August "Auggie" Smirnov

Forest

Born in St Petersburg in Russia to Vesna and Feliks Smirnov, August was raised in the bustling Russian city until the age of 11 when he and his family moved to Florida, USA.

This is where the problems began. August started at a new school and was forced to adapt to the culture quickly so that the other kids wouldn't bully him for being an outsider. Under the growing pressure of school, learning fluent english and helping his mother keep their family afloat financially, he fell into a destructive friend group and shortly began to internalise a gang mentality.

At the age of 15, was involved in a series of incidents inlcuding arson, break-ins and muggings as his father began to physically abuse him, his sister and his mother. At 16, he began dating Reid and slowly made a stable group of friends (Darya, Beatriz and Sebastian) who convinced him to break up with Reid after 7 months of being together.

His father's abuse continued until he was 17 and a half years old, when a neighbour overheard one of the instances of violence and called the police who arrested his father who was later sentenced. A few days after his 18th birthday, his parents got legally divorced.

Due to these instances, his school grades had dropped dramatically so he re-took his final year of highschool, graduating at 19 to attend university for Architecture and began to turn his life around and change for the better.

August began to take anti-depressants and anti-anxiety medication as well as attending therapy to work through his childhood trauma. He stuck to his study plan and worked harder than he ever had before to become top of his class and intern at one of the city's greatest Architectural firms over the summer break.

During his second year of university, he was introduced to Aguero Leon by their mutual friend, Iris Leith, and they surprisingly hit it off straight away. Half way through the year, the three of them decided to rent out an apartment in the city where they would remain until their final year.

It was around this time that August began to experience supernatural experiences such as vivid hallucinations of demonic beings, hauntings and thinking he was able to control and summon electricity with his mind. The most peculiar incident occured during summer break before his final year of college. He believed he had been transported to the mythical ancient country of Solislia where he was the prince and Aguero was his chief knight and boyfriend. He remembered staging battles with the nation of Ascarbn to recover the lost land of Persco'en and when he woke up, he was in hospital with a strange book at his bedside. The doctors informed him that he'd been unconscious for a week.

During their final year's exam season when Iris was out with his new boyfriend, August and Aguero had taken up studying together until the early hours of the morning. After one evening where alcohol was thrown into the mix, the two best friends hooked up. They swore to each other that nothing like that would ever happen again. A week later, Aguero's best friend (at the time) Kyo Ari confessed to him and they began dating then later became engaged.

After a horrific surprise turn of events, Kyo left Aguero for his first love and after August helped him during a month of serious depression, their repressed feelings from the year before bubbled to the surface. They were sexually intimate and later confessed their feelings to one another. Unbeknownst to Aguero, August hunted Kyo down and broke his arm as the streetlights above them flickered and his eyes glowed a powerful electric blue.

Post university, the couple moved to a smaller apartment on the west side of the state and August was offered the junior designer position at Elitas Design to work on an outside meditation space for the CityCrane skyscraper.

A few years later, during one of the couple's date nights, they stumbled across three young children sleeping rough on the street after escaping their orphanage and took them home after seeing how nalnourished they were. A week later, him and Aguero decided to formally adopt the three children, naming them Lev, Yury and Lilia. That very same night, they went to town hall to get married.

As the children grew up and Yury and Lev eventually left home to attend universities, August achieved his dream to be the lead designer on a Japanese and Russian fusion restaurant named 'Осень-Sakura', which translates to Autumn Sakura.

When his daughter Lilia turned 18, he admitted to his husband that he was slowly falling out of love with him, having not spent as much time together as they had in their youth. Desperate to not have their marriage end in divorce, they created a bucketlist together of adventures which culminated in a trip to Seoul a year afterwards where August finally reaffirmed his love for him.