Chapter Text
Apollo falls in love with Percy Jackson quickly and violently, and gods do not get mad, but he thinks he’s going a little insane in his feelings for her.
There is a difference between wanting something and knowing you couldn’t have it, and wanting something and ignoring the fact that you couldn’t have it, and Apollo has crossed both of them a long time ago. There is a canvas before him, and he has painted her face on it, surrounded by layers of wavy, dark hair and a set of large, sparkling eyes, but he finds that no paint in this world, no charcoal and chalk can quite capture her in all her glory, but he tries, anyway, in the midst of tall marble pillars and silk curtains of his temple. He has not found inspiration for painting in a very long time, but she awakes the artist in him and something else, too, something darker that he has not let swim to the surface in a long time.
That is a god’s every weakness―a pretty face.
But she is no longer just a weakness. She has become his fatal flaw.
Apollo cannot get her off his mind anymore, and it’s dangerous and reckless and a thousand other things at once.
He knows he should mind, but he doesn’t.
He’s always been a fool for love.
It happened like this.
Olympus is in an uproar, once again, and Apollo wonders what the cause is this time. His father is known to have a fickle mood, but, as he watches bright, spidery lightning flash across the sky and hears deafening thunder, he feels like it is more than just a temper tantrum. Somewhere down in the mortal world, a human is struck by lightning; just another innocent caught in the wrath of a god.
Apollo materializes in the throne room. He is one of the last gods to appear, and as he ascends his throne, he throws a quizzical look to his sister, who is already in her own seat of power, a frown marring her beautiful, young face.
“What is it this time?”
She glances at him, silvery-yellow eyes sharp and serious. “Father is cross with Poseidon again. I think it’s because of that half-blood girl our uncle sired.”
Ah, Apollo thinks, understanding now.
Percy Jackson, or whatever her name is. The reason of Zeus’s recent ire. Apollo is, quite frankly, not surprised that the oath of the Big Three has been broken again, this time by Poseidon. Forbidding a god to bed a mortal and sire demigods is like trying to tame a lion―it’s just bound to end in trouble.
Two more lights flare in the throne room. Zeus and Poseidon appear, but only the latter has his weapon at hand. The trident glows with an eerie green light, same as Poseidon’s eyes. He’s in a bad mood, too, given the fact that he looks close to bursting into his true form.
From the corner of his eyes, Apollo sees Ares lean forward in anticipation, hungry for a fight.
“― absolutely unacceptable!” Zeus bellows. “That damned child of yours knows no respect! I shall have her head delivered on a spike―”
“You will do no such thing,” Poseidon interrupts, his expression dark, growing murderous at his brother’s words. The glow of his trident intensifies. “If you touch even a hair on her head, I will give you a war greater than anything you have ever battled before.”
Lightning streaks across the sky, and a howling wind whips through the throne room, as the two divine beings continue to argue. “She will know an eternity of pain, brother. I will―”
“Husband.”
Hera rises from her throne and descends the stairs towards the heart of the room, her royal blue gown trailing after her. Jewels set nestled in her golden crown that rests atop of her dark hair. She lays a perfectly manicured hand on her husband’s shoulder.
“You need to calm yourself,” she tells him, and some of the tension leaves Zeus’s form at her touch.
Eyeing the two brothers sharply, she asks, “What is the cause of this dispute?”
“Poseidon’s precious daughter has decided to send us a little gift,” Zeus growls.
Apollo sees it, then, the decapitated head when his father holds it up for all the gods to see. It’s dripping green blood from the snakes that wind around it, staining the shiny marble floor. Poseidon smirks, and Hera sniffs disdainfully at the sight of Medusa’s head.
“That child of yours is impudent,” Athena sides with her father, sending Poseidon a cold stare.
Ares guffaws. “Girl’s got an attitude. I like it.”
“She could have been more fashionable about it,” Aphrodite grimaces.
Apollo remains silent, a smirk curling around his lips, dark amusement spreading through his chest. There have not been many demigods who had dared display this kind of nerve towards the gods, not in the old times and certainly not now (honestly, demigods these days have become so boring to watch), but every now and then a half-blood does manage to rise above all the others.
It seems Percy Jackson might be one of them, and it piques Apollo’s interest, a sudden desire to see what she could become in the future. Poseidon’s children are always so very unpredictable.
Apollo hopes it isn’t the last time he hears of the girl’s impudence.
It’s not.
Poseidon’s daughter captures Apollo’s attention for a second time during an emergency council meeting (which, recently, his father has been holding far too often for it to be considered healthy at this point), and as the arguments heat up, a loud splash resounds through the throne room. Apollo grows silent, as do the other gods, forgetting all about the little spat he’s been having with Dionysus. A black screen flickers into shape, and there are two girls in a small boat, holding on to each other for dear life as water rushes all around them.
Apollo sits up straight, gaze trained on the screen as he understands that one of the girls, the one with the long, dark hair, has to be Poseidon’s. The other one looks like she is one of Athena’s children, what with the blond bouncy curls and the sharp gray eyes.
Little mechanical spiders crawl onto the boat, and he throws a glance at Athena, who grimaces, narrowing her eyes as she detects them, too. In the next second, though, a huge wave crashes into the boat, flinging the tiny creatures away. Apollo lifts his eyebrows at the display of power from Poseidon’s child, impressed when the boat does not capsize. The girl has it clearly under her control.
He sees the gates, then, and understands they are about to smash into them violently. He heaves a sigh. Another pair of dead demigods for the day. Oh well, what can you do. He watches with interest as the dark-haired girl unbuckles her seatbelt.
“We’re going to have to jump for it!” she yells at Athena’s daughter. “On my mark!”
“No, on my mark! Simple physics! Force times the trajectory angle―”
“Fine, on your mark!”
When the blond girl yells ‘now’, the two girls jump from the little boat just as it crashes violently into the gates. On their way done, a satyr grabs them by their arms, wearing a pair of winged sneakers that look a lot like the ones Hermes sometimes uses. The momentum is too much, though, and all three of them come crashing down on the asphalt.
Poseidon’s daughter untangles herself from the other two and rises to her feet. When she spins around, she looks straight into the camera, facing the gods.
Apollo blinks.
It is the first time he fully sees her. He has expected her to be taller, somehow, more muscled, but she is a tiny thing of a girl. Her eyes are a startling, disorienting green, and she is―lovely, already striking at merely fourteen, and there is a promise to her features that she will grow even lovelier with age.
“Show’s over!” Her voice carries through the throne room, straight into a place inside Apollo’s chest that starts to hurt and tug and snap. “Thank you! Good night!”
The screen turns black, but the bright green of her eyes remains stuck in Apollo’s thoughts.
“This is the girl the prophecy might be referring to?” Demeter says, pursing her lips. “She’s so … little.”
For once, Apollo does not partake in the arguments that arise around him, choosing to stay quiet and inside his mind for a little longer, eyes still fixed on the spot where the screen had been.
Apollo’s fate is sealed when, a little over a year later, his sister calls to him for a favor.
It is the middle of deepest winter, and the city is covered in a thick layer of snow, the trees naked and bleak, the sun now a source of warmth that can’t quite reach the mortal world. His sister does not tell him of the nature of her favor, but when he parks his sun chariot, currently in the form a red Maserati, on top of a cliff and sees her Hunters gathered, he suspects he knows what it might be.
Apollo climbs out of the car, not in the slightest bothered by the biting cold, and gives the group a blinding smile.
“I need a favor,” Artemis says curtly, going straight to business. “I have some hunting to do, alone. I need you to take my companions to Camp Half-Blood.”
“Sure, sis!” Apollo calls out, holding his palms up. “I feel a haiku coming on.”
He is met with an orchestra of groans and annoyed grunts, and snickers to himself as he recites his haiku, which is even worse than usual. He can do better, but there’s something quite amusing exasperating his sister this way.
Artemis rolls her eyes and points to a group of demigods and a satyr. “These demigods will also need a ride. Some of Chiron’s campers.”
“No problem,” Apollo agrees, his gaze already starting to wonder. “Let’s see … Thalia, right? I’ve heard all about you.” She blushes at his words. “Zeus’s girl, yes? Makes you my half-sister. Used to be a tree, didn’t you? Glad you’re back. I hate it when pretty girls get turned into trees. Man, I remember this one time―”
“Brother,” Artemis interrupts, a silent warning in her eyes. “You should get going.”
“Oh, right.”
Apollo sees her, then, standing close to Thalia. She is only a girl of sixteen, her hands clasped tightly together, observing him and Artemis nervously. Apollo blinks and blinks again, and it registers, then, in the flash between recognizing her and a loose strand of inky black hair curling in the wind, that there’s nothing only about her.
“Percy Jackson?” he asks and narrows his eyes.
“Yeah,” she says, clearing her throat. “I mean … yes, sir.”
She’s―beautiful.
Disarmingly so, as she stands there wrapped in a dark-blue coat, with the hood pooling around her shoulders. Her black hair is braided tight, the long rope of it draped over her left shoulder. Her eyes, that brilliant, bright green, regard him wariness, like she is not sure what to think of him, too; and there’s an effortless power to her that is familiar like Poseidon's, a storm waiting to be splintered and released that does not fit with the slightness of her frame, the youth of her features.
“Well!” Apollo looks away from her, finally, a liquid pounding rush of something like adrenaline sweeping through him, except it’s not, except he’s a god; he should not feel as if he is suffocating. “We’d better load up, huh? Ride only goes one way―west. And if you miss it, you miss it.”
Apollo knows he shouldn’t get involved.
He still cannot help himself as he materializes in the passenger seat of a sleek Lamborghini, aware of the satyr sleeping behind him but uncaring about it. Percy is in the driver’s seat, her legs tucked up, knees pressing against the steering wheel. Her breath fogs the window she has her forehead resting against. She doesn’t notice him.
“Oh, don’t be afraid of dreams,” he says as he catches a glimpse of her thoughts. She is afraid of falling asleep, terrified of the nightmares that might haunt her.
Percy’s head whips around, and he catches his breath, just a little, when he registers the full intensity of her eyes. They are darker in this dim light, vivid and spark, sparkling like emeralds. Her elaborate braid is coming undone, one singular tendril curling against the slope of her cheek.
“If it weren’t for dreams, I wouldn’t know half the things I know about the future. They’re better than Olympus tabloids.” Apollo holds up his hands, grinning at her. “Dreams like a podcast, downloading truth in my ears, they tell me cool stuff.”
She looks utterly unimpressed by his haiku. “Apollo?”
Winking, he puts a finger to his mouth. “I’m incognito. Call me Fred.”
A dark wing of an eyebrow lifts up, her lips twitching into a smile that seems too sharp to elicit the kind of reaction that it does―a trilling stir in Apollo’s chest, an unexpected metamorphosis that plucks his veins like harp strings and leaves a sweetly effervescent melody in his ichor.
“A god named Fred?”
He looks a little too long at her mouth (but she is so, so pretty, and he is just so, so helpless against her pull). “Eh, well … Zeus insists on certain rules. Hands off, when there’s a human quest. Even when something really major is wrong. But nobody messes with my baby sister. Nobody.”
Percy shifts in her seat to face him fully. “Can you help us, then?”
“Shh, I already have. Haven’t you been looking outside?”
He feels a little put out that she apparently hasn’t noticed the assistance he already provided to her, but she understands quickly enough. “The train,” she recognizes. “How fast are we moving?”
She looks eager to now more, eyes assessing him as if wanting to pull every piece of knowledge and information from him. A shaft of sunlight bleeds across her faces, setting her eyes alight in clear emerald.
“Fast enough,” he says, clearing his throat. “Unfortunately, we’re running out of time. It’s almost sunset. But I imagine we’ll get you across a good chunk of America, at least.”
“But where is Artemis?”
He scowls darkly, because he doesn’t know, that bit of information obscured to him by potent magic, and he tells her as much. She, barely fazed, moves one to the next question. “And Annabeth?”
“Oh, you mean that girl you lost? Hmm, I don’t know.”
Apollo is surprised to see the flare of anger in her eyes, for the briefest of moments, but then she pulls herself together and asks about the monster. He begins to feel useless until he remembers a piece of information that might be of importance to her. “If you haven’t found the monster when you reach San Francisco, seek out Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea. He has a long memory and a sharp eye. He has the gift of knowledge sometimes kept obscure to the Oracle.”
She blinks at him. “But it’s your Oracle. Can’t you tell us what the prophecy means?”
“You might as well ask an artist to explain his art, or ask a poet to explain his poem. It defeats the purpose. The meaning is only clear through the search.”
Something sly flickers across Percy’s expression as she narrows her eyes into green slits, contemplating him in silence before, at last, concluding dryly, “In other words, you don’t know.”
Apollo narrows his eyes as well, not liking how her words make it sound like a weakness of his, the fact that he doesn’t have as much control over the Oracle as everyone else might think he does. “I have to run,” he deflects. “I doubt I can risk helping you again, Percy, but remember what I said. Get some sleep. And when you return, I expect a good haiku about your journey.”
Her lips curl at the corners in faint amusement, and a fire sparks her eyes alight as she realizes that she is, indeed, right, but he snaps his fingers before she can say anything else. She falls asleep, her body slumping against the seat.
Another snap of his fingers, and he is gone.
He wants her already, and what a god wants, a god takes.
No matter the consequences.
She is in front of all the gods for the first time, and they are discussing her fate.
Apollo is tense in his throne, gripping the arms of his seat tightly, although his face remains impassive, good-natured. His gaze flicks to Percy every now and then. She has her arms crossed at her chest, expression growing irritated and darker by the second as she stands there in the center, Thalia Grace and Annabeth Chase by her side. The satyr is pale in his face, gnawing on his thumb worriedly.
“These half-bloods have done Olympus a great service,” Artemis says, silently challenging the gods with her sharp gaze. “Would anyone here deny that?”
“I gotta say,” Apollo starts, clearing his throat, “these kids did okay.”
He gives Percy a quick thumbs-up, and she smiles at him, brief and fleetingly, but it’s enough to make his immortal heart thump violently. He is helplessly aware of how her dark jeans cling to her legs, and he glowers when he sees that the other gods notice as well. The possessiveness bubbles up fast and hard, and he grips the arms of his throne more tightly.
“I will build an aquarium for the creature here,” Poseidon declares after the arguments finally end. “Hephaestus can help me. The creature will be safe. We shall protect it with our powers. The girl will not betray us. I vouch for this on my honor.”
“All in favor?” Zeus asks, and Apollo’s hand is one of the first ones in the air.
The thought of Percy dying makes something dark and murderous boil in his veins. When he looks at her once again, he is overcome with the sudden desire to scoop her up and shelter her somewhere safe, somewhere he can keep her forever. His train of thoughts makes him remember that she is only human, and time will take her away from him, eventually, will make her wither and age, and Apollo is just suddenly―his mind is all over the place―he finds himself thinking about golden apples, about her blunt teeth sinking into the flesh of the fruit.
He knows what he has to do, then.
No one can blame him for it.
Gods are creatures of selfish desires and greediness, and this is the way all the greatest love stories have started―with a beautiful maiden and a powerful god snatching her away to make her his.
He finds himself watching her, observing from a safe distance, quickly becoming fascinated by her life when she is not at camp. He is obsessed when he notices how much softer she is at home with her mother, calmer in a way, and he wants that softness aimed at him, for her smiles to be only for him.
Apollo is clueless how she does what she does to him, how quickly these feelings came to be. His desperation for her increases with every painful reminder that she is not his. A god’s love is a smothering kind of love, it is not a light thing. It is obsessive rather than kind, possessive rather than pure, greedy rather than selfless.
It’s his biggest flaw, he supposes.
Falling for someone who will never love him back.
“No,” Percy Jackson says, and everything and everyone grows silent.
She stands in the throne room with her head held high, her eyes unyielding, and her words so very sure. She doesn’t hesitate. She clasps her hands together and waits for her answer to sink in, and when it does, the gods are indignant.
“You are denying our generous gift of immortality?” Zeus asks, narrowing his eyes.
“Yes.” Percy takes a deep breath, and the clasp of her hands goes a little tighter. “I would like to ask for something else, though.”
Her request is most uncommon and certainly difficult to see through, but the gods do agree at the end to acknowledge their children more, to build cabins for the minor gods, and to pardon those that sided with Kronos. Soon enough, the throne room empties. The gods retire to their own temples and domains to recover from the fight.
Apollo, however, remains seated in his throne, clad in his bright armor, his eyes still obscured by his shades.
No.
She said no to immortality, and it feels like someone has sucker-punched him in the face.
Rachel Elizabeth Dare is his new oracle. Now that he’s already at camp after her initiation, he can finally put his plans to work.
He makes no pretense of being someone else, of looking like something he is not when he approaches her.
Apollo wants her to see him for what he is; a selfish, greedy god that can’t keep his hands to himself.
He finds her sitting by the lake of Camp Half-Blood, gazing upon the smooth reflection of the waters, fingers busy weaving braids into her hair. She appears to be deep in thought, her eyes lost in the distance, the slowly setting sun bringing out the pink in her cheeks. She wears a pair of jeans and one of the camp’s orange t-shirts, a long flowy cardigan, and sturdy boots. He aches to sit next to her and catch the feel of her smooth tanned skin on his fingertips.
“Well, who do we have here?”
Percy startles and spins around, hands flying to the sword she keeps in its pen-form in her jeans pocket.
“Oh,” she murmurs when she sees him. “It’s you.”
She does not relax, though.
The tension remains in her shoulders as she eyes him warily.
“My apologies.” Apollo grins wide, winking at her over the rim of his shades. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
“Well, yeah,” she snorts, quirking an eyebrow. “Don’t sneak up like this next time, then.”
He snickers and leans back against the bark of a tree. It has a red scarf hanging from one of its lower branches; hers, probably. He suppresses the desire to run his fingers across the fabric and hold it to his nose, take a whiff of her scent which, no doubt, is imprinted on it like a tattoo.
“How is Rachel?” Percy asks, rising to her feet. She looks down when she brushes off some grass stuck to her jeans, and doesn’t notice him coming closer. “I hope she’s―”
He’s close enough now that she feels the heat coming from him. She breaks off in her sentence, lifting her head, and takes a step back. “Dude, personal space, please.”
“You’re really so beautiful,” Apollo murmurs, raising a hand to run the back of his pointer over her soft cheek. He can’t help but drink her in, count her lashes, memorize how they flutter when she swallows nervously. “I want to paint you. Not just from memory. I want the real model in front of me.”
“I need to go now,” Percy says quickly, eyes darting around. She takes another step back.
It happens in the next second, when her hand goes to her sword and her eyes look to the side to see if anyone else sees them. Apollo is quick as a wolf, backing her up against the tree, one hand clamped over her mouth. Her scream comes out muffled as she fights and bites and claws at him, but what chance does a girl stand against a god?
“Shh, it’s okay, it’s okay,” he soothes her, but it only makes her more ferocious. Her eyes are wide in terror and panic. There’s a sheen of tears, too. He hates it, doesn’t want to be the one to make her cry, but he knows there is no other way to do this. She would never come willingly. “It’s okay, Percy, it’s okay.”
Apollo moves his other hand to her temple, and with a light press of his fingers against the spot, she slumps into his arms, unconscious. He brushes the stray hairs away from her face. Holding her securely beneath her knees, he lifts her easily into the cradle of his arms and, with a last look at the surroundings, dissolves into a column of light.
The lake stays behind smooth and undisturbed.