paris {district six}

I do not believe in beauty. In winters with dainty white blankets and frost curling off of every breath. I do not believe in summers with golden suns and green meadows. They are but a picture painted by gnarled ugly hands with yellow nails and dark scabs upon the palm. To stop us from seeing the decaying, brown leaves curling under a blizzard's wind or sweltering heat that slowly sets the world on fire. I do not believe in beauty because such a thing has never existed. 

My first memory is that of darkness. Of cold metal beneath my back and the strong smell of iron. The kind of smell that made my stomach flip and churn. The first thing I remember hearing is my own scream resonating around metal walls and losing themselves within the darkness. The first thing I remember feeling is nothing. There was no pain, just a gentle pressure on my limbs and a gentle ringing in my ears. And if Heaven exists it was that feeling because it was so cold and so dark and I was so scared that I didn't cling to peace. To the painlessness that consumed me. I struggled and I fought, roaring like a feral beast gone mad. 

When the pain hit, it was white. It stained my vision and twisted my insides so brutally that I leaned over the metal table and-.

The first thing I remember tasting is bile. Bitter and putrid as it slid across my tongue and onto the floor; as it congealed with the dark red pooled below me. And I wondered what that was, the dark red all over my hands and staining the blue gloves of the men above me. That was splattered upon blue masks and big glasses that made their eyes seem a thousand times bigger. 

I was two, maybe three then. I didn't know what it was. Who they were. Where I was.

By the time I was five, that was all I knew. 

My name was 723, engraved with bright red metal at the base of my throat. The men in the white coats with big eyes were lab coats. Ones with cruel smiles who treated some with kindness and some with seething hatred. Who locked us up at night in cages that were dark and smelled of fear and piss with big golden keys and told us they'd see us in the morning with such glee that it makes me sick to think about it. About them. I was in the room with cages and tables. Where they poked at our skin with silvers that made me feel good or like I was dying. Sometimes both. They stuck knives into my flesh, writing down upon white sheets just how many times they could stab me until everything went black. 

Pain. That was their goal. To cause us as much pain as possible. They wanted to know which of us would die. Which of us would survive. And which of us would break. 

I saw all three during my time at the cages. 

There was a pretty boy, I remember, with dark hair and pretty eyes who smiled at me before lights out in a sad way. They told him to walk upon a bomb. They shoved him face first upon it when he refused. 

Bits of pretty boy was stuck in my hair for weeks. His blood running down my cheeks and onto my palms like the tears that could no longer fall. I was too dried up. 

I began not to care who lived or who died, who was pulled out of the cages with bloody lips and peeling skin as long as I was saved the agony. And I'm sure the others felt the same, the times the lab coats placed their greedy palms upon my shoulders and dragged me from the only home I had ever known. They liked me, oh they liked me in the worst way possible. 

They just couldn't break me. It drove them half mad, pressing a gun to my stomach and firing sharp metal through my abdomen. (A girl named 1105 told me I died for two whole minutes before they got me breathing again. And I remember crying because I wished they had left me for dead.) They stuck me with pins and they tore off my clothes, humiliating me in front of my peers as I sat helpless and small. 

The world started going black when I was six. Long stretches of nothing until I woke up on a table covered in blood and my own sick without the slightest clue how I got there. I didn't remember the lab coats pulling me out of my cage, didn't remember the silvers or the pain. It was... peaceful for once. Everything became nothing for a long, long time and it was all okay. 

There were three types of people in the cages. Those who die, those who break and those who go insane. 

And I am completely and utterly batshit. 

They sold me when I was eight, when there was no room left upon my body to ruin. They congratulated me, said I that I was home free and everything would be okay from here on out. (I did not expect the truth nor did I receive it.) They couldn't introduce a kid like me back in to the world. One who cried and screamed nightly with long, angry marks running down his abdomen. They couldn't risk me running my mouth and ruining everything. 

And so they gave me to an old man with cruel eyes and a beard like salt and pepper. He had large meaty fists that crushed my bones and bloodied my skin. I was not like them, I learned. The people who walked the streets with dull faces and boring clothing. I was not on par with the normal people. Not even close. 

I grew timid, shrinking into myself whenever a human approached. Flinched whenever they raised a hand or moved too quickly (like the dogs the old man kept in his back yard on heavy chains with ivory teeth.) 

The last word I spoke was stop three months and twenty eight days after my eighth birthday. It was a desperate kind of scream, that tore my throat to shreds and ripped any feeling from my finger tips. The salt and pepper man beat me senseless (SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP YOU PIECE OF SHIT BEFORE I KICK YOUR FUCKING FACE IN) 

And the blackness returned after that. The peaceful nothing that I did not remember until I was tucked into bed with an ice pack over my head and wounds all over my body. And I was glad that I remembered nothing of the beating. Salt and Pepper man was not a kind one. 

I stopped talking after that day. There was no point to it. Not one single person in the whole of the house cared enough to hear what I had to say. Not one person in the world, I'd imagine, would want to listen to the incoherent ramblings of an insane man.

(But how am I insane? 

Because they told me. 

Because I cannot stand the sound of anything.

Because I am not human. 

Only a crazy person would think that. Surely)

The blackness came more often after that day. An all consuming darkness that left me bloodied and bruised without the slightest clue what I'd done. (Not that I needed to do anything to gain bruises.) I knew people I did not remember, possessed memories that were not mine. The blackness became less of a savior and more of a monster, a terrifying thing I did not understand. The peace became terror, chaos, nightmares. And hard as I try to move my limbs they would not listen. 

Because the blackness controlled them. 

One of the few friendly faces I would ever meet was a servant named Krista. She had dark red hair that fell to her waist and a face that reminded me of a doe's. Her son (a plump blonde boy) could not communicate like us, could not send gentle vibrations into the air like I once had. He used his hands, tiny little hands that moved so quickly it was a wonder he was actually saying anything. 

And when Salt and Pepper turned his eyes to another, she taught me how to use my hands How to ask for help. 

And she gave me a name. 

(I once read a book about a city of lights. Beautiful, radiant lights that filled up the whole world with its magic. Paris, it was. Can I call you that, beautiful boy? Can I call you Paris?)

(I said yes because she looked so happy and sunny that she made the whole room glow. Paris. A name more suited for her than I, but I hadn't the guts to tell her that and the name stuck. I quite like it now. It reminds me of her, and how no one survives Salt and Pepper.) 

He has a little girl whom he treats like gold. It is weird to see a kind of affectionate light within his eyes when he regards the flaxen haired princess with olive skin and blue eyes. He buys her bright pink dresses and beautiful shoes that tie with lace. He holds her close nights when she comes screaming into his bedroom after darkness haunted her dreams just as it had mine. 

If I believed in such a petty thing as love, I would say that Salt and Pepper loved his little girl with all his heart. (But he is a cold, cruel man. Incapable of such things.) 

Princess is much kinder than he. She gives me a flower every day after school, with a bright smile and a tug on my pointer finger. I think she feels bad for the bruises her father presses into my flesh because I cannot stop from screaming. No matter how hard I try. "I used to have nightmares like you." She once told me, making idle conversation as we waited for her father to return. "But I have papa to sleep with when things get really bad. Do you dream of monsters?" 

I only gave her a nod, unable to meet eyes filled with such purity. 

I grew up with the Princess, she a mere four to my eight years. We talk when her father has turned deaf and blind, completely entranced within the bitter liquid he downs as though it were as vital as water. She doesn't understand my words and so I simply listen. She tells me of school and of her friends, of the girls that have caught her eye in class and how much she would like to hold their hands. And I do not smile often, but the corners of my eyes lift in a happy way when we speak. I envy the princess as much as I adore her company. The innocence she possesses is one stolen from me. 

And this year, she joins the reaping. This year she loses the innocence she once had. It cannot last in a place like this, where we are mere weapons and tools. It's almost as sad as it is funny. But I have long since run out of tears, so I laugh.