Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians.
Sicktember day 2: Homesick
FFF #166: Count the Ways
Lee could count the ways that camp was different to home; it took more fingers than he had, and he kept getting lost and repeating himself, but the answer was clearly lots.
Everything, really.
He didn't have his own bedroom. He had a new bed, which didn't feel right, and a set of drawers to keep his clothes in, but there was another bed underneath his, with someone else in it, and even more beds next to his. There were twenty of them, in total – he'd counted. Most of them had someone who slept in them, because Lee had siblings now, an army of half-brothers and sisters who all shared the same dad as him.
Lee hadn't really known he had a dad. Mommy had always told him that he was gone, that he shouldn't think about him and to ignore all the kids at school who tried to make a fuss about the fact that it was just the two of them. Just Lee and Mommy.
Now, it was Lee and fifteen brothers and sisters and no Mommy.
There would be no Mommy again.
He curled up into a small ball on the bed – his bed, he'd been told, but it wasn't his bed because his bed was at home, the small apartment where he'd lived with Mommy.
He couldn't go back there now. He'd been told that by strangers, then by the guy in a suit who limped and had a smart, fancy cane and said that Lee had a new home, that his absent dad had a place for him.
The strangers hadn't liked that. They'd tried to take Lee away, from his home, from school and friends and to live with people who said they were sorry for your loss, and poor child, but made Lee's spine prickle in a way he'd always knew meant people didn't mean what they said.
The guy in a suit with a limp and fancy cane hadn't made Lee's spine prickle, and Lee still didn't understand how he'd won the argument and taken Lee with him, but he remembered finding out that the limp was because he had goat legs, because he was a satyr from the Greek myths Mommy liked to read to him, and that Lee's dad was a god.
Lee wanted to give it all up. Give up the fantasy, the family, being the son of a god. He wanted to give it all up, if it meant he could have Mommy back again, but when he'd told Chiron that, when he arrived at camp and something golden exploded above his head and Lee Fletcher, son of Apollo was announced to everyone, the centaur – centaur, Chiron, trainer of heroes – had looked at him sadly and told him he couldn't.
He was a demigod. His dad was Apollo, god of music.
His Mommy was gone.
Lee really, really wanted to go home, but he couldn't.
This is your home now, Lizzy had told him when he'd said that to her, the older girl smiling at him and offering him a hug. Your home, and your family.
No prickly spine, no lies.
Lee still wanted to give it all up and have Mommy instead.
This wasn't how I was planning on first writing Lee's arrival to camp, but it fit both prompts really well and wouldn't leave me alone until I wrote it, so here we are.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari