#hunter phoebe

There was an army of them, familiar faces to him.  Some of them he’d known while he was alive, several were his siblings, or his friends, people that had died both before and after him during the titan war, and whatever had gone on after that.  Some of them he’d only met in Elysium, others considered heroes by the standards of the Underworld.

He was directly flanked by his siblings – Michael was almost his age, having almost closed the gap between them and dying only two months younger than the age Lee had been when he’d found himself on the bank of the Styx with the heart-wrenching knowledge that he wasn’t going to make it to adulthood after all, that his dreams had been crushed underneath a giant’s club.  There were Hunters he recognised, too.

Lee had never known for certain that the red-headed girl, Phoebe, had been his sister.  Not while they were still alive.  She’d admitted it when he’d met her in Elysium, and it had made so much sense.  She and Michael still didn’t get on – but here they were, both in the army Hades had raised.

It was a huge army, but still barely a fraction of the residents of Elysium, and it hadn’t escaped Lee’s notice that so many of them were somehow connected to Apollo.  Children, lovers, other descendants – legacies, they called themselves.

Over the millennium, Apollo had made more mortal bonds than Lee would ever have been able to comprehend while he was still alive.  Now that he was dead, it was one of those things that settled in the back of his mind with a quiet of course and no need to think about it further.  It was simply a fact.

And now, they’d been unleashed.

It was temporary, Hades had stressed.  There was a matter that required his intervention at Camp Jupiter – another of those quiet of courses that would have sent living!Lee into a headspin but now sat simply as a fact of existence – and for that intervention to occur, he was sending warriors to deal with it.

Their march was a mishmash of styles.  Romans settled into cohorts, Greeks scattered into whatever groups and arrangements made sense to them.  People who were neither found their own thing, too, as they all adjusted to the bizarreness that was being back in the Overworld.  For some of them, it had been millennia.

Time didn’t mean anything in the Underworld, not to the dead, but Lee knew it hadn’t been too long since he’d died.  The young, most-recently dead of all of them had had enough time to confirm that before he took his place near the head of the army, with the other Romans.

Camp Jupiter was burning, but that didn’t matter to the dead.  They didn’t have lungs that cared about smoke, or hearts to pump oxygen around their bodies.  They didn’t have bodies the way that the living did, something that instead seemed translucent under the light of the sun, even though they could interact with the Overworld, a little bit.

It took effort, but the dead didn’t know exhaustion so that didn’t matter as they advanced, falling upon the army trying to raise the Roman camp to the ground and charging through them.

They could interact enough to kill.

The living couldn’t touch them.

Defeated monsters faded to Tartarus before they could lash out, and the souls of the defeated mortals, well.  Clearly Hades was keeping a close eye on things, because the souls of the slain Romans joined their ranks and threw themselves back into battle with a vengeance when death didn’t stop them.

Thanatos was whisking away the dead mortals of the Triumvirate before they had a chance to try and keep their own war going.

The reinforcements of Artemis – Diana – and her Hunters simply sealed the deal.  The goddess herself disappeared deep into the heart of the city, and Thalia barely blinked as her dead sisters of silver rejoined her ranks, fitting seamlessly back into the Hunt as though they’d never left.  Romans gradually slipped back into their own cohorts, and Hades’ army of the dead gradually dispersed throughout the battle until it was over.

It was the first time Lee had made it all the way through a battle, he realised with some bemusement, but being near-untouchable and already-dead was rather a cheat.  The dead pulled their weight as the fighting faded to be replaced with clean-up, pulling bodies to where they needed to be and searching for cowering survivors from both sides (there were children, in the city, children that the Triumvirate had been willing to slaughter alongside the warriors).

Lee wanted to say it was an accident when he stumbled into a bookshop, but while it hadn’t been his intent he didn’t think it was a coincidence, either.  The silver-gold eyes of the twelve-year-old goddess that showed nothing but expectation when he accidently met them all but confirmed that something had pushed him there.

Some things didn’t need to be thought about.

“Lee?”

His name was a broken gasp, coming from a scruffy-looking teenager that Lee had never seen before in his life and who certainly looked like he’d seen better days.  Actually, the only one in the room he did recognise was Diana herself; the other girls were also strangers, to him, but at least they were also eyeing him like he was a stranger.

The younger girl was eyeing him like an enemy, and Lee distinctly hoped she wasn’t about to try and kill him for a second time.

He was more interested in the teenage boy staring at him like he’d seen, well, a ghost, and the face was unfamiliar but there was something his eyes that wasn’t.

When the boy’s knees buckled, Lee surged forwards, and caught his elbows.  It took all of his focus to not drop him, and the sudden movement from the other girls – excluding Diana, who seemed content to simply watch – implied he’d startled them.

Their weapons went straight through him, and he ignored them.

“Hi, Dad,” he said, because there wasn’t anyone else the teenager could be, even if he was all wrong for Apollo.

Lee was all wrong, now, too.

“What- How-?”

“Pluto took exception to Tarquin’s encroaching upon his domain,” Diana said.  “My Hunters were not your only reinforcements.”

The black girl’s shoulders slumped in relief, and Lee realised there was something familiar about her, too.  Not her face – he had never met the girl before, in either his life or his afterlife – but her soul.

“Father couldn’t have given me a warning?” she wondered, clicking the familiarity into place, because she felt like Underworld.  Not the same way the dead did, but like their Lord did.

Lee fell to his knees, too, lowering his father the rest of the way down in the process.  “My Lady,” fell out from his mouth without his control, because she was still living but her father was his Lord, and it was ingrained.

She looked flustered, and he felt a little bad about that.

“So what, you’re another zombie but on Apollo’s side?” the other girl, the one that looked a similar age to Diana but was probably actually that age asked.  She sounded like she was trying to be dismissive, but Lee had spent years with Michael and still had eternity to go with his prickly younger brother.  If she genuinely didn’t care, he would eat his arrows.

“I’m dead, not undead,” he corrected, and hated how Apollo flinched when he said it.  “But yes.  I was on Dad’s side when I was living, and I’ll stay on his side now.”

“Unless that’s overridden by Pluto,” Diana reminded him, and it was Lee’s turn to flinch, because it was true – Hades was his god, now, and obeying him was in his being just the same kneeling for his daughter was.

Being dead was a freedom that only lasted as long as his god decreed, even for souls in Elysium.

Apollo burst into tears.

Lee had to concentrate hard, as his father wrapped him up in a solid embrace, to make sure they didn’t slip through each other.  The dead and the living were not meant to interact, not like this, and Apollo wasn’t quite a god.

The glimmer was there, deep inside him – so deep that Lee couldn’t see it, only knew it was there because if it wasn’t then no amount of Lee’s concentrating would have let the hug work – but he was overwhelmingly human and that made it hard to touch.

But not even the gods came into Elysium, so this was still more than Lee had had since he’d died.

Diana permitted the reunion for a few moments, before heading for the door.  “This place still smells of burnt Cyclops,” she said, and swept out, her wolves – which Lee had barely noticed until they brushed past him – following.

“C’mon,” the younger girl said.  “Let’s go, dummy.”

Lee didn’t like anyone calling his dad dummy, but Apollo’s next sob almost sounded like a chuckle, and Lee knew he didn’t know enough about any of this to judge.

“How long are you here?” his dad asked as he pulled himself to his feet – somewhat aided by the impatient tugging of the girl.

Lee shrugged.  “Until Hades recalls us,” he assumed, and Apollo’s head snapped around as fast as a giant’s club falling into a skull.

“Us?”

Lee gave him a gentle smile.  “Yeah,” he said.  “Us.”

He wasn’t surprised when Apollo bolted for the door, although he was surprised enough at the teenage body trying to grab him in the process that he didn’t manage to let the contact stick.  Fresh tears welled up in Apollo’s eyes as his arm passed straight through him, and Lee immediately lurched forwards to grab his wrist.

“Sorry,” he said as they walked out, the two girls following closely behind them.  Ahead, Diana was waiting in the street, arms crossed.  “I have to focus.”

“It- it’s okay,” Apollo replied, his voice shaking in a way that said it wasn’t okay at all, but there was nothing Lee could do about it.