The wind whistles over the ruins of the base at Eagle Pass as Alec stands on a heap of smashed concrete and overlooks what was once the proudest edifice of his district. Carrion birds perch on the rubble now, pecking at the blackened smears of blood that mar the rocks, and it's been weeks since the attack and they're still pulling bodies from the mess. Yesterday the field medics brought in a man, buried underneath half a mountain since the bombs fell but alive - alive and missing chunks of flesh as he'd used the only food available to him to stay alive. Most of the new finds weren't in one piece, let alone breathing, and while the numbers are starting to trickle out now, every day or so someone new gets shipped in.
Not just from the mines or the base but around the district, as the rebels make their sweep of the towns in an ever-widening radius. The district is lost, the soldiers who bring updates congratulate each other; it's only a matter of time before the people see it. In the meantime, any casualties are the fault of a district so barbaric and military that it arms their children.
They tried taking the Centre with only a handful of soldiers and rifles, Alec hears later, and he was up to his wrists in a wounded man's guts and couldn't laugh but inside something twisted in savage satisfaction. The people of the districts could have warned them about Career savagery, but the rebels of Thirteen have never seen the children of the Program up close. Out of all the soldiers that made it inside the barricade, none came out; since then they've barred the doors from the outside and are waiting for hunger to make the trainees compliant once the Centre's stores run out. Except that even as a child Alec would have rather subsisted on nothing but protein shakes for months rather than give in to surrender, and so he wishes them luck.
(They learn from their mistake in One, so say the rumours. The children of One's Career Program are deemed acceptable casualties of war, and the residential building stormed and bombed without anyone setting inside. They say the people helped; unlike in Two, District 1's Program didn't stop at children whose parents gave them willingly. Alec thinks of all those children, hard-eyed and beautiful and desperate to live, and turns away from the rebels' triumph.
When they try the same with the Peacekeeping Academy here in Two, they're shocked to find it derelict. Alec knows without being told that they would have emptied it weeks ago, sending every last soldier-in-training into the field. All around the district the trainees are fighting, fourteen-year-olds and other Reaping-age half-prepared kids armed with weapons and determination and a vicious, angry district pride. Not a few of the white-uniformed bodies Alec has seen in the hospital have been younger than he is.)
The sun glitters off the exposed veins in the rock, dazzling his eyes, but the flicker of beauty can't do much to undercut the absolute horror of the attack. The worst part is that, in another situation, Alec might have been a rebel in time. It's been burning inside him since he was a child - not his personal dissatisfaction, not even Alec is selfish enough to turn on his country because he doesn't feel fulfilled in life - but the Capitol took his brother and offered nothing back, and for what? What glory lay in all those deaths, again and again and again?
What glory lay in any of it, whether the Victor that year made their kills with speed and grace, or slow slow slow with a sliding grin and deft strokes of the knife, or with traps or by accident or in a haze of insanity and desperation, what did it matter? With every trainee who washed out of the Program - every boy who came back from a kill test in hysterics, every girl who stared at imaginary blood on her fingertips and smiled smiled smiled until her cracked lips split down the middle - the monster crept closer. This was wrong, the Games were wrong, and maybe given enough time, enough death, Alec would have seen enough.
Then again that's the point, according to the rebels, anyway. How much death would it take for the people of Two to get their heads out of their weapons chests and see the truth? When the only touch of the Capitol's brutality had been those twenty-three deaths per year, of course it made sense to stay. Two didn't have the lash of the whip to deal with, or the gnawing of starvation. The miners hungered and worked in the dark for long hours, but their children would always be safe from the Reaping and even Parcel Days came every few years.
Some people, the rebels say to each other, toasting themselves over a hastily-grabbed lunch between sorties, may have enough compassion to realize that their own comfort does not negate other people's suffering, but not here. Not in Two. Here they're selfish and arrogant and evil, and the plight of others far away would never touch them. The only way to talk to animals is to be an animal, they say, and so they brought the war to them.
Some of the outer mining towns, those furthest from the district centre who suffered most in the dead of winter when the frost ringed their mining tools, joined the rebels when the forces arrived rather than turn and fight. Whether it was true revolutionary fervour or a cold practicality that ran the numbers and decided to minimize losses Alec doesn't know, and doubtful anyone will unless the Capitol wins and there's a second reckoning.
That's the problem with Two, they tell Alec. He's young and practically one of the rebels now, helping their soldiers leading up to the attack and since, and it's a point of pride he thinks to see if they can get him to agree with them wholeheartedly. For Two it was academic; they could sit in their homes and consider both sides, whether the Capitol or the Rebellion would win, and wait to see which they should support to gain the most after it all ended. For everyone else, they tell him, there was never any choice.
They're right or they're wrong or maybe it's somewhere in between, but either way people are dead and Alec helped the people who killed them. He's worked every day since the bombing until he collapses from exhaustion but it's not enough. People are dead - so many people, his people - because Alec didn't do his civic duty and turn the rebels in the first day they came knocking.
The day after the attack - after grabbing a restless, unsatisfying nap underneath a pillar in the ruined Justice Building - Alec heard that the rebels bombed Two's Victors' Village at the same time. It marked the largest wholesale slaughter of Victors since the Quell itself, the most of any district, but when Alec blanched at the news the man who tells him straightened his spine. "The Capitol murdered the other Victors," he snapped at Alec, slashing his hand in a vicious gesture. "It's only fair. Yours were never going to surrender."
Probably not. Brutus died with the Arena, twenty-some years of honour and service relegated to a footnote in a single interview with an addled Peeta Mellark. No one knows what happened to Enobaria; the rebels didn't take her when they breached the Arena but she wasn't in the Village when they pulled out the bodies and counted them, either. Alec hopes she's dead, rather than in a Capitol holding cell or in hiding out somewhere; he can't imagine waking up one day and learning that everyone he cares about is gone.
As for Alec's people -
Aunt Julia hasn't spoken to him since that night in the square when she appeared with the other doctors, proud and unyielding. Like Alec she'd been recruited to save lives; like Alec she determined that her vows as a doctor meant she couldn't turn anyone away who needed healing, but unlike Alec the damage had already been done and the only choice for her was to stem the flow of death or let the bleeding continue. Aunt Julia would have turned Lyme and her soldiers in, Victor or no Victor, and they don't have to ask her opinion to see it.
They haven't spoken but they have worked together, because Aunt Julia is a trauma surgeon, one of the best in Two, and Alec is a family doctor whose emergency medicine is limited to mining accidents and common sense. The rebels treat him as one of their own because of Lyme and the soldiers whose lives he saved before the bombing, but Alec is barely into his first practice and he doesn't know how to command the other doctors. Aunt Julia takes over that first day without being asked, and she strides through the wounded, blood-spattered and smeared with dirt and filth, issuing orders and demanding supplies and terrifying ally and rebel alike with her furious energy.
Uncle Paul and the other staff who worked at Central Command but weren't there for the attack have been confined to their homes. They're there with their families as both leverage and collateral, after refusing to give up any of their access codes so the rebels can access the central mainframe. The rebels are confident they'll hack it without help and so they're not forcing anyone to talk, and Alec lets out a quiet breath of relief. The mainframe holds all the data on Peacekeepers all over Panem, and with access to that a lot of their people would be in even more danger. It will take time for the rebels to crack it, and in the meantime that means Uncle Paul and Kit are safe.
Alec assumed that means Dad and Mom are among those held under guard, at least until the day he learned that a Peacekeeper couple rallied the locals into a private militia and attempted to fight the rebels out of town. The militia fell in the end but they killed enough rebels on the way there to warrant an actual arrest and imprisonment, and the rebels speak of them with a mix of disgust and grudging admiration. "I hear they fought pretty good for people in their sixties," one of them said. "Not just him but his wife, too."
Alec didn't want to ask - doesn't need to, really, who else would it be - but he did anyway, and sure enough. The rebel who checked did a double-take and blink, and looked up at Alec with eyes narrowed in thought. "You're a Seward, aren't you?" she asked. "Any relation?"
Nobody from Thirteen knows the history of last names in Two; none of them will have learned the proud genealogies that mark the Sewards as a proud line of long lineage. They don't know that its meaning - eagle, or so Dad said once - ties right into the mountains they've always lived beneath. Alec could easily pretend it's common and no one would question.
His parents turned him out for nothing more than wanting to be true to himself. Alec gave the first sixteen years of his life to them; he owes them no more allegiance now.
"They're my parents," Alec said. "We haven't spoken in - a while. We had a difference of opinion." The rebel's expression softened, and Alec let her think it was over the rebellion despite the bitter taste of the unspoken lie because it might dredge up enough sympathy to save them. "I know no one can promise anything, but - before anyone makes any decisions, I'd like to talk with them."
"You're right that I can't promise," she said. "But I'll make a note."
No word on Selene. Alec doesn't know for sure that she joined the Peacekeepers but it would make sense - that was her plan, as a little girl, before the Arena got its claws in her - and he doesn't want to risk exposing her by asking the rebels and giving them her name. He checks the intake at the hospital every day and doesn't see her, but that doesn't make it better. She could be alive, and fighting, but she could also be laid out flat in a makeshift morgue anywhere from the Capitol all the way out to Eleven. There won't be any way to know until this all ends and someone tallies up the list of officers on duty and attempts to tally the dead and missing.
One thing is sure: Selene might have rolled her eyes at Alec and Creed and their obedience to duty, but she is not a rebel. She loves her district too, even if she'd rather lose a leg than admit it. The pretend rebels lost every game Selene, Creed and Alec played as children for a reason, and Selene has always defended what's hers.
Footsteps crunch on the gravel behind him, and Alec doesn't turn around to look. Every time someone approaches him without speaking he wonders if it will be Aunt Julia come to ask him questions, and every time it's a soldier or a doctor with a request and Aunt Julia continues to ignore his existence. It aches, all the more because he deserves it, and each time Alec wonders.
"Alec," Aunt Julia says, her voice cool and neutral, and comes to stand beside him.
Alec freezes but doesn't react. He nods, not sure what he's allowed to call her; she's never stopped being Aunt Julia in his head, but Alec can imagine her reaction if he tries familiarity now. Then again he can't picture calling her anything else; 'Julia' is too familiar, too presumptuous, and 'Doctor Valent' far too stilted.
The space between them yawns as wide as the bombed chasm below, but Alec won't be the first to throw words into it.
Silence stretches, long and taut, and finally Aunt Julia is the one to speak. In the end it's a single word that breaks the two years since he stood on her doorstep and hugged her for the last time: "Why?"
He's not surprised. Alec asks himself that question daily. He looks down at his hands, scrubbed clean of blood for now, skin pink and cracking at the knuckles from so much washing and disinfectant. He could ask her what she thinks she's asking him, how far down the rebels' road she assumes he's walked. He could defend himself, explain that he never gave them any information, never gave them the plans or the layout or anything else that would help them take his district.
He could say a lot of things, but Aunt Julia has never been one for excuses and Alec has never stomached making them. Actions have consequences, and Alec's has a body count that hasn't stopped adding up.
"I wanted to help," Alec says finally, helplessly. It makes him naive and foolish - what war doesn't have a body count, what did he expect - but he never wanted this, and maybe she will understand. Out of all of them, Aunt Julia always understood him, always loved him, unconditionally and without reservation. He's disappointed everyone else in his life but not her, never her. If anyone will, it will be Julia Valent or no one.
She doesn't answer. A hawk's cry pierces the sky as it circles the blasted remains of the line of pines below the base of the mountain, and Alec's pulse beats a desperate staccato in the pit of his stomach as he waits. Finally she nods once - the finality of the gesture hits him right between the shoulders - and walks away, leaving Alec alone.
"That's it, then," Alec says to the wind. It's melodramatic and ridiculous, and he almost laughs, brushing a hand across his eyes. In a way it's freeing, like the last, brutal chop of an amputation, and the severed limb might itch and ache in his mind and trick him into imagining a lingering connection but it's gone, and nothing will bring it back.
The good thing about hitting bottom means there's nowhere else to go but to start scrabbling upward. The war will end and the world will move on, with or without Alec; the only thing he can do is keep moving with it.
That afternoon Alec applies for a transfer out of the district; the trains are down going out to the outer districts, blown up by the rebels when they realized they couldn't hold them against the Capitol assault, and so the next morning Alec and his satchel of supplies and a few changes of clothes take the last remaining train to District 1.
After the war ends, Alec returns to District 2.
Transportation is still crippled all across the country and Two is not anyone's priority. Most of the food and supplies from the captured Capitol are skipping Two and being sent out to districts in need: districts without traitors, that means, and it won't hurt the pampered lapdogs to know what it feels like to go hungry for once. District 1 may have been the Capitol's favourite pet but they also bowed to the rebels right after District 8, and so the new regime forgets the ridiculous names and the gemstones and the tributes who tortured their victims four years out of five and focuses on the hidden factories and the angry workers and the girls taken from their homes and sold to greedy Capitolites for entertainment.
With District 1 one of the first to fall, the infrastructure suffered less than most. The rebels tended to commandeer rather than destroy when possible, keeping the factories and facilities open and stripping them of usable materials. It means that Alec's doctor's office, while lacking in essential tools and supplies, had wood panelling and plush carpeting before he tore it up to use as fuel. It's a strange, ridiculous blend of luxury and utilitarianism; every day Alec misses the solidity of home on the other side of the mountains, but he made his choice and here he is.
He watches the war end on television. The districts might be starving, the rebels might have no idea how they're going to feed and clothe the newly-freed people once winter rolls in and the burned fields and demolished factories don't magically restore themselves, but the revolution will be televised and the broadcasts keep running. Alec refuses to have the screens on while he's working, but he catches up late at night when he collapses into bed, nursing a glass of home-brewed liquor that doubles as a disinfectant when he's desperate. It's all rebel-owned coverage now, no spinning Panem seals and the president's sonorous voice-over, and Alec listens and watches the Capitol fall.
He sees the siege in a series of highlight reels, the capture of President Snow and the takeover of the presidential mansion as the new rebel headquarters. He sees the bombs fall on a crowd of children, hands outstretched toward the parachutes that bring their deaths; when the second round of detonations takes out the doctors that rushed in to help, Alec turns off the footage and rests his head in his hands.
He sees the trials, or part of them; once the Victors start testifying, once people who suffered have to sit and reveal their most ugly, private torments to an audience still starving for punishment even in the name of justice, Alec can't watch. He has no interest in staring at the Mockingjay stumbling through her testimony, a girl of seventeen who looks older and younger all at once, exhausted and pale and broken and nothing like the symbol who shouted in front of a backdrop of flames and rubble and galvanized the districts into bloodshed.
He sees that same girl put an arrow in the skull of their new president, marking the shortest political coup since the days of President Snow's predecessor. Alec watches the riot with a grim lack of surprise that fills him down to his feet; he imagines the people back home shaking their heads. The new leader as bad as the old, what a shock, and in the following days the news coverage scrambles to catch up but Alec doesn't bother.
And then come the Peacekeeper trials.
Commander Paylor of the rebellion offers a pardon to anyone who agrees to lay down arms and promise not to raise them again. It's a canny move, politically; the rebellion lacks soldiers, their numbers small to start and much-diminished by the fighting, and Two has people strong enough to fight and smart enough to survive. They don't release the numbers of those who accept her offer to the public, but one day there's a special broadcast as those who refused are marched into an open square and lined up in front of a firing squad.
None of them, Alec realizes with sick horror, are past their twenty, no one over thirty-five. He sits frozen, every bit as trapped as the night Creed died, as the charges are read. This batch are Snow's elite forces, the ones who did his dirty work, and the words hiss in Alec's ears like so much static because they're all within ten years of his age. The youngest one is Kevin, the boy from Alec's year who told him he had to fight if he wanted to stay in the Program, and now his stare is haughty and challenging as he stands with his hands cuffed behind him.
Most of the country doesn't bother paying attention to the execution of a few more loyalist soldiers, say the viewing figures at the bottom of the screen, but if nothing else there's one. Alec slides down to the floor in front of the television and presses his fingers to the television, touching each proud, unflinching face as the camera sweeps across them.
(Selene's not there, he tells himself, scanning the faces with a mess of panic and relief. Selene's not there.)
Alec touches his fist to his chest for the ones who can't, and he keeps his eyes open even as the tears burn until the rifle fire stops and the last body crumples to the ground. He doesn't watch to see what they do with the remains. He does grab his shoes and coat and head out to bully himself a space on the next freight train home, and the next morning Alec watches the mountains from the proper side as the train shoots around the now-familiar curve.
It takes a fair bit of badgering for Alec to get access to the list, and he exaggerates his connection to the rebellion during the war and plays up his relationship with Lyme as far as he dares with the full intention of feeling guilty about it later. The only Victor in Two left is Enobaria and that won't help him, but Lyme died a hero and represents the side of Two that Paylor has been trying to cultivate, so good enough. Besides, inventing relationships with the glorious dead in an attempt to get something out of it is practically a national pastime these days.
The officer in charge doesn't let Alec actually look at the names, but he does check it for him. "No Sewards took the pardon," he says, and while his face isn't exactly sympathetic when his gaze flicks to Alec, it isn't unkind, either. "It doesn't mean anything, necessarily. We don't have full records of everyone in the service, and it's not like we went around shaking people down to check. They might be in hiding."
They might also be dead; the casualty lists are still coming in. Alec folds his hands behind his back and squeezes until the bones in his fingers ache. "They wouldn't have hid," he says. It's been years, but the sun doesn't just stop rising in the morning. "They — raised a militia, during the war, I heard. I don't think they'd just disappear after that."
This time, the man stops halfway through picking up another file to give Alec an openly-awed stare. "That's your parents?" he says his tone somewhere between shock and fury. "Old Man and Lady Hardass? I never paid attention to their names, we just always called them — well never mind. I don't need to look them up, I can tell you right now. They're being held for execution after refusing Paylor's offer to recant."
"Execution?" Alec stares. "How many people did they kill?"
"Enough," he says with a shrug. "Anyway, it's not about that. Everyone gets a trial, that's the way it goes, but they refused. Said they'd rather die than accept any kindness from traitors. Paylor is pretty good with her temper, but she lost it that day and said she'd oblige. They'll go down as war criminals by the time it's all over." He shakes his head and lets out a quiet, disbelieving laugh. "Sorry, I know that's not what you wanted to hear, but your parents are kind of infamous."
By now Alec can't even dredge up enough energy to be surprised. "During the war I was told I could speak with them," Alec says. Guilt gets a finger between his ribs and twists. He'd all but forgotten about them in the aftermath; without the broadcast to remind him, would he have even known ahead of time? "Maybe I can convince them to take the pardon. Can I try?"
"I wouldn't bet on it," the man says. "I mean, I can let you, the fewer people we execute in Two the easier it will make putting everything back together, but they're not exactly — well, I'm sure you know."
"I do," Alec says, and leaves it at that.
It takes a few hours of wrangling as the request makes it up the channels, but finally Alec sits stiffly on the plush leather couch in the lobby of the former District Central Hotel. The rebels have taken it, of course, making it the new district penal institution for political prisoners. Apparently even after raising up a resistance and attacking the rebels, the names Joseph and Adora Seward carry enough weight to keep them out of the ordinary lockup. Or maybe it's just that people intended to be figurehead deaths for the loyalist faction in Two merit a bit more pomp.
It would be almost funny, if Alec had any idea what to say. He's kept himself too busy over the past few years to replay that last argument in his mind, but Alec remembers every word. He meant it too, even the poisoned barbs he spat back in anger. Alec wouldn't take it back, exactly, but he does wonder what might have changed if he'd managed to be patient. Nothing of substance, most likely, but as the bodies pile up the new government is setting its foundation on thousands of what-ifs.
A rebel guard leads him up the stairs and down a long corridor, and Alec occupies his brain by wondering what the rebels are calling themselves now that they're the establishment. Maybe Alec's parents are the rebels now, a thought that is probably funny in some universe but not the one where Alec still can't find the words to convince them not to leap in front of a hail of bullets for the sake of honour. His family has always been good at ultimate sacrifice, with Alec being the sole exception. Maybe if he's lucky some of his personal selfishness will rub off.
There are half a dozen more guards stationed outside the door where they're keeping Dad and Mom, though Alec is pretty sure they would never try to escape just because it would be cowardly to run. His escort explains the situation, and finally the door opens and Alec finds himself standing in front of his parents for the first time in three years.
They both look the same — proud and professional and almost painfully handsome — though with a few more lines and smatterings of grey at the temples. "Alec!" Dad leaps to his feet, face gone slack, and Alec falls back a step. "Alec, what happened? Were you captured? Did they — are you —"
In a way it's almost touching. The last time they spoke, Alec had taken everything Dad thought he knew and thrown it in his face. They'd hurt each other in a way that only family could, and by the end Alec had been glad to do it. Years of silence and absence, time for Alec's parting wounds to dig deep and fester, and yet Dad's first thought at seeing Alec here in the rebel stronghold is that he's their prisoner too.
Alec never fails to disappoint. For a second Alec almost considers agreeing, except that for someone who managed to go through most of his life breathing lies, he's always been terrible at it. "No," Alec says. "I'm here to — I want to talk to you. I want —" As always everything tangles up inside, and Alec huffs in long-practiced irritation at himself. "You need to take the pardon."
To his surprise it's Mom who draws herself up. "Are you joking?" she snaps, and Alec whirls to stare at her.
"No?" Alec teeters off-balance, trying to find his mental footing. "Mom, they're going to kill you! Both of you! You have to recant."
The worry fades from Dad's face, slowly replaced by growing suspicion. "There's nothing to recant. Loyalty is loyalty. The only reason we're on trial for our crimes instead of the other way around is because the traitors won. That doesn't make them right."
"Does it matter?" Alec bursts out. "They've won, it's over! You dying won't change anything, it will just make you dead!"
Dad starts to speak, but Mom talks right over him. "Alec, they want us to apologize. Do you understand what that means? They want us to apologize for fighting, for our loyalty, for our lives. They want us to admit that we were wrong to pledge ourselves to the Capitol and the president and the people who kept this country running. They want to see us grovel and humiliate ourselves and beg for our lives, and I won't. We won't."
"It's just words —" Alec says, but he can't even finish the sentence. Words have power, always have. A leader with might but no words is nothing but a madman. A man without his word is nothing.
Dad shakes his head. "I won't pledge myself to them, either. You haven't seen it. If you'd continued your training and gone out through the districts, maybe you would have. Maybe then you'd realize. You don't know what it's like out there, away from the Capitol. What it's like when lawlessness goes unchecked. When people allow their children to starve while they trade poached game for alcohol. While the rich let the poor curl up and die on their doorsteps because it's easier to move a corpse than convince a living human to move day after day. Without discipline is chaos, and this new world will break apart even as they try to build it."
Alec bites down on his lip. Thousands upon thousands have died for this peace and there's no sign of the proud future that was promised. The country's infrastructure has been destroyed, its people demoralized, and from what he's seen Paylor is trying but there is nothing that ties them together now. Without the Capitol — without the Games to focus their attention, without a leader to pin their resentment on — the people will find another target. It's only a matter of time.
Then again, a wound doesn't heal overnight, either. That doesn't mean it never will.
"You know, don't you," Dad says, and Alec jumps. "This rebellion was a foolish endeavour that will lead the whole country to ruin. Whatever you did after turning your back on your family, you must still understand that."
Alec curls his hands into fists, then forces them open. "I'm a doctor," he says. "When someone comes to me with a broken bone, I don't try to argue against the accident that caused it. The bone is broken. It needs to mend. And — if Two is going to survive, it needs people like you to be in it." He swallows hard. "I need you."
"Alec." Dad runs a hand over his eyes and holds it there, fingers digging into the corners of the sockets. "I don't expect you to understand. You're young and you think everything should work out the way you want just because you want it to." The last of his grand manner fades, and he's just an aging soldier who's lost both sons in one way or another and has seen his country fall apart. "It's not all pride, you know. You think we're foolish, dying for a cause. Have you ever thought that this world is not one worth living for?"
"No," Alec says immediately. He hasn't forgotten, the years of disapproval and shaking heads, the hands on his shoulder that squeezed tight and chased the breath from his chest. Trying and trying coming up a failure every single time. "I do know what that feels like. I know you're scared. But you can't just decide to give up because the world isn't working the way you want it to anymore. Or are we only proud and brave when things are in our favour?"
Dad's eyes glint for a second, and for the first time in years Alec catches what might be a flash of respect. "You're not entirely wrong," he says, and Mom shoots him an incredulous look. "But this isn't my world anymore, or my fight. Building a new world out of the ashes, that's for young people like you. I'm going to die for the one that burned."
Alec tries a little while longer, but neither of them budge. They don't shout at him, or call him traitor, or ask which side he stood during the war, which is more than he expected. In a way it's almost worse; when he stormed out of the house that day he'd been convinced that what he'd done was right. The anger had soothed him, buoyed him up and let him not look back. Without the purifying fire of rage, everything else feels that much murkier.
In the end Dad asks him to leave, but it's not the full-blown hurt and fury of the time before, all stiff posture and twitching jaw. This time it's exhaustion and defeat and resignation, and disappointment hangs in the air but Alec can't find the source of the threads, can't decide whether it's at him or the world or his parents themselves.
"Don't do it," Alec says, pausing in the doorway. He can't ask them as their son anymore, not when both sides agreed to sever that connection. Using it as leverage now isn't fair to anyone. The problem is that without appealing to emotion, what else is there? They're adults and it's their choice, and people have died for less.
Dad shakes his head. "I'm sorry," he says — another first — and Alec slips through the door and lets the guards push it shut behind him.
Halfway home, Alec stops dead in the middle of the street and nearly gets run down by a construction van. He sidesteps back out of the way, scarcely hearing the angry honking as it hits him that he never actually checked on anyone but his parents since coming back. Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia were all right when Alec left, but so much has happened since then.
The Valents were every bit as loyal as the Sewards, even if they had fewer fancy words and speeches about it. Uncle Paul used to talk to Selene about the importance of authority and why they had rules, and for all her sympathetic looks and talks when Alec was a young boy struggling to find himself, Aunt Julia had disapproved just as strongly as Dad ever did after finding out Alec helped the rebels. Would they take the pardon? Or are they in another opulent makeshift cell, waiting for their chance to die so they can stick it to a country that no longer represents them?
And what about Selene?
By the time Alec makes it back to the district office, they're closing up for the evening but he manages to coerce his way in, likely by looking like a complete lunatic. "I need names," Alec says to the girl behind the desk. He grips the counter and tries not to vault over to look through the files with or without her. "Valent, Paul and Selene. Please, I need to know if they're alive."
She's wearing Peacekeeper white instead of rebel greys, but with Paylor's insignia sewn on over a reverse-faded patch on her left arm where the old symbol has been removed. She's not much older than Alec. "Captain Valent took the pardon," she says with crisp efficiency, and Alec sags with a relief so great he actually has to rest his head against the wooden countertop. "He was awarded his retirement pension and returned to live with his family. He has not returned to duty."
No, Alec thinks, closing his eyes and counting breaths in an attempt to slow his stuttering heartbeat. He wouldn't. Uncle Paul knows all the codes to the mainframe at Eagle Pass; he also worked with the thousands of men and women who died there. He won't help the rebels who murdered them.
"Selene Valent," the woman continues, her voice trailing off as she peruses. "Not on the list of pardons. Checking — ah." She makes a small noise of sympathy. "Scouts Division. Killed in action during the Capitol Siege."
Alec pushes himself away from the desk, the first wave of relief swamped by a sudden flood of grief. "Thank you," he says, managing to croak the words out.
The girl pauses. "Friend of yours?" she asks carefully.
"She was," Alec says. He presses his fingers to his eyes, echoing his father's gesture without thinking until his brain pieces together his action with the recent memory. "We'd — lost touch."
"I'm sorry," the girl says. She's here working behind a desk and wearing the symbol of the new regime, but for a moment the anger rises and she's pure Two, proud and straight-backed with her mouth pressed thin. "I'm the only one left in my graduating class. Took a hit to the head early and slept through most of the fighting, lucky me, but." She shrugs. "The mountains endure, right?"
Alec takes a step back and touches his fist to his chest. Words and apologies have no meaning here, not anymore, and the girl matches the gesture as they lock eyes with with quiet solemnity. They don't ask each other's names or offer any more details, and after that Alec nods and takes his leave.
From here he takes the long-familiar path, now half overgrown even if they've repaired most of the road, and several of the trees are scarred from gunfire or flash bombs. Alec doesn't bother to stop by his childhood house, abandoned for months and possibly even commandeered since his parents' arrest; instead he heads straight for the white house with the blue trim and the shed where Selene hit him with the rock.
It's all there, though there's evidence of the war here too. The ground has been trampled in a way that the grass is still recovering from; there was an evacuation, hundreds of soldiers and civilians marching and cutting into the ground with their boots. But the house is there, and the front walk, and the gate, even if Alec can tell by the fresh bolts that it was once torn from its hinges and later repaired.
The paperwork for Dad and Mom's pardon sits awkwardly shoved in Alec's back pocket, and he pushes open the gate and jogs up the walk to knock on the door.
It's Uncle Paul who answers this time instead of Aunt Julia, and it's probably cowardly but Alec is glad. If he had to face her now, he might never make it through and he has to. "I checked the lists," Alec says. It's a stupid place to start but he can't think of anywhere else, and Uncle Paul's eyes tighten at the corners but he says nothing. "I — Selene, I'm so sorry."
Uncle Paul closes his eyes for a moment, and Alec finally snaps to that maybe he didn't know, maybe he hadn't wanted to know, hadn't checked the lists so he could cling to the hope, however distant, that his daughter still lived. "So am I," Uncle Paul says finally, and no, there's grief darkening his eyes but it's old, not fresh and shocked. The wound hasn't healed but it's not still bleeding, either.
"I saw her once, before the war," Alec continues, because what else can he do but babble on like an idiot. "She looked good. I didn't talk to her, but — she was happy."
Uncle Paul nods, but he doesn't move or invite Alec inside. "Alec —"
Alec flinches. The last thing a grieving father needs is for his dead daughter's friend to show up unannounced and start blurting out memories. "Sorry, I — you signed the pardon, right?" Uncle Paul draws himself up, expression closing off, and Alec rushes on. "No, I'm not — it's just, I saw Dad and Mom and they won't. They're up for execution but they won't sign, they're going to die because they're stubborn and I tried but they won't listen. For all I know they're even more determined because I asked them not to. So I just — if there's anything — why did you take it?"
Uncle Paul looks back over his shoulder, and oh. Alec nearly smacks himself in the face, because of course. Uncle Paul has a wife and a son who aren't bound by the promise and would have to live on without him if he let himself be executed in a fit of principle. He still has something left, whatever he's lost, and a reason to keep going. Alec's parents don't have that luxury; all they have is Alec, and after everything that's happened, he can't say that the ravaged remains of their relationship are much to cling to.
"Could you talk to them?" Alec asks. "You've known them a long time, do you think you could convince them? I don't know what to say but you might, and Dad won't listen to me but he might listen to you. You're his friend and he respects you, and if you could just get him then maybe he could get Mom. It's just, we might not be a family anymore but I can't let them die, please."
Uncle Paul looks at Alec for a long time, and finally his expression softens. "Of course I'll talk to him," he says. "If I'd known that's what was happening I would've knocked some sense into him weeks ago. I assumed they were off yelling at Paylor herself somewhere."
"Thank you," Alec says. He pulls the paperwork from his pocket and hands it out. "I — you don't have to tell them I asked you. Whatever you say that works."
Uncle Paul nods, but finally he pushes the door open so he's no longer bracketing the gap with his body. Just then Aunt Julia, likely curious about the conversation, turns the corner and stops dead at the sight of Alec. Alec freezes, and Uncle Paul's gaze flicks to his face but he doesn't move. "Julia," Uncle Paul says without turning, "Alec's here asking if I can't convince Joe and Dora to stop being stubborn fools. Why don't we have him in for dinner?"
Alec falls a step back, biting down on his tongue to keep from doing something absolutely humiliating like begging her to say yes. It's her house and her right to refuse him, the rebels killed Selene and Alec helped the rebels and that means he's tangled up in the whole mess and he has no right to ask her to change her mind —
But then Aunt Julia smiles a little, and it's a faint, tired ghost of the one that used to warm Alec on his worst days when they shared cocoa in the kitchen but it's real, and it's for him. Right then the sky could open up and pour down with rain and Alec would swear the sun shone anyway. "That sounds good," she says. "I'll set an extra place."
Alec wipes his eyes as Uncle Paul steps back to let him in, and Aunt Julia turns back to the other room. "Kit," she calls out. "Alec's here. Do you remember Alec?"
Kit peers around the corner. He's older and taller than when Alec left, a full-fledged child nearing Centre eligibility even with the trace of baby softness still around his cheeks, but his face lights up. "Alec!" he shouts, and runs and tackles Alec right at the knees. "You're back!"
Alec bends and picks him up, making a show of grunting at the weight as he heaves Kit up into his arms and balances him against his hip. "Yeah, I'm back," he says. Kit looks even more like Selene now than he did as a toddler, the same bright, intelligent eyes and probing stare, only no one will be teaching him how to hide a knife and look for the weak spot behind the knee. No one will hand him a gun and tell him to aim for the spot between the eyes. "You've gotten tall. You'll be taller than your mom soon."
(One time Uncle Paul grinned and rested his arm on the top of Aunt Julia's head, and she glared and smacked him so hard in the chest he yelped in shock before bursting into laughter. Afterward she'd hit him again, lightly this time, and pulled him down for a kiss while Selene had gagged and made a show of covering her eyes. Creed caught Alec's eye and raised his eyebrows. Their parents never did anything like that.)
Kit beams and loops his arms around Alec's neck, but then his expression turns serious. "Did you know I had a sister?" he asks, and Alec holds back a gasp. "Her name was Selene and she was a Peacekeeper. She died a hero."
Alec nods. "I know," he says, and the rock in his throat sticks hard when he swallows and behind him Uncle Paul and Aunt Julia have gone very quiet. "I had a brother."
"I know," Kit echoes solemnly, and he puts a hand on Alec's shoulder. "Dad said he died a hero too."
"He did." Alec blinks back the tears, but it's almost routine now, and he finds that he can still breathe. "I can tell you about them someday, if you want."
Kit smiles, but then he pushes back and squirms free, dropping to the floor. "I was making my models," he says, rocking back on his heels. "You want to help?"
Alec catches Aunt Julia's eye, and this time her smile loses the last of the hard edge and she nods. "Sure," Alec says. "I'd love to help you build something."
Kit grins, all of Selene's joy and none of her malice, though Alec bets he'd show it in a second if anyone pushed him or his parents the wrong way, and he drags Alec away by the hand.
"We're having supper soon, boys," Aunt Julia calls after them. "Don't get too caught up in building, remember, I don't want the food to get cold because you had to finish gluing."
"Yes Mom," Kit says obediently, rolling his eyes companionably at Alec, who winks. He glances at Aunt Julia one more time over his shoulder, but she matches Kit's fond exasperation and shoos them both off.
Outside the sun is dipping behind the trees, long grey shadows reaching out across the yard. Inside the lights cast a warm, orange glow and the house fills with Kit's excited chatter and the sounds of Aunt Julia and Uncle Paul finishing up with cooking; Alec thinks for once he won't mind the oncoming dark.
"Alec!" Kit says, hands on his hips. "Are you helping or what?"
"Sorry, sir," Alec says with a sharp apology salute. "I was just daydreaming." Kit nods, apparently satisfied. He hands Alec a tube of rubber cement and an airplane wing, and Alec kneels down and gets to work.