{katie morven||d3}{DONE!}

More often than not, the first thing many notice about Katie is her smile. It's hard to miss; though her lips are a bit on the thin side, she has a slightly wide mouth and well-taken-care-of teeth which tend to add to the genuine happiness which lies behind her cheery expression. When she smiles, Katie's whole face seems to lift and brighten; her high cheekbones, already prominent, become more so with dimples, and small crinkles form at the corners of her eyes. Her nose, which is on the large side - but no monster - also tends to wrinkle up with good humor when the girl grins. The inside corners of her eyebrows raise, softening their natural arch and chasing away the shadows beneath them. Light seems to play from within her eyes, making their deep shade of brown more dynamic, rendering visible the thin ribbons of yellow-green that wind around her pupils.
When Katie is not smiling, all of that changes. Her eyebrows almost always pull together in introspection while her eyes narrow and the light ceases to catch in them. Her chin seems to become sharper as she juts it out ever-so-slightly and tilts her head down.
Katie never can hide her emotions, so rarely is there a blank look on her face; her wide, open facial features are far too expressive for apathy.
Her skin tends toward the pale side, especially in winter; in summer, it tans slightly, but never freckles. The skin on her hands has many small burns from working with electric wires; the skin on her face is also scarred, but for a different reason: Katie had horrible acne in her mid-teenage years. She now has her breakouts under control, but cannot take back the many days and nights she spent scratching at the scabs on her face and combing her fingers back through her hair in frustration.
Though it is often tied up for work, when left loose Katie's hair reaches nearly to her elbows in relaxed waves. Her bangs often also need to be pinned up during work; though they curve sideways just above her eyebrows, they have the annoying tendency to fall into the girl's eyes as she leans her head down over the machines that she helps to create. Katie's hair is, in winter, the same deep oakbark of her eyes; however, during the sunnier months, it lightens to a medium shade of chestnut.
Katie's body is lean, but with angles too sharp for it to be considered lithe. Her shoulders are delicate and slanted; between them sits a prominent collarbone, up from which a slender throat extends. The girl's arms have very little muscling, but little excess fat, so they hang down from her shoulders in a relaxed way - though when Katie is in a bad mood, she has a tendency to clamp her forearms to her sides, allowing her elbows to jut out awkwardly as her long, slender fingers curl up into tense half-fists.
The rest of her body is much the same way - all sharp angles and long bones held together in a structure which measures up to five feet, seven-and-one-quarter inches. As far as feminine figures go, Katie's is far from impressive; her endowment is only slight and her hips are too high and sharp to be very attractive. However, her thighs and waist are fairly slim, and her legs would be considered very nice-looking if not for her awkwardly inward-pointing knees.
Still, the ensemble which is Katie's body is not altogether bad; in her own way, Katie is pretty, even beautiful. When viewed with an unbiased eye, the girl has a regal quality to her face and carriage, a quality which is occasionally enhanced by her personality.

Though Katie is close to many people, no one is close to Katie. She lives entirely in the moment - or as much as she can force herself to, anyhow - to protect herself from past and future. To form a bond is to be dependent, to trust is to weaken oneself. She forces herself to undergo each experience in life while discarding the previous ones so as not to let them cloud her judgement. People like the girl because of this. It is a trait often perceived as a penchant for forgiveness and willingness to let go of the past. In reality, it is not forgiveness, but impunity. Katie is not so much willing to forget as she is unwilling to allow herself the luxury of memory. To remember, in her opinion, is to allow oneself to judge, which can lead to hatred. To hate is to have courage to face the past. In reality, it has taken Katie more courage than she knows just to keep such a tight control of her perceptions.
The unfortunate part of the girl's self-micromanagement is this: her courage is misdirected. She spends so much energy battling herself that Katie has none left to battle the world. She's vulnerable, very much so, and easily hurt.
Don't let that fool you, though. Katie may be unstable emotionally fragile, but she is neither naive nor gullible. She knows that accepting information from other people sets her up to do things wrong which could result in punishment for her. This is part of the reason that Katie rarely trusts. The fact that she is rarely fooled by other people gives the girl strength, and is a powerful defense. She thinks very little of those who try to take advantage of her or deceive her, and being disliked by Katie is dangerous in itself.
Since Katie is hurt so much by the biting words and projections of other people, she has a great deal of empathy for those suffering from the same plight. That's part of the reason she has friends - she's so sweet and kind, always understanding people's problems. Rarely will she degrade someone else's woes, and she almost never complains about her own because she doesn't want to acknowledge their existence. This encourages others to confide in Katie; she's the perfect person to vent to. However, when someone gets on her bad side, she is a library of viscious gossip. People frustrate her easily - Katie does not understand why teenagers will exhibit random streaks of unprovoked cruelty, and when she feels cornered or victimized, she's quick to fight back. Not physically; her anger only outwardly manifests itself in narrowed eyes, tight lips, and tense shoulders. But she can spread rumors with such subtle technique that they rarely ever trace back to her. The girl rarely sees things as outright right-or-wrong, but she feels that there needs to be balance and justice for everyone, and will not hesitate to administer that justice if she feels threatened. Which is quite often; any time she gets in an argument, her first reaction is total confusion - mentally double-checking that she is indeed being contradicted - and her second is a passionate, testy defensiveness.
The defensive side of Katie is fueled by her integrity. She is, essentially, a good person, and she believes that of herself. Therefore (and in her mind, to balance out all the bad things people do), the girl almost always does what she thinks is right in any given situation. So when someone tells Katie that she's wrong, she can't comprehend it. Why would someone think she is wrong? Why would they be unable to see her reasoning? She tries to accept that she isn't always right even when she thinks she is, but mostly fails. In Katie's mind, she tries to be empathetic with others, so in return, others should step into her shoes. If it is a fellow teenager who triggers this confused frustration, she fights back. If it is an adult or superior, she forces herself to accept her own wrongness, which almost always triggers a breakdown. You see now, don't you? Why Katie is so fragile?
She has the obsessive need to do what she thinks is right, and when she realizes that she was wrong all along, it upsets a balance in her. Other people have fewer qualms about doing things wrong, but Katie's different. She needs to do the right thing. Knowing that sometimes she is unable to...kills her.
And that's where the voice comes in.
As if Katie didn't berate herself enough already, she has someone something in her brain that...eggs on her negativity. That is, when she does something wrong, for example places a wire in the incorrect spot while working at the factory, a voice entirely unlike her own screeches at her, filling all of her mind-space. It sounds a bit like a constipated bossy old woman, and the minute the girl screws up, the voice is there, calling her an idiot, telling her how stupid she is. The voice only comes as a replacement for an adult superior; if a supervisor is present, the teenager will accept their criticism quietly. However, if no one is around to see her mess up, the voice steps in and tells her very explicitly the way she is failing. It's a sort of conscience-turned-evil.
Luckily, the tenacious-if-nothing-else teenager isn't going to let herself tear her goodness apart. She refuses to give in to self-pity and depression, instead fighting against negativity with a persistence rarely applied to other parts of her life.
That is the reason that she's so often seen with a real smile. The breakdowns, despite being an important part of her haphazard personality, are actually quite rare. And several years ago, Katie got tired of being sad. She wants to make a sacrifice for the world - wants to use herself to add goodness and loveliness to everything around her. Even when Katie can't be happy with herself, she wants to be happy for everyone else.
So she is.

Nearly eighteen years ago, two best friends made a very big mistake. Tom Morven and Kendra Hone grew up together, went to school together, got jobs at the same factory. But they never intended to have a daughter, and that was what happened.
Following what they decided was the most reasonable course of action, Katie's parents got married three months before her birth. They bought a house in a reasonably nice neighborhood in District Three and settled down to raise their daughter. Both of them loved her very much, and tried to focus much of their attention on her. Family life in the Morven household was fairly quiet; Katie was a happy and obedient child, always looking up to her parents. Naturally, the calm of the household was broken a few times a year, with Katie having fits of crying and screaming when her mother had to discipline her, but these fits subsided throughout the years as the girl learned what was expected of her. Once she entered school, Katie thrived; she was a smart, precocious girl, always praised by her teachers and loved by her classmates.
Even as a young girl, Katie believed in true love. Love, she thought, was perfect, and more powerful than anything else in the world. She thought that her parents had the perfect love, because they could tell each other anything.
Shortly after the girl's eleventh birthday, Tom and Kendra filed for divorce. They talked it over in quiet voices in their room, eventually filtering the split into a simple, easily comprehensible sentence for their young daughter.
"Mommy and Daddy are very good friends, but they never loved each other, and are now going to divorce so they can find people they do love."
It tore Katie's world apart.
No matter how her parents described it to her - that they loved each other, but not in a romantic way; that she could have four loving parents instead of two; that it wouldn't affect her because Mommy would visit all the time - the girl still couldn't handle it. The idea that true love as she knew it was false, and that her wonderful parents did not actually love each other, was too much for Katie. She lacked the inner strength to withdraw into herself or to put up barricades against her own emotions, so she cried. And cried, and cried. Days stretched into months and still the girl cried. Her schoolwork suffered, but she was still very smart, and at twelve years old she managed to talk herself into a lowly part-time job at a light-switch factory. Every day after school she went to the factory and worked for six hours. The dull, mindless repetition of the wires and plastic soothed Katie, and her despair subsided. She couldn't destroy the grief, but with effort, she was able to lock it away in the back of her mind. Eventually, life returned to normal.
But suppressing her most powerful emotions had consequences for Katie. It took so much of her will, conscious or not, to protect herself from the grief at her parents' divorce that she was left susceptible to almost everything else. Tiny things began to bother her, and Tom noticed that Katie began to cry again. Not every day, as before; and the crying was devoid of the frustrated screaming-into-her-pillow which had accompanied the divorce. But this was emotional vulnerability that neither Katie nor her father could prevent, and it slowly began to drive the girl crazy.
Small slip-ups in school or scoldings at the factory would leave Katie crushed. Even Tom, under stress as he attempted to single-handedly raise an emotionally fragile teenager, snapped sometimes.
"Katie?" the man called, peeking around her bedroom door.
"Yeah, dad?"
"You left the water running again. In the bathroom."
"Oh. Sorry 'bout that." The fourteen-year-old half-smiled; her work at the factory left her in a good mood, but she was focusing on her schoolwork.
"Katie, you can't keep doing that. We don't have unlimited water, you know."
The girl turned and looked to her father with widened, fearful eyes. She could feel his frustration, and she shrank from it wordlessly.
"Well?" he demanded.
Silence.
"Katie, I'm serious! I can't believe how irresponsible you can be sometimes! A smart girl like you, doing something idiotic like that! It's so simple! Just turn the water off."
The girl's hands shook. "I'm so sorry, dad...I just, I've been really distracted and stressed. I've got a lot of, um, schoolwork..." her voice trailed off weakly.
"It - it - damn it, Katie! This is getting ridiculous!"
He slammed the door.
Tears began to fall onto the girl's History essay.
She crumpled it up, tossed it in the bin, and laid her head on her arms as her narrow frame was wracked with ill-contained tremors.

Life went on, and Katie adapted. She shifted her outlook on life, determined to feel hopeful about everything, whether it made sense to or not. She couldn't be happy all the time because of her sensitivity, but she tried to be as happy as possible whenever she could and evened out her relationship with her father. Her mother, not living in the Morven household, never really noticed any of the changes that took place in Katie after the divorce; her friendship with Tom became strained, because she believed he was lying about their daughter's emotional outbursts. Thus, the girl's parents drifted farther apart, though she pretended not to notice, and succeeded to a certain degree - her ability to shut down emotions about the divorce grew stronger over the years.
Katie's respect for superiors, friendships with co-workers, and general ability to work hard helped her move up the ranks in the factory, and she was eventually promoted to assistant-manager before being switched to a factory that makes showers. Though Katie doesn't know it, she'll never become manager; her panic attacks when things go wrong are hardly practical for business, and the manager at the light-switch factory thought her crazy after she confided to him one of her deepest secrets:
She is jealous of technology, the way it works so steadily and does not feel emotion.
Since the age of twelve, Katie has wished she was a light switch.
She still does.

Katie has a half-brother that she doesn't know about. His name is Aethon Hone; I haven't created him yet. :}
Faceclaim: Sara Bareilles
Themesong: Miniature Disasters - KT Tunstall
Colors: Darkolivegreen, lightcoral, & aquamarine