Key, District Three (finished)

kiena . marie . ward
i'll :.: keep :.: trying :.: to :.: live :.: my :.: life :.: without :.: you

. basic info .
A falling star
Fell from your heart
And landed in my eyes

Sometimes I have dreams. Uncle says that dreams are nonsense and I shouldn't have them, but sometimes I do anyway, just to be a bit rebellious. And sometimes I remember those dreams, to make him even angrier. I remember feeling as light as air, fabricated from the folds of my imagination and nothing less, and seeing stormy skies that go on forever and ever and ever. I like storms. I like to watch the lightning crack open the sky and give us a glimpse of the radiance beyond, while in the background thunder groans in protest at the splitting of the very universe. But then I wake up, icy sheets gathered around me and breath released in achromic mists, and I know that I am not flying through a storm. I am grounded to the clock tower in District Three, and that's as close to the sky as I'll ever get. Sixteen years old, and my wings have already been clipped by society and, more directly, my uncle. I'll never learn to fly now.

. appearance .
I screamed aloud
As it tore through them
And left me blind

People don't see me a lot. Uncle says I'm hiding, but really, I just like to be alone and think. And no one needs to see me, anway - I'm just a girl, as Uncle is constantly reminding me. I am uninmportant. I am superfluous. I am inconsequential. And that is why I stay in the clock tower, with all my gears and gizmos, while Uncle goes out to talk to all the important people. That's the only time he's really sober, and not smoking so much it makes one want to cough just watching him. Sometimes, though, he'll send me out onto the frozen streets to buy things when he's too drunk to do so himself. That's when people get to see me in all my glory, from the mess of dark strands atop my head to excess grease beneath my fingernails. I suppose I really must be a sight to behold for all of those proper, uppity folks who roam the streets with nothing better to do then flutter about and try to keep track of their horribly dull social lives.

Uncle says that my dark scarlet locks are the only nice feature I have, and I'll always cheerfully agree with him. I don't take pride in my hair (I hardly take pride in anything, except the tower), but I'll admit that the smooth tendrils, only occasionally hardened by the grease I rub the gears down with, are probably the only thing about me that can be considered "pretty". I don't so much like the silky texture of it - rather, the wonderfully exotic color. It's unique in the very best of ways, making me stand out in a crowd.

My irises are two ice-blue disks with a dark ring around them, emphasizing the bright color. It seems my pupils are always belittled by the wide expression in my eyes, bright and excited and open to new knowledge. They are enthusiastic. They are ardent. They are zealous. They're framed by thick but short, dark eyelashes, and my dark eyebrows arch above them smoothly. They often climb high onto my long forehead, for it seems that just about anything can interest me. My nose is rather stout and curves up at the end, just above pale lips. My high cheekbones and sharp chin make my face look angular and cheeks hollow, and when I relax my expression I really do look quite ghostly and starved. But a wide, enthusiastic smile always fills the empty spots in, warding away the sympathies of others.

I'm rather small, standing at only 5'2" and looking seriously underweight. I have no curves, my abdomen slight but rectangular. Uncle says I'm so thin it's easy to imagine me as only bones, a skeleton climbing through the clockwork. He forgets that the cost of his drinks are what have reduced me to little more than willowy limbs and a prominent ribcage. But I've never been self-conscious before and I'm hardly going to start now just because I'm a teenager now and people say that teenagers are supposed to care how they look. Let other girls fuss with make-up and hairbrushes - I'm perfectly satisfied with the smudges of grease on my face and blisters on my fingers, thank you very much.

. personality .
The sun, the moon, they have all been blown out.
You left me in the dark.
No dawn, no day, I'm always in this twilight
In the shadow of your heart

Uncle says I'm not very proper. He says I've got my head stuck in the clouds, and he's right in the most literal way possible. I'm always up in the highest reaches of the clocktower, bending agile limbs over and around moving gears and swinging parts as I clean and dream of the higher worlds. I suppose it's no secret that I want to learn to soar beyond the skies. I look up into the clouds and the endless beyrl canvas and I see wonders no one else could ever hope to even dream of. The sky is a special place. Uncle says I'll never get there - I'm anchored to the ground, just like the rest of the pathetic District Three citizens. But I can't help feeling like maybe... maybe. I draw pictures sometimes, of flying machines. Not hovercrafts, but something smaller, more fragile, and yet able to coast through the skies with ease. Just like me.

I'm really quite smart, but I suppose most people in District Three are. I'm not that kind of smart, though - I love gears and tools and coaxing life from metal machines instead of buzzing programs and the latest and greatest war mechanisms. Gears and rotating gears are where I find the thrills of life, rather than scientific theories and all that kind of useless information. I also like words - I hate saying anything ordinary like "good" or "fun". If you want to live a spectacular life, you have to know spectacular words. Uncle gets annoyed, because I tend to repeat my sentences and enhance them further each time. He says that I need to go out in public more and learn some humility. Personally, I don't think there's anything wrong with being unique - screw them if society doesn't like who I am. I'm my own person and there's no way I'm letting their stupid rules change that.

I long for adventure, like the kind I read about in books. Life in the clock tower is interesting, to say the least, but it's the same thing every day and after a while it can seem a bit dull in comparison to the lives led by all those incredible fictional characters. Uncle says they're just books, but sometimes they seem so real I disappear in them all together, my mind trapped in distant lands even when my body is ducking under chains and pulling myself up higher, higher, higher...

I suppose I've got a lot of energy for a girl who's always spending her time alone with machinary. I can't stand being still - I need to move, to swing, to leap and twist and laugh because Ripred, isn't that what humans were born to do? Uncle says that District Three citizens aren't supposed to be like me - we're quiet, and obedient, and solemn. Well, maybe I don't want to be so dull. Maybe I want to shine instead of blend in with a sea of faces, lost to the world. Maybe I have dreams that spread beyond not starving and then dying. Perhaps I am ignorant in my youth, but I believe in my own dreams. I'm not the kind of person who's just going to watch them fly away - I'm going to fight for them to my dying breath.

. history .
And in the dark,
I can hear your heartbeat
I tried to find the sound

There's this moment in life. You probably won't see it coming. You might not even feel it as it's happening. But I promise you, looking back you'll recognize that moment in an instant. You'll see it there, frozen in time and space in your memory, and you'll think, that was the moment that changed my life forever.

But I'll get to that soon. Let's go back to the beginning, shall we? Back to the very first few breaths of my adventure. Yes, even as a baby to young to speak or laugh, I was unique. Most babies were born in the hospital, with nurses in white uniforms cooing and fathers smiling proudly. They were greeted by beeping machines and warm, soft blankets and sterile walls. But such an ordinary birth could never be my own - no, even as I child, I suppose I was destined for the skies. On the evening of July 17th, I was not born in a snowy room with doctors monitoring my heartrate and then sweeping me away.

No, I was born among the stars.

My mother and father were a high and mighty rich couple, Capitolites through and through. They tell me he was tall and she had bright pink skin, but I wouldn't know. They also tell me I have lots of siblings - six, at least, unless there are more like me who aren't supposed to exist. Unsurprisingly, they weren't the smartest people, and my mother didn't even know she was pregnant when she boarded the hovercraft bound for District Three for some pointless business trip. She went into labor just minutes after take-off, and I suppose I was eager to enter the world, because I was one of those miraculously quick births. 12:37 am, twenty eight thousand feet, two hours before landing. It was lucky that there were two doctors on board, hoping to pick up the most recent medical technology from Three, or I and my selfish mother probably would have been doomed. She was apparently less than thrilled with my arrival, though. Her top priority once we arrived was to dump me off in an orphanage and never look back. I guess six kids was enough for her.

I was lucky enough to be picked up by a nice couple shortly after, and I grew up learning to call them Mom and Dad. They were better parents to me than my real ones were, anyway. I suppose I was as normal a child as one can be. My father was a locksmith, and found a certain delight in fixing machines and making things work. He would bring home porjects for us to work on, sometimes. I was so young, but I still found facination in the way he could coax life out of the icy metal and clicking gears. We were not rich, but we were not poor, either. We survived and found joy in the simplicities of life, as any proper family should. I was loved.

When I was nine years old, my mother disappeared. No note, no body, no final breath. I just woke up one morning to find the absence of dishes clattering in the kitchen and my father sitting at the table, tracing the patterns in the wood and wondering what he did wrong. She had been so kind, so loving, so warm hearted... it was a cold, hard shock when she abandoned us. She had told me she loved me when she tucked me in the night before, but sometimes I look back now and I wonder. It still hurts, just like it always does when you lose someone you love. But the logical part of mind has never stopped wandering back, searching through all the good memories I have of her and trying to figure out where things went wrong.

I was eleven years old when the moment - that wonderful, horrible, life changing moment - hit me. It was the moment that fire killed my father. Uncle was the one who came home that night instead of my father, slightly drunk and filling the house with cigarette smoke. His expression was hard and unforgiving, despite the news he was delivering. A stray spark had ignited the factory my father worked in. The doors were locked. He couldn't get out. And then he told me that my life in the nice house was over. I would be working for him now, doing what he said. The short speech was delivered quickly and easily, but it left me trembling, following Uncle to what he told me would be my "new life", wondering what exactly I had done wrong to deserve such a terrible fate. But I suppose sometimes life's just hard, for absolutely no reason at all. My mother vanished. My father burned. They were irreversable events, and I'd just have to live with them.

My new life, as it turns out, was really not bad at all. I worked in the clock tower, among all the gears and machines my father had loved, and I healed. I learned to be happy again. I learned to spread my dreams out wide and high, and I began longing for things gravity could not offer me. I wanted to fly.

Things really haven't changed much since. I'm still up here, watching the streets of District Three and climber higher than most dare. But the interesting thing about me isn't my history. No, I tend to try and turn my back on that. What I'm really curious about is where I go from here. Maybe I'll grow up, get a normal job, marry, have kids. Maybe I'll grow old and senile and eventually die.

Or maybe I'll take flight.

. codeword / other .
But then it stopped
And I was in the darkness
So darkness I became

<img src="http://i41.tinypic.com/16h2ibt.png">


. Her Face: Odeya Rush
. Her Song: Cosmic Love, by Florence and the Machine
. Her Purpose: No current plots