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tsarisfanfiction · 3 months

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Lodged Thorn: Chapter 1

Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olympians Rating: Teen Genre: Friendship/Hurt/Comfort Characters: Clarisse, Michael, Chris Soulmarks weren't supposed to hurt when they came in. Then again, soulmarks weren't supposed to immediately start fading, either. So this is the fault of The Fanfic Reading Challenge server on discord, with all their talk about Soulmate AUs reminding me that I've never written one. Being me, of course, I've gone the Platonic Soulmate route, and I am still firmly in Michael&Clarisse brainrot, so the result was rather obvious... I don't think this'll be more than two or three chapters; it's just an experimental fic so I'll be working on it as and when my muses engage.

A sharp pain tore through Clarisse’s leg and she stumbled, falling to one knee and barely bracing her hand against the ground to stop herself from overbalancing entirely. “Shit,” she hissed, teeth clenching against the pain as she forced herself to breathe through it.

“Clarisse!” Chris fretted, instantly joining her on the ground. “What happened?” Around the two of them, armour creaked and weapons clattered as her siblings jumped into a defensive circle, no doubt searching for the threat.

She’d say she’d trained them well, except she knew they were all agitated at being held back from the war, their nerves on a hair-trigger for anything involving conflict. She was the same way, no matter that she was pressing down on it with all her might, because she was not jumping into this war, not leading her siblings to fight a war for their father when Ares had always made it clear that everyone should fight their own battles.

Ares would fight to defend his own throne. He did not need – would not want – his children to take that away from him.

It was a weak excuse and she knew it. All of her siblings knew it. She hadn’t even admitted it to anyone that wasn’t an Ares kid – or Chris, because Chris was her partner. The chariot, the argument with Michael (another one, because the short bastard never failed to get under her skin), had made a better excuse, or at least one she was willing to verbalise.

Another bolt of pain shot straight through her leg and she cursed again, hand clutching at the spot in her thigh that burned white hot and intense.

Darker hands covered hers, trying to nudge it out of the way.

“Let me see,” Chris pleaded. If it was anyone else, Clarisse would’ve shoved them away roughly, but it was Chris and while there was no reason for her leg to suddenly be in agony when they were within the bounds of camp, and as far as she could tell nothing was even trying to threaten them, she understood why he wanted to check.

“Sherman, take everyone on another perimeter check,” she ordered. “Make sure camp isn’t under attack.” Her brother grimaced as though it was his leg that hurt, but knew better than to protest. Within moments, he had their cabin dispersing into their patrol routes, leaving her alone with Chris.

Her boyfriend wouldn’t be taking no for an answer now that they had no audience, and Clarisse also wanted to know what the Hades was happening to her leg, so she let him help her tug her pants off until her thigh was visible.

Chris spotted it first, eyes going wide. “Uh… Clarisse?”

“What?” she snapped, moving her hands out of her line of sight until she could see- “Shit.”

Her thigh was uninjured, but not unmarked. Blooming over old scar tissue was the shape of a thorn – a rose thorn, her mind supplied uselessly, trivia picked up from her friendship with Silena.

“That’s your soulmark,” Chris said numbly. Clarisse kept her jaw clenched tightly against the pain.

Soulmarks were generally considered to be a sign from some higher power. Different religions had different views on what, exactly, caused them, and Camp Half-Blood was of the general opinion that they were the Fates’ responsibility. No-one had come up with a pattern in when they appeared, and people tended to only have one, an image that somehow linked two people together on a soul level, hence soulmark. Soulmates were not romantic – not that it was unheard of for a soulmated pair to choose to be romantically involved, although it wasn’t overly common, either. Instead, soulmates were platonic first and foremost. Maybe a best friend, sometimes a sibling (often the case, at camp, where sibling was a broad category that encompassed so many people), always a constant.

Soulmarks were not supposed to hurt like Tartarus when they formed. Clarisse had seen enough campers gain them over the years to know that it was a painless affair, often not even noticed until someone happened to spot the new mark on skin.

“What the fuck,” Clarisse growled at the new image on her thigh, and not just because of the pain that wasn’t supposed to be there. The mark had formed over one of her scars, exactly over the old mark she’d got when she was nine and the new kid at camp had shot her. Deliberately. There was no way it was a coincidence, not when the thorn was golden and she’d always thought of the asshole as a thorn in her side.

Her soulmate was Michael and the Fates were assholes for it.

Trust Michael to still find a way to be a pain even when he was away, fighting a war in Manhattan.

“That bastard,” she snarled. “That absolute…”

Going on a tirade about him at least distracted her from the pain, if nothing else. Clarisse tore her eyes away from the offending image as she did so, spitting profanities to the sky and balling her hands up into fists. She hoped his mark coming in had hurt just as much.

“Clarisse.”

Chris’ quiet voice cut her off. He sounded wrong, looked wrong, skin paling.

“What?” she demanded, barely softening her voice because she was angry, dammit. Why- how- was it Michael?

Her boyfriend’s next words felt like a bucket of ice water had been tipped over her. “It’s fading.”

His voice shook, and Clarisse didn’t miss how his hand came up to grip at his shoulder, where she knew a faint silvery-grey outline of a feather hid under his clothes.

Chris hadn’t had his soulmark when he’d gone to join Kronos. When Clarisse had hauled him, insane and insensate, out of the Labyrinth two years later, it was already faded.

It took longer for her to look back down at the damn thorn on her thigh, but when she did, she could see that Chris was right. The golden colour was leaching away in a gradient. Already, the sharp tip of the thorn had gone the tell-tale silvery-grey.

Michael was her soulmate.

Michael was dying.

She’d told him she hoped he died, a parting shot even after he gave up the damn chariot and proceeded to call her as many names as she’d had in store for him. They weren’t strangers to death – even before this last stand at Manhattan, demigods had been dying. She’d known exactly what she’d been hoping for – or had thought she had, back when she was ignorant about their soulmate deal.

Clarisse didn’t want to care, even now. Finding out he was her soulmate didn’t make her suddenly like him, or even hate him any less. He was still an asshole and maybe she’d do better without him.

“Clarisse,” Chris said quietly. His dark eyes were still locked on her soulmark, and his hand was shaking against his shoulder.

Her name had been Mary, he’d told her, once he was sane again. That had eased the sting of when he’d called her Mary, not Clarisse, while in the throes of insanity. He hadn’t known her long, but she’d been his soulmate and her death had been part of what broke him.

“He’s in Manhattan,” she protested. “There’s no way-” Even if she could make it in time, before her mark faded, leaving the gold nothing but a brief memory, she wasn’t a healer. She wouldn’t be able to save his life.

Chris’ voice still trembled. “You have to try,” he said, insisted. “Even if it’s not enough, you- you have to try. Don’t- No regrets. No regrets, Clarisse.”

Clarisse wanted to say she wouldn’t regret not going. She wouldn’t regret leaving Michael to his clearly inevitable fate. If anyone else had told her she would, she’d have punted them out of her sight.

But this was Chris. Chris, who knew regret. Who knew how it felt to lose a soulmate, who knew things in a way she couldn’t.

Who didn’t want to even risk her feeling the same way he did.

“I’ll be too late,” she said, but she was already pulling herself to her feet again, tugging her pants back up and grabbing her spear from where she had dropped it when the pain began.

It still hurt, but it was a pain she could push aside, a pain that let itself be pushed aside.

Part of Clarisse wondered if painful soulmark appearances tied in to the imminent deaths of the soulmate, revealed too soon if only for closure.

She didn’t bother to grab her armour. The thought that she should barely occurred to her; she had her spear, she could fight.

She was only going because Michael was a bastard who she suddenly needed to try and make sure didn’t die. She wasn’t going to join the war.

It was a matter of minutes before she had the pegasi harnessed to the flying chariot and ready to go, and Clarisse didn’t let herself hesitate as she swung herself up into it. Chris jumped up behind her without asking, without her asking, but Clarisse didn’t protest.

“Where are you going?” Ellis was quiet but observant; Clarisse hadn’t noticed the younger boy until he called out. If it was Sherman, she might have told him the truth, but Ellis was too young – and too smart – to hear about a dying soulmate.

“Patrol,” she said shortly. “Tell Sherman he’s in charge until we get back.”

“What about your leg?”

“Don’t worry about it.”

Clarisse snapped the reigns and the pegasi leaped into action, charging forwards and into the sky before Ellis could make any more complaints – or astute observations.

“You could’ve told him,” Chris murmured in her ear, his arms wrapped around her waist as they flew.

She shook her head. “They need to stay here,” she said. They needed to stay in camp, guarding camp from any side-blows Kronos might get it into his head to initiate, and also away from the front line of a war that would get them killed as shields for the rest of the campers. If they realised she was running to the war front, regardless of the reason, they’d have used that as an excuse to jump into battle.

Pressed against her back, with only clothes and no armour between them, Clarisse could feel him still shaking. “You didn’t have to come,” she said.

“Yes, I did,” he argued. “You’ll need me, whatever happens.” Even above the wind rushing past them, she could hear him take in a deep breath, “and I think… I need this. He’s not Mary, he’s not mine, but… I have to try, this time.”

“Her death wasn’t your fault,” Clarisse said bluntly, and not for the first time. Chris’ usual response of I know that, but… didn’t come.

“And if Michael dies, it won’t be your fault,” he told her instead, and Clarisse felt like the air had been punched out of her as her leg gave a reminding throb.

“I know that,” she said quickly – too quickly, dammit. “He’s too far away.” She couldn’t even see her soulmark to check how quickly it was fading, but it was still hurting so that had to mean he was still alive, didn’t it? “This is as fast as the chariot goes.” They were hurtling through the sky, far faster than mortal transportation could cross the distance between camp and Manhattan, but it was still going to take time to get there.

The odds of Michael being still alive, or even still saveable, by the time they arrived were slim and there was nothing she could do about it. She knew that, of course it wouldn’t be her fault for not getting there fast enough – and besides, she’d already told Michael to die, prepared to not see his scowling, ferrety asshole face again.

She’d told him to die, though, and now he was dying, and it was stupid but there was part of Clarisse’s chest that was getting too tight. Shit.

Chris’ “I know you do,” was full of understanding.

Their flight passed in silence after that, Clarisse pushing the pegasi as fast as they could fly and ignoring Silena’s voice in the back of her head telling her that she was going too hard on the creatures. Instead, she found her head whirling, running through all her moments with Michael throughout her life and trying to work out where the fuck the Fates saw soulmate in there, because Clarisse couldn’t.

Maybe she had misinterpreted the soulmark. That wasn’t common but could happen; the only confirmation was a matching image on the other’s skin, and until she saw Michael she wouldn’t know – and if his was also on his thigh, she wasn’t going to be seeing that ever, unless she tore his pants off to check. Misinterpretation seemed more likely than it actually being Michael, now that she thought about it, but she was already on a mission, and Chris wouldn’t let her bail out of it without checking.

Hades, but Michael was going to be insufferable if he was perfectly fine and she landed in front of him without even bringing her armour to a war.

Eventually, Manhattan loomed in front of them. It was big, big enough that looking for a single demigod would be like searching for a needle in a haystack. From her birds’ eye view, nothing seemed to be even moving, leaving the city looking dead.

The bridges she flew over bore signs of battle, though. Vines curled out of a tunnel, and chunks of masonry were dislodged in a way that only violence could cause. Where was everyone?

She almost flew in straight towards the towering Empire State Building – if nothing else, they would be near Olympus – but a small instinct in the back of her mind had her veering around the city, following the waters that isolated the island from the rest of New York. Past the Hudson, and over the East River instead.

Williamsburg Bridge was obliterated. What had once been a large, proud bridge was a mass of steel and concrete churned up together in the middle of the river, with only solitary suspension cables still bridging the destruction.

Behind her, Chris breathed out Hades.

Demigods had died here. There was no way they hadn’t. She could even see bodies in the wreckage and surrounding river, although none of them wore orange. Enemy demigods, then.

There was no sign of the living, but Clarisse still brought the chariot down, skimming the bizarrely clean waters – what had Jackson done, that had to be the son of Poseidon’s bullshit powers at work – past floating debris and bodies, until she saw it.

There, on the bank, sopping wet and broken, was a too-small body that had her thigh hurting again, and Clarisse wasted no time in bringing the chariot to land next to it, leaping out before the pegasi had even stopped and leaving Chris to scramble out behind her.

Michael looked dead.

Blood covered the side of his face, an open gash running from temple to cheek and barely missing his eye. His body was twisted and contorted in a way that was wrong, no doubt several broken bones. A spindle of metal erupted from his torso, staining the torn orange top dark red.

Worst of all was the certainty. From the moment she'd spotted him, she'd known he was her soulmate, no need to tear at his pant leg to hunt down a matching mark.

“Shit,” she swore, stumbling down to her knees for the second time since dawn because of Michael, of all people. He was still partially in the water and her shins soaked immediately. “Shit. Don't you dare be dead, you asshole.” Her fingers fumbled at his throat, hunting for a pulse. “Don't you fucking dare, Michael.” Blood and damp skin made it difficult to get a purchase, and Clarisse realised she was shaking as her fingers kept slipping away from his pulse points with no success. “Come on, dammit.” She couldn’t even see if he was breathing.

“Clarisse, he's got a pulse,” Chris said suddenly. She jumped, not having noticed him kneeling next to her. He had one of Michael’s wrists in his grip, and Clarisse tried not to think about how lifeless his limp and dangling hand looked. “There's still a chance.”

A chance, but… “I don't know what to do,” she admitted. She wasn’t a healer - she broke things, she didn't fix them.

“Check if he’s breathing,” Chris directed. He sounded calmer, now, as though Michael being not dead yet was the trigger he needed to get out of his own soulmate trauma. Clarisse heard him rustling with a bag she hadn’t realised he’d brought with them, but focused on doing as she was told, dredging up memories of various Apollo kids over the years as they drilled basic first aid into the rest of the campers over and over again.

It was the closest she’d ever got to Michael without one of them trying to hurt the other, either physically or with barbed words, but she shunted the thought out her mind in favour of leaning over him, her cheek almost touching his lips as she squinted down the wonky line of his body. He wasn’t flat on his back, which meant that she couldn’t really see if his chest was rising and falling, and with the metal spire sticking out of him, she wasn’t about to move him, but she could still focus on her cheek, and the faint tickling sensation of air puffing against it.

“He’s breathing,” she reported, pulling back without taking her eyes off his limp body. It seemed impossible that he was still alive. Clarisse had the horrid suspicion that one wrong action would tip him over the edge, and feared being the one to do it.

Only a few hours ago, she wouldn’t have cared. She still hated Michael; a single soulmark wasn’t enough to undo seven years of constant clashes.

She didn’t want him to die.

“Good,” Chris said. “Here.” She sensed movement in her periphery and glanced over to see her boyfriend holding out a vial of nectar. “I don’t know how much he’s got in his system already so go slow with it. You know the signs of reaching the limit.”

Clarisse took the vial, pulling out the stopper with her teeth. “You are never living this down, you hear me?” she told the unresponsive Michael as she slipped a hand underneath his head, her fingers getting tangled in snarled, wet hair, and slowly tilted it enough to straighten out his throat and part his lips. He didn’t stir, no indication at all that he was anything other than dying, and Clarisse tipped the first drops into his open mouth.

In her periphery, Chris was moving around, flashes of off-white bandages flickering across the edge of her vision, but Clarisse didn’t let herself look away from the golden liquid as drop by drop, it landed on Michael’s tongue and slid towards his throat.

“Come on,” she growled as the first third of the vial disappeared with no visible effects. “Show some signs of life, dammit. This stuff is too valuable to waste on a dead body.”

Michael didn’t stir, even as a third turned into a half, and then two thirds. A golden drop landed on the corner of his mouth, trickling down the outside of his face and she growled at it – at her hand, which had started shaking, until it steadied enough for the rest of the vial to trickle inside his mouth, where it was supposed to be.

He must not have had any godly food earlier, because even with an entire vial – and not a small one, either – there were no tell-tale signs of smouldering lips or tongue. Clarisse dropped the empty vial and before her brain could catch up with her actions, caught the single drop now on his cheek with a finger, dabbing it directly on his tongue.

“Come on, you bastard,” she hissed. “You are not dying on me now.”

She hunted for his pulse again, this time finding the spot on his neck that throbbed lightly.

“Is he still breathing?” Chris asked her. She glanced at him to see that he’d packed bandages around the metal sticking though Michael and was securing them in place with more bandages.

When she ducked her head back down, the puffs of air that hit her cheek felt stronger.

“Still breathing,” she confirmed. “What now?”

“We can’t stay here,” Chris said. “We don’t have the supplies to do any more where we are.”

Clarisse sat back on her haunches and looked at the still-crumpled body between them. “Can we move him?” she asked, although Chris was right. They couldn’t stay where they were. They didn’t know where the titan’s army or the rest of the campers were, or where the next stage of the battle would take place.

Hades, they didn’t even know which side of the battlelines they were. She had an awful suspicion they weren’t in allied territory.

If they were, someone else would’ve come across them by now. Michael wasn’t popular outside of his cabin – Clarisse wasn’t the only one that didn’t like him, which had made all the head counsellors siding with him over her about the chariot hurt even more – but even if no-one else had bothered, the other Apollo kids would still have come to try and help him, if they could.

“Carefully,” Chris stressed. “I’ll bring the chariot closer.”

He stepped away and Clarisse’s attention snapped back to Michael. He still looked pale, underneath the blood. Chris had only bound the impalement, leaving the rest of his wounds untouched, and Clarisse grabbed for the bag, needing something do to while her boyfriend wrangled the pegasi. She’d rather be the one dealing with the chariot, but given Michael was her soulmate, she knew why Chris had swapped roles.

“You are still a bastard,” she told Michael as she wrenched out a cloth and pressed it against the blood on his face. She didn’t have any water to dampen it (the East River might look clean, but she still wasn’t going to trust it) and there was only so much it could do to lift the blood dry, but even clearing some of it away made Michael seem less dead.

She haphazardly covered the gash in gauze and medical tape, a temporary solution until they got back to camp – they had to go back to camp, her cabin were waiting, and even if they found the Apollo kids in Manhattan, there was no guarantee of a safe place to leave a half-dead demigod. Camp was further, but was more likely to keep Michael alive.

Hooves sank into the soft bank next to her, passing by until the open end of the chariot sat next to Michael, and Chris reappeared.

“One of us will need to hold him,” he pointed out. “You or me?”

The chariot was Clarisse’s. “I’ll drive,” she said.

There was also no fucking way she was holding onto Michael for the hour it would take them to get back to camp. Soulmate or not, that was too far.

Chris agreed easily. “Help me lift him up?” he asked, crouching down next to him and gingerly starting to move him. Clarisse knelt on Michael’s other side, painfully aware of how small and fragile he was as, between them, they manoeuvred him onto his back. The metal spur shifted slightly, red starting to bloom on the white bandages surrounding it, and she cursed.

There was nothing they could do about it, though, and Chris scooped him up into his arms as soon as he could. Michael’s head lolled limply, and his right arm slipped to dangle down as Chris stood up. Clarisse grabbed it without thinking, and was halfway to setting it back on Michael’s chest when she saw it.

On the pad of Michael’s pointer finger, the same colour as freshly spilled blood, was a thorn, the exact size and shape as the golden thorn on her thigh.

It hadn’t occurred to her that Michael’s soulmark would be somewhere else on his body, for all that it was hardly uncommon for placements to be different. Now she saw it, though, it was obvious. Her mark was where the arrow had landed, seven years ago. His mark was on one of the fingers that had fired it.

“Clarisse?”

Hurriedly, she let go of the arm, and stepped out of the way so that Chris could step into the chariot. He sat down at the front, his grip on Michael obviously firm, and Clarisse wasted no time in hopping in after him, snatching up the reins and bracing herself for take-off.

Chris and Michael didn’t quite slam into her legs as the pegasi lurched forwards, but she still felt the touch as gravity tried to stake its claim on them, and braced harder. It was easier to be the barrier than the cradle. Still, she kept the acceleration gradual, not letting the pegasi immediately blast into top speed as they flew away from Manhattan and the war – or what seemed more like a temporary cease-fire, from the utter stillness of the city beneath them.

It meant that the flight took longer, and Clarisse couldn’t help the periodic glances down at her boyfriend holding Michael – her soulmate and that still felt as wrong as it did right – hoping that they’d made the right decision to move. That she’d made the right decision to head for camp and the infirmary there rather than hunting down the temporary triage the Apollo kids had no doubt set up somewhere.

Somehow, Michael was still alive when the chariot touched down by the Big House over an hour later, and Clarisse jumped out of the way so Chris could hurry inside the infirmary with him. She didn’t follow him immediately, buying herself some time to think as she unhitched the pegasi and led them back to their stables.

The thinking time flew straight out the window as she reached the stables to see that all the horses had gone. There should’ve been several of them there, but not a single one remained. All of their tack had gone, too, and an encroaching feeling of dread had her running to where the chariots were kept.

Gone.

All gone.

“Sherman!” she roared, abandoning the stables and throwing herself towards her cabin, already knowing it would be empty but hoping that her siblings hadn’t surrendered to the urge to go to war and marched out without her – behind her back.

Unsurprisingly, it was deserted. All their weapons were gone, and their armour, too.

Clarisse’s armour was also gone.

What the fuck? Why had they taken her armour with them?

Why hadn’t she seen them go? She’d flown right over the route they must’ve taken-

Except she hadn’t been looking down. Not at the ground. Her attention had been ahead, at her destination, and at her feet, where Michael’s blood had been slowly staining white bandages red, and sinking into Chris’ clothes, too. Her pants hadn’t escaped, either.

Blood on her pants didn’t matter. What mattered was that her siblings had marched to war despite her best efforts to stop them. Clarisse spun sharply on her heel and stormed out of the cabin, heading straight for the infirmary.

Michael or no Michael, soulmate or no soulmate, she knew where she was supposed to be and it was at the head of her cabin.

“They’ve gone!” she raged as she stormed into the infirmary. “All the chariots, all our weapons. Sherwin’s marched them to war!”

Chris’ head jerked up from where he was standing over one of the infirmary beds. Clarisse deliberately didn’t look at the small body laying on it.

“I’m going after them,” she said, before her boyfriend could say anything. “You-”

“Okay,” Chris interrupted her. “Okay, but before you go, I need your help here.”

“I don’t have time to waste!” she argued. “They could have left immediately-”

“The pegasi need a rest,” he overrode her. “You can’t go charging back out there after pushing them so hard already today. Let them breathe. They’re still faster than the other chariots – you’ll make up most of the time even if you hang on another five minutes, and I need your help here. Now.”

It was the sharp now that caught her attention, and she reluctantly trudged closer, unable to help looking at Michael as she did so. The metal was still sticking up out of him ominously, and the surrounding bandages looked close to saturation. Chris had somehow stripped Michael down to the waist despite it, and Clarisse could finally see the rise and fall of his chest as he breathed.

The sight settled something in her, although it barely touched the agitation at her missing siblings. He was still alive.

Her soulmate was still alive.

Her soulmate or her siblings?

Clarisse scowled. “Five minutes only,” she said, glaring at Michael. It was his fault she was delaying, still a thorn in her side even when he was unconscious. “What is it?”

“This needs to come out,” Chris said, gesturing at the metal. It glistened in the light of the infirmary, beads of blood pooling in its twists. “I need you to put as much pressure as you can on the bandages while I extract it.”

“Fine,” Clarisse said shortly, crossing the last few steps to Michael’s bedside. The blood-soaked bandages felt wrong under her fingers, and so did the idea of leaning on the wound with all her strength, but she knew Chris was right.

The metal had to come out, and Michael had to not bleed out in the process.

She braced herself, pushing down hard enough that a split-second choked cry came from the unconscious teen’s mouth, making her jump. The unconscious weren’t supposed to make noises, although she thought it was supposed to be a good sign that he was responding to some stimuli again.

Chris ignored the noise. He’d pulled on gloves, and wrapped his hands firmly around the metal. “On three,” he said. “One… Two… Three.” On three, he pulled, and Clarisse had to fight to keep Michael’s body flat against the bed, and at least some of his blood still in his body as the twisted spire of metal slowly tore itself free.

Michael let out another cry and his fingers jerked, but a glance at his face showed that he was still completely unconscious. Clarisse scowled and pressed down harder as blood started to leak through the bandages.

As soon as the metal was clear, Chris was working around her hands, flushing out the wound and starting to stitch it up. Clarisse could do nothing except stay still and will Michael’s blood to stay in his body, where it was supposed to be.

It was much longer than five minutes before Chris was done, pulling away the last of the blood-soaked bandages and covering the stitched-up wound with fresh supplies.

“He was lucky,” he said as he stripped the bloodied gloves from his hands. “It didn’t go all the way through, and it was far enough away from his core that it didn’t puncture anything fatal.” He sagged against the bed. “I’m not an Apollo kid, but I think he should pull through.”

Clarisse hadn’t realised how much she needed to hear those words until they washed over her.

Fuck Michael for being her soulmate and suddenly being important to her. Maybe he was tolerable while unconscious and near-death, but as soon as he was awake and talking again, she was going to remember why she hated him so much, she knew. He was going to be insufferable about being her soulmate and she was going to wish she’d left him to die.

“I’ll stay here and keep an eye on him,” Chris continued. “Are you still going after your cabin?” That was a stupid question she knew he already knew the answer to.

“Those idiots need me,” she said, “and I’m going to kick their asses for entering the war!”

“Okay,” he accepted. “Be careful, and if I see even a hint of grey on Michael’s finger, I’m going to kill you, even if I have to bring you back from the Underworld first.”

Clarisse glanced down at the finger in question. The thorn was still full of colour, unapologetically red and confirming that Clarisse, at least, was in no imminent danger of death where she stood. She found herself wishing that her own mark was somewhere easier to check, before pushing the thought out of her mind.

She was going to war. She did not need distractions.

“You won’t have to,” she swore. He gave her a thin smile and stood up, bracing his hands on her shoulders.

“Give them hell,” he said. “Then come back.” He kissed her, briefly but firmly. “We’ll be waiting.”

She glanced back over at Michael instinctively; he looked better without metal sticking out of him, but he still didn’t look well. Her feet dragged her over to his side and she looked down at him, crossing her arms.

“Don’t you fucking dare die on me now, Michael,” she said. “I need your ass alive so I can kick it later for being my soulmate.” And scaring me when you’re not supposed to be someone I care about.

Chris chuckled. “I’ll do my best to make sure he doesn’t,” he promised. “Shoo. You’ve got a war to fight.”

“Damn straight I do,” she growled, and with one last glance at both of them, boyfriend and soulmate (both safely away from the war and staying that way), she spun on her heel and marched out.

It was time for the daughter of war to fight.

tbc...

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