Who Walk According to the Law :: Kaelen

[meg.]

As it was in the beginning
So shall it be in the end
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right

[/color]
Let's get together and feel all right.[/size]

AUGUSTUS ASQUITH

[/center][/size][/right]

“SOLIDARITY, SOLIDARITY, SOLIDARITY FOREVER, WE’RE PROUD TO BE WORKING CLASS, SOLIDARITY FOREVER.”

Augustus felt the vibration of the music in his chest, and couldn’t help but let a little smile creep onto his face at the sense of unification in the room. The song was about some old world worker’s movement, something not to dissimilar to the rebellion, but on a much smaller scale. Skipping over the passionate obscenities that he could not bear to utter, even in character, Gus glanced to the other male members of the glee club. They looked so focused, eyes narrowed and chins held high. Absorbed in the meaning of the song, for a little while they lost their differences and were united by, as the song said, their solidary musical motivations.

“Marching in time, Colt!” Jace shot over the top of the music, and Gus almost felt like defending him. He’d never conversed with the bumble-bee-type kid, but he particularly liked the way that his fingers fumbled and he loped like his namesake.

If only they could hold this sense of cohesion out of the beat of the music. Gus tried his best not to hate the way that everyone seemed to judge everyone else in the club, but sometimes the worldly feeling got the better of him. He found himself quite often stuck in a conundrum, hating people for their hate.

Night after night, the sort of like-mindedness that was loosening knots in Gus’s stomach during the song featured in his prayers. He had only been in the mouse maze of tunnels and fluorescent lighting for a couple of months, and had visited the Glee club enough times to count on one hand. However, he had already decided that the thing he missed most about his home district was how everyone that he knew in his secluded life was working hard to keep by God’s word. Here, he found people not just sinning, but acknowledging their sins and continuing to proceed with them. Whispered gossip of theft and even sex were not uncommon, but Gus tried hard not to sink to believing in rumors.

“Faster, girls!”

The teacher’s voice brought Gus back to the present, his wandering thoughts having turned his voice onto autopilot. To try and get back into the emotion of the song, Gus thought of his church group at home- he still truly believed One was his home- and imagined someone trying to stop that. He glanced towards Kaelen Dempsey, as that seemed to be the sort of thing that he would do for fun, and then he scolded himself for being so judgmental. He didn’t even know the kid, and it certainly wasn’t his place to make assumptions. Only God knew what had happened in his past. But the notion of the only place that Gus had ever felt whole being destroyed was enough to suck him into the music’s intention. Without bringing to much attention to himself- unlike Amity Gerber- he tried to transfer some of that emotion into the earthy notes that left his mouth like puffs of cigarette smoke.

So involved in the character he was putting across, Gus did not notice that the bell had rung until the rest of the club had dispersed from around him, and he was left being the only one still singing. A blush banging against his cheeks, he grabbed his guitar and satchel and slung them across his shoulder with such force that the bag split and sheets of hand-written lyrics fluttered to the floor, petals from flowers in autumn. Hands scrabbling on the grey linoleum floor, fingers like tap dancing spiders reached for his music, not embarrassed of his praise music, but not really wanting to share his innermost thoughts with a room of strangers. However, they didn’t seem to notice his problems as his classmates filtered through the door, better places to go than to help the strange new kid.

Gus examined the broken bag carefully, picking at the stitches. They had snapped very precisely, in an even line across the thread. It was a new bag, one that had been given to him by Thirteen’s authorities, so that was all the more amazing- their standard-issue items were made to outlast the object’s owners. But Gus knew all too well that one flawed stitch could make a whole pouch fall apart- he lived every day to make sure that all of his stitches were as close to perfect as they could be. He sat on one of the chairs, trying to style a new bag out of the broken one, but he was having difficulty fixing it to any degree.

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks
There is one question I'd really love to ask
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner

[/color]
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own? [/center]
[/size][/blockquote]

[Deleted]

KAELEN ARTHUR DEMPSEY

Life's too short to even care at all, oh
I'm coming up now coming up now out of the blue, oh
These zombies in the park they're looking for my heart
Oh, oh, oh, oh
A dark world aches for a splash of the sun, oh

[/color][/center]
The notes scrape raw and rough and unpleasant as they wind their way in a vapor up and out of my throat, the tones of the song far too shouty and grating for my own mellow tenor. In another place and time I might give into my inherent stubbornness and stand stock still just to tell Wheaton what a spectacularly awful selection he's picked for the umpteenth time, but in the here and now I'm just too tired, swimming in that kind of bone-deep exhaustion that pulls down at my resolve and turns me into a mindless sheep like the rest of humanity until I can refresh my mind and rise back up to a pinnacle of understanding that everyone seems to lack. For now, though, I'll sway in the back and sing my allotted notes like a good little sycophant despite the fact that The Twitchy One's kept us late again and I can think of approximately one thousand, three hundred and fifty-two things I'd rather be doing.

I can see it in the rest of them too (I see more in people than they ever want me to, something divine and all-knowing that judges without discrimination or mercy), that heavy Friday-late-afternoon feeling lingering in the glassy haze over Alyssa's eyes, in the way Abril's voice has gone a quarter-tone flat from an apathetic lack of effort, and more frighteningly in the way the smaller blur of dark hair next to me stumbles with fatigue and slumps onto a one-way collision course with the floor. Without thinking, I whisper a string of curses under my breath and lunge out of the choreography, catching Colt by the arm before he hits the ground and hauling him back up to his feet.

"You all right?" I mutter beneath the thrumming tide of the music, getting an answer in a weary smile and nod before he pings back off into formation, still singing like an angel even though all of our voices are run ragged by now. That sort of boundless optimism in anyone else would be enough to infuriate me, but with him it always seems to hover just beyond the edge of tolerable, almost endearing on really good days.

"Marching in time, Colt!" an electric tenor shoots out over the crackle of the speakers and I absolutely seethe, temper shortened by sleep deprivation admittedly caused by the subject of Wheaton's criticism.

I don't defend people. I was never destined to play the hero and I've never felt the need to justify myself to the unwashed masses, but something icy and unstoppable shoots past my lips in a curt, biting snap that lowers the temperature of the room by a good twenty degrees. "Lay off, Twitch, it's not Hanlon's fault you've kept us for an extra hour and we're all exhausted. Ripred, I've got more poise than anyone else in here and I'm tripping over my own feet."

Colt looks up from across the stage and offers a quiet, grateful sort of smile, and I give the crooked half-smirk that's the closet thing I'm capable of in return. I don't miss the weird look Alyssa shoots from a few feet away, but I shrug it off with a final sort of shake of my head, breaking eye contact in order to glare at Wheaton as the music cuts off and we're finally dismissed. She's my best friend, she knows all of my secrets except for the one I'm not quite ready to admit even to myself. Whatever this is, this thing I have with the boy who could outshine the sun if he smiled wide enough, it stopped being a game some time ago, and the reality of it knocks me more off balance than I'd care to admit.

I stay after, like I always do, Wheaton's idiocy not enough to deter me from ivory keys and intricate melodies that I can only find in one place in this godforsaken hole of a district. But the room doesn't empty as quickly as it normally does, a faint rip and rustle of paper drawing my eyes up from the keys and onto a slightly unfamiliar form hunched over a broken satchel.

"Oh. New kid," I yawn, not making any move to rise from the piano bench (and why would I? There are few exceptions in the world that would make my debase myself to the level of actually helping someone) and quirking an eyebrow slightly. "I would ask how Thirteen's treating you, but your unfortunate run-in with the shoddy textiles they have here rather speaks for itself, don't you think?"[/color]

If I could find a way to see this straight

I'd run away
To some fortune that I
I should have found by now
I'm waiting for this cough syrup to come down, come down[/center]

((Congrats, you're the guinea pig for first-person Kae. Hope it wasn't awful.))[/blockquote][/justify][/size]

[meg.]

As it was in the beginning
So shall it be in the end
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right

[/color]
Let's get together and feel all right.[/size]

AUGUSTUS ASQUITH

[/center][/size][/right]

"Oh, new kid. I would ask how Thirteen's treating you, but your unfortunate run-in with the shoddy textiles they have here rather speaks for itself, don't you think?"

Kaelen Dempsey, the boy with the familiar face, had said in rehearsal what Augustus had been too afraid to, only in a way that was certainly more ‘Kae.’ No, Gus had been too consumed in how other people might judge him than too defend Colt, the boy who had made a mistake that hadn’t been his fault. Gus had always fancied himself as a bit of a maytr, someone who would be happy to die for the right to believe what he believed in, but when it came to the punch, he ran away from anything that might cause pain. Perhaps it was the reason that Jesus fascinated him so- He had been willing to take everything, with no return for himself. Gus loathed the fact that so much of what he did was, in various ways, for himself, and yet it seemed to be a habit that he could not stop.

The last paper he picked off the floor was last night’s musings. He had sat in his bed, lit by a dim bulb, and as they always did, the words came to him. The words seemed to lie in his fingers, and when he wrapped his fingers around a pencil and combined that with paper, it was like a chemical reaction. His whole life was brought to the front of his chest and he knew that it was not just luck that’s given him so much and he’s grateful, he truly was. And his life rhymed in words that are fluid; liquid emotions that ignite him. It’s when he had a pencil dancing shadows onto paper that, for just a matter of moments, he knew where he was going and where he’s come from and he is anchored, stuck under a rock at the bottom of an ocean yet still able to breathe.

His eyes glanced up to the boy, sitting at the piano and making no attempt to move. It had been Kaelen more than anyone that Augustus had been bursting at the seams trying not to make judgements about. The boy didn’t seem to care, with his flippant remarks and the way that he strutted through the rabbit-warren district as if he owned the place. Cautiously, Gus chose his words, wanting to make an impression of the boy he wanted to be, not of the contradictory mess he was inside.

“Oh, um, yeah, well,” he said, not wanting to base his impression of the district that was to be the rest of his life off one shoddy piece of sewing. “I guess everything has to break at some point, right? Yeah, thirteen’s very different to home- One-“ he added, forgetting that not everyone had lived his life, “but I like it.”

It was true, to some extent. He liked having a bed- although, not a very comfy one- and food in his stomach. However, he missed the freedom of his time as a wanderer, and especially the empathy that he felt with those in his church-orientated life in One. Here, he found that people were not dedicated to living their life for God, or even did not believe in God at all.

It was something that amazed him. Everyday, he saw the beauty in people, altruism at it’s purest, and that, to him, proved the existence of God. According to chance, twice Augustus should have now died, but He had other plans for him elsewhere, and let him escape. How could people believe that it was just the slimmest chance that he had twice cheated what should have been death? How could it be chance that made bacteria evolve into humans, people who could love and be kind?

“What’s your story then, Kae? Were you born here, or…?”

His eyes flicked to Kaelen’s features. Once again, he thought that those almond eyes and that round nose seemed so familiar, but could not pull up where he knew them from. Probably looks like someone from home, he thought. Or just one of those faces.

“You know,” he said, a smile showing on his face and laughing silently to himself. “You’ve got one of those faces that I just swear I’ve seen before.”

It was one of those funny things that just caught Augustus’s mind and stuck there, tossing to and fro, answer just out of reach. He knew that, most likely, he’d never find out where he remembered the face from, but the thought that, at some point, there had been a connection between he and Kaelen captivated him. It was a ridiculous notion of course, but Gus’s mind was inventive.

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks
There is one question I'd really love to ask
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner

[/color]
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own? [/center]
[/size][/blockquote]

[Deleted]

KAELEN ARTHUR DEMPSEY

The lights go out, I am all alone
All the trees outside are buried in the snow
I spend my night dancing with my own shadow
And it holds me and
It never lets me go

[/color][/center]
“I guess everything has to break at some point, right? Yeah, Thirteen’s very different to home- One-“

One.

One.

One.

The room seems to fall into a suffocating vacuum, all swooping in on that singular word. One. He's from One. How long has he been here? My mind is sluggish, slowed down by lingering fatigue and the terrible sensation of something constricting around my chest as I hurriedly add up the numbers in my mind. Three weeks to get here from One on foot give or take a few days for course deviation (or taking time to hide your not-so-dearly departed girlfriend's body, but I digress), and how long had I been here when he arrived? How long have I been here anyway? Time seems fluid, days shifting and blending into one another unmarked by the rising and setting of the sun, so I mark their passage by the closest thing that the underground has to its own personal heliosphere.

First time Colt stayed over - two weeks ago.

First kiss - three... four weeks ago.

First time I met Colt - a month and a half ago.

I had been here three weeks when that happened, so - the figures roll lazily through my brain, morphing and crashing into one another - three months and three weeks. It manages to feel like an eternity and like the blink of an eye all at once, both impossible to believe I've been away from the sky and stars that long and hard to fathom that cold walls and sterile white isn't all I've ever known. Three months and three weeks, and the new boy (Marcus? Aurelius? One of those emperor names - Augustus, that's it) can't have been here for more than a few weeks himself. Take off three weeks for travel and he still would have been in One for a fairly long time after I left, which means-

“You know, you’ve got one of those faces that I just swear I’ve seen before.”

Which means he knows.

Of course he knows;it's not hard to miss the coy sort of sarcasm lurking behind the words. I swear I've seen you before. On a wanted poster. Someone besides Alyssa and myself knows the real reason I'm here, and that knowledge makes something horrid and wrong writhe in the pit of my stomach. It's a foreign feeling, one I haven't experienced since the long-gone days of a poverty-stricken childhood and wondering where the next meal was coming from, but it's familiar enough to place a name with it - terror.

It's a different experience, living a life where I actually have something to lose. In another time I wouldn't have cared who knew about my activities back in One - there are no bars or death sentences waiting for me here. Thirteen has an amnesty clause, anything you do above ground is wiped clean as soon as you become a citizen of the District - in fact, I might have spoken freely about it. Despite my recent experiences that say otherwise I still have an unshakeable belief that it is better to be feared than to be loved, and the idea that I might have been able to hold the threat of unsuspecting doom over the heads of the huddled masses makes me wonder exactly how much things have changed. Alyssa already knows, has known from the start, and if I don't care what anyone else thinks, then why am I so damnably frightened?

I know the answer to that question, but it's another one of those things that I'm not even ready to admit to myself. I fear no one's judgement in a world that I alone am capable of judging, or at least that's the way it used to be. Now there are different variables in the equation and a situation that I can no longer control with a steady hand and a clear mind. The weight of a secret hangs heavy on my shoulders where once it would have not affected me at all, carrying with it phantom images of disbelieving looks and deepdark eyes sparking with the worst sort of betrayal. I could easily handle the disdain and fear of the world, but Colt's a different story altogether. Always has been. There are some secrets that can't be told, and therefore there are people that have to be stopped from telling them.

It's with a blissful sort of calm that I rise from the piano bench, surrounded in a eerie sense of removal from my own body. I feel like a hollowed puppet-version of myself, gliding across the floor before settling to a halt in front of Gaius-Julius-Augustus-whatever-his-name-is, this unassuming boy with the power to ruin my life as I know it. Odd, how the most unnoticeable of things have more power than they're ever given credit for.

A blink, and with that same blissful calm my fingers have laced their way into his lapels and something dark and icy and terrible is rolling off of me in waves even though my voice is flat and stagnant as a still pond. "Listen, punk. I don't know how much you know or what you think you're doing, but I would highly advise that you keep your mouth shut if you value your life, understood?"

A ghost of years of career training seems to settle over my consciousness, whispers of things that aren't so much threats as promises. Ruthless has always been a word applied to me, and nothing on this earth or under it stands a chance against a wrath that could shake the foundations of the universe.[/color]

I move slow and steady

But I feel like a waterfall
Yeah, I move slow and steady
Past the ones that I
Used to know[/center][/blockquote][/justify][/size]

[meg.]

As it was in the beginning
So shall it be in the end
Give thanks and praise to the Lord and I will feel all right

[/color]
Let's get together and feel all right.[/size]

AUGUSTUS ASQUITH

[/center][/size][/right]

It came like a brush against a hot pan, as he couldn’t feel the sting until he had already started to burn.

Augustus Asquith had always avoided confrontation. Although he liked to think that he was always one to stand up for his cause, in reality the boy was very much afraid to become involved in anything to the extent that he might, in a fit of passion, break his own morals. The only time he had let himself go, voice loud and heart ripping in protest for sportful deaths, he had only narrowly avoided death. And so, the sudden aggression showed by the other boy worried him.

"Listen, punk. I don't know how much you know or what you think you're doing, but I would highly advise that you keep your mouth shut if you value your life, understood?"

Sometimes, Gus thought that there was a devil in him. He hadn’t seen it yet, but sometimes, like now, he could see a crack in the curtains and the dark, blinding him with it’s brightness, streamed in. The monster that sat like a thousand years worth of dust in his stomach was something that some people referred to as fear but Augustus had different ideas about what it could be, ideas that scared him even futher. Just as dark is the absence of light, the heavy that sunk Augustus through the ground was the absence of faith.

He had very little experience with this sort of conflict, really. The thick words trickled like honey through his mind, only this sort wasn’t so sweet. It made his muscles shorten, and made him try to focus his mind on the fact that there was a reason for everything, and that there was a lesson to be learnt from this.

He could not, however, figure out the meaning behind Kaelen’s words. The threat seemed worthless, and yet still it sent ripples of unease through his body. He didn’t understand. Perhaps it was something to do with his protest- surely though, this boy was no so in support of the Games that he was willing to threaten Gus with murder.

The funny thing was that there was no doubt in his mind that the threat was real. Perhaps it was the clay voice that it was said with, or the narrowing of Kaelen’s eyes, or just the fact that the last and first time that Augustus had been given a death sentence he had been about to be killed.

And so, Augustus did the same thing he always did to melt the ice of the demon that he knew he should not be acquainted with. He lit a flame of prayer.

Help me, Lord. Help me to help him, and help me to follow Your light.

Long ago, Gus had worked out that his prayers were not answered in words. His mind was not a book or a blackboard, and God did not use ink or chalk. Instead, he opened his mind, took off his hat to the sun and let his thoughts marinade for just a second. The words came out right- right for him, at least. When he asked right, they always did.

“Look, Kaelen, I’m really sorry, but I don’t understand what you’re talking about. But, you know, I’ll be praying for you, and I’d be really happy to pray with you, if you wanted.”

For Augustus, prayer had always given him answers. He was quite certain, too, that the answers had been the right ones, because he was still alive, and no matter the twisting road his path had taken, the view had always been the most beautiful one. It was this view that proved the Gus the existence of a higher power, and gave him the will to keep moving on, because he already knew that there was going to be so much beauty on the way. Everyone has a reason to keep one foot dropping heavy after the other, and Gus believe that if he could get just one person to make that reason the final destination, then his life on this earth would have been worth it.

Perhaps he could help Kaelen find this. It was a judgment that the threatening was not already living for his Lord, but Gus was too engrossed in his childish excitement to scold himself for his slip up. The death threat meant little to him now, a rain shower already settled on the ground, as he thought about ways that he could break through. He wanted, more than anything (although he’d used that phrase a hundred times before) to help, to help anyone, and perhaps Kaelen Dempsey was another stray animal that Augustus could try and once again fail to patch up.

Let them all pass all their dirty remarks
There is one question I'd really love to ask
Is there a place for the hopeless sinner

[/color]
Who has hurt all mankind just to save his own? [/center]
[/size][/blockquote]

[Deleted]

KAELEN ARTHUR DEMPSEY

Since our clocks first ticked
A dark hue and fear-driven
It's only real till it ends
As the stars fall on our heads
Call the wind a thief for stealing their prayers

[/color][/center]
“You… you don’t… wait, what?” There’s a sort of confusion etched into every fiber of me, lining my lungs and scraping harsh and unwieldy over my lips in a stuttered utterance that makes me sound more like Colt’s faltering speech pattern than my own typical eloquent flow. Nothing adds up in this situation, nothing fits into the steadfast mold of logic into which I can usually compartmentalize the whole of my existence, and the abnormal feeling of it all is enough to make my grip on the worn fabric beneath my fingers loosen, arms dropping back to my sides and mouth slightly agape. How could he not know?

I was inherent in the fabric of District One’s fear before my deeds ever had a name stuck to them, the anonymous harbinger of death that hovered over the rims of any and every tumbler and martini glass. People knew what I was long before the whispers began circulating about who I was, and although I got out while the game was still afoot it’s ludicrous to think that my face wouldn’t have been slapped on wanted posters tacked to every lamp post as soon as the Keepers figured out Dahlia and I had given them the slip. The Law is loath to admit defeat, even at the hands of an adversary it could never have hoped to outwit. It was their final revenge after realizing that I had slipped through their fingers, spreading my name like the poison I so adored and making it impossible to ever return to the place I’d once called home, forever a wandering spirit, a deity ousted from his throne and forced to take on the burdens of being a stranger in a strange land. One was a cesspool of sin and depravity, a writhing hellhole teeming with hoards of wasted people who didn’t deserve the air they breathed, but it was something I could call my own, something to survey and hold dominion over, something now lost to me forever beneath the sea of my own infamy.

(The loss stings more than I care to admit, some small part of me that lurks beneath my own precious darkness crying plaintively for the light of the sun I’ve all but forgotten)

But it doesn’t make sense, how Augustus could have come from my home District so recently and seemingly have no idea of who I am or what my transgressions sacred duty entailed. Even if the law enforcement didn’t slander my name in a last-ditch effort to have the final word Elvira certainly would. My dear little sister was always so keen to watch my downfall but so rightfully terrified to take matters into her own hands. In the end she just wasn’t Dempsey enough to truly work up the consuming wrath it would require to take me on by herself, but with my sudden absence and a whole District to listen to her she would have undoubtedly shouted all she knew from the rooftops. And she knew far too much. In the end she was just Dempsey enough to see things that others did not and even now in fleeting moments of paranoia I can sometimes still feel her lurking in my shadow. There is quite literally no possible way that the population of One wouldn’t know about me by now. Or really, maybe that’s just my pride whispering to me, terrified at the thought of wasting away here under the earth while my legacy Above fades into anonymity.

“What do you mean, you ‘don’t understand what I’m talking about?’” I snap, fluency returned in a frigid gale of acerbic doubt as my arms cross over my chest and I ratchet up the intensity of my stare, penetrating black-lined pools of icy citrine boring into their softer counterparts, searching for deception and finding none. Whatever his issue is, he really doesn’t know. I see people in ways they can’t fathom, and over time have become so skilled in the art of lying that it’s too easy to tell when I’m being lied to myself. Nothing adds up, nothing, and I find myself pacing restlessly, a jungle cat trapped in a cage with high-tops in place of paws scuffing against the immaculate linoleum. “You’re from One and you just got here, you have to know. Kaelen Dempsey? Dahlia Widower? Those names don’t mean anything to you? You must have been living under a rock.”

I stammer to a halt with the realization that I’ve taken it too far for my own good, overwriting his fortunate ignorance with a foolish slip of the tongue that could serve as my own doom. Blinking slowly, I decide the best course of action is to feign to tepid sort of amicability that is the closest thing I can muster to actually being nice, lowering my defenses marginally and raking fingers through my hair in a nervous tic. “Well, we’ve apparently had a misunderstanding. My apologies. It’s just that I grew up in One and left under… less than desirable circumstances. It’s nothing you should concern yourself about.”

In all reality, it’s something I desperately hope he won’t concern himself about. I was never one to kill without reason, always sparing the innocent and the pure from a fate they didn’t deserve, but for the sake of keeping my secret under wraps there is a part of me that knows with a heavy certainty that I wouldn’t hesitate to neutralize any threat of indiscretion. I can’t play by even my own rules with this much on the line.[/color]

Can't awake the ones who live this life

Not on our own
'Cause people are the same
(We are the same)
Only habits change, habits change[/center][/blockquote][/justify][/size]