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[tsarisfanfiction]

Remembrance

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Family/Hurt/Comfort Characters: Kayla, Apollo, Michael Human memories fade, and details get forgotten. Godly memories don't, and Apollo will always help his children, if they ask. TOApril Day 30 - Fading Memories. Longest fic of the month to round this TOApril up! Once again it took me a while to work out what I wanted to do with this one, but I definitely need more Apollo&Kayla and also more Kayla&Michael content in my life, so that's where this ended up. There's also a few easter eggs in here for some of my other fics, for the observant/readers with good memories!

Kayla huffed, dragging the box out from underneath the bench.  Damn musicians, shoving all their stuff in the area that was supposed to be her nook, and especially damn the musicians that were also head counsellors that had enabled it.

Also Will, because Will hadn’t been a musician but he’d still let it happen (and Michael, but Kayla would always forgive Michael anything).  No more.  Kayla was head counsellor now, and even if it was only for her final year in camp, this nook at the back of the cabin was going to at least have space for her to stuff all the annoying things like chore schedules.

She wasn’t Austin, or Alice, or Will (or Michael).  She wasn’t having that stuff in her personal part of the cabin, stressing her out with duty­-based things in her safe, stress-free bunk.  Not a chance.  It could get banished to the back of the cabin like she knew other cabins did, for her to pick up when she had to and ignore when she didn’t.

Well, Kayla was realistic.  She wasn’t going to get all of the instruments out of there; there was an entire orchestra’s worth, at least, and several of them were large and heavy, or otherwise not easily moveable – she sent the harp and the full sized drum kits a half-hearted glare, knowing full well that she was never going to win a fight with those particular sisters over the placement of their main instruments.  Still, she could at least clear the flutes that hadn’t been used in years – Kayla didn’t think she’d ever seen any of them come out – off of the desk and find a different cranny to stow them in.

The same went for the crates worth of sheet music stowed under the desk, which was what she was currently trying to wrangle.  For being simple sheets of music, they got heavy when there was a lot of them, rather like a whole pile of target faces all at once, and it took more than a bit of pulling and shoving before she got them moved over enough that she could pull a chair up and sit in it without her legs being crammed against crates.

Well, almost.  She growled as her feet kicked against another one, and ducked back down under the desk to see if she could push that one further back, outside of accidental kicking range.

It refused to, so with another grumble she started to yank it forwards instead, not quite sure where she was going to move it to but determined that it wasn’t going to stay in too-close kicking reach.  Kayla wasn’t tall like Austin or Jerry but she also wasn’t short like Yan and needed some leg room while she was doing head counsellor things.

When it finally came out, it was covered in dust, enough to make her nose itch.  It also wasn’t sheet music, like she’d expected.  Nor was it spare archery targets, which she would’ve been delighted to find – they were forever running out of those.

It was full of photographs.

Curious, she picked one up, puffing until the dust shifted.  There were two boys in the photo – one young and gap-toothed, and the other… well, still young, but maybe at least a teenager.  He had a lot of beads for someone Kayla guessed might be thirteen or so, but the younger kid – and he was really young, definitely nowhere near double digits – didn’t have a camp necklace at all.  He had familiar blond waves and blue eyes, though, and Kayla realised it had to be Will, back when he’d been the baby of the cabin.  The older boy must have been one of their siblings, with his own blond hair and darker blue-green eyes, but Kayla didn’t recognise him.

She set that one down and picked up another, wiping the dust off against her sleeve.  This time, the faces were more familiar, more blond kids, but ones she knew she’d seen before.  Their names didn’t come to her, but she was pretty certain that if she read through the names on the first bead of her necklace, she’d make the connections again.  Unlike baby Will and the unnamed boy, these two were more rough and tumble, with the girl having the boy in a headlock while he clearly fought to get out of it.  Both of them were laughing, though, and the camera was held at an angle, as if the photographer had been laughing too hard to keep it steady, too.

The third photograph made her freeze when the dust came off.

It was her, from behind.  Her hair had been freshly dyed, with no sign of her natural colour at all, and Kayla had only dyed her hair like that for a short time before deciding she preferred to keep the crown of her head visibly ginger.  She was at the archery range, bow in one hand and  gesturing wildly with the other.  Next to her, also with their back to the camera, was someone with black hair in a short pony tail, more or less the same height as eleven year old Kayla – gods, this had been taken six years ago – and gesturing back at her.

She didn’t recognise them.  Not really.  She knew who it was – of course she did, it was Michael, and she was sure she’d always remember the way he kept his hair tied back like that – but what she recognised was his bow, the beautiful horn horse bow that now lived in the attic of the Big House.

Staring at the photograph, she was suddenly hit with the realisation that she didn’t remember his face.  She didn’t remember his voice, either.  She remembered him being her big brother, that he’d spent hours and hours with her at the range, better than any of the Olympic archers Da had coached but completely disinterested in competition shooting, but she couldn’t remember his face.

Kayla had no idea what colour his eyes had been.  If he’d had bangs or if his hair was all swept back into the ponytail.  Details that felt like they should never be forgotten, but she couldn’t remember them.

Logically, she knew she’d only known Michael for a few months, which was basically no time at all compared to the length of time she’d since spent at camp, but with how often his name still flittered through her thoughts, it felt like she ought to remember him better than that.

It hurt, to realise that she didn’t.

Kayla dived back into the box, trying to find more photographs of him.  There were a lot where there was a blur of black hair in the corner, or turning away, or with his back to the camera.  She even found one with a younger-looking Alice braiding his hair, but Michael hadn’t been looking at the camera then, either.  He’d been looking back at Alice as best he could without turning his head.

Still, it was the clearest one she’d found so far, and she cleared away more streaks of dust with her fingers until it was clean.

Seeing Michael with Alice reminded her that she was the only camper left in their cabin, now that Austin had left, that had met Michael.  Raphael and Emma had arrived the next summer, and everyone else was even later than that.  There was no-one else to show the photograph to and reminisce with, or try to remember with.

Okay, maybe she could go to Chiron, but as great as Chiron was, it didn’t feel right.  Chiron hadn’t been any closer to Michael than he was to any other camper, she didn’t think.  She didn’t know how he could have been.  It wasn’t like he was family, really, although she was pretty sure he and Apollo-

Apollo.  Dad.

Her dad, Michael’s dad.

She didn’t even finish thinking it through before she called him, startled when her voice sounded thick, like she’d been crying.  She didn’t think she’d been crying.

The instant appearance of her dad, and the way he immediately wiped tears from her face, told her that she had been.

“What’s wrong?” he asked her, sitting cross-legged in the small patch of floor that wasn’t covered in photographs or musician things.  It put him right in her personal space, but Kayla never minded that with her dad.  Either of them, actually.

“I found these,” she said, waving photographs in his face.  One of them was the first one she’d found, with her and Michael.  Another was the one with Alice.  “And I don’t… I don’t remember him, Dad.”  A sob erupted from her throat.  “I’ve always said he was my favourite brother, but I don’t… I don’t remember him!”

Part of her waited for him to poke her in the chest and tell her that actually, she did remember him.  That he was in her heart, her favourite brother, and it didn’t matter if she couldn’t remember the exact shade of his eyes, or whether he usually had bangs.  That was the sort of sappy thing people usually said, after all.

But he didn’t.  He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her against his side, tucked under his arm like she was younger than she was, like she wasn’t now the most senior Apollo kid in camp.

“Do you want me to talk about him?” he offered, and her head snapped to look at him.

“Yes,” she said, latching onto the offer like it was a lifeboat.  “Yes, Dad.”

He chuckled, quietly enough that it didn’t feel like he was laughing at her.  “Okay,” he said, and plucked the photo of her and Michael from her fingers.  She barely felt it go.  “Michael was a fighter.  And I don’t just mean because of the war, or his arguments with Clarisse – and he got into a lot of those with her.  He was a fighter because he had something to fight for.”  Kayla felt Apollo squeeze her shoulders.  “You.”

The noise that escaped her was both unladylike – not that she cared – and very startled.  “Me?”

Apollo gave a one shouldered shrug.  “Well, his siblings.  All of you,” he admitted.  “Michael was always one for loving deeply, when he let someone in.  He had a reputation for being harsh and prickly, especially with other campers, but beneath the thorns was a massive heart with so much love to give out, if they could make him believe they were worth it.”

“I don’t remember him being prickly,” Kayla admitted.  “Except for the arguments with Clarisse.”

Apollo gave another chuckle.  “He was always arguing with Clarisse,” he said, sounding fond.  “That started his first day at camp and never stopped.  Then again, I probably didn’t help matters,” he added, and that sounded sheepish.

Kayla twisted in his grip to look at him, astonished.  “What did you do?” she demanded.  Apollo’s smile definitely twisted into something sheepish.

“I claimed him,” he said, and Kayla frowned, because of course he did.

“How-?”

“I claimed him because he shot her in the thigh,” he clarified, and she felt her jaw drop.  “It was the first time they’d met, and both of them were very volatile back when they were that age, more so than by the time you got here.  They got into a fight, and well.  It was the first time Michael had ever held a bow, and it was a beautiful shot.  How could I not claim him for it?”

“You claimed him… because he shot Clarisse?” Kayla repeated slowly, trying to wrap her head around that.  In some ways, it made sense.  In other ways, it really didn’t.  Then she registered the other thing he’d said.  “Wait.  He’d never held a bow before camp?  Really?”

The one thing she definitely did remember was how amazing an archer Michael had been.  It was the sort of skill that came from being an archer from the moment he was old enough to hold a bow – Kayla should know, she had the same skill – not from being a preteen, or maybe even a teenager, before ever touching one.  Actually… “how old was he?”

“He was nine, at the time.”  There was a story there, Kayla could tell, but Apollo didn’t show any signs of expanding on it, and she decided it wasn’t worth asking.

Demigods didn’t turn up at camp that young without a reason, and the reason was never a good one.  Kayla didn’t need to know what Michael’s was.  She didn’t want to know.

“He was amazing at archery,” she said, instead, and Apollo smiled fondly.

“That he was,” he agreed.  “He could out shoot some of my sister’s Hunters.  They hated him for it.”  Kayla could imagine that – Thalia and Reyna were chill, but some of the Hunters were definitely snobbish over their perceived archer superiority.  It was one of the reasons Kayla kept rejecting their recruitment pitches; they didn’t like being challenged by an archer who didn’t wear Artemis’ silver colours.  She bet it was even worse with a boy.

“Serves them right,” she muttered, and leant back against her dad’s side again, reclaiming the photo of Michael and Alice.  “I remember him being an amazing archer,” she admitted.  “And his arguments with Clarisse.  I just…  I wish his face hadn’t faded.”  She tapped at the photograph with a chipped nail.  “The photographs aren’t clear enough.”

“I can make them clearer, if you want,” Apollo offered, and Kayla didn’t know how but she wasn’t going to turn down a chance to re-memorise Michael’s face.  Properly, this time.  She nodded.

Apollo held up a hand in front of them, palm up and loosely cupped, and hummed lightly.

Whatever Kayla had expected, it wasn’t for a ball of light to convalesce in front of them, swirling and shifting until Michael appeared in front of them, perching on the box full of dusty and abandoned photographs.

Kayla had forgotten how short he was.

She’d seen it in the photograph, how a sixteen year old Michael had been the same height as an eleven year old Kayla, but being seventeen herself now – gods, she was older than Michael when he’d died – and more or less fully grown it was stark, seeing him in front of her and realising that he really had been tiny.

He didn’t say anything, probably because he wasn’t real, just Apollo manipulating the light until it showed her her big brother again.  Still, there was life in the way he looked like he was sitting, one leg straight down and the other knee raised up, foot on the edge of the box he was perched on, with one elbow resting on the knee.  He wasn’t looking directly at them, but he was focused on something that only the apparition could see, and it was good enough for Kayla to finally, finally, remember the exact shade of brown his eyes had been.

He didn’t have bangs, either.  There were some loose hairs that didn’t quite reach back into his ponytail that stuck out a little, but no bangs.  He did have earrings, though, a single golden stud in the ear lobe.

Kayla had forgotten he’d had those.  She wasn’t sure if she’d ever noticed them when he was alive and she’d taken his presence for granted, unlike the way she was drinking every detail in now, because this felt like a last chance.

Mortals weren’t supposed to dwell in the past.

Something warm dripped onto her cheek and she glanced up on instinct to see silent tears rolling slowly down her father’s face as he looked at the apparition he’d created.  It was a comfort, to know that she wasn’t the only one affected by it.

Still, her eyes were drawn back to Michael, the ephemeral sight that wouldn’t last forever.  His mouth was twisted into a slight smirk, confidence pouring off of him from his expression to his pose, and even though he looked small and young in a way Kayla knew he hadn’t when he’d still been alive and she’d been five years younger than him, rather than a year older, it felt right.  Familiar.  She was sure she’d seen that expression on that face many times before.

Apollo gave a shuddering breath, and raised his hand towards Michael again.  His fingertips dipped into the illusion, and it rippled slightly.  Kayla knew what was coming, and refused to look away as, slowly, Michael faded from sight again.

“It’s good to remember,” Apollo said hoarsely as her brother disappeared.  Kayla wondered if she was supposed to feel worse, losing him again, but instead she thought it felt more like closure.  “But don’t get trapped in the past.  Keep looking forwards.”  He squeezed her arm.  “You’ve got a future ahead of you, and if he was still with us, Michael would be the first to tell you that you’ve got that Olympic gold in the bag next summer.”

Kayla remembered archery lessons with him, being pushed past anything Da had ever tried with her, because he’d known she could keep up, even back then.  “He would,” she agreed.  “I miss him, Dad.  I know I only knew him for a few months, but… I miss him.”

“I know,” Apollo said.  “So do I.”  He reached out and picked up some of the other photos, of familiar and semi-familiar and unfamiliar faces.  “I miss all of them.”

Kayla plucked another one from the floor – the one with the two blonds wrestling.  Both of them had died in Manhattan, she was more certain of that, now.  Siblings she’d known but not for long enough, although with her mind in reminiscing mode she found names finally climbing to the front of her memory.  Nathan and Robyn.  She didn’t think she’d ever seen one without the other.

Looking at them, with their semi-familiar faces, and the other photos still strewn around from her frantic hunt for pictures of Michael’s face, she found an idea forming in the back of her mind, and she barely let it finish before she spoke.

“Dad?”

He hummed, turning his head towards her.

“Help me put these up on the walls?”  She gestured to the box.  It wasn’t like it was doing anything except getting in her way under the desk, and photographs deserved to be looked at.  Her siblings deserved to be remembered, not stashed away and forgotten.

He stared at her for a moment, clearly not expecting the request, before his whole body softened.

“I’d love to.”

[tsarisfanfiction]

The True Story of Atlantis

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family Characters: Will, Gracie, Poseidon According to Percy, Atlantis doesn't exist, despite that being the name of Poseidon's realm. According to mortal stories, Atlantis was destroyed after attempting to conquer Athens. But what's the real story? TOApril day 29 - Lost City. This had me stumped for a while, because all I could think of was "Atlantis" and finding a way to link that back to TOA and also make it fit with what we know of Atlantis in the Riordanverse was a challenge. I do, however, like what I've come up with - but I will preface this fic with a warning for discussion of genodical behaviour. Wiping out an entire civilisation is and will always be an inhumane act of cruelty, even when it's done by gods.

“Hey, Will?”

“Mmm?” he asked, only half-listening to his younger sister as he finished counting up how many boxes of band-aids they still had in the infirmary, and calculating how many more they would need to see them through the new summer.  “What’s up, Gracie?”

She’d only been back at camp for a few hours, one of the first of the summer campers to descend, but Will had welcomed her back already, so this wasn’t her angling her way in for a greeting the way some of his siblings tended to if he didn’t head that off – this was only Gracie’s first return to camp, and Will wasn’t going to let that become a game of hers while he was in charge if he could help it.

The preteen jumped up onto the desk next to his pile of counted boxes, swinging her feet.  They kicked against the furniture in a regular rhythm, because of course they did.  Gracie loved making anything into a drum, even if it was furniture with her own flailing feet as the sticks.

“Mom and I watched a movie last night,” she said, with none of the homesickness some kids had when talking about their mortal parents so soon after leaving them.  Will hoped that meant she was going to settle in well this summer – with no godly shenanigans (there had better not be any godly shenanigans) going on this time, Will was hoping for a calmer year for once.

He hadn’t had a calm year at camp since before Percy had crashed into his life with a minotaur horn and a missing mother.  He thought he was owed one, if the gods had any mercy at all.

“Was it a good one?” he asked, and she nodded her head enthusiastically.

“It was great!” she said.  “Will, is Atlantis real?”

Whatever questions Will had been half-expecting to come at some point, that wasn’t one of them.

“You know that’s a question for Percy, not me,” he deflected, and Gracie gave him a look.

“Percy’s not here,” she said.  “I’m asking you.  In the movie, Atlantis is an old city that’s still surviving because the Queen merged with a crystal and made an awesome barrier, and Mom said that was all fiction, but it was Greek, so is it really fiction?”

Will had no idea what movie she was talking about.

“I don’t know much about it,” he warned her.  “But I don’t think the movie is accurate.”

“Aww,” she pouted.  “But it was pretty!”

He smiled, shaking his head fondly.  “I’m sure Atlantis is pretty, or at least very impressive.  Atlantis is where Poseidon has his palace, which is why you should really be asking Percy this.  I think he’s been there.”

“Percy’s not here,” his sister reminded him again, rolling her eyes like she thought he was being an idiot.  “You are.”

Will sighed and set down his pen, realising that attempting to finish his stock order any time soon wasn’t going to work, not until Gracie’s question was satisfied.

“Okay, I’ll tell you what I know,” he caved, “but remember, I don’t know much.  I only know what I’ve been told.”

He didn’t remember which of his siblings had told him the story, originally.  It had been one of his sisters, during his first summer, but one of the much older ones, that he hadn’t got to know very well before she’d left camp.

“So, there’s a lot of different versions of the myth,” he started, grabbing the chair and pulling it around in front of the desk, so he could face his sister as he spoke – although he couldn’t resist spinning it all the way around, just the once, as he sat in it.  She giggled.  “It’s one of those ones where the mortals believe one thing, for some reason, even though what actually happened was pretty different.”

“Oh?”  She leaned forwards, almost over-balancing as her legs continued thrashing Will’s poor desk.  “Why?”

Will shrugged.  “I don’t know,” he said easily – it was a bit of a lie, because he didn’t think it was a coincidence that the mortal story involved Athens and by extension, Athena, while the true story was based around Poseidon.  He didn’t know the details, though, and he wasn’t stupid enough to start questioning godly intervention or motives where they could hear him.  “But the mortals think that Atlantis was a very powerful island that conquered everything until they tried to conquer Athens.  When they tried that, the gods got mad at them and flooded them out.”

“Why would the gods get mad about that?” Gracie asked.  “Athens was only Athena’s, right?  Why don’t they just say Athena?”

Will shrugged.  “I don’t know,” he said.  “I think there’s quite a lot of mortal versions of the story but I’ve only heard this one.”

She frowned.  “Okay.  So if that’s the mortal one, and you said that’s not the true one, then what is the true one?”

“A good reason to remember to not anger Poseidon,” Will admitted.  “Atlantis was a powerful city, and a powerful naval city at that.  But they were also proud, and arrogant.”

“Pride comes before a fall,” Gracie nodded sagely, and Will grinned at her.

“Exactly,” he confirmed.  “They started to boast.  Said a lot of things, and some of them were probably true, but then they said that they ruled the sea, and that Poseidon did their bidding.  Which was pretty stupid of them.”

Even Gracie had winced at that.  “Gods don’t do mortal’s biddings,” she said, like it was obvious.  “They’re gods.  Even Dad doesn’t do as he’s told.”

Despite himself, Will laughed, remembering how impossible it had been to keep Lester under control even while their father had been mortal.  Bizarrely, he was actually more cooperative as a god, or was at least more likely to do what they asked, if he could.  Still, “no, he doesn’t,” he agreed.  “But the Atlanteans weren’t as smart as us and thought they could get away with claiming control over both the sea and Poseidon himself.”

“So Poseidon destroyed them?” Gracie guessed, and Will nodded.

“Poseidon destroyed them,” he said.  “But it was more than that.  He didn’t just raise the sea to swallow the island whole and drown every single Atlantean.  He also took it for himself, destroying all trace of the civilisation entirely, until it no longer existed, even beneath the sea.  Then he built over it, and even now, his palace is said to be on the site of the drowned island.”

It was pretty horrific, if Will actually stopped to think about it.  The entire eradication of a civilisation, and then creating his own palace directly on top of the ruins.  It would be considered defiling, if it was done by humans.  Genocidal, even.

But Poseidon was a god, and gods just did things like that, back in the Ancient times.  Will sincerely hoped none of them decided to pick those habits back up again in modern times.

Gracie frowned.  “That’s scary,” she said.  “I don’t like that.  I think I like the movie better.”

Will gave her a small smile.  “I think I do, too,” he agreed.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Consequences

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family Characters: Lee, Apollo, Cabin Seven Apollo saved the camp from the Labyrinth invasion. Zeus punished him for it, turning him mortal two years early. That was a mistake. TOApril day 28 - Silent Thunder. Now, "silent thunder" isn't really a thing, because thunder is literally the term for the sound lightning makes. However, that doesn't mean we can't go a little metaphorical with this - after all, you could say that thunder is a consequence of lightning. And some people might recognise this AU from some things I've talked about before...

Lee was furious.

It was an unfamiliar feeling.  He irritated sometimes, and frustrated, and sometimes even angry, but fury?  That wasn’t one of his normal emotions, not something he thought he’d ever actually felt before, but what else could it be?  What else was the feeling of something bubbling up inside him violently, seething through his veins and making his teeth ache as they clenched without his permission, if not for pure, unabated, fury?

But Lee couldn’t show it.

He was an awful liar, and he’d never known if that was a side effect of his truth-sensing, something else from his dad, or just an unrelated part of his personality, but being head counsellor and head healer had taught him how to push feelings down, out of sight until it was safe to show them.  And now?  Now was not safe.

His dad was frustrated, too.  Maybe angry, but if he was, Lee couldn’t tell.  Even if he was, he wasn’t lashing out, either, not in a way that mattered.  Apollo could spout lies about regretting his intervention in the war, in wishing he hadn’t when it had so clearly got him punished, but that was all they were.  Lies.

Lies didn’t hurt Lee anywhere near as much as cherry-picked truths did.  Even if it had forced him to admit his secret to his siblings, promise them that their dad didn’t mean the injured words he was lashing out.  They were all familiar with frustration, with lashing out in anger – gods knew Michael did it enough, even if he’d got a lot better at taking it out at inanimate objects that people than when he was ten.  They just weren’t familiar with it from their dad’s mouth.

Lee wasn’t, either, but that was just more fuel to his ire, to the raging fury bubbling up inside him with every breath he took, and with every word he spoke.

“Apollo,” he said, his voice carefully level – his Head Counsellor voice, for when his siblings were getting a little too rowdy and he needed them to listen, a voice he’d had to use more and more frequently as the war accelerated, from missing campers to poisoned borders to an invasion designed to kill them all.

Might have killed them all, if Apollo hadn’t shown up in as much godly glory as he could in front of mortals and slaughtered everything that even tried to hurt the camp he’d once founded, still protected millennia later – against orders, against the king of Olympus – and then paid a price for.

Lee knew the stories, as he stared down at the messy, injured lump of inelegant teenager in front of him – gods, he was taller than his dad, now.  Taller and older than his physical form, and neither of those had ever been true before.  He knew the stories, and they’d had a meeting about it, the head counsellors, now the war leaders, of the camp.  The choice had been unanimous.

“I, Lee Fletcher, claim your service.”

Eyes looked up at him in betrayal, a deep blue that widened, as though Lee’s words had hurt far worse than any of the multitude of physical injures the mortal body of his father had taken.  Maybe they did.

He could tell his siblings were looking at him in various expressions, too, from the aghast gasps of those that hadn’t put all the clues together yet, to the grumbles of the ones that still hadn’t quite forgiven Apollo his lashing out, to the pained understanding of the most experienced.

Lee hated that he had to do it, too, that he had to trap his own father to his bidding, but the alternatives weren’t worth even considering.  If one of Kronos’ demigods got Apollo’s service…

Well.

Lee couldn’t think like that.  Not when he was angry, at Kronos but also at Zeus, because this was his fault, and the head counsellors had all recoiled in physical horror when the logical solution hit them.  That Apollo had been punished for saving them, that Zeus had decided intervening to save demigods from near-certain destruction was a worse crime than attempting to destroy them in the first place.

That Zeus would have preferred for them to be destroyed.

Apollo was looking up at him in betrayal, choking on protests and his eyes filling with tears that were barely holding on from spilling down his acne-ridden cheeks – Lee needed to get him some treatment for that, it looked like Zeus had inflicted Apollo with the itchy and painful type – but Lee felt the betrayal in his own heart, too.

No-one at camp was naïve enough to think that any god cared about them, except in some cases their own godly parent, but there was a difference between not caring and this.

Apollo was one of the good ones.  He always had been, and after last summer there wasn’t a single camper that didn’t believe it.  Zeus, clearly, was not one of the good ones.

Lee wasn’t naïve enough to think demigods could take revenge, though.  Taking down a god was beyond them, but saving a god?  Saving one of their own, because that was what Apollo – Lester, according to the ID he’d been carrying and that the Stolls had scoffed at as a bad forgery that would have got him caught and in trouble the moment the wrong person looked at it – was, now.  He was scared and mortal, and that made him fit right in with the rest of camp.

Saving a god, they could do, and that meant getting Apollo’s divinity back to him, somehow.

Unfortunately, none of them had a clue how to do that.  Mr D had been singularly unhelpful on the matter, not even caring to linger in their emergency meeting after he’d determined that the topic – Apollo’s current situation – was none of his concern.

Lee disagreed vehemently, but he couldn’t take down a god.  Pollux and Castor had muttered about trying to get him to see reason, but for all that Mr D was known to be good to his own kids, Lee had no hope that they would succeed on this issue.  They were without any godly help, but really, what was new?

Gods, he was starting to sound like Michael.  Or Clarisse.

Speaking of Michael, the eldest of his younger siblings had come up to stand next to him, pinning Apollo with a look that Lee didn’t need to see to know it was there as their father let out protests at Lee’s claim.

There was no mistaking the validity of Lee’s claim, though.  Not when his words had provoked a low grumble from the skies, one that was easier to feel in his bones than hear with his ears.  For whatever reason, Lee’s claim had been sealed, and he was now his father’s master.

If there was a way to make Zeus regret that, make him regret the whole situation, then Lee would hunt it down and make it happen.

But first, his priority had to be his dad, the pathetic younger body in front of him whose tears were now spilling freely down pasty cheeks studded with red and black and yellow spots.  No matter how furious Lee was, he wasn’t mad at his dad, didn’t think he could ever be mad at his dad.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reaching forwards and pulling him into a hug, like he was a touch-starved little brother and not his father.  “I’m sorry, Dad.”

Apollo resisted, wriggling in his grip, but call Lee selfish.  He didn’t let go.  “Why?” he wailed, voice cracking and sounding so far from the melodic voice that sang in his dreams that Lee had to close his eyes and force himself to imagine it was his dad’s usual, beautiful voice.

“There are too many demigods I don’t trust,” Lee murmured, gentle but aware it would still be heard by everyone in the cabin.  “Too many that listened to words from the Pit, and if any of them claimed you…”  Apollo went rigid in his arms, as though the possibility hadn’t occurred to him.  Some of Lee’s siblings gasped, too, putting the same connection together.  “I couldn’t leave you free, Dad.  Not with that risk.”

And he couldn’t have let any of his siblings take the responsibility.  Lee was the eldest, the head counsellor.  It was his job to protect his family, and if that meant taking on this burden, then he would do it.

“I know,” Apollo said, miserably.  “I hate it.”

There was no lie there, but that didn’t make Lee any happier.  None of this did.

He couldn’t take down a god, but if he could ever work out how to make Zeus regret this…

A glance around the cabin, at his gathered siblings, showed nothing but silent agreement.

If they could make Zeus regret this, then they would.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Source of Knowledge

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Angst/Family Characters: Will, Apollo For his overnight vigil, Apollo raided items from his children's cabin. The next evening, Will found them again. TOApril day 27 - Missing Objects. This was a pretty broad prompt, but then I remembered the books Apollo basically stole from Will's bookshelf without any indication that Will know about it, and figured I could do something short and angsty with that... so that is hopefully what this is.

Will found them after Apollo and Meg had gone into the woods.

Maybe he should have found them earlier – it had been a whole day, he thought, since they’d gone, and there certainly wasn’t any excuse to have not tracked them down before he did – but he hadn’t.  He’d had other things on his mind, things like injured campers and missing siblings and a finally-sleeping mortal father, even if Apollo’s sleep had been restless at best.

He still hadn’t been actively looking for them when he’d stumbled across them.  There was a whole nest of things – a flashlight, blankets, a discarded but still full water canteen – but the ones that caught Will’s attention were the same things he’d first registered as missing the previous night, when he’d gone to bed in a cold and empty cabin.

Over the years, cabin seven had acquired a large collection of books on Apollo.  Will was pretty sure some of them had been written by long-gone older siblings, and at least one had the distinctive handwriting of Chiron.  Others were more modern, typed instead of handwritten, on paper instead of fading parchment, and even papyrus.  Cabin six might be known for their library, but they weren’t the only cabin with a god associated with books and learning and knowing things.

It was the newer, less fragile books that had gone.  The ones Will kept on a bookshelf near his bed, rather than the ones more securely stored in with the instruments, the one remnant of the head counsellor’s nook before Lee had converted it into its current instrument storage.  They were the ones Will had once learnt stories of his dad from, guided by Lee in his teacher-mode, and sometimes some of his other more knowledge-inclined older siblings, and the same ones Michael had used to try and teach Austin and Kayla, although with difficulty, because Michael could teach archery but he wasn’t so good at books.

Will had used them, since, to teach younger siblings that thankfully weren’t at camp right now, safely back with their mortal parents and hopefully away from the disconcerting danger that was once again invading camp.

He didn’t know why Apollo had taken them with him for his vigil.  Surely he didn’t need to read about himself.

Will tried and failed to forget how much Apollo had cursed his mortal memory, implying so heavily that he had given up on subtlety and blatantly told them that he couldn’t remember much.

The thought of his father sitting up all night, wrapped in a blanket – gods, Will hoped he’d wrapped the blanket around his shoulders instead of just sitting on it, or giving them both to Meg – reading books about himself in the faint glow of a single flashlight in a bid to relearn about himself was a painful one.

How much of his sense of self had he lost?  His personality was rawer than Will was used to, pubescent mood swings to match the teenage body while his words meandered all over the place, from a hurt and defensive child to glimpses of a protective father Will remembered from private dreams.  It was a much fuller picture of his father than he’d had before, where dream visits had been short enough for Will to know that his dad loved him, and that his dad was very good at being an idiot, but in hindsight not much else.

Now, he felt like a person, which seemed almost blasphemous to think of a god, except Mr D was familiar and showed signs of depth, sometimes – if not as much as Apollo had shown in the past day and a half since he’d woken up.  The problem was that now that he was thinking about it, Will didn’t know if he was actually seeing Apollo.  There was no fakeness to Lester, not that he could tell, but if Apollo needed to read books about himself to know who he was, then could Will really believe that Lester was his dad?

Or at least, that Lester was all of his dad?

It wasn’t something he really wanted to think about.

He knelt down and picked up the books.  Apollo had left one open, looking abandoned in a hurry – maybe when Rachel’s helicopter had arrived, because Will knew better than to hope his dad had actually fallen asleep last night, even if his mortal body had needed it.  Will carefully didn’t look at what was on the page in question, feeling like knowing what, exactly, Apollo had wanted to read and perhaps relearn about himself would be too much.

Sometimes, ignorance was better.

It was easier, safer, to close the book without looking before adding it to the small pile of other books and moving on to folding the blankets.  He kept his movements methodical, lining the edges of the blanket up exactly before making each fold, until he had two carriable squares of blanket draped over one arm, flashlight and still-full water canteen tucked into the crook of his elbow, and the books in his free hand.

If the blankets ended up on his bed that night – the second night alone in a cabin that was never meant to be so empty – and the books open on his pillow after lights’ out with the flashlight to read by, well no-one else was there to prove it.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Beyond Help

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Friendship/Hurt/Comfort Characters: Will, Miranda Even Demeter's daughter can't heal the flowers of a god's soul when they start to fade. TOApril day 26 - Wilting Flowers. This one is actually set between BOO and THO. Apollo equates his sense of self to the Curse of Delos, so what would that look like while he's being stripped of his godhood?

“I’m sorry, Will.”  Will swallowed at the despondent sound in Miranda’s voice as he forced himself to look at her.

She still had her fingers buried in the soil of the planter on the window sill, but there was no sign of the usual spark of life the daughter of Demeter could bring.  The flowers stayed drooping and faded, as though they were mere moments from losing their petals and drying up into the shrivelled brown stems of dead plants.

It was normal, a part of nature.  Will was familiar with the seasonal nature of plants the same way most people were, used to different flowers blooming at different times of the year, always with some colour to display proudly somewhere.

He had never, ever, seen these flowers wilt before.  Logically, he knew that they weren’t the exact same flowers that he’d first seen when he was seven – they’d moved around, had different shapes and clusters – but whatever happened to cause those changes always happened without his notice.  Will suspected overnight, when the flowers took on a silvery hue in the moonlight, but he’d never seen them to prove it.

They were his dad’s sacred flowers, as eternal as the god himself.  In eight years, they’d never faltered.

But now they were changing, wilting and losing the inherent life that always thrummed through them, and Will’s heart felt like it was being constricted by an ever-tightening serpent the longer it went on.

He’d known that Miranda probably wouldn’t be able to do it, when he’d finally caved and gone to the Demeter cabin for help.  They could help any plants to grow, revitalise the soil, whatever was needed – but this was different.  This was the flowers of a god, and Will had the horrible, sinking feeling that it was no coincidence.

None of his siblings had heard anything from Apollo since before the Argo II had left camp for the Romans, and their father’s silence had persisted long past the end of the war and Gaia’s defeat.

Still, there was a significant part of him that had hoped she could produce a miracle and restore the life and vitality of Apollo’s flowers.  The fact that she couldn’t wasn’t the resigned dull ache he’d thought, but a far more vicious pain.

“It’s okay,” he told her, pushing past the way his heart felt like it was cracking in two, the separating parts being crushed together by serpentine coils as though an organ could compound fracture.  “Thanks for trying.”

She pulled her fingers out from the soil, dirt clinging to her skin like it couldn’t bear to be parted from her.  Most people would brush it away, but children of Demeter weren’t most people when it came to soil, and Miranda didn’t seem to even notice the specks of brown on her hands.

“Is there still no sign?” she asked him, gently because that was Miranda all over – gentle and caring even if she had a spine of steel behind it.  Will thought the state of the flowers was answer enough for that, but he humoured her and shook his head.

“Nothing,” he admitted, feeling his lip tremble slightly.  “He’s still silent.  The dreams haven’t started again.”

“There must be a reason,” Miranda said.  “I’m sure he wouldn’t go silent without reason.”  She didn’t even know Apollo, but she’d been in camp long enough to know how close Will and his siblings thought they’d got with their father.

“Yeah,” he said, despondently.  “A reason.”

It wasn’t that he thought Apollo suddenly didn’t love them, or had never loved them.  That was a thought process too far, even in the current silence, although Will wondered if that was the better option.

Because the other option was the one that haunted Will.  No-one had heard of Apollo since the giant banes started appearing, and on top of whoever Apollo’s giant bane was, there was also Delphi, and Python – because Python wasn’t a giant.  Delphi was one of Apollo’s seats of power and it had fallen, and no-one had heard anything from Apollo since.

Will liked to think that he’d, somehow, feel it if something had happened to his dad.  That the sun would feel different against his skin, or a feeling with an unmistakable meaning sinking into his bones.

(The hurt that came from the wilting flowers, the squeezing snake around his breaking heart, meant something, but Will ignored them, because he wasn’t strong enough to handle whatever they were trying to tell him.)

Miranda fumbled a little bit, a good friend but not one equipped to deal with Will facing the hell that was the rest of his life without the father that was supposed to be immortal, before resting a dirt-covered hand on his shoulder.

She couldn’t promise everything would be okay.  Neither of them would ever have believed that, not after two wars and the deaths of too many siblings (Will had lost more, yes, but Miranda hadn’t lost none and even one was one too many; grief wasn’t a competition and Will had never let himself fall into one).  “You’ll get through this,” she said instead, with a quiet confidence.  “Whatever has happened, whatever will happen, you’ll get through this.  And if it gets hard, remember you’re not alone.”  She pulled him into a secure hug, and Will felt his shoulders start to shake in companionship with his lip.

He didn’t cry, but it was close.

“I know,” he said instead, with a voice that shook.  “Thank you.”

[tsarisfanfiction]

After the Setting Sun

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Fluff Characters: Chiron, Will, Nico, Merida and Robin (OCs) It was common knowledge that Apollo kids waned after sunset, but particularly young ones don't handle the waning too well. Chiron has seen it happen many times before. TOApril day 25 - Race Against Time, and credit to @stereden for getting my muses thinking about how Apollo kids' powers wane after dark.

In the glow of the campfire, Chiron smiled fondly – and with more than a little bit of amusement.  The cycle was so familiar to him after so many centuries that it was obvious what was coming, but to the children with their infinitely shorter lifespans and experience to match, it was going to come as a surprise, at least until Will begrudgingly recalled the last time it had happened.

The sun was setting, leaving the flickering flames of every colour and then some to take the lead on lighting up the demigods’ world the same way it did every night, especially in the summer when the camp was at its peak capacity, and with the setting sun came changes.

It was common knowledge amongst campers that Apollo’s children got more and more lethargic the further past sunset it got.  Of course, the older, experienced ones could force themselves into activity during the night if circumstances demanded it (it was a burden the head healers bore, and Chiron wished that sometimes there weren’t medical emergencies that needed more than his learned training to heal – Apollo had taught him everything there was to know, but some things could not be replicated no matter how much knowledge the practitioner held).  The younger ones, however, were another story entirely.

Most of Apollo’s children were older, when they arrived.  Apollo didn’t like to separate his children from their mortal parents until it was necessary, so most of cabin seven’s new arrivals were eleven or twelve, in the wake of the promise Percy had extracted from the gods.  Before that, some of them had been thirteen, or occasionally older.  Children of Apollo arriving earlier usually indicated that something was wrong, or otherwise out of the ordinary (not many of his children were abused, because Apollo had a good sense for danger when it came to children, if not for himself, but there were other reasons, like untimely deaths, that could force an earlier arrival).

The latest arrivals, a pair of twins from Scotland who would not be returning to their previous childhood home for the foreseeable future due to bad luck and parental paranoia – mostly but not exclusively on the behalf of their mortal parent – were the youngest new arrivals since Will, almost a decade before.  They weren’t as young as Will had been, or Lee, or even Michael, but they were still barely into double digits, and thus particularly susceptible to the presence of the sun in the sky, or lack thereof.

Chiron watched as their heads gradually fell together, using each other as an inadvertent and unplanned pillow as drowsiness set in.  Merida was slightly taller than her brother, and her head claimed the higher position (although this was no indication of their respective ages – both twins were tight-lipped over which of them was the elder, and it was so reminiscent of Apollo and Artemis’ constant squabble over who was the elder twin that Chiron could feel only fondness for their stubbornness).

It would not be long before they fell asleep entirely, and Chiron had seen too many young Apollo children fall completely asleep at the campfire and be subsequently impossible to stir until dawn to let Will face that fate.  For some demigods, it was useful – it hadn’t taken cabin seven long to intentionally wait for a young and constantly irate Michael to fall asleep before retiring for the night, back when he had been both young enough to be controlled by the sun’s position, and also fragile enough to lash out at any hand, no matter how genuinely helpful.  For most, it was preferable that they made it back to the cabin at least partially under their own steam.

Chiron made his way to where Will was basking in the gentle strains of music that Yan was serenading the campers with, leaning comfortably against Nico, who had his arms around him and his chin on top of his head.

“Good evening, Will,” he said, “Nico.”  The two young men acknowledged him with a smile – Will – and a nod – Nico.  “I don’t wish to interrupt your relaxation, but I fear that if you don’t act swiftly, you may have some young children to carry to bed.”  He tilted his head towards the half-asleep twins and Will followed his gaze.

The beginnings of confusion immediately cleared into clarity as Will noticed them.  If Chiron wasn’t mistaken (and he tended not to be, when it came to a demigod he had known for a decade), Apollo’s eldest son currently attending camp had been suddenly reminded of the various times he’d been carried, half asleep, back to the cabin and his bed by various older siblings.

Nico’s confusion didn’t clear up, but Chiron couldn’t say he was surprised by that; Nico had never been in camp with such young Apollo children before, and was well used to Will’s ability to stay up all night if he felt it necessary.  Still, he didn’t attempt to restrain Will when Merida and Robin’s head counsellor let out a soft groan that was more fondness than genuine complaint and hauled himself to his feet, although he did press a brief kiss to his boyfriend’s hair as Will moved.

“I’ll be back,” Will promised him, turning to give him a light kiss in return, before picking his way through the fading light to crouch behind the twins.  Chiron didn’t follow, choosing to remain with Nico as they watched him lightly nudge the pair into wakefulness again – for a given definition of the word – and offer them hands to pull themselves up with.

Even out of earshot, the twin’s reluctance to move was obvious, but Will was not a demigod to be out-stubborned easily, and a pair of ten year olds were never going to win against him.  In short order, he had both of them on their feet, each one pinned to his side by an arm around their shoulder, and was escorting them away from the campfire and back towards the cabins.

“Past their bedtime?” Nico asked.  Chiron glanced down at him to see his eyes focused on the trio as they walked away.

“I’m sure Will has some stories for you of his own campfires when he was their age and younger,” he said with a smile.  “Staying awake after their father’s chariot has stabled for the night is not an ability Apollo children tend to develop at birth.”

“Huh,” Nico responded, with the glimmer of a sharp smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.  “I think I would like to hear Will tell me those stories.  Maybe I’ll ask when he comes back.”

Chiron had no doubt that Will would tell him, nor that Nico would pounce on it as an excuse to drag Will to bed a little bit earlier – an endeavour that very few campers would disagree with.  Chiron certainly didn’t, and he suspected Apollo wouldn’t, either.

He said none of that to Nico, however, simply saying, “I’m sure you will enjoy the stories.”

And, well, if he stayed in earshot so that when Will finally came back, noticeably more tired himself but triumphant that he’d managed to get them into bed before they passed out for the night, he could hear Nico beginning to quiz Will, well.

Nico wasn’t the only one that enjoyed the stories.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Hide and Seek

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family Characters: Michael, Apollo, Piper, Meg, Jason Michael wasn't expecting to stumble across his mortal father in his latest escape attempt. Now if only his dad would do the sensible thing and get off the floating villa Michael's been trying to escape for the past two years. TOApril day 24 - Unexpected Allies. This is a spin-off AU from mine and @stereden's fic A Single Drachma, where instead of his escape from Caligula meaning he missed the TBM drama of canon... well. This happened. I may or may not tackle this AU properly later on, but for now here's a pilot of what could be. There are characters I've not written much if at all before in here, so please bear with any oocness that may have occurred as I start to get to grips with them.

Michael didn’t know what he’d expected, but it wasn’t this.

More fucking big eared furry menaces hounding him with the bows that he just wished he could get his hands on?  He’d rather not because they meant trouble, but they were a possibility.

Brainwashed humans and stupid cyclopes working together to pin him down and drag him back to his dressed-up fucking prison?  Second most likely, and preferred out of the two – even without a weapon he had a chance of wriggling past them.

The horse?  Fuck off, but also a known quantity.  Same for the deluded creepy freak that called himself an emperor-god and kept telling Michael he was going to replace Apollo.  If he never saw either of them again it would be too fucking soon, but so far his luck hadn’t been that good.

It hadn’t been good at all.  If it was, he wouldn’t have been stuck on these fucking boats for the past two years.  Michael was very, very sick of water everywhere he looked.  There was land around them at the moment, some bay or other, although he had no idea which one.  He didn’t care, either, as long as he could finally get away, and there had been enough noise going on that something was happening, and he had another chance to slip away – if he could get onto one of those landing boats unnoticed.

Then the lightning had struck the boat he was on, blowing apart enough of it that the freaky sound-proofing that Michael hated so much cracked open and the noise of fighting was right there.

Lightning.  Striking a boat.

Michael had been a demigod long enough to know that lightning didn’t just strike for no reason.

He shrunk back into the shadows as more of the freak’s goons – one of them a cyclops – ran towards the broken cabin and yanked open the door with enough force that it almost came off its hinges.  The freak was not going to be happy about the destruction of one of his precious boats, and Michael almost wished he could see his reaction.

Almost.

He still wanted to get the fuck away more.

Then the freak’s goons dropped dead, and Michael saw opportunity.  He hated to admit it, but with two years’ worth of failed escape attempts, it was pretty damning evidence that he wasn’t going to get away without some help.  It was either going to save or damn him, but he needed to know if there were more anti-freaks on the ship – if there were, he was joining their fucking party no matter what they said.

Michael stayed low as he nudged the door open, pushing it without actually standing in the doorway, because he’d seen how fast those idiots had dropped and wasn’t going to get himself killed by being like them.

Gold weapons flashed out at the empty space, lower than he’d anticipated – a shorter warrior than he’d accounted for – and proved his paranoia right.

“I’m not with those bastards,” he said, keeping his voice low – because sound travelled on the water and the freak might be several boats over but that didn’t make him necessarily out of earshot – but clear.  He was well aware his outfit didn’t help matters, with the stupid white-and-blue sailor crap the freak loved so much, but that wasn’t his fucking choice, either.  Still, he poked his head cautiously around the doorframe, keeping a hand raised where whoever was in there could see it.

It was a bad fucking idea, he knew it was, but two years was enough to make him more than a little bit fucking desperate, okay?

There were four of them in there – closest to the door, with those dangerous-looking twin golden blades, was a black haired girl about his height, and probably a similar age to Kayla (if Kayla hadn’t fallen, and no, Michael wasn’t going to think about seeing his youngest sister fall from the fucking bridge right now).  The other teenagers were all a couple of years younger than him, maybe Will’s age or a bit older, but they had the clear air of demigods, and Michael hadn’t seen any of those in two years.

Demigods on a quest, even if there was too many of them, technically.  If the kid was part of it.

She certainly gripped her weapons like she knew how to use them.

“Michael?”

It was his name, soft and broken and unexpected, and it came from the curly haired brown boy clutching an arrow in his hands.

“You know this guy?” the older girl asked, and the other boy – this one blond – peered at him from behind his glasses in a way that looked distinctly Athena-kid-like, except for the bright blue eyes.

“I- yes,” Curly said, sounding like he’d seen a fucking ghost, and Michael scowled at him.  He didn’t recognise him at all – he hadn’t been a camper two years ago, none of them had been, Michael didn’t recognise any of them.  Not the unruly brown curls, not the nasty case of acne, not his voice or even the bow that he used.

Then he made eye contact.

He’d heard the saying ‘eyes are the window to the soul’ many times, but he’d always dismissed it at romanticised bullshit.  Eyes were eyes and they came in many colours and shapes and emotions, but the idea of them being more had never settled well with him.

Curly’s eyes were an unfamiliar blue, but there was something in them that was familiar, that made Michael unwillingly think of camp, of his siblings, of dreams and sun-warmth.  Of all the things he’d missed for the past two years, wrapped up into one condensed thing.

“Dad?” he asked, and it was stupid, Apollo wouldn’t be fucking here, except-

Except it was, wasn’t it?

Fuck.

“Michael!”  The arrow dropped to the ground, and Curly – Apollo, really, what the actual fuck, what had taken him so fucking long and Michael wasn’t stupid, Apollo hadn’t expected to see him – grabbed him in a desperate embrace.

“How many do you have?” the younger girl asked, but she wasn’t threatening Michael with her swords so he was going to take that.  She went unanswered as Apollo started crying into Michael’s shoulder, blubbing things about you’re alive that Michael immediately decided to shut up in a box and not acknowledge until after he was off the fucking floating villa once and for all.

With his dad there, it seemed a lot more possible, even if there was something really weird about him.

“What the fuck is going on?” Michael demanded, intentionally cutting off Apollo’s words.

“That’s what I want to know,” the older girl said, and Michael could see the way her eyes were inspecting his clothes with suspicion.  “So tell me why you’re here.”

Her voice gained a sort of double-layer, subtle enough that Michael knew most people couldn’t hear it, let alone ignore it, but he wasn’t most people.  Drew had bitched about it often enough.

“You’re an Aphrodite kid,” he deducted, pointedly not answering the Charmspeak-layered question.  That would tell her what she needed to know, would stop her wasting her power-

Except she was looking at him with even more open suspicion now, and so was the so far silent blond boy behind her.  Seriously?

“Answer my question,” she said, and the Charmspeak was less subtle and more like a hammer against his ears.

Idiot.  How had Drew or Silena let her out on a quest like that?

He shut down the unwelcome thought that maybe they hadn’t been there to teach her.

“When you stop trying to fucking Charmspeak me,” he growled.  “Apollo, why the fuck are you like this?”  He gestured as best he could whilst trapped by his dad’s arms at the whole not-pretty teenager thing.  He’d never seen Apollo look so not-perfect in his life.

“He’s mortal,” the younger girl – and really, Michael could do with some fucking names, he was going to call her Sword Girl until he got a better one – shrugged, although there was nothing carefree about the action.

That… that was another can of fucking worms that Michael did not want to deal with right then.  His immortal god of a father suddenly mortal.  Great.

Wait.  Fuck.  Was this what the freak meant when he said he was going to replace Apollo?  Fuck, no, Michael was not letting that happen.

“You need to get the fuck off this boat,” he snapped.  “Now.  Why the fuck are you even here, anyway?”

“To steal Caligula’s shoes,” Sword Girl said bluntly.  She was rapidly becoming Michael’s favourite for actually answering his questions with recognisable answers.  Even if they were stupid ones.

“Why?” he despaired.  “What is worth risking your whole damn fucking existence for a pair of fucking shoes?  Or a boat of them?”

“How do you know about that?” Charmspeak Girl demanded (he would have called her Charmspeak Bitch, except Drew was a difficult one to topple from her bitch queen throne), her voice still laced with the fucking useless power.

He fixed her with a glare.  “Stop with the fucking Charmspeak.  It doesn’t fucking work on me, and even if it did it’s not a fucking interrogation power.”

“What do you mean?” formerly Silent-Blond asked, finally inserting himself into the conversation.  Charmspeak Girl looked just as confused, if also frustrated, and Michael realised she really didn’t have a fucking clue.

She was working with his dad, and Michael wasn’t one for dead demigods, either.  Fuck, he was not qualified to teach Aphrodite kids about their own powers, dammit.  Still, he had to say something.

“Charmspeak is based on attraction,” he told her, elbowing his dad in the process because forget Drew and Silena, why hadn’t Apollo thought to explain this shit to her?  “You persuade people that are fucking attracted to you that they want to do whatever the fuck you want.  Works for direct orders.  Doesn’t work for getting the truth out of people when they’re busy saying whatever the fuck they think you want to hear.  Stop relying on the fucking thing, it’s unreliable at best.”

Charmspeak Girl looked like he’d just told her the sky was fucking green.  Duty done, Michael ignored her and turned back to his dad.

“You need to get the fuck off this villa,” he repeated.  “Which of these idiots is your master?” because Michael had been a camper for seven fucking years, he knew the stories.  Every damn time his dad got turned mortal, he got given a demigod master.  Silent-Blond and Charmspeak Girl stared at him like he’d said something unreasonable, while Sword Girl puffed her chest out.

“Me, duh.”

Huh.  Well, at least it wasn’t Charmspeak Girl.

“Get him the fuck away from this villa,” he told her.  “This isn’t fucking worth-”

“There’s a prophecy,” Apollo said, finally talking again.  “We need those shoes, to beat him.”

Well, fuck.

Michael would love to see the freak defeated.  Right now, more than most other fucking things, but he wasn’t letting Apollo get destroyed in the process, which was what was going to happen if his idiot of a currently-mortal dad kept trying to scout across the boats until he stumbled across the right one, and then the right pair of shoes.

No fucking way.

Fuck.

“What fucking shoes?” he demanded, finally pushing Apollo off of him.  Mortal or not, Apollo was still the god of prophecy.  If he was saying shit like that, then Michael couldn’t just tell him to fuck off and ignore it.

“Caligula’s namesake,” Silent Blond finally spoke, still assessing him with those too-sharp, too-bright blue eyes.  Michael still couldn’t shake the feeling that he wasn’t quite an Athena kid, but didn’t have a clue what other options were on the table.  “His childhood shoes.”

Michael sighed and nodded.  “Get the fuck off of this thing,” he told them.  “You don’t stand a fucking chance.”

They bristled, all four of them, and Michael got it, at least from the three demigods.  Of fucking course they didn’t trust him.  Apollo’s reaction hurt a little more, but Michael forced himself to ignore it.  The arrow at his foot caught his attention and he bent down, picking it up and shoving the shaft against his dad’s chest, not entirely certain why except it was an arrow and Michael had always been an archer.

Apollo’s eyes got so wide it would have been funny if Michael wasn’t currently trying to save his dad’s fucking existence.

“Go,” he snarled.  “If you want to be fucking helpful, get one of those fucking landing boats over to ship forty three.”

“And what are you going to do?”  She’d finally dropped the Charmspeak, but her voice was still sharp without it.

Michael scoffed.  “I’m going to go get your fucking shoes.  Now fuck off.”

He didn’t wait for them to respond, ducking back out of the ruined cabin and slipping back into the shadows.

Time to put the last two years of playing hide and seek with the freak’s fucking goons to good use.

----

Okay I don't usually put A/Ns at the end of fics on tumblr, but at this point I want to clarify the Charmspeak thing, because Charmspeak is a power that can very easily go squick so I've spent some time trying to make it not so awful - specifically the implication that every middle-aged adult that Piper charmspeaks is Attracted to a sixteen year old girl. So, the premise I've worked on is that Charmspeak works on by drawing on either attraction (as in somebody already actively attracted either romantically or physically to the Charmspeaker), or for more powerful Charmspeakers like Piper, the potential for attraction (e.g. if a man is straight or bi/attracted to women, then even though he's an upstanding individual who would never dream of being attracted to a teenage girl, because the only thing that skews her out of his demographic is her age, the Charmspeak is still enough to bring them under control despite the lack of active attraction). This also extends to the additional worldbuilding whereby people with no potential for attraction - don't swing that way, or in the case of Michael in all my fics, are both very much aroace and also have no inclination to seek that sort of company anyway - can't be Charmspoken, even by someone as powerful as Piper.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Going Back

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Angst Characters: Yan, Jerry, Jerry's mother It had been a long time since Yan or Jerry had returned to London, but Jerry's mother was still there, waiting with open arms. TOApril day 23 - Cheesecake and Demons. This was an abstract prompt if ever I saw one, and what I was writing ended up going off the track rather significantly, whoops.

Returning to London felt weird.  Yan hadn’t been there for years, not since they were on the cusp of thirteen and facing their second sudden migration to another country for their own safety, although at least that time they hadn’t been alone.

They weren’t alone this time, either, which was helpful because they’d spent all of a year in England before jetting off to America and Camp Half-Blood, and six years of living separated from most of the mortal world entirely.  True, Jerry also hadn’t really spent much time outside of camp during those six years, either, but unlike Yan, he had the muscle memory and nostalgia of peak time London to fall back on as he led them through streets that were familiar but only vaguely.

Yan was going to have to relearn the quirks of the English transportation system if they were going to spend three years here.  They hadn’t yet settled on which university, exactly, they were going to attend, but they had no intentions of staying in America, and they did have fond memories of their year in London.

Maybe they wouldn’t live in London this time around, though.  Living in a busy city after six years of camp seemed like a bad idea, even without the justified paranoia of monsters lurking.  Britain wasn’t as bad as the Mediterranean for quantity or strength of monsters, but it was still part of Europe, and all of Europe trumped America for monster danger.  Yan wasn’t entirely certain why, but they had theories, and their dad hadn’t disproven or dismissed any of them when they’d brought them up.

This trip was just to visit a few of the universities in person.  They’d done virtual tours, but it wasn’t the same as seeing them in person.

Jerry, unsurprisingly, had jumped on the idea of a trip back to England, and maybe Yan was too used to being accommodating to their younger brother, but they’d had no problems with the insisted-upon side stop he’d proposed.

Maybe Yan was unlikely to see their mother again in person (they’d lost contact with her for a couple of years, until Apollo had made the effort to reconnect them, but time zones between America and Hong Kong weren’t kind, and she had other things to focus on in her life; Yan didn’t think either of them would make the journey to visit the other, although they thought they’d be happy if she proved them wrong), but Jerry had always been close to his mother.  Yan had sat in on many Skype calls, then Facetimes and WhatsApps as technology moved on and camp scrambled to keep up, while Jerry had nattered with his mother for hours on end.

Despite the frequent – weekly, at least – calls, though, Jerry hadn’t seen her in the flesh since the day they’d left for America, and Yan was never going to deny their brother the chance to visit her.  They’d rearranged the trip as best they could, around open days that wouldn’t budge for something as small as one prospective student’s travel plans, and it was doable enough to commute from London that Jerry’s childhood home worked well as a base.

Jerry had been an exhausting bundle of energy all journey, even though by all rights jet lag should have been settling in, and settling in hard.  Gods knew Yan was feeling the effects already.  Maybe Jerry was one of those frustrating people that simply wasn’t affected by it – Yan couldn’t remember if he’d been jetlagged or not when they’d arrived in America, but then again they’d been running for their lives for most of the time between touching down at New York’s airport and finally making it to camp.

There was a reason they hadn’t made the journey between then and now.  Yan still remembered the sight of their gutted satyr guide screaming for them to run and the sheer terror that had pushed their body to speeds far greater than they’d ever thought they could reach.

They jumped off the bus in a familiar neighbourhood, and Jerry didn’t hesitate as he led the way.  His mother hadn’t moved house, she’d assured them for the umpteenth time in their final call before leaving camp, and it was clear from his easy confidence that Jerry remembered the route well.  Yan’s host parents had lived a few roads away, but they hadn’t even tried to contact them to see if they were still there, or if they wanted to see them.

That didn’t matter, anyway.  Yan had never been particularly close to them, not the way Jerry and his mother were still close, despite the physical distance between them for the past six years.

Jerry’s house key still worked, and Yan was a little in awe at how he didn’t even hesitate when he put it in the lock, twisting it to one side and giving the handle an impatient niggle before the tumblers caught and the door swung inwards.

“I’m home, Mum!” he called out, and there was a rush of movement from inside the house, before the woman in question burst into sight, barely faltering before throwing herself around her son in a hug.

“Welcome home, Jerry,” she said into her son’s shoulder – Jerry was taller than her, now, but he was also taller than most of their cabin and several other campers besides, so Yan wasn’t surprised at that, even though they remembered seeing Jerry so small in his mother’s embrace when they’d parted.  Brown eyes, light like her son’s, flickered to look at Yan over Jerry’s shoulder.  “And you, too, Yan!  Make yourself at home, you remember the drill!”

Truthfully, Yan had only actually been to Jerry’s home a scattered handful of times during their last stay in England.  Being the year above him at school had left them with no reason to interact at all, until the monster attack that changed everything, starting with bringing the two of them together.  Still, they slipped off their shoes and nudged them into the corner by the door, and made sure the front door was shut behind them.

Unsurprisingly, Jerry had yet to make a start on getting himself comfortable, too busy embracing his mother, and Yan decided to slip past them to give them some privacy for their reunion.  They let their bag – lightweight, easy to run with, nothing to drop accidentally – fall to the floor next to Jerry’s and padded down the hallway in socked feet until they found their way into the kitchen.

Jerry’s mother had been baking.  That didn’t surprise Yan at all – Jerry had never been silent about his mother’s baking prowess, and there had been flecks of white powder on her cheek when she’d come to greet them.  She was a stress baker, Jerry had said many times, and given her day job, Yan’s younger brother had all but grown up on cakes for the first twelve years of his life.

Yan wasn’t sure if the spread of cakes was a stress response or a British hospitality thing – or a mix of the two, which felt like the safest bet if pressed – but it was magnificent and varied.  Jerry was a glutton for sweet stuff, and had regaled Yan with many stories of his mother’s baking prowess over the years, so Yan didn’t think there was any risk of it going to waste.

But even with Jerry’s bottomless stomach, Yan estimated it would take them several days to consume all of the evidence.

“Take a bite,” Jerry’s mother coached, just about out of sight but certainly close enough to notice their invasion of her kitchen.  “No point standing on ceremony here.  Not in my house, Yan.  And get yourself a drink – there’s squash in the cupboard by the oven.”

“Can I have a bite?” Jerry demanded from behind her.  “Mum.”  He peered further into the kitchen and his eyes widened, highlighting exactly which parent he’d inherited the colour and shape from.  “Mum- is that a cheesecake?”

“Black forest,” she replied proudly, throwing her chest out a little.  “Go ahead kids, I know you love it.”

Jerry certainly needed no convincing, digging in with a cry about how his mother was the best, and Yan wasn’t about to turn down a homemade cheesecake, either.  Camp food was good but it wasn’t this.

They did remember their manners, though, giving her a quiet but heartfelt, “thanks,” before they elbowed Jerry out of the way – the hog would have eaten the whole thing if they hadn’t, a lesson learnt the hard way one time at camp when there had been exactly one cake, and one very hungry Jeremy Allen with no concept of sharing – to liberate their own generous slice.

Jerry’s mother watched them with a soft look on her face.  “Welcome back,” she said again, softly this time, and Yan echoed Jerry’s immediate response with ease.

“It’s good to be back.”

[tsarisfanfiction]

There's An Endless World To Rediscover

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Hurt/Comfort/Family Characters: Austin, Michael Michael... isn't dead. Two years and two more wars but he's back now, and it's weird. But it's a good weird, Austin hopes. TOApril day 22 - Never Forget. This fic is sort of a companion piece to my fic Dawn Rises From The East, although that isn't required reading for this. All that's important is that this is a Michael Lives AU!

There were some memories that just didn’t fade.  Austin had had a few of those through his life, but the one that stuck with him right then was the staccato of a breaking bridge, the crescendo of water erupting from the river below, and the silence of bare cables.  Many of his memories of Michael were fading, the way memories tended to, but that one was still pin sharp, even two years later.  At this point, Austin was pretty certain it had cemented itself a place in his reel of memories for good.

This moment was going to join it.

There had been no staccato or crescendo ahead of the silence, just the usual ebb and flow of chatter between siblings, liberally sprinkled with interjections from their dad.  It didn’t make it any less dramatic as, one by one, their attention was caught by the new arrival.

Michael looked rough.  He looked tired, and dirty, like the two things he needed most in the world were a hot shower and his bed.

He looked alive, and Austin was glad for Will and Apollo jumping in, breaking the silence and proving that Austin wasn’t suddenly hallucinating his dead brother.

The rest of the day was a blurred whirlwind, one that Austin couldn’t tell anyone specifics of if asked.  Yes, he knew that Michael had reclaimed his old bunk above Will, yes he knew that they’d filled an increasingly tired looking big brother in on the whole Roman side of things, and he even remembered that there had been happy birthday songs at the campfire, because apparently Michael’s birthday was close to Will’s.

Austin had never known that, although if he looked at a calendar he could understand why that had never come up before.  The only summer he’d known Michael had been the summer the war against Kronos had reached its peak, and things like birthdays hadn’t been deemed important.  They hadn’t celebrated Will’s that year, and now, remembering how bittersweet Will had been about it last year, and even that morning, Austin realised that the two of them had always had a joint celebration at camp, before the silence that had stolen Michael from them.

Now, he was back, and things were slotting back into place that Austin hadn’t even realised had fallen askew in the first place.

No-one really talked about it until the day after.  It was surreal, getting out of bed to see Michael slipping down from his bunk like he’d never been gone, except for the clothes that didn’t quite fit him anymore, because apparently he had grown in the past two years.  Austin only believed that when the physical evidence of too-short clothing made itself known, because Michael seemed smaller than he remembered.

He'd always been taller than him, but the gap felt larger now.

“You’ve grown,” Michael said to him, some time after breakfast.  Austin had slipped away to the amphitheatre and the comfort of music, not Michael’s usual haunt at camp at all.  He’d been certain his eldest brother would have gone straight for the archery range, with Kayla.

Kayla was adjusting to having her favourite brother (Austin was not a fool, they’d always been second fiddle to Michael, even in Michael’s two year long absence) back with ease.  There had been tears, and tight hugs, but Kayla and Michael had always been like two peas in a pod, and it felt like she’d already forgotten the two years between his disappearance and now.

Austin hoped that didn’t come back to bite her, later, but didn’t have much time for additional thinking because Michael had singled him out, if he’d traipsed all the way to Austin’s haunt just to comment on his height.

He’d been going around all of them, that morning.  Will had taken a chunk of it, but then Will had known Michael for significantly longer than the rest of them.  Kayla, too, but Austin figured the favouritism went both ways, so that made sense, too.  Even the new kids had had some sort of chat with Michael as he obviously tried to get to know his newest little siblings.

Austin hadn’t expected Michael to try and reconnect with him, though.  In hindsight, it was obvious, because Michael had always had time for all of them, even when he was sniping with Clarisse or buried right to the top of his head in battle plans and contingencies.

“I’m older,” he said, rather belatedly.  Michael seemed to take that as an invitation to find a seat next to him.  Unlike most Apollo kids, who reached for instruments when they sat in the amphitheatre, he seemed content to keep his hands empty.  Austin couldn’t relate.

The silence that descended over the two of them was awkward with expectations Austin didn’t remember how to fill.  Two years ago, it was easy, talking to his head counsellor, but now, more wars and trauma later, to say nothing of a supposed death, he didn’t have a clue what to say to ease the pressure.

Michael didn’t seem to know, either, because he looked at his lap, twisting his fingers together, and said nothing else for a long moment.  Austin’s own fingers kept fiddling with the violin, trying to check if the strings were in tune without actually breaking the silence between them, which didn’t really work too well.

Eventually, his brother growled.  “Oh fuck it,” he muttered, and leaned back on his palms, looking up at the sky for a moment before Austin found himself on the receiving end of his stare.  “Play something.”

The words were sharp, rough, and demanding – all things that Austin remembered Michael could be, had been during his first summer at camp, before his eldest brother disappeared – but the look on his face was closer to pleading.

“It’s been a long time since I heard music,” he added, softer and a solid gut punch, because Austin couldn’t imagine spending even hours without music, let alone however long Michael had gone without it, and he didn’t think his brother was just lying to make him play.  Except…

“You heard music last night,” he pointed out.  “The whole camp literally sang you happy birthday.”

Michael shook his head.  “That’s not what I meant,” he said.  “Last night was…” he faltered, and shook his head again.  “Campfires are different.  Campfires are supposed to be music.  It’s different.”

Somehow, Austin thought he understood what Michael was trying to say.  “Rehearsed,” he said.  “What we do at campfire is rehearsed.”

“That,” Michael confirmed.  “It’s not…”  He waved his hands vaguely, words trailing away, but Austin got it, he hoped.

He plucked at the strings, adjusting the E string when it sang just a little out of tune, before nestling the instrument under his chin and just beginning to play.

It wasn’t a recital, like he’d default to with his sax.  He’d played that for so long that his first instincts were always things he’d played a hundred times before, before he started to branch out and experiment.

He wasn’t at that stage with the violin yet.  The notes that he drew out with bow and fingers didn’t align with anything in particular, just instinct guiding him into something new and raw.  Something unrehearsed, something unattached to anything else, just pure music for the sake of music.

Michael smiled, a small thing but still undoubtedly a smile all the same, and reclined back further, until he was leaning against the next row of stone seats.  He didn’t look at Austin, kept his eyes on the sky where the morning sun was gracefully evading any clouds that tried to get in its way.

Then he started to hum, and Austin almost dropped the bow in shock because he was certain Michael had never done that before.  He barely recalled him singing in campfire songs, despite being head counsellor and arguably their leader (although Will never sang, either).  Him humming along to Austin’s improv was different and weird but it was a good different and a good weird.  It chased away the awkwardness hanging between them, two years of absence rendered insignificant by the sheer power of music.

Austin could get used to that.  He could get very used to it.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Light in the Dark

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Romance Characters: Nico, Will Nico misjudges a shadow travel and ends up dumping them in the wrong cave. It's not where they were meant to be, but it lets them have an important conversation. TOApril Day 21 - The Sun and The Earth. This was another prompt that took me ages to figure out, but I've been meaning to practice writing Solangelo for the first time in a while (curse you, TSATS) so have a bit of a snippet of me remembering how to write these two again.

The by-now familiar feeling of tiredness washed through Nico as he stepped out from the shadows, hand firmly clenched around Will’s as he guided his boyfriend back into the mortal world again and he staggered briefly.

Their new surroundings were pitch black, a cavern deep beneath the earth, but as light began to trickle in, illuminating their surroundings, Nico realised that, maybe, he hadn’t brought them to the particular cavern he’d been aiming for.

Merda.

Will was going to kill him.  Luckily, they didn’t appear to have arrived anywhere that was teeming with hoards of monsters ready to launch at them and tear them to pieces – the opposite, in fact, with a complete and utter dearth of any other lifeforms except for the two of them – but it was still Nico that had brought them here, possibly got them a little bit lost, and Will wasn’t going to let him shadow travel again until he’d had a nap or three.

Speaking of Will…

Nico glanced over at his side, where he could feel the warmth of Will’s hand still in his, to see that the sudden illumination of the initially black cavern was stemming from his boyfriend.  Will hadn’t shrugged off any clothing, so it was somewhat stifled by the fabric covering his torso and arms, but the brightness more than made up for it.  It almost hurt to look directly at him.

That… that was new.

Not that Will could glow that brightly – he could glow brighter still, Nico had seen it in Nero’s tower, and when they’d first discovered that Will could glow and he’d turned into a human flash-bang, except mercifully without the bang – but the fact that he was.

“You’re glowing,” he said, feeling a little bit dumb as the observation fell from his lips.  Of course Will was glowing, anyone with eyes could see that.

Will shrugged, the shape of the light rising and falling to accentuate the movement.  “Well, duh,” he said.  “It’s dark and I want to be able to see.”

“No, no,” Nico shook his head.  “You’re glowing but I didn’t tell you to.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Will asked, sounding almost wounded.  Nico felt him tug his hand out from his grip, and made an aborted reach to try and catch it again.  “Am I supposed to wait for you to tell me to glow?”

Oh.

Nico made another grab for Will’s hand, this time not pulling back before he made contact with the warm skin.

“No,” he said at the same time.  “No, Will, that’s not what I meant!”

Will paused in his second extraction of his hand from Nico’s fresh hold.  “Then what did you mean?” he asked, “because that kind of sounded like you expect me to wait for your permission to use my powers.”

Nico winced, well aware that in the light still being emitted by Will his boyfriend could see it clearly.  “Not that,” he said.  “Gods, not that, Will.”

Will shifted where he stood, a little fidget that said he wasn’t quite sure what was going on – or maybe it was just the ADHD kicking in.  With Will, it could be either, or both.  “Okay, I’m listening,” he said.  “What did you mean?”

“You never used to glow until I convinced you too,” Nico pointed out, and Will’s fingers tensed between his, so clearly he was saying the wrong thing again.  “You used to say it was embarrassing, Will.”

The tension started seeping away again, which hopefully meant he was on the right track now.

“This is the first time I’ve seen you glow without needing to be talked into it, Will,” he said, his voice breaking a little and going soft, but Will’s face lit up independent of his glowing so that couldn’t have been a bad thing.

Will’s cheeks started emitting a red-tinged glow, the way they usually did when he was glowing and embarrassed.  “No-one told me to glow at the Tower,” he muttered, and Nico shrugged.

“I wasn’t exactly with it then, was I?” he admitted, and watched a flash of something cross Will’s face – the sort of something that promised the intended recipient was going to regret crossing the son of Apollo.  Nico hoped it was aimed at the long-gone Nero and his minions rather than him.  It hadn’t been his fault that he’d been knocked out – not really, anyway.  Maybe he’d taken on more than he should have done, but Nero had needed to be stopped somehow.

Will squeezed his hand.  “No, you weren’t,” he admitted.  “But what’s your point, Nico?”

“You’re getting more confident,” Nico said, and he hoped Will could hear the pride in his voice, because he was proud of Will for it.  He’d even called it his powers, instead of mumbling something about how it was just a thing that happened sometimes.

He felt Will freeze.  “I… am?” he asked, sounding completely baffled, as though the concept hadn’t occurred to him.  Knowing Will, it hadn’t.  Nico didn’t say anything else, letting Will think it through, sort through his emotions until he found the answer.  “Oh.  I am.”

But Nico had to laugh at his surprise.  “You are,” he said, squeezing Will’s hand tightly.  “Apollo’s pep talk finally got it through your thick skull,” and he wasn’t bitter about that, not really.  It was a little frustrating that nothing he had said had managed to convince Will that his powers were both a part of him and something to be celebrated and used, but at least someone had – and who was better suited to be that someone than Will’s own father, and the one he’d inherited it from in the first place.

His free hand reached up to catch Will’s cheek.  “I’m proud of you,” he said, knowing he was echoing Apollo’s words, but Apollo didn’t have a monopoly on being proud of his son.  “You’re amazing, Will.”

The glow from Will’s face got a little redder again, but Nico’s attention was more taken by the quirk of his lips as he actually seemed to let the praise sink in, instead of deflecting it like he usually did.

Nico got the feeling he owed Apollo several prime sacrifices during dinner for finally getting enough of a chink in Will’s armour of self esteem issues that he could actually listen to praise, now.  Hades would understand.

He probably wouldn’t, but Nico didn’t care.

He slipped his hand around the back of Will’s neck and lightly tugged him forwards.  Will came willingly, with no resistance at all, and Nico pressed a soft kiss to his lips.  “I’m proud of you,” he said again, keeping firm eye contact.

“Thanks, Nico,” Will replied, barely a whisper but close enough that it was easy to hear him anyway.  They stayed there for a moment, Nico basking in the warm comfort of Will’s presence and glow – which was very much one and the same, right then – before Will pulled away slightly, outside of immediate kissing range, but not so far that he couldn’t re-enter it on a whim, if he wanted.  “So, did you bring me here just to kiss me where no-one else could see, or was there another reason?  Not that I’m complaining, mind you, but this does seem rather excessive when there were several places in camp you could’ve taken me without exhausting yourself on shadow travel.”

Nico winced again, and Will’s newfound confident glow dashed any hopes he had of hiding it.

“Nico.”

“I… uh.  Miscalculated,” he mumbled.  “This isn’t where we were supposed to be.”

Will’s sigh was his unimpressed one, where Nico was in for a lecture on recklessness with his powers as soon as his boyfriend was satisfied they were in a safe enough location to do it – or more accurately, that Nico was in a state to actually absorb it, because Hades knew his boyfriend had no real situational awareness when it came to dishing out scoldings.

“Well, is there another way out of this cave, or are we stuck here until you’re recharged?” he asked.  His glow started brightening again, gentle but steady as he lit more and more of their surroundings.  Nico still had to look away when he started getting light echoes in his vision, blinking once or twice before he could focus on the now very well lit cavern.

There didn’t look like there was any exits.  Without letting go of Will’s hand, he knelt and pressed his free hand to the floor, feeling through the stone.  He wasn’t as good at it as Hazel, but maybe…

He sighed.  Or maybe not.  He couldn’t sense anything already there, and Will would go ballistic on him if he started moving rock around while he was already tired from shadow travel.

“We’re stuck, aren’t we.”  Will was resigned.  “There’d better not be anything in here that wants to kill us while we wait.”

Nico couldn’t feel anything, but wasn’t going to tempt the Fates by saying it out loud.  Still, Will seemed to have come to a similar conclusion by himself, because he suddenly sat down, the movement overbalancing Nico enough that he found his rear connecting with the stone floor, too.

“I guess we’re waiting,” Will sighed.  His glow dimmed slightly, enough that Nico could look at him again without risking his ability to see, and a warm weight rested on his shoulder.  Nico tilted his own head until his cheek landed on something soft.

“I guess so,” he agreed.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Fall of the Sky, the Starting Verse

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Angst/Supernatural Characters: Jerry, Apollo, Zeus After Hal, Apollo tried to stop his children inheriting his prophecy domain. Unfortunately, sometimes the Fates have other ideas. TOApril day 20 - Chaos Soup. I couldn't not go revolution!fic with this, so enjoy a symbolic variant of the much awaited Olympic Revolution, as witnessed by a poor demigod.

In Jerry’s experience, there was three different types of dreams.

The first one was the regular ones, the daft ones where he was climbing up the side of Big Ben except Big Ben was actually a giant marshmallow, or running through Hyde Park when Hyde Park suddenly turned into Lords and he was streaking through an active cricket match, burning with embarrassment and horror because he’d probably just ruined his chances of ever playing for England – at least until he woke up and the dreams faded from memory.

Everyone got those dreams, that was normal.  Sometimes they were scary instead, but nightmares were still normal, Mum had promised him over and over again when he was a kid.

The second one was the demigod dreams, where warnings were wrapped up in just enough symbolism to make them seem vague but were actually clear as a bell for any demigod who had had more than one of the things.  It was an open secret in cabin seven that those were sent by their dad (less an open secret in the rest of camp; Jerry didn’t even know if the other campers got those sorts of dreams much, or if it was Apollo giving them special attention.  He didn’t much care, either).  Those were the ones they talked about in the cabin, trying to pick apart what their dad wanted them to notice and making plans to avoid whatever dire consequences seemed to be barrelling their way.  Jerry also included their dad’s casual dream visits in that category, even if they were usually less warning based and more chill.

Then there was the third type of dreams.

For years, Jerry had thought they were the same as the demigod dreams, the ones they all got, with varying frequency.  The ones that Apollo sent to keep them safe.  They were just… vaguer, more nonsensical and far harder to puzzle out.

He’d asked Apollo about them, after his dad’s re-ascension to godhood, when they were actually father and son and for the first time, Jerry knew he was talking to his dad when the blond guy showed up in his dreams with a warm smile and music in his hands.  Why some of them were so abstract, and how he was supposed to translate them.

Jerry was never going to forget the look on his dad’s face, the heartbreak in his eyes, as he’d told him they weren’t from him.  That, somehow, and despite his dad’s apparent efforts to the contrary, he’d managed to inherit a fraction of Apollo’s prophecy domain.

(He had asked why Apollo tried to hold it back from them.  The short story about a big brother he’d never meet with prophecy in his veins and a curse on his voice thoroughly convinced him.  It also terrified him, and he knew Apollo hadn’t told him everything about Hal.  He didn’t want to know any more.)

To everyone else, he pretended that there were only two types of dream.  Just the normal ones and the demigod ones.  It was easy enough to do, because until that chat with Apollo he hadn’t known there were more than two.  The only change now was that whenever he had one of those Prophecy dreams, he was under orders to call his dad as soon as he could and tell him what he’d seen, which he was more than willing to do.

(He was also under orders to never, ever try and change what he’d seen.  Leave the decisions and potential aversions to Apollo.  If they were needed and possible, his dad would handle it, while Jerry stayed safe.  There were no complaints from Jerry about that arrangement, either.  Not after the horror story.)

This dream was unmistakably the third type of dream.

It had that ethereal vagueness that Apollo’s gifted dreams just didn’t, a feeling that there was something missing – or maybe something extra there.  Jerry didn’t have a physical manifestation, here.  He wasn’t there, despite being there, and the dichotomy of two impossibilities clashing together with him in the middle only happened in a Prophecy dream.

He was glad of his lack of physical manifestation, though, because nothing had one, not really.  There were no humans, no beasts, no monsters in his dream.  Instead there were what he’d come to think of as representations, stand-ins for things that his waking mind could never compute.

This time, the main attraction of the dream was a mass of sparking, vibrant electrical discharge that shot out mega bolts of lightning that would blind him in an instant, if he existed, swirling around inside a tempest of clouds of every conceivable colour.  Monochromatic whites, blacks and greys churned with greens and purples and the red of a warning dawn in an inconceivable amalgamation.  Every micron of it screamed fury, anger, distress as it lashed out again and again and again.  Worlds crumbled, crushed by the weight of falling skies.

Yet through it all, the light never faded.  The light just was, in a way that its absence was an impossibility that could not be overthrown and forced into the realms of possibility instead.  Lightning crashed through the light, but lightning was also light, and the light trumped the lightning at every turn, with an endless endurance as the lightning grew more and more chaotic – frantic, if that was a word that could be applied to a force of nature.

There were other things as well, horses made of seafoam and lathering at the mouth darting through the tempest as though it was little more than a light breeze, skeletons of unknown beasts with eyes of gemstones not yet discovered by humanity charging in the wake of the horses, leading the way for the horses, ignoring the horses entirely whilst working together with them so seamlessly they could have been of one mind.  More things still, but even in the dream to expand his comprehension further would be to break his mind.

Jerry comprehended what he needed to, what he could compartmentalise with the waking mind, and nothing else as the light flared, brighter and more vibrant than the most violent of lightning bolts and swallowing it up, devouring it until there was nothing left.

Then the sky finished falling, crashing through the worlds it had crushed and going down, down, down, further and further and further, away from the light and through the dark and beyond that again, into something Jerry would never, ever be able to describe.  It was nothing and everything all at once, beginnings and endings, immeasurable in its abyss.

If you stare into the abyss, the abyss will stare back.

He jerked awake with a gasp, lungs taking a moment longer than they ought to before remembering how to work and drag much needed oxygen inside.  Sleeping on the top bunk was cool, normally, but he could feel the vertigo clutching at him tightly, the world spinning around and threatening to drop him onto the ceiling from where he lay.  The concept of moving felt like Jerry’s mortal enemy, even when he came back into his body enough to realise that he was shaking like a leaf.

That was a new dream.  That was a Prophecydream, and the details beyond his comprehension were already long gone, but the core of it remained, and Jerry was terrified of what it was trying to say.

“Dad,” he rasped, feeling like he’d done nothing but gargle sand for a week.  The corners of his eyes were tight and a little bit hot, and something unpleasantly cool trickled down the side of his face and into his ears.  “Apollo.”

His dad needed to know about that one.

Except he didn’t come.

[tsarisfanfiction]

The View

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Family/Angst Characters: Will, Apollo Rachel's room had a wonderful view over the East River. Unfortunately, that included a certain bridge. TOApril day 19 - Haunted. This one is a case of me looking at a map, doing some mental gymnastics with what we know of the location of Brooklyn House and Rachel's house, and realising that when Will looked out of Rachel's window, he would've been able to see the Williamsburg Bridge. Cue, well. This.

Will didn’t notice it, to start with.  Even with his dad standing behind him, the lure of sunlight was strong – so sue him, he enjoyed soaking up the sunlight, even if it wasn’t his dad’s because his dad was currently mortal, and even if he didn’t, he wasn’t stupid.  Nico wanted to go down to the Trogs and the prophecy all but said they were going to do that, and they were going to need light.

Will wasn’t looking forwards to glowing in front of his dad in a pale imitation of what Apollo could do himself (or in a reminder of what Apollo currently couldn’t do himself), but he knew that if Nico got his way, Will was going to end up doing exactly that, and Will hadn’t yet worked out if there was a correlation between his glowing and his preference for sun lounging, but he wasn’t going to risk that there was one and he might run out of light in the dark if he didn’t get enough sun first.

That wasn’t to say the view out of Rachel’s window wasn’t impressive in its own right, either.  The river lazily wound its way between them, in Brooklyn, and Manhattan.  In the distance, the Empire State Building – Olympus – loomed amongst the other high-rise buildings that made up New York’s best-known island.

Will hadn’t been into Manhattan since The War.  When he had left camp, barring his shadow travel adventures with Nico it had always been to visit the fringes of New York, and he hadn’t done that often, either.  Camp was comfortable, mostly safe (but not entirely, Will would never be able to forget the times it wasn’t, when people got hurt or died), and was far better suited to his needs than the mortal world.

It didn’t take much effort to look away from the tall, historic building that formed their access to Olympus; its king had cast out his father, and the last time Will had been there, it had been filled with destruction, rubble, and dead and dying bodies.  He was on a quest right now, and Olympus had nothing to do with it.

His eyes wandered instead to the river, water green and dirty looking.  Whatever Percy had done nearly two years ago to clean them up hadn’t lasted.  Of course it hadn’t, this was New York.  Rachel’s bedroom window had a wonderful view of it, though, and even the green and murky water didn’t look horrendous while the sunlight glinted off of it, giving the colour some depth.

Then he saw the bridge.

He didn’t recognise it, to start with.  Not from this angle, not in the bright sunshine.  He might not have realised it at all if not for the scaffolding and cranes still perched on it despite the fact it looked intact again.  Signals that the bridge had been broken, might be passable by traffic again but was still in need of a few more repairs before it was considered whole again.

Williamsburg Bridge.

Will dragged his eyes away from it immediately, because they were on a quest, his dad had enough to worry about without Will going into a panic over a bridge of all things.  Camp was in danger, New York was in danger, Apollo was in danger, and now was not the time to let things get to him when they weren’t even related.

His heart thudded loudly in his ears, his chest felt tight, but not today.  Will couldn’t break down now, not today.  Not until this was all over.

It didn’t escape his notice that it was the same as back then, when Michael fell, when his siblings were blown off and he didn’t know who was alive and who was dead but Percy grabbed him because they did know that Annabeth was dying and Will was her only chance at survival.  When Will had to shove down his own disbelief, grief, fear, anger- everything except hope and determination.

He’d have his breakdown later, and Will knew it wasn’t healthy to bottle everything up but needs must, his older siblings had never let breakdowns happen when they were needed and he wasn’t about to let Lee, Michael, or the others down by breaking when he was needed, either.

He turned his face towards the sun, again, let the warmth bathe his face, calm his heart, release his chest.  It didn’t seem to matter that Apollo wasn’t behind the reins of the chariot, because the trick still worked as well as it had done in Manhattan, against Gaia, when a half-dead mortal Apollo had collapsed into camp.

That was another thing Will hated, that the sun didn’t seem to change when Apollo wasn’t there, even though it felt that it ought to, while it was without a god, but that was one more thing on the list of things to be repressed and ignored until later, when Apollo was a god again and everything was right with the world.

When Nico would drag him off, away from everyone else, and insist he break, because Nico understood why Will pushed it all down, but still hated it, and wouldn’t let it go on for any longer than it had to.

With everyone distracted behind him – someone was rummaging around noisily with tin cans, and he bet that was Meg, while Rachel talked prophecy paintings with Nico and his dad – he had the luxury of time, a few heartbeats to get himself under control unobserved, and he took them, closing his eyes to feel warmth permeate through his being until it thrummed beneath his skin, a hollow comfort that he wouldn’t be failing them any time soon.  His light would not falter when Nico called for it.

Seven seconds.  He gave himself seven seconds, then opened his eyes again, carefully not letting his vision focus on the Empire State Building or the bridge.  Instead, it caught on the large trailers sat outside Rachel’s house, where various noses protruded from the side.

Huh, Rachel had mentioned cows.

Behind him, he heard Rachel quip at Nico about his aesthetic, and decided that was as good a time as any to rejoin the conversation before his boyfriend started to get snarky at their best source of information.  It wasn’t that the two of them didn’t get on, they did, but…

He rapped his knuckles against the glass.  “Are those the cattle?”

[tsarisfanfiction]

Butterfly Effect

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Family/Angst Characters: Apollo, Lee, Michael, Will Being the god of prophecy, Apollo saw many things, including the futures that could never come to pass. TOApril day 18 - In The Next Lifetime, although I misremembered it as In Another Lifetime, so that's actually what I went with. Close enough, right?

The thing with being the god of prophecy was that Apollo saw things.  Many things, many futures, all delicately tangled together and fragile enough to be altered beyond recognition by the smallest, most insignificant-seeming thing.  Mortals called it the Butterfly Effect, the concept that even the simple flutter of a butterfly’s wings could escalate into something so extreme it was unrecognisable from its original form.

The rise of Kronos was infinitely more disruptive than a single butterfly could ever hope to be, and yes, Apollo had seen plenty of futures to do with that, too, possibilities where Kronos had rose and won, where he’d risen and lost, where exactly what had happened had come to pass.  Still, it had been a shift in the Fates’ strings that was easily trackable and even more easily curseable.

Apollo had seen many futures that would never happen, and some of those came with relief, while others he grieved with every molecule of his essence, because they had been good futures, so much better than the way the future had evolved so far.  It hurt to think about them, but he also revelled in them, tearing his heart apart as his perfect recall showed them to him again and again – the what could have beens.  The what should have beens, if Kronos hadn’t risen, if a thousand butterflies hadn’t flapped their wings in those exact spots and collided into a hurricane that attempted to destroy the world.

Just because it had failed in that didn’t mean it hadn’t failed in destroying many, many other things in the process.  Worse futures, yes, but also better ones, and there were times when Apollo couldn’t help but wallow, just for a while.

“No, no, you’re not stupid.”  Lee smiled at the young child sitting the other side of the desk.  His suit jacket fit him perfectly, or would have done if he’d been wearing it, but instead it was thrown carelessly over the back of a chair, and the tie that was supposed to be snug in the hollow of his throat was loose and floating down somewhere near the second button of his shirt.  “It’s the letters that are stupid.  They never stay still for me – do they keep moving for you, too?”

The child – seven or eight years old, perhaps, and looking like they were a single wrong word away from either bursting into tears or storming out of the room in a screaming fit – visibly faltered, looking up at Lee with wide, startled eyes.

“They move for you, too?” they asked, and there was wonder in their voice; they were too young to have worked out how to try and hide their emotions, and Apollo was glad for that, because young children shouldn’t know how to hide emotions.

Nor should older children, but life always collected its dues eventually.

“They do,” Lee confirmed.  “How about we try a few tricks to get them to behave a bit?  It won’t be easy, but I bet you’re more stubborn than the letters are.”

Clearly, those were the magic words, because the rest of the hostility drained away from the child, to be replaced with determination.  Lee had always been good with children, had always known exactly what to say to make them feel like he was with them, that they weren’t stupid for whatever emotions they were feeling at the time.

He made a good teacher.

He would have made a good teacher, if he hadn’t died when butterflies created hurricanes and the result was a giant’s club caving in the skull of Apollo’s son, sending him straight to the Underworld for the rest of his existence.

That was the future-that-had-happened that Apollo didn’t like to dwell on, if he could help it.  Not when there were what-ifs that were so, so much better, for all that they hurt in their impossibility.

“Get back here, you little shit!” a man snarled, stalking towards a slightly run-down, clearly low-funded building.  A preteen, or perhaps a growth-stunted young teenager, darted inside ahead of them, breathing hard with tears running down their face and a stuffed bag on their back.  Probably not homeless, but desperate nonetheless, if they were fleeing towards child services.

The child got in just fine, running straight to a desk and gasping out pleas for help even as they nervously looked back over their shoulder.  Lizzie stood up immediately, ushering them deeper inside the building and sending a single, poisonous look over her shoulder at the angry man that was so clearly a threat.  “You’re not welcome here,” she said.  “Leave.”

“Don’t you know who I am?” the man roared, but Lizzy didn’t give him any more of her attention, completely blanking the intruder as she coaxed the scared child into an office, out of sight.  She didn’t need to.

“We don’t give a shit,” Michael said, initially overlooked in the presence of his taller, more colourful sister but dragging the man’s attention to him with ease.  “You could be the fucking king of England for all I care.  You’re not fucking welcome here.”  Lizzy had been dressed for comfort, oozing vibes of big sister or cool aunt.  Michael was dressed for fighting.

A mortal wouldn’t recognise it, straight away, although if they were paying attention they might have noticed that he was carrying.  He wasn’t dressed like a typical security guard, but despite being barely taller than the child they were protecting, he carried himself with all the confidence of someone who knew who was going to win in a fight – and that it wasn’t their opponent.  To someone familiar with demigods, though, the clothing was clearly an outfit that wouldn’t get in his way if he had to move quickly, or agilely.

The man getting offended at his attitude was predictable.  So was Michael’s escalation, when the man got aggressive and started to storm towards him.

“Fuckers like you make me sick,” he spat, drawing a weapon.  Not a bow – concessions had to be made for the mortal world – but any ranged weapon was putty in the hands of an Apollo kid, and Michael was old enough to know which one was the best in any given situation.  Clearly, it wasn’t a gun situation, but tasers were just as effective at stopping abusers in their tracks.

Maybe if Michael had had a taser on the bridge, he could have one day reached that future, the one where he helped to protect children trying to escape their abusers the same way he’d once needed (and hadn’t got).  Maybe that would have caused another butterfly, and spared his life.  Maybe Lizzy would have survived that night, too, if she’d been closer to her younger siblings, if they’d worked together rather than apart.

Too many what-ifs.  Too many brighter futures where his children were still alive that hadn’t happened, because Kronos had risen and his children had paid the price.  Even the ones that were still alive struggled in ways they wouldn’t have done, in a different lifetime.  Apollo had seen Will sitting calmly in a paediatric ward, changing bandages and applying band-aids with children’s favourite fictional characters to insignificant boo-boos, in another future that would never happen, now.  Not with too much war trauma, too much reliance on his healing powers rather than skills to be able to sit in a mortal hospital.

Will wasn’t dead, not yet – and Apollo hoped he would live for many, many more years, that the futures where he dies a teenager wouldn’t come true – but the wars took from him, too.  He’d never be free of the demigod world, even if Apollo was still partial to the future where Will established himself as a permanent supervisory adult at Camp Half-Blood to help keep the children there alive.

Any future where the children – his, and the other demigods, and all children, actually – survived to adulthood and thrived was a good one, in Apollo’s books.

If only it actually came to pass more often.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Third Time Lucky

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Angst Characters: Alice (OC), Will, Lee, Michael The death of one head counsellor was unlucky. The death of two was a coincidence. A third would be a pattern. TOApril day 17 - The Cyclical Nature of Things. I immediately thought of Cabin Seven's tendency to have their head counsellors die, so that's my twist on this prompt! This fic is set the same summer as TON, although later on, and is during whatever quest Will ends up on (this could easily be seen as a companion fic to Stolen God or Eclipse, if you so desire, or any other story where Will goes on a quest that summer).

Will was on a quest, and Alice hated it.

Okay, so being temporarily in charge of the cabin wasn’t terrible – her younger siblings were reasonably easy to corral, all in all, and Alice had never had a problem with putting her foot down, although the comforting-younger-siblings-when-upset thing wasn’t quite so much her forte.  It was even good practice, for when the role fell onto her shoulders.

What she didn’t like was the fear that kept creeping in to her mind and heart whenever she stopped to think about her brother’s absence.  It wasn’t so much feeling the lack of support of a big brother, the way she knew the others were feeling – how could it be, when Alice had never really seen Will as her big brother.  There was only four months between them, and even though Will had been at camp years longer than her, and was a year-rounder against her summer stays, he’d never felt older.

No, Alice wasn’t suddenly adjusting to the lack of a big brother to tell her what to do (and be the one to comfort her when something got to her, because teenage hormones were stupid and she hated them).

Instead, she was scared, because she had a terrible track record for head counsellors, and Will being off on some quest or other rather than staying in the relative safety of camp was not helping her sleep soundly at night.

He was her third head counsellor, and neither of the other two had lived to leave camp.

She still remembered Lee, taking her by the hand after she’d been claimed and leading her straight into their cabin, showing her a bunk and letting her jump on the bed even when the frame started to creak in protest.  It had been a massive change from her mom threatening that her bed would break and she wouldn’t get another one if she did break the perfectly serviceable one that she had.  So massive, in fact, that when she’d challenged Lee about it, he’d challenged her right back.

“Those beds won’t break,” he’d told her, and that had spurred Alice on to greater and greater bounces, feeling the wood groan and flex beneath the mattress.

He’d been right.  Her bunk had never broken, no matter what she’d done on it.

Lee’s skull had, and that was a thought she was packing straight back into its box again.

When he’d discovered her oboe – not that it had taken him long at all, and Alice hadn’t exactly been hiding it – he’d shown her where she could keep it, and dug out sheet music so she had new things to try.

The oboe and the flute sounded good together, and they’d duetted more than once.  Alberto Ginastera was a staple, but there were other pieces labelled anon that Lee had plucked out of who-knew-where, and she didn’t know if he’d written those himself, or if he’d got them from Apollo, but she’d never come across them outside of camp and that felt like it meant something.

She hadn’t played any of those pieces since his death.  She wasn’t sure if she ever would.  The flute wasn’t exactly a rare instrument, but the sound of one always, always, made her think of her big brother, her first and longest-running head counsellor, and the idea of duetting with one…  Maybe she would one day, but not yet.

Because Lee was dead and that had hurt, but it was war and death was an inevitability (not that that made it any less painful).  Other cabins also lost head counsellors, they weren’t special for that.

But then there was Michael, and he couldn’t have been more different from Lee, but he’d been her big brother, too (in age if not stature).  Running to him after a bad dream wasn’t the same as running to Lee, because Lee was good with words while Michael spoke louder with actions, but the comfort had been there all the same.

Michael had a temper and a reputation, but even when Alice had pushed and pushed and pushed, he’d never snapped at her or her bullshit.  She still remembered the day he let her braid his hair, the way that he called out her brazen lie about how his hair was the longest in the cabin with a deadpan look and nothing more.

She still had the photos that Lee had taken, but they were only plastered over her wall at her mom’s house, along with so many others from her summers at camp.  There weren’t any photos of their dead siblings in the cabin, because that hurt too much.

Not her – she liked the reminder, the memories of the good times where they were just siblings messing around and not child soldiers fighting and dying in war – but others.  Will, mostly, if she cared enough to point fingers, and on some days she did but most of the time she didn’t.

Because if Will was the reason, then it meant that Will was still alive, and Alice had lost two head counsellors (and many more siblings) already.  It almost seemed like a thing, that cabin seven had done something to upset the Fates enough that things kept going wrong for them.

First Lee, then Michael.  Then there’d been her dad turned mortal, although Alice had managed to miss the entire thing and only found out about it when she got to camp and discovered she’d missed him by mere days (she’d also missed another battle, and she couldn’t be sad about that.  Mad, because she had three more little siblings now, and sending them off to fight without older siblings to protect them felt wrong).

Now Will was off on a quest, and it had been bad enough last summer, when he’d left her in charge on the backline of the battlefield while he slunk around the front lines.  She’d been certain he was going to die, then, and might have spent several nights in his bed once they were finally all free from night-and-day infirmary duties, clinging to her almost-twin and reassuring herself that she hadn’t lost him, too.

Him throwing himself into a dangerous situation again was not helping her nerves at all.  It felt like he’d already taken all of his allocated luck in surviving last summer’s war, and that this quest was just tempting fate.

Alice didn’t know if she trusted fate enough to bring her brother back again.  Given their track record of dying head counsellors, she leaned towards not a chance in Hades and prayed, instead.  Prayed to the Fates, to Apollo, to Hades and Thanatos and any other god that cared to listen and maybe, maybe do something about it.

Maybe, they’d break the pattern.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Adult Supervision

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Hurt/Comfort Characters: Gracie, Will, Nereids Chiron and Dionysus aren't the only adult supervision at camp, but they tend to be the only ones that make themselves known to the kids. TOApril day 16 - Nymphs and Negligence. Figured this prompt was as good a time as any to explore whether the adults in charge of the camp are actually any good at it. Sources suggest the answer may not be yes.

Camp was different.

Gracie hadn’t really registered it, her first summer, but then her first summer had been full of mortal Apollo and threat of destruction and other rather distracting things, to say nothing of the whole experience of discovering she was a demigod.  Her first summer had been a dramatic mix of fun and trauma, all bundled up into a single, demigodly package, and she figured she could be forgiven for not paying attention to the details, then.

Well, she had paid attention to details, like daughter of Apollo, and archery lessons, and how not to die.  She just hadn’t paid attention to other things.  Mundane things, her mom would call them.  Things like who did the laundry, and the cooking.  Who did all the things that Mom did while she was home.

It was difficult to miss the satyrs, especially as one of them had escorted her to camp personally, a strange look on their face when the golden lyre burst into existence above her head (she had discovered, later, that that had been weird, because Apollo couldn’t have claimed her, or Yan, or Jerry, but they’d all been claimed just the same.  Not even Apollo had ever explained how that had happened, when asked).  With their goat legs and funny gait and little horns poking up through thick curly hair, they were rather obvious, and rather obviously different to demigods even if they wore the same orange t-shirts.

It was difficult to miss the harpies, too, especially when Will went out of his way to introduce her to the main trio, explaining the curfew rule and how it worked when there were medical emergencies in the middle of the night – not, he’d stressed, that she was likely to get involved in that for several years at least, but it was useful to know from the start.  Gracie liked the harpies, even if their eyes were sharp and their fingers were razor talons and they were all in all a little bit scary to look at.

No, it was the nymphs that Gracie had barely noticed, the first time around.  Will had waved in the direction of a bundle of nereids in the lake on her welcome tour, and given her strict instructions not to climb trees without permission unless she wanted several furious dryads after her blood, but he’d never really introduced her to them, and unlike the satyrs and harpies, the nymphs didn’t actually interact with the campers all that much.

Her first summer, it had never even occurred to Gracie that, perhaps, the nymphs were also supposed to be supervision – after all, Chiron was amazing, but he was only one centaur, and Mr D certainly didn’t care enough about them to make sure they were behaving on a day to day basis.  The satyrs had their own roles to deal with – Protectors, mostly, constantly coming and going as they searched for more demigods to escort to camp, preferably in one piece.

It took two summers and a capsized kayak for Gracie to really register the nymphs.

There hadn’t been any particular reason why she’d been in the kayak.  She liked them, liked sitting on top of the water (but not in it, not getting soaked although there was inevitably some water at the bottom of each one that got into her pant legs and travelled up, up, up) as the lake bobbed gently underneath her.  There were other campers dotted around in kayaks, too – not a full camp-wide activity, but enough that she wasn’t alone, even if she was the only one in her kayak.

They were just messing around, splashing each other by slapping their paddles on the surface of the water and laughing as it erupted upwards into their target’s face.  Nothing dangerous – certainly nothing as dangerous as her previous summer, when the risks had involved a high chance of death – but fun and a little exhilarating, as her kayak rocked around her.

It was probably an accident.  No, she knew it was an accident, because she didn’t have any real enemies amongst the campers – in fact she liked to think most people liked her well enough – but it didn’t stop a paddle getting tangled with hers, and in the attempts to separate them, the water moved (someone else slapping it, probably not noticing the danger) and Gracie found herself under the water, still trapped in her kayak but barely any air in her lungs (she was a drummer, not a woodwind or brass player.  Her lung capacity was barely a fraction of Austin or Alice’s!) and a stream of bubbles in front of her face.

Gracie wouldn’t say that she panicked, but she certainly didn’t enjoy being suddenly upside down with no air and no quick way to get air.  Her paddle was gone, as was the one that had been snagged with it, and Gracie didn’t even know how to get out of the kayak while it was upside down, not with the cover supposedly keeping her lap dryish, let alone how to un-capsize herself.

Okay, maybe she panicked a little.

A lot.

She thrashed against the fabric pinning her inside the kayak, feeling her lungs burning as they realised they weren’t getting any more water in and were filling with old air they’d stripped of anything useful and wanted to send back out of her body with some waste elements attached.  She needed to get out, needed to breathe-

Slender arms with webbed hands passed in front of her vision, pushing against her kayak, and there were hands she couldn’t see pushing and pulling at her body, too.  A sudden jerk had her kayak flipping right side up again, with her still successfully inside it, and she gasped, trying not to let water drip from her hair into her face and open mouth as she panted.

“Gracie!”  The cry came from the shoreline, and she turned her head to see Will making exaggerated come here gestures, which meant he was worried by her dip in the lake.

If she was honest, after that, Gracie kind of wanted to get out of the kayak and onto solid, dry land, anyway.  She jumped out of her skin when her kayak started moving without her input, but it made a beeline straight for Will, so she didn’t question it too hard.

He was there the moment her kayak ran firmly aground on the beach, far too firmly to be a result of just the light waves lapping around, yanking away whatever was keeping her pinned inside it until she could scramble out and gratefully accept the towel he draped over her head – and inflict a soaking wet hug on him, because okay she had been scared, and Will was her big brother.

It was only when she asked, much later, how her kayak had righted itself, that she remembered the nereids in the lake.  Will had shrugged about them.  “They exist,” he said, “and they make sure no-one drowns in the lake.  I don’t know much more about them than that, honestly.”

Given how long Will had been at camp, that was a little alarming, if Gracie thought about it enough.  She decided not to.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Love Or Hate

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Teen Genre: Family/Hurt/Comfort Characters: Will, Apollo A long overdue conversation about family, betrayal, and loving them anyway. TOApril day 15 - Without Requisite or Deadline. Halfway there and this was such a weird prompt, so thanks to @fearlessinger for translating it as "unconditional" for me, which finally got my muses churning on something...

Will opened his eyes with a gasp, residual light taking its time to fade away from the explosion his mind had conjured up once again.  It wasn’t the first time he’d dreamed of that moment, when he’d listened to Nico and death and his own hatred over the urge to heal and save within him, and he knew it wasn’t going to be the last, either.  Some demons just never go away, and regret was one of them.

What made it worse was that Will still didn’t know if he did regret it, and if he didn’t, did that make him a bad person?

He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer.

Around him, dawn broke softly, a gradual light intensifying oh so slowly in the inverse of the explosion.  There was no sign of the sun, but there didn’t need to be.  Will wasn’t in his bed, wasn’t in his cabin, wasn’t even in camp, and that told him that the dawn wasn’t real.

It was symbolic, instead, a caressing comfort to match the warm hands that were settling on his shoulders, drawing him against an even warmer body.

Apollo had drawn him out from nightmares into a dream safe space enough times in his life that Will had no problem recognising the signs again, here.

He closed his eyes for a moment, watched the rest of the explosion finish fading away, and then took a deep breath.  “Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, Will,” his dad said, and Will leaned back willingly as Apollo snaked an arm around his torso, resting his head against his father’s shoulder and tilting his head up to look at him.  “More bad dreams?”

“Yeah,” Will admitted, letting his eyes fall to half-mast again.  The nightmares wouldn’t come for him again tonight; once Apollo had pulled him out of one, the rest of his night was always far more pleasant, if not necessarily more restful.  His body got to keep resting, sure, but his mind and soul wouldn’t.

Not that Will cared, if it meant he got to spend some time with his dad, uninterrupted and unshared.

“Thanks,” he added, somewhat belatedly, but that didn’t really matter with gods, with Apollo, because they always knew what he was referring to even if it took a while for him to say anything.

“You’re welcome,” Apollo murmured into his hair, and Will felt a light pressure in his hair for a moment.

These gestures of affection had never been missing from Apollo’s various dream visits over the years, but they’d become far more commonplace since his mortality and all the various fallouts from that.  Will was sure he didn’t need them to know that his dad loved him, but that didn’t stop him enjoying them whenever they were dished out.

Apollo loved all of them, and Will was sure they knew it.  He certainly did.

Echoes of the explosion flickered behind his eyelids, rudely dragging him out from his gentle relaxation with his dad, and a flicker of… of something, danced inside his chest.  It wasn’t comfortable, rather closer to dread, and in a dreamscape there was no way Apollo wasn’t going to notice it.

“Will?” he asked, probing lightly.  “Is something wrong?”

Will appreciated the offer of an out, a way to dodge the topic, because Apollo knew something was bothering him, that was as clear as the dream-dawn sky above him, but he’d given Will an opening to lie about it.  They’d both know it was a lie, of course, but that didn’t really matter, because it wasn’t about lie or truth, it was about whether or not Will wanted to talk about it.

He didn’t, not really, but it was something he’d never had a chance to mention to Apollo, what with his father’s absence and then mortal stint, and he was self-aware enough to know that he wanted answers, somehow.

He hoped he wanted answers, anyway.

“Can I ask you something?” he asked instead of answering directly, glancing towards his father’s face.  Blue eyes, the exact same shade as his, met his look evenly and softly.

“Of course,” Apollo said.  “You can always ask me anything, Will.  What is it?”

Will took a deep breath.  “Octavian,” he said, and felt Apollo still behind him.  “I… How much was the truth?”

He’d never been able to reconcile what Octavian had to say about his father with what he knew of Apollo, but as much as he hated it, the older boy had been a descendant of his all the same, and Will wondered what that meant for their relationship.  He hadn’t really met many legacies of Apollo; they seemed to be a rarity at Camp Jupiter, for reasons his father had never explained.

Apollo sighed.  “Octavian… was not evil,” he said.  “Nor was he… entirely wrong.”

Will’s chest tightened.  “He wasn’t?” he asked, his voice cracking and coming out far too small.  “But-”

“I did search for more power,” Apollo confessed, “and Camp Jupiter was an obvious place to start.  Octavian was more than willing to help me.  Perhaps it was just because he grew up hearing stories of me from the cradle, but he was always devoted to me.”  Will thought Apollo sounded a little pained at that.  “How he reached the conclusion that he needed to destroy Camp Half-Blood, however, I don’t know.  That was never my intention, or my implication when I spoke with him.  We spoke of uniting the camps, much the same way they are now, not subjugating.”

“I hate him, for that,” Will admitted quietly, looking away from Apollo because he didn’t want to see disappointment in his father’s eyes.  “Everything from his attitude to what he did annoyed me, but it was what he was trying to do that was the worst.  He was going to pin the blame for it on you!”

“I know,” Apollo said, “although I don’t think he saw it as blame.”

Will swallowed.  “Do… do you hate him?” he asked, not knowing if he wanted to know the answer to that.  He didn’t know if he actually wanted to know if Apollo was capable of hating his own descendants, because it felt wrong but Octavian had done so much bad, caused so much hurt, that Will couldn’t comprehend not hating him.

His dad didn’t answer immediately, which could have meant anything and Will didn’t know which anything it was.  There was a tenseness in his body, where Will was leant against him.

“I… felt betrayed,” Apollo finally answered.  “And angry. Definitely angry.  Camp Half-Blood is my creation, and for anyone, let alone my own descendant, to attempt to destroy it…”  He trailed off, and shook his head.  “But at the same time, Octavian is my descendant.  He might not be my son, but… that doesn’t matter, really.  I still loved him.”

“Loved?” Will wondered, and Apollo’s arms wrapped around him, encasing him in a glow of warmth.

“Loved,” Apollo repeated, before shaking his head.  “No.  Not loved.”  He paused.  “Love.”

The emphasis on present tense startled Will.  “But he’s dead,” he pointed out.

“You hate him,” Apollo reminded him gently, and Will felt a little cold at the words, no matter how true they were, because his dad clearly didn’t, and that felt like he was the one in the wrong.  “And that’s okay, Will.  There is no law in the universe that says you aren’t allowed to.  Family doesn’t have to love each other.”

“They should,” Will mumbled, “shouldn’t they?”

Apollo sighed.  “Not if they’ve only caused pain.  You don’t owe anyone love if they’ve hurt you, not even family.  Octavian only ever hurt you.  It’s okay if you hate him.”

“But you don’t,” Will mumbled.  Apollo shook his head.

“No,” he agreed, “I don’t.  But that doesn’t mean you can’t, or shouldn’t.  It’s okay, Will.”

“Even though I killed him?”  Will didn’t mean to ask it, hadn’t even realised the thoughts had been swirling around in his mind until they gave themselves a voice, but he couldn’t take them back.

“You didn’t kill him,” Apollo said instantly.  “Octavian made his own choices, and followed the fate he carved out for himself.  Don’t take on a burden that isn’t yours to carry, Will.  His death is his burden, not yours.”

“But-”

“But nothing.”  Will’s hair bowed under the pressure of something pressing against his head instead.  “Don’t do this to yourself, Will.  You did nothing wrong, and his blood is not on your hands.”

Will didn’t know if he believed that, but arguing the point against his dad was clearly a futile endeavour.

“Why don’t you hate him?” he asked instead, dragging the conversation back a few steps.

Apollo sighed into his hair.  Will felt the strands move around with the force of it.

“He’s my child,” he said, “even if there are a few more generations between him and me than there are between us.  I could never hate him.  I could never hate any of you, no matter what you do.  I’m not strong enough, not to hate family.”

Will supposed he could understand that, at least.  Maybe if he’d ever actually seen Octavian as family, he’d be the same, but he hadn’t – and if he was honest, he probably preferred it the way it was.

Finding the strength to hate family seemed like it would be exhausting.

[tsarisfanfiction]

Overgrowth

Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Friendship Characters: Will, Miranda, Billie, Douglas, Steve Clearly the newest Demeter kids haven't yet got the hang of growing plants with their powers. TOApril day 14 - Every Rose Has Its Thorns. I went literal today. Also, despite Meg being the clearly obvious candidate for this prompt, I managed to go with every other TOA Demeter kid except for her, whoops. All kids in here are canon names, I promise.

“Hey, Will!”

He turned to see Billie jogging towards him – as fast as she ever moved unless she was fighting or running from something actively trying to kill her – and sighed, because the daughter of Demeter didn’t usually seek out his presence, which only meant one thing.

“Miranda wants you,” she said, then confirmed it with, “bring your medical stuff.”

“Medical stuff?” he parroted at her, bemused.  She shrugged dismissively, turning her back on him and starting to head back the way she’d come.  Will hadn’t paid attention to it, but it was the direction of the cabins so he had a pretty good idea where she was leading him.

He’d long since got into the habit of keeping an emergency pack of medical supplies on him at all times, so he didn’t bother to make a detour to pick anything else up.  Not until he knew exactly what he was dealing with; Billie hadn’t been running, even if she’d been jogging, so Will was confident that his emergency pack would at least suffice for initial treatment of whatever cabin four had done to themselves.

Sure enough, Billie ploughed straight through the door of her cabin without stopping, and Will hurried to get across the threshold before the door slammed in his face.

Cabin four was, in Will’s opinion, the strangest of the cabins.  Sure, the Hecate cabin had magic permeating every inch of it rather disconcertingly, and the Nike cabin was an active puzzle for reasons he’d never quite worked out, but there was something about a floor that was actually grass, and a central support that was actually a living, thriving tree that had never quite managed to click in Will’s head.

He was pretty sure those things were all supposed to grow outdoors, but if there was one place where they had an argument for growing indoors, Demeter’s cabin would be it.

The central tree was swarmed with other plants, which certainly hadn’t been the case that morning when Will had done cabin inspection and given cabin four a seven for scattered seeds but tidy hammocks.

For some reason, Demeter wasn’t counted alongside her brothers as superior amongst even the Olympians.  Everyone knew the Big Three was the three male godly children of Kronos, while their sisters went mostly unacknowledged.  It was difficult to understand why so many people dismissed her or her children, though.  Will had seen cabin four members consistently pull off illogical feats – always plant-related – ever since he first arrived at camp, and having seen the sheer destruction they could bring about when they wanted to, he had no intention of ever underestimating them.

Unlike most demigods, who got ADHD and dyslexia and no special powers to show for it, Demeter’s kids consistently got green thumbs and plants that would do anything they asked.  Will had never seen one that couldn’t manipulate plants to some degree, and that certainly held true for the current occupants of the cabin.

In the middle, tangled around the central tree, was a massive rose briar, complete with wicked sharp thorns and fully blooming roses the colour of blood.  Billie had made her way to join Miranda where the head counsellor was standing by the cabin’s new plant addition and trying to get the plants to move.

Inside the snarl of thorns and vines seemed to be something that Miranda was specifically trying to get to – or someone, because Will could count just fine and there were two kids unaccounted for, visually, at least.

Douglas’ thick accent was slurring out curse after curse as something struggled inside the branches.  Will couldn’t make out the exact words, but that wasn’t particularly unusual when the Scottish boy slipped into Scots.  He could get the gist, though.

He sighed, drawing Miranda’s attention to his arrival.  “What happened?” he asked her.

She responded with a sigh of her own.  “Plant growing gone wrong,” she said, gesturing broadly at the massive plant.  Some of the branches rustled with her movement, just enough to reveal a glimpse of Steve fighting inside as well.  That answered the question on where both the young Demeter boys were lurking, at least.

It wasn’t the first time it had happened.  It wasn’t even the first time it had happened to those particular boys – Douglas was an enthusiastic plant grower, and Steve was far more of an enabler than he was clearly prepared to be when it came to the consequences.  Neither of them had been in camp all that long, but Will was already well aware that they were going to be a potential headache source for him – especially once they found their own feet at camp.

Will knew the routine, so he waited while Miranda did her magic (not that she would ever call it as such when it was just her normal) and slowly got the branches to release their death grips on the two boys.

Steve was the first one to disentangle enough, rolling out of the mess with stray leaves and the odd broken off thorn stuck deeply into his hair.  He also had several freshly-bleeding scratches across his skin, and Will didn’t wait to be invited over when his role was pretty obvious.

And also very much routine.

“Can you at least try not to bury yourselves in plant matter of the injury inducing kind?” he asked as he pulled out some antiseptic wipes and began dabbing at the myriad of scratches that stood out red against the younger boy’s dark skin.

“It was Douglas’ fault!” he protested.

There was an immediate “Oi!” in a thick Scottish accent emanating from the centre of the still-snarled tangle of thorny vines, followed by what Will was pretty sure was a protestation of innocence in Scots.

“You’re not blameless, either!” Miranda called over, and Steve’s shoulders hunched up to his ears.

“It was an accident,” he muttered.  “They weren’t supposed to get so…”

“Big?” Billie supplied.  “Wild?”

“Yeah, that,” Steve shrugged, thankfully letting his shoulders drop again after a warning poke from Will.

Another sharp gesture from Miranda and Billie had Douglas spilling out from the briar as well, his own curly hair sporting a fine collection of leaves and thorns, and even the occasional petal.  He also had openly bleeding scratches on his bare skin, including one long one too close to his eye for comfort.  It wasn’t close or deep enough to cause permanent damage, or even scar, but it was a reminder of what could have gone wrong.

Will wasn’t a fan of could have gone wrongs, although he did prefer those over the did go wrongs, for hopefully obvious reasons.

He sighed again and pulled out a fresh wipe to attack the other boy’s scratches with.  Douglas winced away from the sting, but Billie grabbed him and held him still.

Neither boy was injured enough to need anything more than just the disinfecting wipe, thankfully, so Will’s medical duties didn’t take long to complete.

“At least try not to injure yourselves on your own plants,” he said as he balled up the used wipes for disposal in the infirmary.  “I’m pretty sure that’s lesson one for plant summoning.”

“Something like that,” Miranda said.  “Thanks for the assist, Will.  I’ll take it from here.”

Will didn’t need to be told twice; he was already in charge of his own cabin and anyone that ended up a patient in the infirmary.  He neither needed nor wanted to expand his responsibilities beyond that – Miranda could handle her own siblings.

“See you at dinner,” he said, and made his way out of the cabin, back to where the grass was outdoors and normal.  As the cabin door shut behind him, he heard the Demeter kids discussing the best thing to do with the rose bush and whether or not it would damage the tree – or pose an ongoing risk to demigods – if they left it where it was.

That was certainly not Will’s problem, either.  Miranda was welcome to that one.