president carmine downer, district thirteen | wip

President Carmine Downer. [ kahr-mine ]
Forty.
District 13.

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( She was born red. )

She had been torn from the womb of her mother like a crack of lightning — and she screamed for hours after the birth. They thought that her throat might swell shut and that the vessels beneath her burning cheeks would surely burst from the pressure that was building, but she learned at a young age to contain the storm that raged inside of her. She grew in the way that roots do; dull and hidden and stretching across only what was provided for their survival — but she never lost the electricity that had buried itself within the marrow of her bones.

( That buzzing hunger for something more than an existence of just dirt and steel. )

She was her father's daughter, a military man who devoted his life to keeping Thirteen safe from the extinction that had been wished upon it, but pieces of her mother were lodged into her skin when the woman sacrificed everything to give her child life. She had always wanted a life better than what her family knew as their reality; clear skies and freedom and a future for her little girl beyond gunfire and secrets.

She never wanted to see Carmine clawing her way to the top of a ladder that was on the verge of toppling over into the abyss that it tried so desperately to rise above. Thirteen was unforgiving, and its politics were a field she believed went best avoided at all costs, and she had hoped that her daughter would be wise enough not to follow her father into the flood that came with his career.

But she wasn't; and she shaped who she became with the iron of his spine and hardened herself with the sharpness of his advice. She was a soldier before she was a woman, and for all the softness that she lost, she never regretted the armor that she learned to wear like a second layer of flesh. She was not ashamed of who she became, and even if her mother hadn't been smiling down when she rose through the ranks and took the position of lieutenant colonel, she smiled to herself in the reflection of her badges.

( All teeth and chapped lips and that familiar desire flashing in her eyes. )

And her father said it'd be her undoing; both parents blamed the other for the ruination of their child — but both played a role in creating her. In the end, however, she learned to form a bridge between the two of them. She was rage and she was discipline and she was a clenched jaw taking the protection of her district seriously — but she also wanted a future for her people that was more than what was expected; she wanted at least a single chance to see the light.

And when she entered the field of politics and threw her hat into the presidential race, she did it without fear. She was as respected as she was loyal, and she knew she had a purpose beyond running drills and preparing for a war that was never engaged. She was not her father, and she was not her mother — she was a daughter that was a soldier, and she was not afraid of fighting; of wanting. She would see Thirteen make its way into a new era, and she would draw the path that others had never dared to dream for.

( And she's willing to bleed for those dreams;
she will begin and end red. )