(push) nick/cassie. and somewhere a baby is crying R-ish rating. All usual disclaimers apply.
Nick could always tell when Cassie was having a nightmare, normally she slept like the dead, when she slept at all, but if she was fitful, she thrashed like she was in battle. They had been traveling together for nearly ten years now, from China to Canada to England to Japan and finally they 'settled' in Moscow. They shared a shuttered studio on the outskirts on the city, surrounded by abandoned buildings and homeless families. She had started crawling into bed with him not long after they'd arrived, she was 16 then, and the loneliness had been too much for both of them.
The first time he'd awoken to her nightmares, it was her 17th birthday, and she punched him in the gut in her sleep. He awoke with the air socked from his lungs and reaching for the gun he kept next to their mattress on the floor, only to find it was just Cassie. Blonde hair - long gone were the pink streaks, replaced these months with black - tangled and covering her face in all her struggle. He'd woken her and before she'd even said a word, she was kissing him. He hadn't been kissed since Kira had gone her own way from London, and with Cassie's warmth suddenly eclipsing him he forgot for a moment that this girl, this young woman, was his to protect, not claim.
They made love clumsily that night, and she cried after, assuring him it wasn't his fault that she sobbed into his bare chest, that she had wanted it all, but her nightmares still hadn't fled. Weeks later, after they had gotten very good at not talking about it, it happened again. She awoke choking, sobbing about something she couldn't be sure was a vision, might have been fiction, but there had been a baby, and it had been wailing, in China, and they hadn't been able to save it. He wrapped his arms around her to sooth her, and she was on him again, begging him to make the nightmares go away. From then on, she didn't even have to ask, she'd awake, shaken and scared and he would comfort her in their new normal. Burying himself in her made his own fears and his waking nightmares vanish, just blonde hair and her voice, little and breathy in his ear. He could only hope it did the same for her.