Archive of Our Own

Dani hates losing. 

She’s done it so many times, but she swears there isn’t a single instance of losing that she’s forgotten. It’s just… she never forgets the feeling of losing. That feeling has stained so many of her memories and continues to do so every time; it stains them so vividly that she can’t help but always remember everything about each instance of losing. Plus, when that feeling is also combined with additional feelings (like the weird lightness of a plastic silver medal from a dance competition, or the painful whiplash of getting knocked on her ass in a spar), yeah, it gets pretty easy to remember. 

There’s unfortunately no exact word to describe the feeling of losing, but Dani’s just kind of terribly, intimately familiar with the feeling of it; it’s almost like a gnawing feeling, one that starts with a trace of fatigue in exhausted limbs and seeps into the rest of her body, slowly, before getting stuck in her chest like hardened sap. 

Anyway, the main point is this: it’s really fucking confusing, why the sight of Sophia sitting at a table on a random Tuesday and laughing at something that Manon said makes her feel like she’s lost a competition she hadn’t even signed up for. 

Dani can hear the laughs between the other two, too — mainly because Sophia always does that pattern of “hahahaha!” every time she laughs genuinely — over the chatter of the usual lunchgoers. 

Dani herself is supposed to be having lunch with her brother James, who’s going on and on about some Muay Thai kickboxing method that he’s been practicing lately. Normally, she’d think it's really cool, but there’s a bit of a breeze, and Sophia must’ve been hanging out with the Aphrodite kids earlier, because her hair’s been styled into princess-like waves. Every breeze blows at her hair most gently, and Manon’s also laughing now as she leans over and makes a gesture with two fries from her plate. 

Okay, look, Dani loves them both. So much. Manon and Sophia are both such genuinely loveable people — and no, not like that. It’s a platonic kind of soulmatism, she's sure; she can imagine them running away to a secluded island — what was that one that Sophia was talking about last time, with some poem? A Lake Isle of the Free or something? — and watching Manon worry about not having air conditioning. She digresses: what she means to say is that they are both extremely gorgeous, but Dani knows they’re all straight. She’s also straight. 

In fact, Dani herself just broke up with her boyfriend, Jonah, who’s also a child of Aphrodite and is sitting at the other end of the table that Manon and Sophia are at. Sophia also used to have a multi-year-long relationship with a Roman son of Bellona at Camp Jupiter, Leon. And Manon, well, she had that short fling with David, a son of Apollo, this past summer, and got a tattoo out of it, but Dani still has to scrub her mind of all the times Manon’s come to dinner just to complain about how “the sex is good, but why is he so terrible at aftercare despite being a literal son of Apollo?”  

Still, if they’re all straight, why is Manon looking at Sophia like that then? Why does she have that small smile — Dani has seen it before, but only in select contexts, yes — on her face as she smooths Sophia’s hair down, and why is Sophia’s smile so wide? Dani swears she can see the brightness in the other girl’s eyes even from here.

Dani feels sick. She feels… a little angry? There’s also the gnawing feeling again, the feeling of losing, but Dani isn’t entirely sure what. There’s a chasm in her stomach that’s growing wide, and she can’t tell if the uncomfortable hollowness is because a part of her wishes she were the one brushing Sophia’s wind-tossed hair back into place and getting that bright, easy smile in return — or — or, because she can’t stop wondering what it might be like to be on the receiving end of that small, private smile Manon rarely gives, and what Manon’s hand might feel like if it were resting against her own face instead — 

The thought of that makes her stomach twist, and not in a good way. 

“Are you being serious?” James is staring at her from across the table, looking pissed. “You’re not even listening to me.”

“Right,” Dani says quickly. “No, wait, I am. You were saying something about using hip rotation…” 

“Bruh,” James squints at her. “We’re past that.”

“You literally just mentioned something about torque — what the hell is that by the way —” 

“That was a good five minutes ago.”

Dani opens her mouth to argue, then closes it again. Her fork scrapes against her plate instead. “Fine. Sorry. There’s just a lot on my mind lately. Won’t happen again.” 

“What’s going on with you?” James leans back slightly, crossing his arms. “Are you still mad about the whole Ares spar thing? It’s not that big of a deal. No one knew she was going to bust out that shield.” 

“No, I don’t care about that anymore.” Dani can’t help it; her eyes flicker from James’s pissed expression to the distant figures at the tables across the pavilion. “It’s nothing, really. I’m just really tired.” 

“Mhm…” James immediately jerks back in his seat, twisting his body a good 180 degrees to look at what Dani’s gaze has drifted to. He does it so quickly that Dani flinches in surprise at the speed of it. Of course, leave it to James not to be subtle at all. Dani feels the exact moment he figures out who she’s been looking at. “Oh, brother, you’ve got to be kidding me.”

Dani snaps her eyes back to him. “What?”

James doesn’t answer right away. He simply exhales through his nose and rubs a hand down his face, expression clearly exasperated. 

“You’re so fucking weird,” he says with a sigh. “I’m getting out of here. Get yourself together.” 

“What?”

“Mhm, you heard me. See you later, sis.” 

Dani shoves a bite of food into her mouth that she absolutely does not want, just as James gets up to leave; he’s still throwing her a half-eyebrow raise as he shuffles away, balancing cup and plate in his hands. Across the pavilion, Dani can see Manon looking away from Sophia, her attention pulled away by a trio of Aphrodite siblings arguing about something — probably clothes, probably romance, probably both — and Manon turns fully toward them, laughing as she gets physically dragged into the conversation.

Sophia is left half-turned in her seat. Dani watches for a moment as the other girl just sits there. Then, Sophia’s head tilts slightly, as if she’s searching for something.

Dani hastily looks down at her plate, but it’s too late. She can feel it, that strange, prickling awareness of another’s attention landing directly on her. When she looks up again, Sophia is coming her way, still with a big smile on her face, though it’s certainly not as big as the smile that Manon drew out a few minutes earlier. She stops beside the table, resting her hands lightly on the edge.

“Hi, Dani,” she says. Her voice is warm and easy, like it always is. “How’s it going?” 

Dani swallows the bite of food in her mouth, which somehow tastes even worse now that Sophia is standing right there.

“Good, good… Did the Aphrodite campers kidnap you?”

Sophia glances briefly over her shoulder toward the Aphrodite table, where Manon is still half-standing now, animatedly gesturing while three other campers talk over each other.

“Eh, I came voluntarily. Manon and I were hosting arts and crafts earlier. I’d say they’ve kind of kidnapped Manon for the afternoon, though,” Sophia says with a small laugh, as she leans down a little, as if to get closer to the same level as Dani. “Something about a box of hairties someone borrowed without asking.”

Dani nods. 

“She’s probably going to be stuck there for a bit,” Sophia continues. “Do you want to hang out later? When you’re free this afternoon, or something, I don’t have anything else to do on my schedule for today.”

Dani’s fork pauses halfway to her mouth because there’s that awful gnawing feeling again. 

Manon’s busy, so now Sophia is here.

It feels awfully like she’s been given a plastic silver medal again. She’s not sure why, but she just knows the feeling. Dani doesn’t even think before she speaks.

“What, so I’m just here to fill in your free time? I’m busy this afternoon with training, so unless you want to just come watch or something — ”

The words come out sharper than she means them to.

“Then, like, sure. If you’ve really just got nothing better to do.”

For a second, Sophia just… stares at her.

Sophia’s mouth opens slightly, like she’s somewhere between shock and about to say something. Her smile — that wide, easy thing — is sliding off her face so quickly, and her hands are peeling from the table as she takes a step back, as if Dani’s words have inserted a physical barrier between them. 

“Oh,” Sophia says. There’s a small pause while she recalibrates, and Dani wants to shrivel up and die, because Sophia looks somewhere between hurt and confused, like she’s trying to figure out where the conversation went wrong. Dani’s already bracing herself; she should get ready to apologize. Maybe Sophia’s going to tell her to also get her shit together, just like James just did — 

“Oh,” Sophia says detachedly instead. “Okay. Sorry that I made you think… or, feel like… that.”

Dani’s stomach drops as Sophia's posture straightens.

“Never mind, then. I’ll, um, I’ll go — I should go organize my cabin’s attic. Yeah, that’ll keep me busy for a bit, ha. I hope you have a good training session today. I’ll see you… Maybe at the bonfire later tonight. Um, or not. Maybe, if you’re not busy.” 

The usual, comforting friendliness is gone now, and Sophia’s eyes flit over Dani’s face, but it’s like she’s staring at something in the distance behind her. Dani has to fight the urge not to immediately turn and look behind herself. Sophia gives a small nod, polite and quick, and steps back from the table without waiting for Dani to respond. 

It’s when Sophia backs out of her vicinity that Dani notices Manon. Across the pavilion, Manon had still been smiling widely a moment ago, laughing with the group around her. Still, now she’s looking this way as Sophia walks back toward the Aphoridte table, again. Several of Manon’s siblings are starting to stand, beckoning to Manon with their hands, but she seems to catch sight of Sophia’s expression, and Manon dismisses the others with a quick brush of her hand. Dani can read her lips from her, and Manon’s asking Sophia, “Hey, what’s wrong?” 

Manon’s smile has faded at this point, and her brows pull together, confusion flickering across her face as she looks between Sophia and Dani.

Dani doesn’t stay long enough to see Sophia respond or sit down next to Manon again. Instead, her seat squeaks slightly as she gets to her feet and dumps the rest of her plate into the closest sacrificial brazier to her table, and mutters a short prayer to her own mother before stalking off to the arena. 

She’s supposed to be sparring with Yoonchae this afternoon, but now she’s thirty minutes early with nothing to do, so Dani starts doing her stretches. 

Yoonchae arrives only minutes later, though, and for a good second, Dani’s relieved to see her. Yoonchae takes one look at her — already mid-stretch, jaw set, eyes somewhere in the middle distance — and says nothing. She just drops her bag by the wall, rolls her neck, and starts her own warm-up.

See, this is exactly why Dani likes sparring with Yoonchae.

+++ 

Yoonchae’s stamina has been the ongoing project of the entire summer. She tires out fast, always has — her Hades gift runs on a different kind of energy anyway, and they both know a full spar today is going to end with Yoonchae sitting on the floor somewhere around the twenty-minute mark, regardless of how well the session starts.

So when Dani says, “Can you just — summon me someone to hit first?” Yoonchae barely blinks.

“How many?”

“I don’t know. Like, a dozen?”

Yoonchae tilts her head slightly. “Twelve?” 

“Is that a problem?”

“No,” Yoonchae says, already closing her eyes. “Just interesting.”

The air in their corner of the arena shifts. It always does when Yoonchae uses her powers — there’s a low, pressurized silence, like a moment before a storm breaks. Then, one by one, they come up through the dirt floor, the skeletal soldiers, armor half-corroded and weapons dull with age but entirely, horribly functional. The twelve of them arrange themselves in a loose semicircle around Dani with the patient, empty attention of things that have been given a command and have nowhere else to be.

Yoonchae walks herself to the low wall at the edge of the arena and sits down, crossing her ankles.

Dani rolls her shoulders and lifts her swords.

For a while, it’s good. This is exactly what she needs, actually — the blunt, uncomplicated demand of a fight, with attacks coming at her from multiple angles, and no time to think about anything except block, step, redirect — she’s sweating hard by the time she knocks down her second soldier, and her lungs are starting to burn. 

For some reason, she still feels like she’s losing the competition she didn’t sign up for.

But, hey, at least her hands are busy.

“You seem mad,” Yoonchae calls from the wall, in the same tone she might use to say the weather’s nice today.

“I’m not mad,” Dani says, and shoves a skeletal soldier hard enough that it stumbles back two full steps.

“Okay. Not at all?”

“No. Not at all.” 

Two more close in from her right. She ducks the first swing and blocks the second — barely — and the impact rattles up her forearm.

“I’m not,” Dani says again, to nobody in particular.

“Okay, Dani.”

“I’m just training. That’s what we’re here to do. Can you not —”

“I did not say anything else.”

“You’re, like, doing that thing.”

“I am just sitting here.”

“You’re sitting there and judging.”

“Sure.” Yoonchae’s voice is dry. “Do you hear yourself right now?”

Dani opens her mouth to respond — which is exactly the problem, because now she’s distracted and frustrated and her footwork is sloppy, her attention split three ways between the soldiers and Yoonchae and the image of Sophia’s smile sliding off her face — and she completely misses the blow coming up on her left.

The butt of a sword connects directly with the left side of her nose bridge.

The world whites out for a half-second.

She goes down hard, knees and then palms hitting the arena dirt, head ducked forward. There’s a ringing in her ears. There’s also — unmistakably, immediately, horribly — a hot, coppery flood down the back of her throat, and she spits instinctively, and there’s blood in the dirt in front of her.

“Oh, my gods.” Yoonchae is off the wall instantly, and the soldiers are still, frozen in place. Dani can hear her boots hitting the ground fast. “Dani —” Yoonchae drops down to her level, hands hovering uncertainly. “Are you okay, holy — okay, wow, that’s — you’re bleeding a lot —”

“It’s fine.” Dani’s voice comes out thick and strange. She pinches the bridge of her nose carefully and immediately regrets it. “Ow. Okay, that — yeah, that’s fine.”

“That is not fine, that is a lot of blood, we should get Lara —”

“Noses bleed a lot. It’s not serious.” Dani tilts her head back slightly, closes her eyes for a second. Stars. Still some stars. Lots of them, yeah, okay. “I’ve had worse.”

“You should go to the infirmary.” Yoonchae’s voice has shifted from alarm into something firmer. “Right now, actually. Come on, I’ll take you —”

“I genuinely cannot show my face there for the next three weeks,” Dani says flatly. “Not after that spar with Megan.” 

Yoonchae opens her mouth. “You’re kidding, right?” 

“No.” Dani waves her off — a weak, vague gesture, the back of her hand. “Send them back. I’m fine. I’m going to my cabin.”

“Dani, you just got knocked on your ass by a skeleton.”

“Thank you, Yoonchae.”

“I’m just —”

“Thank you so much for noticing.”

Yoonchae exhales. The soldiers dissolve quietly behind her, sinking back into the floor without ceremony. Dani gets her feet under her, slowly, one hand still clamped to her nose, and Yoonchae stands with her but doesn’t touch her — she knows better — just watches with her arms loosely crossed and her mouth pulled into a thin, unhappy line.

“You’re an idiot,” is all she says. “Maybe even more than Manon. I don’t get what Sophia sees in either of you.”

“Huh?” 

“I don’t know why you guys are all friends. Manon is an idiot for underestimating herself, and you’re an idiot for overestimating yourself,” Yoonchae says rather bluntly. “You’re both going to die painful deaths at this rate.” 

“Okay, thank you, Yoonchae.” 

Yoonchae sighs as Dani lifts a hand in a vague, backward acknowledgment as she walks toward the arena exit. 

The walk back to her cabin is not her finest. She’s holding her nose with her palm and trying to look like someone who is absolutely not bleeding all over themselves, which she knows is not working because of the way that one Hermes kid freezes mid-stride and starts to ask if she needs help, and Dani shakes her head so firmly that it throbs.

Her cabin is empty when she gets there; everyone’s still at afternoon activities, which is a rare mercy. She goes directly to the small bathroom at the back, turns on the light, and looks in the mirror.

Oh. Okay. 

That’s — there is a substantial bruise, already blooming vivid and dark along the side of her nose, pulling toward the corner of her eye. Her nose isn’t crooked, thank the gods — she checks, she’s done it enough times to other people to know what broken looks like — but the skin is split slightly at the bridge and her upper lip is tacky with dried blood and honestly, the only silver lining here is that she looks like she got into a fight, and not like she lost her footing because she was arguing with her sparring partner about whether or not she was mad.

Dani leans both hands on the sink and stares at herself for a long moment.

Fuck. She is, possibly, a little mad. Maybe she should swallow her pride and just go to the healers. Or— 

Or — she could just clean it up herself, tape it, and take a nap.

Yeah.

Dani pushes off the sink and rummages through the small first aid kit tucked under the bathroom cabinet. It's a communal cabin kit, so it's seen better days, but there's gauze and medical tape, and that's really all she needs — and spends ten minutes cleaning the split skin with a patience she absolutely does not feel. The bruise is a lost cause, she knows. She puts a small piece of tape across the bridge anyway, more for structural comfort than anything else, and then she lies down on her bunk still in her training clothes and tells herself she'll only sleep for an hour.

She wakes up to her cabin being loud.

Evening light is slanting through the windows, orange and low, and somewhere past the noise of her cabinmates coming in and dropping gear and arguing about who used whose hairbrush, there's the distant smell of food from the pavilion, and Dani's stomach immediately makes its feelings known. Loudly.

Fuck. She slept through dinner.

She sits up, slowly, and puts her face in her hands, and just stays like that for a moment.

"Oh my gods."

James. Of course, it's James. She hears him before she sees him — that too-loud, fully-delighted laugh that he has absolutely zero control over — and when she drops her hands and looks up, he's standing at the foot of her bunk, staring at her face like it's the funniest thing he's ever seen.

"Not a single word," Dani says.

James presses his lips together. His shoulders are shaking.

"James."

"I'm not — Did you even put ice on that thing at least? Like, I'm not even asking who did that, actually — damn, was it Manon? Or Sophia?"

"Just shut up, man. None of them actually, though that’s none of your fucking business."

"I'm just looking —"

"Then stop looking."

He laughs again, this time openly, the kind that involves his whole chest. Dani picks up her pillow and throws it at him, and he catches it one-handed, still laughing, and she swings her legs over the side of the bunk and stands up, which makes her head swim slightly before settling.

She is genuinely really hungry. Makes sense, after two hours of sparring and a full accidental nap, which is a specific and urgent variety of hunger, and there's nothing left from dinner because she missed it like an idiot.

Fine. The bonfire will have food. There's always food at the bonfire — someone always brings something, and if nothing else, she can threaten a Demeter kid into giving her a bread roll. She's done it before, though that was like nine years ago, when she was still a kid and new here. 

Dani roots through her things, pulls out a proper bandage, wider than the tape she'd put on earlier, and stands in front of the bathroom mirror again to apply it. It covers most of the bruise, at least the worst of it near the bridge. The rest — the shadow spreading faintly toward her eye — is just going to have to be what it is. She changes her shirt, pulls her hair back, and decides that's as good as it's getting tonight. 

James is leaning against the doorframe when she comes out.

"You going to the bonfire like that?" he asks. His voice is carefully neutral, which is worse than laughing.

"Yes."

"Cool," he says. "Cool, cool, cool. Wanna pull up together?"

"I hate you." 

“Cool, cool, cool.” 

+++

The fire is already high when she gets there, throwing warm light and long shadows across the gathered campers, and Dani can hear the first low strums of someone tuning a guitar somewhere near the front. She scans the outer edges of the crowd automatically, the way she always does — half habit, half the restlessness still sitting in her chest from the afternoon.

She's looking for Lara.

Lara will be somewhere near the instruments, probably, doing her quiet pre-bonfire ritual of tuning and retuning and tuning again while pretending she's not nervous, which she always does before she leads songs even though she has been leading them for two summers now and she's genuinely excellent at it. Dani likes Lara for a lot of reasons, and one of them is that Lara will look at the bandage across her nose and have the courtesy to ask exactly one question about it and then never mention it again.

She pushes through the edges of the crowd, murmuring excuse me, her stomach still loudly registering its complaints, and scans past the fire toward the cluster of Apollo kids with instruments —

She spots Sophia before she spots Lara.

It's not intentional, how Dani’s eyes find her. It's just — Sophia is sitting close enough to one of the smaller campfires that the light catches her hair, and her hair has been done again, probably thanks to Manon’s siblings, and Dani's eyes find her the way they've apparently been finding her all day without her permission. Sophia has her knees pulled up slightly, arms loose around them, and she's just staring into the big central bonfire with an expression that Dani distantly recognizes.

Next to her, Manon is looking directly at Dani.

Dani freezes in her step, three strides away from where James has found a seat.

She genuinely cannot tell, from here, what Manon's face is doing. The furrowed brows could be anger — you said something sharp to Sophia and I watched her walk back to the table looking like that — or it could be concern, the straightforward kind, because Dani is standing at the edge of a bonfire with a bandage across her nose and a bruise creeping toward her eye. Manon is perceptive enough that it's probably both simultaneously, which is somehow worse.

Dani swallows.

Then she waves.

It costs her something, despite its smallness. Just a hand lifted, brief and honest, and a bite-sized chunk out of her pride.

Manon's brows unknit slightly. She waves back slowly, and then turns immediately to Sophia and bumps her with her elbow — it’s a gentle motion, just a nudge — and says something. Dani can't hear it over the noise of the bonfire and the crowd, but she can guess the shape of it.

Do you want to ask Dani to come sit with us?

Sophia looks up.

For a moment, they're just looking at each other across the firelight, and Sophia's expression is showing several emotions at once — sad, uncertain, something else that Dani can't name, and still a little hurt around the edges in a way that makes Dani's stomach turn over with guilt — and Dani thinks, I should go over there. I should go over there and say sorry, properly, not whatever that was this morning —

But Sophia looks away first.

Dani decides for all of them before she can second-guess it. She turns, locates James sitting on a log nearby, and drops down next to him.

James looks at her, and then he looks back at the fire. "Hey," he says simply. “Wassup.” 

"Don't."

"I'm not doing anything."

"Good."

She should be enjoying this. She likes the bonfire nights, genuinely, and the smell of the fire, the way the heat pushes back against the night air, the low hum of camp settling into its evening version of itself. She pulls a marshmallow from the bag that one of her other siblings is passing around, jams it on a stick, and holds it over the small fire in front of their log and tries very hard to just be here.

Her gaze drifts sideways.

Manon and Sophia are shoulder to shoulder across the way, and Sophia's expression is still carrying the shadow of the afternoon, but it's lightening incrementally because Manon is doing something ridiculous with her marshmallow, trying to coax it into a shape that it is structurally never going to hold, and Sophia is watching with reluctant amusement. Dani watches Manon's marshmallow collapse for the third time, and Sophia finally huffs out a laugh, short and surprised, and turns her face away like she's trying to hide it.

Dani pulls her own marshmallow back.

It is completely, thoroughly, impressively burnt-black.

"Oh, no," James says.

"Shut up."

"That thing is dead."

“You’re two seconds from being the same.” 

One of her siblings, two logs over, leans across and tosses her a new pack of marshmallows without being asked, which she catches and accepts with as much dignity as she can muster. She peels a new marshmallow off the stick and tries again, and while she's looking up for the best corner of the fire to float her marshmallow around, her eyes land on Yoonchae. 

Yoonchae, who is sitting on a log on the far side of the bonfire, looks awfully close to Megan. It feels a little like a betrayal — why is she so close to Dani’s current Mortal Enemy #1? They're close enough that their shoulders are nearly touching, and Megan is apparently also doing the marshmallow shape thing, which seems to be going around tonight. Yoonchae is watching her with one eyebrow raised, pretending to be unimpressed while actually being entirely engaged with whatever's happening in front of her.

Dani stares for a moment.

Wow. Interesting. She’s really losing on all fronts today, isn’t she?

She notes the situation and stores it somewhere in the corner of her mind for the next spar. She will absolutely be bringing that up.

+++

Lara never materializes. Or maybe she does and Dani just stops looking — she's not sure when exactly she gives up, it’s not really like her to, but at some point the guitar music starts and it's not Lara leading, it's one of the other Apollo kids, a tall, lanky Asian guy, and Dani's face still hurts with the persistent, low-grade throb of a bruise that hasn't decided yet how bad it wants to be, and she's tired in a way that goes past her limbs, and her sixth marshmallow is somehow also too burnt —

"I'm going to sleep," she tells James.

James looks at her toasted marshmallow. "Yep," he says. “Good idea.” 

She starts to head back to the cabin area. The harpies come out after dark for exactly the people who wander past the safe zones, and Dani knows this, and yet she finds herself walking away from the bonfire and its noise and its light and continuing past the turn-off toward the cabins and down toward the pavilion instead, and she cannot find it in herself to care very much.

The pavilion is empty. Of course it is—everyone's at the bonfire or already in their bunks. The long tables are bare, and the few torches still lit are burning low. Beyond the open columns, the sky is very dark and very cloudy, and Dani sits down at the end of one of the benches and puts her arms on the table.

She sits there for a long moment.

The bonfire is far enough away that she can only hear it as a murmur, the soft collective sound of people having an evening. Somewhere hoots an owl. 

Dani stares at the table and tries to locate the edges of what she's feeling, the same way she might try to find the edges of her injury earlier. The day lines itself up in front of her whether she wants it to or not. The awful gnawing feeling at lunch. The thing James saw in her face before he even said a word. Sophia's smile goes out like a light. Her own voice, sharper than she'd meant it, and the way Sophia had stepped back from the table like Dani had put a wall up between them.

I made you feel like that.

Sorry that I made you think — or feel like — that.

Dani puts her forehead down on her arms.

She is at a complete loss, and she doesn't know why, which is the part that keeps snagging on her, because she's usually good at knowing why and what she’s lost. But this — whatever today has been — she can't find the means to understand it. She’s at a loss searching for where it started and what she's upset about or why the image of Manon smoothing Sophia's hair back in the afternoon breeze has lodged itself somewhere under her ribs like a splinter she can't reach.

She just feels like she's losing. She doesn’t know how long she sits there, thinking about Manon’s furrowed brow and Sophia’s slipping smile. 

She gives up voluntarily this time.

The evening lights are out across camp when she finally makes her way back.

The harpies are also out. She'd heard them twice on the walk back, the distant sound of wings and shrieking somewhere past the tree line, and she'd kept to the lit paths and moved quickly and tried not to think about how much it would complete her day to also get attacked by a harpy. She's a few steps away from the Nike Cabin when she registers the shadow.

Someone is standing in front of her cabin.

Dani's body reacts before her brain does — weight dropping, hands coming up. It’s the automatic reaction of someone ready to fight, and she's already half-committed to an offensive stance when she stops.

"Manon?"

Manon is leaning against the wall beside the door with her arms crossed, still in her bonfire clothes, and she looks up when Dani says her name. In the dim remainder of the path lights, her expression is completely readable.

She looks unimpressed.

"Hey," Manon says.

"What are you doing here? It's past lights out, the harpies are —"

"I'm aware."

"How long have you been standing here?"

"Long enough," Manon says, which is not an answer. She pushes off the wall and looks at Dani for a moment, and Dani has just enough time to register that this is not a casual visit before Manon says, evenly and without preamble, "You were a bitch to Sophia today. What the fuck."

The words land bluntly. 

Dani opens her mouth, closes it.

"She came over to ask if you wanted to hang out," Manon continues, "because she wanted to spend time with you, and you made her feel like she was bothering you. And I watched her walk back to the table looking like she'd done something wrong." A pause. "She hadn't done anything wrong."

"I know," Dani says.

"We actually really like you, you know." Manon's voice shifts slightly — not softer exactly, but less clipped. "Like, genuinely. I thought we're all best friends. I don't know what's going on with you today, but whatever it is — that was completely unnecessary and mean and definitely not friend-like."

Something about the way she says it — we actually really like you, I thought we’re all best friends — hits Dani somewhere she wasn't braced for. She knows they do. She knows that. But hearing it said plainly, in the dark, after the day she's had, after the awful hollow feeling that's been sitting in her chest since lunch — she feels it land wrong. Or maybe it lands exactly right, which is worse.

We like you. And you're messing it up.

"I know," is all Dani’s able to summon.

She doesn't say anything else. There isn't anything else, really. Manon's right. She was an ass. She doesn't have an explanation that would make sense out loud.

Manon looks at her for another long moment, and then she sighs. Not unkindly.

"Here." She holds something out.

Dani looks down. It's a small cloth-wrapped piece of ambrosia, the camp-issued kind, slightly smaller than a square.

"From Sophia's stash," Manon says. "She wanted me to bring it." Another sigh. "She was going to come herself, but she was still pretty upset, so I told her I'd go."

Dani takes it. Her fingers close around it, and she just stands there holding it, and the back of her throat does something she absolutely refuses to acknowledge.

"And look — lord knows if it were just up to me," Manon adds, with a slight tilt of her head toward the bandage on Dani's face, "I probably would've let you sit with that bruise for another day. Just so you know."

It's such a Manon thing to say that Dani wants to laugh. Or cry. Maybe both, actually. 

"That’s valid," she manages weakly. “I’m sorry.” 

Manon looks at her for one more moment. She seems like she's about to say something else — her mouth opens slightly, that brief pause before words — and then she just exhales, and closes it again, and shakes her head once.

"Go to sleep, Dani."

She turns and walks back up the path toward the Aphrodite cabin, and Dani stands in the doorway and watches her go. The night is very quiet. There is the soft receding sound of footsteps on packed dirt, and the faint trail of expensive perfume cutting through the night air, clean and warm and unmistakably Manon, until it isn't anymore and she's just gone.

Dani looks down at the ambrosia in her hand.

She wanted me to bring it.

She unwraps it and eats it standing there in the doorway, and feels the familiar warmth of it move through her — it tastes different for everyone; Dani's has always tasted like the satisfaction of those expensive chocolate protein shakes she’d treat herself with after a good dance competition back in the day — and the throb in her face dulls, the split skin pulling gently back together, and she's still tired and she's still at a loss for what she feels.

But at least the bruise hurts less.

She goes inside and finds her bunk by memory. The cabin breathes around her, the quiet sounds of her siblings sleeping. She lies down on top of her covers, stares at the ceiling she can't really see, and thinks about Sophia sending ambrosia instead of coming herself. Manon was standing in the dark outside her door for long enough, and the way it had felt to hear we actually really like you and not know what to do with it.

Tomorrow, she decides.

She'll figure it out tomorrow.

She closes her eyes and hopes, with everything she has, that tomorrow is a better day.

+++ 

The ambrosia knocks her out so completely that she doesn't dream.

She just stops and then starts again, and when she starts, the morning exists, golden and already halfway gone, and Dani is surfacing from sleep slowly, like coming up through water. The cabin is empty. The light coming through the windows has that mid-morning warmth that means she's slept through breakfast and probably the first activity block as well, and there's a sticky note on the pillow next to her head.

She peels it off.

covered ur morning trainings. swap me & sign in for inspections today. — James

She's still holding it when the door opens.

"Morning inspections! I'm coming in —" The door squeaks open. "Oh."

Dani sits up.

Sophia is standing in the doorway with her inspection clipboard and a pen tucked behind her ear, and she looks — for exactly one hundredth of a second — surprised. Then her expression does a quick, subtle reorganization, settling into something polite and neutral, and she steps inside, glancing down at her clipboard.

"Sorry," she says to the clipboard. "I didn't think anyone was still — the Nike cabin sign-in sheet had James listed for the morning, so I assumed —"

"He covered for me," Dani says. Her voice is still rough with sleep. "I, um. Slept in."

"Right." Sophia makes a small mark on something. She's doing a thorough job of looking at everything in the cabin except Dani directly — the bunks, the floor, the state of the weapons rack by the far wall. "That's fine. Are all the beds still okay?"

"Yeah."

"Okay." Another mark. “Bathroom functional?” 

“Yeah, I think so? Look, um—”

Dani watches her move toward the in-cabin bathrooms and thinks, now. Say it now. It's just the two of you, and it's quiet, and just say you're sorry —

"Do you have the morning off, then?" Sophia asks, still looking at the bunk.

The opening closes. Dani loses it.

"Kind of," she says instead. "I'm sure it'll get busy."

It's really nothing to say. She means it as yeah, probably, you know how camp always finds something to fill the time — but she watches Sophia's pen slow slightly on the clipboard and can't figure out why, and the silence that follows has a texture to it she can't read.

"Oh," Sophia says. "Okay, yeah." She finishes the mark she was making. "I hope it eases up soon, then." A small, polite smile that doesn't quite reach her eyes. "I'm going to finish checking the other cabins. Have a good morning."

"Wait, but you haven’t checked the—"

But Sophia's already turning toward the door, tucking the pen back behind her ear, and then she's gone, and the door swings shut behind her, and Dani sits on her bunk in the empty cabin and stares at the door and thinks:

What the fuck?

She thinks that for the rest of the day, while she's signing in for her own activities, while she's doing her training conditioning, while she's sitting on the arena wall watching a group of younger kids fumble through a formation drill. The conversation replays, and she turns it over, and she cannot find what she did wrong. 

Those were all normal things to say, right? 

She's still turning it over at dinner when Manon appears beside her table.

Dani looks up.

Manon is standing there with an expression on her face that Dani has learned, over time, means she has made a decision and is executing it, and there's no point in discussing it.

"Come with me," Manon says.

Dani stands up.

She's halfway around the table before she fully registers that she's moved at all — her siblings are staring, one of them with a fork suspended halfway to her mouth — and there's something faintly off about how immediately she'd responded, as if the words had simply bypassed the usual process and gone straight to her legs, but Dani follows Manon out of the Pavilion.

They end up in the narrow space between two of the far cabins, away from the dinner noise, where the evening light comes in long and slanted, and there's nobody around because everybody's eating. Manon stops and turns, crossing her arms, and opens her mouth —

She smells incredible.

Dani notices this immediately, and it’s very unhelpful to whatever is going on. Whatever perfume Manon is wearing tonight is different from her usual ones — it smells like sharp spices somehow, something with a little more depth to it — and her lip gloss catches the light when she talks, and Dani becomes aware, dimly and with some alarm, that she has missed the first part of whatever Manon is saying.

"— and I get that you're going through something, I do, but I need you to understand that —"

“Yeah," Dani says. "You're right."

"Do you, though?" Manon tilts her head. "Because this is twice now. Yesterday at lunch and then again this morning, apparently, and I wasn't even there this morning so I can only go off of what —"

"Wait, what about this morning?"

Manon stops. "Yeah, hello? I literally was just talking about how she came to do inspections—"

"Yeah, and I said —"

"Dani."

"What?"

"She thinks you're avoiding her," Manon says. "She told me you said you would be busy, and she thinks when you said that, you were telling her not to bother."

Dani opens her mouth.

"I know," Manon says, preempting her. "I know you probably didn't mean it like that. That's the whole point." She shifts her weight slightly, something moving through her expression. "You keep — something is going on with you, and you keep taking it out on her, and she keeps assuming it's something she’s done, and it is a whole thing, and I am so —"

She's a little flushed. The last of the evening light is doing something specific to the line of her jaw, and there's a small crease between her brows from the effort of being this carefully, precisely frustrated, and her lip gloss is — it's really —

"Dude,” Manon has put her hands on Dani’s jaw to catch her attention. “Are you even listening to me right now?"

"I am," Dani says. "I'm listening."

"You look like you’re blanking out."

"I’m not."

"You absolutely are—"

"I'm listening, look, I heard everything you said —"

"Then what did I just say?"

"Sophia thinks I'm avoiding her," Dani says, "and you're frustrated with me, and you want me to apologize —"

"No, I want you to understand why —"

"I do understand why —"

"Then act like it!"

Manon's voice tips over into something more heated, and her chin lifts slightly, and her eyes are bright with exasperation, and she's so close, they've been talking in close quarters this whole time because it's a narrow space between the cabins, and Dani is aware of several things at once:

the warm smell of her, the way a little color has come into her face, the way Manon has her hands on Dani’s jaw, and the fact that she has absolutely no idea what she's doing —

Dani kisses her.

It's not graceful at all. It's just the result of a day and a half of something she didn't have a name for, and Manon going still against her for exactly one stunned second —

And then Manon steps back and puts a hand flat against Dani's sternum and pushes, not hard, just enough.

"You," Manon says, "are so fucking infuriating."

Dani blinks.

"And stupid," Manon adds. "Genuinely. I cannot with you sometimes."

"I —" Dani replays the last four seconds. "Okay."

"You need to apologize to Sophia." Manon points at her. "Actually apologize. Tomorrow. First thing."

Dani is still approximately four seconds behind everything. "Is this you rejecting me?"

Manon stares at her.

"Because that's fine," Dani says, "I just want to know what —"

"Oh, for fuck's sake." Manon drops her hand from Dani's sternum. "Not only are you stupid, but you're also selfish. Do you hear yourself? I'm standing here trying to help you fix something that actually matters, and you're — you know what, no. We’re not even going to talk about this." She steps back again, further this time. "Sophia. Tomorrow. First thing. I mean it."

She turns on her heel and walks away, back toward the dinner noise, and Dani stands between the two cabins in the long evening shadow and stares at the space where she was.

A bird calls somewhere. The distant sound of the pavilion.

Dani puts her back against the cabin wall and slides down it until she's sitting in the dirt, knees up, and looks at the strip of darkening sky above her.

She has, she thinks, made several errors today.

She cannot identify all of them currently.

She sits there, between the cabins, for a long while before she picks herself up and heads back to her own cabin.

+++

She's been sitting on the steps of the Hermes cabin since six AM.

This is, objectively, a lot. She knows it's a lot. But she'd woken up and thought, find Sophia, say sorry, mean it, don't make it weird.

It's simple and actionable. She can do this.

Except Sophia is not at the Hermes cabin.

Dani has been sitting on the steps for forty minutes watching a few people filter past on their way to breakfast, and the cabin remains conspicuously Sophia-free, because Sophia usually is one of the first to wake in the whole camp, and she's starting to wonder if she somehow got the wrong cabin, which would be a new low even for her —

"What are you doing?"

She looks up. Yoonchae has stopped in front of her with an amused expression. It seems she was returning from the Pavilion.

"Waiting to talk to Sophia," Dani says.

Yoonchae stops. She looks at her and then at the Hermes cabin door. "Err… you know she’s already at breakfast, right?”

Dani stares. "What?"

"I saw her going into the pavilion when I was coming out."

"How early was she up?"

Yoonchae tilts her head slightly. "She stayed over at the Aphrodite cabin last night, I think. Sleepover or something. They were probably all up at five doing their hair or whatever they do."

Dani stands up from the steps.

Right. The Aphrodite cabin. Where Manon is. Where Manon definitely spent the entire sleepover debriefing Sophia about what happened between the cabins last night, in detail, possibly with hand gestures —

She is in a foul mood the entire walk to the pavilion.

The morning is annoyingly beautiful, which doesn't help. Clear sky, good light, birds, all of it. Dani walks through it with her jaw set and her hands in her pockets and arrives at the pavilion to find it still relatively sparse with the early breakfast crowd, which means she spots them immediately.

Manon and Sophia.

Sitting together, shoulders close, this time at the Hermes table, Sophia's hair loose from sleep in a way that means she probably borrowed someone's dry shampoo this morning because it still looks effortless, and Manon is saying something that makes Sophia smile into her cup, and Dani stops walking for a second.

They're always together.

She thinks about it — really thinks about it, for the first time, laying it all out — and it lands on her with a horrible, clarifying thud. The way Manon touches Sophia's hair. The private smiles. The sleepover. The way Manon had gone to Sophia first, every time, before anyone else. The way Manon has told her not to talk about this and to apologize first thing in the morning. How they're always, always, always together.

Oh.

Oh.

They're together. They have to be. And this whole time, that feeling — the losing feeling, the gnawing thing in her chest — it was because she wanted —

She wanted —

Dani stares at the back of Manon's head.

Wait.

What? She wanted Manon for herself? That’s crazy. 

But, wait, that madness kind of makes sense, and Manon and Sophia are together, so great, this means — there’s also like that Aphrodite tradition, right? Okay, this makes sense. This is Manon breaking her heart or something like that, even if unintentionally. Or intentionally. It’s a rite of passage, Dani can accept it. She’s had to do worse for the Nike cabin tradition. It’s fine. It’s totally, completely normal and fine. 

Yes, it should feel true, it should settle, and she does feel sad about not having Manon, but at the same time, this sadness keeps slipping sideways into something else, something that also involves Sophia's contagious laugh and the specific brightness of Sophia's smile and —

Wait, but how come — 

"Bro, how do you still look like shit."

She blinks. James materializes from her left, dropping into a seat across from where she's apparently sat herself down, depositing an enormous bowl of eggs and sausage on the table with a heavy clunk. The bruise has faded significantly thanks to the ambrosia, but evidently not all the way.

"Your nose is like, almost normal," James continues, loading his fork. "But almost. There's still a yellow-green situation happening."

"Thanks," Dani says. "Really helpful observation."

"That's what I'm here for." He points his fork at her. "You want anything? You're just sitting there."

"I'm not really hungry."

"You're literally always hungry —"

"James, I think Manon and Sophia might be —"

"Actually, anyway," James suddenly says loudly, "I had the most unbelievable spar yesterday with this Apollo kid named Martin —"

Dani opens her mouth.

James's eyes have cut briefly to somewhere behind her, and then he's standing up with his enormous plate of eggs. "Okay, I gotta go. Bye."

"What? You just got here —"

"Yep. See you. Love you. Fix your life." He's already gone, sliding away between tables with impressively quick speed. 

Dani turns around slowly.

Sophia is three feet away, and Manon is behind her at a distance that makes it extremely clear she has physically pushed Sophia in this direction and is now pretending to have somewhere else to be, drifting toward the Aphrodite table with an air of total innocence that convinces nobody.

The pavilion is early-quiet, and only a handful of tables are occupied. Most people look barely awake, probably because of staying up too late due to the bonfire. It’s a small mercy, Dani supposes, because otherwise, all the other campers would be staring at them. 

Sophia stops in front of her. She looks like she's braced for something — there's a carefulness to how she's holding herself, as if she’s been assured this will probably be okay and is choosing to believe it even though she's not sure.

"Hey," Sophia says. Her tone is light, as if feigning nonchalance. “You okay?” 

Dani's mouth opens.

She had a whole thing. She had words, an order for them, an actual plan — I'm sorry, I've been taking something out on you sideways, and that wasn't fair, you didn't do anything wrong, I'm sorry — she'd rehearsed it on the steps of the Hermes cabin for forty minutes —

"I kissed Manon last night," she says. "I'm so sorry."

A beat of absolute silence.

Sophia's expression does something she can't track — it had been open, carefully hopeful, and now it's not, it's closing like a door swinging shut, and there's something in her eyes that Dani can't name before Sophia looks away from her entirely.

"Oh," Sophia says. “Okay.” 

Her voice is very even.

Then, she turns around and walks away — not back to the Aphrodite table but out, fully out, toward the Pavilion’s main entrance, and Dani watches her go.

From the Aphrodite table, Manon is staring at her.

Dani turns toward her slowly.

Manon's face says, very clearly, what did you just say.

Dani opens her mouth, and then she closes it.

She points vaguely in the direction Sophia had gone.

Manon's head drops into her hands.

Dani sits in the quiet pavilion, the morning light coming in at its cheerful, indifferent angle, and the word sorry sits completely useless in her chest, and she thinks, with profound exhaustion:

That was not the apology.

+++

Manon has her by the wrist before Sophia is even fully out of the pavilion.

“What,” Manon says, in a voice like the flat side of a blade, “is wrong with you?”

It’s not a question. Dani knows it’s not a question, but she answers it anyway.

“I panicked —”

“You panicked.”

“I had a whole thing prepared, and then she was just standing there, and it came out wrong —”

“What did you say?” 

“I don’t think I —“

“Dani. What did you say?” 

“I told her I kissed you and that I was sorry for kissing you.” 

“Dani.” Manon is already moving, pulling her by the wrist out of the pavilion, past the early breakfast crowd, past a Demeter kid who wisely steps out of the way, out into the morning. Her grip is not gentle. “You are a fucking idiot. I can’t believe you.”

“What?”

“Sophia likes you,” Manon says slowly, like she’s speaking to someone who has recently sustained a head injury, which, to be fair, is not entirely inaccurate. “She has liked you. For a while. And you just walked up to her and said —” Manon stops walking and turns to face her, and her expression is doing several things at once, all of them intense. “I kissed Manon last night, I’m sorry. That’s what you led with. That’s seriously the first thing you said to her?!”

“But I thought— I was going to apologize —”

“For the wrong fucking thing!”

“I didn’t know she —” Dani pulls up short. The information is still arranging itself in her head. “I thought you two were together.”

“You’re shitting me, right?” Manon says.

“What?” 

“We’re not together, you idiot. At least yet, you idiot.” 

“What?” 

“We’re friends, Dani, we’re very close friends, who also happen to like each other, which I’m pretty sure of since that’s what my siblings — and my mother — keep telling me, which you would also know if you weren’t so busy being confused about your own feelings for the last four days —” Manon cuts herself off, pressing two fingers to the bridge of her nose. “You know what, fine. Okay. We are going to deal with your idiocy in a second. First,” She points. “Do you understand what you just said to her?”

“I thought I was apologizing—”

“You told her,” Manon says, “something that made her think that you and I are — that there’s already a whole — and she likes you, and she came over here because I told her you had something to say to her, and what you said made her feel like she’d already lost something before she even —” Manon stops again. Exhales through her nose. “She’s definitely upset with me now, too, by the way. Thank you for that.”

Dani opens her mouth.

“Don’t,” Manon says.

She closes it.

Manon looks at her for a long, assessing moment — the way she looks at things, she’s trying to decide what to do with — and then she says, “Don’t say anything else stupid for the rest of today, please. I’ll try and talk to her first.” 

+++

James finds her at the arena wall around midday, sitting with her elbows on her knees and the expression of someone doing long division in their head.

“So,” he says, sitting next to her.

“Don’t.”

“I’m just saying —”

“James, I swear —”

“Manon’s looking for you.” He pulls out an apple and bites it, unbothered. “She said to meet by the lake. But like not too close to the lake, because the naiads listen in. She said you can go somewhere around there.” 

Dani looks at him. “What the fuck? That could be anywhere.”

“That’s what she said.” He shrugs. “I’d go. She seemed —” He considers his word choice. “Purposeful.”

Dani stares at the arena dirt.

“You’re going to keep sitting there?” James asks.

“I’m thinking.”

“That’s a new one. How’s that going?”

“Fuck you.” 

She gets up and goes

Dani hears them before she sees them, two voices in the cadence of an argument that’s been going for a while and has reached the tired, circling stage. The lake path bends around a cluster of trees, and Dani slows as she comes around it and gets a visual.

Sophia and Manon are standing maybe three feet apart in the long grass just back from the water’s edge. Sophia has her arms crossed, and she’s looking somewhere past Manon’s shoulder, jaw set, eyes bright in a way that means she’s been crying recently or is close to it. Manon’s posture is tense. 

Dani’s first instinct is to back up slowly and disappear into the trees.

She takes one careful step backward.

“Dani, I can see you.” 

Manon has eyes everywhere. It’s unnatural.

“Get over here.”

Sophia looks up at the sound of her name. Whatever her expression does when she sees Dani, Dani can’t fully read it — there are too many things moving across it at once, and she looks away again quickly, back to the middle distance past Manon’s shoulder.

Dani walks over.

“Um, hey,” she says, to both of them, uselessly.

Sophia’s jaw tightens. “You don’t have to be here,” she says, to the middle distance. “I was just telling Manon — I mean, it’s fine. Whatever happened, it’s fine. I wish you both —” A small pause, like she’s making sure her voice is level. “I genuinely wish you both the best. You don’t have to explain anything.”

“Girl,” Manon says. “Did you not hear a single thing I just said?” 

“I mean it. It’s fine.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Manon’s voice drops some of its edge, landing somewhere more firm than unkind. “Dani is already stupid enough for all three of us; we cannot afford two idiots in this group.”

“What?”  Dani turns to her. “Why am I catching strays? What did I —”

“You know what you did.”

“I apologized for the wrong —”

“Yes, you did, I’m aware, focus —” Manon turns back to Sophia, and something in her expression shifts, going quieter. “Sophia. We both like you.”

Sophia’s arms tighten across her chest. “Manon —”

“We do.”

“What?” Dani says.

Sophia sighs, and this time, she sounds angry. “You don’t have to say shit like this out of pity just to —”

“I’m not,” Manon cuts in. “You know me well enough to know when I’m being nice versus when I’m telling you something true. This is the second thing.”

Dani is standing slightly to the side, watching this unfold, and she’s a beat behind all of it as usual, but she’s catching up — and Manon’s words land, and she can kind of imagine Manon’s voice saying something like, you fucking idiot, I like you too, otherwise you think I was just letting you kiss me and not bitch-slap you all the way to Camp Jupiter?

She looks at Sophia — Sophia, who is still not looking at her, jaw still set, eyes still too bright, arms still crossed like she’s holding herself together by pressure alone —

“I’m sorry,” Dani says. Manon looks at her incredulously, because now she’s cutting Manon off mid-explanation.

Sophia’s eyes move to her immediately.

“I’m —” Dani stops. Starts again. “I’ve been an idiot. I know that. I’ve been taking something out on you for days because I couldn’t figure out what it was, and I’m sorry, and that’s what I was supposed to say yesterday morning.” She pauses. “And also this morning. Instead of — the other thing.”

“What other thing?” Sophia repeats.

“Which I also need to explain, apparently —” Dani looks at Manon.

“Please, for gods’ sake,” Manon says, with an expression that clearly communicates she’s been waiting for this.

“I kind of, um, thought you two were —” Dani gestures vaguely between them. “Together. I thought I’d been —” She exhales. “That’s why I said it. I wasn’t trying to — it wasn’t to hurt you. I thought it was already, like, you two.” She stops. “I was wrong. And jealous. I blame my genetics for some of it, you know, competitions and all, but like that was mostly me being jealous. I kissed Manon, but I’d kiss you, too. I mean, like, I like you both. I’m sorry.”

Sophia is quiet for a moment.

Then, slowly, her arms loosen from across her chest.

“This feels like a fever dream,” she says. 

“Yeah.”

“Manon and I are not together. We’ve never been —”

“I know. I mean. I know that now.”

Another beat of silence passes through. The lake is quiet behind them, the naiads apparently having the good grace to stay submerged. A breeze moves through the grass.

“So,” Manon says, into the quiet that follows. “Are we good? Is everything cleared up? Can I be done mediating, because I feel like I’ve aged significantly in the last twelve hours —”

“I think,” Sophia says slowly, “that we are all, genuinely, idiots.”

“Some of us more than others,” Manon says, gesturing at Dani.

“That’s fair,” Dani says.

She’s still a beat behind. She can feel it — the conversation has landed somewhere, something has resolved, the air between the three of them has lost that awful loaded quality it’s been carrying all day — and Sophia’s arms are loose at her sides now and she’s looking at Dani with an expression that’s somewhere between exhausted and something softer, and Dani’s brain is doing its usual thing where it skips the middle steps entirely and lands somewhere ahead of where her mouth should be.

“Can I kiss you?” Dani asks.

There’s a long, awkward moment of silence, during which Dani seriously considers if she could just wade into the lake and drown herself.

Manon is turning to look at her. And almost immediately, at the same time, Sophia is also turning to look at her.

“I —” Dani pauses. Catches up with herself. “I mean — like—“ She looks at Manon helplessly, and then— “Sophia?”  

Sophia’s expression goes very still for exactly one second.

Her face turns completely red.

It happens fast — a flush that starts at her neck and moves up, all the way to her cheeks and then her ears, and she opens her mouth and then closes it again, and Dani thinks, distantly and helplessly, that she is so pretty — unreasonably pretty, probably somehow blessed by Aphrodite, just standing in the late afternoon light with her hair loose and her face going scarlet —

“Oh,” Sophia manages. “Um, sure, I mean —“

Dani steps forward and brings her hand up, and cups her jaw, carefully, like something she doesn’t want to startle. Sophia’s eyes are very wide. Dani tilts her head and kisses her, soft and deliberate and unhurried, the kind of kiss that has an actual thought behind it rather than being the result of a Manon-induced short circuit.

Sophia makes a small sound against her mouth.

When Dani pulls back, Sophia’s pupils are blown wide, her lips slightly parted, and she looks — briefly, completely — like she’s forgotten what words are.

“Oh,” Sophia says again, quieter this time. “Yeah, okay.” 

“Um, thanks,” Dani says.

“Okay,” Sophia echoes.

“Okay,” Manon says, from approximately two feet away. “So. Quick question. And I’m asking this genuinely and also because I think it’s only fair —” She pauses. “Can I get in on this, too? Because I feel like I’ve earned it. I’ve been managing this situation since Tuesday, and it is now Friday, and I've done a lot of emotional labor —”

Sophia is still in front of Dani when she turns to look at Manon; Sophia is still flushed, and laughs — surprised and genuine — and Manon is still talking when Sophia pulls her in close, right in front of Dani, with an air of complete self-assurance, and the kiss she gives Manon is shorter but no less sincere, and when she pulls back she looks satisfied.

“Good,” Manon says, definitely smiling now. “Great. Okay.”

Manon has a satisfied look, the one that means she’s done something good, and Dani watches as Sophia, still flushed and bright-eyed and a little undone around the edges, reaches out and gets a hand in Manon’s collar and pulls her back in for another kiss. 

Manon makes a small, surprised sound against her mouth.

Dani watches for approximately two seconds.

The thing is — and she will think about this later, in the quiet, and probably cringe — she is genuinely, constitutionally incapable of watching someone else win something without wanting to be involved. It’s not a character trait she’s proud of. It’s probably the Nike genetics. And Manon has spent the better part of four days being right about everything and smug about it and also smelling incredible and looking like that, and Sophia has her hand twisted in Manon’s collar, and Manon is caught up enough that she’s not watching her periphery — 

Dani leans in.

She finds the curve of Manon’s neck just below her jaw, where her pulse sits, where the perfume is warmest, and she presses her mouth there — firmly sucks, with the intent of someone who has heard Manon describe exactly this in approximately four separate conversations over the summer, each time with that tone that meant she was trying to sound casual about something she wasn’t casual about at all.

Okay, this might be TMI, but — 

David is, like, good for nothing except —

The one thing he actually understood was anatomy, I swear —

Okay, like, sometimes I think that’s genuinely enough to make me —

Manon whimpers.

It’s small and sharp and completely involuntary, and she pulls back from Sophia fast, chin tucking down instinctively toward the source of the sensation — and Dani lifts her head feeling like she just won a gold at a chariot race. 

Manon stares at her.

Her composure, which is usually immaculate, is doing something it very rarely does, which is slip. Her lips are parted slightly. There’s a faint flush high on her cheeks that has nothing to do with anger or her Aphrodite-blessed makeup this time, and her lip gloss is smudged all over Sophia’s lips. She looks, for possibly the first time since Dani has known her, completely caught off guard.

“Okay,” Manon says. Her voice comes out slightly unsteady. She clears her throat. “Okay.”

“Oops,” Dani says. She knows she herself is smiling. 

“You —” Manon points at her. The point is less authoritative than usual. “You’re not being fair, and you’re pulling from old conversations.”

“You talked a lot about it,” Dani says.

“I talked in confidence, about my preferences —”

“We were all there, Manon,” Sophia says, from beside them, with the serene expression of someone enjoying this enormously. “And you were definitely not trying to hide any details.”

“I —” Manon closes her mouth. Open it. She shivers. “That’s okay. I need a moment.”

“Okay,” Dani says.

Manon looks at her for a long moment. Then she reaches out, gets a hand in Dani’s shirt, and pulls her in, and the kiss she gives her is emphatic and slightly retaliatory, and Dani’s competitive streak does not survive it even a little bit — she surfaces from it with her thoughts genuinely scrambled, blinking, and Manon pulls back with her composure mostly reassembled, and the satisfied look firmly back in place.

“There,” Manon says. “Okay. Now we’re even.”

Sophia makes a sound that is entirely a laugh. She drops herself onto the grass. 

Dani sits on the grass and decides she needs a moment, too.

The three of them end up in a loose, overlapping pile — Sophia’s shoulder against Manon’s, Manon’s knee against Dani’s, the afternoon light going gold and low across the lake — and the quiet that settles between them is completely different than any quiet they’ve had all week. 

Sophia puts her face in her hands.

“I feel insane,” she says, muffled.

“You’re not,” Dani says.

“We all are a little insane,” Manon says generously. “We can figure out the details later, though. We should talk about this more. But later.” 

Dani’s about to voice her agreement when the water at the lakeshore ripples and a woman’s head emerges near the bank. Then another. There are two naiads, rising to their shoulders, watching with the barely concealed interest of creatures who have been lying very still and listening for the last fifteen minutes.

Dani stares at them, and they look right back. One of them is holding something. Dani squints.

It’s a sandal. One of Sophia’s, by the look of it — she glances down, and yes, Sophia is inexplicably completely barefoot, one shoe must have come off at some point earlier maybe. 

“Hey, can I have that back?” Sophia asks politely. “Please?” 

The naiad clutches it slightly closer, eye bright, as if holding leverage.

Oh, Dani realizes, and she seems to realize at the same time Manon does. 

“Oh, gods,” Manon says, under her breath. “Okay. Okay, we need to be smart about this.”

“I think they overheard us,” Dani says, very quietly. “I knew this was a terrible spot, Manon, they’re going to tell everyone.” 

“Not if we negotiate,” Manon says, sitting up straighter.

“You can’t negotiate with naiads,” Sophia says. “You should know this best out of all of us. And all you’ve ever done is argue with them—“ 

“You can’t negotiate with naiads,” Manon says, “but I absolutely can; they love me, we argue out of love —” She gets up and steps forward, slightly toward the bank. “Oh, hi. Hello, babes. I know you heard all of that.”

The naiad with the shoe tilts her head. The second one has been joined by a third, appearing silently from somewhere to the left.

“Here’s the thing,” Manon continues, pleasantly, in the tone she uses when she is about to be completely ruthless about something. “What you just witnessed? Very private. Very personal. And we would love it — really, deeply, genuinely love it — if it stayed that way.” A pause. “And the sandal, please.”

The first naiad seems to consider this. She looks at the sandal, and then she looks at Dani, then Sophia, then Manon.

“We saw the kiss,” she says, in the reedy, slightly-too-loud voice. “The first one. And then the second —”

“Okay, nice,” Manon says.

“And the third —”

“Ah, yes. There was that, too.”

“That’s a lot of information to keep for free,” the second naiad says.

Dani puts her face in her hands.

“Okay,” Sophia says gamely. “What do you want?”

The naiads confer. It’s a fast, rippling exchange, whispered in that way they have that sounds like water moving over rocks, and then the one with the shoe turns back.

“The hockey one,” she says, pointing at Dani, “has to actually come swimming. He’s walked past this lake every day for three summers and never once came in. He only comes when the lake freezes.”

“The hockey one?” Manon seems confused. 

“James?” Dani lifts her head from her hands. “That’s your price?”

“And,” the naiad adds, “he has to admit this is a good lake.”

“It is a good lake,” Dani says immediately. “I feel like that’s a universally agreed thing.” 

“Well, then, why doesn’t he ever say so? He always ignores this place,” the naiad says. “Layla" — she gestures at the second naiad behind her, who waves back — "and I are offended. We want to hear him acknowledge that. And after swimming.”

Manon turns to look at Dani with a raised eyebrow. Sophia is already pressing her lips together, trying very hard not to smile. Dani herself is a little confused by this request, but clearly James has said something to irk the naiads, or maybe the naiads are crushing on him — either way, that’s not her issue to figure out. 

“Fine,” Dani says. “Fine. After swimming. You have a deal. Nobody tells anyone, and I’ll get James to go swimming.” 

The naiads confer again. Then, the sandals land in the grass in front of Sophia with a wet thud.

“Deal,” says the naiad. “We’ll be watching to make sure it happens. Preferably in the next few days.”

“Of course,” Dani says. 

Sophia picks up her sandal. She looks at it, then at Dani, and her smile finally breaks through — wide and warm and the kind that reaches her eyes — and Dani thinks, yeah. Yeah, she won this round. 

Still, she might be in an entirely different kind of trouble now, but that’s fine. She, Manon, and Sophia walk back to the main path to the Pavilion together, and they don’t hold hands or anything, but they’re always just a few inches from each other. Dani swears her lips are still tingling from the kisses earlier — she wonders if Manon was wearing a lip plumper, maybe. 

Later in the evening, she asks Manon to kiss her again to double-check. And just to be safe, she asks Sophia as well, but it seems like she’s still not sure, so she asks them to kiss her another dozen times. 

She returns to her cabin, still quite confused about her sexuality — because really, when did she start liking girls, and, furthermore, when did she start liking two of them simultaneously, and is that something she should bring up with a food sacrifice to Manon’s mom at some point or just quietly figure out on her own — but at least now with a slightly-less bruised face and a new absence of that gnawing feeling she'd been carrying around all week.

Eh. It’s okay, she supposes. Two girls have kissed her an aggregate of several times this afternoon for investigative purposes, and she feels like she’s won some competition  — actually, two, maybe — though she’s a bit uncertain about what this competition could still be. 

Yeah, she thinks. Okay. She can work with this.

Then, she discloses the naiad's deal to James in the middle of a spar the next day. He curses her out for six minutes straight, and she walks away with a new bruise in the same spot on her face. 

It could be worse, she thinks. This is still a net positive. 

You win some, you lose some, right?