Chapter Text
Have you ever stared at something for so long that your eyes start to strain? But you can’t blink, you can’t let yourself blink. My eyes looked across the street, at the thing that stared back. It had two heads. Now I’m certain what you might be thinking; that’s impossible, why are you making stuff up, maybe you should go see a psychiatrist. Now, normally, you’d probably be right; that last one’s a reasonable suggestion regardless.
But I’m not crazy, my name’s Percy Jackson; yeah, yeah, great to meet you two, the weather’s great, whatever. So, you’re wondering what’s happening, I’m certain, and I’d be quite happy to share. To start; do you know what a Half-Blood is? No, you’re right, that’s still too close to the present. So… let’s take it back to the day before the last day of school.
-7
Hot summer air slammed through my shirt and across my face; I was already starting to feel the bare hints of sweat as I jumped off of the bus. Everyone talked around me, but I walked forwards resolutely. There was a strange feeling moving down my spine, like hearing the dogs in your neighborhood bark at nothing, with that horrid certainty that the source could be revealed at any moment.
I tried to shake off the feeling, as my feet dragged me into the cafeteria. At a single table, more off the path on the left-corner of the cafeteria sat my friend, whose crutches were leaned against the table, with a single half-eaten apple in his left hand. As I collapsed onto the roundtable at his side, he looked up.
“How ya feelin’?” He asked with a smile, before taking another large bite out of his apple.
“Like a horse kicked me in the face, and then someone yelled with a megaphone as they tore my blinds down,”
“That bad, huh?” Another bite, this one taking the seed with it.
If someone managed to reach around in his guts, they could probably take all of the apple seeds and turn them into a cyanide pill, “It was, but dad bought coffee, and I feel just a little bit better,”
I hadn’t fallen asleep until two, everytime I did, I saw it, but there’d been coffee on the counter when I woke up, so that was a plus. It hadn’t really woken me up, but it did make the morning just a bit more calming. I would take what I could get, honestly.
“That’s good,”
I nodded lightly, “What about you?”
He shrugged, “Would you believe me if I said I got kicked in the face by a dude with hooves, and then a centaur decided to burst into my room?”
“Not at all,” I replied with a bit of a chuckle.
“Well…” He seemed to struggle with words for a minute, “It was a rough morning. But hey, we’re both here, so I suppose we can head to class together,”
I nodded, picking up my bag, and handing his crutches to him. He offered a small smile as he lifted himself out of his seat, and we headed to class. The walk there was mostly silent, with the noise of the hall crowding around us, as if the edge of any conversation we could have was drowned out by the cacophony that surrounded us.
When we sat down for class, Mr. Brunner had us pull out our textbooks. I think right around now is when it would be appropriate to mention that I’m dyslexic. So, when I looked at the page, everything started to jumble; words and letters moving out of place, as if the entire page was mocking the very existence of my eyes. I tried my best to ignore it, bending over the page and straining my eyes to pick up what I could. Eventually, like most days, I gave up; the pang of guilt moved around in my stomach, but I shoved it away, and reached into my bag.
There sat my sketchbook, or what I more specifically liked to call; The Compendium of Monsters. Within the canals of my sketchbook, I’d drawn as many monsters as I could. I had a xenomorph on one page (colored in blue pen, because that was all I had at the time), a weird Spider-Like thing that I’d decided would be called Greg, and dozens of other critters. Some had ended up being six-feet in height, others could be as small as two centimeters (although those usually came in packs, which I’d written down in the notes). Others were just random doodles, Greek Monsters, faces inspired by the things that appeared in my dreams sometimes.
Today, as I dubiously stared back at my textbook, willing the words to right themselves, I decided I wanted to draw something else; a bit more inspired by the lesson Mr. Brunner was teaching. After thoughtfully tapping my pencil against the page for a minute, I figured out what I wanted. It would be Medusa; only I wanted the snakes to be long, swaying tendrils, with whispy shrouds of darkness coming off of a nightgown-esque dress. She wouldn’t have legs, but instead that same shadow would descend to where her feet should be. And there would be eyes on her arms, forever staring and lacking in eyelids.
Yeah I know, not exactly the most beautiful thing a mind could imagine, but I was drawing monsters, not fairytale heroes!
The bell rang, and I got up to go with Grover, when I heard Mr. Brunner calling my name.
“Percy,”
“Yeah?” I asked hesitantly; the eyes of our wheelchair bound teacher boring into me.
“I’m not quite certain you were paying attention in-class today,” His eyes had that sort of sad, distant demeanor that worked far too well, the ‘I’m not mad, just disappointed’ stare.
It was the day before the last day of school; albeit, granted, we still had his test tomorrow because it was delayed, but still, “I was having…Issues sir,” I said with a sigh.
“Then you should’ve come to me about them,”
There was nothing about the problems that I was having that he could help with, “Sorry,”
“You should not be,” He replied, “But think about it in the future, if you will; do not be afraid to rely on the help of others,”
“Right,” I replied with a small nod, “I’ll keep that in mind,”
The rest of the day passed slowly, and in the blink of an eye, but also really, really slowly. Eventually, I found myself dropped back home, backpack slung over my shoulders, and a tired feeling resting in my chest. It always ended this way, with the desperate need to crawl under the covers and collapse.
Pushing myself forwards, the door swung open, and I grabbed for the elevator… Only to have it close in my face. My eyes glanced up to glare at the inhabitants- but my brain was ground to a halt. I stared into the slowly closing elevator, understanding that my hands wouldn’t be able to stop it, but utterly confused by what I was seeing inside of it.
She had wings. An old lady, but with batwings. She wasn’t that nice-old-lady either, she was a mean one, with that sort of glare in your eye that told you she should never be in a store, or really any sort of business establishment, if you didn’t want her absolutely ruining the day of the person behind the counter. The fact that that glare was currently looking directly at me? Yeah, not exactly the best sign.
The elevator door stopped closing, and slowly pulled itself open. We still stared towards one another, only now I could see a ripple of muscle underneath her ‘frail’ frame. It was as if we were locked in some sort of stalemate, each waiting for the penny to hit the floor. I think that was around the time I decided to just carefully, with as much speed preserved as possible, walk towards the stairs.
The door to the stairwell closed, and I, as calmly as I could, panting as if I’d just run a race, started walking. Each step felt like it took years to traverse, and the image in my mind kept swelling, absolute confusion tearing apart each attempt to explain it. Maybe I was just too tired, and the lady didn’t have batwings, didn’t have the sort of musculature that would make John Cena jealous. But I couldn’t have been hallucinating. Something in the back of my brain was screaming that there was no world in-which that had been a dream.
Second floor, I stopped, and leaned against the wall. I needed to pick apart everything in my brain, I needed to take a minute to just think. Dad always told me that you needed to pick apart your emotions first, because those always got in the way of thinking about things logically. So, I looked at my emotions, and tried to figure out how those were influencing my thoughts at the moment. The first emotion, the most important that I was currently feeling, was panic.
Mom was the one that told me about panic, she said it wasn’t a kind emotion, and that it made everything hazy. When you panicked, your brain was more likely to think of the worst-case scenario, and it scattered every other logical outcome. Your brain wasn’t really in thinking mode when you panicked, it was in survival mode, so you needed to peel that back eventually.
I just sat there for a moment, before a sound threw everything into the wind. I heard the door at the bottom of the staircase start to open. My entire body halted, and I drew into myself, some foreign instinct taking over, and I almost felt like I was about to bawl my eyes out. Then, a guy, somewhere in his thirties, walked up the stairs past me; didn’t even spare me a glance.
As he went out of sight, I took a deep and careful breath, taking the steps that mom had taught me. There was blue, the light trim at the bottom when stone met concrete; it was blue bordering on grey. Then there was the beige of the wall, with those lines that made it look like bricks. Finally, there was the white, with small little dots, with the plastered-on concrete that sat below me. Maybe it wasn’t really concrete, but I didn’t know the word for it right now.
Slowly, I felt my heart calming, and my head stopped pounding with that feeling, and I shakily stood myself back up. Right…Now to look at it without the lense of my panic. I’d seen a lady in the elevator, and she had to me what looked like batwings. Did the batwings follow her when she walked out of the elevator? I couldn’t tell, honestly. It was entirely plausible that they weren’t really batwings, but something she was carrying in the elevator with her. But then, why had she looked at me like that? That wasn’t a good question, it presumed that she’d looked at me in some specific way, when in-truth it was more likely that she was just angry at someone, or something, and had been glaring at the world in-general. People did that; mom sometimes did that when she got home from work, and then she’d lay down for a nap and she’d be fine. It didn’t mean they were looking at me that way. It was preposterous to assume you mattered that much to someone else.
Right, deep breath in, and then out. It was nothing, I had panicked over nothing. Slowly, with legs still shaking just a little, I started ascending again. It would be fine, I would go to our apartment door, and there would be nothing there to attack me.
The rest of the ascent was almost too slow for my liking. I tapped my fingers against my legs, fiddled with my backpacks string, and turned my phone on and off like ten times. Finally, I got my floor and flung open the door; only to find myself face-to-face with that same old lady.
We stared at one another for a few minutes, she didn’t have batwings on her back anymore, but she did look really angry. Finally, she turned away, and kept walking down the hall. My legs had started shaking again, only this time I didn’t have a concrete. There was something boiling its way under my bones, this sensation that something was about to go horribly, horribly wrong. Taking a deep, deep breath, I started walking in the opposite direction.
When I got home, it felt like a gigantic weight had been lifted off of my back; as if atlas had finally taken the Earth off of my shoulders, and I was now free to collapse as a heaving and sobbing mess.
“How’s my lil dude doing!” A shout came from across the room, and my eyes looked up; dad was sitting in the living room with a smile on his face, and sweat pouring down…Guess he’d just gotten done with his workout.
I forced on a smile, and tossed my backpack onto the small dining room table, “I’m doing good! Just, excited for the school year to be over,”
“I’ll bet,” He replied, leaning back on the couch, “Got any plans for the summer yet?”
“Well, me and Grover were planning on sneaking into the local waterpark,” There was a cool trick to it, and all it really involved was asking the right person nicely.
“If I catch a whiff of it when mom’s home…” He drawled dramatically, a wide grin on his face.
“Yeah yeah, you gotta tell her,”
I walked into the living room, unceremoniously dropping onto the couch, “I saw a lady with batwings,”
His eyebrows shot up, his eyes widened, and his mouth started to open; all of that happened in the blink of an eye, before a carefully controlled expression snapped onto his face, “What else?”
“Well, it turned out she didn’t have batwings,” I said, staring at him hesitantly; had I imagined that, or did he seem… scared?
His voice was oddly tense as he replied, “Maybe the next one will have horns,” It sounded like it was meant to be a joke, but the delivery fell apart with just how…Quiet he was afterwards.
That sense of unease rose in the pit of my stomach, and I was just about to say something, when the door opened. My mom walked in, dark bags under her eyes. Her job often left her rather exhausted; which made sense when you considered that she was the chief detective of her department.
When she looked up, she smiled a bit, before she noticed the look on my dad’s face, “What’s wrong honey?” She asked, exhaustion lost for a look of concern.
“Can we talk in the other room?” He said, voice still oddly strained.
“Dad…?” I forced out as he got up, almost too certain of the answer, “Is something wrong?”
There was a look in his eyes, something I couldn’t describe, before a smile etched itself onto his face, “Nothing at all. Just…Adult problems, alright? We’ll-we’ll talk about it in a minute,”
The day hadn’t been all that great to start off with. Combine that with the panic attack I had on the stairwell, and now this. Dad was hiding something from me, and I…Didn’t know how to feel about it. Sometimes he would deliberately jump around the truth, but this just felt weird; like it was more than jumping through a hoop. It felt like something dark was gurgling under the surface, something tensed and ready to jump from the shadows.
Considering everything carefully, I sat back on the couch. He told me that we’d talk about it, and I tried to trust him. So, I closed my eyes and put everything into perspective. There’d been that expression on his face at the mention of batwing-lady, but what did that really mean? Perhaps he was worried I was having hallucinations; that made the most sense, who wouldn’t be worried if their son had suddenly started hallucinating monsters? No other solution made sense, the pieces might fit together in that particular pattern, but the ‘killer’ was trying to lead me astray with false clues and planted evidence; that was something mom said on one of her late-night drunken rants. Those were always fun, sometimes a little bit scary when I got to realize just how smart she truly was, but fun. Right, sidetracked. So, it might just be that…Or he could understand that I was just really tired, and the reference to batwings had reminded him of something else entirely that way that humans sometimes manage to have those really weird pattern-moments.
It was as I was sitting there, considering all of these avenues, that a different idea entirely entered my mind. If I really wanted to know, maybe I could just…Eavesdrop. They’d get mad at me, that much was certain, but they couldn’t really blame me. They were the ones that taught me to think that way to begin with.
Getting up from my couch, I walked into the small hallway that our rooms and the spare shared. Walking a bit closer, I heard their voices get hushed. Right, they might expect me to do something like this. So, I walked over to my bedroom, opened the door, and quietly (but not so quiet that they couldn’t hear it) closed it again. With the steps of a thief, I walked over to their door, and put an ear against it. You’d be surprised at just how thin apartment doors really are; like seriously, what do they make these things with? If I had to put a bet, I’d say they just used tissues and paper towels, and then wedged thin-ass pieces of bark over the rim so you couldn’t see it.
“I think there’s a harpy living in our apartment building,” Right, that was an interesting part of the conversation to start hearing.
My mom was silent for a few minutes, as if digesting the words; which I would be too, if I thought dad had lost his mind, “Which means they’ve found Percy,” Okay…Not digesting that he’s lost his mind, instead seemingly blowing her own head into the stratosphere alongside him.
I heard the bend bed as, what I could only guess was dad, collapsed, “Oh fuck what are we gonna do Jane?!” I heard the panic in his voice, “I can’t, I’m not ready to see him go, and they’re…”
“Hey, relax,” She replied, and the bed crunched again, “We can get through this, right? We knew what we were signing up for when she appeared and asked us to adopt him,”
That was when everything halted. I took a step back from the door as my mind exploded and gears started whirring. I was…I was…The words repeated in my head on repeat, a voice whispering them to me and grinding every other thought to a halt. I was adopted, they thought the harpy was real, and now there was a knock at the door.