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The Olympians were a dysfunctional family.
You didn't need to be a therapist to see that.
Whenever Hera accused Zeus of being unfaithful (she was mostly right), or Poseidon and Ares fought again (every two days), or Aphrodite lost one of her combs (they had taken to keeping copies of them and replacing the lost one before she realized it was lost), or Athena started ranting about modern teenagers (she had been repeating modified versions of the same rant since the Middle Ages) or when Hermes was just plain bored (thankfully not often, because of the amount of work he had to do), everyone knew that peace and tranquility were dead.
Maybe they should make Eirene an Olympian.
Compared to the sibling dynamic between Zeus, Poseidon and Hades, he and Artemis were leagues better. At least they didn't rip the world apart whenever they fought (almost every Tuesday). They just tried to rip each other apart.
Though, to be honest, they had never really been truly angry at each other. Frustrated, yes. Exasperated, yes. Furious, definitely. But they had never had the kind of rage and resentment against each other that Poseidon and Zeus did.
They had fought. They had called each other names. They had sulked, refused to talk to each other for months at a time, tried to strangle the other, almost committed fratricide a number of times, and generally tried to mess up each other's life.
See, but that was the key point. They fought each other. They called each other names. They tried to kill each other.
No one else did. No one else was allowed to. They could fight and scratch and bite and try to tear each other apart and hurt each other, but no one else could. No one else could touch them.
Which was why, when the Titan War finally began, he was going to find that son of Hermes, find Atlas, and personally make sure they died an agonizingly slow death. He would make Atlas carry the weight of the sky again, alone, for the rest of his immortal life, while he used the Titan for target practice. As for Luke... maybe he should slowly burn him with his flames, cook him a little at a time, until he died screaming.
That might complicate his friendship with Hermes, but Hermes would just have to deal with it.
He was understandably mad when Zeus refused to let him rescue her.
"She is my SISTER! MY TWIN! YOU THINK YOU CAN-"
He really didn't expect Hermes to be the one to hit him on the head from the behind. "Sorry, man." He said when he woke up. "We can't have you interfering. Rules are rules."
If he hadn't been restrained by Hephaetus's chains, he would have blasted the trickster god to ashes. As it was, he must have seen something in his eyes, because he backed away, eyes widening in fear. Maybe it was rage. He hadn't felt so much rage since he learnt how Python had harassed his mother. Maybe it was the power of the sun, suddenly blazing in him like it used to in the days of the old, scorching anything and everything in it's path, an unstoppable force of destruction.
It was a long time before he managed to sneak out a puff, the minutest bit of his essence, to aid Percy Jackson and the Hunters on their quest. "Call me Fred." he smiled, but he wanted to take his bow and arrow and deal with the matter himself. "Nobody messes with my baby sister. Nobody."
When Hyacinthus died, when Daphne was transformed, when his romance with Sibyl failed, he had always turned to his sister. She'd roll her eyes over his antics, but she had never scorned him, and had let him stay next to her as long as he needed. When Callisto was killed, when Orion went insane, whenever a Hunter died, he would seek out his sister and refuse to leave until she either smiled or tried to throw him out and ended up sobbing in his arms. It was that way for them forever; they had companions, they had friends, they had half-sisters and brothers, they had parents, but they were never there. They never understood. In front of her Hunters, Artemis had an image, a projection, a responsibility which did not allow her to show what she felt. And he, he had hidden behind the carefree callous playboy image for so long that if he showed any emotion other than flippancy, he would be dismissed for being too dramatic, or too much of a wuss.
I have had playmates, I have had companions,
In my days of childhood, in my joyful school-days,
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces.
...
How some they have died, and some they have left me,
And some are taken from me; all are departed;
All, all are gone, the old familiar faces. -Charles Lamb.
Artemis was all that he had left.
It had always been the two of them, not always side-by-side, but still with each other, miles apart and yet together. Two sides of a coin, never face-to-face, but inseparable, love and indifference, opposites meaningless without each other, sun and moon, each both similar and different to the other. They were immortal, and they stood by their counterpart, even if they didn't agree with them, because no matter what, they were still their other half. They were still family. Millennia after millennia, they were all that remained for each other.
What if she's dead? Not dead like people, but... gone?
No. She was not dead. She was not. I would know. I would feel it. In my soul.
He would wait for his sister. And when she was back, he was going to hug her and never let her go, even if she scoffed him for being an idiot. He could do nothing more without alerting Zeus, but he could wait. And he would wait.
And if, during the quest, Percy Jackson and his companions had momentary strokes of luck when they most needed it, and a certain Sun god had recently cashed in a favor from Tyche, it was no one's fault, was it?