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Athena didn’t understand her father’s plan, here.
Turning Apollo mortal and sending him off to fight Python… it was unwise, as his half-blood son had told him, nearly a year ago now.
There was something she was missing. He had a plan, she was sure of that, but she couldn’t figure it out.
Apollo had managed to beat the odds so far, with two emperors dead and two thirds of the Triumvirate falling apart without them. She had no doubt that with the help of the demigods of Camp Half-Blood, the third would be dead by the end of this battle, and Nero’s empire would finally collapse.
But Python was an entirely different story.
Even with all the scraps of godhood he’d gotten back… he was still almost entirely mortal.
She could not imagine how he would manage to beat these odds, no matter how many times she turned the problem over in her head. The thought of Apollo recreating his most famous myth in the soft, breakable body of Lester Papadopoulos was as ridiculous as it was frightening.
Did Zeus really think he would succeed?
She glanced sideways at her father. His mouth was set in a firm line, his brow furrowed, looking like he’d aged centuries in the past few months. Looking like he was on the way to a funeral. His eyes held more emotions than she’d ever seen in them, more than she could even name, all of them clouded with something like sorrow…
Oh.
Oh, she was a fool, wasn’t she?
An insistence on no divine assistance at all. A note of disappointment in his eyes every time Apollo managed to pull himself out of Thanatos’ grasp. A mourning suit for a son that wasn’t yet dead.
Zeus didn’t think Apollo would succeed. He didn’t want him to. That was the point.
It wasn’t a punishment, it wasn’t a test, it wasn’t a trial. It was a blatant assassination attempt. Athena was a fool for taking so long to see it.
She knew Apollo had fallen out of their father’s favor. She knew he was far from being the favorite son that he had been millennia ago, that everyone seemed to think he still was.
But still. The thought that Zeus had sent one of the Olympians, one of her brothers, to his death…
The throne she was sitting on felt colder than it had ever felt before.
Had he thought this through at all?
He had to know that Apollo’s death would hurt their pantheon more than it would help his power, if it would even help his power at all.
Apollo was more than their Sun, more than their Healing and their Plague. He was more than Music and Poetry and Prophecy, even though those were the domains mortals thought of first.
He was Knowledge, he was Education, he was the Arts, he was Order and Harmony and Reason. He was Civilization itself. He was one of the most important pillars bearing their pantheon’s weight and keeping them above the clouds.
And even ignoring how important his domains were… Apollo had always been the most beloved of all of them. Both by the mortals, and by the other gods.
He gained love and loyalty and belief of everyone who ever met him without even trying, something the rest of them had never been able to replicate. Something that made all of them, even Athena herself, admire and resent him more than they would ever admit.
Something that made their king afraid of him.
She knew that Zeus had always seen Apollo as a threat, despite how hard he’d tried to dumb himself down and make himself as palatable as possible while still shining brightly enough to be who everyone needed him to be. She’d known what he was doing, that all of it was an act, because she was the Wisdom to his Knowledge and she’d known him so many centuries ago and she’d known that he knew what he was doing because he always did. But she didn’t know if Zeus knew that, if he even knew Apollo was acting at all or if his suspicions simply came from his own paranoia, from seeing himself in his son.
Either way, he believed Apollo was a threat. And while he was right that Apollo, more than any of them, had the potential to be a threat if he really wanted to be, the thing Zeus didn’t understand was that he didn’t want to be. That he wouldn’t be, unless Zeus made him into one, which… was precisely what he’d been doing.
The only reason she could think of for him to finally fight back against the tyrant they all pretended Zeus wasn’t was if the ones he loved were in danger. He’d always had the biggest heart out of all of them, always cared much more than a god was supposed to, even when he’d been pretending not to care at all. And now… now he’d spent six months with the mortals he loved so dearly, laughing and fighting and singing with them, bleeding for them and seeing them bleed for him. If he somehow survived his final fight and made his way back to Olympus, she didn’t think he could go back to pretending. Not after everything.
No, he would continue to care, as he always had, and the only difference would be that they would know how much he cared. How much he loved them, with his big, bleeding heart that he’d tried so hard to hide but never could. Not from her.
She… was starting to think that Zeus hadn’t thought this through at all. Whether or not Apollo survived, the King’s position would be more precarious than it ever had been.
Their world was changing. They were changing. Things would not, could not stay as they were. Apollo would not let them. Whether or not he was here to see the changes he made, he would make them. He had already started making them.
Whatever happened, Athena intended to be on the right side of history. And after everything he’d done… that side wasn’t Zeus’s, was it?
No, it wasn’t. She was certain of that.
And she remembered who Apollo was before. Who he’d always been. The Knowledge to her Wisdom. The Sun that all of Olympus looked to warmth and light and love.
Her brother.
So when Hermes asked them all for any final bets, she went all in on Apollo. She never bet on anything unless she was certain she would win, but for the first time, she made her bet based on faith alone.
She wasn’t certain of Apollo’s fate, but she had to have faith in him. If she didn’t…
Gods relied on belief. If nobody believed that he would succeed, that he would survive this, then he had no chance. If all of them accepted that they would lose him, then that was what would happen.
So for once, she ignored her own knowledge, ignored her own logic, ignored the probabilities and the impossibilities and the statistics running in the back of her mind like they always did. She ignored the more emotional part of herself, too, the part screaming that this was it, that he was as good as gone, that she was going to lose her brother.
Despite everyone else betting against him, despite all the obstacles standing in his way, Athena believed in Apollo. She believed in him because she had to, because if he had nobody else’s belief he had hers, and that had to be enough to give him a fighting chance.
He would come back, she told herself. He would succeed and survive and come back to her.
And when he did, she would make sure he knew that she had bet on him, that he had her belief. She would make sure he knew that she was on his side. She would make sure he knew that she was still his sister and he her brother, no matter how far apart they had grown.
And maybe, when she did, Athena would finally have her Apollo back. The knowledge to her wisdom, the emotion to her logic. Her brother.
And if he didn’t come back… if Zeus’s plan, somehow, succeeded…
She couldn’t let the king who killed someone on their council keep his power, and she couldn’t let the one who had killed her brother go unpunished. Changes had to be made.