ken nuan /9/PK/

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O N E

"Hold this Kendra."

"Dad this is literally a human foot."

"Yeah, we might need it later."

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Stationary is never something that I've ever even pretended to be.

When you've seen as much of our little fenced in world as I have then you can get back to me.

My father was a medicine man, born out of the ashes of District Nine. He grew up in a rag tag rumble of children, a little pack animal. People hated them in a fond sort of way. It's hard not to have a soft spot for orphans. At least that's what my father said. He used to tell me stories of the things that they'd get up to when I'd have nightmares to make me laugh.

A lot of the time my father was not there at night and all I had were his journals.

So I guess a lot of the shit I know about dear old dad is shit he never really planned on telling me.

I know that this file is meant to be about me and all but in order to understand Kendra Nuan, it's important to know about my father. I wouldn't be here if it weren't for him after all and his inability to keep it in his pants.

I guess after being a dirty rugrat for so long my dad decided that he wanted to:

a) Give back to the community.
b) Get the fuck out of Nine.
c) Make something of himself after losing six friends and nearly dying in a drawn out gang war that ended in a massive shootout.
d) Find out if Capitolites really had found a way to mod themselves to have like six vaginas because the black market porn mags couldn't be wrong could they?

If you answered 'b' then you're correct but if you answered 'c' then you're not wrong either. If you answered 'd' then you're a fucking idiot and you should resign from being a Peacekeeper immediately.

So when he hit nineteen, he left Nine to go train to become a Peacekeeper. Neither of his two years spent in the academy are that interesting, other than the fact that he stayed longer to complete his medical training. See, my father wanted to become a surgeon so that he could not only be there to stop gang violence but save the lives of gang members after the violence. He didn't ever want to see anybody's friends die of easy fixes ever again. I guess you could say that he was pretty soft-hearted.

Which is probably how I came about.

After getting his medical license and graduating from the academy, my father went to the Capitol to receive a medal from some official on behalf of Snow for exemplary work in school. Honestly I'm certain he only went to break into that research centre in his journal and get a glimpse of the medical technology inside. Of course it was illegal and it was certainly a terrible idea but I appreciate that he did it all the same.

See, I get my charms and excellent looks from somewhere and while my mother has been modified to be aesthetically pleasing, my dad's looks were completely, one hundred percent biodegradable and natural.

There was a lot of sheer luck that led to my birth and I guess that the fact that the person who just so happened to catch my father breaking in was the eighteen year old girl that would later turn out to be my mother was one of them.

I'm pretty sure that they fucked in the morgue that he was hiding out in but his journal isn't so clear in this spot.

How morbid is that, huh?

I think it's kind of romantic, making a new life in a room full of decaying corpses.

My Father never actually got her name that night, it wasn't until nearly two years later when he just happened to be back in the Capitol that he met me.

"I named her after you because she has your dumb face."

Honestly, I think that's a good enough reason to name anybody anything.

Thing is, my mom had decided after having me that she didn't really want me. She was engaged to some rich asshole in government and I was getting in her way of her hopes and dreams of being a princess so she insisted that my father take me. Dad always says that he never even needed a paternity test because as soon as he saw me he knew that I was his because of my adorable little face.

It's funny because in his journals right around the time I was dumped on him, there's nearly five pages of the word 'fuck' repeated over and over again.

So there I went, smuggled out of the Capitol as a sack of flour that my father insisted he was running tests on for it's likeness to a human baby to an extremely incompetent train guard. Carefully sedating me so that I would not move around probably worked. The fact that such an idiotic plan had probably never been tried before helped.

Honestly my dad was really dumb.

He raised me in secret in Nine, leaving me with a trusted friend every time he had to go away on a new placement where he was needed for his medical skill. He had become trapped once again in Nine because of me. I don't think he minded so much.

He never sent me to school but his bookshelves were lined with medical texts and his doctor's journals so there was never anything lost in learning.

If he'd ever doubted at all that I was his child, the doubt was lost when my baby hair grew in black and silky as his. My easy smile and big mouth couldn't be attributed to anyone but him either. My first word, according to the journal, was 'fuck'.

He was so damned proud of me.

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T W O

"Sweetie how are you at stitching?"

"I got a ten in embroidery"

"Excellent, take over while I find some ice."

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I spent my childhood in back alleys, fixing up miscreants and learning everything I knew from my dad. We never really had a plan for the future, never thought of what might happen if he was caught. By all accounts I did exist but only in the Capitol as Kendra Donatella Miriama Valen Histerame.

I liked to go by Ken Nuan.

When my time came for reaping my father would have me hide in a hole he had built underneath the house until it was over every year. We'd both sit and watch the games every night, hands sometimes bloody from a long day of work. We'd sit there watching people get hurt, both trying to be the fastest to say what needed to be done to help them.

Despite the fact that 99% of them died anyway and watching them try to do first aid on themselves was ridiculously frustrating, it was a source of entertainment. It was morbid of course but there wasn't much that wasn't.

We had a few patients that weren't in gangs of course, elderly that couldn't afford to see a doctor, orphans and people from the slums were constant customers.

I never saw my dad drink except on nights when we lost a patient to illness or a gang shooting. I guess that's why I thought it was funny when he never came back from a mission one time. When I eventually got to read his file years later, it said that he'd died from alcohol poisoning the night after saving the life of a politician, only a few hours before he was meant to catch a train to go home.

Honestly I wasn't surprised when the Peacekeepers showed up at the trusted friend's house two days later, kicking the doors down in order to 'rescue' me.

Suddenly I was a face on a missing person's report.

Story was that my father had kidnapped me from my mother and she had been searching for me ever since. Go figure. My father had always told me that my mother was dead.

Sifting through his journals later and hearing yet another story I gave up on trying to figure out what was real and what wasn't. There were too many stories.

My father had always taught me to follow my instincts.

So I didn't trust the frigid bitch when she told me that she'd been looking for me for years with tears in her eyes. There I was, thirteen years old and fatherless, trapped in the Capitol with the insane people that ran a games every year.

My mother went the full monty with my return, holding interview after interview with anyone that asked about her lost, feral child returned to her from the Districts. They'd ask to see me and my mother would place a hand over her heart, assuming she actually had one of course, and tell them that I'd been kept in the dark and could not speak in anything but grunts and growls.

What a fucking shit.

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T H R E E

"Alright, when I say run, run ok?"

"Dad, this doesn't seem like it's legal."

"It's the opposite actually."

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I was put into a school for rich prissy bitches, so that I could learn how to be a 'lady'. Few things wrong with that whole concept, first of all, there's no definition to being a goddamned woman, second of all, it was so boring I nearly impaled myself on a pair of sewing shears just for a bit of excitement.

I say nearly, but I was the talk of fourth form for the entire year after I sewed myself up, quick as you please, right after.

I did learn at least one interesting thing in my time at the school. It turns out that it's very easy to fudge being sick. There was one registered nurse and it was highly likely that she was a profound idiot. Once happily fudged, it was very easy to sit in the library all day, devouring book after book.

My mother may have been made to be a doorstop, but I never was.

My lungs yearned for the burn of running down alleys in Nine, chasing my father to our newest patient. I remembered the scent in the air there too well and it hurt. The Capitol was never my home, not even for a moment.

That is what you must understand.

I am not a traitor.

I was politely asked to leave the school after only a year of learning, which was a pity. My mother was rather upset at the slandering of her 'good' name. In payment for not causing another fuss, I insisted I go to a school of my choosing.

Which is how I ended up at the Academy of Sciences.

Despite being younger, I was placed in the year above mine due to my already extensive knowledge and was allowed to choose a directed path. Though physics and Chemistry were entertaining, my heart lay in surgery, body and soul in the operating room.

My father had taught me well and very much. However, his form of surgery was very much 'take what you can get and just try and save them I guess.' Though effective, it was lacking in many ways and so I had to relearn quite a bit. Being there, learning from someone else, felt utterly strange.

It was and still is his voice that I hear in my head when I am bent over a patient's prone body, mind panicking, trying to figure out what to do. Calming and always certain. I missed him then, as I do now while writing this.

My father was a good man.

It was my aim to be the same.

I subjected myself to the torture of a long, laborious winter of study in the Capitol. I let my mother dress me as she pleased, let her drag me along to whatever she wanted, let her display me like a hunk of flesh to fawning young suitors. I did anything I had to, to stay in that school.

The difference was vast. Gone were the blue skies and sounds of nine. The Capitol's towers towered too high and too brightly for one to even see the stars at night. The people there vapid, empty, so starkly different to the warmth of my neighbors in Nine.

I was so alone, then.

When I was eighteen, I started hatching my plans of escape. I only had a year more at school until I could graduate and look for work at the hospital. My mother expected her daughter to become a nurse, or a caretaker for the elderly perhaps. She expected me to work until she had decided upon a suitable man for me to marry.

Little did she know that I had already pledged myself, my body, to the Peacekeeping Corps.

God, she threw a fucking annoying tantrum about that.

Lucky I wasn't there to witness it.

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F O U R

"You have the power to save, Kendra."

"what about if it's two opposite gangs?"

"No. People, Ken. You save people."

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The few years after were a bit of a whirlwind. I packed for training with the intention to never return. I'd made a few friends in school and I gave them my information to stay in contact but I was uncertain I'd ever see them again. I was alright with that, able to breathe easier after escaping from the heaviness of the Capitol.

I spent a very long time traveling through the districts with another Peacekeeper as my mentor. Where my father had taught me back alley surgery using what you had around you, my new mentor showed me how to travel lightly with all the tools of an operating room on hand.

People would often ask me if she was my mother. We looked similar and I'd never managed to grow very tall. She, of course, wasn't but I'd missed the feeling of being loved. Being with her felt like being twelve years old, up to my elbow's in pig's blood and laughing at my father's jokes.

Still, I spent the last six months of my twenty-first year erasing myself. Using my connection to the Capitol's database, I slowly wiped myself from the system. Every article, every piece of information, swept onto a hard drive and then deleted. My degrees and awards, my name and information, all gone, until, all that was left, was me.

I slipped away on a warm night in May, when the monsoons were just starting in the ocean district and my mentor was sleeping soundly.

I hopped a train to nine, where I discarded my uniform in a poor man's barrel fire.

My father's house was still standing, somehow preserved by the grateful community for nearly ten years, as if they hoped that one day he'd return.

I pried the boards off the windows with bloody fingers and made myself at home.

I am not a traitor, not a deserter.

I was never devoted to the Capital. Nine always held my allegiance. My father's wish to save his neighbors and friends still the burning torch in the back of my head, even after all those years.

I've remained safely hidden for five years, staying under the radar.

The people in Nine come to me with their aches and pains and I heal them, as my father would. Gang allegiance holds no weight in my heart. Elderly and young, they all come to see me. When I don't have an answer, I blow the dust off one of my father's books, burning the midnight oil until I do.

My devotion is to life, above all else.

I strive to exist the way he wanted me to.

end file.