.:House of Cards:. [Open]

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.:House of Cards:. [Open] Apr 20, 2013 19:29:11 GMT -5

Post by Deleted on Apr 20, 2013 19:29:11 GMT -5

Jolene Washburn

I feel numb most of the time,
The more I get the higher,
I'll climb, and I will wonder why,
I get dark only,
To shine.

The good men and women of the district know well enough to let sleeping dogs lie. These are folk that were raised better. It is that their spirits

[/color] have been parched by the sun that cracks skin overhead. The good dry up and die long before they turn to dust. It’s the sickening that stay.[/color] A good many don’t play by the rules; they press limits that don’t nobody need to do. But humanity has a funny way of bringing out the worst in people. All too easy to cut a cord. Simple as slitting a throat[/color], games’ll show you that. Parents do they best to make sure none wind up like the evil ones from the upper districts—little soulless monsters, they is[/color] —but only so much you can do in a world where just getting by is survival. Hope fades thin when the sun cracks it to dust. [/color]

Jolene Washburn was never one to slide away from an ounce of freedom. Where that came from she couldn’t say; sometimes it was in the form of being out late and running wild. Sometimes it was seeing bad men do bad things. Because she kept to herself, all of seventeen-and-a-half, the choices were hers to make. Why do I got to be treated like a child,[/color] She’d ruminate,If I know the bad that men can do?[/color] Was something fragile about all of it. The heat of the spring had come out in full force that evening. She walked along the path toward town, ambling her way toward a Saloon. Whistles were not uncommon to her ears, though she didn’t turn her head to pay them mind. She’d rather play by her own rules, seeing as a generous as men could be, there were always favors to be done.[/color] If anything, Jolene knew that the man that was perched at the top could just as well be the one at the bottom the next day. Dust to dust, and all that bullshit.[/color]

She’d found that hope was a stupid thing to have. Girls often cried about their lot in the lower district, where life was uneasy and stomachs went about growling. No,[/color] she reasoned, The worst thing a girl could have is hope.[/color] Jolene was a Washburn, she was from a family of next to no means—though they weren’t no pig farmers—but it hadn’t stopped them from living. But it wasn’t hope that paid the bills or fed the horses. And it for damn sure wasn’t hope that got them out of bed in the morning. Just about the only thing Jolene was certain of was that hard work, more than any silly notion of fate or hope or whatever stupid girls wanted to believe, that was the thing that kept her going. Whether or not one moved past all the sorry shit that happened was another.

The light flickered from the window of the saloon, and Jolene stopped to push back her hair. One of the few things she took pride in, she only fussed with the tangled mess to make sure there wasn’t any remnants of fieldwork left in it. To be looked at, ah, now there was her real aim.[/color] ‘Cause as far as she could go in this District—which by all accounts weren’t no great distance—as a girl, she only ever got anywhere when she used all that had been given to her by her family. She wasn’t unclever. She wasn’t unpretty. And she wasn’t content to wind up on some boy’s arm, standing in the background to cheer him on to victory. She would rather have slit her own throat then and there.

Tonight she weren’t looking for a way out of this world, but a way in.[/color] Maybe there wasn’t anything exciting behind the swinging doors; maybe there was a whole other world waiting for her. She didn’t know nothing about much—not unless she’d experienced it. History was the best teacher. And Jolene was anything but a shrinking violet. No, the allure of the dark, the way her heart raced when she did just exactly as she shouldn’t have, now there was fun.[/color] Her dour grandmamma had dubbed it her second spirit. [/color] The little boy brother that had died first, he weren’t ready to go from this world just yet. Little Jolene was enough spirit for two; he still pulsed and pulled her. And this yearning for freedom was more than any old phase of young adulthood.

She didn’t press the doors just yet. Instead she drew out a single cigarette and slid it between her long, bony fingers. She curled the thing to her mouth and searched for a match. Finding none, her face distorted into a frown. Shit.[/color] She leaned over the wooden beam where the men hitched their horses and gave a little laugh to herself. Her red hair fell down, obscuring her face. She didn’t listen to the sound of another’s approach, only watched the stretch of shadows as they danced along the ground. “Got a light,” She whispered out, not looking whoever it was in the eye. Better not to waste her time if they didn’t.[/color]
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Baby Wessex d9b [earthling]
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cameron stood in line for an hour for a stupid ride for me <3 best <3

.:House of Cards:. [Open] Apr 21, 2013 12:57:23 GMT -5

Post by Baby Wessex d9b [earthling] on Apr 21, 2013 12:57:23 GMT -5

for what it's worth, I have a slow disease that sucked me dry... I always aim to please
but I nearly died

Mace had no business being anywhere near the district's seediest, most popular saloon. And yet. There was something quintessential about it, something so Ten that he found himself making a beeline for it after dark, while Julian was running or training or generally working hard to make himself ~~even more~~ attractive. Mace did his best work in the mornings and had, in fact, gone for a run that had lasted an hour. He had run through the District Center, sweated through the meager suburbs, and chased his demons right back home. Home, as though the victor's village could ever bring him comfort.

It was, however, a nice change from the audacious color and light of the Capitol. And that was the other reason he'd left his mansion. Even running in the heat, even tending to Whicker, even half-listening to Reggie's inane gossip, none of it felt real. Three weeks in the Capitol and if it didn't have a firework and a rainbow mohawk, he couldn't quite believe it. There was something wrong in his head, something frozen that he couldn't melt. And though Mace didn't drink and didn't smoke, he thought perhaps he'd find something to help him thaw in the saloon. He ambled up to it, his white button down open at the collar, his jeans starched thanks to Reggie, and his belt buckle overly exaggerated, thanks to a Capitolite fan. He wore flexible black shoes instead of his usual boots, a concession to the run he had put his arches through earlier in the day.

Without a horse he would have walked right by the beam, had he not heard the girl. He'd walked a good time in the dwindling light, and found it easy to make out her figure, although he couldn't quite name the color of her hair. He could also see the pathetic stub of a cigarette in her fingers. He took a deep breath in, trying to sort out the scent of the cigarette, and snorted. "That ain't hardly worth lightin'. Who'd you get that from? Wills?" Mace asked, disgusted, his days of growing and secretly dealing tobacco resurfacing. But that had been years ago. He didn't even know if Wills still dealt, and certainly his plants had all grown to weeds, way out beyond the Northern Community Home.

"Give it here,

[/color]" Mace demanded, opening his palm to the girl. His palm, which had once been calloused beyond reason, which was now scarred but soft. A dealer he was no longer, and he was just a shadow of the cowboy he'd been.

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banner credit: jurate
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credit umber vivuus 12b 🥀 [dars]

credit ✨ zozo.

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.:House of Cards:. [Open] Apr 21, 2013 22:45:47 GMT -5

Post by Deleted on Apr 21, 2013 22:45:47 GMT -5

Jolene Washburn

I feel numb most of the time,
The more I get the higher,
I'll climb, and I will wonder why,
I get dark only,
To shine.

“What’s it to you, mister?” Jolene hissed, reflexively. All her life she had to fight

[/color], fight to hold her own against the roughshod farmers of the District. So much that she couldn’t even enjoy the throes of being a teenager. Not that they was ever supposed to just be kids. No chance to smoke the black tar out of poorly rolled, stubby cigarettes she’d bought with her own tesserae because men like this one thought they could push her around. They wasn’t taught to fight to the death with knives and swords here. Instead they learned to sell their bodies, to marry off for a set of pigs and a house, and to bury the dead in old wooden boxes under oak trees without so much as a word. They drank, they smoked, and they died. Most would’ve been sickened at how easily all of it was rattled off, but to Jolene there weren’t no more truth to life than that.[/color]

It was the same as the soil here. The cracked earth gave rise not to fruits or vegetables, or even feed corn. Nothing but weeds broke out of the soil, spiraling up and twisting toward the sun—until they choked one another from the sunlight. She would’ve spat down at the stranger’s feet, hadn’t she seen the face that was looking at her own. The stare was longer than it should have been. Her, looking at Mace Emberstatt with eyes wide and the smirk sliding off her face. In another moment, Jolene weren’t on the wooden planks in front of the saloon at all.

The 59th reaping had been her—second? It seemed so long ago that Damaris and Mace had stood in front of her on stage. That was back at the age when she’d tied ribbons in her hair, and smacked a boy in the mouth for kissing her on the lips. The reaping was the first time she remembered hating the other girls for crying—for thinking to herself just how angry it made her that they were so afraid.[/color] She could never see herself in the shoes of Damaris—or Liliana, Noreen, Lydie, Essence—all helpless women acting like they was thrown to the wolves. She wasn’t no footnote.[/color] She’d already imagined her death—in a shower of fireworks, banners, infamy. [/color]Her future was locked away here, she was dead certain. She’d live to be a hundred and one—skin like leather, no teeth, and swearing at the sun for still burning. The rotten ones always lasted the longest.[/color]

She weren’t stupid though. Mace was important: to the capitol and to the people of the District. He was just about the only one that mattered in this dustbowl. Jolene pulled the cigarette from her mouth and placed it between her fingers. “I earned it,” She said more to herself than to Mace. But the wildfire wasn’t burning now, not when she was being commanded by the likes of him. Better to shrink back, give him what he wanted—as much as it killed her to do.[/color] “But yous can have it, Mr. Emberstatt,” Jolene bowed her head and moved her hand to his palm. Her bony fingers slide along his smooth skin. Hers were not nearly as uncalloused or fresh. [/color]

“Ain’t you a bit of a ways from your fancy house? Didn’t think a man like you would want to be around us,” Jolene said. She was already a part of this lot, whether or not she’d ever been inside. They were weeds strangling on another, and he’d gotten his chance to make it out alive. Though there was enough victors turned to the drink, to her recollection. Once a weed, always a weed,[/color] Jolene reckoned.

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