You didn’t get to be compared to the Kennedys if your family wasn’t white, but if they had been, that probably would have been how people spoke about the Duforts. It seemed success was written into their very DNA, bred into them as if they were prize race horses. Brienne was raised with the weight of heavy parental expectations, expectations that laid the path into politics before her feet and poked her insistently in the back until she walked down it.
If it had been up to her, success would have come another way. Child’s dreams of being a famous treasure hunter were quickly chased away. Lara Croft, Indiana Jones or Nathan Drake she would not be. Those were silly aspirations for silly people, and if there was one thing Brienne wasn’t allowed to be, it was silly. The child who dreamed of trekking through the jungle with the sun on the back of her neck for a living was quickly molded into a prototype for advancement, as if she were more machine than person.
Those weren’t realistic goals, and when her parents found out about her plans to go to University to study archaeology, they took her into a clinically white walled living room and told her under no uncertain terms that it wasn’t going to happen. She would go to Georgetown or she would say goodbye to her trust fund and get to pay her own tuition. ‘It’s healthy to have hobbies though,’ came her father’s caveat. ‘It makes you look well rounded in the eyes of the public. But it’s not a career. Don’t ever forget that.’
‘Of course, papa,’ she had answered, the delicate hints of her mother’s French accent on her silver tongue. ‘It was just a pipe dream.’ She should have known better, Brienne told herself, and from now on, she would. Mistakes weren’t something to be learned from, they were something to be avoided entirely. Her father sat in the same room, reading the news on his tablet and continuing to glance over her shoulder as she rewrote all her college applications, and when she was done, he bent down and kissed her forehead with a smile and told her how perfect they were. That was how she was raised, with love and affection as bells and whistles, carrots instead of sticks, tools to be used to guide her in the right direction or make her feel good when she did what they wanted. She learned her tricks from them, and Brienne of course would play the very same game.
It worked on almost everyone, which was probably why the one person it didn’t work on was the one who caught her eye. It was fun having someone who matched wits with her and who she had no choice but to be honest with because she never bought her bullshit. Her love was a plucky girl she met in her college social studies class who kept up with her every word would fight tooth and nail in every debate. Fortunately for Bri, the girl was equally enamoured with her. At least if there was one thing her parents didn’t criticise her for, it was this. ‘Oh honey, we’re liberals, after all. It’s good to have the gay vote.’ Because what did love matter in politics? For them, even their daughter’s eventual marriage was a business arrangement and a political statement.
They backpacked through the jungles of Ecuador for their honeymoon. They climbed ancient Mayan Pyramids and took pictures of monkeys in the rainforest, they swam with turtles. With her new wife, Brienne got to be the explorer she had always dreamed of, but she went into it knowing that dreams had to end. Dreams were kept for vacations, and even honeymoon snaps on social media were accompanied by political messages about environmental issues, how beautiful the ocean was accompanied by a warning about how badly humans were polluting it.
Every politician needed a cause, so Bri chose hers. It was ironic that she fought for the environment when it was nature itself that would rise up and try to destroy them, and it was perhaps more ironic she fought for gun control before being thrust into a world where firearms were one of the most necessary and sought-after commodities. But she hadn’t known that then. Bri had just fought.
She was so good at pretending that sometimes she almost convinced herself, but it was all for the polls, all for her own advancement. Demonstrations and protests were for the photo op and the approval ratings. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in the things she protested. She just didn’t care about them that much. Her real interest in them could be best described in a vague non-committal shrug. She obsessed over the polls. She wanted to be a senator. Hell, she wanted to be president. Surely she could do a better job than some of the idiots who had served there. People got behind her, this passionate, outspoken young woman with bright ideas who was too good at hiding her fake smile and her fake sense of righteousness.
She climbed the ladder of the Californian Democratic Party rung by rung. At the time of the outbreak, she was the representative for California’s 12th district serving San Francisco. A high-flying young politician, and a crappy wife who spent more time at the office than at home. Then, the world descended into chaos. You couldn’t exactly call your state rep when there was no electricity, and it wasn’t as if anyone even followed the laws any more anyway, so who cared about the people who made them? There weren’t any polls any more, but there could still be leaders.
Bri was good at bringing out the best in people. Her immediate goal was to survive, and she stopped trying to inspire people to vote and started trying to inspire them to protect themselves, to protect her. She was the one who made speeches on the hoods of broken down cars, the one who helped the survivors she fell in line with decide which warehouses to raid and when to lay low. She was no longer the person who fought against easy access to guns. She was the one stealing them.
Survival was a never ending goal. The world had become a war zone. The long game should have been to find and reunite with her wife, but if there was anything Brienne had learned, it was that pipe dreams weren’t something you chased. Dreams were only for vacations, and there were no vacations in this world any more. And yet she made a decision her father would have cursed her for, continuing to wear her wedding ring in spite of the fear of it getting caught on something.
Brienne helped a group of twelve survivors make their way out of San Francisco. Her mind was a rolodex of their skills and attributes, and also their weaknesses, for just as surely as she could bring out the best in people, she found she could also inspire the worst. When the survivor with the injured leg was holding them up and nobody wanted to leave him behind, she planted the gun of the angriest person in the group in his pack, knowing they’d kill him when they found out. ‘I want him to make it out of here with us just as much as you do,’ she’d lied flawlessly, ‘but if we start tolerating stealing among ourselves, we’re asking for our own destruction. There may not be laws any more, but there have to be rules. We have to respect each other. It’s the most basic humanity we have left.’ The hint of tears in her eyes were what sold it. Breaking his neck and leaving him for the clickers to eat? Less humane, but she had left that part out of her argument. It was better this way. He’d have only died slowly and painfully later if they’d let him live, and he’d have got some of them killed with him.
For five years she went on like this. Surviving, planning ahead while also taking each day as it came. She lost count of how many lives had been lost either directly or indirectly because of her decisions, because of her reasoning. She told herself leaders just had to make difficult choices. Maybe most importantly, she told herself those choices had been more difficult than they actually were. Pretending to care was an artform she learned a long time ago.
