fae moreno » d1 » complete

apparentia - -

Some little girls get porcelain dolls for their birthdays, with pretty hair spun from silk and golden thread, cascading down their little glass shoulders. They’ll dress them up in clothes finer than the fabrics adorning the people around them, the doll’s tiny painted smile seeming more important to them than a hungry child or a dying mother who would be saved by the tiniest portion of food. They don’t see past the beautiful thing in their hands, the tiny body that’s plush with goose feathers and the flawless, ceramic limbs, cleaner than the servants that bring them their food, that bathe them and brush their hair. A tiny little doll can take precedent over the world for a little girl who names herself a mother.

Sad, isn’t it? That a toy could be more important than everyone in the world combined for a child. That they can’t seem to open their eyes wide enough to see what kind of horrors surround them. They see through a mesh of lies and luxury, diamonds pulled taught into the glimmering threads that shield their vision and their growing minds. This will be what their future will look like, too; inheritance will make sure of that. They’ll never know differently than the welcoming doorstep of house that’s not so much house or even mansion, but closer to a castle to the lowly peasants that look upon it’s glory and look away just as quickly. There’s no place for commoners in a little girl’s mind, only what she knows to be her own life. It’s hard to break free from that mindset, isn’t it?

But even that little girl must have someone to tend to her, just like she tends to her doll. Except that child that was burdened with the responsibility for someone who was no older than herself was nothing of the perfect toy that was carried around. No, she was the forgotten sister of that precious possession. The one that wasn’t good enough, or that was dropped before anyone could become attached, a dent put into her pinky or her shoulder or her cheek. Enough excuse to buy a new one, a better model. She had blemishes. Not spotty skin or watery eyes, but the rough hands of a young woman who’d never had a childhood. Of someone who had been doing chores and cleaning up after other people’s messes for as long as she could remember.

She’s just a short thing, skinny in the way that malnutrition will make a girl. There’s nothing particularly spectacular about her build, nothing to suggest that she’s anything but what she is: a servant. She even still has a light padding of baby fat that she’s yet to grow out of, no matter how much training she’s put through. Just a couple inches around her hips, soft and nearly healthy-looking, if it weren’t for the fact that it was always covered in drab clothes. Things that were hardly better than rags. Either tattered remains of the other children’s clothing stitched together as quickly as possible to make something that resembled a pair of trousers or a blouse, maybe a dress or two that hung in strips and frayed edges around her knees where she couldn’t hem the end properly. No, she wasn’t often granted the beautiful things that the rest of the Moreno children were gifted.

She’s not beautiful. Cute, maybe, or even pretty, with her softened features. As if everything about her is muted, from the oval of her face with its gently curving chin to her cheekbones, which don’t stand out as much as they do blend into the rest of her face. She may have a ski-slope of a nose but even it’s rounded at the edges, more of a gentle decline and jump for the faint of heart than the brave and courageous. Even her eyes are closer to steely-grey, the colour of the ocean on a cloudy day, preparing for a storm to come that’ll wash the dirt off the rocks, a promise for a new surface that hasn’t quite arrived than they are the blue of the sky on a summer afternoon. Her lips are full and plush, budding roses settled on her childish face. When she smiles, her mouth doesn’t part to show her teeth, instead remaining closed as if she’s ashamed of the little white rows that lay underneath. Her peaches and cream skin is always decorated with bruises, evidence of the other children's cruelty. Evidence that she doesn't belong.

She has a cascade of dark brown hair, a waterfall of waves and curls and knots that makes its way down her back, tickling her waist with its thick locks and strands. Her hair is her one vanity, though she’d never let it be known when that would almost certainly mean waking up with tufts falling right off of her head and onto the floor. Instead, she often wears it up in tight braids and knots that hurt her head, but at least it makes her nutrition-dulled hair seem like just another reason she can only be looked at as plain. At least when she’s inspected beside her "siblings," all of them prettier or handsomer than the last. Really, it’s no surprise that she’s not one of them. Not really.

- - persona

When you look around, what do you see? Do your eyes focus on beautiful sceneries, the finery that’s paid for in blood and winnings? Do you gaze upon gold and silver, marble and jewels, columns inlaid with mother-of-pearl so it glimmers with the riches of the sea and all of the lost treasures swept within it? Do you see only the glory of the world, the fabricated planet that seems like more of a dream than a reality, a whimsical fairytale place where there’s princes and princesses, dukes and duchesses, families with crowns sitting upon their heads and shining thrones at their spines? Do you sweep your hands along gathered silk and furs, run your fingers over velvet robes and cashmere sweaters as you look around and see nothing that you could want, since you already have it all?

Or do you see the very same scene, all of the painted details and hope-washed buildings, and find your heart aching for a way out of this prison that’s been made your house, even though it’s nowhere near a home? Is all of this beauty just a layer over what you know lies truly underneath, at least for you? It doesn’t matter what you’re surrounded by, even if many people in the streets look at you with envy when it should be pity reflected in their eyes. You can only go so far living a lie, though that’s not something that ever occurs to your masters and mistresses. What does it turn you into, seeing through the smoke and mirrors of a land created for the rich, the powerful, the almighty and influential? How does it feel to not fit in either here or there, to be a creature with one foot in Wonderland and one foot in a wasteland? A dead end?

What becomes of the girl who grew up in a tight cocoon of all the things she could never have? It’s only natural that she holds a little bit of bitterness in her heart, the secret desire to become somehow better than the rest of the children that live under the vaulted roof of the Moreno manor. Just a tiny wild thing, hidden deep within her chest, shielded and protected and trapped within the confines of her ribs, a caged thing that’s not strong enough to spring. She’s too weak anyways, a failing student in the art of war. She can’t wield a blade or hold a sword, can’t even keep her spine straight enough to radiate the assertiveness and courage that makes Career tributes worth betting on. She’s too weak to be treasonous, even if sometimes the taunting voices of her "brothers and sisters" follow her to bed, making her throat clog up as she keeps all the lights on, just in case one of them come to slit her throat.

She’s no threat, with her scrawny limbs. She may be quick, but it comes out of fearfulness, not skill. She’s no more able than any of the others, and, if anything, even her speed isn’t enough to get her out from under the feet of the rest of the household. So instead she walks around as a ghost of a girl, hiding in the nooks and crannies and dark corners that make up the grand house. Constantly condescending herself as she dodges blows but makes none of her own, climbing trees and running up stairs and only coming out when she must at training, otherwise hiding in the library to read up on herbs and plants and traps. Things that don’t impress the others, but at least it’s enough to keep her "parents" from kicking her out. No servant is irreplaceable, afterall.

She’s attentive in a way that only adds to her pain. As she takes in the expensive trinkets that others throw away, or even those that they prize, she’s consumed with a covetousness that has her heart aching for just one lovely thing to call her own. Otherwise her observations come only to make sure she can get out of the way before someone’s about to snap, a side effect of an all-encompassing timidness that has her cowering at the first signs of danger. Her caution isn’t appreciated where she’s been forced to stay, even if it’s very likely the only way she’s stayed alive for so long. She’s just a girl who’s trapped by her own phobias, ensnared in a need to always be on the look out for the slightest hazard. She doesn’t live so much as she does wait for the next thing to go wrong. With her watchful eye she learns, and as she’s slowly become to realize this she’s birthed a sort of philomathy. A desire to study those around her to see just what makes them tick.

In light of, or maybe especially because of, all of her faults, she’s astoundingly good at her job. In fact, it may be one of the only things she’s talented at. She’s a dutiful girl who takes every task seriously, carrying out what she’s ordered to do thoroughly, if with a heavy heart. She’s industrious and knows how to make the most of what she has, though she can’t seem to give herself any praise for what she is able to do. She only sees the gaps in what she can’t do, in what sets her apart from the others. Not quite another student, she’s not promising enough for that. Instead she’s forced into meekness and a sort of gentleness for her captors. She tends to them with a caring hand, as if they’re delicate and feeble instead of the beasts that would happily tear her to shreds. As easy to pass by as a wall or a cat, a perfect confidant if there ever comes a time in which someone’s close to their breaking point. A listener that can easily be cast away and thrown to the dogs.

A girl with nothing to gain and hardly more to lose.

historia - -

A lifetime ago she had lost her parents, and already she doesn’t remember a thing about them. Not their faces, which are blurry things in her mind, rippling and splashing and breaking apart as if every image of them is seen under water. They’re just ghosts in her mind, and sometimes she wonders if she made them up altogether. Sometimes, she likes to tell herself that they were good people, that they’d be proud of her for finding a way to live without them, for going on and living and trying her best to make a name for herself. Trying her best in general. Most of the time, she just wonders if they’d laugh at her for moving up into one of the glorious houses that they could never have afforded themselves, if they’d shake their heads at her for choosing to be a servant instead of another cold body lying on the concrete, waiting for some trader to find rotting weeks after she’d died of starvation or cold.

The funny thing about losing her parents when she was so young is that she just couldn’t be sure. She could only have been four when they left one day and just never made it back home. She didn’t even know what they did, and time has taken away everything else that she once knew. She doesn’t even remember their names. If she hadn’t had to use her own every day after that still, she can be almost certain that she wouldn’t even remember her own. Disuse has rendered them nothing but useless memories, another reason to throw herself a small pity party in her room after a particularly hard day of work. One that she’ll quickly dig herself out of, but the few minutes that she gets to spend with her cheek pressed to a straw-filled pillow is the only reason for her to even try to call upon their memory.

(If she truly wanted to know, she’d learn that her parents were rebels. They had tried to start a revolution in whispers and rumours, in all of the little ways that would spread fast but not quickly enough. They were secretive, and in their own way, they were good people. There was enough to them that they nearly did it, on a small scale, but District 1 is no place for a rebellion when it’s more of a stir than it is a revolution. There’s no such thing as moderate change in a land full of comfortable people. There’s not even enough who are suffering so badly that they’ll leap at the chance for any sort of difference. So instead of a turning point in history, all her parents managed was bullets through each of their heads, their daughter’s name dying on their lips with them.)

After her parents didn’t come home, it didn’t take long for the Peacekeepers to come. She didn’t know what was happening. She thrashed and screamed and cried, begging for mercy or forgiveness, whatever she needed to beg for. She thought she was in trouble, but after a few questions about her parents that ended only in the blunt truth that they would never be coming home, she was sent off to an orphanage. Even then she wasn’t a threat. There were no poisonous thoughts leaked into her mind, just what was taught at school. The toxins that were injected into everyone at a young age, keeping them tightly in the grasp of the Capitol.

She spent years at that orphanage. Long, lonely years. The other children were either too old for her to play with or too young, and the one other that was her age liked only to pinch her and call her names as tears and snot ran down her ruddy cheeks. She was an ugly duckling as a child, bones bagged under thin skin and dusty hair, her eyes alien-like in their largeness. A gawky, misplaced child. Even the keepers of the orphanage didn’t like her much, trying to pawn her off every chance they got. Most took one look at her and chose someone who looked stronger. Who looked like they could be a leader - a Victor.

Exactly fifty-three days after her seventh birthday, her luck changed. For once, she was pointed out and taken away just as quickly, with the scratching of pens on paper and the shuffling of sheets on desks. She clung to her new mother’s skirts, smiling for the first time in what felt like years. She cast her eyes upon a palace and thought she’d found a queen to call her a princess, thought she’d been carried away to a fairytale where she’d meet a knight and live happily ever after. Instead, she found herself being thrown into training. When she wasn’t training, she was brushing other girl’s hair with fine bone combs, carrying around platters bigger than her head and shining of silver, staring at tables loaded with more food than she weighed as she waited and waited to be invited to dinner with them.

That never came. There was no change from her duties, no difference or improvement in her training. If she could have proved herself, maybe another child would be found to take her place, to be handmaid and servant and cleaner for the household, but instead she failed at every aspect of training except when it came to hiding. No one could beat her at hide-and-go-seek.

As the years ticked by, there was a transformation though. Not in what she was made to do or how she was treated. She was still a prisoner, jumping at shadows and stuffing cloth into her mouth to stop from making a sound as she woke from horrid nightmares of what the other children might do to her. It was something inside of her that became different. A certain kind of affection bloomed deep within her, a love for the house and all those who inhabited it. A sort of responsibility over those under the roof, from the nearly-kind Coco, who she only saw the best in, to the moody Kyros, who she'd always try to get the best of everything for, just in the hopes that he would notice and smile for it. She should have hated them all, she knew it too well, but there was no one to tell her about Stockholm’s Syndrome or how to fight it.

She’s given her heart over to those who would destroy her at the drop of a pin, and she can’t seem to find it in her to mind.