The Early Years
Belle Havana Cavallera came to be on the 28th of February, 1998 in Westdyke Memorial Hospital. She would grow up in Leftwood, a middle class suburb of Liberty City in Alderney.
Belle's father, Angelo Francesco Cavallera, was a 2nd generation Italian American. He was 24 years old and a hard working lawyer, although young and in lots of debt, but he managed to provide a decent house for his wife and daughter. Her mother Camila was 21 and a first generation Cuban who came to the US as an asylum seeker. She was unemployed but volunteered some of her time at the American Red Cross cooking. Belle Havana was named in honor of her Cuban side.
For the first few years of her life, Belle's parents took good care of her, growing closer as they worked to raise their daughter well. They wanted the best for her, and worked hard for it. Her father put in more effort, taking on more clients than he could realistically handle to keep paying the mortgage and to buy his daughter decent clothes. Her mother got a job as a social worker to contribute to the bills, social workers don't make much these days. She continued to volunteer.
Belle's parents were so busy providing for her that she did not see too much of them, especially her father, although they both tried to fit in time. Eventually, the stress of their overtime caught up to them and their relationship grew tense. They had little time for each other, and little patience left when they got home at night. Despite her near perfect early years, Belle's first memory would be the ear-piercing sound of breaking glass over her parents screams in their first big fight. Belle was six years old.
Her parents never recovered their relationship, only growing more distant as time passed. They learned to tolerate each other and act amicably for Belle's sake, mostly ignoring each other and focusing on raising her. The lack of fighting was good but relations were nonetheless tense and this most certainly had an effect on Belle. She never had many memories of her parents together, and got to know her parents separately even though they lived together.
As she entered her 10s, her parents would begin to confide in her, venting their complaints about the other to her behind their back. She was told exaggerated, dark things about both her parents, the people who had raised her and who she loved most, and began to lose trust in them. Her mind grew darker, as she began feeling the pressure and need to choose between her parents.
Her Mother
Because her mother complained the most, and because she discovered lies and exaggerations in her stories about Angelo, Belle began to distance herself from her. She began mistrusting her, feeling deeply conflicted on the inside. She had loved her mother all her life, and she knew that would never change, but this was in deep conflict with the aggression and dishonesty she felt from her. Choosing sides between her parents was something that scarred her conscience forever, but she felt she had no choice for her morals and respect for her father.
Her mother died on the night of the 27th February, 2010. She was held up by two men in black on a motorcycle down the street from their house. Unwilling to put up with the robbers, she screamed for help, and one of the men slit her throat with a knife. She bled out on the street, found too late by the owner of the house in front of which she was robbed. The identity of the masked men was never found.
Belle did not learn of the nature of her mother's death until years later, but she felt deep regret for the tattered relationship they had when she died. She wished that they could have said goodbye on good terms, and felt the blame for choosing to trust her father, even though she knew it was not really her fault.
Now 12 years old, Belle had far too grown a mind for her age. She had been forced to be a middleman between her father and mother, to endure their tense relationship, to get to know them separately, and to choose between them. Now her mother had been taken from her, and she couldn’t help blaming herself for the regretful relationship her mother had ruined.
She receded into herself. Belle had never been shy, but never had many friends either, but as she entered middle school she closed herself off. She had only her father left to confide in, and a girl named Stephanie.
Stephanie made her way past the barriers of Belle’s mind by making herself available to her, confiding in her, and showing her she cared. She never gave up on Belle, because she knew Belle needed it. Slowly, Belle came to trust her, and the two became the closest friends either of them ever had. Through the years, Stephanie helped Belle recover her straight As, move on from her mother, and even open Belle up a little more to other people. Her life had finally started looking up.
Her Father
On a cold October 1st, 2015, Angelo was driving home from a late shift when his Willard Faction was rammed into an alleyway by a stolen box truck. 4 armed men emerged from the back, surrounding the wrecked car. The men dragged a dazed Angelo from his car onto the cold hard concrete of the alleyway. He was shot 5 times in the stomach with 762 bullets and left incapacitated to bleed out in an alleyway in East Broker.
The cold blooded murder was found to be in revenge for Angelo’s involvement in a criminal case, where he had successfully testified against a gang leader and contributed to his life sentence. The gang took revenge on him and several others involved in the case, which turned into a war with the LCPD.
Belle was now a 17 year old orphan. Her father’s brother died of cancer while she was young, and her mother had been an only child. She had no aunts or uncles, her mother’s parents lived in Cuba, and her father’s mother was deceased. Her father’s father had disowned him and moved back to Italy after his wife’s death, and had no further connections with the family. With no family to take her in, Belle became a Ward of the State.
Her Best Friend
Around the same time, Stephanie had become involved with a gang. She was dependent on them for her cocaine addiction, which they had laced into her. Belle did not know until a month after her father’s death, when she went to speak with her best friend and found her passed out with a bloody nose. Stephanie finally admitted to it, but it hurt their relationship with Belle’s father having recently been murdered in a high profile gang case.
A month later, Stephanie overdosed and was found dead by police in an alley near where Angelo had been murdered, leaning against a trash bag. Belle did not see Stephanie's dead body, her dilated pupils rolled back into her head, dried blood running down her bony chin, white powder dusting her dirty light blue sweater, ripped hood pulled over her thinned brown hair. Instead, Belle read online about a another gang affiliated teen addict who overdosed on cocaine in an alleyway, identified by police as Stephanie.
Herself
Belle wandered the streets feeling like a ghost. She felt invisible, a walking shell with no connection to the souls around her. The bank took the house, which was worth less than its mortgage, and she was left alone with the few dollars her father had in savings and the insurance payout from his wrecked car to fend for herself in the lengthy and taxing process that legal affairs tend to have. After a few weeks she was left with no energy to carry on. She dropped out of high school junior year.
She vowed to stay away from drugs and gangs in honor of Stephanie and her parents, so she had nothing and no one to turn to. One night she failed to return to the orphanage and climbed a factory rooftop in Tudor. For a while she looked across the river at the bright lights of the big city, thinking about the people that lived off alcohol and bolivian marching powder walking like zombies out of the clubs and into the bright 6AM sunrise.
She stood there for what felt like forever, long enough for a sole squad car to pull up beneath the factory. Someone had seen her and called the police for suspicious activity, but the dispatcher had been smart enough to see through her actions, and soon the fire department was setting up a net to catch her and the officers had climbed the roof. They spent nearly three hours trying to talk to her.
She never learned their names, one of her biggest regrets, for she owed her life to them.
To Leave It All Behind
After dealing with the state for a while, Belle gathered everything she had, which was some clothes and a few thousand dollars, and left Alderney. She had to get away from Liberty City and leave her old life, for she knew that if she stayed she would eventually succeed at suicide. She could not stay in the place that had taken her parents and her only friend from her.
Through a combination of hitchhiking and freight hopping, she made her way across the continent. Belle lived her 18th birthday alone on a Santa Fe rail-car with a sunburn and a rotten cowboy hat. After some two weeks, she found herself stranded in the Las Venturas desert without a car in sight. A few hours walking got her to a gas station with an old car for sale. With no other options, she spent her last grand on the car and a tank of gas and set off for Los Santos.
The City of Saints
Life isn’t easy as a homeless 18 year old orphan in Los Santos, and Belle found herself living paycheck to paycheck in the back seat of her car, finding a new place to park every once in a while. Money paid for taxes first, gas second to keep her warm in the winter, and food third. There was rarely any left over after that. She worked miscellaneous jobs for a few months, trying to stay afloat, fighting desperately against the gangs and prostitution.
These months were some of the worst of her life yet. It leaves a permanent mark on one’s psyche to have to fight to survive another day. There was never any time for herself, to think about her life, and to think of tomorrow. She just put her head down and kept running. She eventually found a little stability in the form of a job with Gruppe 6 which she miraculously landed through her writing skills, but her life was still far from healthy.
After getting on top of herself a little with the salaried job, she decided to finish high school. She had always cared about her education and given an effort, and now she finally felt like she could face it again. She had her shift hours changed, picking up the late routes to work after school. She was older than everyone else, but she looked young enough and stayed quiet enough that she made it through without too much trouble. It was hard, but she tried her best to forget about her past that nagged her every morning.
She graduated with a 3.8 GPA a few months later, feeling a little more hopeful about her future. But she was overworked, stressed, and still had no idea where her life was going. She needed control, but couldn’t get on top.
After a few months, she woke up completely drained. It was a sort of catatonia. She couldn’t move. She lay there in the back seat of her car, in a dark, quiet ally, thinking, for the first time in a year. She had stopped running, and her past caught up to her, and she cried. For hours, she lay there and cried, and the world continued around her.
That night, she decided she couldn’t go on like that . She had no friends, no connections, and no direction; she had been letting the city take her wherever it wanted. She needed a goal; she needed stability. Suddenly she remembered the night on the factory rooftop in Tudor. The memory took over her body; she could feel the cool wind blowing, see the lights of the city, hear the traffic nearby, and she felt the closure; the relaxed emptiness that filled her that night, when she had decided to die. And she remembered the police officers.
For the first time that day, Belle could control her muscles. She climbed over the center console and flopped into the driver’s seat. The engine cranked over and sputtered to life as she flipped the visor down, trying to look a little presentable.
With more to come!
Please remember, this is all OOC information
Thanks for reading
