BARTHOLOMEW TODD, DISTRICT TWO

"Just get your ass down there Barty," she said to me and I was scared but I knew that since my mother had told me to I would go. The basement had scared me for a long time because the stairs made a creaking noise when you went down them and the light always flickered. I always thought that one day it was going to flicker and flicker and finally go out and I'd be stuck in the darkness, lost.

"You've got to feed Caesar, Barty because he can't hurt you, you're my indestructible little boy aren't you," she'd ask me and I would nod. It was the only thing I was certain about back then. Even though it took a long time to heal, things never hurt me. I couldn't feel. Then she'd hand me a bowl of dog food and give my shoulder a squeeze. I could feel the pressure but I barely felt her hand there.

I'd start at the top of the stars and carefully step down each one, waiting for the creaking to stop until I took my foot off of the wood. I don't know what made it so scary. Maybe because even then I must of known that I was making my way into a metaphor for what my life was going to be. Even when I didn't fully understand, something inside of me knew that it was wrong, keeping Caesar tied up down in the dark like a rabid beast.

This time, I didn't see that he wasn't where he should have been, collar around his neck and on his blanket. When my foot touched the bottom step, there was a knife against my throat and my hands were gripped tight behind my back. I had dropped the food, it was in a pile on the ground and I screamed for my mother so loudly. Caesar shouted at her, telling her that he'd kill me if she didn't let him past her. My mother only stared at him, impassive with her set of throwing knives in her hand.

I knew that Caesar was a bad man. Mom said that he had hurt her, many years ago and when he had come crawling in her window a few weeks back, she'd beat him up and tied him up downstairs.

I started crying. I was only four years old then and even though I couldn't feel the pain, I could feel the blade against my throat and it was scary. "Bartholomew," my mother said, "Get out of his grip." I wiggled in Caesar's grip but he had me tight. I could smell him. He smelled of piss and fear.

"I cannot," I told my mother and it was true. He would not let go, despite my desperate wiggling. He only pressed the blade tighter against my throat.

"You can't keep me down here like this, Rosalind," he said, voice quiet and loud all at once. She sneered at him, and her arm tensed as she prepared herself to throw the knife. "If you throw that, you'll hit Mew as well you know," he cautioned her. My mother was a deadly thing, cool and calculating and not to be trifled with. I knew that even then at four years old. So I shut my eyes for the next bit.

I knew when the steel entered my flesh, I could feel it slicing throw the top of my shoulder and embedding itself into the upper chest of Caesar. I could feel the warm blood that bloomed across my shirt as a result and the stickiness that came with it. Most of all, I could feel Caesar letting go of me and falling backwards. I was so scared that I took the steps two at a time and I buried my face in my mother's leg when I reached her.

The only thing that I didn't know or feel was the pain that should have come from the blade. The pain that had brought a grown man to his knees but had not even made me flinch.

My mother rubbed the back of my head and she shut the basement door on Caesar and locked it was a twist of the silver key she kept around her neck. She made me take off my shirt so she could sew the cut closed and apply bandages. Then we had soup for lunch and spoke over the sounds of Caesar banging on the basement door until he finally stopped, hours later.

I never really understood the reason mom hated him so much, even after Haven was born, I didn't put two and two together until much later. I was a fool but perhaps it was better to not have fully understood. There was nothing, no poison to cloud my love for my little brother. I loved and continue to love him fully and without regret. We're five years apart and the guy is my pride and joy. Haven's much smarter than me and he's creative and good. At the last parent and teacher conference a few weeks ago, I was informed that they plan to have him skip a year, he was becoming frustrated with the program in his grade five class.

I walk Haven to and from school everyday. It's like my mom said, I'm her indestructible boy, but Haven's normal. He can feel pain and temperature unlike me. Sometimes he describes the feeling to me after getting a paper cut or a sunburn and it does not sound very pleasant so I work hard to protect him, like mom would have wanted.

She passed away a couple of years ago. Caesar escaped the basement when I was five, a year after my mother had imprisoned him. He'd disappeared without a trace for so long that we believed him to be dead or just gone. Nearly ten years later, he'd come back for my mother and they had fought. My mother was out of practice and Caesar was strong and angry. He killed her like a dog in the streets and Haven and I were on the floor, in the kitchen. I pressed my hands over his ears and made him shut his eyes.

Since then it's just been him and I. I'm the one who cooks him dinner and breakfast and packs him lunches, I'm the one who tucks him in at night and makes sure he's healthy, it's me. Sometimes Peacekeepers come around, wanting to make sure that there's an adult taking care of us I guess. I always lie and say that my mother's out, that she'll be home soon. They never question too far, that would require actually caring about our predicament. No one does though, we're just a couple of boys doing our best to slip through the cracks unnoticed, it's how it is all over.

It's alright anyway. No one ever bothers us much because people think I'm older than I am. It's because as soon as I hit sixteen I shot up like a tree. I'm taller than all of the kids in my class and even my teacher. Which doesn't help much in the brains department apparently. I'm really dumb. I stay quiet in order to hide this fact about me, I watch more than speak and so people think I must be smart but it's really just because my head is blank and I don't know what to say. So I smile cautiously or I nod my head along to people's words.

I don't want them to know how much I don't really get.

I guess it's because a lot of the time, people are speaking of their own experiences. At the training center, I pass by people, who are speaking of tennis elbows or painful joints. Sometimes they're bandaging a cut or doing physio on a bum knee. I watch their faces hungrily, to see the twinge that appears when the 'pain' happens. I've always been fascinated with it. It's like an equation for me that's never gone right, I'm missing a step and I can't find 'x', even with a map.

I can't feel pain, I've never been able to.

I can't feel warmth or cold, it's like living inside a thick film, everything is sluggish and slow inside of it. There is nothing inside of it. No pain. I scratch my arm? There's nothing to tell me that I'm cut except for the sticky feeling of the blood dripping down onto my hand. I could break my wrist and never notice if it weren't for the way that it was hanging. One time during training, Eric Wilhelm broke my nose and I didn't know until the matt was covered in blood and I realized I was having trouble breathing.

I can feel pressure.

Someone squeezing my hand, I can feel that. Reaching out and pressing someone against me, I can feel that too. Sticky hands on my arm, tugging at me, asking for an ice cream cone, that too. The pressure of a blade against my throat, I can feel that. Being flipped onto a mat and having all of the air pushed out of me by force, oh yeah. It doesn't hurt though. It never has. Mom always said it was because there was something wrong with my body and she was afraid to tell anyone because she thought they'd take me away and put me in a lab.

So I have to fake it. I'm really bad at faking it. Realizing I've been hurt always takes a bit. Sometimes I can get away with blaming it on the adrenaline but accidents are different. People just assume I must be tough but they don't know the truth. I'm not as cold as they think.

Empathy is my downfall.

When I fight, I never go all out because it's not fair of me. I don't know what pain feels like and so I don't want to cause something like that in other people. Watching their faces crumple, tears roll down their cheeks, I don't like it. People are sometimes incapacitated by a skinned knee even and so I know that it must really be a strong thing, to be hurt. I don't want to be the cause of pain, I don't want to become indifferent to it. What I'm most afraid of is becoming something like a machine, feeling anything is already a struggle. I don't want to forget that I am human too. So I'm a defensive fighter. I don't attack, rather than deflect. If someone ends up on their ass on the mat, it isn't because I've clocked them. It's simply because I've rerouted them.

It's because I know what hurting feels like.

I can feel pain.

Not the physical, but the other. The burn in the heart and the brain that makes tears come up and out. I know that one and I imagine that physical pain must feel nearly the same, it just leaves more of a mark. I cried when Mom died. I looked at her body after and I knew that she must have been suffering so much. Sometimes when I think about finding her there on the street, it hurts again.

Sometimes when I've put Haven to bed and it's just me in the kitchen, I cry. It's like there's a build up of everything and it all comes out at once, like pain. It explodes inside me and there's no other way out but through my eyes and mouth. Sometimes I cry so much that snot comes out of my nose.

Mom said that it wasn't a shameful thing to cry, that it was healthy but I never did it half as much when she was still alive. It's just that sometimes I worry about Haven and I, what's going to happen to us.

I had to get a part time job to help pay for expenses and looking older than I am helped a lot. I work for a man named Ricky as a security guard for his shipping. They ship things to the Capitol, diamonds from the mines mostly and so it's my job and a few other's to guard the cargo as it's loaded onto the Capitol trains. Ricky didn't ask too many questions when he hired me and I guess he liked me because I don't ask too many questions either. I'm happy as long as I get paid. When he asked me how old I was, I told him nineteen. He didn't question that either.

It's good anyway because it's a night job and so I can still go to school during the day. I get home around two in the morning and get Haven up for school at around seven, so I get plenty of rest. Sometimes I say the wrong thing, I accidentally mention school or Haven, or something at work. Every now and then the other guys send me home early, they press a wad of cash into my hand and tell me to get some rest or they say that they don't me on that night. I don't argue. I'd rather be home anyway, I don't like leaving Haven home alone because he's only eleven and sometimes he still gets nightmares.

A lot of the time, there's no one else who can help him anyway when he has his nightmares. He fell asleep in class once and someone had to run all the way to the high school for me. I'm the only one who can snap him out of it. His teacher said it's because I have features familiar to him. I guess it's true.

In biology, I learned that you inherit features from your mom and your father, which is why tributes tend to look different depending on which district they are from. It's because it's been enough years of the same people living in a confined space that we now share gene pools.

I have mom's eyes and her height. Mom was always tall too. I don't think Haven's right though about our eye's being the same. Mom's were brutally intelligent and I'm nowhere near as smart as she was. My hair is the same dark colour as her's though and it curls naturally just the same if I leave it without a cut for too long. After that, the similarities to her stop. My hands are large and my veins stick out weirdly. When I was ten I nearly cut my middle finger off on my left hand when I was slicing a bagel and so there's a deep scar in it.

Matter of fact, I've got a lot of scars. It's just because when a knife or something hot goes against my skin, I don't instinctively avoid it and step away because I don't know it's there. I tend to have a lot of deep cuts from training. As a result, my mother insisted that I learn first-aid. She always said that she wouldn't always be around to put me back together and I suppose she was right about that.

I get lost easily.

You'd think it would be difficult to do so when I've lived in the same place for my whole life up until now but I seem to have absolutely no sense of direction at all. It's that or I get distracted about something or other and my feet end up taking me to somewhere entirely unknown. It means I'm learning a lot about our district but it does take a long time to get home sometimes.

A lot of the time, I'm just going over what I did that day in training, or I'm thinking about what to make for dinner that night or I'm wondering whether I have enough spare cash to get Haven some new trainers or I'm thinking about the creaky step on our front porch stair or I'm thinking about school and what I learned that day or I'm thinking about something entirely different, like wondering life will be like ten years from now or thinking about how far away stars are in the sky.

I think about things a lot.

Never anything useful, just a lot of empty thought I guess.

Last week, I was lost somewhere in the West side of the district and I saw these two kids running around, chasing each other and shouting. They were playing Peacekeepers and Rebels and the Peacekeepers were winning. Which is what they always seem to be doing.

Mom always said that my father was a Peacekeeper, that the reason I never knew him was because when you become a Peacekeeper, you give up your family. I used to believe her. I'd look towards the hill that the academy sits on and be filled with pride for a father that was doing so much good work for people.

Now that I'm older, I know better.

My father was no hero.

On that day, when my mother's body was laying in the street, I was stuck in place on the sidewalk, from where I'd watched her fall after leaving Haven in the kitchen.

Caesar looked up at me and he had a knife in his chest and he was swaying on his feet but when he looked at me, he smiled so wide, so happy that you could see his gums.

I've got that same smile, that same gummy, wide grin.