#sofia-not-sophie

Dionysus was just putting on his usual stink, not that his little brother’s comments didn’t sting a little. Aphrodite’s cute comment was the best he would get in this form. She was pissed at him anyways because he hadn’t dated anyone in almost six months.

“Ignore him, you know D has been sober too long.” Artemis appeared, also human sized, across from him on the arm of his throne.

“You know I love you Artemis, but please get off my throne, you’re gonna stink it up with all your moon cooties.” He could feel her energy seeping into it and brushing up against his own in an uncomfortable way. He probably could have been nicer about it, but he was already feeling off from the solstice.

She hopped off the arm and went to her fifteen foot size. “Cooties aren’t real, brother.”

“I’m the god of medicine I could make them real.”

“That’d be fun, I’d definitely get more hunters that way.” She walked across the aisle to her throne and sat down.

Apollo strummed a chord on his lyre, the highest string was the tinniest bit sharp, the kind of thing Apollo was sure only he could hear, but it still bugged him. In the past he would usually tune with a wave of his hand, but ever since he had to painstakingly tune his ukulele every day as a mortal, he found comfort in the practice.

Hades stalked past followed by Demeter, they were arguing, as usual, “And you even cheated on her! She doesn’t deserved to be stuck down there with the likes of you and that son of yours.”

“Don’t talk about my son that way! And besides Persephone has grown quite fond of him, she’s planning a surprise birthday dinner for him next month.”

Demeter scowled.

“Nico’s actually a pretty nice kid Demeter.” Apollo said. Hades looked shocked, and a bit relieved.

“See even the sun and healing god, who am I most antithetical to likes my son.” Hades smirked and headed to his temporary seat.

“Oh. Apollo I didn’t see you there. Why are you mortal sized?” Demeter looked at him.

“More room in the chair.” Apollo shrugged, “And you shouldn’t pass judgement on demigod’s you’ve hardly even seen, let alone met. Although, I guess that would apply to your kids too. Meg’s still waiting on thirteen years of birthday presents.”

“Her birthday is not until next week. I planned on paying her a visit then, since it is not my busy season.” She frowned, as though she was considering going to harass Hades more, and then turned back to her throne.

Demeter had become much more wary of him since he returned, for good reason. He knew Meg probably wouldn’t talk to her even if she made an effort, but Meg also wanted to meet her. Apollo made a mental note to be with Meg on the whole day of her birthday, just in case he needed to tell Demeter to go home.

Apollo made an adjustment on his lyre and the chord rang out perfectly as he strummed it. He looked around the room to get a sense of when the meeting would start. Athena was calmly knitting, Artemis counting her arrows for what was probably the thousandth time, and Aphrodite was now sulking in her throne.

Apparently it was one of those years where both Hephaestus and Ares weren’t speaking to her since they looked like they were getting on better than normal. Ares was standing by Hephaestus’ throne and they were talking about something. Probably the world’s next new weapon of mass destruction, as if the mortals or demigods needed more of those.

Dionysus and Hermes were playing catch down at their end of the throne room. Only two years ago Apollo would have been a part of that game. The ball was almost the size of his current torso.

He could join the game, it wasn’t one of his bad routines as a god. The game helped him out of his darkest-day-of-the-year-induced slump. It had actually been a good way of bonding with his brothers. It was the twenty minutes of the year that at least a small part of Hermes wasn’t focused on messages in some way. The twenty minutes of the year Dionysus didn’t seem irritated with his punishment.

Sometimes they even got Artemis to join and she enjoyed showing off her trick shots.

A wave of air that smelled like rotting fish wafted over. If Poseidon had arrived, that meant Zeus’ fashionably late arrival, with Hera on his heels was soon.

Apollo should probably look more meeting presentable than a mortal sized teenager on a god sized throne.  He sighed and willed himself to be fifteen feet tall and to look like what the others expected Apollo to look like.

Dionysus had been right, his mortal look was unprofessional for a god.

Zeus appeared in a crack of thunder with Hera at his side and Apollo did his best not to flinch. He might not mind having human instincts still, but the Olympians surely would notice, and he’d rather if most of them didn’t.

Meg shoved her boots on and together they picked their way around Meg’s tentmates, who amazingly hadn’t woken up. This was double impressive considering that most of the Hunters of Artemis were light sleepers, since the whole Hunter deal involved a lot of unexpected monster attacks and having to wake up and go tromping through the woods at a moment’s notice. It was possible Apollo was cheating and doing some kind of god magic to block the sound of his and Meg’s voices, but she wasn’t about to try to figure out if speaking voices technically fell under the domain of music or not. And she definitely wasn’t about to ask him and get a lecture on the intricacies of the “vocal arts” at whatever o’clock in the morning it was right now. 

Apollo ducked through the doorway of the tent, and Meg followed him out into the clearing the Hunters were camped in for the night. As she’d suspected, the sun was not above the horizon yet, and the ring of silver tents looked dull and gray in the dim pre-dawn light. Being up this early should have been illegal.

“This way,” Apollo said, still sort of whispering, and led Meg a couple dozen yards past the edge of the clearing, down what looked like a deer path if Meg was remembering her Hunter-mandated animal tracking lessons right. His shoes (those stupid black Vans with the white stripe that he’d been wearing constantly lately, along with skinny jeans and really terrible flannels because he was a skater boy now apparently) crunched quietly on the light covering of dried leaves as they walked. 

Finally, he stopped and turned to face her.

“Okay,” Meg said flatly. “What?” 

It wasn’t that she wasn’t happy to see him, or anything. Aside from the crimes his constantly changing yet consistently terrible fashion sense committed upon her eyes, Meg really did enjoy Apollo’s periodic visits. (Which he was actually allowed to make now, thanks to the recent lift of Artemis’s ban on him interacting with her Hunters. Apollo still thought it was because he had asked his sister so very nicely, and not because Meg had endured a fairly awkward but earnest conversation with Artemis about it and managed to convince her. He thought that mostly because Meg hadn’t told Apollo about the conversation and probably never would, on account of the fact that he would immediately start sobbing out of love and appreciation or something and it would become a whole thing.) So yeah, Meg liked spending time with him or whatever. The problem was just when he decided to drop in at insane hours like this. As much as Meg appreciated the way being a Hunter allowed her to exist close to nature and everything, spending every night on the ground was not great for quality sleep. And now she was out several prime hours of sleep time. This had better be godsdamn good.

“So,” Apollo said. “It’s a bit of a long story, which I can explain if absolutely necessary, but in essence, I am in need of some romantic advice.”

Meg stared at him, genuinely incredulous. “You came to the aromantic asexual person. For romantic advice.”

Apollo spread his hands helplessly. “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” The time having been, apparently, the middle of the night. “But really, doesn’t that make you sort of an objective party? Unbiased, as it were?”

Meg rolled her eyes at him, to make sure he understood that was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. 

Except, maybe he did kind of  have a point. Not feeling romantic attraction meant she could ignore that whole factor and focus completely on the quality of the actions or words or gifts or whatever Apollo was trying to use to make his dates successful. Honestly, Meg still wasn’t clear on what really made a date successful. The other person agreeing to a second date? Getting in their pants? Unclear. She had no experience with a “successful” date on those vague terms, and a grand total of one supremely horrible, definitely unsuccessful one with that one guy from freshman year. She had been repressing the events of that since it happened, because thinking about it for more than one second made her feel the emotion of cringe to the depths of her soul. Which was impressive, considering she was basically immune to cringe after having been exposed to regular doses of Apollo for the past four years. But anyway, the repression would probably continue for the rest of her life and/or eternity, depending on how permanent her stint with the Hunters ended up being. 

Upon further thought (and really, Meg was putting way more thought into this than she usually did for Apollo’s various problems, and definitely more than it deserved—Apollo had better appreciate that), none of that even mattered. Who cared about experience, or qualifications, or dumb stuff like that? Apollo had just served her up the perfect chance to bully him on a silver platter, and Meg would die before she turned down that kind of opportunity. 

“All right,” she said finally, having left Apollo dangling for at least fifteen seconds by now as she was thinking. “I’ll help.”

Apollo beamed. “Thank you, Meg. You’re a wonderful friend.”

Meg concentrated furiously on not blushing at how stupidly earnest he could be. She was not affected. She was not going to give up on her plan to bully him just because he was a kind and loving person who wore his heart on his sleeve. He had woken her up from a unicorn dream, for gods’ sakes! 

Reminding herself of the tragic loss of the unicorn dream worked. The blush retreated and she speared him with an unimpressed stare. 

“What kind of advice do you need?”

Apollo took a deep breath (never a good sign), and launched into a passionate explanation of his dating fails over the past three weeks. Meg tuned out about half of it on the grounds that it was boring and unnecessary exposition, and also that Apollo was going into way too much detail about the various swanky rooftop restaurants with live bands, outdoor concerts, indoor theaters, and Olympic archery ranges that had been the backdrops for these dating disasters. 

(She did manage to figure out what he considered an unsuccessful date, which was that they declined his offer of a personalized haiku and/or improvised ukulele song, and afterwards wormed their way awkwardly out of the possibility of a second date.)

Eventually, like a wide, lazy river, Apollo meandered his way in the general direction of an answer to her question. 

“I’m not sure what keeps going wrong,” he said. “Is it something I did, do you think? Something I said? Perhaps telling that nice young man from last week that he should schedule a doctor’s appointment to get his undiagnosed stage 1 prostate cancer checked out killed the mood.”

Meg decided to ignore that last part for the sake of her overall mental stability and health. Before she could ask Apollo if what he was trying to say, in his usual roundabout and pointlessly wordy way, was that he specifically wanted advice about how to act and what to say on dates, there was a rustling in the undergrowth to the side of the path. 

On instinct, Meg yanked the hunting knife from her back pocket and readied herself in a fierce fighting stance. And then felt really stupid as Artemis emerged from the trees, holding no weapons and wearing a deeply disapproving expression on her twelve-ish-year-old face, with both eyebrows raised and laser-pointed in the direction of her brother. 

“Ah, good morning, Sister,” Apollo said with a dumb little wave.

“What exactly is this about?” Artemis asked, definitely at least a little irritated, ignoring Apollo’s greeting entirely.

“Why, I’m simply having a chat with my dear friend Meg, like I do quite frequently.” He blinked innocently at Artemis, who was not having it.

“And why could this chat have not waited until daylight hours, Brother?”

“Well, it’s a bit of a private matter,” Apollo admitted, his eyes flicking over to Meg in a look that screamed please for the love of Olympus do not tell my sister what I’ve been talking to you about. 

“Apollo’s failing at dating and he wanted to ask me for advice,” Meg said.

Artemis digested this. Apollo shot daggers at Meg with his eyeballs. 

“I see,” Artemis said finally. If Meg didn’t know from her time with the Hunters that Artemis was totally composed and serious at all times, she would have sworn that the goddess was trying desperately not to laugh at Apollo. Though maybe the whole detached thing she had going on was just an act that Artemis put on in front of the people she led who needed to see her that way. Meg wasn’t exactly a people-reading expert, but it wouldn’t be that surprising. As she had learned over the course of her adventures with Apollo, gods had layers. Like onions, or Shrek, or whatever. 

“All right, yes, fine, perhaps I have been having a small amount of…bad luck in my recent dating endeavors,” Apollo said. “Honestly, I don’t know what’s come over me! It’s as if my natural charm has been all but obliterated!”

“What charm?” Meg asked.

“I believe your idea of your own ‘charm’ has always been somewhat overinflated,” said Artemis simultaneously.

She and Meg exchanged a brief nod of deep mutual respect while Apollo pouted in protest.

“Perhaps I’ve been cursed by some angry ex-lover,” Apollo continued, recovering quickly and tapping his chin contemplatively. “I like to believe I leave all of them on good terms, but I suppose you can never know for sure, and I do have a lot of exes…” He trailed off, presumably now mentally running through his mile-long list of exes and analyzing which ones of them would: a) seriously want to screw him over, and b) have the necessary magic powers or blackmail or piles of money to secretly sabotage his recent dates. Considering who Apollo was, it was probably magic powers. It was always the magic powers. 

“Perhaps it’s your attire,” Artemis said flatly, looking Apollo up and down with an expression like she was smelling a Rafflesia flower. (Meg never had been able to grow one at Aeithales, which sucked because they were huge and pink and bumpy and smelled like a corpse, which was basically perfect. But even with her greenhouses, Palm Springs was just a little too dry for such a tropical plant.)

“This coming from the goddess whose signature clothing palette is Shades of Concrete?” Apollo shot back. 

Artemis rolled her eyes. She really was different around Apollo. Well, Meg’s adopted brothers and sisters also made her roll her eyes a lot, so maybe that was just a universal sibling thing. 

“It’s silver, not gray. And regardless, if you’re wearing anything like that around your romantic prospects, I’m not surprised you are ‘failing at dating,’ as Meg put it.” 

Apollo frowned. “This outfit is totally trendy! The skater boy aesthetic is all over the fashion side of Pinterest! It’s not my fault you two refuse to use social media and spend all your time running around in the woods with no cell service.”

“Apollo, do you even know how to skateboard?” Meg asked, genuinely curious. The mental image of him doing tricks at a skate park was upsetting, but she had to know. 

He waved an impatient hand in her direction. “That’s beside the point. My fashion sense is not the problem here, I assure you. It has to be something else. I’m simply not sure what.”

“Maybe it’s the haikus?” Meg suggested. “Haikus aren’t cool anymore, I don’t think.”

“The plural is haiku, Meg, and haven’t you been listening? My haiku are strictly opt-in these days! I don’t thrust them upon anyone, anymore. And besides, the haiku is classic. There is no way it’s become ‘uncool,’” Apollo said, making big, sarcastic air quotes. “I’m the god of poetry—I would know,” he continued desperately. 

“What about the topic of conversation during these dates?” Artemis asked. “You can be quite long-winded, you know. Perhaps you’re boring them.”

Apollo stared at his sister in disbelief. “Me? Boring?”

“Sometimes,” Meg said sagely. Okay, that was mostly a lie. Aside from his date fail stories, which were inherently boring because they were about romance, Apollo usually had a way of making whatever he talked about interesting. If Meg was being honest, she never would have made it through so many years of piano lessons without quitting out of boredom with anyone else as a teacher. 

Apollo’s face did a weird twitchy thing and then quickly smoothed into his Mild Annoyance expression. 

Wait a sec… was he actually upset about this? It was kind of hard to tell when things actually upset Apollo, because he liked to act upset about things he didn’t care about and pretend like he was fine when something really got to him. Meg wasn’t great at…people things, but she’d figured that much out about him over the years. 

It seemed like maybe all the failed dates were making him feel bad about himself as a person. Which was impressive considering he usually had an ego the size of, well, the sun. That could be underthinking it, though. Again: gods = onions. Maybe Meg wasn’t peeling deep enough. 

Usually, at a time like this she would just ask him directly what was really bugging him, and after a little bit of dancing around the thing, Apollo would explain, and then they could figure out how to fix or get through whatever it was. But with Artemis here, would that work? A conversation with three people was way different from a one-on-one. Gods, it was too early for this much thinking. 

Okay, enough. Going with her gut hadn’t failed Meg so far. 

“Is getting rejected making you feel bad about yourself?”

Apollo’s eyes flicked towards her, then towards Artemis, and then back to Meg. He smiled unconvincingly. 

“Of course not,” he said, unconvincingly. 

Artemis, who was at least as used to Apollo’s BS as Meg was, if not more considering she’d known him for thousands of years, looked a little concerned. She might’ve said something, but Meg didn’t give her the chance.

“Well, good. ‘Cause it shouldn’t,” Meg said firmly. “The problem isn’t you—it’s the people you’re picking. Clearly they suck. They don’t know what they’re missing out on.” 

Meg gave Apollo a second to process that. A way more real smile flickered across his face, like sunlight filtering through tree branches. When she was sure he got what she was saying, she said, “Okay, give me your phone.” 

Even though he hadn’t been magically required to follow her orders for years now, he still dug his phone out of the pocket of his stupid skinny jeans and passed it over to her without protesting. 

“Wait, why am I giving you my phone?” he asked, his smile dropping. Except it was too late for takebacks, because Meg had already backed up a few steps and unlocked it. (His password was literally 7777. He was so bad at cybersecurity.)

Meg tapped on Tinder. Despite Apollo’s claims a few minutes ago about her and Artemis not having any cell service in the woods, his phone definitely did and the app loaded fine. The first profile that showed up was for Pine, 65 years old, 0.2 miles away, with a picture of a young woman Meg assumed was a dryad standing in front of a pine tree and making a peace sign. Apollo had that whole Thing about women who were trees, so that was a clear no.  

“Hey!” Apollo said as Meg swiped left. He lunged for the phone but Meg dodged easily under his outstretched arm. “Are you on Tinder? I have my algorithm very finely tuned, Meg! A single swipe in the wrong direction and it’ll start exclusively giving me guys who are really into baseball again. If I have to hear one more prediction about who’s going to make it to the World Series I might spontaneously combust, and trust me, as much as I enjoy practicing the arts of healing, emergency burn treatments are not conducive to a pleasant evening!”

Meg looked at the next profile. Greg, 32, 1489 miles away (so apparently Apollo had his distance range set to like, the entire US) wearing some kind of sports jersey that definitely could have been baseball (Meg knew nothing about sports and was proud of it). She decided the chance that he was a baseball fan was enough to justify this guy being a reject. 

Apollo grabbed for her again, and Meg ducked behind Artemis for cover. Artemis twisted her neck elegantly in Meg’s direction to give her a Look, and Meg gave her a Look back. Hopefully the meaning of the Look, that Meg was doing this for Apollo’s own good, got across.

It must have, because Artemis stopped Apollo in his tracks with a gentle hand on his chest and said, “Give her a chance, Brother. She may have a point. As much as I am loath to admit it, you are a…what do they call it…a ‘catch.’”

With Apollo’s brain apparently taken mostly out of commission by his sister calling him a catch, Meg had time to swipe left on several more lame Tinder people. Another sports fan, a woman making a kissy face at the camera, guy holding an aggressively medium-sized fish, group photo of like seven women at the beach. If you swiped right, did that mean you were agreeing to date all seven of them? Apollo was into the number seven but probably not like that. 

“Um. Thank you?” Apollo said finally to Artemis. “My Tinder algorithm, though…”

“I’m sure it will be fine, Apollo. Meg is a capable young woman.” 

Hell yeah, she was. Meg appreciated that show of faith, even if she’d yet to find anyone good. As soon as she thought that, almost like it was on cue, a new profile popped up that made Meg’s thumb pause mid-left-swipe. 

Jen, 35, 547 miles away in Los Angeles. Her first pic was a close-up of her playing the violin, with an intense look in her eyes that reminded Meg of how some of the Hunters got when they were hot on the tail of that week’s monster. Jen’s bio said that she was in the LA Philharmonic, which Meg knew from Apollo’s insistence on giving her a “proper music education” was a really good orchestra. He’d taken her and the rest of Aeithales to see one of their concerts at the Hollywood Bowl last summer (he’d teleported the whole group instead of driving, since the two of them knew firsthand how painful the Palm Springs to LA drive was). And…no way. Jen had a poem at the end of her bio. Meg didn’t recognize it, since she had convinced Apollo to not give her a “proper poetry education” because her brain would explode from too many dumb words, and also she had school and didn’t have the ability to split herself into multiple Megs to achieve unlimited free time like he did. 

But someone into poetry and music? Perfect. Jen might even opt in to one of Apollo’s personalized haikus and actually appreciate it. Sorry, one of his haiku. Whatever. 

Meg slid out from behind Artemis and shoved the phone in Apollo’s face. “Look.”

Apollo looked. His eyebrows gradually crawled up his forehead in interest like two blond caterpillars. 

“I will admit, she seems like a better fit than anyone I’ve been seeing in the last month or two,” he said slowly. 

“Just say she’s perfect and that I’m better at Tinder than you,” Meg told him.

“I will not be saying that.” Apollo carefully straightened his cuffs like he was wearing some kind of fancy suit and not a grungy flannel. “I will, however, admit that you’ve made what appears to be an auspicious discovery, which almost makes up for the untold damage you’ve wrought upon my Tinder algorithm.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘of course, Meg, you’re a genius and better at Tinder than me and thanks for fixing all my problems as usual,’” Meg said, and swiped right. 

—

“Well?” Meg asked, staring at Apollo expectantly across the empty tent. He’d shown up later in the morning this time, thank the (other) gods, so the rest of the Hunters were outside eating breakfast and they had the tent all to themselves.

Apollo grinned at her, which gave away what he was about to say before he said it. 

“Jen asked to see me again,” he said, radiating joy and also enough happy golden light that Meg was considering rummaging through her pack for her sunglasses. “We have a second date!”

“Told you I was better at Tinder,” Meg said with love. 

“That you did,” Apollo agreed. His one-man sun thing died down a little, so Meg could look at him without shielding her eyes. “I have one hundred percent certainty that Jen and I will work out, but on the off chance we don’t, and I venture back on Tinder to find it filled with baseball men? You and I will be having words.” 

Meg rolled her eyes at him as hard as she could. 

Apollo didn’t roll his eyes back. Instead, he softened. 

“But truly, Meg,” he said. “Thank you. Even if you’re not interested in it yourself, you really are a romantic expert. Perhaps you should get business cards.” He framed an imaginary card in the air with his fingers. “Meg McCaffrey, Master Matchmaker. The alliteration alone sells it.”

Back to his usual self, then. Meg smacked his hands down and went in for a hug, burying her face in another one of his stupid flannels as he patted her back affectionately.

“Are you okay?”

I get snapped out of my daze and notice Apollo has stopped playing and is looking at me worriedly. I felt a wave of affection warming my heart.

“Yeah, just thinking about some things” I replied with a smile.

He nodded slightly and we sat in comfortable silence for a while after that. After a couple of minutes he looked at me and said: “You didn’t pay attention, did you?”

I shook my head smiling sheepishly. He chuckled and closed the lid of the piano.

“You want to go for a snack?”

“You know it”

I jumped up from my seat and rushed to the kitchen. I heard him chuckling and murmuring something that sounded like “some things never change” as he followed me.

I sat down at the kitchen table and began munching on the donuts I grabbed from the fridge. He sat down across from me and grabbed a donut. I kept cramming down the entire pack of donuts without shame. When I shoved the last donut in my mouth I looked up to find him looking at me with fondness is his eyes.

“What?” I asked, my mouth still full with donut.

“Nothing,” He replied looking amused, “I’m just thinking about how lucky I am to deserve a friend like you”

I swallowed and told him “sap” as if I hadn’t been thinking the exact same thing a couple of minutes before. He just grinned at me and walked to the trashcan to throw the empty pack of donuts away as if he couldn’t just make it disappear with a wave of his hand.

We ended up staying up all night watching marvel movies. And when I say we ended up staying up all night I mean he fell asleep after like 2 of them.