Chapter Text
The Way It Went In The Books:
Apollo told me I could drive his sun chariot any time, and if I ever wanted archery lessons—
"Thanks," I told him. "But seriously, I'm no good at archery."
"Ah, nonsense," he said. "Target practice from the chariot as we fly over the U.S.? Best fun there is!"
I made some excuses and wove through the crowds that were dancing in the palace courtyards. I was looking for Annabeth. Last I saw her, she'd been dancing with some minor godling.
---
"If you want Percy, you can drive my sun chariot - I'll even teach you archery! It'll be so much fun!" Apollo offered, his perfect white teeth nearly blinding me as he smiled.
"Thanks," I told him. "But seriously, I'm no good at archery."
"Ah, nonsense," he said. "Target practice from the chariot as we fly over the U.S.? Best fun there is!"
"Are you sure? I mean, aren't gods really busy or something?" I asked hesitantly.
"Well if I pick you up and I'm driving my sun chariot then I'm already performing my duties! I have no problem mixing business with pleasure - in fact, I prefer it." Apollo gave me another one of his winning smiles, actually blinding me momentarily.
"Well if you're sure. I guess this means I have to become a morning person?" I asked, not entirely sure why I agreed. Archery had never been my favorite pastime, mostly because I was so bad at it. But if I was meant to be the hero of the prophecy then it was probably best I picked up new survival skills.
"Not if you don't want to, it's not like I had to drive all day when I dropped you guys off at camp right?"
"No, you didn't."
Apollo winked and they separated for the night.
---
A few days later I was back home with my mom, dreading the attack that was coming for camp and the prophecy that would follow the next year. Mom sent me straight back to school, promising to introduce me to the man she was dating this coming weekend. I was skeptical but willing to try for her. After a day of math and English lessons that were only interrupted by the slightly less horrifying activity of PE, I wasn't exactly in a good mood.
As I walked home that afternoon I noticed a cherry red sports car trailing along after me, a Maserati Spyder. Apollo. Days ago the god of archery had offered to teach me archery, I had agreed but I wasn't sure if I'd expected him to show up.
"Percy!" He waved from the car that I wasn't sure was the sun chariot. Wasn't the sun chariot thousands of feet or more in the air right now? I was still unsure about that sort of thing, Apollo had landed it to pick Artemis and her hunters up, drop them off at Camp Half-Blood, and also seemingly driven it along the road during their quest to free Artemis but Thalia had burned the Earth when she'd driven slightly downwards. How come the car could land sometimes but not all the time?
"Hello, Lord Apollo," I greeted politely, following his implied instructions to get inside the car. Naturally, no one in New York was paying attention to a fourteen-year-old boy getting in the car of a stranger. Or maybe the god was using the Mist to hide them.
"Aww, none of that Lord stuff!" The sun god grinned, his teeth on ultra-white setting. "I'm your new archery teacher! This is gonna be fun!"
"If you say so," I said, wincing at how disrespectful it sounded. So far Apollo had been kind to me, I didn't want to change that by sounding like a brat.
But if the god thought it disrespectful, he certainly didn't let it show. "I say so and so it shall be!"
"I should leave a note for my Mom, she might worry," I told him, not wanting to put her through another worry session so soon after the last.
"Of course!" Apollo agreed. "You shouldn't worry your mother." He pulled out a small envelope that had Hermes Delivery written in greek on the top right side. "Just write whatever you want on the paper inside, it'll be sent to your mother after it closes."
I did as instructed, watching as the envelope disappeared with a pop once sealed.
Apollo didn't seem to want to drive in silence, because he began pestering me with questions right away. Most of them were about my past failed attempts at archery, which Apollo had apparently been watching from his sun chariot.
"Do you really see everything under the sun?" I asked with curiosity. I know Annabeth thinks I'm stupid but these things do interest me, just not in the obsessive research-monkey way it interested her.
"Most everything," Apollo said, he was grinning brightly but he had such a dark look on his face that I knew he must be thinking about Artemis being captured.
They stopped on a mountain that overlooked a large forest, and I suddenly realized I had no idea where we were. Hadn't Apollo wanted to practice from the sun chariot? And didn't he have to keep driving the sun until sunset? I decided to stop thinking so hard.
"Alright!" the god announced, spreading his arms wide as if he had presented me with the secrets of the universe.
"Um...Apollo, where are we?"
"Nevada! The Toiyabe National Forest to be exact! Isn't it grand?"
It certainly was, now I'm a city boy at heart but even I could admit the forest was beautiful and understand why Grover and even mortals would want to protect places like this. Had the whole world really once looked like this?
"You ready?" Apollo asked, breaking me away from my thoughts.
"Okay."
---
It went terribly.
I can't hit a target to save my life, I thought miserably. Despite the fact that Apollo had said he watched my previous archery lessons, I couldn't help but think of myself as a failure. The god of archery was helping me and I was horrible.
Apollo didn't seem to mind, in fact, the sun god was laughing with tears streaming down his face.
"Do you do this every time you watch me?" I asked, feeling extremely embarrassed.
"Yes!"
I glared at him.
"I'm sorry, Percy, it's just, I've never seen someone so bad! This is the greatest challenge of my life!" The god declared, wiping the tears from his eyes and moving towards me.
"This isn't funny you know, it's a useful skill that I'm terrible at," I muttered.
Apollo had moved behind me and placed his hands on top of mine, making me jump slightly before realizing he was probably trying to show me the correct way to hold the bow - something I still hadn't gotten a hold of yet.
"Like this," he murmured into my ears, breath tickling the back of my neck. Wait...I took a glance behind me, Apollo was no longer in teen-adult form like he'd been in most times I'd seen him. Instead, he was an age closer to mine, perhaps a year older or perhaps just slightly taller than me.
For reasons unknown to me, my entire face heated up. Apollo was...he was practically holding me, my back was pressed against his chest, and his hands were laced through my fingers, occasionally moving to reposition my hips (it made me squeal embarrassingly the first time he did that).
"I'm not letting you leave until you can hit this target," he told me.
What target? I almost asked. A question that was soon answered when a moderate-sized archery board appear in front of them. It was laughably large, even the healers in Apollo Cabin would've laughed their pants off if challenged to hit something like that. Yet it filled me with dread, how long was this going to take? And Apollo had said he wasn't going to let me leave....
"Don't worry, I'm sure you'll do fine."
I was plenty worried.
---
It was past sunset when I finally managed to hit the target, it barely grazed it. In fact, it hit the last scoring ring and even then it looked as if the arrow was surprised it had made it. I was afraid it was going to fall off.
Still, I couldn't help it. I jumped up in the air and whooped so loud I was sure the entire Toiyabe National Forest could hear me. I turned to Apollo, grinning at him. I was so excited I hugged him, completely forgetting he was a god and there might be some sort of social faux pas I was committing.
"I've never even hit the target before!" I proclaimed excitedly, also forgetting he already knew that. "Thank you!"
Apollo patted me on the back softly with his warm hands, unbothered by the possibly inappropriate hug. "Well, my mentorship is superb. You will be able to shoot arrows through a manticore's spikes just like my lil sis's hunters in no time!"
If he'd told me that just an hour ago I wouldn't have believed him. Now? Now I definitely did.
"Thank you," I said again.
---
On the way back Apollo just asked me about camp life in general and even questioned me about his own children at camp. I didn't want to break the happy mood we'd been in after watching me hit the target but I had to ask.
"Forgive me but...if you want to know about your kids so bad then...why don't you visit them?"
Apollo looked sad, he stared down at the seat for a moment before responding. "We aren't allowed to, Percy."
"Why not? You're an Olympian, one of the most powerful gods out there. If you want to see your kids, and I know my dad does too, and it seems like Hermes does, why don't you just go see them?"
I felt adrift watching Apollo sigh, adjusting his hands on the wheel to the darkened sun chariot (it was night so "sun mode" as Apollo called it was turned off) as he thought.
"How many of the old 'myths' do you read?" The god of archery asked finally.
I smiled sheepishly. "I sort of just prefer to learn as I go."
Apollo laughed. "Well, let me tell you a story. Once I had a child who was even a better healer than me." Noticing the shocked look on my face the god laughed again, I was beginning to like the sound. "Yes, Percy, a demigod was an even better healer than me, the god of healing at the time. I'll admit I'm very prideful but even I didn't mind admitting this at the time, he was my favorite son. He specialized in healing like no other child of mind had before, even being given gorgon's blood by Athena to help him develop cures to the ailments of that age. My son...."
"Something happened to him?" I guess, wanting the story to keep going. I wanted to say something funny again, make Apollo laugh some more but I wasn't sure where the story was going so I didn't know what to say.
"Did you know that my sister used to let males into the hunt?" Apollo asked, seemingly at random.
"She did?"
"Only in certain circumstances," Apollo grinned. "No one like us, men who would prefer to live life and have relationships."
"So they had to be virgins like the rest?"
"Yep! Personally, I can't understand it - I mean you've seen my cabin. But yes, my sister would occasionally let men into her hunt as long as their intentions were pure. If they weren't...." The god's eyes darkened slightly, making me want to move away, though there was nowhere to go in the sun chariot. Thankfully, whatever dark memory the sun god had been reminded of dissipated, leaving him with the standard so-cheerful-he'll-blind-you-with-his-smile expression. "Anyways! My sis had this one dude sworn to her, a guy named Hippolytus who wasn't interested in love or marriage even though he was the first son and supposed to inherit blah blah blah. This made Aphrodite mad and to cut a long story short the guy died."
"Oh," I said, still trying to figure out how this tied into the Apollo's-Favorite-Son story.
"My sister was very upset, despite the fact that it seemed like there was nothing to be done she took him to my son, Asclepius the healer I mentioned earlier. My son, he'd figured out a way to bring someone back from the dead. Which he performed for Hippolytus on my sister's request." Apollo's face darkened again, but this time I was not afraid, I'd realized that was just Apollo, he seemed to be completely 'in' the emotions of the story he was telling. It was like the god had been transported thousands of years in the past and was living this as it happened. "Old Death Breath didn't like that you see, he was interfering with the natural laws of death. Now that it had been discovered anyone could use it. My father agreed, and he struck my son down with lightning."
Against my better judgment, I scooted closer to the god, also enthralled in the story now and wanting to offer comfort. For what? An event that happened thousands of years ago?
"And I was enraged," Apollo spoke softly, looking as if he was trying to reel himself back from the memories. Which was good, I didn't need an enraged god on my hands. And he would be on my hands, I realized I had moved so close I was leaning against Apollo. "I slaughtered all of my father's Cyclops, the very ones who made his Lightning Bolt, because it was easier than getting revenge on my father, that would've been impossible."
I had been so entranced with the storytelling I'd completely forgotten why I was here in the sun chariot with Apollo or why he was telling this story until he said, "So you see, Percy, the more involved we are...the more damage we do once they're gone."
"That's so sad...there must be some way for you to do things for you're kids and help them not feel so abandoned, while also not ruining the world when their lives end. I mean, aren't you all upset anyways when they die?"
Apollo's face was dark and pensive, unsettling on someone so youthful looking, and his voice wasn't much better when he next spoke. "I can't talk about this anymore, Percy. Pick another topic."
"I'm sorry...." I whispered. I hadn't meant to upset one of the gods who happened to be on my side.
"It's fine, I just can't bear to talk about this anymore. Tell me about you're life."
"Okay," I agreed, and I began to tell him the first time I'd had a strange encounter as an unknowing demigod.
This was the start of a beautiful friendship....