Chapter Text
Despite the ten days straight you had spent resenting your own lack of demigod reflexes, demigod stamina, and demigod powers, you found, as adrenaline kept you positively frozen with fear before the young man currently shaking a sheet of blood off of his sword, that while human danger responses were disappointing, they weren’t nothing.
You couldn’t outrun him, you couldn’t outfight him, but you could freeze like the best of them.
“This thing doesn’t normally get blood on it,” Percy said, eyeing the bronze blade (you were seeing it as a sword more and more often, now, as your mind adjusted) with something like amusement in his sea green eyes. Beautiful, even as he casually observed aloud that the mundane-looking things he normally stabbed turned to dust afterwards, whereas your cab driver had not.
“He wasn’t a monster,” you said hoarsely, and he turned towards you questioningly, seeming not to have heard what you’d said.
The ten days of captivity in Percy’s apartment had made it clear to you that he was willing to exploit the fact that he could see through the…the “Mist”, and you couldn’t, and to exploit your fear of this fact, now that you knew that any old squirrel could be a three-headed dragon or something, but still it hadn’t occurred to you before now that he might actually kill something that wasn’t a bit more dangerous than it appeared.
There had been a moment, during Percy’s sudden landing of a black pegasus (you saw it as a motorcycle, but you knew it was a pegasus) on the hood of your getaway cab, his crashing through the windshield, and his stabbing of the driver, a moment in which you had even felt foolish for leaving. Sure, you had felt a bit isolated and Percy had been a bit controlling, but look! You had gotten right into a cab with a monster without even knowing! Percy was right.
But now you saw the blood on the blade, and you felt sick. And you had been standing perfectly still ever since he gingerly pulled you out of the back seat.
“He wasn’t a monster,” you repeated, louder but shakier.
Percy shook his hair back from his forehead in that way that you had used to call hot and furrowed his brow a little. There were little red dots all over the right side of his face, where the cab driver’s blood had sprayed. “He was a mortal, but he was taking you from me, which means he was a monster.”
You felt like shuddering, but you were still frozen. There was comfort in being completely still, while Percy capped his pen and shoved it unceremoniously into his pocket. Sunlight glinted off of the streak of silver in his hair.
Hero. Even now, you saw a hero. Even though you couldn’t breathe as he approached you, with his brow still furrowed so seriously.
He wouldn’t hurt you. He wouldn’t.
Percy pulled you into a hug, and it seemed that you could feel every muscle in his body. You relaxed instinctively, even as dread continued to pulse through you.
He had killed the cab driver just because you had asked the man to drive you away. The driver had been doing his job; he hadn’t known anything about you or Percy or monsters.
“I was so worried when I got home and you weren’t there,” Percy said. “So many things could have happened to you.”
You could not outrun him; you knew by now that even if you left while he wasn’t home, he would catch up using a hellhound to follow your scent. And now you knew that you couldn’t take a cab, because he would kill the driver. You took a moment to be glad that you hadn’t tried a bus. Tears prickled at your eyes.
“I know it can be boring in the apartment when I’m not there, but you need to trust me when I tell you what’s dangerous.”
You didn’t ask if the cab driver had been dangerous, even though he had said many times that he loved your sarcasm. The question would either anger him or entertain him, and you didn’t want either. You had never actually seen him angry with you, but seeing him angry with monsters had been plenty warning enough.
“Maybe I’ll have to get us a house boat, so I can be sure that you’re not going anywhere.” Only now did he pull back from the hug, though his hands on your sides didn’t allow for too much space to grow between you. He quirked a smile, even though there was still blood on half of his face. “It’d be nice to live on the water, wouldn’t it?”
The tears fell, and Percy leaned in all concerned, his hands flying to your face and his thumbs making windshield wiper movements on your cheeks.
“Hey hey hey, shh, hey, it’s okay,” he said, and he pulled you into his chest again. He smelled like the ocean, of course. “It’s okay. You’re safe now. You’re here with me.” He held you tighter, closer, as he whispered, “I’ve got you, now.”
His hellhound could follow your scent anywhere on earth, and it could travel instantly, using shadows. The seas were even less safe than the land; not even worth considering, since he was the son of Poseidon. The sky? You couldn’t live on an airplane, or even make it onto one, with his track record of catching up.
What was the next plan, then? Outer space? Or find some other demigods who might help?
You had met his friends, briefly, at the very beginning of your relationship. They’d all had glowing praise for him: most powerful demigod I know; nicest guy; so loyal; he’ll never let you down; if you hurt him I’ll…
It sunk in that you had no idea how you would ever escape.
So, you went for a Hail Mary:
“Percy, please,” you said, as he was ushering you onto the pegasus-that-looked-like-a-motorcycle. “Please, I don’t want to go back to the apartment. I can’t stay in the apartment forever.”
“I told you, we’re getting a house boat,” he said wryly, then glanced at what, as far as you were concerned, was the motorcycle’s handlebars and chuckled at something that presumably the pegasus had said. He was lucky he had proved monsters and demigods and magic to be real, before, because at times like these it was easier to assume he was suffering from hallucinations.
“I can’t stay there forever, either,” you insisted. “I have to go places, meet people-”
He brought his face closer to yours, his eyes hard all at once. “You don’t need to meet anyone. As far as you know, anyone you meet could be an empousa.”
He climbed onto the bike behind you and slipped his arms around your midriff.
“Let’s go home. We can bake blue cookies.”
You were so sick of blue cookies.