Farina Bancroft

## bio

*Farina Bancroft (she/her). District Nine Tribute. Nineteen. Amber Midthunder.*

When Farina Bancroft was born, she cried so loud all of Nine heard her, demanding her arrival be acknowledged.

Farina’s father worked out in the nearby wheat and rye fields like most in the area, his work changing with the season. He left at dawn, returned at dusk. Farina would always listen eagerly for the bells that would ring at sundown in the fields and echo over the flat lands of Nine, signaling the end of the work day and her poppa returning home. Her momma, however, had a more unusual occupation. Her official title when asked: pharmacist. But Anise Bancroft was much more than that.

Her role in the community afforded the Bancrofts a little greenhouse out the back of their small, ramshackle home, stuffed to the cracked plastic ceiling with herbs, flowers, roots, and plants of every shape and name. In a cupboard, even more dried and powdered products were stored from every corner of Panem, some obtained through rather illicit methods and only given out at a premium. While technically illegal to grow anything for sale outside of government jurisdiction, Anise’s expertise with plants was enough for Peacekeepers to overlook their operation. When Farina was young, she once asked why. Her momma replied, “Capitol medicine may mend a broken bone, but it can’t mend a broken heart.”

Publicly, they practiced a more formal mode of medicine. Farina grew up knowing already which herbs to pluck and grind when one of her father’s coworkers came in complaining of joint pain, someone’s uncle was desperate to ease reflux, or a desperate mother sought to break her child’s fever. However, the locals knew they offered tinctures and cures for all kinds of things beyond the call of the Hippocratic oath as well: balms for protection, potions for anxieties, hexes for scorned lovers.

When Farina was older, she would marvel at how many people would approach them for solutions to matters of the heart, perhaps equal or greater to those who would approach them for those of the body. She would ask her momma one spring afternoon, watching the retreating form of a Peacekeeper seeking desperate reassurance of his wife’s fidelity back in Two, whether or not his sachet of caraway, clover, and parsley would actually help “for real”. Her momma would consider her question for a moment, before asking in return, “Well, he sure seems less burdened, doesn’t he?” Farina would nod. There was a certain lightness to his retreating form, she could see it in his shoulders and gait. “And what is true to him, that’s what’s real to him too, isn’t it?” Farina would chew on her lip thoughtfully, then nod again. “Then I would say what we did worked. ‘For real.’”

Three days after Farina’s twelfth birthday, a man showed up on their door, hat in his hands. Harvester accident. Real nasty one. Her father wouldn’t be coming home. She dropped out– the schooling provided by was pointless anyway, especially when she could be working odd jobs in town or in the fields for extra cash when she wasn’t helping her momma with the apothecary. Her brother had already been doing field labor for two years, she was old enough. The little ones were getting bigger, and so were their stomachs, and they wouldn’t fill themselves.

While she carried her own skepticism (perhaps not-so-quietly by her momma’s measure), she continued to work alongside her mother, noting the undeniable demand and emotional impact of their work– and mouths needed to be fed, after all. There was something to it, she had decided as she, too, came to be recognized as a pharmacist in her own right. Sometimes, in their cases of illness or injury, there was something to healing that fell between their patients believing they felt better and their treatments actually doing the work. Maybe there was something to that when it came to their treatments of the human condition, too. Whatever it was, they were alleviating suffering, weren’t they? That was enough for her.

Farina’s expertise in the craft sharpened, but by the time she turned nineteen, it was clear she had not inherited her mother’s touch for bedside manner. Her mother could transform herself from a foul-mouthed, forward force of nature to an empathetic, level-headed presence. Farina had learned quickly to let her mother do all the talking, she’d do the herb grinding.

It wasn’t what she wanted for herself. The thought of her silently grinding herbs in the back of the creaking house for the rest of her life was enough to drive her insane. She craved more, to get out of their little pocket of Nine. She’d sneak out some nights and hitch a ride on the back of a neighbors pickup to go to the main town in her best dress for music and dancing. She’d trade some bullshit fortune readings in exchange for drinks, sell love potions out of her pockets that weren’t anything more than cheap ground catnip for some cash. As entrepreneurial as she was, it wasn’t only business that kept her coming back– the liveliness of it all enthralled her. It was always worth whatever hickeys or whiskey on her breath she’d have to conceal come morning. In the recent couple of years, she’d daydreamed about striking out on her own, letting the wind take her where it may to places like this in every far flung corner of the country– the horizons were endless out here in Nine. A couple of times, some boy she’d just met almost convinced her to do it with him. But she always ended up back home, sliding quietly back under her quilt, her momma and siblings that needed her set of hands to keep food on the table fast asleep nearby.

The Hunger Games were a part of their life as much as any other citizen of Nine. They watched them twice yearly. Farina preferred the summer games– easier to escape them or ignore them for work. In the winter, they were unavoidable, the harvest season was well over and they were in the peak of the cold, huddled up at home with nothing else to do but watch and think about the Games. Farina feared Reaping– who couldn’t when she had no choice but take out tesserae from the day she turned twelve?-- but there was always a distance between the world of Nine and the Capitol in their screens that helped her keep the fear in check. Her momma reassured her and her siblings each year that Nine was massive, there were many children, they’d be more likely to get struck by lightning. It didn’t stop her mother from hanging pouches of cypress, peony, and cloves around each of her eligible childrens’ necks before making the journey to the Reaping ceremony.

Her momma also always said that not all the plants and incantations in the world would stop fate, if something was meant to be. It would seem that Farina Bancroft’s name being lifted from the Reaping bowl at nineteen years old by a Capitol woman dressed in furs was what the universe had divined for her. When Farina reached the stage, she stared directly into the nearest camera and let out a scream so loud all of Panem heard her, demanding her agony be acknowledged.

Farina is angry that her name has been pulled, and is extremely suspicious of anyone who isn’t directly on her team from Nine. She’s determined to come home, to start the life she feels the Capitol is unfairly trying to steal away from her before it has even started, and she believes she’s willing to do what she needs to do to get there. None of this is fair, she doesn’t feel she owes it to the Capitol to play fair in return.  She plans to bring the pouch her mother gave them for protection at every reaping into the Arena with her as her token.

(+) feisty, vivacious, and adventurous

(-) prideful, unpredictable, and unrestrained.

PENNED BY: KAYE