Chapter Text
Apollo gave Benedict the gift of healing and poetry, but Violet Bridgerton taught him the value of good bedside manners.
“She was working as an immunologist in Brooklyn when she met my father — both of them, actually,” Benedict yapped away as he pressed a cool towel to the forehead of his latest patient.
Francesca was the one who found her that very morning, staggering past Thalia’s Pine with a dazed but haunted expression on her face. With a sharp whistle, supernaturally amplified by the grace of Apollo, Fran hailed for the rest of Cabin Seven to come to the poor girl’s aid. Approaching them from a distance, Benedict thought, ruefully, that he had met too many half-bloods like her.
Then, he saw her face, and realized she was not like any half-bloods he’d ever met.
She made it to camp without the aid of a guardian; that was already strange enough. In a ratty grey T-shirt that might’ve once been silver, uncombed black hair sticking to her face, she looked a bit older than most kids the satyrs brought to camp — a fellow teenager around his age, a year or two younger, at most. She must’ve been awfully courageous to have survived this long, not to mention incredibly lucky. She carried a knife. A butcher’s knife, tipped in Celestial Bronze. She met his eyes, he immediately tripped over his own shoelaces, and this girl — this poor, exhausted, hungry girl — had rushed to his aid. Of all the things to do, when she could barely stand on her own two feet! He only just managed to recover himself in time to catch her passing out in his arms.
His mother once told Benedict that patients, even comatose ones, appreciated a bit of conversation — anything to make them feel less like pieces of furniture or slabs of meat on a butcher’s board, and more like actual, living, healthy human beings. The best medicine is laughter, and all that. He’d begun by reciting the usual “Welcome to Camp” orientation video, then went into a bit of details explaining the careful politics of Capture the Flag alliances. As the hour grew late, and the mysterious girl in silver showed no sign of waking up any time soon, Benedict was forced to turn to the only subject he had left to talk about: himself.
“She heroically saved my father — my mortal father, that is — from a deadly bee sting, capturing not only his heart, but also the attention of an Olympian. It was quite the scandal, you see, when I came along.” She and Edmund already had Anthony by then. “Don’t worry, everything worked itself out. ‘Love is not finite,’ or so my mother always told me. This story has a happy ending, or … at least a happy for now.”
It was difficult, but manageable, even with all the monster attacks, until Zephyros, god of the west wind and an ancient rival to Apollo, decided to take revenge upon one of his most favoured mortal families, and Edmund sacrified himself to save the life of his wife and his eldest son.
Anthony wrote the eulogy.
Benedict offered to help.
His older brother would not have it. He would not say why, but Benedict could take a wild guess. His words were another gift — and thus another curse — from Benedict’s father, the very same god whose actions led to Anthony’s father’s death.
His other mortal siblings were sick of him, he could feel it. His mortal mother was sick, period. So, for the very first time, he asked to stay at camp past the summer’s end.
“Maybe some good came out of all that, if I got to be here to help you,” Benedict concluded. In her sleep, he occasionally caught his patient muttering below her breath, something shoe clips and a locked box and error. Whatever haunted her imagination seemed more monstrous than even the beasts from the pits of Tartarus. “I’m lucky, I admit, to know who my godly parent is from a young age. Do you know yours? Did your mortal family tell you? If you have one …”
That seemed unlikely, given the state in which she’d arrived at camp, but it was, to Benedict, equally impossible to imagine that someone, anyone, would ever abandon her. Beyond his duty as her healer, Benedict kind of wanted to feed her hot soup, or sketch her sleeping form in his notebook. Was that sweet, or creepy? Probably creepy. Even the Aphrodite kids would laugh if he spoke this want aloud.
“Whatever happened to you … You’re safe here. Or, as safe as you can be.”
Home — could Bridgerton’s brownstone in Brooklyn could still be called his home? — was not the same without Edmund, but neither was camp after Luke Castellan’s betrayal.
Chiron and Mr. D held meetings after meetings in the Big House with the cabin leaders. The rest of camp dared not speak his name, nor the event that occurred on the last day of this past summer, but a tension underlaid every campfire, every canoe lesson, every pegasus ride.
Every half-blood, sooner or late, must pick a side.
Many children of Olympus, born with instincts for battle over survival, trained since childhood to wield swords over pens, hungered for the chance to prove themselves. But having brushed against death — or, at the very least, heard the stories from Anthony thereafter — Benedict could see no glory in it. Death was death was death was death, no matter the good and noble intentions of the dying.
Perhaps if his older brother had been the one at camp, he would’ve been swayed by either Luke’s offer or Percy’s plea. Perhaps Anthony’s resentment at Apollo’s role in Edmund’s death would’ve crystallized into something harder, something to spur him into action. That Benedict had merely sat on his hands and refused the call might prove, once and for all, that his loyalty laid more with his godly father than his mortal one.
“I’ll tell you something, though. Just you,” Benedict said with a wink, as he fed her nips of nectar and bites of ambroisa. “I didn’t stay for the honour of … well … You-Know-who. Names have power, but you know what I mean. I stayed because … because Francesca’s still young, Gregory’s even younger, and now there’s Hyacinth to worry over too. And those are just my half-blood siblings. I haven’t told you about how Anthony refuses to believe he has the Sight, while Eloise is desperate to prove she does. I haven’t mentioned Daphne and Colin — yes, you counted correctly, there are eight of us. Good gods, what were my parents thinking?” He shook his head with a slight laugh. Not to mention his other siblings from Cabin Seven, or the lost children of Eleven, or the lovely wood nymphs who doted on him and told him where to pick the best strawberries, or the little girl at the campfire who always gave him a knowing smile …
There were so many people he must look after. How would a war possibly help with any of that?
“‘All’s well that ends well,’ to quote the Bard himself. Hey, did you know he was also a son of Apollo?” Benedict whispered. “Just … focus on waking up, okay? Don’t worry about what happens next. Even if your godly parent claims you … even if they don’t … you’ll have friends here.” Gently, he moved her hair out of her face. “You’ll have, well, me.”