reuben poyntz {{ district iii // fin

in the darkness, there is only the steady sound of dripping liquid. the plip plip echoes through the room, leaving the image of a damp cave at the fading end of his dream. he lays there, eyes still closed, trying to cling for at least one more moment to the sleep that is now leaving his body. resigned to wakefulness, his eyelids flicker open.

the bottom of a table greets him, the brown wood rough where the carpenters hadn't bothered to sand it. after all, who looks at the underside of a table? he works stiff muscles in small stretches, readying himself to get up. as he turns his head from side to side - the faint popping in his neck providing some relief - he spots the source of the dripping sound. hanging over the edge of the table, dark drops falling from the long fingertips, was a human hand. the liquid, dripping next to his head, was blood. sighing in dismay and exasperation at himself, he rolled out from underneath the table and tried to survey the mess that had been made.

last night he had made quite the mess and had gone to sleep rather than clean up as he should have. being tired was no excuse for leaving such a scene behind. he was lucky that the peacekeepers were still unaware of him yet, and that they hadn't stumbled in here on accident. with most of a human body laid out on various surfaces like the scattered pieces of a doll, anyone who had walked in would think he had murdered someone in here. for a fact, he hadn't. still, even though the body had been of a recently dead beggar on the street, dissecting that body would still be considered an offense - some stupid law forbidding "desecration of the dead" or whatever.

with one final stretch, he got to work. cleaning up bloodstains that had had nearly ten hours to set was not an easy task, and would require most of the day to clean well enough. he would have to scrub every inch of this place, rather than the usual once-over he would give when the gore was fresh. it was his own fault for not doing this last night. this was alright, though, this place needed to have a good clean soon - there were a couple more stubborn stains that he hadn't bothered too much with for the past weeks.

scooping up the bleach, gloves, and innumerable rags - never as clean as they used to be - he bent to his task. his dark hair, long and greasy, fell in front of his face. brushing it back with the back of one hand, he cleared his vision in order to see the table in front of him more easily. he picked the arm up, making a face at his own carelessness, and went to the large freezer unit in the back corner. tossing the arm in, he let the lid slam shut and decided he would evaluate the usefulness of that limb - and the others that had been left out - once everything was clean. with luck, the time out of the freezer just sitting on the table wouldn't have been long enough for the body to become useless to him. it wasn't every day that he came across a dead guy that no one cared about, and to waste such an opportunity with his own foolishness would be, well, foolish.

as he went back to scrubbing, his hair once more fell in front of bitter green eyes. he glared at the oily locks and swept them back impatiently. at the third time his hair got in the way, he finally became frustrated enough to search for a strip of leather to tie it back. the knot was shoddy, but held his hair back loosely, enough to keep it out of his face. returning to his task, he nearly folded his tall frame completely over the counter in order to reach the wall below a tool shelf. standing, he hit his head on the shelf in question and swore. not always the most graceful, he was often knocking against things. even so, when it came down to it he had a fine hand at detailed work and any kind of stitching or fine incisions were done with a steady hand.

he spent his days in the dark basement, surrounded by tools and bodies - both human and animal - hidden from the gaze of others by four concrete walls and a single wooden door. here he could be himself, and he could pursue his one dream: the creation of new life from existing life. since he was little he had been fascinated with how a mother could form a new being inside of herself and had wondered if he might be able to do that outside of the body and without the aid of a second person - or at least not a living one. would he be able to, using the right techniques, create a new human being out of pieces of others? the only way to find out was to try.

in order to first learn how each piece fit together he first needed to study the human body, both while living and after death. his own body would do fine for the living parts of the experiments - to a point - but the cadavers were another matter. lucking into finding the body of the homeless man had provided him with some much needed opportunities to test the limits of bone and flesh, as well as finally get a proper look at the inside of a person. he had paid ample attention to the science lessons in school, but none of the teachings had gone far enough into the details of the human body. as district three was focused on technology, that was what most of the curriculum had been focused on. it was a shame he hadn't been born in district six, which was the district that was designated as the medical center of panem. the closest district three came to working on experiments to create life was in building more and more intelligent machines that might one day mimic people. only he didn't want to mimic life,

he wanted to create it.