early in the mornin'. elegant

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."

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."

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.

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.

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."