Sunshine Kids (Apollo Cabin Oneshots)

directive of care

Will bent over the desk, pen poised right over the paper. It felt so real to write this down. He'd never even thought about it before, but Tartarus was inescapable now. He wouldn't let Nico go alone. And he didn't want to leave Kayla shouldering the same burden that Will had at her age. He hesitated before scribbling down several sentences.

Directive of care.

The world of demigods was cruel but Will thought that the cruelest thing was loving someone in that world. Kayla wouldn't be happy when he told her about that pink piece of paper, tucked into that white envelope and sealed. Marked with his name and those horrible three words: directive of care. She would fume at him, probably yell, possibly tackle him.

But if anything did happen to him over the next six months. If Nico did come back without him, for whatever reason, she would be glad for that little envelope. He hesitated again, thoughtful, before underlining a sentence three times. No powers.

Will knew what it meant when he wrote it down and he knew it would kill Kayla, but it would also make sure she lived. During the wars, the Apollo cabin had lost more campers to power overuse than actual fighting. Healing came with a price; trading days, weeks, and months off their life to give them to dying campers. It was a gamble that every Apollo kid played as ruthlessly as they could. They always lost in the end, inevitably running out of days to trade and dying themselves, but they never stopped stacking their cards. It was the complex of the healers: if they could save them, they would do everything to save them.

He didn't want Kayla putting her life on the line for him. He didn't want to live in a world where he knew his little sister had sacrificed herself for him. Will would never be able to forgive himself.

He underlined the sentence one more time, for good measure. She'd be required to fullfill the terms of the directive, no matter how much it hurt her. If Will was so seriously injured that he might die, she would have to let him. He took comfort in the idea of watching over them from Elysium. Where he would see his older brothers once again, the ones that had been taken from his far too soon.

"Whatcha doing, Will?" Kayla snuck up behind him. Futilely, he tried to cover the sheet of paper. It wasn't ready yet. She saw his frantic hand motion and the pink peeking out under his arm.

Pink only meant one thing in the medical world of Camp Half Blood and it was an uncommon sight. She stilled.

"Will."

"Kayla," he said gently, trying to mitigate the damage he foresaw coming. "You know why-"

"You're really going to Tartarus? You're leaving me?"

"I have to. Nico needs-"

"You're leaving me?" She repeated. He dropped his pen and pulled her into a hug.

"I'm coming back, I promise. This is just a precaution."

"You can't promise that."

"I swear on the river Styx that I'm coming back to you, Kayla. I'm not planning on dying. But I need to have this written or I won't be able to focus during the quest."

"If you're not going to die, you don't need it," she mumbled, voice muffled in his shirt.

"I love you, Kayls," he ran a hand through her hair, gently untangling the knots from her archery practice. "That's why I'm writing it. Promise me you'll do what it says if you have to."

"I don't want to."

"I know. Please, Kayls. For me?"