Chapter Text
The day it began, there was a singular empty desk in the classroom.
Apollo didn’t mean to notice who it belonged to. Then again, the prince (or whatever was the equivalent of that) of North Ixia didn’t mean to do plenty of things. Coming to New York, for instance, or losing his mother. (He wasn’t sure why that was his first thought.) But it took very, very little for him to remember, and her name felt like a prickle in his throat.
Darcy Graves.
She was just another one of Blackmore Academy’s good-for-nothing students. The mean, “I pull stunts so my rich parents (who I hate, by the way) pay attention to me” kind of student that made Apollo’s eyes roll to the back of his head.
By all means, he should’ve filed that away and moved on with his day — if Graves wanted to skip class to frolic among graveyard flowers, that was her problem. So long as it wasn’t one of the days they shared a lab class, Apollo didn’t care.
So he thought, anyway.
Thing is, Darcy Graves had already taken root. Like a weed you can’t quite pull from your garden, Apollo tapped his pencil and raised his hand in class to answer the professor’s questions with that name lingering in his mind. Darcy Graves. Darcy Graves. It started to lose its meaning midway through the fourth period.
By the time Apollo had to rush to the bathroom, Darcy Graves already felt like the reason he was coughing up blood.
It made no sense. There Apollo was, slouching in front of the mirror, one hand holding his throat and another gripping at the edges of a bloody sink. Was he sick? Couldn’t be. His health was perfect, as was everything in his life. Maybe an enemy of his family had snuck poison in his food, somehow? Or in the Academy’s water supply?
Apollo thought of what Father would say, and then he realized his colleagues were far too stupid to think of such a plan.
“Good gods, Apollo.” He mumbles under his breath. “Way to keep yourself together.”
Trying to wipe the blood trickling from the corner of his mouth only resulted in a smudge. It’s all Darcy Graves’ fault. He couldn’t fall ill now, of all times, let alone be seen bloody like this. What if he couldn’t attend the next fencing tourney over some random cough? The mere idea gave him shivers.
Apollo was no prolific liar. It brought him no enjoyment. He needed only honesty and success to earn his share of paternal attention, unlike Darcy Graves. But he could not tell a soul, not even Father, of this accident — or of this girl he keeps thinking about.
He only needed to wash away the proof.
But a singular white petal stood over the blood, and Apollo was rendered speechless.
A petal? A petal? To think a human could spew such a thing was already a myth well debunked by science. But, to add salt to the injury, the prince was, well, Ixian. Ignoring the sheer absurdity of such a hypothesis, no regular plant or flower would survive in the elevated heat present in most Ixians’ bodies.
It was already there. It was the only rational answer to his delirious, Darcy Graves-ridden mind.
So thought Apollo, indignant as it washed down the drain.
…
There are little downsides to always being the sharpest student in a Blackmore classroom. One of them, as Apollo was becoming increasingly aware of, was the inability to experience what some called “blissful ignorance”.
Three times had he thrown up blood and been met with a singular white petal. A mocking reminder of her weight upon his mind. A frivolous matter, that Darcy Graves was, but still she invaded his thoughts with no concerns for the kind of ecosystem she’d mess with by staying there.
Truth is, Apollo had no time for people, be them friends or otherwise. Especially not when, on top of all his worries, he had to deal with a flower-bearing plant possibly taking root in his body and making him cough up petals. Frankly, it all felt so ridiculous. Apollo was stuck in a toddler’s nightmare in which, after eating a watermelon seed and having his parents tell him it’d grow in his belly if he swallowed the darn thing, he morbidly dreamt of death by plant overgrowth using his body as fertilizer.
Still, he thought of her. Darcy Graves almost felt comfortable, like a soft place to land — if only because her name and all the petals reminded him of the cemetery where his mother had been buried.
The girl herself, though? That’d be giving her too much credit.
Ever since Father enrolled him in Blackmore Academy, Graves had constantly been in the peripheral vision of his life. She was his classmate, yes, but also his lab partner. Someone who wore an oversized lab coat with sleeves engulfing her hands to “look cool”, who skipped class and left all the work to Apollo, and who begged the professors for the specimen dissection class they were about to take.
In short: Darcy Graves was one annoying person. And Apollo should know better than to lose any precious time thinking about someone like that.
Though as he stood by her side in the laboratory, swinging her legs back and forth like a child on a stool that felt much too tall for her, a familiar prickling made its way back to his throat. Most wouldn’t notice the small curve of her lips, but Apollo noticed everything — for the second time that week, he wished he didn’t.
“You’re excited,” he quietly remarked, eyeing the smile with curiosity. Graves immediately stiffens. So does Apollo’s tail, feeling her gaze from behind the bangs.
“What about it?”
The thing about her is that she didn’t really like Apollo. No one in Blackmore did. Most kids who tolerated him wanted to be able to tell people they were friends before he became an Olympian (which he surely would with his track record).
In turn, Apollo tolerated such behavior in order to create a solid network with the kids of the most influential people in the Cursed Apple. It was all a game of politics to him, where every pawn thought itself the king before he came striking.
Everyone, except for Darcy Graves.
“Can’t I comment on it?” The boy glanced at their professor, assessing the situation. He was taught better than to speak while someone of higher authority spoke, but Ms. Fiala was explaining to the morons in their class how to properly use a scalpel and Apollo frankly couldn’t be bothered to listen. “I like it when people like you take an interest in your education, you know.”
“People like—?” She interrupted herself, shaking her head. “Ugh. You’re such a prick.”
“Not everything I say is an insult,” Apollo notes. His voice came out wrong, raspier than usual, and he brought a hand to rest over his neck.
“Everything you say is a backhanded compliment, asshole.”
Apollo opened his mouth to retort, but ultimately chose not to. Bickering with Darcy Graves would be a waste of time, not to mention childish.
With all warnings given to the idiots who knew not how to wield a blade (preposterous for those who were supposed to be his equals), Ms. Fiala began explaining what they’d be doing today: amphibian dissection.
“I call dibs on the frog,” Darcy blurted out, louder than both her and Apollo expected. A couple students around them laughed. “I mean, you’re too squeamish to want to do that anyway, but… dibs.”
“Right. I’m squeamish.” He raises an eyebrow. “Well, you’re right about one thing: I don’t want to stink of formaldehyde all day. That thing is all yours.”
So went the scalpel to Graves’ hand. By rule of elimination, Apollo was in charge of taking notes for the entire ordeal. Good. He had seen Darcy’s handwriting in other occasions and, if she took her notes the same way, he’d have to create a whole new cipher to understand the difference between her vowels.
All in all, the class was simple enough. Objective, as most labs were. Identifying different parts of their specimen, determining its sex, and slowly cutting away at the delicate layers holding its organs in place in order to identify common attributes in amphibian species. And Graves, with steady hands and barely contained smile, was having the time of her life.
(Such knowledge had nearly useless applications in real-life, but Apollo knew only a fool wouldn’t engage with knowledge for the sake of learning.)
“Check it out, golden boy.” Darcy nudged him with an elbow, not caring for the notes he’d been so carefully writing. “Not a single cut on those intestines.”
“You want me to look at its guts?” Apollo scrunched his nose, lifting pen from paper. Still, he obliged — if only to get her to not call him a prick again. “Your cuts are too shallow. See how the membrane looks almost scratched? You need to be more confident with your strokes.”
And Graves groaned. “Meh meh meh. 'I'm Apollo and I'm better than you at everything I do. Do you want me to list your mistakes in chronological or alphabetical order?' That's how you sound sometimes.”
"I do not, and you're butchering my accent."
"There it is again. You did the thing."
"You—!"
Apollo silently pondered how, if it were anyone else, he’d be vexed by such blatant disrespect. Instead, he found himself concealing a smile with the back of his hand and staring for a moment too long at her bony fingers and black nails as she continued to carefully work on the dissection.
It took a moment for him to realize Darcy Graves was no weed in his garden.
If anything, she was the unassuming flower that crept up and took over the moment you looked away — like a lily-of-the-valley growing in the shades of the canopies, or the patches of crocus filling empty space between cemetery gravestones.
And it took less than a second for him to start coughing.
Three times before, he’d been granted privacy when hurling blood and petals. Once in the school’s bathroom, the other two within the confines of Father’s penthouse in the heart of the Cursed Apple. Now, public humiliation marked the fourth, and a cold shiver ran through Apollo’s back when he realized the implications.
When the nobility of North Ixia shows weakness, the whole world stops to watch — and, unfortunately for the young prince, that meant the whole classroom was staring at Apollo’s bloodstained handkerchief and his horrified lab partner, the guilty-as-charged Darcy Graves.
There would be no hiding from Father if he didn’t play his cards right. Apollo didn’t want to take any chances.
“Excuse me, professor—” Bringing a handkerchief embroidered with his mother’s initials to his mouth, Apollo struggled his way last the students and through the door.
What he should have done is run to the nearest sink. But the boy, agonizing, leaned against the wall to his right and kept on coughing. The more he fought it — that physical, unavoidable urge to get rid of whatever was lodged in him and needed to get out —, the more its thorns wrapped their way around his throat. He couldn’t be sure whether the world lost its balance or if he was the one who couldn’t keep upright anymore.
Behind him, steps. A door was closed. Everything sounded and felt a thousand yards away, hidden by a ringing in his ears, but not the touch on his shoulder. Not her voice.
“I got you.”
Apollo wasn’t sure if there was a way to dream within a nightmare. If so, it certainly felt like this was it. Darcy Graves, angel of death, coming to shepherd his way into the great beyond. Or the infirmary, he supposes. (Gods, what's gotten into him? Waxing poetic about annoying, good-for-nothing Darcy Graves?) There was an irony to it that made him laugh and her to frown. Still, she began to lead the way there—
“No,” he shook his head. “Not the nurse’s—”
Another coughing fit. He felt a petal slip through this time, its sickening floral taste mixed with copper and iron, but the thorns still weren't done with him.
“Dude, look at the state of you, I'm not—”
“Father doesn't know,” he pleaded. One of his hands held the handkerchief (and nested within was the petal), but the other took Graves’ hand on his shoulder in his own. “Please.”
She paused.
A dramatic, fleeting thought crossed Apollo’s mind — that he wouldn’t mind dying in her arms.
“Fine.” Darcy lowered her head. “It’s your own damn funeral.”