Notes: Written for the Veritaville Holiday Fic Exchange. The prompts in question (The true meaning of Christmas, For those who believe, Blood on her hands, She's still the fairest of them all) were twisted and mutilated to fit in some way into the fic (and I'm still not sure the interpretations are very valid XD). In the process, the fic itself mutated into this monstrosity. Thus proving again that I have absolutely no control over whatever it is I'm writing. It probably needs to be revised too, but in the interest of putting it up if not on time, then at least around said time, it's being posted.
It might be revised sometime to get rid of any possible abruptness. But in the meantime; I really hope you'll like it, Syd. :)
(And please forgive the explosion of page-breaks and run-on entences. I think I have a thing for the things.)
(Also note: Soph, thank you for putting up with me hitting you with the fic asking opinions on it at three in the morning - for me, anyway XD- I'm pretty sure this wouldn't have been finished if it weren't for you.)
The Paving on the Road
(the life and times of Silena Beauregard)
The first time she tried to use the scythe, she cut herself. The little piece of silver was so deceptively pretty that she almost didn't notice it till little drops of blood dripped into the grass. And then she couldn't stop wondering if it was an omen.
She squirmed uncomfortably, resisting the urge to look around her one more time. Because there was no way this could be so easy. She was passing vital information to the enemy. No way all it took to fool everyone was a sunny smile and a cheery temperament. Someone should have caught her by now. She half-wished someone would, just so she wouldn't have to go through with this.
But seconds passed, nobody jumped out of a bush to confront her with cries of, "What do you think you're doing?" and she was not let off from wondering why she was doing this. But Luke had told her this was the better way. He'd said he didn't want to hurt anybody in Camp. And it was Luke, good-looking to the point where she couldn't really stop looking at him him, and actually nice unlike some of the other older guys-
Silena clamped down on her thoughts and cast the charm before she could lose her nerve.
Charles Beckendorf was a big guy. Silena knew that as far as statements went, that one ranked up there with, "Gee, that Annabeth Chase chick is pretty smart," or "That Lee Fletcher kid has good aim." But it was one thing to know it from a distance. It was another thing to walk into the armory and find out that in proximity, her head was roughly level with his chest.
She almost lost her nerve and smiled her way out, but camp intelligence would have been thoroughly lacking without a weapons section. Besides, she had a trump card.
Being your godly parent's favourite child was largely as mixed blessing. Aphrodite showed her affection by making people fall in love with Silena, the numbers only second to how much Aphrodite made people fall in love with Aphrodite. She'd been initially delighted, briefly amused and had finally settled for being thoroughly frustrated. Because like every self-respecting Cabin Ten inmate, she knew that legendary loves were all about conflict and angst and redemption, and that hopeless puppy-dog adoration was not conductive to drama. Silena had long-ago resigned herself to not getting her epic romance (not that it stopped her from trying, that was the only real explanation for her continuing to pass information to Luke), and she comforted herself by shamelessly using the million or so boys who had a crush on her to make her life easier.
From the (unsurprising) stammering, stuttering, blushing and sudden clumsiness, it looked a lot like her Mom had overdosed Beckendorf on Eros's arrows. It happened occasionally, and more often than not ended with stalkers learning that messing with a demigod (even a daughter of Aphrodite) was not a good idea. At least she was reasonably sure Beckendorf was not the stalker type. With the degree of crush he had on her, he'd have turned into one long ago if he had the inclination.
She dodged a falling hot thing and put on her most brilliant smile, "Hi Charlie."
"Uh," he looked like he wanted to run far, far away, "Hi, Silena."
There was sniggering in the background. Silena ignored it with the ease of long practice, but Beckendorf looked even more like he wanted to run away, which was saying something. She leaned over and put a hand on his arm before he could actually bolt. She couldn't afford to scare him off now, and besides, she was starting to feel sorry for the poor guy. It wasn't his fault her Mom had overdosed him.
She smiled again, and babbled some meticulously constructed story about how the swords stacked in her cabin had fallen victim to the Great Hairdryer Incident between Drew and Alexander (which had the benefit of being true, mostly because she'd fiddled with the thing before handing it over to Drew, who could be counted on to be a drama queen) and how they needed new weapons, preferably in a few days because violence was an entirely unavoidable option when it came to sibling rivalry in the Aphrodite cabin.
About halfway through, at the precise instant where his eyes were starting to glaze over, she casually glanced to aside and gasped over some of the armor he had been working on. Then she plied him with questions till he started answering coherently in sheer self-defence, and leaned forward till he started backing away into the armory to try and escape her. She followed, of course (she felt almost predatory doing it) and practically forced him to give her a tour of the armory in the process.
Finding a way to make a purple-and-green outfit look good? That was hard. Boys? Boys were easy.
His siblings grinned at each other and made way for them, and Silena got to see every little nook of the armory with Beckendorf providing detailed (if a little inclined-to-devolve-into-nervous-rambling) commentary. She beamed, nodded, asked the occasional generic question and mentally noted down the quantity, quality and variety of supplies stacked against the wall. In the hour or so she spent looking around the place, she learned that the Camp was well-supplied for offense, badly supplied for defense, moderately supplied for exploding things, and that Charles Beckendorf was adorable when he babbled.
That last bit, she later suspected, was the primary reason for why the armory soon became her most frequented place at Camp after the Pegasus Stables.
It took a couple of months of jumping at him at odd moments for it to stick, but she eventually found out that yes, Charlie Beckendorf could hold a conversation as well as any other demigod, and that he, unlike many, he had things of consequence to talk about.
In her more fanciful moments, she had to work to remind herself that she had ulterior motives, and that he wouldn't be half as besotted with her if it weren't for the stupid arrows.
It wasn't common knowledge outside of her Cabin, but every year since she'd turned thirteen, Aphrodite had made it a point to visit her "favourite daughter" sometime around the Winter Solstice.
Like everything else about her mother, it was something of a mixed blessing. On one hand, she got to see and talk to her mother. On the other hand, she had to ban her Dad from coming anywhere near her room from the fifteenth to the twenty-fifth of December for fear of making him mope for the next year. Also, if her Mom was in the wrong mood, talking to her was… irritating.
Like now.
"Really, sweetie, you should dump the guy."
"Mom," Silena sighed, "I'm not even dating him."
"Then I suggest you don't," Aphrodite wrinkled her nose at the hideously pink thing, "Anybody who thinks armor is a good gift for a girl deserves to grovel. And anyone who gets a girl armor that shade deserves to be single forever. Even you'd have trouble pulling that off."
She felt herself starting to heat up, and wasn't sure if it was anger or embarrassment. Sure, she could tell her Mom why she'd unpacked it and put it on her dresser (a place of honor if there was any), but she figured blank look would be all she got from it. Because pink armor? Definitely ridiculous and incongruous. Hard to pull off? Oh gods, so much. Inarguably facts, all of it, and both her and her mother knew the truth of it.
She didn't think her mother would get that the other things. About how her children were monster-magnets who didn't possess the ability to turn eldritch abominations into dust with a delicately flicked finger. About how they were practically forced into clunky, bronze armor for survival because even Aphrodite kids had a hard time looking good after they'd been eaten by monsters. And about how despite however hard they worked or how many monsters they killed, they would still be the bottom tier of Heroes, the last half-bloods picked for any team, because being children of the goddess of love meant that they were, at Camp, automatically the weak links in the chain.
And therefore, she wouldn't get the thing about how pink armor was a little statement. It was a way of saying, hey; I can be obsessed with Barbie and kick your butt at the same time. A sentiment which Charlie had apparently taken to heart the last time she'd joked (badly) about the Aphrodite cabin and their general love for all things pink getting in the way of the murdering-rampaging image the rest of Camp worked so hard to cultivate.
She'd received the parcel by Hermes express on Christmas Eve. His scrawl had said something about how it was updated armor, very definitely the best he'd developed so far and that he hoped she'd like it. Ten minutes later her Dad had come in panicking about a possible monster attack, only to find his daughter curled on the floor half-laughing and half-crying. Laughing because she could not believe he'd made effective pink armor, and crying because gods it was so wrong how he poured all of that talent and affection into making things for a girl who he liked because of a love spell.
She'd picked herself up and determined to address the issue with her Mom. Charlie was entirely too nice, and entirely too earnest she'd led him along for quite long enough.
"Maybe it would help if you stopped hitting him with the crush-whammy," Silena had a hard time keeping her voice casual, but she managed, "I don't want another stalker, Mom."
Not that she ever thought Charlie would be that creepy, but a little white lie worked wonders with her Mom. She only ever paid attention to drama.
"Hmm?" Aphrodite rearranged earring collection with a wave of her hand.
"Really, Mom. The poor guy is besotted. Maybe you should lay the arrows off him for a while."
"Who?"
"Charli- Charles Beckendorf. You know… big guy, something of a genius, Hephaestus cabin?"
"Don't be silly, dear," her mother rolled her eyes, "Why would I make one of my husband's boys fall for you? It's pointless if they're anything like their father. Can you believe he gave me a wrench last solstice?"
Silena didn't really register anything her mother said after that. Sure, there was smiling and nodding and making the odd comment about colour combinations and teenage heartthrobs, but her mother was usually quite happy with monologues. And when she finally something about her boyfriend throwing a Christmas bash with her as the guest of honor ("Such a darling, dear. You really have to meet him sometime."), hurriedly kissed her on the cheek and vanished, Silena was left in the wake of her golden, perfumed smoke, feeling entirely out of her depth.
Him liking her because he was hit by a crush-whammy? That she could deal with. Charlie Beckendorf liking her because he liked her? That was a little overwhelming.
Silena kept away from Camp till summer of the next year because she was nervous about facing Charlie. Also because Luke was dead and she was not obliged to spy for him anymore, but mostly because she was acting like she was an Ares girl who'd discovered the horror of romantic feelings. It was embarrassing, and her siblings would have never let her live it down.
Overall, she thought it was a good year. Sure, there was a war brewing on the horizon, but at least she wasn't specifically involved in it now. Being in the mortal world helped her forget about it. And there was something very satisfying about being elected Prom Queen of the school with ninety-percent of the votes.
When she came back for the next summer, she was stunned to discover that the latest epic-romance in the making had started in her absence. And even more stunned to discover that it starred Clarisse, of all people.
Over the years, she'd developed a fair amount of stealth out of necessity, and it was a little bad enough to learn that even at her sneakiest, there was no getting past Clarisse. It was even worse, learning it by way of having herself smacked into a wall with a fist hovering over her face.
"And what," Clarisse had snarled into her face, "do you want?"
Clarisse, it turned out, was at least as physically imposing as Charlie up close. More, possibly. Because while Charlie was bulkier, Clarisse was… more threatening. It was something about the way she glared at you like she was considering slamming your face into a wall.
"Nothing!" Silena squeaked out in reflex reaction to the glare, and she was sure her smile came out a little wobbly.
The glare doubled in intensity, and Clarisse's eyes narrowed.
"I was just here for the hot chocolate, I swear!"
More narrowing. Which would actually have been pretty impressive if she weren't at the receiving end. Silena fidgeted.
"I just wanted to see-"
Clarisse shoved her. As far as shoves went, it wasn't a very hard one (she'd gotten worse in the arena). But it still hurt.
"Entertaining, is it?" she spat, "Watching him see things that aren't there and say things that don't make any sense?"
"I- no! Clarisse, I swear. I don't come here to laugh at him! I just-"
"You just what?"
"Uhm, well," Silena cleared her throat, "Um, It's just that well- he joined them and he's well- that way, and it doesn't seem matter to you. I think that's really swee-"
She stopped herself, belatedly remembering that calling Clarisse sweet provoked about the same reaction as calling a person from the Athena cabin stupid. But apparently, that wasn't even the worst of what she'd said.
"Don't be an idiot," Clarisse snapped, "Of course it matters to me. He abandoned us and joined the enemy. That's a breach of trust. That's deserting."
Silena faltered, and her heart started beating a little faster.
"That's all you Aphrodite girls think about, isn't it?" Clarisse sneered, "Twu Luv. Sappy restaurant dinners and stupid proposals on where the guy compares your eyes to stars or some crap."
"And what's wrong with that?"
"It's stupid. Life doesn't work like one of those girl-movies, okay? The perfect guy doesn't see you and fall at your feet, and you don't get violins playing in the background if it does. In life, the guy you like is a wimp. And then he turns out to be a loser and a traitor and goes crazy in the bargain. Ever think of things like that when you plan your perfect love stories?"
"Yes! Love isn't sunshine and puppies! It's deeper, it's conflict-"
"Oh please. Love is conflict? Are you kidding me? You don't say, 'oh hey, he betrayed us and joined the enemy, and he's now a raving lunatic but that's okay, because you know I love him and that's all that matters.' It doesn't work. It doesn't matter how much you want it to work. Things don't fall into place magically because of love, and that's a stupid word in the first place anyway," Clarisse snorted, "You don't get it, Aphrodite girl. Go play with your dolls or something."
It was probably the way she said Aphrodite girl, like she'd come up with a dozen insults and that was the best of the bunch. Silena straightened.
"People are people," she retorted, right into Clarisse's surprised face, "People do stupid things. Sometimes they join the enemy because they feel desperate. Sometimes they treat people like crap because they can. And you know what? Sometimes they decide that a person is worthless because they can't do oh- one-hundred pull ups in a row or wrestle down a two-hundred pound weightlifter, and spend their life making sure the wimp knows it."
Clarisse stared. Silena figured it was because nobody had ever heard her swear. Or talk in that tone.
"It wasn't- he needed toughening up!"
Or maybe it was that.
"Toughening up?" Silena's voice rose by an octave, "He was a good fighter!"
"He's pathetic. He couldn't last more than ten seconds with me-"
"Oh good gods, Clarisse, listen to yourself!" Silena barely stopped herself from shaking the girl, "Almost nobody lasts long in the arena with you. And Chris was always trying to avoid hitting you-"
"Then he's even more of a wimp than I thought-"
"Oh, and maybe it's just me," Silena interrupted, mouth on autopilot, "But if you like someone enough to, oh I don't know- feed him and take care of him when he's seeing pink elephants or monsters or whatever, maybe you should stop thinking he's useless loser because it's ingrained into him. Maybe you should think that he felt betrayed and alone and couldn't get over the fact that the girl he liked –gods know why- thought he was a total loser and didn't want anything to do with him except beat him up!"
Silena ran out of steam about then, and steeled herself for taking a punch at about the same time Clarisse slumped and released her. She stared.
Clarisse glanced at Chris (who had cowered into a gently swaying ball) sighed, and pushed her hair back. She looked tired, all of a sudden. Judging from the depth of the dark circles around her eyes, she'd probably been exhausted all along but was being too stubborn to show it.
Clarisse closed her eyes for a moment, and waved vaguely at the door, "Look, Princess," her tone wasn't precisely gentle, but at least it wasn't belligerent anymore, "You're… usually decent, so I'll let you off this time. But snoop around any more, or tell anyone, and you'll be needing a lot of make-up to cover that black eye you're going to get. Got me?"
Silena went. She figured that was as close to an apology as Clarisse ever got.
When she turned in for the night, she saw Luke in her dreams, eyes turned to gold. He asked her to report.
She told him she didn't want to, that she was done spying, and discovered that this was different from all the times she'd told half-truths or tried to wriggle out of being the spy. This time he didn't wait for her to give, he took. The lord of time wringed every little bit he could from her head, and fed it to his army.
Two people died in the Battle of the Labyrinth. For the first time in her life, Silena described herself as a traitor.
"Hey! Aphrodite girl!"
Silena was startled enough by the voice to stop staring at her hands. She was imagining them covered with blood. Aphrodite kids, it might have been mentioned before, had a thing for drama. It was why she was seated a corner staring desolately at random things modified to symbolize her (currently bleak) perspective. (It did not help that Charlie kept giving her a worried look every few seconds. If he walked over to try and comfort her, she was going to go set a training dummy on fire for stress relief.)
"Oh. Hi Clarisse," she managed a smile, "How are you?"
She and Clarisse had gotten along surprisingly well since Silena had yelled at her. She supposed it was an Ares cabin thing. People couldn't be real friends till they had punched each other on the face. Or done the verbal equivalent of the same, she supposed.
"Whatever," Clarisse shrugged and flopped down next to her
"I heard Chris is okay," Silena smiled at her, a little brighter this time, "It's great news."
"Uh, yeah. About that," Clarisse said, "I wanted to… uhm… he said he's liked me for a while. How'd you know?"
Silena almost said something about the way he never seemed to try and avoid her in spite of her all the times he got beaten up, but settled for an airy, "Daughter of Aphrodite, hello?"
"Yeah. Um," Clarisse tugged at a blade of glass, "Well, he is kind of a wimp, but I can deal with that. I think."
Even the combination of condemnation into traitorhood, funerals and complicated crushes couldn't distract Silena from rolling her eyes. Clarisse ignored it.
"But he's still a traitor," she continued instead, looking everywhere except at her, "Sure, he says he made a mistake, but there's a war going on all that stuff. Just- what should I- look, you know about this kind of thing, right? What do you think I should do?"
Wasn't that a strange situation? Advice on what to do about a potential traitor posed to a very real traitor by a staunch loyalist. If she didn't feel quite so much like crying, she might even have laughed. But Clarisse was staring expectantly at her (and trying not to at the same time), so she figured something more substantial was in order.
"Um, well," Silena followed Clarisse's example and attacked the grass, "I think you care about him, and that he cares about you, and that you can, I don't know- work out the rest, maybe?"
Clarisse looked at her disbelievingly, "Work it out?"
Oh right. This was Clarisse. Half-baked-fluff was not going to work here. Clarisse liked tangible things. Advice couldn't be punched at to ascertain its' authenticity, and so had to be verbally disintegrated till you got to the bit that would chafe at your knuckles when you went at it.
"Lov- liking someone is not based on reasons."
Clarisse snorted.
"Sometimes," Silena persevered, "You've just got to have faith."
"Faith," Clarisse sneered.
Holy Aphrodite, the girl was hopeless.
"Are you trying not to be happy?" Silena asked her, "Because there's this guy who likes you in spite of well- everything, and he wants to be around you, and you're one step away from jumping him anyway. The only thing stopping you is the possibility that he might turn on you. Which, I assure you, is perfectly normal for most relationships. It will work out. Trust me."
"Yeah, sure," Clarisse rolled her eyes, "And what if it doesn't work out?"
She looked supremely unconcerned, really. If Silena hadn't been close enough to see how rigidly she was holding herself or how the grass around her hands had been ripped into little shreds, she might have even believed it. As it was, she decided to go for reassurance
"I think there's a chance it can," Silena told her, firmly, "And I think you can take it. You're supposed to be brave, Clarisse. Prove it."
There was a brief silence. Silena mildly panicked over the possibility that she might have called Clarisse a coward in a roundabout way, and more importantly, on telling herself that this Chris-Clarisse situation was completely different from the Charlie-Silena situation and that she'd better cut him free before she fell into the abyss that would be reserved in Hades for all traitors. And what right did she have to tell Clarisse to trust Chris, anyway? Traitors could be anyone, anywhere. It was hard to figure out traitors. She knew this better than anyone else, after all.
On impulse, she searched the tables for Chris. He was, of course, looking at Clarisse, and ducked his head down in alarm as soon as she met his eyes. It was, on the whole, a series of actions she'd come to associate entirely with Charlie.
And Silena decided, at that moment, that enough was enough. If Clarisse La Rue was on the verge of finding her man, she was not going to get left behind in the dust because she was afraid. As a traitor, she was most definitely not going to end up at any place in the afterlife that offered rebirth, and if this was the only life she had to have him, then she was going to take it, regardless of whatever.
"Okay, fine. I'll take the chance," Clarisses' voice was grumpy, and sounded like it came from far away, "And it's going to be your funeral if it doesn't work out, by the way."
"It'll work out," Silena's voice was firm, and she found that, much to her surprise, she really believed it, "I know it. And besides, what's love without a risk factor?"
"Oh gods," Clarisse groaned, "Not that word again."
"You'll grow into it," Silena told her, "Now shoo. Go hold the poor guy's hand or something before he decides to go into depression again."
Clarisse rolled her eyes, got up and left without a word. She did, however, take the time to bump her shoulder with Silena's, almost toppling her over (which was Clarisse-speak for, "I think you're admirable and all that stuff, but I can't admit it or I'll look like a wimp"). Then she stalked over to Chris, who looked understandably nervous when Clarisse moved towards him like she was going to punch him, and stunned when she took his hand instead.
Silena left them to work out the rest on their own. She had her own assault to plan.
For the first game of Capture the Flag after Kronos' regeneration, Silena wore pink armor, stuttered Charlie into silence by simply appearing in front of him wearing it, and rescued him from a nest of oversized ants. Admittedly after she'd helped set him up, but the Annabeth/Percy romance was all slap-slap-kiss (on Annabeth's part, at least) and she felt obliged to help them along whenever possible (productive matchmaking was addictive, once you started, it was hard to stop). Besides, things weren't supposed to go that far, really.
But either way, it felt good to help charge into the rescue. As far as relationships between half-bloods went, she thought theirs' was up to a very promising start.
(And it lived up to the promise. There were times she could almost forget about the titan lord who stalked her dreams.)
They had more than a year to themselves before disaster stuck. They had long walks, longer conversations, and dates which inevitably tended to deviate towards destruction. But that was okay. Silena discovered, much to her delight, that two hours in a crowded movie theater was equivalent to one hour on a candlelit balcony, provided that Charlie was there with her. And faced with facts like that, it was hard to get upset about a few runaway Greek myths. For the first time since she was aged in single digits, she was a little in awe of her mother. If this was what she had power over, she'd been shortchanged by every one of the Olympians.
And then one day the golden-haired man appeared in her dreams, and asked for information.
She didn't want to say it, of course. By that point, she would have rather pulled out her toenails herself than talk about it. But that would have been pointless. If she didn't talk, he would show up and wring it all from her mind. Maybe this way she could hold back vital information or-
"They're planning an assault," Luke said.
It was Luke today. It was always Luke, really. Kronos only appeared once in a while, usually without warning. Mostly when she was trying to hold things back, always to remind her why that was a very bad idea.
"Yes," Silena confirmed, tugging at her braid. Her hair was always braided in the dreams. She wondered why.
"The idiots," Luke said. His voice was devoid of any of the venom it might have contained a year ago. He looked different, too. Glowing with health in body, haggard and beaten in the eyes. As much as she hated him now, she couldn't look at him without feeling a stab of involuntary pity.
"I don't want any of them to get hurt," Silena said. Her voice sounded hollow and weak, even to herself.
"Of course you don't," Luke stated dully. He sounded resigned.
That really wasn't a tone (or an answer) she wanted to hear. Silena tried again, on a slightly more aggressive note.
"If- if anybody gets hurt I won't work for you anymore!"
Luke blinked at her, then laughed. The laugh was part hysteria, part madness and entirely unnerving, "Oh god, you think you actually have a choice."
"Of course I do! I-"
"No, you don't," he laughed again, and Silena took an involuntary step back, "You signed up. You can't back off. You're trapped. All the rethinking in the world won't do you any good."
"You promised people wouldn't get hurt-"
"And you believed me? This is a war."
"I-" Deny, deny, deny. Anything was better than admitting it, "I did! I wouldn't have told you this if I knew people would-"
"Silena," Luke leaned towards her, interrupting, "Tell me what you know."
Silena started to shake her head, but remembered the feeling of it invading her head and gave in. She took comfort in the fact that what she knew wasn't much. A person or, at the most, a small team was going to infiltrate the ship and try to do some damage it. Percy Jackson, being the son of Poseidon was probably going to be there. And where there was Percy Jackson, there was, quite possibly, Annabeth Chase. It really wasn't much to go on, and she was glad for at least that little inconvenience.
Luke's face might have tightened a little when she mentioned Annabeth, and Silena pounced on that. She made sure she gave a very convincing performance (which wasn't all that hard, because she really was worried). She pleaded and begged. She was trembling, her hands were bunched into fists and she had fixed all her attention on him. She was, at every point, just about to burst into tears and barely holding it in. And she thought, maybe for a moment, that he faltered.
"Please don't hurt them," she told him again.
"I'll see what I can do," Luke replied, not meeting her eyes, and went.
Silena woke up the next day feeling miserable and refused to meet Annabeth's eyes. Instead, she took a few of the Pegasi into the woods and tried very, very hard not to think of what might happen to the people who called her a friend. Percy was tough, and it was the sea. It would take a miracle to kill him. And he'd trash the ship with a tidal wave before he'd let anything happen to Annabeth. They'd survive.
When she got back, Blackjack was gone, Annabeth was still there and Charlie had left her a hurried little note weighed down with a cast-bronze flower.
She wanted to cry herself to sleep, but something in her muttered vindictively that she did not deserve even that small span of comfort. Instead she walked, and moped, and tried very, very hard to worry. Because worry had to be better than the numb weight of inevitability that had settled on to her. Worrying meant that there was always a chance. Always a possibility. Maybe Luke pulled through, maybe Charlie got lucky. Maybe Kronos decided to let him live to announce his failure to the rest of the world. Something could happen.
It didn't work, and when Percy came with the news, she was not surprised. She had enough, she broke down, and she stammered and sobbed, which she thought was pathetic. But she wasn't at all surprised.
They held the funeral that night. The shroud was chain-mail, and she wondered how it could burn. Charlie would have known, of course, but it wasn't like she could ask him anymore.
Not everyone knew about her fondness for chocolate (the calories involved were alarming, and her siblings would have tried a million ways to break her off it if they knew), but the people who did used it shamelessly for weapons-grade manipulation. Clarisse was one of those people. Which was why, despite Silena's sudden loss of appetite (and thirst), she kept finding herself continually supplied with hot chocolate.
The most recent outburst of tears was gone. They tended to come in little bursts that soon dried up into numbness. Guilt and self-loathing made it hard for grief to develop a strong threshold, and she was unsurprised when the experimental sip of hot chocolate tasted a lot like mud. It was just that kind of day.
Her siblings had tried their best to comfort her, but since most of it consisted of telling her she'd find someone else, she'd escaped to the big house and into Chris' old room. Chiron hadn't protested. Everyone had been walking on eggshells around her since the event. It had gotten to the point where Clarisse knocked before she entered.
"Hey, Silena?"
"Hmm?"
"Are you all righ- no, stupid question," Clarisse shook her head, "How're you holding up?"
Silena shrugged.
"Do you want me to do anything?"
Nothing, really. There really wasn't nothing anyone could do, was there? But if she was owed one favor from Clarisse-
"You could give them the chariot."
Her voice came out low and hoarse and dull, but that was insignificant compared to what how Clarisse went from worried to mutinous in the span of a few seconds. She'd never before noticed how her face transformed when her jaw clenched.
"No."
"But we need-"
"No."
"Clarisse, people will die-"
"And so will we," Clarisse said, "We're children of Ares. We're brave and reckless and all that stuff. We take the heat and we're glad to do it. It's what makes it us. But that also means we are the ones who die first, who retreat last. By the end of the battle, the number of Ares campers will cut down by about half, and we know it. It's what we do."
"But that's not the point. He point is that we could do all that and nobody would notice. We could die protecting them, and nobody would care," Clarisse looked grim, "We're always the hotheads, always the unreasonable ones. Most of the time, it wouldn't matter, but when we're walking into very possible death,-"
"It's not just you, Clarisse. Everyone is-"
"It doesn't matter! It's gone on for long enough. For all I care, evey single one of them can go and get themselves kille-" Clarisse stopped abruptly, and sent her a fleeting, apologetic glance, "I'm sorry, I wasn't talking about him. I-"
Silena nodded vaguely at her (walking on eggshells, every one of them), and hugged her knees to her chest. She understood what Clarisse was saying. Sometimes she thought she'd joined the dark side because she was sick of being insignificant. Because god, there had to be more to her than that. She couldn't have really joined the enemy because she thought some guy was cute, could she? That was just- oh, gods.
Charlie was dead. Gone. Not coming back. What the hell had been wrong with her?
Dimly, she became aware that she was sobbing again, and that the arms and the vaguely soothing noises surrounding her was Clarisse doing what she could to comfort her.
"I'm sorry," she was told, "I know how much he meant to you."
And that just drove the knife in deeper. Because whatever he had meant to her, it had turned out to be far less than what she meant to herself.
She left Clarisse went with the rest of the Camp to New York, decided she was worthless within the span of a few hours (even her siblings were setting monsters on fire), and went back to Camp to try and convince Clarisse to come join the battle.
She found Clarisse in the big house restlessly polishing her spear. Clarisse took one look at her and made her more hot chocolate, but refused. The Ares cabin was worth more than that. She did promise to hunt down the traitor for her before she left the room, though.
She decided Clarisse was a stubborn ass, that enough was enough and pilfered her armor and spear. They were heavier than she thought.
Silena knew all about the importance of appearances. She'd been born knowing about the importance of appearances, and had spent most of her life learning more about the importance of appearances. She knew that at the moment, she had the perfect posture, the perfect stance and was exuding just the right proportions of courage, bloodlust and hysteria. She was also, of course, entirely aware of the fact that she was scared out of her mind.
She'd found the Ares campers milling about the Arena fully dressed for battle (which must have annoyed Clarisse), and she'd stretched her limited Charmspeaking skills fooling them into thinking she was Clarisse, to the point where she couldn't trade in the spear for something slightly more to her scale (because Clarisse, being Clarisse, wouldn't have settled for a weapon which was medium-sized), since that could possibly blow the illusion from their minds entirely. Ares campers responded to action and sharp objects. The more spectacular, the better. Her voice was raw from screaming already, and she wasn't even at the battlefield yet.
Not that it seemed to matter. She was sweating. In full armor. Ares camper, being the deluded macho idiots they were, believed the chunky, old-fashioned ancient armor was better than the vastly improved lighter-weighed, airflow-enabled gear developed by the Hephaestus cabin. Charlie had spent an entire day showing her how it worked-
Not that. Oh gods, don't think about that.
Her mind blanked out on reflex, and for a moment she felt dizzy enough to fall over. But because poise was important, and because she had learned to wobble around in stilettos since she was a teenager, she dealt with it. There was barely a flicker of hesitance before she charged on, ignoring the moment where the waiting scales of the drakon were more infinitely more comforting than the recesses of her mind.
She suspected she was not going to survive the charge, and she knew she should have hated Clarisse for forcing her into this situation. She was perversely more grateful for it than anything else from their friendship. Fear and rage were easier to feel than guilt. And anything was better than the numbness.
Silena shut her mind to the terrified voices in her head, and charged. Her scream this time was distinctly more high-pitched than it had been before, but considering the situation, nobody noticed it.
And she continued to attack the drakon, clumsy and terrified and determined, till it blasted her away with a stream of white-hot fire. After which she didn't require the combination of anger and adrenalin and terror to distract her. The pain worked quite well on its' own.
She managed to speak, to apologize, to tell them enough so they would know what she really was. It would have been unfair if she was regaled as a hero, after all the things she'd done. (But she couldn't help but apologize fervently, not with Clarisse's face twisted in anguish above her own. Some peoples' opinions were more important than others'.)
It was when the numbness started settling in that she realized (really, realized and not just deduced) that oh gods, she was going to die. And from the excruciating pain splattered across her face and the way she could barely see out of one eye, it wasn't going to be heroic as much as it was horrifying.
Silena half-choked on a ragged laugh. It looked like she'd got her epic romance after all. She'd just never envisioned it without a happy ending.
In retrospect, she decided as she faded out of consciousness, that had been a pretty foolish move for a demigod.
Beckendorf was prepared to wait. For all eternity if at all viable.
The Di Angelo kid had warned him about losing his memories over time, and he was annoyed to find out that it was very true and already happening. He couldn't quite remember stuff, and people were the worst. Even his siblings were delegated into tiny bits of information, like "chews gum" or "likes to melt things" with no clear face or form connecting them to the bits. The only person he could remember in any clarity, sight, sound and smell, was Silena. He had a feeling he'd find it hard to forget her.
And if that line didn't prove he spent most of his waking hours with his girlfriend, he didn't know what did.
"Charlie, what are you doing here?"
The voice was so small and hesitant that it was a miracle it managed to sound terrified. And he recognized it almost instantly.
The boatman had been ferrying people across the river for quite a while now, and he'd seem some familiar faces (like that short guy from the Apollo cabin whose name was something to do with a tree). All of them had been a little battered and a little mauled (or more so), but none of that prepared him for the sight of the girl with half her face burned off to the bone.
He blinked. She looked terrible.
"Hello," she said quietly.
He stopped gaping and hurried over, "What happened?"
Silena waved a hand absently. It was a gesture he'd seen her make dozens of times but which somehow wasn't the same with a blackened hand.
"I died. It's not important."
He gaped at her.
"It's not- what on earth are you talking abo-"
"It is not," she said firmly, for all that her hands were trembling, "I need to tell you something."
And she did. She told him about how Luke had come to her with an offer, and how she'd accepted it. All the times she'd told the enemy what was happening, and all the times she'd tried not to but had eventually given in. Of when she gave them the details on the assault to the ship, and (in brief, matter-of-fact tones) exactly how she'd met her end.
"And I'm here. And it was stupid, and wrong, and you paid the price for it," she finished, lifting up a hand to tug at her hair, and winced when she discovered it had been burned off, "I won't blame you if you hate me forever."
The silence stretched on for a few awkward moments.
"Ah," he said, and was surprised he'd even managed that much.
Oh gods, and he thought processing emotions as a son of Hephaestus was hard. It was worse as a ghost. He didn't know where to start, and there weren't any glands to help the process along.
Silena peeked at him from behind her hair. She'd arranged it (or what was left of it) to cover up the left side of her face, and what he could see of her was looking more and more distressed by the second.
"I didn't expect that," he said, after another set of really long moments.
"I know," she slumped, her voice subdued, "I'm sorry."
"I- I don't know what to say."
"I don't blame you," she repeated, and closed her eyes, "I'm sure you hate me for this."
She didn't look anything like the girl he remembered, and not just because he couldn't look at her face without wincing a little. It was in the way she stood and spoke, spine straighter than he'd ever seen and voice stronger than he could recall. But most of all, he supposed, it was in the way she was here, next to him, and how instead of comforting her on her death as he'd imagined, he was standing judgment on a woman who was halfway to tears and unnervingly serene in spite of it. And against all practicality all he could think right then was that gods, she was beautiful.
"No," he shook his head, as much to clear his thoughts as to indicate denial, "You died trying to set it right. That makes all the difference."
"But I screwed it up in the first place."
"We all screw up," he thought his lips twitched almost into a smile, "And you came down here for me. It's not something I can look at objectively."
A heavy silence. He wondered if it was something about the Underworld that clogged the air like this.
"You don't mind? That I was a traitor?" she asked him.
He started to reassure her, tell her that he didn't in the slightest. But the Underworld was not big on lies, not even white ones.
"I think I do," he said, "And I think that it's all right, here and now. You did it, you made amends. And I can deal with that."
Her body slumped a little, like all the tension in the world had left her at exactly that instant. It was a little frightening to watch, even if he knew that, logically, neither of them even had bodies anymore.
"We could be over too," she told him, "I might not go to Elysium."
"You were a hero."
"An anti-hero, at best," she corrected, then sighed and straightened up, "Do you think maybe- can we stay here?"
"Here?" The landscape wished it was only desolate. It had sprinted past bone-crushingly depressing centuries ago.
"Yeah," she told him, and smiled a little, "Not forever. Just for a while. Sit at a riverbank with me, because I don't know if I will be allowed to do that ever again."
Charles Beckendorf nodded in understanding, took the hand of the woman he still loved (whatever else she thought), and did as she said. And for a while there, the Stygian shore was almost as peaceful as the beach back at Camp Half-Blood, desolate souls and all.
End
End Notes: And we're done. You have my heartfelt thanks if you managed to sit through the whole thing. :)