jean-baptiste forgeron {d9 : fin}

Here, therefore, huge and mighty warrior though you be, here shall you die.

The wild sounds of mass production echo through a wrought-iron jungle of pipes and mesh. Heavy drums of industry beat in a tribal rhythm as furnaces roar proudly from the heart of this metal calamity. The tortured screams of machines and drills and engines howl into the night, whilst factory chimneys climb high into the sky - a huge twisted pipe organ spewing it's final symphony. It is the only home you have ever known.

But let's be painfully honest with ourselves, you are not fully home.

It isn't "home" anymore, is it? Home would be somewhere where you belong. This building is nothing but weathered drystone and cement to you, its halls filled with memories that aren't even yours - this isn't a place you used to work, nor even visit. You have never stepped inside it's walls. It was just a stone building on the corner of a street you used to live on. Before.

Before what?

This world of noise and toxic fumes is all you can remember, as far back as you may try to recall, your adolescent brain can only conjure up memories of this ferrous labyrinth. There was a place before, yes, but even that was a small shack wedged between an old production workshop and the magnet-train station. Even that was a part of this endless grid.

Nine is your home. It's where you were born, it's where you'll die. Is that how the saying goes? Here is where you will make the nails that line your coffin. Something like that, you cannot quite recall.

You are a small, pale boy with soot in your eyes and rot in between your toes. You figure, better that than rot in your brain, right? You have seen plenty of empty vessels drifting through the ever-expansive sprawl with nothing inside their skulls but a dense void. You don't ever think yourself above them, nor any better than them, you're just glad you're not them. You'd much rather your wits and your charm.

Charm? Don't fool yourself, boy. You're many things, but charm is not a weapon in your arsenal. You may like to think of yourself as charming, but no girl or boy has ever looked at you twice favourably, they all think of you to be exactly what you are - a homeless little street rat that's avoided the blunt end of the Peacekeeper's baton for long enough to build up something of an ego. You know all too well how quickly that it could all come tumbling back down.

You do not even think it is wise to go home, given that it is now occupied by another family - an unbroken family. A family that can pay the bills and put food on the table. You suppose you just like lurking around this corner of the District, hoping maybe that you can peer back through the window and imagine it is your mother there, instead of some other boys.

A stern chill marches up your cervical spine vertebrae and takes roost just behind the hairs on the back of your neck. The wind whistles between the thin pipes above, endeavouring to creep down whisper to you an entire collection of horrid affirmations in your ear.

She is dead, and you are alone in this cruel world.

Not alone in the true sense of the word, but abandoned yes, with your older brother. The two of you have nothing but each-other to rely on, with a father rotting in a prison cell and a mother cremated in the very furnace she once worked in. There's a sickness in your family, and you fear one day it will find you too.

For all his resourcefulness, you dare not tell Arnaud. He has spirit for the both of you, and an abundance of fight in his chest. The Captain is, as his title suggests, in charge. You nod along with his half-baked plans and pie-in-the-sky dreams in the hope that one day he appreciates just how hard the decisions you have to make truly are. Although, you suspect he will never fully understand.

Au contraire, Jean-Baptiste, perhaps you just do not want him to come to the realisation that he does not need you as much as you need him.

You return the now-wet piece of paper back into your pocket and stare at the old workhouse one more time. Today is not the day to dig up the sins of your father.

There will be plenty of time for that later.