Percy Jackson and the Herald of Destruction
Fandom: Trials of Apollo Rating: Gen Genre: Family/Friendship Characters: Apollo, Percy, Estelle A visit to the Jackson-Blofis household brings Apollo face-to-face with one Estelle Jackson-Blofis once more, and her doting big brother. A toasecretsanta submission from @tsarinatorment for Melonyan [AO3], using the prompt "Apollo, Percy Jackson and Estelle Bloufis-Jackson inspired, something sweet maybe a little angsty!" I have shamelessly used aeithalian's Estelle theory in this fic, which can be found detailed here. It's been a while since I last wrote Apollo pov, and I barely ever write Percy, so this was a bit of an adventure to put together. It's certainly closer to fluff than angst, I think, but I still hope you like it, Melonyan!
As a general rule, gods did not knock on the doors of mortal homes. Nor did they ring intercoms and wait patiently to be let in. Why would they? They were gods, and bound by neither mortal social niceties, nor the limitations of mortal entrances. It was perfectly possible – and normal – for a god to simply materialise in the best chair in the abode (opinions on what constituted the best varied drastically).
And yet, there Apollo was, pressing the button for the intercom for the Jackson-Blofis household.
Belatedly, he realised that the occupants were unlikely to be expecting him to take the mortal entrance, not now he was a fully fledged god again, rather than a vulnerable mortal body that couldn’t do useful tricks like light-teleportation, but the button had already been pressed, and Apollo was not about to do a knock-and-run. Besides, he’d been invited, yes, but generally even invited guests were expected to use the front door.
There was also probably no harm in allowing Percy control over who entered his home – and how they entered. Olympus knew they’d taken enough control from the demigod over the past few years.
Really, it was a wonder the boy – almost adult now, closer to young man than boy – was willing to tolerate Apollo’s invasion of his home again.
The intercom connected with a buzz.
“Who is it?” Percy’s voice demanded, crackling slightly through the technology. Modern technology and demigods didn’t always mix well, although they persevered remarkably as society kept advancing and their choice was to keep up or turn luddite.
Apollo cleared his throat, an unnecessary action but one that helped announce his presence – and a long ingrained habit that Apollo wasn’t in any real hurry to shake. He liked the way it brought everyone’s attention to him before he started speaking.
“It’s me,” he announced, the words falling away into a silence that Percy didn’t break, and after a few awkward moments, Apollo remembered that Percy couldn’t actually see him from his apartment. “Apollo,” he added on belatedly, and a little awkwardly.
Percy’s silent judgement was impressive, given they were several floors apart and couldn’t actually see each other. Clearly to the son of Poseidon that was a minor inconvenience that was easily ignored.
He also, more pressingly, wasn’t letting Apollo in.
“Paul invited me?” The words weren’t supposed to come out as a question, because there was no question about it. Paul Blofis had certainly invited Apollo into the humble Jackson-Blofis abode. Although, one could argue that the question was actually asking whether or not Percy had been informed by his step father that Paul had invited a god over for an afternoon.
Those seemed to be the magic words, however, as with a put-upon sigh that made Percy’s thoughts on the matter of Apollo’s presence in his home crystal clear, he finally, finally pressed the button to open the front door of the apartment block and gave Apollo entry into the building. Apollo did not waste the invitation, slipping in immediately and following the familiar route to Percy Jackson’s apartment – familiar, because while Lester’s memories as Apollo had been more full of holes than one of Britomartis’ nets, Apollo could recall everything he had experienced as Lester in pin-sharp clarity. Many of those things he would rather forget, admittedly, but traipsing towards the front door of the Jackson-Blofis apartment had not been, inherently, full of uncomfortable trauma.
In fact, Sally Jackson had been incredibly welcoming to poor, unfortunate Lester, and Apollo was not afraid to admit that he was hoping to find some of her seven layer dip waiting for him – or some of her blue cookies, he supposed, but between the two it was the seven layer dip that had captured his heart. Its inclusion of his cabin number certainly didn’t hurt.
He was not greeted by a seven layer dip, tragically. Nor was he greeted by a plate of blue cookies, or Sally Jackson at all. Paul Blofis was also summarily absent, which seemed a little rude given Apollo was here on the man’s invitation.
No, instead he was greeted by his demigod cousin, who looked no more pleased to see him now than he had been to see a mortal, beaten-up Lester and trash-covered street urchin Meg in the middle of one chilly January. Percy was not alone, however. Clinging to him, but staring out at Apollo with wide sea-green eyes that almost identically matched those of her big brother, was young Estelle.
There were not many things that unnerved Apollo – well, maybe there were a few, but most did not apply to this situation, or indeed most situations that he allowed himself to enter nowadays – but one Estelle Jackson-Blofis managed to do exactly that. It was nothing the young girl had done – at scarcely a year old, there was very little she was capable of doing, beyond apparently chewing on her big brother’s hoodie string, which Percy had either given up discouraging, or hadn’t even noticed she was doing. Indeed, to look at her, there was nothing untoward.
True, she had the exact same eye colour as her demigod brother, who had inherited Poseidon’s preferred appearance, which raised a few questions about her origins although Apollo could detect nothing as strong as demigodliness about her. Strains of a distant legacy? Yes, but the same strains ran through Sally Jackson, so that was to be expected. Estelle was no demigod.
She was simply a young, mortal child, who coincidentally had the same eye colour as Apollo’s uncle, and his dark hair, too, but Paul also had the same dark hair, and Apollo had no difficulty in recognising her as being his biological daughter.
He almost, almost, wouldn’t have known any different than what he saw now. Indeed, if he hadn’t seen her as a much younger child, before her original baby-fluff on the top of her head thinned away and grew back strong and dark, Apollo would have been as clueless as his father was – hoped his father was, and the lack of any world-ending lightning storms suggested that so far the king of the gods remained ignorant.
If he hadn’t seen the greys threading through her dark hair, salt-and-pepper, almost but not quite the same patterning as Griscelli syndrome, during his last visit as Lester, he would never have known that the girl was a ticking time bomb, a catalyst that could ignite at any moment.
The signal for Zeus to end the current age of humanity. And Zeus will destroy this race of mortal men also when they come to have grey hair on the temples at their birth, Hesiod had written millennia ago.
The Fates had made an interesting choice, choosing the younger sister of one Perseus Jackson to be the herald, Apollo thought. The loyalty of Percy to those he clung to – his loved ones, family and closest friends – was not something Apollo would’ve chosen to pit against the fall of humanity at the hands of his father, but he was not one of the Fates himself, and understood their workings only when they chose to reveal them.
Needless to say, they had not chosen to reveal their machinations surrounding Estelle to Apollo. If anything, she was hiding in plain sight – nothing about her was Concealed from his sight. If he Looked he could see the spiderweb of her lifetimes, the possibilities glimmering in the sun like gossamer spun silk stretching out towards infinity, the same as any other mortal. The only reason Apollo knew what he was seeing was incomplete was because he’d seen the grey at her temples as a young baby; without that knowledge, he would never have noticed that not all the threads that should be there were there – and he knew his father did not see the threads the way he did.
If Apollo could not see any of her Fates where his father learned of her existence and chose to act upon it, then his father would not see them, either.
“I suppose you’d better come in,” Percy said, disrupting his musings and taking his active attention away from the young, innocent herald of destruction and onto her older brother instead. He still didn’t sound happy to see Apollo, and certainly wasn’t eager to invite him into his home, but his irreverence for the gods didn’t seem to quite extend to slamming doors in their faces. “Mom and Paul will be back soon, they had to go out for a few minutes…” He trailed off, but Apollo could read the judgement in his face just fine: Did you have to pick when they were gone to arrive?
Somewhat embarrassingly, it hadn’t occurred to Apollo to check that his inviter was home when he’d arrived, although in his defence Paul Blofis had specified the afternoon in question, so surely it was common sense to assume that he would be around.
“That’s quite alright,” he said, stepping over the threshold now that he had the invitation and breezing into the apartment. It certainly wasn’t the neatest place he had ever set foot in – nor was it the neatest he had ever seen this particular apartment, either. Apollo’s eyes slid over to Estelle again, who still had the end of Percy’s hoodie string in her mouth and was now gripping at the rest of it with her chubby little fists, too. Percy seemed to have finally realised what was happening to his clothes and was trying to get her to let go whilst kicking the front door shut with his foot.
Herald of destruction, indeed. There was no doubt that most of the mess was the fault of young Estelle, given it was mostly a minefield of various age-appropriate toys scattered across the floor in a child-friendly version of caltrops. At least Estelle had not yet been deemed old enough to be introduced to Lego; scattered Lego bricks were far more lethal than caltrops, even to the soles of godly feet.
As it was, combined with the tipped-over container hanging off the edge of a low table, Apollo got the impression the toys were freshly-scattered, just in time for his arrival. There was the faintest tint of red in the tips of Percy’s ears as he looked away from Estelle and realised Apollo had noticed the mess.
“Uh, sorry about all that,” he said, before trying harder to reclaim the knotted end of the hoodie string from his sister’s mouth with no success. It appeared that Estelle’s stubbornness easily rivalled that of her older brother – Apollo felt a flash of sympathy for Sally Jackson. One headstrong child was already a lot of work. Two of them…
He ignored the small thought that pointed out that both of them had been born with heavy destinies hanging over their heads, like thunderbolt-shaped guillotines.
“It’s fine.” Apollo waved his hand dismissively. “You have not seen Ares’ weapon collection.” Admittedly that was a little misleading – Ares loved his weapons and would never leave his spears, swords or shields littered around like this. However, Apollo’s first comparative thought had been caltrops for a reason.
“Can’t say I’m planning on seeing it, either,” Percy scoffed, which was a wise stance for any demigod to take. Perhaps Ares’ own children might enjoy the experience, but most would find it to be not-so-pleasant. For Percy, who did not get on with Ares in the slightest, it would no doubt be more frustrating than anything. “Estelle, no. Don’t eat that.”
The chubby little bundle that heralded the possible destruction of mankind giggled – not an innocent giggle, no. The giggle of a mischievous child who knew they were misbehaving, and also knew no-one was going to do anything about it. From Percy’s sigh and slumping shoulders, he also knew he wasn’t going to be able to do anything about it.
Apollo gestured at the floor. “Did you want a hand?” he offered, knowing better than to offer to hold the child herself – and not wanting to, not wanting to do anything that might get Zeus’ eyes on her more than they already would be by virtue of being related to Percy Jackson – but more than willing to help a long suffering older brother clean up his younger sibling’s mess.
It was a position he’d found himself in more than once, although his younger half-siblings tended to create messes of far more epic proportions than a single disrupted crate of children’s toys, and attempts to do anything about it were heavily dissuaded on Olympus. Still, he’d cleaned up a few of Artemis’ messes over the years…
“Sure,” Percy said distractedly, perching on the edge of a couch so that his sister was now in his lap and not supported by his arm, thereby leaving him with twice the hands available to try and get Estelle’s destructive tendencies redirected towards something that wasn’t his clothes. Apollo sincerely wished him luck with that endeavour.
For his part, with Percy’s permission granted, he knelt down and began to gather up Estelle’s impressive collection of toys, ruining their aspirations of being deadly caltrops by plucking them off the rug one by one and depositing them back in the crate, which he remembered to put upright after the first couple of toys spilled back out again. Her collection truly betrayed her status as the beloved baby of the family – Apollo didn’t think he’d seen a child so young with quite so many toys, before.
All the better to cause chaos with, he supposed as he dropped a plushie satyr with one of his horns half torn off into the crate.
Millennia of being the centre of attention told Apollo when he was being watched, and the same prickle of awareness had him glancing back at Percy and Estelle, both of whom were staring at him with their identical sea-green eyes. Estelle had yet to relinquish her hoodie-string snack, but Percy seemed to have forgotten that he was attempting to rescue it from her maw.
Apollo raised an eyebrow. “Is… there something on my face?” he asked hesitantly, before a thought occurred to him and he craned his head around further. “Or my back? I swear, if Artemis put another of those kick me signs…”
“No!” Percy said, a little abruptly, before shaking his head. “No, there’s nothing on your face. Or your back..?” He said the last bit like a question itself, as though it hadn’t occurred to him that some typical sibling shenanigans didn’t also occur to gods, even when the gods in question also happened to be twins. “I just… didn’t expect you to clean up like that.”
Apollo sat back on his haunches, a well-chewed and still slightly damp hellhound plushie in one hand – oh the irony – and a slightly disturbing squishy skeleton in the other, and centred his attention more directly on Percy. “Like what?” he asked.
“Like that,” Percy repeated, one hand abandoning the hoodie string rescue mission – not that it had been working on that quest for the past thirty seconds anyway – to gesture broadly at Apollo and the toys still to be cleared away. “Instead of, I don’t know, just snapping your fingers or something?”
Apollo blinked, and looked back at Soggy-Hellhound and Squishy-Skelly. He wanted to say that the thought hadn’t occurred to him, and it was true that it had barely occurred to him, a flicker of a thought dismissed before it could fully form, but in reality it boiled down to Estelle, again. Bursts of godly power in the Jackson-Blofis apartment ran the risk of drawing his father’s eye, and Apollo was reasonably determined to minimise Zeus’ reasons for looking in their direction.
As it was, he was technically causing a risk by being there at all, but if he wasn’t being all godly while he was there, maybe Zeus wouldn’t look too closely.
There were some truths that were best off unspoken, though, and Apollo had no desire to speak into the world the danger that Estelle posed, to herself and humanity at large. Percy would take it badly, no doubt, and Zeus would not miss such a declaration.
“I suppose some of my Lester habits haven’t quite left yet,” he said instead, which was true in its own way. “Why, did you want me to?” It was a dangerous question, because if Percy said yes…
But the son of Poseidon was already shaking his head, as Apollo had suspected he would. “No, it’s fine,” he said. “Maybe if she sees that it’s effort to clean up, even for a god, she’ll stop doing it.” The look he sent his little sister was stern, but it was the sort of sternness that didn’t hold up to scrutiny and Apollo could easily see the bemusement behind the fake frown.
Privately, he thought the herald of destruction lurking behind the angelic face thrived on seeing others suffer through chores such as trying to stop her doing what she wanted, knowing they were doomed to fail. The concept of hard work no doubt seemed fun to her, still safely in the stage of youth where everything she wanted fell neatly into place and only other people had to do boring and tedious things like cleaning up her messes. Her tune would only change once it was her responsibility to clean up her own mess.
In Apollo’s experience – and he had a considerable amount of it, given the number of children he had had over the years, even if most of them he had been unable to pick up strewn toys for – most young children Estelle’s age enjoyed watching others clear up their trails of destruction. He had no doubts that an infant Perseus Jackson had been the exact same way.
Still, he saw no reason to disillusion Percy on the topic. Deep down, he suspected that Percy already knew the truth and was simply denying it for his own sanity, but in the short term it didn’t matter. Estelle was still too young to tidy up after herself, and as she had a loving big brother wrapped around her little finger, Apollo knew it would be some time before she truly had to start finding her own feet and responsibilities in the world.
He didn’t envy her that. If anything, he celebrated it. Every day that Estelle was able to act like a loved baby sister with a doting family was a day that her existence went unacknowledged by Zeus, and if that could last her entire mortal lifetime, then Apollo would be ecstatic.
Soggy-Hellhound and Squishy-Skelly found themselves deposited in the crate on top of Torn-Horn-Satyr, and Apollo resumed tidying up, listening to the sounds of Percy renewing his attempts at rescuing his hoodie string with little success, and finding a smile creeping across his own lips.
It was, in the end, in the hands of the Fates, he knew, but that wasn’t going to stop Apollo doing everything in his own power to keep Estelle safe, too – even if that took the form of picking her toys up by hand.
