Kappa Draven :: District Two :: Fin

They learned quickly to watch the worrisome Draven. Beneath the throes of his ashen hair and through the lens of his hazel eyes, something was always stirring. Absent in conversation, Kappa was christened the wallflower of his family. However, words were always mumbling around within his mind without escape. A child confined to the quandaries of his thoughts, quietly churning in the corner of every room. He seemed to slip in and out of existence. A small boy beaming with a smile sometimes. A silent shape sewn to the shadows during others. They prayed for it to be a folly phase of his early youth, but age never broke the insidious impulses of his "imagination."

At age sixteen, the signs of Kappa's struggle became more than minor instances of inconsistent personality. He found fascination in the flames of his family's hearth. For hours, unmoving, the boy would watch. His irises illuminated along the edges of the furling fire and a sadistic smile would stain his cheeks. Once, Kappa's Father found the courage to try and tear away his son from the seduction. He was met by the screeches of sirens and the teeth of demons. His blood stained the floor as his son scuttled back before the flickering fire with an animalistic hiss. That was the first night Kappa heard his Mother crying. 

There were many white walls after that night. Doctors and examinations, ink tests and psychological scans. Kappa saw many things in the splattered scenes of ink that he was shown. The sun, its surface sweltering as flares of solar flames fueled the heat of the solar system. A forest in the night engulfed in a fire stretching out towards the stars on the backs of burning branches. Shadows of people and of places. Apparently the answers caused worry in Kappa's parents, so rarely he saw their smiles after those tests. What he became a frequent witness to though was medicine. Always more medicine. 

Intermittent Pyromania. 

They were such big words for a sixteen year old to wrap his head around. In fact, Kappa still doesn't entirely understand them. His Mother and Father would always simply say they were who he was and why it was important that he took his medicine. Kappa can still remember the disappointment he'd face whenever his parents found out he had forgotten or purposely avoided taking his pills. One time, he had been hiding his pills for a week as a kind of game, when his Mother found his hiding hole. The sadness on her skin Kappa can still remember as though it were a scar. Despite it all, Kappa had a soft soul and broke down anytime anyone would even raise their voice at him. His brother Darius had to spend the rest of the night soothing his sobbing younger brother to sleep.

Kappa's teenage years were fueled by genuine frustration. He went in constantly to the medical center for re-balances on his medicines and therapy sessions with his doctors. Half his days, Kappa felt as though his body was numb and his stomach was a surging storm of sickness. He'd sit for hours alone in his room with his head buried into his hands as every inch of him would tingle endlessly. He never felt like they could the right regiment for his medications. Yet his parents would always urge him that it was all still new and that they'd figure it out eventually. Yet the frustration never fell away.

For a while, Kappa turned to writing as an escape from his entrapped existence. He loved, and still loves, the practice of the page. In poems pushing onto pages upon pages, he would confess to how he didn't even know who he was. The Kappa that stood in his shoes was a stranger apparently veiled in the terms bipolar and pyromania. That boy seemed foreign to Kappa who only saw himself, who knew how he felt. The further he bled into his ink, the more Kappa felt his fury growing. Fury at his position for feeling defined by those two terms, for severing every ounce of his individual soul. He couldn't even understand the difference, and he realized, that's because there wasn't one. He just wanted to be free to be himself, no definitions needed. 

That was the start of it, his rebirth. Kappa may be quiet, but he is smart. He began forming new ways to design a new destiny for himself, one without any evidence of this defined existence. He mastered the manipulation of lying to those in white who were always worrying about him. What he held onto through it all, through the uncertainty, was the colors. Over the weeks and into the months, he stayed focused on the emotions and thoughts that colored his world. Kappa felt more energy and emotion than he ever had the closer the day came. He felt more free from the definitions of the diagnosis the more he accepted them as pieces of himself, not his entire self. Sure, there were months when he was filled with endless euphoria, and then there where months were he was heavy and doubtful. But what teenager isn't?

Kappa was convinced he had it managed, knew he far preferred a clearer reality. For a while too, it seemed as though he finally found the right mix for his medicines. However, that's when they came back to him, the voices of the embers. Whispering they would call to him from the fluttering flame of a lighter he stole from his brother. Nights would pass without a breath a sleep. Sometimes they were silent, but more often then not they were shouting. Kappa tried to find footing against their verbal onslaught, yet their attacks never slowed and only sped up. One night he was ripped awake screaming since he was certain that gasoline had been poured across his skin. Darius came in panicking as he had to hold Kappa while he wreathed and wretched in a wicked tantrum. Kappa knew then that the dosage was too light or that some drug or another wasn't the "right" one for him. 

The next night Kappa finally went through with his vision, his idea. He found the flight of his future on the back of his flames. The Draven house hold roared as a mansion of Hell that night. Fire engulfed every inch and erupted out of every window while Kappa watched whisperless. His family found their way out of the flames before becoming ash, but the boy bound to the act they never saw again. He had used the smoke as a screen for escape. 

It's been several months since then and Kappa hasn't seen a single white wall since. For a while Kappa claimed title to being a boundary boy. He lived right along the border of the district depending solely on himself and his cleverness. A spree of several set fires, the signs of a serial arsonist, were what led Kappa to where he is now. Daliah found him at the site of what would have been his fifth fire in a week: an old storage center down by the train station. Kappa still isn't entirely sure why she stopped him that night, but he's been with her and the others ever since. 

"Why fires?"

She had asked him.

"Because I accept that they are a part of me."

Kappa never knew much about the gangs of District Two, he always figured it was simply rivaling career packs. In a District as devoted to the Capitol as Two and its Troops, Kappa assumed there really wouldn't be any. Much to his surprise, he now calls a small one his home. Various variants of criminals that Daliah's recruited. There's really only one shared sentiment among them all: anti-everything, Capitol and Districts alike. Kappa, or as they know him K, only likes it for one reason. He's free to feel and kill the fear of the voices that guide him. There's no more definitions or white walls, and it was his choice.