Zaven Drevarsky, D3

Zaven, or Za as she is known to most, has never exactly looked healthy. Pallid skin, clammy hands, ribs that poke out at every angle- she's not exactly beautiful. If one was to erase the purple shadows under her eyes that come with improper sleeping habits, add some fat around her hips and thighs, and puff up her mosquito-bite breasts and thin line of lips, then maybe she could be considered quite attractive.

Her legs look, for want of a less stereotypical metaphor, like they could be snapped. But stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, as the scar along her ankle- dotted along one side- reads that this did once happen. One of her brothers, when wrestling with an even smaller five year old Za, snapped her leg clean in half. Like a lot of poorer District Three children, she is pale, for life stuck inside the small square of apartment that she calls home is not exactly the best method for a tan. Her hands and feet are soft, having hardly touched the outside world. There is no defining tug of muscle along her thighs or calves when she stands, nor a covering of fat- nothing to keep her warm when the heating meter runs out. Her breasts still have not even begun to develop- something that she is very self-conscious of- and the line that runs from her hips and straight up her rib cage is just that- straight. Her skin is not the normal peachy-brown, nor is it ivory, but more a translucent white, veins showing through, splotches of pink and bruise dotting it at uneven intervals. The arms that are just that little bit too long for her body hold themselves at an angle that just isn't quite right. And her eyes? They're grey. They're unremarkable. They disappear into a crowd or a forest quite easily.

She would not be one to smile at you in the street. Although, mind, in district three, no one smiles at you in the street, no one wants to spend any more time out there than they have to. Za is not often seen out and about, preferring to coop herself up in her shared room and study one of few books she hasn't yet read. She comes off as offhandish, but if you take the time to prove the fact that you are fairly knowledgeable to Za, she will talk to you for hours- that is provided, of course, that the conversation is worth talking about. She won't talk about nothing, it has to interest her.

Za doesn't particuarly like herself. She doesn't like her body, the way it won't do anything like it is supposed to. She doesn't like that she's seen weird, like any teenage girl, she wants to have friends, to be accepted. She doesn't like that she can't just do all the things that others take for granted. And she's accepted that, because of the increasingly more frequent hospital stays and doctors visits, that she's going to die soon. This makes her brave. It's the only thing she likes about herself- the fact that she accepts the fact that it doesn't matter if she dies tomorrow, because there's a good chance she only has a year to go anyhow.

She's one of those kids who all the adults like, and all the kids find a little to intellectual to make a decent conversation with. She gets jealous easily, especially of those with athletic ability, however she was gifted from a young age to be able to keep her feelings to herself. This makes her a fairly loyal friend- but to be a loyal friend, one needs to have friends in the first place.

Za's had always known she's going to die. And not in the way that most children think of death- that it's something that happens to people that let themselves get old, that it could never touch them. In Za's life, death has been from the very start something that was with her every day, waiting for her to fall into it. She hasn't fallen yet.

Zaven was a twenty five weeker. Born at twenty five weeks of gestation, she was one of the first babies of this age to survive in district three's fairly advanced hospital. Of course, it didn't have nearly as advanced technology as the Capitol did- and so, when finally, after spending the first nine months of her life in hospital because of the complications surrounding her early birth, Za returned home, she didn't quite work right. Most babies will wake up crying in the middle of the night, hungry, or wet. Za never did. She suffered in silence, never sounding a noise. The first time she was take out of the postage square of an apartment that her family lived in and out onto the smog-thick street below, she turned a funny shade of blue- "like the reboot screen" her five year old brother said at the time- and had to be rushed to hospital. It was found that her lungs weren't growing properly, and that they never would. From this moment on, Za was wrapped in cotton wool, never let out of her parents sight. She wasn't allowed to go to school, because that would mean going outside, and her little lungs might not be able to handle that. Because of this, she didn't develop friends as the other girls did, and so she was always a strange little child.

Instead, she enjoyed the company of her five brother, of whom she was the youngest. She always thought that her parents had gone through enough trouble with her, and therefore had decided not to have anymore, just in case they happened to be like Za. Both her parents worked in District 3's electrical factories, and neither were top of the business. And so, there was never enough to go around, especially as the boys reached their hungry teenage years. It was, however, always ensured that little Za had enough to eat at each meal, enough blankets to cover her at night. She had grown to be a favorite in the family, and they didn't want her passing over just yet.

Instead of a formal education, when her brothers returned from school each night, they would share a little nugget of their technological learning with her. She became very good at wiring things up to help around the house- an egg timer that buzzed when the watery yolks were cooked to the exact consistency she liked them, a lamp that turned off when she put her book down for the night. And later on something more complex- a meter that told her where the air was too polluted, where it wasn't safe for her to breathe it. She was allowed to start school age seven- although two years older than everyone else in her class, no one would believe it.

She was always the weird kid at school, and to this day is. She doesn't have many friends, and spends her break times reading, with her nose deep in a book, or fingers plugging away at something with a thousand strands of wire hanging off it.