ares favre {nine} fin

I am what they made me, I suppose. I don't remember much from the years when I couldn't leave someone bloody with a swing of my fist, but I do know that my skin was dark with grime and soot, and that there wasn't much light, only gray.

I remember how it was to feel such great remorse at the slightest of faults, at a quiet "fuck you" or a short bout of anger. It felt like my chest was being crushed from the inside, like claws were twisting up my stomach into an unsalvageable mess.

With everything I've done, I'm glad I don't have to feel that every damn moment I breathe. And I think my little sisters knows what a plague I am, that I am destruction itself- she's three years younger than me, but for fuck's sake, she isn't blind. She had to grow up even faster than I did- she's got me to blame for that.

An older sister is no replacement for parents.

By the time I was fourteen, I was already in a little drug ring of teens and shooting whiskey on the weekends. I spared her that much, but I can see our parents' graves taking a toll on her. She must know that the only reason we're not a pile of bones on the streets is because I stay in the ring and I keep rolling the dice, and somehow, it keeps going my way.

On her fifteenth birthday, she asked me if she was old enough to sell herself.

I slammed the door to my room.

Perhaps it is hypocritical of me chastise her for even suggesting such a thing, considering that at her age, I was screwing a pill pusher, and then a year later, I became a pill pusher myself.

And yeah, my drug days are over, but that doesn't mean there aren't any scars left behind.

I am what they made me, I know.

My parents made me a street rat by bringing me into this world. Before Mom died and before Dad left, I'd steal food when we couldn't afford to buy it. We were poor as dirt, not much different from others in District Nine.

My friends made me a druggie and a dealer. They kept holding things in my face and daring me to try it- first it was beer, then vodka, then a joint, then all these blue and green and white pills. In the little drug ring we had made, starting with ourselves and then recruiting others, I was the guard dog. Anyone who tried to get in our way, or in the territory we claimed, I'd leave purple and blue on their skin. I remember I didn't like it at first, but after a while, it became as easy as walking.

My ex-girlfriend, Liya, made me a fighter and a gambler. I was sixteen when we met, and she was four years older and one hell of a gambler. She was anything but reckless in her methods, she was calculating, she was cold. But her words were sweet like molasses and when she spoke, everyone would listen. She had this elegance, this silk in her voice that made everything she said sound poetic. It was captivating.

I've always had a thing for bad people. Maybe because we can relate on that level.

Liya would bet in this underground fight club. She would look the two in the ring up and down and up and down again and decide who was going to win. And she liked the underdog, I remember. Maybe that's why she liked me, a street rat and ex-dealer who just happened to be able to throw a good punch.

Once she had managed to pull me into fighting, I never stopped, not even when we broke up and she skipped town. After we split, I settled on the theory that her chest is cavernous, that it holds no heart.

(We'd stay up till sunrise, lying on the same bunk. I remember how the smoke from her cigarette would curl into the air in gray wisps. Sometimes at night, whatever walls I have left still holding me together would crumble, and I'd cry over my shitty life. But she would never say anything. She would just lie there, watching the smoke collect on the ceiling with blank, empty eyes. I don't think she even worried about me once, not even when I came back from the ring all bloodied and bruised.)

Before the split, she taught me how to gamble, something I caught onto quickly. I think I even became better than her, the master. And I don't just bet on the winner of fighting matches. When we watch the Games every year, there's this little corner in the District Square of people like me. But we don't bet on who's going to win the Games. We bet on who's going to die next.

I am what they made me, I know.

Truth is, I'm not fucked up because of them.

(It's just easier to say that and deny the truth. It's one of my talents.)

I'm fucked up because of my own damn fault.