<Skid McConnell> [D8]

sulkin'
walkin' round the city after dark
need protection from street thugs

skid mcconnell.
eighteen.
male.
district eight.

who clip the tires
and rip the doors off rugs
and cowards

At six feet even, Skid stands at the height of a man, and he's still not quite full grown. He has some muscle, though it isn't very apparent - the eighteen-year-old boy has malnutrition to thank for that. Because he's spent the majority of his life hungry, he's very skinny. Anyone can see that he's never had enough food, but most think nothing of it - after all, how does that make him any different from the vast majority of children in Panem?

His face is slim and defined, with prominent cheekbones, a slightly pointed chin, and a rather large and misshapen nose with big ears to match. Thin eyebrows that are significantly darker than his hair color hardly even arch over eyes of piercing blue-grey, that give him an air of importance along with a chilling glare should he choose to use it. He doesn't usually, though - only for business. Skid isn't a generally vicious person.

Skid's hair is pale blond, darker at the roots, though its bright color is usually masked by dirt and dust and various other forms of filth he's picked up on the street, because Batty's plumbing usually only works properly once or twice weekly so shower opportunities are quite rare. He doesn't like to cut it, and when he does, it's usually with a rusty pair of fabric shears, so his ends are uneven and messy. Even if he owned a brush - his sisters rarely allow him to use theirs - he wouldn't care to brush it; what was the point, anyway? So what if it was tangled sometimes; it didn't matter, as long as it didn't impair his ability to bring home cash and food to support everyone.

Seeing as the McConnells are quite poor, clothing is not first on their list of priorities. Skid normally wears whatever he can manage to steal, preferably baggier garments so his skinniness isn't as visible. Clothes he outgrows are passed down to Wheels and then Sparky, and the ones that are too small for all the boys are torn up and made into rags or blankets or anything else they can use them for.


and all this life we've glorified
robbin' from the blind
it's not easy, you see


With a lot of practice, Skid has become apt in the art of deception, able to put on all sorts of different facades that help him in his various immoral endeavors. He can become innocent if he needs to, imposing if he needs to, angry if he needs to - anything at all. Because of this, it is rare that anyone ever comes to know what he's truly like. Only his siblings see the softer side of him - and Batty, on some occasions.

Ever since he became the oldest of Batty's six "children", Skid has taken on the role of protector for the younger ones. While he treats even the youngest ones with the respect he'd give to an adult, he still always cares for them as if they were real blood relations of his. He's naturally a fatherly type of person, but it takes a lot to break through his outer shell; because his life hasn't exactly been a walk in the park, he uses an emotional wall as a protective mechanism.

Skid's fairly bright, though he hasn't had any formal schooling; he understands numbers very well, and reads, writes, and reasons as well as any teenager his age can. He's taken care to carefully teach himself and his siblings so that, in the eventual case that they will have to go out on their own, they know enough to be able to get on by themselves in the dog-eat-dog world that is Panem.

Skid is generally extremely untrusting of strangers, and because of this he hasn't managed to make many friends outside of his foster siblings. He got along with the other orphanage kids fine when he was little, but since Batty took them away and his world turned upside down he hasn't been able to really connect with anyone outside of his family; the old woman has instilled a fear of strangers in all of her children through her constant everyone-is-out-to-get-us mantra. It doesn't matter that they don't have friends, anyway; they have each other to talk to, and Skid knows that even though Batty does exaggerate, she's right to an extent: if someone did find out about their situation, then everything could easily change for the worse.

don't think i don't know sympathy
my victims in my shadow
starin' back at me

Skid can't remember a damn thing about what happened before he was put in Batty's orphanage. He was only two when it happened, after all - how could he? All he knows is what the older orphans told him when he questioned them - some strange woman wearing some kind of official-looking suit had dropped off this screaming blond toddler who clearly did not want to be there at all. But let's backtrack a bit, shall we? We might be able to get a clearer story that way.

Skid McConnell's real name - and the name he went by for the first seven years of his life, including the five years he spent in the orphanage - was Virgil Taylor. Virgil was born accidentally to two lower class District Eight factory workers who hardly made enough money to feed themselves, let alone a baby. For two years the Taylors made do, but eventually they were in danger of being kicked out of the filthy tenement they were residing in because they couldn't pay rent. This problem was solved somewhat unconventionally when Mr. and Mrs. Taylor were killed in a factory fire, and Virgil was placed in the care of a social worker, who dropped him off at a run-down orphanage for children whose parents had left them with absolutely no money whatsoever.

Bethesda McConnell, or "Batty", as all of her little charges so affectionately called her, had been running No Hope Orphanage for over twenty years when little Virgil Taylor was deposited there. She wasn't right in the head, and everyone knew that, and she had some unorthodox methods of caring for the children, but they all loved her as if she were their own wacky parent, and that was what mattered. Virgil settled in quickly, befriending some of the other tots his age. Six years passed, he slowly began to forget everything about his parents, and everything seemed fine - or so the innocent little child thought.

The truth was Bethesda and the orphanage had been in a rough spot financially for quite some time now, and shortly after Virgil's eighth birthday, it reached the point of no return. The Peacekeepers announced that they would be shutting it down within a week, and Batty was devastated; what about the children! The aging, senile woman did the first thing she could think of: she snatched up six of the youngest children - Virgil included - and ran off, leaving her business - and the older orphans - to the hands of the Peacekeepers.

They lived in an abandoned warehouse for a month or so before Bethesda was able to rent a scrawny, beat up little apartment with the majority of her savings. She decided that these six children were her own now, and she had responsibilities as their mother, the primary one being to keep them safe. To make sure the authorities couldn't get their filthy hands on the littluns, she changed each and every one of their names to the first thing that came to mind; because she was losing her marbles, these all were nonsense words. And so Virgil became Skid McConnell, oldest "child" of Bethesda McConnell, with his younger siblings Hornet, Wheels, Kit, Sparky, and Bird.

After about a year it became clear that this dysfunctional "family" was going to have to find some other source of income and nourishment, because Old Batty wasn't providing much at all. She had an under-the-radar business of doing people's washing, but many suspected her of foul play and refused her services. It was when he found someone's dropped wallet out on the street containing two hundred dollars that Skid decided to take matters into his own hands - his family was depending on him, after all. As the oldest child, he fancied himself his little siblings' protector. So that was when the thieving began.

It started off small - he would scrounge for loose change or bills in the street, even dumpster dive if his family was hungry enough. Eventually he worked up the nerve to actually pickpocket, and soon this escalated into more dangerous practices such as shoplifting. Skid grew to be a master of deception and lies, adept at putting on an innocent facade so no one suspected it when he sneaked up and grabbed their wallet right out of their back pocket. Hornet, who was only a year younger than him, became involved as well; however, the two eldest made an agreement to not involve the rest of the kids unless it was absolutely necessary. Two of them was enough.

Within the past year and a half, ever since he's been old enough to pass for twenty-one to get into various bars, Skid has developed a new talent: hustling. It started with simple games of billiards that the teenager had a certain knack for, and eventually he developed crude card-counting skills that were incredibly useful in a game of blackjack when the stakes were high. Hornet rarely accompanies him when he's up to such things, though, and not just because she isn't particularly bright enough to wrap her mind around card counting; no, it's common knowledge that a seventeen-year-old girl in a bar full of drunk men isn't a great idea, and Skid is nothing if not protective of all his younger siblings.


not me, i'm knockin
tip toe outside a stranger's door
casually let myself in

as robbers in my thoughts
they tell me what to think
they're hiding in my clothes
crawling in the kitchen sink

actions. 5d7b3c
words. 474b42
thoughts. italics