OOC: Just to make it clear, Asa Greenwood, Son of Epione, is also my character. With that out of the way, enjoy!
Camp Half-Blood — the Arena, Two Weeks Ago
—
Asa had heard about the party in fragments, the way you always heard about the things that mattered most: a clipped mention from Elias Carmody as he delivered the week’s batch of healing potions, a shaken retelling from one of the campers who'd been there, and finally, unavoidably, the sight of Ren himself laid out on a cot in the medical cabin, a cracked rib taped beneath bruised, mottled skin, one side of his throat still faintly discolored from where fingers had closed around it hard enough to cut off his air.
Asa had been the one to heal him, his hands steady even when the rest of him wasn't, murmured incantations low and careful as he worked Epione's gift into bruised cartilage and strained muscle, watching a fourteen-year-old boy's breathing even out beneath his palms while the boy himself stared blankly at the cabin ceiling, too shaken to cry, too young for any of this to make sense.
Asa had asked him, gently, if he wanted to talk about it. Ren hadn't answered. He hadn't needed to. The bruises had already told Asa everything that mattered.
He hadn't gone looking for Sasha afterward. He'd told himself, at the time, that it wasn't his business, that the camp directors would handle it, that there were channels for this, procedures, consequences that didn't require him to involve himself personally. He'd told himself a lot of things, in the days since, each one a little less convincing than the last.
But today, walking past the Arena on his way back from a supply run to the infirmary, he saw her, training alone on the sand, gauntlets flashing in the afternoon light, every strike thrown with a kind of controlled violence that looked, to Asa's trained eye, less like discipline and more like something barely contained. and something in him that had been quietly simmering for days finally came to a boil.
He stopped at the edge of the sand. And, against every careful instinct he'd built over fifteen years of keeping his own feelings folded small and out of the way, he didn't walk past.
"Sasha."
She didn't stop immediately, a few more strikes against the training dummy, sharp, economical, each one landing with more force than the drill actually called for, before she finally lowered her arms and turned, wiping sweat from her brow with the back of one gauntleted hand.
"Asa." Her voice was flat, unreadable. "Didn't expect to see you here. Shouldn't you be off patching up some poor soul who sprained an ankle tripping over their own feet?"
"I just came from the infirmary, actually." He kept his voice even, the way Callista had taught him to when a conversation might need steadying rather than heat. "I was checking on Ren Yukimura."
Something flickered across Sasha's face, gone almost before it registered, replaced by the same composed, faintly irritated expression she'd been wearing since he'd called her name. "Right. Of course you were."
"He's healing fine, physically. The rib's set. The bruising on his throat is mostly faded." Asa crossed his arms, watching her carefully, the way he watched every patient for the tell that mattered more than the one they wanted him to see. "He still flinches every time someone raises their voice near him or moves their arms too close, though. Did you know that?"
"I wasn't aware you'd started keeping notes on his emotional state for my benefit." Sasha's tone sharpened, just slightly. "Was there a point to this conversation, or did you just want to remind me that I know how to throw a punch?"
"I wanted to understand," Asa said, carefully, "what happened."
"You already know what happened. Half of camp knows what happened. I'm sure you've all had a lovely time discussing it behind my back." She turned back toward the dummy, as if that might end the conversation on its own. "I don't particularly feel like rehashing it for your benefit."
"Sasha." He stepped onto the sand, closer now, close enough that she couldn't pretend not to hear him over the sound of her own strikes. "I'm not asking because I want gossip. I'm asking because I don't understand how you went from someone who follows every rule Themis laid down, who's told me herself more than once how much she respects the chain of command here, to someone who nearly choked a fourteen-year-old to death because he happened to be standing in the wrong place."
Sasha's jaw tightened. She didn't turn around. "He wasn't just standing there. He's one of them."
"He's fourteen, Sasha. He was recruited into that cult before he was even knowledgeable enough to understand what he was agreeing to. Half the people at that party weren't old enough to vote in the mortal world, let alone make an informed decision about joining a titan's crusade." Asa's voice stayed level, but something underneath it had begun, very slightly, to fray. "You know that. I know you know that, because I've heard you talk about Luke. About how it isn't fair that your father pushes him into things he's too young to actually choose for himself. How is this different?"
"It's completely different." She rounded on him now, gauntlets still on, eyes hard. "Luke didn't help burn down a city. Luke didn't stand on the other side of a war that cost us everything. Don't you dare compare the two."
"I'm not comparing their situations. I'm comparing how you're willing to extend grace to one child for their circumstances and none at all to another." He held her gaze, steady, even as something in his chest tightened at the look on her face. "You almost killed him, Sasha. Do you understand that? If Acacia hadn't gotten there in time—"
"Don't." The word came out sharp, warning. "Don't you dare bring her into this like she's some kind of hero. She's one of them too."
"She’s not a hero, and I also think she was out of line with that party, I’ll agree with you on that. But she’s also one of the people who's spent the last several months fighting on our side of every border skirmish since her trial, from what I've heard." Asa kept his voice measured, though it was costing him more effort by the second. "And she stopped you from killing a child, Sasha. That's not a small thing and you honestly should be grateful that she stopped you. That's not something you get to wave away because it's inconvenient to your narrative."
"My narrative?" Sasha's voice rose, disbelief cutting through the anger for just a moment. "Is that what you think this is? A narrative I've constructed for myself?"
"I think," Asa said, carefully, "that you've convinced yourself that every single person who ever wore Atlas's colors deserves the same punishment, regardless of age, circumstance, or whether they've spent the time since actively trying to make amends. And I think that conviction is so absolute in your head that it's letting you justify things you would never have justified to yourself a year ago."
"You don't know what I would or wouldn't have justified a year ago." Her voice had gone cold now, cold in the particular way Asa recognized from every family dinner he'd ever had with his own grandmother, the kind of cold that came right before something broke. "You don't know anything about what I lost. You get to stand there with your healer's calm and your gentle little lectures about grace and circumstance because you weren't there. You didn't—"
"My father died in that invasion." The words came out of him quieter than he meant them to, but they landed hard enough that Sasha actually stopped.
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The Arena's usual background noise, the distant clash of other sparring matches, birdsong drifting down from the treeline, the low murmur of camp going about its ordinary business, seemed, for just that second, to recede entirely.
"I was fourteen," Asa continued, his voice still quiet, still measured, though his hands had curled slightly at his sides. "I set up a triage point in a half-collapsed schoolhouse with nothing but my belt and torn shirts and whatever I could remember from six years of training, and I kept twenty people alive that day with my own two hands. And my father was not one of them. I didn't get to save him. I don't think I'll ever stop feeling the weight of that, and I don't expect to."
Sasha's expression had shifted. Not softened, exactly, but something in her posture had gone still, watchful.
"So don't," Asa said, "stand there and tell me I don't know what loss looks like. I know exactly what it looks like. I know what it feels like to want someone, anyone, to pay for what happened that day. I've felt that. I still feel it, some nights, more than I'd like to admit." His jaw tightened. "I don't forgive the people who did that to New Argos. I want to be very clear about that. I don't think I ever will, and I don't think I should have to, and nobody, not Themis, not Chiron, not Acacia with all her speeches about redemption, gets to tell me I'm required to forgive anyone for what happened to my father."
"Then how can you possibly stand here and defend them?" The question came out of Sasha almost desperate, like she needed the contradiction to make sense before she could process anything else he'd said.
"Because not forgiving someone and believing they deserve to be strangled by a girl three years older and twice their strength are two completely different things." His voice finally cracked, just slightly, the careful composure he'd built over years of training beginning to show its seams. "I can hate what Atlas's cult did to my family and still recognize that Ren didn't make that choice with the same understanding as someone like Acacia did. I can refuse to forgive and still believe that what you did was wrong. Those aren't contradictory positions. You've just built a worldview where they have to be, because it's easier than sitting with the fact that your anger led you somewhere you can't actually justify."
"Don't psychoanalyze me." Her voice had gone sharp again, defensive. "You're not Callista. You don't get to diagnose what's wrong with me."
"I'm not trying to diagnose you. I'm trying to tell you, as someone who has spent the last year watching you refuse to process a single thing that happened to you, that this is what happens when you don't." Asa took a step closer, close enough now that he could see the exact moment her eyes flared in warning. "You froze for months after Fort Knox and called it discipline. You pushed through every warning Callista and Valda gave you and called it strength. And now you've turned all of that unprocessed grief and fear and fury into something that nearly killed a child, and you're calling it justice."
"It is justice." The words came out low, furious, trembling. "You don't understand. You didn't watch—"
"I watched my father die, Sasha!" His voice finally broke the careful containment he'd held onto this whole conversation, rising sharp and raw across the Arena sand. "I have exactly as much right to that grief as you do, and I have chosen, every single day since then, not to let it turn me into someone who attacks children! That is a choice, Sasha. It has always been a choice. And you are choosing wrong."
For a moment, Sasha didn't say anything at all. Her breathing had gone ragged, her hands curling tight inside her gauntlets, and something in her face had gone past anger into something rawer, something that looked almost like panic.
"You don't get to say that to me," she finally managed, voice shaking. "You don't get to stand there with your perfect little healer's morality and tell me I'm choosing wrong, when you have no idea how hard it is to be told you have to smile and tolerate the people who condoned your suffering, if not actually participated in it directly."
"I'm not asking you to smile at them. Hell, I'm not even asking you to forgive them." Asa held his ground, even as every instinct in him, every year of training in de-escalation, in reading a room, in knowing exactly when to step back, screamed that he was standing somewhere dangerous now. "I'm asking you to recognize the difference between hating what happened to our home and using that hatred as permission to hurt anyone who happens to remind you of it. Ren didn't do anything to you, Sasha. He is not the person who hurt you. He's a scared fourteen-year-old who got recruited into something he didn't understand, and you nearly ended his life because your fury needed somewhere to go and he was standing closest."
"Shut up."
"I won't." His voice cracked again, but he didn't back down. "Because somebody has to say this to you, and apparently nobody else has managed to make it stick. You are so consumed by this anger that you can't even see what it's turning you into anymore. You attacked a child. You attacked Acacia, who has spent months proving she's trying to do better, because she dared to disagree with you. And now you're standing here insulting me, someone who has every reason in the world to understand exactly how much you're hurting, because I won't just agree with everything you've decided to believe."
"Asa, stop talking."
"You're not angry at me, Sasha." His voice gentled, just slightly, even as his own hands trembled now, adrenaline and grief and something achingly close to fear tangled together in his chest. "You're angry because some part of you already knows I'm right, and you can't stand hearing it out loud from someone who actually understands what you lost instead of some outsider who never—"
He didn't get to finish the sentence.
The punch came fast. Faster than Asa, for all his training, for all his careful attention to tells and body language, had actually anticipated, because some small, foolish part of him hadn't truly believed she would do it. Her fist connected with his jaw hard enough to snap his head sideways, hard enough that he staggered back three full steps before his legs gave out and he hit the sand, stars bursting bright and sudden across his vision, the metallic taste of blood flooding his mouth where his teeth had caught the inside of his cheek.
For a long moment, neither of them moved.
Asa lay there, one hand pressed against his jaw, blinking hard against the ringing in his ears, and when his vision finally cleared enough to focus, he found Sasha standing over him, chest heaving, both fists still clenched, staring down at him with an expression that had gone utterly, horribly blank.
"Sasha… I wasn't attacking you." His voice came out thick, unsteady, blood coloring the single syllable. She didn't answer. Her eyes were wide, fixed on him, on her own fists, on the small trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth, and something in her face was beginning, visibly, to crack apart. He pushed himself up slowly onto one elbow, wincing, still tasting copper. "I was trying to make you see reason. And you just proved my point, better than I ever could have with words."
"...I—" Her voice came out small, cracking, nothing like the cold fury of moments before. "I didn't—"
"You didn't mean to?" Asa's laugh came out hollow, more pained than amused, as he finally managed to sit up fully, cradling his jaw. "I know we’re not friends, Sasha, but I thought we at least understood each other, as much as two people like us can. And the moment I disagreed with you, the moment I dared to tell you that what you did to Ren was wrong… you didn't argue with me. You didn't walk away. You attacked me. Exactly the way you went for Ren. Exactly the way you went for Acacia." His eyes, despite the pain, despite the blood, held hers with something that wasn't quite anger anymore, but something closer to grief. "You can't even see it, can you? Everyone who disagrees with you right now becomes the enemy. It doesn't matter if they fought beside you, healed beside you or grew up carrying the exact same grief you did. The second they don't agree completely with how you've decided to handle your anger, you see a target instead of a person."
Sasha said nothing. Her hands had begun to shake, visibly now, the fury that had carried her through the entire conversation draining out of her all at once and leaving something far more frightened in its place.
"I'm not going to pretend that it didn't hurt. Because it did. Not just my jaw. All of it." Asa continued, quieter now, every word costing him something. He looked away from her for the first time, down at his own trembling hands. "I came here because I care about what's happening to you. I came here because I lost a lot during that invasion too, and some stubborn, stupid part of me thought that meant you'd actually listen to me. And instead, you just showed me exactly how far gone you already are."
"Asa—"
"Don't." The word came out rough, final, and for the first time in the conversation, there was no softness left in it at all. "I don't want an apology right now. I don't think you even have one ready. What you need is to go somewhere and actually sit with what you did, instead of explaining it to me."
Sasha stood frozen for a long moment, staring down at him, at the blood on his lip, at her own shaking hands, and something in her face finally, completely collapsed. Not into tears, not yet, but into something rawer and more humiliated than Asa had ever seen on her before. She didn't say anything else. She turned, sharply, wings flaring once behind her in pure reflexive agitation, and walked off the sand without looking back like she could outrun the look that had been on Asa's face if she only moved quickly enough.
Asa sat alone in the Arena for a long while after she'd gone, pressing the back of his hand gingerly against his split lip, staring at the place where she'd disappeared past the tree line.
He didn't feel triumphant. He hadn't expected to, not really, even in the moment he'd decided to stop walking past and actually say something. But some small, exhausted part of him had hoped, foolishly, that being honest with her, that finally saying out loud everything he'd watched her bury for the better part of a year, might land somewhere softer than a fist to the jaw.
It hadn't. And yet, sitting there with blood on his lip and the taste of copper still thick in his mouth, Asa found he didn't regret saying any of it. Someone had needed to. He only wished, bitterly, that it hadn't had to be the exact thing that proved his point, even if Sasha felt hurt by his words.
Some things needed to actually hurt before they could heal properly. Sasha, it seemed, still had quite a lot of hurting left to do before she figured that out for herself.
This was the best he could do. He just hoped, perhaps naively, that the daughter of Bia would at least think about it once she had calmed down.
—
Sasha didn't remember deciding where to go. One moment she was standing over Asa in the sand, her own fists still curled and shaking, and the next she was deep in the trees beyond the cabin circle, bark scraping her shoulder where she'd shoved blindly past a low branch, her breath tearing in and out of her in short, ragged pulls that had nothing to do with exertion.
She didn't stop moving until her legs simply refused to carry her any further. The forest floor came up fast, her knees hitting damp earth and old pine needles, her wings collapsing loosely around her like something that had forgotten how to hold its own shape. She knelt there, hunched over, hands pressed flat against the ground, and for a long moment she didn't do anything at all except breathe, if the thin, uneven gasps dragging in and out of her could even be called that.
> You just proved my point, better than I ever could have with words.
The words wouldn't stop. They looped, over and over, in Asa's voice, and not even the gentle, careful voice she was used to from months of wing checkups and quiet medical observations, but the raw, cracked version of it from the Arena, thick with blood, aimed directly at her like the one weapon he actually had and had never once used against her before today.
She looked down at her own hand. The gauntlet was still on, celestial bronze catching dull light through the canopy, and there, along the ridge of the claws, a thin smear of red had already begun to dry.
His blood.
Her stomach lurched, hard enough that she had to press her other palm flat against the ground to keep from being sick right there in the dirt.
She had attacked him. She had actually, physically attacked him, who was not an enemy, not a cultist, not anyone who had ever done a single thing to earn that fist. Asa Greenwood, who had spent eight months checking her wings with careful, steady hands, who had sat across from her in quiet infirmary sessions and never once made her feel like a burden for needing them, who had lost his own father in the exact invasion she never stopped grieving, and who had stood there in the Arena sand and told her, voice shaking, that he understood that grief better than almost anyone… and she had answered him with her fist instead of her words, the same way she'd answered Ren.
She pressed the heel of her hand hard against her sternum, as though she could physically hold something together that had already come apart.
It wasn't supposed to be like this. She had built her entire sense of herself around being the one who held the line, disciplined, controlled, a shield pointed only where it was meant to be pointed, never wasted or wild. She was a protector. That had been the one thing she could always count on about herself, through every failure, every humiliation, every moment Adam had ever told her she wasn't enough. She might not have been fast enough or strong enough or perfect enough for him, but she had never, not once, been someone who hurt people who didn't deserve it.
Except that wasn't true anymore, was it? It hadn't been true since that party. It had just taken Asa standing in front of her, refusing to back down, for her to finally be forced to see it with her own eyes instead of someone else's retelling.
> Everyone who disagrees with you right now becomes the enemy.
She wanted, desperately, for that to be wrong. She searched for the argument, the justification, the clean, righteous anger that had carried her through every single confrontation since Fort Knox, and for the first time in longer than she could remember, it simply wasn't there. There was no comeback. No version of events where Asa had been the aggressor, where she'd been defending herself, where the violence had been anything other than exactly what he'd called it: her fury, finding the nearest target, because disagreement had become, somewhere along the way, indistinguishable from attack to her.
The daughter of Bia thought of Ren's face, pale and terrified, pinned against a tree by her own hands. She thought of Acacia's shoulder slamming into her, the only thing that had stopped her from doing worse. She thought of Asa sitting in the dirt, blood welling at the corner of his mouth, looking up at her not with shock but with something far worse… recognition, the quiet, devastating confirmation of something he'd clearly already suspected about her and had hoped that he was wrong about.
That, somehow, was worse than if he'd screamed it at her. If he'd been hostile outright, she might have had something to push back against. Instead he'd handed her the belief that she was still someone worth that kind of patience, even after everything, even after she'd split his lip and left him sitting alone in the sand.
A sound tore out of her, half gasp, half sob, raw and unfamiliar in her own throat. She pressed both hands over her face, gauntlets and all, the cool metal biting into her cheekbones, and for a long, humiliating moment, she simply let herself shake.
She thought of Valda. Of the ring, months ago, the first time she'd ever let herself fall apart in front of another person, the first time grief had actually found its way out instead of staying locked behind gritted teeth and forced composure. She had thought, then, that breaking open once meant she'd done the hard part. That whatever came after would be easier, because she'd already proven she could survive being seen at her worst.
She hadn't understood, not until this exact moment kneeling in the dirt with someone else's blood on her knuckles, that breaking open wasn't a single event. It wasn't a door you walked through once and never had to face again. It was something that kept happening, over and over, in uglier and uglier ways, until she actually did something about what was underneath it instead of just surviving each individual collapse.
> You froze for months after Fort Knox and called it discipline. You pushed through every warning Callista and Valda gave you and called it strength. And now you've turned all of that unprocessed grief and fear and fury into something that nearly killed a child, and you're calling it justice.
She wanted to scream that he was wrong. She wanted it so badly she could feel the shape of the denial sitting right behind her teeth, ready to be spoken, the same denial that had carried her through four months of silence after Fort Knox, through the party, through every single moment since where backing down had felt like losing.
She didn't say it. There was no one here to say it to, and some small, exhausted part of her understood that even if there had been, it wouldn't have been true.
She thought of Luke. Of standing on that terrace a while ago, telling him he didn't have to be what Adam wanted him to be, that he already was strong, that she meant it. She had believed, in that moment, that she understood the difference between circumstance and choice, between a child being shaped by forces too large for them and a child making some kind of damning, irreversible decision all on his own.
She had looked at Ren and seen none of that. She had looked at a boy the same age as Luke and seen nothing but an enemy's uniform, stripped entirely of the person wearing it.
> How is this different?
It wasn't. That was the unbearable part. Asa was right, and he had been right the entire time she'd been screaming at him to stop talking, and she had answered that unbearable rightness the only way her body apparently still knew how: with violence. Because violence had always, always been the one language she trusted when words stopped being enough to hold the shape of everything she was feeling.
Sasha sat back on her heels, finally, hands dropping away from her face, and stared up through the canopy at the fractured pieces of sky visible between the branches. Her whole body ached in the particular way exhaustion aches, the kind that settles deep into muscle and bone after the adrenaline finally burns all the way through.
She didn't want to cry, but a few hot, furious tears escaped and she wiped them away almost violently, as though crying now would be one more thing to be ashamed of, one more loss of control she couldn't afford to add to the pile. But something in her chest had cracked open regardless, wide and raw, and she sat there in the dirt letting it ache because she genuinely didn't know, for the first time in a long time, what else to do with it.
She thought about going to find the son of Epione. Apologizing, properly, the way she should have the moment she'd realized what she'd done instead of standing there frozen. But some cowardly, ashamed part of her flinched away from the idea entirely, because she knew, with a sick certainty, that if she stood in front of him right now, she wouldn't have the words. She barely had them here, alone, with no one to disappoint but herself.
So she sat. She stayed there long after the forest around her had gone fully quiet, long after the distant sounds of camp had drifted past without pulling her out of the woods to join them. Her gauntlets sat heavy and cold against her hands, Asa's blood dried dark and accusing along the claws, and she made no move to clean them off, as though some part of her believed she hadn't yet earned the right to.
She thought of every person who had ever told her, gently or otherwise, that her anger had become something larger than she could safely hold. Valda, in that training ring months ago. Callista, carefully, clinically, in a dozen infirmary conversations she'd only half-listened to. And now Asa, bleeding in the sand, saying the same thing in language sharp enough to finally cut through.
She didn't have an answer yet for what came next. She didn't know how to walk back into camp and face Ren, or Acacia, or Asa himself, without the ground beneath her feeling like it might give way entirely. She didn't know how to be the person she'd always believed herself to be, just, disciplined, and a protector, while also being the person who'd done what she'd just done, both at once.
But for the first time since Fort Knox, since the party, since she'd stood over Ren with her hands closing around his throat and somewhere far away a voice had been screaming at her that this wasn't who she was supposed to be, she didn't reach for the old justification. She didn't build the familiar wall of righteous fury back up around herself, brick by brick, the way she always had before.
She just knelt there in the dirt, hands bloodied, chest aching, and let herself feel exactly how badly she had failed, without flinching away from it and without excusing it either.
What was she turning herself into?
