Don't worry friends, I haven't abandoned The Long Road. This little oneshot has been scratching away at me for weeks so I just had to write it. The story is in the same universe as The Long Road but it takes places quite a few years in the future. In fact it gives a little spoiler of what is to come with my future writings.
The story is a little angsty but ultimately ends on a positive note. It is written from the perspective of Katniss and Peeta's youngest child. The writing in italics is a flashback/memory of something that occured.
I hope you enjoy!
My name is Pippa. To my friends I'm known as Pip. My siblings call me 'Rocket'. To my Dad I'm 'Cookie' or 'Cupcake' or whatever baked goods are on his mind. But to my Mom…well, that's a long story. The thing is, my first name probably doesn't mean much to you. It's pretty ordinary, not overly girly or extravagant like some of the girls in my class. But my last name…well that you might recognise. You see, my full name is Pippa Mellark; third child and second daughter of Katniss and Peeta Mellark.
According to Uncle Haymitch my Momma decided years ago that she would never have children. My Dad, on the other hand, longed for them. He dreamed about marrying Momma since he was five years old and pictured himself growing old with her surrounded by children and grandchildren. He never once asked Momma for kids; he respected her decision to remain childless and loved her unconditionally for years. Until one day Momma changed her mind. Haymitch says she got pregnant the first time round to please Dad, but a couple of years later it was Momma who wanted to try for a second baby.
My siblings are like miniature versions of my parents. My sister Lily has the same dark hair as our Mom although it's naturally curly so she tends to leave it down instead of in a braid. Her eyes are blue just like Dad's. My brother Archer has Dad's blonde hair and sharp jaw with silver eyes like Mom. They were happy together; a perfect little family of four. That is until Mom got pregnant again. Dad says I was a surprise, not an accident. Lily was seven when I was born, Archer was five.
"No flower names," Is what my Momma said when I came into the world; a small, screaming pink lump of a child. So Dad named me Pippa. He never told me why he chose that name or why Mom named my sister after a flower but not me.
Apparently I cried a lot in my early years. Dad says he spent many nights rocking me back and forth in the kitchen for hours at a time, trying anything to settle me.
"Why doesn't Momma sing her a lullaby?" My sister had asked after a particularly long night when my wailing kept everyone awake until the early hours of the morning. "She used to sing to me and Archer all the time."
"Your Momma doesn't feel like singing," Dad replied with a sigh, holding me tightly against his chest.
The doctors put it down to post-partum depression; the baby blues. In the first few months after my birth she struggled to cope with day to day living. Uncle Haymitch had to help out with school runs and looked after me while Dad ran the bakery. Momma refused the medication the doctors prescribed. She pretended to eat the food Dad cooked for her, only to throw it in the bin the moment he left the house. Even when things got really bad, Dad insisted he could manage on his own. That's when Uncle Haymitch called my Grandma and she came all the way from District 4 to help. She gave my Momma a stern talking to and made her drink a special herbal tea that smelt like dirt and tasted just as bad. Within a week Momma started to get out of bed in the morning without being prompted and even started to hold me in her arms again.
As I grew older I began to feel like the odd one out in our family. Although I have blonde hair too and blue eyes like Dad I don't really look anything like either of my parents. My face is rounder, my nose smaller. And I'm shorter too. Each year on our birthday Dad made us stand with our backs against the door frame so he could measure our height. I'm come up a few inches below the height my siblings were at my age.
None of these things would matter much at all if it weren't for Mom. Things between us were strained. Don't misunderstand me; my Mom loves me very much, she tells me so almost every day. She raised me the same way she raised Lily and Archer and never treated me any different. However after her depression lifted there was still something in the way she looked at me. I noticed it even from a very young age. I would catch her watching me with a pained expression. Sometimes in the middle of a conversation her face would blanch and she would disappear upstairs leaving me to wonder what I had done wrong. I never understood.
Uncle Haymitch says I was a trouble maker right from the start. He says I didn't bother learning to walk. I just went from crawling to running almost overnight and exhausted my parents daily as they tried to keep up with me.
"Peeta, I thought you were watching her!" Momma accused Dad loudly as she stripped me of my soaking wet sundress. My siblings giggled behind me so I whipped my head round, flicking water droplets everywhere, and stuck out my tongue in response to their ribbing. Momma gave me a stern look.
My Dad, bent double with his hands resting on his knees, panted heavily. "I was watching her!" He wheezed.
"Pippa saw the lake and started running," My sister explained with laughter in her voice. "Daddy tried to catch her but Pippa ran too fast!"
I felt pride at being about to outrun my father at the age of four. I didn't understand back then about his leg.
"She took off like a rocket!" Dad exclaimed. Even Momma couldn't help but laugh a little.
The nickname stuck and as I got older I only got faster. I ran everywhere. I ran to and from school, I ran to town, I ran to the lake. I ran in the house too, knocking over lamps and bumping into doorframes and tables. I was a little accident prone. At age eight I fell out of the old oak tree in the school yard and broke my leg. My friend Coral says I was really brave because I didn't cry.
Momma doesn't like hospitals so Dad came down and held my hand as the doctor wrapped my leg in plaster. They said I certainly wouldn't be running anywhere for a while.
That's when I cried.
To cheer me up the doctor said my cast could be coated in any colour I wanted. Of course I chose my favourite colour; yellow.
"We're back!" Dad bellowed as he helped me to hop up the stairs into our house and through to the kitchen. The doctor gave me crutches but I hadn't yet got the hang of them.
"Way to go Rocket!" Archer greeted me with a high-five. "Is it broken?"
I nodded and offered up my cast covered leg as proof. "In two places," I replied.
"Look how bright that thing is!" Lily exclaimed, pointing at my florescent yellow cast.
"It's my favourite colour," I replied with a shrug, losing my balance slightly and wobbling on the spot. Lily laughed.
"You look like a wobbly duckling," She teased with a wide a smile. "Maybe that'll be your new nickname; little duck!"
The sound of glass shattering had us all jumping out of our skin. Momma, who had been washing up at the kitchen sink, was now frozen in place. A broken tumbler lay in pieces around her feet. Dad rushed to her side and began whispering something in her ear. My sister, the smile wiped clean off her face, now looked terribly guilty.
"I'm sorry Momma," She apologised tearfully.
Momma accepted her apology with a nod. She glanced at me, that familiar look of pain lingering in her eyes, before disappearing upstairs.
"Your Momma's not feeling well," Dad had said, sweeping the glass fragments into a dustpan.
Just before I turned eleven my parents showed me 'the book'. They told me about the Hunger Games and about their involvement in the war. They didn't tell me all the details of course; just enough to prepare me for when the subject came up at school. Sure enough, that summer in history class Miss Green handed out a new study book called "Faces of the Revolution". None of the kids in class were surprised to see pictures of my parents in that book. Everyone in 12 knows about them; they're sort of famous. However, when Miss Green played a video clip of my mother's reaping the entire class gasped and suddenly all eyes were on me.
"Primrose Everdeen!"
That was the name called out by the strange multi-coloured woman on the screen. The camera turned to a small girl with blonde hair in two braids and blue eyes that were wide with fear and disbelief, much like my own eyes at that very moment. This girl…looked like me! And apparently my classmates thought the same.
Miss Green called for quiet when the whispering got too loud. When the bell rang signalling the end of the school day I stuffed my study book into my back pack and ran home. That night under my bed sheets I read the book cover to cover by torchlight. My parent's story featured heavily, but there was more information than they had originally shared with me. My mother wasn't reaped for the games, she volunteered…to save her sister! A sister I knew nothing about until that day. I silently wondered if my siblings knew, and if they did, why I was never told. But the more I read, the more I began to understand.
I was born with the face of a ghost.
Momma's sister, my aunt, was a war casualty. The book was vague on details but it listed Primrose Everdeen among the District 13 medics who were killed in an explosion in the Capitol. She was just thirteen years old.
"Why did no one tell me?" I had asked Uncle Haymitch the next afternoon, dropping the open book into his lap as he dozed in his rocking chair. He had groaned and dragged a hand through his thinned out grey hair.
"You'll have to be more specific, Pip-Squeak," He replied, flicking through the pages of the book with raised eyebrows.
"Why did no one tell me that Mom had a sister? Or that she died? Or that I look exactly like her?!"
"Those are questions for your parents," Haymitch responded as he closed the book and pulled me onto his lap. "All I can tell ya is that your Mom loved your Aunt Prim more than she had ever loved anyone. She spent her whole life tryin' to keep her safe. When Prim died, your Momma fell apart. Everything she'd ever feared became reality."
"Is that why she didn't want kids at first?" I asked curiously. Haymitch simply nodded. I hung my head sadly. "I remind Momma of Aunt Prim don't I…"
Uncle Haymitch had nothing else to say.
Back at the house I locked myself in the upstairs bathroom with a pair of kitchen scissors. The first snip made my lip wobble and tears prick in my eyes. I wasn't a girly girl like Lily but I still loved my hair. I loved how it flew behind me as I ran through the meadow and how it hung round my face like a curtain when I leant over my desk at school. I once asked Momma to tie it in a braid like hers but she had refused. Now I knew why.
Steeling myself, I took a fistful or hair and began to chop. Soon the entire bathroom floor was carpeted with blonde locks.
"Momma," I called delicately as I stepped into my parent's bedroom. I could hear Mom humming a gentle tune as she ran a dusting cloth over her dressing table. She turned to greet me with a smile; a smile that dropped as soon as she saw me.
"Pip…" She stuttered as she approached me. Her hair reached out to touch me. "What have you…? What happened to your hair?"
"I cut it," I replied bluntly, and brushed her hand away. "Momma, I want to know about Aunt Prim."
Momma's face turned white as a sheet. Her arms went limp at her side and for a moment I thought she might pass out. My determined stubbornness turned quickly to concern as I helped her to sit on the edge of her bed.
"Who told you?" She asked, her voice a faint whisper and her eyes fixed on something far away.
"I found out at school," I explained. "I know you volunteered for her at the reaping. I know that she…died. And I know that I look like her."
Momma said nothing for almost two minutes before she turned to look at me with an expression I had never seen on her face except for in the photographs from the "Revolutions" book. She looked furious.
"The school had no right!" She shrieked, drawing attention from Dad who had been down the hall in his art room.
"Katniss?" He called frantically as he ran into the room. He took one look and me, at my hair, and seemed to understand exactly what was going on. He rushed to Mom's side and held her as she wailed and cried. I had never seen her look so broken. I quietly slipped from the room, ran down the stairs and pushed past my brother on my way out of the front door.
That evening I sat under a fir tree in the meadow with my legs pulled up to my chest. As the sun dipped below the horizon I felt the summer evening breeze tickle the back of my neck, a strange sensation I hadn't felt when my hair was long. I barely acknowledged my sister when she sat down beside me. At eighteen she cut quite the fine figure. She had suitors queuing up at the door, much to Dad's displeasure.
"I like it," She said, stroking the wispy ends of my hair. "Makes you look all grown up."
I smiled in thanks and leant forward to rest my chin on my knees. "I never meant to upset Mom," I said quietly. "I just wanted to know about Aunt Prim."
My sister sighs and puts her arm around me. "You could have come to me, Pip," She said. "I could have answered your questions."
"I didn't know it was such a big secret," I grumbled.
"It wasn't supposed to be a secret…" Lily explained. "Mom just…finds it really hard to talk about her."
"Because she died in the war?" I asked, turning my head sideways to look my sister in the eye. She gnawed her lip, an anxious tick clearly learned from our mother.
"Yes," She replied softly. "But there are things you don't know. Things you might not understand."
"Try me!" I begged. "I'm not a little kid anymore."
With a sigh my sister acquiesced.
To hear of my parent's experiences, the ones the history books failed to mention, was both a relief and a burden. My sister gave me the untold story of our mother's past. How she had been thrust into early adulthood when her father died and was left to take care of her younger sister when her mother fell into a deep depression. She explained in great detail what it really meant to be reaped for the Hunger Games, not once but twice! How, at her age, they were forced to kill innocent children for the entertainment of a sick and twisted generation. She told me about ex-president Snow and his wicked deeds; how he blackmailed Mom into performing for the crowd in order to save her family's lives. How she and Dad were left with no choice but to agree to an arranged marriage to pacify the angry people in the Districts. And then, when Mom finally realised that her feelings for Dad were real, not scripted, he was torn away from her and made to endure torture of the worst kind.
"It took them a long time to heal," Lily concluded. "Even after Archer and I were born they still suffered with nightmares. Sometimes Dad would get confused, even angry. Mom would stay in bed for days on end and refuse to eat. Haymitch used to help a lot. But they got better after a while."
"Until I was born," I added sadly but my sister tilted my chin up and looked at me seriously.
"No," She said firmly. "You were a bit of a surprise; Mom thought she couldn't have any more children. But I remember her and Dad being so excited and I was too. I was desperate for a little sister and I got exactly what I wished for."
I smiled as she brushed my choppy fringe out of my eyes and placed a kiss against my forehead.
Lying in bed that night my mind replayed everything Lily had told me. Mom and Dad really had been through hell and back to get to where they were today. But if Mom really was that happy when I was born, why did I feel like nothing more than an unwelcome reminder?
A soft knock at my door pulled me from my thoughts. I squinted as light from the hallway streamed into my dark room, the silhouette of my mother standing in the doorway.
"Did I wake you?" She asked as I reached over to switch on my bedside light.
I shake my head 'no' and prop myself up against the pillows, drawing my legs up to make space for Mom as she sat on the edge of the bed. She fiddled anxiously with her hands, staring down into her lap for quite some time for taking a deep breath.
"I'm sorry about this afternoon," She said softly, taking my hand in hers.
I swallowed thickly. "It's ok," I whispered. "I'm sorry I upset you…again."
Momma's brows knit together into a frown. "Again?" She asked.
I sighed and picked at a loose thread at the hem of my pyjama top. "Yes again. I always seem to be upsetting you."
"Why would you say that, Pippa?" She questioned, her eyes locked on to mine.
"Because I remind you…of her," I replied, emotion cracking in my voice. "I thought that if I changed how I look you wouldn't be so sad all the time. I thought that maybe you stop seeing me as a reflection of your sister and start to see me as your daughter!"
With that the tears began to pour from my eyes. The sob ribbed from my throat before I could stop it and I pushed my fist into my mouth to prevent another one escaping.
Momma gaped like a fish for a moment before pulling me into a fierce embrace. "Oh my darling," She cried, her hands stroking my back and soothing my sobs. "I am so sorry."
I sniffed and wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, pulling out of her arms. "Is that why you find it so hard to look at me?"
A tear trickled down her cheek and she reached out and cupped my face in her hands. "Sometimes," She admitted quietly. "But I never meant to make you feel like this."
"Is it such a bad thing?" I asked. "To look like her?"
Mom shook her head and brushed a tear off my cheek with her thumb. "No, it's not. You're just as beautiful as she was. I loved my sister very much, just as I love you. And had she been alive today she would have adored you."
I smiled. "I would have liked to have met her."
Momma sighed and let her hands drop to her lap. "Since the day you were born I have been overcome with such great fear."
"Fear of what?" I asked, squeezing Momma's hand gently.
"Fear of losing you," She replied. "You may be the spitting image of my sister but I see myself in you more often than not. Your personality, your spirit…you're very much your mother's daughter. And I worried that being so much like me could only do you harm in the long run."
My eyes widen. "I always thought I was the odd one out. I thought Lily was just like you and Archer like Dad. I never really…fit in."
Mom pulled me against her chest again and kissed the crown of my head. "You fit right here, Pippa Mellark," She told me sternly. "Don't you ever forget that."
"I always wanted to be like you," I said confidently when we pulled apart again. "You are brave and selfless and strong. You survived the Hunger Games twice and lead a rebellion!"
Momma frowned again and I wondered briefly if I'd just got my sister into trouble. "None of that matters if I haven't succeeded in being a good mother," She responded with a troubled expression. "I only ever wanted to protect you. I hope you know just how much your father and I love you."
Leaning forward, I pressed a kiss to her cheek.
"I know, Momma. I love you too."
After that night two years ago things changed for the better. But when I turned thirteen I fully expected Mom to slip back into her depression especially as my birthday was so close to the date Aunt Prim died. Dad said that we should carry on as normal, although Lily insisted on visiting twice a week. She got married and moved into town a year ago. Archer moved to District 3 around the same time to study mechanics but even made arrangements to come home.
I awoke that particular morning in December with a knot of anxiety in the pit of my stomach. The house seemed quiet which was not a good sign. But as I padded down the stairs I could hear gentle murmurings from the kitchen. Mom, Lily and Archer all sat around the table while Dad stood at the kitchen counter icing a dozen cupcakes.
"What's going on?" I asked cautiously, accepting a cup of hot tea from my sister.
"We're spending the day together as a family," Dad replied simply.
After breakfast Momma suggested we take a walk. We bundled ourselves up with coats and scarves and gloves. Dad packed a small bag with a flask of hot chocolate, five cups and the freshly decorated cupcakes.
The path we took was familiar to us all. Mom and Dad took us to the meadow many times during our childhood. Snow had already begun to settle on the ground and it crunched beneath our boots. My parents walked slowly, hand in hand, as they lead us all across the meadow towards the edge of the forest. They came to a stop in front of a row of spindly bushes under a willow tree. They were bare from the winter frost and yet I still recognised them as primrose bushes.
"I never got to bury my sister," Momma spoke suddenly. "Years ago your father planted primrose bushes along the side of the house, as a sort of memorial to her. I appreciated why he did it but the Village had only been Prim's home for about a year. I wanted to create a more meaningful resting place for her. Our old home was destroyed in the bombings and The Seam was completely rebuilt. The only place that felt right was out here in the meadow." Momma paused and crouched down gently, brushing dirt and snow away from a gleaming silver plaque that read: 'Primrose Everdeen – Beloved Sister'. Dad touched her shoulder comfortingly but remained silent.
"She never actually came out here with me. The forest was dangerous back then but it was where I came to do what I had to do to take care of her. This forest fed us and kept us alive. I knew that she could rest safely here."
One by one, my siblings and I knelt down beside our mother. Dad reached inside his bag and handed us each a cupcake, masterfully decorated with an iced primrose flower.
"Prim loved cupcakes," He said with a reminiscent smile.
Like a dam opening Mom began to tell us everything and anything she remembered about her sister. She took care of animals, she lost her first tooth at the age of six, she was popular in school and always got good grades, she never complained about being hungry even when she was literally starving. She was wise and sensible but could tell the best jokes to cheer up anyone feeling blue. She loved children.
"Well Aunt Prim," My sister announced, interrupting Momma's heartfelt monologue and gently touching the silver plague with her gloved fingers. "It's a good job you love kids…because in about seven months you'll be a Great Aunt."
As my sister's revelation sank in and Dad burst into tears of joy I couldn't help but wonder if Aunt Prim was perhaps floating on a cloud somewhere, watching us all with a smile.
My family has taught me so many important lessons throughout my life but the most comforting of all is that even after tragedy and heartache things can be good again.
My Dad once said that our lives aren't measured in years; they are measured in the lives of the people we touch around us. Aunt Prim touched me and yet I never even knew her!
Momma will always grieve for the sister she lost. But because of that sacrifice, Momma now has other reasons to be happy.
As my parents and siblings began to walk back across the meadow I paused for a moment to touch the plaque dedicated to my Aunt. As the voices of my family faded away the sound of the wind in the trees became almost like a melody; the words to which will forever be written in my memory.
Deep in the meadow, under the willow
A bed of grass, a soft green pillow
Lay down your head, and close your sleepy eyes
And when you awake, the sun will rise.
Here it's safe, here it's warm
Here the daisies guard you from harm
Here your dreams are sweet and tomorrow brings them true
Here is the place where I love you.
I got feels writing this so I hope it touched you too.
Please do leave your thoughts and comments. I'd love to hear what you make of my characters.
Thank you!