So, a little less than a month year ago (this is all my fault, I take sole responsibility for this loooong delay), I got roped into reading The Trials Of Apollo by @flightfoot’s amazing meta. I loved it more than I could have ever anticipated, and I’ve been gushing about it non stop to her on discord. We had a lot of fun reviewing the series and taking it apart to overanalyze bit by bit, marveling at the way it keeps growing layers and dimensions the longer one looks at it. Finally, we took out a google doc. The following is result n.3 of our combined excited ramblings, and… well it sort of turned into a full on dissertation. Whoops.
“You must make your own choice.”
Reconstructing Apollo’s Journey within Riordan’s Narrative
Much too self aware to be egotistical
Not the kind of feelings that gods have
You have heard of imposter syndrome?
As if you could have immortality or meaning, but not both
The sun’s indifference
Art thou sure that is thy wish?
The washing away of curses (read on ao3)
Tarquin had orchestrated all this with me in mind. He was forcing me to confront some of my greatest hits of dreadfulness. Even if I survived the challenges, my friends would see exactly what kind of dirtbag I was. The shame would weigh me down and make me ineffective – the same way Tarquin used to add rocks to a cage around his enemy’s head, until eventually, the burden was too much. The prisoner would collapse and drown in a shallow pool, and Tarquin could claim, I didn’t kill him. He just wasn’t strong enough. (TTT 270)
Much like the three emperors, and, in the end, like most of the people in Apollo’s life, Tarquin has hilariously misunderstood what kind of dirtbag Apollo truly is.
There’s no way to coerce someone who already feels guilty about everything into feeling guiltier than he already does. Apollo’s head was already inside a cage of his own making, filled with rocks that he himself dutifully kept adding to it, day after day. Apollo had been sinking long before falling into Tarquin’s trap. None of Tarquin’s carefully selected stones could make him drown any faster than he already was.
And yet there IS something special about these particular stones. They are not like all the others. Tarquin selected them perfectly, indeed, to end up achieving, ironically, the complete opposite of the intended effect.
It’s here, in the place where he least expected it, the place where for so long he’d refused to look out of painful shame, that Apollo finds the lifeline he’s been desperately searching for. The reminder that there are some things, among the infinite number of things that he blames himself for, that are not like the others. There are, in fact, some things that Apollo actually, truly, directly, is responsible for.
Apollo did a lot of bad things in his long life. Some of them, many of them, perhaps even most of them, he did because he was backed into a corner. But some of them, he did because he was perfectly capable of being an asshole in his own right. They are, very clearly, not like all the others. He can’t keep treating them as if they were the same. The people he’s wronged deserve better than that.
And maybe, just maybe, he does too.
Maybe his mistakes do not have to define him.
“I will march right into that box and apologize,” he says. “There has to be another way. The prophecy can’t mean for us to kill Harpocrates. Let’s talk to him. Figure something out.”
This is who Apollo is. He believes in people’s right to make their own choice.
‘Goodbye, Apollo,’ said the Sibyl’s voice, clearer now. ‘I forgive you. Not because you deserve it. Not for your sake at all. But because I will not go into oblivion carrying hate when I can carry love.’
[...]
Harpocrates gave me a dry smirk. My confusion, my sense of near panic must have given him what he needed to finally stop being angry at me. Of the two of us, he was the wiser god. He understood something I did not. [...]
The soundless god sent me one last image: me at an altar, making a sacrifice to the heavens. I interpreted that as an order: Make this worth it. Don’t fail. (TTT 291-292)
Apollo loves people. He loves getting to know them, learn about them, figure them out. He could spend a lifetime just doing that. And he has. He did. He does know people. He does understand them. He possesses a great deal of emotional and social intelligence, and is well aware of it. A little too aware, in fact. A little too quick, a little too confident in passing judgement.
This, too, is who Apollo is. He really does think he knows everything.
And yet, people keep managing to surprise him. They are so much more, they are so much better than he expects them to be. They look at him and don’t see a lost cause. They don’t protest when he calls them “friends”. They put their trust in him even when they know, when it couldn’t be more clear, that he’s as human and as fallible as any of them.
There is a world, here on the ground, far away from Olympus, far below the cold, unforgiving clouds, in which even Apollo qualifies for a second chance.
In front of me, Reyna and Meg stood shoulder to shoulder, facing down the god.
They sent him their own flurry of images.
Reyna pictured me singing ‘The Fall of Jason Grace’ to the legion, officiating at Jason’s funeral pyre with tears in my eyes, then looking goofy and awkward and clueless as I offered to be her boyfriend, giving her the best, most cleansing laugh she’d had in years. (Thanks, Reyna.)
Meg pictured the way I’d saved her in the myrmekes’ lair at Camp Half-Blood, singing about my romantic failures with such honesty it rendered giant ants catatonic with depression. She envisioned my kindness to Livia the elephant, to Crest, and especially to her, when I’d given her a hug in our room at the café and told her I would never give up trying.
In all their memories, I looked so human … but in the best possible ways. (TTT 288-289)
Apollo did not believe Percy when he told him he’d changed. He knew he hadn’t. But now, looking at Reyna and Meg’s memories of him, he realizes that’s not true. The proof is in front of him. The proof is Harpocrates. It’s the Sibyl. It’s Koronis. It’s all the worst mistakes he ever made, long ago, in the distant past, that he decided to never repeat, and that he didn’t, and that today he still can’t fix, that he will never be able to fix, but that he knows, he’s certain, he would not make again.
So maybe, just maybe, there actually is hope for him yet.
For the longest time, Apollo could not see it. But his friends do.
And so maybe he doesn’t really know, maybe he doesn’t really understand everything. There are still things left for him to learn. Things that other people know, and understand, that he doesn’t. Things that other people can see better than him.
So maybe other people can take their share of responsibility too. Maybe they should! They, too, made their own choices. Apollo has no right, really, to take credit for those. He’s made enough mistakes of his own. He’s made plenty. He can stop, now, feeling guilty for the choices that he didn’t, that he couldn’t make. He can stop feeling guilty for the bad choices that others made.
Anger swelled in me. I decided I was done with the ravens’ bitterness. Plenty of folks had valid reasons to hate me: Harpocrates, the Sibyl, Koronis, Daphne … maybe a few dozen others. Okay, maybe a few hundred others. But the ravens? They were thriving! They’d grown gigantic! They loved their new job as flesh-eating killers. Enough with the blame.
I secured the glass jar in my backpack. Then I unslung the bow from my shoulder.
‘Scram or die!’ I yelled at the birds. ‘You get one warning!’
The ravens cawed and croaked with derision. One dived at me and got an arrow between the eyes. It spiralled downward, shedding a funnel cloud of feathers.
I picked another target and shot it down. Then a third. And a fourth.
The ravens’ caws became cries of alarm. They widened their circle, probably thinking they could get out of range. I proved them wrong. (TTT 295-296)
The weight of the world is too much to bear for anyone on their own. Even a god. No matter how powerful he is. No matter how willing. The truth is, Apollo isn’t so exceptional. He is not so different, in the end, from everybody else. Even he can’t do everything. He can only do his best.
This, contrary to the expectations that Apollo had set for himself from the very beginning of this story, and that we’d been all too willing to accept without question well past the point where they had stopped making sense, is the only lesson that Apollo truly needed to learn.
That he can’t – that he shouldn’t, shoulder all of this alone.
He’s only human, after all.
‘Meg and I have been talking, the last day or so, while you were passed out – I mean, recovering – sleeping, you know. It’s fine. You needed sleep. Hope you feel better.’
Despite how terrible I felt, I couldn’t help but smile. ‘You’ve been very kind to us, Praetor Zhang. Thank you.’
‘Erm, sure. It’s, you know, an honour, seeing as you’re … or you were –’
‘Ugh, Frank.’ Meg turned from her windowbox. ‘It’s just Lester. Don’t treat him like a big deal.’ (TTT 58-59)
Apollo has a lot of understandable resentment toward the name “Lester”. It’s another thing his father has forced on him, and that his enemies, and his allies too, up until this point, no matter how warranted it was, no matter how true, have used to put him in his place, to remind him of everything he’s not anymore, of everything he might never be again.
Initially, Apollo is frustrated by how quickly and enthusiastically the Romans have taken to it. But at some point throughout the course of the book, he’s surprised to realize, also, that they are not using that name to belittle him.
Gods aren’t supposed to be people. They are not supposed to walk the earth among them. They are not supposed to get hurt. To bear the scars of it. To need sleep and food and someone to save them a seat at the table. They are not supposed to feel. They are not supposed to care.
The Romans still observe all the rites, but no rites could have ever prepared them for the reality of Apollo as anything other than a distant golden idol. They have no idea how to even begin to handle being face to face with him.
But Lester? That’s easy.
Lester is one of them.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Rachel said. ‘Don’t do it.’
I feigned surprise. ‘Can you read my mind, Miss Dare?’
‘I don’t need to. I know you, Lord Apollo.’
A week ago, the idea would have made me laugh. A mortal could not know me. I had lived for four millennia. Merely looking upon my true form would have vaporized any human. Now, though, Rachel’s words seemed perfectly reasonable. With Lester Papadopoulos, what you saw was what you got. There really wasn’t much to know.
‘Don’t call me Lord,’ I sighed. (THO 344)
Gods aren’t meant to be seen, let alone understood. They aren’t meant to be known. There is still so much Apollo doesn’t tell anyone, even now that he’s resolved to stop hiding.
But what he’s failed to realize up until this moment, is that people don’t need to know everything, to be able to know him. His words and his actions speak for themselves.
Even if I survive, he’d thought, my friends will see exactly what kind of dirtbag I am.
And his friends do, indeed, see.
Reyna gave me a brief pat on the shoulder. ‘All we did was show Harpocrates how much you’ve changed. He recognized it. Have you completely made up for all the bad things you’ve done? No. But you keep adding to the “good things” column. That’s all any of us can do.’ (TTT 300)
“Us,” says Reyna. She has absolutely no idea how much her and Apollo have in common. She doesn’t realize that they share the same struggles, that they are both at the same time having the same revelations about love and responsibility, that they are both at the same time learning to trust the people whom for so long they have thought of as their charges to take care of themselves, to take care of one another, to take on their own share of the load. She doesn’t know how wrong she is in thinking his ego will protect him from all wounds.
But she understands one thing, the most important thing: he’s someone who wants, who is determined, who tries his absolute hardest, day after day, to do better. And that is enough. It’s enough for her to understand just how human he is. It’s enough for her to feel confident in saying “us”.
Apollo misses a lot of things from his former life. He does not miss the pedestal at all. No matter what he used to say, what he desperately tried to believe, Apollo doesn’t want to be above others. All he’s ever wanted is to be with them.
And the people around him… they see it. They understand.
This is what they are offering him, whenever they call him by his mortal human name.
Companionship.
Redemption.
The things that he craves more than anything in the world, found in the most unlikely of circumstances, under the most improbable of disguises, in a shape he never would have been able to imagine.
Apollo had spent so long playing the beautiful fool, he’d forgotten that he could be, in Reyna’s words, sweet, and even adorkable at times. That he could be charming for real, and not just for pretend. He’d spent so long acting the part of an unreliable, ineffectual blowhard, he’d forgotten that he was indeed capable of inspiring gratitude, and respect, and loyalty. That he could be the kind of person whose friendship people might actually want, and value, and even seek out.
It takes him a while to catch up, but finally he understands. When the Romans call him Lester, they are calling him by the name that makes him their friend.
I thought about Hazel and Frank and the washing away of curses. I supposed that kind of love could come from many different types of relationships. (TTT 192)
Slowly but surely, what started out as a very protagonist driven narrative has become more and more a choral one. It is especially evident now that our narrator is literally, physically, taken out of big chunks of the story by his festering infection, and we, together with him, are left to puzzle out everything we’ve missed in the gaps, but it’s been happening for a while.
If at first Apollo almost single handedly carried the entire plot forward, and was uniquely instrumental, each time, to securing the third act resolution, as the story progressed, more and more people’s choices and actions started having an impact in more and more significant ways.
Some of them he saw coming, but a lot of them he didn't.
He’d seen Jason’s resignation to his fate, just like he picks up on Frank’s grim resolve now, even though he keeps hoping he’ll be proven wrong, so much so that he doesn’t quite grasp the full implications of it until it’s too late. He never saw Crest’s sacrifice coming. He couldn’t even begin to anticipate or comprehend the choice that Harpocrates and the Sibyl would make together. He doesn’t understand Lavinia’s real intentions until they are staring him in the face. He struggles to figure out even Meg, whom up until now he was sure he could read at a glance.
Apollo does know people. He does understand them. But people, it turns out, are still, after all, more complex than he gives them credit for.
‘Meg,’ I said. ‘Last night –’
‘You saw Peaches. I know.’ [...]
‘You know,’ I repeated.
‘He’s been around for a couple of days.’
‘You’ve seen him?’
‘Just sensed him. He’s got his reasons for staying away. Doesn’t like the Romans. He’s working on a plan to help the local nature spirits.’
‘And … if that plan is to help them run away?’
In the diffused grey light of the fog bank, Meg’s glasses looked like her own tiny satellite dishes. ‘You think that’s what he wants? Or what the nature spirits want?’
I remembered the fauns’ fearful expressions at People’s Park, the dryads’ weary anger. ‘I don’t know. But Lavinia –’
‘Yeah. She’s with them.’ [...]
I crossed my arms. ‘Well, I’m glad we had this talk, so I could unburden myself of all the things you already knew. I was also going to say that you’re important to me and I might even love you like a sister, but –’
‘I already know that, too.’ (TTT 242-243)
Meg is the reason why the Romans took so easily to the name “Lester”. She’s started calling him by that name almost all the time now, and they picked it up from her in the first couple of days, while Apollo wasn’t around to contradict her.
Unlike them, though, Meg still seems to be using it as a bit of an insult, at least when she knows Apollo can hear her.
“It’s just Lester,” she keeps reminding everybody, clearly annoyed by their awe and awkwardness around him. He’s no big deal. Yeah, yeah, he used to be a god but he’s not anymore. And even as a god, was he really all that? Meg, she makes it very plain, doesn’t think so. He’s my servant now, she says. He and I are a package deal, she declares to anyone who’ll listen. He’s kind of useless without me.
It’s a bit much, especially considering that Apollo, at this point, isn’t giving her even a fraction of the grief he used to at the beginning. As much as his shock at realizing that she really does not want him to die is a result of his own personal hangups more than anything else, it’s not that unreasonable on his part to think Meg must be angry at him.
Because she is.
‘You gotta rest. Tomorrow’s the senate meeting.’
I brushed her red high-top off my chest. ‘You’re not asleep, either.’
‘Yeah, but you’ll have to speak. They’ll wanna hear your plan.’
‘My plan?’
‘You know, like an oration. Inspire them and stuff. Convince them what to do. They’ll vote on it and everything.’
‘One afternoon in the unicorn stables, and you’re an expert on Roman senatorial proceedings.’
‘Lavinia told me.’ Meg sounded positively smug about it. She lay on her bed, tossing her other high-top in the air and catching it again. How she managed this without her glasses on, I had no idea. Minus the rhinestone cat-eye frames, her face looked older, her eyes darker and more serious. I would have even called her mature, had she not come back from her day at the stables wearing a glittery green T-shirt that read VNICORNES IMPERANT!
‘What if I don’t have a plan?’ I asked.
I expected Meg to throw her other shoe at me. Instead she said, ‘You do.’ (TTT 100-101)
It may have come as a surprise to Apollo, but it was no revelation for us that Meg loves him. It’s been obvious at least since she dared indirectly voice her hope of having gained a big brother, and extracted from him that promise of piano lessons at some point down the line, the tentative dream of a future she’d all but given up on before she met him.
Apollo refused to let her sacrifice herself as penance for her crimes. He took her back after her betrayal without a word, or even a hint of reproach. He gave her hope and trust and faith in herself when she had none. Of course she loves him. How could she not?
It took Apollo almost 4 books to realize this. What he doesn’t realize, still, is that this is not all. Because Meg doesn’t just love him. Somewhere between the end of the last book and this one, she started to believe in him too.
She told him on the plane already: “you’re going to beat the Triumvirate.” In her mind, it’s not a question of if anymore, only of how. “It’ll make sense once we get there,” she said, with rock solid certainty, because she may not know everything, she may not even know most things about Apollo, about the circumstances that brought him here, now, in this manner, about the workings of this whole affair, still, but at this point, after all they’ve been through together, she truly does know him.
It’s because of this that she’s grown serious, and restless, and even surlier than usual. Because she's started to realize that at some point down the line, some point soon, too soon, even if he survives, especially if he survives, she will lose him for real, and for good.
She sees it, now. This weird, insufferable teenage boy with a ridiculously big heart, an even bigger lack of common sense and the peculiar ability to give anyone in his vicinity second hand embarrassment, who got stuck to her against his will, and who then chose to stick by her willingly, who told her that she was good and powerful and capable of making her own choices, that she deserved more, that she deserved better… He really is him. The guy from the storybooks. The Brilliant Apollo. When all this is finished, he really will go back to the city of the gods, far above the clouds.
As much as he loves her – and she knows, she has absolutely no doubt that he does – she will end up a footnote in his long life.
So she clings to the name that makes him hers. Lester. But she knows he won’t choose to remain Lester for her. She knows that he shouldn’t. No matter how much he loves her, she can’t keep him all to herself. It would be wrong of her to even ask. Gods belong to everyone. And this is who Apollo is. This is what he wants. She knows, just as surely as she knows him. He wants to belong to everyone.
I gazed at the giant statue of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, his purple toga rippling like a matador’s cape.
C’mon, he seemed to be telling me. You know you want to.
The most powerful of the Olympians. It was well within his power to smite the emperors’ armies, heal my zombie wound and set everything right at Camp Jupiter (which, after all, was named in his honour). He might even notice all the heroic things I’d done, decide I’d suffered enough and free me from the punishment of my mortal form.
Then again… he might not. Could be that he was expecting me to call on him for help. Once I did, he might make the heavens rumble with his laughter and a deep, divine Nope!
To my surprise, I realized I did not want my godhood back that badly. I didn’t even want to live that badly. If Jupiter expected me to crawl to him for help, begging for mercy, he could stick his lightning bolt right up his cloaca maxima. (TTT 331-332)
“What price would I be willing to pay?” Apollo asked himself just last book. And now he has to answer the question. What is he willing to give up to save himself? To save his friends?
In the little abusive cult that he calls family, as his pride and his confidence and his ambition were systematically beaten out of him, Apollo has learned to always weigh the odds, and to always, always opt for what was smart, for what was safe. He has been at his father’s mercy all his life. He knows, in the end, there’s no winning by playing his father’s game. But if he does it, if he accepts to humiliate himself and dance on his father’s strings one more time, maybe he can win this one round.
And isn’t that the wise choice to make then? For all Apollo knows, this is the best he can do. There’s no guarantee that he can do more. That he can do better than this. The safest thing to do, in this moment, would be to call on his father and grovel.
“He’s evil. You’re good,” he’d told Meg in what almost feels like a previous life now, at the beginning of this story, when she turned to him with a silent plea to find her a way to appease her stepfather without betraying everything that she knew, in her heart, to be right. “You must make your own choice.”
He could state it in such simple, clear terms for her. He was light years away from being willing and ready to believe that it applied to him too.
But now, after all the time he’s spent on earth, a regular human person among so many others who are just like him, exactly like him in all the ways that most matter, all these people who care, who get attached, who long for companionship and redemption, who want to do more, who want to do better, and who, all of them, including those who had every reason not to, have shown him more respect and compassion and understanding than his father ever did... that doesn’t seem so impossible to believe anymore.
It’s the bridges Apollo has been building all throughout his journey, the relationships he’s formed, at first tentatively, and then more and more easily and freely, his commitment, first, to see each of the people around him, and now, finally, to the humbling labor of letting them see him in turn, everything he’s given without expectation that it would ever be returned, and that he got back tenfold, that make this choice possible for him.
Like Jason, when he stood up for his brother at the Parthenon, like Frank with his piece of wood, like Lavinia, and Don the faun, and Reyna, and Meg, and all the people who helped him along the way, who embraced him as one of them, Apollo makes the choice to not live in fear. He rejects the safe option in favor of the one that he knows, that he feels deep in his heart is right. He has no idea whether his gamble will have any hope of paying off, but he knows this is the only way to make a real difference.
And that’s what life is for. That’s what power is for. That’s what heroism is all about. Making a difference.
Apollo already had his answer. He’s always had it. Immortality and meaning, power and kindness, divinity and humanity, are not mutually exclusive. Not for him. In spite of everything he’s been taught, in the horrible little cult that he calls family, Apollo wants both.
And maybe, just maybe, he’s starting to believe this is one thing that he does not need to apologize for.
So he’s done hesitating. He’s done fishing for excuses. This is who Apollo is. He wants to love. He wants to grow attached. He wants to spend the rest of eternity meeting new people, figuring them out only to still be surprised by them anyway. And when they’re gone – because they will all be gone soon, always too soon, he wants to cry for them. He wants to remember them. What is a god of music, of poetry, of medicine, if not a god who profoundly loves humanity? This is who Apollo is. He wants to be our friend. He wants to know us, and understand us, and learn from us, and fall in love with us, over and over and over again. He wants it all.
Then he better stop wasting time. He better try and take it.
I unslung my bow and pulled out an arrow. I gathered the lightest, driest kindling into a small pile. It had been a long time since I’d made a fire the old mortal way – spinning an arrow in a bowstring to create friction – but I gave it a go. I fumbled half a dozen times, nearly poking my eye out. My archery student Jacob would’ve been proud. (TTT 333-334)
He recognizes all of the kids he meets on the battlefield. He calls them “my students,” remembering their efforts with fondness, their mistakes with respect. He’d almost forgotten what being a teacher actually feels like. He loves it. He always has.
He will mourn each and every one of them who doesn’t make it. He will take responsibility, as he always does, but he won’t let himself be crushed by the weight of it.
He is afraid, yes. Failure is still a very real possibility. More real than ever now. He knows. But Frank was right. The only way to win is to commit one hundred percent. And so that’s what Apollo does.
His hands may still tremble, but his aim is true.
From this moment onward, it’s like the floodgates have opened. His power, that before eluded him for long strings of chapters, for almost entire books, starts returning to him now more and more quickly, a miracle every few pages, small ones, big ones, and ones that even back when he was still whole, brilliant and golden and unbroken, he never would have thought to be capable of.
Commodus fought, but his fists were like paper. I let loose a guttural roar – a song with only one note: pure rage, and only one volume: maximum. Under the onslaught of sound, Commodus crumbled to ash. My voice faltered. I stared at my empty palms. I stood and backed away, horrified. The charred outline of the emperor’s body remained on the tarmac. I could still feel the pulse of his carotid arteries under my fingers. What had I done? In my thousands of years of life, I’d never destroyed someone with my voice. (TTT 360)
This is the power of a god. The power that Apollo has been desperately trying to get back all this time. And yet, when he has it, his immediate, instinctive reaction is one of horror.
Commodus was beyond saving. He was beyond redemption. He’d made his choice, over and over and over again. He had to be stopped. But he was still a person. And the power to turn a person into ashes with a scream IS horrifying. It’s the kind of power that can and should make good people uneasy. And for all the time Apollo has spent worrying, trying to convince everybody, and most of all himself, that he isn’t one, his thoughts and actions have betrayed him every step of the way.
But Apollo is done hesitating. He pushes past his discomfort and moves forward. He keeps succeeding against impossible odds. He keeps surviving things that would kill on the spot any regular mortal human, let alone one who is literally dying of magical zombie poison.
Finally not just accepting, but WELCOMING the help of his friends every step of the way, he survives long enough for his twin to make it to him in time.
I beamed at my sister. It was so good to see her disapproving I-can’t-believe-you’re-my-brother frown again. ‘I love you,’ I said, my voice hoarse with emotion.
She blinked, clearly unsure what to do with this information. ‘You really have changed.’
‘I missed you!’
‘Y-yes, well. I’m here now. Even Dad couldn’t argue with a Sibylline invocation from Temple Hill.’ (TTT 383)
The two of them, they had a routine. They each had their lines to say, rehearsed a thousand times. But Apollo, for the first time in who knows how long, goes off script. That’s what actually shocks her, so much so that she fumbles a bit for words. Not the intensity of his love, which, unlike him, she’s never had reason to doubt, but that he would state it out loud, in front of everybody, so plainly that it’s impossible to mistake for anything other than what it is.
Gods aren’t supposed to feel. Not like this. At the very least, they aren’t supposed to show it.
She used to be able to anticipate his every move, but in just a couple of lines he’s upended all the rules that they’ve always tacitly agreed upon.
In her sudden insecurity, she grasps for reassurance in the exact same way he always does.
“Little brother,” she calls him, reminding him that it’s her job to take care of him. Ostensibly, to annoy him. In truth, to reassure herself, to reaffirm to everybody, that no matter how far away from her he seems to be now, no matter how changed, he is still hers.
She only relaxes the moment he feigns being insulted at it. Now they are back on track. Back on familiar, comfortable territory. Back to pretending they don’t care for each other nearly as much as they both do. Not that Apollo is really any good at it anymore. Not that she is either, taking his hand into hers and squeezing it tight, staying as close to him as a shadow until she has no choice but to let him go.
‘Diana didn’t want to leave camp so suddenly like that,’ Thalia continued. ‘But you know how it is. Gods can’t stick around. Once the danger to New Rome had passed, she couldn’t risk overstaying her summons. Jupiter … Dad wouldn’t approve.’ I shivered. How easy it was to forget that this young woman was also my sister. And Jason was my brother. At one time, I would have discounted that connection. They’re just demigods, I would have said. Not really family. (TTT 403-404)
The truth is, Apollo was never as alone as he thought he was.
He’s always had family, he’s always had friends he could count on. People willing to offer him the things he so desperately wanted, and was sure he didn’t deserve. He’s been loved and trusted hundreds of millions of times over.
But they were just demigods. Just mortals. Their lives so short, so fragile, so easily lost. Their knowledge and their power so crushingly small compared to his. What weight could their love, their forgiveness, their good opinion of him have, then? Of course they love me, Apollo used to think. They feel indebted to me. They don’t know better. Of course they would forgive someone who could strike them down with a thought.
But none of the excuses he used to make up in his head to discount these people’s generosity, their desire to give back the kindness they’d received from him, holds up to scrutiny now.
These people, it turns out, truly are greater than Apollo gives them credit for. They don’t expect him to do everything. They just ask him to do his best.
“I don’t blame you,” Thalia tells him, and finally, finally, Apollo is ready to hear it and believe it. He still doesn’t think he deserves it, but he knows now, he understands, that that is not his call to make. Jason made his choice, and Thalia has made hers. She won’t let the death of a brother be cause for the loss of another one.
As he accepts her absolution, Apollo can’t help but feel ashamed. The truth is, also, that a small, dark part of him liked to believe he was special. That he was dearer to his father than most of these fragile, short lived people were. That Zeus, his king, his abuser, his dad, would not just let him die like he did all his other children.
For a time, there is no doubt that that must have been true. For all Apollo knows in this moment, it could still be. A small, dark part of him still clings to that belief, to that hope, despite all evidence.
‘I wanted to ask: Does it hurt? Reincarnation?’
My eyes were too blurry to see properly. ‘I – I’ve never reincarnated, Don. When I became human, that was different, I think. But I hear reincarnation is peaceful. Beautiful.’ [...]
‘I hope … maybe I come back as a hemlock? That would be like … an action-hero plant, right?’
Lavinia nodded, her lips quivering. ‘Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.’
‘Cool … Hey, Apollo, you – you know the difference between a faun and a satyr …?’
He smiled a little wider, as if ready to deliver the punchline. His face froze that way. His chest stopped moving. Dryads and fauns began to cry. Lavinia kissed the faun’s hand, then pulled a piece of bubblegum from her bag and reverently slipped it into Don’s shirt pocket.
A moment later, his body collapsed with a noise like a relieved sigh, crumbling into fresh loam. In the spot where his heart had been, a tiny sapling emerged from the soil. I immediately recognized the shape of those miniature leaves. Not a hemlock. A laurel – the tree I had created from poor Daphne, and whose leaves I had decided to make into wreaths. The laurel, the tree of victory.
One of the dryads glanced at me. ‘Did you do that …?’
I shook my head. I swallowed the bitter taste from my mouth. ‘The only difference between a satyr and a faun,’ I said, ‘is what we see in them. And what they see in themselves. Plant this tree somewhere special.’ I looked up at the dryads. ‘Tend it and make it grow healthy and tall. This was Don the faun, a hero.’ (TTT 398-399)
Apollo never lies to people about their own fate, no matter how painful, how unforgiving the truth is, no matter how little they can do to avoid it, no matter how much he wishes he could spare them. He never makes them promises he can’t keep. He doesn’t want to be that kind of god. He doesn’t want to be that kind of person. The circumstances of his birth haven’t made it easy for him, and he hasn’t always been good at it, but he really does his best to treat people with respect.
So he does not lie to Don. He doesn’t make him promises. He just kneels at his side and offers him what little reassurance he can as the faun passes away.
“Did you do that?” the dryad asks Apollo when she sees the laurel tree. Apollo tells her the truth. He didn’t do anything. Nobody other than Don could have performed that miracle. Don the faun made himself a hero.
“The only difference between a satyr and a faun,” Apollo says, answering Don’s last question, “is what we see in them, and what they see in themselves.”
“You humans are more than the sum of your history,” he’d told Piper. “You can overcome the expectations of your family and your society.” And the truth is, he’d confessed, “we gods are a little in awe of you mortals.” Because mortals can see in themselves the potential to change. To grow. To be better tomorrow than they are now. To be better than everybody else believes they can be.
Despite how small and fragile and powerless they are, Apollo believes in people’s right to make their own choices. And yet, in his entire lifetime, somehow, he had never quite managed to bring himself to believe that when given a choice, people might choose to stick by him. That they might be able to see past his failures, his missteps, his ignorance, his impotence. That they might choose not to hold those against him, love him in spite of them, and sometimes even because of them. That they might choose to believe in him anyway. That they might ask of him nothing more than to keep trying. That they might want to help him, even knowing that it could cost them everything.
“I was a god then,” he says. “I didn't know what I was doing.” It’s a lie. It’s also the truth.
He didn’t know that companionship, that redemption could look like this. He didn’t know how stupid, how presumptuous it really was of him, who kept offering his help to people, to think himself above receiving any in return.
People help one another, and gods are people too.
And Apollo sees it now. He sees it more clearly than he has allowed himself to in a long, long time. He, too, has the capacity to change. He has the capacity to be better. And he won’t have to do it alone. These people are eager to support him, if he will only let them.
