WHO:Peeeeeennisssss Katniss & Peeta WHAT: Peeta arrives, goes crazy, gets sedated, and then later... wakes up. WHEN: Saturday night, late WHERE: Medical WARNINGS: It's the Hunger Games, so it's probably going to be gnarly. Mentions of hijacking/brainwashing/hallucinations at the very least. Also injury and pain and feelings. Will update this if there's more
The worst part of Katniss's state wasn't the physical injury. It had been taking a lot of will just to function here, and now even that had been mostly sapped away. Finnick helped, if for no other reason than he gave her a reason to speak, to try to be witty and pretend like she was alright, rather than collapsing in on herself. But she wasn't really feeling any better.
That was, until one of the rescue teams brought in a familiar figure. Katniss only caught glimpses of him at first, in between the people around him, and hardly dared hope that it was real, but when he awoke, there was no more doubt about it. It was Peeta, and Katniss didn't know where he'd been or what had happened to him, but she didn't care. She actually tried to get out of bed, and almost got away with it, because everyone was so focused on him — but her legs weren't steady enough to support her, so she only got as far as swinging them over the side of the bed.
But she insisted, and cried, and would have clawed and kicked and fought too, if she hadn't been so afraid of being sedated again. At one point she found herself shouting, screaming Peeta's name because she couldn't tell if he knew she was there, and he was panicking so much that she wanted desperately for him to know that she was. Before she could get anywhere near him, they'd put him under, and finally, finally, her bed was pushed over next to his.
He was unconscious, but he still didn't look calm to Katniss's eyes. It wasn't a proper, normal sleep, and that had already been difficult enough for him to get before the hijacking. She had a bad feeling that sedatives sat about as well with him as they did with her, and yet there was nothing she could do about it.
She waited until they were alone, even sending Finnick away and back to Annie, and then reached out, gently trying to smooth out the lines in his forehead with her fingertips. Then she reached for his hand, and brought it across the small gap between the beds to rest in both of hers.
Exhaustion started to set in as her adrenaline wore off, but she refused to close her eyes, afraid that he'd disappear again — or that she'd dream of him disappearing. It was a nightmare that had come to her the first time she'd managed to sleep with less medicines in her system. Fear of losing him was not an unfamiliar sentiment, at all — an uncomfortably familiar one, in fact — but this was different. Disappearing was different than being dead. Different from being held captive and tortured. It was heartwrenchingly, devastatingly, unknown and impossible to do anything about. And she'd only just started to get him back.
Eventually, her eyes closed, and she started to doze, somewhere between asleep and awake. Her head fell forward, resting against her own knuckles, his hand still held tightly in both of hers.