Chapter Text
I wanna call you on the telephone
I made a thousand people love me
Now I'm all alone
And my resolve is sinking like a stone
What would I even say
I guess it's something that just never goes away
A crowd of thousands came to see me
And you couldn't reply
—Apollo’s third album, Ghosts and Phantoms
Andy had asked about his mother exactly once when he was younger.
For a long time, he didn’t really think there was anything odd about how he was raised. Most kids had two parents, and he had his dad and Jeff. When people would ask for his mom, he would tell them he didn’t have one. He had dad and Jeff. He cringed thinking about that now, realizing what he had implied about his dad and Jeff's relationship with that, but the point stood. He had two loving adults looking after him.
He didn’t need a mom.
But once he hit middle school, something changed. He started correcting people who assumed Jeff was his step-dad, or that he was adopted by a same-sex couple. His dad and Jeff weren’t together, he would tell people. And his dad was his biological father, no adoption. Once he started articulating that, people really wanted to know about his mother. They pushed more than they should’ve, and in hindsight, it really was none of there business. But Andy gave into the temptation to ask his dad.
“You don’t have a mother,” his dad had told him. At the time, Andy had rolled his eyes, thinking his dad was being deliberately obtuse. Sure his mom wasn't around, but he knew he had to have had one at some point.
“Someone had to have birthed me,” Andy says. His dad winces at that, though Andy doesn’t understand why and won't until years later.
“Listen, Andy,” Percy starts. “Your mother wasn’t a good person. It's complicated. The things she would do… scared me.”
Andy remembers feeling shocked. His dad had always seemed so unflappable. For his mom to be scare him? She must’ve done some truly horrible things, sixth-grade him thought.
“Were you scared about what she would do to me?” Andy asks, voice a low whisper.
His dad looks at him really hard, before he lowers his head. “No I wasn’t.” He tells Andy. Then, like he's admitting a crime, “I was scared about what she would do to me.”
The statement jars Andy. If his dad had told him he was scared for Andy, he would’ve pushed for more details, but the idea of this mystery woman hurting his dad was too much to handle. No one could hurt his dad, not on his watch. Andy decided then and there that he didn’t need to know anything about his mother.
“I know it’s selfish,” Percy continues, “I think about it sometimes—how cruel I was to pull you away from your other parent—”
“No, no,” Andy interrupts. “You and Jeff are all I need, dad,” Andy tells him. “A third person would just get in the way.”
His dad smiles, but it’s a weak thing. Andy knows he thinks about his mom on and off for the rest of the week. He doesn't voice it out loud, but he makes a promise, nonetheless, that he’ll never bring her up again. Not even to himself.
It’s a promise he's broken.
They’ve managed to sneak on the last ferry off of New Delos for the night—a very lucky coincidence considering it’s the last one until the Winter Solstice celebrations are over—and, okay, sneaking is a bit of a strong word. Andy just shows up and tells them that he and his friends are leaving early, and yes of course the sun god knows about it.
They’ve just docked in South Carolina when a horrible feeling starts to rumble through Andy’s chest.
“We’re being watched,” he tells Aspen and Vinyet.
“What? By who?” Aspen asks.
“I don’t know.” Andy answers, frustrated at how the presence seems to just elude his senses. “But stick close to me.”
The ferry dropped them off in the Savannah port, and the ocean water is reassuring in a way it really shouldn’t be. Not when it's because of Poseidon and they’re trying to run from the gods.
Aspen and Vinyet practically hover over his shoulder their whole trek to the closest bus station, waiting for a monster or a god or something else to pop up. The sun has set by now, but Andy still feels paranoia that his dad might be watching.
Vinyet is the one who finally breaks the silence. “Is it just me,” she starts, “or have we walked past this part of town already.”
Andy stops, looking at where she gestures, and yeah, this part of town does seem familiar. “How would we do that?” He asks.
They’ve been walking for what feels like forever by now. Surely they would’ve come by the bus station already, unless they were just walking in circles. But how would they accidentally do that? It’s not like the town is a maze.
“Andy, that presence you felt earlier, when you said we were being watched… did it feel particularly godly?”
Andy’s eyebrows furrow. The presence has stayed just out of his reach, but he does his best to get a little closer to it, to try and get a read on it. “I don’t know,” he says, frustration bubbling at the way it stays murky. “Maybe?”
“Who do you think it is?” Aspen asks Vinyet, who looks deeply troubled at whatever epiphany she had.
“What are we doing right now?” Vinyet asks instead of answering Aspen’s question.
Aspen and Andy stare at her blankly. “We’re trying to find the bus station so we can get out of here.”
“And what does getting out of here entail, exactly?”
Andy scratches his head, and Vinyet rolls her eyes. “Wait,” Andy says finally, as what she is saying clicks into place. “We’re traveling. We’re travelers.”
“Right, and who has the power to confuse travelers? Make them wander in pointless circles? Never getting to their final destination?”
Aspen and Andy don’t answer her question, but they don’t need to. With her pointed questioning, the presence Andy has been feeling finally sharpens into focus, no longer seeing a reason to hide.
“Hello kiddos,” Hermes, the god of travelers, greets.
He looks handsome, like a mischievous frat boy in his twenties. Andy recognizes his smile from some of his demigod children he sees on TV. It’s different from Apollo’s smile. It’s more like a smirk. Like he just pranked you, and he’s waiting for you to realize.
“Where are you all going?” Hermes floats in the air, and Andy can’t help but notice he gravitates towards him a little bit more than he does Aspen or Vinyet.
Vinyet and Aspen shoot Andy panicked looks. The truth is they don’t have an actual destination other than "away from New Delos and his dad". But they can’t tell Hermes that.
“Oh, you know,” Andy starts, swallowing his panic, “Going home. I’m bringing my friends home for the holidays. They don’t really have anywhere else to go.”
Andy nearly cringes as he says it, but it was the best he could think of so last minute. To their credit, Aspen and Vinyet roll with it.
“Yeah, I’m not really on speaking terms with my family,” Vinyet says, looking down at the ground. It comes off as not wanting to see anyone’s pity, but Andy suspects it’s a clever way to not meet the god’s eyes.
“That’s odd,” Hermes says. “I know for a fact Dionysus is looking for you. I'm sure he'd love to have a chat with you.”
Vinyet flinches, and without even thinking about it Andy steps in front of her, blocking Hermes from her line of sight.
“And you,” Hermes looks down at Andy, “Your father is definitely looking for you. He’s practically ready to tear up the East Coast. I’m pretty sure your home is New Delos, now that he’s gotten wind of you.”
“You’re going to take me back to him,” Andy says. His throat is suddenly very dry.
“Yes, eventually,” Hermes concedes. “But if you want to wander around a bit more to stall for time, I suppose I’ll let you. With the temporary curse I placed on you, you won’t actually be going anywhere.”
“You could let us go.” It’s a statement, but the way Andy says it is more like a plea.
Hermes’s eyes soften, even as he still refuses to touch the ground and have the conversation at eye-level. “And why would I do that when my brother just found you?”
Andy opens his mouth before realizing he doesn’t know what to say to that.
“His kid with Percy,” the way the god’s tongue rolls over the name Percy feels familiar, and it makes Andy supremely uncomfortable. He doesn't want to think about his dad personally knowing the gods. “He wants you back by his side badly, and so do the rest of the gods he’s told.”
“Why is that?” Andy asks, voice high.
Hermes gives him a look like he’s stupid. “Because if you’re at his side, with the gods, that means Percy will have to return.”
“No it doesn’t—” Vinyet cuts in, voice sharp.
Hermes turns his eyes towards her, and his expression seems much less genial than it was a moment ago.
Before he can smite her, Vinyet continues. “That’s the whole reason we went to New Delos. Percy Jackson—Andy’s dad—is missing. We’re trying to find him, but if you lock Andy up on New Delos or Olympus, he’ll never be found.”
It's perhaps a bit of an exaggeration. Honestly, even with Andy free to road-trip around the continental US, he wasn't having that much luck finding his dad. But her words are effective.
Hermes seems to get larger after she speaks. It’s not a huge difference, but Andy notices it. He wonders what Hermes is thinking, how he feels about all this.
How close he was to his dad.
“Missing,” Hermes repeats.
“Missing,” Andy confirms. “For a while now.”
Hermes’s expression seems to grow firm. “Well then, I think it’s best I take you three to Olympus right now. There’s a lot of gods who would like to hear more about this—”
Hermes reaches out towards Andy, but Andy takes a big step backwards. He doesn’t want to go to Olympus. He doesn’t want to see any of the gods again.
“Run—” he yells towards Aspen and Vinyet, who take off in a sprint with no questions asked. Andy really made the best questing friends.
Hermes just sighs, like he’s disappointed. He doesn’t try very hard to chase after them, but Andy remembers what he said earlier about a curse.
Maybe they can’t escape him. At least not by running. Or any mortal means that might constitute “traveling”.
That just means they’ll have to be creative about how they escape.
Andy’s mind whirls as he runs past the same tree three times. How did gods travel? Didn’t they just teleport? That had been what Hermes was about to do to them, Andy knows.
Did that count as travel? Andy wonders. Did Hermes even know he was maybe/kind of a god? Could he teleport them away without Hermes’s curse acting up?
It was worth a shoot, Andy decides.
“Guys!” He calls out to Aspen and Vinyet. “Grab my hand.” The satyr and demigod each reach out to grab an extended hand and with nothing but all of the audacity he got from being a theater kid and the confidence he got from his dad, Andy tries to teleport them out of there.
It works, Andy thinks when they hit a pile of snow. There certainly hadn’t been any snow in South Carolina.
“Ugh,” he hears Vinyet groan from where she fell on the ground.
Andy gets up to look around at where he’s transported them all too. It looks like it’s another island, though there’s patches of ice over the sea here.
“What did you do?” Aspen asks, huffing and puffing from their place on the ground. “Why am I cold suddenly?”
“I transported us. I don’t know where to.”
“Oh.” Aspen says, dumbstruck. “That’s… cool.”
Andy gets the feeling they wanted to say something else in place of ‘cool.’
The place he’s dropped them off at is beautiful, even in the dead of winter. The blue ocean stretches out before them, though their view is partially obscured by a bunch of dead trees covered in snow. It’s like a winter wonderland. It kind of reminds Andy of Alaska, at least a little bit.
Certainly more than New Delos had.
Andy turns around, and suddenly, he knows exactly where they are. Because, standing in front of him, is a gorgeous white lighthouse. Its connected building has a red roof that stands out brightly in the snow. And about a hundred feet away is the lighthouse keeper’s house, still standing in pristine condition.
“We’re at the Baker’s Island Light.” He tells Aspen and Vinyet.
“Okay,” Vinyet says, and then, when he doesn’t elaborate, she asks, “and where’s that?”
“Massachusetts.” He points in the distance and tells them, “That’s Salem.”
Vinyet looks even more confused now. “How do you know that?”
“I just do,” Andy shrugs. “It’s a beautiful lighthouse, isn’t it?”
Aspen and Vinyet share a look, but Andy isn’t paying any attention to them as he shuffles up to the lighthouse keeper’s house.
“Are you sure we should be going there?” Aspen asks. “Isn’t it trespassing?”
“No one comes here in the winter.” Andy tells them. "We'll be able to spend the night here without anyone bothering us."
When he gets to the front door, it opens easily.
“They didn’t lock it?” Vinyet asks, baffled.
“No, they did.” Andy tells her.
They pass through the threshold of the house, and everything feels warmer, cozier. More peaceful. More like home.
“So are you going to explain anything, or are you just going to keep spouting off cryptic bullshit,” Vinyet asks, crossing her arms.
Andy looks around the house, eyes full of wonder. “I think I found what my domain is.”
An eyebrow raise from Vinyet prompts him to continue.
He gestures at their surroundings, like it should be obvious. He laughs, “It’s lighthouses.”
Andy smiles at them, and for the first time since he discovered who his father is, it’s not an Apollo’s kid’s smile. It’s just Andy’s smile.