Here we go again, another chapter. Thank you very much to all who have favourited/reviewed this story and also those that have put it on alert. It means a lot to me.

This is mostly going to be Annabeth and Nico doing some talking for the rest of the fic. I've always been fascinated by the fact that the characters are children but act so adult (I've found it hard to imagine them any younger than they appear in the movie, for example, which may be bordering on blasphemy, I know) and I wanted to kind of explore that.

Fighting and war and getting hurt and being sad or alone and a whole lot of other misery are part of being a demigod as well as capturing the flag, drinking blue Cherry Coke and playing practical jokes on other campers and cabins. I'm just sort of trying to run with that.

Marzipan.

When the wrath of Annabeth didn't rain down on his head, he opened one eye curiously and turned his head to look at her, wincing at the pain it caused. This wasn't even his first monster execution today — his body had ached all over before he had been smashed into a mirror and sent flying through closet doors. Now the adrenaline had stopped pumping his back was killing him and when he tried to move, pain shot through his shoulder as well as his ankle.

Annabeth let out a breath and closed her eyes. Her brain was buzzing, running at supersonic speeds as she tried to process everything that had gone on right in front of her. Suddenly, though, all of her thoughts ground to a juddering halt as she realised that she was standing in front of Nico in nothing but a towel that was way too short and left nothing to the imagination. She flushed red, even though she wasn't normally a blusher, and cleared her throat self-consciously.

"I'm just going to… yeah," she said, clearing her throat again and walking quickly towards the bathroom, realising too late that Nico had kicked the door in and it was hanging by one hinge. She just didn't have the energy to try and close it properly behind her so, deciding that it gave just about enough privacy, she just hopped into the shower, finding that most of the water from her bath had soaked away through the hole in the bottom of the tub.

She couldn't stand the feeling that she was half-washed so, even though she needed answers, she quickly scrubbed her face, hair and body with the cheap, generic complimentary toiletries that all smelled like Vaseline. It helped calm her down as well, giving her time to bite her tongue to the point where she wouldn't kill Nico for barging in on her. She hadn't needed him. She would have been fine. Where did he get the nerve from?

When she finished she dried off quickly, yanking her hair into a ponytail using a rubber band. She pulled on yoga pants and hesitated when she reached for a large t-shirt. It belonged to Percy and she couldn't resist quickly breathing in the scent before she slipped it on — as mushy as that was, she couldn't help it. She just missed him so freaking much.

The mirror was not her friend when she caught her reflection, although she had already known that she looked terrible. Not that she ever wore a whole lot of makeup, but she had been dabbing a lot more concealer on lately to try and disguise the fact that, sometimes, her face could look like five pounds of partially-ground beef thanks to all of the skirmishes she ended up in. Now the foundation and concealer had all been rinsed down the drain her face looked washed out and wan.

Mortals noticed her a whole lot more because of the cuts and bruises, which was bad, and looking like you'd been beaten up made it tricky to get a motel room just in case trouble was following you, even with the fake ID the Hermes cabin had provided her with before she left.

She continued to stare at her reflection the tiny little corner of the mirror that Nico hadn't managed to break with his ass — freaking pointy thing with no meat on it at all, no wonder it had done so much damage to the mirror — and discovered that she looked ridiculously pale, the dark smudges under her eyes incredibly pronounced and the cuts and bruises peppering his face livid under the nasty motel room bathroom lighting.

Absolutely nothing new there, then.

It wasn't like it was easy to sleep when you had a missing boyfriend and monsters on your tail constantly. She also kept having these dreams — they felt like they should have been demigod dreams but there was so much static she could hardly decipher anything. It was frustrating; she knew what these dreams were normally about and she could tell they were supposed to be about Percy but there was just nothing she could make out. A Camp Half-Blood shirt that should have been orange but was purple, like the one that Jason had been wearing, and that freaking missing shoe, blackened and burnt and smoking, like the vision that had told her to go to the Grand Canyon.

Then there was the shamefully overwhelming urge to go home, to run straight back to San Francisco. She hated herself for it, for the fact that it consumed her late at night when she was thinking about Percy. All she wanted to do sometimes was drop everything that she was doing and just go home for a reason she couldn't place.

San Francisco was burned into her mind and despite the fact that she knew that she had to keep looking for Percy, that people were depending on her to find Percy, that she needed Percy. Sometimes, all she could see was the Golden Gate Bridge and the fog rolling in and Mount Tamalpais in the background. She was deeply, deeply ashamed of it and was fighting tooth and nail to never give in to it but it felt like her heart was in that city and she couldn't help but hate herself a little for it.

Finally, dragging herself out of her reverie, she tried to storm out of the bathroom, cross-armed, to confront Nico and possibly rip him a new one, but the door got in the way and rather ruined the effect as she had to half clamber over it to get back in the room with him. He was just closing the door on someone and immediately set about relocking it again, even jamming the chair back underneath the knob, his paranoia apparently as great as hers.

"Who was that?" Annabeth asked, curiosity getting the better of her and keeping her anger at bay for the time being.

"The manager," Nico said, pulling a piece of blue chalk from his pocket and busying himself with it, tongue trapped between his teeth, scrawling a design on the inside of the motel room door and hesitating every few seconds in a way that told Annabeth he was doing it from memory.

"Noise complaints?" she asked, watching his design begin to radiate out from the centre.

"Yeah," Nico said. "Oh, and something about the room downstairs getting flooded or something? I'm guess you had a leaky bath."

"How did you get rid of him?" Annabeth asked.

"Uh… I used the Mist," Nico said, a little too uncertainly for her liking and suddenly concentrating extra-hard on the drawing.

"You know how to do that?" Annabeth asked, unable to totally hide the fact that she was impressed despite herself. She was still struggling with manipulating the Mist and she'd had way more practice than Nico.

"Uh… Well, no, not really," Nico told her. "I just sort of made it up. I mean, I've seen the weird hand stuff Thalia does. How hard can it be?"

He showed her what he'd done to the manager a couple of times; Annabeth thought it looked like he was a really lazy traffic cop directing traffic with one hand while he ate a Krispy Kreme with the other.

"Great," she said, snorting. "So the guy will be pounding on the door again in like five minutes?"

"Yeah," Nico said absently, finishing drawing and stepping backwards, dusting off his palms on his jeans while he surveyed his handiwork.

"What is that?" Annabeth demanded, unable to keep the question in anymore.

"It's kind of like a magical protective thing against monsters," Nico said, cocking his head at it and praying that he'd done it right. "A guy from the Hecate cabin showed it to me."

"Well, they didn't show me," Annabeth said, frowning at it. "Are you sure it works?"

Nico glared at her over his shoulder, affronted. "Of course it does. I drew it, didn't I? And no one showed you because you were like all Rambo on us and vanished into the wilderness as soon as you could and decided you were too good for extra help."

"Who let you watch Rambo?" Annabeth asked. "That's a terrible movie."

Nico narrowed his eyes at her and folded his arms. "Bite me," he said, his age shining through as he jutted his chin defiantly and shoved hair out of his face.

"I'd only consider that if I had rabies or was otherwise contagious," Annabeth said quickly, smirking at him. "Now tell me: what is going on?"

Nico paused before he started speaking but lost the stare-off with Annabeth and had to continue. "Monsters have stopped dying," he said bluntly, still looking a little bit mutinous. "Something about the Doors of Death being opened or whatever. I did get sort of filled in on the prophecy but Chiron, well, he can talk and talk and talk and talk and I didn't listen all of the way to the end…

"But monsters and I don't think even the gods know what else are getting free passes out of the Underworld and my dad is going crazy about it because he can't stop it. I've never seen him this mad… Have you not noticed that the monsters you've killed don't stay dead?"

"I don't tend to hang around to watch what the dust does," Annabeth said, aiming for glib but ruining the effect when she sat down hard on the bed and put her head in her hands. Monsters that wouldn't die were bad news, plain and simple. In a kill or be killed situation, it didn't really work if only one side — her — could die.

"Yeah, well, maybe you should have done," Nico said harshly. "Or at least dropped an IM once in a while to let us all know that you weren't dead and then we could have told you."

"Are you taking a tone with me?" Annabeth asked disbelievingly, snapping her head up and glaring at him as digesting the information he had just given her fell way down on her list of priorities. "You are a kid,not my dad."

Nico glowered at her, balling his fists at the 'kid' barb. "Hey, I might be younger than you but I'm not the one cutting myself off from Camp and going off half-cocked around the country and ending up in some crappy backwater 'burb with my fingers in my ears going 'Lalalalalalalala' and pretending everything is all fine as I almost get killed in the bath. Don't you think you're the baby here?"

"Oh cut it out. Please, you're never at Camp. Don't try that one on me," Annabeth said contemptuously.

"We can't all over parents above the ground," Nico said a little miserably, folding his arms defensively. "I don't come to Camp much because it feels sometimes like I'm not wanted, cabin or no cabin. I'm a great big Underworld freak."

"Don't be such a drama queen," Annabeth said with a snort. "No one thinks you're a freak. Freaky, maybe, but not a freak. And there's no one who doesn't want you to be at Camp; they might even be a bit nicer to you if you weren't so frigging aloof all the time."

"I don't know what that means," Nico said shortly, frowning.

Annabeth sighed. "Mingle more," she urged, explaining to him. "Actually talk to campers instead of just being the brooding kid in black with a sword that scares the crap out of them because they've never seen anything like it before."

Nico looked at her warily. "But… I'm not very good at people."

"Trust me, you little runty robot, we've all noticed," Annabeth said dryly. "Now, what were you saying about undead monsters?"

"I thought I already told you," Nico said shortly, less willing to say anything at all to her after that last dig at him. Bianca's words echoed through his head: If you can't say anything nice... Huffily and petulantly, he allowed, "They don't die. The end."

Annabeth rolled her eyes. "Look, you're going to have to be a little more specific than that for me okay? Vague does not work for me."

Nico wrinkled his nose at her, but saw that she wasn't going to back down until she had the information she wanted from him, even though he didn't have a whole lot to give because, hey, Chiron could talk the hind legs off a donkey (was that offensive?) and you couldn't expect a kid with ADHD that had just drunk a suspiciously-purple grape soda to take all of what had been said in.

Mmm. Colourants, additives and sugar.

"It's like I said. Someone or something has opened like a back door to the Underworld that my dad can't close. Monsters don't stay dead and there's been a couple of big names going AWOL from the Fields of Punishment."

"So that telkhine will be back?" Annabeth asked, searching the room for her knife and finding it still clutched in her hand so hard her knuckles were white.

Nico shook his head. "No, not for a while. Stygian iron can keep them down because it sucks their essence straight back to the Underworld, but even I can't put them in the ground permanently. They just keep coming back for more."

"Hence the protection charm to take us off the radar," Annabeth said, nodding towards the chalk drawing.

"Bingo."

"When you say big names…" Annabeth asked, biting her bottom lip and waiting for him to say anything else than what she thought he meant.

"So far? Medea. Midas," Nico said shortly. "Apparently, today's bad guys were brought to us by the letter 'M'."

"So they're out on parole and can't be killed either?" Annabeth asked.

"No idea," Nico said. "As far as I know, no one has come across them yet to try."

Annabeth closed her eyes again, the information weighing heavily on her. "I hope Jason is okay," she said quietly.

Even though she had wanted to kill Jason at first, she couldn't help but feel that his destiny was tied with Percy's and that he could lead them all to wherever it was her boyfriend was being held. With all of the new evil roaming around and him without his memories, she was wondering how well he'd hold up.

"Yeah, what's happening with that quest?" Nico asked, shoving all of Annabeth's stuff to the side so he could hop up onto the dressing table. The cheap piece of furniture shuddered and creaked ominously.

"They've got to find and release Hera by the winter solstice," Annabeth said. "Otherwise, a whole load of evil is coming to come out of the ground. You know, nothing all that new really."

"Why didn't you go?" Nico asked her, frowning. "I thought you would want to go and find Percy, plus you've got way more experience than Jason."

"We don't know that," Annabeth said. "Jason might have even more years fighting monsters than I do. He just doesn't remember. Besides, it wasn't my destiny or my path. I didn't want to go halfway across the country looking for something that wasn't Percy and anyway, I'm not exactly on friendly terms with Hera, am I?"

Nico conceded to her points with a tilt of his head. "Is it true they sent an Aphrodite kid on the quest?" he asked. "Because that's got to be some kind of a joke, right?"

"No," Annabeth said. "A Hephaestus kid and a daughter of Aphrodite both went with Jason."

"Oh, great," Nico said, curling his lip. "So they're all dead already then? Who thought it was a good idea to send a child of Love on a mission like this? Love it just… gross. And lame. Chiron's judgement must be going in his very, very old age."

"She's not like the other Aphrodite children," Annabeth said. "She can charmspeak."

Nico snorted. "So can Drew. That will get her real far. Do you know Drew tried to charmspeak me once?"

"And me," Annabeth said. "It's amazing how quickly you can get her to shut up once you jam a knife under her chin though."

Nico grinned. "I cut a button off the dress she was wearing with my sword. She went crazy, cursed me and ran off almost in tears."

"Props for creativity," Annabeth said, inclining her head at him as a sign of respect.

"Thanks. Seriously though, back to some weedy Aphrodite girl on a quest? How is she going to find time to fight monsters what with all of the looking in mirrors and putting makeup on? When was the last time someone from that cabin went on a quest anyway? Also, when are they going to get cool powers? How about, like, an über facelift of death or something useful like that?"

Annabeth gritted her teeth so hard it would have made a dentist flinch. "I thought we'd cured you of the constant questions," she ground out, glaring at him. Nico only wrinkled her nose at her and looked puzzled, so she let it drop and continued. "She's different from them," she persisted. "Honestly, when she arrived at Camp I kind of thought maybe she was an Athena kid. I would totally have had her in my cabin."

"Really?" Nico asked, looking stunned. It wasn't every day that Annabeth respected a demigod enough to want them to be her sibling and share her cabin. "Well… maybe they've got a chance then."

"I really hope so," Annabeth said heavily. "I mean, I'm not having any luck finding Percy. I'm kind of starting to pin all of my hopes on them sorting out this entire mess and it somehow leading to Percy's reappearance."

"We're going to find him, okay?" Nico told her stubbornly. "So many of us are looking."

Annabeth managed to hold a sigh inside and looked to the floor. She wished she had Nico's optimism but after so many fights and battles and dead ends she was running low on the whole positivity thing. She almost felt sorry for Nico because when you got to be as old as her and had as many years doing this whole demigod thing then you got jaded real fast and that was something that was probably going to be in his near future.

She'd literally held up the sky and sometimes, at times like this when people were depending on her to do something like find Percy or stop an apocalypse or whatever she felt like she'd never shifted that weight from her shoulders. Despite her fake ID, she was sixteen and newly a junior in high school, but instead of worrying about curfews and whether a particular guy liked her or even less shallow stuff like homework and papers, she was out here in the middle of Bumfuck, Nowhere (it had even taken her a while to remember that it was Idaho she was currently holed up in) trying to rescue her boyfriend and maybe save the world in the process.

It wasn't easy or glamorous or exciting. You grew up fast if you're a demigod but that's because you had to do things like run around Manhattan protecting the city from monsters and Titans while people you loved or cared for dropped left, right and centre around you and you got stabbed by jumping in front of a dagger meant for your soon-to-be-boyfriend.

It was difficult and dangerous but it was what demigods were born to do; fight monsters and do battle at the whim of immortal beings and destiny yanking on puppet strings and face the fact that every time they did so it might be the time they didn't come back alive.