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If there's one thing to be said for extremist, revolutionary groups whose ultimate plan is, in fact, world domination, it's that as a general rule, they tend not to be the most original bunch -- for those so keen on changing the status quo, they stick to the letter about it. If the method is tried and true, why bother fixing it?
So while the Titan army is no less obnoxious than they ever were with their fe fi fo fum routine, they are, at the very least, reassuringly predictable.
"You know, I think you're right," Rachel goes, pausing in the middle of the sidewalk to reach down and adjust the heel of her sneaker, holding onto his elbow for balance. She uses this whole movement to look behind them surrepsticiously. "We're totally being followed."
Percy, who'd been expecting something of the sort every since he came home from camp at the end of summer and would have frankly been disappointed in the organizational hierarchy of the enemy if someone didn't keep an eye out on him, just kind of sighed. "This better not be a repeat of Kelli the demonic cheerleader."
Rachel raises an eyebrow. He is immediately jealous: he can't move his eyebrows separately of each other, because he's deformed like that, so he can't pull that look off. "Oh, you mean the cheerleader that somehow managed to destroy the music room and single-handedly crush the dreams of the Goode High School marching band? Oh, wait," she put a thoughtful finger to her lips. At some point since the last time they hung out, she'd been bored enough to paint her nails with white-out: it's flaking off at the ends. "I think she had help. I distinctly remember this cute prospective freshman I know leaving me behind to clean up the mess."
"It happens," he keeps his voice carefully neutral.
She flashes him a grin, the kind where he's grinning back without conscious thought. "As first dates go, I've had better," she says airily, and throws her head back to laugh at his spluttering.
They turn a corner, ducking sideways and dropping down into the well of a set of basement stairs, cutting through the cellar of a cigar shop and coming up, plausibly, in the way that only happens in New York City, in front of a pizzeria owned by some chef with his own show on the Food Network. When Rachel checks a few minutes later, this time by pretending to ask a passerby where the nearest bakery is, they've lost their stalker.
***
The next time Percy sees him, he's ducking into his mother's work, nose running from the cold. There's a nicely-dressed woman in heels coming out at the same time, a large gift box in her arms, done up with brown and mint green ribbons the way the sweets shop does around Christmas.
He holds the door open as she goes through, gingerly testing her footing in the slush, and catches a glimpse of him in the reflection off the glass: a figure clearly wearing too many coats for his frame, a frightfully hideous maroon scarf wrapped so tightly around his face it's almost impossible to get a good look at him; Percy can see the tips of his ears, stained red from the wind, and the definition of his eyebrows. He can't see his eyes in the reflection, but he doesn't need to: there's only one.
Percy feels is mouth twist into some unattractive shape or another, and he stomps his boots out on the welcome mat and heads inside, getting a faceful of central heating and Manheim Steamroller playing from the overhead speakers. His stalker doesn't follow him in.
He choruses a greeting to Christine, who's stacking boxes in the shop window in the shape of a Christmas tree. "May I take one of those?" he goes, and she nudges a box towards him with her foot. Macadamia nuts dipped in dark chocolate; it'd have to do. He rummages in his backpack for a sheet of looseleaf and a pen, scribbles out a note and folds it in quarters.
Sally's at the cash register, loose wispy hairs escaping from her ponytail and curling around her face. He kisses her cheek, not even having to stand on tip-toe anymore to do it, and ducks down to steal a piece of tape from underneath the counter.
"Can you do me a favor?" he asks the customer his mother's ringing up, who gives him the wide-eyed look of someone who isn't asked to do anything out of the routine very often. "Can you give this --" he hands him the box of chocolates with the note taped to it. "-- to the kid in the ugly scarf standing by the light pole on the corner there -- the one playing the PSP. The little handheld game thing," he elaborates at the customer's blank look.
"Do I want to know?" Sally asks, looking bemused, as the door swings shut behind the man.
He just shrugs, not knowing what to answer.
The note reads: were they so pissed at you for your performance in the Labyrinth that they demoted you to being a creeper instead?
***
Four days later, Percy comes out of Modern European History to find, I'm allergic to your nuts, keyed into the paint on his locker door.
"I like him," Rachel decides, holding her textbook up to her mouth to hide her giggling. "Stalkers without a sense of humor just aren't the same."
Percy snorts.
To his left, a couple of upperclassmen are giving him the fish-eye, and he sighs, resigning himself to having no social life for the foreseeable future. Again.
***
"I don't get it," he says into the phone, reaching above his head to open a cabinet door. He knows he saw a box of angel hair pasta in here the other day while he was looking for something unrelated. Where did it go? "What are they so afraid I'm going to do? It's not like I'm going to magically solve the prophecy and destroy Kronos in between P.E. and Intro to Lit."
"...." says Annabeth.
"I mean, it's New York in, like, the dead of winter, okay. Most days, I can't even be assed to do more than sit around the house in my Snuggie and bitch at the snow crews when they leave drifts on the sidewalk that block my apartment, seriously, I'm not going to go and save the world. They can just relax." There it is; it's behind the PopTarts. No wonder he didn't see it before.
"...." says Annabeth.
He holds his hand over the pot of water to see if it's boiling yet. Wisps of steam are rising up, but it's not there yet. He debates waiting, or if he should use his powers to help it along.
He switches the phone to his other ear and pulls out a string of hard pasta out of the box and crunches on it. "I just feel bad. Couldn't they have, like, sent a monster or something to stalk me? They've got empousi crawling all over the place. Why did they have to send Ethan Nakamura? I feel like I should be more entertaining, he's probably bored out of his mind. NO, HEY, MADDIE," he snaps his fingers at Rachel's golden retriever, who gives him a deeply betrayed look. "Get down from there, you know you're not supposed to have your paws up on the table."
"... you don't have a dog," says Annabeth.
"Yeah, no, I'm over at --" Rachel's, he almost says, but finely honed self-preservation instincts kick in, bringing to mind all the horror stories he's heard about nuclear holocaust and decides he doesn't want to risk it. "A friend's house," he finishes lamely. "ANYWAY," he goes, when the silence on Annabeth's end of the line is filled with the sound of her forcefully trying to be reasonable. "You know Ethan better than me. Should I be worried I'm going to wake up one day and find him over my bed with a knife?"
"Not unless you like it like that," she answers. And then, "oh gods."
Percy nearly upends the box of pasta in his excitement. "YES. YES. I got Annabeth Chase to say something dirty! FUCK YES!" he punches the air. "Best day ever!"
"Oh shut up," goes Annabeth, but she's laughing.
***
Early February ushers in and out with nothing more than two weeks straight of gun metal grey skies, a misunderstanding with a rather hedonistic pegasus in the lobby of the opera house that may or may not have led to a different misunderstanding with NYPD, and a really bad case of cabin fever.
"So tell me what we're doing here, exactly," Percy goes, standing on the step below Rachel as she pushes the buzzer for Muller, K. He has to lean back to avoid getting hit in the face by the ends of her scarf as the wind catches them.
"I want to see my dad's face when these wind up in his PR box in a couple weeks," she says happily, and Percy makes a face at the side of her head, but can't actually say anything, but hey, don't they all have daddy issues?
"That doesn't answer my --"
"Yes?" crackles the intercom with an Eastern European warble.
"Um, yeah, Rachel Dare here for --"
"Ah yes! The redhead with the tits like mosquito bites. Come on up, dollface." The door pops off the lock with a loud buzz.
Rachel looks over her shoulder at Percy, her nose crinkled up.
"They're not. They're fine," he assures her, and pretends not to notice when she sticks a bobby pin in the locking mechanism on the door. She's done it a few times before, saying, well, we don't want your stalker sitting all by himself in the cold.
"This is a photo studio," he feels compelled to add four flights later, when they're sitting on mismatched dining chairs in a makeshift lobby of K. Muller's apartment. There are three other girls here, each of them bearing a frightening resemblance to praying mantises: tall, leggy, and ready to bite somebody's head off.
Rachel bobs her head in a nod. "I found Kayina on Craigslist --"
"Yeah, cause that never ends badly."
"-- and she was looking for underwear models." She draws herself up slightly, voice turning mockingly pious, "And since girls of my ... 'socioeconomic bracket'," she throws up air quotes, her lip curled, "have an image to uphold, my father will find it positively abhorrent. I just needed you to tag along and look vaguely manly and threatening in case someone tries anything."
"Ooo, rent-a-boyfriend. I like it."
Rachel and a sharp-nosed blonde named Kimberly get called back together by the warbling voice that answered the doorbell. Not knowing what else to do, Percy follows them, trying to turn his awkward expanding limbs into something approaching hulking, so that he looks more like someone serious about protecting his girl and less like Popeye the sailor man before he eats his spinach. It doesn't really work, because Kayina completely ignores him, Canon hanging from a thick strap around her neck and swinging as she hands both Rachel and the other girl a stack of lacy clothes. She shooes Kimberly into another room and then leaves through another door, like a rabbit in a warren.
Rachel unwinds the scarf from around her neck and hands it to him. "Kayina's looking to get into design school here in New York. Modeling's too cut-throat for her, I think, but you have to give her points for trying."
"When you told me you wanted my help with something after eighth period, I thought you meant super-gluing the lacrosse team's lockers closed," Percy answers dryly. "This wasn't what I had in mind."
"We were going to, but Target wouldn't let me buy superglue unless I was eighteen," Rachel complains. "I don't know what they thought I was going to do with it. Sniff it?"
"You know, that would explain, like, half the senior class."
"This is true." Her fingers pause on the big black buttons of her peacoat. "Jackson, this is the part where I take off all my clothes."
"Oh," he goes. "Right. I'll just --" he gestures with her scarf to her increasingly bemused expression, then puts it down on the end table and slips from the room.
"Say hi to our stalker!" she calls at his retreating back.
The two girls remaining in the lobby have been joined by somebody's mother, the three of them sitting in a line as far away as they can get from Ethan Nakamura, who's trying very hard not to look sinister and brooding and failing at it. He's holding a stainless steel canister between his hands.
"Is that decaf?" Percy goes, dropping into the chair beside him. Ethan startles and masks it quickly.
"Duh," he answers, seemingly on autopilot. "You don't give kids like us caffeine."
"Point," Percy concedes, lifting the canister straight out of his hands and downing a swallow. It's still warm, and sweet, more caramel flavoring than coffee, which he won't ever admit to liking out loud at the risk of sounding like the girls in homeroom. "You know," he goes, swallowing. "Luke must have been pretty desperate for volunteers, if you're the only person they could get to follow me around. You're not exactly inconspicuous," he gestures vaguely at the eyepatch.
"It beats being at Luke's right-hand side these days," Ethan says with a bald honesty he hadn't been expecting. He steals the coffee back. "It's not Luke in there anymore."
Percy suppresses a shiver. He already knew it, but it's still strange to hear it out loud, thinking, that's Luke he's talking about, your Luke, who got the whole Hermes cabin in trouble when you were eleven for your tawdry rendition of Ninety-Nine Naked Wet Sirens on the Wall, and then talked you right back out of it. "So why are you still with them?"
Ethan turns his head, studying him with his one good eye. "Why are you still with the Olympians?"
"Because we're the good guys," Percy replies, knowing the instant it's out of his mouth how stupid it sounds said out loud like that, for all that it's something he feels to his bones. He's fighting on the right side. He has to be.
"See, that's what we say about ourselves, too."
Percy flashes him a look. "The Olympians don't use monsters to do their dirty work. They don't make puppets out of children."
"Yeah, now they don't," Ethan goes, unaffected. "Because they're bored with you. To them, you're like possums, playing dead. They've lost interest for the past couple of decades and wandered away. But now they have you, the prophecy kid. From where I'm standing, you smell a lot like a puppet."
Percy gets it, kind of. It's something they're starting to teach him in freshman lit, this omniscience idea: that just because he's in school -- learning (sometimes) and finding new ways to piss off the lacrosse team and making Dumbo out of stray bits of clay that fall from Rachel's projects and making faces when half-eaten food winds up in the drinking fountain -- doesn't mean everything else stops. The Titan army is still growing. Half-bloods are still training. Percy still has to decide the fate of the world, and he's doing everything in his power to make it lean in favor of the Olympians. Why? Because Grover asked him to. Because Annabeth asked him to. Because to him, there's no other side worth being on if they're not on it.
He supposes it's something similar to Ethan. To him, Luke's side is the right side to be on, because Luke is his friend and Luke asked him to. Everything else -- the spiel about his mother, the apathy of the gods -- is just padding, plausible-sounding excuses, when really, the reason is so much more simple.
"So," he says after a beat, trying for light and missing it by a mile. "Reported anything interesting about me to the head honcho?"
"When you do something interesting, I'll let them know."
Percy grins. "This doesn't count?"
"Yeah, about that. Why'd you run out of there so fast?"
"Rachel was changing."
For the first time, Ethan looks at him with something approaching emotion in that flat, black eye of his. "A hot girl was taking her clothes off, and you left the room?"
There's a pause.
"Oh my gods, I did," and he buries his face into his hands, but not before he sees Ethan grin, the briefest wink of white.
***
He doesn't know if Ethan just stops trying, or if he's given him permission somehow, but he starts seeing him everywhere: inside the turnstiles when he heads down in the subway, standing on street corners, pretending to be absorbed in his PSP, outside his school, in the lobby of his apartment building. Every time he meets Percy's eye, he just raises his good eyebrow -- on him, Percy supposes that's the equivalent of a manly hug and a "hey bro, how's being stalked working for you?"
"Did you know that there's an enemy half-blood downstairs going through your mail right this second?" Nico says without preamble, striding into Percy's living room where he has the VHS/DVD player in pieces on the carpet, trying to figured out why it won't read incoming discs.
Percy flips the plastic plating over, scanning it for debris that might be messing it up. "Oh, is that where he went? I was wondering. Hang out a bit, I might send you down there to fetch him -- he's Asian, he can probably figure out what's wrong with this dumb thing."
"Percy!" his mother admonishes from the kitchen. Then, "hello, Nico, it's been awhile. I'm making pot pie, if you want to stay for a little bit, you can have some with us."
Percy smiles down at his screwdriver. She's making no such thing -- they were going to have a cold cereal and sandwiches dinner tonight, but Sally's maternal instincts go into hyperdrive whenever Nico's around, no matter how busy she is. She's probably digging in the freezer for a box of Marie Coriander's right now.
"Hey, listen --" Nico starts.
"The answer's still no," Percy says instantly.
"But --"
"No. I'm not doing it. I don't care what kind of advantage it gives us, if Luke did it in order to be some vessel for Kronos, then I really don't want to copycat it."
Above him, Nico huffs. "You don't even know what it involves."
"The fact that you want me to agree before you tell me tells me everything I need to know. I'm not doing it." He looks up for the first time, and freezes. "What are you wearing?"
Nico rolls his eyes, pure put-upon preteen boy. "I was in China. It was Chinese New Years. It's the year of the ox. Whatever, stop judging me."
"No, it's .. um. Flattering? I guess. Why were you in China?"
"Uh, because I do, in fact, have friends outside of you? I wound up there once or twice when I was learning how to shadow travel. You get to know people when you drop into their living room on accident. Twice. Once on top of their aunt, but it was fine, because they didn't really like her anyway."
"Speaking of dropping in on people's living rooms."
If Nico rolls his eyes any harder, they're going to fall out. "Yeah, fine. I'm going to leave now. Unlike some people, I have work to be doing."
"Yeah, okay." Percy tosses a slim sheet of silver metal down onto the carpet, having absolutely no idea what it was. "And send Ethan up here on your way out, would you?" he shouts after Nico, knowing there was no way in hell he was going to actually follow the order. "Crap," he hisses, eyeing the mess he made and wondering if he had enough money saved up to get his mom and Paul a new DVD player for their wedding.
***
8:38, and Percy's already twenty minutes late for school when he sprints down the steps into the subway, backpack banging in the slope of his back and right shoe untied. Panting, he slides into a seat by the window, wishing not for the first time that he had a cell phone he could use to text Rachel and tell her to trick their first period teacher into thinking he's there, and that no, he hadn't been eaten. He hefts his foot up on the bench in front of him and yanks hard on his shoelaces. It'd be just his luck that he'd trip and bash his skull in six months before he's supposed to decide the fate of the world.
Five minutes and two stops later, Ethan drops into the seat next to him, dressed in full battle armor. The straps on his left vambrace are cut clean through, the flat of the armor dangling from his arm like a loose flap of skin. His hair hasn't been combed and there's blood smeared in fingerprint-shaped lines on his neck.
Percy boggles at him. "Don't they teach you anything about how to blend in? Subtlety, Ethan, you should try it sometime."
Ethan slumps in the seat. "Give me a break, it's been a pretty stressful couple of days. All reinforcements got called in two nights ago for a raid on Baltimore, but somebody tipped off your side and Clarisse was there to cockblock us with your fucking army."
"Well, good for her." Percy ignores the uneasy twist in his stomach, the feeling that he should have been there, helping, and not safe at home, complaining to his mom about how useless the Pythagorean theorem is going to be to his real life.
The corner of Ethan's mouth quirks. "It wasn't a total loss, though. We got two of yours to come over to our side. A son of Aphrodite and this other kid, super clever. Name's Syed, I think."
"Syed? Ah, no, really?" Shit, Annabeth was going to be pissed. She'd trained her cabin better than that. "That's too bad, I liked him. He taught me that shortcut in Call of Duty."
"He'll be useful," Ethan says, like he's talking about something he picked up at the hardware store and not a half-blood Percy remembers sitting at the Athena table, trying to get the newest girl to stop crying by shoving green beans up his nose.
"Looks like you hustled to get straight back to me, though," Percy says, and immediately blames how crappy the morning's been going so far when that comes out way creepier than he meant. "Since it doesn't look like you've changed."
"I haven't?" Ethan blinks down at himself, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth to smother a yawn. "Oh, I guess I haven't. Whatever, I'm not at my best today."
They lapse into silence, filled only with the click-clack of the train over the rails, the low parade of lights across their faces as they go through another tunnel, the coughing of the young mother four seats behind them. Finally, Percy takes a deep breath and turns to face him. "I'll see it someday," he says, putting every ounce of confidence he can into his tone.
"See what?"
"You at your best."
Ethan is startled silent by that, gaze sliding back and forth like he's not certain if he's allowed to comment. The other commuters in their car ignore them, true New Yorker style -- like they're not even there.
"I'm sure of it," Percy continues, speaking mostly to the stylized Arabic characters Sharpied into the seatback in front of him. "I'll see you make the right decision and join the right side. That will be you at your best."
***
The second day of March is just as monotonous as practically all of February had been, grey-skied and so cold Percy could feel it in his fillings. Goosebumps prickle up and down his mother's bare arm when she links it through his, and he doesn't know how much of her shivering has to do with her nerves and how much of it is because it is freezing.
The shaking stops when they enter the church. The pale sunlight coming down through the stained glass catches in whorls of blues, greens, and reds across her face and her dress. Percy walks her down the aisle and hands her off to Paul at the altar, and he might just be fifteen years old and dumb as bricks in regards to some things, but even he understands the significance of that one.
There aren't a lot of people on his mother's side of the church, which is more out of self-preservation than any lack of likability on her part: there's Percy, Grover, Rachel, Nico (who Percy hadn't really wanted to come, but Sally insisted. "He's like a new puppy, Percy. He followed you home, you have to socialize him."), plus Christine and several other women from Sally's work, a couple friends from her college classes, and even one man who'd formerly been a poker-playing buddy of Smelly Gabe's, who, upon Gabe's "unfortunate accident," suddenly discovered a deep and abiding love for cake-decorating and moved in with a crossdresser from Queens. He and Sally still often meet for lunch in the cantina at the community college and like to engage in philosophical discussions over rye bread, dill pickle, and and 75c bags of Sunchips.
It wasn't anything to sneeze at, really, but as Paul came already prepackaged with an extended family, twenty-four members of his alma mater's former Dead Poet's Society, and the entire staff and faculty of Goode High School, it kind of came off looking like maybe Sally just didn't try hard enough.
They'd been planning on having the wedding reception at wherever was cheap and open, but Rachel had gotten them this place -- or, rather, Rachel's father's credit card got them this place. ("Oh, please, like he'll notice," was her rationale. "Besides, this is the wedding, isn't it? Like, first is the worst, second is the best, that kind of thing?" When he'd just kind of stared at her, she huffed a breath out so hard her bangs blew up. "This is your mother's for real wedding. It should be everything she wants." And that he could agree with.)
"This place" comes with chandeliers and champagne and carpeting that's softer and cushier than Percy's mattress, vaulted glass ceilings with a perfect view of the sky -- albeit an incredibly boring, cloudy, "fuck you Manhattan" winter sky.
True to form, he and his mother get first dance, which Percy hadn't been worried about until he'd seen the reception hall: now it feels like even the building is judging him, and he doesn't want to let it down. Rachel, of course, had volunteered to teach him how to dance ("jumping up and down in place only works in a mosh pit, Jackson, I don't think your mom will appreciate it.") and he'd let her, because he figured out a long time ago that Rachel Elisabeth Dare took it upon herself to embarrass him at every possible interval and he'd better just go along with it.
He spends most of the night just waiting for something to come barging in, because really, usually just him being somewhere is enough to draw in some curious monster or another, and since it's him, Grover, and Nico in one place, he's kind of expecting armageddon to come waltzing in to ask about the raspberry cordial.
But all the catastrophes that seem to be unfolding are the perfect normal type: two of Paul's youngest nephews get their sippy-cups mixed up and one of them winds up projectile vomiting all over his father's dress shirt. One of the bridesmaids catches Grover munching on a linen napkin, but Percy's been deflecting that kind of attention since he was eleven and can do the "there's nothing to see here" spiel by rote.
"Rachel!" he calls, reeling into the kitchen area and searching for the familiar glimpse of red hair and white dress. He smiles and nods to two people giggling by the water cooler, having no idea who they are but figuring they're related to Paul somehow.
"Rachel!" he bellows again, can already hear her answer in his head: word of advice, boy, shouting for a woman is a surefire way to get her to not come.
In the other room, his mother and new stepfather are solidly sloshed, the wine having been much better than they'd anticipated (they're singing, too; Paul's voice gone all high falsetto, "GALLILEO! GALLILEO!" poorly timed with Sally's much deeper, "he's just a poor boy from a poor family," and he's never, ever going to let them forget this.) Meanwhile, they've run out of little plastic spoons to use to scoop toppings onto people's sundaes and Percy has no idea where they keep the extras.
He rounds the corner by the coat check, and, just like that, finds himself toe-to-toe with Ethan Nakamura.
It's knee-jerk, what he does next: there are bystanders in the hallway, mortals, so he grabs the other half-blood by the shirt and bodily hauls him into the coat room, too fast for Ethan to react, despite being older and heavier.
"What are you --" he breathes out harshly, as Ethan wrenches himself out of his hands, puts some distance between them, both of them on guard and wary. On the floor between them, a lone Hello Kitty glove smiles at them with its eyes.
"What the hell are you doing?" Percy manages, finally, abruptly so angry it's difficult to get words out. "Why are you here? I thought, out of all days, you'd have the decency -- my mother's wedding, Ethan."
"I know what day it is," Ethan goes, sounding baffled, his hackles raised. "I've been following you since Christmas, there's very little about you I don't know."
"My mother's wedding," he insists again. His hands are shaking, why are his hands shaking? "What if it was your dad out there, happier than he's been in years? Do you have to do this now? Think of your dad, I think he raised you better than this, please don't do this now --"
"I'm not here to kill you!" Ethan breaks in, loudly.
"... oh," says Percy, and abruptly goes boneless, sinking back against the door and sliding down to the floor, relief so strong inside his chest it's like it's own sentient life. "I just thought -- sorry, it's just that my mom got married, of course the universe would send someone to try and assassinate me on the day my mother gets married, it's just how things work."
He has no idea if he's making sense. His hands are shaking worse now, some mix of leftover adrenaline and aborted fight instinct, and he presses them between his thighs to hide it. Ethan sits down next to him, back to the door, racks of coats standing silent sentinel over their heads.
"What are you doing here?" he asks after a beat. "If not to ruin my day?"
The look Ethan gives him is wry. "Like you said, it's kind of an important day. I really did just come to congratulate your mom."
Percy stares at him. Ethan's mouth quirks further, and he adds, "Just because I willingly fight for Kronos doesn't mean I lose my -- what'd'you call it? My sense of decency."
"Your side kills children," Percy replies like it's a valid argument, his throat gone dry. Unbidden, a voice in the back of his head goes, and so do the gods of Olympus. Bianca wasn't a day older than you are, and she certainly didn't kill herself, now did she, and he closes his eyes against the weight of it, threatening to swamp him with gravity, and forces himself to think of something else: the way Annabeth looks when she's caught up in practicing, like nothing else exists, the smell of the stables and the echo-memory of laughter in the dining hall: all the things he wants to keep, all the things he will save Olympus for.
Ethan's smile is gone. "Can we not fight?" he asks.
"Sorry," Percy goes.
They sit there, shoulder-to-shoulder, for long moments; the party noises drifting closer and farther away in the same beat, footfalls outside the door but not actually coming in. They'll have to move eventually, although he supposes getting caught with Ethan Nakamura in the coat room isn't the weirdest thing they could find the bride's son doing.
"Okay, I lied," says Ethan after the silence has gone on long enough that breaking it is awkward. "I didn't come here just to congratulate your mom."
Oh, shit, Percy thinks, and immediately takes catalog: Riptide is in his breast pocket, though he'll have to rip the carnation out to get to it, and he borrowed these pants from Paul's youngest brother who is about his size and it'd suck hardcore if he shredded them or something, and --
"Percy," goes Ethan in this voice like nothing he's heard before, something that stops Percy dead in his tracks. Ethan reaches out and puts a hand on his leg.
The world tilts off its axis, just like that, everything blurring like an unfocused photograph except for that one point of contact, the starfish of Ethan's fingers pale against his pant leg. For one brief, nova-bright moment, Percy is completely helpless, has no idea what to do: he's defeated a Minotaur, vanquished Medusa, escaped Circe's island, and bore the weight of the world in Atlas's place, and this is what trips him up. Ethan Nakamura, traitor, son of Nemesis, four years his senior, hand on his leg and something unmistakable in his single visible eye.
"Percy," Ethan says again, and Percy thinks of him saying there's very little I don't know about you, and wonders if it's possible Ethan knows something about him that Percy himself doesn't know, just as Ethan leans in.
Up until this point in time, Percy's sexual history has been pretty much limited to an extremely confusing and subtextual conversation with Aphrodite in the back of a limo, and a single rushed kiss from Annabeth, which Percy remembers being heart-stopping, life-altering, and explosive (although all these things might have had something to do with the volcano that'd been, you know, erupting at the time.)
This is nothing like those. It's almost biological, the feeling of Ethan kissing him, and Percy'd still been subconsciously expecting Ethan to try and kill him and responds as such, instinctively, like he's fighting: dragging his teeth against Ethan's lower lip and noticing, clinically, the way it makes him jerk like he's been shocked, fingers tightening on his thigh. They shift their bodies at the same time, half-turning into each other: Percy's eyes are wide open, and in the corner of his vision, Ethan's free hand makes an aborted move towards his head.
The kiss breaks, their mouths pulling apart with glacial slowness, a movement like continents dividing.
Percy reaches out and grabs hold of Ethan's collar, fisting the fabric of his shirt -- not consciously, just desperately needing something to hold on to. "Is this --" he goes in some impostor's rasping version of his own voice. He swallows audibly and tries again, fighting down the urge to shift away, because Ethan's hand has slid down the front of his dress pants, almost like an accident, except he's pressing ever so slightly on -- he can't even think it in his own head, it's too weird, has absolutely no idea how to respond. But. If this is...
"Is this what you want?" he manages, finally. "Is this what it takes to get you to ..." Ethan leans in, mouthing at the skin at the corner of Percy's mouth; he turns into it without thinking, and feels Ethan smile. Percy doesn't think, just blurts, "Because I can be that person for you. I can do this. I just need you to tell me --"
He's babbling, can't stop, because what if ... what if this is the trade off. "Is this what it takes to get you to come back to our side?"
Ethan's unblinking gaze slides left for an instant, just for an instant, and then snaps back, intense and so dark it has his stomach bottoming out.
"Yes," he says, and that's all Percy needs to hear. He takes his uncertainty, his doubts, the gut instinct that sees Ethan Nakamura and yells, danger, Will Robinson!, and puts it aside, every last bit of it, because this is just as important as every battle he's ever fought. He pushes himself to his knees, knotting his fingers into Ethan's hair and catching on the well-worn string of the eyepatch, and kisses him.
***
Ethan lied, of course.
He learns this months after his mother marries Paul, months after they run out of little plastic serving spoons, months after they cut the reception short because Rachel couldn't find Percy and they'd all assumed he'd been eaten because that's the kind of luck they had, months after Percy kisses Ethan, thinking he can change him.
Whatever it was, it's not enough, and he drops his sword, drops everything, to catch Annabeth as she collapses, her blood spilling hot on his skin, Ethan feet away with dagger in hand -- a distance immeasurable, insurmountable.
(Ethan lied, but in the end, Percy does get to see him at his best: it's the look on his face, something unafraid, something heroic, moments before he dies.)
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fin