Fic: Four Times Percy Saw a Daemon Settle, Percy Jackson/His Dark Materials

[antistar_e]

Title: Four Times Percy Saw a Daemon Settle (And the One Daemon That Never Did)
Fandom: Percy Jackson and the Olymians/His Dark Materials
Characters/Pairings: Percy, Sally, Annabeth, ensemble (all canon pairings implied, otherwise gen)
Summary: It was just a part of having ADHD, Percy's mom said, that his daemon has as short an attention span as he does, and changes shape as often as he looks at her. He shouldn't worry about it.
Word Count: 11,200

For lovestories. Most of this fic can be blamed/attributed to her. Cheers, bb!

For those of you who aren't familiar with the HDM verse, you don't really have to be. The AN to this fic pretty much explains everything about daemons that you need to know for this one. I think the only thing it doesn't mention is Dust: it connects planes of existence; the essence daemons are made of. I'm pretty much just using it synonymously with Mist, here. Those of you who've read HDM will read this and know immediately what bit of HDM canon I tossed out the window.

Spoilers for everything up to The Last Olympian.

... this was supposed to just be a ficlet ;_; I haven't written in so long.



i.

The problem with the Nintendo SP, Percy concludes with the wisdom of all twelve-year-old boys who don't like paying attention in class, is that you can't see the screen with the little built-in light is off, but if you turn it on, then the teacher can see you.

He hisses between his teeth as his screen blacks out before resetting, and he's stuck all the way back on level one. "I hate not seeing where I'm going," he complains under his breath, and uses the momentary pause before the level begins to stick his hand underneath his sweater, scratching at an itch on his collarbone -- his skin is all over in goosebumps, so it hurts more than it's a relief. The sweater isn't doing much to keep him warm: any parochial school kid can tell you that uniform sweaters are really just designed to make you shiver more.

"I don't think you should do it, Percy," Yalena replies in a whisper. He doesn't need to be told what she's talking about, and it has nothing to do with Billy Sturgis's SP that Billy won't notice is missing from his duffel bag, on account of him showing off his DS at every available break.

She's nestled in between the pages of his textbook, an earthworm, waving her head at him in a recriminatory manner. "Of course I'm going to do it," he tells her. "I have to. And change into something else, okay? I don't like it when I can't see your face."

She hops down into his lap, obediently shifting midair into a kangaroo mouse. "You're going to get into trouble," she goes, bouncing a little on his thigh. "And you can't afford to get into any more trouble! They're this close to expelling you, Percy -- they'll do it for sure if they catch you!"

"I know that!" he breathes out, frustrated. "But I've got to do it! The teachers aren't gonna do it for us, and I hate it. Last time, her daemon bit Grover's. Bit her, Yalena."

"I was there," she replies, soft. "Nancy's just a bully, Percy. She's not worth getting expelled for."

"Yeah, but if someone doesn't show her who's boss, then she's just going to keep picking on Grover and that's not right."

"You could at least find a way to do it that doesn't involve --" Yalena cuts off with a yelp, just as Mrs. Dodd's starling daemon goes streaking underneath the desk, snatching her up in his claws. Percy cries out at the shock of it, dropping the SP and only managing to bring his knees together in time to catch it before it clatters to the floor and gives him away.

"Percy Jackson," goes Mrs. Dodds, standing above him with this look on her face like Wile E. Coyote just before it drops an anvil on the Roadrunner. Yalena changes into a turtle, too heavy for the starling to hang on to: he drops her, and she immediately pulls back into her shell. "Since you and your daemon seem to be discussing something of more importance than math, how about you go on up to the board and answer number three for us, hmm?"

Percy grits his teeth. He hates Mrs. Dodds, and it has nothing (all right, mostly nothing) to do with the fact she's horrible at teaching pre-algebra: right off the bat, she punishes kids by having her daemon beat up on theirs. He really wishes he could just let Yalena snarl at them the way they want to, but at Yancy, not controlling your daemon's enough to get a detention, and Percy's this close to expulsion anyway.

Glaring at her, he stands -- stiffly, because it takes some maneuvering to stand up and get the SP stored inside the desk at the same time -- and marches up to the board. He hears a scuffle as Yalena changes shape again, crawling up his shoulder as a prickly-clawed gecko of some sort. He picks up a piece of chalk and stabs it against the board with more vehemence than it requires, grinding his teeth. He bets Nancy Bofett's going to grow up to be exactly like Mrs. Dodds. Good for them.

It's about then that the problem begins to swim in front of his eyes, twos changing places with sevens and nines flipping with sixes like trapeze artists.

"Yalena, help me," he whispers out of the corner of his mouth. "What does it say?"

Mrs. Dodds narrows her eyes, and when Percy glances over his shoulder, past Grover's worried face and Freyeda eyeing the fire alarm contemplatively from her perch on one of his crutches, he swears, for a second, that Mrs. Dodds's starling daemon blurs in front of his eyes just like the numbers, like he's got speed lines, rubbed away into nothing, and it makes shivers erupt all over his skin that has nothing to do with crappy school sweaters.

After lights out, he sneaks out of his dorm and pads as quietly as he can down the hallways to the gymnasium, Yalena keeping pace with his stride as well as with her steady stream of protests.

"Just because the class bully challenges you to a midnight duel doesn't mean you immediately take her up on it!" she goes, as they cut through the dark cafeteria, the chairs all upended on the tables so their legs crisscrossed like swords on a coat of arms. "Seriously, didn't you learn anything from watching Harry Potter?"

"I don't think I'm in any danger of meeting a three-headed dog," he tells her dryly. "Like, ever."

The gym, when he gets there, is eerie quiet, shadows obliterating the rows of the bleachers and sunk deep in the giant overhead lights. Nancy isn't here. He snorts, striding out to the midpoint line to wait for her.

He's only been standing there for five minutes, drumming his fingers against his thigh and Yalena nervously flitting from shape to shape, trying to judge which one would be best for this altercation, when the exit doors slam open, spilling moonlight across the shiny veneer of the gym floor. He spins around, just as Mrs. Dodds screeches something wordless, like a banshee from a movie.

"Shit," goes Percy, which at twelve is as severe as his cussing vocabulary goes, wondering what the hell she was doing here -- she wasn't one of the teachers living at the school full-round; the ones who usually caught Percy when he was up and wandering around. She's just a substitute pre-algebra teacher, hasn't even been around for two weeks yet -- when his voice dries up in his throat, leaving it with a feeling like sandpaper.

He remembers, when he was little, the kinds of stories they used to tell each other in preschool around Halloween, about ghoulies and beasties and the world's most frightening things. One story in particular stands out, about the woman with the black ribbon tied around her neck: the only thing she ever asked of the man who loved her was that he never remove the ribbon, so of course he did exactly that one night as she slept ("what happened? What happened? Did her head fall off?" "What? No? Ewww, that's gross!") and her daemon disappeared. Everybody squealed in horror. Without their daemons, humans aren't humans.

"Not necessarily," Percy's mother told him when he relayed the tale, snuggled into her side on the sofa with a bowl of popcorn and The Aristocats in the VHS player. "There are ... people who don't have daemons --" and his head jerked up, eyes widening in disbelief like she'd just told him dragons were real. "I just hope you never have to meet them."

And now, with Mrs. Dodds striding towards him with absolutely no sign of her starling daemon in sight -- Percy wanted to dive behind the bleachers and hide there until she went away.

"I'm dreaming," he gasps, almost tripping over himself in his haste to back away from her, Yalena howling beside him, all recriminations about them getting caught forgotten. "This has to be a dream."

"It's you!" goes Mrs. Dodds. "It has to be you. You're the sniveling, conniving, half-blood thief. Give it to me!" she stretches a hand out towards him, and it might be a trick of the shadows, but he swears her nails are four inches long, tapered down to a clawed tip.

"I don't know what you're talking about!" he blurts out, his daemon abruptly a porcupine with every single spine standing out straight. "See, this -- this is what too much math will do to you, Mrs. Dodds," he stammers, mouthing off on autopilot. "Algebra is very bad for your health!"

Mrs. Dodds smiles at him, thin and poisonous, and then she launches herself forwards, way way way too fast, and Percy doesn't even have time to feel the wind of her passing before she has her horrible taloned hands on his daemon, wrenching her away from him and springing eleven feet into the air.

Percy screams. It is by far the worst thing he has ever felt in his life. Worse than that time he slipped from the platform on the subway and fractured his leg bone in three places, worse than when Smelly Gabe brought the flu home over Christmas and promptly gave it to him and his mom. It's an immediate, searing pain in his bones, in his head, in his heart, everywhere at once, making stars dance across the black of his vision. He's on his knees without feeling it.

He registers, as if from a very far distance, that Mrs. Dodds has changed shape: now she looks like something straight from some late-night sci-fi thing, feathers framing her face and wings pounding to keep her aloft, fangs protruding from her lips in a horrible grimace and her claws vice-like around Yalena, who's screaming just as loud as Percy is and clawing at Mrs. Dodds's wrists where they're exposed from underneath her black biker jacket.

"Give me the lightning bolt, Percy Jackson," she says, low and horrible. "And I just might not crush her lungs."

Percy doesn't have any breath to reply. He gasps once, but that's it, because the next second, a barnyard owl swoops in from nowhere, raking at Mrs. Dodds's eyes. She shrieks and drops Yalena, who lands on all four feet and streaks towards Percy. He scrambles at the gym floor until he gets his hands on her, dragging her close as possible. She whimpers into his neck, a housecat with her ears flat against her head.

Mrs. Dodds swoops through the air above his head, giving chase to the owl and batting at him like a fly. Behind him, he hears Nancy Bofett yell out in pain.

Percy hates her guts, but with the memory of that thing's hands all over his daemon still shivering in his muscles, he knows it's the last thing he would wish on her. As if reading his mind, Yalena springs from his arms.

"Sven!" she calls out to Nancy's daemon. "Sven! Change into something really heavy! Quick!"

He wheels around just as Mrs. Dodds gains the last bit of ground on him, wings beating soundlessly over her head -- and he changes shape. In the dark, Percy can't immediately tell what he is, but he lands on the monster like a ton of bricks. Together, they plummet to the basketball court, and Yalena goes bounding straight over to them, far enough away that Percy feels it like missing the last step on a flight of stairs. She becomes an adder just as Mrs. Dodds starts to untangle herself from Sven, her feathers caught in his horns, and she strikes, lightning-fast.

It takes one moment, then two, for the poison to work; Nancy shouting expletives and Sven trying to trample their teacher, and then she ... she explodes in this swirl of golden light and particles, like the sun highlighting dust motes in late afternoon.

The last thing he sees before he passes out is Yalena's triumphant face, returning to him.

Hours later, but still before anyone in school would even dream of getting up, Percy sits up in one of the Yancy infirmary beds and asks Nancy what, exactly, she saw, because surely he hadn't seen his pre-algebra teacher grow feathers, fly around the gym shrieking about lightning, and then get vaporized, did he?

She frowns at the yellowing paint on the ceiling. "I ..." she starts, her voice small for only a moment before her expression hardens. "Mrs. Dodds was hurting your daemon," she says firmly, like it's the only thing she's certain of. "I know that's not right, no matter what. Besides," she adds, lip curling up into a sneer. "You were practically bawling like a baby. It wasn't like you were going to be the hero, there."

Percy is met with the familiar urge to punch her in the face and, too tired to do anything about it, looks at Sven instead. "He hasn't changed," he notes, resolving to think about Mrs. Dodds some other time. Yalena's the kangaroo mouse again, tucked in the collar of his sweater, and unconsciously, he reaches up to make sure she's there. Her heart beats reassuringly fast against his fingertips.

"Yeah," goes Nancy, tone suggesting she thinks whatever brain cells he has ran off to Tijuana and got their car hijacked, but it's half-hearted at best. She reaches her hand out, and Sven bows his head into it. His horns are huge and curled back, looking rough like fingernails, and his fur is white, streaked with sterling silver. "He's not going to change again. I can feel it."

"A ram," Yalena offers sleepily, answering Percy's unasked question.

He opens his mouth to say something -- probably something stupid, like, "wow, that's gonna be kind of hard to fit into the girl's bathroom, isn't it?" and earn himself another challenge to a midnight duel -- when Mr. Brunner wheels into the infirmary, his face haggard and grey like he's been up all night yelling at someone.

"Percy," he says in his deep, steady voice. His daemon's curled in his lap, watching Percy with lamplit eyes. "I think it's time we had a talk."

"It happens sometimes," is what Sally Jackson says later, when they're on the road to ... wherever it is they're going, she still hasn't told him yet, and he finally remembers to tell her about Nancy and Sven. He's crushed in between her and Grover in the cab of her truck, Yalena and Freyeda and his mother's daemon sitting in the truck bed, keeping a watchful eye out on the unlit highway roads. His mom had wanted to take Gabe's Camaro ("it's faster!") but there was no way they were going to be able to fit Emory in the backseat. "When something traumatic happens in a child's life, their daemon will settle prematurely. I guess the shock of killing Mrs. Dodds -- or whatever it was she saw through the Dust -- was enough to do it for her."

He hears the catch in her voice and looks at her sideways, only now realizing that he's never asked his mother when Emory settled: it's too immediately strange to him, the idea that his mother's daemon has ever been anything than what he is now; too big for doorways sometimes and definitely too big for the Camaro's backseat, but big enough to intimidate Gabe's smaller, nasty Tasmanian devil when she got pushy, and when Percy was younger he used to fall asleep clinging to the soft fur of Emory's belly, thinking it'd be so cool if Emory had a pouch like the girl kangaroos, but he's never really thought about how he came to be the shape he was.

There are a lot of things he doesn't get to ask his mother, but as it turns out, the incident at Yancy Academy with the Fury and the class bully ranks nowhere near the most traumatic thing that's ever happened to him.

2.

He doesn't learn the name of Annabeth's daemon until they're in that amusement park in Denver, springing a trap meant for Ares and his girlfriend with the chihuahua daemon, who he later learns is the goddess Aphrodite. There are red-eyed mechanical spiders everywhere and a Tunnel of Love which, when he's not about to die, will have Percy thinking some very uncharitable things about the deplorable state of Olympian marriages, and Annabeth's as frightened as he's ever seen her.

"Ned! Ned!" she cries out, and her daemon is immediately in the seat with her, a burly anteater with hands like shovels, batting away spiders as they get too close. Annabeth buries one hand in his fur, visibly drawing strength and flashing out with her dagger.

His and Grover's daemons are falcons, whirling together in the air above their heads, and Percy can see through Yalena's eyes the drop their log is going to take. "We have to jump!" he yells to Annabeth, and she nods, determination flooding into her face, a leave it to me more clear than if she'd said it out loud.

"So," he says later, when they're on their way to Los Angelos by way of horrific-smelling truck. "Ned, huh?"

Her cheeks warm. "Nedemurell," she offers in a low voice, and Percy sits up all the way, pulling straw out of his hair.

"Nice to meet you, Ned," he says to the daemon, a pygmy owl pressed close to Annabeth's skin, peering out at him from underneath her ear. He tries not to feel like he just won something, a hard-earned token or another of Annabeth's trust, but he can tell by the look in her eyes that it's showing through anyway, so he distracts her by asking her about the fear of spiders thing.

Ned's different than a lot of daemons that Percy's met. He doesn't change shape much at all: when he first met Annabeth, he thought she was a lot older than she actually was, simply because her daemon was the same every time he saw him, like an adult's. It was rather baffling, being told that Ned stays like that because he wants to: he can't imagine what it would be like to look over his shoulder at Yalena and see the same thing every day. Granted, a lot of Percy's teachers called Yalena "ostentatious," whatever that meant, simply because she liked to change shape as often as she did, but Percy's mom told him not to worry about it, it was just part of being ADHD, that his daemon had as short an attention span as he did.

Annabeth, he learns quickly, likes being the exception to everything, and she is in this: when he sees Ned, he's usually an owl of some kind, which is kind of the default shape for the Athena cabin (if they weren't so OCD, he'd bet the floor of the cabin would be covered in feathers, like, all the time.) When he's not an owl, he's a monkey, fiddling with the pieces of Annabeth's model cities until she holds out her hand for them. It's nice having an extra set of hands, too, when they're invisible under her cap and trying to sneak into somewhere.

"I'm Percy," he makes the mistake of telling her, the first morning he wakes up after fighting off the Minotaur. "And this is Yalena," he nods to where his daemon is lying flat on his chest, still the joey she's been since they remembered what happened. Percy feels it as a ache low in his stomach. He misses his mother more than he has words for.

Annabeth just looks at him flatly. "You're quick to let everyone know her, aren't you?" she goes, not quite a sneer but close enough to get Percy's hackles up. Her daemon's head swivels around 180 degrees, hooting balefully. "Be more careful with who you go around showing your soul to, okay?"

Camp Half-Blood is a really weird place for a lot of reasons, including but not limited to: the fact the cleaning harpies like to munch on people who leave their dirty socks out, the bald eagle sitting in the pine tree at the camp boundary without a human, which is almost as unnatural to see as a human without a daemon (later, Freyeda tells Yalena that the pine tree used to be a daughter of Zeus, which, okay, only ranks partially up there on the top ten strangest things Percy's been told,) and Mr. D, the camp director, who he swears he once saw pacing the forest edge before breakfast one morning, a leopard keeping pace at his heels, even though every time he sees Mr. D around camp, his sloth daemon's hanging limply from his shoulders. ("He's a god, Percy," Grover tells him, like this explains everything, like how an adult can have a daemon that changes shape.)

The Ares cabin makes his life hell. A dozen or so lumberjack-jock hybrids and five pinch-faced girls, Doberman and Rotteweiler daemons snarling around their feet, all managing to be exactly where Percy doesn't want them. The oldest, Clarisse, introduces herself to him his first day by sticking his head down a toilet, her pitbull backing Yalena into one of the other stalls, mocking her lowly as she flickers from form to form in her fright, machine-gun fast.

Percy, who hates the sound of her screaming and has heard it too many times in the past few days, makes the toilet explode.

The only person who doesn't treat him like a leper for being a son of Poseidon (even the camp of freaks think he's a freak, isn't he special) is Luke, the oldest kid in the cabins, and his dingo daemon, Rhondi. Both of them have a rangy, underfed look to them; the scar marring Luke's face is mirrored by a patch of diseased fur on her's, but it's not off-putting. On the contrary, Luke's got one of the nicest, easiest smiles of anyone he's ever known (and he can say that without it being weird, because he's just a kid and nobody else likes him, come on,) and the only thing he says when Percy comes back to the Hermes cabin to pack up his stuff is, "so you're really the prophecy kid? Tough luck," and claps him on the back in a masculine, sympathetic manner that has him feeling marginally better.

But it's only a few days later, when he and Yalena are up and about and wandering around in the middle of the night because it's too weird in cabin three by themselves and it almost seems worth it to be eaten by the harpies in order to get away from that awful silence, they spot the familiar silhouette of Luke, hair frizzy and Rhondi a slim shape at his side, disappearing into the battle arena.

"Follow them!" Yalena squeaks, eagerly fluttering around his head as a big-eared bat. She barely manages to keep her voice down.

"Shhh," he admonishes her, catching her in between his hands and holding her there. She twists her head and bites his knuckles reproachfully with tiny fangs, hissing, "yeah, because I'm the one always getting us into trouble!"

They sneak into the arena. Luke's on the other side by the time they get there, tugging his armor on over his head one-handed, his sword held loosely in the other. Rhondi slinks around him in a slow circle, before she sighs audibly, and abruptly, in the next breath, is a gila monster, her black scaly skin gleaming in the dust.

Percy doesn't even have time to breathe out, "what --" before she's changing again, a kestrel, swooping up to Luke's shoulder and coming to settle there as a bush baby, tail swishing and huge, luminous eyes swinging around to take in everything.

"She still isn't settled?" Yalena whispers, shocked, and Percy opens his palms up to share her wide-eyed surprise, because Luke is at least eighteen years old. Even the siblings closest to him in age have daemons in permanently settled shapes -- Connor Stoll and his chirpy brown-and-white bird daemon whose exactly species Percy doesn't really know, and Travis Stoll with his ratel daemon. It's a little strange if you're over fifteen and your daemon hasn't picked something yet.

"Do you think --" Percy begins, but it's right then that Luke materializes above them, leaning his weight on his sword and raising an eyebrow at them.

"Rhondi thought she heard someone following us," he says cheerfully. "Come on out and have a seat. It has to be a little cramped down there, guys."

"You're not mad?" Percy goes, standing up. "I mean, about," he gestures at the daemon, who blinks back at him in an black, eerie way.

"What, that you've discovered our big, dark secret?" Luke gives him a dry look. "Not really. It gets annoying having people look at us funny, so we decided pretending would be easier. Gods forbid you don't do what you're supposed to when you're supposed to," he adds, and Percy gets the feeling they aren't really talking about daemons.

After that, the episode with the lightning bolt, the pit of Tartarus, and the cursed winged shoes doesn't really come as a surprise.

"He was really torn up about it," Yalena says to him when it's all over and they're tucked in bed at home, the sounds of Sally moving around the apartment and her daemon knocking things over reassuringly steady on the other side of his door. She nestles down against his ear, licking it to make sure he's awake. "That's why his daemon was the way she was."

"Don't make excuses for him," Percy replies, more sharply than he intends. She looks at him sideways like she knows what he's trying not to think about. "They were our friends."

Good does come out of the whole thing, though: when Percy goes back to camp, this time to stay for the rest of the (hopefully uneventful) summer, Grover comes trotting over as soon as he passes Thalia's tree, so excited he's almost tripping over his own hooves.

"I got my searcher's license!" he crows, thumbing some kind of badge on his jacket that Percy can't even make out, on account of Grover's fingers being all over it. "I'm official!"

"Really?" he goes, grinning, because even if he's new to this whole thing, he knows this is a big deal to his friend. "Congratulations, man! That's great!"

Freyeda buzzes around Grover's head, and Yalena settles back onto her haunches to watch her. "Hmmm, Grover," she says, thoughtful. "Do you think ..."

Something in her voice makes them both pause, just as his daemon comes to perch on the nubbly end of one of his horns, and shifts, becoming a giant beetle, big-horned and glossy black. She flicks her wings, just once, and grumbles self-consciously, "What are you gaping at?"

Grover's jaw shuts with an audible click, and, if possible, he beams even wider, eyes scrunching up into crescent shapes. "You, because you're wonderful," he reaches up to pick her up, letting her scuttle up his wrist. "You're going to stay like this, aren't you?"

Another flick of her wings, and Percy's known the two of them long enough to know that's an affirmative.

He watches them, remembering how, right after he learned about Grover's origins, he'd squinted really hard at Freyeda, trying to see if she would blur the way Mrs. Dodds's starling had done. Catching him at it, Grover gave him a deeply insulted look, like Percy had just compared him to Perez Hilton or something. ("Monsters don't have daemons, Percy," he explained. "Dust makes it look like they do to mortals, but half-bloods like you and some mortals like your mother can see through the illusion, and monsters never have daemons because they don't have souls. It's really hard to kill something that doesn't have a soul. I'm a satyr. We're different. Our daemons are real. Centaurs and harpies, too." "What about the dryads and the naiads?" "What, them? They are daemons. A dryad is a tree's daemon, and a naiad is the daemon of whatever body of water it's inhabiting." Percy gave him an odd look, and Grover huffed, "Trees and rivers have souls, too, you know!")

"Where are you going to look for Pan?" he asks, finally.

Grover tilts his head. "Well ..." he goes, kind of sheepishly. "I've been having this dream..."

three.

The thing about having a destiny predetermined fifty years before you were born means that suddenly everything you do has consequences, which most kids are loath to learn anytime before the age of twenty-five and Percy has to come to terms with at thirteen, when Thalia forsakes the prophecy to run off with the Hunters of Artemis and leaves him with the "figuring out the fate of the world" gig.

It's not all bad, of course. There are some props to being the hero of the day.

The first that comes to mind is that time he gets to save Grover from becoming Polyphemus's drag-queen bride. Yeah, that's never going to get old.

There's Tyson, uncomplicated and larger than life, who loves Percy like cake. Percy's never had a little brother before. It's kind of hard to describe how awesome that is, especially since most people think their little brothers are the most annoying things to grace the earth.

Then there's that time they had to get to the Garden of the Hesperides or face world destruction, and Dr. Chase is the fastest way there, so he takes them up in this kickass rebuilt WW1 plane, all of San Francisco spread out below them. Percy'd been expecting it to be ringingly awkward, since Annabeth as a rule didn't get along with her family too well, but Dr. Chase is one of those kooky, amiable, nerdy older men, and he just kept asking Annabeth questions about Camp and what she did over the summer, like they weren't on their way to almost certain death in a plane that hasn't been flown in over seventy years.

"And Ned?" he goes after a moment, glancing back at them with his salt-and-pepper hair springing in every direction. His ring-tailed lemur daemon, Pica, is strapped in the co-pilot seat, a miniature pair of goggles fastened to her head. "Is he ... going to stay like that?"

"Oh, yeah," goes Annabeth, automatically reaching up to run her hand through Nedemurell's fur. "He picked this one a while ago."

There hadn't been any fanfare over it, either. Ned had always been monogamous with his shapes of choice, and now he's a capuchin monkey, with a pale, clever face and rich fur; his preferred form since the episode with the Golden Fleece. By the time Percy found out that he'd settled into that shape permanently, it was two weeks past the fact.

Girls' daemons frequently settled before the boys' did, but he still hadn't been expecting it.

"Don't worry," Yalena told him, arranging herself heavily around his shoulders as a python to comfort him as he works his way through a my best friends' daemons are settled down am I a freak should I be worried crisis that is reassuringly normal. "I'm not that bored yet."

And a newer memory, still shiny copper-penny fresh enough to make him grin unreservedly, of that kiss on the walkway in the depths of Mt. Saint Helens (although maybe he should be worried about that -- the only time Annabeth is willing to kiss him is when she thinks she'll never see him again) which was wet and a little foul-tasting and still the most amazing thing that's ever happened to him to date; Annabeth against him with her skin warm and her heartbeat rabbit-quick against his chest and Ned stroking Yalena's face with his paws, pressing their foreheads together and saying soft for her alone, don't you leave us, don't you ever leave us.

Calypso's island is as close as you can get to paradise without -- wait, no, who are we kidding, it is paradise on earth, package and parcel and wrapped with a little tiny bow, courtesy of the Olympian gods, and is just as much a jail as Tartarus was.

"I don't trust it." Yalena keeps her voice pitched too low for Calypso to hear, even though she's right there, spreading some slippery, eucalyptus-smelling salve on the worst of Percy's burns with gentle fingers. "It's not right."

He knows why she thinks so. Seeing Calypso out of the corner of his eye the first couple times sends frissons of alarm up and down his spine, because she doesn't have a daemon. Why would she? She's a Titan's daughter and she's completely alone on this island. Zoe Nightshade made a daemon for herself because she was in the company of mortal girls more often than not, and didn't want anyone to know what she was -- she'd kept it up for so long he'd become almost indistinguishable from a real daemon. Calypso didn't bother.

It didn't stop her from being possibly the sweetest girl Percy's ever met, mortal or non.

"Why did your daemon choose that form?" she asks, once Percy's able to get up and move around. She sits next to him in the sand, tucking a full hibiscus bloom behind her ear.

"Why did --" Percy echoes, twisting his head around to follow her curious gaze. Yalena is as far down the beach as their bond will allow, stretching it so that Percy can feel it, tightening the corners of his vision uncomfortably. She has her back to them, but he can see through her eyes that she's turning a piece of driftwood over in her paws, looking at it from every angle like it might have a secret message written on it. "Oh, no, she hasn't settled down into one form yet."

"Oh, really?" Somehow she makes it sound like he'd just offered her something fascinating. "I haven't seen her change since you've been here, so I just assumed..."

Percy smiles. "Usually she's all over the place -- I think she's been every animal in the book by now," he lies back on the sand, his bruised ribs pulling, but not urgently. He tries to tug Yalena to him, and feels her resist with a trip of his heartbeat, her mood mulish.

Under Calypso's care, his wounds heal faster than they would otherwise, fading into thin white scars that are barely visible except in direct sunlight, but he knows they're there and he knows he'll bear them forever, memories of explosions and fights etched needle-thin into his skin. At the same time, he has no such permanent record of all the things he loves: the conspiratorial twinkle to his mother's eyes over a package of blue taffy, Grover's braying laugh, the fond note in Annabeth's voice when she calls him Seaweed Brain. There's no scar he can point at and be like, "yeah, this is them."

Yalena comes as close as he can get, though: tempting as it is to forget, to fall into an uncomplicated kind of infatuation with Calypso and everything she represents, Yalena won't let him. She doesn't change once the entire time they're there, and every time he sees her, he's reminded instantly of Ned, because she's chosen the same kind of monkey to make a point. It's a swoop in his gut, a need to get back don't know if Annabeth and Ned are alive what about the prophecy should leave soon.

It's the longest she's ever stayed in one form, keeping her tiny fingers curled in Percy's shirt like she expects Calypso to steal him away in the middle of the night.

In her own way, she's telling him what's important, and he politely declines Calypso's offer of immortality and paradise.

He arrives back at camp just in time to witness his own funeral.

Which, on the flip side, is one of those things that just kind of sucks about having a predetermined destiny.

What really haunts his nightmares, though, again and again, is watching the light flick off in somebody's eyes, and the noise their daemons make as they evaporate into thin air. It's wrong on a fundamental level, seeing someone you care about, their bodies clothed and broken but so very, very naked without their daemons right there.

Mortals aren't made to be alone.

The first time he saw someone die, it was that night on the backroads, the truck overturned on the rain-slick road and his mother held aloft by the Minotaur. If he closes his eyes, he can still hear the echo of Emory screaming, long and horrible until he wasn't anymore, until he wasn't there at all, and his mother hung limp in the monster's grasp.

Daedalus may have been a manipulative creep, and yeah, okay, everyone knew something was up with him the moment he arrived at Camp with a pseudonym and a hellhound daemon he introduced as Mrs. O'Leary ("that cannot be her actual name," Grover muttered,) because humans can't have hellhound daemons, but that didn't make watching him die any less awful; Mrs. O'Leary's giant shape flickering out like a bad television channel.

But the one memory that comes back to hit him the hardest ... that day in the great Olympian junkyard in New Mexico, going over heaps of wreckage again and again, Yalena in dog shape at his side, her nose to the ground and her voice a mournful howl, "I can't feel them, Percy. I can't feel them anywhere," and hearing Zoe's daemon cry something similar, his voice piercing through the still desert air, and listening to it echo from daemon to daemon around the junk heaps, and knowing that Bianca's dead, dead.

Things like that have a tendency to come back and bite you in the butt. Living through it isn't bad enough -- it's right after he watches Thalia take her place among the Hunters of Artemis, her daemon's wing half-extended behind her head, framing her crown of dark hair and the silver tiara in a majestic and picturesque kind of way. Every muscle in Percy's body still hurts from holding the weight of the world; a deep, stiffening ache that even Yalena, draped around his neck as the warmest animal she can think of, can't soothe away.

He rounds the Big House, not thinking of anything but his bed in cabin three, when the snot-nosed kid they rescued from Maine materializes in front of him, and just like that, Percy's back in the desert, listening to Zoe's daemon wail, "I can't find them. They're gone."

"Where's my sister?" the kid -- Norton? Nick? -- demands without preamble. "How come she isn't with you guys? Where is she?"

Percy freezes. He so does not want to deal with this right now: it's part of what will make this memory so horrible later, is that his first reaction is to get annoyed. He's tired and he just wants to sleep. Surely he's done enough already, without having to tell a ten-year-old boy that his sister's dead?

He remembers being that young and Chiron solemnly informing him that his mother's gone, that's it, don't even think of breaching the Underworld looking for her -- it's not something he wants to do to Bianca's brother.

Yalena unwinds from around his shoulders, beginning in a gentle voice, "Look, Nico, we're really sorry --" and that's all it takes.

Nico reels backwards, head snapping to one side in automatic denial. All color leaves his cheeks like it's been washed out with a camera flash, his eyes going huge and black and shuttering closed. He staggers away, one clumsy step, then two, and when his hands come up, his daemon screams with grief -- a long, wrenching wail that echoes in the silent, sleeping Camp. She changes form with the rapid-fire click like a projector slide going: first a black-hooded snake, fangs bared; a snarling ginger housecat; a grizzly bear, the biggest thing Percy's ever seen a daemon make itself, up on her hind legs with her chest puffed out; and finally, a hummingbird, flitting back and forth in a frenzy. Nico brings his fists down and the earth shatters.

Afterwards, he and Yalena debate over who, exactly, they should tell about the di Angelo siblings being children of Hades, but in the end, they tell the same people they always tell -- Annabeth, because if they can't trust her they might as well throw the towel in now and move to the Bahamas before the world ends, and Chiron, who needs to know.

"They were always kind of weird, though, weren't they?" Yalena goes, leaping up on the bed with him after he puts the Mythomagic figure of the god of the Underworld on the bedside table, more carefully than he does with most objects, because Bianca di Angelo was willing to die for this thing, for what it meant to her brother. Yalena winds around his back, a ratty black terrier like the one from 101 Dalmations -- when they were little, she used to mimic the Scottish accent too, more and more poorly until it had warped into something a little south of Alabama and they were both giggling helplessly, unable to stop even when Sally knocked on the door and told them to settle down and go to sleep. He realizes with a pang that they haven't played that kind of game in a long time. "Remember?" she says.

He does. The memory's not even more than a week old, but already it feels tarnished a little bit, unreal and mottled like he's looking at it through an amber glass. When they first met Bianca and Nico, it was during the spring formal at that military school, where the assistant principle wanted to munch on some di Angelo siblings and Percy, Thalia, and Annabeth were there to make sure that didn't happen. His first glimpse of them across the gymnasium-turned-dance-hall, they hadn't looked like much; skinny, dark-haired kids washed out by their uniforms and not all that interested in dancing. Nico's daemon was a ferret at the time, rummaging around underneath the bleachers as Nico sulked, muttering something to his sister. She smiled, stroking his head, and her jaguar daemon lifted his head to nip gently at Nico's calf.

Percy remembers blinking, startled, and thinking, that's strange, noticing that their schoolmates had seen it as well: those closest to them edged away a little bit, looking steadfastedly elsewhere, but they'd already cleared a rather large berth around the siblings, like this wasn't unusual.

He forgot about it, really, until the night before they left on Quest, when he accidentally stumbled upon them saying good-bye. Nico'd been sulking (again, possibly, unless his face was just stuck like that) and Bianca was trying to reassure him, her daemon a solid tan-and-black shape at her side, his head tilted towards where Percy and Yalena were unsuccessfully trying to retreat. Bianca didn't notice them, unable to get her brother to even look at her. Instead, she reached out, plucking his daemon up and cradling her between her palms like she was holding a beating heart, stroking her ears with her thumbs. Nico relaxed almost all at once, leaning into his sister for a hug, and Percy felt the intense need to be elsewhere, crawling all over with awkwardness, like he'd just walked in on his mother and Paul Blofis making googly-eyes at each other.

Touching another person's daemon ... it's an unspeakable breach of intimacy. Small kids can get away with it -- Percy remembers snuggling into the soft, white fur of Emory's belly when he was a toddler -- but small kids can also get away with picking their nose and pooping their pants. It's just something they're expected to grow out of. Nico and Bianca don't seem to have a clue how weird it is. It's like they think it's comforting, putting their hands on each other's daemons.

"They were close, I guess," Yalena offers, finally, curling up next to his back, and he snorts, thinking she may have just made an amazing understatement.

It isn't until a full year later, when he has Nico at his kitchen table, fork poised over a slice of blue birthday cake like he's not entirely sure he's allowed to use it, that Percy notices Linne's still the same shape she's been in every single one of their encounters since Nico ran off: dark underneath the collar of Nico's jacket, and nothing but a blur when she's in the air, darting in and out of sight, a small jeweled flicker in the corners of Percy's vision.

"Hey --" he goes, startled. "Is she --?"

Nico looks up, just as the shadows in the ceiling fan momentarily swallow Linne up. She reappears over by the windowsill, hovering close to the glass with the moonflowers stirring on the other side, looking like that's where she intended to be all along. "Yeah," he goes, unconcerned; the cake's a more interesting topic for contemplation. "It's right."

This catches Paul's attention. "How old are you?" he goes, blinking, fork in one hand and the other pushing a paperback book flat against the surface of the table, engrossed until now.

"Eleven," Nico and Linne answer together; the hummingbird suddenly right by Nico's ear, the feathers on her throat glittering like an oil slick.

Paul's fork dips sharply towards his plate. "And she's already --" he starts, alarm showing clear on his face.

"Paul," Sally cuts in, voice crisp enough to stop whatever Paul was going to say. Behind her chair, Emory has Yalena spread out on her back, grooming her in an absent-minded, affectionate way that has Percy feeling warm all over like he's being hugged, although he's fourteen and too prickly to stand being hugged by his mother; this is close enough.

Paul backs off, but he studies Nico out of the corners of his glasses, perplexed and a little pitying.

Later, Percy's in the kitchen, squirting dishsoap into the sink and rolling up his sleeves, when Linne flits right up next to his ear, so close that Percy jumps, hairs standing up electric on the back of his neck. He'll get used to it, later, the disrespect Nico's daemon has for personal space, and it won't freak him out as much, the creeping electric feeling of too close, but right now he startles, stepping sideways automatically.

She follows, saying in a voice for his ears only, "We know how you can defeat Luke."

iv.

Submerging himself in the River Styx is the most painful thing Percy's ever done.

Nothing else even comes close to competing: not the time Mrs. Dodds grabbed his daemon and not the half-dozen times something's tried to tear her from him since. The only thing that keeps him from sinking right to the bottom and never coming back up is he can still feel Yalena, even through the searing pain his skin makes as it burns and peels. She's exactly where she should be, waiting on the shore: he's still connected to her, a thin line between them like a tether, anchoring him down.

Nico will tell him, afterward, that the instant his head disappeared under the surface of the river, Yalena vanished from sight, sudden as snapping a wishbone. He'd thought that was it, he'd just killed Percy Jackson, oops, sorry about that, world, good luck getting yourself saved without him, until he noticed that Yalena wasn't gone: she'd turned herself into a roly-poly, the smallest thing she could make herself, all rolled up tight as a pebble. He'd felt a little silly, him and Linne standing guard over her as his father's army advanced.

"It's kind of intimidating, you know," Nico complained. "When it's just you, a bird, and a bug against an army of the undead. Just saying. I totally worried I was going to accidentally step on her."

It's not the pain that'll give Percy nightmares about the Styx. The river is full of souls -- the things people swear oaths on. The daemons of the dead, now Dust, flowing around him like water, and being smothered in it feels like touching another person's daemon, a hundred times over. It's wrong. There's just no other word for it.

It doesn't even stop there. Percy sees it too many times that week, people's daemons bursting into golden light, blowing away like clouds of dirt in a brisk breeze.

There'd been some noise earlier that summer, about who was allowed to fight -- the cutoff came as pretty much anyone under the age of thirteen stayed home, where Argus, Peleus, and (by accident) the Ares cabin could protect them. Apparently once you're a teenager, you're officially old enough to die for the Greek gods. One of the younger, unclaimed campers raised a fuss about it, saying that anyone whose daemon is settled should be able to go fight: they were the ones mature enough to handle it. (Percy thinks she's full of it, really -- Yalena still changes shape as often as she ever did, and no one's suggesting that he sit this war out.)

"You stupid, stupid Aphrodite girl!" Clarisse rages, stomping around as Silena Beauregard dies on the pavement of a sleeping Manhattan, wearing the armor of the Ares cabin. "Why did you do that?"

She whirls on her cabinmates, who all look extremely uncomfortable. "How come not a single one of you noticed that she wasn't me? She looks nothing like me and her daemon looks nothing like mine! How could you possibly get confused and follow the wrong girl into war?"

"Clarisse!" Annabeth snaps, tears sharp in her voice. Silena's swan daemon lies limp, body half-cradled in Ned's arms, head tucked gingerly against Yalena's flank. Clarisse's badger daemon stays close, stroking his glossy black feathers with one paw and keening low in his throat. The feathers come away at his touch, leaving mottled pink flesh naked underneath.

Silena's throat works with a deathbed confession. Clarisse dismisses the Ares kids. This isn't something they need to hear.

"You were the spy," Percy says, unable to breathe around the weight of it.

Silena's face is disfigured beyond recognition, poison eating away at her skin, her fingertips going bone-white with shock, but still she manages to nod. Clarisse screams in rage against the sky.

The moment he realizes that this is it, these are the last few seconds of Silena's life, Percy remembers a promise he still hasn't kept.

"Silena, wait," he gasps, half-jerking forward as if he was going to ... what, grab her and physically yank her back from dying? "Silena," and her eyes flicker to him and focus with immense difficulty. "Silena, you never saw what Beckendorf's daemon chose, did you?"

"N-no..." she breathes out. "Too -- too busy ... didn't see each other much ... over summer."

Clarisse glares at him, her eyes hazy and oceanic and glossy with tears, but Percy ignores her. "I did," he tells Silena, smiling so she could see. He was the last person to see Charles Beckendorf and his daemon alive. "She was a swan, Silena. The most beautiful white swan I've seen, prettier than a painting."

"Really?" It might just be him projecting, but she sounds, for a moment, happy. "We'll see them ... again. Soon," she says, talking this time to her daemon.

She doesn't speak again.

He doesn't get a reprieve -- it seems like he blinks and then he's on Olympus, watching Ethan Nakamura pull a Benedict Arnold, striking at Kronos-Luke with dagger in hand.

Seeing Luke like this always gives Percy the heeby-jeebies. Behind the familiar crooked smile is a soulless kind of evil, apathetic and ageless and revenge-driven, turning his eyes black and his voice thunderous like the sound of moving mountains. But even more than that, it's Luke's body, just his body -- Rhondi isn't anywhere to be seen. It has all the hairs on the back of his neck standing on end, every sense screaming, monster! Monster! Kill it! because the only things he knows that don't have daemons are monsters. Monsters and ghosts.

And this is Luke. Percy doesn't know what happened to Rhondi -- she'd been a familiar figure at Luke's side throughout his conquests, her shape ever-changing. And then one day she just wasn't there, and Kronos was wearing Luke's body like a pair of shoes.

Luke lifts a hand from the back of his neck, a mix of human blood and golden ichor glinting sickly on his fingertips, and his lip curls. He swings around, scythe whistling through the air, and Ethan almost falls flat on his back, he scrambles away so fast. Luke's not aiming for him, though.

One low swoop of the cursed blade, and Ethan's black-masked raccoon daemon disappears with a gasp, bursting into Dust. Ethan crumples mid-step like his spine's been severed, and Percy barely manages to catch him before he cracks his head on the edge of Hestia's hearth. He yells his name once, twice, unsure what to do, how to handle this, wanting to stare at the spot where the daemon used to be, where there is only Luke now, cool silver blade curved over his head like a honey-haired Grim Reaper.

Without being prompted, Yalena worms her way in between their bodies, pressing her shoulders hard against Ethan's chest. Percy swallows against the swooping, endlessly intimate feeling of it, but it's the right thing to do: Ethan's fingers sink into his daemon's fur like an anchor, gulping down air like there isn't enough.

Luke watches this, the corner of his mouth smugly curved upward. "You humans have such a serious design flaw," he sighs. "Wearing your heart on your sleeve. You make it so easy to hurt you."

Percy sneers back, retort on the tip of his tongue, but Ethan grabs at his collar abruptly, yanking him down so he can whisper in his ear, "She's his weakness. She was always his weakness. She's the only thing that can get through to Luke," before he slumps, unconscious, his pulse beating fever-fast against the heel of Percy's hand.

He makes a frustrated noise in his throat, wanting to shake Ethan awake again, demand to know who she is -- Thalia, maybe, or Annabeth -- before his brain clicks in. There's only one girl Luke Castellan felt he owed anything to.

He lets Ethan slide to the ground, standing and facing Kronos. Without him having to tell her, Yalena braces herself in front of him, shifting shape subtly from wolf to dingo; apricot-colored fur and thin face, identical to the form Rhondi would take when she was pretending.

A flash of blue cuts through the blackness in Luke's eyes. He shakes his head quickly, like he's freeing himself of tunnel vision.

"Luke," Yalena says, firm and sure.

Luke's mouth twists and then opens, and Percy flinches, expecting more of Kronos's monologue, but the voice that comes out is small and impossibly young, "He killed her. The first thing he did when he climbed inside of me. He picked up my sword and he killed Rhondi. My Rhondi."

Percy looks at him, and for the first time, feels a bolt of pure sympathy for Luke shoot through him. Never, not a single day in his life has Percy ever been alone. That's what daemons are for: someone to talk to, to cry with, to laugh with, even when no one else is. They're your absolute compliment, and he can't imagine what it's like to be alone. Alone like Luke is, trapped with nobody for company but what he invited in.

The scythe droops, his hand slackening, and Percy eyes it, the thrill of possibility rushing through him. All he gets is one step, though, before Kronos slams the full force of his power into him, holding him frozen. Yalena whines, low.

"Like I said," he said, full thunder back in his voice. "Your kind make it so easy. Tell me, Jackson," he goes, cruelty turning his tone caustic. "How about your daemon goes next, hm? Still shape-changing, I see." Yalena growls, lips curling back, and Kronos laughs. "How old are you, boy? Old enough -- all your friends' daemons have settled. And yet, yours hasn't. Hmmm," he taps his chin in mock thought. "Who does this remind me of?"

Percy's fists clench at the implication, and Kronos's lips curve up smugly. "How alike you are. Better say good-bye to her, Jackson. Dear Luke never got the chance."

He steps forward, bringing his scythe up like he's going to strike -- but his hands are empty.

"Mom always said I had quick fingers," says Ethan calmly, standing on both feet, the scythe firmly in his grasp. He spares one look for Percy and Yalena, his single eye overbright and expression unlike anything he's ever seen before, and says just, "For our daemons."

Then he turns, and falls straight off the edge of the world.

Kronos roars, a sound long and horrible that slams into Percy's head like a blow from a brick. But it's enough, the loss of Ethan and the scythe both, and Percy hefts Riptide up and throws himself forward.

When Luke Castellan dies, he's alone in his own head, Kronos gone and banished and the calvary's arrived -- albeit, Percy's calvary is just Annabeth and Grover and their daemons, but they're a sight for sore eyes, truly. Annabeth holds Luke's hand, and he says, "You went to the Underworld and back, right? I'm going to see her again, aren't I?" like a child. Just a child, with a child's daemon, lost.

"She'll be there," Annabeth promises.

Luke smiles, his eyes glassy and at peace. "We'll try for the Isle of the Blessed. I wonder what shape she'll choose, in the next life." He breathes slowly. "Something wonderful, I hope."

And just like that, the war is over.

5.

The Greek gods don't so much as offer him immortality so much as they go, "oh, yeah, while we're at it, here, have this," like they're remembering to include a toy with his Happy Meal.

This one actually makes him pause (because living forever is the kind of thing you stop to think about, even when you're Percy) but not for very long. He glances over his shoulder long enough to see Annabeth mustering up her brave face and Yalena hunch down among the rubble of the great temples of Olympus, a dog with her ears flat against her head and her eyes avoiding his, and knows what his answer's going to be.

"No thank you, actually," he says as politely as he can.

"What --" Zeus goes, startled, lightning crackling around his head. Beside him, Hera arches a pencil-thin eyebrow, unimpressed.

"Percy --" hisses Annabeth in his direction, using her patented, "what are you doing, you moron?" voice, but he feels Yalena nose gratefully at the palm of his hand, and -- forgetting whose audience he's in -- he drops to his knees to wrap his arms around her, pressing his face into her warm fur, his heart giving one great big throb of affection for her.

"Not you," he says against her neck. If he became a god, took a place here on Olympus, it would mean saying good-bye to his mother, to Annabeth, to Grover and Nico and Rachel who brings helicopters to the rescue and even stupid, brave Clarisse: he could see them every now and then, maybe, but the blip of their lives would be like a heartbeat in the bigger scheme of things, and that didn't seem fair. The most important people he's ever met, the people he loves more than himself, and the gods want to make it so he doesn't even get to spend his life with them?

It would mean giving up Yalena, too, would mean giving up his very soul. Just like monsters and Titans, gods in their true forms don't have daemons, and even when they're pretending to be mortals, they aren't real daemons, just something else they put on to blend in, like hats or shoes or a sense of decency. It wouldn't be Yalena, his best friend, his other half, the only one who knew him better than himself, who whispered the answers to math problems in his ear and wears his Achilles heel in the small of her back.

Taking a daemon from a person is the worst thing you can do to them. What about that changes when you trade your daemon for immortality? How is this any different than what Luke did?

"Thanks, but no thanks," he says again, more firmly this time, and doesn't look at his father. "I think I've earned the right to grow old in peace, if it's all the same to you."

Somewhere in the back, with his arm wrapped around his wife Hebe, Hercules gives him a thumbs up.

Yalena whispers quickly into his ear, and he goes, "Oh! But while I've got you here --"

One revoked pact, one promise made on the River Styx, and one blue-lit Empire State Building later, he and Annabeth amble back to the elevator, in absolutely no rush whatsoever, Ned on her shoulder with his tail curled around her bicep, absent-mindedly pawing through the mud and blood and monster guts in her ponytail, Yalena trotting in between them. They're walking close enough that she comes close to brushing against Annabeth occasionally, something Percy feels hot in the base of his spine.

He tells her about what Prometheus said to him, before giving him Pandora's box, about how the fire he gave to mortals wasn't really this ever-eternal burning flame, but Dust. Daemons. A metaphorical fire, if you will. Prometheus's brother made humans out of mud and clay, let them wander around naked and cold and confused, but it was Prometheus who gave them souls, souls to give and love and lose. Souls and free will and the ability to reason, and before anyone knew it, they became the human race.

"It's why he was fighting on the Titans' side," he concludes. "I mean, if something you created went and became better than you, wouldn't your pride be hurt enough to try and destroy it?"

"Percy!" Annabeth claps a hand over his mouth, almost dislodging Ned. "I know you have kelp for brains, but for the love of everything, try not to walk around Olympus saying that humans are better than gods, okay? It would kind of suck if we went to all that work saving the world only to watch you get vaporized."

He grins underneath her palm, reaching up with his hand to pry hers off. He doesn't let it go, instead worming his fingers in between hers and holding on. "But we are," he whispers for her and their daemons alone.

"Yeah, it's not so bad to be us, I guess," she relents, rather bright-eyed, and tugs him into the elevator, hitting the button for the lobby.

"Actually," she adds, about three hundred floors later. "I'm really just looking forward to beating the savior of Olympus in capture the flag. I hope they'll put that on my headstone."

He laughs, "You can try, and I'll tell Yalena to turn into one of those big, hairy tarantulas and put her next to your breakfast bowl."

Annabeth opens her mouth to retort, but Ned interrupts, surprising them both: it's not that Ned's unfriendly, really, it's just that he doesn't usually talk to people who aren't Annabeth. It's a compulsion that most half-bloods' daemons get over, because there's no point in being shy about talking to each other's daemons and each other's humans when you're on the battlefield.

"You haven't noticed?" He clambers over to Annabeth's other shoulder so he can give Percy his own version of Annabeth's "you are too dumb to live, really" look. "You can't feel it? Yalena's not going to change anymore."

As one, Percy and Annabeth turn in the small elevator space to look at Yalena, but Ned's right: Percy knows. It's in his bones, his head, his heart, a feeling of rightness that he'd assumed just went hand-in-hand with having just stopped a Titan overthrow of modern civilization. He feels comfortable, like he's finally fitting his own skin, and he goes to his knees without conscious direction from his brain.

Yalena comes to him, immediately, wagging her tail at him slowly and letting him stroke her head.

She's a dog, a St. Bernard, waist-high and solidly built, her dark eyes turned up to him and soft with adoration. She's his and she's absolutely wonderful and he's keeping her, and the gravity of it moves over him: he'll remember this moment until the day he dies, like he'll remember the trident appearing over his head, like he'll remember seeing his mother die and be resurrected again, like he'll remember his first kiss.

He looks up at Annabeth, to see what she thinks, and she has the back of her hand pressed to her mouth, smothering her laughter. It's not really what he was expecting.

At his murderous look, she takes the hand away to say, "She's going to drool in her sleep," like this is significant.

It takes him a moment to get the joke, but when he does, he kicks her in the shins. Hard. It doesn't stop her from cracking up.

They spill out of the elevator like that into the lobby of the Empire State Building, still laughing, Ned on Yalena's back, rubbing her big, floppy ears in a manner somewhere between fond and trying to tug her around like she's got reins, Annabeth leaning into his side because her leg hurts and oh, yeah, she was kind of stabbed earlier and that still kind of smarts.

"Percy!" Sally cries out, voice ringing like the clap of a bell, and seconds later, when she and Paul have their arms around him and Annabeth indiscriminately, Emory and Yalena and Ned and Paul's beaver daemon tangled and ungainly, Percy thinks, invincibility or no, he could in fact die of happiness, right here, knowing Annabeth and his mother and stepfather are safe, New York is safe, the world is safe, and he still has his daemon.

Which, of course, is about when Linne flits in through the doors, Nico a second or two behind her, yelling about Rachel stealing a pegasus and heading for Camp Half-Blood where the wards were going to fry her mortal ass, because really, it's not like things were ever going to be easy.

-fin

A/N: in case anybody wants it, I kind of have a stream-of-consciousness thing about everybody and their daemons, which has handy-dandy links to pictures of almost everybody mentioned. That can be found here!