This might’ve been said before, but I bet Percy’s birthday is bittersweet for him. I mean, the Battle of Manhattan happened on his birthday. Lots of demigods died. It was tragic, and having that on your birthday is…a lot. So I hope Percy’s doing okay with that.

On the other hand, it’s his birthday! It marks his birth, his anniversary with Annabeth, and the day his prophecy came true and Kronos was defeated.

Happy Birthday Percy Jackson!

August 18 is such a big day for everyone in the Percy Jackson fandom! Percy’s birthday, and the day Percabeth finally happened! So, I am wishing the happiest birthday to Perseus Jackson, who absolutely deserves the best! And, celebrating the anniversary of Percabeth!

But let’s not forget what also happened on August 18. The Battle of Manhattan. Dozens of demigods died. Micheal Yew. Silena Beauregard. Ethan Nakamura. Luke Castellan. And so many unnamed others. It’s not only Percy’s “birth anniversary” — it’s their “death anniversary.”

Anyhow, happy birthday Percy!

halfbloodreminders:

teamannabeth:

until-tomorrow-then:

knaveofmogadore:

hoelympus:

percytheslytherin:

1. Remind me that Luke’s mom doesn’t know her son is dead.

Or

2. Remind me that Sally doesn’t know if her son is alive.

Or

3. Bring up the movies.

Or 4. Remind me that they never found Michael yew’s body.

also 5. Bring up that the Apollo cabin has canonly lost more campers than anyone else

And 6. No one knows that Leo is actually alive

or 7. Remind me that Beckendorf brought out a picture of Silena to look at just before he died

hey cool i’ve covered most of this. nice.

wisegirldanielle:

Does anyone else just lie awake at night and think about how Will became cabin leader at 12 and how he just how to take on the whole big stressful responsibility?

No? Just me? Okay then…

NO BC

Mans big bro died in bigass explosion, wich was caused by the camps hero. Said hero then drags him to pray and do something else to annabeth (which literally anybody Apollo’s kid could done) and leave his YOUNGER sibling screah their brothers body, so he was taken away form his sibling the time they needed him the most

Michaels body was never found theofore he never got traditional funreals, I can just imagine the guilt he must felt because of that.

Will is twelve, oldest brother, head counselor, head medic of the camp. He had so much responsibilities at such a young age, and I’m not even gonna start talking about all the emotial trauma and ptsd he probally has.

Okay I thought little more about Will and his tattoo and what if Will took in honor of his siblings who died in the battle of Manhattan. of course not right after it he was like eleven, but like when hes little older.

Because I dont think he would take the tattoo just randomly and children of Apollon seems to be close so it would make sense

Breaking Through

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians

Rating: Gen

Genre: Family

Characters: Lee Fletcher, Michael Yew

Lee’s newest brother needs something. He isn’t going to stop until he works out what.

For @flashfictionfridayofficial​ #157: Need More Space. I’m having a lot of fun figuring out some backstory and history for these boys, I have to admit. This was written on tablet, which hates Tumblr and vice versa, so will sort out the formatting when my laptop decides to behave again, whenever that’ll be… Word count 787. 

*****

Lee’s newest sibling was tiny, and very, very prickly. He hadn’t told them anything about himself yet - not his age, where he came from, or whether he had any mortal family - but all the signs were pointing to yet another abused demigod child struggling to adjust to his new reality.

The only things they did know was that his name was Michael Yew, and that despite not sharing any physical characteristics with their father, Apollo’s legendary temper seemed to have been inherited by this particular son. Maybe it was just because he was short (Lee had heard that short people tended to be angrier but that tidbit of information had come from a smirking John from cabin eleven and Lee’s spine had prickled so he didn’t think it was true), but Michael seemed to be on a hair trigger where anything and everything could set him off.

Several people, from both cabin seven and other cabins alike, had ended up in the infirmary with arrows where they shouldn’t be, and Michael had only been in camp a week.

The other thing he’d clearly inherited from Apollo, aside from the temper, was archery. Lee had been one such unlucky sap with an arrow through his thigh when he’d tried to talk to Michael and made the mistake of doing so when a bow was in reach. It was a mistake he’d just made again. Michael seemed to enjoy making thighs into pincushions (maybe he secretly liked seeing them fall down to his eye level).

Emily Teague, his eldest sibling and the current head counsellor, shook her head with a sigh as she patched him up. “You need to give him more space,” she told him. “Let Michael come to us when he’s ready to open up. Trying to force him will only make things worse. He’s still adjusting to everything.”

The pale golden glow faded from his thigh and she pulled her hands back, passing him a small square of ambrosia. Lee nibbled on it obediently, the familiar yet homesick-inducing taste of his mom’s homemade cottage pie sliding over his tongue, and frowned.

He didn’t think Emily was right, this time. He’d been at camp long enough to see others adjusting and this didn’t feel right. His sister was smart, and Lee knew she’d tried to help Michael settle in, too, before he snarled and swore at her every attempt, but giving Michael space didn’t seem like the right thing to do.

Michael had taken longer to shoot him the second time.

Their tiny little gremlin of a new brother needed something from them, and Lee wasn’t going to stop until he worked out what.

It earned him three more arrows and three more reminders from Emily, and took him another ten days of poking at a very volatile younger brother, but eventually Lee was rewarded with another small fact about Michael Yew: he was nine years old.

Considering his height, Lee had been sure he was younger than that, but his spine hadn’t prickled so it was the truth.

The second breakthrough came two weeks and another arrow later: his mom was alive but his stepdad was, to use a censored equivalent of Michael’s description, a bastard (yes, that was the censored version; where a nine year old had learned that language, Lee didn’t know, but his own vocabulary had been impressively and colourfully expanded since knowing Michael). There were also younger half-siblings (mortal ones) in the equation and it didn’t take long to put two and two together.

Lee finally discovered his angle of attack.

Clearly, Michael’s idea of half-siblings was not a positive one. It took a single conversation with Emily (Lee knew this wasn’t something he could do alone) to get the ball rolling, and immediately Operation Prove We Do Want Michael Around began in earnest.

Lee made sure he was at the spearhead of it; he’d been the one to reach out the most persistently, and he wasn’t retreating any time soon.

It began small, making sure that Michael wasn’t overwhelmed by the attention, but no less vital for that. Invitations to join activities were no longer put off by Michael’s attitude and renewed in enthusiasm, small gifts kept ending up in his bunk (if Lee saw Michael angrily dash away tears one time, he kept that to himself, especially when he realised nothing got thrown away), and the entirety of cabin seven joined the mission to make sure their newest, youngest brother realised that he was one of them and wouldn’t be tossed away or shunned.

In short, the thought that Michael needed more space was completely overturned; it wasn’t space their little brother needed, it was love and a real family.

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Rating:Teen
Genre:Angst/Family
Characters: Apollo, Michael Yew

The war is over, and Apollo has a body to find.

My response to this week’s @flashfictionfridayofficial prompt, “far from perfect”. This one clocks in at 999 words, according to MSWord. This is actually the start of an AU I’ve been toying with which may or may not get expanded on in the future.  It’s come to my attention that the amount of Apollo&Michael fics in existence is, honestly, tragic - barring a single fic on FFN from 2010, I’m the only person I can find who’s ever written them, so there might be a bit more of these two’s relationship appearing from me!  Naming this thing was a real pig; a title was eventually taken from the lyrics of Into The West.

There’s now a discord server for all my fics, including this one!  If you wanna chat with me or with other readers about stuff I write (or just be social in general), hop on over and say hi!

Williamsburg Bridge, or what was left of it, was a disaster zone.  Mortals milled around, gaping at the destruction that had occurred while they were asleep. More than one was screaming about their car – either severely damaged or washed away in the East River below. Frantic calls for people to answer as friends and families tried to find each other again reached Apollo’s ears from where he was standing precariously on one of the still-intact suspension cables that spanned the gap where the bridge should have been.

Like them, he was there for loved ones.  His heart screamed in agony and a little bit of sympathy for the worried mortals, but while they had hope, he had none.  All he would find were bodies, dead and cold.  Already he had found an arm – just an arm, brutally torn away from the rest of the body – belonging to Nathan, and the knowledge of his son’s fate weighed down upon him heavily.  Somewhere in the river below him was the other missing one – his eldest, Michael. None of his siblings had found him (they’d found Elias, and Sally, but Michael’s body had eluded their tired searching), and while they tended to the still-living, Apollo had taken it upon himself to continue the search.

Not that anyone knew he was doing it.  The gods were in an emergency council, in a ruined throne room with the son of Poseidon making outrageous but justified demands of the gods and thoroughly distracting Zeus from the fact that not all of Apollo was in that room, no matter that he was supposed to be.  When he found Michael – when, not if – he would take him back to camp personally. He could, at least, spare his surviving children the trauma of preparing the body for the funeral.

With the distant frantic cries of mortals ringing in his ears, he jumped down, a fall that would kill a mortal – had killed demigods – and came to a floating halt just above the water.  It was clogged with bridge debris – tarmac and rods of metal and unfortunate, mangled, cars – and looked like a particularly ugly, haphazard dam.  Both Elias and Sally had been caught up in that, alongside many other demigods, from Kronos’ army, and their bodies were long since retrieved.  Apollo made a cursory check, to make sure, but he knew, deep down, that Michael wasn’t there.

He followed the estuary’s flow, walking on the water and casting out all of his senses for something, anything, that would tell him where his son had ended up.  Michael was small, and the waterway was big, but Apollo was a god and he would findhim.

An empty quiver, floating on the water with a broken strap, was his first clue, and Apollo snatched it up, instantly getting an impression of Michael, confirming the ownership. It was battered, damaged by what looked like fire and metal alike, and Apollo pressed it against his chest in despair as he continued his slow search down the river.

Michael was good at hiding; he was small, lightweight, and loved to perch in high places where no-one could see him.  It made him a fantastic archer in the grounds of Camp Half-Blood, where trees provided perfect vantage points, but Williamsburg Bridge’s provided vantage points were far from perfect.  His son had been unable to fight the way he was best suited to, and it had ended in tragedy.  That same, small, lightweight body remained good at hiding even now.

Apollo almost missed him, even with all of his senses on full alert.  Likely, part of him hadn’t wanted to see the broken body washed up on the bank, surrounded by more bridge debris, but he had and he didn’t waste time travelling by foot, instead disappearing and reappearing in a flash of light.

It was not a pretty sight. Some injuries were older, bandages wrapping around them and proving that he’d survived until at least the first lull in battle, where emergency treatment had been possible, but others were open to the elements, from his fall or shortly before it.

Michael’s body was crumpled unnaturally, all his limbs twisted and disembodied in a way that screamed shattered bones, and part of his chest was caved in.  A gash, angry and vivid against the too-white skin, ran from temple to chin, deep enough for the glimmer of bone to be visible.  Tears welled up in Apollo’s eyes and he let them fall unchecked as he knelt reverently beside his son.  His fingers shook as he reached out to touch his cheek, brushing damp, unruly hair away from Michael’s face.  It had escaped the ponytail he favoured at some point and clung like strands of web to the skin.

At the first contact, a spark rushed through Apollo, originating at his fingertip, where it touched clammy skin, and zipping straight the way through his essence, screaming out at him the whole time.

He choked back a disbelieving sob.

“Michael?” he rasped, voice raw, as he tentatively cupped a pale cheek in his hand.  His son’s eyes, their beautiful deep brown so like his mother’s, were closed as if he was in sleep, and Apollo’s tears grew heavier as he felt the faint, so faint, song of life still straining to sound a final few notes.

Somehow, two days after falling, his son wasn’t dead yet. Yet – his body was broken beyond mortal repair, or even demigodly; it was only a matter of time before it finally gave out.

The council was still going strong; no-one was looking at him.  No-one knew he wasn’t all there.

The Ancient Laws forbade interference.

Apollo had lost too many children to the war.

He made a decision.

“You’re not going to die,” he promised, cradling the broken body close in his arms and extending his essence to wrap around Michael in his entirety.  He was so small.  “I won’t let that happen.”

A flash of light later, they were gone.

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Trials of Apollo
Rating:Teen
Genre: Family, Friendship
Characters: Michael Yew, Will Solace, Apollo, Nico di Angelo

During the Battle of Manhattan, Michael Yew fell into the East River; his body was never found.  Two years later, a homeless kid known only as Ferret has a chance encounter that changes everything he knows.

This was supposed to be a short Michael lives!AU because I refused to write another longfic when I have too many planned already.  At over 16k words, ‘short’ is not the word I’d use.  I’ve given Michael a bit of a dirty mouth, so a language warning on this one, as well as a panic attack.  Disclaimer that I have no idea about homeless culture in New York.

Reminder that there’s now a discord server for all my fics, including this one!  If you wanna chat with me or with other readers about stuff I write (or just be social in general), hop on over and say hi!

Ferret snarled at the asshole that had veered his car into a puddle and deliberately splashed muddy, gross, New York puddle water all over him.  “Screw you, too!” he spat after the vehicle as it sped away, straightening back on the road until it was in the middle of the carriageway where it belonged, leaving no doubt that the assault had been entirely intentional.

He hated bastards like that. Being ignored?  Being ignored was normal.  Most people liked to pretend he didn’t exist, and Ferret wasn’t the biggest fan of that, but he’d learnt the hard way that it was better to the usual alternative – behaviour like that.  Why some assholes thought it was funny to pick on homeless kids, he’d never know, but he hated it.

Once upon a time, he’d retaliated far more viciously – he wasn’t afraid of fights, and he wasn’t afraid of starting fights – but then people had started calling the cops on him, and Ferret liked the cops even less.

The cops hated him, too. There was something about him that rankled them; it was probably the fact that Ferret was the only name he’d give them, and no matter how hard they investigated, they’d never got another name.

Ferret had let the investigations happen, until it became apparent they were going nowhere.

The cops didn’t know who Ferret really was – the problem was, Ferret didn’t know who he really was, either.

His first memory was waking up on the bank of the East River, seeing some unfamiliar faces, and then passing straight back out again.

His second memory was waking up behind a dumpster, with some rugged, rough-looking older men sitting around him.  There had been pain – pain in his arm, pain in his chest, pain in his leg – and when he’d tried to sit up, automatically taking the situation in – four men, mostly malnourished but one guy looked like he could enter a brawl and win, between him and the main alley, unlikely he’d be able to leave easily – he’d almost screamed as his body protested loudly.

“Easy, kid!”  The guy that looked like he could win a brawl had caught him as he fell backwards, lowering him back down without his permission, not that he could do anything about it.

“Good to see you awake,” one of the others had croaked; he was missing several teeth, giving him a gappy mouth, and straggly light brown hair had looked like it was in sore need of a brush.  The matching beard had looked worse.  “You’ve been out of it for two days.”

“You got a name, kid?” a third had asked – this one the youngest-looking, barely into adulthood with cropped hair that would probably have been blond if it hadn’t been so dirty.

He hadn’t recognised any of them, and something inside him had bristled.  “The fuck are you guys?” he’d snapped, trying to push himself upright again, gritting his teeth against the pain.  Brawler had put a hand on his back, a support he had neither asked for nor was grateful for.  “What do you want?”

Fear.  That’s what had been coiling in his chest – the fear of the unknown, the fear that he had no idea how he’d got there, no idea why he was there, no idea who he evenwas.  His instincts had screamed danger at him, but he hadn’t been able to see any outright signs of it.

“We found you passed out by East River,” the fourth one – tall and lanky – had said quietly.  “Not far downstream from Williamsburg Bridge. From the looks of you, you were on it when it collapsed?”  It had been a question, but he hadn’t had an answer and said nothing, instead glowering at the man.  “We’ve kept an eye on the news, but no-one matching your description’s been on the missing list and you don’t look like you’ve got the money for hospital so we brought you to our patch.  None of us are in the business of letting kids die on the streets.  The name’s Rook.  This fella’s Jimmy” – the youngest of the four – “then you’ve got Scout” – the gappy-mouthed one – “and Mika.”  That was the brawler guy keeping him upright.  “So, you got a name, kid?”

“I’m not a fucking kid,” he’d snapped, on an impulse he didn’t recall but fell into the familiarity of as the words came out.

Jimmy had failed to stifle a snort.  “You look like you’re about twelve, kiddo.”

“I’m-”  The words had died in his throat as he realised he didn’t know how old he was.  He’d bristled instead.  “None of your fucking business.”

If the men had been insulted, they hadn’t shown it.  Instead, he’d got a fond eyeroll from James and Gappy that made him want to punch them. The pain pulsing through his body had stopped him.

“How long have you been on the streets?” Rook had asked.  “You got a patch of your own to get back to?”

Was he a street kid?  A glance down at what he was wearing had told him he probably was – a faded orange tee had been ripped and torn, whatever words had once been on it illegible.  His jeans hadn’t look much better, and there was a disturbing amount of staining on both items that had looked dark and potentially red.  Shoddy bandaging around his leg and arm was badly done, but there had been no way for him to try and re-do them with the pain in his arm.

“Hell if I know,” he’d grumbled, not realising what he’d admitted until the words were out and it was too late to take them back.

Four pairs of eyes had widened.  “Shit, you hit your head?” Mika had asked, a hand immediately brushing through his hair. He’d pulled away sharply and let out a pained hiss as his chest – his ribs, something told him, three cracked and one broken – had protested abruptly at the movement.  “What do you know?”

He’d bared his teeth at them and snarled.  Unfortunately, they’d taken that to mean exactly what he hadn’t wanted to let on – he knew nothing.

“In that case,” Rook had said, seemingly the leader of the little group of four.  “You’re staying with us.”

“The Hades I-”

“We’re not letting an injured kid out on the streets alone,” Rook had overruled him.  “If you want to bugger off once you’re healed up, that’s your call, but until then, you’re staying with us.”

And that, really, had been that.

That had been two years ago. Ferret – “we can’t keep calling you ‘kid’.  If you don’t know your name, we’ll give you a nickname.” “He’s small and feisty, how about Ferret?” – had ended up sticking with the four after he’d healed up, and they’d taught (re-taught?  He still didn’t know if he’d been a street brat before) him how to survive on the streets. Where the shelters were, which shelters to trust and which ones to steer clear of.  Safe places and danger zones, how to dodge the cops when they came calling.

None of them knew how old he was, despite two years of checking the news for missing kids, and then going back even further than the destruction of the Williamsburg Bridge in case he’d been on the streets before that, there was no record of a kid that looked like him at all – black hair he kept in a short pony, barely brushing his shoulders when loose, brown eyes, and undeniably short.  The men had, eventually, settled on a guess around the thirteen mark, although Ferret protested it, which made him maybe-fifteen now.  He still hadn’t breached five foot, much to his frustration – compared to tall and lanky Rook, he really did look like a little kid.

Life on the streets was tough.  Ferret might not remember what it was like to not be on the street, but he still knew that the life he was living was rough – and it wasn’t made any easier by the Monsters.

He didn’t know what they were.  None of the other guys ever seemed to see them, and for the most part the things left him alone (although not always, and Ferret was glad he was a fast healer, even if that was something the others found a little odd about him – apparently a broken leg wasn’t supposed to heal perfectly in four weeks without any professional medical attention; Mika had been convinced he’d have a gammy leg for life but Ferret’s leg never bothered him after it healed up), but sometimes he got attacked by what everyone else invariably called untrained dogs, or crazed drunks.

No-one had ever called him out for killing them, even though he knew that was what he was doing.  Then again, when they died, they all turned to dust. He didn’t know what the others saw, but it certainly wasn’t that.  In the wreckage of the Williamsburg Bridge, he’d found a bronze-coloured weapon no-one else seemed to see, just a knife but it was something he could use and he was under no illusions that without it, he’d be long-dead.

Ferret wasn’t entirely sure he was sane; even if he knew what he was seeing, doubt crept in every time no-one else saw monsters masquerading as humans, as dogs – as pigeons, that one time a flock of something mean and nasty had come for him and only been scared off when he’d run into the subway just as a train had thundered past, echoing in the tunnel and sending the birds packing.  His fast healing meant he didn’t so much as scar from the encounters, either, and more than once he started to wonder if it was all in his head.

They’d never found a head injury – not that he’d trusted the others near his head for several months, so any signs of it would have been long gone by then, anyway – but considering he already had one glaring brain problem (two, if you counted the fact that reading was a real headache and letters wouldn’t stop swimming around long enough for him to make out the words; most of the research into missing kids was being done by his four pseudo-guardians because Ferret inevitably started tearing up papers or narrowly missing library computer monitors with his fist when he got frustrated) another wasn’t as far off the cards as he’d have liked.

Soaking wet – considering it was August, New York had entirely too many puddles for asshole drivers to splash all over homeless kids with barely any spare clothing to change into – he stropped back to their patch, his meagre collection of pilfered earnings stuffed in his backpack.

The advantage of being small for his age (he assumed, although even if the others were right and he was fifteen, not even being five foot was far too fucking short), was that he was good at getting around unnoticed.  He was also very fit and strong for his size – jimmying open windows, sneaking into unguarded houses and snatching cash and food wherever he could find them was almost disturbingly easy.

Rook, Scout and Jimmy didn’t look quite so malnourished any more.  Ferret considered it repayment for looking after him when they’d found him, and for still looking out for him two years later.  Monsters aside, people tended to leave him alone when the other four were with him – especially Mika, who still had his brawler’s appearance. Ferret provided the food and cash; they provided the shelter, safety and experience.

He’d had to go a decent way out of their patch this time – stealing in the same areas all the time drew attention, he’d learnt the hard way after cops caught up with him one time and he’d spent the night in lock-up before one of the local shelter helpers (one of the good, safe, ones) had turned up with bail in hand and got him out of there.  The four older men had fussed over him for the rest of the day, ignoring him when he snapped at them to drop it.

Ferret had a hell of a temper and he knew it – the various dumpsters in the area knew it; several of them were dented from where he’d grabbed the heaviest things he could (or most breakable, depending on his mood) and hurled them against the metal.  He always hit the same place with every object, leaving some deep dents in the metal by the time he was done.  Other people knew it, too – it was the main reason he got into fights – but the four he lived with found him more adorable than threatening, for the most part.  They let him rage and destroy things and exhaust himself before offering him what food they had to spare and Mika (it was always Mika) squeezed him in a too-tight hug.

All the regular homeless in the area knew he was the quartet’s ‘kid’.

He was the other side of Manhattan now, though, the streets less familiar and his wariness ramped up to eleven as he trudged his way back towards his usual territory.  He’d made a good haul today, any residual guilt at stealing long since trampled by necessity and his hackles raised by the asshole driver to the point that he simply didn’t care.  He stomped as he walked, dodging puddles because his boots – the same ones he’d woken up in, his only ones – were getting worn through and he didn’t want soggy feet to go with soggy jeans and the too-big tee Scout had picked up from a homeless shelter for him a while back.  As always, other passers-by ignored him, preferring to pretend the scruffy kid didn’t exist than acknowledge his existence and the fact that yes, New York had a thriving population of homeless kids.

All the passers-by except the ones that weren’t, because there was hissing, snarling, and Ferret had his knife out of his pocket straight away even as he broke into a run. He didn’t know this area well enough to use it to his advantage in a fight, and a glance around showed him five women with snakes for legs (why did that exist) and three huge, black dogs with glowing red eyes bounding after him.

That was more than Ferret had taken on at once before, and he only had one knife.  Well, he had other things that counted as weapons – broken pieces of metal, mostly, with a few shards of glass – but he’d learnt the hard way that no matter how many of those he threw, they never did a lick against the Monsters.  Eight monsters at once… he couldn’t outrun the dogs, and the snake-ladies were unfairly quick, too.  He’d have to find somewhere to bottle-neck them, force them to fight one at a time, but he didn’t know of anywhere nearby where he could.

He skidded around a corner, nearly knocking over a kid all in black who he shoved out of his way desperately, to an indignant shout that quickly changed into a noise of alarm – that was different, but Ferret couldn’t focus on that right then, not when he was being chased.  His eyes constantly glanced around, looking for somewhere, anywhere, he could turn to his advantage so he hopefully survived the encounter, and he spotted a narrow alleyway half flooded with puddles.

Apparently he would be getting wet feet after all, but it was that or death, and Ferret could always dry his boots once he got back to his home patch.

He spun to a halt, knife out in front of him, and eyed the opening, waiting for the first Monster – one of the dogs, they were the faster of the two types chasing him.  Then he heard the commotion.

The dogs were yelping and snarling in the distance, and the snake women were hissing something fierce. Part of Ferret wanted to peer out of his hastily-chosen alley to see what was going on, but common sense honed by two years on the streets, where attention was bad, just wanted to lay low in the hopes of avoiding a fight he’d struggle to win.

His decision was made for him when a yelping dog with arrows – literal arrows – in its side came barrelling into the alley, jaw open and tongue lolling rabidly.  Ferret dodged to the side, leaping up to grab the side of a fire escape and monkeying his way up a few feet, out of immediate biting range of the huge beast, before dropping down onto its back, knife sweeping straight for the thing’s neck.

It disintegrated into dust, dropping him the last few feet to the ground.  Pain lanced through his ankle, but he grit his teeth and ignored it, whirling back around to face the mouth of the alley before the next Monster came through.

It didn’t.

Instead, the same goth-wannabe kid in his black clothes burst in, a wicked-looking black sword in his hand.  Dust glittered in his hair, the same kind Ferret was currently standing on.  Ferret raised his knife defensively – he’d never fought another human before, but unless something was hiding beneath those all-black, skull-motifed clothes, the kid seemed completely human to him.

Dark eyes zeroed in on his knife, then flickered down to the dust at his feet.

“You killed the Hellhound?” Ferret couldn’t place the accent, but it wasn’t a New Yorker’s.

“The fuck are you?” he snarled back, not letting the blade lower in the slightest.  “What did you see?”

Did this random kid – although he looked to be barely younger than Ferret’s own estimated age – actually see the Monsters for what they were?  Had Ferret finally, somehow, found someone else that saw what he did?

“I saw you being chased by a pack of Hellhounds and Dracaenae,” the kid said.  “We dealt with the rest, but one got past us.”

The Monsters had names.  Ferret almost couldn’t believe it – after two years, he had actual proof that they weren’t just all in his head.  One part of what the kid had to say, however, stuck out at him.  “We?”  The guy wasn’t alone?

As if in answer, another voice floated into the alley.  “Nico? Did you get it?”

“Nope!” the kid – Nico – chirped, sheathing his sword, “looks like the demigod they were after knows how to fight back.”

Demigod?

Ferret cautiously lowered his knife a little as the other’s weapon was put away.  The word was familiar, in a weird way – the sort of familiarity he had in faint spurts, but could never cling to long enough to work out why.

“Is he hurt?”  The other voice got louder.

“I’m fine,” Ferret snarled before Nico could try and check him over.  His ankle would heal up soon enough, and he had to get back before the others started worrying after him.  “Thanks, or whatever, but I’ve got places to be and you’re not it.”

Annoyingly, Nico was between him and the exit, but the other kid looked like he could be pushed past without much trouble, so Ferret limped forwards regardless.

“Wait!” Nico protested, moving to stand in front of him.  “There’s somewhere-”

Whatever he was about to say got cut off when his companion finally appeared.  Where Nico was all black and pale, the other guy was bright – blond waves tousled down around his ears, light blue eyes widened in what looked like shock, and he wore a bright orange tee that looked a lot like the one Ferret had woken up in, two years ago.

He couldn’t read the black print on it, not with the ripples of the fabric as the blond guy moved, dropping a longbow into the muddy puddle and stumbling a couple of steps forward, before staggering back against his companion.

“Michael?”

The name came out strangled, choked up with a bunch of emotions Ferret didn’t care to try and identify.

“What?” Nico demanded, and Ferret found himself under scrutiny again.  “Will, do you know this guy?”

“Michael?” the other guy – Will, apparently – repeated, and while the name was a question it didn’t feel like he was unsure about it.  “You’re alive?  Where- Why-  How?”

The level of emotion rolling off of him was palpable, and Ferret didn’t want to even begin dissecting it. The name rolled around in his head, but he couldn’t let his hopes rise.  What were the odds that, after two years of scouring everything he and the others could find to try and work out who he was, he’d happen to bump into someone in the street who knewhim?

Not worth placing any bet on, that was for sure.

“What are you on about?” he snapped, resuming his push forwards, but neither Nico nor Will moved out of his way, and when he tried to push past them, he found that both of them were stronger than they looked.  Ferret’s unusual strength for his size gave him no leeway in trying to get around them.

“Michael,please,” Will begged, and there were tears forming in those blue eyes.  “I know it’s you.  It’s me, Will.  Will Solace.”

Ferret’s “I don’t know you,” was drowned out by Nico.

“Are you sure it’s him?” the dark-clad teen asked.

“Yes,” Will near-whispered. “That-  That’s Michael’s camp necklace.”

Ferret’s knife-free hand flew to the leather thong around his neck, with its seven clay beads.  It was a bizarre collection, and he hadn’t ever been able to make heads nor tails of whatever the various designs on them were supposed to be, but he’d kept it anyway, because it was a clear link to the past he didn’t remember.

“It’smy necklace,” he snarled.  “Get out of my way before I make you.”

“But…” Will trailed off, looking absolutely heart-broken.  “Michael.  Why didn’t you come back?  I – we – thought you died.  What happened to you?”

Ferret attempted to muscle his way past them, but both of them were taller than him and Nico grabbed his arm.  “Don’t you dare walk away,” the taller boy snarled, suddenly feeling dangerous. Ferret shifted his grip on his knife. “You owe Will an explanation.”

“Nico-”

“Why?” Ferret demanded. “I don’t owe him-”

“Because he’s your brother!” Nico snapped, and Ferret was abruptly cut off as the word slammed into him.  Automatically, he looked at the other teen – about his assumed age, blond and bright with blue eyes, nothing like Ferret’s black hair and brown eyes – trying to find any indication that it was true.  “And when you didn’t come back after the war,” the other boy continued, clearly not done, “you left all the responsibility for your siblings on his shoulders. He was thirteen.”

Ferret should say so what and walk away.  The urge was there, but when he tried to say the words, they died in his throat. There was something about the blond boy, maybe the tears in his eyes, although Ferret wouldn’t call himself soft enough to be affected by that, that made him pause.

“I don’t fucking know,” he lashed out instead, tearing his eyes away from Will, because Will was difficult to look at, and focusing on Nico instead, because Nico was easy to snap at.  “I don’t fucking know.  I woke up on the edge of the East River one day and I don’t fucking know how I got there.”

There was a sharp intake of breath from Will’s direction, but he didn’t dare look back at him, not even when the teen asked “you don’t know?” in a small, quiet voice.  “Michael-?”

“Two fucking years, I’ve been trying to find out who the fuck I am,” he cut him off.  “And now I run into someone who’s apparently my brother, when those gods-damned Monsters come after me yet-a-fucking-gain.”  It felt ridiculous.  It felt contrived as hell, and Ferret’s hackles came up even though something hopeful was blooming in the back of his mind.

“Amnesia?” Will asked, and there was an edge of hysteria to his voice.  Ferret had heard it amongst the homeless often enough to recognise it when he heard it.  “Gods, Michael.”

“What of it?” he snapped back, making the mistake of turning his head again.  “Not one missing persons report.  Not one.”  And that hurt, that he – apparently – had family who had never even bothered to look for him.

“We looked,” Will told him, eyes bright and intense and earnest.  “We were fighting monsters on Williamsburg Bridge, and you fell when it broke.  We looked for you, I swear we looked for you.  We found your bow, your quiver… but we never found you, or the others that fell.”

“You gave up.”  It wasn’t a question, and Ferret’s heart ached when Will sobbed, tears spilling down his cheeks.

“It was war,” Nico interceded sharply.  “A lot of people died.  Mortals think it was freak weather, but it wasn’t.  It was a gods’ damned war and there was only so much any of us could do.”

Mortals? Ferret frowned.  “I don’t care,” he said, stepping back.  If he couldn’t go through them, he’d have to go around instead.  Rook and the others had to be worrying about him by now – they went looking for him whenever he went missing, they were the ones that had bothered the shelter helper into bailing him out of lock-up that one time.  They didn’t give up on him, even though he was rude to them more often than not.

“Come back to camp,” Will begged him.  “Chiron or Mr D. might be able to help your memories.  Dad might be able to help.”

Go with two kids who claimed they knew him – no matter how convincing their story was – that Ferret had no recollection of to a place he didn’t remember, or go back to his four pseudo-guardians?

It wasn’t even a choice. Ferret had lived on the streets far too long for that.

“No,” he said.

Nico bristled, but Will’s face crumpled.

“You-”

“I don’t even know you,” Ferret snapped at Nico, stepping back a pace and willing his ankle not to crumple beneath him.  “I’m going nowhere with you.”

“Living on the streets, being attacked at every turn, isn’t worth it!” the dark-haired boy snapped right back.  “Camp has protective barriers.”

“I don’t give a shit,” Ferret argued back.  “I’m notgoing.”

Nico snarled, but Will’s voice interrupted him.

“Okay,” the blond said, and he sounded upset about it but also resigned.  “We can’t make you-”

“Ican-”

“-if you don’t want to,” he continued, overriding Nico’s hair-raising interruption.  Ferret moved another limped step away from the teen.  “I wish you would, but we can’t force you.”

He seemed genuinely honest about it, but Ferret still warily kept his distance.

“But,” Will added, raising his hands to the back of his neck and snapping Ferret’s attention to the beaded necklace he wore, too.  There were eight beads on it, most of them the same designs as Ferret’s own.  “You should take this.”

“Will, are you sure?” Nico asked, suddenly sounding hesitant as the blond unfastened the cord and started shimmying beads off of until he had one in particular in his hand.  Will gave a watery smile to his companion.

“I’m sure there’s a spare or two back at camp,” he said, “and even if there isn’t… Michael gave more to the war than I did.  It doesn’t feel right that I have one and he doesn’t.”  He held out the bead for Ferret to take.

Ferret wasn’t sure what possessed him to accept it, but he let Will drop it into his palm.  It was no larger than the others on his necklace, clearly part of the set even though its design, like the rest of them, didn’t seem to be part of a matching set at all.  The bead itself was a reddish-grey, like natural clay no-one had bothered to paint, but on it was a painstakingly detailed rendition of the Empire State Building. Surrounding it were minute words – names, Ferret realised.

“Keep it,” Will insisted, curling Ferret’s fingers around it until he was holding onto it tightly.  “And… if you ever change your mind – Camp is on Long Island.  Follow the signs to the strawberry farm.”

“I still don’t see why we can’t grab him and go now,” Nico groused, and Ferret edged away further, only to stumble as his ankle flared up and find himself parked butt first in a muddle puddle.

Great.  Just what he needed.

“Michael!”  Will was on his knees next to him in a flash, worried hands hovering over his ankle.  “Let me help.”

Ferret swatted at him, surprised when he met air – he’d thought for sure Will meant helping him up, but instead the blond’s hands were heading towards his busted ankle, out of swatting range.  “I don’t need your help.”

“I can heal you,” Will told him bluntly.  “I know you heal faster than most people, but I’d be much happier if you weren’t hurt at all.”

Ferret flinched as his hands made contact.  “What the fuck are you-”

A golden glow – an actual glow – shimmered into existence around Will’s hands, and warmth sank into Ferret’s ankle.  Gobsmacked, he watched with wide eyes as the other teen hummed a familiar tune Ferret couldn’t name but somehow knew he knew and the pain in his ankle lessened, fading away into nothing.

Demigod, Nico had said earlier, called Ferret one, and he didn’t have a clue what that meant, but he knew that whatever Will was doing wasn’t something humans could do.

It made his head hurt to think about.

“There,” Will said after a few moments, humming dying away to nothing and the glow along with it.  “All fixed.”  He gave a shaky smile, which Ferret ignored as he cautiously scrambled back to his feet, tentatively putting weight on the ankle to find no twinge of warning at all.  Suddenly, Ferret’s fast healing didn’t seem so bizarre after all – not if his apparent brother could do that.

“Thanks,” he said gruffly. “Now fuck off.”

“I hope we’ll see each other again soon,” Will said earnestly, pulling himself to his feet using Nico’s elbow.  “Please, at least think about coming to Camp.”

Ferret huffed and turned away to stalk out of the alley, before a thought struck him and he paused.

“I have one question,” he admitted, not looking back.  He got the feeling that, if he did, he might cave to Will’s bright blue eyes after all. There was just something about them that felt like they could manage to change his mind.  “How old am I?”

There was a stunned silence from behind him; obviously, Will hadn’t expected the question.

Ferret wasn’t expecting the answer.

“Eighteen,” Will said quietly.  “Your nineteenth birthday is on the twentieth.”

That was… three days away. The same day he’d woken up behind a dumpster to four older guys who more or less adopted him on the spot.

They’d called him twelve when it had been his seventeenthbirthday.

Ferret let out a bark of laughter.  “Don’t follow me,” he ordered, before slipping out of the alley and letting himself be swallowed up by the crowds of pedestrians walking around.

It wasn’t until he got back to the safety of his patch that he realised he still had Will’s bead in his hand.  He scowled down at it, at the names that somehow didn’t float around the same way words usually did for him, until his eyes caught one in particular.

Michael Yew.

That… that was him. He didn’t know how he knew, but there was a certainty that settled into his bones as the name flooded his mind. Finally, after two years, Ferret knew without a shadow of a doubt what his name was.

The sun was starting to lower, the brightness of the day making way for the vibrant oranges of sundown, and Ferret – Michael – knew that he had to get back soon.  Rook and the others would be having kittens about his absence by now.  With nothing better to do with the bead, and a new attachment to it that meant he couldn’t even entertain the idea of dumping it in the street, he hurriedly slipped it onto the leather throng around his neck, letting it clack into place next to the last one in the sequence – an intricate maze-like design picked out in silver against a crimson bead.

Then he hurried the rest of the way back.

Sure enough, all four were ecstatic to see him, pulling him into tight hugs even as he was scolded for taking so long, and he let himself relax.  No matter who he was, no matter who his apparent brother was, he had this.

He considered not telling them about the encounter, about Will and finally having a name for himself, but they’d been working just as hard as he had – harder, even – to find out who he really was, and he couldn’t bring himself to keep it a secret.

“I met someone today,” he told them later that evening, while they were dining on a feast of not-yet-expired bread he’d managed to swipe before everything went wrong.  It was the most heavenly fare they could ask for, outside of the shelter-supplied food they mostly lived on.

“Ooh?” Jimmy asked, waggling his eyebrows.  A small stone was thrown at his head; it landed spot on between his eyebrows, as intended.

“Someone who knew me,” he clarified, and instantly the air changed.

“You’re sure?” Rook asked, ever the cautious leader.

He nodded.  “Yeah,” he admitted.  “What he said about me… it fits with what little I remember.  Why I was on the Bridge, why my own fucking brother apparently never put out a missing report for me, where I used to live.”

“Wait, your brother?” Scout asked, astonished.  He’d lost more teeth over the past two years, so now there was more gap than teeth in his mouth, and his voice whistled when he spoke.  “You met a guy who said he was your bro?”

“What was he like?” Mika added, before he could answer.  He took a mouthful of bread to buy himself some thinking time.

“Too good to be true,” he settled on, once he’d swallowed.  Will, with his bright demeanour, bleeding heart, and tearful blue eyes seemed too nice.  “Doesn’t look a thing like me.”

“You think he was lying?” Rook frowned.  That was an easy question.

“Nah.  I still don’t fucking remember him, but he felt like he believed what he was saying.”  How he knew that, he couldn’t say.  Maybe it was the bead, warm against his sternum where it sat.  “He wanted me to go back with him.  Kid was crying his eyes out; thought I was dead, apparently.”

No-one asked why he hadn’t gone with Will.  Street life was like that – if you jumped at any sob story that seemed too good to be true, it probably was.  Best to check around first, see how much truth it had in it.

“So, what do you want to do about it, Ferret?”  Rook asked, before pausing.  “Did he give you a name?”

“Mine or his?”

“Either.  Both?”

He frowned.  “Kid’s name was Will.”  Will Solace he’d said, but the name on the bead had been Michael Yew and that felt far more natural than Solace did.  “He called me Michael.”

Mika chuckled.  “Good name,” he said, like that wasn’t his own full name.  “So, you a Michael, or you a Ferret?”

That was the question, wasn’t it?  He didn’t know – ever since he’d read the bead, felt the familiarity of the name embracing him, he’d been confused.  He’d been Ferret for as long as he could remember, but Michaelfelt right, like a missing piece slotting back into place after so long.  He shrugged.

“I’d say he’s our Ferret,” Jimmy piped up, leaning over and putting an arm around his shoulders.  He shoved him off, and the older man laughed. “Whatever the rest of the world wants to call him.”

Ferret – Michael – Ferret, yes, that felt more comfortable, he didn’t remember beingMichael, after all, rolled his eyes.  “Shut up,” he muttered, but none of the men were fooled.

“Ferret it is, then,” Rook continued, with a fond smile.  “So, what do you want to do about it?  Now we’ve got a name, we can probably find out more about you, if you want to know.  Or we can forget about it and keep going on the way we are.”

The older man looked at him, and Ferret knew what he wanted.  What all of them wanted.  They’d never hidden their distaste for kids like him – even if he wasn’t a kid, and that was a bombshell he still had to drop on them – living on the streets. If there was a reasonable out for him, they’d want him to take it.

Problem was, Ferret didn’t know what he wanted.  Life on the streets was tough, harsh and sometimes downright cruel, but he knew it, now. He didn’t know this kid called Will, or anything about that camp he wanted to take him to, or really anything at all about a different way of life.  He shrugged.

“Whatever,” he grumbled, and got a fond ruffle of his hair from Mika, who was not at all dissuaded by Ferret swatting his hand away.

“That’s okay,” the big guy said.  “You’ve got time to think about it.”

“It’s a shock,” Rook agreed. “Sleep on it, see how you feel in the morning.”

He was probably right – having something from his forgotten past appear in his life suddenly, in such a stressful situation, wasn’t doing Ferret’s head any good.  Hopefully it wouldn’t keep him up all night; Ferret had a solid ability to fall asleep wherever and whenever he could, thanks to life on the streets, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have times where things just circled around and around in his head and he didn’t catch a wink.

As it happened, when he curled up in his sleeping bag in the cranny behind the dumpster, he had no problems falling asleep at all.

He wished he had.

Fear.

Blood.

Golden, cold, eyes.

Tremors, falling, pain.

Screams.

Hellhounds and dracaenae and giants and empousai and a Minotaur and- and- and-

(How did he know what they were called?)

Lava, harpies, screeching, more screaming, blood, blood, blood, death-and-dying and blood on his hands, got to heal, got to help.

Arguments, shouting, curses and poetry and arrows and swords and-

A chariot that flew.

Gods.

Gods.

Prophecies,Olympus to preserve or raze.

Bright sunshine, a golden lyre made of light.

Faces.  So many faces.  Laughing, crying, screaming,dying.

Pain.

Going to die I’m going to die the bridge has to fall break the bridge!

“-ret!”

Snakes, Monsters, what’s going on-

“-erret!”

Demigod, father’s a god claimed welcome to cabin seven.

Blood, skull smashed in, giants safe-not-safe, death death death.

“FERRET!”

His eyes snapped open to worried faces looking down at him.  Arms were wrapped around his shoulders – he was shaking like a leaf, he couldn’t breathe, there was too much information in his head, like a dam had broken, shattered and everything was flooding in all at once.  His eyes started drifting closed again, darkness dragging him back down, but there was a tap on his cheek and a hand on his chest.

“Hey, Ferret, you gotta breathe first, kid.”

He dragged his eyes open again – an action that took far too much energy – but couldn’t even muster the energy to glare at the owner of the voice.

“In and out,” the voice said insistently.  “C’mon, Ferret.  In, and out. In, and out.  In, and out.”

A hand rubbed at his back firmly and he subconsciously arched into the grounding pressure, somehow wrangling his lungs into at least trying to let air back in again.

“That’s right,” the voice encouraged.  “Like that.”

Ferret felt like he was drowning – water, breaking bridge, falling-falling-falling – as he gulped down air, desperately trying to keep his head up, out of the torrent of whatever it was (memories, memories) trying to drag him under.  The hands helped – too many to belong to a single person, hands on his cheeks, on his chest, on his back, arms around his shoulders, holding him against a warm, moving surface – but he still couldn’t stop shaking, couldn’t steady his breathing beyond frantic gasps, couldn’t focus on his surroundings enough to know who was where, just that he wasn’t alone.

That he was safe.

“There we go,” the voice said, sounding relieved.  Ferret blinked, his chest still heaving, and Rook’s thin, tall figure solidified in front of him.  “You’re okay, kid.  You’re safe.”

Something nudged at Ferret’s mind, a tangible thread in amongst the chaos of thoughts and memories that didn’t seem to have a tether, and he scowled.

“’m not a kid,” he rasped, pushing himself fully upright.  Most of the hands fell away, but one stayed steady against his back in silent support.  He didn’t pull away from it.  “’m nineteen.”

Stunned silence met his declaration.

“No way.”  Jimmy shook his head in Ferret’s periphery.  “Pull the other one, Ferret.”

Ferret snarled at him, belatedly becoming aware that his face was very, very wet and scrubbing at his eyes with the back of his forearm angrily. Dawn hadn’t broken yet – how long had he been asleep?

“Did you remember something?” Scout asked, peering in close.  “That was a hell of a nightmare you were having.”

Ferret scowled.  “Will told me, yesterday,” he admitted.  “I turn nineteen on the twentieth.”  He ignored the probe about the nightmare.  They were memories, he was sure of it, but it was all too muddled and painful to even try to make heads or tails of, and when he tried to grasp at any of it, his breathing stuttered again.

The hand on his back rubbed reassuringly again, and he pressed his palms to his eyes, trying to force it back under control again.

“Who’d’a thunk it?” Mika chuckled in his ear.  “You really are small and vicious, huh.”

He got a snarl for that, but it lost any potency when another spiel of memories crashed over him.

Keep your temper in check.

Don’t let it rule you.

I hope you all die!

Ungrateful bitch! Is your pride that fragile you self-centred cow?

If Kronos doesn’t get you, I’ll kill you myself!

Ferret hunched over with a pained gasp, hands clutching the side of his head like a vice.  Fear, anger, despair punched him in the gut, almost a physical abuse, and he choked on a breath.

“Damn,” he heard one of the men whisper.  Arms wrapped around him again, and he half-heartedly fought to get free.  “What are we supposed to do?”

Phantom pain lanced through him, his leg and ribs screaming at him as he remembered falling, toppling sideways and hitting anything and everything solid on his way down.  He keeled over, but he couldn’t tell if it was in his head or if he was actuallyfalling.

“Not much we can do,” one of the others said, barely audible over the screaming in Ferret’s head, the noise and chaos of weapons ringing against weapons and blood splattering over every surface.

So much blood.

“All we can do is stick with Ferret and hope this passes soon.”

It did not pass soon.

Ferret lost track of time almost immediately, curling up in his battered sleeping bag with his hands clutching his head as thoughts, emotions and memories smothered him, out of sync and so jumbled he couldn’t begin to decipher them but impossible to ignore. There was death – his death, his siblings’ deaths – there was pain and grief and exhaustion, and just when it seemed like that was all it was, happier moments interspersed.

Will, looking younger but unmistakable as the same kid he’d met in the alley, flashed up several times. Other faces and names – Lee, Austin, Kayla – floated into existence, light moments of ribbing and teasing before suddenly he was staring at a bloody corpse, at golden eyes glinting with malice, monsters bearing down on them, intent on tearing them limb from limb.

He screamed more than once, but he didn’t know if it was just in his head.  He sobbed and choked on tears and snot running down his face, he thrashed and fought enemies long-gone.

Sometimes, there were touches.  Moments of lucidity when he blinked and it was Rook, or Mika that he saw.  When Scout tipped water into his mouth, and he heard Jimmy worriedly rasp he’s burning up.

The sun blazed down on him. Not in the alley, in the dumpster that gave shade and shelter, but in his head, scorchingly bright with a grin to match.  Take these, said a warm voice that cascaded over him like sunbeams and arrows that crackled threateningly appeared in his hand.  Live.

He’d died.

He hadn’t died.

He’d been certain he was going to die.

Everythingburned.

He’s getting worse, he heard dimly at one point, between rushing lava and the horns of battle.

Dark, light, day, night, black, bright.  Ferret- Michael- Ferret- Michael-

He didn’t know what was in his mind and what was reality.  Memories and nightmares blurred, if they weren’t the same thing in the first place, events jumbled and all out of order and someone help me I can’t do this.

More gentle touches, ghosts of them, and he didn’t know what was even real any more.

It was easiest just to scream.

—-

“His fever’s finally broken,” he heard.  Something cool swiped across his forehead.

“That was the most terrifying thing I’ve seen in my life,” someone else – Jimmy, he thought – concurred. “What has he even beenthrough?”

“We knew his life was rough,” Rook chided them.  “He’s always jumped at shadows.”

They were talking about him. They had to be.  He swatted away whatever was on his forehead and pulled himself into a sitting position, opening his eyes to see his four companions sitting around him.

“Easy,” Mika cautioned, a warm hand on his back.

“Drink some water,” Scout insisted, handing him a bottle that he grasped and tipped back.  “You’ve had nothing to eat for two days.”  Some bread – going hard, but still edible, especially with the water – was pressed into his hand.  “Try and eat.”

His stomach grumbled at him in concurrence, and he tore off a chunk with his teeth, chewing it stubbornly until water and saliva combined to soften it up.

“We’ll get you something from the soup kitchen when it starts serving,” Rook promised.  “How are you feeling?”

“Like crap.”  His head still hurt, and he had a shit-tonne of memories to sort through now they’d stopped assailing him randomly and seemed to have settled into some sort of order, but he was lucid and breathing wasn’t a chore. It was an improvement, at least.  “Some asshole decided to slam seventeen years of memories into my head all at once.”

“Does it even work like that?” Jimmy wondered out loud.

Ferret (he still wasn’t quite Michael, not yet.  Not that demigod – fucking demigod, what the Hades – son of Apollo who’d fought and almost died to save a bunch of gods’ seats of power.  They must have won the war, they must have done, otherwise Will would’ve been dead, but he didn’t know what the Hades had happened and his head was going to explode if he got any more new information) scowled at him. “Ask my gods-damned head,” he bristled, and got two hands up in surrender.

“Presumably meeting his brother triggered it,” Rook pointed out.  “But the how and why doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Ferret’s tired, spent the last two days in a nasty fever, and needs to rest.  We’ll work out what to do next once he’s feeling better.”

“I’ll be fine,” Ferret griped, but Rook fixed him with a look.

“You need some proper food in you,” he said firmly.  “I don’t know what you remembered, and I’m not asking, but you look like absolute shit, Ferret.”

To Ferret’s annoyance, he knew the older man was right.  His hands were still shaking a little – nothing like the tremors from earlier, but a far cry from being still – and the headache didn’t seem like it was going to leave him alone any time soon.  “Screw you,” he muttered, and got a relieved smile in response.

“There’s our Ferret,” Jimmy grinned.  “You’re not right when you’re not snapping at anything that breathes.”

Ferret flipped him the bird.

At his pseudo-guardians’ insistence, he barely left the cranny behind the dumpster for several more days.  His nineteenth birthday – nineteen, Ferret could hardly believe he’d jumped from maybe-fifteen-if-we’re-generous to nineteen in less than a week – came and went, accompanied by far too much fanfare (it was tame, compared to his slowly-organising memories of camp, even if at camp he’d usually joint-celebrated with Will seeing as their birthdays were only three days apart) from the men. They were, they insisted, making up for the last two birthdays that had passed completely unacknowledged.

Ferret called bullshit, but that didn’t make the traitorous part of his mind that loved every minute of it any less happy.  It was only a thrown-out cupcake with a cigarette lighter jammed into the too-crispy icing, but it was something.

It certainly didn’t make his decision any easier.

He’d dismissed Will’s plea to return to camp, figuring that with no memories it wasn’t worth trying, but now his memories were back, slowly sorting themselves out into something that was starting to feel less and less like watching a reel of someone else’s life and more like what could actually have been his own, the lure of camp was starting to call.

Monsters were getting bolder.  It was hard to fight them when he was being fussed over so much, but they were finding him, now.  More than once, he’d found himself having to throw his dagger straight at one – if there was one memory he was grateful for, it was the training that went with the instincts – and scrambling out to retrieve it from the dust when he got a chance. He was less impressed with the knowledge that the more he knew about who he was, the stronger his so-called demigod scent was, and the more monsters he was attracting.

If one of the guys got hurt because of him, Ferret (Michael, whispered a little voice in the back of his head, reminding him that he was feeling more and more like Michael again every day), would never forgive himself.

The guilt from his argument with Clarisse, for being the factor that made the Ares cabin not come and fight, was already bubbling away viciously in the back of his throat.  He’d read the names on the bead – so many names, ones he could put faces too, now, and get whacked by the sledgehammer of grief when he realised these were the names of the dead, that he’d never see them again even if he went back to camp – and wondered how many of them had died because the Ares cabin weren’t there.

And yet, part of him was getting desperate to see camp (again).  He was a bit old for camp now, he knew – Luke, damn the son of Hermes – had been the oldest camper by some margin at nineteen, and now Mic- Ferret was nineteen.  But, he reasoned, he was still being pursued by monsters.

Leaving to go to camp would mean leaving the guys – mortal, not even clear-sighted, just four well-meaning mortals that had found him half-dead and decided to help him even though they had nothing.  They couldn’t come with him, and he couldn’t leave them in a better place.  He was their main source of non-shelter food and money.

He hadn’t counted on the men working out his dilemma by themselves.

“You’ve got a home, somewhere, haven’t you?” Scout asked him, two days after his birthday.  “Is living on the streets really better than that?”

Ferret jumped, glaring at him from where he was sharpening his dagger – he didn’t know what the others saw it as, but they never questioned it – on a piece of stone. Hardly perfect, but it would have to do. “The fuck you talking about?” he demanded.

“You said your brother wanted you to go with him,” Scout continued, unperturbed.  “So you’ve got a home, yes?”

His thoughts flickered to camp, and his chest ached.  It wouldn’t be the same, but damn if he didn’t want to see it again.

“So what?” he grumped.

“Is it a bad home?”

“Huh?”

Scout sighed.  “I’m trying to work out why you’re still here, Ferret.  Life on the streets is for the desperate.”

“If there’s a good home waiting for you, you should take it,” Jimmy added.

Ferret huffed.  “What makes you think it’s a good home?” he demanded. “It could be a shithole for all you know.”

“If it was, you wouldn’t be considering it at all,” Rook pointed out.

“How-”

“It’s written all over your face, kid,” the thin man smiled wryly.  “You want to go, but you don’t want to leave us.”

He bristled.  “Who says-”

“Ferret. Michael.  Whichever name you want to go by,” Rook interrupted.  It was the first time he’d called him Michael and it silenced him instantly.  “We’re grown men.  We looked after ourselves just fine before we found you.  We’ll survive if you go back home.”

“We’ve always wanted you to be somewhere safe,” Mika added.  “When you didn’t have a place to go, the safest place we could find was with us. But now there’s a home in the equation – if it’s safe for you, that’s all we want.”

“Although you’re more than welcome to come by and see us whenever you want to,” Jimmy chipped in, as Ferret stared at them all.

“You’re ridiculous,” he said bluntly.  “Are you kicking me out?”

“No,” Rook assured him. “Not at all, Ferret.  It’s your decision, but don’t you dare decide to stick around with us because you feel bad about leaving us.  That, I won’t forgive.”

“You’re a good kid,” Mika told him earnestly.  Ferret thought about some of his memories, about how he’d been the reason they’d been down their best fighters, and had to remind himself that they didn’t know about that.  He hadn’t told them anything, because how the fuck did he even start to explain the demigod thing?  “Don’t throw your life away because of us.”

He’d thrown his life away for others once already – for Will, scared at the end of the bridge, for the rest of his siblings who had barely got out the way in time.  He’d known he was going to die.  He’d ended that life.

The eighth bead on his necklace, the one with all the names he’d poured over, didn’t let him let that life go entirely.  They’d have burned a shroud for him, that chapter of his life had closed, but Will had given him the bead, an end-of-summer award from after the burning of the shroud, re-opening the door he’d never thought he’d even see again.

It was Will’s birthday tomorrow, he realised.  Will, his gentle brother who’d ended up in charge of the cabin after he’d fallen from the bridge, who’d begged for him to come back but been willing to let him walk back out of his life anyway, if that was what was best for him.

Nico had been right. He owed it to Will, at least, to try. He’d been a terrible big brother, dumping everything on him like that, and two years of absence would be impossible to make up for, but he could at least step through the door his brother had hopefully left open for him.

The delighted whooping from the guys when he muttered that he might go visit – visit, he stressed – his brother, family, tomorrow, almost got the cops on them for disturbing the peace.

—–

It was a lot of a trek to get to Camp Half-Blood.  The last time he’d made the journey, it had been in one of the camp vans, and every single one of them had been terrified during the two hour trip.  Scruffy and clearly homeless, there was no way he could hail a taxi to get there, but if he walked it, he wouldn’t make it in time for Will’s birthday.  Monsters were also rife around the camp’s border; exhausted, he’d be easy pickings.

Rescue came in the form of one of the shelter workers, the same woman that’d bailed him out of the overnight lock-up.  One of the guys must have told her he wanted to get to Long Island (he hadn’t given them an exact address, but it had felt wrong to give them nothing at all, even though they’d never be able to reach camp), because she caught his attention as he shouldered his backpack with his meagre belongings in it – the guys’ insistence, despite him stressing that he was only visiting, not planning on moving back in – and started the trek out of their patch for what he steadfastly refused to be the last time.

To her credit, she didn’t ask questions.  The ride passed in silence, barring the radio blaring out some familiar music that did nothing to quell his nervousness as they grew ever closer to camp.  Naomi Solace had never been his preferred genre, but with her son as a half-brother, he was familiar with her music regardless. Hearing her on his way to see her son, on his birthday, didn’t put him at ease at all.

Eventually, they reached the signs for the strawberry plantations, and he directed her to stop on the side of the road, insisting that he’d make his own way.

“Are you sure, Ferret?” she asked, looking around at the wooded area with no signs of civilisation in sight – at least, not to her mortal sight.  In the distance, he could see the heartachingly familiar archway with CAMP HALF-BLOOD inscribed in Ancient Greek.  “This looks… rather creepy.”

“It’s fine,” he said shortly, jumping out.  “Thanks for the ride.”

“Ferret?”

He left her behind without a second glance, rucking his backpack further up onto his back before striding out towards the archway, celestial bronze dagger in hand.  On top of the hill, golden scales gleamed – Peleus, guarding the golden fleece, itself shimmering in the perpetual sunlight over the camp.

With every step, he felt less and less like Ferret, the amnesiac homeless kid who didn’t even know his own name, and more like Michael Yew, the demigod that belonged there. It was a strange feeling.  Downright bizarre, in fact.

He gripped the beads on his necklace with one hand, and came to a halt just outside the barrier. Beyond, he could see the cabins in the distance – something looked different with them, but he couldn’t tell what. The Big House sat where it always had done, and campers were hustling and bustling around in the same disorganised chaos he remembered.

It had changed.  Something had changed, and it wasn’t just him.

But it was still camp. Still, somehow, home, and Michael took the last step through the barrier, away from the mortal world and back where he belonged.

His feet wanted to take him straight to cabin seven, to the gleaming beacon of gold that called out to him like a song in his bones – home, family – but he hesitated.  He couldn’t just walk into camp and pretend nothing had changed.  The younger demigods wouldn’t know who he was, and the older ones, the ones he knew (how many of them would even stillbe here?  He knew who hadn’t died in Manhattan, but he didn’t know how many had left for college.  Will had been one of the younger campers, but he was turning sixteen today, officially part of the older cohort now) would likely be gone.

Michael turned away from the cabins and headed for the Big House instead.  Chiron would still be at camp – he’d know what to do.

He made it halfway before there was the familiar (and sorely missed) sound of hooves.  Turning, he caught sight of the centaur, towering above him as he always had done, heading straight for him in a near-gallop.

“My gods!” Chiron exclaimed, skidding to a halt just short of trampling Michael where he stood.  “When the dryads told me they saw you, I couldn’t believe it!”  He knelt down, onto his forelocks – it still didn’t lower him quite to Michael’s eye level, but it was close.  Warm hands grasped his shoulders and old eyes looked him over.  “Michael.  My boy. You’re alive.”

“I am,” he said, meeting his old teacher’s eyes steadily.  “Didn’t Will and Nico tell you?”

Chiron’s tail swished behind him.  “No. Did they know?”

“They found me… about a week ago?”  With the way all the days had blurred together with the cascade of his memories returning, Michael found he couldn’t put an exact date to it.  “Will gave me this.”  He held up his necklace, showing Chiron the eighth bead.

“Ah,” Chiron smiled.  “I wondered why he told me he needed a new one. But I have to ask – why did you take so long to come back to us, my boy?”

Michael clutched at his necklace again.  “I didn’t remember,” he admitted.  “Some guys found me half-dead and looked after me, but I must have had some sort of traumatic amnesia.  I didn’t remember a thing – not even who I was – until Will gave me this bead.”

Chiron made a mournful noise.  “You’ve been living on the streets for two years?” he asked sadly, “without knowing who you are?”

“I was fine,” Michael huffed.  “Found a celestial bronze dagger in the wreckage of the bridge which dealt with the monsters when they came sniffing but they mostly left me alone.”

The centaur didn’t look at all appeased, but he wasn’t a fool and knew when to drop it.

“I am still sorry you had to go through that,” he said, standing back up to his full height again, “although as you managed to miss a second war” – what – “I suppose there is some silver lining to be found.”

“A second war?” Michael demanded, thinking of how many of his siblings’ names were on the bead, how Will was the least-combatant demigod he knew yet would have been in the meetings, on the front lines again.

He’d yelled at Clarisse for not being there for them… but then he’d gone and done the exact same thing.

“There were less casualties,” Chiron assured him quickly.  “None of your siblings were lost.  Your father went through some, uh, interesting times, but I’m sure you will hear all about that at the end of summer fireworks.”

Michael didn’t even care what Apollo had been through.  His thoughts were far more preoccupied with a whole second bloody war he’d managed to miss.

“For now, if you are ready, I believe there are some people who would dearly love to see you again,” the centaur continued.  “Something tells me it is not a coincidence that you returned to camp today, of all days.” Mi

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Rating:Teen
Genre:Angst
Characters: Will Solace

Will’s life might sound like a fantasy, but at the end of the day it’s still a reality.

My response to this week’s @flashfictionfridayofficial (this week hosted by @stories-by-rie) prompt, “fairytale ending” . This one clocks in at 707 words, according to MSWord.  Something short and scrappy because I’m on holiday and neglecting my poor boyfriend to write this; some Will pov on Michael’s death and the war.

There’s now a discord server for all my fics, including this one!  If you wanna chat with me or with other readers about stuff I write (or just be social in general), hop on over and say hi!

Will Solace is thirteen years old when he realises there’s no such thing as a fairytale ending.

When he was younger, before demigods and Apollo and monsters and Kronos, when it was just him and Mom and no real stories to speak of about his absent dad (Mom had never had anything bad to say about him, she’d just never really said anything about him at all), sometimes in his wilder daydreams he’d thought what if his dad was someone super important, or famous.  What if, like those stories he heard, like those songs Mom sang or played on the radio, one day he’d sweep back into their lives and Will’s life would be exciting and special (although he never quite wanted to be like Luke, with a villain for a father, no matter how much he loved watching and rewatching Star Wars even though Mom insisted he was too young for it).

The irony is that Will’s life is exciting and special.  He’s a demigod, his father is Apollo, a name everyone’s heard of even if they don’t know the legends (lots of things get named after Apollo; when Will first heard the name it was in relation to the space missions, not the god).

It’s also, he realises with a stomach sinking so fast it must be lined with lead or even kryptonite, a real life, entrenched in reality despite the fantastical nature of it, and reality doesn’t leave room for fairytale endings.

Will Solace is thirteen years old and his big brother just got swept away in the rapids of the river below as the bridge shatters.  He’s thirteen years old and the screams of Nathan are still ringing in his ears as the hellhound dragged him away and tore him to shreds.  He’s thirteen years old and he’s not the oldest in cabin seven but he’s the one with the most beads and he knows what that means.

His bow is gone, broken or maybe just dropped at some point when Kronos – Kronos – of all people advanced down the bridge in Luke’s body (not Luke Skywalker but Luke Castellan and being corrupted and possessed isn’t a fairytale ending, either), golden eyes laughing at them all but not nice laughter like Apollo’s golden eyes. Cruel laughter, laughter that knows resistance is futile just as much as Will knows it, but Will also knows they won’t give up even though that’s the choice they’re being offered.

Theycan’t give up, not after Michael sacrificed himself to pause Kronos’ advance (not stop it, no matter how much Will wishes one sacrifice, one shattered bridge is all they need to lose to win the war), not after so many have died to get them this far.

Will clutches at the little pot of paste as Percy drags him away, the older demigod either not realising or not caring that Will’s the one in charge of cabin seven now by default and leaving his siblings with futile orders to save someone that’s already dead (not that Will wants Michael to be dead, far from it, but reality’s come crashing down and he can’t feel Michael in need of healing, there’s a void where his injuries had previously been singing out and Will knows what that means even if he wants to scream and cry, but he can’t because Annabeth needs healing and he’s the only chance she’s got).  That little pot of paste is all he has left, now.  Everything else has been dropped or used up and all he has is a little pot of godly paste he woke up with the morning Typhon burst free, after Apollo gave it to him in a dream (they’d all woken up with gifts that morning).

They’re not giving up but they’re losing and unless something changes they’re going to keep losing.  If this was a fairytale, this is when a knight in shining armour would appear, or when a god might come to fight alongside them and save the day.  When a miracle occurs.

But Will’s realised that isn’t going to happen.  And even if it does,it still won’t fix things.

His life might sound like a fantasy but it’s still reality, and reality doesn’t have fairytale endings.

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Rating:Gen
Genre:Hurt/Comfort/Angst
Characters: Apollo, Outsider POV

There’s a man sat on the broken bridge, but no-one else can see him.

Holiday internet is terrible but I scribbled this out yesterday and it looks like this morning the internet will let me post something, so here it is!  Outsider POV is always fun to write.

There’s now a discord server for all my fics, including this one!  If you wanna chat with me or with other readers about stuff I write (or just be social in general), hop on over and say hi!

There was a man sitting by the edge of the bridge, almost dangerously close to where the machinery for repairing it would soon start moving about.  Normally, Shaun would leave well enough alone – it wasn’t his business where other people chose to sit, and it wasn’t quite in the way of the crane he was due to start operating once the sun went up, but something drew him to the man anyway.

Maybe it was the fact that no-one else was disturbing him; not even the foreman had stomped over to tell him to shove off, that work to rebuild the bridge would begin as soon as it was light enough to see the machinery controls.

In the pre-dawn gloom, it was difficult to tell if the man’s hair was black or a very dark brown as it fell in subtle waves about his neck, brushing the top of his shoulders even though his head was bowed over.  He was sitting with one knee drawn up to his chest while the other dangled off the side of the bridge, one arm hugging his shin and the other hand pressed palm-down against the ground.

You know work’s about to start here, was what he meant to open with as he walked over to the man, his steel-toed boots loud against the cracked tarmac.  You’ll need to move.

“Are you okay?” came out of his mouth instead, surprising him just as much as the man, whose head whipped around so fast Shaun winced in sympathy for the crick his neck no doubt just gained, even if the man didn’t react to it.  He wasn’t sure where the question had come from – the man was sitting on a broken bridge before dawn, of course he wasn’t okay – although Shaun didn’t think he looked like he was about to jump.  There was something too grounded about the way he was sitting for that.

Wide, dark eyes, their exact colour impossible to make out in the greyness of pre-dawn but likely some shade of brown, fixed Shaun with a startled stare.

“You can see me?” the man asked, his voice quiet and rasping in clear disbelief.

Shaun couldn’t quite hold back the scoff.  “I have eyes,” he said.  Why did the man think he wouldn’t be visible?

The thought that he might be talking to a ghost flickered through his mind, and it wasn’t so outrageous an idea that he could completely dismiss it.  He ought to be able to – he wasn’t really one for believing in the supernatural – but considering where they were, why he was there, tasked with operating a crane as a bridge was rebuilt, it wasn’t entirely out of the question.

There was still no confirmed death toll.

“Ah, yes,” the man said, “so you do.”  He said it as though that meant something, rather than just an idle comment that of courseShaun had eyes; everyone did.

Clearly this wasn’t someone Shaun wanted to actually be talking with, no matter that he’d started the conversation, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to stop, or leave.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he commented, lowering himself to sit next to the man.  “Are you okay?”

If this was a ghost of one of those killed on the bridge – although he looked unhurt, and weren’t ghosts supposed to look like they did when they had died – maybe he needed some closure to move on.  The bridge was a major one, tales of it being haunted wouldn’t go down too well.

And maybe Shaun didn’t want to be working on a haunted bridge, either.

The man sighed heavily. “I should be,” he said, turning his gaze skywards for a moment before facing the swirling water of the river below.

“But you’re not?”

“I’m not allowed to not be,” came the cryptic answer.  Shaun shook his head.

“I don’t understand,” he admitted.  Part of him was wondering what the best way to leave the conversation would be.  The rest of him was still very curious.

The man sighed again. “You know what happened here?”

Shaun was repairing the bridge, of course he knew.  “An earthquake,” he said, unable to quite keep the duhout of his voice. No-one who had been in New York – or likely even the entirety of the US – didn’t know about the freak earthquake that had wrecked Manhattan and some of the bridges.  The geologists were completely stumped about what had caused it.

“Right.”  The man sounded dubious about it, even though he’d nodded slightly.  “My son died here.”

The death toll of the collapse of the Williamsburg Bridge was still unknown.  Miraculously, most people had escaped their cars in time, but not everyone had.  Divers were scouring the waters below for bodies.  Some had been found, but several names were unaccounted for.  Shaun somehow doubted they’d ever all be found.

He wondered whether the man’s son had been found or not.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “There’s no chance..?”  Not everyone had died.  There had been stories of survivors washing up on the shore of the river, half-dead but not beyond saving.  Some loved ones of those lost had been on the news, insisting that more of the shore needed to be searched, that the lost person had to still be alive.

“No,” the man sighed, his voice shaking.  “If he was still alive, I’d know.  His soul’s moved on, out of my reach.”

He’d given up, then.  Shaun supposed he couldn’t blame him – less painful to accept the probability now than cling to a faint hope that anyone else could see was foolish.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he said, because what else could he say?  The words were routine, an empty platitude, but they were all he had for this strange man no-one else could see.

“Barkley, get that crane ready!” came the shout of the foreman.  There was no acknowledgement of the man he was sitting beside.  “Sun’ll be up any minute now.”

“Yessir!” he called back, before glancing at the man again.  “You probably shouldn’t stay here once the machines start up,” he said apologetically.

The man gave a sad smile. “That’s okay,” he said.  “My job starts at dawn, too.”  Shaun supposed that explained why he, too, was up so early.

“Unlucky buggers, the both of us,” he offered, pulling himself to his feet.  The man gave a light huff that Shaun hoped was amusement.

“Unlucky indeed.”  There was a pause.  “Thank you for talking to me.”

Shaun shrugged.  “You looked like you could do with some company,” he said, still not sure what, exactly, had driven him to talk to the strange man.

The man shrugged again. “I suppose I did.”

Shaun started to turn, another call of Berkley! dragging his unwilling attention over, but one last thought made him pause.  “Your son… what was his name?”

The first rays of sunlight passed over them, seemingly focusing on the other man.  His hair was black, but there was something warm about the colour, as though it was absorbing the heat of the dawn.  His eyes were brown, but there was something golden in their depths.

“Michael,” the man said, with a sad smile.  “His name was Michael.”

There was another, impatient, yell of Shaun’s name and he instinctively glanced over at the foreman again.

When he looked back, the man was gone.