zachariah lee || district five || cbd1 || fin

He's been asked, more than once, what it's like, and it's all too easy to detect the hidden meaning behind the words. How is it being but one kid of many your mother focuses on and cares about? they mean. What sort of trauma do you get seeing a mother's love split amongst so many she did not birth?

To the second question, the answer is easy; there is none, for his mother, like himself, has more than enough love to give anyone who might need it. And to the first?

"I'm not jealous," he says with a shrug and an easy but polite smile. "Why would I be of any of my siblings?"

Indeed, growing up as a kid of a woman who cares for kids might seem weird on the outside, but they don't know him. They don't know how his mother didn't build the orphanage from the ground up so that kids like her needn't suffer the way she had. They don't know how between the two of them, there is more than enough love to give to the point that he considers each and every child that has the misfortune of falling within their walls his own real siblings, given time.

They don't know how his heart warms whenever one of them finds their forever home and forever family (carefully vetted by his own hand to ensure that each and every one gets a childhood they deserve).

And they don't know how his heart breaks when another one ages out of the system, as prepared as they technically could be but with a lifetime of only the best he and his mother can provide.

Another five years, he vowed on his eighteenth birthday. Another five years to make a living for myself, and then I can help. Truly help.

(And he doesn't know that for many, he already has.)