Frank

Hazel might as well have been fuming at the train station. Leo and his husband kind of kept it. She's homophobic so... That's her one flaw. I love her for everything else, though.

"Hazel, honey," I said, figuring it had something to do with Nico. She hasn't spoken with or seen him since our wedding. He sent us a package for the twins when he found out she was pregnant with twins from Jason and she threw out everything. "what's wrong?"

I read the texts and it wasn't hard to tell that Nico has dropped Hazel. In the last number of years, he has moved on completely.

He literally said he'd rather be married to Percy than be her brother.

That's pretty fucking blunt.

But she calmed down, never responded to him. We asked Percy for his address, and he gave it to us and then told us his schedule for work.

It took a while, but we were able to track down Percy's house from our hotel that Monday and we figured he was home.

His house was the nicest house house outside of like Annabeth's. But she's an architect.

So we knock on the door and a guy answers the door. Not Percy. A teenager.

It wasn't Carlos. So I'm assuming this is his son. Phillip? No, it was something else. It started with that F sound, though.

Nico couldn't tell us because he was at work.

"Can I help you?" This kid asked, not exactly being rude, but not expecting visitors.

"This is like the eighth house we've been to, so I hope so." Leo told the kid. "Is Percy Jackson here?"

"Why do you ask?"

"Please," Annabeth insisted that we weren't going to hurt them. "We're old friends of his."

"Oh!" His attitude changed after that and he let us in. "Sorry, he said you guys would show up tomorrow. He is on his way home from um..."

"Work?" Frank suggested. Hazel wasn't here. She refused to see either of them so.

"Yeah! Work!" He agreed. "Sorry, English is weird to speak."

"Is it not your first language?" I figured it was a legit question, being I didn't know that English was Percy's second language. If any of us did.

"No," he told us. "German is. Vati taught us both, but German more important. We lived in Germany."

Figuring that made sense if Percy learned German, we went with it and Percy got home.

Leo

IM SORRY HOW DOES PERCY STILL MAINTAIN HIS LOOKS?

My husband agreed that he was real good looking. Like, good for Nico for getting someone good looking that also has a good personality.

I mean, my husband, Marco, is pretty good looking, too. I can't complain.

"I thought you guys were coming tomorrow," Percy remarked as put his keys on a hook. "The second."

"Is it not the second?" Annabeth questioned as Percy shook his head. "Monday the second."

"It's the first," he corrected her. "Monday the first."

We all looked at each other because our hotel rooms are only good for the second to the ninth.

We're dumb.

"Do you guys have somewhere to stay tonight?" He knew what we were thinking.

"No..."

He sighed.

"Well I have a basement," at least he was nice and offered that up to us. "Nico probably has room at his house, too. But the kids do have school tomorrow."

"Doesn't that mean you work tomorrow?" Jason questioned being he did say he a teacher.

"No," he told us, shaking his head. "I have classes Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So I can critique stuff at home on Tuesday and Thursdays. It's nice."

"I thought you were a high school teacher." My husband commented and the others agreed. But I remembered.

"I'd never teach High school," Percy insisted, offering us something to drink. "I already have a teenager. I teach at an university."

"I still can't believe you managed your PhD." Annabeth didn't mean it in a ride manner, as bad as it sounds. "Like Percy, you failed half of your classes in high school."

He just smiled.

He told us we could look around, though. He was going to change out of his work clothes. So we did.

It was a really nice place. The kids were doing homework so they didn't say much to us. But there was a lot of photos. A few sort of portraits, some art hanging up.

"I didn't know Percy liked art this much," we heard Frank remark in a room we hadn't been in yet. "Annabeth, what did Percy go to college for?"

"Um... I think he wanted to double major, I don't remember if they let him." Annabeth told us. "I think it was like psychology and history or something like that. I might be wrong on psychology, but there something with human behaivor in there. Why?"

We go into this room, and it was breathtaking. I mean, the amount of art was overwhelming.

"Is that..." Piper fell speechless, looking at something hanging on the wall.

"Wha..." We turn around and we were faced with a haunting photo. Just because you knew what it was as soon as you saw it.

He must have paid at least €3,000 for that.

A few minutes later, Percy came down to us staring at this image. None of us have ever been to Poland. Nico might have been, when he was little.

But gods, this almost puts you there.

"Kind of freak, isn't it?"

We all jumped at the sound of his voice and turned to face him.

Fun fact, my husband is a History Teacher and he has an entire class for WWII and the Halocaust.

The class maxes out every semester. And he has two of them a semester.

"I have a copy of that photo in my class," Marco told Percy. "How much did you pay for that? Is the original?"

"Probably €20 or so to get it developed."

That didn't sound right.

"So it's not the original?"

"It's the original," Percy assured my husband, and we're all kind of in shock because like I said, it would've been at minimum, €3000. It's a pretty popular photo of Auschwitz. It was from a German student. He remains unnamed. "I took it."

"Percy!" I mean, Frank wasn't the only one who assumed the worse. "You stole that?"

"I took the photo, Frank," Percy corrected the son of Mars. "As in, with my camera. What do you guys think I did in college? Become an international criminal?"

"Well, no," Annabeth insisted. "But didn't you go to college for like psychology or something?"

"Yeah," he assured us, grabbing a box and putting it on a chair, opening it up. It was a bunch of degrees. "Originally. I was minoring in history, though, and then I switched that to a double major and then I like focused on WWII, and after I got my 2 year in psychology, I kind of got into art and then I decided to go into that and decided to get a master's in WWII stuff and then I got my PhD in Art and Design with a minor in Art Psychology."

I looked at him, kind of scared.

"How far in debt are you?" I questioned.

He shrugged.

"I'm paid off." Percy told us and our jaws dropped. "I paid off college debt about... 8 years ago? No, 7 years ago. A year after I graduated, I was paid off."

"How big are your payments?" Jason questioned.

"Per month or year?"

"Month."

"It was like €85."

I was going to have a seizure, because that means he went to a cheap ass school but like he's really successful and...

Holy shit.

Percy

It was a good weekend. It was nice to see everyone again.

But it was a Tuesday. So I didn't have work and Nico was over. It's been a little over six months, he was actually in the process of moving in. Him and Carlos were.

Well, he goes to grab a pen from my studio and he's been in there, but not since I put up the Arbeit Macht Frei gate photo. He hasn't seen it.

At first I figured okay, he couldn't find a good pen. I needed to get a lot of new ones. But 5 minutes go by, and that's not right.

So I head down to the studio and he's facing the photo, on the ground, shaking. Out of it.

"Nico?" I asked, rushing over to my boyfriend and kneeling down. I had enough sense to know that this was some form of an anxiety attack. I had to ground him.

I sat down across from him and rubbed his arm, his back, anything to keep him with me.

"Hey, Nico," I whispered, figuring that his senses are going to be more sensitive than normal. "It's going to be alright. Just focus on my voice. Stay with me."

I hummed like the only Italian song I knew, which was one I heard Bianca singing. So I imagine Nico knew it. And eventually, it seemed to work.

He was very shaken up, but he could do stuff. So we headed down to the basement, taking a break from moving.

"Have you ever not wanted to remember something?" Nico asked me, a lot more vulnerable than he's ever been, if I remember. Even after Bianca died. "Like, it's so bad or you just didn't care for it enough so you just stopped thinking about it?"

The first twelve years of my life?

"Of course," it was sad that that was my response. "I mean, I haven't completely forgotten. But I just usually don't think about it. Why?"

"I uh... I mean, I knew that it happened to me," Nico explained, his mind just everywhere right now. "Bianca talked about it sometimes. Dad did, too. He doesn't anymore. I think he forgot. But I never had any memories from it myself."

I had a really bad feeling about it, but I had an idea and I asked.

"From what, Nico?"

He was shaking again.

"The camps." He told me. "Buna and Buchenwald and Dachua and Birkenau, Auschwitz..."

He stiffened up.

"I had a twin brother," Nico told us. "The first place we were sent to was the hospital at Birkenau, and it was the last time I saw my two baby sisters and my older brother. They were killed when we got there. Nikolas and I were experimented on. Dr. Mengele was the dude who like experimented on us, I don't know how well known he is. But he was torturing my brother and like keeping track of my vitals and he killed him. Went too far with the knife."