The Girl With The Silver Eyes

Chapter 25

Peeta

"Momma?" a small voice jerks me out of my sleep. I feel a tiny finger poke my shoulder and I roll away from Katniss to see a little girl standing beside the bed. I'm snapped back to the present as I realize where I am and more importantly who I'm looking at.

She's taller than I thought she'd be. Her black hair is darker and thicker than her mother's with messy ringlet curls. She's wearing one of Katniss' T-shirts as a nightgown and has a stuffed rabbit I had won Katniss at the county fair the summer after junior year. Her big blue eyes peer at me in the dark. Before I can think of anything to say, she beats me to it.

"What are you doing here?" She asks. I sit up a little and she tilts her head.

"Because I asked your mother if I could sleep here," I say. "I needed somewhere to stay and she said I could."

"Momma never lets anyone around me," she says. "But I guess it's okay that you're here. You're different."

"Why am I different?" I ask her. She holds out her stuffed animal and I take it from her as she reaches under the bed for something.

"Momma doesn't know I know about these," she says. "And I'm not asposed to go through her stuff but I found this one day while she was in the shower." She sets a shoebox and a scrapbook up on the table beside the bed and looks at me.

"What is all that stuff?" I ask.

"Your stuff," she says. "And pictures of you and Momma when she lived in Ohio." I look at her for a moment and sit all the way up, glancing back at Katniss to make sure I didn't wake her up.

"She told me you would know who I was," I say looking down. "But I didn't know that you would recognize me from pictures taken long before you were born." I feel tears in my eyes and she touches my arm.

"But I'm smart," she says. "Momma says so all the time. She she showed me who you were and you look like the pictures except your face is all scruffy." I laugh and get up, grabbing the book and the shoebox.

"Why don't we go back to your room so we don't wake your Mom up, okay?" I ask. She nods and takes my hand, leading me to her little room off to the side. I sit on the edge of her little bed. Dani climbs up next to me and takes her book back. She flips through to a picture from halloween senior year. We had been Pocahontas and John Smith and had been really fun to do with Glimmer and Marvel, who had been Rapunzel and Flynn, and Tara and Trace , Beauty and Beast respectively because he was nearly 7 feet tall. I smile sadly, remembering those days.

"Momma cries a lot too," Dani says and I just look at her a moment.

"She's had a lot of reasons to cry," I reply looking at my hands. "She's had a hard life."

"For a long time, I only knew her smile from the pictures in her matress," she continues. "She only smiles when she talks about you or to me. But I hear her crying after I leave to go to bed. She plays with a blue ring around her neck sometimes too. I asked why she didn't wear it on her hand and she said it didnt fit." I run my finger over a picture of one of Katniss' senior pictures beneath an old oak tree at my house.

"It's mine," I say. "I gave it to her after we'd been dating around a year. I figured she'd long gotton rid of it. She still has it?"

"She freaks out everytime she misplaces it, which is a lot because she takes it off when she teaches downstairs," she says. I nod and look over more of the pictures.

"Does she still sing?" I ask. "She always used to sing so beautifully."

"Only lullabies before bed," Dani replies. "She said you draw like me. Do you wanna see some of my pictures?" I just nod. And she runs over to her little desk and chairs and picks up a big kids sketch book up and hands it to me. I carefully flip through her carefully drawn pictures and stop at one that resembles a painting of a sunset I once did for Katniss only in crayon.

"These are really good," I say. "Did you really do these all on your own?"

"Well, thats from a painting Momma has down in the studio," she says. "Momma loves it so I painted it to make her happy. She has a tattoo of the scribbles on the bottom." I hear something and look up for a moment before glancing back at Dani.

"I painted that picture for your Momma for her birthday a long time ago," I say.

"Do you still love her?" She asks. I close her book and set it beside me with the pictures she had shown me.

"Yes," I say. "I care a lot about her."

"Are you going to stay here with us forever?" Dani asks.

"I dont know yet," I say brushing her hair away from her face. "There's a lot of things that your Momma and I need to figure out." She tries to say something else but I interupt her. "And if I'm not mistaken, it is long after your bed time." She frowns as I get up and crawls into her bed. I help pull up her covers and she grabs my hand.

"Are you going to be here tomorrow?" She asks.

"Yeah," I say. "I think I'll be here for a little while." She smiles and squeezes my hand. "Now you go to sleep okay?"

"Okay," she says. "Goodnight Daddy." I feel a tear run down my cheek as I smile at her.

"Goodnight Dani," I reply and turn to leave, seeing Katniss in the doorway. I walk out and shut the door quietly and Katniss looks terrified as I look at her.

"I'm so sorry," she says. "I know you wanted to meet her on your own terms."

"Its not your fault," I say. "I think it might have been better this way, without me over thinking everything. That picture you showed me doesnt do her justice."

"You seemed to be getting to know each other pretty easily," she says quietly.

"She's what I always imagined back when I used to talk about taking you away somewhere we could have a better life," I say.

"I'm more sorry than you could ever know to have kept her away so long," she says and I see tears running down her cheeks. I just pull her into my arms and hold her tight for a moment.

"You were scared," I reply. "I dont blame you anymore." She wraps her arms around me and I hold her there for as long as I wish.

Because I know before long, she'll be mine again.