² MANIA ─ catching fire

[ 009 ] young blood

LATER THAT NIGHT, Atlas watches his daughter depart from the dining table, having eaten her fill. Since this afternoon's training, there was an imperceptible shift in the atmosphere, but it stirred nothing within Alecto. Everyone had been looking at her then, as they had watched Katniss the day before. Everyone had seen Alecto, vicious and unrelenting, a storm inside the shell. Alecto's internal world was something she kept closely guarded, fortified by her silence. Nothing moved her, and words only pinged off her skin as if made from marble.

She is silent even when spoken to. At dinner, while Evander talked a blue streak about the art gallery across the street form one of his lovers' homes, she sat with her brows furrowed and her iceberg eyes sharpened to the lethality of wolf teeth. But she has a rabbit's speed and agility. Sometimes, while walking beside her to the training facility, Atlas often finds himself alone. He knows that Alecto has only run ahead or dropped behind, but each time, it feels as though she has vanished.

"I hear she made quite an impression during training," Iko said, lifting a brow as she peered at Atlas over her glass of wine. Only the second of the night, capping her intake. An improvement from before. Back home, she slugged bottle after bottle of drink just to fall numb, as if the mechanisms drilled into her bones back in her days at the academy had come undone and no longer functioned after her Hunger Games. Here, Iko had at least seen sense to be present, sound of mind and body. There was work to do and sponsors to sway.

"They saw her fight," Atlas said, unable to extinguish the spark of pride lighting up his tone. He flipped his steak knife over his knuckles and mimed a stab in the air. "She impressed them. Stole the show."

Grinning like he could eat the world raw, Evander reclined in his seat, throwing an arm over the back of Iko's chair. "Atta girl."

Iko cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at Atlas. "Now I know why she looked so dazed when you two came back. You need to tell your kid you're proud of her more."

Stabbing his fork into his mashed potatoes, Atlas lets out a grunt. In all his years, in all the time he'd spend raising his child to the standard he hoped his late wife would be proud of, he never once considered that Alecto couldn't tell that he was proud of her. Everything she had achieved came not from raw talent but from persistence and dedication. There might have been flashes of certain instances where he wondered if Alecto might have been of questionable character and ethics, but with the Games looming over their heads, the kind of iron-clad lifestyle they led, what situation didn't call for jagged edges and hard choices? It could only be to his relief that Alecto had grown that skin first before the world could draw first blood. As Atlas eyed Iko's elbow surreptitiously from his peripheral vision, he felt his stomach churn from the memory of Alecto's defiant eyes the night after the Reaping, those iceberg blues, and the concentrated darkness he'd seen reflected within them when he'd questioned her. A darkness threatening to swallow the fickle light of her soul, one whose origins he couldn't be certain of, and the silence setting in like the aftermath of a nuclear fallout.

Justifying Alecto's detrimental choices wasn't his aim. But he hadn't noticed that in all her silence, he'd neglected to tell her that he was proud. All their lives, they'd assumed they could read one another, but lately, Atlas had been having doubts.

Flicking his gaze up, Atlas' eyes snapped to meet Iko's involuntarily.

With a calculative stare, Iko cocked her head. She'd been watching him, and the way her stare burned, invisible hands clamped over his shoulders and holding him in place, the way her features kept shifting and shifting until he couldn't read her—not that he could in the first place, it was impossible to decipher anything from Iko—it was almost as if she'd come to understand something that he hadn't quite figured out.