Chapter Text
Life is worth living. Life is worth living. Life is worth living.
To be fair, I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. Not the children’s league, not the fighting, and certainly not Cole. But things happen as they do, and you can’t always control the way things fall. And there really is no point in thinking about what you could have done differently, or else you are letting time be your master, instead of mastering your time. Mastering myself has only really become something I’ve been able to do recently. And even then, I’m much more of a novice. For most of my life, I felt and acted like a petal in the wind, going where I was led, not having the capability for roots, but still searching for somewhere to land.
I didn’t even want to join the children’s league. They were psychos from what I’d heard. But that’s all grownups, I suppose. Every man with an idea for good is a man with an agenda. My intel about the League was reliable; it came from the kids themselves. From the number of groups of children I hitchhiked with and directed across America, I had heard a few things about the children’s league.
That they would hurt you and put you in fights. That they would run tests on you. That they would send you on dangerous missions. Some wilder stories even said that people there would try to kill the children.
One girl I’d seen had shown up on my doorstep disfigured, a long scar curling from the base of her skull in the back of her neck, all the way up to the side of her eye. The eye itself was permanently red, with veins of white. It was a sharp contrast from the rest of her face. It was clear she was beautiful, with warm brown eyes, a sharp nose, and high cheekbones. The scar made her beauty even more obvious, in the sort of way that the sunset is only so vibrant from the air pollution.
She wouldn’t talk about it. I didn’t ask, to be fair, but my job isn’t to ask questions people aren't willing to answer. The aftermath of all of this is the time for questions, hugs, and comfort. Hopefully, I will be long gone and lost to memory by the time that happens. Which requires me to stay out of the Children’s League’s records and the media.
My solution to this was movement. Never stay in the same place for longer than a week. Never tell an adult my real name. Don’t screw anyone over. Don’t screw myself over. When in doubt, shoot first. Don’t harm a child. Keep moving. Keep moving. Don’t ever stop moving. There was never a shortage of places to stay. Many people left the country. The rest just stayed in their homes, in fear of the government or their own kids.
In America, there are around 15,462 campsites, spread across 48 states; Alaska and Hawaii weren’t on my list. Of these 15,462, around 9/10 were abandoned after IAAN. In the eight years of the virus, two months of which were spent in a camp or holding facility, I have visited more than 150 campsites. I switch around every two weeks or so, but if I switch places within the campsite during that time.
To get to said campsites, I have to get a ride. Having my own vehicle is too easy to trace. Believe it or not, kids aren't as willing to give you a ride for free nowadays. Granted, half of them don’t know how to drive anyway, but it’s still frustrating. Here is where the trading comes in. It’s all about what the group wants, not what they need. They may need cash for food, but most of them want information. Trading skills are things I learned from my Dad. He was a drug dealer, so he always knew what people wanted. Unfortunately, he also wanted the same thing. Like father, like daughter. Information is my drug.
But kids usually want information about the Slip Kid, and boy, do I have information on him. See, I was only in an actual camp for around two months. The first two months, where the government was so confused and disorganized that they lost a bunch of kids. People kept pouring into camps, and it was somewhat easy to slip away. Records weren’t finalized, and there was no effort to keep things stable because everyone assumed the whole situation would be over in a couple of months. Something to be less than a chapter in a history textbook. “The time the kids went crazy and got powers.” In fifty years, people would be suspicious that it wasn’t all a hoax. In one hundred, it would be something brought up as a trivia question. No one expected the near-apocalypse that was currently dominating the United States of America.
They didn’t have calm control then, which I have had the pleasure of experiencing multiple times when a PSF tried to catch me. Their color testing was rudimentary and mostly relied on what the kids themselves said. No one expects a nine-year-old to lie to a doctor. That was one of their first mistakes. So I was put in the green cabins, labeled as a non-threat. Hilarious, as the Greens were the smartest in the bunch. To underestimate them was the government’s second mistake. There were so many of us in our matching green uniforms that people lost count. A herd of children, turned victims, turned weapons, turned prisoners. It was easy to slip away. And I had to slip away, to protect my secret. If I had stayed there, they would have found out what I am. They would have seen the flame in my blood. They would have figured out what I am. I’m a Red.
I’ve always known I was a Red. There was a fire just underneath my skin even before IAAN, and then when the disease happened, the fire wasn’t just a metaphor anymore; it was real. It was beautiful. The flames that I could summon at will, that I could control. Everything felt like it finally clicked. I felt powerful. I felt like a fire bender, and because I had taken some martial arts as a kid, there were a few times where I did look like a fire bender as well. By the time I discovered my power, I had already left my parents. A blessing, as they would have sold me to a skip tracer instantly. Anything for a few extra dollars. Then they would have known I was Red, and I would have gone somewhere far worse than Macolinda IAAN control center. I got information from people on the road. I knew what they did to the Reds before they took them all away. And I knew what they did after.
I remember arriving to camp. Scared, confused, lost. No one knew I was a Red. I barely knew what being a Red meant. So it was a secret I had to keep. Something that was better off being forgotten, unused. Like me. I wanted to stay that way, forgotten by the world. It wouldn’t be hard, there weren’t people in the real world who would mourn me anyway. There wasn’t even someone to check for my name in the list of the dead. So when they asked if I’d been sorted already, I lied. I was a Green in the eyes of the United States Government, the only people that seemed to matter.
I lived in a cabin of sorts. It was dark and smelled wet even though it was always dry. So dry that skin cracked in the summer instead of just the winter. There were three bunk beds, two on one side of the cabin and one on the other. After living in my own room for my whole life, I then had gained eleven roommates. Who got the bunk bed didn’t rotate. There was no system developed by the seven to thirteen year old girls. I was one of the oldest, but one of the last ones there. I didn’t get a bed. Instead, I slept on the wet dry floor for two months, listening to the cicadas underneath the wooden floorboards. Sometimes in the middle of the night one would pop up through a crack and we’d have to find it in the dark cabin. Swinging our arms around wildly in our search. We’d accidentally hit each other, run into each other. But this was the best time. It was the only time we were able to touch without getting punished. When you’re deprived of contact, a punch feels like a kiss. I didn’t really talk to the girls during that time. It was such a blip in my life that I remember the sleeping hours of the cabin more than the waking. The floor was where I stayed for two months. Until one day, I got out.
My escape wasn’t daring or bold. It was embarrassingly and patheticly simple. I pretended to be dead right by the electric fence. PSF’s thought I had electrocuted myself. It wouldn’t have worked if I’d stayed a month longer. Because two weeks after I left a Yellow electrocuted three PSF officers and killed them when trying to escape. They burned his body after they killed her. They burned all the bodies after that.
They carried me outside the camp into the woods, and left me to the animals. The woods were well known to have wolves, we all heard them late at night when we were trying to cry as silently as possible. The officers assumed that no one would fake death because they would fear being left to nature. Security is better than the unknown and whatnot. But the wolves were the least scary things in those woods. Better to die to nature where you know what they’ll do to your body than to die at the hands of man, touched as a corpse. Once they’d cleared the area, I simply got up and walked away. A dead girl walking. I had to light a fire somewhere else to distract guards from thinking my death through too thoroughly. It was the first big fire I’d ever made. It wouldn’t be the last.
But I was out. And pretty soon I had learned that the place to go was the Slip Kid’s camp. At the time, I was 13. That was 8 years ago. I knew some things from meeting a few stragglers on the road. I knew Clancy Grey was the Slip Kid, I knew he was an Orange, and I knew that before I officially joined the camp, I would watch a little from the outside. And what I saw made me turn away from Oranges and the camp for a very long time.
I watched him take girls into his room, watched him compliment them, lure them, trap them. It was barbaric. He would manipulate everyone, using his powers to control them, and they wouldn’t even know. And the ones that did know what was really happening, what he was doing, accepted it as a price to pay for his protection. The president’s son was a hero to these kids. To speak against him was blasphemy. “In the name of peace.” That was the solidification of my belief that the ends don’t always justify the means. Clancy Grey and his actions were the final straw.
So I left. At thirteen years old I did what so many kids in America had to do and I went on the lam. I taught myself how to drive, how to do basic first aid, how to be a lookout. I figured out quickly how to watch my back. I spent a year in an old family cabin with a border collie I had healed named Rosco. Rosco was a good dog. But that year I learned and mastered my abilities. I tamed the monster that they were, befriended it even. I got up early to run so in the future I could run from skip tracers. I climbed trees so the government couldn’t catch me. I taught myself how to steal, how to lie, and how to get what I wanted. How to manipulate. Every adult I ran into was an opportunity for me to gain experience.
Sometimes I pandered, acting like a kicked puppy, lost in the wild. Other times I acted out, taking all of my rage out on a man at a truck stop who was a bit too friendly. I stole too many people’s cars to count, and found new hobbies like dumpster diving behind gas stations. Some days I felt feral, like a dog just waiting for someone to try to pet it so I could bite a hand. Most days I didn’t talk. My clothes turned to rags, getting caught on branches and thorns.
Getting my period for the first time alone in the woods I cried. It felt particularly cruel to be alone that day. It felt even worse when I realized that even if things had been how they were, and I was still living with my parents, my mother wouldn’t have helped me. It created a mood and I burned down three acres of someone’s cornfield before finally getting myself to an abandoned pharmacy to steal pads and tampons. Now I stay stocked with them at all times, in case a young girl needs them, or needs someone to be there to explain what’s happening.
A year and a half after leaving Macolinda, I gained a new goal. To help kids on the road just like me. I was a few months shy of fifteen, and I started my pursuit. I went looking for people, then when I found them I acted like it was an accident. This performance only went on for half a year, just until my name got out in the world and I had people coming to find me. It was a thick web of damaged children. I give them money, food, and information. In the corniest way possible, I was given a nickname by a ten year old girl obsessed with fairytales. Rumpelstiltskin. Rumple for short. I helped send her back to her parents. She was one of the lucky few with a mom and dad who missed her and would take her back. In the roughly six and a half years of moving around and having my network, I helped and traded with more than 400 kids. I remember every single one. Maybe not their names, but at the very least I remember their stories.
Not everyone I dealt with was good. Kids can be cruel, evil. The capacity to cause pain does not awaken purely at the age of eighteen. Some of the teenagers would try to take more than they gave. But through force or other means, I always convinced them otherwise. Very few knew that I was a Red. Most thought me Green, and I didn’t refute this idea. Stories of me spread on the hidden channels of America. People would travel miles to find me, like they would the Slip Kid. It seems silly now. I wasn’t offering them much. Not a place to stay, not safe. Just things to pass on. A way to move forward, a path to follow.
Some came to me with ulterior motives. They’d heard of this girl who lived alone, traveling without a weapon, a lowly Green trying to live above her means. I had a few Peeping Toms, most of which were unwelcome, but not all. One Yellow I met in Virginia had a lovely time with me in the room of a motel we were staying in. By the time I had a web of people large enough that people sought me out I was fifteen.
Living alone for so long makes you paranoid, scared. But it also made me comfortable. I felt invincible. The only harm that could come to me was when I was off my guard. I rarely interacted with adults, they weren’t a threat. I became complacent in my own loneliness. It left me vulnerable.
I got captured by the Children’s League when I was eighteen years old. Everything that happened after is a wound that still hurts. Life is worth living, life is worth living, life is worth living.