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The new kids Rosamie and Evette were laughing and squirming around while Drew tried to dress them in their battle armour.
They were identical twins; the youngest of the new Aphrodite bunch this summer; no more than 8 years old with fluffy blonde curls and rosy cheeks like little baby cherubs.
The twins’ father was apparently some super hot and famous basketball player in the NBA, and he had flown them out to New York in a private jet for summer camp. If they weren’t her little sisters, Drew might have called them spoiled little brats. But after less than a week, they had wormed their way into her heart; she already loved them to bits. Sure, they were naive rich kids and they fought a lot, but they were also the sweetest little girls.
They were young enough to still believe in Santa and the tooth fairy. They were young enough to be scared of monsters under the bed, let alone real monsters. It was sickening and heartbreaking how small they were. And now Chiron wanted them to go to war.
"Hey, give those back!" Rosa squeaked when Evette yanked her glittery fairy wings straight off her back. "Ow!" she complained as a strand of her curly hair got caught.
"They were mine first," Evette pouted, speaking with a slight lisp on the ‘S’. She turned her pleading puppy-dog eyes to Drew, who sighed in irritation. They already had her wrapped around their fingers.
"Rosa, keep the wings, Evette, you get the fairy wand," she negotiated, picking up the fluffy pink fairy wand on the bench next to her and handing it over. Rosa squealed in happiness and gave a twirl around, her wings fluttering.
"Can I have the tiara too?" Evette whined.
Drew rolled her eyes. "Fine, as long as you wear it over your helmet and don’t take your helmet off!"
Evette grinned toothily, showing off the gap where her front baby teeth were missing. She placed the gold tiara over her helmet and it glinted in the sunlight.
Some older Ares and Athena kids looked over at the girls condescendingly, scoffing at the fairy accessories over their armour.
Sherman, the head counsellor of the Ares cabin, raised his eyebrows. He was sharpening his sword with a grating metallic sound and smirking patronisingly at the Aphrodite kids. "Don’t you think they’re too old for playing fairies and princesses?"
"No one asked for your opinion, Yang. Stop sticking your ugly nose where it doesn’t belong," Drew sneered.
"Just saying," he shrugged. "We don’t have time for that nonsense in my cabin. Our new kids are already in di Angelo’s junior sword-fighting class, and they’re getting moved up into the next class soon-"
He nodded in the direction of one of the new cabin five kids, a ten-year-old girl who seemed to be possessed by some kind of violent demon. She hacked and slashed at a training dummy, tearing it to pieces at the other end of the armoury. The stuffing was falling out of it, feathers and straw floating to the floor.
Drew screwed up her nose in distaste. "Yeah well we’re not your cabin, so fuck off and let them be fairies and princesses if they want to be. They’re just kids."
"Just saying," Sherman smiled passive-aggressively, hoisting his shield up onto his back with a strap. "They won’t last ten minutes."
Drew gave him a simpering, sarcastic smile. "I said, go fuck yourself."
She didn’t mean to put charmspeak into her voice, but her anger must have heightened her powers, because Sherman paused, readying himself to leave the armoury and do exactly as she said.
Then he shook his head furiously in an effort to shrug the charmspeak off and went bright red. He turned back to the conversation with his siblings as if nothing had happened, pointedly avoiding eye contact with her.
"Drewww," Rosa pestered her and pulled on her sleeve, looking like an innocent little angel in her fairy wings. "What does fuck mean?"
"No Rosamie, don’t repeat that," she chastised her, trying not to smile. "It’s a bad word."
"What won’t we last ten minutes in?" Evette asked curiously, twirling her magic wand around and waving it in the direction of the Ares kids like she wanted to curse them.
Drew’s smile dropped, her heart clenching. She smoothed back Evette’s unruly curls. "Nothing, sweetie. He was just being mean. I think he’s jealous because he wishes he could wear a tiara as sparkly as yours. And ‘cause you two are the cutest and most fashionable in the whole camp!"
"We are?!" Rosa jumped up and down enthusiastically. Her wings flapped and started to slide off, so she hitched the straps back up onto her shoulders.
"Yeah darling, it’s cool to be a princess or a fairy. Sherman wishes he was as gorgeous as you guys."
"You’re the best big sister Drew," Evette squeaked, pulling her into a hug, her tiny hands around her waist. "This game of dress-up is awesome!"
Malcolm from Athena was standing nearby, counting the arrow quivers and writing a list of the remaining inventory of the armoury. He had paused in his writing and glanced over at them, with a sad, pitying look in his eyes. Drew shot him a nasty look and he turned away, flushing.
It was none of his business if she wanted to play dress-up with her little sisters to escape the cold, hard reality. It was none of his fucking business if she wanted to pretend they were fairies, rather than child soldiers donning their battle armour.
"Hey, is there a demigod Barbie that you can dress up in armour?" Rosa asked curiously, her little high-pitched voice grating on Drew’s ears. "There’s a Barbie for everything, right!"
"Is there an Aphrodite Barbie?" Evette added. "She would be sooo cool. They should make a magic Aphrodite doll where, like, her hair changes colour and grows back when you cut it!"
"I dunno girlies, but yeah that would be pretty cool," Drew said, trying to keep her voice even. "Come on, let’s finish sorting out your armour. We can play with Barbies after."
Drew yearned for the days when all she was worried about was whether her Barbies' hair would grow back.
"Lou Ellen said that she can do real magic," Rosa said excitedly, wriggling around while Drew fussed with her armour straps. The breastplate was way too big and heavy; her little sister was practically swamped in it, and it made her look even smaller. "She’s, like, a real witch 'cause her mom is He-cat."
"Hecate," Drew corrected automatically.
"Woah, really!" Evette shouted, jumping up and down. "Do you think she can put a spell on my Barbie so her hair grows back?!"
"Shhh, come here, let me sort out your armour," Drew tried to calm the hyperactive eight-year-old. "You can ask her after - um, after our trip."
"Where are we going?" Rosa asked, her heavy helmet slipping down to cover her eyes.
Drew’s heart clenched painfully. They were so young. She wanted to protect them for as long as she could, but she knew their innocence couldn’t last forever; not in the world of a demigod.
"Just… on an adventure," Drew said cheerfully, forcing a smile. "We’re going into the city… on a field trip to visit a tower…"
"A tower like a castle? Like Rapunzel’s tower at Disney World?" Evette was still bouncing up and down energetically. Drew didn’t know where her kids got their infinite energy from; it was exhausting.
"Kind of, we’re going to go and fight some bad people. You guys get to be heroes, doesn’t that sound fun?" Nyssa, the Hephaestus cabin counsellor, sat down on the wooden bench and placed down a few weapons in leather sheaths. Drew glared icy daggers at her, but Nyssa ignored her and pointed towards another Hephaestus kid over at the other end of the armoury. "Go see my brother Shane, he’ll help you two find a shield that fits."
The twins nodded hesitantly in confusion. As they left to go pester Shane, Drew could have sworn she heard one of them grumble under her breath; "I don’t like fighting, can’t we just play fairies?"
As soon as they were out of earshot, Drew turned to Nyssa.
"I was going to tell them," she hissed, seething.
"No you weren’t," Nyssa raised an eyebrow and looked at her disbelievingly. "They needed to know eventually. You can’t shelter them forever."
"Mm," Drew muttered angrily, picking at her nails. She scratched at some of the peeling red nail varnish and flicked a tiny piece of it to the ground. "Bullshit."
Nyssa sighed, crossing her arms and leaning closer so no one could overhear. "Their swords don’t fit them," she said in a low voice.
Drew watched as Evette waved her pink wand around and dragged her heavy sword across the floor while a stressed-looking Shane explained to them why shields were important.
"Well then maybe you should have made smaller armour and lighter swords," Drew replied stiffly. "You know, for the first and second graders."
Drew knew, logically, that Chiron was doing his best. His job was to train the heroes for war, not coddle them. And for millennia he had seen children being torn apart by monsters, or dying brutally and painfully in wars. The camp population was down after the last few wars, about a quarter of what it was when Drew first joined camp. They didn’t have enough soldiers and Chiron would only ever send the kids out as a last resort.
It was just that… Chiron, and the other older demigods who allowed children to go to war - they were the only people she could physically channel her anger towards. The gods, to her, were faceless and heartless beings so detached from reality that they would never even hear or care about her anger. So what was the point in even trying?
She had never even met her own mother. She supposed that her mother was the one she was the most angry at.
"Tanaka, look they weren’t meant to…" Nyssa stammered and trailed off, tucking a piece of her dark hair behind her ear and avoiding eye contact. She glared at the wooden walls, looking like she wanted to set the armoury on fire.
"They should be playing with barbies!" Drew hissed, trying to hold back tears. "Not playing child soldier!"
"You know Chiron only said - because we didn’t have enough fighters-"
"Oh, don’t try and excuse it," Drew snapped. "They said the same thing before Manhattan. Lacy had to fight and she was ten. Rosa and Evette are eight. They’re not even out of elementary school-"
"Yeah, and Harley is nine and he’s fighting too, you think I’m happy about that?" Nyssa narrowed her eyes and gave a huff of a sigh. "I don’t know why you’re blaming me, like you think I wouldn’t try to stop this if I could?"
Nyssa didn’t look anything like Charles Beckendorf, but she was just like him in her mannerisms; she had his frown, his firm no-bullshit attitude, his selfless bravery. And his stubbornness to always do the right thing too, it seemed.
Nyssa was a product of Beckendorf’s legacy, just as Drew was a part of Silena’s legacy - no matter how much she despised it. Both of them living under the shadow of older siblings who had died as heroes. The only difference between them was that Drew tried to distance herself from her dead sister; because while Beckendorf was a hero through and through, Silena was a traitor. She could love her deceased sister, while simultaneously hating her and resenting her for her mistakes.
Mistakes that, despite her anger and contempt towards the gods, Drew would never repeat. She understood her older sister and her motives; she was almost the same age now as Silena was when she betrayed the camp and died. But regardless of Drew’s own resentment towards the gods, she could never put her siblings in harm’s way.
"Look, Barrera, I’m not blaming you-" Drew started to protest.
"Well, demigods get hurt and die young Drew, you of all people should know that," Nyssa hissed, slamming down a pair of shorter swords on the bench. "All I can do is build better weapons and armour to try and protect them. I suggest you stop being so shallow and start being useful too!"
Drew’s stomach clenched in guilt.
The worst thing was that Nyssa was right.
She couldn’t protect them.
Drew knew all about maths and statistics. It was her favourite subject (yeah, big surprise, but Aphrodite kids were more than just their good looks).
Statistically, less than about a tenth of all demigods would make it to adulthood. Rosamie and Evette had a high chance of dying before they reached eighteen. She probably shouldn’t get so emotionally attached to them, but she supposed it was a bit too late for that.
Most demigods never made it to Camp Half-Blood or Camp Jupiter. Sometimes they would get overwhelmed by monsters and die at the camp border, or succumb to infection in the infirmary. And no one knew much about nomad demigods, because they didn’t live long. Some of their bodies were probably still decaying in the Labyrinth or in various monster hideouts across the country, never to be found. The ones who made it to camp alive were lucky.
But even at camp, they still weren’t safe. The rest of them would die to quests, wars, or even just random monsters who fancied a meal during the school year.
Drew hated school, but a small part of her wished summer could just be over already.
She knew she wasn’t coming back to Camp Half-Blood next year. She hadn’t told anyone yet. Sometimes, demigods just disappeared, went rogue or never came back to camp - and people would assume they had died. She wanted to be one of those kids next year. Maybe it would be easier for her siblings to believe she died a hero, instead of the hard ugly truth; that she was a coward, and didn’t belong in this world of heroes.
Drew glanced down at the short swords while Nyssa slammed the door on her way out.
The swords were identical, made of Celestial bronze, each with a glowing symbol of Aphrodite’s dove underneath the handle. She picked one up - it was much lighter than the ones the twins had before. They looked like little toy swords, just sharper and deadlier. Drew didn’t know if she was thankful to Nyssa for making them, or furious that they even needed child-sized swords in the first place. She wished they were toy swords.
Sometimes Drew wondered how much would have been different if Luke had been successful; if Olympus and its selfish gods had fallen to Kronos. Would the demigods still be pawns, would Evette and Rosamie still be child soldiers? Nothing had changed and demigods were still cannon fodder for the gods. They deserved better.
Drew blinked back angry tears. She wiped underneath her eyes, careful not to smudge her eyeliner. She stood up straight and flicked her hair back, taking in a deep breath.
"Hey, guys!" she said enthusiastically, making her way over to her youngest siblings, who had been given the lightest shields in the armoury by the Hephaestus kid, Shane. She handed them each a new celestial bronze sword. "Be careful with these, yeah?"
"Woah," Rosa’s eyes widened in innocent awe. "These are so cool!"
Evette took a sword and held it carefully, with her shield in her left hand and the sword and fluffy fairy wand balanced precariously in her right. "I don’t have enough hands!" she sulked, with an adorable glum look on her face. "Can’t I just use the magic wand? It looks prettier."
"Well, I can show you all the different ways to gouge someone’s eye out with that wand-" Shane started, but he shut up when Drew elbowed him sharply in the side. "Ow, sorry! I mean, I love pink and fluffy things! Maybe we can accessorise the sword for you with some fluff and glitter after the battle-?"
He jumped back when Drew tried to elbow him again at the mention of the battle.
"Hey! I’m just trying to help. Why are you always such a dick, Drew," he grumbled.
Drew rolled her eyes.
"Well, I can see I’m not needed here," Shane shrugged. "I’ll find you kiddos after the, uh… I mean I’ll find you later, and I’ll ask Malcolm if you can use the arts and crafts centre sometime. He always has a good supply of glitter."
"Thanks Shane!" Rosamie grinned, her helmet sliding down to cover her eyes again.
Shane adjusted her helmet and tiara for her, then left with a salute to the little kids. They giggled.
"Pass it here?" Drew held out her hand and Evette reluctantly handed over the fairy wand. "Hey, it's okay, your tiara is cute though," she complimented her little sister, pocketing the wand. "I’ll keep this safe for you."
Evette grinned, her gums showing and her eyes shining.
Drew felt her throat tightening and her stomach sinking.
She couldn’t hold it together for much longer, she just couldn’t deal with it-
"Hey, Valentina," she called to her fifteen-year-old sister, who was re-braiding her hair while flirting with Blanche from the Iris cabin. It seemed to be going well; Blanche was even wearing Valentina’s colourful bracelets, which usually would have been an affront to her monochrome aesthetic.
"What?" Valentina groaned, looking pissed that she was interrupted. She giggled when Blanche whispered something in her ear.
"Come here," Drew waved her over, trying not to betray the shakiness in her voice.
Valentina tied up her braid with a ribbon then kissed Blanche’s cheek, who blushed and waved coyly at her as she made her way over to her siblings. Drew would have congratulated her on the successful romantic endeavour, but was more concentrated on trying not to burst into tears in a room full of people.
"Can you watch over these two and find Mitchell, Lacy, Belle, Dennis and Mei, and make sure they all get to the van?"
"Alright, come with me you feisty little fairies," Valentina said, patting little Rosa on the head, who grinned in admiration. "You are going to slay. Like, literally, you guys are killing it."
Drew gave her sister a scathing look.
Valentina smiled confidently, but there was a wild look in her eyes, like she too was desperately trying to cling to the last threads of her sanity. Like she too was hiding behind a mask of false bravado, so that she didn’t have to think too hard about leading child soldiers to their deaths.
"We’re going to slay, slaughter and survive," Valentina muttered under her breath, shouldering her bow and arrow quiver.
"Right, yeah, thanks for that pep talk, Val," Drew sniffed haughtily and cleared her throat. "The van is parked down the hill and don’t forget to take a headcount; we’re sharing a lift with Hermes and Demeter so make sure to remind Connor and Miranda to do a headcount of their kids too. Tell Argus I won’t be long. I’ll be there soon, I just need to… check we didn’t leave anything behind in the cabin."
"Fine," Valentina mumbled, looking a little disappointed that the Iris cabin wouldn’t be joining them for the ride. But she didn’t question her older sister’s flimsy excuse.
Drew tried to pull herself together.
She checked her makeup in a reflection on a shiny shield, plastered on her usual frosty smile and gave her impassive bitch glare to anyone who looked at her oddly.
Then she shot a flirty wink to Paolo, the gorgeous son of Hebe, on her way out. He stared after her, looking utterly bemused and nearly dropping a spear on his foot. Luckily Ellis had quick reactions and caught the spear before it could impale him; the son of Ares launched into a lecture about being careful with weapons and not severing any more of your limbs, like oh my gods Paolo, if Will had seen that he would have literally murdered you, you’re so lucky I was here, seriously you don’t want to get on the wrong side of Will.
"Oh, and make sure Lacy brings her glasses, she hates wearing them! Lie to her and say they’re cute!" Drew shouted from the other end of the armoury when she reached the door.
"Nah it’s not a lie, they are cute!" Valentina’s reply was the last thing Drew heard before she closed the door behind her.
She let out a breathless, shaky laugh. Lacy’s were the ugliest fucking glasses she’d ever seen.
Drew held it together. She held it together for as long as she possibly could.
She made her way towards the quietest, most secluded area of camp she knew, passing by the forge, the big house and the amphitheatre on her way. It was her favourite peaceful area, under the cover of the trees just near the edge of the strawberry fields. She would have to leave soon, but until then no one would find her here.
She sat down on the creaky old wooden bench, breathing in the fresh scent of strawberries and watching the trees sway in the breeze.
The pink magic wand was poking out of her pocket, and she grasped onto it tightly, wishing life could be as simple as Rosa and Evette believed it was. Wishing she could wave the wand and keep her siblings safe forever and fix everything.
Wishing it could bring her traitor of an older sister back.
And away from the pressure and the responsibilities and all the eyes on her; she let her mask drop, and broke down sobbing.