The satellite dish at Camp Half-Blood would be better suited as a cereal bowl.
It hardly works. It catches a grand total of nineteen channels, twelve of which are news stations, and the final seven almost never have anything playing that’s actually worth watching. But the DVD player only ever works every third month, and the strawberry plants have to be watered, so on rainy days, the sixteen of them cram into the rec room of the Big House, organised, fight-reduction seating for as long as Nyssa can tiredly maintain it, and squabble over the remote.
“It’s my turn! Give it to me!”
“Quit whining you little twerp —”
“Will! Make her give me the remote!”
“Snitch! Snitch! Sherman, beat him up —”
Nico narrowly dodges Kayla’s dirty sneaker, sniggering to himself as Will and Sherman share, for perhaps the first time in either of their lives, an identical sigh of endless suffering, each grabbing one sibling and yanking backwards. They’ve really dug their claws in, so it takes a couple tries.
“Kayla,” Will warns, both hands clamped around her ankles, “if you don’t let go in three damn seconds —”
“Ellis sucks at picking channels!”
“Everybody sucks at picking channels! We got maybe four to choose from!”
“Seven,” correct several people at once.
Will rolls his eyes. “Forgive me. I forgot about the three toddler channels the rest of y’all babies are so enthralled by.”
“As if you don’t watch Sesame Street with as much childlike glee as the rest of us, Solace.”
“Can it, Diaz. Kayla, remove your nails from his face!”
A hand tugs on his sleeve. Nico glances over to find Austin’s big, pleading eyes, and since he is a massively weak loser, apparently, he sighs, mouth twitching when Austin wiggles happily, and plunges his hand into the nearest shadow.
He digs around for a second, trying to orient himself, and smirks when he sees his hand reappear across the couch, right in between Kayla and Ellis’ heads. He waits, watching for a break. Austin watches carefully next to him, hands still around his other wrist, and when the timing is right — a twitch in Kayla’s knee indicating an oncoming kick that even Will won’t be able to stop — he squeezes. Nico darts between them, snatching the remote for himself. He passes it to Austin with a wink. Austin points it to the TV immediately, clicking it to what everyone has aptly named the ‘Grandma Channel’ — twenty-four-seven footage of gardening set to quit jazz.
Thirteen groans — one cheer by Miranda, their lone ally — sound at once.
“You’re weak as all hell, di Angelo,” Billie informs him, obviously a fake gardener. Shame.
Despite their troubles, the peace of the Grandma Channel does not last. In what can only be a coordinated attack, Nico and Austin are lulled into a false sense of security, entranced by a particularly satisfying timelapse of a grape vine, and when their guards are down, they are ambushed. With a deafening war cry, Harley is flung bodily on top of the two of them, landing with two gleeful elbows to Nico’s shoulder and Austin’s ribs, rendering them breathless and perhaps even close to death.
“No maiming,” Austin protests, wheezing.
“I’m telling Chiron,” Nico agrees, similarly struggling to reinflate his lungs. He glances at his medic boyfriend, also known as Judas, who only shrugs, smirking. His thumb is notably smeared with grease, a consequence of touching Harley no matter how many times Nyssa forces him to shower. Traitor. “No maiming is, like, the only rule here.”
Harley climbs off of them, elbows once again violating the rule on the way off. Nico actually feels his spleen compress into the size of an atom.
The little twerp hands his prize to his big sister, who points it at the screen gracefully, as if she did not just use said brother as a weapon against two innocent people. Constantly innovative, those Hephaestus children.
Nyssa, on account of having hands like steel wires and a right hook that could make Muhammad Ali fall crying to his knees, is left peacefully alone with the remote. Nico glares at her, as he often does, with equal amount of hatred and awe. His emotions are widely replicated across the overstuffed couches.
She clicks rapidly through the channels, as she always does, fast enough that the sound echoes like static along with the rain.
breaking — jump! — traffic — learn — George — crayon — soil — sale —
She hardly rests in a channel for more than a second, cutting in the middle of sentences and even words, images flashing rapidly across the screen, swirling colour and skipping melodies, steadied by the roll of thunder, the patter of raindrops, the roar of wind and away of bending trees.
kids! — buy — gun — bridge — add — spade — colour — nine — east —
Austin sighs from beside him, sinking into the couch. Nico breaks away from the hypnosis for a moment to glance at the rest of the room and finds everyone else similarly entranced; eyes half-lidded and unfocused against the still-swirling TV, heads tilted back, curled into each other, limbs slow, fingers tapping quietly.
run — neat — rose — pasta — schools — closure — Sola — bumper —
gym — roll — climb — bush — accident — bud —
The old couches creak as Will shifts, Kayla pushed gently to the side as he moves forward.
The rain seems to mute itself. Nico is aware, quite suddenly, of the stiff set to Will’s spine, the odd quality of his voice. Nyssa, too, must recognize it, because she glances over at him, then slowly back to the TV, pressing the channel button once and setting the remote carefully on the coffee table in front of her.
“— terrible tragedy,” says a news anchor. “Unbelievably, really, Barbara, and something so sudden —”
“Yes, Dave, always something you read about in old newspapers but never remember happens in real life —”
He reaches for the remote but misses the first time, patting blindly on the table, and the second time, too, eyes glued to the bright screen. His hand scrabbles, nails digging on the old wood, increasingly desperately, but his eyes won’t move, face won’t pivot. Nico swallows, pushing back the sting of bile crawling slowly up his throat, the dullness in his ear, muffled like his ear is turned to a soundproofed wall. The hands he tells to reach over and hand the remote to Will don’t work.
“— almost makes me think of James Dean. That’s Naomi Solace, for those just tuning in, currently in critical condition from a head-on collision with a semi in Savannah, Georgia —”
Nico’s ears white out completely.
Will’s knees hit the floor.
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