Work Text:
Susan’s son is gone.
She knows this. She can feel it in her heart, the ache of loss, so unlike anything she has ever felt before. For everything lost always came back. But her boy, her Lester, he never did.
She’d grieved. Still grieves, her wardrobe never before so devoid of colour.
So tell her how, knowing this, that Lester is gone, dead, and not coming back, that she can be staring directly at him from across the street?
Susan thinks she’s seeing a ghost, at first. Grief in its most condensed form, its spectre haunting her where she’s vulnerable. It wouldn’t be the strangest thing she has seen. Red eyes still haunt her sleep, and now? It’s the face of her son.
Ghosts don’t typically interact much with the living.
She sees Lester—face remarkably lacking any of that acne he’d waged war with in the bathroom through the countless tried and failed products he’d applied to it—and with him, a man she doesn’t recognise, with salt and pepper hair, talking to Lester about something she’s too far away to make out.
That can’t be her son, she knows it can’t; every instinct in her body tells her so.
But her eyes are seeing something different. Her dead son, alive, and with a strange man.
With a surge of desperation, and an anguished cry, she runs to him like a woman gone mad.
“Lester!”
Meg knows something is wrong the moment she sees him.
It’s hard not to when Lester doesn’t look like Lester, at least, not the Lester she’s so familiar with. Because Lester is Apollo and he most definitely looks like that. Tall, blonde, muscly. Everything he had lamented losing all that time back in January, back when they first met.
But every time Lester appeared to her after reclaiming his godhood, he stayed in the form he’d had nothing but complaints for. They hadn’t spoken much on the matter, but she had got the feeling he had got attached.
And yet, here he is. She knows it’s him, can feel it. Meg just knows him like that. And the appearance isn’t that different from those of Harpocrates’ visions he’d cast into their minds, or the description Nero had given when he’d assigned him her target, fully believing he would be the blonde from legend. But he’s different from Lester.
“Lester!”
Apollo can’t help it. He flinches when Meg calls him by that name.
After all this time, everything that name has been through, and all those who know him by it—all of that went in an instant. One heartbreaking, devastating instant.
He’d had plans to have coffee with Paul, a thank you for Apollo coming into his school as a guest speaker earlier that week, though he saw no need to be thanked for that. He’d forgotten just how much he loved to teach, and the Jackson family had already dome him an invaluable kindness.
Still, Paul’s a kind man. And that place did excellent coffee. He’d agreed.
Only he never got that coffee.
“Lester!” cried out a woman, one he didn’t know. Not then.
But oh, did she know him. Or at least, the face he wore.
Lester Papadopoulos.
Apollo had made that name his own, but it was never his to own to make. For Zeus had done worse than make him mortal. Lester Papadopoulos was made a vessel for a god. He’d existed. And like a parasite, Apollo had been forced under his skin, and taken control, wearing him until he had tossed aside in Tartarus.
Lester was dead, and he’d done it. But here he was, parading around in his skin like it was some kind of victory pelt, the spoil of a foe slain.
Everything that had offered him comfort, made him feel at home in that form, it was there that it had evaporated.
He’d felt gross, intrusive. A monster in an innocent boy’s clothing.
But there was one who was more of a monster than he. Another punishment from Zeus, and he hadn’t even tried, not this time. He’d stripped a boy of his life just to get back at Apollo.
Had he less control, that street would have been made an inferno in his rage.
Lester had done nothing, his only crime, from a god’s perspective, was being painfully average. But his was a life to be treasured like Estelle’s.
He hadn’t deserved this. And neither did his mother.
The poor woman had broke down in her grief, clutching Apollo like letting him go would be for the last time. She’d tried ushering him home, getting him away from Paul, but Apollo had stood, rigid and ghost white, like Thanatos was about to come and collect.
“You’re mistaken,” he’d eventually managed. Few times was it that Apollo did not have something to say. But how does one comfort a grieving mother when you have chosen to appear as her dead son? “I’m sorry but I’m not who you think I am.”
“You are,” she had said, cradling his face in her hands. She’d intended warmth, but it had only made him cold. “You’re my son.”
“Apollo.” Paul had looked at him imploringly.
“Lester,” Susan had snapped. “His name is Lester. And I’m taking him home.”
“You can’t,” Apollo had said, managing to wriggle free of her grip without hurting her. His eyes were unimaginably desolate. “I’m not Lester.”
He’d teleported away before she could even think of a response. Just somewhere, anywhere safe that wasn’t there.
He’d needed time to think.
And most of all, its refuge no more, he’d needed out of that skin. His Apollo look offered him little comfort, too uncannily perfect, not a scar in sight, but at least it’s his. At least he’s Apollo.
He’s not Lester.
He’s not Lester.
He’s not Lester.
He’s not—
“Lester!”
Meg’s never seen Lester just flinch like that from his name alone. Weird. Something is definitely going on.
“You forgot to change,” says Meg like Lester has chosen to show up in his pyjamas, rather than the most dressed up she’s ever seen him. Lester and hot should not belong in the same sentence, and she wrinkles her nose at the thought, but here they are. “You look all goddy.”
He looks at her, eyes unfocused before he blinks back into awareness, frowning. Good. “I am a god. I always look goddy.”
Now there’s a thing that Meg never even considered. His voice, it’s different too. Less teenager prone to voice cracks she wasn’t above making fun of and more in line with what you would expect from a god of music. Melodious, like any moment now, he could burst into song, and they would have a number one music hit on their hands.
Meg doesn’t know quite how to feel about that. A face is one thing, but a voice is entirely another.
Lester could be annoying, whiny, complainy, and shrieky, but there had been more to his voice than that. She finds she misses the imperfections. They had been grounding, human.
But Apollo isn’t human. He’s music, other worldly. She knows that’s her best friend, her Lester underneath all that, same quirks and all, but were she to close her eyes now, she couldn’t hear it.
She couldn’t hear him.
“You always look Lestery,” she says, and there’s that reaction again, though a little less extreme. “What gives?”
“Perhaps I wanted a change,” he says, though Meg doesn’t really believe that.
“Did you?” she asks. The question has him floored.
“I don’t—” He sighs, tired, miserable, but perfectly in tune. “I can’t be Lester anymore, Meg. Zeus, he…“
Oh, Meg really doesn’t like the sound of this. Anything involving Lester’s dad is bad news. Of course this is his fault. Maybe he’s upset about him not meeting some kind of godly dress code.
“—is a jerk,” says Meg. Never met him, but she knows enough to know this. “Don’t listen to him. You can be Lester.”
She hates the way his face crumples, her attempt of assurance only succeeding in making things worse.
“No, that’s not it. I can’t be because Zeus didn’t make that body. He took it.”
His voice breaks. Something in Meg breaks too.
“Lester was a real person,” says Apollo.
And suddenly jerk doesn’t even begin to cut it.
(Susan’s son is gone. Again.
And this time, into thin air.
She stares at the space he should have occupied, then at the man he had been with.
“Did he just vanish?”
“I think so,” says the man, blinking. He rubs his eyes. “Though the mist is trying to convince me otherwise.”
Susan blinks numbly. “Mist? What mist? What did you do to him? Where’s my son?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” he says, but his smile is kind. Susan wonders if this man really could have kidnapped her son. “I can’t say I can explain them all, but my wife might have a few answers for you. At least until Apollo gets back.”
“Apollo?”
“Ah, yes. The er—person I was with. He’ll probably need a moment.”
Her stare is blank. “But that was—he was—”
The man winces. “I’ll call Sally. How do you feel about coffee?”)