Agent Flame Wave

In the Forest

Percy woke up to a warm and wet sensation on his chest. He peeked under his shirt and saw that the bandages wrapping his chest had turned a dark red. But as none of the blood had actually seeped out through the gauzes, he decided that he'll just ignore the pain and consider his handiwork a marvellous one.

Actually, he was sure Clint couldn't have done it better.

He saw Clint had taken his bag after all. The demigods were spread inside the carpet, looking like the world's end couldn't wake them up now. But Frank wasn't there.

He carefully extracted his bag from the pile they'd made on the floor, and then tiptoed out the camp, silent as breeze. Apollo's chariot wasn't even near the horizon yet, and the sky was swathed with hues of pale lilacs and indigos. He saw Frank's silhouette, hunched on the ground over the cooling embers of their fire. Frank made no move as to having heard him approach, so Percy made a beeline for his spot by the river. He didn't want to linger around Frank, who looked so lost and distant and eerie, sitting like that in the dark, as if he was already halfway to his beloved.

He filled his bottle with the ice cold water from the shallow stream, then added some iodine drops and waited for it to sediment. They were down to seven now, and he was getting a bad feeling about this quest. And Travis Stoll was still back at camp, hiding among them and doing gods-don't-know what. If he couldn't solve the puzzle, at least he should make sure he has all the pieces.

His opened his phone, the screen had a spider-web crack running along it, and his fingers hovered over a number, hesitant.

The last time she had gone on a mission for SHIELD, it didn't go well. She was caught by AIM agents. He didn't know exactly what they did to her, but he could guess it wasn't anything moderate, because when he rescued her, she had stared at him in such a horribly hollow and broken way.

When Percy was very small, he did something to anger Gabe really bad. He couldn't remember what it was, but after screaming at him for hours, Gabe had dragged his yelping mother to their room by her hair, and locked their door. He wouldn't open it, no matter how much Percy cried and pleaded. So he was stuck in the living room, hearing his mother scream and being able to do nothing about it. He didn't sleep the whole night; not even when, halfway through the night, his mother stopped screaming and there was a silence which felt so terrifyingly absolute, he could hear his own heart trying to gallop away from his tiny body.

The look she had given him was the same one his mother had when she opened the door next morning.

She had rasped out that he was to tell SHIELD never to contact her again and that damn them, damn them all to Hades' snake pit. Then she started running into the depths of the forest, too fast and too mad for Percy to follow.

And he couldn't have gone after her anyway, not when he himself was being chased by the AIM agents. And then he had stumbled upon the phoenix on the snow and everything sort of just blurred into the background.

But he needed to have an eye in that camp, especially on Stoll. And, as her trainer, he should have figured out long ago if she was fit to be back on track. She had been given enough time to rehabilitate.

Also, she owed him one.

She picked up on the fourth ring. 'Who the hell is this?'

'Good morning Clarisse,' he replied coolly.

He could almost see her groan. 'Now where the Hades did you get this number from?'

***

Percy jerked up with a start, clammy with sweat. After finishing his call with Clarisse, he had shaken his water with two packets of powered energy mix and hungrily gulped it down. He didn't count on falling asleep after all that glucose. He certainly didn't count on the nightmares that followed. He couldn't really remember what it was about, but he still feel the terror shaking his bones.