(Author's Note: I originally posted this story, very spaced out, starting sometime around 2011 until 2013, with one or two posts since then. I am making some light edits for 2018 as I return to finish the story. Thank you for reading.)

Welcome to this post-Mockingjay, pre-epilogue fiction guiding Katniss and Peeta through recovery, rediscovery, and newfound moments of hope! Spoilers included at no extra charge!

I have been tailoring this story for a while and have decided that it will never be perfect; so I give you what I have and hope you enjoy it anyway. Each chapter includes lyrics. I encourage you to let them inspire you... maybe make your own fanmix?

I do not claim ownership of the lyrics, credited as appropriate, nor the characters and themes of The Hunger Games trilogy, which belong to Suzanne Collins.

This story is dedicated to Grandma C, who left this world today. All with love.

Smoke Rising Chapter 1: Still Intact

"I'll be there as soon as I can.
But I'm busy mending broken
Pieces of the life I had before."
- "Unintended," Muse

The bright side of having survived two trips to the Games, torture, brainwashing, and a war is that, statistically speaking, the odds are in my favor for surviving just about anything. Of course, having survived all that, I can't say that I really want to.

And so, these past few months have been grueling.

I wake up each morning, take a couple pills, bathe and go to therapy. Then I take some more pills and have "free time" (which, for me, is usually sit-and-stare-off-into-space time) before more therapy (this time of the physical persuasion). Then it's art therapy, which was my idea. Then dinner, complete with a chaser of more pills. And bedtime, which is 60% wakefulness, 30% nightmares, and 10% full unconsciousness.

Every day it's the same. I'm going around in circles on a train through hell. It won't stop. It won't go back to the station. Just the same, burned-out engine running over the same, damaged tracks, day after day. For months, I've been stuck in this sick loop without any signs of it getting any better, and I'm alone for the ride.

The only part of the day that is remotely bearable is art therapy. For that hour, I feel like I can actually breathe. I can lose myself in the smells of sharp, earthy paint and tangy turpentine, the textures of woven canvas and soft, sable brush and plastic knife. I can let my hands work on their own for a while. But that's only as long as I don't look at what I'm painting. It always comes out awful – not in terms of artistry, but subject: arenas and war and death and a girl on fire.

The last time I saw that girl, she was in poor health and half-crazed with shell shock and grief and the weight of decisions she shouldn't have had to shoulder. I can't say I particularly trusted the woman Katniss assassinated, but Coin held enough power that Katniss should have realized that her arrow was seeking out, in addition to a human heart, a cell deep in the Capitol prison system. That's what happens when you assassinate a president.

Except now she is back home, in District 12, and I am the one locked up in the Capitol.

I've been pleading to go home. Not because Katniss is there – because who knows if I'll ever be able to sit in a room with her again, given what's happened to my brain and her psyche and our families – but because that's just it: I have no family. I am alone in the world with nothing but my doctor, my pills, and a house in District 12. Maybe I could talk with Haymitch every once in a while; I have no one to talk to here. Maybe I could bake. Something. It's like the longer I stay here, the less I know who I'm supposed to be. I don't belong here in the Capitol. And I certainly don't belong in 13. Can't I just go home?

All in good time, Dr. Aurelius says.

Before I can leave the hospital, there is therapy I must do.

We have already done some relaxation work. If I feel an episode coming on, I am now pretty good at focusing and keeping myself calm. I still don't trust my hands to not turn mutt, so I tend to get a fierce grip on something stable, but Dr. Aurelius says that's acceptable. If it's a bad episode or a strong flashback, I find a quiet corner in my mind and go to my relaxing place. It's a place I can count on, mentally - always the same, always perfect. There is a long, stone counter laid out with ten beautiful, clean layers of cake to frost. There is fondant, and food color, and frosting, meringue, whipped cream, piping bags, even silicone mats and melted sugar and an airbrush. Here, I can do anything to this cake that I desire, and no one will interrupt me. No one will hurt me. No one will die. I am at peace here. But I usually only have time to plan my cake design before the episode has passed, and I can return to reality.

Must return... It's better on the other side.

I've had relaxation down pat for a while, but it tends to leave me about as spent as an actual episode does. The difference is, after an episode, I feel mentally disoriented and violated and threatened, whereas after avoiding an episode through relaxation, I feel jaded and disgruntled, tired and confused, but still intact and somewhat secure.

So the next step was recognizing my fears and using relaxation to cope with them. We have a ladder of fears, starting at rung one and ending at rung one hundred. My fears are placed on these rungs, and I start at the bottom and climb my way up. I don't take on a new fear until I have managed those on the rungs below it. The process is like this:

Fear: Katniss in a room with me. Rung: 8. Imagine: I picture Katniss and me alone in a room. Experience: I imagine how the situation would play out – this one being rather tame, and having enough new memories of Katniss to process the scene sensibly, I imagine it would be more or less uneventful. Relax: Deep breaths, loosen my muscles, and go to my cake if I need it. Now the fear looks more like rung one. I can now move up the ladder to the next fear.

Fear: Katniss and me in a room, with a firearm at a reachable distance. Rung: 40. Imagine: I try to imagine the brightly-lit room from Rung 1, but sometimes real memories of Katniss and firearms impose, and I end up seeing Katniss and me in a dark tunnel with a gun nearby. Experience: I recognize the anxiety of the situation, but again, recent experience with Katniss leads me through the scenario sensibly. I can see that we would survive the encounter. Relax: It's stressful, but usually I don't need to retreat to the cake. I stick to deep breathing and holding onto things to keep me grounded. But I do need to run through this one for a while before we can move on.

The pattern continues as we work our way up the ladder.

Fear: Katniss and me in a room, Katniss holding the firearm, but it is not loaded. Rung: 48. Imagine. Experience. Relax.

Fear: Katniss and me in a room, Katniss holding the loaded firearm but not pointing it at me. Rung: 65. Imagine. Experience. Relax.

Fear: Katniss and me in a room, Katniss pointing the loaded firearm at me. Rung: 80. Imagine. Experience. Relax.

Fear: Katniss pointing a loaded firearm at my family. Rung: 85. Imagine. Experience. Relax.

Fear: Katniss pointing a bow and arrow at me. Rung: 90. Imagine. Experience. Relax.

Fear: Katniss and me in a room, me pointing the loaded firearm at Katniss. Rung: 100. Imagine.

Wake up shaking on Dr. Aurelius's couch.

We still need to work on that one.

The next step was recognizing my triggers.

Am I worse in the cold? On stormy days? At night? Do thoughts like nightmares trigger my episodes, or does my brain take a more physical cue, like seeing something I would have seen in one of the arenas? Is blood a problem? What about my old hobbies? Thoughts of home?

This has been a difficult portion of my treatment, partly because in order to discover what triggers my episodes, I have to actually trigger some episodes. I have seen a lot of shiny memories, a lot of cruel Katnisses, a lot of dying friends and family. A lot of pristine cake.

It is also difficult because there doesn't seem to be one answer, one pattern to my triggers. Some are portions of memories breaking through my ruined brain. Some are objects, like rough bread or camera lenses. Sometimes, I can't even consciously make the connection between the trigger and my reaction. Once, I passed out after being served a salad with some sort of berry in it, and it didn't even look like nightlock. For some reason lightning can start my head pounding, my heart and breathing to quicken; and I don't even need to have flashbacks to wake up in a daze some time later.

Sleep is dangerous because my mind runs wild. It can churn out fragmented memories, trying to rebuild and repair the holes left by the Capitol. More often, it creates its own, new horrors. Things that never happened in the arena, or things I will never do to Katniss when I see her again. At least, I hope I would never do these things. But whenever I dream about them, they plague me in the wakefulness that follows. I'm only glad that while I am still at the mercy of the image of her face, broken beneath my fist, or her body, torn by my hand, I don't have to actually see Katniss in the flesh.

Which is why the next part of my therapy is so formidable.

Dr. Aurelius believes the next step is to break down my hijacked memories and overwrite them with the truth. I won't be able to get my own memories back, but I can at least correct the misinformation. He has collected audio and video files of many of the events the Capitol used to tamper with my memory. If our theories are correct, I can experience the files, use my episode-avoidance techniques, and correct my shiny memories with factual events. The doctors back in 13 tried something like this to teach me not to kill Katniss on sight, but now we are shifting our focus from trained responses to repairing damaged memory. Dr. Aurelius says this is especially successful if I am in a suggestive state, like being deeply relaxed. I suspect it would help if I were under the influence of something, just like the Capitol used the tracker jacker venom to enhance the tainted memories, but he doesn't mention it. The hijacking disgusts me so much that I cannot consider attempting a similar process to reverse it; so it's a relief to me that it doesn't seem to be on the table.

Instead, after months in the hospital – months during which I took a thousand pills and asked to be sent home a hundred times – the doctor sends me back to District 12. He says it will give me context for my overwritten memories. He says it will help post-hijacking, post-war Peeta reunite with pre-hijacking (but still bitter, post-Games) Peeta. He says it will be good for both of us. That is, for Katniss and me.

You know. As long as we don't kill each other.

"I am on the mend
At least now I can say that I am trying
And I hope you will forget things I still lack."
- "Sowing Season (Yeah)" Brand New