New fic! You can expect semi-regular updates at first because I have quite a bit of it written in draft form, so that's good I guess. I know where it's going and I'm fairly sure I know how to get there, which isn't always the case for my fics so, again, good stuff. This is going to be sad and angsty, I think, so watch out for that. Uh, what else? I think that about sums it up. Enjoy if possible. If not possible then I'm sorry. I will try to do better next time. I don't own the lyrics below — they belong to Johnny Clueless. I am just borrowing them for inspiration and a title.
The world's gonna end on somebody's birthday.
The sky's got to fall on somebody's cake.
With that depressing little interlude, Mission to Marzipan out.
Even before the knock at the door, Annabeth was out of breath. As soon as she heard it she gasped, wrenching her watch the right way up. The rubber strap slid slickly on her sweaty wrist.
Shit.
Where had the time gone? She cleared her throat and shoved her bangs off her forehead with her forearm, giving the small apartment one last, cursory glance and trying to calm down. Given that it was a college apartment that was regularly all but remodelled by monsters casually dropping by without any notice, firmly ruling out any chance that their security deposit would be returned, there was only so much she could do. Well, she had done her best. Granted, the majority of the work had included shoving accumulations of dirty laundry into the laundry basket (she may even have sat on the cursed wicker object and jiggled up and down in desperation to get it to close as if it were an over-packed suitcase, not that you'd catch her divulging that to anyone ever) and ramming piles of junk under the couch, but all in all she considered it a job well done. Hey, she was enrolled fulltime in college, lived with a slob, had only had a couple of hours to clean and was pretty far in terms of personality and neat-freakery from the inhabitants of the Demeter cabin back at Camp. All things considered, it was a job very well done.
For crying out loud, she had used three different attachments on the vacuum cleaner for the love of Olympus — even that round bristly one. She had wasted a whole lot of time digging out the instructions for the vacuum cleaner in order to discover its use because it was taunting her with its total lack of purpose; as a child of Athena, she was damned if something as trivial as a domestic appliance was going to beat her. What showed more dedication than that?
On her way to open the door, she hastily kicked an escapee tennis ball (why did they have a tennis ball when neither of them played, for Zeus's sake?) back under the couch, blessing the valance running around the bottom that she had hated at first. The sofa had been second-hand and cheap — mostly, she guessed, because of the ugly paisley material tacked around the bottom to hide the legs. Yet today it had come in very useful for concealing everything that she had shoved underneath the couch, banished to the land of dust bunnies so big they would have made Medusa stop and think twice.
"Coming!" she called, stopping in front of the mirror next to the door and shoving her hands through her hair, eventually deciding to twist it up with a clip she had found in her pocket so that the nape of her neck could breathe. New York City in August, where the heat gathered in a pocket that sunk ever-lower, bouncing off concrete and plate glass to make the traffic fumes cloying as it attempted to dry-roast you alive.
On the carpet just to the left of the mirror was a green blotch that had been left when Nico, sporting a broken arm, had come tumbling out of the shadows followed shortly by one of the aforementioned monster guests, forcing Percy to leap out of bed and perform a decapitation in his boxers. In the meantime, Annabeth had been desperately holding a too-thin silk kimono closed over a negligee an Aphrodite cabin alumnus assured her would 'blow Percy's mind'. When the monster was dead she had sat on the couch with Nico trying not to blush as she savagely fed him ambrosia, not yet having decided whether she wanted to choke him to death with it or not, given the scene he had pretty much just landed on top on. The point was that monster blood stained and she had meant to try and get it out of the carpet but had forgotten all about it.
"Just a minute!" she yelled to the door, her heart racing in panic as her eyes darted around the room, eventually coming to rest on a large, fake fern abandoned by the last resident that she had faithfully watered for about a month after moving in. For the first few weeks, she had happily marvelled at her apparent inability to kill it, which had so not been the case for any other form of plant life she had come across in the last twenty-one years, until the excess water had begun to seep out into the carpet beneath. She dragged it over to the stain and plonked it on top of it, gave the leaves a quick blow to try and dislodge some of the dust, sneezed twice, then opened the door.
Sally Jackson was standing on the other side carrying the biggest Tupperware container Annabeth had ever seen with both hands. Dangling off her arm was a large shopping bag made of burlap.
As she blew hair out of her face she greeted Annabeth with a slight strained smile and sidled past her with some difficulty due to her burdens. "Hey, sweetie. How are you?" she asked, moving to the kitchen. With a relieved exhalation she gratefully dumped the bag on the tiny folding card table they liked to pretend they ate off (the reality was trays balanced on their laps on the couch or, in Percy's case, often over the sink to save having to wash a dish) and placed the Tupperware cake box on the one square foot of counter space that wasn't occupied by a microwave, a coffeemaker or a toaster.
"I'm fine, Mrs Jackson," Annabeth said, catching a bulbous glimpse of herself in the curved stainless steel of the toaster and wincing, hoping she didn't look as red as the appliance made out. "How is everything? Do you want a drink?"
"I'm better now I've put that bag down," Sally said. "And just some water, please. For now, anyway. Paul's gone to the liquor store to buy something a little fizzier," she said with a conspiratorial wink as Annabeth took a bottle of water from the fridge. Sally shook her head when Annabeth made to reach for a glass. "It's fine; I don't mind it from the bottle," she assured her, twisting the top off and taking a long gulp. Wow, she did not miss the days when she had lived in a building without an elevator. "So tell me, how was my son the birthday boy this morning? Insufferable?"
Annabeth smiled and gestured to the couch and they both walked over to it and sat down. "No more trying than usual," she assured Sally when they were both settled. "Quite quiet to be honest. I think he's kinda freaked out at turning twenty-one, actually," she confided. "I thought he might be; he spent the month leading up to my twenty-first telling me how old I was getting, so…"
"Ah. Classic displacement anxiety," Sally supplied promptly, nodding wisely. "And in a way, classic Percy. He'll be fine. It's probably just hard for him to accept that the law says he's an adult now, even if he refuses to act like one." She took a sip of her water. "Adult prisons and all," she added darkly after swallowing, knowing that despite the Mist Percy's monster-slaying antics may just one day land him in the sort of trouble that required the kind of bail you couldn't just slap on an AmEx and forget about. Something to look forward to for the future… She glanced around the apartment, almost as if she was seeing it for the first time. "Oh, Annabeth, you didn't have to go to so much trouble for me," she said, giving the younger woman a sympathetic look as she put her water down on a coaster on the end table.
"Trouble?" Annabeth asked lightly with a tight smile, attempting an innocent face whilst thinking about the pair of jeans she had practically worn through at the knees kneeling down to scrub out the tub.
Sally fixed her with a look, cocking an amused eyebrow. "Annabeth, please. I was cleaning up after Percy while you were still in diapers. I know the only way you can live with him and still have an apartment this tidy is by sending him away for a few hours and cleaning until you're ready to drop. Been there, done that."
"Uh," Annabeth began, blinking and entirely lost for words. Instead of speaking, she broke into a fit of relieved giggles. "There were plates fossilizing under the nightstand," she eventually managed. "I had to douse them in Clorox before I even wanted to look at them. And oh my gods, I think I had forgotten that the bedroom carpet was blue under the sea of clothes…" She finally managed to swallow her laughter. "I mean, I'm not exactly a neat freak," she added hastily, lest Sally think she was badmouthing her son. "If it comes down to a choice between reading a book and doing the dishes it's pretty obvious which one I'd choose. And some of the mess was Nico's, who seems increasingly to be living here… but yeah. Sorry. I think I'm still high on cleaning product fumes. It's just that I didn't want you to think we lived like total slobs but given that we kind of do…"
Sally smiled at her. "I knew it. It's no good telling Percy to clean up, either. It just won't go in. How is Nico, by the way?"
Oh, you know, occasionally dropping in on me and your son while we're mostly naked chased by something big and ugly with a beak and enormous claws… "Irritating," Annabeth opted to answer sunnily instead with a shrug. "But it's Nico. If he ever stops being annoying, we have to worry. He seems okay."
"Good. I haven't seen him in a while; he stopped dropping by when Percy moved out. I guess you inherited him… Speaking of Percy, where did you send him to get rid of him so you could clean?" she asked almost eagerly, leaning forward towards Annabeth. She knew from experience that you couldn't clean around Percy Jackson, because if you turned your back he'd have created another disaster zone before you could turn to face him again. "If you ever need to get rid of him, just give me a call and we'll think of something. I found that sending him to the South Street Seaport Museum always worked, for obvious reasons, but he's probably over that now, huh? I think I wore it out."
"I sent him grocery shopping," Annabeth said simply with a half-shrug.
Sally winced. "Oh, no. Bad move. You'll be rid of him for a few hours, sure, but you won't get anything on your list and he'll wander back in with something extremely bizarre. One time it was a donkey he insisted followed him home from a petting zoo which, again, obvious explanation for that one now but at the time..."
Annabeth nodded vigorously. "Oh, believe me, I know. I once sent him out for a bag of frozen peas because Nico had appeared requiring first aid again and he came back three hours later with a six-pack of Bud Light of all the beers that he somehow hadn't got carded for and a pack of Mythomagic playing cards with my mom on the front. Oh, and with his shirt in tatters because a monster had decided to jump him in an alley. So this time I sent him with a list of stuff we didn't really need. And as an added bonus, I managed to pack Nico off with him."
"Is Nico any better at Percy at grocery shopping?" Sally asked.
Annabeth twisted her mouth in consideration. "Yes and no," she said eventually. "He has more respect for food than Percy does; maybe it's the Italian thing? Also, he's always trying to keep me sweet so I don't evict him from the couch and make him go back to his dorm, so he usually manages to reign Percy in enough to get at least two thirds of the list done. To be honest, all three of us are probably too ADHD to actually have a completely successful shopping trip. Too many shiny packages. Plus, given that between us we can probably just about manage to boil water... I just wanted both of them out of my hair. I guess it was kind of mean to send Percy to the store on his birthday, though."
"Yes, it was," Nico's voice chided from the bedroom. The drapes were still drawn in there, so it was sufficiently dark for him to have shadow-travelled in with Percy in tow. "You're a very bad girlfriend, you know." Percy squeezed past him, a party hat on his head and another in his hand. Nico ducked under Percy's attempt to jam a hat on his own head and scrambled for the relative safety of the kitchen, glaring at Percy.
"I don't recall party hats being on my list," Annabeth said dryly, rolling her eyes but failing to hide a smile at the sheer amount of goofy Percy's hat was radiating. Maybe he was having more fun on his birthday than she had thought, which was good. She had been worried that he was, as Sally had suggested, entering a massive freak out about growing up. Must be kind of scary, finally becoming an adult but not really having anywhere to go with that, having already saved the world by the time he was sixteen and all. How did you top that in your adult life?
"Yeah, well, nor were booze and handguns, but we had to test Percy's ID out somehow," Nico said brightly. "Hey Mrs Jackson," he added. "I thought you'd like to know that Percy's been out corrupting a minor."
Percy scoffed and leant over the back of the couch to kiss Annabeth's forehead, entrapping her chin in the elastic of the party hat he had unsuccessfully tackled Nico with on the way up. "Please," he said to Nico, adjusting the hat on Annabeth's hair. "Like you need any corrupting." He paused, giving Annabeth's hat another tweak. "I can't believe you didn't buy me any party hats," he added to her accusingly, pushing up from the couch and walking to the fridge, Nico eyeing his every step warily. "Sad, sad world we live in. Makes me wonder why I bothered saving it."
Annabeth rolled her eyes and reached down into a bag next to the couch, pulling out not just a box of hats but also a box of noisemakers. She whipped them both at him as hard and fast as she could, but of course his reflexes were equal to hers and he caught them easily, a wide grin spreading over his face as he tore them open.
"Happy birthday, honey," Sally said, getting up and dragging her son into a long hug. He held her for longer than their standard mother/son hug she noticed with a pang of concern, but when she drew back, Percy had successfully managed to place one of Annabeth's hats on her head, mostly without her realising. "How does twenty-one feel?" she asked, adjusted the elastic so the knot wasn't digging into her ear and studying him contemplatively, trying to figure out what was wrong with him. He seemed over jolly; not that Percy was miserable by nature but he seemed to be acting as if he was less worried about something than he actually was, disguising it by being extra outgoing.
"Kind of old," Percy said thoughtfully. "I think I feel a hip complaint coming on."
"At least you don't have a front lawn to keep chasing all of those pesky kids off of," Nico pointed out helpfully, peeling back a corner of the lid of Sally's container to take a look at the birthday cake inside. He whistled. "Your cakes get bigger and better every year," Nico told her, sealing the lid back down. "You're too good for Percy."
Sally smiled, wrenching her gaze from her son over to Nico. "Better just comes with lots of experience. Bigger is because more and more of them get eaten every year," she said, raising a wry, pointed eyebrow at Nico. "Percy and I have come a long way from birthday cake for two."
"Where's Paul?" Percy asked suddenly, looking around the room expectantly. He already had hat in his hand for his stepfather.
"He had to make a little stop," Sally said vaguely, her eyes twinkling. "He'll meet us in the park."
"Surprises huh?" Percy said. "Not sure how I feel about surprises."
"Will it help if I tell you it's a mortal surprise and therefore one that's not likely to kill you?" Sally asked with a smile. "I figured you'd had enough surprises of the deadly variety in your life so far." Sally thought she saw a flash of panic at the mention of deadly surprises but it was gone as quickly as it came and her son was soon eying Nico tactically.
"We all have," Annabeth agreed, cocking her head slightly as Percy began to creep across the room to the kitchen, where Nico was buried in the fridge.
When the son of Hades emerged with a soda, Percy crossed the room in a flash, wielding the party hat, and made to jam it on Nico's head. A skeleton warrior sprang up between Percy and Nico and the hat ended up perched bizarrely on top of the warrior's skull in an amusing yet disturbing juxtaposition of greying bone and garish colour. Nico opened his soda and the skeleton sank through the kitchen floor and vanished, taking the hat back to Hades with it, leaving Percy looking at Nico's triumphant smirk in frustration.
"Fail," Nico snorted with an infuriating grin. "Look, I don't care if it's the birthday of Zeus himself; the day I wear one of those things is the day my dad throws on a scarf and some earmuffs to go ice-skating on the Styx."
Percy narrowed his eyes determinedly. "Well then. Let's hope he remembers where he put his skates."
"Come on, Nico," Annabeth said tiredly, trying to hide a smile. "If I've got to look stupid, then so do you."
"Uh, hey, he's not my boyfriend," Nico shot back. "Besides, I've always thought you looked kind of stupid all the time."
Annabeth blinked slow and hard at the insult and then set her jaw, poking her tongue into her cheek in irritation. She got up and rounded the couch, laughing in that threatening you're-going-down way she did so well. 'Stupid' was not the kind of word you tossed at a child of Athena and lived to tell the tale. "Oh, now it's on, death boy. Percy, hold him down."
Percy grinned and leapt on Nico, knocking the soda out of his hand and sending it skittering across the scuffed linoleum, spilling its contents as it went. Given that Percy was four years older than Nico and children of Hades weren't exactly known for their physical prowess, Percy was soon clasping his arms around Nico's waist, pinning the teenager's arms to his sides. Nico spat out a string of Greek curses, kicking up from the floor, but Annabeth vanished with the aid of her Yankees cap, the sudden disappearance startling Nico for just enough time for a party hat to appear out of thin air and stick itself on his head. Annabeth reappeared, doubled over with laughter at Nico's seething rage.
"Okay, fine." Nico glowered, admitting defeat as Percy let go of him. "Fine, you win. Two against one, but whatever. If you think you won fair and square then I'll wear the stupid hat, but I will also remember this and when you die, there'll be a lot of waiting around for you two. Your paperwork is going to keep getting lost and you will have to reapply frequently for your deaths to be valid. You think waiting in line at the DMV is bad? You've seen nothing yet."
Percy only rolled his eyes and grinned, jamming a noisemaker in Nico's mouth in an attempt to shut him up.