Disclaimer: I don't own Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Warning for blood/injury and references to canonical character death. Also some canon divergence, I guess.
There were bodies.
It wasn't Clarisse's first time seeing bodies. There had been bodies last summer, crumpled and broken left in the wake of giants and monsters. There had been bodies since then, and some bodies before, the life of a demigod never guaranteed.
It was the first time she had seen so many, and the guilt gnawed at her. Your fault, a voice told her snidely. If you hadn't been such a fucking coward and actually fought from the start you could have saved some of them.
The voice wasn't holding back its scathing remarks, and Clarisse didn't miss how similar it was to a certain son of Apollo's. Then again, there were only so many people that had ever dared call her a coward to her face.
There was a reason she'd been staying away from the area of Olympus quarantined as the triage centre and infirmary. She couldn't avoid him forever, knew she was once again being that same fucking coward by staying away from him, but she couldn't deal with another blown up argument. Not right now.
They'd screwed that up once, already, in the wake of Beckendorf's death, making Silena feel even worse (and she was certain the asshole had never bothered to apologise to her), and even though it had turned out it was Silena's fault, the stupid, stupid girl, Clarisse couldn't screw up like that again.
Not when she was facing so many shrouds, covering so many bodies.
It was a colourful view. Someone had thought to organise them by cabin, and Clarisse remembered all the makings of the shrouds, pre-battle, but seeing them here, used in a gradient of green-red-gold-orange-pink-grey, most with shapes underneath them, hurt.
There were fourteen shrouds laid out over bodies, and two golden shrouds neatly folded next to the gold-covered bodies as though whoever had organised the dead was expecting two more Apollo kids to not make it.
She'd said she hoped they all died. She remembered spitting it in Michael's face, pride and anger warring within and resulting in a screaming match even when he surrendered the chariot, because it was obvious he was only doing it to guilt her into joining the war.
She'd seen eleven Apollo kids board the bus to leave camp. There were four bodies covered in golden shrouds, and the two empty, waiting, shrouds beside them.
Clarisse couldn't say she hadn't meant it, at the time, because she had, but there was no word to describe just how much she wished she hadn't. Not now she was faced with the reality, of at least fourteen dead campers and over a third (over half, if she counted the empty shrouds) of the entire Apollo cabin were within that number.
The fact that she had ever meant it when she said she hoped they died, that this happened, made her feel sick.
She couldn't avoid Michael forever, but for just a while longer, while the Apollo kids were still working tirelessly, no doubt exhausted from a three-day long siege but doing their duties regardless, she could keep her distance and put off the scathing (deserved) words he no doubt had in store for her.
Clarisse ignored the fact that she hadn't seen Michael once. She'd barely caught a glimpse of any of the Apollo kids, maybe thought she'd heard Will shouting for help at some point, since Silena and the drakon (and the fucking Hyperborean giant). But Michael was a midget and none of the bodies underneath golden shrouds were that small, so he had to be around, somewhere, even if he was a shit healer.
She ignored the bodiless shrouds, too.
There were too many bodies. She knew who lay under the red Ares shrouds, that Silena was the pink shroud, that in another room there was a grey shroud covering Luke's body, but she didn't know who lay beneath the others.
She didn't want to know, for all that she'd been logging the faces she'd seen scurrying around, keeping a subconscious tally of who was still alive, who hadn't died in the war, but she knew she'd find out, eventually.
Find out who might have survived, if she'd let her cabin fight from the start.
The gold shrouds, outnumbering any other colour – even the grey of the combined Hermes and unclaimed campers – taunted her. Haunted her.
Clarisse didn't know why she'd ended up in the shroud room, anyway. She spun on her heel, abruptly putting the dead behind her, to be faced later, at the funeral when she'd learn who had ended the war in Elysium, and almost ran over the small girl just entering the room.
She was one of the newest Apollo kids, because of fucking course she was. Clarisse didn't know the brat well, only that she was young, a skilled archer amongst even her own cabin despite her age, and prone to following Michael around with stars in her eyes.
Her eyes were red rimmed, rubbed raw with beads of drying salt on her cheeks that glistened in the light of Olympus, but the glare she sent Clarisse was no less vicious for it.
"I hate you," Kayla said, a heartfelt sting in her words despite the way her voice wobbled, lips quivering in the tell-tale warning sign of imminent tears. "I hate you." Her hands, devoid of grime but speckled with blood that she'd obviously missed while cleaning up from her last patient, tightened their grip on the bow she carried, drawing Clarisse's attention to it.
It wasn't unusual to see Kayla with a bow – it was more unusual to see her without – but the bow in her hands wasn't the green one Clarisse had come to associate with the young daughter of Apollo in the scant months since she'd arrived at camp. It was far more familiar than that, one that she'd seen almost every day at camp for the past seven years – small, for a bow, in the same way its owner was small, for a teenage boy.
Clarisse had never seen Michael let anyone else touch his bow, not even his own siblings – not even Lee, before he'd been killed last year. Certainly not since he'd learnt to shoot it properly, which had taken him no time at all.
Seeing it in Kayla's hands now, in the shroud room of all places, made something in Clarisse go suddenly cold. Her mind unwelcomely reminded her that she hadn't heard Michael's voice once, not even to shout at patients that he thought were demanding too much of Will.
None of the bodies were small enough to be Michael, but the bodiless golden shrouds demanded her attention again.
"Where is he?" Clarisse demanded, knowing it wasn't a fair question to shove on the youngest Apollo kid, but unable to stop herself from suddenly needing to know the answer.
Light blue, bloodshot eyes, fixed her with a death glare even as they started to fill with water for what was clearly not the first time. That in itself was an answer, but Clarisse wouldn't accept it. Couldn't accept it.
Michael had been an incessant, tiny but persistent, thorn in her side since she was nine. There were very few other campers that had been around camp as long as they had been, now. She'd never liked him – fought with him more often than not – but he'd always been there.
He couldn't be fucking gone.
"Where is he?" she demanded again, taking a step towards the younger – much younger, too young to be delivering shitty news but after seeing his bow Clarisse needed to know – girl and towering over her.
"Why do you care?" Kayla snapped back with a thick voice that wobbled. "You t-told him to die!" She drew herself up to her full height – taller than Michael, but still not even coming up to Clarisse's chin – and her knuckles went white around the bow. "He f-fell and all we f-found was his b-bow and he's dead and you told him to d-die!" she shrieked.
Behind Clarisse, the empty golden shrouds mocked her. Not waiting for dying kids to finish dying, but representing the bodiless dead.
Fuck.
"Where?" she snapped, cutting through Kayla's sobs. The younger girl stalked past her without answering, and Clarisse looked over her shoulder to see her kneeling next to one of the empty shrouds, carefully lifting up one corner of the fabric to slip the bow beneath it. "Fucking where, Kayla?"
Kayla rubbed at her face, smearing more salt crystals onto her skin where they glistened amongst her freckles. "None of your business," she mumbled, and it wasn't, Clarisse knew she was the last person that had a right to know where Michael had fallen, but that didn't stop her from needing to know. She whirled back around and picked up the younger girl by the scruff of her tattered camp shirt.
"Where?" she snarled. Kayla scrabbled at her grip, short nails digging into Clarisse's skin. It didn't hurt, not compared to the pain Clarisse was used to, but it snagged her attention and she abruptly realised what she was doing.
"Shit." She let Kayla go, and the younger girl kicked at her shin viciously, face screwed up and still glistening from the tears.
"The bridge," Kayla spat. "I hate that bridge."
She stormed out the door.
Which fucking bridge? Manhattan was surrounded by the things, and the siege had moved to the foot of the Empire State Building by the time Silena had led the Ares cabin into battle. Clarisse hadn't known they'd fought on the bridges at all, let alone which one the Apollo cabin had fought on.
She turned away from the shrouds, fourteen bodies, one empty, and one now covering a bow in lieu of its owner, and followed Kayla out the door.
The daughter of Apollo had disappeared, no doubt back into the infirmary, which Clarisse still didn't want to go into, but if it was where she was going to get answers-
She smacked straight into Malcolm.
"Clarisse?"
Clarisse almost shoved him out of the way, before recognition kicked in. Malcolm wasn't a head counsellor, but he was the undisputed second in command of the Athena cabin, which meant he knew shit.
"Which bridge were the Apollo cabin on?" she demanded. He blinked owlishly.
"What? I mean, Williamsburg Bridge, but why-"
Clarisse pushed past him without a second thought.
She wasn't a healer, wasn't a fixer, didn't have a single use in the post-war cooldown where everything was already broken and didn't need breaking further. Ever since the fighting had finished, she'd been a loose end that couldn't do anything useful.
Not that she'd been of much use during the war, either.
The flying chariot – the same flying chariot that had sparked her latest, worst, and final, spat with Michael – was where she'd left it outside the building in the mortal world. The pegasi munching on a crate of apples that had to have been stolen for them by one of the Hermes kids let themselves be harnessed back without much complaint, and then Clarisse was in the sky.
She couldn't heal anyone, and things were far past the point of being able to be fixed.
But maybe the guilt in her chest would loosen, just a little, if Michael got a proper funeral – and for a proper funeral, they needed his body.
She couldn't heal anyone, couldn't fix anything, but maybe she could at least retrieve a body.
Williamsburg Bridge clearly didn't qualify as a bridge anymore. Clarisse gaped as it came into view below her – or rather, what was left of it. The suspension cables still ran across the width of the East River, but the middle of the bridge was nothing more than rubble piled high in the water.
Six golden shrouds suddenly made horrific sense. What the Hades had caused that?
Mortals milled about, awoken from their enforced sleep, making noises of horror, distress and disbelief. Police and paramedics called for order, clearly trying to get the mortals under control above the wailing and screaming.
Clarisse ignored them and set the chariot down near to the jagged edge of what was once a complete bridge. She didn't know what the Mist showed the mortals, and she didn't care as long as they didn't mess with the chariot as she jumped out and elbowed her way to the edge of the bridge, where it fell away in a jagged mess of cables and metal.
The scale of destruction was ridiculous, and Michael was tiny. Looking at the wreckage now, it was easy to see why the Apollo kids hadn't been able to find him – but also why they were so sure that he was dead. It seemed impossible that anyone could have survived a fall into something like that.
Clarisse set her shoulders and turned away from the gaping hole in the middle of the bridge, stalking back past mortals and ignoring anyone that asked her if she was okay – no, she fucking wasn't okay, but the mortals wouldn't understand and she had a task to do. She had no idea where Michael had fallen from – although she could take a guess, looking up at the suspension cables. He'd always liked perching on tree branches off the ground – the only way he could ever be taller than someone – and with no trees, the cables seemed a likely substitute.
The cables were the only thing still intact, though, and Michael could have been on any part of it when he fell. Clarisse glared up at them as she walked, willing them to give her some sort of clue, some sign that a demigod had been perching on them.
Her feet connected with something on the ground and she stumbled, eyes flitting down to see what had tripped her.
It was an arm.
Just an arm, bloodied and torn at the bicep, punctures that could only be teeth marks in the flesh. Massive ones, the sort that Mrs O'Leary left in the chunks of meat they threw for her sometimes.
The skin, even bruised and battered and sallow, was too pale to be Michael's, and it was missing the tell-tale paler patch where Michael's bracer almost always sat on his forearm – or where any right-handed archer's bracer sat. Clarisse recalled the other bodiless golden shroud, the other representation of a dead Apollo kid with no body, and grimaced.
There weren't many left-handed archers in the camp, and Michael wasn't the only loud Apollo kid whose voice she hadn't heard in Olympus. Fuck, Nathan had been a right pain in the ass himself, but he hadn't deserved to be torn apart by hellhounds.
She knelt down and picked it up, forcing herself to look around in case there was anything else left of the kid. It was stiff and cold in her hands, detached (killed) some time ago, and Clarisse tore off the bottom of her camp t-shirt to wrap it in. There was nothing else human nearby, only dark stains on the remains of the bridge and the splinters of a bow. She picked those up, too, and trudged back to the chariot to wedge them at the front, where they wouldn't fall out on take-off.
Searching the whole debris area by hand wasn't going to work. There was too much of it, and she had no idea where Michael could be. Had he fallen when the bridge collapsed, or before? Had the fighting continued after the collapse and he fell then?
All Clarisse knew for certain was that Michael would never have been anywhere except the front line. He was an asshole and a bastard but he wasn't a coward, and would never let anything get near his siblings without getting in the way despite being the smallest in the cabin – the smallest in camp, most of the time.
But where had the front line been, when he fell?
She hopped into the chariot again, urging the pegasi into the sky before banking them around in a low fly-by of the debris. Up close, it looked even worse; gnarled and twisted metal interlocked and reaching skyward. Some of it looked stained as well, and no amount of hoping it was just rust could shake the thought that some of it was blood.
Alongside Luke the bodies of the demigods that had followed Kronos and died doing it had also been laid, covered in shrouds because the dead were the dead no matter the side of the war they'd fought on. Clarisse suspected several of them had started their journey to the Underworld here, in the twisted spires of metal of a broken bridge.
She wasn't looking for where bodies had laid before they'd been retrieved. She was looking for a body that was still there, hiding in death the same way he'd been too fucking good at in life (Clarisse had been shot many, many times in Capture the Flag by fucking red-and-gold fletched arrows out of seemingly nowhere, and sometimes outside of Capture the Flag, too).
The first fly-past yielded no sign, and Clarisse scowled as she brought the chariot around again, pulling the pegasi to fly as slowly as they could on the next pass, lower and closer to the wreckage until some spurs of metal threatened to snag the chariot as it flew by.
Nothing.
She banked around for a third pass, low enough to skim the water. The pegasi were straining, throwing their heads in protest as they tried to go faster, tried to leap up into the sky, but Clarisse wouldn't let them. They snorted at her, but she held firm, kept looking at the wreckage, knowing it was like looking for a miniscule needle in a giant haystack, knowing that the surviving Apollo kids had failed so Michael had to be hard to spot (and pushing away the thoughts that maybe he was in the middle of the twisted metal, surrounded on all sides and impossible to retrieve until the mortals cleared up the wreckage – if they even bothered searching through it rather than sending it all straight into a metal recycling plant to be crushed. The thought made Clarisse ill and she forced herself to look harder, because that couldn't be allowed to happen.)
Something caught her eye.
She didn't know what it was, a flash too fast to focus, but it had stood out to her and that was enough to direct the chariot back around, landing it on the bank of the river and throwing herself at the wreckage, scrambling up and over metal. It cut into her hands, more scratches to go with the ones she'd picked up during her brief section of fighting in the war, but she ignored them as she clambered forwards, towards where she'd seen something.
Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just a trick of the light, maybe Apollo was punishing her for her cowardice and the deaths of his children by sending her on a false trail, but Clarisse had to check it out, just in case it wasn't. Just in case that something had been someone, had been a sign of the body she was looking for.
It was a hand.
Sticking out from a gap between twisted metals was a hand, limp and lifeless, and Clarisse forced herself not to get too convinced, even if it was closer to Michael's tanned skin than Nathan's pale.
Even if it was somewhere she could never have spotted without looking from the surface of the river, where the Apollo kids wouldn't have been able to get.
Inside the gap was a mop of black hair, and Clarisse lunged for it, kneeling on a faux plateau of metal in front of the gap and reaching an arm inside to push the hair out of the attached face.
His eyes were closed, but she could never mistake Michael's scrunched up, ferrety features for anyone else.
She'd found him.
Half his face was coated in blood, bringing up memories of Lee's caved-in skull from the previous summer, but unlike Lee his head still seemed to be the right shape.
"Dammit," she muttered, fingers curling in sticky black hair until her hand had formed an involuntary fist. "You weren't supposed to actually die, you bastard." Her grip made his head shift a little, and the metal made a low moan, reminding her that finding him had just been the first step.
Now she had to get the body back to Olympus.
Her fingers wouldn't unfurl from his hair, so she used her other hand to trace where his visible hand disappeared into the shadows, finding the kink of the elbow and reaching where it met his body. It felt almost like he was in a hollow of some sort, or perhaps there was a sheet of metal slanting from his body to leave a pocket for his arm. Clarisse couldn't tell, but it made it easier to force her hand under Michael's armpit.
There was another groan as she started to pull and she paused, eyeing the metal in trepidation. If it toppled forwards…
She looked back, behind her, gauging how far back she could scramble quickly and if that was going to be far enough to not get buried if it did.
The groan came again, and beneath her hands, Michael's body shifted. Shit, had she already pushed the metal too far?
The logical part of her brain told her to go, that Michael was dead and wouldn't be killed by collapsing metal but she would, but instead of obeying that, her hand tightened its grip under Michael's arm and-
"-uck."
Clarisse froze.
That wasn't the sound of metal threatening to fall. That was a voice. Weak, but unmistakable.
Beneath her hands, Michael's body shifted again, and there was another groan, but eyelids twitched and peeled open and-
"Fuck," Michael rasped.
It was quiet, hoarse and parched, but it was his voice, and his brown eyes that were open and staring blankly – until they weren't and Clarisse was still frozen, still couldn't move as they followed her arm up to her shoulder and then his head tilted beneath her grip until he was looking at her, not quite the laser focus she was used to but obviously aware nonetheless.
"'risse?"
Clarisse's mouth went dry and she felt faint as her hands finally fell limp and slipped away from him, fingers snagging where his hair had snarled around them. "-chael?" she rasped, the first syllable of his name failing to sound.
He was alive?
It didn't seem possible; she'd (finally) joined the battle two days ago and the destruction of the bridge had to have been before that because she hadn't known about any bridge fighting, so Michael had to have fallen at least two days ago, if not three – maybe even four, fuck. True, he'd always healed fast – and been a smug shit about it – but with no food or water?
Fresh water, anyway. The surrounding metal was damp, and Michael's hair hadn't been dry, either.
"Y'see someone else 'ere?" he demanded. The weakness of his voice didn't stop the sharpness of the words. "Fuck." His eyes scrunched up and a hiss escaped from between his teeth.
"I heard you were dead," she said, swallowing back the instinct to say something a lot more antagonistic. Too many shrouds lined up in her minds' eye, deaths she hadn't been there to at least try and prevent because her feud with Michael had resulted in her being the exact coward he'd called her.
"S'rry to fucking disappoint," he muttered, starting to open his eyes fully again before stopping abruptly with a wince. "You here to watch it happen… or something?"
That hurt, a stabbing sensation in her chest, but Clarisse realised she couldn't blame him for it, not after everything she'd said and done – and not done. Michael had no reason to believe she'd do anything except leave him to die-
Fuck, was he dying? She couldn't see enough of him to see how badly he was hurt, if he was fatally injured and beyond saving.
Silena's melted, ruined face crept into her vision and she blinked it away, feeling her eyes dampen.
"No," Clarisse said, feeling the word tremble as she said it and hoping Michael couldn't hear that. She grit her teeth and tried again. "No. I'm here to get your short ass to Olympus where it's supposed to be, you bastard."
He made a spluttering sound that ended in a wet cough – had he laughed?
"You're one to talk," he rasped, "about where people are supposed to be." Michael's sharp tongue, at least, was still operating just fine. "Where the fuck were you… when we were doing all the ass kicking." He winced again, his head jerking a little as though it was a full-body reaction. "Fuck, is it over?"
"Yeah," she said, and this time her voice stayed steady. "The war's over. We- You won."
Michael's head lolled sideways slightly, closer to where it had been when she'd found him. "Good." His voice was softer, a little more distant, and it felt like the Hyperborean Giant had blasted her chest all over again because Michael never just did that, not talking with her.
"Which means I am getting your short ass to Olympus where it's supposed to be," she repeated, more harshly than she meant to. "Kayla-"
Michael's head jerked. "Kayla's alive?" he interrupted, his brown eyes finding Clarisse's again. His pupils were a bit too big, and rather belatedly Clarisse realised the blood half covering his face probably meant he had a head injury, and a concussion to go with it.
"Yeah," Clarisse told him. "Your little shadow yelled in my face earlier."
Michael's lips twitched. "Thank the gods," he breathed. "She got knocked off. I thought…"
Shit, it hadn't occurred to Clarisse that Michael hadn't been the first Apollo kid to fall, that some of those golden shrouds might've been deaths he'd already known about. Suddenly she regretted not going into the infirmary, if only so she could tell him who was still alive.
The only thing she could do was get Michael back there herself, so he could see for his own eyes. "And she thinks you're dead," she said instead. "So get out of there and prove her wrong."
Clarisse didn't wait for an answer before finding Michael's wrist again, only for it to weakly pull back. He couldn't overpower her even when they were both at full strength, and she frowned when he rasped, "stop."
"You can't stay here," she snapped. "This metal won't hold for fucking ever, and the mortals are swarming the remains of the bridge. It's me or them, if they even spot you before dragging this shit off to the compactor."
"I know," Michael muttered, wincing again. "But, fuck, you can't just pull-" He hissed again. "I'm pinned."
"Shit." Clarisse tried to peer into the gap, but couldn't see much past Michael's head. "Where?"
"Right arm's crushed," Michael reported, and the pain in his voice was suddenly impossible to miss. "And something in my right leg."
Clarisse eyed the snarled mess of metal above Michael's small gap, trying to judge what she could move, but there was so much of it, and she couldn't see what would and wouldn't bring the whole stack down on top of both of them.
She crouched back down to get a better look inside the gap, tracing Michael's arm back to his shoulder again. This time, she could feel him trembling slightly, and the slight rise and fall of his body as he breathed.
"Got ambrosia?" he asked her, and she shook her head. She'd been looking for a dead body, she hadn't been prepared for an alive one. "Fuck. Should be some in my pants but-"
Clarisse didn't wait for him to finish talking, shimmying down onto her stomach so she could reach further into the gap before tracing his torso down. He gave a cut-off hiss but didn't protest; no doubt he knew better than she did that without the godly food, moving him with the injuries he'd listed ran a high chance of finishing him off. Her fingers found the tattered-feeling quiver strap over his hips, then the line of his legs, thankfully curving around rather than going further back so she could still reach.
She found a pocket with something in it just as the fabric of his pants began to get sticky. Michael let out a whimper and she saw his eyes glisten as she fumbled with the opening before slipping her fingers inside to grasp the familiar feeling of something wrapped to keep it clean.
Withdrawing it was much faster than finding it, and she hurriedly unwrapped the squished package, relieved when the ambrosia still looked fresh despite the wrappings taking on a suspiciously red tinge.
There was no point being coy about it; she broke off a large chunk and held it to Michael's mouth. He snapped it out of her fingers without protest and swallowed the dose with another wince. As soon as her hand was empty, she wrapped the rest of the ambrosia and put it in her own pocket before drawing her knife.
Michael eyed it dubiously, but Clarisse ignored him as she set her hand once again in search of his leg, this time seeking whatever was causing the blood loss.
"Bitch," he hissed faintly as her questing fingers found the stickiness again. "Could've waited for the ambrosia to- ssssssshit – kick in." It didn't feel like it was bleeding freely; everything was sticky rather than liquid. Still, that was small mercies when her hand found the wound itself and discovered that Michael's leg wasn't just pinned but impaled.
He cursed her out more as she left his leg to find his right arm and assess how crushed it was. The first probing contact had him letting out a high-pitched shout, and Clarisse grit her teeth, wishing she knew more about first aid.
"What do I need to do?" she asked, because Michael was never the Apollo kid anyone asked for medical help, but he was still an Apollo kid.
"Got a fucking torniquet?" he huffed. In answer, Clarisse tore off her t-shirt and slashed it apart with her knife.
"This will have to do," she said, twisting several orange strips together. Michael grit his teeth.
"Make it fucking tight," he said. "Just below my shoulder."
Twisting fabric around Michael's upper arm was awkward when she couldn't see it and there was barely any space between it and the surrounding metal, but Clarisse persisted, tying her makeshift torniquet as tight as it would go and ignoring the pained noises each tightening twist provoked from Michael. Then she reached to put another one around his thigh, before bundling the remainder of her t-shirt around the metal stuck through his leg.
She was somewhat surprised Michael stayed conscious through it all, especially when she took her knife to the metal and forced Celestial bronze to saw through mortal steel, cutting the impaling spur free of the metal it was entangled with. By the time she was done, her hands were red with Michael's blood, and her shoulders were aching from keeping her arms extended so far for so long.
"Any more reasons I can't pull you out?" she asked him, pushing herself back into a crouch and slipping her knife back into its sheath.
"Can' tell," Michael mumbled. His eyes were closed, and his trembling had worsened considerably. "Don' think so."
"Then it's time to get you out of there," Clarisse decided, hooking her hands under his shoulders. "Don't pass out on me."
"No fuckin' promises."
There wasn't much she could do except pull and hope. Experimental tugs gave some movement in his trapped arm – and some short screams – so Clarisse let go of his shoulder to grip his arm directly, bracing against the metal as best she could as she tried to worm the limb free. Almost immediately, Michael fell completely limp, and Clarisse alternated cursing the bridge and praying to the gods – her father, Apollo – as she tugged.
It eventually came loose with a concerning clatter of metal, and Clarisse didn't let herself think as she grabbed Michael's shoulders again and hauled. Freed from the metal ensnaring him, and too small to be heavy even as a dead-weight, his body shifted easily and Clarisse almost overbalanced backwards as he spilled out of the gap and into her chest.
The gap shuddered as Michael's trailing foot left it, and Clarisse all but threw him over her shoulder as she scrambled away. Blood trickled down her back and metal bit into her free hand as she almost lost her balance.
Behind her, metal shrieked and began to collapse, and Clarisse whistled.
It was a whistle Silena had taught her, loud and sharp, and it brought a fresh wave of grief over her even as she jumped off of the rapidly shifting metal and landed heavily in the chariot as the pegasi pulled it past her.
Michael groaned and Clarisse dropped to one knee, grabbing for the flapping reins with one hand while she let him roll off her shoulder and into a slumped heap by her feet. In the light, it was immediately obvious that his condition was bad.
Blood coated his leg and arm as well as his face. What little of his skin could be seen without blood was pale, and he was still shaking like a leaf. His eyes were closed but with the whimpers he was making Clarisse wasn't sure how unconscious he was.
"Don't you fucking die now," she told him, shifting her stance until he was slumped between the front of the chariot and her legs, safe from the possibility of falling out mid-flight. He didn't reply, but she didn't need one.
A tug on the reins – too much, too harsh, Silena would tell her off for not treating the pegasi better but Clarisse was in a hurry – and the chariot accelerated. Forces pushed Michael against her shins, and she didn't know if he was intentionally curling around her legs or if that was subconscious, but her stance was stable enough to be unmoved as the pegasi threw back their heads and strained their wings.
The distance between the bridge wreckage and the Empire State Building passed in the blink of an eye, and Clarisse let the chariot land roughly, mortals jumping out of the way of whatever they saw with outraged shrieks. She ignored them as she scooped Michael off of the chariot floor, grabbing the bundle of torn t-shirt that wrapped around the sallow arm almost as an afterthought, and bolted for the elevators.
The security guard hanging out awkwardly with some mortals she vaguely recognised as having somehow taken part in the battle looked at her but didn't make a move to stop her. Perhaps he realised it would be futile.
Clarisse didn't care as long as he didn't get in her way.
The elevator up to Olympus played an irritating, lacklustre version of Stayin' Alive, somehow melancholy instead of the upbeat peppiness the song usually came with, and Clarisse alternated between glaring at the doors, where the noise seemed to be coming from, and glancing down at Michael in her arms. His face was twitching slightly, making him seem even more ferret-like than usual, but his eyes showed no sign of cracking open and his arm and leg looked bad in the bright lightning.
Was he dying? She didn't know enough first aid to tell.
"Dammit," she muttered, glaring up at the ceiling. "Doesn't this junk go any fucking faster?"
It felt like an eternity before the floor came to a stop and the doors opened with a cheery little ding that sounded completely at odds with the mournful rendition of Stayin' Alive. Clarisse was all too happy to leave both firmly behind her as she threw herself into a run across the white and gold rubble of Olympus' entrance, clinging tightly to the body in her arms as she rushed past occasional startled nymphs and minor gods on a bee-line for the room they'd set aside as an infirmary.
She almost ran face-first into a god as he appeared out of nowhere in front of her.
"Woah! Easy there!" Apollo exclaimed, catching her shoulder with one hand and forcing her to a stop. He wasn't wearing his stupidly bright golden armour any more, but the gold chiton wasn't much less eye-searing, and he still had golden aviators covering his eyes.
"Lord Apollo," she gasped, snapping up straight, shoulder blades shifting back as far as they could go with her arms full.
"I'll take him," the god said, extending a hand towards Michael – his son, Clarisse realised, this was Michael's father and while he hadn't snatched Michael out of her arms, it was clear that it was an order, not a request.
Still, "he's still alive," she found herself saying. "The infirmary-"
"Is overrun and exhausted," Apollo cut her off, a serious edge to his voice that didn't seem to fit with her previous experiences with the god. "They can't help him now. Give him to me."
Could she trust Apollo with his son? Her own father certainly wouldn't help her if she was that injured, gods didn't help mortals. But the Apollo cabin were definitely exhausted by now, the god – their father – would be right about that.
And Apollo was the god of healing. That was why Apollo cabin were the camp healers, after all.
She held Michael out to his father. "Help him," she said, but it came out more a plea than an order.
His slight weight, even as a dead weight, vanished from her arms and then Michael was laying limply in Apollo's hold instead. "That's what I do," the god said, flashing her a grin made up of too-white teeth. It didn't last long, and she sensed rather than felt his gaze landing on the wrapped bundle still in her grip. "You also have something for Nathan's shroud, I see," he commented, the words jarringly light given it was his dead son's arm. "I'll leave that to you."
With that last order – and it was an order, Clarisse wasn't stupid enough to miss when a god was telling her to do something – he vanished in a shower of sunbeams. When the lightshow died down, there was no sign he or Michael had been there.
She stood there for a moment, staring at the empty spot. She had no idea how bad Michael's condition was, if he was dying or if a single touch from Apollo would be enough to fix him, and having him whisked away so abruptly left her mind churning as it tried to work out if she'd just seen Michael for the last time.
It was Apollo, she reminded herself. He was a god, he was Michael's father, surely he'd fix him.
She forced herself to start moving again, changing destination from the infirmary to the shroud room. Apollo had given her an order, after all, and it was something she could actually do.
She couldn't heal, couldn't fix things, but she could bring something back for the funeral.
There was more than just Nathan's arm in the wrappings. She knelt down beside the empty shroud (and it was empty, unlike the one next to it with the tell-tale bow shape beneath it that didn't need to be there, but Clarisse was not on the shortlist of one allowed to touch the bow; she'd let Kayla retrieve it, if she got the news about Michael) and let not just the bitten-off arm, but also the bow fragments she'd gathered spill out of the bundle to be covered by the golden cloth.
It wasn't a full body, but it was something, at least.
This time she didn't run into anyone when she turned to leave, and with a deep breath she headed for the infirmary. She had siblings in there that she ought to check in on, and now she'd seen Michael, the Apollo cabin didn't seem quite so daunting to face.
The look on Will's tired, drawn face when she pushed open the door was pure despair.
"What the Hades, Clarisse?" he asked, dragging himself up from where he'd been perching on the edge of a table. He looked paler than Michael, cheeks drawn in and possibly closer to death than most of his patients, but that didn't stop him trying to stride over to her, interrupted by staggers and stumbles.
Clarisse grabbed his shoulders and stopped him from face-planting either the floor or her chest. "That's my line, Solace," she snapped back. "Sit your ass down before you fall down."
"You're bleeding," he protested, blue eyes slightly hazy but wide as they stared at her bare arms. Clarisse followed his gaze and bit back a curse.
Her front and arms were covered in blood – all of it Michael's, because her only wounds were small nicks from the metal on her hands. Her sports bra, on full display after sacrificing the entirety of her t-shirt to try and stop Michael bleeding to death, had gained a few shades and a reddish hue.
"It's not mine," she told him firmly.
"Then whose?" he demanded, trying to resist as she pushed him back to sit down on a nearby piece of rubble but failing miserably. He was too tired, and she was stronger than him, anyway.
Michael's name lingered on the tip of her tongue but she swallowed it down, not confident enough that Apollo would save him to raise Will's hopes while there was the chance they could be dashed again.
"It doesn't matter," she said, instead, a lie because it absolutely mattered, but Will didn't need to know that.
Will didn't look like he could handle anything more, right then.
"Go the fuck to sleep," she told him, turning her back and looking out across the splay of injured and exhausted demigods.
Like Apollo had said, she couldn't see a single Apollo kid that wasn't completely exhausted. Will was the only one that was still on his feet – fuck, he was the oldest, Clarisse realised, finally catching sight of the four other Apollo kids that added up to the original total of eleven when combined with the shrouds. Kayla, face still crusted with dried tears, was curled up with Austin in a corner, both of them with their eyes closed. Sam was splayed out on the floor, next to a makeshift bed that held an equally splayed Alice, who had a blood-soaked gauze on her face. They, too, were both completely out for the count.
Fuck, none of the five surviving Apollo kids were even fourteen. Nathan had been fifteen, and Robyn and Joy had been similar. Sally and Elias had both been around the same age as Will, from what Clarisse recalled of them.
Michael was almost seventeen, a few months younger than her and so much older than his surviving siblings.
She looked back at Will, whose eyes had slipped shut. They needed him. Clarisse might have never got on with Michael, but she knew the same wasn't true for his siblings.
He'd been a little shit from the moment he arrived at camp, but when it came to his siblings – especially younger ones – he'd always supported them. Clarisse didn't want to think about how much they might have fallen apart when they'd lost him.
There was nothing she could do for the exhausted Apollo kids. She didn't want to leave the infirmary now that she had finally entered it, though, and Sherman and Ellis were on neighbouring blankets, both covered in bandages but watching her with half-lidded eyes.
The Apollo cabin weren't the only ones that needed their head counsellor, and Clarisse strode over to her brothers.
They were grieving, too, the loss of Mark and Louisa a shock none of them wanted to face for all they'd known it was likely that not all of their cabin would survive if they marched to war (it was one of the reasons Clarisse had held her cabin back, too selfish to risk their lives even though it was what they were born for), and when they finally fell asleep she moved on to other injured siblings.
Hours passed. The Apollo kids slowly started coming around again, and Will banished her briefly to at least clean up and stop getting more blood in my infirmary while Kayla fixed her with a furious glare that Clarisse accepted silently. Chris appeared with an arm in a sling and fresh – clearly stolen – supplies and tried to get her to talk about "whatever's bothering you," but she shrugged him off.
The look he gave her told her the topic was only temporarily dropped, and that he would be pressing later.
Slowly, the hubbub of the infirmary started up, Apollo kids dragging themselves into new rounds of checking on the wounded. Even Alice pulled herself up and about, despite looking like she should be in one of the beds herself, and Clarisse found herself roped into fetch and carry as Will decided if she was going to hang around the infirmary, she could be useful.
She couldn't heal, but she could at least follow basic orders. The help was the least the Apollo kids deserved from her.
Apollo's sudden arrival brought the infirmary to a shocked halt. He was still wearing his ridiculous gold shades, but that wasn't what froze everyone in place. Nor was the garish, gold-studded choker he'd gained since she last saw him, accentuating the otherwise plain white top and designer jeans he was rocking as though he'd come straight from a catwalk.
It was the short figure standing next to him, one arm tucked in a sling while the other had a crutch jammed under it. He looked much better than the last time Clarisse had seen him, no sign of the blood that had covered his face and limbs, and brown eyes alert as they scanned the room. His camp t-shirt and pants were still torn and stained, but he looked truly alive again.
"Michael!" Kayla shrieked, a green-and-orange blur as she launched herself at him. How he didn't fall over when she cannonballed into him, Clarisse had no idea.
The other Apollo kids started moving towards him, too, their faces a spectrum of disbelieving relief.
"You're alive," Will whispered, as though saying it too loudly would make it not true.
Michael's eyes met Clarisse's, just for a brief moment but long enough to be deliberate, before looking at his younger brother.
"Yeah," he said, a ghost of a smile on his lips, although Clarisse saw him glance around again, gaze settling on each of his living siblings for a fraction of a second before his shoulders slumped a little as he clearly looked for a sixth and realised there wasn't one. "Sorry it took me so long to get here."
He didn't say anything about Clarisse, but that was fine, because Clarisse realised she didn't want people to know. They still weren't friends, hunting down his dead body and finding his living body instead didn't change that, and the idea of getting credited with saving him when if it wasn't for her and her cowardice there might have been a few less shrouds over bodies in another room on Olympus right then felt viscerally wrong.
The five younger kids finished descending on him, burying him out of sight, and bringing attention to the fact that Apollo had disappeared as quickly as he'd appeared. Clarisse decided it was time to leave the infirmary.
It wasn't like there was much she could do there, anyway, and the Apollo kids had their own head counsellor to keep them from overworking themselves, now.
Somehow, Clarisse caught Michael's eye again as she slipped out past the cabin seven huddle. He still didn't say anything, but his sharp gaze softened slightly and he gave an almost imperceptible nod. It was the closest thing to a thank you she'd ever got from him – closer than anything she ever expected to get, or wanted.
She nodded back, just once, and wondered if he could tell that she was glad that he hadn't been dead after all, that he was still alive to be a continuous thorn in her side the same way he'd been since she was nine.
Not that it mattered if he did, or at least that was what she told herself as she broke eye contact and walked away. Their relationship wouldn't change that easily.
Even if there was a small part of her that wished it could.
Thanks for reading!
Tsari