rita jakov. / district 1. (fin)

You were a field of wildflowers reaching for the sun, bright and soft and pure; you were a laugh in the wake of any tragedy, the first touch of rain after a long, miserable drought, the last few distant rays of sunbeams spilling over a horizon desperate for a sky full of the stars. You were everything beautiful and good in the world—an angel, or perhaps a lamb bred only for the slaughter, and it would surely be your undoing. Born to a mother who collected pretty things like trinkets, you were never meant to be anything more than a doll on a dusty corner shelf, something to be admired, never played with, and always safely tucked away.

But you grew like only wildflowers know how, half-savage and half-wonder, and though your world was small, you carved your own utopia out of what you had—you crowned yourself the queen of the little village you called home on the edge of District One. The little slice of countryside became a new kingdom, a blank canvas, a wonderful dreamscape of your own making; and you, the little Jakov girl with blonde curls and perpetually rosy cheeks, became the daughter your mother had always hoped you'd be. Humble and kind and perhaps a little bit mysterious, too—the type of girl who would become a woman loved by all who knew her but understood by none.

You were an enigma, the girl with stars in her eyes and white petals in her hair, and for much of your childhood, you remained that way: adored, but held at arm’s-length; indulged, but with the sort of wariness reserved for tall tales of witches and phantoms. You were beautiful in the way of all things tragically misunderstood, and for all that you loved the world despite it's many transgressions, you ached for it, too.

In a District where beauty is paramount and honesty is dangerous, your services were highly sought after once you'd befriended a lonely, frizzy-haired girl with rage in her bones and death on her lips. You tamed her lion's mane, given her eyebrows instead of bushes atop her face, pinched her cheeks, and lent her a dress. Together the two of you attended Dillard's weekly social and all eyes were drawn to you first, obviously, but toward Cara second. In one short afternoon, you'd transformed a wild thing of a girl into the prettiest creature in the room, and if asked today, you'd say the rest was history. But the monsters you'd surrounded yourself with once you were accepted to the academy did so love to be made to look as though they were anything but. And eventually, for your raw talent of making things beautiful, they loved you so—just as much as Midas did so love his gold, but it went to your head. That superficial adoration you had always craved so much. It turned you into a hollow shell of a girl where you'd once been whole, now with no other ambition but this: to make everything within your grasp beautiful. 

It was something of an obsession, wasn't it? That desperate need to see a factory of killers glitter, its pupil's scars wiped clean and the crevices that remained filled with gold—damn near madness, those who’d known you as a girl might say. Don’t you want to be beautiful? A young you would ask and the adults around would laugh and snicker, narrowing their eyes in something like heartbreak for the wildly vapid Jakov girl, with long golden hair and perfectly sun-kissed cheeks, who wanted to be nothing more than something nice to look at. But once they started to revere you for it, you became so beautiful it hurt, and when you could do no more, you went further, indulging every whim and desire of those affluent enough to seek your help. You were greedy in your longing for love, for praise; and to this day, it keeps you up at night, even drove you to become someone the happy girl you'd once been would cower before, but the only thing left untouched by your avarice, it would seem, is your heart. Beneath it all—beneath your marbled skin and behind those eyes of the purest blue, there lives a hopeful girl who still believes there is beauty to be found in violence, in destruction, in annihilation. Naive though you may be, you aren't wrong, and perhaps that is the worst of it: that beauty is not what you'd thought at it was at all, that it is a bloody, ruthless thing with sharp claws and sharper teeth—and that you want it desperately still.

But you have stopped looking for it in this cruel place—have stopped searching the eyes of your fellow careers for anything more than misery, has accepted that there are some marks even you can’t cover up. And it terrifies you, knowing that fate draws closer with each passing day and the only flag you have to wave is a one of a blinding, blood-speckled white. To look imminent death in the face and have no choice but to smile back a surrender is cruelty unrivaled, a curse too often afforded to the undeserving; and you, too, are a victim, with your heart of roses and your pretty little head a tad too close to the clouds. You have never in your life been a real fighter—have never felt the weight of a gun in your hands or the snap of bone beneath your knuckles, but you once believed you could fight your destiny another way, that if you could just make everything beautiful, the world might stop demanding children make themselves into warriors for no other reason than to die.

But years of trying have shown you the disturbing truth, snarling and monstrous and ugly: beautiful things may still be awful, may still feel pain, may still fall. Beauty is a ruse, is a trap, is a lie those left behind console themselves with when they have nothing left to hold.

Beauty is poison, and vanity is disease.

Beauty is poison, and so are you.