Heistia Theft//D3//FIN

Name: Heistia Theft

Age: 15

Gender: female

District: 3

Having a choice is always important. It is even more important to those who do not have it. And she never had a choice. Even if she tried to run from her home, from her family, from her district, she wouldn’t be able to escape her destiny. It was always with her, engraved in her very name. Sometimes that name seemed to be a cruel joke, sometimes she tried to forget it and move on. But it always stayed with her. And she knew that she couldn’t change who she was. Heistia Theft. Heist. A homeless-looking girl who had a strong smell of coal coming from every part of her body. A short-haired pocket thief in the District Square. A grey-eyed small figure that looked so unhappy and lonely among the cheerful children of her age even when she was only five.

She used to have long hair. Beautiful long dark brown hair. But then she had to cut it to make stealing easier. Short dirty hair is harder to remember. And makes her harder to catch. When she hadn’t cut it off yet, a person in the square noticed what she was doing and got hold of her braid for a moment. She freed herself and ran away almost instantly, but she could never forget the fear that made her stomach twist and almost caused her to faint. She remembers this fear, the fear that goes with beauty and she doesn’t want to pay that price for being good looking.

She is so pale, that it makes her look sick and worn out. When spring comes, the sun usually sprays a ton of freckles all over her face, but her skin never changes its color and that looks ironic. Heist always makes fun of her freckles and paleness with her family.

She is also so thin that it always seems that she can be blown away by the wind. She is very short and childlike, even for her relatively young age. This, along with the other appearance details, makes her almost unnoticeable among other people.

She never cared much about her looks. Even though there were times when she wanted to be noticed, those times are long gone, left in her early teens. She knows that the only thing that must matter to her is feeling comfortable and always being able to run. That is why she prefers jumpers with long sleeves and trousers or shorts to all the other clothes.

She has been running, stealing, running again for so long, that she is constantly afraid. Afraid of being noticed. Afraid of being caught. Afraid of every sound, every person, every thought. She always needs to know there is a way out. If she believes that there is a possibility to escape, it makes things easier for her. However, when she finds herself in small spaces or in situations where she can’t save herself, she begins to panic.

This feeling of always wanting to escape chases her in every dream and every time she wakes up she feels weary. When she was eight, her parents noticed that food started to disappear from the kitchen at night and every single thing in the house was found in the wrong place. Heist’s sister woke up once and saw that she was walking around, doing weird things. The next day Heist claimed that she wasn’t doing anything. That is how they found out that she was sleepwalking. However, they couldn’t do anything to help her, so she never stopped doing it.

She never enjoyed being a thief, but she had to be a part of the family business. And she knew that she would never be able to refuse to help her family. Those people are the only thing she can hold on to with her fragile hands. She could never imagine her life without a family because in most desperate situations they were her way to escape, her lifeboat in the ocean of troubles, fears, doubts. This handful of people means the world to her and she would never betray her love towards them. She has almost never fought anybody, but she is ready to even hurt others for the sake of her family and she knows she can fight well. The proof is the boy next door who tried to bully her once and was found on the street in a few minutes with his mouth full of dirt and a bleeding nose.

She likes to have fun with her family, but when she goes outside, everything that is her fades away. In the streets of district three, she is just a girl who steals. She never looks people in the eye, because she is scared that they will see everything she has ever done. All her thefts are clearly visible from behind her grey startled gaze. She could never lie to anyone or hide something, so she doesn’t want to be spoken to. And most people don’t even notice a shivering girl in the corner.

Heist is always cold. No matter how many warm clothes she is wearing, she is trembling. The reason may be her fear of being exposed, or it can be the fact that she never eats enough and doesn’t have the necessary amount of calories to keep her warm. Probably, both explanations are true.

She gets sick often and often misses school. It is not only because her health is too fragile. She also wants to catch a cold most of the time because it means that she won’t have to go to school again. Heist often comes out into the street in winter when no one is looking and eats a few handfuls of snow to get a sore throat and stay at home. The home feels warm and comfortable. And she doesn’t have to run when she is sick because nobody makes her go outside to “work”. Things are more difficult in summer when it is almost impossible to fall ill and she has to steal every day. Heist has always been glad, though, that she only does the stealing, she would never have the guts to participate in murder or a kidnapping.

Despite the fact that she almost never goes to school, she has an ability to remember things almost instantly and knows a lot. Heist loves reading and knows all her books by heart. She can also sneak into any place without being seen by anyone, so she stole bread from the bakery a couple of times.

She has always been able to put her pickpocketing job before her own life. She knows that it has to be done, no matter how unpleasant it is and no matter what price she has to pay for it. The stealing is destroying her, but it is also a source of life for her whole family and Heist is ready to put a lot of effort into helping her loved ones. She never cares about how many friends she has (and she has none of those) and she never cares about what she wants.

Her story is a simple one. She was born. She was given that name that is one of her nightmares. She had a few years of being a normal child who didn’t have to care about anything at all. And then she was taught to steal from people. She knew already that stealing was wrong and her family’s business never looked too attractive to her, but it was what she had to do. And she quickly learned to be one of the finest and most skilled pocket thieves in her district.

When she was eight, she participated in her first robbery. Heist didn’t have to do much, she just climbed inside some big house through a tiny window and opened the door from the inside. After that, she ran away, because she was too afraid to wait for everybody else to come out into the street again. She knew that what she had done was very wrong and couldn’t stop imagining how sad the house owners would be when they lost everything they had or most of their possessions.

When Heist was twelve, she was asked to do the same thing for another robbery. She was seeing it in her dreams for a week after she was told to prepare for it. And when she did what was required of her, she ran back home and fainted on the doorstep, because she couldn’t endure fighting her conscience anymore. She got sick after that and spent two weeks in bed. She can still remember the terrible fever she had and the feeling of heat that surrounded her for the first time in her life. When it was over, she spent three more weeks trying to stand on her shaky legs and getting better.

Then it started again. The life of a pocket thief. And it never seems to stop.