Chapter Text
Apollo is sitting up straight as a board, an extremely bored board, in his council throne in what he’d easily consider to be the most important meeting of his life when the ping comes in, ricocheting through the back of his mind – and he frowns, sitting up even straighter.
Someone, or something, is trespassing in his palace.
Splitting attention away from an Olympian council meeting is generally frowned upon, but generally frowned upon doesn’t quite mean forbidden, and there’s something about this mental ping that’s putting him on edge in a way he doesn’t quite know how to describe. If anything’s managed to get past every defence and countermeasure in place to keep out intruders, he kind of really wants to know about it.
As a matter of courtesy (although he really doesn’t feel like extending it, because the only people in the room right now are his father and stepmother and Dionysus, of all people) he announces that he has urgent business elsewhere, and that he’ll be devoting a few slivers of his being to taking care of it.
Father’s disapproving capital-L Look makes him faintly angry because jeez, dad, if it was your heavenly palace being ransacked within an inch of its life, you’d be abandoning the meeting in a heartbeat to dish out some smiteful godly justice – but he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he just splits away from himself, and falls into existence neatly outside his Sun Palace, brushing nonexistent dust off his chiton.
He’d put a bit more of himself into this him than he really should have, and he feels weirdly bad for himself for not entirely focusing on The Most Important Meeting Of His Life, but on the other hand – the atmosphere in that council room is choking and stifling to the nth degree. If he has to spend any longer thinking about being in there, he may scream. Or set fire to something. Or start composing epic poetry to distract himself. None of which are conducive to a civil, polite discussion about possibly the most important issue he’s ever had to deal with.
Whatever. Relatively less important (but still pretty damn important nonetheless) issues at hand.
He meanders up the pathway to the front door, casually checking to see if the perimeter has been visibly breached, or if there’s any Serious Bad Vibes emanating from anywhere in the vicinity, or if he can hear any hushed whispers and giggles indicating that a surprise birthday party is about to be sprung on him. It’s not actually his birthday, not to his knowledge, and he hasn’t actually been thrown a surprise birthday party for the last few millennia, or maybe ever, but hey – you never know. Maybe the fact that it isn’t his birthday is the surprise bit.
He hears nothing, and feels nothing especially heinous in the way of vibes. He rests his hand on the solid weight of the front door, and frowns. There’s a definite presence inside, but it’s almost overwhelmingly non-threatening. It’s not divine in nature, either.
He takes a step back and flags down a few passing local nymphs to ask them if they’ve seen anyone loitering around the outside of the palace, or perhaps surreptitiously cranking open a side window with a crowbar. None of them have. He thanks them for their time, anyway, and quite a lot of them are incredibly flustered to have their Lord Apollo addressing them so casually and throwing out thank-yous as offhandedly as he is, which causes him to get a bit flustered in turn, and – and, wow. That’s embarrassing. He beats a hasty retreat back to the palace steps, where nobody really dares to go without proper reason.
It’s weird, actually – weird to be getting proper deference and bowing and awe from the residents of Olympus. He’d been missing it for so long. How dare those mortals not treat him as the paragon of heavenly brilliance he was, even stuck in a flabby acne-riddled mortal form, he’d thought, quite frequently, and in a depressingly whiny mental tone of voice. He’d even voiced it aloud a horrifying number of times.
Now, he actually wants to be disrespected. Well, no. Not humiliated, because that’s – no, that’s not it. He wants to be treated as an equal. He wants to treat other people as equals, wants to be able to wander down to the Olympian markets on Sunday mornings and strike up a casual friendly conversation with the sweet old oreade who sells mountain honey and fresh bread. A casual conversation without stammering and bowing and expectations.
He’ll work on that, he thinks. It’s only a matter of time, with these sorts of things – change can happen, but it needs to happen gradually. Making friends isn’t all that hard, really, and he really wants to ask that honey-seller about her bread recipe.
And then he scowls at himself.
See, the thing is, there’s absolutely nothing stopping him from just pushing open the door and confronting whoever-it-is head-on. They’re not going to be even remotely a threat to him, in all his fabulous godly glory, and even if they do manage to frighten him by yelling ‘BOO!’ at the top of their lungs and doing a scary face, Apollo can easily just turn them into a sunfish or something equally harmless and hilarious. (Sunfish: a disgrace to his good name! But like, a really funny disgrace. Look at them, look at their stupid flat little faces! Hysterical.) The only reason he’s skirting around the outside of his house like he’s the intruder, he realizes, is that he still can’t shake that ever-present mortal caution. That constant anxiety, stemming from the near-certain knowledge that the next door you open could very well be your last.
It’s stupid. He’s being stupid. He shakes his head, braces two hands against the double-doors of his Sun Palace, and sweeps them open without the slightest bit of effort.
“All right!” he calls into the warm brightness of his palace, casting his gaze around. “Apollo’s in the house, cha’boy is home. Now who’s been eating my figurative godly porridge...?”
He stops.
From where she’s been sitting against the wall near his newest mess of a piano-related project, her legs askew on the whorled pine-wood floor, a tiny (even by typical mortal standards) girl with messy dark hair and rings under her eyes that might be just as dark looks up at him. Her glasses glint in the light as she surveys him – twenty feet tall and towering over her imperiously in a way that would send just about anyone else scrambling for
“’Apollo’s in the house’?” she says with tangible disdain in her voice. She even raises two crooked sets of fingers to do the mocking air quotes.
Apollo is very aware that his mouth is hanging open, and that ‘mouth hanging open in shock’ isn’t a great look by anyone’s standards, let alone godly standards, but, hey. The absolute last person he’d been expecting to find intruding in his personal quarters on a Sunday afternoon was Meg McCaffrey, demigod daughter of Demeter. He feels he’s entitled to a good few seconds of shock.
She’s wearing a massively oversized neon-green t-shirt tucked into a thigh-length stripy skirt with a messily-latched belt holding it all in check. Her long knee-high socks are dirt-stained and crooked. It’s a very Meg look. He looks down at her, and he feels something in himself break a bit, and for a moment all he wants to do is sit down and sob, and he can’t even begin to think why.
“Meg,” he says, instead of doing something undignified like dissolving into a puddle of tears on the floor, and then he says it again for emphasis. “Meg. What – you – this is my palace.”
“Duh,” comes the typically eloquent response. “Where else was I gonna find you?”
He stares at her for another moment, and then comes forward – forward and down; his physical form dwindling until he’s at her size. And without so much as thinking about it, he’s shifted forms as well. Softer, younger; dark hair an untameable mess. The scars remain, but then again, they always do. He barely has to think about them these days.
And slipping into this form is like pulling on a well-worn jumper – it fits just right, even when it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a bit scratchy around the sleeves and it chafes at his neck a bit, but he loves it anyway. He’d wear it all the time now, if he could.
His bare feet slap and squeak against the floorboards, as he runs and skids and drops to his knees to stop right in front of Meg, taking her in. It’s been a few months, two and a half, to be precise. She can’t have aged all that much in that space of time, and she seems to have acquired a healthy tan from the blazing Palm Springs sun (excellent, Apollo very much approves of that and he’s happy to help) – but. There’s something about her expression. The tightness of the skin around her eyes, the set of her jaw.
He says her name again, this time tinged with incredulousness. Meg. Here. In his palace. It’s so out-of-place. It’s like him being caught anywhere near a live performance of Paul McCartney’s ‘Temporary Secretary’ – completely unthinkable and borderline horrifying when you consider the implications of the situation.
“Huh. Cool,” she says. “You remember me.”
“Of course I remember you,” he says, genuinely affronted that she’d even imply otherwise, and then realizes that she’s making a Meg-flavored joke in the key of dry sarcasm, and then he starts wondering how she’d got into his palace in the first place, which should be impossible, and that swiftly spirals into the vague worry that this isn’t Meg and he’s being messed with or tricked somehow. The thought makes him irrationally angry.
He reaches out and wraps a hand around her skinny wrist, and sends a gentle questioning pulse of light through her that she can’t feel. Almost immediately, the light comes bouncing back with the answer – however she got here and whatever she’s doing here, this is Meg. Slightly dehydrated, running on severely less-than-optimal amounts of sleep for a girl her age, a couple of nicks and scratches – but thoroughly, quintessentially her.
“Weirdo,” she mutters, shaking off his hand – fair, because the move had probably come literally out of nowhere for her. He notices that her fingers are bleeding – not much, just beading at several her fingertips. Like she’s just taken a blood sugar test. He’s pretty sure she isn’t diabetic, though. Strange.
And now Meg’s staring at him with a deeply considering look. She’s probably taking in his greatly diminished acne, and... he hasn’t really changed anything else about his teenage appearance, actually. Maybe she’s trying to work out if he has.
“Missed you,” she decides eventually, and crawls forward to attach herself firmly around his midriff like a tiny filthy koala.
Apollo can’t work out what he’s feeling. The incongruity of Meg, here, pressing her head into his chest and squeezing him like she hasn’t set eyes on him for a century while they both sit, doll-sized on the pine-wood floor of his godly house...
He thinks he must be half-overflowing with warm, bubbling fondness and half-drowning in terror. He finally remembers what to do with his arms in a hug-type situation, and wraps them around her back, resting his chin on top of her head. He stares at the wall behind her, wide-eyed, mind whirring. “Well, yes, I – I missed you too, of course I did, but Meg, you can’t be here – if my father finds out – ”
“We can take him,” she says, with disturbing amounts of confidence, and sneezes into his shirt. Gross.
He sighs but doesn’t let go of her. So small, so mortal. “Quick reminder that my father is the king of the heavens and also the gods?”
“Yeah.” She apparently decides she’s had enough of the hugging for today and briskly untangles herself from him, squirming away to sit a short distance from him on the floorboards once more. “Your point?” She blows her nose on her neon-green shirt – again, gross – and adjusts her glasses, which have fallen crooked from the enthusiastic embrace.
He watches, surprised at how deep the fondness flows in him. It’s warmer than ambrosia and nectar, warmer than the kiss of first morning light on his upturned face. “Never mind. Don’t have one.”
“Thought so.”
He wants to ask her a million questions – what’s she doing here, how did she get here, what’s wrong with her fingers, why does she look so tired – but all of that’s somewhat eclipsed by the simple fact that she’s here. He hasn’t seen her in two and a half months, not in person. He’d caught some glimpses of her in passing – peering out over the clouds when he could plausibly pass it off as a coincidence; bubbles and slivers of half-formed thoughts and messages drifting up from burnt offerings – but nothing real. Nothing tangible. Nothing like the proper complete experience of having her right here in front of him.
She’s pulled away from him, and is now casting a fairly judgemental glare around the inside of his palace. He immediately, absurdly, feels self-conscious. Upon returning to his house, he’d almost immediately set about overturning the entire place and reordering it into something that doesn’t make his entire body cringe just to think about.
“Why is your place so huge,” she demands plaintively. It’s barely a question. “There’s no way you need all this space to yourself.”
Apollo actually laughs in delight, surprising himself. “It’s actually not that big,” he tells her. It’s not. Not anymore. Pre-renovations, his temple had been quite literally ten times the size it is currently.
This earns him a punch to the arm. It doesn’t hurt, but he exclaims and glares at her like it does. “It is, dummy,” she informs him, firm in her perception of reality in the way that only a grumpy thirteen-year-old girl can be. “It’s like – I dunno. Someplace really big. A church.”
“A church?” He wrinkles his nose. It’s technically a temple, so maybe she’s not all that far off, but the idea of living inside a church does not appeal to him. Not even with all the insanely well-composed ecclesiastical music in the universe. “Now you’re just exaggerating.”
“It’s huge,” she insists.
“No, seriously. It’s just a matter of perspective.” He rises to his feet, and offers a hand to pull her up. To his surprise, she actually accepts the help, although she does force him to do most of the lifting work. Typical Meg. “How much do you know about quantum – ”
“Ew,” she says, interrupting.
He laughs again. He hasn’t properly laughed like this, not in weeks. “Okay, fair enough. I never really understood it either, anyway.” He grabs her hand again and says, “Uh, close your eyes, maybe?” and when she does, he spins around on his heel, taking her along with him, and the room rearranges itself as they do.
He makes a bit of a show of it, twirling her around slightly more than is strictly necessary – enough to make any mortal dizzy. When Meg staggers back, unsteady on her feet and sticking her tongue out at him, they’re both the right size to fit in the Sun Palace, or the Sun Palace is the right size to fit around them, or something else equally ambiguous.
“Oh,” she says, reassessing. “Okay. You’re right, that is smaller.”
“Kind of got a taste for small and cozy after camp,” Apollo admits.
“You murdered your piano,” she notes.
It’s... true, sort of. His largest piano is currently in bits all over the floor, near where Meg had been sitting when he’d first arrived. He’s going through the tedious process of restringing the entire thing, by hand. And tuning it, by ear. With repurposed guitar strings. When he relates this to Meg, with no small amount of pride (he’s halfway through, and that’s no small feat when you consider that guitar strings were never meant to be attached to a piano in any form) she stares at him blankly for a moment and then says, “Why, though?”
He shrugs, enthusiasm waning a bit. “Uh, why does anyone do anything stupid?”
“Because they’re you, and you just tend to do stupid things in general?” she guesses.
“Charming as ever, Meg. No, because I’m curious about how it’ll sound when I’m done.” He really is. He really hopes it’ll sound like a proper guitar being strummed when he goes to actually play on the keys, but that’s just idly fantasy. He can’t imagine it’ll end up sounding all that great, because guitar strings aren’t really built to be put under that much stress and then be hit repeatedly with a hammer, but it’s something new. Something fresh.
“Oh,” she says, and then squints at the half-strung baby grand. “Well... okay. But aren’t you, you know, a god?”
His eyebrows raise. “Well, I should hope so. With all the effort I went to – ”
“All the effort I went to.”
“ – the effort we went to; agree to disagree.”
“Fine. So why don’t you just, I don’t know, snap your fingers and get it all done in less than a second?”
The answer to that is complicated. The answer to that is that he could, and he actually did snap his fingers to get it all done the moment he’d had that idea, but he’d hated the feeling so much that the only thing to do was to put it back as it was and do it all by hand. The feeling was terrible. Unsatisfying isn’t the word to describe it, and nether is shameful, but –
“Doing things by hand is fun,” he says instead. It’s not the truth. It’s not exactly fun, not all the time. It’s the closest he can manage to the truth, though. “Passes the time, you know?”
To his surprise, she doesn’t actually challenge this. Instead, she nods thoughtfully, as if it makes perfect sense to her. Maybe it does. “Do you have a piano that isn’t in pieces all over the floor, though?”
“I have six,” says Apollo happily, momentarily distracted at just the thought of it. Just because his palace isn’t overtly extravagant anymore doesn’t mean that he can’t pack it with all the miscellaneous musical instruments he can lay his hands on. He’s got mandolins stuffed on shelves, accordions tucked into corners, a lone dizi propped up next to his out-of-tune old balalaika, and the Valdezinator taking pride of place on top of a stack of old jazz standards. He still isn’t quite 100% on playing that thing, but the improvement since he’d returned from being mortal has been astounding.
“Cool.” She fiddles with the hem of her eye-watering shirt, not really meeting his gaze. “You said you’d teach me, right?”
He blinks. And then blinks again, attempting to connect some dots. “Hang on. Meg, did you – did you come up here, sneaking past guards and gods and everything in-between, at great risk to your life (even though you may have been blissfully unaware of that fact), just to visit me for piano lessons?”
“Yeah. Sure,” she says after a moment, and he’s certain she’s not telling the truth, but... “So show me the piano. How do I do it? I just press the keys?”
“Just press the keys, she says,” Apollo laughs with a roll of his eyes. “The absolute audacity! Here, let me...” He spins around, glances left and right, and then leads Meg over to his personal favorite of his six-ish pianos; a relatively new twentieth-century upright tucked into the corner behind a fleet of music stands holding notebooks full of scribbled poetry fragments. He cracks open the lid as she sits down on the bench, looking kind of unsure where to put her hands and her feet.
“We really shouldn’t be doing this,” he says, half to himself.
Meg frowns, a hint of angry belligerence emerging. “Why not? You said you’d teach me.”
“Well, yes, but – ”
“Are you going to break your promise?”
“Never,” he says immediately, with such raw intensity that she momentarily looks taken aback. “ – That is, I – no. Absolutely not. I told you that you’d be getting the highest quality piano education it is possible for a growing demigod to receive, and that is precisely what I intend to bestow upon you. Now, first you hold your hands like this – ” He demonstrates, and she hesitantly mirrors him – the first time in the history of everything that she’s followed his instructions without complaint, probably. “ – like you’re holding a tennis ball, that’s right – and then...”
*
He teaches her Chopsticks first, because even though it’s stupid and basic and kind of makes him want to tear his ears out, it’s easy as ambrosia pie to learn and makes beginner pianists feel really good about themselves. He watches her tap out the simple melody, the blood seeping sluggishly from her fingertips staining the white keys, and savors the brightness of her tired eyes and the little grin tugging at the corner of her mouth, and wonders. Wonders and worries. Had she always been this small, and it’s only now that he’s no longer mortal that he’s noticing it properly?
“So, your fingers,” he says, after a few minutes of Chopsticks-on-loop – he has a feeling this is going to get infuriating later on, but that’s a problem for future him.
“It’s nothing,” she dismisses immediately. “Just scratched them is all.”
“All right,” he says. Pauses. “Want me to heal them?”
She grunts, and pauses her playing to extend her hands in his direction, which is pretty much an open invitation. “Don’t mess them up,” she warns.
“You’re talking to the god of medicine here,” he says, mock-offended, and takes her hands gently in his to examine her fingers properly. It really does just look like she’s pricked them – all of them – with needles. A bit of a strange sort of wound, but hardly life-threatening. He can’t sense any sort of poison, either. “Rogue gardening accident?”
“What?”
He gestures vaguely at the marks. “Sort of looks like you stuck your hands in a rose bush or something,” he says offhandedly, hoping Meg will correct him and tell him what’s actually going on.
She does not, which Apollo probably should have expected. “Yeah,” she says. “I did that. Ouch.”
Suspicion is warring with concern, but he shakes it off and heals her fingers with no further preamble. It takes literally no power to accomplish, and the skin heals over in less than a split second. As an afterthought, he cleans the excess blood off the piano keys with a swipe of his hand. “There you go – never say I don’t do anything for you. Mwah,” he adds as an afterthought, planting a kiss on her hand. “All better.”
She rolls her eyes, and takes her hands back. “You don’t actually have to kiss it better. I’m not, like, six, Apollo.”
He scoffs at this. “Of course you need to kiss it better! I think I’d know; god of medicine, remember?”
“Hard to forget, you never shut up about it.”
“So trust my authority when I tell you that kissing a boo-boo better is an integral part of the healing process,” he says, and pokes her gently in the side. “I’m also the god of truth. Would I lie about something like that?”
She pokes him back harder, and he retaliates by reaching over to ruffle and mess up her hair as much as he can – and then he freezes, because a split-second overwhelming realization threatens to drown him. He’s in his palace on Olympus and not in the Waystation and not at camp, and if his father were to walk in right now –
But just as quickly he remembers that he isn’t afraid of his father any more. He thinks, grab Meg, flash down to the Waystation so she can’t get hurt, flash back and deal with whatever he has to throw at me, and he relaxes. As long as he’s quick enough, everything will be fine. And his reaction time at this point is immaculate.
“Hey,” he says, noticing that Meg’s gone back to hammering out Chopsticks with all the seriousness of a Gregorian monk composing a litany for the dead. “You’ve got that down, nice work – how about I teach you some actual music now?”
She wrinkles her nose, but lets him show her how to play a C major scale, up and down, and then contrary-motion for good measure. She’s remarkably, uncharacteristically patient as he walks her through simple mode theory – ionian through to phrygian – and then basic chords. Soon enough, he’s flicking through chord books for songs she recognizes, because there really is nothing like being able to slam out some basic chords to a song you know and think to yourself, hey, I can play this!
She knows Ella Fitzgerald, apparently. The way she brightens when he offers it makes him suspect it’s a pre-Nero sort of thing, which makes his throat tighten just a bit, but he pushes that back quickly in favor of showing her how to follow along with the bare-bones score to Paper Moon.
She plays the chords, he makes up a meandering jazz melody, and when she starts to hum, scratchy and untrained, he just about melts. It’s by no means the prettiest or most coherent duet he’s ever played, not by a long shot, but there’s a delicious simplicity to it that has taken up residence somewhere very close to his heart.
“I know you didn’t come here just for piano lessons,” Apollo says when the music trails off to nothing. They sit there for a moment, silent. Meg’s hands are still resting on the keys to D-flat minor. “Not that I mind, but... You look so tired, Meg. What’s wrong?” He swallows. “Let me help, please?”
“You already are,” she says, which is more of an answer than he’d expected. He’d kind of half-expected her to deny the existence of any sort of problem outright. “Just... being here.”
“That doesn’t tell me anything.” He flutters his fingers over the keys, decides on a chord, and plays A-major-nine, soft and lovely. An octave beneath him, Meg tries to copy him, but her fingers can’t quite manage the stretch. She compromises by using her other hand, and he adds a thirteenth on top for good measure and also some funky flair. “Look, I know you’re probably getting sick of me mentioning it every five minutes by this point, but I am a god now. Again, I mean. I have all this power and all the time in the world, and... and, really, what’s the point if I can’t use it to help people? Help you?”
Her fingers slip, and the chord crunches unpleasantly for the split-second before she withdraws, screeching the piano stool back in an equally unpleasant cacophony of noise. “It doesn’t matter what the point is. You can’t fix everything, Apollo.”
His finger lingers on the upper G-sharp. There’s something very strange and contrary about a solitary G-sharp. “I – I know that.” Gods does he know that. He’s so very aware of that. “But I can try. I want to try. I can fix this. Fix you. Whatever it is! Or I can – I can just listen, if that’s what you – ”
“I don’t want to do piano anymore,” she says abruptly. She’s scowling. Her leg’s jittering. These are two very distinct Meg-tells, but he doesn’t know what they’re telling him. She’s upset. She doesn’t like this conversation and she wants to change it, sure, that’s something, but he doesn’t know why. “Let’s do something else.”
He hasn’t showed her any of the fun stuff yet – no cadences or mixed metres, not even polyrhythms – but none of that’s as important as the fact that there’s something wrong with his best friend and even with all of the power in the world at his fingertips he still can’t do anything about it.
“Meg,” he says, softly.
“Apollo,” she responds, scrunching up her face. “I said let’s do something else.”
He wants to press it. He really does. But trying to get an answer out of Meg when she’s in one of these moods is like trying to get Sisyphus’s boulder neatly and evenly balanced atop its hill. “What kind of something else do you have in mind?”
“Show me around Olympus,” she demands, hopping up to her feet. “That’s an order, by the way.”
“You do, of course, realize that you’re not my master anymore, and I don’t have to do anything that you tell me to,” Apollo says, torn between worry and amusement.
“I know,” she replies. “I’m still telling you to do it, though.”
He thinks about how he’s been half-daydreaming about exactly this for nearly a full month – getting to meander with her around Olympus, showing her all of the best gardens and the weirdest, prettiest flowers that he’s made special note of in the back of his head in a little partition of his consciousness neatly labelled ‘for Meg’. He also thinks about how furious, how confused, how bewildered his fellow gods will be if they find that he spent an afternoon teaching a mortal child basic piano skills and where to find the best hot chocolate the heavenly city has to offer.
He weighs this all up, weighs it up with Meg’s quiet exhaustion and the way that she hasn’t really moved more than a metre or two away from his side since they’d hugged on the floor, and says, “Well, you’re the boss.”