How Do You Say Gods- Last Olympian

5: I MEET SOME FISHY RELATIVES

Hope you're all enjoying your three day weekend! I should have called this chapter One Last Explosion, haha. Happy Memorial Day to my American followers, for everyone else, enjoy your Monday treat!

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Beckendorf...the dark feelings still resided in him as his eyes fluttered open...yet Percy woke up feeling more relaxed than he had since...well since he first woke up without his memories. It didn't take much imagination to figure out why.

He could still feel Annabeth pressed against his back. She was sitting upright, he could hear pages of a book flipping. He smiled with a strange sense of deja vu, a hazy memory he tried to grasp like smoke. This was not the first time he'd awoken like this, but it felt new and invigorating as he yawned and stretched for another day.

She smiled and reached out for him the moment he was awake, but stopped herself, her fingers going slowly back around the book without a change in expression as she stretched too to get up.

Alex came into the room today wearing green slacks and a button up pink shirt that was far to loose on him like he was heading for a casual day at the office, there was even an untied, yellow and blue seashell patterned tie around his neck. All that was missing was a briefcase. His hair though, was all feathered up in a massive pompador style right out of the 60's.

"If you're trying to impress my dad, that outfit might do it," Percy grinned.

"The style spoke to me for many reasons," she nodded appreciatively to Percy before announcing, "oh, and it's he/ him pronouns today."

Percy sighed in exhaustion, just because he knew he was going to get that wrong at least once and he always felt bad getting the stank eye from Alex even while they made fun of each other for it.

Annabeth couldn't help but study him with the sharp, fascinated eyes of someone seeing something for the first time. Like everyone else, she'd never met a genderfluid person before, and like everything new she ever encountered, she wanted to know more.

Jason came shuffling in last. His face tight, eyes averted to the ground but shoulders straight as he went back to sit beside Nico.

Thalia let him without a word. She knew that kind of anger, she wouldn't let it stay bottled up forever, but Percy and Annabeth were being the life of the party, laughing over what she'd managed to read so far last night and how it all seemed so much simpler back then. She was teasing him about how his guinea pig face must have blushed upon seeing her in that dress while Thalia picked up the book.

Hopefully at lunch she could snag her brother for a private word, perhaps on the roof where he was least likely to cause property damage and try to explain herself again-

"Hey Annabeth," Will leaned forward anxiously in his seat before Thalia could get her thoughts together and start. "Did Rachel ever come to Camp or try to contact you guys?"

Thalia blinked, then her heart did a somersault of guilt as she realized what he was asking.

"No," Annabeth watched him carefully for that tone. "I reached out of course, to see if she had any visions of where Percy was, but-"

"She was in here," Thalia said with numb lips, looking at Magnus's suddenly stark white face. "She, I would have thought Oceanus would send her back and she would have gotten a hold of you-" she stopped with horror as Magnus jumped up.

"But, Hearth-" He'd been an idiot, he'd been an absolute fool to let him get sent anywhere! He might as well superglue a target to his face because Blitz was going to kill him if he didn't die of shame first-