Kayla will never tell her older brother in a million billion years. Plus one extra.
But she knows more about Lee Fletcher than he does.
It is not something she did on purpose. Nor is it information she necessarily wants, she most certainly did not ask for it. Nor is it information she will offer.
She will not tell him that she knows the crumple of Lee’s face when he tells a lie. She will not tell him she knows the stark pain in his shoulders at the end of the day. She will not tell him she knows the grooved scars on the palms of his hands from bitten-sharp nails. She will not tell him she knows the sounds of his quiet, pillow-muffled sobs as well as or better than she knows the sound of her father’s voice.
Instead she will watch him. And she will meet Lee’s tired eyes. And she will nod to him, and he will nod back, and they will both look at Will, exhaling.
The first time she sees him she is hallucinating.
Genuinely. Medically diagnosed and everything.
“Kayla,” Will whispers, and there is a strain in his voice, as there always is when one of them is sick. “Kayla, dolly, the cloth needs to stay on your head.”
“Cold,” she sobs, “please, Will, I’m so cold.” Dolly. Dolly. He calls her dolly when she’s crying, when the tips of her fingers are bleeding and her knees are scraped raw and she screams if he gets too close to her. “‘M so —”
Her teeth clack hard together so hard her mouth glues shut. And the ice in her finger and toenails fires up her veins and pricks through all of her capillaries, turning her solid, and it burns, and it aches, and she bawls enough that acid burns up her throat and dribbles down her chin, down her shirt, in her bed. And over the heart pounding in her ears she hears her older brother exhale a soft little broken moan and choke it back just as fast and his always-warm hands brush over her cheeks, and she groans and squirms away from it and cries harder, and he whispers “Hold on, dolly, the fever’s almost broken, I can feel it,” and she opens her eyes and he is there, hair longer, hair neater, lab coat starched and collar covered in old Star Wars stickers, bulky glasses barely clinging to his face, tears soaking his long, angular face.
And Kayla squints, and the freezing ice recedes ever so slightly, sparking just under her skin, and she tilts her head, and she stares at him, at his freckle-free face, and whispers, “…Will?”
And he squeezes his eyes tighter and begs, “One more time, kiddo, I’m so sorry. One more time. I can’t help you if I can’t touch you. Pull back the light, baby, I can’t see, you have to control it just a little more. Just enough so it doesn’t burn. Please.”
And she squints again and Will-not-Will wavers, and the infirmary lights blink off his tears, off the lens of his glasses, and the. she squints again and the lights are dimmer, and the lab coat is gone, and his hair is frizzier.
“What,” she croaks, and Will pats her hair, and his hands are rough like she’s used to, and his round face is wet, and his scrubs are barf-stained, again, and he is smiling, tears dripping into his mouth, bright blue eyes clear, and he laughs and touches his forehead to hers.
“One-oh-one,” he whispers, shoulders shaking. “You’re safe, dolly. Your brain is out of the oven. Gods. Holy shit. Holy shit, Holy God, Holy Hera.” And he starts to pray.
She exhales hard, exhales, and forgets about it.
The next time her brain is not cooking hard enough her proteins are denaturing.
The next time she is sleep deprived, which does not help her determine reality.
She is lucid enough to notice the change, though.
She should not be awake. This much she knows. Will had sent her to bed hours ago, a half-hour after Austin and a full hour after the kids — as is her right; she is a full 13 years old — and she went, not without grumbling. And she meant to sleep. She usually does. But the moon was bright, and unusually warm. And the fairy lights twinkled with twice as much laughter than usual. And the audiobook her daddy sent her was just so enticing, just so flowery and beautiful, and as she listened to the gravel-low voice of the woman narrating and stared out the window she could see it playing out, plain as day, over the silver-washed hill of Thalia’s tree and the gentle giggling of the Atlantic waves.
She’s not supposed to be up late enough to watch Will creep in.
But she is, and that’s that. She hears the creak of the rickety screen door, slow like he’s trying to keep it quiet, and holds her breath, careful to make all her muscles react to keep her from being seen. The cabin is big but not that big and she sees him quickly, out of the corner of her half-closed eyes, tiptoe careful across the wooden floorboards, hopping over the noisiest ones, resting at the side of each of their beds and waiting, watching at the ends of them, shoulders dropping, eyes blackened and eyebags heavy. After a moment at each he reaches out his burned hands, resting gently on her siblings’ foreheads, and closes his eyes, exhaling, letting the fiery warmth from his palms spread slowly through their veins, wrapping strands of sunlight neatly around them like spider silk. As it recedes he sighs, in exhaustion or relief, and holds his hand, for a second, breathing in, breathing out, and moving on.
She has relaxed her breathing by then. She is thirteen years old and remembers every day of it; knows how to twitch her muscles and murmur in gentle sleepiness, knows how to breathe til her heart goes slow and flicker her eyelids so her face shows its dreaming. Daddy checks on her too, when she’s home, and she likes to stay up for him, likes to wait, likes to savour the feel of his string-callused fingertips and soft cool palms.
“I know you’re not sleeping, you little twerp.“
He flickers again — she sees it this time — and the heat of his hands fade a bit. His face gets a little longer, chin a little pointier, and the wild curls around his head mellow into something wavier, something gentler and more tamed. The glasses balancing on his wide nose are unbelievably thick, thicker than Julia’s whose prescription is a joke, and make his blue eyes look buggy, beetle-shaped. He’s got half as many freckles but that could be the moonlight. His smile is the same.
“I know what REM feels like, you know.”
She says nothing and keeps breathing. He sighs. He strokes a thumb against her forehead and it is familiar, and she knows, immediately then, that it is her brother who strokes her, who guards the foot of her bed.
“I’m gonna go get ready for bed. If you’re not asleep by then I’m gonna smother you, ya pain in the ass.”
He pulls away and she watches, follows the thwack of his falling-apart Converse, the rise of his gentle humming. He pulls tiny bathroom’s door shut and the humming swells along with the fireflies, echoing soft and melodic in the kind-of-big cabin, and she means to stay awake, really. She wants to watch him transform again, wants to watch his shoulders grow back and his spine stretch straighter. Wants to see the familiar roundness of his cheeks.
But his voice is so beautiful, and the scrape of his toothbrush is as rhythmic as ever, and the moon is so high in the sky. Her audiobook fades to silence as she slips away, warmed, into the cradle of her bed.
The third time she sees him there is no excuse.
It is the dead middle of summer and he is exhausted. The camp swells with the sum of them all, with the drum of running footsteps and crashing swords and crowing laughter. Her brother lives in the infirmary, practically; no matter how many times he is dragged out he keeps sneaking back, keeps slipping out of his friends’ sight and falling right back into his scrubs, hair pulled back.
“You are not supposed to be here,” Kayla says crossly. “Your shifts are done for the week.”
He smiles guiltily and the change is immediate. The slant of his shoulders is identical, the curve of his grin is unchanged, but the glossiness of his eyes fades away, and the strange ghost of her brother takes full shape. He is different, in the clear sunlight. A familiar stranger. He grins at her widely and turns on his heel, strolling to the mortal medicine cabinet.
“And who died and made you head honcho, Sunshine?” She blinks in surprise, glancing down at her hands. That is a new one. Sunshine.“It’s the busy season. I’m only keeping up with demand.”
“You’re gonna wear yourself right out,” she hears herself say. “Right out, and then what?”
“And then the sun will keep shining,” her brother says. “Besides, you’ll be taking over in no time. You’re already better than me, squirt.”
It’s an odd thing to say — she isn’t. By virtue of her parentage she can heal, and she can sing the hymns. But her strength is in her bow and her violin; her strings, not the stretch of bandages or shine of the suture. Will knows it. This brother, though, the one who stands in his place, is not speaking to her.
“‘Course. You know anyone else who can drag an errant soul right back into a body?”
Yes. She’s seen Will do it on more than one occasion, on more than one justification. She’s seen how it makes Chiron’s lips tighten and the atmosphere go dark. There is healing, and then there is blasphemy and challenge. Will walks the line like no one has since Zeus struck the challenger clean off the Earth.
This brother is not talking to her.
“Am I really going to take over, Lee?”
She says it carefully, because she isn’t sure. There are no pictures and Will tells no stories. But she hears whispers, sometimes, from the scattered few who knew them both, who watch Will corral the lot of them to breakfast or take the reigns of the chariot or calm hysterics with a touch, who whisper: “Sometimes I look at him and it’s like seeing a ghost.”
Her brother smiles a wide thing at her. It is as soft as she remembers. “Course, baby. No doubt in my mind.”
The fourth time she sees Lee Fletcher, she makes him come.
She waits very carefully. He comes when Will’s tired, she hypothizes. When his own strength won’t stand. So she waits, for the second wave of camp flu, for his lead on the climbing wall, for the rare nights when Gracie gets cranky and homesick and stomps around the cabin, throwing things and yelling. She waits for the look in his eyes, for the glassiness to smooth into something soft and reverent, something timeless.
It does not come when she expects.
The fourth time they are sitting together. Or, Will is sitting, legs tucked under him on the side bench, and Kayla stands, breathing careful, arms pulling elastic taut.
Her third missed shot, he is behind her.
“Relax you jaw,” he suggests. “Your tension is throwing you off. Let yourself hit the edge — it’s a new challenge, kid. No need for a bullseye.”
“I always get a bullseye,” she argues.
Lee smiles. His eyes are different, she realizes. They’re — constant. Blue. Like hydrangeas.
Will’s change with the sky.
“Bullseyes are a process.” He puts a steady hand on her elbow, tilting it slightly. “You gotta aim for the bigger picture before you focus on the details. The bullseye will come. Start with hitting the target.”
She huffs, scowling, but he’s right, and on her fourth shot the arrow lodges, just on the edge of the compacted wood.
Lee cheers. That, she sees clear as day, is identical, from the strain of his arms to the crow of his whooping laughter. He even does the same clumsy, dorky dance that sends him sprawling.
Kayla smiles past the lump in her throat.
The fifth, sixth, and seventh times pass without her counting, as does everyone one beyond. They happen in stretches and in the blink of an eye — the shapes of his mouth when he yawns, the drawl of his fed-up sarcasm. The weight of his elbow on the top of her head, grinning as she shoves him off, the shake of his deep, bone-rooted sigh when he thinks she’s asleep and his entire body strains, curled up under his favourite quilt. The weight of his ‘v’ in I love you.
She almost stops looking.
“What did he look like?” she blurts, one evening when he takes them to the beach. The rest of them are up ahead, Austin chasing the younger ones up the muddy sand.
Will freezes, just barely, then walks on with a forced lightness, swinging his loose arms between them.
“Who?” he asks, voice light.
Kayla gnaws the inside of her cheek.
“I had four, at one point.”
He says it quiet like he does at the campfire, when it’s only the older kids left but she’s managed to stick around, holding her breath so they won’t notice and send her away. When Will lies back on a log and matches his breathing to the flames, eyes unseeing, and Annabeth watches him carefully and whispers, “Play us something, Will.” And he picks up the guitar he keeps dusty under his bed and sings something soft like there’s no hardness left inside him. No bowstring.
“When he laughed, you could hear it across camp,” he says quietly.
Kayla had not specified which brother but he knows anyway, had been waiting for her ask, and she strains to hear, now, leans in over the turn of the waves and shifts of the sands and strives for every note, every chord of his voice. “He invented a full name for me so he could holler it when I got in trouble. William Andrew.”
“I didn’t know he made that up.”
A ghost of a smile turns Will’s lips. “Yeah, it stuck real good. Even Chiron forgets I wasn’t born with it, actually. He yells it, too.”
He tilts his heart to the sky and stares at the clouds, exhaling, hands still by his sides.
“I was his favourite,” he says finally. “He wasn’t supposed to have anybody, but he loved me. He watched me real careful. He was —” he swallows — “I loved my brother, you know. To the sun and beyond it.”
He stops, turning to the waves. She lets him and watches his back, watches the shape of his scapulae under his camp shirt.
“I wish I still had him.”
The air shifts beside him, then. She sees Lee next to him, this time, not in place of him, with a broad hand on his shaking shoulder, a tanned forehead pressed to his temple. He turns to her, when Will breathes normally again, and winks, blinking back away as the clouds move from the sun.
“I think he’d be real proud of you.”
Kayla hesitates. “I mean — yeah. You’re like him, you know? You stand like he does.”
Will is smiling, softly, eyes red.
“I’ll have to show you a picture of him, sometime.”
“Yeah.” Kayla smiles, exhaling deeply. “Yeah, I’d like to see him.”
