✄ .・。.・゜✭・.
red, the blood of angry men
black, the dark of ages past
━━━
██ 000. / SHADOW LINE
█ ✄ ... / IT HAPPENED on a cloudless summer's day, at twilight. That was the easiest time, you see, because the hollow streets of Eight were just light enough to see, yet still somewhat shrouded in darkness. Only a sliver of half-light peeked out from beneath the setting sun, managing to just break through the thick blanket of smoke that shielded them. A pale glow flickered from the streetlights, bathing the cracking pavements in a brooding yellow hue.
At twilight, it was light enough to see just about what you needed to, whilst still leaving enough darkness to obscure the ghastly details. Nobody could pinpoint faces. Most couldn't recollect exactly what they had seen.
It was the perfect interval of time between night and day; between the hours that those in Eight were out working, and when they tucked themselves into bed. It was a time of ambivalence and of transition, when people found their minds almost overtaken by the lull of sleep, and everything felt hazy. The final moments of civility, before the night would fall, and the demons could come out to play.
Genius, really, when you thought about it.
Coming after their district-wide curfew, twilight was the time of day in which everything in Eight fell unnaturally still. Throughout the day, moments of silence were rare — the hands were always working, the machines always humming, and the district was so monotonous that it was difficult to hear yourself think. Stillness was the only place where people found the space to breathe.
But with that stillness, came the fear. The formidable feeling that things were too quiet, and that they were all only sitting ducks, helplessly waiting to fall into some kind of trap. Most days, the hours of unease passed by without trouble, and the paranoia went away with sleep. But there were occasions, when the chilling whir of engines disturbed their restless slumber, and the men in white suits poured out into the streets. And they never came quietly. They didn't need to — there was no danger for them in raising their voice.
Instead, they shouted and they screamed.
They fired empty bullets, until their blinding sparks of fire burned through the blackened smoke. They banged on doors until people physically dragged themselves out of bed.
You knew you were in trouble, if they came for you first. If there were still splinters of silence between the engine noise. If nobody else had moved. You see, they never made things messy — not unless they had to. The governance of District Eight was rigorous, running like one well-oiled machine. Everything ran within its perfect structure, because that way, there was no room for anybody to step out of line. Not without paying the price. They did not want to break the system, when it was the only thing sustaining their tenuous control, so that was why they came at night — when things were hazy, and people were too idle to fight back.
Back home, the citizens of Eight had come to refer to the peculiar time of day as the shadow line...
The purgatory interlude between
life
and
death.
So it was no surprise at all that they came at twilight. And of course, they should have seen it coming. He had always been too loud. Too overt. But recently, his heedlessness had reached an all time low.
They should have seen it coming.
You see, you got away with things in Eight, so long as you were quiet enough to get drowned out by the noise. If your slur came in a whisper, or in a movement subtle enough to evade their wandering eyes, but only a fool would be reckless enough to raise their voice.
No, they should have seen it coming. And maybe he had, but Paisley would never know, because she had never gotten the chance to ask.
Preston hadn't seemed like he had known that night though, at least not from what she recalled. He hadn't acted any differently to his usual, explosively-energetic self. Over dinner, he had still quizzed Paisley about the facts she had been learning at school, and gorged on his meal so quickly that his mother had to tell him to slow down.
"Doesn't taste any better the slower it goes in, Ma", he had teased, the same words he repeated so frequently they had become an integral part of the Fawns' routine.
The six of them had eaten their dinner as normal, taking care to be grateful for their rations even if they were sparse. They discussed the usual things, like the fact that Polly was starting her first year of school soon, or the fact that Parker had aced another one of her tests. Lisle spent the entire meal anxiously tapping her foot underneath the table, and when he spotted his wife's unease, Burton had placed a gentle hand on the top of her knee. The pair had even bitten their tongues, when Preston had insisted that he couldn't show gratitude for rations when they were left to starve, and no matter how much they wanted to agree, they knew that the words he spoke were dangerous.
Things seemed... ordinary.
That was the first night Paisley had spotted the blurred lines of ink printed onto her brother's arms — blended with the blackened smudges of dirt that stained his skin. Constructing a bunch of words and symbols she couldn't quite make out.
She had wanted to question him, but she knew the dinner table wasn't the correct place to ask. She would ask him tomorrow, she had thought, when he picked her up from school.
Paisley was too young, but her brother still told her all of his secrets, if she only asked. She knew that he was mixing with a girl from across the bridge, and that he didn't do so well in school, and she knew that when he found the chance to whisper, he would organise secret meetings with his equally-insubordinate friends.
She knew that he hated it in District Eight, and that he wanted to put a stop to the way that things were.
He was like her favourite person in the whole world, and when she grew up, she knew she wanted to be just like him — unshakeable and kind and brave. She wanted him to be proud to call her his little sister, and she wanted him to know that he made the world spin around.
There were many things that she would have told him, if only she'd had the time. Things she would have questioned, if she had known how desperately time was running out.
The three Fawn sisters had been bustled off to bed at eight-thirty, but their brother, being seventeen, was permitted to stay up a little longer. An hour or two later, he would have followed his parents to the second bedroom within the Fawns tiny apartment, and settled himself on the cot in the corner of the room. He was always so self-sacrificial, you see — he hadn't wanted to take up too much space.
But that night, Preston Fawn had never made it to bed.
It must have been around nine-thirty, but Paisley had been so young at the time, she couldn't be sure. It might have been the rampant thudding hat had woken her up, or she might have remained sleeping until the door burst open, and the shouting had started — she couldn't quite recall. But she did remember twisting in her bunk to face Parker, and the look of terror in her sister's eyes.
She hadn't known what was wrong — not then. She was far too young, and too oblivious to the world around her. All she had known was that when nine-year-old Parker Fawn had told her two sisters to stay put, she hadn't felt obedient enough to listen.
When the two girls reached the kitchen, their father was yelling. Their mother seemed to be sobbing helplessly, head buried between her hands. As the Fawns tried to protest — to plead desperately for their son's innocence — Preston's body was already half-way out of the door. Three of them had dragged him; one on each arm, a third pushing him backwards with the point of his gun. But still, he did not seem to have learnt his lesson.
He did not go quietly.
He yelled, and he shoved, and he pleaded. He struggled and he kicked until his limbs grew sore. And the stillness had began to tremble then, the noise starting to lull the silent streets of District Eight out of their slumber. The gunshots started, and so the smoke grew heavier, as Paisley watched her helpless brother get dragged like a rag doll onto the street.
Things became less hazy then, because everything was slowly burning into focus, and time seemed to solemnly stop still. Even now, Paisley found that she could still place most of the eerie details. When she closed her eyes, she could still feel the cold, dampened concrete grazed against her bare feet, and the subtle chill of the breeze blowing against her fragile skin. She could still smell the fumes; taste the precipitation in the air; hear the sound of the wind swaying. And it may have been years, but Paisley could still place their faces — every single one. The band of spirits that followed her around like a bad dream.
Five of them, and not a soul any older than twenty, lined up like animals about to become prey.
You see, in District Eight, those who were youthful were dangerous. They were dauntless and unruly, not yet having developed enough tact to stifle their rage. Desensitised to their militant environment, they whispered and schemed beneath the noise of their machines; they were reckless and abrasive and untamed.
Most of them were clever enough to be subtle. Some of them were not.
Some of them put a target on their backs.
The crowds had gathered now, seeming scarily unsure or understanding of the situation. Some of them had coats, others appeared in their nightgowns, but almost all had bare feet, leaving the elements to prey on their soot-covered skin.
It grew noisier. The people in the surrounding crowd continued to stir, and the men in the white suits continued to shout. There were several faces like her mother's, wailing like they were suffering from the most excruciating pain they thought imaginable. Paisley watched as her mother fell to the ground, blood gushing from her knees as her father struggled to keep her contained. They couldn't fight back. Fighting only made things worse. She felt Parker reach for her hand, trying to drag her to hide behind their parents, but Paisley didn't find it within herself to move.
She stood right there, at the front of the broken crowd, staring at her brother like she was the bravest soul in the world.
Preston's eyes had fixated on his second youngest sister, throwing her an expression that only she could have placed. He looked at her for a moment — just a second, before bringing up his forefinger to push horizontally across his nose. It was a simple gesture, unbeknown to anybody else, but it meant everything to her.
That was the final thing Paisley saw, before the bullet flew right through her brother's head.
Somewhere amongst all of the commotion, it had started to rain. Paisley must have missed it, but she could hear it now the rumbles were not stifled by the sound of guns. The steady flow of water washed over the bodies like a current, infusing itself with the blood escaping from their heads. She remembered standing there — frozen, as the crimson fluid pooled around her exposed feet. She could still picture it creeping up her ankles, slowly travelling until it stained the bottom of her nightgown red. And the words that littered his skin were smudging, trickling like teardrops until his arms looked colourless and clean.
She was almost older than him now — only a few months from eighteen. Older than her older brother, the person she had once worshiped for being so experienced and wise.
Paisley learnt that day that death did not come quietly. It did not come peacefully and methodically, like the passing of the setting sun. It barged in at the most unexpected moment and made its presence known, like the whirring of an engine, or the dropping of a bomb. It came like a monster in the night, stealing children from their homes. It was sudden and it was rash, with flames of anguish and shrieks of pain. And it was certainly not peaceful. It sounded like the firing of a gun, or the booming roar of thunder. And that night, it had felt like the debilitation of her entire body, lost and broken at the sight of her brother's body splayed across the ground.
And so, from that moment, seven-year-old Paisley Fawn decided that she did not want to die, not if she could help it. She decided that death was something menacing, and something that should be feared.
Fawns were supposed to be harmless. An animal that was gentle, and youthful, and pure. They were not supposed to be martyrs, lying motionless with a hole blown into their skull.
That was the night that Paisley Fawn had lost the right to say she had a brother. That was the night that the Fawn Four had become three.
❛ red, the colour
of desire
black, the colour
of despair ❜
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AUTHOR'S NOTE . . . well, that was *intense*.
but anyway, hello and welcome to needlepoint (eek). I'm aware that this was very dark, but you've gotta get that trauma from the offset you know, it's important to know when we meet how fucked up our girl is in the first chapter (oh joy!). but no, in all seriousness, I decided to include this scene as the prologue because it's naturally a very integral part of paisley's childhood and is going to play a major part in her characterisation, and the way that she thinks and behaves. naturally, because it isn't a particularly pleasant thing for a seven year old child to go through.
but even though this chapter was only short, I very much enjoyed writing it because I got to introduce small inklings of paisley's backstory and of my interpretation of district eight without giving too much away, as all will become clear in chapter one. I've been working really hard on the world-building and coming up with the laws, structures, environment and lifestyle that make up what the district is like, and I'm really pleased with the stuff I've come up with, so I'm excited to share it with you guys further. but anyway, it is four in the damn morning, and this was written completely spontaneously, so now I shall be going to sleep. love you all, hope I didn't depress you too much!
goodnight!
— dani x