Chapter Text
"What I know about Percy:
1) He's a son of Poseidon (the only mortal one currently. I hope.)
2) He likes candy?
3) He left camp a year and a half ago after some kind of quest. His two quest-mates, plus three friends, disappeared with him. (All anyone can or will tell me about how they left was that it had something to do with shadow. Still deciding if I think they're just messing with me.)
4) No one's seen him since, but he made himself known over the summer. This was also when he had some kind of fight with Thalia?
5) He's a son of Poseidon, but, for some reason, he seems to be really close to Hades. They say he's working for the guy.
6) Some of the friends he took with him reappeared at camp with the Fleece (which is how I'm alive, I guess), and took a bunch of campers with them. I'm guessing they went to the Underworld, but no one wants to say that directly. (Scaredy-cats.)
7) Annabeth hates him and every friend I've thus far caught mention of. If I can ever get her to make sense for long enough, or slow down her talking at least, I'll record the why's.
8) I think he stole my goat?"
Luke sets his pencil aside, frowning at the list he'd made. It felt like too little for a few days reconnaissance. He was starting to think it wasn't just that people didn't want to tell him; they might not have been allowed to talk about it at all, or at the least, weren't sure they could. Some of them, he got the feeling they were too scared to try.
One of the older members of Cabin 7 acted like he might've told Luke more, but thunder overhead had drowned out his willingness. He hadn't been able to tell Luke much about Percy in the first place - "Didn't really know the guy," he'd admitted.
Between the thunder and one of the guy's younger siblings needing him for something, the conversation had ended there. Luke hadn't found a good chance to try and talk to him since then. With Annabeth so often on his heels, his best bet for getting information tended to be from the rest of Cabin 11, and they were being tight-lipped. It was only when Luke heard about the other campers leaving that he realized why that might be. Obviously, they must have known some of the people who left. At least he finally knew why Travis looked on the verge of tears whenever Luke tried to work information out of him.
One of the Gardner girls (Luke hasn't learned which is which yet, and it's not helped by the fact he's yet to see them apart) gives him a few more details, on a day he's been voluntold to help in the strawberry fields. With the Fleece boosting the whole valley, the plants continue to produce fruit even under the grip of winter.
(Luke usually kept a few on him. When he snuck up to the tree, he'd feed them to the dragon recently named Peleus. It was the only way he could get the growing dragon to leave him alone.)
"Some of the Olympians abandoned the council," one of the girls whispers as they work on filling a basket. Luke guessed word had gotten back to her that he was asking questions. "Mother was the first - she left not long after ... he - " She jerked her chin down toward the earth, too nervous to outright say the name, " - declared war on Olympus. More of them have switched to his side since then - Seven and Eleven we know for certain went to the other side. Eight's probably standing with her brother, but no one's sure where Ten's falling in all of this." The daughter of Demeter took in a deep breath, glancing around like she was worried someone might be eavesdropping. With the icy wind cutting over the valley, Luke figured the chances of that were pretty slim, but the girl's anxiety felt like a contagious thing. "Five and Nine are still following the King, but it doesn't sound very willingly, and all their kids left camp. Twelve used to be stuck at camp with us, but I know they made him come back to Olympus." Her brown eyes flashed grimly. "He made his twins leave with the others, before that."
Luke turned that information around in his head as they worked for a while longer, occasionally glancing back toward the cabins. It was alarming to hear that technically three cabins had completely emptied out. Everyone had made allusions to there being a war, though the tense normalcy at camp didn't seem to reflect that much, from what he'd seen. No one had really said why it was happening, yet. He had a feeling in his gut that this girl wasn't going to break from the pack in that regard.
He couldn't help but wonder if they even actually knew, or if they had just been left to make guesses, the same way he had.
"What about - " Luke has to catch himself, fighting not to scowl. It felt ridiculous to duck around their names this way. The gods had never really paid attention to Luke before, and he'd used their literal names plenty of times, so why should he expect it to be any different now? " - Three, where's he falling in all of this?" Carefully, Luke slipped a couple of berries up his sleeve. He wasn't sure if they were allowed to just take them whenever they wanted. However much he hated stealing, it still came naturally to the boy.
Gardner frowns, adjusting the too-tight cluster of some of the plants, snapping off a dead vine as she thought. "I'm not really sure," she admitted after a while. "We all thought he was the thief, before, but - "
"Thief?" He cut in before he could stop himself, frozen with a cold strawberry poised between his fingers.
She looked at him funny for a moment, before her expression smoothed out in sudden realization. He thought she looked nervous. Not so much of unseen gods, this time, but of Luke, which was disconcerting. "Annabeth hasn't told you yet?" The girl questioned, gaze darting over his expression.
It was nice of her to think Luke, after two years on the run with a quick-tempered, highly defensive, very powerful girl, hadn't long ago learned how to control his expressions better than that. Managing Thalia's emotions and insecurities had required a very delicate hand. He found that his brain suddenly refused to think of it as a poker face. Keeping himself neutral while he watched her, Luke moved the strawberry around in his hand, trying to untangle the feeling it evoked. Luke couldn't remember ever having had an aversion to the mention of poker.
"Two years ago," she finally starts after a while, "someone stole the King's weapon from the winter solstice. Chiron seemed to think it was the eldest brother, but the King decided it was Three, especially when summer came and Three's son was discovered."
Narrowly, Luke does not interrupt, fixating on that one point. He'd been more interested truthfully in learning about Percy than he was the background drama with Olympus, but given the gravity of what she was revealing, Luke was starting to think he needed to pay more attention to everything else as well. Still - the way Annabeth had cursed the guy's name, Luke had assumed he'd probably been at camp for at least a couple of years. If he didn't put in an appearance until two summers ago ...
"They sent the kid - "
"Percy," Luke found himself interjecting on impulse.
She startled slightly, maybe not having known he knew the son of Poseidon's name, and Luke felt a strange urge to flush, focusing instead on where a root was poking out of the dirt. Had he said the boy's name out loud before? It felt - familiar, to his tongue, not the almost foreign word it should have been.
The cold was getting to him. He needed to figure out a way to get hold of a heavier coat, clearly. Or a hoodie like he used to wear.
"Um, yeah," Gardner finally picked back up. "They sent him on a quest - I thought it was stupid, honestly. Most of us really believed he stole it for his dad. I still don't really know what happened on it. He took some kid from Cabin 11 that he'd made friends with, and the head of Cabin 5." She brushes a bit of powdery snow off some of the leaves. From what the girl had grumbled about on their way out to the fields, Luke had caught onto the fact she didn't like how unnaturally the Fleece was making nature behave. "Which was a weird choice. She had some friends, I guess, but no one outside her cabin really liked Clarisse all that much. He got the Bolt to the Underworld at some point - "
"Wait," Luke interrupts, his brain threatening him with a headache already. He felt like they were spinning in circles through this story. "You made it sound like he turned out to not actually be the thief. If he didn't steal the stupid thing, what was he doing with it?"
He'd been subjected to enough accidental electrocutions to not really understand what anyone wanted with the Master Bolt.
She shifted on the ground, avoiding Luke's stare, suddenly uncomfortable. After a moment to chew on her lip and weigh things, Gardner suddenly rose back to her feet. They'd only filled up maybe half of the basket she'd brought. "You should talk to Annabeth about that," the girl decided firmly. Without waiting for a reaction, she left Luke there, cutting across a few rows to more quickly reach her sister. He watched for a few minutes as they very obviously whispered to each other about the conversation he'd just gone through.
"Talk to Annabeth, she says," Luke griped under his breath, recklessly snatching a few more strawberries to feed to his lap-warmer. "Like I haven't already tried - " The boy cut himself off with a sigh. Sitting back more on his haunches, Luke scrubbed roughly at his face. That was probably another reason people were mincing their words; his sister. Like it or not, and he found he didn't particularly like it, the girl was right. It should've been Annabeth he was shaking down for more information. He was disconcerted by the sheer fact he had to. In the two months they'd had the girl, Annabeth had always been forthcoming in telling them things, Luke especially. Something must've happened in the years between that turned her tighter-lipped. Maybe aging alone had been enough.
Or, Luke thinks sourly toward himself, dusting himself off as he rose back to his feet, she's just being a good sister, and you're ungrateful and overthinking everything. The simplest explanation was probably the right one. He'd spent years stuck in some kind of limbo inside a tree. Annabeth was probably just trying to be kind to him, sparing all the convoluted backstories he'd missed out on. And could he really blame her for that? Luke knew better than anyone else how off-kilter he still was. His mind had become singularly focused around a stranger who was, from what Luke had been able to deduce, probably just sideways of an enemy. He was darting around at all hours of the night - hiding in a cabin he had no business even looking in the direction of, or clinging to the tree that was once his prison.
His dreams hadn't stopped since the first, either. They were full of foggy images and snippets of sound and details he forgot by the time the sun had risen, but they were there. It was the only thing that really seemed to fully wake him up. Luke had always been quick to befriend and connect with others before, yet here at camp, surrounded by people like him, who should understand - he held back. He had one foot so far out the door, Luke hadn't even learned to tell the difference between a pair of sisters after months here.
Annabeth was right to be worried. Walking back toward the rest of camp, Luke realized he hadn't even asked her more about Thalia. His little sister had given him the vaguest brief not long after he first woke up, and Luke had never felt an inclination to ask her for more details. He hadn't asked anyone about his oldest friend. Did Thalia even know he was alive?
Did he want her to?
It's the first time they've just trained one-on-one. Neither of their cabins watching on, testing each other more than teaching. They come to a halt less from someone winning, more from the need for a break. The wind was minimal that day, so Luke wasn't too worried about the sweat cooling on the back of his neck, even if it was still an uncomfortable contrast to his body's warmth. "You've really gotten good with that thing," Luke commented idly, tossing a water bottle over to Annabeth as he took a seat.
She flashed him a smile, almost glowing with pride. "I've gotten a lot of practice," Annabeth sheathed her dagger as she spoke. "I'm not the little kid who needs you to protect her, anymore."
He hummed by way of a response. Luke chose to neither argue nor agree with her belief. On the one hand, Annabeth had improved so much, he was genuinely impressed by her skill. At the same time - she kept too tense, had the most egregious tells he'd ever seen in his entire life, let her arm extend too far when she struck - he had a list. It was mostly the overprotective big brother in him, he figured. They'd have time for him to help her learn to correct those traits. And if she hadn't realized yet that he was still holding back, that was probably a good thing for her self-confidence. Knowing Annabeth, she was categorizing his probably numerous faults, the thought of which brought another smile to his face as they both took a minute.
There was actual sunshine over Camp Half-Blood today. It was a welcome change, after almost a week of seemingly nonstop rain and snow and clouds. Apparently, without Dionysus's presence, the climate-control spells had faded away. The campers were lucky each of the cabins had braziers they could use to heat them. They kept small fires lit in even the abandoned cabins - a couple of Apollo's remaining daughters tended to the one in Artemis's cabin, while the Aphrodite kids took care of Ares and Hephaestus's, and Luke's own cabin looked after Dionysus's. He'd considered lighting one in Cabin 3, last time he'd braved the wet cold to duck into it. Something had told Luke not to.
It alarmed him a little how much the other campers didn't seem to know what to do in these situations. Keeping the fires lit had been more about honoring the gods than it had been warmth, at first. Most of them didn't have rain jackets. Luke had spent more time keeping gloves and scarves on relative strangers than he could wrap his head around, during the really cold snap. He got the feeling Lee Fletcher at least appreciated his efforts. Half or more of the campers were sniffling messes by the time the sun reemerged.
("You sound like Chris," one of his half-siblings snapped at Luke when he'd tried to get a hat on them, trying to combat the concerning shade of red their ears were turning from running around in the cold. The cabin had gone immediately silent as the words hit the air. It had felt - and looked - like someone had punched all of them in the gut. Travis hadn't met Luke's eyes, when he looked around to try and figure out what that meant. No one had answered his later questions. Luke hadn't found the heart to press them very hard on it, either, so he'd been left to his own guesses. Another camper who'd left them? Someone who had died?)
"Have you dreamed about her at all?" Annabeth's voice breaks him from his drifting revelry.
When Luke shakes out of his thoughts enough to look her way, his sister's eyes are piercing. Searching for something. The level of scrutiny she could achieve had never exactly been comfortable for Luke, but at least this time it was in broad daylight. Waking up to that cutting gaze flashing in the moonlight was not something Luke missed. "Her who?" He questioned, then immediately regretted the words as they leapt off his tongue. "Right, stupid question, no need to tell me." Annabeth's lips twitched. If it was toward an expression of amusement, or disappointment to have her chance cut off, Luke wasn't entirely certain. "I .. don't think I have, actually," Luke shifted on his perch. Gods, he was a hypocrite. Here he was keeping secrets from her, now, even if she didn't need to be protected the way she used to.
"She dreamed of you a lot," she offered, Luke's brows raising. "I think she could talk to your spirit, at times." Annabeth's head tipped down, messing with the bottle in her hands, but there was no nervousness or hesitation to the admissions. "I did, a couple of times, there toward the end. I wasn't sure if you could remember it or not."
Luke stared at his sister, only realizing he was waiting for a tell when her head lifted to see why there'd been no response. He cleared his throat, turning to stare out toward the woodlands, trying to make sense of the turning of his gut. "Are you sure?" It was thin ice he was walking on. The last thing he wanted was to make it seem like he was dismissing her, but Luke just - didn't think it sounded right. He was certain he'd remember it if he'd gotten to speak to his sisters at any point.
But ... maybe she was right? Maybe that was why he wasn't alarmed by Thalia's absence, because his subconscious knew more about it than he was aware?
"I know it was you," his sister's voice soothed, relaxing a little of the tension he'd begun to feel collecting in his shoulders. "It had to be. How else would she have known the Fleece would free you?"
The soft breeze feels suddenly like a sheet of ice sliding over Luke's skin. It cuts straight through the previously warm layers he'd donned. Luke's gaze snaps back to Annabeth, feeling for a split second like he almost didn't recognize her. The feeling was shaken off by the shiver that rolled down his spine. "Annie, what do you mean by that?" He's a little scared to realize his hand is trying to curl around the handle of his sword. Hopefully, she wasn't able to tell, since it was on the opposite side of his body, and there was distance between the two of them.
The steely calm of her eyes suddenly bothered him more than he cared to admit. "Thalia started trying to find the Fleece after your tree was poisoned," she explained, just slightly slower than her normal tempo. For a moment - Luke felt an almost feverish sensation try to claw up his neck, an aching along his torso. The scar there throbbed numbly with a phantom pain. "She was barely able to get through the Sea of Monsters to get to it, but the rebels stole it from her before she could bring it to camp. They used it to trick everyone into turning on her." Annabeth rose from her own perch as she continued speaking, taking one careful step toward him at a time. "It was their fault in the first place. Percy and his friends poisoned you, and - "
"No."
It takes Luke a second to place that the cold, sharp snap reverberating around the arena is from him. Chest heaving slightly, he could feel the hard pound of his blood through his veins, the knot inside his gut having released into something harder to name. Luke had never shouted at Annabeth before. Only one word, it still managed to surprise both of them. His sister reeled back a step, her focus broken as she stared in shock at him.
Part of him saw the little girl who'd chosen them as her new family. That part of him felt guilty. It was not the louder voice in his head, though, and Luke found the feeling of shame was hard to hold onto.
"Luke?" Annabeth tested, uncertain.
He forced himself to take a breath, scrubbing a hand down his face. Luke wasn't sure if he was shaking from cold, anger, or something else entirely. "I'm sorry," the words sat like lies on his tongue. From the way she relaxed a little, Luke knew she was buying it. "I - I just - I'm not sure I'm ready for this. It's so hard to make sense of everything going on around me, as it is." Taking in another deep breath, Luke made himself smile at her, shifting his other hand so she couldn't see how tightly it grasped at the stone bench underneath him. "I just wanna focus on getting to know you again, kiddo, okay?"
Annabeth smiled back at him, trusting the half-truth in his words. "You're right. You were doing so well while we were training - I rushed too much. Thalia said I'd need to ease you through it more," she laughs slightly, and Luke's glad when she glances away, feeling his own smile threatening to waver, "guess I still need to learn to listen to her." She looked out toward the rest of camp, as Luke resisted the urge to bolt for the woods already. "Why don't you get some rest?" Annabeth offered. "I need to see what Bronte's got the others doing, anyways. I can catch you at dinner?" Her head tilted to the side as she glanced back to him. Luke wished he could get away with just smiling and nodding along.
"Sure," Luke agreed, antsy for this to be over with, "my old man bones are aching enough, as it is."
He waits until she's entirely out of sight. The second she is, Luke grabs his sword, and runs for the trees like the Kindly Ones are back on his heels. Luke would've preferred it. At least he knew how to wrap his mind around them.
"Things I know:
1) someone poisoned me.
2) it wasn't Percy.
3) Annabeth's lying to me."