Disclaimer: I only own the plot and my OCs. Anything you recognize as not mine belongs to Rick Riordan, Greco-Roman mythology, and/or their otherwise respective owners.
Author's Notes: Okay, first off, to my guest readers on AO3, I am terribly sorry about turning off my guest comments! I was getting inundated with spam comments a few days ago on multiple fics because a platform wants me to join them (sidebar: AO3 and FFN are the only two platforms I will ever post my stories to, besides sharing links to them on Tumblr. If you see them on other sites, please report the people posting my stories there + let me know) or whatever. I am hoping that I will be able to turn guest comments back on in a week or two, but for right now they're off. Please know it's not against you, it's against those spam assholes, and I love y'all and appreciate you very much!
Secondly, we are getting a little anachronistic with a certain movie this chapter. I debated rewriting it because of this, but I'd already rewritten it once and I decided that I was just going to leave it. Pretend that the movie came out earlier in this universe than it did here if it helps you lol, idk.
Anyways, as always, I hope you enjoy. Until the next chapter,
~TGWSI/Selene Borealis
~The Finding Home Saga~
~Finding Home~
~Chapter 81: Mamma Mia~
Yeah, I know. You're probably why I titled this chapter – and the one after it – after an ABBA song. We'll get to that.
Anyways:
"You're pregnant?" Silena screeched.
The pitch of her voice was so loud that it felt like it was going to pierce my eardrums. I winced. "Yes, Silly."
"But you're a boy! How can you even get pregnant! You don't even have the parts for it!"
(Side bar: I know this is commonly assumed, but since finding out that getting pregnant is an ability of mine as a son of Poseidon, I did some research into this stuff, and I don't really know where else to put this other than here. Yes, almost all biologically and assigned-male-at-birth men can't pregnant. But there are a few conditions that could allow them to, albeit not in the way that I have, as my interior plumbing is a quirk of being a son of Poseidon. Look up Persistent Müllerian duct syndrome if you don't believe me.
But more than that, as I want to reiterate what my mom said last chapter, what reproductive organs you have versus which ones you don't aren't important to what you know your gender to be. There are plenty of people out there who don't have the reproductive organs that align to their gender due to being intersex or transgender, and that's okay.
To get back to the story, though...)
"Well, if you would've given me a chance to explain, I would've told you already," I snapped at her.
Silena's mouth shut. Her face was pale, extremely pale. On either side of her, Katie and Alabaster weren't much better. I'd told the daughter of Demeter to get Chiron to allow her out of cap, because if I was telling my other best friend and Alabaster about this to get my plan going, then I figured I might as well tell all of my closest friends in one go.
Callie had already been told of the news, because she'd come to the apartment a couple hours after I'd told my mom my decision and refused to leave until she got answers for why I was so "sick." She'd banged on the door and everything: "Come on, Percy!" she'd yelled only seconds after her knocking. "Let me in!"
Naturally, I hadn't been able to keep the news from her, although I wouldn't have wanted to anyways. When I'd explained to her that we'd figured out what was going on with me, that I was pregnant, she'd gone pale, too. The first thing that she'd thought to say, after much spluttering on her part and much insistence on mine that I was telling the truth was, "...Well, I guess that answers the question about my conception."
"Not something I wanted to think about again, Callie," I'd huffed, annoyed. "Thanks for that."
Of course, after convincing her that I was pregnant, I had to tell her everything about Luke, having kept it from her up until that point in the conversation. She'd been alarmed, very alarmed, at the fact that Luke and I had been dating for so long, even though she'd admitted that "everything kind of makes sense now."
But once her shock had worn off, she'd become tentatively excited for me. She'd told me that she was happy she was going to be an aunt. That had to count for something.
Now, I just had to get my friends on the same wavelength.
"It's because I'm a son of Poseidon," I said. "Apparently, 'the sea is fertile' and all that jazz, and that means I'm technically hermaphroditic without being a hermaphrodite."
(I should probably also explain this: just as intersex morals may prefer to use the term "intersex" rather than "hermaphrodite" because of the specific connotations of the two words, the same is true for demigods. In our world, if you're a hermaphrodite, it means either you were born with complete male/female reproductive organs, like in the mortal sense, and/or that you were blessed by the god Hermaphroditus...which isn't always seen as a good thing.
Yes, as Hermaphroditus' name implies, he is a son of Hermes and Aphrodite. But that's all I'll get into about his story: it's not really relevant right now, nor totally appropriate.)
"And I didn't know this until like a week ago," I continued. "Nobody told me."
Katie was the first one to recover out of the three of them. Her hands were abruptly gripping the side of the couch cushions rather tightly, so tight that her knuckles were almost white. "Not your mother or my mother? Or your father? Or Chiron?"
"No." I didn't know why Chiron hadn't told me either yet, since I hadn't talked to him about this in the time that had passed since finding out I was pregnant. It was something that I was going to have to find out, though.
Alabaster was the one to recover next. "Well, I told you to make sure you guys wore condoms," he joked weakly as a reminder.
Silena craned her neck with an almost audible snap! to gawk at him. "Ally!" she cried.
He shrugged. "What? I'm just saying! Like, I didn't know that this was going to happen, but still. Just because Percy's gay and we can't get STDs as demigods, that doesn't mean that he and Luke shouldn't have been practicing safe-sex. We live in a world where tons of weird shit can happen." His focus was redirected back to me as he squinted his eyes. "Something like this happening seriously didn't cross your mind?"
...Okay, so maybe he had a point with that.
Whatever.
"Well, it's too late now," I retorted. "Which is why I'm telling you guys this now. You guys are my friends. My bestfriends. You – you mean a lot to me." Ah, shit. My eyes were watering again. Hastily, I moved to wipe them. "But also, um, Al – "
It was Silena who connected the dots as she settled down. "You need to tell Luke," she surmised.
"Yeah," I said miserably.
We all looked at Alabaster. His face, which had gained some color back into it, paled all over again. Then, he flushed. "You want me to contact Luke for you, don't you?" he guessed. He didn't need me to confirm that. Snidely, he asked, "Can't you ask him to come here yourself?"
"It's not that simple," I explained. "He's the one who contacts me, and I don't know when the next time will be. Everything's kind of..." I trailed off. I didn't know how much I wanted to tell them. What Luke had told me about him doubting Kronos was something that was incredibly private, and dangerous if anyone else besides me knew. "It's complicated right now."
"Of course it is," Alabaster grumbled.
"You don't have to do it, Al," I told him. I still felt incredibly guilty about telling my mom how he had helped me. She'd gone out for a bit so that I could break the news to my friends without her hovering, but I knew that she wasn't exactly happy with him currently. He didn't deserve to be on the receiving end of her disapproval. "I won't ask you to do something that you don't want to."
Silena seemed inclined to agree with me – in the sense that she didn't want him to do it, regardless of how I could tell she knew it was the right thing for him to do. It could turn out to be an incredibly dangerous and risky task, depending on where Luke was and what he was doing.
Alabaster sighed, running a hand over his face. "No, I'll do it. It's the least that I can do. I helped get you into this mess, I might as well help make it a bit better."
My friends all stayed the night at my and my mom's apartment. We'd decided that it would be best for Alabaster to do his shit tomorrow, when he would potentially have more time to find Luke.
When my mom came home, she was a little terse with Alabaster, but she didn't exhibit too much of her anger, much to my relief. Jean had sent money with Silena to help pay for dinner for the four of us, because four demigods who were also growing teenagers could eat a lot, plus my mom. She ordered us two large pizzas, some cheesy bread, wings, and a salad – the salad mostly for Katie's sake. Oh, and a liter bottle of Coke. And again, I want to emphasize that we're demigods and growing teenagers, if that seems like way too much food.
But there was an additional level to it. I don't know what it was about the food, if it was the greasiness or simply my desire to eat some good pizza – my mom had ordered from the place that we always got pizza from – but my appetite returned properly for the first time it had since before I'd started getting morning sickness. I found myself tearing into my food, which I carefully portioned out so as to not take too much, with abandon.
This, naturally, also led me to be on the receiving end of my friends' stares.
I looked back at them once, mystified. "What?"
"Nothing," Katie said immediately, shaking her head. Alabaster and Silena followed suit. But I could tell that Katie and Alabaster were similarly amused, while Silena looked a little...disgusted. Oops.
Oh, well. This was the first time I'd been able to eat so much without feeling sick in a while, and I was not going to let the opportunity go to waste.
After we finished dinner, we took over the TV to watch some movies. I started flicking through the channels on the cable, trying to find something that we would all like. As I'm sure you can imagine, my friends and I all had some pretty distinctive tastes from one another, so that wasn't exactly easy.
"You could try seeing if there's a horror movie on," Alabaster suggested.
"Thanks, but no," I said. "Unless you want to possibly witness me throwing up."
A scandalized look came over his face. "Yeah, I'm good."
When I passed by something on the channels, Silena let out a squeal. "Oh, I've been wanting to see that for so long, I just never got a chance to! I can't believe it's out on cable now!" she exclaimed. "Go up, go up, go up!"
I flicked back up through the channels until I went back to the movie she was referring to. It hadn't started yet: there were about five minutes left of the previous movie until it wound. "Mamma Mia?" I said dubiously.
I could tell just from the title alone that it had something to do with ABBA. Rest assured, that wasn't why I was reluctant to watch it.
"Yes!" Silena replied. "We have to watch it!"
Alabaster was even more reluctant than I was. I had the sense that he knew what it was about from her, at least its basic premise.
"I'm down for it," Katie said, leaning forwards a little.
We were two against one hard (but unsaid) no, and then there was me. Undecided.
I casted my vote. "Alright, sure," I said, clicking on the channel the movie was going to play on. "Why not?"
The movie was actually...pretty good. It was a musical, which meant that the plot was definitely a little too over-the-top. But it had Meryl Streep and Colin Firth in it, and all of them were good at singing. Even Alabaster wound up enjoying it by the end, which he shamelessly admitted to. It had Silena laughing as she said, "I told you that you would!"
But well before that, when the eponymous song was sung by Meryl Streep, it...I don't know, I guess it ignited something in me. I'd listened to the song many, many times before, but there seemed to be something special about this time in particular. Maybe it was the fact that not all of the lyrics were included: the last verse, or whatever the hell it's called (I don't know music), wasn't sung:
"Mamma mia, even if I say, bye, bye, leave me now or never; mamma mia, it's a game we play: bye, bye, doesn't mean forever..."
It was like the reality of all of this was hitting me all over again, all at once. I was pregnant. Tomorrow, I was going to tell Luke that, too, and...I had no idea how he was going to react. I thought he would react well. I hoped that he would react well.
But I didn't know, not for sure.
Because what if he didn't?
This wasn't a thought that bothered me so much during the movie. After it was over, I was tired, and it was actually pretty late – around ten o'clock. We'd had dinner later than my mom and I usually did. "Are you guys ready for bed?" my mom asked us.
"We can be," Katie answered diplomatically.
Unlike what I'd expected, my mom had put the two twin-sized blow-up mattresses that she had for Katie and Silena – or any of my friends or Callie if they wanted to stay the night, really, but they were for them in this particular circumstance – in my room instead of the living room, and Alabaster was to sleep on the couch. It occurred to me that this was a sign of her recognizing and accepting the fact that I was gay, so I didn't comment on it.
And this was when that above thought bothered me despite how tired I was, more tired than any of my friends. I couldn't fall asleep in my bed for a while that night, and stared up at the ceiling for a long time in the dark.
If Luke didn't take this...well, I didn't know what I was going to do. Yeah, raise the babies on my own just as my mom had me, sure, but...if he didn't have a good reaction, if he even said that he didn't want anything to do with me anymore or our kids...
I didn't know what I was going to do if that happened. Maybe die of the heartbreak, I thought to myself, and had to quell a hysterical laugh at the absurdity of that statement. Sue me: I'm a Greek demigod, and the Ancient Greeks have always been known for their tragedies. It didn't seem so outlandish that the fated hero of the Great Prophecy – me – would die of a broken heart before he could even fulfill it.
My world would definitely fall apart if Luke rejected me, if nothing else. He was my everything: I knew that I was fated to be with him, as the lyrics of Waterloo said. I'd never be able to let him go.
"...Percy?" Katie suddenly asked me sleepily when it was just after midnight, making me nearly jump out of my skin. "Are you still up?"
Looking down and over at her and Silena's mattresses, I saw that Silena was conked out. It didn't seem likely that she would wake up as long as Katie and I spoke quietly.
"Yeah," I said.
"You know you don't have to worry," Katie spoke gently. I watched her rub at one of her eyes blearily, the light from the cracks in windows' blinds making her just visible. "If there's one thing that I know about Luke, it's that he loves you. He's not going to leave you or anything like that."
At first, I was too stunned to reply to that.
She'd really peered directly into my innermost thoughts and soul there, hadn't she?
Thankfully, it appeared that she hadn't been expecting me to answer her. "Go to sleep, Percy," she said, before she almost immediately went out like a light.
With her boost of confidence, it didn't take me too long to do the same.
In the morning, after breakfast, Alabaster quickly got to work on his spells. He had to do three: the first one was to track down Luke, the second one to teleport to him, and the third to teleport them both back. Technically, he could have just settled with teleporting Luke here, but we'd all agreed that that would be a bad idea. No, it was better for him to explain that there was...something going on with me, and that Luke needed to come back with him to handle it. Now.
...Yeah, that idea wasn't much better either, I know. But it was better than the alternative.
As Alabaster set up his circle in the middle of our living room, the coffee table, couch, and armchair all having been moved or pushed back, I found myself pacing nervously. The anxiety from last night was returning to me. It didn't help that the all too familiar nausea was beginning to resettle in my stomach.
"Percy, why don't you sit down?" my mom pestered me. She wasn't willing to take "no" for an answer: she grabbed me by the arm, and gently led me over to our dining table in the kitchen. I sat down, but I still wound up wringing my hands anxiously.
Katie sat down across from me. She gave me a smile. "It's going to go fine," she assured me, before she laughed and shook her head. "You know, out of the three of us, you were not the one that i thought was going to have a kid first, if at all, the few times I've thought about it."
Despite myself, I raised an eyebrow. "What? Who did you think was going to be the first?"
I had a feeling that I knew the answer, given that Katie hadn't even been in a relationship before, and I was proven correct when the daughter of Demeter deadpanned, "Silena."
"Hey!" the daughter of Aphrodite cried, bustling into the kitchen. "I know how to practice safe sex, thank you very much!"
I was pretty sure I heard Alabaster choke on his own spit in the living room. My mom, meanwhile, looked like she was over the conversation.
Katie smiled sweetly. "All it takes is one time, Silly."
"Well, I know that, but – !"
"Guys!" Alabaster called out. "I'm ready!"
I stood up, and thought that I was going to pass out as all of the blood rushed from my head. My mom and Katie both helped me to one of the armchairs in the living room, the same one I'd sat down in during my conversation with my mom, Demeter, and Despoina. I let them, not even bothering to try and fight.
Alabaster was sitting in the circle he'd made. When I nodded t him to start, he started chanting his spell in Ancient Greek. His eyes began to glow.
It did not take Alabaster long to find Luke. As soon as he did, he ended his first spell, gasping. "I know where he is," he said. "We're lucky. The only people he's around right now are Ethan and Chris."
That...might depend on one's version of "lucky." It had been a long time since I'd talked to either Ethan or Chris, although I knew from Luke that they knew we were back together, and that they weren't likely to tell anyone about this turn of events. Nor were Mia and Athana. Mia would probably even be ecstatic when she found out.
"I'm going to go get him," Alabaster announced.
He performed his next spell. It wasn't as fast as say, shadow-travel with Bianca or Nico would've been, but it did the trick. He vanished in a near-blinding flash of misty green light.
Now, all we had left to do was wait.
Somehow, it didn't take as long as I'd expected and yet longer at the same time. I knew that Alabaster was going to have to make a circle on the other side, because that was how the teleportation spell worked, it required something to ground you (and the circle was also good for helping him focus on other spells, too) before you could place your being somewhere else.
It took about thirty minutes for him to come back with Luke, during which Katie kept on offering up her reassurances, and even my mom and Silena did the same to an extent. There was another flash of misty green light, and before I even opened my eyes –
"Percy?"
Luke.
He was standing in the middle of Alabaster's circle, looking worried out of his mind and confused. His attention was on me first and foremost, but as he looked around the room and took in the presences of Silena, Katie, and most of all, my mom, his posture straightened. "Percy," he repeated. "...What's going on?"
"Hi, Luke," I said, delaying the inevitable altogether.
Luke glanced over at my mom, then at me, then back at her. "Alabaster said that something's going on with you," he spoke slowly. "Something important, that I needed to be here for."
I knew what he was trying to say: "Did your Mom find out?"
Honestly, I was giving him brownie points for not freaking out on the spot.
"Uh, yeah," I answered his indirect question. I wanted to get up, but something within me was telling me that would be a bad idea. Maybe I really would pass out. I gestured between him and my mom. "Um, Luke, this is my mom. Mom, this is Luke."
My mom was gazing at Luke speculatively, albeit it probably didn't seem that way to anybody except me. She still didn't trust him.
Before either my mom or Luke could speak, Alabaster yawned obnoxiously. "That took a lot out of me," he said. "I'm going to go take a nap."
It wasn't until Silena said, "I'll go with you," and Katie agreed with her that I realized what they were doing. I was actually grateful for it, even though it was my room they all went into. Hopefully, they wouldn't be looking too much into my things without me there, if they did at all.
There was a tense silence between my mom and Luke. She was the one to break it, walking forwards and holding out her hand. "It's nice to meet you, Luke," she said. "I'm Ms. Jackson."
"Mom," I groaned, burying my face into my hands.
"But you can call me Sally," she continued as Luke accepted her gesture.
Okay, scratch what I had previously said paragraphs ago. Luke was becoming more and more freaked out by the second. "'Nice to meet you, too," he managed, then looked back over at me. He mouthed: "You told her?"
I knew that he wasn't necessarily panicking over my mom knowing, more of what it meant: why I had told her the truth, if I had told anyone else the truth, and etcetera.
Cringing, I said, "I kind of had to, because of what's going on with me."
The repetition of that had him pausing, as he made the correct assumption. "'With you?'" he quoted. "Not with the...?"
"No."
His eyebrows furrowed. "Then what – "
Suddenly, I was worried that, even though I was the one who was pregnant and feeling faintish when I was standing, he was going to pass out if I told him the news and he continued to be. It was probably a little stupid of me, but I couldn't help myself. "Could you sit down, please?" I requested.
Reluctantly, he sat. As he did on the end of the couch closest to me, he said, "I don't understand. Are you...are you sick?"
"Kind of," I admitted. It wasn't the right thing for me to say: his face blanched. "It's not cancer or anything like that."
Yes, demigods are immune to STDs and plenty of other sicknesses, but cancer isn't one of them due to how it operates. Neither are autoimmune diseases.
Luke didn't say anything in response. He seemed to be waiting on me.
I'd had time to think about how I wanted to tell him that I was pregnant, what I wanted to say. I mean, I was going to have to tell him how it was possible for me to become pregnant, but did I say that before or after telling him that I was? Did I give him a long-winded speech, a litany of apologies for hw I didn't know? Maybe not that: throwing my mom under the bus just as soon as they'd met probably wouldn't go over well. Did I keep things short and concise, then?
Yeah, that was probably the best solution. Keep things short and concise.
Rip it off like a bandaid, just like I had with my mom about my relationship with Luke.
"There's no easy way to tell you this, Luke," I said softly. "But, um, the truth is...the reason why Alabaster brought you here...what's going on with me...it's because I'm pregnant."
Word Count: 4,173
Next Chapter Title: Honey, Honey
