Constantine Stryker || District Two || FIN

For your entire life, you've been forced to go against your nature.

It started with your name. Constantine Fortitudo Stryker. Constantine, after one of the most successful Roman emperors of ancient history. Fortitudo, meaning strength and courage. Stryker, the name of a family of Peacekeepers, and more importantly, Careers.

As the eldest child of the eldest child of the previous generation, high expectations were placed upon you from the very beginning. Expectations to pick up the family legacy, train at a prestigious Career training center, and, if you were lucky, gain glory as being the first Stryker to enter the Games in over forty years.

Yet, even as a child, you didn't seem to share the staunch warrior mindset your relatives possessed. Instead, you gravitated towards finer things in life, at least, in your opinion. While you didn't detest combat, you never really enjoyed it either. Why spend day after day hacking and slashing at someone when you could be spending that time reading or writing or drawing? Your inquisitive mind was wired differently than that of your family, despite attempts to deter you elsewhere.

It didn't help that you weren't exactly built like a Career either. You may have been taller than a number of your peers, towering at six feet four inches, but your long lanky body lacked the muscle that so many of your peers sported. It didn't really bother you all that much - you'd rather be praised for your intellect over your strength any day - but in a land of stonemasons and Peacekeepers, you were seen as inferior regardless.

And really, it wasn't even your physique that bothered you. No, it was your height, all six feet four inches of it, that annoyed you. There are only so many places you can contort yourself into a comfortable reading position, so many doorways you can step under without having to duck, so many jokes you can receive from peers about the weather up there. Your research has told you that most see extra height as a blessing, as a symbol of power, but you can't figure out for the life of you why.

Regardless, you maintained an air of apathy when it came to other's opinions of you. After all, if you were enjoying yourself, what did it matter what others thought? People weren't as interesting as art, weren't as entertaining as painting a bloody sunset, weren't as captivating as a good novel. Your relatives called it being antisocial, your parents called it shy, peers called it aloofness. You didn't give it much thought either way.

They are all beneath you anyway.

If there's one thing you inherited from your family, it was their superior, elitist attitude. The Strykers might not have sent in any tributes in the last two decades, but they still had a reputation as a powerful Career family. Even though the training itself wasn't a main priority for you, it did nothing to brighten your view of the majority of your peers. After all, how many people had heard of a Career that could fight and was book smart?

In retrospect, probably a few, but you digress. You may have no intention to volunteer for the Games yourself, but if fortune shines its light upon you and you are selected, then who knows.

Maybe brains, not brawn, will bring glory back to a district that hasn't tasted victory in almost a decade.