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Peeta’s told me in the past that his nightmares don’t tend to make themselves apparent physically. Late one night during our tour he’d held me through my own nightmare, and when I awoke to find him petting my hair, I’d asked him why I could never sense his bad dreams. He’d told me that instead of thrashing and fighting back like I always tended to do, he would be paralyzed in the fear his mind provided him. I remember feeling a pang of guilt, knowing that, though Peeta held me through my terror each night, I was helpless to defend him from his own.
So, if that’s the case, then what is this?
I wake to Peeta’s muscles spasming, his body shaking as his lips part in silent cries. I’m up and in action within seconds, extracting myself from his firm, sleepy hold and in turn pulling him close to me, sitting us up, guiding his head into my shoulder as he tremors. I whisper gentle things to him, trying to find the source of his anguish. I notice the way his hands clench at his left leg, the way he seems to try and scratch the Capitol prosthetic attachment from his body. His hand muscles are tight and pleading as he tries to seemingly “free” himself in this sleeping haze. Instead of just sitting and watching this play out, I drop one hand from where it was previously combing his honey blonde hair and lace my fingers with his, bringing the scratching to a forceful stop. I pull his hand to my lips and kiss his knuckles one by one, soothing them even as he tries to break away from my grasp.
“Peeta, please,” I whisper, wishing I had his way with words. Instead of attempting to craft my own words to calm his hysteria, I root around in my mind and am supplied with some of his. “You’re safe,” I whisper, copying the gentle, lilting tone he uses to accompany the comfort. “Please wake up.”
With a pat to his cheek and a kiss to his forehead, he’s awake, and I watch the stages of understanding flash across his face. He notices first the way that he’s cradled in my arms, next, the fear and concern in my eyes, and finally, the pain shooting from his leg. He gives a long groan, eyes closing as he bunts into my neck.
“What’s happening, Dandelion?” I whisper, trying to push away the embarrassment as the silly nickname slips from my lips in an attempt at consolation.
The words are stuttering and slow as they fight their way between gasps and grunts of pain. “Phantom… phantom pain. My-” he cuts himself off with a particularly concerning cry, muscles tensing as his hands return to his amputation, “leg,” he finishes weakly.
“What can I do?” I ask without even thinking, knowing inherently that that’s how he would react.
“Wait it- out…” he pants back, but from the way he angles his face back into my neck I know he’s seeking affection.
“Oh, sweetheart…” I whisper, the nickname that started as a mockery of Haymitch’s vocabulary sounding all too natural. I stroke his hair with a gentle rhythm, using my other hand to run down his back and curiously across the thigh of his left leg. I feel him shiver, but not flinch like I feared. “That feel good?”
He sighs in response, and I feel him nod against the warming skin of my neck. As I rub my hand steadily over his hip and outer thigh again, I start, “When you were asleep, it seemed like you were trying to get the prosthetic off? Like it was too tight or something.”
Peeta nods again, and when he speaks, I can hear the pain squeezing at his voice. “Yeah, it- It doesn’t hurt, but sometimes it feels like if I get it off, the phantom pain will stop, even if that isn’t really true.” He tries to laugh to lessen the tension, acting as if he wasn’t in an abhorrent amount of pain. I kiss his forehead, trying to do something to show that his vulnerability is more than welcome.
“I’m sorry,” is all that I say, though I know that if roles were reversed, Peeta would somehow deliver a beautiful speech about the relationship between strength and pain and recovery or something. “And I’m sorry I didn’t know.”
Then he’s taking my hand and guiding it to roll up the fabric of his baggy sleep-pants to over his knee. Where prosthetic meets pale, eternally soft skin is a battleground of scars and irritated flesh. He guides my hand to it, shows my fingers the complex patterns of tattered tissue. I look into his eyes and see the shame. “Peeta…” I start, but cut myself off when I realize how futile my attempts will be at finishing that sentence.
“When I sleep,” he explains quietly, a new tension adding to the preexisting tremor.
“This is all from scratching,” I piece together, circling a finger over the tender skin and feeling a pang of guilt at my ignorance. Looking back to him, I expect to be met with those loving, tortured, beautiful, innocent blue eyes. He, however, has his eyes squeezed shut, the only true indicator of his emotions being the fluttering of his lashes and the furrowing of his brow. I brush my fingers over his temples and kiss his forehead again and again, flattening the hard lines that have begun to deepen in the past few moments. With a brush of my fingers against his jaw, I find the muscles and tendons strung with straining tension, and my heart breaks further in two.
“Peeta, you don’t have to be strong for me right now,” I start, my lips brushing his face as I speak. “You can let it out.”
His hands slip to grip my nightshirt - a nightshirt nicer than everything I owned before the Games - and I smile sadly into his hair, pulling him close against me when I feel the shuddering and shaking of his shoulders begin. I hold him with the same conviction I had back in the cave where we’d first truly been together like this, only now there’s no reason for me to hold him like this except for my love for him. No sponsors, no ratings, no appeasing the Capitol. Just me and him in our big bed that we share not only for convenience or assurance, but now just because we can and because we want to. He doesn’t cry-- not really. Instead, he shutters through his breathing and jolts with pain in my arms anytime he tries to adjust our positioning. By the time his pain and tension begin to ease, we’re back to laying down. Somewhere along the way, he’s come to be held tight in my protective arms, head on my chest and ear to my heart as his heaving slows. I pet his hair and kiss his scalp, feeling my eyelids droop as the adrenaline crashes.
“Sorry,” he whispers into my chest, and for a minute, I think I mishear him.
“Sorry? Why?”
“Waking you up,” he replies, pushing himself up onto his elbows to look at me, a regret and determination in his eyes that makes me smile.
I reach out and cup his face in both my hands, brushing my fingers over his temples and cheekbones. “Did you ever feel like I should apologize for waking you up when I had nightmares?” I ask, knowing the answer, though sometimes I certainly had felt like apologizing. He shakes his head with a sigh. “C’mere.”
He drags himself closer until he’s leaning down above me, and I pull him the rest of the way to my lips, like it's the easiest thing in the world. And maybe it is. Loving him without the stress that used to come with it-- without the false personality and the fluffy pink dresses and the wedding photo shoots. Loving him the way I want, instead of what Snow wants me to portray. Loving him. Not loving the victory or the money that came with. It hurts to think now, with him in my arms, so fully trusting of me and my intentions, of the things I used to say to him. The way I used to act- stuck up and too good for his obnoxiously unwavering love, all because of Snow’s manipulation of each feeling we felt. “I love you,” I whisper between the languid pressing of lips, feeling his reaction by the way he presses into me, his bright smile beginning to spread across his lips. His hand grasps my neck and he pulls back for a moment to give me a smirk.
“Do you, now?” He responds slyly, but I can hear the excitement in his voice.
“I love you,” is all I reply, feeling a mysterious weight lift from my chest. I watch his eyes turn from playful to serious as he hears the conviction in my tone, and I tuck a strand of hair impeding on his eyes behind his ear.
“I love you too, Katniss,” he says back with a sudden steeliness that makes my heart flutter. “I think you knew that already, but just in case.” A wink.
I giggle. God dammit, I giggle. “How’s your leg?” I ask after a couple more kisses and fits of childish laughter.
“Little better. Usually I don’t have you there to… Usually I’m alone when it happens, so it was a lot nicer to have you with me.”
He’s so pretty, I think as I graze a finger across his firm jaw, circling to trace his cheekbone and landing finally at the nape of his neck like I’m painting him with the bright makeups Cinna used to decorate me with. “Is there really nothing to make it better when it happens?” I ask with an involuntary laugh as he rolls us over for my head to rest on his broad chest. He combs my hair with his fingers, giving snide snorts when his fingers get caught in tangle after tangle.
“I don’t know. We could ask your mom.”
“She’d know,” I affirm, rubbing a hand up and down his chest and watching as the thin fabric of his shirt ruffles and wrinkles beneath my fingers.
“Thanks for being there,” he whispers into the top of my head, his lips grazing my hair.
“Thanks for letting me,” I reply simply with a kiss to his pectoral. “I’d missed taking care of you.”
He sighs humorously, squeezing and making me shriek when his fingers tickle my sides. “Well, I don’t mind it so much either,” he laughs, and I finally hear the last of the tension fade from his voice.
“You look a lot better,” I say with a hand to his cheek.
“Gee, Katniss, thanks. Always fun to hear how terrible I looked during my fit of excruciating pain.” His words are bitter but his tone and expression are light. “You don’t look so ugly, yourself.”
I grin and flick him. “Bitch,” I respond, scrunching my nose.
“And what if I am?” He replies with an evil grin that must match mine.
“We can match.”
“Match in bitchiness? Hey, your words, not mine, sweetheart.” He holds his hands up as if surrendering and I can’t help but soften at the banter. It’s always funny to see the side of Peeta that must have been nurtured growing up with two older brothers, especially in contrast to the sweetness in his eyes that more reflects the kindness of his father. I take his hands in mine, clasping fingers, smiling.
“You’re cute.”
“Someone’s getting brave,” he grins, eyes bright. He pulls my hand to his lips, tender and sweet the way he always is. I simply stare into his eyes, letting myself be momentarily lost in them.
After a while more of laughing and kissing and bantering back and forth, I lean down to rest my head in the scoop of his neck, pressing a couple lazy kisses to the skin. “Try and find me next time the pain starts. I know I can’t really do anything, but… I just like being there for you the way you always are for me. Okay?”
His fingers continue their soft swirling and combing of my tangled hair and I feel him nod. “Sounds good, beautiful.”
I grin into his neck and nod off, back into the land of dreams that now, with him by my side, isn’t as dangerous as it used to be.