Victor Alec: Leander
Alec starts having dreams and doesn't know what to do with them.
The first night, Alec tells himself it’s a fluke, the latest weird psychological flotsam his brain has decided to dredge up in the months post-Arena, and he does his best not to think about it. The next night he wakes up in a slick sweat, his t-shirt hitched up around his ribs, mind and body swirling in dark, ugly confusion. It takes him over an hour to calm down. The night after that Alec reverts to an age-old trick and tries calisthenics before bed until his muscles tremble in an attempt to exhaust himself, but it doesn’t work - this time the thoughts slip into his mind before he falls asleep, and worse, with conscious control behind them, shift into a far more elaborate fantasy than the muddled half-realities of dreams.
By the end of the week Emory hasn’t commented on the dark circles or the miasma of guilt and confusion that has to be clinging to him like jungle sweat, but she does spar more and speak less, leaving the silences open for Alec to speak whenever he’s ready. He’s grateful but also a little horrified, knowing that she’ll be expecting the usual nightmares about twelve-year-olds with their throats slit and waking up imagining blood-soaked hands, not … whatever this is.
Finally he can’t take it anymore, and the more patient and accommodating Emory is about the whole thing the more Alec really wants to climb in a hole and never come out, but no, no he won the fucking Hunger Games, he can do this. And so one evening after dinner he fortifies himself with Emory’s borrowed sweater and a bowl of fresh apple crisp balanced on his knees, and he makes a run for the stupid Cornucopia.
“If I ask you a personal question and you don’t want to answer it, can we just pretend I never asked it?” Alec says in a rush, staring down at the trickle of cream mingling with the cinnamon and nutmeg at the bottom of his bowl. Emory poured the cream with a reverence undimmed by twenty years of living on a Victor’s salary, which tells him more about her life before the Arena than he wants it to. The fact that Alec didn’t think twice about giving himself a big splash of expensive cream but expected a trick when Emory offered him cinnamon and brown sugar probably says something about his.
Emory studies him a moment, balancing her fork between two fingers. “I’m not with anybody, never have been,” she says. “Weren’t never interested, in boys or girls or anyone, though I’ve had offers if I changed my mind.” She smiles a little at that, a private one aimed down at her bowl, somewhere between amused and rueful. “And for the record, just because I’m one way doesn’t mean you have to be. It isn’t wrong to feel things.”
Alec goggles at her, close-mouthed only through years of habit enforced by immediate punishment for jaw-dropping. “I -”
“You had the look,” Emory says, her mouth twitching. “Sooner or later everybody asks. And you’ve been ghosting around the place looking skittish these past few days, so that narrows it down.”
“Oh fuck me,” Alec mutters, dropping the bowl onto the table and pulling his legs up to his chest so he can hide his face behind his knees. “It’s … fuck.”
Emory shifts but doesn’t try to touch him while he’s spontaneously combusting, thank Snow. “You know it’s fine. It’s normal, it’s a good thing. Means you’re getting better, if your brain and body are going there.”
He sucks in a breath, the innocent embarrassment - the normalcy of it, how nice it would be to be a teenager mortified about having the sex talk with his designated adult - vanishing as the true nature of his feelings choke up in his throat. The worst part is watching Emory notice, seeing the light of recognition in her eyes, the subtle change in her posture, as she readies herself for whatever new horror he’s about to vomit all over her. Except whatever it is she thinks she’s expecting, it won’t be this.
“I’ve been thinking about Leander.” It hurts to say, the words scraping jagged across the soft insides of his throat, tearing a line down the roof of his mouth and blocking his tongue with blood. “From - the boy from my Arena.”
Emory blinks, and Alec has the amused-not-amused thought that he finally surprised her, but he can’t let her think what he knows she has to be thinking. “I didn’t - it wasn’t on purpose, not at first, it was just a dream, and I tried not to, I know that’s wrong, and weird, and -”
“Alec,” Emory interrupts, gentle but firm. “Your thoughts are your thoughts, that’s all. Try again without the value judgements.”
He breathes - in, out, focus on the repetition - and starts over. “It felt weird to think about him when he’s dead, when I - killed him, basically, so I tried not to, but it kept happening, so I … changed it. I didn’t want to keep thinking about the Arena, and it’s not - it wasn’t a hot thing, I just …” Alec pushes a hand through his hair, biting off a low noise of frustration. “I was thinking about how he was from One, and how he’d never - about what it must have been like for him to end up that way, what might have happened to him. And so I started thinking about if we’d - if I could have shown him what it’s like not to be scared or guilty.”
Alec’s face flushes hot. He can’t look at her, and Emory still keeps her distance, but he can tell it’s for his comfort and not because he disgusts her. He’s still getting used to the air not turning frosty when he admits something weak or undesirable. “I know it’s stupid,” he says - then stops without Emory having to tell him, Games damn it all, and tries again. “I know he’s dead and all of this is in my head and it doesn’t affect anyone but me,” Alec says, and Emory makes a small, satisfied sound. “But I still, I’m -” say it, Alec, just grab the sword and run - “I’m having sex dreams about somebody who’s dead. And not normal ones, they’re all this weird fantasy where I’m some kind of … I don’t know, gay expert who helps him find himself and not be scared anymore, which is absolutely fucking bullshit -” He stops, clicks his tongue, “which is ironic when I’m still figuring this whole thing out myself. The only reason I had any sort of courage to ‘find myself’ is because Creed died and I stopped caring what anyone else thought, but Leander thought I was so confident just because I used Selene in my persona.”
Finally Emory reaches over and rests her hand on the back of his head, and Alec leans into the touch, just a little, letting her steady him. “Is that stupid?” he asks, knowing that’s a stupid question, knowing she’ll never say yes because she’s his mentor and he could decide to do cartwheels through the Village in his underwear and she’d come up for a psychologically justifiable reason for why that’s somehow developmentally appropriate.
“You saw someone hurting and you wish you could have helped,” Emory says. “That’s not stupid.”
Something twists inside him, savage and ugly. “It’s not some kind of noble saviour thing, it’s fantasizing about somebody that I had sex with on camera and then murdered, where I pretend he’s terrified and traumatized and I’m gentle and patient and like I have any fucking idea what I’m doing. Like I wasn’t a complete fucking hypocrite the whole time in there.”
Emory doesn’t pull away, doesn’t take the bait. “Explain?”
Alec lets out a shaky breath. “I said I knew who I was, and he believed me, his district partner probably told him I was gay as a leverage thing and then I proved him right, and he thought I was so sure of myself and it’s all a lie. I only did it because I knew I shouldn’t, it was immature and bad for my image and the cameras and I didn’t care, I was going to die so why not do something stupid and reckless and selfish, why not disappoint my father one last time. I was only brave because of the Arena. If we’d been in the real world, if we were actually boyfriends and my dad caught us I would have been terrified, I probably would have pushed him away and lied about the whole thing.”
He leans forward, hiding his face in his knees again. “And now I have these fantasies where I get to be strong and wise and understanding instead of a fucking coward, and I get off on them, and that’s not about him at all, that’s about me. What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this?”
Emory says nothing for a minute as Alec struggles to breathe, until finally she clicks her tongue and pulls him into her arms. Alec fights her for all of three seconds before he gives in and cries into her shoulder, humiliated and relieved all at once, and the only up side about all of this is after everything he’s already dug himself so low a hole that if she was going to fling him away in disgust she would have done it by now, so there’s not much point in clinging to pride now.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting not to be confused,” Emory says finally. “You were made to feel ashamed and afraid of something that’s part of you. You’re trying to make sense of that. It won’t help that you were spending all your time learning how to kill when other kids would have been figuring this stuff out for themselves. Doesn’t make you a bad person, Alec. Being a Career means we get to do things out of order, sometimes.”
He chews on that a minute, fingers twisted in her shirt. “For the record, for all the ‘fuck my Dad’ shit, he never - I mean, I was thirteen. I didn’t know anything about myself when I left, not yet. But he’d said a few things, and I knew, so when it happened I always heard him in the back of my head, being disappointed in me. He would have been disgusted by what I did in the Arena.”
Emory runs her fingers through his hair, a pause growing as she considers her words, and Alec laughs, this time hiding his face in her shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking. For a tribute who said his motivation was ‘fuck my dad’, I spend a lot of time obsessing over what he thinks about me.”
“Alec,” Emory says in that way she has, amused without an ounce of judgement, “did you really think I thought you went into the Arena and kissed a boy on camera to spite your father because your relationship is uncomplicated?”
He stops dead, startled out of his anticipated brush-off response into a burst of startled, incredulous laughter. “Oh god,” Alec gasps out, and he’s a mess, a complete and total trash disaster, but at least Emory isn’t throwing him away. “I’m sorry, it’s not funny, it’s all awful, but oh my god. I bet my files didn’t say anything about you having to deal with all this.”
“Never mind the files.” Emory rubs her hand across his back, quick and bracing, before coming back to hold him against her side. “And I’m going to repeat myself: you’re not wrong. You have nothing to be ashamed about. Parts of you are coming back now that you’re getting better, and it’s not your fault it’s still twisted up in the Arena and everything else. You’re not the only one it happens to, and it’ll pass. You’re not hurting anyone, so ride it out and don’t blame yourself.”
Alec thunks his head against her collarbone and groans. “I think you have the right idea. Nothing for anybody, nice and simple.” Emory doesn’t bother to dignify that whine with a response, and Alec sighs. “I’m sorry if - I don’t know, are we supposed to talk to our mentors about our weird sex dreams? Or is that a thing I should have kept to myself?”
“If you need to talk about it, like today, then we talk about it,” Emory says, and as always Alec admires her for making things he agonizes over sound so simple. “But if everything’s fine, you don’t have to check in and tell me everything. Having a mentor doesn’t mean signing away all privacy.”
“Okay,” Alec says, ears burning. “I’m -”
“Don’t apologize unless you really need to,” Emory says, interrupting him with an invisible punch to the chest. “Just be yourself.”
He sits there, dumbfounded, sucking in bigger and bigger breaths, until Emory claps him on the side of the face and stands up. “Come,” she says. “We’re sparring.”
Alec will never, never, ever figure out what he did to deserve this - deserve this life, this freedom, even with its conditions, deserve her - but he lets her pull him to his feet and tug him in against her side as they step out into the cool autumn air.
The first night, Alec tells himself it’s a fluke, the latest weird psychological flotsam his brain has decided to dredge up in the months post-Arena, and he does his best not to think about it. The next night he wakes up in a slick sweat, his t-shirt hitched up around his ribs, mind and body swirling in dark, ugly confusion. It takes him over an hour to calm down. The night after that Alec reverts to an age-old trick and tries calisthenics before bed until his muscles tremble in an attempt to exhaust himself, but it doesn’t work - this time the thoughts slip into his mind before he falls asleep, and worse, with conscious control behind them, shift into a far more elaborate fantasy than the muddled half-realities of dreams.
By the end of the week Emory hasn’t commented on the dark circles or the miasma of guilt and confusion that has to be clinging to him like jungle sweat, but she does spar more and speak less, leaving the silences open for Alec to speak whenever he’s ready. He’s grateful but also a little horrified, knowing that she’ll be expecting the usual nightmares about twelve-year-olds with their throats slit and waking up imagining blood-soaked hands, not … whatever this is.
Finally he can’t take it anymore, and the more patient and accommodating Emory is about the whole thing the more Alec really wants to climb in a hole and never come out, but no, no he won the fucking Hunger Games, he can do this. And so one evening after dinner he fortifies himself with Emory’s borrowed sweater and a bowl of fresh apple crisp balanced on his knees, and he makes a run for the stupid Cornucopia.
“If I ask you a personal question and you don’t want to answer it, can we just pretend I never asked it?” Alec says in a rush, staring down at the trickle of cream mingling with the cinnamon and nutmeg at the bottom of his bowl. Emory poured the cream with a reverence undimmed by twenty years of living on a Victor’s salary, which tells him more about her life before the Arena than he wants it to. The fact that Alec didn’t think twice about giving himself a big splash of expensive cream but expected a trick when Emory offered him cinnamon and brown sugar probably says something about his.
Emory studies him a moment, balancing her fork between two fingers. “I’m not with anybody, never have been,” she says. “Weren’t never interested, in boys or girls or anyone, though I’ve had offers if I changed my mind.” She smiles a little at that, a private one aimed down at her bowl, somewhere between amused and rueful. “And for the record, just because I’m one way doesn’t mean you have to be. It isn’t wrong to feel things.”
Alec goggles at her, close-mouthed only through years of habit enforced by immediate punishment for jaw-dropping. “I -”
“You had the look,” Emory says, her mouth twitching. “Sooner or later everybody asks. And you’ve been ghosting around the place looking skittish these past few days, so that narrows it down.”
“Oh fuck me,” Alec mutters, dropping the bowl onto the table and pulling his legs up to his chest so he can hide his face behind his knees. “It’s … fuck.”
Emory shifts but doesn’t try to touch him while he’s spontaneously combusting, thank Snow. “You know it’s fine. It’s normal, it’s a good thing. Means you’re getting better, if your brain and body are going there.”
He sucks in a breath, the innocent embarrassment - the normalcy of it, how nice it would be to be a teenager mortified about having the sex talk with his designated adult - vanishing as the true nature of his feelings choke up in his throat. The worst part is watching Emory notice, seeing the light of recognition in her eyes, the subtle change in her posture, as she readies herself for whatever new horror he’s about to vomit all over her. Except whatever it is she thinks she’s expecting, it won’t be this.
“I’ve been thinking about Leander.” It hurts to say, the words scraping jagged across the soft insides of his throat, tearing a line down the roof of his mouth and blocking his tongue with blood. “From - the boy from my Arena.”
Emory blinks, and Alec has the amused-not-amused thought that he finally surprised her, but he can’t let her think what he knows she has to be thinking. “I didn’t - it wasn’t on purpose, not at first, it was just a dream, and I tried not to, I know that’s wrong, and weird, and -”
“Alec,” Emory interrupts, gentle but firm. “Your thoughts are your thoughts, that’s all. Try again without the value judgements.”
He breathes - in, out, focus on the repetition - and starts over. “It felt weird to think about him when he’s dead, when I - killed him, basically, so I tried not to, but it kept happening, so I … changed it. I didn’t want to keep thinking about the Arena, and it’s not - it wasn’t a hot thing, I just …” Alec pushes a hand through his hair, biting off a low noise of frustration. “I was thinking about how he was from One, and how he’d never - about what it must have been like for him to end up that way, what might have happened to him. And so I started thinking about if we’d - if I could have shown him what it’s like not to be scared or guilty.”
Alec’s face flushes hot. He can’t look at her, and Emory still keeps her distance, but he can tell it’s for his comfort and not because he disgusts her. He’s still getting used to the air not turning frosty when he admits something weak or undesirable. “I know it’s stupid,” he says - then stops without Emory having to tell him, Games damn it all, and tries again. “I know he’s dead and all of this is in my head and it doesn’t affect anyone but me,” Alec says, and Emory makes a small, satisfied sound. “But I still, I’m -” say it, Alec, just grab the sword and run - “I’m having sex dreams about somebody who’s dead. And not normal ones, they’re all this weird fantasy where I’m some kind of … I don’t know, gay expert who helps him find himself and not be scared anymore, which is absolutely fucking bullshit -” He stops, clicks his tongue, “which is ironic when I’m still figuring this whole thing out myself. The only reason I had any sort of courage to ‘find myself’ is because Creed died and I stopped caring what anyone else thought, but Leander thought I was so confident just because I used Selene in my persona.”
Finally Emory reaches over and rests her hand on the back of his head, and Alec leans into the touch, just a little, letting her steady him. “Is that stupid?” he asks, knowing that’s a stupid question, knowing she’ll never say yes because she’s his mentor and he could decide to do cartwheels through the Village in his underwear and she’d come up for a psychologically justifiable reason for why that’s somehow developmentally appropriate.
“You saw someone hurting and you wish you could have helped,” Emory says. “That’s not stupid.”
Something twists inside him, savage and ugly. “It’s not some kind of noble saviour thing, it’s fantasizing about somebody that I had sex with on camera and then murdered, where I pretend he’s terrified and traumatized and I’m gentle and patient and like I have any fucking idea what I’m doing. Like I wasn’t a complete fucking hypocrite the whole time in there.”
Emory doesn’t pull away, doesn’t take the bait. “Explain?”
Alec lets out a shaky breath. “I said I knew who I was, and he believed me, his district partner probably told him I was gay as a leverage thing and then I proved him right, and he thought I was so sure of myself and it’s all a lie. I only did it because I knew I shouldn’t, it was immature and bad for my image and the cameras and I didn’t care, I was going to die so why not do something stupid and reckless and selfish, why not disappoint my father one last time. I was only brave because of the Arena. If we’d been in the real world, if we were actually boyfriends and my dad caught us I would have been terrified, I probably would have pushed him away and lied about the whole thing.”
He leans forward, hiding his face in his knees again. “And now I have these fantasies where I get to be strong and wise and understanding instead of a fucking coward, and I get off on them, and that’s not about him at all, that’s about me. What’s wrong with me? Why am I like this?”
Emory says nothing for a minute as Alec struggles to breathe, until finally she clicks her tongue and pulls him into her arms. Alec fights her for all of three seconds before he gives in and cries into her shoulder, humiliated and relieved all at once, and the only up side about all of this is after everything he’s already dug himself so low a hole that if she was going to fling him away in disgust she would have done it by now, so there’s not much point in clinging to pride now.
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting not to be confused,” Emory says finally. “You were made to feel ashamed and afraid of something that’s part of you. You’re trying to make sense of that. It won’t help that you were spending all your time learning how to kill when other kids would have been figuring this stuff out for themselves. Doesn’t make you a bad person, Alec. Being a Career means we get to do things out of order, sometimes.”
He chews on that a minute, fingers twisted in her shirt. “For the record, for all the ‘fuck my Dad’ shit, he never - I mean, I was thirteen. I didn’t know anything about myself when I left, not yet. But he’d said a few things, and I knew, so when it happened I always heard him in the back of my head, being disappointed in me. He would have been disgusted by what I did in the Arena.”
Emory runs her fingers through his hair, a pause growing as she considers her words, and Alec laughs, this time hiding his face in her shoulder. “I know what you’re thinking. For a tribute who said his motivation was ‘fuck my dad’, I spend a lot of time obsessing over what he thinks about me.”
“Alec,” Emory says in that way she has, amused without an ounce of judgement, “did you really think I thought you went into the Arena and kissed a boy on camera to spite your father because your relationship is uncomplicated?”
He stops dead, startled out of his anticipated brush-off response into a burst of startled, incredulous laughter. “Oh god,” Alec gasps out, and he’s a mess, a complete and total trash disaster, but at least Emory isn’t throwing him away. “I’m sorry, it’s not funny, it’s all awful, but oh my god. I bet my files didn’t say anything about you having to deal with all this.”
“Never mind the files.” Emory rubs her hand across his back, quick and bracing, before coming back to hold him against her side. “And I’m going to repeat myself: you’re not wrong. You have nothing to be ashamed about. Parts of you are coming back now that you’re getting better, and it’s not your fault it’s still twisted up in the Arena and everything else. You’re not the only one it happens to, and it’ll pass. You’re not hurting anyone, so ride it out and don’t blame yourself.”
Alec thunks his head against her collarbone and groans. “I think you have the right idea. Nothing for anybody, nice and simple.” Emory doesn’t bother to dignify that whine with a response, and Alec sighs. “I’m sorry if - I don’t know, are we supposed to talk to our mentors about our weird sex dreams? Or is that a thing I should have kept to myself?”
“If you need to talk about it, like today, then we talk about it,” Emory says, and as always Alec admires her for making things he agonizes over sound so simple. “But if everything’s fine, you don’t have to check in and tell me everything. Having a mentor doesn’t mean signing away all privacy.”
“Okay,” Alec says, ears burning. “I’m -”
“Don’t apologize unless you really need to,” Emory says, interrupting him with an invisible punch to the chest. “Just be yourself.”
He sits there, dumbfounded, sucking in bigger and bigger breaths, until Emory claps him on the side of the face and stands up. “Come,” she says. “We’re sparring.”
Alec will never, never, ever figure out what he did to deserve this - deserve this life, this freedom, even with its conditions, deserve her - but he lets her pull him to his feet and tug him in against her side as they step out into the cool autumn air.