Hello again! Average length chapter this time. Pretty fun, though. Especially the end...

Thanks everybody for reading and reviewing! Enjoy!

XVIII
PIPER

As Piper walked aimlessly across the camp, she couldn't help feeling like the conversation she'd just had with Octavian seemed oddly surreal, almost like a dream. She had a funny inkling that the things he'd told her had been secrets he hadn't told anyone else—and wouldn't ever have mentioned had he not been under the influence of injury and charmspeak. She didn't know Octavian well, but anyone could see that he wasn't exactly the most personal of people. What would happen once he realized what she now knew, she couldn't begin to guess.

Despite that, though, Piper didn't regret what she'd done. The fact of the matter was that while Reyna was away with Leo and Nico, Jason and Octavian would have to work together whether they liked it or not. Hopefully, what she'd said to Octavian had helped to convince him of this fact; if so, the only problem would be Jason. Piper wasn't sure if she had the right to tell him what she'd learned, but the greater good was at risk. If Jason understood that Octavian wasn't actually trying to undermine him for selfish reasons, maybe he wouldn't be so antagonistic. In different ways, Jason and Octavian both wanted the same thing. They only needed to see that.

Without her having realized it, Piper's feet had carried her to her cabin—it seemed, by now, a force of habit—and as she opened the door and stepped over the threshold she collided face-first with someone heading out.

"Whoa!" a voice shouted in alarm as Piper grabbed the doorknob to keep from losing her balance—a fate which the other body was unfortunately unable to avoid.

"Sorry, Mitchell!" Piper said hurriedly as she registered the sight of her half-brother lying in a heap on the cabin floor and moved immediately to help him to his feet. "I was spacing out. Not paying attention."

"No worries," Mitchell assured her with a quick smile. "Hey, you haven't seen Drew around anywhere, have you?"

Piper frowned, trying to remember if their sibling had been present during Jason and Octavian's confrontation. "No, I don't think so," she decided. "Why?"

"She was supposed to help me organize storage shed epsilon," Mitchell explained, scratching the back of his neck and rolling his eyes, "but she never showed. She's been trying to get out of it for days, so I shouldn't be surprised. But everybody's gotta pull their weight around here so you can bet I'll be coming up with another job for her to make up for it. Thing is, I can't find her anywhere. She's getting way too good at avoiding me."

Piper felt a wry smile tug at her lips. As the Aphrodite cabin's second-oldest member, Mitchell had been placed in charge of keeping inventory on their equipment sheds and ensuring that everything remained in its proper place when Drew had turned the job down. He'd been evenly fair in divvying out work, but their former senior counselor continually made every effort to avoid doing her share. It wasn't as though Drew was against organization and cleanliness—more likely she felt that the work was beneath her.

"Good luck," Piper said sympathetically, shaking her head and stepping aside to let her brother through the doorway. After he'd waved and walked past her, she turned with a sudden inspiration and called, "Mitchell!" When he stopped and looked back, she bit her lip and asked, "Can I… ask your advice on something?"

He raised his eyebrows. "My advice?" Though he was a year older than Piper and had known he was a demigod for far longer than she had, he seemed surprised that she would be asking his help, what with her being cabin head and all. But the fact of the matter was that many of her siblings still had a lot more understanding when it came to matters of the heart than she did, despite their shared parentage, and when she nodded in response to his question he shrugged and answered, "Sure, I guess."

Once he'd followed her into their empty cabin, she closed the door and sat down heavily on her bed in the corner. "It's Jason," she said at once, deciding to get straight to the point before she chickened out. "As I'm sure you've noticed, things are… off, between him and me."

"We're in a war," Mitchell pointed out, leaning back against a dresser between two boys' beds across the room and shoving his hands into the pockets of his jeans. "Things are bound to be messed up for a while."

"But that's just it," Piper argued. She drew her legs up onto her bed and crossed them in front of her, trying to decide how best to get her thoughts out. "I feel like… now more than ever it's important to stand together, to focus on… I don't know, love and caring and all that." She hated how cheesy that sentiment sounded, but to her relief Mitchell didn't make fun of her. He only frowned and jerked his head, sweeping his hair—an attractive mixture of at least six shades of brown—out of his eyes.

"The thing about war," he said, "is it heightens all emotions, not just positive ones. It intensifies our outlook on certain events, like… like everything's cast in this harsh light that overloads your senses. The good seems better, and the bad seems worse." His hazel eyes slid up to meet her multicolored ones. "You look at this war and see what it can give us—that we're united against the same enemy, and if we work together we'll come out okay. But a lot of people look and only see what it's taken away. Our safety, security, normalcy… the lives of people we love. For children of Aphrodite, seeing the beauty in things comes naturally to us—no matter how dark and ugly the situation. But for everyone else, it isn't as easy. They don't see the world like we do."

Piper had never thought about it that way before. She had always been on the optimistic side, unlike a few of her friends, but not once did she attribute that as another facet of her mother's legacy. She'd always assumed it was just a simple personality trait. But when Mitchell spelled it out the way he did, it made sense. It explained why so many people around her didn't seem to understand as readily as she did that the only way to win this war was to stay positive and to stand together. It also explained why the war made her feel so distant from Jason—like they were watching from opposite sides of a window. In a way, they actually were. The only question was whether or not that window was one she could open.

"When you put it like that, it sounds like… there's nothing I can do," she said a bit glumly, shrugging her shoulders in a hopeless gesture. "It's not like I can use charmspeak to alter personalities."

"I wouldn't say there's nothing you can do," Mitchell argued, tilting his head to the side. "It just won't be easy. True, charmspeak can't outright change a person's fundamental point of view, but if you really know them, there are other ways you can bring them around."

Mind flashing back to her conversations that day with Gwen and Octavian, Piper shifted on her bed and said carefully, "Hey, can Aphrodite's kids like… see into people's minds, ever?" Realizing how stupid that sounded, she added hastily, "I don't mean like psychic mind-reading, I mean like… Well, I was talking to some people earlier today who were kind of down and it was like I knew exactly the right thing to say, you know? I guess I was just wondering if that was… normal."

She was fully prepared for Mitchell to stare at her like she was crazy, but to her surprise he smiled. "Don't worry, you're not that much of a freak," he assured her, and she made a face at him. "Aphrodite has the ability to empathize with people—to see exactly what they want and, in a lot of cases, what they need to hear. It's one of the things we inherit from her. It's stronger in some of us than others, and I've seen it used in all kinds of ways. Remember that rite of passage tradition you stamped out? That was when I… you know, got the hang of it."

He shuffled his feet, suddenly looking a bit uncomfortable, and Piper tried not to frown in disapproval. She remembered Cabin Ten's so-called 'rite of passage', alright. Before she'd arrived, the generally-accepted thing for Aphrodite's children to do was to get someone to fall in love with them and then break their heart. As far as she knew, she was the only one aside from another former senior counselor, Silena Beauregard, to refuse to do something so horrible. It was no longer required, as Piper had abolished the tradition immediately upon overthrowing Drew's tyrannical leadership, but sometimes she forgot that almost all of her cabin-mates had already done it—had pointlessly broken the heart of someone who'd thought they were in love. Mitchell, evidently, was no exception.

"Anyway," he said quickly, eyeing Piper's tightly-closed mouth and obviously fishing for a change of subject, "it can really come in handy when you need to reach out to somebody. In some ways, it's even more useful than charmspeak—though, to be fair, I guess I don't really know firsthand what that's like."

Piper chuckled. "A blessing and a curse," she offered, thinking on how her ability to use charmspeak had gotten her both into and out of a lot of scrapes in the past.

Mitchell gave an amused smile. "You should know," he said as his expression grew serious again, "it only works if you really want to help. If part of you is still angry with Jason when you try to talk to him, you'll have a rough time of it."

Piper sighed shortly. "Of course there's a catch."

"I wouldn't worry. You wouldn't be going to so much trouble if you didn't want to make things right. It may take a little time, but you'll get there. I've seen you guys together before the war—I know you care about each other. Trust me, it'll work out."

An unconscious smile pulled at Piper's lips as a warm rush of gratitude relaxed the uncomfortable tension in her shoulders. "Thanks, Mitchell," she said. "I hope you're right." When he grinned, a thought struck her, and with a bemused frown she pointed an accusing finger at him and asked, "Wait, did you just use that heart-reading, empathy thing on me?"

He laughed, running a hand through his highlighted hair as he stepped away from the dresser. "Doesn't mean I don't believe it," he replied matter-of-factly. "Anyway, I really should track down our favorite former leader. Let me know how it goes, okay?"

"Sure thing," Piper promised with a smile. "Thanks for your help." He inclined his head and flashed her a friendly grin before letting himself out of the cabin, snapping the door closed behind him and leaving her alone.

With a heavy sigh, Piper lied back and stretched out on her bed, staring at the ceiling and letting Mitchell's words sink fully into her brain. If what he'd said was true, she needed to be sure that all of her anger toward Jason had faded before she could hope to get through to him. But was she ready for that? When his name crossed her mind, her initial feelings were sadness and longing, but beneath them there were definite embers of frustration with the selfish way he'd been acting. Maybe it wouldn't be as easy at she'd been hoping.

But the more she thought about it, the more she herself began to feel selfish. They were in a war. Everyone was working harder than ever to make sure they would be ready in case trouble hit. Many of their campers risked their lives on a daily basis, fighting battles and leaving camp on recruitments missions. Leo, Reyna, and Nico had just undergone an extremely dangerous quest for just the small chance of gaining an advantage over Nyx and Erebos. And here she was, worrying about her love life. Did she really have the right to spend so much time and energy on this one thing, or should she wait until after the war to try and make things right? Gods knew it would certainly be easier.

Piper turned over on her side, feeling more troubled than ever. As her eyes swept over the empty room, they landed resolutely on her bedside table, in which she hid the prophetic dagger she'd carried with her during the Giant War last summer. On a whim, she leaned up from the mattress and reached toward it, pulling open the top drawer and extracting the long, white sock that held the ancient parazonium, Katoptris.

When she slid the fabric away, the eighteen-inch triangular blade glowed faintly in the dim lighting. The sock slipped from Piper's fingers as she straightened the knife, eyes going to the polished bronze surface. Her reflection stared back at her, worry and anxiety clear in the face that looked so much older than she thought it ought to. Since the start of the war, she'd avoided gazing over the blade for fear of its showing her more of the same sort of horrible images she'd seen a year ago. She wasn't sure what had possessed her to bring it out now of all times—maybe the guilt of her selfish worries was drawing out an abnormally strong desire to learn anything that might provide some value to the people around her. If that had been her unconscious intention, however, she was out of luck—her reflection disappeared as it often did, but all she saw was an ominous, swirling blackness.

She breathed out slowly, unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed, and was about to replace the dagger in its sock-sheath when a low, whispery voice brushed her eardrums. If she hadn't been inside her quiet cabin, she would have passed it off as the wind or a rustle of clothing. But as it was, everything around her was still and silent—and the whisper had come from the blade in her hands.

Piper gasped sharply and grew perfectly still, her grip frozen around the weapon's wooden hilt and her eyes glued to the bronze metal, ears straining against the silence. Not a second later, she heard it again—louder this time, though she could only decipher one word: "…King…"

Piper's eyes were staring so hard at the shadows shifting across the reflective surface of the blade that she wouldn't have been surprised if they popped from her head. She couldn't see anything, but when another voice sounded it wasn't a whisper, and it was one whose owner she had no trouble recognizing.

"Let go of me! Who do you think you are?"

Before she could get over the shock, a different voice answered it—deep and raspy, snake-like:

"Ssssilence, girl! Before I sssslice your tongue!"

And then snippets of speech, layered over one another so that Piper had a difficult time separating them into distinct thoughts:

"Well done. This will please the King."

"What could he possssibly want with thissss one?"

"It matters not who we bring. The King only requires bait."

"Why could we not just bring the boy?"

"No, the King was clear. He must come of his own accord. He must choose the darkness. But you know as well as I—he will do anything to save his friends."

A low chorus of rumbling laughter interrupted and then faded to silence. The swirling darkness vanished, and Piper was left staring wide-eyed at her own reflection, breathing much too fast and wondering whether she should run after Mitchell to tell him that she'd just found Drew Tanaka.

DUN DUN DUNNNN! What? It's been a while! Haha ;)

Leave me a review, dears, and I'll see you Friday with the return of our quest team! Later days!

-oMM