, life seemed to take a good turn in the months to follow Gabe's birth. Work at the garage picked up and with a promotion, the money was able to move the family of three out of their small apartment into a house. It was the perfect little place, really. There was a room for a nursery. There was a yard that needed to be mowed every Sunday and even a small plot for a tiny garden. There was furniture to be bought and a real kitchen that was used to cook family meals. And while it may not have compared to the Victorian that she'd once called home, it was the place where she could raise a family and it was a place that Gabe knew as home. And for several years, it was. Gabe grew in that house and it was everything that he knew and loved. There were small scratches in the living room archway, marking his growth. There were his initials scratched into the floorboards of his bedroom, under the bed he would slip beneath and pretend he was a wild explorer on a jungle mission. There were the neighborhood kids he called friends, and the playground just up the block where they'd all go and let their imaginations run wild. While it may have been the big city, it was a city he loved. It was a city that, as he grew older, turned into his playground. And while it may not have been swing sets and jungle gyms all the time, it was something that kept him busy.

Sadly, that all came crumbling down around him just a few months after his seventeenth birthday. It only took one phone call and the world came to a halt. The news of his father's incarceration was devastating to Gabe, a boy who all but idolized his father. Worse yet, for an act that was frowned upon in the household. He was scolded for taking one too many tylenol one afternoon so, to discover that his father had been helping to traffic drugs into the city was a very hard pill to swallow. More devastating was his mother's disgust. The house he'd loved was bought with drug money. The furniture, the food, the clothing he wore. It all felt cheap and dirty, no matter how nice it was. With that in mind, Camilla packed up the both of them and they made the trek back to the one place where they knew they'd be safe from prying eyes and loose lips. Sleepy Hollow was nothing like the city he'd grown up in. For one, it was much smaller. For another, it lacked the people he knew. Despite having made summer trips to visit his grandparents, Gabe was a stranger in the new town. Everything from the house he lived in down to the clothes he was wearing were strange to the young man. Once a very social person, the seventeen year old just couldn't seem to handle watching his family come apart at the seams. It would a long time before he felt complete again.

Sleepy Hollow wasn't the worst thing to happen to him, however. There, Gabe was able to reconnect with a childhood friend that he saw only briefly over the last few years. Felicity Elzinga was, for all intents and purposes, his partner in crime. Though he typically referred to girl as nothing more then his best friend, there was quite a bit that he was able to pile into that small title. It was the decision they made to leave the small town of Sleepy Hollow after graduating high school that put Gabe on the road to recovery. At least, that's where it began in his opinion. While it seemed as if they were getting in over their heads at such a young age; moving to Providence and buying a ramshackle house for the price of the land, it was the best decision the young man could have ever made. It was years of hard work, long days, late nights, and a whole lot of TLC that turned their borderline condemned box into a home. In Providence, Gabe enrolled himself at the Rhode Island School of Design. His artistic talents being something that he had only recently discovered, the young man took it upon himself to explore and revel in this new outlet. It would appear that he had quite a knack, taking it so far as to base an entire trip to Italy around a two week workshop. Family aside, art was Gabe's life and his most used form of expression.

Graduating was, however, not the most exciting thing to take place in the last year. With years together under their belt, Gabe and Felicity tied the knot in a small ceremony. While they had eloped initially, a wedding would follow upon their return. Far too much work had gone into the planning and, despite the head that it had caused, there was really no way they could simply let that work go to waste. As much as he would hate to admit it, Gabe enjoyed being able to share such a pivotal moment of his life with those he cared for most. Now settling into married life far easier then he could have ever dreamed he would have, he is far from the angry young man that he once was so fond of being.

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