It's mother's day folks! Hope that everyone finds some kind of love today with their mom, an aunt, a grandma, an inspiring friend, or any influential woman in the world. They're all heroes, right?

Disclaimer: Don't own the story's setting

Dedication: Shout out to my mom, without which I'd be in a really bad place.

Just an Ordinary Day

"Biology is the least of what makes someone a mother."
Oprah Winfrey

Sally had been very clear with Paul: she didn't want to hear about it.

She didn't want breakfast in bed, she didn't want to watch old movies and sleep all day instead of doing her usual work and meal prep for the week- nothing. The fact that he'd managed to weasel them out of his family's annual celebratory brunch was more than enough. Her decision was final. Things would be hard enough anyways. Mother's Day was going to be a normal day this year. Just an ordinary day. Nothing bitter, nothing torn. Nothing lonely, nothing sad.

Just. Another. Day.

(Which, of course, would imply bitterness and missing someone dear and hell, even feeling angry enough to march up to Olympus, knock down their sparkling little gate and wreck the kind of havoc that would make Hera curl up on her oh-so-mighty throne and suck her thumb. But that was besides the point, of course.)

She called Chiron in the morning while tending to a pan of scrambled eggs while Paul juiced some oranges. That was the only thing she'd allowed herself to do that day. No sitting in Percy's bedroom and looking at the posters of Greek beaches Paul's sister had gotten him from her travel agency, or shaking the jars of sea glass he kept on his bedside table, or smiling at pictures of him and his friends he taped above his desk, or opening and closing his closet to fold and unfold his clothes as to keep the dust away...

Nope. Just a quick phone call to Chiron to hear his heavy and calm voice confirm what she already knew: no news was good news. Nobody had found Percy on the edge of a Californian high way, or in a ditch in San Francisco. No amnesiac boy had turned up at any major American hospital, no contact from the Roman camp... No news was good news. Right.

The entire day went by without incident. She could feel Paul gravitating around her in an icily distant, unusually awkward way, wondering if he should say or do something or stay the hell out of her bubble, but she ignored him and focused on the to-do list she'd built up as a coping mechanism for surviving Mother's Day without her son.

She was actually on point five (which was a new document to edit for work) when there was a knock on the door. Strange, since usually the doorman would have to ring them up...

"You should go open," Paul told her, looking up from his own pile of work (essays on whether or not Macbeth was a tragic hero today- yesterday had been about themes in Romeo and Juliet). He was biting back an excited smile.

Her blood chilled.

"Paul..." she said. "I told you I didn't want anything to happen today."

"I didn't do anything, I swear," he said. But he was smiling.

She didn't know what to make of it, but she felt her chest tighten as she got up and went to the front door. She creaked it opena and jumped out of her skin under the chant of "HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY!"

She lost her ability to respond looking at the nice, cozy crowd in front of her. That, and because Tyson gave her a giant bear-hug, squishing a bouquet of daisies against her back.

"Hi baby," she said hugging him back, still a little dumbfound. He wasn't alone.

There was a solid crowd of half-bloods at her door. There was Annabeth, wearing jean cutoffs and a Yankee's t-shirt, her curls swept over her shoulder like a princess. Grover was leaning on his crutches since he was in the mortal world, also holding a potted plant. Percy's best friends, they'd been there for as long as the gods and the insanity of the world had. Sally couldn't count the number of times that she'd gotten home from work -or even a two-minute trip to the post office- to find them squashed on her couch or doing homework at her kitchen table or raiding her fridge or beating her son at video games.

Leo Valdez beamed at her with a mark on his face as if Piper had just rubbed off a splosh of oil, holding a cardboard box. Piper herself stood by in a soft yellow blouse, the feathers in her hair different from the last time Sally had seen her, holding a gift bag from a shop specialised in vegan, organic and fair-trade soap. Jason stood by her, awkwardly as if he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be doing, shuffling his feet and holding a box of chocolates (the first time that Jason had had a homemade chocolate chip cookie was at her house).

Sally had only met them recently, but she'd probably fed them about a hundred times whenever they came into New York to get spare parts for the Argo II or show Jason the real world. Piper was lovely company, Leo's sense of humour made her think of Percy and the way that Jason stood, thought, acted and even the way that he felt sorry about the ways that the oaths of secrecy he'd taken about Camp Jupiter limited what he could tell them about where her son was... He scared her; made her think of the strict, stoic hero that her son could easily have become.

They were a real crowd. Sally spotted Will Solace, who'd once nearly bled to death in her bath tub as Percy and Annabeth struggled to follow his instructions and pull out an arrow after a fight with some nasty dracanae archers had turned sour. He was holding a basket of cleaning products.

There was Nico in the back, cradling a bouquet of flowers and trying to melt into shadows just like he had the first time he'd come to the appartment, shy and looking for birthday cake (Sally had also insisted that he stayed for supper and had gotten him to spend the night on the couch, sending him off in the morning with a doggy bag full of food when he'd insisted on leaving on account of the scent). The Stoll Brothers were grinning at her and stealing a fire extinguisher topped with a purple bow from one another (they'd once set fire to her kitchen drapes while making Greek fire to beat a rampaging rabid hellhound- Sally laughed when she saw them). Clarisse La Rue, who'd once gotten stranded in New York without any clothes and ended up borrowing a blouse from Sally, held a scarf dotted with daisies. Malcolm, who'd once came to Sally for help identifying a monster masquerading as a businessman in a series of photographs, held a big book on modern myths and legends (if she wasn't mistaking, the name on the cover was his).

"What's all this, you guys?" Sally asked patting Tyson's hair and wrapping another arm around Piper.

"Well, we figured that Percy wasn't around to wish you a happy mother's day," Annabeth said. "And thank you for feeding him, dressing him, cleaning up after him, giving him a place to sleep, driving him around, caring for him, loving him... but we could."

Sally was too shocked to answer, so the demigods happily lined up to explain to her everything they'd gotten for her. Grover's was a special plant that had special healing powers ("I smear this on Percy all the time while he sleeps during quests," Grover explained, "all you need is to make a paste with some water and voilà, everything heals twice as quickly"). Leo explained that he'd made her a set of kitchen knives with a blade that switched shapes and sizes depending on what she was cutting, and that would never need sharpening either. Nico had stolen flowers from Persephone's garden because those would never die ("don't worry," he said, "they don't look like jewels to mortals. Paul probably sees regular old begonias").

Tyson had made her a necklace in Poseidon's forges, and he said that it would glow whenever a son of the sea was near. Annabeth gave her a big, long hug and gave her a tin of cookies. She told Sally she'd snuck into camp's kitchen and had made them exactly how Sally had shown her last Christmas (she also apologised for the lack of icing, but the Stolls had demanded payment for acting like look-outs). A note on the tin thanked Sally for raising Percy right for her.

Jason gave Sally the chocolates awkwardly and told her that he was addicted to the stuff since he'd had one of her cookies (but he promised to her that the box was full, he'd made Piper keep it to make sure of it). Even his ambrosia's taste had changed. While she hugged him he whispered in her ear that his oaths to Camp Jupiter meant he couldn't talk about the camp to a possible enemy, writing to a civilian was different. He gave her a pack of paper tied with string.

Sally wiped her eyes and the first tears that broke through.

"I know you said you didn't want anything," Paul said wrapping an arm around her waist, "but how was I going to say no to them?"

Sally laughed and that's when the tears flowed down for good. The demigods all awed and group-hugged around her, holding her tight and maybe a little desperately considering how scary a big group of them was in this kind of world, and laughing. These children of the gods and powerful half-bloods, these trained warriors and historical linguists, these heroes and modern legends...

Somehow they needed a mother too, and somehow Sally had fit the mold.