Charlie Anning D3 (FIN)

"If every one were cast in the same mould, there would be no such thing as beauty." -Charles Darwin

Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, or that's what she had learned from observation. Beauty was something that she never truly saw, especially not in herself. Brown hair that flows down her shoulders to her chest, straight and healthy. Blue eyes that stare into the mirror, an icy cold color for the girl whose heart was of stone. Plump pink lips push up in thought as she continues to stare at the person in the mirror. An opposite from her is what she liked to believe. Not too smart for their own good. A girl whose life had good things in it, where the only worries would be boy troubles, but that world didn't exist. Fantasies were only that, fantasies that we imagine to hide the depression in our minds. If someone had asked her how to fix themselves, her answer would have been to fantasize about anything and everything. It worked for her, for the most part.

Then the icy blue eyes reached her body. Thin, lanky, and small. Three words that she would use to describe herself to the other her in the mirror. They both carry the same body, but she knows her's is nothing to brag about. Thin and pale, no scars upon her body. Hands are soft to the touch. Feet are rather small for a girl her age, but she still thought they were different and that made her feel special compared to others. The thin stomach and chest rise and fall with every breath she could take, oxygen finding it's way into her body, Carbon Dioxide leaving it's prison to the open air around her. Her form was smaller, not the shortest girl, but not the tallest. The mirror self stares back at her, unknowing of her presence. Beauty was in the eye of the beholder, but she wasn't beautiful in her own eyes. Cousins tell her otherwise, but she ignores them and their words because all she wants to do is observe and learn.

"A scientific man ought to have no wishes, no affections, - a mere heart of stone." -Charles Darwin

The interest in behavior was not what her sister's expected her to enjoy looking at. Behavior was something she was becoming an expert in. The cheerful smiles upon the most broken of souls, her own included, made her strive to figure out why. Why did people act in such a way? Understanding it could take her entire life and yet she would be okay with that. She would be okay devoting her life towards something that her cousin would have been proud of. Something that Hypatia Anning would have nodded in excitement with as Charlie's voice would echo with theories and hypotheses. This was only a fantasy that she could live in as Hypatia Anning was dead. Survival of the fittest and Hypatia wasn't strong enough to survive. Charlie had seen it before it had happened.

It had been like two different predators that had evolved to fight for territory, casualties from both sides and no one would be a winner, only the dead stay dead. Charlie had watched Hypatia die on the screens around the District. The vengeful death of her cousin who had hollow eyes. Evolution of Hypatia Anning could date back to the way she had reacted when she was reaped. Charlie studied her. Her cousin's demise unfolding before her eyes and yet all she could do was study the changes within Hypatia. As she watched, little by little, her heart turned to stone. Only journals filled with hypotheses of survival and evolution of the tributes sits within her drawers and bed. Reading and nature falling into her interests and soon enough, she was trying to avoid all of the technological side of District Three and focus on the survival and behaviors of people. Watchful eyes scanning their entire being, until she solved them like an equation.

Evolution. A key idea that she had heard at a young age, applying it only as she grew older. Humans were created to evolve, slowly and steadily. They learned behaviors that would mean for the best survival chances of their offspring, even if had meant leaving the district, which according to the people she could track, none of them would leave the district for the hopes of their child to live. It was the best survivability rate, or at least, it's what she thought it would be, but instead people stay in the districts. Letting their children die year by year to the Hunger Games. She wanted to figure it out. Why didn't they leave? Why? That was the biggest question for everything she's ever seen.

Curiosity coats her veins with the questions to the world. Adaptations that the people have made, adaptations that she would make with the death of Hypatia Anning, her cousin. Just like the plants and animals, adapting to the ever changing seasons of fall, winter, spring and summer, she changes slightly to being a better person. Spring is the season of flowers and that's what she is, a flower within a field of joy and happiness, happily twisting and turning with the winds. Spring was the time of year she related to the most, joy and yet showers of rain flooding the lands, happiness and sorrows fighting for control within her body.

The war inside of her body between emotions rages on every day she lives without her cousin, Hypatia Anning. Every dinner, there was silence as one person was missing from their seat, never to come back to them and all Charlie ever did was watch her other family member's faces as they contort with emotions from before. All they do is eat, talk about whatever they want and move on from the memory of Hypatia, and she follows the rest of them. Day after day, she just lives her life the way she wants to. Watching the people and animals around the district. Biology, adaptations, and so many other biological findings being recorded in a journal that she owns.

Art was her escape from reality, it wasn't a skill that developed as fast as her mind did with learning and studying behaviors and survivability of anything and everything. It took years and years of practice for her to master the skill. In the journals of information about the little critters in the area and mutts within the games, are drawings of the monsters and critters. Mites, gulpers, latch crabs, squirrels, and birds of different types, fill the pages with gorgeous sketches and perfect drawings that were as accurate as any official book with them. Charlie had studied the games over and over again when she could get the chance to, images of creatures and information of their behaviors and characteristics.

"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change." -Charles Darwin

"Charlie, wake up!"

Her body stiffens as she rises from the bed that held her within the warmth of her own body heat, a characteristic that was used to keep the body warm from the cold nights. Ever so slightly, she crawls out of the messy sheets that lay upon the edge. Her mother's necklace upon the dresser next to her, a shiny glint of memories before everyone who she loved left her to survive upon her own, only to be found by her aunt, taking her in. Not much was known about the night her mother perished, but Charlie remembered it like it had been the day before. That's when the sorrows began their war upon her happy body. That's when she snapped out of thought, her aunt smiling at her, as the other aunts and uncles in the home would do.

Breakfast was as normal as it always was. Together and yet alone, Charlie was always alone with her family members. It wasn't the fact that she wasn't smart enough, as she had just as high of an IQ as the rest of them, she just preferred the silence of the world a little more than the rest of them. Time to think about the wonders of the world, and yet she loved them all. Silence was where most of her breakthroughs happened, as most of her cousins knew. Charlie was the wise one when it came to people and how to deal with people, not exactly popular in school, but she got along with most people out of kindness. Though, not all people saw her as her cousins did. Smart and intelligent weren't always the greatest things to have, as she learned her first day back to the school after living on her own.

They forced her to be the one to do all of their homework, she thought she had been fitting in, but she never had been. They tricked her like a child with the ball behind his back, tricking the dog into thinking he threw it, she had been the dog and the group of girls had been the child. Charlie learned her lesson as all girls did, which ended in a hair pulling fight, where Charlie had won from the fact that she had watched animals fight for dominance. She had made her point clear that day and never had she been violent since then.

As school ends, her cousins and her walk to their home, her home, now that she had to call it that. It hadn't been her home until recently, before all of the madness of living with cousins, she had her mother who took care of her. As her father had been a man who she never truly met. Her mother had been young as had her father. Mother used to tell her of times when they had been teenage lovers, who unfortunately had a child too soon. Charlie Anning. Though her mother always reassured her that her father's death had nothing to do with her, but with himself. She had known it was a lie from the beginning.

Pressure and risks of having a child at such a young age had been too much for her father, as her aunt had told her time and time again when she asked, like every time it would burn out of her mind, but it never truly did. It had been her birth that caused him to push to the last straw. Silent tears would fill her eyes and night sometimes, but when she awoke, nothing ever was different, only the same premade schedule of learning, studying, and focusing on the world around her.

Her mother and Charlie had grown in a small house for years, until she was fifteen. They were happy, happier than anyone could be, but nothing could have prepared Charlie for the incident and months after that would take her by surprise. All she knew was that her mother had gone out and something happened. An attack of sorts, upon her mother, for something she had been working on. A scientist at heart, the first reason she studied the world that she could. It only took one incident to scare her for the rest of her life, it was one attack, but her mother had died, stab wounds upon her side. Aunts and uncles had tried to get to Charlie, but she didn't want them, not at first, not until she needed them.

Fleeing from the world around her, she hides within the streets and homes of District Three. Homeless and poor, like the rest of the district that couldn't afford to become something smart and helpful to the society. She lived on the streets like a rat, hunting for the scraps of food she could find. Studying how others got the food they needed to live, her aunts and uncles were hunting for her, even if she didn't want to be found, it took months of sneaking around and avoiding them, until she went willingly with one, after almost dying of starvation.

Her aunt had a smile upon her face that night, the rain soaking Charlie's clothes with numbing pain. A hand out to Charlie and she only accepted out of pure exhaustion and hunger. Charlie still didn't know why she ran, something in her mind told her to. A way for her to keep out any family if she had been meant to be killed like her mother had been, they never found the killer that killed her mother. That's how she knew she was safe after months of sneaking around the district. No one had approached her for other reasons than crude remarks or to feed her. Her aunt's smile burns within her mind as Charlie grabs the hand with what little strength she has left. Her aunt's words would echo within her head from that day to the present,

"Welcome home, Charlie. We've been worried sick about you."

It had taken her months to get back to her normal self and that's when she had heard the melody of Hypatia's violin within the walls, soothing her to sleep. It had taken weeks for Charlie to gain the courage to approach her cousin and ask for her to play for her, in exchange for some drawings, that Charlie had given her without asking. The melodies had soothed her soul from the sorrows of her past. Her mother and father's deaths. Her life on the streets, before she found a place that she was close to calling home. Hypatia Anning had been perfect and helped her feel welcome within the home, but everything good within her life never lasted.

Hypatia's name rang out upon the microphone of the escort, sentencing the one person she felt attached to, to her demise. A box to come home with where they would either burn her and spread the ashes or bury her under the ground like they had done with her mother. Hypatia Anning had died before her eyes, faster than Charlie could anticipate and yet she treated it like nothing more than an experiment gone wrong. Interests in behavior and survivability, like her time upon the streets. Surviving upon the streets meant evolving and changing into someone that could get the necessary items needed to survive. That's how Charlie Anning started to study everyone's behaviors and adaptations.

Some nights, Charlie Anning lays in bed staring up at the ceiling filled with stars that she had made. The wind from outside caressing the window, the silence allowing her mind to be free and yet she didn't want that. Free to think of anything that she wanted to. As she stares at the ceiling, a whistling of air hits her face like a hand caressing her cheek. The silence is almost too much for her to handle, but that's when the music plays, she remembers every note, every sound like it was a part of her being.

Some nights, Charlie Anning stares at the ceiling, hearing notes that used to put her to sleep with ease, forgetting the sorrows that haunt her life.