Ahahah, drive-by NaNo >.>
I KNOW IT'S NOT NOVEMBER ANYMORE, SHH DON'T TELL.
On the ninth of November, robin_2370_hood prompted me with: No Shave November.
It was totally a gag prompt, so obviously I wrote completely SRS BSNS fic. Percy Jackson, 5,000 words, Silena/Beckendorf, really minor Silena/Luke. This fic covers DEEP, MEANINGFUL TOPICS, like the purpose of life for those whose lives have no purpose, and body hair.
Some flat-footed ignominious jackass with giant clompy boots (read: Lucien Beauregard Jr, the mouthbreathing little fucker) tramped through her room and crushed one of her earbuds because he wasn't looking to see where he putting his stupid big feet, so on Friday, she steals his leather jacket and dumps watching the shop on him and drives out to the Target closer to the airport, because it's bigger than the one by home and she's got the time anyway: business at her dad's patisserie doesn't really pick up in November until Thanksgiving or until it turns hot-chocolate weather, whichever comes first.
She picks up a new pair of headphones -- the cheap gummy kind, not built to last, since she usually cycles through three or four pairs in the course of year, incidents with little brothers not included -- and goes out and sits in the truck. She keeps a pair of scissors underneath her seat, because trying to get open the plastic packaging on any kind of headphones is harder than solving a Rubix cube blindfolded, and she tosses the debris into the truck bed. She plugs the new pair into her iPod.
Having a new pair of headphones is one of life's simplest pleasures, because all at once, her favorite old songs suddenly sound new and different in her ears: these earbuds are wider than her last ones, letting less sound escape, so it's like the music is playing at the front of her skull, not in her ears: it takes up every space in her head. She tucks her knees up close to her chest, the wool of her legwarmers scratchy against her forearms, and sinks into it, Marina & the Diamonds crowing and banging on drums somewhere around her temporal lobe.
Lucien's jacket is ill-fitting on her, but she steals it whenever she can get away with it. The entire inner lining is a street map of Paris, sans Montmarte and a residential neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondisement, because they disappear into the arm holes, but she likes tucking her hands inside the jacket and tracing paths from museum to museum all in a row: the Louvre, d'Orsay, de l'Orangerie, Rodin, up the Champs-Elysees, around to the giant park built for Ares like an offering at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. She's never left America -- doesn't know if she can; would everything god-like in her shrivel up and blow away once she's beyond US borders? What would it leave her with? -- but Lucien Beauregard Sr tells story after story about growing up Parisien, and so the names of the streets are almost a comfort to her, and here is where Dad told us about the time he and his friends stole a goat and had the police following them for blocks, trying to figure out what they hell they were going to do with the it. It feels like part of her lives there, too.
She's at the end of the parking lot, farthest away from the doors of Target, and the cab of her truck is overlooking traffic -- busy as it always is in Alexandria, no matter the time of year.
She won't tell anyone, because it's kind of hard to explain -- especially when you're just hanging out with friends, where you talk about the weather and how much your government teacher can suck your balls, but not deep things, not the quiet things in your soul, because it's not the place -- but this is one of her favorite things, to come here and people-watch. In cars, people are transient, neither here nor there but moving, and it's like that question about a falling tree in a forest and sound; if you're neither here nor there and no one sees you moving, do you really exist?
The thought of it frightens her, that transient things could fade out and no one would know, so she sits here facing traffic and she looks at the people who are stopped at the stoplight, just to let them know that she sees them -- even if they never see her seeing them, because that's not the point -- and somewhere, on some other cosmic level, she's letting them know she cares if they exist or not.
These people are just going on with their lives -- the well-to-do couple arguing without looking at each other in the Mercedes SUV with the temp plates, the young black intern with a parking sticker for the Capitol too busy dreaming big to watch the street lights, the woman with three blue streaks in her hair crying in the left-turn lane -- and Silena looks at them and sees them, and it seems like the most useful thing she could be put on this planet to do: for just one moment, she can make other people real.
-
Almost a week and a half of November passes without her even noticing, which is how these things work, and a stranger walks into her father's shop.
Silena's behind the display case, putting new sticker prices on the trays of eclairs and muffling a yawn with the back of her hand when the bell above the front door chimes and cold air comes drafting in. The name of her father's shop is From France With Love, because no one ever said Lucien Beauregard Sr had good taste in movies. James Bond is a universal thing, so the tourists think it's funny. They have t-shirts, even; one of them is mounted on the wall next to the menu.
She stands up. "Welcome, how may I -- Charlie!" she yelps, all dignity dropping to her feet and shattering into pieces just like that. For a second, it seems almost comically displaced: Charles Beckendorf she only ever sees at Camp, so the sight of him standing in her father's shop making her brain skip like a bad disc. It passes, though, and then she just feels way out of her depth.
She hasn't seen Charlie since they all went home the last week of August: he took her as his date to the fireworks show on the Fourth of July (although technically, she did the asking and the taking,) and all that had been easy. But out here in the real world, she doesn't know what to do. They've exchanged a couple e-mails, sure (and oh, her kingdom for a godsdamn cell phone, when are they ever going to fix that? It's becoming incredibly inconvenient, nearly getting eaten every time she tries to make a call from one,) but nothing deep or serious or especially meaningful, and certainly nothing to warrant a surprise visit.
She comes out from around the counter and then hesitates, but he solves her dilemma for her by opening his arms. The coat he's wearing is too heavy for the weather currently going on outside, so it's a very padded hug, but it's okay. Silena is immediately and overwhelming aware of everything: that the black-and-white dress with the empire waist she got from the Delia's catalog still kind of smells like the plastic wrap it came in, and she still has price stickers stuck to the ends of her fingers for safe-keeping, and Charlie is hugging her the way guys hug: unselfconsciously and tight enough to feel it throughout her entire ribcage, like there's no escaping it.
"Surprise," he says, and smiling at him is Pavlovian; she doesn't even know she's doing it until she is, joy in every part of her.
It's startling, that joy -- it's like not realizing just how cold you are until you walk in somewhere toasty and warm. She'd had no idea, but she's been afraid since the second she walked past Camp borders back in August. The world's going to end; between the Titans gathering their forces and the Olympian gods defending their turf, they're going to destroy everything, and they're going to use children (Percy and Luke) to do it, and Silena didn't realize how deep-down tremor terrified she was until right this second, because now she isn't. One half-blood on her own is what they send satyrs out for.
Two half-bloods is an adventure.
-
Growing up with the life's blood of DC beating in the heart of her town means that Silena was never much bothered by monsters growing up. All the monsters present always get distracted by the proximity of the President, and all the Olympians that routinely walk in to hoodwink him and walk out; it makes for much more interesting stalking than a half-blood child in Alexandria. Especially a child of Aphrodite. Aphrodite is a joke, and everyone seems to get that but her, and it's her children that feel it the most acutely.
"Oh, yeah," Annabeth had said when she tried to explain this once, rolling her eyes in a dismissive way. "Because the life of a daughter of Aphrodite is such a hard one."
Silena had frowned at her, because that wasn't fair. Abstractly, she knows Annabeth didn't say it to be insulting, because Annabeth's got bigger things to care about than hurting the feelings of an Aphrodite girl, but the remark had been ... shallow, and caustic, and as a general rule, shallow isn't Annabeth's thing.
And besides, Silena is not some poor, misunderstood white rich girl. She knows she kicks ass best from horseback with a bow and arrow and she's good at teaching other kids how to kick ass from horseback with a bow and arrow, so objectively, she knows she's not a waste of space. Directionless, yes, but what kid doesn't go through that at some point or another, and it's not like anyone she asks for advice really takes her seriously (point in case, Annabeth.) So she mostly just deals; with no monsters sniffing around her door, it's the dyslexia that causes her most of life's problems.
Okay, yeah, maybe Annabeth's got a point, but not everyone is built for war.
-
You can define someone by their heroic deeds, their acts, the things they are most famous for, but they're more than just their legacy, usually, and besides, Silena's never been on a Quest. She's never done anything interesting, and "hero" always sits a little wrong on her shoulders, every time Chiron addresses them as such.
Not all half-bloods are heroes, just like not all heroes are half-bloods.
Silena Beauregard is a girl who always picks the window seat, who drives a truck, who's gorgeous in a leggy blonde kind of way (she doesn't even think this is an evolutionary advantage, most of the time. It's like, Aphrodite's genes come with a factory default setting, and her kids all grow up looking like mass-produced underwear models. It's not so bad for the girls -- beautiful girls intimidate enough people that they can bluff their way out of a lot of things -- but it's always bad for the boys, because when has anyone ever left a pretty boy alone,) and she likes cheap headphones and she always wears the tartan scarf her little brother brought back from a band trip to Scotland, mainly because it makes him happy to see her in it and Silena doesn't need another reason to wear it.
Her truck has a busted muffler, and its original paint job might have been blue, but decades of exposure to damp Virginian summers has primarily turned it a colorful shade of rust. Silena dubbed it Moira when she first bought it and drove it off the lot by herself, but Lucien calls it Mater, like the one from Cars. She will admit it's kind of an apt nickname.
Surprisingly, she gets a lot of crap for driving it. It's one of those things about life you can never predict going into it.
Silena sees them approaching in the sideview mirror when she's parked at Sonic, and she heaves a sigh. She hates this part.
"Hey, sweetheart," goes smarmy guy the first, leaning against her doorframe. She eyes him sidelong; young, maybe college-age at most (but Silena's not really the best judge when it comes to guessing ages,) a little soft around the middle, but not overweight yet, sandy hair and acne scars low around his mouth. She flicks her eyes away, just as he sways in a little to ask, "this your boyfriend's truck?"
She knows, in theory, that obnoxious boys who hit on the closest pretty thing with tits are kind of like one-celled organisms: ignore them and they shrivel up from lack of stimulus, but she can't help herself.
"No, it's mine," she responds, flat, eyes fixed on the Sonic building in the rearview mirror, willing the girl on skates to come by with her food. "My boyfriend doesn't need to drive a truck because he has nothing to compensate for."
The boy in her window snorts, and one of his companions guffaws, "Chick's PMSing or something, Jesus, man, it's not worth it."
"Naw, she's like a pussy cat. We like pussy, don't we?" goes smarmy guy the first, and Silena widens her eyes at her own reflection, because seriously, what the fuck. No, that's not even remotely cool.
He reaches in through the open window like he's going to stroke her cheek, like she's nothing more than a cat, and she grabs his wrist, twists, and yanks him in, hard enough that he brains himself on the doorframe. He staggers back, far enough for Silena to get a grip on the door handle, wrenching it open so that her car door smashes into his face again. He hits the pavement in an ungainly heap, and Silena slides out of the driver's seat. She spares a quick look at the other two guys hovering there, but one of them holds his hands up in surrender and goes, "we get it, we get it, you're badass."
"Damn straight I'm badass," Silena spits. "Which is why I don't worry about not knowing where my life is going, because at least I don't have to resort to belly-crawling like you fuckers. I will always be worth more than you. Get a life."
She flips her braid back over her shoulder and straightens up; the Sonic girl is standing there, a paper bag on a plastic tray. "Um," she goes, when Silena catches her eye. "Coney chili cheese dog?"
"Yeah, that's mine, thanks," Silena grins at her, settles her shoulders, brushes the dirt off. All in a day.
-
The first time she leads Charlie out to the truck, parked in a narrow cobblestone side-street behind the shop, she finds herself hanging back, arms folded across her chest, waiting for him to say it.
But Charlie just runs his hand down the faded racing stripe down the truck's side, smiling in a lazy, fond kind of way. "She yours?" he goes over his shoulder.
Silena grins and drops her arms. "Yeah, this is my baby," she answers.
He nods, like he hadn't expected anything less. "American made, it doesn't get any better than this. Start her up," he suggests. "I want to hear how she purrs."
-
She's on the desktop computer later: the sun's gone down, but she's too lazy to get up and turn on a light so she can see what she's doing. The glow from the monitor is enough for the important things, no matter what her dad keeps on saying about it ruining her eyesight. So she's just sitting there, one leg draw up on her chair, when Luke Skype-calls her.
She looks at the ringing phone pop-up on her screen for only a moment before she clicks Accept. She isn't thinking about how they're on different sides of a war, good vs. evil, right and wrong, and how it probably makes her a traitor to her own kind, or how it'll reflect on her later. She's thinking about the angle of her webcam, and if it's too dark to do any kindness to her features, or if she should put on a sweater because the neckline of her dress cuts down kind of low. It doesn't matter: webcam video pretty much universally sucks.
These are not the actions of a lovesick girl. She is not stupid, she is not some ditzy Aphrodite girl, she knows how to say no.
Luke was the first person who saw her, the very first time she came to Camp, transient and so lost (if she's going from one place to another and there's no one to see her, does she really exist?) and he made her real.
Some things are more important than sides in a war.
-
"Art school in Paris," she confesses, picking at the loose thread in the blanket they have pulled up to their chins. "It's where I really want to go, if I get the grades I need to and graduate in May like I'm supposed to."
"Are we even allowed out of the country?" Charlie wonders. "Or does, like, one half of our DNA strand just shrivel up and blow away if we step outside US borders? Although," he frowns thoughtfully. "Ben Franklin did make all those trips from the colonies back to England, so maybe."
Silena snorts, dismissive. "I don't think Ben Franklin was a half-blood. He's kind of like Shakespeare: everybody likes to claim he belonged to their special little club, but he probably didn't."
"You have a point," Charlie acknowledges. "So, Paris, huh?"
She's suddenly shy about it. "Is that weird? I mean, it's one half of my heritage, I guess, and my dad always tells me these stories, so it feels like I have some kind of claim to it, you know. Like if I went there, I would be French, instead of just that American Francophile, quick, everyone sneer."
"No, I get it," he says, pressing his shoulder up against hers in a quick show of solidarity. "I think it's cool that you have that. I don't even know what I'm doing next week, much less where I'm going when I graduate high school."
"Yeah," she murmurs, the truth of it hitting low in her gut, the strange idea that she might not be here to go to art school; the possibility of her imminent death is not something she brought up with the college counselor.
She sees him looking at her in her peripheral and tugs the blanket up so that it covers her mouth, the way she always does when she feels she's been caught at something. The cold is just sharp enough to needle at her cheeks, and the only company they have in the bed of her truck is an empty cooler and an ice scraper. He's got her ankle caught in one hand, thumb absently rolling over the knob of bone there like he isn't even aware of what he's doing.
"If you don't get into the art school in Paris, where else are you thinking of going?"
She shrugs. "Some of the community colleges around here. My brother's mom lives in Oregon; I applied to the state university out there, just because. I'm pretty sure Lucien also sent in an application to Harvard, just so he can laugh at me when I obviously get rejected."
"Nowhere in Manhattan?"
"Nowhere in the state of New York," she nods, and they allow a moment of silence for the significance of that remark to sink in. Silena's a badass on horseback when given a bow and arrow, and she doesn't mind long hours in the stables, brushing down the pegasi coats and grooming their flight pinions, but she is no hero, and it's the kind of distinction you can only learn by living it.
"You know what I want to do before I die?" Charlie blurts out of nowhere.
She glances at him, startled.
"I mean," he continues. "Just like one of those bucket list things, you know? I really want to rob a bank. No, really," he goes when she makes puzzled eyebrows at him. "I know I can do it. I know the losers from Hermes call us monkeys with wrenches, but I've taught the kids in my cabin right. They know more than just how to build things. We can hack with the best of them. I really want to rob a bank. Not necessarily spend any of the money. Just know that I have it."
"That'd be an adrenaline rush," Silena muses. "I could help. Flash my dimples at the security guards or something, I don't know."
"We can be Bonnie and Clyde!" His enthusiasm is palpable. "And you'll be the getaway vehicle. No one will expect bank robbers to have an American classic like this beauty." He pats the Ford.
"It's a deal," Silena laughs, and only then does she notice that he's hiked the hem of her boot-cut jeans up to her knee, running his fingers up and down her shin in a feathery touch. "Hey," she protests, suddenly a little self-conscious about it and trying to twitch her leg away.
"No, I don't mind," he goes quickly, catching her ankle again underneath the blanket in that blacksmith hold. "I've been told the palms of my hands are leather-tough. I promise your legs hairs are not slicing them to bits."
"Shut up," she goes, startled into laughing a little bit and knocking her knee against his ribs. "It's November, okay. Nobody shaves their legs in November, there's no point."
"I'll take your word for it," he says seriously. "It just seemed a little anomalous, is all. Daughter of Aphrodite has hairy legs."
"Don't make it sound like a newspaper headline!" she fires back, clapping a hand to her breastbone in mock offense. "And of course we do, we're half-human, too. We have to deal with body hair just like you do. Not only that," she grabs at his free hand, dragging it up to her face so she could rub his fingertips over the corners of her mouth. Usually she Nairs the hairs that grow there, but it's winter and they're super fair anyway, so it's not like you could really see them unless you were looking for them and the light was hitting her right.
"Woah," Charlie goes, soft enough that it alerts something underneath Silena's skin, which suddenly rears up and pays attention to how she's got his fingers right over her lips.
This is one of those moments, she realizes, like the one when the satyr took a deep breath and she knew what he was going to tell her at age thirteen was going to change her forever, like the one when she found herself asking Charlie to see the fireworks with her in July, like the one in the beat after Luke asked her to wear the sickle on her charm bracelet. This one is like that, the kind of moment so malleable you realize just how important it really is.
"How did we wind up here?" she whispers, not even knowing what the hell she's saying, but feeling it, the wonder at the thought that the two of them -- Silena from Alexandria who has dual citizenship and buys cheap gummy headphones and likes fashion but wears her brother's leather jacket in spite of that, and Charles from half-way across the country, who's good with his hands and believes that Percy Jackson will save the world and thinks his most embarrassing secret is that he has two whole seasons of Veronica Mars on TiVo -- wound up here, together, out of all the transient, moving people in the world and all the places they could be and all the things that could have happened, and the universe came together to put them here, in the bed of her truck in the parking lot of Target, the stars clear and bright overhead.
He nudges them together, offering in his slightly uncomfortable way, "I like it here."
This is a moment, Silena thinks, and then doesn't think at all, pushing herself up with the heel of her hand to meet his mouth.
It's awkward for the first beat, the way kissing always is before you remember that this isn't your grandmother or your dad and you aren't some little kid, this is a boy and he's into you and then the awkwardness fades, and Silena kisses at Charlie's upper lip, then the lower in its turn. The dry ridges of skin from the cold catch up against each other as they kiss, pulling at them. Their necks move easily, bonelessly, sliding their faces together.
"Want to know a secret?" he murmurs, up against her lips where the light brush of skin on skin is enough to make every hair stand on end with sensation.
"Hmmm?"
"I lied earlier, when I said I didn't know where I was going for college. I Googled every single school within fifty miles of this location, right here, and I applied to all of them, because I didn't know which one you wanted to go to."
She pulls back, only far enough to stare at him.
"Is that weird?" he asks after a moment.
"No," she whispers, not even really paying attention to the question, she's too busy smiling. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were just saying that to me to get a kiss, because that was seriously romantic."
"Hmm, well, I didn't say I didn't have ulterior motives."
"Ugh, hey, keep the double negatives for when we aren't --" his lips on hers again, and she closes her eyes and opens her mouth. She lets him lick a probing kiss across her teeth, finding the ridges that ten-odd years of chewing have worn down, the places where she used to have braces. His tongue finds that sensitive fleshy bit right up by her gums, the one that makes her spine go a little rubbery. She hooks an arm around his neck, dragging him in.
Charlie has one hand on her thigh, tugging with just enough leverage to get it over his hip, settling her in his lap with the blanket still half thrown-over them, and she knows where he's going with this, the question he'll ask with touch, not words, and she's terrified, absolutely terrified of it, but it's okay, because this, too, is a kind of bravery.
-
She loses her virginity in the back of her truck in a parking lot in the middle of November, to a boy named Charles Beckendorf, whom she loves.
It turns out that children of Aphrodite do not magically get superpowers once they have sex (or during it, for that matter.)
She still feels a little cheated about this.
-
Charlie double-knots the shoelaces of his Reeboks so that the tongues stick out, thick and heavy like camels thirsty in the desert, and he hates the feeling of ice cubes against his teeth, and he's real, a person, flesh and bone and childhood stories that he's prompted into telling when funny commercials come on TV and a secret desire to rob a bank, and Silena's completely terrified that the bigger story is going to forget this, that he'll only be a footnote and no one's going to know these things, these Charlie things.
The oven in the chocolate shop is temperamental, a war-era leftover with shoddy electrical wiring, and on the fourth day, her dad mentions this in passing over breakfast, and middle of the afternoon finds Charlie in the kitchen of From France With Love, the oven torn away from the wall and Hephaestus boy in the middle of it. All the wires and parts -- all the things that make Silena's eyes cross with ignorance -- he's pulling them out of here and putting them into there, as easy as if they're telling him how to do it.
"What are you doing?" Silena asks, standing over him with a carton of strawberries in her arms.
Charlie squints up at her, blinking a little bit like he's surfacing up from somewhere deep and aqueous. "Fixing it," he says simply, like it's the answer he's going to give no matter the question.
When he's done, he's cannibalized two alarm clocks and the innards of the home telephone, but when he puts the oven back up against the wall, they suddenly have a new digital read-out on temperatures, and an oven that actually looks capable of reaching those temperatures without posing a possible fire hazard.
Complete silence greets this pronouncement, stretching on so long that Charlie begins to look uncomfortable, like maybe he shouldn't go playing around with people's livelihoods.
"Charles," says her father, slowly and seriously. "Would you like to stay for Thanksgiving?"
"Would you like to stay forever?" blurts out little Lucien, sounding completely awestruck.
Charlie flushes with pleasure, and Silena pulls up a fold of her scarf to cover her smile. He cuts a look at her sideways, hopeful and shy all at once, and without thinking, she steps up to him, slipping her hand into his. Her father looks amused, and her brother just rolls his eyes like he does when he calls the plot of a movie from a mile off, but she isn't paying attention to them. She's studying the look on Charlie's face; it's a hundred different things at once, and she thinks of a hundred possible different futures for them, the happy and the awful and the cold and the wonderful.
He turns into her, catching her face in one hand and tilting it up, and Silena feels the world spin into place underneath her feet, forever tilting in the right direction, and she doesn't know how this story ends, but Charlie's going to kiss her now, and she doesn't remember to be afraid.
And that leaves ... *counts* six NaNos that I didn't finish on time this year. I still want to write them, of course, but I always want to write everything :/ I hate having unfinished projects oh hai Big Bang.
On the ninth of November, robin_2370_hood prompted me with: No Shave November.
It was totally a gag prompt, so obviously I wrote completely SRS BSNS fic. Percy Jackson, 5,000 words, Silena/Beckendorf, really minor Silena/Luke. This fic covers DEEP, MEANINGFUL TOPICS, like the purpose of life for those whose lives have no purpose, and body hair.
Some flat-footed ignominious jackass with giant clompy boots (read: Lucien Beauregard Jr, the mouthbreathing little fucker) tramped through her room and crushed one of her earbuds because he wasn't looking to see where he putting his stupid big feet, so on Friday, she steals his leather jacket and dumps watching the shop on him and drives out to the Target closer to the airport, because it's bigger than the one by home and she's got the time anyway: business at her dad's patisserie doesn't really pick up in November until Thanksgiving or until it turns hot-chocolate weather, whichever comes first.
She picks up a new pair of headphones -- the cheap gummy kind, not built to last, since she usually cycles through three or four pairs in the course of year, incidents with little brothers not included -- and goes out and sits in the truck. She keeps a pair of scissors underneath her seat, because trying to get open the plastic packaging on any kind of headphones is harder than solving a Rubix cube blindfolded, and she tosses the debris into the truck bed. She plugs the new pair into her iPod.
Having a new pair of headphones is one of life's simplest pleasures, because all at once, her favorite old songs suddenly sound new and different in her ears: these earbuds are wider than her last ones, letting less sound escape, so it's like the music is playing at the front of her skull, not in her ears: it takes up every space in her head. She tucks her knees up close to her chest, the wool of her legwarmers scratchy against her forearms, and sinks into it, Marina & the Diamonds crowing and banging on drums somewhere around her temporal lobe.
Lucien's jacket is ill-fitting on her, but she steals it whenever she can get away with it. The entire inner lining is a street map of Paris, sans Montmarte and a residential neighborhood in the nineteenth arrondisement, because they disappear into the arm holes, but she likes tucking her hands inside the jacket and tracing paths from museum to museum all in a row: the Louvre, d'Orsay, de l'Orangerie, Rodin, up the Champs-Elysees, around to the giant park built for Ares like an offering at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. She's never left America -- doesn't know if she can; would everything god-like in her shrivel up and blow away once she's beyond US borders? What would it leave her with? -- but Lucien Beauregard Sr tells story after story about growing up Parisien, and so the names of the streets are almost a comfort to her, and here is where Dad told us about the time he and his friends stole a goat and had the police following them for blocks, trying to figure out what they hell they were going to do with the it. It feels like part of her lives there, too.
She's at the end of the parking lot, farthest away from the doors of Target, and the cab of her truck is overlooking traffic -- busy as it always is in Alexandria, no matter the time of year.
She won't tell anyone, because it's kind of hard to explain -- especially when you're just hanging out with friends, where you talk about the weather and how much your government teacher can suck your balls, but not deep things, not the quiet things in your soul, because it's not the place -- but this is one of her favorite things, to come here and people-watch. In cars, people are transient, neither here nor there but moving, and it's like that question about a falling tree in a forest and sound; if you're neither here nor there and no one sees you moving, do you really exist?
The thought of it frightens her, that transient things could fade out and no one would know, so she sits here facing traffic and she looks at the people who are stopped at the stoplight, just to let them know that she sees them -- even if they never see her seeing them, because that's not the point -- and somewhere, on some other cosmic level, she's letting them know she cares if they exist or not.
These people are just going on with their lives -- the well-to-do couple arguing without looking at each other in the Mercedes SUV with the temp plates, the young black intern with a parking sticker for the Capitol too busy dreaming big to watch the street lights, the woman with three blue streaks in her hair crying in the left-turn lane -- and Silena looks at them and sees them, and it seems like the most useful thing she could be put on this planet to do: for just one moment, she can make other people real.
-
Almost a week and a half of November passes without her even noticing, which is how these things work, and a stranger walks into her father's shop.
Silena's behind the display case, putting new sticker prices on the trays of eclairs and muffling a yawn with the back of her hand when the bell above the front door chimes and cold air comes drafting in. The name of her father's shop is From France With Love, because no one ever said Lucien Beauregard Sr had good taste in movies. James Bond is a universal thing, so the tourists think it's funny. They have t-shirts, even; one of them is mounted on the wall next to the menu.
She stands up. "Welcome, how may I -- Charlie!" she yelps, all dignity dropping to her feet and shattering into pieces just like that. For a second, it seems almost comically displaced: Charles Beckendorf she only ever sees at Camp, so the sight of him standing in her father's shop making her brain skip like a bad disc. It passes, though, and then she just feels way out of her depth.
She hasn't seen Charlie since they all went home the last week of August: he took her as his date to the fireworks show on the Fourth of July (although technically, she did the asking and the taking,) and all that had been easy. But out here in the real world, she doesn't know what to do. They've exchanged a couple e-mails, sure (and oh, her kingdom for a godsdamn cell phone, when are they ever going to fix that? It's becoming incredibly inconvenient, nearly getting eaten every time she tries to make a call from one,) but nothing deep or serious or especially meaningful, and certainly nothing to warrant a surprise visit.
She comes out from around the counter and then hesitates, but he solves her dilemma for her by opening his arms. The coat he's wearing is too heavy for the weather currently going on outside, so it's a very padded hug, but it's okay. Silena is immediately and overwhelming aware of everything: that the black-and-white dress with the empire waist she got from the Delia's catalog still kind of smells like the plastic wrap it came in, and she still has price stickers stuck to the ends of her fingers for safe-keeping, and Charlie is hugging her the way guys hug: unselfconsciously and tight enough to feel it throughout her entire ribcage, like there's no escaping it.
"Surprise," he says, and smiling at him is Pavlovian; she doesn't even know she's doing it until she is, joy in every part of her.
It's startling, that joy -- it's like not realizing just how cold you are until you walk in somewhere toasty and warm. She'd had no idea, but she's been afraid since the second she walked past Camp borders back in August. The world's going to end; between the Titans gathering their forces and the Olympian gods defending their turf, they're going to destroy everything, and they're going to use children (Percy and Luke) to do it, and Silena didn't realize how deep-down tremor terrified she was until right this second, because now she isn't. One half-blood on her own is what they send satyrs out for.
Two half-bloods is an adventure.
-
Growing up with the life's blood of DC beating in the heart of her town means that Silena was never much bothered by monsters growing up. All the monsters present always get distracted by the proximity of the President, and all the Olympians that routinely walk in to hoodwink him and walk out; it makes for much more interesting stalking than a half-blood child in Alexandria. Especially a child of Aphrodite. Aphrodite is a joke, and everyone seems to get that but her, and it's her children that feel it the most acutely.
"Oh, yeah," Annabeth had said when she tried to explain this once, rolling her eyes in a dismissive way. "Because the life of a daughter of Aphrodite is such a hard one."
Silena had frowned at her, because that wasn't fair. Abstractly, she knows Annabeth didn't say it to be insulting, because Annabeth's got bigger things to care about than hurting the feelings of an Aphrodite girl, but the remark had been ... shallow, and caustic, and as a general rule, shallow isn't Annabeth's thing.
And besides, Silena is not some poor, misunderstood white rich girl. She knows she kicks ass best from horseback with a bow and arrow and she's good at teaching other kids how to kick ass from horseback with a bow and arrow, so objectively, she knows she's not a waste of space. Directionless, yes, but what kid doesn't go through that at some point or another, and it's not like anyone she asks for advice really takes her seriously (point in case, Annabeth.) So she mostly just deals; with no monsters sniffing around her door, it's the dyslexia that causes her most of life's problems.
Okay, yeah, maybe Annabeth's got a point, but not everyone is built for war.
-
You can define someone by their heroic deeds, their acts, the things they are most famous for, but they're more than just their legacy, usually, and besides, Silena's never been on a Quest. She's never done anything interesting, and "hero" always sits a little wrong on her shoulders, every time Chiron addresses them as such.
Not all half-bloods are heroes, just like not all heroes are half-bloods.
Silena Beauregard is a girl who always picks the window seat, who drives a truck, who's gorgeous in a leggy blonde kind of way (she doesn't even think this is an evolutionary advantage, most of the time. It's like, Aphrodite's genes come with a factory default setting, and her kids all grow up looking like mass-produced underwear models. It's not so bad for the girls -- beautiful girls intimidate enough people that they can bluff their way out of a lot of things -- but it's always bad for the boys, because when has anyone ever left a pretty boy alone,) and she likes cheap headphones and she always wears the tartan scarf her little brother brought back from a band trip to Scotland, mainly because it makes him happy to see her in it and Silena doesn't need another reason to wear it.
Her truck has a busted muffler, and its original paint job might have been blue, but decades of exposure to damp Virginian summers has primarily turned it a colorful shade of rust. Silena dubbed it Moira when she first bought it and drove it off the lot by herself, but Lucien calls it Mater, like the one from Cars. She will admit it's kind of an apt nickname.
Surprisingly, she gets a lot of crap for driving it. It's one of those things about life you can never predict going into it.
Silena sees them approaching in the sideview mirror when she's parked at Sonic, and she heaves a sigh. She hates this part.
"Hey, sweetheart," goes smarmy guy the first, leaning against her doorframe. She eyes him sidelong; young, maybe college-age at most (but Silena's not really the best judge when it comes to guessing ages,) a little soft around the middle, but not overweight yet, sandy hair and acne scars low around his mouth. She flicks her eyes away, just as he sways in a little to ask, "this your boyfriend's truck?"
She knows, in theory, that obnoxious boys who hit on the closest pretty thing with tits are kind of like one-celled organisms: ignore them and they shrivel up from lack of stimulus, but she can't help herself.
"No, it's mine," she responds, flat, eyes fixed on the Sonic building in the rearview mirror, willing the girl on skates to come by with her food. "My boyfriend doesn't need to drive a truck because he has nothing to compensate for."
The boy in her window snorts, and one of his companions guffaws, "Chick's PMSing or something, Jesus, man, it's not worth it."
"Naw, she's like a pussy cat. We like pussy, don't we?" goes smarmy guy the first, and Silena widens her eyes at her own reflection, because seriously, what the fuck. No, that's not even remotely cool.
He reaches in through the open window like he's going to stroke her cheek, like she's nothing more than a cat, and she grabs his wrist, twists, and yanks him in, hard enough that he brains himself on the doorframe. He staggers back, far enough for Silena to get a grip on the door handle, wrenching it open so that her car door smashes into his face again. He hits the pavement in an ungainly heap, and Silena slides out of the driver's seat. She spares a quick look at the other two guys hovering there, but one of them holds his hands up in surrender and goes, "we get it, we get it, you're badass."
"Damn straight I'm badass," Silena spits. "Which is why I don't worry about not knowing where my life is going, because at least I don't have to resort to belly-crawling like you fuckers. I will always be worth more than you. Get a life."
She flips her braid back over her shoulder and straightens up; the Sonic girl is standing there, a paper bag on a plastic tray. "Um," she goes, when Silena catches her eye. "Coney chili cheese dog?"
"Yeah, that's mine, thanks," Silena grins at her, settles her shoulders, brushes the dirt off. All in a day.
-
The first time she leads Charlie out to the truck, parked in a narrow cobblestone side-street behind the shop, she finds herself hanging back, arms folded across her chest, waiting for him to say it.
But Charlie just runs his hand down the faded racing stripe down the truck's side, smiling in a lazy, fond kind of way. "She yours?" he goes over his shoulder.
Silena grins and drops her arms. "Yeah, this is my baby," she answers.
He nods, like he hadn't expected anything less. "American made, it doesn't get any better than this. Start her up," he suggests. "I want to hear how she purrs."
-
She's on the desktop computer later: the sun's gone down, but she's too lazy to get up and turn on a light so she can see what she's doing. The glow from the monitor is enough for the important things, no matter what her dad keeps on saying about it ruining her eyesight. So she's just sitting there, one leg draw up on her chair, when Luke Skype-calls her.
She looks at the ringing phone pop-up on her screen for only a moment before she clicks Accept. She isn't thinking about how they're on different sides of a war, good vs. evil, right and wrong, and how it probably makes her a traitor to her own kind, or how it'll reflect on her later. She's thinking about the angle of her webcam, and if it's too dark to do any kindness to her features, or if she should put on a sweater because the neckline of her dress cuts down kind of low. It doesn't matter: webcam video pretty much universally sucks.
These are not the actions of a lovesick girl. She is not stupid, she is not some ditzy Aphrodite girl, she knows how to say no.
Luke was the first person who saw her, the very first time she came to Camp, transient and so lost (if she's going from one place to another and there's no one to see her, does she really exist?) and he made her real.
Some things are more important than sides in a war.
-
"Art school in Paris," she confesses, picking at the loose thread in the blanket they have pulled up to their chins. "It's where I really want to go, if I get the grades I need to and graduate in May like I'm supposed to."
"Are we even allowed out of the country?" Charlie wonders. "Or does, like, one half of our DNA strand just shrivel up and blow away if we step outside US borders? Although," he frowns thoughtfully. "Ben Franklin did make all those trips from the colonies back to England, so maybe."
Silena snorts, dismissive. "I don't think Ben Franklin was a half-blood. He's kind of like Shakespeare: everybody likes to claim he belonged to their special little club, but he probably didn't."
"You have a point," Charlie acknowledges. "So, Paris, huh?"
She's suddenly shy about it. "Is that weird? I mean, it's one half of my heritage, I guess, and my dad always tells me these stories, so it feels like I have some kind of claim to it, you know. Like if I went there, I would be French, instead of just that American Francophile, quick, everyone sneer."
"No, I get it," he says, pressing his shoulder up against hers in a quick show of solidarity. "I think it's cool that you have that. I don't even know what I'm doing next week, much less where I'm going when I graduate high school."
"Yeah," she murmurs, the truth of it hitting low in her gut, the strange idea that she might not be here to go to art school; the possibility of her imminent death is not something she brought up with the college counselor.
She sees him looking at her in her peripheral and tugs the blanket up so that it covers her mouth, the way she always does when she feels she's been caught at something. The cold is just sharp enough to needle at her cheeks, and the only company they have in the bed of her truck is an empty cooler and an ice scraper. He's got her ankle caught in one hand, thumb absently rolling over the knob of bone there like he isn't even aware of what he's doing.
"If you don't get into the art school in Paris, where else are you thinking of going?"
She shrugs. "Some of the community colleges around here. My brother's mom lives in Oregon; I applied to the state university out there, just because. I'm pretty sure Lucien also sent in an application to Harvard, just so he can laugh at me when I obviously get rejected."
"Nowhere in Manhattan?"
"Nowhere in the state of New York," she nods, and they allow a moment of silence for the significance of that remark to sink in. Silena's a badass on horseback when given a bow and arrow, and she doesn't mind long hours in the stables, brushing down the pegasi coats and grooming their flight pinions, but she is no hero, and it's the kind of distinction you can only learn by living it.
"You know what I want to do before I die?" Charlie blurts out of nowhere.
She glances at him, startled.
"I mean," he continues. "Just like one of those bucket list things, you know? I really want to rob a bank. No, really," he goes when she makes puzzled eyebrows at him. "I know I can do it. I know the losers from Hermes call us monkeys with wrenches, but I've taught the kids in my cabin right. They know more than just how to build things. We can hack with the best of them. I really want to rob a bank. Not necessarily spend any of the money. Just know that I have it."
"That'd be an adrenaline rush," Silena muses. "I could help. Flash my dimples at the security guards or something, I don't know."
"We can be Bonnie and Clyde!" His enthusiasm is palpable. "And you'll be the getaway vehicle. No one will expect bank robbers to have an American classic like this beauty." He pats the Ford.
"It's a deal," Silena laughs, and only then does she notice that he's hiked the hem of her boot-cut jeans up to her knee, running his fingers up and down her shin in a feathery touch. "Hey," she protests, suddenly a little self-conscious about it and trying to twitch her leg away.
"No, I don't mind," he goes quickly, catching her ankle again underneath the blanket in that blacksmith hold. "I've been told the palms of my hands are leather-tough. I promise your legs hairs are not slicing them to bits."
"Shut up," she goes, startled into laughing a little bit and knocking her knee against his ribs. "It's November, okay. Nobody shaves their legs in November, there's no point."
"I'll take your word for it," he says seriously. "It just seemed a little anomalous, is all. Daughter of Aphrodite has hairy legs."
"Don't make it sound like a newspaper headline!" she fires back, clapping a hand to her breastbone in mock offense. "And of course we do, we're half-human, too. We have to deal with body hair just like you do. Not only that," she grabs at his free hand, dragging it up to her face so she could rub his fingertips over the corners of her mouth. Usually she Nairs the hairs that grow there, but it's winter and they're super fair anyway, so it's not like you could really see them unless you were looking for them and the light was hitting her right.
"Woah," Charlie goes, soft enough that it alerts something underneath Silena's skin, which suddenly rears up and pays attention to how she's got his fingers right over her lips.
This is one of those moments, she realizes, like the one when the satyr took a deep breath and she knew what he was going to tell her at age thirteen was going to change her forever, like the one when she found herself asking Charlie to see the fireworks with her in July, like the one in the beat after Luke asked her to wear the sickle on her charm bracelet. This one is like that, the kind of moment so malleable you realize just how important it really is.
"How did we wind up here?" she whispers, not even knowing what the hell she's saying, but feeling it, the wonder at the thought that the two of them -- Silena from Alexandria who has dual citizenship and buys cheap gummy headphones and likes fashion but wears her brother's leather jacket in spite of that, and Charles from half-way across the country, who's good with his hands and believes that Percy Jackson will save the world and thinks his most embarrassing secret is that he has two whole seasons of Veronica Mars on TiVo -- wound up here, together, out of all the transient, moving people in the world and all the places they could be and all the things that could have happened, and the universe came together to put them here, in the bed of her truck in the parking lot of Target, the stars clear and bright overhead.
He nudges them together, offering in his slightly uncomfortable way, "I like it here."
This is a moment, Silena thinks, and then doesn't think at all, pushing herself up with the heel of her hand to meet his mouth.
It's awkward for the first beat, the way kissing always is before you remember that this isn't your grandmother or your dad and you aren't some little kid, this is a boy and he's into you and then the awkwardness fades, and Silena kisses at Charlie's upper lip, then the lower in its turn. The dry ridges of skin from the cold catch up against each other as they kiss, pulling at them. Their necks move easily, bonelessly, sliding their faces together.
"Want to know a secret?" he murmurs, up against her lips where the light brush of skin on skin is enough to make every hair stand on end with sensation.
"Hmmm?"
"I lied earlier, when I said I didn't know where I was going for college. I Googled every single school within fifty miles of this location, right here, and I applied to all of them, because I didn't know which one you wanted to go to."
She pulls back, only far enough to stare at him.
"Is that weird?" he asks after a moment.
"No," she whispers, not even really paying attention to the question, she's too busy smiling. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you were just saying that to me to get a kiss, because that was seriously romantic."
"Hmm, well, I didn't say I didn't have ulterior motives."
"Ugh, hey, keep the double negatives for when we aren't --" his lips on hers again, and she closes her eyes and opens her mouth. She lets him lick a probing kiss across her teeth, finding the ridges that ten-odd years of chewing have worn down, the places where she used to have braces. His tongue finds that sensitive fleshy bit right up by her gums, the one that makes her spine go a little rubbery. She hooks an arm around his neck, dragging him in.
Charlie has one hand on her thigh, tugging with just enough leverage to get it over his hip, settling her in his lap with the blanket still half thrown-over them, and she knows where he's going with this, the question he'll ask with touch, not words, and she's terrified, absolutely terrified of it, but it's okay, because this, too, is a kind of bravery.
-
She loses her virginity in the back of her truck in a parking lot in the middle of November, to a boy named Charles Beckendorf, whom she loves.
It turns out that children of Aphrodite do not magically get superpowers once they have sex (or during it, for that matter.)
She still feels a little cheated about this.
-
Charlie double-knots the shoelaces of his Reeboks so that the tongues stick out, thick and heavy like camels thirsty in the desert, and he hates the feeling of ice cubes against his teeth, and he's real, a person, flesh and bone and childhood stories that he's prompted into telling when funny commercials come on TV and a secret desire to rob a bank, and Silena's completely terrified that the bigger story is going to forget this, that he'll only be a footnote and no one's going to know these things, these Charlie things.
The oven in the chocolate shop is temperamental, a war-era leftover with shoddy electrical wiring, and on the fourth day, her dad mentions this in passing over breakfast, and middle of the afternoon finds Charlie in the kitchen of From France With Love, the oven torn away from the wall and Hephaestus boy in the middle of it. All the wires and parts -- all the things that make Silena's eyes cross with ignorance -- he's pulling them out of here and putting them into there, as easy as if they're telling him how to do it.
"What are you doing?" Silena asks, standing over him with a carton of strawberries in her arms.
Charlie squints up at her, blinking a little bit like he's surfacing up from somewhere deep and aqueous. "Fixing it," he says simply, like it's the answer he's going to give no matter the question.
When he's done, he's cannibalized two alarm clocks and the innards of the home telephone, but when he puts the oven back up against the wall, they suddenly have a new digital read-out on temperatures, and an oven that actually looks capable of reaching those temperatures without posing a possible fire hazard.
Complete silence greets this pronouncement, stretching on so long that Charlie begins to look uncomfortable, like maybe he shouldn't go playing around with people's livelihoods.
"Charles," says her father, slowly and seriously. "Would you like to stay for Thanksgiving?"
"Would you like to stay forever?" blurts out little Lucien, sounding completely awestruck.
Charlie flushes with pleasure, and Silena pulls up a fold of her scarf to cover her smile. He cuts a look at her sideways, hopeful and shy all at once, and without thinking, she steps up to him, slipping her hand into his. Her father looks amused, and her brother just rolls his eyes like he does when he calls the plot of a movie from a mile off, but she isn't paying attention to them. She's studying the look on Charlie's face; it's a hundred different things at once, and she thinks of a hundred possible different futures for them, the happy and the awful and the cold and the wonderful.
He turns into her, catching her face in one hand and tilting it up, and Silena feels the world spin into place underneath her feet, forever tilting in the right direction, and she doesn't know how this story ends, but Charlie's going to kiss her now, and she doesn't remember to be afraid.
And that leaves ... *counts* six NaNos that I didn't finish on time this year. I still want to write them, of course, but I always want to write everything :/ I hate having unfinished projects oh hai Big Bang.