kicking and screaming (wicked)

It was a nice day. The sun was shining through the glazed windows of the impeccably clean cabin, bouncing off of the reflective tables in the living room and the hallways that connected to the bedroom. Quite a lot of them were open, letting the early morning breeze carry off the scents of hundreds of perfumes. Tiberius didn’t like the girly smell of the cabin, it made him feel small and weak and closer to Aphrodite. He really didn’t like his birth mother, who had left him after just a couple of months with his overbearing father. Although the boy never showed any hate towards her, you could see it in his eyes, how they hardened and cooled like igneous rocks at the slightest mentions towards her. It was very ironic that he was running the cabin for her, but someone had to make sure his siblings grew up to be respectful demigods. TY was dressed in a white collared shirt, black pants, and thin grey suspenders. The outfit showed off the paleness of his skin, the whiteness shining like a cold aura. You could practically see the bones in his body he was so thin, although there was a considerable amount of muscle that Tibs had procured over the months that he had trained and fought. The cabin leader passed by a mirror and stopped to look at his reflection. Try as he may, he couldn’t resist the urge to fawn over himself once in a while.

He looked handsome, almost ruggedly handsome, but Tiberius could never pull off the bad boy look. Leather jackets and studded vests and muscle shirts just weren’t his thing, and the boy absolutely detested sagging. The black hair that he was born with was like a birds nest, sticking every which way with no method to the madness. Tibs noted to himself to get a trim, mostly because his on/off girlfriend didn’t like it when it was past the ears, and now it was almost to his neck. But it looked good on him, no matter what Tiberius did to himself it always looked good. His eyes today were green, like a bottle green that you held up to a cloudy grey sky, checking to see if there was a letter. Usually his irises changed colour depending on his emotions, but Ty wasn’t angry or sad or confused, just content. He ran his hands through his dark hair, messing it up ever more and walked away from the mirror, walking slowly past a doorway, softly whistling Vivaldi’s Winter. I really should play some classical music around here sometimes. Tibs thought to himself fondly as he walked by a bedroom. 

Then there came a sharp pain in his nose, momentarily spreading white across the whole of Tiberius’ range of vision. The cabin leader stumbled backward, smacking into a corner of the wall, and he was too preoccupied with holding his bleeding nose to notice the hard plaster digging into the soft skin between his two shoulder blades. “Ow!” The boy said, eyes starting to water. He’d experienced worse, counting the time where he’d fought off Kronos’ followers and gotten many cuts and scratches and bruises and death threats than he could count. Tibs opened his eyes to a boy who was profusely apologising. Clearly it was an accident, and so Tiberius wasn’t mad. It dulled the pain a little to know that this wasn’t an act of revenge. He waved off the apology. “It is quite alright. I know it was a minor mishap.” 

When the boy went to get some paper towels for Ty, the cabin leader nodded his thanks, holding them up to his bleeding nose. His hands were warm and sticky with blood, the lines on his palm painted a crimson red. “Don’t worry, if it was broken I would not be able to make a coherent sentence.” Tiberius’ pain tolerance wasn’t great, although in battle the adrenaline did help. The boy walked him to his bed, where Tiberius sat down, stars still dancing in his line of vision. He was fine, of course he was fine. “I’m not angry, Dylan. I won’t punish you.” Tibs said, pressing the tissues harder to his ever bleeding nose, trying not to get the red drops on the duvet.

For a couple of minutes, the cabin leader gently pushed on his nose, barely even wincing. If this incident had happened a couple of months ago, Ty would have cried at the pain and probably pouted about it for weeks. But things had happened to him, things that were unspoken of, things that the boy tried more often than not to forget, because to remember would be a crime in itself. Those things had taught him to welcome pain like an old friend unseen for many years, and so his pain tolerance now was extremely high. Right now, his sprained nose was at about a 4.6, whereas before it would have been a 9.2. Tiberius didn’t care how bruised it looked at all. Really the only thing he was worried about regarding this injury was the amount of attention he would draw to himself. All of the girls sort of flocked to him, all goggly eyes and lips aflutter with proclamations of devotion and adoration. Needless to say Tiberius turned them all down. Ty already had someone. Or he thought he had someone, it was somewhat hard to perceive what he and his on/off girlfriend were at the moment. Ty wondered if Dylan had the same problem, with campers chasing him down like hounds to a deer. He looked curiously at his half brother, green eyes trying to see past this facade of apologies, and there wasn’t. Tibs found most of his siblings to either be afraid of him or completely, annoyingly loyal to him. Ty nodded as he agreed with him, still prodding at his nose. 

But then Tibs shook his head. “No no no I’m not. I’m most undoubtedly not the best.” It was true. Ty didn’t do anything for the Aphrodite cabin except play classical music through the marbled halls and try to air out the millions of mixed perfume, which on good days the demigod could not stand at best. When he came down with migraines, however, the smell was unbearable and make him throw up, so Tibs had forbidden any of those girly scents around his room. However, in Dylan’s room, which was shared by the other boys, the perfume was prominent. Tiberius looked at his hands, which had long since stopped playing with his nose and now were classed, thumbs twiddling around each other like they were dancing.

When Dylan mentioned shopping, Ty sat up a little straighter. Shopping? Shopping? This was something the young and frankly detached cabin leader hadn’t done in such a long while, he couldn’t even remember the newest item in his wardrobe or bookshelf. “You… you want to be seen in public? With me?” Tiberius questioned his half brother, startled at what he knew the answer was going to be. Usually people besides his only friend would want to go out with him to the city, and even that was stretching it. There was only so much a person could handle, Tiberius knew, before they pushed him away, uninterested and unreachable. “I mean, I accept, of course. There are some Shakespeare plays that I have been wanting to acquire for quite some time now…” Ty smiled, almost giddy with the thought of clothes shopping with Dylan, an Aphrodite child that wasn’t half as annoying as their brothers and sisters. Maybe they could grow close through this experience?

The cabin leader shrugged, not wanting to argue with his brother. Granted, Ty wasn’t as bad as some of the other campers that he knew, who killed in cold blood for the fun of it. Tibs didn’t think that taking human lives was fun, and although monsters were a different case entirely, he tried not to do that either. Mostly he was a good man who lived for peace and non-violence. But sometimes his morals got screwed up, and he had done some questionable things. It wasn’t just killing things to protect himself or the ones he loved that made Tiberius a horrible boy, it was the things that he didn’t do. All demigods were supposed to be fighters, with a thirst to protect the old ways of the Greek Gods and their beloved camp. However Ty didn’t feel that. He was a coward who fled into the night without so much as a single word to another person. Ty was afraid of a lot of things, but dying was at the top of his list. “You can’t have met many of our brothers, then.” Tibs said to Dylan. There were lots of better Aphrodite children than he, and Ty didn’t understand why Dylan couldn’t see that. What made him so special? 

Tiberius realised that Dylan was probably one of those people who was a label name brand person and who would drool at the sight of some snapbacks and shoes. Most of his siblings were, and so he was fine with that. Ty only shopped for sweaters and books and ink and things like that, but he still felt his joy level go up when he found something perfect that matched his eyes and didn’t wash out his milky white skin. “Have you never read Shakespeare? Okay, I know how we’re going to spend our thursday nights as a cabin.” It was Tibs’ self-placed duty to give his siblings a different outlook on life and make them become more sophisticated, like his half-siblings back at home. However, unlike his own family back in Albany, if these kids didn’t want to adapt a different lifestyle, then the cabin leader wouldn’t force it upon them. Ty didn’t want them to hate him. He rubbed the back of his head, smiling. “Maybe. Anyways, how are we going to get there?” He liked Dylan, he really did. He reminded him of his little sister back home, Charlotte.