I’m just gonna jot down a fic idea to ruminate more on later, if I may. Feedback welcome if anyone’s got anything to add.
So you know that bit in Blood Of Olympus where Annabeth and Piper go down into the Temple of Fear in Sparta to unchain the Ares statue and have to fight Mimas? And they beat him because Piper gets Deimos to drop the statue of his head onto Mimas and crush him, and then Phobos lets them out the damaged temple?
So, that but it’s Jason and Percy that go down there instead. They can fight Mimas, that’s fine, or he’s not there in this and they just unchained the statue, but they gotta have issues with Phobos and Deimos. Deimos only helped Piper because she made an offering, and potentially because they’re half siblings on Aphrodite’s side. But they’d presumably have no special love for Jason or Percy. And although I haven’t read it - I know in one of the spinoff books Clarisse and Percy fought Phobos and Deimos, and they hate Percy. So they have serious beef, and if they ran into each other again, I think it’s likely they’d fight.
So they’re the gods of personal fear, panic, terror, etc. Related to war of course, but in general too. So I’m thinking if they get into Jason and Percy’s heads and fuck them up a bit, it could be fun.
Percy’s fatal flaw is personal loyalty, and I believe in the spinoff when he fought Phobos the scary thing he saw was his friends burning in fire. But I think you can also have it going in the opposite way, in that he does not react well at all to perceived betrayals either, which we saw when he freaked out on Nico in the Underworld when he thought Nico had betrayed him.
So for Percy, I think they could use that to turn him against Jason. Because the first really bad betrayal we saw Percy go through in the series was Luke - and the similarities between Luke and Jason are plentiful. Obviously the physical: Tall, blond, blue eyed, facial scar. But they’re also excellent swordsmen. And Jason can fly, and Luke had those shoes with wings. I can’t remember if we ever actually saw Luke wear them and fly, but Percy’s intimately familiar with them and links them strongly to Luke, so I think it’d be enough of a coincidence to unnerve him if his image of Jason suddenly blurred into an image of Luke down there in the temple of fear. Percy might be more on guard against Luke, or somebody he now very strongly equates to Luke, and could struggle to trust him, maybe more interested for the moment in pointing his sword at Jason than the twins.
For Jason, it’s a little more of a leap to be honest to get him to freak out about something that might pit him against Percy. His fatal flaw is indecision. So yes, being torn between attacking the twins alongside Percy, or attacking Percy as the more dangerous enemy under the encouragement of the twins could be an angle, if they’re turning up his fear or anger or other battle emotions. But I don’t know what that inciting core nugget of fear would be to push him over the edge.
The other thing I think he’d fear would be a mixture of being forgotten by people, particularly people he cares about. We got little nods to thoughts that maybe he felt Camp Jupiter didn’t look for him quite as hard as CHB looked for Percy, maybe there’s a subconscious worry that they just kind of moved on and forgot about him? His mom abandoned him but promised to come back and never did, maybe she forgot about her promise? And even scarier than that would be Jason forgetting himself. Because that literally happened. He’s still in the middle of his subsequent identity crisis although he’s started getting little bits and pieces back, and also just starting over again, choosing who he wants to be from now on. But he’d probably be pretty freaked out at the idea of having his memory wiped again and having to start all over again - forgetting himself, and his friends, and the quest, and everything.
So possibly if they started with Jason’s fear, of being forgotten by others especially, and made Percy forget him, he’d be on edge. And Percy would be hella confused, cause he might know why he’s there and fighting the twins, but who the hell is this other dude and where did he come from? And then if they double down on Jason and make him forget everything (I don’t know if they could actually do that to people’s memories, but if Juno could, why not right?), then Jason is fully freaking out and then has no clue what’s going on anymore or why he’s there. So THEN Percy goes from confused to suspicious. Because that’s super sus, how did some random demigod just appear down in some dusty Spartan temple right as Percy happened to be passing through on a world-saving quest? And he claims to be innocent and just as confused and clueless as Percy? A likely story, am I right?
It’s just too similar to The Lightning Thief. And that’s when he’d get a bit shaken by the whole ‘holy fuck he looks like Luke, I knew I knew this foreboding feeling, he’s totally an enemy and I can’t trust him’ thing.
I imagine they’d manage to work together to fight off the twins, but maybe the memory manipulation stays for a bit, maybe it’s just a short thing down in the temple, I’m not sure. Maybe it continues and the others on the quest get roped in and they’re making both Jason and Percy uncomfortable because they’re all convinced they know both of them and that the boys know and like and trust the other one too. But Percy’s convinced somebody’s messed with their heads and he’s the only one that’s thinking clearly because he’s literally never seen this kid before, somebody nefarious is trying to slip him onto the ship to sabotage their quest, surely. And Jason is flabbergasted like on the bus in TLH because he doesn’t know any of these people, and he’s trying to convince them all there’s been a mistake and he’s not supposed to be there and something is wrong. Weirdly though, maybe that helps Jercy bond again in the end because they both hesitantly agree there’s something wrong with everybody else and they’re the only ones remembering things right, and okay so maybe Jason isn’t the one behind it and maybe Percy could try trusting him a bit.
But, regardless, if they went at each other it would get real intense real quick, like the cornfield fight in MoA but much worse because it’s not just Eidolons forcing them to joust like puppets, it’s actual terror-fuelled confused chaos. Not to mention that Percy would have just come back from Tartarus, so he’d be extra on edge. And Annabeth isn’t down there to rein him in like she was with Nyx. And for Jason, if you don’t have a clue what’s going on but the only other guy around is legitimately trying to murder you and is kind of terrifying, you’re definitely gonna be fighting for your life, to the same degree he went at Krios - a Titan he killed with his bare hands. It would be complete carnage.
