No Fairness In Death

Chapter 13: No Fairness In Death

NO FAIRNESS IN DEATH (OR SLEEP)

ANNABETH POV

Icarus had forbidden me from leaving the Adamas. I couldn't believe it. How can he? I got it, I had messed up, but it was months before! Since then I had been on my best behaviour, I listened, I learned, and I even forced myself to stop before pointing out when someone was doing something stupid. Luke wouldn't have left me to rot. I thought bitterly.

I sighed, once more going over the knots that I had been assigned to learn: "The Bowline, also known as the king of knots, has multiple purposes aboard ship. A bowline creates a fixed loop on the end of a rope and is used for hitching, mooring and lifting. Because it tightens when stressed, the knot gets tighter when pulled. The bowline is tied by forming a loop, bringing the free end of the rope to pass through the eye, wrapping the rope around the standing line and back down through the loop before tightening." my hands ran over the rope as I enunciated the correct procedure to craft said knot, and in less than ten seconds, it was ready.

I sighed, before undoing it and passing to the next of my list: "The clove hitch is often used for tying something up temporarily, often attaching a rope to a pole or stanchion. The clove hitch is formed by hanging the rope around the support and creating a loop, passing the rope from behind and tightening to form a knot." and once more my hands followed the motions that I had spent days to learn, flawlessly crafting the knot.

Once more, I undid it and passed to the next, all the while explaining to the air what my hands were doing: "The round turn and two half-hitches is used for holding mooring lines by fastening a rope to a fixed object such as a post, ring or tree. The round turn and two half-hitches are created by wrapping the end of a rope around the support and taking it around the standing end of the rope. Another turn is made before taking the end of the rope out of the loop."

I sighed tiredly and dropped the piece of rope with disgust: "I swear, if I have to prepare a single other knot, I'll scream!" then the unthinkable happened: a hand anded over my head and ruffled my hair! Who is the idiot that soon will find himself with a stump at the end of the arm? I whirled on myself and snarled at my assailant, my hand already unsheathing the knife that Luke had gifted me.

"Whoah kid, no spilling blood in the galley, you know how Hannah gets when dealing with hygiene." The unbearably calm and unconcerned voice of David made me unconsciously sag my shoulders. Maybe cutting him would make him remember to keep his grease-stained hands to himself! My free hand rose tentatively to check my hair, finding it clean from whatever disgusting waste the son of Hephaestus usually tinkered within the engines' room. My surprise momentarily stopped me from giving him a proper tongue lashing, and it must have shown on my face since he hunched forward me, grinning like a loon: "Hannah had me scrub my hands raw the last time I came in here with a tiny smudge on them, you pretty blond hair is safe."

My hair is pretty? I asked myself, not that I could care less: "Yes, well, keep your hands to yourself anyway, thank you very much!" I hissed threateningly.

"You're welcome." he nodded seriously before walking towards the fridge and taking out some fish soup of the day before and chucking the whole thing in the microwave. "Welcome?" I repeated, Gods this is so frustrating I was being sarcastic! "That is the part you focus on? Not me threatening you with a knife?"

"You'll be more intimidating in a few years kid, give it time, for now... well, you're just adorable, one of my sisters would have built a robot-teddy bear of you, by now." David answered, causing me to grab the rope I had previously thrown un the floor and toss it in his bowl of fish soup, forcing him to scamper to make sure it didn't fall in. I'm not adorable, I'm scary! I am a genius daughter of Athena! I growled and turned to leave the galley. Some fresh air will make sure I don't kill him in the Galley. I thought to myself, it would upset Hannah anyway, and she had a way to look at you making you feel sorry for being alive that I couldn't quite explain.

Then the bell resonated on the deck, making me run faster up the stairs and reach the rendezvous point, where Hailey of all people was panting out warnings to Charlotte, a daughter of Ares, who was already sporting the bloodthirsty grin that she and her siblings had clearly inherited by their godly father: "Ok, we're dealing with a giant snake, multiple heads, venomous. Emily!" She concluded her speech with a shout to her sister.

The demigoddess in question was already geared up with a couple of spears held in her hand, a giant round shield on her back and a sword to her hip: "Yes?"

"Ask David for some fire, then lead the others, I set up traps for a big ass snake on the way, if you have to retreat try to have it flail around!" Charlotte quickly rattled off, just as Jillian started shaking her head: "No, David and his sister can set up the traps, Emily and Charlotte you two are with me, we'll charge on one side as soon as we approach, Abigail pick up ambrosia and your bow, we'll need it."

As she was talking she reached the side of the ship, pulling a bag over her shoulder which had Φωτιά printed on the side. My eyes read 'fire' without stumbling, and I marvelled at the foresight of whoever had decided to name the stuff that could be immediately useful in ancient greek, sparing us headaches on occasions like this. Quietly, I set a rope on the opposite side of the ship and let myself fall off, quickly climbing down and soon reaching the sandy beach under the Adamas.

Asking for permission would have been stupid, I would never get it, but I would observe quietly and help if needed, otherwise I would return back immediately in order to avoid being discovered.

I followed the team of four demi goddesses at a distance, before running straight while hidden by the tall herbaceous weeds that rose thirty centimetres over my head, and then balancing myself instinctively on the partially underwater roots of the mangroves. After maybe fifteen minutes of nonstop run on the irregular terrain, I heard Jillian's group disappear in a clearing that was somehow lower than the rest of the submerged ground while shouting "ADAMAS!" and when I had reached them, I momentarily froze. In the centre of the area a snake was flailing horribly, several stumps were smoking at the base of its neck, while two heads were rapidly reacting to the new enemy.

Just as I saw Charlotte anticipate Jillian and move to slash away a head that was already weakened by the previous fight with Icarus' group, everything clicked: a Hydra. Emily shouted a warning and her sister held back from completing the attack, turning it into a wide swing with the flat of her blade that batted away the incoming second head. "Greek Fire!" Jillian shouted as she started throwing small vases on the beast: "Abi! Rescue Icarus, we'll hold the Hydra!"

I widened my eyes as I saw the daughter of Apollo sling her bow on her torso without hesitating and running on the edge of the clearing, jumping with precision from root to low branch until she had reached her objective, and when I looked at him, a gasp left my lips. He was covered on small cuts and scrapes typical of those who had been chunked across the woods far too many times, his sword was a strange lump of half molten bronze at his feet, while I could distinguish at least three different pieces of his shield in different places. Worst than everything anyway was his abdomen. A piece of wood as thick as both my wrists had pierced him, and from the bloodied first half of the wood that was laying at his feet, I could imagine the succession of events that had led to it. He had been unlucky, it was simple as that.

He had been likely tossed away by the enormous snake several times before, with all probability counting over his shield to smooth down the blow on his back, only that the last time the shield was already in pieces and he had encountered a branch at an angle that didn't allow it to either bend or break in a way that would avoid Icarus getting stabbed. What can I do, what can I do? I thought furiously, my mind running over options and discarding them faster than I could properly imagine them: in a melee, I would not only distract Jillian, Charlotte, and Emily, but would likely only get myself killed, I had a knife, not a ballista to use. I wasn't strong enough to use Abigail's bow, and I didn't know how to heal... Going towards Icarus would likely only distract Charles, who was doing the inhumanly possible to grant everyone a stable ground on which stand but the Hydra, who was constantly harassed by the leaves. "I... can't do anything..." I murmured out loud.

"I'm out of arrows!" another voice resounded in the clearing "I used the last ones to keep the heads off Icarus!"

As I looked around, I suddenly found how I could help. I moved as fast as I could on the other border of the strange clearing, soon enough finding myself at Icarus' side, Abigail's hand were glowing of a pale golden and were placed over the deep gash over his belly. "I'll take your quiver to Sofia!" I spoke quickly, my hands working on the knots that secured it to the healer's belt. And two seconds later, I was gone, once more running on the outer side of the clearing being as careful as I could about not falling.

In less than a minute, I had reached Sofia general position: "Sofia! I've got Abigail's quiver!" I shouted. Four seconds later, the demigoddess moved amongst the higher branches of the groove, dropping on one of the lower branches and letting herself swing down while keeping her knees on the wood, only to quickly grab the quiver and shot back up among the leaves: "Stay here until we tell you it's safe!" She ordered/reprimanded me with a half-serious glare while she returned to position from where she could contribute to the fight.

Once more, I ran back to Icarus' side, carefully not looking at his grievous wound. "How can I help?" I asked, causing Abigail to divert momentarily her gaze to me, before sighing and frowning, turning immediately back to the slow words muttered in ancient greek that I couldn't make out, causing the golden glow of her hands to briefly intensify.

"Try to fashion a cot to carry him away as soon as he's stable." She ordered, and I nodded, glancing briefly at the ongoing fight before running back among the trees, looking for a couple of branches straight enough. Something like a bed sheet could be fashioned out of our shirts.

I had been waiting sitting in an out of the way angle while playing with the same length of rope I had been learning how to make knots with. It had been days, days of wait, as Sofia and Abigail went in and out, keeping up an unending, constant flow of whatever magical healing was. Finally, Sofia came out, this time looking directly at me and nodding with deep bags under her eyes. I scampered on my feet right away and ran to the door.

The infirmary smelled a bit, a mixture of blood, sweat and bitter herbs. The only occupied bed had low barriers on the sides to stop him from falling off in his sleep. I walked forward until I was at his side, and hearing my footsteps, he opened his bleary eyes to look at me: "You didn't jump in." he said softly with a smile.

"I... well, I wanted to, but... it would only have made things more difficult for everyone... so..." I didn't know how to answer.

"Well done." he managed to nod among the pillows. I stared at him surprised "But... I didn't help! I... was... I was useless, I didn't do anything!" and a bandaged hand landed on my head: "You've done well." he said.

"Thinking is rarely comfortable, but always a better alternative than simply acting. As your mother's daughter, I expect you to understand it better than others." He spoke, and I found myself living again he last 'serious chat' we had, just after the... disaster on the Titan's island.

"I followed the others off the ship without asking for permission!" I protested: "Shouldn't you be angry with me!?" I didn't understand, at all, it was exactly the opposite thing he had told me the last time. He chuckled slowly, breathing deeply to gain enough breath to answer: "I'd say that the fear you felt seeing the Hydra less than ten meters from you is enough for your little escapade, considering that instead of jumping in and dying stupidly you kept your cool and found a good way to help."

I was left speechless, Icarus wasn't supposed to make sense! He was going against what he had punished me for the last time: "I saw that there were only two wounded heads when we arrived, you..." for the gods, he was Strong. I've seen how it moved. "How did you manage to kill so many with only Charles and Sofia as support?" if he wasn't going to scold me, I might as well try to learn something.

He tried to give out a chuckle, but when the first wheezing sound was leaving his lips, he was already asleep.

ICARUS POV

2 May 2001

Six months. It had taken me two months to be able to walk again without stabbing pain in my side at every single step, and another four to regain complete mobility. After painstakingly long sessions with Abigail, both of direct healing, physiotherapy, and casual sex, just to 'test my swing', I could now torque my body like I always did without needing to be careful about it. Sure, now I had a horrible lump of scars in my side, where the skin was just a tiny bit slow to stretch when needed, but the muscles beneath it were in working condition.

For some reason, the magic healing gifted to the daughters of Apollo shown itself to be less than effective with me. I had cursed myself many times in those months: 'Hitting an Oracle?' not a good idea. But even so, I knew that I would have done it again. In my mind was obvious that the Future had no reason to be known by mortals. Either stuff happened and we had 0 control over it, or our free will built the future with unerring precision. I had felt the weight of preordered events on my own skin when Zeus went and turned his own daughter into a fucking tree, and I lashed out on the closest representative of Fate.

I stood from my bed in the captain quarters marvelling at the utter lack of pains, needling, twinges and whatnot. I walked towards the small crate that had ben left on my desk and slowly opened it: the 'trophy' fro killing the Hydra had been declared to be given to me by everyone. After all, I was clearly the one who had paid the harshest price for the battle, beyond being the one to inflict the bigger damage and stalling it while the others organized themselves. The fang was easily fifty centimetres long, and it's normally white colour was partially hidden by an oily black sheen, so thin that it made the whole thing look grey.

I looked it for several moments, my mind easily falling back on the steps of the battle, recalling how I had to dedicate every ounce of concentration I possessed to controlling and directing my powers, which answered to my will only if it expressed an exact result. There was no 'uh, a pull in my gut, look, I won' copyrighted by Percy Jackson, and the difficult of handling the Mist while keeping a rough grasp on the water had felt akin splitting my own mind apart. I shook my head and closed the chest's lid, immediately imagining what kind of weapon could be built with it, the chains made of Stygian Iron and the branch taken from Era's garden. I left the room, focusing on the present and on my real objective. We've been derailed from our target for so long already, how much longer will we be forced to stay on the sea?

"People!" I shouted to the proper encampment that the crew had set up between the beach and the edge of the immense groove that covered the vast marsh: "I'm healed! Tomorrow, we set sail! Tonight, we get plastered!" a laugh of approval immediately answered me, with Abigail and Sofia taking out a couple of guitars to get started, Alexandra and Helena, like the proper daughters of Dionysus that they were, dragged out of the hull of the ship the wine we had left. Charles had joined the, rolling out a barrel from his personal reserves and playing reedpipes. They must have been going stir crazy, because, in less than fifteen minutes, Hanna left the ship, helped by Emily, carrying the brazier that we kept nailed in the galley.

After half an hour, I felt a slight warmth on the cork blessed by Dionysus, and I knew that he at least was rooting for us. I eyed the encampment with a distant gaze: it was hard to imagine that we, that is to say, 'my crew', since I was convalescent until recently, had pulled it off. Wary of further encounters we were unlikely to survive, several trees had been taken down and raised again in a wall that isolated the stretch of land that we had claimed fr ourselves. We didn't go crazy with the buildings, even if the daughters of Athena on board of the Adamas had tried to build a fucking city when we needed barely a few solid yurts.

David had built himself a proper forge, out of boredom, no doubt, and everyone had found some way to keep busy. And since we were talking about teenagers with no supervision and no drug around, it meant a lot of sex. David and Demetra had quickly become a stable couple, as well as Emily and Madison, Hannah and Evelyn, and... I wasn't really keeping track of their relationships, I couldn't care less, even if I wished them all the god they could find in each other. Charles was a satyr of the Old Ways apparently, which meant that he was down for random sex during the kickass party thrown with Dyonisus' blessing, but he would wait for a proper Nymph otherwise.

Emily had kept pummeling everyone with the excuse of a spar, and it resulted in everyone being much more competent with a vast array of weapons, while Jillian had taken to devise strategies that the others had quickly learned the ins and outs of. All in all, the last six months had done a lot of good to my crew.

Annabeth eyed the glass I handed her with a wary expression: "Are you giving me alcoholics?" I laughed, it was so absurd being happy about having survived a fucking Hydra? "Only a little, with some nectar to cut it off, you'll like it, and it won't be enough to damage your liver."

I kept an eye on Annabeth, who had become the official mascot of the Adamas. She was either ten or eleven years old, and she kept trying to sound as serious as possible, while trying to think ways to find Thalia's island without needing to roam without purpose. I scoffed lightly: she had no idea of the sheer pettiness the gods were capable of, even if she was acutely aware now that actions had consequences. Even while driving, dancing and becoming generally molest, each member of the crew walked on eggshells around her, maybe cowered by the steely glint in her eyes, characteristic that she had obviously inherited from her mother.

"Why so glum?" a voice asked me out of nowhere, making me spin on myself in order to identify its owner.

"Hailey," I greeted the demigoddess with a smile: "what does make you think I'm feeling down?"

She shrugged uncaringly, taking a deep gulp from her own glass: "It's how I call your 'pensive' mode, it's unsettling how much you tend to fall into it without any apparent reason."

"Maybe it's Hermes blood singing in you, fearing that I'm planning a theft beyond your abilities." I joked.

"I'm not claimed, I thought you knew." She answered, clearly clamping down on the occasion of speaking about her parents. It was uncharacteristically, and not only for her, among the social disasters that the demigods were, very few had pleasant memories about their homes. As a rule of the thumb, mythological beings, benevolent or not, tended to fuck up the mortals they interacted with.

Is she wondering why I asked her to join me? That she so clearly stated that she wasn't claimed immediately brought up a topic that most would prefer to leave alone. "I knew that the others were claimed because they lived in the other gods' cabins, otherwise they might as well be strangers: I knew what they felt and what motivation they could have to join me, it was enough. It's the same for you."

"I have an idea about who my godly parent actually is." she announced, causing me to raise an eyebrow, surprised at her insisting on the topic: "I know mine too." I offered, not really seeing the point. She knew, good for her, she could more easily find out her powers and better train herself, but I sure as hell didn't need to know.

"When we had to face the Hydra, you had me on a support role, like I was a daughter of Hermes." she accused me. "And so?" I shrugged again, taking another swing from my cup: "You're good in that role." I gestured to the festive encampment: "Everything went well in any case, did it not?" I could almost see her take a step back from me towards an area where the light from the fires was dimmer.

"I'm the one responsible for 'everything going well' in the past months." she trailed off a bit, before taking a deep breath, clearly preparing herself for a big revelation: "I think... no, I'm sure of it it's just..." she took a deep breath and centred herself, forcing her stuttering and uncharacteristically skittish demeanour to fade: "I am a daughter of Hypnos." She announced, obviously expecting me to freak out.

"My mother is Hekate, my father a very old son of the King of the Sea." I answered in kind, I didn't see any kind of problem in telling it to Hailey in what was clearly a secretive fashion, her secret for mine, it felt like an honest exchange.

"I know." she replied, and there I frowned, there was a little clue about Poseidon in the way I fought and managed to keep up with Thalia, but for her to guess... Didn't she say that everything went well in the camp because of her? What did she do, manipulated their dreams to keep them appeased?

"I may have pushed certain dreams in a specific direction to keep everybody calm." She confirmed my theory without blinking, and I frowned some more. If she's been able to somehow glean my parents from my sleep, what's to say that she didn't discover that Hekate pulled me out of some kind of Beyond?

It was only then that she finally decided to bring out what had truly been gnawing at her: "Icarus, why my uncle is interested in you?"

"Your uncle?" I repeated dumbly. Wait a minute... Oh, Shit. I cursed immediately in my head as I realized what had happened: Hypnos was the son of Nyx and Erebus, the twin brother of Thanatos, the Death himself. It wasn't a coincidence that in the myth death so closely resembled a deep sleep. I have surely walked the line between the two realms in the first days of my healing, but for Hypnos to take notice, or worse, his twin? I had the growing suspicion that Hekate hadn't been entirely truthful when she told me of my origins, after all, what could interest Death itself if not the result of some necromancy? Not for the first time, I cursed a bit at the domains that my mother ruled over.

Okay, I thought, taking a deep breath, New Objective: staying away from the twin of Death, let's see let's see... In Greek myth, Hypnos is variously described as living in the underworld, which would make it safe for me to roam around, or on the island of Lemnos. At least according to Homer, who I would take somewhat as the Top authority in this field. My thoughts started to spiral a bit out of control, since I knew that given my lifestyle, Death was very likely to stumble upon me at some point, or at least on someone close to me, hadn't we lost already two people to the fury of the sea?

"Icarus why in your dreams you know the future?" Hailey asked me, and I cursed some more.