taylor livingstone / d12. ( fin )

They call you Ten.

Long before that you were a girl named Taylor, and the world took that from you. All good stories start at the beginning though, and this surely isn't that.

All you ever wanted was the quiet.

As far back as you can remember, the world began in fire and chaos, in shouting and anger and confusion and a kind of noise so loud it threatened to suffocate.

It started when you were a child, the need for it, the overwhelming burning in your soul for an escape from the hustle of everything that went on in the Seam. People there hold their breath waiting for something good to come their way, for some miracle to bless their dining table, but it never comes their way, and they cry and they cry and they cry but you--you learned how to live in it and never drown. You took the noise and the chaos and the want and made it your power, made it the one thing in this life that you understand better than anything else and turned it into an advantage.

At first it was scary, the watching. You were so afraid that someone would lash out at you, that you'd observe something you weren't supposed to and get whipped for it. You couldn't be in your house though, couldn't bear to listen to your mother crying every morning when your father walked out the door in the early dawn hours, boots heavy on the creaking wooden floor. The sound of them would have been enough to wake you up on their own, but her shouts did the job well enough long before he had the chance to walk out the door. Time came and went though and nothing ever happened, and sooner rather than later you were observing everything that your neighbors did, learning the ins and outs of all their schedules so well that you would know exactly when Mrs. Delaney would set out in the morning to bring her goat's milk to sell in the marketplace, or the exact moment when the Woodward's patriarch would come back in the evening, soot caked on his face and hands but with a couple flowers in hand from along the fence for his wife every time.

You couldn't believe it when the Peacekeeper started frequenting one of the homes in your corner of the world, that he would risk covering his pretty white uniform in the telltale grey streaks coal dust leave on everything it touches. But there he was, each and every morning, and you watched him from your spot on the corner of the street, the one with the alcove outside the Thorne's house where you can peek your head out and hardly anyone will see you in the shadows, even with your trademarks freckles and that hair, always mad-dark like a forest at night. You didn't stray far from your home in the beginning; the farthest you ever went was to school and then back home, but there was something about the sight of the Peacekeeper on your street that made you angry, something about it that made you curious--if he could stray from his home, why couldn't you?

You were a small child -- a scrawny thing even compared to the other kids, the one's with parents who couldn't afford to put food in their own mouths, much less the mouth's of their three children--and it made it easier for you to go out in the world and have no one notice you. So you started going with your grandma to the marketplace, started slipping into the place by yourself and wandering around, quiet as a mouse so that no one would notice you. You watched, learning and understanding everything that went on around you.  

You were the last thing people expected when they finally looked at you.

They expected your mother's fire, maybe, the way she would streak through town like a firecracker and demand from the world what had been taken from her one minute and then collapse in a fit of hysterics about it the next. The only reason no one takes her away from you is because they know your grandmother, your father's mother, would tear them apart at the stitches if they ever laid a hand on her daughter-in-law, and she had the support of the black market full force behind her. Or perhaps they expected you to be more like your father, equal in his burning but more steady, like the embers after a fire rather than the blaze itself. He was one of those people who walked into this world, and for everything it threw at him he just kept standing, not exactly fighting back, but there in Twelve just continuing to stand was protest enough.

But you weren't like either of them, not really, not in the ways that people expected. Maybe you were like your mom in the way that you felt everything, in that you could see the world and feel all of its pains and take them into your own body. Where she crumbled though, you pushed them down, gave each and every one a home in the the hollow of your stomach, learned to ignore them until you mastered the task. Maybe you were like your father in that you never crumbled, but you never helped anyone either.

He went to the mines every morning and was always among the last to leave, staying behind to help the men with too much soot in their lungs to breathe properly, to rope around his own shoulder the arm of one's who could barely stand at the end of the day so that he  could help them stumble back to the soot covered town they called home. 

No, you weren't like either of them.

You first start stealing after your mother dies, her hands clutched to her chest when her lungs finally give out. Her mind had never been strong, and when her body started to fail there was nothing in her that knew how to fight, not in a real way, not in a way that mattered, and she took her last shuttering breath in the dark of night, with you clutching one hand no matter how many times your father said You don't need to be here for this, T.  In  Twelve, light hair and light eyes are supposed to be a person's saving grace, are supposed to mean that they're safe from the hell created by coal, but even they couldn't save your mother.

This is the only time you remember seeing your father cry.

That's  also  when  the  fire  in  him  dies,  and  it  feels  like  you've  lost  both  parents  with  the  death  of  one.

Maybe the stealing starts as a call for attention, maybe it's because you're desperate for him to pay attention to you, but if you're being honest with yourself there's a part of you that's relieved when he retreats into himself, a part of you that is glad that all the yelling has stopped, that home is a place of quiet and solitude more than anything else. His mother does what she can, moves out of her own home and into your tiny house where the two of you have to share a room, but she's kind and stern and older than most of the other people you've ever met, which makes everyone respect and love her. You think this is the best thing that's come of all this, that with her in your home no one touches you, that for all the times you risk getting caught slipping two light fingers into jackets pockets to lift the weight of some coin from those with too much money, no one would dare turn you in if they saw it. Soot cakes under your fingernails and grime digs her cruel hands into your chest, latching onto your heart and turning you into something rotten, but you're free.

You're Ten.

A woman in the market calls you that on one of the morning you accompany your grandmother when she goes to sell her herbs and stitchings and buy spirits--for your father, you know, but you pretend not to smell it on him in the mornings now. You're lucky to still have all ten fingers, the woman says with a dry chuckle when she sees you slip some berries out of one of the corrupted Peacekeepers bags. You don't answer her at first, just look back with wide eyes, still colored with childhood naïveté. But then you do, and it's this that follows you for the rest of your life, through every time kids at school push you down to the earth for being too quiet; through every time you think maybe this time you've pushed too far, that you stole too much and you're about to get caught; through the accident in the mines that claims your father's life seven years later.

It's not luck, you replied. 

I've got no time for luck. 

song: can't pretend by tom odell