Of Men and Monsters
Tartarus affected them a lot more than what they thought.
There’s is, of course, the expected; there are the nightmares , the memories, the scars, and all the other… changes they went through. But it’s only much, much later that they realize the full extent of their changes.
Their first hint is Nico, the only other demigod who came back from Tartarus. The only one who knows the meaning of fear, starvation and pain as much as they do.
But mainly, the only one who is like them.
“How come we’ve never noticed before?!”
Yes, how?! You can’t just miss the patches of fur and the long ears, and Nico was in no state to hide them when they found him, either.
“Maybe you just didn’t want to see it.” is his only response.
But then Reyna comes and the Athena Parthenos has to be returned, and everything goes too fast to ponder about it for too long.
The trip to Greece is a long one, and a dangerous one on top of that.
They get attacked, obviously. More than once. Percy and Annabeth fight like demons, slicing and cutting their way through. It’s a thing, with coming back from the deepest part of Hell. You know you can overcome anything afterward.
Once, a monster manages to knock off Annabeth’s sword and pin her down.
She tears open its belly with her feet.
Behind her, Leo whistles with admiration.
“You put knives on your boots? Niice.”
Annabeth hasn't worn shoes since Tartarus.
She looks into his eyes and lies to his face.
“It must be the Mist.” Annabeth deduces later, at night when they’re alone together. “We must be surrounded by it. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”
Percy thinks of Nico and his fur, of himself and his skin, of Annabeth and her feet, how nobody commented or even looked surprised, and has to agree.
“Like monsters?”
Annabeth thinks of things they’ve done and things they’ve seen, and shrugs. “Isn’t is what we are now?”
Percy doesn’t respond.
Weirdly enough, the monsters that are not sent by Gaia tend to avoid them. Don’t look at them they whisper as they walk away they smell like gods’ spawns and Tartarus- that can’t be a good mix
They’re glad, partly, because after everything they went through they think they deserve a little break. But they’re worried, too.
“Do you think we smell like monsters too?” whispers Percy one day.
Annabeth has no answers to that.
As it turns out, they do.
When everything is said and done, when Gaia is finally put back to sleep and they all get to go back to camp and celebrates, romans and greeks together, Gleeson Hedge runs toward them laughing and stops dead on his tracks a few meters away from them, smile fading. Oh, he tries to play it off as nothing- something surprised him, that's all.
But it happens again, later, with Grover, then Tyson. They’re all happy to see them, but the smell is just so disconcerting, they’re not sure how to deal with it.
Neither Percy nor Annabeth blame them. They know.
It’s Rachel, of course, who see them first as they really are. Rachel, who saw the lion’s pelt where Percy saw a coat. Rachel, who saw the way in a Labyrinth whose secrets were out of the very gods’ grasps.
She sees the scales striping Percy’s skin, the small bumps on his back, the big teeth, the yellow eyes. She sees the feathers on the sides of Annabeth’s arms, the bird legs, the talons, the hard beak-like nose. She sees, and without batting an eye drags the both of them in the Big House to make them talk.
And like this, for the first time since Nico, they tell the whole story -not the conveniently summarized one they give to everyone else
Sally’s sight may be decreasing, but she can still see though enough Mist to know something has changed.
For once, they don’t feel guilty when arms wrap around them to hold them tight- unlike the others, Sally is fully aware of the monsters they’d become. She loves them anyway.
They’ll tell them all, someday. The Seven, Reyna, Chiron, the camps, the world. Maybe in a few weeks, or a few months, or a few years- when the wounds will be tended and they’ll feel ready at last. There’s no need to rush- it’s finally over; they can live, now. They have all the time in the world.
(The future will tell them that really, they don’t. But that’s a story for another time.)