Chapter Text
Mom makes the mistake of breaking the news to Dad and Rosy at the same time. Rosy isn’t sure how she’s supposed to feel—it’s not like Mom and Dad have ever talked to her about the possibility of giving her a little brother or sister before—and she looks at Dad for guidance, but Dad just sits there with his hand covering his mouth and a devastated look in his eyes for what feels to Rosy like the longest time. When he finally speaks, his voice cracks. “When?”
“I’m due in about seven months,” says Mom softly. She looks sadder than usual. “I’ve suspected for a few weeks now, but I didn’t know for sure until today, when I stopped by the healer before I went hunting.”
Dad looks—almost betrayed, which Rosy doesn’t understand: if anything, she’d have thought that Mom and Dad would be the ones talking her into getting excited for a new baby in the family. “I know it’s not what we talked about,” Mom says now, anxiously fingering the tail of her braid, “but I think this could be good for us. A fresh start.”
It won’t occur to Rosy until later the implications of what she thinks Mom is saying: that Mom wants her and Dad to start over with a new baby and leave Rosy behind. For now, she just bites her lip and looks expectantly at Dad, who says, “It’s not your fault, Katniss. Are you sure you don’t want to…? I mean, we don’t have to go through with this. Do we?”
Mom shoots Rosy a fleeting look and steels her shoulders, her nostrils flaring. “I don’t regret this, Peeta. I know that… circumstances are different now… but this is what you always used to talk about: giving Rosy a little sibling.”
“Yes, but that was before we knew that…” Dad looks at Rosy, too, now, and then back to Mom. Rosy feels like they’re having some sort of silent conversation underneath the one they’re having on the surface, and she wants in on it, whatever it is. But instead of speaking plainly, Dad just adds, “We should talk about this more tonight. We don’t have to decide anything right now.”
“Yes,” says Mom, but instead of sounding relieved, she sounds strained.
Rosy cuts in, “What do you mean, ‘we don’t have to go through with this?’ You just said I’m getting a little brother or sister! How do you undo that?”
Mom and Dad’s eyes meet across the kitchen table, and Rosy feels a flare of anger about being excluded, again, as always. “We’ll tell you when you’re older,” says Mom decisively.
Rosy screams a little in the back of her throat, sick of always being told she’s not old enough—to help Dad with his baking, to do more with Mom in the woods than just pick berries and herbs. But when she tries to protest, Dad tells her to stop using his warning voice, and that stops her still.
She knows better than to keep bringing it up in front of Dad, so she waits until after dinner, when Dad goes back to his house for the evening. Her friend Ash says it’s weird that her parents have two houses, but Rosy can’t imagine it any other way, really. They all spend most of their time at Mom’s, but after dinner with Greasy Sae every day, Dad goes across the street to his house for a few hours, giving Rosy some quiet time to read and play with Mom. She misses him when he’s gone, but he usually comes back with a watercolor or something for Rosy to keep in her room, and she always likes that.
Tonight, Dad is quiet and sullen all throughout the evening meal, but after he waves goodbye to Greasy Sae, he gives Mom a long hug and a lingering kiss on the lips. (“Ew!” says Rosy.) Then he plasters on a smile, picks Rosy up, twirls her around in the air as she squeals in delight, and gives her a big smooch on both cheeks. “I love you, Primrose Mellark. I love you so much,” he says earnestly, and she believes him.
Mom busies the both of them with reading from her plant book. It’s always a treat when Mom pulls it out: she doesn’t show it to Rosy often, and when she does, as she lets Rosy handle the pages with careful fingers, Rosy feels like she’s being permitted to hold something sacred. “After this, can we get out your people book?” she asks, but Mom just shakes her head and sets Rosy up with a piece of paper and some crayons.
When there’s a lull in the conversation and she thinks it’s safe, she brings up the issue with the baby again. “Daddy doesn’t want me to have a little brother or sister, does he?”
Sighing, Mom sets her hand on Rosy’s shoulder. “It’s more complicated than that. Daddy wants another baby very, very much, but he’s… scared.”
“What’s he scared of?”
But Mom shakes her head and keeps doodling autumn leaves on her slip of paper. “That’s nothing you need to worry about, honey. Just know that your daddy loves you very, very much, and he’s going to love this baby, too, once it’s been born.”
When Dad comes back over, the whites of his eyes are all red like he’s been crying, and it scares Rosy enough that she doesn’t ask him what’s going on. She’s seen her dad look really, really sad before, but he’s never cried in front of Rosy before.
The noise that wakes Rosy in the middle of the night—no, not just a noise, a ruckus—sends her running out of her bed and over to Mom and Dad’s room. She’s used to waking up to hear unexpected sounds coming from her parents’ room—the sound of Mom crying, generally—and even though Mom always tells her not to worry and to go back to sleep, she always flies down the hall to clamber into her parents’ bed and snuggle up to Mom in between her and Dad until they all fall back asleep. Dad can’t reach out to give Rosy or Mom a hug because of the handcuffs, but Mom wraps her arms around both of them and sings until Rosy falls back asleep.
Ash says that it’s not normal, either, for Rosy’s dad to sleep cuffed to the bedpost, but she’s never really questioned it. It’s just what Dad does, she’s always figured.
But tonight, instead of hearing Mom screaming or crying, she hears her dad’s voice, high and bloody-murder, roaring incoherently into the night. Rosy can’t remember Dad ever sounding like that before. When she rushes to her parents’ room and swings open the door, she hangs back, frightened, and they let her, seeming not to notice her presence in the doorway.
“You’re okay, Peeta. You’re okay,” Mom is saying over and over over the dull-hitting sound of metal banging against wood.
“It’s not okay. She’s a mutt, you’re a mutt, you killed my daughter, you’re sick—you’re sick! I’m going to kill you! I’m going to kill you—”
“Rosy’s fine, Peeta. You’re fine. Everybody’s fine. Just breathe, okay? Rosy’s right down the hall; you’re going to wake her up.”
“Don’t talk about Rosy like that to me!”
“It’s just a nightmare. Peeta, look at me. It’s just a nightmare. It’s me. It’s your Katniss. You’re safe with me.”
Peeta twists around the best he can within his constraints, which isn’t very much, but he manages to roll to face the other way and—sees Rosy in the doorway, and his eyes go big and quizzical. “Rosy?” he asks. “Rosy? How are you here? Am I dead? Did she kill us? Are we—?”
Rosy’s pulse is racing, her skin prickling, and she quickly pulls the door shut and runs back to her room. “Rosy, wait,” she hears her mom call after her, but Rosy doesn’t stop until she’s sitting hunched over underneath a layer of blankets, shivering even though it’s the middle of June.
She doesn’t know how much time passes—it feels like an hour, but it’s probably more like ten minutes, maybe—before she hears a rap on the door. “Rosy, are you still awake?” comes a soft voice. Mom’s.
She doesn’t answer, but the door creaks open anyway, and Mom must see Rosy sitting there underneath her stockpile of blankets because she heaves this big old sigh and comes and sits on the edge of the mattress. The floorboards creak under their combined weight. “I’m sorry you had to see that. Your dad doesn’t have night terrors very often anymore, but when he does…”
Rosy just flops down so that she’s lying on the bed, fiddling with the hemline of one of her blankets. “Is Daddy going to be okay?”
“He’s fine. He’s always fine once he wakes up fully.”
“But he said… he thought you—killed me.”
Rosy can barely get the words out, it’s so far from her picture of her mother—her kind, tired, sad mother who’s never raised her voice at Rosy, not once. “Daddy gets… he gets confused sometimes about what’s real. Something—happened to him when Mommy and Daddy were younger, and now he has nightmares about Mommy sometimes.”
“Oh.”
“It’s nothing I want you to worry about. You shouldn’t have seen what you saw tonight. These are grown-up problems.”
“I can be a big girl for you,” says Rosy, her voice wavering.
She’s expecting Mom to smile or laugh or squeeze her hand, but instead, she just sighs again. “You don’t have to be, sweetheart. You don’t have to be.”
“Are you hurt?” Rosy asks, and when Mom doesn’t reply right away, she peels the covers off her face and sees Mom wiping her eyes.
“I’m fine,” Mom says again. “We’re all fine.” She smiles, but it doesn’t look like one of Mom’s real smiles, and Rosy doesn’t understand why Mom is pretending like everything is normal.
“Will you sleep with me tonight?”
“Sure, honey. Let’s go back to bed.”
“No—just you. With me. In here.”
Inexplicably, Mom turns her head so that Rosy can’t see her face. It’s a bit before she answers. “Yeah, okay.”
She starts—sort of guarding Mom and Dad’s room after that. Rosy knows it’s stupid. Eventually she gets tired and goes back to her own bed, and she can’t protect Mom from what happens after that. But she starts sneaking out after bedtime and sitting against the wall next to Mom and Dad’s door, just in case.
If nothing else, she learns some interesting things.
“I don’t know about this baby, Katniss,” Dad says one night, his voice muffled by the wall separating him from Rosy. “I can’t—I can’t force you to abort it, and I won’t try. That’s not… I’m not going to do that. But I don’t understand how you could possibly think that is a good thing when Rosy already…”
“It’s not too late,” says Mom. “Rosy’s young enough that, if it stops now, she probably won’t remember anything when she gets older. And this baby doesn’t have to go through any of it.”
“Yeah, and how realistic is it to hope for that?” Mom says something in reply, but it’s too muffled by the wall for Rosy to hear, but in response to whatever it was, Dad says, “You have entirely too much faith in me, Katniss. We never should have had Rosy. I should have known that I would—”
Rosy doesn’t hear the rest of whatever Dad has to say, because she’s risen to her feet and run quietly back to her room.
Dad always says he loves her, and Rosy’s always taken that to mean that he wants to be her dad. Isn’t that real?
He certainly acts like he really wants her the next morning at breakfast, when he picks her up, spins her around in the air, dunks her in between his legs and back up high. “Good morning, Rosy-bear,” says Dad with Rosy’s favorite smile of his, and she can’t help but giggle.
Dad is painting commissions this morning, and Mom leaves after breakfast for the woods, leaving Rosy in Dad’s care. Out of all the time she spends with her dad, she likes painting days the best. He always gives her a big sheet of paper and some watercolors on a palette just like the one he uses, and she usually tries to recreate whatever Dad is painting on the canvas on her own sheet of paper. Today, he’s drawing a portrait based off of a yellowing photograph, so Rosy draws people: herself and Mom and Dad, all holding hands. At an afterthought, she draws a little bundled baby in Mom’s free arm. Her new brother or sister.
He ducks downstairs for a few moments to answer a ring at the door, and when he comes back upstairs, she is delightedly drawing a tree line on the wall with her dad’s acrylic paints. “What are you doing, Rosy?” he snaps.
He’s using his warning voice, but she doesn’t listen.
“I wanted to draw pretty grown-up pictures like you, Daddy.”
“Well, don’t. And on the walls? You know better than that! I’m going to have to repaint this entire wall now, you know that?”
It seems like an innocuous thing to get stuck on, but Rosy—it’s almost like she can’t help herself, sometimes. Like she knows she’s digging herself into a deeper and deeper hole, but she can’t stop, because stopping would mean admitting that she’s wrong, and Rosy doesn’t like to be wrong. She picks up her paintbrush again.
“Rosy, stop that, dammit! Are you deaf?”
“No!” she squeals. She’s not sure which part of what he said she’s responding to. She’s not sure it matters.
He bends his knees just enough that his face is up close to hers, but he’s still hunched over her, big and intimidating and everything he wants to be. “What did I do to deserve such an insolent, bratty little girl for a daughter?”
Her skin is prickling again. “I’m not a brat!”
“Well, you could have fooled me!” Dad is properly yelling now, transitioning from his warning voice to his trouble voice. It’s no good when Dad starts using his trouble voice. If he’s using his warning voice, there’s still time to diffuse the conflict, but with his trouble voice… “You want me to send you back, huh?” He smacks her on the cheek; it stings, and she immediately starts to cry, pounding her feet in place on the wooden floor. “Want me to give you up and start over with your new little sibling and forget all about you ever being a part of this family?”
She wonders how bad she must really be, for Dad to want to do that.
He shoves her to the floor and whacks her face again, hard. She wonders what Ash would have to say about this. Something big and important, surely, but there are some things Rosy knows better than to speak out loud where other people can hear them.
She pulls herself to her feet and runs; Dad chases after her, snarling with frustration, but she runs out into the street, where she knows he won’t hurt her; he swings open the door and hollers, “Get back here!” and she’s ready as anything to keep running, the consequences later tonight be damned, until—she sees Mom.
“Rosy?”
“Mommy!”
Mom scoops her up onto her hip and carries her back into the house. Dad is breathing hard, still shouting, and gets back in Rosy’s face when Mom sets her down, but Mom pins him by the throat to the wall and silences him with a taut, “Peeta. That’s enough. Rosy, go to your room and cool off. We’ll talk about this later.”
There’s not very much in the way of entertainment in Rosy’s bedroom—she usually only comes up here to sleep—and she makes a commotion out of kicking the wall until her toes are throbbing. She’s been quiet for about five minutes before Dad cracks open the door and wedges himself inside, wearing that sad look he always gets on after a fight.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper with you, Rosy,” he says, bowing his head. “You shouldn’t have done what you did, but I should have kept my cool instead of… instead of yelling at you. Hurting you.”
Rosy doesn’t say anything.
“I just want you to know that—I’m trying. I’m trying to be better. And when I slip up, it doesn’t mean that I don’t care about you.”
But that’s what he always says. “Okay, Daddy,” she says quietly, fisting her sheets in her hand.
At her parents’ door that night, she hears them talking about it. “I wish I could blame it on the hijacking,” says Dad, and Rosy wonders what that means. “But I can’t. I can’t even blame it on Mom. I mean, yeah, I learned it from her—that’s where it comes from—but I’m a grown-ass adult, and I know better. I just get so…”
Rosy rubs her cheek, the one that Dad struck. She still feels a sort of phantom pain, even though it doesn’t really hurt anymore. Even though he didn’t leave a mark. He always knows better than to leave a mark, and she wonders what Mom and Dad are going to make up to tell Uncle Haymitch about what happened out in the road. Again, Rosy finds herself wishing she hadn’t done it—hadn’t jeopardized their fragile peace.
“It’s not too late to take Rosy and leave,” says Dad now, and Rosy can almost see Mom shaking her head.
“We’re not going to leave you. We’re not going to do that.”
Nervously, she knocks on the door, and it’s a second before she hears Mom tell her to enter. She unlatches the door and pushes it open, looking from Dad to Mom back to Dad again.
“Can you unchain me?” says Dad. Mom deftly undoes his handcuffs, and he stretches out his arms in a big way. He looks sad, somehow, even though he’s smiling. Rosy goes running up to him and nestles into his chest.
He says, “I love you, Primrose Mellark.”
And she believes him.