So Kalyd had contacted the Capitol, and he'd received his state-of-the-art tools by supersonic train, and he'd begun to hammer and sand and drill into the house that had fallen apart. In the weeks prior, his escort had been pressuring him to choose a "talent," as the Capitol liked to call the televised victor hobbies that consumed great swathes of official airtime, and Kalyd was fortunate that he hadn't rushed himself and chosen landscape painting, as he'd been so tempted to do at first. Staring at scenic vistas while desperately developing his fine motor skills might've passed the time adequately, but staring at scenic vistas while driving nails into fresh boards provided a strange kind of relief. He'd been angry for a long time, he realized as he worked his anger into the house's foundation. He'd been more optimistic than angry, and this was what had saved him in the end, but some of the man who'd beat against the walls of his regeneration room still huddled inside of his weary body, so angry at times that he could not feel anything at all. So he expelled that man as he drilled through old slabs of plywood, as he stared at the district that had transformed while he'd slept; it was only once he'd released the anger that he'd allow himself to swivel around, to finally look from the neighborhoods that had abandoned him to the seascape that never could. Once he'd finished all of the dismantling and rearranging, and once he'd torn his way through the larger, more dangerous tasks—this took about six long months, during which time half the district had begun to whisper eagerly about the house's future—Kalyd found that the fiercest pieces of his identity had dissolved with the workload, and he re-entered the district center that night with no trace of bitterness remaining, and he introduced himself to the people crowded in the government-supervised forum for the first time, and he was glad to meet them all.
The next six months took Kalyd by surprise, not because they were any easier to live than the first six months but because he received help in doing so. The adults he met were perfectly pleasant, of course—they'd appreciated his eulogy, they'd seen the way he treated American during the final battle and they'd thought of it warmly for months—but the children in particular took a liking to him, and they began to follow him wherever he went. He found that he could complete a good deal of work on the house while school remained in session, but when the afternoon bell rang and a stream of children coursed across the bluffs toward his half-completed house, he was forced to hide his tools in a shed he'd built beside the east wing and stand outside the front door, warning children away from the building. The problem was that they interpreted these warnings as invitations; they liked Kalyd, and they'd seen him on TV, and they'd learned that he did not yet view the world in the ways that an adult should, so they asked him about "Old District Four" and they scattered their muddy loafers across the unfinished floors and they made attempts at simple, stupid conversation. This was the kind of conversation that Kalyd liked best, so after a good three weeks of attempting to repel the children from his second home, he resigned himself to their presence. And after a good three weeks of them simply lingering around the house, he decided he might as well let them do something, and he pulled out the brushes and the paint cans and he let them paint over the old, garishly-pastel walls in brand-new garishly-pastel colors. (Some of them refused to work for free. Because of this, Kalyd ended up with about fourteen pre-teens on salary and a strict verbal agreement not to discuss child employment practices with the Peacemakers. By some strange miracle, their secret remained safe.)
The house grew into itself as Kalyd grew into the community, and, in both of these respects, Kalyd did not want his work to ever end. He added tasks that weren't strictly necessary to the completion of the job—he built a new wing on the east side of the house for social gatherings, he ate dinner with several employees' families—and at some point he realized that he'd stopped building and integrating simply for the sake of moving things forward. He'd entered "New District Four" with that explicit goal in mind, of course, because he'd wanted a future and he'd wanted to change, but building a life had seemed so much like labor at first that he'd been forced to treat it as such. But the nature of his daily life had changed, hadn't it?
☠Kalyd Journeyman's Fading☠
Comincia dall'inizio
