FIN :: Two :: Monet Kelt

[/font]o n e t ‘ B o n e ’ K e l t .[/center]
[/font]i s t r i c t T w o .[/center]
[/font]w e n t y S e v e n .[/center]
[/font]a l e .[/center]
[/font]o m o s e x u a l .[/center]
[/font]h i l d A b d u c t o r .[/center]


Sitting in the dark, I can't forget
Even now, I realise the time I'll never get[/i]
Another story of the bitter pills of fate
I can't go back again, I can't go back again

[/font]p p e a r a n c e .[/center]

Dear brother, do you remember when you broke my arm? It snapped with a noise like broken branches underfoot after a storm. You were the storm. I always was brittle boned. You’d be proud of me now, brother, for I hold myself properly, like a tortured statue, rather than a marionette with no master.

[/i] I am strong, brother, but strength has never made a difference to me. Brainpower was always my weapon of choice in the Training Centre.

You hurt me so because of the masterpiece I had made of the wall – do you remember it as clearly as I do? My peers told me often I had fingers made for a paintbrush, and not for a sword. I was thirteen when I painted it, but I’m sure I still look like the same boy. I had splattered out my hair perfectly, I think, and I’m sure you agreed, even if you did not show it. Heavy around my face, I wore it too long, according to you. You came at me with a knife once, to chop it all off, I’m sure you remember. You told me it was my fault that it took a wedge from my cheek like a cleaver to meat, for I kept struggling. Still my face is lopsided from that drunken night. I had perfected the dappled look it – my hair – has, not speckled, as such, but awash with shades of honey browns and blondes that make every curl individual. It took me an hour to achieve that effect, as I had to keep glancing round to check you wouldn’t come, my hands shaking so violently I was afraid of making slips. My hands still shake uncontrollably now, because I have even less to take my mind off my fears.

You should have taken the time to admire my painting’s features – the grey-blue eyes were deep and enticing. Girls said that’s what drew them in, back then. But I suppose you always were jealous of the looks I flaunted carelessly. You would strike my straight nose with your fists until it bent and broke. My straight nose is one of the only things that has survived your reign of terror over me, brother. Alas, my eyes have blurred and faded, now. They shine with a layer of tears that reflect the memories I suppress so far inside. Unsheltered by short, dark lashes, I avoid the scrutiny that eye contact invites, even now I am so grown up. You taught me eye contact meant insolence, and insolence deserved a beating. Are these fears irrational, brother?

And yet all the things that have changed in me, as well. Following after you, the beloved role model that you are, I now sport the minimal facial hair of a proud man. Perchance it is that even though I do not feel proud, my appearance will not drive others to look deeper. The furrow of my shallow brow adorns my forehead permanently, like some crown or trophy that other men might wish to remove. When once, though rarely, I may have smiled, now no such happiness masks my face. But I still smirk hatefully at those I find insufferable and abuse.[/i]

However, I think, sweet brother, what really drove you to snap my limb so deliberately, with both hands clenched around my skinny elbow, twisting until I shrieked, was how I drew the bruises. Purple blossoms, with marsh-green veiny vines crawling up my neck. Still, when I look in the mirror, the pressure you put on my tender throat amazes me. I flinch when I turn my head too fast, and the broken capillaries that can never heal scream agony through my nerves. Does that make you happy, brother? Every scar, from those just under my hairline where you chose to hide them, to those most prominent on my cheeks and shoulders, drawn to perfection with aid of a mirror. And with every brush stroke I felt that initial torture again. When I see myself now, the ugly stains of a broken past still conspicuous, twinges of pain are accompanied by the stench of Capitol-seal alcohol, stolen from Peacekeepers, and the roar of your curses in my ears. I only painted it to make you happy, brother. But the sober pride had vanished with the arrival of drunken fury, and so, like every time before and after, I was left battered and bleeding on the floor. A bloodstained portrait on the wall, and nimble, shaking fingers wet with tears of fear.[/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify][/size]



And we were never alive and we won't be born again
But I'll never survive with dead memories in my heart[/i]
Dead memories in my heart
Dead memories in my heart

[/font]e r s o n a l i t y .[/center]

Funerals have always disgusted me. Grown men and women, crowded around a corpse in a hole in the ground, tears tumbling over their ashen cheeks just as the earth tumbles six feet into the hole they have dug. Can’t they see death is just another phase of existence? It makes me sick to think that people around me can be so injudicious in their thought that they think life means something. Perhaps it passed down from you, this belief, brother; you never went to funerals either. Though unlike you, I haven’t turned to alcohol or any other depressant to rid me of these sickened thoughts. People are stupid, and it would be stupid to get to know them, too.

I will tell you what I do believe, brother, because you may sneer but it is what has kept me sane. As sane as I can be. There is no reason why we exist. We are here with no purpose, there is no God, we are simply here to be. And so I never grieve the dead, because eventually I will be just like them. After all, if I were to grieve the dead in my line of work, my mind would decompose as quickly as those bodies in the ground. It is hard, explaining what I think, and I would prefer to stay away from prying questions altogether. They just think I’m a monster when I sneer at them, as they push their beliefs in my face. Why should I care what they believe? It makes no difference if they say the body is only a vessel, if they say that the children massacred in the Games go on too early in their lives. I don’t care for ideas of destiny or fate, love is unimportant. They cannot bring me to consider another possibility, and I can’t let them get close enough to try. The only people I’m around are just like me, or are too young to be anything but indoctrinated by their parents. And I am not afraid to use the methods that can break that out of them.

That is another way I am obviously your kin, brother, as disgusting as I may find myself. Violence, pain, the actions of petty life mean nothing to me. There’s no sense in warning against doing something because of its consequences. We pay for everything in death, ultimately. For different reasons to you - my purpose in my career rather than fear of authorities – I won’t do anything reckless, directly provoking Peacekeepers. Punishment by death before my job is done or voicelessness is no more appealing to me than killing my own mother. Yes, I was always smarter than you, dear role model, when it came to choices. I never rushed into anything, even in my anger. I was left with no one to abuse.

This solitude is one thing that has shaped me; I am entirely independent. Almost entirely, really, brother. The traits that link me to the rest of this pathetic batch of individuals, so frail and fearful is my need for company. As much as I detest myself for it, I am desperate for just one link to my kin people. Though I still choose my company very specifically. Whether the be criminals or heroes, those who do what they want, not just consider doing it are those I keep in my company. For why, in this little life we have on the grand scale of the universe, should we think about what will come because of the things we do? Yes, brother, I am selfish. But my mind does not allow me time to think about my effect on other people.

The buzzing sparks of thought in my brain keep me awake at night, and constantly alert in the day. Brother, when I lived with you they used to be little whimpers of worry or fear that would jump like my reflexes, increasing in volume every time I heard a noise. I am not afraid of anything, any more. So now, sweet sibling, instead of the disgusting cowardice, what patrols my head is a mantra. A hypnotic rhythm to keep me calm, when many others panic. The numbers. How do I overcome the conscience I had have, when death is always so close to me? Simple, brother; I block it out with something louder.

To keep that small part of my “soul” that still remains pure and unpolluted by my twisted, sunless growth demands I think of those who have ceased to exist around me in some way, so I do. Did you ever see my box of trinkets, brother? I started collecting straight after father Number One. Do you see how it works, brother? To keep my little innocence tame and weak, I still remember. Each and every death is a number in my system, and object in my little box. I count them when the conscience flares. None of them have a name. The violet thread is Number One. The fossil Number Two. And it carries on, brother, with each new death. Another number, and another little object. Never anything too close to the original person, though I never know any of them enough for it to matter. And so, I prevent madness taking me with such a simple trick. I bet I fooled you, too. Though you always saw it necessary to thwart my plans, didn’t you brother? Even in my mind, locked away, you can beat the numbers. Even in the corners of my disciplined, battered brain, I still address you as brother, and not Number Three.

I always learnt it was better to face your fears and taunt them than turn away, and you certainly are a fear of mine. Even in death, brother, you couldn’t leave me in peace. Every day, you dement my Counting, with you ever-named presence.

And do you think compassion is beyond me? I agree. My feelings towards others are as supressed as bitter memories. And I am content like that, brother. This is how I live. This is who I am.

[/justify]




And we were never alive and we won't be born again
But I'll never survive with dead memories in my heart[/i]
Dead memories in my heart
Dead memories in my heart

[/font]i s t o r y .[/center]

Our lives were satisfactory, were they not, brother? Perhaps it depends on the viewpoint, I know most people would want to sooner forget my existence than accept it. You enjoyed it more than I did. Especially in the earlier years of grieving for mother Number Two, when I felt everything too much – emotions hurled upon me as floods in the canyons of my damaged body, canyons you created in my skin and in my mind. But what am I saying, brother? I am not speaking now to spite you. I will start from the very beginning, from the stain on a page of a letter that became the idea of the first child. I feel it is fair, brother, if I tell you about you, and them, before I narrate to you the story of me. And, brother, considering it is the history, I shall block out the numbers for now.

Pearl Rolland and Jackson-Monet Kelt met when she was twelve and he seventeen, both hoping for that certainly heroic future that came with Career-hood, and both lost in an irrational love split by six years of age and thousands of family history. Oh, the foolish wants of human nature. From their meeting, the veins of happiness and desire spread within and between them, and their relationship continued out of the reaches of their desperate parents; neither family knew the other, they only understood that their child was involving themselves in some romantic idea from beyond the Dark Days. Both you and I thought the story of their hastily evaporating love could only be defined with words like medieval or ancient; words no longer used or needed. I always thought, brother, if it weren’t too drastic, they would have taken the ridiculous idea of eloping beyond the fences seriously.

Although they did remain in the District, both parties broke off connections with their families. Pearl Rolland became Pearl Kelt and was quickly expecting a child. Just nineteen, brother, and already you were destroying her life. However, having trained passionately since she was very young, her body was not too fragile for a baby. She was able to handle more than a few kicks and stretches. Never have I found our mother a heroine, brother, but certainly she put up a fight in those years and months before motherhood. Father was very supportive – in view of public or the doctors – and though she was weak as you drained the life from her, from within, she was well cared for. It was a bitter Winter when you were born, brother, and the cold must have done something to your brain and to your body, or else our father did indirectly, for you definitely were not the child they hoped for. With one leg withered, a corpse even at the beginning of your life, they called you – and here I shall address you – Ivon Orso simply because you were not the son they believed deserved the name Monet, father’s father and a martyr hero of our District, brought down only in the final of his Hunger Games by a cruel twist of chance. A hasty choice of name for a weak and useless son, who could never achieve all the feats of training and violence they did. They knew themselves, brother, that finding a relationship like theirs wouldn’t happen to you. They wanted you to be a merciless killing machine, to bring honour and fame to the Kelts and District Two, but on birth and in your infanthood they saw that was not possible. And they wouldn’t listen as you got older, and more damaged, and begged them to see it wasn’t your own fault.

And yet, there was not point to that, brother, for neither parents believed it was your fault. As you got older, your leg supported by splints and metal gears but never truly valuable, father took more and more to the belief that it was our mother’s fault you were this way. When you had just turned six she was pregnant once again, and her husband was adamant she needed to be punished for whatever she did so that the next child wouldn’t turn out the same way. Strange, it was by my own choice and good luck that I was never forced to train after my twelfth birthday, rather than by any hideous physical impediment. In one particularly sentimental moment, brother, I remember how you recalled to me one such punishment. Three months into my growth, as the swell of her belly was just beginning to show under the heavy clothes she wore, she had had, by father’s standards, one too many drinks. He himself was a heavy drinker, even when you were only a babe, brother, was he not? There is another trait you took from him, most greatly. You three were eating dinner, as I recall you saying, when he surged up, face reddening. Like a great geyser, his temper rose as he seized mother by the hair. Pieces of the meal shooting like greasy meteors went everywhere, and you watched on – you watched, brother, you piece of shit – as he raised his fork – greatly bent by the heat and size of his immense left hand – and brought it down on her face. She bore scars I would when I was a boy, at your hand. You were not shaken as you told me this, brother, while I was still a wide-eyed toddler and you felt some love for me, no, your face was set in heavily shadowed stone. When you told me how she shrieked and writhed as he slashed, again and again at her pale face that so wonderfully fitted her name, there was no regret for witnessing it passively. When the half empty glass of alcohol smashed in his bare grip, refracting angry shards of light across the dining room, onto the place where I would later paint a portrait, and across our mother’s mutilated, now unrecognisable face. Perhaps, brother, if you had been more compassionate, you would have loved her more than I did. I never felt anything for either of our parents. For you knew her before she was the scarred and crooked hag who raised me, and trained me. Her womb and abdomen might have been sturdy enough to bear us both, brother, but her face was no match for the violent, hate-filled man six years her senior, with weapons – however pathetic they may be – dominating her maternal state viciously. However, as you told me of this one abusive moment amongst the very many of your early years and then mine, there was not glint of pools from your eyes in the darkness of that room, no tremor in your voice. You were as monstrous and emotionless as he.

But all monsters get their due – great dictators fall, Districts are destroyed, even I expect to be ripped apart by my victims or authorities soon enough – and our father got his. One night, after numerous blows to mother’s already shattered and sagging face, Pearl Kelt Rolland finally got the better of the man who had herded her just as if she was some animal at market. As you and I argued by the front door, thirteen and eight, and with the first stains emerging on our tainted relationship, the adults argued above. Arguing in the sense that father’s knuckles came into contact with mother’s chest and stomach with an unbearable conflict of bone on pulpy flesh. The clamour increased as the huge man’s ruddy face emerged at the top of the stairs, dragging his wife behind him as she yelped weedily behind him. Your own furious rumble, deep even then, took on a crescendo to match his, and for a moment I feared you would strike me, too. And then, to overpower every noise in the house, one sudden kick from mother that I’m not sure even she was aware of put the intoxicated monster off-balance. Rocking like a discarded plaything, or a terrible ship trapped mid-storm, he staggered blindly to the summit of the stairs. No longer raging, the house fell into a deathly silence as we watched, mesmerised, as his unforgiving form seemed to crumple over the banister. Even now, brother, every individual crack of his neck and cranium on the stairs is branded in my memory. As I count to forget, I only recall it more. The hideous thunk, thunk of a heavy cadaver tumbling down those creaking platforms.

And so came Number One.

You and I pulled the body to the back of the house, leaving a streak of blood as prominent on the floor as if in thick, clotting paint. His smell was rank and stale even when still warm and soft, so soon after his shattered skeleton had hit the landing, from a decade of alcoholism and lack of self-awareness. I let you bury him, brother, as you leaned on a makeshift crutch for your leg, silently at the bottom of the garden, while I tended to our mother. However, by that time I was sure it was too late for her. On her attack, her already hollowing ankles snapped, with the same noise, I’m sure, as my arm made, like brittle ice. Death would come and suck her away rapidly. Still, a desperate and panicky seven year old, I supported her tenderly, knowing she would be in pain still, to her bedroom. There I found the thread that would become Number One’s memory, wrapped around a key to the little box I keep the trinkets in now.

You blamed me for his death, brother, I know you did. In some irrational way, you couldn’t admit that if anyone, it was mother, though it could only have truly been him. The beatings started while she was still alive. Bed-ridden, she had no say in it, even if she could watch you choking me through faded eyes, my windpipe closed and bent against your thick thumbs, bruises erupting around the places you most liked to punish me. That is when I began to rebel against you. Everything became my fault instead of hers, the scapegoat of the next generation. You thought yourself powerful and needed to demonstrate it. Many occurrences happened with me just as they had with you. Legally still under her protection, you could keep me silent within the house and answer the door, showing any Peacekeeper our poor mother who we had to care for at home. For days I never saw sunlight, while you – at only sixteen, brother – were already dependent on depressants and my blood in the webs of your fingers to stay satisfied. You cared for mother, indeed, until you were eighteen you needed an excuse to avoid the community home. When you were my legal guardian, you could treat me just as you saw fit. I feared you, brother, but in an insolent way. Painting pictures on walls, tripping you over by the stairs just as I did in all your loudest nightmares, anything I could do to show you I was still a fighter. I didn’t want to kill you, brother, I just hated you with such a passion I could be driven to. You were a monster, just like Number One.

And this carried on until, conveniently, mother became Number Two just before I turned twelve. To me, it felt like she was abandoning me, like she was giving up.

At eighteen, you had total power over me. I could not run away – our District was full of power hungry teenagers, cautious adults and freshly bred Peacekeepers ready to hurt anyone who stepped out of line. As well as this, my body was in no fit state for any sort of adventure. I could only accept more blows in submission, while you slowly killed yourself in drink and furiously hammering arteries. The constant rush of blood to your head in so many untameable rages had broken blood into your brain. You were slaughtering yourself from the inside out. What I did was just a little push in the right direction. Number Two, unable to teach battle anymore after her first baby, had obsessively taken to cleaning as an escape from the horrific life she led. Cleaning fluids and soaps were abundant in our house – odourless and tasteless, but in no way nontoxic, they were just what I was looking for in my desperate attempts to be rid of the shadow you cast in my peripheral vision and my peripheral thoughts. It all happened hastily, one night before you returned home from a rare trip for supplies for the house. I knew, laden by more liquor and by shopping, or anything you had stolen and your shrunken leg, you would not be back for a while. I filled your bottles with the fluids, marvelling in the ghostly patterns they made as they sunk into the devil’s drink within. For isn’t poison what you were drinking anyway? As you came home quite mollified by a walk and my absence, though I would have voluntarily avoided you for many years prior to this night if you had expressed this desire, and made the direct journey to the alcohol as I knew you would, I sat mutely. I revelled in your cluelessness as the lethal mixture swirled on your blackened gums and down your mucus filled throat. Death came slowly to you. Your eyes glazed, your arteries burning in your throat. Breathing ebbed. Fingers twitched desperately for help I could not give. For once, brother, I watched you suffer. I marvelled at how long it took you to cease motion altogether. Your death remains with me still, yet in a completely different way to the awful ending of Number One. Some sick joy flows through me, and I smirk at your final moments of weakness.

I had not the emotionalor physical strength to bury you, Number Three brother.

And so I ran away, for it was the only thing I could do. Yet, not for long did I live a fourteen year old on the streets. I found a crooked man who would take me as an apprentice in his trade; he wished that some young boy would aspire to be a taxidermist like him. Learning to handle the corpses of beloved pets, scrawny strays and any other little creatures the crazed man could find taught me to handle death as a friend. Taxidermy, filling the skins with cotton and beads, perfumes and letters from their grieving owners, was an art, and so death itself was the greatest contributor. For years I stayed in that line of work, learning the greatest secrets of stuffing animals large and small. Once or twice I enquired into storing people in this way, the crooked man seemed most unnerved. The apprenticeship, and later the shop I inherited as a young man of nineteen, shaken by my past but engrossed in my new skill, was my release from everything – the greatest piece of chance I could have imagined. The career that most District Two teenagers pushed aside, that most people were disgusted by, was my greatest love. I encountered all sorts of obscure people, and their pets, the more shady side of the District seemed to come through my taxidermist’s office at one point or another in those long and glorious years. I made something of myself, brother. I was stronger than you. Number Four’s trinket is a robin, with black glossy eyes and a patch feathered coat.

I first met Altiair Melnont when I was twenty five, still young and mirthful in my cunning profession, and he was a meagre twenty one. However, his wisdom was greater than mine; I had never truly lost the fear of my past, the fear that you, brother, would still come and find me. He had a business proposition for me, he knew that I was doing very well for myself, but would I like to leave and start a career with him. A youth with such passion, such brilliant, sparky thoughts in his head, how could I refuse? But there was something more than that. Yes, I had never considered emotions like real love before, but I was certain that that was what I felt for Altiair. His smile, his words, his perfect brow, don’t be disgusted, brother. I took all my posessions, the stuffed animals that weren’t quite satisfactory and my box of the four objects from my life with death – though yours never made an impact on me, brother –

[/i] and went with him to Melnont House.

I started taking children, just as Number Four had once taken me, though with no bad purpose, quickly after my arrival. Altiair desired to create the ideal fighter; just like my parents once hoped. His plan was to fight children with each other, and the one victor would be that child who could defeat the Games. Unlike other Careers, this fighter would have viewed death and become oblivious to it, unfeeling. Strange, that everything seemed to reflect my own experiences that I would rather have shut out. But be sure that I did not go mad, brother, no I am still sane today because of the numbers. I watched those children fight, taken away by the obedient but malicious girl Altiair found to bury them, and applauded the victor. I cleared up blood and severed limbs just as I was asked to, taking out all my rage, frustration and fear on the children he kept locked up like toys. In a way, I was, and still am, much more brutal than he is.

And so, brother, this is my life. From beginning to end, the gruesome story is something that will haunt me forever. The barrier I have built to stop myself from going insane also stops me from being sane, the thing that makes me forget also keeps me remembering. I am cocooned in death, even though the numbers help me avoid it. I am an enigma, Number Three. I am Bone, now, no longer Monet, and I will live like this until I die.[/size][/blockquote][/blockquote][/justify]



[/font]t h e r .[/center]

Apologies for the weirdness of this bio. I was experimenting with format and well, tadaa, here’s my bio template for future. Ew, right?

I wrote the sections of this bio in separate eons, so if it doesn’t all flow I’m so sorry.
5000 WORDS. FIVE THOUSAND! THAT’S MORE THAN I’VE EVER WRITTEN EVER EVER IN THE HISTORY OF ME. I’m so sorry to whichever staffie read this – you’re perfect and amazing.

I am begging you with the core of my existence to accept this, just because I think I might fade away and die like every single person in this bio if you don’t. And Cass will hang, draw and quarter me.

For the THIS IS WHAT IT TAKES PLOT. Very, very late, he is finally done.

~Onyx

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