axel quintanilla || district six || fin

You've never known what it's like to have parents.

For as long as you can remember, the orphanage was your first home, a drab, decrepit little building with walls that look like they were built before the Dark Days and entirely too many children for comfort. And even then, it never really felt much like a home to you as it was more a temporary residence. 

If temporary could amount for the better part of fifteen years, anyway. 

You'd always been told the same story of how you'd ended up in the orphanage in the first place. How your parents had been poor but happy newlyweds in their early twenties, with no wealth or legacy to their names. Just two broke graduates from the college who happened to be deeply in love and expecting their first child. 

No one had expected the birth to be so difficult that even the best medics in the district could not prevent it from ultimately being fatal. No one had predicted that he would off himself the very next day, so distraught over losing his wife so early that he had barely noticed the small, wailing baby boy that would ultimately be left behind.

It was a story that filled you with immense guilt whenever you heard it. From your very first day, you'd been a killer, however inadvertent your role may have been. Just by existing, you'd ruined not one, but two lives beyond repair. 

Others would say three in times of conflict and war, but you tried to be optimistic about yourself, for the most part. 

It wasn't the easiest job in the world, though, that much was clear. Not when it seemed like the primary goal of the orphanage was to expel kids as quickly as they were taken in, a tough job in a place where few were wealthy enough to afford to adopt and fewer still were willing to add a troubled orphan child into their family. Not when as year after agonizing year, you were passed over in favor of another by the few who dared test their luck with one of your housemates. 

But still, you persevered. It was the least you could do, after all, given the lives you'd destroyed simply by entering this world. 

But even with that knowledge, one could only stay at the orphanage for so long. And after fifteen hellish years, even you had had enough.

So you did the only other thing you could think of. You took to the streets.

It was a living situation that, while by no means easy, you gradually grew to like far more than the confines of the orphanage. Out on the streets of Six, there was no cruel director to keep you in line. Out on the streets, you and you alone were responsible for making sure you had enough to survive on from day in to day out, instead of having to compete with two dozen other boys to ensure you had enough to eat. Sure, there was still competition, but with a much larger overall range of resources to choose from, the job was simpler.

For the first time in your life, you were free.

Or so you told yourself, for freedom, as you would soon find out, had its price. 

The director may have been cruel and intimidating, but he was never brutal, in the way a cat may torment a rat but never sink its claws into it. But where the director was a cat, the Keepers were lions, several times more threatening with their aura alone. They ranged from bored to intimidating to downright cruel and everything in between, and each one was as deadly as the last. 

Discovering which ones were corrupt and which ones were lawful was a task that took several months of painstaking observation, and associating each individual with their patrol and behavior patterns was harder still. For someone who had engaged in Keeper watching since the beginning of their days, such a task might have been simple, but you were an orphan boy who, until then, had rarely set foot outside the orphanage in which he resided. 

At least the cruel ones made themselves easy to identify. 

Food, too, turned out to be a mountain of a problem disguised as a molehill. Yes, the amount and variety was a vast improvement over the meager pickings at the orphanage, but obtaining it proved to be a conflict in itself. You could only lift so much from a market stall or a streetside vendor before the vendor got suspicious, so visits had to be few and far between, alternating your schedule so that no clear pattern could be established. 

And even then, there was only so much an apple here or a pretzel there could do to combat the ever present hunger gnawing in your stomach. 

You'd never been a particularly large boy even before you'd left the orphanage, but the new lifestyle you would come to call the street diet was rough even by those standards. What little excess fat you had once had had melted away in a matter of weeks, revealing each and every rib on your chest. Your cheeks lost their natural plumpness, becoming thin and gaunt with malnutrition. Your blond hair, once neat and well-kept, became long and ragged, the healthy sheen it had once possessed lost in the process. 

Any softness, any reservations you had once had towards certain acts, were lost to the passage of time as the weeks turned into months. You transformed, not only physically, but mentally as well. You likened your transformation to that of the alley cats you sometimes shared the streets with. They were lean and mean, weak yet strong, wary yet aggressive, but above all, they were survivors.

Surviving seemed to be the only thing you were good at, anyways. 

You learned to adapt, bypassing the ever diligent Peacekeepers and alert market salesmen for those more corrupt and less aware of a skinny street kid. 

But sometimes, adapting wasn't simply good enough, as there were often periods of time where you would fail to find anything more sustaining than a piece of fruit for days on end. The weather, too, made life more difficult for you - you had first abandoned the ship that was the orphanage in the summer after your third reaping, so when the winter rains and snows made their appearance, it was another wrench thrown into your plan. 

You had briefly flirted with the idea of returning to the orphanage, but in the end had decided that such an act would likely result in a death sentence for you. After all, the director wasn't known for his forgiving nature, and the odds were likely that you'd be handed over to a squad of Keepers, and likely to your death, at that.

 And you hadn't lived that long relying on nothing but yourself to die by such a stupid act. 

But as the nights grew colder and the days grew shorter, your resolve began to waver. You'd survived tough times before, but this was a new level of rough, one that your practically non-existent girth could barely withstand. 

You'd heard the phrase that drastic times called for drastic measures, and it was around then when you truly discovered its meaning. You'd already done things that orphanage Axel would have thought unthinkable, so what was a few more to add to the plate?

Besides, you decided, sharing a bed with a stranger was worth having a roof over your head and a warm meal when the storms were particularly fierce, all things considered. 

It's nearly been a year since you first took to the streets, and yet it's a decision that you only faintly regret nowadays. After all, it's not like you leaving a living situation that was much better to begin with. Sure, it's far from the easiest lifestyle, but it's a lifestyle that, for the most part, you have worked with. Through all of the hardships and mountains you've had to overcome, you've survived. 

But in retrospect, it's hardly surprising. You are Axel Quintanilla, the only remnant of a legacy of love and affection. 

Survival is in your genes, and by god, you are going to survive the obstacle that is life in Six, whatever the cost.