My standards of revision and editing have not been met with this particular fic and I sure would have liked to make it fluffier but it's already late so what the heeeeck!

Basically the song that goes with my emotions right now. So sorry about the delay in this story, I know that people get excited for the Clarisse and Chris ship week because it's the only time I get around and actually write them. I know that the friendship week story hasn't happened yet, but it eventually will. As mentioned in another author's note on who-knows-which story, I had the back to school week that needs to go back to hell, so I ran short on time and energy and, you know, basic personality. I know you enjoy it anyways.

Disclaimer: I don't own the characters portrayed below.

Domestic Life

Clarisse was more than happy to stay tangled up in the swarm of sheets and limbs that she was engulfed in. But they didn't have any real curtains anywhere in the house yet, and so the light and warmth on her face got her up, and once she was up that was it. Chris was still out cold, of course. For a child of Hermes, he slept too soundly. Last time his excuse had been that he knew that nobody would sneak into their room in the middle of the night because Clarisse would gut them like a murderous sleepwalker.

Anyways, just as she was talking herself into how her shifts had been long this week and she was lucky that she wasn't working on a Sunday and she really did deserve more sleep, she shot up in bed.

Sunday?

It was Sunday.

Shit.

"Chris," she said shaking his shoulders. "Chris… Chris, wake up dipshit…"

"Hermengedaaaagh," he muddled. His arm was pretty much stuffed inside his mouth.

"Chris, it's Sunday and it's..." she stretched her neck to see the alarm clock "11:00 AM."

"It was bound to happen," he muttered.

"Your mother's coming over for supper in six hours," she said.

"OH SHIT," Chris said shooting up.

Clarisse knew a thing or two about in-laws. She knew that her stepdad's family had split feelings about Clarisse's mom. Some of them hated her and some of them liked her more than they liked her stepdad. They were exhausting to keep track of at Christmas, they were giggly and awkward at family reunions, and they were vengeful and judgemental. She knew that Athena had tried to kill Percy when she'd walked in on his proposal under some shrine to Aphrodite on Olympus that Annabeth had designed. She knew that Jason Grace and Tristan McLean were practically best friends.

Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia was something else.

For starters, she spoke poor English, and Clarisse's Spanish wasn't as great as she wished it was. So when she came over, which wasn't often since it implicated a plane from Columbia, sometimes they got each other wrong. For example, Clarisse had referred to something as "embarrassing" and Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia had thought that she was pregnant.

Secondly, after her original run-in with Hermes, Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia had found a happy life with a very rich man and had a nice family of non-godly kids in a very, very big house that Clarisse had gotten lost in when they'd visited two years ago. Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia knew how to keep a house, and her standards indicated that she thought everyone should- particularly Clarisse.

Thirdly, Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia was an avid drinker of coffee. She wasn't a morning-cup kind of person. She was an all-day can't-stop-won't-stop coffee enthusiast. When they'd bought the house, Clarisse and Chris had considered the proximity to Starbucks as a factor. So Clarisse had to stock the house every time, and not with any coffee, but with 'las cosas buenas'. Also their coffee-maker tended to need replacement soon afterwards.

Fourth, Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia (and the entirety of the Rodriguez Valencia family) was incredibly family-oriented. She'd come from a large family and had a large family- Chris was the oldest of her eight children- all of which Clarisse was stressed out to know about in full names, whereabouts, children, spouses and occupations. She loved Chris more than her own life. She'd learned to love Clarisse like a daughter too, which was a weird but nice feeling. And that kind of love and acceptance meant that Clarisse had grown to see her mother-in-law as a kind of mom too, and Clarisse had this habit of not wanting to disappoint her parental figures.

So even though Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia was a strong, happy, loving woman; the fact that the house currently looked like a pig sty was not good.

"This isn't good," Chris said.

Their house was a small little townhouse. You walked into a living room, a dining room and then a kitchen that would lead you to the bathroom. Clarisse wasn't sure when the last time that had been cleaned was, since she'd been on shift most of the week and had actually had a lucid and productive conversation with Chris for the first time last night. The rest of the floor was a mess.

Laundry from a few or so ago that was still to-be-folded was in the living room. The sink had become overloaded with dishes and so now they were laying on the living room. Since Chris had been sick on Monday, there were blankets tossed up on the couch. Sweaters and socks were everywhere. Boxes from the move last Saturday were still taking up as much floorspace as furniture did- and they were stacked. The amount of takeout that they'd had this week was record breaking- what, with Chris coming home from work exhausted and slightly sickish and eating alone, and then Clarisse coming back at ass-o'clock in the morning and also eating alone (the only embarrassment that this had ensued was when they both ordered from the same pizza joint on Wednesday and the same delivery guy came by). Besides, Clarisse had wanted the crunchy and health-destroying taste of frying in her mouth about 24-7. The trashcan was can was stinking the place up. Flowers that the neighbours were giving them had withered in various unstrategically placed vases (or empty cans). A light bulb was burnt in the kitchen.

None of this had hit them all week.

"Well, shit," Chris said once Clarisse got down the stairs, dressed and showered.

"Yeah," she said.

"This is kind of a mess."

"That's what you get when you get sick the day after we move in."

"I told you that going out for seafood wasn't a good idea," he said.

"It was not the seafood," Clarisse said bumping her hip against his. "Besides, it was yours. Do we even have anything in the fridge?"

"I did inventory."

"Awesome. And?"

"If my mother really likes mustard, maybe we can feed her. Oh, and yogurt. We also have yogurt. And some leftover spanakopita from Monday when you ordered Greek food, but there's some green fuzz on that that I don't think is spinach."

"Okay," Clarisse said. "So you will go grocery shopping…"

"For what? What are we making for supper?" Chris said.

"You'll be doing grocery shopping, so you can figure it out," Clarisse said. "I will clean the bathrooms."

"I'll help tackle the living room when I get back," Chris said.

"Right," Clarisse said. "Wait- did we bring soap when we moved?"

They looked at each other. They'd moved in from a small apartment they were renting downtown, near the university campus. They hadn't been that comfortably installed. They were only now what you could call 'adults' who were 'settled down'. And even then, the basement was currently occupied by a cardboard box fort that Chris had ingeniously designed.

"Okay, I will get soap at the store..."

"And we'll wash the bathrooms when you get back," Clarisse said. "Oh gods, is the guest room clean?"

"Do we have a guest room selected?" Chris said. "Apart from the one where that twelve year old on his way to camp crashed..?"

"And did we take out the bloodstains in that one?" Clarisse asked.

It was this kind of conversation that showed them that they were grossly unprepared for this visit and that they had to get moving. Fast.

The first complication of the day was when Clarisse couldn't find garbage bags and had to call Chris so that he could buy some, that way she could start cleaning the main floor out.

She folded laundry, for what that was worth, and put that away in the upstairs closet that didn't really have an organisation to it yet. Even their own room had no organisation to it.

She surveyed the kitchen. Chris had tried cooking when he was sick and burnt some chicken breasts so badly that the takeout diet had been insinuated and the inside of the oven was charred, so she cleaned that up too since at some point during her visit, Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia was going to cook for them. Since Clarisse considered it her gift from karma that every now and then she'd get ajiaco, arroz con coco and arepa- and maybe empanadas, you bet that the kitchen was going to be clean even if it meant that Clarisse had to spend an hour circling every appliance with baby wipes- which was the only thing they had in the house despite not even knowing a baby.

When Chris came back with a nice collection of cleaning products, he became her favourite person.

While rummaging around the house, Clarisse found a few things that she put on her mental list of things to hide from her in-law, and a few things that were to be destroyed right away.

For example, the Easy but Totally Unsafe Way to cut fruits and vegetables that Chris had devised during his 48 hours of feverish delirium earlier that week. Aka, a knife tapped to a fan.

It would be funny and a good story to tell.

But Chris was a legally recognised and fully educated engineer and this was what he could produce.

"Okay, so nothing else is laying around, but there's still that really sketchy stain on the floor," Chris said. "Like, smack in the middle of the living room."

"That was there when we bought the house."

"You can tell Mama that," Chris said.

"Okay, well, if we washed the floor- which I think we're supposed to probably do anyways- it might come out if we put bleach in the water."

"Bleach," Chris said, his eyes popping. "That's what I forgot to buy!"

"Go out and get some," Clarisse said.

"No, no, no- I think I can make it."

"You think you can make bleach…"

"Yeah, I do," Chris nodded. "I think that Travis explained it to me-"

"No."

"If we have hydroxide peroxide…"

"Chris, if you try and make bleach you will have to explain the stain on the floor and the divorce papers on the table to your mother," Clarisse said. "Take your keys, get in the car, and go buy some that won't make you poison yourself in the process."

"That seems harsh."

"Concern is as touchy-feely as I get."

Chris kissed her cheek.

"Nah, but I know better than to argue."

Clarisse was hoping that the date of their move hadn't gotten lost in translation or whatever and that this would soften up Chris' mom, because Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia wouldn't be thrilled with the quality and stock that the household had.

Like, it was bad.

Clarisse was using a pizza box as a dust pan.

"We're missing certain key things that I think adults are supposed to own," she told Chris when he walked in with a bottle of Windex in one hand and an old t-shirt in the other.

"I was kind of thinking that too," Chris said. "Like curtains, most cooking utensils aside from a really intense blender-juicer, a lawn mower..."

"Yeah, we really need to get curtains," Clarisse said. "And paper, a mop that doesn't look like a hand-me-down, umbrellas, jumper cables..."

"It's okay," he said. "We're being adults our own way."

"Yeah, how about we take a one-week break from that and resume once our families are safely out of Washington," Clarisse said.

"So," Chris said as they scrubbed the upstairs bathroom clean together. Clarisse was polishing mirrors and Chris was on all fours in the bathtub. "Who was the oldest boy? After me?"

These quizes were a ritual when someone from Columbia came up to visit, just to make sure that small-girl-from-a-small-family Clarisse didn't get lost in all of it. Usually it wasn't so rushed though, but usually visits were preceded by what Chris called "The Week from Hades After You've Run Over Hades' Dog".

"Ricardo," Clarisse said. "He's twenty-six, and he's in university to become a lawyer, but he's already married Viviana which makes your mother nervous."

"Yeah, but she's gotten better since Viviana's been pregnant. It's a boy, by the way- start thinking of Spanish names, because mama will probably want suggestions."

Clarisse's stomach clenched.

"Anyways, who's the oldest girl?" Chris asked.

"Angelica," Clarisse said.

"Right. And you say it An-he-lica, not ge."

"I know, I know," Clarisse said.

"And she's..?"

"A florist, she works at a rose factory but only part time because she has two kids- who are five and seven; Stefano and Jesus."

"Right, but I mean order-of-birth wise…"

"Oh, she's Alejandro's twin sister," Clarisse said said.

"Right. And she's married to..?"

"Umm- his name is David."

"Excellent. And he is a-"

"Lawyer."

"Which mama likes-"

"Very much," Clarisse said.

"And it's weird because Alejandro…"

"Is also a lawyer," Clarisse said. "And Monica is in medical school- she's the youngest girl."

"How old?"

"18," Clarisse said. "Because she's, like, five years younger than Ana Julia."

"Right. And Ana Julia has how many kids? The answer to this one has changed, one is new. Remember? We sent her a card with a condom in it."

"Oh yeah! Now it's three. Isabella, Maria, and Miguel."

and she's the last of the Five-Year-Apocalypse in which six kids were born in five year's times."

"You're awesome," Chris said kissing her forehead. "A+ from me, anyways."

"As a bonus question to this Rodriguez Family Quiz, can I ask if I should call you Cristian while your mother's in town?" Clarisse asked.

"No, but she will, and you're not allowed to laugh."

Clarisse was taking the Easy but Totally Unsafe Way to cut fruits and vegetables downstairs because Chris had seen it and refused to let her take it apart, and she almost killed herself.

She'd forgotten that they'd unfolded some of the bigger moving boxes like the ones for the fridge and washing machine and duct-taped them into a slide on the stairs.

It was too awesome to unfold, and they'd had way too much fun on the stupid thing for her to take it apart, so she took her chances with gravity and the fan-knife contraption.

"CHRIS! What are you doing?"

"Changing the lightbulb," he said.

He was standing on a ladder that was supported by a cluster of kitchen chairs.

"Your mother is coming over!" Clarisse said. "I think she'd like to see you without a body cast!"

"Well what's your solution?" Chris asked.

She ended up making him put the ladder on the kitchen table which they'd dragged over.

What was the solution?

Cleaning out the kitchen was another adventure.

Chris had been right. Most of the food had to be thrown away. He'd done the obvious, but Clarisse nitpicked some more and actually checked the expiration dates as physically indicated on the bottle and not guesstimated by her ingenious husband.

They didn't have any bread in the house, except for some naan that had come with last night's Indian takeout and a baguette that collapsed under Clarisse's fingers.

"Chris," she called out in confusion.

"Yeah?"

"What's up with the baguette in a Ziploc?"

"Oh, yeah, it's probably not worth it anymore. I hollowed it out last weekend."

Dare she ask?

She did.

"Why the fuck?"

"To sneak booze into a festival."

"The place still smells," Clarisse said, looking out at the now clean main floor. Usually she didn't care much about these small things, what with having spent so much time in Cabin 5 and stuff, but she knew that Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia would spot it and it would bother her. She'd be too nice to point it out, but it'd be there.

"Don't worry," Chris said. "Just watch and learn."

She did watch. Watch her boyfriend find a cookie sheet, cover it with wax paper and sprinkling it with cinnamon and brown sugar before setting the oven to bake it.

"It'll smell like fresh cookies," Chris said. "Pretty awesome way to not creep out girls when they visit you on campus."

"Are you trying to tell me that I've already been fooled into thinking that you don't live in your own filth by cooked cinnamon?" Clarisse asked.

Chris kissed her, which he always seemed to think was a good distraction.

The stairs in front of the front door lead to a little landing upstairs which was surrounded by four small bedrooms and a bathroom.

"I vote that we keep our door closed for the duration of her visit, throw the boxes and stuff laying around in that room into the basement and tell her it's unfinished, and then only have two bedrooms to clean," Chris said.

"I'm not sure if you're being lazy or strategic, but I approve," Clarisse said.

"Yeah. For similar reasons we have to take the Stuff Shoot down from the staircase rail," Chris said. "I don't want to explain to my mom why there's some plastic piping attached to our staircase's railing."

"It's because we're busy people," Clarisse grinned.

"Sure, you can let her know."

"Spare sheets are something that we don't apparently own," Chris said after looking into every cupboard in the house.

"We have to," Clarisse said. "What did that twelve year old demigod passing by sleep on?"

"We gave him a sleeping bag that he brought with him."

That wasn't classy enough for Mrs. Rodriguez Valencia. Unlike twelve year old runaways, she had standards.

"Okay, strip our bed, but the sheets in the washing machine, and we'll give her those," Clarisse said.

"Ay, ay, Captain," Chris said before heading off.

Dryer sheets.

Dryer sheets everywhere.

Apparently they'd been stalling actual cleaning by stuffing these things between couch cushions, underneath beds, in closets…

"You know, I don't think it's crazy," Chris said. "I think if we used tea pouches too…"

"No, we can't," Clarisse said. "I don't know how to say 'dryer sheet' in Spanish and I don't want to be stuck explaining that to your mother in interpretative dancing or someshit."

Chris laughed and wrapped an arm around Clarisse and squeezed.

"You're so good with her," he said. "She loves you. A lot."

Clarisse blushed.

"The way she talks about you, you'd think you were the favourite daughter-in-law."

"Stop," Clarisse said flushing.

"Can't stop, won't stop," he said kissing the top of her head. "I think she's just happy that I'm not alone in America anymore. She knew I had camp or… or Kronos or whoever, but she always worries. I still have the letter she sent me after I told her I'd made my first friend at camp. She said never to let you go."

Swallowing was hard, but it was essential to not-crying.

"You've done a pretty good job," Clarisse said.

"Are you cleaning the toilet?" Chris asked.

"Yes," Clarisse said.

"I thought you might want the product for it then, I vaguely think it's this stuff," Chris said.

"No, I'm making it work, thanks."

"Are you using Coke?" Chris asked once he noticed.

"Yeah, it's flat," Clarisse said. "Found it in the basement. The shit you find down there, eh?"

"Okay, I thought you were supposed to use this product but now I'm sure," Chris said.

"This is working!" Clarisse said. "Look!"

She flushed the toilet. It was practically sparkling.

"Well shit," Chris asked.

"It's like they say," Clarisse said. "The acid and stuff in this."

"Well shit," Chris said. "Someone better tell Mr. D."

The upside to upstairs was that the floor wasn't hardwood, so they didn't need to mop it.

The downside was that it was carpet, which had to be vacuumed.

Clarisse and Chris didn't own a vacuum. They'd just bought a house. They'd gotten married a year ago. They were constantly buying bus tickets for lost demigods. If they had any extra money laying around, they bought specialty Oreos and dartboards and things with use. Not vacuums.

Which was why Chris had gone to see the neighbours and asked them if they had a vacuum, claiming that theirs had gotten lost in the move instead of admitting that Chris and Clarisse were horrible human beings who lived in their own scum.

"Where were you?" Clarisse asked when he came in an hour after heading out.

"I was at that little old lady's house by the time I got a vacuum," he said towing in a prehistorically large and square appliance.

"The one we thought was a hydra?"

"Yeah, yeah," Chris said. "Anyways; not a hydra. She talked for hours. She fed me molasses cookies. She told me to send my mother over any time when we were at work and that the Good Lord would help them overcome their language differences."

"At least she had a vacuum," Clarisse offered.

"No, she had to call her son and make him drive his vacuum over," Chris said.

She was scrubbing the kitchen sink while he was trying to get some tomato sauce stains (that came from the last time the Stolls had stayed over) from the fridge.

"Chris are you done with the-"

As soon as Clarisse turned around she got spritzed in the face. She swore but before she could throttle Chris or otherwise exercise revenge, he started laughing.

"Relax, relax," he said. "This is water. Plain old water. I wouldn't blind you with Javex, now would I?"

Clarisse hit the water in the sink with a hand and splashed him.

"Hey!"

He spritzed her again. Clarisse splashed. Chris spritzed. Clarisse picked up a bucket of mop water and for a few minutes they were just chasing each other around the house with Chris' spritz bottle definitely rocking the underdog concept until Chris grabbed the shower head and immediately drenched Clarisse who somehow didn't throw the water bucket at her.

They were both laughing their butts off until they realised that they'd just made a bigger mess to clean.

Then they started yelling 'YOU STARTED IT, YOU CLEAN IT!'

Chris was hanging out the window and when Clarisse went to check out what he was doing, it turned out that he'd tied the vacuum to a bungee cord, had turned it on, and was dangling the whole thing out a window to try and pick up a rag that he'd dropped while cleaning the windows.

"Chris," she said. The vacuum's noise and his concentration had transported him to the Land of the Deaf. "CHRIS!"

She kicked the power bar that was feeding the whole thing and ended up unplugging it.

He looked over his shoulder.

"You're an idiot, and you're going to die young," she said.

"You better enjoy me while you can, La Rue," he said.

"Maybe when the house is clean," she said.

He got a lot more diligent with the chores after that, funny enough.

Finally.

They got to breathe in something other than the chemically smell cleaning products.

For Clarisse it was the smell of Chris' shampoo since she was currently resting against him, crashed on the couch.

"You know, we did good for five hours," Chris said.

"That was an intense five hours," Clarisse groaned.

"Yeah, but we survived!"

Clarisse wasn't going to admit how many times she'd googled things along the lines of 'how to google [random appliance]' or various other lifehacks.

"The truth is we kind of suck at domestic life," Clarisse said.

"Yeah," Chris nodding. "I think it's just a next level of Deep Thoughts from Camp."

"Come again?"

"You know, at camp. How we had to start realising that some things were serious or that it was okay to let some things matter and bother and change us," he said, referring to the two biggest problems they'd ever had to go through. "Well, now we have to start realising that it is important that someone worries about whether or not there's milk in the fridge and that vacuuming does actually matter."

"Yeah," Clarisse said. "I guess that domestic life is crashing down on us."

"Yeah," Chris said.

Clarisse's fingers twitched.

"Can I tell you something?" She said.

"That's sort of what's happening in this conversation," Chris said.

"I think that that's a good thing," Clarisse said. "Because, I… well… we're kind of going to have a baby."

Chris sat up so abruptly that he swung Clarisse's body up too.

"Really?" He asked, eyes wide.

Clarisse turned to look at him and nodded.

"You're serious?" He said.

"Totally serious," Clarisse said, mouth dry. Then she couldn't help but smile and he couldn't help but smile.

"Get over here," he said pulling her into a hug. "How long have you known? Holy shit and then you were walking around all day, there is no way that you're making dinner, you should've told me, shit Clarisse, you wouldn't have even touched a vacuum…"

"I'm okay," she smiled. "Seriously. I only found out on Wednesday and I thought I'd wait until we were moved in and you weren't barfing up your insides and your mother was gone and you weren't stressed before telling you."

"Shit," Chris said. "No, not shit. I mean… a good shit, you know?"

She laughed. He was so giddy. Her stomach clenched in a kind of excitement that she'd kind of just pushed back until now. Saying it out loud made it more real.

"A good shit," Clarisse said. "Sure."

"Well, also a bad one, I guess," Chris said. "We're definitely going to need to buy curtains now."

Upcoming ship weeks

August

24 - 30 - Chris and Clarisse

31 - 06 - Jason and Reyna

September

07- 13 - Jason and Piper

14 -20 - Frank and Hazel

21 - 27 - Calypso and Leo

28 - October 4 - Percy and Annabeth