franklin morris | two; fin

"Is what it is."

It came from his foster dad, Clive, the latest in a string of them. Like all the people Frank had been unlucky enough to be placed with, Clive was in it for the wrong reasons. Stood by the mailbox on the first of every month waiting for his check to come in so that he could go spend it all at the nearest bar. Didn't stick around much, sure, left Frank to fend for himself, find his own meals, that sort of thing, but he wasn't the worst. Didn't ever try fighting, or anything, probably because he spent his time so wasted that he knew he wouldn't win.

Frank thought he had seen everything Two had to offer- he'd spent a summer doing odd jobs for the Johnwaynes in the swamp, worked maintenance in the very same training center that had taught Julian Bryze back in the day in return for food and free lessons, even stolen everything he could carry from some private school he was supposed to be attending, sold the shit, bought his own apartment. He'd made it two weeks before they found him and threw him back into the system.

But he hadn't ever been this far north. He kept waiting to see the boundary, and it never came, and eventually the ground turned solid and then cooler and the roads had more curves and the horizon was more than a straight line from left to right. Mountains, ones he could've escaped to years ago and likely never been found, yawned up into the sky, piercing through to fog bank like teeth. The houses were sturdier here too, he noticed, which was a bummer. It was a lot easier to break a wooden frame than this reinforced steel shit.

He'd been trying for the last few weeks to convince Clive to let him stay behind in the south, though he couldn't outright say that was what he wanted, because then it would lead to begging, and Frank refused to beg for anything. If he wanted it, he took it, one way or another. Clive, despite having dealt with Frank for a little over a year now, hadn't caught on. Either that or he was so desperate for the money that he didn't care.

That's why they were moving in the first place: Clive had found a job that was just far enough away that they hadn't yet caught wind of his need to be inebriated at all times, including work hours.

"Fuck off," he said simply, tucking his hands into his pockets as the train slowed to walking speed. When he saw the station enclosing, he hefted a bag up onto his shoulder- everything he owned: a couple suits of clothes, a hunting knife, a refillable cigarette lighter, a double-sided coin, and a journal with his name etched onto the cover.

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Two months flew by and winter was in full-force. Frank had resorted to selling Clive's watch- slipped it right off his wrist while he was sleeping- so that he could afford a coat. Poor bastard assumed it had slipped off his walk. He had decided he didn't like it there. The divide between the rich and the poor was abundantly more clear, as everyone either owned a company or made minimum wage working in said companies, and the people he'd met were all a bit too flat for his taste, all talking about their dreams of bringing glory to their district and what and honor it would be to represent their family and whatever else Capitol-fed bullshit they could muster up. Frank himself had trained as a career, but he found that he had more use of it in every day situations than he ever would in an arena.

He'd spent weeks devising a plan to get himself removed from Clive's care and, with any luck at all, sent back south where he knew how to handle things. Plan was simple: wait until Clive left for work, throw himself through a window, put on that helpless victim face that made adults weak in the knees, and say Clive did it in a drunken rage. Maybe he could even say he'd left him lying out in the snow, where he would've eventually bled to death or frozen: whichever came first.

But then he met Julie, and though she was not unlike everyone else in the area, she seemed interested in having something more. Being something more.

After a few meetings, where he'd been less and less sure about following through with his plans, he pulled out his double-sided coin, brought it to his lips.

"If it's heads, I'll stay. But you owe me a kiss. If it's tails, I'll go." His smile was sly; of course he knew what the outcome would be, but he flipped it nonetheless.