Milo Birch; D2 {done!}

Name: Milo Elizabeth Birch
Age: Fourteen
Gender: Of the female variety.
District: Two, born and raised.
Occupation: Student. Dancer. Career. (Motto: Dance, Learn, Kill)
Status: Wealthy parents.
Orientation: We'll see.
Plot: The Birch Family
Face Claim: Margaret Qualley
Codeword: oDair

Appearance: From the bun haphazardly placed on the top of her head to the pink toe shoes extended from her legs as if they are actually part of her flesh and not just some costume-piece, Milo screams dainty and delicate. She dwarves only children at 5' tall, as if her body has given up competing with the strength and brutality of her countless cousins and instead has decided to look the weakest instead. Not that she is necessarily fragile, nor does she neglect the bite that her family is so famous for, she is just more apt at concealing it to the outside world.

She carries herself with subtle confidence, her long neck held in the air as if it is being pulled up by an invisible string. Her ballerina body moves in rhythm only as she cascades her way through crowds and leaps over strangers with gentle feet. Who is this girl who seems to be unafraid of wind and fire and instead runs through the world as if its merely a stage and not a danger? "I'm Milo," she would say (but nothing more, of course).

Every morning she pulls her dark brown hair into a familiar bun. The color of the strands on her head are hard to describe, and perhaps dark brown doesn't actually fit the description. Her hair is a mixture between "raven" and "dark chocolate", and in some lights it can be described as black as a starless midnight. If she were of the vainer type, she would be proud of what is arguably one of her prettiest features. Yet, the long fall of string at the top of her head is almost too distracting from her day-to-day life, and she has considered cutting it to a boys length many a time.

Her lips are almost always chapped and bitten to the point where they're coated with a thin layer of dry blood. If harassed for an explanation she would say "it's a nervous tick, of course" and leave it at that. Long explanations have never been her specialty, and her airy voice, though built for storytelling, is more likely to come off as abrupt and disinterested than excited about anything.

The bridge of her nose is slightly crooked from a time in her childhood where she fell from a signature leap and landed uncomfortably close to the corner of two walls and broke her nose. Her parents could have easily paid for corrective surgery, but Milo was insistent that the injury was her fault and that she would have to bear the burden of its scars for the rest of her life. Besides, she felt that it was her imperfections that made her human, not her strong features.

Green eyes (nearly the same shade as her dead cousin, Beatrice) seem to pop out, but nobody can ever seem to get them to reveal her secrets. It is as if they are merely there, round and even and oh-so-emotionless. She's never been one for individual show, even if its just in her personal features. Her round eyes rest beneath two, straight eyebrows (just as dark as her hair), and sit far apart from her twisted nose.

A face is hardly a notable attribute, and its what lies beneath her head that makes her proud of who she is. Though her legs and arms are short, they're covered with finely-tuned muscle and overly prominent bones. She often wears tight-fitting pants and over-sized sweaters with black ballet flats, especially if she has no task of greater consequence to do that day.

She also hopes to hide the scars, her biggest regret from taking up arena-training on top of her career as a dancer. Fighting is not necessarily a practical part of her life so much as an enjoyment. When she gets to training she morphs into a different creature entirely and starts to twirl and spin with her weapons as if she is merely an illusion. Her preferred mode of fighting is with throwing knives, because she feels no danger carrying them and they make a pretty picture as they fly through the air and embed themselves into the pale flesh of dummies.

It's because of her negligence while training that she has so many horror stories to tell. Days where she tried to leap with a sword and ended up leaving a deep gash on her own arm instead of her targets. It bled profusely and she wasn't allowed to use it for at least a week. The thick red line where it had healed was none too pleasing to the eyes, and Milo often felt embarrassed when asked about it. On her legs are seven pink lines, each more prominent than the last, a relic of a time when she had run into a board of knives after trying to perform some stupid trick, and had escaped barely with her life because her legs had taken the brunt of the attack.

Milo has never been a cautious person in action, even in her dancing, and in performance, she exhibits fire rather than the usual wind and prose that most dancers abide by. Where her hot-tempered cousin Beatrice was sharp and fast-to-speak, yet direct in her attacks, Milo was quiet and mousy, yet bold and showy in fighting. They always seemed to be the most polar-opposite in the family, even if Beatrice craved the sting and destruction of flame and Milo merely tamed it. To her, fire was yet another way to show off, and she idolized the district victor, Cricket Antoinette, and her ability to show and not tell.

As such, the young girl has practiced both her ability to use fire, and her talent at controlling it. When she was younger, she would always come home covered in bumps and bruises and charred skin where she had slipped up, but today the only sign of her previous lack of control is in the many patches of discolored skin that litter her body.

As a ballerina, she is the disfigured swan who has enough passion to dance circles around her competitors.

As a career, she is the gallant showcase of many years of lethal practice. Milo is not afraid to show the world who she is.

Personality: "Leave me alone, Eirwen. I don't want to talk or play, I'm working." Truer words have never been spoken by a girl so young, and surrounded as Milo was by three elder sisters, she often felt embittered at their constant need for attention. Of course, it was rarely the moody, let-me-hide-and-enjoy-my-solitude Eirwen who tended to bug her, but more often than not it was Adriana or Darcy who wanted some of her energy. No thank you.

Milo has never been the type to waste time with other children, and it was rare for her to be seen on the playground doing anything more than burying her nose deep within a book and pretending the rest of the world didn't exist. Most people were too simple for her to pretend to care about, and instead she preferred to spend her time finely-tuning the one thing she truly cared about, stage performance.

Simple is as simple does and Milo wanted no part of it. Her words were often harsh and brutally honest, but of course to hear them, you'd have to get her to speak first. More likely than not she would just stare at you with silent judgement and unperceived rage at such an interruption. Most people wasted the breath that life gave them, she was damn certain not to let them ruin hers too.

Contrary to her cousin Beatrice, Milo was always the law-abiding type. She was told to be a career so she was one, and she did a fine good job of it, if you asked her. Maybe she was a bit prideful (or super prideful, same difference), but that wasn't a bad thing, was it? It was normal to be proud of your accomplishments, of which the over-achieving Milo had many.

Of course she neglected the social-side of life in order to focus on accomplishing, and that usually made her the oddball out of a group. Kids would scorn her and call her names, but she would show them up by surpassing them at any and all of the training exercises her instructor presented her with. Endless hours spent either on the dance floor or in makeshift-combat led her to earn their respect, even if it was only bitter, and she held it over their heads like a trophy. You are all beneath me. Her mind often shouted, but her voice never followed. Milo was always the quiet one of the family.

This made large family dinners awkward and confusing for her. Ancient relatives would ask her about her studies or about training or really, any number of pointless questions, and she would fight back the urge to tell them off and instead answer their questions with as little words as possible, "No, I don't like any boys. Yes, I got top marks in that simulation. No, my performance isn't for another two weeks." Yet the annoying has-beens were insistent, and Milo would feel herself losing her cool composure. "I have to go," she would tell them, and she would disappear into her room to throw knives and play furiously loud music until they backed off.

This would often lead to screaming battles with her mother. The only time she ever allowed herself to be loud. "I DON'T CARE WHAT THEY THINK ABOUT ME, MOTHER. I AM WHO I AM AND I DON'T CARE." If the silly old ladies wanted to know so many things about her life, maybe they should ask somebody who actually gave a flying hoot. Milo didn't care to entertain them either.

She had always felt painfully shy around anyone who she considered just as talented as her. Incidents like these occurred far and few between, but when she was presented with somebody she could actually admire, Milo would find herself biting her lips and wringing her hands and becoming at lost for words. "Um, err, uh..." These tense moments were certainly not her favorite way to pass the time, so instead she attempted to spend her hours training by herself. She wasn't sure what she would do if she ever met Cricket Antoinette face-to-face. Probably faint, then die, then have a heart attack, then come back alive and run off to have a temper-tantrum at her horrible behavior. Milo idolized the powerful probably more than it was healthy, and she had pasted photos of them all over her otherwise bare bedroom walls.

Cricket. Julian. Peridot. Kiera (though she had died). Topaz. Mace. Opal. Wednesdae (also dead). The other victors she considered mere accidents, a flux in the system so to speak, and she felt as if they did not deserve her respect. If only they had died and the careers had won. If only.

Milo would show them all. District Two was the best and it had the most lethal tributes. She was better than they were, and she knew it, especially as each year she grew more fiercely loyal to the Capitol. Bring it on, lower districts.

History: Milo's past is simple, she was born to a games-driven family as the youngest of four sisters. Her cousins were abundant and mostly intolerable, and even at a young age she preferred to do what she pleased. At the age of three, she took up dancing (though at that point, she could not do much), and she never looked back.

Expectations were always her sole speciality in life, and she almost never failed to live up to the expectations of her driven parents. The only times that they felt that failed was when she was rude to her sisters or any of their numerous relatives. Other than that, she was their model child and they pushed the other girls to live up to the standards that Milo had set.

As a result, Milo and her older sisters never got along, and she usually became the reject of their little parties, especially when they were trying to be social with the other kids. This never bothered Milo, she preferred her books and weapons and dancing to their trifle affairs any day.

Milo spent her nights and weekends mostly alone, even at dance practice or in the training center. Although her peers respected her, they did not want to be her friend and as a result she was the isolated child of the family. Even Eirwen had a few friends, though she never truly spoke of them and if Milo was the curious type, she may have pried into her eldest sisters solitary excursions. Yet, the temptation was just never there. Call Milo simple, but she was simply too distracted by herself to care.

When her eldest cousin was reaped for the games she was mildly curious. He had always been deadly with a sword, yet he didn't seem to take training as seriously as the rest of her relatives. It seemed, to Milo, that Cassius did not have the proper focus to be a career. She was not sorely disappointed when come the bloodbath he chose to not focus on his own survival but instead neglected the privilege he had been given to the heat of his addictions. Cassius had died with smoke falling from his mouth and selfish-motive in his heart. He did not deserve the honor the Capitol had granted him, he had earned his own death.

Beatrice's reaping only two years later concerned her thoughts more. The girl was a mad-women with a lot of misused hate towards the Capitol, and it seemed obvious to everyone around her that she'd be the first to kill in an arena. She loathed the world, and wanted to slaughter everything within it. Beatrice fulfilled her promises and had killed two of her fellow tributes before they could even greet her, yet death claimed her due to a slice of a sword straight through her neck.

Beatrice died screaming her brothers name... and another name, Vinnie, yet Milo hardly recognized it. Who was Vinnie? Did she meet him the Capitol? Her mind swam with questions, but she felt no inclination to get them answered. Not yet, at least, perhaps when she was older.

For now, she only wanted the honor of being chosen, to kill, to destroy.

For Milo Birch had earned that right, and by Ripred, she was going to take it.