Zoya Albatross // District Four

[Baby Wessex d9b [earthling]]

Name: Zoya Albatross
Age: 18
Gender: Female
District/Area: District 4
Appearance:

There are a lot of beautiful people in Four, there's no doubt about it. Zoya ranks highly, but has never won one of the local beauty contests. Usually her opponents nitpick, say that she's too skinny and too long, her nose has an awkward upsweep at the end, her hair has been too managed and dyed to ever be truly beautiful. They rarely think to credit the true reason: her icy personality, which has never won over a single judge, and or the heart of a boy, although she has been with many.

She is lovely, though, to study. Like an art piece at a museum. She buys makeup with her spending money, always ensuring that her lashes are long and dark, her cheeks flushed delicately, her lips rose pink or hot pink depending on the occasion. She isn't great at applying makeup, but given the canvas, she doesn't need to be a Van Gogh. A little here and a little there goes a long way.

Zoya does pay particular attention to her hair, indulging in the folly of youth that more product will always produce better results. But even at eighteen her hair is thinning, a sign of worse things to come. She just pumps more volume into it, dyes it white blonde to the point that it is brittle and smooths conditioning creams through it day and night. It is an endless obsession, this one with her hair.

Personality:

Zoya lives in a reality all her own, one where it is other people who are the trouble with Panem, one where despite her very best efforts, all of her friendships disintegrate, all of her relationships are little more than grunts and moans. Of course the real source of her alienation is herself, and her inability to empathize with another human being. She can be responsible (see: earning enough extra money to take care of her family), and she can be pragmatic (see: earning said money so that she can keep a roof over her head until she's nineteen). But that isn't the same thing as caring, and it sure as hell isn't loving.

It's not that Zoya doesn't see other people. She does. She's just caught up in her own head, her own thoughts, her own goals and ambitions. Zoya does not fret or worry; she plans. And she keeps to herself. Privacy is her number one concern in the world, and she learned very early that to trust another person was to ask for inevitable betrayal. Gossip is too powerful, to necessary to the fabric of society. So she stopped trusting, and eventually, she stopped talking except when absolutely necessary.

Worst dinner party date ever? You might think so, but there are plenty of eligible men in Four who want nothing more than a lovely face and a pair of tight lips. Zoya has made the rounds in Four, and never once spoken of any of her affairs. But other people do, and once word was out, she was labeled as a slut, that ice queen cocksucker, to be precise. The thing about keeping your mouth shut, however, is that you still have ears. For a time Zoya convinced herself that the rumors - even the true ones - didn't bother her.

But her skin is not ice, nor steal, nor stone. She is beginning to feel the insults, to see the boundaries of her control when she knows no one outside of her immediate family. And does she really know any of them at all?

History:

It's a bad situation when the breadwinner of your family could care less if you lived or died.

In that case, said breadwinner is Zoya, and the unlucky lives in her hands are her frail parents and her ambitious, slightly demented younger sister, Arezoo. Turns out that particular strain of insanity is genetic, and manifested itself in their mother in post-partum depression that never lifted, and a father who cycles through mania with the shifting of the moon. Not exactly ideal parents, and they found each other late in life. Zoya was born when her mother was already 42, and she was pushing 46 when Arezoo made an appearance, all premature and squished as she was. It was more a mistake in medicine that brought the two Albatross girls into existence, than any caring or wanting by their parents.

Zoya protected herself as best she could from her father's moods and her mother's deadly depression. She thought very little of the red-haired baby she left in the shadows. Instead she focused on school work, on learning to sew and mend her own clothes, on learning to cook with scraps and clean up in the estuary, even though it made her clothes stiff with salt. She became self sufficient, and never offered her services to her sister or parents. If they asked, she considered her time first.

School was a refuge, one with barbed thorns, but a place she wanted to be, nevertheless. She studied hard, found many subjects easier than dealing with her peers, which she had found trying even when she was quite little, before her body had grown into its height and curves.

There hadn't been a moment when Zoya had decided boys didn't, in fact, have cooties. She just transitioned from observing them on the playground to messing around with them behind the school's sheds. She has never once been paid for her time, but Zoya has parleyed these dalliances to jobs, including her current one sewing fine nets for one of the merchants in the district's center. Tumbling with him had been distasteful, but the job was good money, and allowed her access to the most powerful captains in the district.

It is not a life that she would have chosen for herself, but it is one she's willing to live, especially once she frees herself from her familial obligations.

Codeword: Odair
Comments/Other:

Older sister to Arezoo

[Baby Wessex d9b [earthling]]

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[✨ zozo.]

Love her <3

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