Cage me like an animal • F Odair¹ •

XXIII

"I've earned it?"

•∘♛∘•

On the morning Athena Maris' Victory Tour was meant to begin, Douglas Maris' tomb was staring her in the face. It was very early; it was still dark outside, the sun just beginning to peek out from over the horizon, tinging the dark blue sky with warmer, yellow and orange light. Winter had come to District Four, and it was a colder one than what residents of the moderate district usually experienced. There was even some snow on the ground, frost crunching underneath her leather boots. Athena's muscles were clenched tight against a cold to which she was not accustomed. There would be no sand storms here, but if another lethal black wave came roaring towards her again, the odds of her outrunning it successfully this time around were certainly not in her favour. She knew she should get up, move around, stretch her muscles and remove the stiffness from her limbs, but she just remained where she was sitting in front of her father's grave, ignoring how cold the ground she was sitting on was and the way the cold stung her face.

This wasn't the first time she had been to her father's grave since the funeral. She had been doing this several times a week for a few months now, visiting her father's grave at the crack of dawn when she knew no one else would be there. It was her time alone with him. She would visit the grave at other times, too, when her mother and sister wanted to, but this time belonged only to her and her father. She talked to him sometimes, but most days she went there were silent. There wasn't much left to say, really. Her mother and sister, Finnick and Mags, they were all very concerned about her, she knew. They warned her not to let her grief take over her mind. She promised them that she wouldn't, and the next morning, she would sneak out to the graveyard while it was still dark outside and spend the sunrise with her father's tomb. She had a feeling they knew what she was doing, or someone at least suspected her, but she hadn't been confronted about it, and she wouldn't stop until she was. She felt back about worrying them, but she was not ready to let go of this habit that she had developed.

The sun was rising more and more, beginning to bathe District Four in its light. Athena wished, not for the first time, that she could control the sun, that she could stop it from bringing her into the day that she had been dreading for so long. They would all be in her new house in Victor's Village by noon. The reporters, the camera crews, even Alayne Stentor, her old escort. Athena wondered if she would have the same blood red hair as before, or if she had already switched to a new unnatural-looking colour. She wondered if Alayne would be as irritating as she remembered, or if that would change at all now that Athena was a victor. There would be more, too. A staff to tend to her every need on the long train ride. Her prep team to beautify her for every stop they made, with Tatiana, the stylist who made her stand out in the first place in the Capitol.

Athena would have quite liked to put the Hunger Games behind her entirely. She would have liked to move on with her life and treat her time in the arena as some terrible dream that the rest of the country had also happened to have. It was probably already an unrealistic desire, but the Victory Tour that would start today made this especially impossible. It was strategically placed almost halfway between the annual Games themselves so that the Capitol could keep all the horrors fresh and immediate. The districts weren't only forced to remember the Capitol's power over them but to celebrate it. This year, Athena was the star of the show, so she would have to travel from district to district, to look down at the faces of the families of the children she had killed..

Athena still couldn't control the sun, and as always, it still rose, so Athena prepared herself for her walk back to Victor's Village. She looked from the slowly lightening sky back to her father's tombstone. She let out a deep sigh.

"This would be a lot easier if you were here," she murmured. She brought her hand to the tomb itself, running her fingers along his name, which felt colder than usual under her fingers due to the weather. "I'll be back soon."