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: And we're back! Sorry about the delay. Health issues, writer's block, yada yada. You know the drill.

Again slight CW this chapter, this time for violence. Nothing really happens on-screen, but the implication is there. I don't think you'll mind, though, once you read it ;)

I hope you enjoy, as always. Until the next chapter,

~TGWSI/Selene Borealis

~Say A Little Prayer~

~Chapter 8: Brief Visits To New York~

After around five or six rounds of sex, Luke and I had our fill for the time being. We weren't tired, but we did relax, using our remaining time before Katie, Silena, and Drimios got back to cuddle.

Well, and talk, too.

"I can tell your thoughts are busy," I told him, placing a small kiss on his scar. "What are you thinking about?"

"Backbiter," he answered without hesitation.

I was glad he trusted me to the point he could say it so easily.

"The celestial bronze and tempered steel sword you were having made," I said.

He nodded. "It should be ready about now. I know that we agreed none of us should be going back to the continental United States anytime soon, but I don't want the Council to risk finding out about that sword. Plus, I've been thinking about what you said about sacred weapons..."

"And you think Backbiter could be yours?"

"It's a feeling I have," he admitted in a murmur. He gazed at me searchingly. "Am I wrong?"

"...No," I responded, stretching. "You're right. But you're not going alone. I'm coming with you."

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that," Luke said.

"Well, I'm not coming with you all the way," I said, sitting up. I ran a hand through my hair, pinching some of the silvery ends with my fingers. "I know you're going to say you don't want me to come with you to that forge because of – reasons, and I'm fine with that."

Combining celestial bronze and tempered steel was not just fatal for a mortal blacksmith, the force from the ensuing explosion would turn their body into an eviscerated husk. One of the reasons why Luke didn't want me to come with him was because he didn't want me to see that. It was cute, how he still thought he had to protect me like that on some level, when I'd seen so much worse in the possible futures ahead.

The other reason was because the blacksmith had been one of his friends, the few true ones he'd had in his mortal life, and he wanted to pay him his respects and give him a proper burial shroud burning, alone and in peace.

Which, like I said, was fine.

I respected it.

"But I have a few things I need to do myself while we're there," I added.

The furrow between his eyebrows appeared again. "Like what?"

"I'll tell you eventually," I said.

And I would.

He sighed. "Right. You can't tell me for the sake of the future where we win."

It wasn't the full truth, only partially so, but I was willing to let him believe as much. "Thank you for being so understanding," I replied, nuzzling at his neck.

"I try my best," he teased back.

When our friends and Drimios got back, Silena looked at us with narrowed eyes. "There's something different between you two," she announced. "What is it?"

"We got married," I said.

Drimios chuckled. "I was thinkin' that'd probably happen while we were gone."

Meanwhile, Katie's eyes widened. "What?"

"Well, you see, when two gods love each other very much, they have sex. And unlike with mortals, that's a binding ceremony in its own right. So, yeah. Married," I explained. "Don't worry, though, we'll have a proper ceremony after everything's over. And I'm not knocked up. No babies for the immediate future."

Luke spluttered.

"Oh, I'm so happy for you!" Silena squealed, rushing over to and pulling us into a hug. "Congratulations!"

"Thanks, Silena," I said.

"Thank you, Silena," said Luke.

When she pulled away from us, I saw Katie, smiling behind her. It was not a smile that quite reached her eyes. "'Married,'" she quoted. "You never do anything in halves, do you, Perseus?"

I wanted to comfort her, but I knew it wasn't the time for it yet.

So I just kept my response to a simple grin and saying, "You know me, Katherine. But there's something else we'd liked to talk about with you guys, too."

Drimios, Silena, and Katie were approving of our plans, at least as much as they could be. They all definitely had their reservations about it, but when it came down to a vote – at my insistence – it was unanimous.

As the elder god had put it: "If Lucas is right about this sword having the potential to become his sacred weapon, and it sounds like he is, he should go and get it as fast as he can."

So, we were going.

But we didn't leave right away, as we decided to wait until it was a little more than two weeks after my maybe-former-birthday, on September 1st. I knew based off of my visions that two of the Olympians, at least, Poseidon and Demeter, were expecting me to come back to New York a bit sooner than that, in order to pay respects to my mom.

They'd arranged a funeral for her, you see. A way to try and trick me to come back based off of sentimentality, because they expected me to be sad my first birthday without her had passed – and to be fair, I was.

Yet even if I hadn't had my domain of Prophecy, when I'd seen the national news report about it, the segment with the headline of MEMORIAL CEREMONY FOR SINGLE MOTHER FOUND DEAD IN CALIFORNIA AFTER SHE AND 14-YEAR-OLD SON WERE ABDUCTED IN LONG ISLAND, NEW YORK; SON AND SUSPECT STILL AT LARGE, all I would've been able to – and all I did in reality – feel was...indifference.

Not for my mom, never for my mom. Not for the circumstances that had led to her death.

It was just – there'd been no mention of Gabe in the news segment. No mention of how he was technically my stepfather, or what he had done to my mom, or what he had done to me. It was like my dad and Demeter, for all they had said I had every right to be angry at them because of how I'd suffered under Gabe...didn't actually care.

And the opposite of love, as Silena and all the other love deities will tell you, isn't hate. It's apathy.

Since Poseidon and Demeter didn't care about me, I wasn't going to care about them beyond the extent I knew it would be necessary for me to.

Thus, on September 1st, Luke and I first appeared in Central Park. It was a risky business, teleporting so close to the Empire State Building (for those of you who've never been to the city, though, the skyscraper was still blocks away), directly underneath Mount Olympus.

But while each god has their own...signature, I guess is the easiest way to put it, when they teleport, the Council didn't know what ours were. They didn't know that Luke's smelled like his regular godly scent, autumn after a thunderstorm and oak, or that both of mine smelled like the silver fir tree (it would become my sacred tree, something that I would have in common with the Titaness whom I now greatly resembled), the ocean, and black pepper.

They would know eventually, as the more we went back and forth from Alaska and the longer we remained in the continental United States at a time would ensure it. Until then, however, we could be here relatively safe and undetected.

A simple, brief visit after they'd become less certain of us returning anytime soon wasn't going to alert them to our presence.

"Be careful," Luke said to me, his icy blue eyes worried.

"I will," I promised, standing on my tiptoes to kiss him briefly. A couple of joggers went past us, their gazes bemused. It was a Friday morning; with our still-mostly youthful appearances, they probably thought we should be heading to school by now. We ignored them. "Meet up back here in a couple of hours?"

"Of course. 'Love you, Percy."

"I love you, too."

Then he was gone.

I walked out of the park, shoving my hands into my jean pockets. I knew where I was going for the first of the two items that were on my agenda; it actually wasn't too far from where Gabe's apartment was.

When I arrived at my destination, I grinned, and went over to the fire escape and jumped for the ladder. It was several feet up in the air, like most were, to prevent theft or something like that. But thanks to me being a god now, it was no problem for me to get so high up; gravity didn't have the same effect on me anymore even when I wasn't openly defying it. I climbed up the ladder and the multiple levels of the fire escape it took until I came across one bedroom window.

The room inside looked very similar to how I would've envisioned my own being, if Gabe hadn't used it as his "study"and jerking-off room while I'd been away at school. A few posters were on the walls; one for the band the Killers, another for the movie X2, and etcetera. Pictures of a girl with wavy black hair and ocean blue eyes and a man who looked to be her (mortal) father were alongside them.

The girl herself was laying in her extra-long twin-sized bed, complete with blankets and pillows in various shades of blue, still sleeping, even though she should've been out the door a good twenty-five minutes ago. She'd slept through her alarm.

I gazed at her for a moment. It was almost uncanny. Besides her longer hair and her eyes, she looked so much like how I did now – and before. People definitely would've thought we were twins or something if they'd seen us side-by-side before I'd become a god, even with her being six months younger than me and us only being half-siblings to boot.

Although, they'd probably end up thinking it again after she'd become immortal, too.

It was something to ponder on later.

For now, with a grin raising the ends of my mouth, I snapped my fingers.

The girl sat bolt upright as her radio-alarm clock started to play one of the songs by the band she loved so much: "Breakin' my back just to know your name, seventeen tracks and I've had it with this game! I'm breakin' my back just to know your name, but heaven ain't close in a place like this…"

It took her a few attempts to turn off the alarm, and she did almost on auto-pilot – at least until she saw the time. Then her eyes widened even more than they already had.

"Shit!" she cried, getting out of her bed. She almost fell flat on her face due to how her legs were tangled up in her covers, yet she caught herself at the last second. "I'm going to be late! Fuck, no, I already am!"

My half-sister didn't notice me as she ran into the bathroom connected to her room. Both because she was too busy panicking, and because I'd made myself invisible with my powers. I sat down on her bed, humming a tune under my breath.

When she came back out of her bathroom five minutes later, I was ready for her. "Hello, Callirrhoe Blofis – or would you rather I call you Callie instead?" I asked, still smiling. "It's an honor to meet you."

"Who the – who the fuck are you?" were the first words out of Callie's mouth. Her eyes darted wildly around the room. "How did you even get in here? And how do you know my name?"

"I know many things," I said, deciding to take a page out of the stereotypical-fantasy book, where the hero was taken under their mentor's ring, whether they initially liked it or not. It wasn't exactly too far off-base.

Callie stared at me. A trickle of fear entered her visage.

"Are you – are you here to kill me?" she asked.

"What makes you think that?" I returned, tilting my head slightly.

She hesitated. But once she decided to answer me, she jutted her chin out defiantly. "It wouldn't be the first time," she said. "But, just so you know, you'll fail. All the other times happened when I was a kid, but – I'm pretty sure I killed them. Just like how I'll kill you, too."

I couldn't help myself: I giggled.

Even as the anger churned within me, because just to say it one more time: none of us demigods ever should've had to go through something like that.

"Aw, you're sweet. But don't worry, I'm not here to kill you," I told her. I'm actually here to give you a...proposition."

She continued to stare. "What?"

"Hm...how do I put this?" I pretended to muse, tapping at my jaw. "My name is Perseus, but you can call me Percy. I'm your half-brother. And up until a few months ago, I was just like you."

"Wait, I have a – ?"

"Half-brother? Yes. We have a lot of half-siblings, actually, but they're not all like us. We're some of the only ones alive who are," I replied. "And I can't – I won't, I mean – tell you exactly what that means. It'd be dangerous for me to. But I can tell you that I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, like you. Some people also tried to kill me, and instead I killed them, like you. And there was a variety of other things that happened to me because of what we are, which resulted in me being expelled from eight schools in eight years.

"I was also the child of a single parent. My mother – yes, my mother, you'll find out how that's possible soon enough," I said this as Callie looked poised to say something, although she ultimately remained silent, "never told me who our other parent was. She just said they left before I was born and were lost to sea. But then I found out the truth, again like you will soon. And I had to make a decision."

"And what was that?" Callie asked quietly.

"Whether I wanted things to remain like they currently are, or whether I wanted something better, even if it meant fighting against the system and people whom I would've otherwise become close to," I answered. "It's the same decision you'll face, eventually. I think everyone who's like us faces it; they're just not always consciously aware of what they choose.

"But you will be, since I'm here now. And when the time comes, if you decide the same as me, that you want something better...well, then I'm going to give you this."

From thin air, I pulled out a necklace. The pendant was a bit of an elaborate thing, consisting of two insects mirroring each other as they held a disc between them, with one more between their heads and three more below them. The discs and the wings and eyes of the insects were filled with bluish opals.

It was a replica of the Malia Pendant, if you know what that is.

Callie's fear returned tenfold, seeing this. She took a step back. "How did you do that?"

"In due time," I promised. I put the necklace on her bed. "You'll have to smash this pendant on the ground in order to make it work. I won't say what it does for now, but it won't do you any harm, I promise you that.

"Now, won't you look at the time?" I turned my head towards her alarm clock. Predictably, she followed suit. "If you weren't going to be late before, you definitely will be now. But that's okay. I'll give you an excuse." I placed a piece of paper right next to the necklace.

Then, I stood up. Callie instinctively took another step back in response.

"Until you make your decision, it's probably better that you forget this conversation ever took place. It won't be hard," I said, snapping my fingers again.

A glaze appeared over her ocean blue eyes.

"Goodbye, Callie."

Finally, I went back to her bedroom window, and left the way I had come.

My other destination for the day was, as I'm sure you've probably already guessed, Gabe's apartment building. But I did not actually go to his apartment itself.

After walking there, I chose a different apartment instead. This one was a bit cleaner than the apartment I had lived in, although that wasn't saying much – the main difference was that there weren't beer cans strung all over the floor. It still smelled like tobacco, and it was only because of my immortality that I wasn't instantly nauseated by that. But I was still disgusted.

Some things don't change.

Nobody was home at the moment, so I chose the corner of the living room that was just out of view of the front door as my hiding place, using my powers to draw the shadows closer to myself. I waited, with arms crossed.

I didn't need to wait terribly long. Around an hour and a half later, the sound of a distinctive set of footsteps pricked at my ears. A key was shoved into the front door. It was unlocked.

"Hello, Eddie," I said after he'd shut the door behind himself.

The apartment building super, aka one of Gabe's poker friends and the one who had told Gabe to ease off on me the last day my mom had been alive, nearly jumped out of his skin. "What the – who are you? How did you get in here?" he shouted. He gazed at me with wide eyes, before they squinted. "Wait a minute...Percy? Percy Jackson?"

I smiled bitterly. "The one and only."

"What happened to you? You look...different," he said, but his question was soon forgotten. An expression of relief came upon his face. He stepped forwards. "Oh, Percy...you have no idea how good it is to see you. After you and your mom went missing, I thought...I thought..."

"That Gabe killed us?"

He stilled. "Well..."

"If you really thought that, why didn't you go to the police and tell them about Gabe?" I asked, stepping away from the wall. "Why did you let the media act like he was some great guy? Why didn't you say anything about how he was abusing me and my mom? Not to mention raping me?"

Eddie's face paled. "I – I don't know what you're – "

"Yeah, you do," I cut over him with a snort. "Maybe you didn't have direct proof, but you've always suspected. Plus, Gabe's tongue becomes a little loose once he gets shit-faced drunk. But then again, you never said anything before. I guess it's my bad to assume you would've done anything afterwards."

"...Why are you here, Percy?" Eddie finally asked. He shuffled his feet nervously; he could sense that I was a god, even though he didn't actually know I was. He could sense that there was something different about me besides my appearance. Dangerous.

Powerful.

"Actually, how did you even get in here?"

"Well, see, there's a bit of a loaded answer to that question," I said. "First one you just asked, I mean. The second one was easy enough. But...a lot of things happened to me over the summer, Eddie, besides my mom dying. I went under a bit of a...change. Which has given me the ability to do things like this."

SNAP!

All at once, Eddie was pinned up against the wall. The pipes behind the dry wall broke, streams of water flying out through the plaster just right to his neck and above his wrists and ankles. The tendrils of water wrapped around him like chains.

Eddie tried to scream, but it didn't work. The second the sound escaped his mouth, it was magically silenced.

When he gave up trying to scream, he gasped out, and this I did allow, "P – Percy, what the fuck!"

I sneered. "You never did anything for me, Eddie. All those years, you let me and my mom suffer, and now she's dead. But I have the power to get revenge now. I could easily kill Gabe – and you – right where you both are currently standing, and no cops would ever find out I did it. Your deaths would forever go unpunished."

"Then why don't you?" he cried out.

"Because I don't want that," I said simply. "Gabe, at least, doesn't deserve to die that mercifully. And as for you..." The tendril of water around his neck tightened. Eddie coughed and spluttered, but it was of no use. I didn't let it loosen until I could see the veins in his eyes bulging. "Well, think of this as the one time you can do something for me, to make up for all the other ones when you didn't."

He whimpered. "You – you want me to kill him?"

"Yes."

"And if I say 'no?'"

Even though I'd already seen this as potentially happening, I was a little surprised. The futures where he was a coward outright outnumbered the ones where he wasn't.

"Oh, Eddie," I cooed. "As if you have a choice."

A couple hours later, with the very distant sound of police sirens in the direction I'd come from, the officers hurrying to respond to what would be called one of the most gruesome murder-suicides in recent history with no "real" motive, I went back to Central Park.

Luke was already there waiting for me. His expression was fairly melancholic, although it did brighten quite a bit when he saw me. "Hey," he said. "Did you do what you wanted?"

"Yeah," I said. I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed his cheek. "What about you? Did you get the sword?"

"Yes."

I raised an eyebrow. "And?"

"It is what we think it is, but you can see it when we get back," he said, with a rather crooked smile. "For now...I think I'd just like to go home."

"That's alright with me," was my response.

Word Count: 3,676

Next Chapter Title: Oh Iphimedeia, My Iphimedeia