Prompt 42, PJO
They pile onto the hayride, pushing each other off their seats and laughing. Will and Nico sat in the corner, Nico laying his head on the other’s shoulder, their hands gripping each other where they rested on Will’s lap. Their legs overlapped as well, linked at the ankles, pressed closely together despite the large amount of empty space on the other side of them. Percy ended up sprawled on top of Annabeth, Thalia, and Grover. His head laid on his girlfriend’s lap, his feet on Grover’s, who wrinkled his nose and shoved them off, Thalia reaching over to give him a high five as Percy tumbled to the floor with a yelp. Annabeth covered her mouth to muffle her laughter, Leo snorting loudly from the other side of the hayride.
Percy grabbed a handful of hay from the floor of the cart and chucked it towards the three on the bench. Grover picked up what landed on his lap, and started chewing on it, Thalia brushing it back onto Percy, who decided to stay on the ground and accept his fate. The motor of the tractor began to hum, and the cart lurched to a start.
“99 bottles of beer on the wall,” Leo started to sing, horribly out of tune, before getting hit in the side of the head with a pebble.
“Kill it with fire!” Percy yelled.
“Not again, Leo. We aren’t doing this again, shut the fuck up,” Annabeth said, glaring at the other. He grinned and continued to sing despite her stare, which promised that he would not die a natural death if he decided to ignore her warning.
“Country roads!” Will shouted, Nico groaning and burying his head in Will’s shoulder, one hand coming up to cover his other ear. Leo switched tunes immediately, happily following along with the new song choice. The rest of the ride out to the patch was filled with laughter and somewhat out-of-tune singing, each person following quickly after the last to prevent another 99 bottles of beer incident. After the last time, when Annabeth had gotten fed up and chased Leo around camp with a knife, they were understandably hesitant to let something like that happen again.
The cart stopped abruptly at the field, jolting hard enough to almost send people flying out of their seats. As it was, Percy rolled across the floor until he slammed into Leo’s feet with a loud groan. Leo reached down to pat him on the head, and Percy buried his face in the floor and screamed loudly before popping up like nothing had happened.
The driver looked quite a bit concerned as they hopped off, before sighing and rubbing at their eyes.
“I do not get paid enough for this,” they muttered, hopping back into the tractor as the teens ran past them, whooping loudly. They took a large gulp of their coffee and resigned themselves to a long ride back to the main farm.
Percy slid to a halt in front of a cornfield, a gateway over it proclaiming CORN MAZE in large orange letters. He swept his arms out in a dramatic gesture, at which Leo began to slow clap.
“A corn maze?” Thalia questioned, “that sounds easy.”
“You have to stay on the path, Thalia.” Annabeth rolled her eyes as the girl pouted.
“It’ll be fun! Plus, I thought we could play Marco Polo!” Percy grinned, deflating a little when no one else seemed enthused. “Please? It’ll be like tag; we have to try to get to the other end as a runner. If a tagger tags you, you become the runner, and find someone else to tag, other than the person who tagged you. Everyone becomes fair game after two minutes though.”
“Why did you call it Marco Polo then?” Nico asked. Percy lit up and pointed to him with a sharp jerk of his elbow, extending his arm straight to the side.
“While you’re the tagger, you can yell ‘MARCO’ and anyone in earshot has to yell back ‘POLO’ so that we can find people in the maze. And yes, Thalia, you still have to stay on the path. It’s no fun otherwise.”
She rolled her eyes. “Are powers allowed? I know that it’s a demigod-run place, but still.”
“As long as it doesn’t destroy their property.” Annabeth looked at Leo, who pouted and shook the fire off of his hands.
“So I can’t make new paths for myself?”
“No.”
“Damn.”
Will turned to Nico. “No shadow travelling either. You know you’re still not recovered from last time, so you’ll have to run like the rest of us.”
Nico sighed, long and deep. “If I must.”
“It’ll be fun!” Will said, lighting up (quite literally, he started to glow when he got happy, a phenomenon that amused Nico to no end while also being very irritating for sneaking around or trying to sleep, and yes, he knew from experience).
“Two taggers or one?” Grover asked. Percy considered for a moment, tilting his head to the side like a puppy. He eventually nodded, holding up two fingers before taking off into the maze. “Thalia and Annabeth are it! Give everybody a minute and then you can come after us!”
The rest of the boys yelped and ran into the maze, hoping to get away from the taggers. Nico was especially motivated, although that was less from a desire to play and more from not wanting to be forced to run around trying to tag people.
Annabeth and Thalia stood outside, grinning madly at each other as they slowly counted to sixty. They wanted to give the boys plenty of time after all, it would make it better when they caught up to them. At the same time, they hit sixty and took off into the maze.
What followed was a series of hilarity and betrayal. Percy, having run into Leo while being chased by Annabeth, shoved the other back into her path. Leo yelped as she smacked him in the chest, baring her teeth.
“You’re it.”
Leo wailed, then turned to race after Percy. “You aren’t getting away after that you traitor! I thought we had a bond!”
“You thought wrong!” Percy yelled, turning slightly to look over his shoulder. In what felt like slow motion, he felt his foot hit a bump, and began toppling forward. He tucked into a roll, springing back up and dashing off, with Leo in hot pursuit.
Elsewhere in the maze, Will and Nico walked along hand in hand. Every rustle had them looking around for the glint of Thalia’s bow, having heard Percy shrieking about Annabeth chasing him and figuring they were safe from her at the very least. They reached a dead end, turning around, and like a scene from a horror movie, Thalia was there, blocking their path.
“Marco.” She called, the word warbling in a sing-song manner. Nico and Will squeaked out a terrified “Polo” as she began to stalk towards them.
She lunged forward and tapped Nico on the shoulder, backing away quickly to head further into the maze. She stopped within earshot of the two, peering at them between stalks of corn.
Nico turned slowly to face his boyfriend, who held up his hands and took a step back.
“Think about this Nico. We don’t have to do this. We can find someone else-”
Nico shook his head, smirking, and reached out to tap Will on the nose.
“You made me come here dumbass, now go tag some people.”
They stared at each other for a moment before Nico took off, meeting up with Thalia and nudging her. “Run.” He advised.
She took his advice and sprinted away from the blonde with a healthy amount of fear. Will might have been a healer, but he was still absolutely terrifying when he had a reason to be, and right now he was stalking towards them with a dark smile.
By the end of their race through the corn field, Grover had managed to be the only one who didn’t get tagged, having used his pipes (which he had gotten much better at playing!) to convince the corn to create a path for him and close off behind him. He argued that he was following the rules of their game, since there was no destruction of property, and he was technically still on a path. He’d come out mostly unscathed, although his hair and arms were lightly dusted with what might have been pollen. The rest looked a little worse for wear. Percy had dried leaves in his hair, courtesy of Leo who had tackled him in order to be able to tag him. Nico sported a bruise on his arm from where Thalia had grabbed him to throw him back at Will so she could escape, only to be tagged seconds later by Percy emerging out of nowhere.
They flopped down onto the grass just outside of the field, panting heavily and wiping sweat from their foreheads. The dull roar of the tractor’s engine caused them to perk up slowly, gazing towards the cart rattling towards them and waving. A couple groaned in relief, Grover muttering something about yummy fresh hay and sniffing the air.
They piled back onto the cart, much more subdued this time, slumping against each other. Leo started to quietly sing, Annabeth reaching out to gently smack him with a limp hand. Will started singing instead, a vaguely haunting tune about someone taking away children. Nico cuddled further into his side, having been unusually comfortable with PDA throughout the whole trip. Percy laid his head on Annabeth’s shoulder, Thalia and Grover leaning on each other in a mutual effort to keep upright, and Leo decided to forgo staying upright in favor of laying down on his bench.
Sally noticed they all looked a bit more disheveled when they piled back into the van, and were much calmer than they had been when she dropped them off. She passed back some snacks and smiled fondly at the group, glancing up to look at them in the mirror. Not a single one had gotten out of their trip without collecting a bit of debris, from the hay in Percy and Leo’s hair, dirt smudges on Will’s face and arms, animal slobber on Grover, and a light scattering of a dusty substance coating the rest. She’d need to clean out the car, but it was worth it for how happy they looked.
The only commotion on the way home was when Leo pulled an ear of corn out of somewhere, although where he had hidden it, nobody was sure. He lit his hand up, holding it under the corn.
“I’m roasting it,” he said in response to questioning looks from the others.
“No you’re not,” Annabeth said. Leo looked down at the corn and yelped, realizing he had set the outside on fire, and began waving it in the air to put out the flame. This only served to make it bigger, the others ducking away to not get burnt and screeching incoherently, too tired to think straight.
Percy waved his hand, yelping as the corn same closer to him. Leo’s water bottle popped open, the contents splashing over him and putting out the flaming corn. The water seemed to sober him, as he stared at the corn blankly before dropping it in Grover’s lap (who immediately began eating it, burnt husk and all) and falling back into his seat. Water dripped from his hair, and he pulled off his jacket to wrap it around his head.
“Sorry Mrs. Jackson,” he said, “I’ll help clean up.”
“Don’t worry about it dear, and I told you to call me Sally!” She shook her head with a chuckle. These kids were a handful, for sure, but she wouldn’t have it any other way. She had always wanted more kids, as much as she loved her baby boy, and most of these kids were in desperate need of a mother, since their own didn’t seem to be around much.
She smiled at Leo in the mirror and he smiled back sheepishly, twisting his hands in his lap. She opened the side compartment and tossed a fidget back at him that he happily caught and began playing with absentmindedly, the soft clicking becoming the only noise in the van as they all calmed down.
The trip home took about an hour and a half, and surprisingly there weren’t any issues on the way, monsters or otherwise. By the time they got home the ruckus in the back had quieted, and Sally smiled at the sight, pulling out her phone. The seven were slumped in their seats, asleep other than Thalia, who was smiling softly down at them and stroking Annabeth’s hair. Sally pulled out her phone and snapped a couple of pictures before Thalia noticed and stuck out her tongue, which Sally also snapped a picture of.
“I’ll print them off for you.” Sally said, and Thalia nodded. The two stayed there for a few moments more, reveling in the quiet comfort of the scene, before beginning the process of waking everyone up and getting them inside to sleep.