lucius blackwood / PK / D7 (wip)

He was born fangless, with no bite to his teeth. Only the silver pelt made him one of the wolves and even then, no pack would recruit a hindrance. Mother said she saw kindness when he yawned into existence, not cruelty, and that was his first grave sin towards her.

He held no ferocity, he sat alone at lunch break, and his bones creaked too much for him to be athletic. The only callous patches upon his palms were between the slender fingers, there from holding a pencil betwixt it for long hours.

And, the worst of all,
he had a coward's heart.

It was mere fact, not an assumption.

He let the kids trample over his written poetry in middle-school and returned home with rose bruises, trembling not from pain, but from fear – fear of Mother, fear of the strong discipline she demanded through the black tongue of a whip.

Lucius stood far from being the perfect, stupendous son. He was, like a toothless wolf, like a wingless sparrow, like a fangless serpent, an abnormality to the bloodline of predators.

Whenever he glimpsed at the silver frames of distant ancestors, of peacekeepers, he saw a crystalline pattern that he did not succeed.

Most had faces with sharp ends, prolate edges, grey eyes that held the sheen of a storm, thick beards on the men and grey streaks of hair in even the youngest faces.

The only aspect he inherited were the grey-grim eyes. He'd been described as beautiful after puberty made its seamless exit due to them and the thin layer of muscles he'd cultivated over the years but Lucius disregarded it as mere politeness, haloed-nothings that others said to appease him,

all rhinestones with hollows inside.

The clash between the mother and the son was no shocking matter – Miriam Blackwood was a stark contrast to Lucius.

She could remember each trinket's residence in her room with a renowned memory whereas he mastered the art of losing, of forgetting where he'd left his keys, of leaving scriptures and documents out in the rain whenever he went out to read.

Her life worked through statistics, through strategies drawn across a blackboard, whilst he sought after temporary hedonism and heeded only to the pandemonium that was his heartbeat. Their squabbles were legendary and loud, along with the vicious cracks of a whip that would stain his back in red.

She was a storm and he was caught within it. He could recall the nights when she'd return from that forsaken place, smelling of fresh copper and grime, and he'd envisage the atrocities she'd committed there. They were all demented images. Lucius hated the Praetor Lupus even though his mother led it.

He hated it more than the excruciating fact that she had adopted an orphan girl because

he was not hers to love, 
he was not hers to rule.

Katlynn emerged when he was nineteen, after Miriam knew that her son did not get harvested by the reaping and met his demise at the hands of the Capitol. She was, Lucius immediately knew, the crowned jewel of the Blackwood ménage, and so sprung her last name: Crown. Katlynn Crown, all serrated teeth and stitched together by battle wounds.

She, was the wolf that Lucius would never be.

Jealousy flowered in his chest, of course, but it thirsted to its death after the dawn of a realization: he was free. He was free from the shadow, from the duties, because there were new shoulders to uphold them. And, he was free from the Praetor.

It was the darkest section of the Detention Center and a mysterious place – the Praetor. He'd seen pictures of it, scattered across his mother's desk, showing derelict cells that had no sunlight, hands reaching out from the darkness behind bars.

Every time she paid home a visit from there, she smelled of blood. Lucius recognized it from butcher shops and slaughterhouses – it was coppery, it was repugnant. And, she knew he despised it. She knew the Praetor would be purgatory for him.

Perhaps, that was the wicked reasoning she had when she decided to bestow the title of its leader upon him.

Katlynn was as livid as he was. It might have been a mishap, an error that had bloomed from her dying thoughts, a forgery – they would never know. She exhaled her last pneumonic breath in her immaculate room, singly, alone, the quiescence her only comfort. Lucius mourned, but it didn't last long. He was to be moved, posthaste, to the Peacekeeper academy, and then the Praetor.

It was a prison, the Praetor, that echoed each footstep he took and echoed each throb of panic he felt. He did not feel this much dread when he entered the academy. He did not feel this much agony when real silver cut and left marks upon his skin, and when they ordered him to run laps because he feigned lethargy for the most of the time. He did not feel this much claustrophobia when he shared a garret with another peacekeeper trainee.

He preferred the academy tenfold than this slum, where they were caged alongside the screams. The recruits were surprisingly welcoming in the academy; there was strength in numbers and comfort in relations.

And, it didn't help that Katlynn trailed after him shortly, demanding to be stationed in the Detention Center with her faultless academic record in the peacekeeper academy. They were never equals; he was weak whilst the other was strong – she was all serrated teeth whilst Lucius was all blunt molars.

He was weak.