Aylin Goravich |★| District Three [WIP]

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Seventeen, everywhere, straight , District Three, unstoppable.

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Got a secret, can you keep it?
Swear this one you'll save?
Better lock it, in your pocket,
Taking this one to the grave.

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HISTORY

My story is not unlike many other stories when it comes to how it began. A new mother, overjoyed at the arrival of her new baby boy. Sick, ever so sick, but still smiling as she holds him in her arms. And then my story changes. Right there, right at the start, before anyone even knows to hold that last moment of normality close. And so they let it slip away, their heads buried in the moment. Pain ripples again through the woman's bulging torso, and then comes after child. Not twins. Another surge, another shriek, and another baby hurriedly carried away by the nurse. A bloodcurdling scream, the rush to tie the umbilical chord.
Another perfect child handed to a sobbing mother. One, two, three, four. Klaus Goravich is born. He doesn't cry out, but waits silently to be handed to his mama. She isn't screaming anymore - her breathing is suddenly slow and laboured. That was when I came into the world - just moments before my mother left. Five beautiful babies in her arms and a sixth so tiny and undeveloped that you could barely make out it's features.
They tell me that she managed to raise her eyes to look at me, just once, before she slipped away. It makes me feel a little better knowing that my mother saw my face.

I wonder what she saw when she looked at me. Did she believe, like the nurses, that I was dead? Could she feel my weak heartbeat as her fingers brushed against my chest? I wonder if she made an effort to stop them from taking me away. Started to cry out a whispered no but fell away into darkness before the words could escape her lips.
Was I the last thought she had before she passed away? It's irrelevant what she saw when she looked at her last born child - the story still goes the same way. Baby Number Six was carried off down the hallway, the nurses shoes heavy against the tiled floor. Bundled up tight. And then the story stops, because I still don't know what happened to me between that dark hallway and the doorstep. Maybe the nurse realised her mistake too late and couldn't turn back. Perhaps she couldn't face Mr. Goravich with the reality of a seventh child he could not care for. She probably thought I would die anyway. But people lie, so I don't truly know the real reason for the turn of events which led to my father
- or rather, the man I call my father – arriving home to find a bundle dusted in snow set before his door.

When he found me, my skin was almost translucent - my rips jutting from the sides of my chest like minuscule knives.
He says I was so small my entire body fitted into his hand. He brought me inside. And then he did what he had to do. For seventeen years, he lied to me. The baby grew up, got stronger, reached her first birthday. She walked, and the day she learned to talk, she also learned to lie. Maybe it was something to do with growing up in a family filled with secrets and untruths, and perhaps it was simply who she was. They told her they loved her very much, and they tucked her and her two siblings into bed each night. Her brother was a year older than her, and her little sister arrived awhile later. She baked cookies and she read stories and she played games, but all the while something was amiss.
There was a darkness in the Sinclair family that stemmed from more than just a baby discovered on a doorstep at midnight. Maybe it was the way that Logan Sinclair had dark features while Aylin's where fair and Freya's almost ghostly pale in comparison. It's possible that the children each sensed something off about the way their parents avoided the subject of their births and told them every night without fail that they loved them very much.

I believe that they did, but sometimes it's hard to believe anything completely when you were raised in the house of Sinclair.
They were wealthy enough, providing for their children only what they needed and nothing more. Whatever we lacked they made up for with time and energy, love and care. Everything was just a little too perfect. I was five when I started school - it took me two days to learn from the others that my sheltered life was not normal at all. Apparently, other children were allowed to leave the borders of their own garden. Logan never had, but I began to ask questions, spurred on by the difference in the other children's lives. Mummy, if it takes nine months to have a baby, then how come I was born in November and Faye was born in June? And then - Daddy - why is everyone else so much bigger than me? For the rest of the week, I questioned everything, until I realised that the answers my 'parents' where giving me didn't quite add up, either. So I went searching for my own truths. The house was filled with locks. I had never considered that behind the locked doors there may have been more questions rather than answers.
I simply made it my mission to find a key. I stopped asking questions, but I still felt them burning at my mind like fire slowly pulling a structure to pieces.

Mama never sent me back to school. Logan and Faye stayed home, too. We learned lots of things, from our parents, from the strange and peculiar people that sometimes came for dinner, and from books. They could never buy us enough books. In the end, the biggest lesson I learned from my new home-schooled life was not to ask questions unless you want to hear lies. Always find out the answers for yourself. And if you are ever asked something by anyone, never tell the truth. You're almost always better off with a really good lie. So between the books and the numbers and words and the letters, Logan, Faye and myself learned to stick together. We were three puzzle pieces that didn't quite fit the perfect picture we had found ourselves in. I was the only one hungry for the answers. I remember Logan's voice - he must have been eleven or twelve - pulling me back as I picked at the lock to a door I had never been through. "Aylin, don't pry." His voice is deep, dark. As filled with defiance as my own when I snap back. "Why shouldn't I?" I raise my eyebrows, daring him to stop me. He doesn't, predictably, just slinks off into the shadows vowing that when I get into trouble he will be long gone. Of course I don't get into trouble, because I don't get caught.

My first reaping day didn't scare me. And I'm not just saying that. Nothing much has ever really phased me; usually I just wait for the pieces to fall and then start trying to put them together. I manipulate the past and the present, but not the future. I wasn't surprised when somebody else's name was called. And so we moved on with our lives. I tried to untangle myself from the Sinclair web of lies to no true avail, while Logan and Faye maintained a faded sort of interest which was usually overridden by fear. If I were them, I would have been afraid of looking, too. There's just something about being Aylin which makes me brave. Not even brave. Just damn sure that I know what I'm doing, where I'm going, the mistakes I'm not making. The people I'm crossing. Reaping age means more to me than most. Most people's stories tell of a lost friend or sibling, a sleepless night. Not me. To Aylin, being twelve years old was more about finally finding some of the answers. It was the year I stopped growing. The hormones that were supposed to turn me from a child into a woman didn't do their job. That year, Faye grew taller than me. Apart from school, I had never left the property. One day, in the middle of my fourteenth summer, Daddy took my hand and walked me down the road to the hospital, and the doctors poked and prodded me and came up with an outcome I already knew. I had been born sick. Kallmann Syndrome, they called it, although they didn't seem to know much about what it really was.

I decided it had something to do with my having no sense of smell whatsoever, and slipped away while Daddy's back was turned. The District Hospital, I thought, was not a place of secrets. It was a place of documents and files and records and answers. So I took a couple of turns to make sure nobody was following, and found my way to the library of records. It only took me a few minutes to slip the key from the pocket of a doctor and lock the door behind me. It didn't really surprise me to find that there was no record of my birth. Not under the name Sinclair, at least. In fact, the only record concerning any of the Sinclair's belonged to who I thought was my mother. Medical terms I did not understand. And then words, jumping out at me oh so bright. Infertility. Failed pregnancy. And suddenly, in a world of lies I got a glimpse of my very first truth. I didn't like it. What I did like was the rush it gave me, the way I knew I had information that nobody else knew I possessed. The way I had an upper hand on somebody, something to hold over them. Sick, perhaps. But the one thing I had been searching for the the first fourteen years of my life - power over the lies. I took a video of the rest of the document and ran through it over and over again later on, pausing it on each page and scouring it for more I could use against my mother.

Not yet, later, once I had gathered the entire picture and new the ins and outs of everything that had happened on those three nights when a baby entered the house with no trace of birth. Because despite my upbringing I was not new to the ways of the world and the people in it. I watch from the windows, I retrace the steps of every tribute from every game. Just looking for clues about humanity. Body language. Ways of knowing what is important and what is not. I can pinpoint that day when it began, the true lust for knowledge for all the wrong reasons. What I cannot pinpoint is the day it ended. Maybe it will never end, even now the stones are turned - because there are always more secrets locked away somewhere if only you search hard enough for them. That winter I began to sneak away from the house, feeding my parents with lies and decoys to cover my tracks. I am not ashamed that I spied upon my siblings simply to find slip ups I could use to get them to do what I want. "Faye, darling - I'll be developing those photos tonight - I wouldn't want the light to spoil them. I trust you'll let Mama know." What I really mean is if Mama finds the bathroom window ajar and me gone tonight, she'll also find out about the newspapers you've been poring through. She's not even looking for answers, she's looking for pictures of Mace freaking Emberstatt, but Mama doesn't know this.

She did what she was told, just like I knew she would. People are predictable. They fall into the same traps over and over again. This is why I make it my business to fall into no traps at all. People are easy. If you play with them, they fall at your feet. If you work their secrets from their grasp and smile when they need it and give only to take away again they keep playing for it. It's pathetic, really. But it works for me, and I don't mind playing their games as long as they believe they are playing mine. So that night I crept out into the rain and returned to the hospital. The hallways were dark; I expect they smelled strongly of bleach or babies or something, but I will never know. That night I was chased. Of course they didn't catch me - I got the spare key to the library of records. I knew exactly how long it would take for them to forget about the break-in, but the next morning Faye's newspaper showed a picture of the ashen remains. The best way to keep a file from being read is to burn it to the ground. Along with every other file in the building, and six of the patients. You win some, you lose some. I let my parents think they won the battle. Everyone knew I would win the war.

It turned out that Faye had been collecting newspapers as part of her quiet defiance. Maybe she was conducting her own search. Either way, it didn't take much to steal the key and break into the safe box at the back of her wardrobe. Missing persons reports, the week of my birth showed nothing. Even the page of the paper with the birth notices didn't show anything that caught my eye. I had almost lost hope when I stumbled upon the death notices. Nobody had bothered making me one. Probably the family wasn't able to afford it. But there, staring back at me, was a tiny picture of a woman with hair that even in the faded newspaper ink could be identified as a brilliant shade of red. Shining golden eyes. So bright they almost glow red. They say her name was Melinda Goravich, and she died giving birth to her set of sextuplets. Words like tragic, loss and heart condition jump out at me. And then - stillborn, birth defects. I didn't need proof to know that this dead baby was me, and my mother was Melinda Goravich. But I waited for it anyway, because there is no point in collecting answers if the answers are lies just like the questions.

It took two years for me to find the solid facts. Reaping day, my second last. People no longer bothering to usher me from the seventeen-year-old pen in the square. I slipped through the crowd and found what I was looking for. Five children huddled together, one clutching a camera in his hands. Whispering words I could not hear over the roar of the crowd. Sharp features, so like my own. Slanted chin, shaking fingers, nervous expression. "Klaus Goravich." I was behind him, so I did not see his smile. The camera clatters to the ground. My fingers slipped out, swift and careful. They took the roll of film from where it had tumbled, inches from my feet. Later that night, I watched the film in silence. It began a long time ago - with twelve-year-old Jamarion climbing a tree, and falling six feet to the ground. Thirteen year old Lyana sitting in a corner, Tacara playing a game of cards with herself. Marina talking with what seemed like an imaginary friend, either unaware or simply not caring that Klaus was watching, camera in hand.


PERSONALITY

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APPEARANCE

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If I show you then I know you,
Wont tell what I said.
Because two can keep a secret,
If one of them is dead.

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