Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“…Ho-ho mate, three cheers for bear! Ho-ho mate, three cheers for Pooh! Just tell me, somebody, just what did he do?”

“…Percy, do you have to be such a seaweed brain now that we’re moving into our new college on our first slash moving day?” Annabeth Chase asked her boyfriend/etc., Percy Jackson, as the two of them were moving into their new college dorm, at the Nuova Roma.

“Yes! No! Annabeth, you might be the wise girl, but you still don’t understand the inner workings of a male mind-!”

“Is there such a thing as the inner workings of a male mind-?” Annabeth rhetorically asked the closest female next to her. Sadly, as luck would have it, (and Tyche/Fortuna the goddess of fortune and luck really had a particular relation-ship with Percy and Annabeth)-

“…What are you doing here, Rachel?” Annabeth and Percy recovered first, as their favorite (in a non-sexual way) redheaded oracle just stared at them, (and with a legitimate reason, you know?).

“Why can’t I be here?” Rachel replied tartly, (clearly stalling to think for a better answer).

“Because Apollo, Greece, and Rome?” Percy promptly replied in his usual manner.

“Actually, the Divine Twins’ relationships to the entire Greece/Rome dichotomy is slightly different from the rest of the pantheon, and, anyways, since Lord Apollo has completed his trials, as you’ve heard, he took his family to their fam-ily retreat, in Hyperborea – that is where they’re originally from, after all.”

“Why?” Annabeth sceptically asked, “Besides the obvious, that is-“

“Because today is the annual wedding anniversary of Zeus and Hera,” Rachel’s companion, (whose face was rather obscured by the shadows), promptly replied, “and we’re in the city. Oh dear.”

“Why-?” Annabeth began to ask, when the sun got eclipsed – by something dark red in color – and the streets shook.

“That’s why,” Rachel replied flatly, as she pointed to the next new arrival. The city’s streets became deserted abruptly because of her, since the new arrival was… Medusa, of all beings from Percy and Annabeth’s checkered past.

“…Didn’t we kill her?” Percy asked no one in particular.

“She gets killed often enough, for a monster of her power,” Rachel’s companion replied crossly, “but she always returns on this day, and for her own reasons, she always goes to us on this day because of her own reasoning.”

“The gods-“ Percy couldn’t help but to say.

“Precisely,” came the reply regardless. “Zeus surrounds Olympus with a lightning bolt fence on this day so that no one disturbs his partying – or so the official line goes. This is why Medusa, the other Gorgons, and the rest of the monsters can come and go hither and yon on this day-“

The others just stared. “Hither and yon?” Rachel began, when someone else – namely, Frank Zhang, whom Percy and Annabeth had not run into yet, shouted really loudly:

“Hey, Nicola! Where are you and your partner? His worst nightmare is here-?”

“So are we,” the girl in question – ok, she was closer to Percy and Annabeth in age, so ‘girl’ may not have been the right word to use – emerged on the scene.

Percy and Annabeth frowned. There was something not-quite-familiar in the newcomer’s body stance-

“She’s a legacy of Apollo – a rebel legacy of Apollo,” Rachel sighed, give that Nicola was dressed in a style more reminiscent of Nico than of Will, for example. “Her friend,” she indicated the young man, who was decidedly built like a brawler, “is also a legacy, I just don’t remember of whom-“

“Rachel,” Annabeth muttered, “Medusa-?”

“What about her?” Rachel blinked.

Annabeth’s question actually was more actual than how it came across, since this time ‘Auntie Em’ decidedly upgraded her look: this time, she was wearing a tight, and long, dark red dress that contrasted nicely with her marble-white skin and bright green snake hair. A pair of draconic wings, sprouting from the shoulders – her own, and not some strap-ons – completed the ensemble.

“Ah! It’s so nice to see that you New Romans are ready for me,” ‘Auntie Em’ spoke in a voice that echoed from the deserted city streets, (and Percy with Annabeth could not blame the other people – this version of Medusa looked more formidable than the one they’d encountered on their very first quest; more maneuverable too.)

“Dread Queen Medusa,” meanwhile, the New Romans were talking to the monster in question, quite politely, even if they weren’t looking her in the eye, (well duh), and were setting-up/unwrapping something… solid. “Are you here in peace or in war? Because if it is the latter, we got your products right there-“

“Here!” Hazel Levesque squeaked bravely, as she thrust a bag of something at Medusa.

Immediately, the female monster whirled around, but yet another New Roman – this one dressed in a uniform of a lictor – already grabbed the daughter of Hades/Pluto and dragged her out of the line of fire, figuratively speaking.

“You have gotten better,” Medusa sounded more grudging than anything else did, as she went through the bag of… female hygiene products, apparently. “Also, thank you, but I’m not leaving today so easily; Lord Apollo- what’s that?”

“Dread queen,” the male newcomer continued, quietly but firmly, “regardless of what you’ve said on previous visits, regardless of whoever you were, these days, you’re a death goddess, are you not? This is why you can come back from Tartarus, if nothing else.”

“And if I am?” Medusa shifted back to the speakers; Percy, Annabeth, and their companions briefly caught the reflection of two huge eyes, yellow, framed by black, and oh so cold… and then the reflection vanished. “What are you going to-“

“So, we got something of an analogue, a mirror, if you will, to see if we can’t beat you once and for all,” came the firm reply.

“If you think that some fraud, some loaf of bread, or a block of sugar, can scare me-“ Medusa fell silent, and for a good reason, as it became clear, that what was under wraps wasn’t anything else, but a human skull, and there was something strange about its’ eye sockets as well.

“Right,” Medusa inhaled, as her face began to shift: the formerly pristine profile now developed folds and ridges, and fangs jutted out of her mouth. “I can win-“

“Not if I put my two obols in,” spoke… Thanatos of all beings in the universe. “I told you, Medusa that this isn’t over!” In addition, not unlike Medusa, the Greek daemon of death had changed his look: this time he wore a dark black robe that matched his hair, (including a beard), and the feathers of his wings. “With me throwing my power behind this skull, you will be ended once and for all-“

“I will not go quietly,” both Medusa and Thanatos seemed to grow, to tower over the city. “Being a goddess – a barely recognized - goddess of death is all that powers me these days; the New Romans are the primary people to understand this-“

“I meant it,” Thanatos’ voice seemed to grow louder, even as Medusa’s became more subdued. “My offer for you to be my wife and the mistress of my hearth is genuine-“

“I already had something similar with Poseidon,” Medusa snapped. “This is how I ended up in this situation to begin with-“

(Percy, who knew the story of Poseidon and Medusa by now, winced).

“I promise you that our story will be different,” Thanatos reached out to Medusa with his wings, and she… leaned into him, sort of.

“I accept,” she muttered in an odd tone of voice.

“Great,” and Thanatos actually sounded happy here. “Now let’s sort things out with Baba Yaga as well!”

“Wait, what?” Medusa seemed to yowl in a non-evil way, but she and Thanatos, (and the skull, which Thanatos had been holding all the time), already faded away.

“Hooray!” and suddenly the city streets were filled with many very happy people.

“…What has happened?” Annabeth and Percy turned to look at Rachel and her companion, but they were already gone. Instead, there were Frank, Hazel, and the Roman in the lictor suit, who looked now somewhat familiar.

“It’s a long story,” Frank replied instead. “How about we settle you into your dorm and tell you all about it?”

TBC?

Chapter Text

“So, now, what was that all about?” Percy rhetorically asked as he, Annabeth, Frank and Hazel were sitting on a veranda at a pizzeria in the Nuova Roma. “Did this sort of thing happen often?”

“Medusa’s visit to the city? Regular enough, even before there was a Nuova Roma,” Frank replied, matching Percy’s voice.

Percy choked. “The Tartarus?” he finally found his voice.

“Long story, let’s try a brief version,” Hazel said briefly. “After lord Neptune took Medusa, and lady Minerva brought her down, Medusa became, well, a gorgon, and some sort of a death quasi-deity – hence her eye power; the other gorgons don’t have it.”

“I know, I remember fighting them when I first arrived to Camp Jupiter and met you two,” Percy nodded, musingly. “Good times, eh?”

“Yes,” Frank nodded, “no argument, those were some great adventures, in par-ticular whenever we were trying not to die-“

“When was that?”

“I’m trying to wear my rose-tinted glasses-“

“We’re getting sidetracked,” Hazel sighed. “The point Frank was trying to make was that there were far fewer demigods back then, and so the gods had to keep their own eye on the monsters as well. It worked well enough, until Lord Jupiter decided to celebrate his and Lady Juno’s anniversary of marriage on an annual basis. To keep the celebration private – well, private in his perception – he surrounded mount Olympus with a fence of lightning bolts and stopped paying attention to the mortal world. That was when Medusa and her sisters would emerge from Tartarus, fly across the mortal world to Olympus and back, raising statues and cenotaphs all over it. But since Olympus would be fenced-off, they would retreat back to Tartarus and sleep for another year or so.”

“And since gods don’t care too much about mortals, as a rule, and since there were far fewer demigods to do the fighting, this could’ve gone on for ages,” Annabeth muttered.

“True, but Medusa would fly to Olympus because she wanted to have one last face-off with your mum, so something had to be done,” Hazel sounded apologetic here, in fact. “So, enter the first of the great demigods – the original Perseus. Lady Minerva and Lord Mercury trained him personally, as there were no official demigod camps back then, and in exchange for dealing with Medusa – if he survived, of course – he made the gods swear on the river Styx that they would never interfere in his life again. Hey, it was a Bronze Age version of a Grand Quest!” she finished defensively.

“You could ask for things like that back then?” Percy blinked. “And it would work?”

“Meh, Lord Bacchus wasn’t on Olympus back then, he and Lord Jupiter had their own problems, he was in India anyhow, so the Stygian oath didn’t affect him,” Frank admitted, “so he and your namesake warred for a long while, until the latter died and Lord Jupiter made him into a constellation.”

Percy blinked.

“The point is that Medusa didn’t bother the mortal world, at least on such a large scale, until Mr. Harryhausen made his classic, ‘The Clash of the Titans’. It annoyed her something fierce, but since he was mortal, and protected by Lord Phoebus, she couldn’t go after him, so she began to harass us, or tried to,” Hazel continued. “See, there aren’t too many sources of female hygiene products down in the Underworld-“

“You don’t say,” Annabeth, who, (with Percy), had a direct experience with the Underworld, commented tartly.

“Yes, well, one of Dakota’s mortal ancestors began to give her our female hygiene products as bribes to have her leave us alone, and it worked – for a while. More recently, there was a remake of ‘The Clash’, made by the mortals, and it made Medusa really angry, and she began to harass us for real, until now, that is…”

“Got it,” Percy nodded sagely, “only two questions are left: why you? And what have we been drinking all this time?”

“Well, the first answer is – see those mountains?”

“Yeah? Aren’t they the Rockies?”

“Yes. This is where Medusa exit from Tartarus is located, apparently,” Frank replied in a conversational tone. “And as for the second answer, it’s something else that the common mortals have invented – a mix of black tea and espresso coffee. Like it?”

“Totally,” Percy nodded, and effortlessly slung Annabeth over his shoulders. “Now excuse me, me and Annabeth need to do something, see you soon-“ and he left with Annabeth, very, very fast.

“…And the ‘dirty tea’ seems to have acted as some sort of an aphrodisiac upon them,” Frank told Hazel. “Of course it has.”

“Aw, don’t grumble, they’re in college now,” Hazel patted Frank on the shoul-der, “just as we are,” she added in a more subdued manner. “It’s not like the universe is going to block them now-“

Upstairs…

“Hello, hello, hello,” someone, who might, or might not, have been Zeus/Jupiter, told Percy and Annabeth, (who were feeling quite blocked right now). “So, you’re Percy and Annabeth, right? I’m so pleased to meet you-!”

TBC (eventually)…