Work Text:
Prologue
Look, Patrick didn’t ask to be a half-blood.
Being a half-blood is dangerous. It’s scary. And being a 15 year-old ginger kid with an inexplicable predilection for wearing hats was already enough to handle as it was. Patrick guessed getting through Sophomore year with passing grades and his license was just too much to ask.
Until a few months ago, Patrick was an average teenager. An average student with an average life and above-average aspirations of rock stardom. In fact, that's how this all started: with Patrick joining a band. Or at least he thought he was joining a band. He had seen the call on a flier on corkboard outside the Borders bathroom: “Rhythm Guitarist Wanted 4 Punk Band—No Experience Necessary” in big blocky letters on xeroxed pink paper. “Call Now.”
In retrospect, Patrick supposed he could have been more suspicious, when the gravelly voice on the phone had accepted his application without even hearing him play, without even asking him to attend a practice session before giving him the date of the band’s next show and the venue’s address. He supposed he could have been more apprehensive, but really, what was the worst that could happen?
Fast forward to a dimly-lit basement, humid with the body heat; the band, a raucous punk outfit with two beefy guitarists, a hulking bass player, and a short, quiet guy named Andy on drums. Patrick thought the worst thing that could happen was getting hassled by some of the older kids in the crowd. He didn’t anticipate his band members starting to hiss at him mid-set, to growl and pounce on him by their final song, newly spawned claws slicing through his guitar like paper.
He would have been a goner if he hadn't staggered into the crowd, face first into a group of kids near the keg. He couldn’t be sure what happened next exactly. All he knew was that once the first fizz of beer from their dropped cups hit his skin, he felt a jerking sensation below his navel and a roaring in his ears. The next thing he knew, the keg was exploding, launching his bandmates-turned-monsters backward in a tidal wave of bitter fizz. Then, Andy was there. Andy, who had always been so stoic and silent, Andy who now had what inexplicably appeared to be horns poking out of his unkempt hair. Patrick hadn’t had time to ask about them, nor argue when Andy whisked him away in his beat up van. In fact, Patrick barely had time to pack a bag and mumble an excuse to his mom about an impromptu summer tour before he was stumbling out of Illinois and crash-landing into Long Island.
He thought he took the news of being a demi-god, of having an early, presumably painful death pretty well all things considered. He’d lived his entire life feeling misunderstood—not having a dad, not having basic reading skills, not having any normal interests beyond music, music, music—and it was at least nice to know that he could blame some of it on mystical forces beyond his control.
So he hadn't complained when they had given him a camp halfblood baseball cap (a kind gesture on Andy’s part—Patrick’s I <3 Bingo hat had been shredded alongside his guitar) and shuffled him off to the Hermes cabin where he had curled up on his sleeping bag and squeezed his eyes tight and prayed to whatever god would listen that it would be different this time. That if he couldn’t outrun fate, he could at least meet it head on.
Fate, as it turned out, came in the form of one Pete Wentz.