booker ashwood d1m

On the day he was born a bomb fell on the west wing. Booker brought fire and ash with him from the moment he came screaming into the world deep in the bowels of the family estate where the household had moved the moment the air raid had started.

No one died that day. Booker's father was off at war and there was just a skeleton crew at the house. The rest of the staff had been conscripted and had gone to fight with his father. It was just his mother, the maids and the bombs.

Perhaps the greatest loss was the set of crystal that had been in his mother's family for three generations. For years after the fact, the help found shards of crystal in the strangest of places. Wedged between floorboards, on top of bookshelves and in one case, among the sugar cubes on the hutch in the dining room.

"Ash rained down like black snow for three days," the maids would recount years later, "And the beams in the dance hall were all broken and blackened like rotten teeth."

Booker was too young to remember that but the smell of smoke has always reminded him of home. The scent never really went away, even after they finally finished rebuilding five years later. It lived in the walls, under the floorboards and attached itself to every curtain.

Declan Ashwood didn't come home after Booker was born for a long time.

The war dragged on, every time one side would gain ground, they'd lose it again the next day. His father would promise that he'd be home soon in a letter and then weeks would pass with no word. No news became bad news, the maids started to wear only black just in case.

Even in their mourning, they found time to play with Booker. He'd spend mornings in the kitchen playing in the corner while his wet nurse would help with the baking. The afternoons were spent at his mother's feet, in the garden, in the living room, in her office where she would make calls to the Capitol and pass on secret messages to strangers that would come in the night.

Then his father came home for Solstice when Booker was three and part of him vaguely remembers that. Starched white fabric rough against his skin when Declan bent down to greet him. There was a salt and pepper moustache hiding a deep scar over his lip on the left side and blue eyes that seemed to stare right through him.

"Why's he so thin?"
"Rations, darling, we're running out of time."
"It'll all be over soon, my love."

Even after the war ended, Book's father was never seen without that white jacket. Men and women would come and go all the time, folders tucked under their arms, manila envelopes shoved into their jackets. They'd go into his father's study and wouldn't come out for hours.

When they left, Booker would linger in the doorframe of the study and wait for Declan to notice him there. "We're finding the last of the undesirables," his father would say, without even looking up from his work, "And then I'll have time for you."

By the time Booker was five, visits from strangers were much more rare. His father began to spend less time in his office. He'd take breakfast with Booker and his mother, even sometimes spend time with them into the afternoon before shutting himself in his study again.

"The war never ended for him, poor man," Booker heard a maid whispering once.

She was gone the next day.

Declan didn't like weakness, he didn't like it aimed at him, superimposed over his own likeness, it made him feel ugly.

"Why's Book so damned small?"
"Poor nutrition, he'll grow, darling."

There'd been days near the end of the war when there wasn't any food to be had and Booker's mother would stretch milk powder as far as she could but there never seemed to be enough.

He remembers being so hungry some nights that his stomach hurt. He'd cry in agony for hours but his cries would get buried under the whistling sound of bombs falling on the district around them.

The maids would play dinner party with him when there was nothing to eat. They'd cut at squares of tissue paper with butter knives and eat it like there was nothing more delicious in the whole world.

Declan hated that his own son was so weak. Part of him must have felt betrayed, he'd spent years toiling for the Capitol to give his family a good life and had come home to half a home and a sickly child.

His father's regimens began the summer before Booker was meant to start school. He'd be shaken awake in the early morning and made to get dressed, heart still sleeping, shivering in the cold air. Declan would drive him into the woods at the back of their estate, and leave him somewhere within to find his own way home.

At first it didn't seem so bad. Booker got turned around in the woods but it was quiet, peaceful in comparison to the constant excitement of home. There were no maids, no mother, no wet nurse. Just leaves, trees and the sun shining through the canopy like little golden anchors holding the blue sky above in place.

At first he thought it was a game. Book spent that first afternoon exploring the woods. His father would have to come back and get him, but then the sun began to set and his father never came for him.

But the wolves did, long evil shouts in the dark. They sounded like the whistle of a falling bomb but somehow sweeter. He climbed up a tree that night and stayed hidden long into the night until their howling finally ended.

If Booker didn't make it back before dinner, he wouldn't get to eat. Sometimes all he could do was crawl exhausted into bed, all for it to just begin again the next day. There was a time when he didn't see anyone but his father for weeks, he was starting to forget his mother's face.

The season where most children his age would start going to school came and went. Soon enough, there wasn't an inch of their property that Booker didn't know. He started to lay his route home out in his head the night before, using pieces of the land as markers. Each day the car would go further than it ever had. His father pushed his limits without worrying if he'd bend or break, it didn't seem to matter.

One night Booker had to sleep in the fields between the woods and home. His house, a beacon in the night looked so cold from afar. That night, in the tall grass, Booker dreamt that it was burning.

He never learned what he did to earn his punishment but after awhile, he realized it didn't matter. All that mattered was having the strength to make it back home. If he was weak, he would die and after some time, he believed that he would have deserved it.

His fragility was his own fault.

Booker stopped running from the wolves. A knife hidden away in the sleeve of his shirt after dinner one night drew blood and once they realized he wasn't an easy meal, they started to leave him alone.

He brought the head home for his father.

Sometime after that, Declan introduced a new practice. They'd both get a wooden staff, and Booker would have to defend himself. A little boy against a grown man, he earned himself more bruises than anything. The anger was already starting then though. Every time he was able to land a blow back on Declan, it felt good, like a relief.

In the fall, Booker started school at a private school for boys down in the district. It'd been established before the Dark Days and had recently reopened after being rebuilt. All of One's elite young men were attending.

Booker arrived and all the boys in his year were soft. Hands smooth, fingers straight, unbroken. Skin pale, like they'd barely seen the sun. Book stood out, his own skin tan from a year of his father's regimens, palms callused from the wooden staff with scars painting his skin in faded pink lines.

The other boys were weak, ugly things.

He hated them.

They were soft beneath his touch, easily broken. One bruise and they'd run crying for teacher so Booker learned how to hit the other boys so it wouldn't show. The teacher called for Booker's father only once and Declan Ashwood came that very afternoon in his crisp, snow-white, military jacket. He never got in trouble again. Power, strength it was all that mattered.

Through the years, Booker would always go home for the summer and come back a little bit wrong. Nose crooked when he was ten, a busted rib when he was twelve, but no one ever asked questions. Book would just put that charming Ashwood smile on and change the subject if they did.

He grew twisted, the smile on his face never quite reached his eyes. Though he'd been blessed with his mother's features, he started to look more like Declan every day. It was those blue eyes, staring right through whatever they fell on.

But he knew how to hold a room full of people in the palm of his hand, how to seem just kind enough to deserve their love all while pinning them down by the throat through fear. No matter where he was, the classrooms, the dorms, the schoolyard, he simply shone brighter and they all deferred to him.

Oh god, he hated them all.