adam o'malley | pk | complete

maybe that was why you were the black sheep of the o'malley crew. you were the only one who knew how to shut the fuck up, keep your head down, listen when you're spoken to, and never question things out loud. you figure that was the reason you were so good at your job; how you graduated top of your class, how you stayed out of trouble. your independence taught you that quiet was futile to the kind of life you wanted to live, one that granted comfort in chaos that was equally as lonely as it was peaceful. 

despite it all, you still thought of cain and abel. every single damn day. in the hole of the drywall you punched (you got dumped - again), covered in dust that you never bothered to wipe was a frame. underneath the layer of thick debris lay a photo - you, cain, abel and noah - the last time you were ever together in the same room, at the same time. alive. it was also the last time you dressed in your sunday best. glasses of communion wine adorned each of your hands. everytime you looked at it, you noticed how small abel's hands looked holding the communion glass. how young you all were. how cain's grin may have actually been genuine, how your frown definitely was. 

that was before your cousin died, the tiny freckled ginger bastard. it was before abel subscribed to that godawful god's plan ethos, before you received acceptance into the peacekeeper academy and before anyone really knew who the o'malley's were.

that was the nice thing about not being home, jumping from job to job, a life full of suitcases and trains and failed relationships and different friday night bars and no church on sundays. no one gave a fuck who you were or what your last name was. the o'malley's were just another last name that popped up on the tv now and again, just like any other. that was the charm in life as a peacekeeper - charm you never knew existed until now.

commitment, after all, was never really your thing. peacekeeping was the only thing you were committed to - so your ex-girlfriends say, anyway. you craved spontaneity, and thrived in it's impulsive nature, but not in a way that was charming or whimsical. not in a way that drew attention to you. not in a way that was fun. in a way that kept you busy, kept your negativity at bay, kept you from forming dangerous connections and bonds, kept new places and people around you and kept the old ones away. kept you from retaining memories. good or bad. it was a peaceful way to live, you thought, a way of keeping your sanity. 

and if you were being honest to yourself (you were good at that), you never became a peacekeeper to seek a better life elsewhere in panem. you became one because that's all you ever knew, you never knew there was another option. be a peacekeeper, station in district eleven, meet a nice young girl who you liked enough to marry, one that believed in god enough to keep up appearances but not enough to be crazy, pop out a few kids, pray they don't get reaped and retire with a twenty-year old beer gut and enough cash to live comfortably. just like your father cliff. it seemed good enough when you were 17 - old enough to know you were never really good with math, hated farming, hated church even more, but damn you were good at following orders and beating people up to a fucking pulp. it was the easy way out. and now that you were here, at twenty-five years old, you'd rather be six feet under like cain and abel and six than be stuck in a life in your hometown.

your religious trauma taught you enough about faith that even if there was a god out there, you didn't believe in it. you saw enough family and church members get reaped and die a victim to their faith to know that if god existed, they were a prick. and that wasn't any kind of god you wanted to follow. and the more you thought about it, the more you believe the lack of existence after death to be a peaceful way to go. nothingness. numbness. a vacuum to swallow you whole, trapping your thoughts and life into a binary that would eventually erase the memory of you completely. no one to mourn you, no one to remember you.

that was really all you wanted. to be forgotten about.