Valour Fairchild, District 1

Valour Fairchild

You are a living contradiction, as you remind yourself often. To the people of District 1, you’re Valour Fairchild; the girl who is bubbly and bright, charming and fearless, walking on clouds. Valour Fairchild, the daughter of a diamond mogul and his much-too-young-for-him wife, heiress to the Fairchild fortune. Valour, the bright-burning champion of the Fairchild name. You’re the girl who dresses in furs from animals you’ve never even heard of. The girl who walks around town in bright yellow sunny dresses and pretty pink gossamer get-ups, light as a feather and fair as winter snow. If only they knew it was all bullshit.

You’re a beautiful young woman, you can’t lie to yourself. At the age of seventeen, you stand 5’ 5” tall and weigh 120 lbs. You are not particularly curvy or muscular. You were blessed with your father’s platinum hair and bright blue eyes brimming with potential, and cursed with your mother’s stature and baby face. Your gaze is piercing and intense, hidden behind fanning lashes. You’ve got a round face with little jaw or chin definition. Your nose is round and large, yet you outwardly carry yourself with a seemingly defiant confidence. A winning smile that you flash far too often is the first thing people see when they look at you, tucked safely away behind thin lips. Your brows, thin and a bit patchy, lend credence to your face’s narrative of a small wisp of a girl. This narrative is not helped by the large amount of flyaway baby hairs that you struggle to tame, nor by your high-pitched and occasionally squeaky voice. But every time you look in the mirror, you frown because you’re such a faerie of a girl that no one could ever take you seriously. Although, you admit, that does have its perks.

Your name describes you well, but perhaps not in the way most would think. At first glance, people perceive you as vapid and silly. A little girl twirling around in dresses of silk, giggling to herself in the sunlight isn’t one that should be considered with any depth of sincerity. But what can you say? You like to have fun. You’re vain and constantly preening, you think too much of yourself, and despite your sunny personality you don’t appear approachable; but underneath the Milquetoast demeanor lies a cunning and deceptively perceptive intuition.

Amongst those who give you a chance, you’re well-known for being conversational and polite. You love to talk to just about everyone you meet, and you aren’t easily irritated. You are a curious, inquisitive, and nosy girl. You want to know everything that you can fit in your head, and you often have to refrain yourself from asking inappropriate questions. You are an energetic and enthusiastic communicator, and you pride yourself upon your carefree disposition. But it’s never easy for you to open up to others. Truth is, hidden far behind your effervescent exterior, you are constantly dealing with an insurmountable amount of stress and it feels as though the weight of the world is on your shoulders. Stress comes easily to you and you find that it hangs on for far longer than you would like. It is a cruel master which even in your happiest moments never quite leaves you. Nevertheless, you are a staunch optimist, even if you have to tell yourself that multiple times a day. You genuinely want to believe in the good in people, and you truly want to believe that your family is rising to the stars and not plummeting hopelessly to its demise.

The optimism, you know, is your way of coping with the constant worries of living a lie. You cannot bear to think of the alternatives, no matter how likely they may be. You tell yourself often that this is called bravery, and you may or may not be lying to yourself. Truth is, you are too sensitive and easily hurt. You feel freely and deeply, which (if you’re being honest) is more of a bad thing than a good thing. You can hardly hide your emotions. You wear them on your sleeve. You hate the way that you are controlled, hate the way that you feel stifled. More than anything you want to do your own thing and be your own person. You want to get away. Run. Breathe, even if only for a moment. Because behind closed doors, that brilliant exterior gives way to dark and stormy days.

What people don’t know about you is that you and your family can’t afford a damn thing you own. You walk around in expensive clothing, as charming and avant-garde as you can be, because you’re desperately trying to hide the fact that the Fairchild family has hardly a cent to their name. Your father is flat broke after his second diamond mine in 1 failed to produce. Your mother has never worked a day in her life. Your brother and sister, both naturally-talented jewelers, are one of the only things keeping your family above water. Your family is in so much debt that you can’t even visualize the scale of the numbers you hear your father weeping about.

It wasn’t always this way. Before you were born, before your father had even met your mother, he had inherited his first mine from his mother’s passing. Because the Capitol so loves their diamonds, his wealth grew incredibly. He met your mother, who is 20 years his junior, shortly thereafter; they bought a big marble house on a hill in District 1 and decided to start a family. Your father had purchased more mines and things were good, until they weren’t. Your brother was born first, and then you, and then your younger sister. Life was good for the first ten years or so of your life. But your father’s mines couldn’t compete with some of the bigger moguls in 1 anymore.

The money started drying up, your father started getting desperate, and spending what you had left in a futile attempt to save his businesses. On a gamble he bought a potential mine for a huge discount, and it didn’t produce a single thing of value. He took out loans for exorbitant amounts and he can’t pay them back. He can’t afford the taxes on the mines, nor can he afford the taxes on the house that was born of his hubris. Your family is broke. But the world of luxury is a brutal one. All it takes is for one other house to hear that you’re floundering, and they swarm like sharks to drag you under. To be in debt is financial and social suicide, and that’s where you come in. At a young age you started to blossom; intelligent, gregarious, inquisitive, and beautiful. Your parents put everything else they had into you so that you could be the poster child for the drowning Fairchild name. You were the deflector, the distraction. Like a piece of cheap tin gilded with gold foil, You were the shiny thing people looked at so that they wouldn’t see the ugly truth beneath it. You hope and pray every single day that your gilding doesn’t wear thin, that the veneer which so oppresses you holds true. It wasn’t supposed to be for a long time, just until your dad figured something out. He still hasn’t figured anything out. You honestly don’t know if he ever will.

Your parents never raised you with the intention of being a Career tribute like so many of the other kids in District 1. When you asked them the year of your first reaping if you could train at an Academy, they were horrified. Besides, they had already spent SO much money to send you to private school! But you knew that Victors made more money than any family in District 1 could dream of, and you knew that money would save your family and after that you could get as fucking far away from them as you could ever want to be. Eventually they relented, and you dedicated your heart and soul to your training. In fact, it was your only real outlet. Sometimes you just wanted to kick and punch and cut someone, but for a girl trying to keep up appearances, that simply wouldn’t do. Your parents have begged you to stop the training, to not prepare to take part in such a horrible spectacle as the Hunger Games. But part of you wonders if they don’t secretly want it as badly as you do. If nothing else, it would be the ultimate escape from the worries of your little bubble of a world.

You are a fancy porcelain doll in a gilded dollhouse. But the tawdry, meretricious façade is crumbling all around you. Like a well-beloved plaything, you’re starting to lose your luster. If you aren’t careful, the world will see what you are truly made of, that you and your farcical family name are hollow inside. For the last seven years you have fought tooth and nail to mend the cracks in your glowing exterior. You may bend and crack, but you will fight like hell to make sure you don’t shatter. Then, the ugly truth would be on display for all to see. This is the one thing you must not do.