Disclaimer: I am not Rick Riordan. I don't own any works credited to his name. I'm not Cassandra Clare, either, and I don't own any works credited to her name, either. I'm simply just me, and I only own works credited to my own name. Check out my profile if you'd like to see those! (Writing Desk's Raven, previously JustAnotherChapter, Fangirl Queendom, and some other name I don't remember.)
Previously on More Than A Friend:
I didn't expect the reaction I got, nor did I expect the person who opened the door.
The moment the door was opened, I was thrown into a hug. I stood frozen, having absolutely no idea what to do. Annika stepped back, near tears.
"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, for everything I've done all my life." Annika exclaimed. "I hated you and I hated it because I didn't understand it and now it's my fault that you're going to have to go to them, they drugged me when I was drunk and I wasn't thinking clear, and then they showed me, Mikayla. They showed me what they're going to do." She did start crying at that.
"Slow down, Annika." I said softly. "What are you talking about?"
"Those- those creatures. I was at a party, I'd been drinking, and one of them must've slipped something in my drink. I was just feeling so woozy, and I was feeling so much hate, and when they asked me where they were, I told them. I thought they were normal, like me or anyone else at the party." Annika said, voice filled with fear. "And then they forced these awful images into my mind. What they plan to do to you, to me, to everyone else on this planet. And it scares me, Mikayla."
I chose my words carefully, still insure of how to react to this side of my sister. "They plan to do many things, and while I doubt they showed you the worst, as that would break any mortal's mind and I could barely take it when I saw it all, I still have nightmares every night, I understand the fear you're feeling."
Annika looked down. "I'm sorry, Mikayla." She choked out. "I told them where he is and now they have a way to get to you. Please don't be mad."
"Come here." I instructed, holding out an arm. Annika took a small step forward, but I pulled her into a hug and wrapped my arms around her. She tentatively hugged me back. "It's not your fault. I was a little mad when I found out you'd been the one to tell them, but it wouldn't have changed anything. They knew where every single other person important to me was, excluding my court, who they can't get to at the moment if they remain in the temple's wards, which are weakening either way, but it wouldn't have mattered whether you told them or not. They just wanted to add insult to injury. They know everything about me, how, I don't know, from the moment I was born, to most likely this moment right now. They've even spoken of moments that should've been private because no one else had been there, but they have their ways, and I can't help that."
I let go of Annika and she stepped back. "They already knew?" She asked quietly.
"Yeah." I said softly. "And I forgive you for everything between us, Anni."
She looked up at me and smiled. "You remember that?" She asked softly. "Mom and dad and Erin all forgot."
"I've got a perfect memory, remember?" I said with a soft smile, tapping the side of my head. She smiled softly, but then looked down.
"You're really going to forgive me for everything all these years?" She asked quietly.
"Yeah. I'm not the embodiment of mercy and forgiveness for nothing." I told her. "And all you really did was hate something you didn't understand, but that's something that can be fixed, because you're actually trying."
"Thank you." Annika whispered.
"Hey, you've always been my sister. And family's got to stick up for each other, right?" I asked, pulling her into another hug.
"I haven't done much of that most of my life, so I guess I've got a lot of sticking up to do, huh?" Annika asked. I laughed, but stepped back again.
"So, Annika, seems we're talking now, I'd like you to meet Sage. He's my best friend." I told her.
"You two are dating." She said immediately, looking between us.
"Close, but no cigar." Sage said, wrapping his arms around my waist. I laughed and showed Annika my hand with the ring.
"You're married?" Annika asked.
"Yeah. It was sorta spur of the moment, but we're in love, and neither of us had any problems with the little ceremony. We just wanted to be together." I explained.
"Dad's so gonna wanna know this right away." Annika said excitedly. "And- oh my god, I have some people you need to meet!"
Annika grabbed my hand and pulled me into the house. Sage followed behind us, laughing.
"Annika, who was at the door?" Dad called, starting to stand from his seat on the couch. Lindsay and Erin were on the couch, and there was a guy on the loveseat, a crib beside him.
Dad froze when he saw me. I gave a tiny wave. "Hi, Daddy." I said quietly.
"Mikayla?" He asked quietly. The room was so silent that you could hear a pin drop. Lindsay, Erin, and my dad all stared at me, while Annika moved silently over to the guy on the chair and sat beside him.
"It's me, dad. I never died." I told him.
Then he was rushing forward, hugging me, and Lindsay and Erin were joining him in a group hug. I hugged them all back tightly, and a couple tears fell, before my dad backed up and said, with a laugh, "Let her breathe, guys!"
I sat in one of the seats to the kitchen counter that walled the kicthen off from the living room, and Sag sat beside me. My family retook theis spots on the couch.
"How- how are you here?" Erin asked. "We didn't know you'd died until Jacob told us, his mom told him after everything happened up there."
"It worked, didn't it?" Lindsay asked me. "When you came to me, it worked, right?"
"Yeah, that's pretty much how this whole mess started." I confirmed.
"When you came to her?" Dad asked. "What?"
"This was way back when Zeus made his decree that all of us assistants and such could leave back to a mortal life or remain and follow our patron's orders, with three strikes, and if we got those strikes, we'd be sent back to a mortal life. Overpopulation and such, even with new developments being built on the ever expanding floating land that is Olympus." I started. "Obviously, I stayed, my job meant a lot to me, helping people around the world and such. But mom decided that now that I absolutely had to follow her orders, she could tell me I wasn't allowed to see Sage anymore." Sage took my hand and squeezed it softly. I squeezed back.
"She'd take you away from your own best friend?" Dad asked, covering his mouth.
"She told me he was a bad influence, all because she was judging him for the powers he now has, ever since everything happened with his brother." I said. "Mom didn't make me move out of kick him out, though, she knew I was much too sentimental for that, but she told me I wasn't to spend any time with him or talk to him. Once I got two strikes, Sage packed up and left. He didn't want me to lose my job anymore than I did, but not having him there absolutely killed me.
"You remember my nightmares, right, dad?" I asked. He nodded. "I never once did stop getting them. But Sage helped. I wasn't in the best place before, on my own, and it was worse after he left. I couldn't sleep and the nightmares were killing me. Mom couldn't even see it." I shook my head.
"And that's when you came to me." Lindsay said softly.
"Yeah. I knew it wouldn't be long before I snapped at her, especially with her always berating me that I wasn't doing as well anymore, so I came here and I asked for your blessing to take a dip in the Styx." I agreed. "I spent that weekend off doing that and making all my arrangements. Aliya helped. God, she's always been such a great friend, and I didn't even realize it until I couldn't be as close friends with her anymore."
"You went in the Styx?" Erin exclaimed. "Do you know how dangerous that is? Mick, you could've died!"
"I've almost died so many times that it seems like nothing." I shrugged. "Anyways, when I presented my next proposal, which would need approval from the entire council, as it affected all of them, I didn't do my very best. The project was for a camp out in the middle of the country, easier for people to reach, but Athena scolded me after on how badly I'd presented it. Demeter stopped her, said I'd just had an off day, and that they all knew how my projects went and that she wanted to see this one through, as did everyone else. But Athena didn't care that I'd gotten approval, she just told me I knew I had my proposal today and I didn't come prepared.
"I told her I had been prepared. I just hadn't slept. She asked why I hadn't, did I wish to leave my job and return to a mortal life? I snapped at her, then, told her maybe I did want to, that I was immortal but her orders were slowly killing me. She told me I didn't get to blame her for something she did to protect me." I said, letting out a long breath. "So I told her I quit. I told her I was done with sleepless nights and bloody hands and slowly dying inside, all because she didn't like somebody. She got really angry at that."
"What did she do?" Dad's voice was barely above a whisper.
I laughed humorlessly. "She knew quitting would have immediately made me mortal again. Yet she still decided to kill me. It didn't work."
There was silence after that, pretty much everyone disbelieving. Then I continued.
"What happened after that, well, Aliya took me to her grandfather's safehouse, he was a well versed follower of Hecate, and Athena couldn't do anything about that because I no longer followed her orders and because Aphrodite had specifically given Aliya orders to help her friend. Athena was really mad about that." I said. "I spent about a week there, and an hour before Sage was supposed to come meet me, I'd sent him a letter, a voice came out of nowhere asking me to help her, and I don't know why, but I trusted the voice, so I did what she said.
"Sent me to Greece with nothing but ancient clothing and a ceremonial dagger. I travelled, on foot, for awhile, helped some people along the way, before I found these two little girls, twins, tied up outside a temple. I heard footsteps, so I tossed a vial I'd had into a flask nearby, then tried to help them, but these guys, stronger than a mortal should have been, caught me. They left us there all day, and only at night did they decide to do anything." I continued. I took a deep breath, looking down. Sage held my hand even tighter.
"What happened then?" Annika asked softly. "Why'd they tie up two little girls?"
"When they first tied me up by the girls, they mentioned something about profit. The girls told me, later, that the men were going to sell them, but that the ones who were coming to collect them would just kill the men for fun and then kill them, they wanted their entire family dead." I explained. "As for what they did... It was close to night fall when they remembered they had me over there. One of them decided he was going to try to rape me. Gods, I didn't even know I was screaming a name until he told me to stop.
"But then he was there. I'd never heard Sage so angry, and one of them got cocky, so the man on top of me melted into shadows. The other men were rightfully scared, then, and the one who'd gotten cocky turned around, only to have a dagger held to his throat. Sage told them to untie the children, which one of them did, while another started to protest, and another two dropped dead. I was glad they'd a shared the flask." I explained. "Sage threatened them, the last two men ran off, and Sage released the man he'd been holding, who ran off, too."
"And everything was okay then?" Dad asked hopefully, even though we all knew it wasn't true.
"Not at all." Sage said, wrapping an arm around me. "I explained how I'd caught her leaving, and had followed, but the twins told me to back away. Said she had to enter the temple alone. That 'they' drew closer because of the surge of power, when I'd frightened those men. Twins said they'd kill us all if we didn't get Mick into the temple, and I said we should all go in and protect her there, but they said she had to go in alone, and that they couldn't enter the temple until this world fell to them."
Sage took a deep breath before continuing. I was glad he'd taken over this part of the story. I couldn't talk about the ritual. Not only because I didn't want to, but because I was bound by oath. It was the only thing my enemy did not know about, could not know about.
"I was suspicious of the girls, since they said only Mick could go in, but they planned to go in, too." Sage continued. Then he hesitated.
"You can continue." I told him softly. "Everyone now knows, they know. You're released from your oath. Styx herself will back me up on this."
"The girls only smiled at me, and then these four creatures showed up. They immediately addressed me by my title, Tartarus, and then they asked me to join them. Said they could give me so much more than I ever wanted, more than Olympus would ever give me. I asked what they meant to do with the girls." Sage said quietly. "They said the children had to die, there was no other way. And they said Mick had to die, too, but that it would be more fun if she'd already joined some court.
"Then they asked me again to join them. I told them I had everything I wanted on Olympus, and I threw a blast of power at them, to keep them away from the girls. The twins tugged Mick into the temple, leaving me out there with the creatures. One of them lunged at me. I threw it so hard that I heard it's bones crack when it hit the tree line. It was horrible." Sage shuddered. "The other three just looked at me, looked at the temple, and left.
"I don't know how long I waited outside that temple. Eventually, one of the twins came out and told me that Mick had died. I was devastated. The temple remained the same, but the clearing was a lot larger when I left than when I'd arrived." Sage said. "I went back to our house on Olympus. Eventually, they finally turned to me in their search for Mick, and the council summoned me. Athena surprised me when I got there. Enchanted chains, they took away my powers. I could do nothing while she questioned me over and over again.
"Most of the council didn't agree with what she did for the next six months. Really, only Ares, because he loves violence, Artemis, because she'd wanted Mick as a huntress and thought I'd corrupted her out of it, and Zeus, because he was afraid of my power as the new Tartarus." Sage laughed humorlessly. "She tortured me in front of the whole council at the beginning of every meeting, to show them she was in power and not them, Zeus had given her power. Hades, he'd become like another father figure to me when he helped me learn to control my powers, didn't know, because Olympus had closed down immediately, and he was in his realm. Same for Poseidon, who I might not have known, but who I know would've sided with Hades on this because his son is friends with my cousin's godmother, and Percy would never have wanted anyone hurt like this.
"The other Olympian gods did what they could to help. With Olympus closed down, no one else knew anything, all contact had been cut. Until six months after I returned." Sage said. "Ares was about to hit me again for screaming at Athena when she showed up. None of us knew it was Mick."
"Aphrodite knew." I said. "Not right away, but she had her guess, and Aliya figured it out and shared her reasons, and they agreed it was me."
"I guess they knew, then." Sage corrected himself. "But she showed up, her hair was brown, her eyes blue, and no one seemed to know who she was. Zeus almost had a cow when she showed off the diadem."
I smiled. "Yeah, he was way too eager to do whatever I wanted. He wanted to throw me a ball and a feast." I said. "He protested at first when I told him to release Sage, but he had to when I told them all I vouched for him and that if anyone so much as laid a finger on him, they'd have Styx to answer to. Athena hated me for it. I'd come waltzing in and taken away her power just like that."
"Right before we left, she told Zeus that those of them who'd sided with Athena had a lot of angry gods to contend with, and she listed off a whole bunch of gods related to my family." Sage said. "Zeus even looked afraid, especially when you mentioned Physis and Aether."
"Physis is a force to be reckoned with." I said. "I mean, you definitely don't want mother nature angry with you, do you? Her and Gaea's domains overlap, so while Gaea is Mother Earth, Physis is Mother Nature."
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