#in which ava is incredibly bisexual and camila is Like That

[daisychainsandbowties]

Chapter 2 of my percy jackson au!

words: 7k

rated: M

read on Ao3

excerpt:

The moment she steps out of the ocean, salt sticking to her skin, Ava feels a prickle of pain travel up the column of her spine. It takes all of her determination to keep walking, trudging up the sandy incline, dodging the shards of seashell that stick up out of the wet sand. They’re beautiful, glimmers of purple and blue and inky black, growth-bands warping the surface into patterns. Calcium carbonate and chitin derived into a dark rainbow, scattered up the beach.

The pain spreads to her legs, erupting in pins and needles, trying to rock her off balance as she stuffs her board up underneath one arm, eyes on the ground as the dizziness hits. The surfboard is slippery, still dripping seawater down her arms and onto her swim trunks, which are patterned in tiny winking flamingos.

She stops, taking deep breaths as the anaesthetic of the ocean fades, willing herself not to pass out again because she’s already been fireman-carried up the beach twice in the past week. Both times by JC, and he’s sweet about it, but there’s only so many times a girl can be scraped off the ground by a cute boy before it turns from romantic to pathetic.

So she stands with the sunlight prickling the back of her neck in her pink bikini top and her flamingo swim trunks, wondering what the sweet fuck is happening to her. Even before that night in the orphanage, she was able to move most of her upper body. Maybe it was all the baths culminating into feeling, or maybe it was just time, but on her nineteenth birthday Ava managed to get herself into her chair before anyone could come in and wake her. She was still figuring out her hands and building up the muscles in her back and her arms, but it was momentum. It was the possibility of living by herself, of leaving.

But then the monster came and everything accelerated and now she’s here and she can breathe underwater, but she can’t sit out on her board forever. She has to come ashore, and when she does she can feel the livid traceries of scar tissue where they performed surgery after surgery on her back.

Sister Frances never laughed when Ava said she felt like a prawn getting de-veined over and over again.

Ava’s not ungrateful. She doesn’t know if it’s some fucked-up form of water-bending or if she’s secretly part-mermaid, but she’s not willing to look too closely at any of it either. It’s a miracle.

But fuck, it still hurts like a bitch when she leaves the ocean after a day of pushing her body hard, and most mornings she has to spend twenty minutes getting out of bed and stretching before she can sprint down to the beach or slap the bottom of JC’s ‘protein shaker’ when he’s drinking out of it.

Behind her, the ocean sighs, tripping over loose seashells. The sound feels amplified, somehow, like it’s calling her home.

She used to dream of it, there in the strange spiral of dust motes that floated in her room at night, washed into visibility by moonlight, streetlight, by the little lamp that sat next to Ava’s bed. It was decorated with little dragonflies, and it was the only faint nod to childhood that Sister Frances left alone. Beyond that the room was barren, a mausoleum more than a place you might expect to find a sleeping child.

It was a space of tiled whites and the grey of the nuns fluttering by, of the heat trickling in through the cracked windowpanes. Ava and her perpetually dry mouth, alone while the other children lay on the grass outside with juice boxes, their voices reaching her like stray birds, or stones.

So, at night, Ava shut her eyes long before they felt tired, opening them every now and then to watch a spider draw a web in the far corner of the room or to listen to a siren as it grew fainter and fainter, trying not to think of the last time she saw her mother and how the air then had been full of sirens too. Getting closer – the Doppler effect drowning them both in waves of sound where they lay in the weird shimmer of broken glass under the one working headlight of the car.

Both of them strewn onto the road because Ava forgot to put her seatbelt on, and her mother - with a sharp click not unlike the internal sound of breaking bone – undid her belt to reach into the backseat for Ava’s.

Her face, body curved to reach Ava in the backseat. The light in her eyes as she said, ‘Eu tenho você.’  

Then the road and the blood-draped shape of her, white light cutting over her shoulders and making her seem larger than life, though Ava imagines they must have looked small together, out on the asphalt waiting for sirens.

Deftly, sometimes, Ava managed to drift past the sound of her mother’s voice or the phantom feeling of glass cutting through her, hitting to road to find the pain had gone missing. She thought of other things while the world revolved, but not around her.

The lamp cast large dragonfly shapes onto the walls, stretching the wings wide and the long bodies longer.

Her dreams were always blue.

Not the plain, pastel blue of the blanket the social worker put over her legs before she left, passing the shape of Frances in the doorway. Not the too-brilliant blue of the sky, glimpsed through the old windows in her bedroom.

This blue was different. Deeper, and richer, and hungry. It was a blue that turned to black, turned inky and reflected back the night sky. A colour that sat up on the surface and caught sunlight, dragging it down beneath into wavy lines of white surrounded by slats of cerulean.

It was water, absorbing all wavelengths and leaving the blue alone, complicated and occasionally greenish, occasionally lightless. Kicked up into the storms or smoothed into glassy stillness.

Ava dreamed of bright coral a handspan under the surface, the light refracted sideways, sitting on the scales of tiny moving bodies. She dreamed of white foam, of cool dark depths and the bioluminescence that lurks down very deep, where creatures must make their own light.

The water gathered her, and held her, and she felt – somehow – that it wanted to keep her.

But she always woke up. A fish on a hook drawn by the noise of the orphanage waking around her, of someone rushing into her room to say good morning before Frances could get her slippers on. The cool weight of a palm on her forehead and a promise to listen in geography class today, ‘I know you like that bullshit.’

Ava half-asleep saying, ‘I do, I do,’ but only in time to watch the last flash of backpack disappear through her bedroom door.

cont.