ASTRID HARKNESS, D13 :: FIN

i get up in the evening
and i ain't got nothing to say
i come home in the morning
i go to bed feeling the same way
i ain't nothing but tired

( a g e ) i'm eighteen.
( g e n d e r ) that would be female.
( l o c a t i o n ) sleepless in district thirteen.
( s e x u a l i t y ) rude.
( o c c u p a t i o n ) i'm a cat.

man, i'm just tired and bored with myself
hey there, baby, i could use just a little help
you can't start a fire without a spark
this gun's for hire
even if we're just dancing in the dark

( b i o g r a p h y )

message keeps getting clearer
radio's on and i'm moving 'round the place
i check my look in the mirror
i wanna change my clothes, my hair, my face
man, i ain't getting nowhere just living in a dump like this

I was born in the wrong place for a child of starlight. Everything in Thirteen is white and sterile, the kind of uniformity that could choke you if you aren’t careful. When I was a little girl my brother would always tell me stories about the stars, about how in the deep cold of winter nights the skies over Seven were a crystalline canvas of inky dark shot through with pinpricks of heaven’s fire, and somewhere between then and now those stories have become rooted in my soul, forever pulling me up towards those coveted constellations. My entire life has been nothing but blank walls and white tiled ceilings; how could I not be drawn to the siren song of velveteen dark and a million worlds whole lifetimes away? Aiden is the only one of my siblings that ever had the chance to sleep under the night sky. He was six when my parents took him and a meager handful of supplies and left Seven behind for good, fleeing the poverty and the Games and something else that they only talk about in hushed whispers. The rest of us all came into the world in the spotless medical wards of Thirteen, my twin sister Doreah and I six months after our family’s arrival and then Keely three years after us. Something in them made them right for colorless life in the underground, good little children who did whatever they were told without question or complaint. But me, I had the stars in my blood, and all those white walls couldn’t hold me in.

When I was seven, I snuck away from beneath my mother’s watch and climbed up a service hatch, the dust of ages falling into my untamed tangles of honey-brown hair and clinging to the full lashes over gray-blue eyes that had always held the sky in them, even though at that time it was just another fairy tale I’d never seen. When I finally made it to the surface, I stood in awe for a solid hal hour, gaping up at the endless heavens and the trees (real, actual trees) that reached up to scrape them. I saw the stars, and they awoke something in me that hasn’t left ever since. Thirteen is a horrible place to be when you’ve got a wanderlust so deep and powerful that staying in the same place for even a minute feels stagnant and wrong. Aiden told me once that no man is truly educated until he feels at least twenty different textures beneath his feet, so maybe that’s why he ran off a few years ago with that odd white-haired wild girl, off to see the world and breathe different air and maybe be a ranger for Thirteen’s cause if he has time between all that rich experience that comes from traveling wherever the wind blows. I’ve always envied him for that. I still remember the shouting match he had with my parents before he left, their warnings that there were all sorts of things he didn’t want to find up there above the earth, but he never backed down, marching out of our lives with a slammed door and a rucksack on his back.

I wish more than anything that one day I’ll do the same, stand strong and defiant and travel only the path I blaze myself, but despite my fascination with the impossible and fantastical, I’ve always been a realist. I know beyond a doubt that something in me is just a little too compliant, a little too desperate to please for me to toss my family’s opinions aside and snatch a brighter destiny with grasping fingers. Faye told me once that I was a doormat, and I didn’t argue with her, both because I agreed and because I make it a habit to stay out of arguments even when I’m right. Maybe that was a personality trait honed from the days when I thought I could actually please my parents – for someone who has always longed to stand out and shine like the stars, I’m strangely unassuming most of the time. Conflict is something that sets my teeth on edge and sits uncomfortably in my veins, and in the days before I had a best friend who practically breathes arguments like oxygen to fight the battles I had no idea needed to be fought, I could sit through anything with a smile. I’m nice. There’s no other way to put it. I’m the calm waters to Faye’s roaring oceans of a wrath she can’t place, always smoothing over my outlook on life until it was a comfortable place with no ripples and no tension that anyone can see. Unfortunately there’s a bit of tension that comes from being nice to even the people I don’t like, and I read somewhere that suppressed aggression is bad for you, but in all honesty I think Faye has enough aggression for both of us.

She arrived a year ago in a blaze of tarnished glory and a hostility that no one but her could make sense of, and somehow through all of that we ended up friends (maybe she just likes fighting so much that her own battles weren’t enough so she picked up mine as a side job). I begged during breaks between classes and hurried lunchtimes to hear stories of Outside, of how the stars looked over Twelve and what her life had been before, and that was the only time I’ve ever seen her go quiet and cold rather than roaring and blazing. After a while, I stopped asking. Still, her inner rebel matched mine even though it was much louder, and I took the advantage of finally having a partner in crime to give into the pull of the stars again, sneaking Above once or twice a week until it felt like the only time I could ever breathe was when I was bathed in starlight. I even adopted a cat, a creature for me that was just as mythical as a dragon after growing up in a world where the only animals were the underground farm-raised livestock and spiders and the occasional rat skittering through the halls. Finnegan was a skinny, feral thing when we first crossed paths, but after months of bribing him with smuggled food and even a little ball of an herb called catnip that Aiden snuck to me the last time he was in on leave, I’ve turned him into a fat, lazy but still fairly grumpy ball of fluff that complains when someone stops petting him and bites when he’s irritated. Faye sparked that irritation once, and while nursing a bite on her hand with a mutinous glare she said that back in Twelve, they’d have cooked him. It’s the only time to date I’ve ever told her to shut up.

Glee club started as a joke for Faye and an experiment for me. We both had Mr. Wheaton for music class and he’d been after Faye to join up for months after he figured out she could play just about anything given five minutes of quiet and a little space to work with it. She agreed simply to shut him up, or so she said, and then he started in on me after finally hearing my voice rise up from the back row of class, insisting that he needed more people to fill the soprano section after all the seniors we’d be losing. All I knew about glee club was that there were ridiculously popular kids in it – Kaelen Dempsey, Alyssa Roccianno, Reagan Cromley, the sort of crowd that would look at me like I was something that had crawled out from under a rock when I passed them in the hall – and the prospect of being in the same room with them terrified me. I’m good at lots of things, but not people. People are my downfall. I can never be sure of how they work, and the idea of being thrown into the spotlight and expected to function on a normal level with a group of people who probably didn’t even know my name wasn’t a particularly exciting one. Still, I signed my name on the dotted line (one thing I’d learned over the past year was how to be a rebel, even against myself) and walked into my first rehearsal white as a sheet, wilting under the withering gazes of people who obviously didn’t think I was good enough to be there until a smiling, dark-haired boy tripped over to me with a bright grin and a comforting hand on my shoulder. It’s okay, darling, they stop being scary after a while. We don’t bite. It was then that I decided Colt Hanlon was okay, even if the rest of them scared the shit out of me. Still, within a few weeks’ time their glares had turned to smiles, their antagonism to camaraderie even if some of it was in the smirking, sardonic brand that Faye and Kaelen seemed to share. I started as a meek flicker, but I learned to shine for the very first time.

I may be a star-child with a thirst for the unknown, but I’m an oddity in my family. People always talk about how Doreah and I can look so similar, with our marble-blue eyes and bowed lips and friendly faces, and yet be so utterly different at the same time. She’s always been the Golden Child, the standard to which the rest of us are constantly compared and told to emulate, and while I love her in the way only a sister can she’s still everything I swore I’d never be. I could never sit idly by and let the faceless suits of the higher powers define my life, could never accept my fate when I had no hand in it at all. Doreah is everything Thirteen (and my parents) want in a child, and me, well… I’m something else entirely. Even when I didn’t travel beyond the suffocating walls physically, I did so in the depths of my mind. I wandered the world through the pages of books and absentminded sketches in notebook margins and through the tide of songs that flowed over my lips when no one was watching. In our Underland world of strict structure and schedules on our skin, the sin of wandering is enough to make you an outcast, but what no one seems to realize is that not all those who wander are lost.

I’m quite lost, though. I won’t deny that much. The main problem with being so infected with the urge to constantly have a change of scenery is that somewhere along the road I’ve lost my essence. I was never good with decisions to begin with, but there’s a difference between not knowing what you want and not knowing, and I crossed that line somewhere I can’t place. People ask me if I’m looking for something in my lifetime of roaming, and the answer is always yes, but when they ask what it is I’m looking for, there’s never an answer at all. Perhaps I’ll know when I find it, but all I can really be certain of is that there’s a forever for me out there somewhere even though I may not know who or what it is, and maybe the day I find it is the day I can finally put down roots and feel grounded in the world for the first time. It’s much easier to figure out what I don’t want than it is to figure out what I do.

I don’t want to waste away here under the earth without leaving my mark above it, putting footprints in the dirt and reminding the universe that I was here. I don’t want to fit into the District Thirteen cookie-cutter of life, going through the motions with a smile and false gratitude until the day I die. I don’t want to sit and watch my life shrivel and fade without anything beautiful or shining to mark it. And while I can never really know the grand scheme of what it is that I do want, I can name a few things. I want to fall asleep beneath the stars, even if it’s just once. I want my parents to see that I’m more than a disappointment. I want to see Faye smile, really smile instead of the tight curvature of lips that’s only there for the benefit of others. I want to feel the turn of the earth beneath my feet and the rain on my skin and the stars flaming to life in my bones.

I’m Astrid Harkness, and I want more.

there's something happening somewhere
baby, i just know that there is
you can't start a fire without a spark
this gun's for hire
even if we're just dancing in the dark

( c o m m e n t s / o t h e r )

you sit around getting older, there's a joke here somewhere and it's on me
i'll shake this world off my shoulders, come on, baby, the laugh's on me
stay on the streets of this town and they'll be carving you up all right
they say you gotta stay hungry, hey, baby I'm just about starving tonight
i'm dying for some action, i'm sick of sitting 'round here trying to write this book

( c o d e w o r d ) o hai dair.

( f a c e c l a i m ) the one and only sara holmes.

( s p e e c h ) EAB75C
( e m p h a s i s ) FC954A
( m a i n ) B55E54
( f l a s h b a c k ) 6D3A4B
( h e a r i n g ) 283339

( s o n g ) dancing in the dark - matt kearney.

( p l o t s ) part of real life face claim plot and d13 glee plot.

i need a love reaction, come on now, baby, gimme just one look
you can't start a fire sitting round crying over a broken heart
this gun's for hire even if we're just dancing in the dark
you can't start a fire worrying about your little world falling apart
this gun's for hire