² MANIA ─ catching fire

[ 003 ] day of days

YESTERDAY

BEFORE THE MORNING LIGHT leaks over the district, Alecto finds herself hauling her father up over the top of the rock wall. Panting, Atlas rolls over on his back, chest heaving, blinking up to a dawn-dark sky that hadn't lost its stars yet.

"I'm getting old," Atlas grunts, sitting up once he's caught his breath and shucking off the pack strapped to his back. Truth was, Alecto had gotten faster. Something was driving her; he read it in the dead light in her eyes, a magnetic sharpness that never dulled. He'd always managed to keep pace with her. Just not today, when she wasn't so much distracted, but too present. When Alecto was focused on something, it lent her a frightening abundance of strength, a surge that could only be superhuman. Strong-willed, some would call it. Hellbent, Atlas thought. He'd seen it when he watched her slay her opponents in the arena. All odds should've been stacked against her, but, somehow, she'd managed to turn it around.

Settling down beside him with her legs crossed, Alecto pressed an apple into his palm. As they watched the sunrise gild the buildings in a halo of gold, watched the colours of a new day ripple across the sky, they ate.

"Back in the day they called them the Rockies," Atlas said, tracing a finger over the soaring blue mountains. Alecto followed the motion. He glanced back at her, something softening in his eyes, an edge of sadness that hadn't dulled over the years. "Your mother told me that."

Alecto sat upright. Her father rarely brought up her mother, Thalia, and when he did, it was always up here, far from civilisation. Up here in the mountains, Alecto was beginning to think, was where her father felt the least burdened by the nightmares that chased him out of bed and into the closet and down into the basement. Sharing the sentiment wasn't difficult. Up here, full of fire and guts and wonder, it seemed like all their problems were someone else's. Was this what the gods felt like when they looked down upon the humans and their tightly wound, mortal afflictions? Up here, Alecto felt it all melt away, like she'd left some of the weight at the bottom. The topic of her mother, however, was her father's greatest burden, and Alecto's biggest mystery. She'd been a newborn infant when her mother passed. All she had were pictures on the wall, and the little slips and slivers her father gave her. Pieces. Bits and pieces.

So far Alecto had gathered enough to fill in the bare bones of an outline. Her mother hadn't been a candidate for the Games. She was an orphan and Atlas had been her first and last boyfriend. They'd met on their first Reaping Day, when he'd spotted her across the Square, the prettiest girl in the district. She knew her parents got married the day Atlas returned from his victory tour, and she knew they never went anywhere without each other. She knew her mother would always sing to her swollen belly when she'd been pregnant with Alecto, and she knew her mother's favourite colour was robin's egg blue, like the walls of the nursery in her father's house that'd been remodelled as Alecto grew older. She knew she had her father's eyes, but everything else was all her mother.

Pressing her father for more information about what her mother was like, however, seemed to trigger a shut-down response. It was easier to wait for him to open up about her. Easier to listen. Ask no questions. Let him offer up the pieces of his broken heart of his own will.

Atlas drew in a soft breath. He fiddled with his wedding band, a strip of silver encircling his finger, which he never took off. "She never came up here with me, but she liked reading about the old world. Before the Games. Before the Dark Days. Before this became Panem." He sent her a look so sad Alecto had to shut her eyes. "She would've been so proud of you."

A dull ache shakes loose in the cavity of her chest. An avalanche dislodged by seven simple words.

No, Alecto thought, unable to meet her father's eyes. No, she wouldn't.