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

This fic would not have existed without the encouragement of Stereden, who has also done a podfic of it, which can be found in its AO3 crosspost /works/57201739 or on my tumblr tsarisfanfiction!

Lee discovered the problem with borrowing Michael's bow as soon as he and Tris returned to the foyer of the Empire State Building and he saw the grip Kayla had on it. He didn't even have to ask to know that there was no way the girl was going to give him her favourite brother's prized bow just because he said Michael had said he could use it.

The only person that was going to convince her would be Michael himself.

"Kayla," he called, walking over to her. She turned sharply, eyeing him suspiciously. "Michael's awake."

Immediately, her eyes went large and hopeful, and Lee directed her to the elevator so she could see him for herself. Michael could take care of the rest – he'd see her still holding his bow and make sure it ended up in Lee's hands before the battle started.

Then, he went to seek Joy and Robyn out, because they had to divide their cabin in two and he had some ideas, but he didn't know where all of the younger ones would be best suited. His sisters would know that better.

"We need Kayla down here," Robyn said when he got the three of them into a huddle, leaving Tris and the others to keep an eye on the injured. She didn't seem at all happy about it, though. "I know she's only eleven, but with Michael and Nathan down, she is our best archer. She'll give Michael a run for his money in a few years without a doubt."

Joy nodded, although she was clearly equally unhappy about it. Lee had been hoping otherwise, but if he was honest, he'd already known Kayla was good – she even had Clarisse's praise, as veiled as it was, and that wasn't easy to get.

"Sally needs to go up," he said, and neither of them protested that. Sally wasn't the best healer either – her skills were firmly in poetry with not much branching out into either healing or combat – but she could keep Will company and fetch and carry for him if nothing else. "How about Austin?"

"Also a better fighter than a healer," Robyn said. "I'd like to put him out of the way with Will and Sally but I don't think we can justify it." She eyed him. "Honestly, you should be up there, Lee."

Lee shook his head. "I'm fighting," he said. "Michael's lending me his bow."

"That's why you sent her to see him," Joy noted, the smile on her face shining in amusement as she signed. Lee shrugged. He was not above using siblings against each other to manipulate them, and both sisters had been campers long enough to know that. Kayla would no doubt figure it out quickly, too.

"Anyone else we can spare?" he asked hopefully, and tried not to be too dejected when they both shook their heads in tandem. He'd expected that answer, having gone through the youngest two individually.

"Not injured enough to excuse it, and we do need healers down here in the first instance," Robyn grumbled. "I want Elias on healing before fighting where possible, though."

Joy nodded, and Lee wasn't going to argue.

"So – primary fighters," he said. "Me, Kayla, you-" he gestured to Joy. "Who else?"

"Sam," Joy signed, a sign he didn't recognise before finger-spelling their brother's name out. She hadn't known Sam long enough to determine a name sign for him the last time they'd spoken about him, last year – before the battle in camp. Lee quickly added the sign to his mental bank of name signs.

"And Austin," Robyn finished. "He's not picking up healing very quickly. Why aren't you putting yourself as a healer, Lee?"

He grimaced. "I'm still running on empty on that front," he admitted. "Turns out we're solar powered enough that being cut off from the sun for a year did a number on my healing. I can do something in a pinch, but that's going to have to be assumed a last resort that might not work properly."

Both of them looked furious. Robyn was almost spitting as she forced out her next words.

"So. Healers." She gestured to herself. "I'm in charge. Alice and Elias will be able to keep up with battle triage and healing, too. How's Tris right now?"

"Stronger than me but weaker than he could be," Lee admitted. "But keep him in your team. He can still triage no problem, at least."

"So could you," Robyn noted. "You don't need energy for that, and you're the most experienced of all of us."

She had a point but Lee still shook his head. "We need two leaders down here," he said, with an apologetic look at Joy, who would be leading the archers, if Lee wasn't barging in. She waved him off – they both knew that she'd have to keep using her voice in battle, especially with her hands full of bow, and it would be difficult for her.

"The Ares kids had better be bringing you some spare armour," she signed, though, and the thought hadn't occurred to Lee. Neither he nor Clarisse had mentioned armour or weapons to Ellis when he'd called. He shrugged and she frowned.

"You need something," she insisted, tapping at his chest, which also drew his attention to the fact that he was still in a purple t-shirt, unlike everyone else's orange, beneath their armour.

"I'll figure something out before the fighting starts," he said. "Also – where's Michael's quiver? I know he's out of arrows but I'll need something."

Both girls hesitated and glanced at each other, before Robyn groaned. "Back at the hotel," she said. "We took his and Nathan's off of them and didn't bother to bring them with us, given they're not going to be fighting."

"Okay," Lee sighed. "I'll go-"

Two hands latched onto his arms firmly, and both his sisters glared at him.

"You will not," Joy signed one handed, the negative a harsh movement.

"Sam!" Robyn yelled, and their younger brother hurried over to them. "Go back to the hotel, we need all the discarded quivers. Take someone with you."

Lee did not want his younger siblings going out in such a small group, but Sam nodded and disappeared, snagging Alice and Elias in the process. Austin tried to follow, but Sally held him back and he huffed, sitting down on the floor and fiddling with his saxophone instead.

"You need to rest, if you're insisting on fighting tonight," Robyn told Lee firmly. "And let me see those wrists of yours. Michael's bow is no joke and you haven't drawn a bow in too long." He didn't fight her as she unravelled Chris' neat bandaging and sang a healing song over each wrist. Her healing was far more powerful than Lee remembered it being, but it did what it needed to. The bruising and welts barely changed, but he could feel the bones and muscles strengthening.

It was almost more than he knew Will could do, and Robyn wasn't that good. From the glance she sent the sun, she knew it, too.

Well, neither of them were going to complain if Apollo decided to bolster their healing for the war. Nor would anyone else. Lee sent their father a silent prayer of thanks.

They separated. Robyn sought out Sally and sent her up to Olympus, complete with instructions to get Kayla to come back before dark, before snagging Tris and taking him over to the area of the foyer she had commandeered as the triage centre. Lee and Joy only had Austin to round up for the moment, but that was okay, because Lee needed to know what his little brother could do.

Austin didn't have a bow, just the saxophone. But he did also have a quiver of darts tucked away, and at some coaxing revealed a blowpipe hiding inside the saxophone.

"Dad gave it to me!" he proclaimed, gesturing at the saxophone as a whole. "I have another one for playing, but this one…" He proceeded to explain all of the weird and wonderful features the dubbed combat saxophone had hidden inside it. A lot of them weren't actually the most useful for head on fighting, but between the blowpipe and the saxophone, Austin had enough that Lee was at least as confident as he could be that the younger boy would be able to keep himself alive whilst taking down a couple of monsters, and that was by far the most important thing.

Lee was not planning on losing any siblings today. If possible, he didn't want to lose anyone at all, but he was uncomfortably aware that it was war, and war didn't tend to end without casualties.

They were trying not to kill the opposing demigods, he'd discovered, and while he didn't want them dead, he was uncomfortably aware that at least some of Kronos' demigods had no such qualms, which put them at an automatic disadvantage. It was much, much harder to put someone down and keep them there without killing them.

Over the afternoon, more and more demigods trickled in. The trio that had gone out to retrieve the abandoned quivers were quick to return, and Joy had snagged Sam while the other two were directed towards Robyn and Tris. Lee had to loosen the straps on Michael's quiver before it would fit around his waist snugly; Nathan's quiver would have fit him better without the adjustments, but it was also bloody, and given his brother's reaction when he'd seen him earlier, he didn't think it was right to use his.

Michael, at least, had given permission to use his bow, and Lee could extrapolate that out to his quiver without feeling guilty about it.

Kayla finally came back down from Olympus a couple of hours later, when most of the demigods had arrived and were starting to trap the area. The Hephaestus campers were working closely with the Hermes kids to make some of the roads in the vicinity all but impassable, so they could focus their forces on the section that was easier to hold.

"Michael said to give you this," she said, and she clearly didn't like it, but she did hold out Michael's bow to Lee, who accepted it gratefully. "Don't damage it. He got it from Dad."

Lee knew that. It had caused a bit of a stir in the cabin at the time, when Michael had woken up one morning with a bow in his arms and no inclination to let anyone else near it. It had taken them several weeks to get him to actually keep it in the armoury where it was supposed to be – Lee was certain that Chiron had known about the bow being kept in the cabin despite the no bows in cabins rule, but the centaur had never confronted them about it. Lee wasn't actually sure if anyone outside of the cabin knew it was a godly gift – Michael didn't advertise it.

Even now, years later and far less prickly towards his siblings than he'd been when he was eleven, Michael was still protective of his bow. There were very few people allowed to hold it, and even less allowed to shoot it. Lee hadn't been in the latter category before, and appreciated his brother extending it to include him for the war.

"I know," he said. "I'll take care of it."

There was always a risk of weapons breaking, even ones gifted by gods – Lee remembered when Clarisse's first spear had broken, the combination of her shock that it could, and her fear that Ares would be angry about it. She'd become a lot more protective of the next one she'd received. But as a general rule, weapons from the gods tended to be hardier, and more difficult to break.

Lee had no intention of testing just how much Michael's bow could take.

He tested the weight of it, even though there wasn't really any need. The bow had been Michael's from eleven to sixteen, and hopefully for many more years to come, and had adapted to what Michael could comfortably draw over the years. Lee wasn't Michael, but it still drew back smoothly, feeling the same weight as his own bow. He held it at full draw long enough for his arms to start to shake, mostly to test his own endurance as well as the bow's settled weight, before releasing the tension slowly, very aware of Kayla's judgemental look.

She was testing him, making sure she could trust him with Michael's bow, and that wasn't really her call to make but Lee wasn't going to call her out on it. He was curious about her own background, though, because she was clearly an experienced archer. She also used a modern recurve, rather than any of the more traditional unsighted bows favoured by most of the cabin, and that implied formal training before camp, in a mortal setting.

"When did you start shooting?" he asked her as he settled Michael's bow on his back, secure and out of the way for the moment.

She shrugged at him. "Don't remember," she said. "Da's an archery coach."

It took Lee a moment to parse the words and realise that she had to be one of the demigods with two parents of the same gender. They weren't common, but they weren't unheard of, either. He'd had a few siblings with two dads before, although Kayla was the only one in camp right then.

"That explains a lot," he said. "You're good."

"I know," she said, puffing her chest out with no sense of modesty at all. "I'm going to be better than Michael one day."

Lee didn't think Michael was planning on letting his superiority be stripped away quite that easily, but he also thought that Michael recognised that she might – otherwise he'd be treating her more like Nathan, who'd always said that and been laughed off because he was good but Michael was better. If Michael had laughed Kayla off, he didn't think she'd be so attached to him.

"Michael's the best archer I know," he said neutrally, instead of taking sides. "Did you know he can even outshoot some of Lady Artemis' Hunters?" Not all of them, of course – the blessing of a goddess and centuries of archery experience did put several of them in a different league entirely – but the younger ones he had definitely outshot before. Lee remembered the last time it happened.

He also remembered the resulting carnage, because Michael had not been a graceful victor and the Hunters hadn't taken kindly to it. Never let it be said that Michael couldn't cause a lot of chaos with his attitude sometimes, and it wasn't always with Clarisse.

"Are they that good?" Kayla sniffed, and Lee was glad that none of the girls in question were in earshot right then, because that would've sparked its own fight if they had been.

"They're very good," Lee said firmly. "They all have Lady Artemis' direct blessing."

He recognised that look on Kayla's face. It was the same one that Michael pulled when he sensed a challenge.

"Why don't we arrange another competition after the war?" he said pointedly, knowing that Kayla wasn't going to settle until she'd tried to outshoot the Hunters, but also that trying to outshoot them in a war would be a very, very bad idea. "Michael would love another go at them, too."

That got her to pause, although she squinted at him suspiciously. "Fine," she said mulishly. "After the war."

Hopefully he could sort something light-hearted out with Thalia before Kayla tried to issue any challenges herself. Not all of the Hunters were automatically anti-campers, it would just be a case of working with Thalia on the topic.

While the Hunters hadn't made an appearance, the rest of the campers seemed to have arrived, and Lee left Kayla under Joy's watch, asking both of them to divvy up whatever arrows they had left that were useable between those of them that weren't in Olympus. The fighters would need more than the healers, but all of them needed at least some.

Clarisse was prowling around just outside the door, glowering up at the sky as the sun got lower, past the tops of the highest buildings. It wouldn't be long before sundown, and Kronos' attack, and the Ares cabin hadn't arrived yet. Chris was leaning against the doorway, watching her but not intercepting her movement.

Maybe Lee should do the same, but he moved to join her instead.

"You need some fucking armour," Clarisse greeted him as he fell into step next to her. "And some arrows." Her eyes flickered to the quiver on his hip, one that Lee knew she recognised. Michael had used the same one for years.

"The cabin are redistributing what we've got left at the moment," Lee told her. "I'll have arrows soon."

She huffed. "That's the problem with you archers," she muttered, not for the first time and no doubt not for the last, either. It never failed to wind Michael up, but Lee could see her point – it was frustrating when they ran out of ammunition, but until the war, it had never been a problem. Not in the safety of camp. "The bastard really isn't fighting?"

Her eyes were on Michael's bow now, and she didn't look comfortable about it.

"Not tonight," Lee said. "I don't think we'll be able to keep him back longer than that, though. Broken ribs or no."

"Bastard heals fast," Clarisse acknowledged. She looked away from Lee and his borrowed weapons, scanning the streets instead – searching for her siblings.

Lee understood. He was searching, too. If Silena had found a way to get rid of them, despite them being on guard, then they were in trouble. It was no exaggeration to say that they needed the Ares cabin to bolster their front line if they were going to hold the block overnight – or even just the building itself.

Silver flickered in the corner of his eye, and a familiar face appeared in front of them, just out of range of Clarisse's spear.

With the recent revelation that some of the Hunters were his sisters, Phoebe was pretty much at the top of Lee's suspect list. The red-haired Hunter had been a Hunter for as long as he'd been a camper, and he was certain that she'd seen hundreds, if not thousands, of years. She was high enough up the hierarchy without being openly special that it would make sense.

She also was particularly dismissive of camp, and the Apollo cabin in particular. She and Michael got into howling arguments that turned into fights, and separating them was hard.

Her eyes lingered on Lee for a moment, before she focused on Clarisse.

"Thalia sent me to alert you," she said. "Your cabin reached the Plaza Hotel and are now on the way here. Silena is leading them."

Clarisse's prowling came to a halt, and a satisfied glint lit up in her eye. "Good," she said, and Lee was very glad he wasn't her enemy right then. She turned her head back to Chris, who was in sight and just about earshot. "Warn Drew!"

That was going to get messy, quickly.

Phoebe disappeared again, blending into the cityscape unfairly well for someone wearing silver, as Clarisse then turned to Lee.

"Do you want to still be here when they get here?" she asked him, and that was the question. Silena didn't know that she'd been exposed, and if she didn't see him or Tris, she wouldn't have any reason to – until Drew lashed out, which wouldn't take any time at all.

He didn't really want to see that fight, and he didn't really want to see Silena ever again.

There would be no way to avoid her, though. It would be better, in the long run, to get the confrontation over with now, before the fighting. Before a distraction got someone killed.

He and Silena had already caused one death between them, and that was one death too many. Lee wouldn't let there be another.

"No," he admitted. "But I'm staying anyway."

She clasped his shoulder firmly. "I'm with you," she said.

Thanks for reading!
Tsari