Chapter Text
Thalia leaves home when she is ten. After all, it’s not as if she has any family left there to stay for.
It’s not, in any way, safer than being in the apartment with Beryl, with the shattered bottles in the corners and the stench of expensive perfume and cigars, and windows that she left open all the time in the winter, her thermal regulation shot. But she prefers it anyway.
The street is full of monsters. Things with claws and fangs and spines. They spit fire and vomit acid and speak in strange voices and lick their lips with forked tongues when they look at her. They teach her the hard way that violence, not English, is her mother tongue.
Thalia learns how to summon lightning. Wrestles the constant feeling of static into a weapon. Peels the pins and needles from her limbs, sculpting them into blades, spears. They are her own claws, made to match the monsters that want to eat her.
When she is eleven, she kills three dracanae with her lightning and a jagged scrap of metal that she scooped out of a gutter. And Hermes melts out of the shadows, tilting a postal cap at her and winking, sing-songing, “Delivery for the daughter of Zeus, courtesy of dear old dad.”
Zeus’s apology for her eleven miserable years of existence is a spear, and a shield with a face so horrifying she nearly drops it when it melts out of the form of the bracelet it’s stored in. He couldn’t even be bothered to deliver them himself.
Thalia can’t help the mix of bitterness and relief that follows that realization. He doesn’t care enough to bring her his gifts himself. But he also hasn’t come, so Thalia doesn’t have to deal with him. Any man that could find something beautiful in Beryl Grace not once but twice is obviously not of sound mind.
And then, she finds Luke.
They spend four years together. Traveling, killing monsters, living. They sleep under overpasses and in sewers and in the woods. He snags wallets from pockets and she finds places to take showers. They laugh and they cry and they share everything.
And then Annabeth.
And then Grover.
And then an impossible choice that becomes no choice at all, that becomes the realization that even Thalia with her spear and her shield and her lightning, cannot be what a seven year old girl needs.
And then they go to camp.
And then there are Furies.
And then there are not Furies.
And then there is Zeus.
And then there is-
—
(Light flashes and her heart skips and when her word dies, some strange static hiccup in between, it is no longer dark and it is no longer her father's face before her. She glimpses blue eyes and then nothing.)
—
Thalia wakes up in a strange house and her first thought is, Annabeth. She staggers to her feet, up out of the bed she's been tucked into, and smashes out of the room. The larger room she finds has rows of neat shelves and medical supplies along the walls, and there's a kid with blonde hair who can't be any older than ten who jumps and shrieks as she slams the door open. “Annabeth,” she snarls, “where's Annabeth?”
The kid lets out a terrified squeak and points out a door.
Thalia crashes through. It leads onto a wrap-around porch. Around the house, spilling out in all directions, is a vast valley. Cabins dot the hills, and the booming roar of a thunderstorm shakes the sky and trembles the ground. She glimpses fluted columns and burning braziers through the slanted sheets of rain. Camp Half-Blood, just like Grover said.
Thalia straightens. Annabeth. She stumbles down the porch, steps growing steadier. She reaches a set of double doors, and on instinct, shoves her way through. The room is dark, full of shadows and the lingering gloom of the storm outside. She steps in, and spots Grover first, who whips around and stares at her, open-mouthed like he's seen a ghost. And then another figure steps out from behind him, with wide eyes and dark braids and it's-
“Annabeth?” Thalia whispers, disbelieving.
Annabeth stares back. She's so big. She's beautiful, her face sharper, her body more muscular. But she stares at Thalia and her eyes well up with tears in a way that is exactly the same. She steps forward, slowly and then faster, and then she pitches herself into Thalia's arms.
Thalia holds her instinctively, clutches her close. She squeezes, breathes in the smell of clean clothes and hair, what used to be a rarity for them, and now seems unremarkable on her. Annabeth shakes in her arms, and Thalia feels tears press against the back of her eyes.
She tries to do the mental math. It doesn't feel like any time at all has passed. And yet, it has. It must have.
She's still trying to wrap her head around it, shell-shocked and shaking, when her eyes flick back up to cross the room, scanning on instinct, and she spots it. It's in the back of the room, half-hidden in shadow, but its skin gives it away. It glows, little flickers of light pulsing down its arms, revealing scales and what Thalia recognizes, easily, as retracted claws.
Instinct kicks in. She releases Annabeth, shoves her to the side and behind her. She flicks her wrist, and her shield snaps out. She points it at the creature and it flinches, snapping back and baring two rows of shark-like fangs. With her other hand, she summons her spear, spiraling out to a deadly point. She lunges.
The monster dodges, just barely. Her spear skims under its outstretched arm as it pivots. It grabs the spear with both hands and wrenches, throwing her sideways to smack into a wall. She swings her shield around and smacks it hard in the knee. It drops down with a snarl and a curse and rolls out of the way as she lunges to kick it in the throat. “Stop!” it yells. “Stop, what the hell?!”
“I've never seen your kind before,” she snarls, “but you'll die like all the rest.” Her chest feels scraped raw, no lightning left, but it doesn't matter. There's screaming in the room but she barely hears it. She wrenches her spear from its hands and goes to stab it again.
It twists, and- clang!
Her spear goes wide, left of its head, as a sword materializes from nowhere, the flat of the blade slapping hers aside. It scrambles back, still yelling useless pleas as she pushes in, chasing for the kill, and-
There's a flash of orange and Thalia lands flat on her ass. Annabeth shoves in on top of her, stabbing her knife through the strap of her shield to pin it to the floor and wrestling her spear away from her. (She's so strong now. When did that happen?)
“Thalia, stop!” Annabeth wails. “Stop, that’s Percy! That's just Percy!”
Thalia gapes. “It's- what?”
“That’s Percy!” she cries again, as if it will make any more sense if she says it again.
Behind her, the monster finishes scrambling away. Its sword is extended in front of it, its skin pulsing with blue-white light like a frantic heartbeat. “Great,” it says, sounding utterly exhausted. “Just great. Nice start. I can already tell we’re gonna be friends.”
“What is happening?” Thalia demands. “Why are you protecting it?” She looks at it. It’s remarkably human looking for a monster, which usually means it will either be no threat at all, or way more of a threat than any of the rest. But the strange part is the orange shirt. The same orange shirt that Annabeth and Grover are wearing.
Annabeth flinches. Her dark eyes are wide and wet, her face twisted in anguish. “Thalia,” she says, “you’re not… you’re not alone anymore.”
“What are you talking about?”
Grover steps in front of the monster and pushes the blade down with his hand. He meets Thalia’s eyes and smiles shakily. “Thalia,” he says, “this is Percy Jackson. He’s a camper, and the son of Poseidon. Please, please, please don’t kill him. Partly because it would kill me too, partly because Annabeth would be so sad, and partly because I’m like, solidly eighty percent sure Poseidon would flood all of camp as retribution.”
Thalia gapes. The monster- no, the demigod- stares back at her, unblinking. Its- his mouth is set in a hard, unmoving line. He doesn’t look surprised. He just looks grim, like he saw all of this coming, and no one listened. He looks at her like she’s a monster he’ll have to kill.
—
Thalia tries to convince Annabeth to leave camp with her. Annabeth point-blank refuses. She gets so upset that she yells, and then cries, and then storms out. Thalia finds her, eventually, hiding in the Poseidon cabin with Percy and Grover.
It seems that in the past six years, both she and Annabeth were busy putting down roots, albeit different kinds.
So Thalia stays at camp, though she wants nothing more than to run away screaming and drag Annabeth with her.
Luke isn’t here. She doesn’t talk about that with Annabeth much, either. Apparently, Annabeth’s well of patience for the boy who saved her life started to dry up sometime around when he tried to take off Percy Jackson’s head like a demigod guillotine. Any time she tries to talk about it, she starts crying, and cursing, and then eventually she just gets very quiet, and sits there and stares out, far past the horizon.
Part of Thalia can’t rationalize it. Luke, kind Luke, who always made sure to steal enough extra money for them to get smoothies on occasion, who sang joking songs until Annabeth fell asleep on the hard nights, who held Thalia’s hand while she wept when they went to Hoover Dam to see the sculptures there, supposedly sacred to Zeus, and she got not even an ounce of attention from them. Luke, who loved her so much.
The other part of Thalia remembers the rest. Luke, angry Luke, who yelled at Hermes the one time he dared to show his face to them, who used to go out of his way to chase fleeing monsters back to their lairs to wipe out the last of them, who didn’t listen when Thalia told him to just focus on getting to camp, getting Annabeth safe, and kept picking fights, kept distracting them, kept wasting time. Luke, who hated the gods so much.
That part of Thalia, that remembers the full truth, has no trouble rationalizing how Luke could have looked at Percy Jackson, with his fangs and claws and scales, and not hesitated to rip up a problem at the root. What she can’t rationalize is Annabeth’s devotion to Percy, because she sees the truth, even if Annabeth is too stubborn to: perhaps he started as a demigod, but he isn’t one anymore. There’s no mistaking what he is. What he has become. Will become.
(Thalia thinks, privately, that it would be kinder to kill Percy now. Before he loses control, and becomes something no one can recognize. Before he breaks Annabeth and Grover’s hearts. But no one wants to hear the kind of terrible truths that Thalia specializes in. Annabeth has to make her own mistakes with Percy. Thalia can’t kill him until Annabeth is ready to let go.)
Everyone knows Thalia dislikes Percy, or at least is incapable of being at ease with him around. But she thinks that, of everyone at camp, perhaps only Percy himself understands what Thalia is willing to do. What she thinks should be done.
She sees it in his eyes when they speak, when they mutually orbit Annabeth and Grover. He knows what she knows. He doesn’t try to reason with her. Doesn’t try to argue that he is something he isn’t. For that, if nothing else, she respects him.
But it’s a waiting game, so Thalia will wait.
Percy goes to great lengths to avoid being around her. She appreciates the effort. It would be more effective, however, if they weren’t linked by Annabeth and Grover. And also, if Annabeth and Grover weren’t so stubbornly, fruitlessly trying to get them to be friends. So they end up spending awkward amounts of time in the same space, mutually ignoring each other.
And the other thing: Annabeth hovers in Thalia’s footsteps like a shadow, like Thalia will vanish again if she looks away. And Thalia watches and talks and lives in this camp, following Annabeth around in the place that has housed the last six years of her life, and discovers that where she remembers Annabeth, Percy knows Annabeth. Knows how to make the perfect comment to provoke her least dignified snorting laugh. Knows when she’ll be at different activities based on how hot the day is supposed to be. Knows her favorite snack, and the type of laundry detergent she prefers, and how she lunges and twists in the sparring ring.
It shouldn’t make Thalia as furious as it does.
He’s not even trying, is the thing. He’s not trying to replace her. Not trying to be better than her. Not trying to beat her, like loving Annabeth is some sort of game. But he is. Beating her, that is.
Which is especially infuriating when he seems to be half-dead himself. She catches it, the way he sometimes stares off into the distance like he isn’t there at all. The way he watches his claws sheath and unsheath, sliding in and out of his fingers like foreign intruders. The way he and Annabeth spend hours in the sparring ring until he adjusts to the new way his webbed hands grip the hilt of his sword. The way he scratches at his scales like he wants to scrape them off with the blade of his own weapon.
She’s told that the features, as Annabeth calls them, are new. As in, less than a day before she popped out of her tree sort of new. So Percy walks around camp and does a half-decent job of hiding the way he loathes his own body. Thalia knows what he will become. It seems that Percy does, too.
One afternoon, after Percy and Thalia get into a fight at lunch, words tight and snappish, Annabeth corners Thalia at the archery range. Her brown eyes flash and her lips are pressed flat. That’s new, the disappointment. Seven year old Annabeth was never disappointed in her. Never argued. “I don’t understand why you can’t just try to get along,” she says.
“Because I don’t want to,” Thalia says, firing another arrow at the target shaped like a hydra. “And he doesn’t want to either.”
“Because you don’t want to!” Annabeth exclaims. “He’s not stupid, Thalia, and neither am I. I get that you two are similar, but-”
She lowers the bow and turns to her sister. “Similar? Similar? We are not similar, Annabeth. I am not like him.”
“Yes, you are,” she says stubbornly.
“No, I’m not,” Thalia all but yells. Electricity sparks across her knuckles and presses against the back of her teeth, blunted, human, not like Percy’s. “I am not like that thing!”
Silence falls over the archery range. Everyone has given up on shooting. They all stand around, staring. Mouths hang open. A few people snicker. More wince.
The public opinion on Percy is split at camp. About half of the campers seem more of Thalia’s opinion than Annabeth’s: Percy came back a monster, and they should be careful around him. The other half of the campers have stubbornly decided that, monster or not, Percy is a part of camp. But everyone knows that Annabeth and Clarisse have been terrorizing anyone who dares to get nasty with Percy, verbally or physically, as if he can’t take care of himself.
If anyone else had called Percy Jackson a thing, it would have translated to scorched earth and probably immediate maiming. But because it’s Thalia speaking, and Annabeth listening, Annabeth just stares. Then her face calcifies. Hardens into anger, vicious. It’s a face she inherited from Luke. “You’ve always let your stubbornness get in your own way, Thalia,” she says finally, voice cold. “You won’t keep any friends that way.”
She storms away from the archery range, leaving Thalia and the whole Hermes and Aphrodite cabins in silence.
She doesn’t talk to Thalia for a week straight. The silent treatment only ends when she walks out of the Big House where she’s been staying (she refused to stay in the Zeus cabin, point-blank) and nearly runs face-first into Percy, who is standing on the porch, arms crossed, eyes narrowed. In the morning sunlight, his curls have a golden halo effect. The edges of his scales glow silver. “I don’t know what you said,” he says bluntly, “but I assume it was something nasty. The thing is, I don’t actually care if you hate me. I don’t care if you say nasty things about me behind my back. I know everyone does it. I don’t care what you think. But Annabeth loves you. So could you please just apologize to me in front of her, so she’ll stop hiding from you in my cabin and muttering angrily under her breath when you get brought up in conversation? It’s really, really starting to annoy me.”
Then, without another word or leaving a moment to answer, he turns around and walks away off the porch, down the hill to the Arts and Crafts cabin. Thalia watches him go, his scales sparkling in the light, shoulders squared. She exhales through her teeth. Traces the blunted edges of them like a prayer.
She apologizes to Percy at breakfast in front of everyone. “I’m sorry,” she says, “that I said that.” She doesn’t elaborate on what, exactly, that was. She doesn’t mean a word of it.
“Okay,” Percy says flatly. “Thanks.” He doesn’t mean a word of it. When he talks with his lips close enough together, she can only see his front teeth, the ones that stayed human. The shark teeth start on the sides and the back. Thalia wishes they would go all the way around. Wishes he could just be one or the other, so she could stop waiting for him to snap.
When they end up at the canoe lake again, Annabeth partners with her silently.
And the summer drags on like that, Annabeth and Grover and Thalia and Percy engaging in a strange, lopsided orbit.
By the time the last day of summer arrives, Thalia has never been so grateful. Percy is leaving in the morning. Annabeth is heartbroken, though she won’t admit it.
Thalia spends the last night of summer celebration with a few other demigods who are leaving in the morning as well, some friends she’s made through the activities. Sort-of friends. Mostly, they’re just more normal about her being a daughter of Zeus than the others.
Annabeth spends the last night of summer celebration with Percy and Grover. When they trudge back into the diving pavilion in the morning for breakfast, all three of them are yawning and grinning and covered in sand. Thalia doesn’t ask. She doesn’t want to know. Annabeth grins at the boys in a way that makes her whole face crinkle around the joy of it. Grover looks settled, easy with happiness. When Percy laughs with them, it’s wide enough to see his fangs, flashing between his lips.
It’s a swirl of madness, getting the summer campers out with all their belongings. Annabeth spends the morning flitting between her siblings and her friends and, of course, Percy. Thalia sits on the porch of the Big House and watches the campers swarm over the hills like an army of ants. She stiffens when she spots Percy hiking up toward the house. She thinks, hopefully, that he might be there to say goodbye to Chiron.
No such luck. He approaches her on the porch, backpack slung over one shoulder. His eyes have too much pupil. He doesn’t blink at her, his second pair of eyelids flicked protectively over his blue eyes. For a long moment, they just stand there and stare at one another. The air is thick, heavy. Thalia refuses to be the first to speak.
Finally, he breaks the silence with a sigh. “You want to know what your problem is, Thalia?”
Rage flares in her stomach. Her skin itches with lightning. Electricity crackles along her knuckles, sparks through her hair. “Is the son of Poseidon trying to give me some wisdom?” she snaps. “Sure, this should be good. Enlighten me, Jackson.”
He doesn’t flinch at her anger. He meets her eyes, and he doesn’t seem mad. Just… tired. Thalia would have more sympathy for it, if he were human. “The reason you can’t make it easy to be around her is because you think she’s still seven years old,” he says bluntly. “You think she should be exactly the same as she was. You think that the world should be exactly the same as it was. But it’s not. She’s not. Everything’s more complicated now. She’s trying to love you like you’re a whole person, not just the hero she remembers.” A humorless smile flickers across his face. He doesn’t show her his teeth. “Annabeth was a cool little kid, I’m sure. And now she’s a cool person. Just… set everything else aside, and try being friends with her. It’s fun, I promise.”
He hikes his backpack higher on his shoulder, and says, “Enjoy your fall, Thalia.” He turns to go, and Thalia, who has spent all summer hating the sight of his face and the space that he occupies in her life, realizes something very strange. She’s going to miss Percy Jackson.
“You better live until winter break,” Thalia blurts impulsively. He turns back to look at her, and she flushes. She rolls her shoulders back and raises her chin. “I still have to kick your arse in Capture the Flag.”
For a long moment, he just stares. And then the wall cracks. The corner of his mouth twitches up. He smiles, and it crinkles his eyes. He looks suddenly, startlingly human. “Sure thing, Grace. Wouldn’t miss it.”
And that’s the last she sees of Percy Jackson until winter break.