D3 ] Samara Stine \\ done

[presto][/presto]

"My name is Samara Stine, the daughter of Frank Stine. I am an eight year old child prodigy of District Three. And I'm dying."

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Death, Samara long ago decided, is like a weed among the flowers of her garden. It cripples her in particular, strangling the advancement of her mind, the movement of her body, the desire to live. Strangles it until it lays still and silent - alive, for she is alive, but barely. Alive for her failing will to reach the age of four, then five, then seven, then eight and now ten. In the future it'll be fifteen, twenty, twenty five, thirty, forty, until her heart fails and she falls, falls, falls into death's arms like a bird not quite ready to take flight.

(She's ready but she's scared she isn't.)

Samara can't get the idea of death out of her mind. It's a powerful idea, and she flirts with death every moment of her life. If she were a teen, if she were Annabelle's or Damien's or Raven's age, she might say she's death's lover. Except that she's young and she has no interest in men or women whatsoever. But death is always on the periphery - sometimes lurking so much closer - of every aspect of her life. 

She is, after all, the taxidermist's daughter. 

Death surrounds her. Frank - father - kills animals and stuffs them for decorative purposes, and Samara sees death in the glassy eyes of some of her toys (even though she adores them, in particular the lovely gray kitten she named Grayson that Father gave her after her first visit to the doctor). Death lingers around her toys, even when their eyes are wide with fear or wonder or whatever else goes on in their heads that Samara can't ever figure out. Even when their breath comes in so fast she fleetingly wonders if it's going to be their last (if their bodies will succumb to the drug Father gives them, if they'll just give in and allow their system to fail). Even when their eyes are full of furious, determined life and Samara silently takes it all away.

The one thing that doesn't involve death is her little garden. Samara loves her garden and it's beautiful because she loves it. She speaks to her flowers (because someone told her once that they grow better) and waters them and watches them bloom into beautiful things. She wonders what her life will be like if she were a flower - so simple, perhaps. 

But when it rains, when it pours and Father forbids her to leave the house (or perhaps when she's sad and scared and angry all at once with helplessness choking at her), Samara finds herself heading downstairs into her playroom (at her request Father had it done in pure, bright, innocent, flowery white, like a life she won't have).

(She silently likes playing with Sox most; he's her first toy, next to Grayson, and she likes him because he's all drawable skin in both scalpel and colored pens, and looks at her like she might be the queen of everything. But she adores the stark white hair on Nova's head, because it makes her feel like there's someone else who's strange and freak-like in the genetic department, someone who's different. For that reason she's decided that when she dies she'll have Nova buried with her, It's in her will. In crayon.)

Sometimes Samara sits in the corner, curled up, strings in her hands. She'll twitch them and her toys will make shallow cuts on one another in turn, playing the doctor and his patients. She'll watch the thin rivulets of blood trickle off their skin into the white hospital sheets she has to change often. (She'll fix them later, tiny hands carefully putting smiley-faced plasters on the cuts and kissing them better like she once witnessed a loving mother place on her daughter's bruise, like she once had a mother do give 'get better kisses' to her.)

Sometimes she lies them down, carefully, on the little bed and take out a little knife to make them better. Carve out lines of surgery onto their skin, play at being the doctor for herself (only it's not her at the end of the knife yet). She'll tell the it's going to be okay, like her unwitting doctor said to her (right before he started using big words, big phrases, feeling safe in his assumption she's just like every other stupid, ignorant child). It's to make them get better... To make them feel the grief she can't ever forget.

Sometimes... sometimes she positions her toys standing around the little bed in her little playroom. She ties them to the ceiling (with the help of that ladder Father gave her; she's a tiny child, but she's not helpless, not while technology exists) and puts an instrument in their stiff hands before lying down and closing her eyes. And she pictures a hospital room in the Capitol, the surgery, maybe, and the doctors are doing fancy things (that she can't even begin to imagine where they start) to her with high-tech knives and everything. And when she wakes up she'll be cured, she'll be the perfect daughter, alive and well and not genetically doomed to die. She'll run out to her worried family lingering in the waiting room and throw her arms around her siblings in turn and end with her father, holding on so tightly with a smile so wide. And they'll laugh and cry and they'll be happy and perfect. Father will care.

She never tells anyone what she fantasizes about. (Because when she opens her eyes her dolls have not moved, her DNA has not changed, and she'll slip off the bed, leaving the toys where they are. She'll slip off the bed and hurry out the room with tears in her eyes because she's not ready to die.)

+++

They call it the MELAS syndrome, and it's short for Mitochondrial encephalomyopathy, lactic acidosis, and stroke-like episodes. Samara only needed to hear it once before she never wanted to hear it again (the doctors whisper it to her at night, in her dreams, like she needs the constant reminder).

It basically means that her DNA has mutated - or is mutating - to cause all the symptoms she's been suffering from and many more to come. The doctor said her nervous system is being or will be affected, along with her muscles, and she might suffer from seizures somewhere down the road... she might end up bedridden. And dead.

Samara's not quite sure what she'll prefer.

+++

Samara isn't one for looks. After all, she is only eight and uninterested in the other gender (or any gender, really), but the few friends she has love to play with her long honey-blond hair. (Samara pulls the messy plaits free as she walks home from school with a scowl on her lips; she'll much rather have Annabelle fix her hair for her, at least it's neat.) She knows she has large gray eyes - light and dead most of the time, like a fish from one of those documentaries on fishing that come from district four - and her lips are small, pink and pouty (and she's a genius but she's not above using that to her advantage, perhaps with a, "Can I have another cookie, daddy?" hanging in the air before her). She's got fair skin that sunburns easily (and so wears long sleeves most of the time outdoors), and a cherubic little smile she'll pull out if her attempts at being doe-eyed don't work (if her eyes are too dull, too dead for acting).

And she really just doesn't care if she's covered in dirt or blood. It's part of her life, anyway, and the mess drying on her skin only means that the heat of her skin is evaporating the water from the liquid of the mess and heat means she's alive. 

Samara doesn't mind being short, either. After all, little girls grow up to be big girls eventually, even if her body is taking too long a time to catch up with her quicker mind.

But she can get so much more while she's young, so she supposes she doesn't really mind. (At her age the years feel like they're miles and miles away from her end.)

fin

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odair

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any mistakes pertaining to the disease are mine and mine only. Do let me know if I've gotten it completely (or even just a little bit) wrong.