² MANIA ─ catching fire

[ 009 ] maul the world

WHEN THE GILDED DAWN COMES, those bruising moments before sunrise where the sky shutters, caught between oblivion and reluctant waking, Alecto is already out of bed and changed. Two years after her Games, and she still hasn't broken the military routine that'd been drilled into her bones from the Academy, a conditioning that laid out the foundation of her life's structure. Like clockwork, her eyelids had snapped open the moment the nightmare ended, wrenched herself from the middle of it, like a body pulled from a car crash. She'd dropped to the ground to do her circuit of warm-ups, a series of push-ups and crunches and other exercises that kept the blood pumping to her extremities, rough her heartbeat to the surface of her skin, to the hollow of her neck, until she was slick with sweat and panting from the exertion. In a sense, she was exactly like her father. Creatures of habit still trapped in the cage. The door was open, but neither of them knew how to leave. Like finches, they were doomed to a life in captivity. Creatures of commodity, weak with fear.

After her nightmare the night before, she hadn't stopped seeing him, and he never stopped visiting her in her sleep. The March Hare of her fever dreams. The haunting never stopped. Every shadow that flickered singed her nerves was his silhouetted figure lurking round the corner, waiting for her to drop her guard, every whisper of sound through the silence was the drag of a knife against the wall. In her dreams, she was knee-deep in a river of blood and she kept running and running, but she wasn't moving. And the tide was climbing. And the March Hare kept coming. When he caught up with her, one of his plastic eyes was dangling by a thread, and his ears were chewed up and flea-bitten, his fur raggedy and worn, his clothes patchy and filthy. And when he raised his knife, Alecto felt her stomach plummet.

Even though her muscles were burning, screaming for her to take a break, threatening collapse, Alecto didn't stop, didn't let the pain take her. Her parched throat ached for water, but she didn't stop, because if she stopped, that meant succumbing to the weakness. Coughing from the dryness, Alecto pushed and pushed and pushed. And when her arms finally gave out, when she'd lost count of the reps, when she'd begun to see spots obscuring in her vision, and her head begun to spin, Alecto stopped. After, she showered and cleaned herself up, then she headed out to the living room.

During training, Alecto felt the shift in the atmosphere when the others clocked Katniss and Peeta's attendance. The frost was melting. Where there used to be a rift between the new victors and the old (albeit, Alecto didn't bother factoring herself into the equation, considering she had just won a year before the two, and she was more a stranger to the others, having been a subject of self-alienation), something had clicked into place, and there was a cohesiveness now. For the first hour, Alecto stood with Atlas and the District 1 victors. As they navigated the weapons stations together, competing at every turn, trying to beat each others' bests, Alecto caught her father surreptitiously glancing towards the District 12 victors.

"Fascinating couple, aren't they?" Cashmere asked, though her question seemed loaded with ammunition. She flashed Alecto a grin, but there was a dark sheen in her light eyes, a bitterness Alecto recognised, because Iko wore it, too.

Currently, as the career pack were stationed at one of the survival stations weaving hammocks together, Katniss was being painted into a field of flowers by the morphlings from Six, aided by Peeta, who had somehow found the strength outside of their addiction to drag themselves to the Training Centre. In periphery, Alecto caught her father shooting them curious glances every once in awhile, which wasn't the concerning issue. The problem was that there was this conspiratorial look brewing on his face, like a storm, and nobody else seemed to notice it—that slight pinch between his brows, the downward tick of the corners of his mouth, the fractional narrowing of his eyes—but Atlas Heller was a painting wherein the details were all in the subtleties, and it took years practicing careful observation to interpret.