Victor Alec: Alec & Selene
Three scenes of Alec and Selene, in no particular cohesion, just showing them figuring out their friendship again after the Arena.
Alec asks to see Selene almost every day for over a month, and each time Emory tells him it will happen when he’s ready. At first he thinks the trick is he has to stop asking, but then he tries for a whole week and it doesn’t make a difference so apparently there’s no secret to it. Finally, around the beginning of September, Emory tugs his hair and tells them Selene could come over today, if he wanted.
“Yes,” Alec says, so fast he nearly trips over himself. “Yes, please.”
He then spends the entire morning freaking out about his house, his outfit, his hair, wondering what she’ll think about all of it - she used to snicker at him for keeping his room clean as a kid, and Alec never bothered to tell her that if he left anything on the floor his father would throw it away - until Emory catches him rearranging his bookshelf and drags him outside to spar.
“She’s your friend,” Emory reminds him, her arm heavy and settling across his chest. “She wants to see you.”
Alec closes his eyes and lets his head fall back, blades of grass tickling his ears. “Yeah,” he says, breathing in the scent of pine and the thick, heady sweetness of the flowers in his back garden. “Yeah, okay.”
And then she’s there, wearing jeans and a t-shirt with her hair loose, and there’s a hint of the Victor in her stance and the way she holds her hands and the wary flash of her eyes when she passes through a doorway but for the most part she’s just Selene, and all of it rushes back. Their mentors leave them to it, heading to the kitchen to give them at least some pretend privacy, and Alec waves her to the couch and prays he doesn’t embarrass himself unforgivably.
“I’m sorry about all the ‘basically a sister’ stuff,” Alec says for lack of anything better to say. All those years together and now he flounders like an idiot, and he sends a silent apology to Emory all those weeks back for giving her grief about not seeing Selene earlier. He can’t even imagine what kind of cringeworthy horror he might have vomited out while he was still in his emotional octopus stage. “But I knew they were going to start in on the whole ‘you have to ask her out’ thing if I didn’t shut it down right away, and I figured you wouldn’t want that.”
“Why?” Selene says, her tone lazy even as her gaze sweeps over him with a predatory glint that makes Alec’s entire body go cold. The last time he remembered seeing that face had been approximately two seconds before hearing the sentence Do you think you could outrun a bicycle? in that voice. “You totally grew up hot. It could be fun.”
Alec’s world shatters like a pane of glass with a rock thrown through it. “Uh.” Three years of image training and the only thing his brain comes up with is the sound of a child sitting on the kitchen floor hitting pots and pans together. “Uhhh -”
“Play nice, wildcat,” comes Artemisia’s voice from the kitchen, mildly reproving. “Don’t scare him.”
Selene holds the look of intense speculation for a few more heartbeats before breaking into laughter. “Sorry, it’s just, your face!” she bursts out, flopping back against the couch cushions, her expression a perfect picture of abject glee. “I wish you could see yourself, it’s beautiful. But no, don’t worry, I’m not planning on hitting on you all the time. Unless…” She grins again and waggles her eyebrows, mock-suggestively.
Alec searches for an appropriate response, his mind still a wordless expanse filled with nothing but images of running screaming into the woods. Finally he gives up, detaches his arm and swats Selene with it, then picks it back up and screws it back into place, all without a word.
Selene pauses, shocked, then bursts out laughing all over again. “This is perfect,” she says, beaming at him. “This is the best day of my life.”
And just like that, Alec’s throat unlocks. “You did win the Hunger Games a year ago,” he says dryly. “I sort of remember that being your dream since you were eight.”
“I know what I said,” Selene says, smiling beatifically, but then she grins a little and nudges him with her foot. “It’s good to see you, all grown up and breaking kissing boys, beating people with your severed arm. I’ve never been so proud.”
“Good to see you too,” Alec says, enjoying the familiar feeling of basking in constant bafflement. He never thought how much he’d miss it. “You’re also very pretty, you know, objectively. In case being around all my hotness was making you insecure.”
Selene snorts, and Alec grins, and from the kitchen Emory lets out an exaggerated sigh as Artemisia snickers into her hibiscus tea. Alec decides to count this as a win.
With the first hint of a nip in the air it’s too cool for swimming, but the lake looks so inviting with the dappled sunlight over the ripples that Alec can’t resist at least dipping his toes in. He kicks off his shoes, peels off his socks and rolls his jeans up past his calves, sticking his feet into the water and hissing at the cold as soon as the water bites his skin.
“You know we don’t have to do that anymore,” Claudius says, dropping down beside him and pointedly not going anywhere near the shore’s edge. “Part of the whole ‘bathed in riches’ thing means we don’t actually need to prove anything to anyone, including sticking any limbs in ice water. Nobody’s grading you.”
“It’s not that cold,” Alec says. The initial shock has already faded, a pleasant numbness spreading from his toes up his shin, and Claudius shakes his head but doesn’t try to argue. Maybe he guesses the other half of it, which is that after spending three weeks in the stifling humidity with a dehydration headache squeezing his skull like an iron band, the chill of the water reminds him that he’s here, safe and alive and nowhere near the Arena.
Selene flops down next to him, and she doesn’t stick her feet in but she does pick up a long stick and a bunch of reeds and start lazily fashioning herself a fishing pole, just for fun. Claudius watches her for a little while, eyebrows unbalanced, then snorts to himself and pulls a knife out of nowhere to start carving her a hook from a smooth piece of wood. Alec catches his eye, and Claudius grins a little and shrugs with a ‘why not?’ sort of expression that Alec feels deep within his soul. And if Claudius has already fallen into the pattern of going along with Selene’s whims, that tells Alec more about their friendship than a whole afternoon of trainer analysis.
Alec watches the reflections of the trees and clouds across the surface of the water as Selene braids a fishing line out of stripped reeds and ties it onto the freshly carved hook Claudius hands her. Claudius pulls up a log to sit beside her, and he watches as Selene idly pretends to fish - Alec has never seen an actual fish in the lake, but why should that matter to Selene - and Alec enjoys the quiet.
They don’t bother to talk for a long time, and Alec feels the tension in his shoulders unwind. If he focuses on the weather and the company and the sound of the wind rustling in the leaves, he can almost forget the odd ghost-like sensation of the artificial arm at his side, the ever-present reminder of the Capitol’s “gift” that he will spend the rest of his life paying back.
After a while Selene gives up on fishing, tossing her pole aside and leaning back, looking pleased with herself despite the lack of any success. “Here’s an interesting statistic for you,” she says in a bright, ‘this just came to me’ sort of tone that’s completely bullshit and makes the hair stand up on the back of Alec’s neck. “Did you know you’re the first Victor in over ten years to have an Arena romance?”
“Lene-” Claudius says, and it’s not Misha’s warning tone because he’s her friend, not her mentor or her handler, but there’s an undertone of what the hell that Alec does appreciate, in a weird way, even if it’s unnecessary. Selene has always brazened her way through uncomfortable topics; for all Alec knows, she’d caught the rise of murky thoughts and decided to distract him the best way she knew how.
“It’s fine,” Alec says, waving Claudius off with a small smile of thanks. It’s been a few months now, and he still has nightmares and flashbacks and triggers like anyone, and he has his own guilt about Leander that he’s still mucking through, but the stupid showmance part he can separate out well enough. “And okay, how about fuck you, Selene, there have been other romances, it’s not like I’m the first Two to make out with anybody since Devon.”
“Yeah, but none of them made it,” Selene points out, eyes sparkling. “It’s probably a good thing, we were starting to get a reputation for austerity. Three Victors in a row with no exciting saucy bits to replay, you singlehandedly saved us from our new label as the prude district.”
“Yes, that’s definitely why I did it,” Alec says dryly, making Claudius laugh. “Emory told me that our fighting skill and solid standings for the past seven decades weren’t enough, I should make sure to keep our status high in the kissing tables.”
Selene’s grin turns sharp a split second before Alec realizes his mistake, and damn it all, he’s out of practice. “So if it wasn’t strategy, why did you do it?”
“Oh boy.” Alec lifts his feet out of the water, feeling the chill of the breeze on his ankles and watching the droplets splash back into the ripples. “It’s - I don’t know, it felt like I shouldn’t, like it was a bad idea or irresponsible or something, and that made me want to. It was stupid.”
Selene’s grin widens, turning from a predatory expression into something that might actually be pride. “Alec -” he hears her stumble on the invisible ‘Seward’, the full-name childhood taunt so second nature that it overrides the ‘Victors don’t have last names’ for a second before she catches herself, “- are you saying you rebelled?”
Alec frowns, gnawing on his cheek in thought. He’s well aware that giving a serious answer to one of Selene’s teasing questions is well beyond what’s expected of him, but the thought circles anyway. “Not exactly,” he says finally. “It was more like … you remember, way back when we applied to the Program, how they gave us those marshmallows, and said we could either eat one now or wait and have two later? I remember thinking about what Creed did, and how I should wait to eat mine because that’s what Dad would want me to do, be responsible and patient and show I wasn’t greedy. Except then I got mad and decided I didn’t care about Dad or Creed or being responsible, I wanted to eat the marshmallow now, even if that wasn’t what I was supposed to do. It was kind of like that. I knew it made more sense for my image to walk away, but - fuck it.”
He looks over to see Selene’s face lit up bright and shining like a kid on Parcel Day. “What!” Alec snaps. “Don’t make that face at me or I’ll push you in the lake!”
“Marshmallows,” Selene says in that dreamy, almost disbelieving tone. “All the metaphors in the world to choose from, and you went with eating marshmallows. Were you hungry, Alec? Did it taste good? Was it satisfying?” She starts laughing, the words dissolving into giggles.
“It’s not like that!” Alec says, exasperation and horror warring for control of his nervous system. “I wasn’t thinking about - it’s not like I was making calculations or anything, I just -”
“Oh we know exactly what you were thinking about,” Selene says, waggling her eyebrows at him. “It’s okay, we understand, he was pretty hot, and it’s obvious he wanted to eat your marshmallow first.”
“Oh my god,” Alec says faintly. “What are the odds of me freezing to death if I jumped into the lake? Claudius, you’d rescue me, right? Be a friend?”
“That depends,” Claudius says, and Alec whirls around to look at him, already betrayed, because Claudius is using his paint-stripping voice and he only does that when he’s making fun of someone, and what did Alec do to deserve this - “I’m not going to get any gratitude marshmallows for saving your life, am I? Because I’m sure they’re very tasty, no shade on your confectionary, but I’d really rather not.”
Any attempt Alec might make at a retort is lost as Selene howls so hard she falls over, and so Alec falls back on throwing a wet clump of leaves at Claudius instead.
Alec doesn’t really think too much about the details of their for-cameras friendship until the first time he and Selene are booked for a paired interview and have to sit with interviewers, sharing fabricated stories with a grain of truth about their childhood adventures. They sit with their mentors beforehand, crafting anecdotes that carry the right image, friendly and humanizing but not anything that will pull their teeth or blunt their edge, nothing that mentions anything about family or parents or the Program or anything contrary to the image Careers are allowed to cultivate.
Nothing about Creed.
And so they talk about playing tributes in the woods, playing Dark Days and Peacekeepers vs. Rebels, the time Selene hit Alec in the head with a rock when he escaped her prison but he didn’t cry and she brought him flowers later to apologize, the only time she ever remembers saying sorry. They talk about practicing for the Arena together but don’t mention the squirrels, the little heart beating rapid-fast against Alec’s fingers and the squeaks of terror that he still hears at night sometimes even though he’s killed more people than he has fingers and it shouldn’t haunt him anymore but brains are weird.
They talk about Selene giving Alec advice on how to deal with bullies on the playground without the part where he was trying to start fights on purpose to gain the Centre’s attention, how he hated fighting and the only way he could drag himself to do it was to find bigger kids picking on someone little and go after them. They don’t talk about Selene’s daily fights with Petra and the time she accidentally galvanized her entourage into a bully squad before she realized what she was doing and told them to knock it off, this was a personal vendetta.
They sound like - well, they sound inseparable, best friends who never went anywhere without the other and understood each other better than anyone, and it sticks in Alec’s gut like a dagger because it’s not true. He liked Selene, she was his best friend after Creed, but he spent his whole life struggling to catch up to her and she could never understand why he couldn’t just do what she did with the same lack of effort. He wasn’t the most important person in her life by far, and the more they have to play act that he was, the more Alec’s thoughts sour.
Finally it all bubbles up too far. Selene hasn’t said anything, and Alec highly doubts that she will, but if he’d gone around as a kid telling everyone they were best friends the same way she would have come after him with a knife. He can’t leave it like this. And so one afternoon that spring Alec brings lunch and a plate of cookies and his best courage face.
“Uh oh,” Selene says pleasantly, taking the cookies and waving Alec in to set up the sandwiches on the coffee table. “This looks like trouble. I recognize a bribe when I see one.”
“It’s not a bribe,” Alec says, too fast. “It’s - social lubricant.”
Selene pauses with one cookie already stuffed halfway into her mouth. “Whuhthuhfuh,” she says indistinctly, then chews quickly and chokes it down. “The fuck, Alec? What do you and Emory talk about over there?”
His ears burn, but he came this far and he’s not backing down. “Not that kind, I mean like, you know, you bring something like food or alcohol and it gets people relaxed and chatting so the conversation goes easier.”
Selene settles down onto the couch, legs crossed as a barrier between them, though at least she doesn’t build a pillow fort in the middle so that’s something. “Right,” she says, picking up her sandwich and making a show of looking it over for traps. “So I was right, this isn’t just lunch. You want to talk. You should’ve gone with the booze idea, unless these are really amazing sandwiches.”
“I mean, they are pretty good,” Alec says, a little helplessly. “But - no, it’s not - I mean I do want to talk, but I don’t want to talk, I just, I wanted to tell you something. Or - clear something up, I guess, I didn’t want you to think I -”
He stops, lost and frustrated, dropping his hands into his lap. Selene watches him for a moment, eyebrows askew, then she leans over and pats his knee in an exaggerated gesture of consolation. “It’s all right,” she says, her tone one of over the top sincerity. “I always knew you were gay.”
Alec stares at her for a second, then he squawks and grabs a cushion, threatening to fling it at her head. Only the thoughts of his sandwich, painstakingly crafted to fulfill Selene’s bizarre culinary tastes, stops him from the follow through. “Not that!” He screeches. “You’re impossible!”
“Not the arm?” Selene shoots him a wicked grin. “I’m almost disappointed.”
“I hate you so much,” Alec says, deadpan, as Selene touches her thumbs and the flats of her fingers together to make a heart-hands gesture she definitely learned from Misha. But some of the anxiety loosens in his chest, and Alec exhales. “This is what I’m talking about, for the record. This is what our friendship is, it’s you driving me crazy and us throwing things at each other, and when we were kids there was a lot more of me being absolutely terrified of you. Not this whole weird version of things where we held hands and skipped through the daisies or whatever.”
Selene snorts and shoves him with her foot. “Well sure, but we have to tell a story. My fans would love to hear about me scaring you half to death, but that wouldn’t be good for your image, so we pretty it up a bit, that’s all. It’s not like Petra was actually my rival on the pyramid team either.”
“No, but -” Alec frowns. Like always, his protests made a lot more sense in his head, before he tried to explain them to Selene and her unwavering logic field, which tends to melt away half of Alec’s thoughts like morning mist before the noonday sun without her even trying. “It’s like the Capitol version of us makes us out to be better friends than we were. Like … like we took out Creed and replaced him with me. I know you would’ve picked him over me if you had to choose one, and that’s fine! He was your best friend, not me. I guess I didn’t want you thinking I was trying to … I don’t know, paint over how our friendship really was with the fake one.”
For someone who can make absolutely no expression when she wants to remain inscrutable, Selene’s face journeys when she wants you to know what she’s thinking are an incredible ride. Alec watches the incredulity start at her forehead, scrunching between her eyebrows and shooting upward until it hits her hairline, then travel down to her gaze - flicking as though checking to see whether an invisible audience can hear him - and the twist of her mouth. It’s all he can do not to falter, but finally he trails off on his own and Selene wrests her face back to a semblance of normalcy.
“So,” Selene says slowly, “you wanted to make sure I knew you weren’t secretly pretending we were best friends when we were kids, because we’re giving the lines our mentors told us to say?”
The burn in his ears spreads to the back of his neck. “I know you don’t like it when people try to - to own you or claim you or put labels on you,” Alec says, and dogged perseverance got him to the Arena and pushed him through those final kills and damned if he’ll let Selene and her judgemental face stop him now. “I didn’t - I thought maybe, if you thought I was pretending we were more than we were, that you’d pull away now. And I don’t want that, not after everything, and especially not because of tabloid bullshit.”
Selene mulls that one over for a minute, her eyes doing something Alec can’t quite identify. “Well I’m proud you said ‘bullshit’ if nothing else,” she says finally. “Aren’t you worried you’ll pull a muscle with all that sincerity?” Alec glares at her, folding his arms across his chest, and she laughs a little and punches him in the arm. “Aw, come on, look. Of all the people I would ever accuse of secretly manipulating me, you’re not one of them, you dork. I’m pretty sure if you tried you’d split in half or turn to dust or something.”
“I passed my image training same as you,” Alec says icily, but the low hum of worry in his heart finally releases, and he unclenches his posture and leans down to grab his lunch. He slaps Selene’s hand away before she can steal one of his pickles, and she grins at him and mimes a hand-over-heart gesture of pride.
Alec asks to see Selene almost every day for over a month, and each time Emory tells him it will happen when he’s ready. At first he thinks the trick is he has to stop asking, but then he tries for a whole week and it doesn’t make a difference so apparently there’s no secret to it. Finally, around the beginning of September, Emory tugs his hair and tells them Selene could come over today, if he wanted.
“Yes,” Alec says, so fast he nearly trips over himself. “Yes, please.”
He then spends the entire morning freaking out about his house, his outfit, his hair, wondering what she’ll think about all of it - she used to snicker at him for keeping his room clean as a kid, and Alec never bothered to tell her that if he left anything on the floor his father would throw it away - until Emory catches him rearranging his bookshelf and drags him outside to spar.
“She’s your friend,” Emory reminds him, her arm heavy and settling across his chest. “She wants to see you.”
Alec closes his eyes and lets his head fall back, blades of grass tickling his ears. “Yeah,” he says, breathing in the scent of pine and the thick, heady sweetness of the flowers in his back garden. “Yeah, okay.”
And then she’s there, wearing jeans and a t-shirt with her hair loose, and there’s a hint of the Victor in her stance and the way she holds her hands and the wary flash of her eyes when she passes through a doorway but for the most part she’s just Selene, and all of it rushes back. Their mentors leave them to it, heading to the kitchen to give them at least some pretend privacy, and Alec waves her to the couch and prays he doesn’t embarrass himself unforgivably.
“I’m sorry about all the ‘basically a sister’ stuff,” Alec says for lack of anything better to say. All those years together and now he flounders like an idiot, and he sends a silent apology to Emory all those weeks back for giving her grief about not seeing Selene earlier. He can’t even imagine what kind of cringeworthy horror he might have vomited out while he was still in his emotional octopus stage. “But I knew they were going to start in on the whole ‘you have to ask her out’ thing if I didn’t shut it down right away, and I figured you wouldn’t want that.”
“Why?” Selene says, her tone lazy even as her gaze sweeps over him with a predatory glint that makes Alec’s entire body go cold. The last time he remembered seeing that face had been approximately two seconds before hearing the sentence Do you think you could outrun a bicycle? in that voice. “You totally grew up hot. It could be fun.”
Alec’s world shatters like a pane of glass with a rock thrown through it. “Uh.” Three years of image training and the only thing his brain comes up with is the sound of a child sitting on the kitchen floor hitting pots and pans together. “Uhhh -”
“Play nice, wildcat,” comes Artemisia’s voice from the kitchen, mildly reproving. “Don’t scare him.”
Selene holds the look of intense speculation for a few more heartbeats before breaking into laughter. “Sorry, it’s just, your face!” she bursts out, flopping back against the couch cushions, her expression a perfect picture of abject glee. “I wish you could see yourself, it’s beautiful. But no, don’t worry, I’m not planning on hitting on you all the time. Unless…” She grins again and waggles her eyebrows, mock-suggestively.
Alec searches for an appropriate response, his mind still a wordless expanse filled with nothing but images of running screaming into the woods. Finally he gives up, detaches his arm and swats Selene with it, then picks it back up and screws it back into place, all without a word.
Selene pauses, shocked, then bursts out laughing all over again. “This is perfect,” she says, beaming at him. “This is the best day of my life.”
And just like that, Alec’s throat unlocks. “You did win the Hunger Games a year ago,” he says dryly. “I sort of remember that being your dream since you were eight.”
“I know what I said,” Selene says, smiling beatifically, but then she grins a little and nudges him with her foot. “It’s good to see you, all grown up and breaking kissing boys, beating people with your severed arm. I’ve never been so proud.”
“Good to see you too,” Alec says, enjoying the familiar feeling of basking in constant bafflement. He never thought how much he’d miss it. “You’re also very pretty, you know, objectively. In case being around all my hotness was making you insecure.”
Selene snorts, and Alec grins, and from the kitchen Emory lets out an exaggerated sigh as Artemisia snickers into her hibiscus tea. Alec decides to count this as a win.
With the first hint of a nip in the air it’s too cool for swimming, but the lake looks so inviting with the dappled sunlight over the ripples that Alec can’t resist at least dipping his toes in. He kicks off his shoes, peels off his socks and rolls his jeans up past his calves, sticking his feet into the water and hissing at the cold as soon as the water bites his skin.
“You know we don’t have to do that anymore,” Claudius says, dropping down beside him and pointedly not going anywhere near the shore’s edge. “Part of the whole ‘bathed in riches’ thing means we don’t actually need to prove anything to anyone, including sticking any limbs in ice water. Nobody’s grading you.”
“It’s not that cold,” Alec says. The initial shock has already faded, a pleasant numbness spreading from his toes up his shin, and Claudius shakes his head but doesn’t try to argue. Maybe he guesses the other half of it, which is that after spending three weeks in the stifling humidity with a dehydration headache squeezing his skull like an iron band, the chill of the water reminds him that he’s here, safe and alive and nowhere near the Arena.
Selene flops down next to him, and she doesn’t stick her feet in but she does pick up a long stick and a bunch of reeds and start lazily fashioning herself a fishing pole, just for fun. Claudius watches her for a little while, eyebrows unbalanced, then snorts to himself and pulls a knife out of nowhere to start carving her a hook from a smooth piece of wood. Alec catches his eye, and Claudius grins a little and shrugs with a ‘why not?’ sort of expression that Alec feels deep within his soul. And if Claudius has already fallen into the pattern of going along with Selene’s whims, that tells Alec more about their friendship than a whole afternoon of trainer analysis.
Alec watches the reflections of the trees and clouds across the surface of the water as Selene braids a fishing line out of stripped reeds and ties it onto the freshly carved hook Claudius hands her. Claudius pulls up a log to sit beside her, and he watches as Selene idly pretends to fish - Alec has never seen an actual fish in the lake, but why should that matter to Selene - and Alec enjoys the quiet.
They don’t bother to talk for a long time, and Alec feels the tension in his shoulders unwind. If he focuses on the weather and the company and the sound of the wind rustling in the leaves, he can almost forget the odd ghost-like sensation of the artificial arm at his side, the ever-present reminder of the Capitol’s “gift” that he will spend the rest of his life paying back.
After a while Selene gives up on fishing, tossing her pole aside and leaning back, looking pleased with herself despite the lack of any success. “Here’s an interesting statistic for you,” she says in a bright, ‘this just came to me’ sort of tone that’s completely bullshit and makes the hair stand up on the back of Alec’s neck. “Did you know you’re the first Victor in over ten years to have an Arena romance?”
“Lene-” Claudius says, and it’s not Misha’s warning tone because he’s her friend, not her mentor or her handler, but there’s an undertone of what the hell that Alec does appreciate, in a weird way, even if it’s unnecessary. Selene has always brazened her way through uncomfortable topics; for all Alec knows, she’d caught the rise of murky thoughts and decided to distract him the best way she knew how.
“It’s fine,” Alec says, waving Claudius off with a small smile of thanks. It’s been a few months now, and he still has nightmares and flashbacks and triggers like anyone, and he has his own guilt about Leander that he’s still mucking through, but the stupid showmance part he can separate out well enough. “And okay, how about fuck you, Selene, there have been other romances, it’s not like I’m the first Two to make out with anybody since Devon.”
“Yeah, but none of them made it,” Selene points out, eyes sparkling. “It’s probably a good thing, we were starting to get a reputation for austerity. Three Victors in a row with no exciting saucy bits to replay, you singlehandedly saved us from our new label as the prude district.”
“Yes, that’s definitely why I did it,” Alec says dryly, making Claudius laugh. “Emory told me that our fighting skill and solid standings for the past seven decades weren’t enough, I should make sure to keep our status high in the kissing tables.”
Selene’s grin turns sharp a split second before Alec realizes his mistake, and damn it all, he’s out of practice. “So if it wasn’t strategy, why did you do it?”
“Oh boy.” Alec lifts his feet out of the water, feeling the chill of the breeze on his ankles and watching the droplets splash back into the ripples. “It’s - I don’t know, it felt like I shouldn’t, like it was a bad idea or irresponsible or something, and that made me want to. It was stupid.”
Selene’s grin widens, turning from a predatory expression into something that might actually be pride. “Alec -” he hears her stumble on the invisible ‘Seward’, the full-name childhood taunt so second nature that it overrides the ‘Victors don’t have last names’ for a second before she catches herself, “- are you saying you rebelled?”
Alec frowns, gnawing on his cheek in thought. He’s well aware that giving a serious answer to one of Selene’s teasing questions is well beyond what’s expected of him, but the thought circles anyway. “Not exactly,” he says finally. “It was more like … you remember, way back when we applied to the Program, how they gave us those marshmallows, and said we could either eat one now or wait and have two later? I remember thinking about what Creed did, and how I should wait to eat mine because that’s what Dad would want me to do, be responsible and patient and show I wasn’t greedy. Except then I got mad and decided I didn’t care about Dad or Creed or being responsible, I wanted to eat the marshmallow now, even if that wasn’t what I was supposed to do. It was kind of like that. I knew it made more sense for my image to walk away, but - fuck it.”
He looks over to see Selene’s face lit up bright and shining like a kid on Parcel Day. “What!” Alec snaps. “Don’t make that face at me or I’ll push you in the lake!”
“Marshmallows,” Selene says in that dreamy, almost disbelieving tone. “All the metaphors in the world to choose from, and you went with eating marshmallows. Were you hungry, Alec? Did it taste good? Was it satisfying?” She starts laughing, the words dissolving into giggles.
“It’s not like that!” Alec says, exasperation and horror warring for control of his nervous system. “I wasn’t thinking about - it’s not like I was making calculations or anything, I just -”
“Oh we know exactly what you were thinking about,” Selene says, waggling her eyebrows at him. “It’s okay, we understand, he was pretty hot, and it’s obvious he wanted to eat your marshmallow first.”
“Oh my god,” Alec says faintly. “What are the odds of me freezing to death if I jumped into the lake? Claudius, you’d rescue me, right? Be a friend?”
“That depends,” Claudius says, and Alec whirls around to look at him, already betrayed, because Claudius is using his paint-stripping voice and he only does that when he’s making fun of someone, and what did Alec do to deserve this - “I’m not going to get any gratitude marshmallows for saving your life, am I? Because I’m sure they’re very tasty, no shade on your confectionary, but I’d really rather not.”
Any attempt Alec might make at a retort is lost as Selene howls so hard she falls over, and so Alec falls back on throwing a wet clump of leaves at Claudius instead.
Alec doesn’t really think too much about the details of their for-cameras friendship until the first time he and Selene are booked for a paired interview and have to sit with interviewers, sharing fabricated stories with a grain of truth about their childhood adventures. They sit with their mentors beforehand, crafting anecdotes that carry the right image, friendly and humanizing but not anything that will pull their teeth or blunt their edge, nothing that mentions anything about family or parents or the Program or anything contrary to the image Careers are allowed to cultivate.
Nothing about Creed.
And so they talk about playing tributes in the woods, playing Dark Days and Peacekeepers vs. Rebels, the time Selene hit Alec in the head with a rock when he escaped her prison but he didn’t cry and she brought him flowers later to apologize, the only time she ever remembers saying sorry. They talk about practicing for the Arena together but don’t mention the squirrels, the little heart beating rapid-fast against Alec’s fingers and the squeaks of terror that he still hears at night sometimes even though he’s killed more people than he has fingers and it shouldn’t haunt him anymore but brains are weird.
They talk about Selene giving Alec advice on how to deal with bullies on the playground without the part where he was trying to start fights on purpose to gain the Centre’s attention, how he hated fighting and the only way he could drag himself to do it was to find bigger kids picking on someone little and go after them. They don’t talk about Selene’s daily fights with Petra and the time she accidentally galvanized her entourage into a bully squad before she realized what she was doing and told them to knock it off, this was a personal vendetta.
They sound like - well, they sound inseparable, best friends who never went anywhere without the other and understood each other better than anyone, and it sticks in Alec’s gut like a dagger because it’s not true. He liked Selene, she was his best friend after Creed, but he spent his whole life struggling to catch up to her and she could never understand why he couldn’t just do what she did with the same lack of effort. He wasn’t the most important person in her life by far, and the more they have to play act that he was, the more Alec’s thoughts sour.
Finally it all bubbles up too far. Selene hasn’t said anything, and Alec highly doubts that she will, but if he’d gone around as a kid telling everyone they were best friends the same way she would have come after him with a knife. He can’t leave it like this. And so one afternoon that spring Alec brings lunch and a plate of cookies and his best courage face.
“Uh oh,” Selene says pleasantly, taking the cookies and waving Alec in to set up the sandwiches on the coffee table. “This looks like trouble. I recognize a bribe when I see one.”
“It’s not a bribe,” Alec says, too fast. “It’s - social lubricant.”
Selene pauses with one cookie already stuffed halfway into her mouth. “Whuhthuhfuh,” she says indistinctly, then chews quickly and chokes it down. “The fuck, Alec? What do you and Emory talk about over there?”
His ears burn, but he came this far and he’s not backing down. “Not that kind, I mean like, you know, you bring something like food or alcohol and it gets people relaxed and chatting so the conversation goes easier.”
Selene settles down onto the couch, legs crossed as a barrier between them, though at least she doesn’t build a pillow fort in the middle so that’s something. “Right,” she says, picking up her sandwich and making a show of looking it over for traps. “So I was right, this isn’t just lunch. You want to talk. You should’ve gone with the booze idea, unless these are really amazing sandwiches.”
“I mean, they are pretty good,” Alec says, a little helplessly. “But - no, it’s not - I mean I do want to talk, but I don’t want to talk, I just, I wanted to tell you something. Or - clear something up, I guess, I didn’t want you to think I -”
He stops, lost and frustrated, dropping his hands into his lap. Selene watches him for a moment, eyebrows askew, then she leans over and pats his knee in an exaggerated gesture of consolation. “It’s all right,” she says, her tone one of over the top sincerity. “I always knew you were gay.”
Alec stares at her for a second, then he squawks and grabs a cushion, threatening to fling it at her head. Only the thoughts of his sandwich, painstakingly crafted to fulfill Selene’s bizarre culinary tastes, stops him from the follow through. “Not that!” He screeches. “You’re impossible!”
“Not the arm?” Selene shoots him a wicked grin. “I’m almost disappointed.”
“I hate you so much,” Alec says, deadpan, as Selene touches her thumbs and the flats of her fingers together to make a heart-hands gesture she definitely learned from Misha. But some of the anxiety loosens in his chest, and Alec exhales. “This is what I’m talking about, for the record. This is what our friendship is, it’s you driving me crazy and us throwing things at each other, and when we were kids there was a lot more of me being absolutely terrified of you. Not this whole weird version of things where we held hands and skipped through the daisies or whatever.”
Selene snorts and shoves him with her foot. “Well sure, but we have to tell a story. My fans would love to hear about me scaring you half to death, but that wouldn’t be good for your image, so we pretty it up a bit, that’s all. It’s not like Petra was actually my rival on the pyramid team either.”
“No, but -” Alec frowns. Like always, his protests made a lot more sense in his head, before he tried to explain them to Selene and her unwavering logic field, which tends to melt away half of Alec’s thoughts like morning mist before the noonday sun without her even trying. “It’s like the Capitol version of us makes us out to be better friends than we were. Like … like we took out Creed and replaced him with me. I know you would’ve picked him over me if you had to choose one, and that’s fine! He was your best friend, not me. I guess I didn’t want you thinking I was trying to … I don’t know, paint over how our friendship really was with the fake one.”
For someone who can make absolutely no expression when she wants to remain inscrutable, Selene’s face journeys when she wants you to know what she’s thinking are an incredible ride. Alec watches the incredulity start at her forehead, scrunching between her eyebrows and shooting upward until it hits her hairline, then travel down to her gaze - flicking as though checking to see whether an invisible audience can hear him - and the twist of her mouth. It’s all he can do not to falter, but finally he trails off on his own and Selene wrests her face back to a semblance of normalcy.
“So,” Selene says slowly, “you wanted to make sure I knew you weren’t secretly pretending we were best friends when we were kids, because we’re giving the lines our mentors told us to say?”
The burn in his ears spreads to the back of his neck. “I know you don’t like it when people try to - to own you or claim you or put labels on you,” Alec says, and dogged perseverance got him to the Arena and pushed him through those final kills and damned if he’ll let Selene and her judgemental face stop him now. “I didn’t - I thought maybe, if you thought I was pretending we were more than we were, that you’d pull away now. And I don’t want that, not after everything, and especially not because of tabloid bullshit.”
Selene mulls that one over for a minute, her eyes doing something Alec can’t quite identify. “Well I’m proud you said ‘bullshit’ if nothing else,” she says finally. “Aren’t you worried you’ll pull a muscle with all that sincerity?” Alec glares at her, folding his arms across his chest, and she laughs a little and punches him in the arm. “Aw, come on, look. Of all the people I would ever accuse of secretly manipulating me, you’re not one of them, you dork. I’m pretty sure if you tried you’d split in half or turn to dust or something.”
“I passed my image training same as you,” Alec says icily, but the low hum of worry in his heart finally releases, and he unclenches his posture and leans down to grab his lunch. He slaps Selene’s hand away before she can steal one of his pickles, and she grins at him and mimes a hand-over-heart gesture of pride.