Archive of Our Own

The thing about being an Ares’ kid is that every dumb fuck this side of Long Island thinks that the only thing you can think about is blood. Maybe, if they’re really imaginative, they throw in some carte blanche violence. Clarisse knows for a fact that some kids in camp figure her mind is nothing more than the same one-track mantra that a chain-linked pitbull’s got: I hate you, I bite you, fuck you. And yeah, okay, the latter one’s probably par for the course, but that’s only because everybody else around her is a moron who takes one look at her and her siblings and figures they’ve all got some sort of Grecian rabies or something.

Clarisse tries not to take it personally. Every cabin has, like, its thing, and Clarisse would be lying if she said she’s never passed by the Hephaestus cabin and thought about bothering them with her half-busted mp3 player — because if anybody can figure out how to get rid of the whole radio waves to monster attack thing all electronics have got going on, it’s her cousins — or rolled her eyes a little when the Apollo cabin puts on yet another concert. Clarisse and her siblings are just unlucky enough to have Ares’ thing, which is total bullshit anyway, since most surviving Grecian myths were written by Athenians who were both pompous asses and also the sworn enemies of Thrace and Sparta and by extension Dad, so the cards have been historically stacked against them since day one because Ares — and everybody related to him — is clearly nothing more than a whiny little bastard who gets a boner from a fist fight— okay, ew, don’t think of Dad with a boner, Clarisse, the fuck? — and maybe a black eye.

Clarisse has a million and one reasons why that’s all sorts of wrong, and not a single person willing to listen to her. And okay, sure, Clarisse has to admit that she and her siblings do have the occasional crash-out, but can you fucking blame them? First off, nobody but them knows Dad. Not really. Not even Jackson does, so him saying that he does is like Clarisse saying she knows Poseidon just because she’s seen the sea-god before and read a single myth about him, which is probably one more than Jackson has. Second, everybody loves to forget that Clarisse’s family includes, yeah, Phobos and Deimos — who are fucking awesome, actually, with their motorcycles and the same flair that pretty boy from Supernatural’s got — but also Anteros, Eros, Harmonia, and, technically, the Amazons. Third, kids aren’t their parents, and even if they were, they would still all be half-Ares, which means, logically, they should have at least one other emotion besides anger from their human parent, and Clarisse has some proof of that because would somebody that only feels anger be crying? No. But crying’s exactly what Sid’s doing when he comes into the cabin after lunch.

At first, Clarisse figures she’ll just ignore it. Sid’s only been at camp for a few months now, and he’s already way younger than the rest of them — Dad, at least, knows something about child planning, unlike Apollo and Hermes — so, you know, it was about time he got bit with the homesickness bug. But then Shermy, who’s got a soft spot for any camper that’s still rocking velcro-light-up sneakers, wiggles around in his bunk a little and frowns.

“Hey, what’s up, Sidney-bean?”

“Nothin’,” Sid says, which is clearly a lie. He wipes at his face. “Leave me ‘lone, Shermy.”

Ah, Christ. Clarisse stops trying to force her foot into her boot at the sound of Sid’s miserable Elmo voice, and she and the rest of the cabin watch him scurry up into his bunk and curl up all tight and small. She glances around and, yeah, all her siblings are looking back at her, too. She sighs, then tosses her boots before moving over to the unhappy lump previously known as Sid, because apparently being Head Counselor also means she’s all of these morons’ Mom, and that means doing stuff like comforting. Sometimes it’s a real bummer. Most of the time, though, it just gives her a headache. She’s got a bad feeling today’ll be the former, which is always the worst.

“Sid?”

The kid doesn’t move, not even a little.

Clarisse clears her throat. “Sid. Come on. You feeling sick or something?”

“No.”

“You hurt somewhere, then?”

“No.”

Here’s the exact place where every other cabin probably figures Clarisse would throw her hands up and stand around like some moron because emotions, what’s them? Clarisse doesn’t, of course, because she’s a real person with a real, functioning emotional spectrum, and just because she doesn’t flaunt it as much as cry-baby Jackson does, doesn’t mean she doesn’t have it.

“Did you do something stupid?” New campers always broke the rules, sometimes on purpose and other times not. Clarisse is something of a benevolent dictator, though, and she doesn’t want Sid to think she’ll, like, kill him for making a mistake. “It’s okay if you did, kid. Really. We just got to know about it before Chiron or Mr. D comes around.”

“No.”

Clarisse purses her lips together.

“Did somebody say something to you? Do something?”

Sid doesn’t answer that, which means yes, somebody did. Clarisse reaches out and touches the kid’s shoulder. She tugs a little, and Sid rolls, limp, right into his pillow.

“Don’t do that,” Clarisse says, “you’re going to smother yourself or something, and we don’t have a good place to hide bodies anymore.”

Sid lifts his face a little.

“Anymore?”

“Ares humor,” Mark says from the other end of the cabin. There’s a brief shuffle, then a monotone little ha-ha that makes Clarisse’s lips twitch. Stupid fucking Mark.

“Who said it?”

“Nobody said anything,” Sid says.

“So what they’d do, then?”

“Nobody did anything. ‘M fine.”

“You’re crying,” Clarisse points out. “That sort of means you aren’t fine, and cabin rules mean that that’s our problem now.”

“That’s not a real rule,” Sid says, his eyes glancing really quickly over Clarisse’s shoulder to where Dad’s Thou Shall Nots’ sign hangs.

“It’s one of mine,” Clarisse says. “So you bet your ass it’s a real rule.”

Sid sniffles. From the gap between his bunk and the top one, somebody lowers down a box of tissues. Clarisse takes it and plucks a few out, putting them on Sid’s chest. She draws the line at putting it to the kid’s face and telling him to blow like some kind of babysitter. Then she turns her wrist over to glance at her watch. She’d been halfway out the door to go meet up with Silena before Sid came in, and Clarisse sort of hopes that she won’t run too late or anything.

“Come on, Sid. You can tell us anything, you know?” She says, softening her voice. She tries for a smile. “We’re not that scary, are we?”

Something eases in Sid’s face.

“No,” he admits. “Just — I don’t know. None of you guys cry.”

“Mark cried literally two days ago,” Shermy says.

“My nose was fucking broken,” Mark answers, sounding vaguely put upon. Clarisse snaps her fingers behind her, the universal shut the fuck up, and, miracles upon miracles, they actually do.

“So? Crying doesn’t mean you're a baby or anything, especially if somebody made you cry.” She pauses. “Did somebody make you cry?”

Sid mumbles something.

“I don’t speak grumble,” Clarisse says, and somebody — her money’s on Shermy — snorts because she sounds a lot like Dad when she does. She makes a mental note to slug her brother when she gets back after Silena.

“I said they don’t like me,” Sid says. “They don’t like any of us.”

Well, fuck. The cabin goes quiet after Sid says that because, like, they all know immediately what he’s talking about. The minute Dad’s boar-spear combo appears over somebody’s head, it’s like they become ground zero for the bubonic plague. And, look, Clarisse isn’t complaining about not being drowned under a sea of siblings every year, but Dad spacing his kids out also means that nobody really has a buddy like other cabins do. By the time Sid actually becomes a teenager, Clarisse will have one foot out the door — or, well, boundary line or whatever — with Shermy and Mark not far behind. It means that every Ares kid is in a very specific sort of hell where they’re desperate for friends while also being treated like hormonal bastards by every other hormonal bastard in camp who thinks they’re better behaved because their parent is obsessed with agriculture or something.

“That’s not true.”

“It is,” Sid says, sitting up. “It is. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong, but every time — every time — there’s a stupid activity, nobody wants to do it with me. Unless it's dodgeball or something, and that doesn’t make any sense because I suck at dodgeball, so most of the time it’s just me.”

Clarisse holds back a wince, but it’s hard work.

“I just wanted to sit with people at lunch, like I did back in school,” Sid says, and his voice gets all sad and far-away, like he’s imagining his old life back when he didn’t have a god for a dad and ugly-ass monsters didn’t want to eat him up, bones and all. “That’s all. I didn’t — I don’t need friends or anything, just lunch. Just a lunch.”

Clarisse can figure out the rest herself because they’ve all kind of been there before. She was lucky enough to make nice with Silena and Charles before all three of them got claimed, which meant they knew enough of each other to look past all the prejudicing bullshit that came with being a part of the pantheon. Still, most of her siblings aren’t lucky enough, and, shit, maybe the reason why every Ares’ kid is so, as the camp says, antisocial is because there’s no one to be social with.

“Did you ask to sit with somebody?”

Sid nods. “I even said please.”

“Aw, Sidney-bean,” Shermy mutters. “Did they say no?”

Sid nods again.

“They said they didn’t want to be around a — a —”

“An Ares kid?” Clarisse asks.

“Yeah,” Sid says, relieved. Clarisse figures the kids probably didn’t come out and say an Ares kid specifically, but she’s heard all the other lovely pseudonyms they’ve been given: boar brats, vulture-spawn, manics, psychos, and the ever-creative Voorheeses because ha-ha they’re all bloody thirsty killers at a summer camp, isn’t that so fucking funny? Except nobody’s laughing, and all Clarisse feels is tired.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “That’s — that’s rough, Sid.”

“What’s wrong with us?”

“Nothing,” Clarisse says. “There’s nothing wrong with us, it’s just — Dad’s got a reputation, and everybody here has their heads so far up their asses they can’t separate us from him. And it sucks. It really sucks, sometimes.”

Sid’s silent for a little while, staring up at the bottom of the bunk above him, and then he gives a full-body sigh that’s way too heavy for such a little guy like him.

“I hate Dad,” he says.

“No, you don’t.”

“Do too, Claire,” Sid says, doubling down.

“No, you do not,” she responds, “because one, Dad doesn’t stand for that shit, and two, you don’t hate him. You hate how people look at you and just see him. Or us. Or whatever. Trust me. We’ve all been there. We all get it. And trust me when I say I’m telling you the truth to save you the time and your ass.”

“My —?”

“Ask Mark,” she says, “have a little storytime about what happens when you think you hate Dad and then act like you hate him.”

Sid blinks. Then blinks again.

“What?”

“Poor Mark still flinches when he puts his wallet in his back pocket.”

“Shut up, Shermy, or so help me God —”

Clarisse ignores the two idiots. She puts her hand on Sid’s stomach, tugging down his pretty cool TMNT shirt — not that she’ll be caught dead saying that — and then shifts around to ease some of the ache out of her knees from kneeling on the floor for too long. She’s still nursing a hell of a bruise from this week’s Capture the Flag game, courtesy of fucking Annabeth Chase and her little mind-minions. Clarisse had ceded her captainacy to Charles this time around because something about this whole week had simply drained her dry, and she still lost. Worse, the Athena cabin figured it was a victory against Ares even though, you know, Charles and the Hephaestus cabin had been the primary red team sponsor.

Come on, Charles said after the match had been called, peering down at Clarisse’s knee, let them be stupid. Let it go.

Clarisse had, sort of, but it was easy for Beckendoorf to say that when Hephaestus is considered the better of the two brothers. Chase actually shakes his hand after the games and compliments at least one thing he does, even though it had been Clarisse, not Charles, who thought of the pincer maneuver or whatever. But, hey, Clarisse is just an Ares kid. She can’t think or anything. She just punches things, don’t you know?

“You still ate, though, right?”

Sid shrugs, which probably means no. Clarisse gets that, too. It’s sort of difficult to get anything down when the majority of the summer camp you’ve been shipped off to for the rest of your mortal life can’t stomach the thought of even letting you sit at the same table with them.

“‘M not hungry,” Sid insists.

“Kid, you’ve got to eat. Chiron or Mr. D will have your ass if they find out you aren’t. Actually, I’ll have your ass.”

“Sorry,” Sid says, and he really, truly sounds like he means it, so Clarisse can’t get too mad. Kid’s had a rough day.

“Just — go to dinner with the others, yeah? Scrounge up some mac and cheese or whatever. Real food first, though, I don’t need you out of your mind with sugar.” She starts making her way up to stand, but pauses halfway through. “Look, Sid, what happened to you — what’s happening — is real shitty, and it’s fine to be upset about it. But you tell us, okay? You tell me or somebody else when something’s bothering you because if we don’t have each other’s backs, nobody will. Got it?”

“Yeah, Claire. I got it.”

She lowers her voice, “Crying doesn’t make you a baby or anything, either. It just makes you human. Or, well, demi-god.” She sighs again. “You know what I fucking mean.”

Sid bunches up one of the tissues in his hand, nodding. Clarisse pats him on the top of his ridiculously soft Chuckie Finster hair and then gets her feet underneath her. She smacks at Shermy and Mark as she moves back to her bunk for her shoes, telling them to keep an eye on their kid brother and get him to smile again or some shit, and then forgoes her boots entirely for her Crocs. She doesn’t have the energy to really go hiking anywhere today anyway, and Silena always gets a kick out of poking fun at her for owning a pair even though she swears it’s because they’re pink and not because they’re Crocs.

Clarisse checks her watch again.

“Hey, I’ve got to hustle,” she says. “I’ll probably see all of you at dinner, so don’t do anything stupid enough to get me called up to the Big House before then. I’ll be pissed if I am. I mean it.”

“Have fun at Girls’ Night,” one of her siblings shouts back, and Clarisse does actually smile at that because they’re all doofuses, okay? But, like, they're her doofuses, so long live the comites or whatever — and yes, she knows that’s a Roman thingy, but she also bets that Ares and Mars have a my kid is your kid kind of thing going on, so why shouldn’t she think the same way, too?

She’s almost out the door when she remembers something important she almost skipped right over. She wedges her foot into the door and looks back at the cabin.

“Hey, Sid? Those kids at lunch — do you know what cabin they were from?”

“Athena, I think.”

Oh, fucking wonderful. Clarisse just sort of nods at the answer and gives herself another reminder to sit Sid down one of these days and tell him which cabins are safe and which aren’t. And sure, all the cabins are technically safe — nobody’s going to murder them out here or anything — but when people think you don’t have a heart to hurt, they tend to do a lot of damage, and the Athena campers figure Ares kids don’t have a heart or a head.

Clarisse waits for the door to shut behind her before scrubbing at her face. She’s way too young for this shit, she thinks, and she wonders if she could convince another of their godly siblings to get their asses down here and show some solidarity. That’s one nice thing about technically being a part of the war pantheon. Unlike the other pantheons, who never saw their godly siblings or, if they did, were relentlessly looked down upon, Clarisse’s old-ass siblings generally make an effort to visit the cabin every year or so. Maybe she can get Harmonia to come by for a few hours. Phobos and Deimos would be cool, too, but Dad kept them busy with the dead-toll or whatever — they’d explained it to her once a long time ago, but all Clarisse really got was that if they weren’t actively doing war stuff, they were stuck accounting souls, which, boring, but they seem to enjoy it, so good for them or whatever.

“You’re late.”

Clarisse glances up and over to the Aphrodite cabin. Silena’s sitting out on the front steps, holding her hand out to inspect her nails. She tips her wrist, and Clarisse takes her hand gently, looking over the polish that Silena’s very clearly just put on. It’s purple. Like, indigo Lite Brite sort of purple.

“I thought you said you weren’t a winter,” Clarisse says, because last week they spent half the time going through color analysis, and anybody and everybody might expect Clarisse to have nodded off at the ten-minute mark, but fuck them, and she means it with the entirety of her warm autumn chest.

“I’m not, but Charles likes the color. He says it reminds him of amethysts.”

“How romantic.”

“Very,” Silena says, taking her hand back to blow on the polish.

“Sorry about being late. I had a situation to deal with first.”

“Uh-oh. A bad one?” Silena asks and then, with her non-painted hand, holds up another bottle of nail polish, this one the same dark espresso color of Clarisse’s eyes. Silena gives a little wiggle of her eyebrows. “It’s time, dear Claire.”

“It’ll just chip off by Monday.”

“Au contraire. I bummed Drew’s top coat protector. We’re going to lacquer you up to high hell.”

“Perfect,” Clarisse says, leaning against the cabin’s railing. “And no, it wasn’t bad. Well, it wasn’t great, either, you know. Just one of those things.”

“And this thing, specifically, was…?”

“Sid came into the cabin crying.”

“Little Sid?” Silena says, frowning. She takes Clarisse’s hands in her lap and inspects them like an army general. “You’ve got to stop biting these, Claire. You’re going to get ingrowns or something, but — but anyway, new kid Sid?”

“It’s been lonely for him, and today he asked some Athena kids —”

“Ew. Strike one.”

“— if he could sit with them at lunch, and they told him they didn’t want to be around an Ares kid or something.”

“Seriously?”

“Swear to God,” Clarisse says.

“Well, that’s shitty. Are you going to tell Chiron about it?”

Clarisse could do that since camp was technically a no-bullying-allowed sort of place, but if she were Sid’s age and had to go to some big assembly that basically boiled down to let the Ares kid sit with you, dammnit, she’d have, like, an aneurysm. Or she’d walk into the forest and not stop until some monster finally put her out of her misery.

“No, Sid already feels a certain way about crying in front of us. Besides, everybody already thinks we complain all the time since Homer had a thing for writing Dad as a fucking sissy.”

Silena winces. “The Iliad?”

“The Iliad,” Clarisse says, long-suffering and only fourteen. “So, I don’t know. Maybe I’ll go say something to Chase, try to sort things out.”

“Oh…yeah?”

Silena wipes something cold along Clarisse’s hands and then brings out one of those nail file things. Silena’s been trying to paint Clarisse’s nails since their first year at camp, and Clarisse has always had a reason not to do it, but if she’s just going to keep losing Capture the Flag or whatever despite all her best efforts, she might as well start losing with style. Clarisse tries not to twitch as Silena shaves away at her fingers.

“You don’t think that’s a good plan?”

“I think it’s definitely a plan. A good one? I don’t know. You and Annabeth aren’t exactly the best of friends, and you can’t tell me you still aren’t a little upset by Friday.”

“I’m more upset about Sid crying,” Clarisse says. “He’s just a kid. Can’t he have friends?”

“Has he tried the Hermes cabin? They’re generally open to anybody.”

“Sid says he’s always left alone during all the group activities. Besides, I don’t want him hanging around anybody who takes advice from the Stolls.”

“You like the Stolls.”

“I think they’re funny as hell, but that doesn’t mean I want anybody getting caught up in their messes. If a Hermes kid told Sid right now to jump, Sid would probably just say ‘how high’. I don’t want to deal with that.”

“Fair.” Silena feels along the tips of Clarisse’s fingers, nods, and then shakes the brown polish. It reeks to fucking Olympus when she opens it up, and Clarisse crinkles her nose, turning her face away. The camp is in its post-lunch slump, which means most of the grounds are sullenly empty. Far across the way is the Athena cabin, and when Clarisse really squints, somebody who looks a lot like Annabeth is wandering the yard with some other brainiacs.

“I wish I could help,” Silena says, “but —”

“I know. Congrats, by the way, on no newbies.” It’s been two years running that the Aphrodite cabin hasn’t gotten any new campers. A claiming season without any claims was the shit — the best divine blessing any of their parents could ever give them. Not because the counselors don’t like their siblings, but because it’s easier to wrangle seven knuckle-heads together than, say, fourteen.

“I think it’s Mom’s way of saying sorry,” Silena says. She lowers her voice, and Clarisse leans a little closer, “You know, for Drew.”

“Listen, any time you want her whipped into shape, just let me know.”

“I’d pay good money,” Silena says, a little wistful. Clarisse is suddenly very, very glad to have the siblings she does. She’d rather take a pile of dumb, well-meaning kids than the he-said-she-said mess of the Aphrodite cabin. Why some campers seem to revel in their stereotypes never ceases to amaze Clarisse. At first, she thought it was some grand scheme to be underestimated, but, no, kids like Drew just took whatever bad habit they were given and ran miles with it. As much as Clarisse loves Silena, she can only spend so much time around Drew’s whining, especially because Drew always looked at her like something flea-riddled thing Silena dragged in, while also lamenting about how unfair it was that all the Ares boys were just so cute because, you know, they were Ares boys.

Yeah, Clarisse told her brothers to stay far away from her, not that they really needed to be told that. They had perfectly working eyes and ears after all.

“How’s Charles?”

Silena brightens up at the question. It’s a weird sort of thing, what the Ares-Aphrodite-Hephaestus cabins have. A lot of people think Dad’s giving Hephaestus the go-around with Aphrodite — especially because of that stupid golden net myth — but Clarisse is probably sure Dad would rather get trapped in another jar and be tortured by Titans again than do anything to one, actively hurt Uncle H in any way, and two, follow in Zeus’s footsteps. It’s no wonder that Ares ended up the way he was, the way Zeus and Hera must’ve fought — Clarisse got a little taste of it when her mom dated around and got cheated on, and that shit was fucking awful. But yeah, Ares and Aphro and Uncle H, not as scandalous as people keep thinking, but then again it’s clear that the camp has only, like, one brain cell moving around it at any time, and it has to belong to Chiron. Dad has a thing about not marrying, which is fair. Very fair, actually, and very nice to the Ares kids since they don’t have to worry about any murderous godly step-mom or something. Most of Clarisse’s oldest siblings — Eros, Anteros, Phobos, and Deimos — were born because Aphrodite had just wanted kids, Ares had obliged, and Uncle H had still been hiding away on Lemnos. So it’s still a little weird, but not icky, which is honestly the best any of them can ask for. Still, it’s sort of funny that a lot of Hephaestus kids get with the Aphrodite campers, and most of them have an Ares third-wheeler. Go figure, Clarisse supposes.

“...he’s figuring something out — a sword, I think. Or maybe a dagger. I don’t know, to be honest, but he’s so excited about it —,” Silena gushes, and Clarisse nods along. A lot of people also underestimated the Aphrodite cabin because of love and all that, but the Greeks have a fuckton of translations of love, and love for things is one of them. Silena loves somebody most when they’re passionate about something. She could listen to Charles talk about his latest invention for hours just to hear the happiness in his voice. It’s cute.

Silena moves over to Clarisse’s other hand.

“But it’s — well, I think he’s having trouble with it, and I think he doesn’t want to admit it because he’s Charles and a big goober, and you know I’m not much help with stuff like that.”

“You think he’d let me have a look at it?”

“Probably. You know he always gets a kick out of you visiting the forge.”

That Charles does. Most Hephaestus campers do, actually, because you kind of quickly learn just how good that thing you made is when a war-god’s kid starts messing around with it. Weapons, especially. The Hephaestus kids are all blacksmiths, and shit, their crafts are always amazing, but sometimes it takes somebody like Clarisse to figure out the right counterbalance on a sword or why a lance is top-heavy despite it, on paper, meeting all the right weights and measures. Besides, Hephaestus’s kids can only bless the weapon, not what the weapon can do. If they want a bow to get nine shots out of ten, they either give it to someone in the Apollo cabin or send it over to Clarisse and her siblings to figure it out.

“I’ll go after dinner,” Clarisse promises, because even if Silena doesn’t say it out loud, there’s this little furrow in her brow that means she’s worrying about Charles, which kind of tracks because just a few weeks ago, Charles straight up fainted in the forge, the idiot. That had been a great wake-up call for Clarisse. She doesn’t think she’s ever moved faster in her life when Jake pounded on the Ares door shouting that Charles was out and not waking the fuck up. By the time Clarisse got there, still in her pajamas, Charles was rousing, though he didn’t look great.

Oh, hey, he said, like there wasn’t blood caked on his temple. You good?

That’s the kind of guy Charles is, really. Halfway concussed and so dehydrated he probably hadn’t pissed in days, and he was asking if Clarisse was good.

Besides the heart attack you gave me? Clarisse said, looping her arm around his shoulders and lifting, Just peachy, metalhead. If you’re going to vomit, don’t do it on me.

“Thanks,” Silena says, wiping a stray drop of polish off Clarisse’s finger. Something catches her eye past Clarisse, though, and she jerks a little. Clarisse goes to look, but Silena hits her on the thigh hard enough that Clarisse has to give her an unimpressed glare.

“Don’t look.”

“Don’t look at what?” Clarisse asks.

“If we don’t pay any attention to her, maybe she’ll go away.”

Clarisse sneaks a look, and, yeah, Annabeth Chase is coming right over to them. Clarisse blows her bangs out of her eyes, fighting back the urge to bash her head in with the porch railing. “Chase minding her own business and not sticking her nose into things? Fat chance, Silena.”

“Be nice,” Silena says. “Remember you’re on my turf.”

Alright. Alright. Deep breath, Clarie. Show fucking time.

“Hi,” Annabeth says.

“Hello.” Silena caps Clarisse’s polish and moves back to her indigo, working on her unpainted hand. When Annabeth doesn’t follow up, Silena hums and asks, “Do you need something, Annabeth?”

“No, not really.”

Clarisse wants to ask what she’s doing over here, then, but decides she doesn’t really care. It’s probably to brag about winning Capture the Flag yet again, and Clarisse doesn’t need that right now. What she does need, though, is to have a talk with Annabeth about her siblings, so what a perfect opportunity this is.

Clarisse shifts, raising her head up.

“You got some new campers this year, didn’t you?” Clarisse knows the answer, of course, but it’s a solid enough segway. “Some little kids, yeah?”

“A few,” Annabeth says, narrowing her eyes.

“Did they say anything to you about lunch time today?” The younger campers had earlier schedules than the older ones, because, you know, nobody wants a cranky eight-year-old wandering around at midnight. The counselors would be any new camper’s buddy for the first week, but then they took over their normal schedules, and it was up to the kid to figure out where to go and when. Everybody had dinner together like one big, happy family, and, fuck it, Clarisse actually likes those dinners. Not that she’ll ever tell anybody. No way. She’s taking that information down to the grave. Or, well, the Underworld.

“No.”

“Okay, well, I’ve got a little this year, too, and he came to us sort of upset after lunch. Apparently, he asked to sit with your siblings, and they basically told him to get lost.”

“Uh-huh,” Annabeth says, crossing her arms.

“So I’m thinking, maybe —”

“Oh, you’re thinking?”

Clarisse, in her infinite mercy, decides to ignore that. You would think, being the daughter of the goddess of wisdom and all that, Annabeth would have better insults, but so far, Clarisse has been consistently disappointed.

“Look, your siblings didn’t have to let Sid sit with them —,” though Clarisse wishes they had if only to give Sid a little silver lining in his I’m apparently a demigod lifecrisis, “— and you can’t force them to hang out with anybody that they don’t want to hang out with. I get that. But maybe tell them to be nicer about it? He’s only eight.”

Annabeth frowns.

“Were you there?”

“Um, no? He came and told us.”

“How do you know that he wasn’t the mean one?”

“Sid’s not mean.” Sid’s actually a sweetheart, and please, Christ, let him stay that way.

“But my siblings are?”

“Look, I’m not accusing them of anything, I just —”

“To accuse someone is to charge somebody with an offense or a crime —”

“Yes, thank you, Ms. Dictionary,” Clarisse says.

“— and you’re saying that my siblings made yours cry. You’re calling them bullies.”

“If the shoe fucking fits,” Clarisse says.

“Claire,” Silena murmurs. She shoots a scowl at Annabeth. “You know that that’s wrong. Clarisse never called them bullies. You put those words in her mouth, and if you think you didn’t, you need to get your hearing checked.”

Annabeth flushes.

“Just talk to them,” Clarisse says. Be a fucking counselor, she wants to add, but she doubts that’ll go over well. Annabeth’s the youngest counselor in the camp, and she’s touchy about it. Not specifically about her age, but she’s always complaining that every other counselor babies or bosses her around. And look, Clarisse gets it, because it would piss her off, too, if everybody around her kept trying to tell her what to do with her siblings, which is reason one hundred and one of why Clarisse tries to speak to Annabeth as little as possible. “That’s all.”

“Don’t tell me what to do.”

Ah, there it is. Clarisse sighs. She figures she’s done her part as best that she can without going over to the Athena cabin or cornering the kids somewhere to talk to them herself, or getting Chiron or Mr. D involved, so she’s ready to let this conversation go. What people never tell you about Athena campers is that everything is a competition to them, and Annabeth never quits.

“How do you know your sibling isn’t lying?”

Okay, that fucking irks Clarisse. Ares kids are a lot of things, but being liars isn’t one of them.

“Annabeth, maybe you should go,” Silena says. “Claire and I are busy.”

It’s an out for both of them. An easy one, really. But then Annabeth opens her mouth again, and Clarisse has a feeling that this is it.

“No, no. I want LaRue to answer this one. How does she know her sibling isn’t lying about the whole thing just to stir up some trouble to get my cabin in trouble?” Annabeth pauses just to breathe, and then gives it yet another go, “What, he’s that sore of a loser?”

“The fuck is wrong with you?” Clarisse says. “First, jackass, Sid’s not even old enough to play Capture the Flag, so why would he care if we win or lose? Secondly, unlike what you and the rest of you whackjobs think, mine and my siblings’ lives do not revolve around you or the Athena cabin or Capture the fucking Flag. The only rivalry you have is the one you’ve desperately built up in that your head of yours, and — and fuck you for accusing my brother of lying when your mom’s basically the patron saint of it. You probably couldn’t —”

“Ms. LaRue.”

Clarisse stands up because, damnit, sometimes there are godly stereotypes for a reason, and she’s pissed, okay? She’s pissed because, yes, she lost Capture the Flag again, and her siblings are, once again, getting shit on because Ares must equal bad.

“You came over here to me — to me! — to do what, here, Chase? Hm? C’mon. Sore losers? At least when we win — and we do fucking win. We’ve got the damn record — we don’t go around nagging everybody about it. You want to know why? Huh? Because we know we’re good, okay? We know that shit in our fucking souls. We’re good. Ares' kids are good, and we don’t need anybody else to tell us so.”

Clarisse has sort of lost the plot by the end of it, but the other campers around them — the Aphrodite kids slinking out their front door, the occasional camp straggler stopping in the yard to listen — start giving Annabeth all sorts of looks because she’s sort of an ass, young or not, and it’s time somebody put her in her place, and it looks like it’s Clarisse’s lucky day, so —

“Clarisse LaRue.”

Now, look. Look. Clarisse LaRue isn’t the kind of kid to flinch at scary things, but it’s a little different when a god calls out your name. She’s only mortal — or, well, half-mortal — after all. She glances over, and, yep, there’s Mr. D.

“I just wanted —”

“That’s enough, Ms. Chase.”

Annabeth’s mouth closes so fast it clicks, and Clarisse feels a smidge of satisfaction right before Mr. D turns his head to stare at her. Mr. D’s not the scariest person she’s ever met — he’s actually pretty chill if you keep your head down and only bother him about a few things, and, anyway, he’s one of the few gods who actually likes Dad because of, like, post-war parties or something — but here, now, with one hand on his hip and his eyebrows all up, she figures she’s in some deep shit.

“Mr. D —”

“Not another word, Ms. Chase, unless you’d like me to escort you to your cabin,” Mr. D says, and Annabeth visibly struggles with herself before glaring at the ground. He looks around at everybody watching. “Don’t you all have better things to do than gwak? Silena, get your siblings inside.”

The stray campers flee. Silena slowly collects all her nail stuff, but stops from leaving completely. Just go, Clarisse tries to say with her eyes, but Silena can be stubborn when she wants to be and loyal to a fault, so she squares her jaw and meets Mr. D head-on.

“Mr. D, Clarisse was just saying —”

“I heard perfectly what Clarisse was just saying, Silena, and it was full of language inappropriate for anyone within camp to say, let alone a counselor like herself.” He gestures at the cabin behind them. “Now, inside. I’m not going to say it again.”

Clarisse crosses her arms.

“It’s fine,” she mutters, “just go, yeah? No use for you to be in trouble, too.”

Silena gives her a pitying look before turning on her heel and closing the door behind her. Clarisse decides to just bite the fucking bullet and start walking down the steps toward the god.

“To the Big House?”

Mr. D’s eyes narrow. “Take it down a few decibels, Ms. LaRue. I’m not in the mood to be yelled at.”

“This isn’t yelling.”

“Oh? It’s not, is it?”

Clarisse clenches her fists, pressing them into her biceps. Her self-preservation kicks in past the angry haze, because when Mr. D’s voice gets into that strange, perfectly quiet and polite place it’s at right now, ugly shit’s about to go down. Mr. D searches her face for a while before turning toward Annabeth.

“Go back to your cabin. Think about things like humility.”

“Humility? Mr. D, she called me —”

“I’m aware of what Ms. LaRue called you, Ms. Chase. I’m very aware. I’m also aware that you approached Ms. LaRue of your own accord and egged her on. Yes?” Annabeth doesn’t answer. Mr. D looks murderous. “That wasn’t a rhetorical question.”

“I wasn’t egging her on. She just — she exploded at me!”

Clarisse opens her mouth, but Mr. D points his finger right at her.

“Don’t,” he says, and, you know, Clarisse is technically the daughter of, like, the soldier to end all soldiers, so listening to orders is sort of hardwired into her even if the orders come from her forcibly sober wine-god of an uncle.

Mr. D moves over to Annabeth and takes one of her arms in his hand. She squawks, outranged, and immediately starts trying to wiggle out, spouting nonsense about how this isn’t fair and Clarisse has had it out to get her since Friday’s game, and Mr. D, this is ridiculous!

“As ridiculous as coming across two girls who are far too old to be throwing tantrums, throwing said tantrums?” He jerks Annabeth tight to his side, and yikes, Clarisse has only seen that move once, when Castor — or had it been Pollux? — successfully fermented strawberries into this weird not-quite wine thing, but close enough, and Mr. D had to lug them and the whole of the Demeter cabin to the infirmary. “Yes, I agree. Very ridiculous.”

Annabeth finally seems to realize that she might not have been in trouble at the beginning of this whole mess, per se, but she’s certainly gotten herself into it now. She stops struggling.

“Mr. D,” she says, sort of pitiful, and Clarisse feels an iota of pity for her. Rumor has it that Annabeth had a hard life before camp, and she’s only — what, like, twelve now? But then Clarisse remembers all the shit Annabeth tried to imply about Sid, about Clarisse, about Ares' kids, and yeah — yeah, Mr. D, grab her. Fucking haul her off to wherever as long as it's far away from Clarisse and her siblings.

“Hush,” Mr. D says. “And I mean it this time, Ms. Chase. Clearly, the two of you need to cool down before whatever this is —,” he gestures at the space between them, “— can be discussed civilly with indoor voices. You,” he says, pulling on Annabeth’s arm, “and I are going to your cabin. And you,” he points at Clarisse, “are going to your cabin.”

“But Mr. D, why are you coming to my cabin? Shouldn’t you be escorting —?”

“One. More. Word. Ms. Chase.”

“Mr. D,” Clarisse says, because she’s only on, what? Strike one of don’t fucking speak? “It’s almost dinner.”

“I’m aware, Ms. LaRue.”

Clarisse sort of flounders at that.

“You’re making us skip dinner? That’s, like, child abuse.”

“It isn’t child abuse. It’s a punishment.”

“It’s medieval torture.”

“It is not, Ms. LaRue,” Mr. D says, his eyes sort of flashing in the way gods’ do when they’re pissed to high hell. It makes them, for a brief moment, the same color as Silena’s nail polish. “Would you like to see medieval torture? Because I assure you that I’m more than happy to oblige you.”

“No, Mr. D,” Clarisse grits out. She looks between him and Annabeth, then up to the Dining Hall, and then swallows down a spasm of fury. “I’ll go to my cabin now.”

Mr. D just hums, the sound throaty like some big cat’s half-assed chuff, and jerks his chin toward the Ares cabin.

“Go on, then. And Ms. LaRue? I’ll know if you don’t stay there.”

Yeah, she fucking gets it, okay? Her ass is grass because she had the sheer audacity to call Annabeth an obsessed brat to her face and say a few bad words. Whoop-dee-fucking-doo, alright. Call the police or something. Send out a national alert.

“Uh, Claire?”

“Just don’t,” she says, walking the opposite way of Shermy and Mark and, yeah, even Sid, as they head up to the Hall.

“Hey, hey,” Mark says, catching her arm. It’s a very dangerous maneuver, but Clarisse knows she’ll be in even deeper shit if she punches her brother outside the training field. “What’s wrong?”

“Annabeth fucking Chase.”

“Aw, shit,” Shermy says, grimacing. Mark just sighs. Sid looks between all of them with his big, stupid, seal eyes, and Clarisse watches the tiniest frown start growing on his face.

“Is — is that the Athena counselor?”

“No,” the three of them all say together, and okay, Ares’ kids may lie a little, but that’s only because the next sentence out of Sid’s mouth would probably be sorry, this is all my fault. Which, no. It isn’t. It’s Clarisse’s fault for losing her temper with someone as stupid as Annabeth.

Shermy eyes her warily.

“Are you in trouble?”

“What do you think?” She snaps. “Yes, I’m in trouble. Mr. D’s sending me to the cabin to starve or whatever. Have fun at dinner.”

“What, Clarisse, wait —”

She shrugs Mark off hard enough for him to stumble slightly, and then stalks into the cabin, slamming the door behind her. It’s really quiet inside, the kind of quiet that means she starts hearing the cicadas start their nightly set through the walls. The buzz makes her teeth ache until she realizes how hard she’s clenching her jaw and forces herself to relax it. No need to break a tooth or something. Clarisse brings her hands up to try to rub the ache out of her jaw, but then stops cold when she sees her nails. Most of the color has stayed on, but the paint itself is smudged and all gluey from where it’s rubbed against her palm and her arms. For a short while, she just sort of…stares at them, and then she screams. It’s loud and short and fucking beautiful, and she spins around and kicks the nearest thing — a dresser — sucking in a sharp breath when a hot pain flares in her foot.

“Stupid Crocs,” she says, kicking them off. When that’s not enough, she bends over, picks them up, and chucks them clear across the room, feeling a little satisfied when they hit the far wall. “Stupid Annabeth Chase and her goddamn superiority complex, talking to me like I’m sort of —”

She doesn’t kick the dresser again because she’s not stupid, but she does mess up anything she can touch that isn’t, like, super breakable or sentimental. Clarisse doesn’t touch any of her siblings’ bunks because, as furious as she feels, as thunderous as her anger is — how awful Dad’s anger is — she’s not the pitbull frothing at the mouth that Miss Annabeth Chase and everybody else in this stupid fucking summer camp shithole thinks that she is. Her eyes burn. She swipes her hand across them and oh — oh, she’s crying. Well, fuck her, then. People do cry when they’re angry. Who knew?

The issue, though, is that once Clarisse knows she’s crying, she can’t really stop. Most of her anger just melts right into an odd sort of sadness, and she cups her arms around her elbows, funky-ass nails and all, and sobs. She’s sobbing so loud, actually, that she only sort of hears the cabin door open and close behind her. Her first thought is that one of her brothers has slunk back to try and calm her down, so she wipes her eyes with the heels of her hands, sniffs back as much mucus as she can, and kicks something else with her foot. 

“Leave me the fuck alone,” she says.

A certain sort of silence descends in the cabin after her announcement, different from when she first entered. Not even the cicadas are still singing, and all of a sudden, the fine hair along Clarisse’s neck and arms starts to rise.

“Excuse me?”

Clarisse’s eyes go really, really wide, because that’s not Shermy or Mark or Sid or even Mr. D. That’s —

“You want to tell me what’s going on here?”

No, Clarisse very much does not, thank you. She just sort of stays in the middle of the room, her shoulders all hunched up, desperately sort of praying for Zeus to, like, strike her with a lightning bolt right now, please.

“Clarisse.”

She’s not stupid enough to say go away again, but she wants to.

“Clarisse, look at me.”

She swipes at her eyes again — useless, really, because she’s clearly been crying — and then does the tiniest shuffle around to face the cabin door. Her throat works.

“Hey, Dad,” she says, her voice cracking.

It’s always sort of weird seeing Dad. He does a pretty good job of covering up his glamour — which makes sense, Clarisse figures, because Dad’s probably spent more time with mortals and in the mortal plane than most of the other Olympians — and all that taupe skin and white hair, but the eyes stay the same, this deep sort of carmine that’s clearly not human. It’s weirder still to see him without his sunglasses, and without them, Clarisse can see his eyes go every which way, soaking up the travesty that the cabin’s become.

Dad slowly spins on his heel, taking it all in, and then he fixes Clarisse with a look that once, probably, stopped Demeter from declaring an all-out war against Hades after the whole Persephone fiasco — Clarisse is still waiting for that story, actually — and then her whole brain shuts down when Dad points one finger toward the floor.

“Did you do this?”

Clarisse tries not to flinch.

“Did — did Mr. D call you?”

Dad tips his head to the side, his jaw clenching once, twice, three times before he decides to answer. “Was Dionysus meant to call me?”

“So, no, then?”

“Clarisse,” Dad growls, all deep and dangerous. “You’d better start talking very soon and very fast.”

“Don’t yell at me,” she says, and she gets the irony, okay? She gets it.

“Am I yelling at you?”

Well, no, he isn’t, but it certainly feels that way. She doesn’t say that aloud, though, and risks asking another question instead because she really doesn’t want to explain the shitstorm of a day she’s had. “Why are you here?”

“Watch the attitude,” he says, and Clarisse straightens up instinctively, because — well, because Dad’s the god of war, which everybody and their mother knows, sure, but he’s also the god-prince, which is approximately one step down from god-king, and it shows, okay? It shows. Or sounds. “I’m here because the cabin called me.”

“The cabin —? What?”

Dad points along the baseboards. “I’ve got wards here, Clarisse. The same ones that are lying around the whole camp, things that warn me if something bad happens. The cabin called. I came.”

Clarisse gets a handful of seconds to process that information, and it’s sweet, sort of, that Dad’s put the god equivalent of a security system in their cabin. It’s also very terrible for her in this specific scenario because the cabin, apparently, thought Clarisse LaRue turning over a few camping chairs and throwing shoes at it was bad enough to call Dad in the middle of the warring season.

“Now I’m going to ask again, and you’d better answer me, young lady,” Dad says, gesturing at the room. “What is this?”

Here’s the thing. Clarisse could try to be funny with it. She could try to say it’s some new-age feng shui bullshit that the Apollo kids have sworn up and down they should try out, and maybe, maybe, Dad would be so shocked by the audacity he’d go right back around to thinking it’s funny. Mark, when he’s in trouble, is pretty good at doing stuff like that. The issue is that Clarisse very much isn’t Mark, and even if Dad forgives her for trashing the place, there’s still the whole thing with Annabeth that Mr. D could spring on her anytime. Clarisse is in trouble anyway you slice it, and the realization makes her stomach fly right up into her throat.

“I lost my temper.”

“I don’t speak grumble, Clarisse,” he says, but there’s no Shermy to laugh at it now. “Speak up.”

“I said I lost my temper, okay? I lost it.”

Very much not okay, if Dad’s face is anything to go by, but whatever. Clarisse is already a dead woman walking — why not push it a few more miles?

“So you did this.”

It isn’t a question, but Clarisse answers it like it’s one anyway.

“No, Dad, a chimera did.”

That does it. Clarisse goes from standing in the middle of the room to standing in the middle of the room with Dad, and then she’s sort of pulled forward, her bare feet sliding on the floor, and half-turned, and —

“Dad!”

Ares gets her right on the ass with that big hand of his, the smack not landing anywhere particularly sensitive but stinging anyway, even through her shorts. All her breath rushes into the top of her chest, getting all caught up, and her head sort of swims. Clarisse is still trying to come to terms with it all when Dad straightens her up. He does this leaning down thing that puts his face right across from hers, and yikes — she glances at his eyes, deeply regrets it, and then focuses on, like, his jaw instead.

“You —” she starts, breathless, but he talks right over her.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” Dad says, “you’re going to clean this whole mess up — and I mean clean it — and then you and I are going to talk about all the choices you’ve made today, including whatever trouble you got into with Dio.”

“It wasn’t trouble with Mr. D, it was just —”

“No. Not now. Cleaning first.” He lets her go. Clarisse rubs her arm where he was holding, even though it doesn’t hurt. He nudges her shoulder with a knuckle. “Come on. Let’s go, little lady.”

Well, little lady’s arguably better than young lady. It would be a whole lot better if he started calling her Claire, though, but she figures that’s going to take a pretty hefty miracle. Admittedly, it takes a lot to work Dad up to the smacking stage, and he’s already there without hearing everything Clarisse has done today. Still, she has a little, itsy-bitsy, teeny-tiny hope that she might be able to wiggle her way out of it if she keeps her head down and says yes, sir and no, sir at the right time. Dad has, though he’ll deny it to his dying day, a soft spot for his girls. Clarisse’s brothers always cry favoritism, and they might be onto something since she tends to get away with more than they do. Clarisse figures it has something to do with what’s happened to her other mortal sisters: Alcippe, Hippolyte, Penthesileia, etc., etc. Honestly, if Clarisse thinks about it, she’s sort of lucky to be alive, given the centuries-old track record dogging her every step.

“Clarisse.”

“I’m going,” she says, and Dad gives her this little, thin-lipped sort of look that all but screams I’m not messing around anymore. Which, noted.

Clarisse starts shuffling around the cabin, fixing up all the shit she’s messed up. It’s not — look, she was going to clean it all up anyway because no fucking way she was going to let her siblings come back to find everything trashed, but it’s one thing to do it on her own time, alone, in silence, versus being watched the whole time by her dad. The cabin feels fucking massive when she has to walk the whole long way to the end of it to pick up her Crocs, and then she feels even dumber just standing around with her Crocs, eyeing the dent in the wall that might’ve been caused by her but also could’ve been there since the sixties or something.

“You break something?”

“Don’t know,” she admits, because honesty’s the best policy, and she sort of side-steps when Dad moves closer. He puts his hand over the mark, and Clarisse sort of, maybe, kind of crosses her fingers because the last thing she needs is to add vandalism to her list of grievances.

“Looks like something from the boys,” he says, brushing his hand down the wall. The dent’s gone by the time Dad pulls away from it, rasping his knuckles against the fixed spot as if to test the integrity.

“Right,” Clarisse says, still holding her Crocs like a fucking doofus.

Dad hums. He reaches out to put his arm around Clarisse’s shoulders, while his other hand comes up to wipe her face. Clarisse tries to act tough, but Dad’s hand is warm and familiar and smells faintly of the oil they use to keep all their weapons from rusting.

“Let’s talk,” he says.

“Do we —?”

“Yes.”

“Aren’t you busy or something?”

“No.”

“But —”

Dad walks her over to her bunk. He takes the Crocs out of her hand and drops them by the foot of her bed, nudging them over with one of his boots. Then he sits down on her bed, scrunching himself up to fit, and tugs her — not next to him on the bed — but in front of him, between his knees. It’s a very precarious position, Clarisse thinks, and also a mortifying one. It’s the same kind of thing Shermy or Mark does with Sid when they need him to shut up and listen. But Sid’s also eight, and Clarisse is very much not.

“Tell me about today,” Dad says, like it should be easy.

“I — well — um —”

Dad stares at her, unblinking, and whoever says the war-god isn’t patient is lying through their fucking teeth. Clarisse rocks back on her heels, taking the tiniest half-step back, but Dad wraps one of his hands around her wrist to keep her from scooting out of the danger zone.

“I don’t — look, it’s really not that —”

“If you want to stall, go right ahead,” Dad says. “But whether or not your siblings are here to watch what’s going to happen is up to you, Clarisse.”

Oh, yuck.

“What’s going to happen?” She asks, wary of the answer. She sort of has an idea based on that smack he gave her, but surely Dad isn’t going to, like, spank her for just trashing the place. That would be — 

“What do you mean, what’s going to happen? You trashed my cabin, Clarisse — the cabin that I trusted you with when I made you counselor — and you’ve been a right brat since I walked in, little lady. That’s not even touching whatever kind of trouble you’re in with Dio, which I’m going to guess has something to do with your attitude, too, which means, let’s see, I’ve got a kid that needs one big attitude adjustment and a reminder that she’s too old for tantrums.”

“It wasn’t a tantrum,” Clarisse says, flushing. That’s the second time today somebody’s used that word, and she’s sort of starting to hate it. She isn’t a fucking toddler.

“Oh? So what would you call throwing stuff around and kicking things? Redecorating?”

“It wasn’t —”

“It was, and you know it,” Dad says, pulling on her arm to bring her closer. “The only thing you didn’t do was stamp your foot at me, but you’ve still got a little time if you want to get that out of your system.” He pauses, the asshole, and then leans in closer. “You’re a big girl, Clarisse, and you’re better than your temper —”

“Oh, fuck off!”

In hindsight, Clarisse supposes she’s extremely lucky that Dad didn’t just send her straight down to Asphodel, but in the moment, she’s just pissed off all over again by the nerve of Dad talking to her about her temper as if he’s not, you know, the reason for it, and also the reason why everybody hates them in the camp, and — and Ares, god-prince and war-god and also probably equally it not more pissed off than Clarisse now, yanks her to the side and then down, draping her body over one of his thighs.

“Dad!”

Dad doesn’t answer. Not with words, at least. Instead, he just grabs Clarisse’s legs by the knee and hoists them up onto the bed with her, and then grabs her wrists, too, because she’s flailing those around with a dismal sort of panic. Dad presses her hands to her lower back, and then does this reach-around thing to get to the button of her shorts. Clarisse squeaks.

“Hey — don’t —!”

“I can’t begin to think what’s gotten into you to make you think that you can speak to me like that,” Dad says, totally unbothered as he pulls Clarisse’s shorts down her thighs. “I’m not one of your friends or your brothers. You do not speak to me like that.”

“Okay, okay! I get it, just don’t —”

Dad smacks her on the ass again. It hurts more this time, partly because she doesn’t have her shorts to buffer it anymore, but also because she’s half-fucking-naked and Dad’s just hitting harder. He means it this time. This isn’t a ha-ha, knock it off, Claire sort of thing. This is the real fucking deal, and Clarisse whimpers a little on the inside — and fine, alright, maybe a little on the outside, too — because she fucking hates sleeping on her stomach. And also getting in trouble. And specifically getting in trouble with Dad. Mr. D could get prissy at her all he wants, but with Dad —

“Sorry, sorry,” she says, gasping, her body tensing with every other spank. Dad’s hand is big enough to cover most of her backside in one go, so it’s absolutely diabolical that he sets up something of a rhythm that very clearly keeps from overlapping so that every section of her bottom gets a big, helping dose of the fuck were you thinking, Clarisse? The answer, of course, is that she hadn’t been thinking, but Dad doesn’t accept shit like that. “Dad!”

“Settle down. You’ve earned this and you know it.”

Clarisse figures that, yeah, that’s fair, but just because she knows she’s managed to dig her own grave and started to fill it, doesn’t mean she has to like it, and she very much doesn’t like this. She hasn’t been spanked in years, especially not by Dad. Sometimes Mr. D gives her a little encouragement — and Christ, she sort of feels bad for Castor and Pollux if Mr. D thinks his warning swats aren’t fucking horrendous — but that’s about it. Clarisse generally keeps her head down, her shit in order, and her dumbass siblings in order. She’s responsible, thank you, so this isn’t — she doesn’t get spanked.

“Stop,” she groans, trying to wiggle away. “Stop, okay? I get it. I —”

“No, you do not get it,” Dad says, moving from the top of her bottom down to her thighs, and, you know, Clarisse supposes she has to count her blessings that he didn’t take her underwear down too — Christ, she’d rather die — or decided to use something other than his hand. Mark got a belt once. His own, she thinks. Mark had fucked off during Thanksgiving break or something to go climb around Teton National Park despite his mom telling him no, and she’d been so pissed that she called Dad, and you knew you crossed some sort of line when Dad came for your ass outside of the camp season.

Sort of worth it, though, Mark said when he finally told them the story, taping up some of the pictures he took of the park on his section of the wall. But you can bet your asses that I’m never touching that belt again. Bad karma.

I’m surprised you didn’t burn it, Shermy said, and Mark smiled — actually smiled — all shy and rare and dimple-y.

You know, that’s an idea.

“Clarisse.”

She winces, her breath catching at the burn that’s starting to build. Everything from the waist down feels covered in prickly heat, this tender sort of ache that sparks up every once in a while. Dad gives a pair of almighty smacks to either side of her ass that has her feet lifting off from her comforter.

“No wandering,” Dad says. “Aren’t I giving you the attention you want?”

“I didn’t want any attention,” she says, and, fan-fucking-tastic, her voice already sounds all watery. She knows she’s going to cry again — Dad doesn’t do anything half-assed, not war or love or discipline, and he never beats them, but you can bet on the River Styx that he’s going to make you sorry. Honestly, Clarisse blames her older siblings. If they had behaved back in Ancient Greece or whatever, Dad would’ve never become so good at making somebody rethink all their life choices.

“You know, I don’t believe that, little girl,” Dad says. “I really don’t. You don’t throw a hissy fit in the cabin without thinking I’m going to come down and say it.”

“I wasn’t — I didn’t plan the — the —”

“The tantrum?”

“It wasn’t a tantrum,” she snarls, and Dad doesn’t even hesitate to move down to the vulnerable tops of her thighs. Clarisse yips.

“It was.”

“I —,” okay, fine, she threw a tantrum. Move on, Clarisse, because clearly you’re not winning this argument, “— I got sent to the cabin, and I was mad, so —”

“You got sent to the cabin. Why’s that?”

“Mr. D.”

“Well, I figured that, Clarisse,” Dad says, and if Clarisse didn’t know any better, she’d figure that he almost sounded amused. “Who else would you let boss you around?”

The answer to that is next to nobody else besides, like, Chiron and her mother — and Dad, too, of course — and Clarisse pouts because she’s starting to think that, yeah, Dad might actually be amused. She twists as much as she can over her shoulder, glaring at him, which is probably not the right thing to do, but whatever. Ares’ kids don’t do things by halves, even when they’re being punished. She gets a fucking eyeful of her own pinkening backside — wonderful — and Dad’s hand rising right before it flicks down, heavy, onto her thigh. He glances back at her, raising an eyebrow. It makes him look a little like Mr. D — or does Mr. D look a little like Dad? Clarisse supposes they both just look a little like Zeus, though nobody besides Jackson knows what he looks like.

“Start talking, Clarisse, unless you want to give your siblings a show.”

Clarisse squirms, tenses, bucks, struggling with herself and the fucking bonfire Dad’s building up back there. She knows, of course, that he isn’t bluffing. She’s come in before to see Shermy getting his, and nothing good ever comes from Dad swinging by for a curfew check, which everybody knew was actually code for somebody’s getting their ass beat tonight. When Clarisse still doesn’t speak, though, Dad’s legs start shifting below her, and — oh, no, no, no.

“Alright. If you want to do it the hard way, we’ll do it the hard way,” Dad says, and it’s the only warning Clarisse gets before his hand starts swatting at the soft, devilish space between her bottom and thighs, the place where she’ll really feel it. Clarisse hates that place, mainly because it’s the exact spot you sit with, and she likes sitting, thank you, and she has this sudden vision of a week spent awkwardly hovering above everything harder than a pillow.

“Sid was crying!” She yelps.

Dad’s quiet for a minute or two, his spanks slowing into this awful sort of pattern that makes Clarisse’s legs twitch.

“What?”

“Sid — our Sid —”

“I know Sid, Clarisse,” Dad says, and oh, so it’s okay for him to be an ass, but not her? Clarisse sees how it is. “Why was Sid crying?”

“Because they fucking hate us!”

“Language,” Dad says, but it’s half-hearted. Dad doesn’t really care about language as long as they aren’t throwing it at him, specifically. Or another god. Something about respect or whatever. “Who’s they?”

“They! Everybody! The camp!” She sucks in a breath. She wants off Dad’s lap, like, right now, please. “They don’t like us because they think we’re all crazy psychopaths or something, and nobody Sid’s age wants to touch him with a ten-foot pole or some shit, so he’s miserable.”

Dad, thank fuck, stops spanking her.

“He just — Sid asked some kids at lunch if he could sit with them, and they told him to basically go fuck himself because they were Athena’s, and so he came back here crying,” Clarisse says, the whole story just sort of spilling out of her all over the place, “and it’s sort of my job to get him to stop crying, so I figured I should talk to Annabeth fucking Chase or something, but then she walked up to me, and I — she called Sid a liar and then basically called me a liar for trying to make the whole thing up to, like, who the fuck knows? Get her cabin in trouble? She’s the psycho, honestly, not us, so yeah, I lost it. Okay? I lost it, and Mr. D didn’t appreciate it.”

Dad’s thumb does this tapping thing against her wrist, like he’s thinking, and then he lets go of her hands completely to, like, scrub at his face. Clarisse peers over her shoulder again to get a peep at his face, and it’s almost glorious, really, how murderous he looks. He mutters something sharp in Greek that Clarisse bets would’ve gotten him smacked around by Hera if she heard, and then sighs.

“How long has the hating-you thing been happening?”

“I don’t know,” Clarisse says, blinking. “Forever? You’d know better than us.”

“I — what’s that mean?”

Clarisse wiggles, trying to turn to face Dad head-on because he sounds seriously confused, and he sort of lets her. She does this weird fucking half-curl around his hip, pressing her cheek to his side — getting another whiff of that familiar sword-oil smell and also something that smells a lot like myrrh — and Dad leans back, stretching out, nearly knocking his head right off from the upper bunk’s bottom support slats.

“Because, you know…”

“I know what?”

“You’re you.”

Dad stares at her for a moment like she’s just said something stupid, and then his eyes get really wide — wide enough that Clarisse can see the faintest edge of gold around all the red — and he fucking laughs. Like, an actual laugh, as if being despised by his whole family is just hilarious. Clarisse takes everything back. Dad’s the psycho.

“Aw, Claire,” he says, “what’re you talking about?”

“You’re the war god.”

“Uh-huh,” Dad says, like yes, the fuck does that have to do with this conversation, Clarisse? Clarisse sort of aspires one day to be able to convey as much meaning in a single noise as Dad does.

“People don’t like you,” Clarisse says, trying to be as diplomatic as possible, “and because they don’t like you, they don’t like us.”

“Have you been reading Homer again?”

“I — no?”

“Clarisse. You know he pisses you off.”

Fair, but also Achilles. Hector. Patroclus. The Ajaxes.

“You kids are all sorts of screwed up down here,” Dad says, “Clarie, nobody in my family hates me, the same way that nobody hates Hades. I mean, sure, some of us don’t exactly get along, but our pantheons are our pantheons. We didn’t — besides Father and the others — choose them, and we can’t really control how mortals see or write us.”

“But then why does everybody treat us like shit?”

“Because they’re shitty, and they don’t know a single thing about us. Me. The other Olympians. Half of them probably think Hestia is the patron goddess of fireplaces.” Dad tucks a strand of her hair behind her ear. “Look, I’ll talk to Dio about it. We’ll put on some sort of don’t be a jerk assembly.”

“Sid’ll know, though.”

“He won’t,” Dad says, soothing. “Trust me, okay? Let me deal with it. I’d rather come down here and talk about the pantheon than be called down here because my kid gets into a fight with one of Athena’s kids.”

“It wasn’t a fight,” Clarisse says. “I didn’t punch her or anything.”

“No, but you did a number on the cabin,” Dad responds. “Which reminds me —”

Clarisse is very much not expecting Dad to roll her back around so that she’s, once again, back in spanking position. Her jaw drops. She gets her elbows underneath her just in time for Dad to swat her again, reigniting the throbbing sort of soreness that had just started calming down a little, and what the fuck?

“Hey — I — ow!”

“A few things, little lady,” Dad says, and Clarisse fists her hands into her pillow, biting her lip with every new spank. “You do not tell adults to fuck off unless they’re trying to hurt you, and you especially don’t tell me to do it.”

“I know, I know — Dad, you really don’t have to —!”

Dad keeps going. Clarisse’s eyes start to burn again, and she squeezes them closed to try to stave off the tears. It doesn’t work because it never works, but, well, Clarisse is desperate.

“You do not take your temper out on the cabin, or your siblings, or anybody else. You deal with your emotions because nobody else can do it for you, and if I have to come down here because Dio says you did get into a fist fight with somebody, this is going to feel like some love taps.”

Christ, Dad goes back to her sit spots, and Clarisse buries her head into her pillow, too, her feet sort of kicking. It’s embarrassing. She’s Clarisse fucking LaRue. She terrorizes other people, and yet — well, here she is: squirming like some red-faced toddler over Dad’s knee, bawling for the second time that day. This time, though, it feels more cathartic even though it hurts.

“And you’re going to apologize to that Chase girl.”

“No!”

“Yes,” Dad says, giving her an almighty smack.

“But she —”

“I don’t care what she did, Clarisse. She’s not my kid. You’re my kid, and that means you’re going to apologize for your part in the whole fiasco. I’m not saying it’s entirely your fault, but Dio wouldn’t have sent you to the cabin if he didn’t think you needed it, so yes, an apology. If you want these kids to start getting over whatever biases they have, you have to start acting against them.” Dad does one more awful circuit of spanks before resting his hand on her bottom. The pressure of it makes her groan, sniffling. “Do we have an understanding, Claire?”

“Y-yes, Dad.”

His other hand cards through her hair, careful with the knots that have built up throughout the day. Clarisse turns her head to the side to try and get more air in, shivering, and Dad rubs at the little spot along her neck that has a tendency to pinch.

“You have anything to say to me, Claire?”

“S-sorry.”

“Thank you,” Dad says, and Clarisse gets, like, a moment to enjoy what those two little words do before somebody knocks on the cabin door. Clarisse jolts, almost whacking Dad in the groin with her knee. He grunts as if she actually hurt him or something, and then slips her off his lap entirely. “Easy, Claire. Come in, Dio.”

“Dad!” Clarisse squeaks because, um, she’s still sort of pantless and also very clearly freshly spanked. The Greeks are sort of weird about privacy, though, so Dad just snorts.

“He’s seen worse, Claire, trust me. Have you ever heard of the Maenads?”

No, she hasn’t. “Are those like the Amazons?”

“Sort of, if the Amazons —”

“Don’t,” Mr. D says, coming into the cabin.

Clarisse fucking dives under her covers, getting her legs all caught up in her shorts. She flinches when her ass hits the mattress, and she might, maybe, kick at Dad just a little while turning onto her hip instead. He gives her an unimpressed look.

“Behave,” he says, and Clarisse nods, wide-eyed and angelic. Dad snorts.

“Oh, good, you’ve already handled it, then?” Mr. D says. He motions at his face. “You’ve got that look about you, Clarisse.”

“Thanks.”

“Anytime.”

“How generous of you,” Dad says. He gets up from Clarisse’s bed, stretching, and Clarisse sort of wonders just how tall her brothers are all going to be. Dad’s tall. Clarisse is tall. It stands to reason that Mark, Shermy, and even Sid are going to be tall as long as their moms aren’t, like, pixies or whatever, but are they going to be taller than her? She fucking hopes not. They’d be insufferable. It is funny, though, to see Dad next to Mr. D because Mr. D’s not very tall, and watching him tip his head back to try and look Dad in the eyes is pretty fucking hilarious, not that she’s dumb enough to laugh out loud about it. The only person who has a bigger height difference is Dad and Hermes, but Hermes cheats by levitating up as to save his neck the hassle.

“Have a fun afternoon, Dio?”

“Absolutely,” Mr. D says. “You’ll be happy to know that Clarisse is very creative. Linguistically, I mean.”

“So I’ve learned.”

“I’m right here, you know.”

“You want to talk to Athena’s brats?”

“They can be her headache,” Dad says, and he rolls his eyes when Mr. D gives this shit-eating grin. Ah, Greek humor or whatever. “That wasn’t even good and you know it.”

“Yeah, but you’re the one who said it.” The grin goes away. “I’ve got the rest of your kids doing dishes.”

“Did they do something stupid, too?”

“No, I just figured you might’ve needed some privacy,” Mr. D says, but he’s staring at Clarisse as he says it. As mortifying as it is, Clarisse gives him a sheepish little thumbs up because, you know, Mr. D could’ve just released her siblings onto the cabin while she was getting her ass handed to her, but he hadn’t. That meant something. Clarisse isn’t sure if it’s pity or what, but she’s not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

“You’re getting soft.”

Mr. D frowns. “You want to be the pot or the kettle today, Βροτολοιγος?”

Dad grins, sharp and ruddy.

“Every time I start to miss you, I somehow get called down here and remember that I don’t, really.”

“Liar.” Mr. D says, letting Dad herd him toward the door. “You miss me?”

“You’re focusing on the wrong part of the sentence, Dio.”

“I’m focusing on the part where you said you missed me.”

“Miss your wine, maybe.”

“Ugh, don’t mention wine to me. I’ve still got fifty-something years to go.”

“That long?” Dad murmurs. “Maybe you should appeal again.”

Mr. D opens his mouth to say something, but he stops once he seems to realize that Clarisse is still in the room and listening, wide-awake.

“How easy did you go on her? She should be dead to the world by now.”

“I went hard enough,” Dad says. “Besides, even if she goes to sleep now, her brothers will just wake her up.”

“They’re terribly nosy,” Clarisse says.

“You don’t know nosy until you live with Hermes.”

“Or noisy,” Dad adds. He stares at Clarisse. “You okay?”

“I’m good.”

Dad nods to himself, then stops. “You want a hug or something?”

Somebody would probably think that Clarisse doesn’t, especially not in front of Mr. D, but what the fuck does she have left to lose? So yes, she wants a hug. She’s only human, after all. She holds out her arms, and Dad seems to get it because he moves back over to her and wraps her up in his big arms. He’s warm — Dad’s always warm, like some of Zeus’s lightning’s got stuck in his skin — and Clarisse tucks her head into his big ass shoulder, letting out a shaky breath.

“You’re fine,” Dad murmurs, petting through her head again. “I promise, baby girl. Everything’s okay now.”

“You’re not mad at me anymore?”

“That’s a silly question. Have I ever been mad at you?” Clarisse shakes her head. “I don’t get mad at you, Claire, I get mad at the choices you make.”

Well, alright then.

Clarisse looks over Dad’s shoulder. Mr. D’s lingering by the door, squinting up at the cabin’s ceiling, trying to look totally engrossed in it.

“Mr. D? I’m sorry. About today.”

“Thanks, Clarisse. And between you and me? The Chase kid can be annoying.”

“Don’t encourage her,” Dad grumbles, and he presses his forehead to the side of Clarisse's head in the weird sort of headbump he likes to do. Clarisse figures it’s an old habit, something Dad must’ve done with Phobos or Deimos back on real battlefields when their faces were covered in, like,  plumed Corinthian helmets and all that cool shit.

“It’s the truth. She’s a lot like her mother.”

“You’re still apologizing to her,” Dad says, because he might be awesome, but he’s still a dad, and then he gives the tiniest, quickest kiss to her temple before pulling away. Clarisse lets him go.

“Do you apologize to Athena?”

“When I’m wrong.”

Mr. D gives a very loud, very fake cough.

“You good?” Dad asks.

“Hm? Me?” Mr. D says. “Yeah, I’m fine. Just thinking —”

“Well, think with your mouth closed.”

“Do you remember —”

“I remember a lot of things,” Dad interrupts. “Many of which aren’t appropriate for my daughter to hear.”

“The twins liked them.”

“Don’t talk to me about my twins.”

“What’d they do?”

The door opens. Mr. D’s voice starts to fade as he walks out, but Dad stops in the doorway, his hand on the doorknob.

“Claire?”

“Yeah?”

“The nail polish,” he says, “it’s nice. Pretty.”

Clarisse’s throat tightens.

“Thanks, Dad.”

The door shuts. Clarisse lets out a long breath in the empty cabin, her ass whining at her that it fucking hurts, and she kicks her shorts the rest of the way off. She’s just starting to drift off when she hears her siblings coming up the walk, and her fingers run over the slick, cool coat of paint on her nails. Sometimes, she thinks — sometimes it isn’t too bad, being an Ares’ kid. Not bad at all.