Callienta Minorae :||: Capitol :||: FIN

PART II:
I was choked as a child, smothered by the heavy garments my mother would force me into, no matter how much my little body resisted. I was her pride and joy, the gift of my two parents, meant to be married to a high-ranking official of the Capitol. I was taught to never associate with our deep past, something both of my parents hid so well, that I grew to fear the information. I had yet to find what the secret was, only knowing that the word “past” was associated with such negative connotations. Even to their deaths, never did my parents speak of the past, only of the present and the future.

Any information about my life I had discovered was through records that were released to me by enraptured adults who couldn’t help but “assist the pure child”. What my mother had tried to achieve ended up providing me an advantage that I had used to climb my own ranks. At the tender age of twenty five, I had already seen too much information, understood too much about our complex society, all with the assistance of a shy smile and bright eyes. Perhaps if I really tried, I could be married and serve the Capitol by a man’s side. I aspired to more, however, aspired to reach ranks that few people could dream of.

Perhaps I was born for this purpose, to reach for the stars my parents could only talk about but were too weak to actually attempt. My drive made me excel in school, yet all my parents saw was an obedient daughter who was being molded for marriage. Never in their little minds did they think that I would break from the cocoon they had so tightly woven around me, trying to contain me into the perfect little package that they thought of me. A package that knew nothing of the past, little of the future, and mostly of the present. A package that embodied the ideals of happiness while serving another soul.

They disgusted me.

PART III:
I still loved them. They were my parents, bound by blood, motivated by their early failures. My mother had given birth to me 25 years earlier, on April 27, according the record of my birth. Birthday celebrations were unknown to me until I was 10 when I was invited to the birthday celebration of an acquaintance. I was young at the time, easily emotional, and I had asked my parents tearfully why we never celebrated birthdays. “Why must we celebrate aging? Why must we celebrate a tradition that is no longer relevant?” They were not wrong as Capitolites would do anything to prevent aging, transforming their appearances to the latest fad, covering what nature had intended. Once we had reached our mature form, what did it matter to celebrate an arbitrary number?

My young mind did not understand this, and it was the first time I tried to use my looks to obtain information. A cute smile was enough to learn the date of my birth, a day I would celebrate myself in fear that my mother would try to take that away from me as well, just as she had forcibly removed a name plate I had received. “You don’t need this! Are you so stupid that you don’t know your own name?” No, I was far more intelligent than she was and not only did I know my name, but I understood why she had taken it.

I was never meant to grow up into an individual. I was meant to be an embodiment, an abstract thought. Nothing about me was meant to be mine, only vestigial parts of my identity. I was frustrated with the thought that my parents would try to reduce me to something abstract, that I often fantasized leaving my childhood home for a reality where I was an individual. But I was tethered by love and familial duty, finally accepting that it was only right for me to stay by my parents’ side until it was reasonably acceptable for me to leave. My thoughts betrayed my moral compass as even stronger and perhaps more violent fantasies would fly through my mind as I looked outside of the window.

Logs were scattered all over my room as I wrote down every piece of information I could obtain, first establishing who I was before trying to determine who I wanted to become. My parents never knew this secret, believing me to have been so brainwashed that I could do no solving of my own. They thought the parchments in my room were merely my doodles, a release of creativity that they encouraged so that I would be discouraged to pursue anything further. How beautiful these pictures are but they just don’t depict reality. These things will never happen. No females would ever rule Panem.

PART IV:
My mother passed away first and with her, my father’s will to uphold her attempt to mold me into her ideal being. At her funeral—a simple ceremony in Capitolite terms—I had spent a few moments with her by myself, my eyes staring at her closed ones. Her features were mine: I had inherited her soft face, her light skin, her shaped nose. But whatever comely features she lacked, I had made up for it with my father’s genetics. Yes, I was more beautiful than she had been, something we both had known and tried to use to our own advantage. She had always been a small woman—I had towered over her as soon as puberty struck me—but she looked even smaller in her final resting place. I had lowered myself to her ears, giving the perception I was giving her a final farewell, when my breath carried with it words that I hoped she could hear. My lips twisted into a hint of a smile before resuming the mournful look that I had faked so well as I had approached her.

My father passed away not much longer after that, the love of his life no longer there to sustain him. I had felt actual sorrow at his funeral, a flicker of grief for I had loved my father more than my mother. While he had assisted my mother in her plans, he was far more mild-mannered, more caring for my well-being, but also incredibly easy to manipulate. He had relied on my mother to understand how he was supposed to live his life, how he was supposed to treat his only daughter. If there was anything I could ever credit my mother for, it was that she had motivated both my father and I, though in different directions.

I never knew I had a brother, a sore spot to my parents as he had run away before I was born. He was a failure, a ruined experiment, a reason to control any future offspring they had. My mother’s shame was so strong that she and my father successfully suppressed any memory of him, but they were not intelligent like I was. They never realized or had merely forgotten that record of his birth, his childhood up until the day he ran away, all were in logs carefully stored in the nooks of the Capitol, easily ignored by those who did not seek information. I had never sought him out, deciding to arm myself with the knowledge rather than pursuing it.