lena martin / d9. ( fin )

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

   

   


i don't want to fight,
i want to be strong.
there's a difference.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

L E N A.  TWENTY. princess. as i am. as i am. all or not at all.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

tell me love is precious
don't be so pretentious

You are born for better things.

You are a patchwork quilt of heartbreak and home building, of a life simultaneously ruined and still being built. You are bedecked in innocence painted red, a tender-hearted girl with violence at her fingertips. You are built from ghosts, trying to stand on your own two feet while trying to balance who you were as a girl with who you feel you must now be as a woman. An onlooker to your own life, you're both in control and out of it, toying with this feeling of helplessness, and wondering if the control you've taken to get your father’s attention, to get your freedom, is all worth it.

You're a saint with blood in you future, a symbol of love and loss and light, and all the ways the dark threatens those things.

❖

It starts as all things do, with a love that transcends violence, or that perhaps comes because of it—with a girl and her family money; with a boy and his dreams of building an empire.

Like Robin Hood tumbling in from the wild, he steals into her home in the dead of night to try and steal from one of the only wealthy families in District Nine, to take from those who drown in wealth and—well, when you're young you hear the version that ends one way, with him stealing from those who would drown in wealth so that he might spread it among the masses, but later, when you're finally ready, your father tells you the truth.

He wanted to choke them with it,
those who could have helped
but refused.

In his mind's eye, the real evil of the world hadn't been the criminals that riddled his streets, but the people who watched on from their glass towers and laughed as death befell them all. The irony isn't lost on you now, not by a mile, when your own father tells you this story decades later, tucking you in your silk pajamas into your bed with its thousand thread count sheets. Still though, unlike the other gangs that run the streets of your hometown, you're proud of your origin story, that your fathers fathers father, or something like that, didn't choose violence for the sake of violence, for the sake of blood.

He chose violence
for the sake of good.

And the very girl whose home he had broken into? She had slipped a kitchen knife from its block and pressed it against his throat, then left a trace of her lipstick in its wake when he told her his plan. Why take what I'd freely give? she had said, smile amused, eyes dangerous.

And together, they started something new, something with an origin story that made people flock to them. The doe-eyed girl with a knife for a smile and her raven-haired Robin Hood, come again angels descending on the streets of Edgewood, that little neighborhood in the northern part of the city, and later more and more parts of District Nine. They were criminals of the highest order, building soup kitchens where they could, helping to train and educate the masses as absolutely best they knew how to, spreading the wealth at every opportunity.

But for every light, there's darkness, and there's was nothing if not a study in contrasts.

For every bit of good they did, there was a drug runner on the street, pumping their product into the city's veins, infecting them with drugs that made people feel like heaven sent. They pushed their product better than any of the other gangs, turned pain into pleasure and then pleasure into hallucination, and back into pleasure. It was a never-ending spiral. And it's like they say, absolutely power corrupts absolutely, and as your family gained in wealth and stature, such did the leaders pushing the cause on.

And these generations later, you fight the darkness like none before you have, and in your very own way, it has made you the most susceptible.

❖

Your mother and sister die when you are twelve, and that's the beginning and end of everything.

It happens by an unfortunate accident, or so you think, but in this world of yours you can never be completely sure. They aren't the target of a rival gang; it's not a coordinated attack on your family; it just so happens that someone far hungrier thought, perhaps, he could steal the money from your mother wallet—she was a fighter though, like your great grandmother had been, and she tried to fight back, to keep her belongings hers, and so instead the man flicked a knife from his pocket and stuck it in your sisters throat.

The whole neighborhood heard your mother scream, but he tries to silence her by shoving the thing through the bottom of her jaw.

It doesn't work.
A peacekeeper comes.
Justice gets served.
Your father crumbles.

❖

For two years, your father locks you away, says that he will keep you safe no matter the cost, even if that cost might just be your happiness, might just be your sanity. He drowns you in presents, anything and everything that you ask for, supplies you with paint sets that have colors you could never even dream of and lays out sparkling dresses for you on your bed when he gets back from trips down to the South end of the district. For those two years that he keeps you safe, there's always that voice in the back of your head, the one that you try and ignore, the one that you wish wouldn't exist—but the dark permeates.

A golden cage is still a cage.
A golden cage is still a cage.
A golden cage is still a cage.

❖

You're sixteen, the first time you realize that you are not invulnerable. It happens between one breath and the next, with a smile on your freckled cheeks and terror in your heart, you realize that for all you have tried to live your life for love, you have also stepped into the darkness, and that you should have known the darkness would teach you to love it.

I wonder, you think. Is the message clear?

Lying in a velvet box, an inch wide choker of rubies, flushing red as arterial blood. Around her pretty neck, the flashing crimson jewels might just look like a glittering slit throat.

“Do you like it?” you ask your cousin who's moved against you, eyebrows raised, smile like a cut across your cheeks.

Hadn't this been what your father always tried to tell you? That fears could intoxicate? You watched your father fall into the dark violence of the mob for years, sat alone at home in your bathrobe until late in the evenings, staying up until all hours for your father to finally come through the front door. You'd scurry up the steps to your bedroom before he could see you, but you saw it all the same—that way he loved the darkness, that way he welcomed it into his bones with arms open.

You should have known; you thought you were conquering the darkness, but it had every ability to conquer you too.

❖

There's one conversation now that you always flash back to, the moment where you think you turned a corner that you can never turn back around. A boy asks you what you think about the escalating violence brewing between the Crimsons and the Sparrows, dares to pry into the thoughts of a princess wearing a bloody crown.

You kept your heartbeat level and your eyebrows raised, a kind of careful nonchalance.

Your thoughts flash though, for a moment, to all of those many people that this violence threatens to ruin, for a moment to all of the many people that you want to save, want to love. You think of your brutal-hearted cousin and the girl she had been when she walked into your life, think of all the ways that she loves her new family, think of the cruel words you've heard spit at the girls shoulders and how she came out the other side stronger. You think of all your soldiers, those souls who have pledged themselves at your family’s feet, the hands and hearts that will one day be your responsibility, the hungry hands and hearts that you will need to feed. You think of a man with two children, a body decaying as it lies in a red pool of its own making. You think about the allegations leveled against a man you think must have just been hungry, because if he wasn't then that would have to mean that your family died for this gang, and if that's true then you will have to die and be reborn, too, as something terrible, as something horrible, as something royal. You think of a boy across the territory, with the weight of a world on his shoulders.

Mutually assured destruction, that had been your first instinct.

Instead, you had responded with a question.

“You know that phrase–’the things we do for love’?” You'd looked to the photo of your mother and father on the fireplace mantle, couldn't help it when your brows drew together slightly. Slowly, you drew a breath in and brought your gaze down from the mantle, making sure hazel eyes meet blue. “The things we do for war.”

if you need me, wanna see me
you better hurry, i'm leaving soon

1,069.

note for pat: started with 491 words. 
(total length: 1,560)

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

wobble baby wobble 

ripred_bot

[Tom]

This is stunning~