Goodnight Moon ↣ P. Jackson + A. Chase

2.13

Kassandra tracked the path of the sun overhead as they passed through the desert, following the imaginary trail that it left through the sky. She played with the shadows that the beams cast, twisting her hand this way and that to watch the shapes from.

She caught the heat in her palm, letting her skin warm knowing that it would never burn under the sun.

"It should have been me," Percy mutters from next to her in the bed of the truck. "I should have gone into the back into it."

"No!" Grover protest quickly, voice cracking. "It's bad enough that Annabeth and Bianca are gone. Do you think I could lose you too? Who else would be my best friend?"

Percy shakes his head. "Ah, Grover..."

The satyr sniffles. "I'm fine. I'm fine."

She could hear the lie though, the ugly untruth of his fragile statement. She couldn't blame him for his thin attempt to hide his feelings, even if it was pretty bad.

(When Kassandra had held Ariel as she died, clinging her best friend close to her chest in a desperate hope that she could squeeze life back into the girl, her first instinct, before anything else, was to place the blame upon herself.

How could she not when the blow was meant for her? When the monster was tracking her? Ariel wasn't powerful enough to attract anything, not enough to interest a dracaena. No, Kassandra had blamed herself as she sobbed desperately to the police about an unbelievable story because she was hardly capable of making up anything with the inability to lie. She had said a thing had stabbed her friend and the mist had swirled around to make it look like a mugging gone wrong.

She had sobbed until she finally washed the blood from her hands, too exhausted to lift her head, and she knew -- she just knew that he healing had been working, had been slowly taking hold, but it had been her father, Apollo that never wanted her before that had turned away in her time of need.

There had been rumours around camp that the Apollo kids could draw power from the sun when he allowed and she just knew that he had turned her away. She knew then that the gods were to blame. That they never cared about any of them.)

(If she didn't blame him, she would then have only herself to blame and Kassandra had been thirteen doing the best that she could with a tiny dagger. It wasn't her fault.)

"Guys, guys," she says softly. "It's no one's fault. Bianca made the choice to save everyone. Don't dishonour her by feeling guilty."

(At least it wasn't you, part of her whispers possessively, if I had lost another friend I would have torn apart all of Hades to get you back.)

"If I had just gone--"

"It wasn't. If we all thought like that..." she thinks back to the kids that she had dropped at Westover Hall and how she should technically feel guilty for what she did. She didn't. "If you didn't force her to go, then it can't be your fault. Knowing you, you probably planned on going yourself."

"Kass is right," Grover says. "You couldn't have done anything differently."

Percy sighs heavily, dropping his head back. "I don't know what I'm going to say to Nico."

She twists her lips. "I can tell him?" she offers. "It can't be much different than being told that Oriana wasn't coming back."

Grover winces, dropping his gaze. A lot of people missed having Oriana around. She was the heart of the Ares cabin, literally. They were so much meaner with her gone -- the sister that was more protector, that was a caring defender.