aiden {district three}

ᴥ Head RP Tutor 4,546 POSTS Pronouns: he/him last seen Apr 19, 2024 14:52:39 GMT -5 oof	aiden {district three} May 7, 2015 0:19:06 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by ᴥ on May 7, 2015 0:19:06 GMT -5
	Last Edit: May 12, 2015 23:52:57 GMT -5 by ᴥ the m o o n controls the t i d e, it could cause you to d r o w n

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aiden {district three} May 8, 2015 21:12:32 GMT -5

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Post by ᴥ on May 8, 2015 21:12:32 GMT -5

I never wondered what true love was. I always had it. In the way that father wrapped his arms around mother's shoulders and pressed his face into her neck. Because even when they were tired and grumpy and mother snapped and father yelled, by the end it all we sat at the dinner table and father gave mother a curt nod and reminded her of how beautiful she looked in that ratty t-shirt loose jeans. And mother would try not to smile because she was supposed to be mad but it was impossible. They loved each other so much, but I think they loved me more. Because they kissed my forehead when it was time to sleep and took turns reading fairy tales to me in awful, silly voices and had to stop because I wasn't getting tired. Even in a district as dirty as Three, with smoke coating everyone's lungs and death running rampant, we were so happy.

It destroyed Dad to lose her. They never told me what was going on, I was only eight and they didn't think I could comprehend my mother dying. And maybe I couldn't. Dad was a doctor. Dad could fix anyone if he put his mind to it. That's how it always ways. And that's how it was always meant to be. But he couldn't save Mom. She died in a hospital bed with thinning hair and weak fingers and tight skin. I hadn't seen her for months. I didn't get to see her before she died. But Dad told me the last word on her tongue before she died was my name. Maybe that was supposed to be comforting but it only burned across my back like the tears down my cheeks.

And then Dad wasn't Dad anymore. His eyes went dull and his shoulders slumped. He went from big and burly to small and feeble, weight dropping off his skeleton by the pound. I didn't get lunches with little pink cards that smelled of mom's perfume and were signed with Dad's shaky scribble. I didn't even get lunches or breakfasts or dinners. I didn't hear a single I love you for a year after she died, only tears and only sorrow. A bright world turned so dark that I could not help but turn dark with it. Because mom was dead and dad was gone and I was alone. And all I could eat were shitty pieces of toast because that's all I knew how to make. Because whenever I begged father for something more he looked at me with these sad eyes and asked me what was the point.

He said maybe it would be better if the both of us withered away and joined mother in whatever afterlife their was.

"What's the point, Aiden? Without her my world is gray. It is meaningless. Without her it all burns but I'm so cold and everything is so fucking useless. Why Aiden. Why couldn't I have died too?!"

I didn't bother yelling at him for being so selfish. For forgetting about me. Because he loved mother with all of him. And when she died all of him went missing and his world was shattering to pieces around him. I was insignificant in her wake and I came to accept that.

I was ten when Dad healed. Or perhaps that gives the man too much credit, I was ten when he scarred over. When he became cold and callous and when he looked at everyone with the eyes of a man who was too dead to actually die.

Father made people better. He was supposed to.

But the bitter, wretched man my father became was far too careless to do that. The clinic he owned became overpriced, the patients he once served with gusto meant with a cold stare and an outrageous price. And he did not yield when they cried and begged, stood with his arms crossed and nose upturned as they insisted their mother, daughter, son, grandson, would die without his service. He was one of the best in the district, after all, with nimble hands and a kind heart. (But that heart was mother's.) "So what."

And that is how it became. An unfortunate truth. If you lacked the coin, you lacked the cure. And father did not care one bit.

I don't think I would have ever found out what mother died from, I don't think father would have spoken her name again had I not, on my eleventh birthday, developed a rattle in my lungs.

Oh, the horror in his eyes was almost comical. Being his son, his medical care came free, much to his chagrin, I'd imagine. The fancy capitol technology his friend's friend smuggled in through some illegal means or another found the curse lying dormant in my lungs. And if rivers were filled with tears I think that father's would have flooded them all. He held my shoulders, pulling me close and acting as though he were the most loving, caring man and not the callous bastard he had become. "We can fix this." He insisted as my limbs grew heavier and my waist smaller. "We can fix this." He insisted as rust crawled up my lungs and into my palm. "We can fix this." As the pills he forced into my mouth melted and congealed within my stomach, sending my guts splayed across the floor.

Because he didn't care if it destroyed me. He was not losing his son to the same monster that took his wife. I was the only breathing part of her, a standing memoir to the love of his life. And he didn't care if I became as dull a shell as he, didn't care how much unbearable pain I was in as long as coarse breathe ran through my lungs, no matter the blood that accompanied it.

I was able to function, through most of his treatment. I lasted through my twelfth birthday, through my first reaping and through every class. I was a stubborn child, taking after neither my asshole father nor my mild-mannered mom. Because as hard as father clings to me I have never been much like any of them. And I was determined that I would not leave dad, not because he needed me but because I was not done living.

Into the fifth month of treatment my legs gave up. I didn't think it would happen. Not if I tried hard enough. Not if I believed that I could get better enough. But like the chunks of my hair falling to the ground, so did I. Becoming nothing more than a ghost tied to a white bed by the feeble weight of my failing organs. And into the six month of treatment I was ready to die. There was no relief, a constant thousand pounds upon my chest and every breath burnt and screamed and I just wanted it all to end. The constant red snaking up my lungs was torture enough. Bitter red replacing the food I could no longer keep down.

And the night before the seventh month, I fell asleep fully expecting not to wake.

I wondered if that was what mom felt. A desperation for the relief, for the nothingness that death was bring. Did she even think about dad or I? Did I blame her if she didn't? And I decided, before consciousness slipped from my fingertips that it was still her fault. Her fault she even got involved with dad. Her fault she got sick. Her fault I was born and her fault dad was about to lose me too. And I was glad that I would never get the chance to break a heart in such a cruel and selfish way.

Dad didn't sit by me, my last night.

I didn't blame him.

And I don't believe in miracles. I don't think that it was a miracle, my recovering. No matter how dad squeezed my cheeks and screamed in delight. No matter how the strength returned to my limbs and my hair grew back inch by inch by inch. And twelve months into my treatment I was better. I was thirteen and I had my whole life ahead of me. I had seen the edge, tasted what death was, and I had come back for some unknown reason. It wasn't my strong will, my determination to live as I once thought it was. And I cried, I cried for a long, long while, that I had survived. I felt so empty, robbed of a justice. And living hurt just as bad as dying.

I could never bring myself to tell father that.

He wasn't grateful for my survival. He became greedier, hoarding more money and buying extravagant gifts that meant nothing to me. And I begged him, begged him to help the people crying at our doorstep but he only sneered, his contempt for people bristling upon his skin as he insisted that it was their fault I was sick. Their fault Mom had died. Not mere circumstance, bad luck and genetics. No, mom was not defective and I was his little miracle. It wasn't us, it was the world. And he would fight it until the bitter end.

I was fourteen when I found the warehouse. It was quiet, large cement floor stretching for what felt like miles. Tables littered empty spaces, shelves and chairs hidden in the corner, as though afraid to be caught by a wandering eye. It smelled of must and it smelled of death. Smelled of desperation and illness. And I decided I couldn't stand it. I couldn't stand one more minute.

I was fourteen when I started watching father work. Skilled hands weaving in and out of flesh, applying pressure to angry, dark wounds and handing out over sized, over priced pills to the rich and the fortunate. Those who father deemed better than the rest, unlikely to corrupt me with their illness.

You're fragile, Ai, after all.

I was fifteen when I stole his supplies. Hiding them in the warehouse I had spent the better part of a year cleaning. It smelt of roses, incense burning in the darkest corners. It looked clean, walls splattered a sloppy white with droplets that ran down the side like the tears of memories past. An expensive, tattered armchair I'd found in the lower levels of the warehouse sat in the center, surgeon's tools I'd smuggled out of father's office sat on a cheap, wooden table with deep, molding cracks and a missing leg siting next to it. Poised impressively by some potted plants I had nicked from the trash. Brought their brown leaves back to bountiful green just as fate had my body. Shelves stocked with a month's worth of crime were concealed behind a hollow wall I'd found while exploring.

I made a name for myself, I did . Slipping the address to father's former patients and helping when I could. And i couldn't do much, not at first. It was sloppy and I was a sorry excuse for a doctor. But I wasn't bad for a fifteen year old who was supposed to be dead.

Who should have been dead.

I was better than father anyhow. I was saving the people who deserved it.

It wasn't that I was afraid of getting attached. It wasn't that I was just as scared of losing someone as of how they would feel losing me. Because I was bound to die anyway. The thought of death doesn't faze me anymore. Having stood on it's doorstep without so much as a hair raised on the back of my neck, it means nothing to me. Now, I just have to believe that that's true.

But I was sixteen when I first yearned for the touch of another. I'd never had any friends, per say. No one significant, surely. It was just me and dad and my patients for a long, long time. That is, until an invitation was slipped into my locker with beautiful, curling scrawl and scented paper. A party, a big one, with booze and cigarettes and everything that could kill me quicker.

Perhaps that's why I was so intent on going. The thrill of it all. Settling on death's threshold once more and staring at it unflinchingly as I had before.

But what I got was so much better. Touch. Lips against my skin and soft hands upon my waist. To be wanted by someone who did not see me as a ghost of what had passed, but because of how I felt, because of the way my hair felt underneath their palm. The gentle sound that escapes from lips when they are satisfied and the world's ability to break into a thousand pieces in an instant. And as soon as it was over, I wanted more.

And I've still never had a friend. I don't know if anyone I've spent the night with remembers my name over the booze and smoke and pounding music numbing brains and shaking limbs. I don't know if I much care. I use them as much as they use me and they'll be none the wiser they fucked a dying boy.

Because two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, it happened. Bright red spilling into my palms, a deep rattle in my lungs.

And Dad cried when they said my body wasn't strong enough to fight it this time.

A year, at the most, they say. A price has been set on my head, the life that I have left slipping through my fingers. And Dad wants to do the treatment. He wants me to fight it. He doesn't know how little of a shit I give whether I make it out alive. And I'd rather spend this time I have with all my hair, without shrinking to the size of an ant. Without every gaze I receive being that of pity and remorse as I lay on white sheets with a needle in my arm and tubes shoves down my throat.

I'm ready to die.

I don't care one bit.

And that, I believe.

Last Edit: May 12, 2015 23:24:34 GMT -5 by ᴥ

the m o o n controls the t i d e, it could cause you to d r o w n

ᴥ Head RP Tutor 4,546 POSTS Pronouns: he/him last seen Apr 19, 2024 14:52:39 GMT -5 oof	aiden {district three} May 12, 2015 23:53:15 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by ᴥ on May 12, 2015 23:53:15 GMT -5 le fin sara has dib tho
	the m o o n controls the t i d e, it could cause you to d r o w n

✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ Graphics 5,831 POSTS Pronouns: they/them last seen Apr 17, 2024 14:37:45 GMT -5 “And now that you don't have to be perfect, you can be good.” - steinbeck	aiden {district three} May 13, 2015 2:36:43 GMT -5 Quote Select Post Deselect Post Link to Post Member Give Gift Back to Top Post by ✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ on May 13, 2015 2:36:43 GMT -5 I utterly adore him. Beautiful work, truly wonderful. Accepted of course.
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