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Percy Jackson did not believe in the gods before he learned he was the son of one.
He didn’t believe in them all that much afterward, either.
#
Learning you were part-god was a mixed blessing.
Sure, you had above-average reflexes and possibly some sort of inhuman talent.
But the main pros to the situation --- a great summer camp and friends who actually understood you --- were things lots of people got to experience in their nice calm normal lifetimes that exceeded eighteen years.
A lot of the time, actually, being part-god seemed to be mostly disadvantages. Monsters and immortals baying for your blood.
Both steel and celestial bronze slicing to kill you.
Yeah, sometimes it just looked like it got you more new ways to get cut.
#
It breaks Percy’s heart to hear Annabeth protesting that Luke was her friend once, was good, could be good again.
Luke Castellan was a good man once, bitter, perhaps, ambitious, maybe. But goodness lies in choices, and Luke stopped making the right ones a long time ago.
#
They say the greatest swordsman fears not the second greatest, but the worst.
(Which is really a shame because most people consider Luke the greatest and Percy the second. Sometimes those proverbs really come around to bite you in unpleasantly ways.)
In the end, it doesn’t come down to a fight though. It comes down to a choice.
For Percy, that is the moment Olympus falls.
Because, see, he realizes:
The gods? Are all locked in their same unchanging patterns.
They’re composed of echoes of themselves. They’ll live forever, but always chained by everyone’s else’s conceptions of them. That’s all they’re made of.
They’re forever bound by the same old rivalries, jealousies, loves, they’ll never escape
For Percy, everything of Olympus that he had built up in his mind is razed, when he meets Luke’s gaze and they flicker blue.
There’s an ancient Titan housed in that kid, and he just decides: no.
Luke made that choice by himself.
And even the Great fucking Prophecy didn’t know what he would choose.
It’s greater, that power, that ability to choose, than any thunderbolt, any palace of the gods.
That’s…having a choice. Having a soul.
Half of his Greek brothers and sisters chose to fight for Kronos. But Percy can’t bring himself to hate them, ever. They needed more than they were getting, and they made their choice.
It makes him so fucking sad, but he won’t take that choice away from them.
He just says, Never again.
((He could feel his father’s concern. But Percy had no words to explain what he has realized, doesn't think he would tell his father, the god, this, even if he could.
Poseidon is a god. It is his right to do what ever the hell he wants-- forget the laws of physics -- so long as he stays his domain and acts according to his nature. And that’s the way it is and will be forever. His father is not human and he can’t be held to human standards.
He probably can’t even imagine human standards, really. Thousands and thousands of years and they’ll never understand, not fully. The gods are what they are, and that’s how it is.))
#
The thing about turning points is you usually don’t realize they’ve come until you’ve already run straight through them.
Percy loses some friends and he wins a war.
Then he is back in New York, and Percy see monsters everywhere, while the other children see them nowhere.
He wonders if he is broken now, or as whole as he ever was.
(He’s not sure if that’s a positive thought about his present or a grim assessment of his past.)
It was like this after his mom was stolen, he remembers. The world had shifted and even with Grover at his side, he had felt lost, because there was no more logic in the world and no more Mom.
It feels like that now.
(But it’s something else that’s been stolen from him.)
Sometimes Grover tilts his head as if listening to something, and Percy tries it later, at night, in darkness and quiet, and he doesn’t hear anything.
“Perce,” Grover whispers across the night, gently, and Percy holds back a sob, “we will be fine,” his friend, his brother, continues, “you’ll see.”
“Do you ever hear them?”
“No. But I know that they are listening.”
“How?”
“I have faith.”
Percy looks at him and doesn’t say I don’t, doesn’t say I don’t know where and when I lost it, or how to get it back. Doesn’t say I’m not sure I want to, anymore.
#
Demigod dreams are, in essence, a way of honing tools.
Prepare them, warn them, direct them.
(Percy wonders which of his dreams were ever his.)
He has also been taught, that since the minute he is born, his thread was already measured.
But only the length of it, he decides one day. The knots in it are his own dam work.
#
He is dragged back to the world of gods and nightmares after that long school year after his first quest, and it feels both like a dream and like a nightmare.
Percy takes a deep breath, breathing in the strawberry-scented air, and is not sure if he wants to wake up or stay asleep. He doesn’t have time to think too much about that, there is trouble ahead and Grover needs to be found.
Percy goes to search for him. Annabeth worries anxiously about her choices, but Percy has faith in her, more than he ever had in any god.
#
There is a battle going on for his soul, and his sixteenth year will be, he learns, the time to end it.
(Percy wonders if prophecies are at all like weather forecasts.
Is there any wiggle room? Are they ever just super wrong, and everyone just laughs afterward, because how silly that they carried umbrellas around all day but there was no rain after all?)
Hestia tells him some things that are kind and comforting.
The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long - and you have burned so very, very brightly.
(He... doesn't think he likes fire metaphors.)
Sometimes he jokes about it.
I'd hate to peak my sophomore year, he had quipped catching Annabeth’s eye
He didn’t want to ascend a mountain and stay there, crushed under the weight of the great big sky.
But there are times to bend so as not to break, times to move so as not to shatter, time to wait so as not to falter; and then there are times when all that’s left to do is dig your heels in and brace for impact.
He hardens his skin and his heart, and he goes to fight his lost brothers and sisters.
#
Against all odds, he lives.
So, the gods offer him immortality, and he says a firm no.
He knew if he said yes, he would live forever, but this would be his last day alive.
He narrowly escapes immortality and bargains for the lives of his friends.
#
He forgets everything.
#
He remembers everything.
Right down to how it feels to go to war and pray to the helpless gods for your friends to make it through.
#
After that, it’s like a dance. Maybe the Cotton-Eye Joe.
In that: sometimes it’s fun. But mostly it’s just exhausting, repetitive, and vaguely demeaning.
He quips and dodges and kills some monsters.
Repeat.
Where did you come from, where did you go?
Try to save the little ones, bring them to campus. Fail. Succeed. Fail. Repeat.
Where did you come from, where did you go?
He watches the bloody sun sink into the Long Island Sound. And again. And again.
When he kills the Stheno the third time, he sits down right there and very nearly cries. He doesn’t know who for.
Monsters can’t break the patterns any more than he can.
He’s sixteen
and they’re cleaning up the volleyball pitch after the battle with Gaea.
It’s draining work, carrying your friend’s corpses to pyres.
He’s seventeen
and dreaming of Jason’s body facedown and full of holes. Annabeth and the rest of camp is soothing Piper and Leo, so Percy slips out with Frank and Hazel. They steal a bottle of something from Dionysus’ dusty stash and remember Jason together. They toast to Roman honor.
He’s eighteen,
and holding Rosie, who wears her hair in pigtails, who hasn’t learned to tie her shoes yet (Rabbit ears, he’d said just yesterday, waggling the laces with a wink, through the loop, just like that, you try now. Good job! She smiled shyly back and---)
— there’s red seeping through her little polka dot shirt fast—too fast—there’s nothing for it—nothing. And she looks so scared, he holds her tighter. His tear falls on her cheeks, afterward. He can’t let go, not for a long while, even though her blood stains his shirt.
Fuck, how did Grover do this for so long?
Later that night, back at camp, they’d sit there quietly except for the crackle of the campfire. No new camper, despite Percy’s mission.
And he’d cry. Percy would cry, long and silently, curled inside his sleeping bag, and Grover would look away and Annabeth wouldn’t ask. They would know what the conspicuously empty space next to him meant.
He’s twenty
and Annabeth dies. Annabeth who wants to design and build and build a life with Percy dies. But she dies with a blade in her hand and her chin held high, she dies to save a friend, and she is his and she is herself to the end, so even that is not what breaks him
He breaks when it is a twelve-year-old is picked for a quest.
Percy storms the Big House, a one-man army. Dionysus is unapologetic, but only because he is so hardened. He feels guilty, clearly, but he denies it, denies Percy’s protests.
“It’s too young! He’s terrified, he’s not ready.”
“Mr. Johnson, you were also once-“
“I know. But it’s not—It’s—They’re so young, why can’t they just--? Why do all the campers have to quest anyway--?”
Mr. D. just sounds weary, not sour, for once. “It is the duty of all demigods—"
“Screw duty! We’ve done it, and then some! When will it be enough, huh? I’m begging you, please, don’t ask this of them!”
“IT IS NOT ME ASKING.” The god Dionysus booms, (for he is Dionysus right now, not the petulant Mr. D), and Percy falters at the sight.
He is a tangle of curls and fracture lines: eyes glinting like power and wanting but never getting. He is the wild god -- the freedom and the terror -- insanity and ecstasy and all the things he had been chained from.
And then he is watered down – rotted.
His presence wilts, and he turns away. This time, for good.
“We all have our mandates, Perseus Jackson.”
Percy stops, mainly because he doesn’t know what to do with this new face of Dionysus.
He sounds tired. So damned tired. Tired like Percy feels.
Decades of watching kids grow up, only to send them out to die, will do that to you. No wonder he always seems to need a drink.
For the first time in his life, he feels a moment’s kinship with the god.
If only because it’s the most honest thing a god has ever said to him.
(He can’t entirely blame them. He doesn’t think it’s possible to live forever and still care the same way.
It’s the most sympathy he’s ever felt for them. Even while he knows they are wrong. They must be. They are wrong because this cannot be the only way.
It wears him down, the caring, but he knows he will never stop.)
#
Hades, being an ass, is of course the only one who would ever bring it up:
He does it, out of annoyance, mainly, when the usual threats once again fail to faze Percy overly much.
“I’ve seen your type before. A thousand of them. You don’t get to be the god of the dead without knowing the look in someone's eyes when they want it… No. For you, it would be a relief, wouldn’t it.”
…It makes sense that he would get it, of all people.
After all, Percy’s father is always something like tides, in his very person, like the constant currents, the relentless waves—always changing but in swells that rose and fell. His temper surges and subsides, his interest flows constantly from one thing to the next.
Zeus is like the sky, like the prevailing winds: looking down on everyone, and always gusting, no substance.
But Hades deals in people and in choices. He sees their best and their worst, their beginning and their ends, and the sum of their lives, and he judges it.
That’s lifetimes of experience right there.
So, Percy asks him a question.
(He’s more than a little sleep-deprived when he does it, but his judgment of risk has always been poor so maybe it’s not fair to blame this one on his snooze-schedule.)
What about you, Lord of the Underworld, do you ever wish you could die?
Hades doesn’t answer.
But he seems to think about it, which is more important, maybe.
#
Percy’s been thinking about the word hero, lately.
(He thinks that he thinks about philosophical shit more often, now that Annabeth’s gone.
Partly because he feels there ought to be some level of actual consideration injected into his existence and partly because this way he can pretend she’s sitting next to him on the dock or on the roof, her princess-curls shifting in the breeze, and arguing rabidly with him.
He always always makes sure to try to imagine what her half what her argument would be. Because of course, it would be an argument.)
So, yeah: the word hero.
People call him the Hero of Olympus. (As if there was only one. He wants to scoff at that, and shout, maybe, about Silena and Charles and Michael and the others.)
But if there had to be one… well. Percy wonders.
They call him a hero, but really, there at the end, wasn’t Luke the one who was brave?
The one who chose to say screw the gods and their plans and sacrificed himself.
Also, the one who thought, in the beginning maybe, that things needed to change. That someone needed to step up for all those unclaimed kids. All those lonely kids. All those ignored kids who got nothing out of all this godly shit but crappy reading skills and a giant target painted on their backs.
(Percy is Luke’s age now, and every day he understands a little more where that cagy desperation came from. How many kids. How many kids can he watch go.)
Luke was supremely fucked-up and twisted, especially by the end. But still, Percy wonders.
Because he’s starting to think a ‘hero’ is not actually a force of good or evil. By definition at least.
A hero is just someone’s champion. Their defender. Protector.
The gods said he was the hero of Olympus, but they were wrong, they were so wrong, because it was never for them that he did any of it.
It was for his cousins. His brothers and sisters at arms.
His friends, and sometimes his enemies.
The demigods caught between one world and another, trying to be enough to survive both, always falling down and falling short, but standing up again.
He did it for them.
And he’s so damned tired.
Piper has some lines creasing her forehead these days from running herself ragged as diplomat between the camps. She’s twenty-one and supermodel-pretty, but sometimes she just looks ancient.
Hazel and Frank are as untarnished in spirit as ever and still deeply in love. Those crazy kids, gods, Percy loves ‘em. Hazel took some serious damage in a fight with a chimera last year, so she can’t walk anymore, but she can still ride—which she says is more important anyways. She is unofficial Camp Mom over at Jupiter and widely beloved. The unicorns think she is their goddess possibly, and Frank does, too.
Nico escorted Will down to Elysium himself. Nico spends a lot of his time working for his dad these days. Camp is a little too hard to face, the wound is too fresh to walk pass the infirmary and see it under the management of new hands.
Clarisse is the only one of the original cohort left to kick around Camp Half-Blood with Percy. She whips the new kids into shape with her infinite reservoir of competitive ferocity and fierce loyalty to this camp.
(She and Percy are sort of co-leaders, both of them teaching, but her being the head trainer and beloved camp dictator, while Percy does a lot of the scouting and protecting kids on their way to Camp. It’s good this way: they get enough breaks from each other that they avoid killing each other.)
((Both of them still avoid that particular camp bathroom since their first explosive traumatic shared experience with those toilets. Some things just stay with you forever.))
Again and again: Percy holds little hands and leads them through the tall grasses beside the road, past the bramble patches and the tree where the Minotaur lost its horn.
Again and again: he crests Half-blood Hill. And pauses briefly by an old pine.
(He pats it briefly, like an old friend, even though it isn’t, really, anymore.)
He likes to turn and watch each one, as they get their first sight of it. He knows the moment they see it—the white pillars and the pegasi and the strawberries and hordes of fellow children with ancient weaponry.
Their little faces go slack with awe, as the view of the Camp burns through the mist.
Every damn time.
#
They never stop losing them.
But they don’t stop finding them, either.
And Percy thinks, he really thinks, things are getting better. He thinks they’re making it better—him and his fellow counsellors, and someday these kids will do it, too.
They’ve fought their wars, watered these grounds with their blood enough at this point.
These days, they build cabins as their numbers slowly rise. (They’re losing less kids, all the time.) They build cabins and canoes and a new obstacle course (instead of trebuchet and triremes).
They still fight (inevitable, as a demigod) but now it’s only to protect their friends. They do not fight their friends. They do not fight in any more wars, either. (They never raise sword against another half-blood, not in real battle, never again).
And every night, around the campfire, Percy makes another vow to himself.
I’ll watch over these kids.
I’ll gather them up, and keep them safe where I can, and teach them how to protect themselves and how to watch their friends’ backs.
I’m not going to rest or put down my sword because they still need me.
They’re brave but they’re young, and he always melts when a shy kid staring at their feet asks him to show them again how to do that move, please?
Teaching kids is honestly his favorite use for a sword.
He will choose to be a hero for them.
The broken, the young, the scared, the strong,
For them, he will fight another thousand battles, tie another hundred little shoelaces, pick a dozen more strawberries, show a thousand more little hands how to grip a sword and swing like your life depends on it.
For them, he will live.