Chapter Text
The Way Station’s intercom crackles to life
“Main room?” Lettie’s voice comes in over the speakers. Katie pulls her head out of Festus to hear what her girlfriend has to say, Uncle Leo reaching the button before she can even pretend to make it around her sleeping cousin
“WorkShop, what's up?” He says into the microphone by the speaker
“I think we got questers comin’ in” Lettie replies, she's been on the roof all morning messing with some seeds Aunt Meg sent them. It's the prime lookout spot “Looks like they are comin’ in hot”
“How hot?” Uncle Leos asks
“It's airborne. How long till y'all can get Festus closed up and flyin'?”
“Not fast enough, Jason?”
“Yeah I'm coming to you,” Uncle Jason says over the intercom in his office
“I'll go with Uncle Jason,” Katie tells Uncle Leo “You can close up Festus faster than me”
Uncle Leo shoots her a thumbs-up as Katie makes her way out of the workshop, shedding safety equipment and donning jewelry as she goes. By the time she's geared up in her bracelets and jacket Uncle Jason is meeting her by the stairs to the roof
“Who are we looking at?” she asks her girlfriend as they come up next to the blond on the roof.
“No clue” Lettie's hair is still done up in her working braid, she's glued to the lookout binoculars and facing over the parking garages and towards the tracks. “It's three kiddos and a bunch’a flying ladies”
Katie pulls her own binoculars off her bracelet and scales them up with a snapping motion. Sure enough, it's three kids booking it down the middle of the railyard. She can't make out faces, they have hats and hoods, but from the bow that's being fired by one and the celestial bronze sword carried by another, they are definitely demigods. They are chased by a pair of harpies, Katie recognizes them as some of the ones who roost on top of Victory Field
“They pissed off the Victory Girls” Katie informs Uncle Jason, he groans in response “Oh come on you know they have eggs right now”
“Yeah yeah,” he grouches, that flock has never liked him “Are we flying?”
“Nah,” she decides “There close enough for a toss, you good for that”
Her goddad laughs delighted “Always!”
Even at twenty-three Uncle Jason can pick Katie up just as easily as when she was eight. He doesn't need to actually throw her like a frisbee or anything, they do it the safe ‘Captain America’ way with the shield. Uncle Jason turns the dial on his watch as Katie takes her place on the other side of the roof and the shield she and Uncle Leo made him spirals out like a camera shudder, Lettie rambling off locations as they go.
“Ready?” Katie asks, the wind picking up
“Ready,” Uncle Jason grins, they both love doing this. They have a lot of practice with it too, a favorite summer pastime is getting launched into the canoe lake
Katie takes a running start at her godfather, the wind racing her. When she reaches him she springboards off the shield, boosted by Uncle Jason’s strength and his wind. She trusts the air he's summoned completely, Uncle Jason has never missed when it comes to her, setting her between the demigod party and the harpies. She takes out her sword mid-flight, landing in a relaxed stance hoping to de-escalate.
The harpies schreek, the smaller green one landing on the convention center roof. The bigger red one lights on the railing of the Missouri St rail overpass
“Heeeeey Gretchen,” Katie says to the big red bird lady, keeping half an eye on Elenore on the roof “What's going on hun”
“EGGS” Gretchen shrieks
“Eggs? What happened to your eggs?”
“Touched eggs!”
“Did you touch their eggs?” she asks the kids behind her, not taking her eyes off the harpies
“What? No, we were just passing by,” yells a familiar voice she doesn't have the time to try and place
“Yeah no Gretchen we've gone over this, just because a demigod is within twenty feet of the field doesn't mean there after the eggs”
Gretchen hisses and spits in disagreement
“Do you want me to dust you again?” Katie threatens, spreading her arms out in challenge “I can dust you again if you want, but you might miss the hatching if I do”
Gretchen apparently wants to be dusted again, she leaps into the air before dive-bombing Katie. But Katie has fought this monster many times. She meets Gretchen with her sword, going for her weak left side from an old injury that healed wrong. It's a slice mid-air, and the red bird is gold glitter around her
“Go home Elenore,” she calls to the other beast, Elenore shrieks and grumbles but heads back to the baseball stadium
Katie can hear the group approaching on the sharp gravel behind her. She takes a moment to lift up the coin charm on her necklace and lick Ha-Pa’s symbol, the call connects immediately as the symbol lights up
“Hell and it's Handbasket, how can I help you?” Janet, her and Papi’s secretary, sing songs through her necklace
“Hey girl, I had to dust Gretchen again. Can you fast pass her if you spot her” Katie says into the charm
“Oh honey,” the ghost tuts “You are too soft on those birds”
“Shes just broody, it's not her fault” Katie defends, turning to the approaching party “And she's gonna be a mega bitch if she misses the hatching”
“Oh, don't I know it” Janet laughs, Katie can practically hear her filing her nails “Big boss is probs gonna have a dinner before you go watch your boy run, you still good to bring the stuff?”
“I'm good for the drink co*ke, if that's what you're asking” she laughs, Janet huffs in disappointment on the other line
It's then Katie can make out the faces of the approaching party. Three gray-haired gray-eyed demigods, two of which are supposed to be in a different time zone and one of which she is legally allowed to give a wedgie
“Hey Janet I'm gonna have to call you back, I have to go beat an ass,” Katie says
“Oooh, good luck honey” Janet crackles as Katie wipes her thumb over the coin charm disconnecting the call
“This better be a face-stealing situation,” she scolds the newcomers “Because I know for a fact that no brother of mine is supposed to be off questing with his sister right now”
“Katie, let me explain” Atticus Steel, son of Hephaestus and Katie’s baby half-brother starts, hands up placatingly
“It better be a f*cking good explanation, does Harley even know you're here!?”
“No-” Gus groans
“Then what the actual f*ck are you doing in Indiana Gus?”
It's then that his younger sister, Jackie daughter of Apollo, clears her throat eyebrows raised
“Yeah, ixnay on the f-bombs man,” Gus says
“Since when do you not cuss dude, I literally taught you to cuss”
“Since I got my baby brother with me”
It's then that Katie turns her attention to the last and smallest member of the group. The kid can't be older than nine, same gray hair gray eyes as his siblings with the same hooked nose and hiding behind Jackie.
“Oh sh*t,” Katie says eloquently
“Yeah,” Gus says sheepishly “meet our brother, Draco”
-
Katie all but drags the Steel sibling back to the Way Station by the ear. The newest addition still looks scared and apprehensive, so she tries not to let how pissed off she is seep into everything shes doing, but she knows she's failing at it
“Plant it” she demands pointing to the table in the main room, her brother and his siblings follow orders
“Is that Atticus !?” Leo yells from the workshop the second he spots them, storming over
“Heeey Leo” Gus greets, sliding down in his chair ready to be read the riot act again
“The hell are you doing here man?” Uncle Leo is just as thrown and pissed as she is “Does anyone know you're here?”
“Not really ”
“Who knows you're here?”
Both Gus and Jackie look in opposite directions, Draco sitting between them looks lost
“So no one knows you're here?” Katie presses, more silence “No f*ck this I'm calling my dads”
“No! Please don't call Will” Jackie pleads, the idea of her apprenticeship in the infirmary being threatened making her crack
“Then you need to spill Jacqueline,” Katie insists “Why the hell are the two of you off-campus without anyone knowing? How are you in Indiana without anyone knowing?!”
“We may have stolen a pegasi” Gus confesses to the ceiling
“You stole a PEGASI ?!” Katie shrieks
“Which pegasi?” Uncle Leo asks
“Does it matter?” Katie questions him
“It was Dilbert,” Gus grouches “And we sent him back when we got to the house”
“Of Course it was Dilbert, how is it always Dilbert?” Katie mutters to herself pinching the bridge of her nose, she can feel the gray hairs starting. She has no clue how her dads didn't drop her back in the swamp with half the sh*t she pulled as a kid
“Dilbert doesn't snitch,” Jackie says shrugging like Katie wasn't the one who taught them that
“Backtrack,” Uncle Jason says as he enters the conversation, having joined the group with Lettie sometime around the realization that no one at camp knows where the Steel siblings are “Why are you off campus in the first place?”
“We went to get Draco” Gus gestures at the younger boy
“Why ?” Uncle Leo and Katie ask at the same time
“He called!” Gus insists
“We left him a drachma and told him to call us when it got bad” Jackie adds
“So when he said our mom had lost it and the monsters were getting closer-” Gus doesn't finish, the kid is sitting right there already looking hella spooked by the whole thing
“How do you even know he's a demigod?” Uncle Jason asks
The two of them start squawking in half-finished antidotes about what Draco can and can't see and gesturing from their hair and eyes to their brother's hair and eyes to each other's hair and eyes. It's a pretty unnatural color palette, especially with all three of them only sharing a mortal parent who is apparently a brunette. Godly genes are weird
“Alright alright, let me get this straight.” Katie puts her hands out to stop the teens from talking all over each other “You two stole a pegasi to take a cross-country trip in the middle of the night to kidnap your baby brother from your bio mom”
“Okay when you say it like that it sounds bad” Jackie grouches crossing her arms and pouting
“It already sounded bad” Lettie points out
“What did you expect us to do?”
“You literally could have told any adult” Uncle Leo reminds
“This is exactly what the satyrs and counselors are for” Uncle Jason adds
“Hes our brother” Jackie insists
“And the two of you are under eighteen,” Uncle Leo scolds, finger out “And wards of the camp, these rules are there for a reason!”
Katie pats her godfather on the arm as he runs his hand over his face in frustration, groaning and muttering to himself in Spanish about stupid kids and getting motor oil in his hair.
“Did y'all at least have a plan?” Lettie asks, working to defuse the tension in the air “Or were you just gonna walk the whole way home?”
“We were taking the Amtrak back,” Jackie says “But we got derailed somewhere between Crawfordsville and here. We were walking the tracks to the next stop when the fuuu-freacking harpies attacked us”
“You can say f*ck” Draco grumbles, the first real thing he's spoken the whole time “I know the word f*ck I'm not a baby”
“Dude your nine don't say f*ck” Gus tells the kid
“I can say f*ck if I want” Draco insists, crossing his arms and glaring at the table “I can say worse than f*ck”
“Alright alright,” Katie breaks in before it turns into a cussing contest “Who am I calling?”
“No one!” Jackie cries “You said you wouldn't call Will!”
“We have to call someone at camp” Uncle Jason tries to reason “They need to know where you are”
“No, they don't” Gus whines “They probably don't even know we're gone!”
“They absolutely know you're gone” Katie scolds “There's bed checks and a head count at breakfast. This isn't my parent's time anymore, they know you're gone. Aunt Gracie is probably having a heart attack right now, she's never lost a kid. So who am I calling?”
The two older Steels have a wordless conversation that only siblings can have, they come to a unanimous decision
“Mr. Nico,” they say together
“How is my Papi better than my Dad?”
“He's pretty unflappable” Gus starts
“And he can talk down Dr.Will” Jackie adds
“And he doesn't snitch when we sneak out to cabin hop at night”
“And he-”
“Fine, fine,” they are not wrong about how Papi wranglers campers “I will call Papi. At least tell me you have been eating and sh*t on your little excursion? No one is bleeding out?”
The older Steel siblings look sheepish again, at the mention of food Draco’s stomach rumbles
“Come on dude!” She's so done with idiot kids, she doesn't know how her parents do it every day
“We lost our packs when we had to hop train,” Jackie whines “It's not our fault!”
“I'll get some food in them,” Lettie soothes, putting her hand on Katie’s shoulder and squeezing “You go call your dad”
“Thank you” Katie will never not be grateful to her girlfriend
“I thought you said they're nice,” Draco mutters to his older siblings as the adults disperse
“They are nice,” Gus tells him “We're just in big big trouble”
Draco looks awestruck for a second “This is in trouble?” he asks
“I mean we're probably gonna lose dessert for a month,” Jackie says
“And be on double stable duty” Gus adds
“But yeah,” she finishes “This is being in super major deep trouble”
“Oh wow,” Draco breaths “I guess they are nice”
And god damn it does that break Katie's heart, but she can ponder that later. She walks over to the other side of the main room under the rose window to make her call, quieter away from the bustle of the newcomers. It's easier to go through Janet when it's Papi than boot up a rainbow maker, she licks her necklace again
“Satan's Armpit, how can I help you?” comes Janet’s voice through the coin charm
“Hey girl,” Katie greets “Can you put me through to Papi?”
“The ass beating go that bad?” Janet teases, popping her gum into the mic
“I am still waffling on the ass beating, we’ll see what the dads say”
“Oh hoho, tell me later then hun,” the ghost cackles “Patching you through”
The hold music goes for longer than usual. Katie doesn't sweat it, everyone at camp is probably in some kind of search party right now. She just leans her head back against the wall and lets The Seeds wash over her. Lettie is starting grilled cheeses in the kitchen, the comforting smell of browning butter reaching Katie on the other side of the room
Papi sounds frazzled when he picks up on the other end
“Hey, sorry Pippi. Nows not a good time we got some misplaced kids”
“Mayhaps the Steel siblings?” Katie prompts
“How did you-”
“I happen to be looking at them right now. In my kitchen no less”
“What the hell are they doing in Indiana?!”
“Kidnaping their baby brother apparently”
Papi lets out some creative curses in Italian, tells Katie to hang on, and then she can hear the crackle of the walkie over the call. She can't make out the words, but the voices are displeased and relieved. Katie relays what she knows as Papi acts as the go-between the two communicators, the Steels are losing more than just desert privileges when they get back from the sound of it
“How are we getting them back home?” Katie asks “Cause I'm not putting them back on the Amtrak without a chaperone, the new addition is under ten. And four demigods on a train is bad news”
“Not shadow travel,” Papi says “Jackies Apollo and we have no clue how the little one will react. The more people the more draining it is on the carry-ons” and also Dad will kill them both if Papi tries to shadow travel four to five people back and forth that fast
“We can't take Festus either,” Katie tells him “Somethings off in his hydraulics that we've been troubleshooting, he needs to be at the top of his game to take four people”
“Chariot?” someone in the background gives an input, Papi must have made it back to civilization “Or not, sounds like they're all out on their own pickups or too small”
“f*ck, uh,” Katie goes through her mental list; Ah-Pa goes the wrong way, Skeletor can barely do three, the griffins and the pegasus fight if the griffins have to stay at the camp stables, and she's not f*cking with the maze “Is this a Ha-Pa trip?”
“Might be,” Papi grumbles “Let me brainstorm with the rest of the staff and call you back, okay? Just keep them there”
“Can do. Love you”
“Love you too”
They both make a kiss into the call before disconnecting. Christ, it's not even lunch yet, Katie wonders if she can get Lettie to make her a grilled cheese too
-
Lettie, who is beautiful and wonderful and makes an excellent grilled cheese, had the forethought to just start on lunch. The Steels are inhaling the first batch as the blond heats up the tomato soup she froze from the big bunch she made over the summer. The smell of food is bringing people out of the woodwork, lunchtime it is
Lunch is a chill affair, with current residents coming and going as they feed and water the newcomers. People introduce themselves, Gus having met most of them already. If you want to learn from Leo Valdez you need to go to him these days, and most Hephaestus spawn try to do at least a spring break of study under him.
And after GrandJosie passed last year Uncle Leo ended up with the brunt of the psychic connection to the Way Station, making it even harder to travel. It had been building for a while, both for him and Aunt Georgie. But Aunt Georgie works outside of the Way Station, as an art historian at The Indiana State Museum, so Leo ended up with the heavy lifting of both maintenance and magic
Katie and Lettie joined full-time after GrandJosies passing. They had just finished college, and coming up to help Katie’s goddads with the transition made the most sense at the time. But the Way Station has always been Katie’s safe place, and Lettie had taken to the roof garden and with the downtime to write, it made sense to stay. It felt right to stay
And if the building has started to nudge at the back of Katie’s mind, well that just solidifies that they made the right choice
The next issue comes when Katie needs to take the youngest Steel to the Infirmary for the intake physical
“But he's my brother” Jackie whines “I should get to do his medical intake!”
“Jacqueline Ray Steel, playing with blood is for good little demigods who don't commit Grand Theft Pegusi” Katie scolds before pointing to the sink full of dirty dishes “Go help Gus do dishes before I find a worse chore for you to do”
“UGH!” Jackie wails, stomping her way over to her older brother. f*cking fifteen-year-olds
It doesn't help that the Steel siblings were the youngest year-rounders for a good two years, and Jackie the youngest Apollo for four, it's given them a ‘baby sibling’ energy. That and how they were coddled a bit from how they came to camp. They are from a pod of eight siblings, all different dads, that got taken by the state in a hoarder case. When parental rights were terminated and the siblings were being split up the camp was able to keep the two of them together as the only demigods of the bunch. No one ever comes to camp easily, and being separated from mortal siblings is a common story, so everyone is always ready to become a surrogate
Katie guesses that you can't take away a kid that wasn't born yet though, because here Draco is looking worried about leaving his siblings. She wonders how much contact he had with them, how much contact any of them have had with any of the other six mortal siblings who are god knows where. Katie doesn't blame the Steels for going to get Draco when he called, even if it is becoming a pain in the ass
Katie ruffles Draco’s short gray hair “Come on little dude, I promise I don't bite”
A chorus of how big of a liar she is comes from multiple directions, Katie just laughs head thrown back, and beckons the kid down the hall. Its probably not helping her case with the new addition, but that's family
