A/N I am going really soft on you guys. I was gonna hold out on this chapter until I got ten reviews or something, but I couldn't help but post this ASAP.

I suppose I write for myself as well.

This chapter is dedicated to my best-friend FictionalBuzz, Happy 13th birthday! You should have seen her card guys. It was blue and it had a blue cupcake and it said:

Oh! A blue cupcake! (Percy approves)

And that certain friend of ours isn't even in the PJO fandom! Love you A! x

~theoneirataxic

Disclaimer:

Me: I do not own any of the Percy Jackson characters or the Heroes of Olympus characters, mythical creatures, fictional places, names or any other mythicalised objects that have been invented by Uncle Rick.

Rick: …

Me: *sweats nervously* I suppose that covers it, heh heh…

Rick: … Eh, whatever.

"Go away!" I chuck the deflated pillow at the door and the peeking eyes disappear through the crack in the door.

"She's not okay." I hear Jason whisper.

"I heard that." I snap back, glaring through the door. "I am perfectly fine and no, I am not crazy and just leave me alone!" I shout indignantly. Pain pricks through my palms and I see red nail marks on my skin. 'Had I been clenching my fists all that time?' I cover my face in embarrassment and sit against the door. 'Why do I even care about what they think?' I sob into my jeans. 'Why all of a sudden do I feel the need to be the serious one?' I lean against the door and slide to the ground, with my back on the wood. I stomp my foot on the ground, hating Jason, hating this place and most of all, hating that child of Hades. 'What was his name? Oh, it doesn't matter what he's damn called. It's his fault; his fault for my burden and my family's problems. I could so-'

I clench my fist and throw an imaginary object across the room. Then, the chest of drawers beside me follows the movement, a huge arc, and hurls to the opposite end of the room, slamming into the infirmary bed. It sizzles and causes smoke to rise. I get up in alarm and turn the lock on the door. Chairs scrap the floor and Jason knocks again, more insistent this time.

"Epthumaya?"

"What's going on in there?" I hear a fiercer girl grunt. I press against the door and look at the destroyed infirmary, aghast. 'These people are not your enemy. Let yourself be known and lay friendships with the Heroes of Olympus.' I bite my lip in anxiety. Actually, I bite it so hard that blood trickles down my chin. The sizzling from the drawers quickly develop into crackles and fizzes. One whiff of the dense smoke in the room and I know that one thing's for sure. I set the Big House on fire. I embrace myself for the angry shouts of the half-bloods and turn the lock and push at the handle. I push harder, wondering why on earth it wasn't opening.

"Someone get her out of there!" Another girl shouts.

"It's jammed!" I yell to the others. "There's a fire!"

I step back and try to open the door normally, as I would do if passing one, but the lock clicks insistently, stuck in the door frame. "Jason? Help!" I call out.

"I'm here Maya." I hear Jason's calm instructing voice. "Just hang in there." I turn back to the mahogany chest to see that it was no longer something you would store your clothes in. Instead, it was fuelling this fire that was reaching up to the ceiling and slowly creeping towards me.

"Get the Hephaestus kids!" Yells a girl of nine or ten. A silence settles temporarily over the demigods in the opposite room.

"Uh," I bang my fist against the door. "Guys?" They snap out of the trance.

"We need a plan." Another girl decides.

"Trust you to think of that." A sarcastic voice replies.

"Hey! Shut up-" The girl pauses. "I have an idea!" She runs out of the room and I hear her footsteps get quieter as she vacates the room. The furniture crumbles, causing a dark black cloud to rise from the burning chest of drawers. It reaches into my lungs and chokes me. I stumble to the ground and bend down, coughing on the smoke.

"Maya!" Stand back!" Jason orders. "On three. One, two, three!" I step back and something hard hits the door, perhaps a chair, and the bit around the handle splinters.

"Stand back, rookies!" A boy's voice rings through the crackling flames. The frosted glass window shatters and a crowbar swings to either side of the hole left without the window. He continued to hack at the wood, trying to latch on and pull away the planked walls. "Trust Dionysus to make these walls un-thief-friendly!" Bits of wood and splinters fly from both sides of me and I dart to either side, towards both breaking escape routes.

Then the crowbar boy stops destroying the left wall. The loud thumps of the chair on the other side of the door stop too and all is silent except for the flames, which were now roaring, devouring every object in the room. My vision blurs, stinging from the acrid smoke. I crouch in the corner where the drawers were before and cover myself before the flames devour me, too.

At that moment, a geyser of water erupts from the floor and douses everything, including me and the fire – which was reduced to a damp piece of a rough frame of a dresser. I gasp like a fish out of water and faint. In exhaustion or plain shock, I didn't know. I just felt like disappearing.

I wake up to six, no, three faces leaning over me. I sigh in relief when all of them are girls. I wipe my forehead and try to get up, leaning on my elbows. I tilt my head back to get rid of the neck cramps and see that I'm back in Cabin One.

"Did I really-"

"Yes." A girl with frizzy blonde hair nods slowly. "Half of the Big House is sinking into the mud, not to mention a storm is brewing around there," she whispered to me, "it won't go away," then she holds out her fingers and counts. "Oh and there's the geyser that's just sitting there now." She gestures outside the window. I widen my eyes in alarm. The other girl, sitting beside the frizzy blonde elbows her rather violently.

"Hey. I said you could come, if only, you didn't go all freak."

"All freak?"

"Whatever." The girl replies, flicking her hair out of eyes. She looks at me, analysing what to do to me. Her eyes were rather intimidating, a grey colour, so I just lay there, wondering if I should say hi. Or, if I should jump through the window and escape while I could.

She holds her hand out to me. "Hey, I'm Annabeth." I take it to shake it and instead, she uses it to help me sit up. I fidget in the awkwardness. The third was sitting on the windowsill, rather like owning the place. The frizzy blonde next to Annabeth grinned, twirling her eyes around despite the tension in the room. I can't help but laugh. Annabeth tries a smile, and then turns back to looking out the window, twiddling her beads on her leather necklace. She swallows.

"I know why you're here." I speak in the silence.

"I'm sure you would." Annabeth replies.

I open my mouth to speak, figuring out how to word this correctly. "Something happened." I say slowly, "both times. I'm not being controlled, it's just I can't control… Myself…" I say, noticing how it doesn't make any sense at all.

The girl one the windowsill turns to me, and I know that she's a daughter of Aphrodite. Perfect tanned face? Perfect face symmetry? What kind of demigod would have those kinds of looks? But, like me, the girl finds it hard to word out her sentence. "You can tell us what happened." A wave of self- assurance overcomes me. I twitch, feeling something not normal. 'Trust these demigods.' I breathe in and close my eyes.

"It doesn't make sense at all." I say and I know I have to say this too. "But there are some things I cannot tell you."

"We're listening." Annabeth says.

When I was claimed and brought here, to this camp, I didn't know what to think. My mortal parent told me when I was young, perhaps at six months that I was special. I remember that clearly, but everything else seems like, it was taken away from me. After the incident that occurred when I was nine years old, I was raised (since then) with my mortal parent's parents. I was raised like a mortal.

Then when I was claimed, at Half-Blood Hill, strange whisperings have been speaking to me. Not bad ones, but things related to people I should trust in this new place.

I have had history with Hades and that is all I will say. I hate him. And when Jason told me there was a living son of Hades, here at Camp Half-Blood, I needed to… I needed to settle some imbalances. I saw the necklace, the one his sister had given to him. I recognised it. And I went through the phases of my life… Especially the most painful memories. I felt fine to walk and talk. But inside, I felt exhausted.

In the infirmary, I just lost it. I just made a movement with my arm and an object – the chest of drawers – just… It's impossible to do anything around here without being reminded, of the things that have happened to me.

A/N I promised to FB that this would be 2000 words, but I'm really sorry, I just couldn't do it. Review and might end up doing so for Chapter 5!

Song: Picture to Burn by Taylor Swift

"and if you come around saying sorry to me,

My daddy's gonna show you how sorry you'll be"

yes, Maya is a daddy's girl x