Chapter Text
Jason Grace had learned, a long time ago, exactly how long to wait before he stopped hoping.
It was forty minutes. He'd timed it, once, without meaning to—sitting in the west parlor with a plate of food going cold, watching the second hand crawl around the old clock, and by the time it hit the forty-minute mark something in his chest had just . . . stopped straining toward the door. Filed the evening under not tonight and let himself enjoy what was left of it.
Sixteen candles. Forty-one minutes.
"He said he'd try to make the second half," Juno said, from the doorway. She had her arms crossed over her cardigan, the particular posture she got when she was choosing her words like she was defusing something. "The Hendricks call ran long."
"It's fine," Jason said, and hated how practiced it sounded coming out of his own mouth. Like he'd rehearsed being fine. He probably had, subconsciously.
Juno didn't say anything to that. She wasn't a woman who filled silences just to be kind—Jason had figured that out around his ninth birthday, the year his mother's absence had gone from a wound to a permanent scar. Juno had shown up in it not as a replacement for anything but as something else entirely. She didn't hug him. She didn't tell him things would be okay. What she did was sit down next to him on the parlor's stiff little settee, smooth her skirt, and say: "Blow them out anyway. Wax gets everywhere once it starts running."
It startled a laugh out of him—short, real, the first one since he’d met her. He blew out nine candles for an audience of one stepmother and a catering staff pretending very hard not to be in the room, and the smoke curled up toward the ceiling, and somewhere in the house his father was on a call about hydraulic contracts, and that was that. His ninth birthday.
And his tenth. And eleventh, and twelfth. Jupiter had managed to make it to his thirteenth, just for a few moments, but it made Jason's day. And year. Fourteen and fifteen were flitting appearances, there was always something else, a call or an emergency to attend to.
Jason didn’t fully blame him, not really—he knew he was a busy man. He couldn’t make it to every game or event or competition. But this year, he was turning sixteen. This year, his father promised to come.
And this year, once again, the empty space ot jason’s left remained exactly that—empty. He couldn't even be bothered to call himself, Jason thought bitterly. He had to send Juno down to tell me after an hour. Like I'm just an afterthought.
He probably was, to be honest. He didn't think his father even wanted children—Jason was the result of a one-night fling with his mother, and even after he was born, they agreed to let her have full custody. It wasn't until she died in a terrible car crash, one that tore both him and his sister apart, that Jupiter agreed to raise Jason.
And what a delight that was.
Jupiter had married Juno years earlier—not out of love, Jason understood even as a kid, but out of the particular arithmetic rich men did when they needed a wife who could host a gala and sit on a board and not embarrass the family name in print. Juno had never signed up to raise someone else's grief-shaped kid. She'd signed up for a marriage that looked good in photographs. And yet she was the one who'd shown up to every school function Jupiter skipped, the one who'd learned, eventually, which of Jason's silences meant leave me alone and which meant please don't. Nobody had ever thanked her for it. Jason wasn't sure she'd have known what to do with the thanks if he'd offered it.
Thalia had gotten out before any of this really solidified—seven years older, out the door and into a dorm room the second she turned eighteen, calling home just often enough that nobody could accuse her of abandoning him, not often enough that she had to actually watch it happen. Jason didn't blame her. He thought, some nights, that he might do the same thing given the chance.
Juno stepped forwards and cut him a piece of cake herself, which she never did—that was what the staff was for—and set it in front of him without comment, like it was nothing, like it wasn't the closest thing to I see you that either of them knew how to do out loud. Jason ate his cake at nine forty-five at night at his own birthday party, and he thought: sixteen. Sixteen years of forty-minute waits turning into no-shows turning into some new record he didn't want to calculate. And something in him, some old worn-down hinge, finally gave.
Not loudly. Nothing broke. He just sat there and thought, very clearly, I am so tired of being someone's afterthought, and the thought didn't leave when the candles' smoke did.
Piper heard about it before Jason even opened his mouth, because Piper always did—she had a sixth sense for Grace family catastrophe, honed over two years of dating him and one year of very deliberately, amicably, not dating him anymore.
"Okay," she said, dropping her tray across from him at their usual table, "You've got the face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have the face. The 'my father is a walking Forbes headline with no personality underneath it' face." She said it lightly, the way she said most devastating things, and reached over to steal a fry off his tray without asking, which was somehow the most comforting gesture available to him at that particular moment.
"He missed my birthday," Jason said. "Well. Half of it."
Annabeth, sliding in beside Piper with the focused efficiency of someone who'd learned to eat lunch in the eleven minutes between AP Chem and the rest of her day, glanced up. "Your actual birthday? The sixteenth one?"
"The actual one, yeah." Jason picked at his own food. "Juno was there. It was—" He stopped, then shrugged. "It was fine."
"It was not fine," Piper said, in the tone of someone translating for the room. "It was the exact same thing that happened at your eighth-grade graduation, and your freshman debate finals, and—"
"Pipes."
"I'm just establishing a pattern."
"There is no pattern," Jason said, too fast, and Piper gave him a look that said she was choosing, generously, not to fight him on it right this second. Annabeth reached over and stole a fry too, in solidarity, which was somehow worse than anything either of them could've said out loud. Jason let his head drop back against the wall behind him and stared at the ceiling tiles like they might have better advice than his friends did.
They didn't. Nobody ever did. That was sort of the whole problem.
Two seats down, half-listening to a conversation he had no real stake in, Percy Jackson had—up until approximately fourteen seconds ago—been fully occupied with the extremely important task of trying to convince Grover that pineapple was, scientifically, a legitimate pizza topping. He lost that argument, as he always did when Grover made that sad face that he just coudln’t resist. But something in the phrase missed my birthday had snagged sideways in his chest, some old reflexive thing, the way you flinch when somebody describes a bruise you also happen to have.
Percy didn't talk about his own dad. He didn't really have one, in any sense that counted—the guy had taken off before Percy was old enough to have a single memory of him, and his mom had spent years apologizing for that fact like it was a debt she personally owed her son—which it wasn't, and Percy had told her that approximately four hundred times without it ever quite sticking. What he'd gotten instead, for a few miserable years in middle school, was Gabe—his mom's ex, a guy who never once forgot Percy's birthday (mostly because he never once acknowledged it) and who had a real talent for making a house feel smaller every time he walked into it. His mom didn't wear that ring anymore—she hadn't in three years. But Percy still flinched, sometimes, at the specific sound of a man's voice going low and flat right before it got mean, and he still noticed—clocked it instantly, no matter how well-dressed the version in front of him was—when somebody's absence was doing violence a fist never had to.
So when some rich kid two tables over said missed my birthday like it was a small thing, a shrug-it-off thing, Percy heard the forty minutes underneath it. He heard the years of it. And something old and stupidly protective in him sat up and paid attention, even though Jason Grace was, by every metric that should've mattered to Percy, not his problem.
He knew Jason the way you know someone who orbits an entirely different planet than you—same school, same lunch period some days, occasional group project, nodding-acquaintance distance. He was the golden boy of their school—on the student council, valedictorian track, the kind of last name that got printed on building plaques. Percy had filed him, roughly, under doesn't know what a hard day is.
Apparently he'd filed that wrong.
"What could you do about it," Jason was saying to Piper, not really a question, more a tired rhetorical wall, "Make him care? He's not—it's not that kind of problem."
"I could make him look like he cares," Piper said. "Publicity's a hell of a motivator—"
"No."
Percy, against every ounce of better judgment he possessed, said: "I could help."
The table turned to look at him like he'd started speaking a second language. Fair, honestly. He hadn't said a word to Jason directly in—he did the math—probably three months. And he was pretty sure that was just Percy flipping him off for telling him to stop getting detentions—it wasn’t Percy’s fault the teachers hated him, and he said so, along with a few colorful words.
Jason blinked at him. Then, not unkindly, but with the specific flatness of someone who'd had a very long week: "Yeah? What could you do?"
It wasn't mean. It was worse than mean—it was accurate, the kind of dismissal that didn't even bother being cruel because it didn't think there was anything to be cruel about. Percy felt something spark under his ribs, small and stupid and stubborn.
"I could date you," Percy said.
The table went very quiet. Piper's fry stopped halfway to her mouth.
"I'm sorry," Jason said slowly, like he knew what he heard and was hoping desperately it wasn’t true. "What?"
"You want to piss off your dad, right? Really piss him off, not, like, disappoint-him piss him off, he's clearly used to that." Percy leaned back, warming to it now, mostly because backing down felt worse than committing to a bad idea at full speed. "I know guys like that. Old money, big name, probably has Opinions about respectability. You show up with someone like me on his arm—" he gestured at himself, the jacket with more safety pins than was strictly load-bearing, the general vibe of not on the approved list—"And I promise you, he notices."
Jason stared at him for a long moment. Percy watched him do the math—the is this a joke, is this real, is this an insult calculation—and land somewhere in the middle.
"You don't even like me," Jason said finally.
"I don't know you," Percy corrected. "There's a difference. And I'm not doing it 'cause I like you, golden boy, I'm doing it because I think it'd be funny, and because—" he stopped himself half a beat before the real reason came out, the because somebody blowing off their kid's sixteenth birthday makes me want to break something, and swapped it smoothly for: "—and because your face when I suggested that was worth it alone."
Jason huffed something that wasn't quite a laugh. "This is insane."
"Little bit."
"You're serious."
"Deadly."
Down the table, entirely unnoticed by either of them, Piper caught Annabeth's eye. Some silent, extremely dangerous conversation passed between them—an eyebrow raised, a nod, a look that on any other pair of people might've meant nothing, but between these two had the distinct flavor of a wager being made.
"Fine," Jason said, and Percy would think, later, that he could actually pinpoint the exact moment this stopped being a joke and started being a decision—right there, in the tired, reckless set of Jason's jaw. "Fine. Let's piss off my father."
Percy grinned, sharp and a little delighted at himself. "Now you're speaking my language."