Chapter Text
Mike Hanlon was in the somewhat unique position, demigod wise, of having known both her parents from the day she was born.
Her father has always been clever (as well as an aspiring-failed classics major and son of a superstitious farmer, which probably helped) and he’d figured out that the woman who knocked on his front door each year asking to help with his harvest wasn’t exactly human after the third season of everything going picture perfect and then some.
He never really brought it up, he saw no reason to stop flirting with the very pretty woman who made his crops grow better than ever before just because she was potentially a goddess. It was just nice to have someone to tend to his sheep alongside, human or otherwise.
He had a feeling she knew he knew anyway. She just didn’t confirm it until she’d shown up out of season and handed over a baby who fussed and cried and grew dandelions through the fibers of her blanket.
(Her father had always sugar coated the next part, where her mom had told him about how a child with such a rare gift would draw monsters right away, how there was a camp she could drop her off at to keep her safe, how he could visit, if he wanted, but she would never need to know her father if he really wanted to be safe. But Mike knows it must have happened.)
Her father would sit her on his lap and explain gently that he could fight off the monsters drawn in from her magic with the shotgun he kept next to his bed, the one she’s absolutely, under no circumstances allowed to touch, and the camp border would keep her nice and safe during the summer when he wasn’t around. And things were nice, and things were good, and Mike was perfectly okay with nothing changing whatsoever.
And then she turned twelve.
She’d been at camp for her birthday. That’s why it had all gone so badly, that’s why they hadn’t been prepared, summers always made the both of them a little more relaxed, used to magical borders keeping monsters at bay or magical children twenty eight hours away taking the monsters with them. And then, eventually, some new creature from the underworld forces them back on track.
This September's monster had just been something they never could have prepared for, because Mike was twelve and Mike was the problem. Even if her dad tried his best, their barn was just as flammable as he was human, and Chimeras, apparently, don’t let much stop them when it comes to eating sheep and preteens who can stock an entire flower shop with their bare hands.
It’s the first time she ever remembers her dad yelling at her. Not because he was angry with her, she knows that, but because he was scared and because they both almost died and because their house and their barn and their livelihood was left smoldering in the wake of something hunting her.
(But he’d still yelled. He’d yelled and yelled and yelled and then yanked her into a hug so tight she couldn’t really breathe and it’s stuck to her brain like a garden stake shoved through dirt.)
Most of the time summer only campers stay summer only campers because their still alive guardians want them to have well adjusted childhoods where they learn how to long divide. And more campers than there should be find out they’re a demigod in some brutal, parent murdering accident and end up staying year round. There’s some adjustments, sometimes they’re a foster kid who thinks living at a summer camp all year is better than the system or they run away from home, but very rarely does someone start as a well adjusted summer camper who knows what a graphing calculator is and ends up living in a cabin.
It had been awkward, joining those rare and deeply depressing ranks of summer only campers who transitioned into full year campers, right in the middle of the fall: when everyone knew you left and came right back.
Her half-siblings tried to comfort her in a halting, wide berth sort of way. They didn’t like her much and so she’d never gotten close enough with any of them to really want to confide in them anyway. She had cried in her head counselor's lap about the whole thing when she’d arrived, and he’d smoothed back her hair and told her things were going to be okay, but when she’d woken up in her own bunk and embarrassed it had just felt like a formality. He had been doing his job as a counselor not as a brother, and there is a tangible difference.
She understood why, she’d always understood why since she was eight and her dad had brought her to camp for her first summer: powers like hers were rare and sometimes that meant your siblings were jealous but sometimes it also meant they were afraid of you. Both were bad, Mike’s learned, and understanding doesn’t make either feel better.
She’s almost positive the rest of camp thinks her dad died.
But he didn’t. She knows that. She knows that.
(Just like she knows her parents had to have talked about how she was a monster magnet, or that those monster attacks weren’t her fault, or that her dad didn’t mean to yell, or that her siblings don’t like her. She knows it. It still hurts though.)
One of the younger campers slams their way through the door, bright and early, which in the Demeter Cabin means everyone is already awake and getting ready for the day.
“Mail call!”
They make their rounds through the cabin, little head held high and clearly terribly proud of themselves for having such an important job of distributing everyone’s letters onto their bunks, until they reach Mike’s bed and they hesitate, confidence crumpling at the corners.
“Hello.” She pauses in tying her boots and smiles up at them, “Got a letter for me?”
They shrug the tiniest bit, cheeks all pink, “Are you Michelle?”
“Yup, that’s me,” She balls her untied laces into one hand so she can grab the envelope from them, “Most people just call me Mike, though.”
“Oh.” They nod so hard their bangs flop into their eyes, like they’re physically slotting that information into place, “Cool.”
“Thanks-”
“Lark.” They say too quickly, like they don’t trust her enough to even see if she knows it. Which, to be fair, she doesn’t. They had been here already when Mike got dropped off in September, arriving in what was probably a dramatic series of events in the few weeks between summer ending and Mike’s life falling to pieces, and she’s got no possible clue what their name is. Or, at least she didn’t.
“Thanks, Lark.”
They give her a halting thumbs up and then scramble back to their bunk across the cabin. Awesome, another awkward, cordial half-sibling relationship for the books and it’s not even noon.
Her dad’s handwriting, all capital letters and crooked, beams up at her from the back of the envelope.
MICHELLE HANLON, CAMP HALF-BLOOD, FARM ROAD 3.141,
LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK 11954
She beams right back.
He’d bordered the address with little doodled Christmas trees. She feels her smile get even wider.
Christmas is in a week. She’d totally forgotten because they don’t celebrate it at camp (for very obvious reasons) and the barrier keeps out cold until campers bribe the Khione kids for a snow day, but none of that changes the single, solitary fact that Christmas is in a week. She gets to see her dad in a week.
The Hanlons aren’t Christian in any capacity, unless you ask her grandfather, but they celebrate Christmas anyway. She’s always been home for Christmas, and she thinks it makes it almost more special to go home for Christmas than to already be there. Home for the first time in months to make hot chocolate with her dad too early in the morning, home for the first time in months to make fun of her dad’s hopeless inability to wrap presents neatly, and home for the first time in months to press her fingers to the sap-sticky stump they always cut their tree down from to regrow it for next year. It will be a new tree this year, and it will be different, obviously, when their physical home is gone, but she’ll still be with her dad and so it will still be Christmas.
She sticks her nail underneath the flap so she can peel it open without ripping it.
Mikey,
I’m so sorry but-
It’s kind of funny, in the most messed up way possible, that just like that, one I’m so sorry but’s , and any of the hope in her chest crumples up and burns away like their barn and their home and their Christmas.
Because she’s not going home this year.
She just skims through the rest of the letter, because she thinks if she actually reads in any sort of detail she’ll start crying.
Her dad tries so hard to make it less disappointing, but every I’m going to figure out a time to come and visit soon and Don’t worry, honey, your presents are already in the mail were countered by a hundred apologies and work is crazy right now and by next year I promise we’ll have a nice, big house you can come spend Christmas at without having to sleep on the couch. She knows those are valid excuses, and she knows it’s stupid to be upset. She doesn’t deserve to be upset when this is all her fault, but she is upset. She misses her dad and she wants to go home.
(Knowing things is always always worse.)
But she’s a big girl, so she shoves her dad’s letter into her pillow case and goes out to try and grow blueberries.
(And maybe she’s crying when she leaves. But no one stops her or asks if she’s okay. They don’t even notice.)
The strawberry fields are one of Mike’s favorite and least favorite places to be in camp, but they’re particularly helpful when she’s feeling sad about her dad.
The only thing that grows on the fields are strawberries, hence the name, and for all intents and purposes, it’s a good thing. It’s literally a blessing to keep weeds away. Mike likes stuff like blessings from her mom and strawberries well enough (They’re strawberries. No one hates strawberries.) but, also, the only thing that grows on the fields are strawberries, which is a challenge for a bored and generally content chlorokinetic, and deeply fucking frustrating for a upset one.
And right now Mike is the latter.
She digs her fingers into the dirt, eyes closed, letting her breathing settle as she sends up a prayer to her mom. She feels the press against her fingertips and the sticky sweetness of blueberry juice in the back of her throat- and then it tinges slightly sharper. A baby-green strawberry pushes between her pointer and thumb, “Damnit.”
The strawberry turns pink then twists nervously over her knuckle before skipping right over red and into a rotted out brown, watch out, Mikey.
“What?” She whispers to the dirt, but it doesn’t give her much of an answer before an ‘I’m going to fucking kill you’ roars sharp over the field, her rotten little strawberry start to tremble, and she gets a pretty clear picture that she should hide.
With a tiny bit of persuasion the bush behind her swallows her, branches crossing protectively over her knees. She taps the leaves gently to give her a window, but they don’t move, stubbornly whacking the back of her head until she whacks them back, sending the leaves reluctantly splitting apart just as two sets of legs sprint past her; the muddy, tie-dyed jeans a get-away fast blur and the leggings pointedly slower than their friends, firmer in their stance like they’re ready at any second to stop and fight.
She’s almost proud of herself for her combat-analysis skills before shredded sweatpants and a voice she all of a sudden recognizes thunders carelessly through bushes.
“St-st-sto-op!”
That sounds bad.
“If you want a fight I’ll fucking give you one!”
That sounds worse.
She doesn’t like to perpetuate godly-parent-stereotypes, but Henry Bowers is the type of Ares kids you get warned about when you're a new camper. The kind of aggressive, hotheaded bastard who Mike would honestly be worried about being a monster in disguise if she hadn’t seen him go easily in and out of the barrier herself.
She pushes at the leaves to scope out the campers he’s chasing, a who, what, and why before she inserts herself into a situation that is almost certain to make her shitty day worse. It’s a bad, stupid idea, but they’re kids, a Lark-adjecent first year camper whose going to get crushed. When she pushes away strawberries to get that clearer view Henry’s fists are all bloody, and Leggings, who is definitely older than a little kid, Mike’s age at least, looks like she’s about to stop and try to take him on weaponless; which is just stupid, for anyone, even if they are Mike’s-age-at-least. There's not much time for analyzing if she doesn’t want to watch a death match go down on her mom’s super special sacred berry patch.
She shoots another rapid-fire invocation up into her mother’s (hopefully) open hands and shoves both palms forcefully against the root system of her little hidey-hole. It burns sweetly-tart strawberry juice against her vocal chords as a thick, twisting vine the width of her waist shoves its way out of the dirt. Apparently her mom isn’t thrilled about potential bloodshed on her plants either. It creeps its way around Henry’s steel-toed boots just before he can lunge on Leggings. She bites down hard on her tongue to tighten it so he can’t struggle his way out, slowly pushing her fingers down to her knuckles and letting the vine lift him as high as it can. As she twists her hands tight around wet, weedy earth, forcing all her Christmas-related-anger (because that's what it is, at the base of it all, it’s sadness and it’s stress and it’s guilt but mostly it’s anger because everything is so unfair) into the vine as it reels back and throws. They’re close enough to the lake that she almost hears the splash of him hitting the water, and a tiny piece of forced-beached seaweed wiggles its way up from the ground and loosely around her wrist to confirm it. Hole in one, Mikey.
She snorts, pushes it back underground, and sends up a tiny, “Thanks mom.”
“Hi Mike!”
She startles so hard the bush around her flattens, snapping her head up to make eye contact with Richie Tozier, in her badly tie-dyed jeans, as she waves above her head at her, grinning through red teeth. Her nose is bleeding pretty bad and there's a crooked line shattered through one of her glasses lenses, bisecting her left eye into a trippy double-reflection.
She coughs out the breath she’d been holding and sets to apologetically patting the poor, squashed bush back into shape. “Hey Richie.”
The girl next to her, Leggings, is familiar in just how unfamiliar she is. From what Mike’s overheard there's only two new campers who are friends with Richie Tozier and one of them is a summer-only camper. So this must be Bill Something, the year-round Aphrodite camper. The older of the two new kids with freaking charmspeak.
(She’s certainly pretty enough to be a child of Aphrodite, Mike thinks, and then she balls up that thought into the tightest ball possible and launches it into the sun.)
She’s got her hands balled into fists, but they’re lowered, thumbs tucking inside, and then out, and then inside and out again, like she’s not sure what to do with the extra energy leftover from her fight cut short. From what Mike can see, she doesn’t seem hurt like Richie, which is good, she’s not sure if she’d be well equipped to escort two injured campers to the med tent if the one of them that wasn’t Richie ‘walked-off-a-broken-ankle-to-win-capture-the-flag’ Tozier was messed up. Bill just seems winded and ruffled, which are two things Mike can deal with. Half her hair had fallen out of her ponytail and now it’s hanging in her face, right along her nose. When she goes to shove it out of the way Mike can see that her knuckles are all bruised up. She’d obviously fought back a little before the chase began.
(Oh no, she’s cool too, her thought from before shouts down from where it's burning to death in the sun.)
Part of Mike wants to ask why she didn’t just charmspeak Henry away, but she holds herself back, it feels rude.
“D-did you d-d-d-d-do that?” Bill asks, warily waving vaguely in the direction of the lake and the thick vine shrinking back underground at their feet.
“Oh.” She glances down at her hands and then pushes them into her pockets. “Yeah. I have chlorokinesis.”
“What?”
“She’s a cool plant wizard. It’s a god-parent thing like your words.”
Mike snorts. She’d known she had always liked Richie for a reason. “Basically, yeah.”
Bill blinks, prodding the toe of her sneaker against Mike’s catapult-plant, heh, cataplant – “Can… all… D-d-demeter kids..”
“Only one at camp I know of.” She offers, trying to keep tightness at the reminder out of her voice by pulling one of her hands out of her pocket and up between them. A tiny, tangled up strawberry vine fondly twists its way around her fingers before wavering outward and bumping against Bill’s bruised up fist until she takes it.
Some of the tension left over from, presumably, running for their lives, breaks.
“C-cool.” Bill bites down on the offered berry, and when she smiles her teeth have seeds in them. Mike can feel her cheeks go sort of hot as her words stop working.
“So, whatcha doin’ out here anyway?” Richie asks, loudly and clumsily breaking the silence before pulling the wrist of her sweater over her bloody nose and wiping the wetness off absently on the cuff of the red beanie she has pulled low over her head. She repeats the process again. And again. And again. It’s like she’s not even aware she’s doing it.
When she smiles it's still just bloody, which, especially combined with her nose to sweater to hat ritual, is… less cute than Bill’s berry-stained one. It takes Mike a second to pull her eyes away and register the question, “Oh. I’m trying to grow blueberries.”
“Huh?” Richie asks, still smily. She pauses her wiping to push both hands into her back pockets. Her nose hasn't stopped bleeding.
Bill looks between her and the berry stem in her hands, “Why?”
“Only strawberries grow here.”
They both nod like that makes any sense at all.
“Wa-ant help?”
A tiny part of Mike twists tight. She thinks maybe, this might be why people like having friends, because you say stupid, silly stuff and they just agree with you and help you follow through on the stupid silly stuff you just said. She’s got her siblings, kinda, and she’s had classmates before that she used to eat lunch with, but she doesn’t think she’s ever had real friends before. It’s a nice feeling, if that is what it is; the start of a friendship.
But she doesn’t say any of that. That would be insane. Instead she says: “Sure.”
It becomes clear almost immediately that there is not much either of them can do to really help when the only steps of growing things is Mike sticking her hands into the dirt and just doing it, but at the very least the company is nice. Bill talks about her little brother, who has apparently taken to everything (but swimming lessons) so quickly she’s worried he’s going to outpace her before he hits double digits (or drown), and Richie informs her brightly of a multitude things she certainly shouldn’t know about, the new firework show they’re planning in the Hephestus cabin, and what the different code names for the Athena Cabin’s secret capture the flag strategies mean, and more gossip about people Mike doesn’t even know than she thought possible, and it’s sort of fun even if in turn all Mike can provide is a truly marvelous row of accidental-strawberry plants.
She’s just finished her twelfth failed blueberry attempt when Richie pauses in a story about an Apollo kid who, apparently, glows in the dark (Mike’s dubious on that one, she thinks she would have noticed) and asks, “When did your dad die?”
She freezes, hands so tight around the base of the new plant she can feel it cracking beneath her palms. She knows Richie is just making an assumption, a valid one that is also incredibly 100% wrong, but it still hits her heart like a bullet train, “He didn’t.”
“Oh.” She doesn’t sound terribly apologetic, “That's dope.”
“Richie!” Bill hisses, whacking the back of her head.
“What! It was just a question, because last December she wasn’t here and now she is here-”
“Richie. Tozier.”
“What? I was just curious because I didn’t know for her. Like, I wouldn't ask you because I know your dad is dead.”
Bill splutters out a noise Mike could simply not name if she tried, “My d-d-d-dad isn’t d-dead.”
“He isn’t?”
“No! And a-anyway that do-oesn’t have a-a-anything to d-o with not a-asking people about their no-ot-dead p-p-pa-parents!”
“It's fine,” Mike interrupts, laughing a little through her discomfort, “I just… turned twelve and between that and, well, you know,” she wiggles her dirt-under-the-fingernails fingers, “the monsters started getting way worse and he couldn't protect me anymore. So,” she swallows hard, “I’m full time now.”
“Oh. I’m so-orry,” Bill offers, and it’s genuine enough it doesn’t make Mike feel annoyed the way people's empty apologies tend to. Just a little sad.
Richie pokes her in the side, doing little jazz hands with her free hand like she’s trying to generate enough energy to make it stop feeling awkward and downer-y, “Happy birthday?”
She matches her jazz hands, half-smiling, “Thanks.”
Bill tilts her head back, considering Mike’s poor new sprout, stem cracked and smashed on all sides, half mangled and tilting slowly horizontal, “Ma-aybe you ca-an only grow stra-awberries.”
“Nope. Super not that.”
She pushes herself upwards, grinning over like she’s issuing a challenge, and plucks the broken sprout’s only berry, “Prove it.”
She throws it abruptly in Mike’s direction with a wicked sort of spin that has her scrabbling at her chest before missing it entirely. She blinks at the strawberry, fallen, abandoned in the dirt, and pushes herself to her feet. She taps it with the toe of her boot to speed up the decomposition process and wonders, absently, if this is what being charm-spoken feels like. (It’s not. It’s, like, definitely not. But that's for another time.)
Bill and Richie trail after her as she makes her way out of the field through the narrow cut through the bushes and she can hear them squabbling about who gets to be second in line, right after her, and it makes her feel kind of warm and fuzzy on the inside. It’s a feeling that just grows and grows and grows as they crowd over her personal space with rapt attention, so focused that Richie is quiet for the first time Mike has ever seen in her entire time at camp. She pushes her pointer into the grass, hyper aware of her audience and slightly worried that for the first time in her entire life she won’t be able to grow something now that people she thinks she might want to impress are watching.
She breathes in and out, closes her eyes in case this ends up being the kind of embarrassing disaster she would rather join Henry in the lake than watch, and easily sends a brambly wave of blueberries shooting up out of the dirt. More tension than she thought was possible breaks in her chest, tada.
“Nice.” Richie beams, shoving Bill a little, which in turn shoves Mike. “Told you she could do it.”
“You li-i-iterally said nothing like that at a-a-all.” Bill glowers, leaning over Mike’s shoulder to examine the plant more closely. Haltingly, like it’s going to disappear, she reaches out and picks a berry. “Good job.”
“Thanks,” Mike steals the berry from her and bites down on it, “I told you so.”
“You did.” She rapid fire reaches out and grabs another one, shoving it in her mouth before Mike can grab it and sticking out her tongue, and mush-mouthed offering, “You win.”
Richie half-rolls her way around her on the grass, settling her cheek smushed up against Mike’s knee and groaning so hard she can feel it through the leg of her overalls, “I wish I wasn’t allergic to blueberries, those look,” She pinches the fingers of one hand up and emits perhaps the worst italian accent Mike, Bill, or anyone else, on, above, or below the planet has ever heard, “delizioso, Mikey.”
Mike’s brain doesn’t even register the compliment, “You are… allergic to blueberries?”
She looks over to Bill but she seems equally bemused, which isn’t terribly reassuring.
“No.” She snorts, “I honestly don’t know why I said that.” With a shit eating grin she reaches out for one.
Mike slaps her hand away, “I do not believe you.”
She doesn’t have a total reason not to, but she’s been coming to camp long enough to meet her fair share of Hermes kids and to hear her fair share of Richie Tozier stories. It feels rude to say it out loud, so she doesn’t, but Richie seems like the kind of mess that could only have been raised exclusively by Hermes cabin campers, which means she is the exact kind of mess who would eat something she was fully allergic to just to see what would happen.
Even though Mike hadn’t voiced the thought, Richie still yanks her hand to her chest, terribly betrayed just by the virtue of being blueberry stilted on its own, “Come on-”
“Do no-ot let her eat a blu-u-ueberry.” Bill insists, moving off Mike to restrain Richie in a gentle and loving headlock.
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Bill!”
“I’m Iris Messa-aging Stan about it before yo-o-ou eat shit. Y-y-y-you’re allowed to have o-ne if and o-only if she says you can.”
“Oh my god, she’s not my mom, why can’t you take a joke.”
“Your a-a-ctions have con-con-consequences, you a-absolute fre-ak.”
“Jackass.”
“Yu-huh.” She mocks, dropping her chin on top of Richie’s head and getting comfortable, not freeing her an inch. Richie pouts her bottom lip out farther than Mike thought possible, but she makes no actual escape attempts, settling her whole body weight back against Bill’s chest.
“So,” She says carefully, feeling a little bit like she’s interrupting something, “I’m all for winning bets but we’re not any closer to my strawberry-blueberry problem.”
The concept seems to register through Bill to Richie one after the other, and they sink back in a tandem of defeat.
“Oh yeah.”
Richie tilts her head against Bill’s arm, “Can I offer a blueberry suggestion or will you guys be babies about that too.”
“We’re no-ot being b-b-babies, I just d-don’t waant you to di-di-di-die.”
“I was kidding!”
“You don’t fffill me with confffidence! Ever!”
“What is your idea, Richie.” Mike says over her, which gets her a squinty sort of half glare from Bill and a beaming grin from Richie.
“Is it the dirt that's only strawberry or just the area?”
“What?”
“In the field? Is the dirt blessed or is it the field itself?”
Oh. Oh, well that’s interesting. Without meaning to a matching beaming grin slowly works its way across her face, “I… don’t know.”
“Tha-a-at’s not ba-ad, Rich.”
“Thank you, thank you.” She curtseys the pulled out pockets of her jeans.
“We should find that out.” Something about an inch from giddy bubbles up in Mike’s chest, “We should test that.”
“Yes we shhhould.”
Richie doesn’t say anything else, her smile splitting wider and wider and more concerning across her cheeks, not even stopping when it feels like it should be physically incapable for it to get any bigger. Bill’s arms tighten around her neck precautionary but she weasels her way out of the bottom of them with a too practiced sort of ease, like she’s well acquainted with escaping from headlocks. (Knowing the Hermes cabin, she probably is.) Her glasses catch on the sleeve of Bill’s flannel and flick off her face, but it doesn’t seem to register in her haste to book it back to the field behind them.
When Mike turns back she’s shoveling dirt from under a strawberry bush directly into her beanie.
“Richie- Richie stop, I can get a bucket-”
“It’s too late, hats full of dirt.” She pushes it above her head, tilting at a precarious, almost-dirt-spilling angle, as though Mike, who is at least two inches taller than her, won’t be able to grab it that way, “Dirt hat.”
“Richie-”
She cackles, marching past them and further down the hill, “Dirt hat!”
“Is she always like that?” She asks, giving up almost immediately and nudging Bill's shoulder. She lets loose the most affectionately exhausted laugh Mike’s ever heard.
“More or less.” She reaches out for Richie’s glasses and once she has them she settles her arm right back where it had been when Mike pushed her, pressing them together, soft and secure, shoulder to shoulder, while she carefully folds the glasses safely into the front pocket of her button up. It’s an oddly familiar move, almost startlingly so, like Bill is breaking some rule of not-yet-friendship by doing something they’re not supposed to be doing until they hit an established acquaintance-ship, at least. Mike lets her anyway.
“We should probably follow her, huh?”
“Yeah.” She rolls her eyes but it’s fond, “I gotta get my b-brother a-anywa-ay.”
Mike tilts her head forward, questioning, trying to put the dots together between a tiny little charmspeaker who can’t swim and their current situation. Bill snorts and then clarifies, “He can a-actually tell He-enry to leave us a-a-alone once he gets ou-ou-out of the la-ake. Like… in the way tha-at sticks way.”
“Oh, yeah. That’d probably be smart.” If Mike’s being totally, swear-on-her-mom-honest, she forgot had been here at all, “What did y’all do?”
“I to-old him to piss o-o-off. But I a-also accid-d-d-d- accidentally like… told him to-o-o pi-iss o-off, you know?” She’s trying to act annoyed, or maybe ashamed, over the whole thing but Mike can’t totally read what she’s going for because a tiny, amused little smile is forcing its way through and blowing the whole operation.
She can’t blame her, she’s laughing too, “Oh jesus.”
“Yeah.” She tilts her head so it knocks against Mike’s, “Tha-anks for your he-el-l-lp with that by the wa-ay.”
“Well I wasn’t about to watch you get murdered.”
“I could ha-ave taken him!”
“Yeah, okay.” She teases, “You didn’t even have a weapon.”
“Ye-es I do! Watch this-” She wiggles away, reaching up to yank a paintbrush out of the tangled base of her ponytail. It looks like one of the ones you get out of those really shitty hundred piece art kits every family member in a two hundred mile radius will get you for Christmas if they even get an inkling you like to draw, but instead of chipping blue paint the handle glints with celestial bronze. Before Mike can muster up the energy to find some sort of compliment for it Bill snaps the handle over her knee with a shatter-glass crack and both sides shink into two razor sharp, bronze short swords.
“Sick!”
“I kno-ow right!” She beams, whirling them both in a complicated little circles, “Wa-ait until yo-ou see Eddie’s. It’s a spear hidden in a g-g-g-guita-ar.”
“Eddie?”
“Muh-muh-my best friend.”
“The Apollo kid?”
Bill nods her assent, looking even brighter at the mention. Mike assumes best friendship does that.
“She plays guitar?”
“No-ot until she came to camp,” She laughs under her breath, there's a joke Mike’s missing there, “I think it wa-as a, like, her d-d-d-da-ad’s claiming t-t-treat to her? Or so-omething?”
“Yeah, that happens sometimes.” Especially to Apollo kids, he likes his offspring to be flashy, “So she can play guitar, but that begs the question: can you paint?”
“A li-ittle.” But her tone indicates she’s being modest, not in an annoying, trying to be way, but in a she genuinely thinks she’s not great but enough people have told her off for saying that way. Mike can almost picture it, Bill with paint splattering over the knees of her leggings or colored pencils stuck next to the paintbrush swords in her ponytail as she sketches her little brother she had so much to say about or her Apollo kid friend bent over her guitar (or Mike with blueberries sprouting between her fingers, she thinks in a rapid fire burst of excitement, which is presumptuous and stupid and obviously not going to happen). It suits her.
“How’d y’all get these cool ass weapons anyway? I got a knife.” In fairness that probably had more to do with her plants being more capable of protecting her than any weapon could, but still, it was rare as fuck for a Hephestus kid to make a cool, magical weapon, and then just give it away, let alone two in the same day.
Bill’s quiet for a moment too long, and when she looks over her face is all pink.
“Charmspoke them?”
“It was an a-a-a-a-accid-dent.”
“I’m sure.” She grins, and pokes her blueberries with her boot, “Thanks right back for your help with this too by the way.”
“What are friends for right?” Bill half-grins back, jostling her shoulder before whacking her short-swords back on her knees and slotting them neatly back into a paint brush.
And Mike registers, softly, that she’s officially been deemed a friend, that Bill had implied she wanted her to meet her other friends and helped her without thinking about it and called her her friend.
“Yeah.” It comes out like someone had crushed her windpipe, and she has to swallow the emotion painfully before she can do something stupid like start crying. Instead, she wipes her hand off on her pant leg hard enough it grounds her a little, and offers it up to Bill. “Well, I for one don’t think we should leave Richie Tozier unattended for much longer.”
“Yeah, p-robably nnno-ot.” Bill snorts and grabs the hand tight to drag them both up from the ground, stumbling down the hill in tandem to try and locate a lone Richie Tozier and her hat full of dirt, or a seven year old with charmspeak, before Henry Bowers can.
And later that night, when she goes to her full-but-still-lonely cabin and feels the crinkle of her dad’s envelope against her neck through the pillowcase she just has to squeeze her eyes shut and think about a Richie Tozier grin or a Bill Denbrough ‘What are friends for right?’ to almost make not going home for Christmas feel slightly less achingly alone.
Almost.
(Would you look at that. Only two more to go.)