Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

FlashFictionFriday #146 "At What Cost?". Referenced canonical character deaths.

Olympus was saved. Typhon had fallen, Kronos was defeated, and his father was declaring it a victory. The king of the gods looked around at the rubble that was their throne room – Ares' throne missing part of an arm and Hephaestus' defensive mechanisms had all activated (Apollo winced at how close that had been to his own throne getting damaged on at least two separate occasions; it barely seemed possible that his had remained untouched when the ones on either side had clearly been involved in the fight) – at the wreckage of Olympus, their home, and declared it a victory.

Apollo knew what victory felt like. He also knew defeat. This? This was as hollow a victory as could be, and he knew he wasn't the only Olympian to think as such.

Hermes had lost a favoured son. He'd known it was coming – they'd both known it was coming, May Castellan may not have successfully hosted the spirit of Delphi but that didn't mean Apollo didn't hear her ramblings – but that made the sting of the Fates' inevitability no less potent. Hephaestus, too, had lost a son he had been particularly fond of, and Aphrodite's opinions of her daughter's end were mixed yet volatile. Several demigods had died, their strings cut one after the other and leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Artemis had lost beloved Hunters in a number she hadn't suffered in centuries.

Not that Zeus or Hera particularly cared about any of that. Neither of them had lost any children to the war, neither of them had any emotional attachment to the demigods they watched disdainfully from their thrones. All they saw was the defeat of their father, the fact that Olympus, while threatened, had not fallen, and the King and Queen celebrated.

Naturally, that meant that Apollo was to perform. He was to compose epics about the gods' bravery for the ages, sing songs of victory and cheer, and be the epitome of everything is going to be fine, it all went according to plan as Olympus was rebuilt.

He suspected none of them had the awareness to look down at the tattered remains of Camp Half-Blood below them – and Olympus, why did the battle have to be in the summer, when there were so many more demigods around to die – and see how many had been lost from each cabin. He suspected that even if they did, they wouldn't realise how many demigods had died, not with more and more flooding in as his fellow gods claimed more and more erstwhile children and the cabin numbers swelled.

Were she not grieving her own losses, Artemis might have noticed that, alone of all the cabins, only one still remained less occupied than before the children (children, because that was what they were) marched off to a war they should never have had to fight, but she was and she did not. No-one else, of course, cared at all.

There was a lot Apollo could say about his parenting, no doubt a lot his children could say about his parenting, and most of it bad, but there were two things he had taken pride in:

Firstly, that he had always, always, claimed his children when they arrived at camp. He guided them there when they could no longer live a mortal life in safety, and he claimed them as soon as they crossed the border. Not one of the excess demigods squeezed into the Hermes cabin were ever his, although he couldn't blame Perseus for tarring all the gods with the same brush considering he was the only godly parent (big three aside) who could say that.

Secondly, not one of his children had followed young Luke. They had trusted their father more than they hated him, and at the time that had been a major point of pride for him to cling to as more and more of his fellow gods bemoaned their children turning against them (more often than not out of pride, rather than because they cared about the child themselves).

Those two factors had come to collide in the worst way possible; they were the second-largest cabin. They were, through reasons that Apollo tried not to rage over, sent to guard a bridge with their lives and no backup. None of the children had remembered, or dared to voice, that archers and healers did not belong on the front lines.

Kronos had remembered.

Many demigods, from most cabins, had fallen that day, but before the start of the battle, Apollo had had eleven children in Camp Half-Blood.

Now, he had five, and he could see in their eyes – their broken, grieving eyes – a growing disappointment as cabin after cabin gained new numbers, distractions from the war to help them heal, while they gained none.

True, Apollo did have other children out in the world, as-yet unaware of their heritage and the upheaval that would one day come for them, but they were not yet in need of the camp's protection, and he would not tear them from their mortal parents earlier than necessary. Not when camp had so recently been not safe, not when he knew they'd be seen less as children and more as reinforcements to the healers, put straight to work without even a chance to adapt or be seen for who they were, rather than who their godly parent was.

He would assist his children in the infirmary where he could, but he would not condemn more to that horror.

A victory, Zeus called it, called all of this while shrouds were burned (some around bodies, and some empty because there were no bodies to recover), and perhaps in terms of black and white, that was what it was, but there were six new holes in Apollo's heart, in the lives of his surviving children, and the bitter thought inside of him was at what cost?

Another post-The Last Olympian angsty thing, because there's a lot to play with here. Several headcanons coming into play, I admit...

Thanks for reading!
Tsari