giselle fenwick, capitol fin

[calla]

    

    


GISELLE POMELINE FENWICK

blessing's adopted daughter
star, heir, prodigy
protégé
19

✲

96th junior gamemaker

[calla]

Evil is a point of view.
God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately
He takes the richest and the poorest,
and so shall we;
for no creatures under God are as we are,
none so like Him as ourselves.
    – Anne Rice

i am too old for dolls now, mother.

give me something that will bleed.

give me porcelain that will tear instead of shatter.

give me that blonde one there, the one with the lilac dress. look at the way her braid pulls. her eyes open and close on their own, she’s novel merchandise, they advertised it in the spring catalogue - i want her.

and they all stand by themselves now. we won’t need to prop them up. no more wire forms. they speak. they cry. no more silly voices.

we used to take them apart, don’t you remember, baby’s first surgery kit, baby’s first scalpel, we played marbles with their glass pupils.

but the dolls are hollow, mother. give me something that will bleed.

when the hair is cut, i want it to grow back.

i want their eyes.

[calla]

The adoption is a fanfare in the papers. Blessing Fenwick is a rather independent name, despite the height of the tree. Giselle is a baby and Blessing is a scientist, an artist, a doctor, now a parent. Giselle is a baby, and more accomplice than daughter.

The spoiling happens in the strangest way.

Blessing is not soft. Giselle grows up in the labs and the offices. She sits in penthouse suites and presses her face to the glass to watch the lights of the city below. Then she bashes her dolls head against the transparency. No smears, nothing inside the skulls, the lights are still nice and pretty when she's done.

Her nanny is AI controlled. Her tutors are the Capitol's brightest scholars. Her playground has no borders but is full of sharp table corners, lasers with no child locks, humans and rats in the same testing trials. She charms every Nervalink intern into sneaking her chocolates, as well as their mainframe passwords, and then points the finger at them when projects go haywire, giggling behind her fists as they're routinely fired.

What she wants, she gets. It's this simple.

"Uncle Midas is gonna put me in the pictures." She says imperiously one day, after a gruelling babysitting session at the guncles.

A year later, she's on the big screen as a young Steel Campano in the 85th Hunter Gatherer flick, nine years old. She has a face perfect for crocodile tears and a nose that upturns at everything in District Eight when they go to shoot onsite.

She wears pink tulle to accept her supporting actress award and then it's moved on from. She's won, and so she sets out for the next conquest. The trophy itself is routinely dusted, set on the shelf next to her other accomplishments. There's her fencing championship medal, her debate ribbon, the plaque she was awarded for her high school science project on controlled nerve reactions. There's the certificate from the academic decathlon, the sash from the single pageant she entered, a photo of her smiling next to Hera Levelwright.

If she does something, she has to be the best. It's this simple.

She follows Blessing's groundwork and graduates early. She goes through extracurriculars like they're candy. Nothing really sticks.

She ages out of the little girl roles. Her grandfather still sends her a doll on her birthday, but Giselle isn't nearly as brutish with them anymore. Her sixteenth birthday, a squishy little green-eyed baby, she takes the soft stuffing out a little more meticulously. She threads wire through its hair and down its arms like a nervous system. She sets it on the top of the stairs, the little voice box calls out I love you, Mama! and then she pushes a button that makes it explode.

It leaves a scorch mark on the wooden caps. She makes a series of notes on what to adjust for the next year.

Her seventeenth birthday is a red-head. Freckled. She uses a soldering iron to trace shapes between the dots. The doll screams, and Giselle gestures to the sweating intern to up the anesthesia.

There's a side of the family that Giselle finds she doesn't like. It's not that she doesn't enjoy the access that Fenwick gets her, she languishes in it, she uses it to its full advantage. It would be stupid to not use every weapon in her arsenal. But it does start to sour.

She smiles at the galas, still cute as a button, and she bounces between her spot at Blessing's side and the trays of sweets that circle the rooms. But the Fenwicks. The men. They laugh at her without actually laughing. Giselle can tell. Of course she can tell, she mastered that trick before she was seven.

She deals with it in the best way she knows how.

She partakes in a shady Snowbyrd trade. A little baggie of laxative pills. The shrimp from the catering company must have been bad. Terrible for their business, just terrible, they'll probably never be hired for an event again.

The collateral isn't very significant. The consequences even less so. One of Giselle's great-uncles had to be admitted to hospital care because his food poisoning was so bad. She sends him a card, regretful that now they won't be able to go over those marriage proposals he had brought up. She signs it with a heart.

[calla]

dars

[dars]

”If she does something, she has to be the best. It's this simple.”
when the burden of being a prodigy becomes boring ! oh I live. oh I love.