Gnawing at the walls like a rabid dog Light’s hallucinations of L never have his eyes in them why why is it because he can’t stand those beady eyes on him again even in his subconscious?? He still loathes the feeling of being WATCHED, KNOWN by L but simultaneously misses him deeply enough to see him when he’s not there
SERIOUSLY ITS EVERY TIME
HE CANNOT PICTURE L’S EYES STARING AT HIM. HE JUST CANT DO IT. HE WONT.
L NEVER TOOK HIS EYES OFF OF HIM UNTIL HE PHYSICALLY COULDNT ANYMORE. BTW. BTW. LIGHTS NEVER GOT AWAY FROM THE FEELING OF EYES ON THE BACK OF HIS NECK.
Solangelo and Frazel fic: The Curse Of Demeter on ao3
Everyone knows the story of Hades and Persephone in the way demigods tend to know stories, which is to say personally, and with the uneasy awareness that any missing detail might one day crawl out of a prophecy and try to kill them.
The version Will Solace finds in one of Chiron’s books at two in the morning is not the one with flowers, pomegranate seeds, and poets making kidnapping sound wistful. It’s the one where Demeter did not stop at starving the world, punishing mortals, and making Olympus briefly pretend it understood consequences. Hades had taken her child, so she made a punishment out of his.
Every child of the Underworld, the text says, shall suffer when the earth wakes.
preview below, rest of the fic is on ao3! i promise this is also funny and fluffy, its not all doom and gloom evil ancient curse <3
Everyone knows the story of Hades and Persephone in the way demigods tend to know stories, which is to say personally, and with the uneasy awareness that any missing detail might one day crawl out of a prophecy and try to kill them.
Hades takes Persephone. Demeter grieves. The world starves under the weight of a mother’s fury, mortals dropping in fields that refuse to give them anything back while Olympus does what Olympus always does, which is argue for an obscene amount of time before arriving at a solution that still somehow makes the problem everyone else’s fault. Seasons are born from the compromise, flowers become romantic, pomegranate seeds become symbolic. Gods help them all, poets get involved.
That’s the version people tell because it has shape, because it sounds ancient and tragic and clean enough to put in a textbook.
The version Will finds at half past two in the morning, hunched over a brittle old translation in the with his eyes burning and his third cup of coffee going cold beside his elbow, is considerably less clean.
There’s a footnote.
Will’s learned, over the past few years, to fear footnotes. Footnotes are where scholars put the things they can’t prove but very much want to ruin your night with. Footnotes are where Annabeth finds architectural crimes. Footnotes are where ancient Greek poets casually mention that a god once turned a shepherd inside out for being annoying. Footnotes are, apparently, where someone’s decided to record the tiny little detail that Demeter, in the earliest fury of her grief, cursed every child of Hades and Pluto who’d come after Persephone’s abduction.
Will reads the line once.
Then again.
Then a third time, because apparently his brain’s chosen denial as its emergency response and is insisting that if he stares at the sentence hard enough it might rearrange itself into something less horrifying.
It doesn’t.
Every child of the Underworld, the text says, shall suffer when the earth wakes.
Which is, Will thinks faintly, exactly the sort of sentence that should come with more practical information attached. Suffer how? Suffer when? Suffer in a grand doomed bloodline way, or in a manageable please-administer-two-ambrosia-cubes-and-call-Chiron-in-the-morning way? Ancient writers are always doing this, dropping the mythological equivalent of a live grenade into one passive clause and then moving on to describe somebody’s cattle.
Across the room, Nico breathes like it hurts.
That’s the thing Will keeps coming back to, the thing that drags his gaze off the page no matter how many times he tells himself to keep reading, because Nico di Angelo is terrible at being ill in the same way he’s terrible at being emotionally available, which is to say he treats both as personal insults and assumes everyone else will eventually become too exhausted to notice. He’s curled on one of the infirmary beds with his knees drawn up beneath a blanket he complained about needing and then immediately refused to give back, his face turned slightly away from the lamp, dark hair stuck damply to his forehead. His skin’s gone grey around the edges in a way Will hates with a force that feels almost physical, his lips parted, every inhale catching shallowly at the base of his throat.
His lungs sound clear, his temperature’s barely raised, his pulse is too fast but steady, oxygen low enough to make Will’s stomach tighten and high enough to be deeply irritating from a diagnostic standpoint, which feels personally malicious.
Earlier, Nico had tried to summon a ghost from the edge of the woods and nothing had answered.
That had been the first bad sign.
The second had been the way the shadows moved wrong around him, gathering sluggishly at his feet and then peeling away again like they no longer recognised him. Nico had stared at them for one long silent moment, face going blank in that dangerous way that meant he was either frightened or about to say something devastatingly rude. Then he’d taken one step forward, gone white, and pitched sideways into Will’s arms with a breathless little sound that Will’s going to remember for the rest of his life and possibly bring up in court if anyone ever accuses him of overreacting.
Now there’s this footnote.
Now there’s Demeter.
Will looks back down at the book and feels something cold move through his ribs.
“Oh,” he says aloud, in a voice that sounds horribly calm. “I’m going to kill a goddess.”
Nico shifts under the blanket, one eye cracking open. “Which one?”
“Demeter.”
Nico stares at him for a moment, breathing shallowly through his nose, then closes his eye again. “Get in line.”
The Curse of Demeter: a solangelo and frazel fic coming to you very soon!
Everyone knows the story of Hades and Persephone in the way demigods tend to know stories, which is to say personally, and with the uneasy awareness that any missing detail might one day crawl out of a prophecy and try to kill them.
The version Will Solace finds in one of Chiron’s books at two in the morning is not the one with flowers, pomegranate seeds, and poets making kidnapping sound wistful. It’s the one where Demeter did not stop at starving the world, punishing mortals, and making Olympus briefly pretend it understood consequences. Hades had taken her child, so she made a punishment out of his.
Every child of the Underworld, the text says, shall suffer when the earth wakes.
We're so back bby, Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University Chapter 54: I Realise This Friend Group Is Incapable of Leaving a Holiday Untouched by Tragic Backstory
An Update On Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University and Overthinking the Geopolitical Implications of What Started as Gay Fanfic (long post)
As some of you already know, I originally planned for Will Solace and the Socialites of Olympus University to end on New Year’s Eve/New Year’s Day; very neat, very symbolic, very ‘new year, new beginnings, everyone finally stops being emotionally constipated for five minutes.’ Unfortunately, the fic has now looked me directly in the eye and said no.
You may also have noticed I haven’t updated since November, which is partly because life has been doing whatever life does, but also because I’ve been editing the fic. Nothing has changed plot-wise, so if you’ve read it already you’re not suddenly going to find out I killed Percy off-screen or decided Nico actually is in the mafia. The actual story is the same, I’ve mostly been going back through earlier chapters and smoothing out places where I felt like certain events, especially single nights, had started to sprawl a bit too much. Karaoke night, the first date and the redo date are probably the main ones, I love those chapters but on reread I could feel myself circling some of the same emotional beats so I wanted to tighten them without losing what they were doing.
Obviously, because I am incapable of behaving, the ‘abridging’ process also somehow involved adding things. Most self-indulgently, there is now more about my favourite book, The Secret History, in chapter 16, because apparently I looked at my dark academia college AU and thought, do you know what this needs? More Donna Tartt. Nobody is shocked, least of all me.
But the bigger thing I realised while editing is that the fic has grown past the ending I originally imagined for it.
The starting point was always the campus gossip thing. I kept thinking about how insane the rumours around the Seven must have been in canon, because imagine being a normal camper watching these half-mythical teenagers come back from quests where they fought gods and monsters and then just trying to sit near them at dinner. Obviously people would speculate, obviously there would be completely unhinged theories. So the AU began as that translated into college: these rich, beautiful, suspiciously mysterious students wandering around campus while everyone else tries to work out if they’re in the mafia, a cult, a spy ring or some kind of emotionally unavailable vampire coven.
But the class stuff was always there too, the jail arc was one of the first ideas I had, along with the first date disaster. I always knew I wanted the romance to sit inside that social divide, with Will not just being dazzled by Nico’s world but constantly aware of what it means to be near money without belonging to it. The difference is that as the fic has gone on that side of it has become much bigger than I expected.
I’ve always tried to keep the Greek myth world folded into the AU, even without literal gods or monsters. Sometimes that’s through names, sometimes through settings, sometimes through family businesses, sometimes through stupid little jokes that were probably only funny to me. The House of Hesperides is one example. On the surface it’s just this beautiful, exclusive, ridiculous rich-person restaurant but it was also my way of translating a piece of Greek myth into a modern social space.
In myth, The Garden of the Hesperides is guarded, sacred, difficult to reach, full of divine fruit and temptation. Heracles doesn’t really have access to it in the way Hera does, or the Hesperides themselves do. He isn’t wandering in because the space belongs to him. He gets close because of labour, literally because he has been sent to complete a task, and even then the whole point is that the garden is not freely open to him, he is entering a divine space through effort and exception rather than belonging.
That feels very relevant to the way places like the House of Hesperides work in the AU. Will and Austin can stand in the room because they are serving the people who actually belong to it, Rachel can move through certain elite art and social spaces because her labour, taste and connections make her useful to that world. In other words, their access is conditional, it depends on what they can do.
Nico, the Seven and the other customers occupy the space differently. They are closer to Hera, or the Hesperides themselves, or the figures who do not need to be sent into the garden on a labour because the garden already recognises them. In the AU, that divinity becomes wealth. It becomes being able to sit down, order, be served, linger, leave and never think of the room as something that has to be earned. So Will’s relationship to the House of Hesperides is not just ‘poor boy works in rich restaurant’, it’s him being allowed into the garden through labour while Nico’s world enters it through inheritance.
That was always the kind of translation I wanted the AU to do: mythic places becoming restaurants, gods becoming parents with companies, quests becoming social disasters, monsters becoming very human systems. But the more I’ve written, the more I’ve realised the fic is moving beyond just ‘here is a clever modern equivalent of this myth thing’ and into something bigger about fate, class, inheritance and power.
Because once you take the literal gods out of PJO, you don’t really lose them, they just stop looking like gods.
In canon, so much of these kids’ lives is shaped before they are old enough to understand what is happening. Their parents, prophecies, powers, cabins, quests and enemies all become part of a story already moving around them. Greek myth is full of that too: children trapped inside family curses, prophecies trying to complete themselves, parents creating the very disasters they are trying to prevent, people running from fate only to end up exactly where the story wanted them. Oedipus is the obvious one, but Paris is another example: sent away from Troy because he is predicted to bring disaster, only for that exile to put him on the path that leads to the apple, Helen and the war anyway. Myth loves a circle, it loves people trying to escape the story and accidentally tightening the knot.
PJO pushes against that. It still has prophecy, but it cares so much about choice. The whole series is full of kids being handed ancient grudges and impossible roles and still trying to say, no, we are not doing it exactly like you did. The cycle doesn’t break because the gods suddenly become perfect, it starts to break because the next generation sees the pattern and refuses to repeat it blindly.
That’s what I’m trying to do with the AU too.
The mythic forces become real-world structures. Divine parentage becomes surname, inheritance, reputation and access. Monsters become institutions that can ruin someone without ever looking like monsters at all. The gods become parents whose money and influence are so vast that ordinary people can start to seem abstract to them. It isn’t meant to be a neat one-to-one substitution where class equals prophecy or police equal monsters or capitalism equals Kronos or whatever. It’s more that the same narrative pressure exists in a different form. These characters are still being born into stories written before them; the question is what those stories look like when Olympus is made of boardrooms, universities, restaurants, police stations, galleries, ports, legal firms and family offices instead of marble palaces in the sky.
The jail arc is probably where that becomes impossible for Will to ignore. Cecil’s situation is terrifying because the facts matter less than who gets believed first. Octavian has proximity to legal power, so his version of events immediately carries more weight. Jason can call Zeus, Leo and Annabeth can produce a document, Nico and Piper know how to move through that kind of crisis because they have grown up around people who know which levers to pull. And Will is left thinking about the people who don’t get rescued, the people who don’t know anyone, the people who don’t have a Grace or a McLean or a Di Angelo standing beside them when the system decides they are disposable.
That is the point where the fic, at least for me on reflection, starts asking bigger questions than ‘will Will and Nico figure their shit out by New Year’s?’ Which, to be clear, is still a deeply important question, but it’s not the only question anymore.
Because I’ve also been thinking more about the darker side of Nico and the Seven’s wealth. Other than Zeus and Hades, most of the parents’ enterprises weren’t originally developed because I had some enormous geopolitical subplot planned for each of them. A lot of it started as myth translation: Poseidon gets oceans, hydraulics, shipping, wealth connected to water. Athena gets architecture, planning, cities, strategy. Mars gets weapons. Aphrodite gets beauty and social influence. Hephaestus gets tech and industry. It was mostly me trying to make their AU counterparts feel like the gods from canon and myth, just filtered through modern elite power instead of literal divinity.
But once you start taking that seriously, it does get darker.
Because the gods in myth and canon are not just quirky powerful parents with thematic branding. They are actual gods and there is distance built into that. They are immortal, ancient, cosmic, operating on a scale where mortals are tiny and brief and, very often, collateral damage in a story the gods think belongs to them. That does not excuse them, exactly, but it does create a kind of mythic distance. Ares influencing war as the god of war is one thing, a human man standing in for Mars as a weapons tycoon is another, because then he is not some divine force hovering above mortal conflict, he is another human being making money from it.
That difference is where the AU starts to get morally uglier than I think I first realised.
The parents should feel recognisably godlike, not because they can throw lightning or summon storms, but because their influence is so large that ordinary people become almost abstract to them. The problem is that in a modern human setting, ‘ordinary people becoming abstract’ has very real consequences. It becomes profit margins, contracts, lobbying, procurement, development, branding, philanthropy, investment, museum boards, political favours, legal pressure. It becomes the kind of power that still looks elegant from the inside because the suffering is always happening somewhere just far enough away.
Mars as a weapons tycoon is a big one, very Tony Stark before the Iron Man moral crisis. It works as a nod to the god of war, but it also means Frank’s family money is tied to defence contracts, weapons systems, militarisation and the machinery that turns conflict into profit. And I don’t mean this in a naive ‘no country should ever have defence’ way, because obviously there is a difference between the concept of a country defending itself and a private billionaire building an empire around the fact that war, security and instability are profitable. A government can make terrible decisions too, obviously, and many countries have not been innocent in their conflicts, but a Mars-style figure is not the state making a defence decision. He is the private industry orbiting those decisions, supplying them, lobbying around them, profiting from them and surviving regardless of whether the war itself was justified.
He is not personally declaring wars, obviously, but private contractors do not have to declare wars to make money from them, especially when they exist in the orbit of the US military, which is one of the largest and most heavily funded military forces in the world and has relied heavily on private companies for logistics, security and support in modern conflicts. Congressional Research Service reports on Iraq and Afghanistan describe contractors providing troop support, base support, construction, transportation and security, while private security contractors were used to protect convoys, forward operating bases, buildings and infrastructure, which is exactly the sort of background machinery a Mars-style defence empire could plausibly profit from.
So if Mars has been operating at that level since say the 90s, it’s hard not to think about what that actually means. The Gulf War and everything that followed. Bosnia, Kosovo and the wider Balkans, not necessarily in the cartoonish sense of him arming everyone from a shadowy boardroom, but through the very real world of logistics, military support, procurement, bases, equipment, reconstruction, security and contracts. Iraq, Afghanistan, the wider War on Terror, drone warfare, counterterrorism technology, arms deals with allied states, border security, surveillance systems, private military support. All the places where state power and private industry blur together politely enough that everyone can still wear a suit to dinner.
That feels much uglier than just saying ‘Mars is the god of war, so obviously his AU version makes weapons’. Ares/Mars in myth can be this distant divine embodiment of violence, rage and conflict, but human Mars, billionaire defence contractor Mars, is not war as a cosmic force but a man profiting from war as an industry. Frank being gentle and kind does not erase that, if anything, it makes the contradiction more uncomfortable, which is probably exactly why it’s worth looking at properly.
Hephaestus Industries is similar, but in a different register. It’s funny when Leo is building ridiculous things, hacking campus infrastructure or behaving like OSHA was invented specifically to spite him, but a huge tech/manufacturing empire has its own shadow. Surveillance technology, military contracts, automation, extractive labour, environmental damage, unsafe factories, supply chains no one wants to look at too closely, innovation marketed as progress while someone else pays the cost. Hephaestus as a god makes beautiful and terrible things for other gods to use. Hephaestus as a human billionaire means those inventions are entering markets, militaries, cities and workplaces. Leo’s genius is real but his family’s money is still not magically clean.
Zeus is slightly different because his power has already touched the plot directly, and he is probably the cleanest example of me thinking I was making a clever canon/myth nod and then realising I had accidentally created a man whose entire fortune is built around modern infrastructure. In myth and canon, Zeus is sky, kingship, law, hierarchy, judgement, the father at the top of the mountain; in PJO specifically, his domain is so literal that Percy cannot safely travel by plane because the sky belongs to Zeus. So, in the AU, airlines felt like the obvious translation. Of course Zeus owns airlines. Sky god, planes, private routes, rich people crossing continents above everyone else’s heads. Very tidy. Very clever. Unfortunately, the second you make him a human billionaire instead of an actual god, that stops being just a neat little reference and starts meaning carbon emissions, labour, fuel, airport politics, borders, security, logistics, who gets to move freely and who gets treated as a problem at the gate.
The same thing happens with the energy empire. At first it felt like another obvious translation of divine power: storms, electricity, the grid, light, force, the ability to keep whole cities running. But then you sit with it for more than two minutes and remember that an energy conglomerate is not neutral just because energy is necessary. If Zeus owns or invests in fossil fuels, then he is profiting from carbon, extraction and the environmental consequences of keeping everything powered. If he has shifted into renewables, wind farms especially, then there is genuine environmental value there, obviously, and I’m not trying to do some contrarian ‘clean energy is secretly bad’ thing because that is not the point. The point is that Zeus would not be in clean energy because he had a sudden spiritual awakening about the planet. He would be in it because the future needs energy and the future has profits attached to it.
That is the part that feels very Zeus to me. He can profit from the old world while positioning himself at the front of the new one. Airlines give him the glamour and violence of movement: fuel, emissions, private travel, global business, the privilege of crossing borders easily. Energy gives him the more respectable language of transition, sustainability, infrastructure, investment, public good. He can be the man whose companies contribute to the problem and then the man whose companies are paid to help solve it, which is very godlike in the worst possible way.
And then there is lobbying, which is where all of that becomes political. Because a man with airlines, energy companies, security firms and legal connections is not just sitting on money, he is also sitting near regulation. Aviation emissions, airport expansion, fuel policy, energy subsidies, grid infrastructure, renewables contracts, environmental standards, security procurement, labour rules, campaign donations, all the boring adult words that decide how much damage can be made legal and how much profit can be made respectable. Zeus does not need to be a cartoon villain for that to be ugly, he just has to be the kind of man whose businesses sit close enough to government that policy and profit start having lunch together.
That is why the jail arc matters so much, because it only shows the part of Zeus’ power Will can actually see. He sees the phone call to the state senator, he sees the favour from last year, the budget pressure, the legal crisis becoming manageable because the right man says the right thing in the right voice. But the phone call is not the whole empire, it is just the visible spark from a much larger system. So yes, I thought I was being clever making Zeus an airline and energy billionaire because planes are his domain and electricity is his thing, and now here we are, staring directly at the climate, political and corporate implications of the sky god owning the sky in a world where the sky is full of emissions.
Poseidon is another one because on the surface it’s water, oceans, hydraulics, marine wealth, all very obvious god-of-the-sea translation. But if you push that into the real world, the ocean is political. Shipping lanes, ports, offshore drilling, maritime choke points, private coastal development, environmental damage, who controls access to water and trade. A private billionaire obviously does not ‘own’ the Strait of Malacca or Bab el-Mandeb in some cartoon villain way, but people with enough money in shipping, energy, ports, insurance, infrastructure, logistics or offshore extraction can still have influence over the systems that move goods, fuel and power around the world. So then I’m sitting there like, oh my god, does Poseidon turn a blind eye to human rights violations in Eritrea because access to the Bab el-Mandeb matters for trade routes? Which is an insane thing to be asking about a fic that once had Will nearly combust because Nico wore sunglasses indoors, but here we are.
Hades is harder to talk about because his version of it is colder, more restrained, much easier to mistake for reverence than violence. It doesn’t announce itself in the same way Mars’ world does, because it comes dressed as taste, preservation, family legacy, scholarship, all those expensive words people use when they want possession to sound dignified. Funerals, inheritance, antiquities, archaeology, underground wealth, old money; on the surface it fits him almost too well, because of course Hades’ empire would be built around death and the things buried with it, and of course his money would come from what is kept, catalogued, insured, restored, displayed, passed down. His power would not look like conquest in the obvious sense. It would look like custody, which is exactly what makes it more uncomfortable to me, because custody is not neutral when the person doing the keeping has all the money, all the access and all the authority to decide what belongs where.
That is where the antiquities and archaeology side gets darker than I first let myself think about. It is very easy to make it romantic in a gothic way, all marble statues and old coins and beautiful dead languages, but the real world of museums and private collections has always had this shadow under it: colonial extraction, stolen or contested artefacts, wealthy people buying pieces of other people’s histories, institutions like the British Museum displaying objects whose ownership and removal are still fiercely disputed, and entire cultures having to argue for the return of things that were taken from them and then rebranded as world heritage once they were behind European glass. Even when the language is beautiful, there is still the question underneath it of who gets to keep things, who gets to say ‘this belongs here’, who gets to build authority out of other people’s dead, and who has their grief, history and burial turned into an object with a label and an insurance value.
And that is messy for Nico in a way I actually find much more interesting than if Hades’ empire was simply cartoonishly evil, because Nico does care about memory. He does want to honour his mother and Bianca. He wants the dead to matter, he wants what was lost to mean something, and that is such a human, painful, completely sincere instinct that it almost makes Hades’ world more dangerous rather than less. Legacy, preservation, continuity, keeping the past alive; all of that sounds close enough to love that Nico can recognise something true in it, but it also sits terrifyingly close to control, because memory becomes something else once a family has enough money to own it, store it, display it and pass it down as proof of its own importance.
So Nico studying classics and archaeology while being dragged towards that inheritance feels sharper to me now than it probably did when I first set it up. He is trying to understand how people loved, feared, honoured and buried their dead, while his father’s world is built around making death respectable, profitable and inheritable. The question is not just whether Nico becomes Hades’ heir, but whether he can honour the dead without turning them into possessions, and whether legacy can stay loving once a family like his gets its hands around it.
Athena’s world started in a similar place, as a nod to her canon interests and to the rivalry with Poseidon: architecture, planning, cities, strategy, all of that sitting opposite his oceans, coastlines, expansion and force. Their professional overlap was originally just my way of translating that mythic tension into something modern, with land and sea meeting through design firms, waterfront developments, infrastructure projects and two very powerful people who would absolutely make a planning meeting feel like the Trojan War in a boardroom.
But architecture isn’t neutral either, which is the part that becomes harder to ignore once the fic starts taking power seriously. Cities do not just happen, someone plans them, funds them, designs them, sells them, and very often someone else gets priced out of them. Athena’s world can be beautiful and genuinely brilliant, because I don’t want to flatten that either. Good architecture can mean shelter, public space, preservation, accessibility, actual human care built into brick and stone and glass. But the same world can also mean gentrification, luxury redevelopment, hostile design, private security, cultural cleansing dressed up as regeneration, and glossy waterfront projects that look stunning in a render while pushing poorer people further and further from the places they used to live. That feels very Athena in a darker way: intelligence, order and beauty, but also the violence of deciding what a city should be, what counts as improvement, and who gets treated as an inconvenience to the design.
Aphrodite is probably the least obviously violent on the surface, which almost makes her more interesting to me. A cosmetics and socialite empire does not look like blood money in the same way Mars or Hephaestus does, but beauty is still an industry, and industries do not become billion-dollar empires by being harmless. Her world is branding, desirability, consumerism, influence, femininity packaged until it becomes something people are taught to chase and then sold back to them in smaller, shinier forms. It is insecurity made profitable, impossible standards made aspirational, the cruelty of convincing people they are always one product away from being wanted properly.
And that feels very Aphrodite too, because desire is not evil. Beauty is not evil. Wanting to be seen, admired, touched, chosen, adored, none of that is shallow by itself. The darker part is what happens when that longing becomes a market. When love and attractiveness and self-worth are filtered through branding until people start confusing being desirable with being safe, or beautiful with being valuable. Aphrodite’s power is softer than Mars’ or Zeus’, but softer does not mean innocent.
So no, I don’t want the message to be ‘actually Nico and the Seven are evil because they have money’. That would be boring and also not true to the story. They are not Octavian. They are not sitting around gleefully plotting how to ruin ordinary people’s lives. They are young, loyal, funny, traumatised, often ridiculous people who love each other deeply and are trying, in various messy ways, to become better than the worlds that raised them.
But I also don’t want to pretend their fortunes are clean just because they are the good guys.
That is the balance I’m trying to strike, the Seven and Nico can be ignorant about their privilege at times, and the fic has already shown that, but they are not morally empty people. In the jail arc, they know the system is unfair. Piper says it. Jason feels it. Will sees it from a completely different angle because he is the one thinking about the people who do not get rescued. Jason especially has this very canon-adjacent thing where his whole life has been arranged for him, almost like a mundane version of Hera’s manipulation. He has been shaped into the responsible one, the polished one, the future political/legal heir who knows which rooms to stand in and which calls to make, and he does not want to become his father.
The point is not that Jason, Nico, Piper or any of the others need Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil to wander in from the land of unpaid bills and teach them inequality exists. That would be patronising, and also just not the story. They are not walking around with no inner life, benevolently discovering that poor people have feelings. Most of them already know, in different ways, that the world around them is unfair. Jason knows far too much about his father’s kind of power to be innocent about it. Nico has never confused inheritance with love. Piper understands image, influence and manipulation almost too well. Leo knows what it means to be useful before he knows what it means to be safe.
What changes is not conscience appearing out of nowhere, it’s distance collapsing. It’s one thing to know the system is unfair in the way clever, privileged people can know things and still survive them comfortably, and another thing to watch someone you care about nearly get crushed by it. It’s one thing to understand access as an abstract problem, and another to stand in a police station and realise your name opens a door that would have stayed shut on someone else’s life. Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil are not there to educate the rich kids into decency; they make certain truths harder to keep at a manageable distance. They put faces, voices, rent payments, bruises, shifts, panic and actual consequences into places where good intentions used to be enough to let everyone sleep.
Now to the question of Will's dad and the files, originally, I genuinely thought Will would never open them. I liked the idea of him refusing Persephone’s temptation, leaving the folder sealed, choosing not to let that world define him. In my head, the files were almost like metaphorical pomegranate seeds. If he took them, if he accepted the information, the job, the access, then some part of him would be tied to Hades and Persephone’s world in the same way Persephone is tied to the Underworld after eating its fruit. It felt like a clean way to have him break the pattern of the original myth: here is the beautiful, dangerous thing being offered, and here is Will choosing not to swallow it.
And I did still have a backstory for his dad. I just didn’t think Will would learn it in the fic, I thought the choice not to know would be the point.
But the more I thought about PJO canon, the less right that felt. Being claimed by your godly parent is one of the biggest emotional conflicts in the series. The unclaimed kids, the ignored kids, the children left without answers or cabins or recognition, all of that literally feeds into the war with Kronos. Parentage in PJO is never just that, it is identity, abandonment, power, belonging, danger and the pain of being left without a story.
Will’s absent father has shaped him from the beginning of this fic. It shapes how hard he works, how he reacts to Nico’s wealth, how terrified he is of needing too much, how much of himself he has built around being useful and self-sufficient. So I’m now rewriting what I had of the next chapters to actually explore that reveal and what ‘being claimed’ means in a world without literal gods. No spoilers, obviously, and the pomegranate question is still there because accepting knowledge from Persephone’s hand is never going to be simple, but it became too thematically important to leave permanently shut in a folder just because the refusal was neat.
I do slightly regret not thinking all of this through earlier, honestly. Not because I think the fic is broken, but because every time you translate gods into humans, the implications multiply faster than you expect. I thought I was already getting fairly deep into the social and class politics with things like the first date arc, which is hilarious considering that whole thing was inspired by Callie and Arizona’s first date on Grey’s Anatomy, and now I’m sitting here pulling my hair out over maritime choke points and the ethics of archaeology like this is a normal thing to be doing with my spare time.
So I wouldn’t say this is damage control exactly, because that sounds more dramatic than I mean it, but I do want to give the story space to actually explore the things it has uncovered. Not in a preachy way, this is not going to become a lecture every chapter, I promise. The fic is still romance and chaos and rich people behaving weirdly in public and Will having a medical episode every time Nico looks at him for too long. I still want the themes folded into the story the way they have been so far, through jokes and parties and bad decisions and expensive restaurants and arguments in kitchens and characters saying wildly unserious things while accidentally revealing the entire emotional spine of the chapter.
The hope of it, for me, sits somewhere in that difference between Greek myth and PJO. Greek myth often has this horrible closed-circle feeling, where the prophecy is already waiting at the end of the road and every attempt to avoid it just becomes part of the mechanism. PJO keeps the machinery of prophecy, divine parentage and inherited damage, but it also keeps pushing back against the idea that the kids have to become exactly what the gods, the prophecies or their family histories expect them to be. Percy still has to live inside a world built by the gods, but by the end of the first series he forces Olympus to change some of its rules: the gods have to claim their children, the minor gods have to be recognised, the abandoned kids are not allowed to stay invisible just because that was easier for the people in power.
That feels like the thing I’m trying to get at through the AU lens, just with the divine machinery translated into social and political machinery. Nico, the Seven, Will, Lou Ellen and Cecil are all dealing with systems that existed before them: money, class, family empires, old reputations, legal power, poverty, access, all these things that shape what choices are available before anyone has even made one. So the question is not really whether they can float above all of that untouched, because they can’t and I don’t think the story would be honest if they could. The question is whether they can recognise the pattern quickly enough to interrupt it.
That is why the fic needs more room than my original New Year’s ending gave it. It is one thing to reveal the shape of the system, or to have a character realise their parents’ world is compromised, or to have Will understand that the people he loves are standing on money with a history attached to it. It is another thing to show what they do with that knowledge. If the whole point is breaking away from the older mythic pattern, or at least refusing to repeat it exactly, then the story can’t stop at the moment everyone sees the problem. It has to sit with the aftermath long enough for the characters to start deciding what they carry forward, what they refuse, and what they try to make less cruel than it was when they inherited it.
So I really hope people will still enjoy the fic continuing in this direction. It’s still the same story, just with a bit more to explore, and apparently a lot more consequences than my original outline was emotionally prepared for.
Also, if anyone is planning a modern AU where gods become humans, my biggest advice is apparently: good luck. There are way more things to consider than you think. I genuinely cannot believe my biggest stress at one point was ‘oh my god, I can never give any of their parents surnames because the characters canonically get their surnames from their non-godly parents, I cannot go around typing Hades di Angelo.’ Simpler times.
it never sits well with me when people associate beauty with morality like i remember when i was in my early 20s and my friends would compliment each other like “that’s what happens when you’re not racist—you get a banging body” or “you can tell she’s homophobic because of her ugly mug” like it’s never felt right to me. beauty as a reward or a virtue feels so bizarre to me. ugliness as a punishment feels so bizarre to me. it all feels like 19th century phrenology and physiognomy
having completely opposing headcanons at the same time is important for the diversity of the fandom ecosystem. yes I believe this would happen. but I also don’t. hope this helps
as a writer you will have a specific deck of vocab words you like using a lot and when you read other peoples' work you will see a very clear spread of different vocab words on their end. this is why you need to read, to collect other writers' words like it's a card game
kianamaiart
annaxmalina
blakekathryn
izzy806
janainaart
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
