Hunger Games ficlet: Joseph Seward, parenting
Too self-indulgent for AO3, but that’s what Tumblr is here for, right? It’s weird to remember that between Joseph watching his classmate be shot in the head and his son die in the Arena there was a period before he was a terrible dad where he was just ... a new one.
After graduating at the top of the Peacekeeping Academy and blazing through a series of unprecedented promotions as a talented soldier, Joseph Seward had long forgotten the feeling of being outclassed. Even in the Program he and Adam had competed knife to throat the entire way through, and if Adam ground Joseph’s nose into the mats one day then Joseph would leave him behind on the climbing wall the next. The competition had been healthy even with its deadly edge, and Joseph had gone to bed each night satisfied with himself and confident in his performance almost every night.
The confidence took a hit after the drastic events of his year’s Reaping, and throughout his career Joseph took on missions and cases that left him less than certain he had performed to the utmost — more difficult without a trainer to call out points at the end, when the acceptable civilian body count lay leaking real blood instead of classmates pretending not to giggle as they lay on the mats — but he had done his best, and that’s all a man could do.
He had never known real terror, true confusion and the gnawing churn of indecision, the sense that he had failed even though he’d followed every rule laid out to him, since that day in the Reaping Square — until he became a parent.
Joseph had failed to find any sort of manual to help him with that one, and his fond yet faded memories of his own parents did little to ease what Joseph felt to be a deplorable lack of preparation on his part. He’d tried to convince Adora to take off work as soon as the doctor pronounced her pregnant, after hearing advice that women should take it easy and not agitate themselves through what sounded like a thoroughly horrifying process. In response his wife had given him the same cold-eyed stare that had once stopped a rampaging fugitive in his tracks.
“Given that women in the quarries continue to work until their babies all but slide out onto the limestone pallets, I think ours will survive my standing at the front of the room for a few hours a day,” Adora said, and Joseph might have vague memories about the man as the head of the house, but he also knew the value of strategic retreat. He’d raised his hands in surrender, Adora had laughed and kissed him, and when the doctor affirmed that she could teach right up to the due date, Joseph stopped his fussing, mostly.
Still, it seemed appalling that one could train for eleven years for three weeks in the Arena but no one offered so much as a crash course on parenting Joseph asked his colleagues, the ones whose children were just now starting at the Centre, but after the flurry of advice was at once patronizing and conflicting, he gave up. In the end, Joseph would do as he always had done — his best.
And then Creed, tiny and miraculous and perfect, with little fingers that closed around Joseph’s thumb and little feet with toes that curled when he pressed against the sole of the baby’s foot. Creed who cried heartily — “Good lungs is a good sign,” said the doctor proudly when Joseph looked to her, alarmed by the sheer force of squalling coming from the small, red-faced child nestled in his arms — but slept soundly, Creed who ate without a fuss and looked around the world with wide, curious eyes.
Adora went back to work as soon as the doctors pronounced her able, bringing Creed to sleep in his basket behind her desk or tucked against her chest in an improvised baby sling. The students loved him, and some of the older ones had little siblings of their own and gave unsolicited advice with such conviction that Adora brought the stories home to Joseph at the end of the day.
When Creed was only a few months old, Joseph was introduced to Paul Valent, a soldier a few years younger who had moved to a desk post early after suffering a career-ending injury in the field. He had a pretty young wife named Julia, a doctor in the ward where he’d spent his convalescence, but more importantly, Paul had been in the room when Joseph drove his boot into James’ head. It took no more than a look when Joseph asked Paul his graduating year and did the math — a question he didn’t realize he’d asked until he saw the answer in Paul’s solemn eyes — and he gripped the other man’s hand and welcomed him to the area.
The lot next door had been up for sale for a few months without any takers, and Joseph did not have to work very hard to convince Paul to put in an offer. Joseph did his part to vouch for the couple, and soon the newlyweds moved in and Joseph and Adora had friends for dinner several times a week.
When Julia announced her pregnancy a few months after that, Joseph clapped Paul on the shoulder, grinned, and told him he could ask advice any time he wanted. “That’s rich,” Adora teased him later, as they stood over Creed’s crib and watched him sleep. He liked to suckle on his thumb, and Joseph dutifully pried his fist loose whenever he caught him so it wouldn’t turn into a dependency. “Six months ago you were tearing your heart out because you were afraid you’d accidentally feed Creed poison, and now you’re going to play the experienced father to our new friends?”
“I never did that,” Joseph said loftily, though of course he had, and he kissed Dora rather than suffer any more indignity.
Still, in private Joseph rather fancied being the one to pass on his new sacred knowledge, however sparse it might feel. That lasted until the first time he saw an exhausted Julia — wrung out from a birth so difficult Joseph had spent the last ten hours in the waiting room with Paul to keep him from battering down the door — pass over a determinedly howling Selene to Paul, only for the infant to hush as soon as she settled into his arms.
Paul, as it turned out, needed no advice at all.
Oh, he said he had no idea what to do with babies, and he professed his ignorance with an openness that left Joseph baffled, but he was a wonder with Selene. She scarcely fussed when he held her, and they passed many an hour with her cradled against his chest, her head tucked into the curve of his neck, while Paul went over paperwork on the sofa. Joseph had never seen himself so outmatched.
If he had not met Paul before Selene’s birth he might have grown poisonous with jealousy. As it was, however, Joseph marvelled at the man’s skill at handling his daughter, and he chose to admire rather than envy. In the meantime Joseph quietly shelved the tidbits of advice he’d kept waiting for the day Paul asked.
As it turned out, they did need Joseph after all. Julia took several months to recover from the ordeal, and while Paul might have the magic touch, he also needed sleep. Creed was sleeping through the night by then, solid and sound without even fussing for a middle of the night feeding, and so Joseph offered to walk Selene on nights she wouldn’t settle. Paul protested at first, but only as a token, and soon Joseph had the duty of carrying Selene and talking to her while Paul caught some rest.
“She likes being talked to,” Paul said, almost sheepish. “You don’t have to say anything important, but it calms her down.”
Joseph nodded, and as Selene fussed in his arms and mashed her face into his chest in a wordless protest, something in his heart turned over. He had the insane thought that he’d never been trusted with an assignment as important as this. Paul hovered for a moment, hair mussed and eyes shadowed with exhaustion, and Joseph nudged him with his foot. “Go,” he said. “Sleep. I’ll put her down when she’s settled.”
It was a warm spring night, one of the first when the winter’s chill had stopped seeping in through the cracks and running icy fingers down one’s spine. Joseph bundled Selene up into a blanket and stepped outside, and the breeze rustled the branches overhead as the stars winked in and out from behind the leaves and Selene fell silent, staring up at the sky with her father’s wide, blue eyes.
“That’s better,” Joseph said, and as an experiment he crooked one finger and ran it down Selene’s soft cheek. She turned into the touch and gummed toothlessly at his knuckle, and Joseph startled himself by letting out a delighted chuckle.
Later, after putting Selene to bed and returning home, Joseph crawled into bed and nosed Adora’s shoulder. “Your feet are cold,” she said accusingly, reaching back to draw his arm around her waist.
“What a shame, now you understand my life every other night,” Joseph said, pressing his toes against her calf and splaying his hand across her hip. Adora shuffled back over to kiss him, and Joseph threaded one hand into her hair and pressed her against the mattress and ignored her laughter when it took three tries to find the waistband of her sleep pants.
Adora found herself pregnant again less than a year later, but while Joseph thought he might burst with the pride of it, he reserved himself at the sight of Paul’s wistful face. The doctors had warned against Julia going through another pregnancy, citing warnings for both her health and the baby’s, and it was unlikely that Selene would ever have herself a little sibling. Still, Paul was not a poor sport, and while the corners of his eyes tightened and his face pinched a little around the nose, he clapped Joseph hard on the back and wished him well.
“She’ll have Creed, at any rate,” Joseph said. “And the new one, when it’s born. I know it’s not the same —“
“No,” Paul admitted. He gave Joseph a small smile that spoke volumes, and Joseph swallowed but did not press. “But I’m glad for it anyhow.”
They had set up Selene and Creed on a picnic blanket in the yard between their houses, where the fence that had divided the properties when Joseph moved in had since been removed in favour of what they hoped would be a joint playground. Creed toddled back and forth on the blanket, crouching down on his strong, if somewhat unsteady legs to pick flowers and bring them back to Selene. Selene apparently took this as some sort of condescending insult, shuffling after him in a half-crawl half-slither. As Creed watched, head cocked, Selene ripped up a fistful of grass on her own and she brandished it in his face with a forceful “Ba!”
“She’s going to terrorize the little one if they’re any less a firecracker than she is,” Paul said, sounding amused as Creed patted Selene on the head, apparently immune to her mood. “Here’s hoping.”
“I’m sure it will be fine,” Joseph said. “Creed will teach them how to handle her.”
Creed placed both hands over his eyes and bent over double to hide his face, then burst back up. “Boo!” he cried joyously. Selene stared at him for a second, startled, then cracked up laughing.
Despite not being an expert in parenting, Joseph knew enough not to expect his second child to be a carbon copy of the first. Alec was smaller than Creed at birth and came later following two false labours, as though he couldn’t make up his mind whether he was ready to come out. Still, two boys this close in age, Joseph couldn’t help but be proud of the men his sons would become.
Creed, for his part, was absolutely enchanted by Alec. He spent half his time curling up with Adora and pressing a reverent finger to Alec’s forehead, his fists, his cheeks, and the other half bringing over all his toys and explaining to Alec how they would play with them when they were older. He listened very solemnly when Joseph warned him not to try to crawl into the cradle in case he tipped it over, and whenever Adora placed Alec in his arms — propped up on either side by cushions in the corner of the couch — Creed sat very still and talked to him in a low, crooning voice.
Joseph had not expected Alec to be the same, but then again he hadn’t known what to expect. As it turned out, Creed and Alec could not have been more different. Where Creed had nursed from the hospital bed with ease, Alec fussed and refused to eat until it drove Adora to tears, convinced she’d done something wrong.
“He’ll eat when he’s hungry, surely,” Joseph said, doing his best to reassure her. “There’s a biological imperative, he won’t starve himself to death.”
Adora said nothing, only rolled away from him to face the wall as Alec squalled behind him in the cradle. Eventually they gave up on natural feeding altogether and used a bottle, even as Adora wept and Joseph insisted firmly that this did not make either one of them a failure. Joseph took over most of the feedings as Adora couldn’t bear to have Alec reject her, and more than once Joseph caught himself passed out in his armchair with Alec drinking fussily in the crook of his arm.
The feeding alone would have been enough of a challenge, but Alec made himself impossible to put down. Joseph had never met a baby so insistent on being held; Creed enjoyed cuddles but fared equally as well when left to fend for himself, and Selene had squirmed and demanded to be put down within weeks. Alec, on the other hand, took up screaming as soon as he felt himself being lowered down into the cradle, and nothing Joseph did would make him stop.
“At this point it might be easier to work around it rather than try to change things,” said the doctor when Joseph asked, exhausted and desperate. “Many couples have success sleeping with their baby in the bed. It’s normal in the quarries, of course, and quite safe.”
“No,” Adora said when Joseph relayed the news that evening. “No, what will that do to him when he’s older, if he’s this attached now? We can’t have a child who’s unable to take care of himself.” She leaned back against the pillows and covered her face with her hand. “He’ll have to learn. Like you said, there’s a biological imperative. He’ll sleep eventually.”
“I do it,” said a voice from the floor, and Joseph looked down, surprised. They had put Creed down for a nap earlier, and he didn’t usually get up before they fetched him.
“Creed,” Adora said without opening her eyes. “You’re not the mama or the papa. You’re the big brother. That’s not your job.”
“No, lookit. I do it,” Creed insisted. Talking back was even more unexpected than getting up from his nap without permission, and Joseph sat up to watch. Creed made his way to Alec’s cradle, where he pulled himself up onto his toes and poked one arm through the gap in the slats. “Hey Alec,” Creed said, low and crooning. “Hey hey hey. Okay now.”
As always when someone attempted to comfort him, Alec cried louder at first as if to spite him, but Creed didn’t move. He wriggled his arm a little further and patted Alec’s chest. “Okay now,” Creed said again, and moved his hand in circles.
Slowly — miraculously — Alec’s wails subsided, first to broken sobs, then to hiccups, then sniffles, and finally disappeared altogether. Joseph stared, his ears ringing with the sudden silence, and Adora pushed herself up to a sitting position.
“See?” Creed said, beaming. “I do it.”
On the one hand, Joseph was fairly certain that deputizing his toddler to take care of his infant son would put him at the top of the list of Panem’s Terrible Parents. On the other, for the first time since Alec’s birth Adora wiped away tears of something other than grief and frustration and self-blame.
Would it be so terrible to allow Creed a little contribution, so long as they didn’t delegate the actual responsibility? If it helped Alec sleep — if it let Adora rest and stop crying into her pillow at night for feeling like a failure as Joseph sat next to her, sickened with his own guilt and confusion — then it could hardly be worse than now.
That night they moved Alec’s cradle into Creed’s room. Joseph borrowed a surveillance scanner from work so they could listen in on the boys without having to get up and check every five minutes, and he instructed Creed not to touch it. “This is so we can hear you,” he said. “If you need us, you can call us and we’ll come.”
“Okay,” Creed said, and flashed Joseph a perfect salute.
Alec fussed several times that night as usual, jolting Joseph to full wakefulness, but each time Creed’s small voice piped up and soon Alec settled. “I don’t believe it,” Adora said. “It’s working.”
“They’re brothers,” Joseph said as a warm glow of pride spread through his chest. He might not know how to be a father, but apparently Creed knew his own role just fine.
When Alec was three months old, Paul brought Selene over to meet him. Selene stared at Alec for a long second, and in the meantime her face slowly collapsed in on itself in a remarkable grimace. “Ew,” she pronounced decisively, and toddled away from the chair.
“Selene,” Paul scolded in a voice more indulgent than chiding. “Be nice to Alec.”
She considered that for a second, said “Nice ew,” in an exaggerated tone, and disappeared around the corner.
“Well, it could have been worse,” Joseph said, remembering the time Creed took a rock from a pile Selene had designated as hers and she threw the biggest one at his head. He’d half expected to need to lift Alec out of her reach.
“True, she didn’t try to bite him,” Paul agreed. The words were exasperated but the tone was fond, especially considering the ring of teethmarks that stood out at the base of his own thumb.
Joseph laughed and clapped Paul on the arm. “Give it time,” he said. “Before we know it the boys will be fighting over her and you’ll be wishing she still said ‘ew’.”
“Now that’s just terrifying,” Paul said, alarmed, but Joseph wondered if he ever thought about the possibility. Best friends growing up together and becoming childhood sweethearts would make for quite the story to tell the grandchildren, whichever direction Selene’s affections fell. Paul slapped his thigh and pushed himself to his feet with a light grimace, the injury still twinging now and then even if it had mostly healed. “She’s been quiet for thirty seconds. I’d better go make sure she’s not plotting anything too destructive.”
Joseph grinned, and he tucked Alec into his chest sling and followed Paul out into the kitchen.
