#but those are for another time and perhaps for more opportunities for kasen to make an appearance hehe

[dcmeterwrites]

oh boy, did you get inbar lavi for an eight a.m.? wait no, that’s ZAIRA KASEN. i heard the thirty three year old is a professor who gives a pretty tough lecture in political science. she tries to be inquisitive and self-sufficient but on the stressful days, she’s scornful and hubristic. when she gets a chance to relax, catch her at the local bar listening to o.d.d. by hey violet.

— RUNDOWN.

full name: zaira kasen

name meaning: dawn


date of birth: april 22nd

place of birth: new york city, u.s.a.


age: 33


star sign:
 taurus


department: political science

specialisation: international relations and diplomacy, conflict resolution

alma mater: columbia university

alignment: true neutral

mbti: intj

spoken languages: english ( native speaker ), hebrew ( fluent ), french ( fluent ), spanish ( proficient ), mandarin ( intermediate )

mother’s name: tamara kasen

father’s name: isaac giroux

siblings, if any: samuel giroux

birth order: older twin

height: 5′3″

hair colour: dark brown

eye colour: hazel

— BACKSTORY. 

zaira was born into a family that was always on the brink of comfort. her mother worked for an insurance firm, and her father worked as a freelance writer. the couple earned just enough to not be classified as struggling, but not enough to feel comfortable. they had planned for just one kid, but two were born. zaira holds that her brother was the accident, because she’s the elder twin.  

but two kids instead of one put pressure on the family. small disturbances would rock them. medical bills, a tyre puncture. just when things seemed like they were looking up, like they could get something special for rosh hashanah, but something would always interrupt. 

so growing up, zaira was constantly feeling the air prickle with unease. they could never be too indulgent, never get what they wanted, because it was quite possible that tragedy would strike any time. the household being stressful meant that fights were common, sometimes with breaking plates or slammed doors. 

she was always the quiet one compared to her brother, and therefore, she had to be the one that silently bore all the abuse while he acted out, and she was the only one that stayed at home to wipe her mother’s tears. that was her from the start, always doing everything that she had to, and then some.

in school, she may as well have not existed. always at the back of every class, catching up on studying she couldn’t do because she was washing dishes and putting out the clothes. but her grades weren’t just alright — they were good. unusually good, especially given how little time she had to study.

socially, though, she was very anxious. flinched at physical touch, hated confrontation, and could barely get out a sentence longer than ten words without tripping up and apologising. she had few friends, rarely participated in class, never went to parties.

her brother moved out of her life around the age of seventeen, and decided that he was going to start some kind of business with his computer geek friends. good riddance, zaira said. the same year, her parents divorced, after all those years of heaving and huffing. from zaira giroux, she became zaira kasen. 

her last year of high school was going to be the end of her. she had to work harder at school to get to her dream university, the city university of new york, and she had to help her mum, get her sats prepped, work a delivery job on the weekends, and so on and so forth. she began to smoke, during this time, just to get a release. 

one day in october, during her senior year, changed her life. as was occasionally custom in high schools in her area, the government loved conducting a good old talent search to look for bright young minds to sponsor and feel better about themselves for. the first and only qualification was an iq test administered to all the students of her high school.

she took it. big deal. 

a week later, she received a long letter in the mail from the mayor of new york’s office. she’d scored 142 on the iq test, indicative of an abnormally high capacity for logical reasoning. she was given a felicitation by the city of new york — and more importantly than that, she was given the option to attend a far better school with fifty percent of the tuition fees slashed — if only she got the sat score and the gpa for it. 

and she did. it was goodbye cuny — and hello, columbia university. to her at the time, it seemed like things, in general, were settled forever. 

wrong. pretty wrong. the circles at columbia were completely different from what she’d ever had to know. rich, white, male, powerful. it was the clearest signal in the world — the demure, passive zaira wasn’t going to cut it. she would never be given any shred of respect if she didn’t earn it. 

and so she changed. it wasn’t even very gradual. she forced herself to speak louder, to be aggressive, to make sure everyone knew that she was present and a force to reckon with. it was difficult, but by the time she graduated, she was a different woman, much more hardened. 

but she wasn’t yet where she is today. that only happened when she joined work with the united states foreign service, another arena full of old men that thought they knew best. not to mention that if work was hard, navigating the political drama was even harder. 

here, she bloomed. zaira kasen proved herself to be the perfect diplomat. ever charming, ever tactful, and most importantly, unwilling to take no for an answer. over the span of ten years, she rose through the ranks to become a delegate of the united states to the united nations. 

because she attended most of the parties intended for the political hotshots of new york, she came across several acquaintances, men and women that she would meet, look pretty around, and then never think about again. one of these was amelia temperley, famed actress, wife of the attorney general of new york at the time.

another name among the people she met was robert gaskarth, personal aide to the undersecretary-general. he was older, he was likely not wiser, but at the time, he looked like a shiny new car. handsome, very well-read and travelled, loaded with a dynasty to boot. it was clear that he thought zaira was beautiful — and what else he thought of her was never really relevant. 

they married when she was 26, because it was easy, because he laughed at her jokes and he said that her observations were insightful and that she was likely to become ambassador someday — and it was convenient, they both were in new york, working in the same place, and already known to the public.

married life was a dream. 

that was the exact opposite of the thought zaira had while laying in bed with another man — not that she was to blame, you didn’t need a private investigator to know that robert wasn’t being faithful either. but neither of them spoke to the other about it. their stares over dinner, across a ballroom, in the cab rides home, were a peace treaty: you do what you want, i’ll do what i want, and we both keep up the show for the cameras. 

again, this system worked. worked really well for nearly a year, until she was thirty. then she was passed up for a promotion and it struck her like lightning — she was settling. she was making do. she was compromising. 

and for a diplomat — zaira really hates compromises. 

it was like ripping off a bandaid. once upon a time, a divorce after just three years may have looked messy on a public official’s track record, but this was 2016. there was a whole lot worse going on in the world. it was done and dusted in two months. 

and zaira threw herself into doing the absolute most at work. taking on all the new missions, overloading herself with coffee and paperwork, in the hope that a mission reassignment or promotion would be exactly what she needed to convince herself that the marriage thing was a horrible idea. 

be careful what you wish for, because you just might get it. just about eight months prior to the present, zaira was invited to head an observer mission to crimea, a very significant opportunity. with no husband to hold her back, she was off. 

two weeks went by, and they were difficult, but fine. food was awful, stay kept shifting, it was impossible to go anywhere without getting your bags checked. but y’know, this was the job description, and it was all good. 

what wasn’t in the job description was being held hostage by armed vigilantes for 72 hours. what wasn’t in the job description was having a gun pointed to her head. what definitely wasn’t in the job description was having to see and hear a close-range shootout. 

she couldn’t do it. she simply could not do it anymore. it took one letter to her boss and a permanent sabbatical to help her get her shit together. a month off with some therapy was enough to get her back on — some track, even if it wasn’t the one she was on earlier. in the meantime, bills had to be paid. 

an offer had come, buried in her inbox under a list of work e-mails — an invite to give a guest lecture on international relations at riverbank university. zaira’d never travelled further south of washington d.c., so she figured it would be a change of scene. 

and it was. the university campus was so different from her sterile, sly workplace with its mundane reports and routines and its utter disregard for the world outside the glass walls. here, people cared, people shouted and cheered, students banded together to discuss ideas that hadn’t yet been stamped out by cynicism.

perhaps it was an impulse decision. she’s lived to think of it as somewhat of a necessary evil. but she asked if she could stay. 

and here she is, one of the newest additions to the riverbank faculty, in her impeccable blouse and skirt, with an hot coffee in hand, ready to change the world — or at least, engage with minds that might save the world, if they survive the keg stand they’re going to attempt at the next kappa rager. 

zaira knows this is beneath her, something many colleagues have pointed out over the course of falsely concerned emails. and it’s eating away at her too, knowing that there’s probably something more meaningful out there. she’s not going to stop looking for something better — because that’s all she does. 

that being said, she doesn’t really find the time these days, in between woodrow wilson and hans morgenthau, who so many people grossly misunderstand—