[PJO] Us Two Little Gods
Fandom: Percy Jackson and The Olympians
Title: Us Two Little Gods
Word Count: ~4960
Rating: PG
Pairing(s): Percabeth
Warnings: None
Summary: AU: Percy and Annabeth are both offered immortality after the Battle of Manhattan; they take it. But some are born to be heroes. One-shot.
“Pick small things,” a minor god advises them - one whose name she doesn’t even know. He looks like a normal person, she notices, or at least he makes himself look that way in that moment, just for them. His brown skin looks made of regular flesh, but Annabeth knows better. Gods are something else entirely. “Pick the smallest, most specific things you can think of.”
“Why?” Percy asks, all cluelessness and confidence.
“To keep yourselves whole,” the god says, matter-of-factly. “If you spread yourself too thin, you lose sight of who you are.”
Annabeth doesn't understand what he means until they are given their crash-course - at her mother’s insistence; if it were up to Zeus, he would just turn them both on the spot. (My daughter needs the appropriate guidance, Athena said, then gave Percy a dirty look. I won’t have her blunder her way through godhood like some. Percy tagged along anyway.) So they end up sitting through a lecture by a very bored-looking Hermes, and the information is way more complex than they could ever hope to absorb, but Annabeth tries.
The physical manifestation of gods is an exercise in concentration, he explains. It is not automatic, and it is proportional to the strength of what the god or goddess represents on Earth. Gods that represent feelings or abstract concepts more than physical things have a more tenuous and unstable grasp on their physical manifestation, but the difference is usually so subtle that humans could never hope to perceive it. It’s one of the reasons why the Big Three are so powerful: they all represent foundational, everlasting things. The sea, the sky, and the Underworld never get weaker; they simply exist.
But the hardest thing to appreciate, what makes Annabeth question her decision with a wave of icy adrenaline, is that the gods don’t simply represent things, in truth: they are what they represent. Their identity is melded with it in such a way that it’s impossible to separate one from the other. And it’s only thereafter that she gets what the minor god had been telling them: if you spread yourself too thin, you lose sight of who you are. Not only that, Percy points out when they discuss it together, later, but whatever you “represent” takes on your personality and character, making it an unfathomable responsibility to take on absolutely anything that could have an impact on humanity. Annabeth hasn’t even thought of that, and it’s probably her hubris rearing its ugly head once again: she believes she can take it.
They still say yes, albeit with shaky legs and thundering hearts, and when the time comes to pick their godly lot, their choices have been made for a long time. Percy follows the minor god’s advice, but not necessarily on purpose. Annabeth doesn’t, and her mother’s influence is strong enough that another’s domain is given away to Athena's only godly daughter. Her great-aunt Hestia doesn’t seem to mind.
All hail Annabeth, goddess of architecture, and Perseus, god of blue food.
Power is a funny thing, Annabeth realizes. She thought she would still feel like the same person once she was “godified”, in Percy’s words, but the change was immediate and despairing. Through the madness in her head, the unbearable buzzing throughout her entire being, she could make out Hermes’s voice:
“Oh yeah, forgot to tell you guys; apparently there’s some kind of adaptation period?” Her mother must have sent him a reproachful look, because next his tone was defensive. “How the hell should I know about it? I was born like this. You should have had Dionysus do it, then.”
Annabeth doesn’t know how long it lasts, but when she comes to, only Athena and Poseidon are still present in the throne room. Percy is lying on his back nearby, eyes turned dazedly to the sky.
“Where is everyone?” she asks her mother.
“They have left. Only my uncle and I stayed to ascertain the success of your transition.” Athena rises from her throne. “Welcome, my child, to Olympus, your new home.” Then, she turns and walks away.
As she watches her mother’s retreating back, Annabeth feels a sense of abandonment and hurt so piercing and crushing she feels like she can tear the world apart in anger. The biting realization hits her that she could, now. Maybe not the whole world, maybe she’s not that powerful, but she could destroy so much. And she wants to, for those few seconds; she wants to exact some kind of revenge on someone, because her mother is incapable of being the nurturing presence Annabeth always needed her to be and - surprise, surprise - still does, even in her godhood.
In that moment, she begins to understand a god’s fury.
She knows time runs differently in Olympus, but she has only ever experienced it as a mortal before.
Annabeth is given the task of rebuilding Olympus. She does, and she enjoys it more than anything, more than she ever thought she might as a mortal, but it is tiresome work.
The remodelling of the throne room comes first, as it is the primary meeting place of the main gods. She didn’t think it would, but it does sting a little - an egotistical pang unlike anything she’s ever felt before - that she and Percy have no place there, much like most gods and goddesses. Despite their parents, they are not welcome when it comes to the big decisions and are expected to obey their elder gods without question. Percy doesn’t adapt very well to it - and neither does Annabeth, when she’s being completely honest. They soon discover they are not alone in feeling that way, and that beneath a layer of gold and bronze and ambrosia and every divine thing, a constant resentment boils, made stronger by their godly nature. And thus Annabeth realizes another dismaying truth of godhood: that as heroes they were much freer to challenge the gods and change the way the world works than they can ever be, now.
Her second priority is planning the homes of each god and goddess that lives in Olympus. They each have their own extensive preferences and specifications, but Annabeth’s resources are endless and so is her access to humanity’s collective unconscious. As a divine being, her creativity is truly unlimited; the only thing that can possibly hold her back is her own ego. She builds palaces of pure gold and shabby cabins made of wood and stone; on the streets, trees and flowers of every impossible color bloom from the ground, and Annabeth has only to picture them and order them alive. It is pure creation, unlike anything she could have pictured as a demigod.
Finally, it is her own home that she builds: a simple apartment like the one her father used to live in when it was just the two of them, before he married her stepmother. She shares it - and her bed - with Percy.
By the time when, roughly six months later, she finally goes back down to Earth, to visit her friends and siblings at Camp Half-Blood, it has been ten years since the battle of Manhattan. Her half-brothers are grown; her father has a lot more salt than pepper in his hair. Sally Jackson has crow’s feet around her eyes. Percy has been going down regularly himself, but she was too busy, too engrossed in the work that she prioritized so clearly. But it’s only been six months, I counted, only six months, she tells Percy. His eyes are sad at her distress, but he only says, Time is different up there for us now. It’s what he has been telling their friends, their families, when they ask about her. She didn’t realize, didn’t realize the price.
That night, buildings shake when she sobs in Percy’s arms and vows to never let this happen again. But she knows it’s impossible. She has given up the right to fully appreciate their mortal lives when she let go of her own.
When they were first turned, Percy extracted a promise from their divine family: that each demigod would be recognized by their godly parent and have an appropriate cabin for them at Camp. Their vows were half-hearted and full of smirking, but Percy seemed to take them seriously enough to become angry when they start being remiss.
“You can’t,” she has to remind him with a hand on his arm. “We’re not heroes anymore. Now that we’re on their level, we’re no longer protected against their fury by our humanity.”
“No,” he says. “I refuse to accept that. Annabeth, they have to listen!”
Her eyes darken. “Don’t you dare get sent into Tartarus and leave me here alone to deal with them.”
“Is that all they can do to me?”
“Yes. It’s plenty.”
“Because I want them to fulfil their own promise?"
“You know how it is with them, Percy.” Neither of them remarks on the fact that them is now technically us.
“There has to be a way to make them listen.”
Annabeth thinks. “Well, the only way they’d be required to listen is if you were making a complaint about whatever you represent.”
“So…about blue food?”
“Yeah. You’re not the god of children - or family. That’s Hera,” she shudders, “and she doesn’t give a crap about demigods.”
“No, there should be someone who represents demigods specifically,” Percy insists. “Their situation is completely different; they shouldn’t be dumped with all the other regular children of the world.” Annabeth realizes what he’s thinking the moment it hits him - his entire face lights up. “When’s their next meeting?"
It doesn’t gain Percy any fans, standing up before their family and pleading that they add something else to his godly lot: their own children.
“The godling is mad,” Ares laughs. “Demigods belong to their own parents, no one else.”
“Then why don’t they even get claimed?” Percy knows better than to accuse Ares personally. “Why don’t they get more from you all - more attention, more protection, more recognition?” He turns toward his father and uncle. “If you don’t have the time or…inclination to care for your mortal children, why shouldn’t there be one of us to do that for them?”
Zeus regards him cooly.
“It could take some of the pressure off,” Apollo says. “Of course, as long as any decision we make about our own children immediately overrides his will.”
Percy hides his glare remarkably well. “Sure. But they’d still be part of my lot, so I get some say.”
“All in favor, raise your hands,” Zeus’s voice booms through the throne room. Seven hands go up, not including her mother’s.
“All hail Perseus,” the king of gods continues drily, "god of blue food and demigods."
Percy’s new job leaves his hands full - it’s his responsibility to detect new demigods when they are born and do his best to ensure their safety without interfering directly. He notifies Chiron whenever a new one shows up on his radar and they send a satyr as soon as possible. It’s also given him more authority to demand that a hero get claimed. Annabeth knows it’s more work than he thought it would be, but he’s taking it well enough. At least it means he works closely with Camp Half-Blood; for their part, they’ve made him their new patron, and blue food is gratefully burned for him every meal.
“I’d rather they burn some burgers,” he tells her. “At least they’d smell good. Burned frosting? Leaves a lot to be desired.”
“You were the one who picked blue food.”
“…Blue burgers?”
“I don’t think those are a thing.”
“I’m a god! I’ll make them a thing.”
It’s not long before one of the demigods is his own.
She’s about two when Annabeth first sees her, then younger the next time (Annabeth still tries to fit into the earthly concept of time, but it is useless); a girl, with nut-brown skin, curly brown hair, and his brilliant green eyes. Her mother is just a mortal, albeit a special one: much like Rachel Elizabeth Dare, and Sally Jackson before her, this woman can see through the mist and knows about their existence. Annabeth keeps herself unseen, observing the fruit of Percy’s infidelity from afar. They aren’t married, not like Zeus and Hera or Hephaestus and Aphrodite, but the sense of betrayal is still there. It hurts her feelings and stings her ego, but at the same time a part of her, the part that’s been dissipating since their deification, that can’t hold on to the human identity she used to have no matter how desperately she tries - that part, if it doesn’t forgive, it at least understands.
“I’m sorry,” he says when she confronts him, and at that point his daughter is only a promise in her mother’s belly. “I didn’t want to be like them, Annabeth, I didn’t!” His eyes get unfocused. “But it’s like a part of me…detached itself, or something. It was still me!” he adds, as if she looked incredulous (she doesn’t). “I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it’s like…like I’m a different person. A different person at different times and different places.”
She knows. She feels exactly the same. And she can’t hold it against him, not when she can barely hold her own self together in one consciousness. But she can’t stand the sight of the little hero, either.
Annabeth makes her own demigods, later - the traditional way, not Athena-style. And she claims them all.
Their first son - Phelix, the happiest, the luckiest - is born a year (or ten) after they are married before their entire family, Poseidon and Athena looking on sternly.
Unlike them, he never knows mortality or decay; his feelings are boundless and his being was never contained by any flesh not of his own design. He is a child for much longer than Annabeth cares to count, always clinging to her breast in a relationship that’s as symbiotic as it is symbolic, but he is also a grown man and then an old man (and even sometimes a woman), not in succession but simultaneously. Unlike them, he never had a physical form to attach himself to. But she knows his face when she sees it - every time.
Annabeth only understands it in an instinctive level, as long as she doesn’t let her brain attempt to dissect it. In a moment of kindness, her mother explains that having entered the human consciousness as her and Percy’s child, that remains an ever present aspect of all three of them: on some level, he will be a baby forever, as well as a young man, as well as an old man - as he stands alone in humankind’s consciousness. It hits her that Percy’s relationship to their son is just as complex, and that she will never know or understand it.
Her love for Phelix is at once detached and fulminating. She wonders how much of it is godly and how much is universal, motherly; whether she would feel the same if her womb were made of flesh and he’d come out human amidst blood and sweat and feces. He would have been half-god anyway - an unlikely amalgam of Athena and Poseidon - but enclosed within a life that begins and ends. As it is, despite their connection, he is separate from her in a way mortal children aren’t from their mothers - Annabeth knows that, from observation if not from experience. He is his own entity from the start, wicked and kind and selfish, both protective and jealous of his mortal half-siblings, quick-witted like herself and noble to a fault like Percy, but capable of monstrous pettiness and spite in accordance with his divinity. She stares into his face and there are impossible depths to his person, so much more than she and Percy could have hoped to create, and she loves him so much that she lets him go.
They never get to introduce him to their human parents. It takes too long for baby gods to learn to reliably keep their true form disguised, and by then they’ve all been reborn into people who don’t remember ever having had a son or a daughter that became gods.
“Oh, you’re here,” Percy says. The view of the city below, the buildings whose essence seeps into and forms her very self, is too captivating for her to consider turning around to look at him. She has all of eternity to do that, after all. "I thought you might be down there. I heard they’re building a new telecommunications tower and it’s supposed to be the new tallest building in the tri-state area.”
“What? Who told you that?”
He leans on the railing beside her. “Hermes. He just came back from like a month-long trip to Connecticut.”
“Um, I think he was just adding on to your work load.”
“Huh?”
Annabeth barely holds back a smirk. “We’ll see if you’ll need to make a trip to Connecticut twelve years from now.”
“Aw, man.” Percy sighs, but it is more resigned than frustrated. “Hermes brats are my least favorites. Sometimes I wish my powers extended to control their dicks before they actually made the little shits. Maybe then I’d feel some semblance of godly power.”
“Do you?” she asks him suddenly. “Do you…feel it? The power?”
Percy turns to look at her, and inside his eyes she can see a hundred universes turning, pulsing. It’s unnerving, but she clings to the feeling: she’s come to associate it with remnants of her humanity, and it comforts her. The vision is gone so fast she would have thought she imagined it if it hadn’t happened so often before. His eyes are green again, like the sea - like when the only divine thing about him was whatever Poseidon gave him. “I dunno. I feel…spread thin a lot. And, I mean, I do magical stuff, which is really cool, but it feels... I don’t know, normal.” He pauses. “You?”
Spread thin. The words are familiar in this context, but it takes Annabeth a few moments to remember the god that had spoken to them that first day, offering advice - unsolicited, but useful at the time. Now, Annabeth wonders if it really was - if it’s at all possible to become a god from being something else and not dissolve throughout eons and civilizations. “I feel it sometimes,” she begins. It’s true enough; if she concentrates, she can gather enough consciousness to come up with that level of self-awareness. She thinks it’s worth the trouble, but it is a lot of trouble. The worst part is knowing that this is who their parents - her mother - have always been. That she has never truly existed in a human sense. They’re not real. We’re not real. “It’s so…hazy, though. You know, life. Our existence.”
“Yeah,” he agrees softly.
“And we don’t even have Roman counterparts like our parents. Can you imagine, having to cope with a whole new identity on top of all this?”
Percy was silent for a moment. “Do you think we ever will? Have different counterparts, I mean?”
“I suppose so,” she answers slowly. “I guess it depends on how humanity…develops. If the next civilizations inherit a belief in us and keep their ideas of us relatively the same, we won’t change that much. If they change things up, maybe merge us with different deities and beliefs, well…” she trails off.
“What happens if they don’t inherit us at all?”
Trust Percy to go straight for the carotid. “We cease to exist, I guess.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” She wants to turn toward him, pour her heart out; she wants to tell him that the control she wanted so badly, the reason why her boundless ambition jumped at the chance to become one of them, was an illusion all along, and she was too stupid to figure it out at the time. It wasn't them that controlled us, she wants to say, they were never in charge, not in the big picture, not when it really matters. Ultimately, the gods are created by humanity, and are at its mercy, not the opposite. But the most ironic part, the really sad and fucked up part, is that they do have power over individual humans, whose lives are too short to see their power affect the gods in its turn; the latter, on the other hand, do live long enough to feel those consequences. So there’s no winning at all. Lose/lose. I just wanted to be happy.
“I’m starting to think we may not have made the best of choices here,” Percy says with a soft snort. She turns to look at him then, but he’s staring at some point in the distance. Unbidden, images flood her mind, and she doesn’t know if they’re actually what Percy is thinking, or just random information feeding from below into her head. The Isles of the Blest.
“No kidding.” Understatement of the millennium.
He glances at her, and she realizes the images were from him, after all. “That’s what I wanted for us, you know. To try for the Isles. Together.”
The ache in Annabeth’s heart is so piercing that she spares a glance down at their view, hoping nothing crumbled to dust. “We could have done that.” Her eyes well up. “I thought this was what you wanted,” she whispers.
“I thought it was what you wanted.”
There’s nothing she can say to that, because it was, at the time. And there’s no one she can blame the enormity of her stupidity on but herself. If regret were as deadly as Zeus’s bolt…
“Let’s do it. Let’s get back down,” she says suddenly.
Percy looks adorably confused. “What? To do what?”
“No.” She grasps his hands. “Let’s jump back down.”
Her grandfather doesn’t take it well.
“Uncle, just listen, please-“
“SILENCE!” Zeus bellows. For once, Percy obeys, and Annabeth is grateful. The entire room holds their breath as the king of gods rises from his throne; some visibly relax and others sigh in disappointment when he merely starts pacing. Annabeth glances at his lightning bolt, currently out of reach by the throne, then at her family members sitting on their own thrones around them. It’s bad enough that they are required to do this in the throne room, where they stand several feet below their leader, but to have all the main twelve gods present is too much for anyone to take, god or no. She consciously avoids Athena’s piercing, insistent gaze.
For several minutes, no one makes a sound. She and Percy have much to say, but they both know better than to disobey a direct order from Zeus, especially without the protection of their humanity. The thought reminds her of why they’re there, and renews her determination; it’s hard not to feel like they’re making a mistake beneath the judging stares of their divine relatives, but the alternative is at best an eternity of the most mind-numbing ennui and at worst the complete loss of any sense of who they are or used to be. No, she thinks. The price is high, but I guess that’s the cost of making mistakes.
When Zeus turns his gaze back on them, Annabeth struggles not to step back at the fury in his eyes. “Oh, how I wish you were still mortal heroes, how I wish I had never made this cursed offer to ones with hearts so weak, so fickle! Then I could smite you right where you stand and you might disappear from my sight!” The last booming word echoes around the room until it spirals down into an oppressive silence. Even the proudest part of Annabeth can freely admit that she has never felt so terrified. Percy’s hand discreetly seeks hers and she draws strength from him that she hasn’t in years. His fingers tighten around hers and she suspects he feels the same. “Now there is no way to be rid of you, no way to permanently erase you for your impertinence and disrespect for your betters! Tartarus is the only solution - albeit regretfully a temporary one.”
Poseidon stands before Zeus can act. “Brother,” he begins, his tone placating. "They used to be mortals - adapting to godhood cannot be easy.”
“My son did it!” Zeus protests, pointing at a smug Dionysus. “No difficulties, no foolish desire for his mortality back!”
Poseidon is silent for several moments, and when Annabeth looks up, she sees that he is staring intently at Percy, an unfathomable expression on his face. Percy glances up at him, then brings his gaze back straight ahead. “Every mortal is different. Perhaps some are born to be heroes.”
“They should not have accepted, then!”
“There is no such thing as relinquishing immortality,” Hera most helpfully contributes. “It is impossible.”
“It is most certainly not impossible, aunt,” Athena finally speaks, and Annabeth can’t suppress the shiver that runs up her immaterial spine. “It just hasn’t been done. And how were they to know,” she adds, addressing her father, “when some wisdom can only be acquired through experience?”
Percy and Annabeth share a look of disbelief during the brief silence that follows.
“Must we endure, then, daughter,” Zeus says, his tone much quieter, “the disrespect of the implication that mortality is somehow superior to immortality? The insolent disdain of such a request?”
“Send us to Tartarus, then.” The words are out of her mouth before she can think them through, but Annabeth recovers quickly. She can feel Percy’s concerned gaze directed at the side of her head, but she takes a minute step forward anyway. “Send us down as a test…or as penance. When…or if…we make it across to the Doors of Death, you grant us our wish.” She hopes that Percy can understand the situation as she sees it: it’s the smallest price they can pay. This won’t be free.
“What of your godly lots?”
“Annabeth’s can return to my aunt,” her mother interjects before she can reply. “And no one needs a god for blue food,” she adds with a scoff. Percy wisely remains silent.
Zeus looks directly at him. “And your…other responsibilities?”
“My son will take them,” Percy replies. “Phelix will become god of demigods."
The next few moments last at least a couple of years. “Very well.”
The yawning abyss below tugs on the incorporeal fabric of their clothes, their hair, their skin. Annabeth remembers the pull from the last time they stood at their very spot, an eternity ago, when they were not only mortals but children. It terrified them then, as it does now, their godly invulnerability useless against the psychological horrors beneath their feet. The memory - she was with Percy then, and Grover, and things weren’t simple but they were flat and plain and earthly - is enough to quell her doubts for the time. One panic attack at a time. She glances at Percy only to find him looking like his teenaged self again - almost as young as when they were here last time. It triggers the same transformation within herself, and just like that, Annabeth and her husband are kids once again.
They caught a glimpse of the Elysium Fields on their way, and it brought a warmth to her heart that was a melancholy echo of her complex mortal emotions. With each step toward their destination, she remembers a little more of her past self, and she wonders if it’s Zeus's doing, if it’s supposed to be gradual that way, or if it’s her own power manifesting in a way it never had before. It springs the question in her mind of whether they could bring back their own mortality themselves, if they really tried - but it’s moot now. She’ll never know, and that’s fine. Right now, finally - after standing still for so long - they are moving on to something.
“I’d wish you luck, but that would be like sending you into a tornado and wishing you smooth sailing.”
They turn around to face Phelix. He looks young, but older than them; he is taller than Percy by a few inches, and by all appearances could be the one in charge of them, instead of the other way around. Perhaps now he will be.
Annabeth doesn’t really know what to say. He is so different from them, having been born divine, that he could never begin to understand why they are doing this. But it aches that she is leaving him - like Athena left her before. A mortal with a godly parent has some hope of patronage, of support, if not love; but a god with a mortal parents - with two mortal parents? Doubt tugs at her heart and she steps forward. “Phee--“
He holds a hand up. “Don’t. It’s fine.” His tone is benign and there’s kindness in his smile, but the gesture was too quick to be completely convincing. “I will come for you at the Iles. Once you’ve done your...thing,” he gestures vaguely at them both, and Percy smiles. “I will bring you back to Olympus. Dionysus did it.” He nods at them reassuringly. “Uh, if you want,” he adds as an afterthought.
Annabeth and Percy glance at each other, neither willing to clarify that they will have no wish to go back. Instead, they smile at him. “We’ll be waiting,” Percy says.
With one last glance, they turn back towards the pit. Through a path of impossible darkness is their true desire, not what they once believed they wanted but what the Fates actually have in store for them. She has to believe it with every fiber of her being.
“Ready?” Percy asks.
“As I’ll ever be."
Joining hands, they leap.
Title: Us Two Little Gods
Word Count: ~4960
Rating: PG
Pairing(s): Percabeth
Warnings: None
Summary: AU: Percy and Annabeth are both offered immortality after the Battle of Manhattan; they take it. But some are born to be heroes. One-shot.
“Pick small things,” a minor god advises them - one whose name she doesn’t even know. He looks like a normal person, she notices, or at least he makes himself look that way in that moment, just for them. His brown skin looks made of regular flesh, but Annabeth knows better. Gods are something else entirely. “Pick the smallest, most specific things you can think of.”
“Why?” Percy asks, all cluelessness and confidence.
“To keep yourselves whole,” the god says, matter-of-factly. “If you spread yourself too thin, you lose sight of who you are.”
Annabeth doesn't understand what he means until they are given their crash-course - at her mother’s insistence; if it were up to Zeus, he would just turn them both on the spot. (My daughter needs the appropriate guidance, Athena said, then gave Percy a dirty look. I won’t have her blunder her way through godhood like some. Percy tagged along anyway.) So they end up sitting through a lecture by a very bored-looking Hermes, and the information is way more complex than they could ever hope to absorb, but Annabeth tries.
The physical manifestation of gods is an exercise in concentration, he explains. It is not automatic, and it is proportional to the strength of what the god or goddess represents on Earth. Gods that represent feelings or abstract concepts more than physical things have a more tenuous and unstable grasp on their physical manifestation, but the difference is usually so subtle that humans could never hope to perceive it. It’s one of the reasons why the Big Three are so powerful: they all represent foundational, everlasting things. The sea, the sky, and the Underworld never get weaker; they simply exist.
But the hardest thing to appreciate, what makes Annabeth question her decision with a wave of icy adrenaline, is that the gods don’t simply represent things, in truth: they are what they represent. Their identity is melded with it in such a way that it’s impossible to separate one from the other. And it’s only thereafter that she gets what the minor god had been telling them: if you spread yourself too thin, you lose sight of who you are. Not only that, Percy points out when they discuss it together, later, but whatever you “represent” takes on your personality and character, making it an unfathomable responsibility to take on absolutely anything that could have an impact on humanity. Annabeth hasn’t even thought of that, and it’s probably her hubris rearing its ugly head once again: she believes she can take it.
They still say yes, albeit with shaky legs and thundering hearts, and when the time comes to pick their godly lot, their choices have been made for a long time. Percy follows the minor god’s advice, but not necessarily on purpose. Annabeth doesn’t, and her mother’s influence is strong enough that another’s domain is given away to Athena's only godly daughter. Her great-aunt Hestia doesn’t seem to mind.
All hail Annabeth, goddess of architecture, and Perseus, god of blue food.
Power is a funny thing, Annabeth realizes. She thought she would still feel like the same person once she was “godified”, in Percy’s words, but the change was immediate and despairing. Through the madness in her head, the unbearable buzzing throughout her entire being, she could make out Hermes’s voice:
“Oh yeah, forgot to tell you guys; apparently there’s some kind of adaptation period?” Her mother must have sent him a reproachful look, because next his tone was defensive. “How the hell should I know about it? I was born like this. You should have had Dionysus do it, then.”
Annabeth doesn’t know how long it lasts, but when she comes to, only Athena and Poseidon are still present in the throne room. Percy is lying on his back nearby, eyes turned dazedly to the sky.
“Where is everyone?” she asks her mother.
“They have left. Only my uncle and I stayed to ascertain the success of your transition.” Athena rises from her throne. “Welcome, my child, to Olympus, your new home.” Then, she turns and walks away.
As she watches her mother’s retreating back, Annabeth feels a sense of abandonment and hurt so piercing and crushing she feels like she can tear the world apart in anger. The biting realization hits her that she could, now. Maybe not the whole world, maybe she’s not that powerful, but she could destroy so much. And she wants to, for those few seconds; she wants to exact some kind of revenge on someone, because her mother is incapable of being the nurturing presence Annabeth always needed her to be and - surprise, surprise - still does, even in her godhood.
In that moment, she begins to understand a god’s fury.
She knows time runs differently in Olympus, but she has only ever experienced it as a mortal before.
Annabeth is given the task of rebuilding Olympus. She does, and she enjoys it more than anything, more than she ever thought she might as a mortal, but it is tiresome work.
The remodelling of the throne room comes first, as it is the primary meeting place of the main gods. She didn’t think it would, but it does sting a little - an egotistical pang unlike anything she’s ever felt before - that she and Percy have no place there, much like most gods and goddesses. Despite their parents, they are not welcome when it comes to the big decisions and are expected to obey their elder gods without question. Percy doesn’t adapt very well to it - and neither does Annabeth, when she’s being completely honest. They soon discover they are not alone in feeling that way, and that beneath a layer of gold and bronze and ambrosia and every divine thing, a constant resentment boils, made stronger by their godly nature. And thus Annabeth realizes another dismaying truth of godhood: that as heroes they were much freer to challenge the gods and change the way the world works than they can ever be, now.
Her second priority is planning the homes of each god and goddess that lives in Olympus. They each have their own extensive preferences and specifications, but Annabeth’s resources are endless and so is her access to humanity’s collective unconscious. As a divine being, her creativity is truly unlimited; the only thing that can possibly hold her back is her own ego. She builds palaces of pure gold and shabby cabins made of wood and stone; on the streets, trees and flowers of every impossible color bloom from the ground, and Annabeth has only to picture them and order them alive. It is pure creation, unlike anything she could have pictured as a demigod.
Finally, it is her own home that she builds: a simple apartment like the one her father used to live in when it was just the two of them, before he married her stepmother. She shares it - and her bed - with Percy.
By the time when, roughly six months later, she finally goes back down to Earth, to visit her friends and siblings at Camp Half-Blood, it has been ten years since the battle of Manhattan. Her half-brothers are grown; her father has a lot more salt than pepper in his hair. Sally Jackson has crow’s feet around her eyes. Percy has been going down regularly himself, but she was too busy, too engrossed in the work that she prioritized so clearly. But it’s only been six months, I counted, only six months, she tells Percy. His eyes are sad at her distress, but he only says, Time is different up there for us now. It’s what he has been telling their friends, their families, when they ask about her. She didn’t realize, didn’t realize the price.
That night, buildings shake when she sobs in Percy’s arms and vows to never let this happen again. But she knows it’s impossible. She has given up the right to fully appreciate their mortal lives when she let go of her own.
When they were first turned, Percy extracted a promise from their divine family: that each demigod would be recognized by their godly parent and have an appropriate cabin for them at Camp. Their vows were half-hearted and full of smirking, but Percy seemed to take them seriously enough to become angry when they start being remiss.
“You can’t,” she has to remind him with a hand on his arm. “We’re not heroes anymore. Now that we’re on their level, we’re no longer protected against their fury by our humanity.”
“No,” he says. “I refuse to accept that. Annabeth, they have to listen!”
Her eyes darken. “Don’t you dare get sent into Tartarus and leave me here alone to deal with them.”
“Is that all they can do to me?”
“Yes. It’s plenty.”
“Because I want them to fulfil their own promise?"
“You know how it is with them, Percy.” Neither of them remarks on the fact that them is now technically us.
“There has to be a way to make them listen.”
Annabeth thinks. “Well, the only way they’d be required to listen is if you were making a complaint about whatever you represent.”
“So…about blue food?”
“Yeah. You’re not the god of children - or family. That’s Hera,” she shudders, “and she doesn’t give a crap about demigods.”
“No, there should be someone who represents demigods specifically,” Percy insists. “Their situation is completely different; they shouldn’t be dumped with all the other regular children of the world.” Annabeth realizes what he’s thinking the moment it hits him - his entire face lights up. “When’s their next meeting?"
It doesn’t gain Percy any fans, standing up before their family and pleading that they add something else to his godly lot: their own children.
“The godling is mad,” Ares laughs. “Demigods belong to their own parents, no one else.”
“Then why don’t they even get claimed?” Percy knows better than to accuse Ares personally. “Why don’t they get more from you all - more attention, more protection, more recognition?” He turns toward his father and uncle. “If you don’t have the time or…inclination to care for your mortal children, why shouldn’t there be one of us to do that for them?”
Zeus regards him cooly.
“It could take some of the pressure off,” Apollo says. “Of course, as long as any decision we make about our own children immediately overrides his will.”
Percy hides his glare remarkably well. “Sure. But they’d still be part of my lot, so I get some say.”
“All in favor, raise your hands,” Zeus’s voice booms through the throne room. Seven hands go up, not including her mother’s.
“All hail Perseus,” the king of gods continues drily, "god of blue food and demigods."
Percy’s new job leaves his hands full - it’s his responsibility to detect new demigods when they are born and do his best to ensure their safety without interfering directly. He notifies Chiron whenever a new one shows up on his radar and they send a satyr as soon as possible. It’s also given him more authority to demand that a hero get claimed. Annabeth knows it’s more work than he thought it would be, but he’s taking it well enough. At least it means he works closely with Camp Half-Blood; for their part, they’ve made him their new patron, and blue food is gratefully burned for him every meal.
“I’d rather they burn some burgers,” he tells her. “At least they’d smell good. Burned frosting? Leaves a lot to be desired.”
“You were the one who picked blue food.”
“…Blue burgers?”
“I don’t think those are a thing.”
“I’m a god! I’ll make them a thing.”
It’s not long before one of the demigods is his own.
She’s about two when Annabeth first sees her, then younger the next time (Annabeth still tries to fit into the earthly concept of time, but it is useless); a girl, with nut-brown skin, curly brown hair, and his brilliant green eyes. Her mother is just a mortal, albeit a special one: much like Rachel Elizabeth Dare, and Sally Jackson before her, this woman can see through the mist and knows about their existence. Annabeth keeps herself unseen, observing the fruit of Percy’s infidelity from afar. They aren’t married, not like Zeus and Hera or Hephaestus and Aphrodite, but the sense of betrayal is still there. It hurts her feelings and stings her ego, but at the same time a part of her, the part that’s been dissipating since their deification, that can’t hold on to the human identity she used to have no matter how desperately she tries - that part, if it doesn’t forgive, it at least understands.
“I’m sorry,” he says when she confronts him, and at that point his daughter is only a promise in her mother’s belly. “I didn’t want to be like them, Annabeth, I didn’t!” His eyes get unfocused. “But it’s like a part of me…detached itself, or something. It was still me!” he adds, as if she looked incredulous (she doesn’t). “I’m not saying it wasn’t. But it’s like…like I’m a different person. A different person at different times and different places.”
She knows. She feels exactly the same. And she can’t hold it against him, not when she can barely hold her own self together in one consciousness. But she can’t stand the sight of the little hero, either.
Annabeth makes her own demigods, later - the traditional way, not Athena-style. And she claims them all.
Their first son - Phelix, the happiest, the luckiest - is born a year (or ten) after they are married before their entire family, Poseidon and Athena looking on sternly.
Unlike them, he never knows mortality or decay; his feelings are boundless and his being was never contained by any flesh not of his own design. He is a child for much longer than Annabeth cares to count, always clinging to her breast in a relationship that’s as symbiotic as it is symbolic, but he is also a grown man and then an old man (and even sometimes a woman), not in succession but simultaneously. Unlike them, he never had a physical form to attach himself to. But she knows his face when she sees it - every time.
Annabeth only understands it in an instinctive level, as long as she doesn’t let her brain attempt to dissect it. In a moment of kindness, her mother explains that having entered the human consciousness as her and Percy’s child, that remains an ever present aspect of all three of them: on some level, he will be a baby forever, as well as a young man, as well as an old man - as he stands alone in humankind’s consciousness. It hits her that Percy’s relationship to their son is just as complex, and that she will never know or understand it.
Her love for Phelix is at once detached and fulminating. She wonders how much of it is godly and how much is universal, motherly; whether she would feel the same if her womb were made of flesh and he’d come out human amidst blood and sweat and feces. He would have been half-god anyway - an unlikely amalgam of Athena and Poseidon - but enclosed within a life that begins and ends. As it is, despite their connection, he is separate from her in a way mortal children aren’t from their mothers - Annabeth knows that, from observation if not from experience. He is his own entity from the start, wicked and kind and selfish, both protective and jealous of his mortal half-siblings, quick-witted like herself and noble to a fault like Percy, but capable of monstrous pettiness and spite in accordance with his divinity. She stares into his face and there are impossible depths to his person, so much more than she and Percy could have hoped to create, and she loves him so much that she lets him go.
They never get to introduce him to their human parents. It takes too long for baby gods to learn to reliably keep their true form disguised, and by then they’ve all been reborn into people who don’t remember ever having had a son or a daughter that became gods.
“Oh, you’re here,” Percy says. The view of the city below, the buildings whose essence seeps into and forms her very self, is too captivating for her to consider turning around to look at him. She has all of eternity to do that, after all. "I thought you might be down there. I heard they’re building a new telecommunications tower and it’s supposed to be the new tallest building in the tri-state area.”
“What? Who told you that?”
He leans on the railing beside her. “Hermes. He just came back from like a month-long trip to Connecticut.”
“Um, I think he was just adding on to your work load.”
“Huh?”
Annabeth barely holds back a smirk. “We’ll see if you’ll need to make a trip to Connecticut twelve years from now.”
“Aw, man.” Percy sighs, but it is more resigned than frustrated. “Hermes brats are my least favorites. Sometimes I wish my powers extended to control their dicks before they actually made the little shits. Maybe then I’d feel some semblance of godly power.”
“Do you?” she asks him suddenly. “Do you…feel it? The power?”
Percy turns to look at her, and inside his eyes she can see a hundred universes turning, pulsing. It’s unnerving, but she clings to the feeling: she’s come to associate it with remnants of her humanity, and it comforts her. The vision is gone so fast she would have thought she imagined it if it hadn’t happened so often before. His eyes are green again, like the sea - like when the only divine thing about him was whatever Poseidon gave him. “I dunno. I feel…spread thin a lot. And, I mean, I do magical stuff, which is really cool, but it feels... I don’t know, normal.” He pauses. “You?”
Spread thin. The words are familiar in this context, but it takes Annabeth a few moments to remember the god that had spoken to them that first day, offering advice - unsolicited, but useful at the time. Now, Annabeth wonders if it really was - if it’s at all possible to become a god from being something else and not dissolve throughout eons and civilizations. “I feel it sometimes,” she begins. It’s true enough; if she concentrates, she can gather enough consciousness to come up with that level of self-awareness. She thinks it’s worth the trouble, but it is a lot of trouble. The worst part is knowing that this is who their parents - her mother - have always been. That she has never truly existed in a human sense. They’re not real. We’re not real. “It’s so…hazy, though. You know, life. Our existence.”
“Yeah,” he agrees softly.
“And we don’t even have Roman counterparts like our parents. Can you imagine, having to cope with a whole new identity on top of all this?”
Percy was silent for a moment. “Do you think we ever will? Have different counterparts, I mean?”
“I suppose so,” she answers slowly. “I guess it depends on how humanity…develops. If the next civilizations inherit a belief in us and keep their ideas of us relatively the same, we won’t change that much. If they change things up, maybe merge us with different deities and beliefs, well…” she trails off.
“What happens if they don’t inherit us at all?”
Trust Percy to go straight for the carotid. “We cease to exist, I guess.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that.” She wants to turn toward him, pour her heart out; she wants to tell him that the control she wanted so badly, the reason why her boundless ambition jumped at the chance to become one of them, was an illusion all along, and she was too stupid to figure it out at the time. It wasn't them that controlled us, she wants to say, they were never in charge, not in the big picture, not when it really matters. Ultimately, the gods are created by humanity, and are at its mercy, not the opposite. But the most ironic part, the really sad and fucked up part, is that they do have power over individual humans, whose lives are too short to see their power affect the gods in its turn; the latter, on the other hand, do live long enough to feel those consequences. So there’s no winning at all. Lose/lose. I just wanted to be happy.
“I’m starting to think we may not have made the best of choices here,” Percy says with a soft snort. She turns to look at him then, but he’s staring at some point in the distance. Unbidden, images flood her mind, and she doesn’t know if they’re actually what Percy is thinking, or just random information feeding from below into her head. The Isles of the Blest.
“No kidding.” Understatement of the millennium.
He glances at her, and she realizes the images were from him, after all. “That’s what I wanted for us, you know. To try for the Isles. Together.”
The ache in Annabeth’s heart is so piercing that she spares a glance down at their view, hoping nothing crumbled to dust. “We could have done that.” Her eyes well up. “I thought this was what you wanted,” she whispers.
“I thought it was what you wanted.”
There’s nothing she can say to that, because it was, at the time. And there’s no one she can blame the enormity of her stupidity on but herself. If regret were as deadly as Zeus’s bolt…
“Let’s do it. Let’s get back down,” she says suddenly.
Percy looks adorably confused. “What? To do what?”
“No.” She grasps his hands. “Let’s jump back down.”
Her grandfather doesn’t take it well.
“Uncle, just listen, please-“
“SILENCE!” Zeus bellows. For once, Percy obeys, and Annabeth is grateful. The entire room holds their breath as the king of gods rises from his throne; some visibly relax and others sigh in disappointment when he merely starts pacing. Annabeth glances at his lightning bolt, currently out of reach by the throne, then at her family members sitting on their own thrones around them. It’s bad enough that they are required to do this in the throne room, where they stand several feet below their leader, but to have all the main twelve gods present is too much for anyone to take, god or no. She consciously avoids Athena’s piercing, insistent gaze.
For several minutes, no one makes a sound. She and Percy have much to say, but they both know better than to disobey a direct order from Zeus, especially without the protection of their humanity. The thought reminds her of why they’re there, and renews her determination; it’s hard not to feel like they’re making a mistake beneath the judging stares of their divine relatives, but the alternative is at best an eternity of the most mind-numbing ennui and at worst the complete loss of any sense of who they are or used to be. No, she thinks. The price is high, but I guess that’s the cost of making mistakes.
When Zeus turns his gaze back on them, Annabeth struggles not to step back at the fury in his eyes. “Oh, how I wish you were still mortal heroes, how I wish I had never made this cursed offer to ones with hearts so weak, so fickle! Then I could smite you right where you stand and you might disappear from my sight!” The last booming word echoes around the room until it spirals down into an oppressive silence. Even the proudest part of Annabeth can freely admit that she has never felt so terrified. Percy’s hand discreetly seeks hers and she draws strength from him that she hasn’t in years. His fingers tighten around hers and she suspects he feels the same. “Now there is no way to be rid of you, no way to permanently erase you for your impertinence and disrespect for your betters! Tartarus is the only solution - albeit regretfully a temporary one.”
Poseidon stands before Zeus can act. “Brother,” he begins, his tone placating. "They used to be mortals - adapting to godhood cannot be easy.”
“My son did it!” Zeus protests, pointing at a smug Dionysus. “No difficulties, no foolish desire for his mortality back!”
Poseidon is silent for several moments, and when Annabeth looks up, she sees that he is staring intently at Percy, an unfathomable expression on his face. Percy glances up at him, then brings his gaze back straight ahead. “Every mortal is different. Perhaps some are born to be heroes.”
“They should not have accepted, then!”
“There is no such thing as relinquishing immortality,” Hera most helpfully contributes. “It is impossible.”
“It is most certainly not impossible, aunt,” Athena finally speaks, and Annabeth can’t suppress the shiver that runs up her immaterial spine. “It just hasn’t been done. And how were they to know,” she adds, addressing her father, “when some wisdom can only be acquired through experience?”
Percy and Annabeth share a look of disbelief during the brief silence that follows.
“Must we endure, then, daughter,” Zeus says, his tone much quieter, “the disrespect of the implication that mortality is somehow superior to immortality? The insolent disdain of such a request?”
“Send us to Tartarus, then.” The words are out of her mouth before she can think them through, but Annabeth recovers quickly. She can feel Percy’s concerned gaze directed at the side of her head, but she takes a minute step forward anyway. “Send us down as a test…or as penance. When…or if…we make it across to the Doors of Death, you grant us our wish.” She hopes that Percy can understand the situation as she sees it: it’s the smallest price they can pay. This won’t be free.
“What of your godly lots?”
“Annabeth’s can return to my aunt,” her mother interjects before she can reply. “And no one needs a god for blue food,” she adds with a scoff. Percy wisely remains silent.
Zeus looks directly at him. “And your…other responsibilities?”
“My son will take them,” Percy replies. “Phelix will become god of demigods."
The next few moments last at least a couple of years. “Very well.”
The yawning abyss below tugs on the incorporeal fabric of their clothes, their hair, their skin. Annabeth remembers the pull from the last time they stood at their very spot, an eternity ago, when they were not only mortals but children. It terrified them then, as it does now, their godly invulnerability useless against the psychological horrors beneath their feet. The memory - she was with Percy then, and Grover, and things weren’t simple but they were flat and plain and earthly - is enough to quell her doubts for the time. One panic attack at a time. She glances at Percy only to find him looking like his teenaged self again - almost as young as when they were here last time. It triggers the same transformation within herself, and just like that, Annabeth and her husband are kids once again.
They caught a glimpse of the Elysium Fields on their way, and it brought a warmth to her heart that was a melancholy echo of her complex mortal emotions. With each step toward their destination, she remembers a little more of her past self, and she wonders if it’s Zeus's doing, if it’s supposed to be gradual that way, or if it’s her own power manifesting in a way it never had before. It springs the question in her mind of whether they could bring back their own mortality themselves, if they really tried - but it’s moot now. She’ll never know, and that’s fine. Right now, finally - after standing still for so long - they are moving on to something.
“I’d wish you luck, but that would be like sending you into a tornado and wishing you smooth sailing.”
They turn around to face Phelix. He looks young, but older than them; he is taller than Percy by a few inches, and by all appearances could be the one in charge of them, instead of the other way around. Perhaps now he will be.
Annabeth doesn’t really know what to say. He is so different from them, having been born divine, that he could never begin to understand why they are doing this. But it aches that she is leaving him - like Athena left her before. A mortal with a godly parent has some hope of patronage, of support, if not love; but a god with a mortal parents - with two mortal parents? Doubt tugs at her heart and she steps forward. “Phee--“
He holds a hand up. “Don’t. It’s fine.” His tone is benign and there’s kindness in his smile, but the gesture was too quick to be completely convincing. “I will come for you at the Iles. Once you’ve done your...thing,” he gestures vaguely at them both, and Percy smiles. “I will bring you back to Olympus. Dionysus did it.” He nods at them reassuringly. “Uh, if you want,” he adds as an afterthought.
Annabeth and Percy glance at each other, neither willing to clarify that they will have no wish to go back. Instead, they smile at him. “We’ll be waiting,” Percy says.
With one last glance, they turn back towards the pit. Through a path of impossible darkness is their true desire, not what they once believed they wanted but what the Fates actually have in store for them. She has to believe it with every fiber of her being.
“Ready?” Percy asks.
“As I’ll ever be."
Joining hands, they leap.