Disclaimer: I do not profit from this fanwork.

A/N: This is from Peeta's father's point of view, but I am really exploring the reasons for his mother's behavior. As usual, there could be a whole story here, but I'm just digging around a bit.

I was still grieving the sudden marriage of Dew to Lock Everdeen when my older brother was killed.

It was a freak accident when he was walking home from visiting his sweetheart. We Merchants…well, we weren't as used to people dying young as maybe our Seam counterparts. I can't say I was really used to the Seam folk dying, but between starvation and disease, it happened. But we always felt comparatively safe here in Town. I wish it were different, but there it is.

I was devastated. It put things into perspective with Dew, though. I loved her for real, and I was just glad that she was only married and not cold in the ground. And Lock was a decent man and a good, strong worker. He could handle the work in the mines and would feed his family as well as any in the Seam.

After a black week we had to put ourselves back into routine. The bakery didn't run itself, and people needed to eat, us not least (or most, either, I know). And so as I was trying to figure out my new normal day, I got my third real shock.

I was nineteen at the time, old enough to be past the fear of the Reaping, and therefore old enough to pay court to girls. I'd loved Dew for ages, but she was married now, and I didn't think there was another girl her equal in 12. Arranged marriages weren't unheard of—especially among us Merchants, concerned with keeping our children safe in Town rather than marrying into Seam poverty. Many of us thought a friendly marriage and a full stomach better than passion and hunger.

Passion is dangerous, after all. It's too like a fire—if you feel too much it consumes you and if it dies you never feel warm again.

My parents sat me down at our own little kitchen table and asked if I would be willing to marry Bluet, my brother's girl.

She was pregnant.

It happens, you know, and mostly everyone just got married quietly and settled down. Only when the boy is dead, what then?

I guess then you ask the lonely younger brother to step up.

I liked Bluet all right. She was quiet and pretty and a bit of a tease. I didn't really want to marry her, but I didn't want to marry anyone except Dew, and then there was that little bit of my brother to think of. I didn't want to miss out on that. So I married her and eight months later held sweet little Malt in my arms. I couldn't have loved him more if he'd been my own.

Now he's grown he looks just like his daddy.

For the most part, our marriage was smooth enough. Smooth enough to have two more boys of our own and to run the bakery without too many squabbles.

Bluet's thriftiness was sometimes a trial, but I could see how profitable it was in our books.

I guess no woman should have to hear too much about how she's a second choice. Oh, it wasn't from me. I wanted our marriage to be friendly. I wasn't gonna spend my time sulking over Dew. I hope I'm a better man than that.

But it was common knowledge that I'd been thrown over and there are gossips in Town just like anywhere. She heard plenty about it from girls who had been her friends, supposedly, before she married me. She did her best to keep her chin up, but I know it stung.

I could tell her everyday that I chose her and would stand by that choice but it couldn't drown out the chorus.

She managed to ignore it for years, even though I knew sometimes she struggled. It didn't help that she didn't understand my humor and I found her teasing unpleasant, with a caustic edge. And she didn't like that I would slip cookies into children's hands or a day-old loaf into a Seam wife's basket. But we managed and she did well by our children until a couple years after the birth of Primrose Everdeen.

District 12 isn't so big that we don't hear everyone's gossip, no matter how much the Merchants and Seam folk pretend to be separate.

But the gossip took a mean turn when the Seam folk took a hard look at Primrose and began to wonder if Lock Everdeen was really the father.

I don't know how anyone could ever see the way Dew looked at Lock and think that she'd spend time in any other man's bed, even mine. And Prim's coloring was just like Dew's. Just because the first girl took after her father didn't mean the second had to.

For some reason, though, that bit of gossip got to Bluet. She confronted me about it, angrily, and while I assured her that I had never and would never do anything to endanger our marriage, she was always suspicious and unhappy afterwards. I think it hurt her, too, to see Dew with a perfect beautiful little blonde girl. Bluet had wanted a girl badly. When Peeta was born she spent one terrible night crying over him because he wasn't a daughter, but after that she had seemed every bit the devoted mother she had been to Malt and Leven.

The gossip about Primrose and Dew didn't die out until years later, and poor Bluet got more unhappy as the months and years passed. I was sad to see her start to take her feelings out on Leven and Peeta, and I tried to soften her temper and words, but I couldn't be both mother and father to my boys. I know some of her words hurt them.

When Lock died in the mine explosion, Bluet spend the next few months convinced I was going to leave her for Dew. She was so angry and afraid that any little thing sent her into a rage. It's the only time she ever hit one of the kids. Poor Peeta ruined a couple of loaves of bread one night and she went after him with one of the big wooden spoons. I told her after that that I would leave her if she ever did such a thing again. My threat seemed to cement her conclusion that I didn't love her, and from then on she was angry and sensitive even on a good day. But she never physically hurt one of the boys again.

So there it was. We didn't have the friendliest marriage in Town, but it wasn't the worst, either. I'm afraid the boys suffered—Bluet was always chastising Peeta after that and she wasn't much better with Leven—but they had enough to eat and a warm house, and when you consider the folks in the Seam maybe they weren't too badly off.

I wonder sometimes if Bluet would've been better off with some other man. I'm sure her family could have made other arrangements. But I can't regret getting to be Malt's father and I can't regret my own boys. It's hurt me to see their mom so hard on them, but I hope I've loved them enough to have taught them something. You see, when I married Bluet I gave part of myself up, and when the boys were born I gave more. And I've found happiness in the giving. I hope my boys find happiness, too.