silas roscoe » d11 » done!

appearance - -

Why does no one think of all the ways beauty can be used, abused, contorted, and deaformed into the ugliest word in the world? It has become a word to judge everyone and everything, a social norm to be tested against and pushed up to. It's not the same thing as it could be, just a simple adjective that's used as an all encompassing descriptor of all that's around us and all that will ever be. Who are we to judge the beauty of anything, whether it be a person, place, or a thing? Why do we get to say when something doesn't appeal to us that it's disgusting, unattractive, unappealing? We are all the same.

The same atoms sewn together in such a pattern that we all look different, but to say one person is anything but gorgeous is to say that we all are, for there's nothing different between us except for a curve here or a line here. Something that we've decided writes out every part of a person's life. To be ruined over something you can't control would be to slip-slide your way into the deepest, darkest regions of the inferno said to rumble and sputter under this Earth's crust. To be lifted up by that very word would be the biggest cheat you could ever pull, but it doesn't stop some from smiling all the way up. And who's to stop them?

Sometimes, a boy cannot help being somehow graced with features that didn't so much seem as if they were formed from skin and bone but instead from something both smooth and sharp, chiselled and whittled as if he were a creature made from hours upon hours of hard work. As if someone slaved over his fine boned nose for days, making sure it cast the perfect shadows against his high cheekbones in the afternoon sunlight that peaked through the fluttering leaves that had always been his home. For most of his life his angular chin didn't lift, instead leaving his gaze to train away from all those who tried to pry and peer at him.

It took him years to learn to tilt his head up and see the world for what it was through his dark eyes that were the very same colour as the sticky caramelized cinnamon-sugar mixture coating buns in shop windows that he could never have. He became skilled at looking at all those who crossed his path through his black fringe of lashes, and better still at hiding away his lean body under baggy, worn clothing given to him by his brothers. He was a finely crafted statue hidden away under layers of uncertainty, wrapped around him with a cloth woven of anxiety, but as he grew, even he had to shrug it off.

Now he knows how to push his shoulders back and laugh with his head tilted back just so, letting sunshine whisper over his features and light up his face as the corners of his eyes crinkled with his own glee. He knows how to walk so his long legs glide instead of shuffle along, how to make it so everyone watches the lines of his broad shoulders slip into his narrow hips where slim-fitting pants, no matter where they are between decaying and destroyed, just barely cling to his bones. He doesn't hide away his tanned skin anymore, knows better than to try to trim his ebony hair too short. He lets it curl and twist in a messy crown balanced upon his head, always mussed as if he's just crawled out of bed or he simply doesn't care enough to pull the twigs away from his waves.

He is a chaotic beauty crafted by the most loving of deities. Full lips, hollowed cheeks, deep set eyes and a body composed of nearly fragile looking bones, long and slim like a cigarette. Wiry muscle makes up the rest, built up by years of scaling trees and carrying baskets upon baskets of goods to and from the fields, walking miles a day just to get home. He doesn't have a trusting face or a warm expression, but he has a smile that lingers on his cheeks long after it disappears. If you don't care for the nearly flawless, then don't look his way for long. To search for imperfections is to break the spell that anything can be called beautiful at all. Glamours and shields may be at work, but if he's all smoke and mirrors, why uncover the centre of the inexplicably handsome?

- - personality

Can you tell me what it is exactly that makes humans different from anything else? Is it simply because we're aware of ourselves and our uniqueness, that we think we're better because we can create things that only work to destroy everything we should cherish? What's the point of all our intelligence if all we ever do with it is file away at each other, rub until our skin itches and falls away, until every wall can crumble down and all that's left is a broken shell of what once was? Is there any point to having a larger brain or a sense of innovation if all we ever do with it is nurture glowing embers until the world is up in flames? Everything we could do, and we choose to sabotage and suppress. We choose death over life, as long as it's someone else suffering.

Thoughts can be dangerous things in Panem, but they can't be swallowed. Silas could never dim down his ticking mind, could never find the switch that would turn off the questions that he wasn't allowed to ask. He knew better than to open his mouth. He always, always knew. His lips wouldn't curve around the words that would lead to deep gashes across his spine, to welts dancing up and down his shoulders and making salty paths flow down his face. As a child he learned that knowledge should be kept and cherished in a locked away box, never to escape. To let it out would be to let it whither away. It was better to never say and have at least one person know the truth.

He spent the first fourteen years of his life trapping himself like the thoughts he wouldn't let go. He listened, though didn't often dare watch. He worked hard and, as long as he pretended he didn't exist himself, everyone else looked right past him. He managed not to be noticed at all, and people spoke. They chattered away in their not-whispers, too quiet to be heard by anyone who mattered, but not to him. Not when he was listening to everything, wanting nothing more than to have the chance to gather every bit of information he possibly could. On what, he never knew until the conversation was over, but still he paid the strictest attention to every vowel and consonant. He raised himself on stolen words and other worlds. He was a ghost who fed on fables and tales, and he never released the quotes that filtered into his obsessive mind.

Then he began to speak, to really say the things that tickled the corners of his imagination. The restless things that he couldn't keep down even more, even though he knew that he should. Even though his safety could depend on him not asking his older brothers the things they didn't know the answers to. He questioned little things first. Why even though there was food all around them, they never had enough on the table to eat. Why it was like that for nearly everyone in the District, and why no one would help them. Then about the Capitol's hold on the Districts. On the Games themselves. On the rulers of the Capitol. On everything his head could find a path down. When he was told to stop, he realized something that changed him from a curious soul to one shielded by rapier wit and a lilting, degrading smirk. He learned that he lived in a world where people didn't need to be silenced. They did it all on their own.

Now all he has is a bad habit for saying the wrong thing. An attitude that gets him nowhere at all, but at least it keeps him from talking to anyone for too long to wonder if he might have finally met someone who will actually stop and ask. Who will take a pause from the life and the restrictions they've sewn themselves into, will tear down their barricades that keep them safe from the inquiring mind and ask what happened. And if not that, just ask anything. Ask anything at all that wasn't so shallow. Until he meets that day or one where he can no longer swallow his wonder, he can keep edging away from anyone and everyone. He can play the part of a beautiful, broken thing, and take his dismantling of all that's laid out in front of him to a dark place with a key he didn't own.

He is not the beast he's building around himself. He may hide in it's skin and speak in it's voice. It's heart may beat in time with his own and their lungs may rise and fall in a perfect synchronization, but that doesn't make them one in the same. They are not a pair. For now, they're as easy to separate as oil and water. Bring a spark to his surface and the monster will burn away to nothing but curling smoke. It can reach it's putrid tendrils towards him and try to wrap around his thoughts again, but a single stirring gear can banish it far away. Whether nobody knows how easy it is to get him back or whether nobody cares is the only question he has left to ask.

history - -

Do you like stories? Fairytales where the princess always finds her prince, even if he has to climb towering palaces to wake her up, or fight of dragons and witches and evil step-mothers? Or do you prefer to hear the myths that mothers tell their children, warning them away from the water's edge or telling them not to stay up too late, to venture into the forests past the buzzing fences that were meant to keep them safe. They were just made to keep them in. Still there were stories of mutts that lurked in the trees that dominated the outside world that many would never see. Mutts that, if they really existed, would most likely not be deterred by something as simple as charged wires.

This is not folklore, and as such, it's not half as exciting. What could be said about a boy's life when he didn't think much of it himself? He was encased in a place that didn't warrant liberty, didn't have any sort of escape. There were no paints for him to craft faraway places in which questions could be asked and answered with no shame. There were no delicate instruments that could be used to keep his fidgeting fingers busy as he refused to let himself be seen. There was nothing for him at all. No way out. Not a single escape, however temporary, to be found in the entire land that he searched. He was a victim to his own thoughts and a slave to the tyrants who wouldn't let them breathe for the restrictions that they were crushed under.

School came first. Eight hours a day, seven days a week. That exhaused the first six years of his life, just long enough for the teachers to drill into his mind all of the horrible things that could happen if he were to ever get the idea that they might break free of the constant cycle that came from being under a ruler that stopped Panem entirely. Kept them in a frozen time space, free from development of any kind. They were resources and raw materials, not people. That was all he learned, as his eyes traced along page after page with a hungry stare, looking for something, anything that would give him an explanation as to why. But all he got in return was the ache for a collection of knowledge, shelf after shelf of books that would tell him all that he wanted to know, not all that he had to be told.

He never received his wish. He was pulled out of school on his seventh birthday, and he hasn't seen a single book since. From then on he began to work with his brothers, Rush and Caraway, who are respectively two and four years his senior. There were others. Babies that never saw the light of day as their mother starved and had to keep working herself to exhaustion. She lost three children and ended up with three, all at the mercy of the Games, but his siblings were safe, and so far, so was he. He only had the repetitive trekking and traveling to worry about, the corn to tie to his back and the apples to carry awkwardly in front of him. Whenever he or anyone else gets used to a load, they're just given more, never letting the strain off of their tearing muscles. Sometimes he wonders how they walk at all.

This is not a fairytale, but you already knew that. There's no happy ending where suddenly he comes into an inheritance and is whisked away to a castle where there's enough food for him to not be dizzy when he moves too quickly. There's no way to get back the siblings he could have had, or the daughters and sons his parents would have named. There's nothing but more tales of how the Capitol destroyed a family's lives before it could even begin properly, destroyed it when the first child Briar would have had was never born. This was no way to live. They just didn't have a choice.It was this or nothing at all.

His story is one that isn't uncommon. His life is identical to many. Be born, go to school, work, die. Because there was really nothing in between. He could have a family, but could the separated things that many came home to be considered even that? Were they not closer to the shadow of such a thing, a teasing glimpse of what could be if they weren't being shattered and splintered by the leaders that told them it was all for their best? Moping over his own situation would not make it better. His history was just that. His own past. Things that effected him and changed him, but not ones that could be changed. To dwell on it is to suggest that mere thought can alter the paths of time, and such a notion is completely impossible. He hasn't had a particularly bad life. He doesn't mope. In fact, he just about tries to forget about his own story entirely.