Disclaimer: I don't own Trials of Apollo

Day 17 - The Cyclical Nature of Things

Will was on a quest, and Alice hated it.

Okay, so being temporarily in charge of the cabin wasn't terrible – her younger siblings were reasonably easy to corral, all in all, and Alice had never had a problem with putting her foot down, although the comforting-younger-siblings-when-upset thing wasn't quite so much her forte. It was even good practice, for when the role fell onto her shoulders.

What she didn't like was the fear that kept creeping in to her mind and heart whenever she stopped to think about her brother's absence. It wasn't so much feeling the lack of support of a big brother, the way she knew the others were feeling – how could it be, when Alice had never really seen Will as her big brother. There was only four months between them, and even though Will had been at camp years longer than her, and was a year-rounder against her summer stays, he'd never felt older.

No, Alice wasn't suddenly adjusting to the lack of a big brother to tell her what to do (and be the one to comfort her when something got to her, because teenage hormones were stupid and she hated them).

Instead, she was scared, because she had a terrible track record for head counsellors, and Will being off on some quest or other rather than staying in the relative safety of camp was not helping her sleep soundly at night.

He was her third head counsellor, and neither of the other two had lived to leave camp.

She still remembered Lee, taking her by the hand after she'd been claimed and leading her straight into their cabin, showing her a bunk and letting her jump on the bed even when the frame started to creak in protest. It had been a massive change from her mom threatening that her bed would break and she wouldn't get another one if she did break the perfectly serviceable one that she had. So massive, in fact, that when she'd challenged Lee about it, he'd challenged her right back.

"Those beds won't break," he'd told her, and that had spurred Alice on to greater and greater bounces, feeling the wood groan and flex beneath the mattress.

He'd been right. Her bunk had never broken, no matter what she'd done on it.

Lee's skull had, and that was a thought she was packing straight back into its box again.

When he'd discovered her oboe – not that it had taken him long at all, and Alice hadn't exactly been hiding it – he'd shown her where she could keep it, and dug out sheet music so she had new things to try.

The oboe and the flute sounded good together, and they'd duetted more than once. Alberto Ginastera was a staple, but there were other pieces labelled anon that Lee had plucked out of who-knew-where, and she didn't know if he'd written those himself, or if he'd got them from Apollo, but she'd never come across them outside of camp and that felt like it meant something.

She hadn't played any of those pieces since his death. She wasn't sure if she ever would. The flute wasn't exactly a rare instrument, but the sound of one always, always, made her think of her big brother, her first and longest-running head counsellor, and the idea of duetting with one… Maybe she would one day, but not yet.

Because Lee was dead and that had hurt, but it was war and death was an inevitability (not that that made it any less painful). Other cabins also lost head counsellors, they weren't special for that.

But then there was Michael, and he couldn't have been more different from Lee, but he'd been her big brother, too (in age if not stature). Running to him after a bad dream wasn't the same as running to Lee, because Lee was good with words while Michael spoke louder with actions, but the comfort had been there all the same.

Michael had a temper and a reputation, but even when Alice had pushed and pushed and pushed, he'd never snapped at her or her bullshit. She still remembered the day he let her braid his hair, the way that he called out her brazen lie about how his hair was the longest in the cabin with a deadpan look and nothing more.

She still had the photos that Lee had taken, but they were only plastered over her wall at her mom's house, along with so many others from her summers at camp. There weren't any photos of their dead siblings in the cabin, because that hurt too much.

Not her – she liked the reminder, the memories of the good times where they were just siblings messing around and not child soldiers fighting and dying in war – but others. Will, mostly, if she cared enough to point fingers, and on some days she did but most of the time she didn't.

Because if Will was the reason, then it meant that Will was still alive, and Alice had lost two head counsellors (and many more siblings) already. It almost seemed like a thing, that cabin seven had done something to upset the Fates enough that things kept going wrong for them.

First Lee, then Michael. Then there'd been her dad turned mortal, although Alice had managed to miss the entire thing and only found out about it when she got to camp and discovered she'd missed him by mere days (she'd also missed another battle, and she couldn't be sad about that. Mad, because she had three more little siblings now, and sending them off to fight without older siblings to protect them felt wrong).

Now Will was off on a quest, and it had been bad enough last summer, when he'd left her in charge on the backline of the battlefield while he slunk around the front lines. She'd been certain he was going to die, then, and might have spent several nights in his bed once they were finally all free from night-and-day infirmary duties, clinging to her almost-twin and reassuring herself that she hadn't lost him, too.

Him throwing himself into a dangerous situation again was not helping her nerves at all. It felt like he'd already taken all of his allocated luck in surviving last summer's war, and that this quest was just tempting fate.

Alice didn't know if she trusted fate enough to bring her brother back again. Given their track record of dying head counsellors, she leaned towards not a chance in Hades and prayed, instead. Prayed to the Fates, to Apollo, to Hades and Thanatos and any other god that cared to listen and maybe, maybe do something about it.

Maybe, they'd break the pattern.

I immediately thought of Cabin Seven's tendency to have their head counsellors die, so that's my twist on this prompt! This fic is set the same summer as TON, although later on, and is during whatever quest Will ends up on (this could easily be seen as a companion fic to Stolen God or Eclipse, if you so desire, or any other story where Will goes on a quest that summer).

Thanks for reading!
Tsari