1,606I do not own anything of Percy Jackson and the series, Rick Riordan does. I follow the books and the plot and I do reuse some dialogue, but I alter them and fit it into my story. Again, copyright is all Rick Riordan's, I repeat, I do not own anything.
Description: After all of the events in The Lost Hero are done.
Piper used the phone in Chiron's office at Camp Half-Blood. Camp is preparing to travel to New Rome.
At the end of the marathon of demigod portraits, Piper laid her eyes on one last photo. It sat a little out of sight, hiding behind the computer monitor, and framed by a simple black border. Piper immediately had the sense that this particular picture was different from all the rest. The hanging portraits seemed to commemorate the camp alumni in a celebratory light where their brightly smiling faces proudly decorated the walls. In contrast, this simple photo was smaller, not hung openly but positioned out of direct vision. The person in the picture wasn't even looking at the camera like the rest. Piper suspected that this was one of the few images they had of this one girl.
The demigod girl looked to be just a year or two older than Piper. She was East Asian descent and wore a blue LA Dodgers cap that hid a portion of her face. The girl had slanted, sleepy eyes poking underneath the hat and a wide grin directed at someone off-camera. Piper's intuition told her that despite the warm smile, it didn't hide the melancholic look in the girl's eyes. Seeing her dad's world of fame and glory, Piper could tell even when the seemingly happiest of smiles contained a hint of sadness.
The longer Piper stared at the photo, the more she had this nagging feeling that she'd seen this girl before.
Then it struck her.
This was Jade, the step-sibling of Clovis, the cabin leader of Hypnos. The name that seemed to be taboo around here alongside Luke.
And Piper had seen her before. Before she had known that she was a demigod.
The Adalstan siblings. Justin and Paige. They had a step-sister from their father's remarriage.
They were of the few friends that Piper kept in semi-regular contact. She didn't have a lot of friends her own age. As a "troubled kid", her dad would send her to a string of different kinds of private academies to avoid negative publicity, so she was rarely in one place for long. And by the time Piper got to know someone and finally felt somewhat settled in her new environment, something would go wrong, she had to change schools, and everything would start all over again. Sometimes, her dad brought her to a bunch of work-related events so that she could meet his coworkers' kids, but that was worse. A lot of them wouldn't pay attention to her once they realized that she wouldn't use her dad's fame for favors.
Luckily, she had found Justin and Paige at some point during an after party event. The older brother was a little standoff-ish, but he and the younger sister were pretty nice. Their parents worked in the industry, too and unlike other celebrities' kids, they didn't use their parents' reputation to get what they wanted. They had mentioned a step-sibling, but she wasn't around much.
Justin and Paige told Piper that she had once ran into all three of them, including Jade, during a red carpet event for her dad's breakout film, The King of Sparta. Piper had been trying to get a moment of solitude when they caught her hiding away.
Piper didn't recall much of Jade other than the fact that the girl was the stunt double for the main female actress of The King of Sparta. Also, she recalled how Jade followed her charmspeak demands like many others did, but Justin and Paige, interestingly, had never fallen for it. The two siblings seemed to know that she could do it though, because her few attempts never worked on them and they deflected it easily. They also didn't question her when she had to lie to get out of sticky situations that involved Greek monsters.
Lightly brushing off the accumulated dust on the small picture, Piper belatedly realized that Justin and Paige probably already knew about Piper's demigod status because they were aware of their step-sister's demigod life.
Did they know that their step-sister was gone? Forever?
For a sensitive reason, the camp director Chiron couldn't display this one picture on his 'wall of demigod fame' with pride. Piper had heard the full story of Jade's demise and sacrifice from Annabeth, but something about it didn't quite add up. It wasn't the story itself that didn't make sense. The details all checked out, Jade's motives made sense, and her goals had been accomplished without an ulterior motive. Instead, the reactions and dispositions of the surviving people tipped off Piper's ultra-instincts for social cues.
Annabeth, for one, was holding onto a deep-seated emotion about Jade that was never shown openly. Piper saw it in her face whenever she shared a rare memory of the deceased friend to the rest of them. Piper hadn't met Annabeth's boyfriend, Percy, yet but she wondered if he was related to it, or if he also had his own personal thoughts that he hadn't shared with others. And there was something about Clovis, who was extremely harmless, but he seemed to know a piece of information that he wasn't sharing with everyone else. Piper had the sense that Chiron and Annabeth were aware of this, but the former chose to keep peace by feigning ignorance while the latter still struggled with the notion. Piper was strongly reminded of parents whose children lost their lives while serving in the military, how those parents didn't know the full details of their child's death due to the classified nature of the incident. They held onto what little remained of their child's memory and willed themselves to be content.
With a closer look, she noticed fingerprints on the glass and little spots of water damage on the frame's black paint. Jade's picture clearly invoked a lot of deep emotions among the surviving campers from the previous Olympian war against the Titans. Piper suspected that regret was one of the biggest ones.
She wondered how many times a camper came in here and held the small picture frame in their hands. Standing in this bright office. Staring at their friend in the photo.
As she returned the picture to its original place, Piper thought about how she hadn't spoken to Justin and Paige in a while. She picked up the office phone once more, calling her father again.
"Dad? Yeah, I forgot to ask you for a favor. Do you remember the Adalstan family? I hung out with their kids a few times," Piper said. "Could you get in contact with them? It's kind of important."
After that request, she hung up the phone and stepped out of the office, heading towards her cabin. Even though Piper knew that Jade was gone, she couldn't shake off a vague feeling that the deceased daughter of Hypnos hadn't completely disappeared from this world.
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A little snippet of the future. I won't be going into the Heroes of Olympus timeline, but I have a general idea of what would've happened.
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