Second Hand Ideas
Coriolanus Snow is thought to have married Julia Pompey. She is thought to have died from Snow's use of poison. Here is what happened between those two events.
Warnings; canon typical violence, coryo, grief, blood, mentions of suicide, suicidal ideation
Julia knew her husband had always been a genius in his own way. He had saved his name and regained the honour of his family. But sometimes, just sometimes, she wondered how much of this was owed to others. How many times he heard something and claimed it as his own when a lightbulb went off above his head.
Julia had accidentally provided her husband with some of his worst ideas. She hadn't meant to do it. An errant comment thrown into conversation, late night discussions with a man who could never have truly loved her.
He hadn't always had the power to act on his ideas, his own inflated self of importance years ahead of how others thought of him. But he had saved them somewhere in the recess of his brain for later use.
Watching the young girl face her audience, watching the grim determination overcome her features as she attempted not to cry. Well it was all just a little bit too much for Julia. She excused herself from the viewing room and locked the bathroom door with shaking hands.
She would die, that little girl. She would die and no one would remember her in a year. No one ever remembered the losers. That was the point. She understood it all. Or at least she had once. She had sat at dinner parties and laughed about it all, like it was trivial. But it wasn't. Those children died.
Julia thought of her own children, her grandchildren. Her babies. Grown as they may be, they would always be her babies. She couldn't imagine the pain that went through the mother's hearts as they watched their children reaped, year in and year out.
Her heart weeped while she attempted to her dry her eyes. He would know she had been crying. He always knew. She suspected he probably had cameras here in this very bathroom. In every room. In every house. District and Capitol alike.
By the time Julia had composed herself and taken her seat the readings had moved on and she watched with an aching heart and a disinterested smile on her lips and children sobbed and volunteered and accepted their faith.
But her mind was stuck on young Katniss Everdeen. Of the blonde haired sister, Primrose, who had been reaped. Of how every slip in the glass bowl had held the same name. Hundreds of times over and they didn't even know it.
An offhand comment, a young girl flaunting the rules, hunting in the woods, selling to peacekeepers. Providing for her starving family. She had no idea what she had been risking. She had no idea how heavily watched those woods had been. No idea about how her father had been killed in an accident that had never been an accident and now her sister's reaping, a freak statistic given she had only been entered once.
"She's protecting her family. Her sister." The beginning of a second hand idea. An off hand comment about the girls derision for the rules made by Julia had accidentally ruined that young girls life.
"She'd break the law to protect her sister. I wonder what else she would do?"
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Julia had met her husband in a hospital. Not very grandeur or romantic. Just a hospital room with beeping machines, weeping cousins and rattled breathing from an old lady. Coriolanus hadn't cried. Tigris had done enough for the both of them.
Julia had been a medic in training. Assigned the slower cases, the elderly and the terminal. She didn't do much besides record heart rates and administer Morphling. Mrs. Snow had been her patient. She had spent her dying days in the hospital and consequently, Julia had met a young Coriolanus Snow.
She almost hadn't realised his attempt to romance her, as subtle as it was. Romance would be the wrong word. He had a perfunctory plans with which she fit into. She was educated, of reasonable old money, and most importantly, she was pretty.
While Julia had never asked Snow of his past, she had known a substantial amount. She had known of Lucy Gray Baird, the disappearing victor. Snow had loved her. In the only way he knew how. He had, in his own head, owned her.
Julia was young enough to believe that Coriolanus' desire to possess her was love. He was a handsome man with prospects that varied as wide as the imagination. His charm led Julia to believe he could do anything. His vanity led him to believe, and achieve, the same.
They had married quickly as Coriolanus rose in the ranks of game makers, his ideas allowing him to stand out. The renovations of the arena, the victor parades, the primping and beautifying of tributes.
Every suggestion he made was received with praise and rejoicing at the new age of the Hunger Games. By the time the last of their three children had been born, Coriolanus was directly involved with the Quarter Quell. His studies were almost completed and his ideas revered. Every year something bigger and better came from him.
For the Quarter Quell it had to be special. It had to be massive. It had to be his very best idea.
"I just don't think the academy mentors can relate to those children." Tigris had said at tea one day.
And thus the Victors were dragged back to the Capitol kicking and screaming to try and keep those children alive. To fail, over and over in the wider districts because any living mentor from those districts were once offs, lucky escapes and the most fortunate of unfortunate circumstances.
///
By the time their first grandchild arrived on the scene Coriolanus was Head Gamemaker. The second ever Quarter Quell was fast approaching and trouble had been rising in the districts again. It had been making those in the Capitol uneasy and it hadn't gone unnoticed that certain things had become limited such as coal and fruit.
"You can't go back and punish them harder. You can't just make it worse. Is losing twenty four children not enough?" Julia had asked.
The announcement that the victors would be doubled should not have surprised her. It should not have made her gasp. Nothing should have after thirty five years of knowing Coriolanus.
She had learned over and over that truly nothing was below him. She hadn't known everything of course. Not from the beginning or else she was sure she would never have married him. She could've been free. She could've gotten away before she had been dragged under.
She had thought about it once. Leaving. Times had been rough, her marriage on tenuous grounds as her husband's evil began to shine through without shame. He had been a servant, the man who had taught her what love actually felt like.
Her second child had been born only weeks before and Julia associated those weeks and months that followed with a deep sadness. Alarbus had taken notice of her, cared for her when he found her crying. He had tasted the salt on her lips the first time he had kissed her.
Avox's had just began to become common punishment in the Capitol, traitors who lost the use of their voice and had their tongues removed.
Alarbus found out the hard way that it was not a painless procedure. His tongue had been presented in a gift box while Julia had been nursing her daughter. She had almost dropped the baby in shock. Alarbus, who had presented his own tongue under his master's orders, had caught her.
He disappeared the next day, something Julia presumed had to do with the bloody razor left in her bathroom. She didn't know which of her lovers had left it to her, which would hurt more.
///
President Coriolanus Snow. It had been terrifying as his enemies dropped in the months following his Inauguration. No one could argue with him now. Least of all his lowly wife who spent hours avoiding her husband and his greed for more power.
His dinner parties with victors whom he had chosen to be his special pet projects. The young boy with the winning smile, the golden haired siblings, the genius engineer, the razor toothed beauty. All his to keep and show off. Rewards and bribes for powerful men and women.
He ruined everyone he touched. His own cousin had cast herself out, ruining her beauty just to remove association to this monster of a man. A monster she had tried to shelter from the darkness, not knowing it lived within him.
He had brought this darkness onto himself. He had followed his ideas to the end, his weapon had become a double edged sword. Punishing Katniss Everdeen for trying to keep her family alive had brought an end to his reign. The Capitol looked just as it had when Julia was eight and bombs and gunfire were the sounds she associated with daily life.
A full circle had been formed. They had returned to the dark days, all because of her husband's obsessive watch of the District 12 fence. Hoping that one day his song bird would climb it and return. Hoping one day he would get his chance to own everything he had ever wanted.
Instead he had taken her free spirit and accidentally set it alight with the districts.
The last straw had been the song.
Something ticked in Coriolanus' jaw. A muscle, a nerve. Julia didn't know. What she did know was that the end was near. The Hanging Tree echoed beautifully around the empty viewing room. A wine glass sat to Julia's left. A glass that was always within reach but she had never drank from.
Her husband had gotten drunk and loose lipped once. He had told her of Lucy Gray Baird and Sejanus Plinth. So now Julia laughed because she knew Lucy Gray Baird would have. She knew Sejanus Plinth would have. She knew the rebels would.
She lifted the glass while she laughed, looked her husband in the eye and drank deeply.
