m a n h a t t e n | p e a c e k e e p e r

I was fourteen years old and my parents were having a party that had so far lasted a day and a half. I avoided the ground floor like the plague, and any area that was not my own, knowing full well what I had the high possibility of finding if I left my room. There had been a few times before when curiosity or hunger had gotten the best of me and I'd ventured out to sit at the top of the stairs and watch what went on below. I was old enough to know that what I was seeing wasn't what a kid was supposed to see when I saw it.

By then I guess it was too late.

I'd seen it.

Various states of undress made my eyes water and I kept my head down, focusing on the wooden flooring in the hallways of the house as I made my way to the kitchen, unable to bear the hunger anymore. My parent's friends, acquaintances from the other rich families in the districts, vagabonds with nowhere else to go but with drugs to spare, they were all welcome. I didn't listen, tuning everything out around me as I moved though my house, ignoring the couple in the corner there, the two not even hiding behind the couch over there, the three taking turns smoking something, hands on each other's bodies.

I was introduced to sexuality at a young age, it was normalized for me by the time I was nearly fifteen.

Like any young man, I had urges. I never really had to look far for a place to put those. My mother's friends were often more than happy to 'teach' the young boy some tricks here and there and by that point I didn't really care much. My first kiss was given to a woman named Magdol, my mother's 'dearest' friend. She told me it was okay, it was love. It was alright to feel urges like that. As far as I was concerned, we needed no excuse. My parents barely seemed to notice me anymore. I craved attention, I needed it from somewhere and Magdol was more than willing to give it. Despite the fact that she was nearly twice my age, we used each other often for a breath of warmth in between the long bouts of cold weather.

I was born from an addictive personality, I didn't try the drugs that my parents were so fond of, despising the way it turned people inside out but I did find comfort in other vices.

Sex was a good one. I didn't care where or who it came from, as long as I could end up in somebody's arms for a night. If Magdol's weren't available, I made do with another of my parent's friends. I was handsome even then with broad shoulders and a thin, tapering waist. I had muscle attributed to years of training and despite my age I looked like a young man, rather than a teenage boy. No one had any qualms about it.

My first time came that night when I was fourteen, tired of waiting for the party to end to get something to eat. I passed Magdol in the hall on my way to the kitchen and she placed a hand on my shoulder, her eyes the size of the fancy silver dinner plates my parents used for massive ashtrays. "Hatty, go get me a beer love, one for yourself too," she told me.

So I did.

After three months time I had moved in with him. I got my first job in order to help pay the bills. I was sixteen years old slinging bears at this small pub a couple of streets away from where we lived.

Ian's apartment wasn't big. It was a second thought on the rooftop of some old abandoned space. The floors and walls were made of concrete and the ceiling stood high. It was hard to keep warm. It was always hard to keep warm.

Ian was a dealer. He dealt most things, cigarettes, heroin, ecstasy, weed, sex, you name it. Perhaps if all those things weren't so normalized for me I wouldn't have loved him so easily. I'd spent a childhood mixed up in all that. I relished the quiet evenings when he wasn't out working, just him, myself and the ticking of the clock. There were no loud parties, none of my parent's friends to wrap myself around because I was desperate for attention. Ian gave me his attention often.

At nights when we lay tangled together and I was shuddering from the cold of his place, he'd light me a smoke and tell me to warm myself up. Those black clouds of heat in my lungs felt like a poor man's forest fire. Sometimes I felt even colder when the cigarette died between my fingers and the smoke left my lungs. He said I'd keep warmer if I shot up with heroin like he did but I always refused. Ever since I was small I never touched painkillers, preferring to suffer quietly rather than dull my senses and become my parents.

I have always been afraid of them just as much as I have always sought after their affection.

Ian knew this I think. Sometimes he'd use it against me, not letting me near him until I did something for him. He turned us into a transaction. It's okay. That made more sense to me. Mine was and is a life of deals. He never went too far. When I was half crazy with the need to be touched he'd spread his palms over my skin and press his face into my neck.

He probably realized; cigarettes and sex were my heroin.

It was so easy like that, living day by day, coming home from work to see him. When he wasn't around I'd help myself to his small bookshelf, reading long past the hour that he'd promised to be home, waiting for him still.

I loved Ian. I was grateful to him, for taking me out of my parent's house, but there were things that he did that were gentle and good and I loved him for it. He'd run his fingers down my skin and trace my scars, obtained illegally from my father or gained at the training center, he never asked which was which. He knew I didn't want to say. So he's treat each one the same, lovingly kissing my shoulder blades and trying so hard to warm me up.

I noticed Ian was getting worse when one day, his hands were shaking so badly that he couldn't stick himself with the heroin that he was trying so desperately to take. As I'd often done for my mother, I steadied his hand for him and guided the drug into his veins. It had never occurred to me to beg him to stop shooting up. Perhaps I knew he wouldn't listen or maybe I just didn't want to fight with him. My bruises were still fading from the fists of my father and at that time I was often afraid.

There was a lump in the back of my throat where my fear built up, choking me bit by bit.

Something was coming.

It's been two months since I found Ian's dead body. I think. Can't be sure.

Life is a blur of alcohol, sex and brief moments spent hungover. They never last long. I've been fighting hangovers with drinking.

I couldn't go back to our place after I wore all black to his funeral and they stuck him in the ground. I met his parents at the graveyard for the first time. I'd always assumed that Ian had lived alone because he was an orphan. It had never occurred to me that he had a mom and dad. They were nice, sot of what I suspect my own mother and father might have been like if they weren't high most of the time.

I realize I sort of get why they'd rather be high.

The pain in my chest is unbearable, like someone has turned me into an ice box. I'm cold as hell.

My mother was happy when I moved back in, she ran her fingers through my hair and told me how much she'd missed her little boy. My father leered at me, told me that he hoped that I had been keeping up with my training.

Magdol welcomed me back with open arms. She told me that she'd been heartbroken without me, which wasn't true. We both knew it. I was happy to see her too. Without Ian, there was no one to hold me at night, nothing to satisfy my physical urges. If I was drunk enough I could shut my eyes and pretend that I was with Ian. It works better with one of the guys though.

It isn't the same.

Or maybe the problem is that it's all too familiar.

It's as if Ian never came along in the first place. I'm freezing up again.

It's some time past midnight and I'm stumbling down the hall in my parent's house that has always been too big. Magdol's occupied with my mother, locked in the bathroom. They're probably making out or something. Magdol told me that she loves having us both. I stopped caring about anything a long time ago. My mother is a stranger to me anyway.

I guide myself by trailing my fingers along the wooden paneling of our house, trying to ignore the tears trailing down my cheeks. It's been happening a lot lately, where my eyes tear up for no reason. Maybe it's from the pain.

It must really hurt to have your insides freeze over. I'm shaking from the cold.

The cigarette between my lips doesn't do anything to warm me up so I let it fall from between my lips, still lit, still smoking. It falls in a puddle of vodka.

I keep on going.

I've got to find it.

I take a swig from the bottle in my hand, unable to remember what it's meant to taste like. Everything tastes the same anyway, bland and useless.

I pass a couple in the back room of the house. It's my dad. He's got some girl on the pool table, her skirt is hiked up to her hips and they're going at it so hard that they don't even notice me leaving the house, into the back.

It's probably in the work shed.

I trip across the grass of our backyard, the dew collecting on my bare feet. It's cold, I know that it's cold. I don't feel it. I'm already cold. It doesn't matter.

My hands fumble with the lock on the work shed and I tug on it uselessly, as if I can open it by want alone. I remember the key in the planter beside the door. I find it. It's rusted and small but it works. I break in.

My dad used it once in one of his rare occasions of actually doing something useful.

My eyes wander over various labels until they pick up something that they like.

I know that it'd be easier just to kill myself.

I just want it to stop hurting.

I steady myself by grabbing onto the tabletop of my dad's work bench and wrap my fingers around the neck of the bottle of chemicals. Antifreeze. In my current state of mind, it seems to be exactly what I need.

My fingers fumble with it but eventually I twist open the cap and I drink.

I wash it down with the bottle of alcohol I've brought with me and I wait for the cold feeling to leave me.

It isn't long before my stomach begins to feel like it's burning.

I'm burning alive in seconds.

I stumble back outside, arms wrapped around my middle as if I can stop the burning that way and I'm gasping for air. I'm breathing but not fast enough.

Lights dance in front of my eyes, flames.

We're on fire.

No.

The house is on fire.

I stumble forwards, legs giving out to cramps. I fall to my side, body hitting grass and dirt.

Someone is screaming.

Then it's night.

My hands are clasped behind my back and I stand with my feet shoulder-width apart. My white boots stand out stark against the damask patterned carpet.

When I woke up two and a half years ago with smoke-stained lungs and a heart insistent on beating I did the only thing a fresh orphan born from hatred and flame could do. I spent the last year of my official childhood in intense training and as soon as I hit the age of eighteen I entered the Peacekeeping academy.

My grandfather glances up from over his horn-rimmed glasses and he takes all of me in in one foul swoop before letting his eyes fall back down to the piece of paper in front of him. The ornate wooden clock on the wall seems to tick too slowly. I shift my weight from one foot to the other and my fingers itch. I've cut back a lot in these past two years but it's times like these that I like to have a cigarette in my hand.

"You've done well for yourself, Manhatten," he finally says, voice gruff. I'm probably meant to take it as praise but I stiffen at his words. I barely know the man but I hate him. I hate him so goddamned much it burns. "It says here that you graduated from the academy with top honours," he says. There's a 'but' hidden at the back of his throat. I hate him, I hate him.

"But, I cannot recognize you as my Grandson, you'll understand," he purrs. My chest deflates and collapses in on itself, it burns like my childhood and my house. I knew he wouldn't. This is the man who dropped his daughter because of her addictions and stopped sending Christmas cards by the time I turned four years old. This is the man who left a child with addicts. I should have known that he'd want nothing to do with me.

"With all due respect," I say quietly, "I did not come here in search of your acceptance. I came to seek support in a delicate matter." I reach into the back pocket of my custom made white uniform, the chest piece currently void of metals of valor or the like. I remove the glove from my right hand carefully with my teeth and unfold the paper with my official mission outlined on the the page.

It's a stupid plan but charmingly simplistic. My only plan of action is to investigate the drug ring in the District as an undercover Peacekeeper. The only outcome I have projected for myself is to do 'whatever I deem necessary in order to do so.'

He only looks it over for a few moments before looking up at me, expression sharper than before. His voice is sharper too. "Whatever you need, it's yours." There is no hesitation in his voice, no longer a game, a threat to him.

I look at him with fresh eyes, hands at my side and I understand. He's angry too. The monster I am fighting, it's one of his nightmares too. It's too late for the princess to be rescued but I can at least kill the dragon that kept her, stole her so long ago. I nod and take the paper back from him. "I need my inheritance, there's a place I want to rent to keep up appearances."

I can see his hesitation.

The last time he gave away an inheritance it was spent on lesser things, he was betrayed. Perhaps he can see my resolve in my face. He writes a cheque for me. I don't look at the number before sliding it into my pocket. I already know that it's more money than I've ever seen in my life.

I nod at the man behind the large wooden desk and turn on my heel, happy to leave since I've gotten what I came for.

"Manhatten," he calls after me, a hook to the edge of his voice, calling me back. I stop and turn to look at him, expression made neutral, a mask carefully crafted during the rigorous training I've done for the past two years. "Kill them all," he tells me, voice soft, "Every last one of them."

His request is redundant.

I plan to.