Hi! New chapter, yay! I think I've decided on updating at least once every month. I have this major exam that I will be doing by the end of this year and I don't want to flunk it so I'm limiting my time on FF. I haven't given up on this story, yet, though! This chapter is kind of, very intense and emotional. So I hope you enjoy it! Please leave your opinions at the end in reviews! I insist :) ;)

He caught Percy as he was walking through the forest they'd gone through the previous day.

He was frowning and his scraggly head told Apollo that he hadn't even paused in leaving the house to run a comb through his head. It made his chest ache a bit with hurt. But he shook it off as he watched the kid traverse through the woods from the cover of the underbrush.

Percy was carrying nothing. He walked with his hands in his pockets- slouched forward as he toed at the dirt dejectedly. The black hair flopped into his green eyes and he longed to brush it off to see the emotions they held- hurt probably, confusion, betrayal, anger, etc.

He was murmuring under his breath, angry words that molded together into a quiet tirade even though he, as a god, could detect the trace of hurt it masked.

"Stupid, Percy," he was muttering,"I should have known that it was too good to be true. A stranger comes up to you and you know nothing about him, nothing! And yet you still followed him home! Are you an idiot?" Silence- He kicked a rock across the trail; he slouched deeper, he sighed," Mom always said I was too impulsive for my own good…" And then, to Apollo's abject horror. he watched as Percy's shoulders shook and he just… cried. He caught a glimpse of green teary eyes as he glared out from under his fringe at the sky. They held pain (lots of pain) and, god, it hurt. It hurt so bad…

"Mom," he heard Percy's voice say, something he could only vaguely hear over his own heart breaking," Why did you leave me?"

That was it. That was the Cue. He was supposed to spring from the bush now. He was supposed to jump into the path that Percy was trekking. He was to halt him in his path. He was supposed to weave him a tale of greeks and gods to ensnare him into not leaving.

But he couldn't move. He felt himself frozen. He could hear Zeus's voice booming in his ears, a deep rumble that forbade anyone from revealing the existence of the Greek gods on Earth.

Never reveal your existence to mortals!

He hated it- absolutely detested it- but Zeus had made a law. There was no way to get around it, no way to break it, no way to break his promise lest he did get ousted from his position of power, no matter what he told his sister…

Unless…

He did specify mortals though...

Slowly, a plan formed in Apollo's mind, banishing his desolate mood to the furthest corner of his mind so that he could think idealistically. What if… What if Percy was not a mortal? What if he was not the son of Sally Jackson and Gabe Ugliano? What if he was the son of Sally Jackson and a god? What if he was a demigod?

It was incredulous; it had a minute chance of being true. But… hadn't he been suspicious for so long?

He forced his mind to think in a discernible pattern so that he could line the clues up into something other than a mess that resembled spaghetti. It was difficult- His thoughts were characteristic with his domains as a god wherein he drifted easily (poetry), he was always optimistic (light) and everywhere at once (the sun's rays from the sun)- but he managed. He remembered how he'd mistaken Percy for Poseidon at first. He remembered his green eyes, so similar a shade to to the sea god's. He remembered the way they reacted, like they were the same person.

He made up his mind. Then sent a raven at the black-haired child. It killed him inside when he saw the terrorized expression that flittered past his face but it was for the greater good.

"AAh!" Percy shrieked, his eyes going wide with panic, with fright, and O Zeus, O Hades, why was he doing this to him?!

As he tensed, hands already itching to take back his impulsive move, he saw something that made him revise his opinion of all things Percy, or Poseidon, or anything water-related.

He watched as Percy shielded his head with his arms. He scrunched his eyes close, waiting for the inevitable. He half-turned his head away. His posture tensed and became stiff in self defense. Apollo's fingers twitched as the raven (his animal, how ironic) came this close to ripping the soft flesh of Percy's arm, puncturing holes through his arm with its sharp talons, drawing blood.

It was like in slow motion.

The icicle that pierced through his raven was unprecedented. And he would have stumbled back if he hadn't half expected this. As the temperature dropped to sub zero low levels that had his natural affinity to heat cringing because he was so close to the source of cold, Percy finally opened his eyes, those green orbs spelling out his clear thought: I'm not dead, and then, Why? And stared at the corpse of the bird that lay twitching painfully on the ground.

Apollo watched from his vantage point as Percy's green eyes went impossibly wider. The question in them becoming heart breaking as he fell to his knees beside his raven, tentatively stroking the feathers of the same creature that had been about to kill him a second earlier.

His eyes had clouded over with unshed tears, Apollo noted- ashamed for making Percy feel this horrible myriad of emotions.

I'm a terrible person, he thought a bit darkly to himself, watching as Percy cried over the dead body that had ceased twitching and whose eyes had dimmed with death. The gods are horrible people.

As he memorised the way Percy's body shook and trembled, like a leaf in the gusty winds, he read the defeat in the slump of his shoulders, the tears that streamed down his pale cheeks, and he promised himself that he wouldn't let anybody, god or no, mortal or not, hurt him ever again.

And that was a promise he was going to keep.

He stood to comfort Percy, determination alight like a brilliant flame in his stomach, before pausing to shake a branch obviously so that he wasn't too startled and aimed another icicle at him. He saw the sound startle his ward, who immediately stiffened and whirled around.

He gasped when he saw who it was. Then his bottom lip jutted out stubbornly, head tilting upward in defiance while his emerald eyes flashed in anger, outrage, indignance (hurt, reluctant hope)

He was tense with rage, as still as a statue, the calm before the storm.

As Apollo came to a stop right in front of the boy, they came to a stare down, the clearing bearing witness to the absolute silence between fire and water and the unspoken words masked behind their faux apathy.

"What do you want, Fred?" Percy shot off first when the silence became too thick for the sharpest knife to cut. His eyes had gone a dark, viridian green and Apollo was shocked to see the beginnings of resentment and bitterness (that he had sown in there) He also flinched at the deliberate emphasis on his alias.

Despite the cool reception, though, and the seriousness of the situation, he still tried to maintain a semi light conversation by grinning weakly and raising his hands, palms up in defense.

"Nothing, Perce," he jested lightly, "I-" he added quickly when it seemed that Percy was on the verge if exploding in anger," was just here to tell you the truth."

Percy's eyes cooled a bit, and he relaxed minutely before tensing up again, hoping that he wouldn't notice. Too bad that Apollo had already read the signs and knew that he was willing to listen now.

Taking a deep mental breath to prepare himself, he fortified his nerves and softened his expression so that his mouth had stretched into a gentle but serious smile and willed his gold eyes to look as honest as possible. He laid himself out, all honest and bare, and feeling oh so vulnerable, but still hoping for Percy to understand because he was just realizing that taking care of a kid was the best thing to happen to him in centuries. And he really, really didn't want to let that go.

So as he leaned forward slightly to tell Percy everything, and willed him to understand, he also pushed down the stirrings of thoughts of what would happen if Percy rejected him, if he ran off the moment he heard the news, or worse: blamed Apollo for how shitty the world was.

Percy continued staring at him with those turbulent green eyes.

" Well?" He said tightly.

"Percy, I'm a god."

Apollo thought that the confession would at least bring an expression of befuddlement across Percy's face, but the only change in his visage was the tightening of the muscles in his jaw and the way Percy had regained his tenseness from before. His clenched fists were something he vaguely noticed subconsciously as his ward's cheeks darkened from a neutral tanned pale to an angry red puce. However, despite the anger that played on every feature of his body, his green eyes remained strangely impassive.

"Oh?" He asked in a voice that Apollo would have pegged as calm if he hadn't seen the belligerent stance his small body had taken.

He eyed him, growing wary.

"Er, yes?"

Percy shrugged, still strangely accepting, his eyes shadowed.

"Okay."

That made Apollo start incredulously," Okay?"

He shrugged again. "Okay," he repeated dispassionately.

And then the dam burst and he was treated to the glowing, green-eyed glare of Percy, whose lips had twisted into a feral snarl.

"STOP LYING TO ME!" He screamed, his voice a mixture of resentment, hate and bitterness.

It was the sheer volume at hate, directed at him, at the world, that made Apollo too stunned to react fast enough. And he was almost too slow to notice that all the moisture in the air had turned to small icicles that looked as lethal as a bullet.

As he leapt to the side, cursing when the mini projectiles were aimed at him and missed him just by a hair's width, he felt his own power shiver with a need to fight back.

No, he forced purposefully as his power positively howled, don't hurt Percy. Don't hurt Percy. Don't hurt Percy.

But it was difficult, he admitted as he rolled back onto his feet, moving with his momentum, when he saw that Percy had all but lost control and he was in the middle of his own personal rainstorm that he was only just controlling. The wind screamed in his ears, furious shrieks that deafened him so that he couldn't hear his own cussing voice as he leapt this way and that throughout the clearing, dodging the next volley of missiles, and the next, and the next. The solid earth was turning soft under his constant roving and the relentless rain had turned them into slush and mud that made him slip wildly.

"PERCY!" He screamed desperately as Percy's dark chartreuse eyes went blank and unresponsive and the wind continued to whip his hair around, even as the rain water never touched him.

He flailed against the invisible wall of air currents that insisted on pushing him back.

He scrambled wildly around in his thoughts, trying to find a solution to his problem that didn't include unleashing his godly form and taking out half of the continent of North America. "I am a god, Percy!" he insisted,"Gods really do exist. I'm not lying! And you're a demigod!"

Percy responded with a burst of torrential rain then squeezing his eyes shut and pressing the palms of his hands against his ears. He shook his head in denial. "No, no, no, no, no," he murmured to himself.

"Yes!" Apollo shouted himself hoarse," You are!"

When Percy's eyes next opened, there was a solid wall of denial in them that Apollo saw he could never break without a wrecking ball of proof.

He pinched the bridge of his nose tightly, closing his eyes momentarily, and prayed to the cosmos that he didn't kill anyone. "It's true!" he yelled, eyes still closed," And I am a god." The rain stopped touching him.

Then he opened his eyes which had turned into golden orbs of power. He felt the power collecting in his body, bundling tightly as he reigned the majority of his strength in while he spent a spark to dry his clothes. He was this close to unleashing his godly form in the small clearing. But he abstained when he saw he had caused Percy to pause in his self destruction.

"I'm don't lie!" he said firmly. And then sent a wall of flames outwards from his person.