Amerika Eckhart || Disrict Six (FIN)

I was five.

Five should have been the year of new dresses and dollies and butterflies and pink but instead it was the year of dirt and earthworms and rough housing with the neighborhood boys. (Damien Pierce cried because I beat him up. He got teased for weeks after.) Five was the year my eighth sister was born, five was the year my oldest sister got married in secret at eighteen the day before her final reaping. (She lived of course, and I was one of her witnesses.)

Five was my revelation that I wasn't content in my own family crest, that my sorry excuse for a lineage seeped with dead ends at the bottoms of bottles and swaying gently on the end of a rope. Call it crazy good intuition, or just great observation, but I was never meant for that family. I caught their sideways glances like the patches on my flesh were the devil's kisses, hand prints meant for a cursed soul. I think it's not the mottled color of my skin, but the sheer amount of attention and energy I demanded from their weak and tired bodies.

My oldest sister always equated me to a star, but I don't want to be remembered as an intangible ball of fucking gas. A burning torch can be just as poetic, and more useful than for some chick sighing away in the confines of the Capitol. At least fire can light your way and keep you warm during the winter for fuck's sake.

Anyway, it wasn't until I went to school I saw them for the first time. Their light hair, their fair skin... Their nice clothes that didn't smell like the river; they smelled like lemons and flowers, grass and meadows- things I never had the luxury to enjoy. They were clean, like they showered before they came to school, like their water was warm instead of freezing and their mothers braided their hair for the first day of class while I was left to tame my lion's mane alone.

I fell in love with them; porcelain dolls my grandmother kept in a locked case in her living room. Our dusty fingerprints were never allowed to stroke their faces, soft cheeks, healthy physique. They never had to fight six others for their meal.

Their name was Eckhart on the papers they wrote and turned in with beautiful swooping letters, as though angels themselves had time to manipulate the sinew and muscle of their fingers while my own messy scrawl tangled and twisted in comparison, both too light and too harsh to read all at the same time. Everything about them was so beautiful, so elegant, so... Artistic. They were beautiful, and I was comparatively mud on the outside- but I knew I was meant to be one of them. I could hold my chin high like that, I could hold my pen carefully in my forefinger and thumb, write so delicately as though I were tracing the fine hairs in Ceaser Flickerman's toupee (And don't tell me that shit is real, okay?)

I went home to my shared tiny bed in threadbare covers while they slept embraced in satin sheets, and I let my curly hair loose while they carefully brushed every strand, tamed it to beautiful symmetry. Their fingers stroked lone freckles, trying to erase perfect imperfections while I submitted myself to the pokes and prods from my sisters and brothers while my own flesh transitioned from warm brown to cool white like sharp lines dividing myself from family.

The healers understood me. They knew my flesh while looking extraordinary, held no other otherworldly connotations. They couldn't make my daddy understand- he didn't want to understand. He blamed my mother and claimed she cheated. He didn't want to face the reality he sired such a proud creature- I broke every mold my family set for me by the age of five, and I, completely enthralled by those doll-girls longed to belong with them, to exist and play and laugh with a voice like wind chimes.

So I left.

I don't remember the day exactly, but I do remember standing on that big oak porch with my stuffed lion in one hand and a cardboard box full of paled rags at my feet. They smiled at the dirt, at the twists of my hair and elevated me to the same platform as their own children, their beautiful girls I so wanted to be like. I got my own bed with soft, satin sheets, I took hot showers, and I was allowed to do whatever I liked- so long as it was artistic and creative. I could write stories in my tight, scrawling hand, I could dance to swirly, majestic music, I could play pretend for days and days and days and months and months and years and years and years-

That's what stuck.

My 'Parents' never came looking for me, and I still saw my brothers and sisters at school, but they didn't talk to me- not after I started wearing white dresses that showed off my knees, not after my hair pressed into whatever shapes and texture I wanted started to hang flat or in braids down my back, not when Jequirity -

Not when Jequirity -

Not when-

Not-

Acting; Living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.

She took my voice when she left. She took our hearts, blinded our eyes and gagged our throats. She, so silent and strong, so beautiful and ceramic with a layer of diamond below... She shattered us. Any of us would have stepped in her place, but she wanted to take the pull herself, to fight and scream and kick and bite alone. I pretend to smile, though her room remains forever unoccupied. I bite my lips till blood and hug my knees to my chest when they bring up flashbacks of the games.

I cannot lose another, not on of my paper-doll family. Panem's shears cannot separate us, because we are all made of gems below, and rock beats scissors.