Lucas O'Hara || District Nine || FIN

[lance]

Lucas O'Hara
Eighteen
Male
Nine
Cody Saintgnue
Philosophical artist from the ninth District

[lance]

You've always found a certain beauty in things that others seem to overlook.

The shining glow of a full moon casting its light over a dormant factory. The relaxing, peaceful sounds of the woods where the generation before you used to hunt. The raw beauty of an individual blessed by Mother Nature and genetics alike.

Even the Hunger Games, to an extent. You do not fear them as others do, earning you scorning descriptions such as naive and apathetic and heartless. But you took these comments with a grain of salt, for there was something....captivating about them. Something sort of magnetic force that kept your eyes glued to the screen whenever a tribute struggled to survive. There was a beauty in observing one fight for their life, a beauty in the raw struggle to survive as the Games pushed man, woman, and child back to their very roots. A beauty in a glorious, hard fought end, a beauty in the escape that the Games granted. 

Others called it apathy. You called it fascinating. 

Each detail you captured with a keen eye, storing it away in your mind to later be transferred to the blank pages of one of your many sketchbooks. They were crude, plain, but you made them beautiful, with each dash of nature's green or splotch of blood red. 

It was an activity that could keep you occupied for hours, days, even, without pause. For long periods of time, you would be immersed in your work, utterly oblivious to the outside world, until a parched throat and growling stomach would force you out of your fantasy realm and back into the real world. 

It was a habit formed after years of tuning out the outside world. Your childhood had been full of conflict, initiated by one of the two people who were supposed to make it a sweet, nurturing experience.

Alas, Panem is no paradise for those outside the Capitol, and a life in a lower district is far from perfect.

You grew up hearing insults hurled at you from your mother, calling you a "mistake" and an "accident". Your father did little to soften the blows, if only to avoid getting in the line of fire. You later learned that your mother had barely escaped the Reaping before she had gotten pregnant with you, the product of a drunken, carelessly executed one night stand with a fellow ex-eligible. She later guilt tripped him into marrying her "for the sake of the child", though in reality it was mainly for free child support. The fact that you shared her dark hair and light eyes did nothing to change the fact that she viewed you as a curse, an unnecessary burden that had, in her eyes, "ruined her life."

Your father was quite the opposite, in a sense. He was the light of your childhood, the small island of positivity in a sea of negativity. It was him that gave you your first sketchbook and coloring implements, painstakingly smuggled out of the factory he worked. Yet your mother detested the idea of "the little bastard" engaging in anything remotely pleasurable. 

After all, if you had ruined her life, she was going to ruin yours.

Her strangling aura choked you for the majority of your childhood. Though you were allowed to attend school, you were not allowed to participate in extracurriculars or interact with any of your peers outside of the learning setting. You were too intimidated of your mother to explain the real reason you kept everyone at arm's length as a child, so you retreated into a reclusive shell. It was easy to avoid social interactions when you simply did not respond. After a while, the other kids got bored of trying to generate a reaction, and for the most part you were left alone.

Though it was not her only gift to you, the crippling social anxiety plagued you was easily your least favorite result of your mother's iron grip on your very being. 

When you were fourteen, your father had finally had enough. 

In a verbal war that lasted for hours and shook the frail foundations of the house more than once, your parents fought viciously in a battle of words. Insults, accusations, and words of terrible meaning were flung all over the place, and you could only watch with a mixture of awe and fear as your father and your mother engaged in battle. 

Finally, your mother caved, and promptly exited the house in a rage. 

The divorce papers came less than a week later. 

After a decade and a half of being strangled, you were finally free to spread your wings as you pleased. 

---

Less than a year after your mother vacated, your father found true love for the first time. And shortly after your fourth reaping, you once again had a mother.

Though she was strict, she was as warmhearted as your father was, and treated you like you were her own son.

For the first time in fifteen years, you truly felt the warmth of a mother's love. 

Your integration into society and subsequent recovery from years of being strangled were slow. You were still hampered by your introverted nature, and you were still known as the strange boy that saw the Games as beautiful (which, even after all this time, you still do. Granted, you see most everything as beautiful, so that really isn't saying much). Still, despite that, you picked up a handful of friends and acquaintances along the way, which is definite progress. 

You've grown physically throughout the years, as well. Standing an impressive six feet three inches and weighing in at around 160 pounds, you have a reasonably healthy look for someone who does virtually no physical activity. Your facial features also sharpened, giving you a look that strikingly resembles your former mother, imprinting a painful reminder of times past on your face. As a result, you tend to avoid mirrors or similarly reflective surfaces. 

You've recently taken to using your body as a canvas, drawing temporary tattoos on your arms, legs, and on one daring occasion, chest. Images that fade with the next day's bathing, yet for a day depict many painstakingly drawn images from both your memories and your imagination.

It's a lot of work for a temporary piece of art, but you enjoy it.

Your love of beautiful things has not changed throughout the years. Often you'll catch yourself staring at an attractive girl or handsome guy for an extended amount of time, caught in their physical perfection. The freedom you obtained in recent years has given you an opportunity to travel to various parts of the District, giving you a chance to fill your sketchbook with drawings of a factory or the town square. And though by now you realize the serious, dark nature of the Games, you still see the raw beauty in them, as well. 

Maybe you're delusional. Maybe your concept of beauty is different from everyone else in the District. 

Maybe it takes one who has experienced the darkness to fully embrace the light. 

[lance]

This kinda bounced all over the place but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[ghosty]

accepted! <3