quivering touch :: griffin

Sweat,  it is the string to the violin of agony he plays. Alongside him the orchestra hums in a unison of unilateral damnation. A set of souls all sold to the march of metal and the soot of coal. No matter the picture the sky paints, one of sun or one of rain, their shadows exist in constant pain. However, through the welts which riddle their hands and beyond the blisters that bleed like the death of day, they never do fade. Their song is eternal, in existence forever. For now just children pushing carts, soon men lost in a maze of mines.

Prometheus' calloused hands crack as they collect their meager wage. The white of his bandages burgeon with red and bulk with stains as he saunters towards home beneath the sun's unforgiving gaze. The day has only just past noon yet the teenage boy has already watched the ticking hands of his clocks turn for eight endless hours. In such a short time he has already seen children crumble, peace keepers laugh, and parents perish in peril. Despite the dawning hope blooming in a field of blood- red roses somewhere lost within a cruel Capitol sphere, there is no shortage of suffering in the world she fights to find again. Perhaps such truth takes Prometheus to the District's edge, along the boundary of hardship and unknown.

He stops beside a dying bush, his feet breaking its branches in small sharp snaps. He wants to scream, to cry, to find every last person who put them in this place and... He falls instead, his back breaching a wild patch of nettle. The world continues to turn but he lays in silent seclusion. Maybe his parents are buried somewhere near here. Maybe that's worth a spark of anything other than emptiness. But it's not, it only makes the shadows darker and the face of existence uglier.

Who could have envisioned such a life as this?

While his mind meanders the avenues of such a question, Promethues pauses on a face: his brother's. He wants to cry again, to free himself from the gut of grief which entangles his intestines. Every time he urges for escape, wishes for release, his brother beams through his mind like an unavoidable anchor. He cannot stop the song as long as there is breath in his brother. And for that simple statement, a never ending struggle between love and anger is the face of his only family.

Even his love cannot shine through the soot of his stained skin.

Another set of steps shatters the sharp broken branches of the dying bush. Prometheus' eyes slide shut, maybe the peace keepers are finally coming to take him too. Maybe he won't have to feel the guilt anymore. His eyes flutter open, they stare towards the burning sun and accept it's brutal blaze.

"Careful, that bush you're trampling through has thorns."

Prometheus' mouth dances over the broken edge of one of his fingers, his teeth tearing out a tiny thorn from beneath his skin. His body bends up to a seated position, but the sun's stunning stare coats the stranger's features.

"Want mine?"

Prometheus' mouth ejects the tiny piece of plant directly into the ground before him.

Pleasant as always.