in this .:{broken place // chaos

we can do some wrecking here
'til a little color comes back into your face
we can do some wrecking here
and find something to love in this broken place

Life was made up of colors.

It was true. Perhaps the idea was a bit glorified by Autumn's bias perspective, but if she thought about it hard enough everything she knew could be boiled down to a swirl of unique shades and hues, pulsing and thrumming and swarming together to form the pictures of her life. But life moved quickly, and few people had the time to appreciate the spectacular art of each individual moment. Even fewer people had the ability to capture those moments, those still frames, reducing them back down into that which they had been born from. Colors. There was something magical about the way that they could draw the heat of summer or the delicacy of opalescent moonlight on the fresh snow from reality and replicate it on a simple piece of taut canvas, bringing emptiness to life once more.

What a shame they all eventually became such fragile, broken things.

Autumn didn't consider her reality to be fractured. Not yet. Instead, the young girl simply thought herself battered - worn down by a life of hardships and loss, but not quite torn at the seams. She knew that would come later in her life, and once the years had passed and taken their toll she would be old and senile and so utterly broken that she couldn't even be able care for herself any longer. She hadn't reached that point yet - youth still hummed contentedly in her pulse, an energy usually wasted slaving away beneath the searing rays of the sun in the fields.

Winter had been something of a relief to District Eleven. It brought with it temperatures far less extreme than those of the summer, cooling down to the point where Autumn had almost found herself comfortable. On the old, cracked screen of the lone television Autumn and her grandmother owned there was sometimes the image of snow - cool and icy, a gift to the northern districts. Autumn had seen snow very few times in her life. She had a distant childhood memory of sitting of on her father's shoulders and catching one of the many tumbling snowflakes that had fallen, but she couldn't quite recall the feel of it on her palm. It had been a very long time ago, and yet Autumn still found herself yearning for that moment on occasion. She had tried many times to capture the moment with her paints, but the memory was too faded, and her image always came out blurred and distorted.

Indeed, winter had been an almost enjoyable time, but it was quickly fading away as spring approached. The days grew longer and hotter, causing the weary citizens of the district to squint up at the sky in utter disappointment. That was, in fact, what Autumn was doing at that very moment, trying to see through the blinding glare and spot just a single cloud floating across the endless blue. There was nothing. Sighing, she glanced back at her subject, a dainty yellow flower. Its petals were made far too bright by the intense sunlight, and Autumn sighed, glancing at her blank canvas and considering waiting for another more cloudy afternoon. Being granted with a day off of work was rare, but Autumn was hardly in the mood to spend it crawling on her hands and knees through the shade searching for a different plant with the same graceful curves. She wanted to do what she did best - paint. She wanted to feel the smooth brush strokes beneath her hand, to watch the colors blend together to form a recognizable picture. On that day, however, there was nothing. She almost wished the flower was a different color so it couldn't be made so bright. Blue, maybe, or purple. In fact, it didn't even have to be a different color entirely - if only it was a bit more dull in shade. Amber, perhaps, or blonde.

Blonde. Blonde. Blonde! Autumn's heart started suddenly and painfully in her chest, eyes widening in sudden horror at her own forgetfulness. Her grandmother had told her to meet the blonde girl - Jessa, wasn't it? - from school to help her with her work just after noon. The sun was already sinking dangerously close to the horizon - not sunset, but certainly far past lunchtime. It would be a miracle if the poor girl was still waiting, but Autumn jumped to her feet all the same, hurriedly gathering her painting supplies and shoving it into her knapsack. The blank canvas just barely managed to fit, and Autumn shot the sun one last glare before shouldering the bag and sprinting off toward the area where she had been instructed to meet her.

It wasn't a long run. Autumn reached the bench near the square soon enough, but found it to be empty. Panting, she dropped her bag on the rotting wooden surface and was about to drop down herself and try to figure out how exactly she was going to tell her grandmother that she had completely forgotten about her commitment when she noticed something. A backpack with a few books in it leaning up against the bench. So Jessa was still around somewhere. It was a miracle her things hadn't been stolen yet. Autumn considered waiting for the girl to return but quickly decided against it. She had wasted enough time already. Gathering Jessa's bag as well as her own, Autumn began to investigate the nearby buildings, peering through dusty windows into darkened rooms. Most simply held the few people lucky enough to be something other than farmers, slaving away at their trade indoors in order to earn their slightly more luxurious lifestyles, but in one she could have sworn she caught a flash of blonde locks.

Autumn hastily located the door and burst through, sweaty and disheveled, the very image of distress. She dropped the bags near the doorway and dragged her fingers through her hair in an attempt to tame the flyaway strands, glancing up. "Jessa, I am so sorry, I completely lost track of - oh." Autumn hadn't bothered to take the time to consider what the blonde might have been doing in the building, but she had a feeling even if she had she would have never guessed that she was dancing. Autumn blinked, shrinking away slightly. "I'm so sorry," she repeated, although this time she mumbled uncertainly. "I didn't mean to interrupt."

and the king is a hand
and slaps you down like a wave
shackles you down
bound like an anchored chain in the sand