ZION PLAGAS | DISTRICT ONE | (FIN)

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They always said I looked weaker than the rest of the careers. Than the rest of my family. They were right, of course. My shoulders were especially frail for a boy, rather than being broad and strong like Demyx's. I wasn't all that tall, either, and my limbs were all thin and lanky, my fingers long and nimble. And easily provoked because of the long hours spent gardening. I was toned, though, as I should have been after spending a lifetime training my body.

My hair, like that of a raven's, had always looked better long, so I kept it that way. I liked the privacy it gave me at times, though, when my father was scolding me. It did a decent job of hiding my tears. Which were golden brown for the most part, but on occasion, as black as coal. They usually only darkened when I was upset, but my hair had always hidden them too well for anyone else to notice. I wondered if they could guess the color of my eyes at all, or if they could remember them, thickly framed by eyelashes, if they wanted to.

I always wore things I was comfortable in, usually warm sweaters and jeans in the colder months, and button up shirts and vests in the warmer ones. I rolled the sleeves up when I got too hot. Which was a lot of the time. I had a collection of bow ties, and any time we went somewhere for impressions (It happened a lot.) I threw one of them on. If I could get away with it I would also wear plastic glasses with brightly colored frames.

My family calls it weakness, my love of art. I didn't blame them, because in comparison to collecting weapons, it did seem rather puny, but I still loved doing it. I liked that I could catch beauty in my palm, and then with help from my pencil, I could put it on paper and keep it forever. Nobody knew of my drawings outside the large home that felt more like prison I lived in, and my family planned on keeping it that way. Other than Esther, none of them liked that I drew in my spare time. I didn't care.

I laughed at inappropriate things, like people getting into trouble, or teachers yelling at me in school. Once my neighbor's dog died and I couldn't keep my laughter in. I knew it was sad, and on the inside I felt the grief everyone else wore on their faces, but I still laughed on the surface. Things weren't funny, yet my face still burned red from laughing at them. It was shameful, really. I felt bad for it, but I couldn't help it. People saw me as insincere, and probably, at times, insane. I was better at holding it in with the more serious things, though, like people dying in the games, my father crying on the anniversary of his own father's death, or the days my mother's head aches were so bad that she couldn't get out of bed.

If a story started with "Once upon a time," I was instantly glued to it. The same stories that put children to sleep at night were the ones that kept me up thinking about them. The preposterous idea that dragons and princesses and fairies and magic existed was fascinating to me. (If those worlds were real, I would have gladly lived in them.) Unfortunately, I had seen zero proof that they did, so I was still trapped in the living hell I was born in. I kept all of the books my mother read to me as a child on a shelf in my room, and hid my sketch books among them. I made it a point to read one every night before going to bed, and every night I ended up entering an entirely new world, wondering what happened after the story finished and the cover was closed.

I was a completely different person outside my home. I was the career everyone wanted me to be, the one that new just how to kill a person and had no trouble doing so. Nobody had a problem with that version of me. (I did.) Everyone loved him, actually. My parents weren't ashamed to introduce him as their son. Maybe that was why I pretended to be him so often, to appease my parents. To give them what they wanted. so that they would focus on something else. It worked surprisingly well, really. Having two identities was kind of cool to me. Two different people, one for each type of person I would meet. Careers, Bullies, Capitol Officials, Peacekeepers, they all got the career version of me. My friends, children, people I could trust? They got the real me.

For a while after my birth, things couldn't have been better. Demyx, my older brother, and I were actually pretty close. Then, whenever Raider got old enough that he could walk, my life began shifting, and had been falling ever since. No longer was I wanted to play with them, and things got worse as we grew older. I did find a friend in my first born sister, Ursula, though. She was dark, a shadow that hid within the night, but she still seemed to understand me more than anyone else in my home. Esther, as young and small as she was, proved more promising than any of us as careers. With me, that wasn't saying much, but saying that she could out smart, out fight, and just plain out defeat my other brothers and sister? It was a hard thing to believe.

Demyx grew cold toward her, and it was nice to no longer be the only one. He was jealous of her, though, and had no real reason to hate me. Yet he did, somehow, even if he never would admit it. Raider, who had always been one to follow in Demyx's footsteps, despised us both as well. I didn't mind spending time with just her and Ursula, even though she judged me at times Ursula wouldn't have. Because, deep down inside, they accepted me.

In school, I had never had more than a handful of real friends. All of them liked me because of my outbursts of laughter as teachers were scolding, but they never wanted to dig passed the surface and see me for who I was. The few that did seemed to like me just fine, though, so I didn't understand why more people didn't like me. Maybe, just maybe, it was because I was too weak. It didn't matter how tough I acted for all of them, or that my family had a well known name. If they all could see me for who I really, truly was, it would explain everything. Because I was no monster. I was just another boy trying to fit in with the crowd. One that was failing, Obviously.

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