Red Skies at Morning | Clarisse La Rue x OC | Percy Jackson AU

The Birds, by Alfred Hitchcock

I snapped out of whatever funk I was in after the dramatics of Tyson being claimed. The laughing of campers had filled my ears the way it should have and after everyone calmed down, dinner continued mostly as normal. 

Now it was finally time to turn in for the night after a very long day. I muttered a goodnight to Clarisse after she helped me walk back to the Hermes cabin and waddled inside, eager to finally end this day.

I puzzled over my earlier state while I pinched my toothbrush between the backs of my bandaged hands and awkwardly struggled to brush my teeth. Why had seeing Tyson's claiming made me feel like that? 

It could have been anger. There were plenty of reasons for me to be a just bit upset right now, but I wasn't exactly sure why Tyson being claimed would have been one of them.

I sighed when I finally lay down in my sleeping bag, staring up at the bottom of Andy's hammock. This was my first chance to relax today and now I was busy overthinking some random reaction. I sighed through clenched teeth and rolled over onto my side, greeted by the back of a Hermes kid's head barely two feet away.

Something like anger had been there when Tyson had been claimed, churning like magma under the stillness. Laying there, I recognized it as a feeling I felt often back when Luke would talk about his father. It was resentment. 

Resentment towards the gods, more specifically. It'd been so long since I'd let myself think about the gods as more than just distant, abstract ideas that we pretended to believe in for the sake of believing in something. 

Of course, I knew better than to genuinely think the gods were myths, but it was nice to pretend sometimes. To run off to a fantasy where I was just staying at a mortal summer camp, even if fighting monsters wasn't actually a regular summer camp activity.

I had this fantasy that I liked to fall asleep to sometimes. I'd pretend that one day, summer would end and I'd get picked up to go home to my family. I'd run up and hug my dad and we'd go pick up some junk food and I'd start getting ready for the next year of school. 

Then, after attending whatever grade I was old enough to attend, the next summer would arrive I'd come back to the completely normal, mortal summer camp. I'd find Clarisse once I got dropped off and run into Luke and Annabeth in Cabin 11. Everything would be normal, we'd be a bunch of mortal friends. Luke wouldn't be a traitor, just a counselor I looked up to. He'd never tried to kill Percy. Percy was just some kid, not the one who'd probably bring the end of the god's reign. 

But today Tyson had been claimed, proving once again that my trips to Mount Olympus during the Winter Solstice had not been dreams, and that the traits campers in the same cabin shared from the divine parts of the family were not just a funny coincidence. 

Now it was here it was again. The same bitterness that filled me with animosity when Luke had told me the story behind his scar, or when I was reminded that my mother was still making the specific choice not to claim me every day, or when I'd learned that the quest Percy went on last summer had been because the gods were too paranoid and stubborn to solve their own problems, or when Clarisse had once told me about the things Ares did to his kids... 

The pads of my hands were beginning to sting and I realized that I had been curling them into fists, which did not feel great with the burns. I forced myself to relax my hands and tried my best not to think about the gods anymore that night, eventually slipping into a new kind of nightmare I hadn't had before, one so much worse than any of the old dreams of being dragged toward the dark pit.

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