I actually wrote this back in September. But I was never really happy with it so I revised it This is what I came of my editing. Formerly entitled The Cloth That Feels Like Love Itself.
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13 weeks
"Peeta!" I heard her call to me from upstairs. From the sound of her voice, I knew something was wrong. I raced up the stairs two at a time and flew into the room as she called my name again, this time more shrilly.
"Is everything okay?" I asked, trying to keep the panic out of my voice. She'd drawn up her nightgown over the small swell of her belly, her hands hovering over it as if they would be scalded. "Do we need to call the doctor?"
Katniss sat up, her arms falling protectively over her belly as she began to pant. "Peeta, I felt it," she gasped.
"The...baby?" I said slowly, trying to understand her emergency.
"Yes! I...felt it..I felt it...move." She tried to push the words out over her growing hysteria.
I sat down carefully next to her, as if she would bolt into the woods if I wasn't gentle with her. "That's...good, right?" I said slowly, trying to repress a jolt of excitement. Our baby moved!
She just nodded, her body trembling uncontrollably. I put my arms around her and whispered soft words in her ear to soothe her tremors. When I was sure Katniss was calm, I put my cheek to her stomach and spoke to our baby for the first time.
"Hey, you in there! Go easy on your mom, okay?" I chuckled as my heart did somersaults.
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20 weeks
Katniss said the baby liked my voice. Our little girl sprang into action every time I was near. However, this became awkward when we made love. I liked talking to Katniss because she was so open in that moment and so accessible. I never tired of telling her how beautiful she was, how much I loved her. When you've been through what Katniss and I have been through, you don't waste a chance to show each other how you feel.
But I had to learn to be quiet when we were together because the minute I said a word, the baby kicked, which really ruined the mood for Katniss.
"I just finished reading a book where the main character had to put a pacifier in his lover's mouth to keep her quiet," Katniss told me one night on the porch. She'd taken up reading to calm her nerves because pregnancy inspired every one of her fears and being in the woods was becoming difficult for her. Reading turned out to be one of the most soothing things for her.
"What are you trying to say?" I said warily.
Later, when we were sated, I put my lips on her ever growing belly and told my baby, "If your pacifier ever goes missing, you might want to check with your dad."
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41 Weeks
She was born in May, one week past her due date, just like her mother. A spring baby. Katniss said it was close to poetic. She'd told me many years ago about the day I tossed the bread in the rain and the dandelion in spring. It was humbling to mean that much to someone, especially someone who you loved the way I love Katniss. I've always controlled the more excessive parts of my feelings for her but inside, I was like a star about to go supernova, even after all these years.
It always seemed like a massive symbol for one person to carry. Especially for me. I'm not hope and spring all the time. Visions of the past take hold of me and I still have to grip the back of a chair or something solid till it passes. I have dreams that leave me in a funk for days. But Sophia? She was pure light. Uncontaminated joy. She was the real dandelion in spring. I could barely see past my tears when her cry pierced the air the night she was born.
So when Mrs. Everdeen handed us our daughter for the first time, I told her, "Hello, Sophia. I'm your dad. I'm happy to share this metaphor with you."
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6 months
Sophia was a chubby, dark-haired beauty. Looking at her was like looking at a tiny version of her mother, which I think was the universe's surefire way of making sure I'd fall madly in love with her. Except for her eyes. She was born with those giant blue eyes wide open. I always thought babies were born with their eyes closed, like the stray kittens in the meadow. But not Sophia. She came into the world looking around in that quiet way she would always have of observing everything. She latched right onto her mother's breast from the first and placidly drank her part before falling asleep. She took two naps a day and woke up once at night to nurse before falling right back to sleep. Sometimes Katniss had to wake her to keep her on a feeding schedule.
Mrs. Everdeen stayed with us for the first six months after Sophia was born. She liked to say that Prim was that kind of baby - very calm and even-tempered while Katniss was the fussy, cholicky one. But I begged to differ. I looked in her blue eyes and heard my father in my memories, describing me to my uncle.
"Peeta is a sweet tempered child. He never fusses and is just as happy under a tree as in his crib. I can't understand why his mother is the way she is with him sometimes." A terrible melancholy overtook me at the thought of my mother and the way she'd made me feel all of my life.
I picked up my little girl, holding her close to me, a tiny bundled that seemed to disappear in the protective cocoon of my arms and whispered "You are your father's daughter, except I promise I will never, ever hurt you."
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10 Years
Katniss had a hard time when Sophia started going to school. Her brother, Rye, had been born by then and Sophia had appointed herself his official protector. But no one could protect her from knowing about the revolution.
I guess it was in the fifth grade when it all came together for her - the scars, the nightmares, the Book of Memories, Uncle Haymitch's funny ways. But she didn't tell us with words. I think knowledge like that is too hard for a child to convey verbally. It washes over you like a tidal wave and when you come up from the depths of the sea, your world has suddenly been changed and you feel the first ache of what it means to be grown up.
She drew it in her pictures. She didn't keep a journal like other children. She sketched the major highlights of each day and there was no question about it - her talent put mine to shame. She drew compulsively for days, getting up from her desk only to go to the bathroom or eat.
In the evening, I showed Katniss the pictures, before which she simply sat down and cried. They were of both of us in our official clothing, maybe from her history book - Katniss in her "Girl-on-Fire" dress, me in my "wedding suit." Arena outfits. Mockingjay uniform. Because the world had called into question the identity of the two people she believed were the most stable constructs in her universe and now she had to rebuild us in her mind again. It hurt us to watch her do it and yet we had no choice but to let her undergo her process.
We knew she was done when one day, she gathered all of her supplies and placed everything neatly in a stack before coming out on the porch and sitting on my lap. That was when the questions came and Katniss and I answered them as honestly as we could. I could see the horror in her eyes, especially when her brother came to sit with us. I caught her staring at him numerous times, perhaps imagining what it would be like if little Rye had been reaped and coming up against a new kind of terror she had never known in her life.
That night, she cried out in her sleep. We raced across the hallway to find her sobbing. We didn't need to ask. Katniss had foreseen it the moment she knew she was expecting and it opened up an old wound in her heart. I lay in bed with my girls and little Rye, who had woken up with the commotion and cradled them all against me. The only thing I could tell them was "I can't promise bad things won't happen but I swear I will protect you the best way I can."
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16 Years
"What's wrong with Sophia?" I asked Katniss one night. Sophia had been moping around the house for a few days and was nothing at all like her usual self.
Katniss took a deep breath. "Remember Brandt?"
"Sure." Brandt was Sophia's best friend and one of the several classmates who were a common fixture in our house after school. They'd grown up together and were particularly close to one another.
"Well, he's going to District 9 to study engineering. He leaves this summer after graduation."
"Good for him!" I said, perfectly clueless to the implication of the news to my daughter.
"Peeta!" scolded Katniss, giving me a meaningful look.
I sat back and thought about Sophia's dejection, the news of her friend's departure, and the realization hit me that my little girl had been in love and I hadn't even noticed. Hadn't wanted to notice. She'd gone and grown up right under my nose and, without any input from me, had fallen in love and gotten her heart broken.
I know something about the heartbreak of first love. I was luckier than most. I got to marry and have children with my one and only love. We went through every shade of hell to get to our Happily Ever After, but I got to marry the girl I'd loved since I was five. Yet there had been a period where I had been heartbroken. Six months. And it was worse than putting my arm in boiling water. It scalded. It left burns behind. Even after the initial realization that Katniss and I weren't going to be able to bridge the gap of hurt feelings, the pain just kept coming back in waves instead of subsiding and disappearing altogether.
I felt the fist of anxiety close over my chest at the realization that my little girl was probably feeling this right now. The most powerful lesson you can learn as a parent is that you can't live life for your children. That's their job. You can only give them the tools to do the best they can and get out of their way, ready at every moment to help them pick up the pieces when they're done.
So I knocked on Sophia's door, letting myself in slowly. She sat at her desk, pencil in hand, sketches scattered about. It was her heartbreak laid bare. Scenes of every kind that you would expect of two young lovers surrounded her - stealing a kiss, exchanging gifts, walking in the forest. She was working through her heartbreak the way she worked through everything else - through her drawings.
I sat on her bed and waited for her to need me. It didn't take very long. She came to sit on my lap as she had done so many times as a child and wordlessly cried her heartbreak into the crook of my neck. I whispered those soothing nothings that I said to her mother when she was in the grip of her nightmares and grief. When she was beyond tears and able to listen I told her, "Don't ever regret loving people, no matter how it comes out in the end."
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19 Years
Not surprisingly, Sophia decided to study art. I was ecstatic - drawing was more than a hobby or talent to my daughter. It was her way of thinking, of interacting with the world. It was the most natural thing that she would want to make it her career - to immerse herself in her gift. She placed in every art competition she entered and won many of them.
She was particularly fond of sketching her brother, who was a regular teenage woodsman and probably represented all the romantic possibilities of the forest. An air of wildness clung to him the way it clung to his mother. Rye was external in all things - he said what he thought, was extremely affable, had a quick temper and couldn't stand being inside the house. It was earth and dirt and plants and animals that he wanted. He experienced a direct communion with the natural world.
In contrast, Sophia lived inside her mind. She thought all the time, said little and had the same look Katniss had when she stared at you and you were sure she could see right to the bottom of your soul. She spoke through her pencils and paints. And yet, as quiet and thoughtful as she was, she burned with her own fierce fire. She was ambitious. She took pride in her work. She liked to win.
What undid Katniss and me was not that she wanted to study art. It was that she wanted to study art in the Capitol.
"But why the Capitol?" complained Katniss as we walked to the lake. There were some conversations that had to take place far from listening ears.
"The best school of the arts is located in the Capitol." I tried to use my soothing voice.
"But the Capitol!" she repeated and I thought I saw a shiver run up her spine. Outside of my medical visits, we avoided going to the Capitol at all costs, even after the restrictions on Katniss' travel were lifted. It brought back too many bad memories to both of us.
And yet, how could we deny her this? She had gotten accepted to The National Academy of the Arts, the most exclusive school of arts in all of Panem. Only the best students from each district were admitted to this school and District 12 had historically sent very few candidates to the Academy. Our District prepared some of the best doctors and nurses but few artists came from our ranks.
I stopped her furious stomping along the forest path and put my hands gently on her shoulders. "Katniss, it might be time for us to let this go also. The Capitol doesn't represent death anymore, at least for our youth. The young people see it as a place for opportunity and growth. People don't go there to die anymore. They go there to live."
"But..." she whispered. "She's our daughter!" She burst into tears and I held onto her as she trembled in terror. "It's like the Reaping all over again."
"Shhhh...I know. But the context matters. This is a victory for us, don't you see? This is what we fought for." I ached along with her but I had to be hopeful also. "It's an honor for Sophia and isn't meant to be a source of torment for any of us."
"Peeta...how...how do we.." she stuttered.
"Let her go? When I figure that out, I'll let you know." I answered sadly as I pulled her into my arms.
When she boarded the train to the Capitol in late summer, we still hadn't figured out a way to let her go but we did it anyway. Because that's what parents do. Our children become pieces of our hearts walking the vast world outside of our bodies and though it brings us a raw kind of pain, we let them take those bits of us with them as we release them to take their journeys alone.
That morning, Sophia Mellark was the most beautiful she'd ever been - she wore one of Katniss' dresses and stood radiant and proud like her mother, calm and creative like me, carrying an internal scale that she balanced without consulting with the outside world. There was no war, no blood, nor agony to clip her wings. She knew where she had to go and she went there with eyes and heart wide open. Soon, I would have to share that rare creature with the world. She was my greatest joy and now brought me my greatest pain.
Sophia gripped Katniss tightly, a full head taller than her and yet she sank like a toddler into her mother's arms. She told her mother things in a low murmuring voice that no one else was meant to hear, things that seemed to calm Katniss in a way I could not. She turned to her brother, who grabbed her roughly and planted a violent kiss on her cheek, promising to put an arrow through anyone who messed with her.
And then there was me. And I still hadn't figured out how to let her go. She held onto me the longest and I searched for the words to give her. That she was the song of summer, the chill of autumn, the love that I was always fated to let go, whose every laughter and tear became a souvenir that I would cherish until the day I died. But it was she who filled in the aching silence of the air already heavy with nostalgia for the girl I'd raised and loved above every other woman in the world.
"You told me to not be afraid to love and now I understand why, dad. Because you never really leave the ones you love behind."
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Song Inspiration: She by Charles Aznavour, 1974.