Celeste Magpie // District Five

Name: Celeste Magpie
Age: 15
Gender: Female
District/Area: District 5
Appearance:

Beautiful.

It's a very small word to describe so much. The sunrise over the mountains. Diamonds polished and glittering. The sweep of her long lashes as she bats her eyes. It was nearly a decade before someone called Celeste beautiful. She came into her looks during the summer of her seventh year, but children aren't so articulate, and it was a very long time before adults distilled the idea of beauty, communicated it to her in such a way that she understood they weren't just envious of her little red mouth, her elegant bone structure. They actually thought she was beautiful.

The trouble is, this ugly duckling remembers the before. She remembers her cheeks sunken and gaunt when they should have been cherubic, her hair bushy and untameable, her limbs twice as long as they should have been. The thing is: this is all still true. Her torso may have lengthened to shrink her proportions, her hair may have been slicked by gel and tempered by age, but her cheeks are just as sunken, her body just as tiny as Capitol ladies strive for theirs to be.

Celeste seems the flaws, not the beauty. In fact the perception of beauty has only ever brought her trouble. Boys became too interested, and girls disdainful. It was easier to be in the shadows, unappreciated but hidden.

It would be so much easier to steal.

Which isn't to say that Celeste regrets her looks. Quite the contrary. While stealth would be an advantage of being ugly, there are no limits on the advantages of being attractive. Celeste uses them all. A little wink here, a charming smile there, as she lifts a wallet or a keychain or a pretty bow.

Personality:

A kleptomaniac is not born. She is made.

When Celeste came into her looks, she suddenly found herself in the spotlight. Constantly. This surprised and terrified her but it wasn't long before she found the silver lining. Quite literally. It came in the form of a silver locket from a boy who'd been in her class since they were toddlers. He'd never looked her way twice before that September, but when he handed her the locket, she knew it meant something more.

That locket, though it was given and not stolen, means more to Celeste than anything - or anyone - else. It gave her something to want, a purpose and a secret. She found her softening reflection in its smooth surface blunted the edges, made it tolerable for her to see herself, even though everyone else continued to fawn over her. Mostly Celeste couldn't stand her own reflection, except in that locket.

It took her years to realize that all polished silver gave off the same distorted reflection. She saw a set of cutlery in one of the district center's shops. Even in the window, it shone with a brilliance that made her heart and hands burn. It was one thing to accept the trinkets from suitors (and over the years she learned to do so graciously), and quite another to recover something for herself.

She has a particular soft spot for anything metal, silver being her favorite, and prefers things with sharp edges, be that knives or diamonds. Of course such gems are rare in Five, but Celeste has three baby diamonds to her name. Well, her thief name.

Celeste might not be the smartest girl in her class, but she's clever enough to know that if anyone found her pretties she'd be in a world of trouble. She tests each new hiding spot in the Magpie home with lesser baubles, toys and sentimental objects stolen from her siblings. Once a cubby is declared safe, she never leaves more than a handful of her treasures in one spot. There are over thirty hidden treasure troves in the Magpie household, right under the noses of her siblings and parents.

Who neglected her.

Who made her feel ugly.

She has only ever given away a few of her treasures, and every single one of those gifts went to her Aunts. They were too delighted with the gift, too taken with her beauty, to ask where they had come from.

And now her aunts and her pretties are gone.

Unfortunately for the rest of the Magpies, Celeste doesn't have a charitable bone in her body. She sees no reason to share her hoard, to help better their lives. She knows that some day she can do that for herself, once she's eighteen and free of obligation. For now, she bides her time, suffering through school, ghosting through life at home. The only time she's alive is when she's lifting a bracelet from one of her classmates, or an engraved fork from her teacher's lunchbox.

History:

Celeste's saving grace is that it did, in fact, take her seven years to bloom. Seven years of being an ugly duckling to teach her about humility and patience. Seven years of being an average middle child, prone to tantrums, but none so great as Kirk threw. Seven years of admiring things from afar - toys, trinkets, beaded scarves. Seven years of wondering just what she would do, could do, if she ever got her hands on any of them.

Those formative years mellowed Celeste out considerably. Just imagine if she had been born beautiful, one of those round, wide-eyed babies. Oh she was wide-eyed, like all of her siblings, but there was a certain sickliness to her, a pervasively slenderness that made her never seem quite child-like. She just wasn't cute the way other babies were.

And so she grew up wanting.

Her transformation to a graceful swan happened over the course of two months, during the summer of her seventh year. Her torso finally grew to match her gangling limbs, her hair softened and curled in the humidity for the first time, and her eyes finally settled from stormy to a crystal clear blue. It would be five years before she developed the pleasing curves of womanhood, but already at seven it was clear she would be a knockout. It was not something Celeste, or perhaps anyone, could have predicted. She found the transition, like all growing pains, awkward as she was suddenly thrust into the spotlight. Boys at school began to have crushes on her, her best friends gossip mercilessly behind her back, and she found herself isolated from her siblings who genuinely had bigger concerns.

For a time, before she truly became a teenager, Celeste sought refuge with her twin aunts, who showered her with attention. They complimented her jewel eyes, her delicate, bird bones. Their constant flattery helped Celeste to shed her shy nature for a more confident, if no less lonely, one. After all, what did she have to contribute to her hormonal, confused family? A pretty face cannot replace an absent father, cannot balance a bitter mother.

It can't even bring back the aunts who helped her through so much, until she found something even shinier to distract her attention: stealing.

Of course Celeste doesn't think about it like that. Her mind is a place of doors, compartments where she can stick her cross-dressing brother, her sister who doesn't quite belong. She puts the action of taking there too, although her physical treasures are spread throughout the Magpie household, in more than thirty different cubbies. These are secrets manifested, the silver fork that caught her eye, the opalescent bauble that she craved. These truly could help her family, but for now, they are only helping Celeste to define herself.

Codeword: odair
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