Author's Note: This fic was written for the PJO Big Bang on Tumblr, and therefore has art attatched to it, please see the official pjobigbang tumblr for more information. I do not own Percy Jackson and the Olympians or the Heroes of Olympus.

For the Love of a Triangle

A small story set in the winter between The Battle of the Labyrinth and The Last Olympian

Part I: The Rise

"Be careful of love. It'll twist your brain around and leave you thinking up is down and right is wrong."

-Aphrodite, The Titan's Curse

"The worst part about falling for your best friend is the fact that you can't tell them, not wanting to ruin the friendship. So you're basically forced to keep your biggest secret from the one person you can tell any secret to, and that breaks you."

-Unknown

Percy I

Percy moved his entire body to the left, following the path of his game console and trying in vain to swerve ahead of Rachel as her cart raced around the track.

All evidence from Annabeth's visit the previous week had been removed. After she had left, Percy had felt like he could not eat another bite of that batter. Currently, it was sitting in the freezer as his and Rachel's Chinese takeout boxes littered the couch.

Rachel's freckled face was twisted into a face of concentration as she raced just a bit ahead of Percy's cart, staying as still as she could while he was flailing around like an idiot. As much as he hated to admit it, Rachel was way better at this game than him. Maybe it was just his ADHD, but he could never concentrate on the game enough to win.

"Ha! I win again!" she called out with a smile as she crossed the finish line. "Your fortune cookie is mine!"

Percy groaned as he tossed her a fortune cookie from the bag beside the couch that contained whatever was left of the food splayed all over the living room. Rachel cracked the cookie open with her paint-stained fingers, laughing, but her smile faded as she read it.

"Your day will be unexpectedly interrupted." She sighed and threw the fortune across the room, shoving the cookie itself into her mouth.

Percy was a little bummed out; while his times with Annabeth always ended in fights, his times with Rachel always ended with one of them getting pulled away for one reason or other. "I'm done with this game, let's see what's on TV," the redhead decided, pulling up the channel guide for the chunky television before them with the remote.

She picked out some obscure show with dragons and royalty and a ton of people dying, and rested her scarlet curls on Percy's shoulder. He felt his heart rate pick up and almost jumped, but tried to be calm. Why did he always get freaked out so much when she did things like this? Annabeth always did stuff like this and it never meant anything. At least, he was pretty sure it didn't. Percy's head started to hurt just thinking about those kinds of things, and so he lost himself in the TV show, feeling Rachel's heartbeat next to his, and soon they both fell asleep.

Percy soon found himself floating above the current campsite of the Hunters of Artemis as they slept soundly, not even noticing as a Scythian Dracaena slithered towards them, leading a pack of demigods who had deserted Camp Half Blood.

He saw Thalia's blue eyes fly open at the crunch of a twig, and the Hunters Assembled. Percy could barely watch as Thalia shot an ex-camper in the throat with her silver arrows, tears in her eyes. The ex-camper fell to the ground with a yelp, and was soon trampled by his fellow soldiers. Percy felt like he was going to throw up.

The dream flashed to a dark scene of Clarisse and some of the other Ares campers on a mission on the water. They were on a zombie ship, much like the one Percy had sailed on in the Sea of Monsters, and Clarisse was shouting orders at the crew as her siblings fired the cabins at the Princess Andromeda. She was shot in the leg by one of the empousa on the other ship and almost collapsed, but somehow continued standing, taking a bazooka in one of her arms and shooting it at every monster she could spot on the other ship like some twisted carnival game. Other members of her cabin tried to run to her, but Clarisse dismissed them, yelling at her siblings to continue fighting and shooting their opponents. It doesn't matter if I'm hurt, she shouted, there will be plenty of time to heal me by the time we win this thing!

Finally, he saw Annabeth. Unlike the other scenes, there was nothing bloody or violent, but it made Percy feel worse than ever. She was hunched over Daedalus' laptop, and he could practically hear the gears turning in her head as she scanned some of the projects. Her Yankee's Cap was hanging on a hook next to her, and a still-steaming coffee sat beside her, but it wasn't any of these things that caught his attention.

In the coffee cup sat a metal spoon with a decorative handle. If it was possibly anyone else looking at this scene, they wouldn't understand what was so remarkable about it. Annabeth had stormed out of the apartment, she had quickly slashed her dry hand through any Iris Message Percy had tried to send her, and, well…. She had kept the spoon that they'd been eating the dough with. He would have recognized it anywhere; the blue, green, and brown mosaic tiles that always reminded his mom of the cabin at Montauk. Somehow, it just looked right in Annabeth's brown/grey coffee mug.

He started to hear familiar laughter in the background. It seemed on a different plane of existence than the scene he was watching with Annabeth. He could recognize that bell-like laughter anywhere, and started to groan, not wanting to have yet another dream conversation with Aphrodite (it would be the third time since the end of summer), but before any such conversation could happen, Percy's eyes flew open.

He was awoken by the sound of Rachel screaming. She was still asleep, but her mouth was wide open, and the sound coming out sounded almost like a harpy. Percy shook her shoulders quickly to try and wake her up, but she just kept screaming. Finally, her green eyes opened in shock. "What are you doing?" She asked, obviously noticing that Percy's face was almost inches away from hers.

"You were screaming in your sleep. I've almost never heard someone do that before," he said, trying to block out memories of the quest for Artemis when Thalia would scream , whimper, toss, and turn throughout the night. Lots of demigods actually experienced night terrors, but Percy usually took it as a side effect of a life fighting monsters. No mortals usually screamed like that when they were only taking a nap. He wondered if Rachel's life was worse than she let on. As far as he knew, the worst things she went through involved charm schools and lectures from her mother, at least, when she was not hanging out with him. Percy hoped none of their escapades together had given her nightmares.

"It… It's nothing." Rachel shook her mane of curls, and then noticed that her green bandana had fallen off her head while she was sleeping. She reached down to pick it up and then sat down on the floor next to the couch with her bag next to her. "You go ahead and play something. I'm going to draw; usually gets my head cleared after stuff like this happens." Rachel turned away from him, curling her knees to her chest and placing her cream-colored sketchbook on her thighs like they were some sort of easel.

"Wait," Percy interjected, "This happens a lot?"

His expression must have conveyed quite an expression of shock, because Rachel let out a slightly shaky laugh and responded, "More often than you'd expect. It used to be worse when I was younger though."

Percy shrugged, trying to shake the memories of a sleeping, screaming Rachel out of his head (it wasn't his fault after all if she'd been experiencing this since she was a child), and pulled the video game controller out from the spot under the couch it must've landed while they were sleeping. He worked on one of the quests in his slightly ironic Greek Hero game, and was in the middle of fighting a badly researched Siren when he noticed the picture that Rachel was drawing in her sketchbook. Percy nearly dropped his game consul in surprise.

It was of someone exploding. The features were so disfigured that Percy could not even make out the gender of the person, but Rachel had gone into such detail anyways. There was fire everywhere and the body itself was almost too gory for Percy to process, which was saying a lot since he had seen some pretty disgusting wounds at Camp Half Blood. If this was what she was dreaming about, Percy could definitely tell why she'd been screaming. In all honesty, he probably would have been too.

Suddenly, Rachel whipped her head around, accusingly, and Percy went back to fighting the animated Siren in the hopes that she would not notice that he'd been spying on her. He barely even noticed the small shadow in the background of the picture jumping away from the explosion, a sword in its shadowy hand.

A few minutes later, Rachel had finished the sketch, crumpled it up, and shoved it into a pocket of her bag, which was painted to look like the cover of an album that Percy did not recognize. "Can you just… forget that happened?" Rachel asked. "If my parents found out I was getting them in the day too, my calendar would be pretty much booked with appointments to therapists."

"Sure," Percy told her, when in reality he was trying to memorize every single detail of that picture she had drawn. They sat in an awkward silence for a while, as Rachel fidgeted and played with her sharpie-covered sneakers.

"Do you want to go get some ice cream?" she asked him, finally. He said yes, shoving Riptide in his pocket. As they were walking out the door, they ran into Percy's mom, who was carrying a brown paper bag of groceries through the hallway. Percy wondered if she was having Paul over for dinner anytime soon. She usually made quite a shopping trip to get different kinds of food before he came over. Percy was glad to see her smiling though; she had been smiling a lot ever since Paul proposed to her. If his mom was going to remarry, Percy supposed, he would rather it be with someone who made her smile a lot.

"Nice to see you again, Rachel." Sally Jackson said with her warm-as-sunshine smile. Then her eyes glanced the trashed living room. "You guys aren't going to leave the living room like this, are you?"

Percy felt himself put on a guilty face, and blushed, humiliated, as he and Rachel walked back into the apartment and started picking up the empty Chinese takeout containers. While they were cleaning, Percy noticed that another one of Rachel's drawings had fallen out of her bag. He uncrumpled the pencil-covered paper as quietly as possible while Rachel was on the other side of the worn out couch and, as he looked at it, his heart almost stopped.

"Hey, Percy," the freckled girl started, "After the ice cream, do you want to check out the Met? We haven't been there in a while." He nearly jumped out of his socks, hoping that she did not realize he was looking at one of her pictures. Percy hated going behind her back like this, but Rachel's drawings had always been kind of… creepy and mysterious… like the mummy who lived in the attic of the Big House at camp.

"Uh… yeah, sure." Percy waved his hand in a 'whatever' gesture, staring hard at the picture in his hands as the long-gone face of Zoë Nightshade stared back at him.

Her eyes were glassy, and Percy felt his heart start to break into a million pieces at the memory of her death. How did Rachel know this? He could not remember telling her. He doubted Annabeth had while they were in the Labyrinth, especially since they were not that close. How had Rachel captured the exact last moment of life that Zoë had ever experienced? Stars, she had said. Percy remembered her voice every time he looked outside at night to see the skyline of New York City. The stars were not usually that visible in the city because of pollution, but the lights of the city looked enough like stars to make his heart hurt. This picture was ten times worse.

The sight of Rachel crawling back around the couch on her hands and knees, slowly picking up grains of rice covered in sauce and shoving them into the trash bag, made Percy quickly shove the picture into the pocket of his worn hoodie, and continue clearing the living room of all evidence that they'd nearly exploded their Chinese food only an hour before. When they finished, Percy and Rachel each grabbed their respective bags, and headed down the long hallway to the elevator that would take them down to the city.

They never made it to the Met. First, they nearly got run over by a cab as they were crossing a street. They technically had not been supposed to cross the street at that time; the red numbers on the street light were at two when they started, but it wasn't a pleasant experience anyway. Then Percy, even though he'd just eaten, got an undeniable craving for ice cream, and not just any ice cream, it had to be from one of the vendors in central park, so they took the underground there, and then spent a good half an hour looking for this mystical ice-cream vendor in the large area that made up Central Park until they finally found it.

There they were, walking along, a chocolate mint cone in Percy's hand (extra sprinkles), and a Napoleon one in Rachel's, when they were, as the fortune cookie had foretold, interrupted by Rachel's cell phone going off. Rachel ignored it the first time… and the second time… and the third time… until finally it went off again as they were turning the corner, and she picked up, looking at Percy and knowing that too much cell phone activity could cause them to get attacked by a monster, and in New York, there was an abundance of them.

As Rachel picked up the phone with an exasperated "Yes, Mom?", the winter air swirling around them suddenly stopped, as did Rachel's voice and everything else around them. Percy could still feel his heart thumping away in his chest, so he was sure that he hadn't just abruptly died, but everything was eerily still and silent, at least until Percy heard the sound of a Michael Buble ballad and the sight of rose petals.

To put it in the least descriptive way possible, he groaned and cursed just as the most gorgeous woman that Percy had ever seen descended from the sky on a rainbow. Aphrodite, as beautiful and indescribable as ever, sauntered over to Percy with a white scarf wrapped around her head and heels so high that Percy thought she might've died of foot pains just from the walk, or float really, over if she hadn't been immortal.

"Now, dear, is that any way to treat a goddess, especially one who likes you? You know there aren't many on the Olympian Council that do nowadays."

Percy tried to make his tone a little less rude. "What do you want?" He gestured around him, unknowingly flailing his mint chocolate ice-cream cone around everywhere and nearly hitting one of the frozen mortals near him in the face, "In case you didn't notice, I'm kind of in the middle of something."

"It is less of a question of what I want, sweetheart, but more of a question of what you want, and really, you're not doing anything that's more important than what I have in mind."

"Can we not have this conversation again?"

Aphrodite sighed, her beautiful hair falling around her as she did so and catching Percy's attention longer than he thought it should. "Well, I suppose I could stop bothering you about this, but really I can barely make decisions right now, not with my sweet little Eros missing." She ran one of her godly hands through her hair as it slowly started to match Annabeth's shade of gold, before melting back into its usual indescribable color. Percy assumed the gesture was in worry, but really, with Aphrodite, it was hard to tell.

"Wait," Percy started, "You lost a god?"

"Well technically sweetheart, he's not a god, like me, he's something slightly on the level of the Titans. We were both born quite before the rest of my silly councilmembers. Anyway, he's been gone for a few days, and I'm quite afraid he's visiting his unrealistically prideful wife Psyche. We really cannot have him being… distracted during the war. We need all hands on deck during the fight against Typhon, I'm afraid."

"Aren't you supposed to be fighting Typhon too?"

"I am as old and as powerful as Typhon. If I wanted to, I could defeat him in seconds and then proceed to stir the Olympians into Chaos and rule myself, but there's no fun in that, is there? War is so tragic and lovely and beautiful. I do not need as much of my power to play my part as the rest of them do. War causes such amounts of hurried love. I need to watch over all my favorite tragedies, but I cannot do that without Eros, and you, my dear, are the perfect candidate for that."

"I'm kind of in the middle of something here," Percy said, glancing over towards Rachel, who was still clutching her crazy-expensive phone to her ear.

"Oh, please. That mortal's pitiful attempt at a date is going nowhere, and you both know it. Besides, her mother is currently calling her away because she suspects her husband may be cheating on her with his personal assistant and that Rachel has known about it for months. You can thank me for that later. By the way, I prefer Ghirardelli Chocolates as my offerings. I've also put my most emotionally-stable daughter on the job, so I hope you don't mind working with her."

"Silena?" Percy asked hopefully, thinking of the kindest daughter of Aphrodite he had ever met.

"No, sadly, she's still in a state of emotional disarray." Aphrodite must have seen the shock in Percy's expression, because she added, "Don't worry, your other girlfriend is working on that. Here's the deal, sweetie. Ditch the redhead and go to Le Moulin a Café to meet my daughter. If you find Eros and return him to me here before one this morning, I'll leave you three alone… for the time being."

"And if I fail…?" Percy knew that that wasn't the thing you should tell goddesses, especially ones who could fry you to a crisp with a flick of their wrist (they don't like thinking that they're wrong or that they won't get their way), but he had this impulsive need to tick the gods off, it was like breathing or sleeping; he just couldn't go for too long without it.

Aphrodite's eyes started almost glowing, and the soft tone of her voice became slightly echoic as she rose slightly off the ground, high heels and all. "If you fail, you'll start to experience all the pain you are causing those who love you, and trust me, that's a fate almost as bad as the one I gave Psyche so many years ago."

And with that, Aphrodite disappeared in yet another flourish of rose petals. The world went back to normal, and Rachel started arguing with her mom on the phone.

"No! I swear! I did not know about dad and Jordyn! Ugh! Mom! Just wait a second, I'll be home soon!" Rachel hung up the phone with a huff and then shot an apologetic look at Percy. "I'm really sorry, but I have to go." She waved the phone around in the air, whapping a businessman who was walking by in the face with her arm, and causing him to glare at the two of them with a stupid teenagers look. "Family emergency."

Percy felt slightly guilty knowing that Aphrodite had caused all this, but the goddess' threat still hung in the air like the smell of spoiled meat, so he nodded and waved goodbye, swallowing his dread of the quest to come. As Rachel walked away, Percy hailed a cab and made his way over to the café that Aphrodite had told him about.

Drew Tanaka sat in the back booth, examining her nails as Percy walked into the door of the French café Le Moulin a Café. He spotted her and groaned when he saw her dark, cat-like eyes turn to watch him come in the door. Honestly, she looked really scary when she did that.

Percy had never had that good of a relationship with the daughters of Aphrodite, with Silena being the exception, of course, because she got along well with everybody. They were scary, beautiful girls who, out of all the campers, seemed godly the most. He had enough trouble talking to girls as it was, which any girl at Goode High, cheerleader to yearbook committee would tell you, but when they were naturally as beautiful as goddesses (they absolutely knew it, and would not hesitate to remind you), it was harder for Percy to talk to them than any cheerleader at Goode. If the daughters of Aphrodite were the popular girls at Camp Half Blood, then Drew was the queen bee: gorgeous yet slightly evil and not afraid to put you in your place.

Of course, he had gotten assigned to go on a quest with the head cheerleader of the Aphrodite girls; Drew Tanaka. Where Silena could change her hair and eye color, Drew could change your mind. Percy wasn't exactly sure how she did it, but he noticed quite often that when she was upset, a lot of people would tend to agree with her, even Annabeth, who absolutely hated her guts for reasons that she had not yet fully disclosed to Percy. As far as he knew, it had something to do with nurse's shoes and honey and some amount of beehives.

"Nice of you to finally show up sweetheart," Drew drawled, the sweetheart part dripping with acid. Percy could tell that she did not actually mean any of what she had said, all the way from the nice to the sweetheart, but that was just the way Drew talked, covering up her harsh words with things like honey and sweetheart.

"Well, your mom only just told me about what we're doing." Percy felt the need to defend himself, although he knew he was not doing a very good job of it.

"I was informed yesterday," Drew gloated, once again examining her red-painted nails. "Lucky for you, Mr. Hero, I have actually met Eros on several occasions." Her voice still had its snarky I-don't-have-time-for-you tone, but when she said the god's name, Percy could see fear in her eyes. "So this should be a piece of cake."

"Do you have any idea where he might be?"

"He has been shown to like going to Central Park with his wife, Psyche, but seeing as Aphrodite currently can't find him, he probably isn't there. There's a chance he could be at that Chinese place that Zeus likes…" Drew trailed off, listing other possibilities of where he could be, and then canceling them out.

"How do you know so much about the god's favorite hang-outs?" Percy implored.

"Puh-lease, hon," Drew laughed. "Children of Aphrodite are natural gossips. If any god is seen anywhere, even in disguise, we'll know who they are, what they're doing, who they're avoiding, etc. Sadly, most of us are currently at home for the holidays, so as for gods in the New York area that leaves me, and I am currently only aware of my mom, and the Hunters of Artemis."

Hearing about the Hunters sent Percy's mind off on a tangent, wondering how his friend Thalia, lieutenant to Artemis, was doing. Last time he'd seen her, they'd been wandering through the underworld together trying to locate the Sword of Hades. He wondered how much had changed in the past few weeks.

Drew clapped her hands in front of his face. "Are you even listening to me?"

"Um… yes?"

"Then what did I just say?"

Percy's mind blanked. "Uh…"

The daughter of Aphrodite rolled her eyes in exasperation. "I was saying that the best place to check would probably be the Olive Garden near Times Square, but really, finding him is going to be hard."

"Okay," Percy started, "Why don't we head over there then?"

"Great. I'll call up my chauffeur." Percy opened his eyes wide at the mention of a chauffeur, but kept himself from making any comments. Gods, he had known Drew was rich, but not, like, Rachel rich.