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Sally had been watching the skyline for what felt like hours. The Empire State Building stood out in sharp relief, tall and cold without a hint of blue anywhere around it.
“Hey,” Paul stepped up behind her. “What are we looking for?”
Normally, Paul’s ready help with any of her burdens would have Sally relieved. Right now, for reasons she could hardly explain, she felt exhausted by it. “I’m waiting for it to turn blue.”
“It?”
“The Empire State Building.”
Paul hummed in understanding and pulled up a chair beside. They sat together in the kitchen as the sun rose, lace curtains fluttering in the breeze blowing through the open window. Sally couldn’t help wondering about the events of the past few hours. How much had Paul seen? How much had he comprehended? Would any of it make him feel like he was insane, or worse, fear for her mind?
“I’m not crazy.” The words fell heavily in the small room, loud even though she’d spoken them quietly.
“No.” Paul looked over at her. “I never thought you were.”
“Good,” Sally nodded, continuing to stare at the Empire State Building. Percy had made it to sixteen, old enough to shoulder the weight of prophecy. If she would have allowed herself to contemplate it through the years, sixteen was older than she had expected her son to ever be.
The horizon was a line of fiery pink and orange when the top of the Empire State Building radiated blue light. It was alien and wrong-looking, and Sally was thrilled. Her son was alive. Percy was alive and safe.
She laughed and danced around the kitchen. The relief felt like the weight of Mount Olympus itself had been lifted off her shoulders. Paul joined her, spinning her around in exultant circles. There was no music playing, but somehow the two of them settled into a rhythm of steps, happy and free.
Free. It had been almost twenty years since Sally had thought she would feel this sort of lightness. She giggled, a sound she had thought impossible five years ago, and looked into Paul’s eyes. A dark, earthy, brown they were so different from Poseidon’s, and yet she knew the man behind them loved her more than the sea god ever could have. Taking his hands, she interrupted the rhythm of their dance and pulled him in for a kiss.
They stayed that way for a long moment, wrapped up in each other. Sally felt light-headed from the excitement and worry of the past week, the relief of Percy being alive, and the stress of her sleepless night. “I think I should go to bed,” she murmured eventually.
Paul laughed. “I think I’ll join you. But,” he added, “tomorrow I have a lot of questions for you.”
“I can’t promise answers for all of them,” Sally warned.
“I know. Still,” Paul hesitated. “I want to be good to Percy. To you.”
Sally caught the unspoken sentiment between his words. Sitting on their bed, she started to change while she thought about the best way to answer him. Paul had accepted what she and Percy had told him about the mythical world a year earlier, but there were limits to how much a person could accept about the gods without their mind breaking. The last thing she would want was for Paul to suffer because of her.
She had also made the conscious decision not to raise her son in that world until it had been absolutely necessary. Now, after five years of watching Percy struggle to live up to prophecy, Sally didn’t know if she wanted to go back to the world of gods and monsters that had almost swept her away as a young woman.
“I know,” she said finally. “I just don’t want you to get hurt either.”
Paul nodded. “Why don’t we wait until Percy comes back and then we can all talk about it? As a - “
“Family.” Sally finished the sentence for him. “We’re a family.”
The next day, Sally opened her eyes to sunlight slanting across the ceiling and an off-key rendition of Immigrant Song emanating from the shower. She grinned to herself as she recognized Paul’s caterwauling interpretation of the vocalizations. Despite all of the stress of last night, the new day had come without the world falling apart.
Outside, the sounds of a Saturday in New York City were in full swing. Would any of them ever know how close they had come to their world disappearing? Sally shivered, before throwing back the covers and getting out of bed. Laying around thinking about it would only cause her to feel trapped. She sorted through her clothes, deciding what to wear. In the bathroom, Paul’s singing stopped and the water shut off.
“Pancakes for breakfast?” he asked, sticking his head through the open door.
Sally glanced at the clock. “It’s eleven.” She continued talking over the start of Paul’s protest. “So it would have to be brunch.”
Paul’s smile was bright and infectious. “I’ll meet you in the kitchen,” he said, closing the door behind him again.
Making pancakes after the world almost ended yesterday – who would have thought? Sally pulled a t-shirt over her head. I wonder what Percy’s up to today. The thought of Percy sent a chill down her spine. He had been so worried the last time she had seen him, torn between impossible choices. Sally couldn’t help thinking about the war documentaries she had watched and the expressions on the soldiers faces when they had to choose between the best of two awful decisions. In that moment, when she and Paul had woken up on the streets of Manhattan, her son hadn’t been the child she had raised. He had been the general of a mythical army.
“Are you okay?”
At the sound of Paul’s question, something inside of Sally let go. Tears that she had been suppressing every time Percy waved goodbye to go back to camp, or smiled at her through an Iris-message welled up in her eyes. “What did I do to him?” she whispered. “He’s a soldier now.”
Paul shook his head, softly wrapping his arms around her. “It’s not your fault,” he reassured her. “You didn’t create the monsters or the gods or anything else Percy’s dealt with over the years. Everything you did was to keep him safe.”
“And it didn’t even work,” Sally admitted, stifling a sob. “That monster hurt him anyway.”
“He’s gone now,” Paul said, voice soothing.
Sally felt a bizarre mix of laughter and tears bubbling up inside of her. The expression on Gabe’s face when she had said no to him all those years ago still made her vindictively gleeful. Letting out a breath, she managed a small chuckle.
“There you go,” Paul murmured, pressing a kiss to her hair.
“I shouldn’t laugh,” Sally admitted with a sniffle.
Paul shrugged, pulling back from her to reach for the tissue box on the nightstand. “It’s a coping mechanism.” He handed the box to Sally. “Honestly, I probably see my students laugh about death at least three times a week.”
Sally chuckled again at that, wiping her face with a tissue. The last of her tears were falling and her worry was dissipating. “I just want to make sure Percy is all right,” she said.
“Well he looked fine when we saw him. Not a scratch,” Paul deadpanned. He managed to keep a straight face until Sally started laughing when he gave in and joined her.
“Come on, you.” Sally gestured towards the bedroom door. “Let’s go make food.”
“So,” Paul said, after they had made two neat stacks of pancakes and sat down at the table. “I still have questions about the whole – “ he made a complicated gesture in the air with his fork “ – thing.”
“The war?” Sally asked.
“Exactly.”
Sally let out a breath. Now was the moment she had been dreading slightly, ever since the day she and Percy had set out to tell Paul the truth. “Honestly, I don’t know,” she confessed. Seeing the expression on her husband’s face, she raised her hand. “It’s not a brush-off, Paul. I genuinely don’t know much of what Percy’s been up to the last five years. I just know there was a prophecy about him – Poseidon told me that when I gave birth – and the war that the prophecy was about was what we got caught in yesterday.”
The last word gave Sally pause. It had only been yesterday that she had woken up to see Manhattan engulfed in mythical war with the most monsters she had ever seen in one place clashing with gods and demigods. Sixteen years of living with the weight of her son’s destiny on her shoulders had been resolved in one harrowing battle.
Paul nodded, digging into his pancakes. “I suppose we’ll wait until Percy comes home to find out the rest.”
Two Weeks Later
“Okay, level with me here,” Sally said as she sat on the living room couch watching Percy run around the apartment. “You’re never usually this neat. What’s going on?”
Percy stopped and looked at her, an old hoodie in one hand and a pair of his skateboarding shoes in the other. “Annabeth’s coming over,” he said, like that explained everything, and dashed to his room to either put the things he was holding away or shove them in a pile to be dealt with later. Probably the latter, Sally guessed.
The doorbell rang.
“I’ll get it!” Percy shouted.
Paul watched Percy head towards the front door from where he was sitting at the desk in the living room. “Is he nervous?” he asked.
Sally shook her head. It was impossible. They’d known each other for too long and been through too many quests together for Percy to be nervous around one of his best friends. And yet, with the way he was staring at the door, she did wonder if there was something else going on.
Percy leaned forward, wiping his hand discreetly on his jeans before reaching for the knob. On the other side of the door stood Annabeth, taller than Sally remembered.
“Hey Seaweed Brain,” she said with a smile.
Percy grinned back – and yes, Sally could definitely see the nervousness Paul was talking about – and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek.
“Well, that explains a lot,” Paul said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Annabeth asked, stepping into the apartment.
Sally smiled at her. “Just that Percy’s been running around like a chicken with his head cut off trying to make sure everything was ready for you.”
“Mom!” Percy protested, his face turning red. “It wasn’t like that,” he told Annabeth quickly.
Looking over at Paul, Sally said, “I think we can add ‘having his girlfriend over’ to the list of things that will make Percy clean, right after ‘threats from monsters’.”
“Just as long as you didn’t use the same method here as you did in Geryon’s stables,” Annabeth added, taking off her shoes.
“Aw, come on,” Percy protested, his face now approximately the same colour as the brick exterior of their apartment.
“Just teasing,” Sally reassured him. She waved Annabeth over to the living room. “Why don’t you tell use what you’ve been up to since last summer?”
“Um, actually Mom, do you think we could do something a little more low-key?” Percy asked. “The, uh, battle took a lot out of us.” He put an arm around Annabeth. “We... lost a lot of people we cared about.”
Sally nodded. “Of course,” she said. He'd already told her and Paul that he didn't want to talk about most of the things that had happened over the last few months, and clearly it wasn't just him that was needing to avoid thinking about it. The words Greek tragedy had taken on a new meaning once she had realized that her son was going to be living in one, and she had tried her best to avoid that fate for them. It hadn’t always worked, but there were some things she could give him that no ancient hero had had. “Do you two want to bake cookies?”
“Chocolate chip?” Annabeth asked, the haunted look that had crossed her face at Sally's mention of the summer already vanishing.
“Blue chocolate chip,” Percy confirmed, already leading her to the kitchen.
As soon as Sally had known Percy was coming back from camp she had dragged Paul to the grocery store to stock up on baking ingredients. Sugar, flour, butter, eggs, and chocolate chips had all ended up in the cart along with copious amounts of blue food dye. From the looks of it, all of that was being put to good use in the kitchen. Some of it was in a batch of cookies already in the oven, some of it was in the current batch being made, and the rest of it had migrated to the floor, the table, and everything else in the vicinity.
“Percy, I’m not sure your powers extend to food colouring,” Annabeth said, watching Percy hold his hand above the mixing bowl in great concentration.
“You still have much to learn,” Percy intoned, imitating Qui-Gon Jinn. He stared intently at the bowl for a moment before dropping his hand. “Yeah okay,” he admitted, grinning at Annabeth. “Maybe not.”
Annabeth laughed, turning back to the recipe. “Okay, where did the bowl with the dry ingredients go?”
“It’s right there,” Percy pointed. “I don’t get why we can’t just mix it all in the same bowl though.”
“Because you have to make sure everything is evenly distributed,” Annabeth pointed out, adding everything to the same bowl and starting to mix it. “Once that’s done we can start shaping it into cookies – wait, don’t eat that!”
“Why not?” Percy asked through a mouthful of cookie dough he had managed to snag.
“Annabeth’s right, it has raw eggs in it,” Sally added from where she was watching them.
Percy shrugged. “When you fight monsters on the daily, what’s a little raw egg?”
“Demigods can probably still get salmonella,” Paul added, having joined Sally.
“Do we know that though? Like, has anyone tested it?”
“You’re immune to damage on the outside, not the inside.” Annabeth pointed out, shaping more cookies.
Percy nodded. “Good point,” he said thoughtfully. “It would be pretty lame if I got all this way just for a raw egg to be what takes me out.”
“Well, I hope you stick around for a long time, Seaweed Brain,” Annabeth said, her voice softer than usual.
Percy’s hand found hers on the flour-covered table. “I’ll do my best Wise Girl.”
The timer dinged, interrupting a moment that Sally was desperately wishing she had her camera for. Turning to the oven, Annabeth took out the tray of baked cookies, putting them on top of the stove. “Careful, they’re - “
“Ow!”
“- hot,” Annabeth finished, rolling her eyes at Percy who was juggling a cookie in his hands.
“Worth it,” he declared a minute later, taking a bite. “Now this is what ambrosia tastes like.”
“Comfort food,” Annabeth agreed, biting into her own slightly cooled cookie.