➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 6
Today was a "cry in your car in the parking lot behind the Microsoft offices" kind of day. I did not win any awards for adulthood today.
On the bright side, has anyone listened to M.I.A.'s new album yet? Correction, has anyone STOPPED listening to it? Because I sure haven't. Also I heard Linkin Park did a thing? Twelve-year-old me is pretty anguished about that.
This entry is also now one two a couple days out of date. We're just gonna go to the fic now, k?
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 6
For callunavulgari, Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Harry Potter, Percy/Nico/Annabeth, appearances by ensemble, companion to this piece, 8500 words
One year ago today, I wrote a PJO/Harry Potter AU for notworthy and callunavulgari, and so for the anniversary of that fic, callunavulgari asked for a sequel, this time with more Percy/Nico/Annabeth content, which is tots fair because the first one didn't have much in it at all :D It had, like, a dream sequence. I am good at this thing, you guys, clearly.
Reading that is highly recommended before you read this.
Unproofread, un-Britpicked. Remember, the light format will probably be easiest on your eyes!
[read @ AO3]
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♆ | On an early June day, breezy and cloudless and effortlessly bright, a young man at the Gryffindor table finishes eating his breakfast (charmed a very encouraging shade of blue by Hazel Levesque, seated two chairs down between Teddy Lupin and Frank Zhang,) and stands. He slings his bag over his shoulder and wishes the fifth years good luck. Teddy’s hair turns orange and crackles nervously in answer.
His name is Percy Jackson, and his own internal panic has reached a comfortable plateau. His Charms NEWTs start in ten minutes.
He never makes it.
♆ | In the corridor at St. Mungo’s, just outside the Thickey ward, Artemis stoops absent-mindedly to pick up a stray sweets wrapper, Cadbury purple, only to have it immediately snatched from her hands.
“This won’t do,” says the man in front of her. He has enough hair for an entire boyband, floppy and golden and curling just so over his forehead. His hair alone could probably compete on X Factor for him. His robes are on backwards, tied like a dressing gown and gaping open to show his bare rear end. Artemis catches a glimpse in the mirror and averts her eyes, long-suffering. “I can’t autograph this!”
“Gilderoy!” chides the mediwitch who follows him out of the ward. “Dovey, don’t harass the nice witch.”
Gilderoy Lockhart hands her the wrapper back, meeting her eyes. Then his gaze slide past her, spotting the kids in the corridor. He brightens. “I know! They’ll want my autograph!”
“Now, now,” the mediwitch catches his arm, hooking it through hers firmly and giving it a fond pat. “We’ve got to see the Healer now, remember?”
“Do we?” says Lockhart vaguely, but lets himself be towed away. Artemis rolls the wrapper around her little finger, watching him go, then sighs and tosses it in the bin.
She goes back and sits against the wall between Percy and Thalia. There are chairs, of course, but they aren’t particularly safe to sit in, as they keep on trying to levitate without permission. As Artemis tucks her ankles under her thighs, Nico paces by again, close enough to touch, and the chair legs lift off the floor in response. Percy catches the one to his right and holds it down before it can float away like a balloon.
She watches Nico go, reach the end of the corridor, pivot, and come back. His fists make rocks in his pockets, and his shoulders look like they would hurt to touch. He’s no better held together than marshmallows or matchsticks.
“Who was that?” Percy wants to know.
His voice lands strangely at their feet, like he’d thrown it across a Quidditch pitch with dodgy aim, and Thalia glances up. A silver tiara encircles her head, sitting low on her brow. The sides of her head are shaved down to bristles, with the rest styled to swoop over her forehead, a little stiff with gel in places and dyed the same colors of a peacock. She left the gloves from the dye box by the tub; Artemis had gone in there and initially thought she’d slaughtered something that left her hands coated in very dark blood.
“Hmm?” she says.
He nods in the direction Lockhart had gone. Thalia glances down at her mobile. She keeps snapping the cover on and off without seeming to realize she’s doing it. It buzzes in her hand, and she tilts it up in surprise -- a hindbrain instinct, a very Muggle thing to do, checking one’s phone, Artemis thinks, but of course mobiles don’t work here -- but it’s just Nico again, making it glitch.
Most children have a handle on that kind of accidental magic by his age. The proximity to Percy and Thalia probably isn’t helping.
There’s no news on Bianca’s condition yet.
“That bloke. I just thought -- well, it looked like you knew each other …” Percy trails off awkwardly.
Artemis looks down at her hands. She flexes them into a fist, making the skin whiten underneath the stag ring on her middle finger. It’s strange, how she didn’t consider Bianca to be hers until there was a possibility that she wasn’t going to be anymore.
“That was my brother,” she says, shrugging her shoulders, like, what can you do.
Both Percy and Thalia’s heads snap up.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Thalia says blankly.
Artemis acknowledges this with a rueful smile. “Twin, actually,” and somebody makes a noise in their throat. Nico stops pacing, drawn into the conversation. “Our mother named him Apollo, but he grew up and named himself something else, the way you do sometimes.”
“What happened? I mean, to make him --”
“A Memory Charm. He tried to cast a Memory Charm on a child, and it backfired.” She folds her arms, leaning her head back against the wall. “Every generation fears the one that comes after it. Remember that. Fear turns into a need to control. My brother tried it. Now he wears his robes backward and doesn’t recognize me, after we’ve loved and hated each other all our lives.”
♆ | Annabeth Chase first performs magic on a Thursday, the year she turns seven.
For magical children, this is considered a little on the late side, as if, even subconsciously, she wanted to be very sure she knew what she was doing before she did it. Her father, for the most part, had stopped looking for the signs -- the existence of the magical world fascinated him as a historian, but, for the most part, had little bearing on his day-to-day life.
The rain comes down hard as they leave the station, passing out into the breathless, humid air, leaving behind the beeping of the ticket counters and the pleasant overhead voice, telling them which trains were departing in how many minutes.
“-- couldn’t we have flown?” Annabeth asks, pressing in close to her father’s side. He has one of those cool umbrellas that makes her think of tree houses, with the canopy for ventilation. It’s very big and very brown and covers them both.
There’s a lady on the corner handing out Evening Standards, and one other person at the crosswalk with them; a girl, though that’s really just a good guess, as Annabeth can’t see much of her. The rain is coming down so hard that the umbrella isn’t helping much at all, and everything’s really hard to see, just past full dark.
“I like trains,” her father answers.
Annabeth considers this. Trains are quite nice, she supposes, as she was just on one, but it’s worth pointing out, “You like planes, too.”
“True,” Dr Chase allows. “I like everything.”
It happens all at once: the girl, looking the wrong way for traffic, gets fed up with waiting and steps out into the street even though there’s a great orange hand telling her no. A lorry comes around the bend, one-eyed in the gloom like a cyclops, and her father closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see and Annabeth, still thinking of cars and trains and planes, flings out a hand --
She is suddenly a tree, the girl, a great shivering pine growing even as they watch, roots propping their elbows on the kerb and branches dripping needles as fast as raindrops.
The lorry meets her trunk and crunches, the both of them groaning with impact.
Later, after members of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad repair the damages to the vehicle (including fixing the initially busted headlight, which the driver will scratch his head about for months to come,) and turn the pine tree back into a girl, assuring her there’s no harm done, she might smell a little like a cut Christmas tree for awhile, but there are worse things, honest, an Obliviator comes over to Annabeth.
She’s tall, grey-eyed, and stern in a way that makes Annabeth want to straighten her shoulders or check under her nails to make sure they’re clean or something. She introduces herself as Athena.
“Was that your first magic?” she asks.
Annabeth isn’t sure what that was, but magic seems like an accurate enough way to describe it, so she nods.
“Congratulations,” says Athena, a peculiar little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She kneels down, pulling a lolly from the pocket of her brown-speckled robes, the arms of which are patterned like feathers. It gives her the look of a large, perching owl.
After the lolly has been diminished to a stick and a red stain around Annabeth’s mouth, her father shakes the rain out of his umbrella over the mat and says, “I guess you’ll be going to Hogwarts after all.”
“What’s that?” she wants to know. It sounds unpleasant.
Dr Chase opens his mouth, and then catches himself around the empty space where the answer should be. He looks like he does sometimes when he can’t find his glasses, hand groping absently at the place where his brain thinks they should be. He does it when Annabeth asks questions about Mum, too, questions too complicated for him to answer with a simple, she was very nice or she was very smart or she loves you very much. But Annabeth doesn’t ask very often anymore.
♆ | She’s one of the last ones off the train after it pulls into the Hogsmeade station, because she didn’t realize that somebody else was going to take care of the luggage: at eleven, she’d been instilled with a sense of responsibility that told her that if she could take care of it, she should. So she wrestles her trunk down, realizes that nobody else is getting theirs, and faces a dilemma: should she leave it where it is, in the way, or should she put it back with the others to make it easier for whoever’s nice enough to come through?
By the time she’s done getting it back into the overhead rack, she’s sweaty, disheveled; her head smarts from a bump and her hair’s coming out of its ponytail and she wants to cry, because she realizes too late that she could have used magic, she could: spells of weightlessness were right there in Standard Book of Spells: Year 1.
She’s also almost entirely alone on the train.
Well, not quite, she realizes: a pack of older students spill out of a compartment ahead of her, lead by a burly third-year girl with a cruel laugh, who stands in place for a moment to tuck her wand back inside her robes, looking very self-satisfied.
Her name’s Clarisse, though Annabeth doesn’t know that yet, and several years from now, they’ll sit together outside the hospital wing, waiting for Madam Pomfrey to give them news on Silena Beauregard, who’d taken a Bloodletter’s Curse in Clarisse’s defense.
Curious, she peeks into the compartment, and snorts.
Somebody’s left a first-year in here, dead asleep with his head propped at an angle against the window. Clarisse took the liberty of spelling a thin handlebar mustache onto his face, which curls up, life-like, with every slow breath he takes. He’s still dressed in Muggle clothes.
She goes in and shakes him awake.
He startles, eyes popping open and an inhale stretching through him. “Bzz-wah?” he asks, taking in the train compartment, the night sky outside the window, and Annabeth standing over him.
“You drool in your sleep,” she informs him.
And just like that, Annabeth Chase and Percy Jackson are introduced.
♆ | In the end, she is the only one of them whose wand is not ceremoniously broken in front of her.
♆ | The first flat they get together is in a wizarding village in Scotland -- it’s a big deal, somehow, for all that they’ve more or less been sleeping in each other’s bedrooms since the summer after fourth year. But putting their names together on a lease makes it really formal for some reason, and that’s frightening, to have physical proof that Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase have promised to build their daily routines around each other.
It’s not a proper wizarding village, of course, since the only true wizarding village in Scotland these days is Hogsmeade. But the Muggles in town are an observant bunch, who see a lot of things and then drink to forget.
“You can’t make me live in a proper wizarding village!” Annabeth had cried when Percy brought it up; Reyna’s father works independently as a wardsman, casting spells of protection over the houses of those too old to do it themselves, too invalid, or too strongly Squib, and so has a good idea where there are cheap flats for let. “Percy, Wifi!”
He Apparates home once a week to have dinner with his mother and to check on the corner newsagent where Artemis works; Bianca is relearning the simple spells, Alohamora and Wingardium Leviosa, and she’ll chant them soundlessly to herself, levitating boxes of Crunchies and Maltesers out of the storeroom when there are no Muggles in the shop. She smiles at Percy when he comes in for stamps; she doesn’t upcharge him like she does the tourists. She remembers his name. Her hair is grey and slowly falling out, and there are days when she’ll hex anyone who comes near her who aren’t Thalia or Nico.
He knows the name of the wizard who did this to her. He mouths it to himself, as silently as Bianca practices her spellcasting: Hephaestus.
Percy has never performed the Cruciatus Curse in his life, but for Hephaestus …
Well.
Four months in, they’re still arguing about things like the electric kettle (which will smoke if Annabeth forgets and tries to heat it with magic) and whether or not the flat really smells like wet sheep (it does, but admitting it feels like defeat,) when Percy sails past the post office on his bike one day and almost knocks over a witch with a small, pipsqueak owl on her shoulder.
“Oh!” she says in surprise, when Percy swerves and clips the postbox instead.
Her blonde hair sits like a nest atop her head, all brambles and braids, and when Percy regains his balance and asks if she’s all right, pressing his own elbow against his side as if that’ll stop the pain, she doesn’t seem to register the question.
She says, “That’s quite a spell of protection you have.”
Percy touches the cord at his neck, the beads warm from the proximity of his pulse. “It is.”
Her smile reaches her eyes. Her name’s Luna Scamander, she’s in town with her husband, and when Percy takes them to the pub later, she offers him a job.
“I don’t have any NEWTs, I never got that far,” Percy feels the need to point out, looking between them. “Is that all right?”
“That’s fine,” Luna sing-songs. She is slight as spell-light, and her husband sits as broadly grey and rugged as a mountainside beside her. “Like most amphibians, newts are more afraid of people than people are of them, so really, that’s all for the best.”
He swallows, but she might as well know. Most people figure it out eventually. “… I don’t have a wand. They snapped it.”
She seems to give this its due consideration, her head tilting further, like she’s trying to clear her ears.
“Yet you still do magic.”
It’s not a question. Percy gets the feeling that Luna Scamander is the kind of witch who has a lot of questions, but not about the kinds of things that everybody else has questions about, like, what happened to Luke Castellan? and why did they snap your wand?
He nods.
She breaks into a sunny smile.
So Percy and Annabeth sell their flat in the Mostly-Wizarding Village of Ere-on-the-Heath and spend the summer in the uninhabited highlands with the Scamanders and their assistant, a vigilant and active wizard named Grover, who habitually chews on things that probably shouldn’t be chewed on when lost in thought and has a wand that’s been passed down to him through generations. “The core comes from the horn of a satyr, supposedly,” he tells Percy and Annabeth, giving a twitchy shrug. “You know how most members of the MLE can trace a wand’s spellwork due to the magical residue it leaves?” This is news to Percy, but Annabeth nods, so he nods, too. “This wand leaves no residue. It’s nonpollutant.”
“Most importantly,” Luna chimes in from behind them. “It doesn’t bother the wildlife!”
♆ | The thing that most people manage to forget that is that everyone has a little bit of magic in them, and they’ll go their whole lives performing it unconsciously. Muggles have come up with a number of ingenious words to describe it when it happens: coincidence. Serendipity. Fate. Irony. Good luck.
Even people like Percy’s mum, who is a dead zone for magic and has never had a spell stick to her in her life, probably at least has some magic in her.
And then there’s that minority, those with so much magic in them that they become a danger to themselves and to each other if they don’t learn to control it. With training, these people become witches and wizards. They form their own communities, their own cultures.
In Western Europe, which likes to pretend to be the seat of civilization, they tend to favor the wand as a tool of magical conductivity.
But honestly -- and this should really surprise nobody -- any magical item can be be used to harness and focus magic, so long as the connection to the user is personal, deep, and very strong. The conduit must choose the person as much as the person chooses the conduit.
Thalia has a goblin-made tiara that Artemis found for her.
Her spells come out differently, of course, stranger and more ethereal, like stormlight through fog. No one would deny that she’s a witch, especially not anybody who was there the day Hephaestus tried to remove Bianca from the game.
♆ | “A Memory Charm?” Jason hikes his shoulders upright, putting them back against the foot of a gargoyle statue, which is also groaning and holding its skull like it’s got a ringing headache.
Headmistress McGonagall crouches down beside him, her mouth a thin gash of a frown.
His eyes keep jumping, seemingly out of his control, but he manages to focus on her. One hand goes to his chest, gripping the front of his robes like he’s looking for his Head Boy badge. “Is that what happened?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” The Headmistress’s voice is strangely gentle, like she’s handling something in fragile pieces and is afraid rough handling will break it further.
It’s not lost on Jason.
“NEWTs,” he goes. “We were going to -- it was the morning of -- Charms, wasn’t it?” His eyes dart past her, finding Piper first, then Percy, then Leo, his eyes widening as he recognizes each of them in turn, cataloguing them even through the changes. Leo’s hair has mostly fallen out; what clings to his skull is grey, wispy, not unlike Bianca’s. “And the fifth years -- they had their OWLs, I remember, I asked Nico at our table at breakfast if he was going to bother studying because I hadn’t seen him with any books yet, and he was really creepy about it, and then --” he trails off, like the nothingness of it speaks for him.
McGonagall’s mouth turns down in the corners, her eyes pinching with sympathy.
Jason’s voice rises. “What do you mean? Where have the last six months of my life gone?”
“You know,” says Leo lightly. “I never understood why they call it a Memory Charm.”
Everybody looks at him.
The silence lengthens, all of them expecting somebody else to say something first.
“Well,” he lifts his shoulders up around his ears self-consciously, a gesture familiar to Ravenclaws everywhere. “It’s the Cruciatus Curse, isn’t it? It’s the Killing Curse. So why it is a Memory Charm? Why tag it with a linguistically soft word like that? What part of a Memory Charm isn’t curse-like?”
“For that, Mr Valdez,” says McGonagall. “You’ll have to ask the people who invented it.”
♆ | “They’re called,” says Nico with great ceremony. “The Olympians.”
♆ | On a day that Percy doesn’t remember (because he lost six months of his memory, too, starting that morning he never made it to his Charms NEWTs,) seven half-bloods stood together in the entrance hall: four Gryffindors, one Ravenclaw, and two Slytherins, each with one Muggle parent and one magical parent that nobody truly remembers and everybody seems to just describe in really vague terms.
“Do we know how we’re going to do this?” Piper asks, holding her wand crosswise across her chest like a shield.
At her elbow, Frank’s skin keeps mottling into a scale pattern like a snake’s, plainly out of his control. Percy’s teeth chatter.
Hazel speaks up. “It’ll be really hard to do by ourselves,” she says. Defense Against the Dark Arts is her best subject -- she knows for a fact she got an Outstanding OWL, and when the Gryffindor Head of House called her in for career counseling earlier that year, Hazel already knew: she wanted to work in the Department of Mysteries.
“Good thing, then, that I brought reinforcements!” a voice calls out, coming from the top of the grand staircase.
It’s Nico, and with him are Bianca and Thalia and Reyna, Rachel and Octavian. For once, Reyna isn’t wearing her Head Girl badge, and Bianca keeps craning her neck, trying to take in all of Hogwarts at once -- it’s changed a lot since the last time she was here, the year the Chamber of Secrets opened the first time.
“How did you --“ Annabeth starts in surprise, straightening up.
She doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because Octavian snorts at her ungraciously.
“We’re Seers,” he says in his usual rude way, and Rachel’s eyebrows tick up in surprise, because he’s forgotten that he doesn’t ever acknowledge that plural pronoun. “We’ve been dreaming this for awhile.”
♆ | Annabeth meets a wandmaker living on the coast of Sweden and decides to stay for a couple weeks, boarding in a hostel that caters primarily to European backpackers and sightseers who don’t know not to try to take hi-res photographs from their iPads. Percy, who has not been out of Annabeth’s arm’s reach since his wand was snapped, takes her face between his hands and kisses her good-bye until Grover makes pointed gagging sounds on the other side of their campfire.
Rolf and Luna tolerate four days of his directionlessness before they send him to Dublin to meet up with a friend of theirs, a harpy named Ella.
“She’s great company, and she’ll remember every little mistake you make to humiliate you with at a later date, have no fear,” Luna says cheerily. “She wants to write a book!”
“About what?” he says blankly. He’s used to gathering information on magical creatures from a great distance -- they’ve never been particularly literary before.
“Oh, the usual stuff, I suppose. I think she’s only going to release it on Kindle, but if you could persuade her to print a hardcover copy for us, we’d really appreciate it.”
Hazel lives in Dublin, too, so Percy Floos ahead in warning and she greets him at the airport, holding up a sign that says, This is Percy, next to a stick figure with dark hair. If found, please return here. Without Annabeth, he had to travel the long way. At least with Apparation, the worst that could happen is you’d Splinch yourself -- flying Ryanair probably makes Splinching seem pleasant.
“What’s it like, living out here?” he asks as they leave the airport, his arm tucked securely through hers and the sign under the other, flopping against his ankles with each step.
“You’re forgetting I grew up here,” she reminds him.
“I'm not! I just meant, how is it, living in the Muggle world again? You seem to be doing well.”
“Are you judging my lifestyle by my clothes?” She feigns indignation, clutching at her heart. He counts seven beads on a cord around her neck, unbroken. “You? Of course I’m doing well, I’m descended from leprechauns on my mum’s side, remember? Making money was never going to be particularly difficult for me. Don’t make that face!” She elbows him.
He checks. “So you’re not going to try for the Department of Mysteries?”
“It’s kind of hard to work for the Department of Mysteries after they’ve snapped your wand, you know.”
Lunch at her flat is amazing, if only because it isn’t campfire food. Percy loves doing grunt work for the Scamanders, don’t get him wrong, but he swears he dreams sometimes about baked pasta and marinara. He eats two plates, and Hazel laughs at him and offers him a bib.
After, scraping at the side of her bowl with the outside tine of her fork, she confesses quietly, “You know, I’m really glad you didn’t become one of them. I know they offered.”
Percy doesn’t need to be told who she’s talking about. He immediately stretches over to pull her into a hug, kissing the top of her head.
“Why would I?” he says around a mouthful of her hair, very stout about it. “We’re Gryffindors. We’re pigheaded and stubborn. We like things the way they are.”
♆ | He’d always kind of assumed that the rivalry between Rachel and Octavian had less to do with the fact that they’ve both been accomplished Seers since childhood in a wizarding Britain that hadn’t seen a particularly competent one in over a hundred years, and upon arriving at Hogwarts, were displeased to find that not only did they have to share that title, they had to share it with someone in their same year -- and more to do with the fact that she was a Gryffindor and a Muggleborn and he was a Slytherin and a pureblood and they felt they should hate each other, because it was just tradition, never mind the fact that Harry Potter had crossed wands with the Dark Lord so that they could live in a world where they didn’t have to.
“-- wait,” Percy realizes. “Are you? A pureblood, I mean. I know you boast about your family and their position all the time, yawn, yawn, so I just assumed --“
“I am,” says Octavian tightly, in a tone that more clearly says I don’t want to talk about it than if he’d hexed it onto Percy’s face.
He’s one of those people who has the luxury of being extremely well-loved by a large, extended family who taught him everything they could and then sent him to Hogwarts to learn even more. Percy, who can count the number of people he knows who have both living parents on one hand and still have fingers left over, doesn’t know what to make of Octavian. It doesn’t make sense. How can so someone so clearly pampered grow up … so unpleasant?
“Well, he’s the only magical child born to his family in, like, three generations,” Rachel tells him. “I mean, yeah, no, he’s a right prick, but. His family’s all Squibs. They kind of desperately need him to not bollocks it up.”
“Is that what happens to pureblood families over time?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe? If you believe the stuff the Free Wizarding Press has been churning out these days, then yeah, magic runs stronger in mixed-blood families. Why do you think the Olympians are so interested in you lot? If they’ve got you in their pockets, then they can control the kind of generation that rises post-Voldemort.”
Percy grimaces.
She makes a face back at him, her freckles folding into constellations briefly. “But no, Octavian’s family got cursed, I think, back in, like, Grindelwald’s era? The magic got blasted straight out of their veins.”
“You can do that?” she nods, and he shudders. “But why would Grindelwald’s soldiers take the magic out of a pureblood family? I thought that went against everything they believed in.”
“They didn’t,” Octavian’s voice says behind them, startling them both. He Levitates a flagon of pumpkin juice down in between them. “My family did it to themselves. But it turns out that things weren’t any safer for them in the Muggle world than it was in our own.”
Then he leaves again before Percy can ask anything else.
He tells Annabeth about it later, wondering, “That sounds horrible and painful. Why would they do that to themselves? Wouldn’t they be safer with magic than without?”
The look she gives him is exasperated and impatient and strangely sympathetic, too.
“You’ve never listened to him, have you?” she says quietly. “He spellcasts in Hebrew, Percy.”
♆ | Their second place together is a pre-fab in a small town an hour south of London with more character than actual functionality and dodgy plumbing, that lets the cockroaches in when it rains. They make a sport out of Transfiguring them into small chunks of pyrite, which they collect in a small basket on a table just inside the entryway. Percy’s always come out slightly tarnished-looking, which never fails to make Annabeth crow at him smugly.
They live there for a year and a half before Festus destroys it by parking his big fat golden arse right down on top of it.
Leo is not invited over that Christmas.
♆ | The third place that Percy and Annabeth find together, no longer even pretending that they’re not going to be stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, is a two-storey terrace on the Muggle side of Heathrow airport. Departing flights come screamingly close, the sound of it enough to drown out arguments and make the mugs rattle on their hooks. Eventually, they learn to sleep through it. It’s bigger than anywhere either of them have lived before; that first week, they spend a ridiculous amount of time running up and down the staircase just because they can, just because it’s theirs.
Annabeth registers herself as an architect with the Council -- it’s not technically a lie, just like listing Percy as a good-will ambassador isn’t really lying, either. They’ll chock it up to cross-cultural miscommunication if asked.
At the height of June, Percy comes back from a four-week expedition to a Mermish collective in Wales, who’ve gone and established a colony in the reservoir by Trawsfynnydd and are not particularly keen to leave, thanks. The Scamanders are worried that living in a Muggle-made reservoir will have a negative effect on the spawning cycle, which will come in September, but the merman that Percy spent most of his time with either doesn’t understand the question (Percy’s Mermish is passable, but not particularly poetic) or isn’t concerned about it. Tyson takes a fancy to him because “he’s not like other wizards” -- which Percy takes to mean, he doesn’t have a wand, because how else is Percy different from other wizards? The merpeople don’t really understand wands anyway; to them, magic is everywhere and isn’t to be controlled -- and watches from the shallows every morning as Percy gathers the day’s gillyweed along the shore. When he leaves, Tyson screeches at him with more fervor than usual and initiates a hug, which is a strangely human thing to do, and calls him "brother," which Percy honestly has no idea what to do with.
When he makes it home, he finds that Nico di Angelo has moved in during his absence.
He discovers this largely by running directly into it: a clean, grimacing badger skull hangs over the entryway, woven through a circlet of rowan in a sigil of protection. It bonks heads with Percy in greeting.
He rears back, looks at it for a long moment, and sighs.
“Really?” he asks Annabeth, who’d materialized as soon as the wards chimed with his arrival.
She smirks. “I have no idea what you could mean. I knew you’d spend too much time with the merfolk and come back with your head full of kelp.”
He ducks under the skull. “My head’s usually full of kelp.”
Her smirk broadens, baring teeth. “You said it, not me.”
He rolls his eyes and meets her at the bottom of the stairs, letting his satchel fall so that he can get his arms all the way around her, all at once, engulfing them both. He kisses her face all over, and she squirms whenever he hits a ticklish spot. He checks with his fingers; all seven beads are intact around her neck.
“How goes the wandlore?” he asks, taking particular care to kiss at her hairline, where the grey stripe begins.
“Confusing and contradictory, as wandlore often is, but I have a few attempts I want you to try. How were the merpeople?”
“Oh, nice! Very fond of screeching and spears and Ice Mice -- you know, the kind that make their teeth chatter and squeak? If the Ministry really wanted to, they could probably make them move out of the reservoir by offering them enough sweets.”
He tries to keep talking, but Annabeth’s mouth presses flush to his, and since there are few things in the world quite as nice as someone who’s willing to put their mouth on yours, he kisses her for a bit instead.
“I clocked that at about a minute and fifteen seconds,” a voice says from the kitchen doorway. Out of the corner of his eye, Percy spots a familiar figure, drawn long and spindly thin like somebody’s cartoonish idea of a dementor, and groans, because right, new housemate. “Before he tried to get his tongue in your mouth. So who wins the bet?”
“Me,” says Annabeth readily, pulling back.
Nico grins back at her. “Yeah, but you cheated.”
“You didn’t specify the rules. Not closing a loophole? That’s not very Slytherin of you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he goes rudely, and extends his arms. “My turn. Hug. Now.”
“Oh my god, we’re kicking him out,” Percy mutters, and obeys.
Nico is loud and unpleasant and has this unsettling tendency to go to the ends of the earth on their say-so without seeming to think much of it, like he doesn’t see why anybody wouldn’t, it’s Percy, it’s Annabeth, of course they know what they’re talking about, and Percy, who’s only ever experienced that kind of unwavering loyalty from goldfish, doesn’t really know how to handle it and spends a lot of time wishing Nico would just go away. Nico doesn’t.
When he moves in, two major things enter their home with him.
The first is Nico’s entire skeletal collection. He takes over the little room by the loo on the first level that Percy and Annabeth had kind of been thinking of turning into a storeroom for Annabeth’s wand supplies, since it’s cool and dry and surprisingly doesn’t get damp when it rains. Soon, bones are drying on racks and tied up with herbs from the ceiling, and Percy swears once that he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a skeletal cat sitting on the windowsill, surveying the street outside, but it’s gone when he next thinks to look. Everything smells faintly of rosemary, marrow, and rot, but it’s worth it the first time Annabeth hands him a wand made of snakebone, cored with his own blood -- and Bianca’s and Thalia’s and Percy’s, too, because they’re the same something -- and he takes it with a look on his face that Percy’s never seen before and turns and sets the whole kitchen on fire.
(He does apologize for that. Really.)
The second is a pamphlet, well-folded and bent a little in the corners. The watermark from Weasley’s Wizardly Wheezes still laughs faintly in the bottom-hand corner. Inside, it contains several tips for how to tell if you’ve been hit with a Memory Charm. Ginny Weasley wrote it at the turn of the year, 1998.
It becomes habit, opening it on the counter next to the kettle (electric, sorry, Annabeth,) and running through the list like gospel.
1. Are there chunks of time you don’t remember? Hours, whole daytimes or nighttimes that are just dark?
And:
4. The most skilled Obliviators, like the kind that work for the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad, are also often accomplished Legilimens, and will create pitfalls in your own mind, capable of erasing memories as you think of them. If possible, create an unrelated safe word with someone you trust, for them to use in case they feel you’ve been Charmed. If you recognize it, you’re in trouble. If you don’t recognize it, you’re in even bigger trouble.
And:
8. Protective amulets! Done properly (and by this, we mean, don’t buy them from Mundungus Fletcher,) these one-use charms will break in case of a hit and leave you with memory intact and clear evidence that someone tried to cast a Memory Charm on you. They only work if you are wearing them on your person. Is there a limit to how many you can wear at once? No, but seven is the most powerful magical number, which is why most protective amulets are cast by seven wizards at once.
♆ | When Percy Jackson was seventeen years old, the Wizengamot broke his wand and forbade him from ever doing magic again.
At least, that’s what he was told. That part of his memory is missing.
♆ | Annabeth’s Shield Charm wavers, crackling in the corners like it’s been burned up, and the force of maintaining it makes her wand rattle and shake in her hand, a visible tremor running up to her shoulder. Her teeth grit. After this, her hair will go grey at her temple, but she does it anyway.
And Percy is useless.
“What’s the point of having magic if I can’t --“ he bites off the rest of his sentence, hands scrambling for something, anything to use as a weapon.
A rock? Can he throw a freaking rock?
Instantly, Nico’s at his side, because nothing quite attracts Nico like Percy’s own stupidity.
“You are such a git!” he bellows. At this point in time, he is fifteen years old. “What makes you think you need a wand to do magic? We didn’t as kids!”
Percy’s head snaps up. Annabeth’s voice, then, in his memory: Magic comes from magic and magic will be magic again, a circle without end. Anything magical can channel magic, seaweed brain.
“Are you sure?” he shouts back.
“No!” Nico shakes his head. “Do it anyway!”
So Percy does.
He puts a hand to Nico, there at the place where there is skin bared at his neck, and the feeling that goes through him then is the same he got when he was eleven years old, standing alone in Ollivander’s shop and listening to him chuckle, his fingers on a wand with seawood and dragon heartstring at its core.
He stands and the spell comes roaring out of him.
♆ | He wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of Nico murmuring Lumos to the dark, unable to sleep. Instead of getting up out of the duvet, he Summons a book from the shelf; the heavy weight of it hitting his hand tells Percy it’s one of the history tomes he borrowed from Dr Chase.
Sometimes, when he reads, he forgets to stop, like his mind knows there’s a seventy-year vacuum there he’s desperate to fill.
“Now you’re just showing off,” he says aloud, when the Summoning Charm becomes a Levitation Charm, so that Nico can flip pages without removing his arms from underneath the warmth of the duvet.
“You would too, if you had a wand again,” Nico retorts. He doesn’t mean it meanly, but Percy takes a moment to contemplate getting offended regardless.
Instead, he allows, “True. That’s nice. It’s certainly better than always having to outwit Annabeth and steal hers for a short while.”
“I don’t know, I liked those games,” Nico says faithfully. “Strategic biting was allowed.”
“I knew you two planned it,” Annabeth’s voice rises from between them, muttered into her pillow.
Percy flips over, finding her shoulder with his hand and snuggling into her face, because he can. She promptly kicks him off the side of the bed, and absolutely nobody helps him back up again.
♆ | The August sunshine bakes itself into the hillsides, turning the canola fields cracked into gold and brown. A half-league away, Festus suns himself on his back, crushing canola and poppies into dust beneath him. His great golden hide is hard to look at, a shimmering mirage. His contented rumbling makes the ground shiver under them, like a cat purring.
“If they’d asked you --“ Percy begins, and at the sound of his voice, Calypso cracks an eye open. He softens his voice. “The Olympians, I mean. If they’d asked you to be one of them, would you have done it?”
Leo thumps around to the other side of Calypso’s head, where her good eye is, and it focuses on him instead. Her nostrils twitch, a long-suffering sigh extending all through her lungs before huffing out of her in a gust, igniting the shrubbery directly in front of her. With the hindbrain instinct of hundreds of campfires with the Scamanders, Percy kicks dirt over them until they go out.
“Hell, brother,” Leo says, as soon as Calypso’s eyes lid over again. “I can’t say I wouldn’t have been tempted.”
He sits down in the shade of Calypso’s bulk. Percy tenses up, knee-jerk, but he needn’t be worried: while she would probably have no problem turning him into a snack, she likes Leo. Most creatures (and people) do.
In the sunlight, the warped, pulled scars around her neck and foreclaws are stark and ugly. Her scales are chalky, bone-white, her muzzle grey and beaten, but the spines along her back have new green growth, because even she cannot stop growing, not even after escaping hundreds, if not a thousand years of imprisonment in her vault beneath Gringotts. When Leo traipses up into the highlands to visit her, cane thunking solidly amongst loose rock, he’ll sing to her to let her know he’s coming. Percy swears that she sings back, a low tenor hum in her throat like a hello.
“Sounds nice, doesn’t it?” Leo continues after a beat, and it takes Percy a minute to remember the track of their conversation. Right, the Olympians. “Control Wizarding Britain without having to be held accountable for it, unlike the Ministry? Dispose of anyone who gets in your way, arrange everything to your liking, and Obliviate everyone who might remember you?” He chuckles, a burnt-out sound. “They’ve got it made. Fortunately, they didn’t bother offering me that kind of immortality. They just tried to curse me.”
Afterwards, Percy and Annabeth and Hazel, Frank and Jason and Piper, plus Reyna to make seven, all pooled their abilities and made him a new beaded necklace with seven amulets of protection to replace the one that broke, but, like Bianca, there’s no reversing what that kind of spell damage does to a body.
“Do you ever think about which one of them is your father?”
“Merlin’s beard, Percy, what’s with the questions?”
Percy waits him out. Leo’s a Ravenclaw, he can’t resist trailing every question to its inevitable outcome.
“It’s a little creepy, innit?” he goes eventually, and shrugs. “You know? It’s a really dispassionate thing to do. Seed the future generation with half-blood pawns to move where you will and groom them where necessary to be your replacement? No thanks, mate. I want to live in the post-Voldemort world the same way everybody else does -- taking it as it is.”
♆ | “What does that mean, the Big Three?” Thalia’s brow pulls low underneath her tiara. “What does it have to do with us? And what does it have to do with the way our magic always feels a little strange, like it’s leaking out of us whenever we’re around each other?”
“I think it means we’re supposed to be rivals.”
Percy looks at Bianca. She looks back at him, then to her brother, who immediately reaches for her hand. He looks next to Thalia, who’s still scowling.
“Well,” he says brightly. “Well done on that one, everyone. We’re big disappointments already.”
♆ | Nico di Angelo has loved Percy Jackson since he was a child, eleven years old and out of time and full of a single question: what’s wrong with my magic? Percy was the first answer he ever got, and he continued to be an answer, one Nico never grew out of.
It’s a horrible, itchy burn of a love that feels like he’s taken a potion, like if he puts his wand to his own throat he won’t bleed blood, but some golden ichor like a Felix Felicitas. He wants to keep him like a child does, too, and for that, he’ll cross wands with any Olympian that dares.
When it happens, it happens around Christmas.
Annabeth’s at the window, molding together a wreath out of evergreens that she got from Katie Gardener down at the shops, and the whole house smells like pine.
Behind her, both Percy and Nico are trying to untangle the Christmas lights, Percy by cursing at them and Nico by trying to remember if there’s a spell for it. The lights are charmed, the way most things are in mixed Muggle-wizard homes, but they won’t untangle even if politely asked. They tried that.
Preoccupied, it takes them a moment to realize that Annabeth’s stopped, gone still by the window.
“Annabeth?” Percy sets the ball of knotted wire down. “What is it?”
“I think it’s my mother,” she says softly.
Nico and Percy exchange a glance. Then, simultaneously, they shove the lights aside and join her at the window.
A woman’s walking down the street, briskly sidestepping the bins out for collection. She’s dressed in Muggle clothes in that mismatched way wizards do when they haven’t had a lot of experience with Muggles; tight pencil skirt paired with an anorak and bright purple Wellies.
“What makes you think she’s your mum?” Nico asks.
Annabeth’s hand is at her throat, touching each bead in turn. “I’ve met her before,” she answers after a long pause. “Her name’s Athena. I didn’t know who she was, then. But now I can make an educated guess.”
“What’s the plan?” Percy asks, because Percy always asks Annabeth what the plan is.
She tilts a shoulder. “They’ve left us alone for awhile. Maybe they come in peace. One option is to let her in.”
“No!” Nico blurts out vehemently. “Annabeth, she erased your father’s memory. She lied and manipulated you. She’s an Olympian -- if she didn’t directly erase Jason and Percy’s memories, or curse Bianca and Leo, then she certainly didn’t stop those who did. She deserves to be in Azkaban with the rest of them!”
“They tore that down,” Percy reminds him.
“Still,” Nico stresses.
Annabeth’s mouth forms the faintest paper cut of a smile. “You’re a Slytherin,” she says to him. “I thought family was supposed to be all-important to you.”
“The family I choose,” Nico answers firmly. “Blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb, haven’t you heard?”
It takes a moment, but Annabeth places the phrasing first.
“‘Blood is thicker than water’? That’s what that means?”
Nico nods.
They stand in silence for a minute more, watching Athena’s progress up the street. “Maybe she’ll go right by,” Percy offers hopefully, and as soon as the words are out of his mouth, she turns at the gate. She comes up the walk.
Softly in the house, the wards chime.
Athena pauses on the step. She reaches inside her robes for her wand.
“Are we ready?” Annabeth murmurs, drawing her own. Nico’s is already in his hand, delicate ridges of snakebone digging familiarly into the meat of his palm. Percy slides into position between them, his fingers sliding up their shirts to rest on their spines, the touch of it like a summons, magic answering magic. As long as Percy Jackson has Annabeth or Nico, he will never need a wand.
“We’re ready,” he says.
♆ | Sally stops by at half-three on the Saturday before Christmas, bringing them a spare blanket because of something Percy let slip during one of their weekly dinners. Nico’s the only one home, because Percy had gone to the airport to pick up Frank (who is presumably the reason Sally felt the need to bring an extra blanket, because they are lacking somewhat in supplies for guests. Nico had kind of been hoping they could Transfigure Frank into an owl and he could roost up in the eaves overnight, but that’s probably rude,) and Annabeth’s at the chemist’s.
He invites her in, because Percy’s mum is one of his favorite people in the world and among the last he’ll ever chuck out.
(Let’s be honest, the list of adults that Nico trusts is incredibly short and pretty much only includes Headmistress McGonagall, Artemis, and Sally Jackson.)
Her eyes only flick a little judgmentally over the fact Nico’s still in his pants at half-three, and he puts on the kettle for her and asks if she wants to stay for Piper’s show, which comes on at quarter till?
“Oh!” she says, taking her hands out of the pockets of her too-big jeans. “I remember hearing about that! BBC Radio, right?”
Nico nods. Out of all of them, Piper probably adjusted best to having her wand broken -- I’d kind of intended on returning to the Muggle world immediately after my NEWTs anyway, so it really didn’t cause much fuss in my life, she’d said -- and now hosts her own show, frequently gets to guest-star celebrities, and writes for a wizarding zine that’s all online.
“You’d be surprised, the number of younger witches and wizards who find it easier to adjust to a mostly-Muggle life,” Nico tells her during an advert break, because Sally seems genuinely interested. “Magic is changing. The way we interact with magic is changing. Magic never worked properly on electronics because wizards never bothered to figure out how electronics worked. Maybe someday we’ll invent spells that don’t make them go haywire.”
“Imagine that,” she says mildly, and it takes Nico a moment to realize she’s teasing him: magic never works properly on Sally, so she doesn’t know.
It gives him an idea, though, and when she leaves, he gathers up his courage at the last moment and calls after her as she goes down the steps, “If we went to somebody, would you be our witness?”
She stops. She turns and goes, “Witness for what?”
“About the Olympians.”
She blinks. “What makes you think I know anything about it?”
Nico folds his arms and tries to look less like the kind of bloke who’d spent the morning holding her son’s girlfriend’s hips to the bed. He curls his bare toes against the cement. His wand is still in the kitchen, and Percy and Annabeth will be home any moment.
“Spells don’t stick to you,” he points out. Muggles like Sally are what wizards in power will always underestimate. “They never have. If … if Percy’s dad tried to erase your memories when he left you, it wouldn’t have worked, right?”
And Sally --
The Muggle woman named Sally smiles. She smiles and smiles wider, until she laughs and covers her mouth and nods at him, just once. Then she turns around, walking back out into the busy day.
-
fin
On the bright side, has anyone listened to M.I.A.'s new album yet? Correction, has anyone STOPPED listening to it? Because I sure haven't. Also I heard Linkin Park did a thing? Twelve-year-old me is pretty anguished about that.
This entry is also now one two a couple days out of date. We're just gonna go to the fic now, k?
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 6
For callunavulgari, Percy Jackson and the Olympians/Harry Potter, Percy/Nico/Annabeth, appearances by ensemble, companion to this piece, 8500 words
One year ago today, I wrote a PJO/Harry Potter AU for notworthy and callunavulgari, and so for the anniversary of that fic, callunavulgari asked for a sequel, this time with more Percy/Nico/Annabeth content, which is tots fair because the first one didn't have much in it at all :D It had, like, a dream sequence. I am good at this thing, you guys, clearly.
Reading that is highly recommended before you read this.
Unproofread, un-Britpicked. Remember, the light format will probably be easiest on your eyes!
[read @ AO3]
-
♆ | On an early June day, breezy and cloudless and effortlessly bright, a young man at the Gryffindor table finishes eating his breakfast (charmed a very encouraging shade of blue by Hazel Levesque, seated two chairs down between Teddy Lupin and Frank Zhang,) and stands. He slings his bag over his shoulder and wishes the fifth years good luck. Teddy’s hair turns orange and crackles nervously in answer.
His name is Percy Jackson, and his own internal panic has reached a comfortable plateau. His Charms NEWTs start in ten minutes.
He never makes it.
♆ | In the corridor at St. Mungo’s, just outside the Thickey ward, Artemis stoops absent-mindedly to pick up a stray sweets wrapper, Cadbury purple, only to have it immediately snatched from her hands.
“This won’t do,” says the man in front of her. He has enough hair for an entire boyband, floppy and golden and curling just so over his forehead. His hair alone could probably compete on X Factor for him. His robes are on backwards, tied like a dressing gown and gaping open to show his bare rear end. Artemis catches a glimpse in the mirror and averts her eyes, long-suffering. “I can’t autograph this!”
“Gilderoy!” chides the mediwitch who follows him out of the ward. “Dovey, don’t harass the nice witch.”
Gilderoy Lockhart hands her the wrapper back, meeting her eyes. Then his gaze slide past her, spotting the kids in the corridor. He brightens. “I know! They’ll want my autograph!”
“Now, now,” the mediwitch catches his arm, hooking it through hers firmly and giving it a fond pat. “We’ve got to see the Healer now, remember?”
“Do we?” says Lockhart vaguely, but lets himself be towed away. Artemis rolls the wrapper around her little finger, watching him go, then sighs and tosses it in the bin.
She goes back and sits against the wall between Percy and Thalia. There are chairs, of course, but they aren’t particularly safe to sit in, as they keep on trying to levitate without permission. As Artemis tucks her ankles under her thighs, Nico paces by again, close enough to touch, and the chair legs lift off the floor in response. Percy catches the one to his right and holds it down before it can float away like a balloon.
She watches Nico go, reach the end of the corridor, pivot, and come back. His fists make rocks in his pockets, and his shoulders look like they would hurt to touch. He’s no better held together than marshmallows or matchsticks.
“Who was that?” Percy wants to know.
His voice lands strangely at their feet, like he’d thrown it across a Quidditch pitch with dodgy aim, and Thalia glances up. A silver tiara encircles her head, sitting low on her brow. The sides of her head are shaved down to bristles, with the rest styled to swoop over her forehead, a little stiff with gel in places and dyed the same colors of a peacock. She left the gloves from the dye box by the tub; Artemis had gone in there and initially thought she’d slaughtered something that left her hands coated in very dark blood.
“Hmm?” she says.
He nods in the direction Lockhart had gone. Thalia glances down at her mobile. She keeps snapping the cover on and off without seeming to realize she’s doing it. It buzzes in her hand, and she tilts it up in surprise -- a hindbrain instinct, a very Muggle thing to do, checking one’s phone, Artemis thinks, but of course mobiles don’t work here -- but it’s just Nico again, making it glitch.
Most children have a handle on that kind of accidental magic by his age. The proximity to Percy and Thalia probably isn’t helping.
There’s no news on Bianca’s condition yet.
“That bloke. I just thought -- well, it looked like you knew each other …” Percy trails off awkwardly.
Artemis looks down at her hands. She flexes them into a fist, making the skin whiten underneath the stag ring on her middle finger. It’s strange, how she didn’t consider Bianca to be hers until there was a possibility that she wasn’t going to be anymore.
“That was my brother,” she says, shrugging her shoulders, like, what can you do.
Both Percy and Thalia’s heads snap up.
“I didn’t know you had a brother,” Thalia says blankly.
Artemis acknowledges this with a rueful smile. “Twin, actually,” and somebody makes a noise in their throat. Nico stops pacing, drawn into the conversation. “Our mother named him Apollo, but he grew up and named himself something else, the way you do sometimes.”
“What happened? I mean, to make him --”
“A Memory Charm. He tried to cast a Memory Charm on a child, and it backfired.” She folds her arms, leaning her head back against the wall. “Every generation fears the one that comes after it. Remember that. Fear turns into a need to control. My brother tried it. Now he wears his robes backward and doesn’t recognize me, after we’ve loved and hated each other all our lives.”
♆ | Annabeth Chase first performs magic on a Thursday, the year she turns seven.
For magical children, this is considered a little on the late side, as if, even subconsciously, she wanted to be very sure she knew what she was doing before she did it. Her father, for the most part, had stopped looking for the signs -- the existence of the magical world fascinated him as a historian, but, for the most part, had little bearing on his day-to-day life.
The rain comes down hard as they leave the station, passing out into the breathless, humid air, leaving behind the beeping of the ticket counters and the pleasant overhead voice, telling them which trains were departing in how many minutes.
“-- couldn’t we have flown?” Annabeth asks, pressing in close to her father’s side. He has one of those cool umbrellas that makes her think of tree houses, with the canopy for ventilation. It’s very big and very brown and covers them both.
There’s a lady on the corner handing out Evening Standards, and one other person at the crosswalk with them; a girl, though that’s really just a good guess, as Annabeth can’t see much of her. The rain is coming down so hard that the umbrella isn’t helping much at all, and everything’s really hard to see, just past full dark.
“I like trains,” her father answers.
Annabeth considers this. Trains are quite nice, she supposes, as she was just on one, but it’s worth pointing out, “You like planes, too.”
“True,” Dr Chase allows. “I like everything.”
It happens all at once: the girl, looking the wrong way for traffic, gets fed up with waiting and steps out into the street even though there’s a great orange hand telling her no. A lorry comes around the bend, one-eyed in the gloom like a cyclops, and her father closes his eyes so he doesn’t have to see and Annabeth, still thinking of cars and trains and planes, flings out a hand --
She is suddenly a tree, the girl, a great shivering pine growing even as they watch, roots propping their elbows on the kerb and branches dripping needles as fast as raindrops.
The lorry meets her trunk and crunches, the both of them groaning with impact.
Later, after members of the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad repair the damages to the vehicle (including fixing the initially busted headlight, which the driver will scratch his head about for months to come,) and turn the pine tree back into a girl, assuring her there’s no harm done, she might smell a little like a cut Christmas tree for awhile, but there are worse things, honest, an Obliviator comes over to Annabeth.
She’s tall, grey-eyed, and stern in a way that makes Annabeth want to straighten her shoulders or check under her nails to make sure they’re clean or something. She introduces herself as Athena.
“Was that your first magic?” she asks.
Annabeth isn’t sure what that was, but magic seems like an accurate enough way to describe it, so she nods.
“Congratulations,” says Athena, a peculiar little smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. She kneels down, pulling a lolly from the pocket of her brown-speckled robes, the arms of which are patterned like feathers. It gives her the look of a large, perching owl.
After the lolly has been diminished to a stick and a red stain around Annabeth’s mouth, her father shakes the rain out of his umbrella over the mat and says, “I guess you’ll be going to Hogwarts after all.”
“What’s that?” she wants to know. It sounds unpleasant.
Dr Chase opens his mouth, and then catches himself around the empty space where the answer should be. He looks like he does sometimes when he can’t find his glasses, hand groping absently at the place where his brain thinks they should be. He does it when Annabeth asks questions about Mum, too, questions too complicated for him to answer with a simple, she was very nice or she was very smart or she loves you very much. But Annabeth doesn’t ask very often anymore.
♆ | She’s one of the last ones off the train after it pulls into the Hogsmeade station, because she didn’t realize that somebody else was going to take care of the luggage: at eleven, she’d been instilled with a sense of responsibility that told her that if she could take care of it, she should. So she wrestles her trunk down, realizes that nobody else is getting theirs, and faces a dilemma: should she leave it where it is, in the way, or should she put it back with the others to make it easier for whoever’s nice enough to come through?
By the time she’s done getting it back into the overhead rack, she’s sweaty, disheveled; her head smarts from a bump and her hair’s coming out of its ponytail and she wants to cry, because she realizes too late that she could have used magic, she could: spells of weightlessness were right there in Standard Book of Spells: Year 1.
She’s also almost entirely alone on the train.
Well, not quite, she realizes: a pack of older students spill out of a compartment ahead of her, lead by a burly third-year girl with a cruel laugh, who stands in place for a moment to tuck her wand back inside her robes, looking very self-satisfied.
Her name’s Clarisse, though Annabeth doesn’t know that yet, and several years from now, they’ll sit together outside the hospital wing, waiting for Madam Pomfrey to give them news on Silena Beauregard, who’d taken a Bloodletter’s Curse in Clarisse’s defense.
Curious, she peeks into the compartment, and snorts.
Somebody’s left a first-year in here, dead asleep with his head propped at an angle against the window. Clarisse took the liberty of spelling a thin handlebar mustache onto his face, which curls up, life-like, with every slow breath he takes. He’s still dressed in Muggle clothes.
She goes in and shakes him awake.
He startles, eyes popping open and an inhale stretching through him. “Bzz-wah?” he asks, taking in the train compartment, the night sky outside the window, and Annabeth standing over him.
“You drool in your sleep,” she informs him.
And just like that, Annabeth Chase and Percy Jackson are introduced.
♆ | In the end, she is the only one of them whose wand is not ceremoniously broken in front of her.
♆ | The first flat they get together is in a wizarding village in Scotland -- it’s a big deal, somehow, for all that they’ve more or less been sleeping in each other’s bedrooms since the summer after fourth year. But putting their names together on a lease makes it really formal for some reason, and that’s frightening, to have physical proof that Percy Jackson and Annabeth Chase have promised to build their daily routines around each other.
It’s not a proper wizarding village, of course, since the only true wizarding village in Scotland these days is Hogsmeade. But the Muggles in town are an observant bunch, who see a lot of things and then drink to forget.
“You can’t make me live in a proper wizarding village!” Annabeth had cried when Percy brought it up; Reyna’s father works independently as a wardsman, casting spells of protection over the houses of those too old to do it themselves, too invalid, or too strongly Squib, and so has a good idea where there are cheap flats for let. “Percy, Wifi!”
He Apparates home once a week to have dinner with his mother and to check on the corner newsagent where Artemis works; Bianca is relearning the simple spells, Alohamora and Wingardium Leviosa, and she’ll chant them soundlessly to herself, levitating boxes of Crunchies and Maltesers out of the storeroom when there are no Muggles in the shop. She smiles at Percy when he comes in for stamps; she doesn’t upcharge him like she does the tourists. She remembers his name. Her hair is grey and slowly falling out, and there are days when she’ll hex anyone who comes near her who aren’t Thalia or Nico.
He knows the name of the wizard who did this to her. He mouths it to himself, as silently as Bianca practices her spellcasting: Hephaestus.
Percy has never performed the Cruciatus Curse in his life, but for Hephaestus …
Well.
Four months in, they’re still arguing about things like the electric kettle (which will smoke if Annabeth forgets and tries to heat it with magic) and whether or not the flat really smells like wet sheep (it does, but admitting it feels like defeat,) when Percy sails past the post office on his bike one day and almost knocks over a witch with a small, pipsqueak owl on her shoulder.
“Oh!” she says in surprise, when Percy swerves and clips the postbox instead.
Her blonde hair sits like a nest atop her head, all brambles and braids, and when Percy regains his balance and asks if she’s all right, pressing his own elbow against his side as if that’ll stop the pain, she doesn’t seem to register the question.
She says, “That’s quite a spell of protection you have.”
Percy touches the cord at his neck, the beads warm from the proximity of his pulse. “It is.”
Her smile reaches her eyes. Her name’s Luna Scamander, she’s in town with her husband, and when Percy takes them to the pub later, she offers him a job.
“I don’t have any NEWTs, I never got that far,” Percy feels the need to point out, looking between them. “Is that all right?”
“That’s fine,” Luna sing-songs. She is slight as spell-light, and her husband sits as broadly grey and rugged as a mountainside beside her. “Like most amphibians, newts are more afraid of people than people are of them, so really, that’s all for the best.”
He swallows, but she might as well know. Most people figure it out eventually. “… I don’t have a wand. They snapped it.”
She seems to give this its due consideration, her head tilting further, like she’s trying to clear her ears.
“Yet you still do magic.”
It’s not a question. Percy gets the feeling that Luna Scamander is the kind of witch who has a lot of questions, but not about the kinds of things that everybody else has questions about, like, what happened to Luke Castellan? and why did they snap your wand?
He nods.
She breaks into a sunny smile.
So Percy and Annabeth sell their flat in the Mostly-Wizarding Village of Ere-on-the-Heath and spend the summer in the uninhabited highlands with the Scamanders and their assistant, a vigilant and active wizard named Grover, who habitually chews on things that probably shouldn’t be chewed on when lost in thought and has a wand that’s been passed down to him through generations. “The core comes from the horn of a satyr, supposedly,” he tells Percy and Annabeth, giving a twitchy shrug. “You know how most members of the MLE can trace a wand’s spellwork due to the magical residue it leaves?” This is news to Percy, but Annabeth nods, so he nods, too. “This wand leaves no residue. It’s nonpollutant.”
“Most importantly,” Luna chimes in from behind them. “It doesn’t bother the wildlife!”
♆ | The thing that most people manage to forget that is that everyone has a little bit of magic in them, and they’ll go their whole lives performing it unconsciously. Muggles have come up with a number of ingenious words to describe it when it happens: coincidence. Serendipity. Fate. Irony. Good luck.
Even people like Percy’s mum, who is a dead zone for magic and has never had a spell stick to her in her life, probably at least has some magic in her.
And then there’s that minority, those with so much magic in them that they become a danger to themselves and to each other if they don’t learn to control it. With training, these people become witches and wizards. They form their own communities, their own cultures.
In Western Europe, which likes to pretend to be the seat of civilization, they tend to favor the wand as a tool of magical conductivity.
But honestly -- and this should really surprise nobody -- any magical item can be be used to harness and focus magic, so long as the connection to the user is personal, deep, and very strong. The conduit must choose the person as much as the person chooses the conduit.
Thalia has a goblin-made tiara that Artemis found for her.
Her spells come out differently, of course, stranger and more ethereal, like stormlight through fog. No one would deny that she’s a witch, especially not anybody who was there the day Hephaestus tried to remove Bianca from the game.
♆ | “A Memory Charm?” Jason hikes his shoulders upright, putting them back against the foot of a gargoyle statue, which is also groaning and holding its skull like it’s got a ringing headache.
Headmistress McGonagall crouches down beside him, her mouth a thin gash of a frown.
His eyes keep jumping, seemingly out of his control, but he manages to focus on her. One hand goes to his chest, gripping the front of his robes like he’s looking for his Head Boy badge. “Is that what happened?”
“What’s the last thing you remember?” The Headmistress’s voice is strangely gentle, like she’s handling something in fragile pieces and is afraid rough handling will break it further.
It’s not lost on Jason.
“NEWTs,” he goes. “We were going to -- it was the morning of -- Charms, wasn’t it?” His eyes dart past her, finding Piper first, then Percy, then Leo, his eyes widening as he recognizes each of them in turn, cataloguing them even through the changes. Leo’s hair has mostly fallen out; what clings to his skull is grey, wispy, not unlike Bianca’s. “And the fifth years -- they had their OWLs, I remember, I asked Nico at our table at breakfast if he was going to bother studying because I hadn’t seen him with any books yet, and he was really creepy about it, and then --” he trails off, like the nothingness of it speaks for him.
McGonagall’s mouth turns down in the corners, her eyes pinching with sympathy.
Jason’s voice rises. “What do you mean? Where have the last six months of my life gone?”
“You know,” says Leo lightly. “I never understood why they call it a Memory Charm.”
Everybody looks at him.
The silence lengthens, all of them expecting somebody else to say something first.
“Well,” he lifts his shoulders up around his ears self-consciously, a gesture familiar to Ravenclaws everywhere. “It’s the Cruciatus Curse, isn’t it? It’s the Killing Curse. So why it is a Memory Charm? Why tag it with a linguistically soft word like that? What part of a Memory Charm isn’t curse-like?”
“For that, Mr Valdez,” says McGonagall. “You’ll have to ask the people who invented it.”
♆ | “They’re called,” says Nico with great ceremony. “The Olympians.”
♆ | On a day that Percy doesn’t remember (because he lost six months of his memory, too, starting that morning he never made it to his Charms NEWTs,) seven half-bloods stood together in the entrance hall: four Gryffindors, one Ravenclaw, and two Slytherins, each with one Muggle parent and one magical parent that nobody truly remembers and everybody seems to just describe in really vague terms.
“Do we know how we’re going to do this?” Piper asks, holding her wand crosswise across her chest like a shield.
At her elbow, Frank’s skin keeps mottling into a scale pattern like a snake’s, plainly out of his control. Percy’s teeth chatter.
Hazel speaks up. “It’ll be really hard to do by ourselves,” she says. Defense Against the Dark Arts is her best subject -- she knows for a fact she got an Outstanding OWL, and when the Gryffindor Head of House called her in for career counseling earlier that year, Hazel already knew: she wanted to work in the Department of Mysteries.
“Good thing, then, that I brought reinforcements!” a voice calls out, coming from the top of the grand staircase.
It’s Nico, and with him are Bianca and Thalia and Reyna, Rachel and Octavian. For once, Reyna isn’t wearing her Head Girl badge, and Bianca keeps craning her neck, trying to take in all of Hogwarts at once -- it’s changed a lot since the last time she was here, the year the Chamber of Secrets opened the first time.
“How did you --“ Annabeth starts in surprise, straightening up.
She doesn’t get to finish the sentence, because Octavian snorts at her ungraciously.
“We’re Seers,” he says in his usual rude way, and Rachel’s eyebrows tick up in surprise, because he’s forgotten that he doesn’t ever acknowledge that plural pronoun. “We’ve been dreaming this for awhile.”
♆ | Annabeth meets a wandmaker living on the coast of Sweden and decides to stay for a couple weeks, boarding in a hostel that caters primarily to European backpackers and sightseers who don’t know not to try to take hi-res photographs from their iPads. Percy, who has not been out of Annabeth’s arm’s reach since his wand was snapped, takes her face between his hands and kisses her good-bye until Grover makes pointed gagging sounds on the other side of their campfire.
Rolf and Luna tolerate four days of his directionlessness before they send him to Dublin to meet up with a friend of theirs, a harpy named Ella.
“She’s great company, and she’ll remember every little mistake you make to humiliate you with at a later date, have no fear,” Luna says cheerily. “She wants to write a book!”
“About what?” he says blankly. He’s used to gathering information on magical creatures from a great distance -- they’ve never been particularly literary before.
“Oh, the usual stuff, I suppose. I think she’s only going to release it on Kindle, but if you could persuade her to print a hardcover copy for us, we’d really appreciate it.”
Hazel lives in Dublin, too, so Percy Floos ahead in warning and she greets him at the airport, holding up a sign that says, This is Percy, next to a stick figure with dark hair. If found, please return here. Without Annabeth, he had to travel the long way. At least with Apparation, the worst that could happen is you’d Splinch yourself -- flying Ryanair probably makes Splinching seem pleasant.
“What’s it like, living out here?” he asks as they leave the airport, his arm tucked securely through hers and the sign under the other, flopping against his ankles with each step.
“You’re forgetting I grew up here,” she reminds him.
“I'm not! I just meant, how is it, living in the Muggle world again? You seem to be doing well.”
“Are you judging my lifestyle by my clothes?” She feigns indignation, clutching at her heart. He counts seven beads on a cord around her neck, unbroken. “You? Of course I’m doing well, I’m descended from leprechauns on my mum’s side, remember? Making money was never going to be particularly difficult for me. Don’t make that face!” She elbows him.
He checks. “So you’re not going to try for the Department of Mysteries?”
“It’s kind of hard to work for the Department of Mysteries after they’ve snapped your wand, you know.”
Lunch at her flat is amazing, if only because it isn’t campfire food. Percy loves doing grunt work for the Scamanders, don’t get him wrong, but he swears he dreams sometimes about baked pasta and marinara. He eats two plates, and Hazel laughs at him and offers him a bib.
After, scraping at the side of her bowl with the outside tine of her fork, she confesses quietly, “You know, I’m really glad you didn’t become one of them. I know they offered.”
Percy doesn’t need to be told who she’s talking about. He immediately stretches over to pull her into a hug, kissing the top of her head.
“Why would I?” he says around a mouthful of her hair, very stout about it. “We’re Gryffindors. We’re pigheaded and stubborn. We like things the way they are.”
♆ | He’d always kind of assumed that the rivalry between Rachel and Octavian had less to do with the fact that they’ve both been accomplished Seers since childhood in a wizarding Britain that hadn’t seen a particularly competent one in over a hundred years, and upon arriving at Hogwarts, were displeased to find that not only did they have to share that title, they had to share it with someone in their same year -- and more to do with the fact that she was a Gryffindor and a Muggleborn and he was a Slytherin and a pureblood and they felt they should hate each other, because it was just tradition, never mind the fact that Harry Potter had crossed wands with the Dark Lord so that they could live in a world where they didn’t have to.
“-- wait,” Percy realizes. “Are you? A pureblood, I mean. I know you boast about your family and their position all the time, yawn, yawn, so I just assumed --“
“I am,” says Octavian tightly, in a tone that more clearly says I don’t want to talk about it than if he’d hexed it onto Percy’s face.
He’s one of those people who has the luxury of being extremely well-loved by a large, extended family who taught him everything they could and then sent him to Hogwarts to learn even more. Percy, who can count the number of people he knows who have both living parents on one hand and still have fingers left over, doesn’t know what to make of Octavian. It doesn’t make sense. How can so someone so clearly pampered grow up … so unpleasant?
“Well, he’s the only magical child born to his family in, like, three generations,” Rachel tells him. “I mean, yeah, no, he’s a right prick, but. His family’s all Squibs. They kind of desperately need him to not bollocks it up.”
“Is that what happens to pureblood families over time?” he asks.
“I don’t know. Maybe? If you believe the stuff the Free Wizarding Press has been churning out these days, then yeah, magic runs stronger in mixed-blood families. Why do you think the Olympians are so interested in you lot? If they’ve got you in their pockets, then they can control the kind of generation that rises post-Voldemort.”
Percy grimaces.
She makes a face back at him, her freckles folding into constellations briefly. “But no, Octavian’s family got cursed, I think, back in, like, Grindelwald’s era? The magic got blasted straight out of their veins.”
“You can do that?” she nods, and he shudders. “But why would Grindelwald’s soldiers take the magic out of a pureblood family? I thought that went against everything they believed in.”
“They didn’t,” Octavian’s voice says behind them, startling them both. He Levitates a flagon of pumpkin juice down in between them. “My family did it to themselves. But it turns out that things weren’t any safer for them in the Muggle world than it was in our own.”
Then he leaves again before Percy can ask anything else.
He tells Annabeth about it later, wondering, “That sounds horrible and painful. Why would they do that to themselves? Wouldn’t they be safer with magic than without?”
The look she gives him is exasperated and impatient and strangely sympathetic, too.
“You’ve never listened to him, have you?” she says quietly. “He spellcasts in Hebrew, Percy.”
♆ | Their second place together is a pre-fab in a small town an hour south of London with more character than actual functionality and dodgy plumbing, that lets the cockroaches in when it rains. They make a sport out of Transfiguring them into small chunks of pyrite, which they collect in a small basket on a table just inside the entryway. Percy’s always come out slightly tarnished-looking, which never fails to make Annabeth crow at him smugly.
They live there for a year and a half before Festus destroys it by parking his big fat golden arse right down on top of it.
Leo is not invited over that Christmas.
♆ | The third place that Percy and Annabeth find together, no longer even pretending that they’re not going to be stuck with each other for the rest of their lives, is a two-storey terrace on the Muggle side of Heathrow airport. Departing flights come screamingly close, the sound of it enough to drown out arguments and make the mugs rattle on their hooks. Eventually, they learn to sleep through it. It’s bigger than anywhere either of them have lived before; that first week, they spend a ridiculous amount of time running up and down the staircase just because they can, just because it’s theirs.
Annabeth registers herself as an architect with the Council -- it’s not technically a lie, just like listing Percy as a good-will ambassador isn’t really lying, either. They’ll chock it up to cross-cultural miscommunication if asked.
At the height of June, Percy comes back from a four-week expedition to a Mermish collective in Wales, who’ve gone and established a colony in the reservoir by Trawsfynnydd and are not particularly keen to leave, thanks. The Scamanders are worried that living in a Muggle-made reservoir will have a negative effect on the spawning cycle, which will come in September, but the merman that Percy spent most of his time with either doesn’t understand the question (Percy’s Mermish is passable, but not particularly poetic) or isn’t concerned about it. Tyson takes a fancy to him because “he’s not like other wizards” -- which Percy takes to mean, he doesn’t have a wand, because how else is Percy different from other wizards? The merpeople don’t really understand wands anyway; to them, magic is everywhere and isn’t to be controlled -- and watches from the shallows every morning as Percy gathers the day’s gillyweed along the shore. When he leaves, Tyson screeches at him with more fervor than usual and initiates a hug, which is a strangely human thing to do, and calls him "brother," which Percy honestly has no idea what to do with.
When he makes it home, he finds that Nico di Angelo has moved in during his absence.
He discovers this largely by running directly into it: a clean, grimacing badger skull hangs over the entryway, woven through a circlet of rowan in a sigil of protection. It bonks heads with Percy in greeting.
He rears back, looks at it for a long moment, and sighs.
“Really?” he asks Annabeth, who’d materialized as soon as the wards chimed with his arrival.
She smirks. “I have no idea what you could mean. I knew you’d spend too much time with the merfolk and come back with your head full of kelp.”
He ducks under the skull. “My head’s usually full of kelp.”
Her smirk broadens, baring teeth. “You said it, not me.”
He rolls his eyes and meets her at the bottom of the stairs, letting his satchel fall so that he can get his arms all the way around her, all at once, engulfing them both. He kisses her face all over, and she squirms whenever he hits a ticklish spot. He checks with his fingers; all seven beads are intact around her neck.
“How goes the wandlore?” he asks, taking particular care to kiss at her hairline, where the grey stripe begins.
“Confusing and contradictory, as wandlore often is, but I have a few attempts I want you to try. How were the merpeople?”
“Oh, nice! Very fond of screeching and spears and Ice Mice -- you know, the kind that make their teeth chatter and squeak? If the Ministry really wanted to, they could probably make them move out of the reservoir by offering them enough sweets.”
He tries to keep talking, but Annabeth’s mouth presses flush to his, and since there are few things in the world quite as nice as someone who’s willing to put their mouth on yours, he kisses her for a bit instead.
“I clocked that at about a minute and fifteen seconds,” a voice says from the kitchen doorway. Out of the corner of his eye, Percy spots a familiar figure, drawn long and spindly thin like somebody’s cartoonish idea of a dementor, and groans, because right, new housemate. “Before he tried to get his tongue in your mouth. So who wins the bet?”
“Me,” says Annabeth readily, pulling back.
Nico grins back at her. “Yeah, but you cheated.”
“You didn’t specify the rules. Not closing a loophole? That’s not very Slytherin of you.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he goes rudely, and extends his arms. “My turn. Hug. Now.”
“Oh my god, we’re kicking him out,” Percy mutters, and obeys.
Nico is loud and unpleasant and has this unsettling tendency to go to the ends of the earth on their say-so without seeming to think much of it, like he doesn’t see why anybody wouldn’t, it’s Percy, it’s Annabeth, of course they know what they’re talking about, and Percy, who’s only ever experienced that kind of unwavering loyalty from goldfish, doesn’t really know how to handle it and spends a lot of time wishing Nico would just go away. Nico doesn’t.
When he moves in, two major things enter their home with him.
The first is Nico’s entire skeletal collection. He takes over the little room by the loo on the first level that Percy and Annabeth had kind of been thinking of turning into a storeroom for Annabeth’s wand supplies, since it’s cool and dry and surprisingly doesn’t get damp when it rains. Soon, bones are drying on racks and tied up with herbs from the ceiling, and Percy swears once that he wakes up in the middle of the night and finds a skeletal cat sitting on the windowsill, surveying the street outside, but it’s gone when he next thinks to look. Everything smells faintly of rosemary, marrow, and rot, but it’s worth it the first time Annabeth hands him a wand made of snakebone, cored with his own blood -- and Bianca’s and Thalia’s and Percy’s, too, because they’re the same something -- and he takes it with a look on his face that Percy’s never seen before and turns and sets the whole kitchen on fire.
(He does apologize for that. Really.)
The second is a pamphlet, well-folded and bent a little in the corners. The watermark from Weasley’s Wizardly Wheezes still laughs faintly in the bottom-hand corner. Inside, it contains several tips for how to tell if you’ve been hit with a Memory Charm. Ginny Weasley wrote it at the turn of the year, 1998.
It becomes habit, opening it on the counter next to the kettle (electric, sorry, Annabeth,) and running through the list like gospel.
1. Are there chunks of time you don’t remember? Hours, whole daytimes or nighttimes that are just dark?
And:
4. The most skilled Obliviators, like the kind that work for the Accidental Magic Reversal Squad, are also often accomplished Legilimens, and will create pitfalls in your own mind, capable of erasing memories as you think of them. If possible, create an unrelated safe word with someone you trust, for them to use in case they feel you’ve been Charmed. If you recognize it, you’re in trouble. If you don’t recognize it, you’re in even bigger trouble.
And:
8. Protective amulets! Done properly (and by this, we mean, don’t buy them from Mundungus Fletcher,) these one-use charms will break in case of a hit and leave you with memory intact and clear evidence that someone tried to cast a Memory Charm on you. They only work if you are wearing them on your person. Is there a limit to how many you can wear at once? No, but seven is the most powerful magical number, which is why most protective amulets are cast by seven wizards at once.
♆ | When Percy Jackson was seventeen years old, the Wizengamot broke his wand and forbade him from ever doing magic again.
At least, that’s what he was told. That part of his memory is missing.
♆ | Annabeth’s Shield Charm wavers, crackling in the corners like it’s been burned up, and the force of maintaining it makes her wand rattle and shake in her hand, a visible tremor running up to her shoulder. Her teeth grit. After this, her hair will go grey at her temple, but she does it anyway.
And Percy is useless.
“What’s the point of having magic if I can’t --“ he bites off the rest of his sentence, hands scrambling for something, anything to use as a weapon.
A rock? Can he throw a freaking rock?
Instantly, Nico’s at his side, because nothing quite attracts Nico like Percy’s own stupidity.
“You are such a git!” he bellows. At this point in time, he is fifteen years old. “What makes you think you need a wand to do magic? We didn’t as kids!”
Percy’s head snaps up. Annabeth’s voice, then, in his memory: Magic comes from magic and magic will be magic again, a circle without end. Anything magical can channel magic, seaweed brain.
“Are you sure?” he shouts back.
“No!” Nico shakes his head. “Do it anyway!”
So Percy does.
He puts a hand to Nico, there at the place where there is skin bared at his neck, and the feeling that goes through him then is the same he got when he was eleven years old, standing alone in Ollivander’s shop and listening to him chuckle, his fingers on a wand with seawood and dragon heartstring at its core.
He stands and the spell comes roaring out of him.
♆ | He wakes in the middle of the night to the sound of Nico murmuring Lumos to the dark, unable to sleep. Instead of getting up out of the duvet, he Summons a book from the shelf; the heavy weight of it hitting his hand tells Percy it’s one of the history tomes he borrowed from Dr Chase.
Sometimes, when he reads, he forgets to stop, like his mind knows there’s a seventy-year vacuum there he’s desperate to fill.
“Now you’re just showing off,” he says aloud, when the Summoning Charm becomes a Levitation Charm, so that Nico can flip pages without removing his arms from underneath the warmth of the duvet.
“You would too, if you had a wand again,” Nico retorts. He doesn’t mean it meanly, but Percy takes a moment to contemplate getting offended regardless.
Instead, he allows, “True. That’s nice. It’s certainly better than always having to outwit Annabeth and steal hers for a short while.”
“I don’t know, I liked those games,” Nico says faithfully. “Strategic biting was allowed.”
“I knew you two planned it,” Annabeth’s voice rises from between them, muttered into her pillow.
Percy flips over, finding her shoulder with his hand and snuggling into her face, because he can. She promptly kicks him off the side of the bed, and absolutely nobody helps him back up again.
♆ | The August sunshine bakes itself into the hillsides, turning the canola fields cracked into gold and brown. A half-league away, Festus suns himself on his back, crushing canola and poppies into dust beneath him. His great golden hide is hard to look at, a shimmering mirage. His contented rumbling makes the ground shiver under them, like a cat purring.
“If they’d asked you --“ Percy begins, and at the sound of his voice, Calypso cracks an eye open. He softens his voice. “The Olympians, I mean. If they’d asked you to be one of them, would you have done it?”
Leo thumps around to the other side of Calypso’s head, where her good eye is, and it focuses on him instead. Her nostrils twitch, a long-suffering sigh extending all through her lungs before huffing out of her in a gust, igniting the shrubbery directly in front of her. With the hindbrain instinct of hundreds of campfires with the Scamanders, Percy kicks dirt over them until they go out.
“Hell, brother,” Leo says, as soon as Calypso’s eyes lid over again. “I can’t say I wouldn’t have been tempted.”
He sits down in the shade of Calypso’s bulk. Percy tenses up, knee-jerk, but he needn’t be worried: while she would probably have no problem turning him into a snack, she likes Leo. Most creatures (and people) do.
In the sunlight, the warped, pulled scars around her neck and foreclaws are stark and ugly. Her scales are chalky, bone-white, her muzzle grey and beaten, but the spines along her back have new green growth, because even she cannot stop growing, not even after escaping hundreds, if not a thousand years of imprisonment in her vault beneath Gringotts. When Leo traipses up into the highlands to visit her, cane thunking solidly amongst loose rock, he’ll sing to her to let her know he’s coming. Percy swears that she sings back, a low tenor hum in her throat like a hello.
“Sounds nice, doesn’t it?” Leo continues after a beat, and it takes Percy a minute to remember the track of their conversation. Right, the Olympians. “Control Wizarding Britain without having to be held accountable for it, unlike the Ministry? Dispose of anyone who gets in your way, arrange everything to your liking, and Obliviate everyone who might remember you?” He chuckles, a burnt-out sound. “They’ve got it made. Fortunately, they didn’t bother offering me that kind of immortality. They just tried to curse me.”
Afterwards, Percy and Annabeth and Hazel, Frank and Jason and Piper, plus Reyna to make seven, all pooled their abilities and made him a new beaded necklace with seven amulets of protection to replace the one that broke, but, like Bianca, there’s no reversing what that kind of spell damage does to a body.
“Do you ever think about which one of them is your father?”
“Merlin’s beard, Percy, what’s with the questions?”
Percy waits him out. Leo’s a Ravenclaw, he can’t resist trailing every question to its inevitable outcome.
“It’s a little creepy, innit?” he goes eventually, and shrugs. “You know? It’s a really dispassionate thing to do. Seed the future generation with half-blood pawns to move where you will and groom them where necessary to be your replacement? No thanks, mate. I want to live in the post-Voldemort world the same way everybody else does -- taking it as it is.”
♆ | “What does that mean, the Big Three?” Thalia’s brow pulls low underneath her tiara. “What does it have to do with us? And what does it have to do with the way our magic always feels a little strange, like it’s leaking out of us whenever we’re around each other?”
“I think it means we’re supposed to be rivals.”
Percy looks at Bianca. She looks back at him, then to her brother, who immediately reaches for her hand. He looks next to Thalia, who’s still scowling.
“Well,” he says brightly. “Well done on that one, everyone. We’re big disappointments already.”
♆ | Nico di Angelo has loved Percy Jackson since he was a child, eleven years old and out of time and full of a single question: what’s wrong with my magic? Percy was the first answer he ever got, and he continued to be an answer, one Nico never grew out of.
It’s a horrible, itchy burn of a love that feels like he’s taken a potion, like if he puts his wand to his own throat he won’t bleed blood, but some golden ichor like a Felix Felicitas. He wants to keep him like a child does, too, and for that, he’ll cross wands with any Olympian that dares.
When it happens, it happens around Christmas.
Annabeth’s at the window, molding together a wreath out of evergreens that she got from Katie Gardener down at the shops, and the whole house smells like pine.
Behind her, both Percy and Nico are trying to untangle the Christmas lights, Percy by cursing at them and Nico by trying to remember if there’s a spell for it. The lights are charmed, the way most things are in mixed Muggle-wizard homes, but they won’t untangle even if politely asked. They tried that.
Preoccupied, it takes them a moment to realize that Annabeth’s stopped, gone still by the window.
“Annabeth?” Percy sets the ball of knotted wire down. “What is it?”
“I think it’s my mother,” she says softly.
Nico and Percy exchange a glance. Then, simultaneously, they shove the lights aside and join her at the window.
A woman’s walking down the street, briskly sidestepping the bins out for collection. She’s dressed in Muggle clothes in that mismatched way wizards do when they haven’t had a lot of experience with Muggles; tight pencil skirt paired with an anorak and bright purple Wellies.
“What makes you think she’s your mum?” Nico asks.
Annabeth’s hand is at her throat, touching each bead in turn. “I’ve met her before,” she answers after a long pause. “Her name’s Athena. I didn’t know who she was, then. But now I can make an educated guess.”
“What’s the plan?” Percy asks, because Percy always asks Annabeth what the plan is.
She tilts a shoulder. “They’ve left us alone for awhile. Maybe they come in peace. One option is to let her in.”
“No!” Nico blurts out vehemently. “Annabeth, she erased your father’s memory. She lied and manipulated you. She’s an Olympian -- if she didn’t directly erase Jason and Percy’s memories, or curse Bianca and Leo, then she certainly didn’t stop those who did. She deserves to be in Azkaban with the rest of them!”
“They tore that down,” Percy reminds him.
“Still,” Nico stresses.
Annabeth’s mouth forms the faintest paper cut of a smile. “You’re a Slytherin,” she says to him. “I thought family was supposed to be all-important to you.”
“The family I choose,” Nico answers firmly. “Blood of the covenant is thicker than water of the womb, haven’t you heard?”
It takes a moment, but Annabeth places the phrasing first.
“‘Blood is thicker than water’? That’s what that means?”
Nico nods.
They stand in silence for a minute more, watching Athena’s progress up the street. “Maybe she’ll go right by,” Percy offers hopefully, and as soon as the words are out of his mouth, she turns at the gate. She comes up the walk.
Softly in the house, the wards chime.
Athena pauses on the step. She reaches inside her robes for her wand.
“Are we ready?” Annabeth murmurs, drawing her own. Nico’s is already in his hand, delicate ridges of snakebone digging familiarly into the meat of his palm. Percy slides into position between them, his fingers sliding up their shirts to rest on their spines, the touch of it like a summons, magic answering magic. As long as Percy Jackson has Annabeth or Nico, he will never need a wand.
“We’re ready,” he says.
♆ | Sally stops by at half-three on the Saturday before Christmas, bringing them a spare blanket because of something Percy let slip during one of their weekly dinners. Nico’s the only one home, because Percy had gone to the airport to pick up Frank (who is presumably the reason Sally felt the need to bring an extra blanket, because they are lacking somewhat in supplies for guests. Nico had kind of been hoping they could Transfigure Frank into an owl and he could roost up in the eaves overnight, but that’s probably rude,) and Annabeth’s at the chemist’s.
He invites her in, because Percy’s mum is one of his favorite people in the world and among the last he’ll ever chuck out.
(Let’s be honest, the list of adults that Nico trusts is incredibly short and pretty much only includes Headmistress McGonagall, Artemis, and Sally Jackson.)
Her eyes only flick a little judgmentally over the fact Nico’s still in his pants at half-three, and he puts on the kettle for her and asks if she wants to stay for Piper’s show, which comes on at quarter till?
“Oh!” she says, taking her hands out of the pockets of her too-big jeans. “I remember hearing about that! BBC Radio, right?”
Nico nods. Out of all of them, Piper probably adjusted best to having her wand broken -- I’d kind of intended on returning to the Muggle world immediately after my NEWTs anyway, so it really didn’t cause much fuss in my life, she’d said -- and now hosts her own show, frequently gets to guest-star celebrities, and writes for a wizarding zine that’s all online.
“You’d be surprised, the number of younger witches and wizards who find it easier to adjust to a mostly-Muggle life,” Nico tells her during an advert break, because Sally seems genuinely interested. “Magic is changing. The way we interact with magic is changing. Magic never worked properly on electronics because wizards never bothered to figure out how electronics worked. Maybe someday we’ll invent spells that don’t make them go haywire.”
“Imagine that,” she says mildly, and it takes Nico a moment to realize she’s teasing him: magic never works properly on Sally, so she doesn’t know.
It gives him an idea, though, and when she leaves, he gathers up his courage at the last moment and calls after her as she goes down the steps, “If we went to somebody, would you be our witness?”
She stops. She turns and goes, “Witness for what?”
“About the Olympians.”
She blinks. “What makes you think I know anything about it?”
Nico folds his arms and tries to look less like the kind of bloke who’d spent the morning holding her son’s girlfriend’s hips to the bed. He curls his bare toes against the cement. His wand is still in the kitchen, and Percy and Annabeth will be home any moment.
“Spells don’t stick to you,” he points out. Muggles like Sally are what wizards in power will always underestimate. “They never have. If … if Percy’s dad tried to erase your memories when he left you, it wouldn’t have worked, right?”
And Sally --
The Muggle woman named Sally smiles. She smiles and smiles wider, until she laughs and covers her mouth and nods at him, just once. Then she turns around, walking back out into the busy day.
-
fin