tamsin woods / d9. ( fin )

Fire in your smile and a trick on your fingertips. Snow crunching beneath winter boots and coyotes howling somewhere in the distance. Bright lights as a place called home. Using the moon and stars as your guide. Ice in your blood but a smile in your heart. Laughter hard-won and cruelly lost. Fluorescent lights and bruises in the crook of an elbow. The stale taste of lost freedom.

---

Your birth is one that makes people sigh.

It's not a happy sound, not one of content. It's something bleak, something sad and heartbroken, the sound strangers make when they hear about tragedy and have no words. There is no happiness, no sense of calm of ease, for as much as the birth of a child is made to be a blessing, you are a curse the same moment you wail your first cry.

Your mother isn't ready to be a mother, a woman not ready to raise the child she’d born–and so she left her little baby girl behind, crying in the arms of a man equally unready to be a father, but at least willing to try.

Sometimes there was resentment, buried deep in your and your father's bones. Questions about how she could leave you, about how she could leave him. Your father, who was perfect in your eyes, an angel heaven sent down to try and rid the world of its darkness. Sometimes you ask him about her, and it makes you angry that she would leave, but more often than not, there was truly only gratitude. She didn't want you, so you don't want her, and more than that you don't want her for your father. This way, you don't need to share his love any more than you have to, and this way you would be the only person in his life who he would give his own throat for.

You loved him, loved being an only child, loved that when you both went camping up north that there was never the chance your mood would ever be brought down by someone complaining about the cold of the howl of coyotes as they are trying to get to sleep. He teaches you and only you everything that you could ever need to know, things about how to make a fire from nothing but a few stray branches and the right pair of rocks, or which plants would leave a horrible rash and which could be stuck in hot water to soothe a throat. You're his world, and he shows you it every day.

And that was what early life was like for you, a kind of brisk softness, like wolves nipping at your ankles or stars shining in the night sky—your childhood was a series of cold winter mornings with a travel mug of hot cocoa. School was never something to be paid attention to, just something to pass the day time hours until you could escape with your father into the woods just beyond the city proper, go hiking along the border lines of the District and breathe in deep the scent of the woods in the spring time. The only good thing about school was your friends, and the little pranks you could play on all of your classmates. Class clown, they liked to call you, and you wore the title with pride.

But then, one day, you disappear, and the world turns upside down.

Even now, two years out, you aren't exactly sure what happened, can't be sure about who took you and what their names were. They put a wet cloth against your face and one moment you feel panic and then eight months later you are waking up in an alley way, everything in between a blur of stark white walls and even starker faces. They pump you full of drugs, put you through tests of strength and skill, but you're high the whole time. Every so often, flashes of what happened to you still cross your mind, little visions about what was done to you, how a stray new pill tasted bitter on your tongue, and any of the odd things they made you try to do. You can barely remember them, the strange little tasks you'd have to complete for them—the images are all broken up and confusing.

Still, you hold the weight of those memories like some kind of cross to bear.

It was hard, at first—you don't know how, don't understand it, but whoever took you must have already weaned you off of whatever drugs they’d been testing out on you, but those first months you could still remember the feeling of it in her veins, remembered what it felt like every time they forced you to be something other than the kind-hearted trickster you'd always wanted to be. A week after you get out, you find out that your dad died of a heart attack when he found out about your disappearance.

Your own heart breaks for him months too late.

A shadow of the girl you used to be, a night sky now almost devoid of stars, you can't help but wonder if you'll ever be that girl who just loved to smile ever again.