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Artemis welcomes Reyna into the Hunters in the midst of a funeral.
In theory, this moment has been a long time coming. Her camp has been set to rights — as much as anything can be right when dozens of campers (kids) are dead and buried, as much as anything can be right when the Gods still refuse to answer the call of responsibility for their actions — she’s read rites over countless now-lost friends and celebrated with countless newly found ones — she’s passed praetorship to Hazel and melted the frozen terror around her heart as she stepped up and into the light of her new role — everything’s been wrapped up and settled for weeks. Reyna’s free of responsibility, for the first time in years. Everything is perfect.
In practice… Reyna feels mourned.
In practice, she can’t decide whether it’s better or worse that her friends haven’t come to see her off. Whether she should be feeling sick with guilt and hollowed out as she steps forward into the forest. Whether she’s being mourned by the people she left behind or whether she’s mourning the version of herself that’s long been dead and gone.
Okay, so there’s no funeral this time.
It just sure as hell feels like one — feels like everyone’s gone right and Reyna’s gone and gotten left behind, especially with Artemis blinking at her so tonelessly, indulgence laced with a scathing undertone of impatience.
The forest looms dark and dismal behind this glowing icon of cool silver and scorn. Reyna’s heart pounds, dizzying and so loud she can barely breathe, until her vision blurs at the edges. A hazy silhouette looms behind Artemis, backlit by the silver wash of light and shadowed by the menacing trees — it has to be Thanatos — she’s dying — no money for Charon — she’s dying.
Reyna wakes up to see an apologetic grimace just before her head gets set on fire.
“The antiseptic burns, but you cut yourself pretty bad when you, um...” Thalia is annoyingly gentle about the whole thing — more fluff than fuss, and Reyna is suddenly awash in shame and self-flagellation so dizzying she feels like she might faint again.
She’s no stranger to unconsciousness nor is she unused to head wounds, so right away she knows this is nothing to worry about. She’ll heal by tomorrow. Yet Reyna feels hurt in a way that goes far deeper, like she hurt something fundamental about herself and there’s no god or monster left to blame. It’s just her — just Reyna.
“Knock it off. I didn’t patch you up just to let you ruin it already.” Thalia returns with a wet rag and a bandage just as Reyna starts struggling to sit up. She’s rough and wry as she shoves Reyna back down, which makes Reyna feel better — like she’s not so broken that she can’t be snarked at.
Still, the words echo hollowly in her chest. When Thalia steps away again, Reyna pushes up to her elbows and looks around at the forest; the looming sense of hollow emptiness seeps out past her ribs and curls up forebodingly at her back. The Hunters’ camp has been taken down and the clearing deserted; they are alone.
Artemis has left them behind.
Reyna shifts, trying to find a position that doesn’t amplify the pounding in her head. It’s calmed down in the last few hours, but every time she moves her heart rate skyrockets and sends the drums banging against her skull again. “What’s the record for shortest time in the Hunters, do you think?”
“Three hours, five minutes, and nine seconds. Why, you trying to beat it?” Thalia snorts, then pushes Reyna down. She’s been doing that every time she catches Reyna at it, which happens to be every time Reyna tries. “You can’t. You’ve already lasted longer.”
It’s true — the night has fallen more gently than a Hunters’ footstep; Artemis had welcomed and abandoned Reyna all before mid-afternoon. The sounds of the forests have shifted from the tittering of birds to the shuffling of leaves in the wind and Reyna tunes in to listen now, trying to follow the breeze as it winds through treetops and ruffles up piles of fallen leaves, wondering what it would be like to fly along with it. Almost immediately, the wind kicks up all at once and then disappears entirely.
Everything’s moving on without her these days.
“I wasn’t sure if Artemis kicked me out before she left.”
Thalia looks at Reyna with such wide eyes — hair grown out just enough to curl gently around her ear and neck, and it flops satisfyingly as she spins around making salves. A lock of her hair falls into her face, and Reyna is struck with the sudden urge to brush it back. It’s just… hard to see her like that, baffled and a little hurt. That’s all.
“Why would she?” Thalia’s quiet when she answers. That feels worse than Reyna’s head, which she’s told is getting better but isn’t quite sure whether she believes that yet. It was getting better after Krios, too. It was getting better after the war.
Reyna refuses to shrug this off, refuses to make herself small in her shame. She straightens her spine, ignoring the sharp pain that shoots down her nerves like the electricity that sparks around Thalia’s fingers and never touches her, and looks Thalia dead in the eye.
The look Thalia sends back makes Reyna wish, for just one fleeting moment, that she really was dead — in all of her, not just the eye.
Then Thalia’s hands are on her arm and back, soft and gentle as she guides Reyna back down, and yeah, maybe that feels better. Maybe she should’ve stayed down, stayed resting.
Stayed vulnerable, stayed trusting — but it was too damn late for that.
Still, she can’t look at Thalia when she asks, “Mad you got left behind with me?”
Something crashes just out of sight, and Reyna suppresses a flinch on instinct. Thalia’s breathing is heavy and unsteady, and Reyna feels cruel satisfaction at finally cracking this unflappable girl, feels crushing shame at the same.
And somehow, Thalia still answers: “Artemis is a mortal among gods—” and god, god , Reyna knows exactly what she means, a god so kind and compassionate that she could hardly be called one is a high compliment indeed— “but she’s a god nonetheless. Don’t forget that, when you leave here.”
Reyna makes a quiet kind of humming noise, an agreement and a dissent all at once. Thalia takes it as permission to keep talking. “She’s mad, you know? That her strongest Hunter is leaving her, and she’s being a little bi—”
The moon darkens under the ghostly fog, and Reyna coughs. Hard. Thalia throws her head back and laughs; her hair falls in curls and locks and wild joy and Reyna’s heart skips. “Bit ridiculous, though — she’s getting me. ” And maybe the confidence is fake but the way her skin is flushed and her heart is pounding is real, the way Thalia is looking at her is real.
“It’s like the doors, right,” and she doesn’t specify which ones but she knows Thalia knows, knows Thalia is haunted by the same nightmares that make Nico shadow travel into her cabin at 3 a.m., “they let things out and they keep things in but the change doesn’t stop us from opening them — even if it kills us.”
When Thalia smirks, Reyna forgets how to breathe. “I like that — being the death of a god. I could get used to it.”
It’s quiet at last. Thalia’s given up on mixing tinctures Reyna won’t drink, and the wind brushes featherlight across the treetops, or the grass. In a few months, Reyna suspects that the Hunters will have taught her the difference. Right now, she’s not sure it matters.
“You ever wonder what it would be like? To be there with them when the battles happen, I mean.”
Reyna isn’t expecting the question — not from Thalia, of all people, but not really at all. No one ever talks about it. Not to her face, at least.
She thinks about Jason battling Krios all alone on a mountaintop that was crumbling beneath his feet, and Nico bruising pomegranate-red and blanching ghostly pale alone in hell. She thinks about the Seven in Greece while she dragged a statue home, the quests she sent heroes on while she stayed back to protect the camp — quests that not everyone came home from.
She thinks about what Nico whispered into her shoulder, curled up in her bed at night when the horrors visited his dreams too loudly to breathe through (every night, it was every damn night, this kid could not catch a break if Zeus himself hurled it into his hands).
Love is a made-up feeling, he demanded, it’s something you make for yourself. So make it, Reyna, we have to make the love we keep chasing after for ourselves — one of us ought to have it, at least.
She chokes on a sob. You deserve it more than I do, anyways, Nico whispered, voice so steady in the darkness that she almost believed him.
“It would be hell. And I’d go every time if it meant my friends could be kept safe, but they can’t and staying behind kills me but at least it keeps them alive. ”
Reyna thinks Thalia might be allergic to quiet. She hums, taps her fingers, whirls towards Reyna with the widest grin and wildest questions. Reyna might be allergic to disappointing her, because she’s answered every single ridiculous one — dignity be damned.
“So why’d you join,” she asks between feral bites of warm bread and bubbling stew. They’d gotten hungry, and Reyna has long-since learned to come prepared.
Reyna laughs, even though Thalia’s serious. It doesn’t matter, she’s learned. This is what they do now, what they’ve always done.
Always is a fleeting moment and an eternity in this single night, and Reyna’s a fast learner.
“I’m supposed to be a leader, supposed to be burned by love over and over again. I’m supposed to put myself to the side for my campers, do what the fates and the auguries tell me. I’m sick of doing what I’m told.” Reyna snorts, uncaring now of the danger, then adds, “Someone smarter than all the gods and all the fates told me that love is a made-up thing, anyways.” Then she turns the question around: “Why are you leaving?”
Thalia chews, sends a sidelong glance Reyna’s way. “Same reason.”
That makes Reyna laugh again. “Cop out answer!” she cries, indignant. Thalia throws a piece of bread at her; Reyna catches it and tosses it back. It misses by a mile and lands in the crackling fire and burns the night with the scent of warmth.
“Alright, alright,” Thalia gasps when they catch a break in their laughter. “I mean, I joined because I had to, right? I left my home with Luke and Annabeth, and when I got myself un-tree’d Luke had gone rogue and Annabeth was all grown up, and… it was me or him, and maybe it was selfish but Percy was right for it. He had to be right for it, because I wasn’t going to do it anymore — I was done with the prophecies and fake love from a parent who’s never once stopped by to say hi. So what else was there?”
Haloed by firelight and ferocity, Thalia glows. Reyna has never seen someone more defiant.
She grins and bumps her shoulder into Thalia’s, and doesn’t even protest when Thalia fusses and makes her lay back down this time.
In the morning, Reyna will find herself alone and for a moment her heart will pound in her stomach — after everything, she’s left alone again?
Then she’ll straighten up, down the tincture she swore would never pass her lips (but Thalia left at her bedside anyways), and stand, pack her things and square herself for the Hunters to arrive.
She’ll put away the scraps from dinner last night, brush away the firewood and ash — pack the tent, clean up whatever else she can.
She’ll notice something shift in the wind, find fluttering parchment trapped under a silver bow — Thalia’s bow. She’ll read the note and read it again, follow every inked line and splatter with her heart in her throat, then drop the note into the smoldering ashes she has yet to stamp out.
Love is a feeling you make for yourself, she’ll whisper, and then she’ll turn and face a god killed by the girl she loves — by the girl who loves her.
But for now: Thalia drops down on the dewy grass beside Reyna and lays down. Under the silver moon, their hands brush. Reyna can almost pretend it’s the gentle grass, the whispering wind — but Thalia is firm and real under her fingers, warm and kind and full of life.
In the shadows, something brown glints, winks at her. Nico slips back into the night, and oh. Someone came to see her off after all.