b / two. fin

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

O L I V I A   H A L E

bosley | thirty-two
you can call her b

She knows what she wants: an event, by which she means a slip of the knife, a dropped wineglass or bomb, something broken. A sharp thing that will wake her up.

— Margaret Atwood.

townsend academy

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

O L I V I A   H A L E

You came to Townsend late, didn't start at the school until you were almost nineteen.

Later, looking back, you think that's probably something that you should be embarrassed about, or at the very least something that all the girls might look at you funny if they ever thought to ask about. But you don't feel that way. You just don't.

Townsend might have molded you, but you built yourself.

Brick by fucking brick.

Your Mama was a cruel woman, no doubt about it.

A cruel woman wear fake pearls, fake nails, fake hair, even fake fucking teeth—you've got no real idea where she got the money for shit like that, only know that she was fake fake fake with a terrible smile and a pension for cruelty. She used to like hitting you, probably a little too much, sharp little slaps across the cheek.

Well, not all of them were little.

Sometimes her nails would clip you and leave a mark, open and raw and red. Sometimes she'd use the back of her hand and you've get scared her ring was going to blind you. Sometimes the hits bruised and sometimes they didn't but if they did you could always be sure you mother would comment on them.

Put some makeup on that, she'd say, poking the mark on your face face. Makes me feel bad lookin at it.

You'll make more in a night with them than you would workin' all month long in the factories.

That's what your mother used to say, putting the spread of wealthy older men out in front of you. She'd always been sure to sprinkle in a dash of kindness when she did it, too. Tuck your hair behind your ear. Trace your cheekbone with the back of her knuckles. You don't even know where she got access to things like this, where a poor woman in Nine got a list of men looking for a nice night with a pretty young blonde.

That's not me, Mama, you'd say, voice small, jaw tight.

Let's not forget whose roof you slept under last week, her mom would reply. She was always doing that, shaming you for finding love in other places, shaming you for falling into a new bed just to try and feel something that you think maybe you were supposed to have been feeling your entire life.

You would swallow, shiver, and a tear might roll. He didn't pay me though.

You don't want to be bought.

No one really wanted you to shine.

Looking back, you don't really blame the world for the things that it did to you. You were never given much in the way of an opportunity to show the world that she was a force to be reckoned with. Maybe it's because you were originally from District Nine, didn't make your way to Townsend until you fell in love with a girl one day and she showed you what a world of violence tasted like. You were from the depths of Nine before the riots, back when the Peacekeepers knew about the gangs and still didn't give a fuck, just let them have the run of the place.

A crumbling city, decaying and rotten.

She showed you that you could shine.

You know that most everyone else is from Two.

Really, it's luck of the draw that Charlie finds you.

A naive thing in the back of your head wants to call it fate, or destiny, but you bite its tongue.

Only a couple of weeks before you're recruited, there was a little girl in the middle of a gun fight.

You remember the day so clearly. Your violent girl had died in a gun fight herself only a few months prior, and the sound of the shots ringing out—you hadn't even thought about it twice. You heard the girl crying, screaming really, as bullets ricocheted in the alleys around her, and between one breath and the next you'd dropped the small bag of groceries in your hand and taken off running.

You run headlong into the fight, not a thought for yourself.

( You find out later that that's the moment Charlie's spies had decided you deserved recruiting. )

When you got to the girl, there was a bullet in her side and she was lying on the ground, blood pooling around her in a sick kind of seeping circle. You'd carried her in your own arms all the way to the medic, tears in your eyes as you whisper in the girls ear.

You're gonna be okay, you said over and over and over again. We're gonna be okay.

It's been over ten years since you came to Townsend now, and yet, there's still a voice in the back of your head.

You're not good enough.

This job that you've been given, as much as you feel like you've spent the last decade working for it, you can't help but wonder what it is exactly about you that made Charlie truly believe in you.

Sure, the girls look up to you and maybe you're usually the one that they go to for advice and maybe you love them like they're all your very own little sisters and maybe you would die for them kill for them burn down the fucking nation for them—but you're nothing special.

Right?

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

come get the baby bosley uwu

umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]

[umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]]

i wanna WRITE WITH HER