FIRE WAS MY UNSEEN TWIN ;

           there is a clear distinction,  a clear contrast,  in christina’s life:  there is before  and   there is  after.   before is her mother’s eyes, the greenest she’s ever seen.   before  is her father’s laugh ringing through the halls.

           in the   after  there is silence.

       BEFORE

she is born in the springtime, in the morning of a wispy april day. outside the early colors of pinks and oranges fill the sky  ;  when the rays peek through the blinds she is bathed in sunlight.  anointed  in  sunlight.  they name her  christina.

her parents absolutely  adored  her,  they had thought they would never have another child, not after their first one.

compared to her older sibling, who was  sickly,  christina was the golden child, spritely and bathed in sunlight,  and the comparison was always made.  the,  why can’t you be more like christina?’s  asked more and more as she grew older and achieved more.

her mother was a muggleborn who embraced wixen culture like it was her own, and even ran a small shop in diagon alley, tina’s tiny trinkets, selling novelty items and the like.

the family lived in commoratio alley for as long as christina could remember,  their small brood of four sharing meals and stories in a three-bedroom flat on the second floor of a rickety old building with creaking wooden floorboards and doors that needed a hard push to open.

her early life was idyllic, to sum it all up. she played tag with all the kids in their street, sat on her father’s lap as he manned the counter of their little novelty shop just at the edge of diagon alley and knockturn alley.

fun fact  :   she was a  near hatstall  at her sorting ceremony, begging the sorting hat not to sort her into slytherin like it intended— her parents were both  hufflepuffs,  and she had  insisted  the hat put her there.

she stuck mostly to her extracurriculars during her time at hogwarts, joining multiple clubs and even being elected club president for some of them  (  her most notable  — and probably most embarrassing — club would probably be the  rat race club  but, hey, she was a first year when she joined ! )

all these were in the effort to plump up her resume—  she wanted to be a journalist  (  and a good one at that ), and recruiters always  loved  an all-around applicant, or at least that’s what she thought.

february 14th, 2014  was a bittersweet day for christina,  though more so on the bitter aspect of it.  after months of unemployment and rejection notices, christina finally lands a job.  it’s an  assistant job  at the daily prophet, really,  and the pay is absolute shit,  but it’s a  job  and in a rather reputable  (HA!)    publication. it would also be the worst day of christina’s life.

DEATH TRIGGER WARNING START. it was a death eater attack, plain as day.  tensions were already high when news of you-know-who coming back broke out,  especially on her mother,  who was a muggleborn that operated a shop so close to knockturn alley that it was a  miracle  they stayed open for that long.  it was a death eater attack,  christina knew,  but the aurors in her case dismissed it, said it was a robbery gone wrong, and that her parents had been in the way.

(  it wasn’t a robbery,  she knew that, because if it  were  then they would have taken the money in the register, or any of their more expensive items,  or anything.  chris  knew  they were targeted, she just didn’t know it would end up like this. )

INTERLUDE 

         christina is inconsolable after the funerals of both her parents, and her older sibling handles everything she can’t  :  handles the paperwork, plans the ceremonies,  even sells the shop they both grew up in because  times are hard, chris, and neither of us know how to run a business. DEATH TRIGGER WARNING END.

AFTER

her mourning is cut short, because she’s got a  job  now and she has bills to pay all of a sudden.  her superiors take pity on her  (  thank  merlin  they did  )  and assign her to work on a different story.

she’d like to say that she’s  moved on,  that she’s grown and working on other things now,  but who is she kidding?  she might not have been the most spritely before,  but she’s barely functioning outside of work  now.

really, it’s true.  she lives in a flat with   three  other people  who haven’t seen much of her at  all  since she moved in with them.  her  best friend  thinks it’s a miracle if they see her once a month.

in truth, chris has thrown herself into her work, rising up the ranks from assistant to junior journalist to a being a proper journalist— though being a journalist is not really all that. 

she’s written countless of articles for the daily prophet, though most are unpublished, because maybe news reporting isn’t for you, dear.  have you considered the gossip column?

(  it’s not the best job,  and she knows her worth is much more than trailing wix celebrities and rumors about their daily lives especially in the political climate they have now, but a girl also has to pay rent. )

rita skeeter probably doesn’t know who christina yi, begrudging gossip columnist, is, but christina knows a  lot  about rita skeeter.  christina knows that rita doesn’t deserve all that power and fame,  knows that it should have gone to good journalists instead, should have gone to her. tl;dr: christina probably runs a rita skeeter hate blog.  she literally can’t stand her ???

DEATH MENTION TW. on the side, however, she uses her resources to dig more into her parents’ deaths— what she’ll actually  do  with the information, she doesn’t know, but she just  needs to know  what  actually  happened to them.

she’s passionate about what she writes though, be it an investigative piece or a GOSSIP TOPIC™️, even going as far as writing a scathing gossip piece on a certain wix actor’s attitude in his latest stage play.

she just wants to be a successful journalist ! that’s why everything in her mind is all work, work, work, which doesn’t help her social life at all. she’s also really passionate about what she writes and is prone to write alexander hamilton-esque pieces if someone ever crosses her,  though fortunately her editor never publishes them.

wanted connections. 

OLDER SIBLING.  preferable faceclaims are PHILLIPA SOO, CHLOE BENNET, JANEL PARRISH, REMY HII, JORDAN CONNOR, JING BORAN, or any faceclaim that is half-white and half-chinese.  must be older than 26.  christina and her older sibling have a strained relationship. where christina was the golden child, their older sibling was the black sheep, always compared to her and her achievements. she  tries  to connect with them, and while their parents never meant any harm by comparing the two, their relationship is still strained, even more so now that their parents are dead and christina's launched herself into her work. still, christina tries to arrange dinners for the two of them when she can (which is rare), and check up on them every once in a while.

BEST FRIEND.  must be around 25-26, no preferred faceclaim.  because  someone  has to look out for our girl!  it’s a miracle someone’s put up with her for that long. it’s a  must  that they meet up for lunch at least once a month to catch up.  they’ve been best friends since their hogwarts years,  and have always been each other’s biggest fans,  though with chris diving into her work and not coming up for air for weeks at a time,  it’s getting harder and harder for them to connect.

EX/es.  preferably around 25-29, no preferred faceclaims.  said best friend probably convinced her to go out on a date and pursue an actual relationship every now and then,  to which christina actually agrees to,  but it always ends up in flames because apparently she’s  always busy  with work,  which she already thought was a  given  going into their relationship. she probably has 1-2 exes post-graduation.