* pov: third person (markus) *
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It's hard to be proud of your best friends when they achieve your mutual goals and you don't.
He was still pretty okay with it, at least. Alizia had the goddess of fortune as her mother. Not a surprise. Then Yvonne and Yzonne had Nemesis for a mother. Sure, why not?
But it still got him thinking. Thinking hard.
How do I deal with the news when it comes around?
He tried not to focus on claiming too much. There were still three of them left in the Unclaimed section of the Hermes cabin, sectioned off like a litter of puppies up for adoption. With three remaining unclaimed in their circle of friends, Markus decided to try to make the most of his time left with them every second of the day.
He was lovable, at least that's what people claimed about him. Part of him assumed that that was why he could easily persuade people into doing things. He once managed to talk his older sister into permanently giving him her bottle of extra-softening hair conditioner, and that was a huge achievement, considering the fact that she was very greedy when it came to that.
His family was, surprisingly, the easiest to talk to and persuade. They were happy, just him and his older sister, even if both children never knew their mother. He would talk his father into buying both of them their favorite toys and he still wouldn't mind.
That was before his two younger sisters were born.
One night after the youngest one turned five, their father suddenly took one too many shots of beer and came home mumbling some batcrap crazy things about magic and beauty and how one was odd. Markus and his older sister had asked, and Markus still had a red mark from when his father had punched him, yelling the six-letter 'f' word.
Things started going downhill for the two eldest children as the youngest ones grew older. They would slowly manipulate their father just like how Markus had once convinced him with a simple sentence. They purposely put all these weird things into his drinks and blamed it on the one male child of the family. It worsened to the point where their father started breaking down in tears for no reason, and that whenever Markus tried to comfort his beloved tatay he would immediately fling him to the wall, deaf to anything his formerly favored child would say.
And that was when Markus and his older sister decided to run.
Just thinking about it made Markus feel like puking all over someone's face. It was all a blur now, for he didn't want to remember who exactly caused him to lose the one family he had, so he managed to forget his sisters' and father's names. He only remembered their initials — 'T' for the youngest one, 'C' for the second, and 'M' for both his father and older sister.
"You're awfully quiet today."
Markus swiveled around to see Justin's feline-like grey eyes staring at him from behind. He flinched and sighed. Tristan's brother sure was a hard code to crack when it came to his motives, and he was even kind of sketchy and creepy at times.
But, hey, Markus was used to it.
"Yeah. Just thinking. You know, when the most tolerable people of the group are gone, it's truly a miracle that none of us have killed anyone. Like, I don't even need my persuasion skills to talk you out of stuffing calligraphy markers into Clara's nose," said Markus, keeping a generally polite front but also eyeing the pack of markers in Justin's hands.
Justin blanched and hid the pack of markers up the back of his shirt. He sighed and leaned back against the bench, staring into space.
Tristan then came back from her adventures in the toilet, all pumped up to do something. When she looked at the two of them sitting down, looking more bored than she'd ever seen them, she asked what was wrong.
"Courtney said we have an hour off activities since everywhere in camp is packed with numerous cabins doing who-knows-what," said Justin, yawning even though it was, like, ten in the morning.
"We could walk around the ring of cabins, maybe," suggested Markus, leaning forwards. "Besides, we've never actually focused on the looks of the cabins. Maybe we can compliment—"
"—or criticize—" mumbled Tristan.
"—their decoration choices!" Finished the tween, raising his eyebrow in hopes of getting a solid answer. The Noir siblings nodded and muttered in agreement, and all three of them left the bench and ran to the cabins.
===
They'd concluded that the Aphrodite cabin was by far the worst cabin to live in.
It looked like a life-sized Barbie dollhouse — with pink walls, a light wooden gable roof, and white glass windows on the top floor that exposed the bunk beds and the campers inside. The door was open, but it didn't need to be open to smell the strong scent of designer perfume that made Tristan and Justin sneeze and Markus almost run to the toilet to throw up.
"Wonder how they survive in there," mumbled Justin. "I heard the head counselor, Peter McLean, still does his best to avoid the smell."
And indeed, he still did. In the center of the first ring of cabins were a few benches surrounding the central hearth, and sitting on one of them were a Native American dude with multicolored eyes and a tall blonde girl wearing glasses — Peter McLean and his girlfriend, Jessica Grace, daughter of Jupiter.
The other cabins were pretty nice and creative. The Athena cabin, for instance, had its beds on platforms higher up into the cabin with ladders for campers to climb on, while the rest of it was a large workshop and library. The Demeter cabin had a frickin' tree on its roof. The Poseidon cabin's ground floor was made out of glass with water underneath.
They didn't really care about the second ring of cabins — from their view, all the cabins were modeled after one another, just with different colors and that kind of thing.
The Hecate cabin, though placed directly behind the flashy Nike cabin, was prominent to Markus for some reason. Not because he felt drawn to Hecate as a mother but because it just... Reminded him of something that would've held great sentiment to him. He didn't know what, and he didn't care what.
The aura of the Dionysus cabin concerned him as well, and he knew that Justin and Tristan felt the same. It was like there was something off, something they couldn't quite figure out. It felt right to be there because Dionysus was an Olympian, but it was just... Wrong. What was wrong with it?
Before he could voice his thoughts, he caught a whiff of the perfume from the Aphrodite cabin, and he quickly pulled the other two to somewhere where they wouldn't smell anything. And the only safe place where they weren't too far away from the main circle was in front of the Iris Cabin and beside the Hades cabin.
Nothing really bothered them about the two, anyway. Butch from Iris was overall pretty friendly to them whenever both the Hermes and Iris cabins met for activities and the daughter of Hades...
Well, they'd never formally met her or talked to her, but Courtney spoke almost as highly of her as she spoke about people like Leia Valdez, Jessica Grace, Peter McLean, Percia Jackson, Andrew Chase, heck, even Henry Levesque and Frankie Zhang from Camp Jupiter.
In fact... Many people spoke pretty highly of those seven people, plus the daughter of Hades, Nicole di Angelo, and occasionally this girl named Reyna from the other camp. The whole frickin' major ring of cabins, Whitney Solace herself, the older campers from the second ring, heck, even Grover Underwood the Lord of the Wild whenever they'd caught him hanging around.
Markus felt a hand brush his nape.
Something was suddenly missing from his neck.
Markus immediately clawed at it, coming to terms with the fact that the only remembrance of his father's old, kind self, had been stolen right when he knew he should have moved. It was a red cord necklace with a gold charm in the shape of a plate of Adobo, his favorite Filipino dish, and inside the charm was his favorite quote from his father:
"Tandaan mo na kung maganda ka o hindi, hindi lahat nang tao magagandahan sa i'yo. Pero kagaya tayong lahat nang isang plato nang Adobo — meyron pa madaming tao na-masasarapan sa i'yo at magugustuhan ikaw."
Which, in Tagalog, meant, "Remember that even if you're beautiful or not, not everyone will think you're beautiful. But we're all like a plate of Adobo — there's still a lot of people that will think you're tasty and will like you."
He whipped around and met Julia Feingold's cheeky eyes as she held the cord in between her long fingers. He immediately snatched at the cord and yelled, "Give that back!"
Unfortunately, Markus was way shorter than Julia, who immediately raised her hand and laughed as the twelve-year-old jumped around desperately. Tristan joined the chase and almost got the necklace if it weren't for Julia throwing it backward and yelling, "Don't mess up!" to Cecil Markowtiz.
Well, they don't call him 'master of messing up' for nothing. He held the necklace for about two seconds before a wind blew from the South and he let it go. He glared at Adam Janubda, son of Notus, but forgot that the cord had landed on the ground. Julia picked it up before Markus or Tristan or Justin could then threw it towards Mahalia Limtan, daughter of Lethe.
For a minute or two, the cord was passed around from rude troublemaker to rude troublemaker. The older and slightly more responsible campers were far away and didn't hear Markus' screams or Julia's laughs or the flurry of ableist slurs sailing around.
Then Markus felt stupid. Don't I have persuasion skills?
He tried them on Julia. "Give that back," he said once more, putting a bit more firmness in his words.
"I'm sorry. What was that?"
"I said, give that back. Or you wouldn't want me to, uh, tell one of the older campers?" Hahahahaha that's pathetic Markus pull yourself together please.
His confidence wavered a bit. It was hard to be firm with someone taller and older than him. He didn't even know why he was trying, anyway. But, well, you don't mess with Markus Cruz-Villanueva if you don't want a small twelve-year-old to end up using violence.
Julia seemed to get what he was using on her and resisted. "You're not using fake charmspeak on me, Markus. Did you know that this is made of Strife™ gold? If you did you'd probably know that only people of higher authority like me have every right to have them."
"That isn't completely true, Julia. Ask the daughter of their boss." Said Adam Janubda from the side. "She's at the Eris cabin if you want to ask for facts."
"Whatever. I don't want to talk to Trinity Strife or her scary brother. But I am having this and I'm not going to let a midget persuade me into giving something precious up." Announced Julia as she turned on her heel, but Markus still needed his necklace.
"If you're just doing this to please your dad, then I don't think he'll be so pleased. Aesthetic value doesn't overpower sentimental value."
Julia turned back with a raised eyebrow. There was that resisting aura around her. Like she was controlling herself from listening to him.
He forced more persuasion into his voice. "Put it this way. Would you rather keep something of beautiful appearance but only for the sake of its appearance... Or keep something you love for itself no matter how it looks?"
He breathed in and continued. "What if someone stole a part of you... Like, if your ability to prank or get away with things had assumed a tangible form? Just for the sake of how much it would cost or how much aesthetic it has? I don't think you'd let someone get away with taking it.
"So what I'm saying is... You're going to have to give that back." Markus demanded. He forced all his persuasion into it. He didn't even know why he'd use the word 'persuasion' as a skill. Maybe because it was one of the skills that went unacknowledged though perfectly obvious.
Julia bit her lip and seemed like she was fighting back the urge to give in to the request of a lowly preteen. Markus repeated those words once more, trying his best not to end up with his fist into her gut (he didn't like doing that so he barely did, anyway). Then the daughter of Hermes reluctantly handed the cord to Markus.
"Be lucky, kid," she grumbled. "Julia Feingold usually doesn't change her mind."
Markus smiled vibrantly at her as he tied the ends around his neck once more. He turned around to leave with Justin and Tristan, but he stopped after hearing gasps from the crowd, and slowly turned back to see horrified looks on everyone's faces.
He looked down and gasped as his shirt and shorts had morphed into a leather biker's jacket and ripped black jeans, his sneakers turned into combat boots. Black fingerless gloves adorned his hands, and the charm in his cord was polished and blinding gold. He reached up, and damn it, his long locks of brown hair were gelled up in a hairstyle a bit too masculine for his tastes. Well, this outfit was too masculine and edgy for his tastes.
Michelle Pace from the Athena cabin, who'd joined the crowd in the middle of the exchange, smacked her forehead and mumbled something along the lines of "I should've known... It was the kaleidoscope eyes, damn it!"
Markus craned his neck and saw that, aside from being fit in clothes that people would find ruggedly attractive at that point in time (the bad boy era, he supposed) and being bathed in gold light, there was a gold dove flying above his head, trailing hearts, and he didn't know whether or not to react angrily or react surprisingly or react happily.
He felt a mix of emotions. He got pushed back to when he thought about how he'd deal with it when the news came around that he, both obviously and somehow shockingly, was the son of none other than Aphrodite, the godsdarn goddess of love and beauty. How did it not even hit him?
People had called him the cutest baby they'd ever seen when he was still a baby. Fast-forward to when he was about ten, and lots of girls secretly had crushes on him and maybe even a boy or two. They'd completely disregarded his height or stature. Why would he be so surprised?
Just before he could feel happy that he'd finally been marked as a claimed camper and that he knew which god he was the son of, he realized.
The Aphrodite cabin reeked of perfume.
Well, time to stick to Peter McLean like a parasite.