marceline jeon / district 8 / fin!

APPEARANCE  /   Marceline Jeon stands at a respectable 170cm/5' 7", like most of the women in her family. She's stretched long and thin like most of them too, hovering around 100 pounds. During her workday at a textiles factory in District 8, Marceline keeps her long black hair back in a bun at the nape of her neck. Throughout the day, strands fall out, and she pushes them back with the fingers of her needle-calloused hands. She likes her hair, and despite their ever present scabs, she likes her hands too. Her long, thin fingers are deft with a needle, and they're strong. Thick skinned, rough; they represent her hard work. Her hands and arms are Marceline's biggest boon. Her legs, on the other hand, are skinny and weak. Never an outdoorsy child, Marceline took to sewing and knitting early, and to this day, sits with her legs pulled up against her chest. Her joints are weak from underuse and genetic hypermobility. She has knobbly knees, protruding ankles, and stiff hips, all of which are prone to popping. 

She could, says her mother, manage to get by on her face. She's a pretty girl, better suited to modelling clothes than making them, but Marceline isn't interested in marrying up, getting with some Peacekeeper or mayor's child. No matter how her weight fluctuates, her cheeks always stay plump, much to Marceline's own chagrin. Though she has plenty of natural blessings, Marceline has one crippling physical insecurity: her teeth. Marceline's bottom row of adult teeth came in overcrowded. She's had three of them pulled already following painful infections. Two of them were pulled from the back, but most recently she's had one of her lower canines removed. Combined with her flared front teeth that border on rabbit-like, Marceline's mouth causes her considerable distress. As a result, she rarely smiles. When she does, her family and friends find it off-putting, such is its unfamiliarity to them. 

Thanks to her love of textile work, Marceline often spends her evenings hand embroidering her clothes, even after she already put a long shift beading gowns bound for the Capitol. The designs she chooses lend her a levity otherwise absent from her thanks to the blank expression she defaults to. She opts for small, detailed floral designs. She typically adds these designs to the hems of her skirts, the cuffs of her sleeves, and the starched collars of her shirts. Despite her abject failure at maintaining her teeth, Marceline takes meticulous care of her clothes, wearing them like armour.

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PERSONALITY  /   Marceline is the secretive type. It's very rare that she shares anything with people. Even the most minor admission of detail leaves Marceline feeling violated and paranoid. The less she says, the less anybody knows, then the less people will remember her. She wants to focus on her work, which she loves despite the long hours and the cursing and the sweating. Her sewing and her self imposed seclusion form a wall around Marceline. Admittedly, Marceline is lonely, but she's fearful of branching out, which means she's oftentimes frosty towards anybody who does attempt to so much as greet her in passing. She's content to be lonely if it means a peaceful life. Marceline selfishly puts herself before all others, to the detriment of her relationship with her immediate family. In the walls of her own home, Marceline snaps easily, and is frequently irritated to the point of overstimulation by the busy nature of her house. 

As a child (which she still is, but doesn't consider herself to be), Marceline was marginally more open. Most of her friendships were formed in her early years, during that brief period when she went to school, by way of her cousins introducing her to their friends. She maintains the friendships that remain through what little gifts she can afford or by lending a listening ear. Marceline, chronically private, never lets secrets slip. She forgets nothing; which is useful until her memories fester and form grudges. These grudges are forever destined to go unaddressed. Remaining off the radar like this is Marceline's way of doing what she can to avoid being reaped. It makes no difference in reality, but she's convinced that if she keeps her head down, she'll make it to adulthood. 

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HISTORY  /   Marceline's parents got married ten years before Marceline was born, because her mother was pregnant. Marceline was their ninth and final baby, born as tall as all the others but lighter than the rest. It'd been a complicated pregnancy, which her father thought accounted for Marceline's difficult personality as she grew. She walked clumsily alongside her sure footed siblings, all eight of whom had managed to survive despite the odds. So, Marceline let them go out and play without her, and went to sit with her older cousins. They were girls, from her father's side, nine and thirteen, and already working in one of District 8's clothing factories. It was them, and not her mother, who taught her to sew, knit, and crochet. Her mother had this idea that she should play while she still could, despite the fact that Marceline had always been wholly unentertained by her hand-me-down toys. Her cousins told her stories about the girls who wore the dresses they made; her mind spun with possibilities. Not about wearing big gowns herself, but of the people she might dress one day.

She quickly learned that her cousins' clients were little more than fairytale heroines. Once she started working on the factory floor, Marceline worked all day just for her dresses to be whisked away from her by the courier staff, never to be seen again. Still, there was some satisfaction in finishing a dress, even if, to the wearer, she was some anonymous seamstress from nowhere. Marceline learned she was insignificant; she immediately worked to come to terms with that reality. Her pessimism made her unpopular with her boisterous family, who all worked hard to seem happy no matter how loudly their stomachs grumbled. 

Marceline cried the first year she was eligible to be Reaped. She cried on her twelfth birthday, and again on Reaping Day. They were the first tears she shed in years. This biannual outburst became routine; a rare outburst that her family weren't sure how to deal with. To be fair, she didn't know how to either. She earned lashings at the factory for drenching her work with her tears on her birthdays. The rest of the year, Marceline bottled it all up, feeling somehow comforted by the inevitable explosion she knew would come eventually.