D5 :: St. Clair Lyons

it's hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
we're half awake in a fake empire

He was never trying to change the world; everything he did was to impress a girl.

Growing up St. Clair Lyons worked at the slaughterhouse his mother oversaw and it didn’t bother him because it was all he ever knew. He would help with raising the animals on the family farm and then when they were fat and grown he would lead them to his mother, learning how to make death quick and merciful. How to skin a cow so that the hide could be sold and efficiently utilized. How to hang an animal by it’s ankles and cut the major arteries to drain the blood. How best to scrub the floor after. How to split muscle from bone and judge a quality cut of meat from a poor one. How not to waste a thing because every bone, every organ, every piece of each animal should be valued, used, honored. This was the cycle of life and it might always have been the cycle of his life as well had he not fallen irreversibly in love with a wild woman named Roberta Alderose.

"Birdie," he called her, over and over again, never tiring of the way she smiled whenever he called her by this name, "Birdie, Birdie, beautiful Birdie." It didn’t suit her — the nickname or the compliments. She was not delicate and lovely like other girls, let alone a sparrow or a robin, her hair frizzy and her footsteps chaotic. She exploded through every door she entered, impatient and graceless, and when she laughed the sound could forcibly drown out an entire room full of chattering people. The first time he heard her cackle over a joke that was otherwise forgettable, he thought he would go out of his mind over the jagged sound or the lipstick smeared on her front teeth or the way her eyebrows were too pale to find on her face in the dim lighting. Suddenly he knew — oh, Ripred — he knew the same way even the stupidest of creatures know how to breathe, that everything in his life had been horribly boring before her.

Months later when she questioned his sincerity and if he would still love her tomorrow the same way he swore he loved her that day, he immediately marched out of the room — outrageously offended — and found the first person he could to tattoo her name upon his heart. Birdie it said and she cackled like the mother of all madness at the stupidity of this man who she had believed all along. It was just that she couldn’t resist the thrill of teasing him, knowing he would do anything to prove himself. "You never should have named me that," she screeched with raucous amusement, "how was I ever going to be a bird for you when we’d both rather I be a Lyons?" With that she told him that he could either marry her or she would eat him alive just to prove which of them was truly deserving of the predatory name. It was the most romantic thing anyone had ever said to him and they impulsively ran through rain, ran through government traffic, ran through all their good sense to say their vows in front of an official in the justice building. Both of their mothers were furious to be deprived of a proper wedding, but still, this is the story that Birdie and St. Clair Lyons tell when someone asks how they got together.

The details they leave out are no accident. No matter how many times this story is retold, Birdie never mentions how repelled she was to first discover that St. Clair and his family worked for the local slaughterhouse. He never tells the part where he quit in favor of love and then joined her in a controversial fight for animal rights. They don’t laugh at parties about the time they set a herd of cattle awaiting slaughter loose in the name of freedom, only for them to stampede through the city center, causing major damage to everything in their path and endangering the community. Not a word is said about the massive shipment of wool awaiting export to District Eight that was doused with gallons upon gallons upon gallons of red paint and how that winter there weren’t enough coats and blankets to keep the country warm. Under no circumstances do the two of them talk about the old friends they abruptly cut ties with after getting married and realizing that youthful rebellion wasn’t worth losing their children over. More than anything, never do they speak of the lengths they would go to in order to ensure that their past stays in the past.

Ironically, most of the truth is available to the public upon request, scattered through the details of numerous land purchases, records of campaign donations lobbying for a profitable new future for all, and peppered throughout news articles about the District Five industry shift to oil production. Only the cleverest of minds could piece the truth together, but it’s all there — the rise and fall of an anonymous animal rights advocacy group with terroristic tendencies; the hushed discovery of oil in St. Clair Lyons’s very own backyard, one of the first in the District; a series of sudden arrests for treason; land seizures and the auctions that followed, the farms of criminals being sold off at incredibly devalued prices to a single family paying with black gold and promises. Within the span of little more than a month, St. Clair went from being the runaway son of a single mother with three children — a relatively poor butcher who had been too busy working off her parents’ debt to save much money for herself — to undeniable royalty in new world named Oil.

The Lyons knew that if they didn’t seize the opportunity that sprang up from the earth beneath their feet that someone else would. They could stand back and wait for the inevitable changes that would come as other people began searching to see if they too had unknowingly built their homes upon oil or they could lead the way. With the weight of two young children in their arms, it was shockingly easy to forget to care about anything or anyone else that had come before. One year old Zion laughed easily at everything that moved and his three month old baby sister Denali was a chubby little mimic of his every expression, trying to learn the world from the face of a brother she loved instinctively without either of them needing words. Between fretting over the need for money they used to think they could live without and playing games of peek-a-boo with the kids, the Lyons parents worried over a future that had never crossed their minds before. So used to rebelling against the status quo and living in the moment without concerns for their own tomorrows, the danger of getting arrested and thrown into the detention center suddenly felt like a legitimate threat instead of an adventure in martyrdom for a pair of activist revolutionaries. It was no longer a subject to casually joke about and one close call with getting caught was all it took for them to decide it was time for their lives to change.

At first they thought that it would be easy enough to quietly live off the money from the oil on their small plot of farm land — perhaps they could even re-invest that money to acquire a little more ground, a little more of the dark treasure below — but the greedy grins of government prospectors coming to survey the District cared little for the well-being of the Lyons. Every person they encountered was obviously skimming their own piece of the profits to pocket and so there wasn't much left at the end of the day for feeding hungry mouths. Meanwhile their activist friends had begun raising concerns over the potential environmental impact of drilling, of oil wells, of the Capitol swooping in to tear the land as they knew it apart. Everyone agreed that District Five should remain the People's land and no one yet realized that Birdie and St. Clair had more reasons than most to want to interfere with the prospectors' efforts as plans were hastily put into action. The switch from targeting citizen-run meat processing plants or feed lots with abusive policies to going after government officials and imported high-tech machinery came with a learning curve. They weren't properly prepared. Not for the mission. Not for such a narrow getaway. Not for the group going from being considered a problematic nuisance to a criminal organization with a bounty on its collective head. The Lyons family wanted out, but most of their comrades insisted that this kind of heat meant they had taken up a cause that was more worthwhile than any before it. This was only the beginning.

As with most things, it was Birdie who first found the courage to give a voice to the obvious way out. "We could turn them in," she whispered, Denali held to her chest, the shock of orange fluff on her head tucked protectively beneath Birdie's chin, "Deneziel, Pyrah, all of them. Everything could just... go away." To the Detention Center, never to be heard from again. Later she would tell herself that she would have thought longer, harder for an alternate solution if only she had known that the woman she had once called her dearest friend was pregnant at the time. One mother could have stood strong beside another, their children growing up playing together and unfamiliar with loneliness. Instead Birdie's words became a time bomb that could not be disabled, the Lyons turning every last one of their friends in, desperately hoping it would be enough to protect their children. The reward money hadn't been part of the motivation, but they certainly didn't turn it down. When the farm and pasture land previously belonging to the imprisoned criminals was seized on the grounds of unpaid taxes, of defaulted loan payments, of abandonment... St. Clair and Birdie didn't lie to each other about the motivation for using their ill gotten gains to purchase all of it at prices far below standard market value. It was an opportunity — a terrible opportunity, but an opportunity nonetheless.

Suddenly they owned enough property to be taken seriously by the major players in the rising oil business, instead of being a small-time pawn to be taken advantage of. There were actual profits to be had and those profits were used to buy up yet more property from anyone who hadn't yet realized that a good price for farm land was a laughable handful of pennies compared to the worth of oil-rich ground. Years of running covert operations had taught them the value of quick, decisive action and so they didn't pause to wallow in regret over the people they had wronged or to second-guess themselves. Maybe if they were the power in charge — instead of the Capitol itself or any of the swindlers who had crossed their path in the beginning — then they could ensure that things were run better. There was enough money coming in to back local politicians who would be willing to make the Lyons' interests their own, lobbying for a change in District Five's industry. By the time people realized that Birdie and St. Clair had gone from no-name troublemakers to titans who owned a majority share of the new District resource, there was nothing to do except whatever they wanted.