Chapter Text
The sun illuminated Hermes’ curly black hair, giving it the slightest raven sheen.
‘Oh, Apollo is so trying to get his brother laid’ Percy thought with a grin that she did her best to hide in the clump of pale purple lavender flowers nearest her face. She breathed in their light scent in an attempt to distract herself.
Instead of voicing any potentially embarrassing thoughts of that kind, she softened her expression to display the barest of smiles and turned back over to her lover. “How long do you suppose you can stay for this time?”
The god’s eyes snapped open. Percy tried not to take it personally, she knew better herself than to let her guard down around anyone, especially around a god. That didn’t mean that she did keep alert.
“That’s not something I could tell you,” he smiled sympathetically. Something in Percy knew it was fake. Not that he ever gave a smile that wasn’t fake.
Still, Percy was fake too.
“Duty calls when it calls, I suppose,” she shrugged with another quick smile. “But that’s alright. What would you like to do in the meantime?”
Hermes’ smile turned a bit more genuine. She knew it was so by the way it sharpened, a little bit more of the monster he was shining through. “Wellll… I’ve heard you make such beautiful storms.”
Percy let out a huff of air that was the closest thing she would give him to a laugh. “Not on this island, dear.”
“Oh but a hurricane ripping through this field would look so spectacular!”
“It’s too near to my home and you know it.” Percy couldn’t help the roll of her eyes. Somehow, they’d had similar conversations before and he just couldn’t get it. “If anything happens to Circe and my sisters, I will destroy the thing that caused them harm and then myself.”
There’s a glint in his sapphire eyes now, and Percy almost regretted speaking.
“That sounds simply marvelous to witness.”
“Be careful, darling. I’ll find a way to kill a god too.”
His smile only widened, and maybe she should have known.
Maybe she already did.
Percy doesn’t remember when the nymphs first came to the island, and she doesn’t remember when she first called them her sisters.
But it doesn’t matter because family is always something gradual. As long as she can keep that family safe and happy, she doesn’t need to remember when she decided to devote her life to them.
Sometimes, that’s better.
Circe never liked the nymphs. She resents them, even, for imposing on her place of exile. The witch is stuck with them all.
Percy understands, but she also thinks that there’s something more to it. She won’t pry though. Just as Circe never pries about the grass stains on her clothes and the way Percy’s eyes glaze over as she gets lost in a memory.
Percy is a presence. She takes up space, but in an endearing way. Or so she’s been told. But she also doesn’t barge in on a space and force secrets out of people.
She’s kind. Polite. Non disruptive.
They call it obedience. She calls it masking.
It’s fine, though. Because people like her and it’s always easier when people like her. She says her lines and plays their games because why would she be difficult when she doesn’t know how?
She did, once. But she’s a girl and a fairly good student —or she used to be— so she got over it.
Percy loves Circe, she really does. But Circe is still a goddess and could never love the nymphs the way that Percy herself does.
Percy understands making a mistake and getting punished for it, or even being punished for existing as she is. She understands being scorned for being a waste of space. She’s used to it, and it doesn’t matter if that’s “okay” or not.
But she can do her best to make sure that Laurel and Birch and Hawthorn and Poppy and all the others don’t get used to it. Her sisters deserve far better than being born nymphs, being born as pieces in the games of the gods in the best-case scenario.
Percy doesn’t like games. She likes things straightforward and laid out, she likes things where it’s hard or even impossible to cheat at.
But for her sisters…
For her sisters, she would turn her heart into the kind so icy that it can usually only be found during a family game of Uno.
For her sisters, she would break all the rules and then make new ones.
For her sisters, she would mock life and cheat death himself.
In another time, a time that had simultaneously passed and not happened yet, Percy might have cut Hermes some slack. He’s a busy god, he certainly forgets many small things and conversations on the daily. It’s only human.
But that was before. Before Percy traveled back in time and actually got to know who Hermes was, is, in a more honest setting. And he is a god.
Gods do not forget.
Any talk of something simply “slipping his mind” is a mere frivolity at best, a lie at worse. (Not the worst. Percy doesn’t want to know what the worst possible situation could ever be).
The only thing he seems capable of forgetting (and forgetting frequently, at that) is that Percy knows he doesn’t forget things. She doesn’t dissuade him from this idea that she’s stupider than she is.
He’ll make his excuses about forgetting to get out of something he doesn’t want to do or to say something that he knows he shouldn’t say to her. She’ll pretend she believes him. Percy doesn’t like it, but it’s never been the time to bring it up. He can lie. She can listen and let her mistrust grow with every word that leaves his lips.
She wonders, sometimes, if it’s too late to say anything. That’s true for a lot of her relationships, but especially this one. Has the chance to say something really never appeared or is it simply long gone by, something that Percy was too afraid to realize, never mind to act on?
It might not matter. She’s never taken a chance, so it might as well have not existed in the first place.
No matter what way she likes to avoid the fact, she knows that Hermes hasn’t forgotten that Percy doesn’t play games when it comes to her family, when it comes to her sisters.
Well.
No games but her own.
It’s funny that he seems to think she thinks he can forget. She saw that look in his eyes the day she told him. Even if Hermes was capable of forgetting something, Percy’s dangerous loyalty is certainly something she knows he would force himself to remember.
I will destroy the thing that caused them harm, and then myself.
There are people on the island.
Well, there are always people on the island. Percy knows that. But she also knows the water and the ocean surrounding the island. She is less restricted than Circe in how she can interact with the outside world, and she would never say it to the witch’s face, but Percy’s father loves her more than Helios does Circe. That generally leads to some freedoms.
She’s never told Circe much about her relationship with Poseidon, and while Percy ABSOLUTELY has some form of Daddy Issues, even with her now being in the past and Poseidon not knowing a thing about her, he’s still trying to love her as best he can. That’s more than Helios can say, but neither of them is willing to speak for him. He can remain silent as far as Circe is concerned, and Percy just doesn’t feel like it’s a good time to unpack that.
Anyways, she’s getting off-track again.
There are people on the island, probably men because women never had the gall. Well. They never have the chance to have the gall, but Percy likes to think she’s a girls’ girl so she’ll use the former as her official reason. If asked.
Percy isn’t sure that anyone else knows. She’s not sure if she should do anything. Honestly, even if she wants to, there’s not much she can do to get out of this situation without arousing suspicion.
Hermes’ head is in her lap as they lay together in the meadow. Their meadow, maybe. She’s weaving a crown of flowers into his curly hair. The anemones contrast stunningly with the raven black, and she finds herself of half a mind to kiss him. She does not.
Percy weaves in the last flower, a small white moly flower into the back. She doesn’t want it to be the centerpiece. It’s enough a show of trust as it is, even though she knows it shouldn’t be. He does not know what the moly is, she thinks. She does not think so.
She pretends as if she didn’t willingly hand over a powerful piece of magic like a lovesick teenager. A lovesick teenager that she is, so maybe it’s okay.
She knows, on some level, that he might exploit it. She doesn’t know why she’s trusting him not to. That’s what relationships are, maybe.
There’s a shift in the breeze, and Percy knows somehow that her sisters are safe. Circe knows about the intruders and is dealing with them like she always does.
Percy can almost feel, if not hear, her mentor’s song on the wind. She relaxes.
But Hermes does the opposite.
His eyes must have opened at some point because Percy opens her own to look down at him lovingly and he’s already staring at her in slight shock. She feigns ignorance, careful lines of confusion painted in the crinkle of her brow, because he doesn’t need to know what she knows.
She can play the game when she so wishes, and Percy knows that this is the right time to wish it.
Perhaps it’s the best thing to do, for once. Percy’s never been good at cutting her losses but she might be learning. His gaze is gone, as is his head from her lap.
His voice is in the wind, inhuman but there. Ethereal, otherworldly, and Percy can’t make out the words he’s saying. Singing.
She knows that this is no mistake. It’s something he has designed for her not to hear. He doesn’t want her to know what’s going on.
But Percy knows the water. She assumed Hermes knew because he doesn’t ask, but she’s never exactly told him. She knows where he’s gone, because she was considering going there herself.
So she does not know the words of the song, but she knows the melody. And that’s enough to tune in like it’s some radio frequency. Like it’s a song, and Apollo wants her to hear it.
The sun shines brighter for a moment.
Perhaps Apollo and Hermes’ initial feud has not been forgotten.
Apollo is the god furthest from being human that Percy can think of, but he is not the cruelest. He has been on her side of heartbreak, and though that’s not what this is, not yet, they both know what interacting with a trickster god can contain.
Solidarity, then.
Percy can do that.
It’s not the kind of solidarity that she should trust, she’s well aware of that, but she doesn’t have the energy to think clearly. She’s getting sick of Hermes’ lies.
She hears his haunting little laugh and it’s so stupid because only now does it really click.
The god is taking amusement from this. From putting her family in direct harm’s way. Because Percy has no illusions that Hermes didn’t give the men a moly flower. (Some stupid little part of her hopes that he didn’t give them the moly flower, even though it wouldn’t change a thing if he did). He sounds too self-satisfied for anything else to be the case.
To a god, Percy realizes with a not-so-startling clarity, everything’s a game.
She knew that already, maybe. But when she looks deep inside herself, Percy has to admit that that’s not one of the many things she knows.
Now it is.