amina; d2 [wip]

a m i n a

"lyric
lyric"

She was born to be faceless. Stripped of her identity, left to be nothing but a sponge and submerged in pools of blood. Her only purpose was to absorb, to consume her surroundings and find her method of survival.

Every morning she wakes up to four whitewashed walls, smooth floorboards, a mirror, and a sink. She learned to make her bed first thing in the morning because within the Black Room sloppiness was punished. After making her bed, she looks into the mirror to find a face that does not belong to her. A blank stare sits behind dark brown eyes surrounded by skin that's a lighter shade of black and blemished by the occasional spot. The hair she sees is curly and tied into a ponytail; it's easier to fight and train when it's that way.

Those thin lips naturally sit in a straight line, Amina knows that if those lips were to ever curl up there would be dimples on the cheeks. She knows the face that stares back at her so intimately but it doesn't belong to her. It's a blank slate, a canvas waiting for a mask - a tool that belongs to the Capitol.

She was born to wear the masks the Capitol fashioned for her. In the corner of her room sits a row of twelve books, detailing the culture and history of each District. Every day, for an hour, she practices how to act like them. To talk like them, to act like them, to walk like them, to think like them. She wears the masks well, like tools, she picks them up and drops them at a mere whim. Her instructors say she has a talent for acting, in another life where she is born far away in the Capitol she might've been an actress on those cringe Capitol soap operas.

Heh, imagine that.

That would mean seeing her name in flashing lights - but she doesn't know what that would look like. She has no last name, Amina's mother never told them her last name when she made the sale. The Black Room didn't see the need to give her one, so she was simply Amina X. No identity, no story - just a filler. Not exactly made for flashing lights. She finds comfort in the fact that when she does undercover, she'll have temporary last names to go with the mask.

A notebook sits on a desk on the other side of the room. One of the pages is titled Surnames, the letters placed neatly at the top of the page from when she was eleven years old. It's a page of names she'd like to use when she's brought into the Widow Unit and begins to go undercover. She even took the liberty of categorizing each name by District and then highlighting them based on how exciting the name was. From names like Soren and Nyoni all the way to names like Turner and Bolt. There was a story behind each name.

They watched the Hunger Games in the mess hall when it was on. She was always envious of the surnames the tributes had, the banners and legacies they carried. Career dynasties like Fray and Le Roux were flashy but even the subtler identities such as Keeni and Salazar had stories to tell. So she added more and more names as the years went by, slowly adding pages. An identity, even if only temporary, was motivation enough for her to excel in her brutal training.

And brutal it was. Her class size slowly shrunk over the years, because the weak were not worthy of becoming Widows. She'd overheard the instructors mention that around 20% of a cohort in a given year survived to become Widows.