If she had been holding her breath she would have let it go when he answered, but she wasn't. Instead she nods again, half of a movement that clips itself in the middle because everything aches in a way that makes her feel old, though she knows it more as being a particularly caused type of malnourishment. The mention of a bowl combined with his release of her prompts her to look for a bowl or a cup that they do not have. When they drink, they drink from the river with cupped hands, and when they eat it is much the same; Katniss cannot get out of her habit of distrust of cities with such high buildings and implications of difficulty when escape could be necessary. Laughable in an inescapable place to begin with but again it is a hard learned lack of faith and so even harder to disrupt. Her lips tremble and she can feel them instinctively inclined to curl back but she presses them thin, bows her head, shakes it in a curtain of dark tangles and straighter lines that have fared better.

"I'm sorry," even those two words alone feel empty, no matter how much she means them, no matter how much it is Frankie himself who has offered this solution. It is still sickening and it still isn't right, but what is right and what can make other things right are not often one and the same, if ever as far as Katniss has been able to tell. It was not right to kill the other kids her age in the arena, her age and maybe a little younger, a little older, but kids nonetheless; all of them are...were. Only Peeta and her remain of course, still kids...except not. It's hard to distinguish based on looks alone but what they share of each other is knowing, is experience, the history that does separate them even if no one else knows it. She draws on some of that now, a conjunction of strength and necessity, the former greatly gathered by the latter and she tells herself to think of it like a poison. This may seem counter-intuitive to just about anyone else, but for Katniss it is a coping mechanism, a way of paralleling what she must do now to something she has had to do before. Of course the similarity ends abruptly at the part where she actually swallows instead of spitting it out, but she thinks she can force herself to follow through. Again, she needs to.

And it helps, truth be known, that it isn't just hunger keeping her awake. Nightmares are bad enough when they're kept to her dormant hours but worse when they're there when she has both eyes open too. She can't do anything in this state, can't protect herself and certainly can't protect Peeta and that's really the end ruling. She didn't risk their lives to get them out of the Games together to have some City and happenstance overturn her. Besides, she knows if one of them was stuck here, she would never forgive herself and she thinks it likely that Peeta would find some far-removed reason it could have been his fault but that could be up for debate if she ever found reason.

So there's just one more question she has, tucking her arms against her ribcage, curling her hands as she looks up at the barely-more-than-a-stranger, the one who can fix this even though it doesn't occur to her that it's his responsibility to do so. Her mind simply hasn't wrapped around the whole of the situation still, hard enough to come to grips with the little she has.

"How much?" Will he tell her when to stop? Is it hard to stop? What does the pain feel like, if anything she's felt before? It's natural to wonder, but she doesn't waste much time on it.