Come Around ☀ Apollo/Hermes

[igrab]

that one apollomes fic i have been trying to finish since 2010

Once he got Rachel settled - which didn't take long at all, she was an independent lady of class who wouldn't let this Oracle thing get to her head - Apollo stepped down off the porch at the big house, shaded his eyes, and watched his baby sink towards the horizon.

The sun, duh. His baby the sun car, rolling on autopilot like it had been for the past few days. He was a busy man, especially the way things had been going, lately.

He looked out over the camp. He could remember a time when almost everyone could claim some sort of Olympian bloodline - a time of heroes and sacrifices and impossible tasks. They'd been so strong, then, but flighty and quarrelsome and petty. They'd been so young.

He could remember a time when having demigods in the world meant panic and unrest and shame. Everything was harsh and bitter. A hero meant staying alive. A hero meant keeping quiet long enough to stay alive.

Now, like all those times, there was change in the air.

He looked out over the camp and he had a glimpse - not really a vision, it was only in his mind's eye, in his imagination. He saw what the camp might look like if it were full. If the houses crowded happily with each other and demigods and sons and daughters of demigods moved freely through the strawberry fields.

It had taken a boy of sixteen to get them all to admit that they had, somewhere along the line, become parents.

Not just gods, or sires, or patrons, they were well and truly parental and had just as much of a right to be. They could love their children because, goddamnit, that's what humans did and most legends say the gods created humans in their image but it was, of course, the other way around.

The very first cabin that anyone ever saw was Apollo's.

Which was exactly how it should be. He liked being first and he liked being seen and that pride, that burning sense of self-worth was exactly what he felt when he looked out over the camp and saw, shining before all others, the cabin made of gold.

His feet, without any orders from his head, were moving purposefully towards it. Oh no, no, no, he thought. Turn around and walk away, right now. That little display up there with Percy and all the gods and the feet-shuffling and and the getting-shown-up, that was all the fatherly guilt he needed for the next few years. He'd even done as ordered and claimed the last of his children - the girls in Dublin, and New Jersey. But they didn't need the camp. He'd been watching. He wasn't an awful father, he just -

He stood at the door to Cabin Seven, and had no idea what to say.

He could name every single one of his children. Every one. He could name their talents and their skills and their favorite bands and what bedtime story they loved when they were kids. He wasn't an awful father, he just -

☀
The light was fading from Mount Olympus when Hermes came to find him, in the Gods' garage.

"Where were you?" he started in, immediately, not even bothering to take in the details - Apollo was sitting on an upturned bucket, a cloth in his hand to buff headlights that didn't need buffing, but he wasn't moving, and his head leaned so far forward that his hair formed a perfect shroud around his face. "That was kind of an important meeting, you know. Hades has Daedalus, the Labyrinth's collapsed, Zeus isn't sure there's - "

"Hermes." Apollo sighed and wrapped the cloth around in a twist, balled it up tight in his hand. "Seriously? Now is not the time."

He felt rather than saw the way the lighthearted air condensed around them, how Hermes' lips pressed to a thin line and his hand clenched, in a strange sort of parody, around his phone.

"I'm sorry, sir princess, when is the right time to tell you how fucking pissed Zeus is?"

"Zeus is? I couldn't give a fuck about Zeus, and anyway, you're the one here yelling at me about it."

That wasn't what he really wanted to say, not at all. But the words stuck in his throat and he latched onto the lesser pain, because maybe, maybe it would make the greater one not so bad.

He'd hit a nerve, of course. He'd been aiming for it, and he always hit his mark.

Hermes swallowed, heavily. "I'm not going to pretend I'm not angry. But that's got nothing to do with this."

It didn't. Apollo knew that. He sank into the ache like a salvation.

"You keep telling yourself that."

It was a good line. It left the meaning completely up to the listener. In this case, he could hear the rage build up like thunderclouds.

"No! I won't! Why does everything have to be about May?"

Apollo threw down the rag and shot to his feet, whipping around to glare at the other god full in the face. "It's not! For fuck's sake, Hermes, get your head out of your ass! Not everything is about you!"

He looked like he'd been hit in the stomach - a little sick and mostly confused. "Then..."

"My son is dead."

This wasn't happening, this was exactly how this conversation wasn't supposed to go, but somewhere along the line Apollo had started derailing. He wasn't saying this. He wasn't thinking this. It wasn't even happening at all.

The worst part was standing there and watching his face, unable to look away, as shock replaced confusion, then pity replaced shock, and anguish flew in to settle like a paperweight, deep in the center of it all. "...I'm-"

"You're not." He wasn't fucking sorry; he didn't know what it was like. His son had only run off to join the dark side, his son was still out there, somewhere. Luke was, if nothing else, alive.

"I am. I am sorry for your loss, Apollo."

"Just... leave."

He could have blamed Hermes for Lee's death - it was the oldest of traditions, using demigods as pawns and excuses and blaming the father for sins of the son. He could have. It would have been entirely expected.

But the only thing he felt was empty.

☀
"Dad?"

"Kayla," he whispered, his voice as dry as paper. Everyone was staring at him - shocked, to be sure, and no room for anything more.

Kayla would be twelve in three months, he thought.

"...I wrote something for Mike," she said in her small, shy voice.

"A poem?" he asked. That's what she was best at.

But to his surprise she shook her head, pigtails swinging. "A song."

"Hey, hey, hey!" One of her brothers jerked out of his shock and flashed a familiar smile. "Don't go taking all the credit! I wrote the music."

"Did not! You barely drafted the melody!"

"We all pitched in on the instrumentation!"

Apollo caught the eyes of his oldest - now-oldest - son in the back of the room, his feet tucked under him, thumbing the pages of a book. Will Solace smiled, then addressed his siblings. "Come on, you guys, just admit it - it was a collaborative effort."

A chorus of dissensions broke out, and Apollo couldn't help the smile that spread out brightly over his face. "Why don't you show me," he murmured, and that was something they could all agree on.

☀
One song turned into two, then three, and soon they were all clambering over each other to trot out their latest creative works. Even the ones who weren't particularly inclined to the arts stayed to listen, and Apollo could tell that this was the first time in a long time that they'd all done something together like this. He should have come by a long time ago.

He wished that Lee and Mike could've been with them, too.

The last traces of sunlight were fading away when he found himself on the high back porch with Will, alone. He was looking at him. Apollo swallowed and shuffled his feet and cleared his throat and wished very fervently that he was somewhere else, while at the same time, knowing that he utterly deserved this.

"You're not much of a dad," Will pointed out, one eyebrow raised.

"I know." He wished he was good at this sort of this. Hermes would know what to say, he thought, automatically, and just as automatically pushed it away.

Will was picked at some of the gold paint on the railing, chipping it. It looked like it had been repainted several times; probably for the same reason. "But..." and he wouldn't look at him, and Apollo felt a twist of sympathy and kinship as he realized that Will was probably thinking the same things. Except, not about Hermes. Who he wasn't thinking about.

"...But you're still ours, you know?"

He did know.

"So, I guess what I'm saying is..."

Will looked up, and a smile split his face, suddenly lightning up every feature. He was mostly average-looking compared to his siblings, taking more after his mom in that regard, but when he smiled - oh, it was something else.

"...I wouldn't have it any other way."

☀
Some of the gods thought that keeping their distance would make it hurt less, when their children inevitably passed to the Underworld. Hermes knew better. It only made it worse when you didn't know them - it only made you guilty.

He stepped out of Cabin Eleven feeling tired, and irritated, and worn. He should have felt none of those things. He should have felt all warm and fuzzy; he loved his children, he loved them so much and they all understood that nothing about Luke was simple and really, all they had was each other. He should have felt changed, somehow. He felt like he should feel changed.

He was halfway across the quad when he saw a spill of bright light from one of the cabins across the way - a door opening, and then closing.

Cabin Seven. Apollo. It was kind of hard to mistake.

He stopped dead, his heart doing little ridiculous gymnastics while simultaneously shattering apart and informing him that he should run, as fast as he could, in the other direction.

Instead, he waited.

Apollo looked... old. Hermes knew, without a doubt, that he'd been inside that cabin all evening doing the exact same thing Hermes had - smiling, reassuring, bonding, pretending things would eventually be all right.

The worst part about immortality, he thought, was how nothing ever healed.

He waited for Apollo's face to harden over, for him to walk away like he was the only person to ever feel pain, the only one to ever love, selfish and immature and convinced of his own righteousness.

He didn't. He strolled over, hands in his pockets, something in his eyes that Hermes was hard-pressed to identify. For a god of communication, he was lousy as reading faces.

"Hey," Apollo said.

"Hey," Hermes replied.

They fell into step and wandered away from the camp, silent by mutual agreement, or Hermes thought. He never really forgot his first impression of Apollo - older, smarter, stylish and grown-up and beautiful. He had it all together, he knew exactly who he was and what he stood for while Hermes was still frantically struggling to define himself. Even now, he felt like he was tripping every other step, but Apollo was grace in every line.

"I want to take you somewhere."

"Where?" Hermes asked, warily.

A flash of a smile in the night. "You'll like it."

He wanted to say, 'You don't know that,' but he did. He wanted to say, 'I've been everywhere', but he hadn't. He wanted to say, 'I won't like it,' but Apollo knew him better than anyone and it would be a blatant lie.

He sighed, instead. "All right."

Apollo linked their arms together, and Hermes felt himself recoil. "I haven't forgiven you yet," he muttered.

"I haven't apologized."

☀
Tokyo.

"Tokyo?"

Apollo grinned. "It's my favorite place in the world."

"That's what you said about Venice," Hermes huffed.

"Well, that was before I came here."

Hermes shaded his eyes and looked. Motion, color, people - they'd dropped in right in the center of Shibuya, and everything was a mass riot of energy and life. He could feel the cell phone signals buzzing through him, snatches of conversation and endless waves of text, information flowing and multiplying faster than he'd ever seen.

It was insane.

He loved it.

"Come on," Apollo murmured, and grabbed his hand. "We're going to a store you'll like."

Hermes had never been to Japan at all. Of all the old pantheons to last this long, the Japanese was one of the strongest, and with the constant push farther and farther west, none of the Olympians had really had a chance to get to know their very distant cousins. He really should have come sooner. There was so much to learn here.

For example, this store. Hermes could read the neon kanji easily - it was a phone store, and it wasn't just any phone store, it was amazing. He immediately had to play with every single test display, abuse every single function, and where were these phones all his life?

They walked out with three different models, and the store clerk had looked at them strangely but didn't comment. It probably wasn't even the strangest thing he'd seen that day, let alone in his time. Hermes couldn't imagine any tourist not being enthralled.

"Come on!" Apollo shouted, and Hermes raced to catch up.

☀
Tokyo made him feel sixteen, but for all the right reasons this time. The last time he'd been here he was hiding, too; now, with Hermes by his side, it felt like a new city altogether. He showed him shops and arcades and more phone stores and a maid cafe and hey guess what, more phone stores! Apollo couldn't stop smiling. On one hand, he should've brought him here ages ago. On the other, until now, there had been too much between them, again. They needed the start of a new era to shake them up.

The light was slanting down across the buildings when they reached a grove of cherry trees - technically too late for them to be in bloom, but hey, look at that, they were blooming. Hermes gave him a puzzled look and Apollo just shook his head, took his hand.

"Come on," he murmured. "There's someone I want you to meet."

In a little meadow tucked between pink-blossomed trees, the sun goddess of Nippon was sleeping. She was on her back, belly up, with four white paws in her air and her tail curled in the grass. As they watched, one of her back feet twitched.

"Oi," Apollo muttered. "Get up, lazybones."

The white wolf blinked her eyes open, yawned, and in one seamless movement, pushed herself up to a sitting position, fully human. She had a bounding corona of silky black hair and voluminous white robes, edged and embroidered with red and gold. "Moooorning."

"It's like. Five. In the afternoon."

"Still morning." Amaterasu's jaw cracked with a ferocious yawn. "Mmm, it's good to see you again, Apollo-san. And who is this?"

"Hermes," the god himself answered, his face unreadable - like he wasn't sure if he'd be causing an international incident if he laughed. "Greek god of communication, travel, thieves, and merchants."

"And a minor god of poetry," Apollo quipped, which made Hermes give him a Really Weird Look - did he really need to say that?

Haha, of course he did.

Amaterasu's eyes lit up.

"Does he like haikus?!" she asked with unbridled excitement, and Hermes gave in, put his hands over his face, and groaned.

☀
They watched the sun set from the top of the Tokyo Tower, side by side, almost but not quite touching.

Apollo waited for the last few rays to fade.

"I'm sorry," he said, soft and intimate. He could feel Hermes tense beside him.

"Okay," he muttered. Swallowed. Took in a deep breath. "…What are you sorry for?"

It was an old conversation, not as old as time, for they were both young gods when compared to their brethren. But old enough. Hermes had been hours old when he started pulling Apollo's pigtails; what they had would never be stable, but it would always be.

"For my head being so far up my ass it actually created a time-space paradox. For thinking the worst of you. For holding on when I should've let go. For not listening."

It was always, always the same. For not listening.

☀
"I'm sorry," Hermes said desperately, and Apollo didn't want to hear it, but he was too tired to turn him away. They both were, worn to the bone from fighting, fighting - why any of the gods had thought to go up against Achilles, let alone the one that had always known him to be marked with destiny - Apollo just didn't know. (Though if he was being honest with himself, which he usually wasn't, he knew exactly why. Going up against Zeus was even more stupid than opposing Achilles - the hero, at least, was mortal. And no one would dare question Zeus's blind dedication to the Trojans. They were Ganymede's people, after all.)

"What are you sorry for," Apollo said, his voice dull and uninterested. I am tired, he thought, as he had been thinking for years now. I am so tired of this war.

Hermes put his arms around his shoulders, and for the first time in ten years, Apollo felt the spark of something alive, deep in his chest. He moved slowly, by degrees - his head turned, one fraction, then another. His shoulders shifted. His neck curved and then his face was pressed into Hermes's chest, familiar in all the ways that mattered.

"I'm sorry for not being there," the god whispered. "I'm sorry I doubted you, I'm sorry - Pol. Apollon. I'm sorry for not listening."

He had cried, then, hot gold tears that left raw red tracks on the chest that Hermes wore, but neither of them moved to pull away, only clung closer, held tighter. It was all he'd wanted, all this time, after so long throwing everything he had in a futile attempt to avoid the inevitable. After having his priestesses taken from him, his temples defiled. He just wanted to feel like he wasn't alone.

"Let's take that bastard down," Apollo muttered, for he knew what the Athenians' next move was going to be. He'd always known, where this terrible war was headed.

Hermes rested the side of his head against Apollo's, their temples touching. "Together?" he asked.

"Together."

☀
Hermes sighed and leaned over, bridging the space between them. It was useless to say things like 'you never listen', because of course not. They were gods; even if they changed, it wouldn't stop history from repeating itself. And this part of their history, their cycle, was the part Hermes liked best.

"You're lucky I love you," he murmured, watching the stars come out. Apollo's arm came up to wrap around his shoulders; it felt like being blanketed

"I'm the luckiest," the god agreed. "The luckiest being in the world, god or mortal."

Hermes swallowed, felt his voice go small and uncertain. "Even after losing so much?"

It was a question he desperately wanted to know the answer to. Even after all this time, every death still hurt, and as angry as it made him when Apollo dealt with it in ways he couldn't understand - brooding, lashing out, running away to Japan, making really terrible immature jokes and pretending like nothing was wrong - at least Apollo was dealing. Hermes, for all the miles he put beneath his winged, sandaled feet, had never been good with moving on.

Apollo thought before he spoke, choosing his words carefully. It was one of the many things Hermes did, truly, love about him - they were craftsmen, the both of them. Apollo's gifts with poetry gave his speech such beauty, when he chose to use it; and music was the means by which the soul was meant to communicate. Like this, in synergy, they were perfect.

"Mortality - the knowledge that life is fleeting - that is what makes life precious in the first place. Without death, time means so little, because nothing is unique, everything can be rebuilt, redone. Death hurts because we feel the loss of the uncertain future. And the mortals… no." He swallowed, licked his lips. Hermes was watching him, golden profile painted with pink and purple shadows, everything slowly going silver as the moon rose.

"Our children," he said, and Hermes felt his chest constrict. "Our children remind us what it means to be alive. So yes, even after losing so much, losing what feels like everything - I am lucky. Because I will have the time to get to know even more of them. Because I'm the god of prophecies, and humans still surprise me. Because Will Solace isn't going to do great things the way Percy Jackson has, but he's going to make a world of difference to the one person who really needs it. Because every time someone I care about dies, I remember how easy it is, and how lost I'd be, if anything ever happened to you."

It was a night that was not special in terms of the big picture. It was a night that would happen again, in another city, at another time, with another apology - they were gods, and nothing had changed. But it was also the most special night of all, because it was happening, and they were gods. Every moment of grief was as sharp as the first, but so, too, were the moments of joy. Hermes didn't think in terms of forever, he didn't see their existence as a finite stretch of time. There was just this night, these two beings with endless and immortal souls, and a love that wrote no stories, that was absent from the pages of myth.

It was theirs, you see. Even gods had the need for something to call their own.

so high tonight
and i don't feel like coming down
i could lie to you all my days
but you're the one
you're the one

and i'm a fool
for waiting so long
to let you know

come around, come around, come around, come around to me
there's something in between
you and i, come around, come around to me