bigapplesauce | Wake-Up Call [Closed]

Current Music: June 9th, 2013 (post dream party)

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Wake-Up Call [Closed]

Daine wakes with a start, heart pounding and gasping for air. The first few breaths are difficult, and it takes her a moment to dispel the memory of that choking liquid mud and realize the real reason her lungs feel sluggish: Sarge's head is resting on her chest.

Daine? She can feel his worry as he lifts his head and steps back a pace to look at her and sniff at her face. You're awake?

Good. That's Shadow, and a moment later, a rough feline tongue scrapes against her forehead. He's crouched beside her on her pillow, and she can feel the familiar shift of Molly's body along her side. She's in her room. It was just a dream - a nightmare - but it's over.

One slow breath, then another. Molly shoves her head beneath Daine's hand, and she gives the dog a comforting scratch. Okay. She's okay. None of it was real, not the monkeys or the drowning, and Peeta--

Wait. Is Peeta awake, or is he still in that gods-cursed arena?

Daine sits up sharply, earning a soft meow of complaint from Shadow. I have to wake Peeta, she says, swinging her legs off the bed and lurching to her feet. Her head swims for a moment, then clears as Sarge leans against her left side and Molly hops off the bed to press against her right. We have to wake him up now.

She's at his door in less than a minute, not having bothered with shoes (or with anything else that would have slowed her down). Sarge and Molly are at her side, and Shadow is bringing up the rear as if he coincidentally felt like taking a stroll in the same general direction. "Peeta?" She raps her knuckles against the wood, then pauses to listen for a response. Nothing. "Peeta, are you up?" Another pause. She thinks she hears something this time, a quiet sound of distress.

No more knocking. Daine tries the doorknob, finds it locked, and lets out a frustrated huff. Fine. She'll do this the hard way.

She can't shift completely - not without wrecking her clothes - but she can still give herself the head and shoulders of a bighorn sheep. Her collar digs into her neck a little, but she doesn't care. Daine backs up a pace, then slams her newly fortified skull against the door. There's a crunch that masks the faint tearing sound of her collar giving way, then the lock splinters and the door swings open, juddering a little from the impact. Her head snaps back to normal as she stumbles inside and makes a beeline for his bed.

"Peeta!"

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Peeta has been digging for what seems like an eternity. His breathing is fast and shallow in his chest and his head is swimming, but the hole he is digging doesn't seem to be getting any deeper. The ground that just a minute ago pulled him in now resist his advance. And there's no sign of Daine. How long has she been underground? How long before finding her won't save her?

His hands slow as the truth becomes impossible to ignore. Daine is gone. Daine is dead.

All at once, the fight goes out of him and he slumps, palms flat against the ground, head bowed. He doesn't feel the tears on his face, the blood welling around his fingernails. It's over.

Then he hears Daine call his name.

"Daine!" His eyes rove the ground in front of him. He can't see her, but he can hear her. He begins digging with renewed fervor. "DAINE!"

Daine pulls up short beside his bed, watching in mingled confusion and sympathy as he clutches at his bedsheets, fingers scrabbling against the weave.

He's still dreaming, Sarge says, ears tucked back worriedly.

Molly cocks her head to one side. He looks like he's digging.

Daine's stomach drops. "Peeta," she says sharply, sitting down on the edge of the bed and gripping his shoulders. "Peeta, wake up."

"Daine!" Peeta continues digging, but his movements suddenly feel sluggish, as if he's fighting the air as much as the ground. He can hear Daine's voice, but it seems to be coming from all around him, not below him. A strange sensation, somewhat like a tingling, starts in his fingertips. He can still feel his knees against the ground, but he also feels like he's floating a few feet above it, both inside his body and not.

"Daine!" he calls again, his voice sounding distant and muffled and slow. He can feel his lips moving and not moving as he speaks, and the floating sensation increases before it shifts without warning to falling.

He wakes with a start, Daine's hands on his shoulders and her face above his, half illuminated by light pouring in from the hall through his open door.

"Daine." His voice is rough, as if he's been yelling. His arms tremble as he pushes himself up to a sitting position on the bed. Dream and reality shift into place in his mind, and he pulls Daine into a tight hug.

Finally, he wakes. She manages a wobbly, uncertain smile as he sits up, but her face crumples when he pulls her into a crushing hug. "It's okay," she says, wrapping her arms around him. "I'm fine. It's over." At the moment, she only needs the reassurance a little less than he doubtless does.

Shadow leaps up onto the bed behind her, and she feels a little paw press against her back. His fingers are bleeding, the cat observes.

We'll deal with it in a minute, Daine replies, rubbing Peeta's back.

The dream seems both far away and immediate, but he already feels calmer now that Daine's here and he can see that she's okay.

"You died," he half croaks, half whispers. "I'm sorry. I couldn't - you just disappeared. You died. I'm sorry."

He isn't entirely sure what he's apologizing for: for dreaming about the arena, for pulling her into the dream, for what she went through there, for her dying, for not being able to save her, for how he's reacting now that they're both awake and alive and fine. All of it, he supposes, however little any of it was actually his fault.

His shoulders ache as if he really has been digging, and his fingertips burn. He holds on to both pains, using them to ground himself in the waking world and push away the final tendrils of the nightmare.

Daine frowns, then pulls back a little so she can take him by the shoulders and look at him properly. "It wasn't your fault," she says, her tone gentle, but firm. "I walked right into it, whatever it was." And how were either of them supposed to know the ground was going to do that? Maybe it was something Peeta's subconscious came up with, but even so, it's not as if he wanted the ground to swallow her up. He seemed about as surprised by it as she was.

"I know," Peeta replies, his tone not much different from Daine's. "I'm still sorry it happened." He pauses, licking his dry lips. When he speaks again, his tone is matter-of-fact. "I've had enough dreams about dying to imagine what it was like for you in... whatever that was."

And he's had enough dreams about being unable to save people that he should be able to recover from this one more quickly than he is. But rift dreams are far more vivid and real than regular dreams, and the fact that this one took place in the Games just made it that much worse.

Daine still has her hands on his shoulders, and he gently wraps his hands around her wrists, finding calm in the twitch of her pulse beneath his fingertips.

Daine's had her fair share of odd dreams, mostly thanks to the efforts of the Graveyard Hag or, more recently, the rift. Dying in a dream is new, though, and it pains her to think that it happens to Peeta all the time. For a moment, she remembers the bog, the mud pulling and pressing on her, and her pulse quickens under his fingertips. Then she takes a breath and deliberately pushes the memory away. Just a dream.

She releases the breath, then shifts her focus to Peeta's hands. "We ought to do something about those," she says, giving his shoulders a gentle squeeze before releasing them so she can take one of his hands in hers and more closely inspect the damage, holding it in the light from the hallway. It mostly looks like friction burns from the bedsheets, but there are a few small cuts that could do with being cleaned and bandaged.

It isn't until Daine calls attention to his hands that Peeta remembers the burning. He stares at his injured fingers in surprise, almost convinced that the injuries followed him out of the dream, even if the dirt didn't.

"That isn't from the dream, is it?" he asks. "You can't get real injuries from a dream, can you?" It isn't something he would normally suspect, but things work differently here.

He looks up for Daine's answer, but movement in the doorway catches his attention. A few people in pajamas and robes have appeared in the hall outside his room, peering in with expressions of curiosity and concern.

"Um, Daine?" he says, nodding toward the door, which - now that he looks at it - appears to have been broken open. He glances back at Daine at that. What did she do to get into his room?

Daine's about to insist that it can't have been, but then it occurs to her to wonder if Peeta has a rift power anything like what's-his-face (something that started with a Z, wasn't it?). But if Peeta's dreams are that unpleasant, surely he would have woken up wounded before now, right?

Before she can voice any of that, though, her attention is directed to the gawkers in the doorway. Odd's bobs. She hadn't even thought about the noise she made getting in, and when she glances at Peeta's clock, she's both surprised and dismayed to realize it's only a little past two in the morning.

"It's all right," she says, getting to her feet and lifting a hand in general reassurance. "Sorry I woke you." Maybe she shouldn't be apologizing if they were in the same nightmare as she and Peeta, but none of them are looking particularly haunted, just sleepy and confused. To Peeta, she adds, "I'll be back in a minute with some stuff for your hands. You may as well turn on a lamp." She silently instructs the dogs to stay behind as she heads back out into the hall, the onlookers dispersing (though not without a few more baffled glances between her and Peeta).

Peeta watches in bemusement as Daine and the small crowd disappear. He makes a mental note to ask Daine what exactly she did to break through his locked door when she gets back.

Following her suggestion, he clicks on his bedside lamp, inspecting his hands himself in the bright circle of light. They aren't as bad as he would have imagined from his struggles in the dream arena and that, more than anything, convinces him that the damage isn't from the dream itself. Still, the damage is more than might be expected from just flailing around in bed.

The hand he's examining curls into a fist as the memory of clawing at the hard ground courses through him, and Peeta forces the hand open again, pushing the memory away.

Something nudges his arm, and he looks down to find Molly at his side. The minute he lifts his arm out of the way, she drops her head in his lap and stares up at him with dark, solemn eyes.

"Hey, girl," he says softly, giving her a crooked smile. With gentle strokes, he runs his hand over her head, doing the same to Sarge with the other hand when he comes to lean against Peeta's other leg.

It only takes Daine a few minutes to get back to her room and retrieve some antibacterial ointment and band-aids. She no longer needs such things for the People, but it's not that unusual for her to get scratched up a little during her healing sessions. By the time she gets back to Peeta's room, the hall is empty of onlookers. She slips back into his room and carefully pushes the door shut behind her. It doesn't latch, and she winces a little at the damage she's caused.

"Sorry," she says, keeping her voice low. "It was locked, and you didn't seem to hear me knocking, so…" she shrugs, cheeks flushing. "I busted in."

So demure, Shadow observes from atop Peeta's desk, casually washing a forepaw.

Daine shoots the cat an exasperated look. "Well, I had to wake him," she says to Shadow.

"Thank you for waking me up," Peeta says, meeting her eyes. He only thought Daine was dead for a few minutes; it would have been so much worse if he would have stayed in the dream.

He shifts his gaze to the door. "What did you do to bust in?"

She manages a wry smile, appreciating the thanks. She's not sorry she woke him sooner rather than later, but it's a relief that he doesn't seem overly upset about the door. "I shifted - just my head and neck, mostly - into a bighorn sheep." Hopefully he'll be able to figure out the rest of it for himself without her having to admit she head-butted his door open.

She returns to the bed - Molly budges up to make some space - and nods at his hands once she's seated. "All right, let's have a look. My magic doesn't work on humans, but at least I can patch you up the old-fashioned way."

Peeta's eyebrows rise at her explanation. He glances between Daine and the door, noticing for the first time that her collar is torn. "Wow."

He holds out his hands, trying to imagine Daine with a sheep's head.

"I don't think I damaged it overmuch," she says as she carefully dabs ointment on his cuts. That might just be wishful thinking, but it's also hardly the worst bit of property damage the rebel base has suffered at the hands (or heads) of rifties (or even just her, for that matter… Goddess, they're going to start thinking she has an fondness for busting doors down at the rate she's going).

Well, they'll just have to forgive her. It was an emergency.

It doesn't take too long for her to finish bandaging one hand and motion for the other. Years of healing animals the old-fashioned way has made her good at being gentle and quick for the sake of the animals' comfort.

Lost in thought, Peeta's surprised when Daine finishes with the first hand much faster than he expected. He docilely swaps hands, giving the newly bandaged one an appreciative once over.

"You're good at this," he tells her, giving the doctored fingers an experimental wiggle. The burning has faded, but he can tell he's going to be a little sore for a while yet.

He lets out a huff of laughter - he's probably the only person who could need bandages after dreaming, even if the dream was about life or death.

The memory of Katniss patching him up in their cave during the first Games hits him like lightning, come and gone in the time it takes him to blink. He frowns at the far wall for a moment, but is distracted from his thoughts by Sarge wriggling his head under Peeta's now free hand. Smiling, Peeta returns to petting him, comforted by the slide of the soft coat under his palm.

Daine glances up with a smile. "Most animals only have so much patience for this sort of thing," she explains as she wraps a band-aid around his thumb. "Back before I really learned how to use my magic, I had to do my healing with splints and bandages like everyone else." And there was only so much soothing she could do for a creature that was in pain. It was best to work quickly to minimize the animal's discomfort (and give it less time to lash out at her in pain or frustration).

She finishes up his other hand, then sits back with a little sigh. "There you are. That should keep you from getting any infections." The wounds themselves are superficial enough that he could probably take the band-aids off in a day or so and be fine.

Molly wriggles over and gives Daine's elbow a nudge in a silent request for attention. As Daine pets the dog, she debates whether or not to let the dream drop entirely, or to voice a suspicion that's been sitting in the back of her mind for a while, now. Then she looks at the clock again and decides she'd best ask about it, because it might be important.

"That… bog thing. Do you know what it was? Have you ever seen anything like it before?"

Peeta nods. Injured animals can be unpredictable at best, dangerous at worst. It makes sense that Daine would have learned to be quick with her bandaging.

He shakes his head at her question, frowning slightly. "No, I haven't. I never went in that section of the jungle." He can't help but wonder what was in the other areas he never saw.

She'd thought as much, and she nods once. "Have you ever dreamed about anything like that before?" she asks.

His frown deepens. It feels like there's more to Daine's questions than just simple curiosity. "What do you mean? Have I dreamed about the arena before, or that" - he waves a bandaged hand ineffectually - "sand stuff?"

"The sand stuff." It probably goes without saying that he's dreamed about the arena before. "It's just…" she sighs and runs a hand through her hair, wondering how best to explain it. She's pretty sure Peeta's not going to like it if her suspicions are correct, even if it does mean that this really wasn't his fault.

"Every so often, there's a sort of… big dream. One where you're likely to run into other rifties, because a lot of them are there. It's less like you're in one person's dream, or like they're in yours, and more like… like everyone is in the rift's dream, or something. And if you've never dreamed about that kind of sand stuff before, and neither have I… it had to come from somewhere. I've brought things from my world into other folk's dreams before, but it was always things I knew about." So if the bog wasn't her doing, and it wasn't Peeta's doing… maybe it wasn't really Peeta's nightmare.

Which, if it's true, might mean that the nightmare is still happening out there, just waiting to pull them back in as soon as they fall asleep again.

"Wait, wait." Peeta rubs his forehead before dropping his hand into his lap, wincing slightly when a cut twinges at the landing.

"So you're saying the arena may not have been my dream because there was something in it that I didn't know about and you didn't know about? It's some sort of dream the rift made?" The dread hits him before the understanding does, and he's on his feet before the conscious decision to stand registers, chest tight with anxiety. "Does that mean other people could still be stuck in there?" Peeta has never hated the rift as much as he does in this moment, faced with the possibility that it might, even now, have people stuck in a dream version of the Games.

He sits down hard on the bed as another thought occurs to him. "Could we wind up back there if we fall asleep again? How long do these dreams normally last?" He doesn't want to go back, but maybe he should, if other people are there. He could help them. Like you helped Daine? a small voice in the back of his mind asks. He shakes his head slightly and avoids Daine's eyes.

Daine shifts when Peeta stands, wondering if he's about to go bolting down the hall and waking everyone. Not that it would necessarily help much; most of the rifties in the city aren't living down in the base. Maybe he's thinking along the same lines, because he sits back down a moment later.

"I don't know," she says, reaching out to rest a steadying hand on his shoulder. "Maybe." There's no telling for certain just how long these things last in reality, but considering how long she was asleep before she woke up, and how many hours seemed to pass in the dream, it seems likely to her that if it is a rift thing, it's still going on.

"We could sleep in shifts," she suggests, pulling her hand back and clenching them both in her lap. "Then if one of us started getting fitful, the other could wake 'em up."

Peeta frowns at Daine's mention of sleep before he catches a glimpse of the clock by his bed. They weren't asleep nearly as long as he'd thought, and it wouldn't make sense for them to stay up the rest on the night, avoiding sleep on the off chance that they might wind up back in the dream. Still, the thought of sleep isn't completely welcoming, and he nods in approval of Daine's suggestion.

"Good idea."

He's torn between offering to stay awake first and avoid the possibility of the dream, or sleep first with the hope that he might be able to help other dreamers. He feels too wired and edgy to sleep, though, and would prefer some time to think about what happened, anyway.

"You can sleep first, if you want," he offers Daine, before it hits him that she might not be too eager to go back to sleep either. He rarely sought sleep again on those nights he woke from nightmares about dying; he wouldn't be surprised if she feels the same.

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