PHOENIX WINTERS, DISTRICT ONE {FIN}

“WELL I'M STUCK IN THIS FUCKING RUT”
Waiting on a secondhand pick-me-up, and I'm over getting older.

AGE . Seventeen.
GENDER . Female.
DISTRICT . One.
OCCUPATION . Professional Badass.
SEXUALITY . I like dem boys.
TALKING . Butterscotch
DOING . Ohio Buckeye
DEEP THOUGHT . Maine Lobster
READING LIPS . Vintage Yellow

APPEARANCE .

“IF I COULD JUST FIND THE TIME”
Then I would never let another day go by. I'm over getting old.

She wakes up to the sound of silence. Although the years of nothingness that hang heavy on her lost senses have never ceased to make her feel out of place, Phoenix muses from under the soft cover of her blankets that she's grown used to it by now. Her eyes slide open sluggishly, an odd shade of grey-blue with lush, dark lashes and a somewhat feline slant to their structure as they take in the soundless expanse of her bedroom, bathed in the milky light of morning through the drapes pulled over her window. They said her vision would be sharper in the wake of the devastation, that she could see things that most people wouldn't notice, and she supposes they were right, a floating stream of dust motes crossing her field of sight as she rolls out of bed with a displeased groan that she can feel vibrating in her ribcage. She feels more acutely as well, the things that are mere whispers over the skin of others more like a blaring scream to her, if she remembers what a scream sounds like correctly. Touch, smell, sight, taste... they've all heightened over the years to make up for what she's lost, but Phoenix wouldn't lie to herself and say that she'd be content to live this way if there were another possible way to live. There isn't, though, a river of her mother's tears bearing witness to a doctor's impassive diagnosis - permanent, incurable, irreversible damage to the auditory nerve - and Ripred knows her mother is sad enough these days without her moping about when they all know she's lucky to be alive.

The girl in her mirror meets her with bleary eyes and sleep-clouded features, milky pale skin still clinging to the warmth from the blankets even though the cold of the room steals it quickly away, making her small frame (five foot two, a hundred pounds, it doesn't matter when she's larger than life and has no intention of shrinking her personality to match her body any time soon) shiver slightly, all elegant curves and gentle lines silhouetted by the tank top and shorts she fell asleep in. Her hair is a wild, dark cloud around her face, bangs fluffed up ridiculously and deep brown locks falling to kiss the tops of her shoulders in mussed waves that have yet to be tamed by a flat iron. Phoenix scowls as she reaches for a brush, full cupid-bow lips that she doesn't care enough to put balm on to prevent them from chapping in the colder months pulling back over teeth that could have really used orthodontic care had they been able to afford it as the utensil pulls painfully at the snarls in her hair. She gives up eventually, eyes rolling skyward under delicately arched brows as thin, nimble fingers dance over the dark strands and work them into a quick braid that barely comes to her collarbone. Phoenix isn't fond of pulling her hair up; it makes the squared structure of her jawline too evident, makes her eyes look a bit more slanted, makes her nose look a bit too big... but mostly it showcases things she'd rather forget, the misshapen, warped patch of bone at the base of her skull that never healed right. It speaks (if she could hear it, that is, she thinks with a bitter quirk of her lips) of pain and murky half-memories and the terrifying realization that her world was devoid of sound. But sometimes convenience outweighs her preference, so she ties the style off quickly with an elastic band, swaps her shorts out for a comfortable pair of jeans, throws a jacket on over the tank top, and barely spares the girl in her mirror a glance as she leaves the room.

Her feet, small like the rest of her at a whopping size five shoe, pad softly down the stairs - she can feel them creak even if she can't hear them, the old wood's groaning protest shooting in vibrations up legs that are a bit too long in proportion to the rest of her body. Her mother looks up from her spot in the kitchen, a soft smile blooming on her lips as she sets a plate of pancakes on the table.

Morning, sweetheart, her mouth forms around the words slowly, carefully, making sure that Phoenix can read the individual syllables as they come like her father sometimes forgets to do, half his words lost to the ambiguity of the mumbling speech pattern that she barely remembers. Phoenix offers a wry half-smile in turn, sliding into her chair and picking up a fork as the flat plane of her stomach affirms with a low rumble that she's hungrier than she originally thought. She and her mother both pointedly ignore the chair across the table, empty for far too long with no explanation. There are some things that even this family just can't discuss, and Phoenix hates it, hates it the way she hates how her parents look at her with more pity than love, the way she hates them treating her more like a liability than a person, the way she hates herself for wishing more often than not that she could just disappear like he did.

"I'm going out after school today, I think," she says, picking at her breakfast noncommittally. Phoenix can feel her own voice vibrating in her chest and throat but has no idea how it sounds to her mother and the rest of the world, too loud to be considered normal and slightly slurred, thick and uncertain around the edges of the words. "Go hang out with Riley or Willa or Arwen or something. There's nothing to do in this house and I'm bored."

Indescision paints itself along her mother's features as she finishes washing up the last of the other breakfast dishes, hands fretting together as she looks nervously at the front door- because after all these years there's still the fear that siblings think alike and that if she walks away she'll never come back. I don't know, Nix, things have been busy around the district lately and I worry about -

"What, that something's going to knock me in the head and make me go deaf?" Phoenix snaps, standing up from her untouched plate and growling as she stalks down the front hall and yanks the door open. "Stop treating me like I'm fragile when I'm already messed up, Ma. Your good intentions get really damned annoying when they're years too late."

She makes a point to slam the door even though she knows she won't hear it.

PERSONALITY .

“MAYBE IT'S NOT MY WEEKEND BUT IT'S GONNA BE MY YEAR”
And I'm so sick of watching while the minutes pass as I go nowhere.

You probably shouldn't have yelled at her, though. If she could hear Arwen's voice, Phoenix thinks it would be brilliant and melodic, serene but shimmering like the flowing water in a fast-moving creek. There's a sort of inherent, spreading calm in the way she carries herself, and it's that calm that has made eating lunch at what is generally accepted to be the losers' table bearable for the entirety of her high school career. Quirking an eyebrow at the doe-eyed girl, Phoenix stabs at her salad with unnecessary force. She knows that she shouldn't have yelled, but with a fierce temper and an independent streak a mile wide, she can't simply let herself be held down. Like her namesake, she needs to rise up and soar, however broken her wings may be.

"Well we can't all be saints like you. I just get so tired of - well, look what the cat dragged in." A slow, mischievous smile spreads over her face as a tall, gangly form lowers itself into the empty seat next to her. "Come to mingle with the peasants? To what do we owe the occasion, Lightwood, does the school royalty not need you to be their bitch today?"

Riley smiles, quiet but radiant like a sunbeam breaking through a cloudy day, rolling his eyes as he sets his tray down in front of him. I guess not. They haven't sent someone to steal me away back to the popular table yet. Phoenix thinks his voice must be soft, steady, unassuming but utterly unshakable. His family's money might have bought him a higher social standing within the halls of the school, but Riley's an outcast at heart, Phoenix knows because she sees it in his awkward stance and contrived smiles around the pampered Careers and heirs to family fortunes that he calls his "friends" even though he knows he's not fooling anyone. Besides, I like you guys better than them. They're all mean.

"So are we," Phoenix smirks, elbowing him in the ribs lightly. "What even is that vest, you look like you've been rolling around in a rug store's reject bin."

Riley simply grins, shaking his head and mumbling something she thinks might be I like my fashion sense as he pokes experimentally at the blob on his lunch tray that the cafeteria workers claim is Salisbury steak. He knows perhaps better than anyone that Phoenix's jabs bear no real animosity behind them - she's rough around the edges, more likely to show affection in good-natured insults than an honest compliment and more likely to express herself in sharp exchanges of razor-edged wit - and so he takes it in stride, looking over at Arwen when she begins to speak too fast for Phoenix to keep up with the movement of her lips. I was talking to Nix before you bjkhbwihvbwsdvcd and this morning she dhbvjehfbieb and I told her that skjdbvsjdbvkwv...

"Hey, slow down, I can't see what you're -"

Why'd you yell at your mom, Nix? She was just worried about you. Phoenix grumbles internally, thanking whatever forces exist in the universe that Riley, at least, doesn't have a bad habit of talking a million miles an hour. She glowers at the question, though, the corners of her lips pulling downwards and a bitter taste cloying somewhere along the backs of her teeth. She knows, she knows, she knows that people could drown her in their sympathies and good intentions, but she wants neither. Watching the world pass her by is hard enough without doing it under the weight of pitying looks and whispers that no one thinks she sees (or maybe they're talking out loud. She'd never know the difference).

"Well, sorry," she mumbles, pushing the remnants of her salad around with her fork. "It just pisses me off. It's like she doesn't think I can do everything that you guys and the other 'normal' people can. Just because everyone else has given up on me doesn't mean I've given up on myself. I'm worth more than that, I think."

She takes it all in with the senses she has left, tastes the bitterness when people look at her like she's this lost, broken thing, feels the unwanted pity crawl along her skin, smells the cloying, sickly-sweet perfume of contrived sympathy and sees what they say. Odd, she thinks, that they don't make more of an effort to hide their words from someone who can read lips, but she sees everything from oh that poor dear to I should feel bad for laughing but the way she talks is so funny.

Riley looks at her, over at Arwen, and back to her again. We haven't given up on you.

If she could hear them, Phoenix thinks the words would sound like the most deep, honest thing that's ever been spoken A rare, genuine smile blooms across her lips, lighting up the elegant planes of her features that are usually darkened by acerbic skepticism and an endless thirst to prove herself. She might not have many friends, but the ones she's made over the course of time have more than earned her loyalty and love. "I know. And thank you for that."

HISTORY .

“AND THIS IS MY REACTION TO EVERYTHING I FEAR”
'Cause I've been going crazy, I don't wanna waste another minute here.

Memories are something that Phoenix doesn't like to bother with. They're fickle things, fleeting and uncertain in a way that almost everything in her life is, and besides, she much prefers living in the here and now than remaining stuck on endless loop in a past that holds everything she's lost in life. It's the one facet of who she is that even her best friends can't seem to understand (Arwen with her promises that our futures lie within our pasts and Riley with his carefully-kept photo albums full of faces that no longer smile), a desire to shy away from anything that might pull her back to a time when she could actually hear the sound of her own heartbeat in the stillness of night instead of feeling the empty thumps against her ribs.

But the past is everywhere, hanging heavy along the familiar streets that have felt the pads of her feet for seventeen years. The differences between then and now are subtle and earth-shattering all at once, so strikingly the same and simultaneously different that it nearly manages to knock her off her already fragile axis.

There are the things she will always remember, the things preserved in faded snapshots that her mother stashed away years ago, too overwhelmed by what she perceived to be her own failures to face them anymore. Ender is one of those people that sear their way into the lives of anyone they meet, and Phoenix knows better than to think that ten years of absence will make her brother fade away. He was always like that, shining like the stars and daring the world to take him if it could (which it eventually did).

Her childhood is a blur of half-remembered sounds, although she's not sure what goes where (there are days when she gets the memory of birds in the morning mixed up with the sound of the rain and the confusion threatens to take her over) or exactly how it all faded away. She remembers vague things from the beginning of her life: her bedroom walls were purple when she was little, she used to be terrified of thunder, they had a cat named Mittens, she used to be happy... The only constant memories seem to revolve around Ender, the sound of his laugh and the brief starshine of his smile a keen blade that cuts through the fog when Phoenix decides there might be something to be gained from digging through her history to find just where it all went wrong. She can never seem to figure it out, though.

Around her seventh year is where it all starts to fracture, gaping holes and tiny chips torn away from the fabric of her memory leaving hopelessly blank spaces that she's never been able to fill in. The last whole memory she has with sound is a summer day, sweltering with oppressive heat while the rusty swings at the playground squeaked overhead and she giggled for Ender to push her higher, higher until her wings could catch the sun's fire and she could fly away to somewhere where life was more than waiting for the inevitable. After that, there are only bits and pieces. The feeling of the ladder to the tree house beneath her palms. The wind in her hair. The sensation of falling. The last sound Phoenix ever heard was Ender calling her name.

When she woke up, her hearing was gone and so was her brother.

The stifling silence that ruled her world and the holes in her memory were easy for the doctors to explain away. A fall, a fractured skull. She'd nearly died, but instead of taking her life apparently the Reaper had wanted both her ears and the past few weeks of her memory. Her brother's absence was obviously something a bit more tricky, something her mother and father tiptoed around as they spoke silent words she couldn't yet make sense of and stashed the picture frames in the backs of tightly-shut drawers, so dark that even the stars couldn't shine.

Phoenix wonders sometimes. Where he is, why he left, if he's even alive - the Games have claimed many young lives, but she's seen enough to know that the streets have claimed more - wonders why his ghost seems to haunt everything from the phantom laughter of the only voice she really remembers to the flash of wheatblonde hair and starry eyes that dances across the corner of her eye, causing her to pause in the middle of the street and whip her head around, blinking quickly as if to make sure her eyes hadn't been playing tricks again.

Riley's face ducks into her field of vision, eyes concerned while Arwen continues to float along the path in her own little world like always. You okay, Nix?

"Yeah," she mumbles, falling back into step beside him as she adjusts her backpack on her shoulders. "I just... I thought I saw someone I used to know."

ANYTHING ELSE ?

Song is Weightless by All Time Low.

OUT OF CHARACTER .

FACE CLAIM .

NEON LYNXIE • PHOENIX WINTERS

OTHER CHARACTERS ?

Click.

I, SOUTH .
STOLE THIS TEMPLATE FROM ELEGANT BUT IT'S OKAY BECAUSE I ASKED AND I AM CREDITING HER IN GREAT BIG LETTERS LIKE I SAID I WOULD. THANKS BABE <3

CODEWORD . it's a ~*~secret~*~