Dreams are a dangerous foe. Unstable grounds, combined with the inherent denial that what he's seeing can't be false, it's a battle that König can seldom win.

What is a man supposed to do against his own subconscious deciding to attack when he's most vulnerable?

Sometimes, the attacks are harmless, just strange scenarios in which he's been turned into a dragon that hoards sweet treats, other times they're a little more unsettling, like the time he dreamt that his sniper hood was welded to his actual face and woke in a cold sweat.

Tonight, the realm of unreality seems to despise his existence. Tonight, König wakes with a special kind of terror steadily growing in his chest. His large hands shake, and it's almost as if all the air in the bedroom has turned to mustard gas.

Pale blue eyes dart around the room, unseeing of anything in the dark before finally landing on your curled up form next to him.

Unmoving.

For a horrible moment, König is sure that the dream was reality, and he feels like he's going to throw up. A desperate noise somewhere between a sob and a choke escapes his throat as slowly, ever so slowly, he reaches for your wrist, feeling for a pulse.

It takes a few minutes for his shaking hands to focus enough to find one, but the second he does, he lets out a shaky exhale of relief, blinking rapidly to try and stop the tears that he didn't realise were running down his face.

Right now, in this moment, all he wants is to scoop you up in his arms and never let go. It's sort of pathetic, he thinks, the way he needs to hold you like a child holding a teddy bear in a thunderstorm.

König resists the urge for all of five minutes, sitting up against the headboard and gently pulling you against him, only to crush you against his chest, bringing his knees up to box you in, the feeling just shy of painful.

You wake with a start, opening your mouth to protest König interrupting your beauty sleep, but stop when you register the way he's trembling like a leaf in a storm.

"Schschsch, mein Schatz, bitte let me hold you, bitte, bitte," he murmurs into your hair, shifting one hand to rest above your heart, counting the beats under his breath.

The two of you stay like this for a few minutes, until his trembling lessens enough that you're no longer worried he's about to have a heart attack.

"I'm sorry, Liebling, I... I had ein Albtraum." At the blank look on your face, König gives a small smile. "Ach, what is the word? When your sleep mind plays bad tricks on you?" He leans back slightly, nodding when you tell him the word. "Ja, ja, ein nightmare."

"Ich... I thought... The nightmare, it was very realistic. I thought I'd hurt you and... I got so scared. I'd accidentally hurt you, Schatzi, and I kept seeing your ghost and I couldn't get the image of your hands," König takes a deep breath, using his other hand to hold both of yours with a reverence you've never seen from him before. "Your little hands scratching at mine before going limp and..."

His voice cracks. "I could not live with myself, everything was so cold and lifeless without you. Bitte, please, I want you to start sleeping with a knife, a pistol, anything under your pillow. I would not hurt you on purpose, I promise you, I..."