Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

When the call comes, Frederick is far too sleep-deprived to understand what it means. Your parents’ car was hit on the highway. The doctors did all they could, but unfortunately they didn’t make it. Later Randolph calls him. He sounds brusque and cold, which is normal, and his voice cracks halfway though, which is not. Did you hear? Yes. Good. The funeral is next Saturday. Family only, do not bring your girlfriend. Frederick doesn’t have a girlfriend, but he doesn’t say that. Randolph calling makes it true. Frederick Gustavus Chase is twenty two years old, in the middle of his senior thesis on American military airplanes during World War II and the Korean War, and an orphan.

After the funeral, Frederick will only remember two things: the burnished, gold-streaked pine of his mother’s coffin, and the sound of his young niece Emma asking her mother when Gramma Nanna and Grampa Math are coming back. Randolph doesn’t say a word the entire time, except to give the eulogy. It is unmemorable, says all the right things, and doesn’t drag on too long. Frederick stops paying attention a dozen words in, and doesn’t think he misses anything. Natalie and Caroline cry. Frederick thinks he does too. Aubrey cries, but that’s because she’s six months old and it’s past her naptime. Randolph doesn’t. Decades later, when Randolph and Natalie and Caroline and Aubrey and Emma and Magnus are all gone, and Frederick is the last man standing to remember them, he will think back to his parents’ funeral, and his sister-in-law and nieces’ joint funeral and remember that Randolph didn’t cry then either. He will spend a week and a half wracking his brain, trying to remember the last time he saw his brother cry, and then, coming up empty, give up. 

But that’s all decades in the future. For now, Frederick is twenty two years old, in the middle of his senior thesis on American military airplanes during World War II and the Korean War, and an orphan.

He goes back to school. He’s only got two months left of his undergraduate degree, and he’s been accepted to a PhD program at Harvard, close to home, to Randolph and Natalie. He passes his classes and finishes his senior thesis in a fog. He graduates, and almost misses his name being called. He looks in the stands and sees a shadow in Natalie’s eyes, a tremor in Caroline’s hands, and an empty seat where Randolph should be sitting. He almost doesn’t care, but just enough bitterness bounces around inside of him that their falling out becomes inevitable.

Two chapters of his life have closed so close together that they become intertwined in his head. Frederick is an orphan and in possession of two bachelor’s degrees in history and American studies.

Two weeks into class at Harvard, Frederick notices a woman in the back row of the World War I class he’s TAing. This wouldn’t be unusual, except he sees her again in his U.S. military history seminar. And again in the library, when he’s frantically scouring the stacks for any book on Sopwith Camels he can find. He’s desperate, he’ll even take one on the Sopwith Snipe.

“Hello,” he says, on Tuesday. He’s seen her five times since Sunday morning. Normally, Frederick is nowhere near self-centered enough to assume she’s following him, but this is getting excessive, “are you also studying the Sopwith Camel? Its difficulty in handling contrasted with its easy maneuverability, and made it extremely deadly during World War II. Though, if you are studying it, you already know that, obviously, and I–”

The woman smiles at him. She doesn’t look any older than him, but her gray eyes are filled with an intensity that makes her seem ancient. Her hair is brown and curly, and falls over her shoulder in an effortless way that Natalie would probably be jealous of. She’s taller than him, but only by a couple of inches, and is wearing a gray shirt and cargo pants. She also wears a bronze bracelet with a small charm that Frederick swears is the face of Medusa. He is more curious about her than he is afraid, and he’s always been a follower of his own curiosity. “Hello, Frederick.” He doesn’t have time to wonder how she knows his name, because after she greets him, she reaches impossibly high up and pulls down a book. Frederick wants to cry: it’s the Sopwith Camel book he’s been searching for all morning. Michael Porter’s name has never been so welcoming

“Thank you,” he says, then ruins his dignity by immediately bursting into tears. 

She doesn’t seem to mind. “There’s another one up there, but it has a number of factual inaccuracies. Reading it would be a waste of your time.”

“Thank you,” he says again, pulling himself together. “Who are you?”

“I am Athena,” she says. Her brows draw tighter for a moment. He doesn’t really know why.

“Like the Greek goddess?”

Her gray eyes fasten onto his, and her brows release as she answers, “Exactly like her.”

Frederick bobs his head. He’s too sleep-deprived for this right now (which unfortunately seems to be a running theme of important moments in his life). Abruptly, he says, “Was it Thompson’s book? The one filled with bad research?”

Athena quirks up one of her eyebrows. He dares to think that he might have impressed her, then banishes the thought. “Yes.”

Frederick scoffs. “He’s an idiot. Wouldn’t be able to tell a Lightning from a Mustang. I had to slog through his research on Bristol Beaufighters my whole senior year, it was infuriating how wrong he was.”

“I have no patience for idiots,” Athena says. Her gray eyes pierce through him once again, and he has the brief feeling that he’s being tested.

“No one’s not an idiot one hundred percent of the time,” he argues, “even the smartest people get things wrong.” He thinks back to the paper he wrote in the fall semester of his junior year about the rise and fall of the Weimar Republic, and his claim that its fall was due primarily to lack of support from other European nations.

As if she can tell what he’s thinking about, Athena’s eyes lighten. “As long as one admits when they are wrong, and takes the time to correct themselves, then they aren’t a complete idiot. It’s the fools who cling to their inaccurate opinions whom I don’t tolerate.”

Frederick, brain moving at the speed of oatmeal as it falls from his bowl into the sink, has to take a moment to think about this. “I can agree with that,” he says finally. 

A smirk pokes through Athena’s stern face. “Oh, you can?” she says, and he gets the distinct impression that he’s being teased.

He shrugs. “I’m willing to agree with most things that you say. Especially after you give me books on Sopwith Camels.”

Athena laughs. It’s not a pretty laugh, Frederick thinks it sounds more like an owl’s screech than some kind of bell-tinkling titter, but it suits her perfectly. “Come with me,” she says. She does not extend her arm, but he stumbles after her as though she’s tugging him on a leash. They walk down several flights of stairs and nearly out of the library, before she takes an abrupt left and they end up at a study room door.

“Athena,” Frederick whispers, “there are people in there. We can’t go in.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Frederick,” she says, waving her hand as though he just told her the sky was green and sand was blue, “these are your people. Your fellows. Go in, talk to them.”

“My what?” Frederick asks, as though she just told him that the sky was green and the sand was blue.

She frowns. “You are here to attain your PhD in history, with an emphasis on American military history, are you not?”

He nods, feeling like he’s missing something. Have they met before?

“Well, there you go. These are your fellows.”

“Wait, you mean, they’re also history grad students?”

Athena rolls her eyes. Frederick finds it endearing, but probably shouldn’t. “Now he gets it. This is why you don’t skip the mixers. It’s always more valuable to pool knowledge and study as a group. Now go!”

Frederick hesitates. “Will you still be here when we’re done?”

She looks at him as though he’s a dog, or perhaps little Emma, still learning what questions need answers. “I will be wherever I please, Frederick Gustavus Chase. But, if you need me, I will always come to help you.”

Frederick has no idea what she means by that and, again, he is far too sleep-deprived for this many life-changing events to keep happening to him, but if his mother taught him one thing, it was when to stop arguing with a woman. “Bye,” he says awkwardly.

She raises her eyebrows again, and he nearly falls into the door trying to open it. “Goodbye, Frederick,” she says. When he turns around again, she’s gone, like she was never there in the first place.

As he walks into the study room, a dozen eyes flick up to him. “Hi, he says, “I’m Frederick. I’m, uh, I think I’m one of you. I was told I should come here.”

An Asian girl with shoulder-length hair and bright pink sneakers smiles at him. “Welcome, Frederick.” The rest of the group murmurs hellos and welcomes in a low, absentminded chorus. It’s the warmest welcome Frederick’s gotten since undergrad.

Over the next five years, Frederick doesn’t sleep. He barely eats. He sets an alarm at 7:30 to make coffee, then teaches an 8 am class three days a week. The other two days, he lives in the library from opening until closing, supplanting meals with free cookies from the coffee shop. When it’s his turn to host study group, he shamelessly uses the credit card that Randolph never removed from their parents’ old account (now Randolph’s account) to buy fresh sourdough, deli meat, and every spread he can find at the grocery store, and his group mates fall upon the sandwich materials with the level of gusto appropriate for the Red Sox winning the World Series. He writes and rewrites his thesis seventeen times, then throws the whole thing out and goes back to the Sopwith Camel. He spends a semester traveling all across the world to look at as many surviving Camels as he can get access to. The people around him fade in and out, getting married, having kids, buying houses. Some of his friends give up on their doctorate and settle with a masters. Some of them abandon their field entirely and go into the rapidly-expanding world of computer science, making eighty five thousand dollars a year. Those guys have really nice weddings, buy really nice houses, and get cars a lot nicer than his ’68 VW Bus. But the Bus drives fine, still, mostly. He’s able to take three members of his study group to get abortions in it, which counts for a lot. He’s also able to bring his students’ papers so he can grade while he waits. He doesn’t talk to Randolph for two years, and Natalie takes the train up to him four times to drag him home for Christmas. He lives, breathes, and daydreams about Sopwith Camels.

He has two constants: Athena and olives. 

Athena shows up regularly when he’s nine hours into a rewrite and ready to bang his head against the table. She sits down across from him and parries Camel facts with stories about George Washington, Winston Churchill, and Marie Curie. She calls them her kids, and Frederick thinks it’s the second cutest thing she does. She eats olives by the jar (that’s the cutest) and whenever she visits, there are jars left in his pantry. They’re the only food that doesn’t stick around long enough to go bad.

Frederick is twenty three, twenty four, twenty five years old, and he doesn’t know what he’d do without her. He is twenty six years old and she’s not living with him, but she sleeps on his couch when he passes out at his desk, and drags him back to the library in the morning. He’s twenty seven and he really starts to wonder who Athena is.

When he asks her, on a freezing, snowy December morning, she laughs. It still sounds like an owl’s screech, and Frederick still doesn’t care because it suits her perfectly. “I’m Athena.”

“Right, like the goddess,” Frederick says, wondering if they’re going back five years.

“No, Frederick, I am the goddess,” she says, tone laced with exasperation. He reaches into the bowl of olives and tosses one into his mouth. It tastes pleasantly of oil and salt and it’s halfway down his throat before her words sink in. He chokes and the half-digested olive launches out of his throat and lands on his nineteenth thesis draft.

“You–what? You–goddess? Goddess–you–huh?” It makes sense, of course. He never sees her coming or going. She isn’t a student and doesn’t have a job, but she’s always around. She seems to know when he needs her unending wealth of knowledge or peer editing skills. She has an unending wealth of knowledge. She’s never tried to hide it, he’s just… “I’m an idiot,” he says.

“No,” Athena responds, serious as anything, “you’re a student. You have a lot on your mind.”

“But you never–”

“You have a lot on your mind. Besides, no one’s not an idiot some of the time, right?”

It takes him a moment to remember the words he said to her the first day they met. Or rather, the first day they talked… “That’s how you knew so much about me!” he realizes.

“You really never questioned how I knew your full name?”

“I–I had a lot on my mind.”

She screeches again. “Oh, I know. We gods can read minds, you know.”

Frederick promptly turns the color of a tomato. “Uh…” Because the other thing about Athena, the thought that’s only occurring to him now, is that she’s a virgin goddess. He wracks his brain, trying to remember if he’s thought anything unsavory about her.

“You haven’t,” she says easily. “Honestly, you’re more interested in sleeping with my olives than you are with me.”

Frederick turns red again, for a different reason this time. “It’s–they’re good olives!”

Athena smirks. “I know.” She turns back to his thesis draft. “Where were we? Oh, right, the entry of Sopwith Camels into–”

“Will you come home with me for Christmas?” As soon as the words fall out of his mouth, he regrets them. She literally just told him she’s a Greek goddess, why would she want to celebrate a Christian holiday?

She smiles at him, and it’s like he’s seeing her again for the first time. She’s got perfectly curly brown hair, intense gray eyes that make him want to run for the hills as much as they draw him in, and wears what he’s now 85% sure is the literal Aegis as a charm bracelet on her wrist. How did he not see before now that she was a goddess?

“I’d love to,” she says, “now, back to your thesis…”

Frederick is twenty seven years old, and he thinks his life is perfect.

Frederick is twenty eight years old and half of his remaining family is dead.

But let’s back up. First, Christmas.

It starts out fine. Randolph opens the door and looks almost pleased to see them. “Freddy,” he says, “welcome home.” They nod at each other, and then Randolph extends a hand to Athena. “You must be Freddy’s girlfriend,” he says.

Frederick and Athena lock eyes. They’ve discussed this, but conversations with Randolph always stress him out. It’s probably the perpetual sleep deprivation. “I am Athena,” she says smoothly, neither confirming nor denying Randolph’s assumption.

Caroline appears behind her husband, no child in arms for the first time that Frederick can remember. “Freddy!” She says warmly, “And…”

“Athena,” they all fill in for her, accidentally chorusing.

“Athena,” Caroline’s smile is like a hearth, warm and inviting, just waiting for you to collapse and soak up its warmth. It’s part of what makes her such a good psychologist. “Welcome to our home. Randolph,” Her fingers close around the skin at her husband’s elbow in an almost unnoticeable pinch. “Would you like to take Freddy and Athena’s coats?”

Randolph, recognizing when a request isn’t, in fact, a request, does as instructed. Caroline, still all smiles, leads them into the family room. The Christmas tree is set up in the corner, nearly falling over with all of its ornaments. Frederick recognizes several family heirlooms and a few foam gingerbread men and paper Christmas trees that he and his siblings must have made as children. Several more bear Aubrey and Emma’s names in variably recognizable handwriting. Natalie is already there, playing on their parents’ old Persian rug with Aubrey (who’s a lot bigger than Frederick remembers. He feels a pang in his chest, a surge of regret for not coming home more often). A blond man sits opposite to them, playing a clapping game with Emma (also bigger, but she’s older, so it seems less dramatic).

Frederick tilts his head at the man as he raises his eyebrow at Caroline. In a whisper, she tells him, “You’re not the only one who’s suddenly dating someone.”

“Natalie has a boyfriend ?” he hisses, forgetting to keep his voice down.

“Yeah, I do,” she calls from the carpet. “Do you want to meet him, or just keep staring?”

He flushes and walks over, Athena at his side. “Hi,” he says, crouching down on the carpet. Aubrey reaches out for him, now seven years old and missing her front teeth.

“Uncle F’eddy,” she says happily. He hugs her, but his attention is on the man wearing a green flannel and hiking pants in the middle of a Boston winter. “I’m Frederick, Natalie’s other brother.”

To his surprise, the man leans over and gives him a tight hug. Frederick sits there, frozen, until the man pulls away. “You look a great deal like Natalie,” he says jovially. “I am Frey.”

To Frederick’s mild surprise, Athena joins them on the carpet. “Hello, Frey.”

His smile dims, but Frederick only notices because he’s suddenly very tense about this meeting. “Hello, Athena,” Frey says, without her introducing herself.

And, of course, at that moment, Randolph enters the room. “Dinner’s ready,” he says. For all that it’s Christmas, he doesn’t seem thrilled to have the Chase family home filled with Chases. His gaze only softens when he’s talking to or looking at his wife and daughters. 

Frederick doesn’t really want to be here. Absence had dulled the sword of his disapproving brother. He doesn’t want to make nice with the boyfriend he didn’t know his flighty sister had. It’s always wonderful to see Caroline and the girls, but it’s far easier when they come to him, and he’s not also reconciling childhood memories of his parents in the house that Randolph commandeered under eldest child and “well, it’s not like either of you have a family” rights.

Reading his thoughts–he’s really got to ask her to stop doing that–Athena jabs him in the side of his stomach as they walk to the dining room. “Have courage,” she orders. Frederick figures it’s in his best interest to listen to the goddess.

Dinner is passable. For all of his grudges against the man, Randolph makes incredible holiday meatballs. He even passes the lingonberry when requested. Aubrey and Emma are little chatterboxes, and Frederick genuinely enjoys hearing about school and their soccer season, and the play that Emma’s going to be in come springtime. Quantifiable intelligence is genetic for Chases, and Frederick finds himself looking forward to comparing classes and research with them, no matter what fields they pick.

Frey is… interesting. Perfect for Natalie, that’s for sure. Perfect to drive Randolph mad, also certainly. Perfect to set Athena on edge, surprisingly. Once dinner is over, while Randolph and Caroline are putting dishes in the dishwasher, she drags him out of the dining room for a “conversation”. With the girls ensconced in their Christmas morning presents, Natalie leans over to Frederick. “Think we need to worry about them?”

Her tone is light enough that Frederick figures she’s joking. “You’re one to talk. At least you’ve met Athena before. How long have you and Frey been, you know, a thing?”

“‘A thing’?” Natalie teases, “C’mon, Freddy, we’re not kids anymore. You can say dating , you know.”

“You’re inflicting him on Randolph,” Frederick says, thoroughly sick of being called Freddy. “Are you dating or married?”

Natalie makes a face. “Ew, no . Not married. You know I’m not into that kind of thing.”

“And yet, you’ve been with this guy long enough to bring him to Christmas. I must emphasize once again the Randolph-sized shadow that Christmas brings.”

“Look, Frey and I are happy,” Natalie says, definitely annoyed by this point. “Are you? Have you had this conversation with Athena?”

Frederick rolls his eyes. “When would I have the time or inclination to get married, Nat? My whole life is World War II fighter planes, just as it’s been for the past five years.”

“And yet,” Natalie says, in that tone that indicates that she’s about to throw his own words back at him, “you brought her here, for Christmas, with Randolph.”

Frederick doesn’t have an answer, and resorts to shrugging. There’s a victorious gleam in Natalie’s eyes that he doesn’t like. Thankfully, at this moment, Frey and Athena reenter the dining room. When she drops back down next to him, he leans over. “Everything okay?”

“I’ll tell you later,” she says. Her gray eyes have darkened and her body looks tense, but he lets it go. It’s in his best interest to listen to a goddess, after all.

Later that night, she tells him about it. “He’s a god,” she says, reclining on his childhood bed like it’s chaise or a fainting couch. She’s wearing a gray reindeer sweater and orange sweatpants, but she might as well be wearing one of those tunic-like dress-wraps– chiton , that’s the word!–that Greek gods are always wearing in art. It’s his bed, but she looks regal and godlike in it.

“Like you?” he asks, stringing together enough brain cells to listen to what she’s saying.

She makes a “so-so” motion with her hands. “He has different rules than I do. Different kings to obey. But if he gets her pregnant, he won’t be able to stick around to raise the kid.” Frederick scrunches up his face in a knee-jerk grossed-out reaction to his little sister having enough unprotected sex to get pregnant. “Don’t make that face,” Athena says sharply, “He's a fertility god. Even if they’re using condoms–”

“Blah, blah, blah!” Frederick sticks his fingers in his ear. “No sex, no pregnancies, no talks of my sister’s boyfriend’s fertility –”

“Technically, it would be Natalie’s fertility and his virility –” She laughs and stops talking as he makes more ridiculous faces.

“Why are we talking about this?” he complains. “You don’t want to have sex with me, or get pregnant, right?” She raises her eyebrow at him. “Yeah, I know, virgin goddess. One of the things I like most about you. So why talk about it?”

“It’s a fact of life, Frederick. If she stays with him, he will get her pregnant, and she will raise the baby alone.” Her tone implies that he’s being deliberately obtuse. Which he is , but it’s rude of her to point it out.

“What about if I stay with you?” he asks, then immediately regrets it.

Her gray eyes bore into his. “Do you truly want an answer to that question?” He shakes his head. “Good. Now, you should probably go to sleep. Your nieces are going to wake you up quite early tomorrow morning, and you’d most likely prefer to be as rested as possible.” She makes no effort to move from his bed, so he scrunches up next to the wall, with as great a distance between them as he can manage in a twin bed. As a goddess, Athena has no need to sleep, but it’s quite comforting that she chooses to stay with him regardless. “I can hear your thoughts,” she reminds him, “go to sleep, before you begin to embarrass yourself.” He does, and as he nods off he thinks that the Chase house hasn’t felt this home-like since his parents died. 

Four months later, that feeling is gone forever. Once again, Frederick gets the call while he’s far too sleep-deprived and thesis-focused to understand it. This time, though, it comes from Natalie. You need to come home, Freddy. Caroline, Aubrey, and Emma are gone, and Randolph needs us. Don’t bring Athena. He goes, of course, and the funeral is even colder than his parents’ six years prior. Caroline’s parents and brother have never been fond of Randolph, but shared grief has brought them together. Randolph is only thirty three, and he is a widower and–there really isn’t a word for a parent who has lost their child. There should be a word for that.

He tells Athena what’s going on, but passes on Natalie’s message that this is something he needs to do alone. Athena agrees with him, but sees him off with worry in her eyes and a furrowed brow. When he arrives, he notices Frey’s absence as well.

Although the funeral itself is limited to immediate family (Randolph, Natalie, Frederick, and Caroline’s parents, brother, and sister-in-law), the reception is more open. Frederick sees people, Caroline’s friends and distant family, whom he hasn’t seen since Randolph’s wedding. One of those people, to his surprise, is Helen Park, who welcomed him to the study group in his first year as a PhD student.

“How did you know Caroline?” he asks.

“We went to high school together,” she says, “and after I finished my PhD, I got hired for an assistant position in the same department as Randolph, so we reconnected. We–we were going to get coffee next week, to catch up.” Her voice tightens as she nears the end of her thought. Frederick offers her what he hopes is a sympathetic smile. “What about you?”

Well, this is awkward. “She was my sister-in-law,” he says, then stops abruptly, unsure where to go from there.

Her eyes widen, and her face reddens in embarrassment. “Oh, my God, of course! God, how did I not make the connection between Frederick Chase the PhD student and Randolph’s little brother Freddy? It seems so obvious…” She gives an exaggerated laugh and Caroline’s Aunt Loretta glares at them from the dessert table.

“Don’t–uh, don’t worry,” Frederick says, “Happens to the best of us.” It doesn’t, in fact, and they both know it, but Helen’s face lights up like she appreciates the thought.

“So,” she says, in a clear attempt to change the subject, “have you gotten your doctorate yet?”

“Soon, hopefully” he says, “I’m set to defend my thesis in May.”

“Well, best of luck,” she says, “I hope you get Roberts. I think they put him on those panels just so the candidates have a chance of making it through. Rumor has it, he hasn’t voted against somebody in twenty years. What’s your thesis on?”

“Sopwith Camels,” he says, self-conscious. He vaguely remembers Helen’s; something about female sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean…

She smiles minutely. “Right, I remember you having a bunch of books on those.”

“The library actually had to order more. I kept, uh, hounding the librarians. I think they eventually bought them just to get me off of their backs.” He laughs, an unexpected combination of self-deprecation, embarrassment, and anxiety. “What was yours on, again?”

“What we can tell of female empowerment in the Roman Republic, based on the way they worshiped their gods,” she says, without even a hint of the shame that is currently plaguing Frederick.

“That’s… that’s fantastic,” Frederick says, and he means it too. “And you’re still at Harvard? How come I never see you anymore?”

As soon as the words come out of his mouth, he knows they’re the wrong thing to say. “Well,” Helen says icily, “we’re both quite busy now. No time to see the old study group pals, anymore. Oh, I see Caroline’s sister-in-law, I’d better pass along my condolences.” She sweeps away and Frederick is left to stare after her.

He returns to Harvard two days later, and Athena looks at him with a generous amount of pity in her eyes when he tells her about his conversation with Helen. “Frederick,” she says, “you know we have an expiration date.” He does know. He is three weeks away from his thesis defense, and Athena is the goddess of wisdom. She’s already spent nearly six years with him, about five and a half years longer than her peers usually spend with mortal conquests.

“Yeah,” he says, wishing he could come up with a better response. He’s… very fond of Athena. He likes to think they make an excellent match.

“We do,” she says, “but we gods are…fickle. I was never meant to stay this long, but I became fond of you, as well. Your brain is incredible, one of the best I’ve seen in centuries.”

He blushes a bit, despite himself. “You say that to all of your favored mortals,” he accuses.

“I do,” she says, with not a hint of embarrassment. And why should she feel any? She’s a god. She can engage with as many mortals (and their brains) as she pleases. “But yours is truly something. If we were in my city’s heyday, you would be among the elite.”

“I don’t want to be a politician,” he protests, “or a philosopher. I just want to study Sopwith Camels!”

“Then study them,” she says, “Study them for the rest of your life. Study nothing else, and whet your brain entirely on British-constructed warplanes of the Second World War. You will be content in that endeavor. But you must do it without me.”

“I know,” he grumbles. I just don’t want to be alone .

“You won’t be alone,” she promises. “I gift all of my prized mortals a special reward when I leave them. Yours, Frederick, will be among the most extraordinary of all, I can tell. She will accomplish incredible things.”

Frederick does not miss the female pronoun she is attaching to this mysterious “reward”, but he has neither the time, nor the brainpower to dig into that right now, as Athena has not finished talking. “Now,” she says, “get back to your thesis. You promised yourself and your advisor a fifty page revision by Thursday.”

He takes the hint and gets back to work. They don’t talk about Athena leaving again, and when she’s nowhere to be found the day after he passes his thesis defense, he accepts it without protest.

Dr. Frederick Gustavus Chase is twenty eight years old. He is an orphan, and his sister-in-law and nieces are dead. His only remaining family are his brother and sister, whom he rarely talks to and almost never agrees with. He is recently in possession of a PhD in history, with a special focus on militaries and air forces of the twentieth century.

He regrets not asking more questions. He regrets not pushing for more answers. He regrets the whole thing with Athena–well, that’s not true. 

Three weeks ago, a baby floated down onto his doorstep in a golden cradle. According to his kitchen scale, she weighs seven pounds, five ounces. According to the nearest doctor Frederick could find on such short notice, she was likely born the very day she appeared on Frederick’s porch. Her eyes, not that Frederick has told the doctor this, have been dark gray since she first opened them. She even has a belly button.

Okay, that isn’t news to anyone else, but Frederick is very aware of the fact that he and Athena have never had sex. Therefore, this little girl can’t have come out the normal way (right, Athena?), and therefore, should not have a belly button. But she does. And, honestly, it’s the cutest little belly button he’s ever seen.

Their first meeting doesn’t go super well. For reference, it’s July. Frederick has just been hired as a history professor at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Virginia. He does not start teaching until September, and won’t start getting paychecks until then, either. He does not have the money or the resources for a baby. 

So, he calls for Athena. She appears in his shabby living room almost instantly, as though she’s been waiting. She’s dressed like a traditional goddess now, no sight of the T-shirts and cargo pants that she used to drape over the ratty couch of his Harvard apartment. Just a blindingly white tunic-dress-wrap-thing and shiny bronze shoulder pads. She’s even got a feathered helmet on, looking more than ready to lead an army into battle.

“I can’t raise a baby,” he says desperately, “I don’t have the money, or the knowledge, or–I’m living in a one-bedroom apartment, and my lease goes for the next year! Please, you have to take her! Can’t you raise her on Olympus, or something? Is there a god of babysitting?”

She is not amused, and fixes him with a cold look. “She is your reward, and your daughter. We are forbidden from interfering directly into the lives of our children. You must raise her, it is your privilege and responsibility.”

“But I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“No parent does. I hear there are classes available for this kind of thing. You will learn, and you will learn well. I told you, our daughter is going to be extraordinary.”

“But–”

“You’ve already named her, Frederick,” she says, and something in her softens with those words. “You’re attached. You wouldn’t give her up for anything.” He hasn’t even opened his mouth before she tacks on, “Don’t be obtuse. And avert your eyes.” He does, and, on instinct, covers their daughter’s as well. Even without seeing, the golden flash burns his eyes. He hopes he hasn’t just blinded their baby. She’s tougher than you think , Athena’s words are a gong in his mind. Our little Annabeth. Legends will be written about her .

Frederick’s not so sure about the legends part. He’ll settle for her making it to adulthood unharmed. But… their little Annabeth. It sounds nice. How Athena already knew the name he’d only thought about for a couple of seconds, he doesn’t know. Probably more of her goddess mind-reading powers. However it was discovered, he has a daughter now. If she’s anything like her mother, she’s going to be very, very special. He’s still scared, but there’s a bit of excitement underscoring the fear. His daughter. His child. The first Chase baby born in eight years.

Annabeth is developing abnormally. There’s no other word for it. At four weeks old, she gripped Frederick’s shirt for the first time, clutching it stubbornly between her pudgy fingers as he put her down. At twelve weeks, she started to babble, and she crawled from her playpen to the coffee table just after crossing the barrier between sixteen and seventeen weeks old. 

He picks her up and holds her up to his face. She’s over a year old now, with adorable wisps of honey-colored curls. Her eyes have stayed gray. She’s wearing a onesie that has tiny airplanes on it, a gift that showed up on the morning of July 12th with a Hermes Express label on it. It’s grown with her, in the four months since it arrived. “You’re a bit abnormal, aren’t you?” he asks. She squirms. She started walking properly three months ago, over three months earlier than his baby books said she would, and she has not tolerated much carrying since then. “Oh, it’s wonderful,” he tells her, “if I was your Aunt Caroline, I’d–” he has to stop, because he’s not Caroline. Caroline is dead, and she’ll never know Annabeth, and Annabeth will never know her, or her cousins. He switches positions, cuddling her at his shoulder. She digs her chin pensively into the back of his neck, as if to say Put me down, Dad . “Who wants to help me grade papers?” he coos. She catches the collar of his shirt in her mouth and starts to suck on it. Her walking is ahead of time, but Annabeth is sparse with her words. He knows she knows them, but she seems to prefer to exercise her opinions with smiles and glares, rather than yeses and nos. “Oh yes, let’s read what the first years have to say about Winston Churchill, yes, yes. He was your half-brother, you know. Yes, that’s what Mommy said.”

Annabeth is developing abnormally, but she’s still only sixteen months old. Frederick isn’t fond of generalizations but, as a rule, sixteen-month-olds do not care very much for Winston Churchill, regardless of whether or not they are related to him. Thus, instead of actually making her read vaguely-intelligible and poorly cited arguments about World War II, he sets her up on her meander-patterned rug (another unordered Hermes Express delivery).

This is how his days are spent now. Frederick barely understands how to care for his demigod child, and he does not trust normal daycares to know even as much as him, so Annabeth comes to work with him. His students this year were startled by the crib at the bottom of the lecture hall for the first couple of days, but they’ve gotten used to her now. Last year’s students adapted at the same pace. Sometimes, Frederick puts infant earmuffs on her so that she can sleep, other times she is content to listen, although she doesn’t take as many notes as his students. Frederick always runs his lectures in front of her before class, and if she seems interested, he mentions that at the beginning of the day. His students are tickled by this, and test scores have gone up throughout the semester every time. He flatters himself that it’s his teaching, and not just growing comfort with the school.

When Annabeth is asleep, he sets up the baby monitor and sleeps too. The apartment has needed a deep clean for over a month, but Frederick is a full-time professor and single father. As long as he and his daughter are mostly clean and mostly fed, he counts it as a win.

On weekends, he grades papers and lectures to her as they walk around the park, garnering strange looks from other parents. He doesn’t really understand why; it’s not like their babies are going to understand why birds and trees matter any more than Annabeth understands blitzkrieg .

His parenting is not traditional, but it’s working well enough for them. As long as Annabeth is happy, Frederick is happy. Until Natalie shows up at his apartment the week before Thanksgiving, unannounced and with a noticeable swell to her stomach. Frederick’s drops, out of sympathy or fear he doesn’t know, and lets her in.

“Is–it’s Frey’s?” he asks.

She scowls at him. “No, its existence is due to the other god I’ve been going camping with for the past two years.”

“God?”

“Don’t play coy with me, Freddy. I know that you know that Frey’s a god, and you know that I know that you know that Athena’s one, too.” Frederick has a hundred papers to grade and an infant. He hasn’t had a consistent sleep schedule for the past decade, and he isn’t getting on one now. He is far, far too sleep deprived to deal with any bullshit.

“Nat, if you’re going to talk, then talk. I don’t have time for you to dance around anything.”

“You certainly don’t have time for your family,” she shoots back, “you ran out of Boston as soon as you could.”

“I got a job ,” he snaps, “and I have a baby .”

“So do I!”

All of this shouting wakes Annabeth, who starts crying from the other room. Frederick sighs. “See what you did?” he hisses. She makes a face at him, the same one she made when she was five and he caught her standing in the broken shards of Great-Aunt Lucy’s decorative plate, which hadn’t been broken five minutes earlier. It’s also the same face that Aubrey made when she ripped the head off of Emma’s doll. It looks as funny on twenty-six year old Natalie as it did on five year old Natalie and six year old Aubrey. 

Annabeth has never met Natalie before, so she peers at her curiously once Frederick gets her calmed down. Natalie calms down too and plays peek-a-boo with her while drinking some herbal tea that Frederick stole from the History department. He looks at her, and she meets his eyes, and he has the sense that they’re both remembering that last little niece that Natalie played games with.

Natalie clears her throat. “I, uh, I actually don’t have a baby yet,” she says lowly, like every word hurts to come out of her mouth, “But I’m going to. In January. That’s why I’m here.”

He nods and doesn’t say I figured . “How can I help?”

“Why did you name her Annabeth?” she asks, throwing him for a loop.

He stares at his daughter, at her sharp gray eyes, little golden wisps, and pudgy cheeks. Then, he looks up at his sister, the image of their father, down to her short, blond hair and observant, leaf-green eyes. “Anna for Mom, Elizabeth for Grandma. I wasn’t exactly suffering from a surfeit of potential namesakes, but,” he shrugs, “it seemed like an obvious choice. And it fit her.” He’s quiet for a minute, then adds, “Athena’s Greek. And in Ancient Greece, sons would be named for their fathers. You know, Heraclitus, son of Heraclitus. Annabeth… uses the same letters as Athena. So even though it’s not an exact match, she’s named for her mother. It… it felt right, and it fit her. So I went with it.”

“You’re such a sap,” Natalie says, but there isn’t any bite to her words. She pulls a folded-up piece of paper out of her pocket. The edges look ragged and thin, and Frederick can see smudged ink through it. “I’m not having a daughter, I’m having a son. And… I have no idea where to start with his name.” If there’s one thing that Chases will always have, it’s pride. She won’t admit it, but he knows what she wants.

“What do you have so far?” he asks.

She takes a long drink from her teacup. “Bjorn.” Frederick chokes out a laugh.

“You cannot name your son ‘Bjorn Chase’. That’s–that’s gotta be child abuse.”

“It means ‘bear’,” she defends.

“You can’t name him ‘Bjorn Chase’! He’ll never be taken seriously in peer review!”

“Of course your concern is his academic respect . For all you know, he won’t even go into academia. He’s not even born yet!”

Frederick scoffs. “Let’s do the math, shall we? His mother, both of his uncles, grandfather, and great-grandfather all have or had PhDs. He may not follow in our footsteps exactly, but he’s going to be in academia somewhere . At the very least, he’ll be passionate enough about something that he’ll get more and more degrees out of spite, so the people he’s arguing against take him seriously, Ms. Environmental-Lawyer-at-26.”

Natalie kicks him and yelps and bounces his daughter on his knee. “Fine,” she says, “I won’t name him Bjorn. Even though it would be so badass to name my son ‘bear’. I’ll tell him that his uncle is a buzzkill, and that’s why his name is Trygve.”

Frederick busts up laughing again, holding Annabeth tightly against his chest so that she doesn't accidentally hit something she shouldn’t. “No!” he repeats. “That’s even worse.”

“It means ‘trustworthy,” Natalie insists, “Didn’t you want people to respect him?”

“No one’s going to respect a ‘Trygve’. They won’t even be able to pronounce that, and no one’s going to respect what they can’t pronounce.” She kicks him again. “Hey, you came to me with this.”

She rolls her eyes. “Right, because I should have gone to the man who wasn’t even involved in naming his kids.”

“Really?” Frederick asks. He was in undergrad when the girls were born. He didn’t even meet Emma until she was sitting up on her own.

“He told Caroline that he’d love them regardless of what they were called, and left her to figure it out. Eventually, she just gave up and named them after her grandparents.”

Frederick laughs. It sounds about right for their brother. “Well, you came to me for advice, and my advice is that you can’t name him ‘Bjorn’ or ‘Trygve’, no matter how good the meanings are.”

“Well, maybe I should go with your idea,” she says, “name him… ‘Reyf’!”

“No!”

` “Freyson?”

“At that point, just name him ‘Jason’,” Frederick says.

She thinks about it for a moment, then frowns. “Too Greek,” she says, “ My son is going to be a Viking, not a–well, not a…”

“Hoplite?” Frederick suggests. “Hero?”

“I’m gonna throw this teacup at you.”

He’s 78% sure she’s joking, but he rescues it from her anyway. He spent ten bucks on it, it’s practically priceless. He’s so absorbed in making sure his teacup is okay that it takes him a moment to realize that she’s stopped talking. 

When he glances up, he sees her focused on the group picture on his mantle. It was only taken eleven months ago, but it feels like a lifetime. Randolph and Caroline are in the middle, right in front of the fireplace, with arms around each other and the girls in front of them. Frederick flanks Randolph on the left side of the photo, and Athena stands to his right in that gray reindeer sweater. Natalie is on the other side of the photo, and Frey, perfectly balancing it out, poses to her left. The differences in their auras radiate from the frame, even through the photography. Athena has a smile on her face, but her stance is rigid and still, and Frederick can almost see a feathered bronze helmet on her head and a spear in her hand. Frey, on the other hand, has a wide, relaxed grin and is wearing a blue flannel. Athena has the look of Christmas, and Frey has the feel, and both of them are just a little too powerful to be posing like that in front of the same fireplace Frederick and his siblings played, scribbled and spilled their blood on as children. The same fireplace whose mantle has always carried a picture of their parents, a picture just visible in the background of Frederick’s photo.

He picks up the photo and places it carefully on the table between them. Natalie’s eyes follow the photo, not him, but she looks up when he puts his finger on their father’s face. “Anything on your list that sounds like Matthew?” he asks.

“Magnus,” she says immediately. “‘Great’. It’s a Latin name, technically, but there were four King Magnuses of Sweden, one of Denmark, and seven of Norway.”

“Seven?” Frederick asks. It sounds a bit excessive to him, but England managed eight Henrys, Scotland six Jameses before unification, and both Athens and Sparta had an important Lycurgus, so maybe he can’t judge. And anyway, Natalie raises her eyebrows at him, so he drops it. “It sounds like you’ve got a name for your kid,” he says lightly.

Natalie laughs, voice breaking in the middle of it. “Should’ve known that Caroline would have the right idea, in the end.” And, well, if she’s not going to talk about it, Frederick won’t either.

“Do you want to hold my baby?” he asks.

Natalie sniffs. “Yeah.” As soon as she takes her, Annabeth burps, leaving Natalie with milky spit-up on her shirt.

The sight is suddenly too much for Frederick, who bursts out laughing. It’s really more of a cackle, not unlike Athena’s owl-screech. He reaches to pull his baby back, but Natalie pulls away. “Excuse you,” she says, mirth dancing in her voice even as her eyes are wide with shock, “I’m bonding with my niece here. Go–grade a paper, or something.”

Frederick laughs and grabs his bag. Natalie makes a distressed sound, so he looks back at her. “What,” he says, “were you expecting me to potentially endanger my daughter by yanking her out of your arms? You’ve held a baby before.”

“I don’t want you to take her,” Natalie hisses, “I want you to get me a towel, or something, so that if she pukes again it doesn’t land on me.”

“Since when do you care about stains on your clothes? You always say that it just means they’re well-loved.”

“Sure, if it’s dirt, or bleach, or blood–”

“What?”

“Oh, don’t be a baby, Freddy. I bleed. We all do. Sometimes, I even bleed from–”

“Okay, okay, carry on,” he says hurriedly.

“What,” Natalie smirks, “Your goddess baby mama didn’t have periods?”

“No, actually,” Frederick says, regretting taking the bait as soon as the words tumble from his mouth, “you know, because she was a goddess and all.”

Natalie shakes her head. “I hate you sometimes,” she says.

“Just sometimes? I’m slacking in my job as your older brother, then.”

“Yeah,” she says, “you are.” Her voice has gone deeper. Frederick drops the wide grin that had been starting to peek up. Natalie doesn’t often go dead serious. She bounces Annabeth up and down as she paces around his living room/dining room/office. He itches to pull her back into his arms or set her back in her crib or something, but there’s a very real possibility that holding his daughter is the only thing keeping Natalie moving right now, and he doesn’t want to hurt either one of them.

“You haven’t been home in eighteen months,” she says, “not since the weekend after your graduation–”

“Hooding ceremony,” he corrects. Her glare when she turns back to him could set his apartment building on fire, melt him into a puddle of Frederick-goop, and kill Achilles somewhere not at his heel. He holds up his hands in surrender. “Sorry, please continue.”

“You haven’t been in Boston since the weekend after your graduation ,” she says pointedly, “you don’t write or call. You and Randolph haven’t spoken since Caroline and the girls’ funeral. You’re turning your thesis into a book, and we only know because Randolph has friends at the OUP who called to ask if the Frederick Chase writing a book on Sopwith Camels was related to him. You–you’re acting like we don’t exist to you! You had a fucking baby and didn’t tell us. And I’m going to have a baby too, and I can’t keep doing this! We’re all we have, Freddy. Mom and Dad are gone . Caroline is gone . Aubrey and Emma are gone . It’s just you, me, and Randolph. I’ve lost enough family in the past six years, I can’t lose any more. Don’t you agree?”

Frederick stays silent for a moment, letting her words sink in. The first emotion that fills him is guilt–a lot of it. She’s right. She’s right about everything. The second emotion is anger, because while she’s right , she still doesn’t get it. The third is bone-deep exhaustion that has nothing to do with how much sleep he’s been able to sneak in. She’s right, and she doesn’t get it, and Frederick can’t do this alone anymore. It’s draining him away, and if he keeps going he will melt into a puddle of Frederick-goop, and then who will take care of Annabeth?

“I’m sorry,” he says, rubbing at the bridge of his nose. “You’re right. I’ll do better.”

“For her,” Natalie says, handing his daughter back to him. Frederick cuddles her close, reveling in the softness of her skin and how good of a biter she’s becoming. Natalie touches a hand to her swollen stomach. “For both of them, Freddy. Don’t let them grow up like we did.”

“I won’t,” he says, “I’ll do better.”

“Prove it.”

“How?”

“Come back to Boston with me for Thanksgiving.”

“Okay.”

She seems surprised by his easy acquiescence, but Frederick means it. He’s spent the past year and a half hiding from his family, and although the quiet time to bond with his daughter has been amazing, sixteen months he wouldn’t trade for the world, it’s also been isolating. It’s time they go back to Boston. It’s time Annabeth’s family expands.

That night, Athena visits him in his dreams, clad once again in the owl-print shirt and cargo pants of their first meeting. “Your sister is a very intelligent woman,” she says. “If you hadn’t listened to her, I would have been very disappointed.”

“Athena–” he starts, but she holds up a hand.

“You have done a good job so far of raising our daughter. Now, go to Boston for your colonizer’s holiday. Family is what gives us strength.”

He rolls his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.” She scowls at him and vanishes. 

When he wakes up, he goes to stand over Annabeth’s crib. Rubbing a hand down the soft fabric of her onesie, he thinks about her as a toddler, learning, walking, and running all over the apartment; a child, growing fast and devouring books as though they are all she needs for nourishment; a teenager, wielding weapons no mortal has seen in use for three thousand years. He imagines her as an adult, older than he is now, but he can’t think of what she might be doing. He cannot see who might be by her side, not even a man who could conceivably be Magnus. In his mind, his daughter-grown-up stands alone. The thought disturbs him. Dropping a soft kiss on her head, he walks back to his bed and falls into an uneasy slumber.

On his and Annabeth’s last day in Boston, he bumps into Helen Park outside his favorite bookstore. “Hi,” he says, feeling every pound of the two-letter, one-syllable word.

“Hi,” she says tightly. They stare at each other’s faces for a few long seconds, and he almost doesn’t notice when her eyes flick down to Annabeth and her stroller. Annabeth, whose gray eyes are extremely prominent. Annabeth, who is sixteen-and-a-half months old and is squirming in the stroller, protesting the cage that her father has unfairly locked her in. “Who is this?” she asks, managing to pack disapproval, confusion, and wonder into three small words.

A smile automatically pokes through Frederick’s face as he gazes down upon his daughter. “This is Annabeth,” he says.

“And the mother…”

“Oh, she’s…” Frederick actually has no idea what to say. Not in the picture? Technically true, but he’s got a feeling Athena might smite him for that. Not here right now? Definitely gives the wrong impression. A Greek goddess who gave me a baby as a reward for being so smart? Yeah, that wouldn’t go over well at all. “…it’s complicated,” he says eventually. “It’s just me and Annabeth right now.”

A smile spreads across Helen’s face as he says that. She glances back up to him. “Can I hold her?”

“Um…” Annabeth hates being held more and more every day. And based on her reaction to being held by both Natalie and Randolph, spitting up seems to be her default response to meeting a new person. In the pause as he tries to figure out how to respond, Helen’s face falls. “She, um, just ate.” It’s a bald-faced lie and he knows it. Helen has seen them coming out of a bookstore, so she indubitably knows it too, but she is polite enough not to comment on it.

“Do you want to get a drink?” she says instead.

Frederick panics and gestures to his baby. “I have a kid,” he says, somewhat unnecessarily. Obviously, Helen knows that he has a kid. That’s what their whole conversation has been about.

“Not–I meant coffee. Do you want to get coffee?”

“Like, right now?”

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Frederick says, The only person not surprised by that response is Annabeth, who seems bored by the adult conversation happening above her, and has begun supplanting that boredom by stretching up her feet to kick the stroller mobile around. She’s going to be such a good fighter someday. Frederick’s heart warms at that, and he momentarily worries that the amount of time he’s spent with Athena has warped his view on appropriate behavior in a child. It’s probably nothing, though.

So he and Helen get coffee. Boston is quite cold today, but the place Helen takes him to is relatively uncrowded, so there’s plenty of space inside. He parks Annabeth in a nice, windowed corner, and she is suitably entranced by the snowflakes blowing around outside. Confident that he will hear any markers of distress–screaming, crying, throwing up–, he focuses the majority of his attention on Helen.

“How have you been?” he asks, not knowing what else to say.

She shrugs. “Fine. My sister had a baby boy last month. Cute enough, proper number of appendages and all that.”

“Congratulations,” Frederick offers.

“I have the rest of this year at Harvard still, but I’m looking for positions for next year.”

“W&M is looking for a new Classics professor,” Frederick offers. “It’s not quite the same as Folklore and Mythology, but…”

She nods. “Yeah, I’m, uh, I’m looking at them. I like them, actually. Got an interview in a couple of weeks.”

“Want me to put in a good word?”

Helen laughs. “Well, I hope my academic and teaching records will speak for themselves, and I’ve got a half dozen references, but if you want to say something nice about the quality of my feedback, that would be nice. But don’t feel obligated, I know it’s a busy time of year.”

“I’m always busy,” Frederick says. “And I’m offering.”

“Okay, then,” she says. She seems pleased by his offer. Frederick is pleased that she seems pleased. A lot of pleasure is being felt at this table right now–oh, for the gods’ sakes, that is not what he meant.

The conversation drifts after that. Frederick is happy enough in Virginia, but misses New England. Helen wants to be closer to family than she is in Massachusetts, but has siblings, cousins, and family friends in almost every major city across the country. Frederick doesn’t have that much family, but his sister is pregnant, did Helen hear that? Yes, yes she did, Randolph has been talking at work about how glad he is to have a nephew coming. Yes, that sounds like Randolph. For a man who loved his daughters more than anything else in the world, he has a strange obsession with the continuation of the male bloodline. Well, he’s a strange man. Yes, he certainly is.

They wrap up around 3, because Annabeth starts crying, but Frederick feels more refreshed than he has in months. He and Helen were never close in study group, but now he wishes they had been. She’s a lovely person, a fantastic conversationalist, and they have a startling amount of things in common. Even though it’s only been an afternoon, he feels comfortable enough to offer his couch for her to crash on when she comes down to Virginia.

“I appreciate that,” she says, “but I don’t want you to think that I’m using you for your couch, or anything.”

“No, of course not,” he says.

“And I wouldn’t be putting you out, at all?”

“No, of course not,”

“Well, alright then,” she says. “Thank you. I’ll see you in a couple of weeks then?”

“Second weekend of December?”

“Third,” she corrects.

“Third, then. Annabeth and I and our couch will be waiting.”

She smiles softly at that, and he thinks he sees a hint of a blush spread across her cheeks. She ducks down to Annabeth’s stroller and brushes her fuzzy purple coat softly. “Bye, Annabeth,” she says. Annabeth is currently engaged in an incredible amount of screaming. She likely doesn’t even register Helen’s goodbye, nor would she be interested in responding if she did, so Frederick responds for the both of them.

“Bye, Helen,” he says. “I hope your students are absorbent.”

“They won’t be,” she laughs, “but thank you. Yours, too.”

“They won’t be,” he returns. “Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.” As she walks away, Frederick finds himself looking forward to the third weekend of December. They will both be in the midst of finals, and their students will all be losing their heads, but seeing Helen again will be nice. 

“Come on,” he says, walking his screaming baby back to the car. “Just a little longer, it’ll be alright. Yes, you’ll be okay. Just hang on, we’re almost there. Just a little longer.” And the words that fall like oxygen from his lips, as natural as breathing to comfort his daughter now, feel like they aren’t just for her. Just a little longer. Just hang on. We’re almost there . He’s on the edge of something with Helen, he can feel it. It’ll be alright, you’ll be okay . It’s all going to be just fine.

Chapter Text

Helen’s interview goes well. So well, in fact, that she’s offered the job. She comes down to Virginia three more times before the end of the school year, staying with Frederick and Annabeth each time. After the first time, they exchange phone numbers, and call once or twice a week. It’s nice. Frederick hasn’t spent this much time talking to another adult since Athena left. He didn’t realize how much he missed it.

Helen’s third visit is in early April, during Harvard’s spring break. Supposedly, she’s apartment scouting. Frederick doesn’t understand why she’s bringing him with her until she turns to him in the fourth apartment (2 bed, 1 bath, small kitchen, strange, sulfurous odor). “You’ve been quiet,” she says, “What do you think?” 

Frederick thinks for a moment. It’s a good size for her, giving her an office, and a bigger one than she would have had in Apartment #3. She’s not much of a cook, she’d told him, so the small kitchen probably wouldn’t be a hindrance. Apartment #2 had a huge kitchen, but no living space to speak of. The bedroom has beautiful, large windows overlooking a Denny’s, a Target, and an insurance office. Apartment #1 had a river view, but it was three times the price and two thirds the size. Apartment #4 is comfortably in Helen’s budget. “Looks good to me,” he tells her.

Helen beams, and it seems a little large for a friend approving of a potential living space, but it would probably be weird to ask about it. He definitely doesn't want to give the impression that he’s criticizing her or anything.

“I’ve put in an offer,” she says that night, helping him tear bread into small chunks for Annabeth to shove into her mouth.

Frederick hums absentmindedly. “More!” Annabeth demands. He gives her another piece, with a slice of banana for potassium and fiber.

“For the place we looked at today?” he asks.

“Yeah, it looks good. You like it, right?”

“Sure,” he says. “It’s a good size, decent location, and whatnot. You could eat pancakes every morning.”

She laughs, although he hadn’t thought it was that funny. “Yeah,” she says, “Pancakes every morning. Annabeth would probably love that.”

Frederick doesn’t see why Annabeth would love Helen eating pancakes every morning. She’s twenty months old, and has met her four times, briefly. The most recent time, she seemed to recognize Helen on arrival, and even said hello. But Annabeth only cares about pancakes if they’re right in front of her and she’s the one who gets to eat them.

“Well, good,” she says. Annabeth sneaks an extra piece of bread when Frederick turns away from her to cut up more banana. He puts extra pieces on her high chair tray, and moves the bread out of reach.

“Dada,” she complains, “’Wed!”

“Banana,” he counters.

“No!” she cries, “No ’nana! ’Wed!”

Frederick reaches for the bowl of mashed carrot and spoons a little onto the tray. Annabeth shrieks in delight, reaching for the orange mush. She probably smears more on her face than gets into her mouth, but she’s distracted enough by it that Frederick can cover the banana in bread and hand it to her. She glares at him when she tastes the offending berry, but she chews and swallows, which is good enough for him.

Helen laughs. “You guys are adorable,” she says.

Frederick pauses before responding. Something in her tone sounds… wistful? Maybe he’s imagining things. He tries to catch her eyes, but she avoids them. 

Later that night, when he’s putting Annabeth down to sleep, she comes up behind him. He jumps when her hand brushes against his waist to settle on top of Annabeth’s crib.

“Sorry,” she whispers, “didn’t mean to startle you.”

“It’s fine,” Frederick says quietly, trying to convince himself as much as he is her. It is fine. Every time she’s been down, she’s been more than willing to help with Annabeth. It makes sense that she’d step in to support night-night-time. Still, something about her abrupt entrance, like she just assumed she could join into his daughter’s bedtime routine bothers him. As soon as Annabeth’s breathing starts to even out, he hustles them both out of the makeshift nursery he’s built in his closet.

“So,” he says, “you’re leaving tomorrow.”

She nods. “I’ll let you know if my bid for the apartment gets accepted. Then we can start talking about moving times and such.”

“Sure,” Frederick says, thoroughly befuddled, but in no way about to criticize a woman’s thought process. “I’m happy to help whenever, just give me enough warning.”

Helen tips her head to the side. “What are you talking about?”

Frederick blinks a few times. “…helping you move in? That is what you want, right?”

“I thought we were moving in together! You’ve looked at every place with me.”

 A headache is starting to form between Frederick’s eyes. “Is that why you wanted me to come with you?”

“What did you think was going on? That I just valued your abstract opinion?”

Frederick very studiously remains quiet, but he can feel his ears heating up. Helen must see it too, because her face turns from confused to incredulous. “We’ve been dating for months, Frederick!” Her voice almost reaches a shout, and Frederick winces out of fear that she’s woken Annabeth. But his notorious light sleeper of a daughter chooses to stay in Hypnos’ realm, rather than save her father from this mortifying ordeal. Some hero she’s going to be.

“I didn’t…” he trails off, recognizing that he doesn’t have a good defense. I didn’t notice? I didn’t know? Both are true, and not. He didn’t know, but he suspected… something . He noticed her signals, he just had no idea what they meant. 

The longer he stays quiet, the more frustration draws into Helen’s face. Her eyes grow cold, her mouth tightens and her lips thin, and red starts to bloom onto her cheeks. He sees her start to open her mouth, but his is unfortunately already running without input from his brain. He hears the words, “I thought we were friends,” thud into the carpet like the leaden ball forming in his stomach.

Helen’s face closes off. Whatever he had been able to read in her a second ago is gone. He has no idea what she’s thinking or feeling. Her eyes flicker to her suitcase, and his feet are frozen to the ground, watching her pack up her clothes from the little box she’d been using as a laundry basket and put away her alarm clock. When she’s finished, she brushes past him into the bathroom, and when she comes out he sees that she’s changed from her pajamas into the shirt and jeans she’d been wearing earlier. She stands in front of him. Frederick still can’t get his feet to move, and he’s certain that his face is just as fixed.

“I’m going to spend the night at a hotel,” she says.

Frederick forces himself to nod, relieved when it works.

“I’ll call you tomorrow. I think… I just need tonight to figure things out, but we need to talk about this.”

Frederick agrees that they need to talk about it, but really doesn’t want to. He regrets everything that’s led them to this moment, up to and including letting Athena shove him into that study room eight years ago.

“Goodnight,” Helen says. She pauses for a moment, and just as Frederick figures out that she’s giving him a moment to say something, anything , her eyebrows knit together in anger once again. She walks out of his apartment, slamming the door behind her. That, finally , is what wakes Annabeth up, and her screaming tugs Frederick in the opposite direction of where Helen has just left. I’ll call you tomorrow , she’d said. Would she? Or would she decide that it was better to have a clean break?

After soothing Annabeth back to sleep, Frederick tosses and turns in bed. Finally, he can’t take it anymore. He glances up at the clock, sees that it’s just 8:30, and bites the bullet. He calls Randolph.

Shockingly, he picks up. “Hello?” he says. Rather distressingly, Frederick realizes that he is completely unable to read his brother’s mood from that one word. He sounds like a stranger on the other end of the phone, for all that they saw each other not five months ago.

“Hi,” he says, wincing at his own inanity. “It’s Frederick.”

There’s a pause. “Freddy,” Randolph says, “Well, this is quite a surprise.” Frederick still can’t tell if Randolph is happy about the surprise, but it’s always a safe bet that his brother doesn’t like to be disturbed.

“I need your advice,” he says, hating every word that comes out of his mouth.

“ Quite a surprise.”

“When did you know you and Caroline were together?”

Randolph hangs up the phone. Frustrated, Frederick dials back immediately. “Come on,” he says, “Just one sentence.” He can feel his brother’s scowl through the phone, and is oddly comforted by it.

“We were at her parents’ house to celebrate her birthday, and she introduced me as her boyfriend,” Randolph says.

“Did you talk about it beforehand?”

“You said you only needed one sentence.”

“Just tell me.”

Randolph is silent for a moment, then says, “I didn’t know for sure. But I knew that I loved her, and that I wanted to be her boyfriend, and for her to be my girlfriend. We didn’t discuss her calling me that ahead of time.”

“How long were you together before her birthday?” These are the kinds of surface-level questions that Frederick should probably know the answers to. He knows that Randolph and Caroline met as undergraduates, in one of their Gen Ed classes. He knows that they got married when they were both in graduate school. He knows that Caroline’s birthday was in early August.

“We’d known each other for seven months,” Randolph says quietly. Wistfully, even. Frederick hadn’t known that his brother was capable of wistfulness. “But I didn’t ask her out until May. It was terrible timing, finals and whatnot. I couldn’t believe that she said yes. We went out four times before the end of the semester, and we called a few times a week. I wasn’t surprised when she invited me to her birthday dinner.”

Frederick takes the hint and doesn’t prod further. But his brother surprises him when he asks, “Why do you want to know about Caroline?”

“I think…” Frederick almost can’t get the words out, they’re so embarrassing. “I think I might be dating someone.” But once the first ones fall out, they clear the path for a ramble of all the rest. “I think we might have been together since November or December. But I didn’t know. I thought we were just friends. And when I told her that, she left. She said she’ll call in the morning, but…”

Randolph doesn’t laugh. It’s the best thing he’s ever done as Frederick’s older brother. “You need to get your head out of your ass, Freddy,” he says. “Do you like her?”

“Of course,” Frederick says, offended. “She’s extremely smart, and we always have such interesting conversations–”

“In a romantic way, Freddy,” Randolph sighs, “Do you want to date her?”

Frederick stops short. As far back as he can remember, he’s never wanted to date anyone . Even in his five years with Athena, the closest they came to talking about the D word was an agreement that they weren’t dating, but they were (sort of, loosely, emotionally and academically) together. Frederick has never wanted a girlfriend or a boyfriend any more than he’s wanted to be anyone’s boyfriend.

“I like her,” he says eventually.

“When Caroline and I were dating,” Randolph says, dispensing three decades of backlogged older brother advice in one conversation, “I knew I wanted to marry her by our six month anniversary. You’ve been with this woman for, what, five months now? That’s close enough. Do you want to marry her?”

Frederick thinks about it. Boyfriend-girlfriend is a no-go. Automatically. Just, no . Marriage… husband-wife… the thought doesn’t immediately make him want to hunch over the nearest toilet bowl, which might be the best to hope for. “I like her a lot,” he says, “If she wants to get married, I’d be okay with that.”

Randolph snorts. “Work on that phrasing,” he advises, “before you talk to her next. She said she’d call tomorrow?”

“Yes.”

“Well, you’ve got all night.”

“Thank you, Randolph,” Frederick says softly.

He knows Randolph is rolling his eyes again. “You’re thirty, Freddy. You’re old enough to be figuring this shit out for yourself, you’re not a middle schooler with his first real crush.” Frederick does not say that he never had a first crush, real or not. Some things would only further frustrate his brother.

“Thank you anyway,” he says. “Good night.”

“Good night, Freddy.” Randolph hangs up the phone without further ado.

Frederick stares at it for a moment. Then he knows what he has to do. He pulls out the Yellow Pages and starts calling hotels, asking each one if anyone by the name of Helen Park is staying with them. After nearly an hour, he strikes gold with the Sunset View, just two miles from his apartment. The concierge is extremely accommodating and is more than willing to connect him to Helen’s room once he explains that it’s for love.

The phone rings and rings, and Frederick is afraid that Helen will be asleep. But no–for the second time tonight, he’s gotten lucky with phone calls. “Who is it?” she asks.

“It’s me,” he says, “uh, Frederick Chase.”

“Frederick?” There’s surprise in her voice. He hopes it’s good surprise.

“I’m sorry,” he blurts out. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize that we were dating. I’m sorry I didn’t–I’m sorry.”

“Are we dating?” Helen asks. Frederick hasn’t the slightest of clues what she means by that. He wants to parrot her, say, I have no idea. I have absolutely no idea. What does it mean to date? What’s going to change? What do you want? But he doesn’t.

“If you want to,” he says.

“I do.”

“Excellent,” he says. She laughs. He laughs too, although he isn’t entirely sure why.

“Do you want to move in together?” Helen says, after they’ve both pulled themselves together.

Frederick hesitates. He thinks he knows the answer she wants– yes –, but he’s still not 100% that that’s what he wants. His silence must be answer enough for her.

“We don’t have to,” she says hurriedly.

“Can we–what if we revisit this conversation in a year,” he says, “I know we’ve been together for months, but–”

“Of course,” Helen says. He can hear a smile in her voice. He wonders if it’s because she likes the plan, or because she likes that he basically just agreed to spend another year with her. It’s been a big question night.

“Well, goodnight,” he says awkwardly.

She laughs. “Goodnight.”

He hangs up the phone, sets it down, and then walks over to Annabeth’s crib. She is completely asleep, so he runs a hand lightly over the crib wall, instead of her back. “What do you think, Annabeth?” he asks. “You think we’ll be okay?” Annabeth, of course, doesn’t answer. “I think we’ll be okay. But we might not be in this place much longer, huh?” Annabeth makes a face in her sleep. He hopes she’s having good dreams. Crushing Spartans on the battlefield or carving a statue of her mother, the next Athena Parthenos. Or, you know, rolling around on cotton candy clouds or whatever normal children dream of. Trying to recall his own childhood dreams, he comes up empty. The only dreams he remembers are the ones where Athena comes to talk to him. 

Chancing a wake up, Frederick presses the lightest of kisses to Annabeth’s forehead, holding his breath to see if she reacts. She doesn’t. Somewhere between relieved and disappointed, Frederick turns off the lamp and goes to bed. Tomorrow is probably going to be a busy day.

A year passes in what some people would call a blur. Frederick gets put on a tenure track. Helen’s contract is extended after a series of favorable student evals. After the first year, they co-sign the lease on a bigger apartment, one where Annabeth can have her own room, instead of Frederick’s closet. Annabeth transitions from a crib to a toddler bed, potty-trains herself, and comes back from daycare with a planned redesign of her bedroom, complete with a window nook, a bottomless but easily navigable box for her toys, and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf. Helen is off-put, but charmed. Frederick is the one who has to explain to his daughter that they don’t own their apartment, so they can’t just change the shape of the building. Annabeth is upset, but comes back the next day with another design that breaks the laws of physics. This time, Helen is the one who has to explain why they can’t have a secret bookcase door to the basement–“We live on the third floor” isn’t anywhere close to good enough.

They’re making enough money now to enroll Annabeth in a decent daycare. She’s miles ahead of her daycare classmates from the moment she first walks in the doors, and teaches herself how to read. One day, she comes home and hands Frederick a note one day from one of the teachers at daycare, asking him to send the resources he’s using to teach Annabeth arithmetic. Frederick, quite embarrassed, explains to the teacher that Annabeth just “picks things up easily”. Less easy to explain is why his daughter has stolen Miss Nina’s nail clippers and attacked Miss Harper. ‘Miss Harper was attacking Annabeth first’ does not go over well, so he takes her out of Happy Stars and goes back to bringing her to work with him. He spends half as much on gas, and his colleagues make a game out of finding the most advanced (toddler appropriate) books they can to see if they can stump her. No one can. Helen looks on in disbelief throughout the whole process.

“Frederick,” she says, “Annabeth attacked a teacher . We need to talk to her about that, she needs to understand that that kind of behavior is unacceptable.” ‘Miss Harper was attacking Annabeth first’ goes over on Helen about as well as it went on Mrs. Craig and the Happy Stars Board of Directors. “Frederick, why would a daycare teacher attack a little girl?”

“Why would a little girl attack a daycare teacher?” Frederick counters.

Helen rolls her eyes. “Come on, Frederick, I love Annabeth, but she’s not exactly normal . Remember July, when she went after the upstairs neighbors’ dog?”

Frederick doesn’t remember the upstairs neighbors having a dog. He remembers seeing a drakon on the roof and hustling Annabeth right out of there. Her apparently going back is news to him. But he says none of this to Helen. “She’s happier at the college,” he says instead. “She likes the books and the independence. And my colleagues love her.”

“She’s three, Frederick. She needs structure, not independence. And she shouldn’t be spending her days with academics, she should be making friends..”

Frederick refrains from pointing out that Annabeth hadn’t made a single friend at Happy Stars, despite being there for months. He also refrains from pointing out that he and Helen are both academics, and Annabeth lives with them. “She’s happy,” he repeats.

Helen rolls her eyes. “This is going to blow up in your face, you know,” she says. Frederick shrugs. Helen huffs. 

Annabeth, thankfully, remains unaware of these conversations. Shortly after her third birthday, she picks up a book on architecture at the library and pesters him until he introduces her to his colleagues in the math and art departments. Ellis Steiner in the engineering department comes up to him afterwards and tells him that she easily kept up with seven professors for over twenty minutes. Then he asks how old his daughter is, and would she be interested in a summer internship. When Frederick tells him that Annabeth is three, Ellis shrugs.

“Okay, I’ll come back in a decade. If she keeps up at this rate, she’ll be beyond ready for the program.”

Frederick’s chest fills with pride and he stops at the ice cream place on the way home so they can both have some rainbow sherbet.

“Daddy?” Annabeth asks after they’re back in the car, faces rubbed clean of sherbet stains.

He hums.

“Am I different?”

“Yes,” Frederick says. “Your mother is Athena, goddess of wisdom and battle strategy. That makes you a demigod. Most other kids aren’t demigods, they’re fully mortal.”

“Like you.”

“Yes, I suppose.”

“But–so–but–I’m different just because Mommy is a goddess, and other kids’ mommies aren’t?”

Frederick considers this. “Well,” he says, “Yes, and.”

“What does that mean?” Annabeth complains.

“ Yes , you’re different because of your mother, and you’re different because you’re you. Half divine. You have special abilities that other kids don’t have.”

“Like what?” Annabeth asks. “I can’t fly or read minds. I can’t even turn invisible!”

“Your mother is the goddess of wisdom and battle strategy. So you get your brains from her. Your superpower is that you’re super smart.”

“But I haven’t even gotten through that book Uncle Randolph sent on ancient Nordic architecture!” Her voice has pitched higher and whiner, and Frederick fears that a tantrum is imminent. A tantrum over not being able, at the age of three, to read a textbook for engineering graduate students. Athena , he thinks wryly, this is your child.

“You will soon,” he promises. “We’ll read through Chapter 6 tonight before bed, okay?”

Annabeth perks up. “6 and 7,” she says imperiously.

“6 and 7,” Frederick agrees. He sees her older, leading an army clad in bronze armor. An adult, standing across from some other army’s general, arguing about minute word differences in treaty clauses. Ending wars, every bit her mother’s child. Maybe, just maybe, she’ll have moved on from arguing about how many chapters they can read for her bedtime story, and found that she prefers arguing about how many silver talents the Thebans are owed for the hoplites they sent that evaporated at first contact with the Spartans.

But at bedtime that night, Helen frowns when she sees him open Ancient Scandinavian Designs . “Just because Randolph sent that doesn’t mean you actually need to read it to her, honey. She won’t understand a word of it.”

“She’s quite excited about Chapter 6,” Frederick starts, but Helen pulls the book out of his arms and hands him The Very Hungry Caterpillar .

“Here,” she says, “My nephew loved this when he was Annabeth’s age. Lots of bright colors and gorgeous illustrations. And the words are simple, so she can practice her reading.”

“Annabeth has been reading for two years,” Frederick says.

“Just read her The Very Hungry Caterpillar ,” Helen says, “It’s more appropriate.”

As far as Frederick is aware, there isn’t anything graphic in Ancient Scandinavian Designs . Randolph probably wouldn’t have sent it if there was. Probably. But, this doesn’t seem like something to argue about, so he takes the picture book and sits down on Annabeth’s bed.

Her face falls when she doesn’t see him carrying her current favorite book. Frederick hates himself for a moment, but Helen is probably right. Annabeth will be starting kindergarten sooner than later, she should probably be familiar with the classics. “Just for tonight, okay?” he says.

Annabeth’s face screws up, but she acquiesces. “Three chapters tomorrow, Daddy.”

Frederick raises an eyebrow. “Will you make it that long? You look pretty tired tonight.”

“No!” she protests, squirming around in her owl-print sheets (Frederick should really be asking more questions about the Hermes Express deliveries that show up on Annabeth’s birthdays, and are always perfect fits, but he’s far too sleep deprived for that). “I’m awake, I’m awake!”

“Hi Awake,” Frederick says. “I’m Dad.” Annabeth rolls her eyes. “Do you want to read, or should I?”

“Me!” Annabeth sits up and tugs the book onto her lap. “In the–in the liga–guilt–”

“Light, sweetheart, ‘In the light’.”

“In the light of the–of the nomo–oom–oon–moon?” Frederick nods. “In the light of the moon,” Annabeth repeats.

In the end, they don’t finish A Very Hungry Caterpillar . Annabeth throws it across the room after spending five minutes on the word ‘caterpillar’. Frederick doesn’t blame her, these words are nothing like the ones she’s used to in her history and architecture books.

“Daddy?” Annabeth says in a small voice. By now, he’s dimmed the lights and is tucking her in. “Can we go back to architecture tomorrow?”

Frederick kisses her forehead. “Of course,” he says. 

When he relays the story to Helen, she isn’t pleased. “If she’s having trouble with A Very Hungry Caterpillar , why would you go back to something more advanced?”

“She likes it,” Frederick says.

“She’s three! She’ll like anything if you give it enough excitement.”

“Not Annabeth,” he says, “She knows what she wants.”

Helen rolls her eyes and turns off the lamp. Frederick lies there, one of many nights he stares at the ceiling, wondering if he’s doing the right thing. Ever.

The next year flies by, but still nothing of note happens. Frederick teaches, Helen teaches, Annabeth joins a pre-kindergarten class. They all complain about how stupid everyone else is. A Hermes Express box appears in the living room on Annabeth’s fourth birthday containing a stuffed owl (toy, not taxidermy, thank the gods) and some really fancy Greek olives. Annabeth finishes the jar in two days, much to Helen’s disbelief. A package from Natalie arrives on the 13th, just a day late, containing toddler binoculars and a little magnifying glass, as well as an updated photo of Magnus, now two years old and already wearing flannel. His eyes are gray, like Annabeth’s, Natalie writes. Frederick squints and thinks they have more green in them than his sister is willing to admit. Randolph mails them his own book on pre-Christian Scandinavia. Frederick puts it on a bookshelf and leaves it there.

On their way back from Magnus’ third birthday party in January, Helen pulls over at a gas station and tells him to wait in the car with Annabeth. Five minutes later, she comes back and they rejoin the interstate. When they get home and Annabeth has been put to bed and has a 60% chance of actually being asleep, she slaps a plastic stick onto the kitchen table. Frederick looks up from his grading to see a plus sign. 

“Ah,” he says.

“‘Ah’? That’s all you have to say?”

Frederick takes his glasses off and looks at Helen. “Sorry, dear. I’m just… surprised. We haven’t–”

“We did,” she points out, making Frederick feel a little foolish. Of course they did, the proof is in the pudding. Or, rather, in the positive pregnancy test.. “I mean, we don’t do it much, but we did a few times in November. I was… stressed. About the holidays. And it was good stress relief.”

Frederick isn’t sure he agrees about the stress relief part, but he does remember doing it around Thanksgiving. If you can’t call it by its name, you shouldn’t be doing it, he thinks. Then he says the word in his head, just to make things even. Sex . “Are we keeping it, then?” he asks.

Helen inclines her head. “I’d like to, yes. I’m getting older, you know, and I want kids. My own kids, I mean. Obviously, we already have Annabeth.”

Frederick nods. “Shall we get married, then?” he asks.

“You’re really bad at romance.”

He shrugs. She sighs.

“Yes, I’d like to get married.”

Frederick nods. “Excellent.” He picks up Terry Gunderson’s essay on the Truman presidency and circles the three times in one paragraph that Terry misspells ‘battalion’. Two t’s, one l , he writes in the margin and wonders what Terry’s application essay was about. Probably not the army.

Wait.

He sets the paper down again. 

“Helen,” he says.

“Are you taking back the proposal? Because I can’t take back the baby.”

“No, no, it’s just… it’s about Annabeth’s mother.”

“Have you been married to her all this time? Frederick, she’s so out of the picture that I’ve never even met her–” Thunder crashes ominously in the distance. Frederick really hopes there’s a storm coming in.

“We’re not married,” he says. “We never even–Annabeth wasn’t born the normal way.” Gods of Olympus, does he have a complex over the word? Sex, sex, sex . 

“C-sections are perfectly normal–”

“It wasn’t a C-section. She formed from her mother’s brain and was guided down onto my porch by the West Wind.”

“ What? ”

Frederick realizes, rather belatedly, that maybe Annabeth’s birth isn’t the place to start. “Sweetheart,” he says, “Annabeth’s mother isn’t mortal.”

“She’s dead?”

“No, no. She’s a goddess.”

“ What? ” At this, Helen finally sits down. “Goddesses aren’t– what? ”

“Do you remember Athena, from college? I think you met a couple of times?”

Helen pauses and her forehead creases in confusion. “Brown hair, lots of owl shirts. Eyes like… like Annabeth’s– Frederick –”

“Athena isn’t a woman,” Frederick says. Thunder crashes in the distance again. “Or, she is , but not a mortal woman.” He waits a moment to listen for more thunder, but the sky is silent. “She’s a goddess. The Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom and battle strategy.”

“A goddess,” Helen says weakly, but her resolve grows back quickly. “But–goddesses aren’t real–I teach about goddesses, I’d know if they were real–”

“They are real. And the gods. All of them. Well, the Greek ones at least. I can’t speak for other pantheons–”

“Gods. Real. How? ”

“Athena explained it to me once. She called it the Flame of the West. Wherever Western Civilization was the strongest, that’s where the gods went. From Greece, to Rome, to France and Iberia, and then up to Britain. And then, between World Wars I and II, they migrated further west. To America.”

“Migrating. Like birds.”

“More like–Athena described it as a call. Wherever there was enough passion and respect for the old ways, wherever the Flame was strongest, that’s where the gods went. Reinventing themselves as necessary, like Rome, but not really changing. Still themselves.”

“I need a drink,” Helen says faintly.

He blinks. “Um, aren’t you not supposed to drink when you’re–”

“I need a drink,” she repeats. “To throw at you, not to have myself. Annabeth’s mother is a goddess–is that why she doesn’t send child support? And how those presents just show up ?”

“Probably.” Frederick shrugs. “I don’t think too hard about it.”

“You don’t–I need a drink.”

Helen goes off to self-medicate by throwing alcohol (at the tub, thankfully, not at Frederick) and neither of them brings up the topic of Annabeth’s mother again. Frederick thinks that the conversation went better than he thought it would.

They schedule the wedding for spring break. Helen gets them a church and a reception hall, Frederick gets a caterer and a bakery for the cake, tracks down every distant Chase relative he can think of, and tries not to think about how he feels about getting married in a church. His side is still barren in comparison to the Parks, Lees, and Yangs that show up en masse for the wedding of their daughter/sister/niece/cousin/friend. It’s a nice wedding. Annabeth makes it up the aisle on time. Not with the basket of flowers, of course, but Frederick figured from the beginning that that was too much to ask. Helen’s nephew holds up the rings with a hand that drifts back to his nose every thirty seconds. Everything goes about as according to plan as it was going to go with half a dozen toddlers on the premises. Helen isn’t even showing enough for her dress to reveal the pregnancy, although every single one of her family members knows, and resents, that this is a shotgun wedding.

In July, Annabeth turns five. Athena sends a child-size dagger that Helen immediately confiscates. Frederick can’t even argue with that one. Demigod or not, five is too young for weapon ownership. Frederick finds an architecture book on Greco-Roman columns that makes Annabeth’s gray eyes widen in excitement. Helen gives her a couple of picture books about being an older sibling, which Annabeth, predictably, scoffs at. “I already know about the baby,” she tells Frederick.

“Babies, actually,” he corrects absently.

This does give Annabeth pause. For a moment. Then she’s back to scowling. “All of the words are fuzzy, Daddy. And they keep moving around. I hate that.”

That night, Athena appears in Frederick’s dreams and tells him about modern demigods’ propensity for dyslexia and ADHD. The former because their brains are hardwired for Ancient Greek, and the latter so that they can multitask in battle. She doesn’t explain why Annabeth seems to only be affected by the books that Helen gets her, but Frederick suspects that Annabeth is so excited by the architecture books that she ignores any “fuzziness” that they may or may not have. So, Frederick books an appointment with a specialist, and, surprise surprise, his sweet, summer child is extremely dyslexic and even more ADHD. Frederick briefly wonders how this will affect her academic future, but then factors in the Athena wisdom, and figures they’ll probably balance each other out. 

Annabeth starts kindergarten in the fall and her teacher only lasts a week before she’s replaced by someone that Annabeth says has a human face and a snake body. Frederick persuades the school to switch her to the other kindergarten class and wonders if Annabeth should have gotten to keep that dagger after all. He thinks about changing schools, but when he brings it up to Helen, she tells him that he’s being ridiculous.

“Annabeth’s fine,” she says, “Probably just telling stories because she’s upset she has to follow someone else’s schedule. Remember that time she attacked a daycare teacher? She needs to learn to get along with other kids, Frederick. Adults, too.”

Nothing more comes of the dracaena teacher, so Frederick pushes it out of his mind. Half of his colleagues are being let go after this school year, and he spends weeks on edge, anxious that he’ll be added to that list.

In early June, they close on a house. It has three bedrooms and two bathrooms, even though none of them are very big. They paint the biggest one, which will be a shared nursery for the twins, green and Annabeth helps to stick dinosaurs and trees on the wall. Her room is, by request, painted stormy gray like her eyes. It’s an odd choice for a six-year-old to make, but Frederick and Athena’s child has never been typical , and she quickly covers the walls with drawings and blueprints, so most of the gray gets covered. They take with them their ratty couch, dining table and chairs, and the coffee table that Frederick’s had since undergrad.

They talk at length about names. They’re having two boys, which at least means that they can discount half of the names in the baby name book. Helen likes the idea of their names matching in some way, but Frederick argues that no one will ever take Brayden Chase seriously once they find out that his twin brother is named Cayden. Frederick is, as he was with Annabeth, attracted to the classics, but Helen refuses to be that Classics professor, and even names that have survived to the modern day like Alexander, Simon, and Leon get the ax. They spend all of July and half of August clearing out the local library of all of its baby name books, one at a time. Annabeth, who remains abstractly curious but emotionally uninterested about her brothers, suggests Abacus and Echinus. Although her point that it satisfies Helen’s preference for matching names and Frederick’s for classical roots is sound, neither of them are interested in naming their children after parts of columns. Annabeth, predictably, doesn’t see an issue.

In mid-August, Helen turns to Frederick at the breakfast table and says, “What about our fathers?” Frederick, mid-bite of waffle, stops chewing to ponder it.

“Your father is still alive,” he says, “Wouldn’t it be confusing to have two Roberts running around?”

Helen shrugs. “I took your name,” she points out, “So there wouldn’t be a last name issue.”

“Natalie named Magnus after our father.”

“So call her and ask. Matthew and Magnus aren’t very similar anyway.”

“What if,” Frederick says, putting his fork down, “We just picked names that started with the same letters as Matthew and Robert. Then there wouldn’t be any confusion or bad feelings.”

Helen eyes him. “Bad feelings?” Frederick stays silent. “Why–”

“I helped Natalie name Magnus,” he says, “I was the one who told her to name him after Dad. It feels wrong to take that from her.”

“So call her,” Natalie says. “Have an honest conversation with your siblings for once, Frederick, it really isn’t that difficult.”

Helen really doesn’t understand how Chases deal with conflict. The golden rule, essentially, is Repress, Don’t Stress. Every time they’ve been honest with each other, relations strain. Sure, Randolph was the one to urge Frederick to make things official with Helen, but now Frederick has no idea how to talk to his brother at all. They’ve opened an emotional barrier that can’t be closed, so they send each other books and newspaper clippings and Frederick hasn't talked to his brother since the wedding.

With Natalie it’s even worse, because Frederick truly cares what she thinks of him. And while he no longer sees her as a little girl (the knowledge that your younger sibling is now a parent will do that to a relationship), he’s still got an instinct to go easy on her, hold back. She’s not small, or even all that young anymore, but he wants to protect her, not fight. And he knows, knows that if he brings this up to her, they will fight. So, he avoids it. When they call, and she asks what names they’re thinking about, he demurs and changes the subject. 

And then, it’s much, much too late to do anything at all.

Helen goes into labor in early September. It’s actually her exact due date, which is funny timing. At least, Frederick thinks so. Helen, who is delivering twins, seems less thrilled.

Labor is a long process. Frederick has never waited like this before. Annabeth sprung fully formed and infantile from Athena’s head, and he was far enough away from Caroline and Natalie when they went into labor that he heard when it started and ended, but not the play-by-play. From what he’s heard, the first labor is the longest, and Helen is delivering twins. C-section or not, Frederick and Annabeth wait for nearly twelve hours. Well, Frederick waits. Annabeth, precocious as she may be, is still only five, and it is so far past her bedtime that it’s nearly time for her to wake up when Matthew Charles Chase makes his official, screaming entrance into the world. Robert Frederick Chase had loudly announced his presence nearly an hour earlier. The boys are completely identical, down to the birthmark on their tiny chins and the single freckle on their tinier elbows. The nurses have tied a blue ribbon to Robert’s ankle to denote that he is Robert. Frederick wonders anxiously if it would be too much to keep the ribbon there until the boys are old enough to get different haircuts. Or for the rest of their lives. 

Natalie arrives the next day, Magnus in tow. Helen has not been released from the hospital yet, but she is doing well enough to consent to Frederick’s sister coming into her room. Magnus, nearly four, is even less interested in the babies than Annabeth is, but Natalie has thoughtfully brought a set of colorful plastic dinosaurs, and Magnus is happy to share them with Annabeth. The two of them play quietly in the corner of the room while Natalie meets her new nephews.

“What have you named them?” she asks, cradling Matthew in her arms.

“We thought it would be nice to name them after our fathers,” Helen says, before Frederick thinks to phrase it differently. “So the older one is Robert, after my father, but we’ll probably call him Bobby.”

“Robert is a heavy name for a newborn,” Natalie agrees, but even Frederick can see that her eyebrows have drawn together, knitting tense lines across her forehead.

“The younger one is Matthew,” Frederick says, “Matthew Charles. We’re thinking about calling him Charlie.” They are absolutely not thinking about calling him Charlie. They’ve never even discussed it. Helen shoots Frederick a confused look while Natalie’s eyes turn cold.

“For Dad,” she says tightly, staring down at Matthew’s tiny face, the small wisps of light hair that shadow the top of his head. “Our father.”

“Yes,” Helen says.

Natalie smiles, and it’s broad and fake. “Freddy, can I talk to you for a moment?” she says.

Frederick grimaces and doesn’t even think about asking her not to call him Freddy. “Of course,” he says. He kisses Helen’s forehead lightly. “I’ll be right back,” he promises.

She can absolutely tell that something’s up, but Robert–Bobby–shifts in her arms, and she tunnels in on him.

Natalie drags him out into the hallway. “What the hell , Freddy,” she says, and it’s not a question. There is nothing at all inquisitive in the statement. She sounds upset, shocked, and definitely mad, but not at all curious.

“Helen liked the bookends,” he says, regretting the words as they come out of his mouth. Sure, it was Helen’s suggestion, but he agreed to it. By the look on her face, Natalie knows exactly what he’s thinking, but he forges on anyway. “Because we were having two boys, and we each have a father to honor. And Annabeth is named partially for Mom.”

“Yes,” Natalie says, “But I named my son for Dad. Specifically for–why am I even explaining this to you? You were there. You told me to name my son Magnus. ‘For Dad’, you said. You were the one who said–”

“I’m sorry,” Frederick says. And then, “We absolutely can call him Charlie. He’s one day old, he won’t care.”

Natalie glares at him. “No,” she spits, “You named him Matthew, call him Matthew. Charlie Chase sounds like a movie star from the ’40s who drinks gin like water and is too popular to be convicted for murdering his wife.”

Frederick flinches. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, knowing that it means nothing because he hasn’t offered to change it. To make it right. To give Natalie back the honor, the memory that he and Helen stole from her by naming their son directly after his and Natalie’s father.

Natalie shakes his head. “I’ve got a week off of work,” she says. “I’m happy to take Annabeth so you and Helen can spend time with the boys.”

“Thank you,” Frederick says, beyond grateful. “You don’t–”

“Let’s not take this out on the children,” Natalie cuts him off. “They haven’t done anything wrong.”

Frederick nods and he knows, to the very center of him, that something has just fractured between himself and his sister that cannot be repaired. That will not be repaired. He has a vision of himself, potbellied and gray-haired. He sees Helen, in better condition, and Annabeth and the boys, all grown up. He does not see his siblings, or Magnus. It’s been eleven years, he realizes, since his parents died. He thinks they’d be disappointed in what’s happened. He thinks he’s disappointed. Mostly in himself. Also in Randolph. Not really in Natalie, who’s just trying to get by.

Frederick Chase watches his sister walk away, and wonders how long cordiality for the childrens’ sake will last. He wonders how much farther the Chase family can stretch before they snap. Before it’s all broken.

At the end of the semester, Frederick loses his job.

Or–he hears that he will lose his job.

It doesn’t make much of a difference.

He comes home on December 3rd and stares at the boys. He watches Annabeth’s golden curls all through dinner, bouncing as she shows off the building she designed in art class today. It’s more of a castle, really, since it’s got a moat and a drawbridge, but his daughter is very clear that this is an administrative building, not a residence. (Actually, her exact words were, No princesses . Annabeth does not like princesses. She likes Mulan, because Mulan is motivated by duty, not love, and is not actually a princess. She scoffs at Aurora and Snow White, and rolls her tiny, gray eyes at Ariel. Frederick tried to bring her to Hercules last summer. It was a disaster.)

Once the children are all asleep, he tells Helen what’s going on. She nods. “Want me to put in a good word?” she offers. He laughs humorlessly. Over the next few days, they look at the numbers. They have enough saved up to be fine for the mortgage and necessities for a few months, even with three children. They have enough money set aside to cover the twins’ daycare for the summer, if they don’t enroll Annabeth in a summer camp. The real problem is that most schools have already done their hiring for the upcoming school year, and there isn’t exactly a dearth of history professors besides. So Frederick sends some letters, puts his name down, and buckles in for his last semester at William and Mary.

He’s a little surprised to find himself sad about it. It wasn’t exactly the biggest surprise–the end of his contract was coming up, after all. But he’d rank his work over the past six years as entirely suitable, even if it wasn’t above and beyond. He liked the school, but it was still just a job. If he’s learned anything from Randolph, it’s not to let the job consume you. (Also, the children. When you’ve got three of them, it’s hard for anything else to truly take priority)

But his last class of Early American History students is strong, and he even gets to teach the upper level military history class that he’s been lobbying for for the past two years. It figures that they give in just as he’s on his way out. 

Ellis Steiner in engineering comes up to him in mid-March and asks anxiously if he’ll be moving away. He seems a little too relieved when Frederick assures him that no, seeing as Helen is still employed by the school, they will not be going anywhere. Frederick wonders if he’s still hoping to enroll Annabeth in one of his classes in a few years.

The end of March carries with it a surprise: an interview and position offering at West Point. He’d only applied because–who wouldn’t? Frederick is an American military historian by study and trade, why shouldn’t he apply to West Point? But they were never supposed to say yes, even to a part-time position that should probably have been ranked Lecturer, rather than Professor. He wonders if Athena has intervened, but quickly tosses that out the window. She still sends presents for Annabeth’s birthday, but he hasn’t had a dream visit from her since they started Annabeth’s diagnosis process. The job offer is unexpected, but he is, Frederick reminds himself, well-published, with a good reputation and a somewhat unique obsession with World War I fighter planes. In other words, he’s a good choice.

The problem, of course, is that West Point is in upstate New York, which isn’t exactly commuting distance from Williamsburg, Virginia. He’ll only be working half the week, but he’s got three small children and Helen will be working more hours than he will. Like he told Ellis Steiner, moving is not an option.

“Okay,” Helen says, “Three days a week.”

“Right. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.”

“Do you have classes on Wednesday?”

“No, but I’ll probably be doing all of the other professorial responsibilities then.”

“Okay, so you fly up on Monday–”

“Monday night, if possible.”

“Monday night, and you fly back Thursday night?”

“Or early Friday morning.”

Helen sighs. “Frederick, this isn’t…”

“I know.” He takes her hands in his. “But–it could be worse.”

“Of course it could,” she says. She bites her lip. “And you got no other offers?” She knows the answer, of course, but he understands.

“Nothing closer,” he says. Nothing at Virginia State, or UVA, which is even farther. Nothing in D.C. or North Carolina. Nothing within driving distance at all.

Helen sighs again. “You have to take it,” she says, and he can hear how difficult it is for the words to come out. For the gods’ sake, they have two infants and a six-year-old, and they both know neither one of them can ask the other to put their career on hold for a year or two. Frederick taking the position at West Point is the only way either of them will be happy, and it will make them both miserable. Frederick can see it now, but it’s done. 

He calls West Point on Monday and accepts the position. Over the summer, they bring the kids up north to see family and look at the place where Frederick will be teaching for the next three years. At least the school is willing to offer Frederick an on-campus faculty apartment. He’ll be living on the same floor as eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds, but he doesn’t need to worry about housing. Hooray.

Annabeth doesn’t quite understand why Dad will be gone half the week, but she’s easily distracted by a temper tantrum prompted by Helen referring to herself as her mother.

“You’re my stepmother,” she says defiantly. “You’re married to Dad, so you’re my stepmother.” She even goes so far as to pull out the giant Oxford dictionary the size of her brothers and point to the entry for ‘stepmother’. The definition (“A woman who is a subsequent wife or partner of a person’s parent”) supports her argument, but Helen is furious.

She flips to the definition for mother, showing Annabeth the section that clarifies that a mother is “a woman who undertakes the responsibilities of a parent toward a child, esp. a stepmother”.

“I don’t want you to be my mother!” Annabeth screams. Helen’s eyes widen in surprise, then darken angrily. Frederick is startled. It’s the first time he’s ever heard anything like this come out of her mouth. But it’s also clearly time for him to step in.

“Sweetheart,” he says as gently as he can, “You’re hurting Helen’s feelings.”

“She’s hurting mine,” his little warrior throws back. “She’s not my–”

“I understand,” he interrupts. “I understand your feelings. But your words aren’t very kind right now. Can you apologize?”

Annabeth looks to be on the verge of tears. “You said I don’t haftapologize for my feelings . ’Cause they’re mine and–.”

“Not for your feelings,” Frederick quickly interjects, worried that she’s going to flip to the OED’s definition of ‘feeling’ next. “But for your words.”

“Why?”

“Because they hurt Helen’s feelings.”

Annabeth looks dubious. “If I apologize for my words, will she apologize for hers?”

Helen kneels next to them. “I’m so sorry for hurting your feelings, Annie. I just love you so much, I feel like your mother.”

“You’re like my mother,” Annabeth says. “You’re my stepmother.”

“Annabeth,” Frederick warns.

She looks Helen square in the eye. “I’m sorry for hurting your feelings,” she says clearly, enunciating each syllable. Then she turns to Frederick. “Can I go to my room now?”

Frederick lets her go, and although Helen still looks upset, she doesn’t comment. But that night, once the children are all asleep (for the time being), she says, “I would have handled that differently.”

Frederick, who had been scrubbing out a pot, pauses to turn to her. “Handled what differently?” he asks.

“Annabeth’s tantrum.”

“Well, she was upset, I’m sure she didn’t mean–”

“No, she did,” Helen interrupts. Something about her tone feels resigned.

“Has this happened before?” Frederick asks. “Annabeth… expressing her feelings like that?”

Helen scoffs. “You haven’t noticed?”

Frederick sifts through his recent memories. Annabeth has been a little more tense lately, for sure, but he’d assumed that she’d come talk to him if something was really bothering her. Helen must see the confusion on his face, because she sighs.

“Ever since the boys were born,” she says, “She’s just been–I don’t know, rebellious?”

Frederick raises an eyebrow. “Rebellious?”

Helen jerks her hands around, trying to illustrate something that Frederick is having trouble even imagining. Annabeth is stubborn and strong-minded, certainly, but once you explain to her why you’re giving her a direction, she generally follows it. She’s just curious, and likes to know the ‘why’ of it all.

“I don’t think she likes the boys very much,” Helen says. The concept is absurd to Frederick, Annabeth doesn’t spend a lot of time with the boys, but they’re babies. They can’t talk or even play yet, of course Annabeth wouldn’t be very interested in them. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t like them. But Helen raises her hand when he opens his mouth, so he lets her continue. “I know that they’re just babies, but she gets so annoyed when they wake up or need changing. And I just–I can’t handle it. I’m completely overwhelmed, I’m teaching two classes, and with the kids it’s all just–”

“Overwhelming,” Frederick finishes. They’re both exhausted this semester, he knows that. She’s coming back to her first full semester after maternity leave, and he’s wrapping things up for good, and they’ve got six-month-old infants and an extremely precocious first grader. 

“You understand that,” Helen says, gesturing wildly, “But Annabeth doesn’t, so–”

“She’s six,” Frederick says, confused. “She’s–”

“–not a baby,” Helen insists. “She’s old enough to know when it’s time to stop asking questions and start listening.”

Frederick is floored. This is the first he’s hearing of any of this, and he has no idea what that means. “I’ll–”

“For over four years, I’ve raised her, made her lunches and done art projects. I pick her up at the end of the school day and put her to bed. I may not be her actual mother, but I’m the closest thing to one that she’s ever had! But she doesn’t respect that, at all, and it’s becoming a problem.”

“I–”

“I need her to respect me,” she says, eyes boring into his own with evident desperation. “We can’t– I can’t –stay on top of everything if she’s questioning me all the time.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Frederick says, finally getting through the sentence. “We’ll make sure–”

“Next year, you’re going to be gone four days a week. Three days, at the absolute least. And sweetheart, I love you, but you just go so easy on her. It was adorable when she was a little kid and you were reading her architectural treatises because she begged you to, but she needs to learn how to compromise and listen to other people’s directions. If she doesn’t, I’m going to drown.”

“I understand,” he says, “I’ll make sure she does, too.”

Helen collapses against the wall, and he can see her relief in the slow closing of her eyes and the immediate egress of tension from her body. “Thank you,” she breathes. 

He offers up the best smile he can and goes back to washing dishes. It’s not a peaceful scrub, though, not anymore. His mind is churning, struggling to fit this new information into his previously understood boxes. Going back over the past four years, he can’t remember Annabeth seriously pushing back against Helen, or even him for that matter. She resists eating vegetables as much as any child does; she doesn’t love bathtime, but she does love the bathtub paint sticks that Natalie sent for Christmas (almost as much as Frederick hates scrubbing them off the tub, but that’s neither here nor there); the hardest thing about bedtime is negotiating stories (she’s a strong enough reader now that she doesn’t need Frederick to read to her about the construction of the Parthenon, but Frederick’s pretty sure six isn’t too old to be reading bedtime stories to your child). She potty-trained herself years ahead of schedule and her first grade teacher has pulled him aside more than once to tell him how advanced a student she already is. She’s an easy kid, a good kid. If it weren’t for this afternoon, Frederick would be doubtful that she was even acting out at all.

He picks her up from school the next day, and they stop for ice cream on the way home. Annabeth is eyeing her rainbow sherbet with the level of hunter’s focus that he’d expect to see in an owl fixated on a mouse when he guides them over to one of the picnic tables outside. His sharp, clever daughter immediately understands that something, likely a Conversation-with-a-capital-C is about to take place, so she sensibly lowers her cone. “What?” she asks.

Frederick sets his own cup of sherbet on the table. “You know how I’m going to be gone more in the fall?” he says, trying to start off gently. There’s no way it’s working; Annabeth’s mind is honed for battle and problem solving, and if she hasn’t noticed the tensing of his shoulders or how he doesn’t normally let her eat ice cream before dinner, then she’s been replaced by some other child whose mother isn’t the goddess of wisdom.

Annabeth rolls her eyes. “We talked about this already.”

“I know, I know, but I want to talk about it again. I know I’ve left for conferences and stuff before, but this is going to be three or four days a week, every week, all year.”

“I know, Dad, you’ve already explained this.” Annabeth says, scowling a bit. She licks her ice cream cone, somehow infusing the simple action with overwhelming defiance.

“I know. And you can always call me, at any time, okay?”

“I know .” She’s staring him right in the eye now, chin jutted out in a challenge. Or, maybe it’s just a pout. He looks a little closer. No, definitely a challenge.

“But I’m not going to be here all the time, so your stepmother’s going to be doing all the work for both of us. And that’s hard, it’s a lot of stuff to do.” She nods. “So I need you to listen to her, okay? I need you to help her out, just by listening.”

Annabeth looks suspicious. “I do listen,” she says.

“Good,” Frederick says. Her eyes are very big, and very cute, and also they’re getting mad, so it’s probably time for him to back off. Whenever Athena’s eyes got like that, he would flee the apartment for a few hours, give her time to cool off. That strategy won’t work as well for a six-year-old, but he can give her the illusion of it, at least. He pokes her arm playfully. “Finish your ice cream, it’s almost time to pick up the boys.”

He doesn’t see or hear about any other disagreements between Helen and Annabeth, so he decides that everything must have worked itself out. Then he’s got sixty-eight final papers to grade and he, admittedly, gets a little distracted. And then it’s summer, and before any of them realize it, he’s hugging his wife and children goodbye at the airport, promising to call when he lands, and that he’ll be home as soon as he can.

Gods of Olympus, West Point students are bad. The droning on and on about traditions and etiquette is one thing, the way they treat the chefs and janitors, even each other, sometimes, is something completely different. Frederick’s used to teaching know-it-alls with attitude, hell he’s been a know-it-all with attitude. But West Point cadets are somehow even worse than he imagined.

Smarmy little officers-in-training, Frederick seriously worries for their future regiments and soldiers. Most of them are legacies; second or third or even fourth-generation; barely-legal adults whose futures have been decided for them by Daddy’s rank and Grandpa’s money. They don’t know shit about the real world, most of them having grown up with their every need catered to by nannies, housekeepers, and private school. Frederick even has a few students who talk about having had governesses , as though that’s a normal American experience.

And, look, the Chases come from money. Not particularly old money, but Frederick’s parents put three kids through private colleges and Ivy League graduate programs. He’s certainly aware of his privilege. But all of that pales in comparison to Theodore Herbert Jones III, whose grandfather donated the dorm Frederick’s staying in. Or Bartholomew Gordon Payne, who can trace his family’s history in the American military back to the French and Indian War in the 1760s (and will, given any and all opportunities, pull out the chart that shows his relation to George fucking Washington). Or, you know, the goddamn Kennedy who never takes notes in class and turns in papers that could make any professor cry. Frederick has dared his colleagues to not start tearing up while reading his essays, the boy has a way with words that he just knows will be wasted in the Armed Forces.

In short, Frederick is ready to quit by Thanksgiving. He hates being so far away from his family, he hates most of his colleagues, and he hates the fact that the student dorms all around him are very poorly soundproofed. He is thirty-four years old, he does not need to hear everything that barely-legal spoiled brats are getting up to in their miniscule free time. The only thing that keeps him going is a phone call he gets out of the blue in late November from Randolph.

“So you’re at West Point now?” Randolph asks. And then, before even waiting for a response, he says, “I never would have expected that from you. I mean, you hate the military, Freddy.”

Frederick grits his teeth and thinks very hard about how much he cares about his brother, the only sibling still talking to him. “Yes, I’m at West Point,” he says.

“You must hate it,” Randolph says, falsely sympathetic, just like he was when Frederick got his first C (first semester of college freshman year, Intro to Biology, yes, he’s over it).

“It’s great, actually,” Frederick says. He’s lying through his teeth and they both know it. Repress, Don’t Stress. “The students–cadets, I should say–are very dedicated to their futures. I’ve received a number of interesting questions about troop movements just this semester that I’ve never had before.”

Randolph hums. “Yes,” he says snidely, “I’m sure they’re very interested in war.” Frederick clenches his fist, then relaxes it. Repress, Don’t Stress . “Anyway, I’m calling to invite you to Thanksgiving. All of you, even your babies. What are their names, Marcus and Richard?”

“Matthew and Robert,” Frederick corrects, “Although we call him Bobby.”

“Yes, well, whatever their names are, you’re coming home for Thanksgiving.”

“I’ll have to talk to Helen,” he says, “We were planning on going to her sister’s house, as we have the last few years.”

He can practically feel his brother’s eyes rolling through the phone. He wonders if that’s a sign of a close family bond. Probably not.

“I’ll talk to Helen,” he says.

“Great.” Randolph immediately hangs up the phone. Frederick listens to the dial tone for a minute and wonders if this is divine punishment for not being a better brother. He thinks of Zeus, who tricked his sister into marrying him; Hephaestus, who lusted after his maiden sister so hard that they accidentally created a child; and Hades, who went behind his sister’s back to marry her daughter, and figures that being distant and a little thoughtless is probably better than all of that. So, hopefully not then.

When he tells Helen about the invitation, she points out that they’ve already made plans to go to her sister’s, and suggests that they do Thanksgiving at Randolph’s next year. Frederick takes this back to his brother, and it’s reluctantly accepted. Wonderful.

Thanksgiving the next year is a shit show that somehow beats out the Christmas before Caroline, Aubrey, and Emma died. Frederick hadn’t even known that was possible.

Frederick rings the doorbell at precisely 5:30 pm. Randolph opens it at 5:33. He looks older than Frederick remembered, with more gray hairs and what might, on someone who wasn’t Randolph, be called laugh lines. But Randolph doesn’t laugh, so Frederick has no idea what they’re called. Maybe just wrinkles. His brother is thirty-eight years old and has wrinkles and gray hair. His brother is thirty-eight years old and has been widowed and childless for seven years. His brother ought to have gray hairs because he is the father of teenagers, not because he is not. Frederick, looking back at his own family, thinks about how he has more children than Randolph ever did. He thinks about the fact that, two years from now, he will have been a father for longer than him. Or is one still a father, when one’s children have died? He is filled with incredible pity that immediately washes away the annoyance of having been left out in the November Boston cold.

Eight years ago, Caroline had opened the door with a warm smile, and Frederick and Athena had walked into a bright, homey entryway. The whole house had smelled of the meatballs roasting in the oven. Today, Frederick’s childhood home is cold, even though he knows the heat has been turned on. Randolph does not scowl when he sees them, but something freezes in his eyes when he sees Frederick’s daughter, seven years old and a Chase down to her extra-long pinkies. “Come in,” he says, stepping aside. He doesn’t offer to take their coats, as Caroline had lovingly cajoled him into doing at that last Christmas. It’s Frederick who awkwardly hangs them up in a closet filled with dusty winter gear that he would bet drachmae hasn’t been touched in over half a decade.

Randolph leads his family into the living room, where Natalie is playing with a six-year-old. Well, an almost-six-year-old, but really, it’s close enough for Frederick’s breath to catch. He realizes with a start that he hasn’t lingered in this house since Caroline and the girls died.

Natalie looks up when he enters, catching Frederick in his grief. Her green eyes soften a little, and he wonders if this holiday will fix them. She pulls Magnus up to his feet and nudges him in their direction. “Go say hi to your aunt and uncle, sweetheart.”

Magnus reaches up for a hug– just like Aubrey had –and when he smiles he’s missing some of his front teeth– just like Emma –and there’s not a care in the world in his eyes– Frederick can never ever ever come back to this house. He can never look at small children on this rug. Aubrey is gone Emma is gone everyone is gone it’s toomuchtoomuchwheredidtheyallgowhyishetheonlyoneleft . Frederick kneels down and hugs his nephew.

“Those are the babies?” Magnus asks, pointing at the twins.

“That’s right,” Frederick says, forcing the words out past the lump rapidly growing in his throat.

“They used to be smaller.”

“Yes,” Helen says.

“Which one’s which?”

“Bobby's the one in the blue sweater. He's the older twin."

“By a lot?”

“No, just an hour. And the one in the red sweater is Matthew, do you remember?”

“Yeah,” Magnus says, “He’s younger.”

“That’s right,” Frederick says again. 

Magnus grins and waves at Annabeth. “Hi!” he says.

Frederick worries for a moment. According to Helen, Annabeth has not settled down since he started at West Point. Apparently, she keeps inventing bugs in her room just as Helen has gotten the boys down for the night. Something about spiders, or maybe bees? Frederick keeps meaning to talk to her about it, but being gone half the week is not helping.

But Annabeth smiles at her cousin and pulls out the Rubik’s cube she persuaded them to buy her at the airport when their plane was delayed. “Look!” she says, spinning it. Magnus watches, fascinated. In a few seconds, she’s completely messed up the pattern, clean sides replaced with chaos. She hands it to her cousin. “Try to fix it,” she instructs.

To his credit, Magnus sits quietly, spinning the cube this way and that in an attempt to solve it for several minutes, far longer than Frederick would ever have assumed possible for a five-almost-six-year-old. Maybe his extremely ADHD daughter is contributing to a biased data set.

While this all transpires, Helen pulls Natalie aside and they start to catch up in quiet voices, so as to not disturb the children. Frederick could probably join them, and it would be cordial. But he’s fascinated by watching Annabeth and Magnus together. Their little heads don’t just remind him of Aubrey and Emma, but also of Natalie and himself, reversed. The older, taller one watching the younger one carefully, fingers twitching with the desire to step in and do it right, but kept down by the need to teach an essential skill, an important concept, whatever it is.

The moment breaks when Annabeth’s impatience wins out over her desire to share and teach. “No,” she says, yanking the cube out of Magnus’ hands. She eyes it, completely focused, for a few moments, and then her hands flash as she solves it. A couple minutes later, she plops it back into her cousin’s hands. “That’s how you do it.”

Helen frowns over at them. “Annabeth, sweetheart–”

“Cool,” Magnus says, before she can finish. “Wanna play something else?”

“Dominoes?”

“’Kay!”

“Maybe after dinner,” Frederick cuts in as Randolph enters the living room.

Dinner is a tense, solemn affair. There’s no Frey to cut the tension, no Caroline to improve the mood. Magnus and Annabeth are both adorable, but there are flickers of Other in them that cut through their childhood innocence. Annabeth’s eyes are a little too intense; Magnus’ smile a fraction too bright. They were normal enough as babies, but the older they get, the more Other , the more Divinity comes out. Annabeth keeps petering off her sentences, focusing on things that only she and Frederick can see. He’s willing to bet that Magnus is much the same. Maybe he’s seeing trolls instead of centaurs, giants instead of… well, actually, Annabeth also talks about giant-like monsters sometimes. Something in common, perhaps. 

Natalie and Randolph presumably see one another more than either of them sees Frederick, due to living in the same city, but he realizes that he has no idea how much their older brother knows about his niece and nephew’s parentage. And even with their proximity, or perhaps because of it, they are at least as stiff with each other as they are with Frederick.

After dinner, Natalie sends the children upstairs a little too eagerly. Helen leaves to put the boys down, and Frederick knows that she’s about to fall asleep as well, completely knackered from hours of traveling with two-year-old twins and Annabeth, and then sitting through the most awkward Thanksgiving dinner of all time with his family. He wishes they’d just gone to her sister’s again. Last year was perfectly lovely.

This year, Frederick and his brother and sister sit on couches and armchairs in the living room, staring at one another in silence disturbed only by the crackling of the fire. Randolph’s eyes are dark and cold. The flames licking at the hearth are reflected in his eyes, but it doesn’t make him seem more welcoming. It just makes him look dangerous.

Natalie’s fingers are tap-tap-tapping against her knee, but she isn’t making any sound. Just staring at her brother, tense and serious.

It’s Frederick who finally breaks the silence.

“Thank you for inviting us,” he offers, the words hitting the cold stone on the hearth and bouncing out, ringing in the silence.

Natalie draws a sharp breath. “You don’t need to thank us,” she says tightly. “You’re our brother.”

Randolph snorts. “He doesn’t act like our brother. He doesn’t come home, he doesn’t call us until months after life events happen, he doesn’t ask us how we’re doing. He’s made it very clear that we’re not a part of his life anymore. We haven’t been since our parents died.”

“Big words coming from you,” Natalie snaps. “I hadn’t heard from you in three months before you called me up and informed me– informed me, as if I had no say in it at all–that we were having a family Thanksgiving last year. A family Thanksgiving that, might I mention, you didn’t invite Freddy to.”

Randolph laughs coldly. “Oh, I invited him. But Freddy had other plans, didn’t you Freddy?”

“You called me a week before,” Frederick points out. “We’d already accepted an invitation to Helen’s sister’s. We’d made hotel reservations. It wasn’t feasible–”

Natalie rises from her seat. “We’re your family , Freddy, it’s not about feasibility –”

“Helen and I are married,” Frederick snaps. Repress, Don’t Stress . “Her family is my family too, that’s what it means to be husband and wife.”

“Thank you for clarifying that,” Randolph says drily. “We’re not experts in marriage, not like you –”

“Oh, cut it out!” Frederick jumps up too. Repress, Don’t Stress can go fuck itself. “We all miss Caroline and the girls, but you can’t use them as ammunition, Randy .” He doesn’t know where that comes from. Natalie and Randolph have been calling him Freddy since he was a kid, and he’s never been able to get them to stop. But it doesn’t go both ways. One does not simply call Randolph Johannes Chase Randy , and expect to escape with all of their dignity.

Randolph starts to stand as well, no doubt to throw Frederick and his family out into the Boston cold, but he’s not done. He turns to his sister. “I’m sorry that we stole your thunder with Matthew,” he says, two years, six years, seven, thirteen , of rage and bitterness swelling up inside of him. “Really, I am. But I’m not the grad student you can drag back home for the holidays anymore. I’m a grown adult, I have a house and a job and a family of my own. I don’t exist to jump off cliffs at your say-so. We’re not kids anymore, we haven’t been for a long time. For the gods’ sake, we’ve got our own kids now! We’ve got our own lives, and you need to let me live mine. You both do.”

Again, what he’s said rings out in the silence. His brother and sister’s eyes bear into his for several long moments. The tension in the room could be poked with a toothpick. Frederick wants to choke on it, but he doesn’t regret the words. So he says nothing more, and, for a long time, neither do his siblings. 

When Randolph finally speaks, it’s so low and deep that it’s practically a growl. “Get out of my house.”

Frederick– goes up to Annabeth and tells her that they’re leaving, wakes up Helen and tells her he’s going to get them a hotel room for the night, they can’t stay in this house anymore, picks up Matthew and stares at his sleeping face, so calm and still, for a long moment before helping his wife pack up all of their things, walks out the door into the cold November night, away from his family home, his siblings, every part of his life that has led up to this moment –does.

Two weeks later, as Frederick is preparing for finals, he gets a call from Helen.

Annabeth is missing.

Chapter Text

Frederick has never been this scared in his life.

This sleep-deprived, yes. This bone-deep exhausted, too many times to count. But fear is not an emotion that he is accustomed to feeling.

Annabeth is the most self-sufficient seven-year-old he’s ever heard of, let alone met. She’s tall for her age, and fearless. She’s smart and clever. But she’s seven . 

Helen worries that she’s been kidnapped. “She’s so advanced for her age,” she says, tears glistening in her eyes. “It’s not like either of you do a good job of hiding it. Maybe someone wants to take advantage of that.”

Frederick is dubious, and can’t really explain why. “She’s not exactly known for going along with what grown-ups want her to do,” he points out.

“Maybe they threatened her,” Helen says.

“There’s no way you could have slept through that, though.”

Helen’s tears slide down her cheeks. “I don’t know how I could have slept through her leaving at all,” she cries. “How could I have missed the sound of the front door opening and closing? How could I have–”

“You did the best you could,” Frederick says. The words don’t feel right leaving his mouth. No, he has no doubt that Annabeth leaving was of her own volition. But that doesn’t mean that Helen–or himself, for that matter–is blameless. Annabeth is precocious and clever and likes to do things her own way, but this is her home, and her family. She wouldn’t leave without a reason.

They go to file a police report. The cops don’t laugh them off the premises when Frederick insists that his seven-year-old is a runaway, not a victim of kidnapping, but it’s close. He’s not sure they believe him, and he fully doubts that they approve of his parenting, especially when he starts explaining that he wasn’t home at the time, he was in New York, where he spends half the week working. Not that they seem to like Helen any better when she admits that she didn’t notice Annabeth was gone until the next morning.

He’s sick to his stomach by the time they leave the police station. The FBI has jurisdiction, the cops explained, so they should expect to be called back to the precinct later today–hooray for living two hours from Quantico, Frederick supposes. They don’t need to stress about how every second counts, and that Frederick and Helen should stay close to the phones in case Annabeth (or anyone else) calls. Helen’s tears have dried and her eyes are rimmed with a pinky-red as she nods. Frederick thinks he nods too, before he goes to bend over the toilet bowl in the men’s bathroom. Nothing comes up.

The drive home is tense and silent. Helen’s sister came down before they went to the police station to pick up the boys, and Frederick wishes he could feel anything but relief about the fact that he only has one child to worry about right now. He loves his sons, they are perfect marvels who seem to be hitting all the right milestones at all the right times, but his emotional capabilities are shot at the moment. He’s terrified of the situation and for Annabeth, stressed to the point of shaking. He’s more than a little angry at Helen, for which he’s not happy with himself, but Annabeth had been gone for hours before she even realized, and it’s not that he’s 100% sure he would have noticed sooner, especially since she seemingly ducked out so quietly in the middle of the night, but he trusted her to watch his daughter, and she –

Stop.

Take a breath.

Take another one.

This won’t help Annabeth, or bring her back.

He locks himself in the bathroom as soon as they get home, bending over the sink and trading hopeless expressions with his reflection. Helen had tried to hug him comfortingly, but comfort isn’t what he needs right now. Additionally, the more time he spends with her, the more angry he gets. He doesn’t want to be angry, either.

In an attempt to make the time go faster, he sends an email to his department chair, explaining that a family emergency has come up, and he won’t be able to come back up to New York for the rest of the semester. He sends a similar email to his students and tells them that their final is canceled and their grade will be determined by the caliber of their previous work. He forgets to wish them a Happy Holidays, and doubts they’ll notice.

He thinks about Randolph, who lost his daughters when they were just about Annabeth’s age. He doesn’t call.

He thinks about Natalie. He doesn’t call.

He thinks he did a pretty good job burning those bridges.

The FBI comes directly to their house that afternoon. The agents are calm and professional, and they separate Frederick and Helen to take down their accounts. Helen heads into the kitchen with one agent, while Frederick leads the other into the living room. The agent has mostly gray hair, what little there is left of it. “I just want you to tell me what happened from your point of view,” he says.

Frederick stumbles through what explanation he can give. “I wasn’t here,” he says miserably, “I spend the middle of the week up in New York–I teach at West Point. Helen called me yesterday morning, and she told me Annabeth was–” he chokes over the word ‘gone’, a sob digging its pickaxe up his throat. He tries to clear it, and fails. 

The agent gives him a moment. When he fails to continue, he says, “So your daughter disappeared yesterday? Why did you wait until today to report it?”

Frederick buries his head in his hands. “It took me most of yesterday to get home,” he explains, sounding muffled even to himself. “Friday flights are… anyway, when I got home, Helen was dealing with the normal nighttime routine. Our sons are only two, and they’re twins. And we were both in shambles, arguing over if we should leave the door open, or just unlocked, in case Annabeth came back–”

“You feel certain that she left of her own volition, then?” The agent asks.

“Helen didn’t wake up,” he says, “If someone was trying to kidnap Annabeth, she would have woken up. Annabeth isn’t… quiet. Especially when she’s upset. And she’s very clever, very very smart. She would–she knows, when she’s doing something we won’t like, how to be quiet and sneaky about it. Over the summer, she ate a whole pint of ice cream in an afternoon, then filled the container with yogurt and put it back in the freezer. It took us a week to figure that out.”

The agent nods. “What is your wife’s relationship to your daughter?” he asks. “Do they get along well?”

“No,” Frederick admits. “Not very well at all. Helen and I–our sons are both of ours. I mean, she’s their mother and I’m their father. But Annabeth is–she’s from a previous relationship, I suppose. Her mother dropped her off on my doorstep after she was born. She–Annabeth, I mean, has never met her. And even though Annabeth’s known Helen almost all her life, she’s very sensitive about Helen putting herself in the role of her mother. She doesn’t call her ‘Mom’ or ‘Mommy’, she never has.”

“Does that animosity go both ways?” The agent asks, “Does your wife reject Annabeth in the same way?”

He shakes his head. “Not at all. Helen loves Annabeth very much. Even though she doesn’t understand her, she’s always liked Annabeth. I think she would be happy to be her mother. But Annabeth doesn’t want that at all.”

“Has this always been the case, or has their relationship changed recently? Or your relationship with your daughter, has that been under any stress of late?

“When I took the job at West Point, and Helen and I were planning out what it meant for us both to be working, and me gone half the week, their relationship–Annabeth and Helen’s–definitely got worse,” he admits. He doesn’t really like the direction this interview is going, all of the focus being directed on Helen. Maybe the agent interviewing her is digging into Frederick and all of his shortcomings. On the other hand , a nasty, bad husband part of him whispers, Helen was in charge when Annabeth ran away. It’s her fault that she’s gone. It’s his fault too, Frederick argues back to himself. He was the one over 400 miles away from his daughter, how could he just leave her–

Stop.

Take a breath.

“Annabeth isn’t a normal child,” he continues, “She’s very advanced for her age. She was reading architecture books when she was three, and she taught herself long division in kindergarten. I’ve just accepted that she’s a little different–actually, with the boys, it’s been a little bit of a shock how much slower normal development is compared to Annabeth’s. Anyway, to me, it’s just the way she is. But Helen has always been concerned about it. She wants Annabeth to slow down, and make friends instead of reading through recess. We had a conversation about it before I went up to West Point. Helen felt that I wasn’t supporting her parenting style, and pointed out that she was going to be Annabeth’s primary parent for half the week, while I was up in New York. She asked me to talk to Annabeth, and help her understand that she had to listen to her. So Annabeth and I talked about it, and I thought that everything was going okay. I haven’t heard much about the two of them fighting in a while.”

The agent nods. “Thank you, Dr. Chase,” he says, standing up. “We’re going to do everything we can to find your daughter.”

“What can I do?” Frederick asks desperately.

“Stay by the phone,” the agent says. “We’re going to spread her information–her description and such–so people may be calling with information. Anything you get, calls or information, please pass it along to my team and the police.”

He nods. “Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

The agent smiles sadly. “You don’t need to thank us,” he says, “This is our job. We want Annabeth to be safe, at home with her family as soon as possible. Thank you for all of the information you’ve given us.”

They walk out to the entryway, and wait for Helen and the agent interviewing her to emerge from the kitchen. It’s not until after the agents leave that he takes a long look at his wife. There are fresh tear tracks on her face and her nose is now the same pinkish-red as her eyes. He’s still angry at her, but he tries to focus on hope. Hope that Annabeth will be found, or will come home. Hope that she’s okay right now, that someone, from the mortal world or the godly one is looking out for her. 

Athena , he prays in his head, I screwed up. I screwed up so badly. Please look after our daughter. Please keep her safe . There’s no response. He didn’t really expect one, but he hopes that his prayer went somewhere.

Helen’s hand reaches for his. He tears it away and goes to make up a bed on the couch.

The FBI doesn’t find Annabeth. Neither do the cops, nor anyone else. There are a few calls in the first few days. Annabeth seems to be heading northwest, to Richmond, then nothing. A few weeks later, someone in Pennsylvania calls in that they saw her with two older kids, one of whom is Luke Castellan, a fourteen-year-old from Connecticut who was reported missing five years ago by his fourth grade teacher. He’s been spotted sporadically all over the country since then, and has a knack for disappearing before police can even be contacted, let alone investigate. The girl is a little younger, maybe twelve, and is widely suspected to be Thalia Grace, daughter of Beryl Grace, a TV actress Frederick vaguely remembers seeing on grocery store tabloids when he was in college. There are a few more sightings after that, in New Jersey, Connecticut, and New York. In mid-January, a huge storm materializes from nothing over Long Island. There are no more sightings after that.

Athena shows up in his dreams once, the night after the storm. She’s furious. “I entrusted her to you,” she snaps, pacing the floor of Frederick’s graduate housing. He’s sitting on the ratty couch that his body is still lying on back in the real world, the same one she used to sleep on when she was helping him with his thesis. “She was your reward and you squandered her.”

Frederick’s dream-heart leaps. “She’s okay?”

“Only because she is strong and capable. She is a fine demigod, perhaps the finest child I’ve had since Maria. She will be a great hero, and you tried to stifle her.”

He bows his head. “I know, Athena. I’m sorry, it was never my intention.”

Athena’s eyes draw his back up, boring deep, stormy gray into him. He’s known for seven and a half years now that Annabeth has her mother’s eyes, but with Athena’s right in front of him, cutting right down to his insides, the resemblance is uncanny. “She is safe now,” she says, “I guided her towards other demigods who could protect her. Now they are at camp.”

“Camp?” Frederick asks. He can’t remember her ever mentioning a camp before.

Athena waves a hand. “Under normal circumstances, she would be too young. Most demigods aren’t in much danger until puberty, and Chiron doesn’t like starting their training until they’re eleven or twelve. He says it interferes with their ability to fit into the mortal world.”

“Will Annabeth–”

“Annabeth will be fine. If she had stayed much longer in that mortal school in which you enrolled her, she would have lost her mind from boredom. She will do much better at camp.”

He nods. “Okay,” he says, feeling a little lost. “Can she ever come home?”

Athena eyes him critically. “She’s no prisoner, Frederick. If she wants to return to your home, she will.”

He nods again. “Thank you,” he offers weakly. “I’m sorry.”

She stares him down. “Do better,” she insists, “I saw greatness in you, Frederick Gustavus Chase. I am never wrong.”

With that, Frederick wakes up on the same couch. When he looks over to the coffee table, he sees a business card that reads, in a flowering, extravagant script:

Chiron

Activities Director, Camp Half-Blood

Half-Blood Hill

Long Island, New York

(800) 009-0009

Camp Half-Blood, he thinks. Annabeth is at Camp Half-Blood.  

In the morning, while the boys throw Cheerios at each other, he fills Helen in.

“So you had a dream where your ex told you that Annabeth’s at a summer camp on Long Island in January ?” she asks, doubt curling through her words.

To be fair, it does sound a bit ridiculous when she puts it like that. “I’ve had dreams like this before,” he explains, “it’s how Athena communicates with me. Like when she told me about Annabeth’s dyslexia and ADHD.” Helen doesn’t look any more convinced. “I’ll call the phone number today,” he says, “to make sure that Annabeth’s really there. Hopefully, we can even get some physical proof that she’s safe, to bring to the police so they can take down her missing persons report.”

“You want them to take down the report? ” Helen repeats incredulously. “But that’s how people know to call if they see a little girl of her description! That’s all we have to protect her!”

“She’s being protected at camp,” he points out. “She’s not wandering the country, she’s in one place. One safe place. And she’s not missing if we know where she is. Better that the police and FBI focus on the kids who are still in need of help. Annabeth’s okay, Athena was very clear about that.”

Helen shakes her head. “Unbelievable,” she says. “I need to get the boys to daycare. Can we talk about this later?”

“Sure,” he says. “I’ll call the camp today. Hopefully Chiron can give us more information.”

Helen sighs and doesn’t say anything more. She kisses his cheek on her way out, though, so he thinks they’re on the same page.

Chiron is extremely polite, perfectly pleasant, and steadfastly refuses to let Frederick speak to Annabeth. “She’s still getting settled in,” he says, “It’s her first day of activities, and she’s out on a scavenger hunt right now. It’s just not feasible for me to pass the phone. But I would be more than happy to pass along a message…?”

Frederick pinches his eyebrows. Of course it’s not that easy. “Can you just let her know that I hope this place is right for her? I know she’s been… struggling. And maybe we can call once in a while? Are there any other phones at camp, Chiron?”

“There are not,” he says, still polite. “I’m not sure if you realize this, Dr. Chase, but modern technology is quite dangerous for demigods. Even one phone call would alert any and all monsters in the area, putting them in danger. We, of course, have shields around our borders, but I don’t like to chance it.”

“Right,” Frederick says, wondering why Athena didn’t tell him this. “Okay, then.”

“I will pass your message along to Annabeth,” Chiron says. Frederick doesn’t get the sense that he likes him all that much, but his voice is filled with promise nonetheless. “Thank you for calling, Dr. Chase. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon.” He hangs up before Frederick can return the pleasantry. He holds the phone awkwardly in his hand for a moment, then returns it to the cradle.

That, it seems, is that, then. Annabeth is happy at camp, and both Athena and Chiron insist that it’s the best place for her to be. This thing doesn’t feel fragile, exactly, but he thinks he has the power to destroy it, all the same. He doesn’t want to, and he’s fairly sure that it will fade as Annabeth settles in, but he has it. He could drive up there and tell her to get in the car, and she would. But she’d hate him for it.

He tells this much to Helen when she gets home that night. She stares at him over the dinner table, refusing to break eye contact as he relays the conversation. “If you think this is the right thing to do,” she says, after he’s finished his piece, “then let’s do it.”

“You–really?” he asks. He’d been fully prepared to argue his point for the entire meal.

She shrugs. “She’s your daughter. If this is what you say she needs, I trust you.”

“Thank you,” he says. Something is strange here. Something has just changed, and he’s not sure what it is, or if it’s good. But it’s good for Annabeth, right now. “Thank you,” he repeats. Helen smiles at him, then turns back to Bobby, who is slapping peas and chortling.

“Are they funny?” she coos, “Are the peas funny?”

Bobby giggles, spraying his and Matthew’s high chairs with half-chewed green mush. Frederick leaves the boys as they are and gets up to grab a banana. Annabeth fought them when she was the boys’ age, but it was the one battle she never won.

“No ’nana,” Matthew protests as he comes back, unknowingly echoing his sister.

Frederick mashes it up a little bit and holds the mash out on a spoon. It's an absolutely revolting sight, but Matthew, sweet, object-permanence-less Matthew, now looks intrigued. Frederick lets him lick at the banana for a few moments before unceremoniously tipping the spoon into his son’s mouth. Matthew tries to giggle and swallow at the same time, and finds out the hard way that he can’t. Thankfully, only a little banana is spit back up onto the high chair. Not so thankfully, the rest travels outward and upward, into Matthew’s hair and eyes ( don’t ask him how; he swears the laws of physics have nothing on even his mortal children) and all over Frederick’s shirt. He sighs and mashes up more of the banana. This time, it makes it down his son’s throat.

Matthew claps his hands. “’Nana, ’nana!”

“Can you say banana , Matthew?” Frederick asks. “Can you say ba-na-na ?”

“’Nana, nana!”

He sighs. Helen snorts. “You have a way with children, dear.”

“I suppose it was folly to think they’d develop at the same rate as Annabeth.”

“There’s no one in the world like Annabeth,” Helen says with certainty. Even though Athena certainly has other demigod children out there, Frederick is inclined to agree.

“Well,” he says, “in some ways, it’s nice that the boys are the way they are. I feel like I get to savor the stages, this time, instead of just rushing through them.”

“You can take bathtime then,” she says, “Savor the water all over the bathroom, and the soap getting on everything but them.”

He shrugs. “The bubbles will at least make contact with their skin.”

She nods solemnly. “Ingenious, Dr. Chase. This is why you’re a leading expert in your field.”

He scowls at her playfully, unable to remember the last time they joked like this. Thanksgiving? No, long before that. Before… no, he can’t recall any time after he left William and Mary. Well, no use dwelling on it. He can almost hear Natalie in his head. Live in the moment a little, Freddy. (Should he call her? No, he’d have to explain The Annabeth Situation, and then she’d demand to know why he hadn’t called her immediately, and they’d fight, and nothing would change.)

After dinner, after the boys are nominally cleaner and tucked into the little race car beds that Helen’s oldest nephews received for Christmas over a decade ago, and have been passed around the family ever since, Frederick packs up his bed on the couch. Helen looks up as he crawls under their covers for the first time since Annabeth ran away. She reaches for his hand. “I love you,” she says. 

He squeezes it. “I love you, too.” The words aren’t empty. He means them, and he tries to pour that into his expression as he gazes at his wife. He thinks she picks up on it, and her eyes get brighter.

“Thank you for coming back to me,” she whispers.

Any words he might use to respond get stuck in his throat. He’s not even sure what they are. Instead of replying, he squeezes her hand tighter and kisses her cheek.

His sleep that night is restful, undisturbed by dreams of any sort.

Around Valentine’s Day, it strikes Frederick that Annabeth is not, in fact, uncontactable. And that written letters are not a modern technology. So, he writes one. How are you doing? he asks, What kind of activities are you doing? When I was a little older than you, I went to summer camp for a couple of weeks. I remember swimming and making friendship bracelets. Do you do anything like that? Are you making friends? He skirts around the topic of Athena, and the other kids she was sighted with as she traveled north. Everyone is well here. Bobby has started putting short sentences together. Matthew can name every fruit and vegetable we put in front of him. Helen and I miss you very much, but I hope you’re having fun. If you aren’t, you can come home whenever you want. We love you.

When he gets to the end, he realizes that he has no idea what the camp’s address is. Feeling a little ridiculous, he writes Annabeth Chase, Camp Half-Blood, Long Island on the envelope and sends a quick prayer to Athena that it will get to her. When he checks the mailbox the next day, the usual bills and notices are joined by a postcard. The picture is of a lush mountainside, and the note is written in unfamiliar handwriting that just doesn’t feel like English. Yes, Frederick can read it, but it just doesn’t feel right. Older, maybe. Or like the letters have been switched out to be more friendly to his poor modern eyes. Regardless, the note is very brief. A one-time favor, it says, from one parent to another. Instead of a signature, there’s a stamp of a staff with two snakes twirled around it. Frederick stares at the staff, tries very hard to keep his Greek gods straight in his head, then gives up and searches online. With a mildly nauseating 87% confidence, he sends a grateful prayer to Hermes.

He doesn’t get a response for weeks. By the time he does, at the end of March, he’d given up on getting one altogether. But Annabeth eventually writes back. I’m fine, she says, My half-siblings welcomed me immediately. I love it here, and I don’t want to leave. I already feel like I’m at home. She takes a brief paragraph to explain the types of activities Chiron has her doing–her Ancient Greek mythology class is taught as history, she’s been placed in one-on-one instruction in dagger fighting with one of her half-siblings as her instructor, the whole camp is tracking hurricanes based on Poseidon’s temper tantrums, and her math class has taught her the necessary geometry to allow her to design temples and subway stations in exacting precision. She signs it Love, Annabeth but there are several crossed-out words above the Love so it clearly wasn’t her first choice. 

At the very bottom of the page is a section written in someone else’s handwriting. It informs Frederick that, if he wishes to continue writing letters to his daughter, he’ll need drachmas. There are even instructions on how to exchange dollars for drachmas at the bank. He follows them the next day, feeling incredibly foolish, but leaves the bank with a gallon-sized Ziploc bag of gold coins the size of Girl Scout cookies. When he writes his next letter to Annabeth, he tapes one to the envelope. Only a month goes by this time before he gets a response. Something settles in him at the sight of her familiar scrawl. It’s a little neater, and there aren’t quite so many misspellings, but it’s so quintessentially Annabeth that he can’t help but smile.

Annabeth is well. Bobby and Matthew are well. Helen is well. His marriage is well.

Everything is fine.

Frederick figures that everyone’s lives have milestone moments. Certain birthdays or anniversaries, the day a book is published or a piece of art is revealed, one’s wedding day, or the birth of a child. He has several of those, including the wedding and children’s births. Annabeth’s first letter to him also becomes one of those moments. Even years down the line, he can remember that day with unusual clarity. It’s not so much that the anniversary becomes important, but he associates March 29th with the discharge of the most stressful, anxious time in his life. On March 29th, he learned that his daughter was happy and healthy, in an environment that promoted both of those things, and was in the process of making (or had already made) a home for herself. At seven years old, she might be a little early for it, but Annabeth has always been ahead of the curve.

He tries to write to her every month, but sometimes it turns into six or eight weeks between letters. Annabeth always writes back, although her responses typically take several weeks as well. Eventually, he thinks they’ve settled into a schedule where he writes to her whenever he receives her last response. He still doesn’t quite understand how the mail reaches her, but he always tapes a drachma to the outside of the envelope, and he always gets a response, so something must be working correctly. Maybe the mail service to Camp Half-Blood is just slow. If Hermes is the one in charge of it, he must be extremely overworked these days, and one mortal father’s letters to his demigod daughter can’t rank particularly high on his list of priorities. 

So, the gaps between letters very nearly don’t bother him, and Annabeth never reads as bothered in her responses, so that’s that, then. He sends her presents for her birthday and around Christmas, little things mostly, any new books on architecture or Greek history he can find, or a set of mechanical pencils. Helen still raises an eyebrow at the reading level, but she’s barely mentioned Annabeth since they agreed to let her stay at camp. 

Over three years pass peacefully before he even puts a thought toward changing the status quo.

At the end of April, just after Frederick and Helen’s sixth wedding anniversary, he is invited to present at the World History Association’s summer conference in early July. It’s absolutely perfect because the conference will be in Chicago, where Helen’s other sister and three of her cousins live.

“We can turn it into a larger trip,” he tells her excitedly as she reads the invitation. “This way, the boys can meet their cousins, you’ll have time with your sister–”

“–and you can talk about warplanes with people who want to hear a four hour lecture about them,” Helen laughs. She drops the invitation on the bed. “Honey, this is an amazing opportunity!”

She sounds excited, but Frederick thinks he can detect a tinge of wistfulness in her voice. He sits down next to her and takes her hands. “Is everything alright, dear?” he asks.

She laughs, but it still doesn’t sound right. “Yes, of course, everything’s fine. I just…” She sighs. “I’m just jealous, really. I can’t recall the last time I had an opportunity like this. Even with all those ups and downs a few years ago, you’ve landed on your feet. You’re teaching at West Point, and you published two papers last year and you’re gearing up for your next book, and I just… well, I feel like my career has just stagnated recently. Ever since…” She bites her lip and doesn’t finish the thought, but Frederick sees her eyes dart towards the picture of the boys on her bedside table, and he feels terrible.

How often did he hear Natalie, or Caroline, or his mother rant about the way the American workforce treats working mothers? How many of his female colleagues work fewer hours, not because they don’t want to, but because the daycares and after school programs run on a strict schedule, and there’s just no way around it?

He wraps his arms around her and kisses her temple. “I’m so sorry, dear. I didn’t even think about that.” When he leans back, she’s blinking away tears.

“It’s really okay,” she assures him, but the effort is made less convincing by the break in her voice halfway through. “I love the boys so much, and I do enjoy teaching.”

“But?” he prompts.

“But I would like to publish things, too. I’ve had outlines and concepts drifting around in my head for years, and I’ve always put them on the backburner. And I’d like to go to conferences and present my findings and ideas. I’d like to have findings and ideas. I’m just a little sick of always being my own second, or third, or fourth priority!” Her voice rises throughout her speech, never yelling or reaching enough of a volume to wake the boys, but growing nonetheless. There’s a passion and desperation in it that he’s quite ashamed to admit he doesn’t remember hearing from her before.

He hugs her tightly, and she reciprocates, nearly clinging to him. “Would you like to come to the conference with me?” he asks. “You are a historian, even if only on a technicality–” She glares playfully at him. “–and I’m sure one of your relatives would be happy to watch the boys for an afternoon or two.”

“That does sound nice,” she sighs, “spending a whole afternoon talking to other academic adults, not having to worry about naptime or snacks or Matthew running off.” It’s always Matthew. One of the few consistent ways to tell their two identical boys apart is that if one of them is running off somewhere, it’s always Matthew.

He moves his hands back to squeeze her own. “And maybe I can go on leave for the year,” he says, not sure how it would work this late in the year. He’s already planned out his classes for the next two semesters, but none of them are time restricted. “Then, I can be home with the boys and you can go on sabbatical to focus on your research. We could go to Rome and you can be knee-deep in ruins while the boys and I learn Italian and take pictures in a Macchi C.202 Folgore.”

This triggers a peal of laughter from Helen that doesn’t fade for several seconds. “You and your warplanes, dear,” she says fondly. “But you won’t get the boys to go along with you, I’m afraid.”

“Why not?”

“You can’t honestly believe they’d rather experience Axis military history than dig in historically significant dirt.”

“But the whole point of the trip would be so you could do research without the most time-consuming parts of motherhood butting their heads in!”

“If their options are to listen to tour guides or dig in the dirt, Frederick, they’re going to dig in the dirt. They’re five.”

“Annabeth would pick the tours,” Frederick volleys back, hoping he hasn’t tossed a grenade into this lovely conversation. “The boys are still half mine, you know.”

Thankfully, Helen just snorts. “They’re half yours and half mine and entirely five. I think that part outweighs their genetics.”

Frederick considers this. “I suppose you’re right,” he concedes. “Still, it sounds fun, right?”

She smiles at him. “Very fun,” she says.

“Then it’s a plan.”

She hums, then tugs him in for a proper kiss on the lips and he, for once, finds himself enjoying it. She’s been dropping more hints as the boys have settled out of toddlerhood and onto a consistent sleep schedule, and he’s tried to respond. He still doesn’t quite understand what the rest of the world sees in the activity, but Helen seems to enjoy it, which is the important thing.

It’s the afternoon of their second day at the conference, and Frederick is having a blast. He gave his lecture that morning, and it went swimmingly, if he does say so himself. He was allotted 90 minutes of prime time, before Dan Kupetz and Gary Kaminsky’s highly anticipated presentation on the life and scandals of Benjamin Franklin kicked off at 11, and several of his audience members looked reluctant to leave. 

It’s only 3 o’clock now, and Frederick and Helen don’t have anywhere to be until their dinner reservations at 6. Her sister and brother-in-law have taken Bobby and Matthew, along with their own children, to an amusement park called Kiddieland. The conference won’t wrap up for another couple of hours, and there’s one more panel that Frederick really wants to go to that’ll start in a half hour. But they have no events to be at until then, so right now, Helen is talking to some medieval Italian historians and Frederick is giving her space to network and debate. 

Just as he’s about to go over and introduce himself to Gary Kaminsky, a young African-American boy enters his field of vision. “Excuse me,” the boy says, and Frederick is startled to realize that he’s dressed exactly like the rest of them–that is, in khaki pants, loafers, and a button-down shirt. Frederick can’t recall ever seeing such a well-dressed child before, especially one who can’t be older than nine or ten.

“Hello,” he says, startled.

“You’re Dr. Chase, aren’t you? You gave a presentation this morning on the Battle of Britain,” the boy says.

“That’s right.” Frederick wonders if he should be looking around for a parent. He hadn’t heard anything about a child genius in the historical community, and he thinks he would have. Therefore, it stands to reason that this boy is accompanying someone else to the conference, only he can’t see anyone…

“I was just wondering about Churchill’s speech, since you kind of zoomed through that part–”

“Sorry,” Frederick says, “That’s the part most historians usually have a pretty clear education of, thanks to lower level classes.” He realizes that this might come off as insulting. “Not that everyone has that, of course,” he says hurriedly, “There are so many different ways that history can be taught, and no one of them is the most correct, so–”

“I understand that,” the boy says. He doesn’t look insulted. “I just wanted to ask what you meant when you said–”

“Carter!” A man runs up to them. Somewhat hilariously, he’s dressed the exact same way as the boy–his son, Frederick realizes. 

“Sorry, Dad, but I just had a question for Dr. Chase, and–”

“Carter.”

“I’m sorry, Dad.” Carter hangs his head a little bit. 

His father sighs and claps him on the shoulder. “No harm done,” he concedes, “just, please, tell me where you’re going.” Carter nods in agreement. Then, his father turns his attention to Frederick. “Julius Kane,” he introduces himself, “Egyptology.”

“Frederick Chase,” Frederick returns, “American military history.”

Dr. Kane nods. “We attended your lecture this morning,” he says, “Carter was very intrigued.” Carter blushes a little.

“Intrigued is good,” Frederick says, smiling down at the boy. “That’s how most of us got our start, I’d bet.”

“Certainly,” Dr. Kane agrees. He turns to lead his son away, then stops. “You never got to ask your question, did you?” Carter shakes his head. “Well? Go on, then.”

Carter’s eyes dart between his father and Frederick for a few moments, then he says quietly, “It was more about Britain the place than the Battle itself.”

“That’s okay,” Frederick encourages, glancing at Dr. Kane himself and hoping he isn’t overstepping. “I’ll admit that my knowledge of Britain is fairly limited, but I’ll certainly do my best to answer it. And, if I can’t, I’d be happy to direct you to some of my colleagues in British history.”

Carter hems and haws for several more seconds, before eventually blurting out, “How much of London, would you say, was destroyed in the Battle?”

Frederick is a little taken aback, but, upon a moment of consideration, supposes he would have been no matter what question came out of the boy’s mouth. He does his best to think, though, trying to conjure up statistics he learned twenty years ago. “Over the initial Battle, I’m not exactly sure,” he admits. “Since it took place over about 3 months and covered a lot of southern England as well–not much of a battle, I’d say, by our traditional definition of the word.” Carter, and even Dr. Kane, both crack a smile for that one. “But the Blitz, which started at the end of the Battle of Britain, and was directed at more specifically at London, destroyed over a million houses and up to 200,000 civilians were killed or injured. Not all at once, of course, but over about 8 months.”

“Whoa,” Carter says, looking a little blown away by the numbers. He turns to his dad, “So, then, Gran and Gramps and Sadie are probably living somewhere built afterwards, right?”

Dr. Kane nods. “Sadie and your grandparents’ apartment was built in the early 1960s, as part of the postwar rebuilding project.”

“Sadie?” Frederick asks, before he can stop himself from butting into something that has nothing to do with him.

“My sister,” Carter says, before his eyes jump guiltily to his father’s.

Dr. Kane’s eyes have tightened, but he says, “My wife passed away last year. Afterwards, my in-laws fought me for custody. They live in London, with my daughter.”

He doesn’t explain further, but this all sounds incredibly personal. “I’m so sorry to hear that,” Frederick says, hoping he isn’t overstepping. “My daughter doesn’t live with me, either.” Okay, now he’s definitely overstepping. 

But it seems to have worked. Dr. Kane’s eyes flick back to him, filled with sympathy and curiosity, but no discernable frustration. “She did when she was younger,” Frederick explains, “but now she lives with her mother’s family. Like your daughter.”

Dr. Kane nods, and for a moment the two men exist alone in the room, or maybe in the whole universe. Two fathers, separated from their daughters by life and circumstance. It’s a special kind of pain, Frederick thinks, to have a child, but be kept from their day-to-day lives.

The moment breaks soon enough, and Frederick waves the Kanes off. Helen finishes her conversation not long after and takes his arm. “Who was that?” she asks.

“Julius Kane and his son,” he says. “He’s an Egyptologist.”

“What were you talking about with an Egyptologist?”

“London.”

“What?”

He shrugs. “They seemed very nice.”

She snorts. “Everyone seems nice to you, dear.” He doesn’t know how to respond to that, but she thankfully keeps going, so he doesn’t have to. “Well, we have a few more hours of freedom. Want to check out the Mussolini panel?”

He smiles. “That sounds delightful, my dear.”

But he can’t get that conversation with Dr. Kane out of his mind. As he lies in bed that night in their hotel room, wife and sons all fast asleep, he realizes that Annabeth’s birthday is coming up, and he owes her a letter. In the letter, he resolves, he will ask her to come home. Beg, even. Julius Kane fought the courts and lost, but there’s no custody battle keeping Frederick from his daughter. He misses her, and she’s his daughter. That’s enough reason to ask her to come home.

Helen is apprehensive, but willing to hear him out. “It was hard, last time,” she says, “near the end. She made it clear that she had no respect for me, or for the boys. Every time I asked her to be more careful, or have a little more regard for their schedule, she pushed back.”

“She’s older now,” Frederick says, “and I’ll be home this time. I know that me being gone made things more difficult.”

Helen scoffs. “With her? You being gone made things impossible. ”

She’s never put it so bluntly before. He doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry,” he says. “It’ll be different this time.”

“It’ll have to be if you want her to stay,” she points out. A part of him understands what she’s getting at, but a much larger part resents the way she’s phrasing it. “And what about our plans for Italy?”

“She’s my daughter,” he says, trying to sound firm. “I want to spend time with her, to raise her, if she’ll let me. We can take her to Italy with us, we’ll just have to get her a passport. It shouldn’t be any harder than getting the boys’.”

Helen sighs and takes his hand. “That’s true, dear. And I know you want to spend time with her,” she says, “I’m just trying to set expectations. The boys are at that age where they’re starting to ask questions about her, since they don’t remember her at all, but you’ve got photos up all over the place.” They’re not all over the place. For starters, he hasn’t had a new photo of her in three and a half years. Sure, he’s got her last school photo on the mantel, next to the ones of Randolph’s wedding and Magnus’ first birthday. Not speaking to his family doesn’t mean he doesn’t want to remember them. There are a few more scattered throughout the house: a soccer magnet on the fridge, the only school play he ever made, and the professional family portrait they had done for the first holiday card after the boys were born. 

There are many more pictures of the boys, on bookshelves and the walls, their childhood documented to perfection. There are more still of Helen and extended family, her parents, siblings, nieces and nephews. For what feels like the first time, his eyes drift to the mantelpiece Chase shrine. Half a dozen photos, mostly a decade or more old, of people the boys either haven’t met or don’t remember. It doesn’t feel like too much.

“It’s okay with you that I ask?” he checks, one last time. She nods and smiles and squeezes his hand, but he can’t read what’s in her eyes.

That night, he digs out his old Harvard ring, which he’d been planning to send her as a birthday present anyway, and starts writing. He gets the usual pleasantries out of the way–hello, how are you, how are the dagger lessons going–then pauses. This is the part where he might set off a landmine. I know you’re happy at camp, he starts, but we all miss you so much. Would you consider coming home for the school year? It’ll be better this time, I promise. I know your relationship with Helen was strained, but she wants you to come home too. We want you to know your brothers, and for them to know you. You don’t have to respond right away, and I completely understand if you need time to think about it. I love you, sweetheart, and I promise it’ll be better this time. The lies are fine, he reasons. They’re only little, and they really aren’t that far off the map. The boys are starting to ask questions, and Helen agreed to this plan. 

He signs the letter, folds it up with the ring, and tapes the drachma onto the envelope, like always. He tells himself that his fingers are trembling as he puts it in the mailbox because it’s unseasonably cold outside. He formally requests a yearlong sabbatical from West Point and promises them a completed book draft by the end of next summer. He waits, and checks the mail, and waits some more.

Finally, at the end of August, less than two weeks before school is supposed to start, he gets a response. Okay, Annabeth has written. Nothing else on the page has been crossed out or erased, and there’s no elaboration. Just the agreement, or maybe the concession.

That night, after the boys have been put to bed, the phone rings, displaying an 800 area code. “Am I speaking to Dr. Chase?” the voice on the other end asks politely.

“Well, yes,” Helen says, having picked up the phone and put it on speaker, “but probably not the Dr. Chase you intended to speak to.” She makes a face at Frederick, the way she always does when someone assumes that he’s the only PhD in the family.

“My apologies,” the voice says smoothly, “May I speak to Dr. Frederick Chase?”

“This is he,” Frederick says, taking the phone off of speaker and holding it up to his ear. 

“Excellent. Dr. Chase, my name is Chiron. I don’t know if you remember me, but we spoke a few years ago, not long after Annabeth arrived.”

“I remember,” Frederick says. He hadn’t placed the voice until now, but it matches with the slightly strange cadences and mildly intimidating gravitas in his memory. Oddly enough, Chiron’s voice reminds him slightly of his doctoral advisor, a white-haired, easily distracted man to whom he really hasn’t given a second thought for the past decade. 

“Excellent,” Chiron repeats, “Since Annabeth has agreed to spend the school year with you, I thought it would be best to coordinate about timing and expectations.”

“Of course.”

“As you may know, our year-round campers here are expected to keep up roughly with their supposed grade-level. I’ve found that this system is the most beneficial one for any campers who make it to an adult life in the mortal world. I am delighted to inform you that Annabeth is actually several years above fifth grade mathematics. She soared through our lessons on algebra and geometry, and is currently picking her way through trigonometry. I can send you some resources for the school year to keep her from too much boredom, if you’d like.”

“That would be great,” Frederick manages. Trigonometry? Annabeth, at only eleven years old, is already learning trigonometry?

“Now, I cannot find a consistent curriculum for fifth grade science, but I assure you that Annabeth is quite well-versed in mortal human and animal life-cycles, astronomy, and gravitational physics. When it comes to the human body, I usually start campers on the various muscles, organs, and systems when they’re about Annabeth’s age. And, of course, she can always call if she has questions about puberty or bodily changes, and I’m sure one of our older campers would be happy to explain.”

“Right,” Frederick says, blinking at the thought that he’s missed so many years that puberty will likely be a topic of conversation. Athena’s armor, what if she has questions about relationships? Do daughters get the Birds and the Bees? Does he remember enough to give anyone the Birds and the Bees? “Helen–Annabeth’s stepmother, that is–she can answer those kinds of questions as well. Since she, well, went through it.”

“I’m sure that would be fine, if Annabeth feels comfortable with it,” Chiron says. Without even a beat, he moves on. “I believe fifth graders usually cover American history?”

“Yes, although mostly the very early parts,” Frederick agrees. Finally, something he can sort of remember. “The Colonial Era and the Revolutionary War, I believe.”

“Annabeth knows quite a bit about George Washington, of course, he’s something of a role model for all of Cabin Six.”

“He’s one of their half-brothers, right?” Frederick interrupts. “I remember Athena mentioning him from time to time. She was quite proud.”

“That’s right.” Chiron sounds a little surprised–politely so, but still–that Frederick was the one to bring it up. Frederick wonders how common it is for the gods’ former human partners to remember their off-hand comments twelve years after the fact. “Benjamin Franklin as well, which you may have guessed, due to his many scientific discoveries and diplomatic roles.”

“Athena didn’t mention him, actually,” Frederick says.

Chiron clears his throat. “Well, my understanding is that his involvement with the Order of the Friars of St. Francis of Wycombe caused something of a split between them, and that she all but abandoned him after he returned from France.”

“Ah,” Frederick says, sure that he ought to say something in response to that, but not at all sure what that something ought to be.

“All that aside, Annabeth is an expert on the godly side of the war, and she can name all of the major demigods who participated, but the mortal side will be completely new to her. As will, I’m afraid, any reading material. We typically spend the whole school year covering one text from the Epic Cycle, discussing the history and analyzing the metaphors and deeper poetic language. As I’m sure you understand, this does not leave much time for modern literature.”

“Right,” Frederick says, trying to recall if he read Charlotte’s Web in fourth grade or fifth grade. Or perhaps Stuart Little would be more appropriate? 

“Additionally,” Chiron continues, “with Annabeth’s dyslexia, modern English poses quite a challenge for reading that her classmates simply won’t be dealing with. Once she gets her reading list, I’d appreciate it if you’d pass the titles along to me, and I can send you translations or reading guides to make the process easier.”

“Thank you,” Frederick says gratefully. “I remember, when she was little, she noticed the dyslexia more when she didn’t care about the subject matter. Is that–”

“That’s very unlikely to still be the case,” Chiron says. Frederick thinks he can hear a tinge of regret in his voice. “Annabeth hasn’t read anything completely in English since she settled in here. I expect the transition will be incredibly difficult.”

“Right,” Frederick says. “Well, thank you for letting me know about all of that. I just want her to be comfortable here. When should we come pick her up?”

“Oh, there won’t be any need for that,” Chiron says. “Annabeth has expressed that she would prefer to come to you. You can expect a chariot on Saturday, around, oh, midday or so? A few of our older campers will accompany her, to make sure the journey goes smoothly.”

“Oh.” Truthfully, he’s a little disappointed. He’s received so many letters about camp over the past three and a half years, he’d sort of hoped to see it himself, even just once. But if this is what Annabeth would prefer, then of course he’ll accommodate. Perhaps, if the school year goes well, she’ll want him to drop her off next summer. “Alright, then. Will you tell her that we’re looking forward to seeing her?”

“I’ll pass that along,” Chiron agrees. “Goodbye, Dr. Chase.”

“Good-” The line clicks as Chiron hangs up. Frederick stands there for a moment, slowly lowering the phone from his ear.

“Well?” Helen prompts eagerly.

“They’ll drop Annabeth off on Saturday,” he says.

“This Saturday?”

“Well, yes. School starts–”

“How will they know where we live?”

“We haven’t moved, dear. Annabeth probably remembers. Or they’ll check the White Pages.”

“Right,” Helen says, relaxing back a bit. “I thought you were going to say they’d sniff us out with hellhounds, or something.”

Frederick frowns. “No–or, well, I don’t think so. Chiron did say they’d be coming by chariot, though.”

“By chariot? ”

“And he’d like us to send him the reading list as soon as we know, since the English will be difficult for her.”

“Why would the English be difficult? She’s been reading since she was three. Have they not been teaching her there?”

He shrugs. “It sounds like they mostly read in Ancient Greek, since their dyslexia doesn’t affect it.”

“ Doesn’t affect it? ”

“And they have been teaching her. Chiron gave me a bit of a progress report. He says she's been learning trigonometry, since she finished algebra and geometry, and that she’s learned astronomy, life cycles, and some physics. If her science lessons start teaching her about the human body, or about puberty, she can call camp about any questions.”

“She can ask me,” Helen says pointedly. “Have any of them even come out the other side of puberty?”

He shrugs. “She might feel more comfortable asking her cabinmates, or older kids at camp. I told Chiron about you, and he seemed a little–” He pauses, trying to think of the most reassuring way to put it. “–well, he said we ought to wait and see what she’s comfortable with.” He clears his throat and tries to move on quickly. “When it comes to history, she’s apparently quite solid on the demigod side, but less so on the mortal side, so she’ll probably be at grade-level there.”

“Wonderful,” Helen says, and Frederick honestly can’t tell if she’s being sarcastic or not. He peers at her for a second, trying to figure it out. “Dear?” she asks, “Is everything alright?”

“Yes, yes,” he says, giving up. “Anyway, that’s about it.”

Helen rises, takes the phone, and wraps him in a hug. “It’s all going to work out,” she whispers in his ear. Moving back, she says “I’ll call the school tomorrow. We’re definitely past the deadline, but hopefully they’ll accept her.”

Frederick doesn’t know why they wouldn’t, and says as much. Helen laughs. “I don’t know. Maybe Athena can get her in.”

“That’s a good idea,” Frederick says. He can’t believe he didn’t think of it himself. Closing his eyes, he thinks, Athena?

A moment later, her stern, scratchy voice fills his head. I will do my part, Frederick, if you will do yours .

Thank you, he thinks, then opens his eyes. “She’ll take care of it,” he says.

Helen shakes her head at him. “You really need to learn when someone’s making a joke, my dear.”

“But it was a good idea,” he protests. “Thank you!”

She kisses his cheek. “It’s late,” she says, changing the subject. “The next few days are going to be very busy. Let’s go to bed.”

The chariot comes that Saturday, as promised. It lands–although crashes might be a better word–at twelve minutes to two and crushes Helen’s herb garden. The pegasus–because surely, that must be what the giant, winged horse is, even if Frederick hasn’t actually seen one before–whinnies loudly, and stomps its feet through the boys’ sandbox.

The boys themselves are inside, but they run out when they hear the commotion.

“Moto-syka!” Bobby cheers, clapping his hands and staring at the pegasus.

“Caw!” Matthew counters, pointing at the chariot.

“Chariot,” Frederick corrects gently, “Why don’t you let Mommy know that Annabeth’s here?”

Bobby turns around and shouts, “Mooooommmmy!” and Helen appears at the sliding door before he can continue. Bobby points at the pegasus. “Moto-syka!”

“Caw!” Matthew argues. “Mommy, issa caw! An-Annabeff is inna caw.”

“Car,” Helen says, “Matty, can you repeat that for me? Annabeth is in a car , with an arrr , like a–”

“ Arrr like a pirate! ” Matthew crows, “ Arrrrrrrr! ”

Frederick turns his attention from the commotion around the chariot to the people in it. To Annabeth. Apparently Picture Day isn’t a thing at Camp Half-Blood, so Frederick hasn’t seen his daughter’s face in three and a half years. The first thing he notices is her height. She’s had a growth spurt since he saw her last, perhaps two or three, and is now easily as tall as Helen. Probably a little taller still, since, even with the chariot holding her above the ground, she and the other girl are almost the same height.. Her skin has a deep tan, putting Frederick’s pasty Nordic inheritance to shame, and her hair has sun-bleached streaks. She looks a little nervous, and even though he’s several feet away from the chariot, he can see her eyes darting around. She shifts, and he sees the hand she’s got clenched around the boy in the chariot’s arm.

Although, boy might not be exactly the correct term. He looks at least five years older than her, and there’s a scar running down one side of his face, right through his eye, that makes him look older still. He’s got sandy blonde hair a little lighter than Annabeth and Frederick’s, and he looks mildly familiar, though Frederick has no idea where he might have seen him before.

The other girl looks younger than the guy, but older than Annabeth. Frederick estimates that she might be thirteen or fourteen. Her hair is shiny and dark and much longer than Annabeth’s. He can’t see any scars on her, but she’s facing away from him, having jumped down from the chariot sometime when Matthew and Bobby were playing ‘Car or Motorcycle’. She seems to be patting the pegasus, maybe soothing it.

Since no one else seems to be moving forward, Frederick mentally nominates himself for the job. “Annabeth?” he says. She turns to look at him, her apprehension written clear on her face. The hand that isn’t clenching the boys comes up and waves at him. It’s awkward and so endearing, although she probably has no idea. “Welcome home,” he says, wishing he had something better to say.

Certainly, no phrase could have been worse, because that one makes all three kids’ eyes tighten. The boy glares at him and Frederick is extremely intimidated. The scar looks less like an old wound and more like a recent one, the more he looks at it.

Annabeth leaps off the chariot, landing neatly on the grass. Her eyes dart between the four other Chases in the yard: the boys, still bickering about what the chariot is; Helen, who looks as apprehensive as Annabeth; and Frederick himself. He tries to smile, but it probably doesn’t come off very well. 

Annebeth turns to accept a duffle bag from the boy. Carrying another, he jumps down and wraps her in a tight hug. Annabeth is much taller than she was the last time Frederick saw her, but she’s no match for the boy, whose arms almost swallow her up. The other girl hugs Annabeth too, then both of them climb back into the chariot. They wave to her, then the pegasi’s wings begin to flap, and, while all five Chases watch, the chariot lifts into the air and is a speck in the sky before Frederick can believe it. 

With her friends gone, standing in Helen’s parsley with two duffle bags at her feet, Annabeth looks small, scared, and alone. Frederick can’t really fix the first, but he makes a vow to himself to correct the other two. 

He goes over to her, about to hug her, then hesitates. Does she want a hug from him? Would she accept it? He settles for a hand on her shoulder and pats it once, then twice. Reaching down to pick up one of the duffles for her, he’s surprised at the weight. In his junior year of high school, he’d had history, science, and French classes, all back-to-back, all three with heavy textbooks. All year, he’d resented that schedule, complaining to his friends, parents, and anyone who would listen about the weight of his backpack. Still, that weight is nothing compared to Annabeth’s duffle. His hand wraps around the handle, his arm pulls up, and the bag doesn’t move. It lifts up an inch, maybe, from the ground, and then it’s too much, so he drops it. 

Thoroughly embarrassed, he risks a glance up at his daughter. “That’s the weapon bag,” she explains, scooping it up easily. He blinks at her. “I’ve had a lot of practice,” she says, looking a little embarrassed at his scrutiny.

“It’s impressive,” he says, because it is. A ghost of a smile pokes up one side of her mouth, but it falls quickly as she glances behind him. He turns and sees Helen, with a wary look on her face.

“Hi, Annie,” she says. A scowl crosses Annabeth’s face, then disappears a second later. Another glance at his wife tells Frederick that she didn’t miss it. 

“Hi,” Annabeth says. She hefts both of her bags easily. Frederick, who felt the weight of the weapon bag, Athena’s armor, his daughter is impressive, goggles at her and wonders how else Camp Half-Blood has changed her. “Can I put these in my room, or have you redecorated?”

“Of course not!” Helen says, clearly appalled. Frederick, upon close analysis of the situation, dynamics at play, and his own grasp of person-to-person relations, decides that it would be most prudent to not mention the plans Helen has had for the past two years to switch out the furniture and turn it into a guest room. In fact, he should probably forget that she’d ever made any such plans. 

They walk her to her room, and she pauses in the doorway. Frederick isn’t sure if it’s because of what they changed (new sheets on the bed and curtains in the window, a few decorations they’d had to take out because they’d just fallen apart, and the small pockets of dust that Frederick’s panicked use of the Swiffer two days ago had not eradicated) or what they haven’t (the bed still has scratches and dings from a seven-year-old being a seven-year-old, the same old alarm clock has just been set to the correct time, and the blueprints that Annabeth drew when she was five, six, or seven haven’t moved an inch since she left). 

She drops her duffles on the rug and charges at Frederick. He’s shocked when her little arms–not as little as they used to be, but little all the same–wind around him and her head presses into his chest. She doesn’t say anything, but, as Frederick hugs his daughter for the first time in 32 months, he feels something shift back into place in his chest. Annabeth is home. His family is whole.

Naturally, things fall apart pretty quickly. But Frederick won’t realize that until later, much later. If he’s being honest with himself, he won’t understand just how quickly the joy from Annabeth’s first return sours until she’s in college. 

The first few weeks are okay. Frederick swiftly realizes that, with the boys starting kindergarten and Annabeth rejoining a public school environment for the first time in three years, there’s no way they can carve out a few weeks for a family/research trip to Italy. Helen accepts this, and makes reservations for a solo trip in October. Things are a little tense, but Frederick is hopeful that things will work out for Spring Break.

Time off from teaching is wonderful. He loves it, of course, but five years in, and West Point cadets are still too much for him sometimes. It’s refreshing to be home in the middle of the week, to be parent-on-duty for drop-off and pick-up, to contribute to the shopping list. Parenting is a full-time job and a half, of course, but with both him and Helen home through September, it feels easier than ever. He figures out a regular schedule, that mostly consists of him knee-deep in research and outlining from 9 AM to 2 PM every weekday, with several alarms on either side so he doesn’t forget to get the kids. Helen does all of that, sets up meetings and sends emails, gets the visa she needs, and still manages to cook dinner four nights a week. Frederick remains in awe of his wife. 

The adjustment to school is rough, but better than it could be. The children’s issues are understandable–well, Bobby’s difficulty with subtraction and Matthew’s lack of a grasp on personal space are understandable. They’re also normal, acceptable and easily explainable. Annabeth’s eagerness to correct her teacher, reticence to follow directions, and the dagger she keeps around her waist at all times are… less so. On all counts. Still no one is stabbed or expelled, so Frederick counts it as a net win. 

Annabeth and the boys seem to get along fine. Matthew insists for the first week that since “Annabeff” is a girl, she must have cooties, but this brigade ends abruptly the Sunday before school starts when Annabeth painstakingly takes him through her cleanliness routine, points out that she bathes more frequently than he does, and asks what he’s doing to halt the spread of cooties. 

“Raising a panic,” she says, “doesn’t actually do anything. If you’re so concerned about the spread of a disease, you should do your own research, obviously from trustworthy sources, and then present that research in a manner that will allow others to check your findings.”

“But you have them ’cause–’cause you’re a girl an’ that’s how it works! ” 

“With that kind of reasoning, I could just as easily say that you have cooties, because you’re a boy, and that’s how it works,” Annabeth retorts. “You can’t just claim something as fact, you have to have proof. Do you have proof?” 

Matthew sulks a little, but that night he pulls down the encyclopedia and scours it for any mention of the word ‘cootie’. He finds ‘cookie’ quite easily, and ‘clootie’, whose entry he actually reads all the way through, because he’d never encountered the word before (neither had Frederick, truth be told. He didn’t even know that the encyclopedia had an entry on ‘clootie’). But neither of those words is precisely what he’s looking for, so he has to go back to his sister empty handed. At least she’s… well, gracious is entirely the wrong word. Annabeth has learned many things at camp, but it does not appear that grace is one of them. But the dancing around him, hooting about being right, and general celebration only lasts a few minutes, so Frederick doesn’t see the point in scolding her about it. Randolph was certainly a lot worse when he was Annabeth’s age.

Another night, near the end of September, Bobby pipes up at dinner and tells them that Annabeth fought a mountain lion on the playground during lunch. How Bobby knows this he does not explain, since the kindergarteners eat lunch separately from the rest of the school, and Frederick doesn’t remember gossip traveling that well between children at that age. Regardless, his tone is full of nothing but admiration, and he proudly brags to his parents on his sister’s behalf, emphasizing her bravery and focusing on the kinds of details that six-year-olds do: the mess involved (lots), the speed at which Annabeth was moving (very high), and how much glitter was left on the blacktop after she “popped it” (more than Frederick ever wants to see in this house). His brain does not stop to comprehend how a mountain lion, an animal he’s only seen in picture books and postcards from his grandparents in California, would suddenly show up at an elementary school in Virginia.

“Bobby, sweetheart,” Helen laughs at the end of the story. Her tone is uneasy and Frederick can see how her hands have suddenly started gripping the edge of the table, “did that really happen, or are you just telling us a fun story about your sister?”

“It happened!” Bobby insists. 

Helen’s face turns white. “And you saw it?”

“No,” Bobby admits, “But Jake Lee’s older brother did, and he said–”

“I’m afraid Jake Lee’s brother must have been wrong, dear,” Helen says tightly. “There are no mountain lions in Virginia, and Annabeth certainly would never fight one. Right, Annabeth?”

Previously, Annabeth had looked quite proud as Bobby detailed what sounded like an incredible victory. But her face has drawn in a bit from Helen’s response, and Frederick can read uncertainty clear as day on her guarded face. “It wasn’t a mountain lion,” she says carefully, “It was a hellhound. I killed it really quickly.”

“ See? ” Bobby insists. Frederick knows that he has no idea what a hellhound is.

Helen’s face goes from tight to stony. “Annie,” she says, “please don’t lie to me. I know you would never put your brothers, or any other children, in danger by fighting a monster so close to them. You’re a good girl, aren’t you?”

The tension ratchets up from an eight to at least a seventeen. Even Matthew, who had previously been picking at his peas and his nose, seems to have caught on. Bobby’s eyes flick between his mother and his sister. Frederick has one of those internal prods that tells him This is the time to do something, but he’s frozen. Annabeth’s eyes don’t move from Helen’s, but the hand closer to Frederick jerks, as though she wants to reach out. But she doesn’t. Her shoulders climb the sides of her head until she’s almost turtling. Finally, after several seconds of sharp, fragile silence, she says, “It was a hellhound. I killed it. No one got hurt.”

She doesn’t wait around to see Helen’s reaction to that. Honestly, Frederick doesn’t see it either. He just watches his daughter throw her napkin onto the table, get up, and stalk out of the room. As she turns the corner, Frederick sees Band-Aids on her forearms and elbows that he hadn’t noticed earlier. One of them isn’t quite big enough to cover up the gash.

There are other incidents over the next few months. A flock of harpies descend upon Annabeth while they’re at Costco. She kills them all, but there’s a pile of feathers left in the cart that baffles the lady running the checkout. 

An empousa poses as a saleswoman while Helen and Annabeth attempt to buy a pair of shoes nice enough for Helen’s cousin’s wedding and comfortable enough for Annabeth to move around in. From how they both relay the story, it sounds like the kill was truly accidental. The empousa (whom Helen insists on referring to as Sandi) came up behind them while Annabeth was opening up a box, her training kicked in, and Sandi was a pile of dust before Helen could blink. The pile of dust got all over the shoes, of course, so they had to buy them, even though they pinch Annabeth’s feet. 

A drakon flies over the boys’ soccer game and Annabeth disappears for an hour and a half. A dracaena replaces her teacher and gives her zeroes on all of her math tests. A swarm of nosoi invades the house in early November, and they all get the stomach flu (eight years later, Annabeth will admit that that one was a joke that failed to land).

It isn’t peaceful. Any quiet life they had reclaimed when the boys grew from toddlers to small children disappears with a vengeance. Frederick has trouble thinking of even one day that doesn’t get interrupted with some demigod-adjacent crisis. They aren’t all monsters, of course. Sometimes Annabeth gets mad at her brothers and takes a few pieces out of their Legos, so they fall apart. Other times, someone interrupts her while she’s training, and ends up with a spear or longsword through their belly that they can’t feel but is rather disturbing to see. Still other times, Annabeth will get frustrated with a book and throw it at the wall hard enough to make a dent.

But Frederick is so overjoyed at the little family reunification he pulled together that he brushes past most of the issues. They’re just little hiccups, he decides, that will pass with no lasting damage. Truthfully, he doesn’t even realize the extent of the monster attacks until several temporary reunifications down the line. The boys fight with Annabeth less than they fight with each other, even after the initial shine of “meeting” their sister wears off. 

Hence why he’s so completely blindsided when, just as November has turned the corner and with Christmas fast approaching, Annabeth waits an extra moment after boys get out of the car for school. “I called Chiron last night,” she says, just as matter-of-factly as she declared jarred cranberry sauce “an abomination” last week. “He’s going to send a chariot to pick me up on Saturday.”

Frederick looks at her through the rearview mirror, very confused. “It’s not winter break yet, sweetheart. You’ve still got two more weeks of school. We can’t bring you back to camp until–”

“I’m going back to camp,” Annabeth insists. Now he can see a little desperation crack through her stormy gray eyes–eyes so much like her mother’s, that sometimes they’re hard to look at. Like now. “I thought I could do this, but I can’t. I want to go home, Dad. I am going home. I just thought I’d…” she pauses for a second, and he can almost see her brain whirring, trying to pick the best phrase. He’s on the edge of a cliff, ready to fall. “Let you know,” she finishes. There’s a twist in her mouth like she’s not completely satisfied with that conclusion, but she doesn’t say anything more. 

Frederick’s brain is whirring too, as he falls and falls and falls. “Okay,” he manages eventually. It’s only Wednesday. “Do you… do you want to go to school today?” Annabeth shrugs. “You don’t have to,” he continues, unsure of his own intentions here. Is he trying to change her mind, or just give her a good sendoff? Is he trying to make some final memories, or give her something she’ll come back for? Does he want her to stay or does he want her to be happy? “Do you want… we could go get ice cream? Like the old days? Do you still like rainbow sherbet?”

For a moment, he thinks she’s going to say yes. He’s about to put the car back in Drive and turn right out of the parking lot, toward Mighty Ike’s Ice Cream and Yogurt. But her curls shake side to side with her head, and there’s no regret in her gray eyes–for a moment, despite the difference in coloring, he swears she is her mother–as they meet his. “No thank you, Dad.” He hates that this is the moment she’s chosen to use manners. He watches, frozen and helpless as she climbs out of the car. She doesn’t turn back to wave or look at him or anything as she walks into the school. He stays there for several more seconds after she disappears, until the car behind him honks. Too hot and overcome with a chill, embarrassed and a little proud, entirely unsure of what he’s supposed to do in this situation, he turns left out of the parking lot and drives home.

The chariot comes on Saturday, at twelve minutes to noon. The blond boy who dropped her off is inside, and he takes her bags, glaring at Frederick and Helen. Annabeth gives brief, awkward hugs to her brothers and won’t look at Helen. She stands in front of Frederick for a moment, and he remembers the unexpectedly enthusiastic hug she gave him three months ago. Her arms twitch, but don’t rise. Neither do his. His daughter turns away, accepts a hand from the boy to help her into the chariot, and flies away, as suddenly as she’d come.

It’s a bright, cloudless day. Frederick thinks the sun is a little dimmer than it was five minutes ago.

Chapter Text

It’s not like last time. Last time, Frederick couldn’t think about anything else. He couldn’t look at his wife or their sons, entirely overwhelmed by the sudden hole that Annabeth used to fill; the empty space at the table, the sudden silence and strange echoes the house had without a seven-year-old charging up and down the stairs at all hours; the jagged edge where she’d torn herself away from the only family she’d ever known and Frederick wondered if he’d ever see her again. The weeks he slept on the couch and the phone calls he fielded from Helen’s family, their friends, and intrusive reporters. He didn’t know what to do, and there really wasn’t anything for him to do except wait, and the waiting yielded no results and was horrible besides.

But it’s all different this time around. Annabeth told him ahead of time, packed her bags over the course of a few days, and very nearly waved goodbye as she flew away. He knows where she’s going, and that it’s where she’ll probably be for the foreseeable future. He even has a way of contacting her, although he doesn’t use it. He doesn’t write. He doesn’t send her anything for Christmas or Valentine’s Day. The bag of drachmas sits in the drawer of his bedside table, probably growing dust. He wouldn’t know. He doesn’t open it, for all that he stares at the damned thing every night. 

The last time Annabeth left, things were tense and stressful for weeks. Now, the Chases of Williamsburg, Virginia settle back into their old routine with startling speed. Helen dives into research and books four tickets to Rome for the boys’ spring break. Matthew and Bobby join a Little League team. Bobby can’t see the ball coming from two feet away, bless him, and Matthew runs to third base instead of first on the rare occasion that he hits anything but air or the umpire. Frederick drives them to school and practice. He answers emails at unprecedented speeds and writes sixty pages in one frozen week in early March. He learns how to make chicken piccata and beef bourguignon, and they try a healthier brand of cauliflower-crusted dinosaur nuggets on the boys, with terrible results. Each day is chaotic and full in the way that raising two rambunctious boys is. There are no monster attacks and no one is run through by a bronze dagger. 

This must be how normal families live, Frederick thinks. Families without demigod children. Families who balance school and work with baseball practice, trips to the library, and family vacations. There’s plenty of excitement from day to day. Plenty of forgotten homework and late rushes. Plenty of board game nights and Saturday afternoons at the movie theater. 

When they go to Rome, Helen is indeed right that the boys would rather dig in the dirt than visit libraries and tour museums. They swim in the hotel pool and eat gelato every afternoon and it’s heady, how normal it is. How casually they’ve shifted from a fraught family of five into a clean one of four. It’s easy.

Frederick turns in his book draft right on time, takes the summer off, and tells West Point that this coming school year will be his last. He’s missed so much time with his children, since he took the job in the first place. The decision might have made sense then, but not anymore. They’re in a much better financial state, for starters, and the boys are older now than Annabeth was when he started there.

In October, he gets an email from Ellis Steiner, who, sometime in the past six years, has made the move to Virginia State, and now chairs the engineering department there. Ellis writes that VSU is losing two history professors this year. Frederick sends in an application and has been hired by the end of the semester. The hour-plus long commute isn’t nothing, but it’s a dream compared to Frederick’s weekly flights up and down the Eastern Seaboard. Best of all, the position comes with a hefty bonus. Helen is ecstatic when he tells her the news. That night, she pulls him into bed with a mischievous wink. They don’t actually fall asleep for a while, and she’s still flush with excitement in the morning.

The boys are excited too, but confused. Before last year, they’d never had Dad home in the middle of the week before. The concept that he’ll be working full-time, but eating dinner with them every night, going to baseball games, and helping them with their homework absolutely blows their mind.

“I didn’t think you could do that, Daddy,” Bobby confesses while they’re setting up the Christmas tree. “I thought you had to stay away, like Annabeth.”

The mention of Annabeth hurts, like it probably always will. He still hasn’t written to her. He missed her birthday in July, while they were in Rome on another of Helen’s research trips, and he’s about to miss the second Christmas in a row. She hasn’t written either, and they haven’t gotten any calls from Camp Half-Blood. He doesn’t even know if she got back okay, although he hopes that someone would have told him if something truly terrible had happened to her. Still, panic seizes in his chest.

He puts a hand on Bobby’s shoulder. “No one has to stay away, Bobby. I’m coming home because I couldn’t stand to be away from you and Matthew and your mom any longer.”

“Then why did Annabeth leave?” Matthew asks. He’s trying to hook a foam gingerbread man and ask a question at the same time. The hook catches on a pine needle, but falls anyway. When Matthew crawls down to get it, Frederick worries that he’ll knock the tree over. 

“Let me get that,” he says, partially to avert disaster, and partially to formulate an answer to his son’s question. Under the tree, he finds the ornament quickly enough, but it slips a few times as he tries to put it on the tree. Frustrated, he drops it back in the ornament box. Matthew pulls it back out immediately, tracing the top of the gingerbread man’s head and staring at his father. He’s got Helen’s warm brown eyes, darker than Frederick’s. They don’t look a thing like Annabeth’s, but he must have picked up her probing stare while she was home. Frederick still doesn’t know what to say.

“Annabeth doesn’t have to stay away, either,” he says eventually. “She just… prefers to be at camp, with her mother’s family.”

Bobby sniffles. “She doesn’t like us?” he asks through growing tears.

“No, no!” Frederick thinks desperately of a way to undo the damage that he’s apparently caused, but Matthew beats him to opening his mouth.

“That’s not what Mommy said,” he says.

“What?” Frederick turns to him. To the best of his knowledge, the extent to which Helen has told the boys anything about Annabeth’s absence in their lives is that she’s living with her mother’s family in New York.

“Mommy said,” Matthew repeats, “that Annabeth left because it wasn’t safe here. She wanted to protect us.” His dark eyes bore into Frederick’s, and he suddenly seems much, much older than seven.

Frederick blinks at him, once again at a loss for words. Forgetting the ornaments, he kneels down so that he’s at eye height with his son. “Annabeth didn’t leave to protect you, or because she didn’t like you,” he says, trying to forestall both boys’ protests. “You were perfectly safe with her here, as safe as you are now. She left because… because she wanted to go home. And because she hadn’t lived here in so long, this wasn’t her home anymore.”

Bobby came closer while he was talking, and Frederick draws both of them into a hug. Bobby drips a few tears on his shirt, but Matthew doesn’t move at all, except to drop his head onto Frederick’s shoulder. “Does she love us?” he asks eventually.

Frederick squeezes him a little tighter. “Of course she does,” he promises, not sure if he’s lying. Hoping he isn’t.

Frederick means to bring what the boys said up to Helen immediately, but they’re hosting Christmas that year for her parents and all of her siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews, so there isn’t a free moment until New Year’s Day, when the crowd of Parks, Lees, and Yangs have finally cleared out.

Naturally, it goes about as poorly as it possibly could have,

“Dear,” he says, while she’s scrubbing the life out of an aluminum pan. “Can we talk about something Matthew said?”

She looks up, giving him a confused little frown. Dropping the sponge into the pan, she rinses off her hands and reaches for him. “Matthew?” she asks, “Is he alright?”

“He’s fine,” Frederick squeezes her hands, trying to project reassurance. “It’s just, a few weeks ago, he said something strange while we were setting up the tree.”

Helen snorts. “He’s seven, dear, you’re going to have to be more specific than that. This morning, he asked me if a crocodile lived in the toilet.”

Frederick laughs, but it sounds hollow to his own ears. One of his favorite things about his wife is how grounded and down-to-earth she is. Even when Matthew is asking questions about crocodiles in the toilet, and Bobby is checking all of their cabinets for entrances to Narnia, Helen always stays focused on the real and tangible. If it weren’t for him and Annabeth, she’d probably never have thought to wonder if the Greek gods had ever been real, let alone if they were still running around having kids. But, that’s the problem isn’t it. Annabeth.

No, that’s not right. Annabeth isn’t the problem. But she is the reason that Frederick needs to have this conversation. “Matthew said,” he starts carefully, “and this is something I’m paraphrasing, based on something he heard weeks before he relayed it to me, so I don’t want you to think I’m accusing you of anything–”

“Frederick,” Helen says, “honey, breathe.” He takes a breath. “Good. Now, just spit it out.” The words are gentle, but her eyebrows have drawn up and her smile flattened out.

“Matthew told me that you told him that Annabeth has to stay away,” Frederick spits out. He doesn’t make eye contact with her until the last word is out of mouth. 

Helen blinks, then lets out a couple of snorts. “Oh,” she says, “just that? You had me so worried, dear.” Frederick’s confusion must be clear on his face because she reaches for his hands and squeezes them. Hers are still wet and soapy, but he squeezes back, hoping that Matthew got something mixed up somewhere.

“He was just curious,” she says, “about why she’d come and gone so quickly. I guess one of his friends at school has a brother in college, somewhere in DC., Georgetown, maybe? Or George Washington? Well,” she shook her head, “I suppose the precise one doesn’t matter. Anyway, the brother comes home sometimes for the weekend or on school breaks, and Matthew thought that it might be the same with Annabeth, but in reverse. They’ve got so much imagination, our boys. They must get that from your side.”

Frederick thinks about his parents, serious academics, and his sister, a well-respected lawyer, and nearly opens his mouth to disagree. Then, he remembers Randolph, who had been gently let go from his position at Harvard some–what year is it again?–some six or seven years ago now, after his rants and raves about Norse gods became too much for even the Folklore and Mythology department to handle. Maybe he doesn’t have room to protest after all. And Helen’s family, full of scientists, doctors, and that one cousin of hers in politics, doesn’t seem to foster imagination the way that meeting an immortal, ageless goddess before one’s frontal lobe finishes developing did.

“And I had to tell him something, ” Helen says, and Frederick realizes guiltily that she must have just continued talking while his brain wandered off into thinking about his family again. “So I told him, you know, not quite the truth, because I don’t think they’re old enough for that yet, but I reminded him how chaotic our life was when she was here, and how much calmer it is now that she’s back with her family. That was all.”

“Right,” Frederick says. He wonders how Randolph is doing and, for the first time, there’s no immediate anger when he thinks about his brother. His eyes catch on an old picture of Magnus’ first birthday on the mantel, the chocolate frosting in baby Magnus’ hair, and the laughter frozen on Natalie’s face when someone–one of her college friends, probably–took the picture. For the first time, he really does want to call.

But it’s late. They promised to take the boys to the LEGO store tomorrow, since several members of Helen’s family gave them gift cards. He kisses his wife’s cheek and goes through the motions of getting ready for bed, brain ruminating on the chaos that had been omnipresent in the house when Annabeth was there. 

He hadn’t really minded it, to be honest. She’d asked so many questions about his research, seemed to revel in the boys’ fascination with her training, and had even, a bit shyly, shown Frederick an urban-civic-center-slash-temple-to-Hermes she’d designed, to fit right where the Twin Towers used to stand.

Sleep is hard to come by that night, and, when it finally arrives, it drops him into the entryway of the Chase family home in Boston, where he grew up. Laughter echoes, bouncing off the walls, and he follows it back to the kitchen. Caroline is sipping a glass of wine as she leans against the island, just blocking the cabinet where Frederick’s parents used to keep the good china. Randolph is at the stove, stirring a pot of something that Frederick has the oddest sensation is lingonberry jam. Neither acknowledges his presence, so he walks past them into the dining room. As he enters, a young woman he knows has to be Emma runs through him, chasing her sister with a butter knife. Aubrey, taller and older than he’d ever known her, giggles, and he realizes that it was her laughter he heard. They look old enough to be in college, but they’re still acting like the little kids they were when they died.

Frederick walks back through the kitchen and sees gray in Caroline’s hair and Randolph’s beard. He tries to head back to the front door, but something’s pulling him to the living room. 

Natalie’s there, hanging ornaments on the tree with a Magnus who certainly isn’t almost-six anymore. He looks ten or eleven now, which he must be in real life. Like Randolph and Caroline, Natalie doesn’t pay any attention to Frederick, but Magnus glances up from tucking a wooden moose in amongst gingerbread men and shiny baubles, and Frederick has the oddest sense that Magnus can see him. He doesn’t say anything, though, just turns back to his mother and the tree. Frederick doesn’t have time to process this, because, next thing he knows, he’s climbing the stairs and walking down the hall.

He stops in front of the door of his own bedroom, and gets the peculiar sensation that he should knock. He does, a little surprised that his hand doesn’t go through the door, and it creaks open a moment later. Long blond curls peek through the crack and dream-Frederick just about has a heart attack.

It’s Annabeth. Not as a little girl, not as an adult, not even as she was a year ago. Her hair’s grown longer, and she carries herself like a proper tween, not like a kid. Her gray eyes blink curiously at him, and he realizes that she’s grown, and now they’re the same height.

“Dad?” she asks.

Frederick wakes up.

It takes him a minute to realize that that’s what he’s done. He panics, initially, that Annabeth has just disappeared, that, for the first time, something has taken her away other than her own volition. In a way, something has. But the Annabeth he just saw in the dream isn’t real. She can’t be. It was just a dream.

Oddly enough, this isn’t comforting at all. Frederick peers at the clock, and sees that it isn’t even six yet. He doesn’t want to go back to sleep. He’s not sure he could.

Slipping out of Helen’s arms, he pads out to the hallway and peeks into the boys’ room. They’re both still fast asleep. Matthew’s arm dangles off the top bunk and Bobby drools into his pillow. They’re adorable. They’re also the same age, now, as Annabeth was when she left the first time.

He heads to the kitchen and brews a pot of coffee. Staring blankly out the window, he remembers how easy the last year has been. Drama-free and content. But if Frederick knows anything from the decades he’s spent studying military history, it’s that drama-free, content days don’t last. After the Great War, the world leaders decided that the problems had been solved, they’d all learned their lesson, and everybody pinky-promised not to do it again (he might be paraphrasing there, but the point stands). Then World War II broke out, just ten or fifteen or twenty years later (depending on which part of the world you’re talking about).

It’s been twenty years since Aubrey was born. Emma would be turning twenty-two this spring.

It’s been almost nineteen years since his parents died. He’s only a few years away from having lived more of his life without them, than with them.

Frederick is forty years old. He’s not sure he’s cried since his parents’ funeral. He does now, into a mug Natalie gave him when he started college, watching the sun creep over the cookie-cutter neighborhood that’s been his home for the past seven and a half years.

His parents are dead. They never met Annabeth, and could not possibly have imagined their hoard of grandchildren tripling in the years after the accident.

Caroline is dead. She was always better at the emotional stuff than closed-off Frederick, his combative brother, and their volatile sister. Thirteen years on from the capsizing boat, twenty-five years on from the beginning of her relationship with Randolph, and Frederick still isn’t sure what she saw in any of them.

Aubrey and Emma are dead. They never even reached middle school, and Frederick will never read their college essays, watch them turn their tassels, or wait for the news of their thesis defenses. Neither one of them will ever join the ranks of the Doctors Chase.

Annabeth is not dead, but Frederick doesn’t think she’ll ever come back. He cries about this most of all. He cries for the baby she used to be, back when he was sure he was putting in his all about this parenting thing. He cries for the little kid she grew into, realizing that, somewhere along the way, that had changed. He cries for the tween she is now, who screwed her courage to the sticking place and gave them another chance, and he cries for the day she left again, flying home to her real family. He cries for the teenager she is rapidly becoming, and the adult he hopes above all she’ll someday be.

He cries for what feels like hours, but can’t be, because soon Helen is with him, lifting the mug from his hands and tucking his head into her shoulder. She runs her fingers through his hair, and he thinks about how lucky he is to have her. He can’t stop the little voice in his head that points out that Annabeth wasn’t.

Helen makes a few references to the state she found him in on the morning of January 2nd, but Frederick ignores them. He knows she wants to talk about it, but he’s just not sure he can verbalize any of what was going on in his head. And getting into it would be bringing up his family, the living and dead ones, and he doesn’t think he’ll ever be fully ready for that conversation. Helen drops it after a few days, and he’s grateful. Repress, Don’t Stress for the win.

They move on. The only hiccup is a night in late January, where she kisses him with intent (as she is wont and reasonable to do). Suddenly, with no warning or communication from his brain to his body, Frederick lurches back. He stares at her for a few seconds, breathing heavily, then feels the remnants of their spaghetti and meatball dinner crawling up his throat. Leaping out of bed, he rushes to the toilet and barely makes it in time, losing the contents of his stomach to the bowl.

He hears Helen follow him. She places a cool hand on his forehead, then kisses it and hums worriedly.

“Is,” he says when he eventually feels able, coughing slightly nonetheless, “is everything okay?”

“Yes,” she reassures him, “I can’t even feel the hint of a fever.”

“You sure?”

“Of course,” she says, “the Mom Forehead Kiss is never wrong. Do you feel okay?”

“Yes,” he says, realizing as he says it that it’s true. Whatever brought this on seems to have passed as quickly as it came. “Maybe,” he continues, “we just don’t, tonight?”

“Don’t…” Helen trails off.

“Sex,” he says. The word almost gets stuck in his throat again, for Athena’s sake, he’s almost forty-one years old, he can say the word!

“Oh!” she huffs a laugh, “No, sweetie, of course not! Even if you’re not sick sick, you just threw up into the toilet. Absolutely no sex happening in this house tonight, you have my solemn vow.” She even puts her hand on her heart, and Frederick, despite all the conflicting signals his body is throwing at him right now, feels his lips quirk up into a smile.

“Thank you,” he says. “I love you.”

Her hand squeezes his shoulder, then rubs it comfortingly. “I love you, too,” she says, then presses a kiss to his head.

True to form, they don’t talk about that either, and manage to have real sex a few days later with no more vomit issues. Frederick still feels off, but he keeps that to himself, trying to give Helen a good experience.

In April, Frederick and Helen celebrate their eighth wedding anniversary. Bobby and Matthew give them tiny ceramic animals that they made in art class. Bobby’s is a tiny pig and Matthew’s is a duck. At least, that’s what they seem to think they are. Frederick and Helen’s sons are brilliant, and imaginative, and they read LEGO directions like champs, but innately-gifted sculptors they are not.

Also in April, William and Mary loses whatever private funding source had been paying Helen’s salary for her entire time there. She is informed that they can keep her one more year, but no longer. She comes home early, and Frederick finds her staring blankly at the book she’s been working on for two years now, on its fifteenth draft and nearly ready for publication. He sends the boys to change out of their Little League jerseys and holds his wife as she cries.

In early June, they take a trip out to see her parents in Palo Alto. Helen walks around the Stanford campus with an odd look on her face. When they take the boys up to San Francisco, she looks around wistfully. They take the ferry out to Angel Island with rented bikes, and nearly leave her behind because she’s staring back at the city.

“Can you imagine it?” she whispers on their last night. They’re staying in a hotel in Millbrae, a city with twice the population of Williamsburg and a completely different feel. The boys are in an adjoining room, thrilled that they’re considered old enough to warrant a separate space from their parents. They should be asleep by now, but they might just be staying quiet.

“Imagine what?” Frederick asks, wondering what he missed.

“Living here,” she says. 

Frederick blinks. “In Millbrae?”

“Not in Millbrae itself,” Helen says, “but, you know, the Bay Area?”

Frederick gives it some earnest thought. He liked San Francisco. The fog came and went, depending on where they were in the city, and it gave the whole place a nice, refreshing feel. They’d be close to Helen’s parents, who are getting on in years and would definitely be happy to be closer to two of their grandchildren. Helen’s oldest brother also moved back recently. Frederick thinks he and his family are up in the Napa area. A few of her cousins are scattered down the central coast, and she has aunts and uncles in Los Angeles.

The schools are good (both the elementary, middle, and high schools, and the universities in the area), and there are lots of local landmarks. They’d be close to Tahoe and a short flight to Seattle or Denver. The boys could learn to ski.

“I can imagine it,” he says.

A smile grows on Helen’s face. “What would you say,” she says, “if I sent in applications to a few places out here? Stanford, Cal, St. Mary’s?”

Frederick kisses her cheek. “Go for it,” he says.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

She kisses him excitedly. “This is going to sound really corny, but this is where it starts.”

“What?” he asks, although he’s pretty sure he knows where she’s going.

She kisses him again. “The rest of our lives,” she says softly, gazing into his eyes like she’s never seen anything more amazing.

“The rest of our lives,” he echoes. “This is where it starts.” He finds that, corny or not, he means it. There’s still a lot to work out. Really, there’s still everything to work out. But they’re starting somewhere. They’re starting with San Francisco.

The phone rings at the end of July. Frederick happens to be the only one home, so he picks it up.

“Hello?” he says. He doesn’t hear anything for a moment, and he’s about to put it back and chalk it up to spam when a sniffle comes over the line.

“Dad?” Annabeth asks. “Can I come back this year?”