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Her mom takes her to the Empire State Building on their next outing together. That’s when she sees it. Her death.
She’s older but there’s her, Maria, with a blonde boy in her arms, his eyes are wide open, they are so blue, and she’s hugging him, Maria hates hugs but she’s hugging him tight, and there's a spear going through her back.
It’s fatal, she just knows it is.
It’s horrifying.
Maria is always seeing things that can’t be there.
Objects, people she’s never met before, in scenes that don’t make sense. Sometimes they talk to her, but most of the time they can’t see her.
It’s been like that for as long as she can remember. It has never really concerned her, she’s never known any different, and up till then the sights have been harmless.
At the worst she’ll mistake them for reality and get called crazy by everyone, including her mom.
Not in public, no she just says that Maria has an active imagination when other grown ups are around, but at home, she calls Maria insane and punishes her for embarrassing her.
But it’s not till that day that she realizes something is actually wrong with Maria.
The sight of her own gruesome death has her screaming. There are tears in her eyes and she can’t stop crying and everything starts to go dark. She wakes up two days later in a children’s hospital.
No one can tell her what’s wrong, just that she is sick.
She’ll spend the next few months in one hospital or another. Scans, MRIs, sleep studies, at some point one doctor tries to convince her that it’s anxiety, just to be corrected by the therapist he makes her see.
Maria gets diagnosed with ADHD but that’s not the cause of her problems.
Some of them insist she must be faking it for attention. Her fits come anyways, and the visits continue.
She breaks a finger after a bad fit when they were driving on a bridge and she swears it was exploding with her on it.
They’re scared she’ll hurt herself or others, and she rarely spends a night in her own bed anymore. Her sister brings her her favorite deer plushie on the last visit she’s allowed. Maria never sees her again.
She’s given schooling whenever her visits last more than a week. Maria gets diagnosed with dyslexia.
Her mother grows tired of her quickly. Maria had never been her favorite child after she lost contact with her father. Now she’s just a drain on the family’s time and money and there hasn’t been any improvements to show for it.
One day, she has enough and the next time Maria wakes up from a fit she's alone in a place she doesn’t know. She’s pretty sure it’s still a hospital though.
They give her pills daily. They make her tired to the point she can’t focus and she hates them, so she fights the effects.
The doctors are confused whenever she manages clarity, and up her doses. She always fights to get through the fog even when it takes her days.
Maria tries to escape.
She doesn’t know where she’s going to go, just that she hates it in there and wants to leave, but they aren’t going to let her. She always gets caught before she can make it far, and is sedated.
The cycle repeats.
Sometimes while she’s waiting for her next dose to be forced down her throat, the nurse watching her will play music she really likes to keep her from getting violent.
It’s dramatic sounding and can get really loud at some points while still being nice on the ears. Not like her screaming.
Maria learns to sing along. The nurse applauds her attempts, she’s actually really good.
The last time she tries to escape, she actually makes it outside. It’s daytime for once; the sun is at its highest point in the sky, and it’s beautiful.
She makes the mistake of not continuing to run to stop and stare at its blinding glory. She was told by someone at some point that she shouldn’t stare directly at the sun, it could hurt her eyes, but she doesn’t care. She hasn’t seen it in so long and she missed it.
Like is her normal now, she sees someone there.
There in the sun.
It’s a man.
Every part of him looks golden, and there’s no way he’s actually there, it’s not possible but she sees him.
He sees her too.
She waves. He notices and does something with his face she does not understand the meaning of but he waves back.
She waves harder. She knows that she must look like a maniac but she doesn’t care; there’s someone there, she knows it.
He saw her.
The guards find her just waving at the sky. “Poor girl”, they say. She gets sedated again, but this time someone saw her.
She’s back inside.
Two weeks later while she plots her next attempt to leave, she gets a new doctor. Her last one called her hopeless and walked out.
He has goat legs. It’s the first time she has seen such and she tells him so.
For the first time, her doctor doesn’t frown at what she says, and instead smiles at her. He doesn’t tell her she’s right, instead he asks her to explain her next plan to escape. Feeling busted, she does so.
He doesn’t scold her. If anything he helps her see the flaws in her plans and fixes them. By the time her session is finished, her plan is nearly fail-proof. He tells her so.
She executes it the following day.
The doctor is waiting for her when she makes it out. He has a bag over his shoulders and her deer plushie in the crook of his elbow.
It’s the reason she doesn’t book it away from him. At first she thinks he’s tricked her, and she wasn’t going back, but he has her stuff and he’s holding out his hand.
She takes it.
The sun has barely risen as they make their way to a van with “Delphi’s Strawberries” printed on the side. He tells her to get in the back. She doesn’t want to, she wants to see the sun, but he tells her it’s just for a bit so no one from there will follow them, and she doesn’t want to go back so she gets in the back.
She doesn’t like it in there, there’s nothing to do, and she gets scared when there are sirens, but it's not like the doctor had told her to be still so she moves. “Fidgeting”. it’s what a previous doctor had called it.
She pretends to shoot a bow and swing a sword. She ties invisible knots. She even sings her favorite songs. Quietly though; she doesn’t want to go back, and they are normally very loud.
After a couple of hours they make a stop; she has to pee and she’s hungry. The doctor, Sieve, he tells her to call him, ties her hair to make it look neat and gives her a new orange shirt and pair of shorts they find in the back of the van.
When she sees her own reflection in one of the van’s windows, she no longer looks sick.
She gets her first bite of fast food. It feels greasy and looks like what her mom would have called fake food. It’s the best thing she’s ever put in her mouth.
When she asks Sieve about taking her pills, he frowns and says she doesn’t have to take them. He’s going to find her a better doctor, a healer he calls them. They will make sure she actually needs the pills; her old doctors had no idea what they were doing.
It’s the best thing she’s heard. She isn’t even scared at the idea of new doctors. Maybe they can find out why she’s sick.
That’s the only question she asks Sieve. It’s clear he’s expecting more, it’s not the first time he has basically kidnapped a kid, all of them had questions, and she doesn’t know what’s happening, not really, just that she is out and safe.
She knows it.
When they get back into the van, she’s allowed to sit in the front and see the sun.
Their final stop is a place called Camp Half-Blood. It’s behind a field of strawberries so the van wasn’t a lie. It looks like a normal summer camp, she remembers her mom threatening to send her to one, even if she had decided on the hospital instead.
It’s not as scary as she was expecting. It looks homey; a place for fun more than anything else.
Sieve leaves her with a man that looked to be half-horse, Chiron, with a whisper of something into his ear and a final smile in her direction.
She smiles back.
Chiron tells her she’s a demigod. He doesn’t tell her she’s not crazy, but that she is half a god and that makes her different and not the same as normal mortals.
He tells her about how this camp is here to keep her safe so she can live without the fear of monsters –that’s what some of those visions were, monsters, not her imagination going against her–.
That one of these cabins will be her new home once her godly parent realizes she is here.
She can’t wait.
For now she has to stay in the Hermes cabin. He doesn’t care if she’s not his kid, she can sleep in his shrine.
It’s crowded.
She manages to get a bed when Chiron tells the girl he told to give her a tour that Maria is sick. The girl assumes it’s physical. She doesn’t correct her; it gets her a bed.
She tries to settle in. It doesn’t work. There are too many people and half of them aren’t really there and she still can’t tell who.
After a boy her age asks her if she was speaking to the air, even though the girl she was talking to had been responding to her, Maria has a fit. She cries and screams loudly. She claws at her now ruined hair and tries to get her back to a wall, any wall, come on, before she can try to black out to stop herself. She doesn’t want to be awake anymore.
Everyone backs away from her, she’s so embarrassed, half of them flee through the door. Someone must have gone to find a counselor as three of them run in to try and pin her down. She screams louder and tries to get away from their touches.
A daughter of Hypnos drags her to sleep right before a golden lyre appears over her head.
When she wakes up she thinks she’s back in the hospital again and it nearly sends her into another fit. But it’s a girl, a kid, that pops their head inside the room, and the nurses said that she could not have underaged visitors, she remembers that clearly, she still misses her sister, so this isn’t the hospital.
She had expected to still be restrained, the nurses usually had her tied down to the bed after she has a fit, but she’s not. She can move her legs and arms, they don’t even have bruises, they always have bruises, and move her head.
She relaxes.
Seeing that Maria is awake, the girl whistles a call back into the hall before making her way towards her.
She introduces herself as Lucy, a healer at camp. She’s going to look after her, and asks her what happened the previous night, good, she wasn’t out for long, so she can see how to help her get better.
Maria tells her about her fits, about how she sees things that aren’t there and sometimes when they scare her she has fits. That she doesn’t mean to freak out, it just happens and that she doesn’t know why. She kind of rambles on.
Lucy just hums along. She doesn’t look at her like she’s crazy, or tell her to stop faking it. She asks her if she can see anyone besides her and Maria tells her no.
She can actually see a lot of things but they are all mixed together to the point she can’t make anything out. Kind of like water color.
Lucy says that when she and one of their– their? – brothers gave her a scan with their magic, Maria had been almost normal. They healed her bruising and fixed her crooked finger, Maria had not noticed it was fixed, huh, but her body was fine.
No chemical imbalance that would have indicated something was wrong with her brain either.
Maria was bracing for Lucy to say that there was nothing wrong with her after all. Maybe she was just faking it without realizing.
Instead she says that there is no point of medicating her just yet. No, there was no point of that, they would just try preventive care for now. She and their siblings would just have to watch to see what triggers the fits; if not to stop them, then to make sure she was okay afterwards.
Maria asks her what she means by “their siblings”. She only has one sister that she knows of.
Lucy smiles at her and tells her that Apollo, their father, the man in the sun, had claimed her at sunset.
It had only been five days.
Maria now has fifteen half siblings.
The closest one her age is a boy shorter than her with a familiar face. When she asks, he tells her that they’ve never met before, sorry. He doesn’t judge her for the question.
None of them look at her weirdly. The other campers do, someone spread a rumor she was crazy on her first day at camp, but now people are actually scared of her.
She is sat in the middle of them and given the layout of the cabin rules before they bring her inside, –she’s not even restrained—, and give her a bed of her own. Maria is next to the same boy, Michael, and he explains that he also has to be watched because he tried to run away.
Maria calls him stupid for getting caught. He calls her stupider. She tells him that’s not a word and he tells her that her face is not a word. That sets the premise of their relationship for the years to come.
As Maria grows up in cabin seven she learns to accept her visions as predictions. Her sights will eventually become truths.
The first time it happens, she cries in part heartbreak and part relief when a son of Aphrodite dies on the edge of the border. His corpse had been there for years whenever she passed by, and then he was actually there, and now it’s gone.
It makes what she sees both more and less terrifying.
More because the things she sees are awful, and she wishes she didn’t have to know beforehand. And it’s not like she knows when they will happen, they’re just taunts of things she’ll have no control over.
She saw her own death, and she’ll never come back from witnessing it. How do you come back from something like that? It was horrifying. Whenever they have to go to Olympus, she has to be blindfolded just to make it past the lobby.
Less because it means she’s not actually crazy; what she sees might not be there yet, but it will be there someday, so it’s not fake. Her mom and all those doctors who called her a faker could shove it.
She might be sick now, and maybe she’ll never get better, but just knowing she hadn’t done it to herself takes so much shame off her shoulders. It is not her fault. No amount of “it’s all in your head” and “you could get better if you wanted to and just tried” could have fixed her brain and it was not her fault.
Her siblings believe her.
Most of them are somewhat aware she has prophetic abilities, even if they don’t push her on the topic. It’s not like Maria hates her powers, they are awful, but they can be helpful.
The good thing about being in a camp full of kids is that kids grow and change quickly. She’ll never know exactly when, but she can make guesses.
They can be ready.
Everyone has a part to play, her included.
She is sick, not crazy, and definitely not useless.
Maria still learns to fight like everyone else, even when some people side eye her when she tries to wield a bow. She puts it down after an hour and goes to find a short sword instead.
It’s not her favorite, but she does have to get in close to use it, and that fact settles people. She refuses her siblings' indignation on her behalf, the bow wasn’t for her either.
She keeps her abilities close to her cabin. She’s never really made friends outside of it, and she doesn’t want to. Maria’s never alone either way.
When opinions get divided and no one can decide what to do, she’ll go out and try to piece it together to tell them what happens, and they’ll let it play out. If it looks like something will go wrong, she’ll figure out a way to correct it, and sometimes what she sees changes.
Those moments always bring her into hysteria. Not bad, nor does she think it’s good, just a neutral hysteria of maybe, maybe.
The future is not entirely fixed; some things can be avoided, and so they are.
One day she thinks she sees him.
The boy from her death. Maria has seen him more times than just that one vision, and multiple of his corpses are around somewhere, always older than the little boy on the Hermes’ cabin porch, but it has to be him.
He has to mean something, and she has tried to prepare herself for the day he becomes real and not just the visions, but–
A demigod’s life is going to be short; she has accepted that, but that vision has never stopped scaring her, and it probably never will. But the day will go on.
She goes to check if it’s him. She has never approached a new camper before, she doesn’t approach most campers who aren’t her siblings, but she has to check and so she does.
It’s him.
The eyes, they are so blue, they give him away. And she knows, she knows he’s her brother and she tells him so.
It’s clear he knows too.
Maria makes it her job to keep him safe. She doesn’t trust herself to be alone with him, not now, he’s so small, so she locates everyone of his corpses and waits, and they do not come to pass.
He doesn’t make it easy, no kid ever does.
But he’s alive and that is what matters, so she never gets mad at him. She loves him; he’ll be the last face she sees afterall.
Most nights he falls asleep with her running her fingers through his hair. She doesn’t physically interact with him much outside of that.
They spend time together, Will adores Michael almost as much as he adores Lee, and so she is around often, just making commentary, never touching. Maria doesn’t want to hug him, she hates hugs, it makes her feel trapped. Will is so good about not pushing her boundaries, and maybe someday she will hug him, but not yet.
The rest of their siblings don’t know he matters, they just love him because he’s there and that’s what’s important, so she doesn’t stop them from treating him like he isn’t going to matter a lot one day.
Maria never got to be a kid, not really, but Will, he gets to be a kid.
He’s defenseless, Maria learns that early on.
Will isn’t made to cause harm to others when he much prefers to heal them. He tries to heal her even. He is upset when he isn’t able to, and Maria makes sure to reassure him that it’s not his fault. Some sicknesses can only be improved with time, and she’s soothed that he had even wanted to try.
He’s the best healer their cabin has seen in decades, and it’s a great thing. The rest of them will just have to be the ones to protect him.
No one minds.
She picks up a spear of her own.
It scares her at first. Whenever that one Ares girl has hers out Maria leaves the area to hyperventilate, but if she is going to die to a spear, she refuses to go out scared of it.
She masters it quickly and she laughs at the realization.
The future starts its motion.
She sees it, has seen it everyday since she first got sick, but then Luke asked her to join him for the start of it.
She doesn’t go, wonders if she could have stopped it if she had, but she is sick and that doesn’t stop because of her wants, so she stays behind and watches the future unfold in front of her.
It is fixed, and she can’t change that, so she lives it.
Campers die.
They were already dying, constantly were, and will continue to, but now they are certainties.
Maria has never been so uncertain. She knows when she, herself, will die, has never seen another corpse of her lying around, so that must be when. But she knows nothing else and that’s more terrifying than knowing so she distracts herself with another certainty.
Will.
Will is there when she dies, she doesn’t know why exactly, but he is, so she must be able to keep him till then.
Luke had tried to take him away. She had stopped him, and she will continue to stop him until that spear is in her back.
Will is going to see the end of the war.
They will make sure of that, and they prepare him to do so. He might never learn to fight, Maria finds herself stopping him before he ever goes through with it, but she doesn’t know if that means he will someday, or if he won’t and she’s just ensuring that as a fact, but he will learn how to survive.
She tells Lee to give the infirmary to Will. He does.
The faces at camp change to the ones she has always seen, and she tries to not freak out at what that means for them.
It’s happening so fast, she’s even more clueless to what in front of her is actually there.
She doesn't let Will or any of her younger siblings see her uncertainty. She is going to be their big sister that is fearless, even if she is losing it. It’s one thing for them to witness her having fits, but it’s another thing for them to have to witness her falling apart.
They can see her sick, they have never judged her for being human, but she won’t let them be scared just because she can't hold it together.
She wants to be a person they can look back on and know she had been brave. For them.
She catches her first glimpse of Will post the end of the war.
He makes it. Oh my Hera, he makes it out, and she laughs at what she sees for him afterwards.
She’s never been so relieved.
When Lee dies, she remembers the last corpse, and she yells at Will to move. He does.
It’s a certainty now.
She finds more peace with every day they draw closer to the final battle.
Will is still so young, but he is ready. He’s no longer that tiny little boy she was scared to be alone with. He’s hot headed, and still as defenseless as he was as a six-year-old, but he’s bright and he will make a great leader. She just knows it.
She is going to die, she doesn’t think she will ever be able to change that, but she made an impact on Will’s and the rest of her siblings’ lives and that is what will matter.
Maria thinks of her other sister. She hasn’t seen her in years, but the deer plushie is on her bed and that was her impact in Maria’s life, and she wonders if she should do one last thing for her.
She is going to die.
And after she does so, her belongings will be split up between whoever remains. The inheritance as they call it.
Unless they become the counselor, they don’t write wills. They just trust the rest of them to give everything out in a way the person would have wanted, one last way to reminisce about their lives, and fight for the rest.
Even those who do write them just note who they want their successors to be, and let the rest of them figure out what to do with their belongings.
It’s a tradition; a morbid one, but a treasured one nonetheless.
And normally, mortal families get first dibs on the important stuff, but she hates her mother. Everyone knows so, they found her when Maria first asked, but she also hates her, so they won’t tell her mother about her passing.
She puts the deer plushie in a box with a note that says nothing more than “sorry, and I have always tried to love you because of this - Maria” and goes to find an address.
She doesn’t hate her sister, she doesn’t know her, if she remembers her, or if she even will like this one last thing to remember her by. Noel would have loved it if she had left him the deer, their eyes were the same color after all, but this is her decision.
It won’t arrive until after she dies, but that’s not the point.
She packs up the rest of her stuff while she’s at it, and shoves it in their attic with the rest of the storage.
When they leave for the final battle, her bunk will be clean; nothing but a note left on her made bed, with something sure to make whoever ends up reading it laugh.
They march to her death and she is ready.
When Michael dies, that stupid named idiot, she puts Will in charge of the rest of them. He is the middle child, sixth in the eleven of them that made it to the battlefield.
He is ready. The rest of them listen to her, and listen to him.
They follow orders and fight for their lives. Will is the only one of them who won't kill this day.
She watches as Declan falls to a hellhound, and as Jessica gets an arrow through the heart. She doesn’t stop fighting.
She shouts at one of her sisters in Artemis’ hunt, she never learned her name, to get a poisoned Austin, that dummy tried to hide it, to the medic tent.
When it’s time, she feels it in her soul.
She deserts her post and goes to find her little brother for one last goodbye.
Will is surprised to see her, but he’s not scared of her, why would he be, she’s his big sister, nor of her manic grin.
She hugs him. Maria hates hugs but she hugs her little brother, she has watched him grow up, she hugs him tight and tells him that she is proud, so proud and so so sorry.
That should have been the end. This is what she saw, so this should be where she dies.
She sees the glint of something metal in his blue eyes, they are so blue, and she lunges on reflex.
She has spent the past many hours fighting for her life, and so she moves like it.
She herds Will into the elevator and keeps the four enemy demigods from getting to him. When the doors close, her on the outside, she fights.
A spear is still what gets her in the end. In the front, and not from behind like she expected, and it’s not instant, but she doesn’t go down alone.
No, she takes all four of them out with her. They had tried to kill her brother, and she had promised herself that he was going to be the one to make it, so he was going to make it.
She has seen it so. The future is not entirely fixed; some things can be avoided, and so they are.
But not all.
After the battle, someone would have found the four assailants dead in a heap underneath Maria’s own cooling body, a spear wound in her abdomen, the same grin still on her face.