Corrupted Nostalgia

Rachel

"Yeah, but it was really a profound observation …"

Piper's voice echoes off the high domed ceiling over the bath. Rachel thinks calling this place the baths is an understatement. She follows Reyna into the main room where their friends are all gathered at the far side of the swimming pool size bathtub.

"I mean, the idea that human civilization inherits what remains from the previous generations, and like, it's similar to how the gods and the titans started out." Piper looks up as Rachel and Reyna reach the stairs leading into the water. "Hey! We were just talking about our conversation from earlier. Traffic jam philosophy!" She grins and scoots closer to Annabeth on the sunken bench, making room for them to join.

Percy and Jason stand further out in the deeper water, but near enough to take part in the conversation and Hazel and Frank sit on the low bench against the wall on the other side of the stairs.

Jason and Frank avert their eyes as Reyna and Rachel drop their towels and step into the water, while Percy responds to Piper. They sit down beside Piper and Reyna answers Annabeth's wink hello with a quiet chuckle.

"But," Percy says. "So is … is that like an excuse or something? Or are you saying that what's happening in the world is just inevitable?"

Annabeth raises her eyebrow and looks at Percy bobbing in the water. "What do you mean, Percy?"

The water splashes up Percy's chest as he treads water as if responding to his agitation. "Like, the whole deal with global warming; the issues in this country with income inequality; the whole messed up way mortals divide themselves. You know, putting some above others, making their messed up viewpoints real and treating some people as worth more than the rest. Like based on where they come from, how much money and power they have, and even what color their skin is. So, you're saying the previous generation's mistakes that the next generation inherits and basically gets stuck with … it goes all the way back to the gods?"

Piper looks pensive as she digests Percy's words, and Annabeth fixes wide eyes on Percy, her lips turning up at the corner. She looks a little bit stunned at Percy's questions and whole lot taken with him. Rachel thinks it's adorable, and then Piper draws her attention away, responding to Percy.

"Well, sort of. That might be it on like a really big scale, but you can see it within the divisions themselves, right Rachel?"

Rachel tilts her head as she meets Piper's eyes. Reyna holds her hand under the water, their legs touching as they sit hip to hip. She's not sure she's following the conversation well enough. After her conversation with Reyna, and finally figuring out how to reconnect with the world, she'd lost herself again in the irresistible pull of Reyna's body calling out for hers. "Go on," she tells Piper. "I want to hear how you see it."

The smirk Piper gives her makes Rachel blush. As the daughter of Aphrodite, it's likely Piper can read exactly where Rachel's thoughts are wandering. The whole aura of 'flying-high-on-making-love-and-didn't-expect-to-find-a-political-debate-when-I-came-here-to-wash' that she wears, trying to play it cool, is probably as clear as day to Piper.

"Okay. So, my dad is Cherokee, right? The Cherokee nation and all the nations indigenous to this land have basically been swept up like human dust bunnies. Pushed into corners, hidden under rugs, out of sight, out of mind of the white people who took over."

Rachel's heart sinks at Piper's words. It's an instinctual response, guilt. The same reaction seems to flash across Jason, Percy, and Annabeth's faces too, but nobody denies it. It's Piper's turn to talk.

"It's what happened or at least, it's how I feel when I think about it. The only way to keep on living, to keep existing in this new, 'western civilized' world when reminders of how little our people count to the country gets rubbed in our faces wherever we go, is to find an in; a way to assimilate. It's not what we want, but it is how it works. It's not how it should work, just how it is …"

She pushes on through the uncomfortable silence that falls over the room. "My dad found his 'In'. He made it as an actor and got big. He got away from the reservation, and still, even now that we have money, even though his name is a household name, all these people are fans of his and throw themselves at him when they meet him, the learned idea that he's only made it as long as he doesn't make waves keeps him quiet. And the bullshit truth is that he isn't stupid for not speaking up, for not taking on roles that are his actual ancestry. As soon as he makes some bigshot bigot uncomfortable, he could lose everything he's gained with a single stroke of their pen. So, he inherited both his warrior spirit to survive and be strong as well as the brokenness that's been beaten into all of us. It's the same with you guys, I'm sure. Not on an intellectual level of understanding what is right and wrong – I doubt any of us will disagree that a system that allows this to happen is not wrong – but the deep down culturally ingrained feelings we have."

"I know what you're saying," Annabeth says, her frown deepening. "Being born white, even though my life hasn't been easy, I've never felt like my voice didn't count, that I would be overlooked or singled out based on how I look, or that people would notice me and single me out as more of a threat than those of another race. And I do it too, it's like a part of the collective mindset to notice people who look different and to be more wary based on that. I hate that. I hate that it happens. I just fucking hate this world and how it's all gone wrong, how there isn't an easy way to fix it. There's just no perfect solution and half or more of the people in it, don't even recognize the problem.

Hazel has been quiet for the conversation up to this point, but she speaks now. Her voice starts low, but grows louder as they turn to her and listen.

"I know what Piper's saying too, about how in spite of her tribe's long history of strength and endurance, how systemic abuse and the messages you get raised with injure that spirit, how it gets broken down. My grandmother was a slave. Even after slavery had supposedly ended, she wasn't ever free. She'd never known any other way of life, and when she had my mother … well, my mom was born with the rebellious spirit my grandmother repressed. My grandmother died, and Marie, she went the opposite direction. I think it was the hurt from being considered worth less than the white people, that's what drove her to become what she did. She was greedy for power, for a way to have something and be in control of it. It came as a response to having no claim to anything, no rights. And she turned around and took it out on me, the internalized hatred she didn't want to see in herself, she saw it reflected in me. But … I don't know. Maybe it's because I died young; maybe it's because I'm a demigod; maybe it's all the years I spent in Asphodel, not forgetting who I was, but puzzling it all out and thinking about how where my mother came from set her up, set us both up for ending as we did. And now that I'm alive again, now that I'm a praetor, I can't stay silent. I have to count on the fact that New Rome does not operate on slavery, that though America was built on it, as was old Rome, that attitudes can change, that education and working as a team can set things right.

"So that means that even the gods can change," Percy adds. "Even after all these eons of messing up, and the next generation blaming the first for their problems, then making it worse for the one that follows – on and on – it's possible that we could make it right. We're demigods and come from both the mortal world with its problems, as well as from the gods and their issues. We're the ones who need to stand up and make it happen in both places, right?"

Jason wrinkles his forehead, treading water beside Percy, and speaks up next. Rachel's not sure if his squinting is from thinking or because his glasses are off.

"The problem with the gods though, is my dad. He's going backwards instead of forwards. He's repeating his old mistakes all over again, like he's stuck in a loop."

"Yeah?" Annabeth interrupts, scoffing. "And who's the driving force behind him making those mistakes? That cow queen, Hera. She's so desperate to control him and force him to be faithful to her that she drives him in the wrong direction as he tries to escape her. Really, if she'd just let go and accept that it's not his nature to commit to only one goddess …"

"It's greater than that, Annabeth," Rachel says, taking in all of their conversations and points of views. "Hera, more than anything, is the goddess of feminism. She wants equality. She was born even before Zeus, the first three children of Kronos and Rhea were female, and they were devoured, as were Hades and Poseidon. I mean, it's great that Zeus worked to free them, but after he did, when the brothers drew lots for their powers, Hera was slighted because why should it have only been the male gods to qualify for them? Even after she married Zeus and took on the title of queen, she tried to make the pantheon democratic. She reasoned with Apollo, Athena, and Poseidon and convinced them to help her. They all agreed the system was flawed and would lead to Zeus repeating the old prophecy, fearing his children would usurp him and in trying to avoid it, he'd fulfill it. That's where we're at with the gods. There is not a single source currently existing that holds responsibility for all the blame. And Hera is right in the idea that only through opening the board to full disclosure, to equal status, can any strides to change it happen.

Annabeth frowns. "Yeah? Well, I still don't like her. Her lofty claims for equal status end at the Olympian gods. She sees many demigods as not worthy of being counted. Nico and Hazel, she doesn't count them as she doesn't count Hades. Tyson, Ella, all those who are not a mix of 'pure' titan, Olympian, and sometimes human don't qualify as equal in her eyes.

Only Frank and Reyna have remained silent. Reyna clears her throat and they all turn to her.

"It's fitting," she says, "that we're having this talk here in the baths. The baths are part of the reason Rome lasted as long as it did. All citizens of ancient Rome used the public baths. It was the common denominator of the society, that those in power and those who were subservient had the same needs for cleanliness. The baths provided a place for those without a voice in the senate to appeal with the senators, to state their points of view, and for senators to see things from differing perspectives. It wasn't perfect, but the idea that – stripped down, all citizens are the same – is something I like to think about when I'm here. It makes me wonder if there could ever be something similar established in the modern world, some other method of giving everybody a voice.

"There is," Frank says, speaking up for the first time. "But even it is imperfect and under attack by people in power trying to restrict it. The internet."

Another silence falls, and Rachel can almost hear the thoughts buzzing around in her friends' brains. She wonders if the Delphic Oracle is actually picking up on them, and the buzzing is her picking up feedback, when Percy breaks the tension.

"Wow, that's deep, Frank."

Frank's cheeks redden, but he smiles when he sees Percy grinning at him. He lifts his arms over his head, stretches, and then yawns. He settles back again, slipping an arm around Hazel's shoulders and Rachel nearly bursts out laughing when she foresees Percy voicing his thought that Frank pulled off a smooth move, but Frank speaks first. "I think it's going to be Apollo, the one god it all comes down on."

A cold tickle starts at the base of Rachel's head, where her neck begins and spreads down her spine as Frank continues to talk.

"Zeus singled him out for blame after the war with Gaea, and then the whole thing went down with his oracle. I've always liked Apollo. He seems to get the mortal world a lot more than the other gods. If any of the Olympians has the power to inspire changes in the godly realm and here in the mortal one, it's him."

When the cold sensation reaches the middle of Rachel's back, she remembers what the Oracle had told her in her vision, and stands up straight, not even thinking about the fact she's totally naked and now everybody is staring at her.

"Shit," she says. "Reyna. I just remembered. The oracle, she told me..." she looks helplessly at Reyna. "I have to get a message to Apollo. We have to go back to Camp Half-Blood."