Chapter Text
Graduation is supposed to be one of the happiest days of Connor Stoll’s life. And yet, as the ceremony concludes and he hurls his cap into the air along with everyone else, he distinctly feels the lack of a rush through his system, the song of elation that usually thrums in his veins on his best days.
He’s lonely. No, he’s bored.
If he weren’t feeling so empty, he might have envisioned the caps as a thousand arrows falling on him and the other Cabin Eleven members who had fought at his side during the Battle of Manhattan. But Connor can only stare listlessly as the caps make an unimpressive thud on the floor of his university’s auditorium. On cue, his and his classmates’ parents, relatives, friends, and whatnot erupt into a tremendous ovation.
All around him, people are pulled into group hugs, and there are way more tears than Connor can handle right now. His face only bursts into an automatic smile when a few of his regular drinking buddies jump on his back, hollering and whooping like there’s no tomorrow.
Well, he supposes there isn’t. He pushes down his feeling of unfeeling and lets others’ emotions wash over him like a highly contagious cold as he bends down to pick up his graduation cap and proceeds to wrap his friends in increasingly tight hugs.
His traitorous mind supplies that none of them had faced mythological monsters, gods, Titans and Primordials like he and his fellow demigods had. Clarisse was in Arizona, finishing up her first year of med school; Will and Nico had decided to stay together in New Rome Uni; and Percy–
Oh, wait. Percy was probably here. Annabeth was Connor’s schoolmate, godsdammit.
So Connor tells his brain to shut up and shove it with the unnecessarily angsty thoughts.
“There’s our class salutatorian!” cheers Travis. Connor instantly regrets locking eyes with his brother and whirls around.
Unfortunately, he smacks his forehead right into Percy Jackson’s.
“ Ow, fuck! ” Connor violently swears. Percy, with his terrible balance, shuffles backwards one, two steps, before falling over in a graceless heap.
“Damn, I wanted to see the class valedictorian , not the salutatorian,” groans Percy.
“I wasn’t aware that Annabeth Chase was better-looking than me,” replies Connor, clutching his forehead.
“Fuck off, Connor,” says Percy, but there’s a laugh in his voice as he accepts the hand offered to him and is pulled up. Percy pulls him in for a hug, and Connor feels honored. With his tendency for pranking people, he expected more reservation from a frequent victim.
He tells Percy this, and the Hero of Olympus stares at him with his mouth ajar.
“Oh. I didn’t think of that.”
“Cut him some slack, Con,” Travis says, slinging an arm around his brother. “He’s just excited to see Annie Bethie. They probably haven’t smooched in over 24 hours.”
“Call her that again, Travis, and I’m gonna give you a reason to go back to kindergarten,” Percy informs him brightly.
“He’s not wrong, though,” Connor snickers. “I bet she was up until five in the morning chanting her speech over and over again.”
No chance for “smooching” there, as Travis put it. Percy’s eyes shifts into that sad-seal stare that sometimes got even Ms. Stoll cooing at him. And Connor and Travis’ mother did not coo.
Speaking of.
Connor turns to Travis. “Where’s Mom?”
Travis jabs his thumb at a spot behind him. “She’s there—oh wait.” He actually takes a second to turn around, only to gape at the apparently void-of-Mom space. “Oops.”
“Your mother is in good hands,” a voice chimes in, and Percy’s face brightens up with the force of a thousand suns.
“I’m so proud of you!” he whoops. Annabeth is all-too-willing and grinning as Percy sweeps her up into his arms and whirls her around, all the while planting kisses on her face. “My girlfriend’s the valedictorian of class 2015!”
“My son is here as well,” Ms. Stoll’s sardonic voice cuts through.
“I don’t wanna be kissed by Percy though.” Then Connor grins. “Wait, actually, when I was sixteen—”
“I don’t love you enough to hear about your sexual awakening, Connor.” Still, Ms. Stoll can’t fight off the grin that stretches across her lips when Connor throws his arms around her.
“Egg donor! Maternal parental unit! My heart for months has longed for you so!” Connor cries.
“Shut up, second zygote.” She pulls away and pretends to smooth down his toga, but Connor knows she’s preening at his medals. Emphasis on the plurality of the noun. “The next person who tells me you and the first zygote are the same person is getting a ten-minute PowerPoint presentation from me.”
Travis smiles like stupid at the mention of him. He’s not titled with anything nearly as fancy as “salutatorian,” but his position on the state track-and-field team, considering that he’s only been training since his third year in college, is prestigious already in itself. All in all, the Stolls are doing pretty great.
It’s the reward of leaving Greek mythology behind, Connor tells himself. He likes his peers very much (otherwise, Annabeth wouldn’t be his best friend), but the entities and politics that govern it—that’s a whole other story. Connor hasn’t even so much as heard of a quest since he was eighteen, and for that, he’s thrived.
Percy, on the other hand. Connor bites his lip to keep his laughter in, ready to clown Percy for having gods and other things show up at his apartment door at least every single month. He turns to Percy and Annabeth—
His eyes catch on a familiar face in the crowd.
And she’s staring right back at him.
Her name is on the tip of his tongue, but it can’t fall from his lips. He scans her up and down as quickly as he can; maybe something about her can help unstick the fragmented identity that’s refusing to peel off from the roof of his mouth.
Dark, heavy-lidded eyes, the undersides of which are ringed with what looked like makeup. Skin so pale it seemed like it was almost graying, only set off even more by the all-black ensemble she wore. Fingerless gloves wrapped around each hand, combat boots laced tight up to her ankles, a black shirt hugging her torso, and a nicely cut leather jacket hanging off her shoulders. She wasn’t dressed for the graduation—Connor isn’t even sure if she took the effort to comb her hair before coming here, seeing as it was bursting out of her scalp and tumbling down her back like a pitch-black mane.
He blinks, readying himself for another long look, but when he opens his eyes, she’s gone.
Connor is left staring at the space like an idiot.
“Ask my dumbass son. I don’t know with him.”
Ms. Stoll’s voice snaps him out of his reverie. “What?” he says, exactly like the dumbass she claimed him to be.
“What are you gonna do after this, Connor?” Annabeth asks.
She’s worried for him, he knows. Not two months ago, he knew his answer: law school. But now that graduation has finally swallowed him up, he doesn’t know what he wants.
(He wants something different.)
“I don’t know.” He shrugs. “Maybe I’ll take a gap year.”
Annabeth’s brow furrows. She breaks away from Percy’s side and grasps Connor’s hands tightly.
“If you need anything, I’m just a call away,” she says firmly.
“Okay, Miss Architect of Olympus,” he teases. His heart warms. He and Annabeth, they’re not as different as people think them to be. He bends down for a hug with his best friend since his preteens, his best friend since the moment someone else had dropped an actual poisonous spider down her shirt when she was 8. They conspired to get back at the culprit—Connor, though mischievous, had boundaries, and actually harming your victim was overstepping. Especially since putting spiders and Athena kids in the same room to terrify them was his idea in the first place.
Aw, man. Connor is gonna miss her—even with all the mental breakdowns that she could induce in him just by having one herself. The hug is warm and soft.
Until every muscle in Annabeth’s arms tenses, and Connor nearly chokes. They’re still wrapped around his neck, after all.
“What do you want?” she says into his neck icily.
At her words, Connor’s grip also tenses. She’s not talking to him.
“I want to talk to him,” a low voice rasps. It’s the deepest voice that Connor has ever heard from a girl.
Annabeth releases him from the hug, and he turns around to meet a dark, heavy-lidded gaze.
As if sensing danger, his friends crowd at his side. Even his mother, a slender mortal who could be crushed in the blink of an eye, walks forward with a glare to rival Nico di Angelo’s.
Well, except for Travis, who looks like a dying fish. Intimidation didn’t become him.
“I know you,” Connor says.
“For someone who graduated as the class salutatorian from their college, I’m surprised you have such bad memory,” she states. There’s no insult in her tone—just matter-of-fact. “I was under probation for a year after the Titan War.”
Something in Connor’s memory sparks, and his eyes flick to the leather straps criss-crossing across her chest, to the sword hilts barely visible from behind her hair. “Cabin Twenty-One. You were the only person there.”
Diane Stone, only daughter of Thanatos, the god and the personification of death, inclines her head.
The uneasy feeling crawling up his spine is something he hasn’t felt in years. “Why are you here?”
Her eyes scans the crowd of demigods. “I made a mistake. I’ve been trailing a monster, and she’s not happy about it. I need reinforcements.”
Annabeth steps forward, jaw clenched and gray eyes blazing. “What the hell do you mean by ‘reinforcements?!’” she hisses.
“You’re some of the most battle-worn demigods of our generation. Do you not have weapons?”
There’s silence. Connor feels chills erupt across his nape.
He hasn’t held his weapon in a year.
Out of nowhere, Percy groans. “Is it too much to ask to be left alone?!” he whines. “If we don’t have our weapons, will you let us go? Please? I scheduled a really nice dinner reservation with Annabeth here, and—”
“You’re never without weapon, Percy Jackson,” Diane interrupts. “There’s a bathroom on either side of the auditorium, if you must know. But out of all of you here, you’re the one who’d never be without a blade.”
“Are you threatening my son?!” Ms. Stoll snarls. Travis hooks an arm around her waist just in time to stop her from clawing at Diane’s face. “He wants nothing to do with your world!”
“I’m not threatening him, Ms. Stoll. I just need his and his friends’ help.” Diane looks at them. “Unless you’re a child of Hecate, Lamia is not an easy monster to defeat.”
Connor’s heart jumps up into his throat. “You’ve been tracking—”
She meets his gaze head-on. “Yes.”
“Why?!” he yells. “Do you know what he’s done—”
There’s a cracking sound over their heads. Connor throws his gaze upwards, and his eyes widen at the sight.
Frost is forming on the ceiling of the auditorium. The white, web-like veins spread out across the beams, thickening and layering into shards of ice the bigger they get.
It’s the beginning of summer. There’s no other way to explain it except—
“Lamia,” Connor hears himself mutter in horror.
“Mom, get out of the auditorium,” Travis orders. He jumps up on a seat and cupping his mouth, yells as loudly as he can, “GET OUT OF THE AUDITORIUM! THE CEILING IS GONNA FALL IN ON US!”
Ms. Stoll looks simultaneously frightened and indignant. “Is it actually?!”
“No, I just need to create mass panic. THE CEILING IS ABOUT TO FALL IN ON US! Mom, please go out. You’ll be safer out there.”
“The mortals need to get out before Lamia has the chance to trap them here.” Their eyes fall on Percy. He scrunches his eyes shut and clenches his fists. “Get up on the chairs.”
They all obey. A moment later, the pipes in the bathroom rupture, and toilet water pools across the floor. Before the shrieks fill the air, Travis takes his last chance to be heard: “THE CEILING IS ABOUT TO FALL IN ON US! THE PIPES HAVE BROKEN! GET OUT!”
The crowd stampedes towards the exit doors. The security guards, alarmed, pull out their walkie-talkies and try to usher out guests as fast as possible.
Connor glances up at the ceiling again. The ice is now so dense that the temperature in the room has plunged, his graduationt toga no longer protection enough to tamp down his shivers. He thinks he can see a white mist forming above their heads.
Beside him, Annabeth has already shed her toga and carefully draped it over the back of the seat she was standing on.
“How the hell are you gonna fight in heels?” Connor asks.
Percy holds up a paper bag. “I brought her sneakers.”
Connor also pulls the toga over his head and drops it—except instead of landing on the back of the chair like he intended, it slides over the edge and gets soaked in the toilet water on the floor.
He stares.
“... I don’t have a weapon. I’m not gonna be much use here.”
Travis looks around. There are only a few handfuls of mortals now, none of whom seem to notice the five teenagers standing on their seats.
His brother reaches into the inner pocket of his suit jacket and slides out a familiar handle.
Considering the life-and-death situation he’s currently in, Connor feels such an intense wave of betrayal that he can only grit his teeth and violently yank the dagger out of his brother’s grasp. Kavene is as long as his forearm—and is tangible proof that Travis wasn’t as estranged from the demigod life as Connor thought he was.
From the opposite pocket, Travis pulls out a dagger identical to the one Connor holds.
Annabeth shoves her black heels into the waiting paper bag, held by Percy, and produces her trademark Yankees baseball cap. “Where is she?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Connor sees Diane scrutinizing the scrunched-up cap in Annabeth’s hand. “Mmm, maybe about thirty seconds out.”
“Gee, thanks for the warning in advance!” Percy says sarcastically.
“Annabeth, got a plan?” Travis hurriedly asks.
Annabeth’s eyebrows scrunch together. “I’ve never fought Lamia. But I expect her magic will make it hard to stick to any sort of plan. So the best we can do is take stock of our abilities and weapons. We’ve got Percy, with his sword and supremacy over toilets—”
“Hey!”
“Travis is extremely fast and agile, and Connor is… Connor is a cryptid. I’m leaving the spontaneous surprises and tricks to you.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And I can turn invisible, and Diane—”
“She’s here.”
Their heads whip to the entrance of the auditorium.
For a second, there’s only the unsettling silence. The chilly fog draws tendrils over their eyes, and the blocks of ice start to melt into drops rapidly hurtling towards the floor. It gives Connor enough time to wonder if Diane is bluffing, and—
It’s enough time.
The instant Connor closes his eyes to blink away the pricking cold burrowing into his eyes, the floor underneath them boils molten-hot and bursts into thousands of fragments.
Someone else’s back slams into his chest, and his back crashes into the nearest vertical surface. The world goes grainy and all fuzzy, and a sharp ache crowds all over Connor’s skull.
“Hello, children,” Lamia laughs into all their ears.