Disclaimer: I am not Rick Riordan.
It was one of those days.
She didn't have many of them. But today the Hunters weren't traveling, and she could sit at the entrance to the tent, knees hugged to her chest, and watch the snow fall.
The trees were evergreens – that was somehow fitting. Their thin needles traced unreadable patterns in the air, the snow dusted them before tumbling down again, flake after flake slipping from edge to edge, and then just gone, gone into a pile of whiteness, no longer an individual, no longer flying.
Thalia squeezed her eyes shut.
How fitting that she had been more valued, more heroic, as a tree than a living, breathing person. An aloof legend, that's what she had been, known in principle but not in reality.
And then reality struck hard, leaving her with years gone and no explanation.
Thalia dug the toes of her boots into the gathering snow. She had been an inconvenience at Camp Half-Blood, a wild card. Oh yes, she knew that. But that was so much because she just couldn't explain, couldn't say that when she was willing to die for Annabeth, for… for Luke she had lined her life in order, but learning that he was lost had scattered those pieces to the wind.
No one to talk to, no one to understand…really, it wasn't there was an abundance of people-turned-trees-and-then-turned-people-again. And to be told that everything she had believed in with all her heart was a lie was too cruel, too cruel when the camp had only ever seen her as the mysteriously heroic daughter of Zeus. Only three people in the world may have actually known her. But Grover, bless him, wasn't a half-blood and didn't have that same resentment, that same fear, that same history of running. And Annabeth…well, she had been only seven. Intelligent and hardened, but still living with wide-eyed innocence.
So it was really just Luke.
Thalia swallowed. There were times when it paid to be at the center of the war, fighting the battle for civilization in the center of the throne room. There were times when it hurt worse than anything to be trapped forever just out of reach, just outside, just…forgotten.
There are times when your only wish is denied. And there are times when you never get to say goodbye.
Funny how you could be more immortal dead than you could be living forever.
Funny how some of the moments you will never forget are ignored by others…meaning, that one person who you thought would never forget, too.
Because she heard everything that happened inside the throne room.
And she knew she had made the choice a long time ago, the choice to forget, to move on, but the execution of a choice is the hardest part. If anyone had even noticed, they would have thought she was crying from the pain in her legs.
Because in that moment, she had lost. She had fallen.
That smile, that confidence from being a Hunter – it wasn't a lie. It was moving on. And it was more necessary than ever after the Titan War.
Camp Half-Blood held too much despair.
The hill where her body died.
The cabin where she was trapped in isolation.
The council room where she had chosen a quest that would break her heart.
And the knowledge that through doing her part in saving the camp, she had broken it even further.
But that is why she loved her Hunters – because they were her family, her friends, all the parts of her life that made her smile, made her laugh, made her heart warm.
But it sort of just kept the pain buried, or at least kept her on her own in overcoming it.
And yet in a way it still helped her overcome it because sometimes just knowing she was loved was the best way to lighten her heart.
But there were always those days – when she remembered her best friend, her almost…
Her shoulders trembled, and she blinked to keep the tears inside.
Thalia wiped her eyes and rested her chin on her knees, watching the snow fall, each beautiful crystalline flake lost forever in eternal whiteness.