Fic: The November Days [Percy Jackson AU]
Title: The November Days
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Pairings/Characters: Bianca, Nico
Summary: It's a damn, big, bully of a robot and it's trying to crush her friends. "Puta," bellows Bianca, grabbing at the quiver of arrows on her back. "¡Por favor!"
Word Count: 5,000
Notes: This is completely self-indulgent. Done in the spirit of the Racebending Revenge, since I was too late to actually sign up, the premise of this is simple: the first time I read through the Titan's Curse, I was a) in southern France, and therefore rather distracted, and b) somehow managed to miss the three or four references that CLEARLY STATED that Bianca and Nico di Angelo were Italian. Since the diAngelos I know irl are Latina, I assumed, blindly, that the siblings were Hispanic based on their names alone. This is why I always just blinked at people who bitched at Rick Riordan for whitewashing his series: it took me until Battle of the Labyrinth came out before I clued in that no, the di Angelos actually were white.
So this is the AU where Maria was born a clay-thrower's daughter in Oaxaca, Mexico. All details come from my own mother's stories about growing up there.
The memories come back when she least expects them. At least, she thinks they're memories: there's really no other word for them.
The seventh-graders at Clemens Academy have art at ten on Thursdays instead of P.E., after some bridge-playing old ladies complained at the city council that there wasn't enough liberal arts being taught in the neighborhood schools. Basically, it just meant that the seventh-graders got frog-marched down to a closed-in basement room once a week to mess around with paint in the name of expressing themselves.
They'd been working on different shading techniques since the start of the school year: they were supposed to have a final version of whatever done by the first week of November, and most kids were just claiming "abstract art" as an excuse to swirl colors around in the hope that something pretty came up eventually. The colors never completely came out of the brushes, so no matter what color they were dipped in, they came out a milky, diluted greyish version of that color when applied to paper.
Bianca's at a table meant for four, passing the bottles of red and black and blue back and forth. The kid next to her has great smears of black all over his hands, and he's been using them to press surreptitious handprints to the butts of uniform skirts of all the girls that go by. She rolls her eyes, twisting her brush between her fingers, and when she looks again, it hits her: the memory of a woman, elegant crow's feet around her eyes and a gap between her teeth, looking up from a pottery wheel, turquoise earrings flashing amongst her loose coils of hair and her hands coated in a thick, black clay.
She blinks again, shaking off the immediate warmth that spreads in the bottom of her stomach, a knowledge that this is her mother.
I don't have a mother, she tells her brain, trying to be firm, but it insists. It's the same woman, embroidered top loose on her shoulders, white to match her smile and striking against her toffee-colored skin, and she remembers wanting to walk over to her and lean against her and breathe in the smell of clay and tobacco. She remembers the way the woman would pretend to chase her down, afterwards, arms covered in dripping water up to the elbows, webbing between her fingers thick with the rare black clay the region was so famous for. She threatened to scoop her up into a big hug, and Bianca shrieks, her laughter bouncing off the tile and echoing out the windows up into the clear, blue sky.
One more wrench, and then she's back in the windowless room in the school basement, water dripping from the end of her paintbrush and a boy beside her, black paint smudged into the creases of his palms.
She breathes out slowly.
+
She was eight years old when Zeus killed her mother, Maria di Angelo, and eighty-three other mortal bystanders at the biggest artesian convention inside the Arizona border, but she won't remember this until many years down the line. She woke up in a hotel room in Las Vegas with nothing but her name and a four-year-old brother, and as far as she's concerned, that's where her life starts.
It isn't until the summer she's fourteen, when a lawyer sweeps into the Lotus Hotel and Casino and whisks them off without much in the way of explanation that things begin to filter back in, as if the tilt-a-whirl lights and mints on her pillow each morning has been keeping her memories at bay.
First she remembers the pottery. Barro negro, rolls off her tongue one morning, and it means black mud, the unusually colored silt that's everywhere in her home province. Her mother's workshop had shelves of it lining the walls, finished pieces waiting to be boxed and sold, unfired ones sitting to be taken down the road to the oven kiln, and an old, rusted pump right next to a tub where she'd wash her hands and tools every day like clockwork, the squeak, squeak of the handle prominent even in Bianca's dreams.
Her mother made vases, pots, lamps, and religious figures. The first thing she ever made for Bianca was a flute, with fingerholes just small enough to cover, and for lack of a tune, Bianca had enthusiasm, at least.
Her mother initialed the base of every piece; a distinctive MdA that Bianca scribbled into the margin of her abstract shading piece and then had to paint over later. She remembers seeing her mother's art in all the shops in town, could always tell her designs from the others' even before she could read the labels scotch-taped to the shelves that gave the name of the individual artist.
She remembers her childhood home, and how the floors of the kitchen and the hallways and the bathroom were mosaic tile, a spread of interchanging blues so shocking bright and deep there was no parallel in nature. Theirs was a big house in the hills, built in the old style with thick clay walls and a courtyard in the center, at the beating heart of home, where Bianca's grandmother would do her gardening and drink water that'd been boiled clean and come in at the hottest part of the day, when everybody slept.
Once, during a storm, her baby brother toddled right out into the courtyard and peed into the drain, like it was nothing. And everybody was yelling at him -- her mother, her yaya, her aunts and the cousins -- but he couldn't hear them over the thunder coming down from the mountains. "Ayiyiyiyi," her grandmother said, hiding her eyes, and her mother collapsed laughing against the rail, and that was when Bianca knew it was okay to laugh, too.
She remembers the town, with the brand-new museum and the white-washed church with the bells you could hear from one end of the valley to the other. She remembers buildings that don't exist anymore when she Googles them. She remembers the houses made of sheet metal and rope and she remembers the English-style houses that had seemed so strange then, and the people who lived in them; the families that worked on the railroad, and their kids -- white and black and the glossy mix of both, speaking English in low tones and looking nervous and uncomfortable.
She'd stared at them whenever she saw them, crossing the railroad tracks on their way to school, and at her age, it hadn't occurred to her that maybe it was a little rude, not until she's fourteen and everyone's staring at her, because at a private academy in Maine, there are four ethnic students enrolled and she and Nico make up half of that.
The winds blow in from the Arctic, bringing with it the first snowstorm of the year. The snow in Maine falls thick and fast, collecting along the curbs and obliterating the skyline, and Nico comes racing over from the boy's dormitory to drag her outside by the hand to feel it.
Snowflakes catch on her eyelashes and melt, and she stands there as her brother tilts his head back, tongue out, and remembers that this is the first time they've ever seen it.
+
Halloween day finds her sitting outside the principal's office, her knee scraped bloody still and the secretary flashing her looks over her computer monitor. Outside the window, the kindergartners are lining up out on the blacktop in their costumes, a colorful parade of princesses and Spidermen. School tradition has them going around to every classroom, demanding treats from the teachers or else (Bianca doesn't get it, but they never did Halloween at the Lotus Hotel, so this is all new to her. She's not going to tell anyone this, of course; this may be her first and last year here, but Nico still has three, and she doesn't want her behavior retroactively hurting him.)
The door to the principal's office swings open, and Ryan Nimbok comes out, his uniform stretched at the collar and a bag of ice held to his eye. She feels a brief flush of pride: she gave him that, and all he got on her was a bloody knee.
It doesn't look like he's the one who's going to get punished for it, though, even though he's the one that started it, weeks and endless weeks of pinching his nose every time she went by, and pretending to be contaminated if she brushed him accidentally, making her face burn husky-hot with embarrassment as all the other boys guffawed. The last straw was when he told her he'd seen her mother coming out of the crack house down on Pinecone Way, and how she like it there?
He salutes her smartly, going, "Adios, amigo."
And she answers, "No soy tu amigo, y yo penso tu madre huele como las albóndigas," fast as snapping her fingers, and doesn't realize until that very second that she even knows how to speak Spanish.
It makes sense, though -- she's spent the last few free periods in the school computer lab, Nico in the chair next to her with Mario Party beeping happily at them both from his DS, running her memories through Google. The Internet seemed pretty convinced she's a native of Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico. As a child, she'd never bothered to learn the name: it just was. The museum she remembers is in a little town just south of the capital, famous for its barro negro artists. She probably grew up speaking Spanish, so it's understandable that it's coming to her now, with everything else.
Ryan snorts. "Yeah, whatever," he goes, leaving.
The principal calls her in momentarily, makes her sit in the chair across from her and says, "Now, Bianca, why don't you tell me what happened from your point of view?"
What happened? Bianca doesn't rightly know. She remembers Ryan's crack about her mother, thrown at her back because that's the only way he can be brave, remembers the sudden dark hit of anger in her stomach -- her mother is dead -- and then she was spinning around. She kicked at Ryan with her hard, black, expensive shoes, which is probably when the monitors started paying attention, having conveniently caught nothing else. He shoved back at her, sending her sprawling across the sidewalk. Her knee skinned, and her hands flattened in dirt, wet from melted snow, and then, and then --
And then something clicked. There's no other word for it, but something just snapped into place like the right Tetris piece, and Bianca grabbed fistfuls of earth like she was gripping the planet itself. She got to her feet, twisting to face Ryan as he leapt at her again, and instead of dirt, her hands held a human thigh bone, clear and distinct as if she'd pulled it right off the textbook page. It was stained yellow and slightly pink, the way bones are when they're fresh: they bleach white with age and decay. She knows this as surely as she knows that beneath her feet, the dirt will become anything she wants it to be.
She grabbed hold of Ryan's collar and swung the bone, cracking him hard across the eye, and at his shriek, startled -- and the bone was dirt on her hands once more, which was good, because that's when the monitors reach them, yanking them apart.
She sighs, pressing her knees together and looking away from the principal. How can she explain that?
The matronly woman has a cross hanging behind her, almost as big as Bianca's torso, and on the opposite side of the room there's a mirror, so that no matter where she's facing, she can always see the cross, with Jesus all slumped over and grey blood trickling out of his side. There's a mug on the corner of the desk in the shape of a skull for the holiday, pens sticking up out of the top, so Bianca focuses on that instead; looks at the solemn eye sockets and the grin of bone teeth, and suddenly, she knows.
Her mother, Maria, at the stove, stirring black coffee in a saucepan and saying, This is the night where the barrier between our world and the one below is the thinnest, when you can walk on one side or the other anywhere in the world. The midnight between October 31st and November 1st.
Dia de los Muertos, she mouths. The Day of the Dead.
She remembers the festival, the celebration; people gathering in the streets with their radios to dance, wearing masks of bone and silver bells. Altars built along the street, with grinning skulls made out of sugar, toys for the ghost children, and all the favorite foods offered to the dead, to celebrate their life and thank them. She remembers the statues of skeletons in wedding dresses, following her with their eyes. It happened every year, neither something she dreaded nor really looked forward to, except it meant she got to stay out past her bedtime.
But what hits her the strongest is the memory of her mother, dancing in the arms of a tall, white man, so big she looked like a doll beside him. This is your father, Maria had told her, in the same voice she'd used to say, that's an airplane, mija. They used them in the Great War, or this is a squash. Want to hold it? She just nodded, accepted this as just something else about the world, and moved on to where her grandmother had a small jar of candy corns.
She thinks desperately over the next few days, trying to remember her father's face, scanning her mind over and over again. She saw him twice a year: once during Dia de los Muertos, and once in the summer sometime, when they went across the border to the United States to sell her mother's pottery. There were usually four craftsmen who went from Oaxaca every year, all piling into the town's one and old Ford truck, a big blue monster that roared as it went down the road at speeds faster than Bianca was capable of contemplating (although her aunt told her that the current president of the United States, a Mr. Franklin Roosevelt, said that someday cars were going to be everywhere.) They usually got a stand next to a lady selling lotion made out of bee's wax, and Bianca sat in the back with her baby brother and watched the people go by, speaking English and wearing the strangest outfits, while her mother stood at the front, her father with an arm around her shoulders.
It's fruitless. No matter how hard she tries, it's nothing in her mind but a pale oval of flesh, no features distinctive about him but his height, and the way he touched her mother, like he thought she was as beautiful as her pottery.
It isn't until she's kneeling in a junkyard in New Mexico, holding up a Mythomagic figurine of Hades -- the only Olympian god her baby brother doesn't have in his collection -- that she looks upon her father's face and knows him.
+
It was kind of her fault, really.
They had been warned, after all, against taking anything out of Hephasetus's scrap pile, because nobody acts quite like territorial children with the last controller for Melee Bros like the Olympians. But honestly. All this, for a Mythomagic figure? Please, like a crap, made-in-China piece of plastic was going to someday hold the secret of Hephaestus's greatest creation.
"This is bullshit," she states to no one in particular, as the giant robot goes tripping over a pile of twisted metal, long hands making a grab for Zoe and missing. And then she snaps into focus, because those are her friends in danger, and she didn't make these kind of life choices just to let them go to waste.
She takes off at a dead run, grabbing at her quiver of arrows until her fingers find one. "¡Puta, por favor!" she screams, notching it and letting it fly.
It dings the robot right in the side of the head, and it pauses for a second, unimpressed, before turning its head towards her with a long, rusted creak. There is nowhere to run but into the junkyard; the desert stretches on everywhere, a flat plateau of red dirt and sky, like the heavens sitting right on top of them.
"Yeah, that's right," Bianca goes, grinning at it. She fires another arrow, which strikes dead and true in the center of the robot's face, and then tumbles uselessly down its front. The robot's jaw works. "I'm the one stealing from you. Come and get me, moron!"
That does it. The robot swings around in a cumbersome way and starts across the junk heaps towards her, and she dives behind the nearest pile, slinging her bow back and slamming her hands down against the cracked earth. It rumbles under her palms, protesting, tired and sunsick and nothing like the dirt in Maine, and she hums back, encouraging. With a sigh, the dust stirs, and then two skeletons are sitting beside her, bleached like teeth from age and exposure and their dry forearms wrapped around their knees, both heads tilted towards her curiously.
She has a bad moment where it swamps up under her, the knowledge of what exactly she is: a daughter of Hades, the god of the Underworld and all things not fit for sunlight. But then it passes through her, because she wasn't raised to fear the dead.
"Help me," she whispers, and they nod eagerly with a sound like autumn leaves rustling. They scuttle to one side and she dives to the other, just as the robot's foot slams down right where they'd been sitting.
She dodges and weaves, trying to avoid getting smashed and taking inventory of where the others are: Zoe's on top of one of the piles, bow drawn taut, and Thalia's beside her, head thrown back and mouth slightly parted. There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon, lightning sparking between them in agitation, but it's too far off to help even as it draws closer, attracted to the gravity of metal.
"Bianca, duck!" And that's Percy, closest to her, sworn drawn and glowing a sea-foam green. She hits the ground instinctively, feeling it jar through her knees and rattle the arrows in her quiver, but it doesn't help. The robot has her, iron fingers closing around her in a fist.
It starts to lift her, grip tightening in triumph, when it just ... stops.
She flings her head skyward. There, right behind the eye sockets, are the two skeletons, hands at the controls. One of them waves at her, and the other pulls a lever.
The hand uncurls, and she drops to the earth for another jarring thud. Percy's there, hauling her up with a hand under the elbow, and she yanks him forward, yelping, "Run! It's gotta self-destruct."
It's like the demolition game she and Nico used to play back home at the casino: the thing collapses from the bottom up with a roar that almost turns their ears to static, it's so loud. The downburst knocks them off their feet, and then there's silence.
She lifts her head, red dust falling from her hair into her eyes. Across the junkyard, she sees Zoe already on her feet, turning in a wary half-circle. The sunlight catches on her tiara.
"What was that about?" Percy groans, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "We didn't take anything. It should have let us go."
With a flush of panic, she rolls onto her side, digging in her pocket. It's a cool kind of relief, curling her fingers around the Hades figure and pulling it out, letting it lie on her palm for Percy to see. He's confused for a second, before his eyes widen a fraction, and he looks back to where the dust cloud from the robot is still rising. "Those skeletons ..." he starts, fumbles his question, and falls silent again.
"It's for my brother," Bianca goes, and it seems like the most significant thing she's ever said.
With the same click she'd felt when she first used her half-blood powers, her last memory slides into place: the market in Arizona, the black pottery on tables, the women going by in fancy hats and beating the hot air with newspapers, and Hades on his knees, begging with her mother. Maria -- red flower braided into the end of her hair, embroidery climbing the neckline of her white tunic, palms stained black by clay, mother, -- putting her hands on his face and saying, "my love, my love, I cannot raise our children like that." She can almost feel the way the air crackled, tingling along her forearms, right before the explosion. Maria turned away to answer a customer's question, and everything flashed white-hot.
She remembers her father's arms, wrapped around her and Nico both. She remembers everything there is to remember until she woke up remembering nothing at all, arms full of a four-year-old and loving him the same way the maize grew in the mountains: no other reason than that's what it was made to do.
+
Chiron's in the middle of congratulating them on a job well done -- which seems woefully inadequate for what they just achieved, but what can you expect -- when she catches sight of a familiar figure in jeans an an orange shirt coming around the Big House at a dead run.
Thalia came back with her, Zoe's tiara glittering against her dark hair, and stands to her right. Percy and Annabeth are on her left, matching streaks of white framing their faces and exhaustion hemmed in grey around their eyes. She doesn't even think; she breaks rank, right in the middle of Chiron's sentence, and almost skids down the grassy slope to get to Nico.
She drops to her knees because he's just as small as he was when she left, and his shoulder catches her chin as he wraps his arms around her neck, but it doesn't matter. She hugs him back just as fierce.
He's talking fast, too loud and too close to her ear and none of it makes sense, and then he falls quiet. He just says, "mija," and she squeezes him so hard he squeaks.
"I shouldn't have let you go," he mumbles, and she pulls back in order to smooth his hair up off his forehead. He doesn't look any different than before, which surprises her, even though it shouldn't. It's only been a week: long enough for planets to shift and her timeline to grind to a halt, but not long enough to change her brother. There's a trace of sunburn on his nose, and the Camp shirt looks strange when she's so used to him in the ill-fitting uniform from that school.
She presses their noses together, rubbing him into an Eskimo kiss. "I'm proud of you, for letting me."
He smiles, allowing her that much, and abruptly decides that's enough affection. "Did you bring me anything?" he demands, stepping away.
She throws her head back, laughing. "It wasn't like I was on vacation, you twerp!" she exclaims, but she reaches into her pocket anyway.
She will remember the expression on his face when she hands him the Mythomagic Hades until the day she dies: the sun incarnadine over the Mexican mountains, the clay on her mother's hands, and Nico's face, joy in every part of him.
+
By moonrise, Percy has lost his gunshot look, eyes brightened and grin more genuine, and she takes a moment to admire how he does that: how he makes his heart invincible by force of will alone, breathes through the weight of the world and manages to make it home, and she means that in the metaphorical sense as much as she does the literal.
"Bianca," he goes, catching up to her by the lake. It's a bizarre moment, but she has the urge to tell him that she likes the way he says her name: not in a weird way, because hey, she did make a vow of celibacy, but more -- it's like he puts more syllables in her name than there are, like he has to think about it. And let's face it; the list of people who've said Bianca's name in her whole lifetime is woefully short. "Do you have a minute?"
"I'm quasi-immortal," she reminds him. "I have all the time in the world."
This is true, he shrugs with one shoulder, and steps up next to her. They're the same age, but she has to lift her chin a little to meet his eyes: she doesn't think he's noticed it yet. "Do you ..." he begins, and starts over. "With you and Thalia being Hunters, you do know that if I die ... if I don't make it to sixteen, then Nico becomes --"
"-- the prophecy kid," she finishes, eyeing him sidelong.
"I haven't told anyone else," he says quickly, and amends, "besides Annabeth. Your secret is safe with us."
She doubts it. Annabeth's a strategist, by blood and by birth -- there's no way she doesn't have a dozen contingency plans, not now that there are four children of the Big Three in the world. "I haven't told Nico yet. And with the Hunt, I might not be here when he gets claimed or when his powers awaken, whichever comes first, so --"
"I'll look after him," Percy promises, not even needing to be told.
"You could stay," interjects a third voice, and they're responding to the timbre of it before it's even really registered, turning around and bowing low, even as the virgin goddess Artemis steps from the treeline, glowing ethereal like moonlight even in the sunset.
"Lady?" Bianca goes, questioning.
"I do not lose Hunters often," the goddess says, which isn't an answer, of course, but the Olympians are never straightforward and she waits. "And Zoe has been my companion for almost a thousand years. What I am saying," she steps closer, barefoot and leaving no indents in the sand. "Bianca, I would understand, if you felt the need to stay here with the half-bloods, learn to be a warrior like them, and protect your brother." A grin flits across her child's face, sisterly and conspiratorial. "After all, I have a brother, too. They do need constant looking after."
Until seven days ago, Bianca has never been separated from her little brother. She remembers her mother, lying on her back with the baby sprawled out across her chest, lulling him to sleep with a hum, remembers the toddler who peed out in the courtyard because he could, the brother who ate tamales with her while skeletons danced in the streets in November, who woke up with her in Vegas and spent six years (six decades) beating every high score in the Lotus Hotel and sat beside her at the Hermes table earlier and spoke in halting Spanish.
"My lady," she says, not even hesitating. "The best way I can protect Nico is by learning the world. We are decades and countries away from everything we know -- until just a few days ago, I thought Roosevelt was still the president. We are lost. The more I learn, the safer he'll be." She weighs her next words, but lying to a goddess isn't something she can do. "My first loyalty will always be him --" maize in the mountains, doing what they were made to do. " -- but I stand by my oath to you as much as I did the day I made it."
Artemis inclines her head the smallest fraction, and say, "Bianca di Angelo, I have judged your heart well." And with that, she flits away, fast as a moonbeam.
"Man," goes Percy into the quiet. "I wish I could just up and give a speech like that. That was mad impressive."
The Hunters are gathering -- she can feel the stir of it deep in her breastbone, and she needs to go say good-bye (again.) It will be full dark soon, and the Hunt will ride.
-
fin
Translation notes:
No soy tu amigo, y yo penso tu madre huele como las albóndigas = I'm not your amigo, and I think your mother smells like meatballs
¡Puta, por favor! = bitch, please!
mija = daughter. however, in some of the indigenous groups in southern Mexico, "mija" was also used by brothers to describe their sisters, cousins to each other, and young men to their lovers, but it's kind of faded out of this use with our grandparents' generation. Most literally, the meaning meant by mija is, "my most important one."
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians
Pairings/Characters: Bianca, Nico
Summary: It's a damn, big, bully of a robot and it's trying to crush her friends. "Puta," bellows Bianca, grabbing at the quiver of arrows on her back. "¡Por favor!"
Word Count: 5,000
Notes: This is completely self-indulgent. Done in the spirit of the Racebending Revenge, since I was too late to actually sign up, the premise of this is simple: the first time I read through the Titan's Curse, I was a) in southern France, and therefore rather distracted, and b) somehow managed to miss the three or four references that CLEARLY STATED that Bianca and Nico di Angelo were Italian. Since the diAngelos I know irl are Latina, I assumed, blindly, that the siblings were Hispanic based on their names alone. This is why I always just blinked at people who bitched at Rick Riordan for whitewashing his series: it took me until Battle of the Labyrinth came out before I clued in that no, the di Angelos actually were white.
So this is the AU where Maria was born a clay-thrower's daughter in Oaxaca, Mexico. All details come from my own mother's stories about growing up there.
The memories come back when she least expects them. At least, she thinks they're memories: there's really no other word for them.
The seventh-graders at Clemens Academy have art at ten on Thursdays instead of P.E., after some bridge-playing old ladies complained at the city council that there wasn't enough liberal arts being taught in the neighborhood schools. Basically, it just meant that the seventh-graders got frog-marched down to a closed-in basement room once a week to mess around with paint in the name of expressing themselves.
They'd been working on different shading techniques since the start of the school year: they were supposed to have a final version of whatever done by the first week of November, and most kids were just claiming "abstract art" as an excuse to swirl colors around in the hope that something pretty came up eventually. The colors never completely came out of the brushes, so no matter what color they were dipped in, they came out a milky, diluted greyish version of that color when applied to paper.
Bianca's at a table meant for four, passing the bottles of red and black and blue back and forth. The kid next to her has great smears of black all over his hands, and he's been using them to press surreptitious handprints to the butts of uniform skirts of all the girls that go by. She rolls her eyes, twisting her brush between her fingers, and when she looks again, it hits her: the memory of a woman, elegant crow's feet around her eyes and a gap between her teeth, looking up from a pottery wheel, turquoise earrings flashing amongst her loose coils of hair and her hands coated in a thick, black clay.
She blinks again, shaking off the immediate warmth that spreads in the bottom of her stomach, a knowledge that this is her mother.
I don't have a mother, she tells her brain, trying to be firm, but it insists. It's the same woman, embroidered top loose on her shoulders, white to match her smile and striking against her toffee-colored skin, and she remembers wanting to walk over to her and lean against her and breathe in the smell of clay and tobacco. She remembers the way the woman would pretend to chase her down, afterwards, arms covered in dripping water up to the elbows, webbing between her fingers thick with the rare black clay the region was so famous for. She threatened to scoop her up into a big hug, and Bianca shrieks, her laughter bouncing off the tile and echoing out the windows up into the clear, blue sky.
One more wrench, and then she's back in the windowless room in the school basement, water dripping from the end of her paintbrush and a boy beside her, black paint smudged into the creases of his palms.
She breathes out slowly.
+
She was eight years old when Zeus killed her mother, Maria di Angelo, and eighty-three other mortal bystanders at the biggest artesian convention inside the Arizona border, but she won't remember this until many years down the line. She woke up in a hotel room in Las Vegas with nothing but her name and a four-year-old brother, and as far as she's concerned, that's where her life starts.
It isn't until the summer she's fourteen, when a lawyer sweeps into the Lotus Hotel and Casino and whisks them off without much in the way of explanation that things begin to filter back in, as if the tilt-a-whirl lights and mints on her pillow each morning has been keeping her memories at bay.
First she remembers the pottery. Barro negro, rolls off her tongue one morning, and it means black mud, the unusually colored silt that's everywhere in her home province. Her mother's workshop had shelves of it lining the walls, finished pieces waiting to be boxed and sold, unfired ones sitting to be taken down the road to the oven kiln, and an old, rusted pump right next to a tub where she'd wash her hands and tools every day like clockwork, the squeak, squeak of the handle prominent even in Bianca's dreams.
Her mother made vases, pots, lamps, and religious figures. The first thing she ever made for Bianca was a flute, with fingerholes just small enough to cover, and for lack of a tune, Bianca had enthusiasm, at least.
Her mother initialed the base of every piece; a distinctive MdA that Bianca scribbled into the margin of her abstract shading piece and then had to paint over later. She remembers seeing her mother's art in all the shops in town, could always tell her designs from the others' even before she could read the labels scotch-taped to the shelves that gave the name of the individual artist.
She remembers her childhood home, and how the floors of the kitchen and the hallways and the bathroom were mosaic tile, a spread of interchanging blues so shocking bright and deep there was no parallel in nature. Theirs was a big house in the hills, built in the old style with thick clay walls and a courtyard in the center, at the beating heart of home, where Bianca's grandmother would do her gardening and drink water that'd been boiled clean and come in at the hottest part of the day, when everybody slept.
Once, during a storm, her baby brother toddled right out into the courtyard and peed into the drain, like it was nothing. And everybody was yelling at him -- her mother, her yaya, her aunts and the cousins -- but he couldn't hear them over the thunder coming down from the mountains. "Ayiyiyiyi," her grandmother said, hiding her eyes, and her mother collapsed laughing against the rail, and that was when Bianca knew it was okay to laugh, too.
She remembers the town, with the brand-new museum and the white-washed church with the bells you could hear from one end of the valley to the other. She remembers buildings that don't exist anymore when she Googles them. She remembers the houses made of sheet metal and rope and she remembers the English-style houses that had seemed so strange then, and the people who lived in them; the families that worked on the railroad, and their kids -- white and black and the glossy mix of both, speaking English in low tones and looking nervous and uncomfortable.
She'd stared at them whenever she saw them, crossing the railroad tracks on their way to school, and at her age, it hadn't occurred to her that maybe it was a little rude, not until she's fourteen and everyone's staring at her, because at a private academy in Maine, there are four ethnic students enrolled and she and Nico make up half of that.
The winds blow in from the Arctic, bringing with it the first snowstorm of the year. The snow in Maine falls thick and fast, collecting along the curbs and obliterating the skyline, and Nico comes racing over from the boy's dormitory to drag her outside by the hand to feel it.
Snowflakes catch on her eyelashes and melt, and she stands there as her brother tilts his head back, tongue out, and remembers that this is the first time they've ever seen it.
+
Halloween day finds her sitting outside the principal's office, her knee scraped bloody still and the secretary flashing her looks over her computer monitor. Outside the window, the kindergartners are lining up out on the blacktop in their costumes, a colorful parade of princesses and Spidermen. School tradition has them going around to every classroom, demanding treats from the teachers or else (Bianca doesn't get it, but they never did Halloween at the Lotus Hotel, so this is all new to her. She's not going to tell anyone this, of course; this may be her first and last year here, but Nico still has three, and she doesn't want her behavior retroactively hurting him.)
The door to the principal's office swings open, and Ryan Nimbok comes out, his uniform stretched at the collar and a bag of ice held to his eye. She feels a brief flush of pride: she gave him that, and all he got on her was a bloody knee.
It doesn't look like he's the one who's going to get punished for it, though, even though he's the one that started it, weeks and endless weeks of pinching his nose every time she went by, and pretending to be contaminated if she brushed him accidentally, making her face burn husky-hot with embarrassment as all the other boys guffawed. The last straw was when he told her he'd seen her mother coming out of the crack house down on Pinecone Way, and how she like it there?
He salutes her smartly, going, "Adios, amigo."
And she answers, "No soy tu amigo, y yo penso tu madre huele como las albóndigas," fast as snapping her fingers, and doesn't realize until that very second that she even knows how to speak Spanish.
It makes sense, though -- she's spent the last few free periods in the school computer lab, Nico in the chair next to her with Mario Party beeping happily at them both from his DS, running her memories through Google. The Internet seemed pretty convinced she's a native of Oaxaca, a state in southern Mexico. As a child, she'd never bothered to learn the name: it just was. The museum she remembers is in a little town just south of the capital, famous for its barro negro artists. She probably grew up speaking Spanish, so it's understandable that it's coming to her now, with everything else.
Ryan snorts. "Yeah, whatever," he goes, leaving.
The principal calls her in momentarily, makes her sit in the chair across from her and says, "Now, Bianca, why don't you tell me what happened from your point of view?"
What happened? Bianca doesn't rightly know. She remembers Ryan's crack about her mother, thrown at her back because that's the only way he can be brave, remembers the sudden dark hit of anger in her stomach -- her mother is dead -- and then she was spinning around. She kicked at Ryan with her hard, black, expensive shoes, which is probably when the monitors started paying attention, having conveniently caught nothing else. He shoved back at her, sending her sprawling across the sidewalk. Her knee skinned, and her hands flattened in dirt, wet from melted snow, and then, and then --
And then something clicked. There's no other word for it, but something just snapped into place like the right Tetris piece, and Bianca grabbed fistfuls of earth like she was gripping the planet itself. She got to her feet, twisting to face Ryan as he leapt at her again, and instead of dirt, her hands held a human thigh bone, clear and distinct as if she'd pulled it right off the textbook page. It was stained yellow and slightly pink, the way bones are when they're fresh: they bleach white with age and decay. She knows this as surely as she knows that beneath her feet, the dirt will become anything she wants it to be.
She grabbed hold of Ryan's collar and swung the bone, cracking him hard across the eye, and at his shriek, startled -- and the bone was dirt on her hands once more, which was good, because that's when the monitors reach them, yanking them apart.
She sighs, pressing her knees together and looking away from the principal. How can she explain that?
The matronly woman has a cross hanging behind her, almost as big as Bianca's torso, and on the opposite side of the room there's a mirror, so that no matter where she's facing, she can always see the cross, with Jesus all slumped over and grey blood trickling out of his side. There's a mug on the corner of the desk in the shape of a skull for the holiday, pens sticking up out of the top, so Bianca focuses on that instead; looks at the solemn eye sockets and the grin of bone teeth, and suddenly, she knows.
Her mother, Maria, at the stove, stirring black coffee in a saucepan and saying, This is the night where the barrier between our world and the one below is the thinnest, when you can walk on one side or the other anywhere in the world. The midnight between October 31st and November 1st.
Dia de los Muertos, she mouths. The Day of the Dead.
She remembers the festival, the celebration; people gathering in the streets with their radios to dance, wearing masks of bone and silver bells. Altars built along the street, with grinning skulls made out of sugar, toys for the ghost children, and all the favorite foods offered to the dead, to celebrate their life and thank them. She remembers the statues of skeletons in wedding dresses, following her with their eyes. It happened every year, neither something she dreaded nor really looked forward to, except it meant she got to stay out past her bedtime.
But what hits her the strongest is the memory of her mother, dancing in the arms of a tall, white man, so big she looked like a doll beside him. This is your father, Maria had told her, in the same voice she'd used to say, that's an airplane, mija. They used them in the Great War, or this is a squash. Want to hold it? She just nodded, accepted this as just something else about the world, and moved on to where her grandmother had a small jar of candy corns.
She thinks desperately over the next few days, trying to remember her father's face, scanning her mind over and over again. She saw him twice a year: once during Dia de los Muertos, and once in the summer sometime, when they went across the border to the United States to sell her mother's pottery. There were usually four craftsmen who went from Oaxaca every year, all piling into the town's one and old Ford truck, a big blue monster that roared as it went down the road at speeds faster than Bianca was capable of contemplating (although her aunt told her that the current president of the United States, a Mr. Franklin Roosevelt, said that someday cars were going to be everywhere.) They usually got a stand next to a lady selling lotion made out of bee's wax, and Bianca sat in the back with her baby brother and watched the people go by, speaking English and wearing the strangest outfits, while her mother stood at the front, her father with an arm around her shoulders.
It's fruitless. No matter how hard she tries, it's nothing in her mind but a pale oval of flesh, no features distinctive about him but his height, and the way he touched her mother, like he thought she was as beautiful as her pottery.
It isn't until she's kneeling in a junkyard in New Mexico, holding up a Mythomagic figurine of Hades -- the only Olympian god her baby brother doesn't have in his collection -- that she looks upon her father's face and knows him.
+
It was kind of her fault, really.
They had been warned, after all, against taking anything out of Hephasetus's scrap pile, because nobody acts quite like territorial children with the last controller for Melee Bros like the Olympians. But honestly. All this, for a Mythomagic figure? Please, like a crap, made-in-China piece of plastic was going to someday hold the secret of Hephaestus's greatest creation.
"This is bullshit," she states to no one in particular, as the giant robot goes tripping over a pile of twisted metal, long hands making a grab for Zoe and missing. And then she snaps into focus, because those are her friends in danger, and she didn't make these kind of life choices just to let them go to waste.
She takes off at a dead run, grabbing at her quiver of arrows until her fingers find one. "¡Puta, por favor!" she screams, notching it and letting it fly.
It dings the robot right in the side of the head, and it pauses for a second, unimpressed, before turning its head towards her with a long, rusted creak. There is nowhere to run but into the junkyard; the desert stretches on everywhere, a flat plateau of red dirt and sky, like the heavens sitting right on top of them.
"Yeah, that's right," Bianca goes, grinning at it. She fires another arrow, which strikes dead and true in the center of the robot's face, and then tumbles uselessly down its front. The robot's jaw works. "I'm the one stealing from you. Come and get me, moron!"
That does it. The robot swings around in a cumbersome way and starts across the junk heaps towards her, and she dives behind the nearest pile, slinging her bow back and slamming her hands down against the cracked earth. It rumbles under her palms, protesting, tired and sunsick and nothing like the dirt in Maine, and she hums back, encouraging. With a sigh, the dust stirs, and then two skeletons are sitting beside her, bleached like teeth from age and exposure and their dry forearms wrapped around their knees, both heads tilted towards her curiously.
She has a bad moment where it swamps up under her, the knowledge of what exactly she is: a daughter of Hades, the god of the Underworld and all things not fit for sunlight. But then it passes through her, because she wasn't raised to fear the dead.
"Help me," she whispers, and they nod eagerly with a sound like autumn leaves rustling. They scuttle to one side and she dives to the other, just as the robot's foot slams down right where they'd been sitting.
She dodges and weaves, trying to avoid getting smashed and taking inventory of where the others are: Zoe's on top of one of the piles, bow drawn taut, and Thalia's beside her, head thrown back and mouth slightly parted. There are storm clouds gathering on the horizon, lightning sparking between them in agitation, but it's too far off to help even as it draws closer, attracted to the gravity of metal.
"Bianca, duck!" And that's Percy, closest to her, sworn drawn and glowing a sea-foam green. She hits the ground instinctively, feeling it jar through her knees and rattle the arrows in her quiver, but it doesn't help. The robot has her, iron fingers closing around her in a fist.
It starts to lift her, grip tightening in triumph, when it just ... stops.
She flings her head skyward. There, right behind the eye sockets, are the two skeletons, hands at the controls. One of them waves at her, and the other pulls a lever.
The hand uncurls, and she drops to the earth for another jarring thud. Percy's there, hauling her up with a hand under the elbow, and she yanks him forward, yelping, "Run! It's gotta self-destruct."
It's like the demolition game she and Nico used to play back home at the casino: the thing collapses from the bottom up with a roar that almost turns their ears to static, it's so loud. The downburst knocks them off their feet, and then there's silence.
She lifts her head, red dust falling from her hair into her eyes. Across the junkyard, she sees Zoe already on her feet, turning in a wary half-circle. The sunlight catches on her tiara.
"What was that about?" Percy groans, pushing himself up onto his elbows. "We didn't take anything. It should have let us go."
With a flush of panic, she rolls onto her side, digging in her pocket. It's a cool kind of relief, curling her fingers around the Hades figure and pulling it out, letting it lie on her palm for Percy to see. He's confused for a second, before his eyes widen a fraction, and he looks back to where the dust cloud from the robot is still rising. "Those skeletons ..." he starts, fumbles his question, and falls silent again.
"It's for my brother," Bianca goes, and it seems like the most significant thing she's ever said.
With the same click she'd felt when she first used her half-blood powers, her last memory slides into place: the market in Arizona, the black pottery on tables, the women going by in fancy hats and beating the hot air with newspapers, and Hades on his knees, begging with her mother. Maria -- red flower braided into the end of her hair, embroidery climbing the neckline of her white tunic, palms stained black by clay, mother, -- putting her hands on his face and saying, "my love, my love, I cannot raise our children like that." She can almost feel the way the air crackled, tingling along her forearms, right before the explosion. Maria turned away to answer a customer's question, and everything flashed white-hot.
She remembers her father's arms, wrapped around her and Nico both. She remembers everything there is to remember until she woke up remembering nothing at all, arms full of a four-year-old and loving him the same way the maize grew in the mountains: no other reason than that's what it was made to do.
+
Chiron's in the middle of congratulating them on a job well done -- which seems woefully inadequate for what they just achieved, but what can you expect -- when she catches sight of a familiar figure in jeans an an orange shirt coming around the Big House at a dead run.
Thalia came back with her, Zoe's tiara glittering against her dark hair, and stands to her right. Percy and Annabeth are on her left, matching streaks of white framing their faces and exhaustion hemmed in grey around their eyes. She doesn't even think; she breaks rank, right in the middle of Chiron's sentence, and almost skids down the grassy slope to get to Nico.
She drops to her knees because he's just as small as he was when she left, and his shoulder catches her chin as he wraps his arms around her neck, but it doesn't matter. She hugs him back just as fierce.
He's talking fast, too loud and too close to her ear and none of it makes sense, and then he falls quiet. He just says, "mija," and she squeezes him so hard he squeaks.
"I shouldn't have let you go," he mumbles, and she pulls back in order to smooth his hair up off his forehead. He doesn't look any different than before, which surprises her, even though it shouldn't. It's only been a week: long enough for planets to shift and her timeline to grind to a halt, but not long enough to change her brother. There's a trace of sunburn on his nose, and the Camp shirt looks strange when she's so used to him in the ill-fitting uniform from that school.
She presses their noses together, rubbing him into an Eskimo kiss. "I'm proud of you, for letting me."
He smiles, allowing her that much, and abruptly decides that's enough affection. "Did you bring me anything?" he demands, stepping away.
She throws her head back, laughing. "It wasn't like I was on vacation, you twerp!" she exclaims, but she reaches into her pocket anyway.
She will remember the expression on his face when she hands him the Mythomagic Hades until the day she dies: the sun incarnadine over the Mexican mountains, the clay on her mother's hands, and Nico's face, joy in every part of him.
+
By moonrise, Percy has lost his gunshot look, eyes brightened and grin more genuine, and she takes a moment to admire how he does that: how he makes his heart invincible by force of will alone, breathes through the weight of the world and manages to make it home, and she means that in the metaphorical sense as much as she does the literal.
"Bianca," he goes, catching up to her by the lake. It's a bizarre moment, but she has the urge to tell him that she likes the way he says her name: not in a weird way, because hey, she did make a vow of celibacy, but more -- it's like he puts more syllables in her name than there are, like he has to think about it. And let's face it; the list of people who've said Bianca's name in her whole lifetime is woefully short. "Do you have a minute?"
"I'm quasi-immortal," she reminds him. "I have all the time in the world."
This is true, he shrugs with one shoulder, and steps up next to her. They're the same age, but she has to lift her chin a little to meet his eyes: she doesn't think he's noticed it yet. "Do you ..." he begins, and starts over. "With you and Thalia being Hunters, you do know that if I die ... if I don't make it to sixteen, then Nico becomes --"
"-- the prophecy kid," she finishes, eyeing him sidelong.
"I haven't told anyone else," he says quickly, and amends, "besides Annabeth. Your secret is safe with us."
She doubts it. Annabeth's a strategist, by blood and by birth -- there's no way she doesn't have a dozen contingency plans, not now that there are four children of the Big Three in the world. "I haven't told Nico yet. And with the Hunt, I might not be here when he gets claimed or when his powers awaken, whichever comes first, so --"
"I'll look after him," Percy promises, not even needing to be told.
"You could stay," interjects a third voice, and they're responding to the timbre of it before it's even really registered, turning around and bowing low, even as the virgin goddess Artemis steps from the treeline, glowing ethereal like moonlight even in the sunset.
"Lady?" Bianca goes, questioning.
"I do not lose Hunters often," the goddess says, which isn't an answer, of course, but the Olympians are never straightforward and she waits. "And Zoe has been my companion for almost a thousand years. What I am saying," she steps closer, barefoot and leaving no indents in the sand. "Bianca, I would understand, if you felt the need to stay here with the half-bloods, learn to be a warrior like them, and protect your brother." A grin flits across her child's face, sisterly and conspiratorial. "After all, I have a brother, too. They do need constant looking after."
Until seven days ago, Bianca has never been separated from her little brother. She remembers her mother, lying on her back with the baby sprawled out across her chest, lulling him to sleep with a hum, remembers the toddler who peed out in the courtyard because he could, the brother who ate tamales with her while skeletons danced in the streets in November, who woke up with her in Vegas and spent six years (six decades) beating every high score in the Lotus Hotel and sat beside her at the Hermes table earlier and spoke in halting Spanish.
"My lady," she says, not even hesitating. "The best way I can protect Nico is by learning the world. We are decades and countries away from everything we know -- until just a few days ago, I thought Roosevelt was still the president. We are lost. The more I learn, the safer he'll be." She weighs her next words, but lying to a goddess isn't something she can do. "My first loyalty will always be him --" maize in the mountains, doing what they were made to do. " -- but I stand by my oath to you as much as I did the day I made it."
Artemis inclines her head the smallest fraction, and say, "Bianca di Angelo, I have judged your heart well." And with that, she flits away, fast as a moonbeam.
"Man," goes Percy into the quiet. "I wish I could just up and give a speech like that. That was mad impressive."
The Hunters are gathering -- she can feel the stir of it deep in her breastbone, and she needs to go say good-bye (again.) It will be full dark soon, and the Hunt will ride.
-
fin
Translation notes:
No soy tu amigo, y yo penso tu madre huele como las albóndigas = I'm not your amigo, and I think your mother smells like meatballs
¡Puta, por favor! = bitch, please!
mija = daughter. however, in some of the indigenous groups in southern Mexico, "mija" was also used by brothers to describe their sisters, cousins to each other, and young men to their lovers, but it's kind of faded out of this use with our grandparents' generation. Most literally, the meaning meant by mija is, "my most important one."