Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“I really do like this jacket,” Annabeth said, on a particularly chilly walk from Sally’s to the subway station. 

“I’m glad you do, seeing as you’re the one wearing it most of the time.” Percy had been left in just his short-sleeved black shirt and gray sweatpants. Annabeth loved him in a shirt that showed off all the benefits of her husband being a certified gym-bro, and Percy didn’t mind the cold like his wife did, who would complain that anything below 50 degrees is cruel and unusual punishment.

They walked in silence for a little, at first holding hands then severing the connection so Annabeth could shove her hands in her pockets and act like a little wind was the cruellest torture in the world.

“How's work, by the way?” She asked as they finally descended to the subway. She swiped her metrocard while Percy jumped the rail.

“It’s good! I checked on a few families today, and we are making some good progress reuniting Natalie with her mom, now that her mom’s been clean for a few months. Oh, and the kid that came in a few weeks ago, another schizophrenia case? Well I got a call from Frank that she arrived at the rehabilitation facility in California.”

Annabeth grinned. He was such a superhero, a social worker who worked tirelessly to beat the system and get kids to good homes. She knew he had a pretty rough time with his first step father, and he was just trying to give back. For some reason, every kid that had any mental aberration got sent straight to her husband, who had dyslexia and ADHD, and had contacts out in San Francisco for good homes for kids with any complaints of ‘visions.’

Secretly, Annabeth thought Percy might be dealing with a stray demigod or two. But they were in New York, and there were rarely any kids that slipped under Camp’s radar if they were in the city. Plus, there were good satyr settlements in California too, and she just had to trust that the fates would deliver kids to where they needed to be. If Percy was dealing with anything un-mortal, he didn’t know it. She watched for the telltale signs of clear-sightedness, but if there was any monster around, Percy was unafraid.

Secretly, Percy wasn't dealing with a stray demigod or two. Secretly, Percy was in charge of the largest demigod location and relocation operation in the nation, ensuring every half-blood he could find got to New Rome. 

“What about work for you? Did you secure the land for development?” He asked.

“It’s good too, we signed contracts for development, but I'm afraid it’s not going to be enough land for what the company wants. It’s good though, in the very start of the Adirondacks, I’ll have to be going out to the site more and more though. I have a few coworkers doing a feasibility study for some conceptual designs, making sure we’re all good with zoning, etc. It’s getting off the ground though, which is exciting.”

Percy grinned back. It’s nice that Annabeth was climbing the ranks as an architect. She was building this planned community for her company, and had been obsessing over the project for ages. She just loved her job, getting to build a whole city from the ground up, and getting to lead a team of people, it was a dream.

Secretly, Percy knew of one of her coworkers. Malcolm Pace. Son of Minerva, a graecus . Figures, a son of Minerva–or, Athena, he supposes–couldn’t do anything useful in the magical world, so he’d have to get a mortal gig. He hoped Malcolm wouldn’t attract any attention to Annabeth’s job, but he’s a graecus son of Minerva, so he wasn’t super worried. Annabeth had an awesome mortal job, and Percy had an awesome mortal wife.

Secretly, Annabeth was working to build New Athens, a permanent settlement for Greek demigods. She had heard of legacies at New Rome, and while the uptight, bigoted, asshat legionnaires did a lot wrong, the idea of permanent safety was attractive. She was working with Camp for a mass relocation, away from Olympus into the mountains, with room to grow into a thriving community, with a real government, school, and lessons to teach that weren’t just how not to die 101 . 

They boarded the train, then got off and switched to the next, and chatted about small, meaningless things. The haul from Queens to Harlem was long, about an hour and a half, and they eventually put in their airpods and watched the latest episode of that new amazon prime show, the one with Donald Glover. Three stops away from their apartment, a mariachi band boarded. And a cyclops. The Mariachi band started playing, and the Cyclops stared at Annabeth and Percy until the next stop.

“Annabeth, I can’t handle this. Wanna walk the rest of the way?”

Annabeth’s eyes darted at the cyclops. Perfect. She nodded and purposefully left her purse behind. When her husband stepped off, she pretended to realize she had left it, and went back into the car just as the monotonous stand clear of the closing doors played. 

“It’s okay! I’ll just meet you there!” She yelled to Percy on the platform.

The subway sped up and departed, and Annabeth threw a knife at the Cyclops’s head, without even blinking.

Percy cursed on the platform. Shit , he left his mortal wife alone with a monster. And then, he grinned, his mortal wife. She’d be fine. He walked upstairs and plugged some earbuds in to walk the rest of the way home. 

Annabeth called him halfway there, saying she was going to pick up some milk and bread while she was out, and she’d be home a little after him. Percy told her to get some more parchment paper while she was there.

He was fishing his keys out of his pocket outside his door when he heard footsteps from inside his house. He grabbed his sword, Riptide , imperial gold and beautiful, and uncapped it. He concentrated to try to figure out how much more water was in his house than usual. About 120 pounds, so about 180 pounds of person inside. Not too bad. He concentrated harder, and fixed the molecules to their current place, freezing the intruder. 

He unlocked the door to find a girl, silently screaming in pain, twitching under the freeze.

He placed his sword at her neck and unfroze her. She yelped at the release, and panted in exhaustion. 

“What are you doing in my house?” He growled. The earth shook under their feet with his anger.

The girl had wide set eyes, and was seventeen at best. Stocky and short-ish, the girl trembled under his glower. He knew what he could look like when he wanted, taking off the mist that carefully concealed his scars on his face and arms. He knew how to be the man people expected him to be.

The girl quivered, but pulled herself together. “Former Dictator Perseus Jackson, I am Probatio Angelina Smith, legacy of Mercury, and I am to deliver a message from New Rome.”

Percy used his sword to lift her sleeve. Sure enough, SPQR layed. 

He capped his sword. “Good afternoon, Probatio. I cannot begin to emphasize what a bad idea it was to break into my house. You had better make this quick, my wife is on the way home. My mortal wife.”

Angelina nodded, apologizing and still trembling. “I’m so sorry, I just didn’t know how to find you! And once I did you’re always surrounded by mortals and I was under orders to—” she looked back up at Percy, and seeing his sharp glare, moved on from the blathering and apologies. “Okay. Sorry. Sir, uh, you have an assignment from the senate. There is a Saturnist in New York, and he’s attempting to resurrect the titan through his daughter. We need–uh, the senate wants you to find him and uh… end his activities.” She stammered. 

“You want me to kill him?”

“Ye-yeah. For Rome. Ad gloriam Rome. Oh! But the Senate says because it's so close to the Greek settlement, you might find a graecus there, so. Anticipate that, I guess. Sorry. Praetor Zhang will send you the rest of the briefing.”

Percy nodded. He felt bad for the kid, sent across the country because New Rome couldn’t stand sending confidential information over channels less secure than person-to-person contact. Usually, he gave these kids 50 dollars to treat themselves at his favorite Italian place down the block and whatever autograph they inevitably asked for, but this one had broken into his house, and put his entire charade with Annabeth in danger. He owed her no such apologies on behalf of New Rome’s paranoia. “I accept this quest.” 

Angelina stammered. “Sir. Um. I promised my friends back home that I would at least ask if there was any way you could sign–” Percy cut her off with a glance, and the kid took the cue and scurried off.

Annabeth retrieved her knife from the gold dust before looking up and seeing her mother. She tied her braids back and sheathed her dagger before sitting next to her.

“Mother.”

“Annabeth. Olympus has given you a quest. There is a Kronos loyalist here in New York, attempting to finish what Luke Castellan started. You are ordered to clean this mess.”

Annabeth nodded, before looking at her mothers scowling face, before saying “Yes, my lady.”

Athena nodded back, told Annabeth to expect a file on her desk tomorrow, and vanished.

Getting off at the next stop, Annabeth elected to grab groceries. Milk, bread, parchment paper.

Annabeth got home, in the lobby there was a quivering young girl who sped past her. She shrugged and headed upstairs. Percy had turned on the Knicks game and was half-watching it. Annabeth put the groceries away, called Thalia while Percy gradually got more invested in the Knicks, and the two ended their night playing Modern Warfare, a game they were exceptionally good at, and showering together, where the water always seemed to be the perfect temperature when Percy was in.

“Oh, the Colemans want us to come over for their party tomorrow. Should be pretty small, we’re going.” Annabeth told Percy in bed. 

“The Colemans… That’s John and Janet down the hall, right?”

“Mhm”

“Is it like a close friends get together?

“Oh. No. Just for couples in the complex. We’re going because we need to be good neighbors.”

Percy nodded. Seemed reasonable enough. “Do we need to bring anything?”

“Probably a bottle of wine. Could you stop in and get a red on the way back from work tomorrow?”

Percy nodded, and both of them fell asleep.

Annabeth listened to Freakonomics on the way to work and read the file on the way back. 

It was a couple, Eddie and Jasmine. Eddie was a seer, and was low-ranking in Kronos’s army. Jasmine was a Romaïkós , daughter of Ceres . Attempting to imbue the spirit of Kronos into their daughter, Titania—Titania, really? Subtle much?—they recruited a small mix of Kronos loyalists, Greek and Roman alike.

The file said that Jasmine was off the grid, but she had probably left another Roman to protect Eddie and Titania, so to expect backup. It was no tricky job though. Kill Eddie, take the baby to camp, and if Jasmine reappeared then the nearest squadron of demigods would carry out the rest of the mission. 

Annabeth went home and found Percy working in the kitchen. He had his glasses on, which always reflected strangely onto his face, making a thin line appear over his eye, almost a scar. The glare, probably. She changed out of her work clothes and into leggings and a kevlar-blend workout top, and threw an old Delphi Strawberry Farms sweatshirt over it. 

“I’m going to go get some exercise,” she said. It wasn’t a lie. Her and Percy never lied. He glanced up from his computer, where he was scrolling through, reading some documents. 

“I might go meet up with a family for work later. What time are the Colemans?”

“Nineish but I say we arrive at nine-fifteen?”

“Sounds good. Have fun!” He bid her goodbye, and resumed his work on the computer. Annabeth secretly grabbed her knife from where it resided under their entryway table, strapped it to her leg, and slipped out. 

She stopped at the mailboxes downstairs and pressed one that revealed her secret compartment. She tied her hair up, put her combat boots on, and tucked knives into each boot. She put her yankees cap on and slid out of the building.

Once she had left, Percy stopped reading the article. Titania? Really? How tacky, for the supposed vehicle of the Titans. No one got creative anymore. He really was going to meet with a family for work. He and Annabeth never lied. 

He smeared seaweed paste on his eyelids, that always helped him concentrate in battle, and put on his tactical gear. He let down his mist guard, his SPQR tattoo prominently displayed, sixteen vertical lines in neat formation, and a trident at the top. Riptide appeared in his pocket, and he left his apartment to go kill this Saturnist. 

Annabeth snuck in through the fire escape and perched herself on top of the cabinets, invisible, belly and back squeezed between the ceiling enough to be uncomfortable, but easy to escape. She hears two sets of footsteps, one up the stairs and one up the fire escape, entering just like she did. Eddie, carrying Titania, opens the door, but before Annabeth can throw her knife at him, the sink explodes, and grabs her, tearing her down from the cabinet ledge. The invisibility cap remains on, but she can’t see as she wipes the water from her eyes. The man from the fire escape charges towards Eddie and grabs the baby from him, who had now begun to cry.

The water pulls off Annabeth and heads like a jet towards the baby and the mystery man, whose large, muscular back was to her. Before the water can shoot the baby and kill her, Annabeth attempts to tackle the man from behind. As if sensing her approaching, the man, face blurred by the mist, turns around and pushes her down, then draws his sword, wanting to fight with a crying baby in hand.

Annabeth draws her knife to try to wretch the baby away. 

“Huic infantem non nocebis!” He yelled in latin. She took a step back. 

“You’re Romaïkós?!” she said. Some power-hungry centurion, sent to use the baby for his own will. She snapped back into it, and threw her knife at his shoulder. His grip slipped, and she wretched the baby away. She looked for Eddie, but in her fight with the roman, he had disappeared. 

She leveled her gaze at the Roman, who was tearing the knife from his shoulder, and realized the only thing he saw was a floating baby. She hid the baby under her shirt so she would be concealed too, and disappeared, only realizing later she had left her dagger.

Percy felt out for the molecules in the building, trying to sense something strange. He couldn’t find anything. Everything was too familiar to him.

“Romaïkós” she had called him. “Roman” in greek. The graecus had taken the baby, and had ruined his kill.

He texted Frank.

Quest went bad. Graecus interfered with some sort of invisibility power. I couldn’t see her, but she left her knife in my shoulder. She took the baby.  Eddie escaped.

Frank replied in seconds.

Took you this long.

You finally failed at a quest. Percy, you’re losing your touch.

In all seriousness though, that baby is number one priority. We don’t know how successful Eddie was, so your new target is the graecus. Ask Hazel if she can identify the knife, she oughta know with the metals.

Thx frank

Then, a text from Reyna came in:

You failed. Fix it.

Percy ignored this one.

He splashed water on the knife wound. It wouldn't be awesome, but he’d deal. It scarred pretty quickly, a nasty thing, and he reapplied the mist, that made his muscles look smaller and his scars fade, and he took the seaweed paste that helped him blur his face off and smeared it around his new scar, which looked just as gnarly, just less recognizable.

He saw a wine fridge and picked out an unopened bottle of merlot. Saturnists didn’t deserve nice wine. 

Percy changed in the restroom downstairs to his previous attire, and shoved his used clothes in his private mailbox to pick up later.

“Tough workout?” he asked when he got upstairs.

Annabeth startled. “Yeah. It was uh, unexpectedly hard.” she said, changing into her party clothes.

Percy pulled her in to kiss her, and she practically melted against his touch, and they went back to changing.

“How was the family?”

“Huh?”

“The family you visited.”

“Oh. Mom wasn’t there and Dad did not want to see me, so I guess we’ll reschedule.” Percy shrugged, then winced, shoulder wound.

Annabeth looked at him skeptically through the mirror, then resumed putting on her makeup. “You got the wine, right?”

“It’s in the kitchen,”

She pressed her lips to his as thank you, then continued to apply her eyeshadow.

Thirty minutes later, they headed to the Colemans to get tipsy with their neighbors.

John and Janet were more of Annabeth’s friends, anyway. But they were nice-ish, and Percy had to have some new adult friends, not just people he had known since childhood. John, an up-and-coming trial lawyer, was chatting about his latest case. Jane was nodding attentively, and briefly running between the living room and the kitchen to refill drinks and bring out more chips. 

“So, in law, there’s a concept called hearsay, which is when a witness will tell you what another person said. Because it’s not in the court, it can’t be admissible as evidence. Well, my witness, Mrs. Erskine, said that the maid had said that the pool boy had been acting strangely for months now. Now, the prosecution objected, under hearsay, but I was able to overrule the objection. See, it didn’t matter what the maid said, what mattered was that she said it in english! Therefore, her claims of not understanding the argument between my client and the poolboy were inadmissible, because we have now proven she does know English, as Mrs. Erskine only speaks English, so how would she be able to know what the maid said if the maid didn’t speak English?! So at this point my team has to go find the maid again because now we know that she did understand that argument…” he was boisterous, and still in his lawyer suit. 

He kept chattering on, and Percy didn’t dislike the guy. He seemed perfectly acceptable. But he fundamentally didn’t know how to connect with people who thought that hearsay arguments and divorce settlements were the biggest thing in the world. The only people he truly cared about had bigger perspectives, knew larger stakes than John Coleman had ever had.

Well, except Annabeth. But Annabeth had never given him the impression that she cared too much about such little things. He tried to make eye contact with her, but she was on her phone again. She looked rattled, a little shaken. Probably the wine, which Annabeth made a point not to drink too much of. Percy’s Roman sensibilities made him more amicable to the drink, but he didn’t feel like it was the time. He had failed today. No sense in celebration, even among people who didn’t know of his failures.

The other people in the room, just 3 or so more couples, all of which Percy knew vaguely, were fascinated by the story, but as John’s story came to a close, he seemed to notice that Percy didn’t care as much about the world of lawyers as everyone else did.

“Percy, buddy! What is it you do again? You’re a foster dad?” John asked. Percy gave him a weak grin.

“No, no uh, I’m a social worker. I get kids out of abusive or neglectful situations. I do a lot of my work with orphans.”

“Sounds pretty grim, does it at least pay well?”

Percy swallowed. He was unbearably out of his depth. “No, no it doesn’t pay well. But I have good benefits, dental and healthcare and all of that stuff… good retirement. But uh, Annabeth is the main breadwinner. She’s a rockstar at her architecture firm downtown.”

He gestured to Annabeth, trying to make ‘help me’ eyes. She was still on her phone. “Right, Annabeth? You’ve been building that new community upstate?” he tried for her attention again. She looked up from her phone finally. Gods , she looked troubled. 

“Oh, yeah! I’ve been doing some fun stuff.” She looked back down at her phone. Who was she texting?! Probably her step-mom, from her panicky face. Might be another issue with her dad. He doubted it, though. He usually was cued into those matters.

John laughed. “And it doesn’t, like, emasculate you, to have your wife be the breadwinner?”

“What?! No, not at all. I’m super proud of what Annabeth is doing. And I love what I do.”

John leaned back, a smirk playing on the corners of his mouth. “I guess that’s one way to look at it. You must have a lot of patience. I mean, I can’t imagine dealing with all those kids’ problems all day and then coming home and letting your wife run the show. Must take a certain kind of man.”

“Hey man, I don’t love your tone there.” Percy started, before Janet came in and patted him on the shoulder. He winced –fresh wound there, lady!-- as she filled his wine back up.

“Well I think it’s very nice. Not many men are as secure in their position as you are.”

John chuckled. “Yeah. It’s certainly… progressive.” Percy shot another look at Annabeth, who usually would be able to rebuff this shit with him. But she was still on her phone, now making her way to the bathroom, leaving him to stew and sip on the Merlot he had stolen from Eddie and Jasmine.

Is he there yet? Annabeth shot off. Piper replied back almost immediately. 

Annabeth, you need to calm down. 

She tried to. The emergency satyr she had called up had to have been less than 30. He was a baby, and while Brooklyn wasn’t a far cry from Camp, this was a potentially very evil baby, and a very volatile situation.

Should I just try to intercept him? Transport her myself? Annabeth asked.

No. Piper responded. Just “no?” with a period?

Annabeth tried to put her phone down. John was spouting off some lawyer story again. It seemed the man’s only personality trait was passing the bar. Still, she was supposed to be a mortal, and good mortals were good neighbors. She picked it back up

Are you mad at me? She asked Piper. 

The little dots indicating Piper was typing bounced up and down for what seemed like hours, then,

No.

Okay, well the response makes it seem like you’re mad at me

I’m not mad at you.

I don’t believe you!!!

She checked the satyr’s position again. Then she checked the police chatter. Then she checked the Demigod Warnings twitter page. 

She texted Piper again.

I told you about the Romaïkós, right?

You told me about the Romaikos.

Piper couldn't even be bothered to hold down on the i and the o to get the diacritics. What the hell?!

Annabeth got up to use the restroom, and while washing her hands, tossed a gold coin into the sink and requested an IM to Piper.

“Iris, goddess of the rainbow, show me Piper McLean.”

Piper picked up. She was clearly trying to go to sleep, in her bra (not Annabeth’s style, but okay, fine), with Jason sleeping beside her. “Piper?! Are you trying to sleep?! The satyr will be arriving any minute now! You need to be ready to intercept the baby!”

Piper shushed Annabeth and carried the glass of water Annabeth was displayed on top of her and Jason’s bedroom in the little Camp Half Blood cabin they had built. 

“Hi Annabeth, you look cute. You need to calm down, though. The satyr will arrive, he’s a good kid, and the baby will be safe. We have good people looking after both of them.”

“Who’s gonna take care of her when she gets there?! Camp isn’t ready to have a baby! Much less a potential Kronos-baby!” 

“I thought you would take her, once Chiron sees her.”

“And I know you think i’m hysterical but you can’t blame me! The Romaïkós are after her! What if that kid Satyr gets hurt! Wait, what do you mean I would take her?” 

Piper sighed. “I don’t know. You seem pretty wrapped up in this baby here. And isn’t it about time for you and hubby to have a kid? And isn’t this a great way without relying on Hera?”

Annabeth gulped. “What… what are you talking about?”

“Look. I know it’s been a hard day for you. I know the Roman got to your head. But don’t tell me in all of the thinking you’re doing about the baby, enough thinking to really disturb my sleep here, you didn’t give a thought to who would keep her?”

“Piper, Percy is a mortal.”

“And you’re gonna just hide this from him. Forever?” Piper asked, condescendingly, might Annabeth add.

“Uh… yeah. That’s the plan. It’s been five years of marriage. I think if I would have dropped the bomb on him I would have done it before I said yes to his proposal.” 

Piper sighed again. She was doing a lot of sighing nowadays. She had never supported Operation Percy Can’t Find Out. She had barely met him because she couldn’t stomach the idea of Annabeth ‘covering up her whole identity for some guy .’ 

“Either way. That’s not the point. The point is you are going to take the baby with Jason until we can figure out a more permanent solution. And you are going to greet the little Satyr boy and the baby when they arrive at camp!”

“This is a lot more ordering me around than I’m comfortable with.”

“Well, do you have a better solution?”

Piper was silent. That was all Annabeth needed.

“Well. I think you need to tell Percy. He deserves the truth.”

“No he deserves a nice, mortal, non-life-threatening life. Look, Piper, we’re never gonna agree on this, but it’s my life and my marriage. Stay out of it.”

They looked at eachother, and then Annabeth gave Piper a smile, and Piper smiled back. They couldn’t fight for long.

“So the water grabbed you?” Piper asked. Annabeth’s eyes went wide.

“Oh yeah. And he was definitely a Demigod. I think it might even be someone I know. I really felt like I should’ve placed him. I don’t think I know many Romans though.”

Piper pursed. “He definitely didn’t see you?”

“Cap on the whole time. You know they’re really fashionable now? Like I see them everywhere.”

“Of course I know they’re fashionable now. If I didn’t know they’re fashionable my mother would strike me dead. I bet you look good in it, too.”

“Too bad you’ll never ever know.” Annabeth retorted.

Piper grinned. “I miss you, Anna. We need to catch up. Call me soon. I gotta go.”

And with that, she severed the connection, leaving Annabeth face to face with her reflection. She looked nice, but she had a mark that she suspected would be a zit in a few days on her chin. Too much wiping blood from her face there, got it dirty again. Maybe she’d treat herself to a nice facial soon, cut out a few frivolous expenses and go to the Aphrodite kid on 42nd that always gave her discounts.

She left the bathroom to find Percy wincing through shoulder pats and listening to John go on and on about his cases. Janet looked frantic, with the wine slowly dwindling, and her husband getting louder and louder. She approached Janet first, who was washing dishes silently in the kitchen. Annabeth stepped in and started drying some pots and pans for her.

“It’s a great little get together, Janet. Thanks for organizing this. Percy and I always mean to be better neighbors than we are, we appreciate getting to know some people in the hall.” Annabeth said, just to try to ease the nervous look on Janet’s face.

“Oh yeah. Well, I don’t know if your husband feels the same,” Janet giggled, and kept fidgeting around, scrubbing down knives way too hard, making them dull and not executing proper cutlery care at all.

Annabeth stayed quiet. Luke had taught her that the best way to get answers from others was to just open up the floor for them to give them themselves. “Sorry. It’s just. I think John gets a little threatened by him. And Léon and Knox aren’t helping, they’re so interested in the new kid on the block.”

“I would hardly call us new, we moved here seven months ago–”

“But you never show your faces! Both of you are always darting in and out, never lingering in the lobby for conversation, never chatting with the doormen. And, you’ve been so sweet, you’ve come to book clubs and my silly little get-togethers, but you never talk!”

“Janet, I’m sorry if I–”

Janet cut her off again, still ruining her knives. “No, it’s not your fault. We’re all just nosy and we have nothing to do with our lives and we want to know all about the mysterious beautiful people next door who there are many rumors swirling about.”

Annabeth balked. “I didn’t know we were so mysterious. Percy and I are just private people, that’s all. We always love being invited to events like these, though, but our work schedules have us keep some strange hours.”

Janet giggled. Annabeth, albeit belatedly, realized Janet had had more than a few glasses of wine. “Oh sure, it’s your jobs that have both of you sneaking out at night.”

Annabeth furrowed her brow. Yeah, Annabeth had to sneak out to kill a monster or two every so often, but it shouldn’t have warranted this much suspicion. She tried to move the topic along, her curiosity about the rumors swirling about her and her husband gone by that point. “You know, I’m a Virginia girl myself, and I was under the impression that when I moved to New England people would finally stay out of my business.” A little ice crept into her words. She knew why her neighbors thought her suspicious, but if she could encourage Janet to back off, maybe Percy wouldn’t need to find out about Annabeth’s fire escape habit. 

Janet giggled. Unfortunately, subtlety didn’t work on the wine-drunk. “You’re not from Virginia, Annabeth! Listen, I grew up in Arlington, I know how Virginians sound, and I was a linguistics major. You’ve got the strangest accent, yeah you might have hung around Virginia as a kid, but you have a little California to you, your upticks at the end of your words. Real valley girl. And some Long Island as well. And, here's my favorite part: Greek! Not in the accent but the rhythm of your words! Now, at first glance, you don’t seem Greek. Usually they come a little–” Janet looked at Annabeth, tall and Black and definitely glaring at her now, “lighter than you. But the things you say…” Janet giggled again, louder.

Annabeth put down her rag. “Stay out of my business, Janet. Thanks for the party. I’ll be leaving now.”

Janet was giggling again. She took a bit of the hors d'oeuvre and plopped it in a candle, praying to Dionysus that Annabeth’s message could be delivered to her neighbor through the drunk delirium she was in. 

While Annabeth changed into her pajamas, Percy mailed the knife off in Hermes Express to California, with a note to Hazel explaining the situation. He changed into his pajamas and got into bed with Annabeth, who was engrossed in her book with a lime facemask on. 

“What are you reading?”

“Uh…” she turned the book around. “The Liar You Love: Dealing With Your Narcissistic Parent,”

“Oh that sounds useful, give me a summary when you’re done.”

Annabeth furrowed her brows. “What?”

“What?”

“Percy, it's not funny to call Sally a narcissist. That’s so unlike you. Are you okay? Did something happen?” she asked.

“What? No! My dad. My dad is a narcissist.” Percy said, and he could feel the earth give a little tremble. He reached out in his gut and stopped it. “And you’re reading it about…” he trailed off, question evident.

“My mom. Sorry. Forgot about your dad. It’s weird how little I know of your life before I met you.”

“I could say the same. I just don’t like talking about the past. There’s no point in it.” Percy said. Annabeth wanted to press him, to find out who his dad was, and his first step-dad, but knew that doing so would lead her husband to ask questions about her past. They had always been profoundly uncurious about each other's childhoods. Well, Annabeth had always pretended to be profoundly incurious about Percy’s childhood.

“Yeah. You’re right. Thanks, by the way,” she said, putting her book away. “For not pressing me on it. The past is stupid.”

“Thank you too. I much rather like the future. Our future.” Percy said. Annabeth smiled, and kissed him. 

Percy’s phone dinged. He checked it and paled.

Percy, 

I have got some strange news on the knife front. So, it turns out it belonged to Luke Castellan, the graecus who hosted Saturn back in the day. It's been in play for ages, and it went through a fusion with another metal during repairs about three years back.

I had Arnon Milchan, Mercury’s son, dig into its travel records, he said it was shipped out of 511 W 122nd Ave, Apartment 6B. Might be worth checking out. Let me know what you find. I had Mercury ship it back to you, it should be on your kitchen table.

As he sat in the bed in 511 W 122nd Ave, Apartment 6B, the gears in his head started turning. His wife had picked up the narcissism book again. He looked at her harder, feeling her weight in molecules.

Identical to the graecus he battled.

A graecus. Who had stolen a baby. Who had the knife of the host of Saturn. He took off his shirt, the scar from earlier that day still visible. 

The gears clicked and whirred. Percy could feel the throttle of shock close around his throat, but he pushed it aside, for the calculated instinct he had honed since he was twelve. Outside, it began to rain.

“Annabeth, babe. Could you grab me a glass of water in the kitchen?”

She looked at him strangely, her eyes flicked to the scar. 

“Sure, babe.”

She got up, and shut the bedroom door behind her.

Annabeth saw her knife on the counter. A note was attached. “Bonam fortunam! - Hazel”

The scar on his shoulder. She picked up the knife, slowly, and in her silk pajama set, she advanced toward her bedroom door. Romaïkós, her husband, the man who had grabbed her with water, who had blurred his face with the mist.

She racked her brain for what she knew of New Rome. Child soldiers, high mortality, unsteady relationships with the gods, although her “graecus” ass couldn’t judge too much for that. 

A son of Neptune had single handedly killed the Titan Krios. Had brought down Mount Othrys. And now he was attempting to kidnap Kronos babies, no doubt to add to the New Rome ranks.

What a godsdamn fool she had been. 

She went around the apartment shutting the water pipes, but her yankees cap was stuck in the bedroom with him. The facemask and pink PJs were not her usual warrior’s attire, but she was entering to battle nevertheless. 

In the bedroom, Percy dissolved the mist around him. The mist he had learned from Hazel, the mist he had battled Krios with. He felt Riptide hidden in the back pocket of his pajama pants, and he uncapped it. He felt Annabeth close off the water pipes.

His smart wife. 

He shook off the last of the mist, and called out.

“Babe?” He put on the slippers his mom gifted him and Annabeth for christmas, and approached the door. He opened it and Annabeth lunged at him. He overpowered her and swung her off, knocking her against the wall. She got to her feet, bouncing on her toes, in a defensive position. He rolled his shoulders. She stretched her arms, and they lunged at each other.

Their blades clashed with a hideous clang and they danced all around the apartment, their brutality escalating with every hit. Annabeth used her smaller size to gain on him in speed, but he was strong, and parried her stabs with much less strength than she used. She stabbed again, and when he caught her blade she pushed upwards to allow herself to sweep him off his feet, sending him tripping to the ground. She used the time to run out of the apartment, leaping down the six flights of stairs, and out onto the street, barefoot in her pajamas and a facemask in November in New York. 

She hailed a cab and pushed the driver out of the car. It smelled disgusting, but it would hide her scent from whatever monsters Percy would inevitably call on her. 

He grabbed a gun– of course he would grab their gun on his way down, Annabeth is ashamed to call herself a daughter of Athena –and shot at the car.

He’s trying to kill her. Annabeth revved the engine and aimed the car straight at him. 

“Annabeth! Annabeth, wait!”

His body tumbled over the windshield, down the back of the car, and Annabeth sped off. 

“Annabeth, wait! We need to talk!” He cried after her, but she was already gone.

Percy prayed to Jupiter for mercy. He prayed to his father. He prayed that slaying titans and saving the world would grant him the ability to get on a plane, and he booked a Spirit Airlines flight from JFK to SFO. He had a young Probatio pick him up for a few Denarii, and entered New Rome. He tried to make all aspects of him being back in the city discreet, but meeting with the Praetor had its consequences, and he was in the New Rome Times by afternoon, heralding the Titan-killer’s return. “The Right Hand of Rome Has Returned on a Top Secret Mission!” then, below “here are our editor’s top ten picks on what it could be!”

Frank was in a meeting. Budgeting for the new university expansion or something, and as soon as Frank saw Percy come into the senate chambers, mist down, haggard, with fresh cuts and bruises along his side, he excused himself. Wordlessly, they went to the baths.

“What the hell happened to you?”

“My wife.”

They moved from the tepidarium to the calarium and Percy regaled the tale, which was pretty short, to be honest.

“She tried to kill me, Frank, I tried to blow the tires out on the car and she ran over me.”

“Gods, Percy, I’m sorry. I know what you’re thinking, man. If she lied about that, what else has she lied about? She’s a graecus , she’s engaged in guerilla warfare 24/7, 365. They’re ruthless over there, absolutely ruthless.”

“What are you saying dude?” Percy said. The room started to steam, and the heat choked out their faces. It had been a while since Percy had been in this much water, he felt his muscles strengthen, his cuts heal, his brain clear of the fog of the last twelve hours.

“She’s a graecus, Percy. You think it’s happenstance she married a Titan-killer? She carries the knife of Saturn, she kidnapped a baby.”

Piper poured wine, some Pinot from New Zealand that Dionysus recommended. “What? Your husband is the guy from the Titania case? That’s impossible.”

Titania, the maybe-Kronos-baby, was in the other room, in a makeshift drawer-crib. 

Annabeth sat on the floor, staring at the wall, not moving, not speaking. Piper put the glass in her hand and sat next to her.

“I don’t understand,” Piper said. “He seemed so nice.”

“Come on man. It’s a 7-year stakeout to get information from you. Mission accomplished. See? You’re still wearing her ring! Percy I’m so sorry but you’ve been duped.”

Percy twisted the ring on his finger. On the inside, there was an inscription. Their wedding date and initials. He didn’t take the ring off.

“Well. Here’s the upside. You don’t love him. You’ll sever the ties, you’ll make sure he never thinks of coming after you again, and the good news is it’s easy. No one’s stronger or braver than you are, Annabeth. You’re the only one I know who could handle this.”

I’m not handling it, Annabeth thought, but just took a sip of the Pinot and tried to retrieve herself. “Thanks Piper”

“It’ll be over soon. You have your whole life left. The world will not end for this, Anna.”

She nodded, and twisted her wedding ring.

Frank was quiet the rest of the time. Neither of them knew what to say. Percy just kept thinking of Annabeth, his wife, who tried to kill him. Who kidnapped that baby? Who is a graecus. Who is his wife, who is smart and kind and fiercely protective of those she loves.

“I know your fatal flaw is loyalty, man. I know this has to be the biggest betrayal. I–words cannot express how sorry I am. But you have to overcome it. She is a loose end, she is a Saturnist, and she will come after you.” 

Percy stayed silent.

They moved from the caldarium to the frigidarium, into the tank of cold water. Frank spoke once more.

“Why did you give her the knife man? Why did you lower the mist?”

“I… I don’t lie to my wife.” Percy said. And they were silent the rest of the time, in the freezing cold baths of New Rome.

Piper made up the couch for Annabeth to sleep on. She knew how hard it was to stay in the cabins as an adult, but Jason insisted they stay at camp. Still, Annabeth wasn’t ready to see her younger siblings.

“He looked different, Piper. He had these great big scars, and the SPQR tattoo. He’s been manipulating the mist.”

“Oh sweetie, I’m so sorry. If he was manipulating his looks, what else might he have been manipulating to get you closer to him.” She said it more to herself than to Annabeth, but Annabeth still froze at the thought. She hadn’t even thought of the idea that her husband–that Percy , the social worker she had fallen in love with on their commute–could wield the mist to manipulate her. She didn’t know why she hadn’t thought of the accusation yet. It disquieted her, but the idea of him playing mind tricks seemed so outlandish that she couldn’t truly believe he had been manipulating her.

Why had he given her her knife back? 

The question tormented her until Piper spoke, in quiet charmspeak, Annabeth. Rest. and she fell asleep at last.

Chapter Text

Percy was, once again, too anxious for New Rome. He had gone to sleep, woken up at 5 am to run laps around the whole city, filled out his re-naturalization papers while practically running on Frank’s old stairmaster, eaten 5 meals, and still he couldn’t calm down. When he saw Gwendolyn and Dakota while disemboweling dummies and chucking axes at moving targets, he didn’t stop pacing and jumping and wiggling while he debriefed them on the situation.

“She’s a graecus! She has Kronos’ knife! She stole a baby! She tried to kill me!” he nearly shouted.

Gwendolyn asked him when his date with the senate was. “Tomorrow morning. Ten or ten-thirty, I can’t remember.”

Dakota asked to see a picture of her. Percy pulled out his wallet, where their wedding photos were. Three pictures, Annabeth and him shoving cake into each other's mouths, Annabeth and Estelle dancing, and a family photo, of him, his mom, Paul, Estelle, Annabeth, her dad, her step-mom, and Matthew and Bobby, who were at the time valiantly trying to preserve their newfound frat boy aesthetics, even at a wedding.

“Do you have any other wedding pictures?”

“No, not on me. They’re all at the apartment or at my office.”

“Okay. Well, look at this,” Dakota pointed out the background of the first picture. “You should ask Reyna, she’ll know more than me, but look at this girl–her bridesmaid right? That’s Rachel, the graecus oracle”

Percy groaned and sunk to the dusty floor of the sparring gym.

“You’re right. There were probably so many graecus at my fucking New York wedding. I’ll see if Frank, Hazel, or Reyna have any pictures too. They were the only ones I invited. They might be able to figure out her… cohort. Or something” He sunk his head into his hands. Gwen rubbed his back half-heartedly, and Percy felt like throwing up.

He spent the rest of the day pacing, telling his old friends of his plight because he didn’t know what else to do. By the end of the day, it was almost a story, it was almost funny. By the end of the day, he still had not called to tell his mom, only left a message that told her where he was.

He took 7 of Hazel’s sleeping pills that night, and still stared at the ceiling until he thought the popcorn dots spelled out the name of the wife that tried to kill him.

Annabeth could not stop crying, except for when she was driven into the New Athens site and given a chain saw and noise-canceling headphones where she could reenact the Texas Chain Saw Massacre, and just go at it. When she got sick of hacking and chopping and screaming and when the nymphs threatened her if she continued her rampage, Katie took her to make bread, and set Annabeth on kneading sourdough in the mess hall for hours, and when flour stained her fingers and her hands started to ache, Holly and Laurel Victor raced her around the lake again and again, until her arms and hands and legs gave out and she finally crawled to the Big House to demand a meeting. 

They set the meeting for the new plot of land, where New Athens was being zoned and planned and poured over, in a small clearing in the woods. She got onto the dinky Camp Half Blood dilapidated bus they used to use for field trips with a handful of counselors and her siblings, and Chiron of course, and picked at the peeling seats and clenched and unclenched her hands for the full drive. Everyone important to her had spread out, except for Piper and Jason, the oldest people left at Camp Half Blood, and even they were only there every so often. They had a house back in Oklahoma, insisting upon peace and quiet entering their lives. 

Annabeth had peace and quiet once. Annabeth had peace and quiet until last night. Percy’s face flashed in her mind, and she quietly sobbed. Piper was beside her in an instant. Jason had stayed behind at Camp Half Blood to look after Titania, and she was the only one who Annabeth truly knew . With all of her friends spread out, scattered to not attract too much attention, settling down into their lives. And she was alone.

The bus parked at the New Athens forest. At the tent they had erected for project management, Annabeth and a younger counselor she barely knew the name of set up buckets to call upon the older friends who had scattered into the meeting. As everyone settled in, she paced and picked and clawed at her braids, picking at her dark skin, just to keep her mind off the matter at hand. Still, her brain, the traitorous thing, flashed images of Percy. Of their wedding. Of him almost killing the baby. Of their first date. Of his eyes as she ran the car into him.

“So, I have gathered you today because there was recently a quest I was sent upon by my mother, Lady Athena. There is a Kronos-follower uprising, and there were two rogue followers attempting to summon the demon through their baby daughter. I arrived at the scene to stop the ritual, but there was a Romaïkós there, with control over water and mist. He attempted to steal the baby from me, and while I was able to get away, he found me later that day. I need all of us to gather information on Poseidon’s–I mean, Neptune’s –son in New Rome. His name is Percy Jackson.”

Leo, who was in his mechanic’s uniform and, as always, smudged with oil and rust, was the first to put the pieces together. “Oh gods, Annabeth–”

She cut him off. “Percy Jackson has been… posing… as my husband for the last five years. He hid himself as a mortal social worker. We do not know why, but now that his identity was revealed to me in an attempt to steal back the baby, we need all we can get on him. We… We start from nothing. I do not know anything about the son of Neptune.”

Tears once again welled in her eyes. Piper cut her off, standing in front of her so Annabeth could choke down her sobs again, and ordered for the room to gather information on the Son of Neptune and New Kronos movement. And then she took Annabeth to hammer a sword, and build a canoe, and do anything but think about the husband that betrayed her. 

That night, Piper woke Annabeth up from her fitful slumber in the guest house, and brought her to New Athens again, for the second meeting. Annabeth’s head was ringing, but the minutes her hand took while her brain shattered and screeched against its circumstances read that there is a KOS order for the Son of Neptune–Kill on Sight. 

Doug, who she supposed was her younger brother, was the new Head Counselor of the Athena cabin. He was no more than 16, but he had come in true Athena-spawn fashion–prepared with a stack of folders and a bulletin board. 

The center of the bulletin board had two photos, the portrait of a younger Percy adorned in his traditional laurels and a formal toga, and the wedding photo of him and Annabeth with their wedding party. In red, Doug had circled the three romans he could find, using red yarn to tie Percy’s best man, Frank, to reports of a son of Ares–or Mars –who could shapeshift. The current praetor of New Rome. He was tied–apparently engaged– to Hazel Levesque, the revived witch who had a key part to play in destroying the throne of Kronos by manipulating cursed gems and the mist. Off to the side was Reyna Ramírez-Arellano, another Praetor, the general.

“How did we not recognize these people? This is, god this might be 100 demigods in one spot in the middle of New York, what meddling happened?”

Doug shook his head. “I have some theories” he squeaked, “number one is we know that Percy can manipulate the mist–it looks like he learned it from Hazel Levesque before he became Percy Titan-Killer. That’s what they call him, you know, in the papers. Perseus Occisor Deorum.”

Annabeth felt like she was going to throw up.

“Anyway. He might have shrouded his friends. Or the gods intervened and shrouded one or both parties. Or the alcohol.”

The room nodded. Yeah, it was probably the alcohol.

“Anyway. So from his wedding guests we can guess his allies. And then if we look over here –” Doug moved out of the way, where pictures and headlines about Percy Jackson lay together. “Okay so this is nowhere near complete, and I did it with the help of Donald and Maya, thanks guys–” he waved to the two other teenagers at the back of the room. This was just another research assignment to these kids, they didn’t understand that Annabeth’s whole world had been shattered, they were not taking this seriously. Annabeth’s heartbeat quickened again, and Piper once again held her hand. Steadfast. Strong.

“But uh. So what we can glean is Percy Jackson is a bastard of Neptune, that’s roman for Poseidon, but Neptune is like… way crazier than Poseidon. Poseidon is the god of the sea and horses and stuff, Neptune is more like, the god of water. There was this proto-indo-european freshwater deity that fused with Neptune during worship, and Servius–the grammarian son of Minerva from the fourth century, explicitly names Neptune as the god of rivers, springs, waters, wells, etc. He’s also the god of storms, right there with Jupiter. They’re both doing the storm thing.”

Doug stopped and drank a Tropical Vibe Celcius. Then kept going. “So, we know Percy’s powers probably are more water-based. We know from the public roman reports that he can bloodbend–like in Avatar the last Airbender–and that he has limited mist control. He seems really in-control of his powers, in addition to being a magnificent sword fighter. I mean, I watched some footage from the Roman training centers, and like, wow. 

“He’s got two big nicknames. Percy Titan-Killer, obviously. Older than that nickname though, is Dextera Romae. The Right-Hand of Rome. Kind of a badass moniker, in my opinion. They called the late oracle–or, I think they’re called ‘Augurs’ there–Octavian Washington, he was called Sinistra Roma. The Left-Hand of Rome. Listen to this, according to the New Rome Times, Percy, at a gala hosted by Praetor Reyna Ramírez-Arellano—she’s right here see?” he pointed to her picture on the board, “after Octavian had provoked him somehow, Percy put his sword to his throat, and told Octavian to stop. And then, when Octavian continued provoking him, Percy beheaded the guy! Took him by the hair, held him up silently as a warning, and threw his head into the Pacific ocean for his father. Then, two days later, he appoints himself dictator, and starts exiling, like, half the clergy. But he wouldn’t let anyone call him “Dictator,” and he would trick people into having meetings in the baths with him, and he boiled them alive. I mean, Annabeth, you married a real psychopath here. What was it like to spar with him?”

Annabeth looked up at the eager kid. “My husband nearly killed me.”

And Doug sobered up again. “Ah. Anyway, he's been involved in the roman world since he was 12, leaving his mom in New York to train as a child soldier. He rose through the Roman ranks quickly, and became Praetor during wartime, afterwards giving his Praetorship to Frank Zhang. He famously took down Krios, and since then has been running the largest demigod trafficking program in the nation, in which demigods are kidnapped from their homes to be shipped to New Rome. That’s probably why he wanted baby Titania, to make Rome as powerful as possible. Now, here’s where we ran into a little bit of a wall.”

Doug turned away from the bulletin board and looked toward Annabeth again. “We cannot figure out why he would go undercover. Presumably, to impair the New Athens construction, but we’ve only been pursuing this project for about three years now, and you two have been married for five. Any ideas?”

Her head was spinning. But she let the new information wash over her, and sharpen her mind as it was made to do, and she placed herself firmly in the mindset of the killing calm. “I do not know. But I know he is honorable. He revealed his hand to me, he gave me my knife before our fight, and he did not use these blood powers against me. I believe a formal declaration and invitation of a duel would be honored by him.”

Piper immediately stepped in. “Annabeth, no . He is a titan-killer.”

She looked up at Piper grimly. “So am I.”

Percy woke up to the sound of sparrow calls. Which he found as ironic, given the sparrow usually was the symbol of undoubting, unyielding loyalty, at least according to Annabeth. And then the world crashed down upon him, and he headed to the senate chamber, early to a meeting for the first time in his life.

He sat in Frank's office before the meeting started. He eyed Frank’s telephone, an old rotary with a Canadian flag pin in the middle, and was about to call his mom, but couldn't make himself tell her. Not… not yet. Then he just played with Newton's cradle, and prayed to his father, who, as always, did not listen.

The senate meeting was horrible, as centurions reported statistics about his wife’s work during the war. A Saturninan loyalist, they said, was romantically entangled with the host of the time lord, who, at the last moment, tried to seize power for herself, and killed Luke Castellan in cold blood. Who had since been working on reestablishing the Camp Half Blood establishments, making “New Athens,” a mockery of New Rome. Chaotic, reckless, and an expert at guerilla warfare. The Centurions reported she had stolen that baby to help the Greek camp grow stronger, as the Greeks were notorious for collecting superpowered children to carry their small numbers. The infamous di Angelos, Thalia and Jason Grace, and now a host of the time lord. 

The senate ordered him to do what he had to do, and issued an execute on sight command for her, placing a generous bounty on his wife’s head. The senate ordered him to bring an end to this Graecus extremist. And he nodded, and accepted the order, and thanked the senate for the directive to kill his wife. 

Annabeth was good at her training. She knew that Doug and his two goonies couldn’t dig up everything, and she knew her husband. He told everything to his mom. So, when the meeting adjourned, she had Argus take her on the trek down to Queens, to go see her mother-in-law. She had Piper make her look presentable, Piper busting out the dyson airwrap that her mother got her as a wedding gift to tame Annabeth’s hair, and patching up her face with various blessed makeup products that made her look less horrifically disheveled than she was. Annabeth could never fit into Piper’s clothes. Piper was lithe, cross-country style. Annabeth had what Piper called “quads of steel” and “deltoids for days,” so she stopped at a Target on the way to Queens to look a little more like her normal self, dressed in a bland cardigan and black leggings. 

Argus dropped her off at Sally’s. She tipped, and climbed the steep stairs up to her apartment, then knocked on the door and wiped her feet on the “ Life’s A Beach” welcome mat. Gods, how had she not suspected anything?

This could go one of two ways. One, Sally knew, and would try to kill Annabeth… and Annabeth would… she would have to kill Sally. But, she told herself, that was inconceivable, and Percy probably hadn’t told Sally that his cover had been blown. 

Probably, right?

Just when she was starting to think this was a bad idea, Sally opened the door, dressed in sweatpants and a bright purple sweatshirt, with her hair in a bun that had multiple pens and pencils stuck through it. 

“Annabeth! How are you sweetie?” Thank the gods. Percy hadn’t told her.

Time for her to play into her looks, into the light into her eyes that had died. “Sally? I uh. I need to talk to you, and I don’t know who else to go to,”

“Oh! Sweetie of course! Come on in! Paul’s with his buddies right now, and Estelle just went to her friend’s house for a little playdate. It’s just us.

Annabeth came in after her, and cooperated when Sally led her to the big blue couch that was far too large for the apartment it was in. “It's just–I've been seeing things. Big monsters, and horrible creatures, and stuff that just… just doesn’t make sense! And no one else can see them!” She sobs. Real sobs, not fake sobs. It’s pretty easy to real-sob in front of the wedding pictures of her and the man who had likely received a kill directive too. Sally rubbed her back. “I think I'm going crazy, Sally. I think Percy’s gonna have to–” hiccup “check me in somewhere!”

Sally gently cooed, and hugged Annabeth, before taking Annabeth's hand and silently leading her into Percy’s childhood bedroom, with all the punk rock posters that had been semi-turned into Sally’s study where she did her writing. She went into the closet and got a big basket off the top shelf, and sat Annabeth down once more. 

Slowly, lovingly, Sally explained to Annabeth while holding her hand, that the world is so much wonderfully bigger than she thought it was. She showed pictures of her posing with a blurred man by the ocean, and said she met him when she lost her uncle in the hospital, losing the last family she had left, in her senior year. 

“Neptune was wise, and mature, and I thought those were the only two things I wasn’t. So we had this little summer together, while I was trying to figure out my life. I was 19, I was a baby, but I had… I had never felt so alive. He revealed what he actually was to me before he left, but I think somehow, deep down, I knew. Next thing I knew, Percy was born. He… I don’t want to tell you his story. I want him to break this to you, I know he’s been wanting to reveal this side of his life forever. But he’s been through quite a lot, these Gods, they haven’t been kind to my son, and he had to escape that world. So he came back here, to me, in New York, and he met you! And he told me… he told me that you didn’t look at him and saw what he had done, the things he had sacrificed, the power he wielded. I know he has only not told you to keep you safe. But I'm sorry, Annabeth. I really am. If he had known you could see—”

Annabeth simmered in the new information.

There was no way, right? That Percy couldn’t have known who she was. That he hadn’t seen her half-drunk in that dingy bar and clocked her immediately as Annabeth Titanoktónos, as Annabeth Titan-Killer, favorite daughter of a foreign war goddess. 

She struck down the thought from her mind. She could not underestimate her enemy. 

“So Percy’s a part of this… Percy’s been part of this for years and he’s… he’s lied to me?!” She said–she should have an oscar, really, this is a great show. She felt like Ryan Reynolds, just herself on camera, in a different font. Not even a different font. Just like herself, italicized. 

Sally shushed her, like Annabeth was a particularly startled horse, “No, no! Annabeth, he… Percy is on a tight leash from New Rome, even though Frank and Reyna are the praetors, you remember them from the wedding? Frank was Percy’s best man. He is ordered to stay undercover, no matter how much it kills him. When you two got engaged, when you went down to see your parents before the wedding, he stayed the extra day not because his flight was canceled, but to petition the New Rome court to allow him to break the secrecy clause and tell you. But, for reasons they didn’t tell Percy, they denied him. He was devastated, Annabeth, truly. But his hands were tied. He didn’t want to put you in danger,”

Annabeth tried to press more, but Sally shut her down. And then, before Annabeth could react, she brought out a glass of water and a prism, and threw a gold coin into the rainbow. Shit.

“Wait wait wait!” Annabeth protested.

“O Arcus, Goddess of the Rainbow, show me Percy Jackson”

“No! Sally!”

“It’s better if he tells you himself. This is a fascinating method of communication facilitated by the Goddess of the Rainbow…”

Annabeth looked around. “No, Sally, I’m not ready to talk to him.” He couldn’t see her here. He couldn’t know what she was doing. She looked around for a way to escape, until the message connected.

And she saw her husband with his hands on the throat of her sick father.

Percy wasn’t a spy . He was muscle, he was intimidating, he was Bad Cop. But he was a demigod. So anything he had to do, he would do. And, just because he was in San Francisco already, and was dreading the flight home to go kill his wife–to go kill the threat that had been posing as his wife–he decided to give Mr. and Mrs. Chase a visit. 

He had to dig into Annabeth’s file for the information on where they lived now. He could remember the street started with an H and was at the top of a hill and the house had blue shutters, but he couldn’t really tell the taxi driver that. The revelation that Annabeth had a file was strange. And stranger was the amount that the senate blacked out beforehand. He learned that the chases are on 1128 Herrera Blvd. And he learned the vastness of what the senate wasn’t telling him.

“Frank what the hell?!” Percy marched into Frank’s office, where he was wearing the tiny foldable reading glasses that made him look ridiculous and who just sighed and glanced up.

“Percy, you know it’s not my choice. These are the necessary precautions–”

“Necessary precautions my ass! I’m on a kill order here Frank, she is–she was –my wife! I need all of the information we have!”

“The information is classified because Annabeth worked very closely with the Saturnist army”

“ Why would that need to be classified? The war is done! We won, Frank, so why are we still keeping information under wraps?”

“It contains detailed information about the Saturnist movement that would be dangerous for the public eye. So yes, much of her file is classified. We don’t want to inspire a second wave of supporters.” Frank folded up the ridiculous reading glasses and laid his hands open on his desk. He was trying to appear empathetic but firm. It made Percy more angry, seeing Frank talk to him like Frank talks to prisoners and children.

“And by the public eye you mean me?”

Frank just looked at Percy, wincing a little.

“Gods–I did everything! I raised the storm that broke Krios, I took down the throne, I learned the mist, I lost my vision and my body and I very nearly lost my mother, and New Rome still does not treat me like a human being! They treat me like—like a dog that needs to be fucking leashed. Gods. I’m astounded by the fucking arrogance and assholery of you all.”

Percy was getting closer to Frank. Frank was unphased. The only person in the world–maybe other than his mom–who could look at Percy in this state and not be afraid. This made Percy angrier. “No, I'm not astounded! This is not some great surprise for me! I’m just disgusted.”

“Percy.”

“Shut up, Digitulus! Jesus, Frank, I’ll kill you too!” Percy sat down, his head in his hands. 

“Percy.” Frank said, firmer. “There is nothing you can do about how they see you. They will always see you as a threat to their power. They will always see you as a ticking time bomb. So you can either suck it up and carry out the mission with the information you have, and be their good little puppy. Or they can put you down. And I and Reyna will try everything to protect you, but it will not be enough, especially if you let your emotions get the best of you, and you come into a senator's office, insult his power, and threaten to kill him.

Percy finally looked up. “Sorry. Sorry. You know I didn’t mean that I just–it’s been so long since I've come back. And…”

“And?” Frank prompted.

“I uh. I really love her. I really loved her. Sorry. And she’s my wife, and she’s just so smart and so kind–”

“Percy, stop. There is no use feeling these feelings. They will only make your job harder to do.” That’s what Percy used to tell Frank, when Frank was struggling with the killing and the death. He said you must overcome it. You must operate. Make yourself into a tool. “Make yourself into a tool, man,” Frank said.

“I can’t, Frank!” He launched up out of the chair and started pacing again. The glass of water Frank made started to swirl and try to escape his cup on his desk. “I used to be able to! But I’ve left this world, I’ve been so happy and so normal and I thought I would get to be happy and normal forever! And for the first time in my life I loved being alive . I didn’t have the nightmares, I woke up happy, and I loved my little apartment and my dinners with my family and decorating a christmas tree every year and I had everything I never thought I would have! And I love Annabeth. And I can’t stop doing that even though she tried to kill me, and I’ve never loved anyone as much as I love her.”

Frank held his breath as Percy yelled. Percy grabbed him by both shoulders. “I’m soft now,” he said. “I can’t shut it out and become a tool. Not with… not with her. If I kill her… when I kill her… everything I worked for is gone. I’ll never be an individual again. I’ll be the right hand of Rome,”

Frank embraced Percy.

“I’ll work on getting you the uncensored files, but don’t expect them before mission completion. Percy… maybe being the right hand is the only decision you have here.”

Percy nodded. And broke away to go pursue his mission. 

Percy carefully applied the mist on Mr. and Mrs. Chase’s front porch. He erased the scars, and the tattoo, and made himself more unremarkable. And he put on his black-framed glasses. And he knocked.

Mrs. Chase answered the door. She was short, and pale, and had thin, wiry hair, and was wearing the beaded Hmong bracelets that she had given Annabeth that Annabeth had never worn. “I don’t mess with the Hmong mythology. I have enough mythology.” She had said once. It struck Percy again, the depth of his obliviousness about her. How he had never thought twice about that comment. How stupid he had been.

 “Percy? What are you doing here? I mean, what a lovely surprise!”

“Hello Mrs. Chase, I’m just in San Francisco for work and I wanted to stop by and see my in-laws!”

Mrs. Chase let him in. “He’s having a good day today. He’ll want to talk to you.” She said, curtly, then she whisked back to the kitchen. 

Mr. Chase was short, his hair graying now, his dark skin getting more wrinkled. He had warm, dark eyes. Like Annabeths. He looked just like his daughter. Percy moved past it.

“Fred, it’s me, Percy, Annabeth’s husband.”

Frederick grinned. “Percy! Good boy! Where’s Annabeth?”

Percy grasped his hand. “She’s out of town right now, she’s such a hard worker, right?”

“Annabeth isn’t here?”

Frederick, two years ago, had been diagnosed with dementia. Percy, reflecting on who Annabeth’s mom was, saw it as a particularly cruel twist of fate. To have his mind taken from him. 

“No, Annabeth isn’t here. She’s an architect, she’s at her firm.”

“Yes… yes I know that. Annabeth the architect. My smart daughter. She lives on Long Island, New York, with her mother.

Percy just smiled and nodded. “Frederick, let’s go outside. The weather is so pretty.”

“What?”

“Let’s go to the porch.”

“Oh… okay.” and Percy led Frederick to the small sitting area that Annabeth’s little brothers had gifted their parents a few years back as an anniversary present. They both sat in big Adirondack chairs and faced the unlit bonfire pit.

“Fred, can you tell me about Annabeth’s mother?”

“Annabeth’s mother? No I… I can’t… she says it’s a secret.”

“Who? Annabeth, or Annabeth’s mother?” Percy pressed, then backtracked. He had to take this slow. “I mean. I know about Athena. I’ve met her. How did you meet?”

Frederick grumbled something nonsensical. “What did you say?” Percy asked. But Frederick stayed silent. “Annabeth and I met on the subway. We had the same commute every day, and I had the biggest crush on the girl with the biggest brown eyes I’d ever seen, and who was always reading a smart book.”

“Annabeth’s mother, Athena, has gray eyes. Annabeth doesn’t look like Athena, except... except when she’s proud. Then she looks just like her. Just like her. Proud.”

“How did you meet Athena?” Percy asked. 

Frederick waited a bit. Percy could be patient.

Finally, he opened his mouth. And words started spilling out. “So, I think I was 18, yeah, 18 years old. We were rich, but, uh, I had to pay for college myself, needed help. Harvard, yeah, Harvard and scholarships, too. She... she came, and I was so tired, so sleep deprived, thought she was a goddess. We joked about it, her being the goddess of wisdom. She went along with it, our little joke. Great friends, we were. She got me into college, can you believe that?” He laughed. 

Percy tried to smile at him. “I can. She’s a smart woman.”

“No… no woman. She’s never been a woman. Graduated, and she sent me a card and... a baby, Annabeth. Suddenly, it hit me, not a game, she wasn’t joking. She demanded I worship her. Had this... kid. No idea what to do, no clue how to support her. Wasn’t ready, wasn’t good at it, not at all.”

Percy nodded. He felt the stare of Mrs. Chase, watching through the kitchen window. Annabeth’s dad was fragile. He had to be careful.

“No, I'm sure you were a great dad. Annabeth loves you, Frederick.”

“No, no! No…” Frederick looked off, his gaze foggy. “No, she didn’t love me. Annabeth didn’t love me. Kia, yes, Kia, married her. Confusion, both of us, clueless. Step mom, Annabeth hated her, hated her so. Ran away, yes, she did. Annabeth ran away. She was a baby. The spiders… at night. They attacked her. The spider's were in her closet. There were monsters in her closet… she ran away. She fought the monster. She came back… years. Years… she came back and we gave her braces… she still didn’t love me. Annabeth didn’t love anyone. She trained… She was at war. Athena is the goddess of war strategy. Athena… no love. No love in Annabeth’s heart. Only war… war and Luke.”

Frederick trailed off. Percy pressed.

“Luke Castellan?” He knew the name. Host of Kronos. The great traitor.

“She... she never... never saw me as her father, no, no. Thalia, Luke... uh, Chiron, they... they weren't... training her for love, no, no, for war, yes, war. Regret... always... always regret my... my lack of, um, experience, yes, experience raising her. Nearly broke her, I think, yes, yes. Didn't even know. Thalia, Luke... Camp kids... family... not me, not me. Luke, that... that creep, he told her to come, and she... she went, yes, she went. Just a kid, just a kid. Never left Long Island since... since she ran away. Didn't know anything, thought she... thought she knew everything. So driven, so angry, at her mom for... for trapping me, yes, trapping me, at me for being bad at my job. And in the end, she... she had to break her own world, yes, break it. Held Luke as he... as he died, yes, yes. Never got over that, I don't... don't think, never... never got over it. What was I saying? Ah, yes... No... No, I lost it. Where... where am I?”

Percy placed an arm on Annabeth’s father’s shoulder. He was agitated, distressed, he could see Mrs. Chase glaring at him through the window. “Frederick, it's me, Percy. Take deep breaths. Thank you for talking to me.” he said. “See, feel your heartbeat, listen to it. Listening to my heartbeat always calms me.” He reached out to show Mr. Chase where to put his hand on his neck to feel his pulse.

But then, in the corner of his eye, he saw the bird fountain light up with a rainbow. And then, quicker than he could sever a connection, his mother.

And his wife.

Chapter Text

The baby was crying and it was 6 am in JFK and the flight just got delayed because there isn’t enough flight attendants and Piper was at her fucking limit. 

Piper and Annabeth were soulmates. They both believed it, as they whispered it to each other under the Camp Half Blood stars at seventeen, and when Piper zipped up Annabeth’s wedding gown, and when Annabeth held Piper’s hair back when she puked up her guts at her own bachelorette party. They were twin souls. Annabeth was rougher than Piper was. And Piper smoothed her out as Annabeth roughed her up again. Annabeth, who faced horrors beyond comprehension before she could even drive, whose tragic backstory is now the melody to a particularly catchy campfire song, had a right to be rough. Hard around the edges, and hard in the middle. She was business, she was brutal, but she was lost.

Piper wasn’t like that. She had a perfectly fine mortal life. She loved adventure and she had friends and she had a stable enough home life. She was in control of the mortal world, Annabeth in the demigod world. They learned from each other. Piper and Annabeth would take canoes out to the middle of the lake and just talk for hours. Annabeth was dramatic with the stories, talking with hands, wildly exclaiming the funniest things that had happened to her, but Piper was the better storyteller. She couldn’t help it. They would talk about everything, and then they would talk about nothing, and then they would just stop talking, and just be with each other.

Piper thinks that she and Annabeth were in love for a little bit. Not anymore, but they used to be. Piper always remembered Annabeth’s wedding with a profound sense of loss. It never would have worked. But still, Annabeth was her mirrored half. Everything Piper learned about love, she learned from Annabeth Chase. They would break into Dionysus’s old storage and steal moonshine and watch the fireworks, and they would have sleepovers wherever they could, and when Piper went back to Oklahoma in the winters, she saved every cent she made from her shitty waitressing jobs on flight tickets back to New York and to California, and on stamps for the massive care packages they would send each other.

Annabeth held Piper in her arms a month before her and Percy got married. “Everything’s gonna change,” Piper cried.

“No, it won’t. It won’t change. We’re going to go lead massive lives and be constellations together, Piper. And we’re still gonna do it together.” Annabeth had said, rubbing Pipers back as she drunkenly hiccupped in Annabeth and Percy’s apartment. Percy had been in California at the time. Now that she thinks of it, he was probably having similar conversations with his friends.

But Annabeth, for once, was wrong. It had changed. Piper got married soon after Annabeth, and she stayed longer and longer in Oklahoma, until she finally bought that dream house in Tulsa with Jason. Annabeth married a mortal guy, and got mortal friends, and for the first time had a true, stable mortal life. She was trying to do both, but she was, like Piper, getting more ordinary. They did not dream of godhood, they dreamt of gardens and tennis classes, and contentment. And peace. 

But Annabeth, so much of her identity was rooted in the fight, she couldn’t give it all up, not like Piper could. She tracked down monsters, she worked on New Athens, she was a regular consultant for Olympus new builds. Piper admired and looked down on her for it at once, but more than that, she didn’t really care. As long as her best friend was safe and happy. And she liked Percy. Annabeth didn’t let them interact too much, for obvious reasons, Piper understood and all, but he was sweet, and he was clearly in love with Annabeth, and if anything was wrong, Annabeth would have told her.

Piper, she was never the fighter. Not like Annabeth. She did the fighting for a bit and now she’s done. She’s done . Piper loved her ordinary life, she loved her peace, and a part of her resented her best friend for dragging her back in. Realistically, it’s not Annabeth’s fault, but it’s just so Annabeth , that Piper can’t help the disdain. Her feelings would probably be solved if it wasn’t 6 in the morning in JFK. And she’s not even in the new, nice terminal. The salmonella terminals. 

What the hell were they going to do with this baby? All of Camp had been so preoccupied with the fact that Percy Jackson–nice Percy from the wedding, with the kinda geeky looking glasses and heart of gold, who volunteered to teach swim lessons in Harlem to the underprivileged once a week, the social worker who was as dogged as Annabeth, with the sexy gym bod and a total inability to dance–was not only a godsdamned Romaïkós, but THE godsdamned Romaïkós . And Piper didn’t know if the creepy-ass Kronos parents actually infused Kronos powers into the kid, so Piper couldn’t handle it! She could deal with whatever legacy kid powers pop up out of her and Jason’s kid, but she worked so hard for her ordinary life. She felt like a bitch, and a bad future mother, but she would have to say no to bringing this kid in. 

But if not her, than who? Annabeth hadn’t thought about the kid. She was busy with the whole husband-tried-to-kill-her, husband-secret-roman-operative thing. Piper didn’t blame her but there was a bigger picture here! What happens when Annabeth kills Percy?

Her train of thought stopped. What happens when Annabeth kills Percy? She didn’t know. War, probably. Although, neither camps could handle that. They were still rebuilding. She shot a text to Nico, who had distanced himself from both the Romans and Greeks due to his conflicting loyalties. She told him to meet her in Tulsa, they needed to have dinner. She wasn't even sure he knew about recent events, but he might have known that both Percy and Annabeth were demigods. Were Titan Killers. She didn't trust him, even under the possibility that he knew about both lives and declined to tell Annabeth about her murderer husband, but she needed information about Percy from him. Plus, it had been forever, and he always gave her tips on improving her Italian food.

Piper looked up from her chunky Nokia with the monster-protectant software that made all her music sound grainy and her wifi super slow. Oh, she’s finally boarding. She bounced the baby, and fled New York once more.

Chapter Text

Obviously Frank had a wire on Nico. Everyone in New Rome has a wire on everyone. Frank knew Reyna could see every message he sent, he knew when the senate sent kids to trail him, he knew that there was an official list of who, exactly, in the New Rome government, could talk to him about politics, and how they could talk to him. Even Hazel was occasionally abducted and thrust into dark rooms, and threatened, to see if she would give up any information about her fiance. It stopped being effective after the 6th or 7th time. He knew they kept tabs on him. And so he had no reservations about keeping tabs on everyone else. Reyna’s computer screen was always visible to him, he attached trackers to medallions the Senators wore so he could get a good approximation of everyone’s whereabouts, and when there was his fiance’s brother flicking around the nation, known to every council of gods, thrice-accused of treason because of his dealings with both the graecus and the New Rome camps, he got the message from Piper McLean before even he did. 

He had been playing golf with Hazel when his monster-proof phone buzzed with the notification. Mid-drive, too, it totally threw off his swing. Flew right into the pond.

“Crap.” he said, watching the ka- plunk of the ball. He got his phone out of his back pocket.

Hazel was sipping on an Arnold Palmer, in a cute white and blue golf dress that was only possible due to the California weather he had learned to love. It was November! His Canadian sensibilities were still baffled, more than 10 years into living in beautiful San Francisco. He typed a message out to Reyna, asking for official leave to go to Tulsa and intercept the baby.

“What’s up?” Hazel asked.

“It’s the shitstorm Percy’s in. I think I have a lead on where the baby is in.” Frank replied, not looking up from his phone. How long will you be gone? Reyna has asked.

Hazel got quiet. Less than 3 days. If all goes well I'll be back tomorrow morning. He typed back to Reyna. Looking up at Hazel, it was clear she was troubled. He wrapped one arm around his fiance, and pressed a kiss to her head, still typing with Reyna.

Permission granted by senate. Do you request backup?

No. I think it’s best if I do this part alone. Take care of Haz when I'm gone. Frank closed his phone, before lining up to take another drive. He hit. Still shit. Straight into the bunker. But at least it was on land. He had never been good at golf.

He grabbed his and Hazel’s golf bags, and they walked down to Hazel’s driving tee “What if Percy hadn’t found out?” Hazel asked.

Frank was quiet.

“She would’ve come to our wedding, Frank”

“Hazel, we’ve been engaged for 2 years. We don’t have a date yet, and we are nowhere close to getting one.”

“I said I wanted a winter wedding! Wouldn’t that be beautiful? In Canada, with the snow?”

“It’s November, Hazel. We cannot plan a wedding in one month.”

“Bah” she said, but they both laughed. And then they got quiet.

Hazel got her driver out of the bag, hit it. Right on the green. They walked further, to where Frank’s ball was taunting him in the sand.

“It would’ve been at our wedding. You’re right. I mean. Assuming that we have one.” He said.

“I can’t even imagine. What was Annabeth like, at the wedding? I was sick that weekend, remember?” 

Frank thought for a little. “I mean. She was cool. Really freaked out the whole time, a bridezilla, but once everything was neat and orderly and going good, she loosened up. She was fun to be around. But she was the bride , she was kind of busy the whole weekend. And when she was with us, she was busy making goo-goo eyes at Percy. But. She was sweet, she wrote the loveliest thank you notes to all the bridal and groom party afterwards.”

Hazel was quiet. Frank tried to chip his ball out of the sand but somehow made everything worse. He tried again, and got the ball out of the sand trap. He continued making little strides towards the hole, and eventually called it a hole-in-seven. Hazel got a birdie. 

They got club sandwiches and went home afterwards to read their books. Hazel was reading a beat-up Danielle Steele, and Frank was reading How to Win Friends and Influence People . It had been years in the praetor job, and he never truly felt stable in it. His bookshelf was full of that shit. Atomic Habits next to The 48 Laws of Power next to The Art of War . 

Car will take you to the airport at 8am. Flight number is AA3299 . Terminal 2. Reyna had texted.

He sent a thumbs up, and turned to Hazel.

“Piper McLean’s meeting with Nico in Tulsa” he told her

“Piper works with Percy’s wife? A graecus ?” Frank nodded. Hazel closed her book and turned to him. “And she has the baby Percy was trying to get?” Frank nodded again. Hazel pursed her lips. “Okay. Well. Don’t get Nico involved. I don’t want him caught up in this again.” Frank nodded a final time, and they were at an understanding. Hazel’s brother had always been a sore topic between the two. Frank thought sympathizing with Nico–the creepiest guy he’d ever met–was like sympathizing with a graecus , and sympathizing with a graecus was like sympathizing with an ape. Sure they were fine to look at, but something about how wild they were set Frank on edge. Could never fully trust ‘em. 

Hazel never thought like that. Hazel’s judgment of the Greeks was clouded by her love for her brother, and they would never fully resolve the topic between them. Sure, Hazel knew that the Greeks were enemies of New Rome, that they desired the fall of the Roman Pantheon, but when you think one graecus isn’t that bad, it’s not a far leap to sympathize with the whole lot of them.

And, now that Frank’s thinking about it, Percy never really thought like that too. For all his bitching about it, he was a soldier, and he needed to be aimed. If that aim was against the Greeks, he would follow dutifully, but not due to any personal hatred, just a lack of true introspection into the topic. Percy was told “Greeks are bad” and he believed it.

Well, kind of. Not so much in adulthood. Percy was getting more and more suspicious of the New Roman government. It made Frank uneasy.

He went back to his book. He’d meet Piper and the baby tomorrow. Until then, he’d try to get his last night of rest.

Chapter Text

“Percy, honey! Annabeth came here today, it turns out, she can see monsters. Just like me.” Sally said from the Iris message. Frederick, at the sight of Annabeth, perked up.

“Annabeth? Is that you?”

“Yeah dad, it’s me. What’s Percy doing all the way in California? Surely he didn’t visit you all without me!”

“Oh I was just stopping back. You see monsters, huh?”

“I do…” Annabeth turned to Sally. “I kind of want to talk to him alone. This is scary stuff. Do you mind if I…” Sally nodded, hugged Annabeth, and shuffled Annabeth to Percy’s old bedroom. Percy, in turn, said goodbye to Frederick, severed the Iris connection, and called her on his cell from the Chase’s front yard.

“Hey, babe.” Annabeth said.

“Hey.” 

They sat in silence for a few moments. Then, they both tried speaking at the same time.

“By the–” Percy said, at the same time that Annabeth said “Do you remember–” they broke off. 

“Sorry. You first.” Annabeth said.

“No, you,” 

“No, it’s okay. You go.”

“Oh. Okay, uh by the decree of the Senate of New Rome, I am mandated to execute a kill order upon you, Annabeth Chase-Jackson. In the interest of justice and honor, I extend to you the courtesy of a formal challenge.”

“Oh. Yeah. That’s what I was going to ask you, so… I accept, on the condition that we do it out of the view of the Gods, and away from both camps. I would like to not escalate this into a war. I do not know your purpose over the past few years, but I know that I will protect the Greeks with peace.” This was horrifically awkward. Annabeth didn’t feel particularly brave anymore.

Percy started to say something and then stopped. And they sat in silence once again for a few moments.

“Remember our honeymoon?” he asked. Then, went on, “we could do it there. Alaska’s way out of the view of the gods.”

“I won’t bring the baby. I won’t let you have her. Even if–” even if you win, she was about to say. Even if you kill me. Even if you, my husband, cut my neck in the name of Rome, I will not let you endanger this child.

Percy didn’t respond this time. 

“I’ll do it. Alaska. Two days. I consent to the duel, on Styx, I will fight you with honor.”

“Two days. I will fight you with honor, I swear on the River Styx.”

And the conversation was done. The phone call ended, and Annabeth couldn’t stand to see her mother-in-law. So, she took the train she had gone on just days before back to her and Percy’s shared apartment. And then she laid down on the couch, and cried again.

He put down his phone. His phone, which, unhelpfully, still had a picture of Annabeth and him on its wallpaper. She was wearing his glasses. It was right before they kissed for the first time. Their first real date, instead of repeatedly meeting in the worst bar in New York. He had taken her to the beach, which, thinking back, was probably not the best move, making them both drive a solid 2 hours just because Percy was insistent that it was “the spot.”

They had a picnic. Percy brought way too much food, and they stuffed their faces with boxes of strawberries. Annabeth said they were the “second best strawberries she had ever had,” which prompted Percy’s thorough interrogation of if she ranked strawberries . She said that one day she’d take him to her old summer camp, where they grew strawberries to pay off extra expenses.

Usually, the reminder that Annabeth wasn’t who she had insisted she was made him blanch, but this one didn’t. Maybe it was because she didn’t lie. 

They had a food fight that ended up in Annabeth launching herself at him. They wrestled in the sand. Not in a romantic way either, they genuinely fought. Laughing the whole time. Percy wasn’t worried he would hurt her, because Annabeth was uncannily good at getting his knees out from under him. Finally, after squabbling and reaching for a minute, she threw him on his back and landed on his chest. 

Breathing hard, they looked up at each other. Instead of kissing him, Annabeth swiped his glasses, and let him get up. Percy had needed glasses, ever since the Titan War, when he nearly lost his vision from acid being swiped onto his face. Nowadays, he was able to get by with contacts most of the time, but the wound was newer back then. She put his glasses on, making her dark eyes look bambi-big from the strength of the lenses.

“Oh wow, you really are blind,” she giggled. Percy laughed back. He didn’t think he had stopped smiling this whole date. Percy took a selfie of them. The sun was setting. The water made him feel stronger, made the aches and pains of post-war life fade into a gentle hum.

“I bet you can’t even see past me right now,” she said, taking them off and handing them back to him.

Percy smiled. “Not really a problem. I haven’t been able to see past you all night.”

She kissed him. And for the first time since he was 12 years old, watching the Minotaur kill his mother in the rain, waking up in a den of wolves, he felt the earth, solid, beneath his feet. His future looked like insufferable art museum visits and races in the park and dark eyes and a quick smile. She was a landmark that would have led him someplace happier, a more routine, congenial life. 

He had lost that, now. There was a before and after. And he was back in the before. He was, once again, war incarnate. The Right Hand of Rome. When they got married, there had been jokes, to say goodbye to freedom and a life of one’s own. But in Annabeth he had gained an autonomy that he would never have again. He would miss her, and he would miss himself when he had known her. 

Briefly, he stopped hating her and hated New Rome. He felt their strings on him, he saw himself puppeteered. They said jump and he didn’t even say how high ? Because he already knew. As the hand knows the body, as the body knows the hand. But he turned his mind away from the senate and the war and the rules, because to hate New Rome he had to hate himself. He was New Rome.

He snapped himself out of it. He was New Rome, and he had a job to do. For order, for protection, for his father, for the Gods. He wouldn’t miss Annabeth because he was New Rome, and New Rome didn’t have the mortal weaknesses he felt now. 

Percy tried to don the killing calm, if he couldn’t feel his feet firm on the ground anymore, he would at least get to reap the full benefits of being The Right Hand, the sociopathy that came with it. He had slaughtered without morning. He could do it again. 

But it couldn’t fully envelop him this time. Like a suit he had outgrown, he felt his new self, married in New York, babysitting Estelle, kissing my wife , burst out the seams of his old one. It’s okay. He had two days to shrink back down. He goes to the airport, and books the nearest flight out to Alaska. He’s not going to idle around in California, waiting for a solution to a problem that can’t be solved.

The baby had–thank gods –passed out when Piper landed. On the first leg, JFK to DFW, Piper had to bounce her and coo to her and be really awesome and motherly-like while everyone gave her dirty looks for being the woman with the screaming baby on the plane. Then, while the baby slept fitfully, Piper tried to watch Crazy Rich Asians, but had to keep rewinding because she was busy thinking about Annabeth and Percy everytime something vaguely romantic came on because, like, wow , what a betrayal. How could she have been mad at Annabeth for saddling her with the baby while Annabeth’s world came crashing down upon her?

Then, the baby–Piper was still calling her ‘the baby’ because Titania was too tacky of a name for the titan-spawn–would wake up again and Piper would figure out how to be mad at Annabeth again.

In DFW, on her 3 hour layover, Piper rewarded herself for doing such a good Demigod job with some Wetzel's Pretzels, and fed the baby some emergency formula Camp had had on hand. Then, on the plane from Dallas to Tulsa, Piper listened to some Foo Fighters and stared out the window.

Frank also watched Crazy Rich Asians . But he, in New Rome’s private Praetor jet, didn’t have to layover in DFW. He arrived in Tulsa an hour before Piper, and sat outside her incoming gate with centurions guarding each door into Tulsa International, making sure Nico D’Angelo or Jason Grace couldn’t come creeping in, or at least slowing them down on their way. He was almost excited. He had the over-the-ear headphones Reyna had gave him last Christmas on, blaring Foo Fighters so he couldn’t hear Charm Speak, and adrenaline in his veins.

He’s waiting at gate B6, across from the Hudson News where he got some mentos to chew on. He watches the plane touch down, and then, one by one, passengers depart. His eyes are wide, he feels the animal in him snarl in anticipation. And then, she emerges, wheeling a pristine, bright pink roller bag and dilapidated backpack over one shoulder, and the baby is in an old Camp Half Blood carrier. 

Wait for it… wait for it….

She sets the baby down to fish a phone out of her bag, and Frank lept at her. He felt his arms tighten, his body extend, and by the time he landed on her, he was the grizzly he was most comfortable fighting as. The over-the-ear headphones had morphed– obviously they were magic, Reyna had to give her favorite coworker a cool Christmas gift–into earwax, cutting off his The Pretender , and he went for her face. She immediately pulled out her knife to parry the claws coming for her Aphrodite-spawn face, and spun around to grab Frank by the neck.

Frank came at her again with the claws, this time, she got him straight in the hand.  Fight me as a human. Frank could see her lips move, and while becoming human again was tempting for a moment, he was able to shake it off. He swiped at her again, and this time got her in the shoulder.

“Fuck!” She screamed, before switching her knife hand and using her good arm to try and stab Frank in the head. She hacked off a bit of his ear, and noise flooded back to him, along with the sound of what he presumed was his own blood.

Fight me as a human, goddammit! And stay that way! Piper yelled at him, and Frank couldn’t help it. He felt his body retract, and then, as soon as he could feel his toes again, went back at her. The side of his head was bleeding and pounding, but he knew enough to go for her now-injured right side. He punched her straight in the gut, and she stumbled back more. Her knife clattered across the floor, and before she could get enough wind to use Charm Speak or go grab it again, he punched her in the throat. As she choked and sputtered, she tried throwing herself at him, but Frank spun and pinned her on the ground. 

She kneed straight up into the groin.

“Fuck!” Now it was his turn to cry out. His grip loosened and she wiggled out, staggering to her feet as he did, clutching her bleeding shoulder. Then, at once, they both went at each other, grabbing and kicking. Piper elbowed Frank’s gut, Frank kicked the back of Piper’s knees out, she fell to the floor, and they went at each other from there. 

“ Stop fighti—” Frank kneed her in the groin. Less effective when he would do it, but still it hurt enough for her to break concentration. They rolled on the ground, and Piper pinned Frank to the ground. She reached over to try and grab her knife, and Frank tried shifting into a wolf or bug or something to get him out of this grip, but he couldn’t under Piper’s weight. So, as she grabbed the knife, he used all of his weight to roll out of the hold, and was able to get her under him. But she had the knife. 

She held the knife against his heart, he held her neck in his hands.

“Piper McLean. By the order of New Rome, I, Praetor Frank Zhang of the 12th Cohort, command you surrender yourself and the child of Edward and Jasmine Liman to New Rome.”

“I don’t know, Praetor ,” she spat. Blood was starting to trickle out of her nose. “I’m the one with the knife here. Let the baby and I go free. Call off the kill order on Annabeth Chase. And I’ll let you live.”

“The baby will come to San Francisco, it is the property of New Rome.”

“She’s not property she’s a baby! Look at her!”

Piper and Frank turned their heads to the stroller. The now empty stroller. In the now-empty gate, where, they just realized, police officers had been screaming at them.

“Shit.”

“Shit.”

“Drop your weapon! You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney!” The police officer hollered at them. Frank felt hands lift him away from Piper, who had dropped her knife. Both of them stared, awestruck, at the empty stroller.

“If you cannot afford an–son, stand up. Put your hands behind your back. If you cannot afford an attorney one will be provided to you. You’re coming with me. If you decide to answer questions now without an attorney present, you will still have the right to stop answering at any time until you talk to an attorney.”

Handcuffs were clasped onto him and he was being pushed into a small room adjunct to the gate. There were people videoing him, mothers holding onto their children. Piper had started acting hysterical.

“My baby! Where did you put my baby?! Where is she?!” She cried out. Smart. Frank attempted to do the same.

“Where’s my daughter? I need to know where my daughter is!  Show me her!” He was much less convincing. The officer just looked at him unimpressed.

“The child that that woman was with has been placed into protective care. Now until you can prove guardianship and after you have answered our questions as to what happened here today, trust that the child is being taken care of.”

“ Give me my –” Piper started, but her voice cracked with exhaustion. He supposed there’s only so much freaky-deaky Greek shit she could do in one day. 

He was shoveled into a little processing room, and then a police car, and then to the police station. Shit .

Chapter Text

Annabeth, after her cry-nap and 2 glasses of wine, and attempting to call Thalia and then trying to online-stalk the Hunters of Artemis so she could figure out how to contact just one of those wilderness lesbians to try and get in contact with her, and then calling Jason who of course, didn’t know how to contact Thalia either, but who tried unsuccessfully to comfort her nevertheless, booked her flight to Alaska.

After burning some prayers, once again asking for mercy and forgiveness for the audacity to enter Jupiter’s realm, even though he was still Olympus’s savior, Percy stepped onto his plane.

“Could I use my phone call?”

“You can use it after you’re booked in jail.” The airport cop said in the small airport holding center. They had bandaged the side of his head that was bleeding from Piper’s knife wound, but he could still hear his blood pound.

Frank didn’t say anything. He looked at the wall, blank faced, and tried to puzzle out what he was going to do next. He tried to sort it all into nice categories in his brain; resources, objectives, and threats.

He had never been in jail before. Hell, whenever Percy landed in one he openly made fun of him for being sloppy on an assignment. But Percy had never needed New Rome to break him out. He supposed there was no way New Rome wouldn’t be able to break him out, they could either send in some cop-killing reinforcements or somehow hack into a database, but that would take time. Time he didn’t have. Resource one was New Rome, pros being a definite break out, cons being time lost and likely mortal casualties. He really didn’t want mortal casualties.

Resource two was just turning into a fly and fluttering out. Frank glanced at the corners–security cameras. There was only so much he could rely on the mist for, and then what? He’d be hunted? He would hardly be able to get through airport security with the baby while he was wanted by the cops that worked in that very airport.

Resource three was asking Reyna. He felt like a child. Reyna could not be fixing all of his problems for him.

His objective was to get the baby to New Rome. He had no idea how to do that. He had no idea how to get the baby without somehow involving Piper McLean. Admittedly, the baby was probably safer in Long Island with that Camp Half Blood guy– Chiron? Maybe?--than in CPS in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but he hesitated. Piper could’ve maybe passed as the baby’s mother, and could likely do some more Freaky Deaky Greek Shit Charm Speak and have the authorities give up the baby, so he’d be more likely to get the baby out with her by his side. But then what? They exit the police station and try to kill each other again?

His other objective was no mortal deaths. He tried to be unwavering on that, with help from the Senate seeming to be the easiest shot at success. And humiliation. Would they send in some freshly fifteen year old soldiers to bail their praetor out of jail? What would happen with his reelection campaign next fall?

Frank was placed in a police car and taken to the jail. They told him to stop smiling in the mugshot photo and put his fingerprints on file. “Zhang Fai Qiang?” the officer asked, pronouncing it like zang fay kwang.

“Uh, no. It’s more of a soft J in Zhang, like Jahng , and then Fai, like sky, and Ch-yahung, ch like cheese? But everyone calls me Frank.”

The officer huffed. Frank didn’t like it. Frank didn’t like much about this. They put him in a holding cell, and about ten minutes later, Piper entered to get booked too. 

“Piper McLean?” the officer asked her.

“ H– ” but her voice cracked and gave out before she could get words out. “Yes.” she whispered, her voice sounding damaged.

There were no others in the cells. He figured this particular Tulsa jail wasn’t super busy, or maybe it was divine intervention. Either way, good for him. The men’s cell was directly next to the women’s, separated by a few bars with wide gaps. Not large enough for anyone to squeeze through, but big.

Piper glared into the mugshot, scanned her fingerprints, and didn’t let any officers touch her. Then, when she was led into the holding cell, Frank spoke.

“Have you ever been in jail before?” he asked. Know thy enemy, or whatever. His blood was still pounding.

Piper looked at him incredulously. She didn’t know why Frank was talking to her. Then, she shook her head no, then stopped and giggled, and shook it for yes.

“Before Camp.” She whispered. “I wanted my dad’s attention. I shoplifted a lot. I met Leo in rehabilitation.”

Frank, unfortunately, knew about Leo. Crazed, mania-driven, war-machine Leo Valdez that had been causing demigod trouble around the country on a scale so large even the Roman senate had to know about it. 

“Have you?” she asked.

“I haven’t. Percy has, though.”

He didn’t know why he was talking to this graecus bitch. It was probably some aphrodite shit coming off of Piper, or the fact that he was so low on ideas that didn’t involve mortal slaughter or sacrificing his political career on some stupid fucking mission he should have assigned to one of his lessers.

“Really? So has Annabeth.”

Frank stifled a laugh. “Sorry. I don’t really know her, but I couldn’t imagine her in this situation.”

“Oh no, she doesn’t fight people in the middle of an airport. She challenges them to duels in remote territories and in her words, ‘takes care of business.’ The only times she’s in jail is during protests. I’ve spent quite a few pennies of my father’s money bailing her out.”

He didn’t really care about the protests. He quieted.

Then, “I guess they’re both uh, taking care of business now.”

Piper quieted too. “I didn’t say goodbye to her.” She whispered, “If I'm in jail for 48 hours until bail is posted, I won’t be able to say goodbye.”

“Goodbye as in wishing her well, or?”

Piper didn’t answer. Then, quietly. “I don’t think she has the balls to kill him. Some fucked up part of her still loves him, despite the fact that he’s been spying on us.”

Frank froze. “What do you mean?”

“I mean that she was sixteen when Luke was twenty three. She couldn’t drive, he was graduating college. That sick fuck, he like, warped her, he manipulated her and she’s been screwed up ever since. She swore she’d never trust anyone again. Not even me.” She coughed, some bad hacks. Then, continued. “And then, your asswipe comes in, a spy, and goes undercover for, what, seven years? I know she’s like, the lynchpin of all New Rome wants to spy on, and that she was the one carrying most camp secrets, but like, why do it to her? Killing Luke almost killed her. But this? Annabeth’s gonna die in Alaska, no matter whose blood is spilled.”

“You genuinely think–” Frank started. He wanted to ask her a million questions– you genuinely think Percy was the spy? You genuinely think Annabeth was the target of New Rome intelligence operations? You genuinely think New Rome is conducting long-term undercover intelligence operations on your shithole camp? But all of them were answered by her previous statement. He wasn’t Reyna, he couldn’t puzzle out wartime tactics and information based on this little. He couldn’t tell if Piper was lying to him. She was doing a hell of a job if she was, she was saying exactly how he felt. 

“Hm?” Piper asked, quietly still.

“Nothing. I uh. I feel the same about Percy.”

“I just can’t figure out why you are spying on us. And why with him? From what I hear, this is a little below his paygrade. What happened to us just playing hot potato with Nico DiAngelo?”

Frank tried to approach the questions from his side. Why would Annabeth Chase be spying on New Rome? What would she have to learn in New York City? What Roman secrets does Percy carry?”

He felt a block in his brain. It felt divine. It told him not to pry. Frank had plenty of experience with divine interference in his brain. He didn’t like it. So he kept prying, he kept thinking about it. Why would Annabeth be a spy on Percy , who acted almost independently from New Rome at this point. 

Frank felt like an eyeball in his brain was opening up. He felt his body react to the information. 

Piper McLean, Camp Half Blood Powerhouse, genuinely believed Percy was a spy. Frank was one of two people in New Rome who knew, for sure, he wasn’t. The other one was headed to Alaska to kill his wife. And Annabeth wasn’t a spy either. Nothing he knew about war would ever make Annabeth a spy. He thought about it and felt the divine block in his head. Something was terribly wrong about this, and things were about to get a lot worse. 

“Piper. I have a very important favor to ask of you.”

On the flight, Annabeth didn’t watch Crazy Rich Asians or listen to Foo Fighters. She drank a copious amount of red wine until a perky little flight attendant had the audacity to refuse her another glass. The old woman next to her reached over. 

“Tough day?” she asked.

“I’m on the way to kill my husband.” Annabeth said.

“Whoo! Been there, sister!”

On the flight, Percy didn’t even think about Annabeth. He mostly was busy praying and silently crying in economy, convinced that every bump in the plane wasn’t Jupiter, but Zeus, ready to strike him down to save Annabeth from his incoming wrath. Well, he guessed that he was thinking about Annabeth now . And while he was on the topic he thought about the first night in their first apartment together when they slept on the floor and shared all of their embarrassing secrets among the cardboard boxes.

Or, well, not all of their embarrassing secrets, apparently. He thought of her in the rain. He thought of the car. He thought of what her eyes would look like when he rammed his sword through her heart. Then, he thought of stealing the 12 melatonin gummies off of his neighbor’s trey table and trying to go to sleep.

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you, Praetor! ” Piper was kind of yelling at him? Her voice wasn’t all there still.

“No! You promised to see me as Frank, not as a roman but as your best friend’s husband’s best friend!”

“You’re asking me to make quite the leap here. You are telling me that the most powerful demigods of Greek and Roman modern memory, both Titan-Killers , just both happened to like the same horrifying dive bar in New York City?”

“I’m not denying that there was probably some intervention. I don’t think it’s natural for anyone to like that piece of shit place. But, I don’t know, maybe shared experience made them compatible, even if they didn’t know it?”

“From what I know of Percy Jackson, he is a sociopathic murderer and torturer, who forcibly ousted the Roman Government during wartime in a bloody coup, and who nearly killed Hecate in his quest to somehow claim more power for himself,”

“From what I know of Annabeth Chase, she whored herself out to the host of Kronos in a desperate quest to also claim more power for herself–”

“You don’t know anything about–”

“No, listen! I’m saying that what we know about each other might be warped by the fact that it would make a lot of sense for this to be a spying mission. Consider for one second that Annabeth and Percy don’t have to kill each other!” He yelled at her.

“Quiet down!” the guard yelled.

At Piper’s house, Nico rang the doorbell again. No answer. Damn, he had been looking forward to dinner. He had heard Jackson had got himself into some trouble with the Greeks, and wanted to hear Piper’s take on it on his way to California to see Hazel.

Annabeth stumbles into the airplane bathroom. She is hammered . She remembers ordering Vodka Crans in her favorite bar, and then remembers Percy again. Dammit . She pisses, washes her hands, and asks a different, less perky flight attendant for more alcohol.

Percy wakes up from his melatonin dream crying. The weight of loss pins him into his seat. Calm down , he thinks, you haven’t even killed her yet . Then, mortifyingly, the tears keep falling.

Piper can’t remember Annabeth’s phone number, goddammit. She calls one of the virtual Iris message stations and asks to be connected to Annabeth Chase. She hears the waterfall-ish rings of the connection tone rattle the phone. Gods, mortals had really improved from these old landlines in the past few years. Why were these officers not letting her have her bulky, monster-proof phone that sent embarrassing green texts to her Tulsa Book Club group chat? This antiquated piece of shit started spewing mist into her ear, pulsing rainbow. Ugh.

Annabeth, in the corner of her eye, sees her wine shimmer with a Iris voice message. She rolls her eyes and chugs the rest of it. She deserved some alone time.

“Yes, leave a message! Annabeth, Annabeth you have to listen to me. You need to call me. It’s Piper. Please call me. It’s an emergency. Annabeth, do not go fight him. You have to call me. Annabeth you– ” Piper’s voice gave out. The line cut off.

Frank, after Piper’s attempt, approaches the landline. He dials Reyna, whose secretary picks up on the first ring.

“This is the office of Praetor Reyna Ramírez-Arellano. Our regular business hours are between 9 am to 5 am, Monday through Friday. If–”

“Kerry. It’s me, Frank. I need to talk to Reyna.”

“You can talk to me. The Praetor is in a meeting at the moment.”

“No, Kerry, listen. I need a secure line. It’s of urgent importance.”

“I’ll make sure to alert the Praetor to your need of her.”

“Dammit, I am your superior, I am the ruler of New Rome. I order you to get Reyna on the line!”

“All due respect, Praetor, I am not a citizen of New Rome. I am an employee of Praetor Ramírez-Arellano, you do not have command over me.”

“It’s about Jackson!”

Nothing, and then a few beeps and whirs, then, Reyna’s sigh.

“Reyna! Call off Jackson! Nix the Kill order!”

“Oh my gods calm down. Jesus. One second, let me step away from this meeting.” Frank waited a second, before “Okay, what’s happening?”

“I’m in jail in Tulsa with Piper McLean. You remember her from the wedding, right? She caught the bouquet. She was Annabeth’s bridesmaid–”

“Maid of Honor” Piper corrected.

“Maid of Honor. She made that toast about girlhood that we both cried at? She’s Annabeth’s best friend. Well, get this, Annabeth isn’t a spy. She thinks we’ve been spying on her!”

Reyna let out another sigh. Two in less than a minute, that was tough. 

“You’re convinced that Annabeth isn’t a spy from what, a few minutes in a jail cell with the daughter of Aphrodite? Capable of charmspeak, blessed to be charming and charismatic , and with a vested interest as a graecus to have Percy dead?”

“When you put it like that–”

“Not only that, but you landed yourself in jail? Where’s the titan baby?”

Frank winced. “Her whereabouts are, uh, unknown at the time.”

Reyna sighed so hard he could feel the phone tremble with disappointment. Three times. Yikes.

“Think about it. Really think about it. Tell me you don’t feel the gods in your brain. That makes it a little, suspicious, right?”

“You’re a big boy, digitulus , I'm gonna let you get yourself out of this one by yourself Frank. Next time you call me and interrupt an important meeting with donors aiming to support us on our reelection campaign, don’t waste my time with this shit.”

“Jesus, Reyna! I am not your inferior I am your peer and I am your friend, you’re gonna have to trust me on this–”

She hung up. Frank briefly was furious at her, for making him feel like a child instead of her peer. He considered what she had said, though.

And decided to trust the graecus anyway.

Nico texted Piper from her doorstep. “Hi piper.hope your are home.im at your home and you aren't”

Oh shit, it sent. “Hi piper.this is Nico. W”

Sent again. Damnation, Will was totally overestimating his technology skills when he bought Nico this… gadget for Christmas. Will insisted Nico was purposefully bad. Nico insisted that Will purposefully forgot that he wasn’t exactly born with the inherent ability to work a remote, like kids these days were.

“Hi piper.this is Nico.im at your house.are we having dinner?please let me know.regards, nico.see u”

Sent. There we go. See how he threw in that “u” at the end there? He could be cool and technologically astute. To put a cherry on top, he sent Piper a video he had taken on thanksgiving vacation with Will last month. They had gone to Bogotá, and the video was a panoramic of the Plaza de Bolivar. See how he could reach out to old friends? Nico decided to send some more videos. One was of Will cooking in the kitchen, to show Piper he had been eating well. One was an old picture of Piper and him when they were kids at camp half blood. Annabeth was in this picture too! Nico missed Annabeth, she’d always been unfailingly cool. He should reach out to her too.

“AnnabEth this is nico di angelo from camp.have a great day and weekend.from Nico”

Nico is awesome at phones.

“We’re on our own?” Piper asked when Frank got off the phone.

“Yeah. What’s the plan?”

“You turn into a bug, grab the key, let me out, and we run?” 

Frank rolled his eyes. Typical graecus . No plan, like barbarians. No wonder he’s never met one over fifty. It was a miracle they didn’t get themselves killed at any given moment.

“Then what? We pull up to the airport with the cops on our tail and try to get on a plane with no ID and no baby? Leave saturn-spawn here?”

Piper threw her hands up then shoved them in Frank’s direction. “I don’t know man, you make a plan! You Romaïkós love them more than you love your mothers.”

Frank blanched at the insult briefly. He thought of his mother, who relied on her powers in Afghanistan and got blown up for it. A plan would have saved Emily Zhang. Then, he realized he was giving Piper’s insult credence, and expelled thoughts of his mother, and focused on what he knew.

“I can shapeshift. You can do that freaky magic talk.”

“Charmspeak.” Her voice was almost normal now, but he could tell there was still the exhaustion there.

“How many times do you have left in you?”

“Barely anything. Some ambrosia and I could have four good ones in me, but maybe once if I push it. Twice, but I’d have some nasty vocal damage for a bit, and it probably wouldn’t even work.”

“Ok. We need to leave with the baby, so the first goal is figuring out where she is. I’ll need to turn into a mouse or fly and get a layout of the jail, but we can’t have the guards looking for me. Uh, take off your clothes.”

“What?”

Frank looked away from his concentrated stare at the ceiling to Piper, and realized what he had just said. He turned bright red.  “Oh sorry, shit, sorry, uh we need to make a dummy to look like I'm sleeping, and we need to use the stuff in here to make a lump under the blanket they left in here with us.”

He looked at Piper, off his game now, flailing. “I’m engaged! I’m not trying to like, come onto you. I’m so sorry. We just need to use everything we can.”

Piper kept looking at him. Frank looked away, and awkwardly fidgeted with his hands. “Uh. Yeah. Sorry. Okay… my fiancé is really cool.” he added, so she knew he wasn’t trying to cheat on Hazel , who was awesome and who he missed.

Piper kept looking at him. Then, she turned around and took off her presumably stylish (Frank wouldn’t know) sweatshirt and sweatpants. As she was changing, she asked him how long he’d been Praetor.

“I ascended when I was 18. Percy assumed the role of Dictator so he could shut down rebel members of the clergy during the war with Krios. He hated it, but once he stepped down when the war was done, all the systems of government had been so warped by him that only I could figure out how to straighten them back, and why he had changed things as he did. He appointed me as acting Praetor so he could go home.”

“So he could, what, boil people alive then run away?” Piper turned back around to face him. She was wearing a little tank top and boxer shorts. Frank averted his eyes. 

“Boil people alive? What the hell? Where did you get that from?” Frank asked, turning around to take his shirt off to add to the pile. “Wait–do you mean–oh my god, there was a kid in New Rome who was possessed by some sort of ghoul spirit to spy on us, and the only way to get the thing out was to scare it. Percy invited the kid to the baths, and when the kid tried to kill him in there, he slowly turned the temperature of the water up until he scared the dead spirit out.” Frank started working on making the clothes look a little bit like his body in the cell. This wasn’t going to be a particularly handsome illusion, but he didn’t learn nothing from being permanently engaged to Hazel. “Yeah the kid got some burns, but Percy’s never boiled someone alive, that's ridiculous.”

Piper was silent for a second.

“Anyway. He didn’t run away. He went home to his mom. He was just a kid.”

“We were all just kids.” Piper said dismissively.

“Yeah. We were all just kids.” Frank agreed, solemn. “I was acting Praetor for a while, then when Percy resigned I won the special election and took his place. I was seen as this… war hero, but everything I did was because of and for Percy. A few of the high-ranking officials call me digitulus. Latin for ‘little finger.’ If Percy is the Right Hand, then I guess… I don’t love the nickname, and since I came back from my hiatus I’m an independent agent, but really the only reason I’m praetor is because I have Percy behind me, even in his weird pseudo-roman, angel-doner maverick state he’s been in for the past few years.”

Then, he focused on this fugly lump of clothes, and focused on what the guard wanted to see. No trouble here. No extra work. Don’t look here, go look elsewhere. The clothes didn’t stop looking like clothes, but they blended together into almost a blanket.

Kinda? A blanket?

“How does this look?”

“Uh, like clothes.” Piper paused, then “wait. Wait. I can feel it. It’s like invisible charmspeak, telling me to move on. It’s really faint but–”

“Yeah. I’m not good by any means, but let’s hope it works enough for a mortal.”

Piper looked at him, Frank looked away. He didn’t like that he was seeing another woman in her underwear. It felt disrespectful to her and to Hazel. 

“It’s okay, people wear these kinds of boxers as shorts now. They’re all over Brandy Melville.”

Frank didn’t know who Brandy Melville was, and he would still attempt to revert his eyes.

Annabeth landed in Anchorage. She stumbled off the plane, dizzy, hammered . Ten hours on icy November roads lay between her and that godsforsaken cabin in the middle of Alaskan wilderness. If she was lucky, the car would skid out on the ice and a bear would maul her and she’d bleed out and die in the cold. She usually took some time before a mission. Took her big Osprey Quest-Bag that she had browsed all those backpacking reddits for the brand recommendations for, with the ambrosia baggie and tarp and headlamp. 

She hadn’t used that in years. Where even was it? Where was her bag now, the one she had brought? Did she even bring a bag?

The fluorescent lights were shooting into her skull. She steadied herself on her feet, and stumbled towards a restroom. 

There was a child screeching from inside the largest puffer coat Annabeth had ever seen. Annabeth did not pack weather appropriate clothes, what was she thinking?! This is Alaska in November. She needed to sober up. She could barely feel her own words, she felt like she was underwater. Gripping the sink, she stared at herself, hoping to sober up through sheer, athena-driven will. Her face, her lips, her teeth, her eyes. She took a hair tie off her wrist and piled her braids on top of her head in an awful-looking bun. Her pores, her eyebrows, the little scars. 

She thought of a scar on a shoulder, and her husband, and oh, there it was. Sobriety. Immediately, she missed the drunkenness. But she had a mission to do. 

She discovered she did pack a bag. It was on her back. Percy’s old work backpack, bright blue, with little keychains Estelle had made dangling from the front zipper. Some shitty Jansport thing. She looked in it, in this airport bathroom, while the screaming child was hauled away by her mother, and women with fat camera bags around their backs washed their hands, and people trickled in and out of the stalls. 

She packed her knife, which to a mortal looked like an empty flask in a leather sheath, some dried fruit leathers, her notebook, a sweater, some thick socks, a baggie of Goldfish that had somehow opened and spilled goldfish all over said sweater and socks. 

She got the notebook out and sat down in an overpriced burger joint. She was still sloppy, a tad drunk, but she could be focused just by remembering why she was in Anchorage.

Kill Percy.

Something in her flinched. Something in her, something tasting vaguely of her mother’s magic, pushed her forwards. Eh, it suited the cause. Athena versus Poseidon, she’d figure her mother would like this divine vengeance. She prayed, quickly, over her candle, and put some goldfish crumbs in it, and started jotting down her gameplan, only stopping to briefly run to the restroom and throw up, and blame it on the alcohol. 

Percy, in Fairbanks rather than Anchorage, had been sitting for too long. A 15 hour flight when your own brain is your worst enemy is not for the faint of heart. The brain kept telling him to turn around. To turn on Zillow and find a way to live here, permanently, in middle-of-nowhere Alaska, where Jupiter couldn’t smite him and New Rome wouldn’t dare to kill him, and let Annabeth live. He considered killing himself for a bit, so she could live. It became a more and more enticing answer, but the only thing stopping him was his mom. And New Rome, of course. He must do as he’s told. Tormented by what was happening, yet unable to stop it, Percy decided to not kill himself. Yet. He focused on the anger towards her. His wife. For fooling him, for making him into something lesser than what he was. Breaking down the Right Hand with takeout pizza and failed attempts at homemade bread and Jets games. It was a genius move. Sure, he couldn’t figure out why she had chosen him to spy on, and to destroy in the process. He didn’t have the confidential information, the blackmail, the senate in his pocket, the power he used to. He was a fraction of who he was. But maybe that was her goal, to sedate him, to make him fat and lazy in his mortal life, to isolate him from Rome by keeping him cooped up in a harlem apartment.

Nevermind that it was Percy who insisted they live in New York. No, the greeks had their fucking spells, their manipulation. They’re savage, guerilla warriors who could never be trusted. Percy’s relationship with new Rome always had a wild, manic quality, something unhinged and hectic and a little perilous about it, maybe that’s why Annabeth had been a good fit for a spy. He refocused on her, how angry he was. The anger felt flat and hollow, but there was something divine about it. She had cheated him. She had tried to kill him. She was in the house of his mother and sister. Fuck her. Fuck her to hell. Fuck that bitch who was ruining him. He needed to hurt her, he needed to make her pay, he needed to kill Annabeth Chase .

And then, once again, it all evaporated from him, and he was disgusted with himself. And he had to start all over again. 

He rented a car, he nearly froze as soon as he left the airport–seriously it’s two degrees Annabeth was gonna hate it here. No, no, he backtracked. Good that she’d hate it. He’d have the snow, an advantage against her. He hates Annabeth. He hates her so much. She needed to pay for making a fool out of him. Out of Rome. 

He drove the car to the nearest store where he could buy weather-appropriate clothes. All around him, people were making their ways in jeans and sweatshirts, what the hell? It’s two degrees?! He looked at the weather app it’s now zero degrees! Put some clothes on! And he bought 500 dollars of snow boots and puffer jackets because his weakling NYC gear was put to shame when it seemed his boogers were icing over. 

Getting back in the car, he called his mom. When she answered, he hung up. Then he called again. 

“Annabeth is a Greek spy. I’m in Alaska. I’m going to our honeymoon cabin to kill her. If I don’t come back, she’s killed me. I love you, momma.”

“Percy what the fuck?” He hung up on her again. She called back five times, he let it ring out each one. His phone started blowing up with texts. He turned it off. Sally didn’t matter right now. He let himself get lost in the highway hypnosis. Only a seven hour drive through the snow left. He listened to radio static, and tried not to think of what his wife's face would look like when she died.

Chapter Text

When Frank wasn’t Frank but an animal, the first ten minutes were easy. He was never an animal for fun, there was always a purpose, and usually that animal could solve the problem and he could turn back into Frank easily and everyone was grateful for his good work as a bloodhound or a snake and everyone could move on. 

But, one night, he fell asleep as a cat, and woke up blurry and disoriented. He wasn’t Frank anymore, he was a cat. He wanted to investigate to see if there were any mice, he wanted to chase a string, and Fancy Feast sounded pretty appetizing. He wanted to curl up back in the sun and fall asleep again. Hazel walked into the room and asked him to turn back into a human so he could open a jar for her. And, at that moment, he hadn’t seen his fiancé, he saw his roommate. Maybe she would give him some food.

His Frank-brain, in the distance, was horrified. It took him eight hours to transfer back.

Every minute in an animal’s body it became more difficult to hold onto himself. Since then, Frank has kept a litany of biographical information in his brain after he shifts.  Anchor himself to his humanity, to his earth. My name is Qiang Fai Zhang. My parents were Zhang Jingya (or “Emily” or “Em” or “Mom”) of Toronto and Mars (or “Lord” or “Father”) of Mount Olympus. I live with my fiancé, Hazel Levesque, in a big white house in New Rome that has ugly curtains and cajun spices and cameras for security that we mostly use to watch the birds. I am Praetor of New Rome. I am ruler of demigod-kind. I hate figs but love dates. I’ve never gone past season two of Gilmore Girls. I have my tea with two sugars.

And when his animal form breaks these thoughts up, these are the fragments he clings to: this is my soul. This is my heart. Keep going. This is not my body but this is my soul. My name is Frank Zhang and I am capable of shapeshifting. My name is Frank Zhang and this body is not mine. My name is Frank Zhang. My name is Zhang Fai Qiang. My name is Zhāng Fēiqiáng. Wǒ jiào Zhāng Fēiqiáng. Wǒ jiào Zhāng Fēiqiáng. Wǒ jiào Zhāng Fēiqiáng. 

These are the thoughts in his fly brain. He transforms back into a human body in the cell.

“So? What’s the layout? What did you find out?”

“Wǒ jiào Zhāng Fēiqiáng. Wǒ bù shì chóngzi, wǒ shì rénlèi. Wǒ zhǐ shì zài jiǎzhuāng shì chóngzi.”

“What the fuck? Is that Chinese?”

Frank stared at the wall. Only one perspective, how limiting. The wind didn’t pull on him anymore. His sight was frighteningly clear. Piper’s face, long, with high cheekbones, one eyebrow raised above the other. His body felt heavy underneath him.

“Frank? Are you okay?”

And he thought this: my name is Frank Zhang and this is my soul and this is my heart. I like shitty takeout Chinese food more than authentic Chinese but I'll never tell anyone. My favorite holiday is thanksgiving and I always dip my turkey in mashed potatoes. I tell everyone my favorite book is The Alchemist but actually it’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret. 

He returned to his body. “Sorry. Shit. Uh. Yeah. So. Uh. Basically–” and he recapped the layout to Piper, poorly translating fly thoughts to human ones. 

Piper felt like she was in a zoo. Like, ever since Frank had come back from his fly expedition, there was a panel of bulletproof, unshatterable glass between them, and he was the one in the cage. She felt like a third grader, on a field trip, fascinated by the tiger, staring into its eyes, taking notes, silently, about how it ate, how it stretched, how it paced in it’s cage.

There was still a grate between them. They were both in cages. But now, she held all the power. She didn’t know why, she didn’t know what the power even was, but there was an uneasy shift in their dynamic. She had seen the belly of the tiger across from her, big and bulky, still the close-cropped grown-out-buzz cut hair he’d had for forever, the big strong nose, the dark, gentle eyes. Piper looked at Frank, who talked with his hands and tried to explain a conversation he had overheard as a fly, and almost saw the little kids in Camp Half Blood in him. 

Who put this kid in charge of New Rome? She wandered. Then, she grabbed a guard, and, while she held him, Frank turned into a fly and then out of a fly to grab the keys and let Piper out. They were now on the run. They’d find the baby, find Nico, and have him take them immediately to the cabin, where she'd put a stop to this. 

Percy, on the road, almost crashed into a white tailed deer that had dark eyes like Annabeth. He screeched to a break in the Subaru Outback, and the deer stared at the car, and Percy stared at it. Wide, big, brown eyes. Unblinking. They locked onto his soul.

Only the deer would live to see the sunrise tomorrow. 

A hot rage he didn’t understand rose within him, sudden and boiling, and, without thinking, his foot slammed on the gas. The car lurched forward, but the deer sprang out of the way, into the forest. 

His knuckles white, Percy pressed further on the gas. Too fast. The snow and wind screamed past him but he needed to kill something. Another stupid fucking deer or himself or his wife, he didn’t fucking care.

Nico decided to walk to the bookstore he had seen on his way in. He bought a copy of Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen, and put it in his backpack. He then walked to “The Gathering Place” a sprawling multi-million-dollar park Will had mentioned earlier.He sat in their little cafe and read his new books. He came to have dinner with his friend, and he wasn’t like all these new kids; he could be patient. His mother said to him “Aspettare è metà del piacere.” Well, he thinks his mother said it to him. It might have just been Bianca who reported that his mom said it to him. Well, either Bianca or his mom or a combination of the two emphasized that half the pleasure is the wait. And he was having a lot of fun with his coffee and his Austen and his people watching. It made him feel alive, at least.

Piper and Frank ran down the halls. They weren’t being subtle. Frank had this big elaborate plan to be subtle and not have the police chase after them but everything had gone haywire because it was a shitty plan and required a lot of dominos to fall into place that simply hadn’t. She had wasted precious time that could have been spent saving Annabeth’s life. But no. Can’t do something as simple as a jailbreak without it turning into an operation where suddenly they needed to be covert. Stupid. Piper and Frank’s data was already in the system, and Piper wasn’t going to “crawl through the air vents to erase their information off a computer when she finds the computer lab while I (Frank) ask a nice looking guard for his phone so we can call my pilot.”

Well, this wasn’t 2006, so there wasn’t a Computer Lab and Piper doubted she could find a way to pull up their profiles and delete them without, like, advanced security access or something. Also she’s not crawling through an air vent. Also,  fun fact, when you’re a prisoner, no “nice-looking” guard or cop is going to give you his personal phone. Everything boiled down to the fact that this isn’t a heist movie from 1998, and Frank was under the delusion that it was. So, yeah, Piper screwed up the plan on purpose. Because following the plan was more dangerous than just thinking on your feet, which is what demigods were made for. Also, she’s not crawling through a fucking airvent. She’s almost thirty, her knees can’t take that. 

So she had intentionally ruined the plan. And they were following her plan now: run. She grappled with a guard who came around the corner, kneed him in the balls (her mother’s favorite move) and grabbed his baton, and swung it upside his head. She turned and found a young guard trembling with a gun, yelling at them. Frank turned his arm into a bear claw and knocked him out with it, and shifted it back.

Frank was yelling at her, loudly, but also all the guards were. Everyone was so angry at her. So she kept running and didn’t listen to any of them. She took the baton, and, as Frank lioned out behind her, completely incapacitating the Tulsa police, whose worst crimes they saw were usually drug addicts and burglaries, and hadn’t been prepared for anything beyond that, she knocked out the window to an evidence room, reached her hand in, and grasped the doorknob, pushed down, and let them in. 

Inside, an officer was holding the baby. Who was sleeping. Piper pointed the baton at him, and asked him, without charmspeak but with as much menace as possible, if he could please give her that baby.

Five minutes later, the two of them were skidding out of the parking lot in a stolen police car, with three cars chasing behind them. Piper turned on the P.A., cleared her voice, and said:

“Do not follow us. ”

And they listened, kind of, and slowed down, and gave Piper enough room to attempt to lose them.

Annabeth had beat him to the cabin. Stupidly, she didn’t plan for the possibility that the honeymoon cabin was being used. She couldn’t fathom why it was being used. Percy and her had gone up in August, they had seen the ice fjords and hiked flattop mountain in anchorage, took a train to Denali and white water rafted up there, then drove inward towards Yukon territory to, let’s be frank, have a ton of sex and do a lot of stargazing. Sometimes both at the same time. You can’t do too much in November, but the two Airbnbers were here anyway, for some reason. Bundled in fleece and flannel, these two idiots were probably “unplugging.”

But now, here she was, perched atop a hill in the snow, wrapped in bright pink merino wool underlayers, a patagonia fleece she had had her eye on for use back home anyway, a windproof, waterproof black parka with down and synthetic insulation and waterproof pants, a balaclava that forced her to keep her mouth shut lest she get spit on the thing and the spit freezes. Practicality x misery, brought to you by the Anchorage Walmart.

(Side note; what the hell?! Wasn’t this whole thing torture enough? Could she at least have killed her husband in a nice tropical climate? Jesus!)

And she had her insulated gloves and boots and hat and her foot and hand warmers and her Pit Viper sunglasses that took her back to her Intramural Softball games she played the shit out of in college. 

Oh, and her big, fat gun with its big, fat scope. The kind of weapon she had landed herself in jail protesting ten years earlier. Well, thank the gods (and the NRA, probably) for making sure she could buy a sniper rifle over the counter at the Anchorage Walmart with almost no ID.

This sucked. This was so uniquely awful. 

Did Percy specifically pick Alaska because he knew Annabeth hated hated hated the cold?! No, he said it was because it was out of gods’ sightline. That made sense. He wanted to be honorable. So did she. Whatever. It was just to ensure that he’d be able to take her life, not some vengeful Roman go striking her down. 

Still, Alaska? In november? 

She shivered, she felt her lungs freezing with every breath, and for a bit she was able to just focus on the pain from the wind and snow and not her supervillain husband breaking her heart.

Gods, she was so tired.

“I'm sorry, the person you are trying to reach has a voicemail box that has not been set up yet. Please try again later, bye.”

In a woman’s stolen car, Frank was both panicking and glaring at Piper, holding a still-sleeping baby Titania. She didn’t give a shit. She dialled Nico again. It rang, and rang. 

“Hello?”

“ Niuh –” Piper tried to get out, but her voice was now completely gone. She’d be silent for a while, at least until she got into her Ambrosia stores, right next to the SkinnyPop and Cliff bars in her pantry. Frank at least understood what was happening, and was able to put his anger aside at her to take over.

“Nico, it’s Frank and Piper. Please tell me you’re still in Tulsa.”

“Frank! It’s good to hear from you buddy!”

In Frank's mind, he saw Hazel in the golf dress. “Okay. Well. Don’t get Nico involved. I don’t want him caught up in this again” she had said. 

He wasn’t getting Nico involved. Nico had been gotten involved by Piper, and after she tried to get them fucking killed because she wouldn’t follow his simple, reasonable plan, he was just… continuing his involvement.

Yeah she was gonna kill him.

“How’s Haz? I keep looking for a save the date in the mail, but–”

“Yeah, yeah she says she wants a winter wedding but its way too late to start planning it and–” he cut himself off. “Nico, are you still in Tulsa?”

“I am. Piper invited me to eat. You said you’re with her? Piper! It’s been a bit, you never visit me and Will anymore!”

Piper opened her mouth, but just a breath of air came out. 

“Listen, we are going to Piper’s house. Meet us there, we have an urgent mission.”

“An urgent mission? Gods, this is why Will and I have tried to make mortal friends. We can’t have dinner unless it’s an urgent mission! No one calls me unless it’s about an urgent mission!” he can feel Nico’s eyes rolling through the screen. He then adopts a girlish voice. “ Oh! Oh Nico! We need your shadow powers! We need to get from one place to another! Have y’all ever heard of a plane? A car? You know, back in my day, it took two weeks to cross the Atlantic and–”

“It’s about Percy and Annabeth.” Frank cut in, voice tight.

Nico was quiet on the other line.

“Did you know?” Frank asked, even though he knew he shouldn’t.

A beat, and then. “I’ll uh… I’ll see you at Piper’s. 2005 Smith Avenue, right? The white house with the rocking chairs in front?”

Frank glanced at Piper. She nodded.

“Yeah,” Frank confirmed. “That’s the one.”

Another beat of silence, then: “Okay. I’ll be there.” And Nico hung up.

In Alaska, the sun sets early. 

Annabeth liked seeing magic and explaining it to him. She would lean on his shoulder and say: before a beam of sunlight gets to your eyes, it has many, many interactions with molecules that scatter its light. Different wavelengths bounce in different directions when they interact with oxygen or nitrogen in the atmosphere, but in sunlight, the light travels through the atmosphere longer before reaching our eyes, so that the blue and purple has been scattered away, leaving behind reds and pinks and oranges. 

She stood firm in the notion that scientific understanding doesn’t rob the universe of its beauty, it only enhances it. Percy thought that for all her textbooks and poetry and paragraphs, some things can’t be communicated, like the real beauty of a sunset.

And she would laugh, and say that that was very “Toni Morrison” of him. And he wouldn’t know what that meant, but he didn’t really mind. The beautiful thing about Annabeth’s mind was that she was so smart she made you feel smart just by talking to her. It was never a condescending thing, but rather a contagious wonder about the world.

Percy watched the sun dip behind the horizon through his rearview mirror. Maybe the only way he can glimpse beauty is with his back turned to it.

Annabeth was so cold. 

The stolen van was seven blocks away, tucked under an overpass near a convenience store. Frank wrote “SORRY!!!” in the dust on the back of the car (Canada manners die hard) before trudging uphill to Piper’s house, baby in his arms. 

Tulsa, as it turned out, was kind of beautiful. Frank’s Canadian upbringing meant just bitter cold and general dead-ness. Then there was Endless Summer California, with stubbornly green leaves. And then, between the two, there was a memorable stint crashing at Percy’s mom’s apartment in NYC, where the trees–and therefore fall foliage–were scarce. He had begged a seventeen year old Percy, finally not Dictator, finally free of the war, to take him to Central Park and a Broadway show.

Percy had said “If you want to do tourist shit in my city, book a room at the Plaza and take a week off work.”

To which, Frank responded that “I want to know the city, man!”

Percy brought him to eight different bodegas instead. “They’re not gas stations! They’re a different thing!” they giggled over sleeves of Oreos, Arizona Iced Teas, Hero sandwiches, and lottery tickets Percy had begged the cashier for in broken high-school Spanish, despite being under eighteen. They had won fifty dollars on one of them, and spent it all on Coors Light and pizza and drank it on the fire escape.

Frank said: “I really like Hazel. I think I’m gonna ask her out. Now that it’s all done with. Do you think she’d say yes?”

“I’ll never ask out someone in New Rome. They all… everyone looks at me weird.” Percy responded.

“I don’t look at you weird.”

“Yeah you do.”

Frank took the last sip of his beer, and said, “I won’t be scared of you as long as you’re Dextra Romae and I’m Digitulus. As long as you don’t look too closely at Rome. As long as you’re a good soldier. I am not afraid of a knife in the hands of a chef, so, for now, I won’t be afraid of you.”

Well, he didn’t say it out loud. But sometimes things don’t need to be said out loud for both parties to hear it.

Frank looked down at his phone. Percy had sent him straight to voicemail ten times. Iris messages unable to reach him. He was probably in Alaska now. He just had to pray.

He looked back up at Tulsa, which burst with autumn. Like a Charlie Brown thanksgiving special had thrown up in the middle of Oklahoma. Everything was quiet here.

“Your dad’s from Oklahoma, right? Is that why you live here?” Frank asked.

Piper pointed to her throat, and they rounded a corner while a gust of wind hit Frank’s face. 

He mourned his luggage that had been confiscated by airport police and because of Piper’s graecus dumbassery, he’d never see his favorite pair of jeans again. 

Bitch.

He shifted the baby, who was finally starting to wake.

“Have you been feeding her?”

Piper nodded. 

“Well. It looks like she’s hungry.” Frank observed, adjusting his grip. He spotted Piper’s house at the end of the block, and the shadowy figure of his fiancé’s brother. Something twisted in his stomach. He liked to keep a healthy distance from the guy. But, well, he was useful.

Piper waved to him. He waved back. On the porch, Frank and him dapped up, and Piper lifted up a plant and got a hide-a-key, and invited the two boys in.

I mean, Annabeth had never been this cold. Her bones and lungs ached with it. Her dad learned Yoruba a while ago, when Annabeth was little, an earnest attempt to ‘reconnect.’ Nevermind that they didn’t know if the Chase family was Yoruban at all. Frederick just had wanted something to do. There was a fact that there wasn’t a native word for “snow” because, well, West Africa. Not much snow there. It struck her. She thought, “ah, that’s why this sucks so much. My people weren’t made for this.”

Wind went in her face.

Who the hell was made for this? Percy, probably, who always had a 13-year-old-boy approach to the cold. He’d wear shorts outside if it was snowing, if Annabeth hadn’t drilled into him how hot she found him in a sweater. 

If Percy was here, she’d still be cold, but he’d make fun of her for it, in a way that made her laugh instead of chatter and shake, and then he’d go find an extra blanket and hold her icy-cold hands and call her Elsa.

She missed him.

And she was so cold.

Piper pops two ambrosias. Then, she gives Frank half, for his head. Then, Frank and Nico sit at her kitchen island, and she stands in front of them. 

It was silent. Piper looked at Nico, who was looking at Frank, who was looking at her, and they sat in that pocket of tension for a minute.

Then, all three spoke at once.

“Nico, you have to help us. We have to get up to Alaska. They’re gonna kill eachother, we dont have enough time!”

And, “You knew?! What the hell, man? And, what, you let it happen?” 

And, “I did not know until very recently that they didn’t know! I fully believed they both had gotten over the camp feuds, and realized that they’re great for eachother! And once I figured it out, I figured they had figured it out too!”

Their words collided like waves in a storm, drowning each other out. Frank was yelling at Nico. Nico was yelling at both Frank and Piper. Piper was defending Nico, scolding him, and simultaneously shouting at Frank, then Nico started shouting at her, could you not feel the power radiating off of him? You think that’s normal for a social worker?! Then, Piper defending Nico and also yelling at him, and also yelling at Frank, and Frank in turn yelling at Piper. 

The baby started wailing, and for a few seconds, they couldn’t hear her.

Until everything stopped. Suspended from background noise–no hum of the heater, no rumble of cars, no wind or rustle of leaves. That, they could hear.

As three, they turned to the baby that just stopped time.

Piper scooped her up, made some cooing sounds, and time started again. Then, she went to her back garage, and found some formula that she had gotten coupon clipping and was going to donate to a shelter. She read the instructions on the box and made it, not caring to hear the rest of Frank and Nico’s argument. 

She fed the baby and she went to sleep. “Annabeth and Percy have execute on sight orders for each other. They’re in Alaska. They’re out of range of signal or Iris Message, there’s no way to contact them, so we need to somehow get to Alaska when both of them have had almost a day’s head start.”

Nico looked angry. “This is a lot of shit you both are dragging me into. I’m attempting to retire here, I'm a grown man.”

“Please, you’re twenty-six,” Frank snapped. “You were literally on a quest last year. Hardly call that retirement.” 

“Not helping, Frank!” Piper interjected. 

“Excuse me?” Frank shot back. “Your incompetence and inaction led to this, Nico! If you see something, say something!” 

Nico shot to his feet, his barstool screeching against the floor. 

“No! Shut it down, both of you! There are bigger things at play here!” Piper yelled, before the two started fighting each other.

“You’re damn right there are bigger things.” Nico muttered.

The other two turned to look at him. “Bigger things?”

Nico looked regretful, opened his mouth, shut it, and got up and left. 

Piper and Frank glanced at each other, before jogging after him. 

“I shouldn’t have said anything, and you all shouldn’t have brought me here. I’m going back to Austin. I trust you two can find a way to Alaska without your personal teleportation machine.” He was unlocking his car across the street. 

“If you don’t help us, they’re gonna die.” Frank said, without tact or charisma. How is this guy Praetor?! Piper thought for the second time. 

Nico threw open his car door, a black Volkswagen that reeked of Hades-magic. 

“They’ll only kill each other if the fates allow it.”

Frank was on the driver's side, Piper on the passengers, pleading with him through his open crank-windows. They shot each other a look over the top of the car.

“I’ve never heard you talk like that before, you’re just giving up on them?”

“Goodbye, Piper. It was nice of you to invite me to dinner.” He said, starting his car. “Frank.” he acknowledged.

Then, the car’s engine coughed to life, and in a moment, it disappeared.

And the next moment, it reappeared in Piper’s neighbor’s lawn, ten houses down.

Shit. The car ( Batmobile , in Will’s words) was broken.

He saw Piper and Frank jogging behind him to meet him through his rearview mirror.

He thought of Will’s doctor friends, and his neighbors, and his TTRPG group, where nobody knew anything about him. They didn’t know that Nico carried death with him, they didn’t know about Bianca, they didn’t know about his years as a double-double-double crossing spy. They didn’t know about Maria, or the Lotus Hotel, or Tartarus.

And, paradoxically, because they didn’t know him, they knew him far better than anyone in San Francisco or New York City. 

Could he fault Percy for it? Could he fault Annabeth? He thought of Gods and their plans, of every raw scrap of information he held just by allowing people to talk to him. No one else knew the true nature of the Camp rivalries, he thought. At least, no one alive. He’d be risking everything, and no one would know about his martyrdom.

He thought of Annabeth, crying in her wedding dress with her dad, him watching from the corner.

“I just. I never thought it would happen to me.” She sobbed in the dressing room, ruining the makeup Piper’s sister had just done on her.

Her dad, in his wheelchair, put a hand on her shoulder. "You deserve it, kiddo."

Fuck it. 

“I’ll do it.” He told Piper and Frank, and the sky rumbled with thunder. “I’ll get y’all to Alaska. The car’s broken though.”

“We can take the private jet, and you can shadow travel us from Fairbanks?” Frank suggested. Nico agreed. He knew he’d probably get smited by someone , but he’d be a traitor to himself if he did what he was told to do.

And so they went.

Chapter Text

On the private jet, Nico watched Frank knit, and Piper watched Nico, and Frank watched the baby. He didn’t realize he was making a pair of booties for her until he was casting off on the second one. 

There it was. In the distance. A fucking Subaru.

It pulled into the cabin, and Annabeth’s breath caught as she steadied her scope, the crosshairs pinned on Percy. He moved with cold precision, shrouded in dark layers, a balaclava masking his face. Snow crunched beneath his boots, each step deliberate, slicing through the frozen stillness.

The house’s door handle rattled. Locked. He didn’t pause. A step back, his movements sharp, almost mechanical. His boot collided with the lock. Once. Twice. The door gave way with a shrill metallic screech, swinging open.

Her head pounded, her pulse hammering in her ears. She couldn’t look away.

Inside, the two honeymooners froze, wide-eyed, hands covering their mouths as Percy stepped in. He tore off his mask, revealing a face that wasn’t quite his own. The words he spoke were low, deliberate, their meaning lost to Annabeth—but whatever he said worked. The couple scrambled to pack, their belongings shoved haphazardly into bags as they fled the house in ten minutes flat.

Percy moved methodically, slowly, his every action calculated. He pulled a pair of glasses from his pocket, sliding them on with unsettling calm.

Why? Why bring his glasses if not to kill her?

She felt a real jolt of fear roll down her. She suppressed a sob as he fetched two mugs out of the cabinet.
He made a cup of coffee. three creams, four sugars, how he likes it. Then, another one. Black. For her. Gods, he was putting on a show. He knew she was watching him. Fucker.

The couple left, speeding out into the blizzard. Annabeth stopped her shaking, aimed her rifle, and saw him turn his head to the side. The crosshairs just above his ear, she pulled the trigger.

He ducked down, throwing himself on the floor. Another bullet flew into the wall, and he reached across the snow, feeling the presence of Annabeth. He closed his eyes, and saw her silhouette like a heat map. He took her hand and froze it. 

When he was confident she couldn’t shoot again, he comtemplated extending his control, freezing her in place until he could climb the hill she was perched on and beheaded her. Turning around, he saw two cups on the counter.

He didn’t even realize he made two. Perched there, his and hers, like a fucking hallmark card. 

The least he could do is allow her to fight for her life.

In the snow, in Percy’s handwriting, a message appeared. Honor. It said, and a shock of fear went through Annabeth’s body.

She left the gun, the tarp, all the shit. And, in her coat, with just her long dagger and a knife in her boot, she trudged through the snow. Towards her husband, watching her from the window.

He could freeze her in place, march out here, detach her head from her body, and mail it to her mother.

He didn’t, though. He just waited. These Romaïkós , obsessed with duty. Honor. Ugh. She should have shot him while he was driving. 

Gods, they had a point though? Those fucking facists. She did want him to die a death that did a service to his life. Graphic, brutal, but he’d go out fighting. A bullet in the brain was too peaceful for a man like Rome’s Right Hand.

The door was open. Snow was blowing into the house. Annabeth tried to close the door behind her, but the lock was unable to keep it shut, busted from Percy’s foot. Gods, it was freezing. Still, she shed her coat, and took off the ski overalls. Percy was in that icelandic sweater they had gotten on vacation two years ago. 

She looked beautiful.

Dark skin stark against bright snow cheeks flushed from the cold. 

The wind tore through the cabin from the broken door, its icy fingers clawed at everything in the cabin. The door banged wildly against the wall, snow piled onto the floor. Percy’s hand tightened on the hilt of his bronze sword, each breath coming in short, cold bursts, the sting of the frigid air cutting into his lungs. 

He looked at her right hand, grasping a dagger. No wedding ring.

Percy swung. A wide arc, to drive her back. She ducked under the blow, her boots crunching against the snow-slick floor as she darted to the side. A flash of silver—her dagger slashed through his sweater, grazing his ribs.

“Shit!” he hissed, stumbling back.

She didn’t stop, circling him, steps quick and precise. 

“You are a murderer,” Annabeth breathed, swiping towards his legs. He blocked her, but lost momentum. “And you are a fascist,” She knew his blind spots. “And Rome will not wield your unchecked power anymore.”

He pushed his glasses further onto his face with one hand, and swung, forcing her toward the lit fireplace. 

“You’re a fool,” His sword swung in brutal, deliberate strikes. “To believe Rome wields my power.” He kicked at her stomach, which sent her keeling, but not to the ground. “I wield Rome.”

She was fast. Too fast, slipping past blows and jabbing at arms and legs. Like a fucking mosquito. 

No, like a graecus. “You fight like a savage. You greeks are all the same, you’re fucking primative.” he spat at her. 

Annabeth pivoted away from the fire, kicking a blanket near it into it, catching it aflame. Flames rose, and both of them danced away. His ribs ached, and the storm clawed at the newly exposed skin, while the flame threatened to burn the other side. 

His wife darted closer to the kitchen. 

“At least I have my humanity. Unlike you.”

He swung hard at her, and she parried, pushing it into the edge of the counter. The wood splintered, sending a spray of debris into the air. Annabeth twisted around him, her boots skidding on the slippery floor, and she drove her dagger into his side again. 

“What I'm doing here today–” Annabeth started, as Percy keeled over, clutching his side, and cursed. “It isn’t even murder. That would imply my target has a fucking soul.”

He adjusted his grip, Riptide seemed infinitely heavier. Gritting his teeth though, he pivoted to face her again. His breath came in hard bursts, misting in the freezing air. The door banged against the wall, the blizzard outside picked up. His body–the traitorous body–felt heavy. Slower than he had any right to be. 

Annabeth feigned to the left, her dagger flashing, but Percy didn’t fall for it, he swung and she was able to block. She kicked her leg up and in a flash, brought out a smaller blade, and stuck it into his shoulder.

Percy looked to the side, and, while his adrenaline still coursed, took the blade and jammed it into Annabeth’s thigh. 

“ Fuck! Jesus!” Then, she threw it back at him. It landed, with a clang, in the wood wall behind him. 

They resumed. Annabeth wasn’t as fast, but was able to press the advantage, driving him back towards the growing fire in the living room. Percy didn’t let that happen, he swung again. “I’m not gonna be killed by a Saturnist whore.” 

Annabeth ducked, but her foot slipped, and her ankle twisted with a sickening crack. She hit the ground hard, knee slamming into the wood. For a moment, she stayed down, her breath in ragged gasps. 

Percy didn’t hesitate, he charged, and brought Riptide down in an overhead strike. His wife rolled to the side, dagger slicing at his leg as she moved, blade catching his thigh. Percy felt it sink to the bone and yelped in pain. He fell next to her, his momentum faltering, and she pushed herself upright. 

“Heathen tyrant!” She said, weakly gripping her knife and sending it towards his chest.

Using his sword, he blocked her knife attack and sent the blade flying. She stumbled back from him as he grasped for Riptide, and fought him for grip of the sword. The sword went flying across the room. Percy looked at Annabeth above him, and reared his head up, sending his skull into her nose. 

“Oh fuck!” She clutched at her face with one hand, and used the other to punch Percy in the throat.

All of the breath left his body in a quick exhale, and dizzied, he didn’t see Annabeth haul herself back to standing, grabbing a fireplace poker on the wall and leaning on it to support her weight.

“You rat bastard” she whispered, blood streaming from her nose. She gripped the wall and jabbed the poker at him, aiming for his head. He rolled to the side, but it caught his ear just barely, ripping a hole in it, knocking his glasses off and clearing across the floor. Before he could attempt to stand, she swung again for his ribs. The poker struck true, slamming into his chest with enough force to keep him on the ground. Percy reached up and grabbed the poker, and poured his strength into pushing it back at her. It caught her chin, clanging her teeth together. He threw it to the side, and hoisted himself back up, stumbling against a table. He picked up a chair and threw it at Annabeth.

Then another.

And another. 

She ducked beneath all three, but the shards had nicked her. 

The door kept clanging against the wall. The blizzard’s snow continued to pour inside. The fire in the living room set off the fire alarm, finally, and the cabin shook with the alarm and the wind.

He threw the final chair, forcing her back toward the wall from the other end of the cabin. She ducked, but finally this movement sent her sprawling, and her ankle gave out once more. 

Percy limped over to her, bruised and battered. Annabeth was still scrambling at the wall, but her leg was deeply fucked up.

He grabbed her dagger on the way there. And finally, he knelt over her.

And he saw her. Staring at him, gasping in pain. He brought the knife to her chest and

And he couldn’t do it.

He looked at her. The graecus. The bastard. The savage. The spy.

His wife. 

“Do it.” She whispered. He brought the knife to her chest again, but was still. Like he was seeing ghosts. He swallowed. A moment passed.

“Do it!” More emphatically, this time. “Kill me! You won!”

Percy swallowed, and he looked at the knife. Then, her face, then, her lips. He started murmuring to himself, rearing away from her, standing shakily and backing up. 

Annabeth’s hands slipped on the floor. It was so cold. The door kept just fucking banging. Again. Again. Again. Crash. Crash. Crash. And Percy sounded like he was chanting fucking hymns. 

Slowly, she rose from the ground. “What are you saying?” She asked, then, erased the question with. “Aren’t you going to kill me?”

Percy was just looking at her. He kept fucking mumbling.

“Kill me! You won! Come on, Percy!”

She started to advance towards him, her limp ankle dragging uselessly behind her. 

“To… have… and to… hold” Percy was speaking a little louder now. 

“Are those our–are those our wedding vows? You… you asshole!”

“For better or for worse. For richer or for poorer.” He declared unsteadily.

“Fuck you!” She cried. She sunk to the floor and grabbed the knife, every fiber of being aflame. “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you! How could you–” her voice broke, strangled by the weight of her anguish. She limped towards him, her knife now held out stiffly. “How–fuck!” She was weeping now, her body folding in on herself as she kept advancing towards him. “Why would you do this to me?!’”

He stared at her, wide eyed. 

“In sickness and in health. To love and to cherish. I love you”

“You have ruined everything!”

“I love you so much. I don’t wanna kill you. I don’t wanna hurt you, Annabeth.”

“You’re not gonna because I’m gonna kill you first! Fuck you!”

Annabeth finally reached him, and placed one hand on his back, and one steady on her knife. Leaning against him. Her ankle buckled, and he caught her.

“It’s okay.” he whispered, holding her up so she didn’t injure her ankle more. “I accept it.”

“That’s not what you’re supposed to say!”

He gathered her into his arms, and she wept against his chest, her tears smearing into his weather. “What am I?” She whispered, her voice scarcely audible. “ If I don’t kill you, then my mother kills me. One of us gets to leave this cabin and go on living.”

“It’s not living if I can’t do it with you”

“Shut up! Fuck you!” She said, devoid of all previous venom. 

The two of them sank to the ground, and looked out the big living room window. The door to the back kept pounding on the wall. The blizzard kept turning. Annabeth kept sobbing. 

Percy was still silent. Shock-still, as if carved from stone. Their shoulders were touching. The wind picked up, and the snow blew faster.

Annabeth could reach over and stab him now. It would be the easiest kill ever. Take her knife and, bam, right through the sternum, into the heart. Give it a little twist, and hold him while he died. She had slain her loves before, the act held no mystery to her. She imagined he’d hold her hand while he died. Just like Luke.

She would then probably cry, and she’d probably spend the next year crying. But once she’d run out of tears, then what? She’d be back in Long Island, a widow at thirty, working at her architectural firm, maybe getting that MBA she wanted to add onto her masters, spending Percy’s money on clothes and shaving her head and kicking her scar-cream and concealer habit because what more secrets could she keep? 

She might quit the world of the Gods, work as a travel specialist or in client relations or something, travel the world, live out of carry ons in first-class lounges with hundreds of thousands of Marriott Points. She might sleep around, she’d definitely never date again. No, she knew at the wedding. Percy was it. When he was gone she’d be done. She’d live a life that felt like freedom and she’d whisper “I repent nothing” into the mirrors of a hundred hotel rooms in Beijing and Prague and Cape Town and live a life where she wouldn't be sure where she stops and her job begins. A life like the one she lived when she was sixteen, separate from the one she lived now.

Could she do that? Annabeth, in hubris, thought she could. She thought she’d be able to go on living after Percy died. Well, not living, but something. Just waiting for Elysium in a life that felt like Asphodel. 

But first, there’s this moment, this lamp-lit airBnB: Annabeth sits on the floor beside her husband, and she leans back until she finds the reassuring solidity of the wall against her spine. Percy is now crying a little, and together they look at the snow. One more time, she plays through the motion. Reach back, knife, twist, stab, hold, apologize. Then what? Bury him out back? Try to bring his body back to Sally without being arrested for murder? Go to his funeral? Leave flowers at his grave? Annabeth lets out one, giant sob, like her heart is the one with the knife inside of it.
“You’re right.” She whispers. “You’re right.”

Percy brings his mouth to the top of her head, and speaks, soft and steady and low. “Til death do us part. And this is my solemn vow.”

They stayed like that, for a while, looking out the window. The storm their only witness.

Then, Percy got up. Suddenly shifting, Annabeth was left to carry her own weight on the floor. She watched him go to the garage slowly, holding his side, and get a handful of nails from the toolbox and a hammer on the wall, and pluck a charcuterie board out from a cabinet above the oven, and she watched him approach that damned door, throw his weight against it with a big oof . He took the board and nailed the door shut, sweeping the piled up snow half-hazardly towards the fireplace. Gripping the wall, Percy pointed his arm towards the snow and glared. It didn’t do anything. 

He turned towards the fridge and poured himself a cup of water and chugged it. Then he did it again. And again. 

He refocused on the snow, which then melted, and streamed towards the still burning-ish fire in the living room. He drowned the sofa and carpets and everything, but left the hearth itself untouched. 

Then, he limped on to the bedroom, grabbed the entire California king-size comforter, and headed back to his wife, who

was still wide-eyed and staring. And he wrapped it around both of them. A couple moments passed. Then,

“Are you a spy?”

He shakes his head. “No. You?”

A faint, rueful smile was upon her lips. “I think we both are just two of the small population who knows the value and worth of The Rusty Nail.”

“I don’t know, I prefer to think of there being a little more poetry than that involved. Although I don’t know why no one seems to get old Rusty Nail except for us.”

Annabeth appreciated it, his playing along with her untactful steering of the conversation into good, well worn, well hashed banter. A trail they both knew how to tread. She would cry with gratitude, and just the surge of love she felt, if she had tears left. 

“I mean, sure they’re really watering down the beer in the back.” He stuck out his hand for his wife to use to get herself up, and embraced her in a way that soothed the pain on her ankle. They both kept hold of the comforter, still both wrapped in it.

“And you have to wear your Bar Shoes, because the floors are so sticky they ruined my Jordans.”

“But the duct-tape stools and wobbly tables and pool table with missing balls have a certain character to them!”

They were swaying a little here, dancing to the sound of the wind. “Really, credit cards are a scam. They’re doing us a favor by remaining a cash-only business!” Percy exclaimed sarcastically, still quiet though. 

Annabeth let out a shaky laugh and broke away as best she could without putting strain on her ankle. “Oh gods. Jesus. What’s next? What am I going to tell Camp? What am I going to tell my mother? Percy, we’re gonna get killed!”

Percy grabbed her by the arm, yanked her back to him, and kissed her, and Annabeth put everything into the kiss. Every piece of anger she had towards him, all of the sadness, all of the love, all of the hope. Percy was meeting her, one hand on the small of her back, the other on her neck.

She pulled away and looked at her husband, who had a tattoo, and hypertrophic scars on his face and arms, with discoloration around his eyes, who controlled blood and was a dictator and lied to her for seven years. “Fuck it,” she breathed.

“In for a penny,” Percy agreed breathlessly, and pulled her back in.

Reyna, after the meeting, after chewing Frank out, after feeding the dogs, after getting her nails done, opened her computer, and typed out a message.

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

My Praetor has been compromised. The time has come. Notify your father.

She attached a series of coordinates in deep Yukon territory, and after sending it, drove forty-five minutes in silence, parked her Porsche, and sat in the little dark booth to the left of the entrance of the church.

“Bless me father, for I have sinned. It has been one day since my last confession.”

Chapter Text

Laying together in their post-sex haze, Percy stroked Annabeth’s head as it laid on his bare chest. 

“I love you,” she said.

He grinned down at her. “I love you too,”

She looked angelic in the evening sun reflecting now brightly over the freshly fallen snow. 

And a red dot appears on his wife’s forehead. A laser sight.

Percy rolled her out of the bed, and onto the floor in half a second ahead of a volley of bullets.

Annabeth bhit the ground with a grunt and immediately reached for the scattered clothes that had clearly been left there by the last couple. She pulled on a great big button down and cartoonish heart boxers. 

Percy struggled into his blood-stained jeans and yanked his sweater over his head, then flung Annabeth’s scarf at her. Another round of gunfire shattered the remnants of the window, shards of glass and splinters went flying.

“Who could possibly be trying to kill me now?” bit Annabeth as they crawled away from the door, before they heard a kicking at the door, and a great clang as Percy’s nail-shut operation tore apart. The enemy is definitely in the house.

Percy grappled for his back pocket, feeling Riptide appear. 

“You can turn invisible right?” He whispered.

“Only with my hat. It’s in the snow, with my guns.”

“Guns? How many did you buy?”

“Not the point! You can kill them right? Like, suck out all the water from their bodies?”

Percy looked incredulous. “Where did you hear that?! No! I can maybe freeze one person at a time, and it’s not exactly my best skill!”

“What if you like, drown them with the snow?”

“Babe, your intel sucks. Water is different than snow!”

“I know that!” They crouch at the doorway of the bedroom, and look down the hall. “I know that water is different than snow but–” Annabeth is cut off by Percy covering her mouth, and after a second she can hear the assassin too.

The intruder’s heavy boots creaked closer.

Then a small object rolled into view.

Grenade.

Annabeth grabs Percy by the collar and yanked him away from the door. With a grunt, she hurls him out the already-broken window, jumps out onto him, and the two began running towards the shooter just as the grenade detonated, engulfing the cabin in flames.

They hit the ground running, barefoot and shivering, sprinting into the Alaskan wilderness. Smoke and fire billowed behind them, casting long shadows as the sun dipped lower on the horizon.

“New Rome couldn’t spring for a better pilot in your private jet?”

“Oh come on, Nico, you know I don’t have a private jet. This is Rome’s. I had to apply to use it.”

“Reyna has her own jet.”

Frank chose to say nothing at that, except, after a beat; “It’s not the pilot’s fault there’s a blizzard giving us all this turbulence.”

Piper looked between Frank and Nico. “Pardon me, obviously you two know Rome better than I do, but why would Reyna have a private jet and not you? You are both equal, am I correct?”

She was correct, but Piper didn’t know anything. Everyone thought in New Rome, Reyna handled everything. Reyna wore the pants. And before it was Reyna it was Percy. And before Percy it was the clergy. 

Piper, the graecus, doesn’t understand a complex balance of power. Reyna controls defense and the security of Rome, she commands the military, she handles emergencies, she manages foreign policy, so what?! Just a glorified President. Frank, Canadian, was partial to the Prime Minister-like Praetor position; overseeing cabinets, liaising between Reyna and the Senate, doing all the day-to-day stuff!

“We are equals!” he yelled. Piper and Nico snapped to attention, surprised that his voice could carry power. Gods, how embarrassing. “We are equals!” he repeated, quieter, looking down at his hands. “We just… look, if Reyna wants a jet that’s her own prerogative. It doesn’t mean she is involved in a secret nefarious plot to overturn my power!”

Reyna was really proud of herself. Her secret nefarious plot to overturn Frank's power had worked like a charm. 

Hylla had said to her some comment, years ago, when she engineered Frank’s re-rise to power, that “House of Cards wasn’t meant to be a how-to guide for politics.” and she laughed at her. Because, come on, Hylla had needed to kill everyone in line for the throne of Queen of the Amazons. This was way tamer. 

Reyna’s the daughter of a war goddess. Really. What could people expect?

And Frank, bless him, was awesome at being Frank. He loved budget meetings and rules committees and photo ops at orphanages. Reyna had engineered it perfectly: Frank does all the work she couldn’t give a shit about, and Reyna has all the money, secrets, and leverage that matters.

Really, it was being nice to Frank. Getting his hands dirty is what made him resign in the first place. She was lovingly carrying that burden for him. 

And now he’s in jail, helpfully out of the way while she does that dirty work, while she does what her mother commanded of her. She had to pat herself on the back here, she was really good at her job.

Of course, she’d probably have to kill him afterwards, but she wouldn’t be hasty with it. If she played her cards right, he might even live. See? She was super nice to Frank.

When her mother commanded her to go to New York almost three years ago, she met up with Clarisse La Rue-Rodriguez at a Broadway performance of The Lion King. Clarisse wanted to see Hadestown, but Reyna thought it was too on-the-nose. Plus, she wanted to see the costumes and puppets. 

Clarisse sat next to her, and at intermission, she turned, and explained egg tapping. 

“We do it on Easter. It’s a Greek tradition. You take your egg and hit it lightly against someone else’s. If your egg breaks, you’re out. Last one standing wins good luck.”

Reyna didn’t know the woman next to her was Clarisse at the time, and tried to avoid the small talk by opening up her purse and pretending to rifle around.

“Luke told Silena about it, and Silena told me.” Clarisse continued.

At the mention of Luke Castellan, Reyna snapped to attention. 

“Silena told me about it with such horror. It was Easter, and we were dying our eggs, and she was trying to convert me to Luke’s side.” 

Clarisse let out a breath and paused. “‘ A real life egg-tapping.’ She said to me, and I was too focused on my bewilderment at the revelation that there was a Roman camp. But I won that night, my egg was strongest, and I looked at that egg and I couldn’t find the same injustice that she found in it. The strongest survive.”

“Sounds like a waste of eggs.” Reyna said.

“It's not about the eggs. It's about the fridge. We must make sure nothing spoils.” 

Then, Clarisse took Reyna’s hand. “We have different parents, but we both have war in our blood. I hope you understand. Reach out to me when you do.” And the woman pressed a business card into Reyna's hand.

And then, just before the second act began, Clarisse left. Reyna sat through a few more songs, less watching and more staring off into the middle distance in bewilderment, then,  halfway through “Can You Feel The Love Tonight,” Reyna walked out too, and headed straight to LaGuardia.

She got back at 1 a.m. She couldn’t sleep.

At 2 a.m., she scribbled every word she could remember from Clarisse into her gratitude journal.

At 3 a.m., she was in the library, combing through egg tapping, Greek traditions, and everything she could find about Luke Castellan.

At 4 a.m., she had a stroke of sleep-deprived genius, and went to the restricted section in the basement. She went to the unabridged historical timelines.

At 5 a.m., she had vomited, and sobbed, and walked back to her home where she was pacing  around in a sleepless haze. 

Right before 6 a.m., Reyna opened the journal, and saw the first words she had written down from Clarisse.

It's about the fridge.

And, just above it, the strongest survive.

The graecus was right. It was necessary to keep Rome strong.

At 6 a.m., Reyna went to sleep, and she has slept almost-soundly since.

She would later summarize to co-conspirators and other children of war this:

CLASSIFIED – DO NOT SHARE. DESTROY AFTER READING.

Subject: Strategic Overview: Greek-Roman Relations

All,

Power is an inherently complex force, is it not? Mortals begin life on an equal plane, power is forged through effort and charisma. Gods are born unequal, power is granted via divine essence. Us demigods, however, occupy a unique position–we inherit both potential and power.

This duality shapes the crux of our existence. Those who forge their own power do so with resilience and, often, with anger. Power is rarely sought without a fundamental desire to overcome some injustice or to correct some wrong. Those who are given power, by contrast, are entitled–they do not know a life without the ability to solve problems via elimination. And some demigods are both born with power, and pursue more of it. They are hungry. They are insatiable.

There is nothing as dangerous as a hungry man.

George W. Bush registered a 90% approval rating shortly after the terrorist attacks on September 11th, 2001. For the preservation of peace, there must be an enemy, an eternal force to rally against, a manufactured other. For the preservation of peace, we must also destroy a cancer before it infects the whole body politick. Angry, entitled demigods are useful against monsters, but they always make fantastic insurrectionists. When there is no more power to gain, they look towards the gods. 

The Greeks, therefore, create our peace, and we create theirs. We are fascists, they are savages, and harmony perseveres in each camp. When monsters can no longer kill demigods, and when godly intervention would create martyrs, we are given the opportunity to perpetuate this co-engineered propaganda. Our strongest demigods kill each other, and our status as enemies perseveres.

This is how we control a nation. We are utilitarians. I will gladly trade the graves of thousands of innocents for the grave of the rogue, doubting Dextra Romae. No matter how seemingly benign he is now, he will not be controlled forever. Remember what happened when the Greeks didn’t remove a tumor fast enough.

For the eternity of Rome,

Praetor Ramírez-Arellano

Attached: Image of mass grave from the Titan Wars. 

It’s all good, preventative work. She’ll miss Percy. He’s a great man, a good friend, and a loyal Roman. But it’s not like she was sentencing him to his death. If he killed Annabeth, he’d be safe. She had to have faith in her egg, that he wouldn’t crack when hit against an enemy. 

But, if he cracked, then whatever. Can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And Reyna loves omelets. Good protein. Makes you stronger.

And then, the cameras she put in the cabin showed the two… forgiving each other? Holding hands? Dancing? Having sex? 

Gross.

She had told Clarisse as soon as Frank called her, and Clarisse said that the next move was obviously to kill Frank. Reyna rolled her eyes at this, not only would the Greek general obviously jump at the chance for a dead praetor, but Clarisse tended to solve all their problems with ‘kill anyone who knows.’

Reyna was barely able to save Nico. Clarisse was a blunt object. Reyna was more subtle. She didn't take pleasure in death, and sought to avoid it at all costs.

No, if she played her cards right, she’d get to save as many people as possible. If everything went right, Percy would kill Annabeth, bring the Saturn-baby to Rome, and then kill himself a few days later because uxoricide would take its toll.

But things weren’t going in her favor anymore. They were not unsavable though. She’d just kill both of them and send some other demigod to fetch the baby. Or maybe Frank would figure out how to get it and himself out of jail. She wasn’t tracking him at the moment. He was no threat.

So she alerted Clarisse, and trusted the Greek forces would arrive in Alaska, and sent her own troops in too to kill the couple.

It wasn’t as morally taxing anymore to kill people, even people she saw as friends. Reyna could find she could justify almost anything she did to be “for the good of Rome.” And if it could save her people, her Gods, her world, she’d do it. No questions asked.

There was a little part to her, the mortal part, that struck her. All the blood on her hands, executing people for crimes they didn’t commit. So she went to her priest, and got forgiven, and learned how to live for the good of the people. 

“What now?!” Percy panted in the forest. 

“Fuck!” Annabeth whispered. A gust of wind hit them and she shivered hard. He peeled off his bloody sweater and passed it to her. She wordlessly took it, smiling in kind-of thanks. As thankful as one could be in a stranger’s boxers in the snow, with a barefoot, bare-chested war-criminal husband staring at them expectantly.

“Oh my god, it’s so cold.”

“Yeah, but what’s the plan?”

“I don’t have a plan! I’m just cold!”

Percy felt his face scrunch in confusion. “You are this great strategic genius, you plan the Battle of Manhattan to purposefully raze down Olympus to rebuild it in your interest, you trick the Goddess Diana into taking Atlas’ burden of the sky to rejoin with Kronos’ army, and you have no plan?”

Annabeth stared at him, agape. “What?”

“You’re this criminal mastermind, I assumed you’d have a plan!”

“I am not a–who told you that? Jesus! No, I don’t have a plan!”

A beat, then, “I mean, I kind of have a plan.”

Jolie felt genuinely bad about trying to kill Percy Jackson. She knew not to question a Praetor’s orders. Percy had married a saturnist, he had turned, he was a threat to Rome. 

But she couldn’t help thinking of entering Rome, of joining the fifth cohort, scared and alone, with a newly-dead mother, crying in the barracks at night. And Percy, fresh from his role as Dictator, still partially blind from the poison Krios had thrown at him, still walking with a cane from his war wounds, asking her to come with him in the middle of the night and help him read some records he needed to be familiar with before a testimony in the Senate.

Jolie had been the leader of the Fifth for almost three years now. She knew Percy could have asked anyone to help him. She knew Percy probably didn’t even need to read those records. But she also knew the best thing you could do for a depressed person is give them a purpose. Jolie, just twelve years old, sat on the beach with the feared son of Neptune, and was told that she was needed, and wanted, and important, and helpful. And Jolie, twenty four now, still remembered that moment.

At the top of the snow, she sat, scanning the area with her rifle for any sign of her targets, and something died inside her.

Shee froze, her neck unable to complete its full 180. Stopped halfway through. She couldn’t blink, could barely breathe, and she saw the graecus saturnist woman kick the gun from her hands. The saturnist rolled her over so she was belly up and could stare at her, crouching over, glaring with eyes the color of tar and void.

“You know this bitch?” She asked behind her shoulder. Jolie’s eyes focused then on Percy, whose face softened in recognition, but there was no warmth. Just understanding.

“She’s one of ours.” He said, then approached her, and Jolie unfroze. She was still paralyzed with fear, but at least she could blink.

“What did they tell you?”

“You’ve…” she gulped. “You’ve shacked up with a Saturnist. You’re a traitor to Rome.” a pause, then, “We eliminate Saturnists.”

“And you never doubted?” He asked. 

Jolie’s eyes fixed on his chest, where she could see every battle mapped out on Percy’s skin. Every act of loyalty to Rome. It didn’t strike her, in her frozen brain, with two Titan Killers in front of her, that it was in any way bizarre that Percy was shirtless in this frozen wasteland. He just looked Roman to her. 

When Jolie didn’t respond, he punched her in the face, leaving her knocked out in the snow.

Annabeth stripped the clothes off the Roman sniper and split the clothes between her and her husband. The sniper was bulky, tall, so Percy took what he could fit in, and Annabeth took the rest. They each took a shoe, it squeezing Percy’s foot, and it much too large on her own. She was now in one shoe, fleece leggings, an oversized button up poking out of a blood stained sweater, a beanie cap, and one glove. Percy was in a ski jacket with nothing under it, jeans, one shoe, and the other glove. They left the sniper chick in her shirt and underwear. 

They had talked about killing him. Percy was on board, sniper-bitch was the one who pointed the gun at Annabeth’s head, and he couldn’t forgive her for it, but Annabeth argued that if blind loyalty deserved the death sentence, then they’d better bomb both camps, because every demigod in America was guilty of that crime.

They decided to leave it up to the gods, if the kid would get hypothermia, and Annabeth grabbed her long-ass gun. 

The next sniper that Percy found was Greek. This was more frightening. Annabeth was too cold to put pieces together in her head, but she certainly didn’t love that Romans and Greeks going after the same target was a two-time thing, and that this boy, Brad, was focused on killing her rather than the Roman merely 500 feet from him.

Thanks to the two snipers, though, Percy and Annabeth were able to form complete outfits, and both had guns. 

The third sniper was Roman again. When Percy unfroze him, he reached back for his gun, and called Annabeth a slew of words, starting off with Saturnist and savage and ending with ones where Annabeth didn’t put much of a fight up when Percy killed him. They fetched her hat, coat, guns, and car keys, and snuck down to the car when Percy said it was clear. The sun finally set, and as Percy looked out the window to see purple helicopters with SPQR blazed on the side follow, Annabeth floored it to Fairbanks.

Chapter Text

“What now?!” Percy panted in the forest. 

“Fuck!” Annabeth whispered. A gust of wind hit them and she shivered hard. He peeled off his bloody sweater and passed it to her. She wordlessly took it, smiling in kind-of thanks. As thankful as one could be in a stranger’s boxers in the snow, with a barefoot, bare-chested war-criminal husband staring at them expectantly.

“Oh my god, it’s so cold.”

“Yeah, but what’s the plan?”

“I don’t have a plan! I’m just cold!”

Percy felt his face scrunch in confusion. “You are this great strategic genius, you plan the Battle of Manhattan to purposefully raze down Olympus to rebuild it in your interest, you trick the Goddess Diana into taking Atlas’ burden of the sky to rejoin with Kronos’ army, and you have no plan?”

Annabeth stared at him,  agape. “What?”

“You’re this criminal mastermind, I assumed you’d have a plan!”

“I am not a–who told you that? Jesus! No, I don’t have a plan!”

A beat, then, “I mean, I kind of have a plan.”

Jolie felt genuinely bad about trying to kill Percy Jackson. She knew not to question a Praetor’s orders. Percy had married a saturnist, he had turned, he was a threat to Rome. 

But she couldn’t help thinking of entering Rome, of joining the fifth cohort, scared and alone, with a newly-dead mother, crying in the barracks at night. And Percy, fresh from his role as Dictator, still partially blind from the poison Krios had thrown at him, still walking with a cane from his war wounds, asking her to come with him in the middle of the night and help him read some records he needed to be familiar with before a testimony in the Senate.

Jolie had been the leader of the Fifth for almost three years now. She knew Percy could have asked anyone to help him. She knew Percy probably didn’t even need to read those records. But she also knew the best thing you could do for a depressed person is give them a purpose. Jolie, just twelve years old, sat on the beach with the feared son of Neptune, and was told that she was needed, and wanted, and important, and helpful. And Jolie, twenty four now, still remembered that moment.

At the top of the snow, she sat, scanning the area with her rifle for any sign of her targets, and something died inside her.

Shee froze, her neck unable to complete its full 180. Stopped halfway through. She couldn’t blink, could barely breathe, and she saw the graecus saturnist woman kick the gun from her hands. The saturnist rolled her over so she was belly up and could stare at her, crouching over, glaring with eyes the color of tar and void.

“You know this bitch?” She asked behind her shoulder. Jolie’s eyes focused then on Percy, whose face softened in recognition, but there was no warmth. Just understanding.

“She’s one of ours.” He said, then approached her, and Jolie unfroze. She was still paralyzed with fear, but at least she could blink.

“What did they tell you?”

“You’ve…” she gulped. “You’ve shacked up with a Saturnist. You’re a traitor to Rome.” a pause, then, “We eliminate Saturnists.”

“And you never doubted?” He asked. 

Jolie’s eyes fixed on his chest, where she could see every battle mapped out on Percy’s skin scarred on. Every act of loyalty to Rome. It didn’t strike her, in her frozen brain, with two Titan Killers in front of her, that it was in any way bizarre that Percy was shirtless in this frozen wasteland. He just looked Roman to her. 

When Jolie didn’t respond, he punched her in the face, leaving her knocked out in the snow.

Annabeth stripped the clothes off the Roman sniper and split the clothes between her and her husband. The sniper was bulky, tall, so Percy took what he could fit in, and Annabeth took the rest. They each took a shoe, it squeezing Percy’s foot, and it much too large on her own. She was now in one shoe, fleece leggings, an oversized button up poking out of a blood stained sweater, a beanie cap, and one glove. Percy was in a ski jacket with nothing under it, jeans, one shoe, and the other glove. They left the sniper chick in her shirt and underwear. 

They had talked about killing him. Percy was on board, sniper-bitch was the one who pointed the gun at Annabeth’s head, and he couldn’t forgive her for it, but Annabeth argued that if blind loyalty deserved the death sentence, then they’d better bomb both camps, because every demigod in America was guilty of that crime.

They decided to leave it up to the gods if the kid would get hypothermia, and Annabeth grabbed Jolie's long-ass gun. 

The next sniper that Percy found was Greek. This was more frightening. Annabeth was too cold to put pieces together in her head, but she certainly didn’t love that Romans and Greeks going after the same target was a two-time thing, and that this boy, Brad, was focused on killing her rather than the Roman merely 500 feet from him.

Thanks to the two snipers, though, Percy and Annabeth were able to form complete outfits, and both had guns. 

The third sniper was Roman again. When Percy unfroze him, he reached back for his gun, and called Annabeth a slew of words, starting off with Saturnist and savage and ending with ones where Annabeth didn’t put much of a fight up when Percy killed him. They fetched her hat, coat, guns, and car keys, and snuck down to the car when Percy said it was clear. The sun finally set, and as Percy looked out the window to see purple helicopters with SPQR blazed on the side follow, Annabeth floored it to Fairbanks.

The baby was freaking Nico out.

It didn’t look like a normal baby, it had these gigantic eyes that were always looking, and there was always a little drool, and it’s hands kept… grabbing.

He noted his observations out loud. 

“So… the baby’s acting like a regular baby?” Piper rolled her eyes. At the time, she was rifling through the snack drawer Rome kept stocked on it’s private planes and muttering about how all the juice boxes were full of red wine and that was apparently ridiculous.

Nico didn’t agree. The red wine juice boxes were the best. He also didn’t agree about the baby. There was something off. Even if the thing hadn’t frozen time earlier, he could feel it’s power. He pulled out his phone and texted Will.

Hey Will it’s me Nico.  Bad terrible news do u know Percy from N rome.  Love Nico.

Then, he searched up a picture of “right hand” and copied the link and sent it. 

Then, I put a picture of the right hand because everyone calks Percy Jackson the right hand because he is imPOryan t. Love Nico.

Will responded almost immediately.

Here’s the thing. At this point it seems like you are purposefully incompetent at texting. 

Will, You are a young Man.  Love Nico

UGHHHHH YOU HAVE BEEN IN THE TECHNOLOGY AGE FOR ALMOST TWENTY YEARS!!!!!!!

Then, what’s the bad news?

And Nico told him what he could. He didn’t text him any of the top secret, real shit that almost got him killed in the process of knowing–not through these bulky Hermes-made iPhones. But he told him about how Annabeth’s husband had been discovered to be Roman.

They waited five years into the marriage to kill him? I mean. Athena def knew Chase was marrying a Roman son of the enemy.

And, for that matter, how did Rome not know? It took until quests aligned for them to find out?

Nico didn’t know how to tell him without putting him in danger, so the pause between his messages was even longer than regular.

If it’s dangerous, don’t tell me. But Nico, please get out of there. Come home.

Nico, unlike Annabeth or Percy, knew his partner. He knew Will wouldn’t want him mixed up in this shit, not at his own expense. So that was what he was going to do, he’d deliver Frank and Piper, and then get the hell out. He liked Frank, and he didn’t want him to die, at least for the sake of Hazel. But Frank was a praetor… technically, and he had to trust that he’d survive. And Piper?

Piper was… fine. Whatever.

He had done enough by getting on this fucking plane with a greek and roman powerhouse and this clearly evil baby, he didn’t have to do anything else. Fairbanks, then travel to Yukon, then go back to Austin, with his husband and his BBQ restaurants and his TTRPG club and his sunsets in Zilker Park with the bats.

Nico was a deserter. Piper could see the look in his eyes. He wasn’t gonna finish this. And so she pondered two facts as she kind-of played candy crush and kind-of listened to Fleetwood Mac.

One: Nico knew more than she did. 

Two: He didn’t want to get involved in it.

Why wouldn’t he want to get involved? This is a really simple journey, the only real construct being time. Tell Annabeth that Percy isn’t a spy. Tell Percy the same. They’d probably accept the news with happiness.

No, she had to think harder. She had to be like Annabeth.

What had he said? “This is a lot of shit you’re dragging me into” no, not that one. “You’re damn right there are bigger things.”

Piper shut off the game. She revisited what she knew.

One: Nico knew more than she did.

Frank had mentioned on the way out that Hazel didn’t want him to get Nico involved. Why? Because Nico had been through enough shit? Probably. No, something more. Nico had been a double agent for years. He grew up at camp, saved Hazel, spent a few years in teenagehood in California, moved to texas with greek boy Will Solace, but had been to California his fair share of times. 

Why? Why go to California? All Piper has ever known is that the Romans were genuine tyrant authoritarians, whose strict government regulation created this 1984-ass city where any word of doubt against leadership resulted in banishment to the monster-infested city just outside. Where one could not come and go at will, where citizens were held to these Stalinist five year plans that forced every person into volunteer laborers operating under oppressive, totalitarianist conditions.

“Frank?”

“Hm?”

“If…” she had to play her cards right here. Come on. Be Annabeth. Be Annabeth. “If you wanted to leave New Rome. And move out, and leave it all behind, what would that look like?”

Frank scrunched his brow.

“Uh. Kinda depends on who you are.” He laughed. “If you’re under sixteen, it’s almost impossible, unless you have a guardian who the state has cleared has the ability to protect you. Or if you specifically were drawn for a quest, but in that case you gotta bring people over 16 with you. That’s why Percy and I were friends actually,” he laughed again. Nervous. “Because I’m two years older than him, I could apply for guardianship over him when he needed to go do quests.

“But older? You need proof of residency outside New Rome, to pass a few fighting tests to make sure you’re suitable for fighting everyday monsters, you probably can’t leave California for the first few years, but then.. Yeah… you’re good. Go wherever.”

“If you’re some big state official or war hero, we’ll send some probatios to monitor you, make sure you aren’t like, selling state secrets, but… yeah.”

Two: He didn’t want to get involved in it.

If she operated under her own knowledge, it made sense why Nico didn’t want to get involved. New Rome was evil. But it didn’t explain why Nico got involved in the first place. If she operated under Frank’s knowledge, Nico’s involvement was great–more connections, more demigods, more power–but his severance with the nation would make no sense. Why live in Austin? Why leave New Rome?

Piper knew why she left Camp. There was no permanence, no order, no way to raise a family. To continue. But once New Athens was built… would she move there? She’d at least visit, as she had been. Not like Nico. Not like careful, avoidant Nico. 

Come on, be Annabeth. Sharp, quick, connect the dots.

All she had so far is that the truth lies in between what she and Frank know about New Rome, and that that truth will make Nico desert. She’d keep an eye on him, just as she had when she first arrived in Camp, and Bianca pulled her aside and said to protect him.

She remembered the look on his face right after she had sworn that promise, when Bianca signed up for the hunters, and when Annabeth was close to doing so as well. Premature grief. She saw it again now, twenty years later, and the nausea of anticipation welled up in her. 

Nico was on his phone, holding it a foot away from his face and typing with one finger at a time like he was a grandfather.

Piper was squinting at Nico.

And Frank was busy thinking about how everyone else was thinking except for him.

What were they thinking about so hard?

“What are you guys thinking about?”

The two were silent.

He tried again, “What are you guys thinking about?”

Nico and Piper just looked at him. He felt like a child. He always felt like a child. He’s not serious, or powerful, or vaguely competent. A pulse of anger rushed through him at these two graecus scum. Both calculating, cold-hearted killers, both enemies of the state. Look at Piper, there, with her hawkish nose and long lashes, who didn’t care too much if Percy lived or died. What would happen if Annabeth dies, huh? Their mockery of New Rome– New Athens, ugh– would stumble in it’s production? The solitary, distinctly unlikable woman would be mourned then missed.

Piper rolled her eyes and Frank felt her glare go right through his body. He swallowed, and tried to push away the familiar taste of fear.

“It’s about six hours to Fairbanks. They won’t engage us until they either find the dead snipers or Reyna calls me. It’s only justified if I strike first.” Percy said, looking around the car to take stock of Annabeth’s supplies she had brought out. There wasn’t much in here. “Did you even pack?” He asked.

She looked straight at the open road, driving slowly–too slowly for the fact they were being pursued, but the roads were so icy he didn’t blame her. “No. I was… distracted.”

There was a beat between them. Christmas carols played soft and low on the radio–Bing Crosby’s Silent Night . 

“I don’t think the Greeks will wait to engage. We don’t care as much about formal declarations of war. I proved I was an enemy of Olympus as soon as I didn’t kill you. If it were not for us being in Alaska, we would be struck down by Zeus by now.”

Percy checked the glovebox. Nice, a handgun. “What are we doing leaving Alaska then?”

In a moment, Annabeth’s twelve-year-old self entered mind. “A daughter of Athena always has a plan!” She would chirp, hands on hips. Gods, if that kid could see her now.

Her husband glanced at her.

“Annabeth. Do you have a plan?”

“I have a plan! It’s just… I have six hours to work out the kinks, don’t I?”

And, with the road behind her, and the rider in the shotgun seat taking the term literally, she attempted to let her brain expand. Resources, moves, countermoves, contingencies. 

“I need to write. Can we…” she left the question open, and Percy nodded. Setting the car to cruise control, she shifted out of the driver’s seat. Their bodies brushed in the cramped space, a fleeting collision of heat in the freezing Alaska wilderness.

She reached into the space below the passenger seat, and opened up her journal. Percy’s eyes flickered on the last few entries, written mainly in greek, but with big, bold English yelling at her to “KILL HIM!!! KILL THE FUCKING TRAITOR!!!”

She blushed, sheepish. “Sorry.”

“No, it’s… it’s alright. Ditto, until a bit ago.” He grimaced. “I told my mom I was going to kill you, should I call her?”

“No! No not yet. We have to protect all of our liabilities, and we can’t do that until we’re back home.”

Percy nodded, curt, although he clearly felt bad.

“Sorry about, you know, visiting your sick father.”

“Sorry about putting your mother in danger.”

Neither of them accepted each other's apologies, so they just hung in the air, right next to the fuzzy radio christmas music.

Annabeth started writing, scratching out words in greek and english. 

Reyna had a great office. In the senate building, it was huge. A waiting room, with her beloved receptionist Kerry and two interns a year who managed her affairs, and then a big door, where her dogs slept outside, guarding her, although she rarely felt unsafe anymore.

She styled it not like Frank, who made it all clean and Roman-styled, but after her American contemporaries. Her own oval office. Power had changed, and she changed with it. Tall ceilings, a big window, her Praetor portrait hanging on the wall, and six books scattered around the room.

The Leviathan was the only one that sat on her desk. She was an unabashed Hobbesian. Men were naturally at war, and they surrendered the freedom to destroy themselves for safety via social contract with the government. Hobbes had grown up in the 100 Years War and the English Civil War, and, touched by her mother, had made a biting work on the state of human nature. There was no justice, Hobbes argued, without punishment.

In her private chambers she kept her copy of The Prince . She needed to portray an image of power, but sometimes people got spooked, so she kept her Machiavelli at home.

She had autobiographies of Churchill and Lincoln on the coffee table in the sitting area in her office–it really was quite large–and copies of The Art of War near her mini-fridge, a passed-down signed version of Ulysses next to some of her war spoils.  Just Mercy near her wine. She kept a handgun near Meditations from Marcus Aurelius. The bible was on her shelf near the door, and on top of it sat The Aenied, and Plato’s The Republic . All of it was right next to her swords. She kept Icebreaker by Hannah Grace in her desk. She wasn’t all power, and people rarely wanted to fuck a praetor. It sat next to her dagger.

But it was Hobbes she liked best, and Hobbes is what she read when her old black rotary phone rang. Her private line, most thought it was a prop.

She let it ring three times, she never wanted to seem too available, and picked it up.

“Who is this?”

A beat, and then. “Hey, Reyna. Good to hear from you.”

Shit. Percy Jackson, sounding alive.

She breathed in audibly. Steeled herself.

“Before we start, I want to let you know that there are a few Roman teenagers about to freeze to death in the snow, and I’m sure they’d appreciate you knowing about them. Also, my very alive wife is on the phone too. Now, I’m calling you because someone had to order my death, and you seemed the obvious candidate.”

“Hi Percy. Annabeth. It wasn’t personal.”

“You’ll understand I kind of hoped it would be personal. The fact that it isn’t has some tough implications.”

Reyna gritted her teeth. 

“So I have to ask why? Annabeth here has been scribbling down her ideas, and we’re pretty sure we have the answer, but I want to hear it from you, old friend.”

And then the space just gaped from the phone. Reyna felt like she was drowning in it. And for the first time in twenty years, Reyna was afraid. 

She gritted her teeth, “Power is an inherently complex force, is it not?”

Silence on the line. Well. “Mortals begin life on an equal plane, power is forged through effort and charisma. Gods are born unequal, power is granted via divine essence. Us demigods, however, occupy a unique position–”

“Oh my gods Reyna shut up with that overly rehearsed bullshit. Give it to me straight now or give it straight when my sword is at your neck in a few hours.”

Shit. He was coming here. “Did you just threaten a praetor? Percy you know I could have you executed for that!”

“You’re already trying to get me executed!”

Touché.

“Rome and the Greeks have been striking a careful balance since our move to America in 1898. There are no civil wars when we’re waging war against each other. We are fascists, they are savages, and no one starts insurrections for both camps.” 

“Luke knew, didn’t he?” Annabeth asked.

“We stopped the program in the 2000s. We thought both camps were stable enough, and then guess what happened? An alliance with the Titans, a world nearly ended.”

“Did he know, though?” 

Damn. Reyna thought she had sidestepped well.

“Yeah. He knew.”

The three sat in the silence, then Reyna tried to pivot. “Does Frank know?”

Reyna burst out a laugh. “Gods, could you imagine? No, Frank doesn’t know shit. He’s in jail with that greek venus nepo baby girl–”

“Piper’s in jail?!” Annabeth interrupted.

“Yeah, her. He called me a few hours ago, fucking frantic, saying that you weren’t a spy, that Percy didn’t have to kill you, to call him off. Idiot. I’ll keep him in jail until you two die, and then i’ll pick him up and probably convince him that that silly thinking was due to… uh.. Pippa?”

“Piper.”

“Piper’s charmspeak. Shouldn’t be hard. It almost never is.”

Percy let out a shaky sigh. This was probably a hard time for him. “Percy, you’re my old friend. It really wasn’t personal. In fact, I'll strike you a deal. Kill Annabeth, and I’ll spare her family and yours, come back here, and I can publicize Frank’s getting-arrested and put you back as Praetor. Where you belong. You get the money, you get power, and you get to keep your life.”

“Eat my dick, Reyna.”

Reyna took a breath, again, steeled herself.

“You’re playing a dangerous game of chicken here. Listen Percy, you’re a tool, and I mean it in every sense of the word. We took you in when you were nothing, we raised you up, and you did your job. But now? You’re fucking useless. You’re no longer Dictator, you’re not even Praetor. The church hates your ass, you have no power there, and worst of all, you’re completely fucking irrelevant. You’re a fraction of who you used to be, you're a soft-hearted social worker, parading as a mortal in the most pathetic attempt to play house anyone has ever seen. You’re what, a Jets fan who’s idea of a “good time” is going to a fucking cookout and watching Star Wars movies with mommy?! You’re weak, and you bring your weakness all the way to California, where you openly question my leadership, my church, my Rome. Listen, asswipe: I will not have a Civil War happen. There will be order! 

“And Annabeth, I can’t pretend to know who you fucked over in order to deserve your fate, but frankly, I’m glad you’re going. You were the most insufferable bridezilla I’ve ever met, and you fucked my Right Hand so hard, you gave me carpal tunnel. 

“You both should know that while you’ve been putting on belly fat and stained jeans, I’ve been working. I am the most powerful Praetor in modern memory, I have complete control. I own the Senate, I own the Church, and I am sharper, stronger, and more dangerous than you can fucking comprehend.

“Here’s my final offer to you, Percy: come back to Rome, take Frank’s spot, shed this mortal fluff, and become who you were and who you were meant to be. Or you can keep playing this absurd game, and not only will I kill both of you, I will replace your name with mine in every scroll, legend, and history book. You’ll be nothing, rotting in asphodel forever. This pitiful attempt at mortal mediocrity ends now.” She spat. 

Percy took a moment to consider over the phone. “Reyna, you’ve given me a chance to escape with my life. I appreciate that, so I’ll give you one in return. I want you to call off your snipers, call off your guards, let my wife and I into New Rome to testify before the Senate.” She heard the water shut off above her. How? He was in Alaska!

“Think it over. I’ll see you soon.”

And they hung up.

Chapter Text

Jesus, these guys were fascists. 

Annabeth listened to Reyna’s crazed dialogue over the speakerphone, and, unintentionally, eyed Percy.

It was an offer to keep his life. A few hours ago he was going to kill her anyway. He caught her gaze and muted the phone. 

“I’m not gonna take it” he said, offended she would ask.

She shrugged. Worth it to ask, at least.

When Reyna inevitably granted what he’d asked for, Percy would enter New Rome with his graecus wife in tow, and he would put on his ceremonial shit–the laurels, the war medallions, the deep purple toga–and he would enter the Colosseum through the Gate of Life on the eastern Colosseum wall, and the afternoon sun would temporarily blind him, before his eyes adjusted, and he was able to start working.

Percy had entered the Colosseum many times before. When he was a teenager, he’d revel in perfect showmanship of the matter. And he was good at it. Even if he wasn’t powerful because of his father, he would take pride in the fact that he was powerful because of his sword. 

Fighting was easy, for him, something like the experience of Annabeth’s particularly quick, effortless typing: she thinks the words, and then they appear on screen, with no real awareness of the process in between. Percy saw a move, and, without consciously thinking of a reaction, expressed a move back. 

His mind, presumably, ran though every counter-move and parry, but he was unaware of it: he just moved. He saw himself constructing a defense and offense, making and breaking down strategies, identifying weakness, but he didn’t truly have the sensation that he was the person doing it.

He was good. It was in his gut, an entrance to the flow state, focus so clear that all distractions, even his own ego, falls away. Complex things become simple.

And all of the pomp and circumstance surrounding his famous, sold-out fight nights of teenagerhood came naturally too. It was a game, and he was very, very good at it.

When he and Reyna were close, when the war negated reasons for friendship and pulled all of it’s critical players together in a fucked-up tapestry of shared trauma and investment in the future of Rome, he confided to her when she asked him to train her how to fight better. These people were not his friends in any meaningful sense, but, at the time, they were his lifeblood.

“I don’t know how to coach you, Rey. I just do it.” He said to her, pulling her up to her feet after he had repeatedly failed to explain how you know when to execute certain maneuvers. 

She glared at him. “Well, figure out how you do it. When you get your head out of your ass, call me.”

She was fifteen, and Percy was half-convinced they might be in love with each other. He later justifies the feelings he had by simply ‘war fucks you up.’ Frank just called him bitchsexual. 

But, a few years later, with Percy a month away from stepping down as Praetor, Reyna found him drunk on the streets of the square, his head in his hands.

“I can’t do this Reyna! This… political crap! I can’t say the right things, I can’t ask the right questions, I don’t know what to even ask for!”

She crouched down to meet his level, and sat next to him, and pulled out a water bottle from her bag to hand to him. And she didn’t say much, she just looked at Diana’s moon with him, bright and big in the sky.

“It’s so hard, Rey.” Percy groaned. “It’s so hard for me, but you do it so well! How… how do you do it?”

And she held his hand, and said “I just do it. You have your talents, I have mine.”

And she got up, and dusted off her toga, and led him back home. 

But he could see, in her eyes, drunk on the streets of new rome, that she was her mother’s daughter. All war, all fight, a general, even when not at war.

In the last few weeks of his praetorship, he and Reyna struck a deal. He would still teach her sword fighting. They were older now, and the timing less crucial, and they had the ability to start at the basics without the tension of war thrumming between every word they said to each other. And she’d coach him in politics. 

She taught him ethics, conflict management, how to maintain his strong, martyr, weird Jesus-esque Playboy persona, and weaponize it. He taught her footwork, economy of motion, utilizing the environment. 

He taught her that sometimes, sword fighting is like arm-wrestling. The most brute force behind the attack wins.

She taught him how to negotiate. How to make it seem like you have more brute force than you do.

So, in the middle of his call, he had Annabeth message Kerry, Reyna’s assistant, posing as a safety team member, and state that they had received word of a chemical agent in the water line, and to quickly turn off all lines of water while the safety team tested for contaminants. 

He wasn’t fucking dull. He was still the man he was. And now he had a genius wife, who told him what to ask for, and coached him on how to ask it correctly beforehand. 

Still, he felt his chest tightened. To say his heart ached to discover the true cause of the matter was an oversimplification. He felt like he was having a heart attack. He might actually be having a heart attack. His muscles clenched, his teeth ground against each other, as his brain bounced like an air hockey puck, hitting four solid walls of information, and shooting off to hit another.

The first wall: The Greeks weren’t evil. Or, at least, no more evil than Rome. He could accept Annabeth wasn’t evil, but it was a large bias he had to deconstruct. 

The second: He was so close to killing Annabeth. He would have killed his wife. He looked at her, as she nervously checked around the car some more. He would have had to bury her.

The third: Reyna, Reyna, was at fault. Who gave him a Kill on Sight order. Who sent him on the mission to find the Saturn-baby likely for the express purpose of running into Annabeth. His friend, his companion, who had fought battles alongside him, who had taken a knife in the stomach to protect his back. Reyna. His friend. Gods.

The fourth: Maybe, if the Romans and Greeks hadn’t been smashing each other's best swords, and hadn't been picking off their best warriors, he wouldn’t have led the war. He wouldn’t have had to have been the Right Hand, Rome’s martyr-dictator. The war could have been a quick suppression of insurrection. 

Ricocheting from thought to thought, his brain moved faster, and his stomach twisted with the betrayal. He felt sick. 

Annabeth looked behind the car, and she saw two purple SPQR helicopters follow behind, but they didn’t move to attack, just following.

“I think it worked.” She said, mostly to herself.

Percy wiped his nose, red from the cold, and gripped the wheel.

“She used to be my best friend. And she… she’s manufacturing a war between the Greeks and Romans to fight against a riot that hasn’t even happened.”

Annabeth’s eyes flicked towards him. She had puzzled it out on her own, in the back of her mind, while she was still driven by the thrill of a quest, still hellbent on destroying him. That probably made it easier to digest. She thinks Luke tried telling her, even.

But this was Percy’s first time with the thought.

“All these great demigods killed. All the blood.” he was whispering.

Annabeth focused on texting Kerry, under the guise of safety inspector, to tell her it was a false alarm, and let Reyna’s office have water again. She opened her messages on her phone to see almost 20 from Piper.

ANNABETH, CALL ME. YOU DONT HAVE TO KILL HIM

CALL ME NOW

An hour later,

THE KILL ORDER IS OFF. GET OUT OF THERE. CALL ME

Thirty minutes later,

If you don’t call me, you’re killing yourself. I swear on styx, this is an important call. You need to call me. Please, please, please call me

“I was gonna kill you, Annabeth” Percy mumbled, but she was focused on the other ten messages from Piper.

“Babe, Piper texted me–” she cut her sentence off with s screech, as Percy veered off the side of the road, slammed it into park, threw open the door, and vomited.

She threw open the car door and ran to his side. His hands were on his knees, and he sank down to the ground, and made a big effort to do breathing exercises.

She just sat down with him, and rubbed a hand on his back while the Roman helicopters watched above.

“We’re just thirty minutes out from Fairbanks. Let me drive the rest of the way.” 

Percy shook his head at the suggestion. “No. It gives my brain something to focus on. Can we just… can we make a plan?”

Annabeth nodded, and helped him back into the car. She scurried back in after him. She hated Alaska. It was so cold she could feel her brain freezing.

“Okay, so we need a plane. We have to hope, by some miracle, no one’s put a warrant out for our arrest.”

Nico checked his phone. Pings from both the “Every Demigod That Is Alive That We Know About” greek email chain, and Times New Roman the Roman newspaper.

No one thought the name was funny in Rome. Will, the first time he had seen Nico reading it, laughed so hard he almost pissed himself. “Oh god, how ridiculous are those Romans?!” he cackled. To be honest, Nico had never noticed either. He blamed it on the fact that when he grew up, no one gave a shit about fonts–both in Italy and in the Greek and Roman war camps.

He opened the Greek email chain first.

To: [email protected] and 600+ more. See all…

From: [email protected]

Subject: WARRANT FOR IMMEDIATE ARREST: ANNABETH CHASE-JACKSON - d.o. ATHENA

ATTENTION GREEK DEMIGODS: This email serves as an official directive to locate and secure Annabeth Chase. This mission is of utmost priority. The one who finds the target will be rewarded handsomely with the Gods.

Target Details:

Name: Annabeth Zuri Chase-Jackson, Daughter of Athena and Frederick Chase

Last Known Location: Yukon territory, Alaska. Attempting to leave Alaska now.

Wanted for: Betraying Greek cause, disobeying direct order from Gods, joining the Roman army, and attempting to murder greek demigod operatives. This is a spy and traitor whom has been reporting greek information back to Rome for seven years, in conjunction with Perseus Jackson, titan-killer of New Rome.

Objective: The target is to be captured dead or alive. The decision to neutralize or detain the target must be based on real-time assessment of risk, resistance, and operational safety. This is a dangerous woman, working with a dangerous man. 

Reporting:

All updates on the operation should be relayed to Clarisse LaRue-Rodreguiez. Use secure communication channels only. This is a time-sensitive mission. Your cooperation and commitment art crucial to its success.

Strange, Nico thought. It was the most formal the Greeks had ever been. He opened the Roman news, and saw only one difference: Percy was not to be killed.

Interesting. 

He put the phone down.

“Well, I have some great news.”

Piper and Frank looked up at him, expecting. He let the tension draw out. He loved attention. For the Gods’ sake, he called himself The Ghost King as a teenager. 

“They didn’t kill each other.”

Frank clapped in excitement. “Oh thank the gods!” while Piper immediately began asking how he knew, drilling him and not giving him a chance to speak.

Then, her phone buzzed, and she showed the message she had gotten. A selfie of Percy and Annabeth in the car, both bloodied and bruised, but holding hands.

“Thank shit!”

Thank shit indeed. Nico relayed the news to Will that it looked like smooth sailing from here, and the plane started to touch down on Fairbanks runway. Percy and Annabeth would make a life for themselves in this godless land, and they could all just go home.

Percy and Annabeth returned the rental car, and, looking out the window, Annabeth saw a bright purple private plane touchdown.

“Shit. They’re sending reinforcements.” She whispered to Percy. “You deal with that? And I'll return the rental car?”

Percy nodded and moved fast. He ducked though employee exits, weaving past baggage carts and workers, the Mist keeping him a ghost in the almost-chaos of the Fairbanks airport post-blizzard. When the ground crew rolled up the stairs to the aircraft, he didn’t hesitate, or listen to their shouts, as he bounded up it. 

He felt out the door. Three people. No–four.

Then, he opened the door, which swung with a hiss.

He reacted on instinct. The first person he sensed he froze mid-movement, the second person found Riptide pressed against their throat before they could even gasp.

Then, he finally took in the cabin.

Piper McLean was frozen in her seat, eyes wide, breath shallow, and he had his sword up to the neck of…

“Frank! Buddy!” He put his sword down and hugged his friend.

“Percy! I’m so glad you’re alive! And… Annabeth?”

“She’s alive. Returning the rental car.” He clapped his friends back, and pulled away, still gripping Frank’s shoulders. “You would not believe how good it is to see someone I trust.”

Then, his gaze flicked past Frank, past awestruck, but unfrozen Piper, to the shadowy mass in the corner.

Nico.

He pushed Frank away.

“You fucker .” His voice came out low, sharp. He reached again for his sword.  

“You knew!” Frank barely had time to stumble away before Percy charged. Nico’s eyes flashed, and as Percy approached, the shadows swallowed him, and deposited him at the front of the plane, just out of reach.

“I’m in my right mind to kill you, you nearly killed me, worse, my wife , with your secret-keeping double-crossing traitorous bullshit!”

“You can’t kill me.” Nico said, calm and icy.

“You may be used to fighting some little centurions but it would do well for you to remember who I am.” 

A pool of darkness surrounded his ankles, locking them in place. Percy yanked up on his feet, right then left, and came at him again.

“You think you can take me? Does everyone think I’ve gone completely soft?!”

“Exactly!” Frank interjected, then looked embarrassed.

Nico was fading again, slinking back into the dark, but Percy lashed out, yanking water from every source in the cabin–toilet water, water bottles, the humidity in the air. It wrapped around Nico. 

Percy stalked forward to him. Slow, deliberate. He leaned in, voice a venomous whisper, as he got real close to Nico’s ear. 

“Did you think it was fucking funny, huh? Watching all of us kill each other? I know you know about it, I know you almost let me kill my wife.” He whispered. “Did you think twice before hiding the secret that this whole greco-roman war is fake?!” he yelled.

Piper gasped. 

The baby started crying. Percy drew back, and looked at it. Shit, he had mostly forgotten about the thing. Titania, who was wearing Frank’s signature poorly-knitted booties now. 

She was kinda cute. He looked sharply towards Frank, who grabbed the baby and started to rock her.

“You think it was fun for me? I found out by accident. Both sets of Gods wanted me killed for knowing. I was traitorous to both of them already. And Reyna stepped in and saved me, in exchange for me not telling anyone. And so I left, I went to Texas, I moved in with Will, and we have been rather good about not getting involved.”

“You could have fucking told me.”

“Jesus, Percy, we aren’t friends. I wasn’t at your wedding, I don’t keep up with your life, I don’t keep up with any demigod lives except for mine and Will’s. When I heard you two were married, I figured both of y’all knew! It seemed like a reasonable leap!”

Percy backed away, still glaring at him.

“The war is fake?” Piper asked.

“Oh yeah. The greek-savage, roman-fascist shit is propaganda to allow us to requests kill orders on our best demigods, have them killed by the other side, and have an enemy to focus on fighting so that there aren’t any insurrections against either government, or against the gods.” Nico explained. 

Piper sat down. Frank put his hand to his mouth.

“How did I not know this? I’m praetor!”

“Reyna’s been keeping it from you, buddy. You’re only praetor so that you can do the work she doesn’t want to do.” Percy said.

“She told you this?”

“She told me she had been keeping it from you. The rest is kind of… common knowledge” he winced. Frank winced. 

The baby was still crying, and Percy held out his arms, because Frank clearly didn’t know how to hold one. He started bouncing the girl, like he used to do with Estelle, and she quieted down.

A wave of fondness for the time-bomb baby came over him.

“Has she been weird?”
All of them nodded, and agreed in different tones.

“She froze time earlier.” Piper said.

“She’s just weird.” Frank said

“That baby is evil, I swear by it.” Nico added.

Percy looked down at the baby, who was staring back at him with wide eyes, still wet with tears. He wiped her cheek with his thumb. She didn’t look evil to him.

He looked at Nico, who, once again, had a knife to his throat.

“I’m gonna kill you today, underworld scum, you knew!” Annabeth’s voice filled the cabin. She took her Yankees cap off.

Nico shadow-traveled out of her grasp to the back of the plane.

“No, no. He’s… fine.” Percy said, before she could go at him. “It was keep the secret or die, and that’s why he hasn’t been at either camp since.”

Annabeth spat at him. “What a shameful fucking thing to do. Keep a secret and allow us to kill our best for crimes they may never commit? Fuck you.”

But she didn’t make an advance to kill him. Instead, she looked towards Frank, and nodded courteously. “Praetor.” and towards Piper, and she screeched and hugged her. 

“I’m so happy you’re alive!” Piper exclaimed.

“Well, maybe not for long. I saw Greek and Roman troops entering Alaska. Have they issued a general arrest warrant for us?”

“Yeah. Annabeth, you’re wanted dead or alive by the Greeks. Percy, you’re wanted alive.”

Annabeth looked at Percy and grinned. “It worked then. She ceded.” Then, she reached out her hands, and took the baby, and started rocking her, as if on instinct.

Probably on instinct. Percy thought about the Annabeth that he didn’t know–the one who grew up in Camp, caring for younger demigods, leading a war against the titans. He tried to keep a clean slate, free of the propaganda of what he thought she did, but he saw in the gentle motion that she had cared for a lot of babies before.

Had he and Annabeth really never talked about kids? He thought back to their marriage. They had really never talked about anything of substance. He pushed back the thought, and focused on how beautiful his alive wife looked. 

Nico did not like this plan. Annabeth had explained that obviously the next course of action was to fly to San Francisco, enter New Rome, and request a public testimony. He had to admit, the Romans were so honor bound, and, arrest warrant or not, very few would kill Percy Jackson in broad daylight, but the idea of entering New Rome with this merry band of criminals and their evil baby made him sick.

“They won’t shoot us out of the sky, we have Frank here, and you can’t kill a Praetor.” Annabeth reasoned.

You definitely could kill a Praetor.

“And we make the argument to the senate in private that we can call off this greco-roman war, especially because we have a new enemy, the New Saturnists, so there is an actual villain to rally against, and if they refuse to listen, we present the evidence to the people of New Rome.”

This girl had never entered New Rome, she had no idea how the government and politics work. Clearly.

And then she didn’t give him a choice. She said she needed a Roman and a greek supporter, and Frank and Piper volunteered, and said “oh, Nico, you’ll come to. Just in case things get hairy.” What happened to please? She could have at least asked, and not presumed. 

So he was focused, during more plane ride time, on glaring at her. Percy was playing with the baby and talking to Frank, Annabeth was watching Percy play with the baby, and Piper was holding Annabeth’s hand.

“What about the Greeks?” Nico asked.

“Hm?”

“You’ve got this big plan to uh.. Testify. To New Rome which is... whatever. Okay. But what about the Greeks? You’re fighting a war on two fronts.”

“I go to Camp and tell them. We’re all friends, they’ll trust me.”

“Really? There’s a warrant out for your death.”

“They won’t come to California.”

Nico put his head in his hands and groaned dramatically. This dumbass daughter of Athena. Reyna was right. Mortal life made everyone fucking dull.

“Why are you leaving?! We can turn the plane around, you can have your shit sent up! As soon as we cross out of Alaska, you two can and will be struck down by the Gods! I don’t want to go down with you!”

The married couple looked at eachother.

“I don’t think they’re gonna strike us down.”

“Yeah, isn’t the whole point of the fake war to not go against the gods? Even with the arrest warrants, it’s a bad PR move.”

Nico wrung his hands. “Ok, so sure, you are able to reenter the land of the gods. What happens when you both enter New Rome and are immediately arrested or killed?!”

Percy shrugged. “They won’t arrest me. I have too much power in my image. It’s like Annabeth said. To not listen to me would be a bad PR move.”

Nico felt like he was having an aneurysm. “And letting you testify in public this terrible truth about the Roman government is a good PR move?!”

Annabeth shrugged this time. “Do you have better ideas?”

“Yes! Stay in Alaska! Don’t go back to New Rome!”

But they had moved on already. These fucking idiots were going to get themselves killed. Nico just had to pray he wouldn't get caught in the crossfire.

Chapter Text

The plan was more complicated than they let Nico know. But, after he had nearly gotten them both killed, Annabeth liked to watch him squirm. Her mother was passive in her punishments, letting her disappointment in her children be known by the simple withholding of information. Annabeth loathed the practice–she was her mother’s daughter.

So she let Nico stew, and then focused on her friend, her husband, and the baby. The baby that she had never noticed much on the quest, but now that she held her, turned her into a clown. She made ridiculous faces and noises, tickled the baby’s feet, and let the baby wrap it’s little hand around one of her braids, biting back a wince when she yanked.

This was the part her and Percy didn’t agree–what to do with the kid. She said that New Rome had infrastructure, schools, adoption systems, that they’d be able to take care of the kid. He was against the concept, too guarded to state a reason why, but she had gotten one comment out of him. Biting, like it slipped out.

“Powerful kids are tools! And she’s a baby! She’ll be used and destroyed, just like the rest of us.”

Annabeth didn’t concede, she was still on the camp-has-no-infrastructure train, but she let it drop, unresolved, a pulse of issue to weave subsequent conversations and thoughts around instead of about. 

She refused to think about the Titania question. Because then, a dangerous thought entered her mind, of not only this baby growing up, but Annabeth growing up. Getting grey hairs and wrinkles. This terrible knot in her throat surfaced when she thought about dying, and Annabeth found that, for the first time, she wasn’t okay with dying.

She remembered, at fifteen, burning shrouds around the fire. Two for twin spies killed by Kronos’ army, one for one killed by the Chimera, and, puzzlingly, a brief speech about an Ares kid who had been hit by a drunk driver. 

How absurd. Annabeth couldn’t imagine dying by something as mortal as a drunk driver. Aneurysms and cancer and the strong strand dementia lurking in all Chase blood–they all belonged to a world that had never belonged to her. She would die on the battlefield, or on a quest, or she’d get struck down by a god. It was never a positive thought, but the idea of her dying in any other situation was impossible. A death without the gods would be a death without the fundamental principle of Annabeth’s existence. She was a tool, like Reyna and Percy said. Born to worship, trained to fight, and then, she wouldn’t simply die. She would be killed.

And so would Piper. And Nico. And Jason, and every other person wandering around the weird space between war and death. They made a valiant attempt, sure, to detach from the gods, but they all knew, like her, that no matter how mortal their lives could be, their deaths would be godly.

Maybe that’s what made her stomach the betrayal of Camp and New Rome, because she always knew the gods would kill her. And they still are, just in a different way than she imagined when she was fifteen. 

To the Greeks and the Romans and the Norse and the societies of antiquity, a good and proper death was one in battle. Magnus only went to Valhalla because he died in battle. In Elizabethan society, a good and proper death was one just after confessional prayer, so one could fast-track their way to heaven. Hamlet, despite the perfect opportunity to do so, didn’t kill old Uncle Claudius in confession because of his fears of Claudius’ immediate departure for heaven. Only recently has a good death been removed from public service of war and devout religion–now a good death is peaceful. Mid-eighties, asleep, quietly.

Without her realizing it, as soon as she failed to bring that knife to Percy’s chest, her constructions of what constitutes a good death modernized. Suddenly, the inevitability of being killed wasn’t something she could swallow.

Percy was talking to Piper, his posture open, his voice curious. Her two great loves, both haunted by unruly gods waiting to strike. Her stomach lurched. 

So she didn’t think about Titania. Or about the kill-or-be-killed paradigm. 

Instead, she reopened her notebook and continued to scrawl out the words she needed to say to Rome. 

She still thought she would be killed. 

But not today.

Plus, it was on Nico if he thought she was stupid enough to not know the trial was rigged. She was counting on it.

Hazel wasn’t sold on the plan, but prided herself in her ability to be nonchalantly out of the loop. It was an anti-Roman trait, sure, but she prided herself on it nevertheless. The only reason she knew that something was up were the codes that Frank kept sending her that wouldn’t have fooled anyone if they had bothered to look closely. 

In said code, her fiancé had really emphasized that the Greeks were not as bad as they had thought! Hazel failed to see a they in his argument. Nico was Greek… ish. That had been enough for her, much to the frustration of all of New Rome. 

So no, she wasn’t sold on the plan. Or what little she knew of it. And she certainly wasn’t thrilled that her fiancé and brother were involved in it. 

She was glad, though, that all of the bigotry between camps might be able to lessen–if there wasn’t a civil war, that is–that would make it easier for Nico to visit her. That was worth something.

Hazel wasn’t sold on the plan, but she was excited about working on it, and, like every demigod in New Rome, she had grown up to be extraordinarily competent at whatever task needed doing. 

She tied up her curls, she put on a favorite dress, she poured herself some iced tea, and she went outside. And, on orders from the Praetor and Dextra Romae, she began to gossip.

“Do it!”

“I don’t want to!”

“Come on, babe. You were this close to killing me hours ago!” Annabeth said, hands behind her back, chin tilted up, daring him.

“I don’t hit people!”

“You just murdered a Roman. This is a silly little punch!”

Percy reeled his arm back, still in the private plane, on the tarmac in San Francisco. When he hesitated, Nico shoved him aside. “Oh for fucks sake.” He said, and punched Annabeth in the face. Then, in the mouth.

Annabeth blinked. Blood pooled where her teeth cut her lip, she felt her nose tilt to the left. “Oh my gods,” she breathed. Then “Thanks, Nico.”

Looking believably beat up, Frank cuffed her, and the two of them stood at the door to leave the plane as the staircase was rolled up to them. All the windows were here. In this cocoon, Annabeth was safe, unguarded, and she attempted to relish the moment before Frank dragged her out in two minutes.

Percy would be out soon afterwards, as soon as Piper finished dolling him up to look as Godly as possible, but both Frank and Percy emphasized that New Roman paparazzi became violent when forced to wait for news. They needed Annabeth pictures immediately.

Nico shook Annabeth’s hand, and rolled his eyes “You’ll get yourself killed. Just because the gods haven’t shot you down yet doesn’t mean they won’t.”

He had a point. 

But there really was no other choice. Despite Annabeth’s new uncomfortable feelings about being killed, she was rather used to a target on her back. It felt almost comfortable, wearing the weight of it again. An old friend. 

So she gave him a wry grin, a non-answer through her fresh punches.

Percy was next. He clapped Frank on the back, and they exchanged this nonverbal look. She knew that look, she had exchanged it with Thalia and Piper and even Luke. Two soldiers before battle. 

It was still an unwieldy concept in her mind. Like a grand piano in the hallway,  she had to squeeze around, uncomfortably reckoning with the fact that her social worker Star Wars geek husband was not only a demigod, but a demigod regarded as so important to the war effort that she had to put her survival into how the public perceived him.

When they had discussed it in the car and on the plane, Percy was uncomfortable with it. He couldn’t adequately describe what he was to these people, only that he was famous.

Frank pulled her aside, later, on the plane, and told her he wasn’t just famous , but the mosaics and statues of him defeating Krios depicted him bleeding golden ichor.

Annabeth would believe that shit when she saw it. 

Still, the look he gave Frank was uncomfortable, until he turned to her, and cupped her cheek, and kissed her.

“We defeated the Titans on our own.” he murmured. “This is small potatoes. And we’re doing it together.” 

She exhaled a quiet laugh, pressing another quick peck to his lips before pulling him into a hug. They stayed there for a moment.

Piper hugged her too. “I’m sorry this is happening to you.” She whispered. “I’m sorry he’s a demigod.”

“Better a demigod than dead.” She whispered back.

Piper’s grip tightened. “Still. I know how much you loved your mortal life. There’s no going back now.” 

Annabeth swallowed. “It was a delusion from the beginning.” She broke away, and gave Piper a wry smile, a peace offering. “We both knew that.”

Piper looked like she was about to cry, so Annabeth turned, and let Frank shove her out of the plane, into the flash and blur of paparazzi below.

Piper cracked open the window, before she was swatted away by Nico, who instead put on a live broadcast from The Times New Roman . 

Piper let out a little chuckle at the TNR logo. It wasn’t even in Times New Roman. Gods, they all took themselves so seriously .

“It was named after us.” Percy said. 

“Hm?”

“The font. We came first. It’s what you were laughing about, it’s… whatever. Nevermind.”

A sleek woman appeared on screen. Classic news reporter, some legacy of Aphrodite or Hermes–wait, no, Venus or Mercury –with shiny veneers and a french bob.

“Bonum vesperum, New Rome. After a tumultuous and confusing last couple of days, we wait in suspense as Praetor Frank Zhang brings home two fugitives of the law; graecus Annabeth Chase, and former Dictator, beloved war hero, Perseus Jackson.”

A cut to Annabeth being hauled off by Centurions, and Frank getting into a sleek black SUV.

Piper watched the news oscillate between live streams of the plane they were currently in and anti-Greek propaganda. Annabeth was right, this place had infrastructure enough to support rival journalistic companies. New Athens was a genuine worthy goal. She tried to focus on this thought, and not the looming feeling of dread, the pit that sat in the bottom of her stomach. 

“You’re going to do great” She told Percy, who she didn’t know very well, and realized that acutely in this moment. He was this brick wall of a person, stoic and near-silent as he kept watching the news. It was playing old footage of him, sixteen years old, already battle-worn. The images of him killing the head of the church. Speeches of him when he assumed the dictator position. This background noise inflated the aura, which, of course, worked for their purposes: they needed this man as legendary as possible before they attempted to take on the Roman courts, but attributed it to Piper's fear. Despite hours of casual conversation, and technically knowing-but-not-really-knowing each other for years, Piper felt a Romanesque awe. He was attributing to her little knot of dread nestling deeper inside of her.

“Do you think I should wear my glasses?” He asked.

“Hm?” She had been busy looking at the jagged scars. He grabbed them out of his cup holder.

“I just. They make me look a little dorkier, but I can’t see very well without them, and I didn’t really bring any contacts after I fled New York…” he looked down, wringing his hands. It felt unnatural to see him shy. Like a dog walking on hind legs. Like a teacher in the grocery store. 

“Put them on?”

He did. Then he took them off. 

“Yeah, wear ‘em. They make you look older, wiser. Dorkiness is negated by all the ceremonial shit you’ll put on when you enter New Rome.” 

He nodded, and swallowed, and looked at Nico.

“Do you have any, uh, advice?”

He rolled his eyes. “Go back to Alaska and live your life there, out of reach.”

Percy pursed his lips and looked down. Nico was just being mean–Piper shot him a look. Nico scowled. 

Then, Percy…  beca me. Piper had never seen anything like it. In a spare toga with no ornamentation, with thick glasses on, she saw her friend’s husband become the legend they had discussed back at camp. Piper thought the knot in her throat might asphyxiate her, and she gulped–audibly. Percy didn’t hear. He straightened up, rolled out his joints, and drew his sword. The makeup Piper had done was good–it made him less flushed, more glossy, more godlike–but it was an energy to him. A stepping into the role he was born to fulfill.

“Piper. I appreciate your help in everything, and your companionship to Annabeth. I’m honored to have you here with me, truly.” he stated. 

“It’s an honor.” What the fuck? Piper never talks like this except to gods, she never lets anyone talk to her like this except gods. It just felt right. 

Percy turned to Nico. “I don’t forgive you, not yet. But I think I will.”

“Praetor– Percy , sorry. I do wish the best of luck for you and Annabeth. I want nothing more than for this to come to peaceful ends.”

Percy nodded, and he, too, left the plane. Nico would shadow-travel Piper to the area just outside of New Rome, where they would wait until they were called upon as witnesses. 

Until then, she watched as the news cycle churned, as wanted criminal Percy Jackson returned to the spectacle and love of the citizens of New Rome, who threw flowers at his feet, who didn’t call him former dictator or ex-praetor or even Dextra Romae, but just called out Perseus! Like the name of a God. Percy’s safety relied on this pomp and circumstance, and Annabeth was afraid to trust this invisible fanaticism to keep her husband out of the hands of New Roman authorities as his city rallied behind him.

Piper had possessed her own reservations too, but not anymore. Not seeing Percy now, in his element. She was afraid too, but for different reasons. In a simple toga, touching the hands of reporters, being handed babies to kiss, Piper saw firsthand the return to Percy’s homeland, and, for one singular moment, agreed with Reyna Ramírez-Arellano; this man was a threat to security and order. 

Behavior towards him by these masses was inherently idolatrous, and she found herself in three minds. A surge of gladness that Frank’s proclamation of Percy’s celebrity power was true and that it would keep him safe. A flash of disgust at this Romaïkós false prophet. And a piece of her that saw him as these people did, who thought it would be perfectly natural to kneel at his feet.

She looked at Nico. “Is this normal?”

“No, this is pretty tame, it’ll get worse. When he entered the city on official matters a few days ago to receive the kill order on Annabeth, people knew he wouldn’t make public appearances, and he was still plastered on every news site. But once again, he’s at odds with the Roman Government. People are ready for a coup. They’re excited.”

“And the feeling? Like, when you look at him, and…”

Nico nodded. Piper forced bile down her throat, and watched him part the crowd, looking like modern moses with his red sea. Then, Nico took her hand, and she felt her body pull away from the spectacle, and into the battle, the chaos of what would begin.