Author's Notes: Apparently someone else had the same idea as me for AU week, to which I say, more the merrier!
This is the first half of this arc; the second will be posted later this week. I have another two larger story arcs sketched out in my notebook, so hopefully I'll be able to get to those eventually, just not in time for AU week, sadly. (The EVENTUAL plan is Bering and Wells, but it'll take some time.)
Thank you to web for the encouragement and typey for fixing my grammar. Any remaining mistakes are my own.
Based on the Percy Jackson series, and written for AU week on tumblr.
Myka stood at the edge of camp just before the protective boundary ended, staring out into the distance of the fields. She was enjoying the last bits of silence before all the other kids showed up for the summer, and while she knew that she would be excited to see everyone again, she was allowing the feelings of loneliness and separation to keep hold for just a little bit longer.
But he knew where to find her even though she had only recently taken up standing there, looking out from just this side of the line into the world that she rarely went. But she felt him coming and the harsher edge of loneliness was softened, even though the pervasive melancholy remained.
Pete gave a wide berth to the dragon guarding the fleece in what they still called Thalia's tree, and he stopped behind her. Without even looking at him, she smiled. "Your dad literally drives the sun. How are you still afraid of the dragon?"
She could feel her best friend shrug. "Only some of us are good with the heat. Whether that's one of my gifts or not something I actually want to really test out. Besides, you hate the dragon too."
She knew that. Most days she could barely look at it, but today was different. This week was different. This week she needed to feel the terror of being this close to one of the things that still haunted her dreams. "Today's the day, Pete. My anniversary."
She could feel him move beside her but she still couldn't tear her eyes away from the horizon and his shoulder brushed hers. "Our anniversary of coming to camp together," he corrected, but she knew it was different. He got to leave. He got to go home for the school year. But her?
She could tell that Pete knew exactly what she was thinking, that she was lamenting that she was one of the few kids that stayed year-round, and he spoke again. "Leena's getting here today, maybe we can convince her to fake a prophecy and grant you a quest?"
She largely ignored him as she fingered the three beads on her own necklace signifying the number of summers she had been at the camp, and the two beads that hung on the overlapping one. At the end of this summer she would get a fourth, and Pete would get his fifth.
Sam would have gotten his seventh.
Standing there at the edge of camp, it was easy to remember his soft blue eyes, easy smile, and hair the colour of wheat as they waited together in the halls of their school, and she couldn't help the memories rushing back to her.
Because of their dyslexia and ADHD, they were the only two students at their school who had been allowed to take their exams orally, and she adored him. Sure, she was only 11 and he was 13, but somehow in the deserted hallways and after school help, they had become friends.
She had always been shy, but they had whispered their stories to each other when they got in trouble for not being able to stay still, or for answering the teachers' questions out of turn. He had told her of how he grew up on a farm half a state over, and it was only when his dad finally realized that Sam needed educational help that he couldn't provide did they move to the city.
Sam often walked her home, and after witnessing her crushing heartache at her mother's indifference to her and at her father's displeasure, he had wrapped his arms around her and whispered his own defeats: that he felt his learning disabilities took his family away from what they were good at, from what their family's true calling was.
It had been easy to love him.
And even though she felt Pete's presence at her back and the tangible smoothness of the beads at her fingers, it was hard not to be completely swept back into the memories, to the day she first saw the beads at Sam's neck.
"What are those?" she finally asked him, spying them under his plaid shirt.
They both were constantly fidgeting – neither able to stay still for very long, and the waiting for their exams was torturous – but he stilled at the mention. "I go to this summer camp," he said softly, "for kids like me. I've gone for two years now, and I'm going to be going back to New York next month."
The emotions he was showing were conflicted and she didn't know how to answer. Was he excited to be going? Apprehensive? Why was he going to summer camp when he still had relatives who had farms that he could work at? "I went to a fencing camp last summer," she tried, hoping to find another bit of common ground between them. She tried to smooth back her unruly hair, and she was graced with a smile.
"You fence?" he asked, another of his genuine smiles gracing his face. "I took some lessons last year too."
She could feel his excitement drawing her out further, but it was then that the teachers arrived to deliver their tests. "Wait for me after?" he asked, and she nodded. "I have something I want to show you."
When they both were finished he took her to his apartment block, and then up to the roof, and she was stunned by the beauty. "It's all a garden," she breathed, turning around slowly, and even though it was only barely spring, she couldn't believe the lush vines and the rows and rows of vegetables.
His smile was stunning as he told her about each thing that he was growing, and how he loved making the things grow. A row of raspberry bushes thrived in the shade, and he pulled a few fresh tomatoes off the vine. And when she was done sampling all his treats they had a rare moment of silence as they stood together in the middle of the roof, barely moving, and Myka saw his eyes flickering to her mouth.
She had always been tall, and while she had hated the growth spurt she had just gone through, now she was appreciating the fact that she could look at Sam directly, that she didn't feel like such a kid around him, that despite her uncoordinated body and gangly limbs, he made her feel beautiful.
She had read about this moment and heard it described by narrators of audio books. And though she was only eleven, she wanted him to kiss her more than she wanted anything else.
She closed her eyes just as his sun-chapped lips made contact, softly brushing against her own for a perfect moment. She could practically feel his smile, and when she pulled back and saw that it had turned into a beaming grin, she knew that her own expression matched his.
But the moment was short-lived. "Myka," he started softly, his brows drawing together in worry. "I think we need to talk about something."
But that was all the time they had. A sound startled both of them and Sam immediately pushed her behind him, and he reached behind some vines to a hidden cabinet.
"Swords?" Myka asked him when she saw what he pulled out, and he handed her the smaller of the two. It felt too light in her hand, and she stared at it dumbly before looking up to ask a question and, for the first time, seeing what he saw.
On the roof was some sort of giant lizard that she had never seen before, and was so frightening that her brain protested its very existence. It looked like an enormous snake with legs, or a sea serpent that managed to also grow wings. Her mind struggled to fill in the gaps, to place a name to this creature whose head was three feet above her and that had sharp teeth and pointy scales coming down the ridge of its back. And even though she was fighting against the moment of clarity, recognition assured after so many stories heard and imagined, the name came anyway. Still, she pushed it aside. "Sam, what is that?"
She was standing still and he turned slightly to grab her shoulder and shake her into the present. "It's okay," he said, not answering her question. "By its size, it's just a baby. We can fight this."
"Oh, okay," she said, still stunned. "A baby."
"Listen to me," he said to her with urgency as he held his sword in front of them. "I thought you might have been like me, but I didn't know. They were supposed to be sending someone this week to check but if something happens to me, I need you to go to camp, okay? Ask your dad if he knows – he might not – but just get to New York, and then they'll be able to tell you everything."
She didn't have enough information to understand everything that was going on, but she held her sword in front of her, matching his stance, and waited for the monster to make its first strike.
And strike it did. It moved faster than she could have imagined – indeed, it moved faster than she should have been able to see or react to, but somewhere in the fear and the adrenaline and even in the lingering taste of Sam's lips on hers, she found her peace.
And she struck back.
She and Sam moved together as a team, back to back, fighting the monster from all angles, and just as she thought they were getting the upper hand, the strike from the creature's tail came out of nowhere.
Myka had read that in the moments before death a person would see her life flashing before her eyes, but instead all she saw was Sam. Sam laughing with her in the hallways and pulling her out of her shell. Sam hugging her when her father was disappointed in her inability to work in his bookstore, because she couldn't shelve the books in order or help with invoices. Sam cheering her up when her mom doted on her younger sister and ignored her. Sam, leaning in to give her her first kiss.
And then Sam, pushing her out of the way, and getting the full force of the swing instead.
But even as she fell, she was able to push her too-light sword into the side of the monster. She barely even noticed as it started to crumble into yellow dust around her, though, because she was focused solely on the gash through Sam's throat and the bright red liquid coming out of it.
He was already pale as she tore off her jacket and pressed it up against his neck, and he was struggling to keep his eyes open. She screamed for help while holding her jacket, but it wasn't enough, and she could see the life draining out of him.
"Shhh," she told him as he struggled to speak, but he strained against his weakening form to get his last messages out.
"Tell... my dad... sorry for..." he gasped, but she nodded because she knew what he was trying to say. "And tell them... I was a hero..."
Tell whom she didn't know, but she nodded anyway, her tears obscuring her vision, and she knew she only had moments left. "I'm so sorry –" she started, but he interrupted.
"No," he muttered, and he used the rest of his energy to raise his hand and cup her face. And even though he had no breath left, she could see the love in his eyes too as they finally faded, and his hand dropped.
She heard a noise behind her like a howl, and she recognized Sam's dad struggling through the debris at the door to the rooftop, and then breaking through and running towards them. Myka vaguely recognized herself being pushed aside, and he dropped beside her, cradling his son in his arms like a baby. "Did you hear?" she finally asked, not having moved for what felt like hours but had probably only been minutes.
He nodded once, new tears springing to his eyes and he took in her disheveled state. "I thought you might have been one of them," he said, and again she had no idea what. "You have to go," he continued when she didn't answer. "There might be more, and, you have to go, get away from here. The scent is too strong. And – and take the swords."
She gulped heavily, again feeling way out of her depth, but picked back up the small sword that she had dropped earlier, and hesitated at Sam's. She hadn't noticed it before, but it had shattered in the battle and lay in several pieces below her. "Take it," he repeated, and when she bent down to get it, she noticed Sam's necklace on the ground, sheared off in final blow as well. Her hand hovered over it, and his voice was a croak when he said, "take that too."
His blood was still on his her hands but she threw the sword pieces into her school bag and the necklace into her pocket, and she ran, the last image of Sam being held close by his father still seared into her memory.
A slight rustling from Pete brought her back to the present, and she was no longer playing with her own necklace, but the leather rope next to hers. Sam's necklace, the one she always wore around her neck to keep his memory safe.
"You know," Pete said softly, his voice barely breaking through her barriers. "I prefer to think of this week as the one where I met my best friend."
Her shoulders shook and she finally leaned into him, letting him wrap his arms around her. He was so much bigger, now, than that twelve year old kid she met three years ago. He had been so much shorter than her, then, and extremely childish, but he managed to make her feel better.
She left Sam's apartment block in a state of shock, her feet instinctively carrying her home. "Dad," she cried out as soon as she entered the bookstore, and she found her entire family in the back room.
She was barely able to stand amid the exhaustion of fighting and the rollercoaster of emotions. She always imagined that the day she had her first kiss would be one of the happiest of her life, but instead the terror was starting to close in and she was beginning to hyperventilate and the images of her dad and mom started to waver before her and she heard her mom yell about a gash on her arm her dad say something about nectar before she finally felt her legs give out.
Her dad caught her and placed her in a chair, and for the first time she felt pain in her arm. It felt like she was moving in slow motion, turning to look at the cut that extended across her upper arm, and she vaguely remembered one of the spikes from the monster brushing against her body, but she had been too busy at the moment to pay attention to it. Still in her haze, she could feel her dad trying to clean it out, to stop the bleeding, and she could hear her mom ordering her nine year old sister to her room with genuine fear in her voice. Myka didn't reflect on any of these things, though, until a small glass was put into her hands and she was told to drink.
It was unlike anything she had ever drunk before, but she recognized the flavour immediately. "Twizzlers?" She murmured between sips, and she was surprised to see a small smile grace her father's lips. She could feel the liquid inside her, warming her up, and a tugging sensation at her arm. No longer was she shaking or crying, and when she looked at her arm, the wound had already closed and was fading to a thin white line.
"Now," her father said sternly, and she whatever comfort she took from his small smile disappeared. "What happened?"
She didn't know where to start, where she even could start, but then her mom just pointed to the sword that she still was clutching in her hand. "Warren, look. Celestial Bronze."
Myka couldn't make heads or tails from that comment, but she finally spoke. "Sam's dead," she blurted. "There was something that –"
"She has to leave, Warren. If she knows then there are going to be more, and I won't let them endanger my daughter like that –"
"—mom?" She tried to make sense of her syntax, because how would leaving protect her? Myka turned to her father looking for an explanation, and all she saw was shame. "Dad?" But he wouldn't look at her, and something in Myka snapped.
She burst from the chair and ran to her room, finally noticing that she still had her school backpack. She threw her books from it and more carefully wrapped the fragments from Sam's blade, and then filled the rest of it with some extra clothing, barely even noting what she putting in there.
In a moment of clarity she grabbed an extra shirt and headed to the washroom to finally was Sam's blood off of her hands and to clean up where her own blood stuck to her arm.
She threw out the shirt she was wearing. She never wanted to see it again anyway.
When she returned to her room, her mom was there with a sad look on her face, which helped Myka finally process the mystery syntax from before. "You're not my mother, are you?"
"You were never supposed to find out this way. I know that your father didn't mean it, but when your mother falls in love with someone's mind..."
Myka just stood there, waiting for the puzzles to finally fall into place.
"And she does have such a brilliant mind. It was easy to see why your father reacted, and though he thought he was still being noble, it works differently for them. And we do love you, we just... we thought we had another year."
Myka still had no idea what was going on and the ADHD part of her mind was spinning out of control, so she tried to find something that she could focus on. She cast her eyes around the room, and finally noticed that woman before her had a number of things on the bed with her. She pulled a ziploc bag of some weird dessert squares out and started giving her instructions. "Only eat this if you are really hurt, and if you eat too much, it may kill you." She handed the bag to Myka and she stared at it dumbly, before her mom continued. "And here's some money, it will help get you there, and some gold drachmas. I don't know how to use them, but we've been saving them for you."
Myka put each of the things into her backpack before turning back. "Get where?"
Her mom… the woman who had raised her… looked helpless, like she had reached the end of her knowledge. "Camp?"
Myka gave another look around the room at all the things that would have seemed so precious just a few hours ago, but now seemed meaningless. She wrapped the sword in a blanket and strapped it to the outside of the backpack. "New York," Myka finally answered.
The person that she had thought was her mom shrugged, and her eyes flickered to the clock. "You've already been stationary for too long. Now that you're aware..."
Myka's eyes started to fill with tears again and she could feel her anger building inside her. "Aware of what?" she finally cried. "I still have no idea what is going on!"
"Yes, you do." Her dad's voice came from behind her, and she wanted to unleash all her fury on this man, the one who could never quite look her in the eye, who never approved of anything she did, but the look on his face stopped her. "Yes you do. What did you fight?"
She didn't even need to think. "A drakon."
"And what does that mean?"
"That monsters are real."
If she thought she imagined the small smile on her dad's face earlier, she knew for certain that she saw it again when he said, "and it means that heroes are real, too." She wanted to demand more of him, to ask who her mom really was, to find out the answers to all her questions, but the smile disappeared. "And you need to go."
Whatever acceptance she had read in his face a moment was gone, and she knew there was nothing more she could do. Myka slung the bag over her back and pushed past him, walking out of the room she had grown up in without a second look.
She made it two weeks before she was attacked again, and managed to fight them off without thinking too much about the fact that the creatures dive bombing from the sky were actually Stymphalian death birds.
And they kept on coming. The birds, and the other monsters. She had been alone and on the run for a month as she made her way across the prairies, trying not to get lost and trying to outrun the one beast she couldn't kill.
It looked like a giant black mastiff, a great big dog that everyone could see and were afraid of, but it was only chasing her. It was on her scent, and it wouldn't let her go. She managed to slow it down with a few good traps, catching it in cages and buildings and losing it for a few days at a time, but it always came back after her, never quite getting close enough to reach with her sword, and never letting her rest.
That's how she found herself in Ohio, exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated, but not daring to eat the dessert squares that were still tucked in her backpack. She clutched the small sword, knowing that it was weighted wrong for her, knowing that she was going to be off balance if the, the… hellhound, her mind supplied for her, got close enough, but she clung to the idea that she could use this city to her advantage.
She had scouted the area earlier, knowing that her predator was going to catch up to her eventually and planning to make this her last stand. And she thought it was a good plan, anyway, until line of kids from a local daycare crossed her path and she had to swerve between two buildings, following the path through them, hoping to come out the other side – but she was met with a dead end. She stood, then, with her back against the wall, and dropped her bag, waiting for the beast to just come a bit closer, just near enough that she could leap out of the way at the last second, so that she could possibly push off from the wall and plunge the blade into its side...
But the beast never made it.
It stopped in its tracks, and she only just made out a single bronze arrow lodged in its neck before it exploded into yellow dust, and slowly started drifting away.
She stood there panting for moment before finally looking up and locating a boy on one of the balconies, a bow in his left hand and a giant grin on his face. "That was awesome!" he cried, and he climbed down the fire escape to meet her.
When he appeared in front of her she could tell that he was about her age – though still quite a bit shorter – blonde, and incredibly excited. "Did you SEE THAT?" he exclaimed again, his voice still high pitched and he began re-enacting the monster's approach, only pausing when he seemed to inhale some of the sulphur smelling dust.
It was only when he finally stopped that he truly looked at Myka, who hadn't moved since the monster dissolved. "Are you okay?" he asked, and Myka reacted only enough to let him take her hand. "C'mon," he said, as he started to lead her out of the alley and around the building toward a main entrance. "My mom made cookies."
As if on cue, the Pete from her present echoed the twelve year old Pete from her past, and he pulled a bag from his pocket. "C'mon, owl-eyes, my mom made cookies, and I actually saved you one."
"I don't eat sugar," she automatically replied, but they both knew that she would always eat Jane's cookies. "How many did she actually make me?"
His arms were still wrapped around her and he let her go with an extra squeeze, and then a laugh. "I don't know; I got hungry."
She felt a laugh bubble up and she was starting to feel like herself again when a scream reached their ears. Screams were not uncommon at Camp Half-Blood, but the direction from which this one came was – it was coming from the field in front of them.
Her hand immediately went to her belt but her sword wasn't there – she hadn't expected to need her weapons tonight and it was still in the armory – and she could see that Pete didn't have his collapsible bow either, but they couldn't the lack of weapons stop them, not if they were needed.
They could tell where the sound was coming from now, and it wasn't just one person. They could see five kids, two they recognized and three new ones. The screaming, though, wasn't out of fear, it was pleas for help.
Myka and Pete ran through the barrier and down the hill, noticing two others doing the same. When they reached the group, Myka could see why the group had been calling out.
They were emaciated. They were battle-scarred and weak, and all of them sported serious injuries. One was being dragged on a sort of sled, and Myka could tell she had had a broken leg, which Pete went to tend to immediately. "Let's just get them into camp," she ordered at the other kids who had come from inside the barrier, and they each grabbed someone to help.
The one Myka was half carrying seemed to be their leader, and she vaguely recognized her from the year before – she was one of the Dionysus campers, though she looked nothing like the jovial, round faced girl Myka had known.
"You have to help her," the girl was repeating over and over again, almost tugging at Myka to go the other way.
"Pete's got her, he'll help. We just have to get you all to camp."
"No, not all. We had to leave one behind. She was going to stop him, but she couldn't get away and told us to run, to get help."
Myka's blood ran cold because it sound entirely too much like the memory she had just been caught in, but she was silent until they made it past the tree and onto safe ground. "What do you mean, who was left behind?"
"She said her name was Claudia. We need to save her from the institution."
Myka could feel her eyebrows arching upwards and Pete was listening to what was being said. The girl continued with fear in her voice, "We need to save her from MacPherson."