Chapter 8: In which Malcolm comes to his senses (Part 2/4)

When thought of as instructions, even difficult advice was easy to put into practice, and with all the bouts of brain fog Malcolm suffered that week, it was a godsend to be able to go on autopilot.

On Thursday, Malcolm and Annabeth finally managed to get Alicia to retry rock climbing after they casually threw it out there that her height put her at an advantage. Without a fuss, Alicia let them put her in a harness and sent it in just two tries.

As if all of Camp Half-Blood were conspiring with him and Annabeth, a dozen bystanders had cheered Alicia on and offered congratulatory high-fives once she'd reached the ground. Malcolm kept his own promise to ensure that she would be a very well- and oft-hugged kid.

Taking advantage of Alicia's high, Malcolm suggested she put aside her robotics play time with Leo to explore something new in Bunker Nine.

When the three of them reached a limestone cliff in the camp woods, Leo conjured a head-sized fireball in his hand and shot it towards the limestone. Flaming lines spread throughout the stone, revealing a red door that swung open for them all on its own.

"Hot," said Malcolm.

Sending a wink his way, Leo then turned to a grinning Alicia and gestured into the cave. "Play time!" he exclaimed.

She was already on her way in.

The lights were already on, illuminating a workshop the size of an aircraft hanger. By a collection of worktables, over a dozen demigods—most of them children of Hephaestus/Vulcan—were tinkering away with their projects. Several of them stopped their work to greet Alicia, Leo, and Malcolm.

Leo and Malcolm headed for the other demigods, but Alicia had her eyes set on the middle of the room, where Leo's bronze mechanical pet dragon, Festus, was taking a nap next to a bowl of hot sauce. When she scratched behind his ear, Festus opened his ruby eyes and purred. He turned on his side for belly rubs, which Alicia was happy to provide until she began coughing her way over to Malcolm with tears in her eyes, presumably from the fumes of Festus's hot sauce.

"Dude, that is a safety hazard," Malcolm said to Leo, pulling out a chair for Alicia to sit on as she calmed down.

"I'm trying to up Alicia's spice tolerance," Leo joked. "The hottest thing she has is currywurst. Poor thing." He glanced at his siblings at their different worktables. "Yo, what happened to Festus's sippy cup?"

"He hates it," said Christopher, one of Leo's siblings. He held up a steel cylinder at his workstation. "This will officially be his fourth one."

Leo stomped his way over to scold Festus, who was now pretending to be asleep.

When Alicia managed to overcome her coughing fit, Leo recruited Nyssa, Jake, and Maaza to help teach their protégée some origami engineering.

At first, Alicia merely stood aside, simply observing her mentors showcase their assortment of origami applications: a solar panel, a telescope, some electronic parts, a forceps, a shield, a pair of spears, and a range of other weapons. She was mostly quiet, too, when they taught her the mathematical laws of origami and showed her some how-tos on folding and collapsing paper.

But when they let her poke and play with their builds, she asked several all-over-the-place questions and even responded insightfully when they'd answered her unvoiced queries. And when Nyssa offered her a stack of colorful sheets after the crash course, she gratefully took it to the little table Jake had made for her that summer and started to experiment on her own.

So as not to disrupt her, Leo tapped his fingers in Morse code when providing running commentary on her technique. Malcolm did the same, replying with quick questions and notes.

After a good eight minutes, when Maaza sounded back, 'You are so loud' with her hammer, they resorted to knee nudging to signal when to peek at Alicia's progress. It was usually when she had her chubby-cheeked game face on.

Soon enough, they lost themselves in their own projects. While Leo mapped out new crease patterns for pop-up shelters, Malcolm went off into another corner to help Jake work out a model of a working retractable sword, conceptually similar to Percy's own Riptide. They tried at least ten ideas until Jake concluded it was likely mechanically impossible to build it without the help of a child of Hecate. So Malcolm and Jake crashed Leo's station, letting him take a break while they translated his crease patterns into folds.

Leo got to tapping again until Alicia paused her origami practice to look around the bunker and head to Malcolm and Jake's side of the worktable.

"You good?" Malcolm said.

She nodded. "Ähm. Jake, can I have one more piece of paper, please?"

"Sure!" he said, scurrying off to get a stack.

"Alicia! Excuse me?" came a cry from Maaza, standing with arms akimbo by the workstation adjacent to Alicia's little table. "You know you could ask me, right?"

Alicia just shrunk in her shy smile.

"It's okay," Jake told her with a wink as he handed her the paper. "I can be your favorite."

Leo scoffed. "You wish, Mason," he said. "Allie, Uncle Leo's your favorite, right?"

"Umm." She gave him a squirmy shrug.

Unable to take their expectant gazes, Alicia looked instead to Malcolm, who said, "They're just teasing. You don't have to answer that."

So she didn't answer and just returned to her table, nodding at Maaza, who'd asked if she could join her.

As Jake left to bug Nyssa in a faraway worktable, Malcolm realized that, had Alicia sought something right that second, it wouldn't have been Jake she'd turn to. Not where he was now. If Maaza hadn't been sitting right next to her, Alicia would have picked Leo.

It hit him then: Even in Bunker Nine, even in her second home at Camp Half-Blood, whom Alicia would approach and converse with, really depended on whom he was closest to. Or, as he had seen time and time again when picking her up from the bunker, whom Leo was closest to. Like she consciously or subconsciously orbited them, using them as centerpoints around which she could build her bubble of comfort.

Ultimately, Alicia did have favorites, and at the top of the list, he thought as his whole body turned to goo, was him.

Oh gods, it was him.

What was that he was feeling?

Malcolm turned inward for an inspection.

It wasn't regret. Even if he'd ever allow himself to feel that about her, there had been no choice for it to have been regret anyway. So no, that couldn't be it.

He also couldn't say it was— What was it he was trying to pinpoint? Some… desire to escape? To up and at it? What was that called? Whatever it was, he loved Alicia too much for that.

Do you? whispered a voice. Do you actually want this responsibility? Did you ever ask for it?

He crushed the trespasser to dust in an instant, not even going to bother to humor it.

All it was was pressure, wasn't it? Maybe a teensy bit of fear? Both perfectly acceptable. Even somewhat useful.

But how was it that he could stroll into City Hall, responsible for the wellbeing of thousands, day in, day out, no biggie, only to stress about a single individual? Did he even have a right to be so confident about any of his work decisions? And how was all this Alicia stuff only such a big deal now?

It was, he answered, because he'd never noticed that gravitational force he possessed. He'd only just realized he'd somehow become the greatest, largest mass in her universe. It couldn't even be considered conceited to think so—not when refusing to acknowledge that fact would've made for his greatest act of negligence.

She'd had on some invisible child leash and handed it to him. To him. It wasn't Athena, because it just couldn't be. It wasn't even Chiron, because what did Alicia care about legal documents? She'd essentially chosen him. For every time she came crying to Annabeth, she'd go to him two times at least. She may have slept on Claire's bed now and then, but it was him she most often woke up. She asked him for comfort when she was scared, him for story time, him for answers to the most impossible questions, him for—

With a bump on his left knee, Malcolm popped out of his ponderings and found himself staring into warm, brown eyes.

He was so achingly close. And this really must've been the longest this had ever happened. And there was so much to still see. And Leo was looking, and searching and finding—

"Zoning out there, buddy," said Leo. "Or do you just like looking into my eyes?" He winked.

Of course. And, you know, it didn't even hurt at all if he was already this used to it.

Malcolm just smiled. "You know me."

It wasn't even zoning out as much as it was spiraling. He had enough people who would've known the difference.

But wait. Had Leo been talking about before he'd nudged him or after? It only made sense that Leo had nudged him because he was zoning out. But then the comment… It couldn't be both. He'd said 'or'. Had Leo just—?

No, Malcolm wasn't going to think about it. He did his best to erase the moment from his memory and just watched Alicia finish her final origami figure.

"Can you show me what you made, Allie?" Malcolm called to her.

With a giggle that twinged his soul, Alicia scooped up her origami and made a beeline for him and Leo, stopping only for a fallen blue frog. Malcolm was left processing how she'd practically seated herself on his right thigh as she chirped away about her creations (a plane, a bird, an ice-cream scoop with a cone, a frog, and a car) and deposited each piece in their hands.

With a reminder to make time to call his tiny chatterbox of a sister four states away, Malcolm realized this really wasn't all that different to when Sadie would climb onto his lap and tell him and Tyrone about her day at school. Unlike Sadie, however, Alicia wouldn't pick up his arm to ask for a hug, so Malcolm had to do that himself. He dutifully turned himself into a more comfortable chair and went through the motions of providing her praise and encouragement.

As Alicia returned a broad grin and a high-five to Leo when he proposed they scamper over to the dining pavilion for sundaes, Malcolm found that none of this was really as freakishly huge as he had made it out to be. Alicia didn't just orbit him, after all.

And this was just too perfect. But he wouldn't complain.

Having high hopes that Alicia could conquer another challenge, Malcolm brought her to his Friday morning class.

Today, they were doing his students' favorite exercise: rewriting article headlines—first to add objectivity, then to add different types of media bias.

It was during these classes that his students would be at their giddiest. Most felt like he was sharing secrets with them. (He wasn't, really.) Some just sought chances to school their annoying older siblings.

Malcolm had his own obvious reasons for repeating these assignments—which is why he'd put forth the Vio Life project as one of the topics of the day. It really felt messed up sometimes that his students were trusting him this much to shape their worldview. He was surprised, frankly, and even concerned that no adult—no one—had raised any hell about how he could've been infecting young minds with state propaganda.

But today wasn't one of those days. Today, he could be proud that one of the groups had taken it upon themselves to tailor their headlines to different mortal and godly news outlets.

Another table had, in fits of laughter and rounds of table-hitting, somewhat accidentally written a somewhat satirical article on the exchange program between New Athens and New Rome. Malcolm had only even found out when they'd hollered for him to help them find a word one of the students insisted existed ("foundling").

They grinned proudly as they presented it to him, and he found that the article was actually less satirical and more so a perfect replication of the tone-deaf tendencies of the Olympus News Network. He cracked up at the students' mention of "class E felony", and just as he got to the last paragraph hinting at Greco-Roman group therapy, an eraser was thrown, his name was hissed, his forearm was tapped, and his eyes caught those of a satyr named Rafiq from across the room.

He was mouthing Malcolm's name—silently screaming it, rather—and nudging his head to his right, where Alicia was sitting.

Alicia's hair, usually fastened in a braid, now curtained her face. She was staring at the papers in front of her, twiddling the pencil she held loosely in her grasp.

Malcolm had seen the sight enough times not to panic anymore, but, gods, if he didn't feel like a fuck up right now.

A student named Tatiana had pulled up her chair next to Alicia's and spoke to her in a hushed voice. Alicia merely wiped her cheeks with her sleeve.

"How are we?" said Malcolm once he reached their table and crouched on Alicia's other side.

In front of her was one of the kid-friendly articles he'd written specifically for her that spelled out different viewpoints on the biogas project—most of which she'd already learned from him and Jake during one of her Bunker Nine visits. Peeking out underneath the page was a little piece Sophie had put together on origami engineering, which Malcolm had given her full permission to read instead of joining the class.

No one had responded yet. Alicia still hadn't looked at him, but he could've sworn she moved just a bit closer to his side.

"How are we?" he asked again.

"Um. We started," Tatiana said. "We're making progress."

"Alicia was telling us what she knows about the energy project," Rafiq added. "More than I've been paying attention to the whole thing."

"There was something about anaerobic digesters?" Tatiana said. "Which I'm still not skilled enough to understand, and it's not even in the articles you gave us. It was really impressive."

Malcolm sent them a grateful smile.

"Allie, do you wanna take a break?" he said.

"No," she said. "I want to finish this." She sat up straighter and moved her pencil over the first words of the article in front of her—and again, and again, only managing to add a few extra words by the end of it before restarting her attempt altogether.

Gods damn, this was hard.

"We can all take a break, actually," he said, and relocated the other four at Alicia's table to "help" the other students.

"Hey. It's okay," he tried again, putting her hair behind her ear to get it out of her face.

But Alicia didn't look at him. She didn't even budge an inch. She tried over and over again to read the words in front of her, boring her eyes into the page.

"What do you want to do now?" said Malcolm. "It's okay if this is too much."

Another tear rolled down her cheek. "It's easy."

"No. It's not. And that's okay. We could both listen to it instead. Do you wanna do that? We can use one of the tablets."

A long, looong moment passed. He was still getting nothing, and this level of discomfort was flying way past his limits.

"Or we can take a break," Malcolm said again, "Come on. It's totally okay."

Chiron would've done it, too, he told himself.

Putting Tatiana in charge, Malcolm left the classroom, Alicia in hand. The faint gasps and whispered awws and whined ohhs from his students were way too much, and he internally screamed at them to shut the hell up for Alicia's sake.

He led her into the corner of an empty classroom. Sitting on the carpeted ground, he pulled her into his lap. The waterworks poured out quickly in his embrace.

"It's okay," he kept saying as he rubbed her back and stared into space as Alicia poured out all her tears onto his hoodie.

Once the tempo of her sobbing had slowed, he got up to get tissues, making a mental note to remember to pocket some 24/7, and returned to sit in front of her.

"Do you wanna talk about it?" he said.

As she hugged her knees, Alicia was still trying to stop herself from crying. But no headshakes came, so Malcolm waited for her to speak. After a minute, he decided he'd take the initiative.

"It's normal to stumble. 'Stumbling is not falling,'" Malcolm told her, quoting his namesake. It had been his dad's mantra to him.

"But I don't w-want to s-stumble either," Alicia grumbled.

"I know the feeling, Alicia. It's really annoying, right?" he said, and she nodded through her sniffles and hiccups. "I mean, it's already really annoying. But it becomes even more annoying because you know you can learn so quickly. You can understand so, so much, so quickly. Right?"

Alicia gave a one-shoulder shrug and swallowed after a hiccup. "Usually."

"Yeah. But then there's this thing blocking you. And it doesn't even feel like it's you. It's this… something else. This foreign thing that's in your eyes, because how could it possibly be your brain when your brain's already guessing all the possibilities and trying to put together the pieces you're trying so hard to just see?"

Her red eyes met his in agreement.

"Is it like that?" he said.

Alicia nodded.

"That's what it felt like to me. It gets easier with practice, I promise."

What was it his other father would repeat?

"So, Michael Jordan— Do you know who Michael Jordan is?"

Alicia stared blankly at him.

"Michael Jordan," he said, "is this legendary, retired basketball player who played for this team called the Chicago Bulls in the '80s and '90s—"

"Oh. Claire was saying they didn't qualify for a competition last year?" she said.

The playoffs. And it had technically been this year. But he was surprised Alicia had even paid enough attention to have been able to recite the fact. Maybe Claire had gotten her to remember it to rub it in.

"Well, neither did her team," he said. "Anyway, with him, the Bulls won three championships in a row, then he retired and they lost. Then he came back and they won another three championships. He probably holds a couple hundred records. Incredible athlete." Bit of an ass.

Her face remained blank.

"Air Jordans are named after him?" Malcolm tried.

Realization dawned upon her. "Oh. The shoe? Oh, is the jumping person him?"

He held back a sigh. "Yeah, so, Michael Jordan once said, 'I've missed more than nine thousand shots in my career. I've lost almost three hundred games. Twenty-six times, I've been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.' Do you know what that means?"

Alicia mused over the words, her gray eyes practically whizzing. "You can already accomplish more because you've tried more? But trying more comes with a lot of stumbling?"

"You got it," he said and put on a proud grin, desperately trying to flip her pout.

"I don't stumble a lot making robots," Alicia challenged, using her I'll-have-you-know tone. "Papi said I'm really good at it, and Uncle Leo says I'm a natural at mechanics."

Malcolm momentarily rested his aching cheeks. "I know. But maybe you will stumble with it at some point for reasons that don't have to do with reading. I have with things I'm good at and things I've liked. And that's okay. But when that happens, you'll just have to keep trying."

"But it's making me slow," she said. Her red eyes hit him with accusation. "I don't have to be slow if I don't have to read so many things."

"You can give yourself patience. I guarantee you, it'll be worth it to keep trying. Eventually, reading will help you when you get stuck, even with robotics and other areas of engineering. Right now, you're learning from Leo. But someday," he said, switching to a sneaky cadence (and it was really getting easier to do this the more he did it), "you'll read something even he doesn't know. And then he can learn from you. Yeah? So you'll keep reading, right?"

Alicia nodded. "It's not that I don't want to," she blurted. "I do. And I do try. Really hard."

"I know."

"But everything else is easier."

"And some things will come easier than others," Malcolm told her. "But the things that are worth doing are worth"—sucking at—"are worth stumbling over."

Alicia took a few long moments to process his words before she nodded and blinked at him with her soft iron eyes.

They were a stark contrast to the steely gaze Malcolm happened upon in the Cabin Six library.

Sat next to Zeke at the middle table, Annabeth focused on her laptop screen, biting her lip as she scrolled and scrolled and scrolled.

While Conrad and Sophie examined and critiqued each other's freshly made figurines on another desk, Percy and Claire organized magazine clippings and ripped pieces of paper from Annabeth's plastic folder.

"What about water sculptures on the sound?" asked Percy.

"Ooh!" Annabeth said, looking up at him pie-eyed. "That'd be beautiful."

As Zeke seemingly made a note of it, Malcolm and Alicia settled down next to him and Annabeth and peered at their screens—cluttered with a Gantt chart, a couple spreadsheets, and inspo boards for clothing, dining, and decor.

"We're all here!" Annabeth realized.

Shutting her laptop, she spread her arms and called Alicia. As Alicia snuggled her in her lap, Annabeth rested her chin on her sister's head.

"Do you have a date yet?" Malcolm asked, distributing apples that he and Alicia had snagged from the dining pavilion.

"Ish," Percy said. "We obviously want all the family to be there, so it seems best to do it in New Athens. We're thinking April or May, so a month or two after the city's settled and no one's still freaking out about getting it ready."

Conrad snorted. "April or May. Hera's gonna hate that."

"Well," said Annabeth, "Hera can go—"

"Babe," Percy warned with a pointed look at his fiancée, who huffed in response.

Zeke had his pencil at the ready. "And is this going to be an intimate gathering, or are you going full Helen and Paris, or something in between?"

"It seems a little dangerous to draw a line of whom to invite and whom not to," Sophie pointed out.

"Yeah, and that's why Athena and Poseidon had the bright idea to invite everybody," Percy said.

Claire whistled. Conrad followed. Malcolm attempted—and failed—to continue the chain. Yet, the tiniest hoot escaped his lips.

"Aha!" he exclaimed.

Claire gave him a thumbs up.

"Someday, Mal," Conrad said.

Zeke and Sophie blew air out their noses. And Annabeth looked at them exasperatedly.

Oops.

Malcolm returned to the task at hand. Lowering his voice, he asked, "So I'm guessing they've offered to take care of…" On one hand, he rubbed his thumb against his fingertips.

"Yeah, that's taken care of," said Percy.

"So we just have to plan it," Annabeth said. "The fun bit. So."

Momentarily letting go of Alicia, she upturned her notes one-handed until Percy handed a wrinkled sheet with a mess of their combined scrawls.

"Thank you," she said to him. She had on that almost devious expression she wore when she was proud of or excited for something.

Percy did one of his subtle, indecipherable head-tilts before Annabeth faced her siblings.

"Okay, so." She looked up from the paper. "Claire, I know you said you wanted to help with the venue layout—"

"Yes!"

"Can I help with that, too?" said Alicia. (Leo and his siblings had been teaching her blueprinting.)

"Sure you may!" Annabeth said. "And you'll get to help Percy with security as well. Does that sound good? Great! Conr—"

"Catering!"

"—ad. That checks out. Sophie…" Annabeth checked her notes. "You wanted to try your hand at budgeting?"

Sitting on her hands, Sophie swiveled left and right in her chair. "With some help, yeah," she said and straightened her back as Claire gently adjusted her posture.

"All right. Thank you," Annabeth said. "Malcolm, it'd be wonderful if you could do the seating charts."

No. Gods no. His eyes searched her face, but he found not a hint of humor. "You're kidding, right?"

Annabeth was funny like that sometimes.

Of all the things she could make him do. He'd be fine with coordinating security or some other logistics. Flower ordering, maybe. But this?

"You're the fastest at logic games," she said. "You even took the LSAT for fun and you scored 180."

"Given 150% of the time," Malcolm corrected.

"And people with dyslexia and ADHD are entitled to such accommodations," Annabeth said.

"I didn't actually need that much."

"Yeah! Even better!" she said. "Come on. It's just a really big puzzle."

"With a tremendous amount of research on everyone's petty beef."

"Well, we're not asking you to do that part," Percy cut in.

Annabeth's eyes gleamed. "Lucky for us, we know someone who already knows the drama, so you don't need to do any of that research," she said, fanning the air to emphasize her point.

Percy's face gave absolutely nothing away. But Annabeth? Annabeth looked a little too pleased, a little too proud.

"You do like logic games, don't you?" she prompted before Malcolm could say anything.

"Do I like them that much?" His voice tried to leave him, as if trying to get out of the situation.

"Look," said Percy, "this is an important task that Annabeth and I wouldn't trust just anyone to do. It's not just making sure that everything goes smoothly at our wedding. At first, we weren't sold on the idea to invite everyone, but Athena and Poseidon pointed out that it's in our interest because the other gods could give back some favors… which would be super helpful for our future kids."

"Some peace would be nice," Annabeth said, reaching for Percy's hand with that entirely too satisfied look.

Malcolm knew exactly what their scheme was. He knew exactly the manipulative tricks they were pulling on him. He could still say no. This was still just a question.

Eyes shut for a moment, he tried not to think too hard. "Fine, I'll do it."

"Thank you."

At least Percy and Annabeth were grateful. And it wasn't like even Malcolm would trust just anyone either to ensure the wellbeing of his future nieces and nephews. And… maybe the process wouldn't actually be horrible.

AN: Doing my best to have Part 3 done by Thanksgiving!