{ lexandriy 'lex' lionel ✥ district 7 ✥ fin }

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Arthur Lionel never did have much luck, not where women were concerned. In his youth, he'd loved too young, too naively. He gave his heart to the first blonde bombshell to send a wink his way. For the better part of a year, he provided for her and took care of her to the point where her little son had taken to calling him Papa — she left him all the same, having found a more lucrative get than some carpenter's apprentice scarcely out of the Reaping.

It was many years before Arthur's broken heart mended. He fell for a woman with shock-blue eyes, who loved him back, and genuinely. He gave her a small house attached to his woodshop, gave her a ring he whittled himself of the finest mahogany he could get his calloused hands on. She gave him a daughter and five good years and three bad ones before succumbing to her waning health and leaving Arthur and little Lex all alone.

He never had much luck at all, really.

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Lex never heard it that way from her pops, though. That quiet sadness was his to swallow, and he never wanted to burden his daughter with the common sorrows of a mediocre man.

She'd been just old enough during the 59th to pick up on the way his eyes glazed over when the cameras gave their focus to District Seven's tributes.

During those Games, Lex had asked her father why he was crying the one time he hadn't been quick enough to duck behind his calloused paws. Arthur Lionel never had the heart to tell her that once upon a time, he'd given little Alex Hood piggyback rides. That it didn't matter if the toddler had been his child; he'd called Arthur Papa all the same. That it was hard — no, impossible — to see the boy after fifteen years burying the point of his blade in someone else's throat.

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She's got her father's electric blue eyes, layered with an intensity and determination that Arthur Lionel never found for himself. Lex has the same shock of blonde hair he sported before his was given to grey. She pushes it back when she's working, showing off the sharp widow's peak she inherited from him, but otherwise wears it wild.

Wiry and willowy, Lex has little trunk for a District Seven — she's all legs and twiggy branches. At 5'10", she's almost as tall as her pops. Even if their similarities are strictly confined to appearances, Lex likes the comparisons. For most of her life, it's only been the two of them: mild-mannered Arthur Lionel and his whip-smart daughter.

They share the same rough hands, covered in scars and calluses, sawdust and varnish perpetually under the nails. It comes from a shared profession: she is a carpenter, same as he is, though too young and too sure of herself to wield Arthur's level of mastery. Lex has apprenticed under him since she was old enough to swing a tack hammer.

(Her first solo endeavor, a wobbly pine stool, still lives under the tool bench in Arthur's workshop.)

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Proud to a fault, Lex Lionel is incapable of asking for help, even when she needs it. Hell, even the most cleverly disguised offerings of assistance are rebuffed with a stubborn [attr="id","speech"]"I got it."

Though gregarious and fairly outgoing, Lex is incapable of keeping more than a few close friends at a time. Most people find her too mouthy and too polarizing to have around for very long. But to those closest to her, Lex is fiercely loyal. It's just a matter of knowing how to manage her, really. Lex often speaks her mind without considering the repercussions — that is, she's honest, but kind of an asshole about it.

She's got a quick wit and a quicker temper, a combination which can be vexing to outsiders. But once they've gotten through her ego and her outer layer of snark, friends will find none truer than Lexandriy Lionel.

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Her ma died when Lex was small, consumed by tuberculosis. She wasted away, merely lingering for a few years before finally passing on. Lex doesn't remember her much — just the spattering of blood across fresh snow as the Missus Lionel doubled over a snowbank, frail body wracked and heaving. The red constellation mapped the outline of a stag. Over a decade later, it is still seared crimson into her memory. That was the day that Arthur brought his wife back into their house for the last time — she passed the next evening — but Lex just remembers admiring the beauty of that mortal Rorschach test until her pops hollered for her. She was calm as still water.

The only day in her life that Lex Lionel ever felt fear was some winters later, the day she fell through the river.

Young and foolish, Lex and the neighbor boy — one Alistair Rook — had taken their collective disregard for their own mortalities to new extremes, tussling on the newly-frozen river down in the gulch. The slick surface had provided an interesting obstacle for their fisticuffs, and the lack of traction had allowed the surefooted girl to quickly gain the upper-hand over her lumbering friend. Growing frustrated with her taunts and evasions, Alistair threw his full mass into one last-ditch lunge. He belly-flopped on the ice, sliding toward her legs, but Lex was already mid-leap.

She landed hard on one heel, punctuated with the crack! of young ice giving up the pretense of structural stability.

Time froze like the swift river beneath her had not.

And then, in an instant, she was dragged under and away. She couldn't fight the current as it pulled her downstream, freezing water sapping every ounce of energy by the second. She felt death on every inch of her skin.

It was sheer luck that allowed her to escape, in the form of a dam full of unhappy beavers. The sticks gave beneath her boots and gave her an egress point from beneath the ice. Shivering, she pulled herself to the bank and scrambled back fifty yards upriver, where her oaf of a friend was still peering beneath the ice for her.

Lex didn't need to be told to avoid the river after that. She may be stubborn, but that doesn't mean she's incapable of learning. As she spent each winter that followed trying to assure her father, one brush with death was quite enough to last a lifetime.