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[gamemaker kelsier]

THE WOODS ARE LOVELY DARK AND DEEP BUT I HAVE PROMISES TO KEEP AND MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP AND MILES TO GO BEFORE I SLEEP.

Silence always came easily enough to him.

He preferred it, or at least that's what I thought before he went and gave up.

I don't know.

Sometimes I can't remember who gave up first, if it was him or her.

I was sort of young I suppose, or maybe just in the eyes of my parents because I really didn't feel that youth.

What I felt was the colour blue.

Like sticky and smooth all at once on your palm as you run it over the rippling water of a still pond.

It was a dark blue, like the way the clouds are in the sky when they're angry at you, their backs turned to the world below.

Grandmother said that clouds can't be angry but the emotion behind those grey swirls used to get to my father real bad.

I suppose that's why he used to cry a lot.

Or maybe it was the way his heart stood so heavy on his chest, instead of resting easy inside.

It was like a child stomping their feet on a wooden floor.

"She's wearing cement boots today Sun," he'd say and rub the flat of his palm hard across his chest like he could stop the hurt inside of it.

Maybe I should have known by that what was coming.

My dad's smile always tasted like oranges to me, real sweet but so tart that sometimes they hurt.

They hurt mom more I guess.

I remember it well but I choose not to.

I stow my dad's smile in a box inside of my head and I don't open it.

Grandmother said I was lucky to be blessed with a memory like mine but most of the time it only hurts,like pins being pushed slowly and steadily into my skull.

She used to show me sheet after sheet of music, telling me to remember them right before she held them over a candle flame and burned them all to ash.

It smelled like burning flesh and the sting of it sent tears to my eyes that I'd blink back to save for later, when I really needed them.

I couldn't understand why she'd destroy the songs on the pages because as I played them through my head, my memory catching the notes in my hands piece by piece, I knew that they were beautiful.

"In the world we live in, beauty like this is illegal," grandmother told me, and her words looked sharp and burned above her head and I knew that there was real bitterness inside of her.

I started living with her when I was ten, three months after I found my father hanging by his neck tie from the living room ceiling at six fifty one in the morning with a puffy blue face and his tongue sticking out of his mouth and his eyes dead and it smelled like I was five again and there was a monster under my bed and the taste in my mouth was a rancid yellow and the colour of rotting fish and the sound of everything coming crashing to a ha- three months and six days after my father gave up.

It was only two months and twenty-eight days after my mom stopped getting out of bed and I went into her room at two thirty in the afternoon on the sixteenth and it was a tuesday and I tugged on her arm and I tried so hard to get her to not give up too but she looked right through me and it was like the colour blue and the taste of oranges all over again and I didn't know what to do gave up too.

I don't think my grandmother wanted me around though because she was often having people over in the dead of night and secret meetings involving hushed voices and maps that were older than me by many years.

I stayed out of the way so she might forget I was there.

I didn't want to go back to my mother's house.

That's where the deep dark blue was waiting.

I didn't know my grandmother real well.

She had long greying hair that she kept in a tight braid that fell all the way down her back like a rope and only dressed practically as a rule.

She'd been giving me piano lessons since I was four and I had been going to her house every Wednesday from three in the afternoon until four thirty since.

She was sometimes there at Christmas but had always been busy on birthdays and other holidays.

I did not know my grandmother well and she did not know me.

My father had been a lumberjack when he was still living and not hanging from the living room ceiling or buried in the ground and I'd been going to work with him since I could walk.

At first my job had been to 'stay out of the way' but as I'd grown it turned into helping my father by shimmying up the trees and cutting off the small branches for him for kindling.

I didn't go to school.

School was scary.

School was loud and full of people and sights and sounds that made me sick with fear because it all came at once, so loud, so colourful, so haunting.

Mom tried sending me with the other kids when I was little but I used to pass out from everything.

My dad said that I must have been born extra sensitive like him.

I used to cry when my father cut the trees down.

The way that they screamed haunted me, terrified me.

Dad said he understood but he had no other trade to teach me and I could not survive off of my grandmother's music.

I never learned to read anything but notes.

Grandmother tried to teach me reading and writing.

She'd hand me pages and pages of reading and tell me to copy it all out onto papers, like some sort of homeschool.

I could write it all out but when it came to reading it back I didn't know.

They were just lines that I had memorized and placed on paper.

Grandmother started giving me more after she realized that I couldn't read what I had written.

She would have me copy out stacks and stacks of criss-crossed lines and then she would give the things I'd carefully copied for her away to the people who came in the middle of the night to bend over all of those maps.

So I joined the rebellion when I was eleven years old.

Grandmother gave me a lotto memorize. She had me draw pictures of people in perfect detail and then she would give them to men with guns and then the men with guns would look at the pictures and they would leave one by one in the dark night.

If my grandmother did not send me back to the mother who had given up and the living room where my father had hung himself then I was happy.

I think.

She changed my piano lessons from three in the afternoon until four thirty on Wednesdays to Wednesdays, Saturdays and Mondays.

On Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Sunday I went into the woods with the other children and we marked the trees to be cut.

Life was this way for a very long time.

My mother gave up away shortly after my father, four months and ten days after I moved in with my Grandmother.

She was buried beside my father and no one said anything about it.

They were young but that was not unusual for this place.

Sometimes the trees drive you mad.

When you walk beneath them it's easy to forget that the sky exists and a sun lives inside of it.

My father had joked often when my mother was pregnant with me, my mom liked to begin the telling of my name that way.

He'd always wanted a son.

So my mother had given him a Sun.

I was not the same as the one in the sky, that lit up the world with it's waving yellow-white tongues of light.

I had not been enough to keep them happy.

I think they wanted me to.

When I was fifteen and I was lying in my bed and I was looking at the fan swirling above my head I listened to the front door opening and closing.

In the span of an hour, it opened and closed twelves times.

So there was a large meeting that night.

I listened for a half hour more for the door but the meeting was full.

So I listened to the quiet murmuring from below me and waited for it to lull me to sleep.

As my eyes were finally getting too heavy for me to take, the door opened again.

It was with a loud bang.

it did not shut again but many people entered.

Where the members of my grandmother's rebellion moved like mice, the new arrivals were a thunderstorm.

They stomped with heavy boots all over my grandmother's good wooden floors and I listened as there was shouting.

Someone got hit and there was a scream.

Then there was silence.

(But not silence.)

It was thick purple silence, the kind that sits in the air like a fog and smells of the forest right before a heavy snow.

The kind that hurts and paints your skin a deep white, makes fear-tinged sweat roll down your back.

Suddenly the room beneath my bed exploded with a flurry of sound and smells and colour, shades of yellows and reds leaked up through the floorboards in great globs, attaching themselves to my ceiling.

Panic smells like burned rubber.

Like burned everything.

For a moment I swore I could see my room crumbling with flame around me, everything up in smoke as I listened to the fight downstairs.

I knew that that was it, they'd found us.

They were going to kill us.

I knew that I should have taken that moment of confusion and tried to escape, run out the window or something.

My grandmother was old and she chose rebellion.

I was fifteen and stupid.

Which is why I must have thought that the covers of my bed would be enough to shield me from the eyes of the troupe of peacekeepers in my kitchen.

I huddled under them, frozen in fear, overwhelmed by all the sensations that were clogging up my brain.

I cowered as people died.

I was good at cowering then.

When I actually was worried about my life, I wanted to go on living it.

They found me anyway.

Each step they took up the stairs made angry green spots appear under my eyelids.

I should have ran.

I should have fucking ran.

They told me to get out of the bed, lie down on the ground and place my hands on my head.

Their voices made my skin want to crawl off my body because they were so cruel and they smelled of gasoline, words appearing in a steel grey font above their heads.

"Where is my grandmother?" I remember asking them, a sob escaping my lips, distorting my words.

I did as they said but it did not stop one of them from using their heavy boots to kick the side of my head hard, setting off a light show in the air around us.

Then the world went magenta and my home of five years disappeared from my view for the final time.

I don't know what I expected.

Should have known it would all go to shit I guess.

It always does, doesn't it?

It's inevitable.

Waking up for the first time in that dark cell was dark green.

Terrifying.

"Your grandmother is dead," the peacekeeper who stood outside my cell told me, "She was executed for treason."

So I was alone.

I remember wondering how I was going to get home from there.

All I wanted then was to get back to seven, from underneath the ground in two to the trees again.

I missed the sound of pine needles crunching under my feet.

They kept me there for a long time, despite the fact that I didn't know anything about my grandmother's plans.

I'd just been living there.

Everyday there was fresh questioning that I couldn't answer even if I wanted too.

Following the words, there was always pain and vibrant shades of reds and yellows attaching themselves to my skin, making me unclean.

I could hear the thunder with each breath I took.

We were like that down there.

In pain, often.

I cried at first, feeling had always been hard for me.

I felt everything so much that it was overwhelming.

Grandmother said that most people didn't feel things the way I did.

When I ate food I thought of sounds rather than the taste.

Playing the piano tasted like candy melting on my tongue.

She said that wasn't regular.

Pain is odd though for me.

I feel it, harsh and horrible.

I also know the colour of pain.

I know the colour of fear.

The way fear tastes.

The sound it makes.

I know it so well.

I stopped screaming after the fourth month in the detention center.

Suddenly my living became meaningless, I could not understand why I was still trying to hold onto it.

That's what they were waiting for I guess.

They took my tongue out of my mouth soon after.

That memory tastes like iron.

Tastes are hard now.

My long fingers have grown more crooked with breakings and settings and somehow I've grown taller.

I stoop.

I keep my gaze on the floor, where it's supposed to be.

I make myself small and I stay quiet so that they will forget that I exist at all.

I was brought to the Capitol soon after my sixteenth birthday, five months after my arrest.

I was put inside a small cage meant for three that held five.

I spent three days with my knees to my chest, counting the scars on my legs.

They bought me on the fourth day, my masters.

An elderly woman named Nebraska and her young ward, Nathanial.

Nathanial had demons living in his eyes.

I felt them looking at me and it made my cheeks burn as I was fitted with my Avox uniform.

I remembered the way fear tasted when Nathanial grabbed me roughly by the collar of my shirt and took me back to his house in a mechanical carriage.

A collar of steel was placed around my neck.

A small black piece held a tiny blade within it.

"If you ever try to run away, the collar will kill you Avox."

Fear tastes strangely of a handful of dirt I tried eating once as a child.

The collar was too tight, it chafed at my neck.

It rubbed my skin raw and drew blood.

It hurt.

The Avox in that house were not permitted to use their speech.

We were kept silent.

I never learned the language.

I did not know how to read or write.

I was surrounded by many but alone.

My new masters made it clear to me what my position in the house was from the beginning.

It was to not have one.

It was to not hide from Nathanial when he called for me, which was often.

I understood what the man at the Avox pens had said when he told me that I would be an easy sell.

"You've got pretty features, cold but beautiful."

"We'll be rid of you easy."

I was lucky then.

I'd never heard stories of what a first kiss was supposed to feel like.

Or what your first time was meant to be like.

It's not supposed to hurt, I knew that.

Nathanial's way of loving me was the brightest shade of red I knew.

The flecks of it that he'd leave on my skin when he was angry got stuck and would never come off no matter how hard I washed myself.

The skin around my nail beds peeled away, dry from all the washing that they had.

I don't like to think about my time in that house but I can't help it.

It sticks to me like the red does.

I stuck my fingers under the edge of the collar in my first few moments of wearing it, panic gripping me.

I thought if I could tear it off, I could make the nightmare end.

Sort of like breaking a spell.

Sounds escaped my lips past the absence of my tongue, taking root in the hollow of my empty mouth and echoing.

Nathanial taught me then what making a sound would cost me.

I cupped my cheek, shock holding me as it stung from the slap he gave me.

Alarm bells went off in the air around us and something in me gave up again, just like it had in the detention center.

I understood then.

This new place was not my freedom.

I was probably safer in the detention center.

I'd heard stories in there.

About masters like Nathanial.

I remember hoping that I wouldn't get one like the stories.

Even then I'd been foolish.

I'd believed that there would be nice things left in my life.

In my existence.

I was wrong.

The world went such a dark shade of maroon that I could no longer see.

I was mute and blind in that time.

That was good.

I could pretend that my life was not happening to me.

I could be okay.

But.

I wasn't.

I wasn't okay.

Nathanial is killing me.

Oh god, he's killing me.
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sun | 18 | male | avox | jung taekwoon | odaïr

[gamemaker kelsier]

complete! uwu

[maverick hale 🌧️ d5 [nyte]]

can i just like tell u how fucking stunning and heartbreaking this is it's amazing like holy shit

accepted