A/N: Post-War. Travis is having some issues.

Travis sprawled across his bed, interlocking fingers pillowing his head, and stared at the ceiling like it had all the answers. Like maybe it could answer why he couldn't, for the life of him, think of a prank to pull on someone that wouldn't fall dry and flat and wrong. Like it could help him understand why he felt so wrong. Him being here, alive and intact, when so, so many of his friends were dead.

Or injured.

Or shattered.

Or a survivor.

He wondered which category he fell in, or if he had invented a new one entirely. He supposed he shouldn't give himself so much credit. He wasn't nearly creative enough to think of a whole new category of broken.

He sat up, swinging his legs over the bed, and stared at the floor for a moment. And then he rose, moving out the door like a barely-there breeze, and it didn't occur to him that he didn't know where he was going until he had reached the ocean. Or when he walked along the beach, where the sand puffed around his ankles. Or when he found himself walking the perimeter of the forest, or when his feet took him to the fields where the strawberries thrived.

Travis was looking at the fat red triangles of fruit, hands thrust in his pockets, when he tripped over something warm and soft and alive. He caught himself, palms down on the earth, and rolled over to check what he'd tripped on.

It was only to find Katie Gardner glaring at him, trowel held rather formidably in hand, with an enormous straw hat perched jauntily on her auburn hair, and positioned on bent knees in the dirt.

A typical Katie Gardner position, as was the glare.

"Stoll," she puffed. "I hope you have a good reason for-"

She blinked and broke off, eyeing him, and then dug at a particularly difficult weed again. "You better not be here to spray paint the strawberries, or I swear-"

"I'm not."

Katie looked up, dark eyes skeptical, and he offered her a pathetic attempt at a totally-trustworthy-smile. Which she saw through in an instant, because this was Katie, and she saw people. Nevermind that he didn't have enough energy to try to be discreet.

He sat up, hooking his arms over his knees and interlocking them in front. "What're you doing?"

"Gardening. Obviously. What are you doing?"

Travis shrugged.

When he looked back up, Katie was pinning him with one of those I-see-right-through-you-buster looks, and he wondered vaguely if he should be frightened. But really, he didn't care anymore. She could see all she wanted.

It wasn't going to change anything.

He would still be the boy who walked through streets of rubble, the bodies of his friends lost or shredded to an unrecognizable state or dead or damaged beyond repair. He would still be the person who had looked at the terror of being a survivor, and understood it, and had to live with it, because that's what being a survivor entailed.

Whether or not Katie saw it just determined if she understood that terror too.

Katie sat back on her heels, her straw hat wobbling dangerously atop her head, and she dusted off her dirty hands. She set down her trowel and turned towards him, setting her dirt-stained hands on her tanned thighs.

"You're thinking about the war, aren't you."

Travis shrugged again.

Katie tilted her head sideways, leaning forward, her brown eyes attempting to capture his. He let her.

"What, specifically, are you thinking about?" she asked carefully.

Images flashed before his eyes. Horrible, blood-soaked images.

He swallowed, feeling like his throat had turned to metal, and said hoarsely, "All of it."

Katie's freckle-spattered cheeks were shadowed by her ridiculous hat. "Have you talked to Connor?"

Travis looked at her, at the dark eyes and the reddish hair and the brown freckles and the sun-browned skin. "Talk about what?"

She lifted an eyebrow slightly. "All of it."

He let out a soft huff that vaguely resembled a laugh, or it would if he was still capable of making such a sound, and looked away. Trust her to use his words against him.

"Travis."

He looked at her, if only out of surprise, because he was never 'Travis' to her. Always Stoll. Before the war, before the blood, before the slideshow that wouldn't leave his head, he had used to joke that he had 'stoll her heart.' It felt like so long ago, even if it was barely more than a few months. If she gave any response at all, it was usually to roll her eyes and tell him that wasn't even proper grammar.

He didn't recognize that person anymore.

"Do you think there's something wrong with you?"

He blinked at the sheer unexpectedness of that statement, but she held his eyes, and she looked dead-serious, so he thought about it. And he decided that no, there was nothing wrong with being a survivor. Everyone would say that was lucky, right? Everyone would tell him this was 'survivor's guilt' and that he needed to 'move on.'

They never told him how. Never told him he'd be stuck playing everything over and over again on repeat like he was a broken record. Never told him he could get out, never told him a way out existed. They never told him his existence would become circular.

Because when he became a survivor, survival became the maximum he could reach. Not living. Surviving.

"Do you?" he countered quietly.

Katie bent forward further, forcing him to hold her eyes. Stubborn girl.

"No."

"Why not?" He had no trouble looking at her now. "Why doesn't this all seem wrong to you? Is there some trick I'm missing? Some way to get out? Let me ask you, Katie, if you have some secret method of how to stop feeling so sick of being alive-"

He stopped, but it was too late. She knew now. And he couldn't look at her again. Like she was a bright light that hurt his eyes to look upon.

"There isn't something wrong with me, Katie," he said quietly. "I am wrong. And so are you. And so is," he waved in a general gesture, including the entire camp in the movement, "all of this."

"That's not true," she said quietly.

He let out a harsh sound that might've once been a laugh, had he been the same Travis Stoll he'd once been. He'd never get that boy back. Because he was no boy anymore, no- he was a survivor.

She reached out and caught his chin in a few, dirt-browned fingers and forced him to look her in her dark, blazing eyes. Her beautiful, righteous, wrong eyes.

"Look around, Travis. Look."

She swept an arm to encompass the camp. "Look at the strawberries, look at Thalia's pine, look at the house, look at our friends-"

"What's left of them."

"Travis."

"What? What, Katie?" he snapped.

"There's life here. There's people who care for you, and for me, and for all of us. We fought to keep this. And you're telling me it's wrong?"

"Because everyone's dead."

"No!" she cried, exasperated. "We're not! Connor's alive. Percy's alive. Annabeth's alive. No, look at me- We lost people, but not everyone. So many of us are still here."

"Is that supposed to make me feel better about myself for surviving?" The last word came out derisive.

"We won, Travis!"

"It doesn't feel that way."

"But it's true. Look-" She pressed a few seeds into his palm. "There is still life here, as there always will be. We stood against titans, and we won. Everyone you care for who died in that war will go to Elysium. The gods owe them that. And we will see them again."

He looked at her, at the sheer force of nature that was Katie, and he tried. For a moment, he let himself try to haul himself out of the dregs he'd sank into. He tried.

And he failed. As he seemed to do more and more lately.

"And what about the people still alive?" he asked softly. "We're broken, Katie."

They were all mirrors now, reflecting only what they had seen. When Kronos had torn his world down around him, ripped the sky to the earth, and spat on it, there was nothing else Travis could be but a survivor.

The fingers cupping his chin, soft under the gritty feel of dirt, made him look at her again. At the determined eyes. At the fierce set to that chin.

"Maybe so. But broken is not the same as unfixable."

He looked at her, and she looked at him, and after a long, long moment, Travis nodded.

He didn't believe her. But he believed that Katie believed what she was saying. And if Katie could somehow navigate this turbulence... Maybe she could show him how to, too. Maybe... Maybe there was some sort of truth to pesky, stubborn, sweet, fierce Katie's words.

Maybe he could collect some shreds of who he'd been before.

Maybe being a survivor didn't have to define him.

Within him grew a forgotten something- a fragile bubble that depended solely on Katie's fierce, black eyes and the fingers that slipped from his face until he reached up and enfolded them in his.

Hope.

~Fin

Disclaimer: I do not own the characters or the setting. I also don't own the quote, "broken is not the same as unfixable." It's actually from the Lunar Chronicles, by Marissa Meyer, which is my favorite series and I happen to love the quote as well.