Cypress Hellebore

Cypress Hellebore is a character played by KelsKatz.

Backstory
Cypress was born to the young couple of Morgan and Theodore Hellebore on April 8, 1998 in Los Santos. Her mother, Morgan, was a waitress at the local diner, her father, Theo, was a police officer and the family lived in a small house on Prosperity Street.

Childhood
Theo was a very jealous man and always had to keep tabs on his wife, monitoring where she was and who she was with at all times. She was often abused at home for disobeying his rules. Cypress was unfortunately used to falling asleep to the sound of Morgan crying. She had witnessed Theo physically, mentally, and sexually abuse Morgan over the course of her life, and on a handful of occasions had also caught him flirting and meeting up with other women.

Morgan taught Cypress a lot about life early on, so that she would be able to be a self-sufficient woman who didn’t need to rely on another person like she had to, since that was the only reason she had remained with Theo for so long. Morgan relied heavily on drugs in an attempt to stay mentally stable. Cypress eventually follows in her footsteps as a teenager and the two bond even further from this.

Teen Years
After Cypress had become a teenager, Theo started to get more aggressive with both women. He had broken Morgan’s arm and left Cypress with multiple cuts, bruises, and black eyes over the course of a few years. Cypress started to experiment with drugs with her mother during this time and developed an addiction to psychoactive drugs like cocaine and ecstasy and hallucinogens like LSD and ketamine.

Around the time Cypress was in her late teens, Morgan couldn’t stand it anymore and started to think of ideas to get rid of her husband for good. She secretly met with Cypress and the two had brainstormed off and on for months before one night Morgan came to Cypress with a finalized plan. She was going to burn their home down with him inside, and she and Cypress would escape.

Over the course of the next few weeks the two of them snuck their belongings out of the house and into a suitcase they hid in the bushes on the far side of their property. While they continued to endure abuse from him nightly, they knew that soon they could be free from him.

Not According to Plan
On the night of the planned arson, Cypress and her parents all had gone to bed. Cypress was instructed to stay in her room until a certain time, then attempt to sneak out of the house to the suitcase. Her mother would casually get out of bed in the middle of the night to get a glass of water in the kitchen, but instead she would turn on the gas stovetop and leave it on for a while to fill the home with gas.

Morgan stood in the doorway of the home’s back door in the kitchen and was about to light a match when Theo walked up behind her, swiftly grabbing her, thinking she was about to run away in the middle of the night. In the sudden tussle, Morgan had slid the match across the matchbook which immediately ignited the large amount of gas in the home, causing an explosion. Cypress, who was waiting near the bush for her mother, had witnessed everything, seemingly in slow motion, and froze in shock as the flames engulfed both of her parents and their home. In the blink of an eye she realized what had happened and took off running to her mother’s aide but it was too late. Cypress reached into the fire to try to find her but the flames were too large.

Cypress stepped back and a huge range of emotions washed over her. The immense feeling of freedom and happiness that her abuser would no longer hurt her was at the forefront, while the feeling of extreme loss and failure followed quickly behind. She could do nothing else but fall to her knees and sob uncontrollably.

Cypress sustained burns on both of her arms which are now scarred.