hugo belgrave / d3 / (fin)

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

 

 HUGO BELGRAVE

district three
eighteen
anarchy, baby!
times of war

“ And, [he] was everything that was left:
molten eyes and a smile made for war. ”

— maggie stiefvater; the dream thieves.

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

It’s okay to despise what you have inherited,
to feel dead in a city of pulses. It’s okay
to be the whale that never comes up for air,
to love best the taste of your own blood.

You have my permission not to love me;
I am a cathedral of deadbolts
and I’d rather burn myself down
than change the locks.

— rachel mckibbens.  

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

“You want battle? I'll give you war.”
— erin hunter; the first battle.

I prefer to think I was happy once, before the shit-storm.

But, the hard truth is, some people simply weren't built to harbor happiness and joy in their hearts — some were made to bruise their knuckles all kinds of lilac and purple from socking a face, or knock over a lamp so hard that when it splintered, the bits flung and cut them in the cheek. Some were born to not make armistices or quell wars, but to start them.

My story began amid the glistening walls of a mansion, in the arms of a loving mother, watched over by a smiling father. My story had a happy beginning but it isn't the beginnings that form the flesh of a story. It's the fuck-ups, the anecdotes about the time I played with Dad's gun and blew a hole in my sister's favorite pink diary, the blood I shed, the curse words I'd said.

Stories are made of all that, and so much more.
But, I think mine's just composed of fuck-ups.

I hate to sound so utterly privileged but there was something tedious and weary about growing up in a place where everything glistened, in a house that was something of a museum too, brimmed with artifacts and paintings.

There were no walls Serena and I could draw with crayons on, not that Serena would ever do that. Pretty Serena, beautiful Serena, bitch Serena, never a crack in her armor, never a stray strand of hair that wasn't tucked behind her ear. She was the same as the decorations of the mansion — something that was hewn to be on display, immaculate and beautifully prominent. I was something an artist would call an abstract painting but, in truth, was a streaky, confused painting said artist drawn high on cloves, a study in chaos, red through and through. I remember Ma telling me once that she thought I was born bloodstained.

We passed our days in a way children of the renowned mafia leader did: by marveling at the arms Dad would bring it in and leaping from one patch of sunlight to the next in the kitchen as Ma cooked, sneaking red peppers into Serena's drinks whenever I had the chance, playing with the children of Dad's employees.

Back then, our innocence hadn't been blackened and torn yet.
Back then, perhaps, I had a semblance of what happiness was.

But, stories never end with a smiling boy, cradled in his mother's slender arms, gazing at the dark summer sky as it crackled with thunderstorms. Stories have to end with that boy being craved into something else, something furious and wild-eyed.

They are destined to end that way.

The first time I felt this anger humming behind my ribs, I was ten and crying red tears with my teeth bared at Serena because she'd broken the sky-blue mug from my art class. It didn't stem from a tragedy, but from a mere accident. That's the reason I believe that I was born with it, born to be inconsolable and jagged, this anger as innate as my breath, as sacred as my heartbeat. Everything took its course from there, festering like poison in veins, burning like a hungry forest-fire until I was nothing but orange flames.

Sometimes, a thing happens and nothing else occurs. Sometimes, a thing happens — and an avalanche trails a heartbeat after.

After that, my life becomes a brief montage that flickers in and out of existence, a series of technicolor images in disarray. Click. I am ten, hands clenched to fists, shoulder-blades like the hedges of a wall. Click. I am thirteen but act years older than my age, silver-tongued and distant. My innocence starts to shed its leaves. Click. I am fourteen, with alcohol searing down my throat. It feels as if I'd swallowed fire and never threw it up. My innocent becomes ill. Click. I am fifteen and they kill my father biblical. I feel the bullets inside my knee, shoulder, and head for weeks to come. I feel them to this day, with every creak of my bones, with every curl of my muscles. My innocent had begun to rot. Click. I am sixteen and screaming. My throat feels like it'd been split open raw by a sharp blade. I do not stop screaming. My innocence festers at my feet, a rotten thing that'd transmuted something else, something sinister.

Click. I am eighteen and I haven't stopped screaming since.

But, the sound had become an inarticulate cry now, springing from a strangled throat. I scream but no one hears.

My innocence becomes my cruelty — and it chokes me.

Now, the glistening walls had become dull, tarnished by mold and mildew. What was once a kingdom, was now mere ruination. I wish that metaphor applies to me too, gold to ruins, but it doesn't. I have always been these ruins, these broken pieces, these jags and these fragments. Not Serena, with her grace and brilliance, but me, Hugo Belgrave, the family's fuck-up, a boy that bears resemblance to the dark barrel of a gun. 

Now, I am fine with my anger. I welcome my anger: all its waves and chaos, all its hunger and havoc. I let it cloak me like a saint's robes and then I unleash it like God's thunderous wrath.

I think I truly was happy, once, but that was the past.

Some weren't born to be happy — some were born to carry the fierce spirit of Ares, the war god, deep in their bones. Some didn't ask to be born — they simply were. I didn't build this system, nor did I fuck it up. But, here's the thing about ruins: they are so hopelessly irreparable that making themselves splinter again won't change anything.

I think I was happy once, but now I just want to hurt.

I want everything to hurt, both me and everyone else. 

[napoleon, d2m ₊⊹ 🐁 ɢʀɪғғɪɴ.]

dars
hey cutie (;

[dars]

"Hugo Belgrave, the family's fuck-up, a boy that bears resemblance to the dark barrel of a gun. "

The way you wrote his anger overtaking him like a disease?????
It was beautiful!! Literal poetry before my very eyes.

Click.