Amaranth Swire, Capitol, FIN

Amaranth Swire, Capitol, FIN Sept 19, 2012 6:25:25 GMT -5

Post by kneedles on Sept 19, 2012 6:25:25 GMT -5

[Amaranth Swire |Seventy One |The Capitol]

[Appearance]

All capitolite women are brightly coloured birds of paradise, primped and preened to perfection without a hair out of place- Amaranth though is something a bit different, she’s wilder, more unkempt provocative even and- at least in her own opinion- she still out styles them all. Her hair is a garish shade of tangerine, anything but natural darlings; it’s her trade mark after all. Usually she wears her hair in a wild tangle of curls, but Amaranth has been known to mix it up on occasion by running a hot iron through it. After years of dye treatments, gelling and any such other faddy trends, her hair has become coarse and almost as stiff as cardboard so that it holds the curls and back combing rather well. Due to her age, her hair has begun to thin somewhat at the top but she makes up for that by keeping it long using the curls to achieve volume.

Even as a girl, Amaranth was never a beauty, not in the way that her lovers were. Born with a ghostly pale complexion, she’s always revelled in her little imperfections as well as some of the bigger ones. Her teeth have always been large, nicotine stained like old tombstones fighting for room inside of her mouth- last year she had a set of veneers fitted after her gums began to rot and a few teeth came loose and fell out due to years of giving in to a very very sweet tooth making her teeth appear even larger than before, giving her smile a vaguely sinister sort of edge to it quite accidentally. Wrapped around her horsey teeth is a small puckered mouth, always lined with rouge or pink, or purple or whatever other colours she can pick out specifically to clash beautifully with her acid orange hair and while her lips are arguably a little on the thin side, Amaranth still finds vanity in it- especially with the perfect cupids bow curve of her upper lip, accentuated and emphasised by sharp pencil lines at all times. She is also seldom seen without either a red rimed cigarette or a high ball glass stained with her kisses held delicately in hand.

Her nose is sharp and birdlike, while her jaw is rather too square to be feminine but she marks all of these features out like a beacon using powders to make her naturally pale skin even more bright and alabaster like a full moon shining out on a crystal clear night. Her eyes are a blue green grey shade like the ocean in the middle of a storm and when it comes to eye makeup she is of the old school belief that more is always more, slapping on the blue shades with a trowel, lining her eye lids with thin black lines. She likes to be theatrical in the way she looks, as with any other capitolite woman- but if her makeup runs or smudges or a line is drawn unevenly in her shaking hands before she’s had her morning gin and tonic then Amaranth usually pays it no mind. Though her parents never blessed her with beauty, she’s a firm believer that anyone woman can use what they were born with and beautiful in their own way. And though it might be cliché, Amaranth knows there is truth in the old phrase that confidence is beautiful. This confidence radiates from the very core of Aramanth , like a star swelling outwards into a supernova and when she enters a room with a sort of bedraggled poise that is often imitated but seldom captured, Amaranth sparkles.

At seventy one year’s young you can still here the clatter, clatter of sky scraper heels on the paving stones to signify Amaranth’s approach. That’s her way; ‘age cannot wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety’. Her body it’s true, might have gone to seed long ago; she’s begun to shrink and hunch over a little, though Amaranth has never walked in any way aside from with her head held high, while her breasts have flatten drooped and dropped with time- one of life’s great tragedies really, Amaranth always used to be proud of her breasts. The aging process is also clear on her face, in fact no part of her has managed to escape it, which has lost tension in the muscles, dropping a little and appearing jowly though she is more than happy to pull it upwards into a smile. Cigarette smoking and a life lived solely for pleasure and to capture that elusive joie de vivre have made the deep lines in her face an inevitability though she wouldn’t exchange those long nights of drinking, talking and rolling up poist coital cigarettes with purple papers for anything in the world. She has laughter lines, crow’s feet and every other wrinkle that man gave a name to hidden away under the powder as though she were a rumpled sheet. She wears her heels high in spite of her now brittle bones, stiff joints and trick hip because well- what’s the point of stabbing away at life if you can’t be fabulous while you’re doing it.

Her nails, now brittle and yellow are always covered with some garish shade, acid greens, metallics or purples- which will always and for forever be her favourite colour in the entire world.

While other women might try to dress more modestly, Amaranth is just the same as she always was- full of life and bright colours, mixing up her style choices and changing who she wants to be from day to day. Feminine and dressed in pink tutus perhaps, playing the sophisticated older woman in orange satin or the alternative pierced up anarchistic soul. For all her love of the unnatural when it comes to colours, make up and the way she styles her hair, Amaranth is still vehemently against the idea of plastic surgery, since that would be considered cheating, and very much against her- ‘work with what you were given, idealogy’. Similarly, Amaranth does not follow trends, in her day she made the trends and now has earned, she feels, the venerable title of ‘timeless’.

[/size] [/blockquote][/blockquote]

[Personality]

Amaranth is a lover not a fighter and over the years she’s loved so many things; fine wine, good clothing, boys, girls, boys who look like girls, girls who look like boys and people who don’t look like anything much in particular. Amaranth lives her life to the full, grabbing it like a lit cigarette and smoking it down to the stub, inhaling everything that it has to offer and loving the heady rush and lingering scent of ash.

Amaranth has never thought much about gender preferences, as long as her lovers are beautiful then she is happy. Normal couplings are so blase and Amaranth has always enjoyed standing out from the crowd- no easy feat when it feels like every single person in the capitol is a special snowflake, whether it's their hair or their clothes but for the past...oh it's been decades and decades now little darlings, she's been in a loving menage a trois with her two favorite people in the world. You might think that Amaranth is a difficult person to live with- and she's the first person to admit that this is true; she's untidy, leaving brassieres about the place, tights in the refridgerator and cigarette stubs in the cooking wine, as well as lazy on most days- believing that there is nothing worth seeing in the world before noon and people that get up before then are beastly bores but somehow the group of women have managed to co-exist famously for a long time.

She drinks like it's going out of style any day now, but not in the desperately sad way of men lounging in bars sobbing over lost loves. Her choice of drink is social lubricant and she can slide smoothly into any situation as though slicked up with oil, cracking jokes, engaging in debates and charming most people who meet her. Or making them dislike her quite a lot. Amaranth is outspoken and incredibly forthcoming with her views, as persuasive as the serpent that charmed Eve to eat the apple from the tree of knowledge creating original sin, and oft times her views can be equally devious. Sometimes Amaranth enjoys to shock for the sake of shocking, taking sides she doesnt even believe in simply to cause a reaction or a stir.

Love is wonderful, hate is delicious, the only thing abhorrent is indifference.

This motto used to be spread around her workshop. Before she retired only a few years ago, Amaranth made her living designing and selling underwear- specifically raunchy underwear from a variety of boutiques around the capitol and the brand still operates under her name even if she doesn’t directly influence the company anymore. It isn’t vanity that leads Amaranth to call herself a genius when it comes to creating the perfect pair of panties, in her humble opinion anyway, just cold hard facts. Her pants sit on the bottoms of socialites, her brassieres cup the breasts of the rich and the famous like pearls held inside of oysters. Despite her gregarious, drink fueled attitude Amaranth has always proved herself to be an incredibly shrewd business woman, often times rather unscrupulous when it comes to making money. It's quite simple really, she is a woman who enjoys things like being able to sleep in til noon cradling a bottle of fine vermouth, smoking pink roll up ciggarettes and wearing heels too high for a woman her age and these things cost money. Anyone who's ever worked for Amaranth will tell stories of what a harsh task master she could be, with an incredibly direct vision (using herself as a muse for most of her work) which when not executed perfectly will face her wrath. And her wrath can be somewhat wild- to match her firey hair...sigh, how very cliche- but at least she isn't a natural red head so it's not quite so dreadful.

Fashion is fun though, so she tries not to let her drive to create her visions colour this too entirely, and unlike a lot of capitolites she prefers not to be a snob and is even willing to experiment with some of the more…hem…primitive styles that one finds out in the districts. There’s something so wonderfully sensual about how bare faced, basic and just generally dirty the people seem to be out there- she knows because she’s seen the reaping. Sometimes Amaranth is not terribly self aware and is, even after seventy one years rather ignorant on some issues- she thinks that she understands the people from outside of the capitol from what she’s seen of the games, the interviews and the reaping when in reality she couldn’t have any less of an idea.

Every year Amaranth and her lovers sit down to watch the hunger games, and are always very active in choosing favorites. She thinks nothing of the death of the children from out in the districts, as far removed from their world as she is from the goose who died to make the pate she enjoys as a late supper and since they like to choose different tributes to make the games even more interesting things in the house can be quite heated. Amaranth is predictable in that she usually chooses the prettiest of the tributes- the only time they really get to her is when something truly beautiful has to die, it really is such a terrible waste or at least those who are made to look the best. Having once been a stylist herself, for a very brief period when the hunger games were young and she was too Amaranth is especially critical of the interview stages, invariably informing her lovers how she would have done something differently, or all the places where the other stylist has failed. They hold games parties for their friends, drink good wine while the tributes starve and root for winners though they never lose sleep if their favourite is murdered horribly. Deep down Amaranth still harbours some deep seated bitterness towards the districts and sometimes this shows when she takes pleasure in the death of tributes.

[History]

Amaranth was only eight or nine years old when the dark days ended all those years ago, but she still remembers more than she would like to- whispers and worried words, the feeling for the first time in her great glittering capitol what it was like to be afraid, the sound of guns and bombs blasting from somewhere in the distance as she pulled her head under the blankets and tried to dream of somewhere quiet and somewhere calm as she swore that the earth was moving. They did their best to keep the rebels from the capitol but of course, tragedy has a way of slipping through cracks and Amaranth’s father was killed in the line of duty, by some no good rebel fighter.

Like a lot of little girls, Amaranth had adored her father- remembering him bringing her nick nacks and telling her stories of magical creatures, beautiful ladies and all the other things that would make her sit and sigh to herself, dreaming of a better world even if there were those who believed a life in the Capitol was a perfect one. They shipped him home to the family in pieces, nothing about his body was recognisable so they had to rely on the badges on his uniform to identify him in anyway. Her mother was left shaken by the whole ordeal and retreated into herself, keeping to her room and slowly vanishing away, filled up with innumerable complexes and obsessive compulsions- like switching on lights an even number of times and only ever eating a certain, very small amount at dinner to stop the ‘pollutants ‘entering her body . As her mother wasted away, Amaranth was left to her own devices growing up, a life without love, almost in complete silence sometimes when her mother had her ‘head aches’. Until she was fifteen, Amaranth’s only source of joy was her dolls; which she would look after and sew dresses for.

She was a very imaginative child, and each doll had a name and its own distinct personality- she’d spend hours constructing costumes before performing with a kind of maniacal earnestness the complicated soap opera with their lives. She could be quite morbid with it too- there were affairs and murder and all kinds of revolting crimes happening in the made up world of the dolls. The children at school were not overly found of Amaranth. They used to run away from her because they thought she was weird.

Then, oddly for a girl who hated the rebels with a passion for what they had done to her father, Amaranth entered into a rebellious phase herself, triggered by a beautiful boy with a pompadour and no respect for authority. She stayed out late, got to drinking and talking about her plans for the future, lying sprawled out on stranger’s sheets rolling post coital cigarettes in pink wrappings. She made her own jewellery to sell in the markets of the capitol and managed to escape her mother’s house without having to borrow a penny, putting her way through fashion school.

She studied under some of the original games stylists, who set the moulds that would be copied time and time again over sixty one years of the hunger games and when the opportunity came to work with some of them, she had her trepidations but took the job. Some stylists have a way about them that can calm their tributes, others can just annoy them but Amaranth barely saw hers as people- just mannequins really. And they saddled her with a lot of dross really; dirty faced loggers from district seven who were neither pretty nor co-operative. In the end she tired of the job, prestige or not. Fashion is supposed to be fun, and it’s impossible to have fun when some thirteen year old is weeping off all her carefully applied mascara.

So she went back to catering for people in the capitol, who understood her and appreciated her vision, opening up her first underwear boutique to great success. The business grew and as her coffers did Amaranth became quite the woman about town. She was entranced by a couple and quickly brought into the fold- a real true ménage a trios relationship being one of the few things by that point that Amaranth had never tried. And the whole thing went along quite splendidly, perhaps even more splendidly than anyone had ever expected. They became partners, and quite domesticated about it too- well, as domesticated as someone like Amaranth can ever be. She’s not so much a caged bird more a homing pigeon. Allowed to fly freely from the coop though there is never any doubt that she would find her way back to them. Back to fling brassieres and stockings about the kitchen and leave cigarette stubs in the cooking wine.

She still had her lovers for a while; they got younger and younger as she got older and her partners never minded. Their love is not jealous or selfish…such concepts are too bourgeoisie for words, darling. These days though, she is far more content to look but not touch. Perhaps it shows that she is winding down, growing more tired in her old age- she’s over the shop she loves and though she misses it she does have to admit that the last few years working there had left her tired to her bones, trying to thread needles through arthritic fingers and go over stock lists and margins while her brain was growing slower and foggier than it ever used to be. All the same, Amaranth isn’t dead yet. No way, she’s a long way off that yet.

Pass the wine, roll me a cigarette my darlings, the party is only just beginning.