I Rebuild When I Break Down [Elijah]

At that moment, Carter was grateful she was a woman of rather little material possessions. Even her father was concerned when she packed for college in two large duffel bags. An eighteen-year-old girl, especially one that grew up in California… it just didn’t seem possible for her belongings to fit into such small bags. She was sure there was a suitcase somewhere, but they checked them both on as carry-ons with the plane ride to New York, and within that, Columbia University. It had taken Carter all of twenty minutes to move in, but others took hours. Like her roommate, for example.  [Bless her little white girl heart.] She had brought everything necessary to clutter up the room, so Carter felt grateful that she wasn’t typical, or they would have ended up sleeping in the same bed with all the posters and books and well, teenage girl stuff.  That entire week, she had seen girls pull up with U-Haul trucks… Well, maybe that was an exaggeration, but the sentiment still stood.

Carter was abnormal.

She was glad of that too. Coming to Camp Jupiter, she had only brought one duffle with the basic necessities: Namely, her clothes, running accessories, and as many textbooks as she could fit. The learning materials were what would have killed her back… had she not been in good shape. Still, they were uncomfortable, as her duffle didn’t really have the proper straps to displace the forces related to gravity. Her backpack did though, and Carter was secretly thanking the gods of backpack design [whoever the heck that was] for that innovation. She was a runner, not a lifter, and while the pain hadn’t started setting in her muscles like a bad rental tenant yet, it was only a matter of time before her tendons were having screaming matches over the contract.

Giving an exaggerated sigh, Carter glanced around this… new camp. It was like going through your own house and having that insanely annoying feeling like everything was changed. It felt like someone went into Carter’s past and moved the whole camp around a couple of inches or feet. A few different colored buildings, different but the same cut of faces... it was just enough to irritate her to no end. And irritated she was, although some might say irrationally so. She just didn’t see the need for it all, the move, the newness, the…laxness of this new camp. It all felt unfocused; it was as if she didn’t remember enough of the old Camp Jupiter to know if this was the real deal or a bootlegged copy.  

The whole existence of this new camp… and her being a practical stranger to it brought some hesitant questioning to Carter’s mind. She hated not knowing information pertinent to her situation… and this was definitely a case where Carter was starting to feel uncomfortable. Her. Uncomfortable. In the only place she considered herself to have a definition.  That  was the most unsettling part. Camp Jupiter was supposed to be where she belonged…

…but Carter felt like a stranger here as well. These faces, for the most part she did not recognize. No longer did she know the backgrounds of the bodies that passed her. She had no jokes or quarrels with the guy on her left, nor the girl on her right. There were no memories of winning a war game or heated arguments with legionnaires who didn’t know their place. Carter had nothing in the way of a history with this new camp… only possibly with a couple of people who had stuck around from her earlier years. Though… judging from the youthful faces milling about… it didn’t seem like a good possibility. Not that Carter minded…what would she say to someone she knew from two…up to five years ago? ‘Yes hello I’m back and I’m still pretty much an awful person.’ That didn’t seem like a good idea. She knew that she was a tough pill to swallow, and even if everyone was still there, she’d only have a few to look forward to seeing again after all these years.

Her heart turned rather violently and rudely within her chest as she saw the familiarity of the Barracks. Different scenery, but the same swell of emotions long-since-buried came marching through her mind as she dropped the duffle to the ground. It looked like home enough and part of Carter longed to believe that her identity was just waiting inside… that if she just got moved in she’d sink back into her old comfortable skin and all would be well. The more logical side of her stepped in rather quickly and squashed that pathos-driven thought. There was no beginning in life. There was just… continuing. There wasn’t ever going to be a time where Carter could just sink into familiarity once more.

Luxuries like that weren’t afforded to kids like her. Demi-gods.

The Barracks were still as confusing as ever, it seemed. Picking up her duffle, Carter looked around. She was in the Second Cohort, but where exactly was that? This whole thing was frustrating… All Carter wanted was for things to make sense. She thought that coming here, it would start to. That she’d have clarity. But it didn’t, it was one big mess.

”Maybe I shouldn’t have come at all.” Carter said aloud to herself. After all, if she was questioning everything else… why not herself?