² MANIA ─ catching fire

[ 017 ] such a funny way to fall

NOW.

SAND SIFTED THROUGH HER FINGERS as she watched the ocean—blue, endless blue reflected in the pale glass of her eyes—from the shore. Over and over, Alecto dug her hands into the sand and ripped fistfuls out of the body as if to unearth a heart, but the grains kept slipping through the crevices in her grasp, until there was nothing but the thin layer of sediment coating her palms. Over and over, Alecto lulled herself into an idyllic stillness, imagining her own body disintegrating in someone's fist, slowly diminishing one grain at a time, until she was nothing but particles, returned to something bigger than herself.

As Katniss tended, with startling patience, to an erratic and chattering Wiress in the water, the others planted themselves on the beach and feasted. Laid out like a banquet before them, the briny membrane slicking the meat of the shellfish gleamed. Alecto had eaten her fill once she'd left Johanna in the water with the lingering memory of their shared reunion beneath the waves, ferocious in intent and all heat, all touch. Nothing they were used to. And for a long moment, Alecto watched Johanna stand waist-deep in the waves, gently rocked by the mellow tide, yet immersed in her own thoughts, in the shock of the moment, the aftermath scintillating all around her. At this hour, the sun scattered glistering pyrite across the waves. She'd never seen this shade of the ocean before. Not in person, and only ever in pictures, back in school, in her science classes, those picture slides of the ocean projected from a heaving machine, the waves frozen and fixed in time, the horizon a flat edge separating the sky and the dark blue water, soulless in a second dimension. A thing whose beauty lay in its constant motion, tidally locked with the moon, the push and pull of the currents stirring below, the wind's rough fingers kneading the surface of the water, coaxing textures of salt and foam from its blue face. To capture the water in a single moment in time isolated it from the rest of its context, caging it in frames of white, holding it captive from its nature. Out here, intertwined, undeniable, one moving part inextricable from its whole.

Only the sting in her shoulder, where the monkey's claws had gouged deep into her flesh, reminded her where she was. And Johanna, finally clambered out of the shallows, dripping salt water over Alecto's lap as she came to sit next to her, tearing the fleshy meat from its shell without ceremony.

Sat this close, Johanna's shoulder pressed heat against Alecto's arm, Alecto nearly forgot how to breathe, watching her from the corner of her eye, and even then only in snatches, for the immensity of looking Johanna in the eye in this state, half-savage as she devoured the slick, pink meat with reckless abandon, was too great to bear. Gilded by the sun, her cheekbones, her jaw, shone like cut bronze. The strands of her dark hair, plastered to the deeply tan skin of her temples, her neck, began to dry, stirring in the wind whipping salt into Alecto's senses. Johanna's eyes, dark and deadly under the fluorescent lights of the training complex, were now a burning russet, struck by the blazing sun, illuminated pools of glimmering honey, and Alecto, the bee caught in its drowning pull, her heart a single, stuck wing beating and beating and beating, trying to catch air but failing. At the rate Johanna ravished the scallops, it seemed as though she hadn't eaten in days, the hunger a primal, ravenous thing. Briny juice streamed down her chin, her wrists, but she didn't stop to wipe it away, letting it drip into the sand. Deep within, the urge to lick it off her mouth stirred. Right as the thought crossed Alecto's mind, she flushed, and turned her gaze back to the ocean. Back to salt, and safety. All there was laid before her was all this pyrite, this fool's gold, and places she didn't dare wander.

Finnick settled on Johanna's other side, and relayed to her the events of the day. Not caring to partake in the recount of the fog and the mutts, Alecto sank her fingers into the sand, the undulating motion of the flexion pouring sand over her hands, and searched for her father, who spoke in low tones with Beetee. Between the two older men of the group was the quietly restrained tension of conspiracy. Whatever it was, Alecto was too far to make out the head from the tail of their conversation, but she read the lines in her father's face, the frown wrinkling the point between his brows. Whatever it was, something far bigger than themselves seemed to weigh upon their shoulders. Was she simply too young in her father's eyes to bear the burden, to share in that knowledge, or did he not trust her with it? Alecto's gaze caught on the gold band around her father's ring finger, where it covered the tan line of his silver wedding band permanently stripped into his skin.