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She goes back to Tahlequah for the first time since she and her dad spent a sweltering weekend fixing up Grandpa Tom’s old house. She supposes it’s a good thing they didn’t sell it.
Piper lets her bag fall on the floor of the guest room that is now hers, and sits heavily on the bed. She’s sixteen and far too young to feel this old.
She doesn’t leave her bed much in that first month.
oO0Oo
She wants to stay in her self-imposed isolation forever but her father needs her. He doesn’t know anything about her world — about demigods, about the war, about the Triumvirate that destroyed everything she held dear — but he knows she’s mourning for a friend. Even still, he’s fragile in the wake of the events of the past few months, his composure cracking at the seams, and though he tries not to let it show, Piper can see the hopelessness and despair in his dark eyes.
So she drags herself out of her room, begins unpacking their belongings and figuring out how to use Grandpa Tom’s old 1930s-era gas stove, and tries to piece the shattered remnants of her life back together. She doesn’t enroll in the local high school for the last few weeks of the year — it’d be useless, anyways. Arriving right at the end of the semester would just complicate things further, and the last thing Piper needs is more complications in her life. There’s a library a twenty-minute bike ride from her house, so she checks out calculus workbooks and science textbooks and relearns the grade eleven curriculum on her own.
To her surprise, her father joins her at the kitchen table when she spreads her books over the surface and tries to absorb the information through sheer power of will. He sits with her often, helping her with the concepts she doesn’t understand, and it’s almost like old times, when they read Greek myths together in preparation for his role in King of Sparta.
One evening he heats milk on the stove and makes them each a cup of hot chocolate and even though it’s far too warm out for the drink, Piper curls her hands around the mug gratefully. The heat from the ceramic bleeds into her hands and soothes some of the numb chill she’s been feeling for far too long.
“Hey Pipes? I think we need to talk.”
Piper’s head immediately snaps up from her calculus homework. The words ‘we need to talk’ are never a good thing — especially when it comes from her father. She has too many memories of those words being accompanied by Jane’s awful smirk and her father shipping her off to another school, like she was a problem that would go away if he didn’t have to look at it.
“When I was a little older than you,” her dad says, pulling a chair from the table and twisting it around so that he sits with his arms leaning on the wooden backrest. “I lost friends as well.”
He tells her of the young men and women he’d known, the ones who’d left. Some had taken their own lives in grief and hopelessness, others had had their lives cut short at the hands of others. Some left Tahlequah and never came back, vanishing without a word.
He’d tried to be one of them, he explains. He’d tried to run away from everything, from who he was. But it would seem fate played games with them all.
Piper has to clench down on the rage that surged at those words. She never wants to think about the Fates and their stupid tapestries ever again. She hardly notices she’s squeezing her pen tightly until there’s the low groan of plastic bending and she looks down to see the barrel warping under the strain. She quickly lets go before she breaks it and sprays ink everywhere.
“So I understand what you’re going through, Pipes,” he says. “And I know I haven’t always been there for you in the past, but I’m going to be here for you now. No more Any Three Questions, I promise. We won’t need them.”
Her drink steams beside her elbow and her calculus problems are forgotten as Piper leans across the table and hugs her father, breathing in the smell of his cologne and melted chocolate. And though he can’t understand it, not really, not without breaking his mind worse than it had been the first time, he hugs her back and Piper remembers that she’s not alone.
oO0Oo
She returns to Camp Half-Blood for summer break and it terrifies her to see how little things have changed. The demigods just fought their third war in two years but the camp is the same as ever. There’s a sort of beauty in their resilience. A sort of sadness, too.
In the Aphrodite cabin, her siblings watch her when they think she isn’t listening. She hears what they say about her and Jason, about what they think happened during the Giant War, about the quest through the Labyrinth with Apollo.
It’s almost enough to make her laugh when she hears them speculating that she and Apollo killed Medea by putting on a fashion show of dazzling beauty and fantastic music that made the evil sorceress keel over from their awesomeness. Almost.
Leaving Shel behind for the summer had been a hard decision to make, but Piper knows it’s for the best. She needed to check up on the camp, to make sure their enemies hadn’t overrun their defenses and killed more people she loved while she wasn’t there to protect them.
Will Solace calls it an ‘obsessive compulsive urge created as a response to the trauma she’s endured,' but what does he know? She doesn’t pay much attention to the Camp-wide mandated mental health clinics, anyways.
He diagnoses her with depression and post traumatic stress disorder (“No surprise there,” she’d said with a dry laugh, and he’d smiled weakly in return) and gives her special medication infused with nectar, and mostly they taste like her happiest memories.
Mostly.
The ones that remind her of Jason taste like ash.
oO0Oo
On the first anniversary of the Giant War, the remaining Seven get tattoos. Frank and Hazel drive up from California, Leo flies in on Festus, and Percy, Annabeth, and she meet them at the crest of Half-Blood Hill.
They don’t speak much as they walk back into Camp and head for the Hephaestus cabin. For all of them, words seem too heavy on this day. But they’d made a pact months ago, before… before everything, and they would see it through.
Nyssa is waiting for them at the forges and directs them to sit in a curtained-off antechamber. There’s a table ladened with tools and ink, as well as a large reclining chair, like one might see in a dentist’s office, and a smaller stool that she immediately sits on.
“Who wants to go first?” She asks, not beating around the bush.
The Seven exchange looks before Frank steps up. “I will,” he says, and Nyssa gestures for him to sit on the chair.
“Same place that we discussed over the IM?”
When they nod in confirmation, she pulls on latex gloves and picks up the tattoo gun. Frank closes his eyes and braces for the pain, the only sign of his discomfort the tension coiled in his muscle and the slightest tick in his jaw, like he’s biting down on a grimace.
By the end of the day, they’re all sporting bandages around their upper right arms, where a small band of text curls around their biceps. Ambrosia would heal the tattoo too quickly, so they’re left with mortal Advil and cold packs, but none of them complain.
For all they’d been through, they hadn’t wanted to forget their journey on the Argo II. All the demigods had been affected by the Giant War in some way, but there was something that set them apart from the rest, something the others could never understand. They could never understand the sleepless nights on watch while they sailed across the Mediterranean or the heart-stopping terror of the Ancient Lands. They could never understand the fear and adrenaline that thrummed through their blood constantly for a month and a half, nor the gut-wrenching despair of watching Percy and Annabeth fall into Tartarus and the overwhelming relief when they saw their two friends stumble out of the House of Hades and into the sunlight for the first time in weeks.
Even if they’d never known each other before the quest, they were now connected irrevocably in a way that couldn’t quite be described. And since they were now scattered to the winds and the gods had gone silent, they’d decided to do something to commemorate the first anniversary of their battle at the Parthenon.
Seven half-bloods shall answer the call and the date of the final battle was written in ink across their arms, the S plunging sharply like a lightning bolt.
They try to ignore the heavy weight of Jason’s absence.
oO0Oo
When she returns to Tahlequah for the school year, it seems like such a strange thing after everything she’s been through. She can’t remember the last time she’d worried over essays and exams, when it was late nights of studying that kept her awake and not nightmares. Even the Wilderness School, which had been only two years ago, seems like a different lifetime.
Then there’s also the problem of money. Since the Triumvirate destroyed her father’s career and took everything with it, they owe millions of dollars in taxes neither of them had known about until he was audited. Apollo had helped, getting rid of the debt with a snap of his fingers — a thank you, he’d said, for everything she’d done in the past year — but it’s still a big adjustment from the Malibu life they’d been living.
Her father gets a job as a clerk at an accounting firm a few miles from Tahlequah and she does part-time shifts at McDonalds after school. She also runs errands for her neighbours and helps them out for pocket change, the jobs varying from babysitting someone’s toddler while they go to medical appointments to picking up groceries for the senior residents who aren’t able to make it to the store easily.
Her neighbour, Anne Crowe, is her favourite to work for. “Call me Grandma Anne,” the old woman had said the moment she met Piper, and pinched her cheek with a smile. Seventy-three years old, the woman has leathery skin and calluses on her hands from working in her garden, and always has some fresh treat baked in time for Piper to drop by with her shopping.
(Piper tries to decline the constant stream of pies and casseroles and cookies that the woman shoves into her hands, but Grandma Anne just laughs
“I knew your Grandpa Tom,” she says with a sparkle in her black eyes. “He was a good friend and it’s a real shame he’s gone, but we look out for each other ‘round here, got it?”
Piper’s eyes sting with something suspiciously like tears, but she swallows the lump in her throat and thanks the old woman with a wordless hug. Grandma Anne seems to understand the unspoken message anyways.)
Grandma Anne’s joints are stiff with arthritis and her hands aren’t as steady as they once were, so Piper helps her out around the house and in the yard, and over time she begins to learn more about this old woman and her fascinating life.
So when it all becomes too much and too confusing, it’s Grandma Anne that she turns to first. Grandma Anne, who’d survived the residential school system with her pride and spirit intact. Grandma Anne, who’d spent years reclaiming her culture and her heritage, piecing together the fragments she remembered from before she was taken away into a larger picture of who she was. Grandma Anne, who might be able to understand the cultural crossroads Piper finds herself at, the confusion and feelings of not belonging churning inside her.
Grandma Anne answers the door a few heartbeats after Piper knocks, wearing a fluffy pink housecoat and slippers, but even though she’d clearly just woken up, she doesn’t hesitate to open the door wider when Piper’s eyes begin to mist over.
And she doesn’t hesitate to drag Piper into a bone-crushing hug and hold her in the doorway for as long as it takes for the tears to subside.
oO0Oo
She thinks of the last time Jason had held her, how his lips had hesitantly kissed her forehead. The embrace had been a goodbye, an apology and a plea for forgiveness, and when he pulled away, she’d seen in his eyes that there was no explanation necessary. He accepted it, even if it hurt, and knew that she still loved him, even if it wasn’t in the same way he loved her.
She wishes she’d held him closer for longer, breathed in the smell of ozone and rainstorms that was so uniquely him, memorized the strength of his arms around her and his firm chest beneath her cheek. They were still so young, only sixteen, and break ups were just part of life, but she knew it wasn’t something either of them wanted. She’d loved him, she truly had, but the timing hadn’t been right.
She wonders if she might have loved Jason again if they’d met during a different time, in a different life. Perhaps they were meant to be together, but not at this time, not as they were now. Maybe things would have been different if they’d met again as adults, when they had their lives sorted out and their dreams no longer took the faces of their dead friends. Maybe then they could have fallen back in love and been happy together.
She’ll never get the chance to know.
oO0Oo
Ultimately, Piper’s relationship with Shel doesn’t work out. She never really expected it to last forever, even if she’d wanted it to. They’re both still just teenagers and Piper’s only beginning to process the trauma of the Giant War and watching some of her closest friends die. Shel tries, but without knowing who — what — Piper is, she could never truly understand what haunts her every waking moment and seeps into her nightmares more often than not.
So she dates around — goes out with a few girls, a few guys, never anything serious, nothing that lasts forever — until she’s twenty and Grandma Anne’s grandson returns from university in Canada.
She first meets him when she rings the doorbell to drop off Grandma Anne’s groceries and a young man about her age answers the door.
Her first thought? Seriously, mother?!
Because this could only be Aphrodite’s influence, finally fed up with her daughter not settling down after so many years. He’s handsome, tall and lean with bronze skin that almost glows in the sunlight and short, tousled black hair that looks like he’d just run a hand through it in the sort of casually-messing-up-my-hair-so-I-look-sexy kind of way.
“Can I help you?” He asks, voice a rich baritone.
“Uh—” Her throat is dry. Why is her throat so dry? Piper licks her lips, tries to remember what she was going to say. “Groceries!” She says and thrusts the plastic bag into his arms. His nose scrunches in confusion, crinkling the smattering of freckles across his cheeks, and Piper lets out a tiny squeak that has her flushing from her ears down to her toes. Before he can react, she retreats back to the truck and drives off.
As the beat-up pickup truck rumbles along the road, she feels like banging her head against the steering wheel. She can almost hear her mother’s soft laughter echoing in her ears.
Oh, just you wait, my dear. The fun is just beginning.
oO0Oo
To her dismay, Piper keeps running into the man. It’s not that Tahlequah is small, but rather that whenever she helps out Grandma Anne, it’s inevitable he’s there.
Despite her better judgement, she finds herself learning more about him with every visit. His name is Daniel Crowe, he’s a few years older than she is, he’s the youngest of three children, and his favourite book is unironically Homer’s Iliad, which everyone else in his high school class had hated but he had found fascinating.
“And you're grocery girl, right?” He asks, dark eyes twinkling like the stars in a thousand galaxies.
Piper wishes she could melt into the earth as she helps him clear the garden beds of last season’s dead plants in preparation for Grandma Anne to resow in a few weeks. She yanks particularly hard on a dry stalk and it comes flying out of the ground in a shower of soil. “It’s Piper. Not ‘grocery girl.’”
“Can you blame me?” He grins. “You left before you told me and my grandma wouldn’t say anything.”
Suddenly, Piper has a sinking feeling that she’s being set up on both sides. This is a trap, constructed by an overbearing goddess of love and a meddling old lady.
She resolves not to fall into it.
And fails. Miserably.
oO0Oo
She’s made a commitment to Grandma Anne to help her with tasks her arthritis and failing vision made difficult, and even with Daniel there, Grandma Anne seems to have no intention of letting her go back on her promise.
So that’s how Piper finds herself spending four months working beside Daniel nearly every day. From cleaning out the attic to helping Grandma Anne with canning and smoking the summer’s bounty, there’s no escape from him. But she finds that she doesn’t mind that much.
Over time, she comes to learn even more about him. His parents were dead — an unfortunate accident when he was six where their vehicle skidded on black ice and collided with a truck — and his grandmother raised him and his two older sisters. He worked his ass off in high school to achieve the grades necessary for scholarships and then worked even harder at his part-time job to pay the rest of the way to university. In the fall, he’ll be going into his final year of law school, but he eventually wants to become a judge some day.
He smiles at her when he says that, and she can’t help but smile back.
“What about you?” He asks one day as they’re working on fixing up Piper’s truck. “Are you a mechanic?”
“Me? No,” Piper laughs at the streak of grease he leaves on his forehead when he pushes his hair from his eyes. “But my friend is, and he taught me some. I’m actually working on my GED right now.”
Daniel raises an eyebrow. “I never would have guessed,” he said. “You seem smart enough to run circles around my classmates.”
Piper’s smile wavers a bit. “Yeah, well… I went through some pretty traumatic experiences in my late teens and school was just too much to keep up with at the time. So I dropped out and decided to focus on my mental health until I was in a better position. It’s taken a few years, but… I think I’d like to be a teacher, maybe. I tutor a few kids in town and I really enjoy it, but I’m dyslexic and have ADHD so traditional learning isn't the easiest.”
“Hey.” She looks up to see him wipe his hands on a stained cloth and hesitantly reach out to grasp her shoulders. “I think you’d be a great teacher. And a diploma is just a piece of paper; it doesn’t mean a thing about how smart you are.”
She tips her head back and laughs. “You sound like my dad.”
He grins. “He sounds like a wise man.”
“Clearly you’ve never met him.”
They fall silent as they clean up the tools and pack them away. Hopefully, they’ve fixed the rattling problem in her engine.
Daniel throws an oily towel over his shoulder. The worn band shirt he’s wearing is form-fitting and looks well loved, despite the grease that stains it. Before she can talk herself out of it, Piper blurts, “Do you want to get coffee sometime?”
He blinks, then his smile widens. “I’d like that.”
oO0Oo
Four years later, Daniel proposes with a beautiful ring inlaid with small pearls on either side of the diamond, and all the breath is knocked from her lungs.
He kneels on the ground, ring box in hand, waiting for her answer. His smiling, hopeful expression is unwavering, even as Piper flails mentally for words.
“I have to tell you something,” she manages, and something like unease flickers in his eyes. “Nothing bad—” she hurries to assure him, “But I think it’s something you might want to know before you…” a lump forms in her throat. “Before you promise to love me forever.”
“Too late,” he whispers, but allows her to guide him up from their kitchen floor to the living room. Their date-night dinner remains cooling on their plates, but this is more important.
They sit down on the couch and Piper takes his hands in hers. Drawing in a deep breath and trying to steady her nerves, she prays, for the first time in a long time, to her mother.
“I need you to listen,” she says, gripping his hands tightly. “And I need you to promise not to interrupt me until I’m done.”
“Piper—”
“Promise me.”
His nose scrunches in that adorable way of his, shifting the constellations of his freckles into different patterns. “Alright. I promise.”
Once she starts speaking, there’s no turning back. Her heart pounding wildly in her chest, Piper exhales slowly and begins.
“When I was sixteen, I was on a field trip with two of my friends to the Grand Canyon…”
oO0Oo
It takes the better part of an hour to explain everything to him, and when she finally finishes her tale, ending with Jason’s death and the last quest she was ever a part of, Daniel’s silent for a good long while.
“Say something,” she begs. “Please.”
Instead, he moves and slips the ring on her finger.
“I love you, Piper Mclean,” he says, the words tasting like vows in the air, “And nothing — nothing — will ever change that. Not your past, not your parentage, and not this.”
She lets out a shuddering breath and flings herself into his arms. He holds her tightly, his tears dripping onto her shirt, but that’s okay. She’s doing the same to him.
“How are you not freaking out?” She asks. “I was a mess for days.”
“Oh, I’m freaking out,” Daniel assures her. “But a lot of things make sense now. The knife you try to hide from me, the way you disappear without a word only to come back covered in sand—”
“Not sand,” Piper interrupts. “Monster dust.”
“—Monster dust,” he concedes, “and the nightmares you have.”
She buries her face further into his shoulder and tries not to think of the memories that continue to haunt her, even years later.
“That does leave one big question, though,” he says as he draws away. Her brows furrow only momentarily before he says, “How on earth are we supposed to get a wedding invitation to your mother? Do the gods have email?”
And despite the tears still stinging in her eyes and the way her heart is so full she feels like it might spill over, Piper laughs.
oO0Oo
They marry the following spring in a meadow decked out with benches and a wedding arch. She suspects her mother might have a hand in the fact that the entire field is covered with wildflowers of iridescent colours that are far too beautiful to be natural.
Annabeth’s her maid of honour, and Hazel, Reyna, Thalia, and Daniel’s sisters are her bridesmaids. The best man is one of Daniel’s university friends, but Percy, Frank, and Leo are among the groomsmen, and they grin at her as she walks down the aisle. The front row of seats facing the west is empty, the spaces reserved for her Grandpa Tom, Jason, and Daniel’s parents and grandfather. West, for the ghost country, so the spirits of their beloved dead could be with them for this day.
Her mother sits at the back, nearly swallowed up by the crowd, but Piper know’s she’s there all the same, and it means more to her than she could ever express. She might have a rocky relationship with the gods, but the fact that Aphrodite cared enough to attend her wedding makes Piper wonder if her mother really does love her.
Apparently Hera had offered to officiate the ceremony, on account of Piper being one of her treasured Seven, but Piper had shot that idea down quickly. The goddess had no place in her life, not anymore. Not after what she did.
Instead, Grandma Anne stands at the front of the assembly, hunched over her cane but eyes bright as she watches Piper walk down the aisle lined with anemone blossoms. The old woman had been honoured when Piper and Daniel had asked her to preside over their wedding and promised to make it beautiful.
The train of her dress sighs quietly as it passes over the wildflowers and Piper approaches Daniel, her arm linked through her father’s. Daniel is dressed in a smart black suit with a deep blue tie that looks nearly as dark as his eyes. His hair is slicked back, a far cry from its usual unruliness, and his entire expression is slack-jawed with wonder and awe.
Her dad passes her off with a kiss pressed to her brow and takes a seat with the others, and then it’s just them. Just them and the beckoning of eternity.
Piper doesn’t remember much of the ceremony itself, entirely transfixed by the sparkling reverence in Daniel’s eyes, but soon they’re repeating their vows and he’s dragging her in for a long, slow kiss as everyone around them cheers and claps.
And, just for a moment, Piper could almost swear she smells thunderstorms and ozone and feels the ghost of a long-gone smile on her back, and she grins as she pulls Daniel in for another kiss.
oO0Oo
“Do you still love him?” Daniel asks, no judgement in his tone. Just quiet, honest curiosity. He comes to stand behind her, wrapping his arms around her waist and letting his hands settle on her stomach. It’s still flat, too early yet for her to be showing, but the blurry black and white picture in her hands is the first tangible proof of the life they’d made together.
Piper doesn’t even have to think about it. “I think a part of me will always love him. He was my first love and my best friend, even if circumstances strained our relationship, and he died far too young. But it’s been so long and I’ve moved on from who I was at sixteen. I love you, Daniel, and nothing will ever change or surpass that.”
He presses a kiss to her neck. “I know. I just asked because…”
And she knows what he means. Her eyes drift to the calendar tacked beside the fridge, and a lump forms in her throat. It’s July 1st. She hadn’t even realized it when she’d scheduled her ultrasound.
For all his love and acceptance, there’s still parts of her life Daniel will never be able to understand. With his understanding of the worlds she straddles, he’s able to see through the Mist more clearly than he could when they first met, but most of her life is still shrouded from him. He’ll never truly understand the jolt of fear she gets whenever they go into a large open space, the way she instinctively scans the terrain for monsters and defensible positions. He’ll never have the same trepidation opening the door, never knowing if it’s the mailman or a monster on the other side. He’ll never understand the pain of being a child soldier and all the trauma that lingers long after she’s grown.
But he’s always there for her and that’s enough. Still, she wonders at the life their child will have. Will they take more after her or Daniel? Will she have to send them to Camp Half-Blood for training and survival, or will the only monsters they’ll ever have to fear be the ones under their bed?
She swallows down the lump in her throat and leans back into his embrace. “I love you,” she says.
He smiles against her neck. “I was thinking about names,” he says. “I know it’s too early to tell the gender but…”
She frowns. “What did you have in mind?”
“Well…”
oO0Oo
“Hey, Beauty Queen!” Leo’s head pops into the room, his eyes squeezed dramatically shut. “You decent?”
Piper smiles despite the exhaustion dragging at her eyelids and adjusts the baby on her chest. She’s covered by a sheet and after fourteen hours of labour, decency in front of the man who’s pretty much her brother is the furthest thing from her mind. “Come on in, guys. I want you to meet someone.”
Leo and Calypso enter, their four-year-old twins, Esperanza and Valentina, clinging to their hands.
“I want you to meet your nephew,” Piper says. “And your godson, Leo, if you’ll accept.”
She’s rarely, if ever, seen Leo cry, but to her surprise, he begins to tear up as he looks at the dark-haired baby curled on her chest. She already knows that her son is going to take after Daniel more than her. He has Daniel’s sharp nose and unfairly-long and beautiful lashes. But his eyes… They’re already a deep hazel, almost unnatural in colour, and she knows that they came from her own ever-changing eyes, from his divine grandmother, the godly inheritance flowing through his veins just as it does her own.
But right now, curled on her chest in a yellow and orange onesie, he looks so fragile, so unlike the hero he has the potential to be. Holding him against her, feeling his heart beating in tandem with hers, she can’t understand why the gods would ever give up something like this.
“Of course,” Leo says, voice breaking. “I’m honoured, hermana. What did you two decide to call him?”
Daniel comes over, eyes still red from crying and hands shaking slightly, but he’s smiling wider than she thinks he ever has before, and leans over to press a kiss to Piper’s sweaty forehead.
“Jason,” she says, smiling down at the sleeping baby. “We’ve decided to name him Jason.”