Justice Magpie - D5 (Re-sub) <ready>

If you asked a stranger to describe Justice Magpie, the first word that would probably come to mind would be bright. She dyes her hair bright red, and wears colorful clothing; oranges, yellows and baby blues. It makes her stand out against the dreary steel greys and slick shiny black that paints district five. The same colors that her family members have a tendency to dress in. Despite that, it’s clear that she is a Magpie, with the same features, though her cheekbones are a little higher, her nose a little rounder and her lips a little fuller; she certainly has the chalky pale skin that her siblings have. Her slender fingers can often be seen clutching a butterfly net, long legs skipping whimsically as she tries to capture any winged insects foolish enough to wander into town.

A strange, sickly sweet aura announces her presence wherever she goes, the smell of perfume mixing with decay and rot. Many people find it perplexing that a girl that looks like she does never brushes her teeth, but whenever they ask, she just offers them a rictus grin and says something unsettling about the artistic side of death, how the flowers people put in vases are dead and yet they are still appreciated. This is usually paired with the batting of her long eyelashes, flicking over her sunken green eyes; the color of jealousy and greed, as her mother often said. Justice herself would compare her eyes to the moss growing on a tree trunk lying prostrate on the forest floor.
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What people perceive and what actually goes on in her head are two extremely different things. For example, when the annual games roll around, she can be seen dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief when certain tributes fall, regardless of district origin. One might think that she was tenderhearted after witnessing such a display. However, she weeps not for their lives, but for their deaths if she feels the killer did a terrible job of it. It saddens her when a tribute makes a kill and turns it into a hack job devoid of beauty, arrangement or understanding; When they fail to make it a masterpiece, freeing a soul by turning their corpse into art. In this respect, she’s just as dark, just as mad as the rest of her siblings, if less immediately visibly so.

Getting inside Justice’s head is like biting into a shiny new apple, only for it to leave a bitter tang in your mouth when you discover that corruption and decay has already consumed it from the inside out. Once that is understood, the dye in her hair doesn’t seem to make her stand out from her siblings as much. Crimson for the color of blood is close to the blackness of death that surrounds the rest of her family. The colors of her clothes take on a macabre feeling as Justice has admitted before that she loves the hues that the leaves take in autumn because it signifies a kind of death for the trees, that she adores the district industry because the oil drills take a substance made out of the bodies of prehistoric animals and use it to create power, to bring life. Creation through destruction.

Strangely, she likes to tie ribbons around her joints, sometimes little bits of string, other times, strips of fabric. She believes that if she’s not careful, that if she gets too excited, her skeleton will literally burst free of her skin, ribs clacking like cymbals as it leaves her body behind in the dust, Though this does not prevent her from dancing whenever the mood strikes her. Yet this is not the only or the oddest belief she carries in her skull, while she doesn’t know the name for it, Justice is Casadastraphobic. To her, it means that a large portion of every day is spent fearing that she’ll get sucked into sky, that gravity will lose its hold on her. It’s why she insists on putting pebbles in her shoes before she goes outside. When she was younger, she would even tie herself to chairs if she was going to stationary for an extended period of time.
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From the time she was a young girl, it was clear that Justice wanted to be the center of attention. Perhaps it was because of the lack of attention her mother gave her, the fear of vanishing suddenly like her aunts had, or the small tickle in the back of her mind that told her that she and her siblings weren’t like the other children they met. On some level she became aware that something was wrong with her, but she was never able to grasp what it was. She was never close to her siblings, and still isn’t, and is even farther away from her mother. It was difficult, growing up, her fears and vivid imagination taking over her life, straining relationships with the few friends she had made. She was laughed at. Mocked. But the inner workings of her mind kept chugging along.

As she grew older, her phobia turned outward, resulting in an irrational fear of balloons and a hatred of insects capable of flight. It calms her down to pull the wings off of insects and preserve them in formaldehyde, to pin them to a corkboard, safe in knowing that they’ll never be able to fly away from her, or worse, carry her away into the unending sky above. Balloons on the other hand, she makes every effort to avoid, believing them to be possessed by some degree of sentience and hungry for people’s essence. She ties herself to her bed every night as well, having taught herself how to sleep with her eyes open, both actions done in hope that she’ll be safe while she sleeps. And, like her family’s namesake, she surrounds herself with shiny things in order to do so. Justice’s room contains at least a half a dozen mirrors arranged around her bed, for a purpose known only to her.

Now, as a young woman, she feels as though her family’s sordid history has been forgotten by the district at large, which is something of a relief, though it doesn’t resolve her sibling’s problems. Drugs, thievery, rage, to name a few. Justice has come to believe that the Magpies do what Magpies will, and that no one outside of their family is capable of understanding them. As such, she finds interacting with other people difficult. She will tilt her head to say hello, but flits away before a conversation can be struck up. It’s evident that something is not quite right with Justice Magpie, but what that is remains up for debate. For those brave enough to attempt talking to her, she is often found by the oil rigs, twirling like the dancer atop a music box to a tune that nobody else can hear.