Fic: Kiss a Boy in Tokyo Town, Percy Jackson [Part 2/7]

[antistar_e]

Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7

Like it had been in New York, Camp Half-Blood is located a little ways outside of the city. On a map, it's all covered under a great scope just generally referred to as "the Tokyo metro," but in order to get to Tokyo itself from where Percy lives, it's about an hour train ride.

"Do you have money?" he asks Nico the next morning, as -- bright and early, because Nico teleported into his living room without bothering to check time zones first (again) and managed to knock over everything that could possibly be knocked over as he staggered around in the dark -- they head up the escalator at the train station. Percy reaches out and tugs Nico over to stand on the step in front of him -- in Japan, you stand on the right, walk on the left. It's non-negotiable.

Nico gives him a steady look. "My dad's the god of wealth, Percy. What do you think?"

"Just checking."

It's still dark enough out to fool the senses into thinking it's earlier than it actually is; the clouds hover low and grey and there's a light drizzle coming down -- people shake out their umbrellas and roll them up into plastic covers as they step into the station. Percy, being Percy, doesn't get wet unless he wants to, but it's not until he notices that Nico's unkempt hair is beginning to flatten down on his skull that he remembers to extend the courtesy to him as well, tells the water to roll off of him -- which earns him an thankless snort. The rain's not heavy enough and it's too much of a weekday for people to really look at them and wonder why they're not more wet than they are.

It's a strange feeling, though, to lean against the ticket teller machine and help Nico sort out how Japanese money works ("It's 100 yen to 1 American dollar, give or take a decimal point. There are coins for almost everything up through 500 yen, and then you get into the bills. See, these." "So, wait, it's almost 1000 yen to get to Tokyo?" "Well, round trip. You'll pay the second half on the ride back." "Still! I remember when this much could get you all the way to the West Coast and back." "-- you're really that old, aren't you?" "Shut up!") Nico watches him, curious and carrying a paper ticket in hand, as he puts more money on his Passmo.

You get so used to doing things by yourself, that he has to catch himself, look back, make sure Nico's still with him -- and the simple fact that he has company seems to make everything different.

"Percy, there are people wearing masks sitting around," Nico comments to him on the platform.

Like so. Things that have become normal to him suddenly no longer are. He grins, "Yeah. People here will wear masks when they're sick, rather than sneeze all over each other and smear snot in uncomfortable places."

"Oh. So, wait, that's considered rude?"

Grew up with absolutely no role model and less common sense than a drunk kitten, Percy reminds himself in time to keep from asking Nico if, what, he grew up in a barn, of course it's rude. "You can never be too polite in Japan."

"Huh. No wonder the Ares cabin elected to stay behind."

"And no wonder I haven't seen you around."

"What do you -- hey!"

And then they're off, and once Percy gets started, he finds he can't stop. He needs to drag Nico through the connecting stations and show him the vending machines that sell every canned or bottle drink imaginable, plus some vending machines that sell possibly the most random things ("is that -- are those socks?"). He needs to show him the toilets in the public restrooms, which have so many buttons and functions it's the next best thing to being an astronaut, and if they get funny looks when they both tumble out of the same bathroom stall, laughing, well, it's okay -- one white person doing something embarrassing is awkward, but two white people acting silly in public is just cute.

Percy knows they've reached Tokyo when the sun stops shining through the train's windows -- when the skyscrapers have become so tall that no light at all ever reaches the ground, spare for a few minutes exactly at noon.

They're already on the rail line bound for Shinjuku, so it's easy to start the adventure there: the Tokyo Tower sits like a smaller, red-and-white version of the Eiffel Tower at the crest of a hill, and Nico frowns and shades his eyes with his hands and looks up and goes, "Who's that at the top?"

"Prometheus, I think. Tied up there and keeping his head low for a couple centuries, like he's supposed to."

At the zoo in Ueno, they catch sight of a silver stag, standing in the heart of the lion exhibit, head bent to drink serenely out of the trough. All the lions are cowering on the other side of the enclosure, trying to look as if they all meant to be over there at the same time.

Percy looks at Nico out of the corner of his eye. "Should we wait and see if the Hunters of Artemis show up?"

And Nico goes, "What, you mean stick around and volunteer to be ridiculed endlessly because we happen to have a Y chromosome and they don't? No thank you."

They laugh. The stag nimbly leaps off -- clearing the zoo wall in one easy bound.

In the shopping district in Asakusa, they find perhaps the strangest sight of all -- other white people. Percy buys them both some taiyaki from one of the dozens of vendors that line the famous shopping street up in the northern-most point of the main city -- taiyaki being fish-shaped biscuits with flavored filling, because they evaded him earlier at that place kitty-corner to the dentist's.

"You know, I've never asked," Nico comments idly, his mouth full, as they sit on the curb and watch the swirls of people move up and down the street. Everything is narrower and more miniaturized in Japan, stores stacked on top of stores as entrepreneurs built upwards instead of out, and there's not a lot of room for foot traffic. "But where's Mt. Olympus?"

"It's the 300th floor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Building." Percy's never warranted an invite to the new headquarters, nor -- thankfully -- had to go there as the result of any Quest, but Malcolm heads up that way frequently enough on Annabeth's behalf that they all know where it is. He doesn't really need to go -- he knows the basic layout; Annabeth and Malcolm e-mail each other updates on the rebuild-Olympus project so often that Percy'd be jealous, if only it wasn't, you know, Annabeth's life-long obsession. "They have an observatory at the top for the mortals -- it is the tallest building in all of Tokyo."

"And the gods are on 300? It's not the 600th floor?"

"I guess not. Everything's smaller here."

Perfectly aware of the innuendo, they both pause to share a leer.

After a moment of companionable silence, Percy polishes off his taiyaki and wipes a glob of custard from the corner of his mouth. "While we're at it, where's the entrance to the Underworld? It used to be in LA -- as far away from Mt. Olympus it could get and still be in the same country, but Japan's geographically the size of the state of California, so where it'd go?"

The look Nico gives him at that isn't easily identifiable.

Percy shrugs, sucks the custard off his thumb. "Not that I plan on raiding it anytime soon -- I may be one of very, very few mortals who have gone there and come back not once, but twice, but I really don't fancy pressing my luck."

"It's in Hiroshima," is all Nico says, looking distracted, and Percy sobers, correctly assuming that this time, the mortal disguise of the Underworld isn't that of a soul-sucking movie company, because not even the gods can be ironic 100% of the time.

Harajuku, of course, is at the top of the list for this whirlwind tour -- it's Friday, though, and the best time to see Harajuku street fashion is Sunday morning ("I don't think I'm missing much," goes Nico when Percy explains this. "You should see some of the frightful things people are wearing when they die.")

Fortunately, people dressed in strange and physically improbable costumes isn't the only strange thing in Harajuku worth a second look.

They're standing outside of it for a solid five minutes before Nico figures out what they're looking at. When it finally does click, his face twists incredulously. "Are you kidding me?"

Percy grins.

"That. Is that a store dedicated entirely to condoms?"

"Why yes, yes it is." Behind Nico's head, the mascot of Condommania winks at them and tells them to be safe.

"Can they -- are they even allowed to do that? In public?"

"So long as you don't actually imply that you're going to use them. That would insult the Japanese sense of propriety."

Nico digests this for a moment, and then rounds on him, his eyebrows going up suggestively. "Well? Aren't we going in? You did bring me all the way here, you know."

"Yes, but I didn't actually mean -- Nico, what -- urk, oh, okay," he manages feebly, because Nico's already inside, tossing a wicked grin over his shoulder, and Percy has no choice but to follow.

In the end, they wind up spending more money than they should have.

The day stops being quite so fun when, while weaving their way through the crowds in Takeshita St., further down the block, Nico abruptly catches his sleeve and goes, "Percy, those ladies are staring at us."

Percy wonders how the hell Nico can notice something like that in a crowd this size. "Okay. That happens, sometimes, though not so much in Tokyo as in smaller towns like ours -- but we're white, in case you haven't noticed. People will stare at us. Besides, we're young and ridiculously good-looking." He pauses, and looks at Nico very slowly and obviously. "Well ... -"

"I could poke you in the ear with a pin and you'd blow up like a halogen balloon, you're so full of it," Nico says, disgusted. And, a few minutes later, "Except. Percy, now they're starting to grow tentacles. Is that normal, too?"

"... No," Percy decides. "No, that is most definitely not normal."

"Wow, ladies, what nice teeth you have." Nico's hand gives a harsh shove to the small of his back. "Run!"

Percy doesn't even ask, or look around: he bolts forward, diving into a space that opens up between two shoppers and pelting headlong into the crowd. He loses sight of Nico almost instantly, but it doesn't take him long to find their persuers; she cuts in front of him after a few stores down, wearing a I ♥ New York (But Only As a Friend) shirt and a fanny pack, and possessing way too many tentacles to be comfortable. He's seen their like before; they used to be crawling all over the lower decks of the Princess Andromeda.

"I see you, half-blood!" she crows, her voice a hissing, lizard-like shriek. "It was only time, I said to my sister. It was only time they would start getting bored of camp, and then we'd have sport to hunt again!"

"You need to get a hobby!" Percy shouts back -- spots a rock fountain outside a potpourri shop, flings a commanding hand out to it. The water responds with a roar, bursting from the fountain and coming to swirl around him in eddies and ribbons, suspended in midair -- he quickly clears an open space on the cobblestone street as people fan out of the way. "Have you ever thought about pedicures? I'm sure with as many hands as you have, it should be no problem!"

"Insolence!" roars the monster, and Percy frowns in its general direction and wonders of no one in particular, "What does that even mean?"

He snaps his wrist forward, striking the monster across the face with a whip of water, so hard that her head snaps back, and while she staggers, he wraps her tentacles up and orders the water to freeze. After that, it's cake; he lazily strolls up beside her, uncapping his sword and leveling at her where she lays trussed up on the street, helpless and unable even to get back to her feet.

"For your information," he tells her coolly. "We've been out of camp dozens of times. And as long as I live, you will not lay a hand, finger, tentacle, or proboscis on my half-bloods."

She curls her lip, and bursts into fine golden dust with a retort still unspoken on her tongue.

By this point, the crowd's starting to stare, muttering back and forth to each other too quickly for Percy to be able to translate it very easily, but he does hear, "police," and decides it would be a very good time to resume shopping in peace like a normal, functioning member of society.

He meets up with Nico fifteen minutes later at the end of the street, outside the McDonalds. He materializes out of the crowd, his head bent and his face flaming red.

"She chased me into the women's lingerie store!" he mutters at Percy's questioning look, and when the son of Poseidon barks with laughter, shoots him an angry glare. "Don't laugh, it was horrible! I had to hide out amid this teeny-tiny racks of ... of --" he fumbles, pinwheeling his hands through the air helplessly, and Percy -- trying very, very hard not to laugh like a loon -- offers helpfully, "bras?", and he goes, "YES. Those! And I was waiting for her to pass me so I could jump out and vanquish her, but in the meantime, here I was, crouched down among women's underwear, and everyone was staring at me." He trails off into a horrified moan.

Percy claps a hand to his shoulder solidly. "Hero of the hour," he manages, somehow schooling himself into a straight face.

"And when I did leap out to kill her, my sword got caught on the .. the -- the clearance rack," Nico's voice trails off into a whisper, like he can't even dare to speak of it, and Percy's fingers clench compulsively on his shoulder.

"Hero of the hour, defender of the meek from tentacled tourists and small cup sizes," he announces. "Deserves a Big Mac." And steers him into the McDonalds.

One very unhealthy, greasy, manly meal later, Nico isn't blushing quite so hard, but they both agree that they've had enough of Tokyo town for one day.

| --- | --- |

"Which works out just fine," Percy says, back at the train station, while he helps Nico sort his money into the machine to buy the return ticket. "It gives us just enough time to run this stuff back home before we have to head to Hase."

Nico frowns at him. "Why are we going to Hase?"

"It's Friday night. Chris Rodriguez invited me up to his place, and since you're with me, why don't you come too?" he offers off-handedly.

Nico continues to frown at him, so -- feeling uneasy, like he's gone and crossed some boundary he couldn't see -- Percy shrugs and goes, "Unless you have something incredibly pressing you have to get back to..."

"No, I'm coming," he says instantly, like there wasn't even a question about it. "It's just ... who's Chris Rodriguez?"

Percy stares at him, almost missing the turnstile and momentarily causing a traffic jam when he had to backtrack and swipe his Passmo again. "Chris Rodriguez?" he echoes, once he gets through. "Son of Demeter? Clarisse's boyfriend?"

Realization lights up in Nico's eyes, and he wrinkles his nose. "The crazy guy?"

"Formerly crazy guy," Percy stresses with a roll of his eyes, using the tone of voice one uses when saying that the bread used to be fresh, but it's okay, there's no mold yet, it's fine. "Apollo healed him."

"Still."

When they get home, Percy checks the weather channel and pulls a hoodie on and wants to know why, exactly, there are a couple shirts and three pairs of jeans that don't belong to him in his drawers, and how did they get there? And Nico shrugs and says something about being talented and sneaky like that.

"Bull," snorts Percy, pulling his sneakers back on -- Nico never bothered to take his off, but it's become habit for Percy; another one of those things he unconsciously adopted from the locals. "You probably have, like, a butler. Or something. Who's dead and rotted and does your laundry and folds your clothes and then puts them in my drawers because you're too lazy to ask me if you can just stay here."

Nico looks at him like he's a moron, which is probably as close as he comes to a default expression. "Yes," he agrees sarcastically. "Yes, that's exactly it."

And then they're back at the train station, forking out more money to the teller machine, which gobbles up their coins greedily, and Percy has to check the diagram of all the train lines in order to figure out where exactly on the seashore Hase town is and how many stops they have to pay for -- Chris had somehow neglected to mention that part.

The sun's sunk low on the horizon by the time they're sailing over the plains, and Percy watches its position change ever so slowly in the sky as they move, imagining he can almost see the chrome and custom paint job of Apollo's sun chariot.

It's been a long day already, and they wind up drowsing against each other; Nico strips out of his bomber jacket and pillows it behind their heads, and after an undetermined length of time, Percy reaches over, probing at Nico's bicep curiously like he's checking for tender spots on a squash.

"The hell?" Nico gives him a funny look, half-lidded with sleepiness. "What are you doing?"

"You're so scrawny, but these are a lot more beefy that I thought they'd be," Percy goes, teasing. "What, you do a lot of weight-lifting down in the land of the dead?"

Nico rolls his eyes. "Lay off," he mumbles, folding his arms across his chest self-consciously, and whether it was by intention or not, it does make the wiry cords of muscles in his upper arms stand out. He scowls when he catches Percy's smirk. "I did a six-month stint as a farmer, okay? It was muscle up or perish in the fields."

Percy blinks. "You ... were a farmer?"

"Yeah." Nico shrugs defensively. "Demeter thought it would be a good character-building exercise for me. Said that if her brother wanted to waste away like a worm down in the Underworld, that was his prerogative, but he didn't have to afflict the same fate on his children. And she pestered Persephone about it, so Persephone finally just asked me if I would do it, to get her mother off her back. It wasn't so bad -- I had a great crop."

"And you just -- let Demeter bully you?"

This earns him a frown. "Hey. Be nice. She's your aunt too."

They pause for a moment, reflecting on the sheer absurdity of that statement.

"Wow," Percy decides. "We are so inbred."

Outside, the buildings are making a marked shift from urban to rural: compact apartment buildings give way to actual houses with balconies and porches, small businesses with signs in tasteful calligraphy.

Percy casts a lazy glance at the map above their heads, checking where they were and how far they had to go.

"Five stops," he murmurs, sinking back down against Nico.

"I don't understand how you can do that."

"Do what?"

"Just --" he waves a hand vaguely. "How you can even read this stuff. Or speak it. I mean, I listen to you talk to the girls in the shops -- you sound like you were born speaking Japanese. I still haven't even sorted 'good morning' from 'good evening'. I wouldn't have a clue how to find my way on the train."

"It's not that hard, really," goes Percy, amused -- does he really speak to girls in shops like he was born speaking their language? If he does, it's not intentional: he just likes people. It's his fatal flaw, ask anyone. "And it's a lot easier to speak than it is to write, I promise. Here, scooch over a bit, I'll teach you the basic alphabet."

Only he sucks at it -- he mixes up the characters for "so," "ru," and "ro" three times and can't remember which he's supposed to teach first, hiragana or katakana, and just winds up confusing himself and Nico even more, so he gives up, saying something along the lines of being unable to even read English properly, so what are his chances with Japanese characters?

Dyslexia sucks.

| --- | --- |

The address Chris gave them leads them to a house on the end of the block about ten minutes from the Hase-Dera station, two stories tall and with roughly the circumference of a bouncy castle, but to Percy -- who has never lived in anything bigger than a two-bedroom apartment -- it seems a rather large place for one man to live in. The back patio (i.e. square of concrete -- the Japanese have no concept of "lawn") opens out onto the seawall. He can hear the waves crashing against the stone, as familiar to him as his own heartbeat.

"Cheers, man!" says the half-blood in question, throwing open the door just a little after Percy knocks. "I hoped I told you Friday and not some other day -- oh," he adds, spotting Nico on the step below, who is looking up at him a little warily, like he still doesn't believe Percy's assurance that Apollo healed him of insanity.

"Chris, do you remember Nico di Angelo?"

"Son of Hades, sure!" goes Chris, sounding cheerful and very not-crazy. "This is great -- I have a lot of beer, and now another person to help drink it -- can't go wrong there. Come on in!" he steps back a bit to let them through. "I managed to pick up as best I could before you got here, but I suggest you don't open any closets -- stuff might fall on your head."

"Can't be worse than the shoebox Percy's living in," goes Nico, stepping around Percy, who's toeing off his shoes in the entryway. He promptly has to eat his words.

What there possibly was to pick up and where it would go, they'll never know, because the place is floor to ceiling in junk -- in the living room, there's a clear space on the sofa and the armchair and a little space in front of the television, but most every available surface is taken: there are take-out cartons lying around and dirty plates stacked on top of each other, which would be gross and potentially hazardous if not for the fact that each and every single thing has a plant growing out of it. The take-out cartons are blooming with pansies and wildflowers, the dishes are covered with a thin film of moss and creeping ivy, and the coffee table is home to a small greenhouse's worth of poinsettias. Somewhere in another room, the washing machine chugs away.

"Holy crap," whispers Nico, articulating Percy's sentiments exactly.

"How have you managed not to get the police sicced on you?" Percy wonders, amazed.

"I have, actually," grins the son of Demeter. "Twice. But as I'm not growing anything illegal, they can't really do anything besides give me funny looks and talk over my head, and as far as I know, untidiness isn't a crime punishable by law. Yet."

On the front table, just inside the door and peeking out from underneath the leaning fronds of a bonsai tree, is a picture of Chris and an older man who has Chris's dark, frothy hair, only his face is more like a wrinkled walnut and he's missing several teeth.

"That's my papi," says Chris, noticing where he's looking. "Got out of Fidel's Cuba -- didn't even come to this country with the shirt on his back. All he had was a packet of seeds in his pocket -- back when they weren't so anal about agricultural imports. My mother helped him start his flower business in Orlando." There's a vulnerable kind of fondness on his face when he looks at the photograph. "He wanted to come with me when I said I was moving with the gods to Japan, but he had just finally gotten really good at living in America. He's tough enough to ride out what that country's going through. I know he is." A shadow crosses over his eyes.

Percy nods at him in solidarity, because he hopes the same thing about his mother every single day.

Once you got used to the sheer amount of greenery everywhere, things get much easier -- it's already preprogrammed into most men under the age of twenty-five, the ability to sink into sofas and armchairs and look like they've grown on it like an ulcer. Chris has a whole cooler of beer next to the couch, like perhaps it had come installed there when he bought the house.

It's a lot of catching up at first -- filling each other in on how things have gone since they moved away from camp and turned native. Nico participates little in this, merely slurps beer from the rim of his can and lets his eyes rove between the two of them, following the embarrassing stories of how they did and didn't fit in to the local life that get flung back and forth with increasing frequency and deteriorating respect, and then, just as easily, moving on to embarrassing stories about the people they know. ("Oh, hey, hey, do you remember -- um, um, oh help me out, that Apollo kid who was an altar boy before his dad claimed him --" "What, Nate?" "Yes! Him! Nate Atherton!" "Isn't he the one that --" "Went into Catholic seminary after he left camp, only to drop out when we were seventeen in order to get married to that nice crossdresser who worked in a sandwich shop in Queens?" "Yeah. That guy.")

"So, wait, man, how can you afford the digs?" Percy gives him a sarcastic toast with his beer can. "Imminent repossession by natural forces or not."

"Well, Katie Gardener helped me purchase the place, but I can afford the upkeep on my own and have a little extra. It's comfortable, for sure."

Percy arches his eyebrows. "Aren't you a teacher?"

"Yes, but -- we're paid better over here than we are in the States. Especially if you're a native speaker -- most of my income comes from the extra English classes I do in the evenings, outside of the high school."

"Sorry --" puts in Nico, somehow managing to sound as impolite as possible while being courteous. "But who's Katie Gardener?"

"My older sister." He looks thoughtful. "You might remember her -- yeah, I think she was still head of the Demeter cabin when you were around."

"What happened to her?" Percy asks with a pang of nostalgia. He'd fought alongside Katie in the battle in Manhattan. The Demeter cabin had been small, even then.

"Who, Katie?" Chris sends a wry look at the ceiling. "I've never seen her more in her element -- she's about two positions away from becoming president of the Itoen company, much to the consternation of everyone over the age of thirty."

Percy barks out a laugh, "Of course she is." Don't ever try to tell a half-blood that there's such a thing as a glass ceiling.

"Itoen's the biggest name in green tea around here," he adds for the benefit of Nico, who's working very hard at not looking confused.

Nico hums something in his throat, looking contemplative. Percy remembers what he said on the train, about having done a six-month farming stint for Demeter, and wonders if he's thinking that if trading card games turns out not to be his higher calling, if he can go to Katie Gardener for a job. He imagines scrawny, pale Nico out working in the sun under a wide-brim hat, picking tea leaves and contemplating Zen, and snorts beer up his nose.

"Anyone up for a brawl?" pipes up Chris a little while later, kicking out at a gaming console and couple of controllers with his foot, and this is something else that's preprogrammed into any young man under the age of twenty-five: the universal appeal of beating things up with big sticks on a video game.

"So," goes Chris while they wait for the start screen on Smash Bros to load and Nico trots off into the kitchen to get more ice for the cooler. "I didn't think you guys were, like, friends."

"Huh?"

"You and Nico. I mean --" he shrugs, in a no-big-deal kind of way. "I dunno. Just never thought you two got along. He kind of lured you into a trap and sold you out to his father when you were sixteen, didn't he?"

There's a crash from the kitchen, followed by the sound of a dozen ice cubes skittering across the floor and Nico cussing, topped by what is probably a very spirited dance to try and get them all picked up.

Percy frowns in that direction. "Yeah. I guess he did."

"You guess?" Chris's eyebrows go up, and he pushes his glasses up further on his nose to bring Percy into better focus, like it'll make him make sense. "Wait, so you don't care that he basically betrayed you?"

"I dunno. I don't really look at it like that." He fiddles with the buttons on the controller, says evenly, "I mean, okay, sure, he was a cheap sell-out --"

"Hey!" comes from the kitchen. "I can hear you, you know!"

"-- but so was Silena. So was Luke." So were you, before the Labyrinth, goes unspoken, but Chris suddenly looks uncomfortable and busies himself up with setting up the brawl on the screen. "It's a little stupid, don't you think, to hold a grudge against Nico, and not them, just because Nico happened to survive and they didn't?"

Nico comes back into the room half-way through Percy's speech to dump the ice into the cooler, and the look that he gives him is confused, grateful, and a little wary, like he's waiting for the punch line. The overall expression is so bewildered that Percy can't help but laugh at him, dropping his controller into his lap and reaching out to him, grabbing his face between his hands and dragging him close enough to push their foreheads together. "You're all right, man," he says, punctuating his words with a shake to Nico's head, fingers digging into the natural handholds of his jaw and ears. "You're all right."

Exaggeratedly, he rubs their noses together and lets him go. Nico looks dazed and even more confused, and he stays there for a moment, awkwardly distended over the arm of the sofa, blinking at him. Then, as if noticing he was doing it, he pulls back quickly, rubbing his nose with a muttered, "gross," but it's half-hearted at best.

"If you don't hurry up and pick your players, I'm a pick for you and I'll make sure you both get crap characters, don't think I won't," Chris announces to them, stretching out an arm and grabbing a new beer, and the night quickly dissolves into pretending they know kick-ass combos when really all they're doing is hitting a bunch of random bottoms as fast as they can.

Things meander back to the story-telling, and this time, Nico joins in, because as lewd a tale as Percy and Chris can spin, nobody has better stories than the dead, and eventually the two of them give up and just let Nico talk, so, yeah, okay, you think THAT'S bad, wait until I tell you about this --

"Dude!" Percy sinks back against the leg of the armchair, hiding his face in horror at the punch line of the tale of the eighteenth-century Russian czarista. "I didn't even know that was physically possible!"

"Hmmmm," comes from Chris's direction, and when Percy peeks out from in between his fingers, there's a sly grin tugging at the corners of his mouth, imminent warning of something horrible. "That's not what Clarisse says about you."

Percy sits up so fast he almost knocks his beer can over. "She told you about that?" he near-shrieks, voice embarrassingly close to hysterical before he can think to check it. Too late, he realizes that he pretty much just gave away that yes, in fact, it was true, whatever Clarisse says about him, and tries to sink into the carpet.

Chris is looking entirely too gleeful about his discomfort, and a strangled noise comes from deep in Nico's throat; he leans forward over Percy, eyes huge in his skull. "You slept with Clarisse?"

"We were drunk!" Percy wails, and Nico's eyes, if possible, go even wider. "And I mean really, really drunk -- not oh, hey, that was a wild kegger kind of drunk, but more like we broke into Dionysus's private brewery on a dare from the Stoll brothers kind of drunk. That was Bacchanate wine," he emphasizes desperately, as Chris roars with laughter. "It was kind of getting clubbed over the head with a giant concrete block.

"Besides," he adds, in a more sullen voice. "She tried to stuff my head down the toilet the next morning, which was more like her, and we've solemnly agreed never to mention it to anyone."

"You -- I can't believe ... -- Wait a minute!" Nico spins on his knees to face Chris. "Isn't she your girlfriend? How come you're not more angry about this?"

"Because," replies the other half-blood, who really needs to stop looking so damn amused by the whole thing. "I'm the one she came to the morning after, bellowing about how the amount of alcohol she drunk was only proportionate to how unattractive her bed partner was in the morning. It did wonders at making me feel better, because she did drink a lot," he adds cheerfully.

"Oh, gods, shut up!" says Percy, half-laughing, and throws an empty aluminum can at Chris's head.

Nico's still boggling. "And Annabeth didn't murder you on the spot?"

"No, she broke up with me on the spot."

Nico seems content with that.

"And you were back together after a month," Chris murmurs demurely, and for some reason, he's watching Nico over the rims of his glasses, like he just figured something out.

They call it a night sometime after that, and Nico disappears somewhere, melting into the shadows in a way that Percy isn't sure is literally disappearing into the shadows, or just Nico's tendency to blend in and go unnoticed. Whichever it is, he's left them with all the beer cans to clear up, which keeps Percy preoccupied with complaining in no uncertain terms, because really -- there are lines you just don't cross.

"That was entirely too complicated," he informs Chris when he comes back up from taking the bag of cans down to the recycling bins at the end of the street. "They had, like, umpteen-gazillion different bins for different things and you had to stand there and sort it all. There's no conceivable way recycling can be that complicated."

Chris laughs. "Oh, trust me, it took me forever to figure out how it worked. Nah, they're collecting aluminum tomorrow, which is why I had you run those out there -- thanks, by the way. They don't do like that in the city?" he asks, curious, heading into the kitchen to get a start on the dishes; the stacks of them that apparently are used for eating.

"Um, maybe?" Percy mumbles, embarrassed. "I wouldn't know. They've got a guy who comes by once a week and just collects all your recyclables in general. I don't think the building supervisors trust us to know what is picked up on what day."

He doesn't catch Chris's reply, but it sounds an awful lot like, "spoiled." Percy chooses to ignore it, instead casting a mild glance around the kitchen, which, if possible, is even more covered in plant-life than the living room, leaving only enough space for a kitchen sink and a little counter room.

Close to the clock, there's a picture of Katie Gardener in a slope-backed dress with a broad pattern of vines around the hem, arm in arm with the president of the Itoen company. Percy looks at it for a long while, trying to reconcile this successful-looking woman with the awkward girl in armor he remembered from camp.

"You know," he says, leaning back on his elbows on the counter, briefly jockeying for space with a bougainvillea. "I don't think I'll ever really amount to much."

Chris lets out an unbecoming snort, rolling up his sleeves and turning on the water to fill up the sink. "Who says you had to, Percy?"

He gestures vaguely at Katie's picture. "Everybody. I mean, I'm a half-blood. I'm a son of the Big Three. I kind of saved the world when I was sixteen. Now it's like, now what." He glances over at Chris, who pumps soap onto his sponge, looking distinctly unimpressed with his plight. "Like, what do people expect me to do? Save the world again? I don't want to become some famous actor or activist or politician or whatever, like most well-known half-bloods in history are."

"Not all half-bloods in the world become famous, Percy. Just like not all famous people are half-bloods."

Percy pushes a breath out through his nostrils, not quite a snort, because he can't argue with that.

"You know what helps?" Chris continues, quietly. "If you try not to define your life by the fact you're a half-blood. Don't do things because you're a hero, or a son of the Big Three. Do it because you want to." He waves his hand in the air quickly, heading off the immediate protest Percy is about to make. "And I know, I'm sorry, that's really vague and unhelpful and nobody wants to hear the 'just be yourself' crap, but really. Have you ever tried just being Percy Jackson, instead of Percy Jackson, son of Poseidon, hero of prophecy-wrote?"

"I don't think I'd know the difference between the two," Percy mumbles.

"You will," Chris nods to him, his tone sure. His eyes slide, almost knee-jerk, towards the photo of him and Clarisse on the end table, sitting together on the bleachers around the practice auditorium at camp, their hands clasped together in the space between their bodies. "Trust me, you'll know."

The silence that follows is comfortable, filled with the soft clinking as Chris rinses dishes and stacks them in the racks to dry. When he's done, he dries his hands on a towel and comes to lean against the counter next to Percy.

"So," he says after a moment, balling the towel up and tossing in some random direction -- Percy wonders if it'll surface at any point in the next century. "Nico. Where'd he come from?"

"Midair, pretty much. And I mean that more literally than you think -- he just kind of poofed into my apartment yesterday morning, like a genie, only less Robin Williams and more, 'I got tired of hanging out with dead people all the time. Entertain me.'"

"I wouldn't have thought it, with, you know, all things considered --" an uncomfortable shrug and a vague movement of his hand. "But it sounds like you're getting along well."

A loud, protesting, vaguely incoherent noise was the only possible answer Percy has to this. Although, "you know," he continues after a moment, a grin beginning at the corners of his mouth. "I'd find it really ironic if he found some quiet, shy, polite Japanese girl and had to learn to curb his tongue. Oh, gods, can you imagine him with Japanese in-laws?"

There's no reply. Percy glances over and finds Chris staring at him with a look that plainly says, and here I thought you had more available brain cells than that.

"What?" he goes.

Chris is incredulous. "You do know that Nico is as bent as they come, don't you?" he says in a way that suggests he couldn't be any more blunt than if he forced trauma.

"-- What."

"Bent," the son of Demeter elaborates, rolling his eyes. "You know, crooked. Queer. Throws a mean curve ball for the other team. Gay, Percy."

Percy continues to stare at him. "... Nico?" he says, as if there's someone else who's been drinking with them all night that he might possibly confuse with the Nico they know, who is kind of a jerk, but what teenage boy isn't a jerk, like 90% of the time? Gay, though?

"Yes, Nico."

Percy snorts with laughter, disbelieving. "No way," he scoffs. "He's not -- he's just --" And he pauses, because really -- when has Nico ever expressed an interest in girls? To be fair, in the time that Percy knew him, they had a lot more to be worrying about -- and plus, Nico, was, like, thirteen when Percy saved the world, and didn't they still think girls had cooties at thirteen? But surely there must have been somebody --

Chris folds his arms, looking triumphant. "Exactly."

After a bit, in which he watches Percy goes through several stages of digesting this, he pushes himself off the counter. "Listen, man, the trains don't run this late, so you can just crash here. I'll put some pillows and blankets and stuff out on the couch -- you guys can fight over who gets couch and who gets floor, only please keep your powers out of it. I'm paying rent-to-own and I'd rather not explain sudden flooding or a legion of the undead or whatever it is you two get up to."

| --- | --- |

It takes him a while to locate Nico to deliver this message -- he has to go through the entire house twice before he realizes that no, he isn't inside. It isn't until he hears the scuffling above his head, like the world's most overweight squirrel, that it occurs to him that Nico must have gone out onto the roof.

He pokes his head out the window and cranes his neck back, but he can't see past the gutters. So he just settles for shouting, "Oi, corpsebreath! You up there?"

"Yeah, man," comes the reply. "Come on up, it's a beautiful night."

And okay, he thinks, sure, why not. By the way, are you really gay? Because for some reason I keep on coming back to that.

Percy has always thought he'd be the kind of person who wouldn't let something like that affect his way of thinking about a person, but as he gingerly climbs over the tiles, he finds himself wanting to sit a little ways away from Nico, just out of arm's reach -- not consciously, not maliciously, and when he catches himself, he gives himself a rough mental shake. You moron, he thinks to himself. What do you think he's going to do? Just jump you just because you have a Y chromosome? Gods, get over yourself -- you've faced over a hundred monsters and a Titan bend on the destruction of Olympus and come out the victor, and you're scared of stupid Nico who likes boys. And deliberately, he sits down close enough to Nico for their arms to touch. Not that he notices.

"You know," says Nico conversationally to the stars. "For all that we drank, I don't feel particularly drunk."

"It's hard to get a half-blood drunk," Percy replies, amused. "Bacchanate revels aside. We have better metabolisms than most mortals -- helps us keep skinny, too, which is why so many of Aphrodite's kids go into modeling -- and we hold human liquor ten times as well as everyone else. You should go to one of the bars here -- you become, like, a local celebrity once you've taken every middle-aged businessman they've got to offer and drunk them under the table. And the Japanese don't mess when it comes to alcohol, yo."

"I'm glad I know what kind of impression you've been making on the locals."

"Hey. I'm just taking advantage of the lowered legal drinking age over here. Do not tell my mother."

"I wouldn't dare," says Nico loftily, and Percy grins, laying back onto the tiles and folding his arms behind his head.

"Thanks for coming out here with me," he offers after a quiet moment, gets a huff and a "whatever" in response. "No, really. Thanks for the company."

"Eh. It was either that or just hang around the Underworld for another summer. Okay, yeah, it's not so bad when my dad has a little free time and we can actually hang out, but still -- he's a bit of a dick and he hasn't been very good at getting over that."

He snorts, bumping Nico's ankle with the toe of his sock. "Says the boy who sold me out to get his dad's approval, even if it meant me sitting in a cell for three years and you becoming the puppet of the prophecy."

"Yes, well," says Nico uncomfortably, rubbing at his nose in the gross manner he does when he really doesn't want to talk about something. "I chose you in the end, didn't I?"

Percy has to pause at that, fighting down a desire to grin ridiculously at the power lines arcing above their heads.

"Besides," says Nico a little too quickly, as if trying to cover up for how that might have sounded. "Since then, I've completely reorganized the infrastructure of my father's military -- after you went and annihilated it that first time. He's treated me with a lot more respect since then."

"Really? I didn't know you had an eye for that kind of stuff."

"Okay, well, most of the ideas I took from old Mythomagic strategies, but you'd be surprised at how similar it is."

"Ah."

Silence falls between them, comfortable, and up until this moment, Percy hasn't realized he's missed this, just having someone to hang out with.

From up here, he can hear the distant roar the ocean makes as it rushes up against the sea wall, smashing against the stones, and underneath it, the faint, burbling murmur of a herd of sea horses, the chitter-chatter of a family of otters discussing the merits of semi-brined versus slow-brined seaweed, and the soft song of a sea goddess is humming to herself, thinking that no one's listening. Closer to home, Chris's washing machine continues to hum, the sound intermittently floating to them from the open window below. Somewhere on the street, two women are loudly agreeing with each other about something, dissolving into peals of laughter without a thought for who might be listening.

It's so peaceful, just them and the cool summer night, that when Nico pushes himself up onto his elbow, half-suspending himself over Percy, he instinctively shifts his head to focus on Nico's face, and it isn't surprising when Nico lets his head fall so their mouths are touching, except that it is, a little bit, but not enough to really bother him -- it's almost like now that he knows it was a possibility, it isn't so strange. He unhooks a hand from behind his head, letting it drift down to rest on Nico's cheek, and just allows the kiss goes where it wants to, moving back and forth from upper lip and lower lip, chasing itself across the bows of mouths into corners, touches as light as sound, as sighs, as easy as all of that.

Maybe he's drunk, maybe he's just a little too disinclined to say no, to let this go on for as long as possible, but when Nico's weight steadily sinks down into his side, he grabs fistfuls of his shirt and tugs slowly, purposefully, until Nico gets the hint. Percy lets his legs fall apart that little bit, so that Nico can spread himself out on top of him, chests pleated together and Percy's ankle hooked easily over the back of Nico's knee. His elbows are propped up on either side of Percy's head, so he has to crane his neck a little to keep his mouth on Nico's, something he is less and less willing to give up, especially when Nico tentatively slides the tip of his tongue over the swell of his bottom lip.

It is lazy, and languid, all soft, urging noises, Nico's fingers tangled in the strings of his hoodie, and the faintest movement of Nico's heartbeat underneath Percy's palm, and if he wasn't so preoccupied, then it would have struck him as odd, that being here, kissing Nico di Angelo on a rooftop in Hase town, he is the happiest he has been in a long, long while.

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