Hey guys, the last chapter was published on my birthday before I even started high school and this one is being published on my winter break while home from college. A lot has happened in my life (graduated high school, moved thousands of miles from home for college, traveled the world) but I think about this story from time to time and always assumed I would come back to it. Honestly, I know some of the earlier chapters are messy and awkwardly written but I'm jealous of the me that wrote them because she actually wrote. I can't promise this will be much better because I haven't gained any experience since but if you're interested, enjoy!
"We can't go there." the words came out of my mouth before my mind had even processed what I was trying to say.
A quick glance up tp my friends faces revealed that Grover was absolutely scandalized and Annabeth was a bizarre amalgamation of exasperated at my lack of tact and running through a hundred scenarios in her head when she inevitably needed to back me up. She's good at multitasking like that.
Grover was the first to respond and wasn't quite sympathetic to my command. "Dude why?" He asked. "The weather is trash, we're hungry, its Mexican!" He said the last part with the level of yearning I've only ever heard from some junkies in my high school talk about nicotine.
"I hate Mexican food." I said way too quickly, causing Annabeth to sigh.
Grover just looked at me dumbfounded. "Percy we lived together for a year. I know you eat Mexican food. You ate Yancy Taco Tuesday and we both agree that those tacos were probably rat meat."
Sadly, all of this was true and even nearly a decade in retrospect, I stand by Yancy Academy's Taco Tuesday— rat meat and all. I had successfully backed myself into a corner with just three words, but Medusa was just through those ugly doors and I had no need nor desire to fight her again. It didn't further our quest and, to be honest, I was kind of tired from the bus ride.
"Well… you see…" I started. But Annabeth cut me off.
"Percy," she said softly, putting a hand on my arm. "Why are we doing this? Let's just tell him. There's literally no reason to hide this from him."
I was completely caught off guard by her suggestion that we come clean to Grover about our time travel situation. There was no rule that said we had to keep it a secret, but we also had wanted to keep our true quest between us. It was safer for all of our friends if they didn't have the burden of the future on their shoulders.
But Annabeth was right as usual. Years of constant fighting for your life can do wonders for your ability to put things in perspective and I knew by now that efficiency was vital to our mission. Another lesson I'd picked up along the way was that dumb luck is 60% of the reason any Half Blood makes it past their 16th birthday. We didn't know how much of that we could count on it panning out in our favor the second time around so it was probably better to come clean and avoid the battle.
Grover was staring at Annabeth and I as if we were the statue of his uncle Ferdinand I knew was inside the building in front of us. "Tell me what?"
I opened my mouth to answer but Annabeth cut me off again and said. "Not here. We need to keep moving. Come on Grover I'll explain once we get out of here."
The Satyr's face remained conflicted, he began to protest, but after seeing the grave look on our faces he complied and allowed Annabeth to lead him away.
The uneasy silence fell heavy on our trio as we made our way through the brush, blindly hoping to stumble across civilization. I knew neither Annabeth nor I have any recollection of where the Amtrak station that we'd spent two days on the first time we did this quest was, and we hadn't sat down to discuss the recent deviations from the original plan to stick close to past events. All I knew was that anything was better than another round with Medusa. Gods I missed google maps and working smartphones; I didn't care about the monster beacon, 2005 mobile GPS was practically nonexistent and to a cold, wet Percy that was more important.
My brain was running at a mile a minute, stopping only to curse when a thorn stuck my leg as I brushed past a rosebush. Had I made the right call? Had I endangered us even further? What were we going to tell Grover? I was so hungry… How much farther until we found a road?
Finally, I heard the sound of a train horn blowing in the distance and I heard Annabeth let out a sigh of relief.
"Here." she said as we broke through the shrubbery to see a run down, but fully functional Amtrak station glowing in the evening air. The train horn we had heard was pulling out of the station but I couldn't have cared less. We made it. I could see a vending machine sitting next to the platform as we climbed the steps to the ticket kiosk and a part of my brain longed for the Auntie Ems (those burgers from the past were legendary) but I would make do with a pack of peanuts and a bag of Doritos if it meant steering away from that nightmare.
Stepping into the lit area seemed to break Grover out of his spell and he whirled around looking guarded. "So you hate Mexican food now?" his eyebrows were so high up his forehead they might have been trying to escape.
"Buddy…" I said, looking anywhere but at his face. Why did this feel so hard? And wrong? My subconscious answered my own musings. This isn't the Grover you know. You don't want to hurt him.
It was true. The Grover I had seen a few months ago was the lord of the wild, he was a leader in every sense of the term and gave the best advice because he'd been there. But it wasn't even that. This Grover right here had a different bond with me. Sure, we hadn't been tested by battles or torn to pieces both physically and emotionally, but the relationship I had with the satyr in front of me was simple. We hung out every day and he only knew me as the novice kid who had been shoved into a situation far above his pay grade.
"Percy," he started, "I don't know what's going on but you're acting really weird right now. You and Annabeth have been sneaking around together and I can feel that there's another layer to both of your emotions but it's shrouded from me and I can't see what it is. And now we're on a quest and you go running at the sight of a building? And it's like there are a hundred clues but I can't tell what they add up to and I just want to know what's going on…"
His voice broke with his last words and he looked at the ground is distress, fake feet kicking at a gum spot on the platform concrete.
I put a hand on his arm and took a deep breath. "Buddy... " I said firmly, "You're right."
His head snapped up as if he hadn't expected to get any sort of answer. "What?" he breathed.
"Annabeth and I… we're… not really...us." I began.
A fearful look passed over Grover's face and he yanked his arm out of my hands, backing towards the gate and reaching for his reed pipes as if they would protect him from whatever Monster he must have assumed we were.
"W-what does that mean?" his voice shook and I caught a glimpse of the brave friend I had left behind, but I was still at a loss for words.
"Oh my gods seaweed brain have some tact!" Annabeth moaned next to me which I think made Grover's terror/confusion grow. She raised both hands and gave me a look I knew meant 'follow my lead.'
"Grover, there's really no easy way to say this," she soldiered on, "but Percy and I are Percy and Annabeth from the future, sent to save Half Bloods lost in a great war."
Interesting I thought ripping off the Band-Aid… more my style but Annabeth knows best
Grover's eyes grew even wider for a moment before squinting in confusion once more. "What?"
"She's telling the truth man." I added as if it had any ability to lessen the shockwaves of the bomb we had just dropped.
Grover backed up another step, brushing against the iron gate separating the platforms.
"What…?" he repeated, his eyes darting between the two of us as if one was going to shout 'HA! PUNKED!' Neither of us knew how to respond so he spoke again.
"No. You're lying. There is no way this can be true. Time travel isn't REAL!" he vehemently shook his head.
"We're telling the truth man. We've been here since the start of summer." I said grimly.
"N-no… you're Percy from school who just found out he's a half-blood. A month ago you asked me last week if Homer Simpson wrote the Iliad!" He pointed at me.
"Obviously I was trying to throw you off the scent!" I protested, feeling Annabeth's eyes bore into my side. "I know all about the Ili- whatever you said and me, the Percy Jackson in front of you, has known he's a half-blood for nearly a decade."
"Grover," Annabeth practically whispered, "we're not lying to you, Percy and I both aren't even full-time campers anymore. We're from the future…"
After the complete bizzaro world circus that was my teen years, I had learned to accept things no matter how outlandish they seemed and embrace the "impossible" and I assumed the rest of this magical community had as well. Either I was dead wrong or my goat friend hadn't gotten the message, because seemed to not be responding.
"I…. you….." he stammered, "no…"
I felt really bad for the guy so I replied, "Dude, I feel like I need to prove it to you somehow like they do in the movies. Tell you something only someone from the future would know."
He didn't respond so I forged on, "Um… uh…." and then a lightbulb went off. "Thalia!" I nearly shouted, earning my a glare from Annabeth.
My outburst broke Grover out of his stupor but didn't have the desired effect of him believing our story. Instead he practically bristled. "How do you know that name."
"Okay, okay," I began with my palms raised in an 'I surrender' position. "Thalia Grace, daughter of Zeus. You were supposed to take her back to camp but she didn't make it."
"Annabeth could've told you that." he shot back, seemingly empowered by me bringing up one of his greatest failures.
"Ms. Dodds, From Yancy, she was a Fury." I tried.
"If you'd read the Iliad like you claimed you would've known that anyways"
"Grover we both know I haven't actually read the Iliad."
"It's true Grover, he hasn't read the Iliad." Annabeth added unhelpfully.
Although a bit of the tension had been cut, I knew that I needed to pull something deep for him to fully believe me.
"The god, Pan," I said carefully, "You're looking for him."
Grover's face flashed with pain and, for a moment, I worried that I'd gone down the wrong path and came across as exploiting a sensitive topic for him but I continued out of desperation.
"It's your life's mission… right?"
"Percy I'm a Satyr, it's all of our missions to find Pan and anyone could've told me that."
"But not just anyone told me that. You did. Many years ago we sat in a clearing not far from here and you told me about how much you loved the environment and the animals and.. All that stuff... " I finished lamely.
It wasn't even the most convincing thing I'd said in the argument, let alone the most coherent, but something softened in Grover's face and I knew him well enough to tell I had convinced him.
"The future" he said through an exhale. "... okay… yeah…"
"Yeah…" I rocked onto the balls of my feet and swayed my arms by my side.
"That restaurant back there was actually Medusa's lair and last time we made the mistake of going inside." Annabeth seemingly found her voice again.
"I'm sorry wHAT?!" Grover squeaked, looking over his shoulder as if Medusa was going to come bursting through the trees. Honestly he had a point and Annabeth seemed to sense it.
"We clearly have a lot to talk about but theres another Westbound train coming in 10 minutes and I don't want to get stuck here overnight." she said.
"Do we have enough money?" Grover asked, doing a pretty decent impression of someone who hadn't just been told his best friends were time travelers.
Annabeth reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a wallet with a wad of cash and what looked to be a credit card inside.
"Before we left I asked Chiron to help me out, it would be a disaster if we went broke and starved before reaching Hades." She explained.
Even though this wasn't entirely out of character even for a tween Annabeth, Grover looked at her, starry eyed, like he was seeing her in a brand new light. We bought our tickets from a sleepy station worker who was probably stoned and after a quick bathroom break, our transportation had arrived, ready to take us on the rest of our journey… whatever that would be...
I made eye contact with Annabeth. Her face quieted my roaring brain to a soft whirrrr. I wasn't alone and no matter what, this girl was here by my side. We had braved two wars, Tartarus, the Labyrinth, and countless other quests together and this was just the next great adventure.
Then I looked in front of me at Grover who we had just dropped an atomic bomb on but had managed to keep it together enough to get us on the train for the sake of the quest. I was filled with warmth and vowed not to take his trust for granted. As we pulled away from the decaying station I felt, for the first time since getting sent back, like I knew where I was going.