The day from hell started like any other normal Wednesday. Sure, the usual hustle and bustle of the West Wing never quite slowed down for anyone, ever, but there wasn't anything out of the ordinary about the mountains of paperwork pushing their way around the cubicles, and the two climate bills they'd been shoving down the House's throat for two weeks straight was about to pass, and the new HUD appointment had gone though swimmingly. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that this particular Wednesday would be the day it all went to hell in a handbasket. And yet, so it went.

"You're sure there's nothing going on?" Annabeth scrutinized Piper over the edge of her laptop.

"Positive," Piper said with an attempted flip of her hair, the overall effect of which was undercut slightly by the fact that her hair was up in a braided knot on top of her head.

"You're acting squirrelly," Annabeth replied with a frown.

"Am not," Piper retorted. "You're just in a bad mood because Reyna's on the warpath about the climate thing."

"No, I'm in a bad mood because of the other thing," Annabeth groaned.

"We need a day off." Piper leaned back in her chair, which was pulled up to the opposite side of Annabeth's desk. They were set up dueling-laptops-style with a mountain of paperwork on either side of their back-to-back computers.

"We work in the White House, we don't get days off."

"Says the woman who's never taken a day off in her life," Piper rolled her eyes. "Look, it's a light week, or at least it's supposed to be. We've been working our asses off for months to get the climate stuff done, HUD's done, there are no Supreme Court justices set for surgery or God forbid, the grave…"

Annabeth crossed her arms, eyebrows raised. "Are you suggesting taking today off?"

"Obviously not," Piper answered, gesturing to the desk they were sharing. "I am suggesting maybe, possibly, leaving this office before seven o'clock at night. And I am suggesting that maybe, at some point in the near future, we go and find a place with a beach, and we find you a cute guy, and we don't touch any paperwork for a whole week."

"Cute guys are a distraction," Annabeth scowled, waving a pencil vaguely threateningly in Piper's direction.

"That's sort of the point."

"Whatever. You really think we can wade through all of this before the end of the day?" Annabeth glanced skeptically at her watch.

"Hey, you're the boss," Piper pointed out. "You're allowed to delegate."

"This is delegating," said Annabeth.

"No, this is sharing. And sparing me from having to give the stupid tour."

"You don't like giving the tours?" Annabeth asked, looking up at her friend with genuine surprise.

"No, it's all facts and architecture and figuring out how to talk to kids and old people at the same time. I'm not good with kids or old people. That's J—" Piper's cheeks bloomed a furious crimson and she abruptly broke off the sentence with a cough. "That's the kind of stuff that you enjoy."

"Piper, were you about to—"

"I wasn't about to anything," Piper answered as coolly as she could, doing her best to ignore the heat in her nose and ears. Stupid traitorous good circulation, she thought to herself.

Just then, the door burst open.

"Have you heard?" Gwen, one of the secretaries from the communications staff, asked.

"Have we heard what?" Annabeth glanced at Piper for backup, but Piper's face was just as blank as her own.

Gwen's eyes widened. "You're going to want to come out here."

"But we've got the…" Piper looked up at Gwen, then back to Annabeth, then back to Gwen, recalibrating the severity of what must be happening as soon as she saw Gwen's face. "Okay, fine, we're coming."

"What's going on?" Annabeth hissed under her breath to Piper.

"I don't know!" Piper's fingers moved frantically as she pulled up the typical news sources on her phone, even as they followed Gwen out into the hallway, where the TVs mounted in the corners all flashed the same message.

BREAKING NEWS
JOURNALIST MICHAEL YEW KILLED COVERING PROTEST

Piper turned to Annabeth, dread and adrenaline rising in her chest in equal measure. "I don't think we're going to be leaving the office before seven tonight."

"Right." Annabeth sighed, already scanning the room. "Where the hell is Silena? Or Percy? Or… god damnit, has Reyna seen this?"

"Oh my God," Piper realized aloud. "Michael Yew. Don't we know Michael Yew?"

Annabeth frowned, then her eyes widened as she bit back a curse. "Yeah. Yeah, we do. He writes for the Post. Covered us on the campaign trail. He was on that bus with us for months."

"And he—" Piper's hand rose to cover her mouth. "Do we know what— how—"

"Breathe, focus, Pipes. We can freak out later. Right now, there's no time. Where's Reyna?" Annabeth turned to the nearest aide, some kid in an ill-fitting suit who looked like this was his first internship on or off the Hill. "You. Have you seen Reyna?"

He blinked, apparently unused to being addressed directly by anyone, let alone the Deputy Chief of Staff. "I— she's— look in her office?"

Annabeth groaned. "Okay. Great. Piper, find Silena. We need details, we need to know which family members to contact, we need to know what the protest was about… "

"We need to know enough to make a list of what we don't know, and Silena needs to be in the room with you and Reyna as soon as I can find her. Yeah, got it." Piper grabbed a legal pad and a pen and headed at a near-sprint for the press room.

By the time Annabeth got to Reyna's office, the Chief of Staff was already scribbling down notes and on the phone with someone, both eyes fixed on the television in the corner of the room. She held up a finger as Annabeth hovered in the doorway.

"Uh huh. Yeah. Okay. Retaliation? No. Okay. Yeah." She tapped a button on the phone's screen, set it down on her desk, and turned to Annabeth. "I'm guessing you've heard."

Annabeth nodded. "Do we know anything?"

"We know there was a protest, we know there was a gunshot, and we know that Michael Yew ended up dead." Reyna gestured at the TV. "We know about as much as we've already been told."

"It's already making national headlines," Annabeth said. "We don't… there's no way to get out ahead of this. It's going to be bad, isn't it?"

"It's going to be bad on just about every front, yes," Reyna agreed. "That whole conversation about good guys with guns versus bad guys with guns, the usual crap about reporters' safety versus freedom of the press—"

"It's worse than that," Silena said from the doorway, slightly out of breath. "They haven't put it in print yet, but I got it from my guy who liaises with WaPo. It was a protest against police violence, and it was a cop on the sideline who shot him."

Reyna looked at Silena evenly over the tops of the wire-frame glasses she sometimes wore. "You're sure?"

Silena nodded.

Reyna picked up her phone from where she'd just set it down on the desk and dialed a number. Annabeth and Silena sat in silence, both barely breathing.

"Get the President in here," Reyna said to the person on the other end of the line. "Unless he is in the situation room or out of the country, and I know for a fact that neither is the case, get him in here now." She gestured to Annabeth, covering the phone's speaker with one hand and whispered, "Go get Percy and Jason. This is going to be all senior staff, all hands on deck."

Annabeth nodded, and set off down the hall at as fast a pace as she could muster in heels, Silena not far behind. They ran into Percy not quite twenty feet down the hall, hands full of paper and an iPad full of notes tucked under his arm.

He ran a hand through his already-messy hair. "Jason's on his way. Reyna's in her office?"

Annabeth nodded. "Yeah. Senior staff, all hands on deck."

Percy's mouth set into a grim determined line, the kind of line that conveyed a serious togetherness that didn't quite match his disheveled exterior but that Annabeth recognized as the face he'd worn into every law school argument, every Olympic race, every time they'd pitted wills against one another and come out with neither one of them truly ahead.

"Guess we'd better get to it then."

I'm back...

I've moved, started a new job, I'm 10 weeks into training for a marathon, and I've FINALLY found enough of a routine and a normalized schedule that I can start writing again. I don't know how regular the updates will be, but there will be updates!

On a more serious note, the state of the world looks a little different than it did the last time I posted. I hope you're all doing okay. For all of you who clicked on this chapter: thank you for still reading.

~GT