"Send me! Send an army! Send a thousand ships! I don't care, just bring her home. I hate being without her."
[ PERCY JACKSON x FEMALE OC ]
[ PERCY JACKSON SERIES ]
cover by @humaneity !
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0019. | GODS FORGIVE THESE BONES I'VE HIDDEN
Michael asked to make the shroud. No one argued. He sat on his bunk that he would no longer need to share, and he pricked his fingertips with his sewing needle enough times to draw blood. Over the sequinned cloth, red dots peppered the centre of a sunburst and the buds of hyacinths.
They had to burn Lee with some of the dirt from the clearing still mixed with his smashed skull. It was hard to pull apart the earth from their brother and no one could stand to take the task. Pollux had stacked his twin high on the pyre as well, and Chiron had given him the chance to say a few words. He could only cry and toss the flaming torch onto the row of bodies. They burned Lee beneath his sequinned shroud.
Truthfully, Octavia didn't remember much.
Some details were clearer than others. The way the dirt did not catch light. The shiny, pearlescent sheen of the bones leftover once the breeze came by and brushed away the ash. She remembered Nico di Angelo being one of the first to approach her and give her his condolences. She recalled the line of snot that dribbled from Michael's nose and over his lips, smearing with his tears. The way Will held James' hand through it all, and how his fingertips pressed white over his fingernails when he squeezed his big brother's hand when the crying around them got too loud. She remembered the weight of Kayla's head on her shoulder and she thought about how heavy it might have been to have held it in her lap as Kayla had given her final breaths. If she had not saved her from that half-blood, it might have been her reality. If she had tried harder, she might have never known what Lee's smashed head looked like littered on the grass. He would have been sat there with them, holding their hands as they all counted their blessings that they were an untouched cabin. But Lee was gone and there was nothing anyone could do to stop his flesh peeling back from his bones or to stop the shining drachma turning molten beneath his curled fingers, still grasped ready to hold his bow and aim an arrow.
The next day, they treated the wounded.
From dawn to dusk, Octavia busied herself until her knuckles were raw and dry from scrubbing them clean of blood. She thought she had worked tirelessly, but James was even more fierce in his work. He ducked from camper to camper, rationing Ambrosia and Nectar, crafting splints and reseting bones. He congratulated Octavia quietly on setting Katie Gardner's hand straight on the field before it was too late. Had they waited longer, she would have had to lose her hand. That was the only consolation which made Pollux a little easier to look at.
Octavia took it upon herself to be cutthroat. James and Will couldn't make the choices so she was the one who decided which campers got a bed in the Infirmary and who had to go home to their cabins. By the end, she found her cutthroat intentions didn't account for much.
The Infirmary and the Big House were overflowing.
Finally, at the end of the day, once all the wounded were sent to bed or taken care of, Octavia found her feet walking when her mind couldn't think.
