river finch // d10 // fin

R I V E R i s i s F I N C H

FEMALE // FIFTEEN // DISTRICT 10 // ODAIR

A P P E A R A N C E

» You aren't pretty, at least not in the typical sense. Your hair is a dull shade of mousy brown that even you have trouble describing when asked. It falls to your collarbone in waves that are too frizzy to look intentional, and yet too tame to be considered quirky. Your eyes are hazel. Not hazel flecked with green or hazel flecked with gold; just hazel. They aren't particularly big or small. They're just eyes, and they're yours. Your natural skin tone is olive, resulting in a skin tone that doesn't change much regardless of the season.

While you might not be a beauty queen, you are definitely strong. You stand at 5 foot 5 inches and weigh a mere 117 pounds, but that's mostly muscle. Years of climbing trees and sprinting across your father's farm have left you with lithe limbs and a powerful core. You have an unfriendly looking scar on your right knee from when you shattered it as a child. It creaks and cracks whenever you move it, but usually there's no pain. And even when there is, it doesn't slow you down. You give the joint no choice but to keep up with you.

» You are the kind of person who fades into the background of almost any situation. Sometimes you're able to use that to your advantage, but most of the time, it's just frustrating. At your core, you're a tomboy. You don't like typically girly things and loathe being forced to dress up. It has a lot to do with the fact that your father, a real man's man, raised you practically by himself. Daring and impulsive, you hate to lose. You work really hard at what you like but tend to procrastinate on things like school, which bores you.

You have a sarcastic sense of humor and those who don't know better might think you're abrasive. And maybe you are at times, but you wouldn't say you out of your way to be rude. You just never learned how to suffer fools. Or bullies, for that matter. You can't stand bullies and are well known for standing up to them in school, no matter what. You like spontaneity and just having a good time, and aren't really a big stickler for rules. You're passionate about things when they hit you and hate the feeling of not knowing what to do.

You're happy to go along in your life where you are, and how you have been pretty much since the beginning. Just one of the boys. But that doesn't mean you don't like to laugh, smile and feel pretty. It's just that you laugh, smile and feel pretty when you've completed your five mile run in the morning and are in sweats, and your muscles are sore because they're growing. You have no desire to be a boy, but you don't want to be treated like a fragile doll either. You just want to be yourself, even though you're not entirely sure who you are.

» You mother is a rebel - or wishes she was one, rather. Some of your earliest memories are of her stories on District 13, about how there is a secret rebel base there. When you are six years old, she decides to check it out for herself. She kisses you on the head one morning and you never see her again. Your father tells you, as delicately as he knows how, that she was apprehended and killed. But there's no funeral, because traitors to the Capitol don't deserve a proper send off. You never even get a chance to say goodbye.

Your father does his best to raise you alone, but he doesn't know how to dress you up in fancy little dresses. He just can't do it. What he can do is farm, so that's what he teaches you. While other girls your age are busy chasing after boys and wondering when their chests will fill out, you're working. You're shoveling horse manure and feeding the pigs and collecting chicken eggs. Even in 10, the District dedicated to livestock, your passion for animals makes you an outcast. Growing up, you have very few friends your own age.

When your father announces that he's remarrying, you try to find it in your heart to be happy for him. He deserves to move on and be with someone who makes him happy. A year later your step-mother gives birth to a bouncing baby boy, your first and only sibling. What should have been a happy occasion is marred by the financial difficulties you know your father has been having. Meals have been getting slimmer and indulgences are few and far between. You broach the subject of tessera, which he immediately shoots down. We're not there yet, he tells you. We'll survive this. We always do.