ANTI-HERO, j.grace

THREE

     When Kieran Maddox was eleven years old he shot his sister in the shoulder with a bow and arrow. He hadn't actually been aiming for the girl, and technically it had just scratched her rather than getting stuck in her shoulder, but Klein was never going to let him forget it.

One quick trip to the infirmary and a solid scolding for 'distracting Kieran during his lessons' later and the girl was good as new. Still, Klein cursed the boy and for the next week Kieran was only able to talk in rhymes.

Klein had an affinity for throwing out some Apollo style curses, and the second Kieran picked up on it the rest of camp knew they were screwed. So a few weeks later when Travis and Connor Stoll were heard singing every one of their sentences, it wasn't hard to narrow down the culprits.

Not many people knew the reasoning for the curse, and Lee Fletcher had contemplated giving the Maddox twins a weeks worth of bathroom cleaning duty for it. But in their defense, putting the Maddox twins up against the Stoll brothers in capture the flag was a poor decision and any and all results were completely the fault of any head counselors and supervisors involved.

Travis just thought he was hilarious when his in-field prank resulted in Klein leaving a golden handprint on whatever she touched for the rest of the week - 'perfect for the resident golden girl, no?' he had teased.

That's when the first jinx was thrown.

It has been a fun circle of events, and Klein was proud of herself as she felt her abilities grow over the years, but eventually she had stopped throwing harmless curses around at her friends and saved them for the fight, and then she stopped throwing them around all together. Klein stopped doing a lot of things.

Since August eighteenth, Klein Maddox had only picked up a bow and arrow three times.

The first was when she was mad, just a few days after she was officially back on her feet with her prosthetic leg and Klein was angry at the world. She took to the training field and she missed every target horribly.

The second was when she was forced to, it was mandatory training and Chiron wanted to see her out with what remained of the Apollo cabin. She didn't try to land a single shot, and everyone noticed that not a single arrow landed on the targets.

The third time, Klein was beside herself. It had been one month since the final battle, a few weeks since she got her fancy new leg, and all too many days of seeing the sympathetic looks everyone had been sending her. It made her mad, the looks, the whispers. Everyone seemed to be talking about her, about how she already seemed so different.

She was fine. Why did everyone think she was suddenly some kind of basket case?

She took to the training field, and one by one watched as every single arrow missed the targets by a landslide. Again and again she shot, again and again she missed.

And she missed. And she missed.

With an angry cry, Klein Maddox snapped her bow right in half.

That was the end of September. Now in December, Klein hadn't laid another finger on any bow.

She hadn't done anything.

There was something about grief that prevented you from functioning as usual, and the Maddox girl was grieving. Grieving the loss of her leg, grieving for the loss of her brother, grieving for the loss of who she had been before the war. Grief had wrapped it's gnarled, twisted hands around her like a tightening jail cell and had not let her go since.

And it rotted at her, tearing away at her mind and scarring her skin. She had been the camp golden girl, not the star of many quests but the girl who was always seen doing everything. Always with a bow in her hands, always climbing the rock wall faster than anyone else, always signing around the campfire, always with her brother.