Disclaimer: I own nothing besides Emily and the plot.

AN: I finished this earlier than I expected and I can't believe this is one of the last chapters. I'm starting on the final two chapters, the ones where we find out who the monsters are and why they are there. When we get to see the memories of all those "plot holes" you all thought I left hanging. I hope that by the end of the chapter the only question you'll have is, "How did it end?" What happened during the prank war? Did Will get help for his suicidal thoughts? Did Leo ever fix what was broke with his family? We'll see. We'll see.

Clarisse's POV

Studying was not something I appreciated. Not all of my final exams were really, exams per say, but they were still annoying as hell. In Greek Mythology, we were supposed to do a project that summarized our learning of the year and it was a group assessment. Each person had a specific role that they had to complete for the project. The overall thing was getting a grade but also what we put forward. My part was semi easy? I was lucky and got the wars of greek mythology. Our topic was how Ancient Greece influences us today so I was going to talk strategy, hierarchy, who they defeated...that kind of stuff. Easy, right?

"If you don't stop groaning and shoving your book around, you'll see just how good I've gotten with my spear." Chris was having an even worse time than me because he ended up behind after his concussion. Most of his learning was verbal and memory so he was having to rely on other people for physical notes and spelling. "What are you even working on, anyway? Is that for Greek?"

I moved over so he could see the poster I'd created on the floor. I was supposed to create a poster with "our greatest achievements of war" while the others did similar ones for the group part of the project, we were going to tie them all together like a picture book. Hopefully. "Yeah and as you can see, it's not going well. Our exams are in three days and I don't even have this thing finished yet. We're supposed to practice our presentation on Sunday at Marley's house and I still need to study for Latin and Trig/Pre Calc. Not to mention I have to put together my portfolio for Art..." I rubbed my face, trying to at the very least to get my face muscles awake. "What are you working on?"

"Just going over the stuff I missed. I already reviewed what we learned before and I still have it down but this stuff makes no sense to me. I mean, imaginary numbers? Mr. Harvey might be military man, but he's more of a magician nerd if you ask me..." I always loved it when Chris got tired because his lips would pout slightly and his eyes would droop just enough that shadows made them look like dark chocolate.

I blushed as I noticed his lips turn up into a smirk, I'd been caught staring and as long as we'd been dating (longer than Percy and Annabeth), I still wasn't used to the fact that he was mine. That we were in high school together and studying for our final exams...which I needed to get back to working on. "You wanna take a break and help me with this?"

Chris was next to me in a second, lying stretched out on his stomach with his chin on his hands as he looked over what I already had. "Awesome, I like it. The shields are cool, it's a fun way to list achievements. I think this is going to get you extra points cause I would have never thought of that." He ran a hand through his curls and I almost laughed when some of his fingers got stuck. "I should have learned by now. At least with your new do that won't happen!"

I shoved him, but he was right. I'd shaved the left side of my head and cut my hair to my chin on the other side. I thought it looked terrible but he was always playing with it and helping me shave it again when it go too long. "Get back to doing my project, I'm grabbing us some water."

"Make mine vodka and maybe we'll both survive!" I laughed at him, knowing full well he would never touch a bottle in his life if only to take it away from someone. Him and Percy were similar like that, but for different reasons. One saw the way it affects someone else, the other never wanted to lose control again. "Love you too babe!"

"Shove it up your ass, Chris!" I laughed as I heard Piper yell something about my language and ignored Reyna's head shake as she poured over notes with Rachel and Lou on the floor. "What are y'all working on? Homework?"

Rachel was about to give a sassy retort, but Jason cut her off as he barreled into the living room. "Has anyone seen my glasses? I swear I just had them and Piper says she doesn't know either. I already looked on my head so I know it's not there."

Getting water would just have to wait as I watched Jason look under everything, frantically ask for help while they hung around his neck on the little chain thing Rachel had made him. He looked like a grandmother. "Jason, you're going to give yourself a heart attack."

He went to put a hand on his heart like he always does when someone mentions that, ready to say, "That's not funny Clarisse," before his hand touched his missing glasses. "Thanks. By the way, Travis forgot the gym bag again so you'll have to use the sippy cups." He grinned as he ran out of the room, ignoring my questions about why do we have sippy cups?

"Oh come on Clarisse, it's to build up mouth muscles. Helps you get better at sucking on things." Lou squealed as I threw a pillow at her while the other two girls laughed. "What, I just wanted to lighten your mood! You've been moody lately, I thought you might want help!" If that girl couldn't turn me into a cockroach and step on me I would have killed her. Of course I was a bitch when she first joined camp but she was still teasing me and pushing her luck.

As I walked back to the room, I smothered a smirk when I heard Reyna. "Leave Clarisse alone, I'm a lesbian and even I know she's got the best dancing partner in the house. That's a guy of course..."

"Of course. Wouldn't want to offend Piper or anything." If I didn't know any better, I'd say we were normal teenagers. I brought the sippy cups back to our room, laughing as I caught sight of Chris coloring with his feet crossed in the air. "You are such a dork." I crawled down onto the floor next to him so I could finish writing down all the information I needed while he marked over my lines and colored in my drawings. "When was the last time you laid out on a floor and colored like this? When you were a six year old girl?" I raised an eyebrow at his feet again, but I wasn't expecting him to lower them when he noticed what I was looking at. "Hey, I was just teasing. I think it's cute, I promise."

Chris shrugged it off and put his feet back up, but he stopped coloring and just finished darkening the outlines and my writing before getting up to work on his stuff. "I have to finish working on this and it looks like your poster is almost done."

I glanced at him in confusion with the difference in his attitude but I let it go as I moved back to the bed so I could work on my essay on the computer. After an hour of silence, I had my essay finished and printed out, on top of my poster in the living room and had gotten Annabeth to officially check me off for projects. Percy had told her about his mom used to put a piece of paper out with a checklist for all of the work he needed to do so Annabeth and Reyna drew up a poster for it. So far the girls in the living room were right on track to be done on time, as were Jason, Reyna, Percy and Nico. Everyone else was a bit of a mess, trying to help the people that were behind and half finishing projects before moving on to the next assignment.

"Alright, I think a break is needed and I'm bored out of my mind. Let's go spar!" I reached out for his hand, surprised when he didn't seem to notice I existed. I kneeled down in front of where he was working, trying to rack my brain for all of the people skills Piper had been trying to teach me. "What's bothering you?"

He finally looked up at me but there was a guard there I wasn't expecting. "Nothing, I just want to finish this before I do anything else." I hate to bite my tongue to keep from calling him out on the "I" comment, instead just sitting down and picking up a pencil to help. "I'm fine, Clarisse. You can go do something else if you're bored." Okay, that one stung. What is wrong with you? What did I do wrong? I decided to leave him alone if he was going to act like that, glancing back as I left the room to see if he was going to follow. He was closing the door behind me.

I stormed up to the rooftop, ignoring Katie's concerned glances as I picked up my sword and started working on the dummy. Slash, deflect, there goes an arm. Stab through where there should be a heart, pull it out through the ribs.

"He's shutting you out again, isn't he?" I wasn't expecting Travis to be the one talking to me, but there he was leaning back in the arms of one of the other dummies like the weirdo he was. Just because we hadn't killed each other yet didn't mean I liked Chris' brothers. "What did you say? I'm not saying it's your fault, I'm just asking." He ignored my warning glares, not even flinching as I threw a knife that nicked his ear as it implanted itself into the dummies head behind him. "You can't just deflect forever, you're going to have to talk to me at some point. Because I can tell you why my brother is acting like an ass."

"Because I rubbed off on him?" Suddenly there was a sword in front of me that wasn't attached to a bag of hay, blue eyes glaring up at me from behind a mop of brown curls. "Oh so because I'm not going to listen you're going to fight me?"

He didn't fight back, only deflected and pushed me back all while not getting in a single hit. It was frustrating and tiring, all I wanted was for him to have a single reaction. To fight back. But then I was pressed against the railing with a sword to my throat. "Hermes kids don't fight offensively most of the time, we use tricks and manipulation to get what we want. Force isn't always the answer, you have the philosophy that if there's no one to tell than you're being stealthy. We can walk into a mirrored room and take the clothes off of the only other person there's back without them noticing we're even there. You're trying to get him to open up by prying open the front doors while he's standing right behind you." Travis pulled away his sword and helped me back into a standing position, putting his sword back into its sheath and walking over to continue gardening with Katie.

Travis was not helping me with my love life. Right? I showered off quickly to remove the layers of dirt, grime, sweat and helplessness off my body, trying to let the water wash away the nervousness too. I might hate the pranksters but at the very least they knew a different side to Chris than I did, I only started paying attention to him when I found him but they had known him since he arrived at camp. Or they had. Oh gods, I don't know when he came to camp. I knocked on our door quietly, part of me hoping he wouldn't answer the door so I could walk away. But there he was opening the door for me but not looking me in the eye.

I just sat next to him quietly as I worked on some project or another, feeling him slowly move closer. Five minutes later our thighs were touching. After another three he was holding my hand and I put my computer away, I was terrible at typing with only my left hand. It was like trying to write backwards. I finally noticed that he had moved so his face was pressed into my shoulder, something warm and wet seeping into my t shirt. He was crying and I had no idea what to do so I just mimicked what he did for me. I pulled him into my lap and let him curl around me, hiding everything in my neck as I brushed my fingers through his hair and rubbed circles into his back. "I don't understand what's going on with you, but I love you and I'll be here for whatever you need." It was a cheesy line from a movie he made me watch, but it seemed to be the right thing to say as I felt him nod. I held him a little longer before my legs started falling asleep and he moved away so he was sitting in front of me.

"Everyone thought I was crazy and saying some random girl's name when I was in that basement with you. But I wasn't, she was a girl I used to know. But no one has used her name in a long time because she died when I was born. This me." He couldn't look at me and I was having trouble understanding him, but I let him talk. "I was so drawn to Kronos because I didn't really fit into my family, my mother basically threw my step father out of the house when he helped me get my name legally changed. He's the one who paid for the injections, I started around the time I started at camp so I didn't have to get surgery."

I was still listening to him but it was like I was on a delay, processing everything he was telling me. Mary was the first name on his birth certificate, she had died when he changed it officially to Chris. He didn't fit in at camp, he didn't fit in at home so of course he went looking for a place where he would be accepted. But then he was told he was expendable and was thrown into the maze. And at first he was uncomfortable with kissing her, he refused to be seen shirtless and still they haven't… "I understand why you didn't feel comfortable telling me, you weren't sure how I was going to react." I took a deep breath as I pushed the image of longer hair and a smaller body out of my head, that wasn't who was in front of me. That was someone who didn't exist in the first place. If the Fates could spend the time to meet Percy and sew his entire life, they probably spent the time to give him the wrong body to make him who he was. I wouldn't have fallen in love with him if not for that maze and that was what brought him there. "Chris Rodriguez, get your butt over here." I moved so I was off the ground almost as if I was praying without the whole hand thing, reaching out to drag him into my arms, pressing a kiss to his hair. "I love you, Chris."

He was smiling when he pulled away, but I quickly smothered it with kisses that held as much love as I could put into them. We fell backwards onto the floor, laughing as we ignored the way our backs protested and my arm huffed about being used to protect his head. Our homework was done enough, we needed some stress relief.

Jason's POV

Of course I could handle the basic sciences, I had been taught most of this stuff already in the Legion. But their version of tests was experiments that lead to infirmary visits and jokes that lasted for years, having one of Trivia's children who went to med school create illusionary bodies for us to dissect. I showed my knowledge of chemistry by showing the creation of storm cloud in slow motion so the process could be seen before my teachers eyes. I never once sat down in a room with a sheet of paper and wrote out equations to find the answer. "I know this, Mrs. Higgins knows I know this. I can do the math in my head easily but when I try and fill out the equations like she told us...I get answers I know are wrong."

Piper was most likely done with my existential crisi by now, she'd been helping me work on projects and essays all yesterday; and now we were going over the stuff I needed to study for exams. "I don't know how to help you with this. I know you want to be able to do this, you want me to charm you into being able to do this."

I knew she wasn't going to be able to, she'd already gone through this with me during midterms and I'd barely passed. She can only guide someone into doing something they want with the abilities they have. I don't have a strong ability to do this. "So what am I going to do? I can't just fail this test, I am quite literally going into college for this. I can't fail…" I knew I sounded like a spoiled kid but I was panicking. I hated feeling like I had no control over anything, like life was spiraling and dragging me down with it. All over some stupid test that had no real importance in the scheme of everything but meant everything to me. "Piper, what am I going to do?"

"You are going to take a deep breath." Deep breath...isn't that what we want to do? Before I could even realize it was happening I was breathing deeply, slightly dizzy but at least I was calmer. "You are going to look at this like it's battlefield and you are playing against an opponent you've never seen before. Tell me, how do you fight something you don't understand?"

"You do research, you analyze the way they fight…" Tell me Jason….Teach me about how to fight...But then I was closing my mouth and I didn't understand why. "That's not going to work though because I don't want to fight every time I'm trying to learn...I need to make an alliance, work together. But how do I make an alliance with a bunch of dead guys that created the equations I need for this?"

The voice in my head disappeared as she burst out laughing like I had just made the greatest joke in the world, leaning forward with her chin on her palms. "You could ask Nico." Apparently that ruined any progress we'd made as she almost face planted into the table, her arms shaking.

Nico's POV

"Do you people have no decency?" I was tired more than a normal teenager possibly could be, way beyond what any normal person should be and all I wanted to was someone to go over my note cards with. Everywhere I went it was like makeout central, the kitchen. The living room. At least three bedroom doors were locked with muffled moans coming from behind them that I didn't care to check on. If they could get through the sound barrier…

A hand reached out to drag me to the safety of the computer room, blue lights illuminating our faces. "Damn, this really isn't your color." Hazel laughed at my expression, moving over to her pile of pillows and binders, a blanket protecting her from the outside world of hormonal teenagers. "I thought you could use someone to study with that wasn't going to try and drag you into a threesome." She was wiggling her eyebrows like she was so proud of herself for making that joke, she had probably been working on it for a few hours. "Anyway, since you have no sense of humor and look like a dead fish...want me to run through your note cards with you?"

It was all I wanted for the past twelve minutes as I searched for someone not in the middle of mutual suffocation, but once we got started I quickly came to the conclusion that studying was hell.

A yowl rang through the air as the tiniest kitten I had ever seen climbed it's way out from underneath one of the pillows and wandered over to her lap. It moved so it's back was draped over her thigh, stretching out with a purr. It nuzzled into her as it yawned, falling back asleep quickly. She didn't even seem to notice it's existence at first, not until she realized I was distracted by what was residing on her body.

"Is that...Frank?" Even in the dark, with half of her face covered by the blanket on her shoulders and her ducked head I could tell she was blushing. "Wow, didn't realize I was interrupting another private moment...maybe I should go."

"It's not like that!" She was squeaking she was so embarrassed. Poor kitten Frank was almost throw off when she reached over to hit me once she realized I was teasing. "You need to get out of my sanctuary, you asshole. I came here to be protected and you. You just disrespect me like this. In my own corner!" She couldn't hold it together any longer and burst out laughing too, leaning her head against the wall as she took notice of the cards laying everywhere. "I guess we're done studying."

The exam schedule was weird. It went B4, O4, B3, O3, etc…and each day there were only two exams so we had two and a half hours when he we showed up to school of free time. We were supposed to stay in the lunchroom but…"Come on Will, we won't get caught. Besides we need a break." It was almost hilarious how all it took for him to break was a stuck out lower lip and widened eyes that I thought looked weird. "You know we haven't gotten alone time in a while…"

"Fine! You can shadow travel us to the bakery down the street but if we appear in McDonalds I will call the school and tell them you kidnapped me." He was smiling though so I knew he was kidding, at least about calling the school. Not the claiming I kidnapped him part because he would if we got caught. He squeezed my hand as we got pulled underneath the bench we were sitting on, if anyone could see through the mist I imagine it would look like apperating. Warping out of existence.

When we walked into the bakery, it was as if summer had already started. Will started glowing slightly like he was absorbing the warmth that seemed to just be standard in all Ma and Pop shops. "It's warm in here."

If this was a TV show, the camera would have zoomed in on Will's face to show just how exacerbated he was by my existence in his general area. "No, I was expecting it to be freezing in here. It's not like it's seventy degrees outside or anything." He still wrapped an arm around my waist and led me over to the counter with the biggest smile he could muster, tilting his head. "The 'I'm taking my final exam next block' special please." The girl behind the counter giggled as she actually took our order, but he didn't seem to notice how she was acting. "Come on, let's find a table while we wait for our order." He dragged me over to a small booth in the corner that was probably meant for couples, pausing as he seemed to realize there was going to be no space. "Maybe you should find us a seat."

I rolled my eyes as I moved us over to a larger table by the window which allowed for separation from the other customers and a perfect view of the clock which would be their savior. "I need to study for science and Algebra 2 tomorrow, I am so unprepared for those tests."

"You're going to do great, you've been studying and working on projects all weekend. You got tested by Hazel, Annabeth and Percy. I think you're going to do great." He didn't pay attention to the fact that he repeated himself but I could tell he was saying it to himself too, if you said something enough it would come true. Right? "Anyway, it's just a summary of what you've done all year. Mrs. Murray gave you those Big Idea sheets to write down important information from each of the units right? Let me see them and you tell me what's on them." When I just glared in response, he reached around for my backpack as the food arrived so I would be distracted by saying thank you. "Okay. Unit One, this one is about transformation."

"You're insufferable," I groaned as I laid out over the table before muttering out some nonsense that sounded right. I felt a pressure on my head, moving to see Will leaning back into his chair like nothing happened. "Did you kiss me?"

The look on his face would have made me question his parentage if he didn't look like a stained glass angel in the window of a church. "You get something sweet every time you get something right. If you get it wrong, I'll eat your muffin."

"You wouldn't dare!" I picked my head up enough to realize he had moved my food over to his side of the table, out of reach for my lazy arms. "You aren't my type anymore, I like powerful demigods."

I regretted my words instantly as a dangerous look crossed over his face that I felt throughout my entire body, his eyes hooded as he leaned forward enough that he could whisper and I could hear it loud and clear. "Do I not have power over you, Nicolò?"