A/N: Holy sh*t, there is a person on this planet who is not me who knows who Epimetheus is and what he means? That's just ... Wow.
And oh, believe me, insecurities or not, there is not a snowball's chance in hell anyone could ever enjoy reading this more than at most half as much as I am enjoying writing it. :D
...
Disclaimers are for the weak.
"well, that was interesting," Alex says happily as he drops down to the floor and starts picking up his crayons, which have been scattered all over the floor during the fight.
I sigh deeply seeing the destruction the battle caused to this usually so beautiful room.
During all the chaos of the fight itself and then the 'arrest' thereafter, I never really got a chance to look around here rationally and see this mess.
Now I do and it's horrible.
Tables have been overturned,
Alex' toys and crayons are all over the place.
There is blood on the carpet.
One of the flower vases has been shattered.
"well, I guess we'd better start cleaning up," H says, sounding perfectly cheerful, despite it being his home that was desecrated like this.
Ares offers to 'help' with the cleaning, but H chases him away after only a few minutes, as Ares' idea of 'cleaning up' is just him aggressively throwing things towards the general location of where they were supposed to be.
And no, he doesn't check to see if they're breakable before tossing them either.
Alex was laughing his little ass off the whole time – I have a suspicion Ares is quickly starting to become his favorite uncle – and then started imitating him, tossing his crayons towards the place where he'd been gathering them, no longer bothering to just walk the two steps, so H sends him away too.
The two walk off laughing and loudly talking to each other about how we're all just too 'stingy' and how what they were doing was so much faster and easier and even if it was a bit destructive and inefficient to the point of it being straight-up counterproductive, at least it was fun.
"he's going to rub off on Alex," H complains, gathering Alex' crayons and toys before cleaning up anything else, which makes me smile.
"I'm pretty sure he already has," I just say, laughing as I pick up the pieces of what seems to have once been a really expensive vase.
Today is just full of clichés.
I flop down on a half-destroyed couch that I would be happy to never get up from again.
Messing up this room was easy enough and it only took about twenty minutes, but cleaning it up again...damn.
I flinch when my arm stings from the abrupt movement and Pollo smacks himself on the forehead, another cliché.
"duh, I should've dealt with that right when we came in," he says and then he casually starts taking off my T-shirt.
Now, anywhere else I wouldn't have minded that at all, but seeing as we're still in the living room with everyone watching, I stop his hands.
"uh...what'cha doin'?" I ask and he grins, guessing my thoughts.
"well, I was going to heal your wound, but if you'd rather I do something else to you, I'm sure I could convince the others to leave the room for a while," he says.
I just glare at him annoyedly and he laughs before going back to taking my shirt off.
He unwraps the bandages and puts his hand on the wound, making me flinch again.
"sorry," he mumbles, but he still presses a bit harder.
The wound starts to feel warmer and warmer and it even gets to the point of it burning uncomfortably, but I don't say anything about it.
Because I'm thinking that, well, he's supposed to be the god of medicine, right?
So wouldn't he know what he's doing?
But when the burning starts to really hurt and it's feeling as though he's pushing a naked flame against my already painful shoulder, I start trying to push him away.
But he resists and just casually shoves my hands aside.
And he's not even saying anything, he's just looking at me 'apologetically' as he sets my arm on fire.
Well, that's what this feels like, anyway.
So I try to pull my body away from him instead, but my back is up against the backrest of the couch.
I have nowhere to go, I'm trapped.
And just when the pain gets so bad that I'm about to take a swing at Pollo, just to make him let me go, he smiles and in that grin I can see great relief and a little bit of pride and then he finally pulls his hand away.
The burning starts to ebb away, far too slowly for my liking, but there's nothing I can do about that now.
I look up at his face to see him smiling down at me sheepishly.
"yeah, healing hurts," he says and he shrugs. "and healing too much, too fast, that hurts a lot."
I look at my shoulder and my brain nearly short-circuits at the sight of the smooth, wound-free skin there.
I run my fingers over the unmarred skin and immediately forget all the pain I felt just now and I can't help but smile.
Normally a gunshot-wound would leave a pretty nasty scar, right?
But this looks like nothing ever happened at all.
"huh," is the only thing I can think up to say.
Pollo smiles again, this time looking very proud.
"it's not like in the movies, where the person being healed doesn't feel a thing or it only tingles a bit and it's not pretty or shiny and it takes a bit longer than it would've on television, but it's still pretty awesome, right?" he asks, making me laugh, and I nod.
I rub my shoulder, trying to get rid of the last remnants of the pain, and reach for my shirt.
Even if I now understand the logic of him taking my shirt off, which he did only so he could heal my wound, that doesn't mean I make a habit out of sitting half-naked in public.
Alex and Ares come back into the room and Alex immediately walks over to where I'm sitting and sits down on the floor at my feet, which seems to be his favorite position, and starts playing with his dinosaurs.
He never plays with his toys at the table, which I guess is a good thing, but that also means that whether we're at home or out – even when we're at a restaurant or something – he'll always sit down on the floor at my feet whenever he's allowed to play with his toys.
That gets me a lot of weird looks when I take him out to McDonalds.
Especially since he'll just stare at me until I turn my chair just so that he can sit at my feet.
If I wouldn't, he'd probably just crawl under the table and start playing there.
Nobody can tell me why he does that, so I always figured his habit of sitting at my feet is something like my habit of using non-swearwords around children.
It's just something we do, not something we ever really think about doing.
It is not some weird genes we've inherited from our divine father, I can tell you that much.
"so, all done cleaning up?" Ares asks, smiling cheerfully.
"no thanks to you," H grumbles, but he's also smiling, so I'm guessing this is like a running gag between those two.
"we should start working on our planning," I say, taking Elizabeth from Hera's arms – now that I'm not wounded anymore there's no reason I can't carry her myself – and grabbing one of the pencils Athena has neatly organized on the table, she even sorted them on color and size.
I grab one of several notebooks she also stacked there – probably suspecting we'd be writing a lot of stuff down in the near future, seeing as we've been writing stuff down almost every other time we've all gathered – and start making my own planning.
I plan in at one 'fun activity' per day and at least one hour of 'private time with the kids', so I don't make the same mistake I've been making in the last couple of days, stressing myself out and completely forgetting I even have kids.
With a preset planning for spending time with them, it should be impossible for me to 'forget' them anymore.
"we should probably set aside a few hours a day for just 'gathering', since we still have a billion things to discuss and a million more things to plan for," Artemis says, picking up one of the notebooks as well and starting on her planning.
"but if we're going to have to plan our work, which is based mostly on 'hey, that human just did something stupid, I should go over there and fix it', that could become a serious issue," Ares says, picking up the next notebook and soon everyone has their own notebooks in hand and is trying desperately to plan the next week second for second, which is a lot harder than we'd thought it'd be.
"sure, there are some difficulties with this, but we don't really need to plan anything we do inside the house, right? As long as we don't walk out the door, that'd be fine. We can just put that down as 'being home'. I mean, you think I'm going to write down 'having sex with H', 'having sex with Pollo' or 'having sex with H and Pollo'? Even if I could plan that, I wouldn't. Besides, take yesterday for example, I just suddenly felt like it, so I did it. I was still inside the house, so at times like that it doesn't really matter whether I'm upstairs with someone or downstairs with someone. As long as there's someone there who can verify I haven't ever walked out the door without telling anyone and then walked back in 'a changed woman', that's good enough, right? So if there are moments where you don't have anything planned, just put down 'activities inside the house' or something. And then, if you ever want to leave for whatever reason – to go to the park or the grocery store or whatever – or find that 'some human did something stupid and you need to go fix it', you can, you just need to tell three people that you're leaving first. That would take five minutes at most," I say.
"and also, worst case scenario, we could always put some kind of alarm on the doors and windows so no one could enter or leave this house without the others knowing. Sure, that seems a bit dramatic, and I'm definitely not saying 'we should get right on that', but it is an option we have."
"but anyhow, if anyone was wondering, I just figured out the fastest, probably easiest and most reliable way to figure out who's real and who isn't which sadly doesn't involve stabbing people."
Everyone looks at me with such hopeful eyes that I can't help but laugh.
I'm surrounded by actual, factual gods and they're all looking to me for the solution to their problem.
Is there anything in this world that could stroke a girl's ego quite as much as that?
"actually, it's a bit hard to believe no-one came up with this before. These people have our looks, but not our actual identities, right? And since I'm guessing even gods keep up with the times, everyone here has a cellphone, right? So what if we buy a disposable phone and program all our numbers into it? Then, when we need to be sure everyone is who they say they are, we just send out a text-message from that phone to everyone present, then anyone who doesn't get the text – or doesn't respond to it with a 'yeah, I'm here' or whatever – probably isn't the person they say they are. We lock that phone away in a vault or something and don't let anyone but Zeus – the only adult here who doesn't have a doppelgänger yet, as far as we know – have the key or code to open that vault. Of course, we'd test his actual 'Zeus-ness' very rigorously before giving him the key or code, just in case. That way the doppelgängers won't ever be able to get to that phone to change the numbers or send a 'fake' text or something like that, because even if Zeus does end up getting a doppelgänger eventually – or he already has one that we just don't know about yet –, that person won't have the key or code to open the vault and none of us would be able to accidentally give it to him, because we wouldn't have it either. Only the real Zeus would be able to get to that phone. The doppelgängers might have our looks and voices and they might know some of our information, which means they might get through a questioning unnoticed, but they don't have our phones, since we still have those. There is no way for two separate phones to have the same number, so they can't possibly have a phone with the real one's phone-number, or even if they somehow managed to figure out a way to get two phones to have the same number or to receive texts sent to our phones, the real us would still also get the message. So if any of us get a text-message from the 'doppelgänger-phone', we can just send a message back saying 'I'm 'there and there', so don't say anything important in front of me or let the kids leave with me'," I say, laughing again when everyone looks a bit bewildered, as if trying to figure out how it's possible we knew about this problem for days and nobody had ever thought of something as easy and simple as that."when you start thinking too difficultly, the simplest solutions are often the hardest to figure out," I say.
"like when I was stuck on the 'going from Zeus to Jove'-thing. I was thinking all kinds of difficult, so 'it's just short for Jupiter, duh' never even crossed my mind. But anyway, this solution is a bit like the password-thing, as in when the doppelgängers find out what we're doing, if they do somehow get our text-messages, they might start sending 'I'm not there' whenever they get the message and that would be a problem, since one of the real ones would then be a suspect, but only if they do have this technology which I'm almost certain is non-existent, so that's a very big 'if'. Or, when we get the 'I'm not there' message from anyone, then we start asking them control-questions. That would be better either way, because the more little questions we ask in front of one of the doppelgängers, the more they know about us. Like when H asked me about the number of times he asked me to go home with him when we first met and Pollo asked me about the number of ladies at the table when we first met, those are both questions the doppelgängers could know the answers to now, since they were asked – and answered – in front of at least one doppelgänger, so he or she could tell my doppelgänger the answers and that will give her a better chance of getting through the questions-test next time. So it would be best if we only used those questions as a last resort and only to whatever person we already suspect is a doppelgänger."
"these doppelgängers have been causing so much trouble it's not even funny anymore," Ares says, throwing his notebook down – apparently giving up on trying to make a planning – and sighing deeply.
"I love a bit of chaos as much as the next person, but even I have limits. Between constantly having to worry if the person I'm talking to is the person they claim to be, trying to keep up with my normal responsibilities, and now looking out for attacks or kidnappings from friend and foe alike, I'm this close to saying 'screw this, I'm going home'."
"you think you have it bad?" I ask annoyedly.
"I came here to find my baby-daddy and to have a relaxed vacation with my kids. I thought the worst things that could happen were that H got angry or that he would reject Liz and she'd have to grow up without a dad and that my mom would try to screw up my vacation. Instead, I'm currently sitting in a room with eight gods; there are people all around me that aren't who they pretend to be, though they look and sound – and often act – exactly like the 'real' people, and I have no idea why they're pretending to be us; one of those 'fake' people looks like me, so they can screw up my entire life without me even realizing it until it's already too late to fix it; I have two boyfriends, neither of which live anywhere near my home, so if I want to stay with them, I'll have to leave everything I've ever known behind; someone tried to kidnap my babies and when that didn't work they sent the police to take them from me, for reasons unknown; I got shot; my MIA dad may or may not be a god himself, which would make me and Alex demi-gods, so I've got all the ingredients for an identity-crisis here, which would also put a hole in my theory that he didn't leave by choice, since it's not so easy to blackmail or kidnap a god, so maybe I really was just abandoned like yesterday's trash after all; my flight home is tomorrow – and I doubt I'll be able to catch it – and I'm supposed to get back to work in two days, which is obviously not going to happen, so I'll probably get fired; I'm kinda in the middle of the worst fight I've ever had with my mom, so she might actually kick me out of her house and make me homeless, plus she'll try to take Alex from me and, being his mother, she'll likely succeed too; and you're complaining that you're not having fun? You know what? Screw you. You try taking on even half the stuff I'm going through right now and then maybe you'll have the right to complain," I say, gritting my teeth in annoyance.
Yes, I know I'm lashing out and I shouldn't do that, but I can't help myself.
Pollo sits down next to me and puts his arm around me for comfort.
H is sitting on the other side of the couch and just looks at me with such adoration in his eyes it makes me forget about all the drama for one short second.
"I'm sorry if it sounded like I was trying to downplay the things you have to deal with, I wasn't. I was just saying we all have more on our plates then we can – or at least care to – handle right now. You most of all, you're right about that. For us these 'weird supernatural things' are perfectly normal. It's not as much of a surprise to us to find out someone is a god or something like that, since we deal with those things every single day. To us the idea that your father might be the real Prometheus inspires no more of a reaction than us thinking 'huh, will you look at that', but to you that puts your entire childhood and even your very own identity in a whole new perspective that you might not be thrilled about, I do understand that," Ares says, sounding perfectly reasonable and making me feel even worse about my crazy outburst.
"maybe they can't imitate children," Athena suddenly says, surprising and confusing us all.
"you said, and I quote, 'someone tried to kidnap my babies and when that didn't work they sent the police to take them from me, for reasons unknown'," she explains. "but what if they simply cannot imitate children? They can imitate you all they want, but that won't get them very far on the long run. For now, while you are nearly always in or around this house, it doesn't matter whether or not they have your kids with them, since they can just say 'Hera has them' or something. But what if, days or weeks from now, mother leaves and goes home with father? If we all leave? When Hermes is working and you go out with the kids, what will they tell Pollo when he meets 'you', but the kids aren't with you? You might get stressed out and forget about them in here, where there are several other people that you trust at least enough to pick up the slack, but what if we're all gone? Nobody's gonna believe you just left them, forgot them in the park or something. And even if they do, what will 'you' tell them then? 'oh, yeah, I left them in the park. I'll go pick them up in an hour or so, but first I have to do some other things that are way more important, like finding out secrets about myself or others'? To properly imitate you, they'd need to imitate – or acquire – your children, otherwise they can never fully convince others that they are you."
"we could just go to your home," Zeus says, confusing everyone yet again.
"two, no, actually three or even four of your problems could be solved if we all just hop on a plane and go to your home," he explains. "you could just go about your everyday life, keeping your job for as long as you want it, although Hermes and Apollo have more than enough money to support you and even if you separate from them eventually, which would surprise me, after everything you're doing – or are at least trying to do – and are sacrificing for our sakes right now, several of us wouldn't mind supporting you financially for as long as you live, if you'd ask us to, so you don't really need that job at all. That's one problem solved. We can work from wherever we are at any given time – we have ways to travel around the world that are too complicated to try to explain right now – so it doesn't matter to us where we are as we're trying to solve this thing with the doppelgängers. You can keep Apollo and Hermes close and maybe they'll even find some things to love about your hometown so they won't want to come back, so you won't have to choose between them and your life back there. That's another problem – potentially – solved. We'll have a better chance of finding your father or at least finding out the truth about who he is and what happened to him if we're staying at – or close to – his last known address, so that gives us a better opportunity to solve another one if your problems. And these doppelgängers evidently know this town very well and they know the places we frequent here. Going to your home might put them in a, to them, completely unknown location. They'll be far more likely to make mistakes and be exposed in an unfamiliar environment. We already have the fake Athena in captivity. If we manage to catch them all that would solve the entire problem."
I sigh and shrug.
"would catching them help, yes," I concede. "but it would not solve this problem. My dad always taught me that you can never truly solve a problem that you don't understand. You can only avoid or delay it. So our first order of business shouldn't be to get rid of the doppelgängers, it should be to try to find out who they are, how they're taking on our appearances and why they're here in the first place. What is their endgame? You can't become a god just by looking and acting like one and while they might be able to take over my life, there's just no merit in that for them. Demi-god or no, I lead a 'human' life. I have a job, I have two kids to take care of, I have a really annoying mother, I have a father who I somewhat hope is a god because otherwise he might have become the victim of a violent crime; I have to get up early every Sunday to go to church,... Why would they try so hard to take over my life? Sure, they probably only imitated me to get to you guys easier, but what would be the point of that on the long run? That would help your doppelgängers get whatever it is they want, but it wouldn't do my doppelgänger any good, right? So what are they after? And if they are after your entire identities, what did they promise my doppelgänger to make her – or him, I don't know how genders work with those people – cooperate? Are we even sure there's only one of them for every one of us? Maybe the one in the basement is only one of Athena's doppelgängers. Or maybe it's the other way around, maybe we caught the one who acts as Athena's doppelgänger and mine and Artemis' and she would've been Hera's too if we hadn't caught her, but we did and that's why they needed to initiate a new one. I don't know, but I do know there's going to be no solving this problem, whether we're in Greece, America or anywhere else until I do know."
