Persephone Jackson sits in the crow's nest of the Argo as she looks out at the rolling countryside below. Her skin is paler than most remember, and there are dark black-blue bags underneath her eyes.

"Hey."

Percy turns around, the tendrils that had wriggled loose from her long, dark braid streaming out in front of her. Nico is seated next to her in the crow's nest, knobbly knees pulled up to her rounded chin.

"Hi, Nico." The daughter of Poseidon leans her head back, as she stares up above into the white stars.

"How are you holding up?" The younger asks, dark eyes concerned as she tries to catch Percy's green gaze.

Percy sighs softly, and tucks her loose tendrils of hair back behind the shell of her ear. "I can't remember ever being able to see the stars anywhere but at Camp, Nico."

Nico scowls a little, and crosses her legs as she attempts to burn a hole into the demigoddess's head. "Don't avoid my question, Percy."

She lets out a soft laugh, but Nico can hear it, breathy and slightly hysterical. "Sometimes, I think you are so much stronger than I am, Nico." The daughter of Poseidon yanks the hair tie from her braid, and sweeps all of her thick, dark hair over one shoulder, and stares the other demigod in the eyes. "I went into Tartarus with Archimedes, and that gods damn place still haunts my nightmares. After I nearly died, sometimes my vision would flicker, and I'd see Tartarus for what it really is. Monsters, just blood cells in that behemoth's body. Those rivers, just arteries in his huge-ass heart," her voice grows desperate and high. "Did you see Tartarus like that the entire gods damn time you were in there?"

Running her fingers through her hair, Nico lets out a small curse in Italian - nothing too severe, just something she remembers the older boys in Italy saying to sound cool. "Maybe. I don't exactly remember Tartarus all that clearly. Large chunks and snippets? Yes. But it's slowly coming back."

The next laugh, Percy seems to choke on. It is bitter and dry, and just everything that Percy seemed to combat. "I think, that I am going insane, Nico. I really do. I just keep thinking back to that place, and everything that happened there, and what I know because of that gods damn place, and I just-"

She begins to cry, staring up into the stars, right where Nico knows Zoe Nightshade's constellation is, tears rolling and falling onto the wooden bottom of the crow's nest. Persephone Jackson, saviour of Olympus, is crying like a newborn child, hiccupping, and sniffling. It echoes around the two of them like shots from a gun, and the daughter of Hades can feel her heart lurch deep in her chest, and it is hard not to feel just a little bitter.

She knows that it's Archimedes that Percy wants up here, not a scrawny, thirteen years old daughter of Hades seventy five years displaced. It's extremely bittersweet, and Nico is tired too.

"Gods, I am a horrible person," she hears Percy murmur underneath her breath, as the daughter of Poseidon dries her tears with the oversized sweater she wears.

"Why would you say that?" Nico chokes, laughing incredulously. "Percy, you're the gods damn saviour of Olympus! For fuck's sake, Jackson, do you even hear what the younger campers say about you?" She wants to grip the older girl by the shoulders, and shake her like a snowglobe. Shake her until her eyes are bright sea-green again, not this dull forest green they've faded into ever since Archimedes and her burst out of the Doors of Death. "You're a gods damn great person! At least people want you around!"

"Nico-"

"No." Nico cuts Percy off, rage bubbling deep inside of her. "NO! You don't have to deal with these weird, unrequited feelings! You don't have feelings that are considered a sin! You aren't rejected by everyone around you! You don't understand!" She's screaming, and Nico knows that below them, Lea, or maybe Jessica, or whomever is on duty tonight can clearly hear them.

"Maybe you're right. I have it a lot easier than you, most likely, Nico." Percy's eyes are swollen and puffy around the edges, and she reaches over to grasp Nico's clenched hand, rubbing small circles on the top of her palm with her calloused thumb. "But, thank you. I, I am a horrible person. If you hadn't spoken to Bob, he never would have come for Archimedes and I. I gave him to Persephone. Let him become a janitor. Abandoned him, like I did Calypso." She lets out a small breathy laugh again. "I was convinced that I loved Calypso for a while, did you know?" Percy shakes her head, the great, vast black mane she calls hair tangling in one another as she does. "I just...didn't know that the gods hadn't pardoned her until I set her curse on Archimedes, after killing an arai. There were...so many curses just for me. Curse after curse, until I realized that, no matter how justified I thought I was, I still had wronged every monster I killed in some way. I can't even begin to process just how many curses there were just for me. A whole battalions worth, just for me."

Percy's sobbing, crying, apologizing, over and over again in a slurred, rapid sucession, and Nico's just stuck on that one comment - "I loved Calypso for a while." - and her world becomes a little off center.

"Hey." There's another voice, and when Nico looks over, Archimedes Chase is standing in the cramped crow's nest, a blanket draped over his shoulders like a cape. He looks gaunt, and tired too, as Nico scoots over so he can drape the blanket over all three of them. He whispers small, sweet nothings to Percy, who moves so that they all sit in a small pow-wow circle.

They fall asleep like this, Percy's drying tears scenting the air like the sea, and Nico is still reeling. And she wonders, if it is harder to realize that your heroes are never perfect, than to realize that your heart continues to break with every second you spend in their prescence.

wow another genderbend one-shot instead of another chapter of carry on, or always and forever, ren, you say.

to which i reply fug it i hate writing actual stories and that chapter of carry on his half done, and it is giving me a heartache.

but yes. there is angst in here and surprise, the gay trash queen ships perico too. what else in new. but, le gasp, unrequited perico is fun too. will i ever write requited perico? the world may never know.

also archimedes requests screen time because he is a drama queen and yes.

please read blink once it takes place in the same universe, kay bye.