Fly Me to the Moon

Thalia likes to watch the skies at night. Percy likes to watch Thalia. So they meet up – or rather, he heads, uninvited, over to the small observatory she runs in the hills just outside of town – pretty regularly. He knows that if she had a problem with it, he'd be out in the dirt on his backside before he could blink, so he's happy just to be let in after knocking.

She works around him, busying herself with telescopes (which he can just about understand) and other bits of equipment (which he can't). Percy, for his part, sits on the ratty old couch in the centre of the dome that's about as close as Thalia has (or will likely ever get) to a living room. He knows she's got an apartment somewhere in the city that her Dad bought her, but she'd never live there even if her time wasn't wholly consumed by stargazing.

"See, I can never actually see the constellations, y'know?" he says conversationally while she's peering through a scope one evening.

"Wrong kind of observatory, Kelp Head," she tells him. "Actually, I'm not sure there's any kind that just looks at constellations. I'm a little more interested in when Antares is set to explode right now."

"Is that likely to be soon?" he asks. "It's just I told Grover I'd be back before midnight today."

"Very soon. Sometime in the next million years," she says.

"Wow. And I thought my rent was coming up fast."

She doesn't respond.

"Hey, I thought that at least deserved a groan if not an actual, y'know, laugh."

"If you say so," she says, still not giving him either. Then she beckons. "Come over here."

He rolls off the sofa and onto his feet, making his way over. One of the highlights of his evenings here is when Thalia caves to his amateurish questioning and decides to show him something cool, if only to shut him up for five minutes. Of course, little of it ever sticks, but what does, he's willing to bet, is down to his teacher's passion and enthusiasm for her chosen subject.

"Take a look," she orders him, and he duly does so, peering through the lens. The telescope is like none he's ever known before, not one of those hand-held things made for looking at landscapes, but a monster of mechanics, built to dissect the universe, planet by planet and star by star. At the other end of the lens is an orange ball of fuzz.

"That's Antares, okay?"

"Got it," he says, still marvelling at the detail the scope could produce from however many light years away.

"Now, take a look through this one," says Thalia, and he turns to see her angling a smaller telescope carefully, and looking through it herself to check its aim. He hurries over, and she whispers instructions in his ear.

"Can you see Antares there? It's the bright, reddish one. They call it the rival of Mars 'cause of that."

There are a lot of dots and specks in the part of space the scope is showing him. He thinks he can see Antares, but the colours aren't bright enough for him to be certain of them. "Uh-huh?" he says.

Thalia seems to take that as an affirmation rather than a question. "Cool. Antares is the head, or the neck depending who you ask, in the Scorpius constellation. Can you see how if you go out to the right from Antares and then back in again, you get pincers? Or else how there's a kind of fan of three of them there?"

Percy strains his eye for a minute. "I… think so?"

"Alright, so go down and to the right, and there's the tail. It's a kind of… a kind of cup, I guess? It loops back up after dropping, which is the sting, see?"

Percy tries, he really does. But there are a lot of stars in the sky, and his eye can't seem to pick any of them out as particularly brighter than any of the others. "Got it," he says.

"And that's Scorpius, see?" she says. He can hear the smile in her voice, and hates to disappoint her.

"Yeah?"

There's a pause. "You don't see, do you?" she asks.

He grimaces. "Not really?"

"I've an idea. Look at me," she orders. He does so, and finds that she really has been standing right next to him, and her face is now no more than a couple of centimetres away from his.

Then she leans forward and kisses him.

One of her spikes of hair has drooped a little and unexpectedly goes in his eye, not to mention that he's so surprised at first that he doesn't kiss her back, and she pulls back, a worried expression on her face.

"Sorry," she says, looking, for the first time since he's known her, nervous. "Was that…?"

"No!" he says, embarrassed. "I just…" words fail him, so he closes the distance between them again and puts his lips back to hers. Her hands go to the sides of his torso, and they lean into each other for a moment that he wishes would last forever.

Then she ends it and he curses himself for not enjoying the moment properly, but she's smiling, so he's not without hope that there might be another in the future.

"Thought that would make you see some stars," she says, smirking at his slightly dazed expression. "Now budge up," she orders, and he duly steps aside to let her get at the telescope. She peers through it for a second and makes an adjustment to one of the dials. "OK, look?"

He puts his eye back to the eyepiece. "Yep."

"Antares is near the top right corner, still the reddish one – got it?"

"This lens is round; it doesn't have corners. Ow!"

"I'm here trying to educate you and you repay me with lame obtuse jokes?" she asks.

"I'm here making jokes that aren't hurting anyone and you're walking around with WMDs on your feet!" he objects, gesturing to the pointed boots she's tapping against the floor, though both of them know that the jab she gave him with her foot wasn't that hard and that he doesn't really mind.

"You're just lucky I hate stilettos," she says, "but I might go and buy a pair specifically for stabbing you if you don't pay attention. In fact, I kissed you to get you to pay attention here. D'you know there are men who would kill for a kiss from me?"

"Yeah but Luke had a couple of screws loose, didn't he?"

"Maybe, but he had good taste in girls," she tells him. "Back to the grindstone, Jackson."

"I didn't realise I was back in elementary school again," he complains, before taking another look. "Okay, so top right… Wait, the really bright one?"

"Yes, Percy, the really bright one. I did say that earlier."

"I mean, you didn't say it was that bright."

"Whatever, Kelp Head. You see the rest of the scorpion?"

"Er..."

"Pincers up and to the right, body and tail down and left."

Percy chews his tongue as he searches for the pattern that everybody except him seems to be able to find.

"If it helps, in Indonesia, some people call it a swan, and some reckon it's a leaning coconut tree."

"Eh…"

"And in Hawaii, they call it The Big Fishhook of Maui."

"What, like in Moana? Wait, yeah, I see it!"

"Of course it's the ocean one that helps you," she scoffs. "You do know that Moana's based on real Polynesian culture, right?"

"Yeah, but how am I supposed to know which bits you can trust? Like, was that chicken based on real culture!?"

"Shut up, Percy," she tells him.

He turns and, emboldened by the earlier kiss, smirks. "How about you make me?" he asks.

"I'm tempted just to gag you for that," she tells him. He yelps as she treads very deliberately on his foot, but it's just to make up some of the height difference between her mouth and his. She compensates for the last inch or so by reaching around his neck to drag his head down to her level – and he's only too happy to follow her lead.

"You have no idea how long I've been waiting to do this," she tells him, breaking the kiss for a moment.

"I guess we've got some time to make up making out then," he says. "Does that mean we're spending all night out here?"

"Didn't I say it could be a million years before Antares blows up?" she asks. "So, unless you've got a better idea..."

He does have a better idea, actually.

"Where the hell are you taking me?" she asks him, but she doesn't doubt him enough to let go of the hand that's dragging her along the pathway in the night.

"It's a surprise," he insists. "Besides, didn't I tell you I told Grover I'd be back by midnight? So if I was planning to murder you or anything I'd be on a super tight schedule."

They might only just have shared their first kiss, but Percy's known Thalia long enough that he's comfortable taking her out this way, where he's never taken anyone else before. It's only a ten minute walk away from the observatory, but there aren't any real roads that lead there and it's hidden by headlands so that you can only really find it if you're looking for it.

He adjusts his grip on her hand, fearful of accidentally letting her slip away, and she follows him up the last dune.

"I mean, the observatory's for looking at the sky, but it only works if you're looking through the telescopes. So, if we're too busy for that, I figured we might as well come outside," he says, resting a hand on her waist to steady her as they reach the summit.

"I'll admit, I've seen worse views," she says, and the arm she loops around him before pulling herself close and resting her head against him makes it clear that that's a very real compliment.

The sea lies virtually motionless in the bay, and the moon, is dropping diamonds into it tonight. The light, dim though it is from the small and far-off crescent, shows up every imperfection and tiny wave while the water rests.

Far off from the city as they are, the stars above are out in all their glory, doing their best to match the beauty down below. The Milky Way truly looks like a galaxy, and Percy's neck cracks as he tries to take it all in. It shows the depth that it never can through all the pollution of the city, hanging over the earth like an ocean all of its own.

"I never even knew this place was here," she says. Then, unexpectedly: "My dad would hate it."

"Really?"

"Yeah, he has this thing about the sea. I think he's convinced that if he sets foot on a beach a shark'll come and eat him."

"But you don't mind?"

She shakes her head. "No, I like it plenty. It's flying that I hate, which embarrasses him. I just hate the feeling of being so high up that if I fell… you don't tell anyone about this, okay?" He can tell that she feels like she's told him too much – certainly, she's never been so vulnerable to him before.

"No, I hate heights too," he says. "I used to refuse to even go in a plane at all when I was a kid. I still only go now if I really have to."

She nods. "You know, I feel like I should apologise in advance about this."

He suddenly becomes aware of the minutiae of the digestive process within his body as his stomach churns in response to that. "Why?" he asks, trying to sound casual.

She bites her lip. "Because you've brought me out to this beautiful place in the middle of the night, with views like nowhere else in the entire state… and I plan on spending the whole time we're here staring at your stupid fish-face."

He grins, mostly in relief, a little at the insult. "Tell you what," he says. "I'll do my best to distract you from the views if you'll do what you can to distract me."

Her eyes light up like electricity. By the time she says "Deal," she's already closed most of the distance between them, and he stops the end of the word from escaping her mouth as he captures her lips in her own. The kiss is even better than the first two, and for one glorious moment, he feels like they'll never part – and then another glorious moment, and then another as he keeps kissing her for as long as she will keep meeting him halfway.

They do part, eventually – but only for a moment.

So, I don't actually know the first thing about astronomy. Because of that, most of this is written as vaguely as possible in regards to that, and what detail there is may well be wrong.

Despite that, though, my brain decided that an observatory was a great setting for a Perlia fic, and as that's a criminally underappreciated and underwritten pairing, my fingers went along with it and typed this thing out. Not to mention that the premise seemed appropriate due to so many things being named after mythological figures.

This was possibly the hardest work out of all the one shots I've written so far, and I think that's because I started it without knowing whether it was just gonna be fluff or actually have a plot. So, I guess, let it be a lesson to you (and also to me) that you should at least have a vague idea of what it is you're gonna write before starting writing it. I think, on balance, it's probably safe to say that this one ended up on the super super tooth-rottingly sweet side of fluff. It is what it is, and in retrospect, I think that what it is was basically an exercise to keep me writing.

That said, hope you liked it,

Smash those like, share, subscribe and notification buttons – wait, no, wrong social medium…

Please review,

etc.

- JeffJeffJeff