Spoilers for 'Percy Jackson and the Titan's Curse' all throughout.

So I just read the Titan's Curse, and the treatment of Bianca Di Angelo pissed me off (brother & sister are both equally potentially important; sister dies. In the same book as Thalia loses her importance and Annabeth (and Artemis, dammit!) becomes a damsel in distress, not good). So I did what I always do; I wrote fic.

This one is about Bianca, being dead, being alive, and being kickass, with the aid of Zoe Nightshade and the goddess Persephone (who is now Queen of the Dead, and kicks some serious butt).

Disclaimer: The concept is totally Rick Riordan's, and he does awesome things with it. (Though I wish he would remember the gay, occasionally, and give the girls some more guts)

Warnings: Death, language, WIP, SPOILERS

If you're still here? On with the fic! (I like it lots)

The Adventures of Bianca Di Angelo, Champion of Justice (with the aid of Zoe Nightshade, formerly dead)

Prologue:

Bianca Di Angelo is standing in the Fields of Asphodel, in a long long line, before the three judges. She is shivering, though she is trying to hide it; she was, for a brief time at least, a Hunter and a Hero and there are certain things that go with that. She misses her brother desperately, and hopes he is all right; hopes Perseus Jackson kept his promise. Hopes Nico understood what she meant, giving him the last god.

All around Bianca shades of the dead are moaning; she keeps her hands firmly at her side. She will not disgrace herself, not here, though even the grass is screaming. She stands in the line, and she waits.

Time passes, minutes and seconds and hours reduced to the same consistency, trickling by. Despite this, no one talks—it is not the sort of land where one can talk to the person in front of them, and they cannot hear the judges. Bianca looks around, though, and is half-disturbed by the number of children around her, and the methods of their death.

A boy, three people behind her, with his head exploded; a girl further down the line, the same age as Nico with blood running down her thighs and her head lolling backwards. She very much wants to throw up.

She is reduced to watching the people trickle in over the river, and wondering who they might have been as she waits. A man with startlingly blue eyes and bullet-spatters on his chest thanks the ferryman (she thinks she saw him on TV, once, when they were travelling—he looked like a nice guy, from the two or three seconds she caught before they were moving again); a tall woman with banana-bright hair, even in here, is crying softly as she walks. A girl steps down off the ferry, dark hair braided into a silver coronet and blood on her chest, there is something of a goddess in her bearing and something familiar.

Bianca says, incredulously, "Zoe?!"

Her voice echoes in here; she thinks it may be something to with being the daughter of its master, though he seems not to care. The people—the dead people, and at some point she's going to freak out about that, but not right now—are staring at her, because she has spoken and disturbed the almost hallowed silence; she shrugs. What can you do?

The girl she is sure is Zoe looks at her, and their eyes meet. Zoe mouths a word; Bianca thinks it's her name. She says, "Come here," half an order, and the dead part like the Red Sea.

Zoe flashes her a smile, the most beautiful thing she's seen since—and walks through them, stands next to her.

"You're...dead." Bianca says, and her voice is annoyed but honestly. She died for these people, and they didn't have the good sense not to?

Zoe quirks an eyebrow. "I am a constellation now too, thanks to Lady Artemis."

Bianca grins, ignoring the silence in the joy of finding a friend again (even under these circumstances, because Zoe is pretty damn cool). "Seriously? That is so cool." She knows she sounds like Nico, but she's dead. She deserves a break. "So, tell me what happened!"

By the time they have reached the judges, Bianca knows all that has happened since she... died; she has hugged Zoe many times and been hugged back, and they have resolved to go with each other, to wherever the judges send them; neither wants to go alone.

They step up together.