maks ozerov / nine. fin

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

maks ozerov
eighteen | nine

✦

❛ will our actions echo across the centuries? will strangers hear our names long after we are gone, and wonder who we were, how bravely we fought, how fiercely we loved? ❜

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

When I was little, my parents were both killed. I don't really like to think about how they died, because it isn't that they died—they were killed. That's a whole other ballgame. My mom didn't die in her sleep of old age; my Dad didn't get sick during the food shortages and collapse from hunger; they didn't get into an accident at one of the factories. Peacekeepers thought they were involved with the gangs, even though they weren't, and so they rounded the pair of them up and put bullets in their skulls. Look, I don't remember them that well, to be honest. I can see my mom in flashes sometimes, remember her scratching the top of my head soothingly before she tucked me into bed, remember the look on her face when gunshots would go off on the street below us. Dad is harder for me to remember, but I have a memory of the two of us up on our building's rooftop once. He pointed out the constellations that were up in the sky, or at least the ones that we could still see in the gross polluted sky in Nine, but I think it's part of why I like tracking these days, why I like navigating. It's just the briefest flash of a memory, him pointing out stars, but even through all the anger and the feeling of abandonment, I kept looking to those stars and want to live my life by them. Not like it really matters though. Me knowing the difference between what the plants growing in Nine look like when they're whole and healthy and what they look like when they've been stepped on didn't do me very much good when I was growing up in the godforsaken orphanage and they refused to let me go outside for more than five minutes to collect firewood from the back porch. Ah, those were the fuckin' days. I think that the orphanage, honestly, could be worse. Like, being real, I could be being beaten and abused, or conned into believing in some ridiculous religious. But the food is steady, if usually over-salted, and I'd rather have to deal with neglect than have to deal with patching up wounds from a person who's supposed to be protecting me. Sometimes, when I was younger, the older kids would try and pick on the younger ones, just for something to do I think, but when I clambered right up one of them like a tree trunk and pummeled my little fists into their face and gouged my thumbs into his eyes, well—they started leaving me mostly alone. I wish that I blamed them for killing my parents, the Peacekeepers, but for some reason, as I've grown up, I blame the Peacekeepers less and less. Half my neighbors were involved with the local gang; if I were one of them, and I keep thinking about training to become one, I probably would have thought my parents were involved with them, too, or at the very least have thought that they had information about the gangs that they weren't sharing with the PK's. Nah, I'm not angry with them. I'm angry with my parents, I suppose, for not fighting harder to follow up on Mayor Irvine's policies, for keeping us in that neighborhood. Dad was a drunk though, and he wasn't always losing his jobs, so they never really had the money to try and move anywhere else, to a safer part of town maybe. I even know about people going into the woods—why didn't we do that? Move ourselves into the forest and work our way through that world instead of the one we were given? Mostly, though, I hate the gangs. It's their fault that my parents are dead, their fault that this entire fucking district is running itself right into the ground. Why do they think that the Capitol doesn't send us the same kind of resources that they send to some of the other districts? It doesn't matter how much work Talon Irvine puts in—as long as the gangs run rampant as they do, there's no way we're ever going to get the support we need to really thrive, not just borderline survive. I don't care how beloved Talon is she, don't care what initiatives she puts forth; we're a doomed cause. We were dead before she even started. But that's a shit way to look at my life, at this place that I'm forced to call a home. I want it all to change, want life to be something else, something better, something different. It's like with every passing year, more and more gangs turn up and I don't know where they come from or how we're supposed to stop them. The capitol dropped fucking bombs on us when the gangs started rioting and look where we are—more of them, stronger than ever. They're like fucking cockroaches. Spray bleach on them and they just get stronger. One day, I'll join the Keepers, if I can. If they'll take me. I hear the money with them is good, and I won't have anyone I'll have to send my earnings back to; it will all be mine. I'll request some district far away from here, somewhere I can escape this hell.  Some place where I can be someone other than the angry, lonely boy who ended up in an orphanage.  It's out there. I just have to find it.

[gamemaker tallis 🧚🏽‍♂️kaitlin.]

also just uh leaving this here !!


ripred_bot

[gamemaker sloane ♕ kaяi ♕]

oh he cute cute huh