Grace For Saints And Ramblers :: [VT // Hawthorne + Leon]
Sept 14, 2014 23:07:07 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Sept 14, 2014 23:07:07 GMT -5
Is it still theft if the shirt I stole has m'name on it? How abouts if I gave that name away? Does everything that name ever touched stop belonging t'me? How abouts if the person who took that name keels over and dies? Do I get my name back or is it just long gone down the shit-drain of life? Am I gone? Have I been gone this whole damn time and I'm such a halfwit that I didn't even know —
The town square is still all up in a tizzy, even after the speeches by local government officials are done and the Victor of the Sixty-Seventh Hunger Games has stepped off the stage and back into the shadows that ain't actually hiding nobody from nothing, like I'd wish they would if I were him. Everybody around me is star-struck into stupidity and it blows my mind harder than a pistol-click to the temple, try'na figure out why. Leon Krigel isn't from here. He ain't ours. Nobody from these parts oughta be happy that the person up there wasn't May... wasn't Nocturne.
I shouldn't be judging, but I can't help getting offended that nobody seems to care. Now every day is like being a ghost at my own funeral, watching the world keep spinning without me, just like I always knew it would but hoped it wouldn't. Doesn't matter that it's just my name nobody gives a damn about; if the world had known Saskia Hamilton's little brother had bled out before their eyes, surely something would have been different. Instead the protests of the Hamilton family were written off as crazy nonsense and here I am, oh-so-casually walking up to Krigel as if I got a right to this chip on my shoulder.
This shirt I'm wearing, it's one of the shirts my Ma stitched up for me years ago. It don't fit quite right no more — the sleeves rolled up to my elbows to hide how they ain't long enough to cover my wrists and the top buttons undone so's they don't pop off from being stretched too tight across my ribs — but my Ma ain't what makes this shirt important anymore. This is the shirt that turned me into Hawthorne Hamilton and that turned Hawthorne into me. NOCTURNE VARGAS, it says, stitched into the collar, a little bit of blood still staining the left shoulder if you look real close. Leon here, the television said he knew Nocturne, but that's wrong in so many ways I don't know where to start.
"This is awesome," and my voice is sarcasm and sincerity all at once; theft and reclamation; Nocturne and Hawthorne, "having all these parties thrown in your honor, yeah? Bet y'get a lotta people telling y'how they'd kill to be you," and my teeth are bared in a grin and a grimace; joking and truthful; me and him, "but that kind of thing would make my skin crawl, to be real honest. Hope you don't mind a party crasher though —" and he don't mind at all if y'believe the rumors and gossip; notes in the sand and skin; someone I used to know and someone I'm about to, "— I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about."
