our bonds are breaking
.
She can feel the ropes and ties of their friendship pulling tight. It begins slowly, a shuddering tug every now and then, but the knots stay firm and in place. But then the pulling becomes insistent, unable to ignore, and she watches, helpless, as their bonds unravel and fly loose, arcing painfully away from each other as their love turns to hate.
Silena waits, barely breathing, watching as her sister Drew draws further and further away from her. It's painful, almost too painful, but she watches all the same, because she's a spy and that's what spies do. They watch. They listen. They wait.
And they do nothing to stop their bonds breaking. They only hope it will be over soon.
.
It begins after Luke leaves, stirring the campers into a frenzied whirlwind of who can we trust and are you working for the enemy, too? Silena braves the storm, careful to tuck away the small scythe charm Luke gave to her - after a hurried kiss beneath overhanging branches, hiding in the shadows - into a place none of her siblings, or anyone else, will find it.
But Drew suspects.
The two of them are close as anything. Drew looks up to Silena, watches her like a hawk, learns what's right and what certainly is not. They are both so young, so hopelessly innocent. Silena cannot begin to realise what she and Luke have started, and Drew cannot begin to fathom the depth of her sister's deceit.
But she suspects.
Silena's gaze sharpens, her eyes narrow by the tiniest of fractions, and she begins to be wary of exactly who she talks to and what she says. None of the other campers notice any change - after all, it is common knowledge many girls had a soft spot for Luke, and perhaps Silena is recovering from his betrayal - but Drew does. She sees the twitching of fingers, the twiddling of thumbs. It is the body language of a liar, and Drew wonders what Silena has to hide.
And the ropes begin to stretch.
.
The Golden Fleece saves the camp and Thalia's tree, perhaps a little too much than needed, but it saves her all the same. Silena tells herself she should be pleased - after all, Luke's plan worked out in the end - but all she can feel is a hollow emptiness inside. And so she begins to crumble, her heart to beat faster whenever spy is mentioned, and her eyes to stay firmly fixed on the ground.
And this time, Drew isn't the only one to realise.
Charlie Beckendorf sees Silena too, and he goes to her, comforts her. Drew's eyes narrow in jealousy. It should be her by her sister's side, not some good-for-nothing son of Hephaestus.
And the knots begin to loosen.
.
The Battle of the Labyrinth cuts Drew to the core.
Lee Fletcher was a beautiful boy, his hair dark and smooth, his eyes shadowed but at the same time full of laughter, his arms strong and lithe as they grasped his bow. She loved him, she realises, watching as smoke curls up into the sky from his burial shroud. The crowd around her is weeping, shoulders shaking, but Drew stands firm.
Love means nothing to her now, and it becomes as fleeting as the passing breeze. She looks forward to breaking hearts, as hers has now been broken.
And when Drew needs Silena most, when she is curled up alone by her bed, her sister is not there. Silena is gone, and Drew is alone, and slowly, agonisingly slowly, the ropes begin to snap.
.
It is inevitable. Beckendorf and Silena, becoming a couple. The whole of camp knew it was bound to happen. Drew foresaw it long before everybody else - but she is still mad, angry, incensed. Because now Silena is in love, is healthier and happier than she has been in a long while, and has completely forgotten about her oldest sister, her oldest friend.
Drew's heart hardens.
Silena is still preoccupied, and when not with Charlie, she is whisking herself away from the Cabin, out into the woods where no right-minded child of Aphrodite would dare venture, and returning late into the night, when she thinks all her siblings are asleep. And they are - almost. Except one.
Drew waits up, hunched beneath the bed clothes, forcing her eyes to stay open. She tells herself she is doing this just to find some gossip for her friends - Silena and Charlie are probably having moonlight dalliances by the canoe lake - but a tiny part inside of her disagrees. It knows Drew still cares, still loves Silena, and it's making sure they're both all right.
But that small part isn't enough to stop the threads from pulling tighter than they ever have before.
.
And it's over. Camp Half-Blood's power couple has split up, because Beckendorf is dead and Silena is now half of a whole.
She sobs, she cries, she screams her distress for the entire world to hear. They comfort her, her friends, but they don't know. They can't know. Charlie's dead because of her, and there's nothing she can do to bring him back.
Silena grieves, yes, but after all, she is still a spy, and she has a job to do. So she watches, she waits once more. Her eyes are especially fixed on her sister, Drew. The latter is older now, more experienced, and Silena sees the harsh glint in her eyes long before anyone else realises. She knows Drew's heart is made of stone, now, and she knows she is the cause.
Silena watches helplessly as their knots become undone.
.
It can't be happening. The world has to stop turning because Silena can't be dead, her face can't be eaten away by poison, her eyes can't be glassy as they stare up into the sky she will never see again.
Impossible.
Improbable.
Entirely, utterly and completely…true. Silena Beauregard is dead and, not only that, but she's also Kronos' secret spy.
Drew screams so hard, her knees buckle, her head pounds, her vision darkens. She should have seen this coming. Silena always was so gentle and trusting, and easily seduced, especially by guys like Luke. It's obvious, now; the sideways glances whenever he was mentioned, the hiding away in shadowed corners of rooms, and the way she was so destroyed by how Charlie died. Her fault, hers, all hers…
Drew thinks of Lee Fletcher, his smiling face, his crushed skull as he lay prostrate, dead.
Her fault.
And the ropes that once held so firm, so tight it was thought impossible they could loosen…they break. Drew tears herself from Silena, from her sister, from all things good and right in the world, and watches with a harsh gaze as the ropes spring backwards, flying through the air and drawing further and further away from one another. Broken, at last.
All her fault.
.
Silena waits in Elysium, waits with Charlie who she can spend forever with. She waits, because she was a spy, and that's what spies do. She waits for her sister, her Drew, to come and, finally, their ropes can be resewn.
Because, in the end, it was all her fault.
.