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The morning had arrived gently, the way mornings sometimes did in the forest when the season had decided to be generous, light filtered through the silver threaded canvas walls in soft, horizontal panels that travelled across the tent walls slowly.
Inside the tent, Artemis sat on the edge of their bedroll, her silver cloak set aside for the morning, her tunic loose at the shoulders. Her auburn curls fell forward as she drew the brush through them, the motion slow and deliberate, each stroke following the last with the meditative patience of a goddess that had been performing this ritual for the millennia.
She heard him before she saw him, his footsteps approaching the tent had that particular quality she had long since memorized, not the careful quiet of a hunter, but the calm tread of a man walking through a morning that he did not find any reason to rush. The tent flap shifted, the light changed for a moment, and Percy stepped inside, his dark locks still slightly disheveled from sleep, his sea green eyes bright as ever and the faint, alert curiosity that arrived on his face whenever something had caught his attention.
He was holding a package.
Artemis raised an eyebrow.
Percy glanced at her, then at the package, and shrugged his shoulders with the candor of someone who genuinely had nothing informative to offer. The package was wrapped in blue paper, tied with practical twine, and bore his name in handwriting that faced upward from the top. Beside it, tucked beneath the twine, was a letter, its envelope was not sealed with an emblem she immediately recognized. A small token rested against the paper, unmistakable, the winged stamp of Hermes Express, which explained the delivery and nothing else.
He sat beside her on the bedroll, the package settled between them, and reached for the letter first, drawing it from beneath the twine with careful fingers.
The moment he turned the envelope and registered the handwriting, something shifted in his expression, his brows shifted, a small, involuntary widening of his eyes, he was quiet for a moment, then he glanced at Artemis with an expression she read immediately, equal parts surprise and something softer beneath it, he said, "It is from my mother."
Her brush stilled in her auburn curls.
She knew Sally wrote to him, had known it since the first days in his time with the Hunt, letters arrived with consistency at intervals of days, carried by Hermes Express to wherever the Hunt had camped, the deliveries were mysterious in their accuracy and Percy had long since stopped questioning the mechanics of them. Yet until now, Sally had never sent anything beyond the letters, not once, not in all the time Percy had lived with the Hunt, except for the occasional package of blue cookies that arrived wrapped so carefully they survived the journey perfectly preserved.
Percy turned the envelope and opened it, drawing out the letter within, he spread it out with the careful attention he offered to all her correspondence, smoothing the paper against his knee, his eyes drifted across the opening lines, then he looked at Artemis with an expression she could not immediately categorize, then he spoke after a moment, "She says it is for both of us."
Artemis felt her brow lift slightly, genuine surprise arriving with the quiet immediacy of something she had not prepared for, she set the brush aside, her auburn curls falling loose around her shoulders.
Percy read it aloud.
Sally wrote that she had been going through some boxes that had been stored since the apartment move, the kind of task that kept being postponed until a rainy afternoon finally made it inevitable, and that she had found something while doing so, and she hoped Artemis would find it as precious as she did.
Percy finished reading and folded the letter with deliberate care, his sea green eyes remained on the paper for a moment after he finished, in the quiet manner of someone allowing themselves a heartbeat to simply receive what they had been given before setting it aside.
Artemis said nothing, she simply watched him with her silver eyes soft and attentive, present in the specific way she had learned to be present with him in the moments that asked for witness rather than response.
He set the letter on the small table beside the bedroll, and drew the package toward them. They unwrapped it together. His hands worked the twine loose and she folded back the blue paper with careful precision, each layer revealing what lay within, when the last fold of paper fell away, they both looked at what Sally had sent.
An album.
The cover was a deep, worn blue, the color of something that had been handled with love over many years, its corners softened with time, its spine bearing the slight crease of a volume that had been opened and closed countless times by hands that knew it well. There was not a title on the front, just his name had been written inside the front cover in the handwriting of Sally, and beside it, in ink slightly fresher, a single line that read, simply, his whole beginning.
Percy stared at it.
Artemis reached for it, with the reverent slowness she reserved for sacred objects, her fingers settling against the worn blue cover with a deliberateness that acknowledged what she held.
She opened the cover and went completely still.
Sally held him in the photograph, her face carrying the particular exhaustion and radiance that appeared together only in this specific time of a life, the time that came once and never returned. The infant in her arms was very small, his face scrunched with the concentrated expression of someone who had just opened their eyes and took their first breath. One tiny fist had escaped its wrapping and was raised beside his cheek, fingers curled with the instinctive grip of a being not yet familiar with the world but already insisting upon its presence within it, his dark locks had already arrived.
Artemis felt something move through her chest that she had not anticipated.
She had presided over childbirth for the entirety of her immortal life, had been the first divine presence called upon by laboring mothers since long before cities learned to name their gods. She had witnessed countless first breaths, had been present at the arrivals of gods and heroes and kings and ordinary people whose names the world would never know.
She had never once felt it the way she felt it now.
This infant, this particular impossibly small person with the dark locks and the raised fist, would become the hero that faces divine threats and fights battles worthy of tales, would become the lover that lays beside her on every night and holds her in his sleep, would become the man that brings joy to everywhere he went. The distance between that small fist and the hands she knew as well as her own was a distance measured in years she had not been present for, and the awareness of it pressed against her chest in a way she had not prepared herself to receive.
She breathed quietly.
"You were," she began, then stopped, considering the sentence, her silver eyes still on the picture, "Small."
Percy, from somewhere slightly behind her left shoulder where he had retreated as soon as she opened the cover, made a sound that was not quite a word, "Please turn the page quickly."
She turned it slowly.
A series of pictures passed beneath her hands as she moved through the pages with the careful patience of someone looking something worth examined at the proper pace. Percy asleep across the lap of Sally on what appeared to be a bus, dark locks pressed flat on one side, mouth slightly open, drool escaping from his lips as always, utterly without dignity and utterly content. Percy standing in what looked like a park, both arms stretched toward a pigeon that was walking away from him with the magnificent indifference of urban birds everywhere.
A warmth had taken residence in her chest and showed not any intention of departing.
Then she stopped.
The beach at Montauk, he could not have been older than two, perhaps three at the outer limit of estimation, he stood at the edge of the water in a pair of shorts that were slightly too large for him, rolled at the waist with the creative engineering of a mother who had made do. The ocean stretched behind him in every direction the frame would allow. His face held a grin of a scale that seemed barely containable by the face wearing it, every small tooth present and committed to the expression, his cheeks rounded with the effort of it. Both of his arms were stretched wide toward the water as though attempting to embrace it, his whole small body angled forward with the joyful urgency of a toddler who had found the place they had been looking for and intended to demonstrate this finding with their entire self.
Artemis looked at this picture for a long time, then she pressed her lips together, said nothing, and turned the page.
Several ages passed, Percy growing in increments the way children did, the apartment changing slightly with the years, Sally getting older through time with the grace of a woman who loved her son with complete dedication. A picture of Percy at what appeared to be a school desk, staring at a piece of paper with the specific expression of a person in genuine conflict, the kind that meant the paper was fighting back.
She felt a laugh arrive before she could decide whether to allow it.
She allowed it.
It was small, genuine, escaping through her nose as a soft sound before settling into a smile she did not bother to conceal, Percy, from his position behind her shoulder, made a wounded sound, which only deepened the smile.
Then she stopped again.
The kitchen of his childhood apartment, morning light coming through a window just out of frame, the small table with its two chairs, Percy sat at the table and he was perhaps seven, his dark locks sleep disheveled, and before him was a plate of blue pancakes, their color vivid even in the old picture.
He was not using the fork.
The fork sat beside the plate, abandoned and ignored, Percy held a pancake in both hands, his grip enthusiastic and structural, his face bent toward it with the complete absorption of someone for whom this meal had his entire attention and the entire attention was well spent. A substantial amount of the pancake had found its way onto his face, his cheek, the corner of his mouth, he was obviously entirely unaware of the picture being taken.
The laugh that came from Artemis this time was not small.
It was genuine and bright, the rare kind that arrived before composure could consider it, spilling from her lips with a warmth that filled the tent and drifted through the canvas walls into the morning beyond.
Percy had covered his face with both hands.
"It is not finished yet," she said, her voice throughly delighted, and turned the page with the composed determination of someone conducting an important task.
She moved through the remaining pages with the devoted attention she brought to things she intended to remember completely for eternity. Percy with a gap where two front teeth had been, grinning at the camera, not bothered by the aesthetic consequences. Percy and Sally at what appeared to be a diner booth, matching blue milkshakes between them, both of them laughing at something outside the frame, their faces turned toward each other with the ease of two people who were each other as their favorite company.
She memorized each one.
Then she reached the final page.
Back at the kitchen table, decorated with the modest festivity of someone who had made celebration out of careful hands and genuine love. A blue cake sat at the center of the table, brilliant and earnest in its color, ten candles arranged across it. The candles were lit, their small flames caught in the photograph as bright points, ten of them, one for each year.
Percy sat before it.
Sally stood behind him with her arms around his shoulders, her cheek resting against his dark locks, her eyes closed, and Percy leaned back into her embrace with the complete trust of a child who had never once had reason to doubt the arms holding him. His sea green eyes were bright in the candlelight, focused forward on the cake with the concentrated gaze of a child composing a wish worth making.
The position was almost the same as it had been in the first photograph, Sally holding him, his dark locks, his face turned toward the light.
Ten years between the first page and the last.
Artemis closed the album.
She held it for a moment, her fingers resting against the worn blue cover, her silver eyes still, then she turned to Percy, who had descended from behind her shoulder to sit properly beside her, his cheeks still deeply blushed, just as it was from the moment the first page was opened and showed absolutely not any intention of departing.
"I will cherish this for eternity," she said, her voice quiet, she meant it with the force of a goddess for whom eternity was not a figure of speech, "Every page. Every picture."
Percy made a small, helpless sound and covered his face with both hands, his shoulders slightly raised. Yet he did not object, he did not reach for the album. He simply sat with his face in his hands and made the sound of someone whose love for the goddess beside him was the only thing preventing a more dramatic response.
Artemis reached forward and took his hands gently, drawing them from his face with patient certainty, his flushed face appeared, sea green eyes meeting hers with the expression of someone caught between embarrassment and the helpless warmth of being loved thoroughly.
She kissed him.
Slow and tender, her hands still holding his, her forehead resting against his when they drew back, their breath mingling in the quiet of the tent, "I shall write to your mother," she murmured against his lips, her thumb tracing the line of his knuckles with the familiarity of something done countless times, "To thank her."
Percy laughed, a soft and genuine sound that escaped before he could gather himself, his sea green eyes bright and his cheeks still flushed, he whispered, "She will love that."
She set the album on the small table beside the bedroll with the careful reverence she had carried since first opening the cover, her hand resting against it for one moment longer than necessary.
She would cherish it.
She would cherish him.
For eternity.