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Chapter Text

This is as much a story about redemption as it is a story about surviving abuse. It could not have been any other way, because for Apollo these two things are, in almost every way that matters, one and the same. Yet Apollo claims for himself only one of these two story arcs. He takes the redemption, as he rightfully should. He leaves the survival to Meg. She’s the one who should not be held responsible for what she’s done on Nero’s orders. She’s the one who didn’t – couldn’t – know better. She’s the one who could not have tried harder. She’s the one who has a chance of getting free. 

‘I don’t blame you for anything. [...] The fact that you left me alone in the Grove of Dodona, that you lied about your stepfather –’ 

‘Stop.’ 

I waited for her faithful servant Peaches the karpos to fall from the heavens and tear my scalp off. It didn’t happen. 

‘What I mean,’ I tried again, ‘is that I am sorry for everything you have been through. None of it was your fault. You should not blame yourself. That fiend Nero played with your emotions, twisted your thoughts –’ 

‘Stop.’ 

‘Perhaps I could put my feelings into a song.’ 

‘Stop.’ 

‘Or I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me.’ (TDP 163-164)

I could tell you a story about a similar thing that once happened to me, Apollo says. But he doesn’t. Not to her, and not to anyone else. Not even to us, the readers, the only people to whom he eventually finds the courage to admit what he’s known all along: that he’s been a victim for at least as long as he’s been a villain.

In the centre, behind a marble altar, rose a massive golden statue of Dad himself: Jupiter Optimus Maximus, draped in a purple silk toga big enough to be a ship’s sail. He looked stern, wise and paternal, though he was only one of those in real life. 

Seeing him tower above me, lightning bolt raised, I had to fight the urge to cower and plead. I knew it was only a statue, but if you’ve ever been traumatized by someone, you’ll understand. It doesn’t take much to trigger those old fears: a look, a sound, a familiar situation. Or a fifty-foot-tall golden statue of your abuser – that does the trick. (TTT 94-95)

It is a costly admission for him. It takes him 3 books to get there. Oh, he’s joked about it before. He’s complained. Apollo LOVES complaining. Never let it be said that he missed a chance to loudly and dramatically whine about a minor inconvenience. He’ll happily tell anyone who’ll listen how hard and cruel and unfair his life is... so long as there’s no chance of being taken seriously. 

Apollo tells his most convincing lies simply by making the truth sound laughable. 

Zeus seemed to consider egotism a trait the boy had inherited from me. Which is ridiculous. I am much too self-aware to be egotistical. (THO 31)

But he is, indeed, much too self aware not to know what he’s doing. Which is why his rather unconventional redemption arc involves so little actual soul searching. He never has to look very far. Once he finally resolves to stop lying for good, he doesn’t have to look at all.

It’s precisely the act of finally recognizing his wrongdoings for what they are, and resolving to take responsibility for them, that at long last allows him to acknowledge the evil that has been done to him.

He only ever voices the first of those two confessions in front of his companions. He knows he has no right to make excuses for himself, no right to ask for sympathy. He sees the similarities between himself and Meg, but he knows he is not like her. Despite the child-like body he’s been forced into by his father, he is an adult. He does not get to claim ignorance, or impotence, even though he’s tempted to, even though, by some standards at least, he could. It doesn’t matter. His shortcomings may not be entirely his fault, but his surrender is.

Because that’s what he had done. He had surrendered. 

The Apollo we meet at the very beginning of this story, before he is cast out of Olympus and trapped in the dreadfully normal mortal flesh prison that is the body of Lester Papadopoulos, is a fully grown man, father and grandfather and great grandfather hundreds of times over, still living at home with his abusive dad and his wicked stepmom. He is fine with it. More than fine, in fact! As he tells us repeatedly, he can’t wait to get back to that life. So what if that life kinda sucks? What if he has to live it according to his father’s dictates rather than his own? What then? There are no better options. None that he’s been able to find, and he has been looking. He has been looking for a really, really long time. So maybe, as pathetic as the notion is, this is the best he can do. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is fully determined to believe it. After so many attempts, after so many failures, he has found an incredibly shitty but incredibly solid way to cope. And he has settled. He has decided to settle. Even though, deep down, he still feels that this is far from what he should be able and willing to aspire to. He has surrendered. He's found comfort in surrendering. An incredibly shitty kind of comfort! But comfort all the same.

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is the empty husk of a person who's given up on everything that ever mattered to him. He’s a pretender. A showman. An aged comedian with a stale act and an astounding inability to read his audience. He shamelessly tells us of his humiliation and his blunders, brags about how little he thinks of us without a trace of embarrassment, painfully confident that even at his worst he deserves our attention. How could he not? He’s the lead actor on the world’s stage, the main character of Life. 

And yet, he’s very clearly not the character he’s supposed to be: “the handsomest, most talented, most popular god in the pantheon,” he helpfully reminds us, and as ridiculous as that sounds, especially coming out of his own mouth, he may as well be quoting the introductory section of his own Wikipedia page. 

The Brilliant Apollo, the crown prince of Olympus who far outshone all his siblings, who amassed talents and domains beyond those of any of his brethren, to whom so many heroes owed their success or demise, whom so many emperors and kings wanted to emulate, and who, yes, may have been kind of an asshole at times, but a competent asshole who got things done.

This guy? He is, at best, a parody of his fabled namesake. He’s a small, petty, ineffectual loser desperate to be liked but unwilling to do any of the work that would make that possible. He can’t wait to get someone, anyone, to fight his battles for him. He’s all too happy to take credit for others’ accomplishments to make up for the fact that he has none of his own. 

It’s very easy to laugh at him. He seems like he had it coming. The more he keeps lamenting the injustice of his punishment, the more he convinces us that he deserved it. Sometimes he almost seems like he himself might be conscious of this:

I stared at my battered face in the bathroom mirror. Perhaps teenage angst had permeated the clothes, because I felt more like a sulky high-schooler than ever. I thought how unfair it was that I was being punished, how lame my father was, how no one else in the history of time had ever experienced problems like mine. (THO 30)

But immediately he rushes to disabuse us of that notion:

Of course, all that was empirically true. No exaggeration was required. (THO 30)

I’m not joking, he insists while delivering his lines like he expects there to be canned laughter at the end of them:

If I didn’t know how much Percy Jackson adored me, I would have sworn he was about to punch me in my already-broken nose. (THO 26)

And he shows us enough of his real vulnerability that it’s easy to believe him.

I took a deep breath. Then I did my usual motivational speech in the mirror: ‘You are gorgeous and people love you!’ I went out to face the world. (THO 31)

After all, what kind of depth can a person who unironically does that have? 

‘I’m fat!’ 

‘You’re average. Average people don’t have eight-pack abs. C’mon.’ 

I wanted to protest that I was not average nor a person, but with growing despair I realized the term now fitted me perfectly. (THO 20)

He’s convinced he’s so much better than us, he takes our sympathy for granted. He trusts we will believe his obvious lies because he’s too taken with himself not to realize how transparent they are. And even if we don’t, even if he isn’t, does it really matter? Are we not entertained? 

If there’s one thing Apollo is confident he can do – the only thing Apollo’s still confident he can do – is put on a show. 

And he does. He makes us wince and cringe at his awfulness, marvel at his obliviousness and ineptitude, see through his obviously fake brags so clearly and so often in the span of the first handful of chapters, that by the time he finally, actually, has to do something we are fully ready to believe it’s an accident he happens to do the decent thing. He’s so quick to declare any good deed of his was not his intended result, and simultaneously pat himself on the back for doing the bare minimum, that for a ridiculously long while the idea that he can actually be relied upon to do what’s right, that this is in fact a pattern of behavior and intent for him, keeps seeming just implausible enough to be disbelieved.

“You saved me,” Meg interrupted. “I was going to die. Maybe that’s why you got your voice back.”

I was reluctant to admit it, but she might have been right. The last time I’d experienced a burst of godly power, in the woods of Camp Half-Blood, my children Kayla and Austin had been in imminent danger of burning alive. Concern for others was a logical trigger for my powers. I was, after all, selfless, caring, and an all-around nice guy. Nevertheless, I found it irritating that my own well-being wasn’t sufficient to give me godly strength. My life was important too! (TDP 204)

I’m a good person, he says in the tone of someone who knows that statement to be false and is trying to delude himself into thinking it isn’t. And yet he prefaces it with “I’m reluctant to admit it.” If Meg hadn’t voiced the idea in the first place, Apollo would not even have considered it, even though it is, in fact, the obvious explanation. But that can’t be, because Apollo is not selfless, caring, or nice. To really drive that point home, with his very next breath he rushes to recenter the conversation on himself. “Why can’t I also be powerful for MY sake?” he whines. 

Apollo wants to believe he’s a good person. But he is not a person. He’s a god. And gods don’t want, can’t want to be good. Gods are perfect. They don’t doubt. They don’t feel guilt or remorse. They don’t change. 

Sally Jackson crossed her arms. In spite of the grim matters we were discussing, she smiled. ‘You’ve grown up.’ 

I assumed she was talking about Meg. Over the last few months, my young friend had indeed got taller and – Wait. Was Sally referring to me? 

My first thought: preposterous! I was four thousand years old. I didn’t grow up. 

She reached across the table and squeezed my hand. ‘The last time you were here, you were so lost. So … well, if you don’t mind me saying –’ 

‘Pathetic,’ I blurted out. ‘Whiny, entitled, selfish. I felt terribly sorry for myself.’ 

Meg nodded along with my words as if listening to her favourite song. ‘You still feel sorry for yourself.’ 

‘But now,’ Sally said, sitting back again, ‘you’re more … human, I suppose.’ 

There was that word again: human, which not long ago I would have considered a terrible insult. Now, every time I heard it, I thought of Jason Grace’s admonition: Remember what it’s like to be human. 

He hadn’t meant all the terrible things about being human, of which there were plenty. He’d meant the best things: standing up for a just cause, putting others first, having stubborn faith that you could make a difference, even if it meant you had to die to protect your friends and what you believed in. These were not the kind of feelings that gods had … well, ever. (TON 45-46)

“These were not the kind of feelings that gods had” he thinks, still, at the beginning of the very last book. And yet, here he is, having them. He’s had them his entire life. He’s had them since he set out to slay Python the first time, a newborn god brimming with power and a good dose of cockiness too, eager to prove himself, to be of use, to make a difference. 

“I was the worst of the gods,” he says, dropping all pretenses as he sings of his failures to the myrmekes. Because I loved too much. Because I felt guilty. Because I kept trying to do more. Because I kept changing my mind.

These are unforgivable sins for a god. That’s what Apollo and all of his divine siblings have been taught. That’s what they’ve all, in time, learned to believe. Good people don’t survive on Olympus. 

And Apollo is, above all, a survivor. 

So Apollo doesn’t want to believe he’s a good person. 

This is incredibly uncharacteristic of me, he makes sure to specify every time he does something kind, every time he finds himself unable to hide his shame or guilt or doubt, to hide how much he cares, well past the point where we start realizing that it is, in fact, perfectly characteristic of him.

I’m totally gonna throw my companions to the wolves any second now, he says while moving to stand between them and the danger. I’m tired of listening to mortals talking about themselves, he says, having just finished needling them with questions about their circumstances and their feelings and the wellbeing of both them and their loved ones. I did the right thing so I could call myself right, which makes it a selfish thing, actually. I did the right thing but I was thinking about not doing it for a moment there, so really, it doesn’t count. I did the right thing but look, I had no choice, I was coerced, they offered me a musical instrument, that’s practically blackmail!

For someone who appears so eager to boast about his legendary past, he doesn’t seem to be able to recall any of the actual good things he’s done. He won’t even admit to having killed Python the first time until he’s very nearly forced to. Even then, what looms big in his mind is not his success but the fact that he struggled to achieve it. And what is even the most impressive achievement worth, if it’s not effortless? Gods shouldn’t struggle. Only the weak do. 

‘Apollo,’ she said, ‘those shots were fantastic. A little more practice and –’ 

‘I’m the god of archery!’ I wailed. ‘I don’t practice!’ (THO 141)

So Apollo lies. He lies about being better than he is. Stronger. Immovable. In control. He lies about being worse than he is. Ignorant. Unfeeling. Cruel. 

He’s as determined to misread Percy’s annoyance toward him as adoration as he is to misread Chiron’s faith in him as an insult.

It occurred to me that I’d seen that keen look in Chiron’s eyes before – when he’d assessed Achilles’s sword technique and Ajax’s skill with a spear. It was the look of a seasoned coach scouting new talent. I’d never dreamed the centaur would look at me that way, as if I had something to prove to him, as if my mettle were untested. I felt so … so objectified. (THO 104)

Chiron’s not the one who thinks Apollo has anything to prove. In fact, Chiron has the highest possible expectations of him. Chiron, who owes Apollo everything he knows, everything he has, still believes Apollo capable of great deeds like the ones recounted in his Wikipedia page, the ones we all know from the storybooks. 

“Wikipedia,” says Apollo, “is always getting stuff wrong about me.” And as for the storybooks? They’ll make “good tinder for a fire.”

Apollo knows the truth. He isn’t a hero. He isn’t great. He isn’t even good. A good person would not have to worry about forgetting his children’s names. A good person would not stand by as little kids get enlisted to fight their parents’ wars. A good person would not let them die. A good person would not take out his anger on people he knows to be without fault, no matter how rightful that anger is, or how unreachable the real target of it is.

And if he’s a bad person, then he has no reason to try and push back against a status quo where kids are seen as fodder for the gods to use and discard as they see fit. No reason to risk his neck by challenging his father’s rules. No reason to risk anything by trying to do better. If he’s a bad person, then he can claim all the actions and, even more, the millennia of inaction he so regrets were his choice rather than his failure, or worse, something that he had no real say in at all. 

I turned my face to the sky. ‘If you want to punish me, Father, be my guest, but have the courage to hurt me directly, not my mortal companion. BE A MAN!’ 

To my surprise, the skies remained silent. Lightning did not vaporize me. (THO 252)

There’s a long stretch of book 1, immediately after Kayla and Austin get kidnapped, in which all of the bullshit abruptly disappears and we get Apollo’s almost completely unfiltered, genuine pov. It is a noticeable enough shift that it’s impossible to miss even on first reading, but at the time it happens, we don’t know enough about who Apollo really is as a person to know how to interpret it. “It’s all my fault,” Apollo states, even though it clearly isn’t. He takes the blame for his enemies targeting his children. He takes the blame for Meg being captured by the ants. 

And it was easy, in light of what we knew about him at the time, to view this as more proof of Apollo’s egotism. Of course he’d think that. He thinks everything is about him. But look: Zeus did not in fact vaporize him. Apollo’s just being his usual overly dramatic narcissistic self. He’s cracked enough jokes about being fried by his father’s lightning that we know not to take that seriously. He’s just being a comedian. 

Granted, not a very original or funny one. He keeps recycling the same tired punchlines. For example, he keeps making a production of anticipating cartoonishly violent responses from people whenever he says something he knows they’ll dislike. That routine got old fast, but he seems to be really fixated on it for some reason. 

It takes us a long while to realize what the reason is. 

But it’s not actually for his own sake that Apollo fears the most. 

“How could I have been so foolish?” he berates himself. “Whenever I angered the other gods, those closest to me were struck down.” 

It’s only in this moment that he finally allows himself to call Kayla and Austin “my children” out loud. He’d explained his reluctance to do so before:

My eyes watered. Not so long ago – like this morning, for instance – the idea of these young demigods being able to help me would have struck me as ridiculous. Now their kindness moved me more than a hundred sacrificial bulls. I couldn’t recall the last time someone had cared about me enough to curse my enemies with rhyming couplets. 

‘Thank you,’ I managed. I could not add my children. It didn’t seem right. These demigods were my protectors and my family, but for the present I could not think of myself as their father. A father should do more – a father should give more to his children than he takes. (THO 115)

And then, of course, he’d instantly rushed to cover up the shame of having shown some decency. “This was a novel idea for me,” he’d said, lying through his teeth and at the same time wholeheartedly believing his own lie, as all the best liars do. 

Sometimes a decent, moral notion just springs up in your brain fully formed and perfectly articulated like that. You never know when it might happen! It’s not weird. It must be the mortality, actually. That pesky mortal conscience side effect that people get together with their ability to die. It’s totally a thing. 

But the second Kayla and Austin are in danger, his hesitation suddenly evaporates. They are his children. They are his responsibility. “I should’ve done more to protect them,” he says.“I should have anticipated that my enemies would target them to hurt me.”

Nero wanted Meg to depend entirely on him. She wasn’t allowed to have her own possessions, her own friends. Everything in her life had to be tainted with Nero’s poison.

If he got his hands on me, no doubt he would use me the same way. Whatever horrible tortures he had planned for Lester Papadopoulos, they wouldn’t be as bad as the way he tortured Meg. He would make her feel responsible for my pain and death. (TDP 194-195)

Apollo immediately understands Nero’s game. He knows how this works, because he’s living within a scaled up version of it. It doesn’t matter that he isn’t a child. That he’s a god. Zeus is a god too, and he’s more powerful than him. There is no questioning his edicts. There is no escaping them either. No matter how much distance Apollo can put between himself and his father, he’ll still have the same amount of privacy and freedom as a kid whose parents won't let close the door to his own bedroom. Zeus just has to take one step forward to be instantly breathing down his subjects’ neck. It doesn't matter that he doesn't always do it. What matters is that he can, if he wants to.

All the gods live in fear of the day Zeus will decide that he wants to. They’d do anything to redirect his wrath from themselves. They have no one save their own family, high on top of the Empire State Building, walled off from the rest of the world, forbidden from having any kind of meaningful interaction, from building any kind of lasting connection with the mortals down below, and they are ready to throw one another into the jaws of the Beast at a moment’s notice. 

“If I gave up on everyone who has tried to kill me,” Apollo tells Meg, trying to make her understand why he’s willing to put his faith in Lytierses, “I would have no allies left on the Olympian Council.” 

Apollo doesn’t hold it against them. It’s just how it is. 

‘I’m sorry I couldn’t do more.’ 

‘What could you have done?’ 

‘I mean at the Parthenon. I tried to talk sense into Zeus. I told him he was wrong to punish you. He wouldn’t listen.’ 

[...]

My first thought was to scream, ARE YOU INSANE? 

Then more appropriate words came to me. ‘Thank you.’ (TBM 216)

The tragedy of Jason Grace isn’t that his death is unfair, though it is. It’s not even that his death was preventable, because it wasn’t. It’s that his death, ultimately, was not necessary. 

This right here is the turning point for Apollo. Not Jason’s death, but Jason’s willingness to stand up to Zeus for him, even though Jason barely knew him, even though it provided Jason nothing, when nobody else, not even Artemis, would. It’s Jason’s willingness to do for Apollo what Apollo had long lost the courage to do for anyone, including himself.

But Jason has no way of knowing that, and all Apollo can give him is his word. That’s when Jason’s fate is sealed. The moment he decides that Apollo’s promise is worth more than his life. The moment he chooses to sacrifice his last few precious seconds to remind Apollo of it once more, one final time, to stake everything he has on this crazy gamble, believing – or at least hoping, even against all hope – that Apollo will follow through.

“It’s all my fault,” Apollo says. But Meg disagrees.

‘Jason made a choice,’ she said. ‘Same as you. Heroes have to be ready to sacrifice themselves.’

I felt unsettled … and not just because Meg had used such a long sentence. I didn’t like her definition of heroism. I’d always thought of a hero as someone who stood on a parade float, waved at the crowd, tossed candy and basked in the adulation of the commoners. But sacrificing yourself? No. That would not be one of my bullet points for a hero-recruitment brochure.

Also, Meg seemed to be calling me a hero, putting me in the same category as Jason Grace. That didn’t feel right. I made a much better god than a hero. (TBM 316-317)

I’ve always hated thinking of heroes as expendable, Apollo admits, finally, after almost 3 books spent lying to both us and himself about it, and by the time he does, it doesn’t even feel like a revelation anymore. He’d told us, didn’t he? He’d shown us. He is the worst of the gods. But still, a much better god than a hero. Because heroes are willing to risk it all for what they believe is right. And Apollo? He just really, really doesn’t want to die. “I was,” he says, “a coward that way.”

And yet, by the time he says this, we’ve witnessed Apollo’s willingness to risk and sacrifice himself for his children, for the people he keeps insisting he finds so annoying and yet he’s always so eager to start calling friends, multiple times already. 

But he’s never actually wanted to die. He just can’t bring himself to. He is a survivor. And survivors can’t be heroes. Good people don’t survive. Only the bad ones do. That’s what his experience has taught him, again and again and again, even though the notion goes against everything he feels, deep down, is right. 

When he meets his children in person for the first time and they are far more concerned about the prospect of losing their talents than of losing their father, he is relieved. He wants them to be selfish, just like he is. He wants them to survive. 

But as it turns out, his children aren’t selfish. They care so much, so deeply and fiercely, about so much more than just themselves. They grow attached so quickly. They are eager to help. They are just like him, in all the ways he never would have wanted them to be. 

Looking at them, he can’t help but feel ashamed.

Apollo has done many, many bad things in his long life, and not all of them to survive. If there was any justice in this world, he would not be the one still here, still standing, still alive, instead of all the far more deserving people he’s buried. 

But still, he does not want to die. Not even now, at his absolute lowest, not even now that he’s lost everything he’s ever had, up to and including his own name. 

So he can’t think of himself as a hero. He does not want to. 

“I had stabbed myself in the chest fully expecting that Medea would heal me,” he says, to explain why that does not count as a proper self sacrifice. 

In his mind, intent seems to matter as much as actions do. The truth is, for a god? It probably does. For a god, wanting to do something might as well be the same as having already done it. Apollo is not a god anymore, and yet, still, he desperately wants to survive. He keeps surviving despite all odds. He keeps surviving stuff that by all rights should have killed an average mortal human a hundred times over. 

But what good is it to survive, if it benefits no one? What good is the power of a god, the power to do anything you think of the moment it crosses your mind, if it can’t be used to do what’s right?

She fixed her eyes on me. Her lips quivered. I could tell she wanted a way out – some eloquent argument that would mollify her stepfather and allow her to follow her conscience. But I was no longer a silver-tongued god. I could not out-talk an orator like Nero. And I would not play the Beast’s blame game. 

Instead, I took a page from Meg’s book, which was always short and to the point. 

‘He’s evil,’ I said. ‘You’re good. You must make your own choice.’ (THO 290)

Apollo immediately understands what Meg is silently asking of him. He recognizes that she is looking for an excuse, a stratagem, a ruse that will let her do the right thing without setting off her abuser, because it’s what HE always does too. 

He does it even now, even within the confines of his own head, arguably the only place that’s out of the reach of his father’s all seeing gaze. 

His whole life and sense of self have been consumed by the hopeless search for the exact combination of words and behaviors that will let him act according to his own morals without putting into question Zeus’ judgement, without challenging Zeus’ rules, and by his increasingly despicable attempts to fool himself into thinking that that isn’t true. 

But it is true. Deep down Apollo knows it is. Even when he manages to score a point, to win a round... he is still always playing his father’s game. 

This is the awful reality he has resigned himself to. It’s the best he can do. He is convinced of it. He has accepted it. 

But he can’t accept that the same is true for Meg. So he gives her the advice he refuses to take for himself. 

“He’s evil. You’re good. You must make your own choice.” 

He’s able to state it in such simple, clear terms for her. He’s light years away from being willing and able to believe that it applies to him too. 

He doesn’t want that kind of responsibility. He can’t trust himself with it. He can’t even bring himself to admit to the choice that he’s making in this very moment, has to make up a half hearted excuse about suddenly lacking the ability to spin a yarn, for reasons, despite the fact that he’s been bullshitting us for almost an entire novel. 

But he can believe in Meg, because she is not like him. She is strong. She is good. She deserves a chance to do better. 

“You, Meg, are powerful,” he tells her on their first morning together at camp. “You will do well,” he tells Lityerses as they part ways. “We can trust him,” he says, introducing Crest to the residents of the Cistern. Despite all of his protestations to the contrary, against his own better judgement, he can’t help seizing every chance he gets to lift up the people around him, to put his faith in them, to give them his trust, even and especially when nobody else will.

“I believe in second chances”, he says, “and thirds, and fourths.” But not for himself. Never for himself. He knows himself too well. He is not strong, nor good, nor deserving. 

Chapter Text

“So,” I said glumly. “We’re going to get a ride from your brother, huh?”

Artemis’s silver eyes gleamed. “Yes, boy. You see, Bianca di Angelo is not the only one with an annoying brother. It’s time for you to meet my irresponsible twin, Apollo.” (TTC 45)

This is Apollo’s introduction in the series, courtesy of his sister Artemis, the only true ally he has on Olympus, the only one he believes would care at least a little bit if he died. Apollo is “annoying”, she says, “irresponsible”, and before he has even entered the scene, she’s managed to call him “lazy” too. 

He does absolutely nothing to dispel this image of himself when he gets there. 

The twins’ back and forth is a practiced dance that the Hunters and the young demigods are mostly passive spectators or unwitting participants of. 

I missed you, Apollo says, I was worried. Where are you going? but he says it in such a way that it comes across as obnoxious rather than caring, and her rudeness and irritation feel fully justified as she replies that it’s none of his business. 

He recites some self aggrandizing poetry knowing it’ll be met with eye rolls and light mockery. He flirts with the girls knowing he’ll get rebuffed. His friendliness always stops just short of feeling completely pleasant and genuine.

He takes the time to acknowledge and address all of the people present and still somehow comes across as if he’s just trying to put himself at the center of attention.

He LARPs an amicable first meeting, systematically sabotaging each and every one of the numerous overtures he makes, while his twin sighs and shakes her head in the background. 

It’s all incredibly calculated... until it isn’t, and the real desperation at the heart of it shines through. 

“I know what you’re going to say,” Apollo said. “You don’t deserve an honor like driving the sun chariot.”

“That’s not what I was going to say.”

“Don’t sweat it! Maine to Long Island is a really short trip, and don't worry about what happened to the last kid I trained. You’re Zeus’s daughter. He’s not going to blast you out of the sky.”

Apollo laughed good-naturedly. The rest of us didn’t join him. (TTC 52)

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is a thousands of years old deity so desperate to impress a bunch of kids he just met he immediately offers to let them drive his cool car, only to then find himself having to pressure into it the one kid who didn’t want to do it, because she’s the only one that the Lord of the Sky wouldn’t instantly strike down. 

“Nero wanted Meg to depend entirely on him,” Apollo will observe in the not so distant future. “She wasn’t allowed to have her own possessions, her own friends. Everything in her life had to be tainted with Nero’s poison,” he will say, noting how now that the girl has formed an attachment to him, he himself has become a weapon in Nero’s arsenal. “If [Nero gets] his hands on me,” he’ll predict with perfect accuracy, through no power other than the ability to see clearly the parallel between Meg’s situation and his, “he [will] make her feel responsible for my pain and death.” 

There are no things in Apollo’s life, not even the things that by all rights should belong entirely to him, that are safe from his father’s interference. There are no choices he’s truly allowed to make without his father’s permission and approval. If he dares, those who are close to him will pay the price.

In the halls of Olympus, to grow close to anyone is an unforgivable weakness, and to care is a punishable offense. Apollo has to act in secret even just to search for his twin when she’s lost, to send help her way. 

So Artemis cannot, will not speak in her brother’s defense before their father. 

“I can always charm Father into forgiving me,” she tells Apollo. But she cannot charm Zeus into forgiving her brother, and she can’t directly take him on any more than Apollo can. All she can do is try to talk some sense into her stubborn, reckless twin. 

“It’s you I’m worried about,” she tells Apollo, a rare confession of love that is also a clear reproach. You were stupid. You were careless. You should not have angered Father. 

Artemis is far too aware of all the ways their father’s judgement is unfair, all the ways their father’s rules are stifling, damaging, even plain wrong, not to understand that there are very good reasons to oppose him. Still, as she pointedly reminds her brother of his taking part in Olympus' first and only attempted coup, of his killing the makers of the weapon that their father had used to kill Asclepius, she makes it clear she disapproves. 

It’s never a good idea to antagonize the King of the Gods. Artemis, unlike Apollo, is smart enough not to do it. She’s smart enough to have separated herself from the rest of them as soon and as much as she possibly could. She does good where she can, to the extent that she can, far away from Olympus, making sure to never give Zeus reason to look her way. 

‘Meg,’ said the emperor, ‘I am trying so hard to keep the Beast at bay. Why won’t you help me? I know you are a good girl. I wouldn’t have allowed you to roam around Manhattan so much on your own, playing the street waif, if I didn’t know you could take care of yourself. [...]’ (THO 288)

There are a lot of parallels between Apollo and Meg, that become more and more evident as the story progresses. But there are a lot of parallels between Meg and Artemis too. 

Meg, Apollo notes, is clearly Nero’s favorite. She’s allowed comparatively more leeway than the rest of her siblings. She’s told she has earned it. She’s made to feel important. Valued. Trusted. She’s told it is her responsibility to keep the Beast at bay. It’s all an illusion, of course. She has no power over her stepfather’s choices. But it’s a nice, comforting illusion. It’s tempting to believe it. 

A part of Artemis still does, even though she absolutely knows better. Sometimes Zeus does listen to her. If only Apollo did too. If only Apollo just followed her advice, if he just lay a little lower, if he were a smidge more humble, a bit less ambitious, a bit less emotional. If he just learned to let things, to let people go. Maybe everything would be fine.

Artemis has had many more years than Meg to figure out how to best take advantage of Zeus’ favoritism. She has instituted her own personal cult, her very own “all-maiden mafia”, as Apollo tellingly calls it, within the confines of which she gets to be the uncontested rule maker. She grants her followers immortality for as long as they’ll serve her – only for as long as they’ll serve her – to keep them safe, to keep them close, to keep them loyal. She created another, better family for herself. She strives, and for the most part succeeds, in being a much more wise and compassionate head of it than her father is. 

She knows full well her brother could never get away with doing the same. 

But it's much more comforting to tell herself she earned and deserves her privileges, than it is to admit they represent a wrong she doesn’t have the power to right. 

It’s easier to think of Apollo as irresponsible than reflect on the fact that she, who had not hesitated to pierce through with her arrows Asclepius’s mother for daring to hurt her beloved brother’s feelings, did nothing when Zeus decided the boy must die. 

For as much as she strives not to be, Artemis is very clearly her father’s daughter, and she has internalized just as much of her father’s bullshit as her brother has. 

Apollo brought it on himself. He was stupid. Careless. He should not have angered Father. This is what Artemis would rather think, and at least on some level, Apollo wants to agree with her. There is a perverse sort of comfort in the idea that his father would not strike him or his loved ones without reason. If Apollo deserved it, then that means, in a way, that he’s still in control of his fate.

I have done nothing to earn this strife, he tells us, over and over again at the start of his own pentalogy, in exactly the way that will lead us to conclude that he absolutely has. He wants to be pitied, and yet, at the same time, to be pitied is the last thing he would ever want. He wants to be understood, and yet, at the same time, the very thought of it terrifies him. 

Because in his rare moments of honesty, Apollo can’t really find it in himself to believe in his own innocence either. 

The truth is he WAS stupid, and careless, and maybe Artemis is right. He should have just kept his head down. Maybe he really is just a vain, power hungry fool. Maybe he’s deluded, to think he could do better. To think he could do more than his father does.

Apollo has done many bad things in his long life. Not all of them to survive. And power should make good people uneasy. So what does it say about him that he wants it? Does it matter that he wants it for a just reason? Does it matter that he would be taking it from a tyrant? When Zeus took it from his own father, he was full of righteous anger and good intentions too.

The truth is, Apollo is nothing like his father. But Zeus doesn’t see it. He only sees the ways in which Apollo is exactly like him. 

Father hates me because I’m too full of awesome, Apollo says, because joking about it hurts less than acknowledging it as truth. The only thing you’re full of is your own inflated ego, Artemis says, for the exact same reason. 

But it is true. Apollo is punished for his achievements just as much as he is for his transgressions. He is the most radiant and accomplished of all of Zeus’ offspring. It doesn’t garner Apollo any sympathy that he says this, definitively solidifying the impression that he’s nothing but a ridiculous, pretentious brat, but he has no sympathy points to lose with us, because despite all appearances, he’s never really intended to earn any in the first place, and he has no sympathy points to lose with the rest of his brothers and sisters either, because they all resent him and envy him in equal measure for it. He is his father’s biggest pride, and the biggest threat to his rule. He is the son that should never have been born, and that Zeus can’t bring himself to kill like his own father would have. 

We’ll never hear in Apollo’s own words the details of Zeus’s abuse. Apollo chooses not to share them. But once we know to look, we can see the scars all over him. All over Artemis too. 

That day on Delos, in front of Leo and Hazel and Frank, Apollo and Artemis are, like usual, acting out a script that is centuries, maybe millennia old, which the young demigods can do little more than awkwardly witness or play along with. 

I am unjustly mistrusted, Apollo says, dramatically scoring his own wallowing with his ukulele. Well, maybe if you hadn’t accepted to be worshipped above Father... Artemis says. He’s just mad I’m more good looking than he is! Apollo wails. Artemis pretends to gag.

This is how the two of them cope. They have a routine. They keep going through the motions of it, even long after it stopped reflecting their reality, well past the point where it’s become detrimental to them. 

There must have been a time where Apollo’s pride and arrogance weren’t just flimsy covers for self hatred and fear. There must have been a time when Artemis’ jabs were more affectionate than genuinely frustrated. But that time has passed. 

And Apollo has not been a real threat to Zeus’ power in millennia. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story has done everything he could to make himself as non threatening as possible. 

Gone is the frighteningly capable god of the myths. The one who took initiative. Who went out to slay monsters himself, rather than send some heroes to do it in his stead. The one who decided to teach himself to shoot arrows. To heal wounds. Who loved learning new things, who loved sharing knowledge. The one who decided to give a chance to a lonely centaur ostracized by everybody, to give a home and an education to the children of the gods. The one who set up a slave freeing business in his temples. Who’d gift immortality to a couple of girls for free, no conditions, no strings attached, because he was impressed and moved by their reckless bravery. Who’d lovingly carve the wood of his own bows, steal the Fates’ thread to make the strings. Who was warm, and kind, like the sun. Who was loved by all. Who earned more and more people’s prayers even for things that did not fall under his domain… until they did. 

Gone too, is the god whose anger cut down the innocents. The one whose hopeless hunger for love devoured people whole. The one who’d sneer at his siblings because he knew he was better than them, because they might have had more of their father’s goodwill, but they never had even a fraction as much of their father’s attention. The one who got Daphne and Hyacintus killed because he’d been the last to realize that while yes, it was all but impossible for almost anyone, including other deities, to strike back at Apollo himself directly, it was so, so incredibly easy to hurt him by hurting the people he loved. The one who refused Trophonius and Agamethus a second chance. The one who relentlessly bullied Harpocrates. The one who wouldn’t accept the death sentence imposed by the King of the Gods on the son he had orphaned and saved and raised and cherished more than anything in the world. The one who’d fight back. The one who’d rebel.

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is not really Apollo anymore. He’s a flashy idiot, and nothing more. He revels in appearing as dumb and incompetent as possible. 

The first thing we learn about the poetry god is that he’s a bad poet. The first thing we learn about the sun god is that he’s a lazy, irresponsible sun driver. It doesn’t take people long to realize the god of prophecy is just as clueless to the meaning of his oracle’s words as anyone else is. 

“I taught the kid everything he knows,” Apollo tells us of Percy, looking directly into the camera, knowing perfectly well we are aware that it’s a lie, while conveniently forgetting to ever mention he was Chiron’s teacher. 

He even tries to pretend, for a handful of pages at the beginning of book 1, that he has NO IDEA how human pregnancy works (a notion he’s quick to abandon and never brings up again, possibly realizing this is slightly too outrageous a claim to make, for a guy who famously performed emergency cesarean on his dying lover to rescue the life of the infant she was carrying). 

I remember one time I rained plague on a city by accident, he says. Whoops. 

He’s the annoying loser we’ve all had to deal with at one point or another, who doesn’t get that the more celebrities he brags about knowing, the more he exposes himself as a fraud. 

“Want some archery tips?” he keeps asking people who are clearly not interested nor in need of lessons. 

He is the last person on the planet you’d ever want to turn to for answers or help. 

Well, maybe not really the last. But close. 

He keeps marveling and acting offended that people – especially the people who know him, like Chiron, like his twin sister – would look to him for solutions. That they would trust him to come up with a plan. That they would think he has the ability to put things right. 

Artemis glared at Apollo. ‘Hazel Levesque, your brother is still alive. He is a brave fighter, like you. I wish I could say the same for my brother.’ (BOO 312)

Artemis reprimands Apollo for defying their father, but at the same time she does it, she also calls him a coward for not being willing to do it again. She wants her brother to keep his head down, but when he does, she’s disappointed in him. She knows he can be better than that. She wants him to be better than that. Whatever punishment their father has in store for Apollo this time, surely it can’t be that bad. Surely. Apollo is just being a drama queen, as usual. 

Apollo does nothing to challenge this assumption. It’s the one thing he can do for her: let her hold onto the illusion that he’s fine, still fine, he’ll always be fine. That she doesn’t have to feel guilty for being luckier. For being unfair to him. For not being able to protect him. 

Artemis returns the favor by going along with this ludicrous charade of his that she is not quite able – that she is not quite willing to understand. Even as she rolls her eyes at him, she helps him stage the elaborate pantomime that will allow him to follow his conscience while fooling everybody – and most of all himself – into thinking he’s much more stupid and cruel than he actually is. 

Despite everything, no matter what, Apollo and Artemis are a team. 

When the demigods arrive on Delos, the twins are ready. They play their part to perfection. Artemis: the sympathetic, reasonable one. Apollo: the spineless egotistical brat who has to be practically coerced into helping. They sell the hell out of this act.

But it is, in fact, an act. 

Try to strike a deal, son of Hephaestus, Artemis tells Leo, all but winking exaggeratedly in his direction, as she takes away Hazel and Frank to brief them on the state of the enemy forces and leaves him alone with her supposedly murderous brother. 

Leo remembers the story of how Hermes got away with cow theft in exchange for the lyre. My brother loves a good bargain, Artemis had said. The hint couldn’t be more clear.

But the truth is, Leo has zero bargaining power. There is absolutely nothing he could do to force Apollo’s hand. He even notes this in his internal narration, growing seriously worried for a minute that Apollo might just straight up take the Valdezinator from him. 

Apollo does not do it. He doesn’t even attempt to haggle over the price.  

‘I will give you this advice for free. You might be able to defeat Gaea in the way you describe, similar to the way Ouranos was defeated aeons ago. However, any mortal close by would be utterly …’ Apollo’s voice faltered. ‘What is that you have made?’ (BOO 318)

Reading it from Leo’s pov back then, this sounded simply like Apollo getting distracted by the shiny new toy. The timing of that distraction might have been peculiar, but it had to be a coincidence, considering that Apollo had been lightheartedly discussing the pros and cons of killing Leo himself just a couple lines before. 

Now, 5 books later, there’s a lot more to be read in Apollo’s voice faltering right as he realizes that Leo is planning to die. There’s even more to be read in the fact that after learning what Leo needs the cure for, Apollo doesn’t even try to pretend he doesn’t want to give it to him anymore. He insists, in fact, even though he knows, by this point, that it is not actually necessary to ensure Gaea’s demise, and allowing a mortal to get his hands on it will only worsen his punishment. 

‘Here’s the plan,’ Lu said. ‘I know for a fact Nero has cameras in the office building across the street. It’s one of his properties. When we burst out this door, his surveillance team should get some good footage of us on the roof.’

‘Remind us why that’s a good thing?’ I asked.

Lu muttered something under her breath, perhaps a prayer for her Celtic gods to smack me upside the head. ‘Because we’re going to let Nero see what we want him to see. We’re going to put on a show.’

Meg nodded. ‘Like on the train.’

‘Exactly,’ Lu said. ‘You two run out first. I’ll follow a few steps behind, like I’ve finally cornered you and am ready to kill you.’

‘In a strictly play-acting way,’ I hoped.

‘It has to look real,’ Lu said.

‘We can do it.’ Meg turned to me with a look of pride. ‘You saw us on the train, Lester, and that was with no planning. When I lived at the tower? Lu would help me fake these incredible battles so Father – Nero, I mean – would think I killed my opponents.’ (TON 56)

Apollo is rightly horrified to learn that Lu helped Meg fake-kill people in front of Nero rather than help her escape. But horror immediately gives way to understanding. “And are you any better?” he asks himself. No, of course he isn’t. He and Artemis have been doing the exact same thing for centuries, if not millennia. They both chose lies and subterfuge to outright defiance countless times. They both had, effectively, nowhere near as much of a choice as they like to think they had.

The Apollo we met at the beginning of this story was already powerless in all the ways that matter. He’d given up on everything that made him, him, in the hopeless attempt to mold himself into the kind of person his father would respect, and at the same time, impossibly, the kind of person his father wouldn’t perceive as a challenge.

“You neglected your duties,” Zeus said as he sentenced Apollo to this latest punishment, right before accusing him of having been too good at his job. 

The game has always been rigged. Apollo is damned no matter what he does.

Zeus, like Nero, like Caligula, like Commodus, like all the tyrants that Apollo couldn’t help admiring and feel inadequate in front of, believes in power as a means to push people down. Apollo could never make himself believe the same thing. 

But he could act like he did. After all, he’s the god of acting too. So he could fake being great and terrible, knowing full well he should never allow himself to truly be the first, and could never bring himself to truly be the latter. 

Apollo is nothing like his father. Not because he doesn’t share any similarities with him. On the contrary. He and his father are very much alike. They are both liars. Manipulators. They both have a tendency to ignore the unpleasantness of reality by rewriting it inside their own heads and convincing themselves that that’s the truth. They both have the acting prowess and the stubbornness and the sheer power required to force the people around them to join in their game of pretend. 

And like his father before him, Apollo too wants to make things right. He wants to be better, he wants to do better than his father does. 

So he does what his father always refused to do. He learns from his mistakes.

It’s no coincidence that Apollo’s worst crimes are all things he did in the distant, ancient past. Niobe’s sons and daughters. The Cumaean Sibyl. Koronis. Trophonius and Agamethus. Harpocrates. Despite how keen Apollo is on convincing us that yes, even now, he’s the kind of person who could and would happily turn a kid into a lizard just for having dared talk back to him, the truth is it’s been a long, long time since he intentionally lashed out in anger at someone.

‘Meg, have I ever told you about the first time I became mortal?’

She peered from under the rim of her ridiculously large helmet. ‘You messed up or something?’

‘I… Yes. I messed up. My father, Zeus, killed one of my favourite sons, Asclepius, for bringing people back from the dead without permission. Long story. The point is… I was furious with Zeus, but he was too powerful and scary for me to fight. He would’ve vaporized me. So I took my revenge out in another way. [...] I couldn’t kill Zeus. So I found the guys who had made his lightning bolts, the Cyclopes. I killed them in revenge for Asclepius. As punishment, Zeus made me mortal.’

Meg kicked me in the shin. ‘Ow!’ I yelped. ‘What was that for?’

‘For being dumb,’ she said. ‘Killing the Cyclopes was dumb.’

I wanted to protest that this had happened thousands of years ago, but I feared it might just earn me another kick.

‘Yes,’ I agreed. ‘It was dumb. But my point is … I was projecting my anger onto someone else, someone safer. I think you might be doing the same thing now, Meg. You’re raging at Caligula because it’s safer than raging at your stepfather.’

I braced my shins for more pain.

Meg stared down at her Kevlar-coated chest. ‘That’s not what I’m doing.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ I hastened to add. ‘Anger is good. It means you’re making progress. But be aware that you might be angry right now at the wrong person. [...]’ (TBM 237-238)

These are not the words of someone who’s only just now realizing what he did wrong in life, and what the right course of action actually is. They are not the words of someone who cannot truly comprehend the value of life and of loss other than his own. They are not the words of someone who has never before done some extensive, thorough self examination. 

But Apollo offers no explanation for his change of heart. He doesn’t even really acknowledge it. He’s only willing to talk about this to the extent that it can save Meg the pain of making the same mistake.

This fits the larger pattern of Apollo’s narration, which becomes more and more clear the more we get to know him and start being able to parse the lies from the truth. Apollo never makes excuses for himself. Not really. Not for the things that matter. He never takes credit for any of his real accomplishments. 

The killing of the cyclopes wasn’t just an act of retaliation. It was Apollo’s best chance to get Zeus to reverse Asclepius’ death sentence. Yes, it was wrong of him to use innocent lives as leverage, and yet, if he hadn’t done it, his son would still be dead. 

But that’s no excuse. Apollo knows this. He doesn’t even try to present it as such. In fact, he doesn’t even mention it. 

The god of the storybooks was quick to anger. The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story… isn’t. Oh, he pretends to get mad about all sorts of things. But he doesn’t, not really. His real anger is reserved for those who deserve it, and even then, he keeps a tight leash on it. 

“I believe in second chances. And thirds, and fourths,” he tells Lityerses. “But I only forgive each person once a millennium, so don’t mess up for the next thousand years.” The Cornhusker, who’s old enough to have personally witnessed the real events that some of the mythical tales starring Apollo are based on, knows to take that warning seriously. 

The Apollo of now still gets attached ridiculously easy to everybody he meets. He is still fiercely protective of the people he loves. He is still pathetically desperate to be loved. He is still alarmingly sensitive to rejection. But he isn’t the kind of person who’d ever consider getting revenge through an innocent. Most of the time, he isn’t the kind of person who thinks of revenge at all. 

As I was cleaning up the dinner plates, Emmie caught my arm. 

‘Just tell me one thing,’ she said. ‘Was it payback?’ 

I stared at her. ‘Was … what payback?’ 

‘Georgina,’ she murmured. ‘For me … you know, giving up your gift of immortality. Was she …’ She pressed her lips into a tight line, as if she didn’t trust them to say any more. 

I hadn’t known I could feel any worse, until I did. I really hate that about the mortal heart. It seems to have an infinite capacity for getting heavier. 

‘Dear Emmie,’ I said. ‘I would never. [...]’ (TDP 284-285)

The Apollo of now is, to be fair, still a bit of an asshole. He still has a scathing remark for everyone and everything. On a bad day, he isn’t above taking out his frustration on a convenient target. But he never goes further than words, and he only picks opponents who can fight back at the same level, with the same weapons as him. His first instinct, even when he feels ashamed of it, even when he feels like he has to quash it, is to protect the weak, rather than bully them.

All these choices come easy to him. Natural. When we meet him, at the very beginning of this story, the Apollo of now has been making them for long enough that they’ve become a habit. That’s what he does, again and again, while trying to convince both us and himself of the opposite. He does the right thing by habit. He doesn’t even have to think about it most of the time. In fact, by his own admission, he has not consciously thought about it in a while. 

And yet, as soon as he’s confronted with his past sins, he immediately recognizes them for what they are. Even his weak attempts at reframing his bullying of Harpocrates as “teasing” last less than a couple of paragraphs. 

“I was a god then!” he cries. “I didn't know what I was doing!” 

Apollo never makes excuses for himself. Except for this one. This is his biggest lie. The one he keeps clinging to, even after shedding all the others. The only one he actually believes. 

I didn’t know, he says, I didn’t know back when I was a god. I didn’t feel loss like this. I didn’t understand. It’s my mortal conscience which I totally grew overnight, that’s making me aware now for the first time ever. 

But it isn’t true. 

Apollo is still mourning the loss of the humans he loved thousands of years after their deaths. He’s still carrying the grief and the guilt with him. He regretted those hasty curses cast in a moment of anger almost immediately. “I’ve apologized a million times!” he yells at the ravens. 

“I can’t undo it,” he confesses. He says it with the certainty of someone who’s tried. 

Gods don’t apologize. Gods don’t feel regret. They don’t wish to go back on their choices. But Apollo always has. 

My smile crumbled. I felt my ardour cooling, turning stormy. ‘Don’t anger me, Sibyl. I am offering you the universe. I’ve given you near-immortal life. You cannot refuse payment.’ 

‘Payment?’ She balled her hands into fists. ‘You dare think of me as a transaction?’ 

I frowned. This afternoon really wasn’t going the way I’d planned. ‘I didn’t mean – Obviously, I wasn’t –’

‘Well, Lord Apollo,’ she growled, ‘if this is a transaction, then I defer payment until your side of the bargain is complete. [...]’ (TTT 132)

Like many people who’ve grown up in abusive households, Apollo is starved for love. And like many of his fellow abuse victims, he sees love as a transactional affair. He doesn’t really believe he can have anyone’s love unless he’s able to offer some material good in exchange for it.

“Ask for anything in return and it’s yours,” he tells the Sibyl, before she’s even had the chance to reply to his marriage proposal. He doesn’t think he can have her love for free. He knows, deep down, that he can’t blackmail her into giving it to him either.

He is desperate enough to attempt it anyway. 

“Nothing good ever happens to your lovers,” the Sibyl frantically reminds him as she tries to find a way out of the corner he’s backing her into. But Apollo already knows that. Nothing good generally happens to any mortal close to him. His lovers, his children, his friends. 

“I convinced myself [this would be] the one true romance that would wash away all my past missteps”, he says. But it’s painfully clear that his feelings for the Sibyl run no deeper than a superficial infatuation. This is not about her. It’s not even about romance, really. “Marry me,” Apollo tells her. And as horribly misguided as it is, the offer is sincere. He doesn’t want a fling. He wants companionship. He wants redemption.

Unlike those of his twin sister, the boons Apollo offers to his followers are irrevocable. He can’t take them back, because he never meant to be able to do it in the first place. He never planned to use them as an instrument of control. 

Because Apollo doesn’t want followers. He doesn’t want servants. He wants friends. He wants to trust that the people he’s blessed will never renege their alliance to him. He refuses to even contemplate the possibility that they might betray him... or simply change their mind. 

He’s lost too many people already. He is terrified of being alone. He’d do anything to avoid that, even disregard the Sibyl’s own feelings, her own fears, only stopping a hair breadth from taking away her choice altogether. 

In the end, his divine family on top of the clouds is all that he has. His father, Zeus, whose highest expression of regard is to say “you have done me proud”. His mother, whose love has never had the power to shield him from his father’s wrath. His twin sister, whom he does not resent for running away, because he knows that in her place he would have done the same. His son Asclepius, for whom Apollo could not win a better fate than eternal imprisonment. And so, so many others who have nothing but contempt and envy for him, who’d clap and laugh at his misfortune exactly like they all, he included, did from their safe, horrible haven above the clouds, looking down on those they considered lesser than them. 

“Everyone deserves someone who can wash away their curses by making them feel loved”, Apollo says. Like so many people in similar circumstances, he too clung to the fantasy that some day, somehow, he would meet the right person who’d finally make him whole. “But that was not my fate,” he says now. He had to let go of that dream the moment he realized that it, too, was starting to hurt innocent people.

When Venus taunted him with the insinuation that Reyna might actually be the one for him, finally, after all that time, Apollo did nothing. He dutifully stayed far away from the young woman, where he was sure he belonged. And when Reyna finally rejects him, he isn’t surprised. He can’t find it in himself to even resent her laughter. He doesn’t feel entitled to her or anyone else’s love. Not anymore. 

The Apollo of now loves in secret, silently, while he loudly proclaims that he doesn’t. He loves without hope of that love ever being returned. He gives far more than he ever expects to receive. He’s caught off guard every time someone offers him compassion, a kind gesture, a kind word. He struggles to believe even Meg could actually care about him the way she so obviously does. “Just because she had lied about being my friend,” he thinks, barely a couple of days after having met her, “did not mean I wasn’t hers.”

To want to do right by people, to want to do better, are “not the kind of feelings that gods have” he thinks, still, at the beginning of the very last book. That’s what he’s been told, over and over and over again by his father and the rest of his horrible family. That’s what, in time, he’d learned to believe. That his desire to love unreservedly, that his resolve to learn from his mistakes were a defect of his character. That they were his vices, rather than his virtues. Gods aren’t supposed to care. They aren’t supposed to feel. They aren’t supposed to change, let alone want it. 

But Apollo isn’t a person. He is a god. And so, obviously, yes, these are very much the kind of feelings a god has. 

Because the truth is, gods are people too. 

The Apollo of thousands of years ago made a lot of stupid mistakes. He was a child, bound to the whims of his abusive father, desperate for even the smallest morsel of love, the smallest bit of security, the smallest measure of control, to the point of being willing to settle for even just the illusion of it. He was a bully, determined to take what he could get, even at the expense of an innocent. And he was a god. There was a lot, as a god, that he could take from those who had less power than him, just as easily and as quickly as he thought of it. 

“I should have known better than to share the pain,” he says. He was an idiot back then, like all bullies are, no matter how compelling their motives may be.

But he did know what he was doing. He’s always known. That’s precisely the reason why he doesn’t like to think about it. It’s precisely the reason why he stopped doing it.

When we reached the doors, Reyna took Meg’s hand. She turned to me: Ready? Then she planted her other hand on my shoulder. 

Strength surged through me. I laughed with soundless joy. [...] Reyna’s power was awesome! If I could just get her to follow me around the whole time I was mortal, her hand on my shoulder, a chain of twenty or thirty other demigods behind her, I bet there was nothing I couldn’t accomplish! 

I grabbed the uppermost chains and tore them like crepe paper. Then the next set, and the next. The Imperial gold broke and crumpled noiselessly in my fists. The steel locking rods felt as soft as breadsticks as I pulled them out of their fittings. 

That left only the door handles. 

The power may have gone to my head. I glanced back at Reyna and Meg with a self-satisfied smirk, ready to accept their silent adulation. 

Instead, they looked as if I’d bent them in half, too. 

[...]

Humbled and ashamed, I grabbed the door handles. My friends had got me this far. (TTT 275)

This moment, right here, is the closest we ever come to meeting face to face the terrifying god of the myths. It lasts no more than an instant. The Apollo of now is not that kind of person anymore. He made the choice to be better than that, well before this story even began.

“Power makes good people uneasy rather than joyful or boastful”, he says at the end of book 3, pausing the narration to impart a concise but very important lesson on us, the kids at home, like he so often does. “That’s why good people so rarely rise to power.” 

Apollo could not kill his father, like his father had killed his grandfather, like his grandfather had killed his great grandfather. He could never even bring himself to try. But he could learn not to drag innocent people into the line of fire. So that’s what he did. 

“He’s evil. You’re good,” is the advice he offers to Meg when she most needs it. “You must make your own choice.”

These words, too, came easy to him. They were not in any way a revelation. He knew them by heart. He’d tried, once, to put them into practice himself. 

But he could never truly convince himself that his father was evil. He could never truly convince himself that he was good either. 

Even now, in his moments of biggest vulnerability, he still cries out for his father. Even though he knows that his father doesn’t care. He knows that his father will not save him. Even so, he still can’t help indulging in the fantasy that maybe, just maybe, his father will take pity on him. That Zeus, his king, his abuser, his dad, would not just let him die.

He knows full well it’s a lie. But he doesn’t want to let go of it, because if he does… what is he left with? 

Overnight, Helios had vanished. I didn’t know what final prayer to me as the god of the sun had finally tipped the balance – banishing the old Titan to oblivion while promoting me to his spot – but here I was at the Palace of the Sun. 

Terrified and nervous, I pushed open the doors of the throne room. The air burned. The light blinded me. 

[...]

Slowly, the fires receded before me. By force of will, I grew in size until I could comfortably wear the helm and cloak of my predecessor. 

I didn’t try out the throne, though. I had a job to do, and very little time. 

I glanced at the whip. Some trainers say you should never show kindness with a new team of horses. They will see you as weak. But I decided to leave the whip. I would not start my new position as a harsh taskmaster. (TBM 355-356)

Apollo has honed the art of holding people’s attention with his words so they won’t notice his actions to perfection. He’s gotten so good at it, and so used to doing it, that sometimes even he struggles to believe the truth.

But this is the truth. This is how Apollo thinks of power. A job. An obligation. A responsibility. 

He never sought to supplant the former solar deity. But people prayed to him, and he listened. And on that morning of some millennia back in time, all alone in the sun palace, with no audience to perform for, he didn’t let his pride and ambition get the better of him. He didn’t let his fear of being judged and overruled dictate his choices. He didn’t waste time trying out the throne. He decided to leave the whip. 

It was love that gave Apollo the sun. And to be loved, when you’re used to thinking of love as a transaction… to be loved is to be in debt. 

That’s the hardest thing about making your own choices. You have to be responsible not just for your own mistakes, but for your own success too. Then people start looking up to you. They start trusting you not to let them down. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story has let down far too many people, far too many times to be able to trust himself with that responsibility anymore. He has effectively convinced himself that he should never have it. That he does not deserve it. That the best he can do, for everybody, and especially for himself, is to just stop doing.

This way, he can be sure he will never become like his father. 

He will never truly be great. He will never truly be worthy of the redemption that he so hopelessly craves. But at least he won’t be a monster. Not like his father is. He will play the role of the self centered, carefree vapid blonde like his life and sanity depend on it, because they maybe, actually…  kind of do. 

Chapter Text

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story keeps his distance. 

He’s affable enough that most people won’t be particularly offended by him, and annoying enough that nobody will actually wish for his company. He introduces himself with a shamelessly conceited little poem about his own awesomeness, but when a starry eyed Nico asks how he became the Sun, he shrugs. “Downsizing,” he replies modestly. He does not want to appear intimidating, and yet, he’d rather threaten to vaporize the heroes who seek his aid than give them the impression he’s on their side. 

He flirts with anything that moves. He does not stay in contact with any of his lovers. 

He keeps bringing children into the world, knowing full well they’ll be hunted down by monsters from the day of their birth for the sole reason that they are his. 

“If Zeus went around retroactively yanking my divine power out of all my descendants, half the medical schools in the country would be empty. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame would disappear. The Tarot-card-reading industry would collapse overnight!” he tells Kayla and Austin, to reassure them that they will not be losing anything even if they lose him. 

He taught Chiron so the centaur would keep teaching the children of the gods when Apollo could not. He sent the satyrs to him, to keep the children safe. He is the reason why Camp Half Blood exists, but these days, he has so little to do with the place you’d never guess without being told. A patron of the youth in secret, through subterfuge and misdirection, or in name only.

“Over the centuries, I’d had many conversations with demigods who wanted to know more about their absentee godly parents,” he says. “Those talks rarely went well.” He can’t make excuses for the other gods. He knows for certain that at least some of them, were they free to visit and spend time with their kids, would still not care to do so. He refuses to make excuses for himself. What good would it do to tell the kids that he has excellent reasons for failing them? Apollo can’t even stand to tell that to himself. “A father should do more for his children,” he thinks. But he doesn’t. He can’t. 

He answers their prayers. He sends them presents. Sometimes, he visits them in dreams. 

He tries to care for them as little as he possibly can, so they won’t be used as leverage, and so he won’t be destroyed if they are. 

Better for his children to have no reason to get attached anyway. Better for them to grow up feeling free to hate him. A safe target for their anger is the best Apollo can offer them. He is sure of it. He fully believes it. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when none of them takes him up on the offer.

Oh, the injustice! A minor goddess forcing me, one of the twelve Olympians, to retrieve animals for her! I silently vowed that if I ever regained my godhood, I would never again send a poor mortal on a quest. Unless it was really important. And unless I was sure the mortal could handle it. And unless I was pressed for time…or I just really didn’t feel like doing it myself. I would be much kinder and more generous than this net goddess was being to me. (TDP 87)

Apollo says this at the beginning of book 2, when he still has absolutely no intention of truly changing his behavior, when he’s still holding tight onto his shitty but effective coping mechanisms, when he’s still just aiming to check the required items off his to do list as quickly as possible and get back to his home above the clouds, back to the usual routine, back to the horrific, necessary, comforting helplessness he’d gotten so used to it didn’t even bother him all that much anymore. 

I will do better, he promises, careful to undermine his resolution at the same time as he makes it, only to go on to describe the barest of bare minimums, which is precisely what he’d already been doing. 

When he’d been unable to look for Artemis and help free her himself, when, freshly turned mortal, he’d needed an escort to Camp Half Blood, he sought out Percy, possibly the most capable and powerful demigod in existence. 

“Where is the A-List?” he wonders as soon as he arrives at camp at the beginning of book 1. 

Even though he only admits it at the end of the book, he never had any intention to drag any of the children there into danger with him. 

He feigns ignorance and indifference while in his head he’s calling all of them by their full names, knows them well enough to be able to discuss camp dynamics with Chiron as if he too were one of the teachers there. But he isn’t. He looks at these kids from above. He observes them from afar. He learns about everything they do knowing full well he will never even talk to most of them, and if he does, will pretend he has no idea who they are. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story has accepted defeat. He has given up on the idea that he can make things better. That he can make them right. He has settled for harm reduction. 

Sometimes he lends some people a smidge of help, here and there, behind his father’s back. Sometimes he even manages to save one person or two in plain sight, all the while reassuring himself and everybody else that he’s done it by accident, or out of boredom, or vanity, or because he didn’t want to look bad in front of a girlfriend. Certainly not out of the goodness of his heart. Absolutely not because he cares. 

Sometimes he can only avert his eyes as these near strangers he, despite how much he tries not to, feels responsible for anyway meet their fate, and then forget about it as quickly as possible, or at the very least, act like he has managed to forget. 

And sometimes… yes, sometimes he sends a pair of heroes he likes on a stupid, dangerous errand that he could take care of with a single snap of his godly fingers, just because he’s bored, and lonely, just so he can bask in the fantasy that these cool, amazing, wonderful people were happy to do him a favor, see, we are totally friends, they totally like me too, he will think to himself later, he will boast to anyone who’ll listen, even though he knows full well that they don’t, and that pulling this kind of stunts definitely won’t make them like him any better, but not really having the heart and willpower to refrain from doing so because that? That pretend friendliness? The feeling of mattering in some of these people’s lives, even if in the opposite of the way that he wants? That is the best he can do.

Even before he was shoved into this clumsy, flabby, acne riddled teenage form that he hates, despite his claims not to understand why his sister would rather be a small girl than a grown woman, we saw him choose to appear as a teenager much more often than he did as the adult he clearly, undeniably is. 

“I am beautiful and everybody loves me,” is the mantra he repeats to himself in times of doubt. Beautiful, not helpful. He’s given up on being helpful a long time ago. It’s never worked out in his or anybody else’s favor when he tried. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is very, very determined not to try anymore. 

He spends most of his time hiding behind a pair of shades, simultaneously yearning for connection and dreading the possibility that anyone might see past the carefully curated hollowness of his garishly golden exterior. 

If the facade is all people see of him, then that’s all they can judge. Apollo is very fine with that idea. Better for people to be disgusted by a fake version of him than by the real thing. Because that’s what they would be. Disgusted. That’s how he feels, in the increasingly rarer moments when he looks – really looks – at himself. So he’s fine with the idea of role playing the entitled, useless asshole for the rest of his days. 

Playing the asshole is easy. Reassuring. At times, even fun. Bad people don’t have to deal with guilt and self doubt. They won’t let anyone down, because nobody expects anything of them. 

Apollo is fine with that. At least, that’s what he keeps telling himself. 

Taking a page from his biggest role model: handsome, ferociously selfish, outrageously stupid Commodus, the man he’d loved and blessed despite his misgivings, and eventually judged unworthy of the gift of life, he keeps the darkness at bay with the roar of crowds and the glitter of spectacle.

That’s who Apollo is, when we meet him at the beginning of the story. A beautiful, self centered fool. Olympus’ official court jester. A battered, frightened animal hiding inside a house of mirrors. 

‘Let me take care of these cuts, at least. Grover, why didn’t you heal these poor people?’ 

‘I tried!’ the satyr protested. ‘They just took a lot of damage!’ 

That could be my life motto, I thought: He takes a lot of damage. (TBM 40)

The god of performing arts is, for a change, actually good at his job. So good that by the point we first encounter him he’s got everybody, up to and including those who know him best, convinced they’re seeing the real him instead of one of a million distorted reflections. So good that he almost – almost – managed to convince himself of this too. 

It took Zeus six months to unmake him before tossing him into the trash. Even told in the heavily caricatural tone of the start of book 1, even with Apollo doing the absolute most to sound despicable and unsympathetic – and succeeding at that! –  as he spoke of it, this detail always stuck out as particularly appalling. 

Once we can see the whole picture, it’s frankly surprising it took so long. Apollo had already done most of his father’s work for him.

When he crash lands in that dumpster in Manhattan, it doesn’t automatically start him on a self improvement path. He has no big revelation. He's not even really surprised. He’s been through… well, not worse, because as he quickly realizes this IS worse than the previous times, but he’s gone through a similar ordeal before. Twice, in fact, almost back to back, before he’d learned not to question his father’s authority. So this is certainly not the moment that prompts him to reevaluate his life choices. On the contrary. His first, instinctive reaction is to double down. Lean into the act further than he ever has before. Completely disappear into it, if possible. 

He takes refuge in the familiar safety of lies, the more and the bigger the better. Yes, he tells us in all but words, he’s earned this. He could have definitely avoided it if he’d been smarter. This last failure, like all the previous ones, is a result of him not trying enough, rather than trying his best and coming up short anyway. He’s the one in control of his fate. He got himself into his current predicament, and he can get himself out of it too. He just needs to figure out what his father’s requirements are this time, and meet them, and he’ll be allowed back to the miserable, safe predictability of home. Back to the comfort of believing the best he can do is choose the lesser evil. 

He’d been doing so well, before his millennia long streak of good behavior broke. 

So he just needs to behave. He just needs to be careful to keep the distance, to keep up the walls. 

The world is his stage and he’s the only one who sees it, the only one who knows he’s acting inside a play, so he’s the one in control of how both the audience and the other characters will react to him. 

He can still be the one who controls the narrative. 

Zeus stole his godly powers? Well joke’s on him, because Apollo will simply not shoot a single arrow until he’s sure he can superhumanly excel at it again. He will not touch a musical instrument until he’s able to play as supernaturally effortlessly as he’s used to. Take that, Dad! You can’t rob me of anything if I renounce it first!

By this point in time, he’s so set in his self destructive coping mechanisms he won’t back down even at the prospect of causing himself irreparable harm. 

Except, there’s a problem. He’s not alone in this anymore. 

In truth, he never was. But it was easier to pretend, from the top of Mount Olympus, that passivity in the face of injustice was the only possible choice. It was one thing to turn his head the other way and fake a cheerful smile when the people suffering were nothing more than tiny specks on the distant ground below. Now they are all around him. 

The life force of each tree seemed to bear down on me with righteous hatred, accusing me of so many crimes … I wanted to fall to my knees. I wanted to beg forgiveness. But this was not the time. 

I couldn’t allow the woods to confuse me again. I would not let anyone else fall into its trap. (THO 144-145) 

It’s so easy to miss it with Apollo constantly throwing sand into our eyes, but right from the start, the thing that prompts him to action, the thing that anchors him and prevents him from succumbing to despair, always, really isn’t concern for himself, but for others. To the point that he himself admits it’s  “a logical trigger for [his] powers,” as early as the beginning of book 2, even as he tries, and succeeds, in passing it off as a ludicrous idea.

“I have to get stronger,” he says, his first night at Camp Half-Blood, thinking about the missing campers, about his children, to whom he feels he owes more than what he can give. “I must.” 

But how?

Apollo has gotten so used to lying, all the time, about everything, and he does it so smoothly, unflinchingly, boldly, that he himself is not even sure there’s anything real underneath it anymore. He keeps swearing oaths because he doesn’t believe in the power of his own intentions, in the power of his own actions anymore. 

He’s almost as surprised as we are to discover that, even as an utterly ordinary, utterly mortal human, he can still move people, animals, plants and all other kinds of living creatures to tears and ecstasy just by plucking a guitar string. 

Yes, he tires easily now, much like any regular human would, and of course that’s the thing he immediately focuses on: the one downside of what is, by all rights, a miracle. But as distracting and focus pulling as his internal narration is, it can’t hide the fact that his talent, a talent that is not only innate aptitude, but the result of millennia of diligent practice he refuses to admit to, is all but unchanged. 

It makes perfect sense in hindsight. This is the only skill of his he had not already given up on, well before Zeus tried to take it from him by force. The only skill of his that he still sincerely allowed himself to take real pride in. The only thing he had left that he still considered truly HIS. 

Apollo is, in the end, a performer above all. And so here’s his starting point. Music. The power to touch someone’s heart by singing a song, by telling a story. The first of his talents. The least threatening. After all, no battles have ever been won by singing... have they?

I blinked. ‘Zeus … singing?’ I found the concept mildly horrifying. My father thundered. He punished. He scolded. He glowered like a champion. But he did not sing. 

Calypso’s eyes got a little dreamy. ‘In the palace at Mount Othrys, when he was Kronos’s cupbearer, Zeus used to entertain the court with songs.’

[...]

Electricity tingled at the base of my skull. I did know the song. An early memory surfaced of Zeus and Leto singing this melody when Zeus visited Artemis and me as children on Delos. My father and mother, destined to be forever apart because Zeus was a married god – they had happily sung this duet. (TDP 146-147)

Gods don’t have childhoods. They are born fully formed, the perfect embodiment of humanity's dreams of them, ready to take on the world. And yet, Apollo remembers being a child, young and inexperienced, eager to please and to learn. 

He remembers looking up to his father for encouragement, and receiving it in the form of threats. Make me proud, or else. Don't make me hurt you. Don't make me regret breaking with the family tradition and sparing your life. 

Because if gods are people – and we know these gods, at least, are – we must consider then, what it must have been like for them to “[grow up] on stories about titans and gods who cooked and/or ate their children.” To grow up knowing that they themselves were only alive thanks to their father’s magnanimity, feeling forever indebted and bound to their father’s command. 

Make it worth it, their father would not even have needed to say. 

And Apollo did. He was unquestionably the standout among Zeus’s progeny. The model son who gets perfect grades and does a thousand extracurricular activities and wins all of the trophies. The infuriatingly gifted kid who’s instantly good at everything he tries his hand at, and makes all of his siblings look bad by comparison.

There was a time, long ago, when Apollo was in fact Zeus’s favorite. We see it in all the tales of Apollo casually lording his own superiority over a deity lesser than him, in the quietly assured, unbothered tone with which he talks of his siblings’ achievements and blunders. We see it in the way Artemis does not take his fear seriously, in the way she expects him to be able to appease their father, because there was a time, long, long ago, before Apollo’s light became too bright for his father’s tastes, when Apollo could actually do it. We see it in the way Apollo looks at Meg’s foster brothers and sisters, and recognizes in their eyes the vicious jealousy of the spares who know they could never take the golden child’s place, and would kill to be able to. 

“If I gave up on everyone who has tried to kill me,” Apollo tells Meg, “I would have no allies left on the Olympian Council.” 

There was a time, long, long ago, when Apollo did hold his father’s approval. We see it in the way he now resents it far more than he craves it. 

Despite all of Apollo’s insecurities, he genuinely doesn’t mind everybody thinking him stupid, or incompetent, or unskilled. He doesn’t really mind them saying so to his face, even. In his head, he often compares himself to others, taking petty satisfaction in imaginary small victories over them (Ha! My present is bigger than yours), making a production of complaining whenever someone’s stealing the attention away from him (Terpsichore had never been my favorite: she tended to take the spotlight off me). But the truth is, Apollo is not afraid of other people’s brilliance. 

He loves the son who surpassed him and took his place as the god of medicine most of all. He doesn’t feel threatened by his fellow gods’ proficiency in their respective domains; he in fact respects it. That is, when he doesn’t feel smug in the knowledge that he outclasses them.

He does not resent or envy any of the demigods that he meets, who will accompany him on his quest, for being more powerful than he is.

He does not resent the Victor twins for making better shots than he does, even as they mock him for it.

No, the only thing that can really shake Apollo’s confidence is finding himself unable to reach the impossibly high standards he himself has set. 

Ironic, considering that before he was turned mortal this last time he’d been purposely failing that very same test every chance he got. 

The other gods, he says, could not understand why Dionysus chose to look like an old drunk when he could have shown off his legendary beauty. But Apollo always understood. Apollo had been doing for far longer a far more extreme version of the exact same thing. He’d turned his talents, that once were his father’s pride and glory, into laughing stock. 

It was a petty, childish sort of revenge, he knows. But it was the only weapon he had that could actually hurt his father without causing collateral damage. At least, no collateral damage other than that Apollo would be inflicting on himself. But Apollo was fine with that. He welcomed it even. There was a part of him, deep down, that felt he deserved it.

Because there was a time, too, when Apollo looked at Zeus with reverence. We still see traces of it in the awe he can’t help feeling, against his better judgement, before the emperors, who all, in different ways, remind him of his Lord and Father. They all embody his father’s ideals, his conception of power, far better than Apollo ever could. 

And for so long Apollo struggled, is still, to this day, struggling to let go of his father's teachings.

“Gods don’t cry,” Apollo repeats to himself, over and over, fighting a futile battle against the tears that he’s never been able to stop himself from shedding. 

“But Apollo! You are divine!” he reminds himself as the guilt and remorse threaten to suffocate him. “You cannot commit murder. Any death you cause is the will of the gods and entirely beyond reproach.” 

But this one death, just this one, is different, he makes a show of arguing with us, while really he is arguing with himself, with the voice of his father inside his head. I am allowed to feel bad about this one, I swear, he all but pleads, I swear just this once I have a good reason for my sorrow. 

“Look at me, caring about innocent bystanders,” he thinks self deprecatingly. “The other Olympians would have teased me mercilessly.”

He remembers how the entire council made a mockery of his grief, the way Venus used the memory of all the people he loved and ruined and failed to save to cut him to pieces.

“These were not the kind of feelings that gods had,” he says about his own helpless, inextinguishable need and want to love, to get attached, to make friends, to make a difference. 

Apollo has never liked his father’s idea of power, his father’s idea of divine justice. He’s never agreed with his father’s morals. He’s always felt utterly alone in this. So much so that he’s often wondered if, maybe… he wasn’t the one in the wrong. 

All those who don't escape, and the gods cannot escape, become complicit. Apollo included. 

It's the only way to survive. 

The Apollo we meet at the beginning of this story is the arrival point of a thousands of years long journey that he never tells us about. 

We end up putting it together backwards as we see him be forced to reevaluate all the choices he'd already resigned himself to, all the false beliefs he desperately fought to maintain to justify them. 

We discover the way he'd been broken down into pieces only as we realize that what we're actually seeing is him PIECING HIMSELF BACK TOGETHER. 

“You have heard of imposter syndrome? Everything in me screamed I am a fake! I do not belong here!” Apollo finally admits, at the very end of the last book, for the first time in his life giving voice to the feelings he’s ALWAYS felt and been desperate to bury. 

It’s hard to make your own choices. It really is.

And yet, at the same time, it’s the easiest thing of all. 

What else can Apollo do, if not run back into the woods to search for his children? What else can he do, if not give Meg the trust and support she so desperately needs? What else, other than put everything he has left on the line to save his friends, to give a chance, to give a choice to the enemies in whose likeness he recognizes his own?

When I reached the armoury, I scanned the rack of bows. My hand trembling, I picked out the weapon Meg had tried to give me the day before. It was carved from mountain laurel wood. The bitter irony appealed to me. (THO 252) 

There’s a long stretch of book 1, immediately after Kayla and Austin get kidnapped, in which all of the bullshit abruptly disappears and we get Apollo’s almost completely unfiltered, genuine pov. The circumstances won’t allow him the luxury of pretension. It’s just him and these kids with no great powers or expertise, these literal kids who look to him for guidance, for strength, for reassurance, and what else can he do then, but be the adult and take the lead and get them back to safety? He has to. There is no other choice. At least, no other choice that Apollo would let himself consider.

And it’s easy to miss, because Apollo is so good at diverting our attention from the facts, because he refuses to acknowledge the facts even in the privacy of his own mind, because he refuses to give himself credit, but it’s not just his musical talent that’s remained. 

It’s only when he lacks purpose that his skills, each and every one of them that isn’t pure divine magic honed through endless hours of study and practice, fail him. It’s only when he lacks confidence that his aim falters. 

He paralyzes the entire giant ant colony with a song. He brings down a whole cavern with a single shot of his bow. 

I can’t believe Paolo’s handkerchief did that! he comments. 

When he believes in what he’s doing, only his newly acquired physical limitations can stop him. Sometimes, not even those.

But as soon as they are back to camp, he immediately starts shutting down again. It’s actually, depressingly, impressive how fast it happens. They’re back to civilization, there’s Chiron, and Percy, and other mature, competent people around, and Apollo… he lets go of the metaphorical reins like they were hot coals. He throws a full on tantrum right then and there, on the beach, in front of everybody. Even Chiron, with all the tolerance and wisdom of a long, long time teacher, with all the sincere respect and fondness he still has for his old mentor, finally seems to have exhausted his near infinite reserve of patience at that. 

Apollo, who had decimated a whole nest of myrmekes with perfect headshots just hours before, now fumbles with everything, and, finally, all but begs Chiron to shoot his arrow for him. He begs the centaur to finish executing the plan HE himself had come up with, with the weapon that HE himself had created. He can’t, he won’t take responsibility for this victory.

The failures, yes, Apollo can take credit for those. He’s used to it. He can handle it. But victory? Doing what’s right? Doing good things? No, no, someone else, anyone else do it.

Because good things are done by good people. And good people MUST make their own choices.

The only thing scarier than being bad at archery was discovering that I was suddenly good at it again. That may not sound like a problem, but since becoming mortal I’d experienced a few random bursts of godly skill. Each time, my powers had quickly evaporated again, leaving me more bitter and disillusioned than ever. Sure, I may have fired a quiverful of amazing shots in Tarquin’s tomb. That didn’t mean I could do it again. (TTT 204)

It’s hard to make your own choices. If you do, then you’re responsible for your success. Then people start looking up to you. They start trusting you not to let them down. 

And Apollo has already let down so, so many people. He does not deserve another chance. He refuses to take it for himself. Someone else, anyone else who actually wants it, can have it. He will give it to them gladly. He will put in them the faith he can’t bear to put in himself. 

And he does. And they reward his belief by immediately proving him right. 

Meg first. Meg last, also. Meg always. 

This is what Apollo means, when he calls her his role model. She did it. She actually did it. She followed the path he’d shown her and started climbing toward the light. And then... she did something that he never would have predicted. She paused. She turned to look back at him. Well? she asked. Aren’t you coming?

Meg did it first. She did it last, too. But she wasn’t the only one. For every time that Apollo extended his hand, he found another hand reaching back to him.

I didn’t need the wisdom goddess to tell me what I must do. I should leave Camp Half-Blood immediately, before the campers woke. They had taken me in to protect me, and I had nearly got them all killed. I couldn’t bear to endanger them any longer. 

But, oh, how I wanted to stay with Will, Kayla, Austin – my mortal children. I wanted to help Harley put smiley faces on his flamethrower. I wanted to flirt with Chiara and steal her away from Damien … or perhaps steal Damien away from Chiara, I wasn’t sure yet. I wanted to improve my music and archery through that strange activity known as practice. I wanted to have a home. 

[...]

Percy sat next to me. He squinted at the sunrise, the sea breeze tousling his hair. 

‘Yeah, I used to think I didn’t belong here either.’ 

‘It’s not the same,’ I said. ‘You humans change and grow and mature. Gods do not.’ 

Percy faced me. ‘You sure about that? You seem pretty different.’ (THO 343-344) 

By the end of book 1, everybody at camp is looking at Apollo in a new light, even if he doesn’t seem to notice. The characters within the story didn’t have to deal with Apollo’s outrageous, incredibly misleading internal narration all throughout, a farce within the farce that we now realize was specifically aimed at us, the readers. Apollo was very careful to never actually voice any of the horrible, cruel thoughts he insisted he was having about all these people. He may have said out loud a couple of off putting things, but that’s really the extent of it. His actions have spoken far louder than words anyway. 

Unlike us, the characters within the story were free to focus on the facts, so they know what the truth is. They are all, at this point, automatically assuming his thoughts and motives to be fundamentally good. They keep reassuring him that he’ll find Meg again, because his worry is that transparent, even without him saying anything. Rachel and Percy correctly guess that he’s thinking of leaving for the next bit of the quest alone. They understand that he doesn’t want any more people getting hurt. 

It’s a noble sentiment, if not an entirely altruistic one. He does not want to be responsible for any more people getting hurt. 

But it’s too late for that. People are either gonna get hurt helping him, or they’ll get hurt trying to clean up the mess after he fails, because right now, at this moment, he does not have the power to do this alone. He would not be doing anyone any favors by refusing aid. He would only give himself the illusion that he’d be sparing lives. 

Apollo knows this, even before Rachel and Percy point it out to him. It’s a big temptation anyway. One he’s fallen for, in the span of his long, long life, more often than he likes to admit. 

“You seem pretty different,” Percy tells him. Apollo recognizes that it’s meant as a compliment. But he can’t accept it as one. Because the truth is, he’s no different at the end of the book than he was at the beginning of it. He hasn’t changed at all. He’s just allowing himself, now, to be a little bit more honest. 

Chapter Text

By the start of book 2, Apollo is back to his routine of pretending to be a much bigger asshole than he actually is. Back to feigning incompetence too.  

My children Kayla and Austin explained to me this appalling downside to mortal tools that’s called ‘requiring maintenance’, he proclaims, as if we didn’t see him restring and retune a guitar just last book. Funnily enough, the issue of tool maintenance never comes up again after Apollo has gotten the satisfaction of making this point, much in the same way he never again shows the same unfamiliarity with mortal food and everyday appliances he did on his first day at Camp Half Blood.

“I never asked what kind of trials the petitioners went through,” is the explanation he offers for why he can’t remember the proper way of consulting his oracle. He’d rather let Emmie and Jo think he never cared to learn, than admit his memory is full of holes and he keeps forgetting about things that he did, in fact, know. 

Gods don’t struggle. Only the weak do. And nobody expects anything from cruel, stupid fools. Stupid fools will never run the risk of letting anyone down.

Just yesterday, I had toyed with the idea of leaving Calypso behind to the blemmyae when she was wounded. I’d like to say that wasn’t a serious thought, but it had been, however briefly. Now Calypso refused to leave Meg, whom she barely knew. It was almost enough to make me question whether I was a good person. (I stress the word almost.) (TDP 155)

You see, he tells us, he reassures himself with stunning brazenness: Calypso is a good person, completely unlike me, because she does exactly what I’ve been doing from the moment this story began. 

But in spite of his efforts, he doesn’t quite manage to patch up the crack that has formed in the walls of his fortress. His real feelings keep leaking out. 

Now that he’s started doing it out loud, and in earnest, rather than just inside his head where he knew it was pretense, and nobody could protest it, he just cannot stop calling all of these people friends.

And ridiculously, impossibly, people do not contradict him. Even worse: they seem to think his friendship is actually worth something. 

‘You,’ I snarled. It was difficult to sound menacing while bobbing up and down in a net. 

‘Hello, Apollo.’ Britomartis, the goddess of nets, smiled coyly. ‘I hear you’re human now. This is going to be fun.’ (TDP 79) 

It cannot be overstated how much Britomartis risked by giving sanctuary and aid to Apollo. The Lord of Olympus expressly forbade any kind of interference, but Britomartis did in fact interfere, and with only the flimsiest of pretenses as cover. 

Granted, being a minor goddess, and barely even connected to Apollo, almost certainly played to her advantage. By all appearances, Britomartis should have no reason to want to help him, and even if she did, what is the help of a small, inconsequential, almost entirely forgotten deity like her even worth? Zeus thinks so little of minor deities, he barely even remembers they exist most of the time. Ironically, their lower status grants them more liberty of movement than most major gods, and especially the 12 Olympians, can enjoy. 

Still, Britomartis’ transgression could have cost her everything. The gods are always watching. They are all ready to snitch on one another at a moment’s notice. And all of their eyes are on Apollo now.

So, to the benefit of their Olympian audience, Britomartis makes a show of threatening Apollo and his mortal companions’ lives multiple times. She gives Apollo a difficult, dangerous quest, for what they both agree and make a point to underscore is an entirely selfish reason. All she cares about are her griffins, you see. And her house. Definitely not the people who live in it. The fact that this all worked out to our heroes’ benefit in the end is obviously a fortunate accident rather than the precise result she was aiming for.

It’s so easy to believe it, because it meets our expectations of what a god is, how a god thinks and behaves. But Apollo knows the truth. He understands that Britomartis is the one responsible for the miracle that allowed them to escape the zoo. 

Oh, but she didn’t do it out of generosity, she explains, she did it because Calypso is more useful to her with magic than without! 

Apollo isn’t fazed by her excuses. He may not have been sure at first, but by that point he knows what she’s doing. 

It’s the exact same thing he always does. 

At the end of the book, he will comment that he can’t expect her to show him any more of her favor, finally calling what she did with its proper name. But he can't say thank you. He can’t even really show her his gratitude. That would be admitting to what she's done in front of the whole Olympian council. That would be admitting to what he and Britomartis are, too, and neither of them can have that.

Because as ridiculous as the idea might have seemed at first, and as much as they both insist otherwise, the truth is, Britomartis and Apollo are friends. 

But friendship is not something that gods do. Wanting to get into someone’s pants, yes, that is an emotion the gods are allowed to have. Wanting to mess with someone’s head or feelings. Wanting to claim humanity’s achievements as your own. Wanting a mortal to run an errand for you because you’d rather risk their lives than wasting the tiniest amount of your infinite supply of time. All of these things, the gods have a right to.

But wanting to help a friend in need, without asking for anything in return? No. That’s not how it works in the realm of the gods, within the confines of the little authoritarian dictatorship they call family. Love is always conditional. It is always revocable. Love is power, that you can hold over someone or that someone can hold over you. 

This extremely transactional view of love is enforced from the top all the way down to the demigods, whom the gods often won’t even recognize as their own unless they perform some great feat, leading the children to attempt incredibly dangerous stunts just to get acknowledged.

Friendship is for those who have to beg for acknowledgement. Friendship is for the weak, needy mortals who get attached, who are afraid of being alone. But the gods? The gods don’t need anything. The gods are above. 

All of them except for Apollo, who’s always been desperate to love freely, gratuitously, and unable to hide it as well and thoroughly as everybody else does. Who was raised to perceive his inability to master detachment, the ease with which he forms connections, the fierceness with which he treasures them, as a fatal flaw of his character, and who still, in spite of that, yearns for what he believes he shouldn’t allow himself to have. 

A gladiator with a trident rudely interrupted my song. I smashed him in the face with my combat ukulele. Then I used the elephant’s foreleg to climb onto her back. I hadn’t practised that technique since the storm god Indra took me on a late-night road trip in search of vindaloo, but I guess riding an elephant is one of those skills you never forget. (TDP 241)

“Even in ancient times, I had been woefully ignorant of anything below the Saharan Desert,” Apollo deplores. “We Olympians tended to stay in our own neighbourhood around the Mediterranean.” It’s clear he has never been a fan of this policy. He calls it “terribly cliquish.” 

In spite of this, he still was on a friendly enough basis with gods from other pantheons that they used to casually hang out. 

But all of these stories are set in the ancient past, and most of them star deities whose prominence has faded considerably, if not completely. Even immortals can’t take eternity for granted.

And Olympus’ isolationism only worsened with time. 

‘You fight for money?’ 

‘To pay my tuition,’ Jamie agreed. ‘I did not know what I was getting into with this emperor person.’ 

‘And yet you survived,’ I noted. ‘You can see that the world is, uh, much stranger than most mortals realize. You, Jamie, must have lots of ìgboyà.’ 

His laughter was deep and rich. ‘Very good. My name is actually Olujime. For most Americans, Jamie is easier.’ 

I understood. I’d only been a mortal for a few months and I was getting very tired of spelling out Papadopoulos. 

‘Well, Olujime,’ I said, ‘I’m pleased to meet you. We are lucky to have such a defender.’ 

‘Mmm.’ Olujime nodded gravely. ‘If we survive tomorrow, perhaps the Waystation can use an accountant. A piece of real estate so complex … there are many tax implications.’ 

‘Uh –’ 

‘I am joking,’ he offered. ‘My girlfriend says I joke too much.’ 

‘Uh.’ This time I sounded like I’d been kicked in the gut. ‘Your girlfriend. Yes. Will you excuse me?’ (TDP 288-289) 

As soon as he stops trying and failing to impress, Apollo immediately finds the right things to say to connect with Jamie, to the point that Jamie chooses to trust him with his real name and starts opening up about his life. 

Unfortunately, it turns out Olujime has a girlfriend, and Apollo, ever the drama queen, immediately takes this as his cue to flee like a heartbroken Jane Austen heroine. It does not seem to occur to him that what he took as a rejection was actually the tentative start of a friendship. 

But Apollo can’t bring himself to meet Olujime’s openness with any of his own. He can’t bear to bare his metaphorical soul to any of these people and watch them recoil from him, as he’s sure they would. Even after all the time they spent together, he keeps acting like he can’t stand Calypso, mock threatening to make Leo into a constellation as soon as he gets back the power to do so. He still half heartedly tries to pretend he’s annoyed by Meg, even, despite the fact that absolutely nobody at this point is buying it anymore. He expects that they will get tired of putting up with him. That they will abandon him. He doesn’t know what to do with himself when it becomes clear that they won’t. 

It was much easier to let himself be loved by Commodus, safe in the knowledge that they deserved each other, both cut from the same cloth, the exact same brand of ugly and terrible. 

Not that Apollo was ever honest with Commodus either. He spent their whole time together swallowing his distaste for the man’s actions, pushing down his misgivings. He made the young emperor a promise he already knew, deep in his heart, he would not be able to keep.

Even after all the pain and heartbreak, Apollo still pursues romantic relationships. He does not ever pursue friendship, even though he craves it just as much, if not more. He knows he can pay for the first. He doesn’t think he has anything of value to give in exchange for the second. 

You don’t have to bare your soul to someone if your objective is to just spend a fun couple of nights with them. You just need to be beautiful and good in bed. And Apollo used to be beautiful enough that his good looks made up for the lack of everything else. He’d come to rely on them almost entirely as he did his very best to downplay his own intelligence and wit and overall personality. He spent so long playing the part of the handsome idiot, it seems like he’d forgotten he could actually be charming, for real.

But Britomartis met him on his terms. She responded to his fake-flirting by fake-flirting back. Their whole relationship is play acting: he pretends to be pursuing her, she pretends to be stringing him along for fun in return. And there’s no doubt they both enjoy it, to a degree. Their banter is not fake. But it is a facade. It’s far more calculated than it appears. Leo, with his quick mind and keen understanding of people, almost seems to sense this as he observes the metaphorical Greek fireball being tossed back and forth between them, but he’s missing too much context to really understand what he’s looking at, much like we also were at the time. 

The truth is, neither Apollo nor Britomartis care about kisses. It’s fragile, this thing that they have between them. They don’t put a name to it. They don’t allow themselves to discuss it openly. 

“In case you’ve forgotten,” Apollo says, dropping the act for just one moment, “I am no longer immortal, so please, no Burmese tiger pits.” He trusts her enough to ask sincerely. He doesn’t trust her enough to feel like he does not have to ask. He can’t be sure of her intentions. He can’t even be sure of her motives. He thinks she must have intervened only because his sister ordered her to, not because she actually cares. She does nothing to dispel that notion. He calls her his sister’s “minion”. She acts offended. But in truth, that’s what she is. She can’t be Artemis’ friend either. She can only be her subordinate. 

Gods have servants. They have followers. They have enemies. They don’t have friends. 

[Agamethus] did not have a face, but his posture seemed forlorn. The blood from his severed neck trickled sluggishly down his tunic. I imagined Trophonius’s head transposed on his body – my son’s agonized voice crying to the heavens, Take me instead! Save him, Father, please! 

This blended with the face of Commodus, staring at me, wounded and betrayed as his carotid pulse hammered against my hands. You. Blessed. Me. 

I sobbed and hugged the commode – the only thing in the universe that wasn’t spinning. Was there anyone I hadn’t betrayed and disappointed? Any relationship I hadn’t destroyed? (TDP 183)

Self pity is something Apollo is very well acquainted with. Nobody’s gonna cry for him, after all, so he might as well do it himself. And he does. He does love wallowing. He’ll happily tell anyone who’ll listen how hard and cruel and unfair his life is... so long as there’s no chance of being taken seriously. 

Yet when he does it for real, and not for show, he does it behind closed doors, in the drab solitude of a toilet cubicle, where he doesn’t expect to be found.

But someone does find him this time.

Josephine pulled a cloth from her overall pocket. She wet it at the sink and began cleaning the sides of my face, getting the places I’d missed. She treated me as if I were her seven-year-old Georgie, or one of her mechanical crossbow turrets – something precious but high maintenance. ‘I’m not going to judge you, Sunny. I’ve done a few bad things in my time.’ (TDP 184) 

It’s an odd, terrible, wonderful thing, to receive compassion and understanding when you think you least deserve it, long after you’d lost any hope that you could ever have it. 

There is a world, here on the ground, far away from Olympus, far below the cold, unforgiving clouds, in which people are free to admit to their weakness, because they know, they trust, that they will be met with sympathy, rather than reproach. That their vulnerability won’t be exploited. That they will be cared for.

“Nets can be traps,” Jo says. “But they can also be safety nets.” 

This is not what Apollo’s life experience has taught him. He does not understand. 

And yet, maybe, he does. He keeps thinking about it. He just doesn’t know how to make himself believe it.

‘For those of you who don’t know me,’ she began, ‘my name is Hemithea. Jo and I run the Waystation. We never turn away people who are in trouble, even former enemies.’ She nodded to Lityerses. ‘We attract outcasts here – orphans and runaways, folks who’ve been abused, mistreated or misled, folks who just don’t feel at home anywhere else.’ 

She gestured to the barrelled ceiling, where the stained glass fractured sunlight into green and gold geometry. ‘Britomartis, the Lady of Nets, helped build this place.’ 

‘A safety net for your friends,’ I blurted, remembering what Josephine had told me. ‘But a trap for your enemies.’ 

Now I was the centre of attention. Once again, I didn’t like it. (I was really starting to worry about myself.) My face burned from the sudden flush of blood to my cheeks. 

‘Sorry,’ I told Emmie. (TDP 277-278)

Apollo has gotten so used to lying, at this point he lies by habit, out of reflex, without even having to consciously will himself to do it. He lies about himself most of all, and most of those lies are deliberate – to an infuriating degree, especially in retrospect. But he lies about other people too, and these lies are nowhere near as intentional. A lot of the time, he doesn’t even realize he’s telling them. 

In spite of his continued attempts to pretend otherwise, Apollo is very good at reading people. Except in one glaring respect. He has no idea how unreliable his narration can be, when it comes to other people’s opinion of him. 

He goes on and on, at the start of this journey, and still to an extent at least up until the end of book 3, about how he totally expects people’s love and admiration. About how he’s certain to have them by default. He fakes surprise every time it becomes clear that that is not, in fact, the reality of things. It’s one of his favourite recurring gags, actually: him doing – or imagining himself doing – some huge heroic gesture, but also, on the opposite end of the comedic spectrum, something really barely notable that could only look praiseworthy to an airhead like the idiot he role plays as, and readying himself for applause that never comes. 

But the truth is, he does not ever expect applause. Quite the opposite, in fact. He expects anger. He expects reproach. Ridicule, even. At best, he expects grudging tolerance. It’s very hard, all throughout the first 3 books, to get an accurate read of how everybody else really feels about him, because we only have his account of it, and he always expects the worst. 

In fairness, he’s not entirely off the mark there. He has a lot to feel guilty about. But he doesn’t stop at that. He feels guilty for things that he had no control over and objectively bears no blame for. He feels guilty for things that quite frankly aren’t a big enough deal to warrant any assignment of blame. He feels guilty for things that weren’t bad at all and he should maybe, actually, rather take pride in.

“I don’t blame you,” he tells Meg, every time he gently corrects her on something, every time she makes excuses for her stepfather, every time she looks like she wants to apologize. He knows that she’s been taught, she’s been made to feel like she’s responsible for everything, even and especially that which isn’t her fault. He gives her the reassurance and absolution that nobody ever gave him. And why should anyone have? 

He was a god. Of course he was responsible.

Apollo loves to act shocked that he didn’t get the starstruck reaction he pretends to feel entitled to, but his shock at finding himself on the receiving end of a friendly overture, a friendly sentiment… that is not fake. That is always genuine. And it is usually followed by him telling us, telling himself, that that kindness is much more a reflection of the people who bestowed it on him than of what he actually deserves. People are being too kind to him. They are mistaken. They just don’t know him well enough to realize what the truth is. 

And the truth, according to Apollo, is that he doesn’t even deserve the benefit of the doubt.

So when he meets Emmie, the first person who isn’t actively working with his enemies to treat him with some measure of actual hostility (and no, Calypso doesn’t count, because despite how convincing his reasoning sounds, she never quite seems to hate his guts as much as he insists she should), he takes it as proof of everything that he feels is true about himself.

Of course Hemithea, a woman whose last significant interaction with him was to thank him for saving her life, detests him now. Why shouldn’t she? Clearly, his gift meant nothing to her. In fact, she threw it away. This only confirms what Apollo already, deep down, believes. Even when he does a good thing, somehow, he manages to do it wrong. 

He’s so busy berating himself for his own perceived worthlessness, he completely misses that Emmie’s trapped in a spiral of guilt and self loathing of her own. 

Because the truth is, his gift meant everything to her. His gift gave her everything she has now. 

If not for Apollo, Emmie would be long dead, a broken corpse eaten by the fish below the cliff she jumped from to escape the wrath of her abusive father. It’s thanks to Apollo that she lived long enough to meet Jo. It’s thanks to Apollo that she found something more meaningful to her than even the blessing of a god. 

To give up that blessing... it felt right, but it also felt like a betrayal. 

This is the reason why Emmie is so closed off with Apollo. She feels guilty. She expects him to be angry. She expects that he will want to punish her. She’s afraid that, maybe, he already has. After all, it’s his oracle that snatched away their daughter’s sanity. It’s his enemy that’s taken Georgina. 

Even though she doesn’t dare voice it, deep down, Emmie can’t help but feel that, maybe, this is all her fault. Wouldn’t this be a fitting punishment, for turning down the blessing of a god? And not just any blessing. A blessing freely given, without asking for anything in return. Like all of Apollo’s gifts, irrevocable.

By renouncing to serve Artemis, Josephine broke her contract with the goddess and lost her eternal life. But Emmie’s immortality did not belong to Artemis. It was entirely hers. 

And it still could be. She still could have it. But she doesn’t. 

Because she didn’t want just a lifetime with Jo. She wanted the two of them to grow old together. She couldn't bear the thought of seeing her love die, and then, having to keep living without her. 

Josephine shrugged. ‘It’s okay if you don’t get it. But I want you to know, Emmie didn’t give up your divine gift lightly. After sixty-odd years together with the Hunters, we discovered something. It’s not how long you live that matters. It’s what you live for.’ 

I frowned. That was a very ungodly way of thinking – as if you could have immortality or meaning, but not both. 

‘Why are you telling me this?’ I asked. ‘Are you trying to convince me that I should stay as … as this abomination?’ I gestured at my pathetic mortal body. 

‘I’m not telling you what to do. But those folks out there – Leo, Calypso, Meg – they need you. They’re counting on you. Emmie and I are, too, to get our daughter back. You don’t have to be a god. Just do your best for your friends.’ (TDP 186)

Unlike Emmie, Jo is not blinded by guilt. As understandable as wariness toward the gods always is, she knows they have reason to expect better of Apollo. They have known his kindness firsthand. In their house, this refuge for outcasts that they built together, following no vision, no plan other than their own, they still call him Lord. The kindness and respect that Jo shows him, the trust that she’s willing to extend him, tell a story all by themselves. There’s no way for even him to pass them off as a mistake. 

Jo sees that Apollo doesn't “get it”. But she sees, too, that more than angry, he’s hurt.  

“I want you to know,” she says, “Emmie didn’t give up your divine gift lightly.” 

It's true. Even though she is sure of her choice, even though she knows she will never regret it, Emmie can't quite forgive herself for it. We aren’t made privy to her struggle explicitly, but it’s not hard to imagine what her thought process must have been like. To imagine all the good she could have continued doing even after Jo’s passing, for the rest of her eternal life. She gave that up. She feels like it's only a matter of time before she gets her deserved comeuppance. 

“Was it payback?” she asks him, finally. The look on his face is all the answer she needs.

“I believe you,” she tells him. Not necessarily about him being sorry. Not necessarily about him not resenting her either. But she believes now, that he’s human enough to have the same limitations as any of them. Gods, after all, are people too.

‘[...] You want to know what real exile feels like? This is my third time as a mortal. Stripped of my powers. Stripped of immortality. I can die, Calypso.’ 

‘Me too,’ she snapped. 

‘Yes, but you chose to go with Leo. You gave up your immortality for love! You’re as bad as Hemithea!’ 

I hadn’t realized how much anger was behind that last shot until I let it fly. My voice resounded across the parking lot. Somewhere in the zoo, a rudely awakened tropical bird squawked in protest. (TDP 113-114)

The thing is, though, Apollo IS angry at Emmie. That anger, that he keeps so tightly in check most of the time, we see a glimpse of it here, before he quickly reins it back in. 

How could Emmie, how dare Emmie voluntarily give up the thing that he’s so desperate to get back for himself? No, Jo is right, he doesn’t get it. 

And yet, he knows his anger is irrational. He knows it’s projection. This is not the choice he would ever have made. He was born a god. He has never wished to be anything other than what he is. But he isn’t Emmie. And Emmie had a right to make her own choice. Even if it’s the one Apollo thinks is wrong. That’s the gift he gave her. No conditions. No strings attached. So she could do with it whatever she wanted.

But why does she get a choice, why does everybody get a choice, and he doesn’t?

‘If only someone could control wind spirits and carry us over the fence.’ 

‘If only some god could teleport us,’ she countered. ‘Or snap his fingers and bring the griffins to us.’ 

I folded my arms. ‘I’m beginning to remember why we exiled you on that island for three thousand years.’ 

‘Three thousand, five hundred and sixty-eight. It would have been longer if you’d had your way.’ 

I hadn’t meant to start this argument again, but Calypso made it so easy. ‘You were on a tropical island with pristine beaches, aerial servants and a lavishly appointed cave.’ 

‘Which made Ogygia not a prison?’ 

I was tempted to blast her with godly power, except … well, I didn’t have any. 

‘You don’t miss your island, then?’ 

She blinked as if I’d thrown sand in her face. ‘I – no. That’s not the point. I was kept in exile. I had no one –’ (TDP 113-114)

The truth is, it’s not really Emmie, and it’s not Calypso either, that Apollo’s angry at. 

But still, despite everything, he wants to go back to his home above the clouds. He misses his prison. It was a comfortable one. Cozy. He’d gotten so used to it, he barely even noticed the gilded bars of the cage anymore. 

Because what’s the alternative? To stay mortal? To stay powerless? What good would that do him? What good would that do anyone? 

And yet, Apollo’s been thinking about it. At the very least, he can’t avoid acknowledging that it’s a possibility. 

“You don’t have to be a god,” Jo told him. “Just do your best for your friends.” 

But to be mortal. To be powerless. To be content with doing ordinary work, when he once had the ability to make miracles happen. Is that really the best Apollo can do?

“It’s not how long you live that matters,” Jo told him. “It’s what you live for.” And Apollo does understand. But he doesn't agree. 

“As if you could have immortality or meaning,” he scoffs, “but not both.” 

Apollo wants both. 

And why can’t he? Why shouldn’t he? 

Gods are people, yes, but not all people are the same. This is who Apollo is. He wants both. 

I stared at the arched brickwork on the ceiling, wondering if and when it would collapse on my head. ‘I miss my bed at Camp Half-Blood.’ 

‘This place ain’t so bad,’ Leo said. ‘When I was between foster homes, I slept under the Main Street Bridge in Houston for like a month.’ 

I glanced over. He did look quite comfortable in his nest of hay and blankets. (TDP 92)

This is a story about power and privilege. Apollo was born into them. As nightmarish as his life was, in his gilded cage on top of the world, this fact is undeniable, and he is well aware of it. 

“The rich and the gods,” he says, “[are] always the last to suffer.” 

In absolutely every possible way, to stay human, with nothing more to his name than a New York State junior driver’s licence, would be a sucky choice. 

But it would be a freeing choice too. 

Lester simply doesn’t have the responsibility Apollo does. He doesn’t have the power to make Apollo’s mistakes. He doesn’t have the power to fix them either. He might die, yes. But he’d die a hero’s death. He’d die sacrificing everything for a just cause. If he gets lucky, and his death is dramatic enough, someone might even write a ballad or two about it afterwards. He’d die, giving himself the illusion of having spared lives. 

And then people will keep dying. People that, as a god, he could have saved with the blink of an eye.

In absolutely every possible way, to stay human would be the easy choice. The cowardly one. 

And Apollo, despite what he keeps telling us, what he keeps telling himself, is tired of cowering.

Also? He really, really does not want to die. 

Dead people don’t get second chances. They can’t earn redemption. They can’t meet new irritating and weird and wonderful people to fall in love with. They can’t be of use to anyone anymore. And even though Apollo is certain, at this point, that he can’t, that he doesn’t deserve, to have any of these things, somewhere deep in his heart he still desperately longs for them. He does want a second chance. He does want redemption. He doesn’t just want to be loved, he wants to love. He wants to make a difference.

“Heroes have to be ready to sacrifice themselves,” Meg will tell him, trying to console him after the loss of Jason. Apollo doesn’t like her definition of heroism. There is nothing heroic in throwing your life away. Not unless it makes a real difference. To be a hero is not about self sacrifice. To be a hero is, should be, about making a difference.

And Jo is right. You don’t have to be a god, to be able to make a difference. 

‘You’ve built something good here, Hemithea,’ I said. ‘Commodus could not destroy it. You’ll restore what you’ve lost. I envy you.’ 

She managed a faint smile. ‘I never thought I’d hear those words from you, Lord Apollo.’ (TDP 384)

It’s an incredible thing, to receive compassion and understanding when you think you least deserve it, long after you’d lost any hope that you could have it. 

Apollo has no idea how much Emmie needed to hear him say that, but he understands enough, now, to know that she cares what he thinks of her choice. So he tells her. He gives her his blessing one more time, because it's the right thing to do. Because against his better judgement, against everything that his life in his luxury jail above the clouds has taught him, he can’t help wanting to be her friend. 

Emmie does not thank him, but she calls him “Lord Apollo” again. Not out of a sense of duty or obligation. She knows, now, how human he is. She uses the most respectful manner of address, one more time, out of simple, heartfelt respect. 

And he, who just cannot ever believe people might actually, for real, think highly of him, is a bit put off by it. He misses a lot of things from his former life. He does not miss the pedestal at all. 

In the end, what really, definitively puts things right between the two of them is Emmie’s invite to come peel carrots for dinner with all the people below. That’s what Apollo needed to hear. That he, too, can belong with the rest of them. 

“I envy you,” he tells Emmie. She built something good that cannot be destroyed. He wishes he could say the same.

And yet, despite all his failures, people keep putting their trust in him. People are counting on him.

We see all of it through Apollo’s eyes, so, as always, it’s colored by how useless, how worthless his efforts feel to him almost all the time. Because he keeps comparing them to the ease of having the power of miracles at his fingertips, but also, even more than that, because this is how he’s used to thinking of himself, deep down, even as he keeps refusing to admit it. Useless. Worthless. Because the truth is, even when he really did have the power of miracles at his fingertips, he would not, he could not use it. 

“Leo and Calypso seemed to think I could summon godly bursts of awesomeness anytime I wanted,” he says, miffed, before trying and failing to brute force a locked door open. But that’s obviously not how it works. It can’t be. Even though it keeps happening. Not all the time, no... but often enough. Often enough for Leo and Calypso, who have spent almost two months with him at this point, to notice. 

“Be more goddy,” Meg encourages him, again in front of a door that he struggles to open. A door he eventually does manage to break down, thanks to the expertise that he stubbornly keeps refusing to admit he’s acquired the long, hard, regular way, and that has only ever failed him because he keeps second guessing himself. 

But it can’t be that simple. It can’t. “If I could be more goddy,” Apollo exclaims, frustrated, “I wouldn’t be here!”

It can’t be that simple.

Can it? 

Apollo loves complaining about his companions, but in between the complaints, he never fails to acknowledge their skills and achievements. He always makes sure we note them too. 

His skills though? His achievements? He’d rather not think about them. He’d rather we don’t think about them too much either. He alternates between glossing over them as if they never existed and making such a big deal of them that we are forced to roll our eyes at him. 

I almost missed that shot, is how he announces his success. I gave away our position, he says after saving himself and Calypso from capture. “Which part?” he responds to Leo telling him “nice work” for having dispatched Commodus’ serpentine sewer guardian. “The drowning? The screaming?”

The only thing scarier than being useless is discovering that you aren’t. Apollo is terrified of admitting that he is capable. That he is powerful. That he is good. That he, too, can make his own choices. He is terrified that people will start looking to him for solutions again. That they will, once again, start trusting him not to let them down. 

But the thing is, they already do.

‘Calypso, hold this!’ I tossed her the Tots and unslung my bow. I nocked an arrow. 

Once, such a shot would’ve been child’s play for me. Now it was nearly impossible: shooting from a moving train, aiming for a point where the focused impact of an arrow would have the maximum chance of triggering the switch. 

I thought of my daughter Kayla back at Camp Half-Blood. I imagined her calm voice as she coached me through the frustrations of mortal archery. I remembered the other campers’ encouragement the day on the beach when I’d made a shot that brought down the Colossus of Nero. 

I fired. The arrow slammed into the lever and forced it backwards. (TDP 139)

Trust is a powerful thing. Much like a net, it can be a trap. It can be the thing that drags you down into the murky depths and drowns you. 

But it can also be the thing that lifts you up.

I remembered the other campers’ encouragement when I’d made a shot that brought down the Colossus of Nero, Apollo says, allowing himself to acknowledge, in this moment of need, what he hadn’t at the end of last book, and offering us a rare unobscured glimpse at the truth. The winning shot that HE had made, no convenient last minute stroke of luck required. The other campers who were there, not jeering at him, but cheering him on. 

“You actually trust Lit?” Meg asks, as she tries to puzzle the same problem Apollo himself is struggling with. “I can’t be sure,” he replies. “But I think we must try. We only fail when we stop trying.” 

How presumptuous of Apollo, who keeps offering his trust to people, to think himself above receiving any in return. That’s not how it works, here on the ground, a little insignificant speck among so many others. People, unlike gods, help one another.

“Just do your best,” Jo told him. It doesn’t have to be complicated. There’s no need to overthink it. “Just do your best for your friends.”

‘Commodus.’ I drew myself up to my full, not-very-impressive height. ‘This is the only deal. You will let your hostages go. You will leave here empty-handed and never return.’ 

The emperor laughed. ‘That would sound more intimidating coming from a god, not a zitty adolescent.’ 

His Germani were well-trained to stay impassive, but they betrayed scornful smirks. They didn’t fear me. Right now, that was fine. 

‘I am still Apollo.’ I spread my arms. ‘Last chance to leave of your own accord.’ 

I detected a flicker of doubt in the emperor’s eyes. ‘What will you do – kill me? Unlike you, Lester, I am immortal. I cannot die.’ 

‘I don’t need to kill you.’ I stepped forward to the edge of the dining table. ‘Look at me closely. Don’t you recognize my divine nature, old friend?’ 

Commodus hissed. ‘I recognize the betrayer who strangled me in my bath. I recognize the so-called god who promised me blessings and then deserted me!’ His voice frayed with pain, which he tried to conceal behind an arrogant sneer. ‘All I see is a flabby teenager with a bad complexion. You also need a haircut.’ 

‘My friends,’ I told the others, ‘I want you to avert your eyes. I am about to reveal my true godly form.’ 

Not being fools, Leo and Emmie shut their eyes tight. Emmie covered Georgina’s face with her hand. I hoped my friends on my side of the dining table would also listen. I had to believe that they trusted me, despite my failings, despite the way I looked. (TDP 370-371)

Gods are powered by belief. 

It’s in this moment, bruised and dirty and as puny as it gets, standing in front of the man he’d so desperately wanted to save, the man he’d so desperately wished and always failed to emulate, the man he eventually determined had to be stopped and personally took the responsibility to execute, that Apollo finally recognizes the two of them are nothing alike. 

He calls Commodus “friend” one last time, knowing, and finally accepting, that Commodus won’t take this last chance that Apollo is offering him, just like he wouldn’t take all of the chances that Apollo had offered him before. That Commodus will never be the person Apollo wanted so badly to believe he could be. “I had survived,” Apollo says, “a journey he would never dare take.” 

It’s in this moment, as his friends put their lives in his hands, choosing to believe in his impossible promise despite everything, that Apollo, for the first time in what feels like forever, believes in himself.

To be mortal, with no superpowers. To do the extraordinarily important ordinary work of every day. There is meaning in that, and strength, and dignity too. 

But it’s not the best Apollo can do. 

This is.

My body superheated, every particle igniting in a chain reaction. Like the world’s most powerful flashbulb, I blasted the room with radiance. I became pure light. 

It lasted only a microsecond. Then the screaming began. (TDP 372)

The only thing scarier than being helpless is discovering that you aren’t. And Apollo is scared out of his mind. 

Chapter Text

“No,” is the word with which Apollo chooses to open book 3. “I refuse to share this part of my story,” he continues. “It was the lowest, most humiliating, most awful week in my four-thousand-plus years of life.” 

And then he resolves: “I will not tell you about it.”

It’s all for show, of course. He will tell us. In the end, he always does the difficult things he loudly proclaims not to want to do. He just needs a minute to be dramatic first. 

But he is not kidding. This is his absolute lowest point. This: the beginning of book 3. Jason’s fate weighs on the end of it too, but it’s not just about Jason, it’s not even mostly about Jason that Apollo is talking about here. Jason made his choice. Apollo, up until the end of this book, is too afraid to make his own. Even though he knows, now, he knows since he went supernova in the middle of the Waystation’s main hall, what his choice is. What his choice MUST be.

He is afraid.

He told us, didn’t he? He is a coward. He keeps telling us, just in case we forgot. He keeps telling himself, just to make sure he doesn’t forget either. 

Sure, he may have managed to save everybody at the end of last book. And at the end of the book before it. That doesn’t mean he’ll be able to do it again. 

“Just do your best,” Jo told him. But what if his best isn’t enough?

It’s always right before jumping that you feel the most fear. Apollo is no different. In this, too, as in everything else, he is just like the rest of us. 

So this is where we find him at the beginning of book 3. On the edge of the cliff. Paralyzed by fear. Stalling. Backpedaling, even. 

Clinging harder than ever before to those self destructive coping mechanisms of his, because he knows, now, that he’ll have to let them go. 

Feeling small, and weak, and unworthy, because he still hesitates. 

His memories of his former life, always too many to be contained in a finite mortal brain, keep slipping through his fingers, because to look, really look at them would mean to look at himself, and to look at himself would mean having to face all the mistakes that he’s made, all the mistakes that he’s still, knowingly, making. 

His power, every last bit of it, is lost to him because he can’t bring himself to believe he should have it, and, most of all, he can’t bring himself to believe he should want it. 

After all, what good has he ever done with it? 

The truth is: a lot. But he did a lot of bad with it too. Too much for the good to outweigh it in his mind, in his heart. Even the good things that he’s done, he remembers as failures. 

Power is a job. It’s an obligation. It’s a responsibility.

And Apollo is a coward. 

So he’s back to pretending he’s annoyed by Meg, by everyone. Back to wishing he remembered Zeus’s private number so he could call it and plead for his life, ‘cause that would surely go down well. Back to wistfully reminiscing about the good old days when he could just cheerfully order people to do his dirty work for him, a time when he didn’t have to care about anyone other than himself. 

But we’ve gotten to know him a bit too well by now. We’ve gotten to know him enough that we’re starting to suspect such a time never existed at all. He can’t fool us like that anymore. And as much as he tries, he can’t quite manage to keep pretending that he doesn’t know himself better than that either. He can’t actually make any of his usual bullshit sound quite as convincing as it did before. There’s no heart in his lies. At this point, he can’t even believe them for the amount of time that it takes him to tell them. He can't go back to the mental place where he could muster up at least a decent impression of not being utterly crushed by what he'd gotten used to saying and doing. 

Of course he’s not gonna tell us, he’s not gonna tell himself this in plain words. He can’t stay in denial if he says it outright. Luckily, here’s a convenient and appropriately gross metaphor for how shitty Apollo is: 

I tried not to weep or wet my pants. I succeeded at one of those. I’ll let you decide which. (TBM 77)

As we are, by this point, well aware, Apollo is not above indulging even in the lowest forms of humor. He’s actually made this specific joke more than once already. He makes it once more, and once more we cringe, roll our eyes, and prepare to move on, but this time he does not let us. He must clarify. And then bring it up again. And again. And again. He will NOT let it go until we throw our hands up in exasperation and find ourselves yelling at the page that we get it. We get it! You feel like shit!

Apollo’s narration has always been extremely unkind toward himself. But this? This is cruel. This is how you'd narrate your worst enemy's story, not your own.

And Apollo… he kind of IS his own worst enemy in this moment. And he knows it. He doesn’t want our pity. He doesn’t want our compassion either. He wants the satisfaction of drawing out of us the same kind of revulsion he feels for himself. 

Jason’s stare was unrelenting. I suspected that in the weeks since his talk with Herophile he had run every scenario. He was well past the bargaining stage in dealing with this prophecy. He had accepted that death meant death, the way Piper McLean had accepted that Oklahoma meant Oklahoma. 

I didn’t like that. Jason’s calmness again reminded me of Fred Rogers, but in an exasperating way. How could anyone be so accepting and level-headed all the time? Sometimes I just wanted him to get mad, to scream and throw his loafers across the room. (TBM 213)

It’s always by looking at how Apollo looks at other people that we get the most insight into what he really thinks, how he really feels. He can’t, he won’t allow himself to get angry on his own behalf. Not for real at least. But he can get angry on theirs.

It bothers him how accepting of their fate Jason and Piper seem. Forces far more powerful than they are have made their choice for them, and they have resigned themselves to it.

It’s not that Apollo doesn’t understand. He does. He’d done the exact same thing. But now, for the first time in what feels like forever, he’s questioning that choice. He looks, really looks back on it, instead of trying to forget that that’s the deal he’s made, and he’s not sure anymore that the benefits of his surrender outweighed the losses. 

We can’t always know the consequences of our actions, he’d told Harley, way back at the beginning of book 1, “but that doesn’t mean we should stop trying.” And just last book, he repeated the same sentiment to Meg. “I think we must try,” he said. “We only fail when we stop trying.” 

But that’s exactly what he had done. He had stopped trying.

I wondered … if my own father, Zeus, appeared to me just then and offered me a way back to Olympus, what price would I be willing to pay? Would I leave Meg to her fate? Would I abandon the demigods and satyrs and dryads who had become my comrades? Would I forget about all the terrible things Zeus had done to me over the centuries and swallow my pride, just so I could regain my place in Olympus, knowing full well I would still be under Zeus’s thumb? 

I tamped down those questions. I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answers. (TBM 194)

Maybe Zeus was right to punish me, he says, for the first time giving voice to his true feelings, his true fear. Maybe I really am a bad person. He finally admits to these thoughts right as we are starting to realize that, maybe, there’s no truth to them at all. 

“All of this,” he announces to the whole assembly of friends and allies gathered before him, “is my fault.” 

It’s not true. But nobody contradicts him. He is a god. Of course it’s his fault.

This is a story about power and privilege. Apollo was born into both. It doesn’t matter how horrible his life has been, in his gilded cage above the clouds. He should have done more. He should have done better. He had no right to give up on himself. He had no right to give up on what he knew, in his mind, in his heart, was the right thing to do. With the power of miracles at his fingertips, he had no right to do anything less than his best.

But he didn’t. He couldn’t. In the end, he is just a person, like the rest of us.

So maybe it wouldn’t be that bad to be a Lester after all. Lester is innocent. Nobody expects Lester to be able to fix Apollo’s mistakes. It should be a tempting prospect for Apollo, the self professed coward, to remain Lester until the end of his days. But it isn’t. He never even considers it with anything other than dread. Not even for an instant. Not even as a joke. 

Power, he says, should make good people uneasy. So what does it say about him that he wants it? And what is he going to do, once he has it again? What is he going to do, from behind the bars of his golden prison in the sky? 

The truth is, he doesn’t know. 

If I were still a god, he keeps thinking, I could have done so much more. But the truth is, if he were still a god he wouldn’t even be here. If he were still a god, he would have done less for these people than he’s doing even now, as a powerless mortal teenager armed with nothing but his own stubborness.

The god Apollo wouldn’t give even an infinitesimal fraction of his power. The powerless mortal Lester gives everything he has. 

But everything Lester has isn’t enough.

Apollo knows this. He’s known it since the start. He is, indeed, much too self aware not to realize what the stakes, here, truly are. He knows what his choice must be. 

He doesn’t know how to make himself believe.

And belief can’t be faked.

Apollo tries though. He knows how stories work. He’s familiar with narrative conventions and tropes. Gods are powered by belief. Surely, then, if he believes it hard enough, this will be the moment of his heroic redemption. Surely, if he believes it hard enough, he’ll be able to will the power of miracles back into his hands.

I decided at that moment Piper McLean would not die tonight. I charged Caligula, intent on wrapping my hands around his neck. I wanted to strangle him to death, if only to wipe that smug smile off his face.

I felt sure my godly power would return. I would rip the emperor apart in my righteous fury. 

Instead, Caligula pushed me to the floor with hardly a glance. 

‘Please, Lester,’ he said. ‘You’re embarrassing yourself.’ (TBM 290) 

As the god of prophecy, and the god of storytelling, too, Apollo should know that he can’t cheat his way out of a second act lowest point. He should know that genre savviness can’t help him. But he’s desperate. He has exhausted all his other options. He has to try. 

And the tragedy is, it works. 

No, his rage, the rage that he’s spent countless years blunting the edges of, can't summon his power in the moment of need. But the promise he’d made was not the death of his enemy. 

I decided, he’d said, that Piper McLean would not die that night. 

[Jason] yelled again, ‘GO! Remember!’ 

I was slow, dumbstruck. Jason held my gaze a fraction of a second too long, perhaps to make sure that last word sank in: remember – the promise he had extracted from me a million years ago this morning, in his Pasadena dorm room. 

While Jason’s back was turned, Caligula wheeled about. He threw his spear, driving its point between Jason’s shoulder blades. Piper screamed. Jason stiffened, his blue eyes wide in shock. 

He slumped forward, wrapping his arms around Tempest’s neck. His lips moved, as if he was whispering something to his steed. 

Carry him away! I prayed, knowing that no god would listen. (TBM 304)

It’s a terrible responsibility, to have the power of a god. 

It’s an even more terrible one to not have it when you should.

Jason’s death is not Apollo’s fault. Meg is right: Jason made his choice. Apollo knows this. In that fatal moment, as Jason looks him in the eyes for the last time, he acknowledges it outright. “Like me,” he says, “[Jason] had decided that Piper McLean would not die tonight. For some reason,” he continues, guilt and disbelief coloring his tone, “he had decided that I must live too.”

But it’s one thing to know, and another thing entirely to believe.

If I were still a god… Apollo keeps thinking. It’s easier to think about could have beens, pondering choices that Apollo will never have the opportunity to actually make. The real question, that Apollo deliberately leaves unspoken, is what does he intend to do, when he’s finally a god again? What hope does he have, what hope can he have, that he will manage to do any better?

He doesn’t know. He doesn’t feel like he can promise even as much. 

“But how could I not try?” he thinks. 

“We must try,” he’d told Meg, almost a whole book ago already. “We only fail when we stop trying.” 

‘You think you’ve had it bad? I grew up as a hostage in my Uncle Tiberius’s palace. Do you have any idea how evil that man was? I woke up every day expecting to be assassinated, just like the rest of my family. I became a consummate actor. Whatever Tiberius needed me to be, I was. And I survived. But you? Your life has been golden from start to finish. You don’t have the stamina to be mortal.’ (TBM 291) 

All of the emperors, each in his own way, think they have Apollo figured out. They think they know him. They think they understand him. They think they are better than him. They could not be more wrong.

You abandoned and betrayed me, Commodus told him, spitting on the chance that Apollo was offering him one final time. 

You will never know suffering such as I did, Caligula tells him now, completely blind to the fact that he's just finished describing what was Apollo's own childhood, what has been Apollo's entire life up until now. 

You're a user, Apollo, Nero will tell him, absolutely certain that he's staring into a mirror, and entirely too enamoured of his own reflection to realize that the man before him is his opposite in every way that matters. 

A line from the Joe Walsh song reverberated in my head. ‘ “Nature loves her little surprises,” ’ I said. 

Piper snorted. ‘She sure does.’ [...]

‘It’s been my observation,’ I said, ‘that you humans are more than the sum of your history. You can choose how much of your ancestry to embrace. You can overcome the expectations of your family and your society. What you cannot do, and should never do, is try to be someone other than yourself – Piper McLean.’ 

She gave me a wry smile. ‘That’s nice. I like that. You’re sure you’re not the god of wisdom?’ 

‘I applied for the job,’ I said, ‘but they gave it to someone else. Something about inventing olives.’ I rolled my eyes. 

Piper burst out laughing, which made me feel as if a good strong wind had finally blown all the wildfire smoke out of California. (TBM 265)

For a self professed egotistical fool, Apollo spends a lot of time looking at the world around him. He makes note of everything he sees, everything he experiences with all of his senses. He does it with simplicity. His descriptions are not flowery or overwrought. He does not embellish the reality of things; rather, he sees them as they are, and he finds beauty in that. His narration is full of improbable yet incredibly effective similes that he makes up on the spot, taking inspiration from the environment, the circumstances, the people surrounding him.

For a self professed egotistical fool, Apollo spends so much of his time trying to figure other people out. It doesn’t matter who it is, human or pandos, friend or enemy, whether he feels a kinship with them or not, Apollo tries to put himself in everybody’s shoes at least for a minute. He observes, he asks questions, he guesses, he relates, he writes imaginary internal monologues for them in his head, sometimes showing brilliant insight, sometimes projecting his own issues where they don’t necessarily belong, always aiming to understand, to establish some kind of connection.

“I’ve always believed that most sentient creatures like to be recognized,” he says. “We enjoy others knowing who we are, speaking our names, appreciating that we exist.” It’s obvious that this is true for him. He likes to be recognized. He likes to be liked. And it’s becoming more and more clear, even if he doesn’t like to admit it, that he likes being able to recognize everybody. He likes finding the peculiarity, the spark, the thing that makes each individual themselves, in every person he meets.

He is not blind to humanity’s – or any other race of creatures’ – faults, but he clearly LOVES people. He loves how different they are. How weird. How fearless, and resourceful, and inventive, and terrible, even, they all can be. He loves to get to know them. He wants to be their friend.

He keeps gently poking at Piper, until she finally feels comfortable enough, and exasperated enough, to unburden. 

It comes out a raw, jumbled mess of feelings that Piper herself isn’t sure how to put into words. 

But Apollo understands. “You’re wondering who you are without all the pressure,” he says. Like Leo and Calypso. Like Meg. Like Apollo’s sons and daughter and all of the children back at camp. Like Grover, like Crest even, and so many others. 

“I’m in process.” Piper says. 

“I could appreciate that,” Apollo thinks, but does not say. “I, too, was in process.”

All through the series, Apollo keeps looking at his companions and marveling at how young they are. He knew, already, he’s always known, but it hits him now all over again, every time. They are 12, 14, 16, 17, and they have all seen and done more than even wizened veterans should be expected to. They are all children, trying to figure out who they are outside of a crisis. He understands all too well what that feels like.

But he is not like them. He is not a child. And he is not a person either. 

He is Apollo.

Meg picked at a callus on her palm. ‘You were right. About Caligula. Nero. Why I was so angry.’ 

I glanced over. Her face was taut with concentration. She’d said the emperors’ names with a strange detachment, as if she were examining deadly virus samples on the other side of a glass wall. 

‘And how do you feel now?’ I asked. 

Meg shrugged. ‘The same. Different. I don’t know. When you cut the roots off a plant? That’s how I feel. It’s hard.’ 

Meg’s jumbled comments made sense to me, which wasn’t a good sign for my sanity. I thought about Delos, the island of my birth, which had floated on the sea without roots until my mother, Leto, settled on it to give birth to my sister and me. 

It was difficult for me to imagine the world before I was born, to imagine Delos as a place adrift. My home had literally grown roots because of my existence. I had never been unsure of who I was, or who my parents were, or where I was from. (TBM 317-318)

Apollo knows who he is. He remembers sharing his mother’s womb with his twin sister. He remembers the day he was born, singing for joy and eager to help, like Herophile, his Sibyl, his friend, in whom he’d found a kindred spirit, and whom he’d not been able to keep from growing weary and discouraged, much like he had. 

He remembers how the land was so happy to welcome him it sprouted a million golden flowers, forever rooting itself into place. 

He knows his entire lineage, an uninterrupted string of tyrants and murderers of their own kin that he could never bring himself to want to live up to, and is afraid he already has.

“You humans are more than the sum of your history,” he tells Piper. “You can overcome the expectations of your family and your society,” he says. “The truth is,” he’d told us a lifetime ago, at the very beginning of the series, “we gods are a little in awe of you mortals.” 

Mortals can change. Mortals can grow. They can learn to be better. Gods do not. 

Apollo knows who he is. He told us. He is the worst of the gods. He wants what gods shouldn’t want. He wants to be better.

“What you cannot do, and should never do,” he tells Piper, “is try to be someone other than who you are.” He gives her the advice he can’t follow. He gives all of these children the wisdom that he can’t use. He gives them the encouragement that nobody ever gave him. He exhorts them not to give up on themselves. 

Deep down, underneath all the lies, all the bullshit, all the theatre, Apollo knows who he is. He's always known. He can't even imagine a time when he didn't. Like the cheerful yellow blooms that anchored Delos to the earth, that grow around the cabin that houses his children at Camp Half Blood – the resilience that’s the key ingredient in the recipe for resurrection, his sense of self is strong, thriving in spite of the cold weather outside, impossible to uproot in defiance of everything he’s been taught to think and say and do in the horrible little abusive cult that he calls family. 

He knows who he is. He just doesn’t know how to make himself believe that he can, that he’s allowed, that he is RIGHT to be it. 

So as he struggles, chained over the pool of white hot lava that is all that remains of his predecessor, of his friend, to keep himself from splintering into nothingness, his first reflex is again to grab onto the shitty, familiar, trusted coping mechanisms that have kept him alive for so long, and that for just as long have been slowly eating away at him. 

But just as he feared, just as he didn’t dare hope, just as he pointedly avoided acknowledging up until now, he’s let himself grow too much for those lies to be able to sustain him anymore. 

He grabs onto his memories then. Not the bad ones, the ones he could never truly forget, no matter how hard he tried, but the good ones, the ones that for the longest time he wouldn’t dare look at, for fear they would remind him that he had power, and the capacity to use it for good. The day of his birth. The day he freed Delphi from Python. The day he became the Sun. But even that’s not enough. Those days are too long gone.

Once again, as he still, despite everything, always does in desperation, he thinks of his family. He can’t even muster up a vague impression of his mother. Of his father, he can only remember the terror his glower always inspired in him. He remembers his sister the most. Even so, she alone can’t save him. She never could. 

What is he left with, then?

I gazed across the rows and columns of stone blocks, now all blank, as if waiting for a new challenge. The prophecy wasn’t complete. Maybe if I could find a way to finish it … would it make a difference? 

It had to. Jason had given his life so I could make it this far. My friends had risked everything. I could not simply give up. To free the Oracle, to free Helios from this Burning Maze … I had to finish what we’d started. (TBM 378)

His friends who trusted him. His friends who count on him. His friends who depend on him. They are what allows him to hold onto himself. They are the thing that gives his life meaning. 

“It's not how long you live,” Josephine had told him. And she was right. “It's what you live for.” 

But there is so little Apollo can do. How could it be enough? He asks himself this question, at last, the question he’s been trying not to think about all book. Is there really a point to trying? How can he believe that this time his effort will yield the results that it never has before? How can he believe that this time, his resolve will finally make a difference? 

He finds that there is only one possible answer. It's the only one he will let himself consider.

It has to. 

“My friends had risked everything,” he says. “My friends got me this far,” is what he’ll tell himself in his greatest moment of temptation, one book later. “What’s the first thing you’ll do now that you’re back?” Hermes will ask him, two books from now, at the end of this terrible, wonderful adventure. “I think,” Apollo will reply, “I may visit some friends.” 

At each new stage of his journey, he meets new people. He makes new friends. And by the end of each book, he has to leave them behind. He doesn’t mind. He’s used to it. He’s learned to treasure whatever brief amount of time together with them he can get. Some of them he trusts that he will see again. Some of them he knows he will not. He grieves each loss as if it were the first. 

I understand now, he says. I understand, now, what pain is. I understand true impotence, and true strength, and the desire to give back, to repay people's kindness with kindness. When I was a god, he lies, all these concepts were foreign to me. 

He keeps up the pretense, because it's easier to swallow than the truth. 

The truth is he's always understood. He'd always felt these feelings. He'd just let himself become numb to them when he finally couldn't take it anymore. 

It was self defense. It is no excuse. 

So he keeps lying, to both us and himself. He keeps marveling at the depth and complexity of the human experience as if he's discovering it anew, as if gods don't feel the exact same way.

He keeps lying, because the lie is his only assurance that, now, he can make a different choice. That when he gets back to Olympus, sitting at the right hand of his father, he won't let himself again forget what, deep down, he's always known. 

He needs to believe he has some hope, any hope, of doing better. And right now the lie is all that he has. So he believes it.

He grieves each loss as if it were the first. He does not admit, not even to himself, especially not to himself, that that’s what he’s always done. 

But he doesn’t let the grief stop him. 

“I think,” he’d told Meg, “we only fail when we stop trying.” 

So how can he not try?

Good people, he says, rarely rise to power. And power… it should make good people uneasy. But that cannot mean giving up on it. It cannot mean leaving it in the hands of those who never question whether they are doing the right thing.

The morning sun blazed in the east. It had risen today, as always, but no thanks to me. It didn’t care if I was driving the sun chariot, or if Helios was raging in the tunnels under Los Angeles. No matter what humans believed, the cosmos kept turning, and the sun stayed on course. Under different circumstances, I would have found that reassuring. Now I found the sun’s indifference both cruel and insulting. In only a few days, Caligula might become a solar deity. Under such villainous leadership, you might think the sun would refuse to rise or set. But shockingly, disgustingly, day and night would continue as they always had. (TBM 196)

Apollo could have renounced his power. He could have let himself be dissolved into the soup that would birth a new god to take his place and inherit his responsibility. The sun would have kept rising and setting anyway. The sun will keep rising and setting, regardless of who its master is. It will keep rising and setting, regardless of what happens to the people under it. It doesn’t care about good or evil. It doesn’t care whether it warms or kills.

But Apollo does. 

I found myself crying. It was ridiculous. Gods don’t cry. But, as I looked at Jason’s diorama in the seat next to me, all I could think about was that he would never get to see his carefully labelled plans finished. As I held my ukulele, I could only picture Crest playing his last chord with broken fingers. 

‘Hey.’ Meg turned in the seat in front of me. Despite her usual cat-eye glasses and preschool-coloured outfit (somehow mended, yet again, by the magic of the ever-patient dryads), Meg sounded more grown-up today. Surer of herself. ‘We’re going to make everything right.’ 

I shook my head miserably. ‘What does that even mean? Caligula is heading north. Nero is still out there. We’ve faced three emperors, and defeated none of them. And Python –’ 

She bopped me on the nose, much harder than she had Baby Chuck. 

‘Ow!’ 

‘Got your attention?’ 

‘I – Yes.’ 

‘Then listen: You will get to the Tiber alive. You will start to jive. That’s what the prophecy said back in Indiana, right? It will make sense once we get there. You’re going to beat the Triumvirate.’ 

I blinked. ‘Is that an order?’ 

‘It’s a promise.’ I wished she hadn’t put it that way. I could almost hear the goddess Styx laughing, her voice echoing from the cold cargo hold where the son of Jupiter now rested in his coffin. 

The thought made me angry. Meg was right. I would defeat the emperors. I would free Delphi from Python’s grasp. I would not allow those who had sacrificed themselves to do so for nothing. 

Perhaps this quest had ended on a suspended fourth chord. We still had much to do. But from now on I would be more than Lester. I would be more than an observer. 

I would be Apollo. 

I would remember. (TBM 417-419)

Chapter Text

Finally, Apollo stops lying to our faces every other paragraph about what he really thinks and feels. He stops wasting time and energy pretending that he doesn't mean, that he doesn't want to do the right thing. That he doesn’t care about everything and everybody. He's done being ashamed of it. He won’t hide from who he is anymore. 

It should be a liberating choice, but it doesn’t feel like it. Far from it. Now that he doesn’t let himself cower behind his lies any longer, now that he refuses to flinch away from reality and take refuge in the imaginary stage play he’d gotten so comfortable writing and acting out inside his own head, he can see with agonizingly perfect clarity how much he'd screwed up. How much time he's wasted. How much blood is on his hands. 

There was no climbing cage going to the second level – just bare metal rungs against the side of the girder, as if the builders had decided, Welp, if you made it this far, you must be crazy, so no more safety features! Now that the metal-ribbed chute was gone, I realized it had given me some psychological comfort. At least I could pretend I was inside a safe structure, not free-climbing a giant tower like a lunatic. (TTT 247) 

The guilt he felt before was nothing compared to the guilt he feels now without the buffer of pretense. As hollow as it was, he misses the comfort that his safety cage had given him. But the only way to make the climb was to leave it behind. 

Oh, Jason Grace … I promised you I would remember what it was to be human. But why did human shame have to hurt so much? Why wasn’t there an off button? (TTT 134)

Apollo did many bad things in his long life. Some of them, many of them, he did because he was backed into a corner. Because he had no choice, or because he’d been made to believe that he didn’t, and accepted that that was the truth. But he can’t, he won’t let himself acknowledge it, not even now that he’s finally allowing himself to put the right name to what he’s experienced at his father’s hands. 

He is not like Meg. He is not a child. He is responsible for his own choices. He should have known better. He should have tried harder. He will have to keep trying, somehow, whatever it takes, no matter how hopeless it seems, once he’s back with the rest of the gods, back within the fold of the little abusive cult that he calls family, high above the top of the Empire State Building, because unlike Meg, he’s never getting free.

He keeps insisting that human shame is different, because he needs to believe that when the time comes he won’t jump at the chance to turn it off, shut it down, bury it in the sand and never look back, just like he’d done with the godly one, which is exactly the same.

Have you ever had an experience so painful or embarrassing you literally forgot it happened? Your mind dissociates, scuttles away from the incident yelling Nope, nope, nope, and refuses to acknowledge the memory ever again? (TTT 43)

He’d done it to survive. But that’s no excuse. Deep down, Apollo has always believed this. He has to find a way to do better anyway. He has no guarantee that he will. He doesn’t have anything but his desperate, stubborn resolve to keep his promise to Jason, to himself, to everybody.

I will be Apollo. I will remember.

When had I last felt ‘whole’? I wanted to believe it was back when I was a god, but that wasn’t true. I hadn’t been completely myself for centuries. Maybe millennia. (TTT 316)

The problem with getting used to lying all the time is not that you end up forgetting what the truth is. You don’t. Not unless you want to. And Apollo could never truly bring himself to want to. No, the problem with getting used to lying all the time is that, after a while, the lies start to feel more real than the truth itself.

Apollo knows who he is, but he has not allowed himself to be that person in a really, really long time. So long, that he isn’t quite sure how to do it anymore.

But he can’t afford to wait to figure it out until after the crisis has passed. The hourglass is running out of sand. 

Lupa stood before the altar. Mist shrouded her fur as if she were off-gassing quicksilver. 

It is your time, she told me. 

[...]

‘My time,’ I said. ‘For what, exactly?’ 

She nipped the air in annoyance. To be Apollo. The pack needs you. 

I wanted to scream, I’ve been trying to be Apollo! It’s not that easy! (TTT 95)

“Continue to act strong,” Lupa tells him. Apollo understands. Her advice makes sense to him. “Half the trick to being a god,” he had told Meg their first morning together at Camp Half Blood, “is knowing how to bluff.” 

He can do that. He’s been doing it this whole time. So maybe he just needs to switch his old act for a new one. The vapid, selfish, privileged brat for the reformed ex villain seeking redemption. The latter feels more right. It definitely feels closer to the truth, and to the end goal, than his previous routine. 

The problem is, ultimately, it’s still an act.

‘Did you just use the term skedaddleth?’ 

I TRY TO SPEAK PLAINLY TO THEE, TO GRANT THEE A BOON, AND STILL THOU COMPLAINEST.

‘I appreciate a good boon as much as the next person. But, if I’m going to contribute to this quest and not just cower in the corner, I need to know how –’ my voice cracked – ‘how to be me again.’ 

The vibration of the arrow felt almost like a cat purring, trying to soothe an ill human. ART THOU SURE THAT IS THY WISH? 

‘What do you mean?’ I demanded. ‘That’s the whole point! Everything I’m doing is so –’ (TTT 138) 

Apollo has spent so long trying to be someone other than himself, there’s almost no one left who truly knows him anymore. The characters he played are all that most of the people around him have ever known. 

And he doesn’t get to correct their assumptions. He doesn’t get to make his case to the arrow. How would that even go? You see, I’m not actually an asshole, I just pretended to be! I swear I didn’t mean it!

Nobody wants to hear that. To anyone who’s ever had the misfortune of having to put up with it, the two looked exactly the same. 

And, contrary to popular belief that he himself had carefully planted and cultivated, Apollo can read a room. 

I began to speak, the Latin ritual verses pouring out of me. I chanted from instinct, barely aware of the words’ meanings. I had already praised Jason with my song. That had been deeply personal. This was just a necessary formality. 

In some corner of my mind, I wondered if this was how mortals felt when they used to pray to me. Perhaps their devotions had been nothing but muscle memory, reciting by rote while their minds drifted elsewhere, uninterested in my glory. I found the idea strangely … understandable. Now that I was a mortal, why should I not practise non-violent resistance against the gods, too? (TTT 91-92)

The Romans still pray to the gods. They still prayed to Apollo too. And yet, none of them really has any idea who Apollo is. Most of them never cared to know either. Why would they? Gods aren’t people. Gods aren’t friends. They are beautiful golden idols to appease. They might grant someone a wish, sometimes, if that wish is something they already wanted to make happen anyway. They don’t actually care about anything but themselves.

And Apollo was just like the rest of them. 

It doesn’t matter that his indifference was always fake. From a distance, it looked real. From a distance, it looked the same as that of any of the other gods. And Apollo was oh so very careful, at all times, to keep his distance.

He still is. 

He calls Zeus his abuser, but he only does it in the privacy of his own head, and in the pages of these books that won’t be read by any of the people who could actually give him sympathy and support. 

Gods aren’t supposed to need sympathy. They aren’t supposed to need support. They aren’t supposed to be helpless. 

Apollo feels safe in telling us, because we can’t do anything, we can’t offer anything to him other than a listening ear. 

But even to us Apollo doesn’t explain, because the truth is Apollo doesn’t WANT to explain. It’s incredibly hard for him, still, to admit that he was never as in control of his own life and choices as he liked to think and pretend he was. 

This, too, is who Apollo is. He believes that he had no right to be a victim. 

So, even as he admits it, he won’t let himself acknowledge how that shaped every single one of his choices, of his thoughts, of his beliefs even. 

He will take all the responsibility, because he can’t admit that, even at his most powerful, he was always powerless.

He can’t let go of the illusion of control, not so much for the sake of his own pride and dignity – if there’s one thing that’s been made entirely clear by Apollo’s narration at this point, it’s that he really doesn’t care anymore about making himself look good – but because he’s still desperately grasping for some proof, any proof, that he truly can do better, and that he truly will be able, this time, to make a difference, that he will be able to avoid repeating his mistakes, even though the circumstances and the people that taught and helped and pushed him to make them will always be there. 

To admit that he was always powerless would mean admitting that at the end of these trials, even if he succeeds, especially if he succeeds, he will be powerless again. And that is unacceptable.

So no, It doesn’t feel good to be Apollo. It doesn’t feel liberating. It still feels like shit. 

‘I can’t believe I used to think –’ 

‘That I was your father? But we look so much alike.’ 

He laughed. ‘Just take care of yourself, okay? I don’t think I could handle a world with no Apollo in it.’ 

His tone was so genuine it made me tear up. I’d started to accept that no one wanted Apollo back – not my fellow gods, not the demigods, perhaps not even my talking arrow. Yet Frank Zhang still believed in me. 

Before I could do anything embarrassing – like hug him, or cry, or start believing I was a worthwhile individual – I spotted my three quest partners trudging towards us. (TTT 142) 

Apollo knows who he is. As much as he still pretends otherwise, he has no illusions about it. He’s exactly the sort of person that he strived so hard to become. He is someone nobody would miss, except maybe Frank Zhang, who, like Apollo’s children, like all of the people Apollo is ever so grateful, ever so surprised to be able to call friends, is too kind for his own good. 

He’s the worst of the gods, and a rather terrible human being too. Too vain and insecure to stop caring what people think of him. Too much of a selfish coward to make peace with the finality of death, and with it, the possibility that he won’t get another chance to remedy his failings. Entitled enough that he still, despite everything, thinks he has a right to hold into his hands the power to make a difference, and arrogant enough that he still, despite everything, wants to believe that he can.

Are you sure, the arrow asked him. But what other choice does he have?

No one else who has the power to do so will lift a finger to stop the emperors. No one else who has the power to do it will wrestle the future out of Python’s jaws. 

So it has to be Apollo, just like the first time. 

He will have to take responsibility for all of it, because someone has to, and no one else will. 

And when he succeeds, IF he succeeds, he’ll have to go back to his comfortable golden prison in the sky, and try to remember what it was like to be a person rather than a god, hold onto those memories even after everybody else who’s been witness to his struggle will be long gone. 

I dreamed of homes. Had I ever really had one? 

Delos was my birthplace, but only because my pregnant mother, Leto, took refuge there to escape Hera’s wrath. The island served as an emergency sanctuary for my sister and me, too, but it never felt like home any more than the back seat of a taxi would feel like home to a child born on the way to a hospital. 

Mount Olympus? I had a palace there. I visited for the holidays. But it always felt more like the place my dad lived with my stepmom. 

The Palace of the Sun? That was Helios’s old crib. I’d just redecorated. 

Even Delphi, home of my greatest Oracle, had originally been the lair of Python. Try as you might, you can never get the smell of old snakeskin out of a volcanic cavern. 

Sad to say, in my four-thousand-plus years, the times I’d felt most at home had all happened during the past few months: at Camp Half-Blood, sharing a cabin with my demigod children; at the Waystation with Emma, Jo, Georgina, Leo and Calypso, all of us sitting around the kitchen table chopping vegetables from the garden for dinner; at the Cistern in Palm Springs with Meg, Grover, Mellie, Coach Hedge and a prickly assortment of cactus dryads; and now at Camp Jupiter, where the anxious, grief-stricken Romans, despite their many problems, despite the fact that I brought misery and disaster wherever I went, had welcomed me with respect, a room above their coffee shop and some lovely bed linen to wear. 

These places were homes. Whether I deserved to be part of them or not – that was a different question. (TTT 171-172)

Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone deserves to feel loved. Everyone deserves to be recognized. Everyone deserves a home. Everyone, Apollo keeps telling us, keeps confirming with his actions, with his choices, because he really does believe it. Everyone. Except him.

In his golden prison above the clouds, Apollo has been taught that gods shouldn’t want, that gods shouldn’t need any of these things. Gods aren’t people. Gods are not like the rest of us. When Apollo said this, back at the beginning of this journey, it just felt like hilariously misplaced haughtiness. It’s much easier now, 4 books later, with the curtain of lies finally out of the way, to recognize in the familiar rhetoric the common refrain of abuse victims. Good people deserve good things. Normal people deserve good things. Even bad people deserve a second chance. But not me. Never me. 

Apollo has a lot to feel guilty about. But he doesn’t stop at that. He feels guilty for things that he had no control over and objectively bears no blame for. He feels guilty for things that quite frankly aren’t a big enough deal to warrant any assignment of blame. He feels guilty for things that weren’t bad at all and he should maybe, actually, rather take pride in. 

In his golden prison above the clouds, he’s been taught to feel responsible for everything. 

And he does. He spends the first half of book 4 beating himself up for all that is wrong with the world, his guilt threatening to consume him both metaphorically and quite literally, taking the form of the poison inexorably spreading through his body that he, unlike every other mortal human in the city and at camp, in defiance of all of Pranjal’s medical experience, inexplicably can’t manage to fight off. 

Gods are powered by belief, and a god’s belief can quite literally shape reality. For a god, intent is action. For a god, wanting to do something might as well be the same as having already done it. Apollo doesn’t want to die. And he doesn’t. But now that he finally looks at himself again without the filter of pretense before his eyes, he finds it incredibly hard to still believe that he shouldn’t. 

“YOUR FAULT,” Zeus thunders in his memories, the only thing Apollo remembers of the six months that preceded his fall. “YOUR PUNISHMENT.” That’s why Apollo is here. To do penance for the sins of them all. And as much as he tried to protest it, it does make a perverse sort of sense to him. Deep down, there’s a part of him, still, that believes he deserves it.

It’s not your fault, Apollo tells Meg. The two of them are very much alike. He understands her. He has no trouble figuring out that she blames herself for his condition. 

He has a lot more trouble, still, 4 books in, to imagine that she might actually care for him enough to be afraid of losing him, even as the obvious truth is staring him in the face.

It’s because of all the time we spent together, he rationalizes, equating himself to the little peach demon who’s been the only other semi constant presence in Meg’s life as of late in seeming complete earnestness, by all measures sounding like he’s genuinely unable to grasp the absurdity of such a comparison.

Like many people who have grown up in abusive households, Apollo is starved for love, and like many of his fellow abuse victims, he sees love as a transactional affair. He doesn’t really believe he can have anyone’s love for free. He keeps being caught off guard, feeling ashamed every time someone shows him even just a modicum of compassion. He allows himself to pursue physical intimacy, but friendship? Companionship? Understanding? No, those are off limits. There’s no way he can pay the price of them. 

He was shocked that Will and Kayla and Austin would be so kind and welcoming to him when he was a powerless, puny mortal. He struggled to accept their acceptance, their eagerness to help him. Why would they waste their love on him when he clearly had nothing more to give them in exchange for it? “A father”, he’d thought, “should give more to his children than he takes”. 

He thinks about Artemis now, about the way he used to call her his baby sister, “to annoy her,” he says. His next words betray the real reason, though. Despite how much she clearly finds me annoying too, he says, I suppose that, unlike Artemis, Meg really needs me. 

That’s what the whole “baby sister” thing has always been about: giving himself the illusion that there’s something he can do for Artemis that will justify her wanting to hold onto him, because without it, without her actually needing him for anything, he can’t bring himself to believe that she’d care. 

And Apollo knows. When he chooses to, he never has trouble distinguishing the lies from the truth. He’s always known, deep down, that his twin has never needed him. “Artemis understood me,” he tells us. “Well, okay, she tolerated me,” he amends immediately after. “Most of the time,” he adds. “All right, some of the time.”

But “with Meg,” he says, “I felt as if it were actually true.” 

He can believe Meg’s love, unlike that of Artemis, unlike that of his children, of everybody else, because he has the means to buy it. He finds comfort in this thought, even as he realizes that he’s already behind on mortgage payments. 

“What a horribly insufficient friend I had been,” he thinks. 

As he offers her the hug he’d wanted and never dared to give her before, under the mistaken assumption that she wouldn’t accept it – let alone welcome it, he takes all the blame, once again, as he’s well accustomed to. 

It’s not your fault, he tells Meg any chance he gets. It’s not your fault. You deserve better. But he is not like her. 

In his heart of hearts, Apollo truly does believe he is the lone exception. 

Of course it’s all his fault. He is a god. That’s the very definition of being responsible for everything.

“I [will] tough it out until the moment I [keel] over,” he vows, pretending to be shocked at the thought as if that’s not exactly what we’ve seen him do for 4 books straight, as if the only difference isn’t that now he’s admitting to what he’s doing, committed to the new narrative of self improvement he’s chosen for himself just as resolutely as he was to the old fiction of selfish, uncaring entitlement that he’s finally discarded.

Apollo loved to whine, so long as there was no chance of being taken seriously. 

But as soon as he realizes that he is, in fact, truly at risk of being believed, he immediately shutters himself off. 

He doesn’t deserve his friends’ concern. He refuses to add to their worries. There’s nothing they can do to help him anyway. Apollo needs a miracle. They all do. And they are only mortals. At most, they can buy him some time. The rest is up to him, as it rightfully should be. 

What do mortals say – Suck it up? I sucked it way, way up. (TTT 60)

After 3 books of sifting through Apollo's lies to get at the increasingly hard to miss rising mountain of facts, we understand that Apollo is, in fact, observant, keenly perceptive, and incredibly self aware. 

Now that he's stopped lying to us every other paragraph about what he really thinks and feels, we are finally able to see where his real blind spots lie.

“I was tired of others keeping me safe,” he says. “The whole point of consulting the arrow had been to figure out how I could get back to the business of keeping others safe.” 

As is clearly apparent, by now, from the way he chooses to tell and frame this story, Apollo doesn’t really consider anything he does as a mortal as worth acknowledgement, let alone praise. He keeps noting how others help him, while paying no mind to all the times he has helped them in turn. He feels that everything he did up until this point counts for nothing. 

The entirety of his long term plan hinges on regaining his godhood, and his current short term plan is to jump through near impossible hoops in order to perform a ritual that will hopefully allow him to call for divine intervention in time. Not just any divine intervention either: the real deal, “actual grade-AA-quality” help, minor gods need not apply. 

His first reaction to discovering himself powerless, way back in book 1, was to swear those stupid oaths on the Styx because the mere idea of being anything less that superhumanly perfect at the things he’s supposed to be famous for horrified him. It didn’t matter to him at all that he was still good at them. More than good in fact! He was still a prodigy by human standards! 

But human standards are not the standards Apollo has ever been measuring himself with. 

I need to get back to the business of keeping others safe, he says. What he means is, he wants to get back to a place where he’ll have no use for other people’s help. He wants to get back to the place where he’ll have enough power to do everything himself. 

In his mind, there can be no give and take. There shouldn’t. Because he is not a person like any other. 

A father, he’d said, should give more to his children than he takes. And what are mortal creatures to divine immortal beings, if not frail, clueless children? 

This is, to Apollo, what it truly means to be a god. This is his responsibility. To be the solution to all problems. To be endlessly strong, and never in need. To be the father who always gives and never takes. 

For him, being able to do anything less than everything isn’t enough. 

He is in awe of his mortal friends’ bravery, of their resilience, of their hope. He is grateful for their kindness and generosity. He appreciates everything they’ve done for him. But he feels guilty every time he’s forced to take anything from them. He feels like he shouldn’t. Like it’s wrong of him to even just accept what’s freely offered. 

He admires their strength. He finds it genuinely commendable. But he has higher standards for himself. He is a god. They, in the end, are only mortals. There’s only so much they can do.

Now that he’s stopped role playing the asshole, Apollo would never say the latter bit out loud. And he doesn’t. But there’s a part of him, a small, secret one, deep down, that is actually thinking it. 

“If Will and Nico were here,” he says at one point, “they would just be two more people for me to worry about.” 

Apollo believes that he should be strong enough to carry all of this on his own shoulders. That’s how it’s supposed to be. That’s what gods, the ones that actually matter at least, are for. Apollo should be the only one worrying. 

The truth is, even with his newly instated policy of emotional honesty, there’s still so much he simply doesn’t tell anyone. Not even us. 

Better not add to our worries. Better for us not to know. 

And yet, Apollo’s too intelligent to be entirely stupid, and too decent to be entirely unfair. 

He does not make the mistake of keeping crucial intel to himself. He shares all of the knowledge he gains, even when he expects it will do more damage than good. He stands by his beliefs, and he believes in people’s right to make their own choice, even if that choice ends up being the choice to run away. 

“I can’t fall into line like a good soldier,” Lavinia tells him. “Me locking shields and marching off to die with everybody else? That’s not going to help anybody.” 

Apollo understands. He’s never liked mindless obedience and pointless sacrifices either. 

But despite how well he understands her, despite how much of himself he sees in her, even – or perhaps precisely because he sees himself in her, despite having witnessed her unwillingness to back down from a fight several times, he’s quick to assume the worst of her, and of her faun and dryad friends too. Of course they must be running away. They’re mortals. Powerless. What else could they possibly do? 

“How simple it would be to destroy their fragile confidence,” he thinks, looking at the people making lighthearted chatter in the mess hall. “Fragile” is the word he uses, also, to describe Meg’s state of mind, an assessment so shockingly patronizing, standing in such stark contrast to all the times he’s praised her strength and bravery all throughout the past 3 books, and in this book too, that it almost feels out of character for him. 

But it isn’t. This, too, is who Apollo is. 

Asclepius, god of medicine, used to chide me about helping those with disabilities. You can help them if they ask. But wait for them to ask. It’s their choice to make, not yours. 

For a god, this was a hard thing to understand, much like deadlines, but I left Lu to her meal. (TON 226)

This is a story about power and privilege. Apollo was born a one percenter not just by mortal standards, but by godly ones too. He was always eager to help, and able to give on a scale that dwarfed every possible attempt to give back on the part of anyone on the receiving end of his blessings. 

He doesn’t want to think less of them because of it. He refuses to. He took his human son’s advice to heart, so much so that he remembers and recites it reverently millennia after it was first given to him. 

Apollo really does believe in mortals’ right to self determination. He keeps telling them to make their own choices. He is determined to respect them. But deep down, there’s a part of him that wonders just how much of a difference their choices truly can make, when they are backed by so little power. There's a part of him, too, that wonders how informed those choices can be, when they are based on so little life experience, so little knowledge compared to his. 

He's so quick to dismiss people's good opinion of him. Their willingness to put their trust in him. Even their love. 

They don’t know better, a part of him thinks, still, even now. They will turn away the moment I disappoint them. 

Turns out, there’s some real condescension under all the fake one. Much subtler, much harder to spot, and entirely benevolent, but condescension all the same. 

Are you sure, the arrow said, unknowingly asking precisely the right question for the wrong reasons, that what you really want is to go back to being the same person you were before? 

Chapter Text

Tarquin had orchestrated all this with me in mind. He was forcing me to confront some of my greatest hits of dreadfulness. Even if I survived the challenges, my friends would see exactly what kind of dirtbag I was. The shame would weigh me down and make me ineffective – the same way Tarquin used to add rocks to a cage around his enemy’s head, until eventually, the burden was too much. The prisoner would collapse and drown in a shallow pool, and Tarquin could claim, I didn’t kill him. He just wasn’t strong enough. (TTT 270)

Much like the three emperors, and, in the end, like most of the people in Apollo’s life, Tarquin has hilariously misunderstood what kind of dirtbag Apollo truly is. 

There’s no way to coerce someone who already feels guilty about everything into feeling guiltier than he already does. Apollo’s head was already inside a cage of his own making, filled with rocks that he himself dutifully kept adding to it, day after day. Apollo had been sinking long before falling into Tarquin’s trap. None of Tarquin’s carefully selected stones could make him drown any faster than he already was. 

And yet there IS something special about these particular stones. They are not like all the others. Tarquin selected them perfectly, indeed, to end up achieving, ironically, the complete opposite of the intended effect. 

It’s here, in the place where he least expected it, the place where for so long he’d refused to look out of painful shame, that Apollo finds the lifeline he’s been desperately searching for. The reminder that there are some things, among the infinite number of things that he blames himself for, that are not like the others. There are, in fact, some things that Apollo actually, truly, directly, is responsible for.

Apollo did a lot of bad things in his long life. Some of them, many of them, perhaps even most of them, he did because he was backed into a corner. But some of them, he did because he was perfectly capable of being an asshole in his own right. They are, very clearly, not like all the others. He can’t keep treating them as if they were the same. The people he’s wronged deserve better than that. 

And maybe, just maybe, he does too. 

Maybe his mistakes do not have to define him.

“I will march right into that box and apologize,” he says. “There has to be another way. The prophecy can’t mean for us to kill Harpocrates. Let’s talk to him. Figure something out.” 

This is who Apollo is. He believes in people’s right to make their own choice.

‘Goodbye, Apollo,’ said the Sibyl’s voice, clearer now. ‘I forgive you. Not because you deserve it. Not for your sake at all. But because I will not go into oblivion carrying hate when I can carry love.’ 

[...]

Harpocrates gave me a dry smirk. My confusion, my sense of near panic must have given him what he needed to finally stop being angry at me. Of the two of us, he was the wiser god. He understood something I did not. [...]

The soundless god sent me one last image: me at an altar, making a sacrifice to the heavens. I interpreted that as an order: Make this worth it. Don’t fail. (TTT 291-292) 

Apollo loves people. He loves getting to know them, learn about them, figure them out. He could spend a lifetime just doing that. And he has. He did. He does know people. He does understand them. He possesses a great deal of emotional and social intelligence, and is well aware of it. A little too aware, in fact. A little too quick, a little too confident in passing judgement. 

This, too, is who Apollo is. He really does think he knows everything.

And yet, people keep managing to surprise him. They are so much more, they are so much better than he expects them to be. They look at him and don’t see a lost cause. They don’t protest when he calls them “friends”. They put their trust in him even when they know, when it couldn’t be more clear, that he’s as human and as fallible as any of them.

There is a world, here on the ground, far away from Olympus, far below the cold, unforgiving clouds, in which even Apollo qualifies for a second chance.

In front of me, Reyna and Meg stood shoulder to shoulder, facing down the god. 

They sent him their own flurry of images. 

Reyna pictured me singing ‘The Fall of Jason Grace’ to the legion, officiating at Jason’s funeral pyre with tears in my eyes, then looking goofy and awkward and clueless as I offered to be her boyfriend, giving her the best, most cleansing laugh she’d had in years. (Thanks, Reyna.) 

Meg pictured the way I’d saved her in the myrmekes’ lair at Camp Half-Blood, singing about my romantic failures with such honesty it rendered giant ants catatonic with depression. She envisioned my kindness to Livia the elephant, to Crest, and especially to her, when I’d given her a hug in our room at the café and told her I would never give up trying. 

In all their memories, I looked so human … but in the best possible ways. (TTT 288-289)

Apollo did not believe Percy when he told him he’d changed. He knew he hadn’t. But now, looking at Reyna and Meg’s memories of him, he realizes that’s not true. The proof is in front of him. The proof is Harpocrates. It’s the Sibyl. It’s Koronis. It’s all the worst mistakes he ever made, long ago, in the distant past, that he decided to never repeat, and that he didn’t, and that today he still can’t fix, that he will never be able to fix, but that he knows, he’s certain, he would not make again.

So maybe, just maybe, there actually is hope for him yet.

For the longest time, Apollo could not see it. But his friends do. 

And so maybe he doesn’t really know, maybe he doesn’t really understand everything. There are still things left for him to learn. Things that other people know, and understand, that he doesn’t. Things that other people can see better than him. 

So maybe other people can take their share of responsibility too. Maybe they should! They, too, made their own choices. Apollo has no right, really, to take credit for those. He’s made enough mistakes of his own. He’s made plenty. He can stop, now, feeling guilty for the choices that he didn’t, that he couldn’t make. He can stop feeling guilty for the bad choices that others made. 

Anger swelled in me. I decided I was done with the ravens’ bitterness. Plenty of folks had valid reasons to hate me: Harpocrates, the Sibyl, Koronis, Daphne … maybe a few dozen others. Okay, maybe a few hundred others. But the ravens? They were thriving! They’d grown gigantic! They loved their new job as flesh-eating killers. Enough with the blame. 

I secured the glass jar in my backpack. Then I unslung the bow from my shoulder. 

‘Scram or die!’ I yelled at the birds. ‘You get one warning!’ 

The ravens cawed and croaked with derision. One dived at me and got an arrow between the eyes. It spiralled downward, shedding a funnel cloud of feathers. 

I picked another target and shot it down. Then a third. And a fourth. 

The ravens’ caws became cries of alarm. They widened their circle, probably thinking they could get out of range. I proved them wrong. (TTT 295-296)

The weight of the world is too much to bear for anyone on their own. Even a god. No matter how powerful he is. No matter how willing. The truth is, Apollo isn’t so exceptional. He is not so different, in the end, from everybody else. Even he can’t do everything. He can only do his best. 

This, contrary to the expectations that Apollo had set for himself from the very beginning of this story, and that we’d been all too willing to accept without question well past the point where they had stopped making sense, is the only lesson that Apollo truly needed to learn. 

That he can’t – that he shouldn’t, shoulder all of this alone. 

He’s only human, after all. 

‘Meg and I have been talking, the last day or so, while you were passed out – I mean, recovering – sleeping, you know. It’s fine. You needed sleep. Hope you feel better.’ 

Despite how terrible I felt, I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You’ve been very kind to us, Praetor Zhang. Thank you.’ 

‘Erm, sure. It’s, you know, an honour, seeing as you’re … or you were –’ 

‘Ugh, Frank.’ Meg turned from her windowbox. ‘It’s just Lester. Don’t treat him like a big deal.’ (TTT 58-59)

Apollo has a lot of understandable resentment toward the name “Lester”. It’s another thing his father has forced on him, and that his enemies, and his allies too, up until this point, no matter how warranted it was, no matter how true, have used to put him in his place, to remind him of everything he’s not anymore, of everything he might never be again. 

Initially, Apollo is frustrated by how quickly and enthusiastically the Romans have taken to it. But at some point throughout the course of the book, he’s surprised to realize, also, that they are not using that name to belittle him.

Gods aren’t supposed to be people. They are not supposed to walk the earth among them. They are not supposed to get hurt. To bear the scars of it. To need sleep and food and someone to save them a seat at the table. They are not supposed to feel. They are not supposed to care. 

The Romans still observe all the rites, but no rites could have ever prepared them for the reality of Apollo as anything other than a distant golden idol. They have no idea how to even begin to handle being face to face with him. 

But Lester? That’s easy. 

Lester is one of them. 

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t do it.’ 

I feigned surprise. ‘Can you read my mind, Miss Dare?’ 

‘I don’t need to. I know you, Lord Apollo.’ 

A week ago, the idea would have made me laugh. A mortal could not know me. I had lived for four millennia. Merely looking upon my true form would have vaporized any human. Now, though, Rachel’s words seemed perfectly reasonable. With Lester Papadopoulos, what you saw was what you got. There really wasn’t much to know.

‘Don’t call me Lord,’ I sighed. (THO 344)

Gods aren’t meant to be seen, let alone understood. They aren’t meant to be known. There is still so much Apollo doesn’t tell anyone, even now that he’s resolved to stop hiding.

But what he’s failed to realize up until this moment, is that people don’t need to know everything, to be able to know him. His words and his actions speak for themselves. 

Even if I survive, he’d thought, my friends will see exactly what kind of dirtbag I am. 

And his friends do, indeed, see.

Reyna gave me a brief pat on the shoulder. ‘All we did was show Harpocrates how much you’ve changed. He recognized it. Have you completely made up for all the bad things you’ve done? No. But you keep adding to the “good things” column. That’s all any of us can do.’ (TTT 300) 

“Us,” says Reyna. She has absolutely no idea how much her and Apollo have in common. She doesn’t realize that they share the same struggles, that they are both at the same time having the same revelations about love and responsibility, that they are both at the same time learning to trust the people whom for so long they have thought of as their charges to take care of themselves, to take care of one another, to take on their own share of the load. She doesn’t know how wrong she is in thinking his ego will protect him from all wounds. 

But she understands one thing, the most important thing: he’s someone who wants, who is determined, who tries his absolute hardest, day after day, to do better. And that is enough. It’s enough for her to understand just how human he is. It’s enough for her to feel confident in saying “us”.

Apollo misses a lot of things from his former life. He does not miss the pedestal at all. No matter what he used to say, what he desperately tried to believe, Apollo doesn’t want to be above others. All he’s ever wanted is to be with them. 

And the people around him… they see it. They understand.

This is what they are offering him, whenever they call him by his mortal human name. 

Companionship. 

Redemption. 

The things that he craves more than anything in the world, found in the most unlikely of circumstances, under the most improbable of disguises, in a shape he never would have been able to imagine. 

Apollo had spent so long playing the beautiful fool, he’d forgotten that he could be, in Reyna’s words, sweet, and even adorkable at times. That he could be charming for real, and not just for pretend. He’d spent so long acting the part of an unreliable, ineffectual blowhard, he’d forgotten that he was indeed capable of inspiring gratitude, and respect, and loyalty. That he could be the kind of person whose friendship people might actually want, and value, and even seek out.

It takes him a while to catch up, but finally he understands. When the Romans call him Lester, they are calling him by the name that makes him their friend. 

I thought about Hazel and Frank and the washing away of curses. I supposed that kind of love could come from many different types of relationships. (TTT 192)

Slowly but surely, what started out as a very protagonist driven narrative has become more and more a choral one. It is especially evident now that our narrator is literally, physically, taken out of big chunks of the story by his festering infection, and we, together with him, are left to puzzle out everything we’ve missed in the gaps, but it’s been happening for a while. 

If at first Apollo almost single handedly carried the entire plot forward, and was uniquely instrumental, each time, to securing the third act resolution, as the story progressed, more and more people’s choices and actions started having an impact in more and more significant ways. 

Some of them he saw coming, but a lot of them he didn't. 

He’d seen Jason’s resignation to his fate, just like he picks up on Frank’s grim resolve now, even though he keeps hoping he’ll be proven wrong, so much so that he doesn’t quite grasp the full implications of it until it’s too late. He never saw Crest’s sacrifice coming. He couldn’t even begin to anticipate or comprehend the choice that Harpocrates and the Sibyl would make together. He doesn’t understand Lavinia’s real intentions until they are staring him in the face. He struggles to figure out even Meg, whom up until now he was sure he could read at a glance. 

Apollo does know people. He does understand them. But people, it turns out, are still, after all, more complex than he gives them credit for.

‘Meg,’ I said. ‘Last night –’ 

‘You saw Peaches. I know.’ [...]

‘You know,’ I repeated. 

‘He’s been around for a couple of days.’ 

‘You’ve seen him?’ 

‘Just sensed him. He’s got his reasons for staying away. Doesn’t like the Romans. He’s working on a plan to help the local nature spirits.’ 

‘And … if that plan is to help them run away?’ 

In the diffused grey light of the fog bank, Meg’s glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes. ‘You think that’s what he wants? Or what the nature spirits want?’ 

I remembered the fauns’ fearful expressions at People’s Park, the dryads’ weary anger. ‘I don’t know. But Lavinia –’ 

‘Yeah. She’s with them.’ [...]

I crossed my arms. ‘Well, I’m glad we had this talk, so I could unburden myself of all the things you already knew. I was also going to say that you’re important to me and I might even love you like a sister, but –’ 

‘I already know that, too.’ (TTT 242-243)

Meg is the reason why the Romans took so easily to the name “Lester”. She’s started calling him by that name almost all the time now, and they picked it up from her in the first couple of days, while Apollo wasn’t around to contradict her. 

Unlike them, though, Meg still seems to be using it as a bit of an insult, at least when she knows Apollo can hear her. 

“It’s just Lester,” she keeps reminding everybody, clearly annoyed by their awe and awkwardness around him. He’s no big deal. Yeah, yeah, he used to be a god but he’s not anymore. And even as a god, was he really all that? Meg, she makes it very plain, doesn’t think so. He’s my servant now, she says. He and I are a package deal, she declares to anyone who’ll listen. He’s kind of useless without me.

It’s a bit much, especially considering that Apollo, at this point, isn’t giving her even a fraction of the grief he used to at the beginning. As much as his shock at realizing that she really does not want him to die is a result of his own personal hangups more than anything else, it’s not that unreasonable on his part to think Meg must be angry at him. 

Because she is. 

‘You gotta rest. Tomorrow’s the senate meeting.’ 

I brushed her red high-top off my chest. ‘You’re not asleep, either.’ 

‘Yeah, but you’ll have to speak. They’ll wanna hear your plan.’ 

‘My plan?’ 

‘You know, like an oration. Inspire them and stuff. Convince them what to do. They’ll vote on it and everything.’ 

‘One afternoon in the unicorn stables, and you’re an expert on Roman senatorial proceedings.’ 

‘Lavinia told me.’ Meg sounded positively smug about it. She lay on her bed, tossing her other high-top in the air and catching it again. How she managed this without her glasses on, I had no idea. Minus the rhinestone cat-eye frames, her face looked older, her eyes darker and more serious. I would have even called her mature, had she not come back from her day at the stables wearing a glittery green T-shirt that read VNICORNES IMPERANT! 

‘What if I don’t have a plan?’ I asked. 

I expected Meg to throw her other shoe at me. Instead she said, ‘You do.’  (TTT 100-101)

It may have come as a surprise to Apollo, but it was no revelation for us that Meg loves him. It’s been obvious at least since she dared indirectly voice her hope of having gained a big brother, and extracted from him that promise of piano lessons at some point down the line, the tentative dream of a future she’d all but given up on before she met him.

Apollo refused to let her sacrifice herself as penance for her crimes. He took her back after her betrayal without a word, or even a hint of reproach. He gave her hope and trust and faith in herself when she had none. Of course she loves him. How could she not? 

It took Apollo almost 4 books to realize this. What he doesn’t realize, still, is that this is not all. Because Meg doesn’t just love him. Somewhere between the end of the last book and this one, she started to believe in him too.

She told him on the plane already: “you’re going to beat the Triumvirate.” In her mind, it’s not a question of if anymore, only of how. “It’ll make sense once we get there,” she said, with rock solid certainty, because she may not know everything, she may not even know most things about Apollo, about the circumstances that brought him here, now, in this manner, about the workings of this whole affair, still, but at this point, after all they’ve been through together, she truly does know him. 

It’s because of this that she’s grown serious, and restless, and even surlier than usual. Because she's started to realize that at some point down the line, some point soon, too soon, even if he survives, especially if he survives, she will lose him for real, and for good. 

She sees it, now. This weird, insufferable teenage boy with a ridiculously big heart, an even bigger lack of common sense and the peculiar ability to give anyone in his vicinity second hand embarrassment, who got stuck to her against his will, and who then chose to stick by her willingly, who told her that she was good and powerful and capable of making her own choices, that she deserved more, that she deserved better… He really is him. The guy from the storybooks. The Brilliant Apollo. When all this is finished, he really will go back to the city of the gods, far above the clouds. 

As much as he loves her – and she knows, she has absolutely no doubt that he does – she will end up a footnote in his long life. 

So she clings to the name that makes him hers. Lester. But she knows he won’t choose to remain Lester for her. She knows that he shouldn’t. No matter how much he loves her, she can’t keep him all to herself. It would be wrong of her to even ask. Gods belong to everyone. And this is who Apollo is. This is what he wants. She knows, just as surely as she knows him. He wants to belong to everyone.

I gazed at the giant statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, his purple toga rippling like a matador’s cape. 

C’mon, he seemed to be telling me. You know you want to. 

The most powerful of the Olympians. It was well within his power to smite the emperors’ armies, heal my zombie wound and set everything right at Camp Jupiter (which, after all, was named in his honour). He might even notice all the heroic things I’d done, decide I’d suffered enough and free me from the punishment of my mortal form. 

Then again… he might not. Could be that he was expecting me to call on him for help. Once I did, he might make the heavens rumble with his laughter and a deep, divine Nope! 

To my surprise, I realized I did not want my godhood back that badly. I didn’t even want to live that badly. If Jupiter expected me to crawl to him for help, begging for mercy, he could stick his lightning bolt right up his cloaca maxima. (TTT 331-332)

“What price would I be willing to pay?” Apollo asked himself just last book. And now he has to answer the question. What is he willing to give up to save himself? To save his friends? 

In the little abusive cult that he calls family, as his pride and his confidence and his ambition were systematically beaten out of him, Apollo has learned to always weigh the odds, and to always, always opt for what was smart, for what was safe. He has been at his father’s mercy all his life. He knows, in the end, there’s no winning by playing his father’s game. But if he does it, if he accepts to humiliate himself and dance on his father’s strings one more time, maybe he can win this one round. 

And isn’t that the wise choice to make then? For all Apollo knows, this is the best he can do. There’s no guarantee that he can do more. That he can do better than this. The safest thing to do, in this moment, would be to call on his father and grovel. 

“He’s evil. You’re good,” he’d told Meg in what almost feels like a previous life now, at the beginning of this story, when she turned to him with a silent plea to find her a way to appease her stepfather without betraying everything that she knew, in her heart, to be right. “You must make your own choice.” 

He could state it in such simple, clear terms for her. He was light years away from being willing and ready to believe that it applied to him too. 

But now, after all the time he’s spent on earth, a regular human person among so many others who are just like him, exactly like him in all the ways that most matter, all these people who care, who get attached, who long for companionship and redemption, who want to do more, who want to do better, and who, all of them, including those who had every reason not to, have shown him more respect and compassion and understanding than his father ever did... that doesn’t seem so impossible to believe anymore. 

It’s the bridges Apollo has been building all throughout his journey, the relationships he’s formed, at first tentatively, and then more and more easily and freely, his commitment, first, to see each of the people around him, and now, finally, to the humbling labor of letting them see him in turn, everything he’s given without expectation that it would ever be returned, and that he got back tenfold, that make this choice possible for him.

Like Jason, when he stood up for his brother at the Parthenon, like Frank with his piece of wood, like Lavinia, and Don the faun, and Reyna, and Meg, and all the people who helped him along the way, who embraced him as one of them, Apollo makes the choice to not live in fear. He rejects the safe option in favor of the one that he knows, that he feels deep in his heart is right. He has no idea whether his gamble will have any hope of paying off, but he knows this is the only way to make a real difference. 

And that’s what life is for. That’s what power is for. That’s what heroism is all about. Making a difference. 

Apollo already had his answer. He’s always had it. Immortality and meaning, power and kindness, divinity and humanity, are not mutually exclusive. Not for him. In spite of everything he’s been taught, in the horrible little cult that he calls family, Apollo wants both. 

And maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to believe this is one thing that he does not need to apologize for. 

So he’s done hesitating. He’s done fishing for excuses. This is who Apollo is. He wants to love. He wants to grow attached. He wants to spend the rest of eternity meeting new people, figuring them out only to still be surprised by them anyway. And when they’re gone – because they will all be gone soon, always too soon, he wants to cry for them. He wants to remember them. What is a god of music, of poetry, of medicine, if not a god who profoundly loves humanity? This is who Apollo is. He wants to be our friend. He wants to know us, and understand us, and learn from us, and fall in love with us, over and over and over again. He wants it all. 

Then he better stop wasting time. He better try and take it. 

I unslung my bow and pulled out an arrow. I gathered the lightest, driest kindling into a small pile. It had been a long time since I’d made a fire the old mortal way – spinning an arrow in a bowstring to create friction – but I gave it a go. I fumbled half a dozen times, nearly poking my eye out. My archery student Jacob would’ve been proud. (TTT 333-334)

He recognizes all of the kids he meets on the battlefield. He calls them “my students,” remembering their efforts with fondness, their mistakes with respect. He’d almost forgotten what being a teacher actually feels like. He loves it. He always has.

He will mourn each and every one of them who doesn’t make it. He will take responsibility, as he always does, but he won’t let himself be crushed by the weight of it.

He is afraid, yes. Failure is still a very real possibility. More real than ever now. He knows. But Frank was right. The only way to win is to commit one hundred percent. And so that’s what Apollo does. 

His hands may still tremble, but his aim is true. 

From this moment onward, it’s like the floodgates have opened. His power, that before eluded him for long strings of chapters, for almost entire books, starts returning to him now more and more quickly, a miracle every few pages, small ones, big ones, and ones that even back when he was still whole, brilliant and golden and unbroken, he never would have thought to be capable of. 

Commodus fought, but his fists were like paper. I let loose a guttural roar – a song with only one note: pure rage, and only one volume: maximum. Under the onslaught of sound, Commodus crumbled to ash. My voice faltered. I stared at my empty palms. I stood and backed away, horrified. The charred outline of the emperor’s body remained on the tarmac. I could still feel the pulse of his carotid arteries under my fingers. What had I done? In my thousands of years of life, I’d never destroyed someone with my voice. (TTT 360)

This is the power of a god. The power that Apollo has been desperately trying to get back all this time. And yet, when he has it, his immediate, instinctive reaction is one of horror. 

Commodus was beyond saving. He was beyond redemption. He’d made his choice, over and over and over again. He had to be stopped. But he was still a person. And the power to turn a person into ashes with a scream IS horrifying. It’s the kind of power that can and should make good people uneasy. And for all the time Apollo has spent worrying, trying to convince everybody, and most of all himself, that he isn’t one, his thoughts and actions have betrayed him every step of the way. 

But Apollo is done hesitating. He pushes past his discomfort and moves forward. He keeps succeeding against impossible odds. He keeps surviving things that would kill on the spot any regular mortal human, let alone one who is literally dying of magical zombie poison. 

Finally not just accepting, but WELCOMING the help of his friends every step of the way, he survives long enough for his twin to make it to him in time.

I beamed at my sister. It was so good to see her disapproving I-can’t-believe-you’re-my-brother frown again. ‘I love you,’ I said, my voice hoarse with emotion. 

She blinked, clearly unsure what to do with this information. ‘You really have changed.’ 

‘I missed you!’ 

‘Y-yes, well. I’m here now. Even Dad couldn’t argue with a Sibylline invocation from Temple Hill.’ (TTT 383) 

The two of them, they had a routine. They each had their lines to say, rehearsed a thousand times. But Apollo, for the first time in who knows how long, goes off script. That’s what actually shocks her, so much so that she fumbles a bit for words. Not the intensity of his love, which, unlike him, she’s never had reason to doubt, but that he would state it out loud, in front of everybody, so plainly that it’s impossible to mistake for anything other than what it is. 

Gods aren’t supposed to feel. Not like this. At the very least, they aren’t supposed to show it.

She used to be able to anticipate his every move, but in just a couple of lines he’s upended all the rules that they’ve always tacitly agreed upon. 

In her sudden insecurity, she grasps for reassurance in the exact same way he always does. 

“Little brother,” she calls him, reminding him that it’s her job to take care of him. Ostensibly, to annoy him. In truth, to reassure herself, to reaffirm to everybody, that no matter how far away from her he seems to be now, no matter how changed, he is still hers.

She only relaxes the moment he feigns being insulted at it. Now they are back on track. Back on familiar, comfortable territory. Back to pretending they don’t care for each other nearly as much as they both do. Not that Apollo is really any good at it anymore. Not that she is either, taking his hand into hers and squeezing it tight, staying as close to him as a shadow until she has no choice but to let him go.

‘Diana didn’t want to leave camp so suddenly like that,’ Thalia continued. ‘But you know how it is. Gods can’t stick around. Once the danger to New Rome had passed, she couldn’t risk overstaying her summons. Jupiter … Dad wouldn’t approve.’ 

I shivered. How easy it was to forget that this young woman was also my sister. And Jason was my brother. At one time, I would have discounted that connection. They’re just demigods, I would have said. Not really family. (TTT 403-404) 

The truth is, Apollo was never as alone as he thought he was. 

He’s always had family, he’s always had friends he could count on. People willing to offer him the things he so desperately wanted, and was sure he didn’t deserve. He’s been loved and trusted hundreds of millions of times over. 

But they were just demigods. Just mortals. Their lives so short, so fragile, so easily lost. Their knowledge and their power so crushingly small compared to his. What weight could their love, their forgiveness, their good opinion of him have, then? Of course they love me, Apollo used to think. They feel indebted to me. They don’t know better. Of course they would forgive someone who could strike them down with a thought. 

But none of the excuses he used to make up in his head to discount these people’s generosity, their desire to give back the kindness they’d received from him, holds up to scrutiny now. 

These people, it turns out, truly are greater than Apollo gives them credit for. They don’t expect him to do everything. They just ask him to do his best. 

“I don’t blame you,” Thalia tells him, and finally, finally, Apollo is ready to hear it and believe it. He still doesn’t think he deserves it, but he knows now, he understands, that that is not his call to make. Jason made his choice, and Thalia has made hers. She won’t let the death of a brother be cause for the loss of another one. 

As he accepts her absolution, Apollo can’t help but feel ashamed. The truth is, also, that a small, dark part of him liked to believe he was special. That he was dearer to his father than most of these fragile, short lived people were. That Zeus, his king, his abuser, his dad, would not just let him die like he did all his other children. 

For a time, there is no doubt that that must have been true. For all Apollo knows in this moment, it could still be. A small, dark part of him still clings to that belief, to that hope, despite all evidence.

‘I wanted to ask: Does it hurt? Reincarnation?’ 

My eyes were too blurry to see properly. ‘I – I’ve never reincarnated, Don. When I became human, that was different, I think. But I hear reincarnation is peaceful. Beautiful.’ [...]

‘I hope … maybe I come back as a hemlock? That would be like … an action-hero plant, right?’ 

Lavinia nodded, her lips quivering. ‘Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.’ 

‘Cool … Hey, Apollo, you – you know the difference between a faun and a satyr …?’ 

He smiled a little wider, as if ready to deliver the punchline. His face froze that way. His chest stopped moving. Dryads and fauns began to cry. Lavinia kissed the faun’s hand, then pulled a piece of bubblegum from her bag and reverently slipped it into Don’s shirt pocket. 

A moment later, his body collapsed with a noise like a relieved sigh, crumbling into fresh loam. In the spot where his heart had been, a tiny sapling emerged from the soil. I immediately recognized the shape of those miniature leaves. Not a hemlock. A laurel – the tree I had created from poor Daphne, and whose leaves I had decided to make into wreaths. The laurel, the tree of victory. 

One of the dryads glanced at me. ‘Did you do that …?’ 

I shook my head. I swallowed the bitter taste from my mouth. ‘The only difference between a satyr and a faun,’ I said, ‘is what we see in them. And what they see in themselves. Plant this tree somewhere special.’ I looked up at the dryads. ‘Tend it and make it grow healthy and tall. This was Don the faun, a hero.’ (TTT 398-399) 

Apollo never lies to people about their own fate, no matter how painful, how unforgiving the truth is, no matter how little they can do to avoid it, no matter how much he wishes he could spare them. He never makes them promises he can’t keep. He doesn’t want to be that kind of god. He doesn’t want to be that kind of person. The circumstances of his birth haven’t made it easy for him, and he hasn’t always been good at it, but he really does his best to treat people with respect. 

So he does not lie to Don. He doesn’t make him promises. He just kneels at his side and offers him what little reassurance he can as the faun passes away.

“Did you do that?” the dryad asks Apollo when she sees the laurel tree. Apollo tells her the truth. He didn’t do anything. Nobody other than Don could have performed that miracle. Don the faun made himself a hero. 

“The only difference between a satyr and a faun,” Apollo says, answering Don’s last question, “is what we see in them, and what they see in themselves.” 

“You humans are more than the sum of your history,” he’d told Piper. “You can overcome the expectations of your family and your society.” And the truth is, he’d confessed, “we gods are a little in awe of you mortals.” Because mortals can see in themselves the potential to change. To grow. To be better tomorrow than they are now. To be better than everybody else believes they can be. 

Despite how small and fragile and powerless they are, Apollo believes in people’s right to make their own choices. And yet, in his entire lifetime, somehow, he had never quite managed to bring himself to believe that when given a choice, people might choose to stick by him. That they might be able to see past his failures, his missteps, his ignorance, his impotence. That they might choose not to hold those against him, love him in spite of them, and sometimes even because of them. That they might choose to believe in him anyway. That they might ask of him nothing more than to keep trying. That they might want to help him, even knowing that it could cost them everything. 

“I was a god then,” he says. “I didn't know what I was doing.” It’s a lie. It’s also the truth. 

He didn’t know that companionship, that redemption could look like this. He didn’t know how stupid, how presumptuous it really was of him, who kept offering his help to people, to think himself above receiving any in return. 

People help one another, and gods are people too. 

And Apollo sees it now. He sees it more clearly than he has allowed himself to in a long, long time. He, too, has the capacity to change. He has the capacity to be better. And he won’t have to do it alone. These people are eager to support him, if he will only let them.