Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
It's only been a year and a half since Thalia joined the Hunt, taking the recently vacated spot of their Lady's Lieutenant (and Phoebe's thankful, really; Zoë had been in the role too long for her to have been able to step into it herself, knowing the reason is because one of her longest, closest sisters has died. It's better that they have a newcomer, one not wracked with grief and tight in the clutches of shock trying to stumble their way through a new responsibility).
Things have changed. It was inevitable, and it was sudden. Too sudden, for girls who have lived for thousands of years, but their Lady didn't disagree with Thalia's new, fresh stance on things so they've followed and for the most part, adapted. It helps, a little, that their orders to march to Olympus came from their Lady rather than Thalia, although Phoebe is well aware that the daughter of Zeus is attached – too attached – to the demigods at Camp Half-Blood and would never have left them to this fight alone even without Artemis' decision.
For her part, Phoebe has no attachment to Camp Half-Blood. She's old, old enough to remember things that others whisper about as myths, forgetting that myths exist for a reason. Not as old as Zoë, or their Lady, but older than Camp Half-Blood. When she was mortal, there was no safe place for demigods.
She still remembers nearly dying, and the encounter with her Lady that followed.
The demigods at Camp Half-Blood are arrogant, she finds, and she tends to avoid them when she can. Certainly, Phoebe has no love for any of them (and right now, definitely not for any children of Hermes. If any of her sisters had been the ones targeted instead… Well, being a demigod has always at least been good for something). It's good that Thalia kept them together, didn't split them to work with the raucous campers, because the temptation to loose some stray arrows may have been too much.
Zoë's anti-boy leadership isn't so quickly overturned, no matter how much Thalia tries.
In the aftermath of the battle, as the Hunters' best healer, Phoebe's services are required. She sticks with her sisters, because of course she does, soothing wounds and easing fears (and grieving, for those lives lost), and it's only once she gets a moment to breathe that her attention is drawn to the orange-clad demigods rushing around.
Phoebe has never viewed them as her siblings, not in the same way her sisters are her sisters. She isn't one of them, has never been one of them, has never lived at camp, might look their age but has millennia on them.
There is a feeling of dawning horror in her gut when she counts the campers' healers and comes up short. Her father is promiscuous, to put it lightly, and her various visits to Camp Half-Blood across the millennia have always, always revealed a full cabin. Even on the first night of the battle, as they marched to their bridges, she had seen several of them, clutching their bows with varying degrees of competence.
Her feet are moving before her mind realises what she's seeing. What she's not seeing, and she's witnessed her father grieve his children so many times across the millennia and already she can see how ruined he's going to be the next time he appears unannounced and uninvited (some of the slain Hunters were her sisters in blood as well as heart; Phoebe had already known he'd be distraught after this battle, even before the unwelcome revelation).
There are five of them, and her experienced eye tells her only one of them has inherited her father's healing domain in any useful capacity. None of them are even as old as her physical appearance, not even children but mere babes in the eye of the world, and she wonders if it's her father urging her forwards as she leaves the sea of calming silver for the torrent of garish orange, feet taking her to the side of the oldest (oldest, it feels like a bad joke that their eldest of her father's children in camp is barely older than the average Hunter's age at joining when he's always had so many of all ages).
He - of course it's a boy, not a girl, a sister she might one day connect with – is shaking. His hands are steady, healer's hands, but the rest of him is not and his eyes are red with exhaustion and grief all bundled up into one, messy, package.
Phoebe thinks about Zoë, and the relief that she didn't have to fill her sister's position, and the way Camp Half-Blood's cabin seniority works. The fact that the small, black-haired boy with a true archer's grip who had led the cabin to their designated bridge three days ago is nowhere to be seen, and that someone had to inherit the role of leader from their fallen older sibling.
The boy (she doesn't know his name, has never cared to learn the names of siblings so far removed from her life they don't even register as strangers) steps back from his patient and turns, already moving to the next in line, and she doesn't plan on interrupting, doesn't plan on drawing his attention, but something that isn't her consciousness is guiding her actions and without her command her hand is landing on a dirty orange shoulder.
He looks a lot like Apollo. Phoebe sees her father a lot; he drops by the Hunt frequently, ostensibly to annoy Artemis but he always has new songs and poems to recite and Artemis is her Lady but Apollo is her father and she knows she and her sisters of blood and heart are the only ones of his offspring he can visit without breaking Ancient Laws. This boy in front of her, with his battle-mussed blond waves and wide, kind (broken) blue eyes is so unmistakably Apollo's son that for a moment her mind overlaps the two.
Then the moment passes, and she's looking at a shocked (shell-shocked, grieving) child whose lips are parted in a silent, unconscious, question (a plea for help).
Phoebe doesn't know his name, and he doesn't know hers. There are too many dead and dying around them for introductions and she doesn't waste time with that. She could just call him boy – should just call him Boy, that's what Zoë would've done, would've expected, what every fibre of her being defaults to – but that isn't the moniker that falls from her lips as she speaks.
She offers – no, gives – her help, grounding the broken child and giving him another pair of hands, another pair of healing hands with which to save lives, to stop this war stealing any more than it already has. Her sisters are watching her in confusion, except Thalia who watches with thanks before directing more Hunters to help, because no matter how good they are, Phoebe and this healer-son of Apollo are only two people, with four other children of Apollo triaging and patching up lesser wounds, and dozens of patients.
It's long, tiring work. Even her stamina, blessed by her Lady, is taxed, and part of her marvels at the way her fellow healer keeps going even when his skin turns to ash and his eyes fade to a silver not too dissimilar to her Lady's chariot. He does not stop, does not complain, does not neglect a single patient, until eventually they reach the pause.
The pause is a healer's boon, in situations like this (this is not Phoebe's first battle, nor her first time running the aftermath of one). It's the moment where everything that can be done has been done, where the living will live, and the dead are dead. It's the time the healer can take for themselves, to break and refresh before the pause ends and the next stage of post-battle healing begins.
Phoebe fully intends of making use of the pause as she should; to wash up, to eat and sleep and rest while she can. The other children of Apollo, those four helpers who did what they could without her father's gift, are already passed out where they slumped.
It's the oldest boy, the healer, who stops her.
Not intentionally – he waves her off tiredly with gratitude shining through his exhaustion and grief – but she realises that he doesn't know what to do with himself, or perhaps knows but can't do it, can't leave the injured long enough to look after himself. He's young, after all, and the responsibility has landed so heavily on his shoulders.
Phoebe has never found herself in that position but she knows she almost did, after Zoë, and finds herself sympathising, just a little, with his plight.
She also finds herself gripping him by the arm and marching him away from their makeshift infirmary, away from pained patients and responsibilities and out to an unoccupied balcony. He might not have any serious physical wounds (he is injured, too, of course. So is she. War does not give healers a free pass), but he is still, she realises, one more patient for her to treat.
There are some instincts thoroughly ingrained in her after thousands of years in her Lady's service. Soothing terrified girls is one of them; she may not be the Lieutenant, never wants to be the Lieutenant, but she is one of the oldest, one of the most experienced, and the role of big sister has been a comfortable fit for a long time.
This is the first time in four thousand years that the big sister has boy, not a little sister, to soothe, and it feels like it should be different. Should be harder.
Feels like it should feel wrong, because Hunters do not interact with boys more than necessary. Boys have their own rules, their own comforts. Phoebe remembers the few who have been honoured to join the Hunt, and the reasons they never lasted.
It does feel wrong, but only because it feels wrong that it feels so natural, to hold hands that were still when they had a struggling life beneath them but now tremble like leaves in the breeze and talk down a child from a cliff of responsibility before he falls.
She still hasn't asked his name, or offered her own, and he hasn't, either. That doesn't matter; she doesn't need to know, and nor does he. Names have power, that's true, but right here, right now, they're not important.
What's important, what matters, is that as the child's soul cries out, hers reaches out in answer, breaching a gap she had always thought she was content to leave as an uncrossed chasm.
There's four thousand years between them but they were both born to the same father, and for the first time in her long life, Phoebe finds herself reaching out to not a sister, but a brother.
This is the fault of fsinger in the toa discord for pointing out the really obvious fact I somehow missed that Phoebe is heavily implied to be a daughter of Apollo, and this scene has not left my brain since, so I had to write it down (and I have to say, it's been a while since I last wrote anything so I'm delighted my muses woke up again!)
Thanks for reading!
Tsari