Work Text:
In her dreams, Janus stands in front of two doors. One face points left, the other points right, and both of them laugh at her in cruel, sarcastic stereo.
Hasn't she already done this? Her mind races along, trying to determine what choice he is asking her to make. He doesn't need to say anything; his meaning is clear enough, the longer she stands there helplessly. She is screw--
She wakes up with a sudden rush in her gut like she'd just fallen to her bed from somewhere very high up, her jaw aching from being clenched so hard. She can almost hear the creak when she forces it to relax. She pushes the covers off and rolls out of bed.
Her half-sister finds her later in the gray, muted light of dawn, sitting on the bay window and watching the fog roll in off the California hills. "They're just dreams, Annabeth," she says softly, because this is not the first time it's happened.
"Yeah," is all Annabeth can say, because she's a half-blood, and for half-bloods, dreams are never just dreams.
-
"You need to shave," is the first thing she says when Percy pops up at her side at baggage claim at La Guardia, a mile wide smile on his face and a bouquet of flowers poorly hidden behind his back.
The smile vanishes and he quickly inspects his face in the chrome of the carousel. His chin is covered in a day's worth of stubble. Bachelors, she sighs inwardly, taking advantage of his preoccupation to grab her duffel bag off the revolving belt before he could do something silly like offer to carry it for her. "I missed you too," he says dryly, trailing after her as she heads for the doors. "Glad to see we can skip over the pleasantries and get right into the snarky personal comments."
She tosses a smile over her shoulder. "How are you? How was your year?" she drawls out, and almost misses him execute a perfect eyeroll.
"Fine, fine, just great. You know, the usual. Trying not to get kicked out of school -- which is harder on the college level but still possible, I'm finding out -- and almost dying three different ways before Christmas. Almost had a minor heart attack when you told me you were flying in from San Francisco."
"Well," she says, dropping her duffel bag on her feet at the curb and looking for a taxi to hail. "Some of us don't pick fights with the Lord of the Sky and therefore can do amazing things like plane travel."
He's silent, and when she looks over at him, he's watching her, his eyes warm. She really does love his eyes, blue as the bay off the coast. "What?" she says guardedly.
"Nothing," he says, his smile going a little sloppy. "I just really missed you."
The answering smile is on her face before she can think to check it. "Yeah, me too."
He still hasn't given her the flowers, she notices, and when he slips an arm around her waist to pull her close for a kiss, the plastic wrapping crinkles against the small of her back, but she's too busy grinning into Percy's mouth to really care.
This goes on until a voice pipes up from behind them, "I really hope this isn't what the entire summer's going to be like."
Annabeth pulls back, still in the half-circle of Percy's arm, and blinks in surprise. "Nico," she says blankly. "Hi. What are you doing here?"
The son of Hades arches an eyebrow. She hadn't seen him much the previous summer, or the summer before that -- he'd been shadow-traveling through Europe, Percy told her when she'd finally thought to ask, trying to find any living remnant of his mother's family. He's grown, she notes in surprise: his shoulders now fit the old 50s bomber jacket he wears, the leather cracked and worn. He still hadn't learned the benefits of a good haircut, though; he flicks it out of his eyes in order to smirk at her.
"He's kind of my roommate," goes Percy, a little apologetically. He gives her a moment to digest this, sees it register in her eyes that two sons of the Big Three are living together in the most monster-infested city in the world, and really, she should just save everyone the trouble and kill them now, because they are so asking for it, before he adds, "He's also our driver."
Both of Annabeth's eyebrows go up. She points a questioning finger at Nico, who swirls a set of car keys around his index finger, and asks, "Is he even sixteen yet?"
"Seventeen!" Nico says hotly. "Almost seventeen and a half! Geez."
"More like seventy-five, if you want to get technical, since he was born during the Great Depression," Percy points out, and when they shoot him disgusted looks, he holds up his hands in an attempt at peace. "Let's just go, shall we? If Nico doesn't kill us, we'll give the monsters a chance, how about it?"
"Summer fun for everyone!" says Nico with a cartoonish brightness, and hefts her duffel bag up over one shoulder.
"Sure you can handle that, old man?" she grumbles at his back. She slips her hand into Percy's, and they follow.
-
"I'm not quite sure what I think of this," says Percy's mother, shifting Isaac to the other hip. In the way small children do when you turn your back, Isaac has almost doubled in size since the last time Annabeth saw him. He doesn't take his eyes off of her, peering at her suspiciously over the top of his sippy cup. She just smiles at him, waves in a cute little way that does nothing to change Isaac's expression, and wishes she'd followed Nico's example and made herself scarce when Sally arrived.
"It's okay, Mom," Percy says, even though Sally continues to worry at her bottom lip. He reaches out impulsively, like he was going to touch her arm, but Isaac swivels that look on him and Percy draws back out of habit. Sally looks pained, and Annabeth remembers why she didn't leave when Nico did. She'd worked hard all of last year trying to convince Percy that just because his mom had another kid didn't mean she was trying to replace him.
Annabeth had a bit of a head start in that department, but Percy was still awkward around his mortal brother. It's never easy, trying to be in both worlds, and she can't blame Percy and Nico for living together; she'd seek out familiar company, too.
"Yes, but, isn't three such a crowd?" Sally goes, like she can't help herself. "Especially in a place this small. I mean, we have plenty of room at home, still, you know, in case ..." She trails off helplessly.
Percy and Annabeth watch her try to find a way to finish that sentence. There isn't, they know, because even if she offered a spare room in the Blowfis's home to one of them, to relieve the pressure of three people living in a New York City shoebox, which one would it be? Which one could she remove out of the equation without causing an obvious disequilibrium? Not Percy, because Annabeth and Nico don't know each other well enough to live without him. Not Nico, because well, he was there first, and not Annabeth, because what would the point have been of her coming all the way out here?
Neither of them say anything out loud, though, because it's Sally Jackson -- she's probably the coolest mortal mother of the lot. There's no way you can't not like her. Even Nico calls her Ms. Jackson, and Annabeth can count the number of adults Nico respects on one hand.
"It's okay, Mom," Percy says again. "It's just one of those things. We'll work it out."
-
She folds her arms and glares. "What?" she says testily, finding it incredibly annoying that she can get this pissed off in a dream.
Janus just giggles. It's a disturbing sound, and she closes her eyes and wills herself to wake up.
-
Percy first moved into his apartment two years ago -- roughly around the same time he started his first semester of college, and the same time Sally told him that she was going to have a baby. Annabeth has never asked him which was the deciding factor in his leaving home. Maybe he just got tired of the carefully nonjudgmental way that Sally and Paul Blowfis would remodel after a monster came knocking -- it was the stage Annabeth was at with her family these days.
Maybe, one of these summers, she just wouldn't go back to the West Coast. It meant giving up Stanford -- and its painful tuition that you couldn't dream of paying without a mixture of sheer bravado and a ton of scholarships -- but NYU wasn't a bad school, comparatively. And it put her closer to Camp Half-Blood and Olympus.
Although it has the advantage of being on the same side of the continent as these places, Percy's apartment is kind of in the middle of nowhere, which Annabeth hadn't even thought was possibly on Long Island until she was there, and it's easily a half-an-hour to forty-five minute commute to get anywhere in the city, depending on traffic.
Nico volunteered to drive her, the first few trips she made to Olympus, but she imagined that much time spent confined in a small space with Nico gleefully cussing out New York drivers without Percy there to buffer, and decided the subway was the safer bet.
Annabeth tries to keep her visits to Olympus short, simply because she doesn't like the feeling of returning to the mortal world and realizing that a full week has slid by. But there's so much she needs to do there. The gods have had a lot of practice at rebuilding their homes, and at building things in general -- she mostly left designing and constructing their statues to each god's own device: she just made the space for them in the city plan. So she isn't nervous at leaving most of the hard work in their hands while she's away at school, but she is a daughter of Athena, and she likes being there personally, simply because it's easier.
Okay, lies, she just likes being there to boss in person, and having a god obey your directions without question will never get old.
So Annabeth spends a lot of time up on Olympus. She hasn't got the chance to properly visit Camp Half-Blood, although she and Percy were there briefly after she flew in, long enough for her to meet the new kid at the Athena cabin and check up with Malcolm, her former second-in-command, now head of the Athena cabin. She even got to tease him about his mortal girlfriend back home in Chicago, which was both comfortingly nostalgic and a little strange all at once, considering she remembered when Malcolm first came to Camp Half-Blood, seven years old with a lollipop stuck in his hair.
But something catches her even more off guard than feeling like time was slipping by while her back was turned -- there are lights on in the Hades cabin when they go by, flickering in the window like old gas-lamps, casting shadows longer than night.
"Nico has new siblings?" she goes, startled. Her tone is unintentionally callous, like she's remarking on Nico's particularly ugly new sweater set, and Percy seems surprised by her surprise.
"Yeah," he replies after a moment, rubbing the back of his neck and casting a slightly sheepish look towards the Hades cabin. "Two boys, I think. Jack and .... Milo, I want to say. One from Seattle, the other from one of those fly-over states in the Midwest. They trickled in sometime in November, got claimed together around Christmas."
That was almost seven months ago. Annabeth never really wasted time imagining what it would have been like if she'd been claimed as any other god's child besides Athena, but she especially doesn't want to think about what it must be like to be claimed by the god of the Underworld. Or Ares. You'd have to have a stronger stomach than her, that's for sure. "Nico doesn't want to see them?"
Percy lowers his voice, like he's afraid the Hades boys can overhear him. "I don't think he knows what to make of being an older brother," he says, and she gets the feeling he's summing up several nights of heavy debate and some good-old fashioned angst into one sentence for her benefit. "I mean, he was always Bianca's baby brother, and after she died, I guess he got used to being alone. He doesn't take too well to change."
"I noticed," Annabeth remarks dryly, because while Nico has been nothing but perfectly polite to her since she took up a third of the space in the apartment only meant for one, it was that slightly hostile kind of politeness that you get from in-laws you haven't seen in years who've never approved of you and definitely don't like your new curtains. The banter was easy, almost knee-jerk, but there was a distance in it, too, the way there was always distance with Nico. She doesn't know if it's just a seventeen-year-old boy thing, or a Nico thing.
"Not going to lie here," she tells Percy on some other occasion, while Nico is occupied in kitchen with an Iris message from Alecto ("It will never not be weird," Percy mutters, "that my psycho math teacher was the closest thing Nico ever had to parental guidance.") She slips an arm into his, burrowing her face into the crook of his neck. "I liked it better when it was just the two of us here."
She feels the implications go through him like a tremor, almost laughs at how predictable it is, but he twists his body around to kiss her, half-pinning her up against the haphazard TV cabinet in the same movement. She makes some ridiculously girly noise until he deepens the kiss and leaves her no breath for sounds.
"By the gods," Nico complains loudly, and yeah, this is why Annabeth might be a little sexually frustrated by now. "I might be on the phone, but I can still hear you!"
Percy pulls away from her, his whole face appropriately apologetic, but she waves him off before he can say anything or do anything awkward. She takes a moment to forcibly remind herself that Percy keeps Nico around for a reason -- they're friends, and just because she's Percy's girlfriend doesn't mean that she has to come first. She will not make him choose.
She loves Percy Jackson, and she isn't scared to admit it, not to anyone (except maybe her mother; for some reason, she gets the feeling the Athena has never really approved of Percy,) and she will even cohabitate peacefully with Nico di Angelo, because she loves Percy Jackson.
She was eleven years old when she met him, sixteen when he gave up immortality just so he could stay and kiss her on his birthday, and she's twenty-one now. She's known him almost half her entire life, and been his girlfriend for nearly a third.
Which doesn't feel as strange as it might have, otherwise. She'd kind of spent most of her life waiting for him, and things didn't get any easier after he arrived.
She needs him, she knows. Not quite like she needs to breathe, but more like she needs a respiratory system to breathe with. His well-being became a priority early on in her life, and she guesses it just never stopped. And it will never get old, the way his whole face lights up when she enters the room, how when he's looking at her, she can suddenly tell that there are three different shades of blue in his eyes, how when he's kissing her he tends to forget about everything else.
It's not perfect, of course. There are things they can't talk about.
Percy has never asked what, exactly, her feelings for Luke Castellan were. There are days when she hates him so much for this it makes her want to throw a pot at his head, the stupid kelp-headed moron, because she can tell he's afraid of the answer, can tell he always makes it out to be worse than it is, and she will tell him, if only he ever bothers to ask.
On her more clear-headed days, she can almost understand him. Above the couch is the apartment's only attempt at artwork; a mellow, lonely landscape painting of an island, hanging in a frame that gives it too much space. She catches him looking at it amidst all his clutter, his eyes wistful and a million miles away. She would rather die some horrible Titan-invented death before she asks him if he regrets not staying with Calypso on her island when he had the chance. She doesn't think she can handle knowing, because how can she compete with the lonely Titan who broke even Odysseus's heart?
And Nico? Nico, who came back from a fruitless search in Europe for his mother's family, only to discover that he had no place to stay, nothing useful he could be doing, and no education to speak of -- outside of two years at a crappy military school in Maine -- moved in with Percy as a temporary thing, at least until he graduated high school and could put himself on his own two feet.
Annabeth knows very little about Nico. It was Percy he had the adventures with, not her, and even from those, all she really knows is that he liked to mess things up. A lot.
"We're not as different as you think," says Nico to her the day following the Iris-call to Alecto, while she leans against the counter in the kitchenette, waiting for water to boil for spaghetti. She has a dozen blueprints spread out on the limited counter space in front of her; Hera hadn't liked the design for the new sports gym, so she was back to square one.
She absently brushes eraser shavings off her papers. "Besides being demigods and veterans of a war, I'm not sure what we have in common."
"Of course you do," he replies instantly, and when she looks up, he has the same expression he's taken to wearing a lot around her -- a look she can't identify, something that might be angry but wistful, distant but very personal. It's the classic enigmatic look.
He jerks his chin in the direction of the bedroom, where Percy -- as he is wont to do since taking on Achilles's curse -- sleeps like the dead. "If it's for him, it's worth it."
-
July is a slow month, the air stagnant and heavy with heat, which just sinks and lingers in between buildings like a bad smell. Annabeth's favorite time of day might be the cold shower she gets in the morning.
It helps, too, that the glasses of water they leave out never fall to room temperature and the ice never melts. There are some advantages to living with the son of the sea god.
"It never got like this in the 1930s," Nico complains, mournfully stirring the soupy remains of his ice cream.
"Don't let Grover hear you say that," Percy grumbles good-naturedly. "He'll sit you down for a thirty-minute presentation on global warming and how we should turn our cars into lawn art and walk everywhere. Don't get me wrong, I'll all for reducing the carbon footprint, but Grover's zeal can backfire on him sometimes."
Nothing much out of the ordinary happens. So they do what any good ADHD half-bloods do -- they go looking for trouble.
It's a Sunday, and Annabeth realizes as she waits for the creaky old elevator in the lobby of their apartment building that she's not sure if they have any fresh vegetables and the only thing she's bringing home is sliced luncheon meat from the nearby deli -- proof that she's been living with men for far too long.
She accidentally shoves too hard at the door when she unlocks it, making it reverberate off the wall with a resounding bang. On the sofa with a textbook propped open in his lap, Nico jumps clear out of his skin, which combines poorly with the highlighter he has in his right hand.
"Zeus's sandals!" he cusses, ignoring the faint, slightly perplexed boom of thunder in the distance at his misuse of the god's name. "You scared the crap out of me! And look, now there's a great big orange zigzag right through my valence electrons, what the hell."
"I think you'll survive," Annabeth tells him unsympathetically, kicking off her sneakers and taking the deli bag into the kitchen. She hears Nico grumpily rearranging his notes. "And if you'd passed tenth grade like you were supposed to, you wouldn't have to be taking summer school."
"Hey!" he protests, a smoky blush coming to his dark skin -- he hated being reminded just how far behind he is. "I was busy this year with trying not to get killed on the way to school every day, thank you very much. There were monsters!"
"There will always be monsters, get used to it."
She's going to say more, because pulling seniority over Nico never gets old, but the front door opens again, this time without the slam, and Percy comes in, still in his work uniform and looking bright-eyed and gleeful. Annabeth is instantly suspicious, and she knows without looking that Nico's eyebrows have gone up so far they've disappeared into his shaggy bangs.
"Guys, I've got something to kill the summer doldrums with," he tells them without prompting, twirling the car keys around his index finger. "We're going to have an adventure, just like old times!"
"Oh, goody," goes Nico, in the same breath that Annabeth says, "Is this the same 'old times' that involved the world being at stake and us almost getting killed a lot?"
"Kind of," replies Percy with a firm bob of his head. "Only minus the world at stake part. This is just an easy escort job. Apollo wants his herd of sacred sun cows moved to some new ranch in Wyoming, and we're going to be their vanguard on their way through New York state."
"Sounds exciting," says the son of Hades on the couch, in the same exact tone of voice one uses when remarking about tile mold.
Percy is deliberately oblivious. "Oh, it will be. It's been too quiet around here recently, haven't you noticed? If the monsters want to try anything, they'll test it out on this small prey. It'll be a piece of cake."
Nico meets Annabeth's eyes through the divide between the front room and the kitchenette. Being impervious to any weapon, Percy's idea of a "piece of cake" tends to differ slightly from everyone else's.
He shrugs. "I'm in," he goes. "It's either that or sit around here, working on valence electrons and listening to Annabeth make fun of me."
-
Apollo's sacred herd of cows are as golden as the underbelly of a river toad; every part of them sparkles with it, right down to their eyeballs. Yet when Annabeth reaches out, brushing her hand along the coat of one as it gets herded past her, she feels the coarse fur and sweat of a real cow. It's rather strange, because they look like solid golden statues.
She'd had her misgivings about taking this mission, because
a) it was slightly retarded, as far as missions went, and
b) it felt like it should be something Apollo charge his children with as a summer Quest. Gods know there are enough boys and girls in his cabin, and eventually, the campers are going to get itchy for action again, just like Percy and Nico are now.
But she goes with the two of them anyway, because she doesn't really picture herself being anywhere else. She'd rather be here with them, complaining about the smell and wishing she was back at the apartment by herself, than actually be there, alone.
And, because they're half-bloods and it couldn't happen to nicer people, trouble strikes on the morning of the third day.
They get out of the endless suburbs and into the rolling green hills of New York state just as the sun goes down, and the caravan of eighteen-wheelers that are transporting the herd pull into a rest stop for the night -- like the sun chariots, they simply don't operate at night-time. Percy, Nico, and Annabeth let the cows out into the pastures, where they spread out among the fields of green grass, glittering and glowing like the great sacred golden sun cows they are.
"I wonder what the mortals see," Nico comments, pulling the ruff of his collar up around his ears as the wind goes whistling through -- it's a lot cooler outside of Manhattan.
Percy watches the cow closest to them chew its cud. It wasn't quite as exciting as watching paint dry, but it is a step above watching grass grow. "Giant, slack-jawed fireflies, for all we know. The Mist is an amazing thing."
Shortly before dawn, when counting cows has become just as boring as it sounds, Nico pulls a deck of cards out of his pocket.
"Geez, you have everything in there," remarks Annabeth as she and Percy scoot closer to form a playing triangle. Over the past two days and night, she has seen all sorts of things come out of that pocket -- most of it she hadn't even seen him put there before they left. The only thing they brought with them was the pack of emergency supplies they have stored in the cabinet above the sink -- extra weapons, little squares of ambrosia in a baggie, a few spare golden drachmas, the usual.
The son of Hades's lips twitch, like he's enjoying a private joke. "Of course I do," he tells her after a moment, like he's debating whether or not to enlighten her. "That's because it's a void pocket."
"A what now?"
"It's a tiny portal to the Underworld, sewn into my jacket, that means I can store pretty much anything I want to in there and never have to worry about running out of space. Why do you think I wear this thing all the time, even in the summer?"
Because you have the fashion sense of a gnat, she thinks, but doesn't bother vocalizing. She doesn't fancy squabbling the rest of the night. She shoots a glance at Percy, wondering if he knew about this, but his neck is craned back, peering out into the darkness away from the golden herd of cows. The light catches in the blue of his eyes, glittering fierce, and off the veneer of his pen as he pulls it out of his pocket. Riptide. A ripple of tension shimmies its way up Annabeth's spine like a worm on a hook, making everything come rushing at her ADHD brain in an explosion of details.
And there, not so far away, is movement. Something shifting, folding a set of leathery wings as black as pitch, tilting its massive head.
Monster.
To her left, Nico heaves a sigh. "I don't suppose we have time for me to gather my deck up again, do we?"
As in reply, a bellow broke through the pre-dawn air, and the monster leaps over the last hill in a rush of scales, its claws tearing deep tracts in the grass. The cards scatter, and Annabeth rolls to the side, pulling her baseball cap onto her head in the same movement, disappearing from sight. With any luck, the monster hadn't had time to properly count them, and will be too busy focusing on the two major demigods to pay attention and she can find some weak point to exploit.
To their due credit, the cows don't even flinch, as if they're used to being attacked by monsters and are just as used to being looked after.
At first glance, the monster looks a lot like Peleus, the dragon that guards the entrance to Camp Half Blood. Its whole body is covered in scales so rusty brown it looks like it's crusted over with flakes of dried blood. It's surprisingly small for a dragon; only about the size of a small tour bus, and its eyes glow like embers. Its breath comes down on them, hot and foul. Annabeth's surprised to realize she doesn't recognize it. She thought she knew most of the tank-sized monsters in the book.
"Half-meats!" it bellows in amiable greeting. "I was hoping I would find some of you here."
"Oh, good, it talks," Percy says to Nico, purposefully loud enough for the monster to hear it. "I like it when they talk. Usually they're too busy talking to use their brains and I don't feel bad for killing them. They're stupid enough to deserve it."
The dragon's tail lashes out, taking a small chunk out of the hillside behind it. Percy and Nico move steadily apart from each other, spreading out in different directions in a way so rehearsed Annabeth knows they've done it before, so that soon the dragon's head has to sway back and forth if it wants to keep both of them in its line of sight. Percy has Riptide drawn. "You're wrong there, half-meat," it growls. "The only defeating here will be mine! Of you!"
Annabeth holds her nose to stifle a snicker. They really don't bless the tanks with much in the way of witticisms, did they? She moves steadily around the other side, away from the other two, looking for a chink in the dragon's armor. Most monsters of its type have weak underbellies, which is perfect for her dagger.
"Oh, really?" The strain in Percy's voice suggests he's thinking something along the same lines and trying hard not to laugh. "On whose orders?"
"My mother's! She told me that I was to go to the New York and bring back a bull from the moronic sun god's herd, and to kill any half-bloods that may be escorting them. And I am lucky!" Its tail whips out again, like a puppy wagging its tail in prospect of a job well done. "It is a simple mission, and I was expecting young half-meats, all stringy and scared on their first quests. Instead, I get Percy Jackson, whose name is blackest among us, and another son of the trio of morons who rule Olympus!"
"My name's Nico, you sack of ash," grumbles the other son in question.
"And mine is Dracon, the youngest child of Echidna, mother of all monsters. Yes," it adds in response to some perceived surprise. "The same way there are always more of you pathetic heroes being born every year, so are new monsters being spawned. And now it is my turn to write my name on the annals of history, as a slayer of heroes, so that in the future, your brethren will know my name!"
"Dracon?" Percy echoes, and this time, there really is surprise mixed with the amusement. "Isn't that the name of that stupid villain from Kim Possible?"
With a furious roar, Dracon lunges, and Percy sidesteps, slicing at its head with Riptide, but it jerks out of the way in time, leaving Percy to scramble for a rebound. Its head comes snapping around again, fangs bared before he has a chance to get a proper parry in, but Nico raises a foot and slams his heel hard into the soil, setting off an earthquake that makes the monster lose its balance. Its teeth graze right on past him, and it staggers, turning its angry, hissing attention on Nico.
It takes a deep breath, embers catching and flaring on its tongue and on its teeth. Nico hits the ground, pulling a layer of dirt over his head as simply as if he were folding an omelet, just as a jet of flame bursts from Dracon's jaws. The soil sizzles and hardens like lava, becoming a shiny dome covering a boy-shaped lump. Percy shouts, leaping forward with sword held high, but the dragon swipes outwards with its tail, clubbing Percy with the kind of force that would have crushed a mortal like an aluminum can, but merely makes Percy do a floppy imitation of a ragdoll.
On either side of them, the ground splits open, and three skeletons pull themselves out, clods of earth sticking to their bones. They charge Dracon, their bony jaws chattering.
It swivels its head, sending a jet of flame at one that fries it instantly. The other two jump on its back like monkeys, digging their sharp, skeletal fingers into its skin and ripping chunks of it out. They duck when the monster sends another blast of flame arcing over their heads. It gives Annabeth an idea.
"Percy!" she yells, and Dracon's head snaps in the direction of her voice, its eyes clouded with pain and confusion. "Percy, the stream!"
He catches on to her meaning instantly -- she'd pulled up what she could of their route on Google Maps before they left, and she knew that where the bus stop was located was close to a stream, and surrounded on all sides by irrigation ditches. They're too far inland for Percy to draw any power from the sea, but she hears the distant roar of a bunch of water suddenly being displaced and realizes she has nothing to worry about.
Dracon's protesting roars are cut off with a surprised gurgle when it gets slapped full in the face with the force of Percy's attack, drenching the monster thoroughly. The skeletons go flying, skittering along in the dirt that's quickly becoming a pit of mud.
While the dragon is still surprised, Percy launches himself up the incline, cleaving one big slice into the monster's side. Dracon bellows in pain and rage, and the cut immediately begins to glow golden with Mist, the unmistakable sign that it was about to break apart.
Percy darts out of the way, just as Nico manages to break out of his oven-like cocoon and leaps to his feet as well. Annabeth stays where she is on Dracon's right flank, crouched low.
And on the other side of the hill, the cows go on chewing at the grass, unconcerned.
Dracon pants, but its lips peel back off its teeth in a feral grin. "You think you may have defeated me, but my mother has a plan within a plan and I will live to fight you another day!"
Then, just like that, the dragon disappears.
Annabeth whips her cap off in surprise, because there'd been no burst of Mist and dust that usually accompanies a monster's temporary death. Dracon just vanishes into midair, only it leaves something in its place, as if, all along, it had just been a bait and switch.
It's small, only about the size of a drinking fountain, and cylindric on all sides. Her first thought is that it looks like R2-D2; there's a great big lens like a video camera perched on the top of its head, not unlike a giant eyeball. In the center of its body, a screen sticks out, and it is supported by four sturdy claws. There's no mistaking what it could possibly be.
"A machine?!" goes Percy incredulously. "Since when do monsters stand aside and let machines do their dirty work for them? By the gods, what happened to the good old days, when monsters fought with teeth and claws and paintball guns? Get back here and fight, Dracon!"
You're not that old, Annabeth thinks, rolling her eyes, just as Nico says out loud in a tone much like her mental one, "Suck it up, old-timer. This is the modern age. Don't suppose you happen to have a handy computer virus in that grab-bag of yours, do you?"
"Can't say it was on the check-list," says Percy dryly. "What about you? You're the one with the handy-dandy void pocket." He slides a little down the incline.
The instant he moves, the machine gives a little chirping beep, almost like it's saying, "Okay!" The cylinder whirls around so that the giant video lens is facing right towards them, its gears clicking menacingly. The screen lights up, text flashing across it in great chunks. Annabeth only catches snatches of words here and there of what looks like a novel, or an evil overlord's triumphant monologue.
"What on earth is saying?" she demands, alarmed by the sudden energy.
"How the hell should we know? We're just as dyslexic as you!" Nico retorts, and when she glances at him for a fraction of a moment, she notes that he's placed the two skeletons at his side. Their blank eye sockets are watching the machine, and their complete lack of expression means Annabeth can't tell if they're fascinated or bored or simply just waiting for orders.
Annabeth's heart pounds. Percy has a point -- she knows how to fight Dracon, because a monster is a monster and some things about battling them will never change, but she has no idea what to do with this machine. Maybe if she had some idea of what it's purpose was, she could diffuse it, or find some counter-command that might work. If only they had someone from the Hermes cabin with them right now -- a hacker. Or maybe one of the Hephaestus kids, who could build something bigger and smarter that could crush it like a tin can.
Her hand tightens on her invisibility cap, but she isn't sure if the machine's even aware of her. Or aware of anything, really, beyond sensing the movement the other two made. She holds herself perfectly still, just as it gives its little "okay!" chirp again, and the screen goes blank.
For a moment, nothing happens.
Then, "HEY!" Nico yells, and when she cranes her head around, she sees one of his skeletons reach out, calmly grabbing Nico by the wrist and wrenching him clean off his feet. "Stop!" he bellows, and she feels the rush of power that comes with the command, but the skeleton pays no attention.
It's gone beserk, she thinks in horror, dropping to one knee and snatching her dagger out of her boot. It's turning against him!
Nico comes to the same conclusion in the same moment, and swings his leg out with enough force that it knocks the skull clean off its shoulders. It drops him and goes staggering after its head. Nico lands on his feet, twisting around to face the other skeleton, but he's too late: it cracks him full in the face with sheer blunt force. Annabeth can hear the sick snap of it from where she's standing.
He goes down like a ton of bricks and doesn't move. The skeleton gives a satisfied nod.
"NICO!" Percy cries, scrambling down the incline towards him, and the way he says the boy's name makes something instinctive flare white-hot in Annabeth's belly, but --
"Percy, look out!" she screams, and the terror in her voice makes him spin on his heel, Riptide coming up, but it's useless. In a heartbeat, he's enveloped in water from the same stream and irrigation ditch that he'd called it from to use against Dracon, and he disappears from view. Her heart lurches with fear for him, even as her mind rationally tells her that although his own element is trying to kill him, it still can't harm him. You can't drown somebody through the small of their back.
But he's still out of the running. Which leaves only her.
The machine sits innocuously in the same spot, lens turned towards her, the single red light blinking slowly as if it's asking her, "what do you think you're going to do?"
She sets her jaw. She doesn't have an element that can be manipulated with binary code or subliminal messaging or whatever. She's no child of the Big Three, and most demigods are like her: they have to rely on their own strength, their own quick wits, and whatever help they can get from their weapons and their summers training at Camp Half Blood for moments like this. How is this machine designed to handle that?
"Right," she says out loud, and doesn't give herself time to think. She whips her invisibility cap onto her head and charges straight at it, just like it was any other monster.
The machine whirs to life with a frantic beep. Like she has eyes in the back of her head, she can see the remaining skeleton jolt after her, see the live ribbon of water drop Percy and shimmy towards her like a long, thin cord. She sprints faster as Percy rolls onto his stomach with trembling arms and vomits up the water he swallowed. Nico groans and sits up, his pupils wide and dilated from the blow, then jerks out of the way as the skeleton who lost its head almost staggers right on top of him.
Annabeth lowers her head and rams straight into the machine with the force of a football player doing a flying tackle.
It's like getting struck with a cement block. The impact goes right through her, knocking the wind out of her. The machine tips, keening and beeping as it tumbles onto its side. The corner of its screen strikes hard against a rock and the fracture mark runs through the entire frame.
She hears Percy yelling something, but she lies on her side in the grass, dazed and uncomprehending. The beeping is fierce now, and when she pulls herself up onto her elbows, it's to see Percy scrambling towards her, slipping in the miniature lake his water snake caused when it splattered on the ground. He waves his arms. Beyond him, Nico climbs unsteadily to his feet, his gaze unfocused, but there's fear in his face, too.
She twists her head around just as the machine explodes, mere feet from her.
Her heart stops. She can feel it stop, like the trip of a hammer falling. Amazement fills her, because it wasn't an explosion of fire and metal bits, but of dust and Mist. The machine was a monster, in its own way, made of programming instead of hot ash and a need to prove itself, and all that goes right through her with the force of a bomb going off. It's almost as if she's been sent flying; her mind swoops with vertigo like she's tumbling head over heels, even though she knows her body is still firmly tied to the ground.
She spins, and falls, and then she is unmistakably caught.
Th explosion sweeps through Nico and Percy, and she can feel the same thing happen to them: the feeling of being torn from their own bodies, and she clutches them to her and holds them down, so that for one long moment, it's like their hearts are beating in each other's chests, and everything is golden and shimmering like nectar in a clear glass.
Percy is as clear as day to her, every feature set in stone like a beloved, but behind him, Nico shimmers like a half-remembered friend, and it's only when she reaches out to pull them both tighter does she realize that she's shimmering too.
It's over as quickly as it began. Suddenly, she's back in her own body, with her own pounding heart.
And all is quiet, spare the gentle rustle of the grass and the faint sound of cowbells.
"Huh," goes a voice, and when they look up, Apollo the sun god is standing there at the crest of the drive, an arrow notched into his bow and aimed at nothing. He lowers it and keeps on staring at them, just as a sliver of the sun breaks the horizon. Around them, the cows start lowing in earnest, but Apollo doesn't spare them any attention, for all that he came to rescue them. His gaze is fixed on Annabeth, still on her knees next to the tipped-over wreckage of the machine and clutching her aching shoulder.
"Well," he says. "It wouldn't be the first time my livelihood was saved by a beautiful woman. That was a beautiful tackle." He flashes Annabeth a million-watt smile, in a more literal way than you'd think. "Hi. I'm Apollo. Have we met?"
-
Surprisingly, things get better after that. Maybe it was the fact that Nico stepped forward without hesitating to calmly and persuasively dissuade Apollo from the idea that Annabeth was available for dalliance, a tactic that worked much better than what Percy's would have been (it didn't extend much beyond clubbing Apollo over the head with the blunt end of his sword.) It was something a friend would do, and up until that point, neither Nico or Annabeth realized that's what they were.
Or maybe it had to do with the fact that for a moment, undeniably, both Percy and Nico's hearts were beating in her chest -- or perhaps for that moment, their hearts simply stopped beating separately, and she felt what it was really like to share strength with another person, to share the very force that keeps them alive.
There's a camaraderie there, between the three of them, as simple as a cog that's been given a light bump and fallen right into its proper place. The worry lines at the corners of Percy's eyes go away, and they hadn't known that he'd been afraid he was going to have to choose; Nico, his roommate, or Annabeth, his girlfriend. And to see Percy smile like that, carefree, yeah, okay, Nico was right; it pretty much made it all worth it.
In her life, Annabeth is happy. Truly, really happy.
In her dreams, Janus has never looked more smug.
-
Sometime in early August, Annabeth spends a week at Camp-Half Blood at Chiron's request. She doesn't mind; Malcolm turns eighteen on the 4th, so they throw him a party true Athena cabin style, the way she hasn't done since she was their age. Her week is almost up before their pillows stop being booby-trapped to not let their owners sleep on them until they answer 15 trivia questions.
Wherever she goes, the younger campers pester her with questions about her designs for Mt. Olympus, even the ones that were unclaimed at the time of the battle in Manhattan or too young to remember it. It's gratifying in some respects, and absolutely terrifying in others. Every day, she wonders if maybe it's too much responsibility for one half-blood to handle.
When she goes back to the apartment in the city on Thursday, she knows something is wrong the instant she opens the door. The door's unlocked, and the lights are on, but there's nobody home.
All her senses tingling, Annabeth gingerly sets her stuff down in the entryway and investigates further. The TV is on, running low volume on the programming channel. A book is open on the beanbag chair; the one she'd told Percy to read for his upcoming fall class, upside down with three pages bent crooked, like it'd been placed down in a hurry. In the kitchenette, there are still dishes in the sink, and in the rice cooker, a meal is forgotten, congealing in the bowl. She doesn't need to check the bedrooms. The whole thing screams of two boys who left in a great hurry and haven't been back in awhile.
She grabs the emergency pack from the cabinet above the sink, checks it to make sure she has everything -- a dagger, bottle of nectar and ambrosia in a baggie, forty dollars, and a few golden drachmas -- and she's out the door before she even has time to think.
-
Fifteen minutes later, she's three blocks down and it just then occurs to her that she has no idea where Percy and Nico could be, or even where she should start looking. She hadn't even bothered to grab the car keys.
It's enough to make her feel like she's going to shatter, like a wrong vibration is going to shake her apart like raindrops out of a screen door, and she stops at the curb to wait for a walk signal, breathing hard. Panic has full and well set in, because too many things can go wrong when you've been gone for a week and come home to discover that your roommates, two half-blood sons of the Big Three with big black marks on their names in the monster world, have disappeared without a trace.
If she was near a pool of water, she could try to make a spray, see if an Iris-message would go through to either one of them, but she's in the middle of New York City in August -- there's no standing water to be had anywhere nearby. Gods, those boys are stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Couldn't they have left a note? Did they think she wouldn't worry, that she wouldn't immediately assume the worst?
The walk signal flicks to green, but Annabeth doesn't even notice.
She is just getting to the stage of panic where her imagination is weighing more on her mind than her common sense, when a voice says disgustedly from behind her, "Staring into space isn't going to be helping anyone, you know."
Annabeth spins around, and blinks in surprise. Looking at her disapprovingly from the trunk of a tree in front of someone's flat is ...
"Juniper," she says blankly. "Hi."
There are two bright lime patches of color high on Juniper's cheeks. "You never came to visit me this week," she sniffs, and Annabeth realizes that the tree nymph really is upset by this fact.
She will never understand girls.
"I'm really sorry about that, Juniper. I've got plenty of free time next week -- I promise I'll come around, and we can hang out. Drink green tea and talk about what Grover's doing these days, whatever, but right now, I've got something on my mind --"
"Because," Juniper cuts in over her, sounding as testy as a nature spirit can. "If you'd come by my tree instead of making me come all the way out here to this barren, fake suburb, I would have been able to tell you that Nico di Angelo is in trouble and I know where he is."
That cuts right through the faint buzz of hysteria in Annabeth's mind, blurring it right into silence like muting a channel of static on a television. It might be that she's entirely too conditioned by this point, because the very first thing she does is send a quick but fervent prayer of thanks to the gods for looking out for her.
"Where?" she goes, not even caring that only one of the boys is accounted for. Because she knows, somewhere where she's never consciously admitted it to herself for one reason or another, that wherever Nico is, Percy is usually nearby, because perhaps the only person who watches Percy's back as closely as she does is Nico di Angelo.
"Central Park," says Juniper, her temper fading in the light of Annabeth's obvious emotional state. "He's been there for three days now, and hasn't left. Normally that wouldn't bother the tree spirits there, except he's a son of Hades and smells like death. Besides, being nature spirits, we're all rather fond of Persephone, and I don't have to tell you what Persephone thinks of Nico. They want him out."
"Is he all right?" she asks, because yeah, he might be the son of Hades, but he could also smell like death because he is dead -- she wouldn't count on tree nymphs to check for something like a pulse.
"As far as we can tell. But you should probably go check for yourself -- it doesn't take a child of Athena to figure out that there's something wrong."
Annabeth spins on her heel and sprints across the street, just as the walking signal begins to flash the don't walk sign. "Thank you, Juniper!" she yells over her shoulder, knows without looking that Juniper is rolling her eyes. "I owe you!"
The subway is four blocks away, a route familiar to her from two summers of staying here with Percy. It's past rush hour when she gets there, thankfully, pushing her way through the turnstiles with more impatience than it necessitates. She reviews the information Juniper gave her as she stands on the platform, unconsciously sizing up the people waiting with her to determine if any of them might be monsters. There isn't a lot she knows, other than Nico's in Central Park and he's been there for three days.
What's so important that he wouldn't leave that spot, not even to go home or to send her an Iris message or anything? And where's Percy, that the tree nymphs didn't have a word to say about him? Most of them know exactly who he is -- Grover's made sure of that. So why Nico and not him?
These questions loop around in her head most of the trip into the heart of Manhattan. She's not a daughter of Athena because she likes to back down from difficult questions, and now that she has something to work with, she can face this more calmly.
When she gets to the Central Park stop, it's already full-on dark, which she supposed should make her nervous, if she wasn't a half-blood who faced monsters and Titan revolutions like they were pop quizzes. It's a big park, and dark, but it doesn't take long to find Nico -- a tree nymph helpfully materializes out of the gloom before she starts to wonder. Juniper must have sent word on ahead that she was coming. The nymph has a gnarled twist to her face, the telltale toughness of someone who's grown up in New York City.
She leads her to Nico, sitting on a bench beside the path, looking strange and forlorn with his jacket pulled up around his ears and his uncombed hair sticking everywhere, like a bird with ruffled feathers. The nymph disappears before Annabeth can thank her, so she plants herself in front of Nico, fighting the inexplicable urge to punch him. It's different from all the times she's wanted to punch him over the summer -- this anger is born directly from relief, instead of annoyance at his immaturity. He's all right, he's not dead, although he could use a bath and some food.
But more importantly.
"What happened to Percy?" she demands, in the best "Nico di Angelo don't you even think of screwing with me" voice that she had. His attention catches on her suddenly like a camera lens, sharp and focused. Good. She doesn't have to worry about his brains being addled.
"He vanished four days ago," he rasps in a raw voice like he'd gone and shouted himself hoarse. His eyes dart away from her. "He's not dead and he's not in the Underworld -- I would sense it if he was. But he's in some immortal place, I can feel that much. I don't know what happened. I just came home and he was gone."
Like her, then -- and the first thing he'd done was set out immediately to find him, without turning off the lights or even leaving a note. Of course.
"So why are you bumming in Central Park?"
"This is the last place he was before he got shunted out of the mortal world." When her look grows skeptical, he flashes, "It's a proximity thing, I think. Like, I've been able to tell when you're on Mt. Olympus or in Camp Half-Blood. It's just in my head, some feeling that tells me you're not in the mortal realm. I can feel it stronger with Percy since I've been living with him longer. I've spent the last three days trying to find where he might have gone. It's like the trail goes cold right around here."
He delivers this in his abused voice, his tone almost matter-of-fact, but when he stops talking, a tremor goes through him, and Annabeth realizes he isn't holding himself together as well as she thought.
"I'm so sorry, Annabeth," he tells their feet, sinking further into his bomber jacket like a turtle withdrawing into its shell. "I can't find him. I don't know what's happened and I don't know where he could be. I'm so, so sorry --" his voice cracks.
Alarmed, she drops onto the bench next to him, because she's grown up with enough brothers to know that if a seventeen-year-old will cry in front of you, then something is really, really wrong. "Hey," she goes. "Don't beat yourself up. You can't watch him every minute of every day. He'd find a way to get into trouble regardless of how closely you were watching him," her tone is wry. "Besides, it's not your job. He's not your boyfriend."
He cuts his eyes at her, and Annabeth feels a sudden jolt catch her, like missing a step on a flight of stairs. She recognizes the look in his eyes, suddenly; it's the same look he's had all summer, that strange distant wistful look, and she's dismissed it again and again, assuming it was just part of the unfathomable Nico enigma, but it's not. It's the most familiar look she knows; she wears it every time she looks at Percy.
She's just never seen it on anyone else before. She's never bothered to look for it.
"Oh," she goes, the softest gasp, as if she'd pricked her finger on a tack. "Oh, gods, I'm an idiot."
"No, Annabeth, no," Nico says quickly. "No, it's not like --" and he trails off, helplessly, because there's no denying the truth. "I didn't mean to," he finishes, almost miserably.
For the first time, she takes a step back and takes a second look at the entire summer. Horror dips deep into her stomach -- what if Nico's problem wasn't that he had the people skills of roadkill? What if Percy's continual awkwardness wasn't due to the fact they had an interloper at all times? What did they have, before Annabeth came in, thinking she knew exactly how the chips fell?
We've been so stupid, she thinks, reaching out and placing a hand on Nico's shoulder, maneuvering him back so that he was caught between the arm of the bench and the back. His pale face betrays surprise, and then it shifts, becoming the same exact understanding that hit her moments before, as she tucks one leg around him to straddle his hips, using the other to keep her balance. We can't just let one person have so much control over our hearts. We aren't made for it, not when there's the chance they won't be there tomorrow.
She kisses him, logically, feeling him startle under her hands. His lips are thinner, harder than Percy's, but she only has a moment to acknowledge this before he's kissing her back with the kind of predetermination that has her thinking he might have already figured this out.
And the thing is. The thing is, it's almost familiar, kissing Nico. It's not something she's ever done before, but it feels like it should be.
His hands move up the accordion of her spine, up to tangle in her hair, and when she kisses him for the second time, he tugs on it hard enough to make her wince, moving her head to align their mouths better. She pushes his jacket off his shoulders, and he leans up into her so it slides off of him, puddling on the ground. They keep on kissing, mouths moving inside and outside and around the other's, fast and hard like they're worried their thoughts will catch up to them if they don't, and Annabeth finds her shirt has been pushed up around her ribs before she's even aware Nico's moved his hands.
Yes. Yes, there's that feeling again: Nico's heart, pounding in her chest, beating for the exact same reason.
This reason has a name.
She steadily forgets everything else, even the numbness spreading down her leg where it's pinned between the slats of the bench and Nico's body, up until an amused voice behind them says, "By the side of the road? Really? Man, it must be great to be young."
They sit up quickly, their heads spinning with the vertigo of it all, but are too tangled in each other to do more than kind of awkwardly incline their upper bodies in his direction and say, "Lord Apollo."
Standing there as jovially as if he goes for midnight strolls in Central Park all the time, the sun god's grin is roguish at best, or just downright lascivious, his teeth as bright as starlight. "Don't mind me interrupting. I just figured, hey, I owe the pretty lady a favor, what's the least I could do?" He looks at them, and Annabeth is sure it's no mistake that she can't tell which one of them he's looking at when he says, "I know where your boyfriend is."
-
He's in Eris's cellar, which is creepy, eerie, and downright disgusting in places, second only to Grover's underwear drawer.
"Things get lost in there," Apollo explained to them when he gave them directions, and the spare key -- neither of them bother to ask why he has it, though it is a lot more useful than breaking in, which is what they'd been planning but probably wouldn't earn them any brownie points on Olympus. "Eris is the goddess of discord; she's a busy woman, but even I can admit she kind of needs to think about having a garage sale or something. Whoever got him probably put him there in the hope that he'd quietly collect dust for a couple centuries before anyone missed him."
"Where are we going?"
"When she's not on Olympus, or in the Underworld, Eris keeps a place in Washington D.C. I'd give you a ride, but..." he shrugs, and points skyward, where the constellations twinkle at them from in between the clouds. "Kind of the wrong time of day for that."
"We'll be fine," Annabeth bows, feels Nico belatedly follow her example; he still wasn't used to showing the proper respect to the gods. "Thank you very much for your help, Lord Apollo."
"Anything for a pretty face," he winks, and disappears with a pop like a light bulb exploding.
She waits for the spots to stop dancing across her vision before she says, "Let's go." Only when she turns around, Nico isn't there -- he's already half-way down the path, walking briskly with his shoulders set, winding deeper into Central Park. In the wrong direction, she might add, and leaving his jacket where they'd let it fall.
"Hey!" she goes, giving chase with a burst of annoyance, her pack banging against the small of her back. She snatches up the jacket. "Nico, come on! We have to hurry if we have a prayer of catching a Greyhound to D.C. -- it's almost a full day away and he's already been missing for, what, four? And we have to stop by camp, pick up some weapons in case Eris has bodyguards or whatever, so we have no time for whatever --"
"Percy never told you what, exactly, shadow-traveling is, did he?" Nico cuts her off.
"What?"
He grabs her arm and unceremoniously yanks her off the path. They immediately disappear into the gloom, slipping under the dozen interlocking branches of trees. A dryad peeps out at them curiously as he drags her around in front of him so she's standing directly in the shadow cast by the trunk of an oak. For one silly, ADHD moment, she thinks he's going to pin her up against it, because the intense focus in his eyes is the same, but the idea is gone as quickly as it comes.
"Trust me," goes Nico, with a little more of his characteristic smirk. "Shadow-travel is a lot faster than a Greyhound."
Her brows furrow. "Okay, sure, but I'm not a daughter of Hades. Can I do it too?"
He shrugs. "With boundaries," he allows, and before she can stop him, he snatches her again, this time by the hips, pulling her flush against him, and ah, she thinks, those kind of boundaries. As in, none at all. Figures.
Her cheeks are flaming red, though, she knows, because the way he's looking at her now is very deliberate, and she can write off kissing him on the bench with a dozen different excuses, but to keep her there, every line of her body molded into his and his eyes very close, that was bordering on something she couldn't take back.
"Do you love me?" she blurts out, and okay, now is really not the time for this, because she is nothing if not practical and focused on a job, even if she does have to do everything the hard way. Way to go, Annabeth, let's have another completely off-topic question. "Or are you just in love with Percy?" Yeah, Annabeth, something like that. That was good.
The corners of his mouth turn white, and without a word he puts his lips to hers, and Annabeth's okay with this, she thinks, letting her neck go pliant into the kiss, because she's not sure if she's ready for any other answer.
And then, suddenly, they're slipping sideways. It's like being squeezed through a nylon stocking, and Annabeth automatically holds her breath, opening her eyes very, very wide.
When they stop, she loses her balance and pitches herself unceremoniously into the grass, which she's sure makes her look really drunk. She scrambles back to her feet. Nico, of course, doesn't even look ruffled. Then again, she allows, he's been doing this since he was ten years old. He sticks his hands in his pockets and frowns. She turns around.
And stares.
"The Capitol?" she hisses incredulously. "The Capitol? Eris's place is underneath the Capitol building?"
"Oh, is that what that is?" Nico blinks, and she resists the urge to smack the back of his head. "I was wondering."
She stares up at it. She took a trip here once with her architecture class in her first semester of college, but that was simply for a field trip and she'd almost gotten scissored in half by a hydra anyway. "And we're going to break into one of the most important buildings in the entire country and find a locked door that'll lead to Eris's cellar?"
"Looks that way."
"Okay, just checking." She pulls her cap out of her back pocket, expression grim. "Well, let's go hope we don't cause a national incident."
Nico grins. "My favorite kind."
-
She grabs his arm and yanks him so hard that from the outside, he must seriously look like a puppet that's been pulled off its own strings. He staggers once, and she shuts the door as fast as she can behind him, one hand over his mouth. However, she's not fast enough to slide her other hand in between the door before it shuts to muffle it, so she does the first thing that pops into her head.
"Zeus's sandals!" she gasps, and the distant boom of thunder covers the sound of the door closing.
Outside, the night guards go running right on past, shouting on ahead, just like they do in the movies, and Annabeth offers a silent prayer of thanks to the Lord of the Sky's footwear.
"Can you take that damn thing off?" Nico hisses when she removes her hand from his mouth, glaring pointedly at some point below her right ear. "I feel like an idiot being pulled around by something I can't see."
"Shut up," she snaps back, even as she slides her ponytail out of her baseball cap. "Have a little faith in me. I think we're here."
That jars him, and he blinks, looking around. Even in the pitch of dead night, they can make out the outline of a glossy executive desk with an enormous desktop computer, and a potted plant sitting in the corner.
"Um," he feels the need to point out, as she rises out of her crouch and goes to inspect the bookshelf. She catches the titles of the books there in swatches of moonbeams falling through the blinds, but none of them really fall together in her dyslexic mind. "This looks like any other office in this building."
"Yeah, but did you look at the gold leaf on the door? It say, 'General Secretary, High Division.'" When he continues to look blank, she sighs. "There's no such thing."
"Really? Sounds legit to me."
"Well, what do you know, you haven't even passed tenth -- hey!" her fingers catch on the spine of one of the books, knocks on it once, and she smiles triumphantly. When she gives it a quick yank, there's the faint, unmistakable click of a hidden lock being sprung. Nico's eyebrows meet his hairline in disbelief, but he's at her side in a heartbeat.
The bookcase rolls back with a long, mournful sound like a woman wailing. The hairs on Annabeth's neck stand on end, and together, they peer down a flight of medieval-looking stone steps, which spiral away into darkness. Very Camelot, she thinks, because really, it wasn't like the gods could have anything sensible like a normal flight of stairs.
"I don't suppose you happen to have anything useful in that pocket of yours, like matches?" she goes, uselessly, as he's already stepping around her, pulling a flashlight out of his void pocket. She almost expects the batteries to be dead, because wouldn't that be ironic, but when he flicks it on, the beam falls sure and steady, catching on whole colonies of cobwebs that look older than the Constitution and probably had their own system of taxation and plumbing by now. "Or that works," she amends, and when he reaches with one hand behind him, she doesn't even think twice about slipping her fingers in between his, following him as he leads the way down the stairs.
It doesn't take long to reach bottom. By then, the air already has that heavy, syrupy feel of an immortal realm, and it's enough to convince them they're in the right place. When they reach the last step, Nico lets the light go wild as he slips his hand along the wall, and when she opens her mouth to ask him what he's looking for, he finds it and flips the light switch.
Her jaw drops, and beside her, she hears Nico draw in a sharp breath through his nose.
Cluttered isn't even a good word to use to describe it. Eris's basement lair would chase 'cluttered' down by the water fountain and beat it senseless and steal its lunch money. It is beyond cluttered. There are stacks of boxes in every direction, a multitude of trunks piled carelessly on top of one another and crowned with various nicknacks. It's like what the attic at the Big House would be if it got illusions of grandeur and a Size-Up mushroom from Super Mario.
But the crowning glory are the taxidermy mummies. In between boxes and on top of trunks and around the various nicknacks are hosts of marble-eyed people, staring glassily in their direction. They look so real that for a moment, Annabeth feels the familiar jolt in her limbs that signals fight or flight, before her brain catches up and tells her that no, they're like deer heads, kept as trophies on the wall. They're people who've been stuffed.
Then she looks even closer, and realizes that she even recognizes some of the faces.
"Oh my gods," she says, her voice falling flat and lost in the dust. "Is that Elvis?"
"Who?" goes Nico.
"Never mind." She pulls him forward a little bit. "What are they doing down here?"
They peer closely and questioningly at Martin Luther King Jr., who looks beyond them with one hand raised like he's hailing a taxi. "I think," Nico says slowly. "They're the people who've changed the course of history. Eris is the goddess of discord, right? Every big change starts with a little discord. She must keep the mementos down here."
"Well, that's creepy," Annabeth decides with a shiver. "So as long as they're not monsters or automatons or something. Come on. Percy's got to be in here somewhere."
She starts forward, but he gives her hand a sudden sharp tug, stopping her. She twists her head around to snap at him for wasting their time, but the expression on his face stops her. "Annabeth. When ... what are things going to be like after we find him? Will you ... what are you going to do?"
His mouth fumbles with the words, but she knows immediately what he's trying to say. Before she can think about it, she lifts herself up onto her tiptoes to kiss him quickly, with faint wonder at how it's already starting to feel comforting. "I won't interfere," she says out loud, and thinks it might be worth it to see the sudden smile that brightens his face. She's in love with Percy, Nico's in love with Percy, and he might just be a little in love with her too. Annabeth's dealt with worse things in her life. "It's going to be the three of us. It's just one of those things."
They move further in. There's no rhyme or reason to how the mess works; she finds a waxy replica of Nero gazing solemnly at Susan B. Anthony, standing just around the corner. She glances over her shoulder to make sure they haven't lost sight of the exit sign, glowing red above the door they came in. Fortunately, it doesn't seem inclined to shift location the way it did in the Labyrinth.
Suddenly, Nico shakes off her hand and slides in between the life-sized taxidermy dummies of two Al-Qaeda terrorists. On the other side, half-hidden behind a stack of boxes that have "operation valkyrie" stamped on them in characters that takes her dyslexic mind a long moment to translate, is Percy, curled into a ball and unconscious.
She has a canister of nectar from her pack in her hand before she's even maneuvered around the dummies, but Nico thinks of something even better.
He pulls a bottle of water out of his void pocket, unscrewing the cap in a quick twist as he kneels down beside Percy, whose skin is roughly the same color as the cement floor. She catches the faint whiff of salt water and sea brine before he splashes the whole thing at Percy's face.
He gasps awake, an almost bluish flush of color coming to his grey face as water runs in rivulets down his chin. His eyes flicker between them in quick appraisal, and the relief she sees there makes her throat go tight. Then, because he's an idiot -- Annabeth knows this already, she's sure, but it still strikes her at the oddest of moments -- he rasps, "Hey, guys. What are you doing here?"
Nico makes a thin, disgusted noise in the back of his throat. He rocks forward and half-drags Percy to an upright position so they can get a better look at him. He appears fine, of course, except for the fact he looks like he just crawled out of the grave. It's easy to forget, sometimes, that no blade will ever cut his skin, no claw will ever reach him, no monster can sink their teeth into him and shake him like a ragdoll, but he can still be injured. She's glad that time moves slower in immortal places, because she'd hate to see what he'd look like after four days in a dark, dank basement.
"What did you do?" she demands, and it comes out short and rough. Nico gives her a sympathetic look out of the corner of his eyes when she cringes, because try as she might, the caring girlfriend will just never come naturally.
Percy frowns hard, like she'd asked him what were the top three architectural styles used in the Montemartre district of Paris and expected a correct answer (because it should be obvious. European architecture is one of the first things you pick up.) "Someone picked a fight with me. A son of Ares, I think, looking to get Dad's approval. Or maybe I picked a fight with him. I don't remember."
Nico and Annabeth exchange a very meaningful look. Would you like to strangle him? it says. Or should I do the honors?
"I take it back," she grumbles, as they haul Percy to his feet. "Your head isn't full of help. If it was, I would still be holding out on the hope it would show some sort of intelligent life. You have none, obviously."
-
They don't relax until they are on the Greyhound -- Nico didn't want to risk shadow-traveling all the way back to New York with both of them; he'd felt enough strain getting them both past security on the way back out, he said.
There are two other people on the bus with them, a middle-aged couple who are drowsing against each other's shoulders, but as the bus rumbles up the ramp onto the freeway out of the metro area and they show no sign of getting up or transforming into something hideous, Annabeth and Nico decide they're just mortals and settle Percy down into one of the seats, giving him a square of ambrosia to tide him over until they can get home.
He's still pale, and his breathing is shallow. Annabeth wants nothing more than to brush the hair out of his eyes, kiss his temple, or do anything to make him feel better, but there's someone who's been waiting a lot longer for the chance.
Percy's eyes flutter open when Nico's long fingers touch the side of his face. "Nico, what ..." he tries for, but doesn't get any farther before Nico leans in, slanting his mouth against Percy's and stealing the words right off his lips.
He goes still all over, one hand coming up to press against Nico's shoulder, his eyes flicking sideways around Nico's head to find Annabeth watching them. She knows a first kiss when she sees it, knows that Nico has done nothing, said nothing, to intrude on what everybody had already considered to be a foregone conclusion. She knows that Percy is going to push him away and say the first thing that comes to his mind, because he never stops to think. He doesn't want to ruin a good thing, and he doesn't understand that right now, he's the only person who could.
She slides in quickly beside him, and Nico pulls back only far enough to give her room to kiss the side of Percy's face; his temple, the corner of his eye, his cheek. "It's okay," she murmurs in response to the question in his furrowed brows. Nico's hand slips around her to hold her hip, leaning in so far his skinny chest is flush against both of theirs. Percy's eyes are still confused, but when Annabeth moves her head, he doesn't object, opening his mouth to her kiss.
Nico's hands tighten briefly around both of them, holding on as tight as possible so the pressure of both of them would keep his heart from splintering. "We're here," he says. "We're here. Both of us."
Annabeth turns to kiss him for that, and marvels at the fact that even though it's her tongue against the rough of Nico's, she can still taste Percy, the salt and the sweat of him. Watching them, so close to him it makes him cross-eyed, Percy makes a choked noise in the back of his throat.
"Are you okay?" she asks him softly, and she and Nico reach up together to touch his face, smoothing his hair back from either side.
His eyes move from one to the other, and then, slowly, wonderingly, he reaches up with both hands to cup their faces. Nico's fingers slip into hers when he does this, his grip tight with joy. She squeezes back, because what she feels is probably similar.
"Yeah," Percy says, leaning forward so that their foreheads all touch. "Yeah, I will be."
-
On the bus, Annabeth sleeps.
Janus isn't laughing at her this time, but silent, waiting expectantly, both faces looking eerily into either direction. There are still two doors behind him, but she can put names to them now.
"If you're waiting for me to make a choice," she tells him, maybe a little smugly, "then you'll be waiting for a very long time."
-
fin