Hey everyone! Paradigm of Writing here! So, definitely not the update of the story you were probably expecting (and maybe hoping for, but don't worry, Declaration of Death is still in progress!) I had this story here called Vermillion Shorelines, now changed to the aptly titled The Bleeding Shore. It is an SYOT - with many of its submitters if not near all [this was 2016/2017 after all] having disappeared. I have written three SYOTs since this story's initial discontinuation, and with how my skills have progressed as a writer, I knew that I would eventually want to revisit this.
And that is what this is! If this gets readers, great! If it doesn't, oh well! I will be going back and updating all of the chapters before this to correctly reflect what my new writing style is like now but do expect updates decently well for this. I am still in the middle of introductions (I only got through five districts before, I believe), so this chapter, #11: Alchemists of Sorrow, is its re-continuation. The next chapter will be introducing the tributes from District 1 and 10, but that's for another time!
Vito Moran: District 5 Male POV (16)
Killing is a passionate sport, and that is all there is to it. For those who try to deny it, as their faces turn bright red and splotchy, protesting under moral means of how there shouldn't be any passion in such a heinous crime, that is when Vito Moran will slam the door in their face. Anyone who says that killing is without passion is lying to themselves. To be able to do what one must go through, by plunging a knife into someone – a back, a side, a hip, an eye, a throat, a sliced arm – or shooting someone with a cocked gun… the passion must be there to reach that point.
"Hey, Moran, quit the staring, you yutz," comes an irritated voice to Vito's left, fingers wading into his field of sight, digits snapping together.
"Well," Vito pushes the arm out of the way, fixing his slouched posture, "If your face wasn't so stupid, Kremmie, I'd stop staring at it."
Kremmie, otherwise known in the underground as Kremlin, sticks his tongue out at the boy, rolling his eyes. Patrols and stakeouts would lead to less of Vito dazing off if they weren't so boring. Where was the fun in standing around for five hours on end, unable to leave his post, in the very case a rat on the other side of District Five passed flatulence?
"You do it because without it," Vito reminds himself, "You wouldn't be even here arguing with Kremlin."
Kremlin is the closest thing Vito has to a living family member, with greasy tousled black hair pulled taut into a bun, accompanied by a derisive golden glare that pierces and prods the parts Vito tries to hide the most. He can't pull off the same intensity, despite his 5'10 height, with the half top of his left ear cut off, his tanned skin proving to the rest of Five that he did more standing around than actively engaging in the day-to-day activities.
The memorandum about killing came to Vito at fifteen, a year ago, when his role in the Dark Matter gang kicked up a notch, Stole Fressitch, the gang's leader, pulled him down into the bunker.
"This is for you," the man said, not looking Vito in the eyes. A cold shaft of metal passed over Vito's left hand, his eyes squeezed shut, for this certainly was the day Stole found no more use for him and took the remainder of his left ear. At the sensation, Vito opened his eyes to see the bone handle of a blade, a rather cruel looking knife, jutting out from under his tanned flesh. "Do not lose it, for you aren't getting another one."
"Yes- yes sir." Vito gulped, not closing his hand around the weapon. Now was not a time for jokes, it was not a time to make fun of Kremlin's stitched eyebrow job that looked like it was done by a six-year-old. It was a time to man up.
"You're a man now," Stole squeezed Vito's shoulder. "Go find a nobody and taint the blade red."
Vito did not have pleasure in killing the homeless man he found, but there was passion behind it as the man begged for his life, pleading that he had a job lined up and kids to see, yet Vito needed the boost, he needed the raise… he needed stains.
He recalled laughing to Kremlin at dinner the next evening about how the man ended up pissing himself the moment the blade was revealed.
"Think you're some sort of hotshot for killing a guy who wets himself?" Kremlin sneered, plucking a cherry red tomato dangling on a weak precipice off the plate. "Kill a Peacekeeper, survive a chase, blackmail the district mayor, maybe get on President Dermure's radar, and then come talk to me."
Vito doesn't laugh about the sounds his victims make any longer.
It is a far dangerous thing, in Vito's presence, to irritate him as he does the deed. One quick insult, one fast retort, one speedy glance or not so subtle sneer, and the blade plunges into the skin deeper and faster, until his forearm is covered in viscera dripping off of the tweed jacket sewn just that morning.
Dark Matter's trade is subtlety and reading between the lines, the spaces in between being loaded sawed off shotguns with the faint smell of gunpowder residue remaining on the shooter's hands. Their trade in drugs – high profile ones such as heroin, mainly, the largest market being a trade sector in Six, and a coal mine in Twelve run by merchant class folks – is bolstered by its armed force, in which Vito leads a section of them.
Dubbed, the Cobra, a calling card of a fang mark with two quick stabs on the neck, Vito sits and waits, hissing in the dark or whatever space he can find to make his move.
"This is stupid," Vito complains, rubbing his fingers over his brow. He never graces across it entirely, from one end to the other, as he approaches his left ear. It isn't the ear, however, that gets him to stop, but the raised scar just before reaching the temple. A putrid, nasty pale and tar looking gorge rippling across his face, like a cigarette burn smoldered over his tanned skin color. It does not add to his attractiveness, he'd say. "Would Stole even know if we-"
"Yes," Kremlin cuts in. "Yes, he'd know."
Vito silences himself for a moment's hesitation, letting the early morning shadow elongate over his fingertips and down into the dirt. He looks at the shadows, at the way his fingers dance in the light, golden haloes lining the tanned flesh. Vito waits a moment, a pause, a belabored pause. "You ever think about just saying screw it and forgoing an order?" he asks.
"Do you have a death wish, kid?" Kremlin raises his brow. "Why would I ever consider that?"
The boy shrugs. He doesn't really have an answer for it. It is a thought that has crossed his mind before, what it would be like if he were to look straight into his boss's eyes, maybe hock a good spit onto his face, and flash him the middle finger. Just to get that heighted taste of adrenaline in his head, that pulse that would beat and thrum in his neck, the very feeling of being alive right before Kremlin slices a dagger in between his ribcage.
What would happen if-
"Look alive!" Kremlin shouts, nudging Vito in the shoulder a bit harder than Vito was anticipating as he grunts, the boy's body hitting the brick wall at far too fast a pace for his liking.
Vito's gaze snaps into the direction of the alleyway entrance, the sound of panicked breathing and intense stomping sounds of work boots slamming into the asphalt. If he were to guess the speed this person was running, he'd wager that they were running for their life. It is a variable he has to account for, at what he must do now when someone is making a breakneck blitz for him, running away from someone else, as Vito knows it can happen.
"You or...?" Vito trails off, looking over at Kremlin for a brief second. Not long enough to stare at the nasty rippling hole in Kremlin's neck from his midnight injections, but enough to know he's deferring to his companion's seniority.
"All you," Kremlin grins, full of teeth. "Earn those stripes, Vito!"
Their target races into the alley, a look of abject terror on their face. Vito does not have time to determine why, because the man could easily blow right past them, and he is not looking forward to a chase through District 5's less than sanitary alleyways. Blade in hand, Vito doesn't look at them, he doesn't stop to assess the details. He doesn't want a memory of who they are, as if he looks down at their shoes, there won't be anything committed to memory that he can lock towards a singular face.
The man - it is a man by the labored breathing - is stopped short when Vito steps in front of him, arm keeping the figure at bay. Before the guy can open his mouth, whether it is to cuss - a usual trademark of a District 5 lowlife - or demanding he step aside, Vito thrusts the knife up and diagonally, slicing directly into the stranger's jugular. There's a gurgled gasp of pain and shock, and if Vito were making eye contact with the man, he could determine that it'd haunt him, but he doesn't look. That opportunity for morality will never come. He stays strong, as does his stomach when the warm gushing of blood sprays in his face and cascades down his arm.
He withdraws the knife a moment later, the body hitting the asphalt.
It is not over however, all much too fast when Kremlin cuts out a, "Oh, shit!"
"What do you mean by that?" Vito frowns, turning around, and then his eyes widen. "You asshole!" as Kremlin has turned face, bolting down the alley in the other direction. Kremlin has never been one to run away, always the one to stand his ground. Vito turns back around, and this time he must be faced with the consequences of his actions, of the life he took - he didn't even ask why, he never asks why, that is never part of the protocol - to see a man, a large figure in white barreling down towards him.
A Peacekeeper.
"Oh shit..." Vito hisses through his teeth, the blade falling from his hand.
Well. He certainly knows what it looks like. No wonder the dude was running.
The Peacekeeper's black baton reaches out and smashes into the side of his jaw a few seconds later, and Vito Moran knows that he definitely should have walked away from that spot when he wanted to.
Lucina Davenwright: District 5 Female POV (15)
"I don't know which to go with, Luce," comes the usually high-pitched whining of the youngest Davenwright sister, Clarence. Lucina has always found it to be odd that her parents named her sister with such a clearly masculine name while she had such a feminine one, but she figured it had been above her pay grade. A lot has always been above her paygrade, as she's been told time and time again.
Lucina sets down the hairbrush in her hands, the bristles poking and spiked along her scalp as they untangle and undo the knotted locks of brown that torment her nightly. She's able to learn Morse code in just a few hours, but the daily battle of doing her hair torments her daily.
Her younger sister is standing in front of the bedroom mirror on their back wall, which is hung on the door. Her sister's bright blue eyes appraise the pink frilly dress in her hands, which would make her sister look like some sort of fairytale princess, or the rather austere dark blue skirt that goes down to her knees. "Does it matter?" Clarence frowns, holding each one up.
"Well, it is not like you will be televised as you'll just be standing off to the sidelines," Lucina says, ruffling her sister's hair. Warmth has never come easily to her. Sisterhood neither, the interactions that come with speaking to siblings is one of those things that has gotten lost in translation. Robotics and empathy do not mix. Lucina lowers herself down to Clarence's side. "I just need you to show up and support me, okay?"
She tries to hide the bitterness in her voice, but it is a second too late, Clarence's brow furrowing at the implication. It is an impossible implication to miss, what today represents. It's her only day off from school, when the mayor doesn't need her to run any errands or crack any codes or do any "spying" on the rich neighbors that want his downfall and will come up with lies that'll surely headline the Sunday morning papers.
Being reaped for the Hunger Games and having to decorate herself for the sycophants watching through their tiny TV screens has never been something she enjoys doing but is one she must do. It's Clarence's first year. Lucina's suggestion, despite her sister being eleven and not eligible for the reaping age. She must show up. She must see with her own eyes what will become her potential fate should that day ever come, and to know how best to handle it.
Asmates is working. Otherwise, he'd come home, babysit Clarence, but his job dealing with photons and Pascal's number are too important to pass up. Which means Lucina is stuck on babysitting duty.
"Okay, Luce," Clarence says, and Lucina ruffles her hair again.
Her father is still sleeping, she figures, but she doesn't want to go downstairs to check. She doesn't like going into places that don't need her, she doesn't need to waste the time or energy to walk down the stairs, see her dad still sleeping on the couch or wherever he decided to drop for the night, a screwdriver in hand or the shards of shattered lightbulb littering the front of his shirt. It couldn't even be nasty potato chips, but Lucina doesn't do the shopping for the household.
"I would go with the pink. Make yourself look cute," Lucina winks, going back to her vanity on the other side of the room. It bothers her just slightly that she has to share a room despite there being three rooms, and one of them is empty now with Asmates having his own place. Her tick is always an eye twitch, imperceptible to all who know her since no one has gotten close - no one wants to get close enough to the girl, the freakshow, the liar, the mess, the murderer, the waste of spac-
Lucina takes a breath. A deep one, where she feels her lungs expand into her sternum and the building croak of an exhale that comes out is almost like a detonated bomb in her chest. She was doing good too. An intrusive thought like that had waited at least till after the Reaping to rear its ugly head in.
She pictures the thoughts to have horns, antler ones that curve and could pierce through wood and flesh alike. There's foam at the mouth, spewing everywhere. Quite nasty, but what is nastier still is how Lucina envisions herself destroying them, how she'd eviscerate her thoughts in to so many miniscule pieces that they'd be dug up like fossils at a later date by archaeologists hundreds of years from now.
Luckily for her family, for her enemies, for the people Lucina doesn't like and never will care to like, those thoughts have never turned into action.
Clarence dons the cute pink frilly skirt and does a spin. "It's soft!"
"Sometimes Dad does know how to pick a good outfit," Lucina smiles softly again, but she's cheesing it so hard her face hurts. Cuteness doesn't help in this world. Her sister's idyllic innocence won't stop the Peacekeeper invasion if they forget to go, or catch her tears if Clarence Davenwright were to be ever reaped and no one is there to pick her up and save her.
Lucina sure as hell wouldn't do it. Clarence wouldn't do it for her, even if she were reaping age. No one would stick up for her.
Everyone is too selfish for that, and Lucina doesn't blame them. She's seen them, all the volunteers from years before who hail from outer districts - those in the Career districts never do anything selflessly, it is all pomp and circumstance with them, trying to shine the brightest in the halogen lights above their heads - who claim that they are volunteering out of virtue.
Virtue does not stop a blade from meeting its end zone that is a beating heart, and time and time again Lucina adds tallies to all the "good-natured" fools who go into the Games, saving someone's life, for it no matter in the end. Their deaths were meaningless, useless even, not adding anything to the world except another drop of morose hatred and sadness, and Lucina Davenwright hates useless things, things that cannot contribute to the world.
Clarence kisses Lucina on the cheek, and it takes all of the older girl's willpower to not wipe the kiss off of her face. "Well, I'm gonna go get Dad up," Clarence says. "If you do it he'll just yell at you, but he can't yell at me, I'm too cute."
"Maybe too annoying, if anything," Lucina says to herself, and then aloud, "Sounds like a plan, Clair. Bring a pillow with you in case to act like a shield."
Finally, peace and quiet for Lucina to finish getting ready as she goes to sit back down at her vanity, Clarence bounding down the steps. Everything in life must have a purpose, and Lucina in good will for all cannot say her sister's purpose in life is to be cute. It won't save her. Being good, being cute... doesn't stop Panem from taking that life and destroying it. You need to be useful, to provide something for someone in this world, to be a cog in the machine that knows how fast you need to spin. Otherwise...
Lucina sets her hairbrush down, brown eyes appraising how everything just looks off, but it is the best she's going to get, and time is running out.
She goes to stand up and find something in her closet to wear when a loud thump hits the window off to the side. Lucina turns to the noise in time to see a hummingbird, beautiful as can be, fragile and tiny as it can be, fly straight into her bedroom window as if it hadn't noticed a barrier in front of it. A flower, some sort of wildflower found near the District 5 fence line that Clarence had picked up sat on the windowsill, its petals teasingly taunting the hummingbird from afar.
Lucina crosses her bedroom in a few swift strides, opening the windowsill. The hummingbird must've hit the window hard as the bird was on its back, bright amaranthine and cerulean wings flapping crazily, like a beetle struggling to roll over. Its chirps are pathetic now from the pain, one wing bent awkwardly, and the other crumpled underneath it. Either the bird will manage to fly away and live another day, or it shall roll off of the second-story bedroom outdoor windowsill of the Davenwright home to be crushed under a passerby's bootheel.
She takes the hummingbird into her hands. A soft coon in the back of her throat, like when Clarence desperately needs someone to talk to, when she desperately needs a big sister to hold her after all the nightmares. The coon where Lucina refuses to be the comforting sister when pillows, blankets, and a dosage of reality are all Clarence Davenwright needs.
Lucina's neutral expression distorts into a sneer. "Useless!" she spits out at the bird.
Her hands crush the aviary creature to death, the squeaking and cawing of the dying bird almost like music to her ears.
Lucina Davenwright does not have time for the uselessness of the world, and neither does Panem.
All I can say is that this was really fun to do, honestly. I hope you liked Vito and Lucina, and I cannot wait to introduce you to the backhalf of the tribute collection from Districts 1, 3, 4, 6, 7, and 10. Next on the list is to introduce Districts 1 and 10: Zarita Amelle, Camden Winters, Bailey Hyland, and Alejandro Vega, whom I am sure you will enjoy. See you all again with Chapter #12: Gone With the Wind. I hope you have a wonderful day! Love you all! Bye!
~ Paradigm