Chapter Text
Percy Jackson, all throughout his childhood, he was determined to finally become a Hunter. Just like his dad, Poseidon. That’s what his mom, Sally, had told him at least. Mom tended to be nicer when talking about his dad than she really should’ve been.
He was a deadbeat after all.
He never once came around, according to Mom, after he’d found out she was pregnant with him. Never sent any letters, or postcards. No birthday presents. Nada. But Mom always talked about him like he was a king. An amazing man, so kind and caring, blah blah blah. She was an amazing mom, but even Percy knew that she tended to get too caught up in the memories she had with his dad, rather than how he actually was. And Percy wasn’t going to be the one that burst Mom’s bubble.
(Hell, when he’d asked around Strawberry Island, one of the smaller, less inhabited islands in Short Island, York New, everyone else that had known his dad knew what a piece of shit he was.)
It wasn’t until he had finally turned twelve that Mom would actually let him go, leave Strawberry Island, without her, and take the Hunter Exam. She wasn’t happy with their little deal, at all. (She had agreed to it on his ninth birthday, after he had been pestering her non-stop about it, which had been shortly after Mom had told him that his dad was a Hunter. Mom had thought he would just forget about the Hunter Exam entirely, like any other kid would.) But she had agreed to it, and he was holding her to it.
But, because his mother was a genius, she’d had a special clause to their agreement.
Before he was allowed to actually leave Strawberry Island for the Hunter Exam, Mom got to give him an ultimatum of her own. It was something they had added to the initial agreement when he was eleven and it was clear that he wasn’t going to let becoming a Hunter go, that she would give him one task he had to do before she would let him leave.
If he was getting this ultimatum from anyone else, he might’ve been a little worried. He had no idea what he’d be asked to do. But, how hard could it be? It was Mom, she wouldn’t give him something impossible.
“Before you leave for the exam, Perseus,” She never called him by his actual name unless it was something very serious, which did not bode well for Percy, “you have to catch a Ketos.”
Shit.
Well, having to catch a Ketos was going to be far more difficult than Percy had thought.
The first issue he’d found was that he had no idea what Ketos was when Mom first said it. And when he’d asked what she’d meant, she sent him to the library of all places. It wasn’t that he had an issue with libraries themselves, they just weren’t for him. Percy had always struggled greatly with reading in general. The letters and words never stuck to the page, moving around as he tried to read them, and it always ended with him having a massive, major, killer migraine headache.
So for Mom to be telling him to go to the library, it was going to be pretty important.
But, she didn’t send him off to the Hellhole of Headaches (The Library.) empty-handed. Literally. Before she let him head off for the library, Mom gave him a piece of paper that had the words ‘Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes’ written on it in her neat, small handwriting, along with the number ‘160’ that Percy presumed was the page number of that book he was meant to flip to.
It hadn’t taken him too long to find where the library was, he’d only been there a handful of times with his mom, but it was far from being his favorite place on Strawberry Island. And, once he’d gotten to the library (and maybe had to ask the librarian, Mr. Paul Blowfish, for help) he located the book Mom had told him to find and flipped around until he landed on the right page.
That starred Ethiop queen who strove
To set her beauty’s praise above
The sea-nymphs, and their power offended.
The story went on for much longer than just that. Basically, from what Percy understood, this Perseus guy (The Greek hero Mom named him after.) was going back home after severing Medusa’s head off her body when he found this Andromeda lady. And he saved this Andromeda lady from being eaten by the Ketos, which apparently was a sea monster, not a fish. And after all that Perseus and Andromeda lived happily ever after. Yada yada.
All Percy really got from that story was that he needed Medusa’s head if he was going to catch the Ketos.
“Mom, I need Medusa’s head to catch the Ketos!” Percy yelled as he walked back into their house, “Where am I supposed to get Medusa’s head? You made this thing impossible.”
Shockingly, when he’d walked into the house he was met with two things. One, Mom was not in the kitchen or the living room like she normally was when he came back from doing whatever the fuck he’d decided to do that day. And the second was his mom’s response of, “I know Perseus, give me a minute.”
“Mom!” Percy called back, “I told you not to call me Perseus! It’s Percy!” And when Mom didn’t say anything back or walk into the room, he added, “What are you doing?!”
Just as he asked his mom what she was doing, more so asking why she wasn’t helping him solve his problems, Mom walked out of her bedroom holding an old looking cardboard box. As she set the box on the kitchen table, Mom told him, “What is in this box will help you catch the Ketos, okay?”
Percy couldn’t help the doubt that bubbled up inside him as he eyed the box, “What is it exactly?” He didn’t necessarily like to question Mom, especially when she sounded so sure of herself as she did at that moment. But, it was a cardboard box, with the words ‘snake head’ and ‘handle with care’ written on the sides of the box that didn’t have the ‘this side up’ arrows printed on it. Which didn’t exactly instill him with a lot of confidence.
“Perseus, I need you to focus right now.” Mom told him, grabbing onto both of his shoulders as she spoke, “What you are about to do is incredibly dangerous if you are not careful and cautious. You need to keep the contents of this box with you at all times, and it cannot fall into the wrong hands. Do you understand me, Perseus?”
And that, my friends, is how Percy ended up holding Medusa's slimy, severed head (which he would not recommend trying at home) over the edge of a cliff by his house, dangling by the snakes on her head over the crashing waves of the ocean. Or, at least he was holding the head for one minute. And the next minute he was thrown onto his butt by a rogue wave. To make it all worse, he lost Medusa’s head, somehow, and instead there was some crappy ballpoint pen on the cliffside next to him.
What the fuck was he going to do with a pen? And, what the fuck was he going to tell Mom?
“What do you mean you lost Medusa’s head, Percy?” Mom was not happy to hear about his whole ‘losing the severed head he needed to keep a close eye on’ thing. But, she was even less happy about the pen, “That motherfucker.” Mom hardly swore, which only meant she was pissed at him, “Alright, well, it’s out of my hands suppose. Percy, get your things together, you’re going to be leaving first thing tomorrow morning.”
Wait what? Was she kicking him out? But she was also letting him go? What was happening?
“Mom?” Percy asked, “But I, I didn’t catch the fish. And I lost the head. I thought that was what I had to do to go?”
“Do you want to go to the Hunter Exam or not, Perseus?” Mom asked him in return. Not wanting to say the wrong thing, again, Percy elected to simply nod in response. “Good, then do as I say. Get whatever belongings you want to take with you to the exam together, now. And then I have one more thing to show you.”
Before Mom could change her mind, Percy packed a rucksack of one change of clothes, his blue sleeping bag, the box of granola bars his mom had just gotten from the store, and his very manly stuffed animal. (A panda pillow pet he had named Hercules.) And once he had packed all that into his bag, Hercules’ head sticking out the top, Percy dropped the bag beside the front door and rejoined Mom in the kitchen, where she was still holding the pen that had washed up on the cliff.
When he walked back into the living room, Mom was holding the pen up a few inches from her face, carefully studying it like it held all the answers or something. (Which did sound like some corny shit Paul Blowfish would say about ‘the power of the pen’ or some shit.) “What was it you wanted to show me?” Percy asked, mostly so he wouldn’t startle Mom too much when he walked in. It was already getting pretty dark outside, how the day had just flown by in the blink of an eye was odd to him, but given the events of the day, he wasn’t too surprised.
“Come here, Percy.” Mom said, and as he did she held the pen out to him, which he took, but was very confused as he did, “This may be the greatest tool you will get to help you on this quest of yours.”
It was a pen. “Mom, it’s a pen?” Percy asked, “How’s a pen going to help me?” Did she want him to write her letters or something?
Mom laughed, amused by his confusion evidently, before she explained to him, “It’s more than just a pen, Percy. It’s, it is a gift for you, from your father.” He must’ve looked about as confused as he felt, because Mom told him, “All you need to do is uncap the pen, okay? But just, not in the house.”
It was still just a pen, but Percy still took the pen with him outside as Mom walked out into the nearly pitch-black darkness of the night, a good twenty feet or so from the house before she turned back towards him and told him to uncap the pen. So, he did.
And as soon as Percy removed the cap of the pen, expecting absolutely nothing to happen, because why the fuck would he expect anything more, he was instead astounded by the sight of the simple ballpoint pen morphing into a double-edged sword, the bronze blade growing in the moonlight.
“I, I thought it was just a pen, Mom.” Percy repeated, swinging his new sword-pen around in awe, staring at the bronze blade, “How, how did you know it would do that?”
Between the glow of the moonlight and the shine eliminating from the sword, Percy could see the faint grin on his mom’s face as she simply explained, “Like I said, it is a gift, for you, from your father. He’s shown me Anaklusmos before, and now he’s given it to you.”
Percy was never going to be able to remember the name Anaklusmos of his pen-sword, so he decided to call it Riptide instead. (Which according to Mom was also the pen-sword’s name in English.) And so, true to her word, bright and early the next morning, Mom let Percy go off on his own, with Riptide in his pocket and Hercules on his back, he finally got to leave Strawberry Island and headed off to catch a ship for his voyage to the Hunter Exam.