Bishop White | District 9 | FIN

He cant breath.

The taste of saltpeter and metal wafting in his mouth as he lights a torch and holds it up to a hole in the rig he is working on.

It’s a job that he wish he didn’t have to do, but one that he knows he has no choice but to do so.

He comes from nothing, but metal needs to be produced somewhere, and in that, he knew that he finally has some sort of purpose in his life.

---

Being poor was never something that he wanted, but he didn’t have a choice in that matter. He tried, tried his hardest to make do with what he had. A rambunctious scamp, his parents had no clue how to handle a boy who acted out in every instance he was thrown into.

He would always be a handful, because he wanted to know more about the world around him.

However, they were limited in their resources, most of their time was spent trying to make enough money in order to survive.

The land they lived on was rough, large pieces of dry patches that looked like they thirsted for water. Bishop could feel that pain, because most days he had felt the same way. They lived far from any rivers, mostly because it was cheaper to do so. There was less commotion when you lived in the outskirts after all, but that meant they had to travel to get anything accomplished around their property. Most days they scavenged through the district, picking through some of the garbage they would find lying about. It wasn’t a life they wanted, but one they had to live if they wanted to survive.

Bishop though never thought of it as a bad life. He actually preferred it, because he got to work with his hands. Sure, it was no life for a child who could have had a future ahead of him, but he was not born in district one. There were no riches for him to have, and no treasures for him to find.

Poor was his life, and he just had to live with that.

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But sometimes they would find things that they could use around the house, and for the most part, those items could be used to fix others, which is something that his father liked to do from time to time. Some of the scrap could be cut down into smaller pieces that could connect wires or pipes to each other to produce life into otherwise broken objects.

When they would be lucky enough to find such things, that’s when they were able to make enough to survive. It was a meager living that never was guaranteed, there was nothing more that they could do for themselves, and Bishop just had to make it work.

That was something that he would do well.

---

There is something tragic about being thrown into a world that he didn’t understand, but he didn’t let that get him down. No.

He strived because of it.

At first, it was simple, rather tacit, but once they got their feet off the ground, they realized that they could create anything as long as they had the necessary parts.

Their house became a junk yard of sorts, buried underneath discarded trash that they all considered treasure. It was just not Bishop who partook, but his mother and father as well. There was a comradery about it that made it all seem like it was going to be okay, that whatever they did, it was just going to be. However, there was pushback, because what they were able to fix and flip, people wanted to know about.

There was a certain unease about someone capitalizing off another families trash that didn’t sit right with the district at first.

And maybe that was Bishop overthinking things, but the looks he got from people made it very clear that he was not welcomed to poke through their scraps, sometimes having to scavenge through the night in order to find safety in anonymity. He was a junk rat personified, and he had no qualms with it.

After all, he needed to survive, just like everyone else here did.