Victor Alec, Part 1
Hey y'all who wants 16,000 words of an AU where Alec wins the Hunger Games with Emory as his mentor? NOBODY. NOBODY WANTS THIS BUT HAVE IT ANYWAY.
The first day Alec didn’t bother to get up for breakfast, he figured it was an exception on compassionate grounds. Trainees get three days off after their first kills, after all, and watching his brother die in agonizing slowness has to be at least one-third as traumatizing. The second morning, Alec waited for a trainer to knock and tell him it was time to stop moping and get back into routine. By the third, Alec expects someone to show up with the discharge paperwork and a cardboard box. It’s clear Alec has checked out, he’s done and the trainers have given up on making him, so what’s the point? Getting in trouble at the Centre is bad but worse is when they don’t try anymore; that’s when you really know it’s over. Even as a kid Alec knew that if someone smiled at him and said he didn’t have to he was on the quick path to the cut list, and so he’d doubled down and barged through whatever terrible test they’d held in front of him like he’d never hesitated in the first place.
But Creed is dead and Alec can’t pretend anymore, and the Centre isn’t going to waste its time on a kid who won’t get out of bed. Any time now they’re going to come get him and tell him he doesn’t have to do this anymore.
Except they don’t.
After four days of lying in bed except to drag himself to the bathroom and the water fountain, Alec can’t take it anymore. His head aches, the hunger gnaws in his stomach, and as fun and fascinating as it is to lie here feeling sorry for himself and replaying Creed’s death over and over in his head, the truth is that Alec is bored. And so finally he gets up, showers and pulls on a clean uniform, and heads down to the cafeteria for breakfast.
He braces himself, but … no one says anything. The trainer by the door nods, and Alec picks up his tray and food and slides into his seat without speaking. Felix smiles at him but Alec can’t bear to return it; easier to bear Kevin’s wariness as he can’t quite meet Alec’s eye.
They troop back in to watch the rest of the Games, though the trainers aren’t as vigilant about paying extra-close attention now that Two is out. There are breaks for exercises and drills and laps, and they head back to the cafeteria for meals instead of eating in their laps. When the girl from Six wins, Alec can’t make himself feel much of anything at all. He’s glad it’s her, he supposes, in that distant part of him that’s free to make that kind of detached calculus; she gave Creed mercy and that’s no small thing, and at any rate it’s not the boy who botched the job.
Still, Alec can’t figure out why he’s here. He’s not Victor material, everyone knows that; he was always the spare, and as soon as Creed won he was going to test out into the Peacekeeper Academy. That was the plan. Maybe that’s why the trainers never sent him on his Field Exam, all those resources wasted on a kid who was never meant to be tribute. Except that Creed didn’t win, he’s dead and Alec is still here and as each day passes he goes through the motions because there’s nothing else to do.
The week after the new Victor went back to her district, the trainers drag Alec from his bed in the middle of the night, dress him in a grey-green jumpsuit, stuck a tracker in his arm, and dump him in the middle of the woods, alone. Even in the thick of summer, the August heat settling in against his skin, Alec shivers as a breeze rustles the boughs of the pine trees above him. His breaths fill his ears as he struggles to pick up any sound counter to the rhythm of nature.
Underneath it all, there’s a low pricking suspicion that starts below his skin, bubbling in his blood until he can’t ignore it anymore. He’s here: this is his Field Exam, the last major round of cuts before moving on to the Senior ring with the rest of his year-mates.
This is really happening. They’re not sending him home.
And somehow, even though he has no proof, even though there’s still two whole years to go, Alec sees the answer in front of him as though they’d splashed it in stark white paint across the tree trunks in the darkness: it’s going to be him.
One Seward brother died in the Arena as promised, but it wasn’t enough. Someone wants the second one, too.
Anger arcs through him, laced with defiance, and Alec turns his face up to the sky and stares at the speckling of stars through the trees. They can’t make him; they might not have sent him home but it’s up to him whether he passes his tests or not. All he has to do is lie down right here and refuse to take his exam, and they’ll have to pick him up and take him back. As soon as the Centre intervenes in a candidate’s exam then that’s a fail, and no one ever makes it to the Arena without the silver bead.
That’s it, then. It’s decided. No one can force Alec into the Arena, no one can make him ace all the tests and suffer through the exposure and everything else. He can say no, he can refuse, and honestly, he doesn’t even have to go that far. All he has to do is half-ass things and one of the other boys will come out on top. It’s not like the Senior cohort isn’t scrambling with bloody-toothed competition already.
Mediocre. That’s all he has to be. It’s what Dad always thought he was anyway.
Just then a crashing breaks through the trees to his left. Alec screams and whirls at the intruder, and when his mind clears there’s a smashed mess of metal and gears - like a walking tackling dummy - with 10M painted across the remains of its chest. Alec stands over the ‘body’, breathing hard, blood and oil smeared from his fingers to his wrists, and he staggers back and pushes his hands into his hair.
Maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe they’re waiting to see when Alec cracks. Maybe they want to see how badly the younger brother fails to live up to the older one - the one who died, cut down in his prime, forever to be remembered as the perfect son and noble sacrifice.
Alec laughs, a wild, crazed sound even to his own ears, and he staggers back and spits on the dead analogue. “You won’t get me that easily,” he snarls - to the false ‘tribute’, to the pretend ‘Gamemakers’ in the sky, to the very real trainers watching him from who knows where, he isn’t sure - and heads for the closest gap in the trees.
Three weeks later they pull Alec out, exhausted and several pounds lighter but remarkably sane and unharmed. “You did well,” the trainer tells him as they hook him up to an IV to get his fluids up, dehydration being the worst of his injuries. Alec barely registers her words, but he remembers to nod and flash a smile as he leans back against the wall of the hovercraft and tries to pick through the blur of the last few weeks.
He can’t. It all runs together, the hunger and the desperation and the machine kills, and he knows the last one was human but he can’t bring himself to care, not anymore. Blood sticks to his hands and leached out onto the forest bed of dirt and soft pine needles just like the oil, and if one had screamed and not the other it’s all just details, isn’t it? They thought he couldn’t do it and he did, he did, he beat them and he’s here, he won, and the victory sticks in his throat and sits hollow in his chest but Alec doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter how he feels about it, the only thing that matters is the facts.
The facts say that he scored a high pass, low on showmanship but high for survival and combat with a distinction for connection to the audience, whatever that means, and now he has a room in the Senior dorms and a whole week off training to rest and eat and build up his strength before diving back in. Now there are no more secrets between him and his year-mates, no more shadows behind their eyes when they glance at him, and Felix beams and slings an arm around his shoulder and Kevin’s grin still gleams like knives but he knocks Alec with his elbow and jokes about wanting to make a dramatic entrance and it’s good, really it is. It’s almost like belonging.
They choose Selene as the volunteer for the 72nd. Of course they do; it was down to her and Petra, scrapping for blood right to the very end, as late as they’ll allow the decision to go - but at last it’s Selene’s name on the list in stark black letters, and Alec can’t find it in himself to be surprised. Peacekeeping was Selene’s little-girl dream before the Centre got its hooks in her but it wouldn’t satisfy her now, not since the woods and the squirrels and that glint in her eye. They haven’t spoken in years. Alec wouldn’t begin to know what to say.
Alec won’t be able to visit her in the Justice Building like he would if he were a civilian, but he can’t show up at her door the night before with pilfered snacks for a friendly chat to pretend nothing’s wrong, not again. At the same time he can’t not talk to her, not when there’s good odds she’ll be lying dead in the Arena in four months’ time, and so Alec shoulders his way through the crush of Seniors until he finds himself face to face with Selene.
She’s older than he remembers, and harder, the lines of her face sharper, her eyes much icier. She’s laughing when she turns but she stops when she sees Alec, her expression freezing over and her body tensing in wariness. And shit, he should have prepared something, should have decided what to say, they didn’t talk when Creed died and here Alec is a living reminder of the death she’ll be facing this summer, he has to do something -
“Bring it home,” Alec blurts out. “I believe in you.”
Selene stares at him, dumbfounded. “Thanks, Dad?” she says incredulously, and Alec has the hysterical thought that no one here knows him, none of her friends will have any idea who he is because it’s been years since they would have played together pre-Transition, and he must look completely insane.
“Hey, fuck you!” Alec snaps, because he can’t think of anything else. “I was being sincere!”
It’s a Creed line, minus the profanity, the thing he always said whenever he tried to give Selene a compliment and she took offence or made fun of him, and Alec didn’t mean to say it except it’s the first thing that popped into his head. Selene’s breath catches, and for a horrible second Alec fears he miscalculated, that he’s thrown her off and she won’t be able to find her groove - but then Selene laughs, not wild and uproarious like in their childhood, but still real, and Alex exhales.
“You really were, weren’t you,” Selene says, voice light with mocking, and she reaches over and punches him in the arm hard enough to leave an ache. “Well, thanks for your official support. I look forward to your donation.”
Alec snorts and hits her back with enough force that her teeth flash in a hint of an approving grin. “Now go rub it in Petra’s face.”
Poor Petra. Alec’s pretty sure she doesn’t deserve this, but he’ll sacrifice her on the altar himself if it means Selene walks out of the Arena alive. As it is, Selene’s grin turns feral. “Oh don’t worry,” she says. “I will.”
Alec lets her go, and he refuses to let himself think anything about last times or final conversations or any other fateful or morbid trains of thought because he has to get through this.
Alec prays every single night for the next four months. He couldn’t begin to say who he hopes is listening, but it doesn’t matter; each night before bed he gets down on his knees, fist over his heart, and begs - the mountains, the stars, the universe, whoever might be out there - that Selene be allowed to win. He and Selene aren’t friends, not anymore, she probably hasn’t thought about him since she stepped through the doors of Residential, but Alec doesn’t care. He needs her safe, and if he couldn’t have his brother, then let Creed’s sacrifice mean something. Let his be the death that allows Selene her victory.
Selene would scoff if she knew. She might even break his arm. Alec doesn’t care. He keeps up his ritual every day until the day the trumpets blow and Selene stands triumphant, blinking up at the sky with one hand holding her sword and the other shading her eyes to watch the hovercraft descend.
Seven long hours Creed bled to death on live television, and Alec never cried. He does now, trying desperately to blink it all back, but when he looks to the side to check whether anyone noticed, he sees Felix beside him with a bright grin and happy tears streaming down his cheeks.
The tests continue, less exposure and more psychological as the months creep by. They know their candidates can hack it physically by now, what matters is whether or not they’ll break. Alec endures the battery of tests with the same grim stoicism he has everything else, hearing his father’s voice in his head daring him to give up, admit he never really wanted to be here. That with Creed the perfect sacrifice and Selene the perfect Victor there’s nothing left for Alec to do but go home.
It would be true except for one thing: the narrative of Alec’s life has never been give up, even if he wanted to, even if failure would be a relief; it’s been to trudge on, no matter how far behind he’d fallen, because he knew no other way.
Alec has never been the strongest or the smartest or the bravest or the fastest. He’s not the cruelest or the friendliest or the most inventive. But failure is not, and has never been, an option, and so he crafts himself a persona that’s a little bit Creed’s easy charm, a little bit Selene’s sharp-edged grins, and a little bit of Aunt Julia’s calm detachment in the face of blood, and the trainers pass him every single time.
When they post the names, Alec doesn’t even realize it at first, because instead of the usual hollering and shouting there’s silence as his cohort crowds around the paper. “Who is it?” Alec asks, and they all turn to stare at him and all at once he knows.
They’re still quiet as they all sit crammed around the small square of rooftop above the Senior dorms, passing a stolen bottle of liquor between them. “I’ll say it,” Grant says finally. He’s big and broad and his persona is hulking and scowling but he’s not, really. He’d be sweet if they hadn’t trained it out of him. “It’s fucked up. I’m sorry, Alec, I’m not saying you don’t deserve it, but they shouldn’t send you both. We’re not fuckin’ … One.”
Alec shrugs. He’s still waiting for it to hit him, to feel anything but a pit of hollowness at the centre of his being. “I’ll do my duty just like he did,” he says. He waits for the words to mean something, either the pride that buoyed Creed or the bitterness he should feel at knowing they’re empty, but there’s nothing. “It’s what they raised us for.”
“Maybe they didn’t know,” Kevin says dubiously. “I mean, we all drop our families when we sign on, right? And I know it was a big deal when he died, but there’s a lot of trainees here. Maybe they forgot.”
Nathan rolls his eyes. He has more warnings for excessive cruelty (not the same as excessive force, Alec learned a long time ago) than any of them, and Alec will be the least sad to see him go. “Don’t be a dipshit, of course they know. Nobody sends two brothers in by accident. Somebody up there wanted this to happen.” He bares his teeth at Alec in the orange glow of the safety lights. “Hey, maybe your old man pissed somebody off.”
Alec snorts. “That’s the stupidest thing anyone has said in the history of the entire world, ever,” he says in a deliberate drawl. Nathan sneers but Alec refuses to flinch. “My old man has never broken a rule in his life. He used to beat me for forgetting to thank the Capitol before meals. ‘This is what happens when we break the rules’.” The old imitation comes out with surprising ease, even as something in Alec’s chest tightens. “Whatever this is, I’m pretty sure it’s not to punish Commander Joseph Fucking Seward.”
“Eh, look at it this way.” Nathan takes a swig from the bottle and hands it over, giving Alec a condescending pat on the shoulder. “At least if you die on television, you won’t have to worry about getting Daddy’s approval anymore.”
As a kid Alec would have flinched, maybe blustered and tackled Nathan if he’d had a bad day. Early into his stay in Residential Alec would have punched him in the face, broken his nose or split his cheekbone to prove that nobody could talk to him like that. Now Alec uncoils a little, lets the tension crackle in the air as Nathan pulls back, winding up for a fight, the others bracing themselves as they gauge whether or not they’ll have to break up a fight before everyone gets busted for drinking after hours on prohibited grounds.
Alec lets his gaze linger on Nathan for several seconds, then lets his lip curl into one of Selene’s patented careless sneers and turns away. “Did you ever think,” he says, slowly and deliberately, “that maybe they chose me because I’m just better than you are? You’re the one making it about my father, not me.”
“Just let it go, man,” Kevin says with faux casualness, taking the bottle and cutting the tension before Nathan can escalate. “Besides, if any of the rest of us made the list we’d all be congratulating him, right? So we shouldn’t be shitting on Alec’s parade.” He holds up the bottle and the rest of them raise invisible cups - even Nathan, albeit with a bit of a sour expression. “To Alec, our tribute,” Kevin says grandly. “May you win for nobody but yourself.”
Alec starts to protest, but then he stops. If he dies, his death will be swallowed up in the twenty-three others who perish alongside him, his means of death added to the list that Residential candidates memorize and his name carved into the Wall of Sacrifice just inside the main building. If he lives, the rest of his life will belong to the Capitol, an endless payback for the privilege of being allowed to survive.
“You know what,” Alec says, knocking his knuckles against the side of the bottle, “I’ll drink to that.”
It doesn’t feel real. Not packing up his things and moving into the private Volunteer suite at the end of the hall - with a private bath, and now Alec understands that the point of it isn’t just to get them used to bigger spaces, it’s to begin isolating them from their peers - not the ceremony where he stands next to his future district partner and hears the history of their time in the Program recited back to them, receives the gold bead on the bracelet around his wrist. Not even the Reaping, when he stands under the hot July sun and hears the Capitol escort call out a name that doesn’t matter and feels his stomach dip like he just jumped from a high platform before calling out his district’s two most sacred words.
Not even when he’s standing in the white stone room in the Justice Building and his parents walk in, and Alec watches them as though detached from himself and realizes that they’re afraid, that Dad doesn’t want this, that Creed’s death shattered whatever ironclad faith he had in his dream for his sons’ future and that now Joseph Seward sees nothing but death for both his boys. Alec should feel something, disappointment or resentment or anger but he can’t because it doesn’t touch him, he’s not really here, and instead he puts on Creed’s smile and Creed’s confidence and a flicker of Selene’s madness so they know he’s not walking in blind and tells them to wait and see - everything as perfect and performed as though the trainers scripted it for him in an image session. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia come to see him, too, and that comes a little closer - he almost steps forward to hug Aunt Julia before remembering he shouldn’t - but instead of making the Arena more concrete it only throws him backward, pulls him out of his head to when he was thirteen and gangly and desperate for affection.
It doesn’t connect until he meets his mentor, until he’s on the train and the door to the tribute car slides open and Emory steps in, tall and proud and grave, and it hits him that he’s here, and so is she, and this is really, really happening. Emory is here, she knows his name, and she’s here to help him survive.
But before the real, there’s the surreal.
After Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia leave Alec shakes himself, runs through the death list to try to get a grip and pull himself back, remind himself where he is and where he’s going. He’s halfway through the thirty-seventh when the door flies open and there’s Selene, wild-eyed with her mentor at her back. Alec jolts to his feet, half ready to climb the bench behind him and go for the window, since the last time Selene looked at him like that they were eight and she tried to take a bite out of his shoulder.
“Alec!” Selene bursts out, and she flings herself at him and grips his shoulders with iron fingers. “Don’t give me any of that fatalistic Alec bullshit, do you hear me, this is not like when we were kids, you’re going to win this and come home. You got it?”
“Selene,” says her mentor - says Artemisia, holy fucking shit - in a mild tone, and Selene exhales hard through her nose.
“Listen, don’t start about the numbers, either, because all the back to back years have been a girl first and a boy second, and they were all at the start of a decade, and it’s always a steady boy after a wild girl, so you’ve got this.” Selene’s eyes blaze, bright and blue and piercing, and Alec can’t look away. “You’re coming home. Promise me.”
Alec stares at her for several seconds, dumbfounded, then a laugh bubbles up inside him because there’s nothing left to do. “You really thought this through, didn’t you,” he says. He starts to run a hand through his hair before remembering he still has a public walk to the train, and ends up grinning instead. “Have I ever won an argument against you?”
“Never,” Selene says with unflinching certainty, but there’s an edge to her voice that Alec doesn’t recognize and that her mentor clearly does.
“Selene,” Artemisia says again, this time gently. “We should let him get ready.”
And then she’s gone, leaving Alec to stare at the closed door and wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing.
Alec never really though about the geography of it, but they arrive at the Capitol in a matter of hours, nearly a full day before the tributes from Twelve. But extra preparation time for the Two stylist counts as an unfair advantage, apparently, which means their train stops just outside the Capitol border overnight while the other passenger trains from farther out catch up.
Mara, Alec’s district partner, stares at their mentors when they receive the news. “I’m sorry, we trained for eleven years and that’s not an unfair advantage, but getting a few more hours of primping is over the line?”
The same thought definitely occurred to Alec, but the twisted logic of it had followed immediately after. “Yeah, but we didn’t officially receive any training, remember?” he says dryly. It’s all about plausible deniability. “We’re members of the same after school sports club with orienteering as a hobby, that’s all.”
Mara groans and flops back against the bench, but doesn’t argue. “I hope there’s a gym compartment on here hidden between all the crystal and mahogany,” she says, as though she didn’t spend three days locked in a small room for her sleep deprivation test the same as Alec. “I can feel my muscles atrophying already.”
Devon ignores the theatrics with impressive patience, letting her attempt to bait him roll off his back as though it never happened. “There is, actually. Why don't we go blow off some of that steam?”
Mara brightens at that, and she’d been temperamental in Residential but never over the top, just easily frustrated if she thought the trainers weren’t listening to her, and she follows Devon out in good humour. Alec doesn’t miss the look that Devon and Emory exchange as they pass, and he sits patiently rather than asking if they should go get a workout in as well. Sure enough Emory sits down across from him, studying him with her serious, blue-eyed gaze.
“You know Selene,” she says. Ah, that. Alec isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say to that, if it’s a problem or if she’s testing him, but she follows that up right away with, “That isn’t in your file.”
Alec blinks. “Should it be?”
Emory tilts her head, still thinking. “Most of us remember the tributes for the first few years after we win,” she says. “Everybody knows most everybody in Residential, that’s just the way it is. But Selene didn’t recognize you, she knew you, but there’s nothing about you in her file at all. Tell me about that.”
Alec lets out a long breath. Five years of pretending, making sure he never watched her too closely, keeping his distance and affecting neutrality. He’d never managed to believe it, but he’d fooled the trainers well enough, and that’s what counted. “Well, we weren’t supposed to, right?” he says, a little helplessly. “We grew up together - our parents were best friends, all four of them - but everyone knows they separate boys and girls in Residential, and so after we passed our exams we … didn’t talk to each other again. I said congratulations when she made Volunteer, but -” He shrugs. “We figured it was easier that way.”
“But you were close friends,” Emory says. She’s not judging, or at least he doesn’t think she is, just waiting to see what he says. “I’m surprised the Centre didn’t pick up on it. Most trainees don’t manage to hide things so well.”
“I didn’t see my brother, either,” Alec says, and this time it comes out a little testy but he can’t help it. All those wasted years following the rules, catching glimpses of Creed in training but never hanging out in free time because it would look bad on both of them. What did that get them, in the end? How much would he trade for one day, one hour, even, of goofing off in the common area, sparring and flopping on the couch together talking about absolutely nothing? “We were there to train. We all understood the rules. We knew the cost, but we had committed. Does it matter?”
Emory takes a minute to consider her words. Alec watches her as she does it, even with his flash of temper receding, because when Alec used to fight to speak he looked like he was floundering, but when Emory pauses it’s all gravitas and and authority, like she’s choosing between the better of several already valid options. He wants to have that, that confidence and self-assurance, but even right now, just being in her presence a little of her calm and prepossession leaches out into him.
“I’m your mentor,” Emory says finally. “I use everything I’ve got to bring you home. Which means, if you have a personal connection to a recent, popular Victor, I want to know about it to see if there’s any way that we can use it.”
Alec feels the flush of shame burn hot all the way from his neck straight up to his hairline. “Oh,” he says. At the Centre he’d be readying himself for a dizzying amount of pushups; as a kid he’d be heading out back to cut himself a switch. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be mindful,” Emory says mildly, which stops him dead. It’s like that old adage of Dad’s - I don’t want your apology, Alec, I want your obedience! - but without the slap of guilt, the sting of ‘it’s too late’. Mindful, he can do. Alec squares his shoulders. “Nobody’s trying to trick you or catch you out or get you in trouble, not anymore. I just want to do my best to help you.”
Alec flushes again, but this time not because he wants to hide. “Yes ma’am,” he says. “I’ll remember.”
Everything shifts back to unreal as soon as they arrive. Alec pulls back into his head for the Remaking process, the stripping naked and waxing and polishing and buffing and Snow only knows what else. The Centre prepared him as best they could, and he stands silent and stone-faced just like they trained him but it’s still really weird until he detaches, and he lets them do their work and his stylist putter over the designs without asking for his input because that’s what he’s supposed to do.
The Parade is no less ridiculous on the ground than it looked from the screens in the Centre, or when they watch the actual footage again with their mentors after returning to the Two floor of the Games complex. Alec hates all the spectacle elements, the dazzle and the crowds and the slipping out back doors to ‘accidentally’ run into scads of press with their flashbulbs and teasing questions. But this is as much of the job as the killing, and so he puts on his carefully crafted persona and stands next to Mara and says exactly what Emory tells him to say.
In training the Careers band together, vaguely testing out who will take control once they’re in the Arena, but Emory tells Alec not to jockey for position and he’s glad to hear it. Maybe it’s all the years of following Creed and Selene, maybe it’s the lifetime of assuming he was meant for Peacekeeping, but Alec has always felt more comfortable following someone else’s lead than fighting others for the lead role. It’s easier to be unassuming now and surprise everyone where it counts, and when Mara steps in to play ringleader along with the girl from District 4, it’s surprisingly easy for Alec to fall into the old pattern. Harder, really, not to let it feel too familiar, and so he pulls back again to keep himself from losing his edge.
These are not his friends. They are not here to bond and get to know each other or form any real attachments. They’re here because the alliance brings a valuable net boost to supplies and sponsor gifts in the first ten days or so, but the prime reason is Capitol audiences love the drama of seeing the former ‘friends’ turn on each other. The less Alec allows this to affect him, the better off he’ll be.
The morning of the final day, before the final training and interview preparation gets underway, Emory takes him out to the balcony. The sunrise glows over the city, soft and rosy-golden over the silver domes of the buildings, and it’s nothing like the mountains, nothing to dig in and ground himself, but it is pretty, and Alec takes a second to breathe. Emory stands beside him, tall and steady and solid, and she doesn’t touch him but her hand rests next to his elbow on the railing, with its broad palms and wide-knuckled fingers. He wonders, for a brief, embarrassing second, what they would feel like resting on the back of his neck or pressed to his forehead, like Aunt Julia used to do when he was feeling down - then shakes the thought away with an embarrassed jerk of his head.
“I want you to tell me why you’re here,” Emory says, looking out over the city.
Alec glances up at her, wary, but she doesn’t look down. “I -”
“I know you know the script, you wouldn’t have made it this far if you didn’t,” Emory says, a trace of wry amusement colouring her tone. “That’s not what I mean. The Centre passed your file to me. I have my own reasons for choosing you. But none of that will help you when it’s three weeks in and you’re hungry, exhausted, and on your own. I want to know what you’ll be taking with you that’s going to push you through to the end.”
Well that’s … a question, isn’t it. Alec finds himself very glad for Dad’s hatred of fidgeting, as the years of practice help him keep his hands steady no matter how much he wants to twist his fingers together. Why is he here? Because he thought they’d send him home when Creed died, only they didn’t, and Alec was too stubborn to quit or ask for an out once they’d neglected to give him one. Somehow he’d managed to get himself this far, but Emory’s right - that won’t help him when he’s down to the dregs, when he has to reach down inside himself to find that last hidden reservoir of strength on no sleep and no food and no water to make it one more day, one more kill, when it would be easy enough to think he’d done his duty by getting this far, no one would shame him if he stopped now.
If he listened to that tiny, ugly little voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Nathan, that says that maybe Dad would regret the way he treated Alec growing up if he had to watch him die on TV. It sounds ridiculous now, when Alec is well-rested and healthy and fed, but who knows what will happen in three weeks? That’s why he needs to find his centre, ground himself and dig out his real reason for winning - except the deeper Alec searches, the more he comes up with nothing.
Alec feels the first stirrings of panic when Emory reaches over and rests her hand on his shoulder. “Alec,” she says, and he stands up straight and turns to look at her. They’re the same height, eye to eye, but she feels so much grander, her presence that much greater, and Alec takes a deep breath and lets her steady him. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Alec bursts out. “I don’t have a reason. I don’t have any kind of compelling story. I wanted to quit, even, it’s just that every time I gave myself permission … I didn’t. But I can’t think of anything that’s actually pulled me forward, I just … kept putting one foot in front of the other.”
It sounds insane to say it out loud. Wherever Devon and Mara are for their private strategizing, Alec will bet his first batch of sponsor funds that Mara isn’t out there babbling about having no direction or drive; she’s the type who’s known exactly what she wants and exactly how she’s going to get it since before she was old enough to understand what it really meant. Meanwhile Alec has been following someone else’s plan his whole life and never once stopped to think about what any of it means for himself - or that he might have a choice.
A little late for that, of course. Alec is well on his way to hyperventilating now when Emory stops him again; either he’s super obvious or she has experience. “Never mind your brother,” Emory says. “Never mind your parents.” That makes Alec stare until he remembers they visited him at the Justice Building, and they have enough instant recognition in Two that a Victor like Emory who does grassroots work with the Corps must have made the connection. “Who are you?”
He laughs, fights the urge to cover his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do,” Emory says, implacable. “Why didn’t you talk to Selene after your brother died?”
Alec blinks. “What?”
“Your brother died. Your file says you locked yourself in your room, trying to get them to kick you out. If you thought the rules didn’t matter anymore, why not go see Selene? She was the only other person there who knew him.”
He wets his lips and swallows, and it feels stupid now but he gets the impression there’s no sense trying to run. “Because I was a mess,” Alec says. “I felt like - like the whole thing was pointless, or, I don’t know, like I’d discovered some big secret about the Games and I was the only one awake while everybody else was asleep. Creed kept talking about how it was this noble sacrifice but he just - he died, he died messy and bloody and there was nothing noble about it, but -” He waves his hand. “You know that, don’t you. It’s not a big secret, I didn’t uncover anything new or groundbreaking. But at the time I felt like … Selene was probably going to be the volunteer next year, and if I talked to her I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. I’d beg her not to, or try to make her understand this was all stupid, or something, and I couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t listen, and she’d hate me for it, and it wouldn’t change anything anyway.”
Alec sighs and runs a hand down his face. “I don’t know what any of this tells you. I know I can’t say any of it in an interview, that’s for sure.”
“It tells me you have principles that go deeper than what people tell you the rules are,” Emory says calmly. “Tells me you love your friends enough to respect their decisions and let them meet their fate on their own terms. So tell me this, if there’s no glory for you in winning, and you’re not in it for the blood, why didn’t you quit? You said you almost gave up, but then you stopped.”
This one takes him a little longer, if only because he actually wants to think about it. Emory’s hand stays steady on his shoulder, and Alec lets it ground him. “I know the usual answer is because I couldn’t imagine anything else but this,” Alec says slowly. “Or even because I couldn’t imagine quitting and coming home to tell everyone I failed. But I think it’s … the opposite, really. It would’ve been easy. I was never supposed to be here, I wasn’t ever meant to get this far. Growing up, everything was always about how I’d never be as good as Creed, or as strong as Creed, or as smart or talented or handsome or anything. If I’d washed out nobody would’ve even blinked because that’s what I was supposed to do. It’s like my dad had these impossible expectations set for me, and he never expected me to meet them but he still punished me when I didn’t, and I just wanted to -”
He stops, shaken, pulled back to himself as though jerked out of a reverie, horrified at the half-completed thought he’d been about to voice. It’s not even new, Alec realizes with a shock. He always knew. Emory says nothing, just waits, and Alec sucks in a breath and forces himself to continue. “I wanted to do something Creed couldn’t, for once. I wanted to prove I wouldn’t just be Creed’s little brother for the rest of my life. It’s not about the glory or the prize or the sacrifice. It’s something I was never supposed to do but I did it anyway.”
Emory’s gaze holds him frozen, serious and unflinching. “Keep going. You saw your brother die. You knew the cost. So why?”
Alec’s breaths stick in his chest, sharp and stabbing, and he presses a hand to his breastbone to try to massage away the ache. The words bubble up and he tries to push them down but it’s too late, the flood has spilled and there’s no stopping it now, “Because fuck my dad, that’s why! He had our whole lives set out before we were born, Creed the Victor and Alec the Peacekeeper. He killed my brother, he filled his head with all that noble sacrifice shit since he was a baby and Creed bought it, all of it, and all that time he made me feel like I wasn’t good enough because I was born second. Except it’s all bullshit, because I worked hard and I didn’t quit and I got here just the same, and maybe I’ll die and maybe I won’t but it’s not the life he planned for me.”
Emory moves to stand in front of him, and without speaking she slides one arm around Alec’s back and curls her other hand behind his head. Alec freezes for a split-second as his brain struggles to comprehend the foreign contact, but then he collapses, burying his face in her shoulder and clutching at her jacket as he bursts into furious sobs. “I just want someone to see me,” Alec gasps out, the words tearing loose with wrenching effort. “I want one person to believe in me instead of waiting to see when I’ll screw up. Just one. And I wanted it so bad I’m going to die over it.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Emory says, her voice rumbling in her chest below Alec’s ear. “That was a drastic way to get it. But you’re dead wrong if you think it was all for nothing.”
Alec goes very still as Emory runs her hand over his hair in a soothing gesture, half afraid that if he moves this will all disappear. “Do you know what happened, as soon as I picked you? That made you my first priority, over everything and everyone else. I’m your mentor, but you’re my tribute, and that means I’m gonna move the mountains for you. All you have to do is win.”
Alec laughs, wet and incredulous. “Just that, huh? No big deal?”
“Just that,” Emory says, matter of fact. She steps back a little, forces Alec to raise his head with one hand under his chin. “I believe in you,” she says, slow and deliberate. “You won’t ever disappoint me, no matter what happens in there, but I believe you’re the one who’s gonna bring it home. And now you’ve finally figured out what you’re fighting for, maybe you can believe it too.”
“Yeah,” Alec says, a little breathless, and he has to reach up and grip her arms to hold himself steady. A warmth glows within the centre of his chest, spreading outward, and Emory could tell him to leap from the platforms before the countdown and he’d trust that she’d told him to do the right thing. He wants to make her proud, wants to live up to the faith she’s poured into him like light, and realizes with a heady jolt that it’s not the same as fearing that he’ll let her down. “Yeah,” he says again, sounding like an idiot, but Emory’s mouth twitches upward. “Yeah, okay.”
He doesn’t say any of this at the interview, of course. Alec wears his Creed-Selene hybrid persona in full force, charming with a hint of an edge underneath, and he talks about his dead brother without getting maudlin or looking like he’s asking for sympathy, evoking sincerity without being naive, vowing to do right by him without promising revenge.
“It’s not about revenge,” Alec says earnestly. Emory coached him on this part; the Capitol has been pushing the ‘district togetherness’ narrative the past few years, and it’s important that Two be the leaders in maintaining it. “We’re all here for the same reason. I don’t blame anyone for doing what they did to survive. But am I carrying his memory with me into the Arena to make me stronger? Am I going to imagine him fighting beside me, cheering me on? Well you tell me, Caesar. Can you blame me?”
Caesar asks him one more question that Emory prepped him for, the ever-popular ‘anyone back home’. The answer he’s been given mystifies Alec a little but he knows better than to argue, and he supposes it makes sense; he has one previous tribute connection, it would be too much to throw in a Victor as well. But will the teasing really work?
Still, Alec lets his expression turn nostalgic as he delivers his response. “Not like you mean it, no,” he says, as Caesar mugs in disappointment. “I’ve always been a bit too serious for romance. But Creed and I had another friend we grew up with, basically like a sister, and we lost touch recently but I got to see her before I left, and that was really nice. If I win I’d like to reconnect again, if that’s okay with her.”
After that the interview turns to what he’s willing to do to win, and Alec lets him see the edge of his determination, the sharp steel beneath the pretty smile. They like him, he’s pretty sure, but they don’t love him yet - they have sympathy for the boy with the dead brother and the friend back home, but they’re not convinced of his bloodlust. He’ll have to convince them on the battlefield.
That’s fine. He doesn’t have to be flashy. All he has to do is kill the last one standing.
That night Emory claps him on the shoulder, eyes crinkled in a smile. “You did good,” she says. “It’s a solid interview. They’ll remember that once the Games start, don’t you worry. For now, get some rest, you’ve earned it.”
Alec laughs in spite of himself. He’s wiped off the makeup, which felt like he needed to scrape it off with a paint trowel, but as much as his body feels like he can’t even peel out of his suit without collapsing, his mind is whirling far too much for him to sleep. “I don’t think I can.”
Emory gives him a shred look. “Get changed, then come see me,” she says.
He does, and even says fuck it and jumps in the shower for a few minutes, blasting himself with hot water now that he’s finally figured out how to run a cycle without a perfumed rinse, and he heads out into the lounge with his hair in damp curls. He still can’t quite believe the soft fabric of the Capitol pyjamas, and wishes they’d managed to sneak in a pair of Centre-issue uniforms just so he won’t have to leap from this ridiculous luxury into sleeping on the ground tomorrow. Then again, that’s probably the point.
Emory waits for him on the couch with a large mug, which she hands over to him and instructs him to drink. Alec inhales deeply first, and it smells amazing, rich and earthy, but he shoots Emory a suspicious glance.
She actually grins, an expression that looks oddly disarming on her usually stoic face. “If it had drugs in I’d tell you,” she says. “I’m not much for sneaking. This is good old-fashioned quarry herbs. It’ll make you sleep, but it’s the all-natural kind. Now drink up.”
Aunt Julia used to give him herbal tea sometimes, and it’s a comforting sort of connection. Alec drinks, and he settles into the corner of the couch as Emory rests a hand on the top of his head. Questions press at him from all sides, last-minute strategy and doubts and half a dozen other stresses, but Emory works her fingers into his hair, massaging pressure points on his scalp, and Alec’s eyes grow heavy and the cushions are soft and maybe it wouldn’t hurt to close his eyes, just for a minute.
He wakes in bed with a blanket over him, the lights off and the wall-screen dark but playing the faintest sounds of the mountain wood behind him. Alec wonders how she knew before he drifts back down to sleep.
The cameras will be watching when Emory and Alec say goodbye on the roof, so before they head to the elevator Emory pulls him in for a tight hug. “You can do this,” she says, holding his face and pinning him with the intensity of her gaze. “You will do this. You’re going to win, and I’ll be with you every minute until you do. You got that?”
“Yes ma’am,” Alec says. The nerves are starting, his heart pounding in his chest and a low fluttering spreading through him, but he holds steady, keeps the feeling in check and uses it to sharpen him. “I’ll come back to you, I promise.”
“Good,” Emory says, favouring him with a savage smile, and she leans in to press their foreheads together for a brief, thrilling moment. “I’ll be waiting.”
Part 2
The first day Alec didn’t bother to get up for breakfast, he figured it was an exception on compassionate grounds. Trainees get three days off after their first kills, after all, and watching his brother die in agonizing slowness has to be at least one-third as traumatizing. The second morning, Alec waited for a trainer to knock and tell him it was time to stop moping and get back into routine. By the third, Alec expects someone to show up with the discharge paperwork and a cardboard box. It’s clear Alec has checked out, he’s done and the trainers have given up on making him, so what’s the point? Getting in trouble at the Centre is bad but worse is when they don’t try anymore; that’s when you really know it’s over. Even as a kid Alec knew that if someone smiled at him and said he didn’t have to he was on the quick path to the cut list, and so he’d doubled down and barged through whatever terrible test they’d held in front of him like he’d never hesitated in the first place.
But Creed is dead and Alec can’t pretend anymore, and the Centre isn’t going to waste its time on a kid who won’t get out of bed. Any time now they’re going to come get him and tell him he doesn’t have to do this anymore.
Except they don’t.
After four days of lying in bed except to drag himself to the bathroom and the water fountain, Alec can’t take it anymore. His head aches, the hunger gnaws in his stomach, and as fun and fascinating as it is to lie here feeling sorry for himself and replaying Creed’s death over and over in his head, the truth is that Alec is bored. And so finally he gets up, showers and pulls on a clean uniform, and heads down to the cafeteria for breakfast.
He braces himself, but … no one says anything. The trainer by the door nods, and Alec picks up his tray and food and slides into his seat without speaking. Felix smiles at him but Alec can’t bear to return it; easier to bear Kevin’s wariness as he can’t quite meet Alec’s eye.
They troop back in to watch the rest of the Games, though the trainers aren’t as vigilant about paying extra-close attention now that Two is out. There are breaks for exercises and drills and laps, and they head back to the cafeteria for meals instead of eating in their laps. When the girl from Six wins, Alec can’t make himself feel much of anything at all. He’s glad it’s her, he supposes, in that distant part of him that’s free to make that kind of detached calculus; she gave Creed mercy and that’s no small thing, and at any rate it’s not the boy who botched the job.
Still, Alec can’t figure out why he’s here. He’s not Victor material, everyone knows that; he was always the spare, and as soon as Creed won he was going to test out into the Peacekeeper Academy. That was the plan. Maybe that’s why the trainers never sent him on his Field Exam, all those resources wasted on a kid who was never meant to be tribute. Except that Creed didn’t win, he’s dead and Alec is still here and as each day passes he goes through the motions because there’s nothing else to do.
The week after the new Victor went back to her district, the trainers drag Alec from his bed in the middle of the night, dress him in a grey-green jumpsuit, stuck a tracker in his arm, and dump him in the middle of the woods, alone. Even in the thick of summer, the August heat settling in against his skin, Alec shivers as a breeze rustles the boughs of the pine trees above him. His breaths fill his ears as he struggles to pick up any sound counter to the rhythm of nature.
Underneath it all, there’s a low pricking suspicion that starts below his skin, bubbling in his blood until he can’t ignore it anymore. He’s here: this is his Field Exam, the last major round of cuts before moving on to the Senior ring with the rest of his year-mates.
This is really happening. They’re not sending him home.
And somehow, even though he has no proof, even though there’s still two whole years to go, Alec sees the answer in front of him as though they’d splashed it in stark white paint across the tree trunks in the darkness: it’s going to be him.
One Seward brother died in the Arena as promised, but it wasn’t enough. Someone wants the second one, too.
Anger arcs through him, laced with defiance, and Alec turns his face up to the sky and stares at the speckling of stars through the trees. They can’t make him; they might not have sent him home but it’s up to him whether he passes his tests or not. All he has to do is lie down right here and refuse to take his exam, and they’ll have to pick him up and take him back. As soon as the Centre intervenes in a candidate’s exam then that’s a fail, and no one ever makes it to the Arena without the silver bead.
That’s it, then. It’s decided. No one can force Alec into the Arena, no one can make him ace all the tests and suffer through the exposure and everything else. He can say no, he can refuse, and honestly, he doesn’t even have to go that far. All he has to do is half-ass things and one of the other boys will come out on top. It’s not like the Senior cohort isn’t scrambling with bloody-toothed competition already.
Mediocre. That’s all he has to be. It’s what Dad always thought he was anyway.
Just then a crashing breaks through the trees to his left. Alec screams and whirls at the intruder, and when his mind clears there’s a smashed mess of metal and gears - like a walking tackling dummy - with 10M painted across the remains of its chest. Alec stands over the ‘body’, breathing hard, blood and oil smeared from his fingers to his wrists, and he staggers back and pushes his hands into his hair.
Maybe there is no conspiracy. Maybe they’re waiting to see when Alec cracks. Maybe they want to see how badly the younger brother fails to live up to the older one - the one who died, cut down in his prime, forever to be remembered as the perfect son and noble sacrifice.
Alec laughs, a wild, crazed sound even to his own ears, and he staggers back and spits on the dead analogue. “You won’t get me that easily,” he snarls - to the false ‘tribute’, to the pretend ‘Gamemakers’ in the sky, to the very real trainers watching him from who knows where, he isn’t sure - and heads for the closest gap in the trees.
Three weeks later they pull Alec out, exhausted and several pounds lighter but remarkably sane and unharmed. “You did well,” the trainer tells him as they hook him up to an IV to get his fluids up, dehydration being the worst of his injuries. Alec barely registers her words, but he remembers to nod and flash a smile as he leans back against the wall of the hovercraft and tries to pick through the blur of the last few weeks.
He can’t. It all runs together, the hunger and the desperation and the machine kills, and he knows the last one was human but he can’t bring himself to care, not anymore. Blood sticks to his hands and leached out onto the forest bed of dirt and soft pine needles just like the oil, and if one had screamed and not the other it’s all just details, isn’t it? They thought he couldn’t do it and he did, he did, he beat them and he’s here, he won, and the victory sticks in his throat and sits hollow in his chest but Alec doesn’t care, because it doesn’t matter how he feels about it, the only thing that matters is the facts.
The facts say that he scored a high pass, low on showmanship but high for survival and combat with a distinction for connection to the audience, whatever that means, and now he has a room in the Senior dorms and a whole week off training to rest and eat and build up his strength before diving back in. Now there are no more secrets between him and his year-mates, no more shadows behind their eyes when they glance at him, and Felix beams and slings an arm around his shoulder and Kevin’s grin still gleams like knives but he knocks Alec with his elbow and jokes about wanting to make a dramatic entrance and it’s good, really it is. It’s almost like belonging.
They choose Selene as the volunteer for the 72nd. Of course they do; it was down to her and Petra, scrapping for blood right to the very end, as late as they’ll allow the decision to go - but at last it’s Selene’s name on the list in stark black letters, and Alec can’t find it in himself to be surprised. Peacekeeping was Selene’s little-girl dream before the Centre got its hooks in her but it wouldn’t satisfy her now, not since the woods and the squirrels and that glint in her eye. They haven’t spoken in years. Alec wouldn’t begin to know what to say.
Alec won’t be able to visit her in the Justice Building like he would if he were a civilian, but he can’t show up at her door the night before with pilfered snacks for a friendly chat to pretend nothing’s wrong, not again. At the same time he can’t not talk to her, not when there’s good odds she’ll be lying dead in the Arena in four months’ time, and so Alec shoulders his way through the crush of Seniors until he finds himself face to face with Selene.
She’s older than he remembers, and harder, the lines of her face sharper, her eyes much icier. She’s laughing when she turns but she stops when she sees Alec, her expression freezing over and her body tensing in wariness. And shit, he should have prepared something, should have decided what to say, they didn’t talk when Creed died and here Alec is a living reminder of the death she’ll be facing this summer, he has to do something -
“Bring it home,” Alec blurts out. “I believe in you.”
Selene stares at him, dumbfounded. “Thanks, Dad?” she says incredulously, and Alec has the hysterical thought that no one here knows him, none of her friends will have any idea who he is because it’s been years since they would have played together pre-Transition, and he must look completely insane.
“Hey, fuck you!” Alec snaps, because he can’t think of anything else. “I was being sincere!”
It’s a Creed line, minus the profanity, the thing he always said whenever he tried to give Selene a compliment and she took offence or made fun of him, and Alec didn’t mean to say it except it’s the first thing that popped into his head. Selene’s breath catches, and for a horrible second Alec fears he miscalculated, that he’s thrown her off and she won’t be able to find her groove - but then Selene laughs, not wild and uproarious like in their childhood, but still real, and Alex exhales.
“You really were, weren’t you,” Selene says, voice light with mocking, and she reaches over and punches him in the arm hard enough to leave an ache. “Well, thanks for your official support. I look forward to your donation.”
Alec snorts and hits her back with enough force that her teeth flash in a hint of an approving grin. “Now go rub it in Petra’s face.”
Poor Petra. Alec’s pretty sure she doesn’t deserve this, but he’ll sacrifice her on the altar himself if it means Selene walks out of the Arena alive. As it is, Selene’s grin turns feral. “Oh don’t worry,” she says. “I will.”
Alec lets her go, and he refuses to let himself think anything about last times or final conversations or any other fateful or morbid trains of thought because he has to get through this.
Alec prays every single night for the next four months. He couldn’t begin to say who he hopes is listening, but it doesn’t matter; each night before bed he gets down on his knees, fist over his heart, and begs - the mountains, the stars, the universe, whoever might be out there - that Selene be allowed to win. He and Selene aren’t friends, not anymore, she probably hasn’t thought about him since she stepped through the doors of Residential, but Alec doesn’t care. He needs her safe, and if he couldn’t have his brother, then let Creed’s sacrifice mean something. Let his be the death that allows Selene her victory.
Selene would scoff if she knew. She might even break his arm. Alec doesn’t care. He keeps up his ritual every day until the day the trumpets blow and Selene stands triumphant, blinking up at the sky with one hand holding her sword and the other shading her eyes to watch the hovercraft descend.
Seven long hours Creed bled to death on live television, and Alec never cried. He does now, trying desperately to blink it all back, but when he looks to the side to check whether anyone noticed, he sees Felix beside him with a bright grin and happy tears streaming down his cheeks.
The tests continue, less exposure and more psychological as the months creep by. They know their candidates can hack it physically by now, what matters is whether or not they’ll break. Alec endures the battery of tests with the same grim stoicism he has everything else, hearing his father’s voice in his head daring him to give up, admit he never really wanted to be here. That with Creed the perfect sacrifice and Selene the perfect Victor there’s nothing left for Alec to do but go home.
It would be true except for one thing: the narrative of Alec’s life has never been give up, even if he wanted to, even if failure would be a relief; it’s been to trudge on, no matter how far behind he’d fallen, because he knew no other way.
Alec has never been the strongest or the smartest or the bravest or the fastest. He’s not the cruelest or the friendliest or the most inventive. But failure is not, and has never been, an option, and so he crafts himself a persona that’s a little bit Creed’s easy charm, a little bit Selene’s sharp-edged grins, and a little bit of Aunt Julia’s calm detachment in the face of blood, and the trainers pass him every single time.
When they post the names, Alec doesn’t even realize it at first, because instead of the usual hollering and shouting there’s silence as his cohort crowds around the paper. “Who is it?” Alec asks, and they all turn to stare at him and all at once he knows.
They’re still quiet as they all sit crammed around the small square of rooftop above the Senior dorms, passing a stolen bottle of liquor between them. “I’ll say it,” Grant says finally. He’s big and broad and his persona is hulking and scowling but he’s not, really. He’d be sweet if they hadn’t trained it out of him. “It’s fucked up. I’m sorry, Alec, I’m not saying you don’t deserve it, but they shouldn’t send you both. We’re not fuckin’ … One.”
Alec shrugs. He’s still waiting for it to hit him, to feel anything but a pit of hollowness at the centre of his being. “I’ll do my duty just like he did,” he says. He waits for the words to mean something, either the pride that buoyed Creed or the bitterness he should feel at knowing they’re empty, but there’s nothing. “It’s what they raised us for.”
“Maybe they didn’t know,” Kevin says dubiously. “I mean, we all drop our families when we sign on, right? And I know it was a big deal when he died, but there’s a lot of trainees here. Maybe they forgot.”
Nathan rolls his eyes. He has more warnings for excessive cruelty (not the same as excessive force, Alec learned a long time ago) than any of them, and Alec will be the least sad to see him go. “Don’t be a dipshit, of course they know. Nobody sends two brothers in by accident. Somebody up there wanted this to happen.” He bares his teeth at Alec in the orange glow of the safety lights. “Hey, maybe your old man pissed somebody off.”
Alec snorts. “That’s the stupidest thing anyone has said in the history of the entire world, ever,” he says in a deliberate drawl. Nathan sneers but Alec refuses to flinch. “My old man has never broken a rule in his life. He used to beat me for forgetting to thank the Capitol before meals. ‘This is what happens when we break the rules’.” The old imitation comes out with surprising ease, even as something in Alec’s chest tightens. “Whatever this is, I’m pretty sure it’s not to punish Commander Joseph Fucking Seward.”
“Eh, look at it this way.” Nathan takes a swig from the bottle and hands it over, giving Alec a condescending pat on the shoulder. “At least if you die on television, you won’t have to worry about getting Daddy’s approval anymore.”
As a kid Alec would have flinched, maybe blustered and tackled Nathan if he’d had a bad day. Early into his stay in Residential Alec would have punched him in the face, broken his nose or split his cheekbone to prove that nobody could talk to him like that. Now Alec uncoils a little, lets the tension crackle in the air as Nathan pulls back, winding up for a fight, the others bracing themselves as they gauge whether or not they’ll have to break up a fight before everyone gets busted for drinking after hours on prohibited grounds.
Alec lets his gaze linger on Nathan for several seconds, then lets his lip curl into one of Selene’s patented careless sneers and turns away. “Did you ever think,” he says, slowly and deliberately, “that maybe they chose me because I’m just better than you are? You’re the one making it about my father, not me.”
“Just let it go, man,” Kevin says with faux casualness, taking the bottle and cutting the tension before Nathan can escalate. “Besides, if any of the rest of us made the list we’d all be congratulating him, right? So we shouldn’t be shitting on Alec’s parade.” He holds up the bottle and the rest of them raise invisible cups - even Nathan, albeit with a bit of a sour expression. “To Alec, our tribute,” Kevin says grandly. “May you win for nobody but yourself.”
Alec starts to protest, but then he stops. If he dies, his death will be swallowed up in the twenty-three others who perish alongside him, his means of death added to the list that Residential candidates memorize and his name carved into the Wall of Sacrifice just inside the main building. If he lives, the rest of his life will belong to the Capitol, an endless payback for the privilege of being allowed to survive.
“You know what,” Alec says, knocking his knuckles against the side of the bottle, “I’ll drink to that.”
It doesn’t feel real. Not packing up his things and moving into the private Volunteer suite at the end of the hall - with a private bath, and now Alec understands that the point of it isn’t just to get them used to bigger spaces, it’s to begin isolating them from their peers - not the ceremony where he stands next to his future district partner and hears the history of their time in the Program recited back to them, receives the gold bead on the bracelet around his wrist. Not even the Reaping, when he stands under the hot July sun and hears the Capitol escort call out a name that doesn’t matter and feels his stomach dip like he just jumped from a high platform before calling out his district’s two most sacred words.
Not even when he’s standing in the white stone room in the Justice Building and his parents walk in, and Alec watches them as though detached from himself and realizes that they’re afraid, that Dad doesn’t want this, that Creed’s death shattered whatever ironclad faith he had in his dream for his sons’ future and that now Joseph Seward sees nothing but death for both his boys. Alec should feel something, disappointment or resentment or anger but he can’t because it doesn’t touch him, he’s not really here, and instead he puts on Creed’s smile and Creed’s confidence and a flicker of Selene’s madness so they know he’s not walking in blind and tells them to wait and see - everything as perfect and performed as though the trainers scripted it for him in an image session. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia come to see him, too, and that comes a little closer - he almost steps forward to hug Aunt Julia before remembering he shouldn’t - but instead of making the Arena more concrete it only throws him backward, pulls him out of his head to when he was thirteen and gangly and desperate for affection.
It doesn’t connect until he meets his mentor, until he’s on the train and the door to the tribute car slides open and Emory steps in, tall and proud and grave, and it hits him that he’s here, and so is she, and this is really, really happening. Emory is here, she knows his name, and she’s here to help him survive.
But before the real, there’s the surreal.
After Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia leave Alec shakes himself, runs through the death list to try to get a grip and pull himself back, remind himself where he is and where he’s going. He’s halfway through the thirty-seventh when the door flies open and there’s Selene, wild-eyed with her mentor at her back. Alec jolts to his feet, half ready to climb the bench behind him and go for the window, since the last time Selene looked at him like that they were eight and she tried to take a bite out of his shoulder.
“Alec!” Selene bursts out, and she flings herself at him and grips his shoulders with iron fingers. “Don’t give me any of that fatalistic Alec bullshit, do you hear me, this is not like when we were kids, you’re going to win this and come home. You got it?”
“Selene,” says her mentor - says Artemisia, holy fucking shit - in a mild tone, and Selene exhales hard through her nose.
“Listen, don’t start about the numbers, either, because all the back to back years have been a girl first and a boy second, and they were all at the start of a decade, and it’s always a steady boy after a wild girl, so you’ve got this.” Selene’s eyes blaze, bright and blue and piercing, and Alec can’t look away. “You’re coming home. Promise me.”
Alec stares at her for several seconds, dumbfounded, then a laugh bubbles up inside him because there’s nothing left to do. “You really thought this through, didn’t you,” he says. He starts to run a hand through his hair before remembering he still has a public walk to the train, and ends up grinning instead. “Have I ever won an argument against you?”
“Never,” Selene says with unflinching certainty, but there’s an edge to her voice that Alec doesn’t recognize and that her mentor clearly does.
“Selene,” Artemisia says again, this time gently. “We should let him get ready.”
And then she’s gone, leaving Alec to stare at the closed door and wonder if he’d imagined the whole thing.
Alec never really though about the geography of it, but they arrive at the Capitol in a matter of hours, nearly a full day before the tributes from Twelve. But extra preparation time for the Two stylist counts as an unfair advantage, apparently, which means their train stops just outside the Capitol border overnight while the other passenger trains from farther out catch up.
Mara, Alec’s district partner, stares at their mentors when they receive the news. “I’m sorry, we trained for eleven years and that’s not an unfair advantage, but getting a few more hours of primping is over the line?”
The same thought definitely occurred to Alec, but the twisted logic of it had followed immediately after. “Yeah, but we didn’t officially receive any training, remember?” he says dryly. It’s all about plausible deniability. “We’re members of the same after school sports club with orienteering as a hobby, that’s all.”
Mara groans and flops back against the bench, but doesn’t argue. “I hope there’s a gym compartment on here hidden between all the crystal and mahogany,” she says, as though she didn’t spend three days locked in a small room for her sleep deprivation test the same as Alec. “I can feel my muscles atrophying already.”
Devon ignores the theatrics with impressive patience, letting her attempt to bait him roll off his back as though it never happened. “There is, actually. Why don't we go blow off some of that steam?”
Mara brightens at that, and she’d been temperamental in Residential but never over the top, just easily frustrated if she thought the trainers weren’t listening to her, and she follows Devon out in good humour. Alec doesn’t miss the look that Devon and Emory exchange as they pass, and he sits patiently rather than asking if they should go get a workout in as well. Sure enough Emory sits down across from him, studying him with her serious, blue-eyed gaze.
“You know Selene,” she says. Ah, that. Alec isn’t sure what he’s supposed to say to that, if it’s a problem or if she’s testing him, but she follows that up right away with, “That isn’t in your file.”
Alec blinks. “Should it be?”
Emory tilts her head, still thinking. “Most of us remember the tributes for the first few years after we win,” she says. “Everybody knows most everybody in Residential, that’s just the way it is. But Selene didn’t recognize you, she knew you, but there’s nothing about you in her file at all. Tell me about that.”
Alec lets out a long breath. Five years of pretending, making sure he never watched her too closely, keeping his distance and affecting neutrality. He’d never managed to believe it, but he’d fooled the trainers well enough, and that’s what counted. “Well, we weren’t supposed to, right?” he says, a little helplessly. “We grew up together - our parents were best friends, all four of them - but everyone knows they separate boys and girls in Residential, and so after we passed our exams we … didn’t talk to each other again. I said congratulations when she made Volunteer, but -” He shrugs. “We figured it was easier that way.”
“But you were close friends,” Emory says. She’s not judging, or at least he doesn’t think she is, just waiting to see what he says. “I’m surprised the Centre didn’t pick up on it. Most trainees don’t manage to hide things so well.”
“I didn’t see my brother, either,” Alec says, and this time it comes out a little testy but he can’t help it. All those wasted years following the rules, catching glimpses of Creed in training but never hanging out in free time because it would look bad on both of them. What did that get them, in the end? How much would he trade for one day, one hour, even, of goofing off in the common area, sparring and flopping on the couch together talking about absolutely nothing? “We were there to train. We all understood the rules. We knew the cost, but we had committed. Does it matter?”
Emory takes a minute to consider her words. Alec watches her as she does it, even with his flash of temper receding, because when Alec used to fight to speak he looked like he was floundering, but when Emory pauses it’s all gravitas and and authority, like she’s choosing between the better of several already valid options. He wants to have that, that confidence and self-assurance, but even right now, just being in her presence a little of her calm and prepossession leaches out into him.
“I’m your mentor,” Emory says finally. “I use everything I’ve got to bring you home. Which means, if you have a personal connection to a recent, popular Victor, I want to know about it to see if there’s any way that we can use it.”
Alec feels the flush of shame burn hot all the way from his neck straight up to his hairline. “Oh,” he says. At the Centre he’d be readying himself for a dizzying amount of pushups; as a kid he’d be heading out back to cut himself a switch. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry, be mindful,” Emory says mildly, which stops him dead. It’s like that old adage of Dad’s - I don’t want your apology, Alec, I want your obedience! - but without the slap of guilt, the sting of ‘it’s too late’. Mindful, he can do. Alec squares his shoulders. “Nobody’s trying to trick you or catch you out or get you in trouble, not anymore. I just want to do my best to help you.”
Alec flushes again, but this time not because he wants to hide. “Yes ma’am,” he says. “I’ll remember.”
Everything shifts back to unreal as soon as they arrive. Alec pulls back into his head for the Remaking process, the stripping naked and waxing and polishing and buffing and Snow only knows what else. The Centre prepared him as best they could, and he stands silent and stone-faced just like they trained him but it’s still really weird until he detaches, and he lets them do their work and his stylist putter over the designs without asking for his input because that’s what he’s supposed to do.
The Parade is no less ridiculous on the ground than it looked from the screens in the Centre, or when they watch the actual footage again with their mentors after returning to the Two floor of the Games complex. Alec hates all the spectacle elements, the dazzle and the crowds and the slipping out back doors to ‘accidentally’ run into scads of press with their flashbulbs and teasing questions. But this is as much of the job as the killing, and so he puts on his carefully crafted persona and stands next to Mara and says exactly what Emory tells him to say.
In training the Careers band together, vaguely testing out who will take control once they’re in the Arena, but Emory tells Alec not to jockey for position and he’s glad to hear it. Maybe it’s all the years of following Creed and Selene, maybe it’s the lifetime of assuming he was meant for Peacekeeping, but Alec has always felt more comfortable following someone else’s lead than fighting others for the lead role. It’s easier to be unassuming now and surprise everyone where it counts, and when Mara steps in to play ringleader along with the girl from District 4, it’s surprisingly easy for Alec to fall into the old pattern. Harder, really, not to let it feel too familiar, and so he pulls back again to keep himself from losing his edge.
These are not his friends. They are not here to bond and get to know each other or form any real attachments. They’re here because the alliance brings a valuable net boost to supplies and sponsor gifts in the first ten days or so, but the prime reason is Capitol audiences love the drama of seeing the former ‘friends’ turn on each other. The less Alec allows this to affect him, the better off he’ll be.
The morning of the final day, before the final training and interview preparation gets underway, Emory takes him out to the balcony. The sunrise glows over the city, soft and rosy-golden over the silver domes of the buildings, and it’s nothing like the mountains, nothing to dig in and ground himself, but it is pretty, and Alec takes a second to breathe. Emory stands beside him, tall and steady and solid, and she doesn’t touch him but her hand rests next to his elbow on the railing, with its broad palms and wide-knuckled fingers. He wonders, for a brief, embarrassing second, what they would feel like resting on the back of his neck or pressed to his forehead, like Aunt Julia used to do when he was feeling down - then shakes the thought away with an embarrassed jerk of his head.
“I want you to tell me why you’re here,” Emory says, looking out over the city.
Alec glances up at her, wary, but she doesn’t look down. “I -”
“I know you know the script, you wouldn’t have made it this far if you didn’t,” Emory says, a trace of wry amusement colouring her tone. “That’s not what I mean. The Centre passed your file to me. I have my own reasons for choosing you. But none of that will help you when it’s three weeks in and you’re hungry, exhausted, and on your own. I want to know what you’ll be taking with you that’s going to push you through to the end.”
Well that’s … a question, isn’t it. Alec finds himself very glad for Dad’s hatred of fidgeting, as the years of practice help him keep his hands steady no matter how much he wants to twist his fingers together. Why is he here? Because he thought they’d send him home when Creed died, only they didn’t, and Alec was too stubborn to quit or ask for an out once they’d neglected to give him one. Somehow he’d managed to get himself this far, but Emory’s right - that won’t help him when he’s down to the dregs, when he has to reach down inside himself to find that last hidden reservoir of strength on no sleep and no food and no water to make it one more day, one more kill, when it would be easy enough to think he’d done his duty by getting this far, no one would shame him if he stopped now.
If he listened to that tiny, ugly little voice in the back of his head that sounds suspiciously like Nathan, that says that maybe Dad would regret the way he treated Alec growing up if he had to watch him die on TV. It sounds ridiculous now, when Alec is well-rested and healthy and fed, but who knows what will happen in three weeks? That’s why he needs to find his centre, ground himself and dig out his real reason for winning - except the deeper Alec searches, the more he comes up with nothing.
Alec feels the first stirrings of panic when Emory reaches over and rests her hand on his shoulder. “Alec,” she says, and he stands up straight and turns to look at her. They’re the same height, eye to eye, but she feels so much grander, her presence that much greater, and Alec takes a deep breath and lets her steady him. “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I don’t know why I’m here,” Alec bursts out. “I don’t have a reason. I don’t have any kind of compelling story. I wanted to quit, even, it’s just that every time I gave myself permission … I didn’t. But I can’t think of anything that’s actually pulled me forward, I just … kept putting one foot in front of the other.”
It sounds insane to say it out loud. Wherever Devon and Mara are for their private strategizing, Alec will bet his first batch of sponsor funds that Mara isn’t out there babbling about having no direction or drive; she’s the type who’s known exactly what she wants and exactly how she’s going to get it since before she was old enough to understand what it really meant. Meanwhile Alec has been following someone else’s plan his whole life and never once stopped to think about what any of it means for himself - or that he might have a choice.
A little late for that, of course. Alec is well on his way to hyperventilating now when Emory stops him again; either he’s super obvious or she has experience. “Never mind your brother,” Emory says. “Never mind your parents.” That makes Alec stare until he remembers they visited him at the Justice Building, and they have enough instant recognition in Two that a Victor like Emory who does grassroots work with the Corps must have made the connection. “Who are you?”
He laughs, fights the urge to cover his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I think you do,” Emory says, implacable. “Why didn’t you talk to Selene after your brother died?”
Alec blinks. “What?”
“Your brother died. Your file says you locked yourself in your room, trying to get them to kick you out. If you thought the rules didn’t matter anymore, why not go see Selene? She was the only other person there who knew him.”
He wets his lips and swallows, and it feels stupid now but he gets the impression there’s no sense trying to run. “Because I was a mess,” Alec says. “I felt like - like the whole thing was pointless, or, I don’t know, like I’d discovered some big secret about the Games and I was the only one awake while everybody else was asleep. Creed kept talking about how it was this noble sacrifice but he just - he died, he died messy and bloody and there was nothing noble about it, but -” He waves his hand. “You know that, don’t you. It’s not a big secret, I didn’t uncover anything new or groundbreaking. But at the time I felt like … Selene was probably going to be the volunteer next year, and if I talked to her I wouldn’t be able to hold it together. I’d beg her not to, or try to make her understand this was all stupid, or something, and I couldn’t do that. She wouldn’t listen, and she’d hate me for it, and it wouldn’t change anything anyway.”
Alec sighs and runs a hand down his face. “I don’t know what any of this tells you. I know I can’t say any of it in an interview, that’s for sure.”
“It tells me you have principles that go deeper than what people tell you the rules are,” Emory says calmly. “Tells me you love your friends enough to respect their decisions and let them meet their fate on their own terms. So tell me this, if there’s no glory for you in winning, and you’re not in it for the blood, why didn’t you quit? You said you almost gave up, but then you stopped.”
This one takes him a little longer, if only because he actually wants to think about it. Emory’s hand stays steady on his shoulder, and Alec lets it ground him. “I know the usual answer is because I couldn’t imagine anything else but this,” Alec says slowly. “Or even because I couldn’t imagine quitting and coming home to tell everyone I failed. But I think it’s … the opposite, really. It would’ve been easy. I was never supposed to be here, I wasn’t ever meant to get this far. Growing up, everything was always about how I’d never be as good as Creed, or as strong as Creed, or as smart or talented or handsome or anything. If I’d washed out nobody would’ve even blinked because that’s what I was supposed to do. It’s like my dad had these impossible expectations set for me, and he never expected me to meet them but he still punished me when I didn’t, and I just wanted to -”
He stops, shaken, pulled back to himself as though jerked out of a reverie, horrified at the half-completed thought he’d been about to voice. It’s not even new, Alec realizes with a shock. He always knew. Emory says nothing, just waits, and Alec sucks in a breath and forces himself to continue. “I wanted to do something Creed couldn’t, for once. I wanted to prove I wouldn’t just be Creed’s little brother for the rest of my life. It’s not about the glory or the prize or the sacrifice. It’s something I was never supposed to do but I did it anyway.”
Emory’s gaze holds him frozen, serious and unflinching. “Keep going. You saw your brother die. You knew the cost. So why?”
Alec’s breaths stick in his chest, sharp and stabbing, and he presses a hand to his breastbone to try to massage away the ache. The words bubble up and he tries to push them down but it’s too late, the flood has spilled and there’s no stopping it now, “Because fuck my dad, that’s why! He had our whole lives set out before we were born, Creed the Victor and Alec the Peacekeeper. He killed my brother, he filled his head with all that noble sacrifice shit since he was a baby and Creed bought it, all of it, and all that time he made me feel like I wasn’t good enough because I was born second. Except it’s all bullshit, because I worked hard and I didn’t quit and I got here just the same, and maybe I’ll die and maybe I won’t but it’s not the life he planned for me.”
Emory moves to stand in front of him, and without speaking she slides one arm around Alec’s back and curls her other hand behind his head. Alec freezes for a split-second as his brain struggles to comprehend the foreign contact, but then he collapses, burying his face in her shoulder and clutching at her jacket as he bursts into furious sobs. “I just want someone to see me,” Alec gasps out, the words tearing loose with wrenching effort. “I want one person to believe in me instead of waiting to see when I’ll screw up. Just one. And I wanted it so bad I’m going to die over it.”
“Well, you’re right about one thing,” Emory says, her voice rumbling in her chest below Alec’s ear. “That was a drastic way to get it. But you’re dead wrong if you think it was all for nothing.”
Alec goes very still as Emory runs her hand over his hair in a soothing gesture, half afraid that if he moves this will all disappear. “Do you know what happened, as soon as I picked you? That made you my first priority, over everything and everyone else. I’m your mentor, but you’re my tribute, and that means I’m gonna move the mountains for you. All you have to do is win.”
Alec laughs, wet and incredulous. “Just that, huh? No big deal?”
“Just that,” Emory says, matter of fact. She steps back a little, forces Alec to raise his head with one hand under his chin. “I believe in you,” she says, slow and deliberate. “You won’t ever disappoint me, no matter what happens in there, but I believe you’re the one who’s gonna bring it home. And now you’ve finally figured out what you’re fighting for, maybe you can believe it too.”
“Yeah,” Alec says, a little breathless, and he has to reach up and grip her arms to hold himself steady. A warmth glows within the centre of his chest, spreading outward, and Emory could tell him to leap from the platforms before the countdown and he’d trust that she’d told him to do the right thing. He wants to make her proud, wants to live up to the faith she’s poured into him like light, and realizes with a heady jolt that it’s not the same as fearing that he’ll let her down. “Yeah,” he says again, sounding like an idiot, but Emory’s mouth twitches upward. “Yeah, okay.”
He doesn’t say any of this at the interview, of course. Alec wears his Creed-Selene hybrid persona in full force, charming with a hint of an edge underneath, and he talks about his dead brother without getting maudlin or looking like he’s asking for sympathy, evoking sincerity without being naive, vowing to do right by him without promising revenge.
“It’s not about revenge,” Alec says earnestly. Emory coached him on this part; the Capitol has been pushing the ‘district togetherness’ narrative the past few years, and it’s important that Two be the leaders in maintaining it. “We’re all here for the same reason. I don’t blame anyone for doing what they did to survive. But am I carrying his memory with me into the Arena to make me stronger? Am I going to imagine him fighting beside me, cheering me on? Well you tell me, Caesar. Can you blame me?”
Caesar asks him one more question that Emory prepped him for, the ever-popular ‘anyone back home’. The answer he’s been given mystifies Alec a little but he knows better than to argue, and he supposes it makes sense; he has one previous tribute connection, it would be too much to throw in a Victor as well. But will the teasing really work?
Still, Alec lets his expression turn nostalgic as he delivers his response. “Not like you mean it, no,” he says, as Caesar mugs in disappointment. “I’ve always been a bit too serious for romance. But Creed and I had another friend we grew up with, basically like a sister, and we lost touch recently but I got to see her before I left, and that was really nice. If I win I’d like to reconnect again, if that’s okay with her.”
After that the interview turns to what he’s willing to do to win, and Alec lets him see the edge of his determination, the sharp steel beneath the pretty smile. They like him, he’s pretty sure, but they don’t love him yet - they have sympathy for the boy with the dead brother and the friend back home, but they’re not convinced of his bloodlust. He’ll have to convince them on the battlefield.
That’s fine. He doesn’t have to be flashy. All he has to do is kill the last one standing.
That night Emory claps him on the shoulder, eyes crinkled in a smile. “You did good,” she says. “It’s a solid interview. They’ll remember that once the Games start, don’t you worry. For now, get some rest, you’ve earned it.”
Alec laughs in spite of himself. He’s wiped off the makeup, which felt like he needed to scrape it off with a paint trowel, but as much as his body feels like he can’t even peel out of his suit without collapsing, his mind is whirling far too much for him to sleep. “I don’t think I can.”
Emory gives him a shred look. “Get changed, then come see me,” she says.
He does, and even says fuck it and jumps in the shower for a few minutes, blasting himself with hot water now that he’s finally figured out how to run a cycle without a perfumed rinse, and he heads out into the lounge with his hair in damp curls. He still can’t quite believe the soft fabric of the Capitol pyjamas, and wishes they’d managed to sneak in a pair of Centre-issue uniforms just so he won’t have to leap from this ridiculous luxury into sleeping on the ground tomorrow. Then again, that’s probably the point.
Emory waits for him on the couch with a large mug, which she hands over to him and instructs him to drink. Alec inhales deeply first, and it smells amazing, rich and earthy, but he shoots Emory a suspicious glance.
She actually grins, an expression that looks oddly disarming on her usually stoic face. “If it had drugs in I’d tell you,” she says. “I’m not much for sneaking. This is good old-fashioned quarry herbs. It’ll make you sleep, but it’s the all-natural kind. Now drink up.”
Aunt Julia used to give him herbal tea sometimes, and it’s a comforting sort of connection. Alec drinks, and he settles into the corner of the couch as Emory rests a hand on the top of his head. Questions press at him from all sides, last-minute strategy and doubts and half a dozen other stresses, but Emory works her fingers into his hair, massaging pressure points on his scalp, and Alec’s eyes grow heavy and the cushions are soft and maybe it wouldn’t hurt to close his eyes, just for a minute.
He wakes in bed with a blanket over him, the lights off and the wall-screen dark but playing the faintest sounds of the mountain wood behind him. Alec wonders how she knew before he drifts back down to sleep.
The cameras will be watching when Emory and Alec say goodbye on the roof, so before they head to the elevator Emory pulls him in for a tight hug. “You can do this,” she says, holding his face and pinning him with the intensity of her gaze. “You will do this. You’re going to win, and I’ll be with you every minute until you do. You got that?”
“Yes ma’am,” Alec says. The nerves are starting, his heart pounding in his chest and a low fluttering spreading through him, but he holds steady, keeps the feeling in check and uses it to sharpen him. “I’ll come back to you, I promise.”
“Good,” Emory says, favouring him with a savage smile, and she leans in to press their foreheads together for a brief, thrilling moment. “I’ll be waiting.”
Part 2