you're losing your gift, and it's plain to see {rook/rave}

[rook]

holland

It's just you, alone again.

And the world spins on.

The weight of it is heavy on your eyelids; blackened by exhaustion and heavy with time.

The flickers of industry and starlight print long shadows of you over the old stone warehouses and crumbled alleys, whilst blinking streetlights cast irregular patterns on the cobblestones below, dying like the light pollution bleached stars above.

Your light footsteps mimic the rhythm of the late night district dwellers, joining their compliant cadence. Faceless and nameless, you are adrift in the ebb and flow of the city's relentless energy.

You must be everyone and no one, moving through the city's grasp like smoke. It's a delicate dance, avoiding the Peacekeepers who lurk too in the shadows like pale white sharks. Keep moving or die.

The red neon street lights bleed into the damp shiny pavements as you push deeper into the hive of the city center, the noise growing from a low hum into a more visceral cocktail of horns, machinery, and shouting. Here the concrete stretches far above you, reaching up to block out the sun, the warmth, the hope.

A man asks for change, you say you have none. Before you, an old fishwife sells a catch imported from Four, all laid out haphazardly on a bed of ice - fresh she says, but it's half rotten and has more interest from flies than customers. Beyond that, a man offering falsified documents to get out of the District - but you already know that it's no better anywhere else.

Do you think your father would be proud of you? Skulking around like a rat in the gutter, hiding to survive, playing the role of someone you're not. Girl from Two with the world at her feet. You spent all your life trying to be noticed, and now you're doing everything you can not to be.

The world spins on, and it will catch up with you, eventually.

[Deleted]

↳ AJANIE SUPREME

There's an undeniable art to having a resting bitch face. Ajanie is a master in under-expression - it's always cold, blank, ambiguous. He could be perceived as mad, or focused, but it's simply him. It is simply the state of the undercurrent of Ajanie: undetectable. 

Not even his brothers can read him anymore, not since his few month stunt in the Detention Center. Good behavior can get you out, can get you by, but it can never heal what the system takes from you. It broke him in, domesticated the bit of rebellion that fought beneath it all. And fought it did, until it learned. Until it adapted. Until it survived. When nothing else works, all that matters is in spite of it: you. You, you, you. 

There's no denying that. 

Ajanie finds himself delivering once again. He is a carrier of sorts, an errand boy for the wrong crowd that he finds himself disgusted working under again. That's what got him to begin with, that's what got him slammed and tortured, yet here he is, returning to it all. Running only gets you so far - when you're this far in, there is no escaping. Only surviving... remember? And as you do, so does he, Ajanie the boy becomes a man through attrition, as he tucks his criminal behavior into an internal pocket of his bomber jacket. A souvenir of sorts, one of the only things from District 2 that he can still fit. 

It's an alarming feeling, the sensation of outgrowing what feels like home. It's undeniable, once you notice it once, you never mistake it again. A feeling, almost like a premonition of what's to come. That perhaps you've been here before, and perhaps you'll be here again. That old things come around in the vaguest of ways, just like running into a stranger you swear you've met before. A red head, something hard to notice in the monotones of 9. "Aye, my bad-" he starts before the twisted feeling settles in his gut, the oddest deja vu. 

The alertness of danger, he feels it in the static of shocked eye contact. You don't know me, there's a second where he sizes up who he's stumbled into. Something's different, just enough so to fuel his paranoia. There's an urge to act, to find his exit from perception once again, "you know where 104 Hawke's at? I'm not-" how do you briefly explain being still so out of place? "I avoid comin' here. You get it," everybody does. 

Not because they actually get it.

Just because everybody else hates it here, too.