Chapter Text
Most people would call Percy Jackson a troubled kid, which is how he ended up with all the other troubled kids at Yancy Academy.
Percy just called it rotten luck.
It's not like he wanted to get in trouble wherever he went but trouble always had a way of finding him.
There was that incident with a Revolutionary War cannon, and that time he dropped his class into the Marine World shark pool and…yeah.
Point is, bad things tend to happen to him during school field trips. Chaos, destruction, life-changing events. It almost always took a bizarre turn, and it certainly did during his class’s field trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
They were supposed to spend the whole day looking at Ancient Greek and Roman stuff. It sounds like torture (most Yancy field trips were) but the tour guide gave Percy some hope.
You see, Percy had already experienced his fair share of museum guides. They either talked too much about useless jargon, or they talked too slow (which is actually worse for his attention span). The worst ones didn’t talk at all and made things awkward.
Hence, he wasn’t even paying attention to the guy’s introduction speech.
But Percy was nothing if not pleasantly surprised when he actually started talking.
Tall, blonde, blue eyes. He was handsome, for sure, but the scar on his face was a sore topic between the students.
They whispered to themselves, how he looked like a movie villain.
Percy thought he looked really cool.
They really lucked out with this guy because at least he actually kept things interesting, and he sprinkled in random trivia at every opportunity. He was engaging. Not too fast or too slow, just enough for his ADHD brain to latch onto without getting bored or overwhelmed.
Percy could listen to him all day.
It reminded him of those museum trips with his mom. She liked to explain things just like this, drawing parallels to stuff he already knew.
She made it feel real.
This guy—whatever his name was—he felt real. Maybe even too real?
He just had a way of drawing everyone’s attention, like you can’t help but turn and look exactly where he wants you to look.
Case in point, Percy's eyes were immediately directed to the life-sized statue of Athena minus a few missing limbs.
“A lot of the statues here are pure white stone, but in ancient times, these were fully painted with bright colors and decorated with life-like accessories, even metals like copper for the hair. Think of those Christ figures in modern Cathedrals, or lifelike DnD statues, if you’re into that. The same goes for Ancient Greek columns and temples that exist today, they all looked very different thousands of years ago…”
Their tour guide also kept a watchful eye on the students.
He'd direct them from exhibit to exhibit, making sure nobody got left behind or wandered off. And when Nancy Bobofit tried to take advantage of his very distracting charisma to pickpocket some unsuspecting tourists, he actually paused mid-speech and called her out on it.
Nancy turned bright red in both anger and embarrassment. Nobody, absolutely nobody, had ever caught her in the act.
Then he asked her a question about the artifact, to which she stuttered unintelligibly because of course she wasn't listening, and everyone actually laughed. It was glorious.
Percy felt like he was on cloud nine.
It was a good day.