dutch ackerman . district three | fin

D U C H E S S .

Duchess was a girl without a spine. She was soft and pampered — weak. She was a girl who expected jewels on her birthday and for everything to be laid out for her so she wouldn't have to lift a finger. She had this smile that was so warm it could light up the room, and a laugh that was ridiculous but soft like a peel of silver bells. It was the kind of laugh that made others want to laugh with her. Duchess was always giggling and smirking that smug little smile at her sister, Victoire. They had a friendly sisterly rivalry constantly raging — one of the few things that still exists from Duchess's life.

Most of all she loved games, but the kind where there were no rules so she wouldn't have to worry about bending them. It was her sisters, Victoire and Tide, who were often the players in Duchess's games.

She always seemed to have blush in her cheeks that flamed against her fair skin, so pale and untouched by the sun it was like porcelain. Her hair was much lighter than mine, darkened from age. It was dirty blonde, almost the color of honey but a few shades browner. She didn't wear tight black clothing like me; she preferred floral dresses and pearls over leather and elastic.

I talk about her as if she is disconnected from the woman I became, because I am built on Duchess Ackerman's ashes. She died long ago, dissolved into the darkness of an alley and settled into the blood on the ground.

Never to resurface.

But things were different when I was young, when Duchess was still my name. I was happy, once.

The Ackerman home is considerably larger than most in District Three due to her parents' wealth. They are one of the luckier families and have the luxury of living in a secluded neighborhood in a big white house with columns, out of the way from the factories and smog. The neighborhood Duchess grew up in was quiet — there were only a few other houses around them of equally rich or richer families.

There was a hedge maze in the Ackermans' backyard, and in its center, a fountain with Lady Justice on its top tier. Duchess always considered Lady Justice to be an important figure because she, of course, symbolized justice and overall, fairness. She was a woman with a blindfold over her eyes and had a sword in one hand and balanced scales in the other. Justice is blind and fair — that is the message Duchess received from the statue that seemed to glare at her in the hedge maze.

The Ackermans were a traditional family. Duchess's mother, Antoinette, or Anne, taught her daughters house chores — cooking, cleaning, gardening. Her father, Charles, taught his only son, Torian, how to fight, how to build and fix things. Although Dutch was the eldest of the Ackerman children, Torian was considered the heir, simply because he was the only male.

Antoinette's favorite flowers were purple tulips, as was Victoire's, which is what most of her garden consisted of. Duchess preferred white roses, while Tide, who couldn't see but favored the texture of the flower, liked peonies.

Despite Duchess's love of dresses and jewels and flowers, she had an appreciation for the art of combat like Torian. He taught her a few things every now and then, like pressure points and how to deflect attacks. But she never took his lessons seriously — she never really took anything seriously.

She never thought much of Torian's lessons, just like she never thought much of the way her father touched her sometimes. There were several incidents throughout her early youth, but the first she recalled was during a house party that her mother organized. She was teaching Tide how to dance while Victoire played the violin, and they were twirling and twirling across the floor while the other young boys and girls watched. Her father pulled her away then and he was too close to her, so close that Duchess could feel the heat exuding from his body and onto hers. He told her she looked pretty in the peach dress her mother picked out for her and —

she colored over that memory with the justification that it was just her father being affectionate as fathers were supposed to be. Her mind took a Polaroid photo of those moments, crisp and clear in her head, but she ran it over with oil pastels and black pens, because her innocent mind didn't have the capacity to believe it, because her mind refused to swallow the information it received.

So she buried it. Not because she wanted to but because she had no other choice.

She kept diary entries in a little pink journal that she kept under her bed for safekeeping, in which she wrote testament of her early life, or rather, what she thought it was.



The Ackerman family was picture-perfect on the outside but past those stone walls it was all monstrous. Sometimes her parents would get into fights because her mother made eggs the way her father didn't like or because the tea she boiled was too hot and burned his tongue. Duchess had heard of some fathers who spun into an uncontrollable rage because they were full of whiskey and vodka, but Charles Ackerman never drank.

Sometimes Duchess was the punching bag instead. Always Duchess or her mother, never Victoire or Tide or Torian.

"DUCHESS! DUCHESS, WHERE THE FUCK ARE YOU?"

She would hide in the broom closet by the bathroom, knees pressed up against her chest, body cramped between the narrow walls and cleaning supplies. She would hold her breath, swallow down the sobs in the darkness, and although she wanted to wipe away the tears soaking her face she didn't dare so much as lift a finger. Sometimes she fell asleep there at six in the morning, hours after the screaming had already ended.

But sometimes she couldn't hold back a sob and she would choke just one out, and he would find her.

And yet despite everything she believed her father was the only parent she could trust.

"I get so mad because, it's your mother, Duchess, she's just outrageously unbearable. You would understand if you were an adult."

"She's lying to you when she tells you I hit her — she's trying to turn you against me."

"Your mother is the reason this family is falling apart."



The thought was dismissed but it lingered still, slowly festering in the back of her mind like an open infected wound that was left unattended. That's exactly what it was.

D U C H E S S .

Fourteen years old and she learned about child abuse from her friend from school. All of the pieces fit together and she filled in the missing blanks that plagued her for so long but when it finally all made sense it was ten times worse. Because now she knew everything — it was like a veil was lifted, a curtain was dropped between her eyes and reality and it was so dark like oblivion, so cold and horrible that she could feel the weight of the truth in her bones.

The pieces all came together but she shattered; the truth was a sledgehammer and she was glass.

She was thrown into chaos even more than before. They say knowledge is power but in this case knowledge was pain.

Knowledge was pain — she had always felt the sting in her chest, had always felt weak and powerless, but it didn't hit her, didn't truly hurt her, until she could recognize where it was coming from and why. Knowledge was pain — and with pain came this awful inky darkness pooling within her, this cold anger slowly building in the pit of her chest. She had been taught that women were not supposed to feel rage or hate; those were sentiments that belonged to men. Women were gentle, women were kind. But that was not how Duchess felt after spending several nights in her bedroom shaking and digging her fingernails into her palms.

The worst part was that she trusted him. In spite of everything, she had given her trust to her father. How could she have been so blind? It was like she had woken up and discovered that she had hands. This was a part of her, a part of her past, that she had never seen in direct daylight before . . . and there were pieces of her that wished she never had. There were pieces of her that wished she could go back into blindness, because these were things that she did not want to know. She did not want to be a victim. She did not want to feel this — this gaping hole growing inside of her chest. It was an empty black space that she knew nothing could fill. Perhaps it had always been there, just like — just like everything else. But she had been to oblivious, too young, too naive to notice.

There was, perhaps, a way out that was shown to her by Torian, who was a part of an underground fight club. He didn't know what was happening to Duchess, but he did know that there was something wrong. And he wanted to fix that — but that was just it. Duchess did not have just a wound; she was split open at the seams and slowly being torn apart from the core because every day that passed, the realization of what had happened, what was happening, set in.

Her first day in the ring, she came home with a bloody nose that Torian covered up as a wound from falling face first on the concrete after tripping. Despite that, this was not Duchess's last day in the ring.

. . .

she i met her in the winter.
her pink lips were frozen
and her skin was paled by the snowy overcast light.
she had a look about her —
like she was a force to be reckoned with,
all cold-eyed and steely-faced,
wild-haired and deep-eyed,
with a black leather jacket around her shoulders
and a woven red bracelet around her wrist.

a few months had passed
since torian brought me to the ring —
i was still delicate little duchess,
but i had found my anchor:
i threw my fist
and fire erupted in my veins.
for once i had
something i'd never had before:
power.

she watched with an intent gaze
as i was beaten to the ground
by a girl twice my size.
she raised a pointed brow,
and strolled up to me
as i got up with my bloody lip
and dusted myself off.

she told me that i was weak,
but that i had a spirit that she liked —
that although i had lost,
i fought with a fire she had only seen
a few rare times in her life.
she told me that i was weak,
but that she could make me strong.

i opened my mouth to ask
what she meant,
but before i could speak she said,
"let me show you how."

D U C H E S S . D U T C H .

i had washed my hands a thousand times
but they were still full
of blood and grime.
when my father's funeral rolled around i
could still feel his blood on my hands.
no amount of soap could wash it away —
but slowly i realized
that i didn't mind.

on the day of his funeral
it was beautiful and sunny;
the atmosphere did not fit the gloom
in the air,
exuding from my father's many friends
and my mother,
but it certainly reflected
the way that i felt that day.
for the first time in a long time,
it felt as if the clouds
in my mind had cleared —
there was a beam of sunshine
breaking through their ranks.

the heart of a killer is light,
but as i stood there before his empty grave
i felt a heaviness, a new weight
deep within the cavern of my chest.
it was not guilt —
it was the secret
of what truly happened to my father
that i now had to carry
for the rest of my life.

even then,
i could not regret what i had done.
not even for myself.
with madds i was strong enough
to bear that weight.

my only regret was that my mother
would never know what happened to him.
after he had disappeared so suddenly,
for months and months,
it was concluded that my father had certainly died.

that day at my father's funeral,
when all i felt was emptiness
and bitter hate
for the man i had killed,
i separated myself from the girl i was.
i hadn't forgotten what she, what i had been through —
i could never forget,
not when they followed me like shadows
into my dreams,
not when those memories crept out at night
to take another piece out of me.
but i did not feel like duchess ackerman.

duchess was gentle and fragile,
like a delicate rose or a glass figurine.
her life was concerned
only with the duties of an ackerman woman —
clean the kitchen,
care for the younger children.
and she loved her father —
she would never have dreamed of killing him.
not like i had.

the girl i left behind
would always be a part of me —
a part of dutch ackerman.
but telling someone that my name
was duchess
felt like a lie.

i did not shed my skin
like a snake
or become a new person.
but rather,
duchess became an extension
of me.

D U T C H .

many times i was accused
of lacking a heart —
mostly by my victims.
and for a fleeting moment,
i wonder if perhaps they are right.
but then i remember madds
and her smiling face
and full lips the color
of a freshly bloomed rose.

i have felt pain before;
it was pain that made me,
molded me,
into who i am.
even after my childhood
i was not completely disconnected
from my livelihood,
from the vibrancy i had.
madds painted my world in color,
made living life so much more bright.
she was a killer like me —
we weren't good people,
but we were bad people together.
that was what mattered.

in one of our missions,
on a heist against a rival gang,
things went astray.
madds and our squad
had never failed before then.
nemesis was the name of my gun;
it was the one i killed my father with.
nemesis —
the goddess of revenge.
i felt invincible when it was by my side —
i was wrong to think so.

we had came in through the window,
which we had punched open with a rock.
but they had seen us coming —
we had miscalculated
when they would leave
to pick up one of their shipments.
but by the time we realized,
it was too late.

most vividly,
i remember screaming.
we were locked in a fight
between us and our rivals.
i got out with a few cuts
and bruises;
madds was not so lucky.

i heard her cry out
in the midst of throwing a punch
to my opponent's jawline.
the moment my fist collided with their skin,
i was darting towards madds
and her assailant.
"MADDS!"

they had plunged a long dagger
with a jagged and broad blade
through madds's stomach.
one of our training lessons flashed through my mind:
"you don't want to get here . . .
if you do, there's not much that save you."

i had never moved so quickly before —
i was a shadow,
gone within the blink of an eye
and charging the attacker
with my knife.
"get away from her!"
madds crumbles to the floor
and that's when i think i lost it.
in a fit of fury,
i cut her attacker with lethe
and shoved her onto the floor,
kicking her in the gut to keep her down.

we carried dutch back to headquarters —
running through the dimly lit streets,
nearly tripping on the bumps in the cobblestone.
but as time went on,
the blood pooling on madds's clothes
darkened and broadened.
her eyes began to dim
and her lips were open
so her ragged lungs could breathe in
enough air to keep her alive.
she was not as warm in my arms
as she usually was.

deep down i knew that we were too late
by the time we reached headquarters
and laid madds down in the medical ward.
i screamed at them
to go to a proper medical center
but we couldn't, they said —
it would raise questions to nosy peacekeepers,
and we could end up in the detention center.
"our medics can handle it."
i trusted our medics —
but the medical center was closer,
and i knew that time mattered.

the clock on madds's life had begun to tick.
i could see its hands moving
in her empty eyes,
staring up at the ceiling in shock.
i was with her all night,
not leaving her side once.
i was there the next day,
when the head medic came to tell us
that there was nothing more they could do.
"it's all in ripred's hands now but,
the chances of survival are slight."
in short: madds was going to die.

i began to cry —
that was an understatement.
it was somewhere between a sob and a scream,
a sound that ripped through my lungs
as i struggled to breathe between
all the fits of tears.
i could feel her dying,
because i realized in that moment
that madds was a piece of me.
it was only then that i knew
how deeply i loved her.

i held onto her hands,
squeezing them with urgency.
"madds, madds stay with me,"
i pleaded with her,
but i knew she was not in control
of whether her heart continued to beat.

i folded inwards into my chest,
my stomach crumpled like tinfoil,
and my heart shriveled up like a frosted flower.
the realization hit me —
i never told her that i loved her.

"madds," i said.
"madds, i —"
but i looked back at her and she was gone.
her eyes were completely blank
and glassy now,
her skin deathly pale.
those cheeks used to be so rosy —
madds was always a blusher.
it was one of my favorite things,
how her cheeks would redden
whenever she was nervous.
but that rosy color was gone now
and it was never return.
her pink lips —
those lips that i had loved to kiss —
were drained of color, too.

everything washed away
to saturation.

when she drew her final breath,
the flame within my chest went out,
giving way to darkness.

when i buried madds
beneath the old willow tree by the creek,
i buried my heart too;
i would rather live with an empty chest.
things would not be the same after that;
the liveliness i had left
was drained away with madds's life —
because that vibrancy,
those happy feelings,
they came from her,
from being around her and kissing her
and loving her.
but you can't love a corpse —
madds was gone,
and so was every soft part of me
that still remained.

i swore the day of her funeral
that i would never feel this way again —
so weak that i felt as if i'd crumble to my knees,
so despairing that i could feel an abyss
opening up in my chest again.
and for what?
for a love that i would truly never know
whether it was requited.
and slowly my heart began to lose feeling;
soft tissue became hard steel
and i clipped all my heartstrings
so no one could play them again.
(madds had strung them like a harp.)

it was easier that way.