#everythingbutthemockingjay

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Peeta can’t quite remember how their tradition of dressing the children up as their favorite baked goods at Halloween began.  

He knows it was likely his idea.  Katniss has never been very interested in Halloween but Peeta has always loved the holiday.  Every year for as long as he’s been running the bakery he’s decorated it with autumn colors and pictures of fall leaves, and passed out pumpkin-flavored treats to all the children who enter.

And so when Rose was finally born it only seemed natural to bring this excitement into their home.  

The photos of Rose and Ian in the costumes they’ve worn over the years line the hallway between the upstairs bedrooms.  There’s Rose, when she was only five months old, her head and her chubby little arms sticking out of a round, brownish bit of fabric that Peeta sewed together for her.  (That year she was a cinnamon roll.)  Then there’s a photo of Ian, when he had just learned to walk, running away from the camera wearing a long, brownish rectangle of fabric that Peeta sewed together for him.  (That year Ian was an eclair.)

True, the excitement on his children’s faces in these annual photos has waned a little over the past few years.  Last year, in fact, Rosie refused to be photographed at all, in the only slightly-lopsided costume Peeta put together for her that year.  

A baguette, he thinks she was.

But even though Katniss has been telling him for two years now that the children are old enough to pick out their own costumes – despite all the evidence lining up like photographs on the wall that she was actually right about this – he hasn’t wanted to believe it.

There’s no denying it now, though.  Rose looks at him one more time before rolling her eyes.  He realizes, for the first time, that her eyes are actually lined with that stupid mascara that Katniss started letting her wear a few weeks ago. Her arms are folded across her chest in irritation.

“What’s wrong with this costume?” Peeta asks, holding it out in front of him again.  True, this costume probably doesn’t represent the very best work he’s ever done.  But doughnut costumes are really hard to make, it turns out; and he tried his very best.  “You’d make a great doughnut, Rosie!”

At that, Rose’s bottom lip begins to wobble.  A few seconds later she bursts into tears and runs out of the room at top speed.

“Peeta,” Katniss – who’s been completely silent throughout this entire exchange until now – says, very gently.  She comes up from behind him and touches him on the shoulder.  “Honey, you can’t make a twelve-year-old girl wear a doughnut costume to a boy’s Halloween party.”

Peeta bites his lip, blinking back tears of his own.

“Why not?” he asks, images of Rosie as she looked when they first brought her home from the hospital spinning through his mind.  He bites his lip harder, willing his tears not to fall.

Katniss gives a small laugh, but there’s kindness in it.  She presses a gentle kiss to his cheek.