early in the mornin'. elegant

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

They say that as time passes the sting of loss lessens. Like a scar on your skin, it begins to fade, disappearing as time goes on until it fades to a distant memory. They say that you simply learn to live with the new weight you carry, and that you grow stronger from it. Opal is not the type of person who wants to forget her scars. It was hard to forget when your son was the spitting image of his dead father.

She’d had a dream last night. Entangled in the blankets with her had been Potato. Peering from between a hand with a shiny ring he had turned to her, before covering her cheeks in a thousand kisses. She had giggled trying weakly to defend herself from the onslaught. His hands had raced over her skin, touching every inch of her, there had been no missing leg, no broken hand. She had been whole, he had been whole. In the midst of their play a young boy had come tumbling into the room, leaping onto their bed, hurling himself between them demanding their attention. And so the onslaught of kisses changed targets and before young Ky knew what had hit him he was being tickled, and littered with kisses from his father. His childish giggled had filled the air within the room.

Amidst her foggy brain she could smell his scent in the air as she’d pulled out his wedding ring from the drawer beside her bed. She’d stopped wearing it years ago after the chain had broken when Ky had pulled it off when he was younger. Even though she had replaced the chain days after he had broken it, she’d been too scared to put it on again. She twirled the ring in her fingers, the metal was cool against her skin, the weight so very familiar. More familiar to her own hands then they had ever been to his.

Opal didn’t even need to check the calendar anymore to know what day it was today. For seventeen years she had lived through it, and for however many more she would remember it.

Wandering down the stairs she tucked the ring into her pocket, making her way through to the garden. The air was crisp, and the sun had only just begun to rise. Her garden was large and vast, a continuous project that she and Ky had worked on almost every day for the past decade. It had been the one thing she knew how to do, even if she hadn’t quite known how to be a mother. She’d really messed that up, for the first six years of Ky’s life she’d really messed it up. When he had stopped talking the only thing she could think of doing was bringing him to the garden, sitting beside him and simply just being with him.

Opal kneeled down beside the potatoes that had started to sprout, weeds had worked their way into the foliage, and she gently pulled them out. The world around her was quiet, it smelled of fresh air and soil, sweat and sunshine, everything that reminded her of him. She could feel the lingering warmth of his lips against her cheek, of his bright smile as he laughed with his son. She sighed, leaning backwards onto her heels, turning her eyes to the sky.

She wasn't sure how long she'd been sitting that way before she heard his soft steps. Smiling she turned to him, "we have a problem," she pointed at the small collection of weeds she'd plucked, "they're invading the potato field, we've got to stop them." 

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

He'd stood in front of the calendar last night, toothbrush hanging from his lips. The date was marked in red like it was every year, an odd little reminder. It was strange that he even wrote it in, he didn't need to. He always knew when the day was coming. It was always there in the back of his mind, like a storm cloud slowly brewing on the horizon, inevitable and bringing the promise of rain.

He rose early like always, shoes in hand and creeping down the stairs so he wouldn't wake his mom up on his way out. It wasn't that she was against his five AM runs, she was just a light sleeper, always had been for as long as he could remember. Ky noticed that his runners had begun to wear through again and he let out a small sigh as he laced them on the front stoop of their home. They were his third pair already that year.

Ky started his run at a light jog, mind slipping down slowly into the morning's events seventeen years ago. He'd watched the footage more than once over the years since that first time. His mom didn't know he had but when he'd been doing therapy long enough, his doctor decided it'd be good for him and Ky had memorized every moment of the day his father had died.

At this time of the morning, he'd still been sleeping, heavily wounded from the fight the day before. The sun had only just begun to rise and his father had laid in the sand, brow furrowing before he'd blinked awake to a sky filled to the brim with a hot sun. Ky's feet bit into the dirt as he turned off the road and into the woods, feet deciding on his ten-mile route. As he went, he replayed it all in his head, from the moment that Potato Earnest and the eventual victor, Leon Krigel spotted each other to Leon's final strike.

When he'd been six years old and watching it for the first time, he hadn't fully understood what he was seeing and he'd missed the last words of his father, who died kneeling in the parched earth. But he'd watched it so many times that he knew it probably better than anyone.

"Don't let her be alone. I love you Opal Earnest."

Ky leapt lightly over a small stream that ran through the woods and found himself back on the road, feat hitting pavement once again. He ran for a while, head empty except for the sounds of birds waking up in the trees around him and the slight morning breeze that ran through the branches.

There was a lot of theories on who his father had been speaking to before he'd told his mom that he loved her but no one really seemed to know. His mom had told him that he'd never known his aunt was still alive before he'd died so it hadn't been her. Ky liked to think that his father had been telling him not to leave his mom alone. But his dad hadn't even known that Ky was coming.

He had no idea that he existed.

Ky came to a halt again at the entrance to Victor's Village and took a moment to catch his breath. One was starting to wake up which meant that his mom was probably already moving too. This day was always hard for her and Ky wanted to be there for her but his grief always felt hollow. She grieved the man she knew and he grieved the loss of never even having met him.

A part of him couldn't help thinking that the pain he felt was contrived.

When he made his way up to the house, he skipped the front door and went around back to where the greenhouse and the garden beds were, knowing that his mom started every morning working on them. Ky still remembered the first time she pushed his hands into the dirt under hers and showed him how to work the earth. A decade later, and the garden was still always expanding. He'd inherited his parent's green thumbs.

His mom knelt in front of the potatoes where the vegetables were planted and he approached slowly, knowing she'd hear him no matter how quietly he moved. Somehow, she always seemed to know where he was in the house as if she had a tracking device on him. She turned to smile at him before he made it all the way to her and Ky blinked, analyzing the shape of her mouth and then her eyes before smiling back tentatively. The smile reached her eyes, she actually seemed happy.

He knelt beside her but not too close, sweat still dripped down his forehead from the run, it was gross.

"I swear we just weeded this yesterday," he said softly before getting to work on pulling some from the ground, "bet dad made them grow extra fast for us."

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

Opal chuckled, the image of a grinning Potato delicately poking new weeds into the soil was one she’d have never thought of. He’d protect his garden, safekeeping it, it was one of the reasons why she spent every single morning in this garden. She had to keep it safe, care for it just as he would have. Pulling out another weed she looked over at her son. She wondered what this day meant to him, what the name meant to him. She couldn’t fathom having to try and build a person, and an image from nothing more than memories that Opal and Nightshade had shared.

There had been a lot of moments over the years where she had wondered if it was worth it. If trying to get Ky to understand and know who Potato had been meant anything. At times she felt like she was inflicting her own pain onto him, wanting one other soul to share it. She had never yearned for the parents she hadn’t known, she had just tried to pretend they hadn’t existed, it had been less painful that way.

There was no wondering why they had abandoned her, no wondering what her life could have been. But Ky, she subjected him to those notions all the time, it was there when she woke screaming in the night, or when she sobbed his name into a pillow. It was there on days like today or every weekend when they gardened together.

She wondered if he saw the garden as an investment towards Potato, his gravestone in their house, something they could touch when his was so far away. The garden meant a lot to her, it was her way of preserving the few small moments she had had with Potato. Was it also not her reprieve? The one thing she had clung to all her life to get through the good and bad, right? She wasn’t so sure anymore if she was just trying to tell herself it was for her, or if it had always been for him.

“I know,” Opal looked away, a finger playing in the dirt as she tried her best to control her emotions as she spoke. “I know I don’t talk about him much.” She looked over at Ky, she could see the sweat on his forehead, he always woke up early, going for runs that sometimes lasted a short time or some that lasted hours. They both had their own ways of dealing with their pain.

“You can ask me- you know, like ask me questions about him -about us. I’d tell you anything you wanted to know.” She moved a hand to her lap, fingers pulling gently at the fabric on her leg.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

His mom was someone who was unbearably strong. There was a time when she wasn't of course. People knew about that, still asked him about it sometimes at school just to get on his nerves, but to Ky, Opal Earnest had always been strong. He hadn't really known any better since he could remember, things had always just been as they were. Sometimes his mom had good days and he remembered those too, long summer nights when she'd held his chubby hands in hers and read him books all night long until they both fell asleep cuddled in a chair on the porch. They'd been less common than the days he'd creep around the house all morning, his mom's shut door a barrier too heavy to pass, but they'd happened and he remembered them, kept them close like precious gems.

To him, his mom was strong. Few would argue now, she was still one of the best trainers in One and everyone in Ky's generation knew her name, a household legend. His mom was famous and Ky was too by default, despite how hard she tried to keep him out of the spotlight. He hadn't ever known what to do with that, hadn't felt like he'd done anything to earn it. He was just the by-product of a tragic love story. A lot of what he was, was inherited, a strange concoction of mixed emotions that he wasn't entirely sure were his at all. He knew what people wanted him to be and he had been raised in the grief of his mom and his aunt. That grief had become a part of him too.

Everything he knew about his dad was stuff he'd pieced together from the footage of his time in the games, his interviews and his reaping. Nightshade had some pictures of him from when he was small, but there were only a couple. He didn't want to ask his mom about him, didn't want to prod at that pain. He had assumptions about him, things that he'd come up with on his own, but that was it. The first thing people always wanted to ask him is if he missed his dad, if it was hard growing up without him but Ky didn't know. He didn't have any experience to compare it to.

He did know what it was like to grow up with his ghost, though.

Potato Earnest was always there, haunting them, a presence in the house but always in another room than the one they were in and it was heavy, weighing them down. He'd had to come to terms with it over the years, never entirely getting over the stage of anger, aimless but there. He couldn't blame his dad for dying just as much as he couldn't blame his mom for having him.

Ky pushed his hands deep into the earth, fingers pushing against the slightly chalky feel of a dirt-encrusted potato skin. He hadn't really wanted to talk about this today, despite the fact that he'd known it was going to come up. It was his father's day after all, also the anniversary of the day when his mom's world had fallen apart around her. It wasn't a good day and he didn't want his mom to be sad.

"It's fine mom," he said, not quite looking at her, "We don't have to talk about him."

But he wanted to, he really wanted to. There was so much about his dad that he couldn't know just from watching reruns over and over, so much about his dad that didn't make sense to him at all that he'd never had an answer to. Sometimes, his aunt Nightshade had told him stories about growing up with him out on the farms on Eleven and those were good little tidbits, never really enough though. It felt like no one really knew what was going on in his head. Except maybe for one person.

He pulled his hands out again quietly, staring down at the dirt stuck under his fingernails.

"Actually," he said, "I wanted to know how you knew dad was the one. From what I understand, you barely knew each other but you married him after he'd only been at the training centre for a week."

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

The winds around them had shifted, and Opal could taste the storm that was coming in. The smell of the fresh crisp air had shifted too. There was a storm coming, she thought. How poetic. She estimated that they had another thirty minutes or so before the rain would first begin. She had always been good at that. It wasn’t a hard thing to learn when you had pretty much lived your entire life outside. Ky’s next question brought her thoughts to a halt. Of all the things he could have asked. She shook her head, a bemused look crossing her lips.

“The one…” She repeated, as she pulled out another weed. She hadn’t known, she didn’t believe that there was some magical rule that decided that another person was your soul mate. There was no tether that connected you, no string that you followed, or dream you tried to chase. Potato had not been the smartest man in the world, but by Ripred he had been the kindest. There had been something so perfect, so freeing about finding a living soul who hadn’t known who she was. He had been calm, patient, and comfortable. There had been no ounce of pressure to pretend to be someone she wasn’t. There was familiarity, there had been this pure bliss when she had been with him.

The one was a fairytale. “It’s not something you know,” she turned to face Ky, “it’s a choice you make.” She shifted her attention to the garden for another moment, “when I met your father back in district 11 I was on the edge of alcoholism, I slept maybe an hour a night -I was too scared to sleep. I was a mess, but he didn’t know who I was, and everyone knew who I was. He simply saw someone who looked like they needed some help.”

“So he helped me, and he didn’t even know at that moment how much his actions and words meant.” He had been a respite in a raging storm that had threatened to destroy her. She didn’t think she would have made it if not for that small interaction. She hadn’t been strong, not like the other victors, three weeks into her victory and she had already been ready to die.

She had been yelled out by the Capitolites when they’d found her in his field. After all, it had been her victory tour. It had been her parade around the districts, throwing her in front of people who despised her, families who wished she had been their child. “You don’t have to fully know someone to make a choice. And maybe it was all the trauma, the fear, and pain, but I made a choice. I decided that I wanted to be with someone who made me feel peace.” It had been the only choice in her life that had been so simple to make. The only one that had felt so right.

"I knew that I could be happy for the rest of my life, I knew that he could do it. And I knew again when I saw him during the drought, and again when I saw him in the Capitol.” She smiled, reaching over she placed a hand on Ky’s shoulder. “The pain doesn’t hurt so much anymore, I know it took me a long time -too long to get past most of it, I’m sorry I took so long.” She felt light, the pain that normally weighed her down felt manageable, tameable, controllable. She hadn’t felt so incredibly light in a long time.

With a gentle smile, she said, “besides if I hadn’t made that choice I wouldn’t have you.” She would go through it all again so that she could have Ky.

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

He'd always been an intense boy, not that he was trying to be. A lot of his childhood had been spent in silence, watching and listening, experiencing everything in the moment and deeply. Opal had taught him to take in the earth around him from a young age, they'd spent so many mornings in the garden together, eyes shut and his hands curled into fists on his knees. He'd been raised in a shroud of intensity, a grief that was always there like a shadow over the sun and he was a watcher, a waiter.

Sometimes it could be a lot to handle.

Ky listened carefully, fingers focused on pulling weeds up by the root without his brain needing to get involved. His head was a database of plants, everything that his mom had taught him was carefully stored inside of it and it ran on a different channel at this point. It could go on without him.

Opal told him a lot he hadn't known about his dad. He didn't know that they'd met before the reaping, even more than once. It was an odd blow to understand that no matter how much he collected scraps of information, Potato was someone he'd never truly know. How did people deal with grief when the hole inside him only ever seemed to widen?

The fear that he would never be happy was a secret one that he didn't share with his mom. He knew how much he'd scared her when he was a kid, how much she was scared of losing him and he didn't want to be that pain for her anymore. Talk of sadness scared people and made them uncomfortable but Ky had lived with it for so long that he was beginning to worry that it was just who he was. If he couldn't be happy, he wanted to pretend that he was at least.

His mom was sharing more with him in these few minutes than she probably had in years. It was fair, he'd always been scared of upsetting her and she'd been scared of breaking him, what were they supposed to do? He knew that a lot of victors didn't deal with the games well, he'd followed the storylines of all of them closely. If his dad was here, would he even still be the same man that Opal remembered so fondly? Or would he have been just another broken thing?

What if his dad was here?

There was a question he had, a deep one that stayed in the pit of him, too vast to live on his lips. It was something he'd always wondered but he was too afraid to ask her. He felt his mom's hand on his shoulder and he swallowed it back again. It was a bitter question, maybe not even real. It was just something he often asked himself late at night when there was no one else to hear it.

"It's ok mom," he said in response to her apology, "You couldn't help it, it's better now."

He had so many anxieties. What if I never have the chance to make a choice? What do you think dad would think of me? Do you think I'm capable of love? What if I'm like this forever?

Do you wish dad was here instead of me?

If you could trade me for dad would you?

His therapist had told him at their last session that the questions he asked himself, the thoughts that pushed themselves around in his head, were just that. They weren't facts, just things that he had perceived and blew out of proportion. He was supposed to tame them back, answer them himself.

Mom loves you. She loves you, and she'd never trade you.

But he never quite believed himself, the question had been there as long as he could remember.

Ky furrowed his brow and realized that he'd been silent for too long. He pulled his hands away from the small bundle of weeds at his knees and looked at Opal, at her peaceful expression. He didn't want to be the storm cloud on this day. He had to keep it light.

"What's your favourite memory of dad?" he asked.

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

After she had finished speaking they fell into a silence that felt heavy. It was as thick as the air surrounding them, it felt like the storm that was kilometres away, waiting to bring its wrath upon them. There was no denying that within the first six years of his life she had known Ky, but hadn’t fully been there. It had been a surface level of attention, feeding him, playing with him, tucking him in at night, a process of familiarity. Habits that she had formed, but she had struggled to go further into her relationship with him.

It hadn’t been out of resentment, it hadn’t been because she didn’t love him. It was because she had been too scared to commit. The rawness and pain from losing Potato had left her a shell of the person she thought she was. She had truly believed she had been stronger than that pain, but it had beaten her, hit her, kicked her. The reality had been that she had feared losing Ky, and she had been scared of creating an emotional connection. It was hard to allow yourself to be consumed by another person’s life.

Too much time had passed before she had realised that she was so incredibly wrong. That the ideas and notions she had based her choices on were so incredibly stupid. She was hurting him, and in turn it was hurting her more than she could imagine. There was no point in her life that she could remember, after finding out she was pregnant, where she had wished to turn back time. You can’t change the choices you make, you can only accept them, you can only embrace them.

She loved him with her entire heart.

He looked deep in thought, an almost pained expression on his face as he continued pulling at the weeds. The silence grew between them, and Opal wondered if he would even reply. She wondered what was going on in his mind. Too long. It took too long before he stopped pulling the weeds as if he had realised he had taken too long. He turned to face her, looking at her face for a moment, and she felt her expression shift to concern.

“What’s your favourite memory of dad?” He asked.

Opal frowned, confused by the almost abrupt question as if he was protecting himself from whatever deep thoughts had captured him. She pursed her lips, there was something more going on here. She knew him.

“You know,” she said as she stood up, “I like to think of myself as somewhat knowledgeable when it comes to you.” Opal sat in the patch of dirt right beside Ky, reaching a hand over to gently touch his arm. “What’s on your mind? I can’t help if I don’t know what’s wrong.”

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

He'd forgotten how well she'd learned to read him from his posture alone, how hard it was to keep stuff from her. Even when he thought he might have gotten away with something, his mom would bring it up weeks later, she was a mind reader. She'd had to become one, when Ky wasn't speaking, he'd hardly communicated to the point where she'd begged him to give her something.

It'd been so odd to be the person on the other side of grief. His life was split into the time before he saw his dad's death and after. There was a time gap somewhere in there. He never remembered them leaving the Capitol after the night, only remembered waking up one morning in his bed and seeing snow falling outside. He still wasn't sure where he'd gone. He just remembered his mom's face that morning when he'd crept into the kitchen by himself. She'd wiped away tears.

He didn't want to go there again, didn't want to scare her like that. Ky wanted to be honest with her but he didn't want to hurt her and he knew that his type of pain left scars. He wished that she'd just leave it alone but his stubborn streak must have come from her.

Opal sat down beside him and Ky wished that he could be a happier person for her. She deserved a son that brought her happiness, not one that added to her sadness and for the most part, he was pretty sure he was the former. They'd have weeks of laughter and sunshine but they were both prone to spells like these. Ky more often than not lately. His therapist blamed hormones.

For a moment, he considered just trying to change the subject again but Opal would only push him further, it was pointless to try. So, despite the fact that he wanted to bolt, Ky bent over slowly to lay his head in her lap. Things always felt different in the sanctity of the garden in the morning. It was a lot easier, to be honest when someone actually wanted the answer.

"My brain lies to me a lot, mom" he said, "I know it's just my own fears, that's all, they don't even make sense." Ky stared up at the sky, at the clouds slowly moving along above their heads and his throat felt strangely tight, his chest weighed down with something heavy. They were supposed to be talking about dad, it was supposed to be happy and he didn't want to make her cry. He blinked quickly, pushing back the threat of tears.

"Do you think..." he tried, but he still couldn't ask her that question. He shouldn't have had to even, the fact that it even lived inside him showed that he was too afraid to hear the answer, so he tried something else. "Do you think that Dad would like the person I am? Would he be proud of me?" he asked.

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

She knew what that was like. The overthinking, the crashing and colliding of lies and truths and the uncertainty that you’re left with as you try and piece them together. It grew harder and harder to sift through the tangled web of lies, trying to fit the pieces together against the truth. Eventually you stuck together whatever would fit, even if it didn’t your eyes began to deceive you. Eventually… well, eventually the pieces began to fit together regardless of their shapes, they merged and melted and shifted to become one whole and messy shape. Sometimes she wondered if that was all that was left of her relationship.

In all honesty she wasn't entirely sure if the memories she had were real. It had been so long, and a time filled with so much pain that a lot of her memories were foggy, and the ones that stood out seemed hazy around the ages. It scared her, and so she tried her best to not allow herself to really ponder, and try to find the memories buried in her mind. She didn’t think she could have told Ky what her happiest memory was, because she just didn’t know.

She couldn’t remember.

When Ky spoke again she looked down at him, a hand moving slowly through his hair. She could almost feel the way the words caught in his throat as if he didn’t quite know how to let them out. His eyes seemed to shine, and she tried her best to ignore the pit in her stomach. She didn't want to cause him pain, but wasn’t that what they had always done? She tried her best to protect him from it, and in doing so they never spoke about it. In turn, she knew, Ky tried to stop her from feeling pain as well.

It didn’t work. It was so obvious. They both tried so vainly to protect the other from suffering and pain, but they were both so clearly in pain. She could have laughed, a bitter humourless laugh. The pair of them, they were fools. They were simply trying their best to protect each other, it was all they had known how to do.

Ky’s question made her pause, that pit in her stomach weighing her down. Closing her eyes for a moment she breathed in, thinking of the words to say. “I’d be lying if I said that I remembered everything about him,” she had begun, moving her hand once more through his hair. “I don’t…” the words seemed lost to her, a realisation she had made for herself but had never said out loud. “I don’t remember much,” she said, looking down at Ky, “sometimes I get confused by the memories in my head, the ones I’ve dreamed and the ones that were real.”

“Even though I can’t remember everything, I do know -without one shred of doubt, that he would have loved the person you are. He’d have been so proud to call your name, he would have loved you with all his heart.” She leaned down, planting a light kiss on his forehead, “and I love you with all of mine.”

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

Ky didn't uderstand how pain could take so much for so little. It wasn't fair that his mom didn't even get to remember all of her treasured memories with his dad becuase of the way that grief could ravage a person. It wasn't fair that it had eroded them into these haggard things, vague shapes of the things that they had been made to be.

"He would have loved you with all his heart-"

(His mother's lips pressed gently on his forehead.)

"And I love you with all of mine."

She said it so simply, so easy that Ky didn't really know how to handle it. It's not like she never told him that she loved him, Opal made sure to tell him often. He couldn't leave the house or go to bed at night without her saying it and it had become a common thing, something they said that also meant something else.

If this is the last time I see you, I want the last thing I said to you to be 'I love you'.

When you were used to just trying to survive for so long, so used to losing people, you kind of forgot about what was normal anymore. Ky knew that his life wasn't normal, far from it. Despite everything, he was one of the luckiest kids in Panem. Unlike so many, he'd been raised wanting for nothing by a family who loved him endlessly. But not many other kids had a victor for a mother and a tribute for a father. Ky didn't know if there was one person in the world who truly understood how he was feeling.

It was lonely.

A tear slipped slowly down his cheek and he wiped it away, a smile blooming across his face despite his sadness. Life was just about balancing pain, and he'd gotten pretty good at it but he wanted to be better. They both deserved better. They should be happy, living in such a nice house with such a big garden to play in every single day. And he had his whole life ahead of him too, just two more reapings to get through and there'd be no more worry about it.

They'd earned the luck of the draw at this point, Ky wasn't worried. He didn't want to be afraid anymore, he didn't want to wallow in it. He could mourn his father, the life they could have had, but he could also live.

"Mom, let's make a promise," he said,reaching up to loop his pinky with hers, "Let's be happy from now on, ok? It's okay to be sad, but let's be happy."

[cass]

o p a l .

"Took the breath from my open mouth
Never known how it broke me down
I went in circles somewhere else
Shook the best when your love was home"

Today felt different. Sixteen years of remembering him, of feeling this day as one to be anything but happy. But today felt different from any other day she had spent pondering his memory. The pain that normally inserted itself into the way she spoke and the things she did wasn’t there. She couldn’t feel the tug at her heart, the prickle at her eyes when she looked down at Ky, at this moment she felt peaceful. Was it really all coming to an end? It had been long enough. She knew Potato would be shaking his head, agreeing that she had sixteen years too long thinking, stressing, and worrying over him.

Perhaps between the two of them they could formulate some semblance of normality. Whatever that might be for a victor and the child of a victor.

“Mum, let’s make a promise, let’s be happy from now on, okay?” Opal laughed as Ky reached forwards and looped her pinky through his. She nodded her head, looking at him with a bright smile. “I can definitely try my best,” she promised.

She could do this.

The ring she had tucked into her pocket this morning felt heavy as she remembered its presence. She knew where it belonged. “I have something for you,” Opal said, she stopped stroking his hair, reaching into her pocket to pull out Potato’s wedding ring. “I kept this tucked away for a long time, it’s really something you should have.”

She shuffled back, making room for Ky to sit up. It wasn’t something she needed anymore, she had her own. For a long time she had let herself believe it was the only thing she had left of him. She was staring at the most important thing Potato had left her. It was only right that Ky had that last piece of him because she already had her part of Potato right there.

She looked down at the metal ring, when she had first received it, the ring had still been covered in sand and blood. She’d scrubbed so hard that she’d left scratches all over the ring. Now it just seemed like another part of history, of his story. The ring looked as worn and aged as the one on her own finger. Just as if it had lived its very own life with the person it had been made for. It had, she thought. As short as that life had been, the ring had been there for it, now it was marred by those memories, and furthermore by her own memories.

She hoped Ky would find some comfort in its presence. “You know, Ky,” she spoke as she moved the necklace around his neck, “I don’t regret any of it. I wouldn’t go back, because then I wouldn’t have you.”

[✌ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ]

k y .

"Why were you digging?
What did you bury
Before those hands pulled me
From the earth?"

He wanted to keep the promise desperately, so much so that he could feel it boiling within him already, a hopeful glimmer inside himseld. But so much of him was scared to hope for anything other than the strange balance he had held for so long with the hole that was eating away at the edges of him.

Ky couldn't help thinking that maybe he was just like that, the sadness that he felt daily was just who he was. He couldn't tell anymore where it ended and he began. There was this worry within him that it was inescapable. If it was, he didn't want to ruin things for Opal. He'd lived with it for so long that he could just become better at hiding it.

At the very least, he'd ask his therapist for more ways to cope at his next session.

"I have something for you."

Ky sat up slowly, wiping a stray tear off of his ear in the process. His skin felt cold where the drop had made its trail but he didn't feel silly about crying in front of his mother, not that he did cry often. He'd just never learned how to be self-conscious about his emotions and Opal had never even considered teaching him that he should be.

She pulled something out of her pocket and Ky stared intently, uncertain as to what she could be giving him on such a day. He wasn't expecting to see the ring when she opened her hand. He'd seen it before of course, weighed it in the palm of his hand many times but he'd always put it back. It had been his father's wedding ring, his tribute token and one of his last gifts to his mom. It was precious, more precious than he could ever hope to be.

He stared in shock as his mom secured it around his neck. The ring dropped down the collar of his running shirt and instead of the usual cold he was used to feeling whenever he'd picked it up before, it was warm from his mom's pocket. He reached up and held it tightly in his hand, the circular design cutting into his skin.

He wanted to cry.

Somehow it felt different, maybe it was the day or the fact that it was now his but it felt like there was a hand on his shoulder, calloused and heavy. It ruffled his hair gently- or perhaps it was just the breeze -and moved on.

At just the right moment, Opal spoke, words so gentle and loving that Ky had to bite his lip and avert his gaze to keep from letting tears spill over. He'd only just made a promise to be happy. He didn't want to ruin it with tears. So he smiled instead, lips trembling.

"I'm really glad," he said carefully, "I'm really glad that you're my mom, I'm glad I got you."

Despite all the pain he'd inhereted, he meant it, he always would.

[end thread]