Or, an envelope of reminders and the unknown importance of war and warriors.
Part I.
Step. Step. Step.
Reyna wore her 'leader' face, the brave one, the one that showed no fear or sorrow. After this long it was becoming permanently frozen on her face, to where she had to work to unlock the muscles that kept her face in the expression that kept her soldiers functioning.
She grabbed a plate and started walking around in an attempt to find a place for a few, precious moments of rest, and was distracted by two identical faces that popped up in front of her and said, "Take this to Rachel, will you?"
It took her a moment to place the name Rachel. She was still boggled by the Greek way of finding prophecies, through this Oracle, instead of having to wage war in politics against a haughty descendant of Jupiter with a mild talent for prophecy.
In truth, she'd been far too preoccupied with the blatant problems requiring her immediate attention, like 'Greeks' and 'Percy and Annabeth in Tartarus' and 'take the statue to the Greeks', to pay much attention to the girl behind the green mist and creepy voice.
So she played 'find the redhead' (not that it was that hard) and headed for that spot, holding the envelope those twins had given her, and making the conscious decision not to pay much attention to it, so she could plead unawareness of any wrongdoing.
Reyna sat down across from Rachel and slid the package over to the girl. Rachel was reading something and Reyna tried to catch the title as it was lowered, but it was in English.
Reyna was just about to ask about it before the understanding hit her like a blow to the head and she reeled, for a moment, while green eyes fixed on her in confusion.
Reyna knew the girl was the Oracle and had all that power, and didn't fight like the others and had artist's hands.
Somewhere in the line of communication Reyna had missed the knowledge that the girl was mortal.
Then Reyna's stomach turned, slightly, because this was a gods' war, and the gods' childrens' by extension, but it was never meant to be a mortal's war.
Rachel had made a pleased noise and kind of mouthed the words 'thank you' as she opened the package, and Reyna flinched in survival instinct because she'd heard stories of the Stoll brothers.
Out of the creamy vanilla envelope fell a pile of pages and paraphernalia, a letter and a couple of wallet-sized pictures, a ribbon and a couple small slips of paper smaller than Reyna's pinky.
Rachel had seen Reyna looking so she explained, as she spread the stuff out and gazed at them pensively.
"His name was Ethan Nakamura," she slid a picture, glossy and vaguely waxy, like it'd been tossed around and fingered a lot, "and he died a hero's death, but never got treated like one."
Reyna turned the picture around and memorized the face. It was the kind of face that was undeniably young, but had an old feel, akin to the worn and ragged edge on a photo that couldn't be a couple years old. The feature that jumped out at Reyna was the eye-patch, which made her feel sad, because the eye-patch wasn't even a part of the boy, not really, and it was still the biggest defining feature, the thing that separated him from the faces on the street.
Part II.
Rachel breezed through the letter, courtesy of never having dyslexia, and when she was finished she wordlessly slid it over to Reyna and said, "Get it back to me at some point, if you would." and then she gathered up her tray and the scraps of paper tossed about and left.
Reyna read the letter, slowly, having to work hard to keep the letters from swimming and switching, rejecting their given position on the sheet of lined notebook paper.
It was from Percy, to Rachel, dated for a couple months previous. The first and last paragraphs, at opposite ends and different sheets, where filled with warm sentences and friendly one-sided conversation. Something about the language was familiar, it was a way of speaking that Reyna knew. It was the carefully picked words of someone who was very close to the recipient of the letter, but not as close as someone wished to be. It read of like the conversations Reyna had carried with Jason, after his return, with the same soft-prickly feeling, where there was affection but hurt, too. Reyna didn't really know what she had been expecting from Jason: an alley, a friend, something more than a brother-in-arms? She hadn't been expecting to look for him for so long to have him return, hail and hearty, and in love with someone else. That was the same sort of language written into the greetings of this letter, from Percy to Rachel, and Reyna remembered that not all hurts are those caused by wars and gods.
Reyna moved on from her mini-epiphany and read the actual account of the letter. This part, Reyna had never heard of. It was a retelling of several scenes, scenarios, where Percy had interacted with Ethan. There was a couple paragraphs devoted to an interaction in the Labyrinth, which was the first Reyna had heard of that, so she held the page with her thumb and tracked down the Oracle.
Rachel told the story much better than Percy did. Where Percy used action words and contractions and skipped over parts, writing it out devoid of emotion, Rachel did the opposite. When Reyna turned up in her loose clothes, armor off, holding the page and curious look in her eyes, Rachel opened the door and gestured her into the small living space. Rachel waved her hand at the chair, indicating Reyna should sit down, and then Reyna explained what she wanted.
Rachel sat on the floor, legs crossed, waving off Reyna's offer of the chair. Then she started to slowly unbraid her vivid hair, absently looking through the window beyond Reyna's head, and speak.
She wove the story like she wove her hair into several looping plaits, tucking and weaving several strands of people's stories and emotions to culminate in one scene, with a betrayal. Some of the scenes were more intense, beautifully described, than others, and Reyna figured out that that was because Rachel had there, watching and experiencing it all.
Rachel wasn't a warrior, she was an artist, and that was something Reyna hadn't been able to comprehend until she mentally compared that first story of Percy's and the flow of words and painted adjectives from this girl.
As Reyna listened, she started to feel very somber, intent on the story.
Ethan wasn't a bad guy. He was misguided, and that was a terrible thing, but that didn't make him a terrible person.
He had helped the other side of the war, the Titan side, because he was hurt by the Greek way of sorting their gods, on a hierarchy.
Reyna respected the Greek way sometimes, but this wasn't one of them. She herself was a daughter of Bellona, who was technically classified as a minor goddess, and yet Reyna had gotten all the way up to Praetor. Meanwhile there was Ethan, who clearly had some talent for fighting, and was a child of Nemesis, and he'd been stuck in a cabin that didn't belong to him, never claimed or treated with the respect he should have commanded. It was shameful.
Reyna thought back to the picture of him, slightly smirking at the camera, in an eye-patch. He'd given up that eye for a chance at equality, but he'd had to give up a lot more to claim his prize. He'd died, not for either side of the war, but a victim of a different struggle, a battle that put him on one side merely because he thought that was the best way of achieving his goal, the goal that was written into his bloodline: balance. He'd died doing the right thing.
His fate had cruelty written all over it.
Part III.
Reyna's biggest problem was that she tended to forget the minds and hearts behind the faces of her charges. She saw them and saw an army, not a collection of individuals. She was devoutly Roman, in that regard, and it broke her inside when she got a glimpse at the people. Most of the time, by the time she remembered that these people had families and stories, they were gone. That would be when you could probably collect their pictures and a retellings of a few moments of their lives, and stick it all in an envelope, and give it to a girl who spun stories out of scraps of paper and made you truly see the tragedy in everyone's lives, who saw the people but not the war.
A few days later, a guard who'd gone out scouting died, courtesy of a scaly beast that was quickly dispatched, but not fast enough.
Reyna stared down at the boy—he was just a boy, only a boy. He had brown eyes. Reyna had seen him around, but didn't know until she reached down and flipped his tags that his name was Joseph, and he was a son of Nemesis. He didn't die for a great sacrifice, for the balance of the gods, yet it was still a tragedy, because his death was nearly useless.
This time, it was Reyna who asked around.
When all was said and done, she'd filled two sheets of notebook paper with little anecdotes about Joseph Bailey and had a picture of him, arm-in-arm with an older girl she learned was his big sister. She'd died in the battle of the Feast of Fortuna and Joseph had carried her medal around, a medal Reyna didn't remember awarding, and she cried over the picture because she didn't remember having given that medal to Joseph in a poor exchange for his sister's life, and she hadn't even known his name but he was now dead.
She turned up on Rachel's doorstep again, this time clutching an envelope of her own. She'd carefully arranged her face into the 'leader' face again but there was nothing she could do about the slight redness around her eyes, and that must've been why Rachel invited her in.
"Why?" Reyna demanded, as Rachel slowly read through the tiny bits of information about Joseph, like his favorite color and his birthday. "Why did you start doing this?" She was asking why had Rachel starting looking into the lives of people who were now dead, because Reyna knew that Ethan Nakamura hadn't been the only person, the Stoll's had said that that was a normal occurrence.
"Because I forget why they died." Rachel looked up and her face softened, apparently seeing that Reyna didn't understand. "I'm not like you, Reyna. I can't see the big picture: I forget that there's a war going on, and it needs to be fought. I want everyone to live, and no sacrifices be made. When I see the people's stories, I see why they were fighting."
Rachel's eyes watered as she looked down at the picture of Joseph, and his sister, named Carrie. "This was why." Reyna tapped the picture in Rachel's hands, just as the redhead's tears started to fall.
That was the first night the two of them cried together.
Reyna cried because she saw the people.
Rachel cried because she saw the war.
It wasn't the last time they cried, wasn't the last envelope. It became a habit, a repeated occurrence, the two of them collecting envelopes of lives, and they'd read them when they forgot, when Reyna lost a soldier and didn't mourn because she was a leader and mourning was weakness, when Rachel gave a quest to a hero that lead to that kid's death.
The system was Reyna's idea.
"Let's sort them." She was bracketed in by Rachel's legs, leaning up against the sofa, while Rachel braided her hair up and back with nimble fingers.
"Hm?" Rachel's mouth was full of bobby pins.
"The envelopes." There was currently a couple drawers of them, tucked in there securely after the girls had gone over them. "Let's file them, and sort them."
So they did. Reyna kept them stacked upright, alphabetically, on a shelf, and then two shelves, as the numbers grew. Every time Rachel came west to visit she brought a handful of them, the losses acquired in the days in between.
The were times when the losses came hot and heavy, and the envelopes were collected as fast as they could, between both girl's jobs and duties.
The better times were when Rachel came to visit with one, tragic envelope, and that time of several months when there wasn't another.
Over the years others started bringing in envelopes, of demigods who died before they ever got to camp, of one's lost before or in-between and one's that weren't under Reyna or Rachel's eye.
It was worth it. It was worth every envelope, every picture, every tear and bookshelf and night spent up very, very late searching cabinets and behind couches for a mislaid sticky-note that held someone's precious moment.