Finding the Sun

Chapter 29 - The End

The first thing Aster saw when she shadow-travelled back to Mount Rogers was her father. Clearly, he wasn't listening to the various members of his team trying to get him to sit down. He was leaning heavily against the broken doorway, Rossi holding up his other side, looking frantically around the room.

When Aster took Jackie down to the underworld, her fog of darkness disappeared from the room, and Aaron immediately went into panic mode. Not that he wasn't before, his daughter was one-on-one battling a serial killer after all, but at least he had known where she was and from the sound of it, that she was winning. But then she was gone along with Jackie, and just like that he had lost her again. The demigods and his team tried his best to distract him by filling him in with what he and Nico had missed when they were captured, as well as reassuring him that Aster was going to be fine. They all seemed to have full confidence that Aster would "beat her psycho ass up" as Leo put it, but even they started to get antsy after 20 or so minutes. So when he heard the faintest of sounds coming from inside the building, he started to limp towards it immediately.

When he laid eyes on her, standing alone in the room and not visibly injured, he let out a breath of relief. It quickly turned into a hastily disguised moan of pain when she barreled into his arms a second later. His body, with the intense mix of emotions he was currently feeling and also the amount of pain he was still in, decided that standing was no longer going to be an option. He collapsed as slowly as he could manage to the ground, Rossi taking the hint and just letting the father and daughter fall to the ground together, Aster still wrapped firmly in his arms.

She held him as tightly as she thought she could without hurting him, her face pressed into his chest as she cried.

"Shh, it's okay Aster, I'm okay," he muttered, in response to his daughter's muffled apologies. "You have nothing to apologize for, nothing at all."

Aster couldn't help but feel like she did. She knew that Aaron would never dream of blaming her for any of this, but she couldn't help but feel like he would've been better off without ever being introduced to the world of a demigod. Nonetheless, that's a problem for another time. Aster wanted to stop thinking about it, because she really wanted to stop crying. She thought she had been done with the tears after dealing with Jackie, but clearly she was not.

Slowly raising her head from where she had it buried in her dads shirt, she looked out at the surrounding forest. In particular, at her friends and other demigods, a lot of them being head councilors, who were currently cleaning up the remnants of what had clearly been a battle. Demigods were walking around, checking in with their friends, dusting the gold dust off of their clothes and treating any injured. Luckily, Aster saw no one in need of serious medical attention.

She looked up at Rossi, who was still standing near them, and asked, bewildered, "All of them came here with you? For me?"

"Of course kid. They basically took over the BAU when we were still trying to get a lead on where you were. They all wanted you back and Jackie gone as much as the rest of us," Rossi replied with a smile.

It was then that her friends had decided that the private reunion between her and her dad was over, because Will basically told her to get off her ass. Okay maybe he didn't phrase it exactly like that, but he did tell her that some of his siblings were basically ready to spirit her dad away to the infirmary and that he wasn't letting her do anything else until he gave the all clear that she wasn't injured.

Despite her protests, her dad agreed with Will that she needed to get checked out, and the BAU wasn't going to let Hotch go any longer without proper treatment, so Aster reluctantly walked over to where Will had set up a temporary triage area. The second she got up, Leo was immediately at her side ready to help her if she needed, but she just hugged him tightly and gave him a kiss, reassuring him that she was fine. That didn't mean he planned on letting go of her hand anytime soon, but Aster wasn't complaining.