Part 3: The Capitol (II)
(Veturia Snow)
Veturia remembers what it was like before the Dark Ages.
She is old now, and her memories have frayed - scattered pieces, fragments of life, tinted blue, submerging into lethe. She is confined within the walls of her chambers. It is not a confinement per se, not for someone from the districts. But the same four walls begin to coalesce when they are the sole thing you see, they morph into a room with no corners, no hard edges. Only the infinite smoothness of a prison disguised as a palace.
All mothers long for their children's happiness, or at least most do. Veturia has told herself time and time again that it was her son's happiness that rendered her accoplice. A twisted need to fulfill his wishes - by silencing herself. Her son, sanguine and sly and brilliant.
She would never kill her son, could never. She would do anything - degrade herself, become what she despised - but she would never kill him. Even when he began to kill the sons and daughters of the men and women he ruled. Year after year after year.
"If I had not given birth to you, if I had bore no son, this nation wouldn't be eating its children."
She has confined herself within the walls of her chambers, her opulent cell.
(Plutarch Heavensbee)
He used to tell himself that there was nothing he could do. He did that for quite a long time.
When you grow up a certain way, it is difficult to shed your old beliefs. They have settled comfortably within some deep part of your mind - or your soul, perhaps - and the process of unlearning them is an arduous one.
Tell a child that murder is entertainment. They might think it strange, at first. But it is a commodity. So it must be right.
Tell a child that poverty is perfectly fine, as long as it doesn't happen to you.
Tell a child that avidity is the path to a happy and fulfilled life.
Spew fictitious truths to a child, and they'll believe.
Plutarch Heavensbee believed, until he didn't.
He tells himself that the teenagers - and later the past victors, and later the innocent civilians - that die before his eyes (through a gargantuan screen that broadcasts the horrors until they're stale) are a necessary evil. Necessary.
Because, at some point, grown-ups will no longer tell tales of delusive actualities.
Side Note: In real life, Veturia was a Roman matron and mother of the legendary Roman general Gaius Marcius Coriolanus. I read about her in my Latin class and, you know, a mini plot bunny just happened to dart into my head.