nadya. d4. wip.

got me swinging with a broken bat
staring at someone that i'm supposed to love
but it looks like the barrel of a gun
it feels like you're holding your tongue

There's something comforting about a pistol in my hand, and I think it's the fact that a gun beats shattered glass in my father's raised fist.

Ha, fucking cliche home life? Abusive, PTSD father? Check, mate.

He wasn't always like that. Drunk, I mean. He was sober most days, took his money-making skills real seriously. There's always been this invisible fist around my neck, tightening at every failure. Better make me some goddamn money, Nadya, since you got me out of the last job. My stepmom said it was anxiety, and maybe she was right, but she didn't stick around very long anyway, so fuck what she thought.

Don't blame her though. He's a fucking psycho.

But I can't blame him either. Saw some shit in the field, apparently, amongst my turning up. 6 long years, a budding career and I'm learning how to multiply numbers and angry men in white show up at our door. I don't pay them any attention, numbers are more interesting than muffled voices barking orders and pointing at me sitting at the breakfast table.

Then they shoot my Mom in the face and slowly, slowly, my eyes glance up at a smoking barrel and white-clad figures we're supposed to call saviours drag me to hell.

I don't think I stopped screaming the entire way there.

Shell-shocked, the screaming eventually ceased from my throat - now red and raw and aching - but the shrill sound of my pain keeps ringing in my ears. It never really stopped.

They killed my Mom and I didn't quite know how to wrap my head around that. Said she lied on my records about my father, needles in my neck and needles in my fingers. Blood smears on plastic and it pools out of my Mother's skull and a screen in the Justice Building flashes green. 99.9% MATCH, it says. I shouldn't know what it means, but there's blood on my kitchen floor and I join the dots with it in my mind. Finger-painting with streaks of blood, tracing the patterns of my DNA - a stranger, his numbers, a codename, his real name.

SGNT NOLAN CROSS.
2459-A57G-78LK9.
[ redacted ]
99.9% MATCH.

Stationed six years ago in District Four and the rest you can fill in for yourself because that's all they'd tell me. I never really looked like my Mom - all fair skin and yellow hair and blue eyes. It was easy to figure out where my skin kissed by the sun, dark eyes and spiraling hair came from. And then the tricky part came, because Peacekeepers weren't allowed children and the orphanages in Four were spilling out of the seams and a child of a military operative couldn't exactly live on the street.

I did not get to say goodbye to my Mother, nor our home, nor my friends or school or the neighbours cat. Not even the sea. My equations sat on our breakfast table and laid to waste, waiting for a ghost of a girl to come back and solve their puzzles. I sat on a train and wept, leaving my salty tears on the station floor, hoping they'd somehow reach the ocean where they below.

District Two smelt funny. I remember that. I know they say that Four smells like rotting fish but I remember the smell of crackling driftwood and the salt on my skin and in my curling hair, hot chocolate and daffodils in the spring. Two smells metallic - like blood, I suppose. Bleached, like a hospital. Like they're trying to cover something up that nobody should see.

I saw it.

Violence.

Demoted and shamed, my father begrudgingly took me in and I lived in the attic, an old sunken mattress and the spiders in cobwebs my only companions. The only room he had in his tiny one bed-roomed home, he said. Out of his way, I thought. A stranger dressed like the men who killed my mother and I was told to call him family.

"What's your middle name?"

I blink at him the next day in a drafty reception room, studying the freckles across the bridge of his nose and picking one to throw my fist into.

"Katherine."

It's the first time I've spoken to him since I arrived.

He scrawls it down on enrollment papers, shaking hands and a migraine forming behind his eyes. Good, I think. Let my presence cause him pain. God knows his is torture.

He stops at the next line and swallows. Hard.

"And... and your birthday?"

My first curls into something furious.

"May 10th."

His eyes roll backwards, digging into this past and doing the math to fill in the rest. Counting 9 months on his fingers as I scowl, he sighs on the ninth finger and scribbles in six digits.

"And, erm-"

Another pause, and I look up curtly.

"You spell your name... erm..."

My posture sags, muttering the letters underneath my breath.

"N-A-D-Y-A."

Family. They want me to call him family.

I catch a glimpse of myself in the reflection of a window and hate the freckles spilling across my nose, too.

Turns out a lot of kids at my new school hated my face. Word travels fast, but before the neighbourhood could start gossiping about my sudden appearance my classmates took one look at me and decided I wasn't allowed to be treated with any sort of decency. I walk home with a ripped Career uniform, bruises blossoming above my cheekbones and dragging the soles of my shoes across the pavement.

That evening my father taught me how to punch. Ironic, considering those skills were the only good thing he ever gave me and I'd use them to fight off him someday. But for a short while I valued what he gave me. Bully #1 of hundreds went home with a black eye and I, still damaged, did not completely shatter.

Fists turned to harsh words and fingers pulling at my spiraling hair. "Wannabee scum" they'd seethe, who knew children could be so terrible huh? "Go back to Four and rot with the fish" was a good one. My father bought me hair ties and taught me how to round-house kick, to block swinging punches, to balance my weight. Over time, I rose. Flinging punches and solving puzzles and rising above the ranks month by month. Ever my father's daughter, I started to wear his last name with pride.

Yet as I built myself up and learnt to stand on my own two feet, my presence was his downfall.

Age eight and he hangs up his helmet for the last time, drinking whiskey straight from the bottle and flinging it at the wall. Nolan Cross is 'asked to leave' the Corps on account of his lawbreaking 9 years ago and the pulse beating in his daughter's wrists.

His trial ended this afternoon.

I am his fury, he strikes me across the face and there's my mother, lying dead on the kitchen floor with a bullet in her brain, gun smoking and ringing in my ears.

"You ruined me!" he screams and I scream back - he flings another bottle in my direction and I flee, hearing it shatter against the slamming door behind me.

It takes me a long time to learn that it was not me who ruined him but himself, all those years ago. I was just a product of his failures to push the blame on to. It doesn't stop me from scrubbing at my skin so hard it bleeds, raw and stinging in the bathroom with the door locked, wishing I could scrub his freckles and skin and everything about him off of my body - aged eight, aged eighteen, it doesn't make a difference.

He gets his shit together for a while. Doesn't apologise, not in words, but the cupboard is stocked with my favourite cereal the next morning and come afternoon a little monkey mutt plushie sits on my pillow in the attic. Age nine and I'm the best in my class at hand-to-hand combat and my father is running his own weapons trading business and I learn to fire a gun.

I flinch when his hand grabs mine and helps me aim, concentrating on breathing in and out and pulling the trigger as my breath leaves my lungs. Bullets fire through paper-thin paper skin and my lip trembles at a memory of men in white. Destruction sits in my balmy palms and I learn to conquer my fear, own it, master what makes me afraid. I fire, target after target, aged ten and my monkey's name is Sullivan. He and a pistol sleep with me at night.

I miss the smell of the sea every single day.

Gun in my hand, I fire blank bullets and stares at my classmates, feel their hands at my back before their palms can touch the fabric of my shirt, throw them on the ground and threaten to grind their skin against the pavement. First in show, practice games of capture the flag - I lead, quietly, map out a path to victory. They don't listen to me when I tell them that they're too reckless, too pig-headed, watch them lose and I snatch up the enemy flag and float across the finish line. Last one standing, Nadya Cross wins but I don't feel victorious when the other girls shove me against the lockers, too many of them to fight off, aged eleven and my hair is being hacked off with scissors again.

I inherit the tremble in my father's hands. He's all rough around the edges, sunken eyes and a blank stare. Point-blank, I dare question him and he makes me kiss the wall. My lips bleed and no teacher in any of my classes questions the violence around me - in fact, they encourage it.

I slam my fists into one kid's nose too hard, too hard, he's carried away on a stretcher. Men in white tap my combat teacher's shoulder, whisper words I can only predict, scratch down my name on paper.

Twelve years old, there's another hand on my back at the reaping. "Do everyone a favour," a girl in my class seethes. "Volunteer."

My feet stay planted.

Stubborn, they call me. Stupid, I call them. Them and all their ego, their gallivanting around, their brawn and lack of brains. Boys avoid me, girls shy away from me, I learn to crave the quiet of my bedroom attic. Aged thirteen, I blossom and don't quite understand how.

My mother visits me in my dreams sometimes. Other times her angels kiss me on the lips and I wake up with my heart hammering in my chest, catching glimpses of them in the hallways at school and staring for just a second too long.

I hold many secrets in my mouth. They speak of my father and his flaws, his drinking, his fists. They tell tales of the beating in my chest, the curves of skin that I see behind closed eyes as I fall asleep, of my lingering gaze in classrooms and streets and corner stores. At fourteen I press my lips to another's and one of my secrets spills into her mouth - I let her swallow it, swallow me, whole.

I don't see her again - and I'm thankful, in a way. She steals my secret, keeps it hidden in her throat, lets it sit in the back of my head where memories go as months pass by. I smile at boys with kind eyes and unfamiliar faces through shop windows, the kind that don't know me or my name or my past. Sometimes they'd smile back. They don't make my heart race like I want them to, but sometimes I'd pretend. Let them take me out for coffee, ice cream, exchange first names and pleasantries, let the kids from school see me hand-in-hand with a mystery male and let go of his palms once out of sight. 

At fifteen I start to feel bad for the nice guys. Leave them alone to their bookstore, coffee-shop, cotton-wool worlds. I'm too sharp, too blunt, I flinch when they try to brush eyelashes off of my cheeks or shy away at their kisses. Breaking hearts I never meant to hurt when I was only trying to protect my own, I bid the last one goodbye with a kiss on his cheek and meet the children of the night for a midnight brawl.

I take them all down. The street kids, the grown men, the girls who think they're tougher than me. Nobody can beat Nadya. The same audience come and watch me dance and they leave like they arrived - silently. I don't pay them any attention at first, but every trenchcoat and blank stare nags at the voice in the back of my head and sends static flooding my chest.

A bad-boy rich kid catches me off guard and slams his fist into my ribcage. I feel that same static pour from the impact, swinging myself up from the concrete floor and pull him down to the ground, foot planted firmly on his chest.

"You fight like a girl" I spit. He just grins, bloody teeth and recklessness.

He kisses me in the shadows after dark, when the rain washes away our blood and the crowds disperse and I pretend to like it, love it, try to stop thinking about girls girls girls girls girls girls girls.

He fights me every night. Kisses me every night. Learns my name, I take home his leather jacket, start to think that perhaps I'm just looking for someone like me. Someone to slide in to, a skin as tough as mine, and wear him like armour.

Nolan asks where I've been the next morning, questions the purple blossoms on my forehead as if he cares. I think he does care, in his own fucked up way. He's got a girlfriend and is trying, he tells me, to be a better man. Put a ring on her finger - whatever. None of my fucking business. He can pretend to love whoever he wants, even me. At the end of the day I can't tell who planted the bruises on my skin and he shouldn't have to ask.

Through a mouthful of cereal I mutter "Maybe you put it there."

A glass smashes, ingrained into my subconscious. Shattered dinnerware and my father swearing - it's routine. I don't startle at the sound anymore. It's almost comfortable.

Almost.

Bad boy is almost comfortable. Bad boy's jacket is almost comfortable. I still kiss him, pretend I like it, still wear his jacket around like a shield. I settle into our routine - fight, make out, fight, make out, takes me out for dinner and sneaks whiskey into our glasses, make out some more. It's routine, pretending.  I settle. I fight the voice in my head, in my heart.

The silent men don't visit me anymore. Neither do my schoolyard bullies. I take five of them down in one recess and now all they send my way are crude notes in my locker and death glares. Aged sixteen, bad boy catches his finger under my chin outside the diner downtown and lifts my gaze away from the beautiful girl walking past me - I snap back to reality, shy away from the truth, and kiss him with my eyes closed.

"Why don't you kiss me like you'd kiss her?"

(There's loud voices arguing in my kitchen. Four times four is sixteen.)

"What-?"

(Men in white. Four times five is twenty.)

"You don't fool me, Nadya."

(Four times six is-)

I knock him out, cold, leave him in the dirt to rot with my shame. Run home panting, gasping, feeling certain that I'll pass out at any second. Panicked heart beat like my thoughts, I slam my fists against the rough brick walls of the house I daren't call home until I am stone and mortar, building my own walls back up again. I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men, I hate men-

An echo of a gunshot, the world goes black and I wake up the next morning on my porch to my father standing over me, hungover and looking like death.

"Get up," he mumbles. "We've got work to do."

I think about the time he punched me so hard I fell into nothingness, how peaceful it was, how I stirred awake to a weeping man with my skin and eyes and freckles carrying me up the stairs to my attic of a room. He tucked me in bed, handling me delicately for the first time in my life - I feigned slumber whilst he whispered "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. You deserve better, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry."

Thing about forgiveness is that we never became acquainted. Grudges, however, we grew closer with every bat swung in my direction. 

But the thing about grudges is I'm not the only one that holds them.

We gather round some table in a darkly-lit room - fitting the mood - papers and tracks and red lines scrawled across our eyes. Names are exchanged, I nod quietly, rest my palms against the table and study the sheets before me. My mind ticks as voices are exchanged back and forth, getting harsher by the minute and more desperate with every accusation. Too much money, too many weapons, too many soldiers and not enough damn time, space or money. The men squabble, I find calm within their chaos. 

And then,

"Sorry we're late-" a voice starts, cutting through the bickering. I look up to see a stranger shrugging off his coat and a face with a black eye I thought I'd never see again.

Bad-boy.

Wooden bat slammed into my chest, I am knocked out of my own skeleton and flung back in all at once - whiplash, wide-eyed and panicking, panicking, panicking-

"Why don't you just make the soldiers carry them?"

Everybody looks up at me and bad boy continues to stare with the ghost of a grin twitching on his lips. I curl my fist and the bruises wrapped around my knuckles ache.

"You've got the men in one train load and the weapons in the other, right?"

I test the waters, dipping my toes in - it's irresponsible, but smart. I'm torn between the two and step forward anyway, choosing mind over matter as a distraction to the thundering that is my heart.

"If the issue is that there's not enough train carts for the pallets, then we cut the pallet amount in half. Take the guns out. You can fit 4 on one man and make them hold another two - that's 6 each."

I strap two pistols to my thighs and sling two shotguns around my shoulders with balmy palms, thanking my angels that the guns don't slip out of my shaking hands. I straighten, spine rigid, two military rifles in my arms.

"Fit the same amount of men in the carts, plus the weapons, and just hope none of the bullets fire by accident. Or on purpose."

Bad-boy laughs in an exhale and nods, expression ever-changing. "Girl's got a point."

"My name's Nadya" I reply curtly, as if I hadn't heard it slither from his mouth into my own ears mere hours ago.

He nods again, eyebrows raised. "Nice to meet you, Nadya."

We play our game.

The others shuffle, nodding, but my father's only fuming. Pride is a plea to be excused momentraily, his grip tight around my wrist, dragging me outside into the muggy backstreets of Two and shoving me up against the wall.

I've got a gun to his skull before he has time to spit out "Don't embarrass me like that again. Not in front of those men."

Safety clicks off, I see panic in his eyes. Good. It's a nice fucking change.

"You're only embarrassing yourself" I spit, shoving him off of me - his turn to hit the wall. "I saved your fucking ass. Got you your paycheck for the next month. Made you look like a fucking hero, like you've taught me how to think smart. Like you fucking taught me anything other than how to punch someone-"

"Don't you backchat me-"

"Or what?" I spit, my hand furious and wrapped around his throat. Father, dearest, you really should have disciplined your daughter on manners. "You'll hit me again old man? I can put a fucking bullet in your brain right now if I wanted."

He laughs, hungover and fucking miserable. "You wouldn't dare."

I cock an eyebrow, point-blank. "Try me."

He doesn't. Coward.

Bad-boy meets me out the back later, wraps his arm around my shoulder and holds a finger to his lips when I jump at his touch. "Shhhh, don't worry" he whispers, my shoulders sagging inwards, "your secret's safe with me."

"I don't know what you're talking about" I say curtly, eyes dipping toward my shoes.

Sparking up a cigarette, he takes a drag and leans against the brick-and-mortar of the alleyway. "You're a fucking terrible liar, Cross."

I don't say anything.

"I'll keep your secret. Secrets." he adds with a lean towards me and another drag, scrunching up the cigarette in the puddle beneath his feet. "If you'll keep mine."

"So you're bargaining with me now?" I ask, 11:34am and I'm already done with today.

"You could say that" Bad-boy replies. "I know your secrets - your turn to figure out mine."

Heaving in oxygen through my nose, I fire away on an exhale just as I was taught.

"You're leaving the family business."

"Bingo!" 

I might be a terrible liar but I'm a good study.


wipwipwip


"Oh, and keep the jacket" he adds, turning over his shoulder with a grin. "It suits you."

Aged seventeen and Nolan's wife leaves. Hit her, I think, one night when I wasn't around. He doesn't hit me anymore because I hit him back just as hard. Doesn't stop me from sleeping with a pistol in my hand. Doesn't stop me from putting the barrel at the bottom of my chin and closing my eyes, debating on pulling the trigger every once in a while. Death sits in my palms and I fall asleep, my hands falling with me, my head hits the pillow and my heart keeps beating.

She was smart to leave. I envy her, somewhere with someplace to go. With someone who loves her. 

Bad boy waits for me outside of school. So do the trench-coats. They don't do anything but watch as we stroll away into the afternoon, his arm around my shoulders. I turn around and they're gone, but I still feel them watching me. They turn up to training at school, they walk down my street, they sit in the stalls of my favourite diners and watch me - not ever saying a word.

"Capitolite recruits" remarks Bad-boy one day, catching my wary gaze. "Looks like they're interested in you."

"Me?" I blink, watching one leave out of the corner of my eyes. "Why?"

"They hire people for the military, or so I've heard."

I grimace, fidgeting in my seat. "I can't join the Corps. They know that."

Bad-boy takes a sip through his straw. "Not the Corps. Secret shit they can't talk about."

We end the conversation there. Secrets stay between the two of us, not strangers in sunglasses. Our secrets are sacred. We're friends, Bad-Boy and I, and friends keep each-others secrets. Girls pull me aside in the hallways and ask how the sex is, my eyes roll into the back of my head and they gasp - Bad Boy and I laugh at them over milkshakes on the weekends. I haven't laughed in a while. Bad-boy makes me laugh, grin, I fall into his embrace every evening when he hugs me goodbye.

"Thanks," I whisper. "For keeping my secret."

He kisses my cheek and whispers back: "Thanks for keeping mine."

Almost eighteen and I punch a kid in the face for harassing a girl in my class by the bathrooms. She's pretty and popular and used to hold me down whilst her friends cut my hair off, but her awkward smile and the relief that floods her body when the guy flees to find a nurse, bloody and swearing, makes me think it was worth it.

She thanks me, quietly, pulls me into an empty training hall and smiles. "Let me pay you back somehow."

"Don't mention it" I mutter, crossing my arms. Defensive - I'm not used to people like her being nice.

"No, really-"

"Look," I start, sighing at her generosity, "It's no big deal. Guy's an asshole anyway, been looking for an excuse to hit him for months."

She laughs at that. I do too - and then people flood into the hall and her laughter fades away.

Can't be caught laughing with me - whatever. I'm used to it.

"Just, I don't know. You can spread another rumor about me or something if you're worried what your friends might say." I offer with a smile. She blushes - at the offer, at her reaction. 

"Sorry about that. The last time, I mean."

"Don't worry" I finish, opening the door to leave. "I'm used to it."

Pretty Girl invites me to her birthday bash and I politely decline. She slips invitations into my locker anyway. Lip gloss and long, curled hair, she smiles at me in the hallways and I find a cupcake on my desk the day I turn eighteen. Bad Boy raises an eyebrow when she waves at me in public and utters my name aloud in front of other people. I brush off his looks, "Fuck off," I smile, "I'm allowed to have friends." 

"Nope, you're only allowed me. I'm your beard. But maybe not for much longer?"

I nudge him in the ribs and he only laughs. 

Eighteen and I finally take up her offer of acquaintance. She wants to go out drinking, I tell her that's irresponsible - she smiles and waves a flask in front of my face. "Have some fun for once, Nadya." So I drink, take down shot after shot in one go and wince at the taste of tequila - Pretty Girl shrieks and drags me into a club. We dance, I'm hazy and giddy and my feet go in whichever direction they want. I laugh, we slide into the girls bathroom after I threaten to hit someone - familiar setting, our dance, I think I'm really going to regret this tomorrow morning.

Pretty Girl laughs at something I said. Sound vibrations bounce through the walls and floors to the beat of the next song and there's cherry gloss on my lips but I didn't put it there. 

Shell-shocked, I gasp and push her away. "Don't you have a boyfriend?"

She's vulnerable. And beautiful. "Don't you?"

I kiss her until the sun rises and don't regret a thing.

This is the part of the story where we fall in love and live happily ever after with a dog, get a cute apartment in the District Square, Bad-Boy moves in and I finally get a life I was so deprived of, an apology from the universe for the tragedies in my world. And everything is good, for a while - everything is great, actually. Not for long, but it was there - a sigh instead of a scream, I've learned to take what I can get.

She talks to me at school but it's the same sugary-sweet unsuspecting kindness I'm so used to. She kisses me in her bedroom hours after we leave the classroom and we don't talk much, just kiss and laugh and fall asleep listening to music. Cherry gloss on my lips, I leave her house each day with a smile and so many questions. 

Summer leaves us, autumn follows, another reaping comes and goes - we're safe. We're nineteen years old - I look to my future, last year of school, I shrug off questions from teachers and trainers and Pretty Girl seems to have her life planned out. But she doesn't like questions from me. I've grown to want answers from her. 

Bad-boy hangs out with us on the weekends. We're an odd bunch. We don't hold hands, we just fling our arms around each-other like old pals and try on each-others jackets. He cops a bruise on his cheekbones once in a while, but I didn't put it there. I ask, and he shrugs it off in front of her. I try to hold her hand underneath tables and she turns beet red. Nobody wants to talk anymore, so I guess their motives instead: he's too shy to talk to a girl he knows but doesn't. She's too shy to admit what we have.

It was then that I realised perhaps I wasn't half-bad at solving mysteries. Maybe I was more like my Dad than I thought.

I'd come home late and he'd ask where I had been - I'd tell him it was none of his business. He'd swing, sometimes, I'd dodge. He taught me how to do that, it's childsplay, and I spit on his shoes. "Get it the fuck together, Nolan."

"Ffffffuck off, then." He's got greying hair and frown lines and he looks like fucking shit.

I'd just laugh and stomp upstairs, turning the key to a lock I'd put on my door years prior.

Pretty Girl kisses me in my room when the door is closed and the lock is turned and I ask her, one day, what we are.

"Why does that matter?" she mutters, locking up her heart.

"It doesn't, I just..."

I've never been good at lying.

"I like you."

"I like you too," she's beautiful. She's beautiful and she's so fucking frustrating that I break away, push her shoulders away with my palms - defensive, safety on, I'm closing in on myself again.

"I mean I, I just, I think I-"

"Don't" she whispers, terror in her eyes. "Don't say it."

"Why not?"

She sits up, gnaws at my bed sheets with her fingertips and she can't look me in the eyes. 

Her silence fills the gaps in our conversation.

"Oh."

"Nadya, I-"

My hands unlock the door and I open it wide, "I think you should go."

She looks at me then, solemn and apologetic. I can't tell who she feels more sorry for, herself or me.

"I'm sorry."

"Don't be."

She leaves. I listen to her boots click down the stairs, hear the front door open and close, watch her walk out of my home and down the street, disappearing out of sight from my bedroom window.

And then I punch a hole in the wall and my father storms in, furious, I go to deck him in the jaw for good measure but he's sober for once and my fist misses my target so all I do is scream, fall to the floor and sob, uncontrollably, until he's so uncomfortable all he can do is leave me there in my misery. 

I hear him leave too, after a while, following the sound of clinking bottles and glasses hitting the kitchen sink.