Breezeblocks // Gang Wars Oneshot

she may contain the urge to
r u n a w a y
but hold her down
with soggy clothes and
b r e e z e b l o c k s

War is the first man not to shiver when I touch him. Maybe this is the kind of masochistic caress I've spent my entire life searching for — in streetgutters, in blood, in my frantic runaway footfalls. The chaotic brutality that has divided the District since my Reaping is unafraid of me, working in tandem with my own unstoppable sense of self-destruction until I find my cheeks blushing-schoolgirl pink against the fire of a burning city.

Stomach alight with butterflies each time I step into the open air of streets that have finally confessed a resentment for me that spent my childhood hidden behind grimacing smiles and turn-heel strangers, maybe I'm finally beginning to discover something outside of myself worth fighting against. Too many years were spent searching out my own flaws, creating something within me to hate when I ran out of unfairness to hurl my rebellion at.

These people who hate me for harboring the wrong kind of shame — for not wanting to make more of a murderess of myself than I already am — give me far more than they'll ever manage to take away again. A brother risen from the dead, friendships I thought had forgotten me, a hundred gilded targets for my infinite rage. In the forest I had the remnants of a lover's memory and a thousand fits of desperation that went so far as to convince me that a moment of salvation might live within the mouth of a boy who couldn't differentiate my face from his own lapse in sanity; Here, I am being borne backwards, as death and my worst regrets turn back time to days that remember me as human.

The ghosts of my nightmares still haunt me each time my brother turns his back to me, the kind of panic wailing in my veins as he leaves the room that recollects too often the emptiness of his absence. Compared to this, my moments of missing for Zane or Kade are childish, wasted tears. Somewhere, the life-drums of their hearts still beat, a future-cadence that is surely steadier without me. I think I almost know how to be happy for them, reassuring myself that their shoulders must be lighter now that I am gone, their spines a little straighter, the crooks of their lips held a little higher. These days I am only a weight upon the minds of the Morenos and their money-hewn sympathizers, a name that burns their tongues so viciously that their extravagant dinners must be near-tasteless.

I haven't stopped running. I left my fugitive days in the forest, but now there is a destination laid out before me that reaches beyond the grasp of those who have found themselves joining The Great Pursuit Of Ella Dahl. For each hand they lay upon me, I will make them pay a price. Not because I am still an easy whore for their riches, but because I'm finally beginning to feel loved and I won't delude myself any longer. I know that anyone who loves someone as heartless as me must be less than human. War, he does not shy from me and for that, my hollow heart remembers how to race.