Connor Gearton || District 3 || FIN

Connor was never your typical boy who grew up in three.

He did not like machines, he did not think inventions were important, and he for sure did not like the idea of the hunger games.

But that wasn’t important in the early stages of his life.

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He was born to two brilliant inventors who did not know that he was never going to follow in their footsteps.

When he was a baby, they would hold him close to their chest and whisper words to him that he would never bother to learn later in life. It was like they were trying to instill some sort of intelligence in him that he did not care for.

They tried many ways to spark the inventor in him. But they failed every time. From the building blocks they gave him when he was a baby to the time they spent trying to draw fantastical structures, none of it stuck.

Connor threw the blocks against the wall when he got frustrated with them, and instead of beautiful architecture, he drew pictures of dragons and princesses trapped in castles.

There was nothing about him that was normal. At least to his family.

---

And it got worse as he grew.

His parents forced him into classes to learn how to make things with his bare hands. Something that he hated more than anything. Connor hated the classes so much that he skipped them righteously. Even when he ran into kids from the class, he simply made it seem like he was just busy.

They weren’t going to force him into them after all. He was at that age where he didn’t require school anymore. Most of the kids that he knew were already in the work force, and as much as he wanted to be a child that did right by his parents, he chose vehemently not too.

It was something that he did not want to do, and like hell if it was going to let anyone tell him that he had to do something that he didn’t want too.

---

And so it got harder for him as he spent more time with his family. They wanted so much from him, but he never tried to do more for them.

Why?

Because he didn’t think it was necessary. Instead of inventing, he usually hid away deep in the city ruins for a time that he felt was best spent by himself.

There he crafted images of dragons and made believe that he was a knight who was saving a princess.

He valiantly thrusted imaginary swords into monsters that only existed in the depths of his mind, and to any normal person in the district of three, he would be considered an absolute nut. But here, when he was alone, he was considered a hero amongst the peasants. A king who ruled an imaginary kingdom.

But he was no king. Not by a longshot.

---

One day he caught himself in a mirror and looked at the boy who tried to claim himself to be a hero.

When he looked into it, he saw a man who was strong, brimmed with muscles from head to toe. He saw a man who was happy, not a boy who was sad or weak. As much as he claimed to be a warrior, he was far from it in actuality.

His parents always did a great job of bursting his bubble.

There was one time when he tried to escape an evening with his parents, however, he was cornered to the point of staying.

They asked him to join them in helping them create something in with their hands. You see, his parents were lock makers, and while it did not bring in the most business, it did have a pretty penny that came with it when it did.

The gears in a lock were complicated, ones that Connor would never quite understand because he did not do complicated. No. He did fantastical and fictional.

However, he had to try to appease his parents.

So he picked up a lock that they were working on and tried to follow exactly what his parents were doing. However, after a couple of moments, it was apparent that he could not do anything like his parents.

When they looked at him, they were confused for a moment, and then angry the next. They started to realize that he might have not done what he was told to do.

That he had been lying to them.

However, they did not say anything in that moment. Instead, they pursed their lips and asked him to go up to his room for the night.

They would not chastise him in this moment, but he knew that it was obvious they wanted too.

---

And so he decided to start attending a couple of the classes that they wanted him to go too. He did not like it, but he had too, if he wanted to remain in his household and not be on the streets.

However, one day while he was looking at a schematic for a lock, he imagined he was looking at a treasure map where riches could be found.

He stood up in the middle of class and stole the schematic.

As he ran, he felt like dragons and gargoyles were chasing after him, but in that world, Connor was a warrior. He began to outrun them like he was a bolt of lightning, and he got as far as the ruins of the city again before he finally stopped at took a break.

In that moment, the map became easier to read, and after inspection, he noticed that it would lead him to the place where he was standing.

However, here, he discovered a girl, who did not seem that much younger than him.

He smiled, he did not know why, but he did.

She was a beauty to behold, a warrior goddess that defied the odds that the gods had placed in front of them.

She too thought the world was not what it seemed.

---

And after months of meeting in secret, they got lost in their own fiction. Before Connor knew it, he was the king of his own world, their domain stretched across the district, and before they knew it, there was a large number of people who flocked to them to become followers.

They were known as an escape from the hell that the real world presented, but Connor did not think his world was a heaven. In fact, he thought it was a place where people who could not face the world for what it was, went too in order to find something easier to face.

And while he still went home from time to time, he did not spend many days there, because then he would be sucked back into the reality that he did not believe in.

He might have been too young to be a king, but he did not want to hear that. In his mind, what he created was his, and his kingdom only would recognize him as the one they were waiting for.

And so he would sit on his throne, next to his queen, and together they would rule as they saw fit.

As long as they had too.