Oslo Birbeck :: D2 :: DONE

The toddler with a dagger in her hands grew to be the girl with knife fingers and a poison tongue.

Her mother had been a career, though not a very good one. She was more interested in impressing the boys in training than working towards her arena skills if she were ever reaped. Their ripe bodies, the fact that she could influence them and their immature smell felt like she could mold them in her hands. She was yet another to fall victim to the fact that they acted as if the liked her, when really all they wanted was to use her. A great-grandfather of hers had been the victor of an early Games, and although he’d died long before she was born she was still something of a trophy, something that could be showed off to friends about. However, she was quite happy to hop from one boys arm to the next and pretend that she belonged. Giggling uncertainly was quite a skill of hers.

Her father was a career, too, and he was a good one- the type who could dance a waltz with a blade. The type that his trainers would have given anything to see in the games, to be able to say “I taught that kid his axe skills,” he was arrogant. He knew that with his chiseled lower jaw and four-year-run at number one on his gym’s Fit List, he could get what he wanted. It applied to girls, friends, school work, but also to the games. He believed that he could get away without any survival skills, replying on sponsors who would not want to see the light seep out of his impishly handsome eyes. Instead, his time was spent on weapons training, making him a sort of shark on land. But his eighteenth reaping came and went, and his name was not called. The one vague wisp of a friend that he did know who went into the arena didn’t even do him proud, didn’t even make the top five, dying of dehydration before a week was even out. So he dusted off his other trophy, a girl who was a vague descendant of a Victor and seemed nice enough. They courted briefly, married, and she fell pregnant.

He liked the way she waddled, liked the fact that inside her sagging balloon of a stomach developed a child that could some day be the victor he never was. Nurturing this seed became his passion, and he read long into cold winter nights about supplements and diets and feeding, during pregnancy and infancy. Oslo Birbeck arrived into the world screaming, her strong noise ringing in his ears, and he loved every note of it. Perhaps she was not the muscled boy that he had imagined, but she had fire, and even as a teaspoon of an infant he could feel her fire. It was, of course, his own heat that he could feel radiating through her, but he never had been the sweetest tasting apple- only the shiniest looking.

Even as a toddler, he was teaching her to fight with him using her cutlery at the dinner table. He would scold her every time his knife would poke her pudgy belly, and yell harder if she cried. No child of his could be seen looking weak. While his wife was busy plucking her eyebrows and trying to work off her baby-fat, he would make his daughter run laps around the garden and tell her that if she didn’t, she’d get sick. Heaven forbid if she ever complained, or worse- fell.

When his second child- a rather weedy boy- arrived four years after his first-born, no attention was paid. Too busy readying his Oslo for her immanent arrival at the training center, he cared not for the child who stayed up all night coughing, the child that held no hopes for him. He saw so much of himself already in the girl who had been made harder by her four winters, and he liked it. He would do his best to ensure that she had the opportunity for glory that he never had, the opportunity to come back a Victor for a district, because if she died in the attempt then she would no longer be acknowledged as his daughter.

Oslo, however, developed a morbid fascination with the child who she did not accept as her brother. She spent a lot of time in his room. Her young mind acknowledged that there was something wrong with him, something to do with his breathing, and that her mother had told her that he would never be right. However, taught never to give up, she tried her hardest to become the figure to her brother that her father was to her. She took him out on secret adventures around the garden when she wasn’t meant to, forcing him to walk even when his dried fruit lungs were on the verge of giving out. He never made it, however. While her muscled were sculpted and chiseled, his wasted away in his sickbed until just his bony arms were visible. His room was directly above hers, and sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night to hear his hacking cough, smog of breath not able to make its way out of his lungs.

He died when she was nine.

By that stage, her father was too engrossed in her career training to let her see much of a son that was nothing more than a fancy pet to him, kept alive simple because they could afford to. She did not know whom he had grown to become, but sometimes she heard his floorboards moan as if he were dancing, although she thought that quite impossible in his baby-bird-fragile state.

Knuckles whitening around an artificial-smelling bunch of perfect white lilies, she walked slowly after the little coffin. The flowers didn’t seem very apt for someone who obviously wasn’t perfect, as her father wanted nothing to do with him. Her father only liked perfection. The ceremony was small, just family and a few close friends, and the only tears shed were by her mother. Even then, it seemed as if they were but an accessory, just the right thing to do at the time. And then she went back to her house and she went on with her training, as if the five years of the boy’s life had meant nothing at all.

The first boy came when she was fourteen. The kid she clasped between her legs turned her into the little brother she had never known, innocent and sweet and able to hurt. It was as if all her skin had been peeled off and he had wiggled inside her, but somehow she liked the feeling of the parasite that drilled into her heart. She found that she could reverse the roles, and use her body to hold her own power, a father figure to lost souls.

Her power hunger soon moved to her friends in training, also. She had long ago become queen bee, but now she used and abused her power, knowing that people were so desperate to be in with her that they would do almost anything. Her status became ‘elite,’ only those most willing to do her bidding able to get anywhere near her. And while at home, her father still yelled at her whenever she made a mistake, she through away the key that locked in her emotions, and would let anything show.

Her father is a introverted kaleidoscope of idiocy and her mother is a self-obsessed shriveled petal and she is weak because she has emotions.

The slender twist of crystal made a satisfying series of thuds on the wooden table. The glass sparked, a chip flying through the air and rattling on the tiled floor. Her upper lip twitched in anticipation of her father’s reaction when he found out. A family heirloom, it was, but why should she give a damn? The amber liquid it had held had put fire in her throat, and she knew that her family was but a bunch of victory-obsessed losers who try to live through their children. She would never have become a career of her own accord- she would much rather have played ball sports. But, no, she’d been forced to train for an event that, in the unlikely event she was chose for, she’d most likely be stabbed in the back within the first five minutes. The one family tribute that they had been ’blessed’ with, a distant cousin of Oslo’s some ten years ago now, had suffered an unfortunate accident with a dagger and rather puny looking girl from Nine. He had thought he was invincible, a trait that was yet another family heirloom.

In training, she was ruthless. Not because she cared particularly about being the best in the training, but more because the sweet blood that practically seeped through her rows of ivory teeth said that she was perfect. Before each punch she threw, she encased a little bit more of her innocence in the prison of her fist, and she put it into her opponent’s body with all the force she could master. Perhaps that was why her hand-to-hand combat was known to be of a particularly high standard- because weakened her rival mentally, as well as physically. There was no place for the charred remnants of her childhood’s stupid, sweet innocence in career training.

Her weapon of choice, however, was the set of six flat bladed knives that had been a thirteenth birthday present from her father. It was the only thing that he had ever given her that she truly cared about. She liked the fact that, still from far away, even the slightest shiver of her wrist could be deadly. Before each shot she threw, she’d take all the family characteristics that the blade reflected in her face, and discard them with complete and utter precision. She didn’t want to be one of them- didn’t want to be who she was. The want to throw away all of herself in those accurate shots was almost overpowering, but she believed that without her perfection she’d have nothing at all.

Sometimes, she liked to get lost in other peoples bodies, liked to make their nests into her own. Mostly it was when, like now, she was drunk, a drowned rat in all of the emotions that she normally would not let show. She didn’t care who they were, so long as their utopian image was more perfect than her own. Coarse hair would run through her fingers and she would highlight the curves of her physique and make them wait for her. Those moments where she could feel their body positively pulsating for hers, she would hold off until they could take it no longer, and then give in and take their skin and wear it for just a little while. For the smallest handful of time, she knew what it was like to be her father, with complete control over someone else.

Her new body would rise and fall like a tide, a moon waxing and waning, and she would dress herself in the dark, not remembering when pieces of clothing had departed her body, or often where they were now. Her paper bag body felt dirty, crumpled, and she longed to be someone else, tied in a string of liquid emotions for just a night. She didn’t care whether the shower she stepped into was hers or a strangers, but she’d turn up the heat so that it scalded. The pain would take a registrable moment to saturate, and once it swept over her body she would resist all her nerves screaming cries for her to leave, reminding herself that even if she could not master anyone else, she could master herself. She would tell herself that even if she could not be wanted for her mind, she was still wanted for her body, and at the very least that would be a hide the wound from the rest of the world while the flesh beneath festered and attracted flies.

Her bare feet tried and failed to keep in a straight line as the traversed the thick carpet. A plait of scar braided from her left heel to toe, reminding her every day that even in career training, the place that she was most respected for her flawlessness, she was not invincible. Through the alcoholic fog that pressed a nosegay on her thoughts, she knew that she was drunk, and that in the morning she would regret allowing herself to acknowledge all of her stupid little flaws. Concrete urges to shove all of her filth into her father’s face sweep her, but she knows that she can’t because her perfect façade is the only thing her manicured fingers seem to be able to get a grip on. Normally, she doesn’t particularly like to drink, because what has she got left to control, if not her own body? Sometimes, though, her compass seems so stuck in one direction she needs to get lost, just to make sure it still works.



Morning cut into her head like a thick blade, the type she never liked to work with. Her physique wasn’t made for heavy shafts of metal, but mostly she just didn't like everyone being able to see where her next move would be. Her knives could be whipped out in secret, able to attack without anyone even seeing who did it. She opened the wardrobe and picked out a fully prepared outfit, hung on a clothes hanger with a 'sunday' tag on it. Back to her masked ball life, with her pretty-princess perfect act and none of those stupid emotions that the drink had brought out in her last night. Oslo Birbeck to everyone else in her life, was a mint, new-in-box collectors item, no matter that inside, she was shattered.

The backwards tug of a comb through her hair in uncomfortable, and she hates the stench of her hair burning. She knows it’s not alive, but it smells like burnt flesh and makes a rotting ocean in her stomach. It takes precisely 18 minutes for her to style her brown hair to that it falls in unorganized waves to her shoulders. They might look effortless, but when she wakes in the morning the ends flick in every possible direction, and she can’t possibly have that. Like everything else in her life, her hair has to flow towards one point, has to be controlled by her.

A face stares back at her in the mirror, a baby-naked face that she doesn’t know. She hates seeing herself like this, seeing all the vulnerability in an expression that was meant to be like diamond. Lithe fingers like beggars searching for scraps of food apply a layer of tinted crème over her features, hiding bruised bags and acne like a dusting of pollen on her forehead. Black ink is worked so that it lines her oval eyes, only her hand shakes the tiniest bit, and she has to wash it off and start over because she can’t have her body looking flawed.

A slender finger pushes down the end of her nose. She hates the way it flicks up like a ramp, leading to nowhere. One day, she’d love Capitolite doctors to fix it. It would be easy enough- a little skin off here, a little cartilage put in there and it would look fine, but no one did those sort of operations in district two. She wouldn’t mind them fixing the scar along her foot, too. There was something about it, however, that made her want to keep it, because every day it reminded her that there was nothing about her- not even her training- that was perfect.

Hands run down a pressed blouse, over breasts she would like to be bigger and a waist that could certainly be smaller. Although her diet, tailored to a tight fit by her father, had no room for excess fat, somehow all her food seemed to be stored in her thighs, which she believed only got bigger as time went on.

Her short-statured body told lies of her ability. She held secrets where her hair touched her back and in the nape of her neck, locked away so that only a crowbar could pry them loose.