an inconspicuous bag of trash . fin

"Fuckin' hell, I can't believe that actually worked."

He's folded into something like a run-over pretzel when he hears the voice, bones aching and sweat carving a river down his forehead. From his point-of-view the world is draped in nothing but darkness and shadow, the soft glow of the street lights hardly visible through plastic bag stretched thin. It's felt like an eon and a half since the flashlights of men in white bounced and scattered around his makeshift hiding place, footsteps come and footsteps gone and nothing but his own shallow breaths and the feeling of the pavement he lays in to keep track of. Men in white and guns in hands and they'd never stopped to think of the trash bags as their prime suspect, Holt Sickings knows his reputation and carries it wrapped around his shoulders like a minx fur.

Literally- it's why he'd turned a harsh corner and tossed the trash bag over himself and collapsed in a heap onto the pavement just seconds before the Peacekeepers ran past him.

There's one heartbeat, then two after Billy's voice cuts through the dead of the night before a pair of fingertips press out from inside the bag of trash, pale skin hardly visible through the stretching of plastic in the milliseconds before it tears open and he spills out to the sidewalk all guts and sweaty glory. The pavement greets him again with ice and abandon, and there's a sauna of body heat that bleeds out of the into the night as he flips over onto his back and lets his gaze drift to the smog above, panting like a chained-up dog in the Summer.

It's soon interrupted by two ugly mugs, though, the scar over Rusty's right eye illuminated harshly by the dimming streetlights. Holt had accidentally given it to him way back when, one of those Spring days where all you can do is play war in front lawns that were as dead as a war zone, tossed a piece of metal like it were a shuriken and watched it carve open a souvenir on the damn kid's face. 

It'd taken a lot of silver tongues and crimson threats to coax him into telling the Peacekeepers that it was one of the kids from Rockfall. Not like any of 'em would have given much a damn about a kid like them anyways, but he'd discovered early on in life that it was best to make sure your name was kept out of as many mouths as possible. 

Chirps from little birdies kill in Two. So does everything else.

"What took y'all so long to lemme know the coast was clear?"

"... You told us you'd be on Quarry."

"Bullshit, Rusty."

Holt pushes himself up to his elbows and shifts his gaze between the two of 'em, snake eyes and lies mixed in the irises. "That true, Billy?" He tosses the question like shooting an arrow up into the air, waits to see who it falls back down on. Billy shifts his weight and chews on the words, looks at Rusty and then back at him. "Sure is, Dart."

And that's a bingo. Billy never calls him by his nickname unless he ain't telling the truth.

Because Holt fucking Sickings knows these routes like the scars on the back of his hands, has run 'em enough times to carve it into the dust and the dirt (and he has before). Right out of the shops and straight through the back alleyways, hop the only fence panel with the barbed wire missing, a left at Granny Coyote's house (always a left, cause she sits on that damn porch with her husband's shotgun in her hand and she's like a fucking surgeon with that thing. Thank ripred she's blind in her left eye, though), stick to the right side of Sick' Em lane where the lights are always out, underneath the fence near the little blue house that used to have that tarp covering the roof, PAST Quarry and onto Juniper, towards the stench and the dumpsters.

Presto, pronto, and Holt knows they'd been hoping his ass would have been grass.

Can't say he's all that surprised.

Just like anything in Two their friendship is built on termite-infested beams and rusted nails, elbows to ribs turn to knives in back and all of 'em know that. But they're young and stupid and everything in between, and it ain't like they have much of anything else to do. Holt doesn't let it go but instead tucks it into the back of his mind, letting it drip like poison into the folds of his brain, a reasoning and a justification and an admittance all in one. He takes the high road for once in his life- if only to look down on the two idiots. "Shit, well then that's my bad." 

Elbows to standing, he pushes himself to his feet and dusts himself off as if it'll get rid of the way filth rots his skin, bumps fists with allies and enemies all in one before patting the stolen machinery in his grasp, the sound of priceless metal echoing softly in the night.

"Now if you boys'll excuse me, I've got a date with the lady."

Holt Sickings, Dart to both liars and friends, tucks the blanket-wrapped pieces of stolen metal underneath his arm and courses a familiar path back into the night.

There are little black dots that sprinkle the outside of his vision now, mixing and mingling with the holes in the ceiling as he sits with his head cocked back, counting the holes while he waits for the bleeding to stop.

There's some from wear and some from tear, another from water stain turned water damage, but his particular favourite is the cluster of bullet holes that dance together in the center of the ceiling. Calder had come home with a satin-wrapped gun claimed unloaded one Winter afternoon, hiding it underneath the folds of a torn-up jacket that Holt knows he'd swiped from some unlucky bastard on the street. His brother had gotten all the genes of a meathead bull, all stock and muscle and charging headfirst into oblivion.

Unfortunately, he'd had the intelligence to match, too, and Holt had been too young to know any better (at least, that's his excuse).

With eyes on the prize of a barrel, they'd admired it in the same way a thief looks at gold, all heaven and amazed until it'd gone off in their faces and carved a reminder into the ceiling.

Calder shot two more into the ceiling just for the fuck of it. He said it was supposed to end up a smiley face, but he'd run out of bullets before he could get it done. That and Ma had slapped him upside the head hard enough to knock the few brain cells he had right out of him. That'd been the end of that, but for years later he remembered the way the wind had felt as the bullet flew inches past his face.

Now he just feels pain, a whole lot of fucking pain.

"Keep your head back, it'll stop the bleeding!"

Ma's voice calls out from behind a wall too thin, the sound of shuffling pots and pans as she fishes out a rag and dips it in stale water. Calder stands to his and laughs like it's a real knee-slapper, leaning down to get a better view. He should be careful, the last time he did that a bullet nearly tore through his face. Holt Sickings doesn't consider himself any different.

"Yeesh-" Calder's eyes come into his view as his brother leans over and admires the drip drip drip of a nose left bloodied. "They really did a number on you."

That last part is his fault, little white lies after stumbling through the door with a bone broken and the blood to prove it. Holt had said that he'd gotten the short end of the stick and the curled end of a fist from some fucker down at the dumps. Two weeks into working there and he'd already been given a crushed nose as a souvenir, how fitting.

In reality, he'd been perched on the back of Bambam's brand-new set of wheels, rusted glamour reflecting softly in the sunlight. He'd stolen about half the damn parts for that thing and sold it to her on the low for cheaper than the dirt that riddled their skin, pressed his back to the graffiti-covered walls and let the cigarette smoke drift up from between his fingers and towards the roof, pressing and curling and screaming to get out like the rest of 'em. Counting the memories of the parts he'd stolen from delivery units across the months, scratched out the Capitol insignia to make 'em unrecognizable to the people lookin' for 'em, letting sparks fly in the name of their own kind of fun. Then, with all the gracefulness of two kids expecting a Summer of joyrides and

It'd gone about as well as anything two kids think will work.

That is, to say, it didn't work at all. One moment he's locked and loaded and ready to scorch rubber and the next the momentum of a stalled bike had dragged him forwards and pressed his face smack dab into a metal pipe that he'd stolen and watched Bambam loosely fasten into a "badass upgraded handlebar", apparently.

The anatomy of a broken nose and the anatomy of a broken bike ain't too different after all. Dart stands there with a glove of red dripping through his fingertips and a scowl built to match, and Bambam points out the exact piece that had apparently faltered, holding it up like the last clue in an unsolved murder.

He could have sworn he'd watched her foot slam the brake for a split moment just to see what would have happened.

But little white lies go a long way in District Two, it's why he'd swallowed Bambam's and spit it back up in the form of his own. All rough and tumble, flying fists and an unlucky connection, broken bones and wounded pride. Still, his Ma has always been good at writing her own lines and reading between them, too. She wipes his nose and sighs at the way he winces from the pain, muttering bitter nothings under her breath and squeezing her own son's blood from the cloth. "That girl..."

Her voice scolds him like he means something, but her eyes give it all away. Try and lie as they might, when a Sickings member was really in trouble the family stepped up to bat. How it always had been, how he always thinks it should be.

"That girl is no good."

He chews on the words, but they bite back on the front of his mind.

Who in District Two is?"

Rusted key and rusted padlock, a boy stands at the intersection of blood and morality and gulps down what's left of his pride.

Pa told him it was time to step up as if he didn't already know it, standing on shaking legs in torn through boots, nothing but severed heartstrings and a family name left to call his own. Men in white with guns to match float around their house like the first snowflakes of a blizzard, just as dangerous individually as they are in droves.

Memories cling to the walls, mingling amongst the rust stains and graffiti markings they'd built up over the years, circling around him like vultures to carcass as he steps out from the morning sun and into the damp interior of a trailer he's long since known as a second home. He's seen plenty of ghosts in Two, specters and hauntings and something sinister, just fast enough to outrun them until he wasn't. The memories scare him the most, somehow.

He convinces himself that they'll fade, that just like anything else in Two they have to fade. Almost believes it, too.

Almost.

On his way out he swipes the blanket from the handlebars of Death Trap, pulling bare a silk ghost that had been hanging from the handlebars, haunting.

It’ll be good for the upcoming Winter.