Goodnight Moon ↣ P. Jackson + A. Chase

2.07

The arena was quiet in the early winter mornings, personal in the hours that no one was awake unless they had to be. 

Cabin 7 was, of course, up with the sun as Apollo decided that it was time to get up as he drove over camp in that ridiculous sun chariot that looked like some cherry red sports car playing what she was fairly certain was heavy metal music because while she heard the music a little bit, she couldn't hear it fully -- and her siblings complained endlessly, whined and cursed at the horrible sound until she too was dragged out of bed when she could no longer ignore it. 

So in classic Lee fashion, he let Kassandra off to do whatever she wanted instead of tagging along for classes since she was on break. 

It was how she found herself alone as she wailed on a training dummy, fist tightly wrapped to keep from busting her knuckles needlessly. 

There were few things that she enjoyed having in common with her father -- boxing, a sliver of his physical prowess, that made her feel distinctly violent and aggressive when she wanted to be, and while she assumed that he was much more refined than her somewhat slugger, mixed with a handful of multi-style moves, it was one of those things where she strived to be as good as or even better than him. 

(In the first Olympics, the very first Olympics of the gods, Apollo had beaten Ares in boxing and if she couldn't strive to beat everyone else around her, then what was the point? Kassandra wanted him to see her as that spectacular, wanted him to know that she was more than capable of taking care of herself.) 

(When Kassandra was ten, almost eleven, Luke had dragged her to the Ares cabin and dropped her down in front of Oriana when she had nearly broken her hand after beating up on Michael in a spar. 

She had been angry, destructively so, because he was saying something about his claiming and how lucky he was to have been accepted so easily, so quickly by Apollo, and while most she didn't know for certain, she sort of did know and it had infuriated her so much that she had tossed her sword to the side during training and went at him with her bare fist. 

He left with a broken nose and a bruised cheekbone. 

She left with busted and split knuckles, and a nasty slice on her arm that she refused to get healed. 

Luke had dragged her away by the scruff of her collar like she was a bad puppy and let her cry angry tears into his shoulder when they were out of sight. 

At the time, it was like only he understood, only he was willing to hear the truth of how much the gods sucked as he shared his own hatred, his own trauma. 

Oriana had taken one look at Kassandra's angry ten, almost eleven, year old self and promised to teach her how to defend herself properly with her fists if she truly wanted to get down and dirty. )

(And really, nothing could beat the feeling of hitting someone, the sense of knowing that it was her strength that was knocking into them, her strength alone that was hurting them -- and Kassandra was strong from years of training and archery, she was a fierce force to be reckoned with if people you got on her bad side.) 

"You'll hurt yourself if you keep going like that." 

Kassandra snorts, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear and brushing her hand down her face to wipe away the thin beading of sweat from her temples. 

"I haven't hurt myself since I was eleven," she says, pushing up the sleeves of her sweater to her elbows. "That's not to say that people haven't hurt me." 

"Is that why you're destroying the training dummy instead of sparing with an actual person?" Percy teases, swaggering his way over with a hand tucked into his pocket.