Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo

Day 2 - Growing Pains

Gracie was scared.

Chiron had said it was a training exercise. He'd called it a field trip, to get used to fighting monsters in a controlled environment, but Gracie had met human-Apollo. Will and Nico had disappeared for a day, leaving Lester (because she wasn't going to call the weird teenager Dad even if Will and Austin and Kayla did; they'd told her their Dad was the guy that came in dreams, and that wasn't this pimply teenager Will's age) behind, and he'd been tense and scared.

Austin and Kayla had been tense, too, especially when Lester and Meg left with Will and Nico and they were the senior campers. Kayla had kept counting arrows and fletching more until Austin made her stop because her fingers were going sore and she'd need them healthy for later.

Gracie hadn't been at camp very long, but she didn't think Chiron's idea of a field trip-training exercise was the same thing her half-siblings had been preparing for. The training exercises they'd done in camp had been fun, not… whatever this was.

It was the same with the other campers; the ones like Gracie, that had joined recently, seemed excited about the training trip, and Gracie understood that because it was something different, they got to take their weapons and go out on a trip like she did at school sometimes and have fun! If it wasn't for Austin and Kayla, and Will and Lester when they were still at camp, she would be that excited, too.

It had been fun, to start with! Despite being weirdly tense, Austin had led them in songs while they'd travelled to New York in the bus, and Gracie had gladly joined in, even though she didn't know all of the songs – or hadn't done, to start with. Austin was a good teacher, and Gracie had always been good at picking up songs.

Then they had arrived, and the Ares and Athena campers had charged in ahead. Gracie hadn't realised it then, when despite the tenseness she hadn't really understood why the older campers hadn't been as excited about this trip as the newer ones, but they'd taken on the front line of Nero's forces, the biggest and strongest of the grunt fighters.

She'd found that out when Will was gone, disappeared at some point when she hadn't been looking, and Kayla and Austin were also gone, and a grim faced Sherman had dumped a bleeding Ares kid she didn't remember the name of on her, because she was the nearest Apollo kid.

There was so much blood.

So much of it, on the once white tiles of Nero's boring tower, on the orange t-shirt and celestial bronze armour that hadn't stopped whatever had hit the other camper that hard, and Gracie didn't know what to do.

Were they dying? Was it worse than it looked? What did Sherman expect her to do about it? She looked around frantically, for Will, or Austin, or Kayla, or Chiron, but she couldn't see any of them, just more fighting, more blood.

There were screams, too, and not all of them weren't human. Shouts and yells and this wasn't fun.

Gracie didn't think this was fun. Ben raced past in his wheelchair, whooping loudly with something splattered on his wheels and over his armoured, spiky gloves, so clearly he did, but he wasn't the one with a bleeding out camper that had been dumped on him with the expectation that she could do something about it.

She supposed she should be able to. Apollo was the god of healing, and Will was amazing at it. He'd even taught her a few things – not the singing, not the hymns. She knew the words and the tune because it was music but she couldn't get it to work and Will had said that was okay. She could still do triage, he'd told her, could still clean wounds and wrap them up and keep people alive.

Jerry had got as far as stitching, and he could get a chanted hymn to do something, but Gracie couldn't and she couldn't see him if she looked around. She could see Yan, standing tall with their bow and picking off Nero's followers if they got too close, but Jerry was out of sight.

It was down to her, then, and she didn't know if her patient was dying but they seemed pretty bad and Sherman had taken the time out of a fight to get them to her.

The blood was sticky, when she tentatively put her hand on their shoulder, not on a wound but close enough. Sticky and warm and part of Gracie wanted to throw up. It wasn't that she was bad with blood – this wasn't even the first time she'd seen blood, she'd helped Will after Capture the Flag because all Apollo kids helped out after Capture the Flag, no matter how not good they were at healing – it was the fact that it was on her.

She was the one that had to keep this camper alive. That was all on her and it was terrifying.

Focus, Gracie, she told herself desperately, and blindly reached for the small bag on her back that Will had made her pack herself so she knew exactly where everything was. She still fumbled, shrugging the bag off and rummaging through it desperately because she didn't remember where she'd put everything, before her fingers wrapped around something cool and fragile-feeling, although Will had promised her those particular vials never broke.

Gracie wasn't quite sure she believed him, but it was intact as she pulled it out, a miniscule bottle of amber liquid. A single dose, because judging amounts in action was difficult and a mistake would be fatal, so Will had made sure she was only carrying single-dose vials.

At the time, she'd been a little offended that he thought she'd mess up something like that, when it had been drilled into her over and over and over again how dangerous it all was.

Now, with shaking fingers that kept fumbling the stopper, Gracie was glad, because she'd have been too scared to even try and judge it like this, alone with no supervision and a maybe-dying camper in front of her.

She wasn't sure if it all even went in their mouth or if she still spilled some down their cheeks instead, but it was administered and now she had to do… what? What came next?

Stop the bleeding. The blood was still sticky and warm and it was still leaking out of them. Clean and wrap and-

An arrow shrieked past her and Gracie's head jerked up. There was one of Nero's wolf-like followers right in front of her, weapon raised, and her eyes went large as her face went cold because-

There was an arrow in their heart, which had them stumbling backwards as they started turning into monster-dust, but Gracie was shaking even more because if Yan hadn't-

She'd be dead.

She hadn't even noticed.

Bursting into tears on the battlefield – because this was, it was a battlefield and they could die despite what Chiron said about training trips – seemed like the sort of thing that should not be done, but Gracie couldn't help it, bandages slipping from her fingers as her chest heaved, because she was terrified.

How could she save someone's life if she was going to get killed doing it? How was she supposed to do this without getting killed? She'd only been a demigod for a couple of months, she was not ready for anything like this!

"Gracie!" Hands grabbed her and she whipped around to see Jerry. He tugged her into a hug and she resisted because what if they got killed but then there were legs in front of them and she looked up to see Yan standing over them.

"You two heal," they said, and their voice wasn't steady, either, but their bow was and that was comforting. "I'll protect."

"Y-yeah!" Jerry replied, and he looked like he'd been crying, too. There was blood on his hands, and a smear across his forehead. "We got this. Don't let us die."

"I won't."

Gracie still didn't feel safe. Yan was good but they hadn't been a demigod much longer, and Jerry was a better healer than her but hadn't been trained for very long, either, but it was a little bit easier, with both of them with her.

"I've given nectar," she reported shakily, and Jerry gave her a watery grin.

"Awesome," he said, although it came out shakier than she thought he wanted. He was scared as well – this was his first battle. Their first battle, and their experienced siblings were nowhere to be seen, somewhere in the thick of things and not on the edges, and Gracie didn't want to know how terrifying the thick of things was when the edges were this bad.

But Jerry was a better healer than her, and with Yan standing guard, their bowstring singing as they shot anything that tried to get close, they got the Ares camper stabilised.

It should have felt like a victory – a battlefield healing! They did it! – but all Gracie could think about was how that was only one person, and how many more times they were going to have to do it before they were all over.

She burst into exhausted tears at the thought.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari