A/N: This is my first fic drabble thing for this fandom, but I figured I might as well widen my repitoire a bit. Hope it turns out okay.
Disclaimer: I don't own Hunger Games or Breakeven (The Script). :D
"I'm still alive but I'm barely breathing.
Just prayed to a God that I don't believe in,
'cause I got time while she got freedom--
'cause when a heart breaks, no it don't break even."
Katniss has nightmares almost every night. Peeta knows this, because he always wakes up.
Sometimes he's reproachful over the interruption in his sleep. He never gets enough, because she screams and kicks and cries and how is he supposed to sleep through that? But he keeps his tongue in his cheek, and says her name progressively louder, gently shaking her shoulder until she wakes up. In those first groggy moments, he watches her eyes and sees her still stuck in the Games, or replaying her father's death, or running from some newly-invented horror of the Capital's power. She's got tears on her face, and the reproach drain away as he rubs them off with his thumb and comforts her with low, murmuring words, because who can stay mad at something as vulnerable as that?
Most of the time, he can't grudge her this time he could spend sleeping in exchange for her peace of mind. She's gasping and clutching at him like he's all she needs, like he's all that's keeping her alive. He knows she never remembers these moments—that she probably isn't even in her right mind—because she begs him to never leave her, to hold her and make it go away. Once she told him she loved him, and despite the fevered, glassy look in her eyes, his heart jumped. A week later, she called him Gale, and it sank again.
Some nights, she rouses herself enough to sit up in bed, her knees tucked under her chin and arms wrapped around her legs. He gets up long enough to obtain a steaming cup of tea, or chocolate sometimes, and places it in her hands and wraps her fingers around it, like he's afraid she's forgotten how to do the simplest of tasks. On the rarest of these nights, eyes weary and voice small, she'll tell him in halting sentences what she was dreaming about. The wolf-creature with Glimmer's eyes feasting on her mother's body or the boy from District 1, with little Prim dangling from his trap instead of Rue. Once, she dreamt of the explosion that had killed her father—only they had brought Gale's fragmented body home. Peeta wondered how bad of a person it made him that he had wanted to shake her and yell. He bit through his lip and hadn't bothered to cover the bleeding, but Katniss didn't notice. She never did.
Peeta has nightmares every night, too. Katniss never wakes up.