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Something tickles her throat for the first time when they’re bickering.
Their bickering is nothing new, it’s an old and familiar comfort, the series of petty actions and reactions form the steadfast foundation of whatever they mean to each other. Remarks fly bitter from her lips. A smirk lines his, leaking quips like a broken bucket trickles water mistakenly from the bottom.
Travis pranks. Katie yells. The cycle repeats.
“You are the most immature, irritating, infuriating person-” Katie spews at him, the words bubbling out from a brew of fury, placed poignantly after his latest stunt involving pilfering stock from the camp store and replacing it with matryoshka dolls filled with smoke bombs.
All as a ruse to crack an egg over her head as she stumbled out with smoke stinging her eyes, canary-colored yolk running down the strands of her hair.
“Tell me, Ekaterina, do you always look this good?” Travis is the devil incarnate, sly grin painting his features with a shit-eating-cheshire-cat-who-got-the-cream quality he can’t ever seem to shake. “Gimme a camera, I wanna capture this moment. Freeze it forever.”
“My name is not Ekaterina,” she says, fists balling and cheeks flaming. She is a mess, a bona fide one at that, eyes wild, clothes rumpled and stained with stray egg white drippings. “I’m going to murder you, Stoll.”
“Pardon me, O’ Catherine the Great,” Travis says easily, everything is stupidly easy to him.
Katie paws at the goop clinging to her hair and flings it at him with all her might. He dodges, with ease. That frustrating kind he always has that makes nothing serious and burns her skin till it nearly blooms with rash.
Every kind thing she’s ever thought or believed about him, every good moment they’ve ever shared- it flies out the window and into the night air that marks the end of her late shift when he does this.
Grass grows taller and braids itself around his feet. Thistles rise and poke at the exposed skin of his ankles A threat starts in the back of her throat to follow up her scream of anger, ready to spring forth and pierce him when she catches the way Travis grins at her.
Annoyingly good-natured and somewhat fond, the one he reserves for she-whom-he-loves-to-piss-off-most.
Travis winks at her, irises the color of forget-me-nots and Katie’s throat itches while her stomach turns and heart flips. Like something is inside her, scratching against the walls of her windpipe.
The cough comes sooner rather than later, forcing out with her spluttering something that floats past her lips and into the hand she throws up to meet it.
When she pulls away she catches a glance of what’s pressed to the inside of her palm.
A single petal. Blue.
It’s small, no bigger than the width of her pinky finger.
Katie, blessed and cursed with knowledge of far too many plants, knows what it comes from.
Scorpion grass. Myosotis.
Forget-me-not.
The same hue as his eyes.
There’s no way anyone but her saw it. Not with the fixation Travis holds on Katie’s head-to-toe chaotic glory, drinking in the high of his prank.
“I’d never grant you a pardon, Stoll. I’d hand down your death sentence,” Katie spits and edges towards him, crumpling the petal in her hand to snuff out its beauty and focus on the matter at hand.
“Easy, Kit-Kat.” Travis flicks her forehead and she swats away his hand, his feigned innocence she knows by now to discern from genuinity. “I’d hate for my blood to be on your sweet, dainty hands.”
“These sweet, dainty hands want to wrap around your throat.” Katie declares.
“Woah there, Kitty. Didn’t know you were into that sort of thing,” Travis raises a brow that makes her blush with rage.
“Stoll,” she warns. “I swear to all the gods-”
“Wouldn’t mind it one bit if they did, Katie,” Travis says, looking at her in a way that makes her file through a list of everything she knows about him and come away with nothing to align with what’s coming out of his mouth and the shocking sincerity that matches it.
But he’s gone before she can process what that means.
Or why it leaves her flushing all over the same way azaleas dot a countryside pink in the summer. Warmth sears her face.
Her throat ignites once more, uncomfortable heat forcing out a cough. No more petals tumble forth.
She doesn’t know why one came out earlier, but she’s not worried. Being a demigod is full of the unexplained and incomprehensible. Nothing new to her semblance of normalcy.
She’s a child of Demeter. Plants grow at her behest, in tune to her needs and wants. Maybe it didn’t come from her, maybe it was carried upwards by a stray breeze and into her hand to try to make her panic.
Yes, that’s what happened, she tells herself.
Katie misses the spray of pollen that spills past her lips.
The burning in the back of her throat doesn’t go away.
It worsens a week later when Travis steals from her hard day’s work. Her back is bent to tend to the strawberry patch.
She turns around and he’s there popping plump berries that stain his mouth scarlet with his long, slim fingers that are meant to pick locks and deftly thieve away precious goods. Travis says something he thinks is funny. Katie yells.
Travis leaves. An inferno boils her trachea.
She must be sick, or so she says in Demeter Cabin when she turns in for the evening. Miranda claims she’s suffering from allergies- it is the right season after all.
But Katie’s never been allergic to anything in her life, let alone pollen or dander or anything that comes from the wilderness.
Will Solace tells her she’s fine. Nothing wrong as far as he can tell.
Replenish your fluids often, he tells her. Drink something soothing.
Travis catches wind of it, catching her downing cup after cup of tea laced with chamomile, licorice root, and honey as she sits on the Big House porch after a senior counselor meeting.
“It’s you I’m allergic to,” she says with a smirk.
He sips her tea without invitation. She’s screaming and he spits it out immediately, disgust pinching his face taut.
“Nasty. Vile.” Travis swipes his tongue clean.
“That’ll teach you not to steal from others,” Katie claims knowing she can’t change his nature anymore than a leopard can change its spots, but she relishes in how stupid he looks now.
The setting sun catches his hair in such a way it turns the chestnut curls golden. His face is a cut of high cheekbones, twinkling forget-me-not eyes, and lush, full lips that Katie can’t stop looking at when they form a grin just for her, alone on this porch.
“Yeah, right. If you think I’ll ever learn that lesson, I might start worrying about you,” Travis says and Katie laughs, the sound unfurling deep within her chest.
“Mysterious illness talking,” Katie bites when she sobers up.
“Get well soon, Gardner,” Travis pats her knee twice, those long, slim fingers of his dragging white-hot fever over the fabric of her jeans that leaves her shivering, before he runs for Half-Blood Hill and becomes a speck in the distance.
Lava scorches the back of her mouth. Katie drinks her tea.
Somehow, she only feels the need to cough more.
That night, she can’t hold in the hacking as she’s right on the border of consciousness, and out falls several petals onto her pillow.
She thrashes in her slumber and they wind up on the floor.
In the morning, foggy from wandering the land of dreams, Katie forgets all about it and tells her siblings they need to stop tracking in whatever they grow upon seeing a mess of daffodils on the cabin floor.
Katie cannot stop coughing.
Miranda is beside her. They’re cleaning the Demeter Cabin for inspection while everyone else is off at archery practice. Katie folds her sheets dutifully, straightening and smoothing the fabric down with slow, solid motions.
She dusts with diligence, pausing every now and then to bury her face in her elbow as rasping wracks her frame.
Something is stuck in her throat. Breathing has gotten harder. She coughs.
And coughs.
And coughs.
Nothing comes up. Her airway doesn’t clear. Whatever this cold is, Katie knows it comes from hell itself.
Miranda says the dust must be upsetting her.
Katie shakes her head and thinks of Travis telling her to Get well soon, Gardner.
It’s you I’m allergic to.
Katie thinks of seeing Will Solace again in the infirmary. It’s high time they try ambrosia, she mutters to herself and then stops when air stops circulating in her lungs.
Breathing is gone and stolen. It won’t come back. Inhale or exhale, she can’t.
She’s suffocating, Katie Gardner is going to asphyxiate. Her throat has closed, the walls of tissue are shut, knit tight and bound like unready blossoms.
The floor sways and comes up to meet her. Pain flares in her knees. Hands fly towards her but they’re too late. Shaking, Katie grapples her own face and the coughing begins anew.
A lump passes clean out of her throat.
A large gardenia, in full bloom, is her reward. It lands delicately on the shiny, wooden panels of the floor.
White and lovely, it has a rosy sheen, scarlet in some particularly wet parts.
The tang of metal coats her mouth as air returns to her lungs.
Someone is yelling. She thinks it might be Miranda.
As the world goes dark, Katie has a feeling that the spotty glimmer on its petals is her blood.
Chiron may be immortal, but in the strange light surrounding midnight at the infirmary, he looks as though he’s aged another thousand years when he breaks the prognosis to Katie.
It’s called hanahaki. Flowers are sprouting in her lungs, proof of how she loves someone who does not love her back. They’ll continue to grow as her feelings do, until she suffocates on a mix of blood and petals. To death.
The to death hangs unsaid in the air. Chiron doesn’t have to tell her. Neither does Will Solace who gives her an expression so bereft and full of pity in the drawn line of his mouth that she understands.
No amount of ambrosia can undo this.
Young love should be something beautiful, Chiron says. It’s an unfortunate residual curse of Aphrodite that plagues a stray demigod each century.
Chiron has seen many heroes die, and love has been their undoing, but rarely like this.
He squeezes her hand, the warm pressure reminds her of her father, and Will Solace tells her there’s a cure. Maybe whoever she blooms for feels as she does.
Except there’s a problem of magnanimous proportions, one glaring fatal flaw in his plan that stands out among the others.
Katie Gardner isn’t sure who is stealing the breath from her lungs.
For the most part, she manages to hide the petals.
Katie flees when they can’t stop pouring out of her mouth. She artfully covers her fits of croaking up bouquets with her elbow or a spare tissue. Sometimes she even manages to keep them down.
She doesn’t pass any more entire flowers which is a relief. As long as it stays as petals, her condition isn’t worsening. Days come and go where she hasn’t fallen any farther into the abyss of love.
Breathing is more difficult, but coughing clears her airway. Katie is fine.
Completely, totally, and utterly fine.
No one but Chiron, Will, and Miranda know her deadly secret. It’s one they plan to let her take to her grave.
Travis pranks. She still yells at him.
Katie plays capture the flag. She sings along with glee on bonfire nights. She works shifts at the camp store, rides pegasi, and grows strawberries. Like always.
Her life is scarily normal.
Sometimes she even lets herself forget how little of it is left.
One day, after catching Travis in the middle of setting up something spectacularly nasty, Katie is about to shove him out of the Demeter Cabin when she feels the awful, familiar sensation of a flower unfurling in her throat.
“Out,” she manages to choke, clutching a hand over her lips.
Soon, it will come out soon. And no, he cannot see it. Travis Stoll cannot see the petals that spill from her lips coated with her bloody saliva.
No, he can’t know. No. No, no. No.
“Oh, come on, I’ve only just begun!” Travis complains, twirling an ink cartridge in his fingers.
“Out, Travis. Get out,” Katie tries to push him towards the door, syllables interspersed with horrible gagging sounds.
She’s desperate but he’s stubborn, stubborn and headstrong as she is.
“Katie,” Travis says so softly, his eyes even gentler than his voice. Something is wrong, even he can sense something is amiss.
She never uses his name. He never uses hers.
It wraps a noose around Katie’s heart and tugs taut on the strings.
He must see the fear in her eyes, the unspoken pleading. That troublemaker grin she always looks for in a crowd of campers fades from his lips.
There’s no usual fight and spit-fire tongue ready to burn him today.
“Please. Go.” Katie motions one last time for the door and Travis hesitates, something begging to bud out his lips like these cursed flowers want to bud out of hers.
But he abides her command.
Katie barely manages to shut the door before she retches miserably, panting and shaking, staggering to her knees as a spray of leaves slips through her fingers.
Sticky with moisture, they make her mouth taste of bitter metal.
But she’s not done. No, Katie coughs until her vision almost goes black, until her final effort yields a narcissus, white petals large and luminous with a golden center to bind them together. Slick with her lifeblood.
The flower of selfishness.
Katie thinks nothing of that, she just knows it is big. Far too big. Far too big for what stage Will said she was at.
Later, at the bonfire that night, Travis asks her what was wrong in the most obnoxious way possible. Katie firmly tells him lady problems, knowing it will satisfy his need for low-brow humor. Distract from what she knows he sensed.
In the gleam of the firelight, he jokes and grins the way she needs to see, but his face is unreadable when she’s turned away.
Silence is never silent for Katie anymore.
It’s always marred by the rattle in her chest that sounds every time she breathes. In or out.
Stems and stalks of various plants have taken root in her lungs, nestled among the alveoli that harbor the oxygen she so unfortunately needs. Vines creep along her capillaries, crushing the network of tiny blood vessels that keep her body functioning.
Worse, she is so much worse.
You must love them very much, is how Will put it when his stethoscope only revealed what Katie already knew. Your feelings only continue to grow.
Whole flowers are all that come out of her mouth. Gone are the days of handfuls of petals she can conceal in between the layers of paper in the recycling bin.
They don’t grow in size, but there are so many of them. Leaves and petals flow forth, unbidden, heavy and fast.
Chiron excuses her from capture the flag. He tells her to spend her days doing what she likes and dismisses her from the formal schedule the rest of Demeter Cabin follows.
No one else must know. Katie makes this imperative. She claims ‘senior counselor privilege’ every time a stray camper or half-sibling asks where she’s going or what she’s up to.
There are certain mortal medicines, ones that Will prescribes that help somewhat. They can’t stop the devastation that’s coming, but they can delay it.
Time. It’s what they give in every piece of her lungs they preserve for a little while longer.
The irony almost makes Katie laugh.
She may be the daughter of a goddess, but in the end she is very much human.
Time. She wonders how much she has left.
Katie’s nearing the end, she must be.
She can glean this much from the forlorn faces Chiron and Will try not to show every time she’s around. Miranda’s voice is so fragile when she speaks to Katie. It could shatter like a vase, falling to a million little bits as it hits the floor.
When she tries to get an estimate of how long she has left in her, Will can’t give her a straight answer. It could be weeks, it could be a few months. If her feelings grow or subside (or are returned, he adds hopefully, Katie shakes her head) change is promised.
Demeter Cabin hasn’t been pranked since Travis made a joke about Katie’s menstrual cycle at that bonfire all those nights ago.
For a usual target of the Stolls, it’s bizarre, but alas, it’s no surprise they’ve moved on to bigger and better things.
However, years of masterminding stunts that involve working around her schedule means Travis notices when she no longer follows it.
He tries to flag her down at mealtimes. Catch her off guard when she’s walking to the strawberry fields. Katie mixes up her routines on purpose.
No more Travis Stoll. Not now. Not when these days are her last.
Camp is quiet late at night, beautiful with a sort of serene quality. Cicadas chirp. Peleus sighs where he protects the Golden Fleece shimmering in the branches of Thalia’s pine. The strawberry fields she’s worked so hard to cultivate all these years sway in the evening breeze.
In the forest, monsters lurk. They don’t seem so scary with the cabin green sprawling below her, grown and altered so much from when she first came here. They don’t seem so scary when Katie knows the flowers in her lungs will kill her before they do.
Katie watches it all from the roof of the Demeter Cabin, takes it all in with the inky dark of the night and the glow of the moon behind her.
Everyone else has long fallen asleep, the cleaning harpies enforced curfew hours ago.
It’s here and now that she is most alone, stewing with her thoughts as her lungs rattle away the hours.
She will miss this. Home. The best one Katie’s ever known.
Plants are what brought her here, the uncanny ability for them that runs in the godly blood that attracted cyclopses and empousai and turned her into a veteran of war before she was legally an adult.
How strange, that it will be plants that do her in, that it will be them who choke her to death with their lovely petals and leaves that she adores classifying. They’ve never been her enemy.
During the Titan War, she used them to save lives, forming a barricade inside the Lincoln Tunnel.
Now they poison her from the inside out.
Tears come, painting her face with salty streaks.
Katie Gardner has had a good run of it.
Some demigods don’t even get half as many years as she does. She should be grateful, for that, she supposes.
And so, Katie sits alone in the not-quite-silent night, feeling everything she has forbidden herself from in the past few weeks.
But there is someone who is not asleep. Someone who knows their way around curfew restrictions and cleaning harpies. Someone who certainly knows how to get onto the roof of the Demeter Cabin.
“You avoiding me, Gardner?” Travis Stoll’s voice materializes from somewhere in the darkness, warmth pressing her side as he comes to sit beside her.
Katie whips her head so fast her neck cracks. She nearly jumps into the constellations above.
The lighting is dim, but Travis is accustomed to moving in shadow. He catches the glint of silver swirling down her cheeks- makes out how her eyes glitter like broken glass.
His all-too familiar grin, the one that he gives her when siphoning off strawberries from her basket or when deftly weaving something mildly nefarious into her pocket with those long, slim fingers of his, comes crashing down.
The slight widening of his eyes, forget-me-not blue even now, beautiful and achingly expressive as Katie doesn’t want to remember- it can’t mean what she dares to hope for some sick, sadistic reason.
“How do you know how to get on the roof?” she accuses, quick to snap and bite.
“Can’t forget the Easter Bunnies, can you, Kit-Kat?” Travis says, a sad smile lining his lips that Katie wants to press her thumb into to see if they’re as soft as they look.
No, Travis Stoll cannot be worried. That would not make any sense.
And how it makes her heart twist and turn, writhing like a wounded animal inside her ever-tightening chest- it all makes too much sense, blurry shapes pull into focus-
“Thought I might find you here,” Travis nudges her shoulder in that playful manner of his when she doesn’t respond, the one that makes everything not serious that Katie used to hate.
But she knows she doesn’t when she goes to say “Stoll-” and cannot finish the sentence because her throat is suddenly on fire.
Out, out, out come the flowers in wet, heaving fits that Katie cannot hide, cannot flee away from to dump into a patch in the forest no one will ever visit again.
Travis Stoll sees them. A spray of petals flies in the air. His thief’s hands, with their long, slim fingers that have always been too good at snatching and swiping things Katie doesn’t want him to have, do what they have always done and catch them.
Amaryllis and forget-me-not. The flower of pride and the blossom that Travis Stoll’s eyes match too well.
Katie Gardner did not know who was stealing the air from her lungs. Who was causing her throat to erupt with blooms that betray her feelings.
Of course, it’s perfectly obvious now.
As he clutches the sapphire petals of an overly large forget-me-not bloom, dripping dark liquid onto his palm, Katie understands, knows who leaves her breathless in the most devastating way possible.
The same thief she’s always feared.
“Katie,” Travis starts, voice thin and jittery in a way she’s never heard amidst all his boasts and smooth confidence as he stares at her drying blood in his hand that sticks the petal to his palm. “I… I don’t understand.”
I love you, idiot. And it’s killing me. You are killing me, Travis Stoll. Is what Katie would say if she wasn’t so much of a coward, if she hadn’t only just seen what’s existed since long ago.
They do not bicker now. There is no humor to be found between them.
“I’m dying, Travis,” she says, voice surprisingly even and gentle.
He searches her face, scanning for the lies he is so good at tracking in.
Slowly, he raises a hand to the edge of her mouth, thumbing the dried blood encrusted atop her lips for confirmation.
He sees the wistful sadness in her eyes. It brings out something much more painful in his, something that makes Katie want to cough and her chest scream in agony.
“How long has this… have you known?” Travis demands, his gaze sparking with anger. His voice is shaky, bitter edge wobbling.
“A few weeks,” Katie lowers his wrist from her mouth. She cannot handle that tenderness from him.
“How long do you have left?”
“A few weeks. Maybe a month. Will isn’t quite sure.”
Travis opens his mouth to say something, what Katie isn’t sure, but she coughs up another flower and he falls silent.
A purple hyacinth.
Please forgive me.
The meaning plain and simple bubbles from the well of memory, outlined in a manual on flower language Katie read sometime in her first months after coming to camp.
It was the first item of hers Travis ever stole.
“Oh, Katie,” Travis whispers, hollow stare fixed on the mess of flowers in front of them. So many. All so big.
She laughs bitterly and then bursts into tears. Wordlessly, an arm rises to curl around her shoulders and she lets Travis Stoll do this for her. Just this once, she can be weak.
When he asks, she tells him mostly everything. The flowers. How they sprout in her lungs. How they’ll continue to sprout until she chokes on them when they inevitably grow too large to pass. Who else knows her secret: Chiron, Will, and Miranda.
Travis doesn’t say anything and she doesn’t need him to.
Katie cannot tell him he is the cause. No. Not when she wants that sly grin of his to continue to bloom across his face, blooming like the flowers in her lungs.
“Now, make me laugh, Stoll,” Katie commands, poking his side when her tears dry, seeing the stone that’s solidified across his features. “Tell me something funny. Whatever time I have left, I want to spend it happy.”
It’s the closest she’ll ever come to confessing how she really feels- a coward’s admission- but the implication stands.
You make me happy.
“Wanna revisit the Easter Bunnies?” Travis cracks a grin upon seeing her familiar glare.
“Do tell me how you managed to melt chocolate all over this damn roof, o’ criminal mastermind,” Katie returns with a wicked smirk of her own.
Travis and Katie return to their roots, the ones that led to those that burrow deeper into Katie’s lungs each day. They laugh. Katie yells, a little bit. They even bicker.
They stay like that for a long time.
Katie Gardner is living her last days.
Breathing is a difficult process all the time. What flowers she passes are the size of her palm and they bring no relief to her lungs. They are covered in so much blood.
Will Solace has permanently stationed her in Demeter Cabin on a lower bunk.
She knows this will be her deathbed.
Her secret has gotten out- everyone knows the sand inside the hourglass is moments from running out. They may not know the cause, but they know this is the end.
Chiron lets campers skip anything to visit her. Demeter Cabin overflows with children of other gods.
That’s the most shocking part to Katie- how many people show up to bid her farewell.
Connor Stoll is first. He looks so much like his brother, but Katie has no trouble with telling the difference. She never has.
“Travis told me,” he says and Katie grumbles about how his brother has never been able to keep his fat mouth shut.
That makes him laugh. Katie does too. They talk for a while, and Connor leaves her with a chocolate easter bunny as a parting gift as he pats her hand.
She thanks him. Katie would never dream of telling him she’ll never be able to eat it.
Lou Ellen, Sherman Yang, Clovis, Mitchell, and Lacy come too. Followed by the surprises of Nico di Angelo, Clarisse La Rue, and Drew Tanaka.
Annabeth Chase stops by, full of kind words and commendations and she’s the first one Katie cries with. Annabeth was one of the first demigods she ever met, at the beginning of this whole adventure, it’s only fitting that she’s here at the end to smooth her hair and tell Katie she’s a hero and it will be alright.
Even Percy Jackson, the illustrious savior of Olympus, comes to visit Katie Gardner as she lays sick and dying. He thanks her for everything she did during the Titan War and makes some quip about wondering if children of Demeter can make ninja stars out of plants. He says it’s unlikely, but that if any of them could do it, he has a feeling it would be her.
They both laugh and she tells him he better treat his girlfriend right. Percy gives her a fistbump.
There are others of course, a whole stream of them including Chiron, and still Travis does not come.
Her siblings are last, huddling around her bed and they all cry and giggle and joke and she makes sure to explain to Miranda all the duties of being senior counselor.
Her limbs feel so heavy. She is so tired.
When Katie coughs with them there, it’s an evening primrose that flies out of her mouth.
Eternal love is what was written beside it in that old flower language manual. Katie hugs them tight as she can with her failing arms. She will miss them terribly.
Will Solace takes her vitals when he forces them to leave, telling them their beloved sister needs some peace and quiet. He doesn’t bother telling her how her organs are doing.
Katie thanks him, for everything, for keeping her secret and he gives her a hug- fierce, and warm as the sun.
He’s about to leave, as she tells him she wants to be alone. She doesn’t want anyone to see her give her last rattling breath, suffocating on her own blood and the flowers that grow too well in her lungs.
Katie will not make people watch her die simply because she wants the selfish comfort of them there.
But she will not die with this secret. She owes it to Will, who had an undying belief in the goodness of love since the inception of her sickness. He deserves to know.
“Travis,” she croaks before he heads for the door, dabbing away some scarlet forget-me-not petals from her lips.
Will Solace stares at her for a long while. He understands what she means. She knows he will not tell.
He tells her she was always a good friend at camp. Someone he could turn to.
And then he’s gone.
Katie Gardner sits alone, living her last few hours.
This is not a bad way to die , she thinks. Here, in her most sacred home, warm and comforted by the lingering words everyone she cares about have left in the air for her to breathe in as best she can.
Katie bets she’ll look peaceful when they come back. Seemingly asleep, surrounded by magnificent blooms that won’t even look bloodied in the dim light.
She waits. And waits. And waits.
And then there’s a knock at the door, and someone leaning self-assuredly in the frame with forget-me-not blue eyes and a sly grin that both breaks Katie’s heart and causes it to swell.
“You miss me, Gardner?” Travis Stoll says, his eyes and voice watery as he tries to banter with a dying girl.
“I didn’t think you would come,” Katie says frankly as he steals, he is always stealing things, what was Will’s chair and sits at her bedside.
“Call it fashionably late,” Travis folds his arms and grins at her in that way she has never hated. “But I wanted to be last. Some VIP time with Katie Gardner, the daughter of Demeter who thinks she is so much better than me.”
Katie snorts and rolls her eyes. Travis laughs at his own joke, and then laughs harder when Katie asserts she is, in fact, better than him and always will be.
Katie relishes that sound. Lovely, tinkling, almost like a bell.
“That, I have to agree with,” Travis concedes, smile fading from his lips as he suddenly turns solemn in a way she’s never seen.
“Why did you come?” Katie asks, because she has to, she has to know when silence hangs heavy between them.
How much she loves this boy, that she blooms for him. And he will never know these flowers are proof of that love. She cannot let his conscience be guilty for this, not for a matter that is far more weighty than hair dye in shampoo and golden mangoes that say For the Hottest.
Travis inhales sharply, giving Katie an expression she cannot read.
“I wanted to be with you at the end,” his own secret is out in the open, for Katie to comprehend. “To apologize. To shoot the shit-”
“Language,” Katie reprimands softly. It seems like that old habit will die hard alongside her.
“Sorry, Ms. Gardner,” Travis tries to grin, but it’s forced, it crinkles his eyes incorrectly. “I want to apologize for every stupid, nasty prank I ever pulled on you. Gods, Katie I’m so sorry. You tolerated so much bullshit from me, and I did it for such dumb reasons-”
“Travis Stoll, listen very closely, for I am a dying woman, and you will not interrupt me. Nor will you repeat this to anyone else,” Katie states with the same bossiness that never works on him and he acquiesces with a roll of his eyes. Tension chokes them almost as badly as the flowers in her chest choke Katie. “But for the record, I liked your pranks.”
Travis’s jaw goes slack with shock. Katie tells him to shut it lest a fly flies inside his sorry mouth.
“No one will ever believe you,” Katie adds with a smirk. “But there, I give you the gift of truth.”
“Katie Gardner, you are an evil woman,” Travis shakes his head in disbelief and they laugh.
Time is short, Katie knows she is actually at the end now, because him being near and joking with her is making her chest burn and the urge to cough will not be something she can fight in a few minutes.
Given the size of her last few blossoms, it is a miracle she is not already dead. The next one will certainly be the last.
“Travis, please don’t watch me die,” Katie says suddenly. No, the son of Hermes cannot see her depart the earth. She will not allow that.
“I can’t leave you alone,” Travis says, and she sees how his eyes shine the same way hers did that night on the roof. “I owe you that much.”
She cannot stop him. No physical way. And he is too stubborn, those long, slim fingers of his coming to intertwine with hers.
I love you. Katie thinks. To the death.
“Katie, I-” Travis starts, squeezing her hand. He has never been good with words, but whatever he wants to tell her, it must be important. “I have been an idiot. But you deserve to know, before I can’t…”
Katie pools all her remaining strength to squeeze his hand back.
“Those Easter Bunnies, that very first prank. Chocolate is something… it’s… the Aphrodite kids said you should give it to someone you like. So I went and put them on the roof, because I didn’t know any other way.”
“You liked someone in the Demeter Cabin?” Katie chokes out, a flower rising in her throat. Soon, she will be unable to speak. And then, she will never speak again.
“Not someone,” his face is so pained, Katie knows Travis Stoll’s heart is breaking too. “You, Katie, I liked you then, and then I couldn’t stay away, and things just got so out of control, and you were always too good for me, but I couldn’t stop, so I kept pranking and you kept yelling and that’s how we were, but I never told you I wanted something more, and I love you, gods Katie, I have for so long.”
The words tumble out of Travis’s mouth, uneasy and fast like a rushing stream over pebbles and he is crying, salty silver droplets smearing his cheeks and splashing onto Katie’s shirt.
Those long, slim fingers of his cup her face, so soft and gentle. Those thief's hands that she has often called dishonest. But Travis Stoll has never lied to Katie Gardner, and that emotion on his face- true as the sky is blue.
He loves her.
He loves her.
He.
Loves.
Her.
Katie stares up at him, eyes glassy and shimmering like smoke under glass. Something recedes in her throat. Breathing is something she can do, easy and swift again. Her chest swells again, full and deep and not shallow at all.
“Travis,” she says, and her voice no longer rasps. No, now it’s full of awe, and something more, that same emotion that she gets whenever she looks at him. The same one that caused forget-me-nots to bloom in her chest in the first place.
They’ll never bloom inside her again.
She kisses him, unsteady but sure.
When they come apart, she tells him what started this whole mess.
“I love you,” Katie says, and Travis kisses her this time, long and slow.
She tells him everything. They both laugh. There’s even some yelling and some bickering.
Katie Gardner has a long life full of love ahead of her.