Chapter Text
[1]
Prince Perseus of Atlantis has been immortal for a very, very long time. Despite the freedom and all of the possibilities his father and his mother have given him, he feels like a prisoner behind the walls of his kingdom.
The sun doesn’t reach the bottom of the sea, even in Atlantis, they depend on other resorts for lightning. The sun doesn’t reach his room, and it doesn’t reach him. He was once mortal, long ago… but he remembers it, he remembers running by the ocean with the sun’s gleaming light kissing his dark skin as his mother chased after him, all laughs and smiles, under the secretive and watchful eyes of his father. (Then, at five years old, his mother had been killed before his eyes and he had been taken to Atlantis, where he was raised as the son of Poseidon and of Amphitrite, a secret son the King and Queen did not wish their people to know of until a certain age.)
Looking above from the window of his room, he does not hear the sound of the door opening behind him. He does not hear his older brother, Triton, enter his bedroom. “Perseus,” he calls out, snapping Percy out of his daze. The young prince blinks at his brother.
“When did you get here, Triton?”
“Just now,” Triton says blankly before pausing to regard Percy silently, his sea-green eyes, the ones that mirror his one pair, pass over his form in a calculating gaze. “Are you alright, brother? I cannot help but notice that you seem oddly… distracted.”
“Oh,” Percy frowns. “Yes, I am. Thank you for worrying.” But when he turns away from Triton’s scrutinizing eyes, he knows he has not been believed. “Brother, have you ever wished to go up to the surface?”
“Why —” Triton chokes, composing himself almost immediately when Percy turns to him. “Why would you wish of that, Perseus? Do you not have everything you could ever wish and want for here? In Atlantis?”
Percy squeaks at the words, and he waves his arms rapidly in front of him, tail wrapping nervously around his body. “No! No, I did not mean it like that. No, um. It is just that, I was a demigod once. Half-mortal, I was once a land… dweller, was I not?”
Triton nods, slow and hesitant and Percy continues. “So, I just wanted to go up for once and see what it is like. Because, I do not remember much of my time on Land, or… of my mother.” At that, his brother’s sharp eyes soften instantaneously. Even though Triton insists that Percy is his true, blood-borne relative even when there was once crimson in his veins, he always seeps to mush whenever he mentions his late mother — guilt? He does not know.
When the crown prince takes a deep breath in, Percy is prepared. He knows what is to come: the story of Pallas, his niece, or maybe the story of his namesake and the pains he dealt on the surface (despite the original Perseus’ happy ending), maybe, he would talk of the people up there like him, children of the gods, and how they have to go through Herculean effort-type quests just to appease their parents.
But, the story does not come, instead Triton smiles at Percy. It’s a sad, sympathetic expression. “Perseus, I understand why you feel this way. But, you must know that you stay in Atlantis to ensure your safety.”
“Brother,” Percy sighs, irritations churning in his golden blood. “Let us be truthful to one another — you do not understand. It has been millenia since I have seen the sun. It has been eons since I felt its light on my skin.”
“You exaggerate.”
“I do not,” the mer grumbles, his green tail folding neatly behind him as he settles in his window seat. He can just barely see the rays of the sun.
Triton is standing behind him. “Perhaps I do not comprehend the extend of your desires, Perseus. Frankly, I think that there is nothing worth salvaging on the surface. It is a dangerous and polluted place.”
“And the ocean is not?”
The god is silent, and Percy knows he has gone too far, but when he turns around to apologize, Triton is already gone, off to do his duties as a messenger god.
Percy stays there for a while, staring distantly at the empty space where his brother once stood. Then, he turns back to the window and prays to the sun to let him bask in its light once more.
And if the sun seems to shine brighter than usual, reaching even the darkest pits of the ocean, Percy pretends not to notice.