Fernando Rafe | District 9 | FIN

FERNANDO RAFE

A strong boy of nothing more than the water and the salt that was in it. Fernando had never knew what it was like to know his parents. Some people said that was because he was known as a wild child. The toddler that would get into way too many things that he should have not gotten involved in. Sometimes he would find his way into the weapons room as a child, he remembered that much. His parents had been accomplished career trainers when they had Fernando, and of course, they took that life seriously. 

When they would give Fernando a chance to play with them, he should an aptitude for it. Too much so. He enjoyed it. And that was a problem to them. Sometimes they would walk around the house and find various dead animals scattered amongst the grass. Fernando never admitted to doing anything, but his parents had always worried. That worried turned into fear and then doubt sprinkled over it like a tropical depression and then there was nothing.

They made the choice to abandon him once through the night, and much to his dismay, he was in shock.  He thought that they loved him, but he was told by many people that was not the case. It was never the case. They were afraid of him, worried that he might not understand what it meant to train, and what the difference would be when it came to doing so and actually murdering someone. They casted him aside like trash pickup on Tuesdays.

He hated everything for a while. Not because his parents had gone and left him, but because he felt like he was blindsided. He could usually be found keeping to himself in the foyer of the place trying to mind his own business, and sometimes he even tried to run away, but that was so he could find his parents. As a child through, he was not as quick as he thought he was. He wouldn’t make it past the gate before being taken back into the house and reprimanded. He didn’t care though, because he thought that his parents had to have been out there somewhere. 

And he wanted answers.

---

It wasn’t until he became a teen that he had been told that his parents had dipped out of the district illegally. Something about being on the run for something that held a criminal offense. When he grew older, they let him travel around a bit more in the district, and when he went back to his childhood home, he had realized that they were telling the truth to him. A house that he used to know as his own had now been occupied by some other family taken and sullen with someone elses life. 

And man did he think that was unfair.

---

That’s when he settled into the realization that he was going to have to give up on ever seeing his family again. For what it was worth, he wasn’t too heartbroken by it. He quickly found a way to acclimate to the new life, and even found a certain amount of silent strength that couldn’t be matched by others in the orphanage. A lot of people thought hed make an excellent leader someday, and to that he laughed.

Though he say what they were saying, especially when it came to helping various boys and girls try to find their way through the orphanage. Every time someone new came, he would make it a point to make them comfortable. Whether he was doing this to gain their trust or if it was to pull them onto his side, that was always up for debate. 

He left that orphanage at the age of sixteen, but quickly learned that the world was not going to be kind to him. He had to steal in order to get the basic necessities. They taught him how to fish back at the orphanage, but not how to get a job, or even make a living. That was left up to him. And instead of trying to live an honest life, he wanted the instant gratification now. 

He thought he deserved that much. And so Nando had started off small, stealing where he could in order to have some sort of life. However, one day he returned to the ship house where he had found refuge and found another one of the kids from the orphanage hanging around. It was one that he knew well. Before he could even blink, more had followed, and the home he had found had started to feel just like that.

---

But of course, they weren’t doing anything good. And during one of their usual trips to the market, Nando had been caught trying to steal more than he actually needed. The peacekeepers had rushed him, and instead of trying to push the blame off of himself, he had more honor than that. He told everyone else to run, and he would take the fall. No one would have to follow in his footsteps. His life didn’t amount to anything more anyway.

And they sentenced him to the detention center at first, but then they told him they were going to transfer him to a facility in nine. That was all the information he was given, and of course he had to accept. 

There was nothing else he could do.