For my beautiful Maddi, who's taking France by storm as we speak. I was hoping that this could be a get-off-the-plane surprise, but my electronics and my body and brain weren't cooperating. Regardless: enjoy!

Dedication: M

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters portrayed here!

Send Me a Postcard

Let me kiss your tears away

There's no need to feel afraid
I told you, darling, you're the one
So don't worry when tomorrow I'll be gone

I will return with gold and treasures for you
From all the world

-Five to Seven Years, Alexander Rybak

Nyssa stood in the eye of the storm. She was trying hard not to step on a scarf or a blouse or a miniaturized toiletry, but the ordinarily neat and tidy Lacy had completely taken over her cabin It was as if her colour-coded trunk had exploded and vomited every single thrift store find and long cardigan and fun hairband that Lacy had ever owned.

"Your bag is ready," Nyssa said. "It'll be fine."

Lacy was checking over a list for the fifth time.

"I think I have everything," she said. "My lenses, the good tripod… extra batteries! Do I have extra batteries?"

"In the little pocket," Nyssa said. "With the protein bars?"

"Oh," Lacy said. "Right, that's right- I mean, you're right, I-"

"Relax," Nyssa said. "You're going to be fine."

Lacy nodded and picked at the strands of blond that stuck out of the oil-stained bandana she'd stolen from Nyssa ages ago.

"I've never left camp for this long before," Lacy mused.

"I know," Nyssa said. Mostly because she hadn't left camp for more than two weeks at a time either. And usually that was with Lacy. Gods, why did it have to come to seperation before you realised how unseperable you were with someone? "It'll be fun. Like an adventure. And you'll be moving around so much that the monsters won't be able to track you down."

Lacy nodded and started fiddling with her camera some more. The camera had always been Lacy's baby. The first time Lacy had broken any rules at camp was to sneak into Cabin 9 in tears and begging for Nyssa's help because a child of Ares had stuck gum in it and she was scared that it wouldn't work anymore. But now it could be Lacy's ticket out of camp and into the real world. Her pictures were beautiful, a tiny snippet of the beauty Lacy could find anywhere in the world. She was scared out of her mind to share those pictures with anyone in the world and kept them stacked in shoeboxes under her bunk, but Nyssa had convinced her to send some in to a contest and… well, now she regretted it a bit. Not because Lacy had won the contest, not at all. But because now Lacy would leave for six months of globe-trotting and photo-journalism for Eclipse magazine.

Six months... It made the pit of Lacy's stomach coil and her heart ache. Shh.

"It'll be fun!" Nyssa said, laying it on thick.

Lacy smiled and looked up from her camera, peeking through her bangs.

"Thanks," Lacy said. "I don't think I'd have been calm enough to pack if you hadn't been there."

"No problem," Nyssa smiled. "Just send me a postcard while you're gone, okay?"

Lacy smiled and nodded.

Argus came in with the mail cart as he did every Friday. He stopped at tables one at a time and handed out envelopes and care packages alike. Nyssa wasn't surprised when he stopped at her table, but she was slightly stunned at the pile of mail he handed her.

"Looks like someone should have picked up their mail," Jake said.

Nyssa frowned. She didn't know that she got mail. Nevertheless, she flipped through her pile.

There was the one letter from her mom, the token I-still-care, but then… then there were postcards. Dozens of them from all over Europe. There was one of a bright red bus whizzing around London, another of stunning Irish castles, yet another of sunny Spain…

There was one of a beach, in France. Juno Beach. Nyssa remembered Chiron teaching her about Juno Beach when he's posed as her history teacher- it had been a big deal in liberating France during the second world war. And Lacy had written behind it, something more elaborate than a wish you were here, than an I'm doing okay or a no monsters in five days! It was:

Dear Nyssa,

I was missing home by the time we got to France already, which wasn't a good sign. But then we went to Juno Beach. The guides are awesome, and there are always veterans at the beach, ready to talk and share and explain that day. A gentleman from England pointed out the spot where he'd stood when he'd been shot. This was over eighty years ago, but he could still point it out for me. He talked to me for hours and hours and shared hot cocoa from a thermos with me.

I'm not homesick anymore. There's something beautiful and nostalgic and heartbreaking about standing where other people once stood. I feel so connected to the world around me, and I'm loving it. You're right, I'm fine.

-Lacy

The postcard today came from Switzerland, and showed a tiny house on a massive mountain.

Dear Nyssa,

I touched the clouds today! I feel like I'm five years old and I know that you'll laugh at me but I touched the clouds and my feet were still on the earth- that's incredible, no? When else could that ever happen? This trip is amazing, I'm having a blast. I hope you're safe and sound and happy.

-Lacy

Today's postcard was from the Czech Republic. The picture was one that Nyssa knew rather well since Lacy had wanted to see its subject in person forever: the astrological clock in Prague.

Dear Nyssa,

It's something to realise that the world that you wanted to see is really out there… This may sound ignorant, but when I was planning this trip I kept thinking that it couldn't be real, that not everything could live up to all my crazy wildest hopes and dreams, that the world couldn't truly be as colourful and vast and gorgeous as I thought. I was wrong, it is. It kind of makes you think that you can have anything you want.

This made Nyssa's stomach churn. She'd like to think so too, but the countdown she'd scrawled on a pad of Post-It by her bed told her that Lacy would still be on the other side of the planet for 4 months and two weeks.

Europe is beautiful, you'd love it here! The Czech Republic may be my favourite so far. The booze is cheap and I got a shirt that said "Czech Me Out". I thought you'd think that was funny.

-Lacy

Nyssa did laugh.

The postcard today showed dramatic fjords and icy mountain tops and scenery that screamed just you try to outlast me. Nyssa was in love, and according to the message scrawled on the back, so was Lacy.

Dear Nyssa,

I changed my mind- Norway is my favourite so far! I feel like I'll be changing my mind all the time… but truly, Norway was spectacular. Yesterday we watched the Northern lights and it was so beautiful. As if the stars had tipped a paint can aside, as if the sky had stolen our colours for one short night. But it also scared me. This is the first time that we've never seen the same sky. I guess I just realised how far away I'd be from my best friend…

-Lacy

Her stomach twisted in on itself. She was tempted to look up the first plane to Norway taking off from JFK, but she stopped herself. No. This was Lacy's adventure, and as long as Lacy was okay, Nyssa would be okay too.

Nyssa was a bit surprise when Argus distributed the mail and gave her a letter, not a postcard.

Dear Nyssa,

I have so much to tell you and you already say that my handwriting is so small- so I figured that I'd need something a bit bigger than a postcard to keep you updated. But there's still a postcard in the envelope for traditions' sake.

Nyssa smiled as she read through accounts of Lacy's day and nights and sunsets and sunrises. Even when she wrote she was distracted and bubbly, energy and enthusiasm and sheer wonder oozing off her words and launching her into tangents. And boy did Lacy have a lot to talk about. She was absolutely raving about Angkor, an enormous archeological site full of old temples and buildings and water tunnels in Cambodia. She talked about Vietnamese food and the bicycle culture and the monuments from the war and about how lost she'd gotten and how she'd ridden an elephant and eaten fried spiders- which Nyssa had difficulty imagining considering how Lacy was known to cross camp and burst into the forges to make Nyssa help her with bugs on her bunk... Lacy was sure becoming brave on this trip. It made Nyssa's stomach squirm a bit, to think that maybe one day Lacy wouldn't need her to take centipedes out of her shoes or to pick up moths with paper towels when they landed on her pillow... That was a stupid thing to think, but it mattered in a way that Nyssa couldn't explain.

Lacy had attached stunning photographs of tree roots wrapped around temples, of daring stone structures and monuments older than their country. Behind each print was an equally detailed anecdote or explanation, each signed "Lacy" with a little heart in red pen. Other photos included a stunning aerial shot of a boat market, a lone and overloaded car driving down a country road, healthy green rice fields, little kids waving up at the lense with smiles on their faces…

We've just made the switch from Viet Nam to Laos to Cambodia, so check the captions to see which picture comes from where. Yesterday we visited the Killing Fields. During the Khmer Rouge regime, over a million people were killed and buried here. I read a bit before coming and this one sociologist, Martin Shaw, said that the Cambodian was "the purest genocide of the Cold War era", but I don't know how anything like that could be pure. I was a bit of a mess and my pictures felt blurry and distraught and only so-so. I wish you'd been there to pick me up. Lots of love, Lacy.

With a heart, of course.

Nyssa held the letter in her hands and reread it a thousand times and smiled before frowning as well. I wish I was there too. Or I wish you were here. Or I wish that I wasn't missing out on you so much.

Dear Nyssa,

Do you remember how I told you that our itinerary was weird since we were going from east-to-west, but then backtracking to go to Japan? Maybe I didn't tell you… I'll have so many stories to tell when I get home, I'm going to annoy you so much.

Anyways, we went back, and I just found out that it was to time our stay in Japan with a festival called Tanabata. We celebrated it in Sendai. In present day Japan, people celebrate it by writing wishes on different decorations- paper cranes, paper strips, streamers, nets, they all have their own meaning. The decorations are hung all over the place and there are fireworks, parades, outdoor stalls selling food and hosting carnival games… It was beautiful, Nyssa. It was beautiful to see so many people dare to wish.

Back home I always wished for things that I didn't or couldn't have. I wish my dad would take my phone calls. I wish my grandparents would let me move back in. I wish I wasn't gay. I wish Silena wouldn't have been the spy. I wish Mitchell wouldn't have gotten so hurt in the war. I wish I weren't a demigod…

Wishes are a big deal here too, a festival's-worth of a big deal. But in a good way. With all the lights and colours and sounds, you're allowed to feel hopeful about your wish. You're allowed to crawl out of your imagination and ask for the stars. You're allowed to cross your fingers for the moon.

That pink strip of paper I took a picture of is mine. Yasuo, our translator, wrote my wish down for me in Japanese so that it wouldn't stick out like a sore thumb. Because I do think it's a beautiful wish. A gutsy wish. But that's what all the best ones are, no? And one day, it'll be worth it.

I sent you a paper strip, too, in case you wanted to make a wish too.

-Lacy

Nyssa smiled. She already wished every day, of course. And felt like a jerk for doing it. After all, Lacy was doing so well without her, was having so much fun exploring the world... who was Nyssa to intrude on that?

Dear Nyssa,

Guess where I'm writing from now? You probably won't (or at least you couldn't if there was no stamp on the envelope). Even I lose track of where I am sometimes. I wake up and think "which continent?" which is so much nicer than waking up wrapped in the same sheets, in the same bed, in the same room with the same problems every single day. You feel a lot freer.

Anyways, India! India is the first place where I've been able to sit down for a minute and write to you, which is crazy because it's so, so busy. There are people everywhere and they're always moving or singing or working or biking… New Delhi never stops, and that's okay. India's too alive for anything to ever freeze. After all that time in Sumatra (Indonesia-did I tell you about that?), we've had lots of fun being back in a more urban setting. I wish I could capture smell and sound in my pictures too. The food here is amazing, I'm in love with curry and the mangos here are the best I've ever had.

The little elephant that I sent with this letter is from India. I figured I may as well not send the letter alone, and I've had this little guy with me for a bit. Since we've gotten quite close between his time of purchase and the time of mailing, I named him Elliot. It's not very Indian, but try not to tell me that this elephant doesn't look like an Elliot.

As fun and light as I'm making this sound, I've been thinking a lot in India. Indian civilisation has been around for a long, long time and even if they're booming in the economy and growing exponentially, there are some things about India's past that are there to stay. Take the Taj Mahal, for example. That's one of my favourite places so far, Nyssa. It was built by a king as an elaborate tombstone to his wife. I suppose that he wanted her death to be beautiful, if it had to come so soon. Build something permanent, the way he'd have loved to do with her.

(Okay so one of the other cameramen is teasing me and saying that that king also had other wives, which may or may not damper your judgement. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. Any love is love, right? Any love is precious, we just don't always have the marble and gold to show it.)

Love,

Lacy

Nyssa nearly screamed when she opened the letter and saw pictures of Lacy.

She was standing in a grassy savanna. She was arm-in-arm with a girl in colourful red and blue fabrics who wore stunning colourful necklaces around her neck. She was bottle-feeding a baby giraffe, a gaggle of zookeepers in khaki uniforms hanging around. She was sitting cross-legged outside a tent and watching the sunset. She was standing in the ocean with her arms above her head, smiling brightly. Shew as wandering a market and smelling some fruit that Nyssa had never seen before. She was standing in the center of a dusty village, wincing and laughing at the same time as a giant snake slithered around her shoulders. Children were playing in her hair, amazed at how thin and blond it was according to the caption on the back of the picture. Actually, all the captions for today were written in different penmanship. There was a letter from Lacy, but that one was about her time in Egypt. Another letter read:

Dear Nyssa,

Lacy sends you letters all the time, so I imagine that she must be very dear to you. And given how she writes to you religiously and points out museums or buildings that you'd love to see, I can tell that you're very dear to her as well.

However I've noticed that she never speaks or sends pictures of herself in her letters. For her this is about the adventure, but I imagine that you must simply want her whole. She is brilliant and stunning and happy and lucid and in awe and whimsical and dreamy, in case you were wondering- though I imagine that you knew that.

The pictures I've attached here are from Tanzania, an Eastern African country, where Lacy's smiles have never been broader. We have one last week in Africa before we head back to Europe, and then I promise to bring her home to you.

Yours sincerely,

Robert G. Greene, Project Coordinator

That letter kind of shocked Nyssa, in a way. Was she really that obvious..? Were they that..? And Lacy?

What?

How could some middle-aged magazine editor notice what Nyssa had hidden from Lacy, herself and all of Camp freaking Half-Blood for years and years? Unless…

Oh no.

She knocked on the door of Cabin 10 and waited to be invited in. By a stroke of luck, Drew was the only one in the cabin, resting a broken angle.

"What do you want?" Drew asked. "Lacy's probably in Tibet or something right now."

"Actually she's somewhere in Africa," Nyssa said. "And I had a question for you. You're Japanese right?"

"Yes," Drew said. "And if you ask me for a sushi place recommendation, I'm going to punch you in the throat no matter how much Lacy cares."

"No!" Nyssa said. "No, I wasn't going to do that. I was just wondering if you could read Japanese too."

"I can," Drew said. "Why?"

Nyssa showed her the picture of Lacy holding her pink-paper wish, quickly gave a context, and Drew looked if over for a second.

"And?"

"Give me time to breathe, translation's a bitch," Drew huffed. She cocked her head to the side. "Interesting."

"What?" Nyssa asked.

"Lacy wished for 'her arms to go home to'," Drew said. "I'll assume that you know what that means."

"I- she wished for… no! No, I don't!" Nyssa said, her heart beating.

"Children of Hephaestus," Drew said shaking her head. "My sisters need to stop falling for them. It's like I give the same speech daily. Listen shortstack, Lacy's never had a really solid home until she came to Camp Half-Blood."

"I knew that," Nyssa said.

"Right," Drew said. "Of course you did. But Lacy isn't used to being able to go back home. Do you know how much of a mess she was when she got to Camp? She kept all her things in her backpack as if she'd take off running anytime, basically guarded her plate at meals, wouldn't look anyone in the eye… And now she left Camp for six months. That's huge for her. Do you know how scares she must be that it'll all be gone when she comes back?"

"She must be terrified," Nyssa said. "But I knew that. I was always with her before she left."

"Exactly," Drew said. "Which brings us to our main point. She doesn't actually care about camp. She cares about you. It's you that she wants."

"But…" Nyssa stuttered. "No! That's not how it works! I'm the one who's hopelessly in love, not her!"

"Well it's nice to hear you admit it after all these months of seeing you sulk. And here's an idea, from someone who lives with Lacy... Maybe you're both hopeless," Drew suggested. "Whatever. Remind me, when does Lacy's plane touch down in New York again? September eight or-"

"The seventh," Nyssa said. "It's a Friday."

"Brilliant," Drew said. "You have two weeks to pull it together and figure out what you're going to do. Good luck!"

"Argus, what time is it?" Nyssa asked.

Argus looked at her and one of the eyes that Nyssa could see exposed arched its eyebrow.

"I know, I know," Nyssa said. "Okay, I'll stop asking every ten seconds."

Argus nodded his head and crossed his hands again, looking at the airport's escalator. Lacy's plane had landed on time from Peru at 10:45 PM and it was not 10:50 PM. Nyssa could barely stand still. She knew, just knew, that Lacy would come off the plane soon. She wondered if she'd be wearing the same green coat and hiking shoes that she'd worn at the airport when Nyssa had been there to see her go. She wondered if Lacy had gotten bored on her hair and braided her hair a thousand times to kill time. She wondered if she would still be wearing her purple eyeliner, or if she'd run out during her trip. Maybe a new kind of purple eyeliner that was only sold in Bolivia? But mostly, Nyssa couldn't wait to see Lacy again for the first time in oh gods there was Lacy.

Nyssa was temped to take off and run up the escalator to grab Lacy in her arms. However Lacy spotted her and smiled and Nyssa was so stunned that she was struck in place for the minute it took Lacy to touch down on solid ground. She was wearing her green coat and her hair was loose around her face and no she wasn't wearing eyeliner but her camera bag was slung across her shoulder and her smile... Nyssa had thought she'd missed Lacy like crazy, but her hug was like a death grip. And Lacy's was even stronger, if that was possible.

"I missed you," Nyssa said. She thought she might cry and she rubbed at her eyes and smiled and laughed because Lacy was also smiling and laughing and looking at Nyssa with damp eyes.

"I've come to a very important conclusion about the world," Lacy said. "I love it. And because I've stepped where others have stepped, I know for sure that it's a beautiful and brilliant place where I can be free and shameless and happy. But I also know that my favourite place across this entire planet is by your side."

Nyssa kissed her in the middle of the airport.