Work Text:
It was really lucky that Bdubs had been born in District 5, because he’d always been terrified of the dark, but his district is better lit than any other.
As a little kid, he could not sleep without a nightlight, otherwise it’d be all nightmares and terrors, so his parents, to get him out of their bed, put together their spare change until they could buy him a little nightlight.
A small thing, shaped like a crescent moon he turned on and put on his bedside table every night since he was a toddler, but at around ten he had decided to stop using it, to work through his fear of the dark, and to his credit he had managed really well, so much so that he had relegated the little thing in the sock drawer over a year prior.
That night Bdubs wasn’t tired, at school it had been an easy day, the teachers always made sure to be gentle the day before the Reaping, this year even more so, since so many of the kids in his class were about to be in their first eligible Reaping, Bdubs included.
After dinner, he’d gone to bed early, as he usually did since he preferred to work on homework early in the morning than late at night. But instead of quickly falling asleep as he usually would, he kept tossing and turning.
The warm, muggy air wasn’t doing him any favors, everything was too hot and sticky, he couldn’t get comfortable, so he kept tossing and turning, for hours.
When sleep finally came to him it wasn’t restful, he was stuck in a nightmare after the other, first he was getting reaped. Then he wasn’t but for some reason he volunteered, then the Capitol escort went through every paper slip until he could find his. He ran away from the reaping stage and was caught and punished. He got to the arena and every other tribute was a massive 18 year old, or a classmate of his, however impossible that might have been.
He woke up when it was still dark, and his clock, sitting neatly on his nightstand, told him it was barely 1 AM.
Bdubs felt the urge to call his mom, to come sing him to sleep, but he knew the poor woman was exhausted from the day's work, and also extremely pregnant, so he didn’t want to disturb her at all.
He stared at the ceiling a while, unable to calm his heartbeat, when the thought crossed his mind.
Slowly he got up, careful not to let the bed or the wooden floor squeak, and walked over to his closet, opened the sock drawer and dug all the way to the back of his to get out his old companion of so many scary nights.
When he turned it on, the warm glow immediately comforted him, and he felt the drowsiness of the late hour creeping back in. He crawled into bed and was asleep comfortably in a matter of minutes.
That night he dreamed of flying around in space, and living on the moon.