Thalia had never been so anxious the moment Hazel left her all alone next to Apate in the tea room.
"So..." she trailed off awkwardly. "How--"
"Why did you want to have tea again?" Apate asked, looking over Thalia curiously.
"Well... I wanted to talk about Aletheia--"
"Nope!" Apate stood up.
Even if Apate was in a fourteen-year-old form with a black short skirt and a short cropped black cami, she looked very assertive and more beautiful than any eighth grader Thalia had ever seen.
"Come on, Apate!"
"Why would I talk to her? She obviously doesn't like me and I don't like her!"
"You're sisters!" Thalia exclaimed.
"And sisters can choose what they want to do!" Apate snapped back.
"Nonetheless, Aletheia said that she's only mad at you for stealing Eros--"
"I wasn't the one to ask Eros out, he asked me out!" Apate said through clenched teeth.
"Just because--wait, what?" Thalia forgot what she was about to say.
"Eros asked me out and I told him that Aletheia liked him. He said that the truth was something no one really wanted to hear and that even if she liked him, he wouldn't like her. He reminded me of how she took all the attention and how she was like a shining goody two shoes. So I stole him from her for revenge. Of course, I knew I was wrong. But I am deceit. What am I without some wrong?" Apate scoffed.
"So... Eros asked you out?"
"What else did you suspect from the love god who seduced Psyche? Of course he seduced me!" Apate rolled her eyes.
That's when Hazel shadow-traveled in with Aletheia's hand in hers.
"What the f**k--Apate?" Aletheia froze, staring at her sister.
"Aletheia?" Apate had a similar expression.
Well, that was before both of the sisters leaped at each other and began to wrestle on the floor.
"You stole Eros from me!" Aletheia screeched, slapping her sister across the face.
"Oh shit," Thalia muttered.
"Stole?!" Apate pushed Aletheia off of her. "Stole?! Eros wasn't a prize to be won, Aletheia! You can't have everything like Mom and Dad said you could!"
Seeing the two sisters fight, Thalia's logic kicked in at the wrong time. Apate was seen as more beautiful because the truth can be uglier than a lie. Truth hurts, lies hurt afterward, but they feel good at first. That was the reason for it.
"HEY!" Apate screamed as Aletheia brought her sword up to Apate's throat.
Hazel gasped at the show of aggression. Apate growled and took out her own sword, slicing it so far front that it almost slashed Aletheia's throat. The sisters had burst out of the tea room at this point, sword fighting down the halls. The maids all cowered in fear at the display of the twins' powers.
Apate blasted Aletheia into the wall with a jet of blackness and Aletheia sent a heavy boulder of gold into Apate's stomach. Their swords sliced through the air so intensely that Thalia could almost feel the sensation tingling on her cheeks. Naturally, Hazel and Thalia followed them down the hall, feeling useless that they couldn't do anything.
Well, if they did do anything, one of them would be dead and they'd give the sisters another thing to fight about. It wouldn't help. All they could do was watch.
"No!" Thalia yelled as the sword almost decapitated Apate.
Apate, seeing her sister's thirst for violence, went even more ballistic. She threw her sister so high up in the air, Thalia felt like fainting. Her sister landed with a hard thud on the floor, but Aletheia was up in a second, though her nose was crooked and leaking ichor onto the floor. She landed a slash on Apate's arm and her ichor mixed with Aletheia's forming some sort of ball.
The ball floated up into the air and flew in front of their faces.
"What is--" Hazel started but then the ball flew forwards, towards a bush behind the sisters.
"The Night Leaves!" Thalia gasped.
The Night Leaves were wilting as the sisters fought harder and harder, the blood being spilt gathering up into the small ball, ready to dump onto the bush and destroy the leaves once and for all.
"We need to do something. Now!" Hazel gasped.
The tension was making Thalia's hair stand on end. She smelled the ozone and tasted metal in her mouth before a jet of magnificent electricity burst through her fingertips and blasted the sisters apart. The shock and sent them slightly paralyzed, but not enough to damage them. They stared at the two demigods, wondering why they had stopped the fighting.
"Look what you're doing!" Hazel exclaimed, pointing to the wilting bush and the ichor hoveirng over it. "That's your blood! You're killing each other!"
Apate and Aletheia seemed to understand as they looked at each other.
"You're sisters. Sure, you'll fight. Sure, you'll do wrong things. But no matter what, you're family. And family is important. You'll never know how much it means until... until you lose it..." Thalia trailed off, thinking about how her mother used to be with her. Until she got into alcohol. "So are you gonna fix that bush or not? Or are you going to let your one honest desire get melted into a flaming swamp?"
The goddess of trickery slowly stood, dropping her weapon. She slowly walked over to her sister, who stared up at Apate warily. Holding her hand out, she grasped her sister's hand and pulled her up. Aletheia dropped her weapon and stared into her sister's eyes. The two seemed to understand and at once, they both began to weep.
Tears flew out of their eyes and the ichor ball slowly moved away from the bush. It melted back onto the floor as the bush began to bloom again, its leaves uncurling and becoming velvety. Apate pulled away after the sisters had muttered their apologies and plucked a few leaves off of the bush.
"Here," she said, putting the leaves in a bag. "Take them."
Thalia stood there, holding the leaves in shock.
"And I assume you need powdered unicorn horns?" Aletheia sniffed, wiping her eyes.
"W-What? How'd you know?"
"I can always sense the truth." Aletheia winked.
Handing them a container full of silver powder, the two sisters embraced again. As Thalia and Hazel prepared to leave, wanting to leave the sisters some privacy, Apate stopped them.
"Thanks," she said. "Thanks a lot."
Thalia and Hazel did it. They completed their mission.