Lylia Lara Skyler [D11] [Finished]

Unusually frail and small built for her age, her skin is porcelain pale, offering little contrast to her silvery blond hair which hangs loosely down her shoulders and over the small of her back. Clad in nothing else but simple white cotton dresses, her appearance completely contradicts that of almost everyone in her district, making her stand out like a sore thumb; a cerulean blue-eyed rabbit caught in the headlights. Ghost girl. The only time she bothered to dress up was when she absolutely had to - such as when the Peacekeepers made it mandatory for everyone to queue to have their blood drawn at their District HQ. It was a long, agonising four hours in the sun, during which her mother had to ensure that no inch of her skin was exposed at all. She had looked like a huge gunnysack then.

Although her lack of exposure to the sun stunted her growth, her features were delicate, almost fragile in their beauty; only, she was so rarely seen in public that people would jump if they caught an unintended glimpse of her through the window shutters. Ghost girl. Her older sister called her something else, though. It was a word they'd picked up in school - 'Al-BI-noe' she thought it was, which to her simply meant something fancy, but to the medic who first attended to her raw red skin the day she turned two and learnt how to crawl out of the door by mistake, it was an indication of an acute lack of melanin - the substance that helped protect regular people against the harsh UV rays of the sun - and the same substance that made her skin so fragile, it looked almost translucent. Not exactly unflattering, but to anyone who cared to observe, simply not very normal. Ghost girl.

Her muscles were lean and her body fit, however, as she lived her lonely, nightly existence by scouring the woods and nearby flower fields for edible grasses, roots and berries, and having learnt to scamper away at the slightest hint of an approaching Peacekeeper or the first light of day.

Lylia is painfully, painfully shy with people she has never met, no doubt from her lack of social interaction with anyone but her parents and her older sister. She hates to maintain eye contact with anyone for longer than a second or two, much less speak to them unless absolutely necessary. With her family, however, the situation is slightly better. They were the only ones she trusted, after all.

In contrast, Lylia has a deep affinity for creatures of the night, probably stemming from spending almost all her life living a nightly existence. Ghost girl. She loved them. They were her friends. As best as she can, she would try to help any wounded animal if she cared to stumble upon one in the shadows - there was that one week spent scaling a tree each night to feed the abandoned young of a mockingjay, having been drawn by their pitiful cries. When they died anyway due to lack of warmth, she curled up by the base of the tree and sobbed until dawn broke.

While Lylia is not a genius by any standards, she can be quite sharp-witted and stubborn with her convictions. From a very young age, she'd made up her mind on what was wrong and what was right. With the knowledge gleaned from watching TV, one of the few indoor pursuits available, she quickly developed a sense of hatred for the Capitol, the Hunger Games, and the way inequality was perceived as perfectly 'normal'. In fact, she is utterly convinced that the occurrences leading to District 13's destruction had been a cover-up for something else. This side of her, however, would only truly show when night fell - knowing that she is judged every waking second in the daytime, called a freak by those who spotted her in one of those rare moments in public, and constantly being stared at, there was no reason to add yet another black mark to her name.

Underneath it all, however, is a deep longing to be normal again. To be able to play with children her own age, to be able to walk to school with them in the mornings, and most of all, to feel sunlight on her skin and reflecting in her eyes, to dance in the sun and feel the breeze through her hair. To feel alive.

For now, they resided deep within the dreams of the ghost girl.

From the very beginning, life had not been kind to her.

It had been kinder to her sister, Lyra, who was normal, who didn't lack the all-important melanin in her skin, who could therefore enjoy the sunshine, work in the fields, converse with people who did not think her strange. It had been kinder to her parents, who, despite their collective impoverishment and toiling in the fields from morning to late evening just to lessen the empty feeling in their stomachs, had at least one normal daughter to speak of.

Life had not been kind to Lylia. The day she was born, on a cloudy morning in September, her parents wept.

The Peacekeepers knew of her existence almost immediately, the little girl with the unusual skin and eyes and hair, but when news first spread that the Skyler family's youngest daughter was - to put it kindly - different, the District reacted first with an outpouring of sympathy. Surreptitious gifts of berries, or a flower left on their doorstep. A donated dress, hand-me-down, but still perfectly wearable. She couldn't imagine the conversations her parents must have had with a well-wisher. What else could mom say except a forced nod and a fake smile?

Then there came the gossip a few months later. How it was her parents' fault that she had turned out that way, how she was actually a child born after someone with a vengeance on the family must have put a curse on them in the interim between her birth and Lyra's. How her parents must have been evil in their past lives. The gossip grew more and more cruel, until one morning, she saw her mother sobbing quietly in bed, her tear-streaked face illuminated by a single ray of light from a crack in the heavily-shuttered window. Even though she couldn't have been barely a year old at the time, the image still haunts her dreams.

Then, there was the episode where she had somehow managed to crawl out of a door mistakenly left ajar and into the backyard. It was an innocent gesture - her two-year-old self had spotted a butterfly in the garden, and it was oh so beautiful she just needed to see it for herself! The first time the sun's rays hit her skin, her whole body felt like someone had set it on fire. From the inside, burning, peeling her skin raw, so painful she had nearly passed out. From that point on, her parents kept her firmly at home, until nothing they could do would stop her from taking a step out into the backyard once again, in the dark this time. That night, she wandered freely under the moonlight, running almost, feeling the dewy grass tickle her bare feet as she made her way into the outside world. From then on, there was no turning back.

When the time arrived for her to go to school, her parents negotiated a deal with the District's schoolmaster to conduct nightly classes for their little albino child. She couldn't even begin to imagine how much it must have cost them to have persuaded them to agree to the arrangement. But she knew that there could be no repeat of this, and at twelve, with her name due to be entered into the reaping for the first time, the family realised with sinking hearts that being chosen as a tribute could mean, for Lylia, certain death.